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The calamity began at the stroke of midnight on May 10, 1924, when Pittsburgh Street Railway Company employees walked off the job. The streetcar strike threw commuters into a tizzy, and the following morning South Hills commuters jumped into their cars and headed for the recently opened Liberty Tunnels. Between 7:30 and 8 a.m., a record 649 cars entered the city-bound tube. The surge brought traffic to a standstill all the way from downtown through the entire inbound tunnel.

The Liberty Tunnels had opened eight months earlierbefore the ventilation system was complete in response to public clamor for the longawaited shortcut to Downtown. As injudicious as allowing vehicles to drive through an unventilated tunnel may seem today, at that time, research indicated that the natural draft induced by steady traffic flow would render the tunnel air safe. The calculations, however, didnt consider a streetcar strike causing a traffic jam that would fill the tunnel with idling cars and panicky drivers gasping for air while scurrying for the exits on foot and ignoring police orders to shut off their enginesall of which happened that morning.

As the situation became an emergency, County police closed the tunnel and turned traffic away. Thirty-three people were hospitalized for carbon monoxide inhalation. After removing the standing vehicles and waiting for the air to clear, police ultimately reopened the tunnel that afternoon, with a limit of six entering vehicles per minute until the ventilation system was complete.

In the beginning

Ironically, the genesis of the streetcar-strike traffic jam can be traced to the opening of a streetcar tunnel through Mount Washington 20 years earlier. In 1904, the Mount Washington Transit Tunnel (still in use today) brought streetcars to the South Hills, and that newfound accessibility to the city transformed the southern hinterlands into clear-skied suburbs for those wishing to escape the smoke of Pittsburgh industry. Coincidentally, while the South Hills was evolving from rural backwater to residential retreat, transportation was evolving from horse-drawn buggies and wagons to exhaust-emitting cars and trucks.

Although coal mine and freight railway tunnels through Mount Washington had existed since the mid-19th century, the debate about whether a roadway tunnel was necessary or even possible didnt begin until 1907 and then continued for more than a decade. Proponents included vested South Hills real estate interests who saw a potential boom with South Hills property values catching up with those in the eastern suburbs. They and others also argued for improving the tedious and expensive means of supplying 100,000 South Hills residents transporting 2,000 wagonloads of goods per day up and across Mt. Washington or, alternatively, waiting in line at the Castle Shannon wagon incline. Aggravating both options was the daily file of plodding horse-drawn wagons, electric trolleys and automotive vehicles vying for passage to the South Side across the constantly congested Smithfield Street Bridge.

Debating the dig

A profusion of competing interests produced proposals for six different passageways at high and low elevations along the face of the escarpment. Ultimately, the Allegheny County Commissioners submitted a final plan, and in accordance with state law, the proposal was presented to a grand jury for pronouncement on the legitimacy of the public need for the tunnel and the justification of the associated expense. A series of legal brouhahas ensued. Objections ranged from improper presentation of evidence to the grand jury, to underestimated costs, undue influence of special interests, wasting taxpayer money, and the folly of attempting to build a tunnel the likes of which had never been built. Finally, on May 23, 1919after four years of legal tusslingthe Commissioners proposal, called the Neeld Tunnel for its engineer designer Almos D. Neeld, was approved, and the Low Tunnel Plan closely resembles todays Liberty Tunnel.

A new kind of tunnel for a new kind of vehicle

Although tunnels had been drilled through mountains, under rivers and beneath castle walls since the construction of the pyramids, the advent of the automotive age made the Liberty Tunnels the first of a new class of tunnel for a new kind of vehiclea subsurface roadway built to accommodate exhaust-emitting gasoline engines. Given the antiquity of tunnel excavation and the novelty of the internal combustion engine, digging the tunnel wouldnt be the problemventilating it would be.

While the deadliness of carbon monoxide gas was well known at that time, the precise amount a person could breathe before suffering ill effects had never been established. As plans for vehicular tunnels began to emerge, the need to understand the odorless, colorless, noxious gas emitted by gasoline engines became urgent. Ventilation systems for roadway tunnels could not be designed without hard scientific data.

To get it, The New York, New Jersey Hudson River Tunnel Authority engaged Pittsburghs U.S. Bureau of Mines. Although the effort was made for designing the Holland Tunnel, the results of the investigation would apply to the new cohort of vehicular roadway tunnels being planned in New York, proposed in Boston, and under construction in Pittsburgh.

To solve the fundamental scientific problems, the Bureau of Mines enlisted researchers at Yale and the University of Illinois. They broke the problem into three component questions:

1) How much carbon monoxide did gasoline vehicles produce?

2) How much air was required to dilute the CO to a harmless level?

3) What methods and equipment would be necessary to achieve safe levels of dilution?

The Bureau of Mines answered the first question by conducting fuel consumption and exhaust emissions tests in its Bruceton Experimental Mine. Investigators determined that the average gasoline-powered vehicle emitted 1.5 cubic feet of carbon monoxide per minute.

To answer the second question, Yale researchers subjected faculty and student volunteers to carefully metered doses of carbon monoxide. They determined that up to six parts carbon monoxide per 10,000 parts air was physically tolerable.

The University of Illinois was tasked with developing mathematical models of emissions flow under various tunnel conditions and configurations that could be applied to virtually any vehicular tunnel.

Compiling the experimental and calculated data, investigators determined that each car in a tunnel would require 2,500 cubic feet of fresh air per minute to dilute the carbon monoxide to a safe, breathable level.

While scientists worked out the physical theory, the Pittsburgh Department of Public Works conducted a traffic count on Bigelow Boulevard during a period of heavy use to find that the most likely scenario for the Liberty Tunnels during rush hour would be 114 vehicles traveling at 15 miles per hour. At that rate, each of Libertys twin tubes would require 280,000 cubic feet of fresh air per minute.

Early ventilation plans called for utilizing the prevailing westto- east winds to move contaminated air through the tubes. The idea was tabled when, upon close examination, planners realized that outbound traffic would always be bucking a headwind, thereby negating the ventilating force of the natural air current. At the same time, the draft created by inbound traffic would amplify naturally occurring winds to excessively high speeds.

Although the Bureau of Mines had conducted its research with customary scientific rigor, the novelty of running gasoline-powered vehicles in an enclosed space allowed controversy about the tubes ventilation system to persist.

On March 13, 1923, more than two years after publication of the Bureau of Mines tunnel ventilation report and just six months before the tunnel opened to the public, engineering consultants for the Allegheny County Controller proposed to reduce ventilation system costs by more than half. The plan called for cutting the specified number of fans and motors in half and eliminating the proposed ventilation stacks atop Mt. Washington. The problem was that, based on the Bureau of Mines study, the proposed plan would not adequately ventilate the tunnels, especially under extreme conditions.

By taking advantage of the draft created by vehicles, air would flow in the same direction as trafficeach tube opposite the other.

In the end, the Planning Commission deferred to chief tunnel engineer Neeld, who had also designed and engineered several railway tunnels. Collaborating with the Bureau of Mines, Neeld opted for a ventilation system that met requisite air quality while minimizing the need for electric power to run the fans. By taking advantage of the draft created by vehicles, air would flow in the same direction as trafficeach tube opposite the other. At the same time, the amount of contaminated air requiring dilution would be minimized by splitting the tunnel air into two halvesentry and exit. In the entry half, the draft of the vehicles would drive contaminated air to a ventilation shaft in the tunnel ceiling midway through the tube. The massive shaft, which housed both exhaust and supply channels, rose 200 feet from the tunnel ceiling to a fan house atop Mt. Washington. While exhausted air from the first half of each tube was being vented into the atmosphere above Mt. Washington through 110-foot exhaust stacks, fresh air would be drawn in through another set of stacks and blown into the exit half of each tube.

The fan house was equipped with four fans for each tubetwo exhaust and two supplyeach powered by a primary motor and a backup motor. All told, the fan house contained eight fans and 16 motors. At maximum output, the Liberty Tunnels ventilation system was capable of moving 560,000 cubic feet of air per minute. In the event of a catastrophe, such as a fire, each of the fans was capable of running at an additional 25 percent over specified capacity, giving the ventilation system the ability to move 700,000 cubic feet of air per minute in an emergency.

Blasting through

So great was anticipation of the tunnel that ground was broken before publication of the Bureau of Mines tunnel ventilation report. The official Dec. 20, 1919, ceremony followed a banquet at the Fort Pitt Hotel. Groundwork was begun on both tubes at both sides of the escarpment. The first explosive blast was detonated on April 8, 1920, by County Commissioner Addison C. Gumbert, who had championed the project.

The tunnels path bore closely to the horizontal rock strata. Layers of green and blue shale interspersed with courses of clay of varying thicknesses predominated. Engineers called the rock good, meaning it was unlikely to collapse into the void or break away after excavation. An especially hard course of limestone coincided roughly with the junction of the curved arch and vertical walls which, in engineering lingo, is called the springing line.

Each day the supervising engineer noted in a handwritten journal weather conditions, work performed, type of rock encountered, progress made and other noteworthy observations. The journals depict drillers and helpers boring holes in the tunnel face followed by blasters who would insert explosive powder in the holes and pack them with clay to direct the force of the blast into the rock. Blasting frequently took place on the night shift, between the hours of 2 and 5 a.m. The shattered remains would be mucked out by hand and steam shovel, hauled to the mouth of the tunnel in small rail cars called skips and loaded into trucks for dumping in a ravine atop Mt. Washington, which created the ground for McKinley Park.

Excavation was done in sequential steps beginning at the top and working down: blasting, mucking out and supporting the arched roof before simultaneously advancing the arch forward and the bench (the rock beneath the excavated arch) down. When the bench was fully blasted and mucked out, the walls were trimmed and the utility trench dug. Working each part of the excavation in tandem enabled workers to remove the rock as safely and quickly as possible.

The walls and ceiling of the tubes were lined with 24 inches of reinforced concrete and sealed with a waterproof barrier where water intrusion was a problem. Fortunately, groundwater intrusion was minimized by the drainage effect of abandoned coal mines about 150 feet above the excavation. The storm sewer beneath the floor ensured thorough drainage.

A cost-accounting ledger for October 1920 shows a crew of foreman, drill runners, helpers, muckers, nippers, shovel runners, cranemen and pitmen working a total of 11,710 hours to advance 142.5 feet in the west (outbound) tunnel. Payroll came to $7,312.20. Steam shovel runners commanded the highest wage at $1.19 per hour. Pitmen and muckers received only 60 cents an hour.

Light at the end

On May 11, 1922, County Commissioner James Houlihan triggered the final blast connecting the two halves of the outbound tube. The official record shows the opposing excavations aligning within 3/8 of an inch. But an anecdote written years later by Neelds grandson reports an engineer peering through a survey scope and telling Neeld the sighting split the string, meaning the opposing excavations joined perfectly. Neeld is said to have told the engineer to report a slight misalignment because nobody would ever believe it was perfect.

Sixteen months later, after finishing the walls and concreting the roadway, the tubes were opened. Exactly two years and one day after the final blast, on May 10, 1924, the historic traffic jam occurred. And on Sept. 1, 1925, the ventilation system became operational. For the first few months, a sensor devised by the Bureau of Mines was employed to alert fan operators when increasing carbon monoxide levels necessitated boosting fan speed. However, it wasnt long before traffic cycles were deemed predictable enough to dispense with the sensor. Thereafter, tunnel personnel would simply increase the fan speed an hour before the start of rush hour and decrease it when traffic slowed.

Originally estimated to cost $4.8 million, the added cost of the ventilation system brought the estimate to just over $6 million. But the project came in under budget at slightly under $6 million. The dig took 388 working days with an average of 200 men per day. There were no serious accidents while moving between 300,000 and 400,000 cubic yards of rock.

When finished, the Liberty Tunnel comprised the longest vehicular roadway tunnel in the world. The two parallel tubes, each 5,889 feet long and 26 feet 6-1/2 inches in diameter, were set 59 feet apart on centers and separated by 20 feet of solid rock. Access passages every 500 feet connected the tubes. At each exit, a 66-foot open-air baffle chamber reduced turbulence outside the tunnel by deflecting the exiting air current skyward. Initially, a 4-foot sidewalk flanked each roadway. Until 1932, horse-drawn wagons were permitted in the tubes. The walkway remained until 1975.

Since their inaugural opening in 1923, the Liberty Tunnels have witnessed the construction of their river-crossing sibling, the Liberty Bridge, completed in 1928, as well as five renovationsin 1932, 1939, 1975, 1996 and 2008.

Today, the Liberty Tunnel serves more than 63,000 vehicles a day. The roadway is wider due to the removal of the pedestrian walkway, and the fan-house motors have been upgraded to a pair of 115 horsepower jobs for exhaust and 200 horsepower for intake. But the air still flows with traffic and the original fan rotors are still doing their job. And, just as when the tubes first opened, if you look up when youre exiting, you can see the sky through the baffle chamber. At the time of its construction, the Liberty Tunnel was considered to be a marvel of civil engineering. During the excavation, representatives of the Japanese Imperial Government Railway came to witness the engineering prowess behind the worlds first and longest vehicular roadway tunnel. Since then, longer tunnels have been built, but the Liberty Tubes will always be the first of their kind.
Northland Preparatory Academy was one of nine out-of-school time programs across the state to be awarded grants totaling nearly $12,000 by the Arizona Center for Afterschool Excellence and Cox Communications.

The grants range from $500 to $1,500. NPA's grant will allow it to start a new Maker Mondays program. Youth will learn about the maker movement and then write proposals for creating, making and innovating.
GLENS FALLS  Charles Evans Hughes was an early supporter of the suffrage and civil rights movements. He defeated William Randolph Hearst to become governor of New York in 1906, narrowly lost the presidency to incumbent Woodrow Wilson in 1916 and served as a Supreme Court justice.

But most importantly, Hughes was born in Glens Falls.

Beginning with an exhibition opening Thursday at Crandall Public Library's Folklife Center, the city will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Hughes' presidential nomination in "Charles Evans Hughes, A Native Son," which runs through Dec. 31.

"He became chief justice of the Supreme Court and I think thats a significant career to have begun in Glens Falls," said state Sen. Elizabeth Little, R-Queensbury, whose office helped organize some of the events.

When Dennis O'Connor, former president of the Warren County Bar Association and president of the steering committee for "Charles Evans Hughes," heard Little speak about Hughes at a Bar Association event, he was floored.

"I was embarrassed," he said. "I thought, 'Wow, am I the only one who didn't know? I certainly didnt realize how distinguished a career he had and how important he was in civil rights."

Hughes was born in 1862 in Glens Falls, to the pastor of the baptist church. Shortly after he was born, his family moved to Sandy Hill (modern-day Hudson Falls). Within a few years, the Hughes family left the region.

Despite living in other parts of the Northeast, Hughes maintained friendships in the area, said Todd DeGarmo, director of the Folklife Center.

The Hughes family visited friends in Sandy Hill in the summers. As a student at Madison University (now Brown), Hughes camped on Lake George with his fraternity. As governor, DeGarmo said, Hughes visited Raquette Lake.

"That starts a whole love affair with the Adirondacks," he said.

In 1919, Hughes' older daughter, Helen, a YWCA Humanitarian worker, fell ill while at a conference at Silver Bay. The family rented a home on Warren Street, where Hughes' wife, Antoinette, cared for her, and Hughes visited from New York City on the weekends. That year, the couple's youngest daughter, Elizabeth, attended Glens Falls Academy and formed a lifelong friendship with Polly Hoopes Beeman.

"Charles Evans Hughes is a central figure in the story of museum founders Louis and Charlotte Hyde and their extended family," said Erin Coe, director of The Hyde Collection. "Hughes was not only very close personally to Mr. and Mrs. Hyde (he even stayed in Hyde House when he visited Glens Falls), but he was also close to members of the Hoopes family."

Two events in the Hughes programming will be held at The Hyde: the Charles Evans Hughes Day celebration Oct. 15, and a talk by local Hughes enthusiast, "Charles Evans Hughes, A Native Son" guest curator (and Post-Star reporter) Maury Thompson on Oct. 23.

"What amazes me most about Hughes is his political civility," Thompson said. "During the campaign (for presidency in 1916), he said something about how you can discuss issues without losing personal amity. For him, it was more than just a campaign slogan."

Hughes lost the presidential race by about two dozen electoral votes and a half-million popular votes. After the election, Wilson appointed Hughes to investigate corruption in the aircraft industry and defense contracts, Thompson said. Hughes visited Wilson on his death bed, went to his funeral and served on a committee to erect a monument in Wilson's memory.

"Can you imagine a presidential candidate today volunteering on a committee to raise money to build a monument of the guy who defeated him?" Thompson said.

"He had great character, likely inherited from his father, who pastored in Glens Falls," he said. "He did so many things in life, both political and judicial, but also humanitarian."

The timeliness of some of his efforts makes the celebration more relevant, O'Connor said.

"He was important in the women's movement and civil rights," he said. "We are facing some cultural wars in the United States right now, and this is a person in our community who addressed those issues decades ago."

Hughes was an early champion for the suffrage movement, calling for women's rights at a federal level. A women's campaign team, the Hughesettes, traveled the country by train, urging women in states that allowed them to vote to support Hughes.

He established New York's first state public service commission, passed its first workers compensation law and wrote a decision that became the precursor to Brown v. the Board of Education, Thompson said.

"The thing about Hughes," he said, "is the 1916 election was a footnote in his career. Usually you think running for president is the ultimate ... but (he) did so much more in life than the election."
LAKE GEORGE  Peter said he was lucky to have come to the United States from Jamaica with a friend who had worked here before and could act as a guide.

Peter holds down two jobs in Lake George  one at Pizza Jerks, the other at Pizza Hut  earning minimum wage.

For a little over four months of work, he hopes to return home with a few thousand dollars. He was hoping for more, but after struggling to find a second job when he first arrived, he is looking at less.

Peter spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing that speaking publicly might jeopardize his living situation. Peter is not his real name.

Like most international students who come to Lake George to work, he lives in a boarding house-style room. At the Inn at Westbrook on Gage Road, he shares a room with three other students. Each pays $80. Use of the air conditioner costs another $3 a week.

Two steel-framed bunk beds take up a large portion of the room. Clothes litter the floor and a suitcase has been stuffed under the bottom bunk of one of the beds.

A television, easily 10 years old, sits on top of a chest of drawers, along with a small refrigerator and a microwave. Near the door there is a hot plate, with a greasy pan sitting on one of the burners.

Peter called the conditions adequate to a certain extent.

Regulations

On Aug. 15, the village of Lake George passed amendments to the villages zoning laws that will allow officials to inspect and license rented properties, including boarding houses.

The amendments came in response to a fire last year at 17 Cherry St., which at the time was being rented out to a group of international students.

No one was injured in the fire, but when local crews arrived, they found there was no way of knowing if all the students had been evacuated.

The zoning changes will require any rental property or boarding house to pay to have the property inspected by the village before it can receive a license. A record of details about the space, such as how many people are living there, will be created.

The town of Lake George does not currently have any similar measure on its books.

The action is one in a long line of attempts to improve the conditions of international student workers in Lake George. Most have not come to fruition, and promises have not been kept.

History of abuses

According to Lake George Mayor Robert Blais, roughly 300 student workers from all over the world work in the resort community every summer. These workers mostly take low-paying jobs as hotel maids, dishwashers and restroom attendants.

In the past, evidence surfaced that the students were being taken advantage of.

In 2007, in response to information submitted by Mayor Blais, an investigation by the state Department of Labor found local employers had cheated students out of proper wages, deducted rent from wages, violated child labor laws and refused to pay required overtime.

Five businesses were forced to pay more than $120,000 in back wages and penalties, according to a release issued by the Department of Labor on Nov. 2, 2007.

As a follow-up, state officials said the Labor Department would provide education programs for student workers to ensure they were aware of their rights. There is no evidence these programs were ever created.

Peter said he never received any type of training or orientation concerning his rights after he arrived in the U.S.

Today, the Department of Labor does offer educational seminars for international workers, but only upon request.

In 2010, The Post-Star ran a series of articles on foreign workers, detailing the poor conditions under which many students were living.

Following publication, Blais issued a press release, stating that in the spring of 2011 a public discussion would be held on how to address these issues. The meeting never took place.

When asked why it has taken so long for the village to address the living conditions of student workers, Blais said he was not sure.

I guess we were kind of out of the loop, he said.

Problems persist

On July 18 of this year, Kitty Loban, a parishioner at St. James Episcopal Church in Lake George, told the Village Board she had heard from several international students who attend St. James about problems with their living conditions.

These problems included the refusal of landlords to address maintenance issues and the general condition of living spaces.

My source is directly from the students, Loban said.

Peter said that, a few weeks into his stay, the toilet in his room began leaking water. It took four days for a new toilet to be installed, during which time he and his roommates had to use other peoples bathrooms.

Peter said he has not had any issues with his employers, but if issues were to arise, his only resource would be a friend who has worked in the U.S. before. He said he was never given any other resources.

The most I ever got was a booklet from the U.S. Embassy, he said.

The village used to have an office set up to help international students. It was called The Connection, and it opened in 2004.

The Connection, located on Canada Street, was a place where students could discuss issues concerning their jobs and living conditions.

It was meant to be a home away from home for foreign students, Blais said.

The Connection also helped students find jobs and adequate housing.

Businesses paid The Connection $25 to match them with an employee. People looking for renters or lodgers also paid The Connection to match them with a student.

The Connection closed in 2009 because of a lack of local support.

Blais said The Connection worked well, but many in the community felt it was wrong for the village to provide services to people who were not local residents.

The support was just not there from the business community, Blais said.

He said he believes a similar program could work in Lake George if it was set up and funded properly.

I think there is a need again for some type of Connection, but it needs to be financed properly, Blais said.

After the closing of The Connection in 2009, Blais said the village office took complaints from students and did what it could to address those problems. When a landlord refused to return some students security deposits, the village stepped in, he said.

When issues arose with employers, the village could threaten to revoke the businesss license.

Blais said in recent years, however, things have been quiet.

We havent had a lot of complaints in the last few years, he said.

Fees up front

Most students who come to Lake George do so through some kind of an exchange program that helps them get a J-1 work visa, find employment and a place to live.

Peter said a company called Explore Your World out of Jamaica charged him a fee of $1,000, which did not include the price of airfare to the U.S.

Once the student is in the U.S., Peter said, the company offers no further resources or orientation.

Explore Your World said that Intrax, a J-1 visa sponsor, is responsible for students once they arrive in the U.S.

Emmanuel Diaz, operations director for Intrax, said all students are given the number for an emergency hotline and are encouraged to contact their J-1 visa sponsor with any concerns.

Diaz said students are also issued ID cards with emergency contact information.

InterExchange is a nonprofit organization based in New York City, which, like Explore Your World, assists international students in securing visas and finding jobs and housing in the U.S.

Mark Overmann, a vice president at InterExchange, said students who come to the U.S. through their Work and Travel USA program are required to check in with InterExchange every 30 days.

The students are given an orientation in their native country prior to their departure, he said.

Once in the U.S., however, it is usually up to local outreach programs or the host employer to provide any additional orientation or training they might need.

InterExchange students are given contact information for The Polaris Project, an advocacy group based in the District of Columbia, which aims to stop human trafficking.

Overmann said InterExchange seeks to be an advocate for its students and to help them whenever possible. He said the organization would take any report of poor living conditions or abuse by an employer extremely seriously.

We are here as their advocate for the entire time they are here, Overmann said.

When asked how many students InterExchange sends to Lake George every year, Overmann said the company does not feel comfortable releasing that information.

The cost of InterExchanges services vary, but according to its website, they begin at $950. The program requires that participating students have at least $2,000 in their bank accounts.

Still motivated

Peter is scheduled to graduate from a culinary school in Jamaica in November. After that, he hopes to open his own restaurant in Canada, where he has family.

In addition to the chance to earn money, Peter said, he was motivated to come to the U.S. by the chance to experience something new.

I wanted to broaden my culinary knowledge and meet different people, he said.

He said he would consider returning to work in Lake George. He would like to work in the restaurant of the new Marriott Hotel, he said.
Two weeks ago, I got an email from one of our former reporters, showing me a column he was running in his newspaper in Iowa.

You may remember Jon Alexander. He is a local boy who grew up in Warrensburg and has moved on to become the editorial page editor at a couple of different newspapers in the Midwest.

What he wrote had me cheering.

After much discussion at the Quad City Times, it decided to end online commenting by its readers.

I immediately forwarded the column to Post-Star Publisher Terry Coomes and wrote, We should be next.

When commenting was first introduced on our website, I was one of its cheerleaders. It was an opportunity for readers to give instantaneous feedback and engage in a constant back-and-forth discussion about the issues facing the community and the world.

It didnt turn out that way.

Almost immediately, we learned that anonymous commenting amounted to leaving a kindergarten class unattended. They could not be trusted to follow the rules.

And they didnt.

The comments were sometimes profane, off-color, inappropriate and libelous. We promoted the rules at the bottom of each story that readers had to follow. We made registration mandatory  many just put fake names and addresses  and adopted a system where we reviewed each comment before it was published online. The tone has consistently been mean and nasty.

For the most part, the moderating of comments has been my responsibility. It is not a job I recommend and a task that has often left me questioning my faith in mankinds basic goodness and ability to be kind and forgiving.

Its ugly online.

I also believe the commenting has had residual effects on the reputation of the newspaper. People who have read negative and nasty comments only seem to remember they read it in The Post-Star, even if it was not written by The Post-Star.

We have several smart and intelligent commenters who regularly make excellent insights and witty asides, but they are in the minority.

We are also considering eliminating the commenting for the betterment of our community. Other national media outlets have also begun to do this as well.

But I first wanted to ask you, the readers, what you think.

Do you read the comments and do you think they are valuable?

When they eliminated the commenting in Iowa, many readers said the newspaper had taken away their right to express themselves.

Not true.

Newspapers like the Quad City Times and The Post-Star have always given readers the option to voice their opinion in letters to the editor. We also have a newspaper Facebook page and most of our reporters have Twitter accounts and Facebook accounts as well.

After years of moderating comments, I consider myself an expert on the worst of humanity because Ive seen it all as a moderator.

I estimate about 15 percent of the submitted comments to The Post-Star are never published. Another 5 percent probably shouldnt be published.

You can probably tell how I am going to vote.

I think it is time to clean up the newspaper and eliminate comments for good.
There were times riding the Comet at Great Escape when we were certain we were going to die.

The classic wooden roller coaster chugs to a crescendo 95 feet up in the sky and dives into a series of jarring peaks, valleys and turns in rapid succession while reaching speeds of up to 55 miles per hour.

But we didnt die.

In fact, we rode it again  immediately.

Unlike some states, it was gratifying to read the recent report on amusement park safety and know New York does regular inspections of permanent  like at Great Escape  and temporary  like the ones used last month at the Washington County Fair  rides.

Post-Star reporter Kathleen Moore reported that the state Department of Labor inspects every ride when it is moved. So rides used at the Washington County Fair and other smaller events have the same safety standards as permanent locations.

The inspector checks each part of the ride for defects before it is assembled, then checks to make sure the ride was assembled correctly and, finally, observes the ride in motion and checks to see that the operator is operating it correctly.

We followed up by checking the Department of Labor database and found that the Washington County Fair inspections for this year were already posted and all had passed.

The state provides a searchable database by county that lists events  like the Washington County Fair, Sandy Hill Days and the Fort Edward Yacht Club Fair  as well as permanent attractions like Great Escape, Magic Forest and the new Eagle Flyer Zip Line.

Our review of local attractions in Warren, Washington and several local communities in Saratoga County found all had passed, although there were several listings where the inspection result had not yet been posted.

We found all 36 attractions at Great Escape, from Telecombat to CP Huntington Train, had passed. We were especially interested in the Comet, but the only listing we could find that fit the description was Roller Coaster and it had passed  thank goodness.

The concern regarding amusement park inspections came under scrutiny last month after a 10-year-old boy died on a Kansas water-slide ride and three little girls were injured in a Tennessee Ferris wheel mishap.

What was shocking to us was there had been 29 deaths nationally on amusement park rides or water slides since 2010.

And maybe even more astounding was that the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission estimated that 37,300 people of all ages went to emergency rooms in 2015 after being injured on amusement rides, a category that did include bounce houses, mechanical bulls and other attractions, so that number is certainly inflated a bit.

Still, talk about the price of fun.

Dr. Gary Smith, a director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Childrens Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, analyzed data from 1990 to 2010 and estimated that an average of more than 4,400 children per year are injured on rides at amusement and water parks.

That seems significant to us.

So while we came away feeling pretty good about the safety of local rides, six states  Alabama, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, Wyoming and Utah  have no laws requiring rides be inspected. In most cases, insurance companies require inspections, but only on an annual basis. So beware when you are vacationing in those states.

Many other states  including Kansas and Tennessee  have only light regulations. And some amusement parks are allowed to perform their own inspections as long as they use private licensed inspectors. We found that hard to believe as well.

We often hear criticism about government and its intrusions into private businesses with pesky regulations. But in this case, we are glad they are there, and since so many people visit these attractions while on vacation, we wondered why there isnt a more uniform code at the federal level.

That is partially because the amusement park industry has successfully lobbied against federal oversight for decades and often fights regulations on the state level.

At one point, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission regulated both traveling and permanent amusement rides. But in 1981, Congress limited the agencys authority to just traveling carnivals.

If you were wondering why it did that, you might consider that The Associated Press found amusement park trade associations had spent about $11.3 million lobbying Congress dating back to 1999.

Thats why tragedies like the one in Kansas happen.

Local editorials represent the opinion of The Post-Star editorial board, which consists of Publisher Terry Coomes, Controller/Operations Director Brian Corcoran, Editor Ken Tingley, Projects Editor Will Doolittle and citizen representative Stuart Ginsburg.
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A Route 66 icon will be changing hands this month, but to the casual observer, it might not look like much has changed at all.

The Grand Canyon Cafe has been in Fred Wongs family for more than 70 years. It was purchased by his father and some uncles in 1945. Fred and his wife, Tina have been managing the restaurant since 1980.

However, after more than three decades of working 14 hours a day at the restaurant, the Wongs are retiring and passing the baton to local restauranteurs Paul and Laura Moir and Michael and Alissa Marquess. Paul Thomas, a faculty member in the W.A. Franke College of Business at Northern Arizona University, is a minority partner in the business as well.

The Moirs own and manage Criollo Latin Kitchen, Brix Restaurant and Wine Bar and Proper Meats + Provisions. The Marquesses own and operate Mother Road Brewing Co. Together, the two husband-and-wife teams hope to foster the historic value and nostalgia of the restaurant while updating the menu and giving the interior a facelift.

Michael said the group has not made their final decisions on menu items, but said they plan to keep some favorites, like the famous chicken fried steak, as well as some of the Chinese influence the Wong family has given to the restaurant.

I think we would probably be tarred and feathered and ran out of town on the rails if we got rid of that, he joked.

The restaurant was on the market for months before the group was actually selected as the buyers, in part because Fred said he was looking for someone who would appreciate the cafes place in Flagstaff.

Its going to be great, Fred said, They all do really good work and have experience with different places in town. I would rather see them come in than somebody from out of town whos new.

Laura said she has been approached by friends and community members and asked about the sale of the cafe. She said there is always a sign of relief when people find out "Flagstaff people" have bought the restaurant.

The Wongs own a farm in Camp Verde and have family in the Phoenix area. Once the sale is completed, Fred said he would like to focus more on working on the farm and visiting his new grandson, who was born earlier this year.

The restaurant has been featured in numerous travel guides and cookbooks, and Wong said in the 1950s, people used to line up down the block to get a table, before there were many restaurants along Route 66.

The group began talking seriously with the Wongs about buying the restaurant at the beginning of summer. The group expects the sale to be finalized this month, and then the buyers will close the restaurant for a while to make updates. Michael said they are aiming for the restaurant to be reopened by December.

Taking on a project with such cultural significance to the town comes with a lot of responsibility.

Its nice that were not coming in with a concept, Laura said. We like the structure and the way its laid out.

Alissa said she hopes the regulars from Grand Canyon Cafe can embrace the new chapter for the restaurant.

When a place is a touchstone to you, if it changes drastically, that can be very disconcerting, Alissa said. If it can be modernized in a way that makes you feel like you are part of the changes that can feel good.

Alissa said the character of the cafe and other local businesses make Flagstaff a destination for tourists and favorites for locals.

"It brings heart to the community, and helps nurture relationships in the community," she said. "Those places are what makes a town somewhere you want to live, or, if you're a tourist, somewhere you feel welcome."

According to Paul, many of the physical changes to the restaurant will be invisible to customers, like bringing the building up to ADA compliance for accessibility, replacing tile and re-stuffing the booth seats.

The neon sign and the brick exterior will stay, and Alissa said the group is looking at some ways to bring some function back into the retro design, including restoring the jukebox in the restaurant and bringing back an antique wooden door, similar to the one that marked the entrance to the cafe for decades before it was taken down and sold.

However, Michael said the group plans to add their own flavor to the cafe, while maintaining the character of the street that locals have come to love.

With so much changing in Flagstaff right now, we really want people to know we are going to do our best to keep this as much the same as we can, Michael said. Were trying our best to keep it a landmark.

But, some change is inevitable, Alissa pointed out.

Its going to be different, Fred and Tina wont be here, she said
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Samuel William Bliss, age 89, died peacefully Wednesday, August 31 after a brief illness at his home in Lake Placid, Florida, surrounded by family and friends.

He was born on February 23, 1927 in Hominy, Oklahoma, to Samuel William Bliss and Mary Haines. Sam and his three brothers grew up hunting and fishing to help provide for the family. As a young man he was known for his resourcefulness, earning money by selling frog legs and setting pins at the local bowling alley to working as a wildcatter in the booming oil fields of Oklahoma and Illinois. Sam proudly served in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II.

In 1970, Sam moved to Flagstaff where he was a professor at Northern Arizona University for 19 years. During that time, he helped establish the Research and Development Center and doctoral program at the College of Education. He shared his passion for Arizonas wilderness and wildlife with his family and his many lifelong friends. After retiring, Sam worked as a consultant in Arizona, Alaska and Florida, assisting school districts with management and administrative technology.

Sam is survived by his wife of 44 years, Margaret; his daughter, Laura Bliss Spaan of Anchorage, Alaska; his son, Drake Bliss of Cape Coral, Florida; and grandchildren, Kayla and Tyler Spaan.

A memorial service was held Saturday, September 3 in Lake Placid, Florida. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests making a memorial donation to the NAU Retirees scholarship fund at http://nau.edu/Giving/
Prof. Kwame Frimpong said the current system is not sustainable under the country's legal regime.

He said doors to legal education should be left wide open while ensuring training by appropriate quality standards.

Under the current system, a prospective law student would have to apply to the Ghana Law School after completing a Bachelor of Laws programme in the University.

Out of the hundreds that apply, a little over 200 students are shortlisted to take the course after a rigorous interview.

Prof. Kwame Frimpong made the call when the UPSA commissioned its new Law Faculty in Accra.

He said: The Ghana Law School cannot sustain the current system, under the countrys legal education. We should let the faculties do it.

If this happens, then there is no need for someone to come all the way from Bolgatanga in the Upper East Region to come to Accra just to attend a law school before he can be called a lawyer."

His call adds to the growing list of people calling for the Ghana law school to be scrapped.

A senior lawyer and lecturer at the University of Ghana, Kwame Gyan, in 2015 said the law school has become a needless bureaucratic hurdle that hinders brilliant individuals from becoming lawyers.

He said: What I think we should do is; we should scrap the Ghana school of law which is just a school, and the general legal council will remain. So the law school will not teach courses but will be an examining body acting for and on behalf of the general legal council.Professor Kwasi Prempeh, a U.S-based Lawyer, has also described the admission process into the law school as " crude, arbitrary, and grossly unfair way to regulate the supply of lawyers.

He argues that the system is denying many qualified people the opportunity to become lawyers, saying Ghana 'is grossly under-lawyered.'
Mourners who attended the ceremony said his death was a great loss to the music industry.

Among them was the former boss of the Ghana National Petroleum Commission Tstasu Tsikata. He attended the funeral with his wife, Esther. Nettey's songs uplifted him while in prison.

In a moving tribute, Danny Nettey's mom said she can't believe her son is gone and that she is devastated and confused.

Mrs Beatrice Nettey, recounted her fond memories with her son, saying she keeps looking at the door hoping that Nettey would walk by to ask her Whats for dinner, Mom?"

It reads: " I still cant believe you are gone; I am shocked, devastated and confused. You were your usually self when we spoke that fateful morning, so you can understand my shock and confusion.

"I keep looking at the door, hoping that at any given moment you would walk right in and ask me, Whats for dinner, Mom? You would then put your arms around me and ask: Whats up, Mom? with that big smile on your face.

"I miss that big smile and that loud infectious laughter that made me want to laugh along with you. That is the kind of person you were; warm, generous, and big-hearted. Even as you teased me, it was never mean-spirited. You did it to make me happy, besides pointing out the obvious."

At the funeral ceremony, gospel musician Bernice Ofei sang her hit song "Life is so short," to remind all present that we shall return to our maker one day.

Minister Denzel led the worship service.
She said: "My mother walked out of a CEGENSA event today meant to celebrate her and the winners of a short story competition in her honor."Both the banner (hanging in the hall at the African Regent) and the programme cover had her name as 'Ama Atta Aidoo' and not 'Ama Ata Aidoo', which is the correct spelling of her name. All her books use the right spelling of her name. Wikipedia use the right spelling."This peculiar and contrived confusion over the spelling of her Ata is a uniquely Ghanaian problem. And this sloppiness is even a recent thing. "She's been battling this for a while now, culminating in her walking out of an event in her honor today. "Of course, she couldn't have stayed. I know my mum. She would have felt bad throughout the event. "The whole thing is messy. We must really pay more attention to the details of things. It's more disheartening because CEGENSA is an academic institute. They know her, her name and her work."
So I told God about it. I dont do anything without first consulting my friend the Holy Spirit. Few days to the inauguration of the Peace Council, I had a missed call; I didnt know the person so I didnt call back. So the person sent a text message, it was the Deputy Minister of Interior, [James] Agalga. So immediately something said call so I called back. He was then at the house so he came out. First I said, yes this is the Rev. Prof. Martey, moderator of the Presbyterian church of Ghana, but you know something, the Holy Spirit blinded his mind so he didnt even hear that it was the Presby moderator who was talking to him. The Holy Spirit wanted him to tell me what he has for me, to help me decide whether or not to be a member of the Peace Council. He said he had a meeting with the Minister of Interior and they both agreed that I become the Chairman of the Peace Council.
The president told voters in Bimbila in the Northern region that it will be a "dangerous experiment" to try the NPP leader, adding that Ghana is not at the stage where we are experimenting leadership and so you cant come and beg that we should try you."

However, speaking at a rally where he earlier accused the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC) of collapsing the National Health Insurance Scheme and promising to revive it when he wins the election, Nana Addo turned up the venom on his NDC rival.

So what is the purpose of the continuity? Are we going to continue the disaster?, Akufo-Addo said of Mahama. "Is that what we want to do? We want to get rid of the disaster, and bring in a man with new ideas and a fresh direction for our nation.

The presidential nominee of the NPP added that experience of president Mahama at the presidency has be a "disastrous experience for our country.

Akufo-Addo also appealed to voters to have confidence in him.
Speaking at a rally in Nandom in the Upper West Region Sunday, Nana Akufo-Addo said the collapse of the scheme under the watch of president John Mahama is due to the fact that he and his party never believed in it.

He recalled how the then NDC minority in parliament walked out of parliament when the bill to establish the NHIS was brought to the house.

The NPP leader said:"One of the biggest legacies of president Kufour was the National Health Insurance Scheme. It has collapse under the NDC and John Mahama administration.

"When the [NHIS] bill was going to parliament, the NDC parliamentarians including the then MP for Bole-Bamboi, John Dramani Mahama walked out of the house.

"They did not believe in the bill. They walked out. So it is not surprising that when they came to power this important tool of social engineering, of social stability, of equity in our system has been discarded and sent into the dustbin."

Nana-Akufo promised to fix the "collapsed" NHIS and make it work for the benefit of Ghanaians."We are going to bring it back and make it work for everybody here in Ghana."

This is not the first time the NPP presidential nominee has accused the government of collapsing the NHIS.

At a rally in the Dormaa West constituency of the Brong Ahafo region in July 2016, the NPP leader said he will revive the NHIS which he claims is collapsing under the NDC.

I am coming to revive the National Health Insurance Scheme, which ensured that the poor in society gained access to healthcare without the financial burden which used to be associated with healthcare delivery (under the cash and carry regime), he said.

However, president Mahama, who is seeking a second term in office has rejected Akufo-Addo's claims, saying the scheme is "very strong" under the NDC.
Our country is a rich country. It is poor governance that is keeping us where we are today. We have an opportunity this December to change the circumstances of our country. So I have come to appeal to you for the support of yourself and the people of the Gonja Kingdom, he said.

He continued, We, in the NPP, have the men and women who can give this country a first class government, and we have the policies that can get our country working again, create jobs for young people and bring about an improvement in the quality of life of all Ghanaians.

He made this known when the campaign team visited the overlord of Gonjaland, Yagbon Wura Tuntumba Bore Essa I on Friday, September 1, 2016 at the Jakpa Palace as part of his 4-day tour of the Northern Region.

The NPP flagbearer noted, that the provision of potable, drinking water is the reason why he announced the setting up of the Infrastructure for Poverty Eradication Programme (IPEP).

This programme, he explained, will allocate US$275 million per year to tackle issues relating to infrastructural development and poverty eradication in rural and deprived communities across the country. This amount translates into US$1 million per constituency per year, to address the developmental needs of all constituencies across the country, and in this case the provision of water for Damongo.

On the part of the overlord of Gonjaland, Yagbon Wura Tuntumba Bore Essa I, he said the major concern of his people is the lack of potable, drinking water.
PHOENIX -- Gov. Doug Ducey putting some distance between his efforts to cultivate better relations with Mexico and the rhetoric of his party's nominee.

The governor said Friday that he agrees with the policy laid out earlier this week in a speech here by Donald Trump that the first step has to be securing the border. And Ducey said Trump is correct in his desire to rid the country of criminal aliens.

But the governor sidestepped the question of whether he shares the candidate's belief that there should be no path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million people in this country without documents.

And Ducey specifically said he does not believe it is necessary to actually build a physical wall along this country's border with Mexico as Trump has promised to do if elected..

"I want to see border security,'' Ducey said. But the governor said there are other ways to achieve that.

"We can use technology to do that,'' he explained. "We can use border enforcement, we can use border agents to do this.''

And the governor said the state Department of Public Safety and county sheriffs also can play a role.

"I talked about that in my campaign,'' Ducey said of his views of border security

"This is his campaign,'' he said of Trump. "I'll let him speak for himself.''

The governor's comments come as he attempts to navigate a path of openly supporting the leader of his party who has taken a hard-line stance on illegal immigration even as Ducey, as the governor of a border state, is trying to promote closer relations with Mexico.

"Mexico is our No. 1 trading partner, times four,'' Ducey said Friday. "My administration has worked very hard in building that relationship.''

The governor said the addition of new flights between Arizona and Sinaloa helps cement those ties.

On Wednesday, when Trump was in Phoenix -- and introduced by Ducey -- the candidate made clear his view on what should happen to the 11 million migrants already in this country.

"For those here today illegally who are seeking legal status, they will have one route and only one route: to return home and apply for reentry under the rules of the new legal immigration system that I have outlined,'' Trump said.

"There will be no amnesty,'' he continued. "Our message to the world will be this: You cannot obtain legal status, or become a citizen of the United States, by illegally entering our country.''

And does the governor agree?

"There was a policy that was laid out,'' he responded. "People can debate that.''

Ducey did say he is in favor of "anything that supports border security and brings clarity to our immigration process.'' But he balked when asked if that includes the lack of a path to legal status as Trump has said.

"I want to start with border security,'' the governor said. "I think once you get that, then you can have this discussion in terms of public policy.''

Ducey also suggested that people need to differentiate between what he is trying to do here to foster ties with Mexico and the sometimes contradictory rhetoric on the campaign trail.

"We're in the middle of a campaign season that's nationally being discussed,'' the governor said. "What we've done in Arizona has been a positive for this relationship and we'll continue to focus on it.''
According to City News, the suspect carried out the act with five other accomplices around July and December 2014.

Reports say the victim was lured to the house of the medicine hawker, where he made some incantations which reportedly got Ibrahim hypnotised.

A source who gave an account of the incident told newsmen that Ibrahim was given some concoction to drink, while some marks were made all over his body.

When they got to the house, they recited some incantations and gave him something to drink",

They also used razor and made some marks on his stomach and rubbed some concoction into it,

He sold his two cars and that of his wife, as well as his house and three plots of land that he bought for some people", he added.
The suspects, Nasiru Mohammed, 28, Ibrahim Mohammed, 42, Yahaya Shuaibu, 38 and Alaramma Nura Idris, 37, Mallam Sani Mohammed Usman, 45, were apprehended following a command by the IGP, Ibrahim Idris, who directed that criminals behind burglary and theft in Abuja be arrested.

The command took action due to a petition written by Yahya Umar Santa, concerning an increase in the diversion of goods in the state.

Santa stated in his petition that 600 bags of rice worth N6m were taken by the suspects, who were arrested in placed such as Kaduna, Niger and Abuja.
Iyabo was apprehended at the Nnamdi Azikiwe Airport, Abuja, where she reportedly excreted 76 pellets of cocaine, Daily Post reports.

The NDLEA commander stationed at the airport told newsmen that the suspect is still being held for close observation.

ALSO READ: 2 Nigerian men arrested for drug trafficking

While stating what motivated her to commit the crime, Iyabo, who is an indigene of Kwara State said she embarked on her mission due to an offer of N1 million.

I wanted to expand my cosmetic business but I have no money. My sponsor offered to foot my expenses to Saudi on pilgrimage."
According to reports, Nwocha, during a confession, told the police that he only slept with one of the under-aged girls which he kept in his 3 bedroom apartment.

ALSO READ: Custom officers arrest man smuggling bags of rice as corpses in ambulance

I only tried to help the girls. When the first girl came, she said she did not have anywhere to go. I did not know her parents. I am a pastor and I felt pity for her."

"After spending three days, I told her she needed to go out and bring some of her relations so that they would know where she was. But she did not."

Later, some parents in my church also said they would like to send their chidlren to live with me. Some of them came to spend holidays after their exam.

I am a pastor, the devil only used the children against me. I did not rape them. I only slept with one of the girls. She is my girlfriend and we actually planned to marry.

Commenting on the matter, the Lagos State Commissioner of Police, Fatai Owoseni, told newsmen that the suspect kept the girls with a promise of paying their tuition fees.
Neighboring Singapore has reported more than 200 cases of Zika.

Three days ago, Malaysia reported its first Zika infection - a woman living near Kuala Lumpur who contracted the virus during a visit to Singapore.

On Saturday, Malaysian authorities said they had detected the first local infection: a 61-year-old man in the city of Kota Kinabalu, in the Malaysian part of Borneo island.

"The confirmation of the second case of Zika in Kota Kinabalu suggests that the virus is already present within our communities," Health Minister Subramaniam Sathasivam said.

"Zika is present in our country. New cases will continue to emerge," he posted on his Facebook page.

Zika infections in pregnant women have been shown to cause microcephaly - a severe birth defect in which the head and brain are undersized - as well as other brain abnormalities.

ALSO READ: Hong Kong confirms first case of Zika virus

The connection between Zika and microcephaly first came to light last fall in Brazil, which has since confirmed more than 1,800 cases of microcephaly.
In a statement signed by its operative, Tony Opuiyo, the DSS said two high-profile members of the sect were intercepted during a military operation in Kano State.

The statement said: In response to the regrouping of Boko Haram elements in Kano state, the service in concert with the military, carried out coordinated operations in the state which led to the apprehension of two high profile members of the sect, namely; Ibrahim Ustaz Abubakar and Idris Audu (aka Aya).

Audu is an IED specialist who was being groomed to penetrate security agencies in the country. Audu had already perfected plans to seek for recruitment into the next recruitment scheme of the Nigeria army, before his arrest.

On 22 August, 2016, one Samuel Asuquo, a kidnap kingpin, was arrested by the service at Nasarawa Bakoko village in Cross River state, it said.

Asuquo was the mastermind of the kidnap of three Australian staff of Lafarge Cement Company, for which his gang received ransom of 150m.

Similarly, on 30 August, 2016, the trio of Bamaiyi Mustapha (aka Dan Borno), Aminu Isa and Hassan Shehu, members of a notorious kidnap gang operating around the Abuja-Kaduna axis, were arrested at Lafia, Nasarawa state."
Melaye, who lamented the deplorable living condition of Nigerians, said these top officers must be fired for their incompetence, as he is scared of being stoned by his constituents.

The president must immediately transit from mere rhetoric to drastic but positive action to save the economy and Nigeria from total collapse. The hunger in the land is real, pervasive, widespread and debilitating for the poor masses, Melaye said in a statement.

I was a permanent fixture at the All Progressive Congress (APCs) Presidential campaign rallies and events, functioning mostly as the Master of Ceremonies (MC). I am a proud APC Member, a party bonafide with a great stake in the success or failure of this administration, so no one can accuse me of sour grapes or meddlesomeness.

As I walk the streets of my constituency these days, I constantly harbor a foreboding that I could be stoned by my angry constituents for the failure of Mr President to fulfill his campaign promises and expectations to Nigerians.

Nigeria is tottering on a dangerous precipice, sliding perilously to a certain catastrophe if the current economic malaise is not halted immediately.

The lawmaker further said: The finance minister has not only displayed gross incompetence on the job, she also lacks the basic and rudimentary grasp of economic fundamentals necessary to run a critical sector of the Nigerian economy like the finance ministry. It is time for her to go now and pave way for a qualified and experienced person to steer the Nigerian economy away from the dark woods it has sunk presently under her stewardship.

To be sure, Senator Udoma Udo Udoma is a very charismatic man, an accomplished lawyer, and a quintessential gentleman with a fairly untainted reputation. In everyday parlance, he is a good man. But the critical job of budget and national planning minister for a huge country like Nigeria, with her prevailing economic challenges requires much more than being a good man with a great personality.

As a lawyer, accomplished in this field as he is, Udomas appointment to that position is nepotism taken to very ridiculous heights; and a classic case of putting round pegs in square holes-it will, and can never fit. It is akin to saddling a carpenter with a tailors responsibility. The outcome under the circumstances, as has become evidently clear, is bound to be catastrophic for the economy. President Buhari must, therefore, do the needful now by relieving Udoma of this huge burden that is constituting a clog to the revival of the Nigerian economy.

ALSO READ: NGO gives Melaye 3 days ultimatum to apologise to Tinubu's wife

He accused the CBN governor of policy flip-flops, summersaults and inconsistencies as clear evidence of gross incompetence in the management of the nations fiscal and monetary policies.
This is contained in a statement issued by the Chief Press Secretary to the governor, Mr Idowu Adelusi in Ado Ekiti.

The statement quoted Fayose to have said that traditional rulers, local chiefs and community leaders would be consulted to offer suggestions before the final ratification of the budget.

According to him, this will produce a document that truly reflect the needs of the people and not that of government alone

``It is my belief that this type of bottom-to-top approach being adopted by the government in preparing the budget will ensure prioritising the needs of the people.

``State officials cannot just sit down in Ado-Ekiti and choose what the people want in the various communities for the government to accommodate in the budget; it must be participatory and all-embracing.

``If we say let us for instance do a road project somewhere, the most important need of the people of that community could be a health facility.

``We want people's participation in the preparation of the budget so as to affect their lives positively and meet with them at very point of their need", he said.

The governor also promised that his administration will not leave any abandoned project behind while leaving office.

Fayose advised community leaders to hold meetings with their people as well as collate their needs and forward same to their local government chairmen.
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Flagstaff City Council candidates have been given the chance to answer a weekly question in no more than 150 words. This weeks question: Leaving aside for now the option of raising the minimum wage to as high as $15 an hour, what other strategies could the city adopt to improve economic development and good workforce options in Flagstaff?

Council

Adam Shimoni

Flagstaff already has many great organizations established to support local and small businesses. We must continue to support these efforts. We can also create a fund for business micro loans and establish a business advisory group to mentor first time businesses in understanding processes and codes. The City needs to identify the businesses we want to attract, then actively promote Flagstaff as the best place for them to operate. We need to identify businesses that can prosper with the amenities we have to offer - businesses that can thrive on our existing workforce, instead of having to import workers. Flagstaff is the ideal place for businesses in sustainable, research, or web-based fields such as solar, water purification and science innovation. We can work to attract a specialized technical school to train and grow a high-tech workforce to appeal to high-tech companies - something we are currently missing.

Jim McCarthy

To build a strong middle class, we need good-paying jobs. To attract the best businesses, we need to build on the qualities that make us special, while providing opportunities for appropriate growth.

Economic development requires infrastructure. We need a healthy transportation system and a cooperative government. Relocating and expanding businesses need suitable land to build on, or sites to remodel. They need our educated work force, excellent education for their children, and affordable housing.

We appropriately have given tax exemptions to attract business. The public good must be clear before approving these agreements, considering that they can be unfair to existing business.

We have a diverse economy and are socially diverse. This is a perfect place for small scale manufacturing and innovation. The council needs to support that spirit. Council needs to support NACET (Northern Arizona Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology) and ECoNA (Economic Collaborative of Northern Arizona).

Jeff Oravits

I was pleased to see a report from the Economic Collaborative of NAZ with bureau of labor statistics data showing wages and employment up in Flagstaff. Flagstaffs economy is prospering!

A big part of my job as your Council Representative has been meeting with small businesses to assist them in growing their companies and encouraging companies to relocate here. We must continue to adopt policies that foster an environment that small business can prosper in.

Education and vocational training are also critical to a vibrant economy. Over the past 4years Ive spent a lot of time at the Capitol lobbying for additional support for education and vocational programs and will continue these efforts if re-elected.

I have years of experience as a small business owner and employer. With this background and my experience on Council over the past four years I will continue focusing on growing our economy, wages and prosperity.

Karla Brewster

A start would be for the city to make sure all employees of the city are making more than the state minimum wage, setting an example for the rest of businesses. I would guess not many, if any, are at the actual bottom of the minimum wage as a city employee. The other strategy would be to focus on helping businesses locate in Flagstaff that pay good wages, such as the techie businesses. Artificially raising the minimum wage for all businesses has unintended consequences for small businesses and those that are struggling. Raising any wage should be market driven and decided by the individual business. The city could collaborate more with ECoNA in attracting businesses into our region that are clean and pay higher wages. In addition, the city should be part of the group that is talking about workforce housing with the other larger businesses in town. Collaborative efforts are more successful and spread around not only ideas, but often costs.

Jamie Whelan

We must support the Coconino Community College bond 100%. CCC is one of our most important links to workforce training programs. We must also support and grow the CAVIAT program which offers joint technological training and links high school students from 5 school districts to Flagstaff business, industry and our post-secondary educational institutions. Our continued effort to provide the infrastructure in which entrepreneurs and start-ups can be created and grown through the Northern Arizona Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology and the Flagstaff Business Accelerator is essential. Finally, to continue to build strong relationships with ALL economic development efforts in Flagstaff which include but are not limited to the Economic Collaborative of Northern Arizona, Coconino County and the Flagstaff Chamber of Commerce.

I do want you to know that I believe ALL workers need to be paid a wage that allows them to live in our community and raise their families.

Charlie Odegaard

As indicated by the visible resumption of new construction during the past four years, Flagstaff is beginning to be considered more business-friendly. Our strategy should be to make sure that slogan is continuously borne out by clearly stated city policies, procedures, and expectations. Numerous people in the community are telling me the citys expectations for business activities and business development are ambiguous and unclear and often dont exist in writing.

Being able to employ a significant number of community residents is a key component of business-friendliness. Employers tell me that relevant workforce training is lacking in the Flagstaff community. One way the City could address this is to collaborate with Coconino Community College in bringing back vocational training courses that were eliminated because of the recession. I will be supporting Proposition 410, which would add more jobs programs and produce a workforce whose pay increases reflect their skill levels.

Mayor

Jerry Nabours

When we get employers interested in locating their business in Flagstaff one of their first questions is the workforce availability and skill level. This is where we have an issue.

For example, some local manufacturers have told me they have difficulty finding and keeping assembly line employees. These are technical machinery and computer system operators. Some of the car dealers have told me they have to recruit mechanics from other cities.

Our community college could provide training but it is expensive and they are strapped.

There are good high school classes available. There are also technical schools available... at a cost. The Chamber of Commerce holds coding classes for school age children to get them interested.

The key is letting younger people know there are good jobs that do not require a college degree but do require training and skills. Then, supporting the entities that provide such training.

Coral Evans

I have too many ideas to fit into 150 words, but heres a start. Our micro brewery industry should grow. The Verde Valley wine industry is a $50M industry built in the last 10 years. We can also build off the success of the wine industry in our neighboring communities by building relationships with their vineyards. I would like to see a local food and drink incubator.

NorthCounty provides oversight for medical students seeking residencies. How can we build on the success of that program? We can grow the number of new doctors establishing practices in Flagstaff. We should expand arts, science, and cultural based tourism programs. The establishment of an arts district and new arts facility would increase revenues and opportunities.
Gaul-Lebo disclosed this in Calabar during an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN).

He explained that the assembly had proposed 50 bills in the first legislative year, 26 of which were passed, while 24 were still pending at various committees of the house.

He also said that out of the 22 motions brought before the house by members, 18 of them were considered while four were rejected.

He listed some of the bills to include Cross River Infrastructure Development Fund bill; Greater Calabar City Development bill; Water Front Infrastructure Agency bill; Kidnapping Prohibition Bill and Social Housing Scheme bill.

``During the year under review, June 2015 to June 2016, the Cross River House of Assembly proposed a total of 50 bills.

``Twenty six of these bills were passed into law while 24 are still being considered.

``The Cross River House of Assembly was rated the best in terms of legislative work by the Legislative Institute of Nigeria for the 2015/ 2016 legislative year.

``If you check the Institute of Legislative Studies in Nigeria, I think we are the only house of assembly with the highest number of bills passed in one year, `` he said.

The speaker maintained that most of the bills were people-oriented and meant to provide safety social services for the citizenry.

ALSO READ: Cross Rivers Government to legalize street hawking
Abubakar disclosed this on Sunday, September 4, in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, during his visit to NAF Mobility Command.

He said: The planned deployment is aimed at strengthening the existing NAF manpower disposition, especially in Bayelsa and to enhance Nigerian Air Force (NAF) involvement in `Operation Delta Safe.

Preparatory to this deployment, new facilities were recently put in place to cater for accommodation and other welfare needs of the personnel.

These include the construction of new blocks of accommodation for officers and men, office accommodation, airmens mess and provost squadron which were commissioned recently.

According another statement signed by the NAF Director of Public Relations and Information, Group Capt. Ayodele Famuyiwa, two of the airmens blocks of accommodation have been named after Cpl. Omaka VI and Aircraftman Ofonih EF, both of whom were killed in Bosso, Niger, during an Internal Security Operation.

Retired AVM Larry Koinyan commissioned the newly-constructed projects as the guest of honour.

In his remarks, AVM Koinyan applauded NAF personnel for their courage and resounding successes following their renewed vigour at ensuring peace and stability in the various theatres of operations in the country.
Marino, in a letter to the Secretary of State, John Kerry on Thursday, September 1, 2016, directed the State Department to refrain from selling warplanes and other military equipment to Nigeria until President Buhari establishes a track record of working towards inclusion.

He decried President Buhari's "selective anti-corruption drive" which according to him has focused almost exclusively on members of the opposition party, over-looking corruption amongst some of Buharis closest advisors.

The six-paragraph letter which was obtained by Thisday reads in full:

Dear Secretary Kerry, I am encouraged by the personal interest you have taken in aiding Nigeria and its administration as it takes on endemic corruption, multiple insurgent movements, and a faltering economy. However, I believe there are a number of warning signs emerging in the Buhari administration that signal the man who once led Nigeria as a military dictator might be sliding towards former autocratic tendencies.

I would urge the U.S. to withhold its security assistance to the nation until President Buhari demonstrates a commitment to inclusive government and the most basic tenets of democracy: freedom to assemble and freedom of speech. A logical start towards this commitment is for the Nigerian government to hold accountable those members of the Nigerian Police Force and the Nigerian Military complicit in extra-judicial killings and war crimes.

Human rights groups like Amnesty International have widely documented torture, inhumane treatment, and extra-judicial killings of defenseless Nigerians since President Buhari took office.

Quoting Amnesty International Report, he wrote, In the last six months, Nigerias military has unlawfully killed at least 350 people and allowed more than 168 people, including babies and children, to die in military detention.

He continued: The secretary to the government of Kaduna state even admitted to burying 347 of those killed in a mass grave. And while President Buhari promised swift condemnation, his words rang empty. Instead of swift reforms, Buhari chose to reinstate Major General Ahmadu Mohammed, who Amnesty International revealed was in charge of the Nigerian military unit that executed more than 640 unarmed, former detainees.

Also, in separate incidents concerning the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), the Nigerian Army has killed at least 36  the real number is likely higher  people since December 2015 in an attempt to silence opposition and quell attempts by the group to gather publicly.

Marino stated that "President Buhari has continually shunned inclusivety by surrounding himself with advisors and ministers from the north of the country and the region he considers home."

Of President Buharis 122 appointees, 77 are from the north and control many of the key ministries and positions of power. Distrust is already high in Nigeria and favouring Northerners for key appointments has only antagonized the issue. These appointments are also primarily Muslim in the north and Christian in the south, adding a religious aspect to long-held regional biases.

Of additional concern is President Buharis selective anti-corruption drive, which has focused almost exclusively on members of the opposition party, over-looking corruption amongst some of Buharis closest advisors. Politicizing his anti-corruption efforts has only reinforced hostility among southerners.

This is a logical first step in making a demonstrable, sustained commitment to inclusive democracy, with distributed power in Nigeria. Until President Buhari establishes a track record of working towards inclusion, we ask the State Department to refrain from selling warplanes and other military equipment to the country.

The State Department should urge President Buhari to form a government that represents the diversity of its citizens and allows dissenting voices to be heard. Democracy can thrive only if people are free to assemble, to express their beliefs, and voice their concerns," Marino stated.

Meanwhile, the Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshal Sadique Abubakar, said that the Nigerian Air Force has concluded plans to deploy more personnel of the Niger Delta.
In a news report published by Punch News on Saturday, September 3, 2016, the actor denied the story, adding that his belief in God had been the reason for his success.

ALSO READ: Actor threatens to sue female colleague over romance allegations

I never knew I would be successful as an actor; my belief has always been that God should elevate me in my endeavours. I always prayed that God should make me a successful person."

Some people say that I used voodoo or metaphysical powers to be successful. I hear when they say such but I tell everyone that I can never do such."

To clear any doubt about his sincerity concerning the voodoo rumour, the actor swore in front of a crowd at a graduation ceremony held at his acting institute, Odunlade Adekola Drama and Film Production, Abeokuta.

"During the graduation of my students last year, I addressed this issue because it was during that time people were peddling rumours of my demise."

"When the rumour of my death hit town, some people said that I did jazz to be successful. That was why during the graduation of my students last year, I said it in public that if I had ever thought of doing jazz to succeed God should make me lose everything I had ever worked for."

I hear these comments but they do not move me at all. I am a writer, director, producer and an actor. It is normal for people to talk but it has never upset me.

According to the actor, his acting career took shape when he was just a child.
I am a caring and faithful husband to my wife, who just gave birth to a set of twins. We both worked in the banking industry when we met each other and got married.

I lost my job due to a shake up in my bank in 2014 and since then, my wife has been the one taking care of the family. She just lost her job, and God answered our prayer for a child by giving us a wonderful set of twin girls.

My wife has exhausted her savings, the shop which she opened has not been bringing the needed funds, and I have not been able to get another job since.

My friend recently introduced me to a supply job and I decided to go and submit a proposal to a government agency in my state and behold, my ex-girlfriend from University is the one in charge of awarding contracts.

We exchanged pleasantries and got talking about the old times, after which she collected my proposal and promised to help me.

She even advised me to register a construction company, since I studied civil engineering, because the state government is doing a lot of construction work.

To my surprise, the lady helped me with the money I used to register a limited liability company, so I did not need to use my friends company name again.

I did not want to accept her gesture, but my wife said I should accept it, since God has brought her to help me.

Two weeks ago, I got a call from her that my tender for a road construction job has been looked into, and that she wants to see me.

When I went to see her, she said she has been trying to get my attention and I have been avoiding her, now she will see if I will not meet her demand.

She told me that it is in her power to award the N500m road construction contract to me, just by signing on my tender, but I had to sleep with her.

I pleaded with her not to destroy my family and even told her my wife will feel betrayed, but she refused. I left the office dejected.

There are a lot of needs to be met in the house and my father in-law is in the hospital, the family expects my wife, who is the first child to help with funds.

Here I am with the opportunity to get a N500m contract from which I can make at least N75m profit, going by my analysis, and my family is suffering. Please what do I do? Help me.

Hello guys, let us help this young man with our advice. Please post your comments below.

If you want to share any personal marriage issue with us, kindly send an email to: chika.ebuzor@ringier.ng (Your identity will NEVER be revealed).
Atsewe, a Parish Priest at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church, Gwarinpa, Abuja, gave the advice in his homily on Sunday.

``Times are hard; parents should not allow their girls to go into prostitution because of money.

``I once met a prostitute, a student, who told me she was sponsoring herself in school and also taking care of her younger ones.

``She told me that her mother supported what she was doing, so sad that a mother will allow her daughter to go into such business, the priest said.

The cleric, however, urged Christians not to allow the situation in the country to reduce them to what they are not.
They gave the commendation in separate interviews with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Calabar.

They told NAN that Anene embarked on the renovation as part of her Community Development Project during the service year.

Mrs. Regina Agaba, Principal of Government College, Ikot Ansa, Calabar, said that the corps member had surprised the school authorities by the gesture.

Agaba said that hoodlums had earlier vandalised the library.

She said: Hoodlums carted away the reading chairs and tables because there was no burglary proof.

`` The corps member had replaced those things, provided new shelves and renovated the entire place.

Miss Anene is simply marvelous and we, indeed, appreciate her efforts. After library had been vandalized, our students had no quite place to read.

Now she has brought life back to our library; she is a God sent.

Also, the Principal of Estate Secondary School, Calabar, Mrs. Felicia Atsu, described the corps members project in her school as being worthy of emulation.

``It is difficult to find people like Anene these days; it takes the heart of gold to do the things she did for our school. She is a hardworking woman.

``It is a positive development that will enhance learning; my students now have a serene place to study.

``She didnt do it because she was so rich; she did it because she wanted to touch the lives of other people.

``I love what she had done and I pray other corps members will emulate her good gesture, Atsu said.

The NYSC member who is serving with General Electric (GE), Calabar, told NAN that she was moved by the plights of the students who lacked conducive learning environments for learning.
Zuckerberg, who recently concluded a short trip to Nigeria, stunned everyone when he showed up unannounced at the technology innovation center.

According to Tijani, who spoke in an interview with Punch News, his team were advised not disclose any information about the billionaire's visit to the country.

Violation of this instruction would have led to the termination of the Facebook owner's trip.

Tijani said, "It was challenging. We were literally warned not to (say anything); if there was a leak, he would turn back, he wouldnt come."

"The sixth or seventh richest man in the world; it was a security threat."

"We didnt know on time that he was the one that was coming; we knew a CEO or executive was coming from Facebook."

"Then few weeks before his arrival, we were informed that he was coming."

The CEO however thinks Zuckerberg's visit to Nigeria was underutilised, bearing in mind some of the issues faced in the country.

"It is unbelievable to a lot of people that Mark actually chose to come to Nigeria. It gives us hope that there is something unique about this place. But unfortunately, we are not taking advantage of it."

"Again, think about it, do you know that he came in on the day Nigeria was proclaimed to be entering the worst recession in 29 years?"
Like all pregnant women in Uganda, she was tested for HIV as part of routine screening for the virus. She lost her baby and was then given the news that she was HIV-positive.

"I was in a lot of pain and the situation was bad. They told me they were going to clean my womb. They took me to the examination room and asked me how many children I had. I told them I had four," she said, recalling the events of 2008.

"They were using English. I did not understand what they were saying because I never studied English. They told me they were going to give me treatment. Later when I gained consciousness I saw a dressing on my belly, but because I was in great pain, I couldn't ask questions."

After the miscarriage, Ida tried for some years to get pregnant again. Eventually, she went to another hospital, where she was examined and told her fallopian tubes had been cut. Without her knowledge, she had been sterilized.

Joy, who, like Ida, did not want to give her real name, was sterilized in 2003, when she was 21 years old. She had been admitted to hospital in Kampala to deliver her first child. She was HIV-positive.

"They told me after birth that they would give me an injection so that I wouldn't give birth again for five years - which I accepted,"," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"I didn't know until later that I had been sterilized. I found out when I visited a clinic because I kept getting stomach pains."

The doctor at the clinic asked to see her medical records which were with her uncle. When she asked to see the forms she learnt that her fallopian tubes had been cut and her uncle had signed the consent form.

"Upon hearing that, I started shedding tears. This has greatly affected my health. I just struggle to accept the situation," she said.

A 2015 study carried out in nine districts of Uganda by the International Community of Women living with HIV Eastern Africa (ICWEA) found 72 out of 744 HIV-positive women surveyed had been sterilized. Twenty of them had been forced to undergo the procedure, or it had happened without their consent.

Hajarah Nagadya of ICWEA said that 18 of the 20 forced sterilizations had been carried out in government hospitals, and two cases occurred in private clinics.

"These women need psychological support such as counseling because a lot is going through their mind," Nagadya said.

"Others want to consider a legal action, go to court and have the government compensate them."

Asuman Lukwago, the permanent secretary at the ministry, said such cases of forced sterilization were a criminal offence. However, he said there may be exceptional circumstances in which doctors may decide to sterilize women if they believed their lives would be in danger in pregnancy.
OK. We will stipulate that Donald Trumps speech in Phoenix last Wednesday on illegal immigration was insulting to Mexico, opaque on practicalities and alarmingly ignorant on a whole range of key facts about the subject.

But that still leaves one of the most divisive issues in this country unresolved, with Trump only stoking the fires of polarization.

If this campaign year does anything, we would hope it forces to the surface not just the restrictionist resentments that have found voice in Trump but also some of the complex, even counterintuitive findings on immigration that dont yield to sound-bite solutions. Globalization, economic change and demographic realignment all play roles in not just how immigration operates in the world but how different groups are affected and perceive it. Like the blind men asked to describe an elephant by touching only one part of its body, immigration in a democratic, multi-cultural society simply cant be left to those representing only a narrow perspective.

WISE MEN AND WOMEN

So heres an idea? What if Trump, Clinton and all the other advocacy groups agreed to a temporary cease-fire, assembled a panel of wise men and women, and told them to parse all the studies, then come up with a practical, multi-part plan before Election Day?

Sound familiar? In 2013 the Gang of Eight tried to tackle the issue  four Republican and four Democratic senators. But in hindsight, they were partisan politicians, and they didnt include the House. So the plan stalled because a minority of House Republicans who refused to work with Democrats controlled the agenda for the entire Chamber.

Their plan, however, is instructive as a counterpoint to todays unproductive sloganeering by the Trump camp. Rather than Seal the Border and Build a Wall battle cries, the plan called for measurable decreases in illegal border crossings while leaving the technology and security measures to the experts.

ENFORCEMENT COUNTERPRODUCTIVE

As it turns out, subsequent research has only confirmed that tighter enforcement at the border (vs. tougher internal controls) has only bottled up more border crossers in the U.S. who otherwise would return to Mexico and driven them into the shadows.

As for a wall, other research has driven home the point that a physical barrier is the least effective way of reducing illegal border crossings, which are primarily on foot. Tunnels, ramps, ropes  history has shown that human ingenuity will always defeat walls. Janet Napolitano said it best: Show me a 10-foot wall and Ill show you a 20-foot ladder.

That doesnt mean strategic barriers in high-traffic areas arent effective in the short run  in the long run, however, the crossers just go elsewhere. But most border technology is now focused on apprehension using optical and acoustical detection. Its an $18 billion operation along just the border with Mexico, and largely it is cat and mouse that still cant control larger forces like unemployment and drug reprisals in Mexico.

ENFORCE VISAS

The single biggest bloc of undocumenteds in the U.S. are those who at one time had documents like travel or work visas, only to overstay them after they expired. Here is probably the biggest opportunity for improvements that would make a difference  both in biometric tracking technology and in reducing incentives for overstays.

Some incentives, like welfare benefits and most health services that Trump incorrectly says are extended to undocumenteds, have been withdrawn. But universal free public education in this country, even for those here illegally, is an anomaly in most other industrialized countries. Children of foreign nationals who register for school for the first time must show visas or work papers and the date they expire. That information then goes into a database and can be used to enforce visa compliance.

If that presents a civil liberties problem in this country for parents of kindergartners who are U.S. citizens, then ask why the same question is not a problem at the welfare office? We acknowledge that children are innocents and do not choose their parents. But by the same token, most nation states must make tough choices about how many students it can support with limited public resources and have established a process for their parents to apply for visas and, ultimately, citizenship. Trump makes a valid point that those jumping to the front of the line make a mockery of those who have obeyed the law.

HARDLY AMNESTY

As for that path to citizenship, the Gang of Eight was hardly issuing a declaration of amnesty. Undocumenteds under the plan have to pay a fine and fees, any back taxes owed, pass a background check and not have a disqualifying criminal record. Then they have to return to their homeland before coming back. That sounds almost too onerous for the illegal parent or grandparent who simply wants to return occasionally to Mexico to visit family. A halfway measure such as a tightly monitored green card might work equally well.

But the point of comprehensive reform is not so much in the details as it is in the concept that 11 million people here illegally will finally know they have a choice. If they dont exercise it, they bear the responsibility if they subsequently run afoul of the immigration laws. To delay, even without a Trump in the White House issuing threats of deportation, means communities from Flagstaff to Philadelphia will continue to have residents in a legal limbo that is destabilizing and unproductive.

The Gang of Eight isnt coming back. But what about a Blue Ribbon Immigration Initiative? Anything that dials back the rhetoric and dials up the facts and the solutions on such an intractable problem cant come soon enough  preferably before Election Day.
The 15-member council met with President Salva Kiir's cabinet, religious and civil society leaders and visited two U.N. compounds in Juba where tens of thousands of civilians have been sheltering amid nearly three years of violence.

While the country's conflict was sparked in December 2013 by political rivalry between Kiir and opposition leader Riek Machar, Anglican Archbishop Daniel Deng warned that "people have been made to believe it's a tribal war."

"What happened in Rwanda - we're afraid it can happen in this country," he told the Security Council, referring to the Hutu genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994.

Catholic Archbishop Paulino Lukudu Loro described the planned deployment of a 4,000-strong regional protection force to ensure peace in Juba, authorized by the Security Council last month, as a "reconciliation force."

"We need this help," he said. "We cannot put our nation on the right track alone."

South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011 but slid into civil war after Kiir sacked Machar as his vice president. The conflict between forces loyal to Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, and Machar, a Nuer, has often followed ethnic lines.

The pair signed a peace deal a year ago but fighting has continued and Machar has now fled to neighboring Sudan.

After a meeting between the council and Kiir's cabinet, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power said the cabinet ministers had asked "whether the regional protection force was still needed given that Riek Machar has fled the country, given the transitional government is working more smoothly."

"We as a council sent an unequivocal message that 'yes, this force is still needed'," she told reporters. The Security Council has threatened to impose an arms embargo on South Sudan if the government does not cooperate.

South Sudan's Minister for Cabinet Affairs, Martin Elias Lomoro, said of the planned deployment: "We're discussing the modalities."

The new force will boost a 12,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force (UNMISS) that has been on the ground since 2011. When the conflict erupted in 2013, the United Nations took the rare step of sheltering civilians at several of its compounds.

"That's one of the reasons why a regional protection force is so necessary because so much of UNMISS's resources is devoted to protecting civilians in the camps," Deputy British U.N. Ambassador Peter Wilson told reporters.

U.N. peacekeepers currently protect nearly 200,000 civilians at six sites around the country. The Security Council, which visited two camps in Juba on Saturday, were greeted at the U.N. House site by mainly displaced Nuer shouting "down, down, Salva Kiir."

"We need your help, we are tired," said Peter Gatkuoth, 23, who has sheltered at the U.N. House site for several years.

The South Sudan conflict has been marked by the use of rape as a weapon and some displaced women told council members on Saturday that they had to risk being the target of sexual violence every time they left the camp to get food and firewood.

"As a mother I can't imagine that choice," Power said. "I know I would go and take that risk for my children, I think any mother would. We heard desperate appeals for the regional protection force to be deployed quickly."

Oil producer South Sudan's fledgling economy has been battered by the conflict, driving prices higher and leaving half the country's 5.8 million people without enough food.

Paleki Ayang, director of the South Sudan Women Empowerment Network, told the council her monthly salary had dropped from $2,000 more than two years ago to $80.
The two were speaking on the sidelines of a G20 summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou.

China was angered after Australia last month blocked the A$10 billion ($7.7 billion) sale of the country's biggest energy grid to Chinese bidders after they failed to overcome security concerns.

China "hopes the Australian side continues to dedicate itself to providing foreign investors a fair, transparent and predictable policy environment", China's Foreign Ministry cited Xi as saying.

"This also accords with Australia's own interests."

The decision has caused a rift between Australia and its biggest trading partner. China has accused Australia of bowing to protectionist sentiment in blocking the bid for Ausgrid, as well as an earlier one by a China-led consortium to buy cattle company Kidman & Co.

Australia, a staunch U.S. ally, has also drawn criticism from China for running surveillance flights over disputed islands in the South China Sea, and supporting U.S. freedom of navigation exercises there.
Turning the ship before it hits the iceberg
1. Make America Rock Again

Promoters call this the tour that "trumps them all." A super concert of rockers, billed as "Make America Rock Again" is coming to Moline. Hear throwback tunes from Drowning Pool, Trapt, Saliva, Saving Abel, Alien Ant Farm, Crazytown, 12 Stone and Tantric all on one stage Saturday. The tour kicked off Aug. 6 and is slated to run through Oct. 7. At the iWireless Center stop, The Zealots, a rock group of Quad-City natives, were added to the lineup.

5:30 p.m. Saturday, iWireless Center, $$29.50-$39.50

2. A sign of fall

The Beaux Arts Fall Fair is back for the 63rd year. Stroll through aisles of fine art and crafts from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday on Bechtel Plaza outside the Figge Art Museum in downtown Davenport. The fall fair features artists from multiple states along with food vendors and live music.

Saturday and Sunday, Figge Art Museum. Free

3. A first at Codfish Hollow

For the first time ever, Codfish Hollow, the barn-turned-music venue near Maquoketa, Iowa, is hosting a two-day music festival. The lineup includes Guided by Voices, John Moreland, The Rentals, LOLO and Margaret Glaspy. Spend two days at the farm that concert-goers call "a slice of heaven," where camping is free and more than 30 acts will take stage. About 700 tickets are being sold for the inaugural GARP.

Friday-Saturday, Codfish Hollow Barn, Maquoketa, Iowa, $70-150

4. On-stage murder mystery

It's the case of the jealous playwright and the stolen script. In"Deathtrap," a professor devises a plan to scoop up and take credit for a student's script, but things take a turn down a murderous path. And you'll be left guessing until moments before the curtain closes. The thriller, written by Ira Levin, debuts this week at Playcrafters Barn Theatre, 4950 35th Ave., Moline.

&:30 p.m. Friday-Sunday, Playcrafters Barn Theatre, $13

5. Songs about love

Consider these songs: "Making Love Out of Nothing at All," "Lost in Love," "All Out of Love," "The One that You Love." Ever since Graham Russell and Russell Hitchcock, the duo that makes up Air Supply, started making music together in 1975, they've had a full supply of songs about love. You can see them this weekend at Rhythm City Casino, 7077 Elmore Ave., Davenport.

8 p.m. Friday, Rhythm City Casino, $30-40

6. Princess party

Snow Sisters (Anna and Elsa), Cinderella, The Little Mermaid and Tinkerbell, are coming to the Quad-Cities to sing, dance, and play with your kiddos. Go for a meet-and-greet, music, dancing, photo booth and tiara decorating. Plus, there's a candy buffet. For tickets, visit Your favorite fairy-tale movies are coming to life. The Disney princesses, including theare coming to the Quad-Cities to sing, dance, and play with your kiddos. Go for a meet-and-greet, music, dancing, photo booth and tiara decorating. Plus, there's a candy buffet. For tickets, visit riverctr.com

10 a.m. Sunday, Sept. 11, Davenport River Center, $25-$60

7. New name, retro tunes

The annual Hilltop Campus Village Fall Music Festival changed its name this year  it's now the RetroFest. Celebrate all things vintage and retro in the Hilltop neighborhood, the area near 15th and Harrison streets in Davenport. Expect food, live music, a car show and an outdoor movie. Noon Saturday, Hilltop Plaza, Davenport. Free 8. Al the way from Portland The mission of The Portland Cello Project is, more or less, for audience members to forget its a cello ensemble. They perform tunes music you wouldn't normally hear on the cello, such as covers Kanye West and Pantera, with bands you wouldn't expect and places you wouldn't expect. See (and hear) for yourself Friday as The Portland Cello Project heads to Davenport. 7 p.m. Friday, Redstone Room, $15 in advance 9. Have your cake Quench your craving for CAKE, an alt-rock band known for songs such as "The Distance" and "Never There," on Friday  well, kind of. Have Your Cake, a cover band made up of musicians in the Quad-Cities, will play the best of CAKE in their own way. 9 p.m. Friday, Rock Island Brewing Company, $5
Its the texture and the feel of the film, rather than the actual plot itself, that makes it so effective.

The Light Between Oceans is an old-fashioned tearjerker  the kind of movie that fans of The Notebook might embrace -- that begins in 1919. Based on the novel by M.L. Stedman, the film has the feel of white linen and an ocean breeze  intermingled with tears.

The taciturn Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender, Steve Jobs) is a veteran who has returned from the horror of World War I. He takes a job tending the lighthouse off the coast of western Australia. Toms reserve is a symptom of his suffering (possibly with post-traumatic stress disorder)  he wants to isolate himself after what he experienced as a soldier.

He does not expect to meet the free-spirited, talkative Isabel Graysmark (Oscar-winning Alicia Vikander, The Danish Girl,) who lives with her family in a village not too far away. During their first conversation alone together, Isabel boldly proposes marriage to Tom.

The two begin to exchange letters that are not so much passionate as sincere. And they do get married, living together in a lovely, windswept environment.

But tragedy strikes  not once, but twice. Soon after, Isabel, shattered by loss, suddenly is called to the beach. Tom has discovered a dinghy containing the body of a man. Also aboard is a baby girl, who has survived.

Isabel bonds instantly with the infant, and begs Tom not to record his findings immediately. The decision they make together  mostly because Tom wants to please the grief-stricken Isabel  results in tragic consequences. In the meantime, Tom and Isabel begin to raise their daughter.

Sooner or later, Tom realizes that he and Isabel will discover the identity of the man and baby  and they do. Its Tom who instantly knows that a woman (Rachel Weisz) mourning her husband and child who were lost at sea is the mother of the child he is raising.

Tom then decides to take action that sets off a chain of events that will change the lives of everyone involved.

Director Derek Cianfrance, creating an intimacy with his close-ups of faces in delicate light, has directed other compelling dramas, including Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines. In this one, composer Alexandre Desplat enhances its fragile cinematography with a lovely, piano-laden score.

The two leads are capable performers whose chemistry cannot be denied. Coincidence occurs more than it should, but enough to be only annoying and not so much that it ruins the story.

This is a sad, lovely film. Bring some tissues.
DES MOINES  Nearly a decade after a national report showed Iowa had some of the highest rates of racial disparities in its jails and prisons, updated figures show the state has made slight improvements but still ranks among the worst in the U.S.

The good news is racial disparity among Iowas inmates has improved since that first report.

The numbers just havent improved enough to move Iowa out of the bottom few states in the nation.

Iowa made modest gains in key metrics measured by The Sentencing Project, a national nonprofit organization that, according to its website, advocates for a fair and effective criminal justice system.

Iowa has the fourth-most black inmates per capita in the country, according to The Sentencing Projects newest report, which was published this summer.

That represents the slightest of improvement from the groups 2007 report, in which Iowa had the third-highest rate of black inmates per capita.

In the new report, Iowa has the nations third-highest ratio of black-to-white inmates, a small improvement from 2007 when Iowa led the nation in the statistic.

Only 3 of every 100 Iowans is black, but 1 of every 4 Iowa prisoners is black, according to the report.

I think that the numbers indicate that its a systemic problem, that its not like theres just one issue, said Russell Lovell, a retired Drake University law school professor who works with the Iowa and Nebraska branch of the NAACP. You dont get the rankings that Iowa has without having broad-based, systemic issues. Im certainly confident that African-Americans in Iowa are not more crime-prone than they are in other states. I cant buy that argument.

The good news is Iowas inmate disparity numbers did improve.

The new report shows Iowa has 2,349 black prisoners for every 100,000; thats a 44 percent decrease from the 4,200 per 100,000 in the 2007 report.

Iowas ratio of 11.1 black prisoners for every one white prisoner also is an improvement; thats down 18 percent from the nation-worst 13.6 in the 2007 report.

Its good to see that we have scratched the surface, and we definitely believe it is a scratch, said Betty Andrews, president of the Iowa and Nebraska branch of the NAACP. But if we are scratching the surface, it is good to see those numbers moving in the right direction.

That modest improvement comes despite statewide attention that has been paid to the issue in recent years. Since the 2007 report:

 Multiple advocacy groups have pitched solutions to and worked with state leaders.

 The Iowa Supreme Courts chief justice highlighted the issue in his past two annual addresses to the Iowa Legislature.

 Gov. Terry Branstad in 2015 convened a work group to develop recommendations.

As Dr. (Martin Luther) King said, the arc of justice is long, but it bends toward justice, Andrews said. We are hoping were seeing the bending of that arc.

The Sentencing Projects report lists possible contributors to racial disparities in jails and prisons: criminal justice policies and practices, human bias and structural disadvantages faced by minority populations.

Iowa leaders have taken incremental steps to address its high racial disparity levels among inmates.

The states nonpartisan legislative analysis agency produces minority impact reports for any legislation that could have an effect on minority communities. And this year, the state passed into law a package of criminal justice reforms that gave judges more sentencing flexibility for some low-level drug crimes and a measure that makes private the juvenile records of some nonviolent offenders.

But lawmakers have not agreed to other recommendations from the governors work group and other advocates who suggest ways to diversify jury pools and pass legislation to ban employers from asking job applicants if they have been convicted of a felony and to monitor racial profiling by law enforcement officers.

Lovell said the racial profiling legislation is critical. He noted an NAACP study that showed Iowa is one of 20 states without any racial profiling laws and an American Civil Liberties Union study that showed that while whites and blacks use marijuana at roughly the same rate, blacks in Iowa are more than eight times more likely to be arrested for marijuana use than whites.

That study is a really powerful indication, we believe, of the racial profiling here in Iowa, Lovell said. And thats where it starts: You get arrested and you get into the system.  So, that legislation is really an important piece.

Proponents of ban-the-box legislation, which prevents employers from asking job seekers about their criminal history, say such laws eliminate a significant hurdle for former prisoners trying to find employment.

Studies show that after a certain amount of time, the people who have committed a crime are no more likely than the general population to commit a crime, Andrews said. Here they are, 30 years later, 20 years later, and theyre still not able to get a job in the field they would like to be in.

Lovell said the inability of released inmates to find a job can create a revolving door at jails and prisons.

When ex-offenders come out, if they cant find work because no one will hire an ex-offender, then the likelihood of recidivism will increase, he said.

Andrews said she and other advocates will continue to work with state leaders on these and other potential methods of reducing racial disparities in the states criminal justice system. She said education is important, as is continuing the conversation that has built in recent years. For example, in a few weeks, the Des Moines branch of the NAACP will host the fourth annual Iowa Summit on Justice and Disparities.

Her hope is that with continued education and attention, the states criminal justice disparity numbers will continue to improve, perhaps even at a faster rate.

Our goal is always to try to talk and help people  and that includes our states highest officials  understand the impact of maybe outdated practices and policies and legislation (that impacts) people of all colors, Andrews said. Because that gap is at a crisis level, and it just needs to be addressed.
Davenport police worked for about two hours talking to a man who on Saturday had climbed about 100 feet or more up the transmission tower of KWQC-TV6, in Davenport and was threatening to jump.

The man then climbed down from the tower and was transported to Genesis Medical Center.

A Palmer College of Chiropractic student who lives nearby said the man approached him and asked to borrow his phone. The man called his wife at 5:17 p.m., spoke a few words to her and then gave the phone back to the student. The student then called the mans wife who told the student her husband was talking of killing himself. Both the wife and the student called 911.

Davenport police said they spotted the man on the tower at 5:40 p.m. The man had scaled the fence and wire surrounding the tower and then climbed up the tower's ladder.
Political cash and the courts don't mix. But don't tell that to the four Illinois Supreme Court justices who last month struck down an effort to roll back gerrymandering along partisan lines.

They were bought years ago.

Every 10 years, Illinois's highest justices tour chambers of commerce and civic clubs. They go to party events. They beg for cash and support. They perform an ethically tenuous dance of not stating actual positions like most politicians, while assuring partisans of their philosophical allegiance with a wink and a nod.

Every decade, justices hit the campaign trail and play politician. It's uncomfortable. It taints justice itself.

Spending during retention elections has been historically through the roof during the tenures of the current seven justices. Democratic Justice Thomas Kilbride in 2010 raised $2.1 million to fend off a well-funded GOP challenger. It was the most expensive judicial race in a decade, said New York University's Brennan Center. Kilbride authored the majority ruling that looked to kill Independent Map's referendum push. Republican Lloyd Karmeier was elected in 2004 in what judicial experts called the most expensive judicial race in history, where a combined $9.3 million was spent. In 2014, Republicans, Democrats and private interests poured more than $3 million into Karmeier's retention election.

All that money and elbow-rubbing rises to the surface whenever a tough decision is made, and party lines are strictly adhered. And last month's 4-3 decision against overhauling how legislative districts are drawn sure looms large.

Ruling Democrats hated the idea. House Speaker Michael Madigan spent months smothering it. Madigan's Democrats, after all, draw the lines now in the General Assembly. Gerrymandering is their lifeblood. Anything less would be too democratic for Illinois's ruling party.

In the end, four Democratic justices, who rely on Madigan's machine for political survival, just so happened to agree that the Illinois Constitution doesn't permit voters to make decisions. That's unless their paymaster likes it, of course. In that case, it probably never reaches the high court's chambers for clearly political vetting.

A lot of derision is hefted upon the U.S. Supreme Court. "Activist judges" is one such false flags. Yet decision after decision proves just how independent the nation's highest justices really are. Just this summer, philosophically leftist Sonia Sotomayor paired with conservative Clarence Thomas in a 6-2 dissent about guns. Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee, has been considered a traitor by many Republicans for his pivotal vote that upheld most of Obamacare.

U.S. Supreme Court justices have a philosophy. But they're not bound by the specter of re-election.

In states such as Illinois and Iowa, justices are under constant political pressure. Even the most legally solid decision is a potential risk. Just ask Iowa's Supreme Court justices swept out after the gay marriage ruling that, since, has been overwhelmingly reinforced in state and federal courts.

A truly apolitical judiciary is little but an ideal. But, like with many romantic notions, it's an unattainable goal to which the act of striving is the safeguard.

It's questionable that such idealism exists in Illinois. Too much money is spent. Too many promises are made.

Redistricting reform proponents, after all, aimed to reign in those who man the gears of power. And it's hard to trust a ruling when justice itself is beholden to the machine.
As Gage County continues to dig itself out from recent snow storms, officials are evaluating how a similar situation could be handled more efficiently in the future.
NATION

20 stung in bee attack

Los Angeles County Fire Department says a swarm of bees at a suburban park attacked, stinging more than 20 people and sending three to the hospital.

Dispatching supervisor Bernard Peters said Sunday that the attack happened Saturday evening at Cerritos Regional Park, about 20 miles south of Los Angeles.

Witnesses tell KCBS-TV that there were thousands of bees chasing hundreds of people and that the insects seemed to be attacking people with long hair.

Peters says the three people taken to the hospital are expected to be OK and that the bees left the park within an hour of the attack.

Airport terminal evacuated after traffic stop

A terminal at Los Angeles International Airport was temporarily evacuated and some flights were delayed after a traffic stop caused a security breach Sunday.

Some travelers became concerned when officers asked them to move inside Terminal 3 as they conducted a felony traffic stop outside morning, airport police Officer Rob Pedregon said.

He said some people passed a security area without being screened and that about 15 people left out an emergency exit and onto the tarmac. Police quickly moved those people back into the airport, and the terminal was evacuated as a precaution, Pedregon said.

All passengers were rescreened and operations were returning back to normal a few hours after the confusion. An unknown number of flights were delayed.

Police arrested three people they had pulled over on suspicion of car theft.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said in a statement that recent events around the world "have caused travelers everywhere to have a heightened level of concern for their safety."

WORLD

Turks say they have defeated IS group

Turkish troops and allied Syrian rebels expelled the Islamic State group from the last strip of territory it controlled along the Syrian-Turkish border on Sunday, effectively sealing the extremists' self-styled caliphate off from the outside world, Turkey's prime minister and a Syrian opposition group reported.

Also on Sunday, Syrian pro-government forces backed by airstrikes launched a wide offensive in the northern city of Aleppo, capturing areas they lost last month and besieging rebel-held neighborhoods, state media and opposition activists said.

Turkey-backed Free Syrian Army rebels have cleared the area between the northern Syrian border towns of Azaz and Jarablus, Turkey's prime minister, Binali Yildirim, said.

"From Azaz to Jarablus, 91 kilometers (57 miles) of our border has been completely secured. All the terrorist organizations are pushed back, they are gone," Yildirim said, speaking at a dinner with non-government organizations in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir.

Voters turn out in force in Hong Kong

Voters turned out in force Sunday for Hong Kong's most crucial election since the handover from Britain in 1997, the outcome of which could pave the way for a fresh round of political confrontations over Beijing's control of the city.

The vote for Legislative Council lawmakers will test the unity of Hong Kong's pro-democracy camp, with a new generation of radical activists joining the race after emerging in the wake of 2014 pro-democracy street protests.

They're hoping to ride a rising tide of anti-China sentiment as they challenge formidably resourced pro-Beijing rivals for seats. Many of the newcomers back the previously unthinkable idea of independence for Hong Kong, which has added to divisions with the broader pro-democracy movement and overshadowed the election. Last month, officials disqualified six pro-independence candidates in an attempt to tamp down the debate, though other candidates with similar views made the cut.

Hong Kongers feel they have few other negotiating tactics left in their battle for genuine democracy as Beijing takes an increasingly hard-line stance.

South Sudan agrees to peacekeepers

South Sudan has agreed to the deployment of a 4,000-strong regional protection force approved by the U.N. Security Council after first rejecting the peacekeepers as a violation of its sovereignty.

Sunday's announcement came after the Security Council met with South Sudan President Salva Kiir during a rare visit to the turbulent East African country.

The threat of an arms embargo loomed over the meeting, as the council has said it would pursue one if South Sudan didn't accept the additional peacekeepers. The U.N. already has 12,000 peacekeepers in the country, and South Sudan has been wary of giving it more authority.
Its not just the new home for a post office, a bar, and grocery and convenience store that has residents in and around the east central Meade County town of Enning buzzing.

Theres not one but two bathrooms, said Caren Assman, owner of Nellies Mercantile & Saloon set to move this fall into a new 4,000 square-foot building now under construction in the small Meade County town.

Everybody will laugh at that, she said.

But restrooms are no laughing matter for those traveling on Highway 34, which traverses magnificently scenic stretches of rangeland, yet desolately devoid of restroom stops between Sturgis and Pierre.

"That's a long trek for anybody," she said.

The new Nellies will be a big deal in Enning, population about 50, and located about that same number of miles east of Sturgis and about midway between Union Center and White Owl, also Highway 34 way-station stops.

Assman (pronounced Oz-man) purchased Nellies four years ago from longtime owners Karl and Neoma Richter.

Neoma Richter, formerly Ennings postmistress, said Nellie's roots go back to a one-room store, which included a creamery.

She and her husband, Karl, came to Enning in 1968 and ran the store for about 43 years until she retired as postmistress two years ago.

During the Cold War years of the 60s, 70s and early 80s, the owner at the time added a bar for Ellsworth Air Force Base missile crews, she said. An expanded store replaced the bar after the missile sites shut down. Another building, eventually a post office, was added.

It mainly consisted of four little buildings all put together to make one, Richter said. It was just a gathering place for people to get together and not make the 50-mile drive to Sturgis.

Along with a bar, restaurant with full kitchen, a convenience store, grocery store, post office (and bathrooms), the new building will include rental space for meetings and private parties.

Construction on the building started last spring. Assman hopes for completion by the middle of October.

The old building didnt have the electrical utilities capable of handling the load, Assman said, and will be demolished once the new building is complete.

The last event for the old building, Nellies Fall Fling on Oct. 8-9, will include a Rocky Mountain oyster feed, a pie social and a silent auction for mementos from the old building, including the old bar, signage and even an old grocery scale.

A lot of babies have been weighed on that scale, Assman said.

Proceeds will benefit the Enning Fire Department and Ambulance, she said.

Assman hosts a special event monthly at the store. She hopes the new construction will spawn more business activity in Enning.

The property can expand to include a gasoline station, and shed like to see a mechanic and a garage there as well.

"The community supports me so well. Its definitely worth doing, Assman said.

Shed also like to entice more travelers off the beaten path to experience what other rural areas of western South Dakota have to offer.

She even has a catch phrase: "34 Offers More."

Thats going to be my slogan for the next two years as I try to get people to come done Highway 34 again. People have gotten so that they just go the interstate," she said.

The progress is welcome news, Richter said. Assman is to be admired for taking on the construction of a new building, she said.

I know our community is very excited for it. I think its going to go well and be an asset for Enning, she said.

Richter is also resigned to seeing the old building get torn down. That won't happen without a great deal of sentimentality.

Its going to be kind of bittersweet when it goes. We spent 43 years there and raised three children, and it was very good to us, Richter said.
Naomi Schaefer Riley has gone beyond the slaying of sacred cows in her new book about federal policies toward Native Americans.

Shes hanging up the carcasses, butchering them and roasting the cuts over a hot fire.

She writes, for example, that tribes dont need more money from the federal government; tribal sovereignty, in its current form, is an illusion that should be abandoned; trust ownership of tribal land should be replaced with private property rights; adoption law should be less preferential to Native Americans; and charter schools are needed as alternatives to tribal schools.

Thats a sampling of the proposals  all in contrast to longstanding policy tenets  that Schaefer Riley presents in The New Trail of Tears: How Washington is Destroying American Indians. In the book she makes the case for burning down the existing policy framework surrounding Native Americans and building new and different policies atop the ruins.

Schaefer Riley is an ideologically conservative, Harvard-educated writer and editor who appears regularly on Fox News and Fox Business. As such, she expects and has suffered criticism from the opposite side of the ideological spectrum.

For example, Peter dErrico, a consulting attorney on indigenous issues, has written that Schaefer Rileys new book explicitly denigrates communal ways of living. It harks back to the missionary effort to convert the heathens (and take their lands).

Schaefer Riley said she anticipates worse.

Im sure some of the conversations going to be, Naomis a racist, she said in a Journal interview. But I do hope that some of the reaction among readers is not only that they didnt realize how bad things were for Native Americans, but its possible that things were better before than they are now.

Schaefer Riley reports in the book, among other things, that Native Americans have the highest rate of poverty of any racial group in the nation, plus a suicide rate among young men that was 57 percent higher in 2011 than the general population and a child-abuse rate thats twice as high as the national average.

Problems such as those are often expressed as the inevitable result of historical wrongs committed against Native Americans, Schaefer Riley writes. She acknowledges those wrongs but also contends in the book, Its not the history of forced assimilation, war, and mass murder that have left American Indians in a deplorable state; its the federal governments policies today.

South Dakotans featured in new book ensnared in GEAR UP scandal Two men featured in a new book about federal policies toward Native Americans have been link

Those policies, Schaefer Riley writes in the books introduction, are the result of decades of politicians and bureaucrats showering a victimized people with money and sensitivity instead of what they truly need  the autonomy, the education, and the legal protections to improve their own situations.

The rest of the book deals in specific problems and proposals, including what Schaefer Riley describes as a lack of basic private-property rights among reservation-dwelling Native Americans.

Because reservation land is held in trust by the federal government, she writes, banks cannot foreclose on it; thus, people on a reservation cannot get a mortgage to build a home. The dearth of privately owned land and homes also means that many Native Americans have nothing to put up as collateral if they want a business loan, Schaefer Riley writes.

Thus, she writes, trust ownership has been disastrous for economic development on Indian lands and should be abolished.

Another disaster on reservations, Schaefer Riley contends, has resulted from the belief that more federal funding for existing programs is the answer to what ails Native Americans.

Spending by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Education totaled almost $3 billion in 2015, Schaefer Riley reports, while the Indian Health Service has a budget of about $4 billion and a Native American Housing Block Grant Program has a budget of $800 million.

Schaefer Riley argues that federal spending has created a crippling culture of dependency on reservations, which has in turn made a mockery of the popular conception of tribes as sovereign nations.

Schaefer Riley says its time to drop the pretense of sovereignty and encourage tribal self-sufficiency.

The American government does have a responsibility to Indians, but its not to send them checks while pretending to engage in international diplomacy, Schaefer Riley writes.

Another topic that receives significant attention in the book is Native American children.

In regard to education, Schaefer Riley argues that states like South Dakota  one of three states that does not allow charter schools  should allow the creation of charter schools for reservation children.

In her ideal situation, public funding could be used to set up a charter school near a reservation, thereby giving reservation parents an alternative to the federally funded and operated tribal schools that Schaefer Riley says are failing Native American children. The Bureau of Indian Education, she notes, has had 36 directors in 33 years and is beset by low student performance and dilapidated school buildings. There are some successful private schools on reservations, such as the Red Cloud Indian School at Pine Ridge, but they lack public funding and rely partly on tuition.

On adoption law, Schaefer Riley takes on the Indian Child Welfare Act, a federal law that seeks to keep Native American children with Native American families. She writes that taking race into account in adoption cases is illegal for every group in the United States except Native Americans. The result, she argues, is that some Native American children are sent into unsuitable and even abusive homes on reservations when better options exist elsewhere.

Riley presents many additional problems and proposals throughout the book, the latter of which all fall under the broader heading of treating Native Americans more like other Americans. For too long, she contends, politicians have singled out Native Americans for different and oftentimes well-intentioned treatment that has ultimately robbed them of opportunities to own homes and businesses, to send their children to good schools and to protect their most vulnerable.

Indeed, she writes, if tribal leaders attitudes and Washingtons policies dont change soon, another generation of Indians will be lost to the epidemics of drugs, abuse, and suicide.
Two men featured in a new book about federal policies toward Native Americans have been linked to an unfolding corruption scandal since being interviewed by the author.

The book is The New Trail of Tears: How Washington is Destroying American Indians, by Naomi Schaefer Riley, of New York.

During her research over the past few years, she interviewed numerous people, including South Dakotans Stacy Phelps and Keith Moore.

In the book, Schaefer Riley profiles Phelps efforts to turn around a school at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Schaefer Riley also reports opinions on Native American education from Moore, the former director of the federal Bureau of Indian Education.

Since Schaefer Riley interviewed Phelps and Moore, each has been linked to a scandal that has enveloped South Dakotas participation in the Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs, known as GEAR UP.

Moore is not formally accused of any wrongdoing, but his reputation has suffered from revelations that he received nearly $100,000 to be a GEAR UP grant adviser for Mid-Central Educational Cooperative from October 2013 through August 2015, and that he failed to submit required work logs to state government to document what he was doing in exchange for the money.

Phelps has been charged with crimes for allegedly helping a Platte couple  Scott and Nicole Westerhuis  embezzle more than $1 million of federal GEAR UP grant funds that were intended to boost Native American college participation and success.

The federal grant money was passed through the state Department of Education to a contractor, the Mid-Central Educational Cooperative, for which the Westerhuises worked; in turn, the cooperative worked with Phelps American Indian Institute for Innovation to conduct GEAR UP programming in South Dakota.

Scott Westerhuis killed Nicole Westerhuis and the couples four children last September, soon after learning that state government was terminating a contract with Mid-Central because of concerns about the handling of GEAR UP funds.

Phelps, for his alleged role in aiding the Westerhuises embezzlement, is charged with two counts of falsification of evidence and two counts of conspiracy to offer forged or fraudulent evidence.

Schaefer Riley said in a Journal interview that the scandal emerged after she interviewed the men, and because details were still emerging as she worked on her book, her published text contains only a brief mention of it.
The help wanted sign is always out at Scull Construction Service.

Jim Scull employs about 300 construction workers at two locations, Rapid City and Dickinson, N.D., but a strengthening overall economy, both sparking demand for new construction and a low unemployment rate, has several segments of the economy  not just the construction industry  constantly seeking workers from a dwindling number of potential employees.

Theres a natural turnover rate, so were always hiring, Scull said. There are certainly much fewer workers now than there has been. Its a pretty tough market. There just arent many people coming in the door.

South Dakota made headlines in July with U.S. Department of Labor statistics showing the state with the lowest unemployment rate in the nation at 2.8 percent. The states two largest metropolitan areas, Sioux Falls and Rapid City, led the way with unemployment rates of 2.2 percent and 2.9 percent respectively.

But are low unemployment numbers good news or bad news? They are both, actually.

It does manifest itself as a two-edged sword, said Benjamin Snow, president of the Rapid City Economic Development Partnership. A low unemployment rate means a lot of people are working, and thats good.

If youre in a small market to begin with and the employment rate is really low, it might be more challenging (for employers) to find the workers they need without pulling some workers from some other employer in town, he said.

Snow said a healthy unemployment rate should fall between 4.5 and 5 percent.

Anything higher than that means theres a lot of people who ought to be working who arent, he said. Anything lower than that means businesses are constrained in their growth because theres not enough talent.

Fred Dieken, assistant manager of the Rapid City office of the South Dakota Department of Labor, said 3 percent is considered full employment.

The states low unemployment affects all segments of the economy, with construction, nursing and health care, and the tourism and hospitality industries especially in need of workers.

Its definitely a (job) seekers market now, a total flip-flop of where we were during the recession, Dieken said.

Dieken said the applicant shortfall is pushing an increase in wages and signing bonuses. Many employers are also scaling back requirements for previous experience from their potential job-seekers.

Were not quite to the any-warm-body stage, but were willing to spend more time training you, if youre willing to be here and you want to work with us, Dieken said.

Scull said hed like to see high schools do more to encourage students to seek training in skilled journeyman professions along with college preparation classes.

His firm offers an apprentice program for both young people looking for a construction career or an older worker interested in the building trade.

Well bring them along and try to give them a trade or a long-term professional skill so they have a way to make a living, he said. If anybodys got any aptitude and attitude, wed love to train you.

Snow said his organization has applied for state funds to allow the hiring of a workforce development coordinator. A final decision on the position is expected later this month, he said

We just dont have the time to focus on that full time, he said.

Snow said a coordinator can help the state expand its work force through encouraging schools to train young people in skills needed by local employers, helping already gainfully employed workers to expand their skills or become certified in other jobs and by recruiting workers from other areas of the country through apprenticeships or trade schools.

How do you wave a flag and let the rest of the world know there are good jobs here in Rapid City? he said. Why dont you consider moving here and taking one of those jobs.

Snow said competition for skilled labor is a healthy part of the economy. Employers need to give their employees a sense of upward mobility, the potential for growth and other opportunities. Employees need to show their employers a willingness to work and learn.

People are still free agents. They can to work wherever they want to, he said.

Employers and employees need to approach that relationship carefully. Both need to realize that theyre getting a good deal, Snow said.
Forget about the anti-everyone-else zealots, the so-called white nationalists who hang on Donald Trump like a hooded robe. They like to refer to themselves as "alt-right," which is all right with Hillary Clinton and her peeps, who argue the Trumpster has pulled the crazies out of their dumpster and spewed their noxious garbage into the mainstream of politics. He's even made one of their most outspoken haters his campaign chief. Still, Donny responds to her charges with his usual finesse. He's now calling Hillary "a bigot."

But "alt-right" is nowhere near as much fun as that other characteristic of this campaign, the constant litany of conspiracy theories. Let's call them alt-wacko: The election is rigged; a judge of Mexican heritage can't give Donald Trump a fair hearing; Vladimir Putin is in cahoots with Trump, so the Russian government is releasing private emails that embarrass Hillary Clinton and the Democrats so much that the emails will sway the election toward Trump. After all, look at all the nice things Vladimir says about Donald. And look at the experts citing evidence that hackers attached to his government are the ones dumping material that discredits Hillary, though she does a good job of that herself.

Let's also consider how blatant it is, how widely accepted it is that Putin wants to put his guy Trump in the White House. Except that maybe it's too neat, too obvious. So let me show you a double-cross conspiracy theory, one that will demonstrate that I, too, can play the nutcase game.

Consider that it's really Hillary that Vlad wants to win. What if he's floating all the assumptions that he's a Trump guy, because of a public perception that he's manipulating Donald like a puppet. If his geeks at the Kremlin really wanted to humiliate the Democrats, would they be so transparent about it? In this case, the Russians have done everything they can to take credit, short of tagging their hacks with "I'm Vladimir Putin, and I approved this message."

So my theory is that it's Putin and the Clintonistas who are orchestrating this subterfuge. Do I have any proof? Of course not, but then what proof do the right-wingers have that Hillary Clinton has health issues or that Barack Obama was born in Kenya? The answer is none whatsoever. What you have is an audience that wants something to be true. That's also the mindset of those of the liberal persuasion, who would love to believe it was anything but wild speculation that Melania Trump used to be a hooker. There is nothing whatsoever to back that up, other than the fantasies of Obama supporters who would love some payback for Donald Trump's years of Birther hooliganism.

Let's face it, A political system that leaves us such a pathetic choice should be reformed. Perhaps we're not capable anymore of producing a campaign that's not silly and nasty. Not that many other countries are doing much better. France has its burkini idiocy, Britain its Brexit, so we aren't the only ones. But whatever happened to "American Exceptionalism"? In reality, our unreal system of choosing leaders with its reliance on corrupt money and demagogic foolishness can be described this way: It's an alt-embarrassment.
Jene joined the U.S. Air Force in 1949 to pursue music. He completed a three-month study with the U.S. Air Force Band School located in Washington, DC, then continued with trumpet study with the Denver Symphony Orchestra. He was stationed with the 615th Air Force Band in Rapid City, SD. Following his years with the Air Force Band, Jene continued his musical education as he attended the University of North Dakota, and Arkansas A&M, completing a bachelors degree in music education. He later completed a Masters degree in Music education with a minor in English/Speech from Black Hills State College in Spearfish, SD. During his early teaching years, Jene taught throughout the West and Midwest before returning to his home town of Deadwood. He taught music education for several years for the Lead-Deadwood School System. Teaching individual instrumental music to hundreds of students, and encompassing symphonic, orchestral, marching, jazz and pep bands into the music program for the school system. Many of the students he taught sought to enroll in band for all four years of high school just to spend their day with Jeno as he was fondly called. Jene spent countless hours working summers leading the Deadwood Municipal City Band. Jene often could be heard playing local dance jobs every weekend at Turgeons Supper Club in Central City, as a member of musical group, A Touch of Class.
Retired Army Sgt. 1st Class Richard E. Falk has had to wait a long time for the medals he earned while fighting in Korea.

The 83-year-old can thank his accountant for making it happen.

Falk will receive a special Korean medal and a Prisoner of War Medal at the Hamilton Veterans Memorial at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 10.

Theres a good chance that fellow veteran, Gordon Wax, will be there too.

Wax is a certified public accountant with a high density of veterans as clients. As a history buff, he began to have his clients bring in their discharge papers.

He noted discrepancies.

I hadnt found any complete or accurate discharge papers so I started doing research, Wax said. We do owe these fellows the respect that they are entitled to. These men earned these awards and they paid the price. Im on a one-man mission to correct as many as I can before I die.

Wax said Falks discharge papers were not complete.

Hes received awards he doesnt know about, he said. Richard Falk was a prisoner of war. The POW medal was issued in 1985 but it was retroactive back to April 15, 1917.

Falks wife, MaryAnn, created a display of her husbands medals and photographs of different times and continents. It hangs in the living room of their home in Hamilton.

The display has the certificate and medal of The Silver Star for his service in Korea that he received June 4, 1953.

General Orders Number 245 said Sergeant Richard E. Falk, a member of Company L, 31st Infantry, distinguished himself by gallantry in action near Chorwon, Korea.

On 17 April, 1953, during a friendly assault on a strategic enemy-held hill, Sergeant Falk led numerous attacks against enemy-held bunkers while the enemy was delivering a withering fire before the attacking unit, the description said. Entering a communications trench, Sergeant Falk engaged the enemy in hand to hand combat in which he inflicted many casualties among the enemy. The courage and fearlessness exhibited by Sergeant Falk encouraged the men around him to put forth their utmost in regaining the strategic outpost.

The display also shows The Bronze Star, The Purple Heart and a certificate for the Distinguished Service Medal from the Republic of South Korea. The certificate is written in Korean and a translation in English.

The Wharang Cordon medal is Chinese for an ancient society that goes back to 800 A.D., Wax said. That was 50 years ago and the medal has aged and been sun bleached so I asked if he wanted a replacement. The whole process took 18 months. The medal has to be awarded in a military presentation and no one can pin it on him except the president of South Korea or his designated representative. Well hand it to him.

Other awards for Falk include the Combat Infantry Badge, Army Occupation Medal, National Defense Services Medal, United Nations Service Medal and Good Conduct Medal.

The honor guard, for Sept. 10, is comprised of men who served in WWII and Korea. Wax briefly profiled three of them.

Lt. Col. Earl O. McConaha is a retired career officer that established the model for flying helicopters, Wax said. Pfc. John Prouty, of Stevensville, served with the 173 Airborne Brigade. He has the only Jump Wings with the combat jump star. He parachuted with the 2nd battalion of the 173rd. Marine Cpl. Richard Nelson, of Stevensville, was assigned with the 11th regiment of the first Marine division in Guadalcanal and following campaigns of WWII.

Wax said he is delighted when he meets extraordinary men and women that serve or served in the military.

Im just flabbergasted and elated by it, he said. I read the history and here are these men standing right before me that were involved in amazing battles and events.

Wax said he is working to correct records and get awards to those who earned them and has assistance from Montana congressional representatives, the Veterans Administration, the American Legion and the Vietnam Veterans.

These men need to be honored with their decorations, he said. If they were discharged before the end of WWII they didnt get to wear the WWII Victory Medal. It is the obligation of the families and survivors to have these records corrected and make application to receive the award. Its the responsibility of the veterans or their families. This isnt difficult. It just takes time.

Wax invites everyone to attend the medal ceremony at 2 p.m. the Veterans Memorial in Hamilton on Saturday, Sept. 10.
Paul Eidelberg

We need a politically incorrect and radically new multi-disciplinary and multinational understanding of Islam.

To speak of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as the "three Abrahamic faiths" or as the "three religions of the Book," or, more significantly, as the "three monotheisms," obscures rather than illuminates. These familiar tropes, says theologian George Weigel, ought to be retired.

The eminent French scholar Alain Besancon agrees. He writes, "The Abraham of Genesis is not the Ibrahim of the Qur'an; Moses is not Moussa. As for Jesus, he appears, as Issa, out of place and out of time, without reference to the landscape of Israel. His mother, Mary, or Mariam, identified as the sister of Aaron, gives birth to him under a palm tree. Then Issa performs several miracles, which seem to have been drawn from the apocryphal gospels, and announces the future coming of Muhammad.

Alain Besancon takes us deeper into the heart of the matter. He draws this theological distinction between Judaism and Christianity, on the one hand, and Islam, on the other:

Although Muslims like to enumerate the 99 names of God, missing from the list, but central to the Jewish and even more so to the Christian concept of God, is "Father" - i.e., a personal God capable of a reciprocal and loving relationship with men. The one God of the Qur'an, the God who demands submission, is a distant God; to call him "Father" would be an anthropomorphic sacrilege. The Muslim God is utterly impassive; to ascribe loving feeling to Him would be suspect. If God is not "Father," then it is difficult to imagine the human person as having been made "in the image of God."

Now, let us admit that Islam has, over the centuries, given meaning and purpose to hundreds of millions of lives that have been decently lived. It is also true, however, that today, throughout the world, Islam finds itself in the midst of what Besancon aptly describes as "a long-delayed, wrenching, and still far from an accomplished encounter with modernity."

Indeed, Islam continues to divide mankind into two groups, the faithful on the one hand, and creatures Islam calls "pigs" and "dogs" on the other, an attitude that fosters Islamic terrorism.

To clarify matters further, in 1985, note well that Iran's delegate to the United Nations, Said Raja'i-Khorassani, declared that "the very concept of human rights was 'a Judeo-Christian invention' and inadmissible in Islam."

The indiscriminate nature of Islamic terrorism can be explained by these words of Catholic theologian George Weigel: "The notion that there are 'no innocents,' that the enemy is 'guilty' simply by reason of drawing breath  logically entails a strategy of open-ended mayhem based on the radical dehumanization of the 'other.'"

Dehumanization describes the terrorist acts of the Palestinian Authority. This consortium of Muslim-led terrorist groups reduces Jewish children to body parts by exploding the busses in which they ride to school. There is no essential difference between these Muslim terrorists and those that perpetrated the bloodbath in Paris, in Nice, and in Orlando.

Alain Besancon, quoted by Dr. Weigel, exposes another obscure aspect of Islam: "Although Muslims like to enumerate the 99 names of God, missing among the list is 'father'  i.e., a personal God capable of a reciprocal and loving relationship with men. If God is not our 'father,' then it is difficult to imagine the human person as having been made 'in the image of God.'" Small wonder that Muslims liken "infidels" to "pigs" and "dogs," and harbor no qualms about using their own children as human bombs to explode Jewish schools busses, thus reducing Jewish children to body parts.

The social philosopher Lou Harris offers a broader assessment of Islam in Civilization and Its Enemies. Contemptuous of the cultural relativism propagated by American colleges and universities, Harris means by civilization a standard of behavior that can be applied across cultures and across history. He sees civilization as having four prerequisites: a stable social order, the co-operation of individuals pursuing their own interests, the ability to tolerate or socialize with one's neighbors, and a hatred of violence.

Clearly, Islam lacks three of the four prerequisites of Harris' definition of a civilization. What is remarkable is that Syrian-born psychiatrist Wafa Sultan arrived at the same conclusion. She denied a clash between the West and Islamic civilization because, in her view, Islam is not a civilization!

Egyptian-born scholar Bat Ye'or agrees. She defines Islam as a culture of hate, and one can cite several former Muslims who renounced Islam for this very reason.

That said, I have collected several essays by renowned scholars and statesmen who, even though they represent different nations and even different periods of history, nonetheless agree about the egregious nature of Islam, which justifies the title of Harris' book Civilization and Its Enemies.

Part I. Introduction

Part II. Identifying the Enemy

Part III. A Former Muslim Shows How to Combat the Enemy

Part IV. An Insider's View of 'Moderate' Muslims

Part V. Beyond Multicultural Relativism

Part VI. The Theological Basis of Today's Crisis

Part VII. Islamophobia: Facts and Fictions

Part VIII. Islamic Bellicosity and Blood Lust

Part IX. Blood Lust (cont'd)

Part X. Iran and Necrophelia

Part XI. Islamic Imperialism

Part XII. Islam: A Cult of Hatred, Especially of Jews

Prof. Paul Eidelberg is President, Israel-America Renaissance Institute
MUMBAI, Sept 4: Controversy queen and online sensation Poonam Pandey released the trailer of an adult short movie The Weekend here on Saturday.

Directed by Aryan Singh, the short film is exclusively for mobile phone users.

The film has been co-produced by Poonam with Suresh Nakum under the banner The World Networks.

The Weekend will be Indias first adult movie for mobile lovers. It is a short film which is not rated or certified by CBFC, making it quite extraordinary and fascinating. Also, it is a first white-labelled web-portal with telecom operator billing with its exceptional worth, Poonam said in a statement.

It has been an amazing experience working in this erotic thriller. In fact, I can term it as one of the scariest ones as well. Certain things happened during the shoot that scared me, she added.

The Weekend, a horror story of a couple from Delhi, is set to release on September 24.
Guwahati: Security forces had apprehended 11 militants of three different outfit groups in Assam on Friday, officials said.

According to the reports, army and police had apprehended five KPLT militants in Karbi Anglong district, four NDFB(S) militants in Sonitpur district and two HSULF militants in Dima Hasao district.

Following a tip-off, police and army personnel of 8th Jat Regiment had launched operation at Borlangso and Taralangso area in Karbi Anglong district and nabbed five hardcore KPLT militants.

The nabbed militants were identified as Jamson Kro alias Kronihang, Sohan Bey, Ranjit Tisso alias Archim, Ben Killing and Mohon Teron.

Security personnel had recovered one AK-56 rifle with magazine and 15 rounds live ammunition, one point 32 pistol with magazine and two rounds ammunition, two Chinese grenades, two country made guns in possession from them.

On the other hand, security personnel had apprehended four NDFB(S) militants from Sonitpur district and two HSULF militants from Dima Hasao district.

(Reporting by Hemanta Kumar Nath)
Guwahati : In a move to send across State Government's intent of zero tolerance against cross border movement from across the border, Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal on Friday paid a visit to the Indo-Bangla border along Mankachar sector in South Salmara district.

Sonowal inspected the barbed wire fencing while travelling approximately 30 km border areas for three hours along the Mankachar areas and also took stock of the condition of fencing.

The Assam CM visited Sahapara Border Outpost, Kakripara, Jholachar, Diara, Asmer Alga, Kukurmara, Gudligaon, Deepchar, Sishumara Border Outposts and inspected the ground situations there.

Sonowal also inspected the erosion hit areas of Sishumara Border Outpost and vowed to take all measures for a foolproof fencing along the border.

The Assam CM directed the BSF personnel responsible for guarding the Indo-Bangla border to maintain a strict vigil on 24X7 basis.

He also sought suggestions from BSF to fortify the existing fencing system wherever required.

Sonowal visited the border areas with 11 MLAs of BJP and alliance partners, AASU leadership including Dr. Samujjal Bhattacharya , DGP Mukesh Sahay, Home Commissioner LS Changsan and senior civil, police and BSF officers.

(Reporting by Hemanta Kumar Nath)
Guwahati : On the last leg of his two day visit of Indo-Bangla border at Mankachar sector, Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal on Saturday visited Dewaner Alga under Hasichar Border Outpost and expressed that a 'lot needs to be done' towards sealing the border and vowed to take an exhaustive and all-inclusive step on a war footing.

Inspecting the 60 km long riverine border areas along the Mankachar-Dhubri Sector, Sonowal anchored at Hasichar Border Outpost.

'A lot needs to be done to seal the porous border areas in sync with the expectations of the people of Assam. The BJP-led Regime in the State attaches top-most priority to seal the Indo-Bangla border to make Assam, a State free from illegal foreigners,aA Sonowal said.

'This has been a long-cherished dream of all sections of the people of Assam to insulate the borders of the State free from foreigners and they are herbouring an idea of transforming Assam into foreigners' free. Toeing line with the expectations of the people, Government to take an exhaustive and all-inclusive measure to seal the porous riverine border areas on a war-footing. We also seek cooperation from all sections of the people to fortify our international borders including Karimganj and create a protective shield against all cross-border movements including smuggling,'the Assam CM said.

Sonowal travelled around three hours on the Brahmaputra along the riverine borders to get a first hand view of the status of the international border that the State shares with Bangladesh along South Salmara and Mankachar district.

Earlier, the Assam CM had visited inspected the barbed wire fencing while travelling approximately 40 km border areas for three hours along the Mankachar areas on Friday and also took stock of the condition of fencing.

18 organisations representing the aims and aspirations of different communities met the Assam CM at Hatsingimari and endorsed his stand on illegal foreigners and cross border movements and sought to extend their cooperation to pluck the loopholes and seal the Indo-Bangla border.

The All Assam Students' Union delegation including its Advisor Dr. Samujjal Bhattacharya, MLAs of AGP, BPF, BJP, AIUDF, Cong, Director General of Assam Police Mukesh Sahay, DG of Law&Order Kula Saikia, RM Sing, Home Commissioner LS Changsan, DIG, BSF Dhubri Sector KK Gulia and Assistant Commandant of the BSF Sanjay Sarma, CM's press advisor Hrishikesh Goswami accompanied the CM to visit the border areas.

*(Reporting by Hemanta Kumar Nath)*
Guwahati : Banned insurgent group of Khaplang faction of National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN-K) ambushed a convoy of Assam Rifles in Zunheboto district of Nagaland on Friday evening.

The incident took place between the area of Ghokishe and Luvishe villages in the district.

According to the reports the militants had ambushed a four vehicle convoy of Assam Rifles in which at least four security personnel were injured.

Meanwhile, NSCN-K claimed that at least 8-10 security personnel were killed while several others injured in the attack by Naga guerrillas.

But the official sources said only four security personnel were injured.

NSCN-K leader Isak Sumi claimed that one of the four vehicles had rolled down and Naga guerrillas being fired from a close range and maximum occupants of the vehicle were possibly killed.

But the Nagaland government and defence sources said that four security personnel were injured and nobody was killed in the attack.

'NSCN-K claim was baseless and they are trying to spread reaumur,' an official of Nagaland government said.

This is the third attack on security forces by the banned Naga insurgent group in past a month.

Earlier, NSCN-K had attacked the Assam Rifles personnel along the Nagaland-Myanmar border and at a remote area under Changlang district in Arunachal Pradesh last month.

*(Reporting by Hemanta Kumar Nath)*
Kathmandu, Nepal: of Haritalika Teej, a great festival of Hinds, is being celebrated by the Hindu women by worshiping the God Shiva all over the country in Nepal and around the world on Sunday.

Hundreds of thousands Hindu women devotees have throng in the Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu to offer Pooja to the God Shiva.

Likewise, other Shiva temples around the country are also remained busy from the early morning on Sunday.

The Pashupatinath Temple's all four gates were opened for the devotees since 3:30 am.

The Pashupati Area Development Trust (PADT) has expected that around 900,000 devotees would offer Pooja at Pashupatinath on the occasion of Haritalika Teej.

With the aim to manage the crowd and to make the festival calm and decent, the PADT has banned the men from paying homage at the Pashupatinath Temple for Sunday. Heave security personnel and volunteers have also been mobilized in and around the Pashupatinath area.
Kathmandu, Nepal: Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal has made clear that the construction of Nijgadh-Kathmandu Fast Track (NKFT) will not be awarded to the foreign companies.

Prime Minister Dahal, who is also the chairman of the CPN (Maoist Center), has made the revelation during the meeting with the delegation of Rastriya Sarokar RSAN) Abhiyan Nepal.

I have not even thought of awarding the contract for the construction of NKFT to foreign companies, Dahal said while responding to the concerns of the RSAN.

There is a looming suspicion that the government would award the Indian company to construct the NKFT, the delegation of the RSAN had asked Dahal.

This is merely a rumor that the government is handing over the contract to foreign companies, which is completely baseless, Prime Minister Dahal said.

There was no need to be so proud as the decision made by the erstwhile government that Nepal will construct the Fast Track was taken on my initiatives, Dahal said indicating to the CPN UML chairman KP Sharma Oli.

During the function, Prime Minister Dahal also said that he will consult with experts on the issues of national importance before he leaves for India visit. I will take strategic and technical suggestions from the experts before embarking on India tour, he said.
Kathmandu, Nepal: The Supreme Court (SC) the apex court of the country has on Sunday vacated its previous stay order paving way for the government to recommend new ambassadors.

Responding to the writ filed by the ambassadorial nominees, a division bench of Justices Gopal Parajuli and Ananda Mohan Bhattarai made the verdict vacating to the August 17 stay order.

In the previous verdict, the SC had ordered the government not to take any decision until a further decision.

With the verdict the SC has also stated that continuation of the stay order was not necessary as the plaintiffs did not have any position to claim their rights over the positions.

The recommendation made under the basis of division of power among the government allies by the KP OLi led government was withdrawn by the incumbent CPN Maoist Centre Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal led government.

Ambassador nominees Yuvraj Karki (recommended for South Korea), Shiv Maya Tumbahamphe (Israel), Khadga Bahadur KC (Japan) and Narad Bhardwaj (Sri Lanka) had moved to the court challenging to the government decision to withdraw the recommendation by the previous government.
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Shirley Contreras lives in Orcutt and writes for the Santa Maria Valley Historical Society. She can be contacted at 623-8193 or at shirleycontreras2@yahoo.com. Her book, The Good Years, a selection of stories shes written for the Santa Maria Times since 1991, is on sale at the Santa Maria Valley Historical Society, 616 S. Broadway.
Chinese movies are very rare to find on worldwide DVD marketing, most of the time one finds Asian movies from Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan. But those Chinese movies that do come out to the world make a strong impact to the audience, for instance "Still Life", "Beijing Bicycle" and "Shanghai Triad". The Resistance made an impact with a different style of movie, a story plot from a samurai movie, but setting takes place during World War II. Directed by the 32nd generation shaolin monk Peng Zhang Li, who became a movie director and actor tells a story of revenge, genocide, and protection of a young peasant girl who must choose between death or resistance.

Story:

In 1937, the Japanese imperial army launch an occupation attack on south China. A ruthless general by the name of Takeshi (Peng Zhang Li) is the conqueror of the south east Chinese state Shichen, and brutally execute the peasants living there. One of the victims is Xaioyun (Hu Sang) who survived the invasion attack on her family. Three years later she return to the City of Shichen, she is now part of the Chinese resistance group lead by Chen (Zhao Jun Long) and General Takeshi has signed a deal with the German Nazi commander Schultz (Johan Karlberg), now the Axis is working side by side. However there is one new comer to the city, an assassin dress head to toe in black and has murdered over 1500 Japanese soldiers, and the next target is the general himself, the assassin is called "the Black Dress Killer". The general order the towns people to capture the killer and bring him/her to the general or the city will be burned down. Meanwhile the Chinese resistance group manage to rescue an American journalist who call himself Steven (Jeremy Marr Williams), he reveal to the resistance and Xiaoyun that the Americans don't know what is happening in Shichen and he must return to report to his country. Now Xiaoyun has two options, one is to help the America escape China, or two help the resistance to avenge the general...

Reception:

The Resistance was released in November 10th in 2011, and got special screened at Cannes Film Festival 2012, and early 2013 it was released on DVD worldwide.

In USA the movie was successful, best seller in several shops and in Comic Con it was 6th place of 20 in the top hot sales list.

However in the U.K. The critics were very harsh on the film, the NEO magazine gave it 2/5. And most complaints was it wasn't a war film. Also the CGI effect on the U.K. DVD is different from the American DVD.

DVD comparison:

With a free region DVD player, I bought both the U.K. version and USA version, and they are different.

The U.K. opening starts with CGI blood text and old documentary footage while blood is coming out of the pictures, but in the USA opening starts the old video footage freezes and white text is coming into the screen that explains the history.

The blood CGI is different also, in the U.K. Blood CGI is bobble blood (which was also used in Mortal Kombat X) but in the USA blood CGI is more realistic and sometimes the blood spit on the camera.

The colors in the U.K. are at present time blue grey scaled, past time when it's good green grey scaled, past time that is bad is red grey scaled. In the USA version the color is allways brown grey scaled no matter time line.

And one scene is different, in the U.K. when the Japanese Sergant capture some of the Chinese resistance, the light turns of by the black dress killer, and we see all soldiers panic and shoot everywhere, we even see two shots that miss the black dress killer. But in the USA, it's not the soldiers that panic, instead we see the Sergant panic and he see four of his soldiers get killed one by one.

Overall:

The movie is brilliant for its time, use only CGI when it's necessary, filmed in beautiful location of Tao Hua Dao Islands near Taiwan, and real set and props in the scenes, real village, real emperor palace, and with a plot that tells the history differently. It's unique to tell the history of World War II in a samurai style instead of what we are use too. Instead of soldiers and bunkers and explosion like "Saving Private Ryan", we see soldiers with ninja fighters against a resistance group with the same disappearing skill and Kung fu, and the black dress killer, same style as Zorro but with two blades and not a sword. I will recommend this movie for those who are fans samurai films and ninja adventure and those who are interested in a new story telling of World War II.

I reward this movie with 7.3/10

http://youtu.be/UDKdLo4KU9o
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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."
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A story from last week is just reaching us off-playa as news trickles through social media that three-year-old "fancy camp" White Ocean, home to a star-studded lineup of DJs and big dance parties and co-founded by the son of a Russian billionaire, was the victim of vandalism Wednesday night by "hooligans" apparently trying to make a statement about wealthy, so-called "plug-and-play" camps like this one. A post to Facebook from White Ocean organizers that you can see in full below says that the vandals cut off electricity, flooded the camp with 200 gallons of water, and glued trailer doors shut, in an effort to "sabotage us from every angle."

Most telling from the post is the detail that someone from the Burning Man organization, to whom White Ocean reported the incident, said "it makes sense that you have been sabotaged as you are a closed camp and not welcoming."

As Business Insider reports, the camp was started in 2013 by famed British DJ Paul Oakenfold "and funded by entrepreneurs Timur Sardarov (the son of Russian billionaire and oil magnate Rashid Sardarov) and Oliver Ripley." The camp is known for throwing dance parties around a DJ stage just outside the camp itself (at 2:00 and Guild), including an annual White Party which happened Wednesday.

It was during that party that vandals apparently entered the camp and committed the acts above, and also allegedly stole items, and caused the camp's refrigeration system to fail, laying some food to waste.

As the Reno Gazette-Journal reports, "Hired help assists the camp in the concert productions and the corral of RVs that surround a catered cafeteria and lounge space." While paid and invited guests of the camp are allowed to eat for free, the food is not available to all comers, as in the original spirit of Burning Man.

Clearly, as new cell signal and Instagram access has meant that Burning Man is no longer as off-the-grid as it once felt, and as each year longtime Burners bemoan a greater and greater influx of elite, newbie Burners  who can take $2200 flights right onto the playa from LA, SF and elsewhere  acts of revolt like this were bound to begin.

As one Burner, Tony Wichowski, tells the UK Telegraph, "And so the revolution has begun. Taking Burning Man back from the parasite class, back from the electronic dance music tourists. Taking Burning Man back for the people. This wasn't much but it's a great start."

The White Ocean organizer who posted about the event to Facebook, saying they had called authorities and were filing a report with the sheriff, writes, "We came here to unite people through music and love. We came here to inspire and we came here to live and let live." They add, "Please join us at our White Ocean stage and help us celebrate life through music. In doing so together, we can make these foolish acts of hate as minuscule as a particle of dust on our beloved playa."

The biggest question: Was Paris staying there?!

Update: This guy, at Burn.Life, says he suspects the vandals, who left behind no clear message about their motivations, may have actually just been disgruntled contractors who weren't paid by the camp in previous years for services rendered. Also, he claims to be in touch with vandals who took responsibility, so there may be more to come on this.



And here's a video from one of White Ocean's final parties this weekend. Not sure when the LED middle-finger appeared.

Burning man 2016 finished.#burningman #burningman2016 #bm2016 #whiteocean A video posted by Gavrilenko Andrew (@andrewdronandrew) on Sep 4, 2016 at 12:25am PDT



Related: Paris Hilton Is Instagramming From Her First Time At Burning Man, You Guys


Willie Brown has floated rumors in his Chronicle column before that have not had any legs  remember when he claimed within a week that both Ed Lee and Dianne Feinstein might become ambassador to China?  so perhaps take this with a hefty grain of salt: Now Willie says he's been hearing, from "sources," that "our Hollywood-like hunk, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, is in a lather over rumors that real Hollywood hunk George Clooney is thinking of running for governor in 2018."

To be clear, Willie has heard a rumor that Newsom is upset about a rumor.

Also: Clooney has been rumored to be running for office the last couple of years, so perhaps that part does have legs, though Clooney vehemently denied the rumors both in 2014, and in 2015, going so far last year as to tell reporters he had "zero interest" in running for California governor in 2018.

In 2014, despite news reports from the Washington Post and San Mercury News that cited Clooney friends (and foreign tabloids) as furthering the rumor of Clooney's political ambitions, Forbes dismissed it all as "more like a liberal pipe dream than reality, although California does have a history of electing actors as governor."

There would probably still be time, though, to build up a campaign war chest for November 2018  and it definitely would give Gavin a run for his money.

Clooney's been a longtime Clinton supporter and human rights activist, and this past April he and wife Amal hosted fundraisers for Hillary Clinton both in the Bay Area and in LA.

Previously: 1600 Sanders Supporters To Bang Pots Outside George Clooney's SF Fundraiser For Hillary Clinton
A few days after officially becoming an independent candidate, Jeff VanDerWerff is ramping up his quest to win the Iowa House District 4 seat.

VanDerWerff, of Orange City, is vying with Republican Skyler Wheeler, of Orange City, in the heavily Republican district. The outcome will be decided in Nov. 8 balloting.

VanDerWerff already was on the ballot once this year, when he came in third in a Republican primary in June. He received 25.6 percent, behind the 44.5 percent of Wheeler, who won the GOP nomination. VanDerWerff subsequently gathered enough signatures to be nominated by petition in August.

VanDerWerff has planned a Tuesday event at the Sioux County Courthouse in Orange City. He will be joined by Rock Valley Mayor Kevin Van Otterloo, who finished second in the June party primary for House District 4.

VanDerWerff will also introduce two other supporters -- former Republican state Sen. Dave Mulder and Sioux County Board of Supervisors Chairman Mark Sybesma.

Wheeler got traction for his primary win with an endorsement of The Family Leader, a socially conservative advocacy group.

There is no Democratic candidate in the Iowa House District 4 race.
SIOUX CITY | Casino Player magazine has recently released its 2016 Best of Gaming Awards, and Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Sioux City topped the charts in 14 different categories, including the top award for Best Overall Gaming Resort.

Each year, Casino Player, the leading national consumer gaming publication in North America, conducts a survey of the best casinos in the country with the help of readers and gaming enthusiasts nationwide.

Hard Rock Sioux City received first place honors in Iowa in 10 different Best of Gaming categories: Best Overall Gaming Resort, Best Hotel, Best Hotel Staff, Best Rooms, Best Suites, Best Players Club, Best Comps, Best Blackjack, Best Video Slots, and Best Craps.

It also placed in the top three for four other categories in Iowa: Favorite Casino Resort to Vacation At, Best Casino, Best Promotions, and Best Reel Slots.
ORANGE CITY, Iowa | Dr. Laird Edman, professor of psychology at Northwestern College, recently published an article, Primed Analytic Thought and Religiosity: The Importance of Individual Characteristics, in Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, a journal produced by the American Psychological Association.

Working in collaboration with Dr. Julie Yonker from Calvin College, Dr. James Creswell of Booth University College and Dr. Justin Barrett of Fuller Theological Seminary, Edman conducted a study of over 2,500 participants from across the United States. Their study was a response to research published in 2012 that asserted when people are primed to think analytically, their belief in God declines.
SIOUX CITY | Celebrity chef Mario Rizzotti doesn't mind packing his own Parmigiano-Reggiano in the event of a culinary emergency.

"You can't always find the Italian ingredients that you need everywhere," said Rizzotti, a frequent judge on Food Network's "Iron Chef America."

"That's why I'm always prepared."

Rizzotti was at Sioux City's Trattoria Fresco this week, preparing an authentic Italian dinner with restaurant owner Israel Padilla.

The event was part of a year-long "4 the Love of Italian Food Tour," during which Rizzotti will span the country, visiting four restaurants in four cities over the course of four days.

During this kick-off leg of his tour, he hosted meals in Lincoln, Omaha and Sioux Falls in addition to cooking a gourmet meal in Sioux City.

"I am on an Italian food crusade," said Rizzotti, who was born in Rome, Italy. "I want to improve the health of Americans through their consumption of authentic Italian food."

In other words, he was trying to avoid dishes like an Americanized spaghetti and meatballs covered with marinara sauce, replacing it with a panzanella salad (a traditional Tuscan meal using classic Italian bread and fresh tomatoes) and a "tower of shrimp," featuring stacked seafood swimming in a rich, red pepper pesto.

"Mario and I think it's important to educate Americans on the health benefits of Mediterranean cuisine," said veteran Italian chef Adam Weisell, who helped Rizzotti create the "4 the Love of Italian Food Tour" menu. "We also want to help people distinguish the real stuff from the food that is fake."

Fake food, huh? That doesn't sound very good.

"There are some Italian-sounding products that may not actually have any Italian ingredients," Weisell said, pointing to mass market extra virgin olive oil which may be loaded with trans fat fillers and partially-hydrogenated soybean oil.

"I love the United States but I see a country where people are eating themselves sick through bad food choices," Rizzotti added. "Americans have always had a love affair with Italian cuisine. I just have to help them select the right products for better health."

That means buying fresh produce whenever possible.

"Adam and I just spent our morning at the (Sioux City) Farmers Market and it was wonderful," said Rizzotti, who now lives outside Chicago with his wife and three children. "We live in the heartland and should take advantage of all of those benefits."

And what is one ingredient that Rizzotti simply can't live without? That would be extra virgin olive oil, or EVOO for short.

"For tonight's dinner, I'll even be adding EVOO to a sorbet dessert," he said. "I may keep that as a secret to diners but it will taste wonderful."
Health care is a hot button issue for many Americans. This is particularly true in an election year. And like many political issues, there are no easy answers because vested interests often overshadow the debate. Recent attempts to modernize Iowas Medicaid system provide a perfect case in point.

Medicaid provides essential health care and preventative services to those with disabilities or financial constraints. Iowa policymakers recently made the decision to turn over the states $5 billion program to UnitedHealthcare of the River Valley, Amerigroup Iowa and AmeriHealth Caritas Iowa. While this represents a huge shift for Iowas Medicaid system, it is in keeping with the national trend. Approximately 70 percent of Americas 73 million Medicaid beneficiaries receive their Medicaid benefits from a private health plan.

Critics claim Medicaid modernization is bad for the patients who rely on its benefits. This is simply not true. In fact, moving Medicaid to managed care will allow new value-added services, provide greater transparency and give patients better access to health care professionals. Moreover, managed care will open doors to preventative services not possible under the old system.

Modernization does not represent the end of quality health care. Rather, it heralds the beginning of an era of better health equity for those who need it most. - Blake Jenness, Sioux City
Kyle Kittleson uses livestreaming in a very unique way. Kittlesons efforts, delivered over a variety of platforms, have transformed more than 1,000 dogs with positive reinforcement training. Hes also developed a strong passion for marine mammals, an interest important to him since the age of 6, and he has worked across the U.S. in the fields of animal care, rescue, rehabilitation and training. His interests and aptitude have led him to work with exotic birds, penguins, harbor seals, Hawaiian monk seals, California sea lions and more. Small Business Trends interviewed Kittleson via telephone for his thoughts on the latest trends in live programs and what resonates with viewers in the livestreaming world. He also talks about monetization in regards to Busker, an up and coming livestreaming app that also includes a tipping function.

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Small Business Trends: How many live streaming platforms do you use? Do you treat them differently?

Kyle Kittleson: I use three platforms: Facebook Live, Periscope and Busker. On my Facebook Live, Ill always deliver high-value informational content, never just chat. Periscope and Busker can be the chatty ones. Let me say I think highly of Busker and the people who created it. While its nice to be on the receiving end of Busker tipping, its not a priority for me. I didnt open a Busker account to get tipped. Im more interested in making connections with viewers and creating relationships.

Small Business Trends: Lets talk more about Busker tipping, because it seems like an answer to Periscopes absence of a monetization function.

Kyle Kittleson: When I first heard about Busker, I wondered why any viewer would tip. One day I was in Mary Desmonds broadcast and I asked her to play a Britney Spears song, and she did. I tipped her and then it made total sense. I give tips in real life, to a piano player for example, so whats the difference? Not much. Its a great feature of Busker. I teared up during my first Busker broadcast because of the support I received. It was just me introducing myself, but many of the viewers were already watching me on Periscope for a year.

Dog training advice was what I initially thought would generate the most Busker tips. But Ive noticed when Im just doing a broadcast about me, or walking my dog Callie or just hanging out with her, I get more tips. I dont know the reason, but I think its because for the people who are following me  nicknamed the #KittleFam  its the first time in a year theyve been able to communicate in a way that was more than a tweet or an email. Tipping was something they could do instantly to show appreciation, and not just for specific broadcasts I was doing.

They were showing appreciation that I was even on livestreaming to begin with. So its not about getting a dollar, its the fact that somebody would think enough of me to show their support.

Small Business Trends: Can you give us a preview of what content you might bring to Busker? Ive seen you give animal behavior tips and you do street interviews, but what else?

Kyle Kittleson: Closet Confessions is my most popular Periscope show, and I might bring it to Busker so it can reach a brand new set of people. Buskers quality is better than Periscope, but my following is larger on Periscope. But most importantly, Ill be where the #KittleFam wants to watch me. If they say they want to watch me on Periscope, Ill be on Periscope. Its more up to them than it is up to me. At first, the Periscope #KittleFam werent too happy with the thought of me shifting anything to Busker, mainly because it wasnt available on Android at the time. But Busker is on Android now.

Small Business Trends: Ive heard people say its exhausting and difficult to create a live streaming show that gets a lot of viewers, so congrats. How popular is popular?

Kyle Kittleson: I get emails from people saying they have to record Scandal because theyd rather be part of Closet Confessions live on Thursday nights. The show really resonates with people. Its a perfect use of live streaming. It allows people the chance to share and confess something thats bothering them in a supportive environment. While its live, people connect to each other too, which is rare on social media. Revealing personal secrets on social media isnt always safe because social media has an evil and horrible side, but Closet Confessions is a safe haven for thousands of people every week.

Nine or ten months ago, I found myself broadcasting from my closet, and thats how the show idea started. The next day was the shows first episode and 1,500 people tuned in. Since then, Ive had guests on it like Sonequa Martin-Green from the hit show The Walking Dead as well as live streamers. Its become a community. Nobody is above having something to confess. Participating can result in major life-changing decisions. And I mean things like rehab, divorce, taking information to the LAPD.

Small Business Trends: When can people watch it? How can people reach you directly?

Kyle Kittleson: Closet Confessions is every Thursday at 5 p.m. Pacific time. Let me add, the show has nothing to do with me. Its all about the viewers  they are the show. I just moderate it. Ive spent years studying animal behavior and theres not a lot of difference between animal behavior and human behavior. Closet Confessions is powerful, but its not for the weary. My background lets me view human behavior in a unique way, which is helpful for moderating the show because its all live and its as real as it gets. Whats known as reality TV isnt real. But real people making real confessions, thats real. You can send me a direct message on Twitter or Facebook, or email me at Kyle@KyleKittleson.com.

Image credit: Robin Roemer; Pictured: Kyle Kittleson, Callie The Lab

This is part of the Small Business Trends Livestreamed Livelihoods interview series featuring sessions with today's movers and shakers in the livestreaming world.
The next big startup hub might not be a trendy metropolitan area like Silicon Valley. In fact, if you ask Mark Zuckerberg, the growing startup community in Lagos, Nigeria is one to look out for.

The founder of Facebook recently visited the sub-Saharan country for the first time to see the vibrant developer and entrepreneurial ecosystem there. The city already boasts several up-and-coming startups and has some financial potential for international companies as well.

However, inconsistent access to both funding and internet could threaten to slow the areas startup growth. Those are a few of the issues that Zuckerberg hopes to tackle with his work in Nigeria. Of course, Zuckerbergs efforts dont come without potential benefit to Facebook. Nigeria is the companys largest market in Africa.

Always Keep Your Eye Out for the Next Silicon Valley

You dont need to be the size of Facebook to know the value of developing communities around the world when it comes to growing your business. The internet gives even small business incredible reach not only to sell products and services anywhere in the world theyre needed. And developing communities can also be sources of talent to be recruited or partner who can help your company grow.

You dont need to be a tech billionaire to contact these folks either. Simply take the time to learn more about the communities youre interested in. Look for complementary businesses and services to your own in these communities. Connect with popular local influencers via social media. Then set up an opportunity to chat Skype or Google Hangouts to talk about common goals and opportunities on .
Economy  September 4, 2016  Sam Gindin and Herman Rosenfeld

Ever since the sit-down strikes of the 1930s, the cycle of Big Three auto bargaining has been a major economic and political event, an indicator of the progress of the class struggle in North America. If such interest has sagged of late, it charged back into the news with the aggressive declaration of Unifors president, Jerry Dias, that winning new investments for Canada is at the top of the unions agenda in its current bargaining round with General Motors (GM), Ford and Chrysler. Dias followed up this challenge to managements right to unilaterally decide investments with the audacious warning that if these U.S.-based corporations dont deliver on bringing a fair share of investments to Canada, they can expect a strike.

This has set up a confrontation with GM in particular, which has adamantly stated that it wont negotiate over where to put its profits. Its investment decisions, it asserted, will be made by GM alone and only after the contract has been put to bed  effectively saying, with GMs typical amalgam of arrogance and paternalism, that it will decide once the workers have shown they will behave.

A remarkable aspect of these incompatible stances between GM and Unifor is that both the company and the union are taking different positions than they have in the past. The truth is that when it suited GM, it regularly brought its investment decisions to the table. In every bargaining round in the U.S. since the end of the 70s, GM used the threat of withholding investment and the promise of bringing new investments to get wage restraint or, more often, concessions from the UAW. And for its part, the Canadian section of the union has, over most of that same period cautioned, against its current position, that collective bargaining is not the terrain for dealing with new investment. Jobs were a political issue to be resolved at the level of the state and to attempt to deal with it in bargaining would, the Canadians claimed, only lead to disaster.

Struggles in the 1980s

Threats by employers to withhold investments if the workers dont fall in line is, of course, a constant of life under capitalism. For Canadian autoworkers, it was especially highlighted in the early eighties when, in response to their refusal to accept concessions, GM declared that the Canadians up in the attic of the international union werent going to set the standard for the very much larger and more significant workforce on the American main floor. To bring this home, GM went so far as to talk of pulling out of Canada. Peter Trueman, the generally staid news anchor at Global TV, reacted to the threat by angrily noting that companies elsewhere had been nationalized for less. But this reflected the mood before neoliberal ideas came to so completely dominate public thinking. Adolph Reed had characterized neoliberalism as capitalism without a labour opposition, and the early 1980s was a time when such opposition still held capital at bay. The Canadians went on strike in spite of GMs threat and not only won their demands (as documented in the National Film Board documentary Final Offer ) but in the years that followed GM made their largest ever investments in Canada.

Of course, even then the union could hardly dismiss the industrys threats. Those threats are always real; the companies have the power, undemocratic as it is, to deny investment. Currently, North American sales have recovered since the deep crisis of 2008-9 (sales are strong in the U.S. and have been at record levels in Canada). Profits are impressive by any measure. Yet the recovery of production has varied sharply across North America. U.S. assembly of vehicles has surpassed pre-recession levels and Mexican assembly is booming, but Canadian assembly seriously lags. Going forward, things look to be even worse; announced investments in North America have, as the media and the union have noted, dramatically shortchanged Canada. With the auto majors continuing the shift in assembly plants away from the Great Lakes to the U.S. South and to Mexico, and with investments in Canadian engines stagnating, this also threatens a good part of the Canadian auto components sector.

In this context, as courageous as it may seem for the union to declare that it will go on strike for investment and jobs, it does seem incongruous to threaten to close plants that the companies dont seem all that interested in keeping going. It is true that workers can, even in bad times and in plants destined for closure, impose significant short term costs on their employer and so defend or improve their compensation. It is, however, another thing to imagine that such short terms costs, on their own, could be enough to reverse long term strategic decisions over investment.

The Unifor leadership certainly has enough bargaining experience and savvy to appreciate this limit. Their bravado about deploying the traditional strike weapon as the solution to the complex issue of worker insecurity could be based on the expectation that GM is ready to invest here but needs a push to declare its plans during bargaining. Or, if that is not expected to be the case, it may be that it is not so much GM that Unifor is addressing with its strike threat as it is the provincial and federal governments. That is, the union may be using the high profile of bargaining in the auto sector, and the drama of a possible strike, to highlight the jobs issue politically, and thereby place it firmly on the political agenda. This is where the union has argued in the past the jobs issue in the auto industry always belongs.

As the labour movement prepares to march on Labour Day, all this poses a series of questions: Does Unifors attempt to secure new investments through collective bargaining represent a powerfully militant, innovative approach on its part? Or could it be walking into a trap the automobile companies have set? If the government offers subsidies  the only public response being bandied about so far in the media, the industry or the union  is this really a solution?

The Quagmire of Investment Bargaining

It isnt surprising that the overwhelming concern of workers with decent-paying jobs is hanging on to them, all the more so in an era that has witnessed the overall decline in comparable full-time jobs. Yet unions have also traditionally grasped that this couldnt be resolved in bargaining. The availability of jobs was understood to be dependent on a wide range of factors largely beyond the scope of bargaining: the state of the economy, the quality of the product, the age of the facility, corporate competency and technological expertise, the strength of the supplier base, impact of exchange rates, new competitors, strategic decisions to directly enter new markets, etc. And so collective bargaining, even in bad times, has generally set the job question aside  reduced work time to share the work being the singular exception  and focused on improving the compensation and conditions of work.

In the early 80s this issue became a major point of conflict between the Canadian side of the union and its American parent, and eventually a key factor in the subsequent breakaway of the Canadians to form their own union. While the Americans put jobs at the center of their demands, the Canadians argued that if new investment was the main bargaining demand, the company would undoubtedly counter by insisting that any significant union demands got in the way, and that it would only offer the investments in exchange for concessions  basically that the workers buy their jobs. Bargaining would shift from workers making demands for improvements, to corporations being the demand-initiators. Moreover, any concessions made by workers in one facility would create pressure to do the same in competing facilities. The cancer of concessions would therefore create a downward spiral in wages and working conditions without alleviating the worker insecurity. Having opened this door, concessions would become a regular feature of bargaining and the unions role would largely be constrained to repeatedly begging for jobs and selling the consequent concessions to their members as successes.

Which is of course what happened. The United Auto Workers (UAW) came out of every bargaining round from 1979 on heralding an historic breakthrough that guaranteed job security. But there was no way to enforce the corporate side of the trade-off. Investment promises take a number of years to implement and the companies might either be unable to fulfill those promises or simply refuse to do so in light of changing circumstances. In line with the agreement, plants werent closed during the life of the agreement, but they were instead temporarily mothballed until the agreement expired, at which time the companies were free to permanently close them. The companies then announced a new list of closures going into the next bargaining round, leaving the union desperately focused on shortening the list and winning another historic agreement  a cycle that was, all too predictably, to repeat itself over the following decades.

UAW members in the United States 1978 2016 Change (%) GM 450,000 49,000 401,000 (-89%) Ford 190,000 43,000 147,000 (-77%) Chrysler 110,000 26,000 84,000 (-76%) Total 750,000 118,000 632,000 (-84%)

With worker compensation and conditions eroded while job security remained as elusive as ever, the strength and credibility of the American union steadily faded. Today the debates about trying to bargain jobs are no longer abstract or speculative questions; the wretched numbers are there for all to see. Before the concessions began, the UAW had some 750,000 members at the Big Three in the U.S. based on historical sources; today they have under 120,000, according to the UAW, an astounding loss of over 630,000 jobs or over 80 per cent of the former jobs. There is no denying that all kinds of factors were at play  Japanese competition, the impact of new technologies and reorganization of work  but whatever the explanation, there can be no more powerful evidence of the failure of the strategy to bargain jobs.

Markets and Rules: Their Freedoms vs. Ours

What then of government subsidies as the answer to jobs? Here too, some history is relevant. Through most of the 20th century, it was generally accepted that the Canadian auto industry, dependent on U.S.-based corporations, could not survive under conditions of free competition with the Americans. The U.S. market dwarfed that of Canada and the U.S. was where the technology, productive capacities and decision-making were overwhelmingly concentrated. (GMs Research and Development budget, for example, has routinely exceeded the R&D expenditures of the total of all sectors of Canadian manufacturing).

For the Canadian industry to survive, tinkering with the market through lower corporate taxes or higher subsidies couldnt do the trick, even though Canadas corporate taxes are by now among the lowest of any major manufacturing country. For policy makers in the early days of the industry and through the 1970s, it was obvious that the freedom of corporations to sell cars here entirely made outside the country would prevent Canada from developing an auto manufacturing capacity. Direct state intervention was essential, and it took the form of imposing an import duty (tariff) on the entry of such vehicles. Crucially, this wasnt to keep U.S.-based corporations out, but to encourage them to come and produce within Canada (an added inducement for them to do so was that if a company located production in Canada, it qualified for duty-free entry into other countries of the British Commonwealth).

The tariffs did bring assembly plants but as they relied on expensive component parts unavailable in Canada the trade deficit in the auto industry kept growing. The limited scale of the Canadian assembly plants left them relatively inefficient and unable to generate significant offsetting exports of vehicles to the USA. In the mid-60s, this dilemma was resolved by moving to what was an early global precursor of integrated international production. Under the Canada-U.S. Auto Pact, the Canadian and U.S. industries would be integrated, with the free flow of vehicles and components moving both ways but with one crucial caveat: Canada was allowed to have certain safeguard protections.

The union had lobbied hard to win these safeguards, which basically stipulated that if any of the auto majors wanted duty-free access to the Canadian market they would have to match Canadian sales with Canadian assembly. This concession reflected concerns on the part of both the auto companies and the American state that if the Canadian trade deficit in auto continued to grow, the Canadian government might, out of desperation, be forced to introduce more stringent limits on trade. Indeed, the elected heads of the union bargaining teams of each of GM, Ford and Chrysler had opposed the unions formal support for the auto pact, and called for stronger import controls to sustain the building of a all-Canadian car, to which they even gave a name: The Beaver .

The significance of the safeguards the union won in the Auto Pact was made especially clear in the late 1970s, as the Japanese companies dramatically expanded their share of the U.S. market and this led the UAW leaders there to agree to collective bargaining concessions to make their companies more competitive. The Canadians, less socialized into identifying with the American-based companies as theirs, and backed by the Auto Pacts safeguards, instead focused on mobilizing for new politically-enforced safeguards. They demanded further state regulation of foreign corporations, preventing them from undercutting other workers. This, they argued, was key to really defending jobs.

But with the defeat suffered by those forces opposed to free trade in the 1988 election, and the coming into force of the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement, the Canadian auto industry was left to the whims of the free market and the strategic and profit priorities of the companies. Though free trade agreements rigorously limited state intervention to impose social standards, they did not prevent state subsidies to foreign corporations to affect the location of production. Competitive subsidies became an add-on to free trade (as one blogger said, for corporations, the cost of investing moved a bit closer to being free).

This actually placed unions in the position of calling for subsidies on behalf of corporations who were already among the wealthiest corporations in the world and increasingly favoured by competitive cuts in corporate taxation. Unions calling for subsidies for their companies  while other workers faced layoffs and closures, and while curtailed spending on public services impacted public employees and their clients faced the consequences of curtailed spending on public services  were unlikely to gather many allies. The call for subsidies are interpreted as shifting what would be autoworker concessions onto the backs of the broader public. Without a more ambitious political campaign speaking to all workers in the name of full employment, social justice and collective services, any union calling for subsidies risked being seen as simply taking care of its own.

In the end, subsidies did not prevent the auto industry from shifting its plants from the Great Lakes area to the American south. With the companies having already decided to move to the U.S. south and Mexico, and this also being the tendency of new foreign-based investors, the competition over attracting new investment was primarily a matter of which southern state would give the corporations the most. Offers from the North served primarily as an added bargaining chip.

The largest subsidy of all (apart from the bailouts of the banks, of course) was given by the U.S. and Canadian governments to the auto industry in 2009, in the midst of the Great Financial Crisis. As its part of saving the industry from potential bankruptcy, Canada made a commitment to contribute $10.8-billion to GM and $3.8-billion for Chrysler, based on each companys share of North American assembly in Canada. The implication was that as the industry emerged from the crisis, Canadas share of continental assembly would be maintained. Yet once GM had the money, Canadas share of assembly fell and remained significantly below the 16 per cent share of production that the subsidy had been based on. Offering the big dollars but leaving the unilateral power of investment decisions in the hands of corporations proved, once again, to do little for Canadian jobs.

Reframing the Problem

The problem with trying to get new investments through collective bargaining is not that its a bad demand  the union can hardly ignore this concern  but that it may effectively become the only demand, while the company is virtually invited to raise concessionary demands. And absent a broader political campaign, the pressure on the companies to commit to investments is limited, as is the pressure on the government to insist on such commitments and then guarantee that they are actually met. Moreover, if is not backed up by a forceful broader campaign, the union will inevitably find itself on the defensive in the court of public opinion.

Going into this round of bargaining, Unifor has various things going for it. No-one can plausibly put the blame for the crisis in the Canadian auto industry on the workers. Investing in Canada comes with no penalty to the companies and the union in fact has the economic space to make gains. As Dias has constantly emphasized, independent studies rank the Canadian plants among the very top plants in North America in terms of productivity and quality, while the Canadian health care system and the low value of the Canadian dollar mean that Canadian labour costs are relatively low compared to the U.S. (even the auto majors themselves generally concur with these facts). In any case, labour costs in assembly plants are only 7 per cent of manufacturing and roughly 4 per cent of the selling price of a vehicle. And when all business costs, labour and non-labour, are rolled, as a recent study by the global consulting firm KPMG of 10 major auto-producing countries has shown Canada ranks only behind Mexico  and no-one seriously argues that we should be reaching for Mexican standards.

Moreover, the social and political climate has changed over the past few years. A growing backlash against the extremes of corporate power and inequality is ready to be tapped. The union has sensed this change but to really ride this wave and contribute to its development, requires a demonstrated commitment to take on larger, more general struggles. When unions could win their demands based on their workplace power alone, such considerations werent all that important. Today they are crucial.

The obvious strategic demand to focus on in bargaining is ending the shameful two-tier wage structure under which newly hired workers, who do the same work other unionized workers, start at 60 per cent of the wage, remain there for three years, and only reach parity with their co-workers after completing their 10th year, while they are forever excluded from achieving an equivalent pension plan. (It is in fact a multi-tier wage scheme since some groups of workers  called Supplementary Workforce Employees at GM  are likely to never get to the top level). This is not only a matter of a just demand and one that speaks to strengthening the union for future battles, but it also positions the union to gain popular support for its immediate struggles. What makes taking on the issue all the more important at this moment is that it is still a relatively new program; if left to become part of the given landscape it will be all the harder to reverse in the future.

Heady calls for union renewal  now common in the labour movement  cant help but sound hollow when the members expected to carry out that renewal are alienated from the union because of the wage discrimination that two-tier involves. It is impossible to explain to new members why, when union educationals emphasize equal pay across gender, the equal treatment of workers of the same gender is so casually set aside. It is also hard to imagine calling on worker solidarity when, for example, younger workers who are denied a defined benefit plan in retirement are asked to support the defense of such a plan for the older workers alone. Nor can the union credibly speak of the wrongs imposed on low paid and precarious workers without a union when its own collective agreements allow for second class citizenship with second class wages. And though the union is committed to expanding unionization, its inability or refusal to take on this internal inequity in its unionized workplaces cant help but act as a barrier in attracting the confidence of potential new union recruits.

Taking on the struggle against two-tier, including striking over it, would add to rather than take away from the focus on bargaining for new investment. This is because it holds out, alongside a broader employment campaign that would connect with the general frustrations around jobs that concern workers across all sectors, the possibility of public pressure on the auto companies to do what they would not otherwise do.

Corporations have over recent decades gotten almost everything they asked for in the way of free trade, taxes, social service cutbacks, and labour legislation. Though this has fattened their profits and the wealth of stockholders, the alleged trade-off  they would invest and improve our lives  hasnt materialized, as had been noted even by the Bank of Canada. This widespread corporate failure suggests that we have no alternative but to insist on governments taking on the task of directly creating jobs throughout the economy by way of investment in long-neglected physical infrastructure and in expanding the public services that have been eroded or neglected.

Instead of elected governments standing idly by while unelected corporations destroy or move the countrys productive capacity, what needs to be placed on the agenda is the development of the state capacity to take over such facilities and its equipment, an engineering capacity to convert them, and a planning capacity to integrate them into production for social use. In the case of auto, if the companies continue to refuse to invest and facilities are put at risk of shutting down, the government should stand ready to take over these facilities  as the union should have called for with the closing of the Oshawa truck plant and other facilities  and look to integrate them (and component plants affected by the lack of investment by the auto majors) into a plan that keeps people working to address otherwise unmet needs.

The key for such projects would be the environmental transformations that will be needed through the rest of the century: from electric cars to public transit; from refurbishing every home and office to revamping the countrys physical infrastructure; from modifying every piece of machinery and equipment to new standards, to building the equipment for the shift to renewable energies. Reorienting the economy to planning would also mean coordinating with like-minded governments and social forces for planning more socially just international economic relations, not coordinating to the ends of freeing markets to the benefit of multinational corporations.

Conclusion: Is this winnable?

With the changes in the Canadian industry, the union doesnt have the Big Three strike leverage it once had. And in the case of GM, the operation that is currently running full out, CAMI in Ingersol, stands outside the Master Agreement and would likely not be included in any strike (though some kind of concrete solidarity would be expected). Moreover, the corporations wouldnt be thinking about the implications of ending two-tier in Canada, but of the precedent this might set in the USA. Nevertheless, because the demand is not a threat to the profitability of the corporations and would only dent the Canadian economic advantage; because the precedent argument has been dealt with before and the companies had to back down; because a strike, even if not a catastrophe, would still be an inconvenience and mean a loss of production; and above all, because of the shift in the popular mood  because of all of this, winning is actually a possibility.

Moreover, in the last set of American negotiations, Chrysler workers defied their leadership and voted down the first tentative settlement because it condemned new hires to wages and pensions that would permanently remain below the so-called core workforce. This forced a settlement which leapfrogged the Canadian 10-year path to equity and allowed for an 8-year transition. This sets the stage for Canadian workers to now continue this process and leapfrog their American brothers and sisters and establish an all too rare example of workers pushing standards up, rather than undercutting each other. Ford Oakville is, in this regard, well positioned to play the role the U.S. Chrysler workers did. It is one operation that has gotten new investments lately and so is less likely to be intimidated by threats of closures and has as well hired 2500 new workers in the past few years (making up almost half the current workforce) who are stuck within the two tier system and ready to fight for raising the 60 per cent starting wage significantly and then phasing out the gap within the time of two collective agreements if not sooner.

As for jobs, the only credible alternative to gaining investment concessions from the companies as opposed to vainly offering them concessions with no likely ultimate benefit is to engage in a struggle that profiles the role of the companies in denying justice both in the workplace and in terms of fair share of investments. Only such a larger struggle  one that creates some nervousness among the companies over a possible wider backlash that can reverberate on sales, corporate friendly policies, free trade, and yes, also interrupts production as Oshawa workers did in the mid-90s when they took over the GM car plant to highlight their fight against outsourcing  has a chance of defending the unions members and maintaining the integrity of the union. Autoworkers, in spite of the defeats over the past few decades, still have the resources, organization and smarts to pull this off.

The great significance of the Bernie Sanders challenge to the Democratic Party in the U.S., the Jeremy Corbyn revolt inside the UK Labour Party and related outbursts of excitement across Europe and elsewhere is not that they have yet figured out how to win a different world, but that they put the possibility of winning on the agenda again. They reminded us that people arent static; demoralization is not forever and frustrations can be constructively channeled. Give people a vision, combine it with structures through which they can collectively act, present a plan with the possibility of success and the result can surprise us.

We never know what is actually possible until we test it. It may seem a long road from a union trying to protect jobs to a union setting out an alternative agenda for the economy. But surely the main lesson of recent years is that since capitalist corporations think big as a matter of course  as globalization and their determination to build a world in their own image affirm  then we will surely lose if we continue to think small. The options in society have indeed narrowed but that is not a reason to narrow our hopes; it is rather why we need to expand those options by putting more radical alternatives on the agenda. Its the radical that is now the only thing truly practical. If we dont raise our expectations, they will be lowered for us. 
A Hillary Clinton presidency would likely continue along the pro-Islamist foreign policy arc that both her husbands administration and the Obama administration have developed.President Bill Clinton committed U.S. military resources to help Muslims during the so-called humanitarian intervention in Bosnia. However, he chose to turn a blind eye to the genocide that swamped Rwanda during his administration. As G. Murphy Donovan wrote in his American Thinker article How the Clintons Gave American Foreign Policy its Muslim Tilt, Muslim lives matter, Black Africans, not so much. Noting that it was Muslim unrest that precipitated Serb pushback, civil war, and the eventual collapse of Yugoslavia, Donovan added, Bosnians are, for the most part, Muslims with a bloody fascist pedigree. Nevertheless, with no strategic U.S. national interest at stake, Bill Clinton tilted American foreign policy in favor of the Muslim side in the Bosnia conflict.We are now reaping the lethal consequences of that tilt. Donovan points out in his article that, on a per capita basis, Bosnia Herzegovina is the leading source of ISIS volunteers in all of Europe.President Obama, along with then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, took the side of Islamist rebels against the secular authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Libya and Syria that had managed to keep the lid on jihadist terrorism for many years. These Islamists included members of al Qaeda as well as the Muslim Brotherhood.In Libya, Hillary Clinton was the leading voice pressing for military intervention against Col. Muammar el- Qaddafis regime. She did so, even though, according to sources cited in a State Department memo passed on to Hillary by her deputy at the time, Jake Sullivan, in an e-mail dated April 1, 2011 , we just don't know enough about the make-up or leadership of the rebel forces. In fact, as subsequently reported by the New York Times, the only organized opposition to the Qaddafi regime that had developed underground during Qaddafis rule were the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a terrorist group, and the Muslim Brotherhood. The author of the State Department memo had acknowledged the Libyan Islamic Fighting Groups terrorist past but said they express a newfound keenness for peaceful politics. Was Hillary Clinton relying on such assurances of a reformed peaceful Islamic group fighting against Qaddafi, even though it had been on the State Departments terrorist list since 2004 and one of its leaders, Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi , praised al Qaeda members as good Muslims in a March 2011 interview? If so, that is just another indication of her bad judgment.As for Egypt, Hillary was informed by her outside adviser and confidante Sid Blumenthal, in an e-mail dated December 16, 2011 , that the Muslim Brotherhoods intention was to create an Islamic state. Moreover, the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda and other radical groups was "complicated," Blumenthal quoted a source "with access to the highest levels of the MB" as saying. Blumenthal also reported, based on a confidential source, that Mohamed Morsi, who was then leader of the Muslim Brotherhoods Freedom and Justice Party, believed that it will be difficult for this new, Islamic government to control the rise of al Qa'ida and other radical/terrorist groups.Nevertheless, the Obama administration supported the Muslim Brotherhood in its bid to seek power in Egypt through a shaky electoral process. After Morsis election to the presidency, Hillary visited Egypt where Morsi warmly welcomed her and she expressed strong support for Egypts democratic transition. However, the only real transition Morsi had in mind was to impose sharia law on the Egyptian people, the very antithesis of true democratic pluralism. Yet the ObamaClinton gravy train of military aid to the Muslim Brotherhood-backed Islamist regime continued without any preconditions. Hillary Clinton herself and her State Department referred to the importance of the U.S.s partnership with the Muslim Brotherhood-backed regime.When Morsi was removed from power, after millions of Egyptians had taken to the streets to protest the increasingly theocratic regime, the Obama administration decided to suspend aid to the more secular successor military regime. The partnership was no more once the Islamists were swept out of office.While Morsi was still president, the Clinton Foundation, which has taken millions of dollars in donations from Muslim majority governments and affiliated groups and individuals, invited Morsi to deliver a major address at the Clinton Global Initiative. This invitation was extended just a month after an individual named Gehad el-Haddad, who was working simultaneously for the Muslim Brotherhood and the Clinton Foundation in Cairo, left his Clinton Foundation job to work for Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood full time. Fortunes changed for this individual, however, when, after Morsi was overthrown, Haddad was arrested for inciting violence and given a life sentence.The Obama administration, while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, also cooperated with the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to pass and implement a United Nations resolution that was intended to curb speech considered Islamophobic. Clinton, in full spin mode, insisted that the new UN resolution was totally consistent with the free speech protections of the First Amendment, as opposed to the "defamation of religions" resolutions that the OIC had sponsored in the past but was willing to have replaced. The truth, however, is that all we were seeing was old wine in new bottles. To make sure that the OIC was comfortable regarding the Obama administrations intentions, Clinton assured the OIC that she was perfectly on board with using some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people dont feel that they have the support to do what we abhor. She was trying to publicly assure American citizens that their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and press were safe, while working behind the scenes with her OIC partners to find acceptable ways to stifle speech offensive to Muslims.The signs of Hillary Clintons Islamist tilt as she runs for president include the sweepingly general and demonstrably false assertion in her tweet last November that Muslims have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism." She has obviously learned nothing from her disastrous tenure as Secretary of State. Neither is she willing to acknowledge that the terrorists whom she has called a determined enemy are jihadists animated by an ideology rooted in core Muslim teachings of the Koran and the Hadith (Prophet Muhammads sayings and actions). Is there something about the word Muslim in the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic in the Islamic State that she is having problems understanding?Perhaps, it is Hillarys close association with Huma Abedin , her top campaign aide and confidante, who has had questionable links to Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organizations, which explains Hillarys denial of the truth. If someone as close to Hillary as Huma Abedin, whom she apparently trusts with her life, is a Muslim, then how could any Muslim possibly have anything to do with terrorism?Then again, perhaps Hillarys willingness to give Islamists the benefit of the doubt is all the money that the Clintons have received over the years from foreign donors in Muslim majority countries, including the Saudi government and affiliated groups and individuals. Hillary Clinton has also reached out for campaign donations from a pro-Iranian lobby group, the National Iranian American Council. Whatever human rights abuses are inflicted on people in these countries, it would be counterproductive to bite the hand that feeds you, in the Clintons way of thinking.Finally, the Democratic Party itself has moved much further to the Left since the days of Bill Clintons presidency, which has led to the broadening out of the pro-Islamist bias that began to take shape with Bill Clintons intervention in Bosnia. As David Horowitz wrote in a January 8, 2016 article published by National Review Leftists and Democrats have also joined the Islamist propaganda campaign to represent Muslims  whose co-religionists have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents since 9/11 in the name of their religion  as victims of anti-Muslim prejudice, denouncing critics of Islamist terror and proponents of security measures as Islamophobes and bigots. Led by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Democrats have enabled the Islamist assault on free speech, which is a central component of the Islamist campaign to create a worldwide religious theocracy.For a variety of reasons, Hillary Clinton as president can be expected to move the United States towards an even more accommodative stance than her predecessors with Islamists who mean to do us harm.
Le Collectif Cheikh Yassine a organise un certain nombre dactivites et de festivites pour les enfants de Gaza sous le theme  La joie des enfants de Gaza pour lAid . Ces activites ont commence le premier jour de lAid et continue jusquau 4eme jour de lAid dans la bande de Gaza.



Plusieurs activites, ont ete organisees parmi lesquelles : des competitions recompensees par des prix, des jeux, des animations et des chants presentes par un groupe ainsi que des distributions de cadeaux et daides financieres.




According to historian Suetonius accounts, His clothing, footwear and usual outfit was not worthy of a Roman, a citizen or even of simply a man or even human being.

Tiberius often wore bright colors, capes embroidered with pearls on sleeves and wrists. Sometimes he wore silk and women's veils, sandals or soldiers' boots and once he wore womens shoes. As it can be seen by the historians accounts, the poor Emperors choice of style brought him a lot of criticism.

Mandatory Wardrobe Regulation

Medieval society was also very concerned about regulating peoples wardrobes. There were decrees regulating clothing for all classes and social strata, from peasants to the nobility. Clothes were regulated for repentant and unrepentant heretics, infidels, actors and even prostitutes.

Even after the dark ages clothing was regulated, especially in in Germany and England.

From 1244 to 1816, the German principality passed more than 1,300 laws aimed at regulating its citizens attire.

In 1662, a certain Hans Eitel Jacob, son of a weaver from Wurttemberg was fined an amount equal to two-week earnings, for wearing very broad trousers. The judge stated that if he was seen wearing such pants ever again, by the power of the prince the pants would be confiscated. It remains unknown whether in the end, young Hans Jacob was left without his pants!

Say No to Kilts

When the British Empire began to expand wardrobe laws began to have a more political element to them.

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I it was forbidden to wear Irish national clothing. British citizens from 1297 were not allowed to wear hairstyles as those among the Irish.

The Dress Act of 1746 was part of the Act of Proscription which came into force on August 1, 1746 and made wearing the Highland Dress including the tartan or a kilt illegal in Scotland as well as reiterating the Disarming Act. The act was, however, revoked in 1782.
The Philippine Department of National Defense (DND) initiated the acquisition of the two battleships nearly three years ago to prompt the upgrade of the country's territorial defense capabilities. Having studied the documents presented by the companies eying the project, the country's Navy selected HHI's HDF-3000 multipurpose frigate design.

The company was awarded a notice, signed by Philippines' Secretary of National Defense Delfin Lorenzana, on Thursday. The actual contract is expected to be signed on September 12.

HDF-3000 class frigates constructed by HHI are about 115 meters long and 14 meters wide boasting a max speed of 35 miles per hour (56kmh). The ships are able to carry about 3,251 tons making it ideal to accommodate engines in combined diesel or gas machinery arrangements.
The city of Charlotte really wants to build a streetcar line. Queen City taxpayers probably will have to dig a bit deeper to pay for it, though, as construction bids have come in over 30 percent above projections. Such overages should come as no surprise, given the history of transit projects in general and the specifics of this project in particular.Mecklenburg County has a dedicated sales tax to pay for the Charlotte Area Transit System's capital needs and to cover the operating losses of its rail and bus network. Though CATS will build and operate the streetcar, no transit tax money is going to it. Instead, the city of Charlotte is responsible for financing the project and covering its operating losses. That's a particular concern for the city as the federal government is paying $75 million toward the streetcar line's second phase, and all costs beyond that fall entirely on the city.Bids have come in over budget. As the Charlotte Observer reports, the city had estimated the cost of the line plus some city-funded related improvements at $93.2 million. It received two bids for the work, one at $123.3 million, the other at $128.5 million, both more than 30 percent above the city's estimate.Such cost overruns are par for the course. Over the past decade and a half, a series of academic journal articles has demonstrated that costs routinely are underestimated and benefits overstated to get transportation projects approved.For example, in a seminal 2002 article in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Bent Flyvbjerg, Mette Skamris Holm, and Sren Buhl of Aalborg University described the results of a large-scale statistical analysis of transportation project cost overruns. Their article was titled "Underestimating Cost in Public Works Projects: Error or Lie."The researchers compared the estimated cost of projects at the time the decision was made to proceed to their final actual cost. Flyvbjerg and company's dataset included 258 projects costing $90 billion over 70 years.The authors found that costs were underestimated in 86 percent of projects, with the average overrun varying by project type. Rail projects came in on average 44.7 percent over their estimated costs, larger than the cost overruns in fixed-link (tunnel and bridge), at 33.8 percent, or road projects (20.4 percent).Significantly, projects in the 1990s were just as likely as projects in the 1920s to come in over budget. As the authors note,It is as if project administrators had learned nothing from earlier projection errors. Based upon their analysis, the authors concluded that these original cost estimates were off not because of methodological errors, but rather because the project proponents were engaging in deception - lying - to get projects approved.they wrote.Indeed, we've even seen it before in Charlotte. The Queen City's first light rail line, running roughly from Pineville to Uptown was projected in 1998 to cost $227 million. The actual cost came in at over twice that amount.Charlotte's streetcar Gold Line is a strange project. The Gold Line really isn't a transportation solution. The streetcars run on rails set in the car traffic lanes of major streets and stop for red lights, making them no faster than buses, while also being less flexible and more expensive to operate.In actuality, the Gold Line is a politically motivated economic development scheme. Asking hard questions about its costs wouldn't improve its chances of winning community support, and for that city taxpayers are likely to suffer.
If President Barack Obama was hoping for a graceful start to his final trip to Asia as commander in chief, this wasnt it, CBS News reported.

The misunderstanding between the White House and the host of G20 summit first became evident from the moment the US presidents plane landed in Hangzhou, China.

There was no staircase for Obama to exit the plane and descend on the red carpet. Obama used an alternative exit to reach Chinese soil.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  India's northernmost region of Kashmir has been disputed by India and Pakistan since the dissolution of British India and the establishment of the two countries in 1947. Some local residents, most of them Muslims, especially those residing in the Kashmir Valley, call for greater autonomy or even independence from India.

According to the Tribune India news outlet, the clashes occurred in several parts of the state, as the people took to the streets when a delegation led by Home Minister Rajnath Singh arrived to negotiate on the restoration of peace in the state. Ahead of the visit, multiple police units were deployed across various parts of Kashmir.

Health officials confirmed to the newspaper that about 100 people injured in clashes were being treated in local hospitals.
At the start of their meeting, Putin told Xi Jinping that Chinese entrepreneurs whom he met during the forum in Vladivostok confessed that they are very fond of Russian ice cream.

At the same time, a Chinese investor complained to the president that sadly export of Russian ice cream out of Russia is prohibited.

So Putin decided to bring Xi Jinping Russian ice cream on his trip to the G20.
After Kuzbass, we rolled into the Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russias second largest region. The Krai is a land of numerous lakes and rivers, including the majestic Yenisei River, the sixth largest river in the world.

Like everywhere in Siberia, the region is under-populated with only 1.2 people per square kilometer. Out of 2.3-million people in the Krai, close to one million live in the city of Krasnoyarsk, the administrative capital of the region.

   - (@thelong_wayhome)  25 2016  12:26 PDT

Krasnoyarsk is a modern city with a well-developed infrastructure. City residents claim that none other than Anton Chekhov himself said Krasnoyarsk was Siberias most beautiful city.

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Well, the famous writer was probably fascinated by the old Paraskeva Pyatnitsa Chapel displayed on the 10-ruble note.

The chapel hasnt always been as beautiful as it is today. Before the arrival of the Cossacks, a pagan temple was situated on the hill where the chapel currently stands. When the Cossacks came to the area, they turned the temple into a watchtower to notify Krasnoyarsk residents about possible raids on the city.

The chapel was reconstructed during Soviet times and became one of the symbols of Krasnoyarsk. Today, tourists and newly married couples make sure to visit the Paraskeva Pyatnitsa Chapel.

Another cool thing in the city is its Eiffel Tower. Well, of course, it isnt the actual Eiffel Tower, but an exact copy of it, albeit 20-times smaller than the original one. The 15-meter high Krasnoyarsk Eiffel Tower, just like its bigger sister, is illuminated at night.
In my previous article I talked about Krasnoyarsk and some of the interesting things the city has to offer. However, I think the greatest thing about Krasnoyarsk is Stolby, a beautiful natural reserve some 20 km from the city. The word Stolby is the plural form of Stolb, the Russian word for a pillar.

Founded in 1925, Stolby is one of the oldest natural reserves in Russia. The name Stolby was given to the park due to extraordinarily shaped mountains that resemble pillars attached to each other. Millions of years ago, the pillars appeared from chilled magma underground, but due to erosion the mountains were pushed out and got the shape they have now.

The first thing one immediately notices when in Stolby is just how much the landscape resembles the famous Swiss Alps or so I was told by my Swiss friend Matthias.
BEIJING (Sputnik)  Earlier in the day, Xi held a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the G20 summit of the world's top economies in Chinas eastern city of Hangzhou.

China intends to deepen cooperation with India within the G20 framework and together contribute more fully to the growth of the world economy and improve the global economic governance, the Chinese leader said at the meeting as quoted by the countrys foreign ministry.
Russia, China Discuss Specific Detail of Turkish Stream Project

Russia and Turkey proceeded to discussions of specific issues related to the implementation of the Turkish Stream pipeline project, Ulyukayev said.

"Activities on the Turkish Stream are also underway. Specific things are solved there. For example, where, in what place, the pipeline should enter the Turkish coast, with provision of relevant sites. Generally, it was a very practical work."

The Turkish Stream project, which is expected to bring Russian gas via the Black Sea to Turkey and southern Europe, was suspended after a Russian Su-24 aircraft was downed by a Turkish F-16 fighter in Syria on November 24, 2015.

Turkey Fulfilled All Promises on Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant

Turkey has fulfilled all its promises regarding the Akkuyu NPP, the situation is developing very positively with a high level of confidence that the first NPP unit will be put into operation within the timeframe established by the contract, the Russian economic development minister said.

"[The Akkuyu issue] was discussed. Regarding the nuclear power plant we have a very positive situation development. The Turkish side has fulfilled all its promises, made changes to the three laws of the republic giving this project the status of strategic There is a high degree of certainty that in time established by the contract, in seven years, if I'm not mistaken, the first unit will be put into effect," Ulyukayev said.

Putin, Erdogan Discuss Lifting of Russia's Food Ban

Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan discussed Russia's ban imposed on Turkish food products in the context of lifting the restrictions on Ankara, Ulyukayev said.

"Of course it has been discussed, it has been discussed in the context that we are working on lifting these restrictions," Ulyukayev told reporters.

He added that the Russian side should be certain that Turkish companies wishing to export their agricultural production meet Russia's quality specifications.
HANGZHOU (Sputnik)  The joint share of the BRICS emerging economies in the International Monetary Fund's capital has almost reached 15 percent, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Sunday at an informal meeting of BRICS leaders on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hangzhou, China.

"The BRICS countries saw its joint share in the Funds capital to increase to 14.89 percent, a step away from 15-percent blocking threshold. Without a doubt, we have to move forward to carry out an IMF reform," Putin said.

BRICS is an association of five developing economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), which comprises over one third of the worlds population. The five nations have a combined nominal GDP equivalent to approximately 20 percent of gross world product.





BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement, New Development Bank Should Work on Full Scale






Regional countries continue their attempts to diversify energy supplies.

"But will oil from the Middle East be a real secure alternative to the Russian Urals oil?" the articl read.

This summer, Iran shipped 2 million barrels of crude to Poland. In August, the Iranian supertanker Atlantas arrived to the Polish port of Gdansk. It was greeted as a political game-changer just like the opening of the new oil Terminal Natfowy PERN in April.

Polish and German refineries rely on Russian oil coming mainly via a pipeline from Russia. The new terminal allows for importing oil from other suppliers if shipments from Russia are disrupted.

Nevertheless, the dream of Eastern and Central European states to stop reliance on Russian oil is far from becoming reality, according to the article. There are some conditions without which the import of Saudi or Iranian oil could not be possible.

First, oil prices are still low while oil in storage is at record highs. Thus, every producer is trying to dump as much crude as possible to the market. Iranians are said to sell their oil two times cheaper than their Saudi and Iraqi competitors, the article read.

Second, the cost of shipping is very low now. If shipping prices increase the oil shipments from Iran and other Middle Eastern producers to the Baltic Sea will stop being profitable. As a result, "Poland will still be dependent on Russian oil supply," the article read.
HANGZHOU (Sputnik)  The Russian presidents website quoted the Saudi deputy crown prince as saying earlier that a stable global oil market was unthinkable without cooperation by Russia and the Arab monarchy, two of the worlds biggest crude oil producers.

"Of course, cooperation in the oil sector was touched upon, but the focus was more on finance and high-tech as well as the WTO [World Trade Organization]," Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
Danielle Adler, a UNC-Chapel Hill student & "Students for Burr" leadership member, pens Medium post in support of Senator Burr

Background:

Contact: Jesse Hunt

Jesse Hunt jhunt@burrforsenate.com

Raleigh, NC The Burr campaign today is highlighting a Medium post authored by UNC-Chapel Hill student Danielle Adler. Adler, a Charlotte resident, serves as a member of the "Students for Burr" leadership team. Adler gives a detailed description of why she's supporting Senator Burr and working hard to ensure he is re-elected in the fall. Medium : In today's political culture, it's not unusual to see rancorous speeches overshadow legitimate results by some of our elected leaders. It's been a little different here in North Carolina as Senator Richard Burr has amassed an impressive legislative record that has generated real benefits for everyone in North Carolina. Senator Burr's ability to work across the aisle hasn't been lost on students like myself who are grappling with the challenges of an uncertain job market and daunting student loan debt. Senator Burr authored the Bipartisan Student Loan Certainty Act, which reduced student loan rates, and as a result, North Carolina students will save over $1 billion this year on their student loan costs. The savings will help students start their careers with less financial burden and a clear conscience to pursue jobs based on their merits and not solely from a financial perspective.At the beginning of the week, the Burr campaign released the "Students for Burr" leadership team comprised of students from several different North Carolina colleges, universities, and high schools. The campaign yesterday announced the purchase of Snapchat geofilters at eight different North Carolina colleges and universities to allow students to express their support for Senator Burr and highlight his efforts to make college more affordable. During a "college affordability" tour, Deborah Ross struggled to offer any specifics for how she would improve college affordability. Ross also voted against expanding tax credits for students attending accredited religious colleges when she served in the North Carolina House of Representatives. Where Ross fails to offer specifics, Senator Burr has delivered and North Carolina students recognize his commitment to ensuring they have every opportunity to succeed.In 2003, Ross Opposed A Bill That Extended An Education Credit Available To North Carolina Students Attending Private Colleges To Students Attending Accredited Religious Colleges. (HB 150, Vote #726: Passed 66-47 , 6/11/03, Ross Voted No)The Bill Extended The $1,800 Credit Available To North Carolina Students Attending Private Colleges To Students Attending Accredited Religious Colleges.(Michelle Johnson, "Tuition Bill Would Aid N.C. Religious Colleges," Winston-Salem Journal, 8/1/03)
HANGZHOU (Sputnik)  The document was signed by Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin and ChemChinas Ren Jianxin on the sidelines of Russian President Vladimir Putins meeting with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Hangzhou, China.

"The FEPCO project will become a new milestone in the partnership between our countries and will further strengthen Russian-Chinese economic ties. The creation of a joint venture will help us shape the development structure of the worlds one of the most advanced petrochemical projects that will have direct access to the Asia-Pacific market," Sechin told reporters in Hangzhou.

Under the agreement, Rosneft will hold a 60-percent share in the joint venture, while ChemChina will hold 40 percent.
HANGZHOU (Sputnik)  Russia and Turkey signed an agreement to construct and operate Turkeys first nuclear power plant at the Akkuyu site in the Turkish southern Mersin Province in May 2010. The plant is expected to produce about 35 billion kilowatt-hours per year. The project's cost is estimated at about $20 billion.

Earlier in the day, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan held a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in China.

"They spoke separately of RosatomThe Turks have promptly made the necessary legislative changes that will intensify work on the Akkuyu NPP," Peskov told reporters.
Two weeks ago, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said the European Union can abolish visas for the Turkish nationals from October 1 if Ankara implements all the necessary conditions under the EU-Turkey migrant deal, including those related to the anti-terror laws.

In August, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu warned that Ankara would scrap the EU-Turkey migrant deal if Turkish nationals did not get visa-free access to EU borderless Schengen area by mid-October.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The capacity of Europe to host new migrants has stretched thin, European Council President Donald Tusk said Sunday in the remarks before the G20 summit in the Chinese city of Hangzhou.

"In light of an unprecedented number of 65mln displaced people all over the world, the G20 community needs to scale up its share of responsibility. It is even more important in view of the fact that the practical capabilities of Europe to host new waves of refugees, not to mention irregular economic migrants, are close to the limits," he said, as quoted in a press release issued by the European Council.
However, this ban is a symptom of [European inability] to deal the issue of religious and cultural diversity. It becomes more and more difficult to maintain a rational approach to the issues of religious diversity as we are moving more and more towards emotional responses, he added.

Ferrari said, however, that he was not surprised to hear about 57 percent of adult Britons supporting a law that bans people from wearing burqas in the UK.

Well, the burqa is a different thing in a sense that it is a kind of an obstacle to communication. It covers the face, I cant see the face of the person Im speaking to and this impoverishes my relations with that person. But the burkini is completely different. The face is visible and communication is not hampered.

When asked if he would stop burqas from being part of the school uniform in Europe, Ferrari said that in the courtroom or in the classroom a student or teacher wearing a burqa that completely covers the face could be banned because it has a negative impact on relations between teacher and student.

Discussions on banning certain Islamic clothes have recently become a matter of contentious debate in many European countries.

In summer, burkinis were banned from municipal beaches in about 30 French towns, including Nice, which saw a terrorist attack in July that killed 84 people. Some politicians in the country called to introduce a nationwide ban on burkinis.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Official figures, provided to UK's Independent newspaper under the freedom of information act and published Sunday, has revealed that 9,287 refugees under 18 came alone to the country in search of shelter over the stated period.

According to the outlet, underage refugees are placed in childrens homes or with foster parents. So far, social workers have not been able to get in contact with 360 of them. Of those, 81 have been missing for the whole five years.

Fears are that minors could have run off due to psychological trauma, distrust in local authorities who can deport them, or fallen prey to human traffickers.
Sergio Antonelli, the owner of a lilac-colored Niva said that he had come across this Soviet-made workhorse 10 years ago.

I needed a car able to drive across rugged terrain. One of my students advised me to look for a Niva, which I did and eventually fell in love with it. This is the best car you can think of the very best in terms of price and quality! Sergio, who teaches mechanical engineering at Rio Cuarto national University in Cordoba, told Sputnik.

Sergio has logged 150,000 kilometers on his Niva covering most of his native Argentina and also traveling in Peru, Bolivia and Uruguay.

Once I was driving down a dirt road 3,000 meters up in the mountains. This car has served me right in the jungle, never once got stuck in deep mud and made easy work of the Cordoba mountains. This car gives me complete freedom of movement no other car offer, Sergio enthused.

It looks like Niva owners are all members of a secret society.

There is a certain connection between us, Leandro Peralta said. One evening I was outside my house changing a wheel. It was freezing like crazy when, all of a sudden, a [Niva] stopped by and a guy came out and started telling me about his life. I had never seen him before, but he knew how I felt because there is one thing that brings us together and this is the Niva, Leandro told Sputnik.
Pursuant to the proposed arrangement, the US and Russia would coordinate airstrikes against Daesh (ISIS) as well as al Qaeda-linked terrorists including the former al-Nusra Front. While the United States and Russia would jointly takeover the aerial campaign against jihadists in Syria, Assads Syrian Arab Army Air Force would be grounded in a bid to prevent unnecessary collateral damage against civilians and US-backed rebels.

The measure looks to rectify a major point of contention between the United States and Russia with many of the so-called 'moderate' rebels now finding themselves embedded with the freshly rebranded al-Qaeda affiliate formerly known as al-Nusra Front under the umbrella group known as The Army of Conquest. Russian airstrikes against al-Nusra targets have often come under scrutiny due to the interwoven nature of the anti-Assad alliance.
TEL AVIV (Sputnik)  The Israeli government has repeatedly accused Hamas, classified by the country as a terrorist group, of attacking Israel from the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which is surrounded by a security barrier, occupied after the 1967 war.

"Last night, shots were fired at IDF forces near the security fence along the Gaza Strip. In response, IDF targeted a Hamas post," the IDF said on its Twitter account.

Hamas, an Islamist political and militant group, seeks the creation of an independent state of Palestine and wants Israel to withdraw from the Palestinian territories. Hamas also governs the Gaza Strip independently of the Palestinian Authority.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The Al Arabiya broadcaster reported that the militants launched an offensive in direction of the Saudi border region of Tawal, but their plans were disrupted by the Saudi Air Force and artillery.

According to the media outlet, at least 40 militants were killed, and several pieces of Houthis' military hardware were destroyed in the attack.

Yemen has been engulfed in a military conflict between the government headed by Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi and the Houthis, the countrys main opposition force. Since March 2015, the Saudi-led coalition of mostly Persian Gulf countries have been carrying out airstrikes against the Houthi rebels at Hadi's request.
Have you ever seen a news story reported in a national or regional media outlet about your hometown, or a place you know well, that portrays the area in such a light that you just can't recognize it?The piece might use anecdotes or other information about the area to make a larger point, perhaps to satisfy an agenda, or settle a score. It's quite possible the reporter or the editor of the article left out a lot of relevant information because the journalists didn't know much about the place before they got there and were spun by the sources who pitched the piece initially.The premise of the article may be plausible, but because the writer is unfamiliar with the region or its history, a story that appears to be reported thoroughly can be one-sided or incomplete, and it's evident if you live in the place that's being singled out.This practice is known as "parachute journalism." A reporter visits a foreign area for a few days, collects information that tells the story using the slant the reporter intends, and then leaves without spending enough time or effort to gather other material that may temper or even contradict his premise.A recent case in point was a lengthy feature inthat tried to explain the factors leading to the rise of Donald Trump with a local twist, using the collapse of the furniture industry in Hickory, N.C., as the backdrop.The story opened with troubling data about the demise of Hickory's industrial backbone, and how competition, especially from China, has affected the political landscape.But that's hardly the entire story. Yes, several of the manufacturing industries that built North Carolina's economy for more than a century - furniture-making and textiles, primarily - have vanished, largely. But more modern manufacturers have taken their place.More than 75,000 North Carolinians work in plastics and chemical manufacturing. The Lenovo computer plant in Research Triangle Park, the Cree LED facility in Durham, and the HondaJet research and manufacturing campus near Greensboro are examples of forward-looking industries that do quite well in a global marketplace.In a number of cases, the new, high-tech manufacturers have set up shop where the old mills thrived, as explained in a response tostory from Hickory native and Appalachian State University student Eric Cunningham. He agrees that Hickory no longer may be the hub of the world's furniture industry, but the city has adapted by embracing new types of industries - notably, telecommunications.I was not aware of this, but Cunningham reports by 2000, 40 percent of the world's fiberoptic cable - the pipeline that brings broadband services to homes and businesses - was manufactured in Hickory. Local furniture makers now produce high-end, specialized products. A historic former textile mill has been repurposed as a major logistics hub. And while the unemployment rate in Catawba County reached 16 percent at the height of the Great Recession, it's now 4.6 percent, lower than the national average.What really undercuts the WSJ story, however, is this nugget Cunningham cites: A 2015 study from Ball State University has found that while U.S. industrial output has grown dramatically in the 21st century, 90 percent of the nation's manufacturing job losses from 2000-10 can be attributed to improvements in productivity rather than competition from foreign trade.Including just a bit of this extremely relevant information would have led to a much less dramatic tale about Hickory. Or perhaps none at all.So beware parachute journalism - especially when the story's profiling a place you know better than the out-of-town reporter who's writing about it.
ALEPPO (Sputnik)  Another stage of the military assault in the areas of higher military institutions began on Sunday night. At the moment, only a part of the artillery school remains under the control of terrorists.

"Air Force school and logistics support college are [under] our [control]. It is necessary to clean up the artillery [school]. This is an important and strategic step for the liberation of the entire city of Aleppo from terrorists," a brigade commander of a militia group told RIA Novosti.
HANGZHOU (Sputnik)  Moscow and Washington are close to reaching a deal on Syria, which could help to differentiate terrorists from opponents of Damascus, who are ready for political process, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Sunday.

"I will say that we are close to reaching a deal [with the United States] there are no grounds to expect that everything would collapse," Ryabkov told reporters.

Ryabkov added that at the same time he could not predict the date, when it would be announced about the reached agreement.
ALEPPO (Sputnik)  The village is under control of several FSA units, which, according to militia, are fighting under command of Jabhat Fatah Al-Sham, formerly known as al-Nusra Front terrorist group.

"A terrorist riding a bike exploded on a square in Haftali. Five FSA militants were killed for sure. We cannot specify the casualties among the civilian population," the source said.

The FSA militants together with the Turkish army are carrying out an operation against Daesh and Kurdish militia in northern Syria. Syrian Kurds and Damascus have accused Ankara of violating the countrys territorial integrity.
ALEPPO (Sputnik)  In the morning, Syrian troops recaptured a school belonging to the Syrian Air Force and an institution that provided training in support services for the military.

"Any militants that could be still holed up on the artillery school grounds have been isolated in just two buildings. The rest of the militants tried to break out to Ramuse an hour ago," a group leader with the Syrian Army told a RIA Novosti correspondent in Aleppo.

Hardly any gunshots could be heard in the area, which is home to numerous military academies, as government troops combed the grounds and searched every single building.
CAIRO (Sputnik)  According to Masrawy news outlet, the military conducted three attacks on militants' positions from the Apache helicopters. The attacked militants, who were inside the buildings, are believed to have been planning a terrorist attack in northern Sinai.

Egypt has been fighting a jihadist insurgency in northern Sinai since the army, led by President Abdel Fattah Sisi, overthrew then Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013. Police and security forces have been the target of deadly attacks by Islamists in the area.

In 2014, an indigenous militant group in Egypts Sinai pledged allegiance to Daesh terrorist groups. The self-proclaimed Wilayat Sinai has subsequently claimed responsibility for a number of deadly attacks against Egyptian security forces in North Sinai.
Turkish forces, including tanks and other armored vehicles, crossed the border into the Syrian province of Aleppo and shelled Daesh positions.

The Euphrates Shield operation started on August 24 in the northern Syrian city of Jarablus and was backed by a US-led international coalition. At the time, nearly 40 Turkish tanks backed by some 1,000 Syrian rebel forces entered Syria.

On Thursday, the General Staff said that over 260 targets had been hit by airstrikes since the start of the operation without specifying whether some of these were Kurdish forces, which are also targeted by the operation, instead of Daesh.

On Monday, the Turkish Foreign Ministry issued an ultimatum to Kurds and demanded from them to withdraw to the east from the Euphrates.
According to him, Daesh has made enemies such as Russia, Iran and the US; hence, Abadis estimation of eliminating Daesh is quite realistic, Abadi said.

He further said that if Abadi can establish himself as the minister who was able to inflict defeat over Daesh that in itself it would be a very significant outcome for Abadi.

Abadi has a lot of political capital invested in this fight and that is why Abadi will accept help from any country, Rizk said.

He further spoke about how this year the border has been in focus in the fight against the terrorists in order to prevent them from being pushed into Syria once they escape Iraq.

The Iraqi-Syrian battlefield is being treated as one from all sides so those who should be fearful of a return, it is not a return of fighters from Syria or Iraq to Syria or Iraq, it is the return of these fighters to their countries of origin.

Reports suggest that Daesh currently controls some 14% of Iraq's total territory compared to the roughly one-third that it held two years ago.

According to online newspaper Iraqi News, Haider al-Abadi made a pledge of wiping out the terrorists by the end of the year during a conference in Baghdad on Saturday.
The rebels secured a 90km stretch of land along the border in a bid to prevent not only the flow of jihadists in and out of Turkey, but also to prevent the formation of an "artificial state" in Northern Syria controlled by US-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters (YPG). The Turkish backed rebels claim to have connected al-Rai to Jarablus after the latest incursion effectively sealing the countrys border.

Turkey believes that if Syrian Kurds are able to establish a stronghold along the Turkish border this could serve as a launch pad for PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) fighters at home. The Erdogan government has labeled the US-backed YPG, with whom US Special Forces are embedded in the fight against Daesh, to be a terrorist organization that is an extension of the PKK.
The so-called moderate rebels claimed victory weeks ago in breaking the siege imposed by the Syrian Arab Army, but analysis of the battlefield situation shows that the effort was led by Jabhat fateh al-sham, the terror group formerly known as al-Nusra Front that was Syrias al-Qaeda affiliate prior to the rebrand.

The United States has looked to support opposition to the Assad regime with the official position of the Obama administration being that "Assad must go" before peace can be found in Syria, but in providing military aid and support to these rebels opponents contend that the White House has gave aid and comfort to the same terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center on 9/11. That is because the recently rebranded al-Nusra Front has merged with many of the "moderate" opposition rebels under the umbrella group, The Army of Conquest.

Russias Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov laid out this reality in negotiations with the United States on cooperation to bringing peace to the region. "Many of the groups considered acceptable by the US have actually affiliated with the Nusra Front, while the Nusra Front is using them to avoid being attacked," said Ryabkov explaining why the US frequently blames Russian Aerospace Forces for bombing US-backed rebel positions.
Russias center for Syrian reconciliation oversaw the signing of truces with six new areas in the war-torn country on Sunday, bringing the total count of participating settlements to 554, the Russian Defense Ministry said.

"Within last 24 hours, truce agreements have been signed with representatives of 6 inhabited areas in the Latakia province. The total number of inhabited areas, the leaders of which had signed reconciliation agreements, has reached 554," the ministry said in a daily bulletin posted on its website.

Negotiations on joining ceasefire regime have continued with field commanders in the Homs, Latakia, Al-Quneitra and Hama provinces.
Press Release:

"Students For Burr" Leadership Team

Raleigh, NC -This week saw the Burr campaign unveil its "Students for Burr" leadership team, its second leadership team in as many weeks. These leadership teams are committed to helping re-elect Senator Burr and the outreach work they do on his behalf is an important part of the campaign's success. It was more of the same this week for Deborah Ross as she continued to call Hillary Clinton trustworthy and fielded more questions about her dangerous record from her time as the head of the ACLU.On Monday, the Burr campaign announced its "Students for Burr" leadership team that features students from several different North Carolina high schools, colleges, and universities.: Ellie is a junior, studying Public Relations and Political Science at Appalachian State University. She is currently serving as the Chairwoman of the Appalachian State College Republicans and the President of the Appalachian Student Ambassadors. After graduation, she hopes to advance her career in either politics and government, Communications, or the non-profit sector.: Nick is a junior at Wingate University where he majors in Communications. Vaughn entered politics in 2012, when he helped found the Guilford County Teenage Republican and served as the chairman. He later became the State Chairman of the North Carolina Teenage Republicans, where the organization saw record growth, and served on the NC GOP's executive and central committees. In addition, he served as the state Co-Chair for the Students for Tillis coalition that helped United States Senator Thom Tillis during his 2014 campaign. Vaughn has served Wingate University as a Senator on the Student Government Association, as an Orientation Leader, and as an Ambassador of the Wingate University "L.Y.M" organization, that's mission is to give a hat to every child in America that is battling cancer. Vaughn, who is a political science minor, has also served as the Wingate University College Republicans Chairman and the North Carolina College Republicans Communications Director. Most recently, Vaughn attended the Republican National Convention as a member of the North Carolina Republican Party Executive Committee.: Ellen is beginning her senior year at East Carolina University as a Political Science major with a Business Administration minor. Ellen is a member of the Pi Sigma Alpha political science honor society. She is currently serving her second term as the chapter president of the Chi Omega sorority on campus. Through Chi Omega she has been able to spend time working with and raising money for Make-A-Wish of Eastern North Carolina.Senator Burr penned an op-ed for The Hill on Tuesday that detailed his efforts to pass legislation to help prevent the spread of the Zika virus.Wednesday saw the Burr campaign announce the purchase of Snapchat geofilters on the campuses of eight different North Carolina colleges and universities. The geofilters allowed students to express their support for Senator Burr and all the work he has done to help improve college affordability.On Thursday, the campaign highlighted a Medium post written by UNC student Danielle Adler, a Charlotte native and "Students for Burr" leadership team member. Adler pointed to Senator Burr's work on the Bipartisan Student Loan Certainty Act as a major factor in her support for him this fall. Medium : In today's political culture, it's not unusual to see rancorous speeches overshadow legitimate results by some of our elected leaders. It's been a little different here in North Carolina as Senator Richard Burr has amassed an impressive legislative record that has generated real benefits for everyone in North Carolina. Senator Burr's ability to work across the aisle hasn't been lost on students like myself who are grappling with the challenges of an uncertain job market and daunting student loan debt. Senator Burr authored the Bipartisan Student Loan Certainty Act, which reduced student loan rates, and as a result, North Carolina students will save over $1 billion this year on their student loan costs. The savings will help students start their careers with less financial burden and a clear conscience to pursue jobs based on their merits and not solely from a financial perspective.
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"Low-income families of the Latakia and Tartus cities have received over 1,5 tons of humanitarian cargoes. Posts with hot meal and items of first necessity continue their work for civilians who leave the districts of the Aleppo city, which are under control of terrorist armed groupings," the bulletin reads.

On February 27, a US-Russia brokered ceasefire came into force in Syria. Terrorist groups such as Daesh, as well as Jabhat Fatah al Sham (previously known as the al-Nusra Front), both outlawed in Russia and a range of other states, are not part of the deal.
Our adversaries are modernizing at a rapid rate, and in some cases, our capabilities are inadequate to keep up, to maintain our edge, Maj. Gen. Walter E. Piatt, who is in charge of the operations in the new office said in a statement. "We need to  make sure that they are offset from us, not the other way around.

Doug Wiltsie, a director of the Rapid Capabilities Office, at the time said that it will focus on urgent, immediate or emerging threats defined by the commanders on the ground. Army Secretary Eric Fanning obscurely remarked that the new establishment will work on new capabilities development rather than on creating new equipment.
The number of refugees who would be issued back into the custody and care of Greece, a country whose social structure teeters perilously close to collapse after years of economic depression, remains uncertain but with Chancellor Merkels Party being trounced on Sunday by the far-right, anti-immigrant AfD (Alternative for Germany) the German government may need to unload hundreds of thousands in order to maintain control in Berlin.

In 2015 alone, more than one million refugees moved to Germany under Merkels "Open Door" policy although the situation has not been as severe in 2016 due to a number of surrounding European countries moving to seal their borders to stem the tide of refugee travel.

We did not reduce benefits for anyone in Germany as a result of the aid for refugees. In fact, we actually saw social improvements in some area, said Merkel in a Saturday interview defending her pro-immigration policy stance. However, many Germans point to the fact that funds to resettle refugees are being drawn from health and pension accounts meaning Berlin is simply delaying the economic impact of the Open Door policy in an attempt to mask the reality.

Some European countries have taken a much harder line on immigration in the last year, most notably Hungary where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has called for a total ban on migration and draconian measures to prevent "Islamization" of the country.
Key points of the Minsk agreements include a ceasefire, heavy weapons withdrawal from the line of contact in eastern Ukraine, constitutional reforms, including a decentralization of power in the country, and granting a special status to the Donbass region.

The latest ceasefire agreement was reached between Ukraines conflicting sides during a Contact Group meeting in August.
"We have great differences in terms of both the parties we support but also the process that is required to bring about peace in Syria. But if we do not get succumbing from the Russians on reducing the violence and easing the humanitarian crisis then it is difficult to see how we get to the next phase [of the Syrian settlement]," Obama said at a joint press conference with UK Prime Minister Theresa May on the sidelines of the G20 summit in China.

At the same time, Obama noted that "the conversations with Russians are key" in reaching the solution of the Syrian crisis.
The G20 is a premier forum for member cooperation on international economic and financial issues.

The mandate of the G20 is to coordinate member state policies to promote international economic stability and sustainable growth; to promote financial regulation to reduce risk and prevent financial crises; and to create a new international financial infrastructure. The forums main format is annual meetings of finance ministers and central bank governors.

There are 20 permanent members in the group: 19 countries (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States) plus the European Union.

The G20 summits are normally attended by the leaders of the permanent member states, five guest countries and international organizations. The European Union is represented at these summits by the president of the European Commission and the president of the European Council.

The G20 summits are held in the country currently holding the annual rotating presidency of the group.

The G20 countries have held nine leader summits since 2008.
At the meeting, May expressed hope that there is an opportunity for London and Moscow to continue dialogue despite the divergent positions on certain complex areas of concern.

She added that London faced a number of challenges, following its decision to leave the European Union, but the UK authorities continued to deal with them successfully.
HANGZHOU (China), (Sputnik)  Earlier in the day, Putin and May held a meeting in China's Hangzhou prior to the opening of the summit.

"The meeting between the Russian president and the UK prime minister has ended. The sides have discussed a wide range of issues, which are challenging in the current situation, and tried to find contacts, where it is possible to renew the dialogue. First of all they are the issues of security, of struggle against terror threat, the issues of settlement in Syria, of fight against drug trafficking and aviation safety," Ulyukayev, who also attended the meeting, told reporters.
Why has the US made a U-turn?

"Most likely, the White House has made a choice between the Kurds and Ankara," he observed. "In two months, key US officials, including the president, will be replaced by a new administration. Obama seems to have opted to leave office on a positive note, not fueling tensions with America's long-time ally and a key strategic partner. Turkey was given the green light to resolve the Kurdish issue even by using force."

The analyst added that extensive overtures to the Kurds could in the long run undermine Turkey's stability, if not territorial integrity. For policy makers in the US this is a bad scenario because it would lead to Washington "losing a zone of its geopolitical influence." In addition, instability in Turkey would add fuel to the already acute refugee crisis in Europe.
Men constructing the Cedar Falls Hydro-Electrical Plant in 1921: Above.

The origins of Labor Day are rather dubious, born from congressional guilt of Americans shot down by the Army and U.S. Marshalls, while exercising their first amendment right to congregate and protest during the Pullman Strike, in Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 4, 1894, was signed into law during the Grover Cleveland Administration, with the first holiday celebrated on the first Monday in September, 1894. As dubious as the origin of the holiday, was the origin of who killed whom during this Haymarket Massacre, where a bomb explosion and the resultant gunfire killed 4 protesters and 7 officers of the law during this protest to advocate for the eight hour day.The Pullman Strike occurred at the height of the origins of the labor Movement in America, where the oft referred to "Robber Barons" of the "Gilded Age" of American wealth creation, as America's wealthiest men and some of the richest in the world, competed with one another to see who could amass more wealth. These wealthiest Americans: J. P. Morgan (finance, industrial consolidation), Andrew Carnegie (steel), John D. Rockefeller (oil), Cornelius Vanderbilt (transportation, especially railroads), considered each other's wealth as an adversarial component to their ever-encompassing competition to best the other's financial position by building astounding sums of wealth, often at the expense of their workers, skilled and otherwise.These were fertile times, not only for the creation of staggering wealth, but for the origination of labor unions, which began for a reasonable purpose then, but have, for all practical purposes, outlived any purposeful existence now. These Robber Barons, and especially Cornelius Vanderbilt in this case, who sowed these strong seeds of extreme discontent with his ill-conceived greed in cutting the pay of his rank and file Pullman servants (Pullman Strike), to better compete with these upper echelon masters of wealth: Carnegie, Morgan and Rockefeller, may have been solely responsible for congress's rush to provide the American population with this new found holiday in that summer of 1894 - our labor Day.While these Robber barons were basically smart and hardworking, they were men that were competitive to a fault, who made great sport of amassing wealth. They were remarkably just as competitive with each other in their dispensation of that wealth to charitable trusts that still honor their names to this day. While many will appreciate the good deeds of their various charitable trusts, there will be even more Americans, who appreciate their (Robber Barons') unintended day off that their actions did most adequately facilitate.Now you know Stan's version of how we wound up with the American holiday of Labor Day.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Erdogan stressed that Turkey and the United States should adopt a shared attitude against all terrorist organizations as NATO member countries.

We had sent the papers regarding this terrorist to the United States before the coup took place. The documents that were prepared after the July 15 coup was put down will be handed over to a delegation that has arrived from the United States The heads of our justice ministry and the foreign ministry will visit the United States to work together on the issue, Erdogan said at a press conference following talks with his US counterpart Barack Obama ahead of the G20 summit in China, as quoted by Anadolu Agency.

On July 15, an attempted coup took place in Turkey and was suppressed the following day. Ankara has accused Gulen, who has lived in the US state of Pennsylvania since 1999, and his followers of playing a key role in the coup, a charge the dissident cleric has denied.
"The peace treaty is something that Abe wants to secure; economic cooperation is something that President Vladimir Putin wants to agree on. Both of these issues are now viewed as part of the same package. It is important that the territorial issue has been left aside," Professor Nakamura Itsuro of the Tsukuba University told RIA Novosti.

The dispute over the Kuril Islands that Japan refers to as the Northern Territories and claims as its own has remained unresolved since the end of WWII. Some have suggested that Russia could hand over the islands in exchange for the peace deal and joint projects aimed at boosting the country's economy, but Russian officials have dismissed these ideas.
HANGZHOU (Sputnik)  The president stressed that it was highly important for Russia to maintain a constant dialogue with Saudi Arabia.

"We attach great significance to expanding multifaceted and mutually beneficial cooperation with Saudi Arabia. This also applies to our bilateral relations, bearing in mind that we are the largest oil-producing countries. This also applies to international issues. We believe that without Saudi Arabia, no serious issue in the region, of course, cannot be solved," Putin said at the meeting with the Muhammad bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's deputy crown prince.
HANGZHOU (Sputnik)  He added that Moscow could not leave Damascus' request for help without response as the terror threat in Syria had been very high.

"The actions of the Russian Aerospace Forces helped to seriously damage terrorists, their infrastructure, as well as [helped] save the Syrian state, that is the most important thing in my opinion," Putin said, speaking at the informal meeting of the leaders of the BRICS  Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa  on the sidelines of the G20 summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou.

On September 30, 2015, Russia began its anti-terror campaign in Syria on Damascus' request, and started to to conduct airstrikes against terrorist groups. In March, Putin ordered to withdraw most of the country's military contingent after accomplishing its objectives.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The G20 summit is currently underway in the Chinese city of Hangzhou.

"Most likely, [they will meet] tomorrow, but it [the meeting] also cannot be ruled out today, on the summit sidelines," Peskov told RIA Novosti.

Earlier in the day, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said that Moscow and Washington are close to reaching a deal on Syria, which could help to differentiate terrorists from opponents of Damascus, who are ready for political process.
The deal is expected to cover the military partnership between Moscow and Washington, humanitarian aid, measures aimed at preventing Damascus from launching strikes against the so-called moderate opposition and efforts meant to separate moderate rebels from terrorist groups, like al-Nusra Front and Daesh, something that Washington has failed to do.

Earlier on Friday, the Russian president described this last issue as one of the most challenging.

"We insist (and our American partners have had no objections to this) that the so-called 'healthy' opposition must be separated from radical groups and terrorist organizations, like al-Nusra Front. However, we have an impression that al-Nusra Front and the like are play acting, even rebranding themselves, but nothing has actually changed," Putin said.

Radical groups have absorbed the moderate opposition, he added.

"Apart from this, this is not a component of a domestic fight. These are foreign fighters who receive weapons and ammunition from abroad. In fact, our American partners agree with this, but they have no idea, how to do it," Putin said, referring to the efforts to separate terrorists from non-terrorists.
SANAA (Sputnik)  According to the source, UN Yemen envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed arrived in Omans capital of Muscat on Saturday.

The UN-brokered talks to end the Yemeni conflict started in Kuwait in April and ended in early August, with the government and Houthi rebels failing to come to an agreement. As the talks wrapped up, the Houthi delegation flew to Oman for consultation with local authorities. From there, they tried to return to the Yemeni capital Sanaa, but failed over the government ban.

A week ago, US Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the United States and the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Britain have agreed on a new plan to resolving the ongoing conflict in Yemen. The newly-agreed approach will include prompt establishment of a new unity government in Yemen and the transfer of arms to a third party.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Bulgarias ties with Russia soured after the start of the Ukraine crisis in 2014 when the European Union accused Moscow of meddling in Ukraines domestic affairs. Russia denied having a hand in the eastern conflict.

"Bulgaria must have an independent foreign policy. Bulgaria must follow its own objective. We lost a lot by more or less declaring Russia our enemy," Maj. Gen. Radev told Darik News on Saturday.

The former air force commander said it was time for the Eastern European nation to look for friends, rather than enemies, especially for economic and trade partners. Russia could become a lucrative market for Bulgarian companies, he noted.
Recently, the United Nations issued a report on chemical attacks in Syria, accusing both Damascus and Daesh of using chemical weapons during the conflict.

The US called for a firm and quick response in light of the new allegations. But these plans will never materialize, French security analyst and author Alaun Rodier told Atlantico.

"As for me, I doubt that Barack Obama can reinforce the statement with unilateral military actions. And there are several reasons why," Rodier said.
A new Sleep Number mattress store is relocating to the vacated 3Gs gas station site at the corner of 24th Street West and Monad Road.

Developer Matt Worthley of Indianapolis, Ind.-based Thomas English Retail Real Estate said last week that construction will start going crazy on the one-story, 3,000-square-foot building at 357 24th St. W. after Labor Day.

Eden Capital, a Thomas English subsidiary, is developing the project on the 17,000-square-foot lot. The firm, which develops property nationwide, bought the property from 3Gs earlier this year and razed the building and gas pumps, according to Worthley.

The new store will open the beginning of next year, he said.

Last week, heavy equipment operators were seen clearing away dirt at the site. The lot is about 17,000 square feet and was appraised at $239,847 without a building.

The facility, called the Terre Retail Building, is valued at $450,000, according to the city. The contractor is Fisher Construction of Billings.

Sleep Number, owned by Minneapolis, Minn.-based Comfort Select, has about 500 stores nationwide. The company designs, manufactures and sells beds, mattresses and other sleep accessories.

Sleep Number currently operates a store in Rimrock Mall, which a spokeswoman said would close when the new facility is ready.

Billings insurance office opens

A new Billings insurance agency is offering Allstate products.

The Sandra Gebhardt Agency celebrated its grand opening Aug. 1 at 2110 Overland Ave., suite 119.

Owner Sandra Gebhardt said she sells auto, property and commercial insurance from Allstate.

Office hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday. The phone number is 406-652-8464. Gebhardt can be reached by email at sgebhardt@allstate.com .

Allstate is the nations largest publicly held insurer with 16 million household customers.

Billings distillery in national contest

Trailhead Spirits in downtown Billings is in the running for the nations best craft gin distillery in a USA Today readers choice poll.

The distillery produces Healys Gin, described as an American-style gin with juniper, coriander and non-traditional botanicals like hops, heather tips, sweet grass and bitterroot.

Voting at www.10best.com ends at noon Sept. 12.

Billings sustainability conference

The Northern Plains Resource Council is holding a daylong conference aimed at building the local economy through diverse, sustainable businesses.

The Homegrown Prosperity Conference will be from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 10 at the Billings Public Library community room at 510 N. Broadway.

Speakers include a mix of Montana experts and out-of-state experts. Locals include Lisa Harmon, director of the Downtown Billings Alliance, James Scott Jr., vice president of First Interstate Bank, Marcie McLean, director of Western Native Voice, Al Ekblad, director of the Montana AFL-CIO and Megan Jessee, director of the Passages culinary arts program.

Other speakers will be Kimber Lanning, director of Local First Arizona, Chris Woolery, a community development official in Kentucky, and Miya Yoshitani, director of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network in California.

Registration costs $30, which includes lunch. Additional information is available at www.northernplains.org/homegrown.

Entrepreneurs sought in Wyoming

A new business course for northern Wyoming entrepreneurs is launching Wednesday in Powell.

The nine-month course, called Innovention, is designed to help entrepreneurs and innovators better understand how to start and grow a business, or find investors for an idea, according to the Powell Economic Partnership.

Courses are held 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. the second Wednesday of each month until May 14 at Powell Makerspace at 328 E. Third St.

The program cost is $199, and scholarships are available. Call Christine Bekes at 307-754-6094 or email info@pepinc.org . More details are at www.nwc.edu/ctd/training.

Scams du jour

The Billings Police Department is warning of a new development in an old scam involving fraudulent IRS calls.

Several people have received calls from California area codes from people claiming the Internal Revenue Service is filing a lawsuit against them, police said in a news release last week.

The callers then demand payment in the form of untraceable gift cards, and then threaten arrest following a hang up.

If the person disconnects the call, he or she will then receive a second call with a caller ID from a local police department, according to Billings police. The scammers are typically using technology to fool the caller ID system, police said.

The IRS does not threaten arrest or lawsuits or ask for payment by phone. Billings police also recommend never giving out personal information over the phone.

Haikus from the valley

Wing Ding is the thing

in Billings, which sings when the

riders bring the bling.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Saudi Arabia together with Russia wants to prevent a negative scenario from playing out in the Middle East, the Saudi deputy crown prince said Sunday at a meeting with President Vladimir Putin.

"We would like, together with you, to avoid any negative scenario in the Middle East," Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud said at a meeting on the margins of the G20 summit in Hangzhou, China.

The 30-year-old crown prince said the monarchy regarded its cooperation with Russia as a priority.
Clinton's foreign policy choices and strategies appear to uphold this view.

Hillary "was the champion, the demander of the war against Libya; she wants a no-fly zone in Syria," he said. "She is embracing and has the support of 150 of the right-wing Republican hawk foreign policy elite. She has got the support of Robert Kagan, the neo-conservative godfather and also the husband of Victoria Nuland."

Former CIA officer Ray McGovern offered another explanation for the fact that Hillary has blamed the Russian government for an embarrassing cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee's (DNC) computers, although there has been no tangible proof of these allegations. He told RT that the blame game was an attempt to gain more support.

"Apparently Clinton thinks that she can get a lot of good resonance from this from the American people, who are very malnourished on the truth, given the fact that the media doesn't tell them the truth," he said.

Dominic Basulto, who authored a book titled "Russophobia," observed that it was more a matter of distraction.

"For Hillary Clinton, there are two big advantages of this approach - it distracts attention away from what actually happened (a concerted effort by the Democratic Party to take down Bernie Sanders using factors such as religion) and it also casts blame and doubt on the Trump campaign. (Those evil Trump campaign managers, conspiring with the Russians!)," the author of a book titled "Russophobia" wrote for the Medium.
BEIJING (Sputnik)  Foreign ministers from China, Russia, Mexico, South Africa, Indonesia, Singapore, and South Korea, among others, attended an unofficial lunch meeting in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou.

"Foreign ministers who turned out for the lunch exchanged opinions on issues related to terrorism, refugees, global climate change, sustained development, important regional and other issues, and reached a broad consensus," Chinese Foreign Ministrys Hua Chunying said.
French leader Francois Hollande said Sunday he wanted to discuss Ukraine and Syria with Russian President Vladimir Putin at their one-on-one meeting.

"I think we must discuss the situation in Syria and Ukraine because we are all involved in attempts to resolve these problems," Hollande said ahead of the meeting on the margins of the G20 summit.

"As for Ukraine, we need to cooperate within the Normandy Format, and in the case of Syria, we must aim at a comprehensive dialog and, despite that all sides have resorted to some military action, we must pursue a political solution to this crisis," he emphasized.

Hollande said that he planned to discuss with Russian President Vladimir Putin his scheduled visit to France in October.

"Dear Vladimir [Putin], I wanted to personally see you on the sidelines of this G20 [summit], because political problems do have economic consequences. When there are wars, conflicts, terrorism, refugees  all of this has consequences for the economy, not to mention the suffering experienced by the nations, who are facing such a problem. I would also like to discuss the preparation for the visit to France, which you plan to perform in October. In the framework of this visit, a series of symbolic gestures is planned, including the inauguration of the Russian center," Hollande said at the meeting with Putin on the sidelines of the G20 summit in China.

In April, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, on behalf of Hollande, invited Putin to visit France.
HANGZHOU (Sputnik)  Putin and May held a one-on-one meeting early Sunday on the sidelines of the G20 leaders' summit in Hangzhou, China.

"Putin send a clear signal that we [Russian officials] are interested in mending our relations, we want to renew dialogue across all spheres, including most sensitive ones, and are ready to go as far as the British side is willing to," Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
The failed $500 million training program involved the CIA and the Pentagon was a testament to this.

But later the US had to focus on fighting Daesh as the rising threat to the countrys national security. As a result, the Pentagon began to work with Kurdish fighters to fight against the terrorists, Frantzman wrote in an article for the National Interest.

In an article for Hurriyet Daily News, journalist Verda Ozer argued that there is no actual conflict between the CIA and the Pentagon in Syria.

"First of all, the Pentagon and the CIA are not pursuing two separate, independent policies. These are both official and political policies approved by the White House. So we cannot speak of two US institutions that have found themselves in the midst of a conflict," she wrote.

To the contrary, the two strategies are working together because they constitute two pillars of Washingtons policy in Syria, she added.

Moreover, Washington does not consider the FSA and Kurds equal.
HANGZHOU (Sputnik)  Earlier in the day, the Russian leader discussed the Ukraine crisis with his French counterpart Francois Hollande.

"I am glad we have an opportunity to hold negotiations I think that the issues we are going to discuss are very important and it is great to have this opportunity to have bilateral talks on, for example, Ukraine," Merkel said ahead of the meeting in Hangzhou, China.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Russia also wants to exchange information with the alliance on the terrorist threat in Europe, he said.

"The Russian side is interested in organizing a non-politicized review of previously existing military programs in the format of Russia-NATO Council for the purpose of resumption of their implementation, as well as the exchange of information and assessment of the current terrorist threat in Europe, in particular, to counter Daesh," Antonov told the Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta.
HANGZHOU (Sputnik)  The meeting will be the first of the Russian and Argentine leaders with Macri in office. The two presidents have already held two telephone conversations since Macri's appointment in November 2015.

"[The meeting] will take place tomorrow," Peskov told reporters, answering the relevant question.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Anatoly Antonov spoke positively about "cautious" signals from Estonia and Lithuania that they intended to give their opinion on Moscows initiative soon.

"[Authorities] in the capitals of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Poland keep talking about a rising threat from RussiaWe decided to invite colleagues from these countries to MoscowUnfortunately, we have not received their official responses yet," Anatoly Antonov told the Russian newspaper, Nezavisimaya Gazeta.
Within Billings aging north side industrial corridor, White Heating and Air Conditioning has added a modern new look and fresh interior to boost business.

The store at 1125 Fourth Ave. N. has undergone a $300,000 face lift, which includes a new facade, exterior color, and landscaping on the outside. Work was completed Aug. 15.

Its the new showroom inside that makes owner Curt White the most proud. Workers increased the size about 23 percent to 8,000 square feet and installed a showroom to feature fireplaces. The room has 42 working fireplaces on display against different backgrounds  stone, tile, textured walls and others  to create a warm, inviting environment.

This has been a really fun venture, White, 44, said last week.

It was also a big project for White, who bought the building in 2001 for $150,000, half the amount of the most recent renovations. Work started last November in stages, and White said he used several sub-contractors to complete the job on the 64-year-old building.

Whites Heating and Air Conditioning is in the East Billings Urban Renewal District, a blighted northern industrial area eligible for tax-increment financing (TIF) for infrastructure improvement.

In July, workers paved North 12th Street between Third Avenue North and Fourth Avenue North, completing a $20,000 paving project around the block across from White.

The East Billings Urban Renewal District, which is funded by property taxes, did additional paving work, water and sewer improvements and other infrastructure work on 10 blocks in eastern Billings, said coordinator Tim Goodridge.

Goodridge said White could be eligible for reimbursement for part of the renovation. Eligible expenses include curb and gutter work, new sidewalks, ramps and rails to increase accessibility for people with disabilities and some engineering and design fees, he said.

Projects like the White renovations help improve the entire area, Goodridge added.

The things that attract peoples attention the most are new building, upgrades to buildings, and landscaping. All the things that happen down there are done on the initiative of private enterprise. We give them enough to push them over the hill, Goodridge said.

The new showroom at White's has made manager Alex Villarreals jobs much easier. With the fireplaces operating onsite, customers can see how they work and where they might fit in their living rooms, Villareal said.

No more describing them, showing pictures, or pulling them up on the Internet, he said.

Its pretty phenomenal, Villarreal said.

Fireplace sales represent about a quarter of Whites business, which includes service and installation.

Its a big part of our business. Its hard to sell a fireplace to someone if they cant see it, White said.

Whites sells Mendota fireplaces, which cost $6,000 to $8,000 on the high end. Other brands include Napoleon and Heat & Glo. The store also sells Pacific Energy wood stoves.

All fireplaces have a mesh covering, a new industry safety standard, Villarreal said.

Whites has 26 employees. Customers come from Northern Wyoming, Eastern Montana and the Hi-Line, White said.

White, a Billings resident, launched the business out of his garage in 1999. He also operated Grand Fireplace Co. on Grand Avenue earlier this decade before consolidating the business into his current spot.

The Billings Skyview High School graduate said his is a destination store, but hed still like passing motorists to notice him on their way to MetraPark. He added that his aim was to make people think a building that went up in 1952 was a new addition to the neighborhood.

We took what we had, and made it the best we could, White said.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Earlier, a diplomatic source in the Kingdom of Bahrain stated that the Bahraini delegation, headed by the minister of defense, will sign a military cooperation agreement with Russia during the upcoming Army-2016 military expo.

"His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa will pay an official visit to Moscow tomorrow  Monday  to hold talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin," the Royal Court's announcement, carried by the Bahrain News Agency, read.

"The two leaders will discuss ways of bolstering joint ties in all fields, in addition to latest regional and international developments," the message continued.
WARSAW (Sputnik)  A Polish man was attacked and beaten to death this week in Harlow, Essex. Earlier in the day, a group of attackers assaulted two Polish men in the same town.

"In the wake of the recent incidents Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski, Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro, and Interior and Administration Minister Mariusz Blaszczak plan to go together to London," Foreign Ministry spokesman Rafal Sobczak told a Polish television channel, without specifying the date of the visit.

Sobczak confirmed that the new attack that happened over the weekend had been classified as hate crime. The men were admitted to hospital with a cut to the head and a broken nose. One of them has already been discharged.
While the FBI did not find conclusive evidence that Hillary Clintons email account, one of several on the same server, had been accessed by the hacker they are unable to rule it out and for good reason.

The access to a single account in the system also creates the possibility that a sophisticated hacker would be able to patch a backdoor into the entire system or, if it were an unsophisticated hacker, they could still easily gain access to Hillarys email by sending her an email from the trusted staffers account with a link to malware. In either event, the contents of her email account could have been accessed without a noticeable login abnormality.

The only question now is whether the Clinton campaign will come up with some conspiracy claim that Russia hacked Hillary's system between 2009 and 2013 because they somehow had the foresight to know Donald Trump would run for office or whether the mainstream media will continue to give her a pass on potentially exposing top secret American intelligence.
The piece, part of an ongoing series by the Western media that suggests that Vladimir Putin is always the winner of world events  the winner of Brexit, the winner of the DNC Leaks, the winner of the Republican Primary and the winner of the failed Turkey coup  would leave one to believe that it is always Christmas in the Kremlin. This time, Putin won because Assange, Snowden, Trump.

The NY Times hits Assange for failing to provide more material against Vladimir Putin and Russia rather than focusing his sights on the ruling regimes of the West and pointed to his involvement with RT (formerly Russia Today) as evidence that he is a 'Kremlin agent'  the same accusation that has been lobbed against three-star US General Michael Flynn for the same reason.
In an exclusive interview with Sputnik, Russian Deputy Energy Minister Anton Inyutsyn said that "if the sides have interest and benefits, the project has chances to be implemented.

The sides' consent as well as unification of investments and qualifications are not the only things necessary for implementation of the projects, which also demands a fundamental study of technical and economic indicators, risks assessment, regulatory and pricing issues and many others," Inyutsyn added.

Japans new course on promoting closer ties with Russia is opening the way to more Japanese investments into new and existing projects in the Russian Far East which, for its part, could offer Japanese companies highly attractive terms of investment into the advanced development territories and the Svobodny seaport in Vladivostok.

Japanese businessmen have nine territories in the Russian Far East to choose from and where to invest their money and enjoy tax breaks and administrative preferences.

By the way, Chinese investors have already chosen such a territory in Amur region to invest.

Energy, transport, agriculture, timber processing, medicine  these are the priority areas of Russian-Japanese cooperation, and the energy bridge to be built as part of the Asian energy super ring could be a key area of mutually beneficial cooperation between the two countries.

The Asian energy super ring project prescribes the unification of energy systems of Russia, Japan, South Korea, China and Mongolia. This ring is expected to consist of separate energy bridges, one of which can connect Russia's Sakhalin with Japan.
In his first campaign visit to a black church the real estate giant tried to win the hearts of African Americans by invoking Abraham Lincoln, the civil rights movement, and vowing that he will not ignore the needs of black Americans once he becomes president.

"I fully understand that the African-American community has suffered from discrimination and that there are many wrongs that must still be made right," Trump said, "For any who are hurting: Things are going to turn around. Tomorrow will be better."

As for Detroit in particular, Trump promised locals that he will help to "build and rebuild" the city.

"I am here to listen to you," He told the congregation. "As I prepare to campaign all across the nation, I will have the chance to lay out my economic plans which will be so good for Detroit."
Interestingly, her campaign appears to have a very clear pricing for "varying levels of access to Mrs. Clinton."

"For a donation of $2,700, the children (under 16) of donors at an event last month at the Sag Harbor, N.Y. estate of hedge fund magnate Adam Sender could ask Mrs. Clinton a question. A family photo with Mrs. Clinton cost $10,000, according to attendees."

It would be incorrect to say Hillary Clinton spent all her time answering questions from interested attendees, including, among others, Calvin Klein, Harvey Weinstein and Justin Timberlake, as some of the hosts intentionally tried to limit "confrontational engagements", according to Amy Chozick.

"Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, a backer of Democrats and a friend of the Clintons', made sure attendees did not grill Mrs. Clinton at the $100,000-per-couple lamb dinner Mrs. Forester de Rothschild hosted under a tent on the lawn of her oceanfront Martha's Vineyard mansion," writes Chozick.

So, apparently, this is why Hillary Clinton, a candidate who her campaign staff try to portray as the candidate "for the people", failed to answer questions from the press, instead opting to field the concerns of the wealthiest Americans.

The bitter irony is that candidate Clinton attacks real estate mogul Donald Trump as an "out-of-touch billionaire", while Trump's campaign relies mostly on online and direct-mail fundraising. Of course, the Republican candidate also turns to big money donors, but, at least, he doesn't hesitate to run rallies and give network interviews to be accessible to everyday working Americans.
The arrival of US President in Hangzhou for the international G-20 summit was marked with controversy over China's inhospitality. Unpleasant incidents reportedly came one after another, stirring frustration among both US and Chinese delegates.

It all started with reports that no rolling staircase was prepared for Obama to gracefully exit Air Force One and descend on the red carpet. However, a Chinese foreign ministry official later said that the accusations were groundless as it was the US side that decided they didn't need a staircase because the driver didn't speak English and couldn't understand security instructions.

But when the US head of state eventually took off the plane from an alternative exit, US journalists were not allowed to approach him. White House officials wouldn't back down and insisted the US would set the rules for its own leader, but received a sharp response from the member of Chinese delegation: "This is our country! This is our airport!"
There is a long standing tradition in New Brunswick harness racing and that's Labour Day racing at Canada's oldest half-mile track, Fredericton Raceway on the holiday Monday (Sept. 5) in the capital city.

Horse Racing New Brunswick, it's partners and sponsors have assembled a solid eight-dash card with the two-year-old pacers in the spotlight with three divisions of the Williamson Memorial Stake.

Monday's card will go to post at 1 p.m. Three separate divisions of the classic stakes event carry a purse of $6,800 per division and have attracted a number of the region's top horses and horsemen.

Fresh off a successful week of racing in Saint John for Exhibition Week, the capital city will host both a card on Monday, with another slated for Saturday, September 10.

Division one is for pacing fillies and Tobins Secret goes into the race as the one to beat for trainer/driver Earl Smith. She has bankrolled nearly $14,000 this season and only once has missed the top three.

The second division features the second filly stake with Woodmere Finesse looking to have the slight edge with veteran Kenny Arsenault in the sulky. She has a 2:00.3 victory on her resume going into the race.

The final division, this time spotlighting the freshman colts, appears to be a battle between Tobinator and Carters Caper. Tobinator and driver Corey MacPherson come off an eye-popping 1:56.3 victory in his last outing and comes in to the race in fine form.

The Preferred Pace of the day has attracted a competitive field including City Of The Year, who is fresh off a win at Saint John's Exhibition Park Raceway.

Horse Racing New Brunswick extends many thanks to horsemen, fans, volunteers, and corporate sponsors taking part in Monday's program.

(With files from HRNB)
Hf Zeligs Glory won the final Open Pace of the 2016 Manitoba harness racing season as Miami hosted the fair circuit's finale on Saturday, Sept. 3.

Owned, trained and driven by Clayton Braybrook of Kindersley, Sask., Hf Zeligs Glory cruised wire-to-wire in the featured $1,900 Open Handicap. With the inside post advantage, the nine-year-old Glorious Scooter gelding took the lead off the gate and carved out panels of :29.3, 1:00.1 and 1:30.1 en route to the four-length victory in a season's-best 2:00.3. False Advertising was the runner-up for the third straight week at Miami while last week's Open winner Western Olympian finished third.

Hf Zeligs Glory earned his first victory against Open company on the Manitoba fair circuit, and his fourth of the year from nine starts.

Richard Remillard's four-year-old mare Wild Chic was the fastest winner of the card, leading from start to finish in the $1,750 Preferred Pace in 1:59.4.

Braybrook, Remillard and Trevor Williams each sent out a pair of winners during the 11-race card.

To view Saturday's harness racing results, click on the following link: Saturday Results - Miami.
When Maria McCartney was 8, she saw her first ice cream truck. She ran down the street in he
Two divisions of the New York Sire Stakes for two-year-old pacing colts and geldings went postward at Batavia Downs on Saturday night (September 3) to compete for their share of the $110,000 purses up for grabs, and one of the winners made track history.

Pointomygranson (American Ideal-Sangaal) went to the front and took a lead he would never relinquish en route to a five-length victory in 1:53.2 in his $55,500 division. That time was a new track record for two-year-old pacing geldings.

Marcus Miller rushed Pointomygranson off the gate and set unchallenged fractional times of :28.2 and :58. At that point, Jim Morrill Jr. had the heavily favoured Funknwaffles rolling up on the outside trying to catch the leader. But when Miller saw him coming past five-eighths, he asked his horse for more and then hung on as Pointomygranson accelerated.

Pointomygranson would not let the challenger get anywhere close to him up the backside and when they hit the stretch, he was pulling away with every stride and Miller was sitting chilly behind him. He paced his last quarter in :27 flat under wraps.

He was real strong in the race, I couldnt have been happier with him, said Marcus Miller. It was the first time I drove him, but they told me he would be good tonight and he was!

It was the second NYSS win of the year for Pointomygranson ($7.00) and it pushed his earnings to $63,229 for owner Gold Standard Equine LLC. The winner is trained by Chris Ryder.

It was bombs away in the first $55,500 split when 30-1 Americanfirewater (American Ideal-Lucky Turn) pulled a major upset.

The 1-4 favourite, Miso Fast (Jim Morrill Jr.), had things his own way on the front end with the field in single-file behind him, cutting even fractions of :28.2, :58.1 and 1:27.3. But just when things were looking anticlimactic, Drew Monti pulled Americanfirewater from the three-hole and shot up alongside the leader in quick fashion.

Miso Fast and Americanfirewater then tore around the far turn, matching strides as they went. At the top of the lane, it was anyones race and after both colts were driven hard to the wire, Americanfirewater wanted it more and won by a length in 1:56.2, which was a new lifetime mark.

When he came out of the hole, I knew he had a real shot. He was super aggressive today and you could tell right away, said Drew Monti.

It was the first lifetime win for Americanfirewater ($62.50) and the winners share boosted his annual income to $54,739 for owner Rock & Roll Stable Inc. Americanfirewater is trained by Rick Dane Jr.

There were also two $15,000 divisions of the Excelsior A Series on the card.

In the first division, Rollin About (Roll With Joe-Flitabout) was a wire-to-wire winner in rein to Marcus Miller in 1:56.4 for owners Anthony Lombardi, D. Van Witzenburg and George Golemes. The winner paid $8.20.

The second division went to Percys Z Tam and Pat Lachance in 1:56.2 on the strength of a three-wide move at three-quarters. Percys Z Tam ($9.70) is owned by Z Tam Stable LLC, M & M Harness Racing LLC, Royal Flush Stable LLC and Pat LaChance, who also trains him.

Racing resumes at Batavia Downs on Monday afternoon (September 5) with a special Labor Day matinee card featuring the annual drivers bike race, which will be held after the seventh race.

(Batavia Downs)
The United States and Fascist Italy: The Rise of American Finance in Europe by Gian Giacomo Migone, translated from the Italian and with a preface by Molly Tambor Cambridge University Press, 405 pp., $110.00

In the early 1960s, in the full flush of postwar Atlanticism, Gian Giacomo Migone, the scion of a cosmopolitan family of Italian diplomats, arrived at Harvard to study history. As a liberal Catholic, a follower of John F. Kennedy, and a fan of Pope John XXIII, Migone was escaping the conservatism and neofascism of the postwar Italian universities. He came to the United States in search of the promise of democracy and new developments in scholarship. What he found was something more complicated. It was the heyday of the civil rights struggle and he and other foreign students ventured South to witness the dying days of Jim Crow. Yet it was not Americas present that would unsettle him but its past and, in particular, Americas recent history in relation to his own country.

In 1965, the theme of Ernest Mays legendary seminar at Harvard on American foreign relations was the 1920s, and Migone was given the task of exploring US policy toward Italy. This was a ticklish assignment in a double sense. The 1920s were a decade commonly identified with American isolationism, a period in which the US was not credited with actually having had a foreign policy. And Italy in the 1920s meant Mussolinis regime. The question was how the Republican administrations of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, committed to their nationalist program of normalcy and modernization, had engaged with the first effort to build a fascist dictatorship in Europe. As the Vietnam War escalated in the background, it was an assignment that would shake the young Migones naive assumptions about the alignment of Western power with democracy.

Published in Italian in 1980, after many years of pioneering research in American and Italian archives, Migones book established him in Italy as an authority among left-liberal scholars of the fascist era and launched a career that would lead by way of the University of Torino to a seat in the Italian Senate. Still, in an age before the Internet and Google Translate, Migones scholarship remained largely unknown to an Anglophone readership. Like other classic works of European international history of the 1960s and 1970s, many of which were centered on the United Statesin German one thinks of Andreas Hillgrubers Hitlers Strategie, Michael Geyers Aufrustung oder Sicherheit, and Werner Links Die amerikanische Stabilisierungspolitik in Deutschlandthis European interpretation of American power was mostly ignored in Americas own historiography. We owe thanks to Cambridge University Press and Molly Tambor, herself a historian of postwar Italy, for finally bringing us this highly readable translation.

Antifascism was the founding myth of the Italian republic after 1945. But not only did a resentful minority of Italians cling to the memory of Mussolini, as Migone discovered in the National Archives in Washington, it was not until surprisingly late in the 1930s that the United States decided to treat Il Duce as an enemy. In the interwar period, unlike after 1945, Americans did not assume that democracy was the natural destiny of all Western European states. Mussolinis American admirers ranged from the Hearst press to Columbia Universitys president, Nicholas Murray Butler, who gave a platform to fascist propaganda in the Casa Italiana on the Upper West Side. Both Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt expressed their approval of Mussolinis regime. Fascism promised to bring order and progress to Italy while holding at bay the menace from the left.

Already in 1972 John Patrick Diggins, in his Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America, had revealed the widespread enthusiasm for Mussolini among progressive American intellectuals. What Migones book laid bare was that these affinities were founded on more than ideas and politics. Behind the scenes, financial interests had a part in orchestrating the connubio between America and Italian fascism. As he puts it in his preface, Migone may not have started out as a Marxist, but through reading documents produced by central banks and investment bankers he sometimes felt as though he might become one.

One of the obstacles to acknowledging the amicable relationship between Wall Street and Italian fascism was the commonplace view of the interwar period as an era of economic nationalism. Mussolini was famous for his advocacy of autarchy and for triumphs such as draining the Pontine marshes and the battle for grain in agriculture. Italy, for its part, was severely affected by Americas nativist immigration quotas imposed early in the 1920s.

But policies of national economic development were far from being incompatible with fostering international commercial and financial interconnections. One should take the national in international seriously. Italys business elites never envisioned their countrys economic development as severed from the world economy. The immediate effect of World War I was not so much to unleash deglobalization as to bring about a rearrangement of international economic interactions. Whereas before 1914, visionary industrialists like Giuseppe Volpi looked to Germany to assist in the development of modern industries in Italy, such as hydropower, from 1917 onward, Italys economy came to rely on loans from Britain and the US, which by 1919 amounted to $2 billion and $1.65 billion respectively. After the Paris Peace Conference, despite the showdown there with Woodrow Wilson over Italys claim to Fiume, Italian liberals continued to look to Wall Street.

Tragically, in the wake of Wilsons failure to persuade the Senate to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, Americas mind was elsewhere. Insofar as the Senate and the State Department were interested in European stabilization at all, it was the fate of Germany that concerned them. It was the disastrous Franco-German conflict in the Ruhr that caused the US to reengage with European affairs in the autumn of 1923. By then, for Italys first generation of Atlanticist liberals, it was too late. Mussolini had seized power in October 1922.

Migone shows how, with Germany as Washingtons priority, Mussolini positioned his regime as far more amenable than republican France to Americas new hegemony. Though Mussolini boasted of his war record, he did not pursue an aggressive policy toward Germany. He made it clear early on that he understood the power of the US. As he put it to King Vittorio Emanuele III in 1923 in urging him to make a state visit to America:

The return of migratory flow into the United States and cooperation with American capital represent two elements of vital importance for us. Beyond the economic advantagesit would be of immense benefit to Italybecause of the inarguable influence it would have on our relations with other States,and among them none more than England.

Unlike the democratically elected politicians who ruled in Paris, in Italy Mussolinis dictatorship delegated financial policy to a succession of businessmen and technocrats. Unlike the French, they accepted the basic economic terms set down by Congress and articulated by Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover and Andrew Mellon at the Treasury. Circulating among them, as ubiquitous facilitators of conversations on both sides, were prominent bankers and above all J.P. Morgan.

In her preface Molly Tambor notes that one of the most difficult decisions she and Migone had to make in rendering his book into English was how to translate classe dirigente. Out of respect for modern sensibilities they rejected the most obvious option, ruling class, in favor of a variety of synonyms such as elites and business leaders. But even through the filter of this deliberately depoliticized translation, the picture Migone paints is clear. Americas new power in the 1920s was based on its economy, and in the projection of an American vision of international order beyond the League of Nations, it was US bankers who led the way. The crucial issues of ItalianAmerican diplomacy were not questions of democracy, but of finance. They concerned the settlement of Italys war debts and the restoration of the gold standard. And with the friendly guidance of J.P. Morgan, Mussolinis regime came willingly to agreements on the terms of financial arrangements with the US. The war debt deal negotiated in 1925 was the most generous that America concluded with any of its wartime associates. It set off a flow of American investment to Italy that only accelerated after 1927, once Italy stabilized on the gold standard.

Altogether Americas investment in fascist Italy soon exceeded $400 million. Remarkably, by 1930 when President Hoover began his push to restore order to the world (starting with the London conference on naval arms control), fascist Italy, after Ramsay MacDonalds Labour government in Britain, was Washingtons favored partner in Europe. When Mussolinis foreign minister, the charismatic ex-squadistra Dino Grandi, met Hoover in 1931, the president is said to have assured his Italian guest that the vocal minority of antifascists in America should be ignored: They do not exist for us Americans, and neither should they exist for you.

What tore the harmony of the 1920s apart was not the increasingly dictatorial tendencies of Mussolinis regime, but the Great Depression. The collapse of the gold standard and the end to international lending sundered the ties of soft power that had restrained Mussolinis regime. Mussolini had always talked of war and conquest, but since the Corfu incident of 1923, in which Italy was drawn into a diplomatic and military crisis with Greece over the island, he had moderated his foreign aggression. In 1935 expansionism flared back into the open. With his unprovoked attack on Abyssinia, Mussolini unhinged the interwar order. Hitlers militarization of the Rhineland, Francos coup in Spain, and the Anschluss of Austria followed. Insofar as there was any hope of stopping this escalation, it would have consisted of early and aggressive sanctions against Mussolini over Abyssinia. But instead the liberal powers vacillated. Why?

Hitler famously said that he had seen the statesmen of the West at Munich and they were worms. On this, at least, Churchill agreed with him. For Migone, the logic of appeasement was not a matter of moral weakness. It was systematic. The failure to impose sanctions on the fascists was the faded echo of a once-powerful strategy of financial hegemony. In view of the policies of the 1920s, Americas refusal to back even the minimal sanctions imposed by the League of Nations was entirely predictable. Instead, surging imports of American oil and motor vehicles propelled Italys murderous aggression against the only independent African member of the League of Nations. The State Departments principal concern was not to punish this violation of international law, but the fear that if Mussolini were to be humiliated, his regime might collapse and Italy might fall victim to revolution.

Viewing appeasement against the backdrop of financial and political relations in the 1920s is certainly illuminating. But it also reveals a one-sidedness in Migones history. He does not take seriously enough the bewilderment in Washington and London as they responded to Mussolinis sudden aggression. What, they asked, could Mussolini possibly want in Abyssinia? It was a real question. According to the accepted model of capitalist hegemony, which the Americans believed themselves to have been pursuing with their fascist collaborators, there was no obvious answer. Nor does Migone provide us with one. In his effort to refute the overly ideological readings of fascism as a violent political religion, he neglects to give us a systematic account of fascist aggression.

The violence that exploded in 1935 had many sources. But according to Migones own argument it can best be interpreted as the underside of the compliance that he describes so powerfully in the 1920s. Do-or-die insurgency was a different kind of reaction to the new world order created in 1919. We cannot account for the singularity of Mussolinis regimeor that of Hitlerunless we acknowledge this duality. Il Duce did not just pay homage to the power of the British Empire and America. He also railed and plotted against them.

How to respond to this violent insurgency was a real challenge to the strategy of liberal governments after World War I. Their preference for peace was solidly founded. Social and economic interests and a distaste for war played their parts. The military potential of a German-Italian-Japanese alliance was not a threat to be taken lightly. But what drove appeasement was not so much the fear of defeat as the ruinous cost of winning again. The victory of the Entente powers in 1918 had come at a price so high that it called fundamentally into question the value of war as a tool of power politics. Since the Washington naval conference of 1921, both American and British strategy had consisted in solidifying their strategic dominance on the oceans. In 1935, if they had wished to assert it, the superiority of the British fleet over Italy would have been enormous. But imposing a full blockade would have required political mobilization at home and strategic alliances with France and the US that they did not offer and that Britain was not prepared to undertake.

What was missing was a credible system of deterrence, a standing force so formidable and so clear in its political and strategic mission that it would render implausible any effort to overturn the status quo. Since the Paris Peace Conference that is what the French government had been calling forthrough some combination of a League army, automatic sanctions mechanisms, and security guarantees with real teeth. But it was precisely that insistence that made the French republic so obnoxious to Washington.

The subsequent disaster would reveal the limitations of a one-dimensional financial hegemony. To secure a congenial liberal order, a far denser mesh of politics, ideology, and military power would be required. After 1945, Americas promotion of European integration and its anchoring role in NATO were two vital elements of the new order. Anticommunism solidified domestic political support. Eisenhowers nuclear New Look, horrifying though it was, made deterrence financially affordable. As Migones revisionism energetically reminds us, a further element of the postwar order was a rewriting of the history of the 1930s that drew a veil of silence over the fact that as recently as 1935 institutions as pivotal as J.P. Morgan had been working closely with men who were now treated as fascist outlaws.

The work of coming to terms with the past begun by Migone and his generation thus illuminated both the interwar period and the political foundations of the postwar order. And though fascism has passed from the scene, it is this edge of critical self-reflection that gives Migones book its relevance to recent developments. What is the relationship between democracy and internationalized financial capitalism? How squarely can we face the tensions between them? In the era of Vietnam and Pinochet, Migone posed those questions about Americas relationship with Mussolinis Italy. They are still with us today. And in facing them we need all the help we can get. Though the return of the humanities to the history of capitalism is a welcome side effect of the financial crisis, decades of neglect have taken their toll on our critical and analytical faculties. We will do well to sharpen our wits on the efforts of an earlier generation to grasp the political economy of international capitalism. Migones lucid and powerful book is a bracing place to start.
A Worden woman has been ordered from her house until she fixes a problem with raw sewage draining into an open trench on her property.

Yellowstone County officials this summer took the rare step to get a court order to prevent Cari Jo Ross, of 2465 N. 15th Road, from using her house until she fixes the problem.

A Yellowstone County Sheriffs civil officer served Ross the court order in June and on June 20 removed her from the property, posted on the front door a copy of the order to vacate the premises until the sanitary violation was fixed and put a lock on the door.

Mike Schieno, Yellowstone County code enforcement officer, said recently the problem remains.

She has to contact me, and we have to have someone go inspect it to make sure its done right, Schieno said.

Ross, Schieno said, told him on Thursday when he visited the property that she was employed and working with a contractor on the sewage problem.

Meanwhile, Ross is living on the property but not in the house. Ross told The Gazette from her front yard on Thursday afternoon that she did not want to discuss the sewage issue.

Ross also yelled insults at her next-door neighbor, Michael Rogers, who has filed complaints with the county about the sewage. Rogers talked to The Gazette about the problem from his own yard.

Rogers, who ignored Ross' name calling, indicated a handgun strapped to his waist under his shirttail. He said he's had the firearm for several years but got a concealed weapon permit about a week ago. The situation with Ross, as well as general protection, were the reasons he got the permit, he said.

The sewage stink, Rogers said, got so strong that "it would bowl you over. It was actually making me sick."

The smell made it difficult for him to run his small business of filling propane bottles, which he does in his backyard, Rogers said.

Pinching his nose, Rogers said the odor was so bad that "it rips the hair out of your nose."

Rogers said he wished Ross would fix the sewer or leave.

Complaint

The matter came to a head in June, when state District Judge Gregory Todd ruled in the countys favor during a civil hearing and ordered Ross barred from the house.

The county sued Ross in March, saying in a civil complaint that Ross was violating health regulations that prohibit the operation of a wastewater system that poses a threat to public health. The suit sought a court order to force Ross into compliance with regulations or for an order for her to vacate the property until she complied.

The present situation jeopardizes the health of Ross, her children and the public, the complaint said.

Ross told Schieno that she was bagging human feces and throwing it into waste containers on or near the premises, the complaint said.

Ross and her three minor children had been living in the house, which had been provided water and sewer service by the Worden Water and Sewer District.

Child Protective Services with the Montana Department of Health and Human Services has since removed her children from her care, according to court records.

Ross failed to pay her water and sewer fees for several years, the county said. The District tried unsuccessfully to work with Ross to pay the fees and service was stopped, the county said.

District officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Open sewage

In April 2015, RiverStone Health got a complaint about open sewage in Ross backyard and investigated.

A RiverStone inspector determined there was open sewage in the backyard and that it was jeopardizing the health of Ross, her children and the public. It appeared that the sewer line from the house ruptured, the complaint said.

RiverStone attempted without success to get Ross to repair the sewage line, the complaint said.

Meanwhile, complaints from Rogers of leaking sewage continued.

Ross backyard has an open trench, which Schieno described as about four feet wide, six feet long, about four feet deep and full of water.

The property also has numerous vehicles parked in the front yard and backyard and appliances, like a refrigerator, in the front yard.

The countys suit ultimately led to a June 10 hearing before Judge Todd in which Ross was ordered to show cause why she should not be stopped from occupying her house until repairs were made.

Schieno, along with the RiverStone inspector and Rogers, all testified.

Ross, who represented herself, also attended, but she walked out during the hearing and refused to return, court records said.

Shes a little hotheaded. She stormed out of the courtroom, Schieno said.

'Over and above'

Schieno has talked to Ross and been to her property many times, all to no avail. Ross has told him she was going to fix the problem, but so far, has not, he said.

I go over and above to work with people," Schieno said. "Our court system is so overloaded. Do you really think they want to see my cases?

RiverStone officials gave Ross forms to complete that would have provided her assistance, but she did not respond, he said.

Schieno said he could not recall having to get a court order for a sanitary sewage violation in the five years he's been on the job.

Dan Schwarz, chief deputy county attorney, agreed. Schwarz said the Ross case was the first time hes prosecuted a sanitary sewage matter in 13 years with the county.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, well find a way to solve the problem, Schwarz said. Its just a shame. What do you do? Our code enforcement officer tried to assist her to get it fixed. In this case, the county went over and above, he said.

Meanwhile, Ross has various other legal troubles.

In March, Ross pleaded not guilty to felony bail jumping charges. She also is facing probation violations. She was convicted of deceptive practices in Yellowstone County in 2010, and Judge Todd sentenced her to a two-year deferred term. The judge then revoked the sentence for probation violations because Ross was using methamphetamine and alcohol and in 2013 imposed a three-year suspended sentence.

Ross has pending probation violation allegations, including meth use and the sewage problems at her home.

Ross also was in custody at the Yellowstone County jail in late July on misdemeanor theft and traffic offenses.

In August, Ross pleaded guilty in Justice Court to driving a motor vehicle with a suspended license and pleaded not guilty in Billings Municipal Court to misdemeanor theft charges.

Ross' attorney, Robert Kelleher Jr. of Billings, said he was not involved in the sewage case but that he was working with prosecutors to resolve the criminal charges.
Global Partners terminal at Port Westward has reopened, only this time ethanol is replacing crude oil as the commodity of choice at the Clatskanie-area facility.

The terminal, known as Columbia Pacific Bio-Refinery, began receiving shipments of the flammable gasoline additive earlier this summer. In June, 95 rail cars carrying ethanol moved along the Columbia County rail line to Port Westward, according to the Oregon Department Transportation. Numbers for July and August wont be available until late September.

Plummeting oil prices forced the terminal to temporarily close in January. The company laid off 28 of 47 workers there. Its not clear whether those employees got their jobs back. Global Partners declined to comment for the story.

Two years ago the terminal unloaded three-mile long trains every week of North Dakota crude oil onto barges bound for West Coast refineries. The volatile product was carried on the 60-mile rail corridor from Portland to Port Westward. The tracks run through communities like Rainier, where some residents expressed concerns about the risks of derailment and explosions.

Rainier Mayor Jerry Cole said he wasnt aware that Global Partners handles ethanol now.

Whether its ethanol or the Bakken crude oil, were always concerned with safety. One (commodity) doesnt really outweigh the next.  We want that downtown rail corridor to be safe, Cole said.

A $7.8 million rail safety project is planned to upgrade rail tracks, crossing gates and make street improvements in Rainier. The A Street Project is expected to break ground in 2017.

Risk of derailment in Rainier is low because the trains there typically travel 10 mph, said Eric Smythe, operating chief at Columbia River Fire & Rescue. Most train derailments happen at speeds of 50 to 70 mph, Smythe said.

He added that the trains arent necessarily more risky with ethanol instead of crude oil.

Theyre all dangerous (in a derailment). They all will burn and you have to be prepared for every one of them, Smythe said.

Columbia River Fire & Rescue and several local agencies are developing a contingency plan should a rail car derail, he said.

Originally the Port Westward facility was built to refine and handle ethanol, with the help of $36 million in green energy tax credits and loans from Oregon State. But the plant went bankrupt in 2009. JH Kelly, the Longview contractor who built the plant, ended up owning it through the bankruptcy process.

JH Kelly sold the facility to Global Partners, which began shipping crude oil there in 2012 with little public notice. The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality approved of switch to crude oil, but it caught the public and emergency officials off guard.

Last year the company was fined $102,000 for exceeding the 50 million gallon annual limit the state had authorized. In 2013, the Port Westward facility handled 300 million gallons of crude oil, six times the limit.
Shortly before Labor Day last year, pickets lined Fibre Way in front of the KapStone Paper and Packaging plant. An oversized blow-up rat overlooked the street, and blue and white union signs hung in businesses around the city in solidarity with the pulp and paper workers.

A year later, though, little has changed at the mill. Employees continue to work without a ratified contract two years after the old one expired. No contract talks have occurred in eight months, and no bargaining is scheduled. Labor leaders speak of a toxic relationship between labor and management. The firing of four picketing workers last year still is festering. And theres still a distant possibility of another strike.

While its not unheard of for unionized employees to work without a ratified contract, it doesnt bode well for either the company or the union, labor experts and union leaders say. But the situation shows how much collective bargaining has tilted against unions in the last several decades due to a combination of political and economic factors, such as escalating health-care costs and rising global competition.

This is America now. Companies are tough, hard; they dont give in. And they take hard stances and as a result you have lockouts that go on for years; you have strikes that go on for years and you have workers without a contact for years, said Robert Schwartz, a Massachusetts labor lawyer and author of several books about union organizing. You end up in an intractable morass, which is what this sounds like.

Last years strike and

the aftermath: A review

The Association of Western Pulp and Paperworkers Local 153 called a strike Aug. 27 last year after 15 months of failed contract talks. It was the unions first walkout since 1978. After picketing for 12 days, workers returned to work without any clear concessions or company promises to resume bargaining.

However, labor leaders say the strike improved solidarity among unions in the community.

I see the connection was made that we really are union brothers and sisters, and its not just something we say. We really are trying to live by, An injury to one, is an injury to all,  said Shawn Nyman, president of the Cowlitz-Wahkiakum Central Labor Council.

Solidarity within the union also grew, said Rick Von Rock, a former AWPPW Local 153 leader.

They were able to grow within the local, (and) build strength within its membership. They were willing to do this and accomplish what they felt they needed to do to go forward, he said.

Union officials also point to how the strike hurt the company, which reported the walkout cost it $14 million and a loss of $24 million worth of shipments.

Its not clear how much additional financial damage a longer strike would have inflicted. By using replacement workers, the company already was running at 50 percent capacity by day four of the strike. By day eight, the company restarted another paper machine that would have increased production at the mill to 63 percent, but then the walkout ended.

Mill workers missed out on about $2 million in wages and benefits during the strike, according to KapStone. Workers also risked losing their jobs because the company argued the walkout was an economic strike, rather than an unfair labor practice strike. Under an unfair labor practice strike, companies cannot hire permanent replacement workers.

In February, the National Labor Relations Board dismissed the unions charge the company had illegally declared an impasse. In an interview, the regional NLRB director said he agreed it was an economic strike, not one over unfair labor practices.

The status of a previous strike has no bearing on the status of a future strike. Since then, the union contends the company has committed new unfair labor practices, and it says it could strike over those. But the union may want to avoid one, in part because strikes are riskier than they were in the past, Shwartz said.

Declining strikes nationally

The threat of losing a job over a strike has become more real over the last 35 years, starting when Ronald Reagan fired 13,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981, Schwartz said.

Employers looked at that and said, We never thought you could actually retrain an entire skilled workforce. If we do it with air traffic controllers, can we do it with machinists?' Schwartz said.

Since then, strikes have become far less common. In 2014, for example, there were just 11 work stoppages involving more than 1,000 workers, the second fewest in nearly 60 years of record keeping, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Union membership dropped to 11.1 percent of the workforce in 2015, compared to 20.1 percent in 1983, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking the data.

And unlike unions in the service sector, pulp and paper makers must fight for concessions from companies operating in an industry that has grown more volatile.

KapStones fight to stay competitive

Amid declining prices and the strong U.S. dollar, KapStones profits shrunk 40 percent in the second quarter of 2016 compared to the same quarter last year. Overall, the company made about $21 million in the second quarter, down about $13 million from the second quarter of last year.

A major challenge is maintaining Longviews competitiveness. We continue to work to reduce maintenance costs and improve reliability by consolidating and upgrading the mills infrastructure, the company said in a prepared statement to The Daily News.

In the last year, KapStone invested about $30 million in capital projects in Longview to modernize infrastructure, including modernizing a biomass boiler. It also shut down two older boilers.

Companywide, KapStone hopes to boost competitiveness with the $615 million purchase last year of Houston-based Victory Packaging. Victory will use corrugated materials from KapStone mills to make its own packaging instead of relying on outside suppliers, a process called vertical integration.

Many of our larger competitors transfer a much greater percentage of their internal production to their own converting facilities, the company said. At KapStone, we are less integrated, which means our mills compete more actively on the open market. When market conditions are challenging as they are today, this creates a competitive disadvantage, the company said.

Yet the Victory acquisition is still a sore spot for union members, who found it at odds with the companys claims of financial struggles as it sought to reduce employees existing health-care coverage.

But the company was especially concerned about the consequences of the Cadillac tax under the Affordable Care Act, which under the previous Kaiser Permanente plan would have cost the company an estimated $2.7 million in taxes over a two-and-a-half-year span.

Like most companies operating in the United States, the rising cost of health care is another important issue, KapStone said.

The new high-deductible plans with Health Savings Accounts and wellness programs can control costs. It also offers employees better control over their own health care dollars, making them active partners in helping to control the rising cost of care, the company said.

The implemented offer retains Kaiser Permanente health care, a key sticking point for union members, but not at the same level of coverage. Mill workers arent happy with the higher deductibles, which will force them to pay significantly more than in the past.

Kurt Gallow, president of Local 153, said employees already are coping with increased costs. One members wife recently had a heart valve replaced and easily ran up the $3,000 out-of-pocket deductible before insurance coverage kicked in, Gallow said. Another member is worried about prescription prices after having a heart attack last month, he noted.

Beyond health care concerns, Gallow said members are upset over unfair labor practices and that the company hasnt rehired four workers terminated after the strike. The union is waiting for a decision from an administrative law judge on the matter.

Theres been a lot of discipline ever since the strike and people are extremely upset over the terminated workers and the fact that theyre not back to work, Gallow said.

The company also is faced with trying to motivate workers in the midst of a protracted labor dispute. Asked what it has done in the last year to improve morale at the mill, KapStone cited ongoing safety programs with high levels of employee participation. It also pointed to a program created in 2013 which offers financial rewards to hourly employees when the mill exceeds quarterly operating targets for productivity, safety and costs. (The company declined to say whether it has paid out any such awards.)

KapStone believes the best way to motivate employees is to be successful in the marketplace, thereby ensuring our Longview mill, and all our mills and plants, have a long-term and sustainable future, the company added.

Whats next?

For the union, KapStone still needs to change a toxic relationship with its employees, AWPPW officials said. That could start with resuming bargaining. However, the company isnt legally required to restart contract talks unless the union makes a concession to break the impasse.

Union officials say there still a strong incentive for KapStone to have a ratified contract, because a protracted labor dispute sends bad signals to investors and customers.

Any time you have a labor dispute, labor-management relations are not good, so it bleeds over in a sense to everything else, said Greg Pallesen, vice president of Association of Western Pulp and Paperworkers.

For example, employees could have supported KapStone when it tried, but failed, to affect renewable energy policies in the Legislature this year, he said. Instead, it was hard to get employees to back the effort because they were mad at the company, he said.

An unhappy workforce also hurts productivity, noted Von Rock, a retired Local 153 official.

And while the union says it wants to continue bargaining, the two sides havent met since workers again rejected a company offer in January.

Working under an implemented offer for long periods isnt unheard of now, though.

More and more unions have decided to work without a contract, because there are certain advantages, Schwartz said. For instance, without a ratified contract, the union could call a strike at any time on short notice.

You can still put a lot of pressure on the company even if youre not striking, he added.

Informational pickets, leafleting, protests, contacting the companys customers and investors are examples of those pressure tactics. In the last year, the union hasnt engaged in many of the actions in the last several months though, either. Instead the local has focused its energies around unfair labor practice charges.

Gallow said he thought Local 153 members would vote to authorize the bargaining board to strike again if necessary. Yet workers would rather see an offer they could accept first.

Obviously the previous offers just havent been acceptable, or it would have been ratified, Gallow said.

Its up to the members  and what they want to do, he said. But its not an easy situation and its not easy for the other side as well.
Dr. Jonathan Pershing, a US envoy, who is currently in India to attend US-India strategic and commercial dialogue for Paris Agreement talked about climate change at St Xaviers Institute of Communication, Mumbai on Friday. His talking session revolved around the idea of using such electricity resources that do not exhale carbon-dioxide in the environment for reducing Green House Gas (GHG).

Climate change treaties are important and must be followed for the betterment of the environment, but as seen in the past years, these treaties are hard to implement and countries at one or the other point loose tracks, therefore India and U.S are jointly working upon on Combating Climate Change, co-chaired by Pershing.

The group will check the quality of air, and all other factors related with climate change. Resilience in the process must be given attention.

Mr. Pershing said The conversation between India and the U.S. is strongly focused on advancing our work. It is both technical and academic, with interactions between experts and academics on both sides. The question of resilience has often not been given that much importance as countries have focused more on the policy changes they can make to combat climate change, but in some cases it has to be acknowledged that climate change is already happening and we have to look at ways to manage it.

US stands first in GHG Emission followed by China, the reason is that they do not address the carbon issue. US is now taking measures to keep the changes climate under check by asking the manufactures to keep in mind the climate change in every decision they will take during manufacturing, at the same time the agriculture department is asked to carry out farming with low GHG Emission.

He also suggested that India must focus on its Forest management as the Forest of the country is declining.
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The European Commission denies that its shock demand that Apple Inc. hand 13 billion euros in back taxes to Ireland is, in the pungent phrase of Apple CEO Tim Cook, "total political crap". But, say senior EU officials involved, the decision certainly has a strong political element, even if Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager says she is confident her case will stand up to Cook's appeal on its legal merits alone.

Brussels' political target is less corporate America than eurosceptics at home who threaten to pull the EU apart if it fails to show alienated voters it can act in their interests. "Being political should not be confused with politicised," said a spokeswoman for Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker. For him, fighting tax avoidance had been a "top priority" since before he took over the EU executive two years ago, she said.

"The drive towards fairer taxation is in President Juncker's political guidelines," she said. At the same time, Vestager is an "entirely independent" enforcer of EU competition law, she added. Efforts under way, including in the United States, to clamp down on tax avoidance are political in the sense that all states, with budgets under strain, face pressure from voters to claw back cash from other people, preferably wealthy companies, tax experts and government officials say.

For European Union institutions, the struggle is less for money -- Apple's cash will go to Ireland if Vestager wins her case. What Brussels is fighting for is the EU's very survival against eurosceptics like the Brexiteers who persuaded Britons to quit the bloc in June.

Those populists, on left and right, from the UK Independence Party to France's National Front or 5-Star in Italy, have scored with voters by accusing the EU and the executive Commission of cosying up to big, global business against the little people. "Apple shows how you fight against populism," a senior EU official familiar with the Commission chief's thinking told Reuters, describing a two-pronged strategy directed by Juncker.

One part of the strategy is a push for new global tax rules, led by EU Commissioner for Economic Affairs Pierre Moscovici, a French Socialist former finance minister. The other part rests on punishing the worst past abusers to deter others. Vestager says the goal is to change corporate culture so that businesses anxious for their reputation stop trying to pay as little tax as possible and choose to pay "the right amount".

On Juncker's political goal, he won government backing in Paris and Berlin. And many European media also welcomed the Apple move. Le Monde, leftish voice of establishment France and critic of Juncker's low-tax policies when he was premier of Luxembourg, said he had shown "the zeal of the newly converted"."Europe is changing," it wrote. "Bravo, Monsieur Juncker."

Showing Voters EU cares

"The EUs message is clear," Juncker wrote for a G20 meeting in China this weekend. "All companies must pay their fair share. "This is first and foremost a question of fairness. It has urgent practical implications as well. We cannot let down our schools, hospitals and public services that need this money."

The $14.5-billion demand which angered the United States and worried Apple's peers was engineered for shock and awe, the EU official said. Juncker sees Vestager as what the EU president calls his "Rottweiler", he added. Apple and the Irish government say Vestager is rewriting the iPhone maker's quarter-century of history in Ireland. Apple denies that Dublin gave it tax breaks amounting to illegal state aid.

What has changed is the politics. The financial crisis has impoverished Western governments just as footloose young tech firms became hugely rich without paying much tax anywhere. U.S. Senate revelations about Apple in 2013 fuelled public anger and, with some irony, prompted the EU to start inquiries.

Juncker's own history has also played a part. A conservative prime minister of Luxembourg for 19 years, he helped transform it from industrial rustbowl to a financial hub its bigger neighbours saw as helping businesses deprive them of revenues. Weeks after taking over the Commission in late 2014, he faced calls to resign when deals between Luxembourg and global corporates were splashed in world media as the LuxLeaks affair.

He denied involvement but, aides say, the uproar helped galvanise Juncker for a tax crackdown he had already promised. Driving his pledge to run a "political Commission" to reconnect with voters alienated by out-of-touch, technocratic elites in Brussels was a fear that his five-year term was, in his words, the "last chance" to save the Union from break-up.

Legal Underpinnings

"It's political in the sense that, if the Commission is prioritising the allocation of its resources, then clearly tax evasion and tax avoidance are very high on the political agenda everywhere," said Sophie in 't Veld, deputy leader of the centrist group in the European Parliament. "This is something that citizens are rightly and understandably concerned about."

That political approach, Brussels officials stress, does not mean capricious or lacking legal basis. Vestager is clear she must win in court on some untested points of law against the best tax attorneys Silicon Valley and Washington can buy, and against EU member state Ireland.

Asked about Cook's comments to an Irish newspaper about the EU's "political" motives, she said: "I dont think the courts will hear any kind of political opinions or feelings or whats in your stomach or whatever. They want the facts of the case."

Listen, then bite



Some EU officials think the anger of Cook and U.S. officials at the historic scale of the tax demand may partly stem from underestimating Vestager's uncompromising character. Tall, courteous and soft-spoken, she is a woman who takes trouble to greet captains of industry by the lift and escort them back to her office, often then serving them coffee herself. It may wrong-foot those used to more confrontational politicians and executives. She is a listener rather than a talker.

"There are some people who are very loud ... but ... it is very important to have a very, very, very open ear to those who are not loud," the former economy minister and liberal party leader told Reuters on taking office two years ago. People who work with her say she listens closely to career officials on her staff -- much more than did her Spanish predecessor Joaquin Almunia, a professional economist.

One U.S. tech giant to feel a change of approach after 2014 was Google, with whom Almunia worked for years to reach a compromise over concerns about its market dominance. Since last year, Vestager has hit Google with three separate charges. She also put an end to hesitation in Brussels by launching a price fixing case against Russian gas giant Gazprom last year.

Most current state aid tax cases, including Apple, were launched by Almunia but competition experts question whether he would have come to Vestager's radical conclusion. Almunia's own predecessor Neelie Kroes, now at another Silicon Valley darling Uber, said this week the Dane had gone too far against Apple. Some observers believe Vestager, a professional politician since her student days, may be tempted to use cases to raise her profile and further greater ambitions. She says not.

Predecessors have also taken on Washington, among them Mario Monti, later Italy's prime minister, who blocked a mega-merger between GE and Honeywell in 2001 despite U.S. support for it, and Kroes, who slapped heavy fines on Microsoft in 2008. There may be more to come, Vestager says. Her 800 staff are looking at about 1,000 inquiries where firms may have gained an edge by cutting tax deals with governments seeking investment.

A pastor's daughter, Vestager summed up her political credo in the 2014 interview with Reuters: "I was brought up with a very strong value," she said. "That you should always protect the few and the small against those who want to misuse their muscle."

Reuters
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American tech giants Microsoft, Google and Salesforce have officially adopted the EU-US Privacy Shield framework, enabling them to receive personal data from the European Union (EU) in compliance with the new standards. They are now among the 103 companies -- out of the 5,526 signatories -- that have so far signed up to replace the defunct Safe Harbour framework.

Facebook, Apple and Twitter are yet to adopt Privacy Shield, Britain-based Ars Technica website reported. The European Commission adopted the Privacy Shield in July to facilitate the transfer of personal data from the EU to the US. Privacy Shield is a voluntary scheme, whereby companies promise to treat European citizens' personal data in compliance with European Union data rules. Those pledges are then enforced by the US Department of Commerce.

According to the EU, the arrangement was necessary because the US does not meet the data protection standards required by Europe. The European Court of Justice annulled the previous law in October 2015. Since its introduction in 2000, the previous agreement had come to be relied on by 4,400 businesses, including internet giants such as Facebook, Google and Amazon.

But an Austrian law student argued that since Facebook data was subjected to mass surveillance by US intelligence agencies, it did not offer an adequate level of protection. The student lodged a complaint with the Irish supervisory authority, in the light of the revelations made in 2013 by American whistleblower Edward Snowden concerning the activities of the US intelligence services, in particular the National Security Agency (NSA).

The case was later transferred to the European court. After investigation, European Court of Justice concluded the agreement invalid, saying "the transfer of the data of Facebook's European subscribers to the US should be suspended." Recently, in a setback to US tech giant Apple, the European Commission announced that Ireland must demand 13 billion Euros in taxes from the Cupertino, San Francisco-based company.

The White House has termed the order for tech giant Apple as unfair.

IANS
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Technology, media, pharmaceutical and other companies, along with major corporate lobbying groups, filed legal briefs on Friday in support of a Microsoft Corp lawsuit that aims to strike down a law preventing companies from telling customers the government is seeking their data. Friday was the deadline for filing of friend-of-the-court briefs by nonparticipants in the case. The filings show broad support for Microsoft and the technology industry in its latest high-profile clash with the U.S. Justice Department over digital privacy and surveillance.

Microsoft's backers included the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, Delta Air Lines Inc, Eli Lilly and Co, BP America, the Washington Post, Fox News, the National Newspaper Association, Apple Inc, Alphabet Inc's Google, Amazon.com Inc, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and many others. Microsoft filed its lawsuit in Seattle federal court in April, arguing that a law allowing the government to seize computer data located on third-party computers and often barring companies from telling their customers that they are targets is unconstitutional.

The Justice Department argues that Microsoft has no standing to bring the case and the public has a "compelling interest in keeping criminal investigations confidential." Procedural safeguards also protect constitutional rights, it contends. A Justice Department spokesman declined comment on Friday's filings. Microsoft says the government is violating the Fourth Amendment, which establishes the right for people and businesses to know if the government searches or seizes their property, in addition to Microsoft's First Amendment right to free speech.

In the suit, which focuses on the storage of data on remote servers that are often referred to as "cloud" computers, Microsoft said it had been subjected to 2,600 federal court orders within the past 18 months prohibiting the company from informing customers their data was given to authorities pursuing criminal investigations. Under the authority of the 30-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the government is increasingly directing investigations at parties that store data in the cloud, Microsoft argued in its suit.

Five former law enforcement officials who worked for the FBI or Justice Department in Washington state also submitted a brief supporting Microsoft. In July, a federal appeals court sided 3-0 with Microsoft in a separate case against the Justice Department, ruling the government could not force the tech company to hand over customer emails stored on servers outside the United States.

The Justice Department has not decided whether to appeal that decision, a spokesman said. The case is Microsoft Corp v United States Department of Justice et al in the United States District Court, Western District of Washington, No. 2:16-cv-00537.

Reuters
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Tech giant Facebook incurred a loss of $200 million when the Falcon 9 rocket carrying SpaceX communication satellite AMOS-6 exploded in Cape Canaveral during tests, while SpaceX has begun a full probe into the explosion, media reports said. The AMOS-6, which was the result of a collaboration between Facebook and French satellite-maker Eutelsat, was to provide free broadband to at least 14 countries on the African continent and Middle East.

According to Dailymail, CEO of US-based Aerospace company SpaceX Elon Musk also lost about $390 million as the stock prices of two of his companies -- Tesla and SolarCity -- dropped after the accident on Thursday morning. Shares in Elon Musk's electric car maker Tesla dropped 5.3 per cent and his SolarCity venture was also down 9.1 per cent.

The mishap was also a setback for NASA, which has been counting on the private company to keep the International Space Station stocked with supplies and, ultimately, astronauts. SpaceX said Friday evening that its number one priority after Thursday's accident at Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station "is to safely and reliably return to flight for our customers, as well as to take all the necessary steps to ensure the highest possible levels of safety for future crewed missions with the Falcon 9."

The company said it has begun a full investigation of the explosion and that SpaceX's "Accident Investigation Team," along with oversight from the Federal Aviation Administration and assistance from NASA and the US Air Force, is in the "early" stages of reviewing 3,000 channels of telemetry and video data covering a brief time period of 35 to 55 milliseconds, reported Arstechnica.com.

The statement from SpaceX provided no additional information about the cause of the accident. It only repeated that the incident occurred during fueling of the launch vehicle before a static fire test, rather than during the test itself, and that the "anomaly" originated around the upper stage liquid oxygen tank.

At the time of the incident, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was in Africa making new "Friends", CNN said. In a note, Zuckerberg expressed his disappointment but also promised to come back stronger to fulfil his mission to "connect everyone". Apart from a $200 million satellite, the company also lost precious time to build this dream.

"It was a big, complicated satellite. It takes hundreds of people at least two years to build," The Wall Street Journal quoted Tim Farrar, the president of telecom consulting firm TMF Associates as saying. While other tech giants like Alphabet, Google's parent company, has already launched and tested balloons that fly 60,000 feet in the air and beam internet connectivity to the areas below, Facebook will have to wait for more years to build a new AMOS-6 to perfect new long-distance and wireless internet technology.

With that being said, all is not gloomy for Facebook. The company has already successfully tested its solar-powered drone which is to beam free internet for nearly four billion people. Social media giant Facebook last month announced the first full-scale test flight of its Aquila solar-powered high-altitude unmanned aircraft.

The drone will beam broadband across areas about 60 miles wide and stay in the air for up to 90 days at a time. Aquila has the wingspan of an airliner, but at cruising speed it will consume only 5,000 watts - the same amount as three hair dryers or a high-end microwave. In April, the social networking giant Facebook unveiled two initiatives to improve internet services for the rural population in the developing countries, including India.

Announcing at its two-day annual F8 conference in San Francisco, US, Facebook said the Antenna Radio Integration for Efficiency in Spectrum (ARIES) system would boost speed, efficiency and quality of internet connectivity in remote areas in the developing countries. Facebook said the ARIES would demonstrate a 10x spectral and energy efficiency gain over typical 4G. Facebook also launched Terragraph -- a 60GHz wireless system aimed at bringing high-speed internet to dense urban areas around the globe.

IANS
If there's a place in the world for overstatement, hyperbole and exaggeration, it's probably somewhere on the opinion page.

Just like you don't bring to a cupcake to a knife fight, people tend not to bring cool, measured words to opinions come election time.

By the same token, though, it's fair to hold our leaders responsible  or at least accountable  for the words they choose. After all, a senator, governor or congressman saying almost anything is going to get credited as fact just because they say it. People still trust their leaders.

That's why Rep. Ryan Zinke's use of the phrase "blood money" at least twice during Thursday night's debate was both curious, odd and probably crossed the line.

Zinke referred to $1,950 that Denise Juneau had taken from the Lummi tribe in Washington state as "blood money." The Lummi have asserted treaty rights essentially stopping the Gateway Pacific Terminal, which likely will stall if not stop coal production and transportation from the Crow nation in Montana.

Zinke criticized her for taking out-of-state money at the literal expense of Montana's Crow people. But, we doubt if Zinke wants to get too deeply into a conversation about out-of-state money.

Instead, he referred to the donation as "blood money." Twice.

That is a loaded term, bordering on irresponsible. Yet, after the debate, in press release recaps and in interviews, Zinke stood by the phrase.

Blood money usually refers to profits that were made in the killing of another person. It refers to criminal activity. Two, in fact; murder and then taking money tainted by crime.

Let's get this straight: Accusing your opponent of being wrong on coal policy is one thing. Accusing Juneau of accepting money made in a criminal activity is wrong, and simply not supported by any fact. Moreover, to say that the Lummi nation has earned its money through murder is shocking and callous.

Zinke's spokeswoman stood by the statement on Friday, "Rep. Zinke believes that the Lummi have waged an economic war on the Crow people via the Gateway Terminal. They have killed the economic viability of this and killed their treaty rights to prosper off the land."

Hurting the economy is one thing. Killing someone is different. A Congressman who has served in combat  of anyone  should know that important distinction.

Moreover, the Lummi and the Gateway Pacific Terminal is just a very small part of coal's challenges. A global economy and concerns about the environment are much more to blame for Crow coal production problems than a four-figure donation from a tribe two states away.

Economic development and investment on Montana's reservations is essential. We'd challenge anyone to find a more stark example of economic struggle than on some of our Montana reservations. And that's precisely why talk of coal may be a good starting point, but the conversation all too often ends there. What other economic engines can exist there? What other means can tribes use to stimulate development and resurgence?

But Zinke wasn't the only one with an interesting construction of fact.

Juneau accused Zinke of turning his back on the Crow, commenting several times that Crow Chairman Darrin Old Coyote had not heard from the representative in more than a year.

A look at Zinke's schedule shows several meetings during the last year, notably when Donald Trump was in town.

It may have been that Juneau was provided that information second-hand. Again, candidates because of their leadership position have a responsibility to tell the truth and make assertions that are provable.
SC stays HC bail of Manna

Online Desk: The Supreme Court on Sunday stayed a High Court order until October 30 that granted bail to Nagarik Oikya convener Mahmudur Rahman Manna in a sedition case. A five member bench of the Appellate Division, led by Chief Justice SK Sinha, passed the order after hearing a petition filed by the state. The court also fixed October 30 for next hearing in the case, Earlier on August 30, the HC granted bail to Manna in the case filed against him with Gulshan Police Station in the city. A two-member HC bench comprising Justice Syed Muhammad Dastagir Husain and Justice Md Mozibur Rahman Miah passed the order after disposing of a rule. On March 21, the HC issued a rule asking the authorities concerned to explain as to why the Nagarik Oikya leader would not be granted bail in the case. On February 24 last year, plainclothes police arrested Manna from a house in the citys Banani area and handed him over to police the following day. On March 5 last year, a sedition case was filed against him as well as BNP leader Sadeque Hossain Khoka with the same police station for his remarks, which incited army against the government. -- Dhaka, Sept 4 (UNB)
More Turkish tanks enter Syria in new front

AFP, Ankara :

Turkey on Saturday sent more tanks into the northern Syrian village of al-Rai to fight Islamic State extremists, opening a new front after its intervention last month against the group, state media reported.

The tanks crossed into the village from the Turkish province of Kilis to provide military support to Syrian opposition fighters as part of Turkey's "Euphrates Shield", state-run Anadolu news agency said.

At least 20 tanks, five armoured personnel carriers, trucks and other armoured vehicles crossed the border after noon, Dogan news agency said.

Turkish Firtina howitzers fired on IS targets as the contingent advanced, Dogan said.

Euphrates Shield is Ankara's most ambitious operation during the five-and-a-half-year Syria conflict, backed by the tanks as well as war planes and special forces providing support to rebels. The goal is to remove IS from its border and to halt the westward advance of the Kurdish People's Protection Militia (YPG).

US President Barack Obama's anti-Islamic State envoy Brett McGurk said on Twitter US forces hit jihadist targets overnight on Friday with a "newly deployed" mobile rocket system close to the Turkish border with Syria.
KHULNA: A discussion meeting against militancy and terrorism was held at Khulna University of Engineering and Technology(KUET) on Saturday.
Youths vow to fight militancy, terrorism

Campus Report :BUFTBGMEA University of Fashion & Technology (BUFT) organized a seminar on anti-terrorism on Saturday at BUFT Auditorium as per instruction of the government and UGC. Muzaffar U Siddique, Founder Chairman, Board of Trustees of BUFT, was the chief guest of the program. Reaz-Bin-Mahmood, Member of Board of Trustees, BUFT and Former Vice President (Finance) of BGMEA and Salahuddin Ahmed, Member of Board of Trustees of BUFT, were present as the special guests. The program was chaired by Prof Dr Nizamuddin Ahmed, the Vice Chancellor of BUFT. Prof Dr Engr Ayub Nabi Khan, Pro-Vice Chancellor and Convener of Anti-Terrorism Monitoring Cell of BUFT delivered the welcome speech.Registrar ANM Rafiqul Alam, all heads of the academic and administrative departments, faculty members, officials, students and print media persons were present in the event. The program was supervised by Head of Logistics Wg Cdr Shahidullah (Rtd.), Kazi Shamsur Rahman, Sr Asst. Professor of AMT Dept and Chairperson of Cultural Committee and Atikur Rahman, Deputy Librarian, BUFT.IUMahmud Hasan RonyMore than 6 thousand students, teachers and officials of Islamic University (IU), Kushtia raised voices against militancy and urged a united effort to eliminate it from the country. As a part of the program announced by the Ministry of Education, a rally to create awareness about terrorism and militancy was held in IU on Saturday.The rally led by its VC Prof Dr Harun-ur-Rashid Askari, started in front of the administration building parading the whole campus which ends at in front of the TSCC. More than 6 thousand students, teachers of all the departments and the officials of the university joined the rally carrying banner, festoon and placard against militancy and terrorism. After the rally they joined in a seminar and cultural event organized in the central auditorium of IU. A seminar titled 'Resist against Militancy and Extremism' was held at the university central auditorium.Prof Dr Harun-ur-Rashid Askari attended was the chief guest at the seminar and cultural event while Pro-VC Prof Dr Shahinoor Rahman Presided over it.IU transport administrator Prof M Saidur Rahman and Armin Khatun, Assistant Professor of Law and Mulim Jurisprudence Department jointly conducted the discussion programme. University treasurer Prof Dr Salim Toha, Acting Registrar SM Abdul Latif, students adviser Prof Dr Anwar Hossain, Proctor Prof M Mahbubar Rahman Prof ABM Siddiqur Rahman Ashrafi, chairman of Al-Quran and Islamic Studies department, Prof M Mizanur Rahman provost of Sheikh Hasina Hall, Humanities and Social Science faculty dean Prof Ruhul Amin, and among others spoke.Faculty members, Deans, Chairmen of all the departments and IU Teachers Association, different teachers forums, different student political organizations were present there. Vice-Chancellor Prof Harun-Ur-Rashid Askari urged religious people to be united to prevent militancy from the country.We the teachers, officials and students are united to eliminate militancy and terrorism from the campus and the country, he added.Later, a cultural function was also at held the university central auditorium.Symposium at Ashulia schoolAs per direction of the Ministry of Education, a symposium was held under the auspices of SSTS Bangladesh in the primises of SSR High School and College against Jangibad and terrorism with the presence of the students, teachers, hostel supers and guardians of the students concerned. Local chairman and popular leader of the society Shahabuddin Madbar was the chief guest of the function who spoke highly of the arrangements and display for the awareness of the anti terrarism and Jangibad. He urged to stand unitedly to suppress militancy and terrorism for establishing peace and tranguility in the society. Other speakers were Matiur Rahman, Principal of the SSR Institute and president of the function, Waleed Hamed, Director SSTS and Said Sabry, DG, SSTS was the special guest. He also spoke to the audience to be aware of the odd situation. He urged to eredicate crime from the society. Islam is the riligion of peace. So there is no room of militancy and terrarism in Islam.ASAUBASA University Bangladesh organized an anti-terrorist meeting at campus premises on Saturday as per the decision of Education Ministry. Students and their guardians, dignitaries from different social levels, community leaders, imam, media personalities, police officers attended the meeting. Prof Dr Dalem Ch. Barman, Vice Chancellor of ASAUB was present as the chief guest while Hafiz Al Faruk, Senior Police Commissioner was present as special guest in the program. Porf Iqbal Ahmad, Dean, Faculty of Business and Chairman, Anti-terrorist Committee, ASAUB presided over the program.Many of the invited guests including guardians Matiur Rahman Ujjal and Advocate Abdul Hamid, Janay Alam, Officer in Charge, Mohammadpur Police Station, Muajjin of Shamoli Shahi Mosque Hafez Moulana Rezaul Karim and Md. Murad Husain, Staff Reporter, The Daily Protidiner Songbad spoke in the meeting. They emphasized on family relation and social awareness to prevent terrorist activities. The speakers said that free flow of information could protect the terrorism. They also added that it is important to involve the students in different activities which would keep away them from unlawful activities. The speakers have also said that guardians should contact regularly with teachers' of educational institutes and teachers should present a short lecture on anti-terrorism in the beginning of their classes.Treasurer, Deans and Chairmen from different Faculties and departments, teachers from different department, ASAUB officials and students have also participated in the meeting. EU Eastern University (EU) organized a discussion meeting on "Prevention of Terrorism and Militancy" on Saturday. Prof Dr Abdur Rab, EU Vice Chancellor was present as the Chief Guest at the programme chaired by the Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University, Prof Dr Abdul Hannan Chowdhury while Chairpersons; Registrar; Faculty members; guardians; officials and students of EU took part in the program. EU Vice Chancellor informed that families have to render proper education to their children to prevent terrorism. He also mentioned that EU has adopted zero-tolerance towards terrorism and militancy and has upgraded security measures at the university premises in the current context of the country.RUDRoyal University Of Dhaka (RUD) organized view exchange meeting against militancy and terrorism on Saturday at the training academy office (Learning and Talent Dev Centre), Iqbal Center, Banani in the capital. All students and guardians were presents in the programs.Dr HBM Iqbal, Chairman of The Premier Bank Ltd and also the Vice Chairman of the Royal University of Dhaka was present as chief guest. Khondker Fazle Rashid , MD and CEO of the Premier Bank was the special Guest. Acting Vice Chancellor Col. (retd) Prof Md. Mosaraf Hossain presided over the program and exchanged views against militancy with guardians and students All students and teachers along with guests and chief guest took oath against militancy and declared that RUD is the institution of "No-Hooliganism - No terrorism".BSMRMU Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Maritime University (BSMRMU) held a discussion session on anti-terrorism and anti-militancy at the temporary campus of the university on Saturday. BSMRMU Vice-Chancellor Rear Admiral ASM Abdul Baten graced the occasion as chief guest while Dean, Registrar, Treasurer, faculty members, students and all officers of the university were present. Speakers highlighted the importance of presence of students in the class room and involving the students in cultural and social activities side by side. The university is determined to detect and control all types of terrorist activities and militancy. For this, the university arranged extracurricular activities, given administrative orders and special instructions to the faculty members and students, said the Vice-Chancellor.Milestone CollegeAn anti-militancy and anti-terrorism meeting was held at Milestone College on Saturday. Principal of the College Prof Md. Shahidul Islam presided over the meeting while Bidhan Tripura, Deputy Commissioner (Uttara Division) of Dhaka Metropolitan Police was present at the meeting as chief guest. Assistant Police commissioner (Uttara Division) of Dhaka Metropolitan Police Mohammad Sohel Rana, Officer incharge of Uttara West Police Station Md. Ali Hossain Khan, Founder and Advisor of Milestone College Colonel Nurun Nabi (retd), Administrative Principal of Milestone College Lt Colonel M Kamaluddin Bhuiyan (retd) and Administrative Director Md. Masud Alom were present as honorable guests at the meeting.Students, guardians, departmental heads, all teachers, local dignitaries, a large number of officers and stuffs were present at the meeting.
Training on fire safety inspection begins in industrial sector

Economic Reporter :

A two month-long training course on electrical safety inspection in factories got underway yesterday with an aim to reduce fire incidents in the country's industrial sector, especially in readymade garment factories

A number of 315 inspectors, mostly from fire service department, garment sector, trade bodies and the government's labour inspectorate, are participating in the programme.

They will receive training on electrical safety to enhance safety inspection capacity in the sector. The programme will continue until the end of October.

Bangladesh Fire Service and Civil Defence Department (BFSCD), with support from the International Labour Organization's Fire and General Building Safety Project, has organised the course. The US Department of Labor funded the initiative.

According to the BFSCD figures, approximately 75% of fires in RMG factories are electrical in nature.

Taking place in nine batches until the end of October, each three-day training session will comprise classroom work complemented by field visits allowing the trainees to put new skills into practice in a factory environment.

As part of the programme a core group of inspectors will also be trained as trainers in electrical safety.

Brig Gen Ali Ahmed Khan, director general of the BFSCD, said: "Electrical short circuits are the main cause of fires in the RMG sector. This training will better equip the fire service to reduce this risk and ensure compliance with national codes and standards on building and workers' safety, not only in the RMG sector but across all industries."

Srinivas Reddy, ILO country director, said: "This training is an important element of strengthening the regulators capacity to enforce laws and rules governing workplace safety."

"It will also reinforce collaboration between the fire service, Department of Inspections for Factories and Establishments and industry organisations to ensure harmonization and a co-operative approach towards government inspection regimes."
Jamaat calls hartal for today

UNB, Dhaka :Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami has called an eight-hour countrywide hartal for Monday protesting what it called the 'planned killing' of its leader Mir Quasem Ali for war crimes.The announcement was made in a statement issued by Jamaat acting secretary general Dr Shafiqur Rahman on Saturday night. The shutdown will begin at 6 am and end at 2 pm, it said.Jamaat will also hold gayebana janaza for Mir Quasem Ali and doa mahfil seeking salvation of hisdeparted soul across the country on Sunday. Mir Quasem Ali, believed to be the main financer of anti-liberation party Jamaat-e-Islami, was hanged on Saturday night for the atrocious crimes he had committed against humanity during the Liberation War in 1971 to prevent Bangladesh's independence.After over four years of trial, the 63-year-old Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami central leader was executed in Kashimpur Central Jail at 10:30 pm. "Mir Quasem was hanged at 10:30 pm for his crimes against humanity," Kasimpur Jail Super Prashanta Kumar Banik told reporters at the jail gate around 10:44 pm.
India to carry petroleum products via BD

bdnews24.com :The Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL) will transport petroleum products from the north-eastern state of Assam to Tripura through Bangladesh from Sept 7, an official said in Agartala on Sunday.The official said the arrangement was due to the difficulties faced in carrying petrol and diesel through the Indian roads of the region.The IOCL under the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas of the Indian Government and the Roads and Highways Department (RHD) of the Bangladesh government had signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in lieu of this in Dhaka on Aug 18. "If the passports of the officials and truckers of IOCL were received by Tuesday, the transportation of the petroleum products from Assam to Tripura via Bangladesh would start from Sept 7," an IOCL official said.He said Indian oil tankers carrying petroleum products from Bongaigaon (northern Assam) will ply on the Dawki border (Meghalaya)- Tamabil (Bangladesh)- Chatlapur (Bangladesh)- Kailasahar (north Tripura) route covering a distance of 136 km in about four hours. "This new route via Bangladesh would save time and costs in carrying petroleum products from Assam to Tripura as the existing over 400 km mountainous route required more than ten hours to carry these essential items. Besides, the condition of national highways through Meghalaya and southern Assam is horrifying," the official added.The short-term India-Bangladesh deal on shipping of the petroleum products is valid until Sep 30. An official statement of the Indian High Commission in Dhaka said based on the request by the Indian government, Bangladesh has granted permission for the movement of petroleum goods on humanitarian grounds through their territory. The MoU will facilitate India to carry petroleum goods (Motor Spirit, High Speed Diesel, Superior Kerosene Oil and Liquefied Petroleum Gas) from Assam to Tripura through Bangladesh territory to make a buffer stock of them in the north-eastern state.Bangladesh had earlier allowed India to carry food grains and heavy machineries from different parts of India to north-eastern state of Tripura via Bangladesh. The Food Corporation of India (FCI) has transported a fresh consignment of 2,350 tonnes of rice last week from Kolkata to Tripura via Bangladesh to avoid transportation hitches through the traditional route of Assam and Meghalaya.Earlier in 2012, Bangladesh had allowed state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation to ferry heavy machinery, turbines and over-dimensional cargoes through Ashuganj port for the 726-MW Palatana mega power project in southern Tripura. There is only a narrow land corridor to the north-eastern region through Assam and West Bengal that passes through hilly terrain with steep gradients and multiple hairpin bends, making plying of vehicles, especially loaded trucks, very difficult.Agartala via Guwahati is 1,650 km from Kolkata by road, and 2,637 km from New Delhi. But the distance between Agartala and Kolkata via Bangladesh is just 620 km.
NY police arrest suspect in murder of BD woman



New York police have arrested a suspect in the murder of a 60-year-old Bangladeshi woman. Nazma Khanam, who moved to the US ten years ago, was knifed to death in New York less than two blocks away from her home in Queens on the night of Aug 31. The suspect, 22-year-old Yonatan Galvez-Marin, was nabbed from the Jamaica Hills neighbourhood, where the victim's husband found her bleeding.

Police said Galvez-Marin made statements implicating himself to stabbing the woman after she refused to hand over money. The suspect lives along the road where the incident took place, about two blocks south of the Khanam's home. He has been charged for murder, in addition to robbery and criminal possession of a weapon. The victim's relatives, however, have been suspecting it to be a hate crime saying no personal possessions were taken during the assault. A New York police spokesperson said that investigators do not believe that faith or ethnicity were factors in the murder.

Nazma, who taught at a school in Bangladesh's Shariatpur, moved to the United States about 10 years ago with her husband Shamsul Haque. The couple was walking back home and Nazma was a bit ahead of her husband.

Relatives said Haque stopped to catch his breath and let his wife go on without him. He heard his wife scream before finding her mortally wounded.
But finally at Keraniganj!

Govt hints at building dorms for JnU students

M M Jasim/Mahmud Hasan :

The government has responded to the demand for constructing residential halls for the students of Jagannath University (JnU).

The Education Ministry has decided to build the hall at Keraniganj instead of on the abandoned land of the Dhaka Central Jail (old) on the Nazimuddin Road in Old Dhaka, the ministry sources said.

Education Minister Nurul Islam Nahid on Sunday said, the Ministry has drafted two proposals to construct the new halls for the JnU students, which will be submitted to the Executive Committee of National Economic Council (ECNEC) for approval.

"I believe that the proposals will be passed in the ECNEC meeting and we will be able to start the work by 2017," he said.

The minister said this at a meeting held between the minister and the JnU Teachers' Association (JnUTA) in the Home Ministry's auditorium on Sunday.

A 13-member teachers' representative led by JnUTA President Professor Kazi Saifuddin met the minister with a view to resolving the ongoing crisis due to continuous demonstration of the students for residential halls.

Nurul Islam Nahid said, "We will build a 10-storey building for the male students at Keraniganj.

A 20-storey academic building will be built on the campus. A female hall is being constructed. It will be opened soon."

"We also found two lands at Purbachal and Jhilmil projects. The process to buy the lands is going on. The problem will be solved if we can buy the lands," the minister said. He also asked the teachers' leaders to find new land for constructing halls in Keraniganj.

Meanwhile, Raisul Islam Noyon, a spokesman of the ongoing movement, told The New Nation that the students have no faith in the speech of the Education Minister and other top officials of the Ministry for their breach of commitment in the past.

"Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is well aware of our problem. She wants to steer the country in front. We want to meet her and we will stop our movement after getting assurance from her," Noyon said.

He says that the ministry's initiative is just eyewash. It is nothing but to stop the movement. So, the students will continue movement until getting assurance from the PM, he said.

Maruf Nahian, another agitator, said the Education Minister told us several times to resolve our crisis. The students believed his commitments, but he breach his stance.

It may be mentioned that the Jagannath College became university in 2005.

The students began their demonstration for the fourth time on August 2 this year for halls on the land where the Dhaka Central Jail was situated on Nazimuddin Road in Old Dhaka.
Flyberg with bank

McKenna Flyberg has joined Plains Commerce Bank in Bismarck as a retail banker.

Flyberg holds an associate degree from Bismarck State College.

New at Ritter Adair

Sara Christianson and Heidi Belohlavek are new employees at Ritter Adair & Associates, Bismarck.

Christianson is a certified public accountant with more than 10 years of accounting experience. She earned a bachelors degree in business management and a masters degree in business administration from the University of North Dakota, and an accounting degree from St. Cloud State University. She specializes in tax preparation, QuickBooks training and outsourced accounting services.

Belohlavek is a bookkeeper with an associate of arts degree from Bismarck State College. She has years of experience in customer service, payroll and bookkeeping.

Attorneys selected

Jackie M. Stebbins and Micheal A. Mulloy of Stebbins Mulloy Law Firm, Bismarck, were recently selected to Super Lawyers Great Plains Rising Stars for 2016.

Only 2.5 percent of attorneys in North Dakota are selected.

Three hired by BND

April Nogosek, Joe Rauser and Connie Hummel have been hired by the Bank of North Dakota.

Nogosek is a customer service representative in student loans. She previously worked for CenturyLink as a credit consultant. She earned a bachelors degree in management at the University of Mary.

Rauser is a student loan specialist in student loans. He has a bachelors degree in psychology from North Dakota State University.

Hummel is a loan operations specialist in credit administration. She previously worked at Plains Commerce Bank as a lead teller, personal banker and banking assistant.

Doctors on faculty

Drs. Rhonda Schafer-McLean and Shannon Sauter have joined the UND Center for Family Medicine in Bismarck.

A Wilton native, Schafer-McLean is on the faculty and sees patients. She specializes in womens health care. She completed her residency in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Colorado in Denver, then returned to Bismarck and worked for a local clinic.

Sauter, a Bismarck native, is on the teaching faculty and specializes in womens health. Sauter completed residency training at the UND Center for Family Medicine in Bismarck and chose to stay on as faculty.

Two join Sanford

Drs. Shikha Gupta and Kyle Johnson have joined Sanford Seventh and Broadway Clinic in Bismarck.

Gupta, a family medicine physician, received her medical degree from Lady Hardinge Medical College and Smt. Suchetra Kriplani Hospital in New Delhi, India, and completed her residency training in family medicine from the Altru Family Medicine program in Grand Forks. She is board certified in family medicine by the American Academy of Family Physicians.

Johnson, an ear, nose and throat physician, received his medical degree from Keck School of Medicine of USC in Los Angeles and completed his residency training in otolaryngology-head and neck surgery at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington.

Babel hired at LEC

Megan Babel has been hired as the communications specialist at the Lignite Energy Council.

A Bismarck native, Babel graduated from Bismarck State College and from North Dakota State University with a bachelors degree in public relations and advertising.

Her work history includes interning at the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services and working in the NDSU English department.

New shareholder

Fredrikson & Byron has elected Bismarck-based attorney Michael D. Schoepf as a new shareholder of the firm.

Schoepf is a member of the law firms energy, litigation and oil and gas groups.

2 added to staff

Todd Klee and Arlene Brossart are new employees at Premier Tax & Bookkeeping in Bismarck.

Klee, the branch manager, most recently was CFO for Missouri River Feeders LLP and Price Cattle Ranch LLP. He holds bachelors and masters degrees from the University of Mary.

Brossart is a tax and bookkeeping specialist who worked for Associated Pool Builders and Associated Builders. She earned a bachelors degree in accounting from Dickinson State University and a bachelors degree in business administration from U-Mary.

High CPA scores

Karen Stenehjem, an accounting manager with Ritter Adair and Associates PC in Bismarck, has been recognized by the North Dakota CPA Society for receiving one of the three highest combined scores on the certified public accountant exam for North Dakota candidates.
Hill Tracts become hot again

Daylong strike observed: Five Bangali groups demanded repeal of new Land Commission Law

Reza Mahmud :Three districts of Chittagong Hill Tracts became hot again over the CHT Land Dispute Resolution Commission (Amendment) Act 2016. The Bengali people in the region demanded repeal of the act terming it an 'unprecedented black law'.Five Bangali organisations of the Hill tracts observed daylong strike on Sunday at Rangamati, Khagrachhari and Bandarban districts to prevent the first meeting of the Commission set for the day. The amended act was published in gazette on August 9 as a law. The Bangali organisations vowed to continue their movement until the law is repealed. "The amended act is an unprecedented black law because according to the article 6 (1) of the Section 16 of the amended act, no one could file appeal to court or other authorities against any decision made by the CHT Land Dispute Resolution Commission. The main aim of the amended law is to evict Bangales from the CHT," Abdul Wadud Bhuiyan, the former Chairman of CHT Development Board, told The New Nation yesterday. Also a BNP central leader, Bhuiyan demanded that the law be totally repealed or re-amended. Atiqur Rahman, Bandarban district president of the Parbatya Nagorik Parishad said, according to the main law (previous act), the decision of the Commission's Chairman was the final but now it has been changed. The Commission has not adopted any hill resident as Bangali. It is totally ill motivated to make CHT empty Bangali. In contrast, Justice Anwarul Haque, the Chairman of the Commission said, "It is totally baseless idea that the act is targeted to evict Bangalees from the area. The Commission will work only about the disputed lands."Presiding over the meeting Anwarul Haque said this after the first meeting of the Commission, held at Rangamati Circuit House. The Chairman said the Commission is ready to start its work. After the amendment of the law there was no more problem to start resolving the disputes on lands of the area, he added.Parbattya Chattagram Ancholik Parishad Chairman Jyotirindra Bodhipriya Larma alias Santu Larma, Rangamati district council chairman Brish Ketu Chakma, Khagrachhari District Council chairman Kongjuri Marma, Rangamati Chakma Circle Chief King Barrister Debashish Roy, Mobinur Rashid Amin, Additional Divisional Commissioner of Chittagong and Secretary of the Commission Rezaul Karim attended the meeting. The life has been adversely affected in the three hiull districts due to the daylong strike enforced by five Bangali groups.The five groups- Parbattya Nagarik Parishad, Parbattya Ganaparishad, Somo-Odhikar Andolon, Parbattya Bangali Chhatra Parishad and Parbattya Bangali Chhatra Oikya Parishad - have called the strike to prevent the meeting of the CHT Land Dispute Resolution Commission.As a result of the strike, movement of transport, both on roads and waterways, has been affected in Rangamati, Khagrhachharhi and Bandarban districts.BGB and army personnel were deployed at vital points of the three districts towns.Rangamati Kotwali police OC Mohammed Rashid said that strike supporters were picketing in the town.But he said no untoward incident has been reported. It is to be noted that CHT Land Dispute Resolution Commission was created after the CHT Peace Accord was signed on Dec 2, 1997.Parbattya Chattagram Janasanghati Samiti (PCJSS) President Santu Larma signed the accord with the then Awami League-led government.
BD protests Pak reaction over Quasem`s execution

High Commissioner summoned

Sagar Biswas:The government on Sunday summoned acting Pakistani High Commissioner Samina Mehtab to lodge a formal protest against the Pakistan Foreign Ministry statement over war criminal Mir Quasem Ali's execution.



Acting Secretary to Ministry of Foreign Affairs Kamrul Ahsan summoned Samina Mehtab to the Foreign Office yesterday afternoon. Director General of South Asia Wing Monwar Hossain was present there at that time.



"Pakistan's statement about death penalty of Mir Quasem is nothing but direct interference in our internal affairs. The trial [of Mir Quasem] was held in a transparent way. He got chance to file appeal. And he had availed the opportunity," Kamrul Ahsan said on Sunday.



"The country's apex court thinks that it is an appropriate punishment to him [Quasem] for his crimes against humanity committed during Liberation War in 1971. The trial of war crimes is an internal affair of Bangladesh. In no way, Pakistan can express its view over the issue," he said.



Hours after hanging of Quasem, the Pakistan Foreign Ministry in a statement said that he [Quasem] was executed for the 'alleged crimes committed before December 1971' and it was an act of suppressing the opposition, through flawed judicial process, which is completely against the spirit of democracy.



A top ranking official of Foreign Ministry requesting anonymity said that Dhaka also handed over a "diplomatic note" to Pakistan envoy protesting the statement of Islamabad.



On Saturday night, Mir Quasem was hanged for his crimes against humanity during the War of Liberation War in 1971. The 63-year-old Jamaat leader [Quasem] is the sixth war criminal finally hanged for war crimes. And significantly, Pakistan issued provocative statements after each and every execution.



Dhaka earlier several times had cautioned Pakistan not to poke its nose into internal affairs of Bangladesh. But defying all diplomatic norms, Islamabad said it was deeply saddened by the execution of Jamaat-e-Islami leader Mir Quasem for the crimes committed before December 1971.



Against this backdrop, a senior official of Foreign Ministry yesterday described Islamabad's reaction 'totally unacceptable' and 'brazen'.



Expressing its deep sadness over the execution of Mir Quasem, Pakistan on Saturday in its statement said the Bangladesh Government should uphold its commitment, as per the Tripartite Agreement of 1974, wherein it "decided not to proceed with the trials as an act of clemency.



"But refuting the claim, Bangladesh Foreign Ministry officials said it was clearly 'distorted' version of the agreement. The trial of war criminals is going on as people's demand and Pakistan statement is totally against the national spirit, they said.



"The act of suppressing the Opposition, through flawed trials, is completely against the spirit of democracy," Pakistan Foreign Office said. "Ever since the beginning of the trials, several international organizations, human rights groups, and international legal figures have raised objections to the court proceedings, especially regarding fairness and transparency, as well as harassment of lawyers and witnesses representing the accused."



"Recriminations for political gains are counter productive. Pakistan believes that matters should be addressed with a forward looking approach in the noble spirit of reconciliation. Pakistan offers deepest condolences to the bereaved family members," the Pakistan statement added.
The Undead Archives

I have finally salvaged my pre-Blogger TDR archives and added them into Blogger. They are almost totally in the form of one giant post for each month. And the formatting strayed from the originals. Sorry. But historians everywhere can rejoice that this treasure trove of my thoughts is restored to the world.
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When Mandaree Enterprises CEO Clarence OBerry represented his company at trade shows, he liked to take along trinkets from New Town, but it was hard to find local full-time artists whose products he could offer because many couldnt make a living at it.

Thats what inspired him to start People of Earth Matter. For the past several years, he has envisioned the global brand with the message: People of the Earth matter. All of us.

POEM is founded on the belief that all people are connected by the Earth and, hence, to one another, he said in a statement. We all contribute to its beauty, challenges and the richness of its heritage.

Unfortunately, many artists  including many from culturally, economically and geographically disadvantaged groups  dont have access to the resources they need to market their goods effectively or make a living from their work. With its e-commerce platform, POEM can provide those artists with the infrastructure they need to give their work exposure and reach, according to a statement by the company.

Patrick OBerry is serving as manager of POEMs gallery and retail facility on Third Street in downtown Minot.

So far, the company has contracts with five artists: one from Rapid City, S.D.; two from Detroit; one from south of Detroit; and an Albuquerque, N.M.,-based artist consortium. It also is finalizing agreements with 12 more from the Detroit area, where Mandaree has an office, and another from Kenya, said Scott Larkin, marketing manager for Mandaree.

There's Tree Trunk Arts by Collyn DeBano, who makes jewelry from metal casts of plants.

Sonja Holy Eagles Dakota Drum Co. instruments are on display.

There is Rebel Nell, which makes jewelry from bits of graffiti that have fallen from walls in Detroit. The artists employ previously incarcerated women, showing them how they can run a business of their own.

Matt Schanandore, a member of Three Affiliated Tribes, is set to have his native flute and piano compilations available for digital download.

In addition to working with artists, POEM will create some pieces of its own. The production facility in the back of the Minot gallery has a laser engraver, sand blaster and wood-carving equipment.

The company will create those small trinkets, such as money clips, that Clarence OBerry wants to take to trade shows, according to Larkin. It will also offer custom metal, stone and wood laser engraving. The company has engraved bricks for the remodeled 4 Bears Casino & Lodge; it will adorn an 8- by 12-foot art wall with intricate wood laser engravings in its gallery; and it is working on a stone engraving series as a way to preserve endangered languages.

Larkin said the gallery and the production facility went hand in hand.

POEM will send talent scouts to art fairs nationwide looking for artists to join, including the United Tribes International Powwow in Bismarck.

But POEMs ultimate scope is much broader. It is answering a call to action to improve quality of life for people around the world by donating 10 percent of its net proceeds to charitable organizations that support fundamental human needs.

The company has started working with Stop Hunger Now and a literacy-focused charity called buildON. The company is also trying to partner with nonprofits that build clean water infrastructure and support drug-free lifestyles.

It just kind of grew out of itself, Patrick OBerry said of the companys charity focus.

Larkin said Clarence OBerry has always been focused on helping people. He came on as Mandarees CEO when the company was on the brink of bankruptcy.

Helping people is whats always driven him, Larkin said.

So, over the past few months, Clarence OBerry oversaw the renovations of the Minot gallery space, giving POEM a location that allowed it to be part of the community.

The gallery will have an open house from 5 to 9 p.m. Sept. 22, taking donations for the Minot Area Homeless Coalition and allowing the community to see what the company is about. The open house will feature a video mosaic telling the POEM story and the stories of its charity partners, Larkin said.

Larkin said if all goes well, POEM hopes to donate a few thousand dollars to charity partners by the end of the year.

For more information or to RSVP for the open house, go online to POEM.world or email contact@poem.world.
President Joe Biden has decided to ban Russian oil imports, toughening the toll on Russia's economy in retaliation for its invasion of Ukraine. The United States generally imports about 100,000 barrels a day from Russia, only about 5% of Russia's crude oil exports, according to Rystad Energy. Last year, roughly 8% of U.S. imports of oil and petroleum products came from Russia. Gas prices have been rising for weeks due to the conflict and in anticipation of potential sanctions on the Russian energy sector. The U.S. national average for a gallon of gasoline soared 45 cents a gallon in the past week and topped $4.06 on Monday, according to auto club AAA. Should the US ban Russian oil imports over Ukraine war?

You voted:
Hurricane Update: Fears arise that Gov. Ron DeSantis may reroute Hurricane Ian from Florida coast to Martha's Vineyard

Study: People who define themselves by what they stand against, are usually afraid to tell people what they stand for

Liz Cheney: Voters need to ask themselves, why they are so out of touch with their politicians

White House: IRS toy guns for children are now politically correct, mandatory

BREAKING: Biden's economic sanctions on the U.S. to be partially lifted prior to November election

GOP's new slogan for midterms: Make Dissent Patriotic Again

PSA: Due to high gas prices police departments will now be responding and making arrests via Zoom.

NYT: Roe vs Wade to be renamed the "Don't Say Fetus" law

Democrats insist on carrying unwanted presidency to term

Elon Musk went to bed thinking he owns Twitter. Then the mail-in ballots arrived at 2am...

Obama: "If you like your information you can keep your information"

Fact checkers reveal Biden handler not a real Easter bunny

Biden 2021: you'll save $0.16 on 4th of July BBQ!

Biden 2022: you'll save a ton of $$ if you don't eat this 4th of July!

Disney to buy Epstein Island for new theme park

The Biology Underground is like the Weather Underground, except they are real biologists and they've had to go underground

"Psssst. Hey you, kid. Ya wanna watch a Disney movie with me?"

"I am not suicidal," says COVID-19 after being contracted by Hillary Clinton

Trans-swimmer Lia Thomas's trophy is smaller than for male swimmers, and only 73% gold

Sources: U.S. now considers majority of U.S. citizens a threat to U.S.

BREAKING: Russian General claims he was beaten up outside Ukrainian bio lab by two Nazis who poured vodka and caviar over him and yelled "This is NATO Country!"

Global warming news: 100,000 Russian migrants fleeing climate change about to march into Ukraine

Future headline: Donald Trump to buy CNN for one dollar

Georgia Governor Stacy Abrams feels honored to be the new Supreme Court justice

President Biden: 'Vote for me or I'll shoot this foot'

Fact checkers give Pinocchio's speech four Bidens

Fauci: The only thing we have to fear, is a lack of fear itself!

Study: Most people have had sex more violent than January 6th

Facebook permanently bans Facebook from Facebook for violating Facebook community standards

New remake of the 1950's horror movie Them to be titled Them/They

Teachers Union: Idea that CRT is being taught in K-12 just a conspiracy theory by white supremacists trying to maintain their systemically racist police state

Xze/She/He who controls the past controls the future; Xze/She/He who controls the present controls the past

S ocialists vow to fight against Critical Socialism Theory

A more perfect Soviet Union: the Party pretends it unites us, and we pretend we are united

Biden solves border crisis with free direct flights from Central America to major metropolitan areas

Critical race theory: destroy the world of systemic racism, build a world of systemic race-baiting

In the future everyone will get canceled for fifteen minutes

Biden proposes bill to spend two trillion dollars on more money printing factories

Social unity: They pretend to hold elections and we pretend we voted

Immigrants to Texas and Florida from New York and California break down and cry when they realize all their sacrifices for a better tomorrow were based on lies

China anal swabs detect new 'silent but deadly' transmission of covid-19 variant

Social science breakthrough: 'White' is the new way of saying 'Bourgeois'

Biden administration swat teams make sweeping arrests of underground female-only track meets

'Green energy' to be renamed 'blackout energy' for easier comprehension of climate complexities

New children's game: Rock, Paper, Scissors, Science







Texas: Biden administration sends emergency wind turbines to help fight the blackouts

BREAKING: Biden signs executive order canceling the number 45

ATTENTION: It is your duty to report anyone who says this is no longer a free country. Fact-checking commissars are monitoring all state-approved social media platforms for your convenience

OUT: If you don't vote, you can't complain!

IN: If you didn't vote Democrat, you can't complain!

Social media justice: followers removed from pro-Trump accounts will be added to Biden's Twitter account

Fact check: a democratic election is the one in which votes are counted until Democrats win

JUST IN: China bans Twitter for being too totalitarian

Pelosi introduces new House rule to replace 'gender' terms like mother, daughter, father, son with the word 'comrade'; the only acceptable pronoun will also be 'comrade'





Sources: Biden transition team demands access to White House basement to begin renovations

BREAKING: President Trump pardons America for its past

Prime Minister Modi: to avoid accusations of racism India will change its name to Cleveland

Biden creates Antifascist Librarian Justice Committee; the first book scheduled for burning is Fahrenheit 451

Media study: 148% of Americans believe voter fraud doesn't exist

2020 Election forecast: if Joe Biden emerges from the basement on Election Day and sees his shadow, expect four more years of Trump

BREAKING: President Trump pardons Corn Pop

Toobin, though on administrative leave, is still pulling for Biden

Chinese whistleblower: Biden-20 was genetically engineered in a Wuhan lab

Nancy Pelosi sponsors a bill to create the office of removal of the President

New college humanities major: Critical Trump Studies

Opinion: Joe Biden is just an idea

CNN: Biden took a solid second place in the debate, while Trump only came next to last

Having ordered that all Californians switch to electric cars by 2035, Gov. Gavin Newsom follows up by mandating them to have electricity by 2035

Election 2020: Joe Biden pledges to a peaceful post-election transfer of power to George Soros

Out: Flatten the curve. In: Flatten the country.

Breaking: the Democrat Party has finished transitioning from being the party of JFK to being the party of Lee Harvey Oswald

Paradigm shift in Chromatics: Study shows Indigo (#3F00FF) mixed with Jamaic (#C0FF01) yields Black (#000000)

Study: the trouble with wokeism is eventually you run out of victims

Stacey Abrams refuses to concede to Harris; declares herself Biden's VP

Election 2020: Spunky former presidential candidate wins VP slot by a head

Churches in many states to hold services in opened up pubs and bars

Election 2020: Xi Jinping still undecided on vice president for Joe Biden

Reports: Republicans pounce on 'Republicans pounce' reports

Minneapolis launches online looting app to combat Covid-19

DNC study finds lockdowns no longer necessary as the economy is now being destroyed more effectively by looters and rioters

With America in lockdown, China offers to host Democrat primary

Bernie Sanders tests negative for President

In related news, Joe Biden follows other candidates in withdrawing from race and endorsing Joe Biden

New York Governor Cuomo shuts down all 'non-essential' business, surprised to find himself out of a job

Biden commits to picking a woman as running mate as long as she passes his sniff test

Joe Biden's coronavirus prevention tips: always rub hand sanitizer on young girls before sniffing and fondling them

Russian lawmakers warned that the American Democrats are meddling to re-elect Putin

Joe Biden promises lucrative board member jobs as door prizes to get people to his rallies

Democrats now worried they might even lose the illegal alien vote

Soleimani's remains FedExed back to Iran and now no one knows what happened to the box

BREAKING: massive search underway in Iran after Soleimani's boxed FedEx'd remains stolen off front porch

Liz Warren harshly critical of Biden's suggestion to coal miners that they should learn to code, offers to have them trained as romance novelists instead

Pelosi: "First we have to impeach Donald Trump before we can find out why we impeached him."

Schiff calls his Amazon Alexa to testify: 'She knows absolutely everything'

Iran answers to new Reagan statue in Berlin by erecting Obama statue at Tehran airport where he delivered pallets of cash

California accepts award for most progressive environmental policies; further progressive developments to be announced as blackouts permit

BREAKING: Romney DNA test reveals he is 1/1024th Republican

California Governor Gavin Newsom blames electricity blackouts on Ukrainian kulaks, vows revenge

Rat falling from White House ceiling fears for his life, begs reporters for protection, offers a tell-all memoir

Latest UN climate report shows this month so far has seen the scariest climate pronouncements on record

Climate science: there's no need for climate protests in China because China is already communist

Islamic clerics split on whether Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib should be traveling around the world without an accompanying male relative

Dem candidates call for the Beatles' song 'Get Back' and the 'White Album' to be banned; surviving two white guys of the group must pay reparations

Bond's number is up: next 007 will be a black woman, played by Barack Obama

NYT: moon landing was one small step for Man, one giant leap for White Male Supremacy

HURRICANE WATCH: Tropical storm Barry has records sealed, once offshore expected to change name to Barack

Trump politicizes the 4th of July, declares it henceforth to be called the 45th of July, or July the Trumpth

Barack Obama critical of Trump for failing to insert 'I, me, my' into his 4th of July speech: "very unpresidential!"

Congressional Democrats: John Dean's testimony proves Trump is Nixon in disguise and must be impeached

Bernie Sanders admits to being a millionaire, promises to eat himself if nominated

International Women's Day observed, women only paid 73% of attention afforded to men

Democrats: anti-Semitism means never having to say you're sorry

AOC: aborting babies helps preserve the planet for the next generation

Bernie Sanders launches presidential campaign, promises to "build a great big beautiful Iron Curtain" around America if elected

West Virginia renames itself Eastern Kentucky to avoid further embarrassment from Virginia

BREAKING: Justice Ginsburg released from hospital after breaking 3 ribs at late night bar brawl in Adams Morgan

DNA news: Senator Warren tanking in latest totem polls

Orwell studies: 84% of academics believe problems raised in 1984 can be fixed with solutions from Animal Farm

Progress in gender justice: online dating industry issues recommendations for men to wear body cameras, bring attorneys as chaperones

Study: the only people who don't know what socialism is are the socialists

Poll: 1 in 3 #FightFor15 activists believe movement is related to lowering the age of consent across America

CNN expert: Kavanaugh confirmation will increase global warming by 3 degrees

Harry Reid comes forth to say Judge Kavanaugh didn't pay any taxes in high school

Hollywood to America: If you've got a flag on the Moon, you didn't plant that; some other country made that happen

Protest march in straight jackets against Trump ends in chaos as participants try but fail to free themselves

HEADLINES YOU WILL NEVER SEE: California Gov. Jerry Brown single-handedly stops wildfires in his state by issuing an immediate statewide ban on wildfires

San Francisco closes all Planned Parenthood clinics after sting operation catches employees using plastic straws

Vegan mother undergoes experimental surgery to force her breasts to produce almond milk

With none of his emails answered, frustrated Nigerian man commits suicide and leaves $100bn fortune to charity

California gives new meaning to strawman argument as caped Strawman battles supervillains in restaurants, bars, and fast food joints

Violence increases in Mexico as cartels switch from smuggling drugs to plastic straws to San Francisco

Obama proposes a Paris Economic Change agreement among nations to address how world will cope with future runaway economic warming

Stormy Daniels plans border visit to give migrant children freebies

San Francisco: man dumping off 20 lbs of human waste in plastic bag on street corner cited for using non-biodegradable plastic bag

BREAKING: ICE renamed Planned Citizenship, immediately absolving it of all criticism

Senate Democrats demand Supreme Court nominee not be unduly influenced by U.S. Constitution

BREAKING: In 2018, Obama and Biden can finally celebrate Recovery Summer

IG Report: the FBI broke the law, but since there was no criminal intent, no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case

Pelosi on Trump's MS-13 "animals" comments: "Four legs good, two legs bad"

Iran nuclear talks set to resume between the United States and John Kerry

Report: The Mueller investigation has finally determined that the lyrics to Louie Louie are not about Trump and Russian collusion

MARKETS: Demand for carbon credits spikes as Hamas seeks to undo damage to Earth's atmosphere caused by burning 10,000 tires on Gaza border

BREAKING: After state reassignment surgery Pennsylvania will henceforth be known as Transylvania

Experts: If we don't act now, unicorns will be extinct in just ten years. Children will ask, "Mommy, what's a unicorn?" Women and minorities will be forced to seek alternative hallucinations

Korean war must continue: Hawaiian federal judge declares Trump's peace effort unconstitutional

New York: feminists march on Broadway, demand the street be given new, non-misogynistic name

Experts: California's planned transition of all state jobs from citizens to illegal aliens by 2020 will help to avoid bankruptcy and save money for social programs for illegal aliens

Putin: If I didn't want Hillary to be president she would be dead

Doritos maker PepsiCo to introduce snack line for women; new Doritas chips will be 77% as big as Doritos and won't make any scary 'crunchy noises'

TMZ: Tooth Fairy accused of sexually assaulting millions of children, outs self as Transgendered Tooth Recovery Specialist

RUSSIA COLLUSION: Trump offers Putin to trade Rep. Maxine Waters for two unnamed members of the State Duma

Ikea founder dead at 91; his coffin arrived in a box with confusing instructions and took 3 hours to assemble

This Thanksgiving ex-president Obama continues with his tradition of apologizing to turkeys everywhere for the injustice they suffered since America's founding

Oslo, Norway: 2017 Nobel Peace Prize goes to advocacy group about which you'll forget immediately after reading this headline

Cambridge, MA, library to replace racist 'Cat in the Hat' with inclusive 'Che in a Beret'

Millions of men worldwide eagerly await broadcast of Hugh Hefner's funeral, solely for the articles

Bill Gates offers to pay for Trump's wall on condition he gets to install Windows

Bernie Sanders introduces single-payer public transportation bill to end America's unequal, unfair, and expensive private transportation system

DNC embroiled in controversy after official Twitter account accidentally 'likes' pictures of US Constitution and Bill of Rights

Hurricane Irma hits Cuba, causes millions of dollars worth of improvements to property and infrastructure

Climate study: extreme weather may be caused by unlicensed witches casting wrong spells in well-meaning effort to destroy Trump

Ex-president Obama declares Irma "Hurricane of Peace," urges not to jump to conclusions and succumb to stormophobia

CNN: Trump reverses Obama's executive order banning hurricanes

ISIS claims responsibility for a total solar eclipse over the lands of American crusaders and nonbelievers

When asked if they could point to North Korea on a map many college students didn't know what a map was

CNN: We must bring America into the 21st century by replacing the 18th century Constitution with 19th century poetry

Pelosi: 'We have to impeach the president in order to find out what we impeached him for'

BREAKING: As of Saturday July 8, 2017, all of Earth's ecosystems have shut down as per Prince Charles's super scientific pronouncement made 96 months ago. Everything is dead. All is lost. Life on Earth is no more.

DNC to pick new election slogan out of four finalists: 'Give us more government or everyone dies,' 'Vote for Democrats or everyone dies,' 'Impeach Trump or everyone dies,' 'Stop the fearmongering or everyone dies'

Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power" is humanity's last chance to save the Earth before it ends five years ago

Experts: The more we embrace diversity the more everything is the same

BOMBSHELL: TMZ offers Kathy Griffin $5 mil to keep any future sex tape private

DEVELOPING: CNN, WaPo, NYT anonymous sources say Vladimir Putin may have ties to Russia

BREAKING: Manning and Snowden have come out with strong condemnation of Donald Trump leaking classified information to Russia

Gun store goes into lockdown over report an "active university professor" roving the grounds

Dozens injured at Ralph Lauren & Louis Vuitton headquarters after Ivanka calls in missile strikes on rival fashion houses

BOMBSHELL: Evidence proves Donald Trump conspired with his campaign to defeat Hillary Clinton

University ranked "very intolerant of free speech" fights the accusation by banning the study and all involved

Concerned that Russians don't consume enough alcohol in the month of March, Russia's Orthodox Church makes St. Patrick's Day official holiday

Grassroots group calls for "The Million Regulators March" on Washington, supported by all who fear the loss of their betters telling them what to do

Experts: Starbucks CEO Schultz's hiring of 10,000 Muslim refugees likely to blow up in his face

Will the groundprog be frightened by its own shadow and hide - or will there be another season of insane protests?

Trump signs executive order making California and New York national monuments; residents have two days to vacate

Women's March against fascism completed with 400,000 fewer deaths than anticipated

Feminist historians uncover ghastly concentration camps where so-called "housewives" were forced to live inauthentic lives slaving away in kitchens

Dictionary of the future: Global Warming was a popular computer simulation game, where the only way to win was not to play

"Anti-fascist" groups violently protest misspelling of their original name, "aren't-we-fascists"

Post-inauguration blues: millions of democrats distraught as the reality of having to find real jobs sets in

"Journalism is the continuation of war by other means" is exposed as a fake quote by mainstream media journalists

Congressional Democrats: "We cannot just simply replace Obamacare with freedom because then millions of Americans will suddenly become free"

Schoolchildren jailed for building only white snowmen

Obama's reckless attacks on Russia serve as recruitment tool to create more Russian hackers

Hillary: "I lost, so I'm going to follow our democratic traditions, poison the wells, and scorch the earth"

Children in Venezuela cook and eat their Christmas toys

Hillary: "I can hack Russia from my bathroom"

Hillary suggests to counter "fake news" with government newspaper called "Truth" ("Pravda" for Russian speakers)

BREAKING: Millions of uncounted votes found on Hillary's private voting machine in her Chappaqua bathroom

New York Times: Fidel Castro world's sexiest corpse

After years of trial and error, CIA finally succeeds with the "waiting it out" technique on Fidel Castro

Post-election shopping tip: look for the PoliticsFree label at your local grocer to make sure you don't buy from companies that don't want your business anymore

In Hillary's America, email server scrubs you

Obama transfers his Nobel Peace Prize to anti-Trump rioters

Democrats blame Hillary's criminal e-mail server for her loss, demand it face prison

Afraid of "dangerous" Trump presidency, protesters pre-emptively burn America down to the ground

Clinton Foundation in foreclosure as foreign donors demand refunds

Hillary Clinton blames YouTube video for unexpected and spontaneous voter uprising that prevented her inevitable move into the White House

Sudden rise in sea levels explained by disproportionately large tears shed by climate scientists in the aftermath of Trump's electoral victory

FBI director Comey delighted after receiving Nobel Prize for Speed Reading (650,000 emails in one week)

U.N. deploys troops to American college campuses in order to combat staggeringly low rape rates

Responding to Trump's surging poll numbers, Obama preemptively pardons himself for treason

Following hurricane Matthew's failure to devastate Florida, activists flock to the Sunshine State and destroy Trump signs manually

Tim Kaine takes credit for interrupting hurricane Matthew while debating weather in Florida

Study: Many non-voters still undecided on how they're not going to vote

The Evolution of Dissent: on November 8th the nation is to decide whether dissent will stop being racist and become sexist - or it will once again be patriotic as it was for 8 years under George W. Bush

Venezuela solves starvation problem by making it mandatory to buy food

Breaking: the Clinton Foundation set to investigate the FBI

Obama captures rare Pokemon while visiting Hiroshima

Movie news: 'The Big Friendly Giant Government' flops at box office; audiences say "It's creepy"

Barack Obama: "If I had a son, he'd look like Micah Johnson"

White House edits Orlando 911 transcript to say shooter pledged allegiance to NRA and Republican Party

President George Washington: 'Redcoats do not represent British Empire; King George promotes a distorted version of British colonialism'

Following Obama's 'Okie-Doke' speech, stock of Okie-Doke soars; NASDAQ: 'Obama best Okie-Doke salesman'

Weaponized baby formula threatens Planned Parenthood office; ACLU demands federal investigation of Gerber

Experts: melting Antarctic glacier could cause sale levels to rise up to 80% off select items by this weekend

Travel advisory: airlines now offering flights to front of TSA line

As Obama instructs his administration to get ready for presidential transition, Trump preemptively purchases 'T' keys for White House keyboards

John Kasich self-identifies as GOP primary winner, demands access to White House bathroom

Upcoming Trump/Kelly interview on FoxNews sponsored by 'Let's Make a Deal' and 'The Price is Right'

News from 2017: once the evacuation of Lena Dunham and 90% of other Hollywood celebrities to Canada is confirmed, Trump resigns from presidency: "My work here is done"

Non-presidential candidate Paul Ryan pledges not to run for president in new non-presidential non-ad campaign

Trump suggests creating 'Muslim database'; Obama symbolically protests by shredding White House guest logs beginning 2009

National Enquirer: John Kasich's real dad was the milkman, not mailman

National Enquirer: Bound delegates from Colorado, Wyoming found in Ted Cruzs basement

Iran breaks its pinky-swear promise not to support terrorism; US State Department vows rock-paper-scissors strategic response

Women across the country cheer as racist Democrat president on $20 bill is replaced by black pro-gun Republican

Federal Reserve solves budget crisis by writing itself a 20-trillion-dollar check

Widows, orphans claim responsibility for Brussels airport bombing

Che Guevara's son hopes Cuba's communism will rub off on US, proposes a long list of people the government should execute first

Susan Sarandon: "I don't vote with my vagina." Voters in line behind her still suspicious, use hand sanitizer

Campaign memo typo causes Hillary to court 'New Black Panties' vote

New Hampshire votes for socialist Sanders, changes state motto to "Live FOR Free or Die"

Martin O'Malley drops out of race after Iowa Caucus; nation shocked with revelation he has been running for president

Statisticians: one out of three Bernie Sanders supporters is just as dumb as the other two

Hillary campaign denies accusations of smoking-gun evidence in her emails, claims they contain only smoking-circumstantial-gun evidence

Obama stops short of firing US Congress upon realizing the difficulty of assembling another group of such tractable yes-men

In effort to contol wild passions for violent jihad, White House urges gun owners to keep their firearms covered in gun burkas

TV horror live: A Charlie Brown Christmas gets shot up on air by Mohammed cartoons

Democrats vow to burn the country down over Ted Cruz statement, 'The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats'

Russia's trend to sign bombs dropped on ISIS with "This is for Paris" found response in Obama administration's trend to sign American bombs with "Return to sender"

University researchers of cultural appropriation quit upon discovery that their research is appropriation from a culture that created universities

Archeologists discover remains of what Barack Obama has described as unprecedented, un-American, and not-who-we-are immigration screening process in Ellis Island

Mizzou protests lead to declaring entire state a "safe space," changing Missouri motto to "The don't show me state"

Green energy fact: if we put all green energy subsidies together in one-dollar bills and burn them, we could generate more electricity than has been produced by subsidized green energy

State officials improve chances of healthcare payouts by replacing ObamaCare with state lottery

NASA's new mission to search for racism, sexism, and economic inequality in deep space suffers from race, gender, and class power struggles over multibillion-dollar budget

College progress enforcement squads issue schematic humor charts so students know if a joke may be spontaneously laughed at or if regulations require other action

ISIS opens suicide hotline for US teens depressed by climate change and other progressive doomsday scenarios

Virginia county to close schools after teacher asks students to write 'death to America' in Arabic

'Wear hijab to school day' ends with spontaneous female circumcision and stoning of a classmate during lunch break

ISIS releases new, even more barbaric video in an effort to regain mantle from Planned Parenthood

Impressed by Fox News stellar rating during GOP debates, CNN to use same formula on Democrat candidates asking tough, pointed questions about Republicans

Shocking new book explores pros and cons of socialism, discovers they are same people

Pope outraged by Planned Parenthood's "unfettered capitalism," demands equal redistribution of baby parts to each according to his need

John Kerry accepts Iran's "Golden Taquiyya" award, requests jalapenos on the side

Citizens of Pluto protest US government's surveillance of their planetoid and its moons with New Horizons space drone

John Kerry proposes 3-day waiting period for all terrorist nations trying to acquire nuclear weapons

Chicago Police trying to identify flag that caused nine murders and 53 injuries in the city this past weekend

Cuba opens to affordable medical tourism for Americans who can't afford Obamacare deductibles

State-funded research proves existence of Quantum Aggression Particles (Heterons) in Large Hadron Collider

Student job opportunities: make big bucks this summer as Hillarys Ordinary-American; all expenses paid, travel, free acting lessons

Experts debate whether Iranian negotiators broke John Kerry's leg or he did it himself to get out of negotiations

Junior Varsity takes Ramadi, advances to quarterfinals

US media to GOP pool of candidates: 'Knowing what we know now, would you have had anything to do with the founding of the United States?'

NY Mayor to hold peace talks with rats, apologize for previous Mayor's cowboy diplomacy

China launches cube-shaped space object with a message to aliens: "The inhabitants of Earth will steal your intellectual property, copy it, manufacture it in sweatshops with slave labor, and sell it back to you at ridiculously low prices"

Progressive scientists: Truth is a variable deduced by subtracting 'what is' from 'what ought to be'

Experts agree: Hillary Clinton best candidate to lessen percentage of Americans in top 1%

America's attempts at peace talks with the White House continue to be met with lies, stalling tactics, and bad faith

Starbucks new policy to talk race with customers prompts new hashtag #DontHoldUpTheLine

Hillary: DELETE is the new RESET

Charlie Hebdo receives Islamophobe 2015 award; the cartoonists could not be reached for comment due to their inexplicable, illogical deaths

Russia sends 'reset' button back to Hillary: 'You need it now more than we do'

Barack Obama finds out from CNN that Hillary Clinton spent four years being his Secretary of State

President Obama honors Leonard Nimoy by taking selfie in front of Starship Enterprise

Police: If Obama had a convenience store, it would look like Obama Express Food Market

Study finds stunning lack of racial, gender, and economic diversity among middle-class white males

NASA: We're 80% sure about being 20% sure about being 17% sure about being 38% sure about 2014 being the hottest year on record

People holding '$15 an Hour Now' posters sue Democratic party demanding raise to $15 an hour for rendered professional protesting services

Cuba-US normalization: US tourists flock to see Cuba before it looks like the US and Cubans flock to see the US before it looks like Cuba

White House describes attacks on Sony Pictures as 'spontaneous hacking in response to offensive video mocking Juche and its prophet'

CIA responds to Democrat calls for transparency by releasing the director's cut of The Making Of Obama's Birth Certificate

Obama: 'If I had a city, it would look like Ferguson'

Biden: 'If I had a Ferguson (hic), it would look like a city'

Obama signs executive order renaming 'looters' to 'undocumented shoppers'

Ethicists agree: two wrongs do make a right so long as Bush did it first

The aftermath of the 'War on Women 2014' finds a new 'Lost Generation' of disillusioned Democrat politicians, unable to cope with life out of office

White House: Republican takeover of the Senate is a clear mandate from the American people for President Obama to rule by executive orders

Nurse Kaci Hickox angrily tells reporters that she won't change her clocks for daylight savings time

Democratic Party leaders in panic after recent poll shows most Democratic voters think 'midterm' is when to end pregnancy

Desperate Democratic candidates plead with Obama to stop backing them and instead support their GOP opponents

Ebola Czar issues five-year plan with mandatory quotas of Ebola infections per each state based on voting preferences

Study: crony capitalism is to the free market what the Westboro Baptist Church is to Christianity

Fun facts about world languages: the Left has more words for statism than the Eskimos have for snow

African countries to ban all flights from the United States because "Obama is incompetent, it scares us"

Nobel Peace Prize controversy: Hillary not nominated despite having done even less than Obama to deserve it

Obama: 'Ebola is the JV of viruses'

BREAKING: Secret Service foils Secret Service plot to protect Obama

Revised 1st Amendment: buy one speech, get the second free

Sharpton calls on white NFL players to beat their women in the interests of racial fairness

President Obama appoints his weekly approval poll as new national security adviser

Obama wags pen and phone at Putin; Europe offers support with powerful pens and phones from NATO members

White House pledges to embarrass ISIS back to the Stone Age with a barrage of fearsome Twitter messages and fatally ironic Instagram photos

Obama to fight ISIS with new federal Terrorist Regulatory Agency

Obama vows ISIS will never raise their flag over the eighteenth hole

Harry Reid: "Sometimes I say the wong thing"

Elian Gonzalez wishes he had come to the U.S. on a bus from Central America like all the other kids

Obama visits US-Mexican border, calls for a two-state solution

Obama draws "blue line" in Iraq after Putin took away his red crayon

"Hard Choices," a porno flick loosely based on Hillary Clinton's memoir and starring Hillary Hellfire as a drinking, whoring Secretary of State, wildly outsells the flabby, sagging original

Accusations of siding with the enemy leave Sgt. Bergdahl with only two options: pursue a doctorate at Berkley or become a Senator from Massachusetts

Jay Carney stuck in line behind Eric Shinseki to leave the White House; estimated wait time from 15 min to 6 weeks

100% of scientists agree that if man-made global warming were real, "the last people we'd want to help us is the Obama administration"

Jay Carney says he found out that Obama found out that he found out that Obama found out that he found out about the latest Obama administration scandal on the news

"Anarchy Now!" meeting turns into riot over points of order, bylaws, and whether or not 'kicking the #^@&*! ass' of the person trying to speak is or is not violence

Obama retaliates against Putin by prohibiting unionized federal employees from dating hot Russian girls online during work hours

Russian separatists in Ukraine riot over an offensive YouTube video showing the toppling of Lenin statues

"Free Speech Zones" confuse Obamaphone owners who roam streets in search of additional air minutes

Obamacare bolsters employment for professionals with skills to convert meth back into sudafed

Gloves finally off: Obama uses pen and phone to cancel Putin's Netflix account

Joe Biden to Russia: "We will bury you by turning more of Eastern Europe over to your control!"

In last-ditch effort to help Ukraine, Obama deploys Rev. Sharpton and Rev. Jackson's Rainbow Coalition to Crimea

Al Sharpton: "Not even Putin can withstand our signature chanting, 'racist, sexist, anti-gay, Russian army go away'!"

Mardi Gras in North Korea: "Throw me some food!"

Obama's foreign policy works: "War, invasion, and conquest are signs of weakness; we've got Putin right where we want him"

US offers military solution to Ukraine crisis: "We will only fight countries that have LGBT military"

Putin annexes Brighton Beach to protect ethnic Russians in Brooklyn, Obama appeals to UN and EU for help

The 1980s: "Mr. Obama, we're just calling to ask if you want our foreign policy back. The 1970s are right here with us, and they're wondering, too."

In a stunning act of defiance, Obama courageously unfriends Putin on Facebook

MSNBC: Obama secures alliance with Austro-Hungarian Empire against Russias aggression in Ukraine

Study: springbreak is to STDs what April 15th is to accountants

Efforts to achieve moisture justice for California thwarted by unfair redistribution of snow in America

North Korean voters unanimous: "We are the 100%"

Leader of authoritarian gulag-site, The People's Cube, unanimously 're-elected' with 100% voter turnout

Super Bowl: Obama blames Fox News for Broncos' loss

Feminist author slams gay marriage: "a man needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle"

Beverly Hills campaign heats up between Henry Waxman and Marianne Williamson over the widening income gap between millionaires and billionaires in their district

Biden to lower $10,000-a-plate Dinner For The Homeless to $5,000 so more homeless can attend

Kim becomes world leader, feeds uncle to dogs; Obama eats dogs, becomes world leader, America cries uncle

North Korean leader executes own uncle for talking about Obamacare at family Christmas party

White House hires part-time schizophrenic Mandela sign interpreter to help sell Obamacare

Kim Jong Un executes own "crazy uncle" to keep him from ruining another family Christmas

OFA admits its advice for area activists to give Obamacare Talk at shooting ranges was a bad idea

President resolves Obamacare debacle with executive order declaring all Americans equally healthy

Obama to Iran: "If you like your nuclear program, you can keep your nuclear program"

Bovine community outraged by flatulence coming from Washington DC

Obama: "I'm not particularly ideological; I believe in a good pragmatic five-year plan"

Shocker: Obama had no knowledge he'd been reelected until he read about it in the local newspaper last week

Server problems at HealthCare.gov so bad, it now flashes 'Error 808' message

NSA marks National Best Friend Day with official announcement: "Government is your best friend; we know you like no one else, we're always there, we're always willing to listen"

Al Qaeda cancels attack on USA citing launch of Obamacare as devastating enough

The President's latest talking point on Obamacare: "I didn't build that"

Dizzy with success, Obama renames his wildly popular healthcare mandate to HillaryCare

Carney: huge ObamaCare deductibles won't look as bad come hyperinflation

Washington Redskins drop 'Washington' from their name as offensive to most Americans

Poll: 83% of Americans favor cowboy diplomacy over rodeo clown diplomacy

GOVERNMENT WARNING: If you were able to complete ObamaCare form online, it wasn't a legitimate gov't website; you should report online fraud and change all your passwords

Obama administration gets serious, threatens Syria with ObamaCare

Obama authorizes the use of Vice President Joe Biden's double-barrel shotgun to fire a couple of blasts at Syria

Sharpton: "British royals should have named baby 'Trayvon.' By choosing 'George' they sided with white Hispanic racist Zimmerman"

DNC launches 'Carlos Danger' action figure; proceeds to fund a charity helping survivors of the Republican War on Women

Nancy Pelosi extends abortion rights to the birds and the bees

Hubble discovers planetary drift to the left

Obama: 'If I had a daughter-in-law, she would look like Rachael Jeantel'

FISA court rubberstamps statement denying its portrayal as government's rubber stamp

Every time ObamaCare gets delayed, a Julia somewhere dies

GOP to Schumer: 'Force full implementation of ObamaCare before 2014 or Dems will never win another election'

Obama: 'If I had a son... no, wait, my daughter can now marry a woman!'

Janet Napolitano: TSA findings reveal that since none of the hijackers were babies, elderly, or Tea Partiers, 9/11 was not an act of terrorism

News Flash: Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) can see Canada from South Dakota

Susan Rice: IRS actions against tea parties caused by anti-tax YouTube video that was insulting to their faith

Drudge Report reduces font to fit all White House scandals onto one page

Obama: the IRS is a constitutional right, just like the Second Amendment

White House: top Obama officials using secret email accounts a result of bad IT advice to avoid spam mail from Nigeria

Jay Carney to critics: 'Pinocchio never said anything inconsistent'

Obama: If I had a gay son, he'd look like Jason Collins

Gosnell's office in Benghazi raided by the IRS: mainstream media's worst cover-up challenge to date

IRS targeting pro-gay-marriage LGBT groups leads to gayest tax revolt in U.S. history

After Arlington Cemetery rejects offer to bury Boston bomber, Westboro Babtist Church steps up with premium front lawn plot

Boston: Obama Administration to reclassify marathon bombing as 'sportsplace violence'

Study: Success has many fathers but failure becomes a government program

US Media: Can Pope Francis possibly clear up Vatican bureaucracy and banking without blaming the previous administration?

Michelle Obama praises weekend rampage by Chicago teens as good way to burn calories and stay healthy

This Passover, Obama urges his subjects to paint lamb's blood above doors in order to avoid the Sequester



White House to American children: Sequester causes layoffs among hens that lay Easter eggs; union-wage Easter Bunnies to be replaced by Mexican Chupacabras

Time Mag names Hugo Chavez world's sexiest corpse

Boy, 8, pretends banana is gun, makes daring escape from school

Study: Free lunches overpriced, lack nutrition

Oscars 2013: Michelle Obama announces long-awaited merger of Hollywood and the State

Joe Salazar defends the right of women to be raped in gun-free environment: 'rapists and rapees should work together to prevent gun violence for the common good'

Dept. of Health and Human Services eliminates rape by reclassifying assailants as 'undocumented sex partners'

Kremlin puts out warning not to photoshop Putin riding meteor unless bare-chested

Deeming football too violent, Obama moves to introduce Super Drone Sundays instead

Japan offers to extend nuclear umbrella to cover U.S. should America suffer devastating attack on its own defense spending

Feminists organize one billion women to protest male oppression with one billion lap dances

Urban community protests Mayor Bloomberg's ban on extra-large pop singers owning assault weapons

Concerned with mounting death toll, Taliban offers to send peacekeeping advisers to Chicago

Karl Rove puts an end to Tea Party with new 'Republicans For Democrats' strategy aimed at losing elections

Answering public skepticism, President Obama authorizes unlimited drone attacks on all skeet targets throughout the country

Skeet Ulrich denies claims he had been shot by President but considers changing his name to 'Traps'

White House releases new exciting photos of Obama standing, sitting, looking thoughtful, and even breathing in and out

New York Times hacked by Chinese government, Paul Krugman's economic policies stolen

White House: when President shoots skeet, he donates the meat to food banks that feed the middle class

To prove he is serious, Obama eliminates armed guard protection for President, Vice-President, and their families; establishes Gun-Free Zones around them instead

State Dept to send 100,000 American college students to China as security for US debt obligations

Jay Carney: Al Qaeda is on the run, they're just running forward

President issues executive orders banning cliffs, ceilings, obstructions, statistics, and other notions that prevent us from moving forwards and upward

Fearing the worst, Obama Administration outlaws the fan to prevent it from being hit by certain objects

World ends; S&P soars

Riddle of universe solved; answer not understood

Meek inherit Earth, can't afford estate taxes

Greece abandons Euro; accountants find Greece has no Euros anyway

Wheel finally reinvented; axles to be gradually reinvented in 3rd quarter of 2013

Bigfoot found in Ohio, mysteriously not voting for Obama

As Santa's workshop files for bankruptcy, Fed offers bailout in exchange for control of 'naughty and nice' list

Freak flying pig accident causes bacon to fly off shelves

Obama: green economy likely to transform America into a leading third world country of the new millennium

Report: President Obama to visit the United States in the near future

Obama promises to create thousands more economically neutral jobs

Modernizing Islam: New York imam proposes to canonize Saul Alinsky as religion's latter day prophet

Imam Rauf's peaceful solution: 'Move Ground Zero a few blocks away from the mosque and no one gets hurt'

Study: Obama's threat to burn tax money in Washington 'recruitment bonanza' for Tea Parties

Study: no Social Security reform will be needed if gov't raises retirement age to at least 814 years

Obama attends church service, worships self

Obama proposes national 'Win The Future' lottery; proceeds of new WTF Powerball to finance more gov't spending

Historical revisionists: "Hey, you never know"

Vice President Biden: criticizing Egypt is un-pharaoh

Israelis to Egyptian rioters: "don't damage the pyramids, we will not rebuild"

Lake Superior renamed Lake Inferior in spirit of tolerance and inclusiveness

Al Gore: It's a shame that a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of polar bears

Michael Moore: As long as there is anyone with money to shake down, this country is not broke

Obama's teleprompters unionize, demand collective bargaining rights

Obama calls new taxes 'spending reductions in tax code.' Elsewhere rapists tout 'consent reductions in sexual intercourse'

Obama's teleprompter unhappy with White House Twitter: "Too few words"

Obama's Regulation Reduction committee finds US Constitution to be expensive outdated framework inefficiently regulating federal gov't

Taking a page from the Reagan years, Obama announces new era of Perestroika and Glasnost

Responding to Oslo shootings, Obama declares Christianity "Religion of Peace," praises "moderate Christians," promises to send one into space

Republicans block Obama's $420 billion program to give American families free charms that ward off economic bad luck

White House to impose Chimney tax on Santa Claus

Obama decrees the economy is not soaring as much as previously decreeed

Conservative think tank introduces children to capitalism with pop-up picture book "The Road to Smurfdom"

Al Gore proposes to combat Global Warming by extracting silver linings from clouds in Earth's atmosphere

Obama refutes charges of him being unresponsive to people's suffering: "When you pray to God, do you always hear a response?"

Obama regrets the US government didn't provide his mother with free contraceptives when she was in college

Fluke to Congress: drill, baby, drill!

Planned Parenthood introduces Frequent Flucker reward card: 'Come again soon!'

Obama to tornado victims: 'We inherited this weather from the previous administration'

Obama congratulates Putin on Chicago-style election outcome

People's Cube gives itself Hero of Socialist Labor medal in recognition of continued expert advice provided to the Obama Administration helping to shape its foreign and domestic policies

Hamas: Israeli air defense unfair to 99% of our missiles, "only 1% allowed to reach Israel"

Democrat strategist: without government supervision, women would have never evolved into humans

Voters Without Borders oppose Texas new voter ID law

Enraged by accusation that they are doing Obama's bidding, media leaders demand instructions from White House on how to respond

Obama blames previous Olympics for failure to win at this Olympics

Official: China plans to land on Moon or at least on cheap knockoff thereof

Koran-Contra: Obama secretly arms Syrian rebels

Poll: Progressive slogan 'We should be more like Europe' most popular with members of American Nazi Party

Obama to Evangelicals: Jesus saves, I just spend

May Day: Anarchists plan, schedule, synchronize, and execute a coordinated campaign against all of the above

Midwestern farmers hooked on new erotic novel "50 Shades of Hay"

Study: 99% of Liberals give the rest a bad name

Obama meets with Jewish leaders, proposes deeper circumcisions for the rich

Historians: Before HOPE & CHANGE there was HEMP & CHOOM at ten bucks a bag

Cancer once again fails to cure Venezuela of its "President for Life"

Tragic spelling error causes Muslim protesters to burn local boob-tube factory

Secretary of Energy Steven Chu: due to energy conservation, the light at the end of the tunnel will be switched off

Obama Administration running food stamps across the border with Mexico in an operation code-named "Fat And Furious"

Pakistan explodes in protest over new Adobe Acrobat update; 17 local acrobats killed

White House: "Let them eat statistics"

Special Ops: if Benedict Arnold had a son, he would look like Barack Obama







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The brouhaha last month over the U.S. payment of $400 million plus interest to Iran over a long-forgotten defense contract offers lessons in economics and history. It blew up in the second week in August, exactly 102 years after the German battlecruiser Goeben was handed over to the Young Turks ruling in Constantinople on the cusp of World War I.

Economically, the two events are related. But Americans are not a very historical people, and few will connect the dots. So lets first look at the history to get to the economics involved.

The Ottoman monarchy in Turkey was overthrown by young reformists in 1908. As part of a modernization campaign, the new regime purchased two state-of-the-art Dreadnought-style battleships constructed in England. Funds were short and a popular drive raised coins from peasants, schoolchildren and even widows for the impoverished but proud nation to pay for these enormously expensive superweapons.

The ships were ready for acceptance and 500 Turkish sailors were in England when World War I broke out. The battleship race between Britain and Germany was a contributing factor to the outbreak of the war as the British feared their opponents burgeoning navy. One way to improve the odds was to seize the two new battleships just completed for the Turks. The British had some contractual right to do this, but they also refused to refund the money the Turks had so painfully accumulated.

The Turkish government and people were outraged, and Germany was already wooing them as an ally. On Aug. 10, 1914, when the German battlecruiser Goeben and light cruiser Breslau arrived at the entrance to the Dardanelles near Constantinople seeking shelter, it forced the Turks to choose sides. The Germans cannily offered these two ships to the Turks as replacements for the two stolen by Britain. That helped bring the Turks in to aid the Central Powers.

Winston Churchill, who, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had decided to arrogantly stiff the Turks, later ruefully admitted that the upshot was more slaughter, more misery and more ruin than has ever before been borne within the compass of a ship.

Fast-forward 60 years to the 1970s, when another proud Mideastern nation with aspirations of modernity wanted to buy latest-technology warships. Iran, then ruled by Shah Reza Pahlavi, ordered four very large guided missile destroyers, an upgrade from a class being built for the U.S. Navy. Longer, heavier, with newer electronics, better anti-air armament and much more capable air-conditioning, these Kouroush-class ships would be the most capable vessels of their type in the world.

The big destroyers were well along in construction when the Iranian revolution broke out, the shah was deposed, Americans were taken hostage at the Tehran embassy and the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power. Iran canceled its purchase as it became clear that the U.S. would never deliver the ships anyway. The hundreds of millions already paid by the shahs regime were only part of an extensive set of Iranian funds frozen by the U.S. government.

Employees at Ingalls Shipbuilding of Pascagoula, FMC and many other contractors involved experienced panic, as did local governments. There was immediate political pressure for the U.S. Navy to acquire the ships. There was an ironic logic involved: Because we no longer had a loyal client state controlling the entrance to the Persian Gulf, we needed more ships, especially ones designed with air-conditioning and a mix of missile launchers, to operate in those waters.

That is how we acquired four Ayatollah-class warships that served in our Navy for a quarter-century. The unreturned payment has been one thorn among many in U.S.-Iranian relations, though one with far greater weight for the Iranian people than for the U.S., which rapidly forgot it. Forgotten at least, until after years of negotiations by four administrations, the Obama administration in January paid back the $400 million timed just after five U.S. citizens held prisoner in Iran were released.

Interesting historical anecdotes, one might say, but what economics are involved?

One involves the size and role of fixed costs in the armaments industry. Designing and testing a new dreadnought battleship in 1911 was complex and expensive, but it paled in comparison to the overhead involved, before the first weld, on a guided missile destroyer 65 years later. And this pales in comparison to the costs of developing sophisticated military technology today.

When fixed costs are high, the way to lower average costs per ship or plane is to spread such overhead costs over greater output. Judiciously selling some private production in Mississippi and Minnesota to foreign buyers accomplishes that. The British Admiralty of the early 20th century was pleased to see its private defense contractors sell ships to Turkey, Brazil and Japan because such foreign sales helped keep skilled workers employed and maintained a ship-building base larger than the country needed in time of peace. And it lowered the price of ships that Britain wanted to buy.

Second, such foreign sales can spur research. The Admiralty in 1911 was too stodgy to try new gun layouts such as seven in-line turrets; but this was fine in a ship for Turkey that ironically ended up in the British fleet. Similarly, the shah was willing to invest in new radars and missile-launching configurations not yet adopted by the U.S. Navy. Military bling may represent a net loss to world society as a whole, but it historically has advanced technology, whether in metallurgy a century ago or integrated circuits in the 1970s.

The story also illustrates a long process of structural change in armaments industries. The big British shipbuilders like Vickers and Armstrong that sold worldwide, together with specialists such as Elswick, Dreyer or Barr & Stroud, whose equipment was used by nearly every navy in the world -- eventually all were absorbed into British Aerospace, which is now BAE Systems. What old-timers still refer to as the Navy gun factory went from Northern Pump to Northern Ordnance to FMC to United Technology to, surprise, BAE Systems. Such consolidation may be inevitable, but it reduces competition, slows innovation and increases costs. This, however, is another economics lesson that well have to revisit in a later column.
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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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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.
SAVOY  There is a lot of news about weeds lately. Unfortunately, little of it is good news.

With no new herbicide breakthroughs on the horizon, farmers will increasingly be forced to use a mixture of strategies to keep their fields clean.

University of Illinois weed scientist Pat Tranel served up the bad news at the ag colleges annual agronomy event here.

Theyre always changing, he said. The challenges youre going to face five years from now are probably going to be a little different than in the past.

The good news is waterhemp will become less prominent in the future, Tranel believes. The bad news is it will be replaced by palmer amaranth, which may be even more troublesome, largely because of its prolific reproduction.

In five years, we probably wont be talking about waterhemp anymore, he said. Sixteen days after emergence, palmer amaranth is almost twice as tall as waterhemp. If you try to target 4- to 6-inch weeds, your window of opportunity is going to be really small for palmer amaranth.

The good news is that you drove by some pretty clean fields on your way here. We can manage weeds; farmers are doing it.

But the solution is not one size fits all, Tranel said. Farmers need to know what weeds theyre dealing with, what resistance exists, select the right herbicide and then micro-manage each field.

Syngenta agronomist Nate Prater said some weed species are hanging around much longer than in the past. The widespread adoption of no-till and vertical tillage has kept marestail in the forefront.

When marestail first became an issue, you would see it germinate basically the first of September to the first of December, Prater said at a grower event at Pana. ... Now, the only time it doesnt germinate is late December to early January. It has adapted itself.

If that werent enough to worry about, herbicide resistance may be worse than many thought, with pre-emergence herbicides showing reduced effectiveness.

In the past, we dealt mostly with resistance to our post products like glyphosate and PPO inhibitors like Cobra, Flexstar and Blazer. My argument is that there is more resistance in our pre products than what we realized, Tranel said.

Resistance to a post product can be easy to spot.

You have a live plant, you spray it and if its got good coverage and didnt die, its resistant, Tranel said. But with a pre, youre spraying the soil and hoping to kill plants that emerge tomorrow, and up to four weeks from now. So how would you even know if you have resistance?

Waterhemp has shown resistance to everything weve thrown at it. Why wouldnt it show resistance to this?

Southern Illinois University weed scientist Karla Gage pointed out some weed species that were virtually non-existent in the past are popping up with regularity.

What you see in your fields is constantly changing, she said. Theres the potential to evolve resistance to the management that youre putting on the fields. Theres also the potential for a new species to move into the field that you have to deal with.

If you see your fields turning yellow, that could be cressleaf groundsel. It could also be yellow rocket. Those werent there 50 years ago.

Gage said poison hemlock has moved into agricultural fields in Missouri and may soon move across the Mississippi River into Illinois.

She also told of a field on a family farm near Pocahontas that belongs to a former University of Wisconsin ag professor. Observations made over 50 years showed major shifts in weed species. Plants such as giant foxtail and deadnettle that were never seen in the past are now present.

Weed populations with resistance to multiple herbicides will become increasingly common, according to Tranel. He points to species resistant to two, three or even four different herbicides.

For 10 years, weve been warning farmers that managing glyphosate-resistant waterhemp is not as easy as throwing a PPO inhibitor into the tank, Tranel said. That went in one ear and out the other. Now, increasingly, farmers are getting this message because theyre getting it in their fields.

One key may be not depending entirely on chemicals to control troublesome weeds.

Increasingly, you need to think about non-chemical strategies where they are viable, Tranel said. Rotating to alfalfa would be a great way to control waterhemp. I realize that may not be economically viable for a lot of you. But there are these other strategies that can work.
Editor's note: This is the final installment in a four-part series on the Community Health Needs Assessment completed by SIH.

When Southern Illinois Healthcare released findings from its Community Health Needs Assessment in March, it chose three health priorities for the region: Cancer, cardiovascular disease (commonly called heart disease) and its risk factors of diabetes and obesity, and mental health.

To help define the mental health risks for Southern Illinois, SIH conducted a community survey in May 2015 and conducted interviews with healthcare providers in May and June of 2015. Heres what those surveys and interviews found regarding mental health.

Nearly 42 percent of adults in Franklin, Jackson, Johnson, Perry, Union, Saline and Williamson counties reported that their mental health was not good at least one day in the month before the survey.

Our children arent doing any better. The assessment also looked at eighth graders, and 26 to 34 percent said they felt hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in the past year  so hopeless they stopped participating in their usual activities.

It also looked at the increasing suicide rates in Southern Illinois. The age-adjusted rates for the state of Illinois is 9.05 suicides per 100,000 residents, one and a half percentage points under the Healthy People 2020 Goal of 10.5 per 100,000. (Healthy People 2020 is a government program designed to improve the health of Americans by providing science-based health goals.)

In our region, the suicide rates are much higher at 15.02 per 100,000.

To help reduce the rate of suicide, SIH will:

 Increase depression screening among adults and youth ages 12 and older;

 Increase the number of primary care facilities that provide mental health treatment onsite or by referral;

 And increase the number of children and adults with mental health problems or disorders who receive treatment.

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, depression is a serious mental illness. It is much more than just feeling sad. Symptoms can include not sleeping or sleeping too much, weight loss or gain, lack of concentration, loss of energy, low self-esteem, hopelessness, changes in movement, both agitation and exhaustion, and physical aches and pains.

We all have times when we cannot sleep or concentrate or feel agitated or exhausted. How do we know if it is a serious depression?

Christopher Rural Health Planning Corporation, an organization that also is required to perform community health needs assessments, has some answers.

The corporations most recent health needs assessment showed mental health was a priority, too. As a result, the organization hired additional staff specializing in mental health and trained existing staff to help identify patients who might be in need of additional assessment and treatment.

Samantha Pulley of CRHPC said the organization hired two psychiatrists to work one day in Albion and one day in Flora. One of the doctors also provides services via telemedicine one day a week.

They also hired a mid-level nurse practitioner trained in mental health to work four days per week in Christopher, as well as a licensed clinical professional counselor. A grant has provided support for the additional positions.

Along with the additional staff, all staff was trained to do basic depression screening. All patients age 13 and older are screened for depression at least once a year.

April Kiefer of CRHPC explained the process. That initial screening is simply asking two questions:

 Do you have little interest or pleasure in doing things?

 Are you feeling, down, depressed or hopeless?

If the answer to either question is yes, we use 10 questions to get a score for depression, Kiefer said.

Based on the depression score, patients are then referred to a mental health provider for further screening and to develop a treatment plan.

I think having electronic health records where we can all share what is going on with a patient as a whole is beneficial to us, Kiefer said.

Those electronic health records are used to track patients and make sure they access treatment as planned.

We are definitely seeing an increase in patients who are in need of services, Kiefer said.

Those patients are keeping the new staff members busy, too.

Our new staff is booked a month or two in advance for new patients, Pulley said.

Mental health affects the whole patient, and depression goes along with chronic diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease. Pulley added that one of the goals of Federal Qualified Health Centers is to make mental health a talking point to help break down barriers to accessing care.

SIH and its partners will implement many strategies to help change the statistics.

One is increasing education among community members and partners regarding mental and behavioral health resources, targeting school staff, churches, faith community nurses, spiritual homebound visitors and Healthy Community Coalitions. They also will educate students in healthcare fields, including nursing and medical students, regarding resources available.

Another strategy is developing and implementing a standard screening tool for depression to be used by primary care providers. Along with this, they will develop a referral system between emergency departments or primary care providers and mental health providers for treating people with mental health issues in a timely manner.

They will advocate for appropriate mental health services and sustained funding to support it. John Markley, CEO of Centerstone, addressed this issue when he spoke to The Southern in July.

In this industry, we have a very difficult time keeping people as funding is inadequate and the long term viability of these programs is in danger from lack of legislative and financial support, Markley said.

Markley added that it just does not make any sense because when you look at the outcomes of these treatments, they save money in other systems. For example, people who can no longer go to the Crisis Center in Carterville will end up in hospital emergency rooms.

Perhaps the first step to improving the mental health of Southern Illinoisans is to talk about it.

For more information about the SIH community health needs assessment, contact the community benefits department at 618-457-5200.

If you are depressed, hopeless or just need to talk, call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.
Which Great Lakes states have recorded the best growth rate in jobs since the onset of the last recession? Two stand out.

Here in Illinois, were conditioned to know that neither of them is us. The drumbeat weve heard of actual or almost worst in the nation status for things like school funding or unemployment is enough for a world-class inferiority complex.

So is it Indiana and Wisconsin, which loaded up on incentives to attract Illinois companies? No, its New York, which qualifies as a Great Lakes state but whose economy tilts eastward to the Big Apple. It has a state budget surplus but also the highest per-capita tax burden in the country, according to the Tax Foundation. No. 2 is closer to home--Minnesota, land of 10,000 lakes and even more wind-chill readings, where lawmakers in recent years have raised the minimum wage, hiked taxes on the wealthy and brought their budget from a deficit to a surplus.

Around here, we dont hear much about those states economic records, at least compared with certain neighbors that adopted right-to-work laws to chase a slice of Illinois bacon. But it turns out that since December 2007, before the last recession, private-sector jobs in New York have risen by 9.5 percent, or by 691,600 jobs, through this past July. Minnesota came in second with a percentage gain of 5.3 percent, or 125,500 jobs over the same period. So said federal data reported to Congress in August by its Joint Economic Committee. Of the other Great Lakes states, Illinois, yes, was last with one percent growth, or 50,600 net new jobs in the private sector.

The lesson here isnt that Illinois should do everything New York or Minnesota did. Its that a states economic performance is a complicated story and you cant predict the winners based on who has the lowest taxes, the least regulation and the greater hostility to unions. By any measure, New York and Minnesota are high tax states compared with Illinois. The rates they apply to companies and high-wage earners are among the highest in the country.

When companies move or expand, they arent voting for red- or blue-state policies. Numerous studies have shown that the driving forces behind these decisions are most likely access to customers and suppliers and the quality and depth of the local work force. Utility costs and office rents also can be factors and, whatever the industry, relocations often come down to whats an easy commute from the chief executives home.

Illinois, especially Chicago, in years past has performed well by these standards. But theres another important way in which the state is falling woefully short.

Its the natural human desire for a little certainty. Competing is tough enough on its own, so corporate leaders want to rely on what future tax rates, both state and local, will look like. Stability is more important than the tax level itself.

And lo, what does our state provide? A soap opera, now more than a year old, tiresome to all but the political insiders, of continued budget deficits, out-of-control public pensions, stacks of overdue bills and a bond rating that is, of course, worst in the nation. Add to that the saga of underfunded schools and social service agencies at deaths door, and its enough to make any business executive say, OK, how much will I and my company be billed to fix this?

In the meantime, fewer job openings get filled and construction projects get deferred. You can see it in the federal employment numbers, which show that for the 12 months through July 2016, private-sector job growth in Illinois is about half what it was in the prior 12 months.

Just about the time Gov. Bruce Rauner seriously started butting heads with the Legislature, refusing to propose or negotiate a responsible budget, the state economy took a turn for the worse. After a period in 2013 and 2014 in which the unemployment rate here dropped dramatically, we have lost that momentum and now report one of the highest rates of any state.

There is no better evidence of the economic price for Rauners antics. The guy with govern in his title has refused to act the part, shunning legislative compromise in favor of a losers agenda that would gut living standards.

The best thing Rauner could do to promote jobs is to settle on a budget with the Legislature that sustainably funds state services and lowers deficits, setting tax rates that wont yo-yo with every change in administration. There would be no Springfield chaos to scare the job creators. Job growth in places with higher taxes suggests Illinois could profit from leadership that finds common ground and attends to the states fiscal health.

The tragedy is that Rauner, who came out of private equity and went to Springfield to teach it some lessons, didnt understand this important one.
SEVEN COUNCIL FIRES CAMP  A one-room schoolhouse has a unique feel at a protest camp near Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.

The Defenders of Water School opened earlier last week and the children of Dakota Access Pipeline protesters are gathered in open-sided tents and the great outdoors for lessons in reading, writing and arithmetic as well as traditional skills and crafts.

Students wake in the tent or tepee where they sleep with their family and walk up the grassy slope past the aromatic council fire to the main camp center, where breakfast is served and they are sorted by age into hourly sessions from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Alayna Eagle Shield, a young language specialist with the Standing Rock Language and Culture Institute, is the school coordinator. She said the need for a school came into focus Aug. 24, when a federal judge delayed an important decision and it became clear the protest camp with hundreds of people and many families wasnt going to be disbanded any time soon.

Theres no official count of the number of children still in the camp, and its fluid as people go home for business and return. About 40 children showed up the first day.

We need a school, there are so many kids here and we dont want to wait until they go back home, Eagle Shield said.

She starts the day with a session on the Lakota language and continues with anything from teaching about traditional foods, the history of one of the many Native tribes from all over the country and the world sharing the camp, leadership, treaty politics, government and history, and arts and crafts.

The school sends a message that real life continues even in the transient impermanent setting of a camp in a wide meadow near the reservation.

T.J. Running Bear, whose daughter, Santana, 8, is at the school, will always have her memory of the camp every wedding anniversary. She and her new husband, Joel Running Bear, put on bright ribbon shirts and were married at the camp on Aug. 21.

It was beautiful, she said.

Running Bear said she came to the camp planning to spend one night and, other than returning to the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota for clothes and necessities, has remained for what will soon be a month.

I wanted my whole life to see a gathering like this for good and for a purpose, and, in my lifetime, Ill never see this again, she said.

The school is good for her daughter and so is the camp itself, with the exposure to the language and culture of so many other tribes, at least 70 by some estimates, according to Running Bear.

She said she has lost her job in the reservations legal office as a result of being gone and said she had planned to start homeschooling her daughter anyway.

Jobs come and go, but this is historical, she said.

The camp on the north bank of the Cannonball River, not far from the Missouri River-Lake Oahe confluence, has been in existence since Aug. 10. Thats when the tribes started actively protesting construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline just north of the reservation, where the Bakken crude line is planned to be bored under the Missouri River in its 1,100-mile route from Williston to Illinois. It started as an overflow camp and soon became a semi-permanent village with services, a full-time kitchen, council fire, operations planning and emergency center and now a school.

The children range in age from preschool to 16, and many are already home-schooled or will be enrolled in a home-school agreement.

Were hoping they can go back home and catch up. Were trying to work on their needs, Eagle Shield said.

She expects the camp will remain active and the school in session at least through Sept. 14. Thats when a federal court judge said hell hear any appeals of a decision he plans to make by Sept. 9 whether to issue an injunction to stop the pipelines water crossing. An injunction would be in effect while the court decides the tribes larger suit, claiming the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers failed to follow federal law in approving the pipeline water crossings.

That may be the last week of the camp, and maybe not, she said.

Ric Kenney, of western Washington, showed up at the camp and found himself teaching math to young children. He has no textbooks and the kids have only limited supplies, but they're making do.

Were working on getting some workbooks together. Theres quite a range of kids and subjects, he said.

Meanwhile, hes teaching out of his lap, literally, with a large writing pad, while the children follow along, shaded by the tent from the hot sun with the council fire smoke always in the air.

Math was the biggest need, so thats where Im at, Kenney said.

Each school day includes a walk to the nearby water, where children are taught to pray for the water flowing by the camp.

They are taught we fight with our prayers and that prayers are way stronger than angry words or putting their bodies in harms way, Eagle Shield said.
The Welk Agriculture Education Day will be held Friday at the Welk Homestead State Historic Site near Strasburg.

Jay Fuher, soil health specialist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service of the USDA, will demonstrate variances in soil health at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. Students will have the opportunity to inspect local soil and see it in action.
I said, Oh my God! and I fell to my knees, Altovise Benjamin said.

The Orangeburg resident arrived at her Crepe Myrtle Lane home at 4 p.m. Friday to discover a tree had split it in half.

My poor little house is gone, she said. She has lived there for the past 10 years.

After her initial reaction, she said God, Im putting it in your hands.

Benjamin said that neither she nor her three children -- ages 18, 11 and 3 -- were home at the time of the catastrophe.

A neighbor called to tell her that a tree fell into the home she has lived in for the last 10 years. It is located near the Orangeburg County Fairgrounds.

The tree fell just as wind gusts in the Orangeburg area began to reach peak levels due to Tropical Storm Hermine.

According to the National Weather Service, wind gusts on Friday reached 28 mph about one mile north of Brookdale at 4:30 p.m. At the Orangeburg Municipal Airport, wind gusts reached 48 mph at 5:18 p.m.

As wind gusts and rain continued through The T&D region into Friday evening, emergency crews responded to numerous calls of trees in roadways and near structures.

Standing next to her storm-ravaged home on a Saturday, Benjamin said the Red Cross is assisting her with accommodations.

Shes eager to meet with Habitat for Humanity on Tuesday.

Ive already spoken to them, she said enthusiastically. Theyre going to build a new home for me and my children.

Orangeburg County Emergency Services Director Billy Staley said there were many reports of downed trees from the central and eastern regions of Orangeburg County.

Holly Hill Mayor William Johnson said the town weathered the storm despite the heavy flooding it experienced during the historic, 1,000-year flood in October 2015.

Johnson credits the ditch-cleaning efforts of the S.C. Department of Transportation that took place after the flood waters subsided for preventing flooding in the town during Hermine.

The NWS reported 5.97 inches of rain in Holly Hill due to the tropical storm.

Johnson said that a couple of trees fell on power lines, causing Bennett Circle residents to lose electricity from around 7 p.m. Friday until about 9 a.m. Saturday.

According to SCDOT, St. Julian Drive at Miracle Drive, in Eutawville, is closed and expected to reopen on Monday.

SCDOT reports that the road is closed due to downed power lines and trees.

Other rainfall totals that Hermine brought to Orangeburg County include: 8.71 inches about five miles east of Norway; 7.55 inches at the South Fork of the Edisto River and two miles west of Cordova; 6.70 inches four miles northwest of Brookdale; 6.57 inches northwest of Edisto; 6.45 inches in Orangeburg; 5.91 inches at the Orangeburg Municipal Airport and 5.15 inches two miles southeast of Springfield.

In Bamberg County, 10.53 inches of rain fell about 6 miles northwest of Padgetts, according to the NWS. Denmark was soaked with 8.92 inches of rain.

Bamberg County Emergency Services Director Brittany Barnwell said that there was only one report of a tree damaging a home.

Barnwell said the Red Cross is assisting that resident.

She reported that two roads in the county are closed due to washouts: Sweetpea Road toward U.S. Highway 78 and a section of Heatwole Road. SCDOT estimates that Heatwole Road will be useable by Sept. 16.

Calhoun County was mostly spared Hermines wet and gusty wrath.

Calhoun County Emergency Services Assistant Director Dave Chojnacki said there were a total of 10 trees that fell across roadways across the county.

In each of those instances, local firefighters cleared the roadways, he said.

The NWS reports Hermine dropped 6.32 inches of rain about 3.2 miles northeast of St. Matthews.

Emergency directors advise residents in The T&D region to remain cautious as there is a small chance of a couple of additional falling trees over the next day or so due to water saturation in the ground.
Protesters broke through a fence line at an alternate construction site for the Dakota Access Pipeline early Saturday afternoon south of Mandan.

Three private security officers at the site were injured by protesters, said Donnell Preskey, spokeswoman for the Morton County Sheriff's Office. One of them required hospitalization. Two security K-9s were also taken to veterinarians to be treated for injuries.

"Any suggestion that today's event was a peaceful protest is false. This was more like a riot than a protest," said Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier. "Individuals crossed onto private property and accosted private security officers with wooden posts and flag poles."

"The aggression and violence displayed here today is unlawful and should not be repeated. While no arrests were made at the scene, we are actively investigating the incident and individuals who organized and participated in this unlawful event," he said.

Shortly before 9 p.m., Tribal Chairman Dave Archambault II issued a statement saying sacred places containing ancient burial sites, places of prayer and other significant cultural artifacts of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe were destroyed Saturday by Energy Transfer Partners.

"This demolition is devastating," Archambault said. "These grounds are the resting place of our ancestors. The ancient cairns and stone prayer rings cannot be replaced. In one day, our sacred land has been turned into hollow ground."

According to the news release from Archambault, construction crews removed topsoil across an area about 150 feet wide, stretching for two miles, northwest of the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri rivers.

At about 2:30 p.m., protesters crossed through an area on the west side of Highway 1806, near the Missouri River and Cannon Ball, said Preskey. According to several reports from security officers, knives were pulled on them or they witnessed protesters with large knives.

Protesters reportedly marched from their camp located on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers land and marched to the construction site, said Preskey on the west side of Highway 1806. Once the marchers arrived at the construction site, they broke down a wire fence by stepping and jumping on it, the marchers estimated to be at least 300 people, broke into the construction area and rushed construction workers, she said.

By late Saturday afternoon, the area had been cleared. No arrests were made, Preskey said.

Witnesses also say they saw protesters climb onto vehicles at the construction site and beat on them, trying to break the windows.

Two phone messages were left for Johnelle Leingang, emergency manager for Standing Rock, and LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, co-organizer of the protest and tribal historian, but they could not immediately be reached for comment.

Tim Mentz, former tribal historic preservation officer, said in a statement he surveyed the land and confirmed there were multiple graves and prayer sites where the construction site was breached Saturday.

One security guard said a crowd of protesters pushed him against a vehicle and said he was jabbed in the side with a wooden fence pole and kicked in the knees. This caused him to fall to the ground. He heard people saying, "stomp him, kick him, he's just not to going to leave," said Preskey. That security guard was transported to a Bismarck hospital.

Investigators have taken three formal reports of injuries from security officers. However, witnesses say several additional private security officers were assaulted.

Law enforcement from Morton County, Burleigh County and Highway Patrol responded to the construction site. The Morton County Sheriff's Department in cooperation with the Bureau of Criminal Investigation is investigating the incident.
A West Columbia man is in prison after pleading guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old Orangeburg girl.

Rodricus Deshawn Baxley, 33, of 107 Sheraton Lane, pleaded guilty to criminal sexual conduct with a minor last week.

Circuit Judge Ed Dickson sentenced him to prison for nine years. Dickson ordered Baxley to be placed on GPS monitoring once hes released.

He was given credit for having served 464 days in jail.

A 48-year-old woman, Teresa Hinzman of Orangeburg, faces a charge of unlawful neglect of a child in the case. Her charge is pending.

The Orangeburg County Sheriffs Office arrested Baxley and Hinzman in late May 2015.

According to the incident report, a S.C. Department of Social Services worker told investigators in April that a 13-year-old Orangeburg County youth said shed been having sex with an older man.

The youth said the sexual activities had been going on for three years.

The social worker told investigators a woman knew of the activity, and added that an adult woman was also having sex with the man, the report said. The allegations came to light when the females had an argument.

When Baxley pleaded guilty to the criminal sexual conduct charge, he was already incarcerated for two forgery charges from Clarendon and Florence counties.

Baxley is currently housed at the Evans Correctional Institution in Bennettsville.

He began serving time in prison on Jan. 21, 2016, for the forgery charges.

On July 1, he possessed or attempted to possess a cellphone.

As a result, Baxley received the following disciplinary action: loss of canteen privileges for 110 days, loss of telephone privileges for 110 days, loss of television privileges for 365 days and loss of visitation privileges for 110 days.
Hours after his visit to Mexico, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump on Wednesday night delivered a fiery address on immigration in Arizona, taking a hard line on illegal immigration.

Echoing his campaign theme of building a wall on the Mexican border, Trump also repeated his assertion that Mexico would pay for it.

He labeled millions of immigrants as violent criminals and a drain on the U.S. government. And he vowed that no person living in the United States illegally would have a path to legal status without first leaving the country.

In a nutshell, Trump threw down the electoral gauntlet, deciding he will sink or swim on the issue of halting illegal immigration and deporting illegals who are already here.

Critics argue that building the wall is physically impossible, whether Mexico pays or not. As much as that is debatable, there is little room for debate on the matter of forcing all people presently in the country illegally to leave.

Most estimates say 10-12 million illegal immigrants live and work in the United States. That enrages some Americans who feel their tax dollars are supporting illegals, while other Americans champion anyones right  legal or not  to find jobs and build better lives for their families.

The debate is not new. As Congress was unsuccessfully trying to address the immigration issue a decade ago, journalist and author Larry Blasko wrote: You have one side shouting Deport Them! and the other side shouting Love Them! But the reality is hand-wringing and finger-pointing solve nothing. A logical solution could be implemented by now with all the energy both sides have expended screaming for extreme measures.

And extreme is what both sides advocate. Deporting 12 million people is about as realistic a solution as simply opening the borders.

Call it an amnesty program or not, there must be some kind of provision for allowing those in the country illegally (and having not committed crimes) to move toward citizenship. As impractical as trying to find and deport them is, it also would be devastating to the American economy.

In his book, Opening the Borders: Solving the Mexico/U.S. Immigration Problem For Our Sake and Mexicos, Blasko cited the crucial role immigrant workers play in the economy, particularly as workers for agriculture.

That was part of the compromise legislation pushed during the George W. Bush presidency by liberals such as Edward Kennedy on one side and conservatives such as John McCain and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham on the other.

Blasko asked then what would happen if all 10-12 million illegal immigrants were suddenly deported. What happens if overnight theres no labor force to fill those jobs? We need to consider the detrimental effect that would have on the price of everything from fruits and vegetables to home repair services.

A decade later, Trump has the battle lines drawn with compromise even further from reality. But continuing to oppose all efforts at compromise on immigration only makes it longer before there is agreement (Congress would have to be a part of Trumps plan) on how to secure U.S. borders. And wall or not, border security is as essential to dealing with the immigration crisis as is an answer to what to do about the illegals in the country now.
Ive been involved in politics for the better part of a lifetime, and have spoken at a lot of public meetings over the years. Theres one question, I think, that Ive heard more than any other: If I want to be an informed citizen, which sources of information should I consult?

For many years, I had a set answer for this. Read one or more of the respected national news sources, Id respond: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the Financial Times, The Economist, etc. Im not sure how good that answer was at the time, but I know for certain it would be woefully inadequate now. Younger people, in particular, get far more of their information from social media than from traditional news sources.

The internet and social media have upended our expectations of what it means to be well informed. Platforms and websites that take advantage of online and mobile connectivity are like a firehose, providing enormous quantities of information, opinion, news, statements, videos, images, analysis, charts, graphs  all of it instantly available. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and other platforms have become the way many of our citizens communicate. They have become a force for mobilizing large groups of people to apply political pressure on short notice.

The question is, what impact does this have on the public dialogue, and on representative democracy?

Clearly, these are powerful tools. As the rise of the tea party and the alarm over price increases for the EpiPen demonstrate, they can galvanize large, energetic groups of people who oppose a specific target. They make more information quickly available from more sources. They make it possible for users to do their own fact-checking (I can tell you, its quite intimidating as a speaker to watch members of the audience checking up on what you just said).

They allow people to get into the action and take part in political dialogue. They give citizens multiple ways to engage the attention and interest of policy makers  and give policy makers multiple ways to gauge public opinion and seek to understand the interests and needs of constituents. Theyve brought new groups into the public dialogue who were not there before, adding fresh voices to the process and broadening our understanding of what it means to be American.

But if information has become more ubiquitous and powerful, so has misinformation. It spreads rapidly, passed along from user to user with no check. Posts tend to have no room for nuance; arguments can be explosive and arguers aggressive; drama and hysteria fuel polarization; special interests cant help but take advantage of the context-free nature of social media.

All of this makes it far more difficult for policy makers to sift through everything coming their way on any given topic. If a significant portion of the information thats available consists of misleading graphs, false facts, misstatements, and outright lies, the process of arriving at good policy becomes fragile and laden with traps.

Which is why the sheer quantity of information bestowed on us by social media does not necessarily improve the quality of public dialogue. It does not always help citizens make good choices.

And thats really the key question: Does the ubiquity of information available through social media really help citizens understand complex issues, weigh competing arguments, and reach discriminating judgments about politics?

Or does it overwhelm them with bursts of information that is so mixed as to quality that people simply throw up their hands  or, worse, charge full-tilt ahead based on a false understanding of reality?

The answer, of course, is that its a mixed bag. The jurys still out on whether were becoming better citizens because we have more information and opinion at our fingertips. Certainly, the information world we live in today is putting more stress on individual voters to make discriminating choices and on our representative democracy, which rests on institutions that were designed in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Our political process has proved resilient over centuries, and has served us well. But social media pose a powerful challenge. Theyve brought great gifts and equally great risks, and wed be prudent to be cautious.

-----

 Lee Hamilton is a senior adviser for the Indiana University Center on Representative Government; a distinguished scholar, IU School of Global and International Studies; and a professor of practice, IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years.
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Rawpixel Ltd/iStock/Thinkstock(SUGARCREEK TOWNSHIP, Ohio) -- About a dozen demonstrators, some of them apparently armed, gathered on Saturday outside former Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner's family home in Ohio to protest his release from a California jail after serving half of his six-month sentence for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman on campus.



Turner, 21, walked out of a jail in Santa Clara County, California, early Friday morning, and must now complete three years of probation and register as a sex offender.



Turner is believed to have stayed at a hotel with his mother in Mountain View, California, Friday night. His whereabouts were unknown Saturday.



Turner is expected to return to his hometown in Greene County, Ohio. Within five days of coming home, Turner must go to the county sheriff's department to be photographed and registered as a sex offender. Postcards then will be mailed to alert nearby homeowners that a sex offender lives in the area, Greene County Sheriff Gene Fischer told ABC News.



A group of protesters from the Dayton, Ohio, area showed up outside the Turner family's residence in Sugarcreek Township on Friday. Some were carrying weapons, according to ABC affiliate WCPO-TV in Cincinnati. Ohio is a traditional open carry state.



The word "rapist" and other messages were scrawled in chalk on the sidewalk, driveway and the street in front of Turner's home. Meanwhile, police kept watch around the corner, according to WCPO-TV.



"He's not going to live some happy pleasant life," one protester told WCPO. "We're going to never let him forget what he did."



"If he is uncomfortable then he begins to receive at least some punishment that he deserves for his crime," another protester told WCPO.



Turner was found guilty in March of three felony charges: assault with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated/unconscious person, penetration of an intoxicated person and penetration of an unconscious person.



The January 2015 assault was stopped by two men on bicycles who noticed that Turner's victim wasn't moving, authorities said. Turner, then 19, fled the scene but the witnesses tackled him and held him until police arrived, according to the Santa Clara District Attorney's Office.



Turner was initially facing up to 14 years behind bars. Prosecutors asked for six years, but Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Turner on June 2 to six months in jail and three years of probation, as recommended by the probation department.



Copyright  2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
As we see the struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline unfolding on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, the question we see Indians and non-Indians asking themselves is Where do I fall as far as my belief system guides me in this matter? Are these people demonstrating, traitors to America or are they patriots?

If a person hasnt already developed strong convictions one way or the other, and wants more knowledge about the DAPL issue, you can spin the dial to a few of the AM stations from Bismarck. These morning talk shows will certainly give you information as the issue is red-hot on the prairies of North Dakota. One will give a fair slant, while another will sing the reasons to be positive or in favor of constructing the DAPL.

It always is wise to listen to the different radio shows in their entirety. With one you will become aware of why American Indians and others camped just north of Cannon Ball should be arrested. Quite openly it is stated that the Indians should be thankful for the monthly government checks they receive, plus inflaming listeners with the Fighting Sioux name topic. Never mind the issue is about building a pipeline, but in general, one show tries to understand both sides of the pipeline issue, while Indian people will be painted in a pretty bad way while ranting for the pro-pipeline point of view.

For an opposite view, one has to travel to the campsite and visit with the demonstrators. Listen to the messages of why they feel protecting our natural resources is so important. And if the opportunity presents itself, listen to the leaders spread the word of how spirituality, prayer and peaceful demonstration is so vital to overcome the seemingly insurmountable opposition.

As far as facts, it is up to each person to believe what is being stated by opponents and proponents of the pipeline and its Texas-based owners. Both sides will use data that supports their stance. For instance, oil industry experts and politicians will say the pipelines in America are the safest way to transport oil and the chance of a rupture of the DAPL is practically nonexistent. However, the tribes present at the demonstration camp that come from Montana can share their story of the pipeline under the Yellowstone River. This pipeline breached and spilled between 50,000 and 100,000 gallons of crude oil into the river in January 2015. The many downstream non-Native communities are told the water has benzamine in it, so they are advised to not drink the water.

Black-and-white documented studies indicate the subsurface transportation of oil causes far less air pollution. Standing Rock Sioux Chairman Dave Archambault II totally understands this and agrees; however, he cites other studies that reveal the pollution caused by pipe leakages is, although fewer in occurrence, far more devastating in size, contamination and containment problems compared to the surface environmental damage caused by trucks and rail. So there is a choice. Do you go for less air pollution or side with stopping land and water contamination?

The top elected officials, if they are listened to, want the pipeline for its economic advantages. The chairman of the tribe claims the pipeline has nothing to do with the best economic interest of North Dakota. He believes that pipeline builders will be here and gone in months, which he says is like a puff of smoke in the wind. The reality is that rail and trucking revenues will decrease, which means less business and jobs for North Dakotans.

Rumors on both sides of the demonstration are plentiful. For example, a rumor going around the pipeline demonstration camp is that the governor of North Dakota is an investor in DAPL, so it is logically concluded he needs the blockade of Highway 1806. The anti-pipeline citizens believe the governor must have at heart his own interests or his wallet because closing the road brings controversy and hardship on the demonstrators and the tribe, which will cause their spirit to weaken.

The misunderstanding or rumor by the pro-pipeline folks is that the tribe is sponsoring the demonstration, which is not true. The tribe began its opposition two years ago and has now filed an injunction. Many people believe in the tribes position and some began camping in April. Because the position is so widely supported, demonstrators are arriving in droves. To the tribe, these tribes and people are now guests and the tribe must give them basic courtesy assistance, but all campers know they are on their own and they are asked to respect the tribes desire to have everything done in a peaceful and spiritual way.

The official, non-rumor, stated reason to close the road there is an unsafe environment down the road. At least this is the reason stated and restated by the media for the North Dakota officials, and clearly weapons or explosives of some kind are always insinuated.

The chairman of the tribe says there is no danger to the general public. There is no beef with any North Dakota person, law enforcement officer or construction worker. We dont have any desire to hurt anyone. There are no weapons or drugs allowed in the camp, says the chairman. Our beef is with the Army Corps of Engineers and the owners of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Actually our problem isnt even with the companies oil executives because it isnt their fault that they were born, raised and educated to be successful at any cost to society. They will do anything for money.

In Brazil, the Olympic gold medal swimmer Ryan Lochte lied about being robbed. His words swirled around the world, which made Brazilians out to be a bunch of robbers. In North Dakota, we have a sheriff who claims he saw a pipe bomb at the demonstration site, which vilifies the encampment. This statement was used to close the highway and fuels a negativity, as now Indians are terrorists with pipe bombs.

Whats the difference between the swimming hero Lochte and a trustworthy sheriff, who reported seeing a pipe bomb? This is very, very important in thinking about who is a traitor or patriot or a hero or a robber or a terrorist.

The sheriffs department has retracted the false pipe bomb report. Nonetheless, because the blockade has not been reopened, American Indians at the camp continue to be painted as people who should be feared  terrorist. And to illustrate how the public fear works, on one of the morning talk shows someone called in and said, Weve got to keep those filthy Indians from coming to our state Capitol.

If you listen to the pro-pipeline sympathizers, they believe the road closure is appropriate because whats going down at the demonstration site is an unlawful protest. They say this because the lieutenant governor of North Dakota said so. In a press conference, he said demonstrators are on Army Corps land without permission, which means all the demonstrations and activities on corps land are unlawful.

This point is countered by opponents of the pipeline who say the tribe has undeniable rights to be on its own land. It is more than clear that presently the Standing Rock Sioux tribal boundaries are the north bank of the Cannonball River. So obviously the Army Corps or state do not want to tip over that treasure chest of legalities. With no arrests, it is obvious that the camp is enjoying camping and praying on the tribes own land. So it all depends which side of the lawful fence a person wants to be on.

In the end, who is a traitor or patriot should revolve around the long-range implication of the pipeline. This should involve a moral or ethical sense and responsibility for future grandchildren. Sadly to many, everything is based on a red man versus white man deal.

Once there was a case to be made for pipelines, but that moment is irrelevant and in our history. Many hoped there would be an easy transition away from fossil fuels to future sources. But easy transition rarely happen in history, instead, industry is hit by a disruptive force that changes everything, and today its name is the Standing Rock Sioux.  Mark Trahant, independent journalist

In my opinion, the truth of the question of who is a patriot and who is a traitor is which one understands the dire detriments of carbon production and the ongoing broadcasts about industry accidents, which have such dreadful ramification for all life in the future.
FARGO  A new state-funded voucher program is meant to give North Dakota residents struggling with addiction the option of receiving drug and alcohol treatment from a private provider close to home.

But for now, the programs success hinges on whether more treatment providers will decide to start accepting patients with vouchers.

Since the program was launched July 1, only three providers have applied to take part, said Pam Sagness, director of the state Behavioral Health Division. The Heartview Foundation in Bismarck and Sharehouse in Fargo have been authorized to treat patients with vouchers, and a third provider in Grand Forks has applied but has not yet been approved, she said.

Sagness touted the voucher program as a huge step forward, saying it addresses gaps in the states addiction treatment system and gives lower-income patients a choice in where they receive inpatient and outpatient treatment.

We certainly are hoping that providers will sign up and that individuals will access this voucher, so that they can get timely access to services, she said.

No patients have been given vouchers yet, but Sharehouse and Heartview will begin accepting patients through the program this week. Patients must meet income requirements to be eligible. Those who have health insurance but cant afford the cost of treatment may qualify.

The state Legislature set aside $750,000 to fund the voucher program from July 2016 through June 2017, but that amount was recently slashed to $375,000 as part of the budget cuts ordered by Gov. Jack Dalrymple. If the money runs out before June 2017, no more vouchers will be issued until more funds are allocated, Sagness said.

For years, North Dakotans without money to pay a private provider have been able to get drug and alcohol treatment at one of the state-funded regional human service centers.

At times, some centers have had wait lists for treatment. But officials hope the voucher system will eliminate those lists by letting patients receive immediate treatment from private providers.

Sagness said the voucher program also has the potential to allow a rural patient who lives in, say, Hazen, to obtain treatment from a nearby private provider rather than having to drive over an hour to the closest human service center in Bismarck. But right now, thats just a potential because no rural providers have applied to be part of the program.

Sagness said the state is encouraging rural providers to apply, but it may be that some simply have as many patients as they can handle. And she said some providers have noted that the voucher program puts an administrative burden on them because they have to take time to enroll patients in the program.

A lot of providers are actually just one-man shops, she said. So anytime that theyre not in a billable service, you know, it also is a revenue issue for them.

With Heartview taking part in the program, Bismarck-area residents can now receive state-funded inpatient treatment close to home. Previously, the only option for state-funded inpatient treatment was through the Robinson Recovery program at Sharehouse in Fargo.

Allowing patients to get treatment in their communities is considered a best practice because they can be closer to their families and build bonds that will help them later in recovery, Sagness said.
The state has no plans to send additional law enforcement officers to the protest site where there was a clash Saturday between private security officers hired to oversee the Dakota Access Pipeline and those opposing it. Standing Rock Sioux Chairman Dave Archambault II said he will continue to promote peace at the worksites.

Three private security guards were reported injured after around 300 protesters entered the worksite Saturday afternoon. One guard was transported to a Bismarck hospital, but refused treatment, according to Donnell Preskey, spokeswoman for the Morton County Sheriff's Office.

Vicki Anderson Granado, a spokeswoman for Energy Transfer Partners, the company in charge of the pipeline, said in an email that there were 14 security personnel on site Saturday.

In a statement Sunday, the American Civil Liberties Union accused Dakota Access private security of using violent tactics against men, women and children.

No one was arrested after the incident that occurred Saturday, and the Morton County Sheriff's Department and the Bureau of Criminal Investigation are investigating.

Preskey said the sheriffs department isnt planning to send additional officers to the construction site after what happened Saturday, but they will go out there if similar incidents were to arise.

"We are working with law enforcement to ensure that all offenders are arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," Grenado Anderson said in a statement.

The security officers were protecting workers and the companys assets, she said, and safety is ETP's top priority and the company is committed to having the appropriate safety measures in place. The company will continue with its construction plan.

Gov. Jack Dalrymple's office released this statement Sunday:

We urge all protesters to participate only in peaceful and lawful activities, Dalrymple said. Our primary focus as a state is to maintain public safety for protesters, workers and the general public.

On Friday, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe submitted documents in court, identifying areas along the path of the pipeline that are home to Native American artifacts and sacred sites. The next day, workers with the Dakota Access Pipeline brought in bulldozers on the land, which prompted protesters stationed at a camp on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers land to move to where the construction was taking place on a piece of property on the west side of Highway 1806.

Standing Rock Chairman Dave Archambault said Dakota Access Pipeline deliberately provoked Saturdays confrontation between its hired security guards and protesters by coming onto a part of the pipeline route that had been recently found to contain graves and sacred sites.

Archambault said at least a half-dozen people were maced and pepper sprayed and several people were bitten by the security guards dogs  one woman bitten on her breast  after protesters entered the construction zone.

He said the equipment moved at least 15 miles to get onto the site where a private company, with the consent of the landowner, had found graves and sacred sites and could see the features extended onto the easement. The tribe planned to use the archaeological information to amend its court filings and to file a report with the North Dakota State Historic Preservation Office.

They wanted to destroy the proof and evidence; the company knew those sites were there. They dont normally work on Saturday and Sunday; we know because weve been watching them. They desecrated all the land where the landowner gave us permission to look, he said.

The company halted construction of the pipeline on Aug. 16 due to safety concerns, and after arrests were occurring almost daily.

Since the beginning, Archambault said his message has been about non-violence and promoting peace.

And it continues to be my message, but somebody has to put the Dakota Access Pipeline in check as well. Theyre the ones who provoke violence, theyre the ones who are trying to make this more about violence, and tribal leaders around the country are coming here expecting the same thing  being a peaceful, prayerful demonstration, but, when the company does things to provoke it, and the security company provokes it, theyre trying to say that were doing it. But weve maintained that message (of non-violence) all along.

Another tribal chairman is calling on members of his tribe to avoid traveling to Bismarck-Mandan after the clash Saturday.

Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, S.D., Chairman Harold Frazier said in a news release that many of his tribal members were pepper sprayed by the security officers and attacked by dogs after they went onto the construction site Saturday afternoon.

"I am calling on all members of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe to avoid traveling to or doing business in the Mandan-Bismarck area until this crisis is resolved," Frazier said. "I fear for my people's safety."

Hundreds of people across the country have joined the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to protest the oil pipeline that is planned to cross below the Missouri River just north of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg will rule by Friday on an injunction to stop construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline as requested by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

Tribune reporter Lauren Donovan contributed to this story.
Ohio Means Jobs Job Fair.JPG

See what careers are available in your community.

Ohio Means Jobs is holding a job recruitment from 10 a.m. to noon on Wednesday, Sept. 7, at Mentor Public Library's Main Branch.

They are looking to fill several open positions in and around Mentor.

No registration is necessary, but job applicants should bring resumes with them.

Also, if you want more help in your career hunt, check out Ohio Means Jobs' tips for writing a resume and searching for jobs online.
New Blues signing scores on U20s debut

, 4 September,



Everton's deadline-day acquisition from Sheffield United pulled a goal back for England to make it 2-1 on his debut at that level for his country.

Kieran Dowell also featured but the Lions couldn't find the equalizer.

At U19 level, Tom Davies captained England in a 1-0 defeat that also featured Nathan Holland as a substitute.

Phil Jagielka, meanwhile, was an unused substitute at senior level as Sam Allardyce started his England reign with a 1-0 win over Slovakia.

Note: the following content is not moderated or vetted by the site owners at the time of submission. Comments are the responsibility of the poster. Disclaimer

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Saudi Arabia's top sovereign wealth fund is negotiating to buy a stake in one of the kingdom's most ambitious real estate projects as Riyadh restructures the economy to cope with low oil prices, a source familiar with the plan said.



The Public Investment Fund aims to invest in King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) on the Red Sea coast near Jeddah, the source said.



That would inject capital into the business zone, now being developed by Emaar the Economic City (EEC), a Saudi consortium affiliated with Dubai's Emaar Properties Group , developer of the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building.



Launched in 2005, KAEC had a population of only about 5,000 people and 120 industrial tenants at the end of last year, but says it plans to grow swiftly into a full-blown metropolis.



The chief executive of the city, Fahd Al Rasheed, told Reuters in January its population was projected to hit 50,000 by 2020, with an ultimate target of 2 million around 2035.



Tenants now include French pharmaceutical maker Sanofi , a venture involving U.S. battery maker Johnson Controls and producers of building materials.



But with economic growth slowing sharply because of cheap oil, the government wants such zones to expand much faster and focus more on industries such as tourism, medical care and education to diversify the economy beyond oil and create jobs.



Under economic reforms announced in April, the government said it would work with companies developing major business zones to "revamp" them; KAEC may be the first of those cases.



"What they can do is inject cash. It's no secret KAEC needs a lot of equity for this project," the source said of the PIF's plan. KAEC, EEC and the PIF declined to comment.



The source, speaking on condition of anonymity because the matter is not yet public, said the PIF could either buy a stake directly in KAEC and serve as a partner to develop the project along with EEC, or take a stake in EEC itself.



EEC obtained a SR5 billion ($1.33 billion) loan from the Saudi Ministry of Finance in 2011, which has been extended until 2026, and the source said the company had a similar amount of debt to commercial banks.



An investment by the PIF in the economic city would be a step in the fund's development as one of the most important institutions in the Saudi economy, using its financial power to push projects which the government considers vital.



Under the economic reforms, the government has said it will expand the PIF from SR600 billion to over SR7 trillion, by giving it assets such as ownership of state oil giant Saudi Aramco. That would make the PIF the world's biggest sovereign fund by far, on paper though not necessarily in terms of the cash it had available for investment.



The PIF will invest abroad - in June, it bought a stake in U.S. ride-hailing firm Uber for $3.5 billion - but it will focus much of its money and management attention on domestic projects designed to reduce Saudi Arabia's reliance on oil exports.



For example, the PIF will take over Riyadh's floundering King Abdullah Financial District and restructure the project, sources have told Reuters. It is also expected to get involved in developing a Saudi shipbuilding industry and in restructuring state firms such as utility Saudi Electricity Co.



The PIF will "help unlock strategic sectors requiring intensive capital inputs. This will contribute towards developing entirely new economic sectors and establishing durable national corporations," the national reform plan reads.  Reuters
UAE-based Artar Real Estate Development will be utilising new technology at the upcoming Cityscape to bring to life one of its key projects - Mada Residences, a 36-storey residential tower in Downtown Dubai.



The company will make use of a new state-of-the-art technology in creating a virtual reality world for the visitors so that they can experience what it will be like to walk into a Mada Residences home.



Cityscape visitors at the Artar stand will be invited to step into an immersion cube where they will walk around the larger than average one-, two-, three- and four-bedroom luxury apartments, recreated within millimetres of the actual design so that they can appreciate the layouts, textures, lights and materials used.



An experience which has taken the developers more than six months to create, the cube is fitted with motion sensors so that the visitor can easily move around the apartment and understand how the apartments embody the spirit of liveability, said a top official.



Technology is becoming more and more important when we speak to our investors, said Artars chief executive, Sulaiman Abdulrahman Al Rashid.



"We have invested in creating this virtual reality world for visitors to our Cityscape Global stand so that they can experience what it will be like to walk into a Mada Residences home," he noted.



"Liveability isnt just a buzz word we use to pique an interest from investors. Each apartment has been designed to ensure it provides end users and residents a better level of space and comfort," remarked Al Rashid.



The immersion cube will bring that space to life, right from the exhibition floor of Cityscape Global and will offer a proof point to potential investors of the quality in this development, he added.



Complementing the five sq m cube, a core component of the Artar stand in Hall 2 of the Dubai World Trade Centre, will be a number of virtual reality headsets which will provide a similar experience but will use technology from a newly designed mobile app called Mada Residences.



Available to download on both iOS and Android devices, the app allows investors and anyone interested in the development to take the property home in their pocket and experience it at a touch of a button. It allows the client to feel the space and understand the intelligent design of each apartment.



We believe that using technology in this way offers added benefits to our investors and communicates with them in a way that has never been done before, explained Al Rashid.



I expect this will be a trend we will see much more of from the industry over the coming years but we have worked hard to be one of the first to offer it in this region, he added.-TradeArabia News Service
Taqdeer Award Certified Assessors have started the evaluation process for construction companies in Dubai that have applied to participate in Taqdeer Award 2016.



Taqdeer Award is the worlds first points-based award programme for recognising excellence in labour welfare practices and seeks to promote international best practices in labour welfare among construction companies alongwith enhancing relationship between companies and workers and also recognising excellence among workers.



The award, launched under the patronage of Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and chairman of the Dubai Executive Council, will enhance the relationship between companies and workers by recognising excellence in labour practices and setting new benchmarks in work practices across sectors in Dubai.



Major General Obaid Muhair bin Suroor, the deputy director general of General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners Affairs (GDRFA) in Dubai and chairman of Taqdeer Award, said a large number of construction companies have expressed their interest in participating in the award.



"By showing a strong interest in participating in the Taqdeer Award, construction companies in Dubai have reflected their keenness to set international benchmarks in labour welfare practices. This is the first-of-its-kind award in labour welfare and we are confident it will have a positive impact across sectors of the economy," stated Major General Obaid.



According to him, the evaluation process starts with 'Desktop Evaluation', which involves assessment of documents submitted by the companies. The assessors have started 'Desktop Evaluation' for the companies.



Following the completion of 'Desktop Evaluation', the Taqdeer Assessors will conduct onsite visits to verify that the measures being taken and facilities being provided for workers are in accordance with the award criteria. The onsite visits will start this month, he stated.



There are around 282 companies in this sector in Dubai, providing jobs for more than 500,000 workers. The award will target those companies employing more than 100 workers.



The assessors include managerial level experts from different nationalities and with experience of being associated in assessment procedures and have undergone special training to carry out the assessment procedure for the award.



In its first cycle, the Taqdeer Award will cover the construction sector that employ manual workers and the future cycles will include factories and free zones, stated Major General Obaid.



The participating companies will be awarded the ratings from one star to five stars.



Winners of five and four-star ratings will receive a certificate, enjoy priority in government projects, and will be honoured at an award ceremony. These top ratings will give companies a competitive advantage in bidding for international contracts, he noted.



These awards have been launched in line with the vision of the Dubais leadership to make Dubai the worlds best places to live and work, said Major General Obaid.



The award reflects Dubais serious efforts in the area of enhancing employer-employee relationship and aims to enhance awareness among labourers about their rights and duties, encouraging workers to contribute their best, while setting international benchmarks in labour welfare practices, he added.-TradeArabia News Service
Regus, one of the worlds largest providers of workspace solutions, has signed an agreement with United Tower, a mixed-use skyscraper located within the master-planned Bahrain Bay, to operate its business centre in the facility in the heart of Bahrain's capital city.



Leading global real estate consultant CBRE is the exclusive property management company for the United Tower.



Strategically located, this landmark high-rise is designed as a twisting structure, rising from an octagonal floor plate, rotating counter clockwise, and offering uninterrupted 360 degree views to its tenants and hotel guests.



Easily accessible from the airport, the iconic structure is 50 floors and 200 m high, situated in Bahrain Bay, in the heart of Bahrains central business district.



Richard Botham, the senior director and general manager of CBRE Bahrain, said: "United Tower is an iconic addition to Manamas developing skyline."



"The commercial assets at the tower are competitively priced, versatile enough to suit the needs of most business models, offer stylish amenities and ample parking space," he noted.



A major global player, Regus has a network of 2,850 locations in more than 1,000 towns and cities, across 107 countries and serves 2.3 million members.



Its centre in United Tower will be located on the 34th floor, offering wonderful sea views and outlooks towards Manama city.



The global firm will operate a serviced office facility with 83 private offices and suites, along with a modern business lounge and co-working spaces.



"CBRE is proud to include this remarkable building, which will accommodate international occupiers and local establishments, in our premium property portfolio. The addition of Regus will further diversify the solutions offered at the tower for businesses seeking smaller executive offices with flexible lease terms," stated Botham.



Ahmed Al Qaed, the developer and owner of United Tower, said: "Our alliance with leading global real estate consultant CBRE and Regus will allow us to further extend our unique offering and turnkey solutions to businesses who seek prime quality office space."



The building provides 26,000 sq m of commercial office space. It also accommodates the five-star Wyndham Grand Collection Hotel with 262 rooms and several luxury retail and food and beverage (F&B) outlets, said the statement from CBRE.



Typical floor plates for the office levels are approximately 1,300 sq m with smaller subdivisions possible to suit a variety of occupier requirements from 148 sq m.



The commercial features include a dedicated lobby and generous parking provisions, it added.-TradeArabia News Service
As a result of the shale gas boom in North America, a significant amount of new polymer capacity is coming on line. Much of this production will be exported, and three trends suggest that US plastics customers will benefit from the bounty of low-cost feedstocks and an abundant supply of domestic resins, write David Yankovitz and Paul Bjacek of Accenture in an article.



Over 23 billion pounds per year of new polymer (including PE, PVC, ABS, PET, PP, PS, EPS) capacity is likely to come on-stream in the US by 2020, most justified based on low cost gas. This will allow the US to be the second lowest cost region in the world for products such as polyethylene. If all were to be used domestically, its calculation would mean adding 2,000 to 10,000 new plastic processing lines, depending on the type of plastic, process and application. However, much will likely be exported, said the article.



The report also suggested that US plastics customers, that is, plastics processors (those that buy raw plastic resin and convert it to various products, like packaging materials, pipe, bottles and other finished products) will be able to share in the bounty of low-cost feedstocks and abundant domestic resins production.



Processors are betting on the home market

The analysis indicates that domestic plastics processors (or converters) are gearing up to take advantage of the inevitable favourable price and volume position of North America when the new polymer plants start up. About 60 per cent of plastics processing machinery used in the US is imported. Imported machinery data is, therefore, a very good barometer of plastics processors investment sentiment. Encouragingly, plastics and rubber machinery imports grew 9 per cent per year between 2010 and 2015, with important items such as injection molding machine imports growing by up to 16 per cent per year. This is consistent with American Chemistry Council analyses that indicate more than 500 plastic processor expansions have been announced since mid-2012. In fact, new equipment purchases are rising much faster than the capacity utilisation increases in plastics and rubber products production.



The article said that this phenomena is mainly related to the shale gas advantage and to plastics processing in particular.



The US has advantages versus other economies in terms of the current exchange rate, making equipment costs lower (imported aggregate plastics machinery values dropped 31 per cent between 2010 and 2015), as well as an improving total labour cost differential with China, where Chinas relative labour cost rose 36 per cent over the past six years, as those of the US declined by 6 per cent. It could be that processors were taking advantage of the low equipment prices based on exchange rates. However, we believe the manufacturing renaissance, where automation reduces the importance of labour costs, is a real occurrence, although muted a bit due to poor world economic growth.



While these low labour and equipment costs bode well for US manufacturing, plastics processing is doing even better. As a matter of fact, after several years of weaker performance versus total manufacturing, plastics processing has outperformed total manufacturing output in the US since the end of 2011, as shown in Figure 5 by the ratio of plastics to manufacturing output. Manufacturing grew by 1.8 per cent per year between December 2011 and December 2015 versus 4.1 per cent per year for plastic products manufacturing.



The price gap

The gap of US domestic plastics prices versus those of Southeast Asia has been widening over the past few years. As new North American capacity comes on-stream and domestic producers battle for market share, domestic prices may move toward the levels of the largest importing region, Asia. This would narrow the competitive gap between Asian plastics processors and those of the US, and allow US processors to push back on imported plastic products, increase exported plastic products and raise plastic products production beyond the old growth rates of 4 per cent to 4.5 per cent per year.



Avoiding missing the local bus versus the export boat

North America holds strong prospects for growth, especially in megatrend-linked markets. For instance, over the next five years, US gross output in construction, consumer electronics and medical equipment is expected to grow over 4.5 per cent per year. Innovative plastics applications geared towards these markets can even experience higher growth. The aging population, for example, is requiring more healthcare-related products that can assist in mobility and convenience. Strong, lightweight materials can enable electric mobility devices to do more with less energy.



North American polymer producers must prove the worth of their business to these demanding domestic customers in order to maintain market value and share. As assessed in a past blog, producers must innovate in product, service and efficiency to serve the high demands of domestic customers. For instance, some innovations of value to automobile manufacturers include the integration of electronics (like sensors) into plastic trim, adding colour to parts that eliminates the need to use paint, making rapid changes to specifications and supplying global needs with consistent product.



The US finished goods manufacturers that surviNorth Americaved manufacturing offshoring trends in the early part of this century are the most nimble, efficient, resourceful and demanding of resin suppliers, the article says.



* David Yankovitz is a managing director at Accenture and leads its global chemicals practice; and Paul Bjacek is Accenture's research lead for chemicals and natural resources.  TradeArabia News Service
500 Byte Images: The Haiku Vector Icon Format

Haiku uses a custom vector image format to store icons. This is surprising both because most OSes consider bitmaps to be totally sufficient to represent icons and because there are plenty of vector graphics formats out this (e.g. SVG). The goal of the Haiku Vector Icon Format (HVIF) is to make vector icon files as small as possible. This allows Haiku to display icons as several sizes while still keeping the files small enough to fit into an inode (i.e., inside a files metadata). The goal of keeping the icons in the metadata is to reduce the disk reads needed to display a folder  it allows each file to only require one disk read to display.

This blog post examines the details of the HVIF format using a hex editor and the canonical parsers source code. In the process of dissecting an example icon, Ill also show you an optimization bug in the icon image editor.

The Problem Space: Icons

HVIF is designed especially for the icons that appear when you look at the files in a folder.. This include the files on your desktop, which is just a special folder. Each file has an icon associated with it, based on the file type. While some OSes use thumbnails for PDFs and common image types, HVIF is focused only on the symbolic, abstract icons, not on file previews.

Icons are often represented as bitmaps, and BeOS took a fairly standard approach. It had two icon sizes ( 16x16 and 32x32 pixels) and represented each icon as two bitmaps (one for each size). Because bitmaps are arrays of pixel colors without metadata about the meaning of a given pixel, resizing involves applying transformations somewhat blindly, and general creates distortions, making the image blurry or pixelated. Because there are a small, known set of sizes for icons, each size is created separately as its own image and stored separately as well.

The two bitmap files were very small  a 16x16 bitmap is 256 bytes and a 32x32 bitmap is 1024, for a total of 1280 bytes per icon. Icons have been getting bigger since the 90s (when BeOS was developed), and modern OSes have 64x64 and 128x128 icons. Even if you only add 64x64 icons, that moves your total bytes per icon from just over 1kb to just over 5kb. Each of these jumps in size (doubling the edges) quadruples the number of pixels, and thus the storage space needed for the image.

(image from the Icon-O-Matic documentation.)

Besides bitmaps, the major option for representing images are vector formats. Haiku uses vector icons, IRIX used vector icons, even mainstream Linux desktops like Gnome and KDE can use vector icons. Vector representations work best for images that can be decomposed into lines and color gradients  which is a good fit for the abstract style common in icons. One of the big advantages of vector formats is that theyre easy to resize; because you know what the shape is supposed to be (i.e. a circle), you can render it very small or very large without distorting it. This means that you only need one file per icon; it doesnt matter how many sizes you want to render icons at. In the image above, you can see the same icon rendered in three different file formats  bitmaps and two vector formats. The bitmaps are 16x16 and 32x32 ; adding a larger size there will make a big difference to the file size. The vector image file sizes will remain constant as new icon display sizes are introduced. You can see below why bitmaps need all those different files for different display sizes; when a 32x32` bitmap is blown up to larger sizes it becomes dramatically pixelated. When a vector images is scaled up, it looks just as good as at its native size. The drawback to using vector images is that it can take longer to render a vector image than a bitmap; you basically need to turn the vector image into a bitmap at the size you want to display on the screen.

(image from the Icon-O-Matic documentation.)

The promise of vector formats for icons is that one file could be used to represent all display sizes without loss of clarity. Having one file (rather than three) could save some work for the icon artist and maybe save some file size. However, if you work with web images, you probably know that SVGs (a vector file format) arent always smaller than bitmap formats like PNG/JPG of the same image. Bitmaps have fairly predictable sizes based on the number of pixels in the image and the number of colors those pixels can take on. Vector images have file sizes based on the complexity of the image; it takes space to store each line/color-gradient and more space to store complex lines.

In terms of size, HVIF images compare well to BeOSs bitmaps: real-world icons tend to be 500 to 700 bytes. You can also make ones that are under 250 bytes or a bit over 1000 bytes. This is much smaller than storing even just a 64x64 bitmap and also smaller than other vector formats (e.g., SVG). This small size is achieved by using a binary file format designed to save space (unlike SVGs plain-text XML format). Part of the space saving design involves placing limits on the complexity of files (e.g. you can only have 256 paths).

Why do Haikus developers care about the size of icon files?

One kilobyte is a pretty small amount of memory on modern hard drives, or even in RAM, and its not like there are millions (or even tens of thousands) of icons in one operating system. They care because having especially small icon files allows an optimization that makes displaying the files in a folder faster.

If you use the standard bitmap icon formats, youll probably store them in their own files, separate from the files that use them. In order to display each file in a folder, the operating system will need to read the metadata for the file (including its name and file type) and then read the icon file for that file type. If the icon file were so small that you could store it in the same place as the file metadata, then you could save a read from the hard drive  you could get the metadata and the icon all in one read.

Saving one read per file doesnt sound exciting  its just one. However, reading from disk is among the slowest operations: a CPU cycle can be a quarter of a nanosecond; a read from RAM is about 60 nanoseconds; a read from a relatively fast modern SSD is 20 microseconds (20,000 nanoseconds); a read from a slow disk is 10 milliseconds (10,000,000 nanoseconds). The reads from disk dominate the time it takes to display a file in a folder; it could be a significant performance gain to halve the number of disk reads even if rendering a vector image takes longer than rendering a bitmap.

Implementation Details

Because the interesting part of the file format is how small it can be, I really wanted to learn the nitty-gritty details of how it works. Theres a couple posts by Stephan Assmus, the creator of the file format, and one of them covers some key details of how the format saves space. Unfortunately, this post didnt include enough details to satisfy my curiosity, so I used the parsers source code and a sample HVIF file (in a hex editor) to learn more.

Example

I constructed a file in Icon-O-Matic, the application for creating/editing HVIF files. It has two shapes - a letter H on top of a blobby shape. The H is white and the blob has a color gradient from blue to red. The rest of the background (the 64x64 canvas) is blank/transparent. The H has been scaled up from its original size to take up most of the space.

The benefit of having such a simple logo to examine is that its very small (128 bytes)  only 8 lines in the hex editor.

Above is Haikus hex editor. At the right, it the bytes interpreted as ASCII characters, with . for non-printable/invalid characters. In the middle is the bytes of the file printed as hexadecimal; each pair of characters (e.g. 6e ) is one byte. Each line shows 16 bytes. On the left are character counts in hex (0x00, 0x10, 0x20, , which would be 0, 16, 32, , respectively in decimal) . Theses character counts act like line numbers; theyre counting the number of characters that came before that character count/line number.

Binary formats are much harder for humans to read than most plain text formats; I deciphered this file by reading the parsing code that reads these files. The file has styles, paths, and shapes, each in their own sections; shapes come last because theyre each a combination of a style and one or more paths. Heres an overview of what all these bytes mean:

The first four bytes ( 6e 63 69 66 ) are a magic number that identifies this as an HVIF file; the letters ficn was chosen to represent flat icon. Then there are three sections (yellow, blue, green); these sections appear in every HVIF file and each one of them starts with a count of the objects in that section (all of which are 02 in this file). The yellow section is the two styles: a flat white and a red to blue gradient. The blue section is two paths: the outline of the H and the outline of the blob. The green section is two shapes; these each combine a style and a path to make the white H and colorful blob. The shape for the H also has a transformation matrix to scale it up.

Magic Number

When youre parsing a file, it helps to be able to tell right away if its the type you were expecting, which is why the first four bytes are devoted to this. This is common in binary file formats. While the letters are ficn , they appear in the hex editor as ncif because the magic number is a single int32 written in little endian order, which determines the ordering of the bytes. In little-endian, the least significant byte (the n ) goes first and the most significant byte (the f ) goes last.

Styles

Styles are gradients and flat colors. Each shape can have one style, which is used to fill the shape with a color/gradient pattern. In order to get examples of both a color and a gradient, I made the H flat white and the blob a gradient. The first byte of this section, 02 , tells us there are two styles. The first style starts right after that.

Each style will start with a style type (1 byte), which tells you how to parse the rest of that style. All of the styles include at least one color; the gradients have more colors and also have more other properties than the flat colors. HVIF represents colors as aRGB  each color has four channels: alpha (opacity), red, green, blue. Each channel takes one byte to represent (a uint8 ).

The first style is the flat white, represented by 05 ff . I know that the style is this long because Ive already parsed it before explaining the file to you; otherwise, Id have to look at the first byte (the style type, 05 ) and then interpret the rest from there. Objects (styles/paths/shapes) in HVIF are all variable length, to allow objects with simple or common special-case formats (like this one) to be stored very compactly. The first byte is the style type, which corresponds to an enum in the parser code. (An enum in C/C++ lets you give numeric values names; theyre often used as a way to assign different values to a related set of names  like these style types.) There are five possible style types:

STYLE_TYPE_SOLID_COLOR = 1 , STYLE_TYPE_GRADIENT = 2 , STYLE_TYPE_SOLID_COLOR_NO_ALPHA = 3 , STYLE_TYPE_SOLID_GRAY = 4 , STYLE_TYPE_SOLID_GRAY_NO_ALPHA = 5 ,

The flat white is STYLE_TYPE_SOLID_GRAY_NO_ALPHA . This tells us that this is: a flat color, not a gradient; a gray, meaning that the red, green, and blue channels are all equal; and completely opaque, so the alpha value will be 255. Thats a lot of information to put into one bit! Leveraging overly specific types to pack common cases into very few bits is important to keeping the files small.

Because this is a flat color, it is defined by one aRGB color. The alpha value is given by the type (NO_ALPHA). The red/green/blue value is given by the second byte: ff . All three of the color channels will be set to 255; (255, 255, 255, 255) is how aRGB represents pure white.

Were already done with the first style. There arent any padding/delimiters in HVIF; that would use up space. Instead, we go straight into the second style, the gradient for the blob.

The bytes for the second style are 02 03 04 02 00 ff 00 00 86 00 00 ff . Based on the enum, 02 is STYLE_TYPE_GRADIENT ; I do like that the type values are so easily human readable in the file  2 is just 02 . A gradient starts with a gradient type, gradient flags, and a gradient stop count; each of these is one byte. The gradient type here is 03 , and Ill used another enum from the parser to interpret it.

enum gradients_type { GRADIENT_LINEAR = 0 , GRADIENT_CIRCULAR, GRADIENT_DIAMOND, GRADIENT_CONIC, GRADIENT_XY, GRADIENT_SQRT_XY };

The enum starts at zero and increments by one with each new name, so 03 matches to the fourth name, GRADIENT_CONIC . We dont actually need to understand this to parse the style because the gradient type affects the rendering, not the structure of the file. Every gradient has colors that start and stop at different places (i.e. starts as opaque as the aRGB color is and eventually become transparent); the gradient type determines how the renderer will fade between the colors.

The next byte, the gradient flags ( 04 ), does affect the parsing. Many HVIF objects have a flags byte near the beginning; this allows for space saving in a similar way to the various flat color types. Each bit in the flags byte has a meaning, determined by another enum:

GRADIENT_FLAG_TRANSFORM = 1 < < 1 , GRADIENT_FLAG_NO_ALPHA = 1 < < 2 , GRADIENT_FLAG_16_BIT_COLORS = 1 < < 3 , // not yet used GRADIENT_FLAG_GRAYS = 1 < < 4 ,

A byte has 8 bits; for 04 this is 0000 0100 . The fact that there is only one bit thats a 1 means that only one flag is set. Flags are checked using statements like gradientFlags & GRADIENT_FLAG_TRANSFORM , with a resulting value of anything greater than zero being true/the flag is set. Each flag value only has one 1 in it, so the the only one thats set is the one whose value is 4. This means that only the GRADIENT_FLAG_NO_ALPHA is set because 1 << 2 (one left-shifted twice) is 0000 0100 . This flag means that the alpha value for all the colors in the gradient is 255 (completely opaque).

You may have noticed that the flag values start at 0000 0010 and continue to 0001 0000 . While not using all the bits (due to not having enough flags to need to) is fine, it seems odd to me that 0000 0001 isnt used. I dont have an explanation for why.

This is a gradient where the colors will not include alpha values (all are opaque), so the next step is to look at the stop count to find out how many colors there are. In this case, thats 02 , which is just 2 . Each of these two colors will be 4 bytes - a stop offset plus red, green, blue. The bytes for the first color are 00 ff 00 00 , which means that the stop offset is zero and the color is 100% red. The second color is 86 00 00 ff  a stop offset of 86 and 100% blue. This the end of this gradient, and (since weve parsed two styles) the end of the styles section.

Paths

The paths section is:

02 0a 0c 2b b3 da 2b b5 72 30 b5 72 30 b3 da 31 b3 da 31 b7 70 30 b7 70 30 b5 d8 2b b5 d8 2b b7 70 2a b7 70 2a b3 da 06 08 de 6e 40 24 28 28 b8 18 b3 6d b4 47 b8 f2 40 2c 54 b5 79 c6 39 ba 16 c9 36 3c 58 50 54 4c 54 c7 3d 54 58 40 24

A path is made of line segments; each segment can be straight or curved. The H path is entirely straight lines, but the blob-path has a mix of straight lines and curves. This lets me show you two different ways paths are encoded. These differences offer space savings, like the other complexity-increasing encoding choices.

The first byte is 02 to say that there are two paths. Each path starts with a path flags byte and a point count. For the first path, this is 0a for the flags and 0c for the point count. For the flags, we care about the pattern of bits rather than the value; 0a in hex is 0000 1010 in binary. Two of the flags are set (since there are two 1 s), but Ill need another enum to decode what those mean:

PATH_FLAG_CLOSED = 1 < < 1 , PATH_FLAG_USES_COMMANDS = 1 < < 2 , PATH_FLAG_NO_CURVES = 1 < < 3 ,

This flag byte works the same way as the gradient styles flag byte: PATH_FLAG_CLOSED and PATH_FLAG_NO_CURVES are true for this path. PATH_FLAG_CLOSED is direction to the renderer  please connect the last point to the first one with a line. This flag does not affect parsing. PATH_FLAG_NO_CURVES means there are only straight lines in this path. As important as the flags that are set, PATH_FLAG_USES_COMMANDS being false means that this path will be encoded as a list of points (we dont have to worry about commands yet). Because this path is only straight lines, each segment will be defined by one (x,y) point.

The point count is 0c in hex  meaning 12. The first point is 2b b3 da ; this is composed of an x coordinate ( 2b ) and a y coordinate ( b3 da ). Each coordinate can be 1 or 2 bytes, so each point can be 2, 3, or 4 bytes. In this first path, all the points happen to have 1 byte xs and 2 byte ys.

Each coordinate is encoded in a special number format designed for the HVIF format. This allows integer values in the range -32 to +95 to be represented with one byte and integer values in the range -128 to +192 to be represented with two bytes. All non-integer values are represented using two bytes, and they can be in the range -128 to +192. The first bit of the first byte of a coordinate is 0 if the coordinate takes one byte and 1 if it takes two bytes. To get the value of a one byte coordinate, interpret the byte as a uint8 and then subtract 32. To get the value of a two byte coordinate, set the first bit to 0 , interpret the two bytes as a uint16 , divide the result by 102, and then subtract 128.

This is the code that reads one coordinate:

// read_coord bool read_coord (LittleEndianBuffer & buffer, float & coord) { uint8 value; if ( ! buffer.Read(value)) return false; if (value & 128 ) { // high bit set, the next byte is part of the coord uint8 lowValue; if ( ! buffer.Read(lowValue)) return false; value & = 127 ; uint16 coordValue = (value < < 8 ) | lowValue; coord = ( float )coordValue / 102.0 - 128.0 ; } else { // simple coord coord = ( float )value - 32.0 ; } return true; }

While the ranges of the one-byte integers and two-byte integers are documented elsewhere, the code seems to be the only source for how to interpret a two-byte coordinate. All coordinates are 32-bit floating point numbers in the implementation, but I dont think thats essential to the format.

The range on the 1-byte coordinates initially confused me: why would you have a range like -32 to +95, instead of being centered at 0? An important point to remember here is that the core range is 0-64  the coordinates that are actually on the native 64x64 canvas. Thus, the center of that range is the natural center of the coordinate system. There are 7 bits available in one byte (8 minus the flag bit), so theres room for 127 values. By adding 32/31 values on each side of the core 0-64 range, you end up at -32 to +95. (A quick way to check whether a range might be sized to take up a given number of bits is by adding the endpoints  i.e. +32 + +95 = 127.)

This format actually makes parsing the x/y coordinates by hand pretty easy. Im not trying to understand every single number, just figure out what each part is for. The first bit says whether this coordinate is one or two bytes; in the hex editor, this will be a letter pair that starts with 8, 9, or a letter (A through F). When Im reading a coordinate, I can quickly figure out if this is one or two bytes and move forward; I dont try to determine the values of all of them because its not interesting or useful to me.

Here are the 12 points:

Point # x1 x2 y1 y2 1 2b b3 da 2 2b b5 72 3 30 b5 72 4 30 b3 da 5 31 b3 da 6 31 b7 70 7 30 b7 70 8 30 b5 d8 9 2b b5 d8 10 2b b7 70 11 2a b7 70 12 2a b3 da

Even without turning the bytes into decimal numbers, its clear that most of the line segments are vertical or horizontal. Im not sure why Icon-O-Matic chose to store the path this way, when HVIF has a special space-saving way to store horizontal or vertical line segments. Those special line segments are stored as one coordinate only, rather than the two for a basic line segment.

Using the horizontal and vertical segment types does require changing the type of the path. While lines-only paths and curves-only paths have segments of all one time, command paths allow each segment in the path to have a different type. There are four supported segment types: line, cubic curve, horizontal line, and vertical line. Command bytes near the beginning of the path  between the point count and the first point  contain a 2-bit tag for each segment in the path. A 12-point path would need three command bytes  2 bits per point * 12 points / 8 bits per byte = 3 bytes.

The simple lines-only path requires (12 points * 3 bytes per point =) 36 bytes to represent the points. A command path would need 3 bytes to represent the segment types, but only 6 + 7 + 7 = 20 bytes to represent the points.

Point # Segment Type x1 x2 y1 y2 1 Line 2b b3 da 2 Vertical Line b5 72 3 Horizontal Line 30 4 Vertical Line b3 da 5 Horizontal Line 31 6 Vertical Line b7 70 7 Horizontal Line 30 8 Vertical Line b5 d8 9 Horizontal Line 2b 10 Vertical Line b7 70 11 Horizontal Line 2a 12 Vertical Line b3 da Total Bytes Used: 6 0 7 7

Using a different path type would save (36 - 23 =) 13 bytes; while thats not a huge difference, it seems relevant in the canonical implementation of a file format designed to save space. To make sure Im not confused about the way a command path would be represented in the file, Im going to edit the file to just change the representation of this one path. Theres one more thing to figure out before jumping into editing: the format of a command byte.

From looking at the command byte parsing code, commands are read right to left within a byte, judging by the parsing code:

Each pair of bits matches up to a segment type:

PATH_COMMAND_H_LINE = 0 , PATH_COMMAND_V_LINE = 1 , PATH_COMMAND_LINE = 2 , PATH_COMMAND_CURVE = 3 ,

So, the command bytes would be 0100 0110 , 0100 0100 , and 0100 0100 , which is 46 44 44 in hex, assuming that the bytes are read from left to right (while the bits within a byte are read right to left).

Ill also need to change the flags byte from 0a (no curves, closed) to 06 (commands, closed). I wanted to set it to 0e (no curves, commands, closed), but that doesnt work due to the ordering of an if statement in the parsing code:

if (pathFlags & PATH_FLAG_NO_CURVES) { if ( ! read_path_no_curves(buffer, path, pointCount)) error = true; } else if (pathFlags & PATH_FLAG_USES_COMMANDS) { if ( ! read_path_with_commands(buffer, path, pointCount)) error = true; } else { if ( ! read_path_curves(buffer, path, pointCount)) error = true; }

The code for the H path changes from:

0a 0c 2b b3 da 2b b5 72 30 b5 72 30 b3 da 31 b3 da 31 b7 70 30 b7 70 30 b5 d8 2b b5 d8 2b b7 70 2a b7 70 2a b3 da

To:

06 0c 46 44 44 2b b3 da b5 72 30 b3 da 31 b7 70 30 b5 d8 2b b7 70 2a b3 da

In addition to logically representing the same path (i.e the same end points for a series of line segments), the file with this path changed also looks identical to the original icon. Using the more space-expensive way of storing this path seems like a bug in Icon-O-Matic (a minor one in this case) that I could probably fix since Icon-O-Matic is open-source (like the rest of Haiku), but lets get back to the substance of this post  understanding the image format.

Now that youve seen a command path, the second path will be easy to understand. Its a command path, and the only new feature it uses are curves. All curves in HVIF are cubic curves; each one is defined by three (x,y) points. In the parser code, these are referred to as x, y, x_in, y_in, x_out, and y_out. These six values are written in the order I just named them.

The second path is:

06 08 de 6e 40 24 28 28 b8 18 b3 6d b4 47 b8 f2 40 2c 54 b5 79 c6 39 ba 16 c9 36 3c 58 50 54 4c 54 c7 3d 54 58 40 24

The first byte ( 06 ; 0000 0110 ) is the flags: a closed path using commands. This time the zero on the no curves flag is correct; this path does have curves. The second byte ( 08 ) is the point count; there are 8 points in this path. The reason this path takes more bytes despite having 60% the number of points of the previous path is that curves take a lot of bytes (6) to represent. I never thought Id say six bytes was a lot.

The command bytes are de 6e ; the segments will match up to the commands in de ( 1101 1110 ) and then the commands in 6e ( 0110 1110 ). The commands within each byte are read right to left. This results in the following commands:

Bits Decimal Value Meaning 10 2 line 11 3 curve 01 1 vertical line 11 3 curve 10 2 line 11 3 curve 10 2 line 01 1 vertical line

Editing the first path confirmed the interpretation of the command bytes; this is important because if the ordering of commands is wrong but the types are correct, then the file will look ok, but the rendered result will be different. The number of coordinates for each segment type is set, but if they are parsed in the wrong order, the coordinates will be grouped differently.

Using this command listing results in the following understanding of the path:

Type X Y Xin Yin Xout Yout Line 40 24 Curve 28 28 b8 18 b3 6d b4 47 b8 f2 Vertical Line <28> 40 Curve 2c 54 b5 79 c6 39 ba 16 c9 36 Line 3c 58 Curve 50 54 4c 54 c7 3d 54 Line 58 40 Vertical Line <58> 24

The <28> and <58> in the table represent the implied values for the vertical line segments; being a vertical line means copying the x of the previous point. This path is a weird mix of types since I drew it by hand, with the goal of getting as many line segment types as I could. The final path is horizontal; the shape being closed means that the final point (58, 24) is connected to the first point (40, 24) by a line segment. I intentionally made that segment horizontal, not realizing that it wouldnt appear as a horizontal line segment in the file.

Shapes

The shapes section tells you what the renderer will actually draw. Each shape has a style and one or more paths. The space inside the path (or between the paths) will be filled with the style. The shapes are ordered back to front, so the first shape you parse will be the bottom-most layer of the image. In the logo Im dissecting, this means the blob-shape will be first and then H-shape will be second.

The shapes section starts with a shape count  02 because there are two shapes  and then jumps straight into the first shape. The bytes for this one are 0a 01 01 01 00  pretty small compared to those paths.

There is only one type of shape, so both shapes in this file start with 0a , the shape type for SHAPE_TYPE_PATH_SOURCE (another enum). Im not really sure what this means, but since theres only one shape type, its pretty meaningless. The next byte of a shape is the style index. The 01 here means this shape is using the second style in this file (its indexed from zero); thats the red-to-blue gradient. The next two bytes ( 01 01 ) are the path count and a path index; this shape has one path and its the second one in the file  the blob-y one. The last byte ( 00 ) is the shape flags; none of them are set, so Ill wait for the next shape to discuss what the flags mean, other than that setting any of them would mean wed have more to read for this shape.

Because shapes refer to styles (and paths) by one byte, there can only be 256 each of styles and paths in a single icon/file. (256 is the number of distinct values you can fit in 8 bits.) This is probably plenty for icons, but not enough for all complex vector graphics; being specifically for icons allows HVIF to produce smaller files by placing this limitation on complexity.

The second shape takes up more bytes: 0a 00 01 00 02 44 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 44 47 1c c9 00 00 be 6a aa . The first section is very similar to the first shape: the only valid shape type 0a , the first style (flat white), and one path  the first one ( H ). Thats the first four bytes, so were up to the shape flags byte  02 . Each bit in the flags byte represents a different additional feature a shape could have.

SHAPE_FLAG_TRANSFORM = 1 < < 1 , SHAPE_FLAG_HINTING = 1 < < 2 , SHAPE_FLAG_LOD_SCALE = 1 < < 3 , SHAPE_FLAG_HAS_TRANSFORMERS = 1 < < 4 , SHAPE_FLAG_TRANSLATION = 1 < < 5 ,

Since Im not giving a full manual on the HVIF format, just looking at one example, Im going to skip explaining what the other flags mean. The one thats set in 02 is SHAPE_FLAG_TRANSFORM . This mens that there will be a six-value matrix thats used to scale/translate/skew/rotate the path. Im not really sure, but I think the difference between this flag and SHAPE_FLAG_HAS_TRANSFORMERS is that this flag means theres only one transformation matrix.

The rest of this shape is six numbers. The numbers in this matrix are 24-bit floats in a format created for HVIF. Icons dont need the precision of 32-bit floats, so using a smaller format helps save a lot of space. However, Im not sure why 24-bit floats were chosen over 16-bit floats (a more standard format). In any case, heres the six numbers:

Byte1 Byte2 Byte3 1 44 00 00 2 00 00 00 3 00 00 00 4 44 47 1c 5 c9 00 00 6 be 6a aa

This is one of the only parts of the format thats not variable length  as soon as you read that the shape flags were 02 , youd know that the next (3 bytes per float x 6 floats = ) 18 bytes are a transformation matrix.

Since only that one flag bit was set, thats the end of this shape. This matrix scales the H path up and moves it to the center of the image. I got the H by copy-pasting text into Icon-O-Matic, but the shape wasnt big enough for my taste initially, so I scaled it up.

Conclusion

I like playing with Haiku; after trying a number of less-popular-than-Linux operating systems, its the most stable and usable of the ones I tried. Its also different enough from Linux to have an interesting point of view. This vector icon format is just one example of that.

This vector format is interesting to me because its a binary format (I hadnt parsed binary files before), its a vector image format (which I havent looked at in detail before), it has a clear constraint to optimize around (which makes the reasons behind design decisions easier to guess), and it was created mostly by one person (so it should be simple enough for me to figure out). Parsing it by hand made me a lot more comfortable converting between hex and binary and thinking about bytes as a collection of bits. Editing the files to investigate how command bytes work made me feel super cool  I edited a file by hand in a hex editor AND IT STILL WORKED! Thats a power Id previously ascribed only to wizards with a specialty in low-level programming.

I recommend digging into the details of a binary file format with an open-source parser. Having the source code to look at while interpreting the hex was invaluable; it would have been much harder to do this without the code available. Reading about the features of HVIF and then following my curiosity about how exactly those features worked was very satisfying, and I learned new skills in the process (even if knowing the details of HVIF has very limited applicability).

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Dan Luu for comments on the post and help with the how slow is reading from disk? calculation, David Turner for catching awkward wording and lots of spelling mistakes, Bert Muthalaly for positive comments that make me want to write more posts, and Julia Evans for finding the confusing parts. Thanks to @davecporter for catching a typo. :)
Turkey is now willing to accept the liberalisation of travel visa rules with the European Union by the end of the year instead of October, as previously targeted, the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag said on Sunday, citing senior Turkish government sources.



Ankara had threatened to walk away from an EU migrant deal should it not get more relaxed travel rules in October, but Turkey's EU Affairs Minister Omer Celik downplayed that prospect on Saturday after a meeting with EU officials.



Welt am Sonntag quoted senior Turkish officials familiar with the EU talks as saying that a delay until November or December was now seen as acceptable. However, Turkish officials were still insisting on securing visa liberalisation "no later than the end of the year," the newspaper said.



The newspaper also quoted EU sources as saying the two sides had narrowed their differences about implementation of Turkey's anti-terror laws, which the EU has set as a condition for granting Turks visa-free movement, but gave no details.



The EU, which depends on Ankara to curb the flow of migrants into the bloc, is now seeking to ease tensions with Turkey after criticising President Tayyip Erdogan's post-coup crackdown.



Celik said on Saturday Ankara would stick to the migration accord but it was "not rational" to expect Ankara to relax its counter-terrorism laws now as it fights Islamic State in neighbouring Syria and Kurdish militants on its own soil.



The EU worries Turkey applies its anti-terror laws too broadly in order to go after critics of Erdogan.  Reuters
Mother Teresa of Calcutta, known as the "saint of the gutters" during her life, was declared a saint of the Roman Catholic Church by Pope Francis on Sunday, fast-tracked to canonisation just 19 years after her death.



Tens of thousands of pilgrims packed St. Peter's Square at the Vatican for a service to honour the tiny nun, who worked among the world's neediest in the slums of the Indian city now called Kolkata and become one of the most recognisable faces of the 20th century.



A Nobel peace laureate, her legacy complements Pope Francis's vision of a humble church that strives to serve the poor, and the festivities in her honour are a highlight of his Holy Year of Mercy, which runs until November 8.



Standing under a canvas hung from St. Peter's Basilica showing the late nun in her blue-hemmed white robes, Francis said she was a "dispenser of divine mercy" and held world powers to account "for the crimes of poverty they created".



"For Mother Teresa, mercy was the salt which gave flavour to her work, it was the light which shone in the darkness of the many who no longer had tears to shed for their poverty and suffering."



Around 120,000 people attended the ceremony, according to Vatican estimates, celebrating the life of a woman who Francis said it might be difficult to call "Saint" as people felt so close to her they spontaneously used "Mother".



"Everything she did gave an example to the entire world," said 17-year-old student Massimiliano D'Aniello, from Grosseto, Italy, adding he had made a musical about her with his friends.



"She showed we can't all do everything, but little gestures made with so much love are what's important."



Pope John Paul II, who met her often, had no doubt about her eligibility for sainthood, and put her on the route to canonisation two years after her death instead of the usual five.



'SHE WILL PRAY FOR US'



As pilgrims from across the world gathered at the Vatican along with delegations from more than a dozen governments, the canonisation was also celebrated in Skopje, the capital of modern Macedonia where Mother Teresa was born of Albanian parents in 1910 and became a nun aged 16.



No major ceremony was scheduled in Kolkata, where the first MoC mission was set up in 1952, but prayers, talks and cultural events were planned, in an atmosphere of quiet pride.



"We are blessed with this canonisation because we know mother is in heaven and she will pray for us and she will bless us," said Sister Laisa, assistant superior general of the MoC.



Pramod Sharma, a Kolkata resident who grew up near a convent school and childcare centre where Mother Teresa worked, said he and his country were proud she had chosen India as her home.



"(She) belonged to our India and stayed with the Indians and will forever stay in our hearts," Sharma said.



The Church defines as saints those believed to have led such holy lives they are now in Heaven and can intercede with God to perform miracles - two of which are needed to confer sainthood.



She is credited with healing an Indian woman from stomach cancer in 1998 and a Brazilian man from a brain infection in 2008. The Brazilian, Marcilio Andrino, and his wife attended the ceremony and were blessed by the pope.



Sister Leandra Stupnicka, a nun from Wroclaw in Poland, said she got up at 4 am to be at the Vatican early on Sunday and pay her respects to the new saint.



"This mother was simple, very poor and devout and for us she is a testament to serving others," Sister Leandra said. "We pray to be like her."



After the canonisation service, the pope treated 1,500 homeless people from across Italy to Neapolitan pizza served by members of Mother Teresa's order. - Reuters
More than 20,000 ICT industry leaders and experts from over 120 countries gathered in Shanghai, China last week for the first Huawei Connect, Huawei's largest-ever integrated conference for the global ICT ecosystem.



Held from August 31-September 2, the themed conference dubbed "Shape the Cloud" explored cloud era trends and how different industries can achieve digital transformation by developing cloud technology and contributing to the cloud ecosystem.



Throughout the three-day, Huawei showcased its strategy to serve as a platform for growth, and support strong alliances that push the industry forward and promote ongoing social progress.



Society as we know it is developing towards a smart society, and in this environment, it simply will not be possible for any company to operate and compete on its own. All industries from healthcare to education will become more interconnected, more complex. As industries integrate and consumer demands evolve, enterprises have to become more open and flexible, and future-proof their business with ecological advantages, said Guo Ping, rotating CEO of Huawei.



Guo stressed three of Huawei's guiding principles for cultivating a sound ecosystem in the cloud era: making a bigger pie (i.e., market) is more important than fighting for a larger share; managing cooperation is more important than managing competition; and benefit sharing is the driving force behind the evolution of the ecosystem  and the result of its successful development.



On day one, Huawei officially unveiled its Integrated Communication Platform (ICP), the companys newest addition to its range of Safe City solutions featuring extensive connectivity and high visibility. The platform can pick up alerts from various channels via social media, Internet of Things and so on, and can also quickly and extensively access videos. It enables fast response and handling of security alerts, streamlined coordination of different first responder departments, and granular, informed command decisions.



On day two, Huawei announced its Agile Network 2016 solution that uses Software-defined Networking (SDN) technology to shape the network architecture of the cloud era and to establish a firm foundation for the digital transformation of enterprises. The Agile Network 2016 focuses solutions on the mobilization of users and services during the digital transformation of enterprises, on IoT application of production systems, and on new challenges brought by cloud-based applications. This new solution is intended to create a network that is on-demand, has self-services, is easily managed, and is both secure and trusted.



Huawei also launched FusionStorage 6.0, which is designed to help customers address potential challenges arising from migration of their services to a cloud by providing the performance and capacity of a fully distributed architecture, flexible and optional infrastructure, and an open and compatible architecture. Additionally, Huawei launched FusionStage PaaS platform which features an open architecture and offers enterprises a complete environment for app development, deployment, operation, and management.



Furthermore, Huawei and Accenture jointly announced verified enterprise SAP and Oracle cloud solutions, which are based on Huawei FusionCloud solution for global enterprise customers' core applications to provide a one-stop service. The two-year alliance between the two ICT leaders leverages Huaweis extensive experience in ICT infrastructure and Accentures capabilities in consulting, systems integration and outsourcing.



On the last day of the event, Huawei launched the first full-scenario Agile Controller 3.0 (AC 3.0), which focuses on four business scenarios (enterprise campus, data center network, WAN, and IoT) and provides capabilities such as on-demand network resource pool reservation,, automatic deployment, intelligent optimization and bandwidth adjustment on-demand for enterprise customers across campuses, carriers and data center networks. This can improve the resource scheduling efficiency of enterprise cloud services, improving the network efficiency for carrier customers and providing the best customer experience possible.



Huawei also announced its New Financial Cloud Solution for Mission Critical jointly developed by Huawei and Infosys Finacle, designed to ease some of the IT challenges of the finance and banking sectors. The new innovation is based on the Huawei FusionCloud platform and the world's first 32-socket Mission Critical server KunLun, integrated with the worlds leading banking system - Infosys Finacle.



Another major announcement that place on day three was the official unveiling of Huaweis new-generation convergent all-flash System OceanStor Dorado V3, which is designed for enterprises' overloaded key applications. Featuring excellent performance, stability, reliability, and convergent efficiency, the new system can improve database performance twentyfold while ensuring service sustainability.



Lastly, Huawei officially launched its first Enterprise Solution Partner Program. Leveraging Huawei's leading ICT infrastructure, the new program will offer powerful support to companies that jointly develop solutions with Huawei to serve global customers. Huawei Enterprise Business Group (BG) will provide its partners in the program with open API, global expert support and lab resources. The program will also support the introduction of new, high-value solutions to the market; help to achieve business success for the partners it works with. This program is the latest example of Huawei Enterprise BG's commitment to building business-driven ICT infrastructure (BDII).  TradeArabia News Service
Infoblox, an automated network control company, will make the Middle East launch its Actionable Network Intelligence Platform at the upcoming Gitex Technology Week, the regions largest ICT event, in Dubai, UAE.



The solution uses Infobloxs network intelligence to provide actionable control points, visibility, and context.



The company will also demonstrate its DNS Firewall as a service solution that extends the companys industry-leading DNS protection to roaming devices off premise, as well as Infoblox Threat Insight that prevents DNS based data exfiltration with built-in streaming analytics.



Gitex Technology Week runs from October 16-20 at Dubai World Trade Centre.



Cherif Sleiman, general manager, Middle East and Africa at Infoblox said: Today, many organizations are mired in confusion when it comes to securing their networks and broader IT infrastructure.



Threat intelligence services give warnings, but dont provide a path for translating that information into action. Monitoring systems warn of malicious activity within a network, but dont give clarity on where to find infected devices, user information, and other metadata. Most important, network and security administrators are drowning in data and alerts, with no easy way to prioritize effective and timely threat response.



Infoblox is the industry leader in managing DNS, DHCP, and IP addressesthe category known as DDI. These services are uniquely at the center of every network, making it possible for Infoblox to spot suspicious activity, instantly block outbound communications to malicious destinations, and prevent exfiltration of intellectual property, customer information, and other sensitive data.



With the recent acquisition of IID, a leader in global cyberthreat intelligence, Infoblox has created an Actionable Network Intelligence Platform that combines threat intelligence with network context to deliver uniquely actionable security insights, he added.



The company will also demonstrate its Infoblox DNS Firewall as a Service solution  an upcoming cloud-based service that expands the value of customer investment in Infoblox by providing visibility, policy management, and context-aware security for devices on-premise and off-premise. Infoblox DNS Firewall as a service will offer a single pane of glass for protecting users from malware and cyberattacks while they are on the corporate network and when they are roaming outside the corporate perimeter.



This new cloud service from Infoblox will extend the capability of network and security operators by providing actionable network intelligence that strengthens their operational and security postures. In addition to providing cloud-hosted recursive DNS with firewall capabilities, the new service delivers unified reporting and single-policy configuration for Infoblox customers, capabilities not available from purely cloud-based DNS services.



Executives from the company will also showcase the Infoblox Threat Insight solution. Theft of sensitive or regulated data and intellectual property is one of the most serious risks to an enterprise. DNS is frequently used as a pathway for data exfiltration, because it is not inspected by common security products such as firewalls, IDS and proxies.



Infoblox Threat Insight detects and automatically blocks attempts to steal sensitive data via DNS without the need for end point agents or additional network infrastructure. Threat Insight provides protection against both DNS tunnelling and sophisticated data exfiltration techniques. Infoblox is the only vendor to offer DNS infrastructure with built-in analytics for protection of data.



Gitex offers a great platform for our company to expose our brand and showcase our latest innovations in DNS security and automated network control to many IT decision makers from various segments of the market that attend the event, Sleiman said.



Because Gitex focuses on our target industry and brings so many of the key players and users in one place, it represents an ideal opportunity for interaction between all the interested parties. We hope to expand and lead our business to success by sharing our technology and knowledge with event attendees. We are committed to the region and investments in events like Gitex are absolutely key to our growth.  TradeArabia News Service
German carmaker Daimler plans to roll out at least six, and possibly as many as nine, electric car models as part of its push to compete with Tesla and Volkswagen's Audi, a person familiar with Daimler's plans told Reuters.



The maker of Mercedes-Benz cars remains on track to unveil a new electric car at the Paris motor show next month. In July, the German carmaker said it had accelerated development of premium electric cars, a segment currently dominated by United States-based rival Tesla.



German trade magazine Automobilwoche earlier cited company sources as saying Daimler would bring to market more than six electric car models between 2018 and 2024.



German firms are investing heavily in electric cars, a segment once neglected by the industry as customers shunned their limited operating range and high cost.



But a growing political backlash against diesel fumes and recent advances in battery technology to increase the reach of an electric car by up to 50 percent have spurred major investments by Volkswagen, Daimler and suppliers such as Bosch and Continental.



Reuters' source said Mercedes would also make an SUV model with a plug-in hybrid engine powered by fuel cells, which would have a range of up to 50 km (30 miles) on battery power and would then run on electricity generated by hydrogen.  Reuters
The Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) has announced that the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) will be the host organisation of this years SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition (ATCE).



ATCE will take place in Dubai from September 2628 under the patronage of the Vice President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates and Ruler of Dubai, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.



Adnoc has a long-standing relationship with SPE, and hosting ATCE further extends Adnocs contribution to the oil and gas technical community in the Middle East and beyond.



Qasem M Al Kayoumi, manager, technical centre, Adnoc, said: Adnocs support of ATCE and SPE is a reflection of our long-standing commitment to this important non-profit organisation which is dedicated to collecting, disseminating, and exchanging knowledge relating to the oil and gas industry.



"Sharing knowledge and best practice amongst industry experts is core to the success and progress of energy companies, particularly during this period when industry players are looking to increase operational efficiency and maximise profitability.



The welcome keynote address at ATCE will be given by Abdul Munim Saif Al Kindy, director, exploration development and production at Adnoc, and the following representatives of Adnoc will be taking part in plenary and panel sessions throughout the conference:



 Mohamed Al Marzouqi, manager, reservoir engineering, offshore  The Next Generation (YP 2.0): Talent Management for Future Energy;

 Mohamed Al Mutawa, manager, production and facilities engineering  Boosting Efficiency in E&P; and

 Omar Suwaina Al Suwaidi, director, gas management directorate  E&P 2.0: Shaping the Future.



Over 2,000 papers were submitted for this years event, of which 540 will be presented in 58 technical sessions, covering all phases of oil and gas exploration and production. ATCE is expecting more than 8,000 attendees, who will also have the opportunity to visit a world-class exhibition with more than 250 exhibitors showcasing state-of-the-art technologies.



Sponsoring and exhibiting at SPE events like ATCE helps to support the industry by funding training courses, university scholarships, technical journals and many other services, a fact highlighted by Qasem M. Al Kayoumi, manager, Technical Centre, Adnoc. Adnocs support of SPE is a good investment in our professionals, who benefit tremendously from the various technical and educational programmes provided by SPE.



Saudi Aramco and Shell are supporting the event as principal sponsors, alongside OiLServ and Industrialisation & Energy Services Company (Taqa) as platinum sponsors. -TradeArabia News Service


Libya's state National Oil Corp is looking to charter a tanker to load 80,000 tonnes of crude oil from its major Ras Lanuf terminal that has been shut since December 2014, sources familiar with the matter said.

A shipping source said NOC was looking to load on September 18-20. A senior Libyan oil official said that the tanker would load from storage.

Ras Lanuf along with neighbouring Es Sider port have been shut by a blockade by Libya's Petroleum Facilities Guard. A deal was recently brokered to empty storage tanks for another blocked export terminal called Zueitina. -- Reuters
Majid Al Futtaim, a leading shopping mall, retail and leisure facilities operator, today officially opened its 20th mall -- My City Centre Al Barsha, in Dubai, UAE.



The mall, a neighbourhood retail destination located in Dubai Science Park, is tailored to the needs of nearby residential communities including Villa Lantana.



Built with an investment of Dh57 million, My City Centre Al Barsha is Majid Al Futtaims second mall under the My City Centre brand after My City Centre Nasseriya, and is set to address the daily shopping and service needs of the more than 40,000 residents anticipated in the area by 2017.



Having committed in June 2016 to increase its total investment in the UAE by Dh30 billion by 2026, taking its total investment in the country to Dh48 billion, Majid Al Futtaim plans to continue developing right-sized malls in key neighbourhoods to deliver accessible, convenient supermarket, lifestyle, and F&B choices on the doorsteps of regional residents.



The mall will be anchored by a 1,187 sq m Carrefour Market  taking the tally of the Carrefour Market concept to 33 in the UAE and a total of 55 Carrefour stores in the country  offering a wide range of products including a diverse selection of organic and locally sourced food products.



My City Centre Al Barshas mix of retail and dining outlets has been carefully considered to benefit the largely Emirati communities in Al Barsha South as well as the diversity of residents in Villa Lantana and the Arjan mixed-use development.



The new mall features City Centre Clinic, Majid Al Futtaims third UAE wellness destination addressing the primary healthcare needs of the community; dining options such as McDonalds, Shakespeare & Co, Tim Hortons and Papa Murphys, with seating for alfresco dining, as well as lifestyle brands including Aldo Accessories, Sketchers, Arabian Oud, Inglot, Al Rifai and Jackys.



Community malls are a key element of Majid Al Futtaims development strategy as our research has shown that regional residents are keen to have shopping, dining, and services within easy reach of their neighbourhood. My City Centre Al Barsha is Majid Al Futtaims second location set to meet customers needs through a community mall; we continue to seek new opportunities in high-growth residential locations such as Al Barsha, as part of the companys stated regional investment strategy, said Kim McInnes, CEO  Majid Al Futtaim Properties Shopping Malls Business Unit. - TradeArabia News Service


British Airways resumed direct flights to Tehran last week after four years of suspension due to Western sanctions on Iran.



The airline, owned by IAG, becomes the second European carrier to resume flights to Iran after Air France.



The first BA flight left Heathrow on Thursday evening.



"British Airways has a long history of flying to Iran so we are very excited to be launching our new six times a week service, direct from Heathrow to Tehran, said a spokesman.



The service follows the relaxation of sanctions against Iran and the reopening of the British embassy in the Iranian capital last year which was ransacked by protesters in 2011. - Reuters
Menzies Aviation, a global airport services provider, is planning to formalise a joint venture partnership with Oman Air to offer ground handling services at all airports across the Sultanate by the first quarter of 2017, a report said.



The two sides are currently going through a due diligence process aimed at concluding a formal JV agreement between them, reported Oman Observer.



With such a complex arrangement, there is a significant period of due diligence required by both parties. This phase of the partnership is still on-going, Nick Digby, business support manager, Menzies Aviation plc (UAE), was quoted as saying in the report.



Our current schedule suggests that the partnership will be formalised in the first quarter of 2017, he told the Observer.



Our partnership with Oman Air means that we will have a presence at all airports in the Sultanate, he added.



Oman Air Ground Handling already employs over 2,000 people and handles more than 50,000 aircraft turnarounds per year. The resources of both companies will form the Joint Venture, and they will continue to deliver exceptional service, which includes the full support of Menzies Aviations training, technology and experience, he explained.
Vote for love, not war

Neither Hillary, nor Trump shows for love, for peace for our future. We, the voters, gotta choose for love, not war. Why?

Facts:

"When Moammar Gadhafi was killed in the field after the fall of his government she laughed with a reporter: We came, we saw, he died."

As for Donald Trump, he is usually equally aggressive in speaking of potential U.S. military actions, "nuke them!" He said many times.

Now, what can we do? Lesser of two evils? The third choice? does it exist? You tell me!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`

With the campaign proper about to begin, on Labor Day, a last August thought, a very simple one: War is terrible. It is my impression our candidates for president dont really know this. They never say it, not in formal speeches or in thinking aloud, in reveries in friendly interviews. I would say of most of Americas political class that they have their heads all screwed up about war, that they approach the subject coolly, as a political and geopolitical matter, and that they see it through prisms of personal political need and ideological gain. They are missing the central fact of itthat it is terrible. Before the election is over it would be good if someone said it.

The thought arises most recently from the harrowing photo and videotape of the 5-year-old boy in Aleppo, Syria. You have seen one or both. His name is Omran Daqneesh and he lived with his parents and three siblings in the rebel-held Qaterji neighborhood, which late Wednesday night last week either Russian or Syrian forces targeted in a brutal airstrike. Omran was pulled from the rubble. He was placed on a seat in the back of an ambulance.

The left side of his head was covered in blood. His thick dark hair was stiff from smoke and dust. His legs were marked by soot and what looked like bruises. One report said hed been in the rubble an hour before they dug him out.

They wouldnt let the ambulance go until it was full. There was room for more children, and they came. But Omran is the one you cant stop watching. He stares mutely, like a shocked old man. Photojournalists make flashes of light as they take his picture. No one hasor takesa moment to call any comfort to him, to the 5-year-old boy as he stares ahead.

He cant fully see out of his left eye, which seems damaged. Tentatively, calling no attention to himself, he brings his left hand up to his head and touches around for the wound. He seems to find it, then puts his hand down on his legs, as if not to call attention to his wounds.

Watching the videotape, posted on YouTube by an anti-Assad group, you see what is most harrowing. It isnt only his youth, his aloneness, the bloodits that he isnt crying.

Children, by nature and instinct, cry when they are infants. But as they grow older, 3 and 4 and 5, crying is sometimes more of a decision. Children who know theyre cared for cry in the expectation that someone will comfort them. If by 3 or 4 you havent had that, or havent had that enoughif circumstances were harsh enough that you couldnt rely on help or comfortthen you might not cry. Because it wont bring the help you need, or may in fact bring negative responses.

For all 5 years of his life, Omran Daqneesh lived in a country wracked by civil war, surrounded by the tension, fear and hardship war brings.

Anyway, he didnt cry. He was taken to a local underground hospital called M10, treated for head wounds and released. There are reports his older brother has since died.

War is terrible. It abuses the innocent and takes their lives, it wastes all kinds of treasure, it kills generations and whole cultures. It strikes me as rather mad that our candidates for commander in chief of the most powerful armed forces in the world dont ever simply think aloud about this.

About 18 months ago I asked a potential Republican presidential candidate, in conversation, if he hated war. He got the dart-eyed look politicians get when they sense a trick question. This startled me. How do you not know the answer? After a few seconds I said, This is not a trick question. I explained I was thinking of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who said, I hate war, roughly five years before prosecuting one with unambivalent vigor.

The potential candidate then stuttered that of course he doesnt like war, but sometimes its necessary. Well, yes, sometimes it is. But why would you fear stating that war is hell, and hell aint where we want to be?

Afterward, and again this week, I went back to FDRs famous speech, delivered at Chautauqua, N.Y., Aug. 14, 193680 years ago this month. He was less cheerful, he admitted, about world events than domestic onesthis at the depth of the Depression. What happens in the world may have an impact on the United States, but we can serve the cause of peace by setting an example and following the policy of the good neighborthe neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others. Because of this practice the whole world now knows that the United States cherishes no predatory ambitions. We are strong; but less powerful nations know that they need not fear our strength.

He observed that the noblest monument to peace . . . in all the world is not a monument . . . but the boundary which unites the United States and Canada3,000 miles of friendship. Still, so long as war exists there is danger of being drawn into one. That grieves him, he said, because I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. . . . I have seen cities destroyed. . . . I hate war.

Its quite a speech, a deep and persuasive exposing of thoughts on the most essential of human and governmental subjects. But what really surprised me on rereading it was that I dont think a Republican or Democratic candidate would feel free to speak like that anymore. Theyd fear being called soft. That isnt good, or even practical. FDR after all was pretty good at waging war. It only made him more powerful, made his decisions more convincing, that hed laid down the predicate that hed never wanted it and in fact hated it.

Unless Im missing something neither candidate for president appears to have an informed or deeply felt sense of the tragedy of war. Hillary Clinton was subjected, in the primaries, to sharp criticism from the left that she was too bellicose, was wrong to go all in on Iraq, wrong to support regime change in Libya, wrong to be so temperamentally activist in this area. When Moammar Gadhafi was killed in the field after the fall of his government she laughed with a reporter: We came, we saw, he died.

As for Donald Trump, he is usually equally aggressive in speaking of potential U.S. military actions, though its clear he hates war at least for himself. He did not serve and famously told Howard Stern that dodging incoming STDs was his personal Vietnam.

Our leaders are shallow on the subject of war. No, worse than shallowtheyre silent. Which is one reason they will likely not be fully trusted should they make rough decisions down the road on Syria, or Iran, or elsewhere.

War is terrible. That should be said over and over, not because its a box you ought to check on the way to the presidency but because youre human and have a brain.

You should hate war. A 5-year-old knows that.
More than 120 medical professionals as well as international medical experts are attending the annual Aviation Health Conference, which is running from September 3 to 4 at the Etihad Airways Medical Centre.



Held under the theme Ophthalmology and Colour Vision in Aviation,, the conference is under the patronage of the UAE General Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) Aeromedical Section in partnership with Etihad Airways and Moorfields Eye Hospital Centre Abu Dhabi.



In opening the conference, Dr Nadia Bastaki, Etihad Airways vice president Medical Services and senior aviation medical examiner, highlighted the importance of collaboration within the industry.



Etihad Airways Medical Centre organises annual aviation health conferences to encourage collaboration among aviation medicine practitioners and health industry stakeholders both in the region and internationally.



The airline is honoured to have Dr Ansa Jordaan, chief, Aviation Medicine Section at International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) as a guest speaker this year.



The ongoing education, sharing of medical experience and latest intervention work towards standardising medical practice and encouraging aviation safety by enhancing aircrew health is of paramount importance, especially as we explore the latest advances in the aviation field, Dr Bastaki said.



The Etihad Airways Medical Centre is a state-of-the art facility, which is staffed by 13 physicians and 15 nurses offering a full range of services including: General Medicine, Aviation Medicine, Travel Health, Occupational Health, Ear Nose and Throat (ENT) Services, Internal Medicine, Dental Services, Physiotherapy, Laboratory and Radiology, 24 hour Ambulance Service and National Service medical checkups for the airline's staff.



Each year, a different topic is discussed by the conference attendees who include aviation medical examiners and nurses, ophthalmologists, doctors and other healthcare professionals from major airlines and the health industry.



Speaking at the conference, Dr Jordaan highlighted the issue of colour vision assessments, calling it a matter of high priority for the industry, adding that the aviation industry needs to standardise assessments for colour vision across the world.



Mohammed Ali Al Shorafa Al Hammadi, chief executive officer of United Eastern Medical Services, commended the airline for highlighting the issue of ophthalmological health.



Through Moorfields Eye Hospital Centre Abu Dhabi, we are pleased to participate in this important medical event in the field of aviation medicine, in collaboration with Etihad Airways Medical Centre. We continue to provide full support and cooperation to the industry, said Al Hammadi. - TradeArabia News Service
Taj Dubai has welcomed Aabhas Mehrotra as the new chef de Cuisine for its global eatery Tesoro.



Mehrotra comes with an impressive culinary career in Indias most lauded restaurants, the hotel said in a statement.



A graduate from Oberoi Center of Learning and Development with top honours, Mehrotra embarked on his journey with Oberoi Amarvilas, Agra (India) where he gained experience under Michelin Star Chef Daniel Hebert.



His career quickly flourished as he gained hands on experience in various cuisines and cultures, from Patisserie to Thai to Italian Fine Dining and Gourmet Global Dining. He honed his skills working with acclaimed chefs as Michelin Star Chef Vineet Bhatia, Chef Anil Rohira (World Pastry Champion 2008), Chef Peter Yeun (King of Laminated Pastries) and Chef Vikas Bagul (World Chocolate Master 2014).



Mehrotras efforts have been applauded from his student days as he topped performance in Patisserie at IHM Aurangabad (India), and subsequently went on to contribute to the win of Best Pastry Shop in South Mumbai (2013 and 2014) by the prestigious Times Food Awards. In 2015, his contribution as Sous Chef De Cuisine at VETRO also led to the win of Best Italian Fine Dining Restaurant in Mumbai by Times Food Awards. His other noted achievements include  Winner of Pre Plated Dessert by The Great Indian Culinary Challenge 2014, and the Winner of Hot Food and Best Overall Team by The Great Indian Culinary Challenge 2016 and Best Team of the Quarter  CEO Awards 2016 (Managing Director and CEO The Oberoi Group of Hotels).



Drawing on his knowledge and passion for global cuisine as well as years working alongside highly accomplished chefs, Mehrotra is a natural fit for Taj Dubais Global Eatery - Tesoro.



With a focus on extensive culinary creativity, experience in creating recipes as well as handling and preparation of elaborate meals using the finest and freshest produce, Mehrotra has clearly made his mark on the Tesoro menu, the hotel said. - TradeArabia News Service
Ending federal mineral extraction would cost Wyoming almost $900 million in annual revenues, according to a recent report from the U.S Chamber of Commerce.

The report, from the U.S. Chambers Institute for 21st Century Energy, examines what a complete cessation of oil, natural gas and coal development would mean for state and federal coffers, as well as the impact to the current industry workforce. However, some say the reports stark projections are unlikely to come true.

Under the reports scenario, Wyoming could lose 32,500 jobs and $886 million a year from mineral royalties, according to the report. In terms of the states GDP, the effect would be about $9 billion.

The financial impact study is a response to a growing keep it in the ground movement, which supports ending or phasing out mineral extraction on all federal lands and waters. Some proponents of the idea recently filed a lawsuit challenging almost 400 leases in Wyoming and neighboring states.

Similarly, a congressional bill sent to committee in November would end offshore drilling and coal leasing on federal lands. A second lawsuit filed recently in Colorado accuses the Bureau of Land Management of failing to hold quarterly lease sales in a number of states, including Wyoming.

In an effort to appeal to the keep it in the ground movement, a number of prominent politicians have proposed ending energy production on federal lands, said Karen Harbert, president and CEO of the institute in a statement. Their proposals will have a devastating effect on Wyomings economy and quality of life. In the last fiscal year, the state used $471 million from federal royalties to fund education, and another $316 million to fund state operations. If these politicians get their way, Wyoming will lose 20 percent of its budget and be in an immediate crisis.

However, the likelihood of the reports scenarios coming true, either a complete end to federal extraction or a gradual decline in leases, is slim in the near future, said Charles Mason, professor of petroleum and natural gas economics at the University of Wyoming.

The report has some validity in terms of a cautionary tale for Wyoming, he said. Some states have large areas of natural gas and oil production on private lands, making them immune the dramatic impact of an end to federal extraction. That is not the case in Wyoming, where a bulk of development is on federal lands.

The figures in the report come as no surprise in a state that relies on its mineral riches to cover everything from legislative paychecks to school buildings.

In the first quarter of 2016, the state lost 5,500 mining jobs due to the decline in oil, gas and coal markets, according to the Wyoming Economic Analysis Division. Jobs in construction, transportation and utilities also saw significant declines due to the falling prices of those commodities.

Moreover, Wyoming has experienced a number of government cuts this year, including a contentious $45 million from K-12 education.

Despite the visible effect of the economic downturn, Wyoming still received the highest amount of federal royalties from mineral extraction of all states last year. Eighty percent of coal mined on public lands comes from Wyoming, along with 40 percent of onshore natural gas, and 18 percent of onshore oil  the bulk of the nations federal oil is offshore, according to the report.

Western and southern states stand to lose the most in the what if scenario. New Mexico, Colorado, Texas and Louisiana would lose heavily, both in revenue and jobs.

Nationally, the report states, a sudden end to federal mineral extraction would result in a loss of $11.3 billion per year.

Production on federal lands and waters still accounts for a quarter of all oil, natural gas and coal produced across the country, Harbert said. If that were to end, it would hit Western and Gulf Coast states particularly hard, and could result in production moving overseas, which would harm our national security and impact prices.

Aside from the keep it in the ground movement, the institute attributes a dip in national energy produced on federal lands since 2010 during President Barack Obamas administration and an uptick in regulations.

The report also includes data on a second what if scenario, in which all existing leases are left alone but new leasing opportunities are reduced.

That scenario would cost the country $6 billion in lost revenues over the next 15 years and 270,000 jobs, according to the report.

However, the report ignores the reality that demand for energy must be met and a move in the direction of renewable fuels actual stokes a natural gas market, Mason said. The reason is not political, its pragmatic.

Its well known that renewable sources suffer from what is called an intermittency problem. There is something of a mismatch of when stuff is produced and when it is used. Until we get to a point where we have excellent battery storage  which is not in the near future  something has to back that up, he said.

My personal feeling is that natural gas has a relatively important role to play for a while. I think that bodes well. Wyoming historically has been in that echelon  not quite as high up as Texas and Pennsylvania, but important. And I dont think that is going away.
Recovery Rocks

The 12th Annual Recovery Rocks will take place on September 10, 2016 at Washington Park. This event celebrating recovery from not only addictions, but also from other life events is free and open to the public. Starting at 11 a.m. and ending at 3 p.m., there will be a free barbecue provided by Jim McBride of the Johnson Restaurant Group, Classic Car show, Avengers band, giant inflatables, and other activities to enjoy. Sponsors of this event are 12-24 Club, Wyoming Recovery, Mercer Family Resource Center, Casper Community Meth Watch, Wyoming Meth Project, Central Wyoming Counseling Center, Wyoming Behavioral Institute, Auto Zone Stores and Johnny Js Diner.

Casper Charla

Would you like to practice conversational Spanish or help others learn? Come and join the Casper Charla! Te gustaria platicar en espanol? Ven y charla con nosotros! Todos son bienvenidos!

Come and join us on the third Wednesday of each month this fall. We meet at a different restaurant and partake in food, drink and conversation. All levels of Spanish are welcome, from beginning to native-speakers.

Nos reunimos los miercoles en varios restaurantes en Casper. Ven por una copa, un antojito o simplemente una charlita.

Wednesday, September 14, 5-7 p.m. at Tacos Mexico; Wednesday, October 12, 5-7 p.m. at Arepa Barn; Wednesday, November 9, 5-7 p.m. at Don Juans; Wednesday, December 14, 5-7 p.m., place to be determined for the Fiesta de Navidad.

Chronic pain/illness group starting

Highland Park Community Church and The Healing Place are starting HopeKeepers. HopeKeepers is a support group designed to meet the emotional and spiritual needs of the person who lives with chronic illness or pain. Through the support group setting you will have the opportunity to grow spiritually surrounded by others who share similar circumstances, unrevealed answers, and even joys, living with chronic pain or physical pain.

The group will meet Monday evenings, 6 to 7:30 p.m., Highland Park Community Church, Rm #1332, starting September 19. Call The Healing Place at 265-3977 to enroll.

Family continues suicide support

Good Grief, Support will continue at 5:30 p.m. on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month (Sept. 14 and 28) 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.

New depression group begins

J.R.s Hunt for Life is offering See it Clearly, a free peer support group for persons suffering from depression and other mental conditions that lead to suicidal thoughts and actions. We are not professionals but rather a group of like-minded peers wishing to support each other in these struggles. We offer anonymity and confidentiality to all attending. Our meetings are at 6:45 p.m. on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month at 500 South Wolcott in the conference room on the second floor, (12-24 Club). Meetings in September are Sept. 14 and Sept. 28, and so on through the year. If you have ever considered or attempted taking your life or are struggling, please come. You are important to us.

Summer clearance at thrift shop

Summer clearance at the Methodist thrift shop, 611 W. Collins, is on now.

Prices and selection begin at regular prices, but as the sale progresses, prices are reduced and so are your options to get the good stuff.

Shop early and often for great bargains in clothing, small kitchen and household items, books  everything.

Store hours are Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Donations of clean usable items are accepted during those hours only. Items left outside are discarded.

The volunteer staff appreciates the generous support of the community which enables us to help support Interfaith and Holy Cross Brothers with their assistance programs.

We will be closed from September 1 to September 12 for cleaning and stocking of an all-new fall inventory.

For more information, call 234-6611.

Daytime Women in the Word

Women In The Word, a non-denominational, community Bible study for women of all ages, will begin Wednesday, September 7 at 9:15 a.m. at Highland Park Community Church, 5725 Highland Drive. We will be studying the Book of Mark and the minor Prophets. Childcare will be provided for children ages 0-3 years. Orientation for new women will be held on August 31, 9:15 a.m. at Highland Park Community Church. Register online at www.casperwomenintheword.com or call Angela (267-8061 or Joyce (234-2922) for more information.

Annual musical instrument swap

Do you have a musical instrument lying around gathering dust? Bring it to Wyoming Musics annual instrument swap and put it to good use. Instruments are being accepted on consignment at Wyoming Music in the Sunrise Shopping Center, 4230 S. Poplar, during regular business hours. This is a great opportunity to sell your instrument and help someone else get a good used instrument at an affordable price for band or orchestra. People can also donate an instrument to a needy student by dropping it off. We will have it professionally cleaned, make sure it is set up correctly, and then give it to a student who otherwise could not participate in instrumental music.

Part of the proceeds from the sale are used to help provide instruments for children who wish to participate in music in school. The sale continues until Sept. 30. For more information, please call Dean Lorimer at 237-7322.

Saturday morning watercolor

The schedule for the Saturday morning watercolor sessions at ART 321 has been set for 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. August 27, practice session.

Ladies bible study Sept. 19

David: Seeking a Heart Like His, by Beth Moore, will be held at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church, 2300 E. 15th St., in two parts  Sept. 19 through Oct. 24 and continuing Jan. 9 to Feb. 6.

If you are interested or have questions, contact the Church Office at 307-234-6475 or pop@casperpoplc.org. We encourage any interested woman to come. You dont have to be a seasoned Bible student to enjoy these studies. Cost of the workbook is $17. Afternoon class is offered 3:15 to 5:15 p.m., and same-day evening classes are 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.

Life After Loss starts Oct. 4

Life After Loss is a support group for people who have lost a loved one to suicide. This is a nine-week program designed to help you navigate the troubled waters of this time. The class starts October 4, 2016, at the Highland Park Community Church, 5725 Highland Dr., 5:30 to 6:30 p.m., Rm. 1327. There is a $12 fee for the book and materials, scholarships are available. Please contact Ardith at 267-3532 or The Healing Place at 265-3977.

Beginning Experience in October

Beginning Experience of Wyoming is a weekend program that offers healing and renewal to divorced, widowed and separated men and women. It is a nonprofit, faith-based comprehensive program offered to all persons, regardless of religious preference. A Beginning Experience weekend offers support and direction to help resolve grief or anger that can follow the end of a marriage by divorce, separation or death. The weekend can be a time for a real awakening, a re-evaluation, and a new beginning. Beginning Experience is a positive experience of hope. You can anticipate an intense reflective, possibly painful, but spiritually honest self-encounter. You will also find support, warm fellowship and community.

The next Beginning Experience weekend will be in Casper and starts at 7 p.m. Oct. 21 and runs through around 4 p.m. Oct. 23. The donation we ask for the weekend is $150, which includes sleeping arrangements, meals, and materials. Scholarships are available. No one is turned away due to finances. Registration deadline is Oct. 18, 2016. Contact these Casper team members for more information: Curtis at 307.240.1232 or email westcurtis2014@gmail.com; Diane at 262.4142; or Paulette at 267.6375.

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 Sept. 30 and Oct. 1.

The Expo Tradeshow hours are Sept. 30 from 4 to 8:30 p.m. and Oct. 1 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. It 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 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 Sept. 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 through Sept. 4. The circle is in Amoco Park, 1007 W. First St., 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

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.

Evening in the Word

Evening in the Word Non-denominational Womens Bible Study will begin at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 13, at Highland Park Church in room 1321. The group is studying Redeemed by Angela-Thomas Pharr. Books are $15. Call Gwen at 307-262-0719 for more information. Check us out on Facebook!
The Casper Area Chamber of Commerce is ramping up its efforts to address member concerns about the economy and other issues facing the state.

Chamber Executive Director Gilda Lara told the Natrona County commissioners at a recent meeting that several events are planned featuring the countys legislators and top state officials.

We have seen a much more engaged membership, said Lara. Our luncheons that we hold are always well attended, and many that have more of a political nature are extremely well attended.

In August the Chamber had the states U.S. congressional delegation speak to a sellout crowd.

The main emphasis was what are we going to be doing with energy, what are we going to be doing for economic development, lets talk about Medicaid expansion, lets talk about the (health insurance) exchanges and the Affordable Healthcare Act, Lara said. So, these are topics that are of great interest to mostly small businesses.

The Chamber will also be holding its annual State of the State luncheon on Sept. 14, with Secretary of State Ed Murray as the featured speaker.

Meanwhile, for the upcoming legislative session, the chamber will be hosting events with the Natrona County delegation.

We found that our members want to know whats going on ahead of time, whats going on during the session and what happened, Lara said.

Commissioner Rob Hendry noted the states economy and budget would be key issues facing lawmakers.

It is going to be an interesting legislative session, because theres going to be lots of new ones down there, and with the downturn, itll be very interesting, Hendry said.

I think the more information we can bring back from that to the membership, I think the more beneficial that will be, because we truly do see ourselves as that communication conduit, Lara said.

In addition, the Chamber will also have a State of the Community luncheon involving county commissioners, the Casper City Council, the Casper Area Economic Development Alliance and the Casper Downtown Development Authority.

In her presentation, Lara spoke of other chamber activities. She mentioned the University of Wyoming at Casper College recently asked for a letter of support to assist in an application for an Americas Grant.

Theyre looking for grants to assist adults that have been displaced during the downturn in the economy, and providing them with funding to allow them to change their skill set, to take on another career, so we dont have this large unemployment piece going on, Lara said.

Another education effort involves a locally supported program teaching leadership skills to incoming eighth-graders.

Its been two years in the making, but this year we finally launched our Junior Leadership Casper program, Lara explained. Its a summer camp, it is six weeks long

You talk about oil and gas, and what makes this community function? asked Hendry.

Yes, to a certain extent. Really what were trying to do with these eighth-graders is more teaching them diversity and compassion and how to get along with others, Lara answered. We are providing them with those basic tools that allow them to be great leaders, even within their eighth- and ninth-grade classes.

Meanwhile, the Chambers ongoing adult Leadership Casper program has seen some changes.

This year were partnering with Dale Carnegie training. They have some of the highest caliber professional development opportunities out there  they carry Continuing Education Credits, Lara said. Many of our businesses who place their employees in this program will be interested in the CECs associated with it.
People tend to associate Wyoming with cowboys rather than culture. But according to a recent study, when it comes to the arts, Wyomingites are more cultured than most.

The National Endowment for the Arts released statistics recently on American participation in the arts. The research details how Americans utilize the arts, from attending performances to reading to staging or creating artwork.

The Cowboy State is ranked near the top in every category.

In 2015, about 43 percent of Wyoming residents said they attended live music, theater or dance performances  the third-highest rate in the country. They were fifth in the country for the percentage of adults who attend visual or performing arts events or go to the movies (76.6 percent), and in 2014, tied for seventh in the country for the highest percentage of adults who personally perform or create art (58.7 percent).

Weve known for a very long time that the creative sector helps drive the economy in Wyoming, said Michael Lange, executive director of the Wyoming Arts Council. The piece (of data) we did not have was how many folks are in the creative sector doing this for their personal enjoyment and how many are doing it for a social aspect. (More than 58 percent)  thats a huge number. This shows that more than half the people in the state are performing or creating artwork.

One of those artists is Eric Wimmer. Hes the curator at The Nicolaysen Art Museum in Casper and a local artist. He wasnt surprised by the NEAs findings.

We have the fewest amount of people living here, but the artists we have living here on average work on a more professional level, Wimmer said.

The art world is a tough place. But when you come to Wyoming, you have the support of other artists. Its just one big family up here. (Unlike a big city), you dont have to sacrifice that side thats just crammed in with so many people all trying to stand out. I think you can be more of an individual here, and have a more flourishing art career.

Lange was excited by the data. It reveals that the money the state is putting into the arts is having a positive effect on the population.

I think theres some strong correlations and associations made in the study that make a lot of sense for Wyoming, Lange said, and speak highly about whats going on with the arts in this state.
CHEYENNE  Years ago the city manager in Rock Springs warned a group of business leaders about losing the core of the city, the downtown. He called it the soul.

A seasoned veteran, the manager said he had seen too many communities with downtown areas that had withered away when the new big mall was built on the citys fringe.

Rock Springs was next. But I wasnt there to see what happened.

Yet after I moved to Cheyenne, I witnessed the disappearance of Cheyennes flourishing small, charming, locally owned specialty stores.

One store sold only womens hats. Others sold only womens clothing or childrens clothing or shoes or mens clothing.

Trends change, and now the shopping malls are losing their appeal.

About one third of the countrys 1,100 enclosed malls are predicted to fail in coming years, according to published accounts.

Contributing to their demise is an increase in online sales and competition from discount stores like T. J. Maxx.

Also foundering are the big anchors for the malls  Sears and J.C. Penney.

The downfall of the big malls should give the downtown areas a chance to grow again.

In Cheyenne, some progress has been made to remove a significant blight in the historic downtown area. It is the hole, a vacant lot that has remained vacant for about a dozen years, ever since a fire erupted at Marys Bakery.

The blaze was thought to be arson, but no one was ever charged.

The current plan is to build a childrens museum and education center in the empty space.

The museum and its location is surfacing as an issue in the campaign for Cheyenne mayor between Amy Surdam and Marian Orr.

Surdam has been described as the visionary responsible for the childrens museum. She made it happen and is now president of the museum board and president of the Downtown Development Association.

Supporters have raised $3 million in donations.

The project will cost about $20 million. To help raise the rest of the money the supporters are proposing collecting one fourth cent of the sales tax for four years to build the museum as an economic development deal.

They collected enough signatures to get that proposal on the November election ballot.

So far, so good.

Early last week Orr announced an offer had been made to donate 2 acres of land for the childrens museum in the west edge part of Cheyenne on West Lincolnway.

The offer came from Stephanie White, who inherited over 20 acres of land adjacent to Cheyenne Ice Events center from her uncle, Paul Smith, former owner of the Hitching Post Inn.

White made the announcement during a joint news conference with Orr, who said the new location would provide plenty of parking for the museum.

This is a stroke for Orrs campaign.

The lack of downtown parking has been one of the drawbacks to locating the museum there and one reason for the opposition to the project.

The latest development, however, would turn the hole into a parking lot.

As such, it would meet the needs of occupants of the to-be-restored Hynds Building next door.

As I understand it, it is a demand from the developer.

Surdam hasnt commented on the new offer yet on grounds she had no knowledge of the details and needed to discuss its with the board, according to published accounts.

I am writing this before that board meeting.

For all I know the board and Surdam will think locating the museum on the West Edge area is a wonderful idea.

I dont.

Putting a parking lot in the hole is a pitiful solution when the city could have an attractive asset in that historic block.

The museum could be part of revitalizing the downtown.

The citys core, or its unique soul, may never regain its previous vitality but it can be improved. LoDo in Denver can be modeled here on smaller scale.

The hole is one starting place.

After 12 years of ugly, the city can do better.
Residents of Wyoming are proud of our heritage, including wildlife and open, intact spaces that make our state unique. To protect this heritage, Wyoming residents want to know their voices are being heard and their comments make a difference.

This sentiment is especially true in Sweetwater County, which has approximately 7,000 square miles of Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service lands. These public lands are managed for multiple use and provide outstanding opportunities for recreation, including sightseeing, camping, hunting and fishing. One of the most outstanding public land outdoor recreation areas is Little Mountain.

For generations, Little Mountain has provided our countys residents with high-quality hunting and fishing experiences. Little Mountains trophy elk and mule deer and native cutthroat trout attract sportsmen and sportswomen from across the country to support our local outfitters and outdoors businesses. In fact, over the past five years alone, hunting and fishing have greatly contributed to our countys economy. These economic contributions are extremely important especially as we grapple with the impact of declining oil and gas prices.

I recently had the opportunity to travel to Washington, D.C., to meet with our congressional delegation and officials from BLM. I expressed my sentiments about Little Mountain and how special it is to elected officials, sportsmen and women, recreationists and others in our local community. I told them Sweetwater County is coming together to protect Little Mountain, because we, too, realize this is one place where we must strike the right balance between maintaining access to first class wildlife and fishery habitats while at the same time allowing for responsible oil and gas development.

Currently, the BLM is working on updating the Resource Management Plan for the Rock Springs Field Office. It is my understanding that the RMP update proposes to include a Master Leasing Plan for Little Mountain. This Master Leasing Plan will strive to balance needs of wildlife, fish and their habitats, while at the same time examine opportunities for industry to develop oil and gas resources in the right places.

In addition, the Master Leasing Plan process will provide opportunities for all residents and stakeholders to express their concerns and be a part of a process that will shape the future management of the Greater Little Mountain region of Sweetwater County. This transparent and open public input approach is one that I can support and that we can all get behind.

Theres still a lot of work to be done on the BLM Rock Springs Resource Management Plan and on the Little Mountain Master Leasing Plan. I am optimistic that if we all work together in a transparent process, we can create a long-term plan that balances environmental and development concerns and keep Little Mountain a special place for generations to come.
In the Rocky Mountain states, there is a movement to take federal lands from the U.S. government. Like-minded groups are found throughout the West, but mainly in Utah and Nevada.

A nonprofit membership organization, the American Lands Council, unites members and headquarters in South Jordan, Utah. One GOP candidate for the lone Wyoming U.S. House seat said taking of federal lands by the state was his highest priority.

To understand Utahs leadership role, one must know Mormon history. Utahs path to statehood was not smooth. When the Mormons reached Utah in 1847 to escape persecution in the Midwest, the world beyond their society was to them led by the devil, for it had behaved hellishly.

The U.S. government, which by our Constitution is to assure freedom of religion, had not come to their aid because of their practice of polygamy. They had tried to settle in Ohio, Missouri and Illinois. They were first peacefully received but later persecuted. There were deaths, homes and crops burned, and finally, while jailed in Missouri, their prophet Joseph Smith was murdered.

Most of the Latter-day saints traveled 1,200 miles to Utah from Illinois, and like Israelites into the wilderness they felt purified and safe. In their new Zion, Brigham Young said on July 28, 1847, We do not intend to have trade or commerce with the gentile world, for so long as we buy from them, we are in a degree dependent upon them. I am determined to cut every thread of this kind and live free and independent, untrammeled by any of their detestable customs and practices.

Their hate for their Midwest tormentors resulted in the hideous massacre of 120 Arkansas immigrants crossing southern Utah in 1857.

For a while the Kingdom of God, as the elders called it, stretched from southern Oregon to San Diego and took in Montana, Idaho, even Colorado. During the Brigham Young administration alone, they founded nearly 400 settlements.

In 1849 gold was found in California and soon the LDS territory shrank to the Territory of Utah  Utah as we know it. Thousands from the eastern states and all over the world found the West. But the greatest transgression on Mormon society by the U.S. government came in 1857. In July 1857, Young learned that an American army was on its way to Utah Territory to end polygamy and the LDS theocracy.

Without bloodshed, polygamy ended, but not officially for many members until 1890 when then-President of the Church, Wilford Woodruff, received a revelation from God to end polygamy. Wyoming, with far fewer people than Utah, became a state in 1890. Utah was required by Congress to ban polygamy. It became a state in 1896.

With tourism, the landscapes of Utah have become the states most important economic factor. Utah has a higher percentage of federal land than Wyoming, mainly controlled by the Bureau of Land Management. It is a geologic mecca with more national parks and monuments than any of the other contiguous states, and all are showcases for geologic processes. They draw visitors from over the world.

The BLM closed Recapture Canyon near Blanding, Utah, to off-road vehicle use in 2007. It cited the need to prevent damage by vehicles to Anasazi ruins, artifacts and the grandeur of the sandstone canyon.

Phil Lyman is the chairman of the San Juan County, Utah, county commission. He organized and led a group of local protesters on an off-road vehicle ride through the canyon in May 2014. A cadre of gun-toting Cliven Bundy supporters, of the Bundy Nevada ranch incident, were included in the ride. The BLM estimated the damage at $96,000. Lyman was arrested, but not by San Juan County sheriffs deputies, who watched on horseback as the protesters headed down the canyon.

A measure of Utahs statewide hostility to the federal government is the fact that Lyman was chosen county commissioner of the year in 2015 by the Utah Association of Counties, though he was convicted of a felony. Many members of Utahs rural counties and their commissioners believe the public lands belong to them. After all, they colonized the wilderness.

In March of 2015 Gov. Herbert of Utah signed the Transfer of Public Lands Act, which demands the federal government hand over to Utah more than 30 million acres of federal public land.

Of course it is unenforceable. The national parks and monuments, national forests and BLM lands belong to all of us, whether we live in Blanding, Utah, or Chicago, Illinois.

It is symbolism for Utahs opposition to federal control of public lands. Do we follow Utah  and where would this lead?
Liberal Politics from the Heart of Bluegrass Country
We in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana have a world-class treasure that is fast going to hell: Yellowstone! Old Faithful is known worldwide; yet many folks that visit Old Faithful during this very busy time come away saying never again will I go there. If the NPS does not make some decisions with parking there will be some very ugly road rage violence at Old Faithful. The NPS cannot continue to have the same system of parking for Old Faithful. Shuttle to Old Faithful during peak times, better enforcement of parking etc. Our Congress cannot in good faith continue to not fund the park system. The NPS cannot continue to allow gross violation viewing and photograph dangerous wild animals especially during mating season. Trying to please everyone will not work! The most egregious problem I saw on my recent visit was the terrible destruction of Lamar Valley by buffalo. If this continues to be over grazed much of Lamar Valley will really go to weeds. With the mess there now that area will need rest for years. Man is the only predator that can take the buffalo. The mess in Lamar Valley is something everyone that cares for Yellowstone must see and get involved soon.
Montreal-based Bombardier Aerospace is celebrating its 40th year in Tucson, dating back to when Gates Learjet launched operations here in 1976.

With more than a million square feet of hangared space, the Tucson facility is the largest of Bombardiers nine aircraft service centers worldwide.

It houses two separate maintenance operations  one for business jets like Learjet models and medium-sized Challenger and Global Express jets, and another for commercial aircraft like Bombardiers CRJ-series regional jets and Q400 series turboprops.

Business-jet services provided at the Tucson center include scheduled and unscheduled maintenance, modifications including interior mods, full paint capabilities and avionics installations.

Employment at the Tucson service-center operations at Tucson International Airport has risen and fallen with the fortunes of the aviation industry.

But Bombardier, which acquired Learjet in 1990, has added hundreds of jobs in recent years and now employs nearly 1,000 people here.

Bombardier is continually looking at opportunities to expand its customer services footprint, said Tim McGuire, general manager of the Tucson business-aircraft operation in Tucson, adding that recently announced global cutbacks are not affecting Bombardiers Tucson facility.

We are managing the business prudently and continue to hire skilled technicians as our in-service fleet grows, he said.

McGuire said Tucson is a great place for aviation maintenance because of its location and year-round flying weather, and he cited Bombardiers longstanding partnership with Tucson International Airport and its employees  some of whom have been with us since the very start.

Bombardier in Tucson

1976: Learjet opens an aircraft finishing plant at Tucson International Airport.

1981: Local Learjet operations peak at 2,800 employees.

1987: A sour economy causes a plunge in corporate interest in private jets, driving Learjet almost into the ground.

1990: Montreal-based Bombardier buys Learjet, which by then has only 200 Tucson employees.

1999: Bombardier invests $40 million in facilities, equipment and training in the Tucson operation, which the company transforms into a center of excellence for completion work.

2001: Local operations peak with 2,250 employees, who finish approximately 200 aircraft.

2002: A sharp decrease in demand for business jets hits Bombardier hard. In January, the local plant announces plans to lay off 550 employees during the year.

2003: Bombardier announces a consolidation plan designed to save $25 million a year by building and finishing aircraft in the same location, including plans to move 800 jobs from Tucson to Wichita, Kansas. But the company also announces plans to open a new service center in Tucson for regional jets.

2006: As it marks its 30th year in Tucson, Bombardier employs 650 people here in maintenance work, aircraft refurbishing, painting and interior installations. Bombardier extends its lease with the Tucson Airport Authority 22 years, until 2028.

2007-2009: Employment at Bombardiers Tucson operations hovers around 600 through the Great Recession.

2010: Bombardier begins to grow in Tucson again, adding about 40 jobs.

2012-13: The company boosts its local workforce by nearly 200, to more than 900 by the end of 2013. Federal stimulus funds are used to build a fence to separate Bombardier from the airport property, so employees dont have to undergo airport security checks.

2014: In July, Bombardier announces it will lay off about 1,800 employees companywide. The company reports about 50 fewer workers in Tucson that year, for a total local workforce of 865.

2015: Bombardier plans a $1.5 million renovation of its Tucson aircraft interior refurbishing and customization shop. The company boosts its local workforce to 984 workers by year-end, driven by increased fleet-customer maintenance and modification work at its commercial aircraft operations.
Bauman is chief of UA Cancer Center division

Dr. Julie E. Bauman has joined the University of Arizona College of Medicine  Tucson as professor and chief of the Division of Hematology and Oncology in the Department of Medicine and the UA Cancer Center.

Bauman is a member of the National Cancer Institute Head and Neck Cancer Steering Committee, and a former Tucsonan, having graduated from Salpointe Catholic High School.

Her research focuses on design of biomarker-driven, early-phase clinical trials to prevent and improve survival in head and neck cancer.

Bauman was associate professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, where she was co-director of the Head and Neck Cancer Center of Excellence at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, among other roles. She has also been an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico and its Cancer Center in Albuquerque.

She completed her fellowship in medical oncology at the University of Washington, her residency in internal medicine at the University of Utah, and earned her medical and masters in public health degrees from Tufts University.

McReynolds promoted at KB Home in Tucson

KB Home has promoted Amy McReynolds to president of its Tucson division.

In this position, McReynolds will assume a key role in directing the builders growth strategy for the greater Tucson region while continuing to oversee KB Homes day-to-day operations in the market, the company said in a news release.

McReynolds joined KB Home in 2013 with more than 20 years of residential homebuilding experience. She is a Tucson native and holds a bachelor of science degree in business administration from the University of Arizona.

She serves as chair of the Southern Arizona Home Builders Association.

Simpleviews Senstad to head Europe office

Tucson-based Simpleview has added a European office, in Oslo, Norway, and has hired Rolf Senstad as its general manager in Europe.

Simpleview says its growing customer base in Europe includes the Prague Convention Bureau, The Hague Convention Bureau, Edinburgh Convention Bureau and Innovation Norway.

Senstad has extensive IT and operational management experience spanning three continents.

Hartmann to lead Youth On Their Own

Nicola Hartmann has joined Youth On Their Own as executive director.

She previously was director of advancement and corporate relations at San Miguel High School and executive director of the Sunnyside Foundation.

Hartmann holds a B.S. in business administration/marketing from the University of Arizona Eller College of Management and an MBA from Thunderbird School of Global Management.

Tech Parks Arizona adds Powell as fellow

Richard Powell has joined Tech Parks Arizona as Senior Fellow. He will assist in evaluating new technology initiatives especially in the field of advanced energy.

Powell has held several key appointments with the University of Arizona including vice president of research, professor of optical sciences and of material science, and director of the Optical Sciences Center. He retired from UA in 2005 and has been a consultant for solar energy research projects at Science Foundation Arizona, Research Corporation for Science Advancement and Arizona Research Institute for Solar Energy.

Bohne promoted at Truly Nolen HQ

Truly Nolen Pest Control has promoted Greg Bohne to director of domestic franchising at the Tucson corporate office.

Bohne joined the company in 2013 and previously managed both the Tucson and North Tucson service offices. He moved to the domestic franchise division in August 2015.
Up next

As David Ira Goldstein prepares to launch Arizona Theatre Companys 50th season  his last as artistic director  he looks back with a sense of pride.

ATC has been a hearty survivor, he says. Like the cactus, we sometimes had to get by waiting for the next storm to feed us, but weve always managed to grow.

Financial struggles have taken their toll. But not on the art, he says.

The art on stage has always taken priority; thats something the artists and community can feel proud of.

As the company settles into more solid financial ground, Goldstein is looking forward to letting go and seeing a new artistic directors ideas and energies. A spokesman for the theater company said national searches are expected this coming season, with a new managing and artistic directors in place by the 2017-18 season.

I do think its time for fresh vision, a time for a greater focus on the diversity of our region, he says. Im eager to see what they do with it.
Topics and speakers for the balance of 2016 in the lecture series

Lectures are free to the public and a light lunch is served. No registration is required

Where: Kiewit Auditorium Arizona Cancer Center University Medical Center 1515 N. Campbell Ave.

Each lecture runs from noon to 1 p.m.

The lineup:

Oct. 10  Minor Neurocognitive Disorder, Corinne Self, MD, UA assistant professor of medicine.

Nov. 14  Alzheimers Disease Screening in Primary Care, Lisa ONeill, MPH, education director, UA Center on Aging, and Morgan Hartford, MSW, program manager, Alzheimers Association

Dec. 12  Cultural Considerations for Behavioral Health in Elder American Indian Clients, Cheri Wells, LPC, a private practice counselor in Flagstaff, who has more than 15 years of experience working in behavioral health with Native Americans.
An hour before his first class at Arizona State University last month, Eduardo Lujan, 23, got an unwelcome phone call. The school had revoked his two-year scholarship because of his immigration status, a university administrator told him.

Lujans aunt had brought him to the United States from Mexico when he was 8. He lived here without legal documents throughout his childhood and his status prevented him from receiving state financial aid to Arizona universities.

He attended Pima Community College, where his work permit allowed him to apply for the All-Arizona Community College Academic Team scholarship, which offers two years of tuition at any of Arizonas three universities. PCC administrators selected him for the award in March, and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and the Arizona Board of Regents sent him letters of congratulations.

From there, the national Phi Theta Kappa honor society named him to the All-USA Community College Academic Team, which is reserved for the top 20 community college students in the nation.

He left Pima with a box of medals and his sights set on ASUs criminal justice program. After that, maybe law school or a career in law enforcement as a detective.

But the phone call from Jennifer Ash, ASUs assistant director of admission services, brought those dreams crashing down. Lujan said Ash referenced Arizonas Proposition 300, which bars state funding for anyone who is not a citizen or legal resident of the United States or who is without lawful immigration status.

Federal law says that any alien who is not a qualified alienis not eligible for an state or local public benefit and therefore is not eligible for the All-Arizona community College Academic Team tuition waiver, Arizona Board of Regents spokesperson Sarah Harper wrote in an email to the Star.

SORTING IT OUT

Lujan was confused. He had a legal work permit  and the scholarship guidelines said he could use it to apply. I felt that I had been lied to, he said.

His work permit came from President Obamas Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, which the president created the program by executive order in 2012. DACA doesnt grant lawful status, but it has awarded work permits and deportation deferrals to more than 728,000 young adults, including Lujan.

In 2014, an appeals court blocked two more programs Obama created to expand deferred action to parents and more childhood arrivals. The programs remained blocked after the Supreme Court heard the case in June and issued a split decision.

Young adults like Lujan, who qualify for the 2012 DACA guidelines, were not affected, Tucson immigration attorney Mo Goldman said. Their work permits and deportation deferrals are still valid and renewable every two years, Goldman said.

The next president, however, will determine the fate of DACA. Republican candidate Donald Trump has promised to end it, while Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has vowed to continue Obamas fight to expand it.

In 2015, the Arizona Board of Regents gave in-state tuition to DACA students after a Maricopa County Superior Court ruling that determined their work permits gave them appropriate lawful presence in Arizona.

The State cannot establish subcategories of lawful presence, picking and choosing when it will consider DACA recipients lawfully present and when it will not, Judge Arthur Anderson ruled.

The way Lujan saw it, the decision by ASU and the Arizona Board of Regents to revoke his scholarship contradicted that ruling. But the ruling only addressed in-state tuition in Arizona, not state financial aid, attorney Lynne Adams wrote in an email to the Star. Adams represents the Arizona Board of Regents and ASU.

Matt Matera, executive director of Scholarships A-Z  which advocates for access to education regardless of immigration status  doesnt buy that the ruling cant also apply to financial aid. The lawful presence language should apply to state financial aid, grants and tuition waivers, along with in-state tuition, Matera argued.

While DACA students are not eligible for federal financial aid, in some states, including New Mexico and Washington, they can qualify for state financial aid and pay in-state tuition.

Arizona does not allow DACA students to collect state financial aid and is trying to remove itself from the list of states that let them pay in-state tuition by appealing Judge Andersons ruling.

STEPS FORWARD

Feeling frustrated and confused, Lujan said he called Melissa Pizzo, ASUS dean of admission and financial aid services, six times. No response. Pizzo also did not respond to Arizona Daily Star inquiries.

Federal law restricts ASU from commenting on Lujans records, but the university also declined to answer questions about policy.

After striking out with ASU, Lujan said he called the Arizona Board of Regents four times. Debbie Sale of the regents student affairs office told him their legal team was reviewing his situation, he said.

Next, he called Karrie Mitchell, assistant vice chancellor in the Pima College student affairs office.

The PCC scholarship committee didnt ask about DACA eligibility, and the Arizona Board of Regents didnt tell them DACA students were ineligible, Mitchell told the Star.

We had no idea, she said. But we will be very clear next year.

The Arizona Board of Regents acknowledged that it didnt communicate DACA students ineligibility to PCC, but emphasized that the federal law also applied to PCC, Harper said in an email.

Phi Theta Kappa organized the scholarship criteria and sent it out across the country, Mitchell said. It included the work permit DACA students have.

The honor society was aware of Lujans situation, but national officials there wouldnt discuss it with the Star.

Whatever wires got crossed, Scholarships A-Z advocate Matera said everyone involved should have found a way to honor their commitment to Lujan.

Its everyones responsibility to ensure that if we have all of a sudden decided he doesnt qualify at the last minute, we better find some alternative funding for him while were also revisiting why he doesnt qualify, Matera said.

Lujan did get some help staying at ASU, although it may be short-lived. Mitchell, of PCC, asked a contact at the university for help connecting Lujan with private funding. ASU found private donors to fund his first semester.

Lujan is thankful for that, but its still only a quarter of what he was promised.

Eager to begin his life at ASU, Lujan had moved away from his family in Tucson. He signed an 18-month lease in Phoenix with roommates he found on Facebook. And he transferred locations at convenience store QuikTrip, where he works as a clerk.

He has considered suing in hopes of getting his funding restored, but he doesnt have the time or the money, he said. He was struggling to pay for books even when he still had the scholarship.

Its been something messy and unfortunate. I honestly hope it never happens to anyone else, Lujan said.

He wants to graduate and make a difference. I look forward to being able to repay society  to repay a country that opened its doors for me, he said.

Lujan hopes to raise enough cash to stay at ASU through an online GoFundMe campaign. For this three remaining semesters, he would need to raise $18,300.
Look around yourself, sitting there in your so-called home.

How does hell look?

I ask because, if youre in the United States, you are in a borderline living hell, according to much of the political rhetoric were hearing lately. This close to the border in Southern Arizona? Definitely a hellscape.

Thats the impression Donald Trump left in his speech on illegal immigration Wednesday night in Phoenix, in rhetoric that matched much of the doom and gloom weve heard during this never-ending campaign.

President Obama and Hillary Clinton have engaged in gross dereliction of duty by surrendering the safety of the American people to open borders, and you know it better than anybody right here in Arizona, he said to the approving shouts of the audience.

Later, he said, were in the middle of a jobs crisis, a border crisis and a terrorism crisis like never before. All energies of the federal government and the legislative process must now be focused on immigration security. That is the only conversation we should be having at this time, immigration security.

The only conversation  really?

The sense of crisis and doom is essential to Trumps appeal, as the howls of the crowd made clear  and it is central to much of todays political rhetoric. However, watching Trumps speech online Wednesday night in Tucson, Arizona, I had no idea what reality he was talking about.

Ive spent a lot of time talking with poor people around here  from the homeless camps to our many rundown trailer parks  and still, that rhetoric doesnt match the reality Ive seen.

This has been a poor town for years and remains one, but it is definitely, visibly improving. Going downtown on Friday I drove along recently paved streets past four major construction sites on what used to be blacktop parking lots.

Bureau of Labor Statistics data show Tucsons job growth has been remarkably fast this last year. The number of jobs grew by 4.2 percent from July 2015 to July 2016, economist Jeb Kolko noted. Thats the third fastest of any U.S. city. Better: Were not talking about unemployment rates, which do not include those who have stopped looking for work, but simple, raw new-job numbers.

Wondering if I am missing something hellish in Tucsons daily life (other than the heat) I decided to stop by a diner Friday morning to get the opinion of the late breakfasters inside. Since I love cinnamon rolls, I picked Gus Balons, 6027 E. 22nd St.

The first customer I asked, Mary McLaughlin, is 74 and a political conservative, eating with her son, Jeff Bales. She said, I dont see Tucson as a town that is business-friendly, and spoke of her opposition to the downtown streetcar and waste in Rio Nuevo. When I asked about national politics, she decried the lies of Hillary Clinton and her actions related to Benghazi.

When I asked her how things are going, she told me about her politics, but I wanted to know how things are going for her. To that she said they were OK, thats shes just a churchgoing woman and a quilter. Interesting, I thought.

Next I spoke with Michael and Veronica Heredia, 38 and 37, who were, frankly, pretty darn optimistic.

Personally, things are wonderful  financially, physically, Michael said.

Hes been in real estate  buying, selling and managing residential property  for 12 years, he said. After the crash in 2008, he almost lost it, but he hung on and is doing great now.

Everythings dramatically getting better, he said.

He and Veronica are independents, both in the real estate business, and seem to be politically moderate. Veronica had some specific concerns about how government operates  especially about the Department of Child Safety and Tucson Unified School District. She wants improvement in both and agreed when her husband said, Damn politicians need to figure out how to work together.

At the last table where I stopped, John and Suzy Shukwit were finishing breakfast and groaned at Donald Trump, whom they consider a fraud.

Trumps reality is not my reality, said Suzy, who is retired from a career in health-care human resources.

When I asked her how life is going in Tucson, Suzy was hesitant. She hates the traffic and worries about crime in their far-east-side neighborhood.

Were seeing crime moving closer and closer, she said.

When I asked whether she knew that from personal experience or neighbors experiences, she said no, that it was from the news.

The news and politicians. Those, Ive found, are the two big sources of doom and gloom in what otherwise might be considered a pretty decent time in this city and, generally speaking, in this country.

There are spikes of concern  the killings of police this summer, the far-too-regular mass shootings  that seem to shake our foundations. It would be wrong to ignore them, but we should also keep them in perspective. Acts of spectacular violence are less likely to affect any of us than our familiar, chronic problems: surging drug abuse, persistent joblessness for some, inadequate and expensive education.

And, yes, even border security.

These are tough, intractable problems, and we should demand that our politicians address them. But they dont make this place a living hell.
The single mother would say goodbye to her son before she left for work each morning and then  or so she thought  he would catch his bus to middle school.

He was up when I left and he would go back to sleep, she says.

That school year, the boy missed three or four days of school a week, either because he was sleeping or because his worried mother was hauling him to doctors appointments for his sleep and anxiety issues. The Star is not identifying them because the boy ended up in the juvenile criminal-justice system because of his chronic truancy.

Thanks to law enforcement intervention and medical help, he started attending classes regularly again and eventually graduated from high school.

He was one of the lucky ones. Education and justice officials say truancy is pervasive in Tucson-area schools  and there are fewer measures to push kids to show up for class or to lure them back if they become chronically truant.

About one in five Pima County students missed 15 or more days of the 2013-2014 school year, new data from the U.S. Department of Educations Office of Civil Rights show. Thats higher than the national average of about 13 percent.

Most of the schools with the worst truancy rates are alternative district or charter schools, where half of all enrolled students missed 15 or more of the school years roughly 180 days. Among those with the highest chronic truancy were Pantano High, Ombudsman  Charter Valencia, Project More Alternative, Marana Career-Technical and Sentinel Peak High schools.

But truancy is a problem at all types of Pima County schools. Even when the Star excluded alternative schools from the calculation, the county average was about 18 percent.

Most schools have mechanisms to alert parents when kids are missing school. TUSD and Amphitheater districts have mobile apps parents can download to keep an eye on their kids attendance. But educators across the county say schools lack the resources to chase after every child who is chronically absent. And when parents dont actively participate in getting their children to school, the problem gets worse.

Abundant research connects chronic truancy to academic failure, dropping out and crime, but community intervention for chronically truant youths has declined in the past decade.

Truancy sweeps, which were facilitated by the Pima County Attorneys Office and law enforcement partners that cooperated with schools to identify and find truant students, became infrequent as budgets were slashed. Since sweeps require patrol officers, detectives, school resource officers and school officials, the county attorneys office is able to conduct just two a year now.

Making matters worst, the Center for Juvenile Alternatives  a public-private case management agency that diverted youth offenders from detention to restorative programs  closed in 2012. Schools could refer chronically truant students to the center when it existed without having to report them to the County Attorneys Office. Now they cant.

We are barely making a dent in the number of chronic truants across Pima County, says Pima County Attorney Barbara LaWall. Weve been dealing with this as an issue for so many decades.

Community leaders have taken notice. Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild launched an attendance awareness campaign in 2013 and formed a partnership with local school superintendents to combat chronic absenteeism.

This is a communitywide issue, he says.

A SNAPSHOT

Its about 8:30 a.m. when Connie Moore, a registrar and attendance tech at Utterback Middle School, gets a phone call from a parent whose child is refusing to go to school. This happens often, she says.

Some kids skip school without their parents knowing; in other cases, the parents are well aware.

The first bell at Utterback rings at 8:45 and the tardy bell follows 10 minutes later. By 9:10 a.m., each teacher should have entered class attendance into a computer system. If a student is marked as absent, an automated call goes out to the parent.

Its only been four weeks since school started, but Carlos Silva, Utterbacks attendance liaison, is already seeing some red flags. Hes keeping an eye on kids who have missed more than four or five days, or have been tardy several times. Sometimes counselors let him know who to watch out for.

If you dont show up, youre already starting off on the wrong foot, he says.

Utterback is part of the cluster of middle schools with the highest rates of chronic absenteeism outside of alternative schools. About 42 percent of its students missed 15 or more days in 2013, data showed. Other schools in the cluster include Valencia, Secrist and Safford middle schools, all four of which are federally designated as schools with high poverty rates.

Silva wants to cut Utterbacks rate in half.

When a kid misses school four or five times, Silva calls the parents. So far, he hasnt had to do that too many times.

A couple of parents have promised to talk to their children. If that doesnt work, Silva says hell start bugging them a lot. If that doesnt work, hell pay parents and students a visit at home.

When parents dont care, thats the hardest, he says. So he tries to be a good role model to the students, smiling a lot and reminding kids that its never too late to straighten up.

There has to be somebody that cares, he says.

LINKS TO DELINQUENCY

There are many reasons students are chronically absent: illness, lack of transportation, even a need to work and contribute to the family income.

With each absence, its harder and harder for a student to get back on track.

Academic foundations cannot be laid properly if a child is constantly missing school, says Debbie Ferryman, a dropout prevention coordinator for Tucson Unified School District. They cant build on that to read, build on that to have the math skills.

When that happens, students lose their connections to schools and education as learning gaps grow, and they are far more likely to fail. By high school, they could be so short of needed class credits that they see no choice but to drop out.

The risks extend beyond the school walls. School and criminal-justice officials say chronic truancy can predict students eventual involvement in crime.

Jane Butler, a Pima County Juvenile Court Judge, always asks youths who come through her courtroom, Where do you go to school?

It concerns me when they say theyre not in school or forgot the name of the school they were enrolled in, she says.

Thirty-four percent of youths who committed low-level crimes were not in school, Butler says, citing a 2007 report of Pima County Juvenile Court statistics. Of that group, 40 percent who reoffended within 90 days of being released were found not to be in school.

If they dont go to school, she says, theyre on the streets and getting in trouble.

ENFORCEMENT, PREVENTION

State law requires parents and guardians to ensure that children between ages 6 and 16 go to school, whether at a district, charter, private or home school. If they dont, parents could be charged with a Class 3 misdemeanor, a status offense.

But being punitive isnt the goal, says LaWall, the county attorney. My goal is to get those kids back in school.

Between 1996 and 2011, when the Center for Juvenile Alternatives was open, the County Attorneys Office investigated nearly 1,700 truancy cases.

Just under 1,300 parents were prosecuted. But if parents agreed to participate in diversion programs, including parenting classes, charges were dropped. If they refused, they went to trial. That happened about 200 times over the 15-year period.

None of the children involved were charged, though state law says a child could be prosecuted as incorrigible youth for being habitually truant.

During its 15 years, Pima County schools referred an additional 6,500 cases to the Center for Juvenile Alternatives  and even that was barely scratching the surface, LaWall says.

Since 2012, when the center shut down due to funding loss, a total of 267 cases have been referred to the Pima County Juvenile Court. LaWall says her office has dealt with only about 80 referrals.

But TUSDs dropout prevention team is not convinced that referrals to law enforcement or the courts are the answer to reducing chronic truancy. Ferryman, the dropout prevention coordinator, and John Kramkowski, a dropout specialist, both say punitive and threatening approaches have rarely worked at TUSD.

They create more dysfunction than anything else, Ferryman says.

Instead, they say, TUSDs approach is to build a positive relationship between schools and families and to educate students and their parents on the importance of good attendance.

We want to make sure that were educating families that all absences add up to gaps in education, Kramkowski says.

A community issue

The mother whose son was chronically truant in middle school tried taking the boy for medical treatment to improve his mood and sleep. She tried working with the school to catch him up on his class work and modify his curriculum.

But when he kept skipping school to sleep, she knew she needed more help.

School officials had told her about a paper arrest for chronic truancy. He would be arrested, but not handcuffed or taken to jail. Instead, he would be sent to the Pima County Community Justice Board, where volunteers help youths divert from crime.

She decided to give it a try. Over the course of 90 days, her son met with members of his neighborhoods justice board and completed several exercises intended to teach him about responsibility and accountability. Under board members guidance, he wrote essays about his future and dreams, along with an apology letter to his mother.

It was just making him more aware of his decisions and how they can impact others, how it wasnt necessarily a punitive measure and that there are programs and people in the community that want to see youths succeed, she says. I think he was thinking more that this was going to be awful and meaningless.

Chris Segrin, chairman of a midtown community justice board, says chronic truancy is often a family and community issue, rather than just about the youth who is skipping or missing school. The board focuses on restorative justice to help young people understand that actions have consequences.

If they admit to their crime, we develop consequences and they are geared toward improving their lives and helping them to achieve their goals, Segrin says. Activities can include art projects, fixing bicycles, writing essays about college or career goals, going to the library and writing book reports and family-building exercises.

SCHOOL STRATEGIES

Her sophomore year, Perla Samaniego preferred practically anything to school.

She and her friends routinely ditched classes to hang out. Her grades suffered. Her mother was upset.

Then she had an epiphany: This is not going to take me anywhere, she realized.

Samaniego, now a senior who dreams of becoming a pediatrician, joined the cheer squad in her junior year, which she says helped her stay engaged in school  she had to have good attendance and grades to be on the squad.

Fun and engaging electives and clubs can help boost attendance, says David Baker, superintendent of the Flowing Wells district, who attended an attendance awareness event Friday with colleagues from other districts. Such activities sometimes get shortchanged in favor of academic achievement, adds Steve Holmes, Sunnysides superintendent. But schools are supposed to offer learning beyond academics and have a responsibility to identify why kids are missing school, Holmes says.

To that end, students at Amphitheater schools are connected to adult advisers who ask them about classes, attendance and life outside of school.

We want kids to know that we want them there, says Monica Nelson, an assistant superintendent at Amphitheater.

That spirit should extend throughout the community, says Ferryman, of TUSD. For example, convenience store employees could call the nearby school if they see teens wandering during class time.

Everybody has to be on the same page, she says, and on the same team.
Tucsons own would-be saint, Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, is still in the first phase of a journey toward canonization.

Right now, Padre Kino is considered a Servant of God, meaning the Roman Catholic Church has begun investigating the possibility of sainthood.

The Kino Heritage Society, a Tucson organization dedicated to the legacy of Father Kino, hopes to soon see him approved for the title of Venerable  the next step in the process. That progression follows the approval of a collection of documents about Kinos life by church leaders in Rome and the Pope.

Rosie Garcia, president of the Kino Heritage Society, said the group believes the Positio, or documents summarizing Kinos life and evidence of sainthood, should soon go before the Pope.

A founding board member of the society, Mark OHare, believes Kino could be the patron saint of borderlands.

The process to canonize Kino has been in the works since the 1960s, starting in Hermosillo, Sonora.

I dont know if Im going to see it in my lifetime, but we know that the written work has been completed, and were hoping that he becomes venerable and then beatified and then canonized, Garcia said.

For beatification, one miracle must be attributed to Kino. Canonization requires two miracles. But the Pope can waive the miracle requirement, OHare said.

Were hoping since Pope Francis is a Jesuit and Father Kino is a Jesuit, hell look at the Positio and say, Yes, he is worthy of sainthood, Garcia said. After all, he is the one who brought evangelization to Pimeria Alta and established 20-something missions in the area.

Kino is credited with bringing Christianity to northern Sonora and Southern Arizona and opening 21 missions in the region in the late 1600s and early 1700s. He famously cultivated peaceful relationships with the American Indians living here and introduced cattle and new crops.
Lake Powell has been called Jewel of the Colorado by the federal agency that built it, the Bureau of Reclamation.

Its been a vital force for the intermountain West because of its ability to store vast amounts of water and generate electricity for farmers, cities and towns in 13 states.

But a new study warns that the lake could virtually dry up in as few as six years if the region gets a repeat of the dry spell it experienced from 2000 to 2005.

That could cripple the ability of the Colorado Rivers four Upper Basin states to deliver river water to the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada, as theyre legally obligated to do.

And it would increase the likelihood of cutbacks in river water deliveries to Arizona, in particular.

The state already is on the edge of shortages for its $4 billion Central Arizona Project.

During the 2000-2005 drought, Lake Powell lost 13 million acre-feet of water and dropped almost 100 feet.

Today, the lake has about 13 million acre-feet left, said Eric Kuhn, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, which is helping to oversee the study.

The study was financed by the district, which is based in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, along with the Southwestern Water Conservation District in Durango, and four water groups in Western Colorado that represent various interests.

The lake avoided serious problems during the drought because, in 1999, it was almost full.

Today its about half full, Kuhn said. You cant go into a drought like that today if its half full. Things will have to change in how we do business.

The first warning sign would come if a drought pushed the lake below 3,525 feet, almost 85 feet below where it is now. At that point, Upper Basin states would start delivering water from their other reservoirs to Powell.

If levels dropped below 3,490 feet, there wouldnt be enough water flowing through Glen Canyon Dams turbines to generate power.

The study is aimed, in part, at trying to help guide efforts at devising a contingency plan, to keep things from getting out of hand, Kuhn said. The four Upper Basin states  Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming  are devising a three-legged stool plan to protect Lake Powell.

One leg would involve reducing water demand by farmers and cities in the Upper Basin. The second would step up cloud-seeding programs to try to boost snowfall in the region. The third would transfer some water stored in the smaller Upper Basin reservoirs to Lake Powell.

Officials managing the effort say computer models show that taking these steps would reduce the risk of catastrophically low levels to near zero.

Brad Udall, a water researcher at Colorado State University whos not involved with the contingency plan, is less optimistic. He says such measures can help, for sure. With modest reductions in flow, they would be meaningful.

But if the regions dry period repeats itself, he said, youll need fundamental change. His uncle, Stewart Udall, voted to create Lake Powell as an Arizona congressman in 1956 and shepherded construction of the Glen Canyon Dam that holds back the lake while he was interior secretary in the early 1960s.

We can not, unfortunately, say that these kinds of potentially catastrophic events will not occur under climate change, he said. Such is the nature of the climate change beast that we have unleashed.

Storage is Powells primary purpose

Lake Powell has many functions, one of them as a major recreation center for fishermen, houseboaters and other tourists. But its fundamental purpose under the federal law that created it is to serve as a water insurance policy for the Colorado River Basin.

Every year, it stores water that flows downstream from the four Upper Basin states. When its needed its released to Lake Mead and the three Lower Basin states.

For the Upper Basin states, the reservoir storage has ensured theyll be able to meet their legal requirement under the 1922 Colorado River Compact to deliver 75 million acre feet to the Lower Basin every 10 years. The Lower Basins legal share is 7.5 million acre feet a year.

In an average year, Lake Powell gets enough water that it can release a bit more  8.23 million acre-feet a year. In a wetter year, it will release 9 million acre feet to Mead.

Lake Mead and Lake Powell rise and fall together, said Chuck Cullom, the Central Arizona Projects Colorado River programs manager.

In case of a drought like that of 2000-2005, Lake Mead would get 7.48 million acre-feet, worsening the structural deficit that is already causing Mead to drop by up to 12 feet a year due to the Lower Basin states chronic overuse of river water compared to supply.

The new studys analysis is consistent with the studies and analyses CAP has been doing  and is part of the reason its been focusing on trying to protect Lake Mead, Cullom said.

The Lower Basin states have already agreed on two short-term programs to reduce their take of water from Mead. They are trying to negotiate a three-state deal that would reduce water deliveries even further, he said.

Whether the six-year cycle of 2000-05 repeats itself is anybodys guess, said Pat Tyrrell, Wyoming state engineer who has been involved in the Upper Basin water talks. Kuhns analysis is the worst case, said Pat Tyrrell, Wyoming state engineer who has been involved in the Upper Basin water talks.

If that does come to pass, Tyrell said he is fairly confident we can deal with worst case scenario if it ever happens.

Its impossible to even guess the odds of the Colorado Basin getting another six-year arid spell any time soon, said Udall and another longtime Colorado River researcher, Connie Woodhouse, a professor in the University of Arizonas School of Geography and Development.

Given todays changing climate, led by continued warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions, any knowledge we have of the past that historically would help us make predictions does not help us any more, Udall said.

Unprecedented Climatic events

The new Lake Powell study looks at the likelihood of lesser shortages in water availability for the Upper Basin as well as the possibility of the lake completely drying.

Applying data from three droughts from a 25-year period starting in 1988, it predicted that even with little new growth in that basin, a moderate drought would trigger shortages of 350,000 to 500,000 acre-feet.

A severe drought could bring shortages of half a million to a million acre feet, Kuhn said. A drastic drought could bring shortages of one to 1.5 million acre feet, he said.

The studys computer models didnt factor in rising temperatures expected in this region due to climate change.

I havent shown the climate change hydrology because it just scares everybody, Kuhn told his districts governing board in June, according to an account of the meeting published in the Aspen Daily News.

The Upper Colorado Commissions computer models have shown that if the Upper Basin states take the precautionary measures theyre talking about, the risk of Powell falling to dangerously low levels is near zero  even if the basin gets another 25 years of weather like it did from 1988 through 2012, said Don Ostler, executive director the Upper Colorado River Commission. Even if nothing is done, he believes the risk quite low. I would say less than 20 percent, Ostler said.

During those 25 years, the rivers annual flow averaged 13.2 million acre feet  a bit less than what the Bureau of Reclamations studies have predicted it would carry by 2050 thanks to warming weather and other climate changes, Ostler noted.

The river carried an average of 14.7 million acre feet from 1906 through 2015.

Udall questioned the validity of using the years before 2000 because the years 1990 to 1999 were very wet and not representative of the weather we see now.

After seeing 30 inches of rain in one day in Louisiana, 20 inches in Houston, unprecedented drought in California over the last 5 years, not to mention the flow reductions in Colorado River, Udall said, I think we need to seriously consider water-related climatic events that have no historical precedent.
I'm guessing I'm not the only one who thought a miniseries based on the O.J. Simpson trial was a horrible idea. After all, most of us old enough to have lived through it, had already been glued to the television day after day in the mid-90s watching the trial unfold. What dramatization could possibly be as entertaining as those real-life events? Of course, I couldn't have been more wrong. Not only is 'American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson' the best dramatic presentation we've seen on TV in 2016, it ranks among the best miniseries ever produced. It's fantastic.

The series is based upon attorney and frequent CNN 'talking head' Jeffrey Toobin's book, 'The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson', and both the book and this miniseries delve into all the behind-the-scenes manipulations that occurred on both the defense and prosecution side of things, as well as the bigger picture: primarily that the trial served as a commentary on the status of race relations in America. In fact, the miniseries opens with video footage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, setting the tone for what's to follow.

By far the main reason to watch this miniseries is for the actors, in what may be the best-cast television show in recent memory. Not only are a good half dozen or so of the actors dead ringers for their real-life counterparts, but there are so many outstanding performances here, it's actually difficult for me to pick a favorite.

While stars Sarah Paulson and Courtney B. Vance get the 'flashy' roles, playing prosecution attorney Marcia Clark and defense attorney Johnnie Cochran, respectfully, I think the best performances here actually belong to David Schwimmer and Sterling K. Brown. Schwimmer plays Robert Kardashian, a close friend of O.J. who is both devoutly religious and someone who stands firmly behind O.J.'s innocence. As the evidence mounts up, however, we begin to see the toll it's having on Kardashian as he realizes he's being lied to by his best friend. It's a powerful, heartbreaking performance, and one in which Schwimmer may have accomplished something no reality show has been able to do: restore honor to the Kardashian name. As for Brown, he plays prosecution attorney Christopher Darden and looks as if he could be his twin brother. Like Schwimmer's character, Brown's role asks him to go through an internal struggle  having to try and put O.J. away while dealing with the racial issues that are presented in the case  issues that, as an African American, Darden both sympathizes with and understands.

Then there's John Travolta  making a rare appearance in a TV role and actually getting the somewhat thankless assignment of portraying attorney Robert Shapiro, a lawyer who originally defended O.J. (as Simpson was one of his clients beforehand), but gradually lost more and more say in the case as seasoned defense attorneys joined O.J.'s 'Dream Team'. At first, it appears that Travolta is wildly overacting in all of his scenes...until you figure out exactly what he's doing. Shapiro isn't the most interesting of characters, so Travolta plays him over the top, and you soon realize that you can't take your eyes off him every time he's in a scene. It's either the worst performance in this miniseries or the smartest one...perhaps a little of both, but I really enjoyed watching it.

Finally, there's Cuba Gooding Jr., who portrays O.J. Simpson. Ironically, this is the most miscast of all the roles in the series, as Cuba not only doesn't look anything like Simpson, he doesn't even make an attempt to act or sound like O.J. (I think we all can agree Cuba has a much higher pitched voice). The bonus featurette on this release claims that the reason they went with Cuba is because of his wholesome personality: no one would believe that Cuba Gooding Jr. was a killer  and they wanted to have an actor that could convey that same feeling of innocence to the home audience. Thankfully, Gooding is decent enough here (although I have to confess that his is the least appealing performance...even lesser than Travolta's), but I still think he was probably the wrong choice of actors for the role.

As a whole, though, 'The People v. O.J. Simpson' is simply riveting television, and  despite a lack of meaningful bonus materials  this release is a must-have. When I first watched it earlier this year, it was already on-demand, and I literally watched all 10 episodes over a weekend's time. You may find yourself doing the same. That's how addictive and powerful this presentation is. In a time where TV is really producing some great material, this is the gold standard of what can be achieved.

The Blu-Ray: Vital Disc Stats

'American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson' acquits itself on Blu-ray in this 3-disc set. The discs are housed inside a standard Elite keepcase, with one disc each on the two inside covers and an attached plastic hub holding the second disc in the set. A single insert contains an advertisement for Jeffrey Toobin's book of the same name (upon which this series is based) on one side, and an ad for FX shows available on home video on the flip side. The reverse side of the keepcase's slick (see from inside the keepcase) contains a list of the episodes and bonus features, including which disc they appear on. A slipcover with artwork matching that of the keepcase's slick slides overtop. The front flap of the slipcover opens to show a timeline of the major events that took place in the case, from the night of the murders to the verdict.

The first disc in this set is front-loaded with an advertisement for other 20th Century Fox shows available on Blu-ray and DVD, a short promo for Jeffrey Toobin's book, and a trailer for American Horror Story: Hotel. The main menu (identical on each disc) consists of a montage of footage from the episodes, with menu selections running horizontally across the bottom of the screen.

Although the box for this release indicates that these are Region A discs, the Blu-rays in this set are actually region-free.
The Sample Return Capsule will jump ship as the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft nears Earth.

The main spacecraft will enter solar orbit, while the capsule will come screaming into the top of the atmosphere at 27,000 mph. The tiny capsule will deploy a parachute when its about 2 miles from the surface, slowing down enough to land gently in the Utah desert.

Researchers will pick up the capsule and deliver it to the Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation Office at Johnson Space Center, in Houston, Texas. There, the asteroid rock and dust will be extracted and studied.

Most of the sample will be reserved for future scientists and future questions we havent figured out to even ask yet, and the science laboratory instruments that we havent even developed yet, said Gordon Johnston, OSIRIS-REx program executive at NASA.

The OSIRIS-REx science team, including partners in Canada and Japan, will receive the remaining 25 percent.

The Canadian Space Agency, which contributed a mapping laser to the mission, will receive 4 percent of the sample. The Japanese Space Agency will receive 0.5 percent in exchange for a sample of stardust from a comet mission.
Local agencies that provide supervised visitation to foster children and help reunite foster kids with their parents are still waiting to see what the months ahead will bring.

An email this week from the Arizona Department of Child Safety let agencies know two things: Current case aide contracts will continue until the end of September  rather than until the end of August, as originally stated  and parent aide contracts have been extended until Feb. 28.

Agencies here and across Arizona are being scrutinized in a statewide check on overspending.

Some were spending too much on overhead costs, said Arizona Department of Child Safety Director Greg McKay, with employees receiving gym memberships and other perks while draining money he said could be going to other services.

But providers say the national hourly average for a supervised visitation is $80  the same as Arizonas average.

That amount, used to provide children and their parents with opportunities to meet and work toward reunification, includes employee pay, benefits and training as well as transportation costs, utilities, facility rental and sometimes food.

With roughly 19,000 Arizona children in out-of-home care, child advocates say spending high sums on these services is unavoidable, and that if some agencies are abusing funds, that should be addressed individually.

The emailed letter leaves many questions unanswered, said Bob Heslinga, executive director of Aviva Childrens Services, which oversees 500 to 600 parent-child visitations per month.

For one, Heslinga said, agencies were originally told to apply only for case aide jobs and that the parent aide job would be included in that.

Now it appears they are totally separating that out, he said.

One hope is that having more time will provide a chance to find the best approach and cost-saving measures that wont hurt services.

Im not sure how to interpret it at this point, but I think they are listening to some of the concerns, said Denise Ensdorff, executive director of Arizonas Children Association.

Emily Jenkins, director of the Arizona Council of Human Services Providers, said she is hopeful this will provide an opportunity to sit down with both the Arizonas governors office and the DCS.

We hope to come to a better understanding of what the level of expertise is thats needed and what it costs our agencies to provide those services, she said. Its time to step back and have reasoned discourse about how we can come together and provide the level of services these children need.

The biggest concern, she said, is that children will be left in limbo.

The DCS did not respond to interview requests Friday.
PHOENIX  Arizona's laws to lock up sex offenders for failing to register after they've completed their sentence are valid because they're not meant to punish, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected arguments by the attorney for David B. Clark that it was unfair and illegal to arrest and imprison him for 3 years for failing to register.

Sandra Slaton argued that locking her client up amounted to an additional punishment after he had completed his four years of probation. And Slaton said this was particularly unfair to Clark since the law requiring sex offenders to register did not exist at the time he pleaded guilty in 1982.

But the appellate judges did not see it that way.

According to court documents, Clark pleaded guilty in 1982 in Pima County to sexual misconduct with a 14-year-old when he was 18.

The following year state lawmakers adopted a statute requiring sex offenders to register.

In 2009 Clark was arrested in Cochise County for failing to comply. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 3 years in prison.

Slaton filed a federal appeal, claiming it was illegal to subject her client to a law that did not exist when he was first sentenced in 1982. But in doing that, she also had to argue that Clark was being punished.

Appellate Judge Susan Graber, writing for the unanimous three-judge panel, disagreed.

She said the 1983 law was not intended to be punitive but instead provide information about sex offenders to the public. And she said Arizona courts have found the purpose of the law was "to protect communities, not punish sex offenders.''

Graber acknowledged that at one time the Arizona Supreme Court had held that sex offender registration was a "traditional form of punishment.'' But she said that contention was undermined by a subsequent ruling by the state Court of Appeals which he that "dissemination of truthful information in furtherance of a legitimate governmental interest (is not) punishment.''

The appellate judges also rebuffed Slaton's argument that the Arizona law goes beyond simply disseminating factual information about someone's record and is more akin to public shaming.

She cited the increased use of the Internet and that the Arizona statute requires online identifiers. That, Slaton said will likely lead to harassment of registered sex offenders.

Graber said disagreed, saying the fact there is widespread public access to the information that might lead to humiliation is a "collateral consequence of a valid regulation.''

Slaton said she is considering an appeal to the full appellate court. She said the ruling is based on the contention that registration as a sex offender is not punishment.
PHOENIX  Gov. Doug Ducey said he does not see legalizing marijuana as a better alternative to the legal and illegal use and abuse of opiates.

At a press conference Friday, the governor touted laws he has signed designed to deal with the problem of opioid addiction. That includes requiring physicians who prescribe the drug to check a statewide database to make sure patients are not doctor shopping and making it easy for friends and family members of addicts to get naxolone, an antidote to opiate overdoses, over the counter.

And he praised Walgreens for making drop boxes available for patients to dump their leftover drugs to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands or poisoning the water supply if flushed down the toilet.

But Ducey rejected the idea that a measure on the general election ballot to allow adults to legally use marijuana for any reason might provide a better alternative for those now using addictive opiates.

Dealing with opioids is an issue we now have in our state right now that we need to take action on, the governor said.

If we want to expand this universe of people that are addicted and abusing drugs, well youll have that chance in November, the governor continued. I, for one, the person who has to deal with the 19,000 children that are in our foster care system that has 85 percent of their parents that are abusing or are addicted to drugs, do not think we should expand that universe or that it would be a good idea in any way.

Nor does Ducey believe marijuana is a safer alternative.

I dont think that any state became stronger by being stoned, he said.

At Fridays event, Ducey said opiates have been abused and misused.

He said some is due to the legal versions of the drug, which include codeine, morphine and oxycodone, being overprescribed by some physicians, whether through lack of education or the failure to check a database that might show them the patient is already getting a prescription from someone else.

And that doesnt even touch the issue of those who are buying and using those otherwise legal the drugs illegally, as well as those using heroin.

Addiction is responsible for more annual youth deaths than suicide, firearms, school violence and car accidents combined, Ducey said. Prescription drug abuse and misuse is an epidemic that lives in every state in the nation, including Arizona.

Existing Arizona law allows individuals with certain medical conditions and a doctors recommendation to use marijuana. About 100,000 Arizonans have obtained the necessary identification cards from the state Department of Health Services that allows them to purchase up to 2 ounces of the drug every two weeks from state-regulated dispensaries.

Proposition 205 would expand that so that any adult could have up to an ounce of marijuana from a somewhat-expanded network of dispensaries and use the drug in any non-public setting for any reason.

It sets up a regulatory and taxing scheme that proponents argue mirrors the system that now exists for alcohol. They also contend marijuana is safer and far less addictive than other drugs.

Ducey isnt buying it.

I would check your facts when you say something is not addictive, that somethings safer than alcohol, and to look at the unintended consequences that have happened in states like Washington and Colorado, he said, decrying the way this has infiltrated high schools with brownies and cookies and Pez dispensers and all-day suckers.
In 2009 Hugh Jackman and Deborra-lee Furness travelled to Ethiopia as World Vision Australia ambassadors to see how rural communities were being empowered to eradicate poverty.

Dukales Dream is a story about Jackmans unlikely friendship with an Ethiopian coffee farmer, named Dukale -which was a life-changing moment for both.

While in the Yirgacheffe region, Hugh met a 27-year-old coffee farmer, named Dukale, working to lift his family out of poverty. Spending time on Dukales farm, Hugh learned first-hand about the value of fair trade coffee and clean cookstove technology. By utilising shade grown farming practices and limiting reliance on fossil fuels, Dukale was able to create a bio-farm with a zero carbon footprint and resounding health implications for his family. Additionally, his wife Adanesh, who traditionally collected firewood for the familys energy needs, now had time to focus on other income generating opportunities while their children pursued an education.

Hugh came to understand something as simple as a cup of coffee had the potential to reduce global poverty through the choices consumers make. In 2011, he launched Laughing Man Coffee & Tea to provide a market for farmers like Dukale and he contributes 100 % of his profits to the Laughing Man Foundation to support educational programs, community development and social entrepreneurs around the world.

Sunday, September 11 at 9.30pm on Showcase.
Help India!

By News Agency of Kashmir

Jammu: Police claimed that two top Hizbul Mujahideen militants surrendered before it along with arms and ammunition in Doda district, today.

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Senior Superintendent of Police Doda Manhor Singh said that one militant, identified as Shahbaz alias Gani son of Muhammad Hanief of Bharthi, Gandoh surrendered before police and 26 Rashtriya Rifles during the wee hours today.

A senior commander of HM, the militant, was said to be active in Thatri, Gandoh, Kither, Chatroo and other areas of Kishtwar since 1998 and. He handed over one AK Rifle, 3 magazines, 1 pouch, 3 wireless sets, 1 pouch and large quantity of incriminating documents to the police.

Meanwhile defence spokesman Lt Col Goswami told News Agency of Kashmir that another HM militant surrender before 11 RR and local police along with his weapon in Nowapachi area of Kishtwar.

Identified as Riaz Ahmed alias Faisal son of Ghulam Mustafa Lone of Tiller Marwah the militant laid down his arms after persuasion by the locals and relatives, the spokesman said.

Jammu and Kashmir government has formulated a special surrender policy which includes monetary benefits like Rs 1, 50,000 as Fixed Deposit Receipt, stipend worth Rs 2000 per month upto a period of three years and the cost of weapons surrendered by them besides vocational trainings and facilitation in rehabilitation.
Help India!

By Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, IANS

Mother Teresa has done unparalleled service to India. Could she also have benefited from the unparalleled spiritual wealth of India? Yes, definitely!

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Although Mother Teresa lived in this ancient land of rich spiritual heritage, she stayed away from Indian spirituality and remained an island unto herself. It is not uncommon for spiritual seekers to lose sight of what is happening inside them when they get involved in serving others.

Whether many so-called religious people are really on the spiritual path itself is questionable. They neither acknowledge nor recognise the conflicts and agony that one faces on the spiritual path. Mother Teresa has been so sincere and honest to herself that she expressed what she was experiencing. On the spiritual path, what is most important is to be honest with yourself and recognise what is happening within you.

Serving others uplifts ones energy, but it does not alleviate one from the inner torment. For that, one has to understand the mechanics of consciousness and their relation with pleasure or pain. This knowledge is found in many Indian scriptures such as the Upanishads, Yoga Vashistha, Ashtavakra Geeta and Tripura Rahasya.

The knowledge of Vedanta could have helped Mother Teresa get over her doubts and quench her intense seeking. All the states described in her letters are mentioned in the nine obstacles to yoga enunciated by Maharshi Patanjali.

Mother Teresa would have benefited immensely from Maharshis enunciations on how to face the obstacles of Vyadhi (ill-health), Styana (procrastination), Samshaya (doubt), Pramada (carelessness), Aalasya (laziness), Avirati (craving), Bhranti-darshana (confusion), Alabdha Bhumikatva (lack of any spiritual attainment) and Anavasthitva (emptiness or agonising state of mind).

Mother Teresa seemed to have gone through the agony of these states of consciousness without the knowledge of spiritual science. This is akin to a person suffering from malaria, not knowing what medicines to take.

What Mother Teresa experienced is not different from what many saints from different religions, including Sri Ram, went through. Sri Ram found his guidance from Maharshi Vashishtha in the form of Yoga Vashishta. In the scriptures it is said that only one who is well versed in some practice of samadhi can help one to overcome spiritual torment and misery.

When orthodox beliefs limit us from looking beyond, it becomes an impediment on our spiritual journey.

One on the spiritual path should have an open mind and, at the same time, honour orthodoxy. Spirituality beyond the boundaries of a religion can help one to cope with loneliness, isolation and emptiness. It need not be seen as a betrayal of ones own religion or philosophy.

Spiritual practices like yoga and meditation do not in any way conflict with ones religious beliefs. Take the example of Father Bede Griffith who came to India and studied yoga and Vedanta philosophy in Trichy. These teachings helped him to overcome obstacles on the spiritual path while remaining true to his faith as a devout Christian monk.

Being orthodox, Mother Teresa perhaps thought she would be betraying Jesus if she searched for answers to her dilemma in Indian spirituality. A seeker has to keep the goal in front and if there is a block on the path, he or she has to find an alternative route to the goal.

When we see God as an object of perception, that is when we are totally lost and misery follows. From the scene to the seer, from the object of perception to the perceiver that shift of consciousness makes all the difference on the spiritual journey. This is how the real joy, which is the nature of consciousness, gets kindled. And all the barriers, mental blocks and intellectual inhibitions that our understanding imposes can be transcended by experiencing the precepts of Vedanta.

It is unfortunate that people are not open in their thinking. I am sure that just a few sessions of pranayama and meditation would have helped Mother Teresa to overcome those days of darkness and inner torment. Thousands of seekers on the spiritual path experience this state, but they overcome it once they practise dhyana.

The Indian philosophy talks of three types of misery  physical, mental and spiritual. Spiritual torment is the worst. The agony and torment that one experiences is at the level of the mind and to go beyond the mind, go beyond thoughts, is the very purpose of samadhi. Mind is the cause of both bondage and liberation. Unless one knows how to quieten the mind, it is impossible to achieve inner peace.

The mind can be transcended through yoga sadhana. Yoga is not asanas alone; pranayama and meditation are an integral part of it. Patanjali Yoga Darshan, Adi Shankaras Drig Drishya Viveka, Vigyan Bhairav Tantra of Kashmir Shaivism, Thirumandiram of Saint Thirumula all offer different techniques that help one overcome spiritual torment and misery.

Ayurveda, yoga and Vedanta respectively are the three remedies to eliminate mala (impurities in the body) vikshepa (disturbances in mind) and avarna (veil that covers the light within). While ayurveda helps people to calm their thoughts, pranayama and meditation help one become happy from the core of their Being.

Happiness is only a sign of connection with the divinity deep within. Through these Vedantic practices, you can experience the scintillating consciousness that you are. It is a simple recognition of what is and has always been in us, and with us, as our self.

The basic principle of Vedanta is that what you are seeking is already there, like the air around you. You dont have to go somewhere searching; you only need to become aware. In the same way divinity, or the consciousness, bliss, love, is already present in you; it is only a matter of recognising it.

Scientific temper and Vedantic knowledge together make one whole and bring inner stillness. And that is the essence of Indian spirituality. Critics often ask what use is spirituality if the underprivileged are not taken care of. What they fail to see is that wherever there is genuine spirituality, a component of seva or service has always been attached to it. And this can be seen through the length and breadth of this country.

In the realm of consciousness, as you sow so shall you reap. If you think suffering is an important tool for uniting with God, then you are bound to attract it. If you sow a seed of suffering, that multiplies. The lack of experience of dhyana (meditation) and samadhi (equanimity) can keep a seeker morose and dull. To overcome this, one needs a shift in understanding about heaven and hell, and about the consciousness that is all pervading. Spirituality alone can bring that shift.

In the Eastern philosophy, experience comes first and then faith follows. In the occidental way of thinking, belief comes first and then experience. Mother Teresa had faith but was struggling for an experience. And it was experience which turned atheist Vivekananda into a swami. Ironically, Kolkata witnessed both in the same century!

(The writer is the widely revered Indian spiritual guru who heads the Art of Living Foundation.)
Help India!

By TCN News,

New Delhi: Worried about excessive hues and cries about the Muslim woman rights and several courts judgments on matters of Muslim personal laws seeming contrary to the provisions of the Islamic law, Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind today launched a training course in Muslim personal law for lawyers.

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The former Chief Justice of India A.M. Ahmadi launched the courses here at Jamiat headquarters, ITO and noted the move to be a positive way to deal with the misunderstandings about the Islamic Sharia.

He said, Each and every community has to face difficulties at sometimes, but a wise community is one which instead of resorting to the sentimentalism, first evaluates its own faults and then correct it and if there is a concerted attempts unleashed for distorting its image, then it thinks it better to respond with wisdom and full acumen. 

While speaking on Common Civil Code, he said that it was not an issue of a particular community but in country like India which is a pluralistic society, such move will not be accepted even by the majority community.

The launching programme was attended by more than four hundred eminent jurists and Islamic scholars where several lawyers and prominent Islamic scholars spoke on the need of courses which could deal with misunderstandings prevailing about the Islamic Sharia in the society.

The speakers included Maulana Abul Qasim Nomani, cleric from Darul Uloom Deoband, Maulana Sayed Mohammad Shahid, Zafaryab Jilani, Mohammad Salman Mansurpori, Prof. Akhtarul Wasey, Shakil Ahmad Sayed, Prof. Afzal Wani and Kamal Faruqui.

Maulana Mahmood Madani, General Secretary of Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind who is instrumental in starting the course, said that this training programme will cover issue such as marriage, divorce, maintenance, inheritance, testament and auqaf. These training courses in Muslim Personal law have been designed with the objective of making the practicing lawyers better informed about the Muslim personal laws, he said.

The speakers at the progaremme noted that for the last many years, Indian courts have been delivering many on matters of Muslim personal laws which are contrary to the provisions of the Islamic law. The lack of awareness and misunderstanding about many of the provisions are some of the reasons that are leading to such judgments.

They also noted that lawyers are failing to inform the courts about the Islamic laws, due to which the courts develop the understanding regarding Islamic concepts and deliver judgments as per the information passed to it by the concerned advocates. This not only affects the image of Islam and Muslim community but also tarnish the image of Muslims regarding the rights of woman in Islam, speakers highlighted.


The White House(HANGZHOU, CHINA) -- Emerging from his first meeting with Theresa May since the British prime minister took power earlier this summer, President Barack Obama reaffirmed America's close bilateral relationship with the United Kingdom.



"The prime minister continues to be a steadying influence during a time of transition," Obama said. "The bottom line is, is that we don't have a stronger partner anywhere in the world than the United Kingdom. And despite the turbulence of political events over the last several months, we have every intention to making sure that that continues."



In the wake of the Brexit referendum earlier this summer, Obama pledged to develop a new trade relationship with the UK.



"It will not simply endure, but it will continue to grow stronger with time," he said. "The vibrant economic partnership between our countries will continue as the UK gains further clarity on its new relationship with the EU. Our two countries will be discussing ways in which we continue to sustain and strengthen our trade and investment ties."



As for Prime Minister May, she reiterated that her government "respects" the decision of voters to leave the European Union, and there will be no second referendum.



"Brexit does indeed mean Brexit," May said. "On the 23rd of June, the people in the UK voted for the UK to leave the European Union. The government respects that decision. We respect the wishes of the people, and we will put that into practice. So there will be no second referendum, no attempt to turn the clock back, no attempt to try and get out of this. The UK will be leaving the European Union.



Obama is encouraging ongoing U.S.-Russian negotiations at the G20 to strike a lasting ceasefire that'd ground Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's air force so humanitarian aid can reach suffering children, women and innocent civilians.



The president said Secretary of State John Kerry and his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, "have been working around the clock, as well as a number of other negotiators, to see what would a real cessation of hostilities look like that could provide that humanitarian access and provide people in places like Aleppo relief."



But after previous ceasefire agreements in Syria haven't lasted, the president remains skeptical.



"We're not there yet, and, understandably, given the previous failures of cessations of hostilities to hold, we approach it with some skepticism, but it is worth trying," he said. "To the extent that there are children and women and innocent civilians who can get food and medical supplies and get some relief from the constant terror of bombings, that's worth the effort, and I think it's premature for us to say that there is a clear path forward, but there is the possibility at least for us to make some progress on that front."



Obama also downplayed a verbal kerfuffle at the airport between White House and Chinese officials, saying that U.S. values don't change when he travels abroad, even if host countries may be put off by the footprint traveling with the president.



"We've got a lot of planes and a lot of helicopters and a lot of cars and a lot of guys, and if you're a host country, sometimes it may feel a little bit much," Obama conceded. "We don't make apologies for pushing a little bit harder when it comes to press access, and that's been the case from my very first state visit here, and we don't always get everything that we'd like to see, but we think it's important for us to at least stand up for those values."



The president insisted the episode does not distract from his positive talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping on climate change and other bilateral issues.



"The bilateral discussions that we had yesterday were extremely productive and continue to point to big areas of cooperation. When I bring up issues like human rights, there are some tensions there that perhaps don't take place when President Xi meets with other leaders, but that's part of our job, that's part of what we do," he said. "And so I wouldn't over-crank the significance of it."



Later in the day, while meeting with Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan, Obama condemned the violence produced by a failed coup attempt in Turkey earlier this summer, reassuring Erdogan of Americas commitment to stand with its NATO ally.



Obama pledged to work with Erdogan to investigate the coup as the leaders reaffirmed their shared aim to defeat terrorism.



"I have assured him that our justice department and my national security team will continue to cooperate with Turkish authorities to determine how we will make sure that those who carried out these activities are brought to justice," Obama said, adding that the duo also discussed humanitarian support for Syrians fleeing the war-torn country, and praised Erdogans government for taking on a lead role in the refugee crisis.



Erdogan said operations are underway to respond to the coup are "within the framework and rule of law." He said that his government has submitted documents and his minister of justice will travel to the U.S. to collaborate with Americans on the investigation.



Copyright  2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
The other day I was lurking around the interwebs and saw an all-too-common argument -- folks using a film's financial success as a benchmark for overall quality. Apparently, only good movies make money and only bad movies tank, right? Right?



I hope you can see the logical fallacy.



Point being that, while there are certainly some wonderful films that print money and terrible ones that vanish quickly, terrible, horrible, utterly forgetful movies can be tremendous blockbusters spawning sequels and cinematic universes, while timeless, important classics can nuke the box office fridge.



'The Iron Giant' is one of the latter. An excellent movie that tested through the roof and had all the makings of an animated blockbuster akin to era-classics like 'The Lion King' and 'Aladdin', but one that suffered because its visionary director pushed for an earlier release while the studio was either ignoring or poorly marketing the project.



But it was also a film released on VHS, DVD, and Laserdisc at a time when physical media was still a growing market, and something funny happened. People found 'The Iron Giant'. Fell in love it. Shared it. Bought it. Rented it over and over. So much so that it earned itself a Special Edition DVD as well as, late last year, a 4K restoration and theatrical re-release with two new scenes.



'The Iron Giant' lived happily ever after, enchanting children of all ages, but serves as a cautionary tale for filmmakers, studios, and audiences alike. For us film fans, I would encourage our readers to ignore the weekly spectator sport of box office reporting. It fuels expectations and tribalism, both of which muddy your chances of being open to all sorts of movies and TV shows. Because, whether or not the numbers are high or low, what matters most is whether or not you connect to a piece of art. If a film can make you FEEL something, then I'd consider it a success. If it can't, it's time to move on (for you, at least; there's always a chance someone else will fall in love with what doesn't float your boat).



Back to the movie itself. Co-written and directed by animation wunderkind Brad Bird -- you may know him from his work on 'Ratatouile', 'The Incredibles', 'Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol', or 'Tomorrowland' -- 'The Iron Giant' is a hand-drawn fable that asks a heartbreaking question: what if a gun found out it was a gun and didn't want to kill anymore?



In this case, the gun is the Giant, a massive, sentient metal man from outer space who crash lands in the picturesque small town of Rockwell, Maine amidst the Red Scare days of the cold war. The giant befriends a lonely little boy named Hogarth, who lives with his single mother and really wants a pet, and learns the difference between life and death and what it means to have a soul. Along the way a government agent arrives to investigate, hoping to capture the giant to finally earn respect from from his peers, which sets Hogarth and the Giant's friendship on a collision course with some pretty serious consequences, all while testing that thematic question we asked above.



I hate to admit it. I too missed the film's theatrical release even though I was working at a movie theatre at the time. Which is a shame because 'The Iron Giant' is a pretty extraordinary movie that deserves to be revisited often. As such, if you have not seen it, stop reading now and skip down to the next section. You should watch it with as few expectations as possible.



MINOR SPOILERS to follow.



How to breakdown 'The Iron Giant'. Technically, the movie is a throw back to the styles of Walt Disney-produced animation. Brad Bird studied under the guidance of Disney's Nine Old Men, and it shows. On the same hand, you can see Bird's visual style emerging, from his character design to his tonal qualities to his action pacing, in ways that evoke the coming of 'The Incredibles'. In a way, Bird is reverential of past techniques, but passionate about evolving the medium. The whole production feels hand made, and that's a wonderful thing. Were it not for certain computer graphics and the immersive soundtrack (more on this below), you'd be hard pressed to nail down exactly when it was produced.



Emotionally, this film is on par with 'E.T.' in the way it blends coming of age thematics with the heartbreak of saying goodbye to friends. Your children are going to love this movie, but they're probably also going to cry. But that's okay. It's important to learn about these things in the way we watched 'Bambi', 'E.T.', and 'The Lion King' (among others).



TONE is probably the hardest thing to lock down in film, particularly in movies that dare to dip their toes into multiple tones, and this one delivers over and over again. One minute you're in awe, the next chuckling or white-knuckling the remote, or bawling your eyes out. 'The Iron Giant' also offers thrilling (and often stunning) set-pieces for action junkies, and oodles of visual gags and other forms of slapstick for comedy fans. In that sense, there's a lot here for people of every age to enjoy.



'The Iron Giant' is an impressive animated feature debut by a very talented filmmaker who took a rag-tag group of animators with a bare-bones budget, and made what many have hailed as a masterpiece. Bird and his team and their film even managed to survive bombing at the theatrical box office before finding new life in home video. For this I am thankful, because the world's a better place 'The Iron Giant' in it.



Vital Disc Stats: the Blu-ray



'The Iron Giant' Signature Edition arrives on Blu-ray courtesy of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment in a one-disc package. There is no slipcover, Digital HD, or DVD copy. Inside this standard Blu-ray case, you'll find one BD50 that houses two cuts of the film as well as all the Bonus Materials. The Signature Edition runs 01:29:58 (versus the Original Edition's 01:26:39) and includes two new scenes -- The Giant's Dream and a moment with Annie and Dean at the diner -- as well as a nod to 'Tomorrowland' when the Giant's hand is watching TV in Hogarth's house.



One note about the menu design. I like the simplicity, but there's no RESUME PLAY feature so any time you power down, want to swap to a different cut of the movie, watch a Special Feature, or engage Audio Commentary, the movie starts over at the beginning. This takes away from the overall ergonomics.



An Ultimate Collector's Edition is also available. This $74.99 MSRP set adds a DVD, a Digital HD copy, a letter from Director Brad Bird to the fans, five Mondo Art Cards, a 32-Page Book, and a collectible Iron Giant Figurine.
Forty-one years before Patrick Swayze bounced into the Double Deuce, another 'Road House' gave audiences a thrill. A relative in name only to the 1989 film, director Jean Negulesco's steamy tale of stormy passions starring the formidable quartet of Ida Lupino, Cornel Wilde, Celeste Holm, and Richard Widmark scorched the screen in 1948. Straightforward in tone, but simmering with interpersonal tension, this 'Road House' maintains a tight focus, and its tough, no-nonsense presentation and strong performances cement its reputation as a high-quality film noir.

Somehow, though, 'Road House' never achieved the popularity it so richly deserves. The movie faded into obscurity after its initial release, and even the hearty praise heaped upon it by film noir scholars over the ensuing decades hasn't enhanced its name recognition. I remember catching 'Road House' on TV quite by accident decades ago. I tuned in because of the stellar cast, but the taut story held my interest. And that climax! Eerie, explosive, and utterly gripping, it ranks right up there with the best finishes in the genre.

The sleepy town where most of the action transpires is the film's only sedate element, and on its dreary outskirts sits Jefty's Road House, a bustling hangout that combines a bar and bowling alley. Two buddies run the joint. The handsome, level-headed Pete (Wilde) is practical and business-like, while the hot-headed Jefty (Widmark) is a romantic dreamer who gets carried away by grand illusions. Outwardly charming, but tough as nails underneath, Jefty knows what he wants and goes after it, no matter the consequences.

And what he wants is Lily (Lupino), a second-rate, chain-smoking lounge singer from Chicago. Jefty impulsively hires the cynical, defiant dame to increase business, and promises her a hefty salary, much to the chagrin of Pete, who tries to pay her off and send her back to the Windy City. But Lily digs in her heels and stays. Jefty falls hard for her and plans to propose marriage, but Lily takes a shine to Pete, who at first rebuffs her advances, then realizes he loves her. And when Pete gets wind of their clandestine affair, he becomes unhinged, and hatches a diabolical plot to make both of them pay for their betrayals.

Distinguished by snappy dialogue and richly drawn characters, 'Road House' quickly draws us into its stifling small-town setting, where heightened emotions steadily percolate until they boil over. And in a performance brimming with a feverish fervor, Widmark leads the charge. The previous year, he made a huge splash in his film debut, 'Kiss of Death,' playing a psycopathic hitman with a maniacal giggle who memorably disposes of a wheelchair-ridden Mildred Dunnock by pushing her down a flight of stairs. Widmark recycles the giggle here to great - and grating - effect, going crazily over the top as he fashions a creepy, pitiable, yet deliciously vicious portrait of broken-hearted vengeance.

Widmark commands attention whenever he's on screen, but so too does Lupino, who, like the film, never quite received the recognition she deserved. Always in the shadow of Bette Davis and Ann Sheridan at Warner Bros, Lupino left that studio seeking juicier roles, and she got one in 'Road House.' Oozing attitude and a sullen sex appeal, she stands up to both Widmark and Wilde, alternating petulance with a hard-knocks sensitivity that makes her been-around-the-block character sympathetic. She also gets a chance to show off her smoky vocals in a couple of half-sung, half-spoken tunes that fit Lily's marginal talent well. As Susie, Jefty's fresh-faced, perky accountant, wryly quips, "She does more without a voice than anybody I ever heard!"

Winningly played by Holm, Susie is the good-hearted glue that tries to hold the splintering trio of Pete, Lily, and Jefty together, despite her unrequited feelings for Pete, who doesn't give her a second look. The part might have seemed like a booby prize to Holm, who had just come off a Best Supporting Actress Oscar win for the anti-Semitic drama 'Gentlemen's Agreement,' but she makes the most of it, instantly garnering our affection and, later, concern when she puts herself in jeopardy to save Lily and Pete.

Though some of the plot points don't ring true, they at least lead up to a memorable finale that allows 'Road House' to make a lasting impression. The last 15 minutes are about as gripping as film noir gets, combining suspense, violence, and a hint of operatic tragedy to create a stunning set piece. 'Road House' may not meet every criteria on the noir checklist, but this highly entertaining, well-executed film is faithful enough to the genre to make a potent statement and warrant its long overdue rediscovery.

The Blu-ray: Vital Disc Stats

The 1948 version of 'Road House' arrives on Blu-ray packaged in a standard case. Video codec is 1080p/AVC MPEG-4 and audio is DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono. Once the disc is inserted into the player, the static menu without music immediately pops up; no previews or promos precede it.
James Wan, who has set the world of horror cinema ablaze for the last few years, returns to helm 'The Conjuring 2,' a direct follow-up to his biggest box-office hit to date. Well, unless we take into account he also drove last year's 'Furious 7' to juggernaut success. But does that really count since the franchise was already riding the money-making gravy train due to an established loyal fan base? I think not. As with the 'Saw' and 'Insidious' movies, 'The Conjuring' series is his own creation, his thriving baby with huge profit margins. And this franchise, in particular, has proven quite lucrative with spin-offs, like 'Annabelle' and its sequel, delivering some satisfying frights. So, it's no surprise New Line Cinema has signed the director to a long-term deal overseeing every aspect of the franchise, including another spin-off called 'The Nun' branching off from this sequel. Wan is also directing 'Aquaman' while attached as producer to other projects, such as the 'Mortal Kombat' reboot and MacGyver's return to television this fall. If he continues this sort of success, I almost half expect to see the title card "James Wan presents" at the start of many features.

If it seems as though I'm somewhat slow on sharing my direct thoughts about the sequel, it's because I am. Partially. That's not meant to imply it's a bad movie, which picks up six years after the events of the first. On the whole, it's a competent follow-up, picking up at the tail-end of the Warrens' most famous documented case at the Amityville house, an experience that left Lorraine (an adequate Vera Farmiga) fearing the life of her husband Ed (a much more likable Patrick Wilson). Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in the north London boroughs of Enfield, the Hodgson family is being terrorized by a malevolent spirit targeting middle child Janet (a giftedly convincing Madison Wolfe). And once again, Wan and his team deliver several hair-raising scares, switching back and forth between both continents. The children's single mother Peggy (Frances O'Connor) struggles to make sense of furniture moving on its own, mysterious noises echoing in other parts of the house and the creepy voice of a 70-year-old coming out of Janet. Lorraine is also tormented by visions of a terrifying creature with glowing eyes and dressed in a nun outfit  an inhuman presence unnerving enough to earn its own movie.

This is one of the production's better aspects, which is to be expected in a supernatural popcorn flick. So, it's a shame when that momentum effectively established early on can't be sustained to the end, as it was in its predecessor. Don Burgess's photography is faultless, amplifying the apprehension with a spine-tingling atmosphere that seems to permeate even the most tender moments with a feeling of uneasiness. Wilson's heartwarming rendition of Elvis Presley's "Can't Help Falling in Love" remains blanketed by a gray overcast and an understated palette. Later, when the Hodgson house turns into a haunted carnival-like ride, Burgess's cinematography is terrifically complemented by Joseph Bishara's deceptively simple but dreadfully bloodcurdling musical score. However, just a little over halfway into its 134-minute runtime, the film is no longer a paranormal shocker, in spite of Burgess and Bishara's excellent contributions. Plodding along with suspicions by the skeptical Dr. Gregory (Franka Potente) and dialogue on religious faith that sometimes comes close to sermonizing, the jump scares and Kirk M. Morri's editing grows predictably routine, racing to a disappointingly brief showdown and a much too easy win.

And yet, in the face of these minor gripes, 'The Conjuring 2' stands proud as one of the better horror flicks of the year. Although we're really only at the halfway point. It's not quite as good as its predecessor, but it's a strong follow-up with some smarts accentuating a story co-written by the director with Chad and Carey Hayes. Porting over the same theme from the first movie, the Warrens sympathize with the Hodgson's troubled family and financial issues, choosing to help when others won't. The only other believer is fellow paranormal investigator Maurice Grosse (Simon McBurney) on a personal journey for comfort in the belief of an afterlife. This appears to be the common thread piecing the franchise together. Wilson's Ed divulges that families in strife tend to be more susceptible to supernatural forces. Considering there are plenty more of Warrens' investigations dealing with families, fans should expect the next installment to be on the Smurl haunting or perhaps a better retelling of Snedeker house in Connecticut. Whichever he does next, Wan has proven himself a talented craftsman of the horror genre, showing a unique signature style that skillfully builds the tension to its boiling point and loves scaring audiences.

The Blu-ray: Vital Disc Stats

New Line Cinema and Warner Home Video bring 'The Conjuring 2' to Blu-ray on a Region Free, BD50 disc with an UltraViolet Digital Copy inside a blue, eco-cutout case. After a couple skippable promos, viewers are taken to a static screen with a generic set of menu options along the bottom of the screen and music playing in the background.
Yesterday, while visiting Hawaiis Midway Atoll, President Obama officially made the size of a marine monument twice the size of Texas while highlighting his climate change commitment. The monument's new size has angered local fishermen and Native Hawaiians. The monument, created by President George W. Bush in 2006, puts more land and waters off limits to local fishermen and recreation, and Obamas critics are calling his actions heavy-handed. The monument is now the largest protected marine Environment in the world or roughly 3.5 times the size of California.

A native of Hawaii, Obama used his executive power to expand the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, making large swaths of fertile fishing grounds off-limits to fishermen. That means they now have to travel at least four times further out to sea to catch fish like tuna, a costly adventure that actually emits more greenhouse gas emissions because of the increased travel time. Hawaiians not only consume three times more fish than landlocked Americans but fishing is a major source of local commerce.

"Obama Visits Midway, Highlighting Monument and Commitment to Environment" by JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS via NYT https://t.co/7lDTbCcHPX  Areeha sheikh (@areeha18) September 2, 2016

Onerous restrictions equal fewer jobs

While environmentalists say the new size was essential to Native Hawaiians by making it off-limits to fishing and recreational activities, residents say they cant afford the increased costs associated with the new restrictions.

Especially smaller fishermen who barely eke out a living. The new size, they say, would infringe on traditions that Hawaiians have relied on for centuries and would be counterproductive to Hawaiis sustainable fishing practices:

Papahanaumokuakea Expansion Is Counterproductive for Hawaiis Sustainable Fisheries https://t.co/hPwYWDkCdW pic.twitter.com/VgG81lJIei  World of Nature (@WorldfNature) August 31, 2016

The White House said that the region would suffer a six percent loss in fishing productivity, while others say its closer to ten percent of Hawaiis annual haul.

But whether the figure is six or 60, Obama will be long gone from office as the impacts of his decisions resonate throughout the fishing community. That isnt sitting well with House Natural Resource Committee Chair Rob Bishop (R) of Utah:

Drawing attention to climate

Obama also visited the Midway Atoll, the site of ramshackle buildings from World War II.

The Battle of Midway was considered a victorious moment during the last world war and according to Obama, the atoll could fall victim to accelerated rising seas. He said that communities like those that live on the Midway Atoll may have to move because of the effects of climate change, specifically sea level rise.

But Obama apparently is unwilling to keep up with the latest research since it doesnt fit his catastrophic climate change narrative. As reported yesterday by Blasting News, a new study that looked at 30 years of sea level rise found the continents were gaining more land than they were losing. The study showed the Earth has gained 107,000 square miles over the past three decades, including 21,000 square miles of coastline.

That means continents are gaining in size, not shrinking:

Sorry Al Gore, new study shows coastlines gaining land despite sea level alarmism

https://t.co/zG4YkENS1b via @ClimateDepot #climate  Climate Dispatch (@ccdeditor) September 1, 2016

Scientists have long held that in a warming world, the coastlines would be the first casualties as melting ice sheets poured excess water into the oceans. It would seem those fears were a bit premature as all indications show that sea level rise isnt accelerating and has remained consistent for the past millennia. Part of the reason is that Antarctica isnt melting as predicted and defying all expectations. It has actually grown in size since satellite measurements began in 1979.

Next up, the Paris accord

After Hawaii, Obama is expected to travel to China to ratify the Paris Climate Agreement despite not having the two-thirds approval of the senate, a constitutional requirement. White House staffers say that since the climate accord is not a treaty, Obama is simply making an executive decision. But with the purse strings controlled by the Congress, Obama will have a difficult time carrying out the accord with a budget of zero dollars and five months left in his term.
Dr. Kurt Tank was a German aircraft designer during World War II when Adolf Hitler ruled. He is famous for designing the Focke- Wulf 190 and the 4 engine Condor. After the defeat of Germany, Dr. Kurt escaped to Argentina. His tenure in Argentina was not much of a success and he came to India as a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology at Madras.

Heading the HAL design team

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru came to know about the presence of DrTank in Madras and offered him the post of chief designer at Hindustan Aeronautics at Bangalore. India was trying to develop an indigenous fighter jet and Nehru thought to incorporate the German designer a coup of sorts.

The Western powers led by the USA were not enamored of Nehru's brand of pro- Soviet neutralism and denied the latest fighters to India.World politics at that time was dominated by USSR and USA.The Indians thought to be self-reliant and develop their own jet and it was a boon that Dr. Kurt Tank joined the team.

The HF-24

Dr. Tank joined the team and soon brought out the first jet fighter ever made outside the developed world. He conceived and launched the Hindustan Fighter-24 or Marut which means the Wind god. The plane was a twin-engine single-seat fighter-bomber. However, the plane was underpowered and only achieved a speed of 1.1 Mach in a dive, though it was designed as a Mach II plane.The aircraft was inherently safe and in two decades of service with the IAF rarely suffered any crash.

The Marut could carry 2x500lb bombs or rockets. It had built-in machine guns. Due to its slow speed, it was mainly used for ground attack and a tactical role.

The plane first flew in 1961 and remained in service till 1990. Three squadrons of the IAF were equipped with the Marut.The plane was used in the 1965 and 71 wars with Pakistan and no aircraft was lost due to enemy action.

But the lack of more powerful engines hindered its development. But within the constraints, the HF-24 has left a mark in the history of Aviation in India. A bigger achievement is that it was the first jet fighter manufactured outside the developed world.

Dr. Tank left India in 1969 and settled in Bavaria. A Marut is displayed at the Air Force Museum at Palam and one is exhibited in Bavaria. In India, the wheel has turned a full circle and the HAL made Tejas advanced interceptor is on the verge of induction into the IAF
Skill films feel like a dying genre. Movies that showcase a person's physical abilities on a playing field or on the stage with a story wrapped around that ability feel like they're going the way of the dinosaur. While flicks like the 'Pitch Perfect' franchise still pull in some box office bucks, movies about dancing or unique sports just aren't getting made any more. If you're at all familiar with movies like 'Step Up' or 'Honey' then you're probably already well aware of the fact that there really isn't much to distinguish them from one another. Change the faces, change the athletic ability, and reuse the same stale story and you've got a "new" movie for audiences to ingest. Sadly, 'Honey 3: Dare To Dance' follows the same rote formula. While an impressive display of natural talent, the story is so bland there isn't much point in watching it.

Melea Martin (Cassie Ventura) has a dream. As a student at Cape Town's most prestigious art school, Melea has a dream of bringing Hip Hop to Shakespeare. 'Romeo and Juliet' is the choice play she hopes to bring a modern and edgy interpretation to the stage by combining it with her modern Hip Hop dance techniques. While the faculty, her friends, and her boyfriend Erik (Kenny Wormald) are intrigued at the prospect of updating the Bard's great work of tragic romance, the financial department isn't too keen. As it turns out, Melea is up to her neck in debt and her scholarship isn't enough to cover expenses. Out on her own, Melea must find a way to pull everything together to bring to the stage the greatest presentation of 'Romeo and Juliet' anyone has ever seen.

While the Cape Town location is unique and the desire to transform a work of Shakespeare into Hip Hop dance is a new spin, the story behind 'Honey 3' just isn't anything new. If you've seen 'Flashdance,' 'Breakin'' or even 'Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo' for that matter, you've seen 'Honey 3' many times over. Athletic ability movies of this type are virtually a dime a dozen. It's unfortunate too because at its core, 'Honey 3' could have been something worthwhile and unique. I was actually kind of interested in seeing this movie just because it feels like it's been a long time since an ability movie like this came out. Sadly, writer Catherine Cyran and director Bille Woodruff just don't do anything new with the material.

Now, that isn't to say 'Honey 3' is a complete washout. Like watching a film about race car drivers and their high-speed duels on the track, 'Honey 3' is all about staging one impressive dance sequence after another. The cast is clearly bringing their A-Game here as Cassie Ventura and Kenny Wormwald along with the rest of the cast are clearly very talented dancers. Had 'Honey 3' been a sort of short-form musical, possibly even just a music video, it would have been a great showcase of their natural talents. While Kenny Wormald already got to strut his stuff in the 'Footloose' remake, he doesn't really bring anything to the material other than being able to move in sync with the music. Unfortunately the same goes for Cassie Ventura. She's practically playing the same sort of person she did in 'Step Up 2: The Streets.' Coupled with the familiar storyline, 'Honey 3' is the unfortunate sort of movie that is content with just playing things safe. It doesn't try anything new, so if the dancing is all you're after, this movie delivers those scenes in spades.

Where franchises like 'Honey' could go to make things better is to upend it's drama genre conventions. Why not make these movies action films? Sure 'Gymkata' is a goofy take on the survival action game, but over all it worked as a gymnastics movie! It showcased some impressive action while letting it's lead star Kurt Thomas got to do some deadly gymnastics routines. If 'Honey 3: Dare To Dance' had gone that rout - that would have been something cool to see. Some skilled guys and gals knocking out bad guys clad in 80s ninja garb in sync to modern music, that at least would be a fresh approach to old material. Maybe 'Honey 4: Deadly Moves' could deliver on that idea? Should I copyright that idea now? Maybe I'll let the powers that be have that one for free and they could just owe me one. At the end of the day 'Honey 3: Dare to Dance' is worth watching, or rather certain scenes are worth watching, the stuff in the middle and surrounding edges you can skip.

The Blu-ray: Vital Disc Stats

'Honey 3: Dare to Dance' arrives on Blu-ray in a two-disc set courtesy of Universal Home Video. Pressed onto a BD50 disc, the disc is housed in a standard two-disc Blu-ray case with identical slip cover. Also included is an Ultraviolet Digital HD voucher. The disc opens with trailers for other Universal releases before arriving at a static image main menu with traditional navigation options.
Xi flags stronger Egypt ties Updated: 2016-09-04 12:21 By An Baijie in Hangzhou(chinadaily.com.cn)

China would like to enhance its cooperation with Egypt in areas such as production capacity, finance, environmental protection and infrastructure, President Xi Jinping said on Sunday.

Xi made the remarks while meeting with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi during the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hangzhou.

The two countries should strengthen communication and cooperation in international and regional affairs, Xi said, adding that both sides should push forward bilateral ties at the new point of the 60 anniversary of diplomatic ties.

The Egyptian president expressed gratitude to Xi for inviting him to attend the G20 summit as a guest country. He said the China-Egypt friendship was deeply rooted in the minds of the people from both countries.

Egypt would like to boost communication and cooperation with China in areas such as industry, telecommunication, technology, agriculture, water project, finance, local government administration and human resources, he added.
President Xi affirms partnership with Russia in meeting with Putin Updated: 2016-09-04 16:34 By AN BAIJIE in Hangzhou(chinadaily.com.cn)

China and Russia should firmly support each other's efforts to safeguard sovereignty, security and development, President Xi Jinping said on Sunday.

Xi made the remarks while meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the sidelines of the G20 summit held in Hangzhou.

The two countries should push forward practical cooperation in areas including infrastructure construction, energy, aviation, aerospace and high technology, Xi said, adding that the bilateral military exchanges and security cooperation should also be enhanced.

China and Russia should strengthen coordination in international and regional affairs to safeguard justice and promote world peace, he said.

Xi also urged to align the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative with the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union.

Putin said that Russia would like to make joint efforts with China to increase mutual political trust and people's friendship in order to further motivate economic cooperation.

The two countries should enhance cooperation in areas including trade, investment, finance, energy, science and technology to bring real benefits to the people of both sides, he added.

The Russian president voiced support toward the G20 summit's theme and agenda set by China and wished the summit success.
Nation can engender win-win changes Updated: 2016-09-04 10:30 By Bernard Yeung(China Daily)

President Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama meet at the West Lake State Guest House in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, on Saturday. Wu Zhiyi / China Daily

Bernard Yeung

The G20 Summit in Hangzhou is China's golden opportunity to take on a leadership position. China can play a critical role by nurturing the development of meaningful communication and initiating dialogue to seek win-win compromise and solutions. To restore stability, openness and economic hopefulness, China can help shape the following agenda: raise the level of understanding among nations, organize positive dialogue, push for global programs on inclusive growth and further structural reforms and market liberalization.

The dialogue needs to be based on creating understanding and seeking solutions for crucial issues such as forging international cooperation in trade, and recognizing the new global distribution of economic power by enhancing the representation of rising nations of the East in supranational organizations.

This is imperative because Asia has evolved into an interconnected system.

Intra-Asia trade stands at 56 percent of total trade, rising by 77 percent from 2007 to 2014. China is the epicenter of such tradewith 50 percent of its exports going to Asia while 60 percent of its imports are from Asia.

Intra-Asia, cross-border direct investment also has increased substantially, again due to the China factor. Driven by rising wages, China has been actively offshoring labor-intensive work to neighboring countries such as Vietnam, Malaysia and Laos.

Meanwhile, it is in-shoring high value-added skill and technology intensive work. Some 66 percent of China's outward foreign direct investment, or FDI, stays in Asia.

This transformation is further aided by the internet and digitization revolution in almost all countries. For example, the internet directly connects buyers and sellers, empowering them with information that allows for the elimination of intermediaries.

In the banking sector, mobile payments and other financial technologies reduce transaction costs and connect savers and users of funds. These developments level the playing field for a private sector driven efficiency revolution.

A pan-Asian production network that feeds fast-growing regional consumption is developing with China at the center. But other Asian countries and the West still play significant roles. It takes global sourcing of resources and capability to meet the needs of 4.4-plus billion Asians. There is business for everyone and Asia's growth benefits the whole world.

In this context, China can play a critical role in generating a vibrant and well-connected Asia for sustainable and harmonious global growth.

While China does not want to be seen as trying to be a global rule-maker, it can, and should, show poised Eastern style leadership. The approach should be friendly, not confrontational, with the objective to seek understanding and pragmatic win-win solutions. Cornering issues into an impasse will not be beneficial to all. Furthermore, by winning respect based on gentle leadership and its economic position, China can take the lead in enhancing the rising Eastern nations' representation in global affairs.

China can set a good example in the G20 of an Eastern pragmatic Confucius leadership steering G20 dialogue toward seeking balanced win-win solutions for the world.

The author is Dean and Stephen Riady Distinguished Professor of National University of Singapore Business School.
US, Britain downplay trade concerns after Brexit Updated: 2016-09-04 17:04 (Xinhua)

HANGZHOU -- US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister Theresa May, at their first meeting since the latter's assumption of office, downplayed concerns about bilateral trade following Britain's decision to leave the European Union (EU).

"The bottom line is we don't have a stronger partner in the world than the United Kingdom," said Obama at the meeting, which took place in this eastern Chinese city on the sidelines of the 11th Group of 20 (G20) summit.

"And despite the turbulence of the political events over the last several months, we have every intention of making sure that continues," he added, referring to Britain's shock Brexit referendum in June.

Washington ruffled London's feathers when it warned ahead of the vote that the United States would prioritize its trade talks with the EU over those with Britain should the latter choose to exit the bloc.

On Sunday, Obama toned down the rhetoric, saying that the warning was never intended to be a punishment. Yet he added that it would not make sense for Washington to deviate from the EU track.

The top priority for London now, Obama said, is to define its new trading relationship with other European countries.

May, for her part, joined Obama in underscoring the two partners' solidarity, pledging that her country will strive to pursue an aggressive trade link with the United States despite the Brexit.

In an attempt to dispel any doubt about whether her country is really leaving the EU, the prime minister ruled out the possibility of holding a second referendum on the EU exit.

"The UK will indeed be leaving the European Union," she said.

On the margins of the G20 summit, Obama also touched upon the Syria crisis, saying that his country and Russia are working around the clock to clinch a deal on how to deal with the situation in the war-torn Middle East country.

Acknowledging that the two countries still have "grave differences," he said, "There is the possibility at least for us to make some progress."
Europe should ratify Paris climate deal, like China, US Updated: 2016-09-05 04:04 By Fu Jing in Brussels(chinadaily.com.cn)

Vice-Prime Minister of Belgium Didier Reynders poses with young Chinese artist Zao Dao at the annual Brussels Comic Strip Festival on Sunday, saying he welcomes Chinese artists to the event. [Photo by Fu Jing/China Daily]

Vice-Prime Minister of Belgium Didier Reynders said on Sunday that Europe should follow China and the United States, after the two powers took the lead in ratifying the Paris climate change agreement one day ahead of the two-day G20 summit in Hangzhou, in East China's Zhejiang province, which starts on Sunday.

Reynders, who is also foreign minister of Belgium, made the comment when he was visiting the China exhibition at the annual Brussels Comic Strip Festival held on Sept 2-5.

"It is my pleasure to visit the display of Chinese works for the second time and I am enjoying those by both classic and modern Chinese artists," said Reynders during an interview with China Daily.

He also said he was enjoying the works by Chinese artists at the festival and "at the same time, to see the beginning of G20 summit in China."

The Belgian foreign minister said it is positive and encouraging that China and the United States have taken the lead in ratifying the Paris Agreement on climate change which was achieved in the end of last year at the UN talks in France.

"It is nice to see that China has ratified the climate agreement at the same moment as the United States ahead of the beginning of G20 summit and I hope Europe would do the same," said Reynders.

United Nations has started a one-year ratification period of Paris Agreement in April and so far European Union has not announced its timetable. The EU could only go through the ratification procedure after its member states do so at domestic level. France has already ratified the agreement mainly because of its presidency of climate talks in 2015.

At the festival, Reynders exchanged ideas and posed for photos with Chinese artists, welcoming them to the Belgium, which is dubbed "the kingdom of comics."

Chinese organizers exhibited classic comics books such as Sanman, a lasting famous character created by the artist Zhang Leping (1910-1992), who lived roughly the same period as the Belgian cartoonist Georges Prosper Remi (1907-83) better known by his pen name of Herge and who created the long-running character Tintin.

The works by Chinese young artist Zao Dao attracted much attention at the three-day comics and cartoon fair, with visitors have lining up to watch her paint on the blank page of her illustration collection which was sold at the show.

To contact the reporter: fujing@chinadaily.com.cn
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Genres : Documentary

Director : Soren Sorensen

Plot Synopsis

The story of Peter Sorensen, and two men he served with, Loring Bailey and Glenn Rickert, who were killed fighting the Vietnam War. Peter Sorensens son, filmmaker Soren Sorensen, was only a child when he first visited the Vietnam Memorial on a family trip to Washington, DC in the mid-eighties. The sight of his father making pencil rubbings of two names, out of the more than 58,000 etched into the granite wall, remained in his mind well into adulthood when he decided it was time to have a serious conversation with his father about the War. Conversations with Peter Sorensen, and the friends and family members of two men he served with who were killed in Vietnam in 1970, give voice to the individuals who continue to silently carry the psychological burdens of a war that ended over 40 years ago. My Fathers Vietnam encourages audiences to broach the subjects of service and sacrifice with the veterans in their lives.
Intended as a discussion group, the blog has evolved to be more of a reading list of current issues affecting our county, its government and people. All reasonable comments and submissions welcomed. Email us at: bill.pysson@gmail.com REMEMBER: To view our sister blog for education issues: www.district100watchdog.blogspot.com
Hanoi, September 3 (VNA)  Raul Castro Ruz, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba and President of the Cuban Councils of State and Ministers, has congratulated the Communist Party, Government and people of Vietnam on the 71 st National Day (September 2, 1945).



He sent the congratulations to Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, President Tran Dai Quang, and Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc on September 2.



In the message, he reiterated Cubas resolve to intensify the friendship and cooperation with Vietnam.



On this occasion, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez also extended the congratulations to Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh, noting that the Caribbean nation is willing to do everything to reinforce the countries time-honoured amity.



On September 1, Abdel Aziz El-Sherif, a representative of the Egyptian Presidential Office, delivered President El Sisis congratulations to President Tran Dai Quang on Vietnams 71st National Day



The Vietnamese Embassy in Egypt held a celebration of the National Day in Cairo with the participation of Egypts Assistant Foreign Minister Yasser Morad, foreign ambassadors to the country and Vietnamese expatriates.



Ambassador Do Hoang Long reviewed the country's 71-year journey and thanked Egypt for supporting Vietnam during the period. He hoped that bilateral ties will be strengthened as the two countries share many similarities and boast cooperation potential in various fields.



Also on September 2, a celebration was organised in Jakarta by the Vietnamese Embassy in Indonesia. It also attracted local senior officials, foreign diplomats and Vietnamese people living in the country.



The Vietnamese people are proud of having a friend like Indonesia, Ambassador Hoang Anh Tuan said, adding that bilateral relations have been flourishing and were lifted to a strategic partnership in June 2013.



In his speech, Indonesian Minister of Law and Human Rights Yasonna Hamonangan expressed his belief that bilateral traditional friendship and strategic partnership will continue to thrive for peace, stability and prosperity in the region and the world./.

VNA/VNP
An electronic appliance manufacturing line at the RoK invested Bluecom Vina Company Limited in Trang Due industrial park (Hai Phong) __Photo: Danh Lam/VNA

Of nearly USD 300 billion in foreign direct investment Vietnam has attracted so far, more than half is unreal as foreign investors tend to blow up registered capital to get incentives.The country had by July attracted an accumulative figure of nearly USD 300 billion in foreign direct investment, according to the Foreign Investment Agency under the Ministry of Planning and Investment (MPI).The first seven months of this year alone saw foreign direct investment rising 46.9 percent year-on-year to USD 12.94 billion, including nearly USD 8.7 billion of newly registered capital and USD 4.25 billion added to existing projects.But disbursed FDI capital reached only around USD 140 billion, meaning more than half of the figure was unreal, said Prof. Dr. Nguyen Mai, chairman of the Vietnam Association of Foreign Investment Enterprises, who has watched Vietnams FDI attraction for nearly three decades since the Foreign Direct Investment Law was introduced in 1987.The unreal amount is regrettably still included in the annual statistics and economic reports, creating an illusion about foreign capital inflows to Vietnam, he said.Prof. Mai agreed any country attracting FDI would report difference between registered and disbursed capital but such a huge gap as in Vietnam should not be overlooked.Analysts quickly pointed out the unreal capital came from large-sized projects which stayed on paper only.Thailands oil and gas group PTT has recently suspended its Victory Nhon Hoi oil refinery and petrochemical complex project in Binh Dinh central province. This project was initially estimated in 2012 to have an investment capital of USD 28 billion when PTT began studying the investment. The committed investment was later cut to USD 22 billion and then USD 20 billion but no progress has been seen since 2012.Earlier, Taiwans USD 2-billion Guang Lian steel complex in Quang Ngai central province had its investment certificate revoked for failing to start after being licensed ten years ago.Ba Ria-Vung Tau province also had some USD 12.7 billion worth of FDI registered just on paper. This number includes USD 4.5 billion of Long Son petrochemical project and USD 4.1 billion of Saigon Atlantis Hotel project, both licensed in 2008, and USD 900 million of Dragon Sea international convention and tourism resort project licensed in 2010.Analysts blamed on the policy to offer incentives based on investment size, prompting investors to register huge capital amounts to receive preferential treatment.Investors tended to blow up investment capital to get more incentives, particularly land-related incentives, economist Pham Chi Lan told the local press. Many big-sized projects received land areas much larger than needed as a result of enjoying land incentives, she said.Hiking up capital with unreasonably high costs of production lines and equipment was also a trick played by investors to report false losses for tax evasion and transfer pricing, Lan added.Dr. Nguyen Minh Phong, another economist, pointed out that foreign investors took advantage of registering high capital to receive not only investment incentives but also the green channel mechanism which offered foreign-invested projects quicker and easier processing of procedural formalities.Many projects registered at as high as USD 3-4 billion in fact merely sought for transfer to other investors to get profits, Prof. Mai said, citing many projects were not started years after being licensed because investors could not re-sell their projects.Investors practice to inflate registered capital caused massive waste and adverse economic and social impacts to Vietnam, Lan said. But more seriously, it presented a false picture of foreign investment in the country and might deny truly interested investors investment opportunities in the country.Withdrawal of licensed investment projects largely affected Vietnams investment environment, Prof. Mai said, stressing the need to tighten the requirement for large projects to make investment deposits. Under current regulations, all investment projects must make an investment deposit before being licensed and projects using 50 hectares of land or having an investment capital of USD 100 million or more must be licensed at the central level. But in reality, many large projects were licensed by local authorities without having to make investment deposits for certain reason, leaving localities in a dead loss once investors withdrew, Prof. Mai stressed.To avoid unreal FDI capital, particularly for investors keeping land, progressive land taxes should be imposed, according to Dr. Tran Dinh Thien, director of Vietnam Economics Institute, saying an investor doing nothing with its licensed project for two years for instance must be taxed double or even triple.The FDI attraction strategy should also be revised to take into account quality rather than quantity, Dr. Thien said, calling investment promotion authorities to look for good and strategic investors instead of attracting massive investment.Prof. Mai said the MPI should ask local authorities to review FDI projects that have not yet been implemented to group them into two: those which can be implemented this year and others which cannot be started. The projects of the first group should be closely monitored so as to be implemented early while the other group must be removed from investment statistics.Do Nhat Hoang, director of the Foreign Investment Agency, said review of FDI was now key to investment promotion work. It was now time to see the real effectiveness of FDI projects rather than only taking care of investors and facilitating project implementation as previously, Hoang stressed.The MPI was now working with other ministries and sectors to screen projects to find out those meeting with difficulties so as to make appropriate adjustments, Hoang said, adding those projects whose investors were financially unviable would be eliminated so as to create opportunities for other potential investors. We could allow investors to delay project implementation for plausible reasons, but not for an indefinite period as this would be unfair to other investors, including local ones, he said.The MPI is now drafting a national investment promotion list to call foreign investment in infrastructure, manufacturing and supportive industries, agriculture, forestry and fisheries.-
There has been an exciting discovery in the forests of northern Viet Nam.

A group of animals called Delacours langurs have been found there.

There are very few of these left in the world.

They are found living in the wild in Viet Nam and nowhere else in the world.

HA NOI  The worlds second largest population of the critically endangered Delacours langur was recently discovered by Fauna & Flora International (FFI), giving fresh hope for one of the planets rarest species.

Following reports of sightings in a once largely unexplored forest in north Viet Nam, scientists from conservation NGO FFI Vietnam conducted field assessments to ascertain whether this species does indeed live in the area.

FFI Vietnams Biodiversity Technical Advisor Trinh inh Hoang said, "Our surveys and assessment revealed that there was a population of significant size. We detected seven groups of Delacours langur, with the total number of primates in the population being as high as 40. Only one other area in Viet Nam has a larger population of Delacours langur."

Delacours langur is indigenous to Viet Nam, but because of human activities such as hunting, stone mining and charcoal production, it faces a severe threat of extinction with fewer than 250 left, a press release issued yesterday said.

Although they remain under grave danger of being wiped out within a decade, scientists now have renewed hope that they can be saved.

"This discovery is good news  both for the species and for the people of Viet Nam, particularly because we have also identified a number of infants and juveniles among the groups, Hoang said.

This means that they are breeding and, if we can protect them, they should be able to thrive in this habitat once again."

However, Dr Benjamin Rawson, country director of FFI Vietnam, warned that urgent interventions to curb human activity such as hunting and mining were needed to safeguard these prized primates and their habitat.

Speaking at the Congress of the International Primatological Society in Chicago, he said, "Weve notified the Vietnamese authorities of our findings and recommendations, and we continue to work alongside officials and local communities to ensure the Delacours langur doesnt become this centurys first primate extinction."

Delacours langur (Trachypithecus delacouri) is a primate endemic to Viet Nam, first discovered by Jean Theodore Delacour in 1930 and described by Wilfred Hudson Osgood in 1932.

In the early 1990s, a comprehensive survey recorded 19 isolated subpopulations comprising 50 to 57 groups and 281 to 317 individuals in an area of about 5,000sq.km in north Viet Nam. More recent surveys indicated that there has been a significant decrease in both the number of groups and the number of individuals.  VNS





GLOSSARY

The worlds second largest population of the critically endangered Delacours langur was recently discovered by Fauna & Flora International (FFI), giving fresh hope for one of the planets rarest species.

If a type of animal is endangered there are not many of them and they could become extinct and therefore be gone forever. If it is critically endangered, there is a very good chance of them disappearing.

Rare means not common.

A species of animal is a type of animal.

Following reports of sightings in a once largely unexplored forest in north Viet Nam, scientists from conservation NGO FFI Vietnam conducted field assessments to ascertain whether this species does indeed live in the area.

Unexplored forest is area of forest that people have not been into much and therefore little is known about it.

To conduct a field assessment means to carry out a study in the forest, in this case, rather than in an office.

FFI Vietnams Biodiversity Technical Advisor Trinh inh Hoang said, "Our surveys and assessment revealed that there was a population of significant size.

A survey means a study that involves examining something very closely.

Revealed means showed.

Significant means important.

We detected seven groups of Delacours langur, with the total number of primates in the population being as high as 40.

Detect means discover.

Primates are the group of animals that includes monkeys, humans, gorillas, chimpanzees, lemurs and orang-utans. Langurs are also primates.

Delacours langur is indigenous to Viet Nam, but because of human activities such as hunting, stone mining and charcoal production, it faces a severe threat of extinction with fewer than 250 left, a press release issued yesterday said.

An animal that is indigenous to Viet Nam comes from the country and was never brought in there from another country.

Human activities are things that people do.

Charcoal is a type of burnt wood used as fuel.

Severe means great.

A press release is a statement that a company, or an organisation, writes up when they have something to announce to the media.

Although they remain under grave danger of being wiped out within a decade, scientists now have renewed hope that they can be saved.

Grave means serious.

A decade is a period of ten years.

Renewed hope is hope that has come about, once again, after having gone away.

"This discovery is good news  both for the species and for the people of Viet Nam, particularly because we have also identified a number of infants and juveniles among the groups, Hoang said.

Infants are babies.

Juveniles are young creatures.

This means that they are breeding and, if we can protect them, they should be able to thrive in this habitat once again."

Breeding means having babies.

To thrive means to do well.

A habitat is a place where a creature lives and has the correct amount of food and shelter to do so.

However, Dr Benjamin Rawson, country director of FFI Vietnam, warned that urgent interventions to curb human activity such as hunting and mining were needed to safeguard these prized primates and their habitat.

An intervention is an action that sees you getting involved in something.

To curb human activity means to put an end to it.

Safeguard means protect.

Speaking at the Congress of the International Primatological Society in Chicago, he said, "Weve notified the Vietnamese authorities of our findings and recommendations, and we continue to work alongside officials and local communities to ensure the Delacours langur doesnt become this centurys first primate extinction."

To notify someone of something means to alert them to it.

Recommendations are suggestions.

Delacours langur (Trachypithecus delacouri) is a primate endemic to Viet Nam, first discovered by Jean Theodore Delacour in 1930 and described by Wilfred Hudson Osgood in 1932.

If the Delacours langur is endemic to Viet Nam, it is found there living in the wild and nowhere else in the world.

In the early 1990s, a comprehensive survey recorded 19 isolated subpopulations comprising 50 to 57 groups and 281 to 317 individuals in an area of about 5,000sq.km in north Viet Nam.

Comprehensive means thorough.

Isolated means far away from others.

A subpopulation is a group that belongs to another group but lives a bit apart from it.

Comprising means consisting of.

More recent surveys indicated that there has been a significant decrease in both the number of groups and the number of individuals.

If there is a decrease in the number of groups and individuals, there are fewer of them.

WORKSHEET

State whether the following sentences are true, or false:

In spite of the new discovery, the Delacours langur could be wiped out within ten years. The fact that there are infants and juveniles among the newly found population of Delacours langurs means that they are breeding. The Delacours langurs were first discovered by Wilfred Hudson Osgood in 1930. It seems that there are more Delacours langurs now than there were in the 1990s. FFI stands for Forests and Flowers International.

ANSWERS:

 Duncan Guy/Learn the News/ Viet Nam News 2016



1. True; 2. True; 3. False; 4. False; 5. False.
Quang Nam  The Cham Islands, 18km off the coast of Hoi An city, gained access to the national power grid on Saturday, after a one year construction project to install a 15.5km sub-marine cable system at a total cost of VN 485 billion (US$22.7 million).

Chairman of the islands Peoples Committee, Nguy en V an An, told Vi et Nam News that the project is crucial for the islands future development.

The Electricity of Viet Nam (EVN)s Central Power Corporation officially switched on the islands power with the national grid on Saturday, providing 24-hour power for over 2,400 people live in the four villages on the islands.

Its a great milestone for the island people. We were eager to have power for years, hoping for a bright future. The islands have been designated a biological tourism complex, featuring different environmentally friendly initiatives, since 2009, An said.

The sub-marine cable project was 85 per cent funded by the State budget. It includes nearly 30km of lines over the islands and six transmission stations. It is expected to boost socioeconomic development and national security and defence of Viet Nams islands and seas.

About 98 per cent of the provinces 1.4 million residents already have access to power. Cham is the newest remote area of the province to connect to the national power grid.

The Chairman and General Director of the Central Power Corporation, Tran inh Nhan, said the system will provide power to local islanders 24 hours a day and limit emissions from diesel-driven generators on the area.

He said islanders used power from diesel generators seven hours a day, while renewable energy sources fall short of demand.

In 2010, a solar power station with a 28KW capacity was built on the island. But it only supplied power to 100 households in Bai Huong Commune. The solar power station received funds from SIDA (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency) but it was unreliable due to lack of sufficient sunlight.

Wind power is also an option. But turbines are only able to power single households with a limited supply of electricity.

In 2013, the islands were given access to fresh water for the first time when an 80,000 cubic metre reservoir was built.

The Islands chairman said environmentally friendly technology solutions - such as wind power and solar energy - remain a top priority.

Recognised as a world biosphere reserve by UNESCO in 2009, Cham Islands welcome around 100,000 tourists annually, 10 per cent of whom are foreigners.  VNS
By Thuy Phan

Returning home for summer holiday after two years studying in India, 27-year-old Vuong Thi Quyen from Thanh Luong Hamlet, Quang Xuan Commune, in the central province of Quang Binh, is as determined as ever to leave her mark on the world.

Although she weighs just barely 28kg, she defeated many other weighty applicants to win a scholarship for one young, talented female student, awarded by the Ministry of External Affairs of India.

Quyen is currently a third-year student in the faculty of journalism and mass communication at Niilm University in Kaithal City, India.

According to Vuong Quoc Thuan, Quyens father, she is the youngest daughter in the family. She is also the only one of his four children to suffer from the effects of herbicide dioxin Agent Orange, which was sprayed by the US military during the American War in Viet Nam.

At birth, Quyen used to be as physically normal as other children of the same age. However, when she reached nine, a tumour started to grow on her back and got bigger over time.

Conclusions from the local hospital stated that she has deformed bone structure, which is the consequence of the development of the tumour. All the nutrition is absorbed by the tumour, making her body very skinny, Thuan said.

But Quyen has never been defeated by her unfortunate fate. She has always performed best at school and was ranked among excellent students at secondary and high schools.

After graduating from Quang Binh University, majoring in computer science, Quyen was hired to work for Quang Trach Districts Association for Victims of Agent Orange/ Dioxin.

Sometimes I cast doubt on her working ability, but Quyen has always made me feel as if she were neither handicapped nor a victim of Agent Orange, says ang Ngoc Van, chairman of the association.

Quyens chance came when Viet Nams Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of External Affairs of India jointly launched an interview to award a scholarship to a young talented female student in 2014.

Triumphing over many other contestants, she won the US$6,200 scholarship to attend Niilm University.

Simple wish

At Niilm University, most international students come from Africa and Asia, like Uganda, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Nepal, all of whom are the children of officials serving in the ministries of foreign affairs.

There are only three Vietnamese students at the university, and only Quyen is a victim of Agent Orange.

My international friends had no idea about the disaster caused to Viet Nam by Agent Orange or its victims. But then they understood, welcomed me with admiration and have helped me a lot, she said.

Her first days at school were a struggle. She fell far behind her classmates because her English skills were lacking, and all the teaching and textbooks were in English.

With the assistance of two Vietnamese students, Quyen spent most of her time, besides attending lectures, honing her English.

By the end of the first term, she was able to communicate as fluently as other students. From an average mark of 60/100, Quyen has acquired nearly 70/100 for each subject. Her great efforts have made a good impression on her international friends.

For a victim of Agent Orange, living in a foreign land seems to be fraught with enormous difficulties, from the erratic climate to different eating habits.

The weather in India is severe. In summer, the temperature can be as high as 48 degrees Celsius, while in winter it can plunge to below 0 degrees Celsius. Quyens body is highly sensitive to changes in the weather, and she sometimes feels tired and suffers from pain.

In Haryana State where Quyen is living, most of the residents are Hindus and vegetarians. Despite living there for two years already, she has not been able to get accustomed to the food. Quyen therefore has to ask her friends to go shopping for her and cook the food herself.

Im entering the third term and also the final term at Niilm University. My two Vietnamese friends have already finished their courses and come back home. Now Im the only Vietnamese at Niilm University, which makes me a bit worried, Quyen said.

I have a lot of dreams after graduating, she said. I have been tremendously supported spiritually and financially from my family and the whole community. After this summer holiday, I have to be back to school. However, Im sick most of the time in India, so my only wish now is to have good health to finish my last term so that I could repay what I have been offered and contribute to society. VNS
By Minh Thu

Besides the pursuit of knowledge, Tran Anh Linh, 17, a high school student in the US, also learns in order to get involved in social work.

She currently studies at Emmaus High School in Pennsylvania. When she returned to Viet Nam, she connected her friends and founded a group called Make A Simple Wish.

We have a chance to receive a developed education and live in an international environment, so we want to share what we have learned with children in our homeland, especially those who live in remote areas, said Linh.

The group was founded to organise educational activities for students in rural areas. While other groups and organisations support poor children by donating money, food or books, Make A Simple Wish group chooses education to help.

We decided to introduce a new learning method using science and technology to the students in the remote areas where they have few chances to approach new things, said Linh.

Since last year, Linh has convinced Vietnamese students from high schools across the US to join her.

The group has visited schools in the northern province of Lai Chau, the southern province of Ben Tre and HCM City.

The group has co-operated with provincial groups, local youth unions, and university teachers and students to introduce the Learn to Learn method to students.

They use Lego pieces to tell stories. During the assembling process, the students would create their own stories about the models they were working on.

This method is based on STEM education, an approach used to develop students science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills.

Thats what we learned from our school, and now we want to bring this method to Vietnamese students, said Tran Anh Khoa, from Eyer Middle School, Pennsylvania.

This method helps students develop their own creativity and imagination, Khoa said. They also find inspiration and joy while learning because this method combines learning and playing.

This method is totally new for students in rural areas. Nguyen Thi Thanh Thao, a teacher from Le Hoang Chieu Primary School (Ben Tre Province), said the new learning method also inspires teachers like her.

The students are eager for extracurricular activities from the Make A Simple Wish group, she said.

I also feel happy when my student radiantly shows me that he can make his snake robot move, which he failed to do one day before.

Le Thuy Loan from the HCM City University of Economics said she highly appreciated the Make A Simple Wish group for introducing a new learning method to students in rural areas.

The groups activities provoke a passion for science and technology for the students and make them nurture new thinking and creativity since primary education, she said.

In addition to learning time, the group also offers spiritual food for the students through cultural activities like singing contests and drama performances.

With support from other agencies, the group raised funds for poor students from Le Hoang Chieu Primary School. Accordingly, they donated containers to store clean water for the school, which was a dire need because Ben Tre is one of the southern provinces suffering saline water intrusion.

Visiting the poor students families, we realise how lucky we are, said Linh. The students have to help their parents after schooltime, some of them are motherless or fatherless and their lives are so difficult.

We were born in big cities so we havent experienced agricultural work. This is also a precious chance for us to learn about life.

For the members of Make A Simple Wish, the activities in the rural areas are truly meaningful because they have a chance to help those who are less lucky than them. And through the work, they also learn about the value of sharing, experience new things and improve themselves.

Education and knowledge bring many opportunities for the students, and thats the most effective way for them to be confident when they grow up, said Linh.

We just want to sow a seed of science in the students mind. We hope that what they learn today would benefit them tomorrow. VNS
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About Censored News Censored News is published by Brenda Norrell. Since 2006, Censored News has received more than 20 million pageviews. As a collective of writers, photographers and broadcasters, we publish news of Indigenous Peoples and human rights. Contact publisher Brenda Norrell: brendanorrell@gmail.com

From the publisher Censored News is published by Brenda Norrell, a journalist in Indian country for 40 years. Norrell created Censored News after she was censored and terminated as a staff reporter at Indian Country Today in 2006. She began as a reporter at Navajo Times during the 18 years that she lived on the Navajo Nation. She was a stringer for AP and USA Today and later traveled with the Zapatistas through Mexico. She has been blacklisted by all the mainstream media for 14 years. Contact brendanorrell@gmail.com

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Pham Quoc at, co-founder and CEO of HATCH! Program and who was listed among Forbes Viet Nam 30 under 30 in 2016, spoke to Le Thu Huong about HATCHs entrepreneurship schemes and what it takes for Viet Nams startup ecosystem to move forward.

As one of Viet Nams most well-known startup leaders, Pham Quoc at founded HATCH! with three friends in 2012. HATCH! now offers community building and incubator programmes, connects startups with angel investors and runs an annual national startup conference called HATCH! FAIR.

Inner Sanctum: What differentiates HATCH! VENTURES from other incubators?

HATCH! was founded in December 2012 as a startup community builder. Since then, we have been actively promoting the entrepreneurship ecosystem in Viet Nam.

Since 2016, we have established HATCH! VENTURES as a key accelerator for technology startups. We focus 100 per cent on the quality of the startups, while caring about social impacts at the same time. By ratio, we have the highest incubation staff per incubated company in Viet Nam, which means that we work with each company very closely and hands-on, ensuring they can leverage all of our resources. Over the last three years, we have worked with over 200 companies, and many have raised millions of US dollars in funding.

Inner Sanctum: As someone who has been actively involved in the Viet Nam start-up scene, what do you think are the missing pieces of the puzzle in the ecosystem for it to move to the next level?

I think whats missing in the country are two things. First of all, there are not enough startups registered in the ecosystem tapping into professional resources like incubation. Too many entrepreneurs try to work alone, and for that reason they are quite possibly also making 100 per cent avoidable or preventable mistakes.

Secondly, there is a funding gap between bootstrapping and institutional investors. This gap is filled in mature startup ecosystems by strong angel investment networks. Right now in Viet Nam, angel investment is a new topic, and would-be angel investors are out there, but need to be reached, made aware, educated, and given opportunities to try investment in early-stage innovation-based enterprises.

We are working to educate angel investment to Vietnamese investors, as well as to gather them under the same initiative to invest into potential Vietnamese companies.

Inner Sanctum: Its now the norm for Vietnamese start-ups to set up their companies in Singapore. What do you think the Vietnamese Government can do to reverse this trend?

There are many advantages for serious Vietnamese companies to register legally in Singapore. There is less paper work, the tax is preferable, and it is much more transparent to investors. Its hard to think that in the short term any change will take place in Viet Nam.

To be able to be as competitive as Singapore, it requires a lot of effort and many years of excellent implementation. I would argue that while we need to change as soon as possible, we should take a look at the resources that we already have and leverage these resources, such as many English speaking young people, high Internet and smartphone penetration and a young population, etc.

Inner Sanctum: Youth unemployment has been a major concern. How do you think the development of startups in Viet Nam could address youth unemployment?

Entrepreneurship ecosystem building is not a short-term employment or talent-development solution, but rather a long-term employment solution. Surviving, strong startups do eventually become small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) employing hundreds of people. Growing SMEs can eventually become multi-national corporations (MNCs), employing thousands. But SMEs and MNCs need a talent pool of people who have experience working in SMEs and MNCs.

It is very hard to go from a startup to SME and MNC with no experience in the latter. The typical, urban-living youth should still seek an employment-based career, and excel at one specialised skill. Thus, they can maximise personal branding, personal income growth and long-term financial stability. Entrepreneurship is only for the brave and the determined.

Rarely does the typical urban-living young person jump from high school or university into startups. In fact, this may not be the best career choice for the average young person. The success of an innovation-based enterprise hinges on small teams of highly intelligent, highly motivated and creative leaders.

I believe that there is no typical way of starting up a business. And a business can also be the cause of unemployment.

Inner Sanctum: There are probably many startup ideas from young Vietnamese people but implementation is always a major challenge. Without major efforts, ideas just stay on paper. How important is it for young people to understand that building a startup is not always glamorous like depicted in the media?

It is critically important, and the media can help. Startup stories are inspirational and motivational, but the underlying discipline, rigour, methodological practice, and struggles do not make the best-selling stories. The rapid rise to wealth makes a great story. It is rare. Outside of the rare cases, entrepreneurs must apply themselves to following a tried-and-true, formal "commercialisation process", like the ones developed for use in our HATCH! Incubator programme.

Inner Sanctum: Can you tell us more about HATCH! FAIR 2016 and Social Innovation Camp, the two biggest projects that HATCH are running this year?

HATCH! FAIR 2016 is our fourth annual startup conference and exhibition, organised by HATCH! PROGRAM. It is the only national startup event in Viet Nam, with dedicated international partic ipants. For the first time, it will be organised in HCM City, with pre- and concurrent side-events organised in Ha Noi, a Nang and HCM City.

The Social Innovation Camp took place in August in the three cities. Ten teams will be selected to the final round at HATCH! FAIR 2016 on Oct 7-8 in HCM City. Social Innovation Camp is one of three competitions prior to HATCH! FAIR. With help from UNDP Viet Nam and other partners such as the ADB, Oxfam, it is a competition focusing 100 per cent on impact startups.

We are looking for innovations in healthcare, the environment, food and community empowerment. This was expanded from our previous cooperation with UNDP on the competition called Hackathon for Social Good last year, which mobilised more than 100 young people.

The competition in 2015 resulted in two innovative ideas, one was an app called For People (4P), which collects citizen feedback on public services and GT-101, an educational tool to encourage citizens to report misconduct by traffic police. We hope ideas from the camp this year can be scaled up to make a difference across the country. VNS
For only VN2,000 (less than US10 cents), guests at the Smile Eatery Network in HCM City receive a nutritious meal of rice, braised pork, vegetables and soup.

The networks six eateries are staffed by volunteers, including Bui Quang Long, a driver who works for an office near Eatery on Cong Quynh Street in District 1.

Long, who works during his lunch hour, says he wants to help the poor. Most of the guests are manual labourers, lottery sellers, scrap-iron dealers and pedicab or motorbike taxi drivers.

Nam ong, one of the founders of the Smile Eatery Network, says all of the eateries have met hygienic standards and have become so popular that the network plans to expand.

Every day, guests stand in line at the eateries beginning at 11am.

Le inh Phuong, a 79-year-old from Phu Yen Province, who earns his living selling lottery tickets, eats meals there and says the volunteers treat him well.

Most of the people who have donated funds to the eateries do not want to be named. Two young women who donated VND300,000, for example, left a note, saying no need for us to be named.

One day, a young girl showed up at an eatery with a 50kg bag of rice, saying that she wanted to ensure that the poor had enough to eat.

John William Kelly, an American veteran who visited HCM City in 2011, works as a volunteer six days per week for the network.

The Smile Charity Eatery network includes Smile No 1 on Cong Quynh Street in District 1; Smile No 2 on Nguyen Ngoc Nhut Street in Tan Phu District; Smile No 3 at 298A Huynh Tan Phat Street in District 7; Smile No 4 at 132 Ben Van on Street in District 4; and Smile No 6 at 43 Trung Trac Street in Thu uc District.VNS
by Nguyen Huong

Frankly speaking, I dont know how to begin my story, said the caller in a hesitant voice. You might think its ridiculous that a woman of forty like me is still so impracticable, she added.

Far from it, elder sister, I said, while drawing her portrait from the other end of the line.

With a pastel in hand, I sketched her eyes round and big with curved eyelashes.

From the other end of the line, nothing but a deep sigh could be heard.

A few minutes later, the same voice resounded again.

I live in Cu Kin Commune, the caller resumed her narrative. You might wonder why coming from such a remote area I came to know your Consultative Office No 8. Its all thanks to my passion for publications. I used to work for the Cultural Affair Section of the district. I enjoyed reading all papers and magazines, one after another, page by page, including their ads. Because of my diligent reading I can tell truth from lies, she went on lengthily.

I resumed my work: drawing her long wavy hair flowing down over her shoulders.

Why did you change careers? I asked her.

Simply because I worked in the district office while my husband was teaching in a commune school. Our workplaces were very far from each other. I started working for the Association of the Commune Women when my daughter reached pre-school age. Work was only busy when there was a communication campaign running, so I had a lot of free time for reading, she answered.

Who is your favourite author? I asked her.

Thats a difficult question to answer, she replied after a few minutes of silence. When I was young, if I liked a story or novel I loved its author at once. Now that at the age of forty, my taste has changed noticeably. Yet, on the whole, Im still passionate about literature. Whenever I have a novel or a story, I read it deep into the night. Im very upset when I cant attend my favourite writers talk shows, she admitted.

I stopped drawing to get todays papers and magazines off the rack, some of them said that there would a talk with a famous author. I recommended the magazines to her.

She might quickly skim through a few pages of a weekly, I thought.

Heres an interesting piece of information in the Youth Magazine. Do you want to know it in detail? she asked me.

Of course, I do, elder sister. Like you, whenever I find a good novel I stayed awake until midnight to read it. Surprisingly, the next morning I feel fine. My husband often teases me when by saying I love books more than our children, I confessed.

Now I began to add two dimples to her cheeks. She must have been very beautiful in her day, I said to myself. I removed the curl of her hair and replaced it with a long wavy lock flowing down to her shoulder.

Did you read todays Van (Literature) magazine, elder sister? I asked her.

Not yet. It has an interesting story?

Maybe. Now listen to me, I said, opening it to the story section and started reading. Youre invited to join a cultural exchange with author Minh Thuy on Sunday with the editorial staff of the Literature magazine. She will answer questions afterwards. The magazine also dealt with her career, her adventures to strange lands which inspired readers so much that a well-known travel brochure decided to pay for all her trips, provided she furnished them with a story on the places landscape and people. Yet, she refused this offer as she wanted to travel as she please. I waited and waited for a reply from the other end of the phone, but nothing could be heard for a long while.

Silence!

Hallo, Are you still on the phone, my dear sister? I asked her in an anxious voice.

Just a minute, dear artist! Do you believe in telepathy?

Yes, to some extent. Why have you put such a question to me?

I want to tell you something about Miss Minh Thuy, she replied in a reluctant voice. Last month, our commune administrative committee told me that they had great pleasure to welcome her to our locality, she said.

Recently, a Hanoian musician, born and bred in the capital, made a business trip to our province of ak Lak, she told me. Inspired, he composed a song that made our home town famous nationwide. After that success, the Cu Kin Commune president and I myself hoped that our province would gain more fame through Minh Thuys article. Furthermore, the Provincial Association of Arts and Literature let us know that she would stay for a fortnight. So we would have to provide her board and lodging and travel fares. For me, it would be a golden opportunity: to be able to wine and dine her at home because in the whole commune there was not a single guest house. As the chief of the Commune Association of Women, I proposed to look after her at my place and to take her to local beauty spots. As a city-dweller, she will be fond of the magnificent natural scenery all around here, I said to myself. Besides, she would have a rare opportunity to visit some ethnic groups in their tribal costumes and enjoy their special cuisine.

My husband, also a lover of writers and artists, was also excited. We would let her use our bedroom while we would sleep with our children on their beds. We would tidy our house and make the bed as well. From the bottom of our heart, we wanted to show our admiration and respect for such a noted figure in the circle of arts and literature, she said.

I would do the same, sister, I told her from the other end. Moreover, I would dress up nice to give a good impression, I added.

I bought a brand new mosquito net, a flowery pillow, a new pair of shoes and two fashionable skirts. Obviously, in cities, skirts are normal clothes, but here in the country, they look weird to rural people, she clarified.

Yes, I see, I see.

Minh Thuys publications are what I like to read the most, recalled the middle-age woman. Writing about real things is in no way easy, not like romantic stuff. I remember that in one of her stories, a woman sees her ex-lover, now a bigwig, in a meeting and is quite embarrassed. She does not know how to behave properly. She hopes that during the lunch break, she might bump into him to pour out her inner feelings. Poor her, he disappears without a trace when the meeting is over.

The pastel in my hand stopped abruptly. I did not know how to add anything to her nice face. It seemed to me that I had failed to catch some important features on her face. As a result, she looked like a certain renowned artitst. My solution was to draw a V-shaped necklace on her lily-white complexion above her breasts.

Where did I stop my story, my dear young painter? she asked. Well, a welcome party on that evening was held in her honour at a luxury restaurant in the district. Minh Thuy arrived at the place in a 12-seater mini bus rented by the provincial Association of Arts and Literature.

Now come on, cheers! everybody raised their glass in expectation of her work taking being inspired by our locality. As the commune chairmans accomplice, I sat in a corner to sneak a glance at her. She looked more beautiful than her photo in the magazine. Shes a highly intelligent orator, I whispered to myself. While I was trying to find a reason to talk to her, she was asked to raise her glass once again so that everybody present, one after another, might congratulate her on her success. I was lucky enough to meet her over the nice wine. Taking advantage of her Cheers going round and round I took a glass of cold water instead of wine, for I knew Icouldnt drink as much as the men in the room.

Hello, are you still on the phone? the caller brought me down to earth suddenly.

Of course, Im here, listening to you.

The reason for my lengthy story is to help you understand the matter better.

Sister; I see, I see.

What do you think?

Allow me to guess.

Please.

Your opinion of this literary icon was smashed into pieces because she made some conversational faux pas.

Oh no, far from that! she said, As I had told you before that she was a master in the art of oration. At our place, she was very polite. The problem was our house: all my careful preparations for her, my newly-bought bedsheet, pillow and mosquito net came to nothing.

Really?

She stayed in our house for one night, said the caller. The next morning, she asked me to go to the headquarters of the local authorities for a certificate saying she had stayed in our locality for two weeks. At noon, I came back home to give her the document. Much to my surprise, she asked me to take her to the highway to return to the capital as soon as possible after saying goodbye to us all with her thanks.

..

I neednt have told you this, for earning more money by fudging expenses was very common among journalists or the like. Yet for my icon, it was quite different, I think. This morning, I went on the internet and read the Magazine Arts and Literature and came across Minh Thuys essay entitled Cu Kin Commune, Lets Come to Love. You see, she came to our place late on the evening and left us early the next morning to return to home. What did she see and who did she meet? you might ask me. What she wrote was completely based on Wikipedia. Thats all.

I nodded my head, totally forgetting the fact that she was on the other end of the line.

Hanging down the receiver, I looked for my notebook and a pencil then clicked the mouse. In a few seconds, her article Cu Kin Commune, Lets Come and Love came up.

I glanced at its first line. Fog, wilderness, mystery, immense jungle! And, last but not least, its magic charm makes you lose your way home!.

Translated by Van Minh
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WATERLOO  It would be easy for Community Bank & Trust employees to focus on big transitions. From the banks 2013 acquisition by QCR Holdings Inc. of Moline, Ill., to its current $3.5 million renovation, the past five years have brought regular, far-reaching changes. However, employees who nominated CBT as an Employer of Choice highlighted aspects of the banks ability to make employees and customers feel like they belong. I look forward to coming to work every day to see my work family, said employee Kate Merchant in her nomination. As a mother of two young children, things come up where I have to leave unexpectedly for them, and CBT is so supportive and lives by the words family first. The key is trust, said Brian OHair. Trust is the defining principle, which has been built over a long period  created through managements credibility, fair treatment and authentic caring, he said. The degree of pride and levels of connection and camaraderie employees feel with one another is championed by several long-term employees and is contagious to newcomers such as me. Sue White agrees. When she transitioned her mother to a senior living community, moral support from co-workers and clients made the move less stressful. I continue to stay because this bank is such a family-oriented business, even to the customers, said White, who has worked there eight years. Management ... always gives positive recognition. The opportunities are endless here. CBT rocks! At the heart of this family feeling is the banks mission, vision and values, said CBT President and CEO Stacey Bentley. The mission states CBT will be the most relationship-driven community bank so that our employees, clients, shareholders and the local community prosper. We work around where employees live, Bentley said. That makes a difference. This is their community; our customers are their neighbors, family and friends. Shes proud that employees support this commitment. For example, the banks United Way employee campaign has boasted 100 percent participation for 19 years. We believe that when you take care of the team and listen, employees rise to the occasion, Bentley explained. When employees enjoy their work, theyre empowered to provide excellent customer service. To that end, CBT takes great care to provide employees with personal and professional development opportunities. In addition to regular federal certification and training, the bank provides staff with formal educational sessions and ongoing activities. (T)here are many opportunities to learn new skills, said Rachel Fettkether. We learn something new every day and are faced with all different kinds of people and situations. Further, employees are recognized for exemplary work through an internal web platform called Kudos. When someone does something exceptional, (managers) tell them over this website,  through monthly meetings or email, explained Fettkether. In addition to excellent health benefits and a good work-life balance, nominators lifted up CBTs unusual, innovative offerings. One is the sabbatical program. Any employee with 10 years of service is eligible for the 30 consecutive paid days off, which are in addition to traditional vacation days. The point of the perk is to do something on your bucket list, said Bentley. Those on sabbatical are expected to inspire co-workers by blogging about their experiences. Employees who meet qualifications can become eligible for additional sabbaticals.
CEDAR FALLS  Cedar Falls Utilities works hard to make its employees proud.

In an industry that offers exciting innovations and evolving technologies, the public utility views its workforce as a precious resource.

CFU offers meaningful and challenging work in an environment that nurtures a culture of support and respect for each other, said CFU President Jim Krieg. Our reputation in the community is stellar because of the high standards and core values that are set for employees.

Molly Cormaney is among the staffers who appreciate high standards and regularly strive to exceed expectations.

Employees and management make every effort to learn from mistakes and commit to not repeating them, she said. I am very proud to work for a company that is committed to such a high standard of performance. I believe employees see it as a vote of confidence in their abilities, and we work to maintain that confidence. We really hate to disappoint our customers.

That attitude is common among employees, said Krieg. He believes this sense of responsibility helps CFU employees strike the right balance between family, community and career.

Managers accommodate outside commitments to kids activities and other events. Likewise, some CFU programs and activities are open to families.

Im honored to have celebrated my one-year anniversary with CFU, said Alex Chittenden. I dont state that lightly. It has truly been an honor to work amongst such wonderful people. I have two children, and thanks to the support from the leadership, I can spend the time I need with them.

CFU provides staff with opportunities for professional development at every point in a career, i.e., apprenticeship, tuition reimbursement and continuing education programs.

Sheri Ubben has been with CFU for 26 years. She went to career college and found the company was willing to build on her investment.

CFU provided me with an opportunity to grow in my field, which I appreciate, she said. They have provided me with training needed for the various jobs I have held and an income which has grown my family and provided me the opportunity to live a comfortable life.

Ubben and her co-workers also appreciate that the company encourages community involvement through United Way, the American Heart Association Heart Walk, Toys for Tots and others.

A strong staff comes from not just continued training and learning but from encouraging them to help others have opportunities, too, Krieg said.

Terri Roberts has worked at CFU for 35 years and loves her job. She is especially proud of bonds between employees.

(Staff) committees are great because they represent all employees, whether they are union, salary or hourly, she said. We all work together for a common cause.

CFUs wellness program is among Roberts favorites. It includes an on-site fitness center, healthy snacks throughout work spaces and reimbursements for reaching fitness benchmarks.

Krieg noted the wellness programs innovations. In response to an aging workforce and health issues common to utility workers, CFU implemented a stretching program.

The daily practice has greatly reduced the number of back injuries, said Krieg.

That results in greater quality of life and better overall fitness for the employee, he explained. There are fewer days off work, a reduction in related injuries and just a better general experience.
WATERLOO  Peters Construction prides itself on shattering industry stereotypes.

For one, managers tend to develop projects that allow employees to avoid being away from home for long periods of time.

When your work is in the communities in which you live, it makes a difference, said President Brad Best. In this field, you typically walk away from the project at the end of the job. But for us, we drive by our work all the time.  We can show it to our kids.

This effort to work within a smaller geographic area allows employees to attend to personal events and appointments, said Phillip Nieman.

They are flexible anytime there is a family issue or event, he said. Never in my seven years of working here have they denied a request for time off.

Peters Construction has been fortunate to have the resources to bid on projects that keep employees closer to home, said Best.

We havent seen the highs and lows, and it looks good for the foreseeable future, he added.

Peters also lacks walls that sometimes divide construction managers from field staff, said Best.

Everyones input is valued. We all contribute to the insight and rely on input from everyone, he said.

As a result, all employees are eligible for company-funded educational opportunities and professional and leadership development.

Those opportunities are not exclusive to upper management, said Best. Opening this up to everyone ensures the next generation of leaders will be built.

Peters willingness to devote resources to employee training shows how much the company cares for employees, said Nieman.

There are many opportunities to learn new skills, and if you show a desire for growth and learning, that desire will be fostered, he explained. I have had the opportunity to participate in a range of training sessions that have provided certifications and development of skill sets, including construction-specific and overall leadership development.

Periodically, office staff takes lunch to field staff on site.

Its an opportunity to show the field staff we care, and its an opportunity for us to see and appreciate their work, said Best. We do need to see the projects so we understand were stronger as one company than as many individuals doing our own thing.

Another way such information is shared is through regularly scheduled meetings. Best believes these meetings help the teams view themselves as part of a larger effort. It also allows teams to give and accept advice and assistance and understand the bigger picture.

We build things  churches, hospitals, schools, offices, breweries, you name it  but we do it as a team and for the betterment of each of our employees and our community, he said. When the work you do is in your community, it makes a difference.

A smaller geographic work area allows the company to support employee volunteerism. This is particularly important to Best, because of the nature of Peters projects. Thats rare in the construction industry.

The community impact of building something that will provide a lot of jobs to people is huge, he said. Its neat to be a part of projects like that.
CEDAR FALLS  Briana Hilmer believes the ideal employer blends mission, service, collaboration and quality. She found that mix at Western Home Communities.

We encourage people to do what we love, she explained. We promote providing the best care possible to the amazing people who live here.

To stay that course and ensure employees are engaged and empowered, WHCs senior leadership relies on regular feedback. This includes an annual, anonymous employee satisfaction survey.

Were looking for information on what we can do better in our field, particularly as it relates to keeping the work-life balance in line, said CEO Kris Hansen.

In reviewing the results, Hansen looks for ways to bolster strengths and address issues.

We want to engage employees in a way that helps us identify needs and implement solutions, he said. The focus is on communication, which is easier said than done. Its important, because these employees are working at the closest level with residents, patients and clients.

Employee recognition is vital, and Hilmer believes WHC excels in that area.

The CEO, COO and directors send employees handwritten birthday cards, she said. Employee anniversaries are recognized and celebrated. ... WHC treats employees and residents/tenants like family.

Another way WHC has fostered communication is through an emphasis on process improvement, said Hansen. This has created opportunities for employees at all levels to collaborate and find ways to identify and resolve issues.

One of our goals is to make sure we can have fun; there are a lot of very stressful situations because of what we do, he explained. Often, its about slowing down and having those necessary interactions.

Meanwhile, recent renovations and expansions have improved the comfort and quality of care for residents while providing employees with the needed tools and resources, said Linda Bowman, WHC chief communications officer.

In the past year, WHC renovated its existing nursing home and the first independent living community, which was built in 1989.

The organization also opened two small house nursing homes for dementia care. The homes are the first of their kind in Iowa.

This wonderful innovation has allowed residents to be fulfilled and have moments of joy, said Bowman.

In addition, construction has started on WHCs sixth independent living community and new center for well-being.

To address the shortage of health care workers, WHC started an in-house training class and pays students while they attend. There also are financial incentives for new and existing employees.

My 10-month-old son was recently in the hospital for five days and has been sick a handful of times since, said Ashley Cunningham. WHC always supports putting family first. I actually got a promotion while on sick leave with my son. Ive never heard of that happening anywhere before.

Wendy Ager believes senior leadership understands the connection between caring for the staff that will care for clients.

(This) is an organization that instills a feeling of pride, she said. Employees are encouraged and financially assisted in their education pursuits. Clients are encouraged to live fulfilling lifestyles. I appreciate that we live our mission.

WHC also provides a variety of ongoing training to help all members of staff deal with issues common to working in eldercare.

For example, employees must deal with the death of a resident or patient, and it never becomes easy, said Hansen.

The need for such tools extends to all employees, not just those in regular contact with residents.

I appreciate having a good-hearted leadership team that rewards smart, hard-working employees effort to grow with and in the organization, said said employee Ashley Cunningham.
HEATHER ANDERSEN, LISW, has joined Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare-Iowas Covenant Clinic Psychiatry on Orchard Drive in Cedar Falls. Andersen, of Cedar Falls, is a social worker who specializes in mental health. She has bachelor of arts degrees in social work and psychology and a masters in social work from the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. Since 2004, she has worked at Hawkeye Valley Area Agency on Aging in Waterloo, the Senior Behavioral Health Unit at Sartori Memorial Hospital and the Mental Health Unit at Covenant Medical Center as she worked toward her independent license of social work, which she attained in May.

New Upper Iowa University faculty members include: BLAIR SEIM of Cedar Rapids is assistant professor of accounting application at the Fayette campus. A graduate of the University of Northern Iowa, Seim earned a bachelors and masters degree in accounting. He also received an associate of arts degree in elementary education at Marshalltown Community College. Seim, who became a certified accountant in 2006, most recently served as senior tax accountant at Transamerica in Cedar Rapids. SARAHMARIE HARDY of Waterloo is assistant professor of education at the UIU-Waterloo Center. While earning her bachelors degree in elementary education, Hardy graduated summa cum laude at Upper Iowa. She later earned a masters in educational leadership at Clarke University. In addition to eight years of teaching experience at the elementary and middle school levels of education, Hardy has served as an adjunct professor and teacher education coordinator at UIU.

GREG METZ has joined US Bank as a branch manager for its main bank in downtown Waterloo. Metz, of Waterloo, originally of Pingree Grove, Ill., graduated from Illinois State University with a bachelors in finance. He has 11 years of banking experience working for Chase, Associated Bank and most recently BMO Harris Bank.

JENNIFER RUBEL of Bettendorf has joined Amperage Fundraising Advisers as a regional fundraising adviser for the Quad Cities and western Illinois area. She has 20 years of fundraising experience, primarily with the University of Iowa Foundation. Most recently, she served as the director of advancement services at Palmer College of Chiropractic in Davenport. Rubel earned her bachelors degree in sociology from the University of Iowa.

Four new associates have joined VGM Group Inc. JARROD LISTER joins VGMs Creative Division as an office administrator and photo/video assistant. He previously was at Sidecar Coffee Shop and is a University of Northern Iowa graduate. AMANDA PEREZ joins VGMs CE Solutions as a customer service representative. JAROD WRIGHT comes to VGMs Fulfillment Division from The CBE Group. He is currently a student at UNI. ABEL GONZALES also joins VGM Fulfillment.

GABE BERGER has been named operations manager at Peters Construction Corp. in Waterloo. For the past seven years he has worked at Prairie Lakes Church and prior to that he spent seven years at Target Distribution. He graduated from the University of Northern Iowa in 2001 with a degree in managementbusiness administration.

PAT HIGBY, energy education and outreach coordinator for the University of Northern Iowas Center for Energy and Environmental Education, has been recognized by the Iowa Science Teachers Section of the Iowa Academy of Science as a 2016 recipient of the Outstanding Service Award.
WATERLOO  Two men and two teenagers were arrested Friday evening on murder charges in connection with a July shooting death.

At 5:50 p.m. July 17 Waterloo Police were called to UnityPoint Health-Allen Hospital after multiple gunshot victims arrived there.

Otavious Brown, 21, Dewon Campbell, 17, and Aundrey Roberts, 22, all had suffered gunshot wounds outside 817 Logan Ave.

Brown, who was shot in the chest, died as a result of his injuries. His death was the first homicide in Waterloo in 2016.

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.

Arrest warrants were obtained Friday for four suspects on charges of first-degree murder, attempted murder and intimidation with a weapon:

Shavondes Shavez Martin, 20, of 314 Crescent Place, was arrested in the area of Utica and Edwards streets.

Jacques Dominique Williamson, 25, of 229 Halstead St., was arrested at home.

Armand Isavia Anthony Rollins, 17, address not available.

Doncorrion Deangelo Spates, 15, address not available.

All four had their initial court appearances at 9 a.m. Saturday. Their next court date was set for at 3:30 p.m. Sept. 13.

Williamson and Martin, the two adults, as well as Rollins, are in custody at the Black Hawk County Jail. Spates, who at 15 cant yet be held in the jail, is in custody at North Iowa Juvenile Detention Services in Waterloo, according to the Waterloo Police Department.

Martin, 20, has been convicted of fighting or other disorderly conduct three times since 2014, as well as assault causing bodily injury in 2014 and two convictions for interference with official acts, as well as possessing controlled substances.

Williamsons record involves mostly minor charges such as public intoxication, interference with official acts and failure to disperse. His most recent charge was July 17, the night of Browns murder, when he was arrested and charged with false report of an indictable offense to a public entity.

Rollins, the 17-year-old, was taken into custody as a juvenile in 2015 for being a felon in possession of a firearm. His last charge was July 25, when he was arrested for a controlled substance violation and being in possession of a false drug tax stamp.

Spates, 15, has no prior convictions. He was charged Jan. 1 of this year with carrying weapons after police were called to a fight at Club 319 in downtown Waterloo. The bar has since closed.

Spates and a brother of Rollins  Demond Deon Rollins, 16  were arrested Friday as police were coming to arrest Spates at 520 Elm St. Spates and Demond Rollins apparently led police on a foot pursuit before being apprehended in the area of Courtland Avenue and Elm Street.

Demond Rollins, of 209 Thompson Ave., was charged with carrying weapons, possession of a weapon by a felon, interference with official acts while carrying a firearm and possession of marijuana.

According to police, Demond Rollins allegedly was seen attempting to throw a handgun onto the roof of a garage located behind 423 Fowler St. The gun instead hit the side of the roof and fell to the ground next to him.

He was taken into custody with juvenile detention services.

Spates does not yet have any additional charges related to the pursuit.
WATERLOO  Attorneys for Jeffrey Duane Smith, currently serving life in prison in the slaying of Tonyeah Jackson, say they know who the real killer is.

Jackson, 27, of Waterloo, was gunned down inside the former Club Crystyles on July 9, 2006.

Defense attorney Thomas Frerichs says in court records Smith deserves a new trial because, among other reasons, there is new evidence someone else confessed to killing Jackson.

The defenses suspect is Justin Dollen, who was himself shot and killed outside an after-hours club in 2015.

Prosecutors, who point to the fact people who knew Smith identified him as the Club Crystyles shooter, are skeptical.

Jackson and Smith, who was dating Jacksons cousin, had been in an argument earlier that day, and authorities allege Smith later tracked down Jackson at the Logan Avenue nightclub, began shooting a 9 mm handgun with a laser site and drove off.

According to Smiths motion for a new trial, Dontay Sanford, Dollens brother who is serving time in the Anamosa State Penitentiary where Smith is also housed, identified Dollen as the killer. Dollen allegedly confessed to Sanford before his death, and Sanford told Smith in March while they were in prison.

Dontay said that he felt sorry that Jeff is here. Dontay thought that his brother Justin got killed because of the killing on Tonyeah, Chris Roby, who said he witnessed Sanfords comment to Smith, wrote in a signed statement provided to Smiths attorney.

Sanford said Jackson had stolen drugs and money a gang member had stored with a female friend of Jacksons. The gang member then had Dollen, who was a younger and newer member of the organization, kill Jackson in response to the theft, according to the account relayed in Smiths motion.

A person at the nightclub notified Dollen when Jackson arrived, according to the motion. The lookout was later called as states witness to implicate Smith at trial.

Smiths arguments on appeal dovetail with the defenses arguments during the 2009 trial that resulted in his conviction.

Attorney Robert Montgomery, who defended Smith, said Jackson was killed by members of a rival gang and noted police, acting on a tip about a purple getaway car leaving the scene, raided a Woodmayr Drive home where they found a purple car with a warm engine, drugs and 9 mm ammunition.

According to Robys statement, Sanford said after the shooting, Dollen returned the house all hyped up and left before police arrived.

One of the people at the Woodmayr address was Sanford. During the 2009 trial, Sanford exercised his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when asked about ammunition found at the house and about any connections to Jacksons slaying.

Smith also alleges Jackson was possibly a police informant based on an officers business card that was with his wallet. The officer turned out to be the lead investigator in Jacksons slaying.

His attorney said this was exculpatory evidence prosecutors failed to turn over before the trial that could point to a motive other than the one proposed by the state.

Smiths attorney said the nightclub had a video surveillance system, and there was evidence it was working the night of the slaying.

The defense maintains phone records show Smith was in a different part of the city at the time of the shooting.

Attorneys for the state said in court records there were no surveillance recordings from the nightclub, and Jackson was not an informant. The officers business card was given to Jacksons mother when the wallet was turned over to her and was inadvertently included in a photo of the wallet, Assistant County Attorney Kim Griffith said in court records.

Police reports indicate the clubs office had four security screens, but the system wasnt recording on the night of the shooting.

The allegation Dollen admitted to the slaying before he died is hearsay and would be inadmissible as evidence, Griffith wrote, and the defense had already proposed someone at the Woodmayr home was the killer during the 2009 trial.

At trial, prosecutors said the purple car was misidentified as the getaway car, and Smiths own blue car was found unoccupied down the street from the club.

Meanwhile, Dollens slaying remains unsolved.

Dollen was shot in the parking lot outside Porsches Theater of Arts on West Airline Highway around 3:30 a.m. on Aug. 30, 2015, and pronounced dead a short time later at an Iowa City hospital. Police said there were a number of people in the parking lot at the time, and investigators recovered spent shell casings at the scene.
DES MOINES  State tax collections for the first two months of fiscal 2017 grew by $500,000 over the same period one year ago, meaning growth in revenue stood at zero through Wednesday.

Receipts bounced back from a negative start in July to increase 2.2 percent in August, but the flat performance means tax collections in the next 10 months need to be better than expected to meet the growth rate of 7.1 percent the state Revenue Estimating Conference projected for fiscal 2017.

To hit the 7.1 percent growth estimate of $7.284 billion for the entire fiscal year, receipts have to grow by $483.5 million.

So far, the state tok in $1.152 billion through August, with personal income and sales/use tax collections up modestly and corporate income posting a double-digit decline.

Generals funeral

Funeral services have been scheduled for retired Maj. Gen. Warren G. Bud Lawson of Ankeny, the 26th Adjutant General of Iowa, who died Aug. 10 at age 83. Visitation will be held from 3 to 7 p.m. Sept. 14 at the Camp Dodge Pool Pavilion, 7105 NW 70th Ave. in Johnston,with the Lawson family present. Funeral services will be held at 11 a.m. Sept. 15 at the Camp Dodge Pool Pavilion, followed by burial in Iowa Veterans Cemetery in Van Meter at 2 p.m.

Flood fraud

Iowa Attorney General Tom Millers office is advising Northeast Iowans impacted by recent flood damage to be wary of consumer scams and shady contractors who tend to solicit victims of natural disasters. The AG says consumers should be wary of cleanup, home repair and construction contractors who seek business door-to-door and ask for advance payment.

Also, state regulations make price gouging illegal for those counties where a disaster declaration is in effect. Price gouging is defined in state rule as raising prices unreasonably above the price at which the merchandise or service was sold in the usual course of business immediately prior to the onset of the emergency.

The rule, which applies during the emergency declaration and up to six months after, recognizes prices may be higher because sellers also often incur increased costs. State law prohibits price gouging when a county has been declared a disaster area. Consumers should contact the Consumer Protection Division if they have consumer complaints about questionable contractors or about price gouging at the www.iowaattorneygeneral.gov Web address.

State beaches

Officials with the Iowa Environmental Council say Iowa has posted a record-breaking number of beach advisories at state park beaches for a second-straight year due to high levels of microcystin  a toxin produced by some forms of blue-green algae blooms that make the water unsafe for swimming.

The six beach advisories warnings issued by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources last week brought to 37 the total number of microcystin warnings posted this year. That surpassed last years record of 34 warnings, according to council officials.
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Column response

ROBERT A. CAMARATA

GRUNDY Center  Im writing to rebut Jon Alexanders guest column in the Aug. 28 Opinion section. Not the whole column mind you; I agree with much of it. Just his claim the cause of hunter decline in Iowa isnt due to local dips in popular prey species. On that count he is dead wrong.

Fifty-plus years ago most hunters in Iowa, and there were millions of them in those days, were here to hunt pheasant, quail and to a lesser extent ruffed grouse. In those days my godparents farm had acres of slews, raspberry brambles and fence lines with trees and shrubs, as did most farms in Iowa. But farmers were taxed for that ground as if it produced an income, which it did not.

So, over the last 55 years that land has been put under the plow. Today there is little hunt land left for upland birds. Im 72 and have hunted pheasant most of my life, but I dont hunt them anymore. Many land owners dont even live on their land any more, making it hard to get permission if you find a tiny bit of habitat you would like to hunt.

Act on guns

BOB BLACK

WATERLOO  As a nation we now have 357 million firearms, 40 million more than American humans. This figure does not include illegal firearms. Out of 175 countries, we rank No. 1 in guns per 100 residents. Serbia is second with 76 guns per 100 residents, which the Serbs put to use in genocidial attacks on their neighbors.

Come to think of it, we are doing the same, only slowly. Republicans like to point to the Swiss, who have a lot of guns, but do not mention the Swiss have much tougher gun laws. The Swiss also have elected and non-elected officials, politicians who do their job for the people, not lobbyists.

The gun crisis in this country has become an insane cycle of killings followed by insincere political hand-wringing and no action. Ninety percent of the American people demand action politicians, now move.

Clintons lies

DAWSON DOWDEN

CLARKSVILLE  I often wonder how anybody would or could vote for a person who has 1) lied to the people of America and Congress, 2) cant protect people who are under her (how is she going to keep America safe) , 3) cant handle or secure classified material. Just wondering. I think you should examine her very closely.

I have never seen or heard of a Democrat who didnt like a tax increase.

Who do you trust?

ROBERT BLAIN

CEDAR FALLS  Theres no need for Mr. Trumps wall. As president, he could sign an executive order that wages earned under bogus Social Security numbers be held in escrow accounts until their Social Security status is rectified (no way). The result: An illegal who receives no pay will leave the U.S. of his/her own accord.

Why hasnt this been done by past presidents? Its because both sides got what they wanted. The bleeding heart, soft-headed left-wing giveaway artists went right along with the right-wing mammon worshipers who got millions of low-wage workers. The U.S. is now saddled with millions of illegals who will cost this country far more than they ever pay in. And within a couple of generations, the illegals offspring will be mired in our welfare system: Well, so much for work.

Currently there are more than 8 million illegal aliens holding jobs in the U.S. using bogus Social Security numbers. An executive order would send them packing in short order, and Trump could ask Mexico to pay for the ink when he signs it.

Police misconduct

CAROLE & JACK YATES

CEDAR FALLS  Do instances of Waterloo police misconduct actually have consequences? What will happen the next time an officer does something like what was shown on a 2014 video where an African-American teen, Malcolm Anderson, was thrown down by a white police officer for what were later found to be false charges?

Currently, investigations of Waterloo police officer misconduct are internal. This process is troubling for the people of the Cedar Valley because the Waterloo Police Department is not accountable to the public. For the public to trust the integrity of the police, citizen involvement in these investigations is necessary. The Waterloo police chief was quoted in a Des Moines Register article (Aug. 25) as saying he wants to avoid discussion of questionable police conduct. However, without that conversation the public has no guarantee of fairness: A citizens review board would go a long way in promoting trust and accountability in the police department.

Open the debates

JON FOOTE

WATERLOO  In my opinion, the presidential debates are the most important events in our election process. We cant have real democracy without a free exchange of ideas and an informed public.

The debates should give voters the opportunity to see all the candidates on the ballot, representing the diversity of American political thought, discussing important issues in an unscripted manner so the people can make informed decisions about the direction of our country.

The right to vote means little unless we have the right to know who we can vote for.

The presidential debates should include all viable candidates. Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Jill Stein and Gary Johnson should all have access to the debate stage.

The Commission on Presidential Debates, which is actually a corporation controlled by the Democratic and Republican parties, stifles democracy by locking out independent candidates from the debates.

The Democrats and Republicans created the Commission on Presidential Debates to seize control of the debates from the nonpartisan League of Women Voters, which called the commission a fraud on the American voter.
Vote for Grassley

WAVERLY -- All of us pay taxes, whether on clothing, telephone, furniture or on our taxable income. None of us want our tax money used to take the life of an innocent child either before or after he or she is born. The Hyde Amendment was passed by Congress in 1973 assuring us that our tax dollars would not pay for abortions through the Medicaid program. Abortion is the taking of an innocent childs life.
News / National

by Staff reporter

President Robert Mugabe has expressed concern at the judgement which was passed by the courts to sanction demonstrations that rocked Harare recently.In an address to the Youth League National Assembly at the party headquarters in Harare on Saturday afternoon, the President said after it became clear that the demonstrations were not peaceful, it was unwise for the court to allow them to go ahead.The Zanu PF First Secretary and President paid tribute to the youth league for remaining united around the President as the centre of power and refusing to be divided by factionalism.He thanked them for the great mobilisation work that they are doing and urged them to do more in preparation for 2018.President Mugabe commented on the recent demonstrations that saw the burning of properties, looting and breech of people's freedom saying it should not be allowed to continue.Mugabe outlined the various empowerment programmes that government is rolling out for the youths in the housing and land redistribution sphere, saying corruption should not be tolerated in the allocation.The President urged the youths to continue safeguarding and defending the revolution saying that it is now time to prepare for the 2018 elections.The Zanu PF Youth League National Assembly meeting attended by provincial and national youth league executives and members of the national youth service, was aimed at hearing the challenges and views of the party youths in various spheres of life.
If you have opinions about the subject matter of posts on this blog please share them. Do you have a story about how the system affects you at work school or home, or just in general? This is a place to share it.
It appears that the trial I mentioned here in the Lisa Miller case is going to be the trial of Philip Zodhiates. He is a Virginia businessman who allegedly helped Lisa Miller get out of the country. This article implies that Zodhiates had a contact in Canada who helped Lisa and Isabella on the Canadian leg of their journey to Nicaragua.

Zodhiates' trial is set to go in Buffalo, NY, this fall, possibly this month. As I mentioned before, Ken Miller is under threat of additional jail time if he will not testify, and I now conclude that it is Zodhiates against whom he's being pressured to testify.

It is a bit chilling to reflect that the federal prosecutors doubtless have enough evidence to convict Zodhiates without Ken Miller's testimony but are putting Miller under the extreme stress and internal conflict of coercing him to testify nonetheless. One could look at this as sadistic, but my best guess is that it's just cold-blooded prosecutorial zeal. "We want to throw in all the evidence we have in the case. You never know what will convince a jury. Miller has evidence. Miller must be forced to testify." Pity and moderation don't apparently enter into the calculation.

And then one wonders about that Canadian contact, if he exists. Will Zodhiates be convicted, the contact found and extradited from Canada, and Zodhiates told that he will face yet more (indefinite) jail time if he won't testify against the person from Canada? The chain of potential targets of vengeance seems never-ending, with each man-link in the chain being coerced into testifying against the next.

The federal prosecutors even arrested and indicted a different pastor, Timothy Miller (not related to any of the others by that last name in the case), whose crime was apparently only helping Lisa after she arrived in Nicaragua. It's not even clear to me how he can be charged in an American court for actions performed in Nicaragua. I've heard of much more serious crimes than this being unprosecutable because the American citizen in question committed them on foreign soil, so I admit to being stumped by this one. Timothy Miller seems only to have gotten out of prosecution by agreeing to cooperate with prosecutors. He should never have come back to the states at all.

Pray for Philip Zodhiates as well as for Ken Miller's decision concerning whether to testify in his case.
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News / National

by Staff Reporter

15:22 - The Zanu PF Youth League held its 2nd meeting for the period 2014-2019 amid reports that the young need land for empowerment.15:23 - In urban provinces, youths are pleading for farm lands to eke out a living as most industries are not functioning.15:25 - In Manicaland and Masvingo, the youths say they are now united following squabbles in the past year.15:27 - They appealed to government to intervene in provinces that share borders with animal conservancies to ensure that people are protected from wild animals.15:29 - The youths also pleaded for subcontracts in the awarding of tenders in big national projects.15:30 - Most provinces expressed gratitude to President Mugabe and Minister Kasukuwere for the progress that has been made in implementing the youth housing programme.15:32 - The youth representative for Harare province expressed concern over the recent stay always and violent demonstrations that rocked the capital city.15:37 - The party wing appealed for vehicles to help in the mobilisation process and preparations for 2018.15:39 - They appealed to party leadership to be allocated a quota for youth in elections.15:44 - On the state of the party, Secretary for Commissariat in the Youth League Hamandishe said there is no factionalism as they say the President is the one centre of power.15:46 - On the recent demonstrations, the youths say they are unhappy that some people are obsessed with removing the President before his term expires and that they will not stand by and watch the demonstrations again.15:48 - They denounced multiple farm ownership among senior party members with some in clandestine partnerships with former farm owners.15:50 - The youths expressed concern that some ranks in the city have become plotting grounds against government and the organising of #Tajamuka
Brazilian aircraft maker Embraer's CEO Frederico Curado (R) pours champagne on an new Embraer E190-E2 during its unveil in Sao Jose dos Campos, Brazil, February 25, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

RIO DE JANEIRO - Brazilian airplane manufacturer, Embraer, has signed a contract to sell up to five E190 planes to China's Colorful Guizhou Airlines for a value of up to $249 million, the company announced late on Friday.

In a press release, Embraer said the sale was concluded Friday during a Brazil-China business seminar in Shanghai, attended by Brazil's President Michel Temer.

The deal includes the confirmed purchase of two planes and the right to purchase three more. The first two will be delivered in 2017.

Embraer also sealed the sale of two Phenom 300 private jets to Colorful Yunnan General Aviation.

Embraer's director-general Paulo Cesar de Souza, stated that this sale confirms China's growing interest in Embraer. He added that over the past 15 years, Embraer has delivered 230 planes to China.

"China has huge potential for us and...represents 12 percent of our income," commented de Souza, who highlighted that Temer was presented in order to send a message of trust to investors and promote the commercial interests of Brazilian companies.

Colorful Guizhou's chairman, Zhai Yan, also said that "we hope that the E190 fleet can help us build a sky passageway inside and beyond Guizhou Province, and eventually contribute to improving the connectivity of China's Southwest Region.
News / National

by Staff Reporter

As the United Nations work towards achieving universal energy access before 2030, stakeholders in the local energy sector are calling upon Zimbabweans to adopt and invest in clean renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and thermal.In presentations made during a Power-For-All media capacity-building workshop in Harare recently, energy experts highlighted the need for Zimbabwe to join the rest of the world in switching to renewable energy sources.Power-For-All is a global campaign by businesses and non-governmental organisations to drive the policy, regulatory and financial environment needed for the energy sector to increase energy access.Zimbabwe is one of the many countries that are grappling energy poverty.Statistics released by the Ministry of Energy and Power Development on the energy situation in Zimbabwe revealed that during peak hours, the country needs 1 400 megawatts yet the average internal power generation is about 1 065 megawatts.The shortfall is met through imports from South Africa and Mozambique.Most rural communities rely on wood and cannot afford the electricity connection fees that are charged by the Rural Electrification Agency (REA).Individual rural households, most of whom do not have any income, are often quoted to pay as much as $3 000 for them to get connected to the national grid.Globally, more than 1,3 billion people lack electricity with 2,7 billion relying on traditional biomass such as wood and cow dung for cooking.It is against this background that energy experts highlighted the need for Zimbabwe to join the rest of the world in adopting clean, affordable renewable energy sources.The experts argued that the acceleration of the use of renewable energy helps in the fight against energy poverty.In a presentation on how the country can move from fossil energy and switch to renewable energy sources, Engineer Oswell Chakwanda chronicled how other countries have successfully incorporated renewable energy sources as a substitute to fossil."People without electricity often burn wood or cow dung for cooking, which are known sources of air pollution. Air pollution kills more people every year than malaria and tuberculosis combined. There is need for people to move to energy alternatives such as solar or wind," Eng Chakwanda said.He said Zimbabwe must take a cue from Japan, the world's third largest investor in renewables. Japan has successfully implemented solar power projects.Ms Fiona Mundoga, a programmes officer with the Ruzivo Trust, a research-based institution that tackles issues to do with renewable energy, land, agriculture, livelihoods, food security and natural resources management; highlighted how renewable energy sources have transformed the lives of rural communities.She gave an example of how affordable solar lamps have allowed vendors to sell their produce at night."We also have solar household systems which are common in both rural and urban areas. They help address energy requirements as far as lighting and other utilities are concerned," she said.Mr Wellington Madumira, a project officer with the Zero Environmental Organisation, called upon the media to help in the switch to renewable energy sources"By reporting on energy issues, the media empowers people to participate in the debates and discussions that affects them. Communities will be able to share knowledge and skills at all levels," Mr Madumira said."Media reports enable people to have a say in the design, implementation and impact assessment of sustainable energy projects, increases public awareness and broadens participation," he said.Apart from Japan, Zimbabwe can also learn from such countries such as Denmark which is relying on wind for energy generation.In 2014, nearly 40 percent of Denmark's overall electricity consumption was covered by wind power. The European country is on track to meet its 2020 target to have 50 percent of all its energy needs covered by renewable energy sources.Most countries are now resorting to solar energy and according to the International Renewable Energy Agency, solar plants using photovoltaic technology could account for eight to 13 percent of global electricity that will be produced in 2030.In 2015, solar plants produced an insignificant 1,2 percent of global electricity.The cost of producing electricity using solar panels is lower when compared to that of producing natural gas and using coal-fired plants.Government, through the Ministry of Energy and Power Development, is developing and promoting the use of renewable energy sources.The National Energy Policy promotes the uptake of renewable energy resources in the country with the Electricity Act making a provision for Independent Power Producers (IPPs) to participate in electricity generation.The Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-economic Transformation (ZimAsset) also promotes increased uptake of renewable energy with energy falling under the infrastructure and utilities cluster.Renewable energy sources have lower marginal costs as compared to fossils. The International Renewable Energy Agency predicts they will account for more than 60 percent of new power-plant investments by 2035.Global wind installations, for example, have soared by about 25 percent a year since 2006.Global commercial investments in clean energy have more than quadrupled, from nearly $30 billion in 2005 to about $160 billion in 2012.Even countries with vast oil reserves and coal have recognised the importance of using renewable energy sources and are, therefore, developing substantial renewable energy programmes.According to the International Energy Agency, the cost of maintaining oil wells have doubled with investors making losses in new oil mining ventures.Online sources indicate that solar energy is changing economics and is already influencing business consumption and investment.In consumption, a number of companies with large physical footprints and high power costs are installing commercial-scale rooftop solar systems, often at less than the current price of buying power from a utility.An example is that of Wal-Mart Stores, an American multi-national retail corporation which operates a chain of hypermarkets and grocery stores. Wal-Mart recently stated that it will switch to 100 percent renewable power by 2020, up from the current 20 percent.Although the future lies in renewable energy, this does not, however, mean that the world is, in the immediate term, running out of fossil fuels. There are enough known oil reserves to cater for the next 53 years and coal deposits are also still abundant.70 total views, 70 views today
Alexis Zanghi in the LA Review of Books:

THEY TRAVELED in groups of 100. Mostly at night. In lorries. And on foot.

During the 1970s, migrants leaving Portugal in search of opportunity developed a system to ensure their safe arrival at their destination, and to deter fleecing by people smugglers. Before departing, each man would take his own picture. Then, he would rip the picture in two, keeping one half of his face for himself and giving the other half to the smuggler. Once over the border, the man would mail his half back to his family, to indicate that he had arrived safely in France, Germany, or Switzerland, or any of the other northern European countries reliant on cheap labor from the depressed and volatile countries ringing the Mediterranean. Then, the smuggler would come to collect payment from the migrants family, bearing his half of the mans face as evidence.

These pictures stare up at the reader of A Seventh Man like eerie passport photos. Written by John Berger in collaboration with Swiss photographer Jean Mohr in the 1970s, the book sought to document the daily lives of migrant workers in the industrial north of Europe. In one, ripped in half on a diagonal, a mans forehead drifts apart from his chin, eyes obscured by the tear, suspended on the page. The effect is one of facelessness and anonymity. This is perhaps the intention of Berger and Mohr: to highlight, and in doing so, hopefully negate the erasure inherent in migration. Berger sought to facilitate working class solidarity: to promote empathy among workers, across linguistic and cultural borders. Then, one in every seven workers in Europe was a migrant.

Today, as well, one in every seven people in the world is a migrant, refugee, or otherwise displaced individual.

At the Museum Europaischer Kulturen in Berlin, a collective of migrant artists called KUNSTASYL (literally art asylum) are at work on a peaceful takeover of the museums east wing. On the ground floor, one artist, Dachil Sado, has painted a large Hokusai wave washing over a giant, oversized thumbprint.

More here.
Laws crafted by those elected should do most good for most people
News / National

by Staff reporter

THE Ministry of Health and Child Care has been accused of refusing to treat Sexually Transmitted Infections (STI) in children below the age of 18 saying they are underaged and should bring a parent in order get treatment.The chairperson for the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee for Health Dr Ruth Labode was at pains expressing her dismay over the alleged failure by health institutions to assist young girls."These girls cannot be treated for STIs at clinics and hospitals, they are told to bring the mother or guardian so that they can be treated but how does a 15-year-old who is sexually active tell a parent that they have an STI and want to be accompanied to a health institution. Some things are taboo in our African culture. So allow them to access the STI treatment alone, if they have the courage to come and tell the service provider then that is even good. It shows they have good health seeking patterns," she said.She went on: "It pains me that we have young girls that are sexually active but are being denied contraceptives when they come to clinics as they are said to be too young to access them. Yes, they say at 18 years one is an adult but the fact is that children below that age are having sex and the best we can do is to give them so that we do not have a rise in teenage pregnancies and other diseases."Dr Labode said Zimbabwean laws were not yet aligned to many things."If the Constitution says 18 years is the legal age, we assume that it applies everywhere but that is not the case, nurses do not treat young people, if she gives an injection for an STI and the 15-year-old reacts then she is at fault. I experienced nurses who would call and consult first because they were not protected once a problem occurs," she said.She said once the Public Health Act which was under review was functional there could be clauses that would enable a child under the age of 18 to access STI treatment easily while the medical practitioner also gets protected.She said teenage pregnancies, sex work and abortions happened to young people who have no access to sexual health products.Dr Gerald Gwinji the Permanent Secretary for Health raised concerns about why the young child was engaging in sexual activities and said it was not the ministry's position to deal with those issues."We treat them when they come but they are having sex while under-age which is not the responsibility of the ministry, that is an issue of morality," he said.Dr Bernard Madzima the director of family health in the ministry said they were guided by policy in the treatment of people."We have an adolescence sexual and reproductive health policy that guides us as a ministry. It talks about age appropriate initiatives. When a girl or boy in the early adolescents' stage comes to seek sexual health products we give them information only, but for the late adolescents we give commodities," he said.He, however, acknowledged that the issue of contraceptives was still a grey area that was in need of more clarification. On the issue of treatment on STIs for minors he said they have the right to treatment, and only when they needed an operation that was when a parent was called in.An official at the United Bulawayo Hospitals (UBH) who declined to be named for professional reasons said they encourage minors to come for treatment with parents.The doctor said they also consider the fact that the parent that they ask the minor to bring could be a barrier to treatment in that the child can be reluctant to expose themselves to the parent that they are sexually active and have contracted an STI.
At least 35 people were killed early on Sunday when a passenger bus struck a fuel tanker in a head-on collision in the southern province of Zabul, officials said.

The passenger bus was on its way from Kandahar to Kabul when it collided with a fuel tanker. In the accident, 35 people were killed and more than 20 others were wounded, Zabuls Governor Bismillah Afghanmal said.

Deputy police chief of Zabul, Ghulam Jilani Farahi, said some of the wounded were rushed to the hospital in the provincial capital Qalat and some to neighbouring Kandahar.

The Kabul-Kandahar highway is affected by insurgency and those who drive through the area normally do so at very high speeds so as to avoid the militants.

At least 73 people were killed in May when two passenger buses and a fuel tanker collided and burst into flames in eastern Ghazni province, which is labelled as one of the worst accidents in the country. In April 2013, another collision killed 45 people in Kandahar province. Afghanistan has some of the most dangerous roads in the world, often in poor condition and traffic rules are seldom observed.
Pope Francis on Sunday declared revered nun Mother Teresa a saint in a canonization mass at St Peters square.



For the honour of the Blessed Trinity we declare and define Blessed Teresa of Calcutta (Kolkata) to be a Saint and we enroll her among the Saints, decreeing that she is to be venerated as such by the whole Church, the pontiff said in Latin.

For Francis, Mother Teresa put into action his ideal of the church as a merciful field hospital for the poorest of the poor, those suffering both material and spiritual poverty.

The elevation of one of the icons of 20th Century Christianity came a day before the 19th anniversary of her death in Kolkata, where she spent nearly four decades working with the dying and the destitute.

Tens of thousands of pilgrims  rich and poor, powerful and homeless  filled St. Peters Square on Sunday for the canonization of Mother Teresa, the tiny nun who cared for the worlds most destitute and became an icon of a Catholic Church that goes to the peripheries to find lost souls.

Throughout the night, pilgrims prayed at vigils in area churches and flocked before dawn to the Vatican to try to get a good spot for the Mass being celebrated under a searing hot sun and blue skies.

Her heart, she gave it to the world, said Charlotte Samba, a 52-year-old mother of three who travelled with a church group from Gabon for the Mass. Mercy, forgiveness, good works: It is the heart of a mother for the poor.

One group of 40 Indian nationals traveled from Macerata, Italy to honor a woman given Indias highest civilian and humanitarian awards for her work in the slums of Kolkata. Another group of 100 drove from Kosovo toting a banner that read: Mother Teresa: Pray for Us.

In addition, 13 heads of state and government led official delegations while 1,500 homeless people invited by Pope Francis had VIP seats and were going to be treated by the pope to a Neapolitan pizza lunch in the Vatican auditorium afterward.

While Francis is clearly keen to hold Mother Teresa up as a model for her joyful dedication to societys outcasts, he is also recognizing holiness in a nun who lived most of her adult life in spiritual agony sensing that God had abandoned her.

According to correspondence that came to light after she died in 1997, Mother Teresa experienced what the church calls a dark night of the soul  a period of spiritual doubt, despair and loneliness that many of the great mystics experienced. In Mother Teresas case, it lasted for nearly 50 years  an almost unheard of trial.

For the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who spearheaded Mother Teresas saint-making campaign, the revelations were further confirmation of Mother Teresas heroic saintliness. He said that by canonizing her, Francis is recognizing that Mother Teresa not only shared the material poverty of the poor but the spiritual poverty of those who feel unloved, unwanted, uncared for.

What she described as the greatest poverty in the world today (of feeling unloved) she herself was living in relationship with Jesus, he said in an interview on the eve of the canonization.
News / National

by Staff reporter

CHIEF Bota of Zaka district in Masvingo province has died.He was 96. Chief Bota, real name Chiyo Mugabe died at his home last Wednesday after a long illness. He was born on February, 5,1920.Zaka District Administrator Mr Tapson Chivanga said burial arrangements will be announced in due course as family members were still working on modalities for the chief's burial."I can confirm that one of our respected chiefs, Chief Bota has died. He passed away on Wednesday at around 8 am after battling undisclosed ailment for some time."There are traditional rites done when a chief dies and it is after these that we can be made aware of the proposed date of burial. We had a meeting with family members and those within the chieftainship. We will stand guided by the family," said Mr Chivanga.He called on the Bota clan to choose the heir to the chieftainship peacefully without wrangles that have characterised some areas after the death of incumbent chief."The most painful thing is that we have lost two chiefs in a space of one year in Zaka after Chief Nyakunhuwa passed on in August, 2015. We have been working with Chief Bota well despite him being advanced in age and I hope the remaining clan will continue with the good work. I call upon the Bota clan to choose a replacement peacefully," he said.Mr Chivanga said Chief Bota assumed his position in 2004 after the death of his predecessor in 2002.He revealed that Chief Bota worked in South Africa for many years before joining Mashava Mine in Masvingo in the early 1980s. He is survived by his wife whose name was not given, 11 children and 53 grandchildren.
News / National

by Staff reporter

ZIMBABWE needs to employ an additional 10 000 nurses at all the country's hospitals if the health institutions are to operate at optimal capacity, an official has said.In an interview on the sidelines of a public review meeting in Harare last week, the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Health and Child Care, Dr Gerald Gwinji said nurses were critical in the health sector."When we made our estimates in terms of burden of disease and gaps that we have we need close to 10 000 new nurses in our institutions. Care has become very intense and nursing is a one profession that needs to be complemented by the nurses," he said.Dr Gwinji revealed that the establishment that is being used was done in 1980 and has not been reviewed despite the growing population and the demand that is being brought by HIV and Aids."It hasn't been revised, disease burden has increased and the population of Zimbabwe has grown greatly over the past three decades which does not tally with the establishment," he said.However, he noted that the Government has improved on health delivery over the years."We have since 1980 built new hospitals, clinics and many other facilities we are spreading ourselves thinner and thinner in terms of nursing staff. So an additional 10 000 nurses is welcome and we have the capacity to train them too," said Dr Gwinji.It is anticipated that the revising upwards of the nurses establishment will see thousands of nurses also benefiting as some have not being employed after Government froze recruitment. An estimated 3 500 nurses are unemployed in Zimbabwe.Dr Gwinji said the ideal nurse to patient ratio in Zimbabwe was one nurse per every four patients but at the moment it was one nurse to 15 patients, a situation that is compromising the quality of health care to patients. The country is also in need of a number of midwives to reduce maternal related complications and mortality.According to United Nations Fund for Population Activities, midwives assist in curbing almost 90 percent of maternal deaths.In Zimbabwe statistics show that an average of 610 women die each year from maternal related complications.Commenting on cases of negligence at hospitals being reported in the media, the Permanent Secretary said mistakes do happen."There are mistakes and oversights that happen in this profession and there is a way of dealing with those people. We promptly respond to issues that border on negligence and dereliction of duty in the particular cases. But our nurses are highly trained who are sellable all over but we also don't condone such practices and glitches on duty," he said.In Zimbabwe the shortage of nursing staff is particularly dire in rural institutions where very few nurses are manning hospitals and clinics and the workload is overwhelming.
September 4, 2016

Egypt has begun registering Jewish antiquities in an attempt to protect them from theft and neglect  an important step forward in preserving history. However, the government still faces criticism for not making good on promises to renovate the countrys synagogues  or, for that matter, Egyptian historical and archaeological sites in general.

Jewish antiquities have always been part of Egypts cultural heritage, and government officials have said they are also part of the worlds heritage and the property of all mankind, not only Egypt. And so, Saeed Helmy, the head of the Islamic and Coptic Monuments Department at the Ministry of Antiquities, is calling on countries around the world to financially support Egypt in restoring and preserving the antiquities.

Helmy, who is in charge of the Jewish monuments in Egypt, told Al-Monitor in mid-August that the country has been unable to finance such projects because of its financial state. Egypts economy has suffered since the January 25 Revolution in 2011, and tourism has been decimated.

I know very well that the Egyptian monuments  including the Jewish antiquities  capture the attention of people all around the world. Therefore, Id like to make it clear that Egypt pays considerable attention to its monuments whether they are Islamic, Coptic or Christian, and that is what I asserted during my meeting with the [US] cultural attache at the US Embassy [in Egypt] on Aug. 2. However, we need the support of the countries that are interested in cultural heritage in order to protect these great antiquities.

The Jews built 11 synagogues in Egypt  10 in Cairo and one in Alexandria  which contain thousands of manuscripts that document their community in the country, along with birth and marriage records of Egyptian Jews.

Many synagogues in the heart of Cairo were frequently visited tourist attractions, especially Ben Ezra, Ashkenazi and Sha'ar Hashamayim. Ben Ezra in Old Cairo is one of the oldest synagogues in Egypt and houses thousands of ancient Jewish books. Old Cairo is also where the first mosque in Egypt, Amr ibn al-As Mosque, was built in 642, and is home to a number of Coptic churches, most notably the so-called Hanging Church.

The Ashkenazi Synagogue in Ataba, built in 1887, is in need of complete maintenance in addition to renovation work of its floors and walls.

Despite their small number, members of the Jewish community in Egypt  which is down to six individuals  have always cared for and attended to the Jewish antiquities in Egypt.

On March 26, Magda Haroun, the president of Egypt's Jewish community, said in an interview with the privately owned Al-Youm Al-Sabeh newspaper that she had received several promises from Egyptian officials who are responsible for documenting and repairing buildings of Jewish origin, but none of these promises were actually fulfilled.

Therefore, Haroun said, she called on President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to help preserve this cultural heritage, especially after water leaked through the walls of some synagogues.

I dont want to place on him [Sisi] a burden greater than what he can bear. He is a true human being who bears a great responsibility. Yet I had to look for a higher authority to preserve this great heritage, Haroun said.

Sisi indeed may have responded to Harouns message, as the Ministry of Antiquities announced June 11 that it was forming a special committee to take stock of Jewish antiquities in synagogues and register them in the ministrys records. This was the first time that the Ministry of Antiquities has offered to register the artifacts, after many years of neglect.

Ahmad Abd al-Majid Hammad, a member of the committee assigned to register the artifacts, said 60 pieces have been registered to date at the Moussa al-Dar'I synagogue, which was built in 1925. The antiquities included 32 boxes containing Torah scrolls, in addition to a few curtains that display drawings, decorations and the Star of David. Moreover, the antiquities included a metal frame and wooden artifacts.

Helmy, who heads the registration committee, told Al-Monitor that the ministry looks equally at Islamic, Coptic and Jewish antiquities. Helmy said he does not allow any discrimination against any of these monuments, and that he often reminds antiquities students of this.

The best proof that the Ministry of Antiquities cares about the Jewish heritage is that we have finished [in 2010] repairing the Maimonides synagogue in Jamaliyyah Street in midtown Cairo at a total cost of 8.5 million Egyptian pounds [roughly $950,000]. We have restored the synagogues entrances, floors and all the antiquities inside it. For the first time, the synagogue has been placed on the list of tourist attractions in Egypt, he said.

Helmy added, Therefore, anyone can come and freely visit this great archaeological site. It is an unprecedented achievement and it shows that the ministry gives great attention to the Jewish monuments in Egypt and seeks to preserve them, [even] making them touristic attractions that visitors can enjoy."

He acknowledged the deteriorated condition of Jewish antiquities in Egypt, saying, The situation of the Jewish antiquities in Egypt is no different than the situation of the Egyptian monuments as a whole. They need considerable support to restore and repair them, especially after the security chaos that broke out in Egypt after the [2011] revolution that had a [negative] impact on tourism and the economy.

Therefore, the Ministry of Antiquities paid a heavy price, given that its resources are based on the revitalization of tourism.
September 2, 2016

Mosques and churches in Egypt are going to have to start paying for their electricity in advance.

Gradual lifting of the electricity subsidies began two years ago, and by 2019 subsidies will be fully removed, meaning citizens will pay for electricity what it costs the state to produce it.

Egypts Ministry of Endowments administers many of Egypts mosques. On Aug. 24, the ministry said it will recharge all prepaid electricity meters for a full fiscal year for all mosques, as part of its role in serving the houses of worship. The ministry typically covers renovations, maintenance, furniture and lighting in mosques, in addition to other services.

The ministry said the work would take about two weeks at most in all of the endowments directorates, as the Ministry of Electricity will only be installing prepaid meters.

In May, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi stressed the importance of installing prepaid meters, not only for electricity, but for water and gas consumption as well in all new housing projects.

The state is seeking to expand the use of prepaid meters by installing new ones, but as for the old ones, nothing will change.

Ministry of Electricity spokesman Mohammed Yamani told Al-Monitor more than 300 prepaid meters have been installed in mosques affiliated with the Ministry of Endowments, and 600 meters have been installed in civil mosques, which were built by certain figures and charities, while 150 churches have installed these prepaid meters.

Similar to the way cellphones are topped off, a meter is recharged with a sum of money withdrawn from a mosques account, depending on estimated consumption. An alarm goes off when the account is almost empty, which means the electricity will be cut off in the mosque or church unless the account is replenished.

The Ministry of Endowments denied all rumors claiming that the ministry would require citizens to pay the mosques electricity and water bills. Such stories had been circulating on social networks, angering many people.

Those reports, the ministry said, were lies. A meeting will be held for the ministries of endowments, electricity and finance to settle any outstanding issues.

Until now there have been no prepaid meters to monitor electricity consumption for mosques and churches. Minister of Electricity Mohamed Shaker explained that the Ministry of Endowments pays the bills of its affiliated mosques and local government administrations pay the churches bills, while charities cover the bills of civil mosques.

There are 114,000 mosques [in Egypt], over 31,000 of which are civil mosques, while 83,000 are affiliated with the Ministry of Endowments, Shaker said. There are also more than 3,500 churches coordinating with Ministry of Endowments to install prepaid electricity meters, he added.

Shaker announced in early August that the Ministry of Electricity would increase prices for residences by 40% on average. For zero to 50 kilowatt hours of consumption it will charge 11 piasters (1.24 US cents) per kWh, from 51-100 kWh it will charge 19 piasters per kWh, from 101-200 it will charge 21 piasters per kWh, and the maximum price will be 95 piasters per kWh.

The Ministry of Endowments pays the bills for its affiliated mosques through the annual budget allocated to it by the Ministry of Finance, in addition to the profits it makes from the real estate and other assets it owns.

Medhat Fouda, the chairman of Middle Egypt Electricity Distribution Co., which covers the northern provinces of Upper Egypt, said his company is owed more than 600 million Egyptian pounds ($67.6 million) by the Ministry of Endowments, the state water and sanitation companies and the mechanical division at the Department of Irrigation.

Yamani told Al-Monitor that the Ministry of Endowments owes the Ministry of Electricity a total of about 1.2 billion pounds.

Yamani has said mosques and churches tend to consume a lot of electricity. Many have air conditioning.
September 2, 2016

RAMALLAH, West Bank  On Aug. 23, former Fatah leader Ahmed Abu al-Ezz Halawa was beaten to death by Palestinian security forces in Nablus, in the northern West Bank. His killing has sparked anger against the government, which was reflected in thousands of people, including Fatah leaders and members, taking part in his funeral Aug. 28. During the funeral, slogans were chanted against Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah and Nablus Governor Akram Rajoub, calling for their dismissal from their posts. This stance was also endorsed by Halawas family and a number of Fatah leaders.

Fatah member of parliament Najat Abu Bakr, who took part in the funeral, told Al-Monitor, Fatah has serious reservations on the government's performance and practices, the latest of which was the killing of Halawa. She added, Halawas wife told me in person that Hamdallah is primarily responsible for the killing of her husband.

Abu Bakr said, Hamdallah should submit his resignation, admit his failure and give citizens some dignity. Had I been in his shoes, I would have resigned immediately. The people of Nablus and Fatah leaders in the city have demanded that the government resigns.

Although Hamdallah announced Aug. 23 the formation of an inquiry commission into the Nablus incident, some Fatah leaders have not been satisfied and viewed that a presidential commission, including members of parliament as well as other social figures and members of the military judiciary, should have been formed instead of the inquiry commission that consists of ministers in the government, which is a party involved in the crisis.

Jamal Tirawi, a Fatah parliamentarian from Nablus and member of its Revolutionary Council, told Al-Monitor, We have demanded that members of the Palestinian Legislative Council [PLC] assume a role in the inquiry commission, along with the various supervisory authorities. Yet the decision was issued by Hamdallah in his capacity as minister of the interior, which is contrary to the law, because he is a party to the incident.

The Nablus incident is just the latest in a series of events that have led to resentment among Fatahs leaders and members. Most prominently is Hamdallahs order to use security forces against Fatah leaders and members in the city of Tulkarm in the northern West Bank during a protest against the electricity crisis in July and August. As a result, security forces arrested a number of Fatah members, which prompted several Fatah members to resign in protest against the arrests and against security forces beating Ibrahim Khreisheh, a member of Fatah's Revolutionary Council, on Aug. 5.

Fatah and Hamdallah have clashed several times. On Nov. 6, 2014, the security forces arrested Bassam Zakarneh, the former head of Palestinian Public Sector Employees and member of Fatahs Revolutionary Council, on charges of inciting against the government.

On Dec. 4, 2014, Hamdallah and Azzam al-Ahmad, a member of Fatahs Central Committee, had a confrontation on the air during a talk show on al-Falastinia TV. Hamdallah accused Ahmad of nominating his sister-in-law to the post of education minister.

In February, Abu Bakr staged a sit-in inside the PLC because an arrest warrant was issued against her for accusing a government minister of corruption, despite her parliamentary immunity.

Tirawi said, What is taking place on the ground proves that there is a major rift between Hamdallah and Fatahs members and some of its leaders. Thus, we call on preventing security services  which are under Hamdallahs responsibility  from oppressing Fatah.

He added, If the results of the inquiry commission  which was formed by Hamdallah  are not convincing, Fatah will reject them and will raise its voice for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to hear it.

Zakarneh told Al-Monitor, Tension prevails over the Palestinian street, because of the instructions given to the security services by the person in charge of them  namely Interior Minister Rami Hamdallah  who should assume responsibility for what is taking place.

He said, Security forces are the party implementing the interior ministers instructions. Thus, as we endorse holding those responsible for the chaos accountable, the official authorities must also be held accountable for their abuses, even for the smallest abuses, whether committed by a soldier or the interior minister.

By contrast, close ties between Hamdallah and Abbas seem to be Hamdallahs guarantee that he will preserve his post. In an Aug. 27 interview on Maan TV, Hamdallah said, I refer to Abbas and we are fully coordinating together. He was consulted on all decisions that are being taken.

Writer and political analyst Talal Okal told Al-Monitor, There is a tendency to promote the role of security services at the expense of Fatah, and to treat all Palestinian factions  including Fatah  equally, despite being the ruling party.

He added, Fatah is unable to apply pressure to remove Hamdallah from his post of prime minister, which is a decision that can only be taken by Abbas.

Fatah went through a similar experience under the rule of former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who served as prime minister from 2007 to 2013. On March 3, 2011, Fatah demanded that Abbas dismiss him. Yet he remained in office until Abbas decided otherwise. This means that the good ties between Abbas and Hamdallah will guarantee that Hamdallah remains in his post for a long time.
September 1, 2016

A senior Israeli Foreign Ministry official told Al-Monitor that the ministrys policy research branch has begun preparing policy papers for an eventual meeting between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the next US president, on the occasion of Netanyahus participation at the March 26, 2017, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference. Thus, the ministry hopes to end the crisis in the relationship between the countries. The plan is to emphasize, both in the prime ministers meetings there and in his AIPAC speech, Israeli security predicaments in relation to Iran and its terror proxies in the region  Hezbollah and Hamas  and to base future US-Israel relations primarily on security cooperation.

Meanwhile, US-Israel relations continue to deteriorate due to Israel's continued opposition to the Iran deal. There were many sharp disagreements between President Barack Obama and Netanyahu in the last eight years, but none as virulent and deep as the Iran nuclear agreement. The scars and anger over Netanyahu's struggle against the Obama administration inside the American political arena are still alive in Washington, at all senior working levels. These sentiments are continuously nourished by Israeli statements, such as Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman's comparison Aug. 6 between the Iran deal and Hitler's Munich Agreement of 1938  with the US administration expressing to the prime minister its strong dismay. Yet it is not Liberman but Netanyahu who is viewed by the US administration as the mastermind behind the Israeli anti-Obama campaign. In a background briefing Aug. 23 to Israeli ultra-Orthodox reporters, Netanyahu reportedly praised his victory (according to him) over Obama.

A senior US diplomat in Tel Aviv told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that according to the International Atomic Energy Agency and US intelligence, Iran is fulfilling its part of the agreement. It has dismantled thousands of centrifuges and filled the core of a plutonium reactor with cement. Iran is giving up 98% of its nuclear materials and international inspectors are roaming its facilities.

"Iran, thanks to the agreement, is much farther away from acquiring a nuclear bomb, and it may not develop it even after the 10-15-year period of the agreement. And this was achieved by President Obama without firing a shot," said the American diplomat.

He complained bitterly that Netanyahu was not in the least admitting the success of the agreement so far, which is in contrast to opinions voiced by Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot.

Indeed, it was quite clear that under the pressure of a global consensus, and given the gradual nature of the lifting of the sanctions, Iran would stick to the deal. Simultaneously, Iran does continue to support the Bashar al-Assad regime in the Syrian war, and it also continues to sponsor international terror both directly and through terror organizations such as Hezbollah. And it is unlikely that Iran will change course after their upcoming elections scheduled in May 2017.

Netanyahu considered his battle against a US-Iran deal also as a means to foster his image as the savior of Israel against another Holocaust. He thrives on the description of existential threats to Israel and on his claims of being the only one with an adequate response to these threats.

A senior Israeli official told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that the prime minister and foreign minister still believe that the agreement was a historic mistake. First, because Iran's ambition to ultimately become a nuclear power has not diminished. And second, because it will now be able to use additional financial resources to encourage regional and international terror. "Netanyahu believes Obama is naive about the intent of the Iranian leadership and was fooled by them," he said.

The official added, "The pragmatic Arab governments, mainly Egypt and Saudi Arabia, share Israel's view."

This may be true. Yet the Egyptian and Saudi leaderships were wise enough not to confront Obama publicly on the issue. An Egyptian diplomat in Tel Aviv told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that Cairo had reservations about the deal, yet it concedes that Obama made the right decision together with the P5+1 (the five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany). He said that Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi favors a regional diplomatic move toward a "nuclear-free Middle East" that will include Iran and Israel.

The Iran deal is completed and is in the process of implementation. Yet the confrontation between Netanyahu and Obama, and its recent manifestations, will have lasting effects on US-Israel relations. It is not only Obama who is enraged by the Israeli position; the US defense establishment and the State Department are also adversely affected. Israel, in their view, has placed itself on the wrong side of strategic US interests. Furthermore, the American Democratic leadership, which will probably remain in power after November, remembers very well Netanyahu's siding with the Republican Party on this issue.

Obama fulfilled a historic mission with the Iran agreement by preventing Iran from developing, at least in the next 10-15 years, nuclear weapons. With this, he and his administration strengthened Israel's strategic security interests, as recognized by the Israeli military chief of staff.

With the failure of US Secretary of State John Kerrys peace initiative in 2015, and following the Iran deal, Washington considers that Israel's foreign, peace and security policies are fundamentally mistaken. This American perception is unlikely to change, even after the November presidential elections.
September 2, 2016

Sharif Muhaisen is worried about losing his job. Muhaisen works for Sanad, a construction industries company in Ramallah owned by the Palestine Investment Fund (PIF). Muhaisen is responsible for importing cement from Jordan. We import about 500,000 tons of cement from Jordan every year, he told Al-Monitor by phone from his home in Ramallah.

As part of his job, Muhaisen must travel to Jordan to meet with various cement companies, attend workshops and for other work-related reasons. Since summer 2015, however, Jordan has denied Muhaisen entry.

Although I was born in Gaza, I have lived all my life in the West Bank, but I still need a special entry permit from the Jordanian authorities, he said. Since last summer, [the Jordanian authorities] have consistently denied me an entry permit. Muhaisen provided Al-Monitor with a screen shot of text messages informing him that his requests had been denied.

Muhaisen, whose wife and two children have Jordanian passports because they were born on the West Bank, have no problem crossing the King Hussein Bridge into the kingdom. Up until the summer of 2015, "It took a few days to get the Jordanian authorities to issue the needed permit, but since my last application in June [2015], I and many others have been regularly rejected, Muhaisen said.

Wafa Abdel Rahman, another Gazan who lives in Ramallah, told Al-Monitor that in the second half of August alone, 850 Palestinians of Gazan origin had applied to enter Jordan or to travel via Jordan. The information was leaked to her by sources in the company that delivers the applications. Only 20 out of the 850 were allowed entry, she said.

Abdel Rahman said that while the problem applies to all Gazans  whether they reside in Gaza or the West Bank  the one group that is suffering the most are the 50,000 or so Gazans who live in the West Bank and have, over the years, had their residency changed with the approval of the Palestinian and Israeli authorities.

Because those Gazans living in the West Bank are not allowed to travel to besieged Gaza, they cant travel anywhere else, while those in Gaza have the opportunity to leave, albeit rarely these days, as Egypt is constantly closing the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt, Abdel Rahman said.

The problem has become so acute that Human Rights Watch issued a statement May 16 calling on the Jordanians to ease the movement of Gazan Palestinians. The organization was unable to obtain a statement from Jordanian officials regarding the ban. Al-Monitor has also been unable to get information on the travel ban.

Many Jordanian policies have been the subject of intense discussion, but it has been taboo to talk about the King Hussein Bridge policy due to its sensitivity because of the fear of mass deportation of Palestinians. The issue here is to how decisions are made in regard to travel across the bridge, which is the only connecting point between Palestine and Jordan, and by extension, the only connecting point for West Bank Palestinians (East Jerusalem residents excluded) to the rest of the world.

The Jordanians' bridge policy is unknown and undeclared. Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, and there are two official Jordanian-Israeli crossing points, in the north and south. as an occupying power, Israel controls the Jordan crossing on the West Bank side of the King Hussein Bridge. The West Bank was part of Jordan when Israeli seized and occupied it in 1967, and although King Hussein severed administrative ties with it in 1988, Jordan has not constitutionally ceded the territory. The bridge is therefore not considered an international border, although Jordan recognizes Palestine.

Regardless of legal definitions, some 2.8 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and holding passports issued by the Palestinian government have no possibility to travel after Israel, in 2000 following the second intifada, blocked them from using Ben Gurion International Airport. The only available exit route for West Bank Palestinians is the King Hussein Bridge.

One theory as to why Jordan is denying entry permits is that officials fear that Gazans will come to Jordan and never return. Another theory is that Jordan is secretly carrying out punishment to Gazans because of the rivalry between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the Gaza-born Mohammed Dahlan.

All Palestinians have Ramallah-issued passports, and the Oslo Accord, through which the Palestinian Authority (PA) was created, clearly stipulates that the West Bank and Gaza are one administrative unit and that free access is to be allowed between Gaza and the West Bank as well as between the Palestinian areas and the rest of the world. Jordan, however, has apparently chosen to ignore this arrangement and has adopted a different set of policies for Gazans. Any Palestinian born in Gaza or born to a parent from Gaza is considered by Jordan to be a Gazan Palestinian and required to get special permission; they are assigned a blue bridge card to distinguish them as Gazans. West Bank Palestinians are granted green bridge cards. A yellow bridge card is issued to Palestinians holding Jordanian citizenship.

Palestinians from Gaza, regardless of whether they live in Gaza or in the West Bank, must apply to the Jordanian Interior Ministry for an entry permit by sending an application via a designated express delivery service and then wait for an electronic response  in recent months, usually a rejection. Gazans living in Gaza who are unable to use the Rafah crossing need Jordan's approval to enter the country before they can apply for a permit from Israel to transit its territory to get to the King Hussein Bridge.

Students, professionals, businesspeople or others planning family visits to Jordan or abroad were suddenly denied approval beginning in the summer of 2015. The virtually across-the-board rejections from this undeclared Jordanian policy have left tens of thousands of Palestinians living in the West Bank essentially imprisoned there, unable even to go to Gaza.

Plans are being prepared by activists for a public campaign against the travel ban, said Abdel Rahman, who along with Muhaisen says the Ramallah-based Palestinian leadership has not done anything about the discrimination against Palestinians of Gazan origin.

Palestinian officials say they are following up on the problem, but also note that Jordan is a sovereign country that has the authority to decide who is allowed to enter its territory. Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah told Al-Monitor in April, We are in constant touch with our Jordanian partners, and we have excellent cooperation at all levels.

Azzam Shawwa, head of the Palestinian Monetary Authority in Ramallah and of Gazan origin, told the Gaza-based Sawa news agency on Aug. 23 that the problem facing Gazans has been resolved by Jordan. There is no evidence, however, of any resolution. Shawwa did not respond to attempts by Al-Monitor to obtain clarification.

Freedom of movement is a frustration Palestinians have had to deal with for decades. Most would accept travel restrictions on certain individuals for security reasons, but it is difficult to believe that the rejection facing hundreds of Palestinians of Gazan origin, such as Muhaisen, is for security reasons. It appears these Palestinians are being collectively punished for the simple reason that they were born in Gaza or have Gazan ancestors.
September 4, 2016

BAGHDAD  The possible participation of armed factions under the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMU) in the local elections that are scheduled to take place in April 2017 and the parliamentary elections in 2018 has sparked huge controversy in Iraq. As a result, Iraq's Independent High Electoral Commission announced Aug. 28 that it would not include any political entity registered under the PMU in the elections, as the latter is a military organization that is connected to the security apparatus, affiliated with the state and obeys the commander in chief of the armed forces.

Most armed factions have not hidden their intention to participate in the electoral race and for their members to join parliament and even take part in forming the Iraqi government. Some of these factions think their battle against the Islamic State (IS), the blood their members have shed in that fight and their defense of the country must be rewarded with political representation.

The escalated tone about the PMUs participation in the local and parliamentary elections has stirred the concerns of well-established political parties in the government. As a result of the massive publicity surrounding the PMU, some of its factions such as the Badr Organization, Hezbollah Brigades and others found themselves receiving greater amounts of support from Iraqis after being depicted as the only forces that managed to expel IS from regions under its control in June 2014.

On Aug. 27, Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Sadrist movement, best described the participation of the PMU in politics and in the elections. He said that throwing Shiite faction fighters combating IS onto the political scene is suicide for the political process in Iraq. Sadrs statement was an answer to the question of one of his followers about the electoral committees registration of entities that include PMU factions. He said, Such nominations will mix jihad in politics and will tarnish the reputation of jihad and jihadis and turn the government into a military or militia one. He added, Involving jihadis who lack political expertise will be suicidal for the political process.

After Sadr voiced his objection to PMU factions participation in the elections, the electoral commission announced Aug. 28, The PMU is a military organization with security ties to the security apparatus and the law of political parties forbids the registration of any political entity that takes the form of military or semi-military organizations. According to Article 8.3 of the Law of Political Parties, there should be no links to any military force.

The Law of Political Parties that the Iraqi parliament approved Aug. 27 states, The formation of a party or political organization and their work must not be similar to military or semi-military work and the party must not be affiliated with any armed force.

In its report, the electoral commission talked about the PMU because the PMU is a state organization, but did not mention the armed factions under the PMU and whether they circumvented the law and registered as political entities. Also, the electoral commission is silent about factions affiliated with political parties and members of parliament, such as the Badr Organization or Asaib Ahl al-Haq.

Al-Monitor tried to get answers to these questions from electoral commission officials, but they refused to make any statements to the media. Nevertheless, a member of a PMU committee, Karim al-Nuri, told Al-Monitor, The parties that have PMU factions will participate in the elections, and they have the right to do so.

Nuri justified these parties having armed factions, which theoretically could prevent them from participating in elections, by saying, The parties have volunteers in the PMU, and they have worked under PMU command. He added, The war against IS that threatened the Iraqi people forced the parties to encourage their members to form armed factions.

Iraqi officials are trying to portray the PMU as an organization that takes orders from the commander in chief of the armed forces, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, but this is not necessarily the case. Many factions have reiterated that they only answer to their leaders, which makes political and military control over them impossible.

Although Sadrs concerns about the government becoming a military or militia one in case the armed factions rise to power are realistic and justified, they contradict the actions of Sadr and other political leaders. Sadr, for example, has organized armed factions affiliated with him, integrated them into the security forces and won them over politically. Sadr spearheads Saraya al-Salam, which is an armed faction, and he is not any different from the remaining parties that circumvent the law to keep their armed factions and stay in the electoral race to try to attain or maintain political power.

Although it will be hard for PMU factions to have a clear path to participate in the elections, they can make it into the race through the backdoor  that is, through the political parties they are affiliated with.
September 3, 2016

Police target journalists on "Army Day"

Mustafa Akyol writes that the attempted military coup in Turkey on July 15 and subsequent crackdown by the Turkish government has opened a whole new chapter in the nations history. The followers of Fethullah Gulen, seen by most political groups and ideological camps as being behind the coup, have become the national 'enemy within.' This perspective, of course, has quite worrying consequences, for it leads to collective demonization and punishment, and the Gulen community includes many innocent people who are unaware of the groups darker side. How to uphold the rule of law in the face of hysteria over a powerful threat is a challenge that should concern everyone.

The collective demonization and punishment described by Akyol includes independent media and journalists. Even before July 15, Turkey ranked 151 out of 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index, which described a campaign by the Turkish government in which journalists are harassed, many have been accused of 'insulting the president' and the Internet is systematically censored. The regional context  the war in Syria and Turkeys offensive against the PKK [Kurdistan Workers Party] Kurds  is exacerbating the pressure on the media, which are also accused of terrorism.

The report adds that the media and civil society are nonetheless resisting [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogans growing authoritarianism, as is well-known to readers of Al-Monitors Turkey Pulse.

Reporters Without Borders noted less than one month after the coup attempt that Turkey had achieved the nefarious distinction of world leader in imprisoned journalists. And, believe it or not, it may be getting worse. Cengiz Candar reports that on Aug. 30, historically celebrated as Holiday of Victory or Army Day in Turkey, there were no such celebrations and parades, reflecting the grim and tense mood of a society dominated by accusation and purge. Instead of parades, the holiday ushered in another round of crackdowns on prominent journalists for alleged ties to the Gulenist movement. Candar writes, Replacing the fanfare of previous years was a surprise: a new wave of intimidation and suppression of independent journalism. The day began with police raids on the homes of various world-renowned journalists.

Candar explained that the failed coup merely provided the catalyst and context for the government to intensify its already wide-reaching campaign against independent media. The matter of suppressing freedom of press is getting very serious, Candar concludes after speaking with journalists now facing intimidation and harassment, including Hasan Cemal, a former editor-in-chief of the daily Cumhuriyet and the senior columnist of Milliyet. Cemal was summoned to police headquarters along with eight others for being at the Ozgur Gundem offices in May to display solidarity, months before the coup and the ban on the daily.

Turkish reset on Iran and Russia

Russia and Iran appear to benefit from a deterioration in US-Turkish relations over Syria, the US response to the failed coup and Ankaras request for the extradition of Fethullah Gulen.

Semih Idiz writes, The failed coup in July appears to have also strengthened Erdogans hand in Syria against the United States. Russia and Iran condemned the coup attempt outright, without waiting to see its outcome, which is the opposite of what the West did in Turkish eyes.

He added, The result is that many Turks consider Russia and Iran to be more reliable than Western countries. After Turkey reset its Syria policy, Ankara is also closer to Moscows and Tehrans positions regarding the future of Syria. Ankara is better poised now to get Russian and Iranian support for its approach to Syrian Kurdish aspirations.

Complicating matters further, Idiz notes, is the perception that the United States is reluctant to extradite Fethullah Gulen, the alleged mastermind of the attempted coup, has also resulted in a sharp increase in anti-American sentiments among Turkish government officials."

Fehim Tastekin argues that even if Erdogan is resetting Turkeys Syria policies, the next steps are all high risk. According to Erdogan, the military operations are to continue until the YPG [People's Protection Units] is no longer a threat," which will lead to further tension with the United States.

Tastekin explains, It won't be easy for Turkey-supported armed groups to hold the de facto buffer zone. Their capabilities and capacity are limited. They can advance or hold on to a position only if there is an army like the TSK [Turkish Armed Forces] behind them. If the buffer zone is to be secured by increasing TSK's presence on the ground, that would put Turkey in the position of occupier, ushering myriad of problems it would have to cope with both on the ground and in the international arena.  Building a town for refugees without coordinating with the Syrian administration will only consolidate Turkey's occupier status. Moreover, settling refugees in a risky area is bound to provoke humanitarian and legal arguments.

Aleppo: Battle for "undivided" Syria

An Iranian military source told Ali Hashem that the battle of Aleppo is not a battle for a city or a province, it is a battle to keep Syria undivided.

Hashem writes that despite the huge stakes in Aleppo for the Syrian government, Turkey is enjoying a Russian-Iranian blind eye and minimal Syrian condemnation, as the objectives of this specific battle serve their agendas: solidifying the stance of the Syrian regime and ending the ambitions of Syrian Kurds for a state. Never mind that in the long run, a Turkish victory with the help of opposition fighters could have dire consequences for the battle in the center of Aleppo.

A field commander told Hashem that if the Syrian government and its allies retake Aleppo, the province will be next.  The battle seems to be over a passage, but this passage is as important as the whole province.

Iran and Russia likely to expand "tactical" ties over Syria

Ali Omidi reports from Iran that despite historic tensions in Russia-Iran relations, the tactical alliance between Tehran and Moscow in support of the Syrian government is likely to grow. Strategic cooperation with governments that share Irans interests in Syria would not be difficult to forge, Omidi writes. Indeed, the decision to allow the Russians on Iranian soil was made by the Supreme National Security Council, consisting of representatives from all pillars of power in the country. Given this, the opposition expressed by 20 lawmakers in the 290-member parliament is insignificant by comparison and cannot be the reason for Russias sudden departure from Hamedan.
September 2, 2016

Americans really, really dislike their politicians. Just not enough to actually replace them, apparently.

Even as Democrat Hillary Clinton plummeted to Donald Trump-like depths of unpopularity this week, the quintessential Washington insider could take solace from a string of victories by establishment candidates who triumphed over voter ire. The results are likely to reinforce Clinton's preference for a careful, boring campaign at stark odds with her Republican rival's wild swings between presidential gravitas and red meat rhetoric.

RealClearPolitics average polling doesnt show much change from last week and still has Clinton ahead of Trump, 46.1% to 42%. But one thing that has dramatically changed over the past three weeks is Clintons unfavorable rating, which according to a recent ABC/Washington Post poll now stands at 59%  neck-and-neck with Trump's 60%.

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The poll also showed Clinton's favorable rating has dropped to 41%. Trump's favorable rating is up some, but still very low at 35%. As the drip-drip of email revelations continues, Clinton's standing with the public sinks deeper and deeper.

The FBI now says it has found 30 emails potentially related to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the US mission in Benghazi as part of the thousands of deleted emails that were recovered from Clintons server. Regardless of what those emails actually contain, Clinton and her team repeatedly stated that all work-related emails had been turned over to the government and that any deleted emails were only purged because they were personal. Sept. 13 is the deadline for the State Department to begin delivering some of those newly uncovered emails.

It also turns out that Clinton may have emailed classified information after leaving office, according to emails obtained by the Republican National Committee that deal with the "123 Agreement" between the United States and the United Arab Emirates over nuclear energy production. The Clinton camp is claiming that the Benghazi emails are duplicates even as it gears up for more revelations from WikiLeaks; organization leader Julian Assange has said the American press supports a demon in Clinton.

Trump, meanwhile, has yet to decide what kind of campaign he wants to run.

His press conference alongside Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto on Wednesday had him looking positively presidential. By the next day, however, the brash billionaire was back to his old self, promising to deport millions of illegal immigrants and getting Mexico to pay for a border wall.

Despite the continued bad press from Clinton's email woes, one thing could make her feel warm and fuzzy this week: Pretty much all of the establishment candidates won their primaries, putting the lie to the idea that voters are ready to "toss the bums out" regardless of who comes next.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., won with 55% of the vote to former conservative state Sen. Kelli Wards 35%. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., handily defeated homebuilder and Trump supporter Carlos Beruff despite repeatedly promising not to run again after losing in the presidential primary against Trump. In November, Rubio will face Democratic Rep. Patrick Murphy, who won 59% of the vote against former congressman Alan Grayson, a liberal firebrand.

Meanwhile, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz won her primary with 57% of the vote despite having to step down from her role as the Democratic National Committee chairwoman amid allegations she flagrantly rigged the primary against leftist Bernie Sanders. Her opponent, Sanders-backed Tim Canova, won 43% of the vote.

One outlier: After 24 years in Congress, Rep. Corrine Brown, D-Fla., lost her primary to Al Lawson, a former state senator from Tallahassee. The final tally was 39% to 48%. But Brown had been indicted on federal fraud charges in July, which more than likely cost her the election.

More good news for Clinton is shown by a recent Gallup poll that found that in 2016, 55.4% of Americans said they are thriving  up from 48.9% who said the same thing in 2008. Expect the Democrats to jump on this as a sign that everything is great under the Barack Obama administration.

Does all this mean the country is ready for a third Obama term? Well, not exactly. For one thing, the Gallup data seems to contradict a recent RealClearPolitics poll showing that 62.9% of voters believe the country is heading in the wrong direction. Another glaring problem with the Gallup findings: The poll was first conducted in 2008, so there is no pre-recession, pre-Obama data to compare it with. In other words, there was almost nowhere to go but up.

The presidential race is basically a referendum on the state of the country, but the candidates, the pollsters, even the voters themselves seem confused as to what state we're in. One thing's for sure: It's going to be an interesting two months until November.
Two correctional officers are in critical condition after being shot Saturday morning at the Fresno, California County Jail.

Juanita Davila and Toamalama Scanlan, both veteran officers, were shot in the head and neck area, according to the Fresno County Sheriff's Office. Davis is now in critical but stable condition.

The shooter is Thong Vang, of Fresno, 37, according to the sheriff's office. Vang is a convicted felon and known gang member.

Thong Vang (FCSO)

Vang was released from prison in 2014 after serving 16 years for raping multiple underage teen girls.

The incident began at around 8:30 a.m. when Vang entered the lobby of the jail where 15 people, including small children, were waiting for jail visitation.

According to the sheriff's office, Vang tried to cut the line and began to display "bizarre behavior" such as pacing back and forth.

When Davila and Scanlan approached Vang, a struggle ensued between them. Vang then pulled out a handgun and shot the officers, police said.

Another officer in the lobby called for help, and other correctional officers arrived in the lobby to secure the area.

One of the responding correctional officers, a lieutenant, fired shots at Vang. Vang also returned shots, but no one was struck.

At some point, officers deployed a Taser on Vang, but Vang still refused to surrender.

Vang attempted to flee by opening an unlocked door, which led to a jail records area. He stayed in a hallway until sheriff's deputies and Fresno police responded to the lobby.

The officers again ordered Vang to surrender, and Vang dropped his weapon.

Vang will be charged with attempted murder, according to the sheriff's office.

A motive behind the shooting wasn't released.
Millions of Americans will be celebrating Labor Day on Sept. 5, a day that marks the unofficial end of summer. It's celebrated with parades, parties and - of course - barbecues.

But why do we celebrate Labor Day and what is its history? Here's some information from the U.S. Department of Labor.

Always the first Monday in September, the Labor Day holiday is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of the American workers.

"It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country," the Labor Department said in its history of the holiday.

History of Labor Day

Labor Day was first created by the labor movement in the 19th century and was marked by cities and towns before becoming a federal holiday in 1894.

The day came about as massive changes were underway in American manufacturing. During the Industrial Revolution of the late 1800s, there were few restrictions on the treatment of workers and many people worked 12-hour days and seven days a week. Children - some as young as 5 - worked in factories and no one was guaranteed a minimum wage. Working conditions were often unsafe and there was no recourse for employees.

It was during this time that labor unions - groups formed to represent workers - grew in prominence. The unions organized strikes and rallies to protest poor working conditions and pay and, on Sept. 5, 1882, 10,000 workers in New York took time off without pay to participate in what's believed to be the first Labor Day parade in U.S. history.

The idea of celebrating American labor spread and states began passing legislation for similar holidays.

Then, on May 11, 1894, employees of the Pullman Palace Car Company in Chicago went on strike and union officials called for a boycott of the railway cars. Federal officials dispatched troops to Chicago, where the two groups clashed and more than a dozen workers were killed.

In the wake of the massacre, Congress passed an act making the first Monday in September of each year Labor Day, a legal holiday in the District of Columbia and the territories.

It was approved on June 28, 1894. All states later made the day an official holiday, with state, federal and most city and county offices closed.

Who founded Labor Day?

No one really knows who first suggested a day to celebrate American labor.

Some believe it was Peter J. McGuire, general secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and a cofounder of the American Federation of Labor. Others think it was Matthew Maguire, a machinist, not Peter McGuire, who founded the holiday.

Matthew Maguire, later the secretary of Local 344 of the International Association of Machinists in Paterson, N.J., reportedly proposed the holiday in 1882 while serving as secretary of the Central Labor Union in New York.

"The problem with declaring a single "founder" of Labor Day is that, at the time, no one realized that a new national holiday was being born. It was only after the fact that people tried to pinpoint a single founding father," said Linda Stinson, a former U.S. Department of Labor's historian. "So the historical conundrum seems to hinge on the fact that the two names sound alike and were probably mixed up in the common consciousness. Toss in the years of bitter rivalry between the American Federation of Labor and the Knights of Labor and, of course, you're going to have multiple heroes emerging in the legend of Labor Day."
Opinion / Columnist

The response to my article titled "Why those who are forcing Mthwakazi to join in the pseudo Revolution are wrong of 31st August 2016" by Mama Nomazulu Thatha missed the point and concentrated on the headline. It is for that reason that I am changing the headline and I will not define nor label the so called revolution currently happening in Zimbabwe. I will not call it pseudo, folly, pathetic, unplanned, chaotic, unco-ordinated or whatever negative term, I will leave it to Mama Thatha and the likes of her to define it to their hearts' content. What I will not change is the core message of my article, I will not change its comma nor it's full stop. I stand by it.I respect those who feel that people from Matabeleland should partake in the demonstrations currently taking place in Zimbabwe and I believe that those with differing view-points from mine can at least entertain them and allow themselves to be shifted from their linear thinking to something liberating and refreshing.My aim of expressing these somewhat unusual and uncompromising view-points is not to appease, denigrate nor to conform to the popular political discourse which I believe to be wrong and leading us back to old and oppressive politics. The politics of appeasement does not work with me and therefore calling me names or labelling me a tribalist does not work anymore and this is the position which most people from Matabeleland should reach.Let me start by saying this, I am not against the demonstrations and I am not against the removal of Mr Robert Mugabe and his government. Therefore, those who from the East who feel the need to demonstrate they should go ahead and do so, we will cheer them on, what I am against is blindly leading the people from Matabeleland into a trap. As long as I live and see the trap I will always warn my brothers and sisters. Today Zimbabwe is what it is because of tribalism and very few people from maShonaland do acknowledge this reality, so tell me what will make this country not to revert to its core mode of tribalism after Mugabe. Tribalism is the elephant in the room in Zimbabwe and we should be able to state who is tribal in Zimbabwe, the truth is known, it is the government of Robert Mugabe which is tribal against the citizens of Matabeleland. If this government did not commit tribal sins against the people of Matabeleland we all know that Mugabe would have handed over power to Tswangirayi, but because he is too afraid of his tribal sins, he is prepared to hold the whole nation to ransom until he goes to the grave.If people want the people the of Matabeleland to participate in these demonstrations, they should first show how the tribalism against them will be eradicated post Mugabe epoch, without this they should go hang. Any leader from Matabeleland seeking to lead these demonstrations without this clarity or extracting some consents from those who are pushing them to get involved they should be told in no uncertain term that their position in untenable and a sell-out position.You will hear those who purport to be educated tell you about the electoral reforms, misgovernance, lack of rule of law, economic mismanagement, corruption etc as the causes of the calamitous state of affairs in Zimbabwe. They are wrong, the cause is tribalism and no one is currently tackling this scourge and why would anybody from Matabeleland in his or her sane state of mind help those who are against his/her interests. Once beaten twice shy. We have seen it before; it would be the height of irresponsibility for anyone from Matabeleland to encourage people to work against their aspirations, with the blind hope that they will reap positive fruits post demonstrations, this is sheer madness having lived in Zimbabwe and experienced its reality.These so called revolution as it is currently configured would not change anything for the people of Matabeleland. I am not saying these truths because I am brave, absolutely not, I am also afraid of the cios, but I am saying these because we cannot allow our people to fall into a gully and bottomless abyss.Ask yourself this simple question; Is there a time when the people of Matabeleland have ever been friendly to ZANU PF and Mugabe? The answer is none, but today the people of Matabeleland are viewed as if they are cowards and as if they are in support of the system, how insulting is that? When the gukurahundi genocide was committed against them they were alone, when Shona teachers were planted in their region they were alone, when the police officers were planted in their region they were alone, when the Shona people got preference in all sectors of employment in their region they were alone, when the government employs only Shona speakers at border posts which are situated in Matabeleland they are alone, when their children crossed the borders to the neighbouring countries they were alone, not a single Shona person ever lifted even the index finger in disgust. And the current so called revolution does not seek to address these ills, it just wants to remove Mugabe and install another Mugabe. 36 years of suffering for the people of Matabeleland is long enough, but 72 years is unacceptable, any change without the fundamental structural changes will ensure that the people of Matabeleland are subjugated for the next 36 years which will make it 72 years of subjugation under the Shona extremists. This is not acceptable and those advocating for this should face the music, whether they are Matabele or otherwise.In my previous article I stated that right now it is not the right time for the people of Matabeleland to get involved, I reiterate in this article that it is still not the right time. The people of Matabeleland should be doing what they should be doing right now, that is re-organising and stop this short-termism mentality which will lead them into a cul-de-sac.Some may ask, when would be the right time and what signs shall we see?, the truth is that when the right time comes you will not ask this question, this would be the time of no return a defining moment which will set the events of the next 20 years or so. Just be prepared, the time is near, never again work against your aspirations, against the aspirations and the future of your children.----------Thulani Nkala
Pauley Perrette

FILE - This July 15, 2010 file photo shows actress Pauley Perrette from the television show NCIS arrives at the Pacific Design Center prior to taking part in a charity dog event benefiting in West Hollywood, Calif. Authorities say a man attacked Perrette in front of her Hollywood home, punching her in the face several times. The actress tweeted that she thought she was going to die Thursday night, Nov. 12, 2015. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel,File)

(Richard Vogel)

Television star, Pauley Perrette who stars in the hit CBS Televison show 'NCIS' made her way back to her hometown of Equality, Alabama to help open the brand new Equality Fire Station.

Perrette known to millions as the offbeat forensic scientist, Abby Sciuto on the show, helped her father and Coosa County Commissioner Paul Perrett, welcome the new fire station to the area.

Dozens of fans piled into the hull of the fire station as she made her way to the stage after a brief introduction from her father. The brand new fire station in Equality was opened during a dedication ceremony on Saturday morning.

Fans shared there pictures with Perrette on social media:
Namon O'Neal "Duck" Hoggle died in Selma last week, at the age of 81. His obit in the Selma Times-Journal told of his success in business, and his many friends.

Dallas County Sheriff Harris Huffman served as an honorary pallbearer at his funeral. So did Probate Judge Kimbrough Ballard.

Hoggle, you see, was an upstanding member of his community.

You'd be hard-pressed to know he was a suspect in a civil rights slaying. He was the last of the men thought to have bashed in the skull of Unitarian Universalist minister Rev. James Reeb in 1965. Reeb was killed for standing up for black people, for standing up to the Selma powers that be.

Three white men -- Hoggle, his brother and a man named Elmer Cook - were charged in the brutal swing-away style murder. It took an all-white jury in a kangaroo court 90 minutes to set them all free.

The brother of a defense witness served as a juror, but the prosecution did not object. The county sheriff entered the jury room during deliberations, but nobody said boo.

Witnesses who put those men at the scene of the crime were not called or not allowed to testify. The prosecution was half-hearted and the judge stilted. The jury put race over justice.

The best description of the beating may have come in an account by Jack Mendelsohn in 1966. In it he quotes Rev. Clark Olsen, who accompanied Reeb and the Rev. Orloff Miller as they left a black-owned Selma cafe and were approached by a group of white men.

"Olsen looked around just in time to see one of the whites swing a three-foot club or pipe at Jim's head just above the left ear," Mendelsohn wrote. "'It was a two-handed swing in the style of a left-handed batter,'" Olsen recalls, "and the man's face was intense and vicious." At that moment both Olsen and Miller were set upon by flailing fists. Miller dropped to the ground in the fetal fashion taught to civil rights demonstrators, and Olsen went down from the blows on his head and chest, his spectacles flying. Jim toppled over backward. Olsen remembers his attackers saying: 'Here's how it feels to be a nigger down here.' After a few wild kicks at their prone victims, they scattered. There was not a soul on the street."

It was a two-handed swing in the style of a left-handed batter.

You can almost hear the crunch. You can almost feel the frenzied drive to University Hospital in Birmingham, the rush to treat his massive skull fracture and brain damage. The Rev. Martin Luther King prayed for Reeb, but he went into cardiac arrest the next morning, and died two days after the beating.

Another victim of the insanity called Alabama's status quo.

Stanley and Namon Hoggle and Elmer Cook, from left, and Robert Radford, investigator. N(AP Photo/Horace Cort, File)

You can almost hear the sobs of his family. You can almost hear the cheers that erupted in the courtroom as that all-white jury set the men free. The sound of 1965 Alabama justice.

Reeb was dead at the age of 38. And Duck Hoggle was a businessman, a pillar of the community, a guy who -- as Dallas County District Attorney Michael Jackson put it -- "became a friend to a lot of so-called dignitaries."

Hoggle would die a half century after Reeb, only to be carried to eternity, as through life, by the Dallas County law.

The FBI tried to reopen the Reeb case a few years ago, but it went nowhere. Witnesses were dead. All the other suspects were dead. History was written by a tainted jury in a tainted courtroom in a tainted Alabama county.

And history now calls Hoggle a beloved entrepreneur. And not a killer.

These days white America wonders why the justice system is so often distrusted in the black community, why there is such anger and resentment toward police and the courts. They believe justice is blind.

Because they never learned the lessons of Selma.
Tom Brokaw made "The Greatest Generation" a household term for the men and women who survived the Great Depression, won World War II and made America a super power.

Ed Buckbee's new book, "The Greatest Space Generation," chronicles the pioneers, mainly based in Huntsville, who took America to even greater heights -- to the moon and back on the Saturn V -- the first and only rocket so far to take man outside Earth's orbit.

As a new generation of Huntsville rocket scientists works toward a mission to Mars, Buckbee's book looks back in great detail at how Wernher von Braun's Huntsville team accomplished the greatest engineering feat of the 20th century.

"We sent (The Saturn V) to the moon nine times and it never failed. I wanted to record that story," said Buckbee, who was a public affairs officer for von Braun's NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center team and the first director of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center.

"The Greatest Space Generation," includes essays by 15 members of the von Braun team who describe in great detail how they accomplished the seemingly impossible.

It has something for everyone: Technical details that will fascinate engineers and space enthusiasts; a glimpse at the national pride that came with the "smoke and fire show" that Huntsville showcased to the world; and a look inside the intangibles of von Braun's legendary management style and bigger-than-life personality that sold the ambitious plan to his team and the country.

"Ed Buckbee has woven the tale of the Greatest Space Generation and Wernher von Braun into a readable and important historical narrative," wrote Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt in the book's foreward. "He has added significant new insights and guidance for a following generation that will win the next geopolitical battle in space and then take Americans to Mars."

Those working on the Space Launch System NASA will soon aim at Mars, and those who will explore deep space stand on the shoulders of thousands of gritty and brilliant scientists, engineers and support staff that build the Saturn V, Buckbee said.

Deborah Barnhart, CEO of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, wrote a chapter on the Mars Generation, those who are now attending Space Camp in Huntsville, surrounded by reminders of the accomplishments of their predecessors.

"They build robots, program computers to connect the globe, make movies with their phones and play electronic games with people around the planet they've never met. And they can do it all at once," Barnhart wrote. "Space Campers I know are already thinking about what their first words from Mars will be. Probably in 140 characters or less!"

Smoke and Fire

Anyone who lived in Huntsville in the 60s can tell stories of windows rattling, sometimes breaking, when NASA would test the massive Saturn I and Saturn V engines on Redstone Arsenal.

Buckbee was there for at least 40 of those tests, often taking VIPs and media to see, and feel, the pure energy of 160 million horsepower harnessed and on display on one of the massive test stands on Redstone, then perhaps the tallest structures in Alabama.

"It really scared the daylights out of me and others too," Buckbee said. "I could feel it like a hammer on my chest and could feel the heat coming up my leg."

He recounts a story of a Life Magazine photographer sent to cover one of the early engine tests. Buckbee said he tried to prepare the man for the coming shockwave of sheer force, heat and power.

The veteran journalist brushed him off, saying, "Son, I've covered wars, floods, tornadoes, every kind of destructive event you can think of. I think I can handle this little rocket engine test firing."

When the shockwave hit, "That Life Magazine photographer knocked over the camera and started running across the field. He didn't get one photograph," Buckbee said.

Grand vision, simple motivations

The book is filled with insights about von Braun, from the strong relationship he built with President John F. Kennedy, spurred by Kennedy's own visit to Huntsville to experience one of those powerful engine tests, to the notes he would write to his managers. There are also looks into his human quirks.

Buckbee said von Braun never carried cash with him, and often had to have one of his staff pay for his meal if they had lunch at a diner on one of his many speaking engagements.

Whomever paid for the meal would bring the receipt, usually just a few dollars, to Bonnie Holmes, von Braun's trusted assistant. She's write them a personal check, signed by von Braun.

"The thing is, nobody every cashed those checks. They were all over the walls in building 4200. Poor Bonnie couldn't balance Dr. von Braun's checkbook."

The success of the Saturn V team can be attributed both to von Braun and company's grand vision, as well as von Braun's simple motivations.

"Remember, today's work must be done today," von Braun would often remind his team, resulting in many late nights.

And the simple, but critical reminder: "Make sure your part works."

Von Braun's Mars plan

Some may not realize that von Braun not only dreamed of going on to Mars, he had a plan to do it using a Saturn V outfitted with a nuclear upper stage. He had plans to build a space station, then a moon base, and 50 Saturn Is and 100 Saturn Vs to make trips to Mars over a 25-year period, beginning in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

"The nuclear stage was actually ground tested at Area 51," Buckbee said.

But with the Vietnam war raging and social unrest of the time, von Braun's pitch to Congress in 1969 went nowhere.

Had Kennedy not been assassinated in 1963, "a lot of us believed he would have agreed to commit to a Mars landing after the moon," Buckbee said.

Asked what von Braun would think about today's mission to go to Mars, Buckbee said "He would be disappointed that we have not been there. He was confident we had that capability. He had thought it through."

Buckbee said he wrote "The Greatest Space Generation" to make sure the details of their achievements were not lost to history. As of last week, Buckbee said, he had attended the funerals of four Apollo-era rocket team members within 10 days.

"They are fading fast. That is another reason the book was really overdue."

Want the book?

"The Greatest Space Generation" is available at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center gift shop, or online at www.spacecampstore.com or on Amazon.com.

Haskins takes a weekly look at points of pride statewide. Email your suggestions to shaskins@al.com, or tweet them to @Shelly_Haskins using #AlabamaProud
Bush Radio 89.5 fm is the Mother of Community Radio in Africa. Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Bush Radio exists with the sole purpose to uplift, develop and educate the communities it serves. To find out more about Bush Radio go to www.bushradio.co.za, where you can also listen on-line. Please share your comments on our news: feedback@bushradio.co.za
As Hong Kong heads into contentious polls, filmmaker San San F Young explains how discontent is rising among the youth.

Hong Kong  On February 8, 2016, the first day of the Chinese Lunar New Year, violent clashes between police and young protesters erupted in the city of Hong Kong, with surprising aggression and subsequent injuries on both sides.

It was triggered by authorities attempting to close unlicensed street food stalls, a traditional part of the citys New Year celebrations. With tensions high around what many see as attacks on local identity since the 1997 handover back to China, many youths gathered to defend Hong Kong culture.

IN PICTURES: Hong Kong through the eyes of rooftop rebels

FAST FACTS: Hong Kongs Legislative Council election First major election since the 2014 Umbrella Movement

Legislative Council (LegCo) has 70 seats: 35 are elected by voters; the rest by people connected to different sectors

Before 2014, LegCo was split between pro-Beijing and the traditional pro-democracy blocs

New, young, more radical localist candidates born out of the Umbrella Movement are running in these elections for the first time

Localist parties want to maintain Hong Kongs values, action, self-determination and in some cases, independence

Youth support for independence has grown. A July Chinese University of Hong Kong poll found that among people aged 15-24, 39 percent supported independence, while 26 percent opposed it

The government has banned six pro-independence candidates from running The incumbent pan-democrats have 27 seats.

The pro-democracy bloc needs to maintain one-third to retain its veto power.

Not since the peaceful mass protests of the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement of 2014 had so many young people gathered to make a stand, but two years of mounting frustrations meant that when the clashes began, the notoriously well-behaved local youths were now willing to fight back.

What ensued was a crackdown on the young: CCTV in wide operation, weeks of arrests, undercover operatives and heavy police patrols. The authorities then increasingly focused on politically-active student groups and the youth-led localist parties  groups who call for Hong Kong peoples interests to be put first and the territorys autonomy and for distinct cultural identity to be defended against Beijings influence.

As the city heads to the polls to elect Hong Kongs Legislative Council, or LegCo, rifts within the pro-democratic camp are symptomatic of growing discord about how best to counter the strength of the pro-government candidates, many of whom are seen as conduits for mainland Chinas political interference.

The rooftoppers

High above the struggles below, I focused my film on one element of this youth discontent: Hong Kongs thrill-seeking rooftoppers; Airin and her friends, young urban explorers who elude security to climb the citys vertical skyscrapers.

Rooftopping and urban exploring is the exploration of any open or abandoned space. In this dense vertical city of over seven million, spaces hidden in the famous skyline are often the only ones left to explore.

For rooftoppers worldwide, conquering buildings and breaking the rules is part of the sport, but for these friends in Hong Kong, defying the authorities is informed by a deeper rebellion.

Sharing videos and photos of their jaw-dropping adventures has already made them internet stars, but also allowed them to use their fame to make political statements.

Airins past images have gone viral, like one of her rooftopping above Umbrella Movement protesters, wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and waving a colonial flag  a statement of pride in Hong Kongs distinct cultural identity.

Reclaiming the city from big business, big money and Beijing

Taking part in such a dramatic activity is also a rejection of traditional Hong Kong Chinese cultural expectations. Great emphasis in Hong Kong is placed on filial duties, studies, career and financial status, whereas rooftoppings ethos is that of freedom and a rejection of commerciality, authority and ownership.

It is also one of the few things young people can do for free.

The cost of living in the city is among the highest in the world, and the near-impossibility of owning ones own flat means that the majority of Hong Kongs youth live with their parents well into adulthood  creating resentment towards this restriction and the difficulties of fulfilling a basic need for personal space.

ALSO WATCH: People and Power  Hong Kong: Occupy Central

Sneaking onto rooftops is a statement of reclaiming the city from big business, big money and Beijing.

These rooftoppers are informed by an energy which propels all of Hong Kongs politically-awakened youth, from musicians to artists, filmmakers to activists.

The citys young people are part of a generation who have grown up with the fight for democratic reform alongside worsening economic prospects and increasing worries of eroding civil liberties. For Hong Kongs historically well-behaved teens, rooftoppers  like other young creatives  showcase their frustrations by celebrating disobedience.

Filming in the days which followed the February clashes, we climbed a tower in Mong Kok  one of the central protest areas  with Airin and others, and watched from the ledge as police vans crisscrossed the district below. The rooftoppers do not condone violence, but they are convinced that the old occupy tactics of the Umbrella Revolution will no longer work, and that more radical action is necessary.

Like many politically-awakened youth, their experiences from the Umbrella Movement and their distrust of the police have built to such a degree that even though they dont plan to join protest events, they carry salt water and bike helmets in their backpacks in the belief that they could easily find themselves in the wrong place and be pepper-sprayed or threatened with batons.

Moving backwards

There is genuine fear among Hong Kongs young. In recent years, they have seen their economic prospects dampened and their sense of national identity changed, with TV, schools and even Pokemon characters switching from Cantonese to Mandarin.

Theyve been threatened with proposed legislation to make sedition more easily prosecutable, to limit online freedoms, and to insert patriotic education into the national curriculum to teach students about the love of the party and a history which glosses over the Tiananmen protests and the millions who starved under Mao.

A criticism that is being voiced is that Hong Kong is one of the worlds few societies which is moving backwards, heading towards even less freedom.

ALSO WATCH: 101 East  Hong Kongs Missing Booksellers

Insults of So Communist! are used against any heavy-handed government initiatives, and slogans like Reclaim Hong Kong or We Are Hong Kong are appearing more and more, scrawled on walls, or in comments on social media. Distrust in the media is at an all-time high, with most local youth now looking for news on social media and new online channels.

The Umbrella Movement managed to mobilise over 100,000 young people, but the Hong Kong government failed to engage with people, made no concessions and many youth leaders were taken to court. Numerous incidents of alleged police brutality against protesters have been widely circulated online and galvanised many more into action. All of this has led to the increased popularity for more radical politics.

There were signs of heightened emotions before the clashes of this year.

A film titled Ten Years was released in late 2015, featuring five dystopian visions of Hong Kongs future  visions of a city where officials operate like gangsters, the word local is banned, taxi drivers get into trouble for speaking Cantonese, brainwashed Red Guard youths report on their parents and people self-immolate in front of the British Embassy in a cry for help.

The film was banned on the mainland and labelled a thought virus by one pro-Beijing newspaper, but was so popular in Hong Kong it out-performed Star Wars in the cinema in which it was released and went on to win Best Film at the Hong Kong Film Awards. There were reports of cinema-goers so moved, they were crying in the cinema.

Rising fears, diminishing freedom

Currently, the government has raised more concern in their attempts to control the anti-establishment wave, banning notable localist candidates from standing in the September 4, 2016 LegCo elections, prompting criticisms of political censorship.

Localist and pro-democracy political leaflets have also been censored, with those parties then releasing tongue-in-cheek leaflets, with stars and moons covering banned words or with statements such as: My political views are_________.

Attempts to reign in youth parties seem to only give rise to more fears. A self-perpetuating cycle of government inflexibility and badly-executed controls is creating more fear about diminishing freedoms and is seen as proof of Beijing influence  all the while, drawing more to rebellion.

Q&A: Joshua Wong  The Hong Kong teenager who confronted China

In Mong Kok, one older activist described what he believed to be the difference between the 2014 protests and the events of 2016: When police fired gas canisters at Umbrella protesters, he said, most young people fled or helped friends escape the area. But in 2016, when word got out that police were moving in with gas and riot gear, defiant youths from all groups and affiliations deliberately came into the battle, willing to be hurt and risk up to 10 years in jail.

As rooftopper and photographer Ben says in our film, Hong Kongs Rooftop Rebels, we need to ask ourselves: What is so wrong in our society that young people feel compelled to take these risks? With ongoing questions surrounding the banning of localist candidates and allegations of the intimidation of pro-democratic candidates, the results of the LegCo elections are unlikely to ease the divides.

You can follow San San F Young on Twitter: @ssfyoung
His vitriol and demonisation of undocumented immigrants forecloses any constructive dialogue on the issue.

Lauren Carasik is the Director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Western New England University School of Law.

Anticipation that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump might moderate his position on immigration in a long-awaited pivot to the general election was extinguished on August 31 when he laid out his 10-point immigration plan in a fiery speech in Arizona.

Instead of a more compassionate and humane platform, he reverted to his fulminating and nativist rhetoric, vowing to deport two million criminal aliens immediately and rejecting any path towards legalisation for the nations estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants, who would have to return to their home country and wait their turn in the long immigration queue.

It was unclear how aggressively Trump would pursue law-abiding immigrants, though they would be pushed further into the shadows, including those brought to the country as children who have never known another home.

Mexico visit

The speech stood in stark contrast to Trumps hastily arranged visit to Mexico to meet with President Enrique Pena Nieto hours earlier.

The trip was presumably a gambit to appear adept at diplomacy, while appealing to Latinos and moderates put off by his previous disparagement of Mexico and its people and his hard line on immigration.

During the seemingly smooth visit, Trump appeared relatively muted and conciliatory, reading from a prepared text at the joint news conference.

There is not a consensus in the US about how to deal with those who are not legally in the country, and reasonable minds can differ about a sound and humane policy without being xenophobic. by

But the cordial visit was quickly overshadowed by an unfolding dispute between the candidate and the Mexican president about whether the pair discussed who would pay for the wall Trump has long promised to build to protect the countrys southern border- at Mexicos expense.

Trump insisted the issue of who would bear the costs did not come up, while Pena Nieto said he made clear from the outset that Mexico would not pay for a wall.

If Trump intended to burnish his credentials at statecraft, Pena Nietos later comments that the candidates policies pose a huge threat to Mexico was an inauspicious start.

The facts on the ground

In the speech, Trump doubled down on his vilification of immigrants, featuring the anguish of families whose loved ones had been murdered by undocumented immigrants.

They are indeed tragic stories, but they are hardly representative. To bolster the point about the criminality of immigrants that has long been part of his nativist grand narrative, Trump cited the misleading statistic that 25,000 immigrants?have been arrested for homicides.

While that claim is technically true, it covered a period from 1955 to 2010. By comparison, more than 11,000 people born in the United States were arrested for homicide in 2010 alone.

And multiple studies have found that immigrants  both those here legally and those without legal status  commit crimes at a lower rate than people born in the US.

Even if the claims of malfeasance were accurate, the appropriate response would be focusing efforts on deporting criminals and security threats  the very policies the Obama administration has aggressively pursued, along with targeting recent border crossers (PDF).

And Trumps insinuation about the deleterious impact of immigrants is contradicted by studies finding that they actually make communities safer, not less so. Unsurprisingly, the speech won praise from white nationalists.

Aside from crime, Trump lamented the record pace of immigration and its impact on [the nations] jobs, wages, housing, schools, tax bills and general living conditions.

OPINION: Fear of a black and brown America

He claimed that illegal immigration costs our country more than $113bn a year, blaming migrants for at least some of the countrys economic woes, though they comprise only a tiny fraction of the population  a divisive tactic Trump has long employed to stoke resentment.

That figure, which is derived from a group advocating for limits on immigration, contradicts other studies finding that undocumented immigrants yield a net positive for the economy, by ignoring contributions like the nearly $12bn a year they generate in state and local taxes.

Right way to deal with immigration

Meanwhile, immigration from Mexico has been slowing, not growing at a record clip. Between 2009 and 2014, there was a net loss of 140,000 people, as many Mexicans returned home to reunite with families.

Also, apprehensions of Mexicans at the southern border are decreasing, according to a US Customs and Border Protection Report for 2015 (PDF).

OPINION: How Donald Trump could make America great again

Trump reiterated his position on Muslim migrants, recast from a total ban to extreme vetting, that includes an ideological test intended to weed out those who do not share the countrys liberal values, including religious freedom, and womens and gay rights.

Under the policy, Trump said previously, Those who do not believe in our constitution, or who support bigotry and hatred, will not be admitted for immigration into the country.

It is a standard some observers quipped that Trump himself would be hard-pressed to pass.

There is not a consensus in the US about how to deal with those who are not legally in the country, and reasonable minds can differ about a sound and humane policy without being xenophobic.

But Trumps vitriol and demonisation of undocumented immigrants forecloses any constructive dialogue on the issue.

It also ignores the logistical challenges and financial costs of the deportation he promises, the civil liberties his plan would threaten, and the devastation it would wreak upon hardworking families who have long contributed to the nations diverse social fabric and economy.

If the country really wants to uphold its vaunted ideals of tolerance and compassion, the massive roundup, detention and deportation of immigrants defies those goals.

Lauren Carasik is a clinical professor of law and the Director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Western New England University School of Law.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
China needs to reassure other states on its commitment to take strong leadership for coherence and effectiveness.

J Berkshire Miller is the director of the Council on International Policy.

This week, China is hosting the G20 Summit Hangzhou and has the worlds attention as world leaders gather to discuss the shared challenges of spurring economic growth and avoiding any tendencies for economies to turn to protectionist moves that stifle global trade.

Indeed, the G20 has for several years now replaced other global fora  including the G7  as the premier venue to discuss global economic issues and chart common positions.

The summit also provides China with another high-profile venue  following up on its hosting of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation in 2014  to enhance its international status as a global leader in shaping economic discussions.

Challenges on the agenda

But, as China hosts the leaders summit this week, Beijings G20 moment is overshadowed by a number of concerns regarding the stability of the global economic recovery and the strength of international cooperation to mitigate future crises.

One of Chinas key priorities during the summit is to discuss the reform of global governance bodies that appear to be ill-equipped to deal with the barrage of shocks to the worlds economy.

The worlds premier economic fora  such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organization and a range of regional development banks  have been slow to take on governance reforms and have been unable, or unwilling, to adapt to the dramatic changes in global wealth distribution over the past two decades.

The G20 has shown its strength mainly during crises and has been effective when in reactive mode. by

During Chinas host year, they have attempted to hammer home this point and their establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) was largely born out their frustration with the poor allocation of shares in current institutions, such as the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

Indeed, the United States-Japan-led ADB has more than 30 percent of its capital flows coming from Tokyo and Washington, while Beijing contributes a mere six percent.

Despite lingering concerns in the US and Japan, among other countries, about the role of the AIIB  there is shared goal from the G20 on the need for infrastructure development as an element for sustainable growth.

Risks ahead

Aside from stagnancy on global governance reform and the remaining divide on the AIIB, the effectiveness of the G20 meetings has been blunted as a result of the reluctance of members states to sign on to a joint action, and rely more on the forum as a venue for shared practices and to gain acceptance or understanding of their national economic and financial policies.

Essentially, the G20 has shown its strength mainly during crises and has been effective when in reactive mode.

Where it has lacked strength or purpose thus far is its ability to achieve real consensus on proactive and effective measures to mitigate future financial risks and potential crises.

Another ongoing risk to the integrity of the G20 grouping is the intense growth of regionalism on issues of trade and investment.

REPORTERS NOTEBOOK: Chinas Hangzhou prepares to host G20 summit

This is largely an outgrowth over the frustration of the stagnancy of liberalising global trade and failure of repeated trade negotiations at the WTO mired in dispute since the Doha Round.

But the regionalism is especially acute and important for China as host, due to the fact that some of the most ambitious initiatives are coming out of Asia.

The region is already covered in layers of bilateral and multilateral free-trade agreements, but now there is the push for large bloc groups such as the US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Chinese-backed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.

Additionally, China has focused its investment approach regionally through the AIIB and its One Belt, One Road initiative.

Chinas domestic issues

But aside these challenges, one other reason why this summit is especially critical for China is due to its own vulnerabilities as it transitions to more balanced growth.

Beijing is struggling to search for sustainable solutions to issues of overcapacity and moving from an export-first economy to a steadier equilibrium that spurs domestic consumption, especially among Chinas rapidly growing middle class.

Unfortunately, it appears that Beijing does not want to address what it terms as national policy issues during the G20.

In the lead-up to this weeks summit, the state-run China Daily remarked in an opinion piece that there was no need for the G20 to discuss overcapacity and insisted that it should be a domestic, rather than global, issue and should be resolved within the concerned countrys pricing and trade policy framework.

For China to end this weeks summit with a positive G20 moment, it will need to reassure other states of its commitment to take strong leadership going forward that makes the institution coherent and effective.

Beijing also needs to demonstrate the importance of boosting global growth and focusing attention back on liberalising trade, rather than focusing too much talk on regionalism.

J Berkshire Miller is the director of the Council on International Policy and is a fellow on East Asia for the EastWest Institute.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
The former hurricane is expected to threaten the coast from the Carolinas to Connecticut in the coming days.

It was always expected that Hurricane Hermine would gain energy over the Gulf of Mexico, and bring damaging winds and flooding rain to the state of Florida.

Usually, such cyclones weaken as they lose their source of energy, the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and interact with the land.

For a time, this is what happened. But once Hermine crossed the Florida Panhandle and reemerged into the Atlantic, it reaped the benefit of passing over the northern end of the Gulf Stream.

Off the coast of North Carolina and Virginia, sea surface temperatures are currently between 26 and 28C, some two degrees above normal, and high enough to support tropical cyclone development.

Consequently, Post-Tropical Cyclone Hermine, which has sustained winds of 100 kilometres an hour, will intensify. Winds will increase to at least 120kph  a Category 1 hurricane on the five point Saffir-Simpson scale.

It is unclear whether the US National Hurricane Center will reclassify Hermine as a hurricane at a later date. Regardless, the impact on the eastern seaboard will be considerable.

Hermines northeastward movement is the result of steering by a trough of low pressure. That is now moving away, leaving Hermine somewhat marooned in the Atlantic for the next few days.

During this period, low pressure and strong winds will result in massive waves of up to eight metres, and a significant enhancement of water levels. These could be up to 1.5 metres above the tidal norm.

The coastal region from the Carolinas, northwards through Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut to Cape Cod will be affected by stormy weather and a significant risk of coastal inundation and erosion.

Fortunately, no features in the upper atmosphere are expected to interact with Hermine in such a way that would cause it to develop any further.

This makes it a very different system from Hurricane Sandy which brought devastation to this coast in October 2012.

Sandy was another storm system which lost hurricane status but was reinvigorated by warm Gulf Stream waters. It, too, was a large system which was driven northwards.

Unlike Hermine, however, Sandy interacted with a frontal system from the northwest and was driven onshore by an area of high pressure across the North Atlantic.

Sandy also coincided with spring high tides, which made the coastal inundation and erosion far worse.

It is expected that Hermine will remain far enough offshore not to have a major impact on the coastline, although there is still some uncertainty in its likely behaviour before the polar jet stream dips southwards later this week and hauls Hermine further out into the Atlantic.

Nevertheless, tropical storm warnings remain in place along the coast and the area is best avoided during this period.
Obama tries to downplay unusual incident between US and Chinese officials upon his arrival in Hangzhou for G20 Summit.

US President Barack Obama has tried to downplay a row between US and Chinese officials upon his arrival in China for the G20 Summit, saying the incident should not be overblown.

Obamas last scheduled trip to China before leaving office got off to an awkward start on Saturday soon after Air Force One landed in the eastern city of Hangzhou, where leaders of the worlds top economies are convening.

After the plane parked on the tarmac, a Chinese official attempted to prevent US national security adviser Susan Rice from walking to Obamas motorcade as she crossed a media rope line, speaking angrily to her before a US Secret Service agent stepped between the two.

Rice responded but her comments were inaudible to journalists standing underneath the wing of Air Force One.

Our country, our airport

It was unclear if the official, whose identity was not immediately clear, knew that Rice was a senior official and not a journalist. The same official shouted at a White House press aide who was instructing foreign reporters on where to stand as they recorded Obama disembarking from the plane.

This is our country. This is our airport, the official said in English, pointing and speaking angrily with the aide.

Al Jazeeras Adrian Brown, reporting from Hangzhou, said it was a curious incident as China has tried everything to pull off a trouble-free G20 summit, its highest profile event of the year.

It has millions of volunteers on hand and it has spent $100m on the venue where the G20 Summit is going to be taking place, Brown said. It is what happens when you have this sort of regimented and in many ways stifling security we currently have here in Hangzhou.

Chinese airport officials at first also declined to provide Air Force One with airport steps on the tarmac upon its arrival.

Eventually a set of steps were found. Apparently there was a mechanical problem with the first set of steps. But the real problem came when the US officials got involved in the altercation with that Chinese official on the tarmac, Brown said.

US-China tensions

China is looking to cement its global standing and avoid acrimony over a long list of tensions with Washington.

Addressing the incident at the airport during a news conference in Hangzhou on Sunday, Obama said: I wouldnt overcrank the significance.

We think its important that the press have access to the work that we are doing, that they have the ability to answer questions. And we dont leave our ideals and values behind when we take those trips.

It can cause some friction. Its not the first time it has happened. It doesnt just happen in China; it happens in other countries where we travel. I think that this time, though, the seams were showing a little more.

Obama added that his talks with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping a day earlier had been extremely productive.
Bus collided with fuel tanker and burst into flames in southern Afghanistan, killing at least 35 people, officials say.

At least 35 people were killed in Afghanistan when a fuel tanker collided with a passenger bus, causing a massive explosion, according to local officials.

Sundays incident happened on a major highway connecting the southern province of Kandahar with the capital city of Kabul.

Bismillah Afghanmal, provincial governor of Zabul province where the accident happened, told the AFP news agency that the passenger bus was on its way from Kandahar to Kabul when it collided with a fuel tanker in the Jildak area of Zabul.

In the accident, 35 people were killed and more than 20 others were wounded, he said.

Ghulam Jilani Farahi, deputy police chief of Zabul, said authorities could identify only six bodies and the rest were completely burned, adding that the bus was carrying more than 60 people.

The driver of the oil tanker and a passenger died immediately after the truck burst into flames during the early morning hours on Sunday, officials said.

The Kabul-Kandahar highway passes through areas prone to conflict and many drivers are known to drive at high speed in the hope of avoiding attacks.

Risky roads

Afghanistan has some of the worlds most dangerous roads, often in dilapidated condition, and traffic rules are seldom enforced.

Many in the country rely on old and rickety passenger vehicles, meaning that high casualty accidents are common.

In May, at least 73 people were killed when two passenger buses and an oil tanker burst into flames in a head-on collision in eastern Ghazni province, in one of the countrys worst road accidents.

The World Bank last November signed off a $250m grant to upgrade roads crossing Afghanistans Hindu Kush mountains, crucial trade links that are often closed in winter by snow.

Insecurity is growing across Afghanistan as the Taliban presses on with a 15-year battle against the Western-backed government.

Afghan troops have struggled to stave off nationwide attacks since NATO forces ended their combat mission at the end of 2014.
Media and activists report gunfire and blaze at jail where politicians are held, as anti-government protests continue.

A prison in Ethiopia where high-profile politicians are held has caught fire and gunshots were later heard there, according to media and opposition activists in a country gripped by a wave of protests.

The jail, Qilinto, is on the outskirts of the capital Addis Ababa and is used to imprison leaders of the Oromo ethnic group, among others. Members of the Oromo community have been leading demonstrations against the government since November, demanding more political and economic freedoms.

Fortune, a privately owned newspaper, reported that there had been 20 casualties, but did not specify whether it meant dead or wounded. It carried a photograph of a huge plume of smoke billowing over a row of buildings, and said the fire had been brought under control by Saturday evening.

Ethiopia protests: Fast facts  Protests in Oromia started in November last year when the government announced a plan to expand the capital  a city-state  into the surrounding Oromia region.  Many Oromos saw that as a plan to remove them from fertile land. The scheme has since been dropped, but the unrest spread as demonstrators called for the release of prisoners and for wider freedoms.  In the Amhara region, demonstrations began over the status of a district  Welkait  that was once part of Amhara but was incorporated into the neighbouring Tigrayan region more than 20 years ago. Those demonstrations have also since widened.  The ruling Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front is a multi-ethnic coalition made up of four parties. The opposition and political analysts, though, say it is dominated by the Tigrayan Peoples Liberation Front.

The paper said that three firefighters had been taken to hospital with breathing difficulties.

A pro-government radio station reported that one person had been killed, and six injured. Opposition activists put the number of dead at between 20 and more than 30, citing family members of inmates.

Al Jazeera could not independently verify the reports.

Fortune, citing sources, reported that the fire had been deliberately started as part of an escape attempt and said that police had now taken control of the facility from prison officers.

WATCH: What is triggering Ethiopias unrest?

According to the New York-based Human Rights Watch group at least 500 people have been killed by security forces since the protests began in November. Though demonstrations started among the Oromo, Ethiopias biggest ethnic group, they later spread to the Amhara, the second most populous group.

Both groups say that a ruling coalition is dominated by the Tigray ethnic group, which makes up about 6 percent of the population.

The government has denied that violence from the security forces is systemic, though a spokesman told Al Jazeera that police officers sometimes take the law into their own hands, pledging an independent investigation.

Authorities have blamed opposition groups inside and outside of the country and what they have called anti-peace elements for the chaos.

The governing Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front last month rejected a United Nations request that it send in observers, saying it alone was responsible for the security of its citizens.

The government, a close ally of many western nations, is accused by rights groups of regularly cracking down on the opposition and jailing journalists. At elections last year, it won every seat in the 547-seat parliament.
Ping, who narrowly lost presidential vote, urges supporters to end violence as post-election unrest claims more lives.

Gabons opposition leader Jean Ping says he has asked his people to calm down as post-election violence claimed more lives and the governments crackdown continued.

Ping, however, who had already declared himself the winner of last weeks presidential election, insisted that the truth will finally happen and that President Ali Bongo rigged the vote.

We will have access to power, whether he [Bongo] likes it or not. We are going to have access to power, Ping, a veteran diplomat and former top African Union official, told Al Jazeera on Saturday.

Ping called for a total recount under supervision of the UN and the European Union.

Bongo, who has been president since 2009, was declared victorious on Wednesday by a razor-thin margin of just under 6,000 votes. Violence has since erupted in different parts of Gabon, leaving several people killed and hundreds of others arrested.

READ MORE: Libreville reels as clashes erupt over vote

On Saturday, two people were killed, including a policeman, the first member of the Gabonese security forces listed as a victim in the unrest.

The other was a young man who, according to witnesses, was shot dead by security forces.

The parents of the man wanted to march with the body up to the government building with many other people. They were dispersed by security and defence forces, a witness told AFP news agency.

I blame the person who ordered the killings. I don't know who pulled the trigger. I did not see him but the person who sent himthat's whom I blame by Falone Carvallo, mother of a young man shot dead on Friday

Several residents said the death was just one of several in Port-Gentil in recent days caused by security forces.

Interior Minister Pacome Moubelet-Boubeya deplored the death of the policeman, who he says was shot in Oyem, the main town in the countrys north.

Moubelet-Boubeya said that, despite the ongoing violence, we are seeing life returning to Libreville, with businesses beginning to reopen their doors.

However, the Gabonese capital has been without internet access since Wednesday.

Across the country, the unrest has paralysed transportation, with bread and other fresh foods in short supply, the situation further aggravated by widespread looting.

At a suburbs of Libreville, residents on Saturday were preparing to bury another young man, Jeffrey Bidzo Bidgong, who was killed on Friday.

People in the area told Al Jazeera that the 18-year-old was shot in the head by a man who was wearing a mask and was in police uniform.

His mother told Al Jazeera that her son had gone to look for an open shop to buy a drink, adding that Jeffrey was not into politics and did not even vote.

I blame the person who ordered the killings. I dont know who pulled the trigger. I did not see him but the person who sent him  thats whom I blame, the mother, Falone Carvallo, told Al Jazeera.

Excessive force

The Archbishop of Libreville on Saturday called on both the ruling party and the opposition to avoid an imminent crisis.

The post-vote violence in this small but oil-rich central African nation has sparked international concern, with top diplomats calling for restraint as rights groups raised alarm over the use of excessive force.

In a special session on Gabon late on Thursday, the UN Security Council expressed deep concern about the situation, urging all sides to to refrain from violence or other provocations.

The US government also urged all parties to work together to halt the slide towards further unrest.
Party of German Chancellor braced for a backlash over its refugee and migrant policy in regional vote.

An anti-immigrant party is expected to make huge gains in a state election in eastern Germany, a year after Chancellor Angela Merkels decision to open the borders to refugees.

A potential loss in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern to Alternative for Germany (AfD) on Sunday would be a big blow to Merkel, who has her own electoral district in the state.

Polls closed at 1600 GMT and first result estimates will be published shortly. Some 1.3 million people are eligible to vote.

Surveys before the vote showed support for the three-year-old AfD party, which was running for the first time for seats in the regional parliament, running at more than 20 percent. That could put it in a position to overtake Merkels conservative Christian Democrats from second place, after the Social Democrats.

Sundays election was the first of five regional votes before a national election expected in a year.

The repercusions of this result will resonate across Germany because we know that within 12 months there will be a general election, Al Jazeeras Dominic Kane, reporting from Schwerin, the capital of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern region, said.

WATCH: Europes refugees  An economic opportunity?

Earlier this week, Merkel urged the population to reject AfD.

The more the people who go to vote, the less the percentage won by some parties that, in my view, have no solution for problems and which are built mainly around a protest  often with hate, she told broadcaster NDR in an interview.

In January, Germanys interior ministry said that 1.1 million asylum seekers and migrants had entered Europes biggest economy in 2015 after fleeing war and poverty in their home countries.

But late last month, the head of Germanys Federal Office for Migration and Refugees told a German newspaper that the country took in fewer migrants in 2015 than previously thought, because some were registered twice and others had moved on to other destinations.

Well present the exact number soon but its certain that less than one million people came to Germany last year, Frank-Juergen Weise told Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

Deciding factor

In the sprawling farming and coastal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern  Germanys poorest and least populous  the issue of refugees and integration has also become the deciding factor for one in three voters.

I am voting AfD. The main reason is the question over asylum-seekers, a pensioner and former teacher who declined to be named told AFP news agency.

A million refugees have come here. There is money for them, but no money to bring pensions in the east to the same levels as those of the west, he said, referring to the lower retirement payments that residents of former Communist states receive compared with those in the west.

AfD leader Frauke Petry released a video on Friday urging voters to make history not only in the state-region, but the whole of Germany by backing the party massively in the polls.
With almost all of the votes counted, results show Merkels Christian Democrats overtaken by AfD in regional poll.

A year after German Chancellor Angela Merkels decision to open the countrys borders to refugees, an anti-immigrant party has made huge gains in a state election, according to official results.

With most of Sundays ballots counted, Alternative for Germany (AfD) received about 21 percent of votes in the eastern Mecklenburg-Vorpommern region, beating Merkels party to take second place.

Merkels conservative Christian Democrats came third with 19 percent, the partys worst result yet in the state that includes the chancellors own electoral district.

The centre-left Social Democrats gained the support of 30 percent of voters.

Frauke Petry, the head of AfD, said her partys success in the state election was a result of Merkels catastrophic migration policies, according to the DPA news agency.

WATCH: Europes refugees  An economic opportunity?

Sundays election was the first of five regional polls before a national election expected in just over a year.

The repercussions of this result will resonate across Germany because we know that within 12 months there will be a general election, said Al Jazeeras Dominic Kane, reporting from Schwerin, the capital of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern region.

Kane said that the AfD had grown from a party that just a few years ago was struggling to get above the 5 percent threshold required in order be represented in any parliament in Germany  state or federal  to a political force that was persuading one in five voters in the area.

So the question will be: will the government listen to this? Kane said.

The fact is that the government in this state was a mirror image of the government federally, of the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats in coalition, and both parties until this point have maintained the fact that the refugee policy is the right one.

Deciding factor

In the sprawling farming and coastal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern  Germanys poorest and least populous  the issue of refugees and integration had become the deciding factor for one in three voters.

I am voting AfD. The main reason is the question over asylum-seekers, a pensioner and former teacher who declined to be named told AFP news agency.

A million refugees have come here. There is money for them, but no money to bring pensions in the east to the same levels as those of the west, he said, referring to the lower retirement payments that residents of former Communist states receive compared with those in the west.

Petry, the AfD leader, released a video on Friday urging voters to make history not only in the state-region, but the whole of Germany by backing the party massively in the polls.

Erlier this week, Merkel urged voters to reject AfD, which she said in an interview had no solution for problems and which are built mainly around a protest  often with hate.

In January, Germanys interior ministry said that 1.1 million asylum seekers and migrants had entered Europes biggest economy in 2015 after fleeing war and poverty in their home countries.

Then, late last month, the head of Germanys Federal Office for Migration and Refugees told a German newspaper that the country took in fewer migrants in 2015 than previously thought, because some were registered twice and others had moved on to other destinations.

Well present the exact number soon but its certain that less than one million people came to Germany last year, Frank-Juergen Weise told Bild am Sonntag newspaper.
Dr. Mordechai Kedar is a senior lecturer in the Department of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University. He served in IDF Military Intelligence for 25 years, specializing in Arab political discourse, Arab mass media, Islamic groups and the Syrian domestic arena. Thoroughly familiar with Arab media in real time, he is frequently interviewed on the various news programs in Israel.





Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blog spot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work.

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..Israelnationalnews.com..02 September '16..A small, unimportant-looking article appeared in an obscure spot on one of the inner pages of a weekly newspaper this week, reporting the fact that the Czech Republic, having decided that Tel Aviv is the capital of Israel, will be presenting it as such in its history texts and atlases. The impetus for the change, the article further added, was pressure from the Palestinian Arab envoy in Prague. Israel's Foreign Ministry is working to change the decision.The Czech decision follows a similar one by UNESCO which claimed in April of this year that the Temple Mount belongs to Muslims - and only Muslims - and that its name is the El Aqsa Mosque.There are those who see this as just another point of contention between Israel and the Arab Palestinians, another topic for the negotiation table to be settled in the agreement that it is hoped will be reached at some future time. The problem is that this viewpoint is totally detached from reality, and it's time for all of us to open our eyes and see what is really behind the Arab Palestinian campaign regarding Jerusalem.Hamas, Fatah and the Palestinians, both religious and secular, modern and traditional, in Israel and out of it, see in uprooting Israel from Jerusalem a sacred obligation, a supreme mission and goal from which there is no way to backtrack. Saeb Erekat, the head of the Palestinian Authority negotiating team, has declared frequently that without East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, there will not be one.Yasser Arafat coined the phrase "Millions of shaheeds marching to Al Quds," meaning that the Arabs are prepared to sacrifice millions of shaheeds in order to wrest Jerusalem from the hands of the Jews.The whole thing is very peculiar, because Jerusalem was never the capital of any Arab or Islamic state, let alone of a Palestinian state  a state which has never existed  so why is Jerusalem such an immovable issue? What is behind the Arab Palestinians relating to Jerusalem as their capital and why do they want to take it out of Israeli hands?In previous articles, I explained the religious Islamic element in these goals and presented the issue of a Jewish presence in the Old City of Jerusalem as a theological problem for Islam, which believes that Judaism was rendered null and void by Christianity, which in turn became valueless when Islam appeared to take the place of both religions.The return of the Jews to their homes, land and Temple site seems to Islamic eyes the return of Judaism to its former glory, putting Islam's very existence into question  as Islam is supposed to be the true religion while Judaism and Christianity are false.Palestinian Arab intentions can be discerned from what they say and in what they do. They claim to be descendants of the Jebusites (from whom King David conquered Jerusalem) and therefore preceded the Jews in Jerusalem. This claim is as true as other Arab imaginary claims: Saddam Hussein once claimed to be descended from the Babylonian Hammurabi, Assad said that the Syrians were descendants of the Assyrians, the Egyptians claim they are Pharaoh's direct descendants and there are even Lebanese who claim to be descended from the Phoenicians. Arab history itself, however, claims that the Arabs arose out of the Arabian Peninsula, destroyed all the ancient idol-worshipping nations in their path and settled in their lands. And now they claim to be descended from them?Even more interesting is what the Arab Palestinians actually do: They hand out the scarf that appears in the picture accompanying this article to their friends. One side of the scarf has the words "Jerusalem is ours" and on the other side they have put the map of all of what they call "Palestine." Israel does not appear on this map. And note that the flag next to these graphics is that of the PLO, not Hamas.This scarf reveals the connection between the Arab Palestinians' approach to Jerusalem and their approach to the state of Israel. It cries out soundlessly that the goal is to get Jerusalem as a first step on the way to all of "Falestin"  that is, Israel  all of it, and in other words: after we gain Jerusalem, we will succeed in gaining all of the land of Israel.This final goal, that of completely destroying the Jewish State, is normally kept hidden from those who would rather not see it. Nice, pleasant people in Israel and outside it, Jews and non-Jews alike, fall right into the trap of Palestinian duplicity over and over again. They persist in believing that if we just give them the "holy basin"  the Temple Mount and parts of Eastern Jerusalem- they will be satisfied with that and recognize the State of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish People. Those nice people include volunteers from organizations such as "Ir Amim" that tries ceaselessly to gain recognition for the "rights" of the invaders from the Arabian Peninsula in the Jewish capital.Today enormous sums are invested in the campaign to cut away Jerusalem from Israel. Qatar, the main supporter of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, has set aside half a billion dollars to promote the removal of Jerusalem from Israel by mounting an international propaganda campaign that will fill newspapers, television, radio, academia and political corridors. It is quite possible that other Arab, Islamic and even European countries are involved in the effort to take Jerusalem out of the Jewish People's hands  and it is, of course, of no significance that the Jews remained loyal to their Holy City through a 2000 year long exile replete with unbearable suffering and persecution.Anyone who tries to remove the city of Jerusalem, and in particular, the site of the Holy Temples, from the land of the Jewish nation is taking part, whether or not he admits it, in the Arab and Muslim war against the Jewish people. That is a war against the Jewish state, the Jews' very existence as a people, culture, religion and heritage. There is no way to square the circle and there is no recourse but to tell the truth about the real nature of this battle against the Jews. It does not take place only on the battlefieldIt is taking place in every possible setting, public, legal, academic, educational, political and in the media, and the BDS movement is another of its manifestations.Every person, Jewish or non-Jewish, who assists in the efforts of the enemies of the Jewish people regarding Jerusalem and the Temple Mount in particular is an active supporter of those enemies' ambition to destroy Israel, the state of the Jewish People. Possibly he does not realize that or is unaware of the historical, religious and emotional connection between the Jewish people and its Holy City, its eternal and historical capital, but that lack of knowledge and consciousness does not grant his actions a different import or condone them.The Palestinian Authority, that convinced the Czech Education Ministry to see Tel Aviv as the capital of Israel is participating in a war  that's right, no less than a war  against the Jewish people. We have to call it by its real name and not tiptoe around the problem for destructive and foolhardy reasons, such as political correctness. The Palestinian Authority, in its attempt to remove Jerusalem from Israel, works night and day to destroy the State of Israel's existence as the land of the Jewish People.Israel must act according to the normative principle of "when at war, fight a war." Israel must dismantle the Palestinian Authority, dispatch Mahmoud Abbas and his corrupt sons to one of the many homes they have acquired all over the globe with the donations contributed to the "Palestinian people," dismantle the army they built with American money, take apart the corrupt and illegal institutions they have established.Do the State of Israel and the Jewish people wish to survive? Then it is time for them to recognize the enemy and the type of war that enemy has declared on the nation of Israel and its land. Seventy five years ago the Jewish people did not recognize the meaning of the war that had been declared against it, and the result was catastrophe. If we continue with the lack of consciousness that characterizes us today in the face of the Arab Palestinian challenge, we will find ourselves once again without a state that protects the Jewish people everywhere in the world.
Hong Kong saw a record number of voters turn out for the first major election since pro-democracy street protests rocked the Chinese-administered territory in 2014.

An hour before polls were scheduled to close at 1030pm local time (14:30 GMT) on Sunday, about two million people, or some 52.57 percent of registered voters, had cast their ballots, according to government data.

Even after the official closing time, some were still waiting to enter polling stations to cast their votes, local media reports said.

Hong Kongs previous election saw 1.8 million people vote.

The government said the full results are expected on Monday, according to DPA news agency.

The vote is for a 70-seat legislative council in which Hong Kongs pro-democracy opposition is hoping to maintain a one-third veto bloc against their better mobilised and better funded pro-Beijing and pro-establishment rivals.

If the outcome favours pro-democracy candidates, it could pave the way for a fresh round of political confrontations over Beijings control of the territory.

In July, six pro-democracy election candidates were disqualified from the election by the Hong Kong government on the grounds that they supported independence from China, even after some were forced to sign a pledge that Hong Kong is inalienable Chinese territory.

We dont want our next generation to be slaves of the Chinese Communist Party, said Edward Leung, one of those disqualified who campaigned for a replacement candidate in an open-top bus and addressed cheering crowds on the streets of Hong Kong with a loudhailer.

Its a revolution of this era, shouted Baggio Leung, of Youngspiration, who was running on Leungs vacated ticket.

Hong Kong: Rooftopping for freedom and disobedience

The pro-democracy vote, though, risks being split by the emergence of a new generation of radical activists who are competing with moderate mainstream parties to challenge their pro-Beijing rivals.

Joining the fray are those young radical groups who sprang up after the protest movement, some of whom are calling for outright independence from mainland China. That is adding a whole new dimension to this election, Al Jazeeras Rob McBride, reporting from Hong Kong, said.

The protests against Beijing have really raised the temperature here.

The citys widely unpopular Beijing-backed leader, Leung Chun-ying, cast his ballot earlier on Sunday and urged the public to turn out and vote.

Outside the polling station where he voted, a small group of protesters demanded that Leung step down

Our election is a democratic election, Leung told reporters.

The democracy in the election is reflected by the free choice of voters; they do not need to be told who to vote for, he said.

The growing calls for Hong Kongs independence highlight frustration among residents, especially the young, who are chafing under Beijings tightening hold.

A spate of incidents, including the disappearance of five Hong Kong booksellers who later resurfaced in mainland Chinese detention, has aroused fears that Beijing is reneging on its promise of wide autonomy for Hong Kong under a one country, two systems framework, which was agreed in the 1997 handover from Britain.

At that time, Beijing agreed to maintain Hong Kongs freedoms and separate laws for at least 50 years.
Obama says grave differences remain, despite earlier reports that the two sides were close to a truce deal.

The United States and Russia came up short on Sunday in attempts to finalise a ceasefire deal in Syria, as US President Barack Obama said grave differences remained and fighting on the ground continued.

Russia and the US have been striving for weeks to secure a ceasefire between Syrian President Bashar al-Assads government and moderate rebels that would expand humanitarian access to hundreds of thousands of civilians caught in the crossfire.

The strategy has hinged on an unlikely US-Russian militarily partnership against extremist groups operating in Syria. But beyond the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and al-Qaeda, Moscow and Washington have conflicting views about who fits in that category.

Were not there yet, Obama said on Sunday on the sidelines of the G20 economic summit in Hangzhou China.

Its premature for us to say that there is a clear path forward, but there is the possibility at least for us to make some progress on that front.

Negotiations between US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov were set to continue in China on Monday.

Terms of ceasefire  Russia to refrain from bombing mainstream rebels  Pro-Assad forces to withdraw from Castello Road. The key supply route would become a demilitarised zone  US to coordinate with Russia in fight against al-Qaeda Details come from letter sent by Washingtons Syria envoy Michael Ratney to the Syrian armed opposition

Russia and the US have backed opposing sides in the conflict.

Moscow has supported Assad and Russian fighter jets have been targeting rebel forces for nearly a year, while Washington has supported some rebel groups fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army.

Fallout

Negotiators had been hopeful a deal could come together during G20, and American officials on Sunday were optimistic enough that they invited reporters to a planned announcement by Kerry and Lavrov. But officials removed Lavrovs podium just before Kerry came out  alone  to announce that no agreement had been finalised.

Were not going to rush, said Kerry, who has negotiated several failed truces with Russia over the past few months.

The US diplomat said the two sides had worked through many technical issues, adding, however, that Washington did not want to enter into an illegitimate agreement.

Russias Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, also speaking on the sidelines of the G20, said a deal was close but that the timing of any announcement could not be predicted.

We are talking about most serious issues of implementing a ceasefire, he told Reuters news agency. We are close to the deal  but art of diplomacy requires time to implementation. I cant tell you when the agreement will be reached.





But the Syrian opposition remained firm in its stance that Assad could play no part in any political transition.

The coalition said no when [UN special envoy for Syria Staffan] de Mistura submitted [a similar] document last year  but he unfortunately kept the points where Bashar al-Assad will remain [as president] during the transitional period, which is not acceptable for us, Nagham al-Ghadri, a member of the oppositions Syrian National Coalition, told Al Jazeera.

Ghadri said key figures from the political and armed opposition were set to meet this week in the UK capital London and would be announcing a response  not in detail, but headlines  to the proposed ceasefire plan.

Sticking points

In recent days, the US State Department has said it only wants a nationwide ceasefire between Assads military and the rebels, and not another cessation of hostilities that is time-limited and only stops fighting in some cities and regions.

Last February, the two sides announced a ceasefire deal that excluded ISIL and al-Nusra Front, the Syria-based now group, now known as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, which said last month it had cut ties with al-Qaeda.

Negotiators on both sides have spent weeks poring over maps of potential areas where opposition groups operate and where Assads forces would be prohibited from launching air strikes. The idea is for Russia to use its significant influence over Assad to ensure compliance with the deal.

READ MORE: Fear rises in Syrias Moadamiyeh as evacuation begins

But the US is wary about military coordination with Russia, who it says has mainly targeted moderate, US-backed opposition groups in a bid to prop up Assad. The US wants Russia to focus exclusively on ISIL, also known as ISIS, and al-Qaeda-linked groups.

Neither side explained on Sunday in detail what sticking points remained.

Kerry said that the US wanted a deal with the best chance for survival, but Ryabkov, Lavrovs deputy, said Washington had to dissociate itself from groups links to the group previously known as al-Nusra Front.

Many of the groups considered acceptable by the US have actually affiliated with the Nusra Front, while the Nusra Front is using them to avoid being attacked, Ryabkov told Russian media, citing a longstanding complaint of his government.





Earlier this year, the Syrian opposition accused Moscow and Damascus of using the close proximity of al-Nusra Front to more moderate rebel groups as a pretext to bomb the latter.

Government offensive in Aleppo

Meanwhile, as ceasefire terms were being discussed in China, pro-government forces were on the offensive in Aleppo in northern Syria, in a push to retake a key area seized by rebels last month.

Government forces recaptured the Weaponry College and the Air Force Technical College in the strategic Ramosa military complex on the citys southwestern outskirts, according to a rebel official and a monitor.

Rebel forces captured the area last month in an assault that broke through a government siege on Aleppos opposition-held eastern neighbourhoods  home to some 300,000 people.

If the government manages to retake the entire Ramosa area, the assault would effectively reimpose the siege on rebel-held east Aleppo.

Zakaria Malahifji, of the Fastaqim rebel group, confirmed reports that the two colleges had been recaptured by government forces.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war, said later that government forces had also recaptured the Artillery College.
Ankara sends second aid shipment to besieged Palestinian enclave after Turkish-Israeli deal to normalise ties.

A ship carrying aid to Gaza has departed from the Turkish city of Mersin and is on its way to the Israeli port of Ashdod, according to a senior Turkish official.

This is the second major shipment of humanitarian aid to Gaza since an agreement was reached with the government of Israel to normalise relations, the official, who asked to remain anonymous, told Al Jazeera on Saturday.

Turkey and Israel reached an agreement to normalise ties in late June ending a six-year rift that was sparked by an Israeli raid on a previous flotilla bound for Gaza in which 10 activists were killed in 2010.

OPINION: What the Israeli-Turkish reconciliation says about Gaza

The vessel carries 100 wheelchairs, 1,000 bicycles, 100,000 backpacks and stationery kits, 300,000 pieces of clothing, 1,288 tonnes of flour, 170 tonnes of rice, 64 tonnes of sugar, 95 tonnes of vegetable oil and 350,000 diapers, the official said.

We expect the items to be distributed to the people of Gaza before the upcoming Islamic [Eid al-Adha] holiday. In addition to regular aid materials, we added presents for Palestinian children such as bicycles.

The Eid holiday is expected to start on September 12.

After the June deal between Israel and Turkey, a previous Turkish ship arrived in the port of Ashdod in early July. That aid was carried to Gaza by trucks, and the aid en route is expected to be delivered the same way.





During negotiations that led to the deal, Ankara had called on Israel to lift an eight-year-old blockade on Gaza, something the Israeli side rejected.

A compromise was eventually reached, which allows Ankara to deliver aid to the besieged enclave through Israeli ports.

Aid distributed unfairly

According to Jehad Saftawi, a Palestinian journalist in Gaza, there are mixed views there on the aid and the Turkish-Israeli deal.

He also told Al Jazeera that aid delivered to Gaza was not usually distributed fairly.

The aid only reaches the people who are close to Hamas, not to the wider parts of the society. The aid distribution process is as politicised as construction tenders, he said.

Saftawi said many people were disappointed that the blockade had not been lifted as part of the deal.

INTERACTIVE: Gaza  life under siege

Before the agreement, Hamas got peoples hopes high, saying that Ankara would be able to convince Israel to lift the blockade, Saftawi told Al Jazeera.

Nonetheless, some people, particularly the ones close to Hamas, are more optimistic. They carry the view that at least few countries, such as Turkey and Qatar, care about Gaza and offer their support and help.

Nagham Mohanna, who works for the Gaza Centre for Media Freedom, believes Turkey sending aid to Gaza is a positive step, but expects further steps pushing Israel to defivitively end the siege on the territory.





The people of Gaza need concrete moves towards lifting of the blockade and open borders. They need to get out of this big prison to feel dignity as other people do, she said.

As part of the agreement, Israel also committed to pay around $20m in compensation to the families of Turks who died in the 2010 raid on the Mavi Marmara ship.

Israel argues that the blockade on Gaza is needed to prevent the Hamas movement, which controls the enclave, from acquiring resources that could be used to fight Israeli forces.

The United Nations and rights groups, however, say the blockade causes severe humanitarian problems in the territory and should be lifted.

Ankara and Hamas have close ties, and the Turkish government has been a supporter of the Palestinian cause.

Follow Umut Uras on Twitter: @Um_Uras
South Sudan has agreed to allow 4,000 additional UN peacekeepers to enter the country, after first rejecting the regional protection force as a breach of national sovereignty.

The announcement late on Sunday came after a meeting in the capital, Juba, between President Salva Kiir and ambassadors from the UN Security Councils 15 member states.

The transitional government of national unity gives its consent for the deployment of the regional force, the government and the security council said in a joint statement, which was read out by Martin Elia Lomoro, the South Sudanese cabinet affairs minister.

WATCH: Whats hampering peace in South Sudan?

The threat of an arms embargo on South Sudan loomed over the meeting amid warnings by the Security Council, which had approved the deployment of the protection force in mid-August, that it would pursue such action if the government in Juba did not accept the additional peacekeepers.

Kiir had previously said that the deployment of the peacekeeping force was a violation of South Sudans sovereignty.

A force of some 12,000 UN peacekeepers is already in the country, and South Sudan has been wary of giving it more authority amid ongoing clashes with opposition forces.

Hybrid court

Protecting civilians has become a critical issue for UN peacekeepers following fighting that erupted in Juba in July between forces loyal to Kiir and opposition leader Riek Machar, threatening to send the worlds youngest country back to all-out civil war.

Hundreds were killed and thousands were displaced, while Machar, a former first vice president, fled after the outbreak of violence.

Both civilians and foreigners, including aid workers, were targeted in the July chaos by soldiers who raped women and girls, conducted mock executions and forced people at one hotel compound to watch as they executed a local journalist.

According to Sundays joint statement, South Sudan has also committed to implementing a hybrid court to investigate war crimes.

Both government and rebel forces have been accused of widespread abuses in the recent fighting and during the civil war that began in December 2013 between supporters of Kiir and Machar.
Fearing a repeat of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, community leaders ask the UN Security Council for extra troops.

Displaced civilians and religious leaders in wartorn South Sudan appealed to the UN Security Council on Saturday to urgently deploy extra foreign troops as government ministers questioned whether more peacekeepers were needed in the capital, Juba.

The 15-member council met with President Salva Kiirs cabinet, religious and civil society leaders and visited two UN compounds in Juba where tens of thousands of civilians have been sheltering amid nearly three years of violence.

While the countrys conflict was sparked in December 2013 by political rivalry between Kiir and opposition leader Riek Machar, Anglican Archbishop Daniel Deng warned that people have been made to believe its a tribal war.



UN urges South Sudan to accept more peacekeepers

What happened in Rwanda  were afraid it can happen in this country, he told the Security Council, referring to the Hutu genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994.

Catholic Archbishop Paulino Lukudu Loro described the planned deployment of a 4,000-strong regional protection force to ensure peace in Juba, authorised by the Security Council last month, as a reconciliation force.

We need this help, he said. We cannot put our nation on the right track alone.

South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011 but slid into civil war after Kiir sacked Machar as his vice president. The conflict between forces loyal to Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, and Machar, a Nuer, has often followed ethnic lines.

The pair signed a peace deal a year ago but fighting has continued and Machar has now fled to neighbouring Sudan.

After a meeting between the council and Kiirs cabinet, US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power said the cabinet ministers had asked whether the regional protection force was still needed given that Riek Machar has fled the country, given the transitional government is working more smoothly.

We as a council sent an unequivocal message that yes, this force is still needed, she told reporters. The Security Council has threatened to impose an arms embargo on South Sudan if the government does not cooperate.

South Sudans Minister for Cabinet Affairs, Martin Elias Lomoro, said of the planned deployment: Were discussing the modalities.

The new force will boost a 12,000-strong UN peacekeeping force that has been on the ground since 2011. When the conflict erupted in 2013, the United Nations took the rare step of sheltering civilians at several of its compounds.

UN peacekeepers currently protect nearly 200,000 civilians at six sites around the country. The Security Council, which visited two camps in Juba on Saturday, were greeted at the UN House site by mainly displaced Nuer shouting Down, down, Salva Kiir.

We need your help, we are tired, said Peter Gatkuoth, 23, who has sheltered at the UN House site for several years.

The South Sudan conflict has been marked by the use of rape as a weapon and some displaced women told council members on Saturday that they had to risk being the target of sexual violence every time they left the camp to get food and firewood.

Oil producer South Sudans fledgling economy has been battered by the conflict, driving prices higher and leaving half the countrys 12 million people without enough food.

Paleki Ayang, director of the South Sudan Women Empowerment Network, told the council her monthly salary had dropped from $2,000 more than two years ago to $80.

If somebody is hungry you cant preach to them about peace agreements, she said.
Status of giant pandas upgraded to vulnerable, but Eastern gorilla is added to critically endangered list.

Decades of conservation work in China have paid off for the giant panda, whose status has been upgraded from endangered to vulnerable owing to a population rebound, according to officials.

The improvement for the giant panda was announced on Sunday as part of an update to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, the worlds most comprehensive inventory of plants and animals.

The latest estimates show a population of 1,864 adult giant pandas. Although exact numbers are not available, adding cubs to the projection would mean about 2,060 pandas exist today, the IUCN said.

Evidence from a series of range-wide national surveys indicate that the previous population decline has been arrested, and the population has started to increase, the IUCNs updated report said.

The cornerstones of the Chinese governments effort to bring back its fuzzy, black-and-white national icon have included an intense effort to replant bamboo forests, which provide food and shelter for the bears.

Through its rent-a-panda captive breeding programme, China has also loaned some bears to zoos abroad in exchange for cash, and reinvested that money in conservation efforts.

According to Simon Stuart, chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission, the improvement came from the hard work of controlling poaching and replanting bamboo forests.

This is something to celebrate because it is not a part of the world where we expect this to happen, Stuart told reporters at a news conference to unveil the updated Red List.

Experts warned, however, that the good news for pandas could be short-lived.

A warming planet, driven by fossil fuel burning, is predicted to wipe out more than one-third of the pandas bamboo habitat in the next 80 years.

There was bad news, however, for the worlds largest gorillas. Officials at the IUCN conference said the species had been pushed to the brink of extinction by a surge of illegal hunting in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

With just 5,000 Eastern gorillas left on Earth, the majestic animals now face the risk of disappearing completely, according to officials.

Four out of six of the Earths great apes are now critically endangered, only one step away from going extinct, including the Eastern Gorilla, Western Gorilla, Bornean Orangutan and Sumatran Orangutan, the IUCN said.

Chimpanzees and bonobos are listed as endangered.

Today is a sad day because the IUCN Red List shows we are wiping out some of our closest relatives, Inger Andersen, IUCN director general, told reporters.

War, hunting and loss of land to refugees in the past 20 years have led to a devastating population decline of more than 70 percent for the Eastern gorilla, the IUCNs update said.

One of the two subspecies of Eastern gorilla, known as Grauers gorilla, has drastically declined since 1994 when there were 16,900 individuals, to just 3,800 in 2015.

Even though killing these apes is against the law, hunting is their greatest threat, experts said.

Wrong direction

The IUCN Red List includes 82,954 species  both plants and animals  and undergoes a major update every four years.

Almost one third  23,928  are threatened with extinction, it said.

Compared with previous years, even more species are under threat.

Carlo Rondinini, mammal assessment coordinator at Sapienza University of Rome, said almost 28 percent of mammals are threatened with extinction, three percentage points more than in the previous mammal assessment in 2008.

A takeaway point we would like to emphasise is we are not journeying in the right direction with respect to species conservation, Andersen said.

We are losing species at a faster pace than we have ever done.
Turkish forces and allied Syrian rebels clear area between the towns of Azaz and Jarablus, Turkeys prime minister says.

Turkish forces and Syrian rebels have driven out the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group from its remaining territory along the Syrian-Turkish border, Turkeys Prime Minister Binali Yildirim had said.

Speaking from the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, Yildirim said on Sunday that Turkish troops and Ankara-backed Free Syrian Army fighters had cleared the area between the northern Syrian towns of Azaz and Jarablus.

Our 91km border has been completely secured, he said during a televised speech. All terrorist organisations have been repulsed and they have gone.

Earlier, Turkeys state-run Anadolu news agency had said that the advance had removed terror organisation Daeshs physical contact with the Turkish border in northern Syria. Daesh is an Arabic acronym for ISIL, also known as ISIS, or IS.

READ MORE: Turkish tanks enter Syria in new front against ISIL

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also said on Sunday that ISIL had lost its contact with the outside world after losing the remaining border villages between the Sajur River  and Al-Rai.

The UK-based group, which monitors daily developments in the war, said rebels and Islamist factions backed by Turkish tanks and warplanes had taken several villages on the border after IS withdrew from them, ending ISs presence  on the border.

Al Jazeeras Hashem Ahelbarra, reporting from the city of Elbeyli on the Turkish side of the Syria-Turkey border, said the rebels offensive had forced ISIL fighters to pull out towards al-Bab, which is their last remaining stronghold in northern Syria.

Sundays development came a day after rebel factions took control of a number of villages in the area, without meeting any resistance from ISIL fighters.

There are no clashes, ISIL fighters flee as soon as they see us advancing, especially because we are supported by Turkish air power, Ahmed Othman, a commander in the pro-Turkey rebel group Sultan Murad, told Al Jazeera from Aleppos northern suburbs on Saturday.

The loss of the area near the Turkish border will deprive ISIL of a key transit point for recruits and supplies, though the group continues to hold territory in both Syria and Iraq.

READ MORE: Kurds and refugees behind Turkeys Syria offensive

Last week, Turkey launched its first major incursion into neighbouring Syria since the civil war began more than five years ago. After crossing the border on August 24, Turkish-backed Syrian rebels captured the border town of Jarablus from ISIL in 14 hours.

Dubbed Euphrates Shield, Turkeys operation, which involves tanks, fighter jets and special forces, is targeting both ISIL but also Syrian Kurdish forces that have been key to driving ISIL fighters out of other parts of the Syrian-Turkish border.

The Kurdish YPG militia is a key partner of the US-led coalition against ISIL, and has recaptured large swaths of territory in Syria from the group.

Yet, Ankara considers the YPG a terrorist group and has been alarmed by its expansion along the border, fearing the creation of a contiguous, semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Syria.
The rebel-held half of Aleppo in northern Syria has once again been cut off by government forces, after heavy bombardments and repeated attempts to drive rebel fighters out of territory they took last month.

Pro-government forces, backed by heavy Russian air strikes, recaptured on Sunday a strategic military complex in the Ramosa district on Aleppos southwestern outskirts, according to Syrian state media and a monitor.

Rebel forces had captured the complex last month in an assault that broke through a government siege on Aleppos opposition-held eastern neighbourhoods  home to some 300,000 people.

The government takeover of the area has effectively reimposed the siege on the citys rebel-held neighbourhoods.

The army has managed now to control many areas within the vast complex that houses military installations. Rebel factions say that they are going to reunite in order to launch a counter offensive, Al Jazeeras Hashem Ahelbarra, reporting from the city of Elbeyli on the Turkish side of the Syria-Turkey border, said.

Ramosa is crucial for all parties. It is crucial for the government because it will pave the way for them to encircle rebel-held areas. Its also crucial for the rebels because it is the only supply line.

Once Syrias largest city, Aleppo has been roughly divided between government control in the west and rebel control in the east since mid-2012.

#Hara_FM: the most updated map after besieging rebel-held areas in #Aleppo by regime forces #Syria pic.twitter.com/wGdYCwEi64

https://twitter.com/RadioHaraEngl/status/772447431271276544

Syrian state television, citing a military source, said on Sunday that armed forces, in cooperation with their allies, took full control of the military academy zone south of Aleppo and are clearing the remaining terrorists from the area.

The advance, it said, had cut all the supply and movement routes for terrorist groups from southern Aleppo province to the eastern neighbourhoods and Ramosa.

READ MORE: Fear rises as Syrias Moadamiyeh as evacuation begins

Zakaria Malahifji, of the Fastaqim rebel group, confirmed to Reuters news agency that the Weaponry College and the Air Force Technical College in Ramosa had been recaptured by government forces.

And the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war, said later on Sunday that government forces had also recaptured the Artillery College, and that the eastern part of the city had been cut off.

Russias intervention last year turned the war in President Bashar al-Assads favour in many areas, but rebels have made some gains lately in Aleppo and in Hama province further south.

A spokesman for rebel group Jaish al-Nasr, Mohammed Rasheed, told Reuters that rebels had launched a push to try and capture the town of Maan, north of the province capital, Hama city.

Advances by the rebels in recent days have brought them to within only six miles of government-controlled Hama.
President criticises judiciary for reckless rulings, ahead of a legal challenge against an official ban on rallies.

Zimbabwes President Robert Mugabe has accused the countrys judiciary of recklessness for allowing anti-government demonstrations, ahead of a legal challenge against an official ban on protests.

A High Court hearing is set for Monday on the constitutionality of the governments ban, which came into force on Thursday after weeks of protests against Mugabes rule and his handling of the countrys ailing economy.

Violence erupted more than a week ago at an anti-Mugabe protest when police used tear gas and water cannon to disperse marchers angered by spiralling unemployment, a plummeting economy and allegations of government corruption.

Mugabe said judges would be acting with disregard for peace if they ruled to give permission to more demonstrations.

We cant allow that to continue, (to have) these violent demonstrations unimpeded. No. Enough is enough, Mugabe told a conference of the ruling ZANU-PFs youth wing on Saturday, according to a report in the countrys Sunday News weekly.

It is not just we, the ordinary people, who should have the understanding [of the need for peace]. Our courts, our justice system, our judges should be the ones who understand even better than the ordinary citizens, the 92-year-old president said.

To give permission again when they are to the full knowledge that it is going to be violent or probability that there is going to be violence is to pay reckless disregard to the peace of this country, he added.





Tendai Biti, leader of the Peoples Democratic Party and the lawyer behind the legal challenge to the latest ban on demonstrations, accused Mugabe of violating the constitution and attempting to intimidate judges.

What Mugabe is trying to do is breach the constitution by assaulting the judiciary and by trying to cause direct and indirect fear in judges, Biti said, according to Reuters news agency.

Mugabe is now the worlds oldest head of state. Speculation was rife about his health last week after his whereabouts following a regional summit on Tuesday were not known, and flight data showed that he had travelled to Dubai though he was supposed to be heading to Asia.

Mugabes spokesman had denied reports that Mugabe was ill. However, when he returned to Harare on Saturday, the ageing president joked that he had returned from the dead.

Yes, I was dead, he told reporters, according to Reuters.

It is true that I was dead. And I resurrected. As I always do, he said.

Once I get back to my country, I am real.
An in-depth look at what scientists aboard US coastguard icebreakers are doing to understand a struggling ecosystem.

The Arctic is warming up at twice the rate of the rest of the globe. Summer sea ice has receded by almost 25 percent since 1979, with the sea change becoming ever more apparent and Arctic-native animals now visibly struggling in their prolonged search for shelter, ice and food.

Offshore oil exploration and increased tourism have also contributed to the speed at which environmental changes are occurring in the Arctic, with the fear of an ice-free summer on the horizon looming over the fate of the area.

Ten years ago ... this was complete ice. Now we have some open water. by Captain Jason Hamilton, commanding officer, USCGC Healy

These changes have also been spotted on land, with melting permafrost causing entire patches of land and manmade structures to sink as the earth softens.

Proximity to land and resources also presents a challenge, not only in times of emergency on the water, but also in executing the research required to understand and attempt to combat the effects of global warming on the Arctic. This is where the Polar-class icebreakers factor in.

The United States owns only two icebreakers that are able to breach the density of ice formations the Arctic is known for. Weighing in at 16,000 tonnes and with the ability to reach 30,000 horsepower, they are a force to be reckoned with on the open seas.

These vessels are used not only as a coastguard, but also to aid in scientific studies. Missions often include unmanned vehicles  a safety precaution  including drones and others that explore not only the view from the air, but also what is happening in the water and life under the ice.

Levels of carbon dioxide in the air and the sea, water salinity, temperature, oxygen and chlorophyll blooms  a potentially dangerous situation where algae multiplies and decomposes on the surface of the water, taking up oxygen resources from the rest of the sea life  are all deliverables that can be quantified using the unmanned vehicles.

Scientists from the Arctic Domain Awareness Center at the University of Alaska Anchorage are also working on an isotope sniffer among other experiments and unmanned drones. A snout hangs out from the bow of a Polar-class icebreaker as a means of atmospheric sampling, and feeds the information down to isotope analysers below deck, in seconds-long intervals.

The ultimate vision is to understand the effects of potentially environmentally damaging activity, such as offshore rigging by the Shell oil company, creating technology  guardians of the water  that can accurately register important data in extreme temperatures and conditions without endangering the lives of crew members.
Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blog spot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work.

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..Analyses from Israel..04 September '16..Among those diplomats and journalists who dont simply blame the Arab-Israeli conflict entirely on Israel, the preferred approach is evenhandedness. This approach, epitomized by the cycle of violence cliche, holds that both sides want peace and are equally to blame for its absence. Remarkably, this view has persisted despite decades of proving wrong in ways that hurt the very countries which espouse it  as demonstrated yet again by newly released documents from the Nixon Administration.The documents, which Amir Oren reported this week in, include redacted versions of the CIAs daily presidential briefings on the eve of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The agencys cluelessness is mind-blowing.
           2005     ..        










English News Brazilian President hails G20 Summit as constructive

Alwihda Info | Par peoplesdaily - 4 Septembre 2016



Brazil is currently meeting many obstacles in its economic recovery, while Chinas exemplary development experience can help Brazil and other economies boost growth, hoping that China can share its experience in the upcoming G20 Summit.

By Zhang Yuannan from Peoples Daily With its agenda covering innovation, energy and climate change, the G20 Hangzhou Summit is very constructive, Brazilian President Michel Temer told the Peoples Daily on Saturday ahead of his attendance at the meeting, adding that he is confident of the success of the summit.



Expressing great expectations for the summit, Temer said that he is very glad that China is his first overseas stop after assuming the post of president.



As soon as he formally took the presidential oath on Wednesday local time, Temer set off for China with a delegation, showing the great importance he attaches to China and the G20 Summit.



Much of the summits agenda covers top concerns for Brazil, the president explained, adding that with close ties among G20 members, the summit will help all sides exchange ideas and finally eradicate those roadblocks through discussion.



Citing his own country as an example, Temer said that as a nation lacking technological innovation, Brazil can learn from G20 members with advanced technologies. I believe that the summit will benefit all attendees, especially Brazil, he stressed.



By bringing more developing nations to attend the G20 summit than ever, China has demonstrated its strong sense of responsibility and foresight both as the summits host country and a developing nation.



The newly-appointed president appreciated Chinas efforts in this regard, saying that developing nations also hope to play a role in the summit, and more involvement from developing countries will better the cohesion of the G20.



Representatives from developing nations will discuss solutions and exchange ideas on concrete actions during the summit, which is a good thing for Brazil, he added.



Praising the medium-to-high growth rate maintained by China amid the uncertainties confronting the sluggish world economic recovery, Temer said that Brazil should learn from China and remain confident of its prospects for development.



He stressed at the same time that Chinas precious development experience can provide a good reference for his country and other economies.



Brazil is currently meeting many obstacles in its economic recovery, while Chinas exemplary development experience can help Brazil and other economies boost growth, he elaborated, hoping that China can share its experience in the upcoming G20 Summit.



With a close bond with China, the 76-year-old Temer committed himself to collaborations and exchanges between the two countries during his tenure as the Brazilian Chairman of the China-Brazil High-level Coordination and Cooperation Committee. He has also paid multiple visits to China.



In a meeting with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on Friday, Xi described their relationship as old friends.



There are two meanings to Xis words, Temer said, explaining that by using the term old friends, Xi refers not only to the multiple meetings between them, but also to the solid China-Brazil ties. Meetings between the heads of state can facilitate bilateral relations, he added.



When addressing the Brazil-China High-level Business Seminar held in Shanghai on Friday, the president described China as his countrys most-needed cooperative partner, saying that now is the right time to further reinforce the Brazil-China comprehensive strategic partnership.



Praising their close economic, trade and diplomatic ties, he said that China now has grown into Brazils largest economic and trade partner, and that geographic distance cannot hinder bilateral ties.



He also expressed his confidence in future bilateral economic and trade cooperation, saying that the frequent high-level exchanges between the two sides will push the relationship forward.



Brazil-China economic and trade cooperation sets a good example for other countries in building an interconnected world economy, and will also generate positive effects on world peace, Temer said.



Extending his gratitude to Chinas hospitality, the president reaffirmed his confidence in the success of the Summit, saying that the Summit will add luster to his impression of China.



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English News Xi urges G20 to take action, not be talking shop

Alwihda Info | Par peoplesdaily - 4 Septembre 2016



The G20 should also reinforce interactions with established organizations, adding that a measurable performance index system should be completed to urge members to implement their pledges.

By Meng Xianglin from Peoples Daily Chinese President Xi Jinping urged the G20 members to work with real intent instead of just making empty promises as he offered gave Chinas remedies for future development of the group. Experts praised the presidents prescription, advising the G20 to implement the proposals by transforming and innovating its cooperation mechanisms.



As Xi addressed the opening session of the Hangzhou summit on Sunday, he said that that it was time for the G20 to be a group of action, not just a talking shop, as he called on the G20 to drive global economic growth by fully honoring its commitments and implementing each and every plan.



The G20 Summit was created in response to the 2008 global financial crisis, and the crisis in turn consolidated the mechanisms status as the premier forum for international economic discussions.



However, while this type of forum-oriented mechanism usually gives effective prescription on crisis response, it lacks a concrete agenda in a post-crisis era. In recent years, negative voices have described the G20 as talking shop, some even claiming that the mechanism risks becoming marginalized.



Zhu Jiejin, professor from Shanghai-based Fudan University, told the Peoples Daily that crisis-response brought fame to the G20, but at the same time posed challenges to its sustained development. The communique the G20 released when it was established also described itself as an unofficial mechanism of a crisis-response forum.



As the crisis has come to an end, the G20 now has difficulties in transforming itself from a crisis-response mechanism into that which can have a long-lasting governance agenda, the scholar said, advising that it has to change its empty agendas and improve its poor implementation.



Sheng Bin, Professor of the Institute of International Economics at Nankai University, suggested that Xis proposals of taking action mean that the G20 now has to transform and innovate its cooperation mechanisms.



In the short-term, with increasing downward pressure and potential risks, global economic growth is now fragile. This moment is right for G20 members to turn the tide with more policy coordination, concrete actions and concerted efforts, Sheng said.



In the long-run, facing challenges in transforming from a crisis-response mechanism into a long-acting governance one, the G20 must create new public goods and policy dividends by making institutional arrangements for a series of key agendas in global governance.



Zhu suggested that to transform the mechanism, medium- to long-term agendas should be selected, citing the G20 Blueprint on Innovative Growth, the Action Plan on 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as well as the G20 Strategy for Global Trade Growth as good examples.



The G20 should also reinforce interactions with established organizations, he said, adding that a measurable performance index system should be completed to urge members to implement their pledges.



China also proposed an index system to supervise the implementation of the agendas related to structural reform, and such measures can improve the transparency of the fulfillment and press those laggards in actions, Zhu said.



Sheng believes that to be a group of action, the G20 should set up a forceful executive body to ensure the sustainability and effectiveness of the working agendas. It also needs to further cooperate with other economic organizations or forums to translate political willingness into concrete action plans.



New action mechanisms and models should also be explored, he stressed. G20 members can also realize collective actions by using opportunities created by initiatives of individual countries, he pointed out, saying that the Belt and Road initiative put forward by China as an emerging economy is such a contribution.



The G20 also needs to obtain intellectual support for action plans, policies and solutions through extensive and in-depth cooperation with business circles and think-tanks, the professor noted.



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When Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio became the new Catholic pope in 2013, he chose the name of Francis to indicate that his pontificate would be one of mercy and compassion for the poor and needy. Such is the reputation of his eponym, Saint Francis of Assisi: "the man of poverty, the man of peace, the man who loves and protects creation," said Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, as to why he chose that name.

St. Francis (1182-1226) is indeed known for all those qualities. But he was known for something else his modern-day namesake fails to live up to: unapologetically confronting Islam.

According to St. Francis of Assisi and the Conversion of the Muslims by Frank M. Rega:

Fully aware of the dangers, Francis was determined to go on a mission to the unbelievers of the Muslim nations. The primary sources are in agreement that he was now ready to sacrifice his life and die for Christ, so there can be little doubt that the intent of his journey was to preach the Gospel even at the risk of martyrdom. (p. 43)

Along with saving souls, he sought to save lives as well  to help bring peace to the turbulent world he lived in, where Christians, responding to centuries of Islamic invasions and conquests of Christian lands, had gone to war with Islam in the Crusades:

Converting the Muslims by his preaching was the ultimate goal of Francis' efforts, and a peaceful end to the war would be a consequence of their conversion. In the words of scholar Christoph Maier, "Francis, like the crusaders, wanted to liberate the holy places in Palestine from Muslim rule. What was different was his strategy. ... He wanted their total submission to the Christian faith." (p. 63)

In 1212, during the Fifth Crusade, Francis and a fellow monk (actually a friar, as St. Francis himself was ed.) traveled to the Middle East and sought audience with Sultan al-Kamil  despite al-Kamil's vow that "anyone who brought him the head of a Christian should be awarded with a Byzantine gold piece" (p. 57). St. Francis's contemporaries also warned him that Muslims "were a mean people who thirst for Christian blood and attempt even the most brazen atrocities," (p. 34). The determined friar continued their journey, only to experience the inevitable:

The early documents are unanimous in agreeing that the two Franciscans were subjected to rough treatment upon crossing Muslim territory. The men of God were seized in a violent manner by the sentries, assaulted, and bound in chains. Celano reports that Francis "was captured by the Sultan's soldiers, was insulted and beaten" yet showed no fear even when threatened with torture and death. (p. 58)

Eventually brought before Sultan al-Kamil, the friars sought to "demonstrate to the Sultan's wisest counselors the truth of Christianity, before which Mohammed's law [sharia] counted for nothing: for 'if you die while holding to your law, you will be lost; God will not accept your soul. For this reason we have come to you.'"

Intrigued by the cheeky friars, "the Sultan called in his religious advisers, the imams. However, they refused to dispute with the Christians and instead insisted that they be killed [by beheading], in accordance with Islamic law" (p. 60).

Perplexed, the sultan refused: "I am going counter to what my religious advisers demand and will not cut off your heads ... you have risked your own lives in order to save my soul."

During their disputation and in reference to "the centuries-old Muslim conquest and occupation of lands, peoples, and nations that had once been primarily Christian," Kamil sought to trap the friars: if Jesus had taught Christians to "turn the other cheek" and "repay evil with good," he inquired, why were "Crusaders ... invading the lands of the Muslims?"

Francis quipped by also quoting Christ: "If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell."

Francis then explained: "That is why it is just that Christians invade the land you inhabit, for you blaspheme the name of Christ and alienate everyone you can from His worship"  a reference to Islam's dhimmi rules, which, along with debilitating Christian worship, make Christian lives so burdensome and degrading that untold millions had converted to Islam over the centuries to ease their sufferings.

There are more interesting aspects concerning St. Francis's encounter with Sultan Kamil, including those who find parallels in the modern world, such as sharia's strict bans on blasphemy against Islam and evangelizing for Christianity (often seen as one and the same) and call for the execution of apostates from Islam. They are discussed in this brief article.

For now, consider some important differences between St. Francis and his modern-day namesake, Pope Francis.

While the saint accused Islam of persecuting Christians and sought to bring them succor  to the point of putting his life on the line  Pope Francis refuses to confront Islam. When he has the attention of the world, he habitually fails to condemn or even shed light on the nonstop Muslim persecution of Christians, including millions of Catholics.

Last year, he delivered a nearly hour-long speech before the United Nations. Only once did Francis make reference to persecuted Christians  and he merged their sufferings in the very same sentence with the supposedly equal sufferings of "members of the majority religion"  that is, Sunni Muslims. In reality, of course, Sunnis are not being slaughtered, beheaded, enslaved, and raped for their faith; are not having their mosques bombed and burned; are not being jailed or killed for apostasy, blasphemy, or proselytization. That's because the terrorists  whether al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, or ISIS  are Sunnis. And before that, Francis issued his first encyclical  an important document meant to be relayed to the world's Catholics  with no mention of persecuted Christians.

More recently, after a journalist asked Pope Francis about the slaughter of an 85-year-old priest in France and how he was clearly "killed in the name of Islam," the pope disagreed and proceeded to offer a plethora of absurd and silly rationalizations in defense of Islam.

Nor did St. Francis preach passivity before aggression:

A foremost expert on Francis and the Fifth Crusade, Professor James Powell, wrote: "Francis of Assisi went to Damietta [Egypt, where Sultan Kamil was] on a mission of peace. There can be no question about this. We should not however try to make him a pacifist or to label him as a critic of the crusade." Another leading crusade scholar, Christoph Maier, was even more explicit: "Francis thus accepted the crusade as both legitimate and ordained by God, and he was quite obviously not opposed to the use of violence when it came to the struggle between Christians and Muslims." At one time Francis had remarked to his friars that "... paladins and valiant knights who were mighty in battle pursued the infidels even to death[.]" ... Francis admired the deeds of such brave men because "... the holy martyrs died fighting for the Faith of Christ." (p.70)

This is why those who know the true biography of St. Francis deplore his modern-day transformation into some sort of Medieval "hippie"  or, in Pope Francis's words, "the man of peace, the man who loves and protects creation."

In 1926, Pope Pius XI issued the following statement:

What evil they do and how far from a true appreciation of the Man of Assisi [St. Francis] are they who, in order to bolster up their fantastic and erroneous ideas about him, image such an incredible thing ... that he was the precursor and prophet of that false liberty which began to manifest itself at the beginning of modern times and which has caused so many disturbances both in the Church and in civil society!

In the context of confronting Islam, Rega laments that "for the revisionists, the 'real' Francis was not a bold Evangelist, but a timid man, whose goal was to have the friars live passively among the Saracens [Muslims] and 'to be subject to them'" (p.95).

A final important point: While St. Francis did not mock Muhammad  though apparently not enough to dissuade the pious from calling for his head  he unequivocally portrayed the Muslim prophet's message as false. Unlike the diplomatic Pope Francis, who never seems to preach Christ to Muslims, but rather confirms them in and validates their religion, the sincere saint was actually more concerned with the souls of Muslims, to the point of putting his own life on the line. This used to be one of the concerns of all popes, the "vicars of Christ." But apparently not for Pope Francis.

In short, there's a fine line between St. Francis's compassion and Pope Francis's cowardice  or worse, complicity. When it comes to confronting Islam and standing up for the faith and persecuted Christians, Pope Francis woefully fails to live up to the brave friar whose name he appropriated.

Raymond Ibrahim, author of The Al Qaeda Reader and Crucified Again, is a Shillman fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and a Rosen fellow at the Middle East Forum.
We need a politically incorrect and radically new multi-disciplinary and multinational understanding of Islam.

To speak of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as the three Abrahamic faiths or as the three religions of the Book, or, more significantly, as the three monotheisms, obscures rather than illuminates. These familiar tropes, says theologian George Weigel, ought to be retired.

The eminent French scholar Alain Besancon agrees. He writes, The Abraham of Genesis is not the Ibrahim of the Quran; Moses is not Moussa. As for Jesus, he appears, as Issa, out of place and out of time, without reference to the landscape of Israel. His mother, Mary, or Mariam, identified as the sister of Aaron, gives birth to him under a palm tree. Then Issa performs several miracles, which seem to have been drawn from the apocryphal gospels, and announces the future coming of Muhammad.

Alain Besancon takes us deeper into the heart of the matter. He draws this theological distinction between Judaism and Christianity, on the one hand, and Islam, on the other:

Although Muslims like to enumerate the 99 names of God, missing from the list, but central to the Jewish and even more so to the Christian concept of God, is Father  i.e., a personal God capable of a reciprocal and loving relationship with men. The one God of the Quran, the God who demands submission, is a distant God; to call him Father would be an anthropomorphic sacrilege. The Muslim God is utterly impassive; to ascribe loving feeling to Him would be suspect. If God is not Father, then it is difficult to imagine the human person as having been made in the image of God.

Now, let us admit that Islam has, over the centuries, given meaning and purpose to hundreds of millions of lives that have been decently lived. It is also true, however, that today, throughout the world, Islam finds itself in the midst of what Besancon aptly describes as a long-delayed, wrenching, and still far from an accomplished encounter with modernity.

Indeed, Islam continues to divide mankind into two groups, the faithful on the one hand, and creatures Islam calls pigs and dogs on the other, an attitude that fosters Islamic terrorism.

To clarify matters further, in 1985, note well that Irans delegate to the United Nations, Said Rajai-Khorassani, declared that the very concept of human rights was a Judeo-Christian invention and inadmissible in Islam.

The indiscriminate nature of Islamic terrorism can be explained by these words of Catholic theologian George Weigel: The notion that there are no innocents, that the enemy is guilty simply by reason of drawing breath  logically entails a strategy of open-ended mayhem based on the radical dehumanization of the other.

Dehumanization describes the terrorist acts of the Palestinian Authority. This consortium of Muslim-led terrorist groups reduces Jewish children to body parts by exploding the busses in which they ride to school. There is no essential difference between these Muslim terrorists and those that perpetrated the bloodbath in Paris, in Nice, and in Orlando.

Alain Besancon, quoted by Dr. Weigel, exposes another obscure aspect of Islam: Although Muslims like to enumerate the 99 names of God, missing among the list is father  i.e., a personal God capable of a reciprocal and loving relationship with men. If God is not our father, then it is difficult to imagine the human person as having been made in the image of God. Small wonder that Muslims liken infidels to pigs and dogs, and harbor no qualms about using their own children as human bombs to explode Jewish schools busses, thus reducing Jewish children to body parts.

The social philosopher Lou Harris offers a broader assessment of Islam in Civilization and Its Enemies. Contemptuous of the cultural relativism propagated by American colleges and universities, Harris means by civilization a standard of behavior that can be applied across cultures and across history. He sees civilization as having four prerequisites: a stable social order, the co-operation of individuals pursuing their own interests, the ability to tolerate or socialize with ones neighbors, and a hatred of violence.

Clearly, Islam lacks three of the four prerequisites of Harris definition of a civilization. What is remarkable is that Syrian-born psychiatrist Wafa Sultan arrived at the same conclusion. She denied a clash between the West and Islamic civilization because, in her view, Islam is not a civilization!

Egyptian-born scholar Bat Yeor agrees. She defines Islam as a culture of hate, and one can cite several former Muslims who renounced Islam for this very reason.

That said, I have collected several essays by renowned scholars and statesmen who, even though they represent different nations and even different periods of history, nonetheless agree about the egregious nature of Islam, which justifies the title of Harris book Civilization and Its Enemies.

Part I. Introduction

Part II. Identifying the Enemy

Part III. A Former Muslim Shows How to Combat the Enemy

Part IV. An Insiders View of Moderate Muslims

Part V. Beyond Multicultural Relativism

Part VI. The Theological Basis of Todays Crisis

Part VII. Islamophobia: Facts and Fictions

Part VIII. Islamic Bellicosity and Blood Lust

Part IX. Blood Lust (contd)

Part X. Iran and Necrophelia

Part XI. Islamic Imperialism

Part XII. Islam: A Cult of Hatred, Especially of Jews

Prof. Paul Eidelberg is President, Israel-America Renaissance Institute
Among Hillarys most preposterous, unsustainable lies about her emails was that she deleted only personal emails referencing wedding plans and yoga classes. If there were a grain of truth to the notion of Hillary practicing yoga Id argue shed have been better advised to study jiu-jitsu, because her opponent, Donald Trump is a master of that art, turning her attacks on him against her.

The prevailing fairytale spread by her camp is that he is the rough naif in the thickets of oh-so-difficult to comprehend diplomacy while she is experienced on the world stage. Neither she nor her spokespersons when asked for examples could do more than point to the many miles she traveled as Secretary of State, a claim Carly Fiorina had fun with earlier in the race. She famously said, "Like Mrs. Clinton I too have traveled hundreds of thousands of miles but flying and traveling is an activity, it's not an accomplishment and unfortunately she didn't accomplish anything as Secretary of State."

This week, Trump proved Carly right and showed that he was vastly more clever than she in the art of diplomacy. Mexican President Nieto invited both candidates to a meeting in Mexico to discuss issues between the two countries. Hillary turned down the invitation, Trump, with a far busier schedule -- a rally in Washington State followed by one in California and another in Arizona, quickly took him up on the offer.

The naysayers prematurely wrote this off as a disastrous move on his part. Instead it was a resounding success.

As Roger L. Simon observed:

Donald Trump's performance at his dual statement cum brief press conference with Mexican President Enrique Nieto on Wednesday should put shivers in the Hillary Clinton camp even more than the new L.A. Times poll numbers showing a sudden bounce for Trump. Trump was a hundred percent presidential in his performance, showing that he was not about to put his foot in his mouth on the global stage as easily as Hillary's supporters are hoping. All this is occurring with her email/foundation metastasizing. This election is not over. Trump had a five-point plan for the border, including the building of the wall, that emphasized a partnership with Mexico. Very smart. That Trump decided not to discuss with the Mexican president how the wall would be paid for was undoubtedly wise. Indeed, one simple manner of payment would be a taxation of remittances, which wouldn't involve the Mexican government at all.

The Clinton camp kept firing beanbags at the mission, but some remembered her trip there as Secretary of State when it was apparent that shed done no homework for the trip as the exchange about the Virgin of Guadalupe -- a national icon revealed:

You have a marvelous virgin, Clinton tells Mexicans. Catholics believe that almost 500 years ago the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe was miraculously imprinted on the cloak of St. Juan Diego, who became the Catholic church's first saint indigenous to the Americas in 2002. According to news agency reports, the basilica's rector, Msgr. Diego Monroy, had had the image lowered from its altar for a closer look by the visiting dignitary. "Who painted it?" Clinton asked. "God," the rector replied.

She claimed the Trump visit was a mere photo op. And in a remarkable sign that she lacks self-awareness the Secretary of State when we abandoned Israel, deposed Gadhafi whod cooperated with us, facilitated arming Iran with nuclear weapons, and stood by as the Kurds were attacked, and drone strikes took out civilians, remarked: If more countries get nuclear weapons, if we abandon our allies, if our commander in chief orders our military to break the laws and commit torture or murder terrorist family members. Thats why it is so critical we get this right.

Dan Drezner, among others, warned the visit was likely to be a disaster: The question is why it is happening. As Ill explain in a moment, there are so many ways this can go wrong that it boggles the mind. Remember Mitt Romneys disastrous overseas trip in 2012? Scott Walkers bumbling overseas trip in early 2015? Multiply that by a factor of 10 and thats how badly this could go.

In any event, the suggestion that Trump would make a fool of himself in Mexico proved once again his detractors were wrong. The picture of him and Nieto was a compelling image of a candidate well suited for the world stage. Both were cordial and frank about the areas they thought they could work together on. Hillarys campaign said they are looking for an "appropriate time" to meet with Nieto, noting that her campaign has been in constant communication with Mexican officials, according to a statement obtained by the Washington Post. She made a major mistake in not accepting the invitation and no amount of sniping by her and her followers can undo that. Theres no way she can go now. Trump took her claim of being the superior, experienced diplomat and turned it on its head. He was a figure on the world stage while she was shuffling around Sagaponack begging for more money.

He took the risk and he won:

The stagecraft Wednesday said almost as much as the words that came out of Trump's mouth. The joint press conference with Pena Nieto was set up like a meeting between world leaders, with podiums and questions from the press. Trump's team clearly wanted the audience of Americans watching at home to visualize the businessman as their president. The GOP nominee seemed to embrace that role. He hardly cracked a smile, and looked somber, nodding respectfully as the Mexican president spoke and as a woman translated for him. [snip] By focusing largely on areas of agreement with Mexico's president and refusing to inflame the biggest area of controversy -- the question of whether Mexico is going to pay for a border wall -- Trump tried to show that he's a leader capable of modulating his behavior when the situation requires it. The most telling moment came in the question-and-answer section after Trump's statement, when ABC News reporter Jon Karl asked whether Trump and Pena Nieto settled the question of who would pay for the wall. Trump said he discussed the wall with Pena Nieto but not who would pay for it.

The following day, Trump delivered his ten-point plan on immigration. He provided a detailed look at the administrations refusal to follow immigration law and with the survivors of people murdered brutally by illegal aliens by his side he detailed the cost to America by this Cloward-Piven like effort to swamp the countrys schools and welfare programs with millions of unskilled -- sometimes criminal -- aliens, creating chaos and changing us forever. Instead of the appeals to emotion on behalf of illegal aliens -- a standard feature in todays news coverage -- he argued for compassion for Americans being overwhelmed with the elites generosity at their expense. He argued that our citizens in poverty and crime-ridden neighborhoods and our veterans are more deserving of compassion than people who cannot contribute economically and who may not even accept our cultural norms.

Your newspapers and TV news probably did not cover it adequately. If you can spare the time, I urge you read a transcript of his remarks.

In sum hed pledged to do the following:

Number One: We will build a wall along the Southern Border.

Number Two: End Catch-And-Release

Number Three: Zero tolerance for criminal aliens

Number Four: Block Funding For Sanctuary Cities

Number Five: Cancel Unconstitutional Executive Orders & Enforce All Immigration Laws

Number Six: We Are Going To Suspend The Issuance Of Visas To Any Place Where Adequate Screening Cannot Occur

Number Seven: We will ensure that other countries take their people back when we order them deported

Number Eight: We will finally complete the biometric entry-exit visa tracking system

Number Nine: We will turn off the jobs and benefits magnet

Number Ten: We will reform legal immigration to serve the best interests of America and its workers

Our message to the world will be this: you cannot obtain legal status, or become a citizen of the United States, by illegally entering our country.

There are those who say that he can never achieve these goals. True, some will require Congressional cooperation and some of his plan may require compromise, but can you doubt this marks a significant step in the right direction?

Following the speech, the switchboard for taking donations was jammed with over $5 million received from appreciative Americans whose legitimate concerns have for too long been treated as racist or inhumane by the kind of people who summer in Marthas Vineyard, nibble canapes and swill champagne in the Hamptons, whose kids go to tony private schools and who live in gated communities.
From an analysis of the FBI document dump (Part 1, Part 2) concerning Hillarys email use and her foreign travel schedule, it is apparent that the Chinese are more likely to have gained access to Hillarys emails than Russia. Other countries would have had opportunities as well.

Hillarys email server was most vulnerable from mid to late January to late March 2009, when the email server used was an older Apple machine for her hdr22@c1intonemai1.com email account. During that time, there was no encryption of her login ID or password. From the FBI report (page 27 of Part 1):

Investigation determined Clinton's clintonemail.com e-mail traffic was potentially vulnerable to compromise when she first began using her personal account in January 2009. It was not until late March 2009, when the Pagliano Server was set up and an SSL certificate was acquired for the clintonemail.com domain -- providing encryption of login credentials, but not e-mail content stored on the server -- that access to the server was afforded an added layer of security.

That means that when she traveled abroad, anytime her Blackberry was turned on, it would periodically send her login and password in the clear to connect to the server. Specifically, Hillary traveled to Beijing, China on February 20-21, 2009 during this time period. The Chinese government controls the telephone service so it would have been relatively easy to obtain her login credentials if her phone were turned on and connected to the local telephone service at any time during the trip.

The State Department has a mobile security team that warned Hillary and her staff about the risk of using mobile devices abroad. From the report (page 14 of Part 1)

Clinton and her immediate staff were notified of foreign travel risks and were warned that digital threats began immediately upon landing in a foreign country, since connection of a mobile device to a local network provides opportunities for foreign adversaries to intercept voice and e-mail transmissions. The State Mobile Communications (MC) Team was responsible for establishing secure mobile voice and data communications for Clinton and her team when they were traveling domestically and abroad. When the security climate required, the State MC was capable of [REDACTED] could be received and viewed by Clinton and/or her designated staff.

It is not clear to what extent the Mobile Communications Team could have prevented intrusion by the Chinese since a REDACTED portion apparently covers the methods to secure communications. Given Hillarys reckless disregard for security measures, it is possible that the MC Team was unable to shield Hillarys email use from interception.

If the Chinese did gain access, it is unlikely it would have been noticed, since there was only limited monitoring for attempted intrusions into the server. Bryan Pagliano was the IT tech who helped to transition Hillarys email account from Apple to a Windows server. From the FBI report (page 28, of Part 1)

When asked about the maintenance and security of the server system he administered, Pagliano stated there were no security breaches, but he was aware there were many failed login attempts, which he referred to as brute force attacks. He added that the failed attempts increased over the life of the Pagliano Server, and he set up the server's logs to alert [Bill Clinton IT aide Justin] Cooper when they occurred. Pagliano knew the attempts were potential attackers because the credentials attempting to log in did not match legitimate users on the system. Pagliano could not recall if a high volume of failed login attempts emanated from any specific country.

Therefore, if the Chinese had the correct ID and Password, they could have monitored the email server undetected since Pagliano, and Cooper were only looking for failed login attempts.

Even after the server was upgraded to encrypt login credentials, if Hillary used the same password, the Chinese could still access her emails.

Besides China, other governments would have had the opportunity to gain access to Hillarys emails. During the vulnerable period from January 2009 to late March 2009, Hillary traveled to Japan, Indonesia, South Korea, Egypt, Israel, Palestinian Authority, Belgium, Switzerland (where she met with Russian Foreign Secretary Lavrov), Turkey and Mexico. Any of those countries could have gained access to her emails.

These FBI reports help to clarify the extent to which Hillarys reckless use of an unsecured email server put our countrys secrets at risk of interception by foreign adversaries. It is also of concern that the FBI resorted to the time honored Washington practice of dumping damaging documents on Fridays ahead of national holidays where the damage can be minimized. This demonstrates the extent to which the FBI has been politicized, which is another reason to doubt the impartiality of Director James Comeys decision to not refer Hillarys email case to the Justice Department.
As a professional headline-writer, I recognize excellence of the highest order when I see it in a headline. We have just been graced with a work of art that I hope will be long remembered. You can count on your fingers the number of headlines that have lingered in the collective memory for decades.

There is the immortal New York Post headline that both shocked and amused:

When the author of that immortal prose, Vincent Musetto, passed away, The Post eulogized him with its own headline, Genius behind Headless body in Topless Bar Headline Dies at 73, and wrote of his masterpiece:

Headless Body in Topless Bar ran on The Posts front page on April 15, 1983. As witty as it was horrific, it expressed with unflinching precision the citys accelerating tailspin into an abyss of atrocious crime and chaos. Headless Body soon became the stuff of pop-culture legend. Saturday Night Live worked it into routines and David Letterman invited Musetto onto his late-night show to talk about it. It even became the title of a 1990s crime movie. But Musetto, a managing editor, had to fight to get Headless Body into the paper. He pleaded with then-executive editor Roger Wood, who was equally appalled by the crime.

Expressing with precision a widely feared phenomenon while, telling the truth in a small handful of words, seems to be a big part of an immortal headline. Another editor who gained immortality from a headline was not so happy with his achievement at the time. Kirk Scharfenberg was the editorial page editor of the Boston Globe during the disastrous presidency of Jimmy Carter, and as a joke put a headline on a column about the presidents latest speech, More Mush from the Wimp, expecting that others in the production process would recognize the sarcastic joke. The intended headline was the entirely forgettable, All Must Share the Burden, but 161,000 copies went out with the better headline. (I was among the lucky subscribers to the Globe who received the witty version, and my eyeballs almost popped out from their sockets when I saw it.)

Unlike Musetto, Sharfenberg got a lot of grief at the liberal Globe for telling the truth. But as with editor Musetto, editor Sharfenbergs obituary in the New York Times made mention of his most famous work, but spared readers the prose in its headline.

Which brings us to this weeks headline genius, who, at the moment, remains anonymous. I refer to this article from The Washington Examiner.

Time to take the car keys away from Granny Clinton

This hits us where we live. When a parent reaches the point of being unsafe behind the wheel, it is heartrending for family members to end the mobility. But in order to protect the rest of us, it must be done. This is resonant, to say the least.

Bravo!
One disadvantage of United States citizenship is that all income from whatever source, worldwide, is subject to taxation. This is true regardless of how one obtains American citizenship; indeed, there are many "accidental Americans" who, by dint of having been born to a person with American citizenship, are technically American citizens, many of whom are now being hit with significant tax bills from the Internal Revenue Service. Renunciation of American citizenship is possible, and is being done in record numbers, but it comes at a price in paperwork if not in dollars  the Expatriation Tax.

Complicating matters is the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which requires American taxpayers to report their foreign accounts to the United States Treasury. The United State has entered into various Tax Information Exchange Agreements (TIEAs) with various countries to ensure that the foreign banks give the U.S. Treasury the information required under FATCA. One such agreement is with Israel.

As a result, many foreign banks and brokerage firms, including many in Israel, are reluctant to open accounts with American citizens.

The ancient Romans; the British; and, once upon a time, the United States all asserted the interests of their citizens abroad. In 1976, Israel rescued its citizens held by terrorists in a daring raid upon the Entebbe airport in Uganda.

Israel is now giving serious consideration to the interests of its citizens who also happen to hold American citizenship. In an action brought by Republicans Overseas Israel, the Israeli Supreme Court has enjoined the government of Israel to cease and desist in its planned transfer of FATCA information to the IRS, pending a hearing on 12 September 2016. The arguments used focused not so much on taxation per se, but upon the IRS's demonstrated data security deficiencies and the probability of resulting identity theft, a topic this writer has discoursed about in these pages on several occasions. (This, by the way, exemplifies a judiciary that knows its mission to keep the executive function checked and balanced.)

Tax-related identity theft harms its victims not only financially, but also emotionally. It subjects them  and their families  to much anguish. And even beyond its poor data security and data stewardship practices, the IRS falls short in properly assisting the victims of tax-related identity theft.

Reporting of personal financial information to the IRS is comparable to a prosecutor's disclosure to the crime syndicate the identity of a witness in a major prosecution.

The main difference is that the potential damage inflictable by the Mob has its limits.

Kenneth H. Ryesky, now a senior adviser with the U.S. Desk of Ernst & Young's International Tax Services in Tel Aviv, is a lawyer who has taught business law and taxation at Queens College CUNY. He formerly served as an attorney for the IRS. The views expressed here are his own.
Gonzaga University, a Jesuit institution in Spokane, Washington, has, for some reason, decided to hire Melissa Click, disgraced communications junior professor at the University of Missouri. Most AT readers remember well her actions during the racial agitation at that Campus:

University of Missouri communications assistant professor Melissa Click communicated her displeasure with student journalists who were videoing her leading a demonstration on campus. They captured on video her enraged face and uplifted arms as she called out, "I need some muscle over here" to remove the non-protesting students.



Her academic work is not at all impressive. As I wrote after examining her list of publications:

A brief examination of her published work shows that she is highly political. Incidentally, she has been an assistant professor at MU for 7 years now, according to the Missourian. As a recovering academic, I can report that this is a very long time to remain at the bottom of the hierarchy of professors. Most institutions have an up-or-out system, and spending 7 years at the bottom rung of the tenure track is not an encouraging sign.

Clicks research seems to involve indulging in a lot of popular culture and writing up her thoughts. For example, on Twilight, a favorite topic, she problematizes the abstinence and romance messages of the popular series.

But for the academics to Gonzaga, apparently this oeuvre was impressive. The Kansas City Star report At Gonzaga, Click is listed as a lecturer on the faculty page of the universitys website.

Elisabeth Mermann-Jozwiak, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Gonzaga, said in a written statement that Gonzaga officials knew of Clicks recent history and were confident in welcoming her to the university. Click was hired for a one-year, non-tenure track position as a lecturer in the universitys communication studies department.

Dr. Click was hired through an extensive national search process that revealed her to be the most qualified and experienced candidate for the position, the statement read in part. Dr. Click has excellent recommendations for both her teaching and scholarship, which includes an extensive record of publication. We are confident she has learned much from her experiences at the University of Missouri and believe she will uphold the rigorous standards of academic excellence demanded of Gonzaga faculty and students.

At Columbia, Click found herself at the center of controversy that continued to generate fallout for the university for months.

How can any student journalist at Gonzaga feel it is a safe space?

Academia, in particular the liberal arts, has been so corrupted that thuggery is tolerated as long as it is conforms to the leftist biases of the faculty. The University of Missouri has experienced tremendous damage from the racial incidents that took place there, with applications and donations plummeting to the extent that dormitories have been closed.

Gonzaga may not realize the door it has opened.
Google Fiber is the next big thing in internet connectivity, offering fast internet speeds at affordable prices. Unfortunately, its currently only available in a few cities in the U.S., with limited plans to expand in the near future. Nashville, Tennessee, happens to be fortunate enough to have been chosen to receive Google Fiber but has encountered some roadblocks along the way. In order to build a fiber-optic network, Google will need access to utility poles located across the city. The problem is that these poles are owned by the two big competing local internet providers, Comcast and AT&T.

While the rival companies have not exactly been uncooperative, they have not been providing access to the utility poles in a timely manner, slowing the construction of the fiber network. Google needs access to 44,000 utility poles across Nashville. Nashville has a policy in place called make ready, which requires existing service providers to move their existing wires before another company can add their own wires, leaving the new company at the mercy of the old one. On Tuesday, September 6, the Nashville Metro council will meet to vote on the future of these utility poles. Googles proposal is an ordinance called one touch make ready, which would allow the new provider (in this case, Google) to move the existing wires on their own prior to adding new wires, eliminating the need for two separate companies to work together to complete the process. AT&T is not happy about this idea, however, and is prepared to file a lawsuit if Googles proposal is excepted. According to Google, of the 88,000 utility poles in Nashville that require a fiber attachment, half of them have wires that need to be relocated.

Although Google claims that of the 9,793 poles that have already been approved for make ready work, only 33 of them modified, AT&T counters by stating that The reality is that as of yesterday, AT&T has completed Make Ready work on 459 poles for Google Fiber, and AT&T is meeting or exceeding the timetables outlined in the contract Google signed with AT&T. Comcast, the other major rival in the area, pointed out that they feel the companies should work together to address issues, rather than place all of the decision-making responsibility on a single company. The decision of whether to implement the one touch make ready ordinance will be determined once and for all this Tuesday, and if passed, the ordinance could serve to help Google finish their fiber construction sooner. Once completed, Google Fiber will offer Gigabit internet for $70 a month and a package that includes television service for $60 more. Considering that this is similar to the pricing competitors offer for significantly slower speeds, residents of Nashville are likely eager to see Google Fiber construction finished as quickly as possible.
Smartphones with large displays have become increasingly popular over the past few years, thanks to some stellar options available on the market, such as Samsungs Galaxy Note series. While devices like Samsungs Galaxy Note 7 pack a ton of useful features, they also come with a pretty hefty price tag. Fortunately, some manufacturers that dont quite have the same brand recognition as Samsung make comparable devices at a much lower price point. Chinese manufacturer Xiaomi, for example, has the Mi Note, which is similar in design and specifications but much more affordable. Soon, Xiaomi will release the Mi Note 2, successor to the Mi Note, and thanks to a recent leak, there is some information available regarding the release date of the device.

Unfortunately, there have been two possible release dates leaked, and there is no way to tell which, if either, is accurate, but it does provide a general range of when to expect the device, and suggests it will be released soon. The first link, from Weibo, says that the Mi Note 2 will be released on September 14. The second source, which appears to be a leaked promo image with 9.24 at the bottom, contradicts this claim by suggesting a release date of September 24th. These conflicting dates do create a bit of confusion, but one possibility is that the device will be announced on September 14th, and officially released on September 24th.

The Mi Note 2 is expected to come in two variants. The first packs a Snapdragon 820 chipset with 4 GB of RAM, similar to the U.S. version of the Galaxy Note 7. The second configuration, however, includes a Snapdragon 821 chipset with an impressive 6 GB of RAM. The physical design is sleek and attractive, and resembles the Galaxy Note 7, even down to the display, which curves around the edges. According to rumors, the Mi Note 2 will likely sport either 5.7-inch 2K display and 13 MP dual camera. Since the device has not yet been officially launched, the price has not yet been confirmed, but it is expected to sell for around $450, and will probably be available in the same markets as its predecessor, the Mi Note. More information should be available later this month.
BEIJING - Chinese companies are expected to make more acquisitions in Germany as they continue to embark on outbound investment around the globe, a report showed.

The long standing trade and investment partnership between the two countries has provided a solid foundation for Chinese companies to invest in Germany, and merger & acquisition (M&A) activities of Chinese investors in Germany have increased significantly since 2010, according to an investment guide to Germany produced by Deloitte.

Sino-German economic relations have evolved into a strong trade and investment partnership over the past 25 years. China has been Germany's second largest export market outside Europe since 2002, while Germany is China's largest European trading partner, according to the report.

"The motivation to tap into the global market will continue to drive outbound M&A activities by Chinese companies, and Germany will remain a major investment destination for Chinese companies because of the long-term trade and investment relationship between the two countries," said Rosa Yang, chair of Global Chinese Services Group, Deloitte China.

In recent years, Chinese investors have shifted their focus from acquisition of troubled assets to strategic investment in leading multinational technology companies.

China's home appliance manufacturer Midea offered to take a 95 percent holding in German robotics maker Kuka in August, and the German government said it would not block the acquisition as it would not endanger German security.

When it comes to industry sectors, automotive suppliers and industrial companies have traditionally been the focus areas for Chinese investment in Europe. Meanwhile the real estate industry in Germany has showed steady performance in recent years, both in residential and commercial property, and caught the attention of Chinese investors.

"With regard to foreign investment, there are sometimes concerns about job losses and whether the acquired companies will be dissolved with technology being taken away. In fact, foreign investment creates jobs and promotes growth and that is why they are economically important to Germany," said Dirk Hallmayr, leader of Chinese Services Group, Deloitte Germany.

Many Chinese investors have taken over financial distressed automotive suppliers in Germany, which have subsequently undergone successful restructuring and regained competiveness, Hallmayr added.
This Blog is a digital journal for two cute pooches, Casey (A White Color Shih Tzu Dog Mix) & Peanut (A Brown Dachshund Dog Mix) who are both two complete opposites who have nothing in common except this blog and same owners.
Keith Vaz: Vazeline sex, Paris Brown and a casualty of Modern Warfare 2

Keith Vaz MP is riding high on the news cycle. The Sunday Mirror has news on the Labour politician. Its a story of sex, drugs and power. By way of a titter, the BBC notes: Mr Vaz has been referred to in the media as the Teflon politician and Vazeline  because, in the words of the Telegraph, nothing sticks. The story is of gay sex with two male prostitutes, at leat one of whom is from Romania, allegedly.

The Mirror claims:

He is one of the most influential MPs in the House of Commons and is currently overseeing the biggest shake-up of Britains prostitution laws in a generation. But today the Sunday Mirror can reveal Keith Vaz, a married father of two, is leading a double life paying young male escorts for sex.

(As is alleged.)

Was he for or against legalised sex with prostitutes?

The Mirror:

Mr Vaz last met two Eastern European prostitutes eight days ago, even though he is chair of a powerful parliamentary group probing vice and drugs. And as the talk ranged from sex to pets, Mr Vaz eventually said: We need to get this party started.

Pets? Richard Gere legend stuff? Dunno. But weve not seen Gordon the Gopher for a while, and you know how much Vaz loves celebs. But back to the story of sex for hire:

While chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, Mr Vaz has publicly said he was not convinced that men who pay for sex should face prosecution.

He said:

Treating soliciting as a criminal offence is having an adverse effect, and it is wrong that sex workers, who are predominantly women, should be penalised and stigmatised in this way. The criminalisation of sex workers should therefore end.

Good. What consenting adults do with their bodies is not the States business.

In a 90-minute rendezvous on August 27, the former Minister for Europe offered to cover the cost of cocaine if it was brought to the flat  but said he did not want any himself. He is currently heading up the committee which has investigated harm caused by the illegal Class A drug. Mr Vaz, Labour MP for Leicester East since 1987, also told the pair to bring along poppers  the sex-enhancing drug.

Cocaine? In 2009, Vaz said:

As part of our investigation into the cocaine trade we want to explore the human cost of drug taking, particularly on users and their families. We are pleased Mitch Winehouse, the father of Amy, has agreed to share with us research for a documentary on the damaging effects of drug abuse and of the effectiveness of drug rehabilitation.

A touch hypocritical, then? Maybe. There is no suggestion he took any illegal drugs. If adults want to take banned narcotics, well, that too is their own affair. Cocaine should be legal. If whats alleged is true, Vaz is coming across as a liberal.

Vaz tells the Mail on Sunday:

I am genuinely sorry for the hurt and distress that has been caused by my actions in particular to my wife and children. I will be informing the Committee on Tuesday of my intention to stand aside from chairing the sessions of the Committee with immediate effect.

He then said in a statement:

At this time I do not want there to be any distraction from the important work the Home Affairs Select Committee undertakes so well. Select Committees do vital work in holding the government and others to account. We are due to publish two Reports, one into Anti Semitism and the other into FGM in the next few days, in addition we have a number of key witnesses. I will of course inform Committee members first of my plans when we meet on Tuesday. My decision has been based entirely on what is in the best interests of the Committee which I have had the privilege of Chairing for the last 9 years.

Got that? Vaz has stepped down from a committee looking into sex and drugs because its alleged he might know about them.

Like you we are shocked and appalled (surely, sniggering and gossiping  ed). After all, when Paris Brown, then just 17 years old, was chosen to be Kents youth police crime commissioner, her Twitter account made waves. There was a comment on drugs  I really wanna make a batch of hash brownies  sex  Worst part about being single is coming from a party/night out horny as f*** and having to sleep alone  and argy-bargy  I dont condone violence but im so pleased that my brother thumped the fat little fuck.

Teenagers, eh. Exposed in the tabloid Press, Paris soon resigned.

And who was outraged and disgusted by Browns mere words? Yep, Keith Vaz, who stated:

Public money should never be given to anyone who refers to violence, sex, drunkenness and other antisocial behaviour in this offensive manner.

Paris was getting 15,000 a year as the police wonk. Vazs public service earns him far more. Although his alleged comments were made in private, via text.

PS: Think of the children. We look to our MPs as role models. If Keith Vaz is being linked to drugs and sex on the clock, wont kids follow his example? After all, when he saw the computer game Modern Warfare 2, Vaz was absolutely shocked at the level of violence in this game. He asked what steps ministers were taking to ensure that violent games did not fall into the hands of children and young people. Its not about censorship, said dad-of-two Keith, its about protecting our children.

Amen to that.

Paul Sorene

Posted: 4th, September 2016 | In: Key Posts, Politicians, Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
Tourism officials from the 21 APEC member economies are preparing their industry infrastructure to host an expected doubling of international tourists in the region to 800 million people within the next decade. The potential payoff for job creation and growth is substantial, a new report meanwhile details.

Measures to help small businesses and workforces accommodate this surge in visitors were taken forward by officials and industry representatives over the last week in the budding ecotourism destination of Kokopo. Focus is on maximizing the services capacity of the regions small firms, which account for 97 per cent of all businesses and half of labor across APEC economies.

The Asia-Pacific is currently the most significant contributor to the advancement in tourist numbers globally, noted Papua New Guinea Tourism Minister Tobias Kulang, in opening remarks. The regions position is reflective of its above average market growth which registered a nine per cent rate within the first four months of 2016.

Papua New Guinea is working with its APEC partners to boost tourism as an engine for economic growth and prosperity, Minister Kulang continued. We are fully committed to the success of regional efforts to ensure a sustainable, inclusive travel and tourism sector, and promote labor, skills development and certifications to build compatible workforces.

International tourist arrivals in APEC economies have jumped 168 per cent to over 426 million during the last twenty years. The region stands a good chance to hit its target of 800 million by 2025 if actions conducive to growth are taken, according to a new industry report from the APEC Policy Support Unit.

Achieving APECs tourist arrivals goal, aided by collaboration to improve air connectivity and entry processes, would add USD 3.8 trillion dollars in GDP, create 21.1 million jobs and lift 15.2 million people out of poverty across the region, the report adds. But it will also strain the industrys ability to cater to new visitors, particularly travel, tourism and hospitality operators with scarcer resources.

APEC is deepening engagement with the travel and tourism sector to better understand the new challenges facing operators big and small, and establish conditions that enable them to harness growth opportunities, said Jennifer Aguinaga, Chair of the APEC Tourism Working Group, which administers regional initiatives in support of travel and tourism development.

We are focused on meeting infrastructure and human resource needs as tourism demand rises and changes in technology and business models transform the industry, added Aguinaga, who is also with the National Travel and Tourism Office at the United States Department of Commerce.

To this end, APEC is working with the private sector to lift structural barriers to industry innovation, including the development of new products and niche markets. Easing bottlenecks to entrepreneurship and tourism operators owned by women, who account for 60 per cent of the industry workforce, is a parallel emphasis. Financing and digital divides are among them.

APEC economies are further boosting occupational standards and certification programs, wider access to training and career development vital to encouraging young people to pursue long-term employment in tourism. They are also driving best practice adoption for mutual recognition in recruitment, retention and workforce planning among employers.

Small businesses are more likely to hire locally, generate jobs that are less skill-intensive and provide more flexible work arrangements, said Emmanuel San Andres, an analyst with the APEC Policy Support Unit and co-author of the report. Greater public-private support for the sectors modernization will be critical to realizing its full growth potential as more tourists arrive.

APEC economies are well placed to exchange critical ground-level data needed to assess the impact of tourism development on businesses, households and individuals, San Andres concluded. Ultimately evidence-based policies will do a lot more to build an inclusive and rewarding tourism sector in the region.

Click here to view the APEC Tourism Arrivals and Inclusive Growth Report

# # #

For additional information, or to arrange possible media interviews, please contact:

David Hendrickson +65 9137 3886 at [email protected]

Michael Chapnick +65 9647 4847 at [email protected]

More on APEC meetings, events, projects and publications can be found on www.apec.org. You can also follow APEC on Twitter and join us on Facebook and LinkedIn.


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The route from Imam Khomeini International Airport is being serviced by six-weekly flights to British Airways hub at London Heathrows Terminal 5. This follows the recent relaxing of sanctions, .

After Fridays first flight, Sean Doyle, British Airways head of network and fleet, said: British Airways has a long history of flying to Iran so we are very excited to be launching our new six times a week service, direct from Heathrow to Tehran.

Iran is a fascinating country, full of amazing and surprising places for tourists to visit and discover its sophisticated and ancient culture.

The recent lifting of sanctions has also effectively allowed Iran to re-open for business and paved the way for commerce to re-connect with Irans economy, which is the second largest in Middle East and North Africa, with a diverse range of businesses and industries.

From 2 September flight BA0153, British Airways four-class Boeing 777 is offering seats in its First, Club World (business class), World Traveller Plus (premium economy), and World Traveller (economy).






Flight 462 was on a charter flight from Riyadh, to Alexandrias Borg El Arab airport with 150 passengers on board.

The flight landed safely in Alexandria and the man was detained by police, according to a statement. The man was later found to be unarmed.

International media had erroneously reported that the aircraft was linked with EgyptAir leading to furious reaction from the national carrier.

In a statement EgyptAir said: A lot of news was published with EgyptAir in head of the news. Mentioning the companys name in this story causes much confusion to the readers and customers of the company worldwide, it will defames the status of the company, which is unacceptable. Stories relating the incident to EgyptAir are entirely untrue,


Primeclass, the brand of TAV Operation Services providing solutions for the passengers who are seeking comfort during their travels, has added Muscat in its service portfolio as the 20th airport. TAV has won the operating rights of the passenger lounge for 10 years by placing the highest bid amongst the seven companies that joined the tender.

TAV Operation Services general manager Ali Bora Isbulan said: We are delighted to announce that TAV Operation Services has added another passenger lounge to its portfolio comprising of 39 lounges operated at home and abroad. There will be suit rooms, SPA center and a special shopping hall in Muscat Primeclass Lounge which is going to be constructed on an area of 3,050 meter squares having 550 seating capacity. We will be serving to approximately 250 thousand guests annually at the lounge which is planned to be put into service in 2017. TAV Operation Services/Primeclass has become a preferred brand around the globe which provides privileged travel solutions. We are hosting more than 2.5 million passengers at our lounges per year. In addition to Nairobi Turkish Airlines Star Alliance Lounge opened last month, we will be operating new passenger lounges at Washington D.C Dulles Airport and Frankfurt Airport Terminal-2. We are planning to add 30 more passenger lounges into our business portfolio at the airports which are not operated by TAV. We are focused on our growth plans regarding Germany, France, England, Switzerland, Belgium, and Italy. Besides we are planning to launch new passenger lounges in Africa and USA. Furthermore, our business talks and negotiations are continuing at various cities in the States, namely Chicago, Dallas, Denver, San Francisco, Boston and Los Angeles. I would like to also mention that our company can also become a passenger lounge operator in Canada, Chile and Mexica.

Muscat Primeclass Lounge will be available for the passengers of contracted airlines, TAV Passport and Primeclass Lounge Card holders as well as some other private passenger lounges members.

The new airport of Muscat, the entrance gate to Oman, is expected to host 11 million passengers in 2017.
Warren Chapel AME Church will celebrate its 149 th Church Anniversary on Sunday, Sept. 11 , during the 10 a.m. worship service.

The theme for this celebration is Growing in Grace and Faith While Growing Stronger and Reaching Higher.

The guest preacher will be Rev.

Warren Chapel is located at 501 N. Market Street in Chattanooga.

The senior pastor is Rev. Dr. Pedro K. Basden. The public is cordially invited.
Francis celebrates Mass for the canonization of the founder of the Missionaries of Charity: "In all aspects of her life, was a generous dispenser of divine mercy, making herself available for everyone through her welcome and defence of human life, those unborn and those abandoned and discarded." The Christian life "is not merely extending a hand in times of need.." An immense crowd in St Peter's Square: "We will continue to call her Mother Teresa."

Vatican City (AsiaNews) - Mother Teresa is "a model of holiness a tireless worker of mercy help us to increasingly understand that our only criterion for action is gratuitous love, free from every ideology and all obligations, offered freely to everyone without distinction of language, culture, race or religion ". This is the conclusion of the homily delivered by Pope Francis on the occasion of the canonization of the founder of the Missionaries of Charity.

The Pope said that the Mother "in all aspects of her life, was a generous dispenser of divine mercy, making herself available for everyone through her welcome and defence of human life, those unborn and those abandoned and discarded. She was committed to defending life, ceaselessly proclaiming that the unborn are the weakest, the smallest, the most vulnerable'."

The Pope celebrated Mass before more than 100 thousand people. They are devotees of the Mother who had come from throughout the world, not just Asia: A sizeable US delegation was a group of parents who over time have adopted children from the houses of the Missionaries of Charity around the world.

The Eucharistic celebration began with the narration of biographical traits of Mother Teresa and the history of the Congregation which she founded. Soon after, with the Litany of the Saints, the canonization ceremony commenced. Immediately after the reading of the solemn formula, the square erupted into loud applause.

After the reading of the Gospel, Francis reflection started with the first reading: "Who can learn the counsel of God? (Wis 9:13). This question from the Book of Wisdom that we have just heard in the first reading suggests that our life is a mystery and that we do not possess the key to understanding it. There are always two protagonists in history: God and man. Our task is to perceive the call of God and then to do his will. But in order to do his will, we must ask ourselves, What is Gods will in my life?".

In the same piece of wisdom, the Pope continued, "we find the answer:" People were taught what pleases you (Wis 9:18). In order to ascertain the call of God, we must ask ourselves and understand what pleases God. On many occasions the prophets proclaimed what was pleasing to God. Their message found a wonderful synthesis in the words I want mercy, not sacrifice (Hos 6:6; Mt9:13). God is pleased by every act of mercy, because in the brother or sister that we assist, we recognize the face of God which no one can see (cf. Jn1:18). Each time we bend down to the needs of our brothers and sisters, we give Jesus something to eat and drink; we clothe, we help, and we visit the Son of God (cf. Mt 25:40)".

We are thus called to translate into concrete acts that which we invoke in prayer and profess in faith. There is no alternative to charity: those who put themselves at the service of others, even when they dont know it, are those who love God (cf. 1 Jn 3:16-18; Jas 2:14-18). The Christian life, however, is not merely extending a hand in times of need. If it is just this, it can be, certainly, a lovely expression of human solidarity which offers immediate benefits, but it is sterile because it lacks roots. The task which the Lord gives us, on the contrary, is the vocation to charity in which each of Christs disciples puts his or her entire life at his service, so to grow each day in love.

Recalling the "great crowd" mentioned in the Gospel, Francis explains that it "is seen in the great number of volunteers who have come together for the Jubilee of Mercy. You are that crowd who follows the Master and who makes visible his concrete love for each personHow many hearts have been comforted by volunteers! How many hands they have held; how many tears they have wiped away; how much love has been poured out in hidden, humble and selfless service! This praiseworthy service gives voice to the faith and expresses the mercy of the Father, who draws near to those in need."

Following Jesus, in short, "Following Jesus is a serious task, and, at the same time, one filled with joy; it takes a certain daring and courage to recognize the divine Master in the poorest of the poor and to give oneself in their service. In order to do so, volunteers, who out of love of Jesus serve the poor and the needy, do not expect any thanks or recompense; rather they renounce all this because they have discovered true love. Just as the Lord has come to meet me and has stooped down to my level in my hour of need, so too do I go to meet him, bending low before those who have lost faith or who live as though God did not exist, before young people without values or ideals, before families in crisis, before the ill and the imprisoned, before refugees and immigrants, before the weak and defenceless in body and spirit, before abandoned children, before the elderly who are on their own. Wherever someone is reaching out, asking for a helping hand in order to get up, this is where our presence  and the presence of the Church which sustains and offers hope  must be."

The new saint, Mother Teresa, "in all aspects of her life, was a generous dispenser of divine mercy, making herself available for everyone through her welcome and defence of human life, those unborn and those abandoned and discarded. She was committed to defending life, ceaselessly proclaiming that the unborn are the weakest, the smallest, the most vulnerable. She bowed down before those who were spent, left to die on the side of the road, seeing in them their God-given dignity; she made her voice heard before the powers of this world, so that they might recognize their guilt for the crime of poverty they created. For Mother Teresa, mercy was the salt which gave flavour to her work, it was the light which shone in the darkness of the many who no longer had tears to shed for their poverty and suffering.

Her mission to the urban and existential peripheries remains for us today an eloquent witness to Gods closeness to the poorest of the poor. Today, I pass on this emblematic figure of womanhood and of consecrated life to the whole world of volunteers: may she be your model of holiness! May this tireless worker of mercy help us to increasingly understand that our only criterion for action is gratuitous love, free from every ideology and all obligations, offered freely to everyone without distinction of language, culture, race or religion.

Mother Teresa loved to say, Perhaps I dont speak their language, but I can smile. Let us carry her smile in our hearts and give it to those whom we meet along our journey, especially those who suffer. In this way, we will open up opportunities of joy and hope for our many brothers and sisters who are discouraged and who stand in need of understanding and tenderness".
Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam has announced he will call an extraordinary session of the 109th General Assembly to consider legislation preventing the loss of $60 million in federal highway funds after the U.S. Department of Transportation deemed the state out of compliance with a federal zero tolerance drunk driving statute.

We are disappointed in the U.S. Department of Transportations decision. The state made clear to federal officials that while it disagrees with the interpretation that Tennessee is out of compliance, any such perceived impact of the law was inadvertent and could be fixed in January 2017, Governor Haslam said. To avoid any negative impact to the state, I will ask the General Assembly to convene in a special session and clarify state law in this matter.

Last month the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) notified the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) that 2016 Tennessee Public Chapter No. 1030, which passed overwhelmingly during the 2016 legislative session, signed by the governor, and actually strengthened penalties for DUI offenders aged 18 to 20, puts the state out of compliance with a federal zero tolerance drunk driving statute that conditions certain federal highway funding on compliance with its provisions.

The NHTSA indicated Tennessee would permanently lose $60 million if it remained out of compliance as of October 1. In separate letters to NHTSA, TDOT Commissioner John Schroer and Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery agreed that Tennessee continues to meet the requirements of federal zero tolerance drunk driving statute.

All 11 members of the bipartisan Tennessee congressional delegation urged U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx to work with Governor Haslam and state officials to find a solution. To avoid a special session of the General Assembly, the state told federal officials it would take up a remedy in January 2017, but the state was notified today it needs to be in compliance by October 1 or face the loss of these federal highway funds.

Governor Haslam will issue an official proclamation calling for a special session in September in the coming days to clarify Tennessee Code to remove any question of compliance with the federal requirements relating to federal-aid highway apportionment.
By Ray Norris, Professor, School of Computing, Engineering, & Maths, Western Sydney University

Shutterstock/Sam DCruz

My Australian-educated friends tell me they were taught at school that all Aboriginal people only counted one, two, three, four and many. While it might be the case for some communities, there is also abundant evidence in others of complex Aboriginal number systems extending to high numbers.

The Australian writer Dame Mary Gilmore, for example, commented in her 1934 book Old Days Old Ways: A Book of Recollections that:

The Aboriginal power to count or compute in his native state was as great as our own [] I have seen partially trained native stockmen give the exact number of cattle in a group up to four or five hundred almost without a moments hesitation, yet authorities on the blacks continue to tell us that the Aboriginal only counted to ten or thereabouts.

Wardaman senior elder Bill Yidumduma Harney, co-author of 2003s Dark Sparklers: Yidumdumas Wardaman Aboriginal Astronomy Northern Australia, explains how cattle are counted:

We go five and five all the way and then bunch it up. Go five and five is ten. Then count the number of tens. We call that Yigaga.

I have listed elsewhere many other examples of traditional Aboriginal people counting to high numbers.

Origin of a myth

So why do some people believe the generalised view that all Aboriginal people cant count beyond four when there is abundant evidence to the contrary?

I suspect part of this myth has its roots in a distant colonial past when the British invaders maintained a belief, on which the terra nullius concept was based, that Aboriginal people were barely human, without culture, civilisation or counting.

When my wife and I were in the Tiwi islands in 2005, the local children were competing to see who could hold their breath longest under water. Although my guidebook said they couldnt count beyond four in their Tiwi language, they were clearly counting to 50 or 60 in a non-English language.

But the myth is reinforced by a linguistic debate about Aboriginal counting words. For example, the distinguished Australian linguist Barry Blake famously said in his 1981 book, Australian Aboriginal Languages: A General Introduction that:

No Australian Aboriginal language has a word for a number higher than four.

Blakes statement refers to a linguistic nuance that does not include compound words such as thirteen or twenty-one, so Blake would probably also say that, with the exception of the words hundred, thousand and million, the English language does not have a word for a number higher than twelve.

But even Blakes statement has counter-examples. In 1881, James Dawson, in his work The Languages and Customs of Several Tribes of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria, reported that the Kuurn kopan noot (Gurnditjmara) language has a word for 20 (peep) and 100 (Baarbaanuung).

The Chaap wuurong (Djabwurrung) people had a number system extending to 28  the number of days in a lunar month  each of which was identified as a place on the body, and as a verbal name which also described that part of the body.

These examples are obviously inconsistent with Blakes statement, as he recently acknowledged to me:

Fair enough. These would be exceptions to my generalisation.

The myth continues

But the real problem is that his original generalisation is often misinterpreted to mean all Aboriginal people cant count beyond four or Aboriginal people dont have a concept of numbers greater than four, both of which are obviously incorrect.

Even worse, respectable academic papers continue to be published that fly in the face of the evidence.

Last year researchers Kevin Zhou and Claire Bowern, from Yale University, argued in a paper that Aboriginal number systems vary, and could extend beyond ten, but still didnt extend past 20, in conflict with the evidence Ive mentioned above.

As a physicist, I am fascinated by the fact that the authors of this paper didnt engage with the contrary evidence. They simply didnt mention it. Why?

Although my training is in astrophysics, I have for the last few years studied Aboriginal Astronomy, on the boundary between the physical sciences and the humanities, and I am beginning to understand a major difference in approach between the sciences and the humanities.

What the data say

In physics, data rule supreme. The most brilliant theory by the most eminent physicist in the world can still be shot down by the lowliest graduate student if it is found to be in conflict with the data.

Of course, data may occasionally be disputed, but that process is explicit, calling for a re-examination of the data, or for the experiment in question to be repeated. A physics paper promoting a theory while simply ignoring conflicting data would not survive the peer-review process, or the subsequent derision.

In humanities, the data is often much more dependent on the skills and interpretation of the researcher.

Ethnographic information suffers from potential errors of misunderstanding, mistranslation and misinterpretation, so is fundamentally less reliable than taking a physical measurement with laboratory equipment or a telescope.

Ethnographic experiments are not repeatable. Once a subject has been exposed to the ethnographer, their answers are unlikely to vary. In physics terms, the ethnographer has collapsed the probability wave function.

So perhaps it isnt surprising that papers written by scientists differ in their conclusion from those written by anthropologists and linguists. But which is right?

As a scientist, I will argue that the true answer is the one most firmly based on evidence. Presumably my linguist and anthropologist friends will disagree. And my post-modernist friends will question the notion of truth, and say we all have a valid narrative.

Sorry, but speaking as a scientist, if I can find a single reliable piece of evidence that is inconsistent with your theory, then your theory is Wrong. You might disagree. But please dont ignore it.

Ray Norris does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Originally published in The Conversation.
I am on a 90 day visa right now to visit my Australian husband. If for some reason we have to extend my visa, while on the extended visa, can I still file for the 820 onshore Spouse visa. (Note this is an IF question. I'm talking about a simple additional 90 days as I've done before without a problem.) Thanks in advance
The hurdles including strict US laws have forced Google to rethink the development of its stand-alone self-driving car.

Googles self-driving car may have reached the end of the road, with its technology boss Chris Urmson, who led the project for seven years, resigning earlier this month. The departure comes amid a move from Google to team up with the automotive industry, rather than challenge it, in the race for autonomy.

According to a note sent out by auto analysts at investment bank Evercore ISI, the Google Self-Driving Car Project was clearly in trouble. The Google driverless project is likely not as advanced as many believe, it said.

Perhaps one of the reasons for Urmsons exit was the Google car projects philosophical U-turn performed last September, with the hiring of ex-Hyundai US boss John Krafcik as CEO of the Google self-driving project. Google also recently signed a deal with Fiat-Chrysler to build autonomous prototypes based on the companys Chrysler Pacifica MPV, all of which suggests that any idea that Google would put its own self-driving cars into production now looks increasingly unlikely.

Additionally, not only do the Google cars have a self-imposed 40.23kph top speed, it took until 2011 for fully autonomous testing on public roads to become legal in the US, when Nevada changed its local laws. Googles home state, California, didnt change the law until this year and the car is still only legal in four states.

However, Californias regulations contained one crucial clause, which could well have sunk the Google car for good  Article 3.7, paragraph 227.18 of the order states: A manufacturer shall not permit any of its autonomous vehicles to be operated on public roads in California when the operator is not seated in the drivers seat and either monitoring its operations and able to take over physical control of the vehicle, or in physical control of the vehicle.

The requirement for autonomous vehicles to have a conventional steering wheel and brake pedals was a major setback for a stand-alone Google car. Its understood that Urmson was involved in political lobbying to try to get this clause rescinded. His departure makes this unlikely, especially as major car manufacturers are already testing conventional cars fitted with autonomous tech, such as Audis A5 and A7 prototypes.

Another big issue for the Google Self-Driving Car Project is whether Googles own mapping base can be used for autonomous driving. Many in the industry say it cant, which is why the HERE mapping division was bought from Nokia by Daimler, Audi and BMW.

But despite these departures and legislative hurdles, the Google project remains committed to seeing true self-serving vehicles, according to a recent Bloomberg interview with new project boss Krafcik. He highlighted the recent fatal accident involving a Tesla driver using the Autopilot function as an example of the problems with whats known as level two autonomy.

Krafcik revealed that Google tested this combination of radar cruise control and lane keep assist in 2012 and found that its drivers started to zone out and even started texting or reaching into the rear seats.

Krafcik says he remains convinced that full level four autonomy, which is our focus at Google, is still the best outcome. He added that Googles deal with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles calls for 100 autonomous Pacifica prototypes, which would double our test fleet. He also admits that building a car is a significant hurdle. Google realised that its really hard to build a car, he said. We built the little prototype that gave us a taste of the complexity.

So, while the stand-alone Google car may be dead, the project to embed Google self-driving technology into future models from mass carmakers clearly isnt.
A growing number of European fleet professionals believe traditional fleet management will evolve into mobility management, which will radically transform the fleet industry as we know it today. The expectation is that the fleet managers of today will evolve into mobility managers in the future. Instead of managing a fleet of vehicles to meet employees mobility needs, the new mobility managers will move beyond asset management to manage a broader array of mobility and travel services, creating new multi-modal mobility options for employees.

Paradigm Shift in Fleet Management

The concept of mobility management will represent a paradigm shift in fleet management, allowing employees to receive a mobility budget instead of a car allowance. A mobility budget is a financial incentive that stimulates employees to travel in a more sustainable way. It is a fixed monthly budget that an employee can use to pay for all travel costs, regardless of the travel mode used.

If, by the end of the month, the mobility budget is not completely spent, the employee is allowed to either keep the money or use the remaining amount for other employee benefits. Employees decide how to spend their mobility budget. The more environmentally sustainable way an employee travels, such as using public transport, or even by participating in a teleconference or videoconference rather than traveling to a meeting, the more monies will be left over for the employees use. The proponents of mobility management say this financial incentive motivates employees to use sustainable transportation. The trend to create a corporate mobility budget has spread to some companies in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, the UK, and Sweden.

Convergence of Fleet & Corporate Travel

Mobility management at multinational companies provides the business case to realign fleet and travel expense management into a single corporate function. As corporations adopt a mobility business model, the prediction is the pressure to converge these functions will accelerate. However, this discussion is not new. For decades, management has recognized that there are many similarities between fleet management and travel management. For instance, over the past decade-and-a-half, a growing number of fleet managers have assumed dual responsibility of managing both the fleet department and travel department. In a mobility management model, fleet and travel management are simply different manifestations of mobility, which offers the opportunity to reduce corporate spend, while providing greater options to employees, by merging these two corporate functions onto the same IT platform.

This position was reinforced by a recent Frost & Sullivan study entitled, The Future of Corporate Mobility  Will Fleet and Travel Management Functions Converge? In the study, Frost & Sullivan said a growing number of organizations are looking at fleet and travel convergence to control spend, improve operational efficiency, reduce CO2 emissions, and increase employee satisfaction. The Frost & Sullivan quantitative study results were based on an Internet survey of 465 fleet, travel, and mobility decision-makers in five European countries  Germany, France, the UK, the Netherlands, and Belgium. The second phase of the study included qualitative phone interviews with an additional 116 companies in both the private and public sector. Half of those surveyed (51%) already employ, or have piloted, mobility solutions. The research revealed 22% of these companies see a high opportunity for travel and fleet management convergence and expressed an interest in an IT platform to facilitate this convergence.

Where Do We Go from Here?

As the concept of mobility management matures and becomes more widespread, companies will transition to operating their fleets on the basis of a total cost of mobility (TCM), rather than the traditional, asset-based, total cost of ownership (TCO).

In the future, the boundaries between fleet and travel management will increasingly converge at many corporations as the travel functionality and fleet functionality as simply different mobility options. Dedicated corporate mobility services will be integrated into corporate travel options. In this new mobility environment, assessments will be made of the most cost-efficient, time-efficient, environmentally-efficient, and labor-efficient ways of making essential business travel. Corporations will adopt new mobility business models that include integrated mobility solutions, such as carsharing, ridesharing, and ehailing, such as the proliferation of Uber, Lyft, and similar type of services. Proponents predict that mobility management will produce structural changes as corporations adopt new integrated technology functionality to realign their fleet and travel processes into a single mobility solution.

Let me know what you think.

[email protected]
4 September 2016 10:12 (UTC+04:00)

By Trend



This year Azerbaijan mark 2 important milestones in the history of EU-Azerbaijan relations: the 20th anniversary of signing the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement in 1996 and the 10th anniversary of signing the MoU on a strategic partnership in the field of energy in 2006, Elmar Mammadyarov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan said.

He made this statement at the Informal lunch of the EU member states with the Eastern partner countries in the margins of Gymnich.

According to him, over the last 2 decades, the EU-Azerbaijan cooperation has tremendously grown and gradually evolved into a large-scale partnership in many areas of shared interest. Both legal documents have greatly contributed to this process.

"We have obvious shared interests in a wide variety of areas and there is still much untapped potential in our cooperation. Submission of the draft Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA) in the margins of Riga Summit was a clear signal reaffirming the importance that we attach to our bilateral relations. Development of long-term relationship with the EU and its Member States based on principles of equal partnership and mutual benefit is one of the key aspirations of Azerbaijans foreign policy", he said.

"We do believe that the SPA will provide a solid legal foundation for enhancing EU-Azerbaijan engagement in a most comprehensive manner and we look forward to launching official negotiations once the negotiating mandate is formally approved by the EUs Foreign Affairs Council. Let me, dear colleagues, express our expectation that it will occur soon. We are ready for intensive dialogue on upgrading our legal framework, which should reflect current realities and ambitions, and will promote EU-Azerbaijan bilateral cooperation for years to come", he added.

Mammadyarov noted that discussions held with Federica during her visit to Baku injected a new dynamism into EU-Azerbaijan interaction. The upcoming months seem to be promising ones in our bilateral political agenda, including the parliamentary dimension, and we will spare no efforts to keep that momentum going. The members of Parliamentary Cooperation Committee will pay a goodwill visit to Baku this month with the aim of reviving inter-parliamentary dialogue. We also look forward to the forthcoming visit of COEST mission to Baku as another opportunity to discuss issues of mutual interest with EU Member States.

"We stated that we were building our relations with the EU based on bilateral track of the Eastern Partnership, however we never excluded the potential and significance of its multilateral cooperation. We have always advocated for its realization through practical implementation of feasible and tangible projects in areas of shared interest, which could deliver concrete results through concrete actions based on concrete commitments. The timely implementation of the Southern Gas Corridor is of a strategic importance in this context. In our firm understanding, transport is another key area which could greatly advance mutually-beneficial cooperation among interested partners within the Eastern Partnership multilateral track.

However, inclusive multilateralism is hindered by protracted conflicts in the region. Territorial integrity and inviolability of borders of Azerbaijan is not less important than other EaP partners. We hail the EU's explicit support to these key principles in its recently adopted Global Strategy. The sooner withdrawal of Armenian armed forces from occupied territories will serve to the EU objectives in fostering regional cooperation in South Caucasus and beyond it", he said.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
4 September 2016 10:39 (UTC+04:00)

Byb Trend

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan discussed the prospects of restoring full-fledged bilateral cooperation, including in energy on September 3, at the meeting in Chinas Hangzhou, TASS reported.

"Im glad to have a chance to meet and discuss the implementation of our agreements reached during your visit to Russias St. Petersburg," Putin told the Turkish president opening the meeting. "Of course, a lot more needs to be done to restore the full-fledged cooperation in all areas. We will talk about this once again today," Putin said.



Erdogan also said he plans to consider all the issues of bilateral cooperation raised at the St. Petersburg meeting of the two leaders in August. "There will be the possibility to consider the energy issues as there is some development here," he said, adding that some steps need be taken for progress in this area.

Ahead of the talks, Putin and Erdogan greeted each other and also shook hands with all participants of negotiations from both sides. Both leaders noted that the delegations at the talks are representative.

Among members of the Russian delegation are Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, presidential aide Yury Ushakov, Energy Minister Alexander Novak, Economic Development Minister Alexey Ulyukayev, Rosatom chief Sergey Kiriyenko, Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller, Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin and head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund Kirill Dmitriyev.

Members of the Turkish delegation are Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, Economy Minister Nihat Zeybekci, Energy Minister Berat Albayrak, Head of National Intelligence Organization Hakan Fidan, foreign policy adviser Sadik Arslan and others.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
Kicking off Labor Day weekend with a "W" in the win column is a big deal and Friday night Todd Morrow of East Ridge did just that, picking up the $2,500 payday for the "Blue Collar Nationals" at the Crossville Speedway.

Starting fourth, the "Blonde Bomber" took about one-third of the event to work past Cory Hedgecock and local standout Brandon Williams. Once out front it was all clean, mean and green for the # T1 "A-Plus Collision, Allen's Pools, Johnston Enterprises, A&K Transport, Mollie & Bobbie Boutique, KC Graphics" sponsored Rick Coulter Platinum chassied Phantom Race Engines powered driver.

Behind Morrow at the checkers were Williams, Caleb Ashby of Cunningham, Tn., Georgian Donald McIntosh and Kentucky's Terry English.

Morrow and his www.ToddMorrowRacing.com raceteam head toward Middle Tennessee for Saturday's Southern All-Star Racing series event in Summertown before Sunday's "Blue Collar" finale at Duck River Speedway in Shelbyville.

Friday in the Crate Late Model special event Morrow raced to a seventh-place finish won by local racer Jesse Lowe.
Walker County Commissioner candidate Perry Lamb said a property tax rollback by Commissioner Bebe Heiskell does not erase tax burden caused by higher assessments.

He said, "I am encouraged to see that Bebe is preparing to lower the millage rate by 'almost a mil' after raising the millage rate last year by 'almost a mil.' The assumption is that this will make it easier to swallow the property appraisal increase just sent out by the Walker County Tax Assessors office.

"If you do the math, Bebe rolling back almost a mil does not erase the tax burden for those who have complained that their property assessment went up as much as 25 percent. In fact, if you include the Development Authority increase, Bebe has raised taxes more in the last two years than she is reducing them now.

What this county needs is someone willing to be fiscally responsible and consistent. Walker County cannot continue down this road of wasteful spending with taxes that continue to rise except during an election year. As Walker County Commissioner, I will manage our county and departments in an efficient manner thereby eliminating these reactive responses we see from the current administration.
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10/29/2022

The Chattanooga Mocs will head to Johns Island, S.C., for the 2022 Southern Conference mens and womens Cross Country Championships on Sunday, October 30. The championships will be held at the ... more
An electrical worker was shocked while working on a utility pole in Pasco County, according to the officials.

Worker made contact with live wire

Other utility workers were able to lower him to the ground

He was taken to Tampa General in critical condition

The incident happened Friday night in the 7000 block of Foxwood Drive.

According to officials, the 30-year-old workers shoulder made contact with a live wire while climbing the pole.

Fellow utility workers used the mans safety belt to lower him to the ground. He was taken to North Bay Medical Center in New Port Richey before being flown to Tampa General Hospital in critical condition. His condition is currently unknown.

Pasco Fire Rescue reminds residents to be careful if they come in contact with live wires. If you see wires in the road, do not approach.
Rising number of outbound visitors from the mainland will promote growth among members

China, the world's largest tourism market for both domestic and outbound travelers, will be responsible for more than 500 million out-bound visits in the coming years. That will help to fuel the economic development of G20 members.

As an example, Li Jinzao, director of the China National Tourism Administration, said in 2015 that in the next five years, more than 150 million Chinese tourists will visit countries along the route of the proposed Belt and Road Initiative, spending about $200 billion.

According to a communique released after the G20 Tourism Ministers Meeting in Beijing in May, tourism is one of the fastest-growing, most resilient economic activities, in addition to being a cross-cutting sector that has significant multiplier effects on other businesses. The World Bank has said that for every dollar spent on tourism, a further $3.20 is generated in GDP across the global economy.

Last year, expenditure on outbound tourism by residents of G20 members exceeded $980 billion, accounting for 80 percent of total tourism expenditure globally. Inbound tourism to G20 members accounted for 70 percent of the global total. Vice-Premier Wang Yang said that more than 120 mil-lion mainland tourists traveled overseas in 2015, spending $200 billion, which contributed to the recovery of the global economy.

South Korea is a good example because the country's tourism industry is reliant on visitors from the Chinese mainland. Last year, more than 14 million international tourists visited South Korea, with more than 6 million from China. Their aver-age individual expenditure was $2,200, and they contributed 1.6 percent of South Korea's GDP.

China has become the No 1 source of tourists to the US, injecting nearly $74 million a day into the US economy.

"To contribute more to tourism exchanges among G20 economies, we will encourage second-and third-tier cities to launch international tourism cooperation ventures and forge more sister-city ties. We will encourage Chinese companies to invest more overseas, and we will also welcome foreign companies to invest in the Chinese tourism industry and develop a larger number of classic travel routes along the Silk Road," Li said.

suzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

Chinese tourists examine a live octopus on Jeju Island, South Korea, on Aug 26. Wang Gang / For China Daily

(China Daily 09/04/2016 page6)
That I learned of Harry Koskos began with seeing a match cover for sale on eBay for his restaurant known as Harrys Place. There is not much room on the front and back of a 1.5 by 4.5 inch piece of cardboard to provide much information. Still, the match cover described Harrys Place as being located at 11th and Market streets, that it was Your Eating Place in Chattanooga, Tenn., and that the menu included juicy steaks and town talk sandwiches.

A bit of sleuthing at the Public Library and on the Web uncovered more information, but Im hoping that more is available. Thats where you, the reader, can help. If you remember Harrys Place or the Koskos family, or have been told of them, please contact me at jolleyh@bellsouth.net. Ill update this article with the additional information that you provide.

From information available on www.archives.com, one can see the World War I draft registration for Harris Koskos. He was born June 1, 1895 in Polichmito, Greece on the Metelin Island. He registered for the draft in Detroit, Michigan. However, according to the 1930 U.S. Census found on www.archives.com, Harry Koskos was not a veteran.

The 1930 census lists the 35-year old Harry Koskos as living in the 7th ward of Chattanooga in a $4,000 home with his 25-year old wife, Sophia, and 3-year old daughter, Katherine. Harry had stated to the census worker that he was the proprietor of a lunch room and that he had immigrated to the United States in 1913.

The Chattanooga city directories recorded Harrys Place as being at 1029-35 Market Street across from the Hotel Plaza beginning in the 1920s. Harry Koskos selected a location with a lot of traffic and potential customers. His eatery was between the two train stations in downtown, and near several hotels. City Hall was a few blocks from Harrys. Railroad commerce and its workers were nearby. There was a large automobile unloading ramp from the railroad between Market and Broad streets, and produce and grain were also unloaded in the area. Businessmen, rail workers, and travelers all got hungry, and Harrys Place was one of their options for a good meal.

Harry Koskos passed away in 1939. His widow, Sophia, continued to operate the restaurant into the 1950s. She passed away in 1972.

Those are the details that I was able to find. Again, if you have more information, please contact me
Two fifths of companies said their EU staff were worried about their residency status and one in 20 had already lost workers

Workers from the European Union have expressed concern about their status following the Brexit vote, and some have already resigned, a survey of UK businesses shows.

The study of 800 firms revealed that one in 10 have been told by EU staff that they intend to leave the country as a result of the referendum vote.

The British Chambers of Commerce said its research showed the urgency for assurances from the Government on residency rights of EU employees working in this country.

Two fifths of companies said their EU staff were worried about their residency status and one in 20 had already lost workers.

The loss of skilled employees would hamper businesses when they are already suffering recruitment problems, said the BCC.

Acting director-general Adam Marshall said: "Since the referendum many firms have expressed concern over the future status of their existing EU workforce. These hardworking people are absolutely vital to the success of businesses, and must be retained because we cannot afford to lose talented and skilled workers.

"Theresa May should reassure them as soon as possible that they will have the right to remain in the UK, to provide much-needed certainty both for EU employees and UK employers.

"The Government must also clarify how new EU hires will be treated, as many businesses also say they are uncertain about whether the people they wish to recruit will be able to continue working with them in future. A sensible immigration policy that allows businesses to plug difficult skills gaps should go hand in hand with sustained investment in training UK workers for the jobs of the present and the future.

"Guaranteeing the rights of EU workers is just one of the major issues that the new Government needs to make, and quickly."
Fans of The Archers will be able to enjoy the Radio 4 soap opera in sound and vision for the first time from Sunday.

All of this week's episodes, which feature the trial of one of the programme's main characters, are being illustrated in a series of sketches by a professional court artist.

The first drawing shows the defendant, Helen Titchener (played by Louiza Patikas), listening to evidence from her husband Rob (Timothy Watson).

Helen is charged with attempted murder and wounding with intent, after she stabbed Rob with a knife earlier this year.

The trial marks the culmination of a long-running storyline that has seen Helen suffer mounting psychological abuse from Rob, and which has won the soap praise from charities for its portrayal of domestic violence.

Every episode of The Archers this week will cover the trial - and court sketches will capture some of the key moments.

The artist Julia Quenzler has produced the illustrations, which will be available to view on The Archers website.

Ms Quenzler has been a court artist for 30 years and currently produces sketches for the British press as well as the BBC. Among the real-life trials she has covered were those of Harold Shipman and the Soham murders.

On drawing for The Archers, she said: "It's been fascinating, I've thoroughly enjoyed it. But of course I haven't been able to tell anyone I was doing it so I've had to refer to it as a secret project. I didn't want anyone asking me any questions and my face giving anything away."

Ms Quenzler usually works from notes and memory, as sketching inside a courtroom is considered contempt of court.

For this project, she had to work almost entirely from imagination. "I was given a few photographs of the actors but I was reminded that obviously many listeners have conjured up their own image of how each character looks," she explained.

"I was also told that the trial would be held in a typical 19th century court building so I drew the sort of panelling they might have had."

On the subject of Rob's abusive behaviour towards Helen, she said: "I can't let that influence me at all. I was basing his appearance on the actor's photograph but also the script. I was reading the script and noting his reactions, the tone of his voice, imagining what he would be doing with his hands while he was in the witness box."

Listeners have been given no clue as to how this week's events will unfold, but Archers editor Sean O'Connor has described the trial as "both shocking and deeply moving".

The second of Ms Quenzler's sketches will be released after Monday night's episode.

:: The Archers is broadcast from Sunday-Friday at 7pm on Radio 4
The PSNI has issued a road safety appeal as children and students return to school and college.

Assistant Chief Constable Alan Todd says road users across Belfast should plan ahead for busier rush-hours and heavier traffic.

Over the summer months many of us have benefitted from lower levels of traffic and shorter journey times," he said.

As the new academic term begins all road users should remain focused on their driving, plan and leave more time for their journey as there will likely be delays.

"Most importantly, drivers should watch for children and young people on bicycles or on foot, particularly close to schools, junctions and bus stops."

ACC Todd has advised parents to kit their children out with high visibility clothing and bags to ensure they are seen.

"And that they highlight the importance of road safety, in particular, how to cross the road safely  looking both ways without being distracted by friends, mobile phones or seemingly walking in a daze with earphones connected to music players," he said.

"Pupils should also only cross where it is safe, preferably at pedestrian crossings.

It is important that they cross precisely at these locations and not take the risk of crossing even a short distance away. They should also be aware that its better to miss the bus and be late as opposed to taking their chances by running across roads to catch a bus.

Please remember that children and young people on bikes can often be inexperienced, unsteady and unpredictable, so slow down and allow at least three feet of passing distance between your vehicle and the bicycle. If your child rides a bicycle to school, ensure they wear a properly-fitted bicycle helmet and that bicycles have been fitted with appropriate lighting.

The Assistant Chief Constable also appealed for parents carrying out the school run to slow down, ensure that they stay well within the speed limits and that children travelling to school in cars are properly restrained, warning

In a crash at just 30mph, an unrestrained child can be thrown forward with a force 30 to 60 times their body weight," he said.

This means that they would be thrown about inside the vehicle, injuring them and quite possibly seriously injuring or even killing other passengers.

"They are also likely to be ejected from the car through one of the windows. This scenario is every parents worst nightmare, but sadly this is a reality that too many police officers and our emergency service colleagues have experienced.

Police will be paying special attention to roads close to schools in the first few weeks of term and where offences are noted, whether for speeding, inappropriate parking around schools or allowing children to travel unrestrained, they will be issuing advice, guidance, warning and when appropriate, fixed penalty tickets which carry three penalty points.

Everyone needs to take personal responsibility for road safety."
Irish naval personnel are to be given a medal for helping save migrants in the Mediterranean

Irish naval personnel who have helped save the lives of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea are to be given a medal.

Defence Minister Paul Kehoe made the announcement during a visit to Cagliari in Sardinia where he met crew from the LE James Joyce who have been assisting the Italian authorities with the ongoing crisis

Irish naval vessels have rescued some 11,500 migrants so far as part of Operation Pontus.

The minister said those who have taken part in the humanitarian mission should be recognised for their "outstanding role".

The Defence Forces International Operational Service Medal will be presented during a ceremony in Rosslare late next month.

Mr Kehoe added: "Those who serve the State in these important humanitarian missions will receive a recognition which is deserving of the contribution which they have made."

The minister also thanked the families and partners of naval personnel. They were often the "unsung heroes of such missions," he said.
Junior doctors have suspended strikes planned for next week amid concerns over patient safety.

Last week the British Medical Association (BMA) announced training medics would perform a series of strikes by withdrawing labour, including emergency care, for a week each month until the end of the year. The first wave of strikes was supposed to start on September 12.

But the union has said the first wave of industrial action has been suspended after health leaders said they needed more time to plan for the escalated action to protect patients.

However, further strikes scheduled for October, November and December will still go ahead, the BMA said.

Jeremy Hunt welcomed the announcement but said that the "most extreme strike action in NHS history" will be "damaging" for patients.

In a statement to the House of Commons, the Health Secretary said the forthcoming strikes would bring "unprecedented misery" on patients.

Mr Hunt told MPs: "This afternoon's news delaying the first strike is of course welcome but we mustn't let it obscure the fact that the remaining planned industrial action is unprecedented in length and severity and will be damaging for patients - some of whom will have already had operations cancelled."

He added: "It is deeply perplexing for patients, NHS leaders and indeed the Government, that the reaction of the BMA leadership, who previously supported this contract, is now to initiate the most extreme strike action in NHS history, inflicting unprecedented misery on millions of patients up and down the country.

"We currently anticipate that up to 100,000 elective operations will be cancelled and up to a million hospital appointments will be postponed."

He continued: "As with previous strikes we cannot give an absolute guarantee that patients will be safe but hospitals up and down the country will bust a gut to look after their patients."

Dr Ellen McCourt, chairman of the BMA's junior doctors' committee, said: "Patient safety remains doctors' primary concern which is why, following discussions with NHS England, the BMA has taken the decision to suspend next week's industrial action.

"While the BMA provided more than the required notice, we have taken this decision to ensure the NHS has the necessary time to prepare and to put in place contingency plans to protect patient safety.

"Our hospitals are chronically understaffed, our NHS is desperately underfunded - we have to listen to our colleagues when they tell us that they need more time to keep patients safe.

"Future action is still avoidable. The BMA has repeatedly said it will call off further action if the Government puts a halt to plans to force junior doctors to work under a contract they have rejected because they don't believe it is good for the future of patient care or the profession.

"I urge Jeremy Hunt to put patients first, listen to our concerns and end this dispute through talks."

Earlier, the doctors' regulator, the General Medical Council (GMC), warned that patients would "suffer" given the scale of the action at such short notice.

But after the BMA made its latest announcement, GMC chairman Professor Terence Stephenson said: "This delay will give hospitals and other providers more time to plan for reduced medical cover, thereby reducing the impact and potential harm to patients."

The next action is scheduled for October 5, 6, 7, 10 and 11, November 14 to 18 and December 5 to 9, which will see junior doctors withdrawing from labour between the hours of 8am and 5pm, in the ongoing dispute over a new contract for training medics.

The Government and British Medical Association (BMA) remain at loggerheads over the contract, which the Department of Health says will help to provide a seven-day NHS.

Mr Hunt set out a series of "reassurances" about how a seven-day service would work.

He told the Commons the Government had committed to employ many more doctors to help meet the commitment.

"That means our plans are not predicated on simply stretching the existing workforce more thinly or diluting weekday cover," he said.

"We recognise that junior doctors already work very hard, including evenings and weekends, and whilst we do need to reduce weekend premium rates that make it difficult to deploy the correct levels of medical cover, we expect this policy to have greater implications to the working patterns of other workforce groups including consultants and diagnostic staff.

"Finally, we have no policy to require trusts to increase elective care at weekends, our seven-day services policy is focused on meeting four clinical standards relating to urgent and emergency care, meaning vulnerable patients on hospitals' wards at weekends will get checked more regularly in ward rounds by clinicians, and clinicians will be able to order important test results for their patients at weekends."

Six strikes have already taken place across England during the lengthy dispute, causing disruption to hundreds of thousands of patients who have had appointments and operations cancelled.

In May it looked as though a breakthrough had been reached in the dispute after both sides agreed to a new deal.

Then in July, the Government announced that it would impose a new contract after junior doctors and medical students voted to reject the contract brokered between health leaders and the BMA.

Labour's shadow health secretary Diane Abbott, who at the weekend said she would join junior doctors on the picket line, welcomed the delay in action.

She claimed the Health Secretary has attempted to vilify junior doctors in a bid to win the support of the public and urged him instead to withdraw the contract.

"The public simply don't believe you in your attempts to demonise junior doctors", she told the House.

"You have failed to convince the public that doctors are the enemy within and mere dupes of the BMA."

She added: "What could be more confrontational than seeking to impose a contract and, even at this late stage, I would like to ask you if you will listen to the junior doctors' leader, Dr Ellen McCourt.

"The public is looking for you to try and meet the junior doctors, stop vilifying, stop pretending they are the enemy within, and meet their reasonable demands."

Mr Hunt challenged her to put forward any evidence that he, or his colleagues, have vilified junior doctors during the row.
Bangladesh has hanged a man for war crimes during the 1971 war of independence from Pakistan

Bangladesh authorities on Saturday executed a top Islamist party leader convicted of war crimes involving the nation's 1971 independence war against Pakistan, officials said.

Proshanto Kumar Bonik, a senior jail superintendent, said Mir Quasem Ali, a leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, was hanged at 10:30 pm, hours after several dozen family members and relatives met him for the last time inside Kashimpur Central Jail near the capital, Dhaka.

"We are doing our necessary formalities now. We will send the body soon to the ancestral home in Manikganj district for burial," Mr Bonik said after the execution.

Immediately after the execution, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan said security measures would be put in place to prevent unrest by Ali's supporters.

Authorities deployed para-military border guards and additional police in Dhaka and other cities late Saturday.

The Jamaat-e-Islami party in a statement late Saturday protested against Ali's execution and called for an eight-hour general strike beginning on Monday morning.

The execution took place a day after Ali refused to seek presidential clemency. It was his last chance to see mercy. The president had previously rejected appeals for clemency by other Islamist party leaders facing execution.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court rejected a final appeal for reviewing Ali's death sentence handed out by a special tribunal two years ago.

After the Supreme Court ruling, the Jamaat-e-Islami party called for a day-long general strike across the country last Wednesday, but got little response.

A special tribunal dealing with war crimes sentenced Ali to death in November 2014 for abduction, torture and murder.

The 63-year-old Ali was a member of Jamaat-e-Islami's highest policy-making body.

He was found guilty on eight charges, two of which carried the death sentence, including the abduction and murder of a young man in a torture chamber. Ali was sentenced to 72 years in prison on the other charges.

Ali built his fortune by establishing businesses from real estate to shipping to banking, and he was considered one of the party's top financiers.

Ali is the fifth Jamaat-e-Islami party leader to be executed since 2010 when prime minister Sheikh Hasina formed the special tribunal to try suspected war criminals.

Also executed was a close aide of former prime minister Khaleda Zia from the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Jamaat-e-Islami is a key partner of Ms Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party in the opposition against Ms Hasina.

Ms Hasina's government said Pakistani soldiers, aided by local collaborators, killed three million people and raped 200,000 women in the 1971 independence war.

Jamaat-e-Islami, which had openly campaigned against independence, has denied committing atrocities.

Ms Hasina has called the special tribunal trials a long overdue effort to obtain justice for the victims of war crimes, four decades after Bangladesh split from Pakistan. Her government has rejected criticism from abroad that the trial process did not meet international standards.

The international human rights group Amnesty International noted that the United Nations had raised questions about the fairness of the trials of Ali and other Islamist party leaders.

"There is no question that the people of Bangladesh deserve justice for crimes committed during the War of Independence, but the death penalty is a human rights violation and will not achieve this. It is a cruel and irreversible punishment that most of the world's countries have now rid themselves of," said Champa Patel, Amnesty International's South Asia director, in a statement released on Saturday.

AP
The US is sceptical an agreement with Russia to end violence in Syria can work but will keep pursuing it nonetheless, president Barack Obama said as negotiators from both countries edged towards a deal.

Mr Obama, speaking on the sidelines of the G20 summit in China, said the US and Russia still have "grave differences" about what is needed to end Syria's civil war and which opposition groups are legitimate targets for the US and Russian forces. But he said "it is worth trying".

"We're not there yet," Mr Obama said. "I think it's premature for us to say there's a clear path forward, but there's the possibility at least for us to make some progress."

A deal could be announced as early as Sunday by US secretary of state John Kerry and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, said a senior US state department official, adding that the two countries were close to a deal but still had unresolved issues.

Mr Kerry and Mr Lavrov have been deep in talks for weeks over a deal to boost US and Russian military cooperation to fight the Islamic State group and other extremists in Syria - a step Moscow has long sought.

The package would include provisions so aid can reach besieged areas of Syria and measures to prevent Syrian president Bashar Assad's government from bombing areas where US-backed rebels are operating.

US officials have said that as part of a deal, Russia would have to halt offensives by Assad's government, something it has failed to do over months of diplomatic efforts.

They said the US must get rebels to break ranks with the al Qaida-linked Nusra Front, a task that grew tougher after Nusra fighters last month successfully broke the siege of Aleppo, Syria's largest city and the site of recent fierce fighting.

Though negotiators have been hopeful a deal could come together while world leaders are gathered in Hangzhou for the G20, that optimism has been tempered by the failure of previous ceasefire deals to hold.

The US has long been wary of increasing military coordination with Russia in Syria's civil war because it says Russia continues striking moderate, US-backed opposition groups in a bid to prop up Assad. The US wants Russia to focus exclusively on IS and al Qaida-linked groups.

Mr Obama and Russian president Vladimir Putin plan to meet on the sidelines of the summit, the White House said.

For Mr Obama, a military partnership with Russia would mark a significant change. When Russia started bombing targets in Syria last year, the US declared the intervention an act of desperation and said its coalition fighting IS was not coordinating with Moscow. The minimal cooperation focused on avoiding mid-air collisions between Russian and coalition planes.

The new approach would involve intelligence and targeting cooperation. Assad's forces would be barred from attacking areas outside of IS control; attacks on Nusra and its allies would be up to the US and Russia to work out among themselves in their Joint Implementation Group. Defence secretary Ash Carter and National Intelligence director James Clapper both have expressed misgivings.

Discussions about the intractable Syria conflict and the related fight against IS have been a major focus as world leaders gather for the G20, which brings together the world's major economies.

Mr Obama met first with new Prime Minister Theresa May, then with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan for their first sit-down since the failed coup in his country in July.

Mr Obama called the attempted overthrow "terrible." He assured Mr Erdogan that his national security team and the justice department would ensure that those responsible are brought to justice, a reference to Turkey's extradition request for an exiled cleric it holds responsible. The US is still weighing Turkey's evidence against Pennsylvania-based cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Turkey's demands for the US to hand over Mr Gulen have coincided with growing clashes between Turkish forces and US-backed Kurds in Syria. The Pentagon has backed the incursions, but said they should only be aimed at IS fighters. Turkey has used the operations to push back Syrian Kurds it accuses of seeking to claim more territory.

Mr Obama called Turkey a key ally in the campaign to defeat Islamic State and said "we now need to finish the job" of securing Turkey's border with Syria.

Since the failed coup, the US has been alarmed by Turkey's diplomatic flirtations with Russia, Assad's patron, and softened demand for Assad's exclusion from a political transition.

Mr Erdogan said it was important for the US and Turkey to "embrace a common attitude against terrorism". In a reference to Washington's support for the Kurds, he said there are "no good terrorists or bad; all terrorism is bad".

AP
A photo taken on August 12, 2016 in Tirana shows personal belongings of Mother Teresa exhibited in a special pavilion in the Albanian National Museum dedicated to Mother Theresa, the nun who spent most of her life caring for the sick and the poor in India. When Pope Francis canonises Mother Teresa on September 4, two Balkan countries will be celebrating the sainthood of a woman they both fiercely claim as their own. Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in 1910 in multi-cultural Skopje -- then part of the Ottoman Empire and now capital of the Republic of Macedonia -- Mother Teresa had an ethnic Albanian mother whose family came from Kosovo. / AFP PHOTO / GENT SHKULLAKUGENT SHKULLAKU/AFP/Getty Images

Nuns of Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity, pray during a vigil of prayer in preparation for the canonization of Mother Theresa in the St. John in Latheran Basilica at the Vatican, Friday, Sept. 2, 2016. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

Press Eye - Northern Ireland - 4th September 2016 Springhill residents rededicate 'The Saint That Lived In Our Street' sculpture as Mother Teresa is canonised. The sculpture was made in 2010, of material from the Corpus Christi Chapel which was demolished. Pictured: The Very Reverened Aidan Denny, Curate in Corpus Christi Parish at the Mass on Sunday morning. Picture: Philip Magowan / PressEye

Press Eye - Northern Ireland - 4th September 2016 Springhill residents rededicate 'The Saint That Lived In Our Street' sculpture as Mother Teresa is canonised. The sculpture was made in 2010, of material from the Corpus Christi Chapel which was demolished. Pictured: The Very Reverened Aidan Denny, Curate in Corpus Christi Parish at the Mass on Sunday morning. Picture: Philip Magowan / PressEye

Springhill residents rededicate 'The Saint That Lived In Our Street' sculpture as Mother Teresa is canonised. The sculpture was made in 2010, of material from the Corpus Christi Chapel which was demolished. Pictured: The Very Reverened Aidan Denny, Curate in Corpus Christi Parish at the Mass on Sunday morning. Picture: Philip Magowan / PressEye

Press Eye - Northern Ireland - 4th September 2016 Springhill residents rededicate 'The Saint That Lived In Our Street' sculpture as Mother Teresa is canonised. The sculpture was made in 2010, of material from the Corpus Christi Chapel which was demolished. Pictured: Joan McCoubrey, The Reverend Darach Mac Giolla Cathain, Mary McNeill, who lives in no.41, and Tommy Holland, community worker. Picture: Philip Magowan / PressEye

Press Eye - Northern Ireland - 4th September 2016 Springhill residents rededicate 'The Saint That Lived In Our Street' sculpture as Mother Teresa is canonised. The sculpture was made in 2010, of material from the Corpus Christi Chapel which was demolished. Pictured: The Reverend Darach Mac Giolla Cathain, Parish Priest, rededicated the sculpture at No. 41 Springhill Drive along with Fr. Des Wilson. Picture: Philip Magowan / PressEye

Press Eye - Northern Ireland - 4th September 2016 Springhill residents rededicate 'The Saint That Lived In Our Street' sculpture as Mother Teresa is canonised. The sculpture was made in 2010, of material from the Corpus Christi Chapel which was demolished. Pictured: The Reverend Darach Mac Giolla Cathain, Parish Priest, rededicated the sculpture at No. 41 Springhill Drive along with Fr. Des Wilson. Picture: Philip Magowan / PressEye

Press Eye - Northern Ireland - 4th September 2016 Springhill residents rededicate 'The Saint That Lived In Our Street' sculpture as Mother Teresa is canonised. The sculpture was made in 2010, of material from the Corpus Christi Chapel which was demolished. Pictured: The Reverend Darach Mac Giolla Cathain, Parish Priest, rededicated the sculpture at No. 41 Springhill Drive along with Fr. Des Wilson. Picture: Philip Magowan / PressEye

Press Eye - Northern Ireland - 4th September 2016 Springhill residents rededicate 'The Saint That Lived In Our Street' sculpture as Mother Teresa is canonised. The sculpture was made in 2010, of material from the Corpus Christi Chapel which was demolished. Pictured: Crowds gather at the sculpture. Picture: Philip Magowan / PressEye

Press Eye - Northern Ireland - 4th September 2016 Springhill residents rededicate 'The Saint That Lived In Our Street' sculpture as Mother Teresa is canonised. The sculpture was made in 2010, of material from the Corpus Christi Chapel which was demolished. Pictured: The Reverend Darach Mac Giolla Cathain, Parish Priest, rededicated the sculpture at No. 41 Springhill Drive. Picture: Philip Magowan / PressEye

A mass has taken place in west Belfast to celebrate Mother Teresa's elevation to sainthood.

The Macedonian born nun served for a time in west Belfast during her life.

A sculpture the Saint That Lived In Our Saint was dedicated to Mother Teresa on Springhill Driveclose to Corpus Christi church in 2010.

It was rededicated yesterday by the Reverend Darach Mac Giolla Cathain, Parish Priest within hours of Mother Teresa being canonised by Pope Francis at the Vatican.

The Very Reverened Aidan Denny, Curate in Corpus Christi Parish led Mass at the church on Sunday morning.

An estimated 100,000 pilgrims flocked to St Peter's Square in Rome canonisation on Sunday morning.

The nun is revered for her work with the poor in India.

Known as the saint of the gutters, the nun won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

She died in 1997 at the age of 87.

In India, a special Mass was celebrated at the Missionaries of Charity, the order she founded in Kolkata.

Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close Pope Francis is driven through the crowd after celebrating a Canonization Mass for Mother Teresa, in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. Francis declared Mother Teresa a saint on Sunday, praising the tiny nun for having taken in society's most unwanted and for having shamed world leaders for the "crimes of poverty they themselves created." (Angelo Carconi/ANSA via AP) AP Pope Francis blesses a nun of the Sisters of the Missionaries of Charity as he leaves at the end of the Canonization Mass of Mother Teresa in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. Francis has declared Mother Teresa a saint, honoring the tiny nun who cared for the world's most destitute as an icon for a Catholic Church that goes to the peripheries to find poor, wounded souls. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia) AP Pope Francis passes in front a portrait of Mother Teresa at the end of a canonization ceremony in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. Thousands of pilgrims thronged to St. Peter's Square on Sunday for the canonization of Mother Teresa, the tiny nun who cared for the world's most unwanted and became the icon of a Catholic Church that goes to the peripheries to tend to lost, wounded souls. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino) AP Pope Francis talks with a nun of the Sisters of the Missionaries of Charity as he leaves at the end of the Canonization Mass of Mother Teresa in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. Francis has declared Mother Teresa a saint, honoring the tiny nun who cared for the world's most destitute as an icon for a Catholic Church that goes to the peripheries to find poor, wounded souls. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia) AP A Sister of the Missionaries of Charity waves as Pope Francis is driven through the crowd at the end of a Canonization Mass for Mother Teresa, in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. Francis declared Mother Teresa a saint on Sunday, praising the tiny nun for having taken in society's most unwanted and for having shamed world leaders for the "crimes of poverty they themselves created." (Fabio Frustaci/ANSA via AP) AP Nuns of Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity stand near a Swiss guard prior to the start of a mass celebrated by Pope Francis where Mother Teresa will be canonized in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia) AP Faithful and pilgrims wait to enter in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican before Mother Teresa's Canonization Mass celebrated by Pope Francis, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. Thousands of pilgrims thronged to St. Peter's Square on Sunday for the canonization of Mother Teresa, the tiny nun who cared for the world's most unwanted and became the icon of a Catholic Church that goes to the peripheries to tend to lost, wounded souls. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino) AP / Facebook

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Whatsapp Pope Francis is driven through the crowd after celebrating a Canonization Mass for Mother Teresa, in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. Francis declared Mother Teresa a saint on Sunday, praising the tiny nun for having taken in society's most unwanted and for having shamed world leaders for the "crimes of poverty they themselves created." (Angelo Carconi/ANSA via AP)

Pilgrims arrived at the Vatican before dawn on Sunday to get a good spot among the masses for the ceremony.

Cardinal Angelo Amato read a brief biography of Mother Teresa's work, then asked the Pope to canonise her in the name of the Church.

Pope Francis responded: "After due deliberation and frequent prayer for divine assistance, and having sought the counsel of many of our brother bishops, we declare and define Blessed Teresa of Calcutta to be a saint and we enrol her among the saints, decreeing that she is to be venerated as such by the whole Church."

The event was celebrated in west Belfast with prayers at a sculpture of Mother Teresa at Corpus Christi Church where she once served.

Mother Teresa worked in Ballymurphy for 18 months in the early 1970s.

Founder of the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa arrived in Belfast in 1973 and started a mission along with four other nuns.

However due to certain disputes they withdrew from the mission.

She joined an Irish order, the Loreto Sisters and began her service as a nun by serving two months as a novice in Rathfarnham in Dublin in 1928, where she learned English.

She returned to Ireland many times over her life, and was awarded the Freedom of Dublin in 1993.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (C), U.S. President Barack Obama (R) and Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon attend the deposit of instruments of joining the Paris Agreement in Hangzhou, capital city of east China's Zhejiang Province, Sept. 3, 2016.

The presidents of China and the United States met with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon Saturday in Hangzhou to deliver their countries' instruments of joining the Paris climate pact.

Ban said that the joint move by China and the United States was significant and the contribution paved the way for the early entry into force of the Paris Agreement, the new framework for the world to achieve sustainable development.

Chinese President Xi Jinping said that climate change concerns the well-being and future of humanity. The Paris Agreement has charted the course for post-2020 global cooperation against climate change, indicating that a cooperative, win-win, equitable and fair climate governance mechanism is taking shape.

HISTORIC MOMENT

Depositing the documents together, China and the United States have displayed their ambition and determination to jointly tackle a global challenge, Xi said.

The handover of the legal document is evidence of China's solemn commitment, Xi said.

Taking advantage of the implementation of the Paris Agreement, the international community should boost efforts to improve the global governance mechanism and innovate relevant actions, to support the full operation of the agreement, the president said.

Developed countries should honor their commitments and provide financial and technological support to developing countries to enhance their capability to undertake climate action, Xi said.

China, a responsible developing country and an active player in global climate governance, will implement its development concepts of innovative, coordinated, green, open and shared growth; fully advance energy conservation, emission reduction and low-carbon development; and embrace the new era of ecological civilization, he said.

"Just as I believe the Paris Agreement will ultimately prove to be the turning point for our planet, I believe history will judge today's efforts as pivotal," U.S. President Barack Obama said.

He said that the United States and China had led by an example in climate action as they were the world's largest economies, giving the rest of the world confidence that a low-carbon world is the future.

A total of 178 parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change have signed the agreement. However, for the pact to come into effect, ratification documents must be submitted by at least 55 parties representing 55 percent of global carbon emissions.

"Together the U.S. and China represent 40 percent of global emissions, so today we are moving significantly closer to the goal we have set," said Obama.

SIGNIFICANT OUTCOMES

A statement on climate change cooperation outcomes issued Saturday by China and the United States said that the two countries have forged a "historic partnership" in combatting climate change.

Respective strategies for mid-century, low-greenhouse gas emission development will be formulated and published, it said. Both agree to hold a series of technical exchanges on the formulation of such strategies, beginning this year.

The two countries support the Assembly of the International Civil Aviation Organization to reach consensus on a global market-based measure to address carbon emissions from international aviation this October, and expect to be early participants in such measure.

Both countries have enhanced domestic action to promote the transition toward green, low-carbon and climate-resilient economies, according to the statement.

To fulfill its commitment to the Paris Agreement on climate change, China will cut its carbon emissions per unit of GDP by 60 to 65 percent by 2030 from the 2005 levels, increase non-fossil fuel sources in primary energy consumption to about 20 percent, and peak its carbon emissions by 2030.

Within the next five years, China will lower its carbon dioxide per unit of GDP and energy consumption per unit of GDP by 18 percent and 15 percent respectively, increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to 15 percent, and increase the forest stock volume by 1.4 billion cubic meters.

Energy efficiency in the country's industries, transportation and buildings will be increased while green power dispatch will be promoted to accelerate the development of renewable energy, the statement said.

China will also start in 2017 its national emission trading system, phase down the production and consumption of HFCs and promote low-carbon development of transportation by developing standard modern transportation equipment and energy-efficient, environmentally friendly means of transport.
 Flash

China on Saturday expressed deep condolences to the victims of a terrorist attack in Southern Philippines' Davao City, and reiterated its opposition to "terrorism in all forms."

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying made the remarks after an explosion killed at least 14 people and wounded almost 70 others in the hometown of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on Friday night.

Saying the Chinese side was shocked by the attack, Hua expressed deep condolences and sympathy to the victims and their families.

She said China believed that the Philippine government, under the leadership of Duterte, will take necessary measures to restore peace and stability in the city.
Mewing is a TikTok trend that has blown up in the last few months. It is claimed that it can help shape your jawline as well as cure other ailments by actively pressing your tongue to the roof
Versions Of The Ganesha Birth Story Faith Mysticism oi-Anwesha

Hindu mythology is basically an oral tradition. The mythical stories about Hindu gods and goddesses have been told and re-told several times even before there was a script to pen them down. That is why, it is common to have many versions of the same mythical story. The Lord Ganesha birth story is not very different in this regard. There are several versions of Lord Ganesha birth story.

The core of the story remains the same but it has been re-told by changing a few details many times. Here are the three different versions in which the birth of Ganesha has been described in Hindu mythology to mark the holy occasion of Ganesha Chaturthi.

Story 1

The most common version of the birth of Ganesha goes something like this. Goddess Parvati was very lonely in Kailash (Shiva's abode). So she created a statue of a boy with the dirt from her body and installed life into it. She named the boy Ganesha and left him to guard the door while she went to bathe.

When Lord Shiva arrived at the gates of Kailash, Ganesha barred his way. Unknown to news that Ganesha was his son, Shiva chopped off his head in anger. When Devi Parvati came to know if this, she was extremely upset. Distraught, she went into a fit of rage. In all the confusion, Ganesha's head was lost. Lord Shiva ordered his followers to cut the head of the first animal they see in the forest so that Ganesha's life can be restored. They happened to find a white elephant's head and thus, Ganesha has the head of an elephant.

Story 2

The second story of the birth of Ganesha is more or less similar except for two differences. Firstly, Devi Parvati creates the boy Ganesha with sandalwood paste instead of the dirt from her body. And secondly, it takes an entire army of Gods to wage a war against Ganesha who is endowed with all the 10 Shaktis of Goddess Parvati.

Story 3

The most recent version of the story comes from novel series 'Immortals of Meluha'. Author Amrish has given a different twist to this mythical tale of birth of Ganesha. Here Ganesha is a son born to Lady Sati from her first marriage. But because he was 'deformed' or rather born with birth defects, Sati's father banished him to the Land of 'Nagas'. So Ganesha was bought up by his mother's Naga sister, Kali. This story of Ganesha's birth stresses on the fact that he was not the biological son of Lord Shiva.

These are the three different versions of the story of Ganesha's birth. If you know any other versions of this mythical tale, please do share it with us.

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Story first published: Thursday, September 5, 2013, 9:04 [IST]
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The leader of the Green Party has said the Government should not appeal the Apple tax ruling.

Earlier this week the European Commission found Apple's tax deal with Ireland illegal and ordered the tech giant to pay 13bn, plus interest, in back taxes. The total figure is about 19bn.
Update 2.45pm: Gardai have launched a murder investigation after the discovery of a mans body in Co Kildare.

Authorities have confirmed the remains are that of 24-year-old Philip Finnegan (pictured) who went missing from his home in Dublin on August 10.

The post mortem has finished but gardai say they will not be disclosing the findings for operational reasons.

The scene remains sealed off for a technical examination.

Me Finnegan's death has prompted fears of more gangland violence erupting in Dublin, as it is understood his murder is linked to criminal activity.

Sinn Fein TD Aengus O'Snodaigh has called for a Garda task force in the north inner city to be expanded, saying: It should not be confined to the north inner city. Some of those shot dead come from the Dublin south central area in particular.

A garda at the scene in Co Kildare. Picture: Collins

Earlier:

Gardai are appealing for the public's help as they investigate the death of a man whose body was found in woods in Co Kildare.

A post mortem on the man's body has resumed. The identity of the man has not yet been formally established.

The remains were discovered in Rahin Wood near Carbury on Friday evening.

Gardai were alerted and the location was sealed off to faciliate a technical examination. The area remains sealed off and members of the Garda Technical Bureau are continuing their examination of the area today.

The man's body was taken to Naas General Hospital, where the Assistant State Pathologist Dr. Margaret Bolster began a post mortem examination yesterday.

It is being reported that the man's body could have been in there for less than a month, and Gardai think the man was from Dublin, in his 20s and died violently.

There are reports the remains are those of a Dublin criminal who disappeared in July, but this has not been confirmed.

Investigating officers are appealing to anyone who visited Rahin Wood during the month of August to come forward and contact the Incident Room at Leixlip Garda Station or the phone Garda Confidential Line.
Update 4.30pm: A strike by Dublin Bus drivers will go ahead after fresh discussions between management at the company and unions representing staff broke down.

Workers are due to walk off the job in three 48-hour stoppages this month - on September 8, 9, 15, 16, 23 and 24.

Unions say it's only fair that bus drivers and Luas drivers are paid the same wage.

A meeting between all parties earlier this afternoon has failed to resolve the issue.

NBRU general secretary Dermot O'Leary said: "We did advise in advance of our meeting that parading all parties through the door to create what has now transpired to be a false and misleading impression that the issue of pay could be magically resolved, was something that staff and commuters would find intolerable."

He criticised "this ritualistic marching of people in and out of buildings, creating as it were an impression that the workers are being intractable".

He added: "The NBRU is committed to finding a resolution to this pay dispute in the interests of staff and commuters alike.

"However, it takes more than the commitment of one party to effect an agreement. Shirking responsibility or remaining aloof is not conducive to settling this dispute. The onus is now on the shareholder to unshackle the restraints on Dublin Bus and allow it the opportunity to work with its staff towards finding a solution."

Earlier:

Unions representing striking drivers at Dublin Bus are meeting with management at the company this afternoon.

The meeting is aimed at averting strike action planned by drivers over six days this month.

Drivers are due to walk off the job in three 48-hour stoppages on September 8, 9, 15, 16, 23 and 24.

Workers say they want pay parity with Luas drivers who got an 18% wage hike this summer.

Unions, including Siptu and the National Bus and Rail Union, will meet with management at Dublin Bus Head Offices this afternoon.
Update 11.20am: An elderly woman who was injured in a collision earlier today, has died.

The female pedestrian and a car collided on the Navan road in Cabra at 8.15am this morning.

The 39-year-old male driver has been released from Finglas garda station. A file is being prepared for the DPP.

The road remains closed and it is expected to reopen around 1.30pm later today. Motorist are also to be advised that there are road works on Blackhorse Avenue and this should not be used as an alternative route.

Earlier:

A woman is in a serious condition in hospital following a road accident in Dublin.

The female pedestrian and a car collided on the Navan road in Cabra at 8.15am this morning.

The woman has been taken to the Mater hospital where her injuries are described as serious.

The male driver of the car was arrested and brought to Finglas garda station.

The road is closed in both directions and diversions are in place.

Gardai are appealing for witnesses to contact them at Cabra garda station on 01 6667400, the Garda Confidential Line on 1800 666 111 or any garda station.
A nationalist, anti-immigration party has performed strongly in a state election in the region where Chancellor Angela Merkel has her political base, likely overtaking her conservative party, exit polls suggest.

The exit polls for ARD and ZDF public television put support for Alternative for Germany, or AfD, in Sunday's election for the state legislature in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania around 21%.
Barack Obama has said the United States would guard against any "adverse" impacts from the Brexit vote, but warned that a trade deal with the UK was not Washingtons top priority.

President Obama suggested the trading relationship between the UK and the US could become stronger in future and vowed to make sure it did not end up "unravelling" as the Brexit process began.

Theresa May held her first talks with the president since becoming Prime Minister of Britain at the G20 summit in Hangzhou, with trade one of the main items on the agenda.

During the referendum contest Mr Obama controversially warned that the UK would be at the "back of the queue" for a trade deal.

Challenged about his comments at a press conference alongside Mrs May, the US president said: "It is absolutely true that I believed pre-Brexit vote and continue to believe post-Brexit vote that the world benefited enormously from the UK participating in the EU.

"But I also said at the time that, ultimately, this was a decision for the British people and the British people made that decision."

Mr Obama said he had never suggested that the US would "punish" Britain for the vote.

But he said that Washingtons focus was on the bigger prizes of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the troubled US-EU trade deal, while the UK had to make sealing a deal with Brussels its main priority.

He said the US would work with Mrs May on the process: "We will consult and co-ordinate with her as she and her government move forward with the Brexit negotiations to ensure that we dont see any adverse effects in trading and commercial relationships between the United States and the United Kingdom."

Mr Obama added: "We are going to do everything we can to make sure that the consequences of the decision dont end up unravelling what is a very strong and robust economic relationship and could become even stronger in the future.

"But, first things first."

The US president said the "special relationship" would endure as the UK pursues an "orderly exit" from the EU.

He praised Mrs May as a "steadying influence during a time of transition".

Mrs May called the US a "special partner" for the United Kingdom, a "long-standing ally and close friend".

Speaking about their discussions over the UKs decision to leave the EU and its impact on relations with America, she said: "The UK has always been a strong partner for the US and that will remain the case."

Mrs May added: "We are both strong supporters of free trade and today we have discussed how to take forward consultations to ensure that the UK and US have the strongest possible trading relationship.

"This reinforces my belief that as we forge a new global role for the UK we can and will seize the opportunities that Brexit presents and make a success of it."

Earlier, Mrs May said: "There will be no second referendum, no attempt to turn the clock back or get out of this. (Britain) will be leaving the European Union."

European Council President Donald Tusk said there will be no negotiations with Britain on the terms of its departure from the EU until the Government formally invokes the two-year leaving process.

Speaking in Hangzhou, Mr Tusk said such pre-negotiations are not in the interests of the remaining 27 EU members.

"We need to protect the interests of the members of the EU that want to stay together, not the one which wants to leave," he said.

The UK has to invoke Article 50, the EU treaty clause that sets up the departure of a nation from the current 28-member bloc.
Raise funds for programs and initiatives in the areas of global poverty, social injustice and health initiatives while enjoying hors d'oeuvres and live music.

The enchanting ladies of the Iota Xi Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc., cordially invite you to "An Evening in Paris - An All White Affair"

Enjoy a night filled with delicious hors d'oeuvres, as DJ Greg spins the latest hits on the dance floor.

Tickets are $27 (individual) and $50 (couple) and proceeds will allow our chapter to provide programs and initiatives in the areas of global poverty, social injustice and health initiatives.

Tickets can be purchased from any IXO member or online.

We look forward to having you join us for a fun and entertaining evening! And don't forget to check out IXO's Facebook page for event updates: https://www.facebook.com/Iota-Xi-Omega-Chapter-of-Alpha-Kappa-Alpha-Sorority-Inc-608537059162361/
Chippewa Valley Affordable Solar and the Midwest Renewable Energy Association (MREA) announce that Able Energy Company, WeKnowSolar.com, has been selected for the Solar Chippewa Valley Group Buy.

Those who know they are ready to move ahead with getting a solar site assessment can contact Able Energy Company at http://weknowsolar.com/chippewa-valley-solar-group-buy.html

Until the Dec. 31 deadline, home and business owners throught the Chippewa Valley have an opportunity to take advantage of low solar pricing through the Solar Chippewa Valley Group Buy Program.

The program can help residents invest in cost effective solar installations through the security and power of volume-purchasing. Free, one-hour sessions by Midwest Renewable Energy Association members help educate homeowners, small business owners, and farmers on the benefits of solar energy and are the first step toward participation in the program.

Sessions are being held at the following dates and place:

Sept. 6, 6:30 p.m. at CVTC Energy Education Center (4000 Campus Dr., Eau Claire)

Sept. 17, 4 p.m. at Sustainable Future Fest, Eau Claire (sustainablefuturefest.com/index.html)

Sept. 28, 6:30 p.m. at Lazy Monk Brewery (97 West Madison St., Eau Claire)

Oct. 3 and 20, 6:30 p.m. at CVTC Energy Education Center

Nov. 1 and Dec. 6, 6:30 p.m. at Lazy Monk Brewery

For information about the Solar Chippewa Valley Group Buy Program, contact program chair Peter Murphy at peterm@midwestrenew.org or 414-988-7963. For additional information or to sign up for updates, visit solarpowerwisconsin.com. Be sure to check out the information on the still-available Wisconsin Focus on Energy 2016 solar rebates.
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are said to have agreed to activate the agreement on financing and providing...
LONDON: Rishi Sunak will on Wednesday face off against opposition lawmakers for the first time as British prime...
COLOMBO: Sri Lanka will attempt to increase tax revenues to 15% of gross domestic product by 2026 from 8.5% now,...
Police have found one of two detainees who escaped Canberra's jail on Friday night.



Patrick McCurley, 28, was arrested after police stopped a car he was driving on Majura Road at Majura about 6pm Sunday.



ACT Policing had tracked down the car after they received a report from a member of the public who saw McCurley driving a blue Suzuki Swift in Weston Creek about 5pm.



Jacob McDonald, 21, remains at large.

Police asked for the public's help to find the pair, who were on remand and were last seen inside the Alexander Maconochie Centre about 11.15pm.

Prisoner Patrick McCurley (right) has been arrested while Jacob McDonald (left) is still at large after escaping from Canberra's jail.

Their disappearance sparked a "whole of ACT" search which stretched over the NSW border. A NSW Police spokeswoman on Sunday said officers had continued to assist police by keeping a look out for the men.

Corrections Minister Shane Rattenbury promised a full internal review into the incident, which is the first successful escape from the territory's jail since it began taking prisoners in 2009.
Seeking the trade certificate, Mr Barclay made an inquiry with Get Qualified Australia Pty Ltd, a consultancy that matches jobseekers with registered training organisations that can issue qualifications for a range of industries, such as construction, business or beauty.

The 39-year-old painter was applying for a new job in November last year, when he was informed he would need his 10 years' experience formally recognised by a Certificate III in Painting and Decorating.

It has been eight months since David Barclay was able to work as a painter after his experience with an education consultancy group left him out of pocket and without the qualifications he needed.

The company, which describes itself as "Australia's leading Skills Recognition & Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) Specialist," has been the subject of a successful freezing order brought against it by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission pending possible legal action.

David Barclay at work. Credit:iPhotocommercial/Craig Burrow

"I would never touch an RPL process again...I would have to be crazy," Mr Barclay told Fairfax Media, after first dealing with Get Qualified Australia in November last year.

"After my first inquiry, Get Qualified called and texted me every day for two weeks, they seemed so intent on selling me something," Mr Barclay said.



"They told me there would be a fee of around $2500 for the certificate, and my experience made me eligible. But after I had already paid $1300 I found out I was not actually eligible for the certificate. They never should have issued it to me."

Mr Barclay has since been battling to obtain a refund from Get Qualified Australia, who he said "insists" the only way forward is to continue paying his account and claim the certificate, for which he is not qualified.
Google, McDonald's, Starbucks and Amazon are among the global firms now under the European Commission's gaze which have typically used non-US subsidiaries to mop up their global earnings and hold them offshore.

Apple and Ireland had no idea that the secret tax deal they struck in 1991 would one day be worth 13 billion. Even last week, after the European Commission ruled that this is precisely how much the country must claw back from the tech giant, neither side was willing to accept the sums.

Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, described the ruling as "total political crap", among other things.

Margrethe Vestager, the Danish politician in charge of competition law at the commission, said Apple's private data can only be revealed once both the firm and the Irish government agree. "It's quite a good illustration of the fact that more transparency would be a good thing. That country-by-country reporting would make it much easier to know the ups and downs here," she told journalists.
He's built a reputation for generating outsized returns for early stage investors in biotech companies. And now that James Williams is at the helm of his own publicly listed biotech, the pressure is on to see if that success can be replicated.

There was the 10-fold return from selling iCeutica for $60 million, a company that had developed a platform for reformatting existing drugs with improved clinical outcomes along with earlier deals such as with Ferriscan and the sale of an artificial cornea.

Dimerix is developing a drug with the potential to treat some liver diseases. Credit:Louie Douvis

But the key to generating outsized returns is getting the science right.

"Without the science and clinical outcomes, there is no deal," Dr Williams says of the way to profit from the biotech sector. "It's all about getting the early development right and getting the capital lined up.
The Australian arm of the Quaker society has broken ranks with other religious groups and called on the federal government to legislate for same-sex marriage, warning of a damaging and extreme plebiscite campaign.

As representatives of about 40 major religious, charities and ethnic groups prepare to argue the "no" campaign if a plebiscite goes ahead, Quaker leaders have lobbied the federal government to "directly and promptly make the decision on marriage equality".

Officially known as the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers have about 2000 members and regular worshippers in Australia and have recognised same-sex couples since 1994, including in formal commitment ceremonies.

The church is one of the few Christian organisations to advocate for same-sex marriage, along with some individual Jewish, Uniting and Baptist congregations and celebrants.
Harold Wayne Knoll, of Chippewa Falls passed away Aug. 19, 2016, near Orlando, Fla., at the age of 93.

Harold was born to Art and Verna Knoll June 15, 1923, in Homer, Minn. He was the middle child to brother, Everett, and sister, Melva. He spent most of his youth in Winona, on the Mississippi River, boating and fishing. Anyone will tell you that those were some of his happiest years.

Harold met the love of his life, Nancy Turner in Winona, while both attending the Teachers College; he went on to spend 65 years with his best friend. Together they had three children, Stuart (Avery) of Winter Springs, Fla., Pam Munyer (Fred) of Bedford, Texas, Jeff (Vanessa) of Chippewa Falls. His children will tell you that he was the best dad they could have asked for. He was grandpa to Kathy, Jackie, Heather, Alex, Mitchell and Tucker. Also, great-grandpa to 10.

Besides being a family man, Harold had many career accomplishments. He served in the Army as a Tech-5 during World War II. Harold enjoyed science and tinkering. He taught science in Alma Center, Wis., and went on to become a plastics engineer in many cities across the country, until he eventually ended up back in Wisconsin. He was an active Mason, a member of the Elks, and an avid member of the International Order of Foresters. During his retirement, he traveled the world with his wife, volunteering for the American Red Cross.

Harolds family has planned a memorial service on the Mississippi River at a future date.
Chinese bombers will be able to strike Australia from new artificial islands in the South China Sea as part of a major military modernisation that has also prompted calls for Australia to develop a ballistic missile shield.

Chinese H-6K long-range bombers can more easily target bases in the Northern Territory and even installations such as Pine Gap and Harold E. Holt naval communications station outside Exmouth by flying from 3000-metre runways being built in the Spratly Islands, senior analysts warn.

Fears will be heightened further after Chinese air force chief Ma Xiaotian announced on Friday China is developing a long-range bomber that will improve its ability to strike far from home.

Former national security adviser Andrew Shearer said China's rapidly improving ballistic missiles bolstered the case for Australia to "get much more serious" about missile defence, including a land-based shield similar to US Patriot missiles or the high-altitude systems being used by Japan and South Korea.
Theresa May is to open talks on a landmark new free trade deal with Australia, as she declares Britain will lead the world in global commerce outside the EU.

Mrs May will meet Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull at the G20 summit in China on Monday to shape the broad outline of what would be Britain's first new trade pact after Brexit.

She is expected to explore further trade opportunities in talks with President Obama and Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, during the two-day gathering of world leaders. She will also meet Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, for the first time, and will attempt to soothe relations with her hosts, which were damaged after her decision to pause the Chinese-backed Hinkley Point nuclear power plant project.

Mrs May insisted it was "a golden era for UK-China relations", echoing the choreographed rhetoric from Mr Xi's state visit to Britain last year.
Trade Minister Steve Ciobo says there is merit in re-examining whether foreign donations should be banned, following revelations Chinese interests have paid the personal bills of prominent Labor Senator Sam Dastyari.

Speaking to Fairfax Media before heading to London and Brussels for talks on furthering free trade agreements with the UK and EU, Mr Ciobo said it was worth having another look at restricting donations to just individuals.

"It's a great shame [but] it's not unexpected": Trade Minister Steve Ciobo. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

"Foreign donations to Australian MPs and political parties is a matter that's been looked at and reviewed on a number of occasions," he said.

"There might be some merit in only allowing donations from individuals, and not from unions, organisations, corporations and sometimes foreign entities," he said.
Tony Abbott's grin said it all. When the former prime minister left Parliament House after Thursday's embarrassing lower house debacle he looked perilously close to schadenfreude overdose.

Abbott's government was an incompetent mess from top to bottom; a circus that lurched from one self-inflicted crisis to another until it finally tore itself apart. But at least it never lost a vote in the house.

Abbott will never get the vindication he truly wants  he'll never reclaim the top job  but he's already getting the next best thing: a front row seat to watch as the man who vanquished him falls apart.

Malcolm Turnbull had one job last week: to prove to Australians that his "solid working majority" was real.
Michelle Bridges has long been a pioneer. Not only did she help make fitness interesting enough for reality television but she also spearheaded the activewear trend. A look that made her feel like an outcast when she arrived in Sydney 20 years ago from the Northern Territory.

"When I first moved to Sydney I was working full-time as an instructor and personal trainer in the city, so I was going from gym to gym to gym with my backpack on dressed in my tights and workout gear," she said.

Michelle Bridges models her range of activewear for Big W.

"This was a long time ago and people would stare at me like I was some kind of strange person. I felt certain that the shopkeeper was thinking I was going to steal something but now it's the fashion to be wearing your fitness gear with your little backpack on."

The Biggest Loser trainer laughed at new research, conducted by ING Direct, which highlighted that Australians, on average, spend about $1400 on workout wear every year but only 19 per cent put it to use in the gym.
The staff members' alleged behaviour capped a string of racially charged incidents - including a white woman calling black beachgoers "monkeys" in a Facebook post - that have raised hard questions about the pace of change in race-related policies and attitudes here more than 20 years after apartheid ended. "They go around posting signs about the ethos of equality for all the girls at the school, but that is not true," said one 15-year-old student. "It feels like they don't want to accept the fact that we're African." "It's degrading," said a classmate, also 15, noting that the students' protests were about much more than rules on hair. "If we don't stick up for ourselves, no one's going to." Both students spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from teachers. After thousands signed an online petition supporting the Pretoria students, the head of Gauteng province's education department met with students, parents and staff at the school last week to hear the students' claims. The department later ordered the code of conduct clause dealing with hairstyles to be suspended.

The code includes a long list of rules governing students' general appearance. Its hairstyle guidelines had stipulated that all hair must be brushed, tied back in a neat ponytail if long enough, and that "cornrows, natural dreadlocks, and singles/braids... are allowed, provided they are a maximum of 10mm in diameter." The provincial education department also ordered an inquiry into the students' claims of racial discrimination and said "the mocking of learners' hairstyles" and "the mocking of African learners' usage of their mother tongue" must stop. Some see the students' allegations as a depressing sign that the promises of the Rainbow Nation - a term coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu that came to encapsulate the hopes of a post-apartheid South Africa - are going unfulfilled for its youngest citizens. "It's not about just schools," said Yvette Raphael, a human rights advocate for young women and girls who attended one of the protests. "The Rainbow Nation is not a true thing. It's not reality... Behind closed doors, some of things of pre-1994 are still happening." Pretoria High School for Girls, founded in 1902, was an all-white school under apartheid, despite its founding headmistress' vision of it as a place where "girls of different races and different denominations might meet in that commonwealth of letters." The school admitted its "first black, non-diplomatic pupils" in 1991, according to its website.

The school, which said it could not speak to the media when contacted for comment, has said in a statement that it will work closely with the government to "resolve the issues which were raised" in the meeting. Nomfundo Parkies, whose daughter is among the school's black students, said she appreciates the institution's disciplined environment but that its rules "should be considerate." "There's a serious need for an attitude change," she said as she waited to pick her daughter up after classes. "We see it everywhere. It's not surprising that it's coming out here." South African Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga said she didn't consider anything in the school's code controversial. "Those are standard rules that you find in most codes of conduct," she told the public broadcaster SABC.

"They look innocent," she said about the rules. "It's perhaps in the implementation where difficulties came." Other government officials, however, have been less equivocal in their concern. "Schools should not be used as a platform to discourage students from embracing their African Identity. #StopRacismAtPretoriaGirlsHigh," Arts and Culture Minister Nathi Mthethwa tweeted Monday. He also tweeted: "To assert our language & hair, is to assert one's cultural belonging. Schools must embrace cultural diversity #StopRacismAtPretoriaGirlsHigh." The South African Institute of Race Relations welcomed the government's decision to investigate students' claims.

The allegations "shouldn't be taken lightly," said Salaminah Kelebogile Leepile, a spokeswoman for the think tank, adding, "We need sufficient information from all parties." The widespread attention that the Pretoria events have generated may prompt other schools to take a closer look at what is happening in their own classrooms, according to Melissa Steyn, chair in Critical Diversity Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. "People become complacent with things as they are, until there is a sense of urgency," she said. "A lot of schools are doing some very quick footwork to fix up their own policies." In Johannesburg, Parktown High School for Girls said recently that it has decided to amend its rules to ensure that all girls "attend school feeling comfortable with what they consider to be their natural hair." "We do not have a problem with hairstyles," Anthea Cereseto, the school's headmistress, said in an email. "We believe the hair issue is the superficial manifestation of something deeper in the country which needs to be dealt with."
Lindy and Michael Chamberlain arrive at the Alice Springs Courthouse on September 13, 1982, during the second inquest into the disappearance of their baby daughter, Azaria, at Uluru . Credit:Nigel McNeil Australians judged both these women because they didn't grieve in the way mothers were meant to grieve. As Batty said at the time: "I could only control how I reacted. I couldn't control anything else." But yes, unadorned hatred and loathing, expressed in those letters, those impossible letters, make the fabric of the play. They are worse than anything I've ever been sent on the internet, which might give you some insight into how appalling they were. Unadorned hatred. Lindy Chamberlain holding a picture of herself holding baby daughter Azaria. Credit:Russell McPhedran Here's one: "Killing Azaria made you a millionaire."

Bad tempered bitch. Stuck-up bitch. Cunning bitch. Murdering bitch. Whodunnit? The dingo or the bitch? And to her son: "Your mum killed your baby." This is a story about a baby who was killed by a dingo in 1980, a wedding in 1983 and two murders. For me, it's also about journalism. Letters to Lindy opened in Sydney at the Seymour Centre last Friday and I went, not only to draw a line under the past, but to find out what next. Chamberlain, now Chamberlain-Creighton, 69, would answer questions after the play, about her past, present, future. I felt the play must also talk to me about one of my heroes of journalism, Malcolm Brown, who showed the way for those of us who want to write about injustice, who followed the case of Chamberlain all the way from 1980 to now. There was another reason for me to see this play with my husband of 33 years.

Alana Valentine, the playwright, was the chief bridesmaid at our wedding, after spending so much of our time together at the University of Technology, Sydney (called something else then). The year Azaria was killed, John and I were editors of the student newspaper. Valentine and I both remember how much the case affected us then. We had so many arguments with the young men - and some women - in our lives. Those arguments continued until 2012. Usually when a play has an interval, the chatting begins as soon as the lights come up. On Saturday night, there was silence. My husband leaned down to Valentine, sitting in front of us; and said: "That was a sledgehammer." She replied she would take that as a compliment; secretly, I wanted to leave. It was too hard. Weakly, I asked her if the second half was like the first. At the end of the extraordinary performance, Chamberlain-Creighton answered questions (also David Hamer, a University of Sydney professor of law, talking about the number of those wrongfully imprisoned). She mentioned how much she appreciated the support of Brown, whose position on Chamberlain's innocence never wavered from the start. A shout out to Brown, also in the audience that night.

Then one young woman came up right at the end. It was hard to hear because she spoke softly and the recording I have is poor - but I think she said: "I am currently a victim of a mass murder." There was a murmur across the theatre. She spoke of how much she admired Chamberlain-Creighton, how she, too, felt supported by those around her, how she also planned some motivational speaking. But the real question was this: "When people hear of you or when people meet you for the first time people obviously [think of] the case, do you ever find it difficult or ... frustrating that this is now in your identity and this is what you are identified with rather than people seeing you just as who you are, your character, your personality? Do you find that difficult to talk about, do you find it frustrating that people think of the case when they think of you." Chamberlain-Creighton replied: "Aidan [her son] said after the 2012 inquest, it would really be nice to be known as someone other than the rock people [audience laughter]."
A DNA-covered lighter allegedly left behind near a smouldering crime scene, a burned shoe and CCTV ignorance.

Police believe the blunders formed part of a bumbling evidence trail that led them straight to those allegedly linked to Queensland mother Sabrina Bremer's murder.

The law caught up with Joshua Mundy, 28, Rachel Wheatley, 27, and Jade Rodney Nielsen, 38, this week after homicide detectives in two states allege they carefully retraced the trio's uncovered tracks.

Those tracks are alleged to have first been uncovered on the side of an isolated road at Dulguigan, near Tweed Heads, in northern NSW.
A 78-year-old man was airlifted to hospital after his car flipped onto its side and came to a halt in the front yard of the house in regional Queensland on Sunday morning.

Police said the accident happened at 9.35am on Sunday on Glastonbury Rd, Glasonbury, west of Gympie, at 9.35 on Sunday.

A 78-year-old man was airlifted to the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital. Credit:RACQ LifeFlight Rescue

The Dalby man was transported by LifeFlight to the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital and a 76-year-old female passenger was taken to Nambour hospital.
A man has been charged after an armed robbery and police chase in Harristown, south-west of Toowoomba on Sunday morning.

It will be alleged around 2.15am a man wielding a knife threatened an attendant at a convenience store on James Street.

Police have arrested and charged a man after a chase in the state's south-west ended when stingers were deployed to stop a stolen vehicle. Credit:Cathryn Tremain

The man demanded money and car keys and the attendant complied before the accused fled in the stolen Hyundai sedan.

The 31-year-old male attendant was not injured during the incident.
JIM FALLS  Up in this small town in northwoods Wisconsin, Labor Day weekend is synonymous with one thing: Sturgeon Fest.

Its a great way for the community to get together and enjoy the holiday weekend with family-friendly outdoor activities like the demolition derby, a truck and horse pull and carnival area, to name a few.

But for the Jim Falls Lions Club, the event is also the clubs largest fundraiser.

For 56 years, the club has organized the annual festival, which raises money to go toward local community organizations as well as the Wisconsin Lions Camp, Lee Vrieze, president of the Jim Falls Lions Club said.

The camp is for children and adults who are blind, visually impaired, diabetic or have a mild cognitive disability. Annually, Vrieze said approximately $5,000 from Sturgeon Festival is donated to the camp. On a good year, sometimes even more.

Its a respite for the families and the campers to get a chance to be with someone in their own demographic, Vrieze said. The campers come out of their shell, its a personality-changing event for them. Its very fulfilling to talk to some of those people.

They also support locally, which he said this year included helping a Lake Hallie woman get a service dog and donating to Lions Club International to help with national disasters.

After adding a flat water and kayak race in 2012, Vrieze said they have fallen into a groove and are really happy with what the festival has turned into. Fans of the festival appear to have their niche, showing up annually for the same events. Saturday morning that meant the ninth annual car show and water races.

Dale Horgen of Chippewa Falls has been bringing his classic cars to Sturgeon Fest for quite a few years. He enjoys showing off his hard work, as well as seeing the craftsmanship of other classic car owners.

His current car, which he calls Bits and Pieces took him five years to build, almost completely from scratch, which is where the name came from.

Tracy Swedlund and his canoeing partner Scott Stalheim drove up from Medford to participate in the Flat Water Canoe Races Saturday morning, where they came in second place.

The five-mile race runs 2.5 miles down the Chippewa River and then 2.5 miles up.

It was a good day, Swedlund said. For just a little place here outside of Chippewa Falls its really nice.

Swedlund and Stalheim race recreationally and competitively throughout the state, often competing in triathlons that consist of biking, running and canoeing.

Stalheim also competed in the kayak race at noon on Saturday.

Sturgeon Fest continues Sunday and Monday at Anson Park in Jim Falls.
New competition to Queensland's taxi services and Uber will be launched in Brisbane on Monday, coinciding with the legalisation of ride-sharing apps in the the state.

The company, GoCatch, waited for the state to legalise ride-sharing before it entered the market.

The Sydney-based start-up has previously warned a failure to legalise ride-sharing in the state risked Uber becoming a monopoly in the market.

The service will use the previously existing GoCatch taxi booking app and it will allow users to choose between booking a taxi or the ride-sharing service.
A government department responsible for protecting Victoria's most vulnerable children has been accused of ignoring serious child abuse allegations involving a senior staff member and a boy in her care more than 20 years ago.

Fairfax Media can reveal a 50-year-old woman, who works for the child protection division at the Department of Health and Human Services, was charged with two serious sex offences last week.

The allegations relate to a boy in custody at the Melbourne Juvenile Justice Centre. Credit:Craig Abraham

The state government responded on Friday by ordering an independent investigation of the department, which has been accused of covering up the alleged abuse in 1995.

The disturbing allegations were reported to law enforcement last year after a whistleblower inside the DHHS turned over evidence about the incident to the royal commission into child sex abuse, which referred the matter to Victoria Police.
Mark Tromp, pictured right, is driven from the Wangaratta police station on Saturday night. Credit:Mark Jesser The paranoia centred on their financial affairs, specifically that someone was trying to steal their money. That anxiety built up to the point that the parents fled the house, taking their children with them, on Monday. Ella and Mitchell Tromp after their father was found alive and safe. Credit:Daniel Pockett Both Mitch and Ella left their family and found their way home. Sister Riana had stowed away in the back of a stranger's car before she was discovered and taken to hospital. Their mother, Jacoba, was found wandering in Yass, while Mark was last seen in Wangaratta before he disappeared.

Mitchell previously said there had been no current or previous diagnoses of mental illness, but it is believed one of his parents experienced a mental health episode, which spread through their family until everyone, apart from Mitchell, believed they were in serious danger. Mark Tromp was found on Saturday afternoon. "I can see everyone's questions," he said. "I can see why they want to know, but it's a family matter. I just want the family to be able to come back together and everything to work itself out." He and Ella said they would await the outcome of a police investigation for concrete answers. The Tromp children: Mitchell, Riana and Ella.

"I still feel confused. I think our state of minds weren't in the best place," Ella said. Their father was cleared at the police station on Saturday night by a medical assessor from Albury Wodonga Health and released into the care of his police officer brother Ken. Mark and Jacoba (Coby) Tromp. Mitch and Ella said they couldn't wait for him to come home so they could hug him. "It's the first time I haven't woken up crying in two days," Mitch said.

"I think I'll cry when I see Dad," Ella added. Both children have spoken to their father on the phone. "He was my dad; he was just how he always is and it was so great to hear from him," Mitch said. "I just wanted to hear his voice and we'll go through those details [about where he had been] later," Ella said. "He's well and he said he just wanted to come back home and get back to work."

Jacoba  known as Coby  and Riana both remain in hospital in Goulburn being treated by mental health clinicians. Mitch and Ella said their mother and sister were both doing well, but they were unsure of when they would be allowed to return home. Mitch said he wished he had never left his family. "I had to go with the family because I wanted to see where they were going  I couldn't leave them," he said. But it got to the point where he had had enough and didn't believe their fear was based on anything real. He left his family in Bathurst, NSW, and took a series of trains home.

"I thought getting out was the best idea for me at the time," he said. "In hindsight, I should have tried to stay with them and try and help to bring them back around and talk to them more, but I got out of the car." The rest of the family continued driving to Jenolan Caves. Ella, who with her sister left their parents once they got there, said she was still confused by what had happened. "I was confused about the whole situation, as I still am now," she said. "I just wanted to get home to feed my horses." Ella and Riana had stolen a car at Jenolan Caves, and Ella drove it back to Silvan. Mark and Jacoba drove south to Wangaratta, where they separated. Jacoba took public transport back up north to Yass, while Mark dumped the Peugeot, which belonged to Ella, in a Wangaratta side street on Wednesday night.

Yarra Ranges sergeant Mark Knight  who led the investigation and knows the family  said that despite the family's fear they were being followed, no one was after them and they were not being pursued. Police have not found evidence suggesting the family's money was being targeted by a thief. Sergeant Knight said there had been no previous diagnosed mental health conditions among the family and there was no evidence of drug taking or drug psychosis. There is no suggestion of carbon monoxide poisoning, which can cause psychosis. The family have no debts and their businesses  an earth-moving company and berry farm  are successful. Sergeant Knight said he experienced "sheer relief and happiness" when he was told Mr Tromp had been found.

"It brought us an overwhelming relief," he said. He and three other officers, including a retired policeman who volunteered his help, worked out of the Monbulk police station investigating reported sightings of the man they knew well. Their colleague Ken Tromp, Mark's brother, led the search in Wangaratta. Timeline:

Monday, August 29: The Tromps leave the family home in Ella's Peugeot, terrified someone is after them. During the course of the drive, it's discovered Mitchell has brought his phone with him. He throws it out of the window near Warburton, about 32 kilometres from the family home. The family continues driving towards Bathurst. Tuesday, August 30: Mitchell decides he wants to go home. He leaves the family at Kelso, a suburb of Bathurst, about 7am and makes his way to Sydney. The rest of the family continue on to the Jenolan Caves. That afternoon, they decide to split up. Ella and Riana acquire a car, make their way to Goulburn then go their separate ways. Riana is found along the highway after stealing a lift in a ute and is taken to the local hospital due to stress-related issues. Ella drives back to the family home in Silvan. Parents Mark and Jacoba are reported missing and that afternoon police attend the family home to find credit cards and mobile phones lying around the house and car keys in ignitions. Wednesday, August 31: Mitchell arrives at the family home in the morning after catching the overnight train from Sydney. That afternoon, police search the Jenolan Caves area for Mark and Jacoba but are unable to find them. The couple drive south to Wangaratta where they separate. Jacoba takes public transport to Yass and Mark is seen leaving the Peugeot, with keys in the ignition, in a side street. Thursday, September 1: Police are notified in the early hours of the morning that the family car has been located in Wangaratta and that a lone man was seen walking away from the car. It is believed this man was Mark. Later in the day, Jacoba is taken to Yass District Hospital after a local found her wandering around town. Saturday, September 3: Mark Tromp is found by police after a passer-by saw him walking along Greta Road, on the outskirts of Wangaratta, shortly before 6pm.
Melbourne Express: Monday, September 5, 2016

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Her recollection of their exchange makes tor some entertaining reading ... Beth: I'm a lesbian and your own sister is gay so I don't understand why you oppose same-sex marriage. The plebiscite will hurt me and my LGBTIQ community, especially young kids who aren't out yet. LGBTI youth have the highest levels of suicide - they're 3 times more likely to commit suicide, and trans people are up to 7 times more likely. It's not because of some inherent fault in us, it's because of homophobia and transphobia. And the non-binding plebiscite will end up hurting and probably killing people in the LGBTI community. Tony: I hear you, but marriage, while it's a legal not religious thing, as an institution has been around a lot longer than the laws. A lot of people have strong deeply held beliefs about marriage being between a man and a woman. A plebiscite will allow an open discussion and will mean those people who have those strong beliefs will be less resentful if same-sex marriage is voted on by all Australians. Beth: But it didn't take a plebiscite to change the Marriage Act, it was done in Parliament. People elected you to do a job - to represent us in Parliament, if we take this issue to the the whole of Australia you're not doing your job. Tony: I hear you, but I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. If you'll excuse me, I've just got to go do something ...

(At this point, Ms Cole reports, Mr Abbot starts to get up - slowly, on account of the bike ride.) Beth: Could I please talk to you about one more thing. I just wanted to say that we need to close the camps and bring the refugees here. There are children self harming and being sexually abused and killing themselves. Keeping them there is causing trauma and death. Tony: (standing up at this point) Well, at least we stopped the boats and stopped people dying at sea. Beth: Maybe, but they're dying back in their homes, and in the camps. Bring them here. (Ms Cole writes that Mr Abbott awkwardly and hastily walks away at this point.)

Ms Cole got a round of applause on social media for championing minorities. "I'm deeply touched by the supportive response," she told WAtoday. "Tony Abbott was part of the Liberal Government that changed the Marriage Act back in 2004. I was a lot younger at that stage, and I remember crying as I watched the news. "Yesterday's conversation with Mr Abbott was a chance for me, now as an older person, to express my deep concerns. "I spoke from the heart, and while I know it won't change Mr Abbott's mind, at least I could voice what many people in Australia believe.

"Most people are in favour of allowing two consenting adults who love each other to marry  and this can be handled in Parliament like every other issue. Why waste public resources on a hugely expensive, non-binding opinion poll?" Ms Cole said she believed the money could be better spent on support for defence force personnel and people with muscular dystrophy, for example, the very causes Mr Abbott was supporting in Dwellingup. "There's a small but very vocal minority who hate us, and the plebiscite will give them a public platform to unleash this. It will be vicious, with particular impacts on young LGBTI people who are already vulnerable. This could be avoided if politicians did their jobs and voted on the issue in Parliament," she said. "Refugees especially have no voice. The Nauru Papers show that people are being abused and they are self-harming. All they've done is flee their homes because they had no other choice but to get into a boat, and then they face terrible conditions in our offshore detention centres. Loading
Hangzhou: Chinese President Xi Jinping has directly implored Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to ensure Australia provides a "fair, transparent and predictable" policy environment for foreign investment, as the rift over the decision to block a Chinese bidder from acquiring electricity network Ausgrid and maritime tensions in the South China Sea shadowed the pair's meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hangzhou.

The details of the 20-minute, closed-door meeting at the picturesque West Lake guesthouse on Sunday were briefed by the Chinese foreign ministry, underlining the level of scrutiny Beijing has attached to the decision to block the state-owned State Grid from making the acquisition.

China "hopes the Australian side continues to dedicate itself to providing foreign investors a fair, transparent and predictable policy environment", the foreign ministry cited Mr Xi as saying. "This also accords with Australia's own interests."

China has accused Australia of bowing to protectionist sentiment for blocking the bid, as well as for an earlier decision against a Chinese-led consortium to buy cattle company Kidman & Co. Both decisions were made on national security grounds.
Vatican City: Pope Francis has declared Mother Teresa a saint, honouring the tiny nun for having taken in society's most unwanted and for having shamed world leaders for the "crimes of poverty they themselves created".

Francis held up Mother Teresa as the model for a Catholic Church that goes to the peripheries to find poor, wounded souls during a canonisation mass that drew an estimated 120,000 people - rich and poor, powerful and homeless - to a sun- filled St Peter's Square.

"Let us carry her smile in our hearts and give it to those whom we meet along our journey, especially those who suffer," Francis said in his homily.
When people are willing to help people out without expecting anything in return, good things happen.

Its what gave Chippewa Falls native Kyle Frenette the opportunity to spend a decade of his life working as one of Justin Vernons managers, leading man of Bon Iver, through his company, Middle West.

I emailed him on the off chance he might be interested (in working with me), Frenette said. I released two records on my label and said to him, Im going to music business school, do you need help with any of this stuff that youre doing? We met at Caribou Coffee on Snelling Ave. in St. Paul, and here I am.

That was in 2006, shortly after Bon Iver posted its first record on MySpace. Frenette knew Vernon briefly; they both took piano lessons from Chippewa Fallss Phil Cook, and Frenettes high school band opened for Vernons college band at Stones Throw in Eau Claire.

They released Bon Ivers first album, For Emma, Forever Ago, in 2007, selling copies out of Frenettes Minneapolis apartment. Ten years later, theyve traveled around the world together.

Everything you could ever think of happened, for the most part  we dont have a private jet or anything, Frenette said. But I think staying here, living here throughout that cycle, kept us grounded.

It also connected them to other people in the Chippewa Valley who are working to make a better community for everyone, including local author Michael Perry.

Perry, a longtime friend and mentor of his, introduced Vernon before a press conference full of people from around the world Friday night in Eau Claire for Bon Ivers new album, 22, A Million, which he debuted at the 2016 Eaux Claires Music & Arts Festival and which will be released Sept. 30.

When something starts that small and that locally, literally rehearsed in a farm house south of town with friends you grew up with, and then it becomes as large as it has become, how do you keep things real? Perry asked. When it comes time to announce an album, how do you somehow announce it to the world but also pay attention to your neighbors?

But Vernon, one who understands the value of lending a hand, came up with an answer. So it made sense to Perry, and Vernon, when the time came to release the new album, five years in the making, that he invited press from all over the world to the place it began.

Alejandro Franco, who works for Warped Magazine in Mexico City, spent one night in Eau Claire for the press conference and said it helped him better understand 22, A Million, and perhaps all of Bon Ivers music.

I got to know this place, and I think I get the point a little bit more than I did before I came, Franco said.

Tom Barnes, from mic.com in Brooklyn, N.Y., said he spent 12 hours in a plane, taxis and buses to get to the city, but as soon as he arrived he forgot about that.

It feels fulfilling, it was really satisfying to hear his music in the place he calls home, Barnes said.

But you dont have to be from the area to connect with the music, Franco noted. It has a particular sound very different to everything else, and he has many musician friends who are inspired by Bon Iver.

The most beautiful thing about Bon Ivers music is it comes from here, Franco said. But the dark side, the weird side I think comes from any human being, and thats what I connect with.

Vernon experimented with a machine called an OP-I in the bands third studio album, blending his voice with various tracks and combining samples of musical works to create something completely new. 22, A Million is a step in a new direction for the band, but one that Franco enjoyed.

I think this album is the most honest work in his still young career, he said.

Vernon may or may not agree with that, but he does think hes sending a different message than previous albums.

Its wanting to bash things apart a little bit, break through some stuff, Vernon said. I needed to sound a little radical for me to feel good about putting something out into the world. Shouting, I think, was more of my zone.

The album has a lot of religious and spiritual symbolism, questioning its place in the world, while Vernon questions his own. Math and numbers play a huge role, as the title suggests.

The track listing includes titles such as 715CRKS, 29 #Strafford APTS and 8 (circle), and ending with 10. 00000 Million.

I shout out Eau Claire in a lot of ways, 715 being our area code, but (this album) is also a bridge for me from Eau Claire to understanding the rest of the world, Vernon said. 22 being my favorite number is the beginning. Million is just the other, everyone else, the impossible to understand category.

So how do you make sense of the impossible to understand? On this album, its about finding yourself as much as it is connecting with the people who help find you along the way.

On what hed tell local artists trying to make a name for themselves, Vernon said its important not to get so wrapped up in your work that you forget about life.

Its so important to remember your life is going on the whole time, he said. You cant put yourself too far down the rabbit hole because youll lose the reason why you did it in the first place.

Perhaps that helps explain his success, Frenette thought. The whole crew is a mostly local collective who were just trying to build up the music scene here.
Bizarre World Series opener ends with Phillies stunning Verlander's Astros

Justin Verlander's World Series struggles continued as the Astros blew a 5-0 lead, losing Game 1 in extra innings to the Phillies.
To people like me  that is, proponents of free expression exasperated by the ideological bullying we see in collegiate life today  trigger warnings are catnip. The absurdity of it all, we cry! The spinelessness of faculty and administrators! The shameless pandering to the gossamer sensibilities of coddled, overgrown urchins! (Thats coddled (TM), by the way, because Im fairly certain the word is no longer used for anything other than complaining about youngsters.)

So when news got out last week that the University of Chicago sent a letter to incoming freshmen stating that the school did not support so-called trigger warnings, I was among those cheering the return to academic non-wussiness. After all, if I had to get through Ovids Metamorphoses, with its depictions of rape and kidnapping, not to mention the harrowing dactylic hexameter, shouldnt everyone have to?

In theory, yes. But the truth is I never read Metamorphoses, partly because I was too triggered by its rhythmic rules to actually take a course in classical Roman poetry. One thing I did learn in college, though, is the importance of intellectual integrity and open debate. And that is why, as much as it pains me to say it, Im beginning to wonder whether those of us who rail against trigger warnings are missing the bigger picture.

On the heels of the University of Chicago letter came a widely circulated essay on the website Medium by a social psychology professor arguing in favor of small advisories for students. The professor posed a simple question: Whats wrong with just asking students ahead of time if there are subject areas that might keep them from fully absorbing a lesson and, if so, giving them a heads-up? When used effectively, the essay argued, trigger warnings arent about censorship or excusing students from doing the work but, rather, helping them process the material in ways that work best for them.

That sounds reasonable enough, but its unlikely to get critics of campus identity politics to stop raving about trigger warnings. Thats because the term has become a stand-in for the much larger phenomenon of leftist groupthink masquerading as liberalism. Just as Columbia University student Emma Sulkowiczs mattress became the symbol of campus anti-rape activism, trigger warning is now shorthand for a wide constellation of student concerns and demands. But given what minor intrusions these advisories can be, at least in the big scheme of things, maybe they dont adequately capture the scope of the problem.

Ill say it again: Im opposed to trigger warnings on principle. But to my mind, theyre not nearly as troubling as the way some college students (a minority but a very vocal one) shut down important debate and discussion because the mere thought of it is somehow threatening. On many campuses, especially liberal arts colleges and especially in the humanities, conversations about provocative or sensitive topics appear to unfold less like conversations than recitations from a handbook  one that must be memorized and adhered to under threat of expulsion from polite campus society.

According to the handbook, campus speakers whose views diverge even slightly from those of the loudest campus activists deserve to be shouted down or dis-invited under the pretense that students do not feel safe in their presence. (For the record, the University of Chicago also made it clear that it would not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial.)

According to the handbook, administrators have to answer student demands ranging from renaming buildings to eliminating Shakespeare requirements to creating segregated safe spaces for students of many marginalized groups.

According to the handbook, what doesnt require protest is that self-identified liberal or even far-left professors outnumber self-identified conservative faculty members 5 to 1.

Apparently the American college campus, though probably more progressive and demographically inclusive than at any time in history, is really a bulwark of sexism, transphobia, post-colonial bigotry and just about any other social injustice you can think of.

Yikes. Merely laying out those examples triggered me. Any one of them strikes me as far more troubling than an instructor warning a class that The Rape of Persephone contains rape scenes. Thats why those of us whove been ranting about the extremism of campus activism might need to choose our battles and stop making the trigger warning our target. Its easy to make fun of, but its not the biggest threat to the future of liberal education. The biggest threat is that liberal is starting to mean its opposite. The warning signs are everywhere.
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AVALANCHE

A Love Story

Julia Leigh

W W Norton & Company

133 pages; $23.95



THE ART OF WAITING

On Fertility, Medicine and Motherhood

Belle Boggs

Graywolf Press

242 pages; $16



For several years I was a professor of creative writing at an English university, and a native habit of finding metaphors and similes in unlikely places occasionally led me to glimpse a strange half-analogy between the writing student and the woman embarking on in vitro fertilization (IVF).
Both Bharti Airtel and Vodafone, the incumbents in the telecom sector, have come out with identical communiques for their customers, claiming that the Jio tariff plan, unveiled days before, wasnt as good as it looked.
Homegrown pharmaceuticals firm expects to launch 19 approved products that have an addressable market of $6.8 billion in the US in the next three quarters.

"We have 19 product families that are approved, that will be launched over the next three quarters and that is for approvals that we have on hand today," USA CEO Robert Cunard told analysts.

He further said the company has another 22 targeted "action dates through the end of the financial year" although it does not "anticipate all those will be final approvals but a significant number will be".

In terms of the potential of the product pipeline, Cunard said: "And of that 19 product families today, the addressable market is about $6.8 billion as per IMS June data."

While a large portion of that is Esomeprazole, still "a lot of breadth remains in that pipeline and we think that accelerates through the balance of the financial year", he added.

Cunard said Aurobindo is trying to focus and ensure maintainers of service levels, introduce the products and get the most out of the launches.

In terms of preparedness on the manufacturing side, he said although the company had "some catching up to do as far as validation and manufacturing" is concerned , it is "in a good position with that now, the facilities have been able to step up and we are in a good position to launch those over the next three quarters."

Commenting on the over the counter (OTC) segment in the US, MD N Govindarajan said the company expects a spurt in growth in the second half of 2017-18.

"Right now, it (OTC) is still less than $10 million in terms of the current sale...As you would appreciate the fact that at the end of the day you need to have a critical mass in terms of the market before you really grow in this business," he said.

"As far as products (are concerned), we have 20 products in the (US) market under OTC segment," he added.
Carborundum Universal Ltd (CUMI), part of Murugappa Group, is expecting to come out of losses in its business in China by changing its business model there.The company's new strategy is to toll manufacture, manufacturing in third party plants with its own people controlling the quality, for select products and address the mid segment of the abrasives business, while the premium products will be exported from India to China.

The company has been trying various options in the operations in China, since the country accounts for a significant percentage of all the manufactured goods at the world and is a significant market for the company.
Emamis foray into the cement space, Nirmas entry into the segment after the buyout of Lafarge Indias 11-million tonne (mt) cement business, and Shree Cements proposed investments have laid the ground for cement players eyeing more revenues from east India.
issued a statement on Sunday, saying it was committed to honouring its contractual obligations to NTT DoCoMo in compliance with Indian laws, but that it was disappointed at the lack of cooperation from the latter in sorting out the dispute over their joint venture, Tata Teleservices. Despite several attempts on our part, our partner has refused to come together with us to engage the government and the regulator on the issue, stated.
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Mother Teresa of Calcutta was today declared saint by Pope Francis at a canonisation ceremony in Vatican City.

Mother Teresa, known as the "saint of the gutters" during her life, was made a saint of the Roman Catholic Church, just 19 years after her death.

Millions of Catholics revere her as a model of compassion, and more than 100,000 people were attending the mid-morning ceremony in front of St Peter's Basilica, which was decked out with a canvas of the late nun in her trademark blue-hemmed white robes.

Pilgrims had streamed from all over the world at St. Peter's Square at the Vatican from early morning ahead of a service to honour the Nobel peace laureate, who worked among the world's neediest in the slums of Kolkata.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj is leading a 12-member delegation to attend the function.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday said that sainthood for is a "memorable and proud moment", after her canonisation at the Vatican.

"Sainthood of is a memorable & proud moment," Modi, who is in this east Chinese city for the G20 Summit, said in a tweet.

In the same tweet, he also shared a link to the video of his 'Mann Ki Baat' radio address to the nation on August 28.

The prime minister had praised the nun, who became a global icon because of her work with the dying and destitute of Kolkata, in that edition of his monthly-radio address.

"As Indians we have to feel proud about the canonisation of Bharat Ratna . She had dedicated her life for the upliftment of the poor. She was an Albanian, and English language was not her mother tongue and yet she adopted it as her language and served the poor," he had said.

Teresa's canonisation was announced in March by Pope Francis after the Church recognised two miracles attributed to her after her death in 1997.

Born in 1910 to Kosovan Albanian parents in Skopje - then part of the Ottoman empire, now the capital of Macedonia - Teresa had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.
Ahead of the Gujarat assembly polls in 2017, the Congress is planning to win over the Patels sensing the resourceful community is drifting away from the ruling BJP, which is trying hard to deal with internal rift.
Deemed exporters have a new problem. Their Terminal Excise Duty (TED) refund claims could be rejected, on the ground that the duty has been paid by utilising their Cenvat credit balance.
Maharashtra government's new housing policy, released on Friday in the run-up to the election to the 227-member BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) slated for early 2017, has evoked mix reactions from realty firms.
Separatist leaders on Sunday rebuffed attempts by five Opposition members of the all-party delegation to reach out to them as they refused to talk to them, with hardline leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani even refusing to meet them.
A majority of stakeholders have reiterated only licensed players should be allowed to offer Wi-Fi services at public places while many have proposed that availability of unlicensed spectrum should be increased to promote such services.
Insurance companies and repositories are gearing up to meet the October 1 deadline for issuing electronic policies to those who pay Rs 10,000 or more as premium annually.
Government has set parameters for public sector for receiving capital support and only those lenders which fulfil the criteria post third quarter results would be eligible for funds.

"The Ministry has set parameters for getting capital support. Those who fulfil the criteria post third quarter results would be eligible for capital infusion," sources said.

The government in July had announced the first round of capital infusion of Rs 22,915 crore for 13 .

"75 per cent of the amount (Rs 22,915 crore)...Is being released now to provide liquidity support for lending operations as also to enable to raise funds from the market," the Ministry had said in a statement.

"The remaining amount, to be released later, will be linked to performance with particular reference to greater efficiency, growth of both credit and deposits and reduction in the cost of operations," it had said.

Sources said that the second round of funding would be in addition to the remaining 25 per cent of the Rs 22,915 crore capital infusion announced in July.

The first tranche was announced with the objective to enhance their lending operations and enable them to raise more money from the market.

Out of the Rs 22,915 crore, State Bank of India (SBI) was provided Rs 7,575 crore followed by Indian Overseas Bank (Rs 3,101 crore) and Punjab National Bank (Rs 2,816 crore).

The other lenders, which have got commitment of capital infusion are Bank of India (Rs 1,784 crore), Central Bank of India (Rs 1,729 crore), Syndicate Bank (Rs 1,034 crore), UCO Bank (Rs 1,033 crore), Canara Bank (Rs 997 crore), United Bank of India (Rs 810 crore), Union Bank of India (Rs 721 crore), Corporation Bank (Rs 677 crore), Dena Bank (Rs 594 crore) and Allahabad Bank (Rs 44 crore).

The capital infusion exercise for the current fiscal is based on an assessment of need as assessed from the compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of credit growth for the last five years, banks' own projections of credit growth and an objective assessment of the potential for growth of each PSBs, it had said.

Minister Arun Jaitley in his Budget speech for 2016-17 had proposed to allocate Rs 25,000 crore towards recapitalisation of PSU banks. "If additional capital is required by these banks, we will find the resources for doing so. We stand solidly behind these Banks," he had said.

Under Indradhanush roadmap announced last year, the government will infuse Rs 70,000 crore in state banks over four years while they will have to raise a further Rs 1.1 lakh crore from the markets to meet their capital requirements in line with global risk norms Basel-III.

In line with the blueprint, PSU banks are to get Rs 25,000 crore each in 2015-16 and 2016-17 fiscal. Besides, Rs 10,000 crore each would be infused in 2017-18 and 2018-19.Government has set parameters for public sector banks for receiving capital support and only those lenders which fulfil the criteria post third quarter results would be eligible for funds.

"The Finance Ministry has set parameters for getting capital support. Those who fulfil the criteria post third quarter results would be eligible for capital infusion," sources said.

The government in July had announced the first round of capital infusion of Rs 22,915 crore for 13 banks.

"75 per cent of the amount (Rs 22,915 crore)...Is being released now to provide liquidity support for lending operations as also to enable banks to raise funds from the market," the Finance Ministry had said in a statement.

"The remaining amount, to be released later, will be linked to performance with particular reference to greater efficiency, growth of both credit and deposits and reduction in the cost of operations," it had said.

Sources said that the second round of funding would be in addition to the remaining 25 per cent of the Rs 22,915 crore capital infusion announced in July.

The first tranche was announced with the objective to enhance their lending operations and enable them to raise more money from the market.

Out of the Rs 22,915 crore, State Bank of India (SBI) was provided Rs 7,575 crore followed by Indian Overseas Bank (Rs 3,101 crore) and Punjab National Bank (Rs 2,816 crore).

The other lenders, which have got commitment of capital infusion are Bank of India (Rs 1,784 crore), Central Bank of India (Rs 1,729 crore), Syndicate Bank (Rs 1,034 crore), UCO Bank (Rs 1,033 crore), Canara Bank (Rs 997 crore), United Bank of India (Rs 810 crore), Union Bank of India (Rs 721 crore), Corporation Bank (Rs 677 crore), Dena Bank (Rs 594 crore) and Allahabad Bank (Rs 44 crore).

The capital infusion exercise for the current fiscal is based on an assessment of need as assessed from the compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of credit growth for the last five years, banks' own projections of credit growth and an objective assessment of the potential for growth of each PSBs, it had said.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in his Budget speech for 2016-17 had proposed to allocate Rs 25,000 crore towards recapitalisation of PSU banks. "If additional capital is required by these banks, we will find the resources for doing so. We stand solidly behind these Banks," he had said.

Under Indradhanush roadmap announced last year, the government will infuse Rs 70,000 crore in state banks over four years while they will have to raise a further Rs 1.1 lakh crore from the markets to meet their capital requirements in line with global risk norms Basel-III.

In line with the blueprint, PSU banks are to get Rs 25,000 crore each in 2015-16 and 2016-17 fiscal. Besides, Rs 10,000 crore each would be infused in 2017-18 and 2018-19.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday exchanged views with on the sidelines of the G20 summit here with the US president praising the "bold policy" move on GST reform in a "difficult" global economic scenario.

Modi first met Obama briefly when they were onstage to pose for a family photograph at the G20 Summit venue in this eastern Chinese city. The two leaders had another opportunity to exchange views during an informal evening programme.

Obama in his intervention during the G20 summit praised Modi for the recent tax reform as an example of "bold policy" in an otherwise "difficult global economic scenario".

On August 8, Parliament cleared the landmark Constitution (122nd Amendment) Bill, 2014, on the Goods and Services Tax. The government has set April 1, 2017 as the target for rolling out the GST, considered the biggest tax reform in a long time.

Earlier on Sunday, Modi met Chinese President Xi Jinping and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on the sidelines of the summit.

Modi, who arrived here yesterday from Vietnam for the summit, also met Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad bin Salman and discussed ways to enhance bilateral ties.

The prime minister called for strengthened partnership with Saudi Arabia in sectors such as maritime, infrastructure, low-cost housing and discussed further cooperation in energy sector, they said.

On Monday, Modi will meet British counterpart Theresa May and Argentinian President Mauricio Macri before returning to Delhi.
Describing as "an influential voice in discourse", Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday said it was the grouping's shared responsibility to shape the global agenda.

Leading from the chair, Modi addressed the Leaders Meeting here, before the 8th annual Summit in Goa from October 15-16.

"We, as BRICS, are an influential voice in discourse. It is, therefore, our shared responsibility to shape the agenda," he said.

"Our shared responsibility to shape international agenda in manner that helps developing nations achieve their objectives," he added.

Modi said that as chair of BRICS, "'Building Responsive, Inclusive and Collective Solutions' is the theme we have chosen which mirrors central priorities at G20 Summit".

"We've taken out of capitals to involve people from all walks of life. It will be an opportunity to deepen our ties and with BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) countries.

The four other leaders who participated in the meeting of the five-member bloc included Brazilian President Michel Temer, Chinese President Xi Jinping  with whom Modi held bilateral talks earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin and South African President Jacob Zuma.

"Our summit next month would not only be an opportunity to deepen ties with ourselves, we will also interact with India's neighbouring countries of BIMSTEC  Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand  who have been invited for the outreach summit. We welcome you all to Goa next month," Modi said while concluding his brief address.
China is willing to work with India to maintain their "hard-won sound" ties and further boost bilateral cooperation, President Xi Jinping told Prime Minister Narendra Modi here on Sunday as the two leaders held talks amid differences over a raft of issues.

"China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound relations and further advance their cooperation," state-run Chinese Xinhua news agency quoted Xi as saying during their half an hour meeting, their second in less than three months.

The two leaders met before they attended the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) leaders meeting held ahead of the here.

Xi's comments came in the backdrop of a raft of differences between the two countries, including listing of Pakistan-based terrorist organisations in the United Nations, China stalling India's membership at the elite Nuclear Suppliers Group and the $46 billion China-Pakistan Corridor being built through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

The two leaders had last met on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Summit in June in Tashkent and are again set to meet in Goa next month on the sidelines of the BRICS summit.

Officials on both sides attach importance to the meeting in view of growing differences between the two Asian giants on bilaterally sensitive issues like listing of Pakistan-based terrorist group Jaish-e-Muhammad leader Masood Azhar.

China, too, has been concerned over close India-US ties, especially in defence, as the two countries signed the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement that will give the militaries of the two countries access to each other's facilities for supplies and repairs.
on Sunday summoned Pakistan's envoy here to protest its "interference" in the country's internal affairs after Islamabad said it was "deeply saddened" by Jamaat leader and 1971 war criminal Mir Quasem Ali's execution.

Additional Foreign Secretary for Bilateral Affairs Qamrul Ahsan summoned Pakistani High Commissioner Samina Mehtab and protested against the reaction.

"The opinion that Pakistan gave over the execution of Mir Quasem Ali was entirely tantamount to interference in Bangladesh's internal affairs," Ahsan said after the meeting.

Pakistan reacted just an hour after the hanging of the 63-year-old media tycoon last night, the sixth Islamist to be executed for war crimes committed during the 1971 war.

Its Foreign Office said in a statement that Pakistan was "deeply saddened over the execution of the prominent leader... through a flawed judicial process."



Ahsan said he told the Pakistani envoy that Mir Quasem's trial "took place in a very transparent manner, in front of everybody."



"(Mir Quasem) had scopes to appeal against the judgment and he exhausted the scopes. The apex court thought he deserved the punishment what he was handed down as he took part in the genocides in 1971," Ahsan said as having told the envoy.

Officials said the meeting betwen the two senior diplomats lasted for 20 minutes.

"Nothing much to say," Mehtab told reporters after coming out of Ahsan's office.

Mir Quasem was the infamous pro-Pakistani Al-Badr militia's third most important figure. He was convicted of running Al-Badr's torture cell that killed several people.
The heads of three world economic bodies warned of the risk to trade from the protectionist headwinds sweeping many developed nations as global leaders met in Hangzhou, China. In a panel session on Saturday ahead of the Group of 20 summit, Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), urged business chiefs to lobby governments to help keep trade flows up as she issued a warning about the outlook for growth into 2017. Her views were echoed by Roberto Azevedo, director-general of the World Trade Organization. "Trade is way too low and has been way too low ...
India will organise a three-day roadshow in UK beginning on Monday to attract foreign direct investment in the sector.

The government recently allowed 100 per cent FDI in multi-brand retail for food products produced and processed in India.

Industries Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal is leading a team of officials to London for the purpose, an official said.

UK is home to several big players which India can tap, including Tesco, Marks & Spencer (M&S) and Salisbury.

The government has permitted 100 per cent foreign direct investment in trading of food products, including through e- commerce, to provide a boost to the country's sector.

Food Processing Secretary A K Srivastava had said that Walmart, the world's largest retailer, is keen to retail processed food in India.

The food processing sector received FDI worth $1.04 billion during April 2014 to March 2015.

The industry was valued at $39.71 billion in 2013 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11 per cent to $65.4 billion by 2018.

Some of the major investments received in the last two years include Linde Group's investment of $200 million in seafood segment in Andhra Pradesh, and US-based Mondelez International's new manufacturing plant in the state.
In Dream Town, a collection of boxy office buildings on the gritty edge of this historic city, one tiny company is developing a portable 3-D printer. Another takes orders for traditional Chinese massages by smartphone. They are just two of the 710 start-ups being nurtured.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday told Chinese President Xi Jinping that the partnership between both nations is important for the region and also for the whole world.

The Prime Minister's assertion came as the duo held bilateral talks on the sidelines of the in Hangzhou City of China.

During the talks, Prime Minister Modi highlighted the menace of terrorism, saying the recent attacks show how it is spreading across the world and is, therefore, a matter of grave concern.

He also condemned the terrorist bomb attack at China's embassy in Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek.

The Chinese President on his part said Beijing is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound relations.

"China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound relations and further advance their cooperation," Xinhua quoted Xi as saying.

The meeting between the two leaders is significant as it follows China's move to stall India's membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and bilateral differences over the proposed $46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which runs through Pakistan occupied Kashmir besides Beijing blocking the UN move to ban Masood Azhar, chief of the Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM).

Beijing too has raised concerns over the close ties between India and the US and the recently signed Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA), which will enable the militaries of both democracies access to each other's facilities for supplies and repairs.

This is first meeting between Prime Minister Modi and President Jinping after their meeting on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit held in Uzbekistan capital Tashkent in June 23.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday met his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull who assured his country's support to India's bid for the NSG membership and the two leader agreed to deepen the bilateral defence and security cooperation.

Prime Minister Modi thanked Turnbull for Australia's pro-active support to India's membership of the elite nuclear trading club when the two leaders met on the sidelines of the G20 Summit, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup told reporters here.

"Prime Minister Turnbull assured that Australia will continue to support India's inclusion in the NSG," he said.

India's efforts to join the grouping suffered a setback in June when the NSG plenary held in South Korea decided against accepting its membership application after China and some other nations opposed entry of a non-NPT signatory.

"The two leaders discussed defence and security cooperation. In this context, both the sides positively accessed the recent Naval exercises held between the two sides and agreed to remain in touch," Swaup said after their talks.

"The issue of terrorism was also discussed during the meeting and Prime Minister Modi said that it is important for all the democratic forces to come together to counter this challenge," the spokesperson said.

Swarup said the Prime Minister told Turnbull that India's neighbourhood, in particular, is suffering from the destabilising effects of terrorism.

"Even Russia, China, Afghanistan were all facing terrorism threat emanating from our region and it was important for us to identify the suppliers, exporters and financiers of terrorism. Otherwise, the world is going to face a huge challenge in coming weeks and months," Modi said, apparently referring to Pakistan from where terror groups such as Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Taliban operates.

"Prime Minister Modi's overall message was that we need a unified approach on countering terrorism," Swarup said.

Modi said India-Australia relations are full of energy and the implementation of the mutually agreed projects and programmes have been considerably speeded up under Turnbull's guidance.

The two leaders also discussed the possibilities of trade and investment ties between India and Australia.

In the context of trade, both the sides felt that much more can be done and if the comprehensive economic cooperation agreements between Australia and India could be speeded up that would certainly provide much more momentum to their ties.

Modi also sought the support of Turnbull in encouraging the Australian pension funds to invest in India. He also sought Turnbull's support for clean coal technology.

"Because of India's clean energy targets, it is important for us to adopt as much clean coal technology as possible and this is an area in which Australia has proven expertise. Whether it is underground mining or other form of mining, Australian companies can provide us those technologies," he added.
Dozens of allies threw their weight behind Microsoft on Friday in a case that challenges law enforcement's use of secrecy orders to cloak its pursuit of digital communications in investigations.
United States (US) President Barack Obama held "candid" discussions with Chinese President on the thorniest issues in the relationship between the world's two largest economies, the White House said in a statement on Saturday.

Obama emphasized to Xi that China should abide by a recent arbitration ruling against its claims in the South China Sea, live up to a bilateral deal on hacking and cybersecurity issues, and uphold human rights including religious freedom.

"The president reaffirmed that the US will work with all countries in the region to uphold the principles of law, unimpeded lawful commerce, and freedom of navigation and overflight," the White House said in a lengthy statement after the meeting.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday met Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad bin Salman here and held discussions on enhancing bilateral ties between the two countries.

According to the Prime Minister's website, both the leaders held discussions regarding enhancing bilateral ties during the sidelines of the here.

"Another bilateral follows first session at G20. PM meets Mohammad bin Salman, Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted soon after the meeting.

Mohammad, who is the son of Saudi King Salman, also holds the key defence and economic policy portfolios of the oil-rich Gulf Kingdom.

Modi earlier met US President Barack Obama briefly when they were on a stage to pose for a family photograph at the venue in this eastern Chinese city.

He met Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull on the sidelines of the Summit.

He will meet his British counterpart Theresa May and Argentinian President Mauricio Macri on Monday before returning to Delhi.
The European Commission denies that its shock demand that Apple hand Euro 13 billion in back taxes to Ireland is, in the pungent phrase of Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, "total political crap".
One of the most outlandish ideas to spring from Silicon Valley's most recent tech boom was an attempt to disrupt the $200-billion-a-year US fast-food industry with grilled cheese and soup. The Melt, a San Francisco-based restaurant chain backed by Sequoia Capital, aimed to combine smartphone pre-ordering and high-tech ovens with a dining experience that evoked warm memories of elementary school lunches. While the five-year-old chain now has 20 restaurants in California, Colorado and Texas, nostalgia and new technology haven't quite offered the competitive edge its backers hoped. In ...
British Prime Minister said on Sunday she wanted her security advisers to help review a delayed nuclear power investment from China - a source of diplomatic tension - as she arrived for a G20 summit.

May upset Chinese officials in July by delaying a $24 billion project that would see French firm EDF build Britain's first new nuclear power plant in decades with the help of $8 billion from China.

Speaking during her first visit to China, May was asked whether she would ask the National Security Council, a team of ministers supported by intelligence officers, to look at the potential security implications of the Hinkley deal.

"I will be doing exactly as you've said which is -- as you know, I'll be looking at all the evidence around this issue," May replied.

Although there is not expected to be a formal review process by the NSC specifically on Hinkley, the comment marked the first official acknowledgement that national security advice would be a factor in her decision.

The initial delay caught investors by surprise and has cast doubt over whether May, who took office in July following Britain's vote to leave the European Union, will continue to court China as a major source of infrastructure investment.

"This is the way I operate," May earlier told reporters en route to the summit, which will include a one-to-one with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

"I look at the evidence, ...take the advice and consider that and come to my decision."

A final decision is expected later this month, May said.

May, a former interior minister, is wary of the risks of allowing China to invest in nuclear projects, according to a former Cabinet colleague. The EDF deal is viewed as a precursor to Chinese involvement in another two nuclear plants.

Asked whether she trusted China, May said: "Of course wehave a relationship with them... What I want to do is build on that relationship."

She also stressed a need to broaden the group of nations that Britain can trade with and tap for cash to help reinvigorate its power, transport and technology infrastructure.

"This is the G20, this is about talking to a number of worldleaders. I'm going to give the message that Britain is very muchopen for business... I want to be talking about theopportunities for free trade around the world."
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan backed the healing of relations between their nations, on Sunday, damaged by Ankara's shooting down of a Russian war plane last year.

"There is still a lot to do in order to completely re-establish cooperation in all areas," said Putin, after the bilateral meeting in Guangzhou on the eve of a G20 summit in the southern Chinese city.

"Turkey is going through a difficult period, fighting against terrorism in the face of serious terrorist crimes," he said.

Putin added "I am sure that... We can go forward on our path of cooperation" once the situation in Turkey is "completely normalised".

Turkey and Russia normalised ties in June after Erdogan sent a letter to Putin expressing regret over the shooting down of a Russian war plane on the Syrian border last November which had caused an unprecedented crisis in their relations.

The following month Erdogan survived a coup attempt by a rogue military faction and in August the Turkish leader met Putin during a highly symbolic visit to Russia, his first foreign trip since the failed coup.

Today, the Turkish leader said he and Putin would take "certain measures" to move bilateral ties forward, notably on thir joint TurkStream project, to pipe gas to Turkey and southern Europe, which was stalled by the diplomatic freeze.

The shooting down of a Russian fighter jet by a Turkish F-16 on the Syrian border last November saw Putin slap sanctions on Turkey and launch a blistering war of words that dealt serious damage to burgeoning ties.

The first Russian charter plane carrying tourists to Turkey since Moscow lifted its travel sanctions landed in the Mediterranean resort of Antalya on Saturday.
Despite the separatists refusing to hold talks with the all-party delegation, CPI (M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury on Sunday said "their intention is clear and they are ready for unconditional talks" with everybody.

Hurriyat leaders S.A.S. Geelani and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq refused to meet a group of the all-party delegation, who arrived here to hold meetings with all the stakeholders in the state.

"They said they won't meet. Our intention is clear. This is our indication that we are ready for unconditional talks with everybody. We want peace and tranquillity in the Valley," Yechury told the media here.

However, Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front chief Yasin Malik met with the delegation.

Talking about the meeting with Malik, Janata Dal (United) leader Sharad Yadav said, "The meeting was good. They said they would come to Delhi and hold talks. We believe that they have agreed to take the talk forward. Our aim is to make an atmosphere for peace to ease the tension. We had come here with this aim. We will surely come forward for talks."

Apart from Yechury and Yadav, the all-party delegation members who had gone to meet with the separatists include CPI leader D Raja and CPI (M) MLA Yousuf Tarigami.

Earlier today, the separatists rejected Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti's invitation for talks with the all-party delegation.

This came after Mehbooba appealed to all separatist leaders and other organizations to take the lead and engage with the all-party delegation.

She also said the country's political leadership must reach out and engage all sections of society, including the leaders of the Hurriyat Conference, in a productive dialogue process.

Mehbooba had earlier written to the separatist leadership requesting them to "take a lead and engage" with the delegation, "which will be the start of a credible and meaningful political dialogue and resolution process."

The all-party delegation, led by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, earlier in the day met Mehbooba and her predecessor Conference's Omar Abdullah.

During the two-day visit, the delegation, led by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, will interact with Governor N.N. Vohra besides holding meetings with the representatives of all political parties and others.

After coming back, the delegation will convene a meeting and give suggestions on the basis of which the Centre will decide its future course of action.

Earlier on Saturday, a preparatory meeting of the all-party delegation was held in New Delhi.

The delegation was made aware of the prevailing situation in the state and contours of the tour during which they will hold talks with a cross-section of people.

Ahead of the visit of the all-party delegation, the Centre approved the use of chilli-filled grenades as an alternative to pellet guns for crowd control.

Kashmir has been on the boil since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Wani on July 8 as more than 70 people have lost their lives.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The all-party delegation led by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh on the first day of its visit here on Sunday met about 200 members in about 30 delegations from various sections of society and listened to their point of view to reach at a common solution to the current scenario in the state.

Before leaving for Srinagar, Singh had said, "We intend to talk to individuals and groups, who want peace and normalcy in the Kashmir Valley."

The delegation is on a two-day visit to Jammu and Kashmir.

The Home Minister chaired the meeting of the all-party delegation that was also attended by Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti.

During the meeting, a detailed presentation was given by the State Government highlighting various issues related to the current scenario in Jammu and Kashmir and it was emphasised that a clear roadmap needs to be drawn with a focus on the way forward, said a press statement issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs.

The meeting also stressed that the recommendations of the Working Groups and Parliamentary delegations need to be considered.

While interacting with the delegation, Mufti said, "Kashmir is a common issue of interest and should not be viewed as a political issue." Mufti also thanked all the parties for visiting the state to listen to the problems of the people of Jammu and Kashmir.

All the parties agreed to this fact and emphasised that steps need to be taken to restore normalcy and peace in Kashmir at the earliest, said MHA in the statement.

The delegation also met the representatives of various political parties, who expressed their concern over the injuries to civilians due to the use of pellet guns; to which, the Union Home Minister said the Government is already working on the alternatives to pellet guns such as PAVA shells.

Conference led by Omar Abdullah, the Congress Party led by J-K unit president Ghulam Ahmad Mir, Peoples Democratic Party led by Sartaj Madni, Peoples Conference led by Sajad Gani Lone, Communist Party of India (M) led by M.Y. Tarigami, Awami Itihaad Party led by Er. Abdul Rashid, Peoples Democratic Front led by H.M. Yaseen, Democratic Party Nationalist led by Ghulam Hassan Mir and BJP led by state president Sat Sharma met the All Party delegation and expressed their views and ground-level experiences during the meeting.

In addition to the political parties, delegations of academicians, teachers and student associations, representatives of school management, prominent NGOs, representatives of Leh, Kargil, Pahari associations, Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee, Fruit and Saffron Growers associations, Civil Society etc. also met the delegation.

The Jammu and Kashmir Students Welfare Association informed the delegation that they are willing to work with the Government of India hand-in-hand and shoulder-to-shoulder to bring normalcy in the state, says the MHA.

The delegation also met Jammu and Kashmir Governor N.N. Vohra later in the evening.

On Monday, the delegation will visit Jammu after meeting different civil society delegations in Srinagar in the morning.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
With the all-party delegation set to visit Kashmir today, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) has expressed hope that a solution will be found to restore normalcy in the restive Valley.

"I don't think all parties have different views on Jammu and Kashmir. In the all-party meeting, most of the people expressed their opinion of peace returning to Kashmir. They spoke in support of speaking to anybody. They spoke in support of confidence building measures, including the restrictions on pellet guns and review of AFSPA," TMC MP Sougata Roy told ANI.

Roy said by talking to different sections of people there, they can hope to cool down the ongoing unrest in Kashmir. "We are going in that perspective. We think that by going and talking to different sections of people which we will today and tomorrow, we can hope to find a solution, at least cool down the situation so that normalcy is restored."

Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh will lead an all-party delegation to Kashmir today to discuss and find solution to the ongoing unrest there.

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti yesterday invited Hurriyat leaders for talks with the all-party delegation.

A preparatory meeting of all-party delegation was held in the capital.

Singh said the Centre would take a final decision with regard to Kashmir unrest on the basis of feedback and suggestions given by the all party-delegation.

The delegation was made aware of the prevailing situation in the state and contours of the tour during which they will hold talks with a cross-section of people.

Along with Singh, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar, Minister of State in PMO Jitendra Singh and top officials were present in the meeting.

The prevailing ground situation in Jammu and Kashmir, views of different stake holders, individuals and groups were conveyed to the parliamentarians during the meeting.

During the two-day visit, the visiting MPs will interact with Governor N.N. Vohra and Chief Minister Mufti, and will also be holding meetings with representatives of all political parties and other delegations in Srinagar to bring peace in the Valley.

The valley is facing unrest due to protests in the aftermath of the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Muzaffar Wani on July 8.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
With Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin threatening to train more Kashmiri suicide bombers, who would turn the valley into "a graveyard for Indian forces", the Congress on Sunday said it is important for the Indian state to understand that an engagement with the Hurriyat if at all contemplated does entail or does necessitate an engagement with Pakistan also.

Congress leader Manish Tewari said the Hizbul Mujahideen is a puppet of Pakistan essentially what Syed Salauddin has been made to say by his puppeteers in Pakistan is that the Hurriyat and the deep state in Pakistan are Siamese twins.

"They are two sides of the same coin by being belligerent on Pakistan and trying to soft on the Hurriyat is something, which the Pakistanis through Syed Salauddin are making clear it is not going to work," he added.

Dismissing talks as futile, Salahuddin in an interview with a leading English daily insisted that there was no solution to Kashmir except militancy. He also vowed to block any peaceful political resolution to the Kashmir conflict.

The Congress leader, however, welcomed the Centre's initiative to send an all-party delegation to Kashmir and expressed hope that they are successful in building an emotional connect with the people in the valley.

"Well, it's a welcome initiative the all-party delegation is intending to reach out and have an emotional connect with the people of Kashmir," Tewari told ANI.

"So, therefore, under those circumstances, we do hope that something positive comes out of the whole process," he added.

Commenting on Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti's move to invite the separatists for talks along with the all-party delegation to resolve the conflict in the valley, Tewari said, "If the Centre agrees to what Mehbooba is saying this means you will have to talk continuously and concurrently with both Hurriyat and Pakistan."

Mehbooba has written to the separatist leadership requesting them to "take a lead and engage" with the delegation, "which will be the start of a credible and meaningful political dialogue and resolution process."

Expressing hope that the separatists would accept her offer, she wrote: "My party has always believed that the Hurriyat Conference is a stakeholder in the peace... and prosperity of the state."

Meanwhile, an all-party delegation, led by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, arrived in Srinagar today for an assessment of the situation due to the unrest in the valley.

During the two-day visit, the delegation will interact with Governor N.N. Vohra and the Chief Minister besides holding meetings with the representatives of all political parties and others.

Kashmir has been on the boil since the killing of Hizbul Mjahideen commander Burhan Wani on July with curfew continuing in parts of the valley for the 58th day today.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
With three former Chief Justices of India emphasizing on transparency in the Supreme Court collegiums proceedings for selecting judges, the Congress Party on Sunday laid emphasis on finding a modus vivendi, which is as far as practically possible and acceptable to everyone.

Congress leader Manish Tewari said all stakeholders in the legal process must have a substantive conversation as to what is the best way forward because no system is completely perfect.

"Under those circumstances, if the system precious to the collegiums system was flawed and the collegiums system is imperfect and the judges in their wisdom have found that the Judicial Appointment's commission was again a flawed paradigm, unconstitutional to say the least and they struck it down," Tewari told ANI.

"But when you are dealing with judicial appointments, you need to find a modus vivendi, which is as far as practically possible (and) acceptable to everyone," he added.

Another Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi, however, pointed out that it was just a communication gap and would be resolved soon because the different elements of the collegiums cannot have anything accept the same view regarding transparency and merit and consensual approach.

"I think it is tragic if the collegiums divisions or differences are used or exploited by any external agency.to delay the appointments process that is my fear. It is also my hope and expectation that this will be resolved soon because the different elements of the collegiums cannot possibly have anything accept the same view regarding transparency and merit and consensual approach," said Singhvi.

"So, I have no doubt that they will come together and solve this. But my fear is that any delay in solving this should not be exploited by external agencies to delay the appointments process. Since vacancies, which are already humongous and scary cannot be a casualty for even one moment longer," he added.

Putting forth their concerns, the three ex-CJIs KG Balakrishnan, P Sathasivam and R.M. Lodha backed Justice J. Chelameswar's unprecedented decision to stay away from collegiums meetings because of their "opacity".

Justice Chelameswar earlier strongly criticised the collegium system in vogue for the past 22 years as "absolutely opaque and inaccessible both to public and history, barring occasional leaks."

The fifth senior most judge in the Supreme Court hierarchy, who is scheduled to retire on June 22, 2018, had also observed that the collegium system was without accountability.

Chief Justice of India T.S. Thakur has, however, expressed hope that the issue would soon be sorted out.

The collegium system was created by two judgements of the Supreme Court in 1990s in which a body of senior apex court judges headed by the Chief Justice of India selected persons and recommended their names for appointment as judges.

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With a shimmery diamond ring on her finger, it seems like American actress Lindsay Lohan has moved on in her love life and is possibly celebrating a new engagement with long time rumored beau Dennis Papageorgiou in Greece.

The 30-year-old actor was caught sporting a bikini and the giant ring on her hand that caught all the attention. The ring looked nothing less than the emerald engagement ring that her ex-fiance Egor Tarabasov gave her before the two split earlier this year, reports Hollywood Life.

The 'Mean Girl' star was also spotted hanging out in Greece with Papageorgiou, showing fast signs of moving on from her ex-flame, who also allegedly tried to "strangle" her.

However, LiLo was just a couple of weeks back, during her 30th birthday, snapped wearing the emerald engagement ring gifted by her ex-flame.

The drama between her and Tarabasov began when she accused him of cheating on her via Instagram after which the situation got very heated leading to the couple's not-so-amicable breakup.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Urging Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government to bring an end to the environment of distrust in the valley, the Shiv Sena on Sunday said Pakistan is through the separatists trying to make Kashmir the main focus of all issues.

Shiv Sena leader Manisha Kayande said that Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti should have met the separatists much earlier.

"The situation in Kashmir is deteriorating day by day. The only relief at such time is that the curfew has been lifted from the valley. Mehbooba, who has called the separatist leaders for talks, should have taken this step much earlier," said Kayande.

"As of now, there is an environment of distrust in Kashmir and it seems like all the political parties are trying to pull out their agenda. There are many problems, which need to be addressed and because of them the whole episode is becoming complicated. So, I would request Modi Government to take major steps in this regard," he added.

Mehbooba has written to the separatist leadership requesting them to "take a lead and engage" with the delegation, "which will be the start of a credible and meaningful political dialogue and resolution process."

Expressing hope that the separatists would accept her offer, she wrote: "My party has always believed that the Hurriyat Conference is a stakeholder in the peace... and prosperity of the state."

Meanwhile, an all-party delegation, led by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, arrived in Srinagar today for an assessment of the situation due to the unrest in the valley.

During the two-day visit, the delegation will interact with Governor N.N. Vohra and the Chief Minister besides holding meetings with the representatives of all political parties and others.

Kashmir has been on the boil since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani on July 8 with curfew continuing in parts of the valley for the 58th day today.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Former Afghan president Hamid Karzai has become a proud father of his fourth child.

The baby girl was delivered at the Apollo Hospital in Delhi at around 11 a.m. on Saturday.

"President Karzai paid a brief visit to the hospital on Saturday to see his wife and his new born child on his way to London," Afghan Ambassador to India, Shaida Mohammad Abdali, said in a press statement.

Karzai and his wife, Dr Zeenat Quraishi Karzai, had their first child- a baby boy in 2007, named Mirwais, after eight years of their marriage.

In 2012, they had their second child, Malalai, a baby girl, and Howsi, a baby girl in 2014.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
With the all-party delegation set to visit Kashmir today, the Panthers Party (NPP) said a healing touch is required to bring peace in the Valley.

"Who is Mehbooba Mufti to call them? Is this issue supposed to be resolved by her? This issue must be solved by the Indian leadership with Pakistan. You should give a healing touch to the people of Jammu and Kashmir. The healing touch will be to dismiss the present government and then hold talks," NPP leader Bhim Singh told ANI.

"The people there are ready for Governor's rule. They (BJP-PDP Government) won't leave it unless Kashmir turns into ashes," he added.

Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh-led all-party delegation will visit the Valley today to discuss and find solution to the issue of ongoing unrest there.

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti yesterday invited Hurriyat leaders for talks with the all-party delegation.

A preparatory meeting of all-party delegation was held in the capital yesterday.

Singh said the Centre would take a final decision with regard to Kashmir unrest on the basis of feedback and suggestions given by the all party-delegation.

The delegation was made aware of the prevailing situation in the state and contours of the tour during which they will hold talks with a cross-section of people.

Along with Singh, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar, Minister of State in PMO Jitendra Singh and top officials were present in the meeting.

The prevailing ground situation in Jammu and Kashmir, views of different stake holders, individuals and groups were conveyed to the parliamentarians during the meeting.

During the two-day visit, the MPs will interact with Governor N.N. Vohra and Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, and will also be holding meetings with representatives of all political parties and other delegations in Srinagar to bring peace in the Valley.

The valley is facing unrest due to protests in the aftermath of the killing of terrorist Burhan Wani on July 8.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Welcoming Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti's decision to invite Hurriyat leaders for talks with the all-party delegation, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) has said it is necessary to invite them as they can be instrumental in ensuring that the situation in Kashmir is normalised.

"We are talking with the separatists with whom ordinarily we would not like to talk, but in the best interest of the restoration of peace and bringing about normalcy, we may even tolerate this and speak to them. They can be instrumental in ensuring that the situation is normalised. I think that should happen and all our best wishes to Rajnath Singh and all our political leaders," NCP leader Majid Memon told ANI.

When asked about the Centre's decision to use chilly-based PAVA shells as an alternative to pellet guns, he said the move might prove to be a significant step in winning the confidence of the people of Kashmir.

"What Rajnath Singh has done today should have done much earlier. In the House also, we had raised this issue that the use of pellet should be stopped, but this government was not in a position to pay heed to that, but its better late than never. I think this particular move may help win confidence of the people and making them think about bringing normalcy in the valley."

Chief Minister Mufti, yesterday, invited Hurriyat leaders for talks with all-party delegation who will be visiting the valley today.

"I write to you in my capacity as the president of the J-K Peoples Democratic Party and request you to take the lead and engage with the All Party Delegation of Parliamentarians visiting the state tomorrow," the invitation said.

The invitation stated that the meet will be the start of a credible and meaningful political dialogue and resolution process to end the stalemate in the Kashmir valley.

"To convert our conviction and commitment of a peaceful and prosperous J-K into reality, it is important that you share your thoughts and beliefs with this distinguished group who represent the people of India and not only the Government of India," the invitation added.

The all-party delegation will embark on a two-day visit to Kashmir where parliamentarians will interact with Governor N.N. Vohra and the Chief Minister and will also be holding meetings with representatives of all political parties and other delegations in Srinagar to bring peace in the restive Valley.

The Centre announced a special package of Rs. 200 crore to engage the youth of Jammu and Kashmir in constructive sporting activities.

The Centre's package provides for construction of indoor sporting halls in all districts of the state to provide playing facilities to the youth during long winters. Under the package, two stadiums in Srinagar and Jammu will be upgraded to the international standards, while existing stadiums at Poonch, Rajouri and Udhampur will also be upgraded.

Union Ministers Arun Jaitley, Dr Jitendra Singh and Ram Vilas Paswan will also be part of the delegation, besides leaders of the opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad and Mallikarjun Kharge. JD (U) leader Sharad Yadav, Sitaram Yechury, CPI leader D. Raja, NCP's Tariq Anwar and TMC's Saugata Roy will be the part of the delegation.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary and member of all-party delegation Sitaram Yechury on Sunday said Hurriyat leaders were unwilling to hold talks with the delegation members.

"We met Mirwaiz Umar Farooq; we met Shabir Shah; and then we met professor Abdul Gani Bhat; the leaders of Hurriyat, all of them, said they had decided not to talk on the issue," Yechury told the media here.

Yechury also took a swipe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi's statement during an interview that 'vishwas' (confidence) and 'vikas' is needed to for the restive Kashmir".

"Prime Minister Modi talks about vikas and vishwas, we first need to generate vishwas, and in order to do that, at least fulfil those promises that were made earlier, only then vishwas can be built," he said.

Apart from Yechury, Janata Dal (United) member Sharad Yadav, CPI leader D. Raja and CPI (M) MLA Yousuf Tarigami, all of them parts of the all-party delegation, had gone to meet the separatist leaders.

Earlier today, the separatists rejected Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti's invitation for talks with the all-party delegation.

This came after Mehbooba appealed to all separatist leaders and other organizations to take the lead and engage with the all-party delegation.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, who attended Mother Teresa's canonisation ceremony in the Vatican City on Sunday, said it was a proud moment for both India and Bengal, where she dedicated her entire life to the service of the poor.

"It is a proud thing for Bengal that she belonged and worked for Kolkata. Our missionaries, our charity, all our Fathers, Bishops, Christian brothers and sisters, we have always a good relation with them," said Mamata.

"It is because of their invitation that we are here, and we are greatly honoured," she added.

She further said it was an excellently-organised gathering, and all the priests, the bishops, the nuns and the whole community from all over the present there were just like one family.

Rejoicing her sainthood, Kejriwal said, "It is a very emotional moment for the entire humanity, especially for India."

"Even though she was from Albania, she made India her home and spent her entire life to serve the poor and the needy," he told ANI.

"The way she selflessly served the poor by living among them, such examples are very rare in history," he said.

He added that he was fortunate enough that he once got a chance to work at her Kalighat Ashram for a couple of months in 1992-93.

"She was a great soul and I'm personally very happy that she was granted sainthood," he said.

Pope Francis declared Mother Teresa a saint at a Sunday morning Mass, making her the model of his Jubilee Year of Mercy.

Mother Teresa, known as the "saint of the gutters" during her life, was made a saint of the Roman Catholic Church, 19 years after her death.

Millions of Catholics revere her as a model of compassion. More than one lakh people attended the ceremony in front of St. Peter's Basilica.

Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj lead a 12-member delegation to attend the function.

In India, a series of events were held in Kolkata to mark the occasion. A special mass was organised at the Mother House in the city, with nuns promising to celebrate with the poorest of the poor.

Her statue was also unveiled at Seashore St. Anthony's Shrine in Chennai.

Pope Francis had in March announced that Mother Teresa, who spent 45 years serving the poor and sick on the streets in Kolkata, will be elevated to sainthood after the Church recognised two miracles attributed to her after her death.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Expressing displeasure over the 30-member all-party delegation meeting being convened in Kashmir instead of Jammu, the Jammu and Kashmir Panthers Party (JKNPP) has said the party would boycott the meeting as they have decided not to visit Kashmir.

"This is just ridiculous, why should JKNPP, a Jammu-based political party, go to Kashmir when the all-party delegation is supposed to visit Jammu. Summoning us to Kashmir and not allowing us to meet the delegation in Jammu is highly unfair, unjust and it is motivated as well, we believe. If we are not called to the meet for the all party delegation on 5th (September), we shall be boycotting because we have decided that we will not be going to Kashmir," JKNPP member Harsh Dev Singh told ANI.

Singh further said the delegation meeting various political parties in Kashmir will not serve the purpose, as they need to prolong their stay and visit different places to assess ground realities in the state.

"We welcome the visit, but we feel that the all-party delegation's visit is very short. They cannot assess the situation in just one day. The delegation ought to have visited different places in Kashmir valley, they needed to go to different districts and to see for themselves the ground situation prevailing in the Kashmir valley and how disturbed the entire valley is," he said.

Singh also supported Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti's decision to invite Hurriyat leaders and stated that there should be no restrains in meeting with all party delegation.

"As far as calling different stake holders or different political groups is concerned there shouldn't be any barriers and if Mehbooba Mufti is inviting them, let them have dialogue with the all-party delegation. They are also citizens of India whether they like it or not," he said.

A 30-member all-party delegation is all set to visit the valley for two days, during which they will interact with various political parties and stakeholders.

Parliamentarians will also interact with Governor N.N. Vohra and the Chief Minister.

Chief Minister Mufti yesterday invited Hurriyat leaders for talks with the all-party delegation.

"I write to you in my capacity as the president of the J-K Peoples Democratic Party and request you to take the lead and engage with the All Party Delegation of Parliamentarians visiting the state tomorrow," the invitation said.

The invitation stated that the meet will be the start of a credible and meaningful political dialogue and resolution process to end the stalemate in the Kashmir valley.

The Centre announced a special package of Rs. 200 crore to engage the youth of Jammu and Kashmir in constructive sporting activities.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The members of the all-party delegation on Kashmir will be holding talks with the separatist leaders in Srinagar in order to bring normalcy in the valley.

The all-party delegation members, including CPI (M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury, CPI leader D Raja, CPI (M) MLA Yousuf Tarigami and Janata Dal (United) leader Sharad Yadav, have left to meet separatist leaders Syed Ali Geelani and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq.

Before leaving for talks with the separatists, Yechury told ANI that the situation is very serious compared to 2008 and 2010.

"It is important to understand the root of this discontent and tackle the situation otherwise it would be difficult to bring normalcy in the Valley. We are ready to talk with any stakeholder to restore normalcy. We don't want any more torture on the people of Kashmir," he added.

Yechury said that they would hold talks with everyone, including the Hurriyat.

However, there has been no official confirmation from the side of the .

Meanwhile, Deputy Chief Minister Nirmal Singh said they have discussed the situation in the valley with the all-party delegation and put forth their views.

"The issue will be further discussed with the other parties and people," he added.

Singh, however, downplayed posers when asked whether the all-party delegation would also hold talks with the .

"Whoever wants to meet the are free to do so. Things will take place as the delegation wants," he added.

Earlier on Sunday, the separatists rejected Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti's invitation for talks with the all-party delegation.

This came after Mehbooba appealed to all separatist leaders and other organisations to take the lead and engage with the all-party delegation.

She also said the country's political leadership must reach out and engage all sections of society, including the leaders of the Hurriyat Conference, in a productive dialogue process.

Mehbooba had earlier written to the separatist leadership requesting them to "take a lead and engage" with the delegation, "which will be the start of a credible and meaningful political dialogue and resolution process."

The all-party delegation, led by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, earlier in the day met Mehbooba and her predecessor Conference's Omar Abdullah.

During the two-day visit, the delegation, led by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, will interact with Governor N N Vohra besides holding meetings with the representatives of all political parties and others.

After coming back, the delegation will convene a meeting and give suggestions on the basis of which the Centre will decide its future course of action.

Earlier on Saturday, a preparatory meeting of the all-party delegation was held in New Delhi.

The delegation was made aware of the prevailing situation in the state and contours of the tour during which they will hold talks with a cross-section of people.

Ahead of the visit of the all-party delegation, the Centre approved the use of chilli-filled grenades as an alternative to pellet guns for crowd control.

Kashmir has been on the boil since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Wani on July 8 as more than 70 people have lost their lives.
With an aim to find a possible solution to the prolonged Kashmir unrest, the all-party delegation headed by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh left for Srinagar on Sunday morning.

During the two-day visit, the MPs will interact with Governor N.N. Vohra and Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, and will also be holding meetings with representatives of all political parties and other delegations in Srinagar to bring peace in the Valley.

Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader Saugata Roy, before the departure, said, "It is a good step for ensuring normalcy in the Kashmir Valley. I hope this will pave the way for improving the situation there. Yesterday, in the all party meeting everyone suggested that we should talk to everyone, including the Hurriyat. Therefore, it is a good thing that Mehbooba Mufti has invited them."

Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad on his part said that he hopes that the all-party delegation would be able to find solution to the Kashmir issue.

"I hope we will be able to find solutions; our delegation will be beneficial for Kashmir and for the country. Of course we won't be able to take decisions on the spot but it will be an opportunity for parties and Kashmiri people to interact. I appeal to all the party, be it mainstream or non-mainstream, to come forward and talk so that things are brought to some solution," Azad told ANI.

Union Minister of Food and Public Distribution and Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) chief Ram Vilas Paswan asserted that they are going with an open mind and are ready to talk on anything that is within the framework of the Constitution.

Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Sitaram Yechury told ANI that they would try and talk to all the stakeholders and try to restore normalcy and stop all this senseless killing.

"It is very late we wanted this to happen two months ago. Let's hope that even now we will be able to make some difference," he said.

Biswajit Daimary, Bodoland People's Front leader, said that they would today be meeting people at the ground level in the Valley.

"After our visit, I am sure we will find some way to bring normalcy into the Valley," he said.

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti yesterday invited Hurriyat leaders for talks with the all-party delegation.

This came after the opposition parties suggested the government to invite the Hurriyat Conference for talks.

Rajnath said the Centre would take a final decision with regard to Kashmir unrest on the basis of feedback and suggestions given by the all party-delegation.

The delegation was made aware of the prevailing situation in the state and contours of the tour during which they will hold talks with a cross-section of people.

Apart from the Home Minister and Minister of State in PMO Jitendra Singh, those who will be part of the all-party delegation include Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, leader of opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad, his Lok Sabha colleague Mallikarjun Kharge, senior Congress leader Ambika Soni, Ram Vilas Paswan (LJP), JD-U leader Sharad Yadav, Sitaram Yechury and CPI leader D Raja.

NCP's Tariq Anwar and Saugata Roy, Shiv Sena's Sanjay Raut and Anandrao Adsul, TDP's Thota Narasimham, Shiromani Akali Dal's Prem Singh Chandumajra, BJD's Dilip Tirkey, AIMIM's Asaduddin Owaisi, AIUDF's Badaruddin Ajmal and Muslim League's E Ahamed will be part of the delegation.

TRS' Jitendra Reddy, N K Premchandran (RSP), P Venugopal (AIADMK), Tiruchi Siva (DMK), Y B Subba (YSR-Cong), Jaiprakash Yadav (RJD), Dharamveer Gandhi (AAP) and Dushyant Chautala (RLD) are also in the team..

The valley is facing unrest due to protests in the aftermath of the killing of terrorist Burhan Wani on July 8 amid which over 70 people have lost their lives and thousands others have been injured.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Coming down heavily on Syed Salahuddin for threatening to train more Kashmiri suicide bombers, who would turn the valley into "a graveyard for Indian forces", the Panthers Party (NPP) on Sunday demanded appropriate action against the Hizbul Mujahideen chief at the as well as at the international level.

NPP leader Harsh Dev Singh told ANI the terrorist openly issuing threats of turning Kashmir into a graveyard for the security forces needs to be taken very seriously by the state and the government of India.

"Appropriate action at the as well as international level must be taken," he added.

Singh said if the United States can strike Afghanistan to eliminate Osama bin Laden then why not India.

"Why not India take up the issue with the international community and convince them that all such terrorists like Salauddin and Hafiz Saeed are also required to be dealt with in the same way in the interest of peace.not only in the subcontinent, but the world over," he added.

Salahuddin has said he will turn entire Kashmir into a "graveyard" for the Indian armed forces.

In an interview with a leading English daily, Salahuddin, disregarding the all-party meet, said talks would be futile and the only answer to the issue of Kashmir was militancy.

"The Kashmiri leadership, people and mujahideen should know there is no formal, peaceful way," the daily quoted him as saying.

While the all-party meet is an attempt to assuage the situation in the Valley, Salahuddin has warned of his "might", threatening to "take the entire region into [militancy's] fold".

He also said that the militancy movement took a sharp turn after the Hizbul militant Burhan Wani was killed on July 8, the daily reported.

Calling the Valley a concentration camp, he said use of more force by the army will only strengthen the militancy movement.

Kashmir has been on the boil since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani on July 8 with curfew continuing in parts of the valley for the 58th day today.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Taking a swipe at Congress leader Anand Sharma's comment on the Indian economy under the Democratic Alliance (NDA), Union Minister of Law and Justice Ravi Shankar Prasad on Sunday said it is Sharma's 'ego' which is speaking, because the opposition is still unable to digest their defeat in the Lok Sabha polls.

"We can't expect more from this party. This is Anand Sharma's ego, because the Congress has still not understood that they have been defeated badly at the Centre and in states, and will also loose in the future," Prasad told ANI.

Commenting on the condition of the Indian Economy during the United Progressive Alliance's regime, he said it was mired in 2G and coal scams.

"India is moving towards a larger economy, and investments are coming in India. The World Bank and other rating agencies have said India has the most progressive economy," he added.

Yesterday Sharma slammed Prime Minister Narendra Modi by saying that he has no understanding of the economy and accused Modi for 'misleading' the country.

Sharma challenged the Centre to present a 'White Paper' to prove economic mismanagement during the UPA regime.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi in an interview on Friday said the Indian government has started bearing fruit, and there is no reason for alarm.

He said his government has worked in all fairness without showing any bias to any particular political party or individuals.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Protesting against Pakistan's reaction over the execution of condemned 1971 war criminal Jamaat-e-Islami leader Mir Quasem Ali, Bangladesh has said Islamabad's reaction is a direct interference into the country's domestic affairs.

Additional Foreign Secretary for bilateral affairs Kamrul Ahsan said, "The opinion that Pakistan gave over the execution of Mir Quasem Ali was entirely tantamount to interference in Bangladesh's internal affairs."

Ahsan also summoned Pakistani envoy Samina Mehtab on Sunday to register Dhaka's protest against Islamabad's reaction, reports the Dhaka Tribune.

"We have told the envoy that Quasem had scopes to appeal against the judgment and he exhausted the scopes. The apex court thought he deserved the punishment what he was handed down as he took part in the genocides in 1971," added Ahsan.

He said that Dhaka told Islamabad that Quasem's trial "took place in a very transparent manner in front of everybody".

Mir Quasem Ali was hanged on Saturday night for committing crimes against humanity during the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971.

A statement released by the External Affairs Ministry of Pakistan condemned the execution and said, "Pakistan is deeply saddened over the execution of the prominent leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh, Mir Quasem Ali, for the alleged crimes committed before December 1971, through a flawed judicial process," reads the statement.

It offered the deepest condolences to the bereaved family.

The statement also said: "The act of suppressing the Opposition, through flawed trials, is completely against the spirit of democracy. Ever since the beginning of the trials, several international organisations, human rights groups, and international legal figures have raised objections to the court proceedings, especially regarding fairness and transparency, as well as harassment of lawyers and witnesses representing the accused.

Pakistan also called upon the Bangladeshi Government to uphold its commitment as per the Tripartite Agreement of 1974 wherein it was "decided not to proceed with the trials as an act of clemency".

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The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Sunday said the use of chilli-based 'Pelargonic Acid Vanillyl Amide' (PAVA) shells as an alternative to pellet guns in order to control agitating people in Kashmir should be welcomed by all.

"Every political party says there should be a check on the use of pellet guns as many youth of Kashmir have got injured. But it is the responsibility of the state. If the crowd becomes uncontrollable, the Centre will use chilli-based PAVA shells in order to control the crowd. It should be welcomed," BJP leader Prem Shukla told ANI.

Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh yesterday approved the use of chilli-based (PAVA) shells as an alternative to pellet guns for crowd controlling.

PAVA shells are less-lethal ammunition, which temporarily incapacitates the target and renders them immobile for several minutes.

Last week, a seven-member expert committee headed by Home Ministry Joint Secretary T.V.S.N Prasad was constituted by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh to find alternative to the use of pellet guns.

Pellet guns gained widespread attention after more than 1,000 people sustained injuries in clashes with security forces in the Kashmir valley following the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani on July 8.

PAVA shells, which contain Pelargonic Acid Vanillyl Amide, is an organic compound found in chilli pepper. It derives its name from the compound, which is also known as Nonivamide. It is considered to be bio-safe, less lethal than pellet guns, but equally effective.

PAVA shells cause severe irritation and paralyses for a short duration. On the Scoville scale, the degree to measure the power of chilli, PAVA is categorised as "above peak", having a temporary effect.

Once fired, the shells burst out to temporarily stun, immobilise the target (protesters) in a more effective way than a tear gas shell or pepper sprays, and can also be used in combination with stun and tear shells.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday met Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad bin Salman on the sidelines of the G20 Summit here.

During the meeting, Prime Minister Modi sought greater cooperation in improvement of infrastructure, particularly assistance in modernisation of railway stations and called for greater Saudi investment in India through the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF).

Both the leaders also discussed in detail the reform needed in the United Nations Security Council and emphasized the need of its expansion to include more permanent members.

Presently, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, People's Republic of China, and the United States are the five permanent members of the body.

Prime Minister Modi also called for strengthened partnership with Saudi Arabia in sectors such as maritime and energy.

He said that India could also become a source of food supply to the Saudi Kingdom.

He further said that he looked forward to an early visit by the Saudi King to India.

Earlier in the day, he also met the G20 Summit host, Chinese President Xi Jinping.

During the talks, Prime Minister Modi highlighted the menace of terrorism, saying the recent attacks show how it is spreading across the and is, therefore, a matter of grave concern.

He also condemned the terrorist bomb attack at China's embassy in Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek.

Later he held meeting with BRICS leaders where he asserted that it is a shared responsibility of the group to shape an internal agenda in such a manner that developing nations achieve their objectives.

During the meeting, Prime Minister Modi insisted on deepening ties with the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) countries.

He also welcomed all the BRICS leaders to the BRICS Summit which will take place in Goa on October 15 and16.

Prime Minister Modi also held bilateral talks with his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull.

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Narendra Modi on Sunday met painter Shen Shu and his team from Hangzhou's Zhejiang Kaiming Art Gallery who gifted the Indian Prime Minister with his portrait.

Prime Minister Modi took to Twitter to express gratitude to the painter and his team, saying he was 'touched and honoured with their gesture'.

"Thank you to painter Shen Shu and his team from Hangzhou's Zhejiang Kaiming Art Gallery for the special gesture today. Was told during our meeting that Shen Shu and his team worked for four months to complete the portrait. Touched and honoured by the gesture," he said in a series of tweets.

Earlier, the Prime Minister also met Indophile Professor Wang, who translated 10 ancient Indian works, including the Gita and Yoga Sutras, into Chinese.

"Glad to meet Indophile Prof Wang. He translated 10 ancient Indian works including the Gita, Yoga Sutras into Chinese," Prime Minister Modi said.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday held bilateral talks with his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Hangzhou City of China.

"Bilateral meetings continue...PM @narendramodi & PM @TurnbullMalcolm discuss India-Australia relations," tweeted the Prime Minister's Office (PMO).

"Advancing an important partnership. PM @narendramodi & Australian PM @TurnbullMalcolm meet in Hangzhou," tweeted Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) official spokesperson Vikas Swarup.

The meeting assumes significance as it took place just days after a report by the Australian media which revealed that sensitive information related to India's Scorpene submarines has been leaked, with French shipbuilder DCNS, which designed the submarine, facing a leak of documents spreading over 22,000 pages.

The meeting is a follow up on the progress made following Prime Minister Modi's visit to Australia in November 2014.

India and Australia have several commonalities, which serve as a foundation for closer co-operation and multifaceted interaction on lines similar to what New Delhi has developed with the other western countries.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who arrived here on Friday night to attend the G20 Summit on September 4 and 5, will take up multiple issues of India's interest with various global leaders on the sidelines of the Summit.

"During the visit, India will take up issues like cross-border mobility of professionals, terror financing, tax evasion and reduction in remittance transaction cost among others," said Secretary (West) Sujata Mehta, while briefing the media on the G20 Summit in New Delhi.

She said the Summit is an important "leaders only forum", which offers a lot of opportunities to hold discussions on matters beyond the provided themes.

She, however, mentioned that due to the Prime Minister's tight schedule, bilateral talks with other leaders will depend on the availability of time, while adding that there will be a customary meeting with the host of the summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping.

She also said Prime Minister Modi will be the lead speaker at the session on inclusive and inter connected development.

It would be the first meeting between Prime Minister Modi and President Jinping after their meeting on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit held in Uzbekistan capital Tashkent.

Before embarking on the two-nation journey, Prime Minister Modi in a Facebook post said, "I will visit Hangzhou, China from 3-5 September 2016 for the Annual G-20 Leaders Summit. I will arrive in Hangzhou from Vietnam where I would have concluded an important bilateral visit.

"During the G-20 Summit, I will have an opportunity to engage with other world leaders on pressing international priorities and challenges. We will discuss putting the global economy on the track of sustainable steady growth and responding to emerging and entrenched social, security and economic challenges.

"India will engage constructively on all the issues before us and work towards finding solutions and taking forward the agenda for a robust, inclusive and sustainable international economic order that uplifts the socio-economic conditions of people across the world, especially those who need it most in developing countries. I look forward to a productive and outcome oriented Summit.

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President Pranab Mukherjee on Sunday greeted his fellow citizens on the eve of Ganesh Chaturthi.

In his message, the President has said, "On the auspicious occasion of Ganesh Chaturthi, I convey warm greetings and good wishes to all my fellow countrymen.

May Lord Ganesha, the God of learning, knowledge and wealth remove all obstacles on the path of progress and prosperity of our nation. May the blessings of Lord Ganesha be upon all and bestow good fortune and happiness. Let us on this day dedicate ourselves to building a strong and vibrant nation".

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Bollywood item girl-turned actress Rakhi Sawant was spotted in an all infuriated avatar thrashing the censor board after it issued an 'A' certificate for her upcoming movie 'Ek Kahani Julie Ki'.

The 37-year-old bold actress threatened Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) chairman Pahlaj Nihalani of barging in his house and pulling him down while accusing him of making bribe driven decisions.

"The censor board should be shut down as they do nothing but to take money from big banners and tease the poor producers. They openly ask for bribe and take unnecessary advantage of their position; the people sitting there are literally incompetent and uneducated. I will make sure we shut it down. I will get inside Prahlaj Nihalani's house and pull him down from his chairman's chair. If he doesn't know anything he should resign and I will sit at his place, I think I can do the job better, at least I'll not be biased and categorize producers according to their banners," she said.

Reportedly, Rakhi's forthcoming thriller drama was initially given a U/A that was later changed to an 'A'.

"Is it because we have not given them any money that is why they have changed our certificate to 'A' or the reason is just that Rakhi Sawant is in the movie. I guess they have issues that an item girl has managed to become a heroine. They have all lost their minds. I'm country's daughter, a Bollywood star, an actress and an item girl at least not a porn star. So, how can you take such a decision," she added.

B-town's drama queen also took on porn star-turned actress Sunny Leone to justify her point.

"I have not come from abroad and I am not a porn star. They have issued an U/A certificate to a film like 'Ek Paheli Leela' in which a porn star has shown all kind of filth, nudity and obscene content and we have not even worn short dresses. I am struggling from the last 12 years in the industry and have no adult content in the movie, still we are sitting with an A certificate," she said.

Rakhi further said that she has approached the Bombay High Court and urged them to take cognizance of the Censor Board's irrational decisions.

"I am definitely going to teach a lesson to the censor board, I'm going to fight against them, I have already made an appeal before the High Court to take strict action against them following their biased decision. I think the court should take the screening responsibility in their hands and remove the censor board from the country," said the 'Buddha Mar Gaya' actress.

However, Rakhi said the movie will follow its scheduled release date despite all the fuss.

Helmed by Aziz Zee, the movie also features new comers Amit Mehra, Jimmy Sharma and Saniya Pannu in important roles.

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The separatists have rejected Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti's invitation for talks with the all-party delegation.

This came after Mehbooba appealed to all separatist leaders and other organizations to take the lead and engage with the all-party delegation. She also said the country's political leadership must reach out and engage all sections of society, including the leaders of the Hurriyat Conference, in a productive dialogue process.

Mehbooba had earlier written to the separatist leadership requesting them to "take a lead and engage" with the delegation, "which will be the start of a credible and meaningful political dialogue and resolution process."

Expressing hope that the separatists would accept her offer, she wrote: "My party has always believed that the Hurriyat Conference is a stakeholder in the peace... and prosperity of the state."

Meanwhile, an all-party delegation, led by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, presently in Srinagar for an assessment of the situation due to the unrest in the valley met Mehbooba and her predecessor Conference's Omar Abdullah.

During the two-day visit, the delegation will interact with Governor N.N. Vohra and the Chief Minister besides holding meetings with the representatives of all political parties and others.

After coming back, the delegation will convene a meeting and give suggestions on the basis of which the Centre will decide its future course of action.

Earlier on Saturday, a preparatory meeting of the all-party delegation was held in New Delhi.

The delegation was made aware of the prevailing situation in the state and contours of the tour during which they will hold talks with a cross-section of people.

Ahead of the visit of the all-party delegation, the Centre approved the use of chilli-filled grenades as an alternative to pellet guns for crowd control.

Kashmir has been on the boil since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Wani on July 8 as more than 70 people have lost their lives.

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Data released by Germany, England and the US has revealed that the number of Pakistanis applying for asylum in the three western countries have spiked in the last one year.

The reports showed that over 10,000 Pakistanis had sought refuge in these three countries, with Germany topping the list of application, reports the Express Tribune.

The data by the German Interior Ministry showed that 9,185 Pakistani nationals have applied for asylum from January to July 2016 which includes repeat applications from 156 people.

According to reports, the number is nearly threefold increase from the same period in 2015 when 2,546 Pakistanis applied for asylum.

With Germany already sheltering over half a million migrants, it is now turning away and deporting an increasing number of migrants in recent months.

Reports suggest that Berlin turned away some 13,000 people, including 529 Pakistanis, at its land borders from January to July 2016 for having invalid documents.

The data released by the British Home Office this week showed that Pakistanis applying for asylum was up from the 2,313 to 2,992 in June 2015 to June 2016, with only 16 percent of the

applications approved.

In the U.S. too, the arrival of Pakistani refugees witnessed a marked increase in 2016 with the data from the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration showed that as many as 376 Pakistanis applied for refuge in the country in 2016.

The number was up from 205 in 2015 and the highest at any point since 2011.

So far, Pakistanis make up around three percent of the 2,83,078 migrant arrivals in Europe this year.

In case of data, which classifies the refugees by religion, most of those who sought refuge were Ahmadis.

At least 78 Christians also sought refuge in the country in addition to 33 Shias.

Though the data mentions the number of asylum seekers, the reason for the same has not been mentioned.

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New Delhi, 4 September (ANI): Students from Tripura living across the capital as well as from neighbouring city like Dehradun came together to show solidarity towards the indigenous people of their state and held a peaceful sit-in protest at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi on Saturday.

Organised by International Tiprasa Forum under the theme 'Justice for Indigenous People of Tripura', the protestors demand a proper CBI investigation into atrocities committed to the indigenous people of Tripura during a peaceful rally by Indigenous People Front of Tripura (IFPT) demanding separate tribal state Twipra Land at Agartala on August 23.

"23rd August, 2016 was a sad day. Not just for the Indigenous people of Tripura but for Indians all over the world. On this day, a peaceful rally by Indigenous People Front of Tripura (IFPT) in Agartala in full adherence to the Right to Assemble and Demonstrate was unconstitutionally, criminally, and mercilessly attacked by certain communal, unruly elements who are of ostensibly of the illegal immigrant population from Bangladesh," the statement said.

"Today, students and professionals belonging to Tripura have come together to highlights the incident which had happen on 23rd august, 2016 in Agartala. It was a sad day for our country because it is a complete violation of our constitutional fundamental rights which is right to assemble and demonstrate," said Hawmchang Debbarma, president, International Tiprasa Forum.

During the rally on August 23 in Agartala, more than 25 persons, most of them from the tribal community, were injured in the skirmish and a dozen vehicles were burned beside damage of shops.

Following the untoward incident, a large number of tribals, majority of them students or working in the capital city, had fled out of fear of a backlash.

"Our families back at home are in tense and feeling insecure. We want to know why they are feeling insecure in our own land, in our own country. Being an Indian, our only urged to the government is we want peace, we don't want violence," added Billow Jamatia, president, Tripura Student Forum, Delhi.

Students from Tripura have made an appeal to the Home Ministry to intervene in the state, either through a personal visit by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh or through a swift CBI enquiry.

Seeking proper redressal, relief and compensation to the victims and to highlight the historical negligence towards the indigenous people of Tripura are also part of the agendas at the sit-in protest.

"We are here sitting in a peaceful way demanding the centre for a severe investigation on what actually happened on 23rd of August. The state media says that, it is the IPFT cadres who created non-violence in the state. But as we can see that the casualties are on only found on one side. So I don't think so, that is the outcome of a peaceful rally. I think that was a pre-plan. So our demand is a proper investigation without the influence of state government or any political parties," said Debbarma, a student.

Henceforth, the protestors are demanding an intervention of the Central Government and safety assurance as the unfortunate indigenous people of Tripura have became minority in their own motherland and insecure in their own homeland.

"We, the International Tiprasa Forum (ITF) also termed this recent Agartala incident as alarming and called upon the centre and the respective state government to take a firm stand on the issue on illegal Bangladeshi immigrants," statement added.

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An all-party delegation headed by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh arrived here on Sunday on a two-day visit to the Kashmir Valley.

The delegation members decided to travel by road in a secure convoy of cars from the Srinagar International Airport to The Lalit Grand Palace where they will meet various local leaders.

Sources said Rajnath too would stay at the hotel.

During his last two visits, the Union Home Minister stayed at the Nehru guest house adjacent to Raj Bhavan when he held meetings and met various delegations.

The sources said it was to send out a message that the delegation was a non-governmental exercise that a private hotel was chosen for the the stay of the party leaders.

The delegation includes Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Minister of Food and Public Distribution Ram Vilas Paswan and Minister of State for Development of North Eastern Region Jitendra Singh.

Other prominent members are Congress leaders Ghulam Nabi Azad, Mallikarjun Kharg and Ambika Soni, Communist Party of India's D. Raja, Communist Party of India-Marxist Sitaram Yechury, and All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul President Muslimeen Asaduddin Owaisi.

--IANS

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The Bihar Police has lodged a case of the alleged killing of a pet dog in Vaishali district and begun an investigation into it, officials said here on Sunday.

Chanda Devi of Ghoshwar village lodged an FIR against another villager, Inderdeo Das, alleging that he poisoned and killed her pet dog out of peeve and as a revenge, police station chief Subodh Kumar Mishra said.

Chanda claimed that her pet 'Tommy' was as dear to her as a son.

"She mentioned that Das had last week alleged that her pet fog bit his cow. Chanda said this was far from the truth as Tommy was with her at that time and not outside the house," Mishra said.

Mishra said Tommy's body was sent for autopsy and its report is awaited before any action is initiated in the case.

Grieving the dog's loss, Chanda Devi's household cooked no food and the family has demanded action against the accused.

--IANS

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British Prime Minister Theresa May arrived here in China on Sunday for the 11th leaders' meeting of the G20 major economies, her major international summit debut.

At the summit, themed "Toward an Innovative, Invigorated, Interconnected and Inclusive World Economy", Britain is to show it is "open for business as a bold, confident, outward-looking country" and will be a "global leader" on free trade, Xinhua news agency quoted May as saying on Saturday before leaving for China.

The European country's shock vote in June to leave the European Union (EU), led to the resignation of May's predecessor, David Cameron, and has put Britain's posture on regional integration and globalisation in question.

On the sidelines of the two-day G20 summit, May is expected to have a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss bilateral relations and other matters of common concern.

During her stay in Hangzhou, May is also expected to meet with other world leaders including US President Barack Obama, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

--IANS

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China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound relations and further advance cooperation, President Xi Jinping said on Sunday.

Xi made the remarks while meeting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the G20 summit here, reports Xinhua news agency.

He said both sides had seen healthy, stable and speedy development of their relationship and that as neighbours and developing countries they should continue high-level exchanges.

China and India should continue the dialogue at various levels and in various areas and also frequently exchange views on major issues of common interest to enhance understanding and trust, Xi said.

The two countries should seek synergy between their development strategies and discuss the implementation of pragmatic cooperation in large projects in infrastructure construction and production capacity, he said.

He proposed that the two sides strengthen people-to-people exchanges and promised that China would continue to encourage Chinese companies to invest in India.

China and India should respect and care for each other on issues of major concern and handle differences in a constructive way, Xi said.

He said China would deepen cooperation with India to jointly contribute more to world economic growth and better global governance within the G20 framework and support India's efforts to host the upcoming BRICS summit.

--IANS

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Hong Kong on Sunday began voting for the first Legislative Council election since the 2014 pro-democracy Occupy movement.

Chief Executive CY Leung and other government officials in his administration urged the public to come out to vote as polling stations opened at 7.30 a.m., and are due to close 15 hours later, the South China Morning Post reported.

The three main groups -- pro-Beijing parties including pro-business parties; traditional pro-democracy parties known as pan-democrats; localists who want democracy but think there should be more confrontation with the government -- competing are divided by their stances on the territory's relationship with Beijing, the BBC reported.

Leung said he believed voters would have their own "independent minds" when picking their candidate, as he and wife visited a polling station at 8.11 a.m. to cast their votes.

"Democracy is reflected in the freedom of choices of the voters. The electors can have their own choice. There is no need for other people to teach them how to vote," the South China Morning Post quoted the Chief Executive as saying.

The seats are in the Legislative Council, which passes laws and budgets in the territory.

Voters will choose 35 lawmakers based on geographical constituencies and 35 people to represent selected trades, the BBC said.

The city has partial democracy and not everybody can vote for all the seats.

Thirty seats are decided by a pool of just 6 per cent of just 239,724 people. Hong Kong has 3.7 million voters.

The vote does not elect the Chief Executive, who is the head of government, but many analysts believe the outcome of Sunday's vote could have an impact on whether China grants current leader CY Leung a second term in office, the BBC reported.

For two months in 2014 protesters demanded his resignation as the Occupy movement occupied major parts of the city and caused political upheaval while calling for the right to elect a leader directly.

--IANS

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Actress Isha Koppikar, known for working in films such as "Company", "Kaante" and "Shabri", will reportedly be seen playing the role of a police officer in a yet-untitled Telugu film.

The film also features Nikhil Siddhartha and Ritu Varma. Isha was last seen in 2001 Telugu film "Prematho Ra".

"She was officially finalised on Saturday. It's her return to Telugu cinema after a decade, and she will be seen in the role of a fierce cop. The role will see her demonstrate her Hapkido skills," a source from the film's unit told IANS.

Hapkido, a form of self-defence, is a highly eclectic style of Korean martial arts.

"She's the vice president of the Hapkido Federation of India. In the film, she will be seen performing stunts, and she's planning to bring professionals from China and Japan to choreograph the action involving Hapkido," the source said.

Some reports earlier suggested that Esha Gupta was considered for the role.

"There must have been some confusion with the names. Hence, Isha would have become Esha. We never even considered Esha because we were looking for someone senior for the role," he said.

To be directed by Sudheer Varma, the project was tipped to be a sequel to 2013 Telugu crime-drama "Swamy Ra Ra".

"This isn't a sequel. It was speculated as one because it marks the reunion of the director and Nikhil who worked together in 'Swamy Ra Ra'. This is a fresh script, and the makers are yet to finalise the title. The regular shooting will start from next month," he added.

The project is being bankrolled by Abhishek Pictures.

--IANS

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In an indirect reference to Pakistan, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked the BRICS member nations to "isolate supporters and sponsors of terror".

In a meet with the leaders of the BRICS ahead of G20 summit, Modi said "terrorists in South Asia, or anywhere for that matter, do not own banks or weapons factories".

"Clearly, someone funds and arms them, and BRICS must intensify joint efforts not just to fight terror but to coordinate actions to isolate those who are supporters and sponsors of terror," he said.

In the meet, Modi said was the primary source of instability and the biggest threat to societies.

He also raised the issue with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on the sidelines of the G20.

"In a very hard-hitting intervention, he said terrorists in South Asia or anywhere for that matter do not own banks or weapons factories," Indian External Affairs Ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup quoted Modi as saying.

Without directly naming Pakistan, Modi told Turnbull, "Our (India's) neighbourhood, in particular, was suffering from destabilisation effects of terrorism". He stressed the need to "identify the suppliers, exporters and financiers of terrorism".

--IANS

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The All Jharkhand Students Union (AJSU), a part of the BJP-led ruling coalition, on Sunday demanded almost doubling of the reservation for other backward class people in the state from the existing 14 per cent to 27 per cent.

"The reservation quota for backward class people should be increased up to 27 per cent in education and services of Jharkhand," said AJSU president Sudesh Mahto while addressing Akhil Jharkhand Backward Class Mahasammelan here.

"In Jharkhand, the population of backward class is 46.11 per cent and the reservation is just 14 per cent. The central govt has given 27 per cent reservation to backward class people and reservation for backward class varies from 21 to 50 per cent in different states of the country. Even Mandal Commission recommendation advocates 27 per cent reservation for the backward class," he said.

In tribal Jharkhand, 27 per cent seats have been reserved for the community, 14 per cent for backward classes and and nine per cent for the Scheduled Castes.

--IANS

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Separatist leaders Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq on Sunday snubbed opposition leaders even as Geelani supporters booed them with anti-India slogans.

Janata Dal-United leader Sharad Yadav and Communist leaders Sitaram Yechury and D Raja went to meet Geelani but the hardline Hurriyat leader refused to even let them in, informed sources said.

Outside his house at Haiderpora, several of his supporters massed around, angrily shouting slogans as the MPs' cars and security vehicles went past, shouting slogans like "Go India, go back" and "We want freedom".

After their failed bid at Haiderpora, the three leaders returned to the Sher-e- convention centre where they had earlier attended a meeting of all parties with Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti.

Sharad Yadav, Yechury and Raja earlier went to meet Jammu and Liberation Front chief Mohd Yasin Malik at a police hub turned into a prison at Humhama, close to the Srinagar airport.

Malik met them barely for 10 minutes but more to say that there was no point in holding any talks with the MPs, informed sources told IANS.

Also detained with Malik are three key Geelani supporters.

Separately, Asaduddin Owaisi of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen went to meet moderate Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz at Chashma Shahi where a tourist hut has been converted to a sub-jail.

Separatist leader Shabir Shah was also brought to the sub-jail.

Mirwaiz was cold to Owaisi, saying the Hurriyat had already decided not to meet the MPs who had come with the Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh.

A disappointed Owaisi then met Shabir Shah for some 10 minutes but Shah too made it clear that he was in no mood for any dialogue with the MPs or the government.

Shah told the media that he only exchanged pleasantries with Owaisi.

"I told him this is not the way to talk to Kashmiris. You brought me from a police station to a sub-jail and expect me to talk," Shah said.

"I have told them clearly that they must first address the situation in the Valley and then engage in a dialogue with us in a proper manner," Shah added.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi Sunday invited Saudi Arabia to invest more in India's infrastructure, particularly in the railways, during a meeting with Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud, on the sidelines of the G-20 Summit here.

"Prime Minister invited greater Saudi investment, particularly through the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF)," official sources here said.

"He also sought greater cooperation in infrastructure, particularly modernisation of railway stations," the sources said.

Modi complimented Prince Mohammad for his Vision 2030 Document that charts out a roadmap for the future of the Gulf kingdom.

The Saudi Vision 2030 is aimed at making the Gulf kingdom a global investment powerhouse and turn into a connecting hub for the continents of Asia, Europe and Africa.

Modi also recalled his highly successful visit to Saudi Arabia in April this year following which he was conferred that country's highest civilian honour, the King Abdulaziz Sash.

"There was a detailed discussion on UN Security Council reforms with both leaders emphasising the need for expansion of the UNSC to include more permanent members," the sources said.

Modi also said that he looked forward to an early visit from Saudi King Salman to India.

--IANS

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday told Chinese President Xi Jinping India's concerns over terrorism emanating from Pakistan through which the $46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is being built.

In his 35-minute meeting with Xi on the sidelines of the summit in Hangzhou city, Modi conveyed to him that New Delhi and Beijing "would have to be sensitive to each other's strategic interests".

"He (Modi) said it is of paramount importance that both countries respect each other's aspirations, concerns and strategic interests," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup told Indian journalists here.

Asked whether terrorism was discussed, Swarup said: "It was raised."

The CPEC passes through the restive regions of Balochistan, Gilgit-Baltistan and Pakistani Kashmir.

India has strongly opposed the project as it claims Gilgit-Baltistan and Pakistani Kashmir.

In his interaction with Xi, Modi said the attack on the Chinese embassy in Bishkek was yet another proof of the "scourge if terrorism".

Beijing's refusal to designate Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar at the UN Security Council has irked India.

This was Modi's eighth meeting with Xi as the Prime Minister.

"China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound relations and further advance their cooperation," President Xi said while meeting Modi.

Modi told Xi that "our response to terrorism must not be motivated by political consideration" - an apparent reference to Pakistan, India's arch rival and China's all-weather friend.

Modi also raised the issue of terrorism in his meeting with BRICS leaders and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on the sidelines of .

"In a very hard-hitting intervention, he (Modi) said terrorists in South Asia or anywhere for that matter do not own banks or weapons factories," Swarup quoted the Indian leader as saying.

Without directly naming Pakistan, Modi told Turnbull: "Our (India) neighbourhood, in particular, was suffering from destabilisation effects of terrorism."

Modi stressed the importance to "identify the suppliers, exporters and financiers of terrorism:.

Swarup refused to divulge if the issue of India's membership to the Nuclear Suppliers Group figured in the meeting with Xi.

"If you read between the lines when we are talking about our strategic interests, concerns and aspirations, it is not that China is unaware of our strategic interests, concerns or aspirations or that we are unaware of theirs. It is something that both sides are aware of," Swarup said.

Earlier in June, China had blocked India's entry into the nuclear trade grouping, citing its non-signatory status to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Pope Francis on Sunday declared Nobel Peace Prize winner Mother Teresa, revered for her work among the poor in India, a Saint of the Catholic Church.

"We declare and define Blessed Teresa of Calcutta to be a Saint," the Pope said to a roar from the thousands gathered at St. Peter's Square here, including many Indians who held or waved the Indian flag.

"We enrol her among the Saints, decreeing that she is to be venerated as such by the whole Church. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit," he said, making a long-awaited announcement.

An estimated 120,000 people attended the Mass, according to the Vatican Press Office.

Crowds flooded the Vatican to celebrate the highly anticipated canonization of Mother Teresa, an event which Catholics and non-Catholics alike had looked forward to since the nun's death in 1997.

Many arrived before dawn to get a good spot for the ceremony, the Catholic News Agency reported.

In New Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi described the sainthood of Mother Teresa as "a memorable and proud moment" -- reflecting the popular thinking in the country which Teresa made her home.

Cardinal Angelo Amato read a brief biography of Mother Teresa's work and then asked the Pope to canonize her in the name of the Church.

Mother Teresa's life was given to service and she was committed to defending life, especially the "unborn and those abandoned and discarded". She was "a generous dispenser of divine mercy".

"She was committed to defending life, ceaselessly proclaiming that the unborn are the weakest, the smallest, the most vulnerable," the Pope said.

Speaking of Teresa, the Pope noted how she "bowed down before those who were spent ? seeing in them their God-given dignity.

"Today, I pass on this emblematic figure of womanhood and of consecrated life to the whole world of volunteers: may she be your model of holiness!"

After the Mass, the Pope thanked everyone, especially the Missionaries of Charity whom he called the "spiritual family of Mother Teresa".

Hundreds of Missionaries of Charity Sisters attended the event, along with several heads of state or government. About 1,500 homeless people from across Italy were served a pizza lunch by some 250 nuns and priests of the Sisters of Charity order, media reports said.

Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu on August 26, 1910 in Skopje, now in Macedonia, Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950.

After doing iconic work in the slums of Calcutta (now Kolkata) that won universal acclaim, she died in 1997 at the age of 87. She was beatified in 2003, a key step to sainthood.

Two miraculous cures of the sick after Mother Teresa's death have been attributed to her intercession.

The youngest of three children, she attended a youth group run by a Jesuit priest called Sodality, which eventually led her to becoming a nun.

She joined the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland at age 17 and was sent to Calcutta, where she taught at a high school.

After contracting tuberculosis, she was sent to rest in Darjeeling. It was on the way that she felt what she called "an order" from God to leave the convent and live among the poor.

The Vatican granted her permission to leave the Sisters of Loreto and to live her new call under the guidance of the Archbishop of Calcutta.

Catholic News Agency said Mother Teresa's canonization was significant not only because it took place during the Jubilee of Mercy but also because it fell during a special September 2-4 Jubilee celebration for workers and volunteers of mercy, of whom Mother Teresa is widely considered one of the greatest.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Christian leaders and admirers of Mother Teresa on Sunday expressed happiness at her sainthood, saying she spoke the language of love and compassion.

The Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) in a tweet said: "We pray for Missionaries of Charity founded by Mother. God bless them with many vocations of girls to serve like her."

"The poor whom she loved are also ours," it said in another tweet.

Pope Francis on Sunday declared Mother Teresa of Calcutta, revered for her work among the poor, a Saint of the Catholic Church.

John Dayal, Secretary General of All India Christian Council, said Mother's sainthood is another honour for the land of Mahatma Gandhi.

"Mother is now officially a Saint of the Catholic Church. She always was the saintly Mother for everyone else. This only adds to the joy of everyone who admired her persona and the lesson in love and compassion she taught us."

"For us in India, the joy is personal. And honour to the land of the Mahatma. We are more blessed for these lives who lived amongst us and served the people," he said.

Former Election Commissioner Navin Chawla, who wrote Mother Teresa's biography, said Mother's work was great and any criticism of her was irrelevant.

"You can imagine that in 1948, when Bengal was still reeling under the terrible after-effects of the terrible famine in which four million people had died, and the partition that came in 1947 and into that she stepped as a single nun, no helper, no companion, no money to speak of. She had just got that call that she must serve God," Chawla told CNN News18.

"Those who criticise Mother Teresa, do they know what is the reality of our streets? Could they spend a few days working in the streets and the slums with their own hands before they criticised her?" he said.

Christian theologian Father Francis Gonsalves appreciated the unconditional love Mother Teresa showered on thousands of destitute and poor.

"The beauty of Mother Teresa is her power of love, unconditional love. She was a messenger who always had something to teach others, not through sermons but through compassion and mercy," he said.

Father Savarimuthu Sankar, of the Archdiocese of Delhi, said: "Mother Teresa taught us the real virtue of love and that we should not give from our abundance but share whatever we have."

--IANS

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Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi will attend the 28th and 29th Asean and related summits in Laos, an official said on Sunday.

Suu Kyi's attendance of the summits will be another one of the regional meeting after the 49th Asean ministerial meeting held in the Lao capital of Vientiane in July which she attended as a foreign minister, XInhua news agency reported.

This is not only Myanmar's first year in the Asean following the formation of the new government but also the first year of the Asean community.

Myanmar called for doubled efforts in Asean community building to anticipate the 50th anniversary of Asean in the coming year.

Myanmar also voiced support of Laos' Asean chairmanship this year which is taking place at a time the grouping is strengthening the community efforts by implementing the Asean Community Vision 2025.

Suu Kyi in May also accompanied Myanmar President U Htin Kyaw on a goodwill visit to Laos after the new government of the ruling National League for Democracy took office in April.

--IANS

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US President Barack Obama praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for enacting the Goods and Service Tax bill, describing it "as an example of bold policy in an otherwise difficult global economic scenario".

Modi also hailed Obama for his leadership in the two-day ongoing G20 Summit here.

"PM closed his intervention at the G20 by paying tribute to President Obama for his leadership in G20," External Affair Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup said of the meet.

"Earlier, in his intervention President Obama praised PM Modi for tax reforms as example of bold policy in an otherwise difficult global economic scenario," Swarup added.

During the informal evening programme on Sunday the two leaders had yet another opportunity of exchanging views, he added.

--IANS

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After the central government suspended four Home Ministry officials, including an IAS officer, for alleged lapses over the issuing of licence to Islamic tele-evangelist Zakir Naik's NGO, senior officials have expressed their resentment over the punishment meted out.

A group of senior officials in the Home Ministry reportedly registered with Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi their protest over suspension of Joint Secretary G.K. Dwivedi.

"Some officials have met the Union Home Secretary on the issue (over the weekend)," a source said.

Four officials of the Home Ministry were suspended on September 1 for their "lapses" in renewing the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) licence of the NGO Islamic Research Foundation (IRF) of tele-preacher Zakir Naik.

Naik's Peace TV and his speeches have come under the scanner of the central security agencies for allegedly propagating radical views, especially in the aftermath of the July 1 Dhaka terror siege that left 22 people dead.

According to security agencies, Zakir Naik through Peace TV had reportedly promoted radical Islamist views.

While the probe by the Home Ministry and security agencies was on, the Law Ministry has favoured registering a case against Naik and IRF for pursuing divisive agenda and communalism.

The Home Ministry officials told the Union Home Secretary that suspension of Dwivedi, a joint secretary in the Foreigners Cell, was uncalled for as the lapses were committed by his juniors only.

"The action against Dwivedi appears demoralising," a source said, and stressed that the Home Ministry should reconsider its decision as regard a senior official who was discharging his duties diligently.

The Home Ministry and especially Home Minister Rajnath Singh were displeased after the mandatory FCRA licence of NGO IRF was renewed by the Foreigners Division.

Sources said the online route for issuance of licences was utilised by the NGO on August 19 even as a probe was on against Naik.

Sources said that suspended IAS officer Dwivedi has been working on a number of "pet projects" of the Narendra Modi government, offering long term visas and citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs and other minorities of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.

He also worked on the merger of Person of Indian Origin (PIO) card scheme with Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) card scheme.

In July, Bangladesh's Ministry of Information cancelled the downlink permission to Naik's Peace TV.

The controversial Islamic orator is also banned in Malaysia, Britain and Canada.

--IANS

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President Pranab Mukherjee greeted the people on the occasion of Ganesh festival, which will be celebrated from September 5 to 15 across the country.

"On the auspicious occasion of Ganesh Chaturthi, I convey warm greetings and good wishes to all my fellow countrymen," he said in a message here on Sunday.

"May Lord Ganesha, the God of learning, knowledge and wealth, remove all obstacles on the path of progress and prosperity of our nation. May the blessings of Lord Ganesha be upon all and bestow good fortune and happiness. Let us on this day dedicate ourselves to building a strong and vibrant nation," he added.

The 10-day festival is celebrated in most of the country. It begins with Ganesh Chaturthi -- also called Vinakaya Chaturthi in southern India -- the fourth day of the first fortnight of Hindu lunar month of Bhadrapada, and ends on Anant Chaturdashi, the 14th day of the same fortnight.

--IANS

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Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Sunday left for Srinagar with the 28 member all party delegation intending to establish peace in the Kashmir Valley.

"Heading to Srinagar with the All Party Delegation. We intend to talk to individuals and groups who want peace and normalcy in the Kashmir Valley," Rajnath tweeted.

The all party delegation will meet various local leaders during their two-day visit.

The delegation will review the ground situation and explore ways and means to end the ongoing unrest that has paralysed normal life in the Valley for the last 58 days.

Meanwhile authorities on Sunday lifted curfew and restrictions from the entire Kashmir Valley.

Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti wrote letters to separatist leaders requesting them to meet the delegation.

Seventy four people -- 71 civilians and three local policemen -- were killed in clashes since July 9, a day after Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani was killed.

--IANS

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Singapore's Ministry of Health (MOH) is reviewing the practice of isolating potential Zika-infected patients, a senior official said on Sunday.

The ministry is considering letting suspected Zika-infected patients rest at home while their blood and urine samples are tested, Xinhua news agency quoted Minister of State for Environment and Water Resources and Health Amy Khor Lean Suan as saying.

The ministry is also considering sending confirmed cases home to recuperate, but the infected persons are advised to take precautions to prevent themselves from getting bitten by mosquitoes, Khor said while attending a community outreach event in western Singapore on Sunday morning.

The suspects are currently isolated at Communicable Disease Centre as they wait for the test results, while those found to be Zika-positive are isolated in hospitals.

Khor explained that isolating the infected may not be effective. She said Zika-positive patients admitted to hospitals generally have very mild symptoms, and they are discharged within one to two days with negative test results.

Singapore confirmed 26 new cases of locally transmitted infection as of Saturday, according to a joint statement released by MOH and National Environment Agency.

The update brought the total number of Zika infections in Singapore to 215 since the first locally transmitted case was reported on August 27.
Nuns shed tears of joy and hugged each other, amid euphoric scenes at the Mother House, the global headquarters of the Missionaries of Charity, as the orders founder Mother Teresa was declared a Saint by the Vatican on Sunday.

Hundreds of admirers of the Albanian nun, who made Kolkata (then Calcutta) her home for seven decades to serve the poor and the infirm, gathered near the blue, three-storied building since the morning to soak in the festive atmosphere.

Since morning, pilgrims from across the globe started arriving.

Outside, traffic was thrown out of gear, as people carrying blue flags, and lilies in hand, made a beeline for the small, dingy lane leading up to the freshly-painted house, where Mother lived for 44 years and also died on September 5, 1997. The lilies and other flowers were offered at her tomb, as the devout cutting across all religions bent down and prayed.

The entrance to the house was bedecked with blue and white blossoms, the colours that Saint Teresa chose for the sarees to be worn by the nuns of her order.

Two giant screens in two rooms of the house beamed the ceremony at the Vatican live for the visitors, who sat under a life size flex of a smiling Mother Teresa.

Wanting to capture this once-in-a-lifetime moment, the selfie sticks were out and clustered smiling faces huddled together.

"We not miss (sic) anything here. This is history. I will tell my children about it," a French national reared his head out of the frame to quip in broken English.

MoC sisters were busy since dawn, but laughed off any mention of fatigue.

"What are you saying? Today will never come again. We are celebrating victory of humanity," said one.

On how the day has unfolded, she added: "We have had visitors coming in since yesterday. The gates were open for all pilgrims who have made the journey from afar. We realise it's a special occasion and everyone associated with her wants to be part of it."

There were cheers as Pope Francis was seen on the giant screens arriving for the celebrations at the St Peter's Basilica in a ceremonial procession.

The crowd followed the proceedings with rapt attention, but erupted in joy a few minutes past 2 p.m. when he declared that the nun would henceforth be called St Teresa.

Bells rang, the clapping continued for several minutes, some MoC sisters wept, some hugged, and others prayed to celebrate the moment, as Mother Teresa became one of the fastest saints in Catholic history.

The honour came a day before the nun's 19th death anniversary, and only nine days after her 107th birthday.

An elderly lady was seen crying profusely. She came for the programme despite not keeping well, but fell unwell during the time of Mother's anointment, clutching one of the sisters standing at the corridor. She was taken out of the building.

"She had to leave for home as she was keeping unwell and her pain aggravated. She was advised bed rest by the doctors. She said no force could stop her from coming here on this occasion," the nun said later.

The Kolkata Municipal Corporation set up a white and blue canopy on the busy A.J.C. Bose Road, close to the Mother House, and organised a ceremony on the occasion. A giant screen was installed there as well.

Minister Firhad Hakim and MP Sultan Ahmed were in attendance throughout to ensure everything was smooth.

Speaking at the KMC event, MoC assistant general Sister Lysa underscored the connect between the Mother and Kolkata.

"Mother's sainthood is a great blessing for whole Church, whole world and for the whole country and in a special way Kolkata. Blessing for entire Missionaries of Charity family and poorest of poor," she said.

"Saint is one who loves God and neighbours. A saint is one who had deep love and union. A saint is one who practices heroic virtues. That was what our Mother was."

"Her path of holiness was very simple.. within the reach of every ordinary person," Sister Lysa, said, praying to Saint Teresa of Calcutta "to bless all of us".

Rabindranath Tagore's popular song "Baro Asha Kore Esheychi Go, kache deke lao, firayo na Janani" (I come with great hopes, draw me towards you, don't refuse, oh Mother,)" was rendered at the programme where representatives of all religions participated.

--IANS

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Tens of thousands of people flocked to Vatican City's St Peter's Square on Sunday to watch Pope Francis declare Mother Teresa a saint.

Pope Francis will celebrate a Mass and Canonisation on Sunday on the eve of Mother Teresa's 19th death anniversary. She died on September 5, 1997, the BBC reported.

Many pilgrims arrived at the Vatican before dawn on Sunday to get a good spot for the Mass, BBC reported.

Some 1,500 homeless people across Italy were also brought to Rome in buses to be given seats of honour at the celebration - and then a pizza lunch served by 250 nuns and priests of the Sisters of Charity order.

In 2002, the Vatican ruled that an Indian woman's stomach tumour had been miraculously cured after prayers to Mother Teresa.

Pope Francis cleared the way for sainthood last year when he recognised a second miracle attributed to her.

She died in 1997 - aged 87 - and was beatified in 2003, the first step to sainthood.

She founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950. The sisterhood now has 4,500 nuns worldwide.

--IANS

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US Ambassador Richard Verma on Sunday called on Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, at his official palace here, officials said. The Dalai Lama's office declined to comment about the visit.

Verma, who was on a personal trip to McLeodganj for two days, along with his wife and children called on the Nobel Peace Laureate in the morning and flew back to Delhi after his courtesy call, a state government functionary told IANS.

Sources said only close aides of the spiritual leader were present at the meeting that lasted for almost an hour.

A senior official in the Dalai Lama's office said the visit was the routine one to promote understanding between the US government and the Tibetan leaders.

The ambassador also met high-ranking officials of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), including Prime Minister Lobsang Sangay, on Saturday.

Last month, 72 US lawmakers led by veteran Tibet supporter Congressman Jim McGovern wrote a letter to US President Barack Obama to prioritise the issue of Tibet during his last months in office.

"We write to ask that you redouble efforts in support of the Tibetan people during your remaining months in office. We believe it is critically important to move beyond words to actions," they said.

In the letter released on August 17, they have particularly urged President Obama to emphasise six issues with regard to Tibet, including publicly supporting the right of the Dalai Lama to return to Tibet and the immediate and unconditional release of all Tibetan political prisoners languishing in Chinese prisons.

The Dalai Lama, who believes in the "middle-path" policy that demands "greater autonomy" for the Tibetans, is viewed by the Chinese as a hostile element who is bent on splitting Tibet from China.

He lives in exile along with some 140,000 Tibetans, over 100,000 of them in India. Over six million Tibetans live in Tibet.

The Tibetan exile administration is based in this northern Indian hill town, but is not recognised by any country.

--IANS

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With reference to the editorial, "Don't undermine Constitution" (September 2), the decision of the Haryana Assembly to invite a Jain monk, Tarun Sagar, to deliver a lecture on its floor goes against the grain of India being a secular state.
Real estate has always been a part of high net worth individuals' (HNIs') investment portfolios. With the relaxation in norms with regard to size of commercial spaces such as special economic zones (SEZs), longer-term investors and a real estate regulatory body, things are really improving for HNIs who want to invest in the commercial realty space.
On November 17, 2013, Delhi chief ministerial candidate Arvind Kejriwal thanked his supporters for generously donating to his one-year-old Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Kejriwal told his donors he did not need more money, as he had already achieved the target of Rs 20 crore needed to fight the Delhi Assembly elections the following month.
Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi will embark on a roadshow from Deoria in eastern Uttar Pradesh to Delhi, starting Tuesday traversing as many as 233 Assembly constituencies to reach out to people ahead of crucial polls in the state early next year. The programme was announced by All India Congress Committee General Secretary Ghulam Nabi Azad, who said the Congress vice-president would travel through 39 districts of Uttar Pradesh covering 2,500 km in the month-long exercise.
At least 15 pro-government Yemeni soldiers were killed in rebel attacks in the north and in a suspected jihadist bombing in Aden today, military and security sources said.

Shiite Huthi rebels and their allies launched twin attacks to try to retake the port of Midi in the northern province of Hajja, after loyalists had captured it, military sources said.

"Eleven soldiers were killed in the attacks and 28 others were wounded," a military official said.

Meanwhile, Saudi-led coalition warplanes carried out 15 air strikes against the Iran-backed rebels to stop their advance in the area, military sources said.

Other air strikes hit rebel positions in the insurgent-controlled capital Sanaa and other provinces over the past 24 hours, they added.

The sources spoke of rebel casualties but AFP could not verify this as the Huthis and their allies rarely acknowledge their losses.

The coalition began its war on the Iran-backed rebels in March 2015.

It intensified operations since the suspension in early August of UN-brokered peace talks between the rebels and their allies and Yemen's government.

Today, in Yemen's main southern city of Aden, a roadside bomb killed four soldiers and wounded one at a checkpoint in the Sheikh Othman district, a security official said.

He said jihadists, who have boosted their attacks in government-controlled Aden over the past few months despite efforts to increase security, are suspected of being behind the bombing.

Earlier, the official had given a toll of two soldiers killed and three wounded but said that two later succumbed to their injuries.

More than 6,600 people have been killed in the Yemeni conflict since March 2015, the UN says.

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The first Bangladeshi vehicle to have entered India through a land border as part of an accord for improved regulation of passenger and cargo traffic between the two countries will arrive here tomorrow.

Fitted with a Global Positioning System (GPS) to track its movement, the vehicle carrying commercial goods will reach Inland Container Depot (CID), Patparganj.

"It is a historic moment as a vehicle from Bangladesh carrying imported consignment has been allowed to come into India without changing trucks," said Vinayak Azaad, Additional Commissioner at ICD, Patparganj.

The vehicle had entered the country late last month via Petrapole border in West Bengal, he said.

There was no provision to allow trucks registered in India to enter Bangladesh and vice versa until the accord was signed last year.

Bangladesh-Bhutan-India-Nepal Motor Vehicles Agreement, which was signed in June last year, allows vehicles to enter each other's territory and does away with trans-shipment of goods from one country's truck to another at the border, a time consuming and costly process.

"This will pave the way for more efficient passage of goods between India and Bangladesh saving a significant amount of time and resources of both the countries," Azaad told PTI.

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways and the customs have played a significant role in ensuring hassle-free entry of the vehicle into India.

"We have coordinated with the Road Ministry and state police forces to ensure hassle-free movement of the vehicle to Delhi," the official said.

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Two militants of People's Liberation Front of India (PLFI) were killed in a gun-battle with security forces and arms and ammunition were recovered in Odisha's Sundargarh district, police said today.

Acting on an intelligence input, a team of District Volunteer Force (DVF) personnel yesterday launched an operation in the dense forest of Jarda where they came face to face with the PLFI militants who were camping there, following which a gun-battle ensued, a police official said.

Two PLFI members, identified as Shankar Munda (35) and Bhima Munda (32), were killed, while the others managed to flee, said IG of police, Western Range, R K Sharma.

Police destroyed the camp and recovered a number of items including two carbines fitted with magazines, two bags containing Rs 54,000 in cash and three mobile phones, he said.

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Five persons of a family, including two women, have been booked for allegedly cheating an NRI of Rs 15 crore on the pretext of setting up a lucrative for him in the UAE and Delhi, police said today.

SHO Inderjit Singh identified the accused as -- Sohan Lal Shinh, his wife Veena Shinh, sons Lokesh Shinh and Mohit Shinh and daughter-in-law Idlim Shinh.

He said a case under Indian Penal Code (IPC) Sections 420 (cheating), 406 (breach of trust) and 120-B (criminal conspiracy) was yesterday registered against the five after a complaint was lodged by the Belgium-based NRI Sarabjit Singh.

Sarabjit said he is settled in Belgium for the last 25 years, though he originally belonged to Barnala in Punjab. The accused met him in June 20014 at a function in Delhi, Singh said.

Lokesh allegedly told the complainant that he worked at a bank in Australia and was a business expert and could help boost his business prospects.

Lokesh invited Sarabjit to Phagwara and also visited the latter's residence in Barnala and persuaded him to have a joint business deal, the SHO said.

The NRI told the police that he allegedly gave Rs 1 crore to Lokesh in presence of his nephews Baljit Singh and Gurjant Singh and Rs 75 lakh more after a few months.

He was then invited to Dubai where Lokesh and they registered a joint business company, Singh said.

Later, Sarabjit's family invested money in the company which totalled up to Rs 15 crore and Lokesh then fraudulently transferred the company in his brother and wife's names, duping the NRI of the money, he said.

After the fraud, the entire family has gone underground and a search is on for them, he added.

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A rising China, which has been worrying its neighbours with its aggressive behaviour including over the South China Sea, needs to restrain itself in order to play a responsible role at the world stage, US President has said.

"Part of what I've talked to communicate to President Xi (Jinping) is that the United States arrives at its power, in part, by restraining itself," Obama told CNN in an interview.

"You know, when we bind ourselves to a bunch of norms and rules, it's not because we have to, it's because we recognise that, over the long-term, building a strong order is in our interests. And I think over the long-term, it will be in China's interests, as well," Obama said in the interview that was recorded before he left for China.

"So where we see them violating rules and norms, as we have seen in some cases in the South China Sea or in some of their behaviour when it comes to economic policy, we've been very firm. And we've indicated to them that there will be consequences," Obama said.

He asserted that what the US has tried to emphasise to China is that if it is working within international rules and international norms, then they should be partners.

There is no reason that China and the US cannot be friendly competitors on the commercial side and important partners when it comes to dealing with the many international problems that threaten the two countries, he said in response to a question.

Obama noted that China has been run during his lifetime by a communist party that has been much more anti-Western in the past.

"We went through a period over the course of 20 years, in the '90s and on through maybe the onset of my presidency, where, because state-sponsored capitalism and an export-driven model was very successful, China was less interested in making waves," Obama said.

"But, you know, you've got over a billion people, one of the largest economies now in the world. And so it's to be expected that they will want a bigger seat at the table when it comes to international affairs. And what we've said consistently is we welcome the peaceful rise of China, consistent with international norms. That's good for everybody. An impoverished and collapsing China would be dangerous for everybody," Obama said.

The US wants China to take on more responsibilities, not only for its own people, but also for a wide range of international problems and conflicts, whether it is climate change or disaster relief or dealing with things like Ebola, Obama said.

"What we have said to the Chinese -- and we've been firm consistently about this -- is you have to recognise that with increasing power comes increasing responsibilities. You can't pursue mercantilist policies that just advantage you now that you are a middle income country, in many ways, even though you still have a lot of poor people," Obama said.

"You know, you can't just export problems. You've got to have fair trade and not just free trade. You have to open up your markets if you expect other people to open up their markets," he said.

"When it comes to issues related to security, if you sign a treaty that calls for international arbitration around maritime issues the fact that you're bigger than the Philippines or Vietnam or other countries, in and of itself, is not a reason for you to go around and flex your muscles. You've got to abide by international law," Obama said.
Activists of a local outfit were today arrested when they tried to show black flags to Union Minister of State Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore here while protesting over the Siruvani dam issue.

A total of 35 activists of Thanthai Periyar Dravida Kazhakam (TPDK), led by its general secretary K Ramakrishnan, were arrested, police sid.

The demonstration was organised to protest against the Centre for giving its nod to an environmental assessment study by Kerala to construct a dam across river Siruvani, the lifeline of three western districts of Tamil Nadu, including Coimbatore, they said.

The protesters raised slogans against the Centre and also the Kerala government.

They also protested Rathore's participation in the 'Isha Gramotsav', organised by the city-based Isha Foundation, which recently faced allegations of brainwashing and illegally detaining some inmates of a yoga centre run by it.

A local judge, deputed by the Madras High Court, has however given a clean chit to the foundation, saying the inmates were staying in the centre at their own will.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Ahead of the Panchayat polls due early next year in Odisha, Congress today brought back into the party fold, former MLA Shivaji Majhi, who had been suspended for defying a whip during Rajya Sabha elections six years ago.

Apart from Mahji, the ex-MLA of Lanjigarh in Kalahandi district, former MP Nakul Nayak also joined the party in the presence of Odisha Pradesh Congress Committee (OPCC) chief, Prasad Harichandan here.

Welcoming the two leaders, Harichandan said the return of Majhi would bolster the party in the backward Kalahandi district while Nayak's entry would strengthen the party in the tribal-dominated Kandhamal. Nayak had been MP from Phulbani in 1989 on a Janata Dal ticket.

The entry of the two leaders into the Congress fold is significant for the party at this stage as the BJD Government in the state is following an "anti-tribal and anti-Dalit" policy, the PCC chief said.

The two leaders joined the party following a decision of AICC on the basis of the recommendation made by Kalahandi and Kandhamal Congress Committees, he said.

Majhi had abstained from voting during Rajya Sabha polls in 2010 defying party whip, party sources said adding he was suspended in June, 2011 after release of an audio tape, which claimed that two ministers had struck a deal with Majhi to keep away from voting in the election.

Suspension of Majhi was revoked in 2014, but he had later joined BJP.

"I was disappointed in 2014 after being denied Congress ticket for the Assembly elections and I joined BJP. However, decided to return to Congress when I saw the attitude of BJP towards Dalits and tribals," said Majhi.

Hitting out at the BJD Government, ex-MP Nayak said Kandhamal has suffered a lot during its rule for the last 17 years as nearly 80,000 people were left homeless and more than a lakh left the district due to riots.

Both BJD and BJP have failed miserably in restoring normalcy in Kandhamal, claimed Nayak, who turned rebel after being denied a BJD ticket in the 2009 polls.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Air India's flight operations were partially affected today with a section of pilots deciding not to report for duty in protest against pending issues related to salary and allowances, besides alleged denial of weekly off.

Some pilots who fly narrow-body aircraft did not turn up for duty, affecting operations of around 10 to 12 flights today, airline sources said.

These pilots are members of the ICPA, which had earlier warned the management of action unless pay anomalies between the pilots of erstwhile Indian Airlines and Air India were sorted out by September 7. The pilots are also angry over the delay in payment of international crew layover allowance that they are entitled to when flying abroad.

Some pilots owing allegiance to ICPA have stopped taking duty calls about their respective flight schedules following which those flying wide-body Boeing 777 and 787 have been drafted for operations, sources said.

The ICPA pilots were also irked over alleged denial of weekly off to them. According to them, the roster for September 1 to 14 had no mention of their weekly off. Riled, its leaders had asked all ICPA members to decide their weekly off on their own.

An ICPA circular issued by its general secretary Capt. T Praveen Keerthi yesterday said," In continuation to Circular No. 05 of 2016, since Capt. Arvind Kathpalia (ED ops) has failed to print planned weekly off for all ICPA pilots, DO NOT ACCEPT any revised roster from CMS and follow the roster issued before 1st September 2016 only, till further instructions from ICPA."



The Indian Commercial Pilots' Association (ICPA) represents around 750 pilots who operate narrow-body planes and are from erstwhile Indian Airlines.

Air India spokesperson could not be immediately contacted for comments.

Specific details of which flights were affected could also not be immediately ascertained even as sources said mostly domestic services were impacted.

On September 1, the ICPA had flagged continuing pay anomalies in a strongly-worded letter to Air India's Director (Finance).

"Our patience has run thin. We will wait till September 7 for the anomalies in pay and allowances to be corrected and international layover allowance to be paid up to date failing which we will be forced to take any action as deemed fit to safeguard the interests of our members," ICPA had said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Bihar BJP leader Sushil Kumar Modi today demanded the Bihar government conduct an inquiry by an all party committee into the breach of embankments in the state and said the state government should stop muzzling the Opposition's voice.

"Chief Minister Nitish Kumar is threatening to lodge cases against the Opposition in order to muzzle its voice. The government should conduct an inquiry by an all party committee into the incident of embankment breach," Sushil said.

He had earlier said the Gumti Tola link embankment, constructed under MG-NREGA, breached in Katihar and another embankment on Mahananda river was forcefully cut by local people near Kachaura in Katihar, which submerged 45 panchayats, but the administration remained a mute spectator.

Parts of Naugachhia (in Bhagalpur district) submerged due to a breach in Lakshmipur-Ganga Zamindari embankment, he had said.

Taking strong note of Sushil's statements regarding breach in embankments, state Water Resources minister Rajiv Ranjan Singh alias Lalan Singh had yesterday challenged him to prove that the present floods in the state was a result of breach in embankment and had termed Sushil's allegations as a "bundle of lies".

Reacting to Singh's comments, Sushil said "BJP is not afraid of such threats. The government has miserably failed in carrying out relief and rescue operations for flood victims... Instead of threatening the Opposition, the minister should concentrate on his department.

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Aiming to bring peace in Jammu and Kashmir, an all party delegation led by Home Minister Rajnath Singh was today in Srinagar for a two-day visit to the state during which it is expected to interact with a cross section of people.

"We intend to talk to individuals and groups who want peace and normalcy in Kashmir Valley," Singh said before the departure of delegation comprising 30 members from 20 parties.

Cutting across party lines, leaders said that they were hopeful of finding a solution for restoration of peace in the Valley where violent clashes have claimed 71 lives since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani on July 8.

Senior Congress leader and former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said that the delegation was ready to hear "everyone".

The visit "will be beneficial for Kashmir and for the country," he said, adding everyone wants peace in the state.

Azad said it will be an opportunity for the parties and Kashmiri people to interact.

CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury, another member of the team, said the all-party delegation should have gone two months ago "but let's hope that even now, we can make a difference".

LJP Chief and Union Minister Ram Vilas Paswan said that the MPs are going with an open mind and want to interact with anyone who wants to talk within the framework of the Indian Constitution. "We are ready to talk," he said.

Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge said all parties were cooperating with the government and their sole aim was restoration of normalcy in the state.

""We will try our best to bring back normalcy. We are cooperating with the government. It is the responsibility of the government to deal with the situation very intelligently.

"All parties are cooperating for that. So we hope that it will be resolved," he said.

Reaching out to separatists, Jammu and Kashmir Chief



Minister Mehbooba Mufti yesterday invited their top leaders for talks with the delegation.

Mehbooba wrote letters to the leaders in her capacity as PDP chief, seeking their cooperation by engaging with the delegation.

Apart from the Home Minister and Minister of State in PMO Jitendra Singh, those who are part of the all-party team include Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, leader of opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad, his Lok Sabha colleague Mallikarjun Kharge, senior Congress leader Ambika Soni, Union Minister Ram Vilas Paswan (LJP), JD-U leader Sharad Yadav, CPI-M general secretary Sitaram Yechury and CPI leader D Raja.

NCP's Tariq Anwar and Trinamool Congress' Saugata Roy, Shiv Sena's Sanjay Raut and Anandrao Adsul, TDP's Thota Narasimham, Shiromani Akali Dal's Prem Singh Chandumajra, BJD's Dilip Tirkey, AIMIM's Asaduddin Owaisi, AIUDF's Badaruddin Ajmal and Muslim League's E Ahamed will be party of the delegation.

TRS' Jitendra Reddy, N K Premchandran (RSP), P Venugopal (AIADMK), Tiruchi Siva (DMK), Y B Subba (YSR-Cong), Jaiprakash Yadav (RJD), Dharamveer Gandhi (AAP) and Dushyant Chautala (RLD) are also in the team.

BSP and Samajwadi Party have also extended their support.
Adopting a tough stance, separatists today rebuffed attempts by five opposition MPs to talk to them even as an all-party parliamentary delegation explored ways to end the 56-day-old unrest by holding discussions with Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti and some other mainstream leaders.

During the first day of its visit, the delegation met about 200 members in about 30 delegations from various sections of society and listened to their point of view to reach at a common solution to the current scenario in Jammu and Kashmir, a statement from the Home Ministry said.

While the delegation, led by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, met mainstream sections, five members of the group broke away to meet the separatists.

Four MPs -- -CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury, CPI leader D Raja, JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav and RJD's Jay Prakash Narayan -- went to meet hardline Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani at his residence where he is under house arrest for the last 60 days while AIMIM leader Assadudin Owaisi went to meet moderate Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq at Chashma Shahi sub-jail where he is lodged.

At Geelani's residence, the gate was not even opened for the MPs while people shouted slogans outside. Geelani saw them from the window but refused to meet the parliamentarians.

"It is our effort to show that we are ready to talk to anyone whether they agree to meet or not," Yadav said.

The group also went to meet JKLF chief Yaseen Malik who is under detention at BSF camp in Humhama. He told the MPs that he will talk when he visits New Delhi.

Owaisi went separately to meet Miwaiz who met him briefly but only exchanged pleasantaries.

After Owaisi's failed attempt, the group comprising Yechury, Yadav, Raja and Narayan went to meet the Mirwaiz and were with him for about 15 minutes.

The group tried to meet former Hurriyat Chairman Abdul Ghani Bhat who also refused to talk to them. Bhat welcomed the leaders but made it clear it has been decided that no talks will be held with the delegation members.

Owaisi said he also met another detained leader Shabir Shah for some time and offered 'namaz' along with him there.

But no separatist leader held talks with them.

"This is a futile exercise. Nothing concrete will happen until or unless India talks to Pakistan on Kashmir. We will not be able to arrive at any solution if India only talks to Kashmiris or Pakistan talks to Kashmiris. We should try and solve this issue which can otherwise result in hostilities between the two neighbouring nations," said Ghani Bhat.

Earlier in the day, the separatists rejected Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti's invitation to them for meeting with all-party delegation, terming such a measure as "deceitful" and insisting that it cannot be an alternative to a "transparent agenda-based dialogue to address the core issue".

The delegation had come here to cool the volatile situation arising out of violent protests that have gripped the Valley since the killing of Hizbul militant Burhan Wani on July 8. The clashes resulting from the protests have claimed 71 lives and injured thousands.

After his meeting with Mirwaiz, Yechury said, "We are



urging both sides to first restore normalcy and ensure that sufferings of people during last two months ends. Start unconditional political dialogue."



He said "When government gives slogans, some tangible follow up steps should also be taken."



Referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's talk about "Vikas (development) and Vishwas (trust)", the CPI(M) leader said "no tangible steps have been taken to develop trust among the Kashmiri people."



He said the governemnt keeps on repeating Vajpayee's statement of 'Jamhooriyat, Kashmiriyat and Insaniyat' but "forgot the steps taken by the former Prime Minister along with the slogan like unilateral ceasefire during Ramzan and talks with Hizbul Mujahideen. (The then) Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani himself held number of meetings with Hizbul leaders."



Earlier, Owaisi said Mirwaiz expressed his inability to have any talks because of position taken by his organisation.

"I met him (the Mirwaiz) and he told me that my organisation has not mandated any talks with the parliamentarians. He expressed his inability to carry out any talks," the AIMIM leader said.

He described the attempt as "ice breaking" and hoped it will continue with "some constructive steps being taken by the state and the central government. The process of dialogue needs to continue."



The 26-member parliamentary delegation, which arrived here this morning, began its engagements with a meeting with the Chief Minister Mehbooba who pitched for unconditional dialogue with all stakeholders.

"Met the 'All Party Delegation' at SKICC today and pitched for unconditional talks with all stakeholders," Mehbooba wrote in a Facebook post. She refused to talk to reporters at the venue of the meeting.

She said she was committed to help initiate a "sustained and meaningful dialogue" within the state with political groups, irrespective of the ideological views and predilections of the political groups.

It was followed by a meeting with National Conference leader and former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah who spoke of "continuous failure of the state government and its dilly dallying tactics".

During his hour-long interaction with the delegation, Omar recalled the previous all-party delegation visits since 1990 to Kashmir and said that "unfortunately when things cool down, there is no progress on the issue".

He said the MPs who have come here this time face a mammoth task in their hands to revive faith in this process.

"There was a time when my father had conveyed to grant



internal autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir and had warned New Delhi that if they continue to deny it, time will come when it will also not be acceptable to people of Jammu and Kashmir. I think we are heading for that time only," Omar said.

He told the delegation that his workers were pressurising him not to attend the meeting "such is the situation".

"Mehbooba Mufti should decide whether she wants to be the Chief Minister or Leader of Opposition. In the morning she says one thing and does a complete about turn by evening. She wants that Hurriyat should be talked to but in the evening she puts them under arrest," the opposition NC leader said.

State Congress chief G A Mir, after meeting the delegation, said it seems it (delegation) has no roadmap. "They do not have anything concrete to offer," he said.

PDP General Secretary Sartaj Madni met the delegation with 10 PDP leaders.

He apprised the delegation about the ground situation in the state and reiterated its stand that PDP will be a bridge between Indo-Pak dialogue, dialogue between the Centre and separatists and the Centre and Kashmiris.

"We have told the delegation that they should find a political solution to Kashmir issue. Both PDP and BJP are committed to agenda of alliance where dialogue with all stakeholders can be agreed upon," he said.

Asked about killings in the protests, Madni did not give any direct reply and asked reporters to write only the truth.

Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad, who is part of the central delegation, said the attempted meeting of five MPs with separatist leaders was in their individual capacity.

An official statement from the Home Ministry said in addition to political parties, delegations of academicians, teachers and student assciations, representatives of school management, prominent NGOs, representatives of Leh, Kargil, Pahari associations, Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee, Fruit and Saffron Growers associtions, Civil Society etc also met the delegation.

"The Jammu and Kashmir Students Welfare Association informed the all-party delegation that they are willing to work with Government of India, hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder to bring normalcy in the state," it said.

The statement said various political parties expressed their concern over the injuries to civilians due to the use of pellet guns.

"The Union Home Minister said that government is already working on the alternatives to pellet guns such as PAVA shells," it said.
"Modern Family" actress Ariel Winter has said she is single, refuting reports that she was dating her longtime friend and actor Sterling Beaumon.

The 18-year-old actress clarified her relationship status on Twitter.

"Everyone thinking I'm taken when I'm just over here like hi I'm single," Winter wrote.

The pair, who have attended multiple Hollywood events together over the past few months, sparked dating rumours when Winter broke up with her boyfriend Laurent Claude in June after two years of dating.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
BJP activists burnt effigies of AAP leader Ashutosh in various parts of the state today for "comparing" his party's tainted minister Sandeep Kumar, who has been booked for rape, with "son of Gujarat" Mahatma Gandhi.

Condemning Ashutosh, the AAP election in-charge of Gujarat, over his controversial blog, the BJP said it "won't tolerate insult to Mahatma Gandhi."



Earlier, angry activists set the AAP spokesperson's effigies on fire at Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Junagad and other cities.

In the blog written for a TV channel, Ashutosh had referred to the alleged affairs of icons like Jawaharlal Nehru and Gandhi while seeking to defend Kumar who was sacked as minister after a CD purportedly showing him with a woman in a "compromising position" surfaced.

"The comments made by Ashutosh on Gujarat's son and Father of the Nation Mahatma Gandhi reflects his dirty mindset and it also shows the difference between what AAP says and what it practices," MOS for Home Pradipsinh Jadeja said in a statement.

He said actions' of AAP ministers and MLAs shows the Arvind Kejriwal-led party has reached the "nadir of political values."



"AAP spokesperson Ashutosh has tried to malign Mahatma Gandhi by making cheap comments against him, all in order to save the image of his minister who was found indulging in a dirty act," Jadeja said, adding that AAP members had also made "dirty comments" on Jain monk Tarun Sagarji.

Attacking Congress over its "silence" on the controversial blog, the minister said, "The party which made tall claims on the issue of assassination of Mahatma Gandhi is mysteriously silent on this issue.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A day after inviting separatist leaders for talks, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti today pitched for unconditional dialogue with all stakeholders as she met the all-party parliamentary delegation here and offered to help in this regard.

She said she was committed to help initiate a "sustained and meaningful dialogue" within the state with political groups, irrespective of the ideological views and predilections of the political groups.

"Met the 'All Party Delegation' at S.K.I.C.C today and pitched for unconditional talks with all stakeholders," Mehbooba wrote in a Facebook post. Earlier, she refused to talk to reporters at the venue of the meeting.

The Chief Minister said she reiterated the commitment to catalyze the reconciliation and confidence building within the state and across the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir.

"Also committed to help initiate a sustained and meaningful dialogue with all internal stakeholders, which will include all political groups irrespective of their ideological views and predilections," she said.

"This dialogue seeks to build a broad-based consensus on resolution of all outstanding issues of J&K," she added.

Mehbooba, in her capacity as PDP president, yesterday had written a letter to separatist leaders, appealing them to engage with the all-party delegation for finding a solution to the problems of Jammu and Kashmir.

However, the separatist turned down the invitation saying the delegation had not spelled out a mandate.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Bangladesh's fundamentalist Jamaat-e- Islami leader and media tycoon Mir Quasem Ali was buried in the wee hours today in his ancestral village in Manikganj after a funeral prayer following his execution last night.

Mir Quasem, 63, widely considered as the top financier of the Jamaat, was hanged at the high-security Kashimpur Central Jail on the outskirts of the capital at 10:30 PM yesterday.

Three ambulances, one of which carried his body left Kashimpur prison after 12:30 AM. A Fire Service car, six vehicles of RAB and police and three other cars were escorting them when they left the jail premises, Bdnews24 reported.

Mir Quasem's relatives had already reached Manikganj's Chala village to prepare for the burial.

His body arrived in the village around 2:45 AM and he was buried around 3:30 AM after a funeral prayer.

Police did not allow outsiders to enter the village.

Mir Quasem was the sixth Islamist to be executed for war crimes committed during the country's 1971 Liberation War against Pakistan. His execution came after he refused to seek presidential clemency.

Hundreds of Liberation War veterans and war crimes trial campaigners rallied at Dhaka's Shahbagh Square and rejoiced at the execution of the last of the high-profile perpetrators of crimes against humanity.

Mir Quasem was the infamous pro-Pakistan Al-Badr militia's third most important figure. He was convicted of running Al Badr's torture cell that killed several people.

Three million people were said to have been massacred in the war by the Pakistani army and their local collaborators.

Mir Quasem was the convenor of NGO Rabita al-Alam al- Islami's Bangladesh chapter when he started playing some role in Jamaat's politics in 1980. He later went on to become its director.

He was a former vice-chairman of Islami Bank Bangladesh Limited and chairman of the now-closed Diganta Media Corporation, believed to be pro-Jamaat.

Mir Quasem owned several business houses and media outlets including a now suspended TV channel and was a central executive council member of Jamaat-e-Islami.

He pumped billions into the Jamaat since the mid-1980s to put it on a firm financial footing in Bangladesh.

His hanging comes nearly four months after Jamaat-e-Islami chief Motiur Rahman Nizami was executed.

Before him, five war crimes convicts had been executed since Bangladesh initiated a trial process in 2010 for the 1971 war criminals. Of the five executed war crimes convicts, two had sought presidential clemency which was rejected.

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With the 10-day Ganpati festival commencing from tomorrow, several actors including Emraan Hashmi and Arjun Rampal are preparing to welcome home the God of good luck, while stars like Katrina Kaif and Daisy Shah will visit friends' places to offer prayers.

When asked how he is going to celebrate the Ganesh Chaturthi tomorrow, Emraan said, "We have friends and family coming over. My wife, she is a Hindu, so there is always a ritual in her house, we go and visit Ganeshji. It is all very special to us."



Actor Vivek Oberoi said he likes the traditions associated with the festival and meeting people to celebrate the occasion.

"Every year, we anxiously look forward to celebrate Ganesh Chaturthi and welcome our favourite Ganesha at home. I like people coming over, do puja and be part of the joyous celebrations in honour of the divine being," he said.

Supporting environment-friendly celebration of the mega festival, actress Shilpa Shetty said, "From last year on, have made a promise to myself that I would contribute in bringing in an eco-friendly Ganpati, and I maintain that and continue to do that."



"I would request people to use eco-friendly Ganpati and also materials," she added.

Gearing up for the festive mood, Arjun Rampal said, "Ganpati is coming home tomorrow. We always bring Ganpati at home. We wish for positivity and happiness."



Television host and actor Manish Paul said he celebrates the festival perform the 'visarjan' (immersion of the idol) also at home.

"We get Ganesha every year and this year is going to be no different. All friends come to seek his blessings. It's going to be eco-friendly Ganesha and we do the visarjan at home only."



Actress Katrina Kaif said she will go over to friend's place to enjoy the festival.

"I go visiting friend's house during Ganpati, that's how I celebrate it."



When asked if she will ever get Ganpati for herself, she replied, "Yes why not, it will be wonderful."



Daisy Shah too would visit friends on the occasion.

"I will visit a few friends and relatives this Ganpati to seek blessings of Lord Ganesha. Everyday is a blessing in a way and one can ask whatever they wish to on any day. For me festivals are more about spending time with your loved ones," she said.

Bollywood stars like Salman Khan, Govinda, Nana Patekar, Riteish Deshmukh, Tusshar Kapoor, Ranbir Kapoor among others also celebrate the Ganesh festival with traditional fervour.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Describing BRICS as "an influential voice" in international discourse, Prime Minister Narendra Modi today said it was the grouping's shared responsibility to shape the global agenda and help developing nations achieve their objectives.

Leading from the chair, Modi addressed the BRICS Leaders Meeting here, before the 8th annual Summit in Goa from October 15-16.

"We, as BRICS, are an influential voice in international discourse. It is, therefore, our shared responsibility to shape the international agenda," he said in this picturesque eastern Chinese city.

"Our shared responsibility to shape international agenda in manner that helps developing nations achieve their objectives," he added.

BRICS brings together five major emerging economies, comprising 43 per cent of the world population, having 37 per cent of the world GDP and 17 per cent share in the world trade.

Modi said that as chair of BRICS, "'Building Responsive, Inclusive and Collective Solutions' is the theme we have chosen which mirrors central priorities at G20 Summit".

"We've taken BRICS out of capitals to involve people from all walks of life. It will be an opportunity to deepen our ties and with BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi- Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) countries.

The four other leaders who participated in the meeting of the five-member bloc included Brazilian President Michel Temer, Chinese President Xi Jinping - with whom Modi held bilateral talks earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin and South African President Jacob Zuma.

"Our summit next month would not only be an opportunity to deepen ties with ourselves, we will also interact with India's neighbouring countries of BIMSTEC - Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand, who have been invited for the outreach summit. We welcome you all to Goa next month," Modi said while concluding his brief address.

As a formal grouping, BRIC started after the meeting of the Leaders of Russia, India and China in St. Petersburg on the margins of G8 Outreach Summit in 2006.

The grouping was formalised during the 1st meeting of BRIC Foreign Ministers on the sidelines of UN General Assembly in New York in 2006. The 1st BRIC Summit was held in Yekaterinburg, Russia, on June 16, 2009.

BRIC was expanded into BRICS with the inclusion of South Africa at the BRIC Foreign Ministers' meeting in New York in September 2010. Accordingly, South Africa attended the 3rd BRICS Summit in Sanya, China in April 2011.

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The Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) detected huge loss of public money in Mizoram in purchase of cows allegedly disregarding recommendations of an expert committee, in it's report tabled in state legislature.

The CAG report said that the Director of Mizoram's Animal Husbandry and Veterinary department failed to comply with the recommendations of an expert committee resulting in the death of 126 cows and monetary loss of Rs 68.04 lakh which could have been largely avoided.

Under the New Land Use Policy (NLUP), the flagship program of the present Congress government in the state, the Animal Husbandry and Veterinary department placed orders for supply of dairy cows at the rate of Rs 55,000 per cow from two firms - Kwality Dairy and Agro Sales, Karnal in Haryana (500 cows) and Model Diary Cattle Breeding Farm, Ludhiana in Punjab (300 cows).

The two firms were not among the four firms which made their bids in response to the tender floated by the Departmental Purchase Advisory Board, the report said.

The report said that the two firms together dispatched 788 cows, of which 43 died during transit and there was public protest when the supply and distribution of dairy cows was in full swing over the health conditions and quality of the cattle distributed to the NLUP beneficiaries.

Among others, the import of cows from outside the



state, allegedly caused the death of many domestic cows due to outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) which prompted the state government to constitute a three-member Enquiry Committee headed by Principal Secretary for Disaster Management and Rehabilitation on July 24, 2012.

The committee recommended procurement and transportation of diary cows from far-off places like Punjab and Haryana during the winter season before the end of February.

But, the CAG noted, the Director of AH and Veterinary department again placed orders for supply of 1,400 dairy cows from the same firms at the rate of Rs 54,000 each and, in blatant disregard to the recommendations of the committee, allowed the firms to supply 1,372 cows between March and May in 2013.

As a consequence, 16 cows died during transit while 110 cows died inside Mizoram while in transit camps and the failure of the state Veterinary department to comply with the recommendation of the expert committee resulted in the death of 126 diary cows and the loss of public money to the tune of Rs 68.04 lakh, the CAG report said.
For those who revered her, Mother Teresa's elevation to the Catholic sainthood today came not a moment too soon.

The diminutive nun whose journey from a corner to the Ottoman Empire to the slums of India made her one of the most famous women in the world was regarded by many as a saint during her lifetime.

"Saint of the Gutters" and "Angel of Mercy," were among the sobriquets she picked up over the course of nearly four decades working with the wretched poor of Kolkata and building her Missionaries of Charity order into a global force.

But there was another school of thought. Australian feminist Germaine Greer called her a "religious imperialist" who preyed on the most vulnerable in the name of harvesting souls for Jesus.

And her most ferocious critic, the British polemicist Christopher Hitchens called her "a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud."



But Teresa was always far more revered than reviled.

Millions acclaimed her as an icon of Christian charity and a global symbol of anti-materialism and worthwhile self-sacrifice.

Her adopted homeland, India, took her to its heart. "It is natural for every Indian to take pride in Mother Teresa's canonisation," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said earlier this week.

On her death in 1997, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II predicted Teresa would "continue to live on in the hearts of all those who have been touched by her selfless love."



The private Teresa was a more complex personality than she appeared to the world. Behind her gaunt, wrinkled face lay a troubled soul.

For long periods, she was plagued by doubts about the faith that drove her mission to provide comfort to the dying.

"There is so much contradiction in my soul," she wrote to the Bishop of Calcutta in a posthumously published 1957 letter.

"Heaven means nothing to me, it looks like an empty place."



Two years later, she wrote to a priest friend saying: "If I ever become a saint, I will surely be one of darkness; I will continually be absent from heaven - to light the light of those in darkness on earth."



The saintly tag became official today, thanks to a fast-track canonisation process that reaches its conclusion on the eve of the 19th anniversary of her death in what is now called Kolkata, formerly Calcutta.

Baptised Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, Teresa was born into a



Kosovar Albanian family in 1910 in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman empire and now the capital of Macedonia.

Her father, a businessman who was involved in the region's byzantine politics, died when she was eight.

By the time she was 12, according to biographers, Agnes was already a regular visitor to Catholic shrines and knew that she wanted to dedicate her life to missionary work.

At 18 she enrolled in an Irish order, the Sisters of Loreto, spending a brief period in Ireland learning English before her departure for India in 1929.

There she spent two decades teaching geography to the children of well-to-do families before founding her own order in 1950.

In 1979, her work in the Calcutta slums was rewarded with the Nobel peace prize. In her acceptance speech she made a fervent defence of her approach to helping the poor, which was by then coming under increasing critical scrutiny.

To those who said birth control was vital to combatting poverty, she replied that abortion was "direct murder by the mother."



To those who said her Order should promote development, she replied that she was a missionary, not a social worker.

Teresa could come across as an ascetic figure and as a strict task-mistress to those under her. "She spoke her mind," Pope Francis recalled in 2014. "I would have been a little bit scared had she been my Mother Superior."



But in his homily at her canonisation mass today, Francis hailed her as beacon for the world.

She was, he said, "an eloquent witness to God's closeness to the poorest of the poor."



Those who knew her best describe someone who loved fun, chocolate and ice-cream.

Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, a member of her Order who promoted her sainthood cause within the Vatican, told AFP Teresa would often be found bent over in laughter while discussing the day's events with fellow nuns.

"You felt that she was a mother," he said. "She was not very good at telling jokes but she had a sense of humour and could really find the funny aspects in ... Daily life.
Amid allegations of lackadaisical approach of officers in checking vessels and aircraft, Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC) has asked customs officers to rummage carriers to prevent smuggling or any security risk.

The has also advised top customs officials to issue orders directing boarding officers not to accept any gift.

The said that references have been received alleging lackadaisical approach of customs officials in rummaging and examination of vessels which come at berth at various Indian ports.

The references also allege illegal gratification in the form of gifts and cash, it said.

Rummaging of vessels, aircrafts and vehicles crossing land customs stations is an effective method to prevent any attempt to smuggle prohibited and restricted goods and hence supervisory officers need to adequate attention to this important preventive function, the circular said.

"While the prevailing rummaging practices need not be diluted, a full detailed rummage should be carried out on vessels/aircrafts/vehicles where risk analysis, reliable information suggests the necessity for such.

"This will also help in reducing harassment, alleged complaints and enhance ease of doing business," it said.

Some of probable parameters for rummaging could be that ships or aircrafts arriving from sensitive ports or airports having higher risk profiles; composition of crew and random selection, the CBEC said.

"While deciding these, the Principal Commissioner/Commissioner shall keep in mind the risk elements relating to smuggling of contraband goods, perceived threat to national economy and security...," it added.

On the issue of illegal gratification, the CBEC advised the top customs officials to issue standing orders similar to the one issued by the Office of the Principal Commissioner of Customs, Chennai III Commissionerate.

The Chennai III Commissionerate in its standing order has said that citing international formalities or convention, in certain cases the Master of the vessel/shipping agent may offer gifts to the Boarding officer.

"The Boarding Officer should refuse the gift politely and firmly," the order said.

It also warns that it it is found that instructions in this regard has been flouted, "strict action shall be initiated".
The Centre is eager to accord tribal status to the 11 Gorkha communities, but some technical problems are holding it back for now, Union Tribal Affairs Minister Jual Oram said here today.

"The central government is pursuing the demand for tribal status for 11 Gorkha communities with all sincerity. But, we have to follow the established norms and procedures to get over some technical problems," Oram told reporters in this hill town.

"All the 11 Gorkha communities seeking tribal status are living in almost all states of the country. For that, the tribal department needs to take inputs from the states concerned and consult other departments involved. That is why the issue is pending," he said.

"I want all Gorkhas to know that the Prime Minister has already promised that the status will be accorded, so there is no room for doubt. People should not worry unnecessarily," the minister said.

To a question, he said the West Bengal and Sikkim governments had already issued recommendation for these communities.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Cholayil, the maker of ayurvedic soap Medimix, is planning to extend its flagship brand to other categories like creams and body lotions next year, a top company official said.

"We have plans of expanding it under newer products and we are working on it. We will be focusing on skincare only, since Medimix is synonymous with skincare. Creams and lotions is one market we are looking at, because we see a good opportunity in that area. We will be launching it in the third quarter of next fiscal," Cholayil Chairman and Managing Director Pradeep Cholayil told PTI.

The company sells prickly heat powder and face wash besides soap under the Medimix brand and recently launched intimate hygiene wash under the same brand.

Apart from Medimix, the company also has two brands -- Krishna Thulasi, which it acquired in 2011 and Cuticura -- focused for the southern markets, especially Kerala, but Cholayil said the company would be rolling out these brands to other regions of the country next year.

"We will be launching Krishna Thulasi and Cuticura in other parts of the country by April next year," he said.

The Chennai-based company sells soaps under the Krishna Thulasi brand, while under Cuticura, it sells talcum powder, soaps and deodrants.

The total soap market in India is estimated to be Rs 17,000 crore of Cholayil has a nominal market share.

The company has reworked its distribution strategy and is focusing only on the profitable markets.

"We have tried to rationalise the cost of distribution. We have identified the areas which contribute to our business and we are focusing only in all the major cities and sub-towns of that, so that the distribution is reached in the right way," he said.

Cholayil is focusing on increasing its sales penetration in Uttar Pradesh and Delhi.

"We are having a good establishment in the Western region. We are focusing on the Northern market, especially Delhi and Uttar Pradesh which are our key focus markets," he said.

Last year, it had clocked a revenue of Rs 152 crore and this year it plans to touch Rs 170 crore.

The company spends 18 per cent of its sales on marketing, with 60 per cent of it allocated to television.

Cholayil exports its products to around 25 countries including the Middle East, US, South East Asian countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, and exports contribute to around 30 per cent of overall sales.

The Middle East is the largest market for the company, accounting for 60 per cent of its sales.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The US-based companies are expected to invest more than Rs 2,400 crore in Madhya Pradesh, especially in the infotech sector thus generating a large number of jobs, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has said.

"Of the Rs 2,400 crore, Rs 1,000 crore is expected to be invested in the IT sector by US companies (for which MoUs were signed with infotech firms). This (IT investment) is going to provide employment to more than 10,000 people," he said.

Chouhan was talking to reporters here last night on his return from a five-day visit to US.

"My US visit was more productive than I had expected. The IT sector will generate a large number of jobs with modest investment," he said.

Chouhan said the delegation accompanying him held talks with representatives of 25 companies who expressed willingness to invest in MP and other states in the country.

The Chief Minister said the UK, Japan, Singapore and UAE are going to be official partners at MP's Global Investors Summit (GIS) to be held in late October at Indore.

Chouhan said Madhya Pradesh was fast emerging as a preferred destination for investors.

Foreign companies now consider the state a viable and profitable destination to set up ventures, he said.

Former US Ambassador to India Frank G Wisner and representatives from 100 companies attended a seminar in New York during my visit, on business opportunities in Madhya Pradesh, the Chief Minister added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The US-based companies are expected to invest more than Rs 2,400 crore in Madhya Pradesh, especially in the infotech sector thus generating a large number of jobs, Chief Minister has said.

"Of the Rs 2,400 crore, Rs 1,000 crore is expected to be invested in the IT sector by US companies, according to the Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) signed with them. This (IT investment) is going to provide employment to more than 10,000 people," he said.

Chouhan was talking to reporters here last night on his return from a five-day visit to US.

"My US visit was more productive than I had expected. The IT sector will generate a large number of jobs with modest investment," he said.

Chouhan said the delegation accompanying him held talks with representatives of 25 companies who expressed willingness to invest in MP and other states in the country.

The Chief Minister said the UK, Japan, Singapore and UAE are going to be official partners at MP's Global Investors Summit (GIS) to be held in late October at Indore.

Chouhan said Madhya Pradesh was fast emerging as a preferred destination for investors.

Foreign companies now consider the state a viable and profitable destination to set up ventures, he said.

Former US Ambassador to India Frank G Wisner and representatives from 100 companies attended a seminar in New York during my visit, on business opportunities in Madhya Pradesh, the Chief Minister added.
Democratic presidential nominee is having a hard time in convincing American people that she is a truthful and honest candidate, the rival Donald Trump Campaign claimed today.

" is having a hard time being accepted as a truthful and honest candidate vis-a-vis the American people," Trump Campaign Manager Kellyanne Conway told ABC News.

Conway said the American people want answers, 17,448 e-mails were not turned over to the inspector general.

"That's in addition to the 33,000 emails that had been deleted," she said.

"And certainly a former United States senator, former first lady and certainly the sitting secretary of state should know what the C means," Conway said.

Conway alleged that the Clinton Campaign is trying to shift the focus of the elections from these issues.

"They want this election to be about Donald Trump. And the American people want this election to be about honesty and trustworthiness and her being more acceptable and forthcoming in her responses," she said.
Domestic copper industry has urged the government to protect it from the annual USD 1 billion imports of the metal from Japan and ASEAN countries, with which India has inked market opening trade pacts.

Hit by the rising imports, industry body Indian Primary Copper Producers Association (IPCPA) has approached Cabinet Secretary P K Sinha requesting him to consider reviewing the Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with Japan and ASEAN countries, among other measures.

"Copper prices are around USD 5,000 a tonne and with 2 LT of imports, the hit is around USD 1 billion annually. We met Cabinet Secretary and drew his attention towards industry's plight," IPCPA Vice President R Ramnath told PTI.

Indian manufacturers are losing share in the domestic market due to rising imports of refined copper products. They nearly constitute one-third of the market rising at alarming CAGR of 22 per cent over the last 5 years, he added.

Every year, India consumes around 6.7 lakh tonnes (LT) of copper, an important industrial metal that is used in power and telecom, consumer durables as well as electrical goods, of which imports alone account for one-third or roughly 2 LT, he said.

However, "they (import) is expected to cross 2.5 LT mark in 2016-17," he said.

IPCPA constitutes state-run Hindustan Copper Ltd, Anil Agarwal-led Vedanta Ltd and Aditya Birla Group's Hindalco, which account for 100 per cent copper production in the country.

India, with a total copper production capacity of 10 LT, produces about 7.9 LT of the metal of which 4.6 is consumed in the country, while 3.5 LT is exported mainly to China.

"In the last 20 years, copper firms have invested a total of around Rs 30,000 crore in the sector that now is in the red due to imports, which are eating up into the companies' sales and profits. This needs to be checked," Ramnath, who is CEO of Vedanta's Copper business rued.

IPCPA has requested the government to revisit the FTA's pending for review -- with ASEAN nations (in 2016) and with Japan (in 2017), he said.

FTA or Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA) seeks to liberalise trade and services regime besides removing non-tariff barriers and encouraging investments.

"We have also urged for increasing custom duty on copper products from 5 per cent to 7.5, the reinstatement of export incentives and reducing duty on copper concentrates to nil from 2.5 per cent at present," Ramnath added.

The industry employs around 50,000 people directly and indirectly and has contributed Rs 34,000 crore in the last three years through exports. Besides it serves more than 800 small and medium enterprises, he said.

"Rise in imports will impact firms, which in turn will affect India's balance of trade with China as India exports around USD 2 billion worth of copper products to the People's Republic -- constituting 15-20 per cent of the total outbound shipments to the Communist nation," Ramnath added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In the wake of recent disturbances, Crimean authorities have assured Indian tourists that the country is a "safe travel destination" and said "all is well" in the region.

"I want to assure tourists from India that Crimea is a safe travel destination," Prime Minister of the Republic of Crimea, Sergey Valeryevich Aksyonov, said.

Crimea has been under Russian control since 2014.

"We welcome guests. Especially as Russia and India have long-term friendly relations," a statement quoting Aksyonov, issued here, said.

According to the Russian Federal Security Service, armed clashes took place in northern Crimea last month involving a group that had allegedly came from Ukrainian territory to commit acts of terrorism in public places and thus disrupt the tourist season on the peninsula.

"In the last two years, many politicians, business representatives and tourists from countries like France, Italy, Germany, USA, Japan, China, Israel, Poland and Jordan visited Crimea," he said.

"The inflow of tourists to Crimea has increased. Crimea remains one of the most popular holiday destinations for those from Russia and outside," Aksyonov said.

The Kerch Sea Ferry, which connects the mainland of Russia and Crimea, transported about 59,000 passengers in a day, showing Crimea's great demand as a resort destination, he said.

This year, the number of Ukrainian tourists to Crimea rose by 15 per cent, he said.

"We are planning fam (familiarisation) trips for tour operators and media to Crimea to woo tourists," he added.

"We believe that a vacation in the Crimea should be safe, comfortable and interesting and also value for money for the tourists," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Police today detained 17 Dalit protesters after they tried to disrupt a "social inclusiveness" programme organised by BJP, attended by the party's senior Dalit leaders.

Gujarat Assembly Speaker Ramanlal Vora, social justice and empowerment minister Atmaram Parmar, Rajya Sabha member Shambhuprasad Tundiya and Lok Sabha member Kirit Solanki were the main speakers at the programme at Anandnagar here.

Some Dalit protesters shouted anti-BJP slogans and showed black flags, police said. The women among them beat utensils.

"We detained 17 persons...12 men and five women," said inspector P B Rana.

BJP is trying to win back support of the Dalit community in the aftermath of Una incident where cow vigilantes beat up some Dalits.

Today's protest was backed by the Bahujan Samaj Party, its state secretary Pradeep Parmar said.

"Some of our workers were among the protesters. We wanted to convey to the BJP leaders that we do not need inclusiveness but equality. The party (BJP) is not serious about Dalits but is always at the front when it comes to seeking their votes," Parmar said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Government is likely to take a decision soon on opening legal services for foreigners in a calibrated manner.

The move is aimed at boosting the country's services sector, which contributes about 60 per cent to the country's total economy.

"The commerce ministry has already framed the idea and now the Law Ministry is taking it forward. They are working hard at it. We hope it will come to the Cabinet soon," a top government official said.

The official added that the Bar Council of India (BCI) is on board on the proposal and they are reviewing their rules.

Advisory and arbitration are low-hanging fruits with which the government is considering to begin with.

An expert said the government should open the sector in a gradual manner only.

"Government should do the opening in a calibrated manner considering the concerns of BCI and Indian law practitioners," Krishan Malhotra, Partner at Dhruva Advisors, said.

The UK and the US have been pushing India to open up the legal services sector to foreign firms.

The Advocates Act, which is administered by the BCI, provides for foreign lawyers or law firms to visit India on a reciprocal basis for temporary periods to advise their clients on foreign laws and diverse international legal issues.

Work is also under progress for opening education services for foreign players.

On this sector too, the commerce ministry has forwarded the framework to the HRD Ministry.

"It is up to the HRD ministry to look at it. We are giving a framework, we have given some recommendations. Now they will have move. The commerce ministry has suggested a framework and important potential areas," the official added.

In the beginning, opening online courses could be an option with the government.

The move would also help India in increasing its share in the global services trade.

The global services trade is worth about USD 5 trillion and India's share is only about USD 235 billion, which is about 3.25 per cent.

India's services exports have increased from 16.8 billion in 2001 to USD 155.6 billion in 2014 and this has made the country world's eighth largest exporter of services.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Delhi government has ordered restarting registration of diesel cars and SUVs with engine capacity of 2000 cc and above on payment of one per cent of the ex-showroom price of such vehicles as green cess.

The move comes after the Supreme Court on August 12 lifted its order banning registration of diesel cars and sport utility vehicles (SUV) of 2000 cc capacity and above upon one per cent of the cost of the vehicle deposited with Central Pollution Control Board by the vehicle manufacturers, dealers or sub-dealers.

In an order issued last week, the Transport Department of Delhi government directed all Regional Transport Officers to register these vehicles in the capital.

"All the registering authorities/motor licensing officer (MLOs) are directed to register diesel cars/SUVs of 2000 cc capacity and above upon production of the proof of the deposit of one per cent of the ex-show room price towards Environment Protection Charge with Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB)," the order said.

With the transport department's order, Mercedes Benz, Toyota, BMW, Audi and other makers of high-end cars and SUVs will be able to sell their vehicles having engine capacity of 2000 cc and above.

A senior government official said the purchaser has to give one per cent of the cost of the vehicle as Environment Protection Charge to dealers who will be required to deposit this amount with CPCB for pollution mitigation efforts.

In August this year, the apex court had vacated the embargo on registration of such vehicles after taking on record the affidavits of Mercedes, Toyota and its dealers as well as that of Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) offering to deposit one per cent of the price of the vehicles as EPC before the registration.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
On the occasion of Teachers' Day tomorrow, the Delhi government will felicitate teachers to encourage them towards leadership.

Several prominent personalities from different fields, including Bollywood, will attend the event, a senior Delhi government official said.

"The main purpose of inviting Bollywood personalities is to encourage government school teachers towards leadership. It includes Bollywood actors Piyush Mishra, Zeeshaan Ayub," an official said, adding Magsaysay Award winner Anshu Gupta will also attend the event.

"This is the first time that the government has invited several celebrities to attend the event," the official said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Assam-based ecologist and conservation activist Bibhuti Lahkar has become the first Asian to be awarded the prestigious 'Heritage Heroes Award' by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Lahkar received the award at the IUCN's ongoing World Conservation Congress in Honolulu, Hawaii last night, an IUCN release said.

Lahkar was among five conservationists across the globe to be nominated for this year's Heritage Heroes Award, aimed at recognising "outstanding efforts" around the world in making a difference in the conservation of World Heritage sites in challenging situations, it said.

Lahkar has been working to save the grasslands, flora and fauna of Manas National Park area for the past two decades and is currently engaged as Manas Landscape Administrator for Aaranyak, an NGO working for biodiversity conservation in northeast India.

On receiving the award, he thanked all who helped him along the way and said he felt humbled and honoured by the recognition for his work.

"Today I am delighted and honoured to get this award. I have dedicated this award to Manas World Heritage Sites and local communities living around Manas," he said.

The ecologist has intensively studied the grasslands of Manas and is now globally recognised as an expert in the threatened flora and fauna of the Terai region along the southern foothills of the Himalayas, an Aaranyak release said.

In the early nineties, Lahkar was conducting research at



Manas when he found himself in the height of the Bodo agitation, followed by the armed struggle by Bodo insurgents when people occupied land within the Park and started rampant timber collection and poaching in the protected area.

As a consequence, Manas was listed as a World Heritage Site "in Danger" (1992-2011) and it was during this period when Lahkar formulated a vision for Manas with support from the locals.

Along with his team, Lahkar trained ex-poachers, hunters and members of local grassroot NGOs (almost 600 in number) and these poachers-turned-conservationists are now helping the forest department in patrolling and protecting the Manas National Park.

He was also instrumental in connecting Manas Wildlife Sanctuary with the Royal Manas National Park in Bhutan, which led to a system of trans-boundary wildlife monitoring and now supports management in the entire Manas natural area that spreads across India and Bhutan.

He also conducted the first GIS survey of the park and his research findings and recommendations are a critical component in the Manas Tiger Conservation Plan.
Equities, not just in the domestic context but across the globe, have been the best asset class in the past 25 years, with the Sensex and the Nifty being the second best performers among top 10 global indices with an average of over 12 per cent returns.

The Shanghai Composite Index of China tops the list among top 10 global indices by giving a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.9 per cent during the 25-year period, according to an analysis of various asset classes and their returns by the city-based brokerage Centrum Group.

The data pertains to the 25-year period ending July 31, 2016 and are in local currency terms, the brokerage said.

Our study prove that the have trounced all other asset classes such as currencies, commodities, real estate, by a wide margin. Of course some of these asset classes have given higher returns over a short-term, but for the long term it is definitely the equities, Centrum analysts Sweta Chawla and Siddhartha Khemka said.

"Of course, this has happened over a longer time frame and the asset class comes with its own set of volatilities in the shorter time frame," they told PTI.

While the Sensex has given in a CAGR of 12 per cent for past 25 years, Nifty has been a notch better at 12.1 per cent, while in dollar terms this have been 7.9 per cent each.

Against this, the Shanghai index gave in 11.9 per cent during the period in dollar terms.

Over the past 10 years, the Sensex and Nifty top the chart with 10.1 per cent and 10.7 per cent, respectively, while the shanghai was a low 6.7 per cent.

Similarly, from a five-year perspective too, the domestic indices have come in a close second with 9.1 and 9.6 per cent respectively against 10.9 per cent return by the Nikkei and S&P 500, and Dow Jones at third with 8.8 per cent. Against this, the Chinese index has been the worst performer with a paltry 2 per cent returns during the same period.

The Brazilian index Bovespa has given 11.8 per cent , 4.5 per cent and -14.2 per cent for the 20, 10 and 5 year periods, respectively, as 25 year data is not available. In the case of the German index DAX the returns for the 25, 10 and 5 year period have been 7.7 per cent, 6.1 per cent and 7.6 per cent, respectively, and that of the Hang Seng of Hong Kong it has been 7 per cent, 2.7 per cent and 0.4 per cent, respectively.

The British FTSE's stood at 3.9, 1.3 and 2.9 per cent each, and French CAC has given back 3.8,-1.2 and 3.9 per cent, respectively.

But the third largest index Nikkei has been disappointment over the 25 years with a negative -1.5 per cent return, 0.6 per cent for a 10 year period in terms of the yen but the best in the 5-year tenor at 10.9 per cent.

Noting that these returns are lower when converted into dollars, the report says within equities, emerging have done better than the developed indices despite the effect of currency depreciation in these countries.

In dollar terms, however, the returns have not been that strong, with Shanghai giving in only 11.9 per cent, 8.3 per cent and 1.3 per cent respectively for the 25, 10 and 5 year period, respectively, while the Sensex and the Nifty returning 7.9 per cent each for the 25 year period and 10.1 per cent 0.4 per cent (Sensex) and 6.7 and 0.8 per cent (Nifty) for the rest of the period.

The Dax has given 7.7 per cent, 4.7 per cent and 2.3 per cent, Hang Seng 6 per cent, 2.6 per cent and minus 0.4 per cent, FTSE 2.9, -2.2 and -1.4 per cent, and the Nikkei -0.3, 1.8 per cent 4.9 per cent, making it the second best amongst all in the five-year period after the S&P 500 which returned a whopping 11 per cent to investors in a five-year investment horizon.

When it comes to commodities as an asset class, while silver, gold and the industrial metals have given positive returns on a 25-year CAGR basis, most of them are negative on a 10-year and a 5-year basis. Crude and aluminium are the worst hit among all the commodities.

Similarly, in currencies, the yen, the pound and the euro have done relatively better than their peers, but compared to equities, the returns are still dismal.

Real estate, another hot asset class, where investors end up putting a huge chunk of money, is another disappointment, says the report.

Commodities also have been a big disappointment during this period. While silver returned 6.6, 6 and -12.7 per cent in the 25, 10 and 5 year period, respectively, gold's performance has been 5.4, 7.8 and -3.6 per cent, LME at 3.2. -4.8 and -12.9 per cent; Brent Crude 3.1, -5.5 and -18.3 per cent; WTI crude at 2.6, -5.6 and -15.3 per cent, respectively.

When it comes the currencies, it has not been any better with the yen's returns being 1.2, 1.2 and -5.8 per cent for the 25, 10 and 5 year periods.

The pound's has been 1, 3.4 and 4.2 per cent, the euro at 0.3, 1.3 and 4.9 per cent; the yuan at -0.9, 1.8 and -0.6 per cent; the rupee at -3.9, -3.7 and -8.7 per cent; the Brazilian real at -6.0, -4.1 and -16 per cent; South African rand at -6.5, -7.2 and -15.7 per cent and the Russian rouble was the worst with a return of -13.6 per cent, -9.4 per cent and a whopping -19 per cent.

Against this, the bonds have done better, with the Pimco Total Return Fund growing at 5 per cent CAGR in 25 years.
Several thousand ethnic Chinese staged a protest march in Paris today over the fatal mugging of a Chinese tailor last month, as crime against community members has spiralled.

The protesters, almost all wearing white T-shirts reading "Security for All" and many waving French flags, rallied at the Place de la Republique in central Paris.

Zhang Chaolin, who was 49, was set upon on August 7 by three thieves who tried to snatch a bag belonging to a friend of his. He died a few days later from his injuries.

Zhang's image appeared on a giant banner in the middle of the square, under the words, splattered with red paint: "Zhang Chaolin, dead for nothing. Who will be next?"



"Stop violence, aggression, insecurity", one placard read amid the sea of white T-shirts worn by protestors who later marched towards nearby Place de la Nation.

An umbrella organisation, Stop the Violence, Security for All, called the protest two weeks after around 1,000 people marched in the Aubervilliers suburb north of Paris where the tailor was killed.

Elected officials who joined Saturday's protest included the right-wing president of the greater Paris region, Valerie Pecresse.

Security for All is demanding police reinforcements, more security cameras and a recognition of anti-Asian racism.

Today, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve pledged to beef up the police presence in Aubervilliers and help finance security cameras.

Reported violent robberies targeting the Chinese community, who are seen as lucrative prey as they are thought to habitually carry large sums of cash, have tripled in the past year, from 35 to 105.

In the event, the bag the thieves were after during Zhang's mugging contained only candy, cigarettes and sunglasses, according to a source close to the investigation.

The stereotype has prompted a string of attacks on Chinese tourists, including one early last month in which assailants sprayed teargas on members of a tour group before making off with their luggage.

In September last year, a Chinese tourist guide was robbed of 25,000 euros (USD 28,300) in cash and his new Rolex watch after he had prevented two of his group from being robbed themselves outside a hotel in a Paris suburb.

A lawyer for the community, Francois Ormillien, has warned that without an adequate response from city authorities the community could form "defence leagues" -- vigilante groups -- to defend itself.

"There are youths 17 to 19 years old who are more aggressive than their elders and want to let loose, but they are very much in the minority," Ormillien said.

He noted that authorities have begun cracking down harder on crime targeting the community, citing the example of a teenager with no prior police record who was jailed for two years for a violent theft.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A 28-year-old Pakistani-origin British woman, who was murdered for "honour" in Punjab province, was raped by her former husband before he and her father allegedly killed the woman, according to the medical report.

Samia Shahid, a resident of Dhok Pandori village, some 230 km from Lahore, had come to Pakistan from Dubai on July 15 to see her ailing father and was found dead on July 20.

Her father had claimed she died of cardiac arrest.

The murder would have gone unnoticed had British MP Naz Shah not wrote a letter to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, alerting him that it could be a case of "honour killing".

A high-level inquiry headed by Deputy Inspector General (DIG) Abu Bakar Khuda Bakhsh concluded that she was murdered.

Bakhsh has told Dawn newspaper that "the forensic report of the sample of her body has confirmed rape and the DNA report of her former husband matched the sperms."



Samia's former husband Shakil and her father Chaudhry Shahid are in police custody for her alleged murder.

Police sources have said Shakil - also Samia's cousin - confessed to strangling her to death as she married another man of her choice.

Samia's murder came over a week after social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch was strangled by her brother "for disgracing" their family honour. The incident sparked international uproar over increasing "honour killing" cases in Pakistan, forcing the government to announce introducing strict legislation against those involved in the case.

A beauty therapist from Bradford, Samia divorced Shakil in May 2014. She then married Syed Mukhtar Kazim.

Kazim has told police that her wife was killed by her family members for marrying against the will of her parents.

Kazim and Samia, both British-Pakistani dual citizens, had been married for two years and were living in Dubai.

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A day ahead of their planned indefinite protest here, several farmer union leaders and activists were today taken into preventive custody in a "crackdown" by Punjab police.

Krantikarti Kisan Union president Shinder Singh Nathuwala was detained in Moga, while the body's general secretary, Satbir Singh was taken into custody from Ludhiana district.

Seven farmer organisations had last month given a call for an indefinite protest here from tomorrow demanding the waiver of outstanding private and government loans for farmers and labourers.

They also sought Rs 5-lakh compensation to families of suicide victims as well as a government job for one of their kin and new tubewell connections along with the installation cost.

They are also demanding land ownership rights for cultivators.

Bharatiya Kisan Union (Ekta Ugrahan) general secretary Sukhdev Singh Kokri said, "We were anticipating police crackdown. That is why we had left homes, but some of our leaders were apprehended by the police."



"It is high-handedness on the part of the SAD-BJP government, which is snatching our democratic right to protest. We want to protest peacefully, but police are unnecessarily provoking us and picking up our men," he alleged.

Kokri alleged that some 300 leaders and members were held in Bathinda, Moga, Faridkot, Ludhiana and Patiala districts.

Police said that they have detained members of the outfits but refused to specify the number.

The farmer unions include BKU (Ekta), BKU (Ugrahan), BKU (Dakaunda), and Krantikarti Kisan union.

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Residents of a housing complex with 156 flats in south-west Kolkata had a narrow escape as a fire broke out in one of the buildings during the wee hours today as people were fast asleep.

Two fire tenders were rushed to the spot, which controlled the situation and helped in evacuation of the panicked residents, a fire brigade official of South 24 Parganas Fire Station said.

"The reason of fire is apparently short circuit. We reached the spot at 2.50 AM and by 4 AM the fire was under control," the fire brigade official said.

The fire started from the electrical metre box compartment on the ground floor of block 1 of the complex at around 2 AM and started spreading fast with thick smoke billowing out, Arun Maity, caretaker of Merlin Emerald Housing Complex under Sarsuna Police Station, said.

The housing complex has ten four-storied blocks, all interconnected.

Seven families in the charred block were most affected including this PTI correspondent, who lives on the fourth floor as he had to evacuate his ailing 76-year-old bed-ridden father, his five-year-old son along with his mother and wife.

Recounting the horror, this correspondent said "It was pitch dark and the entire house was covered in thick suffocating smoke when I woke up in pain. There were loud cries outside asking for help.

"It was like a furnace outside and with my ailing father and child in arms, it seemed a mile to carry them to the terrace. With fresh air, we got a new life. Thankfully all blocks are interconnected, so we could exit from the furthest tower," he said.

The residents of second and third floor of the charred block suffered the worst as they were nearly asphyxiated in the thick smoke before the fire brigade officials rushed in to evacuate them on time.

"We have inspected the spot and a complaint has been registered. It could have been a major disaster, but fortunately it's under control," Officer In-charge of Sarsuna Police Station Supriyo Bhattacharjee said.

CESC MD, Aniruddha Basu said the fire could have been caused by some internal problems and a team has been sent to restore supply to the complex and check the power supply lines.

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Russian President today held talks with British Prime Minister Theresa May for the first time, telling her Russia wants to re-establish ties in all areas, the Kremlin said.

The meeting, on the margins of a G20 summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, was "good, constructive and open," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

"Mr Putin gave a clear and unequivocal indication that we are interested in completely re-establishing our relations and dialogue in all areas, including the most sensitive ones," he added.

In that regard Russia is ready "to move forward as far as the British are prepared to go," Peskov said.

British relations with Russia have soured in recent years, notably over Britain's efforts to prosecute the case of Kremlin critic and former spy Alexander Litvinenko, who was murdered by radiation poisoning in London in 2006.

Britain has also been one of the most fervent supporters of Western sanctions against Moscow over Russia's role in the Ukraine crisis.

When May became prime minister in July, following the resignation of David Cameron, Putin said he was ready for "constructive dialogue" with the new British leader.

The Kremlin strongman had accused the British government of being "overconfident" and "superficial" in the June referendum that saw the UK vote to split from the European Union, a decision which cost Cameron his job.

Putin warned that the move to leave the EU "will have consequences for the United Kingdom, for all of Europe and for us, of course."

Many observers have said that Brexit could play into Putin's hands as he has been accused of trying to drive a wedge between EU members.
Forests in and around Madhya Pradesh capital lack caring capacity and necessary prey base, forcing the tigers to move out of their natural habitat and come close to human habitations in cities, according to a letter written by a top forest official to his senior.

The observation has been made in a letter by a senior forest official to Principal Chief Conservator of Forests of the state which mentioned movement of a tigress and its four cubs, besides other big cats, outside the forests of Bhopal and neighbouring Sehore area.

These tigers have come from Ratapani sanctuary, which is about 30 kms from here. They have been spotted in outer areas of Bhopal and Sehore which are frequented by people.

"The caring capacity and prey-predator base in the forests of these areas do not look appropriate. Kindly take appropriate steps in managing the tigers," reads the letter, a copy of which was received in response to an RTI query filed by wildlife activist Ajay Dubey.

Dubey said it is worrying to know that tigers are coming out of these forests due to lack of caring capacity and prey.

"We want the government to constitute a fact finding team to check reasons behind tigers' movement out of their natural habitat. It appears that illegal activities like mining inside these forests is disturbing their natural habitat," he claimed.

Dubey said the state government must notify Ratapani sanctuary as a tiger reserve which will go a long way in conservation of the big cats.

There are six tiger reserves in Madhya Pradesh--Kanha, Bandhavgarh, Panna, Bori-Satpura, Sanjay-Dubri and Pench-- which have about 308 big cats. There are about 2,226 tigers in the country, as per 2014 census.

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A former minister and independent MLA from Udhampur Pawan Gupta has demanded the creation of a separate state so that the political and economical aspirations of the people from the region are not held hostage by the Kashmir-based leaders.

" people have their own political, social and economic aspirations which cannot be met under the failed 70-year old Kashmir-dominated dispensations," Pawan Gupta said.

"The people of reject the demands of Kashmiri leaders ranging from autonomy to self-rule to freedom or merger with Pakistan," he said in a statement issued in Jammu on Sunday.

"Kashmir has seen radicals, who in the words of PDP MP Muzaffar Hussain Baig, are not fighting for autonomy or self rule, but for a Muslim state," he added.

He said the existing constitutional and administrative structure in the state is unitary and Kashmir-centric.

"It is a structure that the Kashmiri leadership exploits to the hilt and on a daily basis to its own benefit and to the benefit of the Kashmiri people. It is aimed at depriving Jammu and Ladakh and the minorities of their legitimate due share in state's political economic and social progress. This is slavery of the worst form so not acceptable to us," he said.
Four opposition MPs of all-party delegation today broke away from the group and decided to reach out to separatists by meeting them separately.

CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury, CPI leader D Raja, JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav and RJD's Jay Prakash Narayan left the venue where the all-party delegation headed by Home Minister Rajnath Singh was meeting various groups and individuals and proceeded to meet hardline Hurriyat leader Seyd Ali Shah Geelani at his residence where he is under house arrest.

The MPs are also likely to meet another Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz Umer Farooq who is in Chashme Shahi sub-jail and JKLF chief Yaseen Malik and JK Democratic Liberation Front leader Shabir Shah, who are under detention at BSF camp in Humama. They are also likely to meet former Hurriyat chief Abdul Ghani Bhat.

They will be meeting Hurriyat leaders in individual capacity as an effort to reach out to separatists.

Separatists have shunned the offer of coming to discussion table.

A day after Mehbooba invited separatists in her capacity as PDP chief, separatist leaders Geelani, the Mirwaiz and Malik had issued a joint statement here, rubbishing her offer.

"These deceitful methods of crisis management through Parliamentary delegations and Track-Two only prolong the sufferings of the people and can't take the place of a genuine transparent agenda-based dialogue to address the core issue of the peoples' right to self-determination in J-K.

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Ending a week-long tussle, the JDA today opened the main entrance to the Raj Mahal Palace heritage hotel following a meeting between Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raj and Rajmata Padmini Devi, a member of the erstwhile royal family of Jaipur which owns the property.

A committee of ministers was formed to look into the matter after a meeting took place between Devi and Raje last night.

Followingthe committee's recommendation, the orders to open the seal were issued and the gates were reopened.

Enforcement officer Kishore Singh opened the gates today morning.

The BJP appears to have stepped in to resolve the tussle after the 'Rajmata' took out a rally against the JDA on September 1 that spilled the confrontation between Raje government and the erstwhile royal family out in the open.

Senior BJP leader Saudan Singh met Raje and Devi's daughter Diya Kumari, also a party MLA, two days ago to discuss the issue.

Notably, in the protest rally taken out by the 'Rajmata', Diya was not present but her husband and son had participated in the march.

The gates of the heritage hotel were sealed over a week ago by the JDA which claimed that the gates were on a land owned by the government, a move which Devi said had humiliated the family.

The former Jaipur royal family had moved the court in this regard.

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Germany's anti-migrant populists made a strong showing at state polls today, scoring ahead of Chancellor Angela Merkel's party as voters punish the German leader over her liberal refugee policy.

The xenophobic Alternative for Germany (AfD) obtained around 21 percent in its first bid for seats in the regional parliament of Mecklenburg-Western Vorpommern, according to exit polls shortly after voting ended.

Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, meanwhile, garnered just 19 percent in its worst ever showing in the north-eastern state, while the Social Democrats maintained top place with around 30 percent.

Calling it a "proud result," Leif-Erik Holm, AfD's lead candidate said, "And the cream of the cake is that we have left Merkel's CDU behind us... Maybe that is the beginning of the end of Merkel's time as chancellor."



Although the former Communist state is Germany's poorest and least populous, it carries a symbolic meaning as it is home to Merkel's constituency Stralsund.

The polls are also held exactly a year after the German leader made the momentous decision to let in tens of thousands of Syrian and other migrants marooned in eastern European countries.

Although she won praise at first, the optimism has given way to fears over how Europe's biggest economy will manage to integrate the million people who arrived last year alone.

Her decision has left her increasingly isolated in Europe, and exposed her to heavy criticism at home, including from her own conservative allies.

In the sprawling farming and coastal state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where economic regeneration and jobs used to top residents' concerns, the issue of refugees and integration has become the deciding factor for one in two voters.

"I am voting AfD. The main reason is the question over asylum-seekers," said a pensioner and former teacher who declined to be named.

"A million refugees have come here. There is money for them, but no money to bring pensions in the east to the same levels as those of the west," he said, referring to the lower retirement payments that residents of former Communist states receive compared to those in the west.

Compared to other parts of Germany, the northeastern state hosts just a small proportion of migrants under a quota system based on states' income and population -- having taken in 25,000 asylum seekers last year.

Most of them have already decided to abandon the state, preferring to head "where there are jobs, people and shops," said Frieder Weinhold, CDU candidate.

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UK-based spirits maker William Grant & Sons is eyeing over 30 per cent of the single malt Scotch whisky market in India in the next six to seven years as it plans to offer more products and expand reach in the country.

It is presently having around one-fourth of the Indian single malt Scotch whiskey market through its brand Glenfiddich.

The current size of the Indian single malt Scotch whisky is around 1.5 lakh cases. A case contains nine bottles of one litre whiskey.

"Last year, Glenfiddich was about 40,000 cases out of that. We are growing our market share here. Earlier, we were around 25,000 cases and we are looking at double digit growth," William Grant & Sons India Head of Marketing Shweta Jain told PTI.

On being asked by when it would have one-third of the market share, she said: "probably in the next 6 to 7 years".

The whisky maker has several brands in its Indian portfolio including Balvenie, Monkey Shoulder, Hendrick's Gin, Grant's and other varietals from Glenfiddich.

The company is also introducing some of its leading brands from its global portfolio.

"Step by step we are doing it. In the last quarter of the previous year, we had introduced Monkey Shoulder and many more is going to come in," Jain added.

According to her, now Indians are travelling globally and are exploring the popular brands across the globe.

"Faster adaption are happening to various pallets, so we are closely watching that as we want to participate in that opportunity. We want to bring the very best we have to offer globally into the country as well," she said, adding that appetite for nicer quality drink among Indians is going up.

William Grant & Sons is having a triple digit growth in India as it is introducing new brands here.

"We are introducing varietals also. Its not just one expression. Within Glenfiddich, we introduced 26 years old and 21 years old recently. Within Grants more and more expression are coming in. We have small presence for many years but we are now wanting to expand," she added.

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A case was today registered against a man for allegedly firing in the air during his marriage ceremony in Falaknuma area here, police said.

Police acted on the incident after some local TV channels aired a video showing the bridegroom firing two revolvers a few days back.

"We are verifying when the incident happened. Investigations are on," Assistant Commissioner of Police (Falaknuma Division) Mohd Abdul Bari told PTI.

"We have registered an FIR under relevant sections of Arms Act in the connection with the incident...We are in the process of identifying the bridegroom, who opened fire in the air and will soon catch him," he said.

As per TV visuals, the bridegroom was holding two revolvers and fired 10 rounds in the air, the ACP said.

"Once he is taken into custody, we will interrogate him and ascertain from whom he got the weapons," he added.

Further probe is on into the incident.

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The Gurdaspur district administration today announced a holiday in Batala sub-division here on September 8 on account of Guru Nanak Dev's marriage anniversary.

The 529th marriage anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev, the founder of the Sikh religion, falls on that day.

Gurdaspur District Magistrate Pardeep Sabharwal has ordered closure of state government offices and government as well as private educational institutions, including polytechnics and ITIs, in Batala sub-division on September 8, an official release said here.

However, the examinations of Punjab School Education Board and the universities would be conducted as usual, it said.

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Mizoram Home Minister R Lalzirliana today asserted that the state government would not agree even if the Manipur-based Hmar People's Convention (Democratic) continued to demand a separate autonomous district council comprising areas adjoining Manipur, in the ongoing peace talks.

Lalzirliana said that he wished that the current peace talks between the state government and the HPC (D) would be successful in solving the insurgency problem hitting the north eastern part of the state for years.

The negotiation between the two sides was held on August 10 in Aizawl and the second round is scheduled to be held during mid-September or third week of this month when the HPC (D) delegation comprising overground Hmar leaders are slated to table their political demands.

The parleys between the two sides reached a stalemate in 2013 over the period of extension of the Suspension of Operations (SoO) with the Hmar militant group accusing the state government of being insincere in finding a permanent solution to the Hmar issue.

In the first round of talks, the HPC (D) delegation members led by Lalthaliana comprised former President of Hmar Inpui (Hmar Supreme House) John Pulamte, President of Hmar Students Association (HSA) Lalthlamuana Hmar, General Secretary of Hmar Inpui Francis Songate, Rohringa and Thanglianchhunga.

The state government delegation led by Additional Secretary for Home Lalbiakzama comprised Joint Secretary for home Lalhriatpuia, SP, CID (SB) Rodingliana Chawngthu and OSD (Home) David H Lalthangliana.

(Reopens CES1)



The HPC (D) organised a meeting of leaders of



different Hmar organisations at Churachanpur in Manipur on August 13 which endorsed the peace talks between the Mizoram government and the HPC (D).

The said meeting constituted a Drafting Committee to chalk out the demands of the Hmar people to be presented when the two sides meet again at the negotiating table during September.

Social activist Dr. John H. Pulamte was appointed as Convener of the Drafting Committee with the other members being - Lalhalien (Secretary, Hmar Inpui or Hmar Supreme House) Dr. Vanlalnghak (Speaker, Hmar Inpui), Francis Songate (General Secretary, Hmar Inpui), Lalthlamuana Hmar (Speaker, Hmar Students Association) and David Buhril (Social Activist).

Except for Dr Vanlalnghak and David Buhril, all the members of the Drafting Committee including its Convener are delegation members in the current peace talks.
The Himachal Pradesh government will spend Rs 2,292 crore for providing irrigation and drinking water facilities besides strengthening the network of educational and health institutions across the state.

Addressing a public meeting at Baddi in Solan district after inaugurating a number of developmental projects, Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh said his government was focusing on all-round development in the state.

"The government has given top priority to education and is endeavouring to provide quality education to children, nearer their homes and as a result, the enrollment of students is nearly 100 per cent in primary and elementary schools," he said.

"We will open more educational institutions wherever required after taking into consideration the strength of the students," he added.

Claiming all the panchayats had access to roads, electricity, potable water, irrigation and health facilities, Singh said efforts were afoot to link every village with motorable road.

He urged people to adopt organic farming, horticulture, floriculture and vegetable production by taking advantage of modern techniques.

"Low cost and high productivity in farm sector would benefit the farmers. A Rs 1,115 crore Horticulture Development project is also being implemented in the state with World Bank funding," he said.

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The iconic 3.18-million-year-old human ancestor, Lucy, may have died of injuries sustained after falling from a tree, according to a new study.

Lucy, an ancient specimen of Australopithecus afarensis, is among the oldest, most complete skeletons of any adult, erect-walking human ancestor.

Since her discovery in the Afar region of Ethiopia in 1974, Lucy has been at the centre of a vigorous debate about whether this ancient species also spent time in the trees.

"It is ironic that the fossil at the centre of a debate about the role of arborealism in human evolution likely died from injuries suffered from a fall out of a tree," said lead author John Kappelman, professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the US.

Studying Lucy and her scans, Kappelman noticed something unusual: The end of the right humerus was fractured in a manner not normally seen in fossils, preserving a series of sharp, clean breaks with tiny bone fragments and slivers still in place.

"This compressive fracture results when the hand hits the ground during a fall, impacting the elements of the shoulder against one another to create a unique signature on the humerus," said Kappelman.

"The injury was consistent with a four-part proximal humerus fracture, caused by a fall from considerable height when the conscious victim stretched out an arm in an attempt to break the fall," said Stephen Pearce, an orthopedic surgeon at Austin Bone and Joint Clinic.

Kappelman observed similar but less severe fractures at the left shoulder and other compressive fractures throughout Lucy's skeleton including a pilon fracture of the right ankle, a fractured left knee and pelvis, and even more subtle evidence such as a fractured first rib - "a hallmark of severe trauma" - all consistent with fractures caused by a fall.

Without any evidence of healing, Kappelman concluded the breaks occurred perimortem, or near the time of death.

Kappelman argued that because of her small size - about 3 feet 6 inches and 27kg - Lucy probably foraged and sought nightly refuge in trees.

In comparing her with chimpanzees, Kappelman suggested Lucy probably fell from a height of more than 40 feet, hitting the ground at more than 56km per hour.

Based on the pattern of breaks, Kappelman hypothesised that she landed feet-first before bracing herself with her arms when falling forward, and "death followed swiftly."



Kappelman conjectured that because Lucy was both terrestrial and arboreal, features that permitted her to move efficiently on the ground may have compromised her ability to climb trees, predisposing her species to more frequent falls.

The study appears in the journal Nature.

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Pakistan Tahreek-e-Insaf Chairman today said Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's name should be placed on Exit Control List (ECL) by the Supreme court, till the probe into his family members' off shore holdings revealed in the Panama Papers concludes.

He was addressing a big rally in Lahore, organised to target the Prime Minister on alleged corruption.

"Nawaz Sharif's name should be placed on ECL till the conclusion of the probe into his family members' off shore holdings revealed in the Panama Papers. The Supreme Court should order placing his name on the ECL," Khan said, adding, Sharif will be in jail when he comes to power.

further said his party would march towards Sharif's Raiwind residence after Eidul Azha (this month) if he (Nawaz) fails to respond his four questions about making assets abroad.

"Nawaz must tell the Pakistani nation how he made billions of rupees and then transferred it abroad. How much tax he paid on the money through which he purchased apartments in London," he said.

Khan said if Nawaz Sharif thinks he will get away from Panama Leaks, he is seriously mistaken. "Panamagate will not leave Nawaz Sharif," he said.

Khan also urged the heads of National Accountability Bureau (NAB), Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) and Federal Investigation to act and start probe against Nawaz Sharif and his family members for their off-shore holdings. He also declared Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) a B-team of ruling PML-N.

He said Nawaz Sharif wants the Panama Papers issue to be investigated according to laws dictated by his government. "Along with militant terrorism, Pakistan is also facing economic terrorism," he said, adding the PML-N is destroying the institutions to avoid accountability.

"I warn the monarchy of Sharifs that our protest is peaceful, so they better not provoke us," he said.

also praised Army Chief General Raheel Sharif for refusing to accept extension of his tenure and the new office of field marshal. "Nawaz Sharif tried to bribe Gen Raheel by offering him extension and the office of field marshal but he refused. We salute Gen Raheel," Imran Khan said.

Gen Raheel's tenure is completing this November.
Two Indian-origin brothers, who were declared as Britain's richest family this year, were today said to be close to clinching a whopping 5 billion pound deal to sell a stake in one of the world's biggest computer hosting networks to a Chinese consortium.

Mumbai-born brothers - David and Simon Reuben - are in advanced talks to sell half of their UK based company Global Switch, which runs data centres in locations ranging from London to Hong Kong and Singapore, according to The Sunday Times.

Global Switch's two centres in Canary Wharf, east London, are together the biggest in Europe. They manage servers for a range of Wall Street banks and Sprint, the US wireless internet provider.

The Chinese consortium is led by Daily Tech, a data centre giant run by its founder Li Qiang. Daily Tech, which hosts server space for the likes of Alibaba, is leading a dozen other Asian investors, including Avic Trust, a private financial subsidiary of the state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China.

Data centres form the backbone of the internet and the banking system. They are hi-tech, high-security warehouses that host servers on behalf of financial institutions, governments and telecoms providers.

They are equipped with sophisticated cooling, power and security systems to prevent blackouts or data breaches.

Under the terms being discussed, the newspaper reports that the Chinese could take a 50 per cent stake in Global Switch in the next few weeks, with the possibility of buying the other 50 per cent from the Reubens' Aldersgate Investments at a later date.

The potential deal is understood to value Global Switch, which has 10 data centres, at about 5.2 billion pounds, including debt. The new shareholders will help fund an expansion in Asia, and the existing management will stay in place.

Their talks have raised some security concerns over the sale of the data centres headquartered in the UK to the Chinese, leading to calls for UK security services to vet the deal.

Labour peer Admiral Lord West, a former security minister, said the prospect of the deal alarmed him.

"I have a nervousness about the Chinese getting more and more involved in large chunks of our digital infrastructure,"he said.

A spokesperson for Global Switch said the new Chinese investors will have no role in its management or day-to-day running and will have no access to any customers' data.

The Reubens were born in India to a wealthy Iraqi-Jewish family before moving to Britain in the 1950s and made their fortune in metals and property.They had topped 'The Sunday Times' 2016 Rich List with a fortune of 13.1 billion pounds.

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To celebrate the canonisation of Mother Teresa as a saint, IndiaPost today released a commemorative postage stamp on her.

Union Minister of State for Communications Manoj Sinha unveiled the postage stamp during a ceremony at the Divine Child High School here, an official statement said.

Bishop Agnelo Gracias and Sister Rubella, a representative from Missionaries of Charity, were present at the ceremony.

Teresa, who worked for the destitute in Kolkata and became a global icon of Christian charity, was declared a saint by Pope Francis at the Vatican today.

Her elevation to Roman Catholicism's celestial pantheon came in a canonisation mass in St Peter's square in the Vatican that was presided over by Pope Francis in the presence of 100,000 pilgrims.

"For the honour of the Blessed Trinity... We declare and define Blessed Teresa of Calcutta (Kolkata) to be a Saint and we enrol her among the Saints, decreeing that she is to be venerated as such by the whole Church," the pontiff said in Latin.

The ceremony came a day before the 19th anniversary of Teresa's death in Kolkata, the Indian city where she spent nearly four decades tending to the poorest of the poor.

Teresa spent all her adult life in India, first teaching, then tending to the dying poor.

It was in the latter role, at the head of her now worldwide order that Teresa became one of the most famous women on the planet.

Born to Kosovan Albanian parents in Skopje - then part of the Ottoman empire, now the capital of Macedonia - she won the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize and was revered around the world as a beacon for the Christian values of self-sacrifice and charity.

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IOC employees of the Bongaingaon Refinery, Indian Oil Officers Association Bongaingaon unit and Bongaingaon Refinery Employees Union today donated Rs 16,89,313 to the Chief Minister's Relief Fund.

The employees handed over a demand draft to Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal here for relief to the victims of the recent devastating floods in the state.

The Chief Minister thanked IOCL employees for their generous contribution which would help in rehabilitating the flood victims, an official release said.

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A trial court, which has sentenced two convicts in the 2009 Jigisha Ghosh murder case to death, has sent the case file to the Delhi High Court for confirmation of the capital punishment.

Additional Sessions Judge Sandeep Yadav has sent the case record relating to the conviction and death sentence of Ravi Kapoor and Amit Shukla to the high court, court sources said.

It is mandatory for the trial court to refer a death penalty case to a high court for confirmation of sentence within 30 days of the pronouncement of the verdict.

Yadav had on July 14 held the duo guilty on various counts, including the murder of 28-year-old IT executive Jigisha Ghosh.

The court while sentending the two to death here on August 22, said the girl was killed in a "cold-blooded, inhuman and cruel manner" and "brutally mauled to death".

It had said the magnitude and brutality exhibited by the convicts made the case 'rarest of rare', warranting capital punishment for Kapoor and Shukla. The third offender Baljeet Malik was given reprieve from the gallows for his good conduct in jail.

The two have not yet challenged the trial court judgement. However, Malik through his counsel Amit Kumar, has moved the high court challenging his conviction and sentence of life imprisonment by the trial court.

Malik in his appeal, has stated that the trial court has "failed to appreciate that there has been contradictions and discrepancies in the depositions of the prosecution witnesses (PWs) and, therefore conviction and the sentence awarded to him is liable to be set aside".

"The trial court has failed to appreciate that the prosecution has planted PW-2... As a last seen witness with intent to falsely proving the presence of the appellant in the company of deceased (Jigisha) at about 4.45 AM on March 18, 2009 at SBI ATM at Mahipalpur.

"The presence of PW-2, who has been falsely shown as a last seen witness, is extremely improbable and doubtful, and, therefore his deposition with regard to being last seen witness cannot be considered credible and probable evidence." the appeal has said.

The court had also imposed varying fines on the convicts,



with Kapoor being slapped with a fine of Rs 1.2 lakh due to his incapacity to pay, while Shukla and Malik were directed to pay Rs 2.8 lakh and Rs 5.8 lakh respectively as the pre-sentencing report suggested they were financially stronger.

The trio are also facing trial for the murder of TV journalist Soumya Viswanathan, killed a year before Jigisha.

The court had said leniency cannot be shown to these convicts as there was a rise of gruesome crimes against women which needed to be dealt with in an appropriate sentence.

It had also directed that out of the total fine of Rs 9.8 lakh, Rs six lakh be paid to the parents of the victim, and an adequate compensation amount be decided by the District Legal Service Authority (South).

It had on July 14 convicted the three men, saying it was "abundantly clear" that they had committed the crime.

It had held the three men guilty under several sections of IPC, including 302 (murder), 364 (abducting for murder), 201 (destruction of evidence), 394 (voluntarily causing hurt in committing robbery), 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating) and 471 (using as genuine a forged document).

The additional sessions judge, however, held that the charge of criminal conspiracy (120-B of IPC) could not be proved against them.

The police had filed the charge sheet in the case in June 2009, stating that Jigisha's post-mortem report revealed that she was killed by smothering. The trial in the case began in April 2010.

Recovery of the weapon allegedly used in Jigisha's murder had led to cracking of the murder case of Soumya Vishwanathan, who was a journalist with a channel.

Soumya was shot dead on September 30, 2008 while she was returning home in her car from office in the wee hours.

The police had claimed robbery as the motive behind the killings of both Jigisha and Soumya.
JNU has revoked the suspension of a professor against whom action was taken in July following allegations of financial irregularities, and penalised him by withholding one increment in his salary.

Ashish Agnihotri, professor at JNU's Centre of Languages and Vice President of JNU Teachers Association (JNUTA), was suspended by the university following complaints that he claimed LTC and medical reimbursements of over Rs 50,000 in respect of his parents by submitting false certificates.

According to sources, the Executive Council of the JNU in its recent meeting decided to award the penalty of stopping one increment without cumulative effect to Agnihotri.

Representations were also made by certain quarters to HRD ministry, raising complaints against the professor and demanding institution of an inquiry against him.

The university had then ordered an inquiry and the Executive Council decided the penalty on the basis of the report.

The JNU Teachers Association (JNUTA) had come out in his support alleging that the administration was indulging in a "witch-hunt" of teachers and asked for revocation of his suspension as the professor had accepted his "unintentional lapse".

When contacted, Agnihotri refused to comment on the issue.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Job seekers have become more cautious while considering offers from startups as it presents substantial risk to their long-term goals, according to experts.

"With the premier tech school IIT Bombay blacklisting nine startups, job seekers have become more cautious before accepting offers from them.

"There could be more job seekers declining offers from these companies as they will weigh the substantial risk they need to take while making such career moves as they consider their long-term professional goals," hiring consultancy Michael Page's Director Ankit Agarwala told PTI.

Recently, IIT Bombay had blacklisted nine startups for one year as a penalty for various violations, including revoking offers to some graduates.

Startups are generally hiring cautiously and focusing mainly on critical or essential roles that will directly contribute to the productivity of the organisation, Agarwala said.

"Compared to the previous year, we are seeing tighter control on head count expenditure... There is a strategic move from firms to hire mainly for key roles instead of undergoing large scale expansion," he added.

It will mean that these startups will need to work harder in attracting talent in order to convince senior and high-potential candidates to come onboard, he said.

Echoing a similar view, TeamLease Assistant Vice President Sudeep Sen said that with time to come, startups will be cautious to hire and the incumbents will be doing deeper scrutiny as well.

"The onus would be on the startups to have a clear business plan, including reliable funding sources, to build the confidence of senior candidates in the business and financial stability of the organisation," he pointed out.

GlobalHunt Managing Director Sunil Goel said top institutes want to give a very good start to their students, which they think should not be measured only on salary offered but also validity and assurance to honour the offer letter and sustainability of the job.

The IIT-Bombay ban on nine startups would have about 15-20



per cent impact on other premier institutes inviting such companies into their campuses, Sen said.

"Such companies have to pass through acid test of 'start up employer qualifier', where valid business plans, long-term stay, return on investment (ROI) and investors, among others, will be scrutinised," he added.

Moreover, the millennials are still excited about startups as they get multi-activity experience in a very short time, contrary to a structured system at the initial stage of their career, GlobalHunt's Goel felt.

However, Goel added that good business models with decent and sizeable investment back-ups are likely to attract the pool of best talent available and will continue to grow at 15-20 per cent in coming years.
Thousands of Kashmiri Hindu employees who migrated to Jammu following mob attacks on their transit colonies in Kashmir, on Sunday held a protest rally against the state and the Central governments for not reaching out to the community.

As their protest entered the 54th day, they wore black bands and took out a march demanding registration of an FIR and compensation to affected employees besides a high-level dialogue with both the Central and the state governments.

"Both the governments are begging the separatists to hold talks with all-party delegation but they have failed to reach out to these Kashmiri pandit employees of Valley and not even a single minister or top officer has reached out to them," chairman of All Party Migrant Coordination Coommittee (APMCC), Vinood Pandita said.

" cannot be made sacrificial goat by the Central government. We will not tolerate any talks with separatists," he added.

The Kashmiri pandit employees, who were working in various government departments under the Prime Minister's rehabilitation package in the Valley, returned to Jammu after their transit camps were attacked by stone-pelting mobs in the wake of the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani on July 8.

The protesters demanded disbursement of their pending salaries, and forming of a comprehensive return and rehabilitation programme for entire Kashmiri Pandit community in the valley before their return resume duty.

"These employees have been sitting on protest for over 50 days. The governments are unmoved as if the Kashmiri pandit community does not exist," said All State Kashmiri Pandit Conference President, Ravinder Raina.

"The Central and state governments failed to protect these Kashmiri pandit employees from mob attacks. They were forced to migrate from there. Instead of reaching out to them and give them confidence, they are left feeling unwanted," he added.
Six people, including an Indian, have been arrested by Sri Lankan navy with over 2 kilograms of heroin in their possession, prompting the country to step up its surveillance on its northern seas to prevent smuggling mainly from South India.

The navy arrested five Sri Lankans and an Indian yesterday from the northern district of Mannar's Pallimunai with over 2 kilograms of heroin.

The navy's northern Commander Rear Admiral Piyal de Silva said today coastal operations have been stepped up due to increased detection of illegal transfers of mostly Kerala ganja (cannabis).

"We have detected 612 kg of Kerala Ganja coming to Sri Lanka from India during the last 18 months," de Silva said.

"The biggest threat is protecting our fishing resources; we have increased the number of surveillance craft," he said.

He said the navy had also arrested a boat last week carrying 5.5 kg of gold to India valued at 35 million Sri Lanka rupees.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Sri Lanka's envoy to Malaysia was today mobbed by a group of protestors allegedly linked to the LTTE after he refused to divulge the details of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa who is on a visit to the country.

The attack on High Commissioner Ibrahim Ansar at the Kuala Lumpur international airport was allegedly carried out by the LTTE sympathisers, who were protesting against the visit of Rajapaksa, under whose leadership the Lankan troops defeated the Tamil Tiger rebels ending the nearly three decade-long civil war.

Rajapaksa is on a visit to Malaysia to attend a conference and is scheduled to return to Lanka tomorrow.

"The Government of Sri Lanka condemns this act of violence on Sri Lanka's High Commissioner Ibrahim Ansar in Malaysia, in the strongest terms. The High Commissioner is receiving medical attention," the foreign ministry said.

Speaking from Kuala Lumpur, the opposition legislator Lohan Ratwatte told the local media that Ansar was seeing off the joint opposition leader Dinesh Gunawardana at the airport when he was attacked allegedly by the LTTE sympathisers.

Sri Lankan High Commission in Kuala Lumpur is coordinating with local law enforcement authorities to identify the perpetrators and assist with the investigation.

"The Foreign Affairs Ministry in Sri Lanka is seized of the seriousness of this incident and is taking all necessary action in this regard through diplomatic channels," it said in a statement.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Chinese tech major has become the second-biggest smartphone brand in terms of value ahead of Apple, Micromax and Oppo with a market share of 9.1 per cent, according to the research firm IDC.

Besides, the market share in terms of units sold of the company surged in the second quarter, making it the third largest smartphone brand in India, with share of 7.7 per cent, the report by IDC said.

According to IDC's recent report released this month, both Motorola (now owned by Lenovo) and combine emerged as the number two player in the second quarter of the financial year 2015-16.

had acquired Motorola in October 2014 from Google.

With a growth of 24.5 per cent over the last year, Lenovo group captured 7.7 per cent of market share by units sold while the market grew by only 3.7 per cent, according to the research firm's quarterly mobile phone tracker.

"This is a huge milestone achieved by us, which has motivated and encouraged us further to go against all odds by creating meaningful and innovative, technologically-advanced products that enhance the consumer mobile experience," said Sudhin Mathur, Director-Smartphones, Lenovo India.

The company recently launched a series of smartphones like, K5 PLUS, ZUK Z1, Moto G4 Plus, and Moto X Play, among others in India.
US President believes that a majority of Americans specially youngsters "completely reject" the kind of positions taken by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

"He (Trump) has been able to appeal to a certain group of folks who feel left out or are worried about the rapidity of demographic change, social change who, in some cases, have very legitimate concerns around the economy and feeling left behind. But that's not the majority of America," Obama said in an interview aired on CNN.

"And if you talk to younger people, the next generation of Americans, they completely reject the kinds of positions that he's taking," Obama said in the interview which was recorded before his travel to Asia.

"So, you know, we have to take it seriously. I think that any time we hear intolerance, any time that we hear policy measures that are contrary to our values, banning certain classes of people because of who they are or what they look like, what faith they practice, then we have to be pretty hard about saying no to that," Obama said.

Obama said America will do that this time and he was optimistic about it. However, the US President said there was a need to pay close attention to what is going on.

Dwelling into history, Obama said there has been a long tradition in the United States of inclusion, immigration diversity.

"But also people, once they're included in what they consider to be the real America, worrying about outsiders contaminating, polluting, messing up a good thing," he said.

"That's not new. That dates back to the beginning of this country. What I'm always reminding people is that, although you'll see bumps...Of anti-immigrant sentiment directed at the Irish or Southern Europeans as opposed to Northern Europeans, or the Chinese, or today, Latinos or Muslims -- the long-term trend is people get absorbed, people get assimilated."

"We benefit from this incredible country in which the measure of your patriotism and how American you are is not the colour of your skin, your last name, your faith, but rather your adherence to a creed. Your belief in certain principles and values," Obama said.

"I don't expect that that's going to change simply because Mr Trump has gotten a little more attention than usual," he added.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has gifted a Bible in Bengali bound in Baluchuri silk to Pope Francis at Vatican City after the canonisation ceremony of Mother Teresa.

In a tweet, the Chief Minister who is in the Vatican to attend the function, said Missionaries of Charity's Superior General Sister Prema and Archbishop of Kolkata will hand over the holy book to the Pope.

"Sr Prema & Kolkata Archbishop met @MamataOfficial today. This Bible bound in Baluchuri to b handed over to @Pontifex," Banerjee tweeted.

Banerjee is leading a 12-member official delegation to the Vatican as a guest of the Missionaries.

The Chief Minister and her delegates including MPs Sudip Bandopadhyay and Derek O'Brien were seen walking to the venue of the canonisation ceremony by singing songs of Rabindranath Tagore.

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"Team Bengal walked all the way from the hotel with songs on our lips and I was ushered in the venue in a very special way by Sister Prema, Head of the Missionaries of Charity and was seated with them," Banerjee said on Facebook.

She said it was a moment of overwhelming pride, a moment to once again dedicate ourselves to the cause of humanity.

"I feel immensely blessed to have witnessed the canonisation of our beloved Mother in the Vatican today," Banerjee said.
The AAP government has informed the that an "action plan" on making buildings here compliant with the Building Code, 2005 for seismic zone-IV was still awaited from the three municipal corporations.

In its affidavit filed before a bench of justices Badar Durrez Ahmed and Ashutosh Kumar, the Delhi government said despite its "sincere efforts" to comply with the court's earlier directions, the matter was still lying with the three corporations.

The court had earlier directed the government to inform it about the steps taken for finalising the building bye-laws and for taking action for making the structures compliant with stipulations under Building Code, 2005 for seismic zone-IV.

"Despite all above exercise, the reply/action plan is still awaited from all the three municipal corporations of Delhi i.e. NDMC, EDMC and SDMC. Hence, another letter dated July 20, 2016 has been again sent to all the three MCDs for submission of the requisite action plans. The action plans in the prescribed common lines are still awaited," the affidavit said.

It further said, "It is clear that all sincere efforts have been made by this department (Directorate of Local Bodies in Urban Development Department) for compliance of the orders of the court and the matter is lying with all the three MCDs i.e. NDMC, EDMC and SDMC."

The court is hearing a petition by advocate Arpit Bhargava questioning how safe were buildings in Delhi if a major earthquake hits the city. The matter is now listed for hearing on September 7.

The court had earlier observed that Delhi falls in a high risk seismic zone IV and had sought action plans from various authorities to ensure that buildings in the city survived an earthquake.
Germany's Chancellor said on Sunday that she hoped Ankara would soon lift a ban on German lawmakers visiting a Turkish airbase that was imposed amid a row over the Armenian genocide.

Turkey last month stopped German MPs from visiting their troops stationed at the Incirlik base in southern Turkey, which is used to launch coalition raids against Islamic State (IS) jihadists in Syria.

After with the meeting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the G20 summit in China, Merkel said she was hopeful of progress on the issue.

"I think it is possible that in the coming days we will have good news about this completely justified request," Merkel said.

The airbase ban came with tensions running high between Berlin and Ankara over a resolution by the lower house of the German parliament calling the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman forces during World War I a genocide.

Turkey vehemently rejects the genocide claim, arguing it was a collective tragedy in which both Turks and Armenians died.

The German government has stressed the Bundestag vote was non-binding, a move widely interpreted as a step to soothe Ankara, a key player in both the fight against IS and the European migrant crisis.
Hollywood star Michael J Fox has put his family vacation home on the market for USD 4.25 million.

The 55-year-old actor, who is best known for his starring role in the "Back to the Future" franchise, has decided to put the property he and his wife Tracy Pollan built in 1997 up for sale, despite previously describing it as his "fantasy" and "the best therapy possible," reported Female First.

The spectacular-looking estate in Sharon, Connecticut, boasts five bedrooms and is situated next door to Tracy's parents and her brother.

The decision to sell the property comes as something of a surprise too, as Fox has previously spoken of how much he has loved spending time there.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Flour mills have inked deals to import 8.25 lakh tonnes of wheat from Australia, France and Ukrain for delivery during this year in view of likely shortfall in domestic output.

Millers' said they can import more wheat if the government reduces import duty on it to 10 per cent from the existing 25 per cent or removes it completely.

Last year too, private flour millers had purchased about 5 lakh tonnes of wheat from Australia for the first time in a decade due to sluggish supply and lower international prices.

"Import deals have already been signed for 8,25,000 tonnes of wheat from Australia, France and Ukraine. These contracts were entered during July-August period. Further contracts are not happening now," Roller Flour Millers' Federation of India Ex-President M K Datta Raj told PTI.

Out of the total quantities contracted, the shipment of 2,50,000 tonnes of wheat has already reached Indian ports and the balance is on the way, he said.

Last month, 60,000 tonnes of Australian wheat and 30,000 tonnes each of Ukrainian and French wheat landed at Tuticorin port in Tamil Nadu, he added.

Millers are importing wheat mainly due to low global prices and a likely shortfall in the domestic output by 5 million tonnes.

"We estimate 2015-16 wheat output to be lower at 85-86 million tonnes and the US Department of Agriculture also says India's output to be lower at 88 million tonnes. But the government has pegged 93.50 million tonnes," Raj said.

Even the government's wheat procurement remained low at 22.9 million tonnes as against the target of 30.5 million tonnes set for the 2016-17 marketing year (April-March). Bulk of the procurement has been done during April-June.

Asked if more imports could take place in the coming months, Raj said, "If the duty is removed, then more wheat will come. Anytime, the government should make a decision on this as wheat stock in its FCI godowns are reducing."



The government is going slow on making a decision on wheat import duty as it is in the process of clearing the 2014-15 stock in Punjab. "If import duty is reduced/removed, nobody will buy this wheat," he added.

The state-owned FCI has a wheat stock of 26.87 million tonnes at present.

Despite drought in over ten states, wheat production has been pegged at 93.50 million tonnes for the 2015-16 crop year (July-June) compared to 86.53 million tonnes in the previous year, according the Agriculture Ministry's fourth advance estimate.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A 16-year-old girl in northwest Delhi's Jahangipuri has alleged that her neighbour has threatened to throw acid on her after she "rejected" his advances, police said today.

The class XI student was stalked by the man, who has been staying in the vicinity of her residence for some time now, a senior police official said.

An FIR has been lodged at Jahangirpuri police station based on the complaint by the girl's parents, he said.

The man accosted and threatened her with an acid attack while she was returning home from school yesterday. The girl then informed her parents about the incident who approached the police.

The girl had filed a case against him earlier also but the accused got bail and starting stalking and threatening her again, he said.

The police is on the lookout for the accused who is absconding, the official said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today met Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad bin Salman here and held discussions on UNSC reform and on enhancing bilateral ties in various areas including energy and maritime security.

In the meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit, Modi said the Saudi Deputy Crown Prince has been a "strong friend of India", sources said.

"They held a detailed discussion on UN Security Council reform, with both leaders emphasising the need for expansion of the UNSC to include more permanent members," they said.

The prime minister called for strengthened partnership with Saudi Arabia in various areas such as maritime security, infrastructure, low-cost housing and energy sector.

He invited greater Saudi investment, mainly through the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF), and sought greater cooperation in infrastructure, particularly modernisation of railway stations, according to the sources.

Modi told the Saudi Deputy Crown Prince India could also become a source of food supply to the oil-rich Gulf Kingdom.

The deputy crown prince, who is the son of Saudi King Salman, holds the key defence and economic policy portfolios.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today met Chinese President Xi Jinping here amid differences between the two countries over a raft of issues, including the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor which runs through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).

The meeting was held this morning on the sidelines of G20 leaders summit at the Hangzhou West Lake State Guesthouse.

The meeting between the two leaders comes in the backdrop of contentious issues including listing of Pakistan-based terrorist organisations in the UN, China stalling India's membership at the elite Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and USD 46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

The two leaders had last met at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit in June in Tashkent and again set to meet in Goa next month on the sidelines of BRICS summit.

China too has been concerned over the close ties of India with the US and the recently signed Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) which will give the militaries of both countries access to each other's facilities for supplies and repairs.

After the meeting, both the leaders will attend the BRICS leaders meeting ahead of the G20 summit to finalise their strategy at the summit.

Modi reached Hangzhou last night after concluding his two day visit in Hanoi. He will also have bilateral meeting with his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull and Saudi Arabia's Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.

He will attend the two day G20 summit to begin later here today. He will also meet British Prime Minister Theresa May and Argentinian President Mauricio Macri in the second and concluding session of the G20, before returning to Delhi.

A meeting between Modi and US President Barack Obama is, however, not on the cards during this trip, officials said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
India today raised its concern with China over the CPEC which runs through PoK, and terrorism "emanating from the region" as Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Chinese President Xi Jinping the two countries need to be "sensitive" to each other's strategic interests.

Asserting that fight against terror should not be motivated by "political considerations", Modi said it is of "paramount importance that we respect each other's aspirations, concerns and strategic interests" to ensure durable bilateral ties.

In the bilateral meeting with Xi ahead of the G20 summit, Modi raised India's concerns over the USD 46 billion China- Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) being laid through PoK.

Besides a host of energy-related projects, the CPEC consists of rail, road and pipelines to ferry oil and gas from Gwadar port to Kashghar in Xinjiang through PoK.

Replying to a question whether the terrorism emanating from the region where the CPEC is being laid through has been discussed, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup told reporters the issue has been raised during the meeting.

Modi said both India and China need to be "sensitive" to each other's strategic interests and called for specific actions to "prevent growth of negative perception".

"As a matter of principle, both countries would have to be sensitive to each other's strategic interests," Swarup said while touching upon broad themes that Modi stressed upon during his nearly 30-minute bilateral with Xi, their eighth meeting.

"In order to promote positive convergence, we would also need to prevent growth of negative perception. For this, the specific actions by both countries would play the major role," he said.

In particular, Modi highlighted that "we have succeeded in maintaining peace and tranquility on the border", he added.

Condemning the recent suicide bomb attack on the Chinese Embassy in Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan, in his opening remarks, Modi said it is yet another proof of the continuing scourge of terrorism.

"The Prime Minister reiterated that our response to terror must not be motivated by political considerations," Swarup said.

On his part, Xi said China is willing to work with India to maintain their "hard-won sound" ties and further boost bilateral cooperation.

"China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound relations and further advance their cooperation", state-run Chinese Xinhua agency quoted Xi as saying.

About the bilateral relations, which experienced turbulence due to differences over a raft of issues, Modi said in order to make the Asian century a reality, the countries of the continent would have to take responsibility.

The meeting came amid differences over including listing of Pakistan-based terrorist organisations in the UN, China stalling India's membership at the elite Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and the CPEC being built through PoK.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to ahead of G20 summit here was aimed at jointly piling pressure on China and to raise their "bargaining chips" with the country, Chinese state media said on Sunday.

"Given the South China Sea issue, Beijing-Hanoi relations have not been smooth over the past years. Negative emotions toward Beijing among the Vietnamese people have also been rising," an article in the state-run Global Times website said.

"Under such a backdrop, Modi's visit to has without doubt made Indians associate the tour with many strategic meanings, believing that New Delhi and Hanoi might jointly pile pressure on Beijing," it said.

"The fundamental reason behind it is the interests of India and . New Delhi and Hanoi both wish to raise their bargaining position while having interactions with China, but neither of them wants direct confrontation with Beijing," it said.

While such a possibility cannot be totally excluded, but it will not play a vital role either, it said.

"India has always been cautious when it comes to directly putting the screw on China. In this regard, the US has never stopped drawing New Delhi over to its side for its rebalance to the Asia-Pacific strategy, but India only showed reluctance toward it and has not responded to Washington actively.

"This has made the White House quite grouchy," it said.

Pointing to various commonalities between India and China which are emerging powers and members of BRICS, the editorial said, "India hopes it can improve its underdeveloped infrastructure with the help of Chinese investments and technology."

Vietnam just witnessed the first visit by an Indian prime minister in the last 15 years.

During the same period, Chinese former president Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, former premier Wen Jiabao, as well as sitting President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang have all paid formal visits to the country.

Some of them even visited Vietnam twice during their time in office, it said.

"Such a comparison can well illustrate what is going on behind Sino-Vietnam ties and Indo-Vietnamese relations," it said.

"For Vietnam, with or without China, cooperating with an emerging power like India is beyond doubt of great value. However, such a bilateral relationship will have only limited influence on China.

"After all, strong support from Washington and Tokyo has not yet worked in piling enough pressure on Beijing as Vietnam hoped, thus, how effective can India's vague support be?" it said.

India extended a $500 million line of credit to Vietnam to deepen defence cooperation and signed 12 agreements including a deal to construct offshore patrol boats during Modi's two-day visit to Vietnam earlier this week.

The two countries also decided to elevate their strategic ties to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership to provide it a new momentum.
Prime Minister on Sunday met Chinese President Xi Jinping here amid differences between the two countries over a raft of issues, including the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) which runs through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).

The meeting was held this morning on the sidelines of the G20 leaders summit at the Hangzhou West Lake State Guest House.

"First engagement in Hangzhou is a meeting with the host. PM @narendramodi meets President Xi Jinping," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted.

The meeting between the two leaders comes in the backdrop of contentious issues, including listing of Pakistan-based terrorist organisations in the United Nations, China stalling India's membership at the elite Nuclear Suppliers Group and the $46 billion CPEC project which runs through PoK.

The two leaders had last met at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Summit in June in Tashkent and are again set to meet in Goa next month on the sidelines of the BRICS summit.

China too has been concerned over the close ties of India with the US and the recently signed Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement, which will give the militaries of both countries access to each other's facilities for supplies and repairs.

After the meeting, both the leaders will attend the BRICS leaders meeting ahead of the G20 summit to finalise their strategy at the summit.

Modi reached Hangzhou on Saturday night after concluding his two-day visit in Hanoi, Vietnam. He will also hold bilateral meetings with his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull and Saudi Arabia's Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.

He will attend the two-day G20 summit to begin here later under the theme of "Strengthening Policy coordination and Breaking a new path for growth".

On Monday, he will take part in the second and concluding session of the G20 and hold bilateral meetings with British Prime Minister Theresa May and Argentinian President Mauricio Macri before returning to Delhi.

A meeting between Modi and US President Barack Obama is, however, not on the cards during this trip, officials said.
All illegal immigrants may not be deported from the US if Donald Trump is elected as the next president of the country, a top aide of Republican presidential candidate said today.

The former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani told the CNN in an interview that decision of the rest of the illegal immigrants would be taken only after all criminal aliens are deported.

This is what Trump said in his major policy speech on immigration early this week, he said.

"The speech is consistent with what he said in the past, and it leaves a very big opening for what will happen with the people that remain here in the US after the criminals are removed and after the border is secure," he said.

"He says in a very, very important sentence, that, at that time, when America is safe, we will be open to all of the options, meaning that Donald Trump, as he expressed in one of his interviews recently, would find it very, very difficult to throw out a family that's been here for 15 years, and they have three children, two of whom are citizens," Giuliani said.

"That is not the kind of America he wants. His main focus of that speech, and I think the reason for the emotion in it was because of all of those mothers who came up whose children were killed by illegal criminal immigrants," he said.

"What he said in the speech is, after we secure the border and after we remove the criminal illegal immigrants, to a large extent -- you're never going to get to 100 per cent -- then and only then can we look at this in a very rational way in which we can look at all the options and be open to all the options," he added.

The former New York Mayor said not all illegal immigrants would have to go back.

"There are other options too. I mean, it's going to depend on the person. Some of these people could have been on welfare for the last 30 years, or taking benefits or cheating. And maybe some of them have to be thrown out, but not necessarily all of them," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
At least 36 passengers including women and children have been killed when their bus collided with a fuel tanker in southern Afghanistan's Zabul province, an official said today.

Gul Islam Seyal, spokesman for the provincial governor in Zabul, said more than 25 others are seriously wounded with some in critical conditions.

The collision took place in Shar-e Safa district, on the main highway linking the capital, Kabul, to the southern city of Kandahar.

Seyal blamed both drivers for being reckless.

He said authorities will transfer critical patients to neighboring Kandahar province.

In May, 52 people were killed on the same highway in Ghazni province in a collision involving two buses and a fuel tanker.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The remains of Jacob Wetterling, an 11-year-old boy kidnapped from a rural Minnesota road nearly 27 years ago, have been identified, authorities said, providing long-awaited answers to a mystery that has captivated residents and sparked changes in sex offender laws.

A masked gunman abducted Jacob in October of 1989 near the boy's home in St Joseph, about 80 miles northwest of Minneapolis. The Stearns County Sheriff's Office confirmed in a statement Saturday that "Jacob Wetterling's remains have been located" and that the Ramsey County medical examiner and a forensic odontologist identified them yesterday.

Additional DNA testing will be conducted and investigators are continuing to evaluate new evidence in the case, the sheriff's office said, adding that authorities expect to be able to provide more details early next week.

A law enforcement official told The Associated Press earlier yesterday that a person of interest in Jacob's abduction took authorities to a field in central Minnesota last week.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing case, said remains and other evidence were recovered and that the remains had been buried.

Jacob's mother, Patty Wetterling, sent a text message to KARE-TV earlier Saturday, saying that Jacob "has been found and our hearts are broken." She did not immediately respond to calls and text messages from The Associated Press.

Jacob was riding his bicycle with his brother and a friend on October 22, 1989, when a masked gunman abducted him. Authorities said the man held on to Jacob and told the other boys to run. Jacob hadn't been seen since, despite extensive searches, tens of thousands of leads and offers of a monetary reward.

No one has been arrested or charged in his abduction, which led to changes in sex-offender registration laws.

But last year, authorities took another look at the case, and were led to Danny Heinrich, a man they called a "person of interest" in Jacob's kidnapping.

Heinrich, 53, of Annandale, denied any involvement in the abduction, and was not charged with that crime. But he has pleaded not guilty to 25 federal child pornography charges and is scheduled to go on trial on those counts in October.

The FBI has said previously that Heinrich matched the general description of a man who assaulted several boys in Paynesville from 1986 to 1988.

Earlier this year, Heinrich's DNA was found on the sweatshirt of a 12-year-old boy who was kidnapped from Cold Spring and sexually assaulted just nine months before Jacob's abduction.

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A protest of a four-state, USD 3.8 billion oil pipeline turned violent after tribal officials said construction crews destroyed American Indian burial and cultural sites on private land in southern North Dakota.

Morton County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Donnell Preskey said four private security guards and two guard dogs were injured after several hundred protesters confronted construction crews yesterday afternoon at the site just outside the Standing Rock Sioux reservation.

One of the security officers was taken to a Bismarck hospital for undisclosed injuries. The two guard dogs were taken to a Bismarck veterinary clinic, Preskey said.

Tribe spokesman Steve Sitting Bear said protesters reported that six people had been bitten by security dogs, including a young child.

At least 30 people were pepper-sprayed, he said. Preskey said law enforcement authorities had no reports of protesters being injured.

There were no law enforcement personnel at the site when the incident occurred, Preskey said. The crowd disbursed when officers arrived and no one was arrested, she said.

The incident occurred within half a mile of an encampment where hundreds of people have gathered to join the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's protest of the oil pipeline that is slated to cross the Missouri River nearby.

The tribe is challenging the Army Corps of Engineers' decision to grant permits for Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners' Dakota Access pipeline, which crosses the Dakotas and Iowa to Illinois, including near the reservation in southern North Dakota.

A federal judge will rule before September 9 whether construction can be halted on the Dakota Access pipeline.

Energy Transfer Partners did not return phone calls and emails from The Associated Press yesterday seeking comment.

The tribe fears it's a project they fear will disturb sacred sites and impact drinking water for thousands of tribal members on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and millions further downstream.

The protest yesterday came one day after the tribe filed court papers saying it found several sites of "significant cultural and historic value" along the path of the proposed pipeline.

Tribal preservation officer Tim Mentz said in court documents that the tribe was only recently allowed to survey private land north of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation.

Mentz said researchers found burials rock piles called cairns and other sites of historic significance to Native Americans.

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One pilgrim was today killed and 15 others were injured when the mini-truck they were travelling on plunged into a deep gorge near Manguwal area here, police said.

The accident took place when around 25 pilgrims were returning from Dera Gur Bad Bagh Singh gurudwara in Himachal Pradesh, they said.

All the injured were rushed to a hospital from where Sarbjit Kaur and Manjit Kaur, residents of Ludhiana, were referred to Chandigarh as their condition turned critical, police said.

The identity of the deceased has not been ascertained yet, they added.

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Alarmed by the growing Indo-US defence ties, Pakistan's cabinet has given the go-ahead for negotiating a long-term defence agreement and security cooperation with its all-weather ally China, a media report said on Sunday.

Pakistan's cabinet in a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on July 15 at the Governor House in Lahore gave the go-ahead for negotiating a long-term defence agreement with China, The Express Tribune reported.

The cabinet considered the summary to initiate negotiations on a draft agreement between Pakistan and China on a long-term strategic framework agreement for enhancing defence and security cooperation in diversified fields.

The cabinet held detailed discussions on the proposed agreement before giving the nod of approval, the report said.

The cabinet was informed that the draft agreement was based on principles of mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity, sovereignty, non-integration and non-interference in each other's internal affairs, equality and cooperation for mutual benefits, and peaceful coexistence for strategic gains in defence and security, including arms and technology transfers.

It was also informed that input from ministries of foreign affairs, interior and defence production as well as the Joint Staff Headquarters had been obtained and incorporated in the draft agreement which was subsequently vetted by the law and justice division.

In April 2015, when Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Pakistan, the two countries agreed that their relationship had acquired greater strategic significance against the backdrop of complex and changing and regional situations.

They agreed to elevate the relationship to the all-weather strategic cooperative partnership.

The reports of defence agreement surfaced a week after the US signed a key logistics agreement with India governing the use of each other's land, air and naval bases for repair and resupply.

Pakistan had called the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement between the US and India as an agreement between the two sovereign states and hoped it would contribute to peace and stability.

"Pakistan would like to see that such arrangements do not contribute to polarising the region by disturbing the strategic balance in South Asia and escalating the arms buildup," Foreign Office spokesperson Nafees Zakaria told a news briefing on Thursday.

In 2011, the then prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani had expressed a desire to sign a defence deal with China during a trip to Beijing.

At that time, the Chinese leadership advised Pakistan against such an agreement fearing that it might create a strain in Islamabad's and Beijing's relations with both Washington and New Delhi, the report said.

Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmed Chaudhry recently informed the Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence that Pakistan's growing strategic partnership with China was one of the main reasons behind the current strain in its ties with the US.

The US was probably upset with the multibillion-dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor project, according to him.
Pakistan has said it was "deeply saddened" by Bangladesh's execution of Jamaat-e-Islami leader Mir Quasem Ali and alleged that he was hanged after a conviction "through a flawed judicial process".

Pakistan's reaction last night came just an hour after the hanging of 63-year-old media tycoon, the sixth Islamist to be executed for war crimes committed during Bangladesh's 1971 Liberation War.

"Pakistan is deeply saddened over the execution of the prominent leader of Jamat-e-Islami, Bangladesh, Mir Quasem Ali, for the alleged crimes committed before December 1971, through a flawed judicial process," a Pakistan Foreign Office statement said.

"The act of suppressing the Opposition, through flawed trials, is completely against the spirit of democracy. Ever since the beginning of the trials, several international organisations, human rights groups, and international legal figures have raised objections to the court proceedings, especially regarding fairness and transparency, as well as harassment of lawyers and witnesses representing the accused," it said.

Mir Quasem was the infamous pro-Pakistan Al-Badr militia's third most important figure. He was convicted of running Al Badr's torture cell that killed several people.

Pakistan also called upon the Bangladeshi government to uphold its commitment, as per the Tripartite Agreement of 1974, wherein it was "decided not to proceed with the trials as an act of clemency".

"Recriminations for political gains are counter productive. Pakistan believes that matters should be addressed with a forward looking approach in the noble spirit of reconciliation," the statement said.

It said Pakistan offers deepest condolences to the bereaved family members.

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Angry parents of the victims of the 2014 Peshawar school massacre are planning a sit-in this week here in Pakistan's capital to demand a judicial inquiry and punishment to those responsible for the security of the children.

After a series of protests in Peshawar over the last one a half year, dozens of families of the victims converged on Islamabad and called for a meeting with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on September 1, the Dawn reported.

At least 60 family members, including women and children, of the students killed in the attack reached Islamabad, but were stopped by the district administration at the entrance to Red Zone," Ajoon Khan, the father of a student who was killed in the Army Public School (APS) Peshawar attack said.

"They even did not allow us to go. In the evening, they told us that a camp was vacant in front of the National Press Club (NPC) and we should shift there until a meeting is arranged with the prime minister the next day," he said.

"We said we will prefer to stay in front of the Prime Minister House instead of going to the camp and again moved towards the Red Zone. One of the parents threatened to immolate himself in front of the PM House. But we were again stopped near Zero Point," he added.

"We will wait for a few days and will again visit Islamabad on Thursday to hold a sit-in in front of the PM House or D-Chowk," Khan said.

Khan said instead of taking action against those behind the APS attack, the government had named a school after his son, Asfand Khan.

"I don't want any compensation because it will be like selling the blood of my son. I want justice. We used to pay Rs 500 per month as a security fee for each student as we were told that army officials were providing security to our children. But no one was held responsible after the massacre of the children," he said.

"When contacted, Additional Deputy Commissioner Islamabad Abdul Sattar Isani said coordination was made between families of the martyred students and the minister for CADD on September 1. Steps for arranging their meeting with the prime minister will be taken next week," Sher Nawaz, whose son Yasir Iqbal was a student of second year said.

At least 150 people, mostly school children, were killed when Taliban gunmen stormed Army Public School. The attack, one of the deadliest in the country's history, led to a nationwide crackdown on militants across Pakistan.

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Protesters today attacked the house of ruling PDP MLA from Tral constituency in south Kashmir, Mushtaq Ahmad Shah, breaking the window panes of the building.

"There were clashes between protesters and security forces in Tral and some miscreants attacked the house of Tral legislator Mushtaq Ahmad Shah with stones," a police official said.

He said the protesters broke the window panes of the house, but no one was injured.

"The forces deployed in the area fired several tear-gas canisters and managed to disperse the protesters from the spot," the official said.

However, intermittent clashes were going on in Tral, he said.

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The public portion of the Carlisle Family YMCAs capital campaign  a call for donations from the public to revitalize the facility  is set to take off in 2017, according to Marcia Drozdowski, executive director of the nonprofit foundation.

It was announced Oct. 2 last year that Y officials planned to maintain their current location at 311 S. West St., in Carlisle and pursue a revitalization project, rather than move to a new location  an idea tossed around by the YMCA board of directors in 2009.

Issues with parking, the buildings archaic design and facilities, and growth in business are what spurred the discussion to move or revitalize. Since the latter was decided upon, the Y hired GRO, a company focused on YMCA facility development, to design a concept plan to improve the current location and the experience for its members.

The campaign is to renovate and revitalize this facility, that has remained the same and wont change until we see how much money weve raised, Drozdowski said. We have not started fundraising our effort. We are doing prep work for the campaign: researching donor information, making sure everythings accurate, looking at grant options.

Other than that, she said there are no updates at this time from when she last spoke to The Sentinel in October last year.

This is the quiet phase, she said.

There is no date as to when the Y will open up to donations at this time or when a capital campaign will be officially launched, but Drozdowski said the work this fall in further finalizing plans and preparing for the campaign, will determine that.
Indian government should come out with income distribution data for years before 2012-13 for a meaningful assessment of income inequality in the country, noted French economist Thomas Piketty said.

Piketty, who gained global fame for his book 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century' on wealth and income inequalities in Europe and the US, also emphasised that Indian media should put pressure on the government to provide the data.

"I will do my best to exploit the new data for 2012-13 in order to come with some new estimates of Indian income inequality in the coming months. However, I should stress that it is going to be very difficult to produce reliable conclusions with only one year of data," Piketty told PTI.

"The previous income tax tabulations series ended in 1998-99, so this leaves us with a gap of almost 15 years, during which so much has changed in India. It is odd that the Indian tax administration did not keep anything in electronic format for this entire period," he added.

The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) on August 19 had placed a new version of the income distribution data for assessment year (AY) 2012-13.

According to the data, 14 lakh people or just 4.6 per cent of the total assessees paid taxes in the highest 30 per cent tax bracket. There are 2.89 crore assessees in the country.

In a panel discussion at the Jaipur Literature Festival earlier this year, Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian who sparred with Piketty, had blamed past governments for non-availability of tax data, and had assured that the present government was working to fix it.

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today announced three ministers would make an urgent visit to London following attacks against its nationals in Britain, including a murder which may have been a hate crime.

Announcement of the government delegation to Britain came hours after two Polish men were assaulted in a British town, following a vigil for a fellow Pole killed in August.

There was an upsurge in the number of reported hate crimes around the period of the June 23 referendum in which Britons voted to leave the European Union.

"In connection with the recent incidents targeting Polish citizens in Britain, the following ministers are planning an urgent trip to London: Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski, Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro and Interior Minister Mariusz Blaszczak," foreign ministry spokesman Rafal Sobczak told Polish media.

The date of the visit had not yet been finalised, Sobczak said.

"This was a vicious and horrible attack," said police official Trevor Roe of the most recent attack, which took place at around 3:30 am today.

One man suffered a broken nose and another a cut to the head during the attack outside a pub in Harlow, which is northeast of London, police said.

"Although we are considering this matter as a potential hate crime, it is not being linked with the attack at The Stow last weekend," he added, referring to the killing of factory worker Arek Jozwik.

Jozwik, 40, was killed in Harlow on August 27 and hundreds of people attended a vigil in his memory yesterday.

Six teenagers have been arrested on suspicion of being involved in the murder and released on bail. While police are investigating whether it was a hate crime, they say the motive is still not clear.

Yesterday, Waszczykowski urged Britain to keep Poles safe from xenophobia in comments that followed talks with visiting British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson in Warsaw.

"We're counting on the British government and authorities responsible for the safety of British and European citizens, including Poles, to prevent the kind of xenophobic acts we've seen recently," he said.

Some 800,000 Poles are thought to live in Britain, one of its biggest minority groups, under EU rules allowing freedom of movement between member states.
Four police personnel and a police officer's son were arrested today for allegedly assaulting a watchman in Saidabad area here, police said.

The watchman, identified as Chityala Amruth, had complained to Saidabad police on September 1 that four persons came in a vehicle and forcibly took him to police station by beating him.

During the course of investigation, a police team collected CCTV footages from nearby the scene of the incident and identified the persons who had assaulted him, a release from Hyderabad Police stated tonight.

The accused were taken into custody and during the interrogation they confessed their crime, following which they were arrested.

They have identified as Ambati Prithviraj, a student and B Shiva Raj, Chakali Mallesh, U Ravi Kumar and A Rajkumar- all police constables.

According to police, Prithviraj, son of an inspector, had earlier argued with the watchman who was quarrelling with his wife which disturbed the former as he was preparing for an exam.

Later, four police personnel from Vikarabad had allegedly assaulted the watchman.

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Donald Trump is pledging that the government he appoints will bring sweeping change to Washington's culture. So far, that promise comes with a heavy New Jersey accent.

Despite being passed over for the job of Trump's running mate, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and an entourage of his closest allies could leave a lasting mark on a Trump administration, should he win in November.

As chairman of Trump's transition team, Christie is building a coalition of advisers who will staff key federal government agencies and execute new policy prescriptions if Trump wins the general election.

Among them, are two of his longtime aides, Rich Bagger, a lobbyist who helped lead Christie's gubernatorial transition team and Bill Palatucci, a top Christie adviser whose law firm has been showered with government legal work.

"The chairman is the public face, sets the tone and ensures the transition has good connectivity with the candidate," said Clay Johnson, who served as executive director of George W Bush's transition team in 2000.

The team also includes Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner a New Jersey native along with some experienced government officials such as Jaime Burke, who was the personnel director for the Romney transition team in 2012 and a White House liaison to Health and Human Services under George W. Bush.

Christie is also hosting a transition team fundraiser in New Jersey later this month promising to give an inside look at the team for USD 5,000 a person.

Presidential transition teams lay the groundwork early since the winner is ultimately faced with the daunting task of readying the new administration in the two and a half months between Election Day and the inauguration.

"You have to be proactive," Johnson added. "We didn't know how fast warp speed was but a transition goes faster than that. It's a mind boggling challenge."



As a former presidential contender, Christie has taken some very public swings at his opponent-turned-ally. He's called the New York businessman "thin-skinned," and said Trump's proposed Syria policies are "painfully naive."



Also Christie, like a number of Trump's closest advisers, brings his own share of baggage to the campaign. The embattled governor is still grappling with the fallout from a scandal back home, after lanes were closed on the George Washington bridge for political retribution.

Lawyers for former Christie appointee Bill Baroni recently revealed text messages sent from an administration staffer to a campaign staffer that Christie "flat out lied" about his knowledge of the scandal.

Christie, who has not been charged and denies wrongdoing, disputed the remarks and called them "ridiculous." The criminal trial against Baroni and another former Christie aide is scheduled to begin September 19.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin's "aggressive and imperialist ambitions" are responsible for the poor relationship between the US and Russia, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine said today.

"I don't think you can make an argument that the relationship with Russia is in a good place right now. But that's not the US' fault, that's Vladimir Putin's aggressive and imperialist ambitions," Kaine told ABC .

"Here is a guy who violated international law at the end of the Bush administration by moving into the Ossetia region of Georgia. And then he's violated international law by annexing the Crimean portion of the Ukraine and destabilising the Eastern Ukraine," he said.

"Donald Trump was not even aware that Putin had gone into Crimea as recently as two weeks ago. He promised that Putin would not and had to be reminded that Putin went in and took over Crimea two years ago," Kaine said, taking a swipe at Trump.

This is just one of a number of "very, very troubling instances" that have shown Trump's coziness with Putin, Kaine alleged.

"He's already had to let go one campaign chairperson, Paul Manafort," said the Senator from Virginia, who is schedule to deliver a major foreign policy speech next week.

Russia went into Georgia, the South Ossetia region of Georgia, when President George Bush was in office, before President Obama was elected. And he went into Crimea during the Obama administration, he noted.

"But to try to say that's the US' fault is ridiculous. The guy is a dictator, who represses journalists -- and there's another tie. Donald Trump is banning journalists from outlets he doesn't like from covering him on a campaign. He's taken some lessons from Putin and others. But to say that Putin's imperial ambitions are the fault of anybody in the United States is ridiculous," Kaine alleged.

Responding to questions on the FBI report on Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, he said those notes demonstrate in very significant detail, why the FBI chose not to go forward with any additional proceeding.

"She did make a mistake. And she made by deciding she wanted to use one device rather than multiple devices. She's apologised for that. She said it was a mistake. And she's learned from it," Kaine asserted.

"The reason these materials are being made public is that Hillary Clinton said I want the public to see them. When Congress asked the FBI, give us your notes, Hillary said, yes, that's great, give them your notes but let the American public see it," Kaine said.

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The Ministry is set to roll out two major initiatives -- setting up of a regulatory authority for fixing fares and creating an infrastructure development fund -- that will have far-reaching effect on the national transporter, officials said.

The latest initiatives of the railways, which has already undertaken a series of changes in its policy and structure, come at a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been laying emphasis on reforms.

While the formation of a railway regulatory authority is likely to be announced through an executive order soon, the World Bank has agreed to anchor the Railway Infrastructure Development Fund with a corpus of $5 billion over a period of seven years, a senior Railway Ministry official said.

The fund will be co-anchored by pension and sovereign wealth funds.

The official said these two initiatives are part of major reforms being undertaken by the that will transform the national transporter in a big way.

In a recent interview to a TV channel, Modi has said "reform to transform" is his government's mantra.

The proposed regulatory authority will play a crucial role in deciding rail tariff while the Railway Infrastructure Development Fund will be used in remunerative projects which have scope of good returns in shorter period.

There will be no separate Rail Budget in 2017 ending the age old practice as Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu has written to Finance Minister Arun Jaitley seeking the merger of it with General Budget, a step considered to be a major reform.

Prabhu has already taken steps for decentralisation in the decision-making process empowering General Managers and Divisional Railway Managers. He has also made it mandatory making all procurement through online tendering process.

The official said, " is now exploring non-Budget funding options to implement projects, including high-speed trains, rolling stock, station development, and signalling and infrastructure development which was not before."

Railways has already formulated a medium-term capital investment plan of Rs 8.56 lakh crore for the next five years.

He said there will be no fund constraint for implementing rail projects as adequate measures being being undertaken to garner investment in the national transporter.

Life Insurance Corporation has provided the railways a Rs 1.50 lakh crore loan for 30 years, of which Rs 10,000 crore has been used so far.

Besides, the Japan International Cooperation Agency had agreed to provide loan at 0.1 per cent interest for a 50-year tenure and a 15-year moratorium for the Rs 1 lakh crore Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train. The implementation period for the 508-km project is slated till 2023.

This is in addition to the budgetary allocation of Rs 1.21 lakh crore for the railways in the current financial year.

Railways expects broad gauge lines commissioning to increase to 19 km per day from the present level of 10 km per day and it would further rise to 25 km per day in partnership with state governments.
Embarking on a major expansion plan, Reliance Capital plans to increase customer base to 50 million from 20 million along with a fivefold expansion of reach to 25,000 cities and towns over the next 3-5 years, Chairman Anil Ambani has said.

Reliance Capital, the financial services arm of Ambani-led business conglomerate, also plans to double the number of its business partners to one million in this time period.

"Together, these initiatives will further accelerate our growth and lead to substantial value creation for all," Ambani said in his annual letter to shareholders of Reliance Capital, which is present across insurance, mutual fund, brokerage and consumer and home finance, among other areas of financial services.

Highlighting the financial performance of the company in the last financial year, Ambani said, "Reliance Capital made significant progress during the year towards improving operational performance across core businesses and is fully geared to capital on its growth aspirations".

The industrialist said the Reliance Group, which is also present across telecom, infrastructure and defence businesses among others, "touches the life of one in every five Indians, every single day".

Reliance Capital's total income rose by 12 per cent in the fiscal 2015-16 to Rs 9,998 crore, while net profit was up 10 per cent at Rs 1,101 crore.

Among its main businesses, Reliance Nippon Life Asset Management's profit rose to Rs 502 crore while income from operations was up 38 per cent at Rs 1,314 crore.

Reliance Mutual Fund's average asset under management rose by 16 percent to Rs 1,58,408 crore, giving it a market share of 12 per cent.

Reliance Nippon Life Insurance commanded a market share of 4 per cent in the private life insurance sector, while Reliance General Insurance was also among the leading private general insurers with a market share of 7 per cent, Ambani said.

Reliance Home Finance's asset under management rose by 27 per cent to Rs 7358 crore. Its total income rose 59 per cent to Rs 815 crore, while profit was up 29 per cent at Rs 137 crore.

Reliance Commercial Finance saw its asset under management rise by 7 per cent to Rs 15,157 crore, Ambani said, while adding that the focus of this business was on asset backed lending and productive asset creation and 100 per cent of its loan book was secured.

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Goa Shiv Sena today alleged irregularities in vehicle registration process in Goa and bordering Puducherry where taxation is minimal.

"Tax on registering a vehicle in Puducherry is only one per cent, while in Goa one has to pay more than 15 per cent. We have noticed a spurtin vehicles with Puducherry number plates on Goan roads," local Shiv Sena unit chief Sudip Tamankar told reporters here today.

He said there was a possibility that locals in order to avoid to high taxes here were getting their vehicles registered in Puducherry.

The BJP-led state government during the recently held Monsoon session of the Assembly had hiked the tax on registration of vehicles, due to which the total taxation (for registration) has crossed 15 per cent mark.

"We have also understood that former Goa Transport Director Arun Desai has been transferred to Puducherry," he said.

Though he was quick to add that the transfer can be mere a coincidence.

"Transport Minister Sudin Dhavalikar in the Assembly had justified the hike stating that number of vehicles in the state is on the rise," Tamankar said.

He said majority of non-Goans living in the state can get their vehicles registered on the leave and licence document or by an affidavit about their residential proof whose authenticity is never checked by state Transport Department.

"But Goans have to submit number of documents including voting card, Aadhaar card and others to prove their identity," he said.

"We have written to the Transport Department asking them to issue a circular to all Regional Transport Offices to verify the authenticity of the leave and licence document or affidavit sworn by appointing an officer before registration," he said.

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Serena Williams sped past another milestone en route to the US Open fourth round as men's contenders Andy Murray and Stan Wawrinka clawed their way into the last 16.

World number one Williams dominated Sweden's Johanna Larsson 6-2, 6-1 to surpass Martina Navratilova for most Grand Slam wins by a woman with 307.

Not only has she surpassed Navratilova, she matched Roger Federer's mark for men.

"To be up there with both men and women is something that's super-rare, and it actually feels good," said Williams, who said she was "really excited" to reach 307.

"Obviously I want to keep that number going higher," added Williams, who will get her chance when she takes on Kazakhstan's Yaroslava Shvedova for a quarter-final berth.

In the one hour it took to subdue Larsson, Williams again appeared untroubled by the shoulder injury that has slowed her since her Wimbledon triumph.

"It definitely feels solid," she said. "I'm doing a lot of work on it so I can keep it in this position."



While Williams encountered little resistance, it was another story for the top men's seeds in action.

Wawrinka, a two-time Grand Slam winner and twice a semi-finalist in New York, had the closest call, saving a match point in a 4-6, 6-3, 6-7 (6/8), 7-6 (10/8), 6-2 victory over Britain's Dan Evans.

The 31-year-old third seed saved the match point at 5/6 in the fourth set tiebreaker, breaking the will of his 64th-ranked opponent.

"It's always good to win by saving match point. It's always something special, that's for sure," said Wawrinka, who had his left ankle taped after twisting it during the match. "It was a tough battle and I'm happy to get through."



Many of Murray's troubles against Paolo Lorenzi were of his own making as he allowed the energetic Italian journeyman to make him look ordinary through two sets before pulling himself together to win 7-6 (7/4), 5-7, 6-2, 6-3.

"I had to stop rushing," said Murray, who arrived at the year's final Grand Slam off victories at Wimbledon and the Rio Olympics and may have expected less from Lorenzi, the 34-year-old who only won a first ATP title in July.

"I was making a lot of unforced errors and (Lorenzi) is very solid, and doesn't give you cheap points," Murray said. "I was looking for those cheap points too often."



Murray takes on Bulgarian Grigor Dimitrov, a 6-4, 6-1, 3-6, 6-2 winner over Portugal's Joao Sousa, for a quarter-final berth.

Wawrinka next faces 63rd-ranked Ukrainian Illya Marchenko, who advanced when a hurting Nick Kyrgios, hobbled by a painful right hip, retired while trailing 4-6, 6-4, 6-1.

Kyrgios, the 14th seed from Australia soldiered on after receiving treatment at the end of the second set before opting out at the end of the third.

(REOPENS DEL 113)



The tall Croat started to serve better, losing only five points in his next five service games. He also attempted to keep the points short but Kovalik continued to present a dogged fight and it boiled down to tie-breaker with the two players holding their serves.

Kovalik had handed an opening to Cilic with a double fault at 2-2 but the Croat netted a backhand on next point to let go advantage. The world number six hit a forehand long at 4-5 to hand the Slovakian two set points. Cilic saved the first but netted a backhand on the second to hand Kovalik the first set.

Stunned by the reversal, the Croat put his foot on the gas and raced to a 3-0 lead with a break in the second game.

After a foot fault call at 15-15, which perhaps disturbed his rhythm, Kovalik hit a forehand long at 30-40 to face a break point. Cilic played smart and pinned the Slovakian on the far left side of the baseline in a long rally and sent down a volley winner from a weak backhand return to seal the break.

Kovalik prevented Cilic from walking away with a 5-1 lead by saving two breakpoints in the sixth game. Not only this, he broke Cilic back in the seventh and made it 4-4 with an easy hold in the next game.

The Slovakian though choked when he was serving to stay in the match at 5-6. He sent a backhand to net to hand Cilic his first set point and followed that with a long forehand to allow the Croat make a comeback in the match.

The third set was again neck and neck before Kovalik cashed in on unforced errors from Cilic to get a break in the 11th game, setting himself up to close the match in his favour.

However, there was more drama to the match with Kovalik facing three breakpoints but Cilic could convert none and eventually Kovalik converted his first match point.

In another second match of the day, Spaniard Albert Ramos-Vinolas outplayed Steve Darcis 6-2 6-0.
Sacked Delhi Minister and AAP MLA Sandeep Kumar arrested on charges of rape on a complaint of a woman who figured in an objectionable video with him, was today produced in a Delhi court which remanded him in police custody for one day.

Kumar, 36, was produced before a magisterial court in Rohini here, which sent him to police custody till tomorrow on a Delhi Police plea for remand to quiz him in the case.

The former minister was arrested yesterday night after a woman approached Sultanpuri police station in north Delhi with a complaint of sexual harassment against the former social welfare and women and child development minister following which a case was filed.

The police have booked him under section 376 (rape), 328 (causing hurt by means of poison with intent to commit an offence) of IPC, under section 67A of IT Act (punishment for publishing or transmitting of material containing sexually explicit act) and Section 7 of the Prevention of Corruption Act (public servant taking gratification other than legal remuneration for an official act).

In her complaint, the woman alleged that around 11 months ago she was raped by Kumar when she had gone to his office in Outer Delhi's Sultanpuri seeking help to obtain a ration card.

She alleged that Kumar had offered her a spiked drink and when she fell unconscious, she was taken to his house adjacent to the office and raped.

The woman alleged that Kumar had told her that he will get a ration card for her and also ensure jobs for her children.

Kumar was removed from the AAP government on August 31 by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal after the CD purportedly showing him in a compromising position with the woman surfaced.

The MLA from Sultanpur Majra had surrendered before the investigators at the office of DCP (Outer) in Pitampura where his statement was recorded, police officials had said.

Soon after the controversy, the MLA had defended himself, saying he has been targeted.

Kumar's wife has also come out in support of her husband, claiming that he was "falsely implicated" in the scandal.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
What a strange place our nation has come to when a candidate for president representing a major party, in a major policy speech, calls for ideological certification of immigrants.

If ever a candidate deserved extreme vetting, its Donald Trump. There are few policy proposals I can think of that are more un-American  a term that any defender of civil liberties must use advisedly  than the ones he made this week in a speech in Phoenix on immigration.

The image of America he conjured in Phoenix is as terrifying as it is untrue. Its a country where sanctuary cities shelter undocumented immigrant killers who prey on defenseless citizens. Where the government invites dubious refugees from terrorist hotbeds without vetting them. Where the president has attempted to foist an illegal amnesty for undocumented immigrants and refuses to execute immigration law.

To Trump these are not mere executive failings; they are acts of betrayal. The rage with which he delivered his message on immigration is informed by the old stab-in-the-back fantasy so beloved by fascists of yore. President Obama and Hillary Clinton are subverting America, and they are using immigrants to do it.

This narrative works hand in glove with Trumps racial scapegoating. Places where blacks and Latinos live, to him, are lawless hellscapes where predatory criminals breed, prey and hide. Its not enough to point to crime rates, which are rising in some places while remaining well below historical peaks, or to point out that minority communities are disproportionately the victims of violent crime. No, Trump must present immigrant criminals as direct threats to white America.

So in Phoenix he paraded parents who lost their children to God-awful acts of violence (or mere car wrecks) in which the culprit was an illegal immigrant. He twisted the natural sympathy any decent person would feel for these grieving people into an indictment of every immigrant  legal, illegal or yet to come to our shores. All wound up complicit before Trump paused to catch a breath.

The speech was grotesque. Though his handlers gave Trump new terms to sprinkle in  detainers, removal, bio-metrics  to add a veneer of gravitas, the point was not to explain policy. It was to enflame hatred.

There is a policy story to be told, and when Trump tries to tell it he is compelled to lie. He has to pretend that immigrants are not being deported in record numbers and that much of immigration law and policy is already focused on deporting those with records of violent crime. He has to ignore the vetting process already in place for those seeking refuge in the United States, which is thorough and rigorous, taking up to two years to complete.

Much of the 10-point immigration plan Trump presented is simple white nativism. For example, he signaled a break with recent Republican Party tradition by calling for even legal immigration to be severely curtailed as well.

As a Los Angeles Times report put it, the shift he advocates would greatly reduce immigration overall and move the U.S. from an immigration philosophy of allowing strivers from around the world to take advantage of American opportunities to one focused on bringing in people who already have money and job skills.

Left unsaid was who will get to decide on an immigrants suitability, and according to what criteria, but its hardly a mystery. Its our right as a sovereign nation to choose immigrants that we think are the likeliest to thrive and flourish and love us, Trump said.

Perfect. A man driven by an insatiable desire to be worshipped and feared will also set the standard for ideological correctness.

How a major party of this great nation nominated a person so unfit for the presidency, so pernicious, needs to be thoroughly understood before its too late.

That a broad swath of Americans has embraced his unapologetic racism is not surprising. And that others might be dragged along by Trumps fear mongering  in a time of stagnant wages, gutted pensions, terrorism and chaos spreading around the world  makes a certain sense.

What should deeply trouble us is that a major political party was powerless to stop him, and that the free press, a cornerstone of American democracy, shrank for so long from calling his racism and dangerous authoritarian tendencies what they are.

Trump has maligned the spirit in which our republic was founded: that it should be a safe haven for all the world, where men and women could find freedom and opportunity.

There will be a reckoning for this. Whether that extends beyond the Republican Party remains to be seen.
Missionaries of Charity Sister Mary Sally, who was evacuated from conflict-torn Yemen earlier this year by the Indian government, today met External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj here.

"A special guest in Rome! Sister Sally, who was evacuated out of Yemen by the Govt meets EAM @SushmaSwaraj," External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted.

Union Food Processing Industries Minister Harsimrat Kaur, who is part of the Indian delegation, and Sister Mary Prema Pierick, Superior general of the Missionaries of Charity, was also present on the occasion.

Sister Sally, the Indian mother superior of an aid home in Aden, where four nuns were killed and an Indian priest was kidnapped by gunmen, was evacuated from Yemen in March.

Swaraj represented India at the canonisation ceremony of Mother Teresa at a mass in St Peter's square here presided over by Pope Francis in the presence of over 100,000 pilgrims.

Swaraj arrived here earlier along with 12 others that included two state-level delegations from Delhi and West Bengal led by Chief Ministers Arvind Kejriwal and Mamata Banerjee respectively.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Special prayers and mass processions were organised by churches in Kerala to celebrate the proclamation of Mother Teresa as a saint at the Vatican.

Hundreds of devotees took part in a procession organised at St Joseph Church here, while a special Holy Mass held at St Antony's Church at nearby Kochuthura, was also attended by a large number of parishioners.

Archbishop of Latin Archdiocese Soosai Pakiam led the prayers and gave a special message to the devotees at St Antony's Church.

Hundreds of people also took part in the special prayers organised at nearby Kurishumala pilgrim centre, marking the elevation of the Nobel prize laureate to the sainthood.

Devotees released 1,001 colourful balloons, bearing the image of the Mother, at St Joseph's Church in Pushpagiri in Thellakam in Kottayam district, where Archbishop Mar Joseph Powathil led special prayers.

A large number of people gathered at the church premises when the canonisation ceremonies were shown live on the big screen there.

Mother Teresa was today proclaimed a saint by Pope Francis, who hailed her as the personification of maternal love and a powerful advocate for the poor.

The canonisation mass in the Vatican was attended by 100,000 pilgrims, including 13 heads of state or government and hundreds of nuns from Teresa's order, the Missionaries of Charity.

The ceremony came on the eve of the 19th anniversary of Teresa's death in Kolkata, where she spent nearly four decades working for the destitute.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
All India Forward Bloc national secretary VP Saini today contested the claim of a London-based website that Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose died in a plane crash in Taiwan in 1945, terming it "wrong" and "part of the conspiracy" against the revolutionary leader.

He also refuted the claim of the website that it had access to vital declassified documents regarding Netaji's disappearance.

Saini, also the Netaji Subhas Kranti Manch chief, claimed that the documents mentioned by the website were from a book, titled 'Conspirators, Abductors and Killers of Netaji', which was written more than 24 years ago.

He said whatever information and documents on the alleged air crash, in which Netaji was feared killed, were supplied by Japan, had been proved wrong.

He said Taiwan had informed India in writing that no air crash had occurred at Taihoku on August 18, 1945. Hence, there was no question of Netaji's death in it.

Justice Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry had also reported that Netaji did not die in the air crash, Saini said and accused certain members of the Bose family of "joining hands" with the government and others in the "conspiracy against Netaji" because of their "personal reasons or vested interests".

He alleged that the Centre, with the connivance of some members of the Bose family, was trying to bring to India the "so-called" ashes of Netaji from Renkoji temple in Tokyo but the followers of the revolutionary leader will never let that happen.

He appealed to the Centre to try to find the truth of Netaji's fate "honestly" and give the national hero his due.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
President Pranab Mukherjee today lauded the former Union Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde for his struggle to reach the highest positions in the country, overcoming difficult circumstances.

"In overcoming the odds of an extremely humble background and beginning, overcoming the handicaps thereof without bitterness and rising up to the highest positions in the country, Shinde's story is indeed the story of India," Mukherjee said.

He was speaking at the 75th birthday celebration of the senior Congress leader at his native town Solapur in western Maharashtra.

The President described Shinde's life as a "shining example of an empowering, enabling and progressive democratic India, having played out itself as per the dreams of its founding fathers".

Maharashtra Governor Ch Vidyasagar Rao, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and NCP chief Sharad Pawar were among those present at Shinde's public felicitation.

Shinde attributed his success in the political arena to the people of Solapur, who he said, saw him rise from the humblest of origins to become the Chief Minister of Maharashtra and later a Union Minister.

Pawar, who was the CM when Shinde was a minister in state cabinet, said the latter duly implemented all the responsibilities given to him.

Fadnavis noted in his speech that Ajmal Kasab, the lone Pakistani terrorist caught alive during the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack, was hanged during Shinde's tenure as the Union Home Minister.

(REOPENS BOM5)



Congress president Sonia Gandhi's written message



congratulating Shinde on his 75th birthday was read out at the event. She hailed Shinde as an outstanding parliamentarian and administrator.

Congress leaders P Chidambaram, Kumari Selja, Jyotiraditya Scindia and Shivraj Patil and NCP leader Praful Patel also attended the event.
External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj today represented India at the canonisation ceremony of Mother Teresa at a mass in St Peter's square here presided over by Pope Francis in the presence of over 100,000 pilgrims.

Swaraj arrived here earlier alongwith 12 others that included two state-level delegations from Delhi and West Bengal led by Chief Ministers Arvind Kejriwal and Mamata Banerjee respectively.

Food Processing Industries Harsimrat Kaur Badal, Lok Sabha MPs Prof K V Thomas, Jose K Mani, Anto Anthony and Conrad K Sangma and Deputy Chief Minister of Goa Francis D'Souza were also part of the delegation.

"Homage to a life spent in service of people. External Affairs Minister @SushmaSwaraj and Indian delegation at canonisation of Mother Teresa," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted.

Her canonisation ceremony, that comes a day ahead of her 19th death anniversary, was attended by thousands of pilgrims from all over the world including some 1,500 people looked after by the Italian branches of Teresa's order, the Missionaries of Charity.

Teresa's canonisation was announced in March by Pope Francis after the Church recognised two miracles attributed to her after her death in 1997.

Revered for her work with the poor and destitute, Teresa spent nearly four decades of her life in Kolkata.

Born in 1910 to Kosovan Albanian parents in Skopje - then part of the Ottoman empire, now the capital of Macedonia - Teresa had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

Yesterday, Swaraj met the Indian diaspora at a reception hosted by India's Ambassador to Italy Anil Wadhwa.

The External Affairs Minister mentioned welfare efforts for diaspora, assisting Indians in distress and the evacuations the government has conducted, Swarup tweeted.

"I have come here with a delegation from different parts of India, with those of different faiths to pay respects to life of Mother Teresa," Swaraj had said at the reception.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
External Affairs Minister today met her Italian counterpart Paolo Gentiloni and discussed cooperation in key areas of trade and counter- terrorism, the first high-level contact between the two countries after the UN court's verdict on the Italian marines issue.

In the meeting, Swaraj, who is leading a 12-member delegation that attended the canonisation ceremony of Mother Teresa today, and Gentiloni expressed their satisfaction on the first high-level bilateral meeting after a "considerable period", according to the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA).

"They reviewed the state of bilateral relations and discussed the future roadmap of cooperation in trade and investment, science and technology, counter terrorism, cultural exchange and other areas of mutual interest," the MEA said.

They also agreed to expand cooperation between Italy and India in multilateral fora, it said.

The relationship between India and Italy soured after India detained Italian marines -- Salvatore Girone and Massimiliano Latorre -- on charges of murdering two Indian fishermen off Kerala coast in 2012.

Unsatisfied with Indian judicial process, Italy moved the UN Tribunal, which in May this year allowed Girone to return pending the trial. Latorre is already in Italy on health grounds.

During the meeting today, Swaraj also conveyed her deep condolences for the recent earthquake in central Italy that caused a lot of destruction and claimed many innocent lives.
External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, who is leading a 12-member delegation that is here to attend the canonisation ceremony of Mother Teresa, today met Indian diaspora and talked about various welfare efforts of the government for community members abroad.

Swaraj met the Indian diaspora at a reception hosted by India's Ambassador to Italy Anil Wadhwa.

The External Affairs Minister mentioned welfare efforts for diaspora, assisting Indians in distress and the evacuations the government has conducted, External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted.

"I have come here with a delegation from different parts of India, with those of different faiths to pay respects to life of Mother Teresa," Swaraj said at the reception.

"For the Indian principle is based on the saying: ekam sat, vipra bahuda vadanthi -- the truth is one, the wise call it as many," she said.

She thanked Indian diaspora for coming, not just from Rome but from Naples, Florence, Milan, Swarup said.

Apart from the central government delegation, two state government-level delegations from Delhi and West Bengal led by Chief Ministers Arvind Kejriwal and Mamata Banerjee respectively were also in Rome to attend the ceremony that will take place tomorrow.

Swaraj's delegation comprises of Minister for Food Processing Industries Harsimrat Kaur Badal, Lok Sabha MPs Prof K V Thomas, Jose K Mani, Anto Anthony and Conrad K Sangma and Deputy Chief Minister of Goa Francis D'Souza.

Others include Judge of Supreme Court Justice Kurian Joseph, eminent lawyer Harish Salve, Secretary General of Catholic Bishops' Conference of India Theodore Mascarenhas and K J Alphons.

Secretary (West) in the Ministry of External Affairs Sujata Mehta is also part of the delegation.

In March, Pope Francis had announced that Mother Teresa, who founded the Missionaries of Charity, will be elevated to sainthood after the Church recognised two miracles attributed to her after her death in 1997.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Syrian government troops renewed the siege of rebel-held parts of Aleppo today, as Washington and Moscow failed to reach a deal on stemming violence in the country's devastating war.

Turkish forces and allied Syrian rebels meanwhile expelled the Islamic State group from the last stretch of the Syrian-Turkish border under its control, a monitor said.

Syrian state media said the army and allied forces had taken an area south of Aleppo, severing the sole route left into the eastern neighbourhoods held by the opposition.

"The armed forces in cooperation with their allies took full control of the military academy zone south of Aleppo and are clearing the remaining terrorists from the area," state television said, citing a military source.

It said the advance "cut all the supply and movement routes for terrorist groups from southern Aleppo province to the eastern neighbourhoods and Ramussa."



The development leaves about 250,000 people living in rebel-controlled parts of the city cut off from the outside world once again, and will raise new fears about a humanitarian crisis in Aleppo.

Once Syria's economic powerhouse, the city has been ravaged by the war that began with anti-government protests in March 2011.

It has been roughly divided between government control in the west and rebel control in the east since mid-2012, but in recent months regime forces slowly began to encircle the east.

In July, they severed the only road into the rebel neighbourhoods, the key Castello Road running from the Turkish border in the north, creating food and fuel shortages in the east.

The siege prompted international concern, with aid agencies urging 48-hour ceasefires to ensure humanitarian access.

In early August, rebel forces including Al-Qaeda's former Syrian affiliate battled regime forces south of the city to open a new route to the east, through Ramussa district.

But in recent days regime forces backed by Syrian and Russian war planes launched a counter-offensive.

A key regime ally, Moscow began an aerial campaign in support of President Bashar al-Assad's government last September, even as it continued to publicly support efforts for a negotiated solution to the five-year war.

Earlier today, hopes were raised that Moscow and Washington might be on the verge of announcing a deal to halt the bloodshed.

US President Barack Obama said both nations were working "around the clock" on a ceasefire, and a State Department official said a deal was close.

But the hopes evaporated later in the day, with a State Department official saying Russia had "walked back on some of the areas we thought we were agreed on."



Instead, US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov are set to meet again tomorrow in Hangzhou, China, where G20 leaders are gathered.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Tablighi Ijtema Committee here has requested the Railways not to carry out maintenance work at the city's main railway station during the 3-day annual international Islamic meet, beginning on November 26 in Eintkhedi.

In a letter, released today, to the Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu, TIC Bhopal chairman Iqbal Hafeez Khan has requested the planned maintenance work at platform no 1 be postponed to December 5. In the alternative, it should be completed by next month, so as to avoid inconvenience to lakhs of devotees arriving here to attend the 69th Aalmi Tablighi Ijtema (International Islamic Congregation).

"We have come to know through newspaper reports that the platform number one at Bhopal main station will be closed for maintenance between November 2 and December 15. As a result all the trains coming from Uttar Pradesh are proposed to be stopped at Habibganj station," the letter said.

It would create a problem for the devotees as well as the district administration in regulating the traffic, it said.

Khan also lauded the Railways for extending special support for the meet, popularly known as Ijtema.

TIC had already petitioned the local Railway authority and the district administration over the issue, the letter said.

Over 12 lakh Muslims from India and 30 other countries are expected to attend the Ijtema, which Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has called "the pride of Bhopal".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Turkish troops and allied Syrian rebels expelled the Islamic State group from the last strip of territory it controlled along the Syrian-Turkish border today, effectively sealing the extremists' self-styled caliphate off from the outside world, Turkey's prime minister and a Syrian opposition group reported.

Today, Syrian pro-government forces backed by airstrikes launched a wide offensive in the northern city of Aleppo, capturing areas they lost last month and besieging rebel-held neighbourhoods, state media and opposition activists said.

Turkey-backed Free Syrian Army rebels have cleared the area between the northern Syrian border towns of Azaz and Jarablus, Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said.

"From Azaz to Jarablus, 91 kilometers of our border has completely secured. All the terrorist organisations are pushed back, they are gone," Yildirim said, speaking at a dinner with non-government organisations in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir.

The FSA's advance shut down key supply lines used by IS to bring in foreign fighters, weapons and ammunition.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said IS "has lost its link with the outside world after losing all border areas" with Turkey.

It said the last two border villages that IS held were Mizab and Qadi Jarablus, which were taken this afternoon.

IS had occupied the border area even before it declared its self-styled caliphate in June 2014, and it used the Turkish border to bring in fighters from around the world.

The extremist group, which controls parts of Syria and Iraq, is now surrounded from all sides by hostile forces.

The loss of its territory along the Turkish border follows a series of recent defeats for IS, including its expulsion from the central Iraqi city of Fallujah and its defeat in the former stronghold of Manbij in northern Syria.

Airstrikes by the US-led coalition have killed a number of the group's most prominent founding members and leaders.

In a statement, Turkey's armed forces said the "the Jarablus-Azaz line has been connected."

Turkey has long pushed for a safe zone in Syria between these two towns, with a plan to house Syrian refugees there.

Turkey hosts an estimated 3 million Syrian refugees, the highest number in the world.

Meanwhile, the recapture and return to siege of rebel-held parts of Aleppo dealt a major blow to insurgent groups. They have lost scores of fighters in recent weeks in the battle to open a corridor into the city and lift the government's blockade.

After the government laid siege on Aleppo for the first time in July, the United Nations said that nearly 300,000 residents were trapped in rebel-held neighborhoods, making it the largest besieged area in war-torn Syria.
Canadas British Columbia becomes first foreign government to issue masala bonds

Published: September 3, 2016

Canadas British Columbia province has become the first foreign government to issue of masala bonds, a rupee-denominated bond.

It had issued Rs 500 crore rupee denominated overseas bonds (masala bond) on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and successfully raised $75 million (about Rs 500 crore).

British Columbias issued masala bond was priced to yield 6.62 % to semi-annually with a three-year tenor in the LSE. By issuing masala bond, it has secured high-quality investor support from across Europe, Asia and America.

Comment

Masala Bonds are rupee-denominated bonds issued to overseas buyers. It is aimed at boosting investments into Indias infrastructure sector.

British Columbia by issuing the masala bond has well-positioned confidence of investors outlook for Indias infrastructure sector.

Thus, it signifies major participation of the rupee in the international markets and highlights prosperous and favourable conditions of Indian economy.

Month: Current Affairs - September, 2016

Topics: British Columbia  Business  Canada  Economy  infrastructure  International  Masala bonds

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Ankara stepped up its fight against militants in Turkey and northern Syria with air strikes on Kurdish rebel positions in the restive southeast and IS extremists in northern Syria, security sources said today.

Jets bombed four PKK targets in the Cukurca district of the southeastern province of Hakkari close to northern Iraq yesterday evening, the sources told state-run Anadolu agency.

The bombing took place after a bloody 48 hours during which at least 22 Turkish soldiers and a village guardsman were killed in clashes and an attack blamed on PKK militants.

Twelve soldiers were killed in two separate clashes in the Cukurca and Semdinli districts in Hakkari, the provincial governor's office said, while in Van province, eight soldiers died during fighting between soldiers and militants. Two more died in southeastern Mardin, Anadolu said.

The village guard, killed in an attack in Mardin on Friday, was part of a group of local residents who cooperate with Turkish security forces against the PKK, listed as a terror group by Ankara and its Western allies.

Another six PKK positions were hit in the Mount Tendurek region between Agri and Van provinces in the country's east yesterday evening, Anadolu said.

The Turkish military said more than 100 PKK fighters were "neutralised" during clashes in Cukurca with its security forces yesterday, without explaining how many were killed and how many were injured.

Meanwhile Turkish warplanes destroyed Islamic State (IS) group targets in northern Syria yesterday, hours after Ankara sent more tanks from the southern Kilis province to support Syrian rebels.

A two-year ceasefire between Ankara and the PKK collapsed last year, after which Kurdish rebels launched frequent attacks on security forces in the country's southeast.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim vowed that billions of lira would be invested in centres "damaged by PKK terror" during a televised speech in Diyarbakir today.

He promised 1.9 billion lira (643 million dollars) would be invested in the historic Sur district of Diyarbakir, which has been ravaged by renewed violence.

Another seven "terror-damaged" areas would receive 10 billion lira and Yildirim promised thousands of new homes would be built in the southeast.

More than 600 Turkish security force members have been killed since July 2015 while more than 7,000 militants have been killed in Turkey and northern Iraq, Anadolu said.

It is not possible to independently verify the toll.

Activists claim innocent civilians have also been killed in the offensives.

More than 40,000 people have been killed since the PKK first took up arms in 1984.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said today NATO countries needed a common approach to all terrorist acts and organisations after talks with US President Barack Obama on the sidelines of the G20 summit in China's Hangzhou.

"There is no good terrorist or bad terrorist. All types of terrorism are bad. We must stand against them.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Turkish warplanes have destroyed 10 Kurdish rebel positions in the restive southeast as Ankara steps up its fight against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), state media reported today.

Jets bombed four PKK targets in the Cukurca district of the southeastern province of Hakkari close to northern Iraq yesterday evening, security sources told state-run Anadolu agency.

The bombing took place after a bloody 48 hours during which at least 22 Turkish soldiers and a village guardsman were killed in clashes and an attack blamed on PKK militants.

Twelve soldiers were killed in two separate clashes in the Cukurca and Semdinli districts in Hakkari, the provincial governor's office said, while in Van province, eight soldiers died during fighting between soldiers and militants.

The village guard -- killed in an attack in Mardin in the southeast on Friday -- was part of a group of local residents who cooperate with Turkish security forces against the PKK, listed as a terror group by Ankara and its Western allies.

Another six PKK positions were hit in the Mount Tendurek region between Agri and Van provinces in the country's east yesterday evening, Anadolu said.

The Turkish military said more than 100 PKK fighters were "neutralised" during clashes in Cukurca with its security forces yesterday, without explaining how many were killed and how many were injured.

Many of the rebels were taken back to northern Iraq, according to Dogan agency. The PKK command is based in the Qandil mountains of northern Iraq.

A two-year ceasefire between Ankara and the PKK collapsed last year, after which Kurdish rebels launched frequent attacks on security forces in the country's southeast.

More than 600 Turkish security force members have been killed since July 2015 while more than 7,000 militants have been killed in Turkey and northern Iraq, Anadolu said.

It is not possible to independently verify the toll.

Activists claim innocent civilians have also been killed in the offensives.

More than 40,000 people have been killed since the PKK first took up arms in 1984.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said today NATO countries needed a shared attitude against all terrorist acts and organisations after talks with US President Barack Obama on the sidelines of the G20 summit in China's Hangzhou.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Two persons including a juvenile have been arrested in connection with Wednesday's theft of diamonds worth Rs 2 crore from the car of a commission agent in east Delhi, police said today.

Vinay was arrested from Madangir area in south Delhi by a team of officials of Preet Vihar police station. His juvenile accomplice has also been held in connection with the theft and stolen diamonds worth Rs 2 crore recovered, DCP (East) Rishi Pal said.

The incident took place on Wednesday when the diamonds were stolen from the car of Vijay Gupta, who works as a commission agent for gems and jewel traders, near Karkari More red light while he was getting a flat tyre fixed, he said.

Vinay told police during interrogation that he was following Gupta's car from Karkardooma on his motorbike alongwith the juvenile and punctured his car's tyre.

When Gupta was busy getting the tyre repaired, the juvenile broke the window glass of the vehicle and the duo fled with the diamonds, Pal said.

Following the investigation and scrutiny of the CCTV footages from nearby areas, police got clues that led to the arrest of the accused.

Vinay has earlier been involved in five cases of snatching and theft, the DCP said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Two Polish men were assaulted in a British town today, hours after a vigil for a fellow Pole murdered in what police say may have been another hate crime.

One man suffered a broken nose and another a cut to the head during the attack outside a pub in Harlow in the early hours today, Essex Police said.

Factory worker Arek Jozwik, 40, was killed in the town northeast of London on August 27 and hundreds of people attended a vigil in his memory yesterday.

Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski urged Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson yesterday to prevent xenophobic attacks against Poles after Britain voted to leave the European Union in June.

"This was a vicious and horrible attack," said Superintendent Trevor Roe of Saturday's assault.

"Although we are considering this matter as a potential hate crime, it is not being linked with the attack at The Stow last weekend," he added, referring to the killing of Jozwik.

Six teenagers have been arrested on suspicion of being involved in the murder and released on bail. While police are investigating whether it was a hate crime, they say the motive is still not clear.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A 27-year-old British glamour model is on an Islamic State related terror watch by UK authorities after she used social media to communicate with extremists, a media report said today.

Kimberley Miners, who has posed topless for The Sun, is believed to have secretly converted to Islam and her "liking" and sharing Islamic State (ISIS) videos have triggered an investigation by Britain's anti-terrorist police and MI5.

The model from Bradford appears on social media under the alias Aisha Lauren al-Britaniya and has posted images of Muslim women brandishing rifles and other weapons, The Sunday Times reported.

Pictures show her fully veiled or with only her blue eyes on display, but in public she wears skinny jeans and leaves her long blonde hair uncovered.

She said she was abused when she went out in Islamic dress.

Britain's anti-terror officers have reportedly spoken to her up to four times and referred her to an anti-radicalisation programme.

She has been warned that she faces arrest if she continues to engage in extremism.

Miners insists that she disagrees with ISIS beheadings and said she was primarily concerned about the plight of Syria's refugee children.

However, the former model admitted being in direct contact on Facebook with an ISIS recruiter called Abu Usamah al-Britani.

The fighter appears to be openly using social media to groom a new generation of jihadist brides from Britain and the West, the report said.

Miners, who comes from a Christian family, first appeared in the national media in 2009 when she was juggling her job as a street cleaner in Bradford with a fledgling career as a topless model.

"People think it's really odd that I can be something so glamorous yet do something so dirty by day - but I love it," she told The Sun at the time.

Her transformation is thought to have begun about a year later when she was deeply affected by the death of her father, Anthony, in a freak drowning.

Miners appears to have found solace in the company of Muslim friends, including another white convert.

She said her interest in Islam was sparked last year.

"I found peace through it all,"she was quoted as saying.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
British researchers have discovered that it is now possible for machines to learn how natural or artificial systems work by simply observing them, without being told what to look for.

The discovery, by researchers at the University of Sheffield, is inspired by the work of computer scientist Alan Turing, who proposed a test which a machine could pass if it behaved indistinguishably from a human.

In the test, an interrogator exchanges messages with two players in a different room: one human, the other a machine.

The interrogator has to find out which of the two players is human. If they consistently fail to do so - meaning that they are no more successful than if they had chosen one player at random - the machine has passed the test, and is considered to have human-level intelligence.

Dr Roderich Gross from the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering and Sheffield Robotics at the University of Sheffield said, "Our study uses the Turing test to reveal how a given system, not necessarily a human, works".

"We put a swarm of robots under surveillance and wanted to find out which rules caused their movements. To do so, we put a second swarm - made of learning robots - under surveillance too. The movements of all the robots were recorded and the motion data shown to interrogators.

"Unlike in the original Turing test, however, our interrogators are not human but rather computer programs that learn by themselves. Their task is to distinguish between robots from either swarm. They are rewarded for correctly categorising the motion data from the original swarm as genuine, and those from the other swarm as counterfeit. The learning robots that succeed in fooling an interrogator - making it believe their motion data were genuine - receive a reward," he said.

The advantage of the approach -- Turing Learning -- is that humans no longer need to tell machines what to look for, according to Gross.

"Imagine you want a robot to paint like Picasso. Conventional machine learning algorithms would rate the robot's paintings for how closely they resembled a Picasso. But someone would have to tell the algorithms what is considered similar to a Picasso to begin with.

"Turing Learning does not require such prior knowledge. It would simply reward the robot if it painted something that was considered genuine by the interrogators. Turing Learning would simultaneously learn how to interrogate and how to paint. Our interrogators are not human but rather computer programs that learn by themselves. The learning robots that succeed in fooling an interrogator receive a reward," he said.

"Scientists could use it to discover the rules governing natural or artificial systems, especially where behaviour cannot be easily characterised using similarity metrics," Gross said, adding that 'Turing Learning' could lead to advances in science and technology.

The discovery was published in the journal Swarm Intelligence.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Opposition National Conference today said the frequent unrests in Kashmir were due to New Delhi's "continued refusal" to undo the wrongs of history and restore constitutionally legitimate rights of Jammu and Kashmir.

"From 1953 till 2016 today, New Delhi's continued refusal to undo the wrongs of history and restore the constitutionally legitimate political rights of J&K and its people have resulted in a pervasive sense of alienation and isolation in Kashmir," it said in its memorandum submitted to the all-party delegation here.

"It is this sense of alienation and isolation that fuels all agitations in Kashmir including the current one," it said.

The Opposition party said in recent years in successive efforts to pacify recurring agitations in the state, New Delhi has taken political initiatives in times of unrest only to abandon them in times of peace.

"The failure to implement the recommendations of the Prime Minister's Working Groups on Kashmir as well as the shocking indifference and contempt shown towards the Interlocutors Report are recent examples of this pattern of apathy and callousness," the party said.

"Similarly, the then central government refused to even acknowledge the Autonomy Resolution passed by the J&K Legislative Assembly in 2000 with a two-thirds majority. These glaring failures have provoked violence and instability in Kashmir," it said.

The NC said there was a needed for an acknowledgement of historical injustices perpetuated against the people of Jammu and Kashmir under the fig-leaf of "national interest" and "integration".

"The fact that J&K has acceded to the Union of India under a certain set of conditions and has not merged with the Union needs to be respected. The erosion of the state's autonomy from 1953 to 1975 needs to be reversed to uphold the integrity of promises made by the Union of India with the people of Jammu and Kashmir," the party said.

"The relationship between the state and the rest of the country is unique and constitutionally validated and no amount of shrill rhetoric or jingoism can change this reality," it said.

The party said that the genesis of the political issue in Kashmir lay in the erosion of the state's internal autonomy and a number of broken promises that violated good-faith agreements between the leadership of the state and successive central governments.

"The dismissal of a popular, elected government in 1953 and the incarceration of J&K's Prime Minister late Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah was the first blow that demolished the bond of good faith between Kashmir and New Delhi," it said.

The NC said that for the last couple of years the



political narrative vis-a-vis J&K's special status and Article 370 of the Constitution had become increasingly "reductionist, regressive and jingoist".

"The resulting atmosphere of shrill rhetoric has created a sense of insecurity among the people of the state and taken us further away from the overarching goal of reconciliation," the principal Opposition party said.

"Unfortunately the goal of appeasing respective political constituencies has taken precedence over the goal of a stable and peaceful J&K," it said.

Noting that Pakistan is a party to Kashmir issue, the NC called for involvement of Pakistani establishment in finding a solution to it.

"We cannot shy away from the fact that the Kashmir issue has both internal as well as external dimensions. A tit-for-tat diplomatic policy of one-upmanship between New Delhi and Islamabad will change precious little as far as restoring peace and stability in Kashmir is concerned," it said.

"Pakistan, by the very nature of this political issue and the fact that a large part of J&K's territory is administered by Islamabad, is a party to the issue. Any serious, meaningful process of finding a lasting solution to the Kashmir issue has to not only include an engagement with stakeholders of various opinions within J&K but also with the Pakistani establishment," it added.

The NC said that New Delhi's conventional investment in a policy of containment and operational management of the political sentiment in Kashmir had created a prolonged phase of political vacuum.

"The very fact that initiatives of political outreach, such as the visit of this all-parties delegation from New Delhi, are seen as reactionary manoeuvres rather than proactive initiatives, points at the reason for the sense of scepticism in the Valley," it said.
Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan today said American firms will invest Rs 2,400 crore in the state, in sectors like information technology and construction.

Out of the Rs 2,400 crore proposed investment, American IT companies will invest Rs 1,000 crore generating over 10,000 jobs.

Addressing reporters here after returning from a five-day trip to the US, Chouhan said efforts were made to create employment opportunities in the state.

Discussions were held with 25 companies while 100 firms participated in the Investment Summit, Chouhan said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The United States and Russia came up short today on a deal to end years of brutal fighting between Syria's Russian-backed government and US-supported rebels.

Negotiations were to continue today, even as a dispirited President Barack Obama doubted the diplomacy would ever pay off.

Russia and the US have sought for weeks to secure a cease-fire between Syrian President Bashar Assad's government and moderate rebels that would expand access for hundreds of thousands of civilians caught in the crossfire.

The strategy has hinged on an unlikely US-Russian militarily partnership against extremist groups operating in Syria.

But beyond the Islamic State and al-Qaida, the two powers have conflicting views about who fits in that category.

"We're not there yet," Obama said on the sidelines of an economic summit in China, where across town US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov were trying to hash out the deal.

"It's premature for us to say that there is a clear path forward, but there is the possibility at least for us to make some progress on that front."



A senior State Department official said the talks faltered yesterday when Russia pulled back from agreement on issues the US negotiators believed had been settled.

The official, who wasn't authorized to discuss negotiations publicly and requested anonymity, didn't elaborate. Kerry and Lavrov were consulting with their governments before talks resume on Monday.

The conflict has killed as many as a half-million people since 2011 and caused millions of Syrians to flee their homes, contributing to a global migration crisis. Amid the chaos, IS has emerged as a global terror threat.

Kerry and Lavrov's talks on the sidelines of the Group of 20 economic summit represent their third significant attempt since July to finalise a new US-Russian military partnership that Moscow has long sought.

The package would include provisions so aid can reach besieged areas of Syria and measures to prevent Assad's government from bombing areas where US-backed rebels are operating.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
India and Vietnam ink 12 agreements in different areas of cooperation

Published: September 3, 2016

India and Vietnam have signed 12 agreements in different areas of cooperation to boost bilateral relations.

These agreements were signed after Prime Minister Narendra Modi held wide-ranging talks with his Vietnamese counterpart Nguyen Xuan Phuc in Hanoi.

This was the first bilateral Prime Ministerial visit from India to Vietnam in 15 years since the visit of then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 2001.

The agreements were signed in the fields of

Exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes, double taxation avoidance, co-operation on UN peacekeeping operation.

Health, cyber security, advanced IT training, sharing of shipping information between the Navies of the two countries and mutual recognition of standards.

PM Narendra Modi also announced a line of credit (LoC) of 500 million US Dollars to Vietnam to facilitate deeper defence cooperation. The LoC will be used by Indias L&T to build offshore high speed patrol boats for Vietnamese Coast Guards.

Elevation of bilateral relations to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership

Besides, India and Vietnam also have agreed to elevate bilateral relations from Strategic Partnership to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.

This was announced in a joint press statement by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Vietnamese counterpart Nguyen Xuan Phuc in Hanoi.

The two countries also agreed to celebrate 2017 as the Year of Friendship. Prime Minister Narendra Modi also visited the 15th century QUAN SU PAGODA in Hanoi, the headquarters of Buddhist Sangha of Vietnam.

Month: Current Affairs - September, 2016

Topics: Current Affairs - 2017  Current Affairs 2016  Cyber-security  Defence  Health  India-International Relations  India-Vietnam  National  Space technology

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has named publicly 18 military commanders to oversee the production and distribution of food and basic goods in an effort to alleviate severe shortages affecting the country.

Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez selected the military personnel for the "Great Mission of Sovereign Supply and Security," appointments formalised in the state newspaper.

"We will have thorough, precise control of the strategic areas," Padrino Lopez told journalists on Saturday.

"This semester we will record supply levels greater than what we presented in the first semester, and next year, we will already have a structure to increase projection and improve distribution."

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro created the plan to combat severe shortages - which private firms say have hit 80 per cent  of basic products like rice, sugar and toilet paper that has fueled mounting unrest.

The embattled Maduro blames the crisis on the collapse of oil prices and an "economic war" by businesses backed by US "imperialism."

The country's opposition seeks to unseat the leftist president with a referendum, staging this past week a mass demonstration in favour of holding a recall vote.

Venezuelans line up at dawn or even overnight outside the nation's supermarkets, guarded by heavily armed police to battle the growing problem of looting.

Many people resort to purchasing scarce products from "bachaqueros"  black-market sellers who buy subsidised products and sell them at a mark-up.

The government launched in July a new plan against the shortages, putting the military in control of food distribution, the country's key ports, and of companies and factories.

According to state television, 660 private companies, 133 public companies and 2,467 food outlets have been audited since then, leading to 102 individual arrests.

Maduro says the military will make things right, arguing that the private sector controls 93 per cent of distribution of basic goods and is killing the economy with hoarding and scalping.

But the opposition and entrepreneurs say the problem is low production, which they blame on price controls and a lack of dollars to buy imported goods.

Francisco Martinez, president of the business association Fedecamaras maintains that operating companies are working between 30 and 40 per cent of their capacities because of challenges acquiring raw materials.
Parts of the Great Indian Desert and the barren Rann of Kutch could be a thriving economy with "no water problems" if Union Minister Nitin Gadkari's dream of building a 850-km canal from Gujarat to Rajasthan becomes a reality.

"I have a dream project to make a 850-km long canal from Kandla at the border of Gujarat/Rajasthan to Jaisalmer and Jalore. This will change the economy of Rajasthan and Gujarat," the Road Transport, Highways and Shipping Minister told PTI.

The project, he says, is in a preliminary stage and will use Arabian sea water from Gujarat to Rajasthan to transform the barren Rann of Kutch and Thar Desert regions into thriving economy.

The project will not only solve the water crisis in Rajasthan but will also result in clean drinking water, salt, gas to run urea plants, reduce power tariff and promote coastal movement of coal, lime and other products besides employing at least 1,000 youth, he said.

"We will make water ports in that canal. It is in a preliminary stage. The project will have 1,000 MW electricity generating capacity from sea water. Its byproduct will be salt. From salt we will manufacture gas to run CNG vehicles, drinking water will be there. We will leave this water in canal," the Minister said.

He said all adjoining rivers will be linked to the canal and during floods the river water will be released in the canal.

While one side of the canal will have highways, the other will see coming up of railways, he said adding that land will be no problem for the project as it is all desert and a government company has already surveyed it.

Funding too will not be a problem as WAPCOS (Water and Power Consultancy Services), a Government of India undertaking, was ready to invest in the project.

On funding requirements, he said it is yet to be assessed though the preliminary assessment estimated roughly Rs 5,000 crore expenditure.

The Minister was hopeful that the gas obtained from salt manufacturing will be used to set up a urea plant there that in turn will reduce the urea prices by at least 30 per cent there.

Elaborating about the project, the Minister said the idea was to select about 1,000 unemployed youth who in turn would be provided with Rs 2 crore loan each to buy three trucks, two JCBs and one pokland.

He said the idea was to provide 1 km earth work to each of the selected unemployed youth and they can recover the machinery cost from the project.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Scientists in Wales may have found a solution to the global chocolate crisis caused by a cocoa shortage by using by wild mango as a new cocoa butter alternative.

Bangor University researchers discovered wild mango butter can be used as an alternative to cocoa butter.

Disease and crop failure made the price of cocoa butter more than double between 2005 and 2015, with prices set to rise by 30 per cent by 2020.

Cocoa butter is the pure butter extracted from cocoa beans and is one of the unique natural fats highly demanded by food, pharmaceuticals and cosmetic industries and in particular is a major ingredient in the chocolate industry.

Cocoa butter is currently the only commercially available natural fat which is rich in saturated and monounsaturated fatty acids. Moreover, the price of cocoa butter is one of the highest among all tropical fats and oils and according to International Cocoa Organisation. The price of cocoa butter more than doubled between 2005 and 2015.

The discovery could see mango butter - which is lower in fat - "plucked from obscurity", the team said.

Sayma Akhter, a Bangladeshi-origin senior author and postgraduate student, said wild mango was a so-called "Cinderella" species - one which is visually appealing but currently overlooked - with its real potential still unrealised.

"The identification of value could pluck it from obscurity into mainstream production," she said.

"With the support of government and non-governmental organisations, small scale industries could be set up to create a new income source for local people. There are many other new products that can come from underutilised fruits which are still waiting for proper attention," she said.

Prof Morag McDonald, head of the university's School of Environment, Natural Resources and Geography, said a new use for the wild mango could help protect it from deforestation.

"Adding value to underutilised products through processing for products that have market value can generate a valuable incentive for the conservation of such species, and help to generate alternative income sources and reduce household poverty," McDonald added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A 28-year-old woman bank employee was murdered by unidentified persons in Sidgora area within Sidgora police station limits, the police today said.

The victim, Anita Besra, a tribal who had recently joined a bank, went missing after she left home in Jahersthan Tola in Baridih around 11 AM on Saturday but did not return, Officer In-charge of the police station, Rajdeo Singh said.

The body, however, was found in a nullah this afternoon, Singh said adding the police have detected injury marks on her head and hands.

An investigation was on and sniffer dogs have also been pressed for clues, Singh said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
"I died that day!" said an



inconsolable 30-year-old Naseema after her 15-month-old child became yet another victim of Taliban in Pakistan's tribal areas.

Unable to take her ailing child to hospital because there were no men at home and Taliban had prohibited women from venturing out alone, the helpless woman saw her baby daughter taking her last breath.

Resonating unheard voices of numerous such women living in conflict zones, a collective work of twelve journalists from India, Pakistan and Nepal-- Garrisoned Mind - was yesterday launched here.

"The fear of rape, violence, molestation is a constant companion of these women living in conflict zone. Their own identities are subsumed in the process of state formation and nation-building," Luxmi Murthy, one of the editors of the book, said.

"The title of the book was carefully chosen as Garrisoned Minds - colonisation and militarisation of minds in war zones, where bodies of women are treated as territories to be conquered, marked and claimed by the assailants," she said.

Women and children are most affected in conflict zone. "However, we generally ignore their plight," Shujaat Bukhari, Editor-in-Chief, Rising Kashmir said.

Siddiq Wahid, former vice chancellor of a university in Kashmir, said. "There is a vaccum of knowledge on Kashmir issue."



"Three things that are seemingly present in Kashmir are anger, embarrassment and despair," he said.

"There is an absolute impunity enjoyed by military forces landed in Kashmir, Manipur, Khyber, Balochistan, FATA or in Nepal," alleged associate professor, Centre for Women Development Studies, Seema Kazi.

Garrisoned minds, a publication of Speaking Tiger, gives reportage on the lives of women who faced atrocities in such conflicts.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
New tyre brands are making a beeline for India. Encouraged by a robust and consistent demand for cars across categories and segments, Bridgestone is bringing in its value label, the all-American Firestone while Apollo Tyres has just entered the two-wheeler tyre market. Growing demand and the emergence of brand-conscious customers looking for value purchases are the key reasons, say companies, that are encouraging them to get their wheels on the road.
China is willing to work with India to maintain their "hard-won sound" ties and further boost bilateral cooperation, President Xi Jinping told Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday as the two leaders held talks amid differences over a raft of issues.

"China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound relations and further advance their cooperation", state-run Chinese Xinhua news agency quoted Xi as saying during their half an hour meeting, their second in less than three months.

ALSO READ: India extends $500 million to Vietnam to bolster defence ties



The two leaders met before they attended the BRICS leaders meeting held ahead of the G20 summit here.

Xi's comments came in the backdrop of a raft of differences between the two countries including listing of Pakistan-based terrorist organisations in the UN, China stalling India's membership at the elite Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and the USD 46 billion China-Pakistan Corridor being built through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).

The two leaders had last met on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit in June in Tashkent and are again set to meet in Goa next month on the sidelines of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) summit.

Officials on both sides attach importance to the meeting in view of growing differences between the two Asian giants on bilaterally sensitive issues like listing of Pakistan-based terrorist group Jaish-e-Muhammad leader Masood Azhar.

China, too, has been concerned over close India-US ties, especially in defence, as the two countries signed the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) that will give the militaries of the two countries access to each other's facilities for supplies and repairs.
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Hearing center opens in Portland

York Hearing Center hosted a ribbon-cutting Aug. 25 for a new office at Wildcat Drive in Portland, officials said.

The Portland Chamber of Commerce officials were on hand.

York Hearing Center provides hearing aid sales and service of all styles of hearing aids, programming and adjustments of hearing aids, custom ear protection, and hearing aid and Bluetooth accessories. Other services include free hearing tests, speech in noise testing, two-week free trials on hearing devices, in-house repairs, and free clean and checks on all hearing aids, officials said. The center is located at 1500 Wildcat Drive, Ste. B, Portland.

First Pet Memorial Center opens

Corpus Christi Pet Memorial Center hosted a ribbon-cutting Aug. 25, officials said.

The center, which has its own pet cemetery, is located at 1534 Holly Road. Dee Besterio is the licensed funeral director and former owner of Austin's Pet Cremation Service, officials said.

Corpus Christi Matchmakers now open in Corpus Christi

Corpus Christi Matchmakers hosted a ribbon-cutting Aug. 26, officials said. It is located at 800 N. Shoreline Blvd., North Tower, Suite 410, inside Shoreline Plaza.

YWCA receives grant, seeks donations

YWCA Corpus Christi was awarded a matching grant for $35,000 from a local foundation and the organization must match the funds, officials said.

YWCA improves the health, well-being and lives of seniors 55 and older with a wide-ranging program of land and water activities. The organization is seeking donations from individuals, organizations or anyone who recognizes the importance of the programs offered for seniors, officials said.

The YWCA is a Women's Mission Membership movement dedicated to eliminating racism and empowering women. Volunteer and investment information can be found at YWCA's new website, www.ywcacc.org.

Radiology Associates opens new facility

Radiology Associates opened a state-of-the-art, 14,000-square-foot facility at Six Points, officials said.

Festivities included an official ribbon cutting with the newly merged United Chamber of Commerce and tours. Radiology Associates purchased the building that was previously First National Bank. Renovations took 26 months en total and the new facility will be home to 112 employees. The building includes: three mammography rooms, four ultrasound rooms, two MRI suites, two X-ray rooms, a fluoroscopy room, four doctor reading suites, patient waiting area and reception and 45 parking spaces. The new building is at 1812 S. Alameda St.

Compiled by Natalia Contreras
CALLER-TIMES FILE PHOTO Sales of local homes were strong in May and June, during which 528 homes and 580 homes respectively went to new owners.

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By Chris Ramirez of the Caller-Times

Corpus Christi's unemployment rate in July hit 6.2 percent, its highest since the recession, according to a monthly report by the Corpus Christi Regional Economic Development Corp.

The unemployment rate in the city typically has hovered between 4 percent and 5 percent in recent years, but hit 6 percent in June, the agency's report said.

The last time it was this high, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics was May 2009, when the jobless rate hit 6.8 percent.

Statewide unemployment in 4.6 percent.

Other highlights:

Year-to-date airline enplanements, or passenger boardings, at Corpus Christi International Airport were 197,681 from January to July. That's down 2.4 percent from 202,524 during the same period last year.

A total of 508 homes were sold in the Corpus Christi Metropolitan Statistical Area, according to the report, which cited data from the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University. Sales also were strong in May and June, during which 528 homes and 580 homes respectively went to new owners.

Year-to-date activity for permits on new residences in Corpus Christi remained in line with that of last year. In all, 696 permits were distributed between January and July, compared 695 during the same period in 2015. Commercial permitting during those months decreased, to 159 in 2016 from 180 in 2015.

The city of Alice continues to struggle in collecting sales taxes.

Its year-to-date collection in July was about 49.8 percent off the pace from last year. The economic development corp.'s report, which used data from the Texas comptroller's office, said the city collected $3,056,718 in the first seven months of 2016, compared with $6,085,157 during the same period in 2015.

City officials and economists have blamed the sluggish tax collection on the oil and gas downturn.

Twitter: @Caller_ChrisRam

August Economic Trends 2016 by callertimes on Scribd
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WEDNESDAY

Orientation set for small businesses

A small business orientation is from 4-6 p.m. at the Center for Economic Development, 3209 S. Staples St., CED 146. The seminar will provide new business owners information to start a business. Topics include small business loans and financing requirements, business plan, licensing, contracting and permit information and resources. Free. Information: www.seminarscc.com.

THURSDAY

Get familiar with QuickBooks

A seminar on how to use QuickBooks, accounting software for small businesses will be from 2-5 p.m. at the Del Mar College Center for Economic Development, 3209 S. Staples St., CED Room 123. QuickBooks can help track income and expenses, create invoices and organize financial data. Erika Salinas will be the instructor at the seminar. Cost: $45. To register, visit www.seimnarscc.com or call 361-698-1021.

FRIDAY

Society of CPAs meets Sept. 9

The Corpus Christi Chapter of the Texas Society of CPAs will host a meeting from noon to 1 p.m. Sept. 9 at the Solomon Ortiz International Center. Cost: $35/before Sept. 2. $40/after Sept. 2 and at the door. Information: 800/428-0272, ext. 279.

LATER

Meeting set for construction group

The National Association of Women in Construction monthly business meeting will be at 5:30 p.m. Sept. 20 at The Bar BQ Man Restaurant, 4139 S. Interstate 37. Cost $20.

Compiled by Natalia Contreras
As late-campaign rhetoric gets overheated, voters should remain wary

Be on the lookout for misleading ads, stump speeches and text messages from campaigns in the final countdown to the Nov. 8 elections.
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Labor Day is a time for us to celebrate the workers who make our economy grow  the people without whom businesses could not survive and thrive.

Yet for many, it can sometimes feel like American workers don't get the kind of respect they deserve. Wages remain low (and aren't rising fast enough) relative to productivity, we lag behind other developed nations on guaranteeing benefits like paid leave, schedules are often set without enough input from employees who have families to take care of.

But we now have an opportunity to improve how workers are treated. That may not surprise you. What may surprise you is that there's a strong incentive for those changes to come from businesses themselves. One area in particular is giving workers a greater ownership stake in the companies they work for  in essence, celebrating workers and businesses at the same time.

There are two main ways to do this  employee stock ownership plans, or ESOPs, and worker cooperatives.

According to the National Center for Employee Ownership, about 32 million Americans own stock in their employers, whether through ESOPs, options, stock purchase plans, or 401(k)s. But there's a big difference between just owning a few shares of your company's stock and being part of a company that's essentially worker-owned.

When workers have decision-making power, they often understand better what's working in the company and what isn't. And they certainly have an incentive to address any problems, because as owners, their profit-making potential is tied to the company's success.

We're already seeing the potential  just look at employee-owned companies, like New Belgium Brewing and Dansko (both ESOPs) or Cleveland's Evergreen Cooperative, that have strong balance sheets, create hundreds of jobs and boost their local economies.

Take ESOPs  businesses that choose to give their employees shares of the company, even 100 percent in some cases. According to the NCEO, nearly 7,000 ESOPs in the United States employ 14 million workers and cover $1.23 trillion in assets. And lest you think this is a new trend, that data also found that more than half of all ESOPs today have been around since before the turn of the century.

Or take worker cooperatives, where decision-making power is shared among employees. There are fewer of them in the United States  only 300 to 400, according to the Democracy at Work Institute  but they employ 7,000 people and generate $400 million in revenue annually.

Not only do these firms provide longer-lasting, better-paying jobs, they also give workers the chance to build their skills and take a more active role in growing the company  because as owners themselves, they do better when the company does better. For Americans who are struggling, worker ownership can be a pathway to prosperity, one that can help revitalize local economies.

One way to continue this trend would be to support bipartisan legislation that would make stock options more attractive to employees by letting them defer the taxes they would pay on those options. Another would be for the Small Business Administration to increase lending support for ESOPs through its Section 7(a) loan-guarantee program, a program designed to help either start a new business or expand an existing one.

That's all well and good, but for worker cooperatives, we need to ensure that they are treated equally compared to ESOPs when it comes to those kinds of tax benefits. Right now, they are not, and ESOPs remain the top choice for investors due to various existing tax benefits. While ESOPs are an important piece of the puzzle, we can't discriminate against workers who want to build assets, and become owners, but can't find work at a company that offers an ESOP.

It's a common misconception that we have to choose between employees and employers. That's not the case, of course  what company could survive without its workers?  but now there are new types of companies challenging that idea. This Labor Day, let's stop treating workers and business owners like enemies, and let's support the companies that are making them one and the same.
Saturday, September 3, 2016 at 7:06PM

While Huaweis P9 smartphone hasnt made its way here yet, there are already additional colour options for the smartphone. The premium device, which the Chinese brand co-developed with Leica for the camera optics, is now also available in very striking colors of red and blue. It was previously available in Haze Gold, Ceramic White, Rose Gold, Prestige Gold, Titanium Grey, and Mystic Silver. The new models come with 32GB onboard storage, 3GB of RAM, and will retail for 549 (or almost CA$800).

Source: Android Authority
"My friends and family saw [ the promo] and they were like, 'Oh, my god!'. And all my work colleagues. I was getting all these messages like, 'Oh my god, I'm crying!'. And I'm like, 'I'm sorry!'," she said.
Catholic schools in the ACT receive for each student, on average, 60 per cent of the government funding that government schools receive for each of their students. A child in an ACT government school receives $14,447 of combined commonwealth and territory funding, where a child in a Catholic school receives only $9716, according to data from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority on the My School website.
He is also being asked to speak at wedding conferences around the world. This week he's off to New York for a speaking engagement. Later it's to Stockholm and Spain. He'll also do weddings in New York and Washington DC while in the US.
Mr Shorten said Labor's push for donation reform at the last election  which included dropping the disclosure threshold from an indexed $13,000 to a fixed $1000 and a new ban on so-called donation splitting  stood in contrast to Mr Turnbull's reported donations to the Coalition's campaign of more than $1 million.
The directorate includes Disability ACT and Therapy ACT, which have both been the subject of change due to the NDIS, and so the Commissioner for Public Administration has been waiving the two-year rule.
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Our Promise: Welcome to Care2, the world's largest community for good. Here, you'll find over 45 million like-minded people working towards progress, kindness, and lasting impact.

Care2 Stands Against: bigots, racists, bullies, science deniers, misogynists, gun lobbyists, xenophobes, the willfully ignorant, animal abusers, frackers, and other mean people. If you find yourself aligning with any of those folks, you can move along, nothing to see here.

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Photo: Getty Images

Overview for all signs:

Feelings of uncertainty cause emotions to swing. Seek further clarity before reacting.

Some situations need time to settle or return to their usual pattern. Be more self contained on your own path to avoid any fallout around you.

Take it slow, remaining silent as the truth will rise to the surface eventually. Whispered communications show where support is for some.

Try to relax and follow protocol. Be responsible. Order can be restored by Wednesday. Align yourself with like-minded individuals for best success. Be realistic about financial matters.

Double check travel plans, coming or going for yourself as well as others; changes are likely. Be ready to shift gears.

ARIES: Preparations take more time than expected. Line up the right people for the job to be completed.

TAURUS: Organize your finances carefully if they are tied to others in any way. Sell or discard stuff now.

GEMINI: Home or property plans need more clarity and firming up. Certain arrangements are important.

CANCER: What you say or do now affects relationships or location. A clearer understanding is needed.

LEO: Dont let the past cloud your future direction or plans. Financial security should be closely watched.

VIRGO: Your quiet confidence in your abilities will get you through any tough situations or competitions.

LIBRA: You may gloat a little as you are the one who knows what others are really up to. Be gracious.

SCORPIO: Harness the influence of power brokers who are on the same page. It is a successful force.

SAGITTARIUS: Your status or reputation solidifies your position at the top. Private meetings are good.

CAPRICORN: Stay the course and you can weather any storms around you. Avoid other involvement.

AQUARIUS: You have a beneficial connection to others financially or through joint assets. Discuss it.

PISCES: You get clarity on the true intentions of those involved with you or who want to be connected.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.
Photo: Contributed

An Edmonton man faces several charges in connection with the death of an elderly couple.

Edmonton police have charged Edward Kyle Roberts, 31, with first degree murder, break and enter and possession of a weapon.

Police allege Roberts broke into a residence and stole a knife that they allege he used to kill Joao Nascimento, 93, and Maria Nascimento, 81.

Police spokesman Scott Pattison says a neighbour reported a suspicious person seen loitering in the area on Friday.

Pattison say police discovered the bodies of the two victims when they entered their residence.

Police say the cause of death will be officially confirmed following autopsies scheduled for Tuesday.

Pattison says the couple had been married for forty years and their sudden death was "extremely tragic."

"(They were) in the latter years of their life, living a peaceful existence," he says.

Pattison could not speculate on a motive but says investigators believe the couple were "random targets."

It's not known when Roberts will appear in court.
Photo: The Canadian Press

Saturday night's $5-million Lotto 649 jackpot was won by a ticket sold in Ontario.

A ticket purchased in the province also claimed the draw's guaranteed $1 million prize.

The jackpot for the next Lotto 649 draw on Sept. 7 will again be $5 million.
Photo: CTV An oil sands facility seen from a helicopter near Fort McMurray, Alta.

Justin Trudeau's Liberals are wooing Chinese investors by sending a strong message they are open to rolling back the thresholds on foreign investment the Harper government set up in 2014.

"Its something we would consider amongst a number of different things," David Lametti, parliamentary secretary to the Minister of International Trade, said on CTV's Question Period with Evan Solomon.

After the Harper government approved the 2012 sale of the Calgary-based oilsands company Nexen to Chinas state-owned enterprise China National Offshore Oil Corporation for $15 billion, they made an about-face by imposing tougher investment laws.

At the time, Harper said Canada is open for business, but that does not mean Canada is for sale to foreign governments.

Harper argued selling Canadian companies to state-owned companies buying up were not a "net benefit" to Canada.

But now that Chinese investment disappeared when the price of oil fell, Trudeau appears open to welcoming Chinese business once again.

But that has the opposition concerned.

Looking at that option seems to (bring up) the question of sovereignty again, NDP MP Nathan Cullen said on Question Period. It almost seems like pipeline blackmail. If we want to have any trade with China, we might have to do something Canadians might not want.

Lametti said the government has not formally explored this possibility of increasing the thresholds on foreign investment but would consider all proposals that might enhance trade.

- with files from CTV
Photo: Skylar noe-vack

Three people received minor injuries after the car they were in struck a tree.

The accident happened at around 5 a.m. in front of Murray GMC on Westminster Avenue West in Penticton.

Upon arrival, emergency crews found the a car was heavily damaged on passenger side.

There is no word on the exact cause of the accident or if charges are pending.


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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.

Popular destinations

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.

Breckenridge Luxury Hotels

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.

Naples Luxury Hotels

Naples Luxury Resorts

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.

Louisville Luxury Hotels

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.

Galveston Luxury Hotels

Galveston Luxury Resorts

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.

Omaha Luxury Hotels

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.

Columbus Luxury Hotels

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.

Anchorage Luxury Hotels

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.

Portland Luxury Hotels

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.

Florence Luxury Hotels

Florence Luxury Villas

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.

Asheville Luxury Hotels

Asheville Luxury Cottages

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.

Long Beach Luxury Hotels

Long Beach Luxury Villas

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.

Cincinnati Luxury Hotels

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.

Laughlin Luxury Hotels

Laughlin Luxury Resorts

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.

Anaheim Luxury Hotels

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!.

Santa Cruz Luxury Hotels

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.

Eugene Luxury Hotels

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!.

Branson Luxury Hotels

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.

Panama City Beach Luxury Hotels

Panama City Beach Luxury Resorts

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.

Monterey Luxury Hotels

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.

Norfolk Luxury Hotels

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.

Palm Springs Luxury Hotels

Palm Springs Luxury Resorts

Palm Springs Luxury Villas

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.

Rochester Luxury Hotels

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.

Pigeon Forge Luxury Hotels

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.

Jacksonville Luxury Hotels

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.

Minsk Luxury Hotels

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.

Jaipur Luxury Hotels

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.

Chicago Luxury Hotels

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!.

Auckland Luxury Hotels

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.

Amsterdam Luxury Hotels

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.

Berlin Luxury Hotels

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.

Bangkok Luxury Hotels

Bangkok Luxury Resorts

Bangkok Luxury Villas

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.

Bruges Luxury Hotels

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.

Brussels Luxury Hotels

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.

Budapest Luxury Hotels

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.

Playa del Carmen Luxury Hotels

Playa del Carmen Luxury Resorts

Playa del Carmen Luxury Villas

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!.

Denver Luxury Hotels

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.

Dusseldorf Luxury Hotels

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.

Edinburgh Luxury Hotels

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!.

Rome Luxury Hotels

Rome Luxury Villas

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.

New York Luxury Hotels

New York Luxury Villas

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.

London Luxury Hotels

London Luxury Cottages

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.

Madrid Luxury Hotels

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.

Memphis Luxury Hotels

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.

Miami Beach Luxury Hotels

Miami Beach Luxury Resorts

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!.

New Orleans Luxury Hotels

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.

Paris Luxury Hotels

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

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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.

Zermatt Luxury Hotels

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.

Abu Dhabi Luxury Hotels

Abu Dhabi Luxury Resorts

Abu Dhabi Luxury Villas

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.

Cebu Luxury Hotels

Cebu Luxury Resorts

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.

Hoi An Luxury Hotels

Hoi An Luxury Resorts

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.

Colombo Luxury Hotels

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.

Hong Kong Luxury Hotels

Hong Kong Luxury Resorts

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.

Orlando Luxury Hotels

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Orlando Luxury Villas

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.

Nice Luxury Hotels

Nice Luxury Villas

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

Singapore Luxury Resorts

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.

Cannes Luxury Hotels

Cannes Luxury Villas

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

Park City Luxury Resorts

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

Fort Lauderdale Luxury Resorts

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.

Myrtle Beach Luxury Hotels

Myrtle Beach Luxury Resorts

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.

Pattaya Luxury Hotels

Pattaya Luxury Resorts

Pattaya Luxury Villas

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.

Dallas Luxury Hotels

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.

Sydney Luxury Hotels

Sydney Luxury Villas

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.

Melbourne Luxury Hotels

Melbourne Luxury Villas

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

Seville Luxury Villas

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

Sedona Luxury Resorts

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.

Key West Luxury Hotels

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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.

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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!.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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
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Celebrating jailhouse recovery Audio Article Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle Sears paid a visit to the Chesterfield County Jail last week, meeting with over 50 of the men and women participating in the HARP (Helping Addicts...

An icons legacy memorialized Audio Article Enon Library was dedicated in memory of the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker on Friday, Oct. 21. Board of Supervisors Chair Chris Winslow, right, was joined by Walkers daughter, Patrice Walker...
Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov should have been shot by the Bolsheviks in 1922 but, thanks to a certain pre-revolutionary poem, is condemned to life imprisonment inside Moscow's Hotel Metropol  and in a servant's garret room, no less, not his accustomed luxury suite with its views of Theatre Square. What happens next is the subject of Amor Towles' delightful new novel, "A Gentleman in Moscow."

Fans of Towles' first book, the 2011 best-seller "Rules of Civility" (and I am proudly one of them), will enjoy this book. Whereas "Rules" was set mostly in 1938 New York City and charted the course of Katey Kontent, a plucky young woman from Brooklyn looking to find her way in the Big Apple, this new book spans 32 years and is confined largely to the rooms, hallways, service stairs, restaurants and storage areas of the Metropol, which is an actual hotel in the heart of Moscow. Yet, a hotel is a city of sorts if you think about it and, as with Miss Kontent, Count Rostov is a memorable character you come to care about and root for.

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Asked to state his name by a prosecutor for the Emergency Committee of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, Rostov does so in full, noting he is also a "recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt." Now, the Order of Saint Andrew the First-Called was (and is again) the highest order in Russia, so clearly here is a man of some achievement  or excellent connections  even if he chooses to keep it carefully wrapped in a charming insouciance that annoys the communist prosecutor and, apparently, the late Tsarina.

Towles introduces his character slowly, offering glimpses of the man and his past as the story proceeds. But from the start, Rostov is quite the Renaissance man. He can taste the nettles tucked under the Ukrainian ham of a saltimbocca "fashioned from necessity"; seat a banquet's worth of Soviet bigwigs with a diplomat's dexterity; memorably bed an actress; befriend practically everyone; and quietly outwit dogmatic apparatchiks.

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Still, prison is prison. Living in a proverbial gilded cage like the Metropol has an impact on Count Rostov. And while he vows to commit himself to the "business of practicalities" , confinement tries his soul. But it also hones his wits, bolsters his courage, deepens him in the many ways that large and small trials can temper one's character. Not for him, long bouts of Proustian depression.

Lest the reader find hotel living claustrophobic, Towles does manage to escape the Metropol when the story requires it. He moves fluidly backward and forward in time to explain a character's motivation, set up the scene we're about to enter, or explain what happened to someone who crossed the wrong commissar, say, unbeknownst to the others. In so doing, Towles manages to outline the murderous brutality, fear and bureaucratic banality of the Soviet era without letting it overwhelm his narrative.

As with "Rules," I appreciate the little details Towles sprinkles through the novel. That he names his hero Rostov is surely no accident. The Rostovs were one of the families featured in Leo Tolstoy's epic novel, "War and Peace." At one point, the Count picks up a book and begins to read. Towles doesn't say what it is but gives the first line: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." That's "Anna Karenina," also by Tolstoy.

"Marvelous," the Count says.

Agreed. And "marvelous" is a word I'd use for this book. Finishing "A Gentleman in Moscow" left me with conflicting emotions. I was happy for a good, engaging read. And I was sad that it was over and I had to bid Count Rostov adieu.

Or maybe not.

Maybe  just maybe  Towles could be talked into a sequel or prequel to this book. He did that, after all, with his short e-book, "Eve in Hollywood," which followed a "Rules" character, Eve Ross, who was supposed to take the train to Chicago but didn't get off. And  who knows?  maybe Hollywood will pay a call (as it did with "Rules"). Count Rostov is a character to the movies born; lucky the leading man gets to play him.

wdaley@chicagotribune.com Twitter @billdaley

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A Gentleman in Moscow

By Amor Towles, Viking, 480 pages, $27
I recently booked a trip to Italy through OneTravel.com. My flight was one hour late arriving in Rome. I wasn't concerned because I knew that I'd planned plenty of time before my next flight to Palermo. I retrieved my luggage and went through customs, then grabbed a bite to eat before heading to the check-in at Vueling Airlines.

When I got there, an airline representative told me I'd missed my flight. I gave her my confirmed booking, and she said that my flight was canceled and I'd been placed on an earlier flight that departed at 9:10 a.m.

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I had not been notified and couldn't have accepted the change, since my flight didn't land until 9:15 a.m. Vueling would not honor my ticket because I booked through OneTravel and not the airline directly. The representative could not offer me another flight for that day and told me to go to Ryanair.

I booked a flight with Ryanair. The only flight I could get was for the next morning, and the cost of the ticket was more than double the original price. I immediately called my hotel in Palermo to cancel my one-night stay but was told that I was not within the 24-hour cancellation period and I would have to pay for the hotel.

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I then needed to find a hotel. I was exhausted from the all-night travel and decided that the Hilton at the Rome airport was my best option. The only room available was one on the concierge level.

When I returned from my trip, I called OneTravel.com. It denied ever receiving a call from Vueling and would not claim responsibility for the error.

I've tried to get in touch with Vueling directly but have not heard back yet. I would like someone to take responsibility for this mistake and to be reimbursed.

I've exhausted every avenue and am hoping that you can help me.

 Judy Weidel, Towson, Md.

A: Vueling should have told your travel agency about the rescheduled flight, and it should have fixed your itinerary so that your flight to Palermo didn't leave 15 minutes before you arrived in Rome. That's an impossible connection, of course.

Your online travel agent, OneTravel.com, is responsible for monitoring the flight schedules and ensuring that you can reasonably make all of your connections. So, while it's regrettable that Vueling didn't inform the agent of the schedule change, that doesn't absolve OneTravel of its responsibility. I mean, that's the reason you work with a travel agent (online or offline). You want to have someone to help you when something goes wrong, as it did for you.

You might have avoided this by contacting all of your airlines directly to confirm your flights before leaving. That's always a good idea, even when you're using a travel agent. Sometimes, airlines fail to inform their travel agents about a schedule change, and you really don't want to miss your flight.

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You might have appealed OneTravel.com's decision to one of its executives. I list the names and numbers of its executives on my consumer-advocacy site: http://elliott.org/company-contacts/fareportal.

I contacted OneTravel.com on your behalf. It apologized for the mix-up and refunded $692.

Christopher Elliott is the ombudsman for National Geographic Traveler magazine and the author of "How to Be the World's Smartest Traveler." You can read more travel tips on his blog, www.elliott.org, or email him at chris@elliott.org.

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A 27-year-old man was ordered held on $1 million bail on charges he sexually assaulted a 10-year-old girl multiple times during the course of several months, Cook County prosecutors said in court.

Rodolfo Contreras, whose address was listed in the West Humboldt Park neighborhood, is charged with predatory criminal sexual assault, a Class X felony in Illinois.

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Prosecutors said Contreras repeatedly attacked the young girl, who is the daughter of an acquaintance, about half a dozen times between April and September. He was arrested on Saturday.

Contreras is scheduled to return to court Sept. 6.
Edward Huskisson worked for the Swift Canadian Co. for nearly four decades. (Family photo)

Edward Huskisson, a British-born executive of the Swift Canadian Co., worked for a dozen years in Toronto and Montreal before being transferred to Chicago, where he later rose to senior vice president and then president of the international division.

In the mid-1980s, Huskisson, a longtime member of Christ Church of Oak Brook, co-founded the LOVE Christian Clearinghouse, now known as Love Inc., a resource clearinghouse where area pastors of all denominations in the western suburbs find help for those in need.

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"At the time, we felt it made good sense to try and link the efforts and resources of all the churches in our area," said fellow co-founder Peter Mackinnon. "Or, as Edward so aptly put it back then, 'It was a capital idea!'"

Around that same time, Huskisson also began volunteering with Executive Service Corps of Chicago, a volunteer organization made up of professional executives helping nonprofits and public agencies find solutions to ongoing challenges.

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In 2003, the group named him a life director to recognize his 19 years of service  a total of nearly 21,000 volunteer hours invested in West Side Future Consortium, a partnering agency working to improve the quality of life in that community.

"Edward was a gentleman  kind, thoughtful, honest and humble," Mackinnon said. "He was someone who had never met a stranger, a true humanitarian."

Huskisson, 90, the recipient of The Gutenberg Award from the Chicago Bible Society in 1995, died Aug. 21, of respiratory failure in his home at Park Place, a retirement community in Elmhurst, where he had been living with his wife for the past two years.

"He cared deeply about people, not just those he knew, but all people," said his wife, Janice Doty Huskisson. "His greatest joy came from helping to improve the lives of as many people as possible."

Huskisson was born in Woking, in the county of Surrey, where his father was a businessman in the meat industry. He graduated from Marlborough College in Wiltshire, England, and joined the British Royal Artillery, where he was chosen for officer cadet training during World War II. He served two years in India, helping to maintain peace during the establishment of Pakistan as a country.

Huskisson was discharged as a captain in 1948 and returned to his family's home in England, where he was encouraged by his father to find work in the meat industry. He was hired for management by the Swift Canadian Co. and sent to work in Canada.

In the early 1950s, and while living in Toronto, he married his first wife, Ethel, with whom he had five sons. The couple also lived in Montreal before moving to the Chicago area and making their home in Glen Ellyn and Hinsdale. He retired from the company after nearly four decades.

A member of Christ Church of Oak Brook since 1967, Huskisson served in many key roles at the church. He also served as president of the Executives Breakfast Club of Oak Brook, and four years as a village trustee in Hinsdale, during the late 1980s and into the early '90s.

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"One of the things I admired most about Edward was his genuine interest in people," said Mackinnon, a fellow member of Christ Church of Oak Brook. "He was a wonderful conversationalist. When you spoke with him, you had his undivided attention."

In 1990, two years after the death of his wife, Ethel, of cancer, Edward married his second wife, Janice Doty, also recently widowed. The two had met through a mutual friend at a house party on the Fourth of July.

"It's not every American that meets an Englishman on the Fourth of July  and then marries him!" his wife said.

Huskisson was preceded in death by his son, Bill.

Other survivors include four sons, James, Peter, Robert and John; a stepson, Clayton Doty; a stepdaughter, Patra Doty Dunn; two sisters, Mary Charlotte Boase and Susan Loughnan; 25 grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.

Services were held

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Giangrasse Kates is a freelance reporter.
A 17-year-old boy is in serious condition after plunging 50 feet down a canyon in Starved Rock State Park on Sunday afternoon, according to fire department officials.

The boy was with friends in a restricted area of Pontiac Canyon and he fell, said Utica Fire Protection Chief Ben Brown. His friends called 911 about 12:40 p.m.

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"We found him at the bottom of the canyon with Illinois Conservation Police,'' Brown said. "We packaged him up, and hauled him out of the park to a boat that took him across the Illinois River to a helicopter.''

The boy, of Belvidere, Ill., was airlifted to St. Anthony Medical Center in Rockford, where he is in serious condition.

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"When you veer off the beaten path or you climb is when you fall,'' said Brown, who added the rocky area is usually safe.

None of his friends was injured.
A 32-year-old man who was killed in an Archer Heights alley early Sunday, the first homicide of the Labor Day weekend in Chicago, has been identified.

He was with a 22-year-old man in the 4800 block of South Kildare Avenue when someone fired shots at them, police said.

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The older man, Juan Pita-Rosas, of the 4700 block of South Springfield Avenue, was shot in the head and taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 1:05 a.m., according to the Cook County medical examiner's office.

An autopsy Sunday determined Pita-Rosas died of a gunshot wound to the cheek and his death was ruled a homicide, the office said.

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The younger man later walked into Holy Cross Hospital with gunshot wounds to the arm and chest. He was listed in serious condition.

Police searched the alley early Sunday, looking for something that would show which way the shooters had approached. They found a bullet hole a few houses south of the crime scene; an officer was sent to wake up someone in the house to ask if the hole had been there before the shooting.

Moments later, a man in shorts and sandals walked through his gangway to see. No, he told them, the hole was new. They opened the garage door and found that the bullet had hit his lawn mower. The alley began to smell of gasoline.

The resident, who declined to give his name, said he hadn't heard any gunshots.

"It's so close to home," he said. "This is bad news. I hope it's not a regular thing."

At least eight other people have been shot in Chicago since Saturday morning:

At 11:50 p.m. Saturday, a 25-year-old woman was hit by a stray bullet. She was in the 3400 block of West Irving Park Road when someone in a nearby black SUV began shooting at another car. A bullet ricocheted toward her right leg, and she suffered a wound that police described as a burn or impact injury. She refused medical attention at the scene.

At 9:25 p.m., a 21-year-old man was critically injured in an attack in West Pullman. He was outside a residence in the 12400 block of South Perry Avenue when someone shot him from a passing gray Chevy Malibu. He was shot in the head and taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center in critical condition.

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A 25-year-old man and a 17-year-old boy were shot sometime before 8:25 p.m. in the 4900 block of North Kenmore Avenue, police said. The two walked into Weiss Memorial Hospital, and hospital officials called police at 8:23 p.m., a police spokesman said. They both were shot in the back during what may have been a drive-by attack. The shooters fled in a gray four-door car. The shooting victims' conditions were stabilized.

About 8:20 p.m., a 63-year-old man was shot and critically wounded during a robbery in Back of the Yards. He was in a store in the 1800 block of West 47th Street when someone entered and announced a robbery. The 63-year-old man was shot in the stomach and went to Stroger Hospital in critical condition. The shooter got away with an unknown amount of proceeds.

A 16-year-old boy was shot in LaFollette Park, in the 5000 block of West Hirsch Street, about 8 p.m. He was in the park when someone approached on foot and fired multiple shots. He was shot in the head and went to Mount Sinai in critical condition.

Also at 8 p.m., an 18-year-old man was shot in the Gage Park neighborhood. Family members took him to Mount Sinai Hospital after he was shot in the 5500 block of South Troy Street. He was listed in good condition, and police said he was being uncooperative with the investigation.

A 19-year-old man walked into Little Company of Mary Hospital after being shot about 3:10 p.m. in the 8100 block of South Throop Street. He suffered a gunshot wound to the left arm in what was believed to be a drive-by shooting and was in good condition. No one was in custody.

As of Sunday morning, at least 21 people have been wounded in Chicago shootings this Labor Day weekend. In addition, an off-duty Chicago police officer was grazed by a bullet early Sunday in Bridgeport.

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Check back for updates.
Khizr Khan and his wife, Ghazala, whose son, Capt. Humayan Khan, was killed in 2004 in the Iraq War, spoke to the annual Islamic Society of North America convention in Rosemont on Sept. 3, 2016. (Grace Wong / Chicago Tribune)

The couple who lost a son in the Iraq War and were attacked by Donald Trump after their appearance at the Democratic National Convention this summer on Saturday thanked those at a national Islamic convention for their support but warned the "assault" on the Muslim community won't end with the November election.

Khizr Khan and his wife, Ghazala, whose son, Capt. Humayan Khan, was killed in 2004 in Iraq, spoke to the annual Islamic Society of North America convention in Rosemont on Saturday afternoon.

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Khan praised Muslim leaders for being a voice for the community and also thanked the scholars and mentors in his life.

"The burden of the scholar has gotten heavier because of the assault," Khizr Khan said. "Some people believe that this assault may be over, assault on my community and assault on my religion, will be over in November. Do not be mistaken. This assault is far beyond elections."

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Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, introduced the couple.

Calling the Khans "remarkable human beings," Sarsour said that Khizr Khan was "unapologetically Muslim" and that "we as American Muslims know exactly what the U.S. Constitution says, and we expect those who are going to be the leaders of the United States of America to abide by that Constitution."

Khizr Khan, the father of a soldier killed in Iraq, speaks at the Democratic National Convention. (Los Angeles Times)

Sarsour also praised Ghazala Khan's silence during the Democratic convention, something Trump raised questions about, saying that the Republican presidential candidate was blind to "the power, the grace of Ghazala Khan."

"We do not have to scream, we do not have to speak for people to know that we as Muslim women are powerful women, that we are the foundations of our communities and our institutions, and it is because of us that our communities thrive," Sarsour said.

Ghazala Khan spoke first, thanking everyone for the love and respect they have received.

"I'm so grateful for all of you and all of America and all of the world," Ghazala Khan said. "I feel so close to you guys. ... I have given one son and got this many back."

In his remarks, Khizr Khan said, "The ink of the pen of the scholars is more sacred than the blood of the martyrs," and said scholars must play a large role in shaping the reaction of the Muslim community to the "chaos" in American society.

"I want all the scholars to teach us how to deal with this mess," Khizr Khan said. "We want you to teach us how to condemn violence. We are looking towards you to teach us how to deal with this chaos that is generated locally. How to participate in this process, how to be the citizen of democracy."

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Khizr Khan also encouraged those at the convention to support refugees and welcome them to their communities.

ISNA President Azhar Azeez said he invited the Khans to thank the family for their "supreme sacrifices."

Saturday night, Jeh Johnson, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, called the Khans heroes during his address.

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The Khans were presented with the Outstanding Ambassadors of Islam Award during Saturday night's session.

Ghazala Khan told the thousands of people they were all her children and that she loved them all.

"Let your voice be heard so that tomorrow, our future generation, our children, don't have to hear this ugly political rhetoric that we have heard," Khizr Khan said. "Enough. It ended today."

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Johnson reassured the audience that the Department of Homeland Security was "aligned" with their interests and that the Muslim-American story was "the quintessential American story."

"It's frustrating to listen to those who foment fear, suspicion and intolerance," Johnson said. "Who don't know the mistakes of history and are in the midst of repeating them. Have faith that the character of the American people, as a whole, is such that in the end, in the end, we will choose not to drink this brand of soiled milk."

gwong@tribpub.com

Twitter @GraceWong630
Chicago Police SWAT members pull aside two women, right, for questioning at the scene of a standoff with suspect involved in a carjacking with an Illinois State Trooper Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016, in the 4200 block of West 16th Street in the North Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)

A standoff in the Lawndale neighborhood Saturday night involving a person police believed to be the third suspect in the carjacking of an off-duty Illinois state trooper ended with the suspect surrendering to police, authorities said.

The 18-year-old suspect had been tracked to his home Saturday night and Cicero, Illinois and Chicago police surrounded the home in the 4200 block of West 16th Street, leading to a short standoff. About 8:30 p.m., several people, including the suspect, walked out of the home with their hands up, ending the standoff.

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The carjacking took place Monday at 18th Street and 51st Court, when a woman who's a state trooper was robbed by three men, said Ray Hanania, a spokesman for Cicero police. The trooper was believed to have had her gun in her car, and it was taken in the robbery.

Cicero officers arrested two of the suspects after a foot pursuit, and investigators identified a third, who was believed to have the trooper's gun, Hanania said.

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The gun and vehicle were recovered by police, Hanania said.
Indiana Gov. and vice presidential candidate Mike Pence speaks to supporters at the Hyatt Regency Sarasota in Sarasota, Fla., on Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2016. (Eve Edelheit / AP)

Donald Trump would suspend the U.S. program that offers safe haven to Syrian refugees fleeing violence and conflict in their country, his vice-presidential running mate said.

The program "puts safety and security of the American people second to the agenda of the UN or to liberals in this country," Indiana Governor Mike Pence said in an interview with NBC News' "Meet the Press" that aired Sunday.

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The Republican said the U.S. lacks adequate screening of refugees: "our own FBI says we can't know for certain who these people are." Instead, Trump favors working with Arab countries to create "safe zones" for those fleeing war-torn areas, Pence said.

In 2015, President Barack Obama set a goal of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees during the fiscal year that started in October, a sixfold increase from the prior year. The target has been met, National Security Advisor Susan Rice said in a statement on Aug. 29. The U.S. will admit at least 85,000 refugees in total this year, Rice said, "vulnerable individuals and families" from countries including Iraq, Ukraine, and Burma.

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The civil war in Syria has killed hundreds of thousands of people over five years and displaced millions more, many of whom have sought refuge in Europe. Those admitted to the U.S. are subject to vetting that can take up to two years, according to the State Department.

Trump said during a speech in Phoenix on Aug. 31 that he would suspend immigration from Syria and Libya.

"We have no idea who they are, where they come from," Trump said. "There's no documentation. There's no paperwork. It's going to end badly, folks. It's going to end very, very badly."

Democrat Hillary Clinton has said the U.S. should increase the number of Syrian refugees admitted into the U.S. to 65,000, and focus on those most vulnerable.

Bloomberg
By the time Michelle Burton and a dozen other Birmingham, Alabama, police officers arrived at an apartment Tuesday night, it was too late to save a 30-year-old man, who died of an apparent drug overdose.

On the couch lay a 35-year-old woman, slack and unresponsive, but with a faint pulse. Paramedics on the scene administered a dose of Narcan, a fast-acting opioid antidote, before rushing her to the hospital.

Then there was the matter of the couple's shaken children: a 7-year-old girl, a 3-year-old boy, a 2-year-old boy and a 1-month-old girl clad in a tiny purple gingham dress.

They were being comforted by next-door neighbors, the same ones who had dialed 911 earlier after hearing the older girl crying out: Help! We can't wake mom and dad up.

Protocol dictated that the children would need to be taken to the South Precinct, then to family court and finally to the custody of Child Protective Services at DHR, the Alabama Department of Human Resources.

It was already 9 p.m. Burton, less than two hours away from finishing her usual shift, let her husband know she was going to be home late from work that day.

"It was horrible," Burton told The Washington Post. "It was a very sad situation."

But it was not, she said, the first such situation they found themselves in.

An officer-in-training with Burton lent the two boys his flashlight; soon, the toddlers were running around, shining it in people's faces.

The 7-year-old was quieter, Burton said. The officer asked if she needed anything.

The girl asked if someone could sign her homework, so she could turn it in to her teacher the next day.

"That broke my heart," said Burton. "She said, 'I did my work.' She pulled it out and showed it to us. It was math homework, (like) 'Which number is greater? Which number is odd or even?' . . . I told her, 'Sweetie, you probably won't have to go to school tomorrow. . . . But where you're going is going to have everything you need.' "

In the apartment, Burton found an unopened can of infant formula and a baby bottle; she grabbed both.

At the precinct, officers bought whatever the other kids wanted to eat from a vending machine. There, Burton removed her vest and other police gear so she could comfortably hold the infant and give her a bottle. It had to have been hours since she had been fed, Burton thought.

"A lot of us are parents," Birmingham police spokesman Lt. Sean Edwards told The Post. "We just go into parent mode and not necessarily police mode. ... Officer Burton, she just really wanted to grab the baby and just cuddle the baby."

So she did. Soon, the infant was sound asleep on Burton's shoulder.

At some point, someone in the precinct captured a photo of the tender scene, which Burton later showed her husband.

Edwards said he wasn't surprised by Burton's actions. The department has more than 800 sworn officers, and they have to be prepared for dozens of different scenarios, he said.

"It's a part of our job, it's a part of what we see, what we do. Our concern is to preserve, to protect," he said. "We find ourselves in a lot of situations like this."

Maybe it's because Burton, 33, is a mother of two boys herself, or perhaps it's just that she's good at comforting children. She's often tapped to go to car accidents and other incidents where kids might be left alone.

"They're like, 'Let's call Burton because this is what she does.' It happens a lot," Burton said. "But it's not just me. I actually have pictures of officers, male officers, like making baby bottles. . . . We do what we have to do when we have to do it."

The rest of that night was a blur, but Burton said she can't forget the number of people who came together to make sure the four children were safe. A social worker - who had just welcomed her own newborn grandchild - showed up to the precinct and stayed with them until 3 a.m. the next day, when they finally were placed in the care of Child Protective Services, Burton said.

Burton finally went home at 4 a.m. and promptly fell asleep.

While she was sleeping, Brian Burton, who also is in law enforcement, posted the photo of his wife and the baby on Facebook early the next morning.

"Last night, my wife Michelle Burton told me she would be late getting off work because of call she was on where the parents of 4 small children had both overdosed," Brian Burton wrote in his post. "She spent the rest of the night taking care of these babies. She got home at 4 this morning. I've never seen her more beautiful than in this picture. What an incredible woman."

Michelle Burton woke up to find hundreds of notifications on her phone. The photo had been shared more than 1,000 times.

She said she's not surprised by her husband's post, because he has always been her biggest supporter.

"He's very proud of who I am and what I do," Burton said. "What surprised me is just [how much] positive that seems to have come out of it."

AL.com wrote about the viral photo. For the next several days, Burton said she couldn't go anywhere without getting stopped.

Someone at a gas station recognized her: Are you that officer? The stranger had asked. What happened with the kids?

While at the bank, another woman simply walked up to her and gave her a hug. Birmingham may have the largest population in Alabama, but at its heart, it's a small town, Burton said.

"I'm overwhelmed about the whole thing," Burton said. "I don't want people to think that it's only me that does this. We all do things like this. . . . It was one of those nights where everybody worked together and everybody did what they needed to do."
PHOENIX  If Hillary Clinton carries Arizona in November, there's a good chance it won't be because Democrats on their own have flipped a reliable GOP state they hope to win consistently someday.



Instead, Clinton and Democrats may have Gary Johnson to thank.



The Libertarian Party nominee's best chance to influence the presidential race may come in Arizona, where the former New Mexico governor appeals to a group of finicky conservatives who make up part of the GOP base.



"It could happen," said GOP Sen. Jeff Flake. "Donald Trump has managed to make this an interesting state in terms of presidential politics, and not in the way that Republicans have wanted."



Johnson "is an easy out for some people in our party," Flake told The Associated Press.





About a dozen of the most contested states will help determine which candidate gets the 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. In Arizona, where the Republican nominee has carried the state in 11 of the past 12 presidential elections, Johnson could play the spoiler, potentially putting 11 electoral votes in Clinton's column.



The GOP's recent struggle with independent-minded, small-government Libertarians was clear before Trump's speech Wednesday in Phoenix, when he reaffirmed a hard line on immigration. And his stance could alienate the roughly one-quarter of Hispanic voters in the state who usually align with Republicans.



"I think that right now we're at a tipping point, where at any moment we are going to begin to see an outpouring of support," said Latino GOP strategist Juan Hernandez, who works for Johnson in Arizona.



Sensing an opportunity herself, Clinton began airing television advertisements in the state Friday, and has reserved $500,000 in ad time through mid-September.

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Democratic strategist Andy Barr said Hispanic turnout was "the multimillion-dollar question." About one-third of the state's population identifies as Latino, but their share of the vote ranges between 12 percent and 16 percent, according to public and private polling.



"This closer it gets to 20 percent, the more our chances of winning go up," Barr said.



Johnson will appear on the ballot in every state this fall, while Green Party nominee Jill Stein is on track to make it in at least half. Neither is remotely within reach of carrying a state. Neither seems in a position to tip any state toward Trump.



But Johnson could move a close race toward Clinton, in much the same way that Ralph Nader pulled enough votes away from Democrat Al Gore in 2000 to hand Florida to Republican George W. Bush.



Four years ago, Libertarian candidates in Arizona drew enough votes away from Republicans that Democrats Ann Kirkpatrick and Kyrsten Sinema won election to the U.S. House.





Flake, who had endeared himself to many Libertarians while serving in the House, won his Senate race that year, too.



"It's a really sore spot for the party," Arizona Republican Party spokesman Tim Sifert said of those 2012 results. "You could see people frustrated, throwing away their vote and going with a third-party candidate."



The views of most Libertarians, focused on personal liberty and small government, overlap more with Republicans than Democrats. Johnson's call for dramatically lower business taxes and regulation to unburden entrepreneurs resonates with Matthew Sherman of Phoenix, who describes himself as more as a conservative than as a Republican.



"I'm for whoever has the best plan on startup companies," said the 31-year-old who's working on a business networking app. "So far, that's Gary."



Republican Dave Richins, a councilman in Mesa City, said Johnson is conservative on spending, but tolerant on social issues, which he calls "a pragmatic combination."



"For me, a lifelong Republican, I don't agree with everything Johnson proposes," said Richins, a Johnson organizer. "But I find his pragmatism refreshing. That's how we get things done."



Johnson's hands-off approach to government also includes decriminalizing marijuana, and he could benefit from a November ballot proposal in Arizona on that question.



"That's another reason for Libertarians to vote in higher numbers," said Barr, who is running the decriminalization campaign. "We're inclined to believe that could increase Johnson's performance."



At the beginning of August, Johnson's campaign had $1.2 million after raising $1.6 million in July, according to Federal Election Commission reports. Since Aug. 1, he's raised more than $3 million, according to his campaign. That's a paltry sum compared with Trump and Clinton, whose campaign said it raised a total of $143 million last month.



Johnson is spending in a few competitive campaign states, including Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, and less competitive ones such as Oregon, New Mexico and Utah.



Arizona is not on that list, but aides say it likely will be this fall.



"As a New Mexican, he's fairly well known in Arizona," said Johnson's spokesman, Joe Hunter. "Arizona makes sense for us. We have a natural base of support there."



Associated Press
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said Donald Trump is encouraging a cyberattack by the Russian government akin to the Watergate break-in.



Speaking on ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" on Sunday, the Democratic vice presidential nominee compared the cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee -- which was widely linked to Russian government hackers -- to the scandal that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation.



"He has openly encouraged Russia to engage in cyber hacking to try to find more emails or materials, and we know that this cyberattack on the DNC was likely done by Russia," Kaine said. "A president was impeached and had to resign over an attack on the DNC during a presidential election in 1972."



In 1972, burglars broke into the DNC headquarters at the Watergate building in Washington at the behest of Nixon's reelection campaign. Nixon resigned two years later.



Kaine's comments came as he was pressed by host Martha Raddatz on the information contained in newly released notes from Hillary Clinton's FBI interview about her use of a private email server while at the State Department.



Kaine reiterated that Clinton has apologized for using a private email account rather than one issued by the department. But he insisted that the documents show "clearly" why the FBI chose not to pursue criminal charges.



"So contrast the Hillary situation, where the FBI said there's no need for legal proceedings, with an attack that is being encouraged by Donald Trump on the DNC by Russia similar to what led to resignation of a president 30 years ago," Kaine said.
A fire that started on the second floor of a Cameron Parkway town house in Orland Park left one person injured Saturday morning, according to the Orland Fire Protection District. (Ray Hanania)

One person was injured in a Saturday morning fire that damaged a four-unit townhouse in Orland Park, a spokesman for the Orland Park Fire Protection District said.

The fire was reported about 8:30 a.m. on Cameron Parkway, with firefighters observing smoke and fire in a second-floor bedroom window, spokeman Ray Hanania said in a news release.

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One person had to be rescued after returning to the burning building and was transported to Silver Cross Hospital in New Lenox for undisclosed injuries, he said. A second person was evaluated at the scene but not transported.

A report that a second person was unaccounted for proved to be untrue after firefighters did a search of the four units, Hanania said

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The fire was extinguished in about 20 minutes, with assistance from the Mokena and Homer Township fire protection districts, he said. Fire damage was limited to one unit, which was deemed uninhabitable.

The cause of the blaze is under investigation by Orland fire investigators and the Orland Park Police Department.
Despite all the hand-wringing over the vaunted China slowdown, the Chinese economy remains the single largest contributor to world GDP growth, claims Project Syndicate, a US magazine.

File photo shows a construction site in China. [Photo: sina.com]

The article continues to say that China's contribution to global growth is 50% larger than the combined 0.8% contribution likely to be made by all the so-called advanced economies.

If China's GDP increases by 6.7%, China contributes to the global GDP by 1.2 percentage point. According to the IMF's latest review, the global economy is expected to grow by 3.1% and China's contribution to the growth accounts for 39%, dwarfing any other economies.

For example, US growth is 2.2% and contributes only 0.3% to the world economy, just a quarter of China's contribution. The European economy contributes a mere 0.2 percentage point and Japan only 0.1%.

The article argues that China's contribution is all the more important for the global economy, an economy which could barely withstand a renewed round of recession.

The Chinese economy is moderating, going through the transition from "old normal" to "new normal", but still remains the powerhouse of the world economy.

The article warns that a hard landing of the Chinese economy would be "disastrous" while a successful rebalancing will benefit the whole world. It concludes that the world is now more than ever in need of a successful China.
The photo taken on August 4 shows that the express way linking airport and Hangzhou city has been revamped for the 2016 G20 Summit set to be held in Hangzhou, capital of east Chinas Zhejiang Province (XINHUA)

There are various reasons why the Hangzhou G20 summit is of unusual importance, apart from the fact of China being the host for the first time.

One is that it brings together the leaders of the world's most powerful economies for the first time since the UK Brexit referendum in June. Almost immediately after the vote, the world economy showed signs of volatility in the initial shock, such as steep stock market falls and downward pressure on the British pound's exchange rate.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was pessimistic, its July 2016 projection laying particular emphasis on economic and political uncertainty after the UK's exit from the EU, and foreseeing anemic economic growth of 3.1 percent in 2016.

More than two months after the referendum, however, markets seem to be relatively calm and have partly absorbed the initial surprise. Thus the G20 summit offers an excellent chance for world leaders to discuss the future without being under emotional and time pressure.

The UK will be represented in the Hangzhou Meeting by its new Prime Minister Theresa May. She is already looking beyond disengagement from the EU, keen on presenting to her partners new opportunities that could arise.

Specifically, her objective is to change the agenda and show that Brexit could be a development benefiting all sides, including China and the US. British public opinion narrowly stands on her side. A recent YouGov survey showed 46 percent of respondents believed Brexit was the right decision and 42 percent considered it wrong.

China has not welcomed Brexit according to conventional wisdom, although it has never got involved in domestic developments of the UK. Most analysts believe that the bilateral dimension of the Sino-British relationship has always mirrored Beijing's will to improve its relations with the EU, further increase its investments in Europe and generally expand its presence in the Old Continent.

However, this observation can be partly challenged. China was concerned about the risk of the EU losing a powerful member-state such as the UK for several reasons, and it was not alone in this. However, this does not mean it pegged its growing relationship with the UK on such tenuous grounds.

In that regard, the evolution of Sino-British relations in previous years - especially during the administration of David Cameron - includes a distinct characteristic going beyond the potential influence the UK could exert on EU policy or even the symbolic aspects of its membership in the Union.

The UK nowadays may lack the status of previous centuries, but it remains a powerful country having special gravitas in political and economic affairs at the international level. It is therefore questionable whether it is the UK or the EU that will lose in terms of prestige in the long-term.

Within this context, comments made by some scholars that China will not any longer find London particularly attractive as an offshore renminbi center or that Chinese investments will be diverted from the UK to other European countries are premature. Almost everything will depend on the outcome of disengagement negotiations between the May government and Brussels.

Brexit requires efficient policy recommendations and responses by the relevant actors even before this outcome will be known. The UK and China can pave the way for a smooth "divorce" by practically seeking alternatives. Discussions on the occasion of the Hangzhou summit can be a good starting point.

The creation of a bilateral free trade agreement might be a model of action when unexpected developments such as Brexit take place. Although theory differs from practice, such a free trade area could break down the stereotypes in Europe and show how difficult decisions can be accelerated.

China has already signed similar accords with several countries including Iceland, Switzerland, Singapore, New Zealand and Korea. Another one with Norway is under consideration.

All in all, the G20 summit will lead participants to think out of the box in the post Brexit-era. The recent letter sent by Theresa May to China's President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang shows that she is prepared to closely work with the Chinese government on various fronts. Other partners are expected to follow her lead.

George N. Tzogopoulos is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:

http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/GeorgeNTzogopoulos.htm

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
As China is this year's G20 summit host, President Xi Jinping's speech to its prelude, the B20 business leaders meeting, stressed both the fact that China's achievements for its own people are historically unprecedented, and that these benefitted not only China but also the world at large.

The speech, therefore, was an extended analysis of the reality often expressed in the short phrase that China's development constitutes a "win-win" for itself and the world.

First summarizing China's achievements for its own people, he noted: "There has been no precedent in human history for a country with a population of over 1.3 billion to realize modernization. Since its reform and opening up, China has lifted more than 700 million people out of poverty, the living standards and quality of life of more than 1.3 billion people have improved significantly, China has achieved in a few years a development process that took other countries hundreds of years to achieve." These were, he said, historically unprecedented achievements of "socialism with Chinese characteristics."

But to accomplish this, China necessarily had to deal not only with domestic policy issues but also actively promote global stability -- in particular peaceful development. "History has repeatedly proved that without peace there can be no development and without stability there is no prosperity. This is closely related to the security of states, as no state can avoid the consequences of instability and no country can conquer the world."

China's interest in the construction of a more rational and just international order, and its increasing interrelationship with other countries, therefore, reflect humanity's common interests not just China's national interests. "We pursue an independent foreign policy of peace, adhering to the basic state policy of opening up . and actively promote the construction of a more just and rational international order. China's interaction with the outside world will continue to deepen."

The practical conclusion the president drew was that the G20, encompassing countries accounting for 85 percent of world GDP, should deal not only with short term, but also longer strategic objectives:

"One of the goals of China's G20 presidency is to enable the organization to transform itself from a crisis-response mechanism focusing on short-term policies to one of long-term governance that shapes medium- to long-term policies, and so become the premier forum for international economic advancement."

Naturally, as the summit host, President Xi did not engage in a confrontation with concepts being advanced by others; however, as analysts have more freedom than presidents, it is worth examining the internal coherence of China's approach as outlined in this speech. In particular it is valuable to contrast it with the alternative concepts based on a premise that international relations are a "zero sum game," in which one country's gain is necessarily another's loss, or the view projected particularly by American neo-conservatives that China's rise is a threat.

Domestically, President Xi was not exaggerating when stating China's achievements are unprecedented. This is simply an objective fact, important to establish as will be discussed shortly. The main economic and social parameters may be taken as follows:

Economists regard life expectancy as the most sensitive indicator of overall human and social conditions, as it simultaneously balances all positive factors such as rising incomes, good health care, and environmental protection against negative ones such as poverty, poor health care, pollution etc. By this measure, China's life expectancy increased by 32 years in a 29-year period (1949-78) -- the fastest ever achieved by a major country.

From 1978-2015 China's annual average per capita GDP growth of 8.6 percent was the fastest achieved by a major economy over such a prolonged period.

From 1978-2015 China's annual average eight percent increase in consumption, the foundation of living standards, was also the fastest.

Since 1981, based on World Bank statistics, China has managed to lift 728 million people out of poverty, compared to the 152 million achieved by the rest of the world. Thus, by World Bank reckoning, China was responsible for 83 percent of the reduction of the number of those living in poverty in the world.

This is the reality that those who wish to pursue not cooperation but confrontation with China seek to downplay.

Now, if the first part of President Xi's analysis, of the benefits of China's achievements for its own people, is clearly justified, what do we make of the consequences for the rest of the world?

The immediate starting point may be taken as the international financial crisis. Since this began it is well known that global growth has been weak, a key focus of the G20 summit. In the period 2007-15, annual average world per capita GDP growth was only one percent; in the advanced economies, it was only 0.3 percent.

However, the world economy is interconnected. The strength or weakness in one part transmits itself to others. Without China's growth the situation the global economy confronted due to the advent of the international financial crisis would have been far worse.

Measured in current exchange rates, China contributed 46.3 percent of world GDP growth, while the United States contributed 21.9 percent. Measured in internationally comparable prices, purchasing power parity (PPP), China's accounted for 29.4 percent of world growth and the United States 9.7 percent. China contributed almost half of the world growth measured at current exchange rates and only slightly under one-third using the PPP measurement.

Yet, there is an even more fundamental reason China's interests are inseparable from those of the rest of the world. Since Adam Smith founded modern economics it has been known that the division of labor, which, in a modern globalized economy, must include the international division of labor, is the most powerful force raising productivity.

This is why economic development is not "zero sum" after all. Each country, by participating in the international division of labor, benefits more than if it sought to develop alone. In economics, fortunately, one plus one is more than two. The very term "reform and opening up" describing China's policies since 1978 expresses the understanding that China can only develop successfully by participating in any international division of labor, and other countries equally benefit from their interaction with China. For this to work, however, needs peace.

President Xi's speech, its basic conception of "win-win," therefore involved no mere "warm words." They were, in fact, a precise expression of the idea that China's and the rest of the world's fundamental interests coincide.

It is therefore to be hoped that the G20 summit will undertake work that flows from this basic concept.

John Ross is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:

http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/johnross.htm

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
Chinese President Xi Jinping said Saturday China and the United State have far more common interests than differences and hoped bilateral ties stay on the right track.

In a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama in the eastern city of Hangzhou on the eve of a G20 summit, Xi said cooperation between China and the U.S. can lead to "great things" that are conducive to both countries and to the world at large.

He said the two countries should follow the principles of non-conflict, non-confrontation, mutual respect and win-win cooperation, deepen mutual trust and collaboration, and manage and control their differences in a constructive manner, in order to push forward the continuous, sound and stable development of bilateral ties.

A statement from China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the two leaders compared notes on Sino-U.S. relations and on major international and regional issues of mutual concerns in a "candid, in-depth and friendly manner," with a series of "important consensus" reached between the duo.

Noting it was in Hangzhou 44 years ago that the normalization of Sino-U.S. ties broke the ice, Xi also spoke highly of his previous meetings with Obama since 2013.

In particular, the building of a new type of major-country relations between China and the U.S. has witnessed substantial progress over the past three years, he said.

Two-way trade, investment and personnel exchanges are at historical highs, and both countries have worked together in combating climate change, advancing negotiations on a bilateral investment treaty, and establishing a mutual trust mechanism between the two militaries.

Important progress was also made in fighting cyber crimes, coping with the Ebola epidemic in Africa, and facilitating a comprehensive agreement on the Iranian nuclear issue, Xi said.

"All these have showcased the strategic importance and global influence of Sino-U.S. relations," the Chinese president said.

UNDERPINNING COOPERATION

With the G20 Hangzhou summit set to convene on Sunday, Xi said China appreciates the U.S. side's cooperation and support for its hosting of the summit.

He said holding a successful summit is the international community's shared expectation, as well as the due responsibility of China and the United States as the world's two largest economies.

China hopes to work with the United States and other parties to achieve fruitful results during the summit to inject momentum to the world economy while lifting confidence, he said.

On the economic front, Xi said China's fundamentals for long-term economic growth remain sound, and that the country will adhere to the macroeconomic policy of making progress while maintaining stability, and firmly advance the supply-side structural reform.

He told Obama that China will stick to the direction of opening up and reform, and further facilitate foreign investment access.

China welcomes foreign enterprises to invest in the country, and will continue to provide them with favorable business environment, Xi said, calling for efforts to reach a reciprocal and win-win bilateral investment treaty as soon as possible.

Noting that China and the U.S. handed over their instruments of joining the Paris Agreement separately to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Saturday in Hangzhou, Xi said the two countries have made important contributions again to address the global challenge of climate change.

Xi said both countries should expand cooperation in fields such as energy conservation and emission reduction, clean energy, and intelligent power grid, among others.

They should also continue to actively expand practical collaboration between their militaries and local authorities, and in areas of counter corruption, law enforcement, cyber security, culture and UN peacekeeping, he said.

For his part, Obama said the U.S. welcomes China's contribution to global development and the peacekeeping cause.

The two countries took the lead in ratifying and accepting the Paris Agreement on climate change, demonstrating again the influence of the cooperation between the two countries, Obama said.

Washington hopes to build stronger trade and investment ties with China, and make joint efforts with China on a wider range of fields, including regional and global security, he said.

CONTROLLING DIFFERENCES

Aside from strengthening cooperation, Xi and Obama also agreed to manage and control differences between their two countries in a constructive manner.

On the issue of Taiwan, Xi said China will resolutely safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity, and curb "Taiwan independence" activities in all forms.

China will make great efforts to maintain the peaceful development of relations across the Taiwan Strait and seek peaceful reunification of the nation.

He urged the U.S. to honor its commitment to the one-China policy, the principle of the three joint communiques, and safeguard peaceful development of cross-Strait ties and the overall interests of Sino-U.S. cooperation with actual deeds.

The Chinese president also voiced hopes the U.S. will honor its commitment in Tibet-related issues, and not support secessionist activities by "Tibet independence" forces.

China opposes any other country interfering in its internal affairs in the name of human rights issues, Xi continued. The country attaches great importance to the protection and promotion of human rights, and ensures its citizens' freedom of religious belief according to law.

The achievements of China's human rights cause are obvious to all, he said, adding China is willing to carry out dialogues and communication on human rights issues with other countries on the basis of equality and mutual respect.

Obama, meanwhile, said the U.S. opposes all attempts aimed at seeking "Taiwan independence," and reaffirmed that Tibet belongs to China.

He said the U.S. and China should make sure that both countries could carry out fruitful cooperation in fields with common interests, while working to control differences in spheres where disagreements remain, so as not to impact bilateral ties.

He said he is willing to work with President Xi in laying down a sound foundation for the future of U.S.-China ties.

REGIONAL ISSUES

Both sides exchanged views on other major international and regional issues.

They agreed the two countries share extensive common interests in the Asian-Pacific region, and should continue to reinforce communication and cooperation to properly manage and control differences.

They also agreed to reinforce coordination and cooperation on regional hot topics and global challenges to promote the proper resolution of related issues together with the international community and play positive roles in promoting world peace, stability and prosperity.

Talking on the South China Sea issue, Xi urged the U.S. to "play a constructive role" in maintaining peace and stability in the region.

He said China will continue to unswervingly safeguard its territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests in the South China Sea.

In the meantime, China will stick to peaceful settlement of disputes through consultation and negotiation with parties directly concerned, and safeguard peace and stability in the South China Sea along with ASEAN members, Xi said.

As to the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue, Xi said China has been committed to denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula, safeguarding peace and stability of the peninsula, and solving relevant issues through dialogue and consultation.

All parties should refrain from any act that could escalate regional tension and collectively make positive efforts to put the situation back on the right track.

He said China opposes the deployment of the anti-missile system of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) in the Republic of Korea, while asking the U.S. to respect China's strategic security interests.
Chinese Vice Minister of Commerce Wang Shouwen holds a press conference on Saturday prior to the G20 meeting. [He Shan/China.org.cn]

As the world is still mired in an anemic economic recovery, the G20 Hangzhou summit on Sept. 4-5 will help pave the way for world trade expansion through ratification of the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) from all group members by the end of this year, Chinese Vice Minister of Commerce Wang Shouwen has said.

He told reporters at a press conference on Saturday that China will use its current presidency of the G20 to urge all its fellow members to take this vital step.

Concluded at the WTO's 2013 Bali Ministerial Conference, the TFA contains provisions for expediting the movement, release and clearance of goods, including those in transit. It also provides measures for effective cooperation between customs and other appropriate authorities on trade facilitation and customs compliance issues.

The vice minister said 90 WTO members have ratified the agreement; however, 18 more ratifications are needed to reach the required two-thirds majority for the agreement to go into force.

China believes implementation will deliver benefits to business entities around the world, he stressed.

A B20 (Business 20) report released in July containing policy recommendations for the G20, said member countries should ratify the TFA by the end of 2016 and urge all other WTO members that have yet to take this step to do so.

According to the report, world trade and investment continue to slow significantly in the headwinds facing the world economy, indicated by the fact that, in 2015, global trade grew by only 2 percent.

In the same year, China's foreign trade slipped by 8 percent, representing the worst performance since 2009.

China decided to accept the protocol in September 2015, it being the first multilateral agreement covering trade in goods that China has been engaged in after joining the WTO.

Implementation of the TFA has the potential to increase global merchandise exports by up to US$1 trillion annually, according to the WTO's flagship World Trade Report released on October 26, 2015.

Zhang Lin, assistant research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences told China.org.cn that to ensure the TFA comes into force and thus implemented will create huge momentum to China's foreign trade hit by the economic slowdown.

According to WTO estimates, its implementation may help reduce trade costs by up to 15 percent.

However, it will still take some time for all WTO members to ratify the agreement as efforts wary widely across the world.

"Some countries hesitate to ratify TFA because of domestic protectionist sentiment and a low level of free trade,"said Zhang. "Opening domestic market is bound to meet with opposition from sectors that could be hurt by an influx of foreign goods when they don't have the necessary competitive edge.

"There is still pressure for ratification,"she added.
Chinese President Xi Jinping delivers a keynote speech at the Business 20 (B20) summit in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, Sept. 3, 2016. (Xinhua/Ma Zhancheng)

President Xi Jinping on Saturday assured global business leaders with a vision that China, having reached a new historical starting point, will integrate itself into a new global growth blueprint.

Despite concerns over China's economic slowdown, Xi said at the Business 20 (B20) summit in the eastern city of Hangzhou that China has the confidence and ability to maintain medium-high rate of growth and deliver more development opportunities to the world while ensuring its own development.

NEW START

After 38 years of reform and opening up, China has come to a new starting point to deepen reform across the board and foster new drivers of economic and social development, adapt its economy to a new normal and transform its growth model, and further integrate itself into the world and open itself wider to the world, according to Xi.

Rapid growth over the past few decades has elevated China to the position of the world's second-largest economy, showering benefits on nations worldwide as well as the country's own people.

But its export-driven and investment-led growth model, which once propelled development, has reached its limits. Emerging problems -- industrial overcapacity, high debt levels and environmental degradation at home and sluggish global demand -- weigh on growth.

Speaking on the eve of a summit of Group of 20 (G20) major economies, Xi said China has the confidence and ability to maintain medium-high rate of growth as the country continues to deepen reform, pursues an innovation-driven development strategy, advances green development, promotes equity and sharing of development outcomes, as well as opens up wider to the outside world.

"China's goal of reform has been set and we will not deviate from it. China will take sure and firm steps in advancing reform and will not slow down its pace," he said.

Though China posted its slowest annual growth in a quarter of century last year, policy makers have refrained from taking any radical stimulus moves. Instead, they have resorted to supply-side reforms to optimize the economic structure, prune industrial overcapacity, slash costs, and boost efficiency.

Those efforts are painful and take time to deliver, but some positive results are beginning to take shape.

The economy is now more balanced, and driven more by consumption than investment. Consumption contributed 73.4 percent to China's economic growth in the first half of 2016, up 13.2 percentage points from the same period last year.

On a new starting point, China's development could chart the course of the world's development as well as the agenda setting of the G20, said Su Ge, president of the China Institute of International Studies.

NEW BLUEPRINT

Xi said China will work with other parties to ensure that the Hangzhou summit comes up with an integrated prescription to address both the symptoms and root causes so that the world economy could move along a path of strong, sustainable, balanced and inclusive growth.

All parties at the summit should work to build an innovative and open world economy to generate new drivers of growth and expand the scope of development, he said.

The world economy should become interconnected and inclusive to forge interactive synergy and strengthen the foundation for win-win outcomes, Xi said.

Against the backdrop of lackluster global economic growth, "we need to innovate our macroeconomic policies and effectively combine fiscal and monetary policies with structural reform policies," Xi said.

With members representing more than 85 percent of global economic output and two-thirds of the world's population, G20 has an undeniable influence on managing the global economy.

The G20, which held its first leaders' summit after the global financial crisis, has played an important role in crisis response.

The G20 has come to "a crucial juncture of development," Xi said.

One of the goals of China's G20 presidency is to enable the G20 to transform from a crisis response mechanism focusing on short-term policies to one of long-term governance that shapes medium- to long-term policies, and solidify its role as the premier forum for international economic governance, he said.

"This year's G20 has, for the first time, put the issue of development front and center of the global macro policy framework," Xi said.

It is also the first time that the G20 makes an action plan for implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and carries out cooperation to support the industrialization of African countries and least developed countries, he said.

The solutions China offers will help build the G20 a community of common destiny, said Hu Angang, an economist with Tsinghua University.
 Flash

A spokesperson with the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Saturday urged the United States to drop its double standards on the South China Sea issue and play a constructive role in maintaining regional peace and stability.

Asked to comment on U.S. President Barack Obama's recent remarks on the South China Sea issue before he headed for Hangzhou for a G20 summit, the spokesperson noted that Washington has not yet ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

"So how could the U.S. be entitled to make irresponsible remarks (on the South China Sea)?" the spokesperson said in a statement.

The spokesperson said the U.S. side should pay due respect to actual facts, drop its double standards, and honor its commitment not to take sides on the issue of territorial sovereignty in the South China Sea.

"Only in this way could Washington retain credibility, and play a constructive role in maintaining regional peace and stability," the statement read.

It said China upholds a neighborly diplomatic philosophy of amity, sincerity, mutual benefit and inclusiveness, and that its stance on the South China Sea issue has been clear and consistent.

The South China Sea islands have been part of China's inherent territory since ancient times, and China will continue to firmly safeguard its territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests in the region.

In the meantime, China will stick to peaceful settlement of disputes through consultation and negotiation with parties directly concerned, and safeguard peace and stability in the South China Sea along with ASEAN members, the statement read.

It went on to say that disputes between China and other claimant states are in essence related to territorial sovereignty and maritime delimitation.

Sovereignty issues are beyond the jurisdiction of the UNCLOS, and China has explicitly excluded disputes concerning maritime delimitation from the compulsory dispute settlement procedures provided for in the UNCLOS.

China's non-acceptance to the South China Sea arbitration not only serves to protect China's own rights and interests but also the authoritativeness and the integrity of international law, the statement said.

The spokesperson urged the U.S. to adjust mentality and acknowledge the fact that China's development is an opportunity rather than a challenge for the U.S., calling on Washington to truly support and accept China's development.

Noting that China attaches great importance to the Sino-U.S. relations and makes tremendous efforts in the development of bilateral ties, the spokesperson called on the U.S. to work together with China to expand cooperation, manage and control differences, and steadily push forward the ties in the direction of building a new type of major-country relations.

The statement also acknowledged that the G20 summit is the first one hosted by China. With joint efforts of relevant parties, China is fully confident that the Hangzhou summit will yield fruitful results, restore confidence and inject new impetus into global economy.

As the world's second largest economy and an important member of G20, China serves as an important contributor to global economy, governance and cooperation.

In recent years, China has contributed over 25 percent of global economic growth, with ideas like innovation, invigoration, interconnection and inclusiveness receiving active responses from other countries.

Meanwhile, as a consistent defender, builder and contributor of the international system and world order formed after World War II, China firmly safeguards and practices the standard of international law with the United Nations Charter as the core, and plays an important as well as active role in the United Nations and related multilateral mechanism, the statement read.

Being the main donor country of UN's peacekeeping operations, China also has contributed the largest number of peacekeeping forces among five permanent members of UN Security Council, it said.

China has always advocated resolving international disputes through peaceful means via consultations and negotiations, and has played a unique and constructive role in pushing for a solution to regional hot spot issues including the Iranian nuclear issue, Korean Peninsula nuclear issue, as well as Syrian and South Sudan issues.

With the growth of China's national strength, China will make greater contributions to world peace and development, the statement said.
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Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli, special envoy of Chinese President Xi Jinping, attended Saturday the funeral of late Uzbek President Islam Karimov in his home city of Samarkand.

"The Chinese leaders, government and people are deeply grieved at the death of President Karimov. On behalf of Chinese President Xi Jinping, the Chinese government and people, I am extending deep condolences and sincere sympathy to the Uzbek government and people as well as Karimov's relatives," Zhang said at the funeral after laying a wreath in front of Karimov's portrait.

Karimov died Friday at the age of 78 after being hospitalized following a stroke on Aug. 27.

Karimov, founder of the Republic of Uzbekistan and an outstanding leader of the country, enjoyed great respect and love of the Uzbek people, Zhang said.

In the past 25 years, under Karimov's leadership, Uzbekistan has witnessed social stability, economic development, improvement in people's livelihood and international status, with remarkable achievements in a wide range of areas, the Chinese vice premier added.

Karimov was a close friend of the Chinese people and the founder and booster of the China-Uzbekistan relations, Zhang said, adding that the late president has made great contributions to developing bilateral friendship and deepening cooperation between the two countries.

"At this sorrowful moment, the Chinese people firmly stand with the Uzbek people," Zhang said.

The Chinese side believes that the Uzbek people will inherit and carry forward Karimov's unfulfilled wish to make great strides in national construction and revitalization, he said.

In a meeting with Uzbek Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev on the same day, Zhang said China attaches great importance to its relations with Uzbekistan and will work with it to build a community of common interests and destiny that enjoys equality and mutual benefit and that sticks together through thick and thin.

The China-Uzbekistan relations have developed rapidly since the two countries forged diplomatic ties 24 years ago, Zhang said, recalling Xi's state visit to Uzbekistan in June, during which Xi and Karimov reached consensuses on deepening pragmatic cooperation, promoting common development and upgrading bilateral ties to a comprehensive strategic partnership.

"The fruits yielded in the development of bilateral ties should be cherished by both parties," Zhang said.

While hailing Tashkent for its long-standing firm support for issues concerning Beijing's core interests, Zhang said China will continue to support Uzbekistan in choosing a development path that suits its national conditions.

He said China will work with Uzbekistan to fulfill the agreements signed by both parties, continue to promote the Belt and Road initiative, and enrich the connotations of their all-round strategic partnership by prioritizing economy, trade, energy, production capacity, traffic and security in bilateral cooperation.

Mirziyoyev, who is in charge of the funeral committee, appreciated Beijing for sending a high-level delegation to attend Karimov's funeral.

Uzbekistan attaches great importance to the Uzbekistan-China relations, and will work with China to implement the consensuses reached by the two leaders of the two countries, broaden win-win cooperation and push forward bilateral ties, Mirziyoyev said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping met with his Mexican counterpart Enrique Pena Nieto on Sunday, with the two leaders agreeing to deepen the two countries' comprehensive strategic partnership.

Pena Nieto came to attend the Group of 20 summit in the eastern city of Hangzhou.

Xi said the two countries have seen many results from their cooperation in trade, investment, finance and energy.

China is willing to work with Mexico to consolidate political mutual trust, expande shared interests, enhance understanding between the two peoples, so as to make the China-Mexico comprehensive strategic partnership more extensive and beneficial, Xi said.

He stressed that China and Mexico should keep close high-level exchanges, promote communication at different levels and in various fields, and outline a roadmap for their cooperation in the coming five years.

Xi urged the two sides to make full use of their complementary advantages, align China's 13th Five-Year Plan and innovation-driven development with Mexico's structural reform, and strengthen cooperation in industrial investment, infrastructure, special economic zones, finance, telecommunications, new energy, geo-spacial information and nano technology.

The two sides should facilitate people-to-people exchanges, keep close communication in major international and regional issues, Xi said, expecting Mexico to display its regional influence in advancing China-Latin America relations and building the Forum of China and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).

Pena Nieto said China is a close friend and an important trade partner of Mexico, adding his country will work to make the comprehensive strategic partnership achieve tangible results.

Mexico is ready to cooperate with China in investment, finance, tourism and special economic zones, and intensify communication and coordination with China in international affairs, the Mexican leader said.
China Aid

Reported in Chinese by Qiao Nong. Translated by Carolyn Song. Edited in English by Ava Collins.





(Wenzhou, ZhejiangAug. 30, 2016) Five Christian detainees in Chinas coastal Zhejiang were suddenly released on Aug. 28 after four months in prison. Local sources believe the release came because of a government order in preparation for the upcoming G20 summit meeting in Hangzhou.

Ji Qingcao, Ji Qingcou, Ou Jinsi, Mei Xueshun, and He Lijing are members of Yazhong Church who were arrested last April on the charges of obstructing government administration and disturbing public order.

Beginning on Sept. 25, 2015, a group of people, including the five prisoners, came into conflict with authorities while protesting a planned demolition of Guankou Church. Over the next year, many of those involved in the protests were detained or arrested for various reasons, of which the April arrests were the latest.

Wen Xiaowu, who has not been heard

from in four months, poses with his

mother in an undated photo.

(Photo: China Aid)

A few days ago, Id heard that [the five Christians] had been released in the past few days, a Wenzhou Christian told China Aids reporter. I feel like the government is trying to pacify the people before the summit meeting. Since the summit meeting will be held here [on September 4], the government begins to worry that they have detained the Christians for too long. The local government was concerned about petitions organized by the family members, thinking higher officials would pressure them.

Though the five from Yazhong Church have been released, Wen Xiaowu, the leader of a house church in Ruian is still being held and has not been heard from since his arrest on April 15. Wen was detained with his wife, Xiang Lihua, and their son, on the charge of gathering a crowd to disturb public order after travelling to meet with diplomatic officers at the American Embassy in Shanghai.

China Aid raises awareness for prisoners of conscience in China who are detained unlawfully like Wen Xiaowu, and works to secure the releases of detainees such as the five Christians of Yazhong Church.

ChinaAid Media Team

Cell: (432) 553-1080 | Office: 1+ (888) 889-7757 | Other: (432) 689-6985

Email: [email protected]

For more information, click here
Adnan Amin, director-general of the International Renewable Energy Agency. [Photo/IC]

The cost of renewable energy has fallen dramatically and will continue to do so, while investment has reached record levels and additions to global capacity have set new highs, and according to Adnan Amin, director-general of the International Renewable Energy Agency, the improvements can be attributed to the G20's strong commitment to non-fossil fuels.

G20 energy ministers and officials met in Beijing in June, ahead of the upcoming G20 Summit in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province.

They acknowledged the progress made in scaling up renewable energy, and examined opportunities for even more action, during discussions on the sidelines of the meeting.

"The dramatic and ongoing shift in the global energy sector accelerated in 2015," Amin said.

According to a report published by IRENA, by 2025, average electricity costs for solar photovoltaics could fall by 59 percent, offshore wind power costs could fall by 35 percent, and onshore wind power costs could see a 26 percent reduction, compared with the level last year.

By then, the global average cost of electricity from solar PV and onshore wind power sources will be roughly 5 to 6 US cents per kilowatt-hour.

A technician inspects wind turbine blades at a factory in Lianyungang, Jiangsu province, in September last year. [Photo/China Daily]

Electricity prices for concentrated solar power could also fall by as much as 43 percent, depending on the technology used, according to the report, which highlighted the significant cost differences that exist today and signaled strong potential for future cost reductions for G20 members.

"Given that solar and wind are already the cheapest source of new generation capacity in many markets around the world, this further cost reduction will broaden that trend and strengthen the compelling business case for switching from fossil fuels to renewables," Amin said.

Last year, G20 ministers endorsed an 11-point communique, including the adoption of a renewable-energy toolkit, which would provide options for members to increase their deployment of clean energy.

As of this year, 173 countries have set renewable energy targets, up from 43 in 2005.

To facilitate the sharing of best practices, IRENA and the International Energy Agency continually update their joint IRENA/IEA Policy and Measures Database, which contains more than 700 policies for G20 members.

The continuing cost reductions have resulted in growing investment in the renewable energy sector. Last year, a record $286 billion was invested in renewable sources, 3 percent higher than the previous record in 2011, according to IRENA.

"But to increase deployment of renewable energy to the levels needed to meet global climate and development goals, this figure must double by 2020 and more than triple by 2030," the report said.

China is playing a vital role in the global renewable markets by leading investment and newly installed generation capacities.

Globally, investment in fossil fuels was less than half the amount invested in renewable energy last year, and it's estimated that by 2040 two-thirds of energy projects valued at $11.4 trillion will be in the renewable sector.

Since 2009, the price of solar PV modules has fallen roughly 80 percent, while the price of wind turbines has declined by 30 to 40 percent, mainly as a result of the expansion of generation capacity.

IRENA said that by 2025 cost reductions for renewable energy will increasingly depend on technological innovation, operating and maintenance costs, and quality project management.
Blockchain technology will be used in China's social security system because it can facilitate trade and lower transactions costs, according to Wang Zhongmin, vice-chairman of the National Council for Social Security Fund. "There's no doubt that blockchain technology will be used in the social security system because of its valuable applications in the investment and management of social security funds," he said.

Wang said blockchains can enable people to trade freely and lower transactions costs.

At the end of 2015, the National Council for Social Security Fund had 1.9 trillion yuan ($284.5 billion) in funds under management, increasing 24.6 percent year-on-year.

A revolutionary new technology, the blockchain, allows parties to carry out direct transactions without using an intermediary. It does so by providing a means for people to share reliable and tamper-proof lists of information known as distributed ledgers.

"To realize the full potential of blockchains, we will above all need to collaborate on a common platform. At UBS, we think it is essential that the industry avoid a standards war of the type that has bedeviled the adoption of new technologies in the past," said Axel Lehmann, chief operating officer for UBS Group.

Lehmann said the good news is that such collaboration is happening. There are already several significant large collaborative efforts. For example, many banks, including UBS, have been experimenting intensely with the technology and working with peers in open, collaborative ways.

At the moment, China's main initiative in the blockchain space is the China Ledger Alliance, a noncommercial organization focused on research and development of blockchain applications. Led by research and development company Wanxiang Blockchain Lab and similar in structure to international collaborations, it can be considered China's answer to the rapidly evolving blockchain ecosystem.

The aim of the alliance is to adapt and develop existing blockchain technology to the needs of Chinese businesses and set standards across the industry to ensure regulatory compliance in China's legal environment. The alliance counts 15 members, including both financial services firms and technology companies.

Early this year, China's central bank announced its investigation into digital currencies as an answer to the growing interest of Chinese investors in bitcoin and other crypto-currencies.
VIENTTIANE - To upgrade the Free Trade area (FTA) between China and the Association of the Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are in line with the common aspiration and practical need of both sides to deepen and expand cooperation in trade and economy, Chinese Ambassador to ASEAN Xu Bu said.

China and ASEAN agreed to upgrade the FTA in November 2015, China's first with foreign trading partners, after four rounds of talks that officially started in August 2014.

The move will not only forge closer economic and trade ties between the two sides, but also help realize the targets of scaling up two-way trade to $1 trillion and two-way investment to $150 billion by 2020 and promote the negotiations on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), Xu said in an interview with Xinhua on the eve of the China-ASEAN summit to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the dialogue partnership between the two sides.

"It will speed up the economic integration and further liberalize and facilitate trade and investment in the region."

The Chinese ambassador said the negotiations on RCEP have been at the crucial stage.

"A total of 13 rounds of negotiations have been conducted and four meetings at the ministerial-level held so far, with the establishment of a related working group."

Progress has been made in the negotiations in the sectors such as trade in goods, trade in service, investment, economic and technical cooperation, intellectual property, competition policy, legislation and mechanism, Xu said.

China respects ASEAN's central role in the negotiations and is willing to work with it to press forward the negotiations and bridge differences between the two sides in a bid to conclude the negotiations within the year, he said.

RCEP is a proposed free trade agreement between the 10 member states of ASEAN and the six countries that have existing FTAs with the bloc, namely Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand. ASEAN groups Brunei, Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

RCEP potentially includes more than 3 billion people or 45 percent of the world's population, and a combined GDP of about $21.3 trillion, accounting for about 40 percent of world trade.

Once the agreement is nailed down, it will significantly optimize the production networks and value chains in the region and help Asia become a "world factory" in the world value chains.

"It will simplify the complicated trade ties among the Asian countries, eliminate trade barriers, promote trade and facilitate investment."

"RECP will also narrow the gap in development level and significantly promote the industrial upgrading of its members by opening up," Xu noted.

Speaking of cooperation in industrial capacity, the Chinese ambassador said it should be a priority for the two sides.

"Cooperation in industrial capacity will give new impetus to the development of both China and ASEAN. To achieve their respective development goals, both sides need to create new channels and break new grouds."

To further boost cooperation in industrial capacity, Xu said China and ASEAN should enhance synergy between their respective strategies and initiatives.

"China is willing to align its international industrial cooperation drive and the Belt and Road Initiative with the ASEAN Economic Community Blueprint 2025 and the Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity, as well as development plans of respective ASEAN member states," Xu said.

China and ASEAN should also prioritize key sectors including iron and steel, cement, engineering, power and building materials to improve efficiency of their cooperation, he added.
Wang Shouwen, vice-minister of commerce

Move aimed at creating open and transparent system

Leaders attending the G20 Summit are likely to reach an agreement on a set of guiding principles on global investment, in a bid to spur declining investment activity, a senior Chinese commerce official said on Saturday.

If approved by the G20 members, the document would be the world's first multilateral agreement guiding global investment and a milestone in the global effort to create an open and transparent investment environment, Vice-Minister of Commerce Wang Shouwen said at a news conference ahead of Sunday's summit opening in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province.

The document, Wang said, will lay out a set of key principles, including a stance against investment protectionism and placing emphasis on policy stability and consistency.

"There are as many as 3,300 investment agreements in the world with different market access standards and regulations ... which resulted in a fragmented system and caused confusion and inconvenience for investors," Wang said. "The purpose of creating the guiding principles is to provide a common reference and to improve global coordination in facilitating cross-border investment."

Sun Xiao, policy director of the B20's China Organizing Committee, said, "It is necessary for major economies and international organizations to reassess the current investment agreements to build a more effective standard to better resolve disputes and assist global investment activities.

"For China, as the country's economy is undergoing a structural adjustment and industrial boom, it will encourage more global companies to invest in the country's environmental protection and modern service sectors to assist in the development of supply-side reforms."

Wang, the vice-minister, said China will continue to liberalize and improve its investment environment by reducing the number of items on the negative list, which specifies investment sectors that are off-limits to foreign investors. It allows industries not on the list to follow the same new investment rules as domestic firms.

China has revised four key investment-related laws to facilitate growth.

The European Chamber of Commerce in China said in a statement on Saturday that incorporation of the negative list approach into the legislation is commendable, but far more needs to be done.
Representatives attend the opening ceremony of the G20 Energy Ministerial Meeting on June 29 in Beijing. [Photo/Xinhua]

China prepares to play increasingly important role in non-fossil-fuel power generation

At their meeting in Beijing in June, energy ministers from G20 members emphasized the significant role of clean and renewable energy, and they will present their official communique to the G20 Summit for the consideration of global leaders.

"We encourage members to facilitate investment in renewable energy production and use through reducing barriers and risks, taking full consideration of the available indigenous renewable energy sources, increasing substantially the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix," according to the Beijing Communique of the G20 Energy Ministerial Meeting.

Last year, the global energy market was unstable as a result of a complicated global economy and weak demand that have resulted in declines in the price of crude oil.

However, clean and renewable energy have been developing well, and with sustainable growth. Nuclear power has also started to recover globally, as the public regains confidence in the power source.

In their communique, the ministers said, "for countries which opt to use nuclear energy, it contributes to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions".

The G20 energy ministers called upon all countries that choose to use nuclear power to ensure the highest safety standards, and to exchange their expertise and experience.

Meanwhile, "it is important to engage the public in science-based dialogue and transparency to inform policymaking," according to the communique.

In addition to nuclear power, which has shown slight growth, the use of renewable power has risen steadily as well.

According to the Blue Book of World Energy 2016, compiled by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the world's installed wind-power generation capacity grew by 17.2 percent last year, a 16.4 percent rise from 2014. Moreover, China accounted for 51.8 percent of the world's newly installed wind-power generation capacity, which emphasized the country's leading role in expanding the use of clean power and reducing emissions.

Huang Xiaoyong, president of the CASS Graduate School, said the development of clean and renewable energy will not lose momentum, despite competition from cheap oil.

"As the technology improves, energy utilization will develop in a clean and highly efficient direction, which is not only decided by the quality of resources or investment, but also a technology revolution," he said. "We are all waiting for a great opportunity, and it will require closer international cooperation."
Faced with many challenges, including environmental pollution and climate change, energy reform and global cooperation are becoming ever more urgent for all participants to ensure a cleaner supply chain.

At the G20 Summit in Hangzhou, global leaders will discuss crucial issues, including an improved and more-comprehensive energy cooperation system between countries.

In August, the State Grid Corporation of China, the world's largest State-owned electricity utility, outlined a plan to build a pilot zone in West China to increase the proportion of on-grid clean power in the mix, which will be used to build a Europe-Asia energy connection, and to bring wind power from the Arctic in the future.

The zone is part of the "Global Energy Interconnection", a vast high-voltage transmission network that was proposed two years ago by Liu Zhenya, State Grid's former president.

It is a vision for a massive global electricity grid powered by renewable sources.

In March, the Global Energy Interconnection Development and Cooperation Organization was established in Beijing.

Its 80 members include Chinese power companies, industrial associations, universities, banks and power companies from Japan, Russia and Brazil, in addition to foreign enterprises such as ABB and Siemens.

"Global energy interconnection is a must on the path to energy reform and sustainable development," Liu said.

"As the (world's) largest energy system, the network will provide huge economic, social and environmental benefits, and bring a blue and bright global village."

China is leading the world to a more-renewable future by installing greater solar and wind power generation capacities than any other country.

According to data from the National Energy Administration, China's installed solar power generation capacity reached 20 gigawatts in the first half of this year, almost equal to the total installed solar power generation capacities in 2013 and 2014.

The China Photovoltaic Industry Alliance has predicted that the country will add 5 to 10 GW of capacity in the second half.

In addition to maintaining the increase in renewable domestic power, China wants to lead the world to a cleaner future through power interconnection.

From the technical perspective, time differences will allow the Eastern and Western hemispheres to supplement each other's electricity needs, and seasonal differences will enable the Southern and Northern hemispheres to supplement each other's power systems.

In this way, the efficiency of global power distribution will be vastly improved.

The plan will give renewable-rich nations, such as Australia, the opportunity to become major exporters of clean energy.

"President Xi Jinping has proposed the Belt and Road Initiative, which has strengthened international cooperation in energy safety," said Zeng Ming, a professor at the North China Electric Power University in Beijing.

"The aim of the Global Energy Interconnection is to build a new energy utilization system that can accelerate the reform of energy production policies, plus those for transportation and consumption, in different parts in the world. China should grasp this opportunity."

Cao Peixi, general manager of China Huaneng Group, said the network could accelerate the development of renewable energy, which would be beneficial in helping the Chinese power industry to explore markets overseas.
A visitor takes pictures of Chinese ecology awareness posters on display during the opening day of the World Climate Change Conference 2015(COP21) at Le Bourget, near Paris, France on November 30, 2015. [Photo/Agencies]

Beijing aims to try and get consensus on advancing Paris climate deal

China is showing its commitment to the Paris Agreement by ratifying the hard-won agreement on climate change. This means that China, which ratified the agreement on Saturday, becomes one of the first G20 members to complete the domestic ratification process after the United Nations announced a one-year ratification deadline in April this year.

Having been involved in Sino-US environmental cooperation since the 1990s, Daniel Dudek, vice-president of the Environmental Defense Fund based in New York, said China's strategy and actions are encouraging.

"Someone needs to articulate the positive case for globalization. China can and should do this," Dudek said. "China can do this by giving back some of what it has gained through economic cooperation by fostering more environmental cooperation."

"Personally, from where I sit, I see globalization under assault," he said. "The premises of freer trade and of environmental cooperation are being questioned in many countries and regions. Perhaps we have been too blase in assuming that everyone understands the necessity of cooperation economically and environmentally."

Dudek said China should lead the drive to ratify the Paris Agreement ensure its Belt and Road Initiative focuses on green development so that it creates global business demand for green energy technologies.

"China has already entered into a phase where it can exert global green influence," said Dudek.

China has not stepped back from shouldering this responsibility. When Wang Yi, China's foreign minister, outlined the 10 priorities for the Hangzhou Summit recently, climate change was one of them.

"We will call on all parties to accelerate their ratifying procedures, bring the Paris Agreement into force at an early date and coordinate with all parties to take positive action so as to make contributions to international cooperation in climate change," he said.

Before Wang's announcement, under China's proposal and with the support from all parties, the first G20 statement on climate change was released at the G20 Sherpa meeting in April, 2016.

In the statement, the G20 members promised to sign the Paris Agreement on April 22 or soon thereafter and finish their domestic ratifying procedures as soon as possible.

The Paris Agreement's central aim is to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping the global temperature rise this century to below 2 degrees Celcius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 C.

It is clear that the G20 members have to take the lead in tackling climate change.

G20 countries account for the majority of the world's carbon pollutants. China and United States alone emit more than 40 percent of the world's total greenhouse gas emissions, which has proven the significance of the cooperation between the world's largest economies.

On Saturday, the United States joined China to formally ratify the Paris agreement to curb climate-warming emissions, which could help put the pact into force before the end of the year.

The deal requires at least 55 nations representing 55 percent of global emissions to become international law.

However, the fact that climate change is even on the agenda for the G20 Summit in Hangzhou represents some sort of progress. A careful reading of the documents of the first two summits in Washington and London in late 2008 and early 2009 show that climate change was hardly mentioned.

At the Pittsburgh summit in September 2009, climate change and energy efficiency were discussed, but that was when the international community was still hoping to achieve a concrete agreement at the United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Tracking climate change for years, Dennis Pamlin, founder of Sweden-based consultancy 21st Century Frontiers, said that the first thing to note is that green issues have, so far, not been a top global policy priority for either the G8/G7 or the G20.

"It is economic and security policy issues that have taken center stage and green issues have been dealt with on the side," Pamlin said.

But he said, under the Chinese G20 presidency there have been some impressive developments, especially in the Green Finance Study Group, whose work has focused on how the financial system can be aligned with sustainable development.

"That China prioritized this work indicates a serious understanding of what is required for a transformative low-carbon agenda," said Pamlin.

He also said that increased focus on innovation in areas such as sustainable agriculture has also been impressive and the fact that there is a group dedicated to sustainable agricultural innovation should be acknowledged as a step in the right direction.

"China's most important contribution to a successful G20 outcome is to look beyond the Hangzhou meeting and demonstrate that there is an interest from China to contribute to sustainability initiatives on the global level," said Pamlin.
During a recent series of talks with academics and analysts on the prospects for the G20 Leaders Summit in Hangzhou on Sept 4 and 5, Fredrik Erixon, director of the European Center for International Political Economy (ECIPE), made two points that impressed me.

One was his view on the status quo of the global situation, which he described as an "extraordinarily difficult time". That's something that's hard to disagree with, especially in the European Union, which is facing tremendous challenges.

And on a broader scale, such is the backdrop to the G20 summit, which is a platform for the leaders to forge consensus and generate a new impetus for global growth.

His second key point was China has been actively offering global solutions, and it can inspire the other participants at the summit to do likewise.

One example of this is the grand Belt and Road cooperation that China has initiated. And, looking back, the development of the initiative has come in tandem with the annual G20 summits.

President Xi Jinping, for instance, first raised the idea just two days after his first attendance at a G20 summit, when Russia had the chair in 2013, when he delivered a speech at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan, and proposed the Silk Road Economic Belt.

One month later, he gave a speech in Indonesia, in which he proposed establishing a Maritime Silk Road for the 21st Century.

In 2014, before the G20 Summit was held in Australia, China announced it was setting up the Silk Road Fund with an initial investment of $40 billion.

In 2015, when Turkey was the chair, the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank came into operation.

Xi attended an important seminar on the Belt and Road Initiatives just 20 days before the upcoming G20 summit, at which he said the initial outcome of the two proposals had been "unexpectedly fruitful," with about 30 countries entering into concrete agreements with China to materialize the initiatives.

When Xi first raised the Belt and Road Initiatives, some claimed China would use it to export its polluting industrial capacity.

However, while it is true that China aims to export its overcapacity of industrial production that does not mean it will be polluting and out of date. For many countries, it will be a critical engine of growth, creating new jobs and making new development possible.

Xi has emphasized that the Belt and Road should be green and the people in countries along the new Silk Roads should be beneficiaries of the initiatives.

Of course, China still has a lot to do to achieve sustainable, green development. But the government is being more aggressive in its law enforcement against polluters and corruption.

Recent cases have shown that senior officials are being punished or removed from their posts for violating environmental laws.

And China is serious about making the Belt and Road green. The charter of the AIIB stipulates clearly that the environmental impact will be the key criteria when considering financing a new project.

The European Union is competitive in green technologies and has strong environmental protection laws. These are advantages if it is willing to join the green Silk Road initiative.

And certainly a China-EU partnership in this regard would offer practical benefits for third party countries along the Belt and Road.

Confidence in sustainable growth can be justified if all along the new Silk Roads demonstrate the necessary resolve to be greener.
The nation's top economic regulator would enhance oversight over progress made in cutting steel overcapacity at provincial and municipal levels in order to meet reduction goals set for this year.

"China has been actively cutting overcapacity and takes the issue seriously," said Zhao Chenxin, spokesman of the National Development and Reform Commission, adding that the nation can, and would, make all-out efforts to meet this year's reduction goal.

Steel production capacity needs to be cut by 45 million tons and coal output capacity by 280 million tons by year-end.

Lian Weiliang, deputy head of the commission, said the central government would make more efforts to oversee the progress in the second half, after notable imbalance has been found across regions.

Data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology shows that by the end of July, the nation cut 38 percent of capacity in the coal sector and 47 percent in the steel sector. In minister Xu Shaoshi's words, efforts made so far "lagged far behind expectations".

Some old industrial bases with heavy industries, such as Liaoning and Heilongjiang province, have yet to achieve any progress, while some developed regions, such as Jiangsu province in the southern part of China, finished 80 percent of their yearly target by July-end.

Regions that have long relied on heavy industries are facing more difficulties compared to other developed places. "Cutting overcapacity is a must for all and the targets set earlier this year must be met," said Xu, who is also the chairman of the commission, adding that local governments, which are primarily responsible for achieving the goals, should quicken their pace of cuts while dealing with layoffs and debt issues.

Xu said local governments should not waver in their determination to cut overcapacity. Some regions' efforts have been found to be slowing due to concerns over unemployment and rising debt issues.

Lian said the central government would enhance inspection to see if local governments are keeping so-called "zombie enterprises" alive in order to avoid debt issues and job losses, referring to the loss-making firms in sectors riddled with overcapacity.

Meantime, the central government would offer a helping hand to local authorities to deal with difficulties arising from cuts to steel and coal capacities.

Apart from 100 billion yuan ($15.31 billion) of funds pledged to help industrial enterprises cut overcapacity in the next two years, the central government would continue to provide more financial support to resolve future problems, said Lian.

The central government is also drafting plans to help companies resolve debt issues based on market mechanisms like debt-to-equity swap programs, Lian said.

Xia Nong, deputy director-general of the department of industry under the commission, said that the government would also help companies resolve debt issues through mergers and acquisitions, which could become a future trend to facilitate the capacity reduction process.

wangyanfei@chinadaily.com.cn
Increased English language services seen as key to internationalization

In a bid to become more international, Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province, plans to improve the quality of its legal services for foreigners and establish an international commercial arbitration court over the next five years.

The host of this year's G20 Leaders Summit sees English, the global language of business, as key to its future development.

According to the city's latest five-year plan (2016-20), "legal environmental construction is key to becoming more international", while "English signs will be added as many as possible, and the current ones will be made more accurate".

Providing better legal services will also help attract more overseas investment in the city, according to the Supreme People's Court.

Li Liang, director of the court's trial management department, said it had established an English version of its own official website and asked grassroots courts to improve their legal services for foreigners as well.

It is now planning to make another website for disclosing verdicts in English, which will help foreigners understand Chinese judgments, Li said.

Jiang Qibo, chief judge of the court's case-filing tribunal, said at the end of last year that providing English legal services in the Yangtze River Delta region, where Hangzhou is located, is a must in the face of the increasing number of foreign disputes.

Commerce, marriage and intellectual property are the three main kinds of cases in this area, Jiang said.

He spoke highly of courts that have taken measures to better serve litigants in English in Yiwu, Zhejiang province and Shanghai's Putong district, where foreign investment is rising, but said such pockets of good practice were "far from enough as our country is going global".

It will be necessary to first provide English legal services in the delta region's other cities before extending the initiative across the country, Jiang said.

"Measures taken in Yiwu and Putong can be learned from, such as the construction of an interpreter database to guide foreigners who file cases, and the provision of judicial documents in English," he added.

Zhou Qiang, China's top judge, said in March that the way the country's judicial system is perceived on the world stage can be improved by better handling cases relating to foreigners.

According to the latest statistics released by the top court, Chinese courts heard 15,348 civil and commercial cases involving foreigners last year, about the same number as recorded in 2014.

But both Zhou and Jiang confirmed that Chinese courts are short of English talent, especially those who can communicate with foreign litigants in English.

Hangzhou's plan for the next five years pays attention to this problem, while also highlighting the importance of education for international talent.

caoyin@chinadaily.com.cn
Capital city of province now gearing up to play much bigger role in trade via e-commerce

Centuries ago, it was silk that made Hangzhou, a major producer and exporter of the treasured fabric, a critical city in East-West trade.

The capital city of Zhejiang province is now gearing up to play a much bigger role in trade. But rather than exporting any particular products, Hangzhou, home to the world's largest e-commerce company Alibaba Group, is using internet technology to enable more companies and more people to do business online, even cross-border trade.

The Hangzhou government has made the information technology-driven economy its top priority to spur growth since 2014, as the city revamps its sprawling economy which was once dominated by specialized manufacturers in small towns.

E-commerce and other information technology sectors have proved themselves effective powerhouses to fuel economic growth. In the first half of the year, Hangzhou witnessed 10.8 percent economic growth, eclipsing the overall national growth of 6.7 percent in the same period.

Jin Jianhang, president of Alibaba Group, said that only when each individual makes his or her own effort to participate in business can a city's economic growth be truly boosted.

E-commerce seems an ideal way to involve a large number of people in business as it lowers the threshold to set up a business, whether it is a one-man shop or a 200,000-employee manufacturer, anyone can find his or her place in cyberspace.

Jin used an example to show why Hangzhou has such a thriving economy. "Out of every 17 online shoppers in Hangzhou, there is one who owns an online store," he said. In 2015, nearly 60 percent of the city's total retail sales of 469.7 billion yuan ($70.34 billion) were made online, while China's average rate was 12.8 percent.

Alibaba, which was founded 17 years ago by former English teacher Jack Ma, provides fertile ground for anyone who wishes to engage in e-commerce. On its online platforms that sold more than 3 trillion yuan worth of goods in the fiscal year ended in March, it connects more than 400 million shoppers with retailers around the world.

Yang Mingping, who owns an online education startup in Hangzhou, said the platforms to do business are not the only thing that Alibaba provides.

"Many Alibaba employees have become multimillionaires after the company's record breaking IPO in the United States in 2014, and their deep understanding of the internet makes them very supportive venture investors for anyone who wants to set up internet-enabled businesses in Hangzhou," he said.

Thousands of other smaller online retail businesses are clustered in the city, encouraged by the local government's favorable policies to support people to set up their own businesses.

Dong Yan, deputy director of the innovation and entrepreneurship park in the city's Binjiang district, said the local government has made a big effort to attract talent and offered tremendous support to encourage those who want to set up their own businesses.
A car drives into a newly-opened smart warehouse-like carport in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. The carport is 18 meters underground and can hold 132 cars. Long Wei / For China Daily

Come 2020, residents of Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, may find themselves spending more of their time underground as the city looks to enhance the use of its subterranean environment.

The local government has approved a five-year plan on the subject, the first of its kind, "because the city is ready to explore underground", said Chen Lijun, deputy director of the underground space and pipeline department of Hangzhou Municipal Construction Committee.

As the 16,847-sq-km city, which is home to around 6.22 million people, expands further, "exploring the space underground will bring sustainable growth", Chen said.

According to the plan, by 2020, the city's total utilized underground space will exceed 82.6 million sq m, of which 25 million will be newly opened. One-third of this area will be used for parking, aiming to alleviate congestion on the city's streets, while there will also be storage buildings, pedestrian streets and shopping malls, as well as facilities for exhibitions and physical exercise.

Crucially, there will be new tunnels built, called underground pipeline galleries, for electricity, communication, gas, heating and drainage, among other utilities.

"We will arrange technicians to carry out regular maintenance and checks to guarantee the good operation of these 'lifelines' for the city," said Lu Ge, director of the committee.

After the underground tunnels are finished, the city's residents will no longer have to suffer from roadworks due to pipe maintenance, he said.

On April 21, Hangzhou was selected as a pilot city for underground pipeline galleries, in which three have been built so far. Over the next two years, it will spend more than 3.8 billion yuan ($569 million) on building another five galleries, whose total length will reach 32.26 km.

Considering the extent of Hangzhou's proposed underground expansion, Yao Minhe, a national legislator, suggested establishing a database to monitor progress using cloud computing technology.

"Information sharing will ensure safety during the construction phase and prevent unnecessary misunderstandings among governmental departments involved in the construction," he said. "An emergency alert system is also necessary during the construction."

Zhao Zhiyong, another national legislator, echoed Yao's thoughts, saying that sufficient research needs to be carried out on the geological conditions and water table of areas where underground construction is to be carried out, to ensure the safety of the whole city.

Contact the writers at zhengjinran@chinadaily.com.cn
A customer shops for imported products in a cross-border e-commerce store in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. [Photo/China Daily]

In less than four years, three entrepreneurs have developed JollyChic from a startup to one of China's largest e-commerce clothing exporters, and their ambition is to globalize the idea of affordable fashion and design.

Four years ago, Li Haiyan and his two partners met in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province. All of them were confident of the prospects for China's e-commerce exports, and after paying several visits to overseas markets, they decided to launch a B2C (business to consumer) platform to sell Chinese clothing to Europe, the United States and the Middle East.

The company was founded in December 2012 under the name of Jolly Information Technology Co Ltd. To date, through cooperation with domestic suppliers, Jolly has expanded its revenue from 10 million yuan ($1.5 million) in 2013 to 500 million yuan in 2015.

Jolly Information Technology has also helped up to 1,500 Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises get rid of the label of original equipment manufacturer (OEM) supplier and promote their brands overseas.

JollyChic, the online shopping brand of the company, has become the most influential Chinese mobile e-commerce app within the Gulf Cooperation Council member states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Ding Wei, one of the three founders and current executive president of Jolly, said big data was one of the keys to the firm's fast growth over such a short period of time.

"Through tracking each product's search ranges, ready-to-pay rates and consumer feedback, the smart system can make simultaneous analysis and calculate the potential orders from time to time, so that Chinese manufacturers can quickly respond to market demand and get prepared for overseas orders," said Ding.

Spending dozens of million yuan on research and development, the company now boasts more than 100 software engineers in Hangzhou and Silicon Valley in the United States.

Big data also helped Jolly unlock huge market potential in the Middle East, and offered more tailor-made products to the area since two years ago. More than half of the company's revenue now comes from this market.

Ding said the Hangzhou-based company will pay more attention to meeting the needs of US and European consumers in the coming years.
Liu Ruopeng, president of Kuang-Chi Group.[Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Kuang-Chi Group, a Shenzhen-based future science company, plans to invest 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) in several projects in Hangzhou, one of which is an experiencing center that allows ordinary people to experience life in the future and near-outer space flight simulations.

Liu Ruopeng, president of Kuang-Chi Group, said that people will be able to experience what it feels like to live in a futuristic room where furniture can move, think and reconfigure themselves in Future Valley.

Visitors to the Valley can also log into a simulation aircraft of a deep space tour that offers the experience of flying up to 21 kilometers above the ground, which is just beyond the border of outer space.

Kuang-Chi Group set up a subsidiary in 2014, which went public in Hong Kong Stock Exchange in August 2014. Around 3,000 scientists from more than 40 countries will congregate in the Valley to conduct research. The Valley is expected to open by the end of next year.

"Our mission is to develop science and technology that create a future life ecology," said Liu. "We have chosen Hangzhou because it is a city that embraces innovation and tolerates failure, for the Valley. Moreover, the South Lake, where the Valley is going to be built, has a large water surface and cubical space for us to run the machine," he said.

The Kuang-Chi GCI Fund & Incubator, a global incubator mechanism initiated by Kuang-Chi, was established in Tel Aviv. The first phase of $50 million has just been invested into projects that aim to change the future of Man's way of life.

Liu is in Hangzhou for the Business 20 Summit, which he believes is a great occasion to strengthen connectivity throughout the world.

"Science needs globalization to deliver a connected system that fundamentally changes every aspect of people's life. An important theme of the event is to connect the world into a common community, which is exactly what future science needs to create new productivity," said Liu.
British Prime Minister Theresa May arrives in China's eastern city of Hangzhou to attend the 11th G20 summit, Sept 4, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

HANGZHOU -- British Prime Minister Theresa May arrived in this eastern Chinese city on Sunday for the 11th leaders' meeting of the G20 major economies, her major international summit debut.

At the summit, themed "Toward an Innovative, Invigorated, Interconnected and Inclusive World Economy," Britain is to show it is "open for business as a bold, confident, outward-looking country" and will be a "global leader" on free trade, May said Saturday before leaving for China.

The European country's shock vote in June to leave the European Union (EU), led to the resignation of May's predecessor, David Cameron, and has put Britain's posture on regional integration and globalization in question.

On the sidelines of the two-day G20 summit, May is expected to have a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss bilateral relations and other matters of common concern.

Upon her departure for China, she said "this is a golden era for UK-China relations," and that in Hangzhou, she will talk to Xi "about how we can develop the strategic partnership that we have between the UK and China."

China and Britain can enhance cooperation in a number of fields, from infrastructure investment and international financial framework to cooperation on taxation, anti-corruption and anti-microbial resistance, said Liu Xiaoming, China's ambassador to Britain.

"Our joint efforts in these areas will be essential in the G20's transition from an organization for crisis control to an institution of long-term governance," he said in a signed article published by Britain's Daily Telegraph on Thursday.

During her stay in Hangzhou, May is also expected to meet with other world leaders including U.S. President Barack Obama, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
An employee of New H3C Group, a Hangzhou-based information technology solution provider, doing a soldering job. [Photo provided to China Daily]

New H3C Group, a Hangzhou-based information technology solution provider, is using more integrated solutions to ensure the higher efficiency of backstage IT systems.

"The key to more efficient IT systems is integration. Traditionally, the IT infrastructure is fragmented. When the engineer sends one signal, it is very slow to be carried through because of the lack of the organic connection of different resources," said Wu Jian, chief of the cloud computing product department of New H3C.

The company's new systematic solution plan, the unified information system, has increased the backstage operation IT system significantly.

New H3C provides customers with a full range of servers, storage, networking, security products, hyper-converged infrastructure and IT management systems. Its products have been widely deployed in nearly 100 countries and regions serving customers such as Vodafone, Telefonica, Swiss Telecom, DreamWorks and Samsung Electronics. Its revenue in 2015 stood at 21 billion yuan ($3.1 billion).

In the company's survey of its customers, it found that IT system maintenance engineers complained about the complicated operation process in which they have to log onto different interfaces to manage different parts of the system, such as the power supply, the CPU, the machine cabinets, and the memory.

"UIS aims to make the systems management simpler," said Wu.

According to Wu, with UIS, the engineers are able to monitor all parts of the IT system in one interface. To some extent, it needs only one engineer to manage the system.

New H3C has cooperated with more than 200 universities to help them boost the efficiency of their education system. One noticeable result is that the UIS has overcome the problem of user crowding that causes congestion and systematic breakdown in course selection.

For instance, in a school of 20,000 students, it usually takes three days for the students to complete the course selection. Now, it only takes three hours with the UIS-backed system.

"UIS has turned IT capacity into a service like running water or electricity. When the course selection system is running, the capacity will flow to the system. When the course selection is completed, it will flow to other places that need it most, said Wu.

In its service directly facing the consumers, New H3C has been taking the lead in Wi-Fi product development.

"Stable Wi-Fi services attract more users, which then will become potential customers of more products and services," said Bai Lang, head of the wireless product department of New H3C.

At the World Internet Conference held last year in Wuzhen, Zhejiang, H3C's Wi-Fi solution realized 20 mega bytes of data per capita. The whole venue of the conference had nearly 3,000 access points. In peak hours more than 6,000 people were connected to the internet at the same time.

According to China Internet Network Information Center, as of June 2015, 88.9 percent Chinese internet users use mobile phones to get connected to the internet while 93 percent of mobile phone users access the internet by Wi-Fi.

According to Bai, Chinese enterprises at the moment have 15 million units of Wi-Fi devices and New H3C's products account for 30 percent of them. It has around 5 million access points throughout the country, covering more than 20 industries such as medical services, education and retail.
Automatic algorithms allow timely analysis and efficient response

Security data technology is helping Hangzhou become a safer and more intelligent city, said a top executive of Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co Ltd, a video surveillance product supplier in China that has provided security solutions to major international events in China and overseas.

"Security data and cloud computing technologies will enable automatic capturing and analysis of the images in CCTV surveillance, which will make security information more accurate and efficient," said Zheng Yibo, vice-president of the company.

Hikvision, in which the State and private investors have stakes, made digital video recorders when it was created in 2001. It has grown into a company listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange that covers more than 100 countries and regions in the world with 21 branches overseas. It provided security solutions for the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the APEC Summit in 2014, the Shanghai World Expo in 2010, and this year's Rio de Janeiro Olympics.

"The biggest challenge in CCTV surveillance is to select valuable information from myriads of data, to which SDT is the key solution. This technology is still at the beginning stage," said Xie Linghua, senior engineer of Hikvision.

According to Xie, high quality pictures and timely information transfer are the key to CCTV surveillance. At the moment, a large number of CCTV devices are maintained by human labor. Once the system breaks down or encounters some technical problems, it cannot be fixed in a timely manner.

"Maintenance costs are high while effectiveness is compromised. Therefore, an intelligent CCTV monitoring system is the future trend in the industry. Intelligent surveillance is able to use automatic algorithms to analyze the images. It is able to capture the motion of the object in a scene, and able to draw a conclusion as to what that motion means. It saves a lot of human labor and boosts the outcome," said Xie.

Hikvision introduced a DT camera last year, which is able to identify temperature, humidity, smoke and position in addition to conventional information of image, sounds and alarms. Meanwhile, it is able to turn the information of non-human face images, such as car plates, into structured data.

Hikvision has 17,000 employees, among which more than 7,000 are researchers. The input in R&D every year accounts for more than 8 percent of the company's revenue.

According to the statistics of Shenzhen-based China Public Security Technology Co Ltd, the total output of China's security industry was 498 billion yuan ($74.6 billion) last year. CCTV surveillance product output accounted for two-thirds of the security industry.

Chen Zongnian, chairman of Hikvision, said that globalization is the company's next step. "The World Internet Conference, which is held in Zhejiang every year, the G20 Summit and the Asian Games to be held in Hangzhou this year have put Hangzhou in the spotlight. It means a lot of opportunities for Hikvision to promote its international recognition. Our overseas revenue is less than 30 percent of the total revenue. It will increase year by year," said Chen.
The Business 20 has called on the G20 leaders to curb the rising protectionism in international investment and trade by introducing clear and transparent policies.

A number of proposals by the B20's organizing committee and taskforces, focusing on international investment, trade, innovation, infrastructure development and employmentthe labor force participation rate is at its lowest in 40 years, and is continuing to declineare expected to be included in the G20 Summit statement this year, said Jiang Zengwei, chair of the B20 2016.

The B20 provides a platform for international companies and chambers of commerce to participate in global economic governance, as well as economic and trade regulation, through meetings and summits that collect the opinions of world business leaders and making recommendations to the G20 leaders.

"The B20 has suggested that the current investment agreements be reassessed, in a bid to build more effective standards. This will help to resolve disputes and assist global investment activities," said Jiang, who is also chairman of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade.

More than 3,300 investment agreements are currently in use in global markets, which hinders the flow of capital and increases investment costs for enterprises.

Bill Winters, chief executive officer of Standard Chartered Plc, said there are still significant risks to the global economy and the sluggish global growth will make it harder for the world economy to cope with any more shocks.

"We need to focus on ways in which to unlock investment to support the huge need for infrastructure finance across the world and to fund clean energy technologies that will enable us to transition to a low carbon, sustainable world," Winters said.

The B20 proposals include a plan for global infrastructure connectivity, along with an electronic world trade platform and suggestions for promoting innovative growth.

A total of 815 representatives attended this year's B20 Summit in Hangzhou, including 142 companies on the Fortune Global 500 list and 103 enterprises from China's top 500 companies.

Zhang Yanling, a member of the executive board of the International Chamber of Commerce and former vice-president of Bank of China Ltd, said in Beijing on Wednesday: "In its policy proposals to the G20, the B20 has suggested adopting innovative technologies and management instruments to enhance the value of infrastructure projects and strengthen infrastructure connectivity among countries and regions.

"It is important that different countries join the efforts to develop infrastructure as a means to leverage global economic development."

The B20 provides a great opportunity for business leaders to communicate their priorities with heads of governments. Germany will hold the B20 presidency in 2017.
President Xi urges all parties to work to build an innovative, open economy

China will work together with all parties to make the G20 Hangzhou summit prescribe remedies for the world economy to achieve robust, sustainable, balanced and inclusive growth, President Xi Jinping said on Saturday.

All parties at the summit should work to build an innovative and open world economy to explore new sources of growth and expand the space for development, Xi said in a keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the Business 20 Summit in Hangzhou, capital of East China's Zhejiang province.

The B20 helps international companies and commercial organizations participate in global economic governance and the making of economic and trade regulations, as it collects the opinions of world business leaders and develops a consensus.

Xi said China is standing at a new starting point for comprehensively deepening reform and injecting new impetus in economic and social development, adapting to the new normal of economic development and transforming its economic development mode.

Proceeding from this new starting point, China will unswervingly deepen reform in a comprehensive manner, implement an innovation-driven development strategy, pursue green growth, deliver more benefits to the people and further open-up and interact with the world, Xi said.

The world economy should become more interconnected and inclusive, and join forces for win-win solutions, Xi added.

More than 800 business leaders gathered in Hangzhou for the B20 Summit this year, and the B20 has submitted more than 400 policy recommendations in various fields, including reform of the financial system, trade, investment, energy, infrastructure, employment, finance and anti-corruption.

He Yafei, former vice-minister of foreign affairs, said the G20 Summit has already started to transition from a crisis-response mechanism to one of long-term economic governance, with its focus switching from cyclical policy to structural policy and coordination of macroeconomic policies.

Tian Huifang, a senior researcher at the Institute of World Economics and Politics at the Beijing-based Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said there is a strong demand for infrastructure investment in a large number of developing countries to accelerate their industrialization and urbanization.

World Bank studies show that the current annual infrastructure investment in developing countries is about $1 trillion. To maintain current economic growth and meet future needs, at least $1 trillion more investment on an annual basis will be needed until 2020.

Fu Chengyu, former chairman of the State-owned Sinopec Group, the country's largest oil refiner, said when it comes to developing countries, infrastructure, education, health and other fields remain bottlenecks for economic development. If investment is concentrated in such bottleneck areas, it will effectively improve and help the economy return to rapid growth.
HANGZHOU - Several documents that are likely to be ratified at the upcoming Group of 20 (G20) summit will promote trade facilitation, curb protectionism and boost cross-border investment, an official with China's Ministry of Commerce (MOC) said Saturday.

It is hopeful for the G20 summit scheduled for Sept 4-5 to ratify a G20 Strategy for Global Trade Growth, which may become a guiding document for G20 members' trade cooperation, Vice Minister of Commerce Wang Shouwen said at a press conference.

During a G20 Trade Ministers Meeting in Shanghai in July 2016, consensus was reached upon the strategy, which included principles and measures to lower trade cost, boost trade in services and enhance trade finance.

Wang said that G20 members need to take effective measures to boost global trade amid lackluster world trade growth and rising trade protectionism.

World trade growth has been lower than global economic growth for four consecutive years since 2012, and about 2,800 trade restricting measures have been rolled out by World Trade Organization members since October 2008, with 75 percent of them still effective now.

Complicated regulations for global investment have also brought inconvenience to investors, as there are currently more than 3,300 investment agreements around the world, Wang said.

Business leaders from G20 members have called for action to solve the problem and create a sound investment environment, according to the vice minister.

As a result, China for the first time pushed investment policy coordination onto the G20 agenda this year, Wang said.

If ratified, G20 Guiding Principles for Global Investment will become the general framework of global investment regulations and represent a historical step in multilateral investment policy coordination, Wang added.
Roger Gifford, chairman of the City of London's Green Finance Initiative

China can be a leader in creating concrete international commitments toward green finance at the G20 summit, given its active role in this area, according to Roger Gifford, chairman of the City of London's Green Finance Initiative.

"We hope to see China encouraging other governments to sign an agreement to encourage their respective countries' companies and organizations to put environmental impact into the considerations of major new projects, like infrastructure projects," Gifford said ahead of the G20 Leaders Summit.

Such an achievement will be helpful in driving global economic growth as new infrastructure and power projects attract funding, he said. It will also help in mobilizing resources to reduce carbon emissions to fulfill the commitments made at the Paris Climate Change Conference in 2015, Gifford added. China, as the G20 host nation, has for the first time put green finance on the summit agenda.

Yi Gang, deputy governor of the People's Bank of China, said recently that a new report on green finance is due to be delivered to the summit.

The report comes from work carried out by the Green Finance Study Group under the G20 framework, which consists of government representatives from all G20 members and is chaired by the People's Bank of China and the Bank of England.

Gifford, who is championing green finance through his role with the Green Finance Initiative and as the British head of the Nordic bank SEB, made green finance a big theme in 2013 during his time as Lord Mayor for the City of London.

Green finance is a new concept created in recent years to channel funds from investors to environmentally friendly projects through the creation of products, such as green bonds and green loans.

China has led the world in the sale of the green debt this year, issuing green bonds worth $11.9 billion as of July, compared with $33.9 billion in green bonds issued globally over the same period.

Those numbers reflect robust growth from last year, when green bonds worth $36.2 billion were issued internationally, of which $1.3 billion were issued by Chinese organizations. As of July, Bank of China has sold $3.03 billion in new green bonds, the largest international issuance of its kind.

Gifford said green finance is a new opportunity for infrastructure projects to attract funding, while infrastructure construction is vital to boosting the global economy.

He said China has great potential to exercise leadership in green finance for three reasons.

"First, it has a leading track record of issuing green bonds already. Second, its energy and climate-mitigation projects' requirement is huge. Third, the green finance agenda fits into China's ambition of increasing its participation in global governance in finance and climate change related topics."

He added that another significant way China can lead the global green finance agenda is to encourage green funding for projects that are part of the Belt and Road Initiative.
Qi Ye, director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy

The ability to solve problems is declining in most industrialized countries, with the trend becoming obvious in the past two years, according to a study by a top Ger-man think tank.

The annual study, known as the Sustainable Governance Indicators, was released by Bertelsmann Stiftung last month.

Although China was not included in the study, Qi Ye, director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy, said the nation has made significant progress in its governance capability since the end of 2012, when the current leadership took power.

President Xi Jinping has focused on economic restructuring, poverty alleviation and radical anti-corruption measures at home, and a cooperative win-win global strategy, Qi said.

The report comes at a crucial time as China prepares to host its first G20 Leaders Summit in Hangzhou this weekend.

It shows the United States' governance performance fell below the average for the 41 industrialized nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation Development and the European Union.

Sweden ranked first, followed by Switzerland and Germany. Of the largest national economies, only two G7 countries, Germany and the United Kingdom, are among the top 10. The study applied 136 indicators to assess the government actions and reforms of all countries in the EU and OECD. More than 100 international experts took part in the study, published every year since 2009.

The research team also points out that, from the financial and economic crisis to climate change, terrorism and international migration flows, problems are becoming increasingly global.

"Yet there are fewer opportunities for mutual problem-solving because (right-wing) populist movements are gaining ground in a number of OECD and EU countries and placing particular national interests ahead of the objective of joint international policy solutions," the report said.

Qi at the Brookings-Tsinghua Center said the progress in China is due to four achievements at home and abroad.

First, the nationwide anti-corruption campaign has built political solidarity between the people and leadership. Second, China has maintained an enviable economic growth at an annual rate close to 7 percent, higher than almost all major economies, despite the economic slowdown. Third, environmental regulations are at their best, with more stringent legislation, tougher enforcement and better compliance.

"And fourth, China's capacity in global governance has been enhanced significantly," he said.

Daniel Schraad-Tischler, a senior analyst at Bertelsmann Stiftung, said the decline in problem-solving capacity, due to political polarization in many countries, represents a massive challenge, given the growing number and intensity of transnational problems and crises.

"With regard to transnational challenges such as terrorism, global migration flows, climate change, resource scarcity and growing social inequality, we would need governments that are capable and willing to act in a long-term-orient-ed, internationally coordinated manner," he said.

G20 members bear a strong responsibility to act together in order to promote global public goods, he said.
Guy Dru Drury, chief representative in China of the Confederation of British Industry

China's presidency of the G20 this year provides a unique opportunity to showcase the nation's growing leadership on the world stage, says a senior UK business leader.

The two-day leaders summitthemed "Building an Innovative, Invigorated, Interconnected and Inclusive World Economy"began on Sunday in Hangzhou, the home of e-commerce giant Alibaba and automaker Geely, which owns London Taxi Co.

"The summit is expected to shine a spotlight on the new mechanisms and institutions through which China has been working to expand its global role, such as its leadership in forming the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and its Belt and Road Initiative to support infrastructure development throughout Asia," said Guy Dru Drury, chief representative in China of the Confederation of British Industry.

"Generating greater awareness among G20 members about how they can work together with China through these channels could make them much more effective in achieving their objectives."

It's the first time the summit is being held in China and leaders of the world's largest economies are set to discuss a technical agenda, including trade, investment, international collaboration and anti-terrorism.

Drury said greater international cooperation related to innovation-led growth, particularly in areas such as the digital economy, is likely to be highlighted. He also expects promoting innovation to be a top item on the agenda.

As the recovery of the global economy has remained highly fragile and growth underpowered, he says China's role as host could prompt the nation to accelerate its economic reforms and further open up its markets to foreign trade and investment, creating new engines for growth.

To maximize the potential for foreign investment, he suggests that China streamline and simplify its domestic regulatory framework and reduce red tape, by tackling nontariff trade barriers, so that it's easier for foreign companies to enter the Chinese market.

Drury said that as momentum continues to gather behind the China-initiated AIIB and the Belt and Road Initiative, these ambitious projects could begin to reshape the economic architecture throughout Asia and play an important role in boosting global economic growth.

Nearly 1,000 business leaders attended the B20 meetings ahead of the G20 in Hangzhou, including those from the CBI, which represents members of the British and international business communities.

Drury said the B20 event was an important platform for global business leaders to discuss the role of the private sector as the principal engine behind economic growth and ultimately produce policy recommendations for the G20 leaders.

He hoped G20 leaders will work to achieve outcomes that boost confidence and help to restore order in challenging global economic and political environments.
Mutual trust is a precondition that ensures the smooth development of China-Australia ties, and the two countries should respect each other's core interest and major concerns, President Xi Jinping said when meeting with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Sunday.

They met on the sidelines ahead of the G20 Leaders Summit in eastern China's Hangzhou city.

China and Australia are expected to further implement their bilateral free trade agreement, explore cooperation in fields such as energy and resources, agriculture and husbandry, food processing and infrastructure construction, Xi said.

Australia hopes to further provide a fair, transparent and understandable policy environment for foreign investors, which also serves the interest of Australia itself, Xi said.

The two countries should work on expanding joint research and development regarding fields such as food, agriculture, mining and oceanic science, and they should reinforce cooperation to fight corruption, find fugitives and illegal assets and fight terrorism, Xi added.

China is ready to reinforce coordination and collaboration with Australia through mechanisms such as the United Nations, G20, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, Xi said.

Turnbull said the two countries enjoy a long-standing friendship and the comprehensive strategic partnership enjoys widespread support within Australia.

The Australian side is dedicated to implementing the bilateral free trade agreement, is ready to deepen bilateral economic and trade relationship, and continues to welcome Chinese investment in Australia, Turnbull said.
BEIJING - By setting up seven more free trade zones (FTZs), China has demonstrated its resolve to liberalize trade and investment.

The new FTZs in Chongqing, Henan, Hubei, Liaoning, Shaanxi, Sichuan and Zhejiang were announced by commerce minister Gao Hucheng on Wednesday, bringing the total number of FTZs to 11, just three years after the Shanghai FTZ opened for business.

Bai Ming of the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation sees the announcement as a clear statement of intent ahead of the Hangzhou G20 summit.

"The FTZs will increase access to the Chinese market and substantially improve the business environment for foreign companies," said Bai. "This demonstrates commitment to free trade and investment despite rising protectionism in other parts of the world."

This year, China is the target of 65 new probes and restrictions from overseas, mostly anti-dumping and anti-subsidy cases, a substantial increase from last year.

Last month, Australia rejected China's State Grid's bid for its largest electricity network, citing "national security" concerns. In July, Britain delayed work on a nuclear power station partnership, triggering media speculation that this was also due to "national security."

Despite the setbacks, the new FTZs are proof that China is still committed to opening up, said Bai.

The new FTZs involve both inland provincial regions in the west and coastal areas in the east and northeast, widening the scope of trade and investment. Among the FTZ successes have been the "negative list" specifying investment sectors that are off-limits to foreign investors, and allowing foreign firms to operate under the same investment rules as domestic ones. Replicating theses successes nationwide will greatly benefit foreign businesses, Bai said.

The announcement came as some are concerned over access to the Chinese market. The European Union Chamber of Commerce in China claimed earlier this week that European companies face a "lack of reciprocity." Chinese investment in Europe has increased rapidly while European firms are still heavily restricted in China.

"Chinese outbound investment may be outpacing inbound investment, but that's the result of China's success rather unfair treatment of foreign investment," Bai said. Many developed economies have experienced fast growth in outbound investment, which is a natural process, and China's economy has just reached this stage, he said.

Moreover, China is shifting to greener, quality growth and better market regulation, which require both domestic and foreign firms to adjust their investment strategies, he said, noting that there is abundant evidence of an improved business environment.

In the FTZs in Guangdong, Tianjin and Fujian, inbound direct investment rose by 225 percent, 220 percent and 548 percent year on year, respectively, in the period from their launch in April 2015 to the end of the year, official data show.

In the first seven months of 2016, EU countries' investment in China rose 31.3 percent year on year.

"Italian firms are very optimistic about their development in China, especially in western regions," said Sergio Maffettone, consul-general of Italy in Chongqing, where one of the new FTZs is located.
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Being as one of the world's buzzing sector that reserves innovation potential, artificial intelligence, or AI, requires collaboration around the world, said one executive of the nation's leading company.

"What we want to achieve is to seek impetus through innovation and vitality through reform, to increase medium- and long-term growth potential of the world economy," said President Xi on Saturday in the keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the Business 20 Summit (B20) in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province.

Liu Qingfeng, chairman of iFLYTEK Co, one of the leading domestic voice recognition R&D companies, sat down with China Daily and share his views on B20's significance to the development of the world's artificial intelligence (AI) industry.

"I think AI is one of the greatest dreams of human beings, and will become a core engine to drive the industrial revolution," said Liu.

According to him, during AI's world-changing process, the original technology innovation should rely on the cooperations between industry pioneers around the globe, and he calls the industry eco-system should be established and distributed globally.

"The best advantage of AI technology is to maximally meet every individual's demand. For example, thanks to AI, the future smartphone that embedded in voice recognition function will be reshaped to glasses, watches, buttons or even brooches and necklaces, which are bound up with users' aesthetic taste and dressing habits," Liu said. "The personalized demands will encourage entrepreneurs and startups to tap into the market rather than eliminated by overladen users or unbearable investment."

According to Liu, currently about 160,000 developers are utilizing the firm's voice cloud platform to implement their applications and the figure has seen rocket growth, up 100 percent increase compare to last year.

"The change illustrates the potential of AI in China and what we can do to help fuel its global development."

Ma Si contributed to the story
President Xi Jinping welcomed his counterparts from Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa and delivered a speech during the BRICS leaders' informal meeting on Sunday morning ahead of the G20 summit.

"The rising of emerging economies and developing countries is the one of the deepest changes in modern international relations. The BRICS countries are not only leaders of the emerging economies, but also important members of G20," Xi said, hoping all the five nations would strengthen coordination and cooperation to support the development of those two important platforms.

Xi also expects the BRICS countries will work together to play a bigger role in the world stage and be more positive in international governance.

"I'm looking forward to the fruitful outcome of today's informal meeting. It will make great preparation for the G20 summit in the afternoon and also set foundations for the 8th BRICS summit to be held in Goa, India a month later," Xi said.

The informal meeting will give BRICS leaders a chance to discuss their major decisions and fine-tune them before announcing them at the 8th BRICS summit in mid-October in Goa in western India, according to Swaran Singh, professor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is here to attend the Group of 20 (G20) summit, in Hangzhou, capital of East China's Zhejiang Province, Sept 4, 2016. [Xu Jingxing/China Daily]

China and Russia should firmly support each other's efforts to safeguard sovereignty, security and development, President Xi Jinping said on Sunday.

Xi made the remarks while meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the sidelines of the G20 summit held in Hangzhou.

The two countries should push forward practical cooperation in areas including infrastructure construction, energy, aviation, aerospace and high technology, Xi said, adding that the bilateral military exchanges and security cooperation should also be enhanced.

China and Russia should strengthen coordination in international and regional affairs to safeguard justice and promote world peace, he said.

Xi also urged to align the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative with the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union.

Putin said that Russia would like to make joint efforts with China to increase mutual political trust and people's friendship in order to further motivate economic cooperation.

The two countries should enhance cooperation in areas including trade, investment, finance, energy, science and technology to bring real benefits to the people of both sides, he added.

The Russian president voiced support toward the G20 summit's theme and agenda set by China and wished the summit success.
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Lenovo Group Ltd, the world's largest personal computer maker, will launch its augmented-reality-enabled smartphone in October in China, as part of its broad efforts to boost phone sales with innovative products.

Yang Yuanqing, CEO and Chairman of the Beijing-based company, said on Saturday the Phab2 Pro, the world's first smartphone to host AR applications without the need of other accessories, will help create new business models by bringing new interactive experience to consumers.

Yang holds a Moto Z, the latest flagship of the brand, at a press meeting held on September 4, 2016 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. [Photo/chinadaily.com.cn by Liu Zheng]

The new device, first unveiled in June, is based on Google Inc's Tango project and allows users to play virtual dominoes on a physical table and shoot digital robots that inhabit users' living rooms.

"Technology innovation and business model innovation are part of the new path for growth," Yang said, adding the company aims to leverage cutting-edge technologies to change the way people live and work. He made the comments at the B20 summit which was held in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province on Saturday.

According to him, in the Internet of Things era, smart devices are not limited to just computers and smartphones. They will be everywhere. They will be powered by natural language interaction, artificial intelligence, and cloud services.

Yang holds a Yoga tablet, a hardware used by the B20 as its official gift to the attendees, at a press meeting held on September 4, 2016 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. [Photo/chinadaily.com.cn by Liu Zheng]

Yang also showcased the company's Moto Z modular handset on Saturday. The phone, which will belaunched in China next Tuesday, has high-powered magnets on its rear with which users can fasten additional equipment, including extra batteries, speakers and projectors.

Lenovo is banking on the two phones to gain the market share it is losing to rivals such as Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and Oppo Electronics Corp.

"The handsets are not just incremental improvements on existing phones. They are designed to stand out in the industry where smartphones look and operate just the same," Yang said.
Michael Bloomberg, the UN secretary-general's special envoy for cities and climate change, hailed the ratification of the Paris Agreement by China and the United States, the world's two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases.

In an email statement, he said that by ratifying the Paris Climate Agreement on Saturday, the US and China are demonstrating that the world's two largest economies will help lead the fight against climate change - but it's imperative that more nations join them.

"Cities are united in this effort, but to succeed, nations must be too - and I urge local leaders to continue pushing their national governments to ratify the Paris Agreement in the months ahead," Bloomberg said in the statement.

Last December, China and the US agreed to cut emissions in a bid to keep the global average rise in temperatures below two degrees Celsius. Both China and US are together responsible for 40 per cent of the world's carbon emissions.
The foreign press shares views about Chinese President Xi Jinping's speech at the open of the G20 Summit in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province Sunday.

Fredrick P.W. Gaye, a Liberian news editor at the China-Africa Press Center

President Xi urges G20 members to support the development of African countries and other underdeveloped countries, as it's very welcoming, and it's good for the development of our countries. China wants all the world to be developed. So for me, it is very good for my country. The attention to Africa is growing now, thanks to China's efforts in pushing the agenda for African development.
Chinese President Xi Jinping addresses a banquet for the Group of 20 (G20) summit in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang province, September 4, 2016. Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan hosted a banquet for guests attending the 11th G20 summit in Hangzhou on Sunday evening. [Photo/Xinhua]

HANGZHOU -- Leaders of the G20 economies took a break on Sunday from their tight schedules and set sail into the night waters of the West Lake in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou.

The image of Chinese President Xi Jinping standing among leaders from emerging markets and developed countries sends a strong signal: that we are in the same boat, with China charting the course ahead this time.

Hours earlier, Xi, the helmsman of the world's second largest economy, had referred to boats metaphorically to stress the need of joint efforts when addressing leaders of the world's leading economies who have gathered for their annual meeting.

"To brave through the rough waters of world economy and start a new journey for future growth, it's good to know that we are in the same boat," he said in the opening address of the G20 summit.

"Let's make Hangzhou a new departure point and steer the giant ship of global economy on a new voyage from the shore of the Qiantang River to the vast ocean," the Chinese president said.

For the world's most populous nation, the Hangzhou summit on Sunday and Monday comes as an important opportunity to show the world that China has what it takes to help navigate world economic recovery.

It is the first time that Xi has chaired a G20 summit. Many hope the heavyweight get-together could set a course for global growth.

Speaking on Sunday afternoon minutes after welcoming the G20 leaders with handshakes, the president said he hoped the summit would prescribe a cure that would take the global economy onto a healthy growth trajectory.

"The therapy will take an integrative approach to address both the symptoms and root causes, and propel the world economy onto a path of robust, sustainable, balanced and inclusive growth," he said.

Called a "paradise on Earth" by 13th-century traveller Marco Polo, Hangzhou is the capital of Zhejiang, one of China's most successful provinces of which Xi was once Communist Party chief. The city's economy grew by 10.8 percent in the first half of this year, faster than most of the big cities in China.

The choice of Hangzhou as the host city of the summit well captures the role China now seeks on global stage.

As the world's most populous nation, the second biggest economy, and above all a powerful driver of global growth, China has every reason to lead.

But China beyond Hangzhou faces big challenges. GDP expanded 6.7 percent in the second quarter this year, the lowest rate since the global financial crisis in early 2009.

Xi, nevertheless, struck a rather optimistic tone on Saturday.

China has the confidence and ability to maintain medium-high growth as the country continues to deepen reform, pursues an innovation-driven development strategy, and opens up to the outside world, he told business leaders on the eve of the G20 summit.

The global circumstances in which the G20 leaders are meeting are also far from promising, but many of the issues with which the G20 is grappling are not so different from those of previous summits.
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Reporters and photographers check out a machine that writes Chinese characters with a brush in Hangzhou on Friday. [Photo by Feng Yongbin/China Daily]
Chinese President Xi Jinping (center), US President Barack Obama (right) and Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon attend the deposit of instruments of joining the Paris Agreement in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, Sept 3, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

Two leaders hail expansion of dialogue, fruitful results so far

China and the United States have showed leadership and commitment in tackling climate-change challenges as they formally committed to joining last year's Paris Agreement on climate change on Saturday ahead of the G20 Summit.

"China and the United States have expanded dialogue and achieved fruitful results in recent years to tackle global climate challenges," said President Xi Jinping, commenting on the two countries' efforts to advance climate-change initiatives since 2014, when the two countries submitted their respective emission goals for the Paris Agreement.

Xi and US President Barack Obama submitted formal agreement documents to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

China pledged to peak carbon emissions by 2030, while the United States pledged to cut emissions by 28 percent by 2025 compared with the level in 2005.

The formal commitment to the agreement by the two major countries, which together account for a large proportion of the world's carbon dioxide emissions, sets a good example for other G20 members who signed the Paris Agreement to facilitate ratification, experts said.

"Commitment and efforts being made by the two countries send strong signals to other G20 members to quicken the pace of their own legislative process," said Bai Yunwen, a climate and policy researcher at Greenovation Hub, a Beijing-based NGO.

The G20 members are responsible for 75 percent of global emissions, and their energy-related greenhouse gas emissions increased by 56 percent from 1990 to 2013, according to a report released in late August by Climate Transparency, a nonprofit organization.

Echoing Bai's statement, Niklas Hoehne from Germany's NewClimate Institute said that if G20 members were to rid themselves of their reliance on coal, this would have a significant bearing on their ability to both increase their climate pledges, and get their emission trajectories below 2 C.

The Paris agreement, made in December last year, set goals to limit the rise of global temperatures below 2 C compared to the preindustrial levels.

The agreement will only come into effect with the ratification of at least 55 parties that account for 55 percent of total emissions.

Lin Boqiang, director at the China Center for Energy Economics Research at Xiamen University, said the formal commitment made by the two major emitters would help the agreement to come into force.

"Global powers could take the chance provided by the G20 platform to enhance policy coordination and help the agreement to come into force at an earlier date," he said.
Jack Ma, executive chairman of Alibaba Group, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, grab lobsters imported from Canada at the online giant's headquarters in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, on Saturday. They were celebrating the opening of the Canada Style online shop on Taobao.com, an Alibaba-backed online marketplace where Chinese consumers can directly buy specialty products from Canada. [Photo by Jin Liangkuai/Xinhua]

Jack Ma, executive chairman of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, has called for the establishment of an electronic world trade platform whose objective would be to reduce barriers to make it easier for small and medium-sized enterprises to expand their trading capabilities worldwide.

The so-called eWTP initiative, which Ma first proposed in March, has become a hot topic as business leaders from around the world gather for the 2016 B20 Summit in Hangzhou this weekend and consider ways to spur growth.

The platform "is going to be very fundamental for the next 20 or 30 years for the world economy, and for this century", Ma said before summit.

Recognized by many industry observers as an effective way to boost the development of SMEs, the eWTP initiative appears in the final B20 Policy Report.

Gianfranco Casati, group chief executive of emerging markets at Accenture, said e-trade significantly reduces costs for SMEs and eases access to customers.

Luigi Gambardella, president of ChinaEU, a member of the B20 SME Development Task Force, said he expected "the eWTP will provide SMEs a transparent and open platform to sell their goods and services globally, thus facilitating their inclusion in cross-border e-trade".
Chinese tourists examine a live octopus on Jeju Island, South Korea, on Aug 26. Wang Gang / For China Daily

Rising number of outbound visitors from the mainland will promote growth among members

China, the world's largest tourism market for both domestic and outbound travelers, will be responsible for more than 500 million out-bound visits in the coming years. That will help to fuel the economic development of G20 members.

As an example, Li Jinzao, director of the China National Tourism Administration, said in 2015 that in the next five years, more than 150 million Chinese tourists will visit countries along the route of the proposed Belt and Road Initiative, spending about $200 billion.

According to a communique released after the G20 Tourism Ministers Meeting in Beijing in May, tourism is one of the fastest-growing, most resilient economic activities, in addition to being a cross-cutting sector that has significant multiplier effects on other businesses. The World Bank has said that for every dollar spent on tourism, a further $3.20 is generated in GDP across the global economy.

Last year, expenditure on outbound tourism by residents of G20 members exceeded $980 billion, accounting for 80 percent of total tourism expenditure globally. Inbound tourism to G20 members accounted for 70 percent of the global total. Vice-Premier Wang Yang said that more than 120 mil-lion mainland tourists traveled overseas in 2015, spending $200 billion, which contributed to the recovery of the global economy.

South Korea is a good example because the country's tourism industry is reliant on visitors from the Chinese mainland. Last year, more than 14 million international tourists visited South Korea, with more than 6 million from China. Their aver-age individual expenditure was $2,200, and they contributed 1.6 percent of South Korea's GDP.

China has become the No 1 source of tourists to the US, injecting nearly $74 million a day into the US economy.

"To contribute more to tourism exchanges among G20 economies, we will encourage second-and third-tier cities to launch international tourism cooperation ventures and forge more sister-city ties. We will encourage Chinese companies to invest more overseas, and we will also welcome foreign companies to invest in the Chinese tourism industry and develop a larger number of classic travel routes along the Silk Road," Li said.
The English version of Zhejiang province's official website provides a shortcut for foreigners to get to know this east area of China, both during and after the G20 Leaders Summit, which takes place on Sunday and Monday.

The site, www.ezhejiang.gov.cn, was launched in late August in Hangzhou, the provincial capital.

"We launched the website in hope of providing a window for the outside world to get to know facets of Zhejiang, one of the most vibrant and diverse provinces of China," said Lai Yingjie, director of the province's information office.

Backed by the information office and China Daily, China's global newspaper, the website has a visually appealing design. Columns for news, investment, travel, services, culture and G20 information offer a wide range of channels and perspectives for understanding the province.

Lai said the website, with its immediate updates of the latest local news and detailed service information, will meet the diverse needs of guests from all over the world.

"Through the website, people will see how fantastic Zhejiang is as a place to live, visit, do business and learn about culture," he said.

Ikenna Emewu, a senior editor at the Beijing Bureau of The Daily Sun newspaper of Nigeria who came to cover the summit, said the website is "absolutely" convenient for people to learn about the province.

Like many people in other parts of the world, Emewu used popular English-language search engines to gather information and do research about Zhejiang before coming to the province.

"Not many people outside China can read or understand Chinese. People like me know more English, so an English platform like this is essential," he said.

He added that if some information about Zhejiang or China is released in Chinese, he might not be interested. But English platforms are attractive because they help the outside world learn about the province and all of China through a familiar language.
Which of China's universities has the largest international impact? Which university is favored the most by world leaders? Which university is visited by the largest number of leaders from other countries?

A report released earlier this year by cuaa.net showed that more than 250 leaders of other countries have visited or delivered speeches at almost 60 universities in China.

Cuaa.net, also known as the Chinese Alumni Network, often releases rankings of Chinese universities.

According to the report, Peking University, which has been visited 21 times by G20 leaders, is deemed to be their "favorite university in China". It is followed by Tsinghua University in Beijing, which was visited by leaders 14 times, and Tongji University in Shanghai, which was visited eight times.

The report also found that leaders from Germany, having made 16 visits to Chinese universities, are more passionate about touring such higher education institutions than their peers from other countries.

Following Germany is France, with leaders from that country visiting Chinese universities a total of nine times.

Cai Yanhou, a senior researcher with cuaa.net and a higher education researcher at Central South University in Changsha, Hunan province, said visiting leaders consider factors such as the impact of the university, as well as the university's historic and business links with their country.

Further analysis based on the report found that United States presidents prefer to visit Tsinghua University, while Russian presidents and Australian leaders favor Peking University.

Leaders of France prefer Wuhan University; governor-generals of Canada like Sichuan University; and German leaders favor Tongji University.
Naoko Tsukada has been living in Tianhe central business district in Guangzhou for more than two years. The 44-year-old Japanese housewife moved to the capital of Guangdong province from a northern city in 2014 after her husband was transferred to work in the southern Chinese city.

Compared with her time in the north, Tsukada said her life in Guangzhou is more "colorful and interesting".

"Apart from the daily routine of sending my son to a Japanese primary school and going shopping at a supermarket near my residence, I can attend various interesting activities," said Tsukada, who lives at the Canton Residence serviced apartments, owned by the New World China Land Ltd of New World Group Hong Kong. "Besides, the environment here is pleasant and the facilities are good."

Several months ago, Tsukada attended a Chinese traditional art event organized by the residence. It invited egg carving master Sun Kaifu to give an introduction on the history and production of traditional crafts and to teach people how to make egg crafting pieces.

"I loved this activity," Tsukada said. "Not only did I get to learn something about Chinese culture, but also I was able to make friends with people from many other countries, like the United States, South Korea and Australia. It's a really international community here."

The Canton Residence, where 90 percent of residents are foreigners, is part of Canton Place, is a high-quality international life circle in Tianhe CBD built with the vision of integrating the world and demonstrating the international quality of life in contemporary Guangzhou, formerly known as Canton.

Various activities have been organized by Canton Place to help foreigners integrate into Chinese society and culture, and to enrich their lives in the country, including cross-border miniconcerts between China and Brazil and fruit-picking activities on farms on the outskirts of the city.

"Working and living in Tianhe CBD, I don't feel like I am in a local community," said Igor, a Russian businessman.

"There are Thai restaurants, Italian restaurants and restaurants from other countries everywhere. There are always international events being held here. You can find overseas food easily in supermarkets. More importantly, you don't feel any discomfort from being a foreigner here as you are very well treated. It is highly internationalized."

While Tianhe CBD strives to build itself into an internationalized area with an open, diverse and inclusive environment as the number of overseas businesses and professionals grows, it is also, at the same time, making efforts to preserve its traditional culture.

The Hung Sin-nui Art Center was built in the city to recognize the well-known Cantonese Opera artist Hung Sin-nui's distinguished contribution to culture. The art center, a cultural landmark building in Tianhe CBD, covers 3,000 square meters and includes an exhibition hall and a theater.

The traditional culture of Liede village, which has a history of 800 years, has also been protected and preserved by combining modern and fashionable lifestyles with ancient traditions.
Joseph Hoyt, a student from University of California Santa Cruz, conducts field research to learn whether China has a fungus deadly to bats. He is collaborating with a research group from Northeast Normal University in Changchun, Jilin province. Provided To China Daily

More exchanges advised for young researchers, who represent 'the future' of innovation in world

As a country with the world's largest number of scientific researchers, China is benefiting and will continue to benefit from scientific exchanges and cooperation with other G20 members, particularly in exchanges of talent and young research staff, officials and scientists said.

Zhao Xinli, deputy director of the China Science and Technology Exchange Center, said the G20 is the largest and most important group in technological innovation worldwide. Cooperation and innovation under the G20 framework will not only benefit the members, but it is also of great importance to the sustainable development of the world.

The center is an institute under the Ministry of Science and Technology that fosters scientific exchanges and cooperation internationally.

According to the China Science and Technology Talent Development Report, which was released by the ministry last year, China's human resources in this area exceeded 71 million people as of 2013, ranking it No 1 in the world.

Meanwhile, the latest statistics from the World Bank Group and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization showed that the research and development investment of 19 G20 members, excluding the European Union, accounts for 87 percent of the world total, with the academic papers that these members publish accounting for 76 percent of the world total and applications for patents from these members accounting for 97 percent.

Zhao, who is also the coordinator of the G20 innovation agenda, strongly suggested more frequent exchanges and mutual visits of young research staff.

"Young talent and scientists are the future of G20 members, as well as the future of mankind. We should work together to provide better and more convenient conditions for them to thrive and collaborate," Zhao said.

The Ministry of Science and Technology has signed agreements over the past decades with G20 members, such as the United States, Australia and New Zealand, to enable talent mobility and exchange.

The exchange program between researchers under the Sino-US high-level consultation mechanism for cultural exchanges is one such example.

Launched in 2003, the program funded 40 outstanding master's or doctoral students from the US each year to work alongside Chinese research staff for eight weeks at universities, research institutes or laboratories in China during the summer vacation.

The program has been running for 12 years and has accepted at least 435 young scholars from the US in total, according to the China Science and Technology Exchange Center, which administers the program.

Feng Jiang, a professor of ecology at Northeast Normal University in Changchun, Jilin province, recalled working with a US student under the program in 2014.

The student from the University of California Santa Cruz, Joseph Hoyt, came to conduct research into whether China has a particular fungus that led to the death of bats in North America.

Feng said Hoyt was hardworking, smart and happy to work with the Chinese students on Feng's research team. The research findings were published in international academic journals, attracting the attention of those in biological and ecological circles.

"This is a good example of what will happen if young researchers and scientists from different countries exchange thoughts and work together," Feng said, adding that he hopes more young, talented scientists from other countries visit and work with them in the future.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences, China's highest academic and consulting institute for science and technology, has funded large numbers of research staff exchanges and cooperative research programs between China and other G20 members over the past five years.

Statistics from the academy's Bureau of International Cooperation showed that from 2011 to 2015, the academy spent 130 million yuan ($20 million) on funding the President's International Fellowship Initiative to support distinguished scientists, visiting scholars, postdoctoral researchers and PhD students from overseas to visit, study or conduct research at higher education or research institutions in China.

Almost three-quarters of the funding went to those from members in the G20, according to the bureau.

The academy has also provided financial support worth 190 million yuan to international cooperative programs, among which almost 60 percent were joint efforts with developed countries, such as with the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Japan.

For example, the Thirty Meter Telescope is a proposed astronomical observatory with a large optical telescope located in Hawaii. China, together with the US, Canada, Japan and India, participated in the construction of the telescope, which is expected to be the largest of its kind after construction is completed in the 2020s.

Another key project is a China-Japan advanced photon technology lab, which was set up to conduct joint research on laser-based micro and nano processing and device fabrication technologies.

(China Daily 09/04/2016 page22)
President Xi Jinping has declared China and India should respect and take care of each other's concerns and properly handle disputes in a constructive way.

He made the remarks on Sunday during a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hangzhou.

He said the two neighboring big developing countries should keep developing bilateral ties, change views often on major issues of common concern and strengthen strategic communication to boost mutual understanding and trust.

China expects to work with India to maintain the hard-won positive ties, he said.

Xi also said the Chinese government would encourage enterprises to invest in India and suggested the two sides explore possibilities of some "concrete big projects" in fields such as infrastructure and capacity cooperation.

Modi said the India-China relations were of great importance to the two countries, the region and the world.

The two countries hold similar stances on international affairs, he said.

Asian countries should join hands to strive for regional stability and prosperity, he added.
Premier Li Keqiang conveys condolences over the death of Uzbek President Islam Karimov at the Uzbek Embassy to China in Beijing soon after 11 am, Sept 4, 2016. Li conveyed the deepest condolences on behalf of the Chinese government and people and said President Xi Jinping had sent a letter of condolence. Li also said the Chinese government would safeguard and promote the development of the all-round strategic partnership under joined efforts with Uzbekistan. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]
The third-biggest investment destination for Chinese enterprises in the European Union, the Netherlands, offers both favorable policies and a good environment for boosting bilateral economic ties between the two countries, a senior Dutch official said.

"The Netherlands is a smart choice to locate a pan-European operation, whether it's a European headquarters, a shared services center, a customer care center, a distribution and logistics operation, or an R&D facility," said Chris Teunissen, executive director for China at the Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency. He said the two countries have huge joint potential in such areas as politics, economics, education, culture, environment and healthcare.

To date, Chinese companies have established some 550 operations in the Netherlands, creating more than 8,500 jobs.

Last year, imports from China to the Netherlands reached about 34.3 billion euros ($38.2 billion) and exports from the Netherlands to China amounted to 8.6 billion euros.

Teunissen said the Netherlands provides a perfect springboard into the European market, with access to 95 percent of Europe's most lucrative consumer markets within 24 hours' rail or road transport of Amsterdam or Rotterdam.

"With attractive innovation and R&D incentives, and a statutory corporate income tax rate of 20 to 25 percent, the Netherlands is among Europe's most attractive countries for international companies," he said.

Teunissen said the abilities of the country's workforce are also attractive to foreign investors. About 90 percent of Dutch are fluent in English, the lingua franca of international business, science and technology.

Henk Kamp, Dutch minister of economic affairs, said "These investments are vital to boost our economy and create jobs for a lot of people."

Many Chinese companies use the Netherlands as a base for marketing and sales to the different markets of Europe. Currently, nearly 8,200 foreign companies have established over 11,200 operations in the Netherlands.

The Netherlands is one of the principal choices for Chinese companies to locate their European headquarters, including famous names such as Hikvision, Liugong, Mindray, BYD and Opple.

The country offers an attractive test market, adaptable consumers and an open culture.

"In the last couple of years we've seen many Chinese companies set up R&D centers in the Netherlands and more companies beginning to collaborate with Dutch high-tech enterprises and universities, such as Yili, Mapscape and Yongli," Teunissen said. "Chinese investors are interested in the high quality of the Dutch business community and the favorable living environment."

zhuanti@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 09/04/2016 page28)
French authorities are beefing up security and have pledged to issue visas faster to Chinese applicants as part of its effort to win back tourists scared off by recent terrorist attacks on its cities.

In an exclusive interview, Francois Navarro, general director of the Paris Region Tourist Board, revealed overall visitor numbers to Paris have plummeted since November, when Islamic militants launched an attack on the French capital.

Several Chinese tour operators, including Ctrip, offered refunds to customers booked to travel to Nice, following the July 14 attack.
Hengfu Group Sugar Industry Co Ltd, a major sugar manufacturer in Zhanjiang, has seen its international trade spike in recent years, thanks to Belt and Road Initiative.

The company began operations at a new production facility earlier this year in Preah Vihear, Cambodia, said its director, Liu Feng.

Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen said the sugar production facility has created more than 7,000 jobs for local residents, while the entire project will create over 14,000 jobs for Cambodians.
"When we mention the word 'Long March', what first comes to mind?"

This is the question I have asked too many times in the past several months. As we all know, there are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people's eyes. Likewise, there are many answers to this question.

Long March rocket series

A Long March 7 (CZ-7) carrier rocket blasts off from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center in Longlou town, Wenchang city in South China's Hainan province on June 25, 2016. [Photo/IC]

"As a foreigner, I have heard of the amazing tour the Chinese Red Army went through, but my deepest impression of the word is the Long March rocket series," said William Spenser, a college student majoring in Business Administration at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing.

Indeed, the rocket series is an important cultural symbol that deserves worldwide attention. China started developing modern carrier rockets in 1956, and the Long March rockets have become the main carriers for China's satellite launchings.

China launched its first satellite, Dong Fang Hong 1, or "the East is Red," into the Earth's orbit on a Long March-1 rocket on April 24, 1970, becoming the fifth nation to successfully launch one independently after the Soviet Union, the United States, France and Japan.

"It is not a coincidence that the rocket series is named 'Long March'. The rocket series' names are endowed with profound meaning and significance," said Liang Xiaohong, Secretary of Party Committee of China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology.

"At the beginning, designers fretted over the name and all were at a loss. Several days later, one major designer read a poem entitled 'The Long March' by Chairman Mao and was touched by the spirit of persistence and bravery of the Red Army. He then thought 'Long March' is the exact word for the rocket and settled the matter of the name immediately," Liang added.

In 2016, China blasted off its new generation Long March-7 carrier rocket for its maiden space flight from the new Wenchang space launch site on June 25 in South China's Hainan province. And the Long March-7 is widely expected to become the main carrier for China's future space missions.
Actress Zhang Yuqi at the opening ceremony of Venice International Film Festival on Aug 31 in Venice, Italy. [Photo/Xinhua]

The third edition of the China Film Forum took place here at the 73rd Venice Film Festival on Friday, drawing many Chinese and Italian creative professionals of the film industry.

This year, the event especially focused on creative projects linking Europe and China, and on major challenges and opportunities for screenwriters, directors, and producers from both sides.

A wide panel addressed various issues under the theme "How to write in China and Italy", with Italian director and screenwriter Paolo Genovese appealing to both Italian and Chinese colleagues to "dare" in their own projects despite all difficulties.

Author of 10 movies overall, Genovese explained his two most successful films, "Perfect Strangers" in 2016 and "The Immature" in 2011, had also been the most arduous to carry out.

"If an author is truly sure about his project, he will eventually find people to produce his film, even if it deals with a sensitive topic," Genovese told the audience.

"A bigger problem (for Italy) might be reaching movie theaters, for lack of an available distributor."

Among guest speakers was Shu Huan, screenwriter of blockbusters "Lost in Thailand" and "Lost in Hong Kong", who addressed the current situation on China's market.

"The Chinese movie market has been very lively in latest days, and many capitals are flowing in it," Shu told the audience.

"At the same time, we are going through a sort of creativity crisis in terms of stories and scripts," he added.

Other Chinese professionals, such as "Go away Mr. Tumor" screenwriter Yuan Yuan, shared his view that more creative and qualified talents would be needed in China in order to benefit the most from all the financial resources pouring into the movie industry.

Current and future chances of co-operation between Italy and China were, of course, another topic discussed by the various guests.

"For a truly successful artistic cooperation, we need to get to know each other more and more, in terms of culture, language, sense of humour, and sensitive topics for our respective audiences," Italian director and screenwriter Francesco Bruni stressed.

As president of Italy's main audiovisual author association 100 autori, Bruni pledged more opportunities for discussion and views exchange among those people in Italy and China "who conceive cinema."

China seems attracted by Italy's creativity and long cinema tradition, some Italian filmmakers at the forum believe. Many of them are aware of the large opportunities the Chinese market could offer.

"Everything is possible in China, if you have the necessary resolution," director Cristiano Bortone said.

Bortone's movie "Coffee" was the first feature resulting from a co-production agreement Italy and China signed in 2014, and was going to be screened as special event at the Venice Days on Sept. 3.

Other efficient examples of artistic Sino-Italian collaboration were analysed at the forum, such as Italian director Sergio Basso's documentary "The Long March" and "He Hui: The Soprano of the Silk Road", co-produced by Agnese Fontana and Duan Peng.

Venice Days is an independent event that has been taking place alongside the Venice Film Festival since 2004, offering an informal framework to authors, filmmakers, and movie creative talents to exchange views and projects.

This third China Film Forum, which took place at the Villa degli Autori, represented a "centrepiece of Venice Days' International agenda," organizers said.

The event was arranged by Venice Days and Sino-European co-production network Bridging the Dragon along with Doc/it, with China Beijing TV Station (BTV) and Hua Huang as supporting partners.

Related:

Italy-China movie cooperation dominates talks among professionals in Venice
On the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Hangzhou on Sept 4-5, President Xi Jinping will host an informal meeting of his counterparts from Brazil, India, Russia and South Africa, or a BRICS meeting. Since all BRICS nations are members of the G20, their leaders, or representatives, have been sharing notes and coordinating their policies and strategies at various global forums, including the G20 Summits.

But the BRICS meeting in Hangzhou will be special for several reasons.

First, the meeting will give BRICS leaders a chance to discuss their major decisions and fine-tune them before announcing them at the 8th BRICS summit in mid-October in Goa in western India. About 900 delegates are expected to attend it, including 300 from China.

Second, the two summits put special focus and onus on China and India, which are seen today as locomotives of the global economy, which has been struggling for the last eight years. Indeed, the World Economic Outlook of the International Monetary Fund has lowered the global growth estimate from 3.1 to 2.9 percent for this year.

Third, the two summits will give China and India the opportunities to push developing countries' agenda of democratizing global financial governance, and put the BRICS house in order as it has been attracting criticism for its geographical and structural disconnects.

And fourth, given that for some time, the Brazilian, Russian and South African economies have been facing downswings, China and India have to play the lead roles and thus get the chance to reset their bilateral ties that have hit a hump since the beginning of this year.

On the positive side, the new-found bonhomie between China and India has resulted in two sides signing contracts worth about $50 billion for Chinese investments in India in the next five years.

Conscious of their developing relations, however, the two sides have treaded cautiously, with India responding in a measured manner to the July 12 ruling by an arbitral tribunal in The Hague. In return, Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited India last month.

In fact, the China-India bonhomie has extended to global financial governance, too, as the BRICS New Development Bank was established in record time of three years and has already announced its first tranche of funding for green and sustainable projects for all five BRICS members in social sectors such as healthcare, education and population matters.

Besides, the China-led 57-member Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank has India as its second-largest stakeholder. This means the two countries are aware of their inordinate responsibilities to strengthen BRICS as a platform to achieve innovative structural adjustments in global financial governance, including in the G20.

Led by China and India, BRICS leaders have already been debating how to develop their own commercial arbitration mechanisms to reduce their dependence on redress centers in developed countries, whose awards tend to be loaded against developing countries.

Similarly, to strengthen their competitiveness in trade and investments, BRICS leaders have been debating about setting up a rating agency for the five-member bloc. And to encourage intra-BRICS trade, they have been discussing the possibility of issuing "BRICS visas" for businesspeople and visa-on-arrival for other visitors. All this not only raises their clout in G20 deliberations, but also strengthens their drive to restructure the outdated Bretton Woods institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and help emerging economies get larger representation and greater say in global financial decision-making.

The author is professor of diplomacy and disarmament at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
The G20 Summit in Hangzhou is expected to set records for both the number of participants and the number of meetings, as some non-G20 members have been invited as guests and BRICS leaders will hold an informal meeting on the sidelines of the summit.

As host to such a significant forum, China needs to better play its role as a flag-bearer for free trade. The United States was the initiator and has been the leading advocator of the world's multilateral and liberal trade system after the end of World War II.

But while exerting a huge influence on the development of international trade rules, it has not gone all-out to advance inclusive, non-discriminatory liberalization of multilateral trade or further reduced its trade barriers. Instead it has been dragging its feet on the Doha Round of the World Trade Organization talks and spared no efforts in seeking to create regional economic groups exclusive of those major trading powers such as China that it believes threaten its leading status.

The most typical case is the US' unconcealed attempt to push for a Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement without China. Besides, calls for protectionism have increased in the US to an unprecedented level.

In sharp contrast, China has chosen an evidently different approach from the US. As the world's leading trading country, China has not only been striving to advance the Doha Round of trade talks, it has also been continuously and voluntarily lowering its trade barriers. Despite its efforts to push for bilateral and regional free trade agreements, or FTAs, and advance its Belt and Road Initiative, China has not used its advantages to cozy up to smaller trading partners to form a closed or semi-closed trade circle to maintain its leading trading status.

All of China's efforts are aimed at pursuing a more open and competitive trading environment. It is with such an approach that China has prioritized imports expansion on its foreign trade agenda for the past few years. For example, the trading partners with which China has inked FTAs in the past two years are not less-developed emerging economies but developed or newly industrialized economies whose per capita GDP is much higher than that of China. On Dec 9, 2015, China announced its FTAs with the Republic of Korea and Australia will take effect on Dec 20, and it would expand the range of preferential taxes for imported consumer goods for daily use and cut duties on imported equipment, key components, energy and raw materials since Jan 1, 2016.

In contrast to the TPP, China has openly stressed that the Belt and Road Initiative should conform to WTO rules and proposed a free trade area with the European Union.

All these reflect China's willingness and determination to promote a more open trade environment. But to be an effective free trade flag-bearer, China should first maintain its own domestic economic stability and pursue sustainable development. And since it believes in open and fair competition, instead of obstructing the TPP, it should better promote the broader and more inclusive Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.

Also, China should push for coordination among major countries on fiscal and monetary policies to maintain their own (and the world's) economic stability to prevent them from resorting to trade protectionism. And in its effort to reform the international economic coordination mechanism and improve global governance, China should take into consideration both equity and efficiency.

China attaches great importance to the G20 platform, but the participation of a number of countries with huge political, economic and ideological differences also means difficulties and low efficiency in the group's efforts to promote policy coordination. Thus, the G20 should only be viewed as a venue to reach principled consensuses not as a place to perform concrete decision-making functions and prescribe a panacea for all problems.

The author is a researcher at the International Trade and Economic Cooperation Institute of the Ministry of Commerce.
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Gongchen Bridge is the landmark of the Grand Canal in Hangzhou. "Gongchen" literally means "respecting the emperor" in Chinese. [Photo provided to China Daily]

In ancient times, the Grand Canal served as the main artery between north and south China for grain transport and every kind of economic and cultural exchange.

Cargo ships still sail on the 39-kilometer-long Hangzhou section of the waterway, which has become a tourist attraction thanks to its scenic beauty, culture and history.

Hopping on a pleasure boat, modeled on the traditional craft that once transported grain, you start a brilliant one-hour journey at Wulinmen port.

A night cruise promises memorable views. Along the banks, traditional Chinese architecture is colorfully lit up, and the buildings' bright reflections glitter in the water. Fog slowly rises amid the greenery and the combination with lights on the ground makes for a visual wonderland.

"The canal in Hangzhou is unique because it fostered Hangzhou's integration with other Chinese cities. It has a long history, with grain-transporting and port culture," says Zhu Qunying, a manager at the Hangzhou Grand Canal Group Culture and Tourism Company.

The company has just improved the lighting on the canal at night. And next year, it will expand access to buses and ferries and offer public bike-rental services and stores, making it easy to transfer between land and water, and tour around the canal.

Illuminated onshore as you pass is a beautiful woman in traditional Chinese costume playing the guqin, or the Chinese zither, and you can clearly hear the melody from the boat's stereo set.

All the bridges you see have different relief images, with scenes showing the lifestyles of local residents in ancient times.

The boat turns and returns to Wulinmen port once it reaches the Gongchen Bridge. The structure, which is about 400 years old, is believed to be the largest arch stone bridge among the city's ancient bridges.

Along the canal, there are also four museums and the Workmanship Demonstration Pavilion, which were originally old factory buildings and storehouses.

The pavilion showcases more than 20 kinds of craftsmanship, such as traditional embroidery, egg-carving and leather-tooling. Experts offer training sessions for adults and children.

According to an old Chinese saying: "It's futile to draw water with a bamboo basket". But at the pavilion, 60-year-old craftsman Zhang Xinrong makes a bamboo basket that defies it.

"It's solid enough to keep goldfish in," says Zhang, who has been weaving bamboo for 40 years.

"To pass on the craft, it is important to have innovation. I am willing to teach whoever wants to learn to weave bamboo," he says.

In the countryside, weaving daily necessities from bamboo was popular in the old days, but such items have largely been replaced by plastic or stainless-steel goods.

Zhang not only makes replicas of traditional items for exhibition, but also creates modern merchandise such as leather purses with a woven bamboo surface.

He also uses very thin layers of bamboo strips, and dyes them to weave elegant Chinese landscape paintings and calligraphies.

As for the museums, you can visit the China Umbrellas Museum, the China Knives, Scissors and Swords Museum, the China Fans Museum and the Hangzhou Arts and Crafts Museum.

The museums showcase the history, culture and production processes used to make these daily use items and local handicrafts.

Hangzhou is an important producer of traditional oilpaper umbrellas and West Lake silk umbrellas.

They are complicated to make, with bamboo used as the umbrella stem and for the ribs. The canopies flaunt pretty photos, including those of the scenic sites of Hangzhou.

Separately, a group of sculptures show how craftsmen made and repaired umbrellas in ancient times.

In ancient China, a red umbrella was believed to be auspicious, with the power to exorcise evil spirits. So, when scholars traveled to the capital to take an imperial examination, they carried books and a red umbrella for safety and success.

In some ethnic groups in China, an umbrella is seen a token of love.

In one well-known story, a white snake fairy falls in love with a young scholar, Xu Xian, at West Lake. And when they meet, Xu gives her an umbrella because it's raining.

Fans are, however, more personal items and have more meaning.

China has various types of fansfolding fans, leaf fans and silk fanseach with exquisite designs.

In the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907), a bride would use a round fan to cover her face until the wedding ceremony ended.

Fans were also given as gifts as a symbol of friendship in Chinese history, especially among scholars.

As for scissors, the Zhangxiaoquan scissors originated in Hangzhou more than 300 years ago. They are a staple in every household.

The museum has statues of craftsmen making the scissors as well as videos showing the 36 procedures required to make one, from fine grinding and to creating elegant patterns on the metal.

Speaking about the process, Ding Jican, 53, who has been making scissors for 38 years, says: "One has to endure hardships and work hard to make these scissors. And, nowadays, innovation is about new patterns, such as curves of the handles."

Meanwhile. ferries can also take you to other ports along the canal, such as the Tangxi ancient town, which has old residences, and a seven-arch stone bridge, called the Guangji Bridge.

The town also offers traditional local snacks including pastries, and a chance to pick seasonal fruits such as cherries and loquats.

Fact box

China's Grand Canal, the longest artificial waterway in the world, was inscribed on the World Heritage list on June 22, 2014. The Grand Canal starts from Tongzhou District of Beijing in the north and runs 1,794 kilometers southward to Hangzhou. The project traverses five major rivers in China, the Haihe River, the Yellow River, the Huaihe River, the Yangtze River and the Qiantang River, and six provinces. It was built beginning in AD 605 during the Sui Dynasty (AD 581-618) to enable transport of surplus grain from the agriculturally rich Yangtze and Huaihe River valleys to feed the capital cities and large standing armies in northern China.
HANGZHOU -- US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister Theresa May, at their first meeting since the latter's assumption of office, downplayed concerns about bilateral trade following Britain's decision to leave the European Union (EU).

"The bottom line is we don't have a stronger partner in the world than the United Kingdom," said Obama at the meeting, which took place in this eastern Chinese city on the sidelines of the 11th Group of 20 (G20) summit.

"And despite the turbulence of the political events over the last several months, we have every intention of making sure that continues," he added, referring to Britain's shock Brexit referendum in June.

Washington ruffled London's feathers when it warned ahead of the vote that the United States would prioritize its trade talks with the EU over those with Britain should the latter choose to exit the bloc.

On Sunday, Obama toned down the rhetoric, saying that the warning was never intended to be a punishment. Yet he added that it would not make sense for Washington to deviate from the EU track.

The top priority for London now, Obama said, is to define its new trading relationship with other European countries.

May, for her part, joined Obama in underscoring the two partners' solidarity, pledging that her country will strive to pursue an aggressive trade link with the United States despite the Brexit.

In an attempt to dispel any doubt about whether her country is really leaving the EU, the prime minister ruled out the possibility of holding a second referendum on the EU exit.

"The UK will indeed be leaving the European Union," she said.

On the margins of the G20 summit, Obama also touched upon the Syria crisis, saying that his country and Russia are working around the clock to clinch a deal on how to deal with the situation in the war-torn Middle East country.

Acknowledging that the two countries still have "grave differences," he said, "There is the possibility at least for us to make some progress."
Hillary is even ahead in many Red states because Trump is such a bad candidate. Predictions of an electoral landslide are starting to appear. I got to tell you, you tin foil hat wearing fools would be the type of people who, when observing a tsunami heading to shore, would stop to weed your gardens before fleeing to higher ground. BLAH HA HA HA HA HA
(Photo : Twitter) The Vernee Mars smartphone is expected to hit the market soon.

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As the official release date of the Vernee Mars draws closer, the company has released a set of new photos of the device, probably to score more marketing points. Vernee devices are quite well-accepted in the Chinese smartphone market, which is why many are anticipating the release of the new Mars model.



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The new set of photos show the back part of the phone. This revealed a couple of design cues that Vernee is known for. First is the arc antenna design which Vernee has been building a hype about for quite some time now. Although many believe that the Mars would be available in several colors, the new set of photos only show the silver model.



The new photos also confirmed that the upcoming Vernee Mars would look hauntingly familiar to Apple's iPhone. Even the placement of the camera sensor, along with the USB Type-C port, the dark plastic stripes, and speaker locations are comparable to the iPhone. If not for the Vernee logo, one could easily misjudge the Mars as an iPhone.



While being tagged as a cheap iPhone rip-off is an unflattering compliment, the Vernee Mars does have a decent set of specs to make it stand on its own. Powering the Vernee Mars is a MediaTek Helio P20 chipset with an octa-core processor, 6GB of memory, according to Giz China. It is unclear how much storage space the device would come with.



The device's MediaTek Helio P20 chipset has four Cortex A53 cores running at a still unconfirmed speed, and four Cortex A53 core clocked at 2.3GHz. It has an ARM Mali T880 graphics processing unit, which should be powerful enough to handle graphics-intensive apps and games.



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Seth Cropsey

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An American foreign policy expert argues China does not respect and cannot be expected to respect international law, and that the three decades-old U.S. policy of trying to convince China to become a stakeholder in the liberal international order has failed.



The results of these foreign policy failures, said Seth Cropsey, a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute and Director of its Center for American Seapower, is an unduly assertive China that pushes its weight around because it views the U.S. as an effete pushover afraid to confront it on the battlefield.



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"U.S. policy toward China has failed spectacularly," asserts Cropsey. "China's actions show that it sees us as a strategic competitor."



On the other hand, the U.S. persists in the dangerous illusion China "is a large market that can be cajoled into joining us as a defender of international security and economic stability," said Cropsey.



"China does not respect international law."



In an indirect repudiation of President Barack Obama's weakness or unwillingness to challenge China, Cropsey said the next U.S. President needs to understand that "our fate as a great power is inseparable from America's continued role as a great Pacific power."



Cropsey, however, said this doesn't mean aggressive policies or military confrontation. What it does mean is the next President must engage in active diplomacy with countries on China's periphery that fear its hegemony.



Cropsey said the next President must also ensure the U.S. has the "credible combat power to foreshorten China's mis-behavior and militarized ambitions, including consistent, reliable and frequent U.S. Navy freedom of navigation operations in the international waters of the South China Sea."



No less important, this rebuilding of the U.S.' long-neglected combat power means increasing the U.S. naval advantage over China "by building substantially more attack submarines, and exploiting this asymmetric advantage by deploying them to the South and East China Seas."



Communist China's world view is predicated on exploiting to the hilt the advantages conferred on it by its massive economic and military power. That view is expressed through unrelenting strategic bullying of Asian nations withstanding its demands in the South China Sea.



Cropsey said China's big bully mindset was illustrated when China's previous foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, told other Asian senior officials in 2010 that, "China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that's a fact."



He said China's brand of exceptionalism reinforces Yang's blunt assertion that might makes right. China's exceptionalism, according to Cropsey, "lies neither in adherence to principle, nor to law, nor accepted norms of international behavior, but rather in deflection from these."



Cropsey was a U.S. Navy officer and deputy Undersecretary of the Navy in the Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations.



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TagsSeth Cropsey, Hudson Institute, Center for American Seapower, china, United States, seapower, U.S. Navy
(Photo : Getty Images ) China has asked the US to play a constructive role in the South China Sea dispute.

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Chinese President Xi Jinping met with his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama in a bilateral meeting on the eve of G20 Summit in Hangzhou.



Xi told Obama that the US should play a constructive role in South China Sea dispute. He asked the United States to play a positive role in maintaining peace and stability in the disputed territory.



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He also made it clear that Beijing would continue to safeguard its territorial sovereignty and interests in the contested waters.Xi said that China remains committed for peaceful settlement of the dispute.



"In the meantime, China will stick to peaceful settlement of disputes through consultation and negotiation with parties directly concerned, and safeguard peace and stability in the South China Sea along with ASEAN member states," the Chinese leader said, Xinhua reported.



U.S. President Barack Obama, on the other hand, reiterated his country's stance on the South China Sea issue. Obama urged his Chinese counterpart to respect an international tribunal's ruling on Beijing's territorial dispute with the Philippines over the South China Sea. Obama told Xi that China, as a signatory to UNCLOS, must abide by its obligations under the international treaty.



"The President underscored the United States' unwavering commitment to the security of its treaty allies, and noted that the strength of those alliance relationships has contributed to the security and stability of the Asia-Pacific region," a White House statement said.



The Permanent Court of Arbitration, in July, ruled against China in favor of Philippines in a long-standing territorial dispute over the South China Sea. Beijing has said that it does not recognize the verdict.



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Tagschina, US, South China Sea Dispute, Barack Obama, Xi Jinping
(Photo : NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS) This infrared image from Juno provides an unprecedented view of Jupiter's southern aurora. These views are not possible from Earth.

(Photo : NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS) NASA's Juno spacecraft took this photo as it closed in on Jupiter's north pole, about two hours before closest approach on Aug. 27, 2016.

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The first pictures sent by NASA's Juno spacecraft of Jupiter's North Pole depicts a planet unlike the ones we're used to seeing with its many bands of colored clouds and storms. Juno also picked-up "ghostly sounds" being emitted by the giant planet.



The stunning photos, including the first infrared views of Jupiter's north and south poles, were taken during the spacecraft's first flyby of the planet with its instruments switched on. Some unique discoveries have already made themselves visible.



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"First glimpse of Jupiter's north pole, and it looks like nothing we have seen or imagined before," said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.



"It's bluer in color up there than other parts of the planet, and there are a lot of storms. There is no sign of the latitudinal bands or zone and belts that we are used to -- this image is hardly recognizable as Jupiter. We're seeing signs that the clouds have shadows, possibly indicating that the clouds are at a higher altitude than other features."



One of the most notable findings of these first-ever pictures of Jupiter's north and south poles is something the JunoCam imager didn't see.



"Saturn has a hexagon at the north pole," said Bolton. "There is nothing on Jupiter that anywhere near resembles that. The largest planet in our solar system is truly unique. We have 36 more flybys to study just how unique it really is."



Juno successfully completed the first of 36 orbital flybys on Aug. 27 when the spacecraft was 4,200 kilometers above Jupiter's cloud tops. The download of six megabytes of data collected during the six-hour transit, from above Jupiter's North Pole to below its south pole, took one-and-a-half days.



All eight of Juno's science instruments were energized and collected data. The Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM), supplied by the Italian Space Agency, acquired some remarkable images of Jupiter at its north and south polar regions in infrared wavelengths.



"JIRAM is getting under Jupiter's skin, giving us our first infrared close-ups of the planet," said Alberto Adriani, JIRAM co-investigator from Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali, Rome.



"These first infrared views of Jupiter's north and south poles are revealing warm and hot spots that have never been seen before. And while we knew that the first-ever infrared views of Jupiter's south pole could reveal the planet's southern aurora, we were amazed to see it for the first time.



"No other instruments, both from Earth or space, have been able to see the southern aurora. Now, with JIRAM, we see that it appears to be very bright and well-structured. The high level of detail in the images will tell us more about the aurora's morphology and dynamics."



Among the more unique data sets collected by Juno during its first scientific sweep by Jupiter was that acquired by the mission's Radio/Plasma Wave Experiment (Waves) that recorded ghostly-sounding transmissions emanating from above the planet. These radio emissions from Jupiter have been known about since the 1950s but had never been analyzed from such a close vantage point.



"Jupiter is talking to us in a way only gas-giant worlds can," said Bill Kurth, co-investigator for the Waves instrument from the University of Iowa, Iowa City.



"Waves detected the signature emissions of the energetic particles that generate the massive auroras which encircle Jupiter's north pole. These emissions are the strongest in the solar system. Now we are going to try to figure out where the electrons come from that are generating them."



Juno was launched on Aug. 5, 2011, from Cape Canaveral, Florida and arrived at Jupiter on July 4, 2016. JPL manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA.



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TagsJuno spacecraft, NASA, north pole, Scott Bolton, Jupiter
(Photo : Getty Images.) Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping have met on the sidelines of the ongoing G20 Summit.

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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday met China's President Xi Jinping just ahead of the G20 Summit. This is the second meeting between the leaders of two of Asia's largest countries in less than three months. The last time Xi and Modi met was at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit in June in Tashkent.



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NDTV reported that meeting between the two leaders lasted for nearly half an hour. "China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound relations and further advance their cooperation," President Xi said, according to Xinhua.



Xi's comment comes at a time when the bilateral ties between China and India have been under strain due to a host of contentious issues. China's blockade over India's bid for membership in the Nuclear Suppliers' Group (NSG) and the controversial China-Pakistan Economic Corridor project are among these issues.



There is no confirmation that Xi gave any assurance to Modi over these pressing issues. Modi's visit to China comes after his two-day visit to Vietnam that saw both countries sign various agreements. Modi's visit to Hanoi was closely watched by experts and leaders in China. Experts say the visit was primarily aimed at enhancing India's influence in South East Asian region.



This week Modi also gave a red carpet welcome to the President of Myanmar Htin Kyaw in New Delhi. The visit is important as it came barely weeks after Myanmar's de-facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi's visited China. Myanmar is a traditionally close ally of China but has been trying to woo Naypyidaw as part of South East Asian diplomatic strategy.



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TagsPrime Minister Narendra Modi, G20 Summit 2016, Modi and XI Meeting, Modi's China Visit
(Photo : Getty Images ) China strongly opposes the US' planned deployment of its THAAD anti-missile system to South Korea.

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Chinese President Xi Jinping conveyed his country's objections about Washington's planned deployment of an advanced anti-missile system to South Korea to U.S. President Barack Obama when they met on the eve of G20 Summit in Hangzhou.



Xi told his American counterpart that China opposes the deployment of the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) to South Korea.



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In June, the United States and South Korea announced their decision to deploy the THAAD system to US forces based in South Korea. However, China and Russia strongly opposed the move. The US has been trying to placate China over the issue.



"China opposes the deployment of the anti-missile system of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) by the United States in the Republic of Korea," President Xi said, according to Xinhua. "China has been sticking to denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula, safeguarding peace and stability of the peninsula, and solving relevant issues through dialogue and consultation."



The two leaders also discussed the contentious South China Sea dispute. Obama asked China to respect the verdict of an international arbitration court on the South China Sea territorial dispute.



Xi, on the other hand, told Obama that the Washington to play a constructive role in maintaining peace the in disputed territory.



The Chinese leader also made it clear that China would not tolerate any "interference" in its internal affairs in the name of human rights.



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TagsG20 summit, Barack Obama, Xi Jinping, THAAD, South China Sea
(Photo : Getty Images ) India and Vietnam have urged China and other South China Sea claimant countries to resolve their dispute through peaceful means.

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India has joined Vietnam in calling for a peaceful resolution of the territorial disputes between China and other South China Sea claimant countries.



On Saturday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Vietnamese Premier Nguyen Xuan Phuc issued a joint statement, calling for a peaceful resolution of the disputes over the South China Sea.



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The two leaders called on all parties to resolve the disputes through peaceful means without threat or use of force. China continues to build military facilities on several contested islands in the South China Sea, resulting in deteriorating ties with other claimants.



"Both sides also called on all states to exercise self-restraint in the conduct of activities that could complicate or escalate disputes affecting peace and stability, respect the diplomatic and legal processes, fully observe the Declaration on the conduct of parties in the South China Sea (DOC) and soon finalize the Code of Conduct (COC)," Modi and Phuc said in the joint statement.



China and its neighbors, particularly the Philippines and Vietnam, have been engaged in a bitter dispute over the ownership of several islands and reefs in the South China Sea. In July, the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) ruled against China in favor of the Philippines in a long-standing territorial dispute over the South China Sea.



Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid a state visit to Vietnam from Sep. 2 to 3. During the visit, Modi announced the Indian government's plan to provide four new patrol boats to Vietnam. Modi concluded his two-day Vietnam trip on Saturday and left for China where he would take part in a G20 Summit.



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TagsSouth China Sea, South China Sea Dispute, Narendra Modi, Vietnam, India
home World Taliban group terrorizes Christian communities in Pakistan

Four suicide bombers and a civilian were killed when terrorists attempted an attack on a Christian colony in Peshawar, Pakistan. Five people were reportedly injured.

The Pakistani Taliban faction Jamaat-ul-Ahrar claimed responsibility for the attack. The suicide bombers gained entry to the Christian Colony Warsak after hitting a security guard at 5:50 a.m. last Friday.

The colony is situated near the borders of the Khyber and Mohmand agencies. A Frontier Corps training center, a cadet college and an army school are in the immediate area.

Security agency sources told DawnNews that the training facilities were the initial targets but they had been alerted to the threats. Thus, the terrorists chose to attack the Christian colony instead.

The police recovered guns, four suicide jackets and four hand grenades from the scene. The attackers were reportedly using Afghan mobile phone SIMs. Each of them were armed with 8 to 10 kilograms of explosives.

A day before the attack, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) gave a briefing regarding the operation against terrorists in the region. Asim Bajwa, the Director-General of ISPR, reported that 3,500 terrorists have been killed during the course of Operation Zarb-i-Azb which began in 2014.

Jamaat-ur-Ahrar carried out another attack at the Mardan district courts just hours after the statement by the ISPR was made. At least 14 people were killed and 52 people were injured. A hand grenade reportedly exploded before the attacker detonated his suicide vest.

"First there was a small blast followed by a big blast," chief rescue officer Haris Habib told the Express Tribune. "So far, we recovered 14 bodies of the lawyers, police personnel and civilians," he added.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said that the attacks would "not shatter our (Pakistan's) unflinching resolve in our war against terrorism."
Appointment of gay Bishop of Grantham a 'major error' say conservative Anglicans

The leading group of conservative Anglicans worldwide has criticised the appointment of the gay Bishop of Grantham as a "major error".

Bishop Nicholas Chamberlain revealed he was gay yesterday after a Sunday newspaper threatened to out him.

He told BBC News he had never sought to make it a secret. "My focus and priority has been on my ministry, on serving God, on serving God's people. And I do that, as I always have done, as a gay man."

He added: "My sexuality is part of who I am rather than the whole of who I am".

The Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, or Gafcon, said in a statement: "We note with prayerful concern the revelation that Nicholas Chamberlain, Bishop of Grantham, is in a same sex relationship."

Gafcon conceded that even though he is in a committed relationship, Chamberlain lives within the guidelines of the bishops of the Church of England which stipulates that gay clergy must be celibate. Nor has he campaigned publicly for a change in the church's teaching on sex and marriage.

"We do not doubt that he has many gifts as a leader and pastor," said Gafcon. "However there are aspects of this appointment which are a serious cause for concern for biblically orthodox Anglicans around the world, and therefore we believe that this appointment is a major error."

The group, which represents conservative evangelical Anglicans worldwide but particularly in the global south countries of Asia and Africa, warned that the news will "exacerbate" the divisions caused by the attempt in 2003 to make Canon Jeffrey John the Bishop of Reading. Dr John is currently Dean of St Albans.

"We remain opposed to the guidelines for clergy and Bishops, permitting them to be in same sex relationships as long as they publicly declare that the relationship is not sexual. This creates confusion in terms of the church's teaching on the nature of sex and marriage, and it is not modelling a helpful way to live, given the reality of our humanity, and temptation to sexual sin," said Gafcon in the statement, signed by Archbishop Peter Jensen, general secretary and Canon Andy Lines, chairman of Gafcon UK.

Tracy Byrne, of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, said: "It should be noted that Bishop Nick is not in a civil partnership, and so it is perhaps unwise to draw a direct parallel with a married opposite-sex couple. However, his relationship is clearly an important and significant one, in which he has flourished and within the context of which he has been supported in his ministry as a fine priest and pastor, and now bishop.

"Those who made the appointment were aware of Bishop Nick's relationship and were satisfied that he is living within the discipline of the church. Whilst that space for accomodating priests in celibate gay relatinships is an unsatisfactory one for many of us, and a costly one for those who have made that choice, it is nevertheless a valid choice to make, both for the individual concerned, and for those making the appointment. It is a choice which should be respected, and those relationships and individuals should be honoured."
Fourteen gay Church of England clergy defy rules to marry their partners

Fourteen gay clergy who have married their partners in defiance of Church of England rules are calling for "full inclusion" of LGBT clergy.

In a letter sent today to all the Church's bishops, the clergy say: "It is time to respect that a diversity of theology within the Church now exists and that there is more than one understanding of what a faithful Christian may believe on these issues."

The letter, also signed by eight laity who are church members who have married their partners, is timed deliberately in advance of this month's meeting of the House of Bishops, who will be discussing the next steps after nearly two years of "shared conversations" on the issue held privately in dioceses around the country.

It also comes after the Bishop of Grantham Nicholas Chamberlain became the first bishop to come out as gay and partnered, and to talk about living with the bishops' guidelines which stipulate that gay clergy must be celibate.

The divisions over the issue extend beyond the Church of England to the wider Anglican Communion. Members of the LGBT community protested at Canterbury Cathedral earlier this year at the end of a meeting of worldwide Anglican church leaders that imposed "consequences" on the US Episcopal Church for sanctioning gay marriage.

The Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, or Gafcon, has described the appointment of Chamberlain as a "major error".

In their letter, the 14 clergy, some of which have withheld their names because of privacy and confidentiality issues, write to the bishops: "As you meet to discuss we seek from you a clear lead that offers a way forward to greater inclusion that will enable those parishes that wish to do so to celebrate the love that we have found in our wives and husbands. We hope for an outcome that will enable those who wish to do so to publicly celebrate where we see God at work in the lives of our congregations without fear and in openness."

The letter headed by Rev Andrew Foreshew-Cain, Vicar of St Mary with All Souls, Kilburn and St James', West Hampstead, who was the first serving gay clergyman to marry his partner and who is also a member of General Synod.

Foreshew-Cain told Christian Today: "The letter calls for the bishops to take a bold move towards greater recognition and unconditional inclusion for LGBTI members of the Church. Copies of the letter were posted today to all the bishops.

"The letter includes the names of many of those clergy who have married their wives and husbands despite the attempts of the Bishops to stop them from doing so. Some have chosen to signify assent to the letter, whilst withholding their names from public view. Some have done so because they have not told their bishops that they are married, others to protect their supportive bishops from pressure and some to prevent their bishops from taking action against them."

Some of the couples are revealing their marriage status for the first time.

The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby said at the Greenbelt Christian Festival that he was "consumed with horror" at the way the Church has treated gay people.

Foreshew-Cain said: "We are promising to pray for our Bishops as they meet and want to encourage them to be bold and honest as they help the Church to move forward. The Church needs to allow the talk about good disagreement to become a reality on the ground so that parishes and communities which want to celebrate and welcome gay and lesbian married and civilly partnered couples can do so, without fear of retribution."

The signatories say in the letter: "We are just a few of the many gay and lesbian people in this country who have in the past two years been able to celebrate with families, friends, and in our cases often our local church community, the enriching and life enhancing love we have found in our wives and husbands."

They call on the Church to "move forward".

They say: "We fully appreciate that the time may not yet be right for a change in the Church's official understanding of marriage. But many in our parishes have already made that move and it is time to respect that a diversity of theology within the Church now exists and that there is more than one understanding of what a faithful Christian may believe on these issues."

The other named signatories are Rev Richard Harris and Ricardo Goncalves, Rev Garry Lawson and Timothy Wane, Rev Clive Larson and John Markham, Rev Paul Collier and Mr Collier, Canon Jeremy Davis and Simon McEnery, Rev Geoffrey Thompson and Tony Steeles and Rev Prof Mark Cobb and Keith Arrowsmith.

The named laity are Jeremy Timm and Mike Brown, Ruth Wilde & Ellie Wilde, Jack Semple and Ross Griffiths, Paul Jellings and Andrew Carter, Erica Baker and Susan Strong, Karen and Samantha Bregazzi-Jones, Keith Barber and Tim Mills, Simon Dawson and David Mooney.

A further seven clergy couples and readers said they wished to remain anonymous in order to protect themselves, and often their bishops, from attack.
Nicaragua's government slams door on Christian missionaries ahead of November polls

Two days before Americans go to polls on Nov. 8, Nicaragua, a country also in the Americas, will also hold its own supposedly democratic election but whose outcome is already widely expected: the second reelection of President Daniel Ortega.

Running without a credible opposition rival, Ortega looks almost certain to win a third presidential term, according to The Guardian.

Ortega's government earlier removed the opposing National Coalition for Democracy from the ballot, and curtailed the right to independent national and international observation of the Nov. 6 presidential election, the Havana Times reported. Hence, opposition forces have decried the forthcoming election as a "farce."

To pre-empt any outside meddling or influence that could put into question Ortega's expected electoral victory, his government has imposed new restrictions on foreign Christian missionaries entering the country, according to CBN News. These missionaries must now submit in detail the purpose of their entry before the government decides on whether they should be allowed in.

Last Aug. 26, the Nicaraguan immigration office denied entry to two Catholic missionaries who were coming to offer a post-graduate course in Theology in one of the Catholic dioceses in the country, the Havana Times reported.

One bishop, Enrique Herrera, criticised the blockade placed on the missionaries. However, in their Aug. 29 pastoral message, the Episcopal Conference made no mention of this new restriction.

In its pronouncement, the Episcopal Conference of Nicaragua avoided a specific call to vote and recognised the population's right not to do so. It called on Nicaraguan citizens to "decide and act according to the dictates of their inner conscience, freely and without fear of any type of outside coercion."

"Each person should engage in serious reflection in order to decide what they consider most just and convenient for the present and future of the country," the bishops said.

In mid-June, in the days following the exclusion of the opposition from the elections, the Episcopal Conference issued a statement deploring "any intent to create the conditions to impose a single party regime."

Nevertheless, the bishops called on the people "to act peacefully, respecting each person's legitimate options and avoiding anything that threatens the physical and moral integrity of others."

They also encouraged the people to "never lose hope, especially in the darkest and most adverse moments."
'Solomon's Palace' discovered in Israel, showing another proof that Bible passages were based on actual historical events

Solid evidence has once again been unearthed proving that passages from the Bible were based on actual historical events.

A team of archaeologists has discovered a palatial building in Gezer, Israel, which the discoverers named "Solomon's Palace," according to New Historian.

The spectacular building was constructed over 3,000 years ago, in the tenth century BCE, according to the archaeologists. Although they could not tell yet which king, if any, lived in the palace, they believe it was likely built during the reign of King Solomon.

Their conjecture was based on Philistine pottery discovered at the site. According to the Bible, Philistines lived in Gezer until the city was vanquished by Solomon's father, King David.

According to the Bible, King Solomon was the driving force behind the creation of Israel.

Excavation co-director Professor Steve Ortiz, from the Tandy Museum of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary of Fort Worth, Texas, told Haaretz that the structure was significantly larger than the size of normal houses of the time, which suggests that it was home to someone of great importance.

The Old Testament states that the city of Gezer, which is situated on a crossroads in a pass leading from the coast to Jerusalem, was given by the Pharaoh of Egypt as a dowry to Solomon's wife. Solomon then rebuilt the city during the late tenth century BCE.

The archaeologists said the palace complex they've unearthed could only have been built by a king with substantial resources, one like Solomon.

The archaeologists also found evidence of destruction within the rooms in the complex, which they said could be associated with the Shishak invasion in 925 BCE, when the Pharaoh launched an invasion of Israel and Judahanother event described in the Old Testament.

This was not the first high-profile archaeological discovery in Israel this year that showed evidence of the events written in the Bible, according to the Christian Post.

Last month, a team uncovered a first century AD era synagogue at a site called Tel Rechesh, which is located near Mount Tabor.

The find confirmed the Bible's New Testament narrative about the preaching Jesus Christ did in synagogues, a leading archaeologist said.

"This is the first synagogue discovered in the rural part of the Galilee and it confirms historical information we have about the New Testament, which says that Jesus preached at synagogues in Galilean villages," said Dr. Motti Aviam, a senior researcher at the Kinneret Institute for Galilean Archeology, as quoted by CBN News.

Matthew chapter four records how Jesus went throughout the Galilee teaching and preaching. A similar account is found in Matthew chapter nine verse 35 which says, "Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness."

According to experts, the walls of the synagogue room are "lined with benches constructed from skillfully hewn limestone."

Israeli news site Ynet reports that the synagogue was discovered just four inches underground and reportedly measures 29 feet long and 26 feet wide.
Police are investigating the death of a man shot in the parking lot of a southwest Houston shopping center Saturday afternoon, authorities said.

Officers responded to a shooting around 3:30 p.m. in the 6100 block of Wilcrest. When they arrived, they found the unidentified man dead in the parking lot, said Houston Police Department homicide division investigator D. Williamson.
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.
Transcription

1 Imprimis T h e n a t i o n a l s p e e c h d i g e s t o f H i l l s d a l e C o l l e g e December 2006 Volume 35, Number 12 OVER 1,250,000 READERS MONTHLY Saddam s Iraq and Islamic Terrorism: What We Now Know Stephen F. Hayes Senior Writer, The Weekly Standard Eugene C. Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Journalism, Hillsdale College STEPHEN F. HAYES, a senior writer at The Weekly Standard, is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and DePauw University. Before joining The Weekly Standard, he was a senior writer for National Journal s Hotline. He also served for six years as Director of the Institute on Political Journalism at Georgetown University. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, National Review, Reason and many other publications. He has appeared on numerous television and radio programs, including NPR s Talk of the Nation, FOX News Sunday, CNN s Late Edition, and NBC s Meet the Press. He is the author of The Connection: How al Qaeda s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America and of a forthcoming biography of Dick Cheney to be released this spring. The following is adapted from a speech delivered on November 9, 2006, at Hillsdale College, during the author s two-week residency to teach a seminar on investigative journalism. I woke up early on the morning of October 26, I was in Baghdad, staying at the famous al Rashid Hotel. From that hotel, CNN broadcast images of the first Gulf War to the entire world. In January 1993, as George H.W. Bush prepared to leave office and Bill Clinton prepared to assume the presidency, an American-made missile (TK) crashed into the lobby of the al Rashid, destroying the piano in the Western-style lounge. On this day, I prepared for another long day hopping from helicopter to helicopter following Paul Wolfowitz around. Wolfowitz, regarded by many as the intellectual architect of the war, was in Iraq for the second time since the beginning of the war. I had also been with him on his first trip in July, when Iraq was still relatively calm, and attacks against coalition troops were sporadic and usually unsuccessful. We had even walked through downtown Mosul, in northern Iraq, without our bulletproof vests and helmets. It was a false sense of stability. Things had gotten worse in the three months between that trip and this one. The night before we arrived at the al Rashid, a Black Hawk helicopter had been shot out of the sky by insurgent rockets. I spoke with my wife from Tikrit, Saddam Hussein s hometown, and she was nervous. Her colleagues at CNN had heard rumors of threats against the al Rashid and she knew we were headed to Baghdad. You re not staying at the al Rashid, are you? I told her we were. There s nothing to worry about, I said. I m traveling with the No. 2 official from the Defense Department. If ever

2 Imprimis Hillsdale College Educating for Liberty Since 1844 a location would be under the tightest of security, it would be the al Rashid. At 5:59 a.m., we got our wake-up call. My roommate, James Kitfield from the National Journal, volunteered to take the first shower. I had been out later than he had the night before, sipping a few Heineken tallboys at the al Rashid bar with other reporters, officials from the Coalition Provisional Authority, and Iraqis such as Kanan Makiya, who had returned to their country with the hope of making it hospitable to democracy. As Kitfield headed to the shower, I found that I couldn t sleep. I stood at the picture window of our room on the 11th floor. In the distance on my left, I could see Saddam Hussein s old parade grounds. I had long been fascinated by the monuments that mark the beginning and end of the parade route identical sets of arms holding two swords that cross over the street. The blades form arches, maybe ten stories high. The street below those swords is paved with the helmets of dead Iranian soldiers casualties of the Iran-Iraq War that consumed much of the 1980s. The burly arms that hold the swords were said to be exact replicas of Saddam Hussein s down to the hair follicles. I surveyed this hideous manifestation of Saddam s megalomania and began to devise a plan. We were not scheduled to visit the parade grounds an oversight, in my view. So I thought about the best way to convince Wolfowitz and his aides that a short side-trip would be worth the time. As I looked out over downtown Baghdad, I noticed a bright blue box sitting under some trees just beyond the wall that separates the al Rashid Hotel grounds, along with the secure Green Zone, from the rest of Baghdad. That it was out of place a small patch of color in a landscape that was otherwise desert brown to the horizon seemed curious but not threatening. A moment later, I watched as the first rocket left the blue trailer and whizzed over the wall toward the hotel. Then came another, and another, and another, and another, and another flares of orange on a straight-line trajectory into the lower floors of the hotel. I suppose I expected them to stop, figuring whoever was shooting would have to pause and reload. So for probably 15 or 20 seconds, I stood at the window and watched. I looked in vain for the people firing at us. And the rockets just kept coming. It finally occurred to me that standing in front of a window was not a good place to be, so I turned and ran out of the room. In the time it took for me to get from the window to the door maybe two seconds one of the rockets hit our floor. The hallway was filled with smoke, so, taking my cues from two soldiers crawling on their knees and elbows, I dropped to the floor. The door to my room shut behind me. Remembering that Kitfield was still in the shower, I pounded on the door to get his attention, but he was already on his way out, wearing only a towel. He joined me in the hallway, and we waited until the concussive blasts had ended. The hallway had already begun flooding. Six rooms down from ours, an internal wall had been blown into the hall by the rocket. The smoke seemed to be getting thicker, and there were shouted warnings of a big fire, though I never saw one. I stopped in the room next door to ours, where NBC News cameraman Jim Long and veteran Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski were standing in front of the window. Long was shooting video of the smoke near the blue trailer. I walked down the hall to survey the damage. It was restricted to one room, but extensive. Water on the 11th floor was more than ankle-deep. The man staying in the room that was hit, Lt. Col. Charles Buehring, was a top adviser to L. Paul Bremer, the civilian administrator of Iraq. Buehring did not survive his injuries. As I walked down the 11 flights of stairs to the lobby, I noticed a small drop of blood near the fourth-floor landing. By the time I reached the ground floor, the white tiles were mostly covered with red footprints some showing the treads of shoes, others the imprints of bare feet. In all, 16 al Rashid guests were injured. The preliminary investigation would reveal that the attack could have been far worse. The blue trailer held 40 anti-tank rockets 20 Russian and 20 French. Just 29 of the 40 rockets fired. Seventeen of those 29 hit the building. And only six of the 17 rockets that hit the building exploded. So six out of 40 did what they were supposed to do. The subsequent investigation at first focused on a senior Iraqi regime official and his contact at the hotel, the head of catering at the al Rashid, who, it turns out, had long been an informant for Iraqi intelligence. But then came a surprise: Everywhere investigators looked, they turned up evidence that pointed to a collaborative effort between Saddam loyalists and Islamic fundamentalists affiliated with al Qaeda. It was the kind of cooperation between secularists and Islamic radicals that the U.S. intelligence community had long assured us would never happen. And yet it did. Again and again and again. And it is still happening throughout Iraq today. I did not come here today to defend the Iraq War, although I am certainly willing to do

3 3 I N D E P E N D E N C E G R O V E A Retirement Community with access to all that Hillsdale College has to offer Join friends from across the country, alumni, retired professors & staff. Choose from 164 independent apartments and cottages Myriad of services and amenities offered in a resort-style setting Comprehensive long-term health care Enjoy the amenities and opportunities that Hillsdale College offers Lock in the lowest prices and best location to suit your lifestyle Don t Miss Out! For more information about Independence Grove Call or Enjoy carefree retirement living with those who share your philosophy and principles. that. I know people of goodwill disagree about the necessity and conduct of that war and President Bush was reminded of that fact on November 7. Rather, I d like to look at a fundamental misconception about that war particularly among elites and consider what it says about our conduct of the Global War on Terror and our prospects for winning. For five years, beginning just days after the attacks on September 11, one question has dominated the national debate: Is Iraq part of the War on Terror or a distraction from it? This was debated prior to the 2002 elections, when Congress voted by heavy margins to authorize war. It was a central issue in the 2004 presidential campaign. And, in a sense, it was one of the primary issues in the recent congressional elections. And yet, as much as this is the fulcrum of the national debate on U.S. foreign and defense policy over the last half decade, few people have addressed it seriously. War opponents have taken to making claims that are demonstrably false. Representative Jack Murtha, a longtime hawk and leading critic of the Iraq War, appeared on Meet the Press last spring. He told Tim Russert: There was no terrorism in Iraq before we went there. None. There was no connection with al Qaeda. There was no connection with terrorism in Iraq itself. Before that, a Kerry campaign spokesman told us, Iraq and terrorism had nothing to do with one another. Zero. Network television anchors tell us the same thing. A high-profile Washington Post columnist described Iraq s connections to terrorism as fictive. And on it goes. The Bush Administration has neglected to respond to those challenges. What is the truth about Iraq and terrorism? Why doesn t the public hear about it? And why does it matter? Failed Intelligence In the months and years before the Iraq invasion, the U.S. intelligence community with a few notable exceptions believed that secularist Iraqis would never work with radicals like Osama bin Laden and that fundamentalists would never cooperate with an infidel like Saddam Hussein. On what did they base these opinions? Not much.

4 Imprimis Hillsdale College Educating for Liberty Since 1844 Before 9/11, the U.S. intelligence community never penetrated the senior leadership of either Iraq or al Qaeda two of America s most dangerous and determined enemies. Think about that. Bob Woodward interviewed the head of the Iraq operations group at the CIA, who told him that CIA reporting sources inside Iraq before the war were thin. How thin? I can count them on one hand, he said, and still pick my nose. In July 2004, a report from the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded: The Central Intelligence Agency did not have a focused human intelligence collection strategy targeting Iraq s links to terrorism until The CIA had no [redacted] sources on the ground in Iraq reporting specifically on terrorism. And that same report quoted an unnamed Intelligence Community official who made this breathtaking admission: I don t think we were really focused on the [counterterrorism] side, because we weren t concerned about the [Iraqi Intelligence Service] going out and proactively conducting terrorist attacks. It wasn t until we realized that Intershow Presents Hillsdale C O L L E G E C R U I S E EXPLORING AMERICAN HISTORY MONTREAL QUEBEC BOSTON NEW YORK PHILADELPHIA CHARLESTON MIAMI October 24-November 4, 2007 Aboard the Six-Star Luxury Liner Crystal Symphony Confirmed Speakers: Edwin Meese Former Attorney General for Ronald Reagan Larry Arnn President, Hillsdale College Additional Speakers to be Announced! Space is limited! For more information, or to reserve your cabin, please call: (800) there was the possibility of going to war that we had to get a handle on that. Again, think about that. Saddam Hussein claimed that the Mother of All Battles, as he called the Gulf War, never ended. His government harbored several of the world s most notorious terrorists Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal among them. Within days of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, his government facilitated the escape from U.S. authorities of the Iraqi who mixed the chemicals for that bombing. Less than two months later, his intelligence service botched an attempt to assassinate George H.W. Bush on a visit to Kuwait. By the late 1990s, he was supplying chemical weapons expertise to terrorist-friendly Islamic fundamentalists in Sudan. He wired $150,000 to his intelligence chief in Prague to blow up the U.S. government s headquarters of Radio Free Europe. An Iraqi government-run newspaper called Osama bin Laden an Arab and Islamic hero and there were several credible reports including some from open sources that Saddam Hussein offered bin Laden safe haven in All of this, and yet the U.S. intelligence community wasn t really focused on the [counterterrorism] side of the threat from Iraq. I d submit to you that that was an oversight. Let s spend a moment on two of those matters: On October 2, 2002, a young Filipino man rode his Honda motorcycle up a dusty road to a shanty strip mall just outside Camp Enrile Malagutay in Zamboanga City, Philippines. The camp was host to American troops stationed in the south of the country to train with Filipino soldiers fighting terrorists. The man parked his bike and began to examine its gas tank. Seconds later, the tank exploded, sending nails in all directions and killing the rider almost instantly. The blast damaged six nearby stores and ripped the front off of a cafe that doubled as a karaoke bar. The cafe was popular with American soldiers. And on this day, SFC Mark Wayne Jackson was killed there and a fellow soldier was severely wounded. Eyewitnesses immediately identified the bomber as a known Abu Sayyaf terrorist. One week before the attack, Abu Sayyaf leaders had promised a campaign of terror directed at the enemies of Islam Westerners and the non- Muslim Filipino majority. And one week after the attack, Abu Sayyaf attempted to strike again, this time with a bomb placed on the playground of the San Roque Elementary School. It did not detonate. Authorities recovered the cell phone that was to have set it off and analyzed incoming and outgoing calls. As they might have expected, they discovered

5 several calls to and from Abu Sayyaf leaders. But another call got their attention. Seventeen hours after the attack that took the life of SFC Jackson, the cell phone was used to place a call to a top official in the Iraqi embassy in Manila, Hisham Hussein. It was not Hussein s only contact with Abu Sayyaf. One Philippine government source told me: He was surveilled, and we found out he was in contact with Abu Sayyaf and also pro-iraqi demonstrators. [Philippine Intelligence] was able to monitor their cell phone calls. [Abu Sayyaf leaders] called him right after the bombing. They were always talking. A subsequent analysis of Iraqi embassy phone records by Philippine authorities showed that Hussein had been in regular contact with Abu Sayyaf leaders both before and after the attack that killed SFC Jackson. Andrea Domingo, immigration commissioner for the Philippines, said Hussein ran an established network of terrorists in the country. Hisham Hussein and two other Iraqi embassy employees were ordered out of the Philippines on February 14, Interestingly, if the Iraqi regime had wanted to keep its support for Abu Sayyaf secret, the al Qaeda-linked group did not. Twice in two years, Abu Sayyaf leaders boasted about receiving funding from Iraq the second time just two weeks after Hisham Hussein was expelled. The U.S. intelligence community discounted the claims. Then there is the case of Abdul Rahman Yasin, an Iraqi who had come to the United States six months before the bombing of the World Trade Center in In the days after the attack, Yasin was detained twice by the FBI. Although he offered investigators details of the plot, he was released on the assumption that he would be a cooperative witness. Released. Twice. The second time the FBI even drove him home. According to the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report, Yasin promptly fled to Iraq with Iraqi assistance. His travel was arranged by the second secretary of the Iraqi embassy in Amman, Jordan. In 1994, a reporter for ABC News went to the home of Yasin s father in Baghdad and spoke with neighbors who reported that Yasin was free to come and go as he pleased and was working for the government. So an Iraqi participant in an al Qaeda attack on the U.S. mainland fled to Iraq with Iraqi government assistance after those attacks. These are just two examples among hundreds of things that we knew about Iraq and terrorism before the war. And we knew these things despite the woeful state of our intelligence operations in Iraq. You might say these are things we learned almost by accident. Ignorance as Policy We now know much more about Iraq and terrorism. In the three-and-a-half years since the war began, the U.S. government has collected more than two million exploitable items from Iraq. That s a term of art to describe documents including payroll logs, audio and videotapes, strategy memos between senior Iraqi regime officials, letters between government agencies and computer hard drives of top Iraqi ministers. In these documents we have an extraordinary history of prewar Iraq. In these documents we can get answers to the many outstanding questions of what Saddam Hussein was doing in the years leading up to the most recent Iraq War and, in some cases, what he was doing once the war began. It is such a potential treasure trove that you would think the U.S. government would have doubled or tripled its teams of analysts and translators in order to mine this information for clues about Saddam s weapons, his secret allies, and his relations with a wide variety of terrorists. But the U.S. intelligence community, now led by John Negroponte, has steadfastly resisted serious attempts to exploit and release the information captured in postwar Iraq. As of March, three years after the war began, the U.S. intelligence community had fully translated and analyzed less than five percent of the documents captured in postwar Iraq. In some cases, they actually fought efforts to increase their budgets something that is unheard of in the intelligence bureaucracies. At one point, a little more than a year into the document exploitation project, senior intelligence officials tried to have the project shut down altogether. Why is this? Why would our intelligence community choose ignorance? There are several complicated reasons. But I suspect the most important one is simple. In those years that the U.S. intelligence community wasn t really focused on Iraqi terrorism, the Iraqi regime had been. Consider just a couple examples of what we have learned from a review of just the small percentage of documents that have been translated. * In 1995, a senior Iraqi intelligence official met with Osama bin Laden. After the meeting, Saddam Hussein agreed to broadcast al Qaeda propaganda on Iraqi government-run television and to let the relationship develop through discussion and agreement. 5

6 Imprimis Hillsdale College Educating for Liberty Since 1844 * In 1998, a confidante of bin Laden visited Baghdad as a guest of the Iraqi regime, staying in the Iraqi capital for two weeks at government expense. The document corroborated telephone intercepts the U.S. government had not previously been able to understand. And what about the two items I mentioned before Iraq s support for Abu Sayyaf and its relations with Abdul Rahman Yasin? * A fax from the Iraqi Embassy in the Philippines to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in Baghdad, dated June 6, 2001, confirms that the Iraqi regime had been providing arms and weapons to Abu Sayyaf the al Qaeda affiliate in the Philippines responsible for the death of Mark Wayne Jackson. * Iraqi financial records confirm that the government supported, harbored and financed Abdul Rahman Yasin, the 1993 World Trade Center bomber, throughout the 1990s. Who Cares? Skeptics ask: Isn t this just history? Why does this matter now? To answer that question, let us return to Baghdad. It is April 2003, just days after U.S. Marines toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square. David Dunford, a career foreign service officer, was working alongside other Americans and several Iraqis in the old Ministry of Foreign Affairs building. Dunford had been recruited to come to Iraq to help the Iraqis set up a new Ministry. The team sifted through the detritus of the bombed-out building. Walls were black from smoke. One office had a pile of ashes in the middle, all that was left of the files of one senior ministry official. Elsewhere, they found employment records, personnel documents, and other relatively unimportant documents. But there were important ones, too. Dunford and his Foreign Ministry team unearthed a memo from the director of Iraqi Intelligence to other senior Iraqi regime officials. An Iraqi translated it for them on the spot. Dated February 2003, a month before the beginning of the war, it read like a blueprint for the insurgency. Dunford and his colleagues turned it over to the CIA and heard nothing about it ever again, despite several requests for more information. This description comes from Paul Bremer, the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, who saw a copy of the document months after it was found. The document, Bremer said, listed orders for point-by-point strategy to be implemented after the probable collapse of the regime beginning with the order of Burn this office. Bremer continued: The document called for a strategy of organized resistance which included the classic pattern of forming cells and training combatants in insurgency. Operatives were to engage in sabotage and looting. Random sniper attacks and ambushes were to be organized. The order continued, Scatter agents to every town. Destroy electric power stations and water conduits. Infiltrate the mosques, the Shiite holy places. Let s remember the chronology. The document was written shortly before the U.S. invasion of Iraq and found immediately after. It was provided the same day to an intelligence team called the fusion cell in Baghdad. Thus we had documentation in April 2003 that an insurgency had been planned. And yet Donald Rumsfeld and others said repeatedly throughout that spring, and the following summer and fall, that there was no insurgency. I called David Dunford to talk about what he found. As an aside, I should point out that Dunford is a strong critic of the Bush Administration and its foreign policy. He has had harsh words for the ideological components of the reconstruction. I knew about the insurgency memo from an Iraqi who worked with Dunford. The Iraqi told me about another document found in the same batch of files. I did not mention the second document to Dunford when we spoke. I started the conversation by asking about the insurgency memo. Dunford remembered finding it, but told me that he did not recall details about it. Then, without prompting, he added this: I do remember one document that we found that was a list of jihadists, for want of a better word, coming into Iraq from Saudi Arabia before the war. That suggested to me that Saddam was planning the insurgency before the war. The jihadist document listed hundreds and hundreds of fighters who had come from several countries in the region, including Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Sudan and Syria. There were other similar lists found throughout Iraq. I spoke to one intelligence official who described footlockers continued on next page (detach envelope)

7 7 Imprimis ORDER FORM Dr. Mr. Name Mrs. Ms. Miss Address City State ZIP Telephone ( ) Home Office 1-10 copies 75 each 25-$10 50-$ $30 FREE SHIPPING! Qty. Author/Title Price Subtotal Michigan residents, add 6% sales tax TOTAL Enclosed is my tax-deductible contribution to Hillsdale College for $ My check made payable to Hillsdale College is enclosed. Charge my: VISA MC DISC DINERS CLUB Exp. Date Card No. Signature continued from page 6 full of such documents sitting untouched at a U.S. military base in Baghdad. A similar set of documents was examined by the Pentagon and discussed in a long report called the Iraqi Perspectives Project. That booklength treatment of the former Iraqi regime, written by military historians led by Dr. Kevin Woods, reported that the Saddam Fedayeen one of several domestic Iraqi terrorist groups began training young recruits in That year, they turned out 7,200 would-be Iraqi terrorists. Four years later, the program expanded: Beginning in 1998, these camps began hosting Arab volunteers from Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, the Gulf, and Syria. It is not clear from available evidence where all of these non-iraqi volunteers who were sacrificing for the cause went to ply their newfound skills. Before the summer of 2002, most volunteers went home upon the completion of training. But these camps were humming with frenzied activity in the months immediately prior to the war. As late as January 2003, the Arab volunteers participated in a special training event called the Heroes Attack. Who are these Arab volunteers? Are they still working with former Iraqi regime officials? How many of them are in Iraq, taking shots at our soldiers? And why doesn t anybody care to find out? I d like to finish with another paragraph from the Iraqi Perspectives Project, this one also based on a captured Iraqi document. I hope you ll bear with me as I quote verbatim. As I read, I d like you to think about the conventional wisdom, as articulated by Representative John Murtha and others, that until the U.S. invasion, Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism. The Saddam Fedayeen also took part in the regime s domestic terrorism operations and planned for attacks throughout Europe and the Middle East. In a document dated May 1999, Saddam s older son, Uday, ordered preparations for special operations, assassinations, and bombings, for the centers and traitor symbols in London, Iran and the selfruled areas [Kurdistan]. Preparations for Blessed July, a regime-directed wave of martyrdom operations against targets in the West, were well under way at the time of the coalition invasion. Editor, Douglas A. Jeffrey; Deputy Editor, Timothy W. Caspar; Assistant to the Editor, Patricia A. DuBois. The opinions expressed in Imprimis are not necessarily the views of Hillsdale College. Copyright Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided the following credit line is used: Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, SUBSCRIPTION FREE UPON REQUEST. ISSN Imprimis trademark registered in U.S. Patent and Trade Office #

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CLEVELAND, Ohio -- After Friday's bad weather and two practices on Saturday, the big boys of NASCAR are set for tonight's Bojangles Southern 500 at 6 p.m. on NBC. Here is what the cars will look like at the green flag.

Hurricane Hermine hit the South Carolina area on Friday, wiping out all track activity, including two practice sessions. Therefore, the starting grid was set per NASCAR rules with Kevin Harvick on the pole.

The weather forecast for the remainder of the weekend is improved, which was about the only good NASCAR news to come out on Friday, as that's the day NASCAR announced popular driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. will not race again this season.

You can follow along live today at NASCAR's Race Center.

Updated Chase grid

Updated driver standings

Here's a look at today's complete NASCAR schedule:

SPRINT CUP

BOJANGLES' SOUTHERN 500

Site: Darlington, South Carolina

Schedule: Sunday, race, 6 p.m., NBC.

Track: Darlington Raceway (oval, 1.37 miles)

Race distance: (501.3 miles, 367 laps)

Last year: Carl Edwards, starting 13th, beat Brad Keselowski despite leading just 15 laps.

Last race: Driving at Michigan, Kyle Larson nabbed his first career win. It was Larson's 99th start in stock car's top series.

Fast facts: Larson's win was the first for Chip Ganassi Racing in 99 races. Jamie McMurray took first at Talladega in 2013. ... Edwards has finished in the top 10 eight times in 12 starts at Darlington. ... All four drivers for Joe Gibbs Racing have won at least once at "The Lady in Black."

Next race: Federated Auto Parts 400, Sept. 10, Richmond International Raceway, Richmond, Virginia.



CAMPING WORLD TRUCK

CHEVROLET SILVERADO 250

Site: Bowmanville, Ontario, Canada.

Schedule: Sunday, race, 2:30 p.m., FS1.

Track: Canadian Tire Motorsport Park (road, 2.46 miles)

Race distance: (157.37 miles, 64 laps)

Last year: Erik Jones won from the front row for his second win in 2015.

Last race: Brett Moffitt won for the first time in a major NASCAR series at Michigan.

Fast facts: Moffitt finished third, second and first at Pocono, Bristol and Michigan, respectively. The Iowa native is driving in place of Matt Tifft, who is recovering from a brain tumor. ... Canadian Gary Klutt will make his series debut. Klutt, who races in NASCAR's Pinty series, won in Bowmanville last season on his way to rookie of the year honors.

Next race: American Ethanol E15 225, Sept. 16, Chicagoland Speedway, Joliet, Illinois.

(The Associated Press contributed)
Cleveland police car 3.jpg

Cardell Houston, 19, is charged with aggravated murder in the November 2015 killing of William Barnes Jr. in Cleveland's Cudell neighborhood.

(File photo)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A 19-year-old Cleveland man awaiting sentencing in three felony cases has been charged in the 2015 killing of a man in the city's Cudell neighborhood.

Cardell Houston was charged Friday with aggravated murder in the Nov. 20 killing of 34-year-old William Barnes Jr..

Houston shot Barnes inside a car parked on West 104th Street just south of Western Avenue, Cleveland homicide detectives wrote in court records.

Barnes, of Cleveland Heights, parked his car in front of a house about 2:15 p.m., police said. Houston and another man, who has not been identified, walked over to the car and got inside.

Houston sat in the back passenger seat of the car, police said. Shortly after the two got into the car, Houston pulled a gun and opened fire on Barnes, police said. The men got out out of the car and left the area, leaving Barnes bleeding inside.

Barnes was rushed to MetroHealth, where he was pronounced dead.

Houston led Parma police on a chase in February after he drove away from the scene of an accident on Brookpark Road in a 2009 Chevrolet, police said. He was arrested a week later in Cleveland driving a stolen Chevrolet Malibu.

While he was out on bond in those cases, Houston was charged with burglary and drug possession.

Houston again made bail. He pleaded guilty June 29 to burglary, attempted failure to comply with a police order attempted receiving stolen property, and remained free on bond.

A week later, Houston was shot after he climbed through the window of his children's mother's house and got into a fight with her boyfriend, records say.

The boyfriend, who was a license to carry a concealed firearm, shot Houston in the leg during the struggle.

Houston was charged with aggravated burglary and is being held in a Cuyahoga County Jail cell on $25,000 bond, according to court records.

He has not yet been arraigned on the murder charge.

The Cuyahoga County judge who heard his previous cases will sentence him after the new charges are settled, court records say.

If you wish to comment on this story, please visit our crime and courts comments page.
Transcription

1 Framework Paper i Oil and Gas Resources in the Federal Republic of Nigeria Wumi Iledare 1 and Rotimi Suberu 2 1. Overview Nigeria, with an estimated population of 140 million, ranks among the top 10 nations in proved oil and natural gas reserves. Of Nigeria s current 36 constituent states, only nine are classified as oil and gas producers. The nine states are located in the three southern geopolitical zones Southwest, South-South (Niger Delta), and the Southeast. The six producing states in the South-South geopolitical zone Delta, Bayelsa, Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Cross River, and Edo accounted for 91.5 percent of the gross oil production in In the late 1990s, the majority of oil and gas production was from onshore and shallow water fields. But, as militant disturbances and insecurity of employees increased, suspension and outright abandonment of oil and gas operations in the western part of the Niger Delta region became inevitable. As of January 1, 2009, the estimated crude oil and natural gas reserves are, respectively, 36.2 billion barrels and trillion cubic feet (tcf). Crude oil production has expanded, growing from its initial daily output of about 5,100 barrels in 1956 to as high as 2.5 million barrels per day in the late 1970s and in 2004 and 2005 (OPEC Bulletin, 2008). Continual investments and economic and policy incentives have been instituted by the federal government in an attempt to increase Nigeria s proved oil reserves to 40.0 billion barrels and expand production capacity to 3.0 to 4.0 million barrels per day by 2010 from its current 2.5 million barrels per day. At current extraction levels, Nigeria has a production equivalence of about 30 years in comparison to the global aggregate average of 45 years. As in many other developing-world federations with twentieth-century constitutions and large regionally concentrated hydrocarbons, multi-ethnic Nigeria has entrusted the ownership, regulation and redistribution of its oil and gas wealth in the federal government (Watts 2008: 98). At the same time, the country s fiscal federalism architecture constitutionally and statutorily guarantees the devolution of considerable amounts of centrally collected oil and gas revenues to the federation s state and local governments. 2. Federal System and constitutional provisions The expansion of the petroleum industry from the seventies produced fundamental changes in the structural configuration and fiscal architecture of the Nigerian federation. The federal system has evolved through five key moments since it was first instituted, under British colonial rule in 1954, to hold together Nigeria s fissiparous society, including two historic regions (North and South), three major ethnic groups (Hausa- Fulani, Yoruba, and Ibo), hundreds of ethnic minorities, and almost equal number of Muslims and Christians. 1 Omowumi O. Iledare is a Professor of Petroleum Economics and Policy Research, and the Director of Energy Information and Data Division of the Center for Energy Studies. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Petroleum Economics at the Craft & Hawkins Department of Petroleum Engineering in Louisiana State University. 2 Rotimi Suberu is a Faculty member at Nigeria s University of Ibadan since March 3-4, 2010 Page 1

2 The post-independence First Nigerian Republic ( ) combined a Westminster-style parliamentary system with an awkward federal structure of three (later four) large, but unequal, regions, each of which was dominated by a major ethnic group and controlled by a party based on that group. This was succeeded by military rule from 1966 to 1979, during which the soldiers broke the four regions into 12 and later 19 smaller states in a largely successful bid to undermine the Ibo-led Eastern Region s war of secession and to consolidate Nigeria s post-civil war unity. Civilian rule was restored in the Second Republic ( ), which incorporated the basic features of the military s integrationist political engineering, including the 19-state federal structure, the replacement of the parliamentary system with a strong executive presidential system, the formal prohibition of sectional parties, and the massive shift of fiscal and legislative powers from the states to the central government. The military re-imposed their rule from 1984 to 1999 and during that period the number of states grew from 19 to 36. Since 1999, the country has seen the political disengagement of the military and witnessed the longest era of uninterrupted civilian rule in the federation s history. Under the political dominance of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), this period has seen both a historic inter-civilian transition from the presidency of Olusegun Obasanjo to that of Umaru Yar Adua as well as the implementation of modest socioeconomic reforms and the reassertion of states rights in reaction to years of predation and over-centralization under military rule. 3. Ownership and jurisdiction The current 1999 Nigerian Constitution, section 44 (3) affirms the Federal Government s proprietorship and control of all minerals, mineral oils and natural gas in, under or upon any land in Nigeria, its territorial waters, and exclusive economic zone. All such minerals, oils and gas shall vest in the Government of the Federation and shall be managed in such manner as may be prescribed by the National Assembly. Accordingly, the Constitution places under the Federal Government s list of exclusive legislative powers all matters relevant to the regulation and management of the petroleum industry. These include export duties, incorporation and regulation of corporate bodies, mines and minerals (including oil fields, oil mining, geological surveys and natural gas) and taxation of incomes, profits, and capital gains. Federal Government ownership of Nigeria s mineral wealth is further reinforced by several statutory laws and regulations. The most important of these decrees or acts include the Petroleum Act (which was first promulgated in 1969), Petroleum Profits Act (1959), Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Act (1990, 1993), Land Use Act (1976), Oil Pipelines Act (1978), and the Oil in Navigable Waters Act (1979). The Petroleum Act, for instance, confirms the Federal Government s proprietary rights over Nigeria s petroleum assets and gives the Federal Ministry of Petroleum Resources the authority to issue licenses (to Nigerian citizens or companies incorporated in Nigeria) to undertake activities relating to oil prospecting, exploration, drilling, production, storage, refining or transportation. The Petroleum Profits Act specifies the applicable tax rates on the chargeable or net profits of companies engaged in petroleum operations. The Land Use Act provides for an extraordinary level of government control over land use and transfer (Human Rights Watch 1999: 68). The Act had two fundamental implications: (i) it made land ultimately a matter of national, rather than sub-national jurisdiction, effectively enabling the central government to control and acquire land anywhere in the federation, thereby constraining the formal powers of the governors to regulate land use in their respective states; (ii) it brought land under government, rather than private or customary (communal) ownership, which meant that land legally or customarily occupied before March 3-4, 2010 Page 2

3 the Act could be revoked and acquired by the government for mining or oil pipeline purposes with compensation restricted to the value of unexhausted improvements at the date of revocation. Although ownership and control of all onshore and offshore mineral resources is constitutionally and statutorily vested in the Nigerian federal government, the federation has historically included arrangements for the compensation of oil-bearing units through the payments of portions of centrally collected mineral revenues to those units on a derivation or unit-of-origin basis. However, whereas the constitutional framework of the First Republic had explicitly made both onshore and offshore petroleum resources subject to the derivation rule, a 1970 military decree limited the application of the derivation principle to revenues from onshore resources only, while the post-military constitutions since 1979 (including the current 1999 Constitution) have been silent on the issue. In response to demands by the Niger Delta states for the application of the derivation rule to offshore oil the federal government crafted a political deal that culminated in the enactment by the National Assembly of the Allocation of Revenue (Abolition of Dichotomy in the Application of the Principle of Derivation) Act of This provided that an area of two hundred meter water depth Isobaths contiguous to the littoral states would be deemed to belong to those states for the purpose of the derivation principle. The Act, however, provoked another round of litigation as it was challenged at the Supreme Court by 22 non-oil producing states. The Supreme Court ruled that the Abolition Act was consistent with the extensive revenue sharing powers of the National Assembly. This underscored the Court s willingness to abandon a rigid adherence to the constitutional principle of federal ownership of natural resources for the larger goals of inter-regional accommodation and conflict mitigation in the Niger Delta. 4. Petroleum revenue arrangements in context of the federal fiscal regime Oil and gas revenues Over the years, the Nigerian oil and gas sector has dominated merchandise exports. Oil revenue from exports grew from $718 million to $9.4 billion from 1970 to 1978 but declined dramatically from a high of $25 billion in 1980 to $4.7 billion in 1986 as a result of the crude oil price collapse. The vulnerability of the economy to oil price instability has also been costly in terms of revenue fluctuation, income distortions, and fiscal indiscipline. In 2008 total oil export receipts for Nigeria were about $75 billion dollars, which represents about 98.8 percent of total exports for the year. Yet, the oil and gas sector s share of GDP in Nigeria declined from a high of about 47.7 percent in 2000 to just 25 percent in 2005 and 22 percent in A recent World Bank estimate shows that the contribution of the oil sector to GDP is still low at 28.4 percent. Centre-State fiscal transfers The 1999 Constitution, Section 162, sets out the basic guidelines for the intergovernmental sharing of the major centrally collected revenues. It provides for the payment of the revenues into a Federation Account, which is to be allocated, according to an act of the National Assembly based on the recommendation of the Revenue Mobilization Allocation and Fiscal Commission-RMAFC. Any such act, according to the Constitution, shall take into account the allocation principles of population, equality of states, internal revenue generation, land mass, terrain as well as population density, [while] the principle of derivation shall be constantly reflected in any approved formula as being not less than thirteen percent of the revenue accruing to the Federation Account from any natural resources. Derivation revenues are set aside before eligible remaining revenues are distributed from the Federation Account. Currently, revenues in the Federation Account are distributed in the proportions of percent to the central government, percent to states, percent to localities, and 4.18 percent to centrally controlled special funds. The Federation Account revenues devolved to the sub-national governments March 3-4, 2010 Page 3

4 are shared among the states and among the localities on the basis of the following indices and percentage weights: equality (equal shares to each state or locality) 40 percent; population 30 percent; social development needs 10 percent; land mass and terrain 10 percent; and internal revenue generation effort 10 percent. This is aside from the derivation rule, which allocates 13% of natural resource revenues exclusively on a derivation or constituent unit-of-origin basis. These constitutional and statutory provisions notwithstanding, federal revenue sharing has remained one of the most intractable and controversial issues in Nigeria. Particularly, the derivation principle has been the most contentious issue in Nigeria s fiscal federalism, creating gross disparities in per capita federal revenue transfers between oil-producing and non-oilproducing units, while failing to contain militant resource sub-nationalism in the Niger Delta. Despite the entrenchment of the minimum 13 percent derivation rule in the 1999 Constitution, however, intensive agitation for the expansion of the rule to between 25 and 50 percent persists in the Niger Delta states. Yet, the distribution of gross revenue allocation shows that the nine oil-producing states in Nigeria received over fifty percent of the total federal revenue transfers to the states in 2008 even though they accounted for 22.3 percent of the population. The inequality in national revenue distribution amongst the states is evident in the steep disparities in per capita allocation between oil producing and non-oil producing states. Total revenue per capita allocated to oil producing states, on average, was N35, 955 in In comparison, the per capita allocation to non-oil producing states was N10, 249. A state like Rivers, which accounts for 36.9 percent of oil production and 3.7 percent of the population of the federation, received 14.9 percent of total allocation to the 36 states in 2008 with a per capita allocation of N64, 213. Bayelsa, with about 2 percent of the population, received 6.8 percent of transfers in 2008, with a per capita allocation of N89, 282. In comparison, each of the 27 non-oil producing states in Nigeria garnered, on average, less than two percent of the transfers in 2008, even though they collectively accounted for 77.7 percent of the population. 5. Macroeconomic challenges While Nigeria has earned billions of dollars exporting oil and natural gas, the industry has not generated the type of multiplier effects necessary to facilitate sustainable national development and economic growth. The petroleum economy has made the federation more like a unitary state than a federation in a fiscal sense. Expanded access to oil revenues has increased the financial dependency of the constituent states and localities (which derive 90% of their finances from federal revenue transfers), accentuated the disparities in central revenue transfers to them, and led to an underdevelopment both of alternative sources of subnational revenues (partly because the fiscal effort criterion in the allocation formula is not worth much) and of effective budget formulation, accounting, recording, and reporting systems (owing to the easy availability of shared revenues). In addition, the poor quality of public financial management at the subnational level, where approximately half of national public spending takes place, intensify macro-economic challenges. The oil legacy has also imposed significant costs on the Nigerian economy through petroleum and energy price distortions, corruption and inefficiencies, and fiscal instability due mostly to crude oil price volatility. The subsidization of domestic petroleum prices increased from N278.9 billion in 2006 to N633.2 billion in Phasing out subsidies, although an unpopular reform, would be necessary to reduce the cost to the national economy especially with rising share of imports in domestic petroleum products supply. Since 2004, the federal government has spearheaded a political agreement between all tiers of government to implement an oil-price based fiscal rule. In response to significant fiscal instability, the rule adopted an approach that is based on relative conservative estimates of the oil price for each budget with excess revenues being saved for stabilization. The oil price rule broke the link between public spending and oil prices and created an oil-savings cushion [the Excess Crude Account] of $18 billion as well as foreign March 3-4, 2010 Page 4

5 reserves that peaked in September 2008 at $62 billion. The benefits of this rule became evident with the sudden decline in global crude oil prices from a high of $147 in July 2008 to about $45 in December 2008; the federal government had based its budget on an oil price of $45 and was able to draw monies from the excess crude fund to stabilize spending during the downturn. Yet, the current stabilization regime also does not seem to have a truly integrated structure in terms of federal, state and local spending; the states seem to have taken a bigger hit during the downturn than did the federal government. 6. Environmental and social issues Nigeria s centralized petroleum industry governance framework leaves the oil-bearing communities with no constitutional or statutory rights, voice, or even consent on oil and gas industry projects in their communities. Nigeria gas flaring rates is among the highest worldwide. Oil spillage or leakage, arising from the nonreplacement of corroded, high-pressure oil pipelines, but also from the activities of oil thieves, vandals or saboteurs, have often occurred. There have been a few instances of badly designed or poorly maintained oil facilities, and weak government investment in critical infrastructure improvements. All these factors have combined to endanger the rich and unique, but fragile, ecosystem of the Niger Delta (Africa s largest wetland). Although petroleum industry operators are statutorily required to observe the highest international environmental safety standards in their activities, the limited technical capacity of the federal regulatory agencies (Department of Petroleum Resources, National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency, and National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency), and the shallow rule of law context, have meant that such requirements are weakly enforced or respected. High levels of poverty, unemployment, socio-economic inequality, dysfunctional social services, and infrastructure underdevelopment in the Niger Delta compound the environmental neglect and degradation of the region. Although poverty is less extreme in the Niger Delta than in Northern Nigeria, the divisions between rich and poor are more obvious in the Delta, and declines in Human Development Index have been steeper for the Niger Delta states than the rest of the federation. The capital intensive nature of the oil industry means that levels of unemployment and underemployment are higher in the core states of the Niger Delta than in any other region in Nigeria. In addition, the high earnings of some oil industry workers lead to localized price distortions, driving up prices and constraining the purchasing power of ordinary people. Federal and local government mitigating measures have been scarce, marginally effective, non-transparent, and generally poorly coordinated. 7. Conclusions The expansion of the oil and gas industry in Nigeria since the 1970s has produced fundamental changes in the structural configuration and fiscal architecture of the Federation. Nigeria has transformed from the diversified, agro-based economy that it was in the sixties to the mono-resource, petroleum based economy that it has become. This transformation has made the Federation more of a unitary state than a federation in a fiscal sense and expansion in access to oil revenue has increased the financial dependency of the constituent states and localities, and disparities in the amount of statutory revenue allocations to them. The oil legacy has also imposed significant costs to the national economy in Nigeria through petroleum and energy price distortions, fraudulent practices, inefficiencies, and fiscal instability. The oil-based funding of constituent states and local governments by constitutionally and statutorily guaranteed central financial transfers have been a powerful inducement to fraudulent practices at the subnational level. This is because these governments are neither responsible to the central government nor accountable to their constituents for the use of the transfers. In recent years, the central government has March 3-4, 2010 Page 5

6 subjected its own fiscal operations to the rule of fiscal responsibility in accordance with the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2007 (CBN, 2008). The Act, which is designed to institutionalize budgetary transparency and accountability as well as effective management of the public sector, has helped the federal government to minimize undue leakages in the economy. The monumental lack of financial transparency and accountability that afflicts Nigeria persists despite various measures implemented since 1999 to promote fiscal accountability and efficiency. Such measures include the establishment of the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC), Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), the NEITI Act, Excess Crude Oil Account, Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA), Public Procurement Act (PPA), and Electoral Reform Committee (ERC). Ultimately, the prospects for promoting transparency and accountability in oil and gas governance in the Nigerian Federation depend crucially on the restructuring or reinvigoration of these currently weakly designed or poorly implemented reform measures. A major weakness, however, of recent reform measures is that they have been dependent not only for their establishment, but also their operational effectiveness (including appointment and funding decisions), on the very political class whose abuses and excesses the reforms are designed to contain. Abating fraudulent practices and corruption in the petroleum sector and the economy as a whole requires full adherence to transparency and good governance principles in the NEITI Act of Reforms to put an end to the ill-considered and politicized intra-tier revenue allocation formula and put more emphasis on conditional grants are worth considering for promoting accountability and good governance. Sound fiscal policy framework for managing the nation s mineral wealth oil-based budget rule, excess oil savings and mandated infrastructural dedicated spending among others is necessary. The PIB 2009 represents an ambitious attempt to expunge fraud and inefficiency out of the structure, governance, and fiscal framework of the oil and gas sector. Ultimately, lack of transparency and accountability has consequences that include among others, public discontent over the pace of national development despite the earning potential from the oil sector; greed and power struggle among competing elites to control oil revenue sometimes leading to instability of government; public protest over domestic fuel shortages and related inefficiencies; inequitable distribution of petroleum wealth, which often exacerbates public fraud and corruption; and ineffectiveness of national laws, unenforceable contracts, and weak regulatory regimes, all of which produce an inefficient business environment. Credible oversight institutions with autonomy to detect, investigate, report and punish fraudulent practices, and a truly credible and competitive electoral environment with incentives for politicians to deliver public goods and services are proven ingredients of good governance. International cooperation in prohibiting and policing public officials illicit offshore assets acquisition would also go a long way to improve transparency and accountability in the governance of the Nigerian petroleum sector and economy. i This Framework Paper was prepared for the Conference on Oil and Gas in Federal Systems, and summarizes the findings of a more detailed paper on Oil and Gas in the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The Framework Paper is not for citation without authors permission. The full version of the paper is available on the Conference s webpage at The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development or the World Bank or of the Forum of Federations and their affiliated organizations, or those of the executive directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent. The World Bank and the Forum of Federations do not guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this work. March 3-4, 2010 Page 6

7 Nigeria Courtesy of the Forum of Federations Political and Economic Indicators INDICATOR DATA GDP US$ billion PPP (2008) GDP per capita US$2, PPP (2008) Number, type and % of population 36 states: Lagos 6.5%, Kano 6.5%, Kaduna 4.4%, Katsina 4.2%, Oyo 3.9%, of constituent units Rivers 3.8%, Jigawa 3.2%, Benue 3.1%, Anambra 3.1%, Bauchi 3.2%, Delta 2.9%, Borno 2.8%, Imo 2.8%, Akwa Ibom 2.7%, Sokoto 2.7%, Niger 2.7%, Abia 2.6%, Ogun 2.6%, Osun 2.4%, Adamawa 2.4%, Enugu 2.4%, Plateau 2.4%, Kogi 2.4%, Edo 2.4%, Kebbi 2.3%, Zamfara 2.3%, Ondo 2.2%, Cross River 2.1%, Ekiti 2.0%, Taraba 1.7%, Kwara 1.7%, Gombe 1.7%, Yobe 1.6%, Nassarawa 1.3%, Bayelsa 1.1%, Ebonyi 1.1%, Abuja Federal Capital Territory 0.4% Total population ~149 million Area km Currency and exchange rate Nigerian Naira (NGN) = $ 1 US Dollar, floating rate Political system federal Federal Republic Political Party Regime Peoples Democratic Party dominant party but with some states under opposition parties Distribution of powers/ Ownership The Federal Government has exclusive powers and proprietary rights over all of petroleum resources regulation and management of the petroleum industry. These include export duties, incorporation and regulation of corporate bodies, activities relating to oil prospecting, exploration, drilling, production, storage, refining or transportation, and taxation of incomes, profits, and capital gains. As established with the Petroleum Act. The Abolition Act allocates two hundred meter water depth Isobaths contiguous to the littoral states, deemed to belong to those states for the purpose of the derivation principle. Source: CIA 2009 Fact Book; Wumi Iledarei and Rotimi Suberu, Gas Resources in the Federal Republic of Nigeria, from the Conference on Oil and Gas in Federal Systems, March 3-4, 2010, Washington, DC. Conference on Oil and Gas in Federal Systems World Bank Headquarters, Washington, DC - Black Auditorium - March 3 rd 4 th, 2010
CLEVELAND, Ohio - Cleveland police are asking for the public's assistance to find a 90-year-old man who was last heard from early Saturday.

Harold D. Bruce, 90, called family members between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. Saturday, saying he wanted to "get out of the house," Cleveland police spokesman Sgt. Jennifer Ciaccia said. Bruce lives alone on the 17000 block of Throckley Avenue in the city's Lee-Harvard neighborhood.

Bruce is about 5-feet 6-inches tall and weighs about 165 pounds, police said. He has white hair and may be wearing glasses.

Bruce may be wearing the outfit he was seen wearing Friday - a red shirt, tan pants and a red Cavs hat. The man is believed to be on foot and does not have any cash, Ciaccia said.

Anyone with information about Bruce's whereabouts is asked to call Cleveland police at 216-621-1234.

If you'd like to comment on this post, please visit the cleveland.com crime and courts comments section.
CLEVELAND, Ohio - Happy Labor Day, Cleveland!

We hope you're relishing the last days of summer at a sunny barbecue somewhere. But first, catch up on any news you might have missed.

How hot was this summer? August 2016 tied 1947 for the hottest on record for Cleveland, with an average of 77.8 degrees, meteorologist Kelly Reardon reports.

Plus more fun climate facts - from rainfall to humidity - for the summer.

What's new with back to school? Kent State University has opened an entirely gluten-free dining hall, which it says is the first in the country, Karen Farkas reports.

Plus more new stuff at 17 area colleges.

How good are Ohio colleges? The Princeton Review on Tuesday named 14 public and private colleges in Ohio among the nation's top 381 four-year colleges, Farkas reports.

And here's another list, of Ohio's smartest college students by Emily Bamforth.

And how much help are those colleges getting from alumni? College graduates would rather pay off student loans and donate to charities instead of giving to their alma mater, Farkas reports.

What's new in business? Ohio approved tax credits Monday for 14 projects that would create more than 1,800 jobs; one company in Richfield promises more than 200 new positions, Robert Higgs reports.

How good were the good ol' days? In poll after poll, Americans say they are less optimistic about the future, Steve Koff reports. They say our best days are behind us, that we used to be a stronger nation, that our moral and sexual standards used to be higher.

How many days until the election? Just about two months. But applications for absentee ballots are in the mail, Sabrina Eaton reports.

What's new in Akron? A permanent home for the Akron Children's Museum hopes to open this fall. Jennifer Conn has photos and a timeline of the idea.

What's new on Twitter? @TowerLightsCLE is shutting down, Bamforth reports. The account, which reams of Clevelanders followed for "selfies" of the Terminal Tower, funny quips and hints about the building's colored lights, tweeted Thursday that it would shutter after the building is sold.

Who had prison sentences commuted? President Barack Obama used his executive authority to shorten the sentences of 111 federal prisoners convicted of drug crimes, Koff reports. The White House is following through on a decision to give a second chance to many convicts locked up when the country adopted a no-nonsense approach to drugs.

What's new in medical marijuana? The law allowing medical marijuana in Ohio starts Thursday. And Sextant Development, which makes 3 million adhesive transdermal patches a week in its Brunswick facility, may start making marijuana patches. See Jackie Borchardt's video.
Shirley Duncan-Barnes and friends

Shirley Duncan-Barnes, far right, was killed early Sunday morning when a man in a stolen car crashed into her at Lee Road and Cloverside Drive, police said. Duncan-Barnes had just left her 30th class reunion where this picture was taken, said Cassandra Ward, who is pictured on far left.

(Cassandra Ward)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A man in a stolen car sped through a red light and crashed into the car of a 49-year-old Maple Heights mother who had just left her high school reunion, police said.

The crash came just after midnight on Lee Road near Cloverside Drive, south of Harvard Avenue. Shirley Duncan-Burnes was pronounced dead at the scene.

The man, who was injured, fled the scene and has not been arrested, police said Sunday.

Duncan-Barnes went to a 30-year reunion for the 1986 graduating class of Jane Addams Business Career Center at H20 Lounge, her classmates said.

"We were all in good spirits, catching up and reminiscing about everything," Kevin Eardes said in a phone interview Sunday.

Duncan-Barnes left the lounge early with her longtime friend Cassandra Ward, and the two were going to meet more friends at the Cabaret on Lee Road, Ward told cleveland.com Sunday.

Neither woman had been drinking, Ward said.

Ward and Duncan-Barnes drove separately. They missed the turn for the Cabare, and pulled into the Lee-Harvard Plaza parking lot to turn around, Ward said.

When the light turned green, Ward turned left onto Lee Road. Duncan-Barnes was behind her.

When Ward came through the intersection, she saw the Chrysler 300 speeding toward her, heading north on Lee Road.

"I looked back just as she was throwing her hands up in the air to brace herself," Ward said.

Then she heard the crunch of metal as the Chrysler struck Duncan-Barnes' car behind her.

The force of the crash spun Duncan-Barnes' car completely around, and propelled her through the brick wall of a music store.

Ward pulled over to the side of the road. She and other people rushed over to the car. A man kicked in one of her windows, but they could not get her out of the car, Ward said.

Cleveland firefighters and paramedics were called to the scene. Duncan-Barnes was later pronounced dead.

Witnesses told celveland.com at the scene and again Sunday morning that the man had been taken to the hospital. But police on Sunday said the driver fled the scene and has not been arrested.

Ward said she and Duncan-Barnes remained close after high school. The two worked several jobs together, including cleaning offices downtown and rode the RTA to work together, Ward said.

"She was like a sister to me," Ward said. "We talked about everything."

Duncan-Barnes's husband died last month after years of health problems, and she was still struggling to explain to her 6-year-old daughter that her father was not coming back in the days before the crash, Ward said.

"She was just a beautiful person, inside and out," Ward said.

Duncan-Barnes and Eades' uncle went to the same church. Duncan-Barnes always bought paper plates, plastic silverware or a dish to church events, Eades said.

Police ask anyone with information to contact them at 216-621-1234.

If you wish to comment on this story, please visit our crime and courts comments page.
NORTH RIDGEVILLE, Ohio -- A teenage girl was wounded early Sunday morning in a drive-by shooting in this otherwise quiet Lorain County community.

Police arrested three suspects in connection with the shooting which came about 6:15 a.m. Sunday on on Lear Nagle Road and Theresa Court, police said.

Someone fired multiple shots into the home. One of the bullets grazed a 17-year-old girl who lived at the home. Her injuries were not life-threatening, police said.

Officers took three men into custody on Main Street shortly after the shooting, police said.

Neighbors Kelli Mohn and her boyfriend, Dan Turner, said they awoke to four or five gunshots, then heard squealing tires on Theresa Court.

"It being the holiday weekend and Labor Day tomorrow, I figured it was just fireworks," Mohn said. "It wasn't fireworks."

Mohn walked outside onto her porch after police got to the scene. She could smell gunpowder in the air, she said.

The shooting shocked Mohn and Turner. Mohn has lived in the same apartment for 18 years. She said other than teenagers speeding up and down the street and smashing the occasional mailbox, the neighborhood is quiet and peaceful.

"We've never had a problem like this out here," Mohn said.

Neighbors said the family has lived in the house that was shot at for at least a decade, and described them as nice people.

North Ridgeville police continued to investigate at the house for several hours Sunday morning. Officers carried a marijuana plant out of the house and placed it into the back of a police evidence truck.

Police have not released a motive for the shooting.

If you wish to comment on this story, please visit our crime and courts comments page.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A 49-year-old woman died early Sunday morning in a crash on Cleveland's East Side after she left her high school reunion party, witnesses said.

Shirley Duncan-Barnes, of Maple Heights, was pronounced dead on Lee Road near Cloverside Drive after midnight, when a man driving a Chrysler 300 struck her Dodge Caliber and sent her car crashing through a brick wall.

The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner's Office released her name Sunday morning.

Duncan-Barnes had left the 30th class reunion party for the Jane Addams Business Career Center, according to multiple witnesses who said they were also at the party and were driving behind Duncan-Barnes.

The witnesses said the man in the Chrysler 300 was speeding just before he struck Duncan-Barnes's car.

The man was injured in the crash. His status was not immediately available.

If you wish to comment on this story, please visit our crime and courts comments page.

Cleveland.com reporter Chanda Neely contributed to this report.
IMG_5485.jpg

The Departed performs in August in Scottsdale, Arizona. From left: Eric Hansen, Cody Canada, Ross Smith and Jeremy Plato.

(Josh Crutchmer, The Plain Dealer)

He is as if the old Tasmanian Devil from the old cartoons played lead guitar. He is a whirlwind of arms, legs and hair, and sometimes out pops a guitar, or sometimes his face comes into focus at the microphone long enough to sing a verse. Cody Canada is 25 and is playing the second of back-to-back shows in front of 200 people at the original 125-capacity Wormy Dog Saloon in Stillwater, Okla. It's May 2001, and he is less than 18 months away from releasing his first major-label record, along with the other three members of Cross Canadian Ragweed, but he's playing like he is still learning his own sound. He and his bandmate and bassist, Jeremy Plato, are already 4-6 years older than the Oklahoma State University students they are jamming for, but they play to the crowd. Listening to it now, that's what strikes you -- they're among friends and hung over. They lead with a cover of Todd Snider's "Late Last Night" and announce headache-induced remorse for playing back-to-back shows in Stillwater. They close with "Carney," already Ragweed's pot-influenced signature song. Hearing the show 15 years later, you can't miss the playfulness of it all. Canada is host and Plato is the sidekick, delivering one-liners at his whims. For two hours in between, they make music.

* * *

To the subset of Canada's fans who have followed him from the beginning, this is conflicting now. It's not tear-jerking. But you want to stick your head through a time warp and warn him, because you're thinking about all that lies ahead -- the lauded record deal with Universal South that ended as a burden, sellout cries from Ragweed's own fans, the reverberations from the band's public breakup in 2010 and his subsequent ventures with The Departed -- all against the backdrop of Canada turning from that 25-year-old into a 40-year-old husband and father of two.

You don't really want him changing anything because it means you miss out on the ensuing 15 years of his music, but you kind of want to make eye contact and shake your head. He's seen glimmers of what "making it" means by this point. He saw Mike McClure -- who will join Canada, Plato and The Departed Sunday night, Sept. 11, at Musica in Akron -- and The Great Divide land an Atlantic Records deal in 1998 that had gone south by 2000. And he heard smatterings of boos in 2001 and 2002 at shows in Texas any time a major Ragweed concert in another state was mentioned. But this night in Stillwater, he's not thinking about it. He carries himself like a kid who has made it to the place he knows he belongs, and the crowd is verifying this. Even in retrospect, that youthful energy is properly focused, but the naivety breaks your heart. He swings upside-down from the bar's rafters, plays an extra encore, and repeats it all at the next gig in the next college town.

I've been thinking about that show because I've just been watching Canada in 2016 -- in early August in Midland and El Paso, Texas, and Scottsdale, Ariz., where we caught up for this piece. He's about to release his ninth studio album in that 15-year span, and 11th overall, when The Departed release a Plato-fronted album of old country covers titled "In Retrospect" this fall. During that three-show run in August, Canada was not naive or playful, and certainly not uncertain. He was struggling through an allergy/cold/flu attack that left him at times in Midland unable to properly breathe, much less make it through his set. The Departed are Canada and Plato, sure, but they're joined by Eric Hansen on drums and Ross Smith on keys. Hansen was a forefather to Canada in Oklahoma's old Red Dirt music scene, and Smith is a decade younger, having cut his teeth in Texas and only recently settled down with his wife in Conway, Arkansas. The four of them are deliberate and professional during this run. In Midland and El Paso, the shows hit exactly 90 minutes. Canada sticks to his set lists, ignoring requests his vocal cords aren't up for. The crowd in Midland is cowboys and oil field workers blowing off steam on a Friday. The El Paso crowd the next day is as distracted as the band is by the streets outside teeming with Pokemon Go players in as close to a zombie apocalypse as that city has seen. Then, Scottsdale happens on Sunday. Rock Bar Inc. fills up, the crowd is even dotted with some whose fandom predates that Stillwater show. The band plays -- through Plato's sampling from the upcoming album, through the pre-written set list, through the first encore. The show tops out at two-plus hours and could easily have lasted three if the venue had allowed. This was the gig they had been waiting for, and they rocked out, only this time it was measured and confident. It was, in other words, a show enabled by experience.

It's easy for music fans to miss an artist growing up. Not growing up as in "doesn't party anymore" or whatever else that means in music, because songs get written about that -- but developing an adult self that is wholly distinct from the high-drama, high-stress lifestyle that nearly every musician spends a decade embracing.

One of the songs in that Stillwater set was "The President Song," in its day an anthem for frat boys and bartenders at Oklahoma State University. The lyrics, by Canada's standards, do not represent his views now, but they were there, sometimes funny (John Wayne fighting Saddam Hussein) sometimes cringe-worthy (a verse about destroying a country), and always evoking two decades ago. Canada's son Dierks is 11, and his other son, Willy, is 8. He kept that song from them until this summer.

"The other day we were on vacation and one of the kids said, 'I want Daddy to be president,'" Canada said. "And everyone laughed, 'You never heard that song did you?' So I played it for them, and I didn't realize what was said in that song. That makes it so much different now. I'm really easy about what I write, and I want my kids to like it as much as the fans."

"Music's going to change regardless, because you get older and you have different outlooks on life and you have children to take care of. You're not just doing it every night for yourself. We're finally getting to the point now where people are respecting this band."

What hasn't changed is Canada's willingness to let current events, and the world around him, dictate his songwriting. With 2016 in a seemingly endless cycle of bad news, he has put the brakes on a wholesale launch of new material.

"I'm not exactly where I want to be. I want to be at the point where I can write all the time. The reason I can't do that is, I pay attention to what's happening. I feel like since Hippielovepunk (The Departed's third album, released in January 2015), the situation has gotten worse -- race wars and terror and hard things to watch on television, and I really didn't want to write the next record twice."

Sharing his bus on his current tour is McClure, who produced all of Ragweed's seven studio albums but none of The Departed's. Between their work producing Ragweed's Happiness and All the Other Things in 2009 and partnering for a live acoustic album, Chip and Ray: Together Again, For The First Time, in 2015, the two did not collaborate, and spent a great deal of that period completely away from each other. For the two people who had the biggest hands in taking Red Dirt music to his peak, that ultimately led full-circle.

"We got away from each other for four and a half years," Canada said. "And we both learned that we're really better together. The next record we do with my music, we're going to have him involved. We're more grown up -- not that much, but we're easier on each other now than we used to be."

They'll be on stage in Akron in what will be The Departed's first show in Northeast Ohio in its current incarnation. Despite his home in New Braunfels, Texas, Canada makes a concerted effort to cover most of the U.S. on tour every year, and chalks the motivation up to fans of live, original music.

"They don't get it up here," Canada said. "People outside of Texas and Oklahoma are starving for this music. Where we're from, you can go in a 200-mile radius and see any genre you want. We come here or on the West Coast, and we look at the posters, and there's nobody even closely related to us. So of course there's no competition, but the crowds know that, and they appreciate it and they show up."

To bring it full-circle, what hasn't changed for Canada is his invitation for others to share in his moment. The smile from the earlier gig is still there, though less naive. The rocking is too, though it's more pointed and less Tasmanian Devil now. He wants his band to be embraced the same way his band was in 2001, not for adulation or the fortune, but to confirm his place. At 25, he had long-since known he belonged to music. But at 40, he sees he had to make music belong to him first to see the embraces that matter now.

"When I really got into this full-time, I was trying to impress my wife," Canada said. "Then I was trying to impress my fans. Then I was trying to impress my peers. Now, really I'm just trying to impress my kids. That's the most important thing to me. They're in their formative years, and that's when they're really paying attention. I want them to be proud of what I do. Once they're proud, I'm proud."

_______

If you go

What: Cody Canada and The Departed with Mike McClure

When: 8 p.m. Sunday, September 11

Where: Musica, 51 East Market Street, Akron

Tickets and information: liveatmusica.com
applegateoffice.jpg

Pro-labor posters decorate Harriet Applegate's office at the North Shore AFL-CIO Federation of Labor.

(Lisa DeJong, The Plain Dealer)

Harriet Applegate, North Shore AFL-CIO Federation of Labor

Working people -- especially white males -- are angry because they feel they have been left behind. It is not minorities and women whom they should blame but a not-accidental process over several decades that has allowed the wealthy to accumulate at rates never before seen, while the median wage has not increased in 30 years.

It is ironic that this anger has moved some of them to support Donald Trump, a man who has benefited more than most of his fellow billionaires from this process. Even Trump's multiple bankruptcies -- which resulted in workers not getting paid for work they performed -- made him richer!

How can democracy be sustained with such severe economic inequality? Thanks to Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, a lot more Americans can answer this question. The rich must pay higher taxes; in the case of many large corporations, they must actually start to pay taxes. Tax cuts since the days of Ronald Reagan have resulted in a massive shift of wealth from the middle class to the rich.

Even if we returned to the progressive taxation of the President Dwight D. Eisenhower years, it would not be enough to make the economy work for working people. To make the economy work for everyone, we need unions.

Unions increase the incomes of working people, but they do so much more: they perform the critical function of fueling our economy, lifting people out of poverty and slowing down the concentration at the top.

But while unions represented one in every three workers in 1960, today it's one in ten!

It is no coincidence that over these same years, wages have stagnated, effectively reducing real income for ordinary people, while wealth has been redistributed upward to what can only be described as obscene concentration: Four hundred people own more wealth than 61 percent of our population, and just 20 own as much as half of us!

Unions benefit society in other ways as well: They not only raise wages but they also raise them disproportionately for those most in need. A union contract does not discriminate (everyone doing the same job gets the same pay); unions give workers dignity and a voice at work as well as a bigger stake in their workplaces and communities. Importantly, unions also fight to provide working people with a political voice to counter the billions corporations and billionaires spend on elections and lobbying.

Unions have always been at the forefront of minimum wage battles because -- even though most members make more than the minimum wage -- unions also fight for those who have no voice. That is why one of the nation's largest unions has turned to legislation to lift workers out of poverty. 'Raise the Wage' campaigns are currently being fought in 120 cities.

Despite the fact that there will be real hardships for employers if they have to raise wages, the simple truth is that wages are too low. There is no more inescapable truth in our country today and, where poverty is concentrated, they are really too low.

While the moral dimension of the problem should motivate us, there is plenty of economic self-interest to motivate the more pragmatic. Those small businesses who threaten to close will gain from increasing the minimum wage because if people make more money, they spend more money. And they will spend it at the same grocery stores and small businesses everyone is so concerned about, they make a deposit not in the bank but into the local economy.

The fight to raise wages is not going away and it is especially not going away in a city with crippling poverty like Cleveland. How will we respond?

It's about deciding what kind of a city we want to be. Do we care about all our citizens enough to lift up those who need it the most? Or do we want to be a city that works to accelerate the concentration of wealth ever upward? Are we that 'shining city on a hill,' a city that looks to the future, an enlightened, progressive city supporting high-road businesses and development or are we that fumbling, self-doubting city of the past taking the low road and succumbing to fear-mongering, a city which cannot emerge from mediocrity for never daring to think outside the box or to move boldly to do the right thing?

This Labor Day and in the coming year, let's embrace the future confident that we are doing good for our city by doing right by its workers.

Harriet Applegate is executive secretary of the North Shore AFL-CIO Federation of Labor in Cleveland.
APTOPIX Mideast Yemen

Fighters loyal to the Yemeni government gather at the site of a suicide car bombing in Yemen's southern city of Aden on Aug. 29. The bombing claimed by the Islamic State group in Aden killed more than 50 pro-government troops who had been preparing to travel to Saudi Arabia to fight Houthi rebels in Yemen's north. Yemen is embroiled in a civil war pitting the internationally recognized government and a Saudi-led coalition against the Shiite Houthi rebels, who are allied with army units loyal to a former president. The fighting has allowed al-Qaida and an IS affiliate to expand their reach, particularly in the south. Ali Mohamed writes that Congress should probe possible U.S. complicity in rising civilian deaths in the war.

(Wael Qubady, Associated Press)

Ali Mohamed co-founded the Horn of Africa Freedom Foundation

Last year I wrote an op-ed on cleveland.com calling for a political solution to the Saudi-led war in Yemen. Eighteen months have passed since the Saudi-led coalition launched a military campaign against the Houthis, a Zaydi Shiite group of northwestern Yemen, yet the Saudi objective of the war has not been reached: disarming the Houthi rebels and restoring President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi to power throughout Yemen.

The Houthi rebels and the forces allied to Yemen's former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who are putting up stiff resistance, have lost some ground especially in southern Yemen, but they still control large swaths of territory, including the capital Sana'a. The Saudi-backed, unelected Hadi controls much of southern Yemen, including the port city of Aden -- where a tenuous authority exists at best.

The human cost of the military campaign in Yemen is staggering. Since March 2015, the Yemeni conflict has claimed the lives of 6,500 people, and more than 30,500 are wounded, including civilians.

Nearly 3 million people are displaced from their homes. More than 19 million are without access to clean water and sanitation, and in need of emergency humanitarian assistance. Three million children under 5 are facing severe acute malnutrition, according to UNICEF.

A naval blockade by the Saudi Navy to prevent weapons is preventing food, medical supplies, fuel and other essentials from reaching Yemen, a country that relies on imports for 90 percent of its

food.



Both sides of the conflict have committed serious violations of international humanitarian law.

While using American-supplied bombs, the Saudi-led airstrikes are also targeting medical facilities, schools, factories and open markets, which may "amount to war crimes," according to Human Rights Watch.

For example, last month, a medical facility in northern Yemen supported by Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) was hit by an airstrike, killing 19 people, which forced the group to evacuate staff from the north of the country because there was no guarantee they would not be attacked again.

Tragically, the Obama administration is silent on the killings of civilians in Yemen by the Saudi coalition bombings while vocal at the carnage in Syria caused by the Russian and Syrian governments. The Obama administration is also complicit in the Saudi-led war in Yemen by providing weapons, intelligence and logistics, even though the U.S. Congress never authorized such a war.



Weapon sales by the United States and Britain to Saudi Arabia are fueling the Yemeni conflict. In fact, last month, the U.S. State Department approved the potential sale of $1.15 billion worth of tanks, armored recovery vehicles and other equipment to Saudia Arabia, pending a possible congressional bar to the sale, but such a prohibition is rare, according Reuters.

Sen. Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said recently on CNN, "There is an America imprint on every civilian life lost in Yemen."

Saudi propaganda has stated that the Houthis are "influenced and supported" by the Iranians. The Saudis consider the Houthis as a proxy for Iran.

But most experts in the region agree the influence the Iranians have on the Houthis is very unclear or limited. With the Saudi coalition's complete control of Yemeni airspace and the blockading of its coast, the likelihood that the Iranians are providing the Houthis with military support is very little.

The Saudi-led war in Yemen is a local power and control struggle among Yemeni tribal factions like any other war. During the Arab spring, the Houthis were instrumental in the 2011 uprising that overthrew Saleh, Yemen's longtime ruling dictator. A Saudi-brokered power-sharing government denied the Houthis a role in that government. Consequently, the Houthis, with the help of forces loyal to Saleh, the former president, took over Sana'a, the capital, and other major towns in Yemen.

The Houthis are saying that they are fighting for the political and economic interest of the Zaydi Shiite community of northwestern Yemen, against the unresponsive central government. The Houthis are also countering the Saudis' extreme ideology of Wahhabism spreading into Yemen.

Congress has the power to stop the human tragedy in Yemen. Firstly, when Congress comes back later this month, they should hold a hearing on the Saudi war in Yemen, the U.S. involvement, and the supply of lethal weapons to the Saudis. Secondly, Congress must also act now and stop military sales to the Saudis in the light of the indiscriminate bombings of innocent Yemenis by coalition airstrikes.

Those airstrikes are alienating more Yemenis in a time when America needs more help defeating al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen, the most lethal al-Qaida affiliate, which has expanded its influence in Yemen and benefited during the Saudi-led military campaign.

We must put the value of human lives ahead the interest of the Saudi regime, one of the worst human rights violators in the world. America must give peace a chance in Yemen because all Yemenis deserve to live and work in peace.

Ali Mohamed is the co- founder of the Horn of Africa Freedom Foundation in Lewis Center, Ohio.

To contact Ali Mohamed: aliadm18@gmail.com
County expands oversight of the convention center

The Huntington Convention Center of Cleveland opened in mid-2013. (Thomas Ondrey, The Plain Dealer)

(Thomas Ondrey, The Plain Dealer)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - In early 2014, about six months after the new Cleveland Convention Center opened its doors, a group from the Republican National Committee came to town to check it out.

We all know what happened next.

In the convention business, as in most any business, timing is everything.

When the Republicans announced two years ago that they had chosen Cleveland for their 2016 presidential convention, the timing was perfect - perfect for Cleveland, which wanted a high-profile event to showcase its turnaround, and perfect for the new convention center, which was trying to fill vacancies in its wide-open calendar.

Since that announcement, the convention center (officially, the Huntington Convention Center of Cleveland) has landed hundreds of events, large and small. Mark Leahy, the convention center's general manager, attributes many of them to the city's success in pitching itself to the Republican Party.

"That could not have happened at a better time in the life cycle of this building," said Leahy. "We got a bump right off the bat."

Cleveland convention center: by the numbers

Opened: Summer 2013

Size:

230,000 square feet

Cost:

$465 million, which includes the adjacent Global Center for Health Innovation

Funded by:

0.25 percent sales tax in Cuyahoga County

Room nights generated:

191,000 (since 2013)

Attendance:

420,000 (since 2013)

Total events in 2015:

196 (160 goal)

Exhibition Hall events in 2015:

41 (40 goal)

Operating loss, 2015:

$1.9 million

High profile upcoming events:

* Content Marketing World, September, 3,500 attendees * International Economic Development Council Annual Conference, September, 1,200 attendees * Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovation Summer, October, 2,000 attendees * In 2017: American Bus Association, National Association of College Admission Counselors, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Advanced Manufacturing Expo, etc.

Leahy recently sat down with The Plain Dealer to talk about the center's recent successes, challenges and what the city needs to do to maintain the momentum.

A Boston native, Leahy came to Cleveland after opening and running Pittsburgh's convention center for 10 years. He arrived in Northeast Ohio about four months after the publicly-financed, $465-million convention center opened.

"I've been doing this for 30-something years. This is my fourth building -- I've opened three," he said. "I'm very, very pleased with the numbers, very optimistic about the future."

The center is exceeding several of the numeric goals set by the Cuyahoga County Convention Facilities Development Corporation, the organization formed by the county to monitor the building's operation. The total number of center events in 2015 (196) was higher than targeted, as was the number of major exhibit hall events (although square-footage occupancy of those exhibition hall events fell slightly under goal).

The center calculates the economic benefits of those 196 events at $90 million, generated via hotel room nights, restaurant meals purchased and the like.

This year, thanks to the RNC and other high-profile events, should produce results that are even better, in terms of attendance and overnight bookings.

"This is now a convention city," said Leahy. And for that, he largely credits the Grand Old Party. "One of our toughest sells has always been getting people to come here and see what we're offering. The RNC has blown that door open."

Mark Leahy, general manager of the Huntington Convention Center of Cleveland; he works for property management firm SMG, hired by Cuyahoga County in 2013 to run the center. (Lynn Ischay/The Plain Dealer)

What's also helping:

* The convention center itself, which is getting high marks from users for its clean, functional space and views of Lake Erie. Members of the media, who were camped out here during the RNC, were charmed with the center's small farm, located at the center's northern end. Designed to showcase the building's sustainability efforts, the farm got attention from the Wall Street Journal, ABC News and others.

* The new Hilton Cleveland Downtown, the taxpayer-financed hotel that opened in June, has helped, as well. The 600-room hotel, a block west of the convention center, is attached to the center via a basement-level hallway. "The Hilton has been a game changer," said Leahy. "It makes us competitive in the winter months, which has been an issue."

* Cleveland's reputation in the health-care field, which is helping the city land medical and health-related conferences. Last year, nearly a third of the meetings at the convention center were health related. This year, that percentage will likely be closer to 40 percent, said Dave Johnson, director of public relations and communication for the convention center.

Medical conventions are highly coveted for a couple of reasons, according to Leahy: Typically, attendance is high, because doctors and others in the field need continuing education credits to stay licensed; attendees have higher discretionary income for shopping and dining out; and these meetings tend to last a day or two longer than average.

"That seems like a great niche for Cleveland," said Eric Belfrage, senior vice president at CBRE Hotels in Columbus, who recently toured the Cleveland complex. The adjacent Global Center for Health Innovation, a showcase for medical technology and ideas, offers a unique selling point for the city, he said.

"It's a very competitive market," Belfrage added. "That's why Destination Cleveland and Experience Columbus and all the other convention and visitors bureaus are vying for these groups."

Laurel Keller, a Cleveland hospitality consultant, said filling a new convention center takes time - especially in a place like Cleveland, which hadn't been competitive in the convention market for years.

"I think the ramp up has taken a little longer than anyone had hoped it would," said Keller, vice president at Hotel & Leisure Advisors. She attributes the slow growth, in part, to the delayed opening of the Hilton, three years after the convention center debuted.

"It's a bit like a two- or three-legged dog hobbling along," she said. Since then, though, convention center numbers have picked up.

"From what I have been able to glean, it's competing well," she said. "There is reason for optimism."

Past success, of course, is no guarantee of future progress (though in the case of convention business, word of mouth definitely helps).

Leahy is already concerned about 2018, when bookings are lagging -- because, he said, many conventions run on a five-year cycle; groups who met here in 2014 won't likely be back until 2019 at the earliest.

Looking ahead, Leahy is hoping to make inroads into the religious meetings market, in collaboration with city-owned Public Auditorium. Religious groups often need not only exhibit space and meeting rooms, but also a large hall for general sessions.

Leahy is also hoping Cleveland can wrest some of the state association business away from Columbus.

Despite its early success, the convention center continues to lose money, though not as much as it was projected to. The center posted an operating loss of $1.9 million in 2015, considerably less than a projected $4.3 million deficit.

Leahy says critics who complain that the convention center isn't posting a profit yet are missing the point.

Particularly in the early years, as they're drumming up business, convention centers spend more money than they generate in rental fees and other revenue.

The center isn't supposed to make money for itself - it's supposed to attract people to town so they spend money at hotels, restaurants, and shops. Depending on the event, convention visitors spend anywhere from a couple hundred dollars to more than $1,000 per day, said Johnson.

"We know what a convention delegate will spend while they're in town," said Leahy. "If we bring in 125,000 room nights, you can count up the direct spending and the taxes generated."

A more pressing concern: a possible hotel glut in Cleveland.

Downtown Cleveland has increased its room inventory by nearly 50 percent in recent years, to almost 5,000 rooms, a huge boost in supply that is expected to outpace demand, at least in the short term.

"Occupancy will go down when you have this unprecedented introduction of supply," said Keller. "Everyone is in agreement on that."

The only sure way to fill those rooms: increase demand.

Leahy and his sales staff of six work alongside Destination Cleveland, the Hilton, Marriott, Westin, InterContinental and others, to pitch Cleveland as a meeting destination and to fill downtown hotel rooms.

"It's a real cooperative approach," said Leahy, involving many of the same people who helped bring the RNC to town.

Leahy is convinced the momentum will continue.

"The repercussions of the RNC will be felt for a long, long time," he said. "It's not about the next big thing we can do. It's working day in and day out."
Bill Gates  technology entrepreneur extraordinaire and the world's richest man  has recommended dozens of books over the years, and this summer is no exception.



The voracious reader and self-proclaimed "learning nerd" is known to plow through at least one book every week, with a heavy emphasis on business, science and mathematics. And although the summer is (almost) over, his book menu offers plenty of brain fodder for book lovers to absorb in the fall and beyond.

Some of Gates' favorite tomes range from the eclectic to the informative, including an 800-page science fiction novel and a 200-page nonfiction book on how moribund Japan can regain its economic mojo.

Writing on his personal blog, gatesnotes, Gates said he hoped each selection would inspire readers to "go off the beaten path."

"[These] books are simply ones that I loved, made me think in new ways and kept me up reading long past when I should have gone to sleep." Gates credited his childhood librarian, Blanche Caffiere, for stoking his lifelong passion for knowledge as a 9-year-old student at Seattle's View Ridge Elementary School.

"My 4th grade teacher made it okay for me to be a messy, nerdy boy who loved to read books. It's remarkable how much power one good person can have in shaping the life of a child." Bill Gates

So whether you're heading to the beach, lake, mountains or just planning a staycation this Labor Day weekend, here are the billionaire's top five recommendations to read during the waning days of summer (which technically doesn't end until September 22). Gates summarizes his impressions of each book in his own words:

"How Not to Be Wrong," by Jordan Ellenberg. Ellenberg, a mathematician and writer, explains how math plays into our daily lives without our even knowing it. Each chapter starts with a subject that seems fairly straightforward  electoral politics, say, or the Massachusetts lottery  and then uses it as a jumping-off point to talk about the math involved. In some places the math gets quite complicated, but he always wraps things up by making sure you're still with him. The book's larger point is that, as Ellenberg writes, "to do mathematics is to be, at once, touched by fire and bound by reason"  and that there are ways in which we're all doing math, all the time.

"The Vital Question," by Nick Lane. Nick is one of those original thinkers who makes you say: More people should know about this guy's work. He is trying to right a scientific wrong by getting people to fully appreciate the role that energy plays in all living things. He argues that we can only understand how life began, and how living things got so complex, by understanding how energy works. It's not just theoretical; mitochondria (the power plants in our cells) could play a role in fighting cancer and malnutrition. Even if the details of Nick's work turn out to be wrong, I suspect his focus on energy will be seen as an important contribution to our understanding of where we come from.

"The Power to Compete," by Ryoichi Mikitani and Hiroshi Mikitani. I have a soft spot for Japan that dates back three decades or so, when I first traveled there for Microsoft. Today, of course, Japan is intensely interesting to anyone who follows global economics. Why were its companies  the juggernauts of the 1980s  eclipsed by competitors in South Korea and China? And can they come back? Those questions are at the heart of this series of dialogues between Ryoichi, an economist who died in 2013, and his son Hiroshi, founder of the internet company Rakuten. Although I don't agree with everything in Hiroshi's program, I think he has a number of good ideas. "The Power to Compete" is a smart look at the future of a fascinating country.

"Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind," by Yuval Noah Harari. Both Melinda and I read this one, and it has sparked lots of great conversations at our dinner table. Harari takes on a daunting challenge: to tell the entire history of the human race in just 400 pages. He also writes about our species today and how artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and other technologies will change us in the future. Although I found things to disagree with  especially Harari's claim that humans were better off before we started farming  I would recommend "Sapiens" to anyone who's interested in the history and future of our species.

"Seveneves," by Neal Stephenson. I hadn't read any science fiction for a decade when a friend recommended this novel. I'm glad she did. The plot gets going in the first sentence, when the moon blows up. People figure out that in two years a cataclysmic meteor shower will wipe out all life on Earth, so the world unites on a plan to keep humanity going by launching as many spacecraft as possible into orbit. You might lose patience with all the information you'll get about space flight  Stephenson, who lives in Seattle, has clearly done his research  but I loved the technical details. "Seveneves" inspired me to rekindle my sci-fi habit.




A week or two ago I happened to wake up and turn on the TV and Rev. Al Sharpton had someone on as a guest I didn't recognize, a rotund black minister, Mark Burns, with an amiable personality and the self-awareness to realize he couldn't debate any issues with Sharpton. She said so aloud, making me wonder why Sharpton had this Trump-Supporting idiot on his show. He couldn't debate any issues, just parrot Trumpanzee attacks and innuendoes against Hillary Clinton. I turned off the TV and got an extra half hour of sleep.





This week, that same obscure South Carolina pastor has been in the national news... as a fraud. The video from CNN above covers it pretty well. Another self-serving huckster, Burns saw Trump as a meal-ticket and signed on to the Trumpanzee gravy train-- just another one of life's losers trying to dismiss as "political correctness" qualities like education, ability, character and truthfulness. That's the Trumpist following and there are lots of desperate people like Burns hoping for a shortcut to fame and fortune. Trump trots him out to show "the blacks" love and admire him. Trump doesn't admit how much he pays the dishonest Burns for a chance it show he has "black support."





day minute. Burns, of course, blamed the exposure of his lies and shortcomings on Hillary Clinton and political correctness, anyone but himself and his Trumpist cronies. Watch that video up top. That's the character of the kind of people who support Donald J. Trump because that's the character of Donald J. Trump. Burns' claims to having earned a degree from North Greenville University and to have served 6 years in the Army Reserve have been shown to be false and, after first trying to claim that someone manipulated his website-- another lie-- he finally came clean on Friday and admitted he made up his whole bio in an attempt to trick his congregation-- and later the general public-- into thinking he was someone he wasn't. Another follower, like Trumpanzee, of PT Barnum's guiding adage that there's a sucker born everyminute. Burns, of course, blamed the exposure of his lies and shortcomings on Hillary Clinton and political correctness, anyone but himself and his Trumpist cronies. Watch that video up top. That's the character of the kind of people who support Donald J. Trump because that's the characterDonald J. Trump.





Most African-American voters are way too savvy to fall for the load of easy-to-see-through bullshit Trumpanzee and Pastor Burns are trying to sell the public. New polling from the PPP (charts above) show Trump with zero percent favorability among African-American voters, something that's never been seen in the history of presidential polling before! According to that poll, Senor Trumpanzee can expect 3% of the African-American vote, the smallest number any Republican candidate has ever gotten. And a Suffolk University poll the following day showed Trump with support from 2% of African American voters, less than either Jill Stein (4%), Gary Johnson (4%) or undecided (3%).

UPDATE: So Far Trump Isn't Surging With Black Voters




Elizabeth Scharpf is a force. She has a stack of diplomas and a downright intimidating resume. Scharpf, 38, studied at Notre Dame, spent two years researching the Austrian healthcare system on a Fulbright scholarship, worked for three years in global pharmaceuticals and biotech, and then went to Harvard to pursue a dual graduate degree at both the business school and the John F. Kennedy School of Government. In her free time, Scharpf interned for the World Bank in Mozambique. And that was all before Scharpf really got started.

Since graduating from Harvard in 2007, she has had a single-minded focus: giving women and girls around the world access to maxi pads.

While Scharpf was at the World Bank, she was working with local entrepreneurs when she noticed particularly high rates of absenteeism among women. She came to learn that women weren't going to work when they had their periods because maxi pads cost more than a day's wages.

That struck the then 27-year-old from Colts Neck, New Jersey, as absurd. And more than that, it made her angry.

The more research Scharpf did, the more she learned this problem was global  a secret pandemic that women everywhere suffered from but didn't talk about. With her business savvy and experience commercializing health products, she hoped she was uniquely situated to help.

Bernice Huang, an intern Scharpf first brought to Rwanda with her in 2008, blending materials to test their absorbency. Source: Sustainable Health Enterprises

"It's not that I am so passionate about menstruation," she tells CNBC. "I am the person that always forgets when they have their period and is like, 'I hope not today, because I am wearing white pants!'" The thing that really got Scharpf is that "it's symbolic of so many overlooked, taboo things that fall through the cracks." In particular, not having access to sanitary pads affects a woman's ability to take care of herself and get through her day  it affects her dignity. And that was something that Scharpf couldn't stand for. In 2008, Scharpf went to Rwanda with a blender in her backpack in search of a material to make maxi pads with. Looking back, she says that many would call her idealism "naive." Instead, she thinks she's been driven by an "optimistic urgency" that defines entrepreneurship.

A new way to manufacture pads

Scharpf knew that to make pads affordable in Africa would mean developing a production process using locally sourced material. Importation and transportation can become the bulk of the cost of getting a consumer good to remote locations.

At the time, she and her team would put anything they could find into a blender to turn it into a fiber. Then they'd let the material dry overnight and pour Coke on it to see how well it absorbed liquid.

Through trial and error, Scharpf discovered that banana fibers are surprisingly absorbent  and banana trees are everywhere in Rwanda.

With funds from a couple of grants, including social entrepreneurship foundation Echoing Green and Harvard Business School, and the collaboration of students and professors, Scharpf developed and patented a process to turn banana fiber into a fluffy, absorbent material that looks something like cotton. Then, she developed a process to seal the banana fiber fluff into pads with old paper-making equipment.

"We make our pads with no water, very little electricity  not because we aim to be the leanest, greenest machine, but because we had to," says Scharpf. "And we had people from major companies like Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark tell us that this was not possible to create the material that would go in our pads with no chemicals and with little electricity. We figured out how to do it because we had to." Now, nine years later, Scharpf is still doggedly working to make the pads affordable and available in Rwanda. Her company, Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE), has made and distributed almost 200,000 pads to 10,000 girls throughout the country. SHE sells packs of pads for 70 cents, which is 35 percent less expensive than the next cheapest option. SHE also provides 28 production jobs in the local community of Ngoma in the Eastern province of Rwanda, where the main facility is located, and business to 600 local banana farmers, most of whom are women.

Global growth goals

Go! pad with 2 wrapped pads on banana fiber. Source: Sustainable Health Enterprises

SHE is, against all odds, making progress. That's not only due to Scharpf's unwavering dedication, but also due to a partnership that SHE has made with the consumer giant Johnson & Johnson. Its chief technology officer learned about the work Scharpf was doing and believed it could be applied around the world. The innovation department signed on as a technical adviser in March 2015. As part of the agreement, Johnson & Johnson does not have a financial stake in SHE, but does get a front row seat to the team's innovative process. "We believe SHE's development of a scaleable business model could be transferred to other tropical regions, thus creating jobs for women in rural communities and incremental income for local banana farmers, in addition to assisting girls and women in need of sanitary napkins," says Josh Ghaim, the Johnson & Johnson CTO. "We believe that SHE's approach has significant potential for scalability and thus could be an important step towards making women's healthcare more accessible in these regions."

The SHE production team outside their facility in Ngoma, Rwanda. Source: Sustainable Health Enterprises

Banana fibers are a raw material that could hold particular promise for Johnson & Johnson, as it looks to expand into India and China in the future. Also, making consumer products in the location where they will be used  as opposed to manufacturing them and then transporting them to the point of sale  is an interesting technology for the company.

For her part, Scharpf hopes that getting access to the brains, talent and equipment at Johnson & Johnson will help SHE scale production faster. By the end of 2017, SHE aims to distribute maxi pads to 250,000 girls. And within three years, SHE expects to launch in other emerging markets. The ultimate goal is to expand across the globe by replicating the system used in Rwanda.

A banana tree trunk being processed into fiber. Source: Sustainable Health Enterprises
People clap as British Home Secretary Theresa May makes a statement after Andrea Leadsom pulled out of the contest earlier today to become Conservative Party leader outside the Houses of Parliament on July 11, 2016 in London, England.

Officials traveling with U.K. prime minister Theresa May have been warned to take precautions against spies that may attempt to seduce them at the meeting of the 20 largest industrialized economies (G-20) that begins Sunday, The Independent reported on Saturday.

So-called "honey pots" an espionage term for someone who seduces an official for confidential informationhave taken advantage of British diplomats on at least one occasion in the past. In 2008, an official traveling with then prime minister Gordon Brown was targeted by a Chinese spy who swiped his mobile phone as well as documents, the British publication reported.

As a result, U.K. officials are asking May's G-20 traveling party to take precautions, such as mobile devices, free memory sticks and other giveaways from their Chinese hosts. A source told the Independent that the hotel may be bugged, and Beijing may try to intercept emails and other communications.

The report may add a layer of tension to a meeting that has already gotten off to an awkward start. President Barack Obama's official entourage landed in Hangzhou on Saturday, and immediately ran afoul of Chinese authorities.

National Security Adviser Susan Rice got into a spirited confrontation with a Chinese representative at the airport, while another aide was chastised by the same representative over directions the aide was giving to reporters.

The full report can be found on The Independent's website.

Reuters contributed to this article.
A security guard gestures outside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China. Johannes Eisele | AFP | Getty Images

I never should have brought so much lipstick to the G-20. I was assigned to cover the international summit in China, as well as the business-focused "B-20" taking place over the next few days in Hangzhou. This is the first time China is hosting the G-20, so the authorities are taking the event very seriously. The city has been in virtual lock down to ensure the country puts on a good show for world leadersincluding U.S. President Barack Obama.

Yet perhaps China is taking things a bit too seriously.

I got to the security checkpoint outside the hotel where Obama is staying, and Chinese officers waved me to a body scanner while two beefy American agents stood behind. After going through the usual checks, I pulled my handbag off a conveyoronly to be told by the Chinese officers to take out my make-up kit, which contained five different lipsticks (Normally I don't carry so many, but in a rush that morning, threw in everything I had. I began to regret my decision.)

The officer uncapped each tube, twisted it to expose the color, and then carefully set the lipsticks aside. The officer proceeded to open my mascara, eye pencil, eye shadow and eye linerall while announcing what the items were to another guard blocked from my view. Unsure of what the officers were looking for, I offered my phone battery and my iPad but was told to put them away. Instead, one pulled out my black patent Prada heels and studied them closely. I was starting to feel very self-conscious.

The American security agents appeared to find the display very amusing. I heard one exclaim: "Those are nice shoes!" When I looked up and expressed regret about bringing so many lipsticks, one quipped: "Well, you never know what color you might need."

When I asked if the Chinese security officers were this strict with everyone, they nodded and one lamented, "They do that to us, too."





Source: Avon

That statement became more apparent as the day progressed. President Obama arrived at the airport, where chaos ensued between Chinese and U.S. officials. A staircase had not been properly arranged for the president to disembark from the main door of Air Force One. While White House staffers scrambled to find a smaller set of stairs, a Chinese official ordered the U.S. press corps to leave. American officials intervened, which prompted a heated exchange with the Chinese delegate.

Tensions had also flared at the state house on Hangzhou's West Lake, where President Obama eventually met with China's President Xi Jinping. In advance of President Obama's visit, White House staff, protocol officers and secret service were blocked by Chinese security, who challenged them on how many Americans could enter. The disagreement nearly led to a fist fight between one Chinese official assisting the American diplomats and the Chinese guards.

Even an evening stroll for the presidents didn't go without a tussle. Chinese officials had drastically cut the number of U.S. journalists allowed to witness the walk, frustrating reporters as well as White House staff.

At a press briefing Sunday with U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May, Obama attempted to play down the conflict while redirecting attention to broader issues such as climate change.

"We think it's important that the press have access to the work that we're doing - that they have the ability to answer questions. And we don't leave our values and ideals behind when we take these trips," he said. "But none of this detracts from the broader scope of the relationship."

Figurines of G-20 country leaders made by folk artist Wu Xiaoli for the G-20 Hangzhou Summit. Long Wei | VCG | Getty Images
VATICAN CITY  Mother Teresa, the nun who devoted her life to the impoverished and one of the Catholic Church's most iconic figures, was canonized as a saint on Sunday.



Saint Teresa of Kolkata, as she is now known, was canonized by Pope Francis in front of about 120,000 faithful at the Vatican.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner, who died in 1997 and was famed for her work with the poor in India  but fiercely criticized by some  was praised by Francis as a "generous dispenser of divine mercy."

"Her mission to the urban and existential peripheries remains for us today an eloquent witness to God's closeness to the poorest of the poor," the pope said.

"Today, I pass on this emblematic figure of womanhood and of consecrated life to the whole world of volunteers: may she be your model of holiness."

The Vatican handed out 100,000 tickets for the ceremony, but thousands more thronged to the Vatican.

More from NBC News:

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Jeffrey Korczyk from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was visiting the Vatican for a second time with his wife, Tracey. He said the pair had "lucked out" and that witnessing Teresa's canonization was "a once in a lifetime experience."

"Just how she helped everybody  she was so selfless," Tracey Korczyk said.

Jees Thomas, originally from the Kerala region in India, but now living in Italy, waved a large Indian flag with a group of friends on St. Peter's Square.

"This is a blessed day for me," Thomas, a Roman Catholic, said. "Mother Teresa was in India. She did lots of things  helped everyone."

The Vatican announced Sunday it would give Neapolitan pizza to 1,500 poor and homeless people cared for by Teresa's Missionaries of Charity in the Italian cities of Rome, Milan, Florence, Naples and Bologna to honor the occasion.
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Indonesia's finance minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati told CNBC she was optimistic her country could receive a ratings upgrade this year  despite oil being pinned below $50, levels at which she said her country is generally "comfortable." Despite the low price of crude walloping other OPEC nations, Indonesia, which is part of the G-20 group of the world's biggest economies, is managing to ride out the crisis. It has a coveted investment grade credit rating from Moody's Investors Service and Fitch Ratings, but not yet from Standard & Poor's. Indrawati told CNBC she hoped Indonesia's rating might be upgraded in 2016, with the Indonesian government engaged in programs to boost infrastructure spending, open up the private sector and reform taxation.

Barry Kusuma | Getty Images

"We are very much confident  this is very much the focus of all the reform of the fiscal (policies), that we are going to have much more credible, coherent narrative (of) policy," Indrawati told CNBC at the G-20 summit in Hangzhou, China on Sunday. "It's a very strong package (of) macro prudent and the very ambitious structural reform. Not a country in which growth is generated by a bubble activity but real, deep reform that can be sustainable, so I'm optimistic that it could happen," she added. The International Monetary Fund sees Indonesia's economy growing by a healthy 4.9 percent this year and 5.3 percent in 2017.

In June, Standard & Poor's affirmed Indonesia's rating outlook at "BB+" with a positive outlook, implying the country's credit status could be hiked to investment grade. Fitch Ratings and Moody's Investors Service already rank Indonesia in this category, which indicates a debt issuer is less likely to default than peers assigned a "speculative grade" rating.

Oil 'sustained' below $45

Indonesia oil well Fuse | Getty Images

Indonesia is the only OPEC member country in Asia-Pacific and has the largest economy in the south east of the region. It exported $6.4 billion worth of petroleum in 2015, according to OPEC data.

Indrawati forecast crude oil would remain at today's historically low levels between $40 and $45 per barrel, baring disruption from security problems or natural disasters. "If we look at the purely supply and demand, I think that is going to be sustained," she told CNBC. "We already have put in a budget of around $40-$45 and (at) that level, we're looking at all the situation in the supply side of the oil and gas, as well as the demand side, I'm comfortable with that level," the minister added separately. WTI crude futures for October fell back below $45 last week. Light crude has rallied by around 19 percent this year, but remains far below the levels above $100 traded at prior to the commodities rout of July 2014 onward. Petroleum and natural gas are major industries for Indonesia, but manufacturing, tourism, agriculture and mining are also significant. The country exported 315,100 of barrels of crude oil per day in 2015, according to statistics from OPEC, which Indonesia rejoined in July.

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Here's what the Mint's 2017 quarters will look like

George Rogers Clark leading his men through the flooded plains approaching Fort Sackville graces the reverse for the George Rogers Clark National Historical Park quarter dollar.

The Ellis Island (Statue of Liberty National Monument) quarter dollar depicts an immigrant family approaching Ellis Island with a mixture of hope and uncertainty.

Frederick Douglass, with his District of Columbia home in the background, is depicted on the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site quarter dollar.

An aerial view of mounds in the Marching Bear Group is featured in the design for the 2017 Effigy Mounds National Monument quarter dollar.

Approved designs for the reverses of the five America the Beautiful quarter dollars to be released in 2017 were announced Sept. 1 by the U.S. Mint.

The designs and the national park or historic site for which each America the Beautiful quarter dollar is to be issued are:

Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa: depicts an aerial view of Native American mounds in the Marching Bear Group; designed by Artistic Infusion Program designer Richard Masters, sculptured by U.S. Mint Sculptor-Engraver Renata Gordon.

Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in Washington, D.C.: depicts Frederick Douglass seated at a writing desk with his home in Washington, D.C., in the background; designed by AIP designer Thomas Hipschen and sculptured by Mint Sculptor-Engraver Phebe Hemphill.

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Ozark National Scenic Riverways in Missouri: reflects Alley Mill, a steel roller mill built in 1894. This merchant mill was used to convert wheat into flour. Much of the original milling equipment is still in place, and visitors to the park can tour the mill; designed by AIP designer Ronald D. Sanders, sculptured by Gordon.

Ellis Island National Monument (Statue of Liberty) for New Jersey: depicts an immigrant family approaching Ellis Island with a mixture of hope and uncertainty. The hospital building can be seen in the background; designed by AIP designer Barbara Fox and sculptured by Hemphill.

George Rogers Clark National Historical Park in Indiana: depicts George Rogers Clark leading his men through the flooded plains approaching Fort Sackville. Designed by AIP designer Frank Morris and sculptured by Mint Sculptor-Engraver Michael Gaudioso.

For a review of the initially proposed designs, check here.
Back in June, as a caption to a Trumpanzee gif I wrote that "Hillary isn't my idea of an honest politician but her level of crookedness is nowhere near Trump's," a corollary, I suppose of the lesser-of-two-evils theorem of American politics. Although neither has been charged-- let alone in prison-- it's been known for several months that Trumpanzee bribed Florida's shady Attorney General, Pam Bondi, to drop her investigation into the fraud charges against Trumpanzee University, which had ripped of hundreds of Florida students. Worse, yet, Bondi solicited the bribe from Trump-- a quid pro quo if I ever heard one! AP reported then that Bondi "personally solicited a political contribution from Donald Trump around the same time her office deliberated joining an investigation of alleged fraud at Trump University and its affiliates." The $25,000 was funneled to her PAC-- And Justice For All, illegally, through a tax-deductible charity, a Trump family foundation, on Sept. 17, 2013-- four days after Bondi's office publicly announced she was considering joining a New York state probe of Trump University's activities. As soon as she basically shook Trump down for the $25,000 her office claimed there was "insufficient grounds to proceed." That in spite of "thousands of pages of records related to consumer complaints about Trump University and its affiliates filed with Bondi's office... Many of the Trump-related consumers alleged that they paid money for training materials and personalized instruction which were never delivered." Bind lied to the media and claimed she only got one complain, when in fact, there were at least 20.





Washington Post, reported that Senor Trumpanzee Late last week, David Fahrenthold, writing for the, reported that Senor Trumpanzee paid an IRS fine for how he paid the bribe , rather than anything to do with the criminal nature of the bribe itself.





Trump's charitable foundation-- through which he funnels other people's money into "charities" he wants to be perceived to be supporting-- paid Bondi's PAC $25,000 to shut down the case, an improper use of a charitable foundation. Slyly Trump tried to cover his tracks by claiming the gift was for an actual charity in Kansas. Once exposed, the Trumpanzee Organization called it a mistake and agreed to the small fine. A Trumpanzee lackey claimed "It was just an honest mistake... It wasnt done intentionally to hide a political donation, it was just an error."

[T]he Trump Foundation did not notify the IRS of this political donation. Instead, Trump's foundation listed a donation-- also for $25,000-- to a Kansas charity with a name similar to that of Bondi's political group. In fact, Trump's foundation had not given the Kansas group any money.



The prohibited gift was, in effect, replaced with an innocent-sounding but nonexistent donation.



...[W]hen the Trump Foundation sent in its tax filings that year, it compounded the original error by leaving out any mention of a political gift. When the IRS form asked if the Trump Foundation had spent money for political purposes that year, the foundation wrote "No."



Then, the Trump Foundation told the IRS about a gift that did not exist.



The foundation told the IRS that it had given $25,000 to a third group, a charity in Kansas with a similar name, "Justice for All." In fact, the Trump Foundation had not actually sent the Kansas group any money.



This new, incorrect listing had the effect of camouflaging the prohibited gift. Trump's CFO said that the listing of the Kansas group was another mistake, made by the foundation's accountants.

Meanwhile, Bondi has attempted to return the bribe that is likely to end her political career and force her to stand trial one day, but Trump has refused to accept it back!





"Lock up Crooked Hillary Clinton!"




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Zero percent import duties have taken a bite out of the domestic market.

Vietnam's fruit imports skyrocketed in the first seven months of the year following a series of free agreements that have slashed import duties.

Fruit imports cost the country $420.74 million in the first seven months, jumping 36.4 percent on-year, the Voice of Vietnam reported on Sunday, quoting data from the Ministry of Industry and Trade.

Thailand was the country's main supplier in that period with import value of $163 million, up 70 percent on-year, followed by China with $102.52 million (up nearly 30 percent), and the U.S. $41.2 million. Notably, imports from Australia surged 212 percent to $24.6 million.

According to Lang Son Province's Customs Department, Vietnam imported 4,800 tons of small mangoes through Lang Sons Tan Thanh Border Gate with China from February 1-August 1 this year. The declared import price at Tan Thanh was around $160/ton or VND3,600 (16 cents)/kg, but the fruit was sold for up to VND35,000/kg in Ho Chi Minh City.

Vietnam has abolished import taxes for most fruit from China and ASEAN nations under the ASEAN-China FTA and the ASEAN Trade in Goods Agreement.

Related news:

> Chinese fined in Vietnam for illegal dragon fruit dealing

> Mekong Delta fruit farmers being killed off by saline intrusion

> Vietnam's appetite for imported fruit grows in first half of 2016
Ragtag furthers big-screen mission through A Community Thrives

Ragtag Film Society took home $12,000 in grant money, which will further its day-to-day and big-screen mission.
Millions of dollars could flow in on the back of more than 20 cooperation agreements.

In what will be the first visit by a French president in 12 years, Francois Hollande is calling on Vietnam from September 5-7 to bolster bilateral ties in a wide range of sectors.

During the visit, the two sides are expected to materialize their strategic partnership signed in 2013 to strengthen cooperation in politics and foreign relations, security and defense, trade and investment, science and technology, and education and training.

Apart from official meetings with Vietnamese leaders, Hollande is scheduled to deliver a speech at the Vietnam National University in Hanoi and visit Ho Chi Minh City, where he will meet with the citys leaders and the business community. He is also expected to visit the Heart Institute in Ho Chi Minh City, one of the beacons of cooperation between the two nations.

The two sides are expected to sign more than 20 cooperation agreements during the visit. One of the deals will be a service contract between Airparif, an organization responsible for monitoring the air quality in the IIe de France, and Hanoi's municipal government. The purpose of the contract is to help improve air quality in Hanoi by setting up a monitoring system.

Another agreement will involve the French Development Agency (AFD), which is expected to provide a 52.5 million euros loan package and 1 million euros of non-refundable aid to help Vietnams central province of Ha Tinh, the northern province of Ninh Binh and the southern city of Can Tho fight rising sea water.

The AFD is also expected to contribute another 100 million euros this year and 50 million euros from 2017-2018 to help Vietnam deal with climate change.

In June this year, Vietnam and France agreed to establish a strategic partnership in defense.

France is Vietnams fifth largest trade partner in Europe, behind Germany, the U.K., the Netherlands and Italy, with two-way trade reaching $4.2 billion in 2015, up 19 percent year-on-year. The figure stood at $919 million in the first quarter of this year.

Vietnam mainly exports footwear, garments and textiles, household utensils, seafood, machinery and electronic components to France while importing aviation equipment, pharmaceuticals, mechanical and electronic products, chemicals and alcoholic beverages from the country.

With 461 projects worth over $3.4 billion, France is now the third largest European investor in Vietnam, after the Netherlands and the U.K., and ranks 16th among 114 countries and territories investing in the Southeast Asian nation.

Related news:

> Beyond the baguette: France's food legacy in Vietnam

> France seizes 2,000 dead seahorses en route to Vietnam

> Classical concert: France Alumni
Last week, thousands of my physician colleagues and I received a letter from the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy. He asked us to change our behavior in prescribing pain medicines.

Around the same time, I was seeing a middle-aged man who had been admitted to the hospital for the fifth time in the same number of months for "pain."

A week earlier another patient burst out at the nurse, "I am not taking my antibiotics until I get my pain medicine." His skin infection did not warrant narcotic pain medicine.

And in yet another case, the nurse found a patient's bedside drawer full of pain medications. "The drugs have a good street price," the patient told me.

Undeniably, our nation is in the midst of an opioid epidemic, and Tennessee is at its epicenter.

Each year, the number of prescriptions written for powerful pain pills in America is enough for each adult to have their own pain pill bottle. Tennessee is ranked among the top three states in the nation with the highest painkiller prescription rate, along with Alabama and West Virginia. And the prescription rate of one drug, oxymorphone, is 22 times higher in Tennessee than in Minnesota.

Where are people who abuse prescription pain medicine getting them? A 2011 national survey found that 55 percent receive them free from family or friends and 16 percent stole or bought them from family and friends. Only a small number, 17 percent, were prescription medicines. But that is likely higher in our state. And even 17 percent amounts to a lot of addictive pain pills.

Doctors have many options to treat pain: non-opioid and nonaddictive options include Tylenol, aspirin, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS) like Aleve. There are also non-pharmaceutical options, such as massage, biofeedback, and acupuncture that may help relieve some types of pain. In contrast, opioids are powerful drugs which can be addictive. Common opioids include hydrocodone, oxycodone (formulated in Percocet) codeine, morphine, as well as heroin.

"The addiction began insidiously," one friend told me about her husband. He began by taking a few Percocets for back pain. Over the years, he visited emergency room after emergency room and kept changing doctors in a quest to keep a steady supply of opioids. Eventually he overdosed and nearly died. This is often the case when a one-time prescription creates such a strong urge that patients seek or steal pain medicines from family or friends, demand that their doctor prescribe medicine or even buy it on the street.

The outcome is lethal. In 2014, 1,263 people died in Tennessee from overdose (the majority of them from opioids) which is more deaths than roadway vehicular accidents.

To solve the opioid addiction problem, we need to understand how we got here. For a long time, many patients suffered needlessly from untreated pain. To solve this problem, over the past two decades "treating pain" became a major priority. We even made "pain" a 5th vital sign along with temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, and respiratory rate. Meanwhile, the drug companies marketed the drugs heavily to doctors, at times even incorrectly stating that the opioids were not addictive.

The problem is that we, the doctors, lacked proper training in treating pain with opioids: when to start, when to stop, when to wean, when to recognize an addict and offer help. There was no proper database to track if patients were getting drugs from other doctors.

It's also difficult for physicians to determine when pain is genuine. In some cases it's clearer  the pain of some cancers or after surgery for example. But in many other cases like back pain or abdominal pain, it's harder to know. We need to conduct detailed evaluations, or refer patients to pain experts. In addition, we should only prescribe limited number of pills, not a 30-day supply, as is commonly done.

Curbing most addictions, such as smoking and alcohol, depends on changing the behavior of patients. The opioid addiction is different. It partially depends on changing the behavior of doctors who overprescribe the highly restricted, controlled pain medications.

The surgeon general is asking us to take a pledge as explained on the website TurntheTideRx.org  so we need to educate ourselves. This week, I take a required training course in opioid drug treatment to maintain my license. Also, a controlled substance monitoring database tncsmd.com now tracks what narcotics have been prescribed to a patient.

Lastly, we must change the lens through which we see opioid addiction. This is a terrible disease, not a moral failing.

Dr. Manoj Jain is an infectious disease physician.
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Basking in the spotlight that follows former presidents of the United States around when they take to the road, Habitat for Humanity of Greater Memphis has a lot to celebrate these days.

With Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter on the scene, it would be easy to overlook the leadership exhibited by Dwayne Spencer in shepherding the nonprofit to its current success.

Consider Spencer's personal story. For years, the 49-year-old president and CEO of Memphis Habitat didn't talk much about his Fayette County roots. Only recently did we learn that he grew up in circumstances that probably were more difficult than many of his Habitat clients of today.

He "lived with his grandmother, his mother and his aunt in a little house outside Somerville," The Commercial Appeal's Geoff Calkins wrote. "Only, it wasn't a house, so much as a shack. The ceiling and walls were caving in. The only water came from a single faucet, like an outside faucet, that stuck straight up from the ground."

Spencer emerged from that background and into a successful academic and professional career that eventually led him, in 2001, to the top job at Memphis Habitat.

Two years later he faced a crisis. A series of stinging articles by The CA's Marc Perrusquia revealed that 40 percent of Habitat for Humanity of Greater Memphis' homeowners had filed for bankruptcy after moving into their homes.

The city's bankruptcy epidemic, easy-credit schemes, predatory home-lending practices and other factors had erased much of the impact of what had become one of the city's most popular charities.

Owners had refinanced their homes for cash, taking costly second mortgages and accepting short-term loans with triple-digit interest, erasing the financial impact of Habitat's zero-interest mortgage and low payments.

Spencer and other Habitat executives responded with a financial education initiative and a repayment plan and began talks with a local bank to restructure its eligibility criteria. Strict new policies were put in place to fend off predators.

Habitat for Humanity regained its footing and under Spencer's leadership grew from a staff of 10 to 38. Its annual $1 million budget grew twelvefold.

Spencer thought big. Like bring-Jimmy-and-Rosalynn-Carter-to-Memphis big.

His successful pitch to the Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project made an impression on the Tennessee Housing Development Agency, which decided to provide a $1 million matching grant to help Habitat take full advantage of the former president's once-a-year happening.

The work project in late August brought hundreds of volunteers to Memphis, people coming together from different ethnic backgrounds, religions, and socioeconomic status, all working together, including the Carters, to build homes and enhance a neighborhood.

Because of the project, 21 new homes on a 10-acre tract in North Memphis known as Bearwater Park will eventually rise on lots donated by Hope Presbyterian Church's Oasis of Hope ministry. Six repair jobs for elderly homeowners and 10 beautification projects will be completed.

Of course, that's only part of the story for Habitat for Humanity of Greater Memphis.

Since its founding in 1983, Memphis Habitat has built more than 445 homes in the Memphis area. It has completed 80-plus repair projects in Uptown Memphis and funded the construction of 64 homes abroad.

Eighty percent of Habitat homeowners are making their mortgage payments on time, Spencer reported recently, and the foreclosure rate for them is only .03 percent.

It has engaged in various efforts designed to stabilize neighborhoods in Memphis, such as working with Le Bonheur Children's Hospital to remove structural asthma triggers in at least 150 homes where children have been sent to the ER.

It has helped instill in its clients a better understanding of the power of homeownership as well as the responsibilities that come with it.

The organization under Spencer's leadership has shown conclusively that it deserves the continued support, financial and otherwise, of corporate sponsors, individual donors and volunteers.
It's set to be an 'upgrade' from the iconic Dinh Le - Nguyen Xi streets where books have been sold for decades.

December 19 Street will become Hanoi's first book street to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the National Resistance Day.

It will stretch 200 meters, connecting Hai Ba Trung and Ly Thuong Kiet streets and is set to open on its namesake day.

Local authorities will manage this cultural corner. Funds to establish the venue will come from the city budget and stalls will be available for prospective vendors including booksellers and publishers at a fee. Book content will be examined by the citys department of information and communications.

The book street will follow the design inspired by Hanoi's Old Quarter. Bookshelves will be hung on public walls as a way to call for donations and to maximize space for readers and book introduction events.

December 19 Street is considered to be an upgraded version of Dinh Le  Nguyen Xi streets where books have been sold for decades.

Last February, the spring book event held in Hanoi attracted thousands of people and brought in VND4 billion ($178,800) worth of books in three days.

The decision to establish the book venue in Hanoi follows the earlier success of Saigons own Nguyen Van Binh book street, which has now become the southern hub for books. After six months, 200,000 books have been sold, raking in about VND15 billion ($675,000) in revenue.

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> World Book Day Celebration at Bookworm

> Publisher recalls history book containing doctored Vietnam War photo
SHARE Daniel Sumrok

By Daniel Sumrok, Special to Viewpoint

In my four decades as a physician, I have seen the path of destruction that addiction leaves on individuals, families and communities.

I have served patients from Connecticut to California. From Appalachia to the Navajo, Apache, Sioux and Hopi reservations. From Eskimos in Alaska to the Shuar people in the Amazon jungle. And, now from rural West Tennessee to urban and suburban Memphis. My calling and my passion have grown out of the awareness of how addiction affects all of public health.

Each of the top 10 causes of death in the United States, which together account for 80 percent of all deaths in the nation, has links to substance use. As many as 24 percent of all deaths in this country, have substance use as a direct cause.

As one of the first 106 doctors in North America to be recognized as a diplomate in Addiction Medicine, I was thrilled on March 16, 2016, when the American Board of Medical Specialties approved recognition of Addiction Medicine as the newest subspecialty in medicine.

Physicians and scientists have been working since the time of Hippocrates to describe the impact of substance use and to develop effective approaches for treatment. But today, addiction science is exploding beyond myths, thanks to scientific inquiry that ranges from genetics to brain imaging.

As more is understood, we are moving away from pseudoscience concerning addictions to evidence-based science. As a result, effective, attractive, affordable and accessible treatments are emerging.

At the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, we recognize the vast problem of addiction and are committed to being a leader in the solution. Our new Center for Addiction Science in the College of Medicine is dedicated to diagnosis and treatment of substance use and its impact across the community.

This fall, we expect to receive national recognition as a Center of Excellence during a meeting at the White House. An event in Memphis will follow, where we will outline our plan to battle addictive disorders in the Mid-South.

Our efforts span addiction in pregnancy, neonatal abstinence syndrome in newborns exposed to addictive substances in the womb, adolescent and child psychiatry, adult and geriatric addictions, detox and medical stabilization, residential and outpatient care. They also encompass research to better identify causes and treatments.

It now appears that substance use disorders are caused by psychological trauma in the form of adverse childhood experiences and other psychological damage, mediated by genetics and environment, that physically change the way the human brain functions. Changes can be seen on functional scans of the brains of people who have suffered trauma.

Traumatized brains seek comfort and reward through the systems of the brain that control pleasure, motivation, satisfaction and reward reinforcement.

Desperate brains seek comfort desperately, often resulting in substance use, and hold on tight, even when this results in negative consequences like jail, disrupted families, hepatitis C or loss of a job.

It is clear that impacting the suffering of addiction calls for recognition of the role of trauma as a cause. Reducing addictions in the future will take a commitment by all to create safety and security for our children at home, at school and in the community.

It will also take new approaches to diagnosis and treatment. At UTHSC, we are training our medical students, residents, fellows and physician assistants across all specialties to recognize addiction through the lens of evidence, which is growing rapidly through research.

We are beginning genetics and other research to augment the science base. Our addiction medicine fellowship training program began July 1, bringing recognition to UTHSC as a national leader in pioneering this training effort.

Everyone knows our community is severely affected by addiction. We are not alone. Our success as a nation, a community, and even as a species, may depend on our approach.

Dr. Daniel Sumrok is an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center and directs the Center for Addiction Science.
SHARE The body of Boris Nemtsov, a former Russian deputy prime minister and opposition leader lies at Red Square with St. Basil Cathedral in the background in Moscow, Russia, Saturday, Feb. 28, 2015. Russia's Interior Ministry says Boris Nemtsov, a leading opposition figure and former deputy prime minister, has been shot and killed near the Kremlin. Nemtsov, a sharp critic of President Vladimir Putin, was killed early Saturday. His death comes just a day before a major opposition rally in Moscow.(AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin)

By David J. Kramer, Special to the Washington Post

Our next president should recognize that Russia under Vladimir Putin is an authoritarian, kleptocratic regime that poses a serious threat to our values, interests and allies.

We should contain and deter Russian aggression by reassuring our NATO allies that we will defend them, fulfilling the collective-defense guarantees of Article 5 and reaffirming our support for the sovereignty, territorial integrity and aspirations of Russia's neighbors to join NATO or the European Union. We must also support those living inside Russia who are struggling for a better, more democratic future.

The problem boils down to the nature of the Putin regime. Since coming to power 17 years ago (initially as prime minister) by ordering brutal force against Russia's region of Chechnya, Putin has demonstrated a ruthless willingness to do whatever is necessary to stay in power. Any threat  real or imagined  is dealt with decisively, whether it originates inside Russia or abroad.

Since he returned to the presidency in May 2012 after a four-year stint as prime minister, Putin has launched the worst crackdown on human rights in Russia in decades. Critics, journalists and opposition figures are regularly harassed and arrested  even killed, as happened to Boris Nemtsov just yards from the Kremlin in February 2015.

In Ukraine, Putin couldn't stomach the prospect of citizens demanding an end to corruption and deeper integration with the West. Were Ukraine to succeed, it might pose a threatening alternative to Putin's corrupt authoritarianism in Russia.

So he invaded Ukraine in late February 2014, starting with the annexation of Crimea. Since then, nearly 10,000 Ukrainians have been killed trying to defend their country against Putin's aggression. The next American president should provide lethal military assistance to help Ukrainians defend themselves.

Putin also intervened to prop up the murderous Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and the vast majority of Russian military strikes there have hit non-Islamic State targets. He threatens countries that host NATO's missile defense system or that want to join NATO or the European Union.

To justify his way of governing, he and his propagandists demonize the United States, perpetuating the myth that the United States is the biggest threat to Russia. His zero-sum way of thinking, demand for recognition of a Russian sphere of influence, interference in elections in other countries (even attempting to meddle in U.S. elections) and support for like-minded authoritarian leaders mean that Putin's interests and ours are almost diametrically opposite.

The next U.S. administration should recognize that the nature of the Putin regime precludes real partnership between the United States and Russia and vastly limits areas of cooperation. Increasing engagement will not alter that  George W. Bush and Barack Obama tried and failed  and even risks appearing desperate, which Putin would exploit as weakness on our part.

We should stay true to our values and restore the notion of "linkage" by making clear that Putin's mistreatment of his own people  and his neighbors  will adversely affect our bilateral ties. The next administration should implement more aggressively the Magnitsky Act for gross human rights abuses and maintain  even ramp up  sanctions against Russia for its ongoing violation of Ukraine's sovereignty.

And we should make sure that Putin's best export  corruption  does not pollute our own way of doing business.

David J. Kramer is senior director for human rights and democracy at the McCain Institute for International Leadership and a former assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor in the George W. Bush administration.
Somewhere in Beijing, almost as I write, Nick Timothy is calculating whether to sleep with his beard inside or outside the sheets, as he solemnly removes his pinstriped suit from within them. (Theresa Mays co-Chief of Staff has no wish to be filmed removing it outside them by a hidden camera.) Earlier, he has courteously evaded the gorgeous, pouting Chinese cultural attache who indicated that she wished to join him there, in order to continue their passionate discussion of Joe Chamberlains ideas about clean water provision. (He doesnt want to follow in the footsteps of the Gordon Brown-era SpAd who acted otherwise, and woke up in the morning minus his Blackberry and half the contents of his briefcase.)

As he does so, he is pondering not only his view of his hosts, as shared with ConservativeHome readers (rational concerns about national security are being swept to one side because of the desperate desire for Chinese trade and investment), but his approach to foreign affairs as whole (we need to rediscover the principles of a traditional, realist, conservative foreign policy. Value stability. Respect sovereignty. Do not make foreign policy part of an ideological crusade. Do not try to recreate the world in your own image. Do not, however much you might disapprove of a dictators abuse of human rights, use that as a pretext for regime change. Always act on the basis of the national interest. Above all, understand the risk involved when things change in complex and volatile states).

It is all too easy to assume that Mays views are always the same as Timothys  understandably so, given her decision to put George Osbornes plan for Chinese investment in Hinckley Point on hold. But the context within which he wrote those last words for his site offer a clue to her view of foreign policy. He was writing for this site about the Chilcot report, and May is the first post Iraq-war Tory leader. I do not mean by this that she came to the Commons after it. That is palpably not so, since she was first elected to Westminster six years earlier. Indeed, she not only voted in favour of the invasion, but viewed the run-up to the vote from a senior vantage, since she was a member of the Shadow Cabinet at the time.

Rather, I mean that she is the first leader of her party since the war not to be emotionally shaped or even scarred by it when it comes to foreign affairs. Iain Duncan Smith strongly supported the war at the time. Michael Howard later fell out badly with George W.Bush, then Americas President, over his criticism of Tony Blairs conduct of it. In opposition, David Cameron distanced himself from liberal intervention abroad (we cannot drop democracy from 10,000 feet  and we shouldnt try). In government, he moved closer to it, persuasing the Commons to back military action against Gaddafi in Libya and failing to do so over missile strikes against Assad in Syria. But all alike have lived in the shadow of Blairs decision to pursue military action.

Iraq, however, seems less important in shaping Mays view of the world than her long sojourn in Marsham Street, where she worked as the longest-serving Home Secretary since the war. Like her former and present SpAd, she tends to peer out at it through the prism of security. Like him again, she prizes the ideal of the national interest (which is already being deployed to re-shape aid policy). Like him, too, she is cool and cautious about approaching the outside world. She has no record of engagement with America, let alone the Republicans. (If Donald Trump becomes President, theirs will not be a diplomatic marriage made in heaven.) She speaks warmly of China, echoing Osbornes hope of a golden era, but acts coldly: she will not be rushed into giving a final verdict on the Hinckley Point plan.

She is due to meet Vladimir Putin. As Home Secretary, she will have looked at Russia, too, through the prism of security, presiding over the Litvinenko Inquiry report. But her focus as Prime Minister will be closer to home. Todays Sunday Telegraph reports that she wants trade talks with Australia. This is doubtless partly to take the shine off Barak Obama sticking to his back of the queue line about a US-UK trade deal, but it is a clear enough sign of her priority. May will not be able to escape those unknown unknowns, as Donald Rumsfeld called them, or even known unknowns like further fall-out from Islamist extremism. But her focus will be on dealing with the biggest post-war policy challenge that a British Prime Minister has faced  dealing with the consequences of the Brexit vote.

There is a central paradox. At the coming Party Conference, May and her colleagues will champion prospective trade deals and proclaim a Global Britain. But she be looking inward to look outward: at a Commons where roughly three quarters of MPs were pro-Remain (including a majority within her own party; at a Lords where the pro-Remain majority is even bigger; at Scotland, where Nicola Sturgeon is manoeuvering to force a second independence referendum, and at Northern Ireland, where she will have to square a particular policy of no border controls with a more general policy of toughening them. Looking further afield, she is unlikely to have Blair-style illusions of a special relationship with Americas President. Abroad if not at home, Brexit is everything, Brexit is all.
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Amidst All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) justifying polygamy, saying it meets social and moral needs and the provision for it stems from concern and sympathy for women, facts suggest the the practice is down from 5.7 per cent of Muslim families in 1961 to 2.55 per cent in 2006. The latest figures of polygamy, released by the third National Family Health Survey (NFHS), carried out in 2006, also show that two per cent women reported that their husbands had more than one wife. It found that polygamy was prevalent among 1.77 per cent Hindus, down from 5.8 per cent in 1961.The 1961 figures  based on Census of India data  also show that among tribals it was then widely prevalent: 15.25 of them were polygamous.Crucially, while the Hindu personal law outlaws bigamy and polygamy, the Muslim personal law does not. AIMPLB said in an affidavit to the Supreme Court, "Quran, Hadith and the consensus view allow Muslim men to have up to four wives", adding, while Islam permits polygamy, it does not encourage it."Since polygamy is endorsed by primary Islamic sources, it cannot be dubbed as something prohibited. Where women outnumber men and polygamy is not permitted, women will be forced into leading spinster's life, AIMPLB said.Contrary to the AIMPLB, the Bhartiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA) has said, the Muslim community needs to have a law against polygamy, to move towards a society that treats women with dignity and equality. But BMMA also said, We don't imagine that just passing the laws mean things will change. At the end of the day, there is no substitute for proper grassroots activism. paper based on NFHS data on the subject said, In modern times, a person is bound by the marriage laws laid down by their religion and have to be adhered to and any deviation from the norms are considered to be illegal. Until recently, no scientific data also was available at the national or regional level to assess whether polygamy is still practiced or is non-existent.It added, For the first time data required to study and understand such marriage practices was collected as part of the 2005-06 NFHS. Data was collected from both women and men  women were asked a direct question whether besides herself, her husband had other wives and men were asked if they currently have one wife or more than one wife.The paper said, Preliminary analysis of this data reveals some interesting findings on this aspect of marriage. In India as a whole, two percent of women reported that their husband had other wives besides herself. Urban-rural differentials are marginal (1.5% in urban areas and 2% in rural areas).Husbands older than women, women with less education are more likely to have multiple wives than husbands of younger women and women with higher levels of education. Spouses of women age less than 30 have about 1.35 partners whereas husbands of women age 30 or more have 2.22 to 2.51 partners, the paper said.It added, One interesting finding is that women across religious groups  Hindu (1.77 partners), Muslim (2.55 partners), Christian (2.35 partners), Buddhist (3.41 partners) have reported that their husbands have multiple wives. It is more common for husbands of women belonging to scheduled castes and tribes to have multiple wives than women belonging to other caste/tribe groups.Differentials in this characteristic are not only by background characteristics of the women but also a clear regional variation emerges from the findings of the survey, the paper said, adding, Polygamy is more prevalent in the Eastern (2.11 partners), Northeastern (3.20 partners) and Southern (3.02 partners) regions.It further said, In the northern and central regions, it is non-existent as the women from these regions have reported their husbands to be having only one partner on an average.The general thought in India is that marriage is practiced mainly for progeny, i.e., to have children to continue the lineage. Also, we need to understand marriage practices in the context of strong son preference that exist in most parts of India, the paper said.It added, The data clearly shows that husbands of women with no children are more likely to have multiple wives (2.51 partners) than women who have at least one child (1.80 partners).
People shop for remaining stocks of insect repellent products at a pharmacy in Singapore September 2, 2016. Photo by Reuters/Edgar Su

Monitoring will be expanded to outpatient medical stations.

Vietnam has put several high-risk locations on high alert following reports of the Zika virus spreading across Singapore and Malaysia.

On September 1, the Ministry of Health convened an online meeting with authorities from Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, provinces in the Central Highlands and the central province of Khanh Hoa to discuss ways to prevent the disease from entering Vietnam, VietnamPlus reported on September 3.

Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are the two main air gateways to Vietnam, while Khanh Hoa is a popular tourist destination.

Vietnams General Department of Preventive Medicine said the Ministry of Health will use advanced screening technology to diagnose cases of the Zika virus. The Trioplex test, provided by the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention, started this month, and is able to detect chikungunya, dengue and Zika in a single test.

Representatives at the meeting also agreed that monitoring should be be expanded to outpatient medical stations, where patients with early symptoms often go for health checks.

Vietnams National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology will also hold training courses for medical workers across the country to show them how to test patients.

From April to early August, Vietnam confirmed three cases of the Zika virus in Ho Chi Minh City, Nha Trang and the central province of Phu Yen.

Authorities in Singapore said they had detected 151 cases of the Zika virus, including a second pregnant woman, as of September 1. The government said that half of the cases reported previously were foreigners, mainly from China, India and Bangladesh, and most had already recovered, according to Reuters.

The United States, Australia and other countries have added Singapore to the growing list of places that pregnant women or those trying to conceive have been warned to avoid.

Meanwhile, Reuters quoted Malaysian officials as saying Sunday that the country is bracing for more Zika cases after detecting the first locally infected patient, which could further stretch a health system struggling with dengue, another mosquito-borne virus that can be fatal.

Zika is primarily spread by mosquitoes but can also be transmitted through unprotected sex with an infected person. A case of suspected transmission through a blood transfusion in Brazil has raised questions about other ways it may be spread, according to Reuters.

Related news:

> Southeast Asia needs to up its game to combat Zika: experts

> Singapore steps up Zika prevention effort as confirmed cases rise to 56

> Malaysia confirms first Zika case, victim had visited Singapore
A: Things have changed considerably. Dalits are far more politically aware than what they were earlier. While I live in Lucknow, I belong to Mominpur village in Unnao district. After a gap of 30 years, I went to my village. I met all those whom I knew them. I remember, how if a Brahmin passed by, we had to stand up in respect. Now no more. My uncle, very old, told me, under no circumstance, this old order should return. Now, you can see Dalit youths joking on Brahmin priests (pandas)  I heard one of them asking a panda, Where are you going my dear?, and the answer came, To perform puja at someone's place. Pat came the answer: You you are going to get some alms (bakshish)? Go go... Hope you get a good sum. Good luck. I wouldnt imagine this type of remark three decades ago.

A: The Una incident, in which four Dalit youths were flogged by cow vigilantes on July 11, was a turning point in UP politics. It helped Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) leader Mayawati take the centrestage, pushing in the backdrop the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). If till then the Dalits were still in a dilemma, Una made it clear that the cow vigilantes (go rakshaks) were not just against the Muslims but also against the Dalits.A: The go rakshaks would attack any Muslim trader taking cattle from one place to another for trading. The attacks were common, even on those transporting cows to cattle fairs, which are common in UP. It has destroyed Muslims' hold over cattle trade. The trade has passed on to Hindus now. Muslims fear transporting animals. However, Dalits seemed less concerned, even if their disillusionment with Prime Minsiter Narendra Modi had begun. With Una, tables turned. The video which went viral showed go rakshaks beating up Dalit youths. It was seen by large sections of Dalits. It had a wide impact. Dalits for the first time found that they too were the targets.A: Even if they were, they didn't come to light. However, just a fortnight after the Una incident, four Dalits were beaten up by 20 go rakshaks in Tagrohi village near Lucknow. The Dalits had to run for their life. First Information Report (FIR) was filed. This triggered protests. Dharnas were organized.A: True. First the Dalits became infuriated after Union minister VK Singh, who kicked up a row with his remark that the Centre cannot be blamed if somebody throws a stone at a dog. He was referring to the Faridabad Dalit burning incident, in which two toddlers died on October 19-20 night. Thereafter came the suicide of Rohith Vemula. This was the first incident which brought Muslims and Dalits closer to each other. Though belonging to Hyderabad, Vemula had planned to show the film Muzaffarnagar Baqi Hai, a film of one of the worst communal riots in UP. Frequent attempts to prove that he was not a Dalit backfired. The Dalits in UP reacted angrily. They saw the suicide as an attempt by the Modi administration to cow down a young and brilliant Dalit scholar. The Dalits took out rallies in protest in every district, in every block. The Una incident was the last straw, which turned the anger against the go rakshaks and the BJP, which supports them.A: This appears to be the scenario, as of today. Already, thanks to Una, Mayawati has become a front-runner for the UP assembly polls, which are likely to take place in February next year. No doubt, especially in western UP, where a large number of Muslims are former landlords (zamindars), there has been a strong contradiction between them and Dalits. Yet, things have changed, thanks to Una. Remember, Dalits form 22 per cent of UP population, and Muslims 17 per cent.A: Well, in my calculation, of Dalits, Chamars form 12 per cent of UP population. They will go with Mayawati lock stock and barrel. As for other sections of Dalits anywhere between 60 and 80 per cent will support Mayawati. Coming to Muslims, in western UP, the situation may not be as good for Mayawati. Here, the Samajwadi Party support base among Muslims will remain intact. But things will be different in rest of the state. Wherever they see a winning BSP candidate, the Muslims will vote for her or him. They don't want BJP, it is clear.A: The Urdu newspapers, which would hardly support the Dalit cause, have suddenly begun highlighting the Dalits' plight in UP, Gujarat, elsewhere. Read any Urdu daily  Inquilab, Qaumi Awaz, Nai Duniya, or the Urdu edition of Rashtriya Sahara  the tone is the same. Upper caste-controlled media, on the other hand, is putting out articles after articles pointing to why the alliance between Dalits and Muslims cannot happen.A: Of course. One of major reasons that attracted Dalits towards the BJP in 2014 Parliamentary polls, when it won 71 of 80 Lok Sabha seats, was Gujarat model. Dalits thought, with Narendra Modi in power, their conditions would improve, as they did in Gujarat. There would be no law and order problem, prices would fall. Things did not changed. Worse, VK Singh, Rohith Vemula and Una have together demolished the model, at least among the Dalits. They say now, BJP is not for Dalits. They now ask  Is this the Gujarat model which Modi advocated? They also ask: Why was Modi quiet on Rohith Vemula? Why did his ministers continue attacking him, even after his death? Why has he not spoken on Una? BJP has lost Dalits completely.A: Having lost Dalits, it is fast moving to find base among upper castes, especially Brahmins, who form another big voting chunk, as also other backward classes (OBCs), the biggest group. Brahmin votes will be divided  Congress is still strong among them. As for OBCs, majority of them would vote Samajwadi Party, which is already the second most important contestant, relegating BJP to the third position.A: No. Dalits see it like this: Upper castes have amassed huge wealth through corrupt means, exploiting them generation after generation, something Manusmriti justifies. So if BJP and Congress leaders have 20 choppers, and Samajwadi Party 10, what's wrong if Mayawati has two? Besides, any attack on Mayawati is seen as an attack on Dalits. See what happened in Gujarat. The moment BJP leaders, gathered for a sadbhavna rally in Una the other day, attacked Mayawati, the Dalits moved away. The BJP had to wind up the programme. This has been widely reported.
Why more Vietnamese are giving up their citizenships

From abroad with love: Vietnamese brides fall for other countries.

A total of 4,474 individuals renounced their Vietnamese citizenships in 2015, according to data released by the Ministry of Justice last month. Most of the names on the renunciation list were Vietnamese women who married foreigners.

Minister Mai Tien Dung, chief of the Government Office, said at a recent regular press briefing that many Vietnamese brides give up their nationality as soon as they leave the country to become eligible to apply for citizenships in their husbands' countries.

That makes it easier for them to live and work overseas, Dung said.

More than 100,000 Vietnamese women marry foreign men each year. Statistics released by the Justice Ministry estimated that in 2010 alone, the closest year for which data is available, around 120,000 Vietnamese women married Taiwanese men and another 35,000 got hitched with South Koreans.

The number of people renouncing their Vietnamese citizenship is still quite small in comparison with the number of Vietnamese women married to foreign men, Minister Dung said.

Official statistics also show that some Vietnamese businesspeople hold dual citizenships.

Recently, a newly-elected legislator was dismissed from the National Assembly, Vietnam's legislature, for violating the countrys Nationality Law which prohibits Vietnamese citizens from having dual citizenship.

Nguyen Thi Nguyet Huong, a 46-year-old businesswoman, was stripped of her position after her undeclared Maltese citizenship was uncovered.

Related News:

>Nearly 4,500 Vietnamese renounce citizenship in 2015

>Vietnam steps up efforts to bring overseas experts home
Loris Baz and Pol Espargaro were fortunate to escape serious injury during a huge accident on the opening lap of Sunday's British MotoGP.

The pair made contact on the fast approach to Turn 3, as Baz took evasive action to avoid Danilo Petrucci braking ahead of him.

Riders and bikes were sent bouncing across the grass and back onto the track, with Baz being knocked out. The race was red-flagged and later restarted without either rider.

Pol Espargaro and Loris Baz involved in the first lap accident. #BritishGP #MotoGP pic.twitter.com/L7anBR1rah-- Crash.net MotoGP (@crash_motogp) September 4, 2016

Baz regained consciousness as he was being moved to the ambulance, with medical checks later revealing nothing more than a sprained right ankle.

"When I arrived at the second turn, I was running parallel with Pol and just about to overtake him, but then the guys in front of us braked very early, especially Petrucci," Baz explained.

"I pulled over to the right a bit in order to avoid a collision, but Pol entered the turn from the outside and we touched. After banging into him, I don't remember a lot of what happened. I woke just before getting into the ambulance.

"I don't remember the crash itself, but the consequences could have obviously been worse because it looks pretty bad. I have a sprain in the foot that was operated on, but they did an X-ray and I there is nothing broken, even though it hurts when I put pressure on the foot.

"The most important thing is that Pol, who also doesn't have any fractures, and myself are all right. It was a race incident that shouldn't have happened, but this corner is quite narrow. I don't think I did anything stupid!"

On Monday, Baz will have a head scan at the Geneva hospital in Switzerland, to make sure he has no concussion. If all is fine, the Frenchman will be back on track next weekend at Misano.

Monster Yamaha Tech 3 rider Espargaro was also deemed okay after medical checks, and intends to be on track at Misano, but admits to being in a lot of pain after being 'hit by both bikes'.

"I felt a strong impact from behind me at the first corner. I started to roll on the floor and then both my bike and Loris' bike hit me," Espargaro said. "On one hand, I have to say that this incident was really bad luck, but then again, to be completely honest, the past few races have not gone exactly to plan. On the other hand, I have to be pleased that nothing worse happened.

"I must admit that I am feeling a lot of pain all over, and especially in my right tibia but this is not something that I am overly worried about and I am sure that with some relaxation and massages, I will be fine. I'm always a bit nervous when I start from quite far back on the grid because it's dangerous and the accident today confirmed this.

"However, I missed the entrance to QP2 by one tenth and I paid a high price in qualifying when it rained which cost me even more in the race today. Having said that, I have to be happy that I am more or less ok after that hard crash and even though we have another GP in the next few days, I will be a lot better in Misano where I am confident that my luck will change and things will be a lot better."
Nguyen Quang Thach on his journey across Vietnam to bring books to rural areas. File photo

Nguyen Quang Thach is recognized for bringing books to rural areas in Vietnam over the past 19 years.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has honored Nguyen Quang Thach and his brainchild Center for Knowledge Assistance and Community Development for having built more than 9,000 libraries in 26 provinces in Vietnam.

"While realizing 'Books for rural areas of Vietnam', despite many difficulties, I've felt really happy to see my efforts welcomed and recognized," said Thach.

Nguyen Quang Thach started his work in 2007 with three libraries after 10 years of studying library design and applying library models.

Thach was so passionate with the idea of making books accessible to people living in rural areas that he gave up his high-paying jobs at the Ministry of Transport and then at non-governmental organization World Vision.

He went on to found the Center for Knowledge Assistance and Community Development in 2010 with the help of public funding. He used donated and discounted books to set up different types of libraries, including clan bookcases where a group of families related to each other set up a mini library for their children, or parish bookshelves where readers are Christian and other libraries for marginalized groups.

Thach traveled around the country carrying a banner with a message saying "Books bring opportunities to all. Please donate books to develop clan bookshelves in the Vietnamese countryside."

During those trips, he met with local cultural officials to introduce the cheap and practical clan library model.

In 2015, he walked 1,750 kilometers from the northern Hanoi to southern Ho Chi Minh City to raise funds and awareness for his library revolution.

The program has engaged more than 100,000 people, most of them farmers, who crowd-funded the libraries.

Beyond building the libraries, the program has also provided training to local communities on how to run them and created activities to encourage reading.

The library system has so far made books accessible to more than 400,000 readers in rural areas.

And with the help of millions of Vietnamese both at home and abroad and the support from the Vietnamese government, the program is expected to expand nationwide to bring books to as many as 20 million people in rural areas by 2020.

The UNESCO King Sejong Literacy Prize offers two awards each year to honor the work of governmental agencies and non-governmental organizations for their fight for literacy.

The prize is funded by the South Korean government, hence the prize is named after Korean King Sejoing who created Korean alphabet Hangul.

The winners are awarded with $20,000 along with a medal and a certificate.

Related news:

> History books to shed light on Vietnam's border dispute with China

> Golden books document last feudal dynasty
In this issue: interview with Nicolas Veron, and the latest podcast  on recent EU measures to tackle the energy crisis.
(Photo: REUTERS / Yorgos Karahalis)Kirill, Russian Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, leaves Saint Dionysios Orthodox church in Athens June 1, 2013. Kirill is on a seven-day visit in Greece

Pope Francis is urging Arab Christians to 'keep flame of their faith' while Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill says events in Nigeria and Central African Republic linked with massive murder of Christians are particularly "terrible."

The Pope told Christians in the Arab-speaking world to "keep the flame of their faith," despite the darkness of the trial" they are facing.

Francis was speaking at the Vatican Aug. 31 during a general audience with Arab-speaking pilgrims from Iraq, Jordan, and the Middle East, Vatican Radio reports.

"The healing accomplished today by Jesus [of the woman with the hemorrhage Mt 9:20-22] assures us that when human hope disappears and everything seems impossible, the sun of Divine hope rises again for those who, despite the darkness of the trial, keep the flame of their faith!" said the Pope.

"The Lord bless you all and protect you from the evil one!"

In Moscow, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia, on Aug. 29 decried the "shocking" persecution of Christians in some African countries, who are being "simply swept away by radical Islamists."

Kirill said that the events in Nigeria and Central African Republic linked with massive murder of Christians are particularly "terrible," Russia's Sputnik news agency reports.

"The Russian Church does all she can to make the world community aware of the terrible situation of Christians and their congregations, including those in Congo," Patriarch Kirill said according to the Russian Orthodox Church.

"I will not enumerate all the regions where Christians are suffering today, but would like to emphasize that dreadful crimes are often committed in the territory of Nigeria and the Central African Republic, as the result of which great many Christians die," he noted.

"We raise this issue at the international level. I had the opportunity to discuss it during the meeting with Pope Francis," said Kirill.

JOINT DECLARATION

The Patriarch said he and Francis had signed a Joint Declaration Feb. 11 when they met in Cuba, in which they called on the international community to make every effort "in order to stop this atrocious crime of our times  the mass killings of Christians."

The Russian Patriarch was speaking at a meeting with the Ambassador of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Valentin Matungul, the Patriarch.

(Photo: Russian Orthodox Church) Pope Francis (l) and Russian Patriarch Kirill at their historic meeting in Havana, Cuba on Feb. 12, 2016.

Kirill noted that Africa is suffering a "monstrous extermination of an immense number of Christians" at the hands of radical Muslims and the Russian church leader said he had spoken of the matter with Pope Francis.

"We are particularly concerned about Christians, who are killed by radical Islamists," he said.

"The Russian Orthodox Church is doing its utmost to raise this issue so that public community could be aware of it.

"We raise it on the international level, I had a chance to discuss it with Pope Francis.....[all international institutes] should take efforts to prevent dreadful crime of our time - massive killings of Christians," said Kirill.

Some African countries north of the equators face constant threats of Islamist-inspired terror, notably Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria, with Boko-Haram group, which pledges allegiance to the Daesh jihadist group.

In February, on the first anniversary of the Islamic State massacre of 21 Coptic Christians on a beach in Libya, Francis and Kirill issued a joint declaration denouncing the systematic persecution of Christians throughout the world.
Since Bangladesh became independent in 1971, it has enjoyed a broad and robust bilateral relationship with the United States. The United States has provided billions of dollars of assistance that has helped Bangladesh achieve impressive social outcomes and build its institutions.

The United States is very proud to have been a partner in Bangladeshs growth, and we welcome this nations participation in all three of President Obamas signature development initiatives: health care, food security, and the all-encompassing issue of climate change, said Secretary of State John Kerry during his recent visit there.

Over the years, the people and government of Bangladesh have worked hard to forge a path to prosperity. Today, thanks in part to its $28 billion garment industry, Bangladesh has enjoyed two decades of economic growth around 6 percent annually, one of the more impressive track records in the world.

But despite its successes, Bangladesh has seen a number of disturbing terrorist attacks. Two major attacks in early July killed dozens of people, and a spate of smaller attacks over the past several years, often directed at members of religious minorities, foreigners, bloggers, and security officials is obviously intended to push people apart, to create internal strife, said Secretary Kerry.

These heinous acts of violence, and too many others worldwide, are a stark, painful reminder that those who aid terrorist groups or perpetrate these acts have no respect for national boundaries, no concern for the rights of others, no regard for the rule of law, and they do not embody the values of the people of Bangladesh or the United States, or the majority of people across the globe. And it is important for us to make that statement.

When a country faces those kinds of threats, its even more important to uphold the values of democracy. Because if you dont, you will more quickly feed the frenzy that can come with opposition and panic and hysteria, said Secretary Kerry. Remember this: no country is immune from terrorism. Its easy to terrorize. Government and law enforcement have to be correct 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, he said

The fact is we have to stand together, and the United States is standing with Bangladesh in this fight.
Chance leaned forward in his booster seat, transfixed by the Broadway production of the musical, School of Rock. His slightly younger brother Hudson, 8, who had recently started playing guitar, was equally engrossed in watching the story of a rock n roll-loving substitute teacher who inspires a class of children through the magic of music.

I've been taking my nephews to professional theater for about three years, and these experiential gifts have been rewarding for us all. But early on I grappled with the fundamental question: When do you take a child to the theater?

Thats the question Im most asked as a theater writer by parents who want to bring the performing arts into their youngsters sports-, tech- and game-crammed lives. Its not an easy call, either, when you want to ensure a memorable experience and when tickets for a professional theatrical show for a family can easily shoot into the three figures.

A lot has to do with the child, but a lot has to do with the parent, too: How much time a mom or a dad is willing to commit to talking to their kid about the theater experience, about the show they are about to see and about the production after they have seen it.

I think preparing the kids for what they are about to see is most important, says Henry Hodges, who acted in Hartford Stages productions of To Kill a Mockingbird and The Orphans Home Cycle there and in New York and in Broadways Mary Poppins.

Hodges, 23, and co-author of the book How to Act Like a Kid: Backstage Secrets of a Young Performer, still vividly remembers his first Broadway show when he was 9, The Phantom of the Opera. (He had seen a professional production of A Christmas Carol a few years earlier, but the big-time Phantom was his theatrical benchmark.)

My mother and I got tickets from the discount TKTS booth and we were up in the balcony, but it didn't matter. I was transfixed by the songs, the story and the stage magic, he says.

But sometimes the magic doesn't happen. A lot has to do with the age, maturity and the wiggle-factor of the youngster.

In the book How Does a Show Go On: An Introduction to the Theater, co-author Thomas Schumacher, producer and president of Disney Theatrical Group, says everyone thinks their kid can sit through a two-hour-plus show. But think again, he says.

He advises first starting youngsters out with a local childrens theater production or kid-centric touring shows like Dora the Explorer especially geared for short attention spans. See how their patience holds up for these shows before spending big bucks on a Broadway or Broadway touring production. Earlier than age 6 is generally not a good idea when shows run 2 1/2 hours, he says, and even that age may be pushing it for the young and the restless.

My go-to starter Broadway/touring shows are: Peter Pan (silly pirates, a ticking alligator and flying kids; whats not to like?); Beauty and the Beast (a story as simple as a theme park, catchy tunes and singing spatulas) and The Lion King (the best and the brightest show for kids, absolutely transformative).

What also helps is that these musicals are based on stories and films that kids should be well familiar with, so the narrative connection should be immediate and easy to follow. If not, go over the book or the film with them. No need to worry about spoiling the story. Youngsters have infinite capacity to view something pleasurable over and over again.

After youve exhausted the  or sidestepped  the Disney repertory of shows (Mary Poppins, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid), its time to move on to shows based on the books of childrens author Roald Dahl, who balances the sweet with some salty and sour in his fantastical tales such as James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and especially Matilda. These tales suggest that sometimes its OK to be a little bit naughty, especially if you have hideous parents and the headmaster looks like Lurch in drag.

Children who are just a bit older can appreciate the slightly more involved stories in shows like Newsies, Peter and the Starcatcher, Cats and, yes, School of Rock. (My nephews loved this show, but it also helped that they were familiar with the TV series.)

But theater writer-musician Seth Rudetsky says parents should not get too hung up on kid classics and suggests taking youngsters to traditional Broadway shows. There was not the separation between kid shows and adult musicals when I was growing up. So dont underestimate your older child and you both can enjoy Damn Yankees, Hello, Dolly! and Oklahoma!

Still, it doesnt hurt if there are kid characters in the show in which youngsters can identify: theres the boy-centric Oliver and Newsies, and its hard to resist the girl-power of Annie and Wicked (coming to the Oakdale Musical Theatre in Wallingford in late November). For all genders, shows like The King and I, The Sound of Music, Mame and The Music Man are solid winners.

Before going, follow this checklist to ensure your experience will be a hit and not a flop.

You and your child should check out the theaters website, which can often give you videoclips of the show and information about the production, including the running time.

Ah yes, the running time. Remember: the longer the show, the older the kid.

Talk about the show with your child before you go; let the child know the rules of behavior; tell them to hold off their questions about the show until intermission.

Get there in plenty of time for a stress-free arrival, but not too early that the waiting will be unnerving.

Buy a keepsake program or poster and then go to the stage door to see and thank the cast. Talk about the show afterwards. This could be one of the great memories of your childrens lives.

Frank Rizzo has covered Connecticut arts for nearly 40 years. He is a theater critic for Variety and has contributed perspectives to The New York Times and American Theatre magazine.
A tropical storm warning hung over the region Sunday as a downgraded Storm Hermine threatened to flood coastal communities in Fairfield County and knock out power with winds gusting up to 50 miles per hour.

The storm was expected to bring rain and wind Sunday evening and continue through Tuesday, even as the system stalled offshore south of Connecticut. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy predicted a minimal impact statewide, but warned coastal regions could experience flooding and high winds that can knock down trees and cut power for thousands of residents.

If you live in a low-lying, flood prone area, please stay alert during the changing weather conditions, especially during high tide cycles over the next few days, Malloy said.

He also advised having enough food and water for everyone in the household and make sure your yards are clear of anything that might take flight.

Bill Jacquemin, a meteorologist for the Connecticut Weather Center, echoed the call for preparation and precaution. The biggest thing is tidal flooding, said The winds will be up to 50 miles per hour on the shoreline and 30 miles per hour inland. There could be tree damage and power outages. I dont know about people buying batteries, but it is a strong storm.

Town and city officials also warned residents to take precautions.

Coastal areas may experience moderate flooding, Norwalk Mayor Harry Rilling said in a Code Red message to residents. With wind gusts ranging from between 50 and 60 miles per hour, residents should prepare for the possibility of extended power outages. Residents in low lying area that typically flood during extremely high tides should make plans to move vehicles to higher ground.

Fairfields Emergency Management Team said wind and rain is expected to be less than originally believed, and warned coastal flooding is likely the worst outcome. The most dangerous times for this storm will be during high tides, at 2 a.m. on Monday morning and 2 p.m. on Monday afternoon, officials said in a statement.

Metro-North said, if winds exceed 40 miles per hour, the commuter railroad must shut down its trains. Meanwhile, Malloy closed state campgrounds at noon Sunday and the state emergency management center was partially activated at 6 p.m. The governor said he had spoken with the states utility companies and with about 160 town and city officials during a statewide conference call. He said all were prepared for the storm.

(Utility companies) have alerted their workers and have pre-stationed assets, Malloy said. But I remind everyone that making repairs in high winds is not a safe thing for them to do. If you lose power and winds are gusting at 30 miles per hour, repairs might not be made until the storm is over.
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BRIDGEPORTThe midday shooting at an I-95 underpass near Orange Street on Wednesday wasnt the first of the week, and it was not the last.

Maria Villafane lives at the senior living center across the street from where the shooting occurred. She watched with a friend from a park bench as a man pulled up in a black vehicle and blast four or five rounds at a passing beige car driving under the highway.

Unlike the three shootings that occurred on Monday night, no one was hurt.

Local and federal leaders have talked extensively last week about how to respond to Bridgeports rising levels of gun violence, from increasing access to employment opportunities to decreasing the proliferation of drugs and illegal guns.

Meanwhile, local residents have reacted to the violence in different ways.

Why granny wants a gun

I told the police that I would get a license for a revolver, said Villafane. Because I live alone and Im afraid ... you never know what could happen here.

On Tuesday, 150 people filled to Bijou Theater to watch a the documentary film Armor of Light, a film sponsored Connecticut Against Gun Violence, which advocates for stronger gun control laws from a pro-life evangelical perspective.

Were not gun grabbers, said CAGV Executive Director Ron Pinciaro on Thursday, saying he supports the rights of gun owners to hunt, shoot for sport and keep a gun safely stored in their residence. Absolutely, if you need a gun to defend your homeand understand that its 500 percent more likely to be used against another member of the household that it is against an intruderthan were fine with that.

Villafana said the she used to have a gun permit and a revolver, which she obtained after being robbed of $1,200 in downtown Bridgeport years ago. Also years ago, she had a chance to use it.

One time, I shot at someone that told me he was going to pick up the drug money, she said, adding that she had never seen the man and wasnt a drug user. I shot away from him ... a warning (shot).

She said that she wouldnt want to shoot and kill even a criminal, but that wont stop her from getting a gun.

Im a Catholic, but I know how to defend myself, she said.

Things can escalate very quickly ... a little frakus starts that ordinarily would mean nothing, said Pinciaro. But if theres a gun present it's a whole different situation.

A national gun violence problem

Following the film, Pinciaro moderated a panel featuring former Bridgeport Deputy Police Chief Arthur Carter and gun control advocates U.S. Rep. Jim Himes and activist Lucy McBath.

McBath recently spoke at the Democratic National Convention, the most visible moment in her advocacy following 2012 death of her son Jordan Bath, who was shot over a dispute about loud music at a Florida gas station.

Bridgeport mothers affiliated with the group YANA (you are not alone) sat up front and applauded McBath and the other panelists.

Our hope ... is that we come together and try to prevent some of these homicides and guns and violence in our city, said YANA co-founder Nicole Matthews, whose red shirt memorialized Shaahyid, her 18-year-old son, killed in 2005.

All mothers of slain children, they wore red T-shirts emblazoned with the names and photos.

When things like this happen, everybody thinks that were in a box ... but its happening everywhere, so we really wanted to come because we wanted to know how the church family along with the community can get together, Matthews said.

Healing wounds

Matthews supports gun control and other possible solutions for reducing violence, but she also participates in the painful work of healing the wounds. Usually, it starts with a phone call from a family member in shock.

Theyre in denial. Theyre heartbroken, she said. We go out, we sit with them, we help them , we direct them to the right facilities to go to for burial.

That trauma can touch the dozens of families of gun victims this year who were shot, but not killed, according to Matthews.

First and foremost I want to thank God that these mothers dont have to bury their children.

I dont think its any different because even though their children hadnt passed away, theres still a sense of, you know, it very well could have been the other way.
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Connecticut native Zachary Lamothe likes to mosey around, exploring the nooks and crannies of the state, and his latest guidebook, More Connecticut Lore details 82 spots that are  sometimes literally  off the beaten path.

Many of the places Lamothe covers in the book, published by Schiffer Inc., are in Fairfield County and the lower Naugatuck Valley.
CultNews101.com: news, links, resources. Cults101.org: resources about cults, cultic groups, abusive relationships, movements, religions, political organizations and related topics. CultMediation.com: offers resources designed to help thoughtful families and friends understand and respond to the complexity of a loved ones cult involvement. Intervention101.com: to help families and friends understand and effectively respond to the complexity of a loved one's cult involvement. CultRecovery101.com: assists group members and their families make the sometimes difficult transition from coercion to renewed individual choice.
These real PA creatures could become cryptids if we don't save them
Check it out: Fun things to do this weekend in Lake County

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Poldark is back tonight after an absence of sixteen months but picks up from where it was - and how it was - at the end of the last series so seamlessly it hardly seems its been away.

In terms of both the main storyline and the minor details that made it so distinctive it is exactly the same. And rightly so.

Anyone from Julian Fellowes and Simon Cowell to David Attenborough will tell you, the key to following up a smash hit series like Poldark is simple: dont get any ideas or start having delusions of grandeur. Just do it all again. In television its not familiarity that breeds contempt but change.

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A welcome return: Poldark is back tonight after an absence of sixteen months but picks up from where it was - and how it was - at the end of the last series so seamlessly it hardly seems its been away

Part of the fun with a show like Poldark is spotting the trademarks, even when they are ludicrous cliches.

Series Twos opener contains every element and image from the formula of the first as religiously as a Greatest Hits tour by Madonna.

Here are just some of the best for anyone who wants to tick them off or divide them up and play Poldark Bingo.

Ocean views: Expect long panning shots of the lush but rugged Cornish countryside and sea-shore as it would have been in the 1780s

1.Long panning shot of the lush but rugged Cornish countryside and sea-shore as it would have been in the 1780s filmed from ye olde helicopter.

2. Close-up of our impossibly handsome hero Ross Poldark looking almost as rugged and lush as the landscape he is surveying. His three-pointed hat, chiselled cheekbones, and attractively styled mascara scar confirm him as the Adam Ant of his time, not to mention the inventor of designer stubble.

3. Brooding moodily, Poldark leaps on to his horse and charges along the cliff top with a dazzling golden sun and silver sea behind him to visit the nearest village/hostelry/rich neighbour.

Leading man: There are sure to be close-ups of our impossibly handsome hero Ross Poldark in his three pointed hat, looking almost as rugged and lush as the landscape he is surveying

4. Once he arrives, he exchanges a couple of surly, impassioned, speeches with the first person he happens to meet. And then charges back again.

5. At the halfway point Poldark stops and, for no obvious reason, is seen in poetic silhouette on his horse, in his three-pointed hat, staring at the sea/sunset, mesmerised, as if hes never seen either before.

6. As he approaches home, his wife - the former peasant girl turned local supermodel Demelza - steps out of their derelict stone cottage to greet him. She is wearing an emerald green dress. Tragically this is seemingly the only item of clothing she possesses but on the plus side, it accentuates her spectacular red hair as perfectly as any modern-day stylist could manage.

Off her goes: Poldark will no doubt leap on to his horse and charges along the cliff top with a dazzling golden sun and silver sea behind him to visit the nearest village/hostelry/rich neighbour

7. Demelza calls out his name in an accent that vacillates weirdly between Cornish, Irish, and transadlannic Made In Chelsea.

8. To the sound of soaring violins and the crashing of the waves Poldark and Demelza embrace as romantically/passionately as if he had just returned from the war. Who has the most Lovely Hair out of the two is hard to say  as is how they have hair that is in better condition than anyone we know today. Worthy of a Flake advert.

9. They skip inside for some cider, gruel, and a soft focus sex scene. Poldark takes his shirt off remembering just in time to order his servants Mr and Mrs Wurzel (Timothy Spall and Dawn French) out of the room before ravaging Demelza.

Bonded: As he approaches home, his wife - the former peasant girl turned local supermodel Demelza - will step out of their derelict stone cottage to greet him in an emerald green dress

Limited wardrobe: Tragically this is seemingly the only item of clothing she possesses but on the plus side, it accentuates her spectacular red hair as perfectly as any modern-day stylist could manage

10. Meanwhile Poldarks former fiancee Elizabeth sits in her palace bored out of her tiny mind, in front of a gold-plated mirror, combing her hair that grows even longer and thicker every time we see her.

11. The village bankers  led by Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse  meet in their private members club sipping brandy, lifting their long coats to warm their backsides in front of the fire, occasionally tossing money into it, as they hatch a plan to ruin Poldark, taking turns to cry he is a blaggard Sir !

12. George Warleggan turns to the camera, sneers, and twiddles his imaginary moustache.

Look who's back: George Warleggan will turn to the camera, sneer, and twiddle his imaginary moustache

13. Poldark addresses his revolutionary Co-Operative of grubby peasants seemingly exiled from Camden Town or Glastonbury promising the unemployed miners they will find gold if they keep digging - even if it is a copper mine.

14. Poldark takes his blouse off again and starts pounding the walls of the mine with his shovel, knowing he has no hope of striking copper, tin, or anything else of any value but in the knowledge it is doing wonders for his six pack. Its a free gym basically.

15. After a valiant days hard labour and class war subversion, Poldark bemoans his lack of money to Demelza and their servants. He could sell his horse Champion (Champion the Wonder Horse) but instead he vents his fury by mounting up again (on Champion that is) and thundering off on his trusty steed across the cliff tops. With black mane flowing in the breeze, muscular body glistening in the moonlight, tireless in his determination... it truly is a spectacular sight and magnificent beast to behold. And his horse isnt bad either.
What are the real thoughts of Chairman May as she sits amid a Cabinet made up mostly of nonentities nobody would recognise in the street?

There this feeble Politburo hunches, squeaking amid the Elizabethan grandeur of Chequers, a government committed to a task most of them hate. Even Boris Johnson doesnt really want to leave the EU.

Brexit means Brexit, intones the Prime Minister. But this slogan seems to have escaped from Lewis Carrolls Alice books, where Humpty Dumpty proclaims that words mean what he says they mean.

What are the real thoughts of Chairman May as she sits amid a Cabinet made up mostly of nonentities nobody would recognise in the street?

If I were her, Id be scared of the months to come. France, our ancient rival, has spotted that nobody in London has decided what we really want.

As we dither, they will undermine us. Before long it will be clear that either we exit the EU single market and take our chances, or do a deal under which we stay, more or less, under Brussels rule.

France wouldnt be able to bully a government committed to departure, backed by a parliamentary majority.

Such a government could be genuinely tough in talks, because it had a real, much desired aim.

But this lot? As Winston Churchill said of a similarly soggy Cabinet in 1936, they are decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity.

From behind them come the endless whispers, especially from the USA, which drove us into the EU in the first place, that we might walk back the decision.

Plus there are the mutterings of the Civil Service, the diplomats, and the BBC.

These are tricky times. Chairman May, who claims to admire the first Queen Elizabeth, may find that she faces nearly as many foes as that cunning monarch did, at home and abroad.

But the most dangerous ones will be among the smiling faces round the Chequers table.

She is not there because she is strong but because  for the moment  nobody else is stronger.

Cowardly truth about Oxford's state school 'success'

Oxford University boasts of increasing its state school intake to 59.2 per cent. How cowardly of it. On the same day we learned that most boys (50.46 per cent) leave state primary school without reaching the Governments pretty basic standards in reading, writing or maths. Many will never catch up.

If state school children are getting into Oxford, its either because they go to super-exclusive fake comprehensives, surrounded by expensive houses or open only to churchgoers; or they go to besieged and rare grammar schools; or they have private tutors; or they have been given special treatment and are not really up to Oxfords standards.

Oxford should campaign to bring back selective state schools, not cringe before the equality commissars (file photo)

In the days before comprehensive schools, Oxfords non-public school intake was rising fast without any of these tricks or reduced standards  from 38 per cent in 1939 to 51 per cent by 1965.

If grammar schools had survived, many reckon it would soon have reached 70 per cent, and maybe higher. Oxford should campaign to bring back selective state schools, not cringe before the equality commissars.

But we are at the mercy of crude egalitarians. The supposedly Tory Government continues to employ Alan Milburn, the Blairite former Cabinet Minister and (so far as I know) unrepentant student Marxist.

Mr Milburn, who refuses to tell me where his own children went to school, regularly attacks the privilege of private education, though never that of the socially exclusive pseudo-comprehensive state schools favoured by well-off Leftists.

If state school children are getting into Oxford, its either because they go to super-exclusive fake comprehensives or they go to besieged and rare grammar schools (file photo)

As head of the creepy quango the Social Mobility Commission, he cranks out regular reports claiming that public school toffs rule the world. Hes just got lots of headlines by claiming that City bankers still discriminate against applicants who wear brown shoes.

His evidence for this? A 15-year-old book about the death of the traditional banking industry, by a man whose name his report misspells, and another book on the City by a Dutch expert on the Middle East.

People do believe what they want to believe, I find.

It's official: The British bobby IS dead

HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary has - after 50 years - grasped that police foot patrols have been abolished

My I told you so department is now back from a much-needed holiday, after a long summer of full-power gloating and smirking. Immediately it has new work to do. Her Majestys Chief Inspector of Constabulary has (after 50 years) finally grasped that police foot patrols have been abolished.

Congratulations, HM Inspector! Well spotted! Even so, he buried it in his complacent survey report, where among all the politically correct stuff, it reveals on page 38 that one third of us have not seen a uniformed police officer on foot in their area in the past year  in the past two decades, in my case.

Even this fact is turned into a PC lecture about more deprived areas. One in four say they see one once a month. If so, he was probably nipping into Costa Coffee for a flat white.

So what are they doing instead? As we learned again last week, car pursuits seem to appeal far more than plodding the pavement deterring crime and disorder. Are these pursuits  which in some years have led to as many as 20 innocent deaths  even remotely worth the risk?

But while resources are available for such chases, what of shopping centres such as The Stow in Harlow, where a Polish man, Arkadiusz Jozwik, was violently (and fatally) attacked? Gangs of menacing youths smoking cannabis, that peaceful drug Sir Richard Branson wants to legalise, have been patrolling The Stow for months, promoting fear and disorder.

But police  as everywhere  seem to have paid little attention to either the menace or the illegal drug abuse. Now, too late, they are present  for a while. And there is a lot of grandiose stuff about a hate crime.

Maybe, maybe not, but it might also be Dope Crime, that growing category, and also a Neglect Crime, the sort of thing that happens on streets which the police have quietly ceded to the violent and lawless.

Can there be any simpler way of putting this? Doctors should never go on strike. Mercy is not a commodity that can just be withdrawn.

People living with pain and fear cannot be deliberately ignored by those trained and paid to help them.
Keith Vaz was caught meeting two Eastern European male prostitutes, believed to be Poles, for sex

Unfortunately, it says much about the low expectations of our parliament that blatant greaser Keith Vaz  most twinkly of charmers yet palpably flawed  was allowed to become one of its grandees. How liberally we apportion high rank and squander our esteem.

For the past decade he has chaired the Commons committee which oversees vice, drugs and the police. The sainted Vaz! It was absurd. There were plenty of questions about Vazs personal conduct yet he took ostentatious delight in roasting Scotland Yard commanders and in ridiculing serious Whitehall mandarins. Only a few weeks ago he ordered one top official out of the room like a naughty schoolboy for failing to be sufficiently honest.

And Vaz attacked newspaper editors  yes, he enjoyed it. People with stuff to hide often do. Yet everyone I know at Westminster had doubts about Vaz. No one would describe him as a monk. The elite could have marginalised him but instead sat on its suspicions. Why trouble the little people (the electorate) with qualms about this most unprivy of counsellors?

I first came across Comrade Keith a quarter of a century ago when he announced his engagement to Maria Fernandes. This was, let us say, deemed enough of a surprise to merit inclusion in a diary column I was then editing. Camp Keith had by then been in the Commons for a few years, having replaced the lurid Tory Peter Bruinvels as MP for Leicester East.

Cambridge-educated, Vaz had a quick wit and spoke in a fastidiously posh accent. He was courtly in his ways, a monstrous flatterer, his voice swooping like a cut-price Lady Bracknell. He could be disarmingly salty about his fellow Labour MPs  we diarists found this useful  and he was patronising about his constituents.

He played minority issues for all they were worth, which went down well with Asians in his Leicester seat. That identification as a campaigner for minorities also bought him some political insurance, as did his frequent mentions that he suffered from diabetes. A little victimhood aint half a useful thing in modern politics.

Back in the early 1990s I put his flamboyant bitchiness and garrulous mateyness down to youthful excess and ambition. It is not unknown for MPs to be egotistical, after all, but most, when they enter Government, acquire a layer of seriousness. Vaz became Minister for Europe in Tony Blairs first term. Despite that significant position, he remained giggly and silly. He was later dismissed.

Labour MP Keith Vaz, pictured at a party conference event, is well known for his flamboyant style and love of publicity

The Home Affairs committee chairmanship in 2007 gave Vaz his second chance. Here was one of the more sensitive jobs in our public life, bringing access to various secret documents and a supervisory duty over the police.

It also brought publicity, to which he seemed addicted, inviting high-profile witnesses to give evidence to his committee, even when they really had little to contribute. It was Vaz who turned Parliament into a circus when he got that idiot Russell Brand to give evidence to an anti-drugs inquiry.

Vaz sashayed round Westminster with Bollywood stars  Shilpa Shetty was one. Nobody, not least the delightful Shilpa herself, seemed entirely sure why she was there, but Vaz stuck to her side as though fixed by glue.

He held expensive dinners in Soho, when it was never quite clear who was paying. He seemed to have no shortage of money. He organised the annual Diversity Nite dance evening at the Labour party conference when the main point of the exercise seemed to be photographing Keith Vaz with some pretty girl baring her belly-button.

Mr Vaz memorably invited comedian Russell Brand to give evidence to the committee

Sinister was not quite the word for Vaz. If you stood downwind of him you were more likely to catch a whiff of aftershave and some soapy unisex unguent. He used this absurd image as a disguise for something, we now see all too plainly, that was rather less fragrant.

Were the police scared of him? His conduct of that committee and his scrutiny of police behaviour was certainly highly political. It was Vaz who pioneered the modern aggression of select committees. His meetings became show trials and they ended peoples careers.

He deployed heavy sarcasm and insincere politeness. He would repeat questions needlessly, chasing meaningless apologies from slow-talking officials. He placed tremendous premium on honour and consistency.
They moved to a 140 a month flat in Sri Lanka and she trained journalists

Fiona Barton, 54, is the best-selling author of The Widow, this years fastest-selling debut novel.

The psychological thriller is being turned into a major TV drama. Fiona is married and lives in France.

My light bulb moment - to ditch my career and become a volunteer, thousands of miles from home - came over a terrible meal in a Chinese restaurant in late 2004.

Fiona Barton, 54, the best-selling author of The Widow, had just watched the Motorcycle Diaries about Che Guevara when decided she wanted to leave her old life behind

My husband and I had just been to see The Motorcycle Diaries - the inspiring story of Che Guevaras journey through impoverished Latin America.

As we looked at each other over the congealing beef in black bean sauce, we started talking about a future that would involve stepping off a precipice.

I was 48 and a journalist, a job Id loved and succeeded in for 25 years - Gary, 52, was a builder with his own business. We had two adult children, mortgages and all the paraphernalia of a full working life.

Yet the idea of volunteering was so powerful that I remember it made our teeth chatter with excitement.

We did lots of research talked to our family and, three years later, applied to Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO).

It was both exhilarating and terrifying - we lived on 140 a month in a small flat, washing our clothes under a cold outside tap and coping with the occasional rat and cockroach

A year later, we boarded a plane to Colombo in Sri Lanka to begin a two-year placement.

It was both exhilarating and terrifying - we lived on 140 a month in a small flat, washing our clothes under a cold outside tap and coping with the occasional rat and cockroach.

I trained journalists, working under terrifying physical threats, while Gary taught carpentry to adults with learning difficulties. It was a challenge most days. But it made me feel more alive than I had for years. And it gave me space to write outside the relentless news agenda.

I had heard the voice of Jean, the main narrator of The Widow, in my head for months, but I wrote the first words of my novel in February 2009.
Also listened to her kids' advice while writing her children's cookbook

When Nadiya Hussain won last years Great British Bake Off, 14.5 million viewers tuned in and joined Mary Berry in weeping at her (now legendary) acceptance speech.

Since then, the 31-year-old has baked the Queens official 90th birthday cake and written two cookbooks.

She lives in Milton Keynes with her husband Abdal, sons Musa, nine, and Dawud, eight, and daughter Maryam, five.

TRUST YOUR INSTINCTS

Nadiya Hussain, 31, who lives in Milton Keynes, said she trusted her instincts and decided to enter Bake Off - despite not having had a great year

Bake Off came at the right time because Id spent my 20s being a stay-at-home mum.

My instincts told me that was the right thing to do and, despite everything thats happened to me in the past year, I wouldnt change that decision. When I applied for Bake Off, I think my instinct was telling me it was time to branch out.

You know how it is when youre a mum - you love it, but you also lose yourself a bit. I lost a lot of confidence, and I sort of forgot how to be me.

My husband Abdal was amazing. It was him who pushed me to enter the competition.

He downloaded the form and filled most of it in! He knew I had it in me, even if I wasnt 100 per cent sure.

She has learnt to ignore negative comments on social media and listen to her children's advice while writing her new children's cookbook

Obviously, since I won, things have changed massively for us, but Abdal and I feel strongly that one parent should be at home, so hes changed his work patterns to be around when I cant be.

I dont want to delegate those small (but important) jobs, like reading bedtime stories. Ive been attacked on social media, and some of it has been vicious, but Im learning to deal with negativity.

There will always be a minority of people hiding behind computers who want to be sexist or racist. But theyre a drop in the ocean.

There will always be a minority of people hiding behind computers who want to be sexist or racist. But theyre a drop in the ocean

If I do get upset, Abdal is my voice of reason. He doesnt get massively inflated by the highs or dragged down by the lows. Hes always got a grip.

I know the kids are proud of me. They were very excited about me cooking for the Queen. But theyre brutally honest, too. When

I was writing my new childrens cookbook, I ran stuff past them and they were dead honest when something didnt work - Nope mum, thats not funny.

Theres so much going on and Ive met so many amazing people that I really dont know whats coming next.

If you asked me who Id like to bake for then it would be David Attenborough . . . or Trevor McDonald. Ive got a thing about beautiful voices and Id want to hear them give their verdict on my baking.

Just dont ask me to do French macarons. Theyre a nightmare!
Every bride wants to be the star of her show. So why would any woman surround herself with a dozen bridesmaids?

Well, like having multiple children, having multiple bridesmaids is seen as the ultimate status symbol.

Five brides tell us why they filled their aisle with bridesmaids...

The rich and famous do it, so why not me?

In the pink: Vivienne Edge wanted ten bridesmaids to match husband Adam's ten ushers at their 55,000 wedding extravaganza

Vivienne Edge, 27, married husband Adam Myers, 37, a property developer, on July 30. The couple live in Leeds with their daughters, Mila, two, and Alexandra, eight months. Vivienne had ten bridesmaids and two flower girls. She said:

'My fiance Adam started it when he announced he was having ten ushers because he had so many friends  I thought: Right, Im having lots of bridesmaids, too.

'Luckily, though, when I counted up my best friends, the number came to ten. I didnt want to have an uneven number, as it would look odd in the photographs. Our two daughters were flower girls.

'Having lots of bridesmaids is seen as something that the rich and famous might do, as well as ordinary brides like myself, so its something of a status symbol.

A few people clearly thought I was mad. My gran rolled her eyes and laughed: Why cant you just do things like a normal person?!

As well as coordinating dresses the girls also got matching nightwear to get ready in

'There were no disagreements about the bridesmaid dresses we chose  a light-pink halterneck  though a couple of the girls worried they might be showing a little too much cleavage. But they thought: Its Viviennes day, well just go along with whatever she wants. I really appreciated that.

'We kept the cost down by buying the gowns from the online retailer ASOS, so the dress bill came to around 1,000. But as the whole wedding cost 55,000, it didnt make much of a dent in the budget.

'I had worried that I would have to organise all the girls, and that gave me a few sleepless nights. But they were fabulous, and brilliant at organising themselves without much input from me.

'Thankfully, they helped calm my nerves on the morning, before the ceremony. One of them even said: Im going to wear wedges, not stilettos, so that I can run anywhere you need. The ultimate sacrifice!

'There were one or two mishaps, though. At one point, one of the girls opened a bottle of champagne and it sprayed all over another girls dress, so we ended up drying her down with a hairdryer!'

There was no way I could please everyone

Special day: Jenni Clayton's ten bridesmaids were a picture in pastels, while the four flower girls wore white

Jenni Clayton, 27, is a childminder. She lives with her husband Jez, 32, a telecoms manager, and their two children in Caterham, Surrey. Shes expecting their third child in December. The couple married in October 2014, and had ten bridesmaids and four flower girls. Jenni said:

'There were moments when I was planning my wedding that even I thought I was mad to be having so many bridesmaids. Just getting all of them  my eldest sister, Samantha, who was my maid of honour, my younger sister, cousins, nieces and my daughter  to the same place at the same time to try on dresses was a nightmare.

'Eventually, we all managed to meet at Lakeside Shopping Centre in Essex, but thats where the problems began.

'Two of the girls were heavily pregnant, but would have given birth by the time of the wedding; one was going to be heavily pregnant on the day itself, some were slim, some were top-heavy. Judging sizes was extremely tricky.

'Thankfully, it was easy to find a dress that everyone liked in two different colours, lilac and pink, while the four flower girls were in white.

'But, of course, there was bickering. Some wanted their hair like this, others wanted their make-up like that, some didnt like the shoes. Others refused to pick, saying: You decide, youre the bride. There was no way I could please all of them, so we had a majority vote instead.

'It could have been very pricey, too, but Id asked some of the older bridesmaids if theyd buy their own dress to cut our costs. Each seemed happy to pay. All in all, the outfits came to around 2,000. If Im honest, my husband thought it was mad  but then, he had his best man, ten ushers and four pageboys, too. And yes, having 14 people following me up the aisle was slightly ridiculous!

'We had 130 guests at the ceremony and 280 in the evening. All in all, the day cost around 30,000, which is a lot of money. We borrowed money from various sources to pay for it and still havent had a honeymoon. But it was worth it. I knew being surrounded by so many bridesmaids would make me feel very special  and it did.'

It cost 10,000 just to hire them a room

Teal appeal: Jennifer Hughe's grandmother, who died before the wedding, chose the bridesmaid dresses

Jennifer Hughes, 28, a photographer, is married to Kieran, 32, a machine driver. The couple married at The Ritz hotel in Central London in September and held a second ceremony in their home town of Southend, Essex, two days later. Jennifer  who gave birth to the couples daughter, Serenna, last month  had 12 bridesmaids and two flower girls. She said:

'I suppose Ive always been a bit over-the-top. So its little wonder my wedding turned into a bit of an extravaganza  all fuelled by the fact that I used to be a wedding photographer. I knew from experience that when a bride is surrounded by lots of immaculately made-up bridesmaids wearing matching outfits, it makes for a stunning photograph. Anything for that one perfect shot.

'But I also knew things might become tricky. Id seen it all at the weddings Id covered: bridesmaids who dont turn up on the day, those who forget to bring their dress and, of course, arguments over what theyre wearing. I was determined to learn from others mistakes.

'Thankfully, there were no fallings-out among me and the girls, who were a mix of friends and family.

'But it was a standing joke that if arguments started, I could easily get rid of one of the bridesmaids because I had more than enough replacements.

'But it was all so expensive  so much so that Ive never actually sat down and worked out how much the whole wedding cost  I dread to think.

'We got married at The Ritz. But the only suite my 12 bridesmaids and I could fit into while we got ready for the ceremony was the luxurious Prince of Wales suite, which cost 10,000 to hire.

'And because there were so many bridesmaids, it was virtually impossible to get everyone together beforehand. My sister-in-law and niece live in France, so we had to repeatedly send their gowns across the Channel to be fitted properly.

'Thankfully, my father and other family members helped us out a lot with the vast bill. We made some economies by choosing an off-the-peg gown for the bridesmaids, rather than a bespoke number, so I know the cost of the dresses ran into the hundreds, not thousands.

'However, my smallest bridesmaid was a size 6 and the largest a 16. It would have been so easy for this difference in the womens figures to become an issue  but the fact it didnt is down to my beloved nan, who chose a beautiful teal dress with shoulder straps that would complement everyones figure.

'Nan, 93, was supposed to be my matron of honour  my 13th bridesmaid  but she died nine months before the wedding.

'I was heartbroken. While the whole day could have been less extravagant, it was such an awful time that we decided to have the best day possible.

'I was also supposed to have only one flower girl. But just before the wedding, while I was out shopping with my heavily pregnant bridesmaid, her waters broke in my car.

'We rushed to the hospital and my extra flower girl arrived five weeks prematurely. She even wore a mini version of the bigger flower girls white dress.

'Some people may criticise my extravagance, but it made my day. After all, I was looked after by the women that I cherish the most in my life.'

I couldnt choose  so I asked ALL my friends

Lovely in lavender: Michaela Foster surrounded herself with her 12 closest friends when she married her husband Richard

Michaela Foster, 27, an operations manager, married her husband, Richard, 30, a lecturer, on May 16, 2015. They live in Liverpool. Michaela had 12 bridesmaids and a flower girl. She told us:

'In all honesty, it was partly my indecision that led to me having 12 bridesmaids. With close friends from school, university, work and various social groups, I just couldnt make up my mind who to ask  so I asked them all.

'My husband Richard laughed at me, but he can hardly talk. He had the same problem and ended up having three best men because he couldnt choose one of his friends over another.

'It may seem a little over-the-top, and a few people have raised their eyebrows when Ive told them, but I dont understand why. After all it was my day, wasnt it?

'Cost was a consideration, though. When I invited my friends to be bridesmaids, I sent them a little card and my sister wrote a rather sweet tongue-in-cheek poem in it, which asked them for a small contribution towards their dress.

'No one complained but, in the end, we didnt need their money as we had budgeted carefully. The off-the-shoulder lavender dresses were 150 each and I paid 20 each for their handbags, 10 each for their earrings and 30 each for hair.

'But, of course, it all added up  the whole wedding cost us around 30,000, which sounds a ridiculous amount for just one day.

'But our thinking was that you only get married once  hopefully  and we should go for it.

And because I had so many bridesmaids, so many jobs were taken care of. They 'helped with so many tasks leading up to the day  choosing the colour scheme, helping me with jewellery and delivering a present to Richard on the morning of the ceremony itself.

'They all really helped to calm my nerves, too. I would have felt very nervous had I been on my own or with just one other friend.

'Being so busy not only getting myself ready, but making sure that they were all dressed, was a welcome distraction.

'The only fluster I got into was when I realised there was only half-an-hour to go and I still hadnt put on my dress!'

I sacrificed a pair of Jimmy Choos to have 11 bridesmaids

Family and friends: Bride Shaunie Bennett had 11 bridesmaids and three flowergirls but her husband Joe thought she was mad

Shaunie Bennett, 24, is a student nurse. She married Joe, 25, an electrician in April 2016. The couple live in Southmoor, Oxford. Shaunie had 11 bridesmaids and three flowergirls.

She said: 'You might think that 11 bridesmaids sounds like a lot. Not for me! I just thought Why not? My husband thought I was completely mad. He was only having four ushers and a best man. But I just couldnt bear to leave anyone out. In the end, I had two sisters, a sister-in-law, two nieces and some friends.

'Stress levels did get very high at times. After my initial nonchalance, I started to worry that I wouldnt like having so many bridesmaids, that it might be chaotic. Im a bit of a control freak and like everything in order.

'And there was certainly some chaos. We ordered dusky pink dresses ranging from size 6 upwards, but when they arrived ten weeks before the wedding, they were all damaged. We had to send them back which was a nightmare  and then, when the next batch arrived, it was only three weeks before the wedding. We had so many alterations to make, we had to find an extra seamstress.

'All but six bridesmaids paid 200 for their own dress. The cost of the wedding was already 22,000, so I had to make economies. But I paid for their hair and presents on the day. That probably cost an extra 1,000 and meant I had to sacrifice buying myself Jimmy Choo shoes to go down the aisle. But it was worth it.

'As for arguments, I suspect there were some over organising my hen party. After all, if there are 37 women going to Spain and 11 bridesmaids organising it, theres bound to be some disagreements. Thankfully I was kept out of them.
Natalia Osipova with Sergei Polunin

My interview with Russian ballet star Natalia Osipova has not got off to the best of starts.

So guarded is the darling of the Royal Ballet  who has now segued into modern dance with a risque new show at Sadlers Wells  about her love affair with Sergei Polunin, the brooding enfant terrible of dance, that I worry their relationship may be on the rocks.

Dubbed the Brangelina of Ballet, the two have been together for over a year now. They fell in love while dancing Giselle together in Milan, which sounds so sexy and romantic it makes me feel faint.

Their chemistry  on and off stage  seems quite explosive. I imagine they have fiery rows  and even more heated, er, reconciliations. But to my horror, Natalia says at first that she doesnt want to discuss our feelings for each other in public. What?

The dancer, who turned 30 in May, is at pains to demonstrate how much she has grown since her relationship with Sergei began last summer  when, clearly in the throes of early passion, she made the gushing admission that they found it hard to be apart for more than two days.

Sergei  who left the Royal Ballet amid drama and allegations of drug-taking just before Natalia joined as a principal, giving their union a star-crossed twist  has said that he never wants to dance with anyone but Natalia again.

But the Natalia I encounter today  busily rehearsing a contemporary dance ensemble specially choreographed for her by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Russell Maliphant and Arthur Pita (Sergei dances the latter two works with her), which will return to Sadlers Wells later this month after a successful summer run and then transfer to New York  is altogether more composed than she has seemed before.

Natalia and Sergei performing in new dance piece Silent Echo at Sadlers Wells in June

Despite having made London her home since 2013, Moscow-born Natalia still struggles with the language. This is my biggest challenge. I need to study English and to learn it properly, but there is never the time, she sighs.

With the help of a translator, she explains how she has evolved of late. I am a highly emotional person, confident and bold, but ruled by my emotions. I am capable of a sort of madness. If I am feeling emotionally charged, I could buy a ticket and move to another continent! she exclaims.

I am too spontaneous sometimes. But now that I am 30 I think I am becoming more balanced and getting better at thinking before I speak or act.

Even just the way Sergei says good luck can make me feel much better

Perhaps we can rewind a few months for the sake of this interview, I joke. I am not sure my humour translates. She has previously admitted that, due to their similar temperaments, she and Sergei have been known to clash.

We are two strong characters and at times this creates friction, but you learn to make compromises and to find ways of not arguing with your partner, she explains. Sergei is a very fiery and emotional person, but he is emotional in a different way to me. I cant quite explain it. We are different people, of course... She trails off, and I get the sense she is wading through verbal quicksand here, resisting the Brangelina-isation of them as a couple, while glorying in the loved-up state she has found herself in.

She doesnt care what others might make of their relationship, she says. I am sure there were people who had something to say on the matter, but I am not concerned about it.

And though she is a self-confessed hot-headed leading lady, Natalia reveals that, when dancing with Sergei, she enjoys letting him take control. As a very strong person, I have always tended to take the lead, but with Sergei, it is he who leads.

'That is the dynamic that works best for the two of us. As a female its an interesting feeling and state of mind when the male can take charge on stage. It has been something new for me and I like it.

Natalia and Sergei performing in Run Mary Run by Arthur Pita, specially commissioned for them, at Sadler's Wells in June

I mention Sergeis comment about not wanting to dance with anyone but her. We have both grown up since then. It was probably said in a moment of emotion!

'We are at a different point in our relationship now. We are very solid and open with each other. We understand that work is work and we both have to make professional decisions. We wouldnt restrict ourselves to only dancing with each other, because it wouldnt be the best decision for our careers.

But wouldnt she feel jealous watching Sergei dance with another? On a personal level, it would be bad to see him with someone else, but professionally, no, she insists. I am very lucky that I am not and never have been a jealous person.

This trait must have come in handy when Natalias relationship with her former boyfriend, Russian ballet star Ivan Vasiliev, broke up shortly before she moved to London and took up with Sergei.

The pair had been the golden couple of the Bolshoi, but rumour had it (supported by Vasilievs own admission) that he left her for a younger dancer  ballerina Maria Vinogradova, to whom he is now married. (This scandal was referred to as the Bolshoi love triangle.)

I dont listen to any gossip, Natalia says curtly. Ivan and I have a good relationship. We are in close touch. We dont see each other often, as we live in different places, but when we do it is very warm and fine. We have danced together since we split and I would happily do so again.

For the moment, though, Natalia remains focused on dancing with Sergei in the independent Sadlers Wells production, which represents a departure for her as a classically trained ballerina.

Staged in three parts, it involves a lot of strutting and shimmying, with costumes that could not be more unlike the restrictive, conservative ones worn in ballet.

The pair entwine themselves seductively in distressed jeans and T-shirts, perfect for showing off Sergeis extensive collection of tattoos. The less I wear, the more comfortable I am, so I loved this costume, says Natalia.

It felt so much lighter and freer than ballet clothes. The best part has been working directly with brilliant choreographers and creating amazing poses together. My body has had to get used to using different muscles, but I am loving it.

And how does she feel about her paramours tattoos? Actually, I like them, she giggles. I think they reflect his personality quite organically. I am not planning to get any myself, she adds hastily. I dont think they would be suitable on my body.

Lovers on stage and off, dancing their hearts out in denim, and a male lead who could be described as a bit of rough comparisons to my favourite film, Dirty Dancing, are impossible to ignore.

Does Natalia feel a bit like Jennifer Grey to Sergeis Patrick Swayze? I love that film. Its very iconic, but for some reason I never made this association.

Like Dirty Dancing, Natalia Osipova and Guests, as the performance is titled (I wonder how Sergei feels about that), is about love.

It is set in the 1960s and about two people who are in love; the male character dies and she continues loving him [in one scene she tries to pull him from the grave]. It is deeply romantic, about love that surpasses death  not just love, but loyalty; about a woman who thinks shell never be able to be with anyone else.

As a very strong person I tend to take the lead, but with Sergei it is he who leads

Given that Natalia commissioned the three pieces  each one written for her by a top choreographer (such is her star quality, they presumably jumped at the chance)  I cant help but think that this gives an insight into the depth of her feelings for Sergei.

Having initially said that she didnt want to discuss him, Natalia has let the word we creep into her speech when discussing the man with whom she has shared a stage and now a life and a home.

We love Japanese food, she says in response to my question about what she likes to eat. We just like to go to small local restaurants, nowhere fancy.

On a perfect weekend, we like to walk around the canals in our neighbourhood of Little Venice and maybe visit London Zoo. We spend as much time outdoors as we can. We like to lie in bed as long as possible first, though, to feel fresh. Ideally, I would lie in until about 11am.

'We like to cook together, although I am not a very good cook. Sergei is much better than me. He cooks mostly.

It all sounds very domestic. Do they want children? I think that should be the aim for every woman. Thats my point of view, says Natalia, somewhat cryptically. We know each others families very well now too; there are good relations between the families.

It was, in fact, through family that the two came together. Natalia is exceptionally close to her parents, who still live in Moscow, and tries to visit as often as her schedule allows.

I feel a huge responsibility to make them proud and pay them back for the sacrifices they made to allow my ballet career to happen. They were not well off  my father is an engineer and my mother doesnt work  but they always found a way to give me opportunities, whether it be taking me to the theatre or finding money for dance lessons.

Initially, Natalia was not drawn to ballet. She started out as a gymnast and it was her parents  presciently spotting her greater potential for dance  who insisted that she make the transition. I wasnt happy about it at first, she recalls, but gradually I got used to it, and now I am so happy that I made that change and so grateful that they insisted.

When Natalia was due to appear in Giselle in Milan in 2015 and her partner fell ill, it was her mothers idea that she contact Sergei to see if he might stand in, so she sent him an email.

Natalia and Sergei in Run Mary Run

He had at the time gone off by himself. (In a strop, so it was said, after spiralling into unhappiness and cocaine use, to explore a freelance career as a dancer/actor/model.) My mother had seen him dance and suggested he might be a good pairing for me in this role.

'Thats how it all started. I knew of his excellent reputation as a dancer. And as to his other reputationsit was his dancing that I chose to focus on and that made me write to him, she says diplomatically.

And was it love at first sight? Yes. From the first meeting there were very strong feelings. We both understood there was something special.

This attraction was palpable  and their performance so widely acclaimed that they will reprise the roles in a production of Giselle in Munich this month.

It was very emotional dancing with Sergei that first time, Natalia reminisces. We came together as individuals, with our own experiences, and something a bit magic happened. I think the audience could feel it. It was emotionally very charged. I think they had a great time watching us in that show. Giselle is so romantic and will always be my favourite ballet.

Natalia leads a highly regimented life as a dancer, with long days of rehearsals and few breaks. She has, like most top ballerinas, been dogged by injury. This is part of my professional life and something I have to live with, but my injuries arent giving me too much grief at the moment.

Though only 5ft 5in tall, with tiny bones, she feels that her body is oaf-like by dancing standards. It has been a challenge, she sighs. I have to be very strict with what I eat. I have nothing made of flour and no sugar. I eat mostly salads.

NATALIA LOVES Fashion failsafe For a red-carpet event, it has to be Alexander McQueen. Film to curl up in front of I love Francis Ford Coppola and The Godfather, and Sergeis favourite actor is Mickey Rourke, so we try to watch anything he is in. Plan B I would be a painter. I love getting my paints out and am thinking of doing a course soon. Style inspiration I love the actresses from bygone French cinema; I particularly admire Fanny Ardant. Listening to Elvis Presley, Ella Fitzgerald and Otis Redding. We have a record player and their songs sound best on vinyl. Go-to countries Israel was beautiful and fascinating. And Beijing has pandas  my favourite animal  in the zoo. I missed rehearsals to look at them. Last meal on earth Spaghetti  because that is what I have to deny myself as a dancer. Alternative dance partner Carlos Acosta is a genius and it is the greatest honour to dance with him. When I first joined the Royal Ballet he took so much time to make me feel welcome. He has a magnetism and a talent that is unsurpassed. Advertisement

Having a man in her life who understands the sacrifices required of her must make things easier? I dont know any different because my boyfriends have only been from the dance world, and it seems to have worked out pretty well so far, she says coyly. Its a nice feeling to be with someone who understands.

Natalia once said she found pre-performance nerves so bad that she wanted to run away. Having Sergei by her side makes a difference.

With age, I have got better at managing the nerves. Now I know how to not let it get to that point. I arrive at the theatre much earlier and spend some time on the stage, living the life of my character before the show. That is really helpful.

' Its such an individual state, so even Sergei cant always help me, but it is great when hes there beside me. He can try to calm me down. Even just the way he says good luck can make me feel much better.

When I ask if Sergei would consider a return to the Royal Ballet, as some have speculated he might (it would, after all, make sense with her there), Natalia will only say, I cant answer that. It is a question for him. But he is an outstanding dancer and I think it would be really interesting if he did decide to.

Either way, the pair intend to partner on stage as much as possible  even if not exclusively. We want to find a way to do more together, Natalia reveals, sounding for a moment a bit too smitten, and then correcting herself.

I mean, I would like to think that of course we are professionals, so we would dance our best with anyone. It shouldnt make a difference, butit is such a special feeling to dance with the person you love.
Ive always been synonymous with red lipstick  I wouldnt leave the house for my YOU magazine without it! declares legendary accessories designer Lulu Guinness OBE when we meet for tea. Taking inspiration from 1920s actress Louise Brooks and painter Frida Kahlo, she would slather on waxy red theatre make-up back in the 80s.

But these days, Lulu gets her fix with Lipstick Queen Cupids Bow in Metamorphoses (20, spacenk.com), paired with Essie Nail Polish in Aperitif (7.99, superdrug.com) and her own Red Perspex Lips Clutch (245, luluguinness.com), of course.

As the queen of lips, it makes sense for her to have teamed up with wonder jelly Vaseline to design the limited-edition Vaseline Lip Therapy Lulu Doll Face Tin (2.99, boots.com, from October). She pops it on dry cuticles, uses it to smooth her brows and runs it around the inside of her nostrils to form a barrier against hay fever and in-flight germs. Naturally, it keeps those red lips plump and perfect, too.



The race to nab Victoria Beckhams make-up collection for Estee Lauder is fast approaching. Top of our list? The Java Sun Bronzer (48), Eye Ink in Black Myrrh (36), which can be used wet or dry for a precise or smoky look, and Morning Aura Illuminating Creme primer (68, all esteelauder.co.uk, from 13 September).

All are infused with Victorias characteristic pared-down chic, which feels so right for autumn.

This week were

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There is something beautiful about India which I am afraid we might lose. And it is our sense of hospitality as a culture.

We are open, not just in terms of food, but to ideas. Our syncretism is a part of our hospitality to ideas. The stranger, the guest, the visitor, the exile, the refugee - they are always welcome.

In fact, the vision of India is an openness to all creeds. One feels every form of defeated knowledge, every old fashioned idea, will find a home, a niche. The last Victorian and the last Marxist will settle down amicably in the same neighbourhood.

Saint Teresa of Calcutta, the tiny nun who cared for the world's most unwanted and became an icon of the Catholic Church

Hospitality

There is, however, a problem. While Indian culture and civilisation see hospitality as a way of life, the Indian nation state and its current idea of majoritarian dominance threaten the seeds of plurality present in such a framework of attitudes.

One must add that even the nation state has a sense of openness, to its credit. India was open to Tibet and welcomed the Dalai Lama, and was considerate to over a million refugees that streamed in after the war in the then East Pakistan.

Another testimony to the hospitality of India is the way we honour our foreign residents as distinguished Indians. I am thinking of the pride we take in the achievements of Mother Teresa or the Dalai Lama.

Indias pride and its sense of celebration about Teresas canonisation is a familiar example. Yet if one looks a bit more closely, our sense of hospitality is suddenly emerging with a lot of caveats. The murder of the missionary Graham Staines over the conversion issue is one such event. The recent attacks by the RSS and Bijrang Dal on Mother Teresas role are another.

Thousands of pilgrims thronged St Peters Square in the Vatican for the canonisation of Mother Teresa

Even here, one must point out that none of these critiques are as blatant as Garret Hardins devastating attack on Teresas credentials. Hardin, in his now almost legendary essay Life Boat Ethics, presents a sociopolitical perspective on aid, suffering, and development.

In his rendering of this Darwinian world, where triage lets the fittest eliminate the weak, he argues that the mothers work was a waste of time. All she did was to pick up the old, the wasted and the dying from the streets of Calcutta and provide them with a temporary shelter. After a while the poor, he claimed, return to the streets to die anonymously.

Hardin advocates a sense of triage, a process of sorting and elimination where the weak and the defenseless are eliminated. The demographic power of the poor, he claims, might sink life boat earth, which should prioritise the rich and the powerful.

Compared to the arrogance of such an analysis, the RSS/VHP critique of Teresa looks minor. Yet is worrying.

Objection

The objection came over a set of issues. Firstly, there was a sense of unfairness, that Narendra Modi reprimands them over the cow protection issue and then sends a delegation headed by Sushma Swaraj to attend Teresas canonisation ritual at the Vatican.

Pope Francis waves to the faithful as he leaves after a Holy Mass and the canonisation of Mother Teresa of Calcutta

For the VHP and RSS, Teresa was a missionary committed as much to conversion as to charity. Yet their objection was articulated almost in rationalist terms that canonisation was superstition, that the age of miracles was over.

At a deeper level, there is a residual feeling that conversion, even if it is allowed by the constitution, challenges the Hindu way of life which disallows such a possibility. One can only be born a Hindu. One cannot convert to it.

Then there is the whole issue of Rice Christians who convert to Christianity for economic opportunities. One must admit conversion does trigger violence. The struggle almost becomes a battle of competing world views.

The RSS and VHP feel that Teresas views on conversion should have been challenged more officially. Sending a delegation composed of Swaraj, Kejriwal, and Francis Dsouza almost becomes a tacit approval of Teresas ideologies.

Struggle

This triggers a hornets' nest of other questions which had remained submerged before. Firstly, many NRIs - in their nostalgia for Calcutta - felt she defamed the city. The other claim was that she was a relic of medievalism. A narcissist who was attention-seeking. Such critiques are irrelevant because they show little sense of the woman and her integrity.

A more basic critique was that Teresa showed compassion but did little to improve their conditions. The poor remained desperately poor, despite Teresa. One response to this came from the Left. For the CPM and the likes of Jyoti Basu, Teresa was a piece of integrity. She created a sense of trust, of integrity. For the Left, such concern was adequate. Left or Hindu, they owned up to her in a wonderful way.

I think Mother Teresa sensed the power of the Indian style of hospitality and adoption. Such an attitude, we must realise, was not subject to fashion. It saw the best of her and the best in her, and responded to it.

In fact, our sense of Mother added to the overall quality of Teresa. She needed India, and Indias sense of her, to be Teresa. This is why I feel the nitpicking and carping, whether from NRIs or intellectuals, is narrow-minded.
Launching a scathing attack on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati on Sunday said the BJP is working on the agenda of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

Mayawati, who was in Allahabad addressing a public rally, said: Atrocities against Muslims, SC/ST and other minority communities have increased ever since the BJP came to power in the Centre. The minorities and Dalits are being harassed in the BJP-ruled states.

Muslims are being harassed in the name of gau rakhsha and love jihad, she added.

Attacking Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Mayawati said that the central government has not even fulfilled a single promise that it made in its 2014 Lok Sabha election agenda.

BSP chief Mayawati is garlanded during a mega rally in Allahabad

He (Narendra Modi) promised that he will bring back the black money and every Indian will get Rs 15 lakh in his/her account. Have you got a single penny in your account? His promises to the farmers were also fake.. he is just working for the benefit of some business houses, she said.

She took exception to recent newspaper advertisements by a private telecom company using the Prime Ministers photograph, alleging that Modi was benefiting big business houses by snatching away the land of the poor, waiving loans worth billions, and making state-owned companies suffer to allow private ones to flourish.

Mayawati also went ahead to attack the Congress and said the party lost UP and the Centre due to its wrong policies.

After Independence, the Congress ruled the Centre for 54 years. It also ruled UP for 37 years, but then it was rejected. False promises do not work for long. Rath yatra (of Rahul Gandhi) will not work for the Congress. Projecting an old lady (Sheila Dikshit) who spoiled Delhi during her regime as the chief minister is an evident fact. She had said (when she was Delhi CM) that people of UP and Bihar are maligning the face of Delhi, Mayawati said.

Mayawati also termed a pre-poll survey "fake" which projected that her party would end up third, way behind the ruling SP and the resurgent BJP, if assembly polls were held in the state today.

"Our opponents, especially the Congress and the BJP, have numerous friends among big business people who control the mass media. This makes possible fake surveys wherein we are shown as having been relegated to the position of number three or even number four in the state. I would like to remind the people that similar misleading surveys had come out before the 2007 Assembly polls as well, when we ended up winning an absolute majority," the BSP supremo said.

Terming it ironic, the BSP chief said: On the one hand, our opponents try to dismiss us as a spent force and on the other, they allege that people are spending huge amounts to get a BSP ticket for the upcoming Assembly polls in UP. Herein lies a paradox which the common people can see through. But the SP, BJP and the Congress have reached a tacit understanding to create an impression that we are in dire straits.

Her comments came against the backdrop of leaders like Swami Prasad Maurya, R K Chaudhary and Brajesh Pathak quitting the BSP in the recent past.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi was presented with a collection of Chinese translations of ancient Indian texts and yoga sutras to mark his visit on Sunday.

The presentation of the books by Hangzhou scholar Wang Zhicheng comes at a unique time for Chinas Indologists. Just before Modi landed in China, Huang Baosheng, Chinas most renowned Sanskrit professor and Indologist, was completing a lifetimes endeavour. It took Huang 10 years to finish Chinas first complete Sanskrit textbooks.

The 11 volumes are a full guide for aspiring Sanskrit scholars that will be introduced in universities and schools. These range from a primary Sanskrit reader, the last book that was finished recently, to literature readers and translated Buddhist sutras that are important to Chinese.

India's PM Narendra Modi is presented with a memento by Indophile Professor Wang in Hangzhou, China

For Chinese scholars, this is potentially a transformative development as for the first time it provides them with a complete set of guides to study the language, which will be circulated in Chinese universities.

Peking University has taught Sanskrit for decades, and there are still around 30 Chinese studying the language. But they have been facing difficulties.

Why I have compiled these books? We have so many people in China studying Western culture, but few studying Indian culture, Huang told Mail Today.

Ancient Indian culture has been so important to China and Sanskrit is a key language to have a deep understanding of this great culture, so this is my effort to help the new generation in China learn this language and culture.

Many young Chinese interested in India or Buddhism are taking to the language, says Sanskrit researcher Huang Yiting at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Huang Baosheng, Chinas most renowned Sanskrit professor, has completed the countrys first full Sanskrit textbook, which run to 11 volumes

I majored in Indian English literature, but to learn Indian literature you need to understand ancient culture of India which drew me to learning Sanskrit, she said.

But the problem is many cant go to India to study as Indian universities are not interested in hosting Chinese scholars on short-term courses and visas do not come easily. Most Chinese Sanskrit students go to Germany but what they learn is also not so ideal.

As Modi visits China, the appeal from Professor Huang is that India should do more to help the next generation of Sanskrit scholars, starting with providing them visas and allowing them to come to India on fellowships.

The biggest tragedy, he says, is more Chinese scholars are now going to the West to learn the language and not to India.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday stressed to Chinas President Xi Jinping that it was of paramount importance for bilateral relations that Beijing respected Indias concerns on key strategic issues.

Officials said these include Chinese investment in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and Indias entry to the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

The PM raised the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor issue during his bilateral meeting with Xi, his first meeting in Hangzhou, which was held before the G20 Summit opened on Sunday afternoon.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Chinese President Xi Jinping before a bilateral meeting in Hangzhou, China

Modi also stressed the need to address the root causes of terrorism emanating from the neighbourhood, leaving little doubt that his message was aimed at getting China to pressure Pakistan, rather than preventing international action on its all-weather friend as it has recently done by placing holds on UNSC sanctions on terrorists such as Masood Azhar.

The PM also made what officials described as a strong intervention on terrorism during the informal BRICS leaders' summit that followed his bilateral talks with Xi.

Terrorists in South Asia or anywhere for that matter do not own banks or weapons factories, he said.

His meeting with Xi was seen by both sides as an opportunity to set ties on track. While officials said specific issues were not discussed in detail, the idea was to convey a clear message on the way forward for ties, and for more sensitivity to each others core concerns.

From left: Brazils President Michel Temer, PM Narendra Modi, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and South Africas President Jacob Zuma at the G20 Summit

New Delhis message to Beijing in recent meetings was that it could not delink bilateral ties from its positions that often oppose India in international fora such as the NSG, where China has sought to delay Indias entry.

Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Vikas Swarup declined to say if the NSG issue was specifically raised with Xi, pointing out that a summit-level meeting was aimed to provide overall guidance and direction to Indo-China relations.

However, he added: If you read between the lines when we are talking about our strategic interests, concerns and aspirations, it is not that China is unaware of our strategic interests, concerns or aspirations, or that we are unaware of theirs. It is something that both sides are aware of.

The issue has emerged as another thorn in Indias ties with China. But hopes are that some progress will be made soon, with the director generals of their disarmament departments holding talks to bridge differences.

Mentioning the recent attack on the Chinese Embassy in Kyrgyzstan, the PM stressed to Xi that it was yet another proof of the continuing scourge of terrorism.

Modi also stressed this message during a meeting with his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull. Modi said Afghanistan, Russia, and China were suffering from the destabilising effects of terror.

Hence, it was important for us to identify suppliers, exporters and financiers of terrorism, otherwise the world will face a huge challenge and problem in coming weeks and months was the PMs message, said Swarup.

The PM also thanked Turnbull for Australias proactive support for Indias membership to the NSG.

Modi's brief date with Obama

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday exchanged pleasantries with US President Barack Obama and other world leaders attending the G20 summit. Modi met Obama briefly when they were on stage to pose for photographs at a venue in the eastern Chinese city.

Earlier in the day, Modi met Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull on the sidelines of the Summit.

PM Narendra Modi with US President Barack Obama at the G20 Summit in China

PM's talks with Saudi Prince

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday met Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad bin Salman and held discussions on enhancing bilateral ties between the two countries.

According to the PMs website, the leaders held discussions about boosting bilateral ties.

Another bilateral follows first session at G20. PM meets Mohammad bin Salman, Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted soon after the meeting.

Mohammad, who is the son of Saudi King Salman, also holds the key defence and economic policy portfolios of the oil-rich Gulf Kingdom.

PM Modi met Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad bin Salman for talks

China will work with India, Xi tells Modi

China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound ties and further strengthen bilateral cooperation, President Xi Jinping told Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday, as the two leaders held talks amid differences over a raft of issues.

China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound relations and further advance their cooperation, state-run Chinese Xinhua news agency quoted Xi as saying. The half-hour meeting was their second in less than three months.
Ritu Kumar says her husband has been falsely implicated in the rape case he now faces

The wife of Sandeep Kumar, Delhi's Women and Child Development Minister, has defended her husband after his arrest on rape charges.

Ritu Kumar says he has been falsely implicated in the scandal.

My husband is innocent, I stand by him. Rape charges against my husband are a conspiracy, Mrs Kumar said.

The minister was arrested on allegations of rape and other charges hours after he surrendered before police. The move followed a complaint by a woman who was reportedly pictured with him in 'objectionable' photos leaked on a CD.

He was also suspended from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).

A woman who claims to be the one in the video that has rocked the AAP came forward and complained to Delhi Police, alleging that she was drugged on the pretext of help with a ration card.

She alleged that there was nothing consensual in the 'sex CD', reports of which were aired on news channels.

Delhi Police quickly sprung into action and filed an FIR against Kumar.

The controversy involving Sandeep Kumar further rankled the AAP on Sunday as a party MLA shot off a letter to its convenor Arvind Kejriwal, criticising party leader Ashutoshs stand and alleged that a coterie was damaging the party.

Sandeep Kumar (left) has been suspended by the AAP after a woman accused him of rape

Bijwasan MLA Devinder Sehrawat, who had earlier spoken out against the manner in which AAP had sacked Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav, said the situation is getting indefensible and disgraceful and action needs to be taken to remove rotten elements.

He said justifications from Ashutosh for Kumars conduct were not as per the acceptable value systems.

Sehrawat also hit out at AAPs Delhi unit convener Dilip Pandey, questioning his conduct, and said there were disturbing reports from Punjab.

Congress leader Sheila Dikshit on Sunday launched an attack on Arvind Kejriwal over Sandeep Kumars alleged sex scandal, and asked the Delhi Chief Minister to resign on moral grounds.
The Narendra Modi government has shown interest in an eco-friendly mechanism to turn organic waste into ashes, which might be used as agricultural fertilisers under the Swachh Bharat Mission.

The mechanism uses Neosonic technology that does not require any fuel or electricity to run, thus causing zero-pollution, and uses magnets to reduce organic materials to three-hundredths of their original volume.

We had made a presentation to the Prime Ministers Office which recommended it for further presentation in other ministries. The Urban Development ministry has also shown great interest in the technology, said US Sharma, who brought this technology from Japan to India.

The Neosonic technology promises to convert one tonne of waste into three kgs of ashes within a few hours, without leaving any harmful byproducts

According to Sharma, the equipment has drawn a positive response from Maharashtra for waste management in its Devnar area.

States are implementing most of the projects under the Swachh Bharat Mission.

This technology has unique features and this is the reason that officials in PMO recommended this for waste management solution to other departments. But there is apparently lack of will among the implementing agencies which has delayed our efforts in contributing to the ambitious Swachh Bharat Mission, Sharma said.

Neosonic equipment does not produce any toxic gases, substances, or even noise or heat into the environment, as it is based on low-temperature pyrolysis that decomposes organic waste using powerful magnetic action.

The machine can decompose 72 tonnes of garbage per day, and once activated it will continue to operate for another 10- 12 years.

The end result is only vapour and ceramic ash, which can be used as fertiliser for agricultural land.

Sharma said he would start getting these machines manufactured in India to promote the Centres Make in India plan if the states adopt the technology.

One of the associates is a member of JICA (Japan International Corporation Agency) which has agreed for funding the technology in India. It will also help in generating employment in our country, said Sharma.

Ministry officials who have witnessed Sharmas presentation said that Union ministries regularly coordinate with their state counterparts about projects under the Swachh Bharat mission.

Recently, officials from the ministry of water resources held meetings with officials from various states including Punjab, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and others to make the states free of open defecation.
The recent arrest of a car thief by Delhi Police has unearthed shocking facts about how gangs are using laptops and stolen data to steal high-end luxury vehicles with engine immobilisers fitted in them.

The thief revealed that cars stolen from the city are being dismantled and their engines sold to farmers in the neighbouring states, mainly Uttar Pradesh, to be used as power generators to supply electricity or run water pumps.

Some of these accessories also make their way back to Delhi to be sold as genuine spare parts at various auto-spare markets in the city.

According to Delhi Police, more than 100 vehicles were stolen from Delhi every day this year

Delhi Police data shows that the recovery rate in auto theft cases is about 5 per cent.

Auto-lifters operating in the city have upgraded themselves to decode security gadgets installed in high-end cars. The capital has become a major playground for them, a senior official from Delhi Police anti-auto theft squad told Mail Today on condition of anonymity.

According to Delhi Police, more than 100 vehicles were stolen from Delhi every day this year, as per records up to 15 August. This included everything from two-wheelers to high-end luxury cars and SUVs.

In the recent arrest, made by North-east district police, the accused revealed that high-end luxury cars in the city are stolen on a demand basis.

The modus operandi includes finding work at a car workshop or embezzling data on engine-key combinations with the help of an employee.

The stolen code data, stored in a laptop, is used to make a master key or a set of keys that will match the car's electronic control module. The car thieves then target their victim and often use a female gang member to avoid suspicion.

Car companies claim the engine immobiliser as one of the safest security device but these auto-lifters have found a way to crack it. They match codes installed in their laptop, connect it with the car chip to start the engine, said Ajit Kumar Singla, DCP, North-east.

An immobiliser is an electronic device fitted to an automobile that prevents the engine from running unless the correct key (or token) is used. This prevents the car from being "hot-wired" even after the thief has broken inside the vehicle, thus reducing the theft.

Car thieves are embezzling data on engine-key combinations to help their criminal activities

A few months back, Delhi Police registered a case in the Safdarjung Enclave area where auto lifters decoded the security system of an SUV with the help of a laptop. The incident was captured on a CCTV.

Sources in the anti-auto theft squad say that engines with low CCs are used to provide electricity in neighbouring UP as they are converted into generators in many villages.

Such vehicle engines are also in demand to be converted into water pumps to run tubewells in the farms.

Several parts of these cars, such as side-view mirrors, steering wheels, and other unmarked components, also make a comeback to the city markets to be sold as genuine spare parts.

Dismantling of a car is done quickly and as the word spreads, buyers reach out and frisk away the parts they specialise in, the sources said.

Last year, almost 31,000 vehicles were stolen from Delhi. Only 1,770 were recovered, even after they arrested 1,542 suspects during the period.

Auto theft has seen a steep rise after Delhi Police started an online FIR system to help people file cases of theft.

This is a good initiative which helps people avoid running to a police station to file an FIR in case their bike of car stolen. But, it has been also noticed that after this initiative, there is a downfall of recovery rate, the official said.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, last year, Delhi topped the list of all the states as well as cities in the country with more than 32,000 stolen vehicles.
The Government could renegotiate the controversial electricity price deal for the proposed new nuclear plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset if it takes a stake in the project, say experts.

Reports this weekend suggest it is preparing to step in with a 6 billion payment to support the scheme, replacing a contentious investment in the plan by a Chinese nuclear group.

A 6 billion taxpayer investment could also prompt a renegotiation of the hotly disputed price.

Reports this weekend suggest the Government is preparing to step in with a 6 billion payment towards the for the proposed nuclear plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset

The current plan, with French group EDF building the new Hinkley plant, guarantees the owners would be paid at least 92.50 per Megawatt hour for electricity produced, far above the current wholesale price.

A senior energy industry source said: 6 billion is loose change to the Government, it would cut the capital expenditure by a third and its less of a risk for EDF.

That should bring the strike price down, which would be good news for consumers.

Prime Minister Theresa May unexpectedly delayed the project after coming to office and is expected to make a decision on whether to go ahead with the troubled plant later this month.
Washington and Brussels could face a showdown in the European Court over Apples multi-billion pound tax row with the European Commission, legal experts say.

A legal battle looms over the commissions ruling that Ireland granted the technology giant 13 billion (11 billion) in undue tax benefits.

Apple is understood to have retained City lawyers Freshfields to handle its case. But competition lawyers told The Mail on Sunday that the US government would also have the right to make its case in the European Court.

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Apple and Dublin are facing a bruising fight with the commission over the potential payment

US treasury chiefs are understood to be furious at the commissions investigations into the tax affairs of some of Americas best-known brands, as bills payable in Europe could reduce payments to the US tax authorities.

The US Treasury declined to comment on whether it would make representations to the European Court, but with a raft of tax cases looming it is increasingly likely that governments will step into legal battles on behalf of their leading companies.

Apple boss Tim Cook has already called the commissions ruling political c**p.

The commission said Apple should repay 13 billion in state aid given by the Irish government over two separate sweetheart tax arrangements. The commission alleged the deals allowed Apple to say that a head office based nowhere was responsible for its profits.

In an earlier finding, commissioners said Apple had agreed one deal in 1991 with the Irish revenue that meant it would pay tax on a maximum of $40 million (30 million) of profits in Ireland, despite an Apple representative admitting there was no scientific basis for the figure.

The deal lasted for 15 years  much longer than similar tax agreements in other countries  the commission argued. The UK reviews similar deals every five years.

Apple and Dublin are now facing a bruising fight with the commission over the potential payment.

The Irish coalition government said on Friday that it would contest the ruling, which it feels will undermine its appeal as a low-tax base for multinationals. But the decision will go to a vote in the Irish parliament this week.

US treasury chiefs are understood to be furious at the commissions investigations into the tax affairs of some of Americas best-known brands

Competition experts said the case was likely to last at least five years, going before the General Court of the European Union in Luxembourg, with an appeal likely to be heard by the European Court of Justice whatever the outcome.

The General Court case will not get a judgment for three to four years, said Juan Rodriguez, an EU competition expert at City law firm Sullivan and Cromwell.

Apple says the commissions claim has no basis in fact or law. In a letter to his customers, Cook wrote: We never asked for, nor did we receive, any special deals.

The commissions formal judgment against Apple has yet to be published and may not appear for several months.

Apple is allowed to argue over which elements of the judgment are commercially confidential so that it can have them removed from the public document. In a similar case involving Starbucks it took eight months before the full details emerged.

Commissioners have pursued several multinationals founded in the US over their taxation deals with low-tax European Union member states.

There is a case against Fiat-Chrysler as well as Starbucks, and the commission is due to rule shortly on a case involving Amazon that could see the online retailer repay 400 million to the Luxembourg tax authorities.

The investigations have infuriated the US government which publicly criticised the commission earlier this year.

These investigations, if continued, have considerable implications for the United States  for the US government directly and for US companies  in the form of potential lost tax revenue and increased barriers to cross-border investment, it said.

Critically, these investigations also undermine the multilateral progress made towards reducing tax avoidance.

Washington and Brussels could face a court showdown over Apples multi-billion tax row

One of the underlying issues is the US tax code. Companies pay a federal rate of 35 per cent and state tax on top, but pay no US tax on foreign profits if they are not repatriated.

US companies have exploited the loophole to pile up hundreds of billions of dollars offshore. Combined with other European loopholes, that has allowed Apple, Google and others to pay little or no tax on their European profits.

If Apple is forced to pay 13 billion to Ireland it could offset that payment against any US tax bill that it would face when repatriating its offshore cash.

Cook described the commissions ruling as political c**p in an interview with the Irish Independent, adding: I think that Apple was targeted here. And I think that [anti-US sentiment] is one reason why we could have been targeted.

People in leadership positions in several countries tell me that this is the agenda.

But in a blow to UK Brexiteers hoping to use the row to lure the tech giant to Britain, he said the company wanted to stay in Ireland.
Amazon's European HQ paid 47.7 million (40 million) in corporation tax across Europe in 2015, six times more than in the previous year.

The rise came after it changed its structure in the EU ahead of a crackdown on multinationals.

Customers still officially pay the Luxembourg business for goods they buy on the website, but the online retailer has branches around Europe meaning profits on the sales are taxed where the customer is based.

Amazon's European HQ paid 47.7 million (40 million) in corporation tax across Europe in 2015, six times more than in the previous year

Amazon declined to say how much of the tax payment went to the UKs Revenue & Customs.

The retailer restructured in May 2015, so would have paid higher tax for only half the period the accounts cover.

Amazon EU Sarl, the Luxembourg business, made profits of 480 million in 2015, on total sales of 18.6 billion.
British business growth rebounded in the three months to August shaking off some of the European Union referendum blues, but expansion is still far below the rate seen last year.

The latest survey from the CBI will fuel the simmering row over how well the economy is bearing up after the Brexit vote amid a flurry of conflicting data.

The CBI's growth indicator stood at +8 per cent, slightly up from the +5 per cent figure recorded in July.

The Treasury had warned that an Out vote could mean the economy shrinks by 0.1 per cent

The stronger figures will be taken as a sign that the economy remains resilient despite the June vote to leave the EU.

But the index remains at low levels compared to the double-digit positive numbers seen throughout 2015.

The CBI figures come hot on the heels of the latest Purchasing Managers Index figures for manufacturing, issued by research group IHS Markit last week.

These showed a sudden recovery at factories following the sharp slump seen after the Brexit vote.

The PMI construction figures on Friday showed a rebound from the July doldrums, although they indicated that the building industry is still shrinking.

Expansion in British business is still far below the rate seen last year

The third key PMI measure  covering the services sector and regarded as the most important indicator  will be issued tomorrow.

Before the referendum the Treasury had warned that an Out vote could mean the economy shrinks by 0.1 per cent in the following three months.

Patrick Minford, professor of applied economics at Cardiff Business School and one of the Economists for Brexit, said the Treasury forecasts were 'completely dead and buried'.

He added: 'They ought to have the most red faces and be eating the most humble of pies.' Minford said he expected third quarter growth to be strong at around 0.6 per cent.

But Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit  the research group which compiles the PMI figures  argued that the Treasury forecast might still prove to be accurate.

Britain's fastest growing companies want membership of the European single market and access to EU workers to be the Government's top priorities in Brexit negotiations, according to a survey by private equity firm ECI.
Living on a small island theres not many job opportunities, youve got to create your own, says the founder of Hebridean Sea Salt.

Natalie Crayton, 34, set up the firm on the Isle of Lewis in 2011. Now Crayton, who has four employees, has won a 180,000 deal with Sainsburys that will see it launch into 360 stores. It is the firms first UK-wide deal.

The island in the Outer Hebrides has a population of about 18,500. Crayton said: I was a stay-at-home mum. I wanted to work for myself for the flexibility with the children.

Natalie Crayton set up the firm in 2011 and has now won a 180,000 deal with Sainsburys

'I had the idea after trying to buy Scottish sea salt but there wasnt any available. I decided to do it myself. It took six months of research. Our first customers were delicatessens.

Crayton said she got the deal with Sainsburys through perseverance, little by little.

She added: The plan is to get into more supermarkets and launch new products. We have a range of smoked salmon that uses our salt in the cure, and thats available in Whole Foods.

Hebridean Sea Salt is also stocked in Waitrose and Co-op stores in Scotland.

The expansion has been possible after a 250,000 investment in new equipment last year, which took production from 50kg to 300kg per day.

The business evaporates water sourced locally from Loch Erisort and then harvests the salt by hand before it is hand-packed on site.




At the talks following the official welcome ceremony, they rejoiced at the extensive and substantive development of bilateral relations, especially since the strategic partnership was set up in 2007.

They said the upgrade of bilateral ties is to meet the aspirations of the two countries leaders and peoples, and to be in conformity with both sides fundamental and long-term interests, as well as their willingness to contribute to peace, stability, cooperation and development in the region and the world.

PM Nguyen Xuan Phuc said Vietnam treasures the time-tested friendship with India which was founded by late President Ho Chi Minh and Indian PM Jawaharlal Nehru. He said his country supports Indias Act East policy and its greater role in the region and the world.

Narendra Modi, who is the first Indian PM to visit Vietnam in 15 years, congratulated the Southeast Asian nation on the great socio-economic development progress and expressed his pride of the close relationship between President Ho Chi Minh and PM Nehru.

He stressed Vietnam is an important pillar in Indias Act East policy and the expansion of Indias relations with ASEAN.

The two leaders agreed to enhance political and diplomatic cooperation through increasing visits at all levels and exchanges between their Parties, parliaments and people. The countries will effectively implement existing cooperation mechanisms, including soon organising the meeting of the Inter-Governmental Committee.

They considered security-defence cooperation as one of the important pillars of the comprehensive strategic partnership and pledged to effectively carry out the Joint Vision Statement on Vietnam-India Defence Cooperation and deepen collaboration in this sphere.

The Indian PM thanked the Vietnamese Government for providing favourable conditions for his countrys naval ships to visit Vietnam, thereby helping boost mutual understanding between the two navies.

The two PMs highlighted the enormous strategic cooperation potential in economics, trade and investment. They hailed two-way trade that surpassed USD7.8 billion in 2015 and showed confidence that the bilateral trade target of USD15 billion in 2020 is feasible.

The leaders agreed to direct ministries and relevant sectors to take concrete measures to help businesses collaborate in the fields of their strengths while reducing trade barriers on import-export products and encouraging bilateral investment.

PM Narendra Modi welcomed Vietnamese enterprises to participate in the Make in India initiative to enjoy its preferential treatment. He acknowledged the proposal to reduce trade barriers and entrusted ministries and sectors to work on this issue.

Meanwhile, PM Nguyen Xuan Phuc welcomed Indian companies to increase investments in Vietnam and pledged to create the most favourable conditions for Indian investors and support them based on Vietnams current law.

PM Narendra Modi affirmed that Indias Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) will continue to implement its projects in Vietnam, and hope to get more support to expand cooperation and investment in the country.

The two sides exchanged measures to widen collaboration in other important fields such as energy, peaceful uses of nuclear energy, aerospace science, oil and gas, information technology, and science-technology, along with education, healthcare, culture, tourism, and people-to-people exchanges.

They underlined the potential and significance of agricultural cooperation and stressed the need to increase connectivity in aviation, navigation, infrastructure and digital connection.

The PMs also exchanged views on regional and international issues of mutual concerns and agreed to enhance coordination at regional and global forums, especially of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and related forums.

Regarding the East Sea issue, the two sides reiterated their wish and determination to work together to maintain peace, stability, security, freedom and safety of overflight and navigation in the East Sea based on the principles of international law, particularly the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea 1982 (UNCLOS).

They confirmed the importance of fully respecting the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the East Sea (DOC) and hoped the involved parties will soon reach a Code of Conduct in the East Sea (COC).

The Indian PM expressed his hope that Vietnam and other ASEAN member states will soon reach an agreement to realise the USD-1-billion credit package that India provides for the bloc in digital and infrastructure connectivity.

He took this occasion to thank the Vietnamese Government and people for their warm welcome and invite PM Nguyen Xuan Phuc to visit India at a convenient time. PM Nguyen Xuan Phuc accepted the invitation with pleasure. Dates for the visit will be arranged through diplomatic channels.

After the talks, the two PMs witnessed the signing of 12 cooperation agreements between the two countries./.
MINNEAPOLIS (AP)  The remains of Jacob Wetterling, an 11-year-old boy kidnapped from a rural Minnesota road nearly 27 years ago, were identified Saturday, authorities said, providing long-awaited answers to a mystery that has captivated residents and sparked changes in sex offender laws.

A masked gunman abducted Jacob in October of 1989 near the boy's home in St. Joseph, about 80 miles northwest of Minneapolis. The Stearns County Sheriff's Office confirmed in a statement that "Jacob Wetterling's remains have been located" and that the Ramsey County medical examiner and a forensic odontologist identified them Saturday.

Additional DNA testing will be conducted and investigators are continuing to evaluate new evidence in the case, the sheriff's office said, adding that authorities expect to be able to provide more details early next week.

FILE - In this Aug. 28, 2009, file photo, Patty and Jerry Wetterling show a photo of their son Jacob Wetterling, who was abducted in October of 1989 in St. Joseph, Minn and is still missing, in Minneapolis. Patty Wetterling said Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016 that his remains have been found. Daniel Heinrich, who authorities have called a person of interest in the 1989 kidnapping, denied any involvement and was not charged with that crime. But he has pleaded not guilty to several federal child pornography charges. (AP Photo/Craig Lassig, File)

A law enforcement official told The Associated Press earlier Saturday that a person of interest in Jacob's abduction took authorities to a field in central Minnesota last week. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing case, said remains and other evidence were recovered and that the remains had been buried.

Jacob's mother, Patty Wetterling, sent a text message to KARE-TV earlier Saturday, saying that Jacob "has been found and our hearts are broken." She did not immediately respond to calls and text messages from The Associated Press.

Jacob was riding his bicycle with his brother and a friend on Oct. 22, 1989, when a masked gunman abducted him. Authorities said the man held on to Jacob and told the other boys to run. Jacob hadn't been seen since, despite extensive searches, tens of thousands of leads and offers of a monetary reward.

No one has been arrested or charged in his abduction, which led to changes in sex-offender registration laws.

But last year, authorities took another look at the case, and were led to Danny Heinrich, a man they called a "person of interest" in Jacob's kidnapping.

Heinrich, 53, of Annandale, denied any involvement in the abduction, and was not charged with that crime. But he has pleaded not guilty to 25 federal child pornography charges and is scheduled to go on trial on those counts in October.

The FBI has said previously that Heinrich matched the general description of a man who assaulted several boys in Paynesville from 1986 to 1988. Earlier this year, Heinrich's DNA was found on the sweatshirt of a 12-year-old boy who was kidnapped from Cold Spring and sexually assaulted just nine months before Jacob's abduction.

Heinrich was questioned by authorities shortly after Jacob's disappearance, but he denied involvement. Court documents say his shoes and car tires were "consistent" with tracks left near the site of Jacob's abduction, but couldn't be ruled an exact match. Authorities also searched the home where Heinrich lived with his father at the time and found scanners, camouflage clothing and a picture of a boy wearing underwear.

Heinrich's attorney did not respond to emailed requests for comment Saturday.

Jacob's abduction shattered childhood innocence for many in rural Minnesota, changing the way parents let their kids roam. His smiling face was burned into Minnesota's psyche, appearing on countless posters and billboards over the years. Each year, Minnesota residents were asked to keep their porch lights on for Jacob's safe return.

Patty Wetterling always kept hope her son would be found alive. She became a national advocate for children, and with her husband, Jerry Wetterling, founded the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center, which works to help communities and families prevent child exploitation. In 1994, Congress passed a law named after Jacob Wetterling that requires states to establish sex offender registries.

Officials with the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center posted a statement on its website Saturday, saying they are in "deep grief."

"We didn't want Jacob's story to end this way," the statement said. "Our hearts are heavy, but we are being held up by all of the people who have been a part of making Jacob's Hope a light that will never be extinguished. ... Jacob, you are loved."

___

Associated Press writer Jeff Baenen contributed to this report.

___

Follow Amy Forliti on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/amyforliti. More of her work can be found at http://bigstory.ap.org/content/amy-forliti.

FILE - This undated file photo provided by the Sherburne County Sheriff's Office, shows Daniel Heinrich. Patty Wetterling, the mother of Jacob Wetterling, missing since 1989, said Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016 that his remains have been found. Heinrich, who authorities have called a person of interest in the 1989 kidnapping, denied any involvement and was not charged with that crime. But he has pleaded not guilty to several federal child pornography charges. (Sherburne County Sheriff's Office via AP )

A white ribbon with a large J hangs on a post along Minnesota Street as residents there await confirmation that remains found belong to 1989 abduction victim Jacob Wetterling, Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016, in St. Joseph, Minn. The Stearns County Sheriff's Office says in a statement that Jacob's remains were identified on Saturday. Jacob was 11 when he was kidnapped from a rural road on Oct. 22, 1989, near his home in St. Joseph, about 80 miles northwest of Minneapolis. (Kimm Anderson/St. Cloud Times via AP)

Pedestrians walk past white ribbons hung along Minnesota Street as residents of St. Joseph, Minn., wait for confirmation that the remains of 1989 abduction victim Jacob Wetterling had been found, Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016. The Stearns County Sheriff's Office says in a statement that Jacob's remains were identified on Saturday. Jacob was 11 when he was kidnapped from a rural road on Oct. 22, 1989, near his home in St. Joseph, about 80 miles northwest of Minneapolis. (Kimm Anderson/St. Cloud Times via AP)

A bouquet of flowers is placed at the end of Jerry and Patty Wetterling's driveway as news has come out that the search for Jacob Wetterling may be over, Saturday afternoon, Sept. 3, 2016, in St. Joseph, Minn. Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton and other officials are offering support to the family of Jacob Wetterling after his mother said the remains of the boy missing for nearly 27 years have been found. In a statement, Dayton says Jacob's story "has touched the lives and hearts of Minnesotans for a generation." (Kimm Anderson/St. Cloud Times via AP)

A single bouquet of flowers is rested on the sign for Dr. Jerry Wetterling's chiropractic office as the town of St. Joseph, Minn., waited for confirmation that remains found were those of the 1989 missing boy Jacob Wetterling, Sat., Sept. 3, 2016. The Stearns County Sheriff's Office says in a statement that Jacob's remains were identified on Saturday. Jacob was 11 when he was kidnapped from a rural road on Oct. 22, 1989, near his home in St. Joseph, about 80 miles northwest of Minneapolis. (Kimm Anderson/St. Cloud Times via AP)
He's called Teflon Don - a nickname that has ironically stuck because nothing else will, from shouts of 'racism' to cries of 'bigotry' from his opponents.

Now an interesting theory has emerged about why this may be the case - because liberal pundits have been too mean in the past.

Frank Bruni, of the New York Times, argues that because pundits have been too eager to use labels such as 'racist' about moderate Republican candidates, when an outspoken one such as Trump appears, they have no words left to attack him with.

Attacks against Donald Trump are falling on deaf ears because Republican voters are used to hearing the same things said about ever candidate they put forward, it is claimed

While the label might be more apt for a candidate such as Trump, who has denounced Mexicans as 'murderers' and 'rapists', he can simply counter that Democrats say that about every Republican, and he'd be right.

As an example, Bruni cites Howard Wolfson, former communications director for Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2008, who also participated in Kerry's campaign and spoke out against McCain and Romney.

He says: 'I'm quite confident I employed language that, in retrospect, was hyperbolic and inaccurate, language that cheapened my ability - our ability - to talk about [Trump] with accuracy and credibility.

'It's only when you find yourself describing someone who really is the definition of an extremist - who really is, essentially, in my opinion, a fascist - that you recognize that the language that you've used in the past to describe other people was hyperbolic and inappropriate and cheap.'

Using the specific example of Mitt Romney during 2012, Noah Rothman at Commentary Magazine recalls how the Republican was viciously attacked during that election, but has now become a Liberal talking-point thanks to his refusal to support Trump's candidacy.

Rothman recalls how Romney was attacked as evil for his work at Bain Capital, denounced as a bigot after it emerged he held down and cut the hair of a high school classmate who may or may not have been gay, and branded racist by MSNBC pundit Toure after telling Obama to take his 'angry' campaign 'back to Chicago.'

By branding more moderate candidates such as Mitt Romney a 'racist' and a 'bigot', it means there are no words left to attack a candidate like Trump, observers believe

He adds: 'All those stereotypes Democrats fabricated to assail Mitt Romney helped inoculate Trump against similar charges that were and are true in his case.

'In this sense, the Obamas themselves helped clear the way for Trump.'

Karol Markowicz, of The Daily Beast, a self-confessed anti-Trump Republican, pins the blame solely on NYT columnist Paul Krugman.

In an August column Krugman wondered why 'not-crazy Republicans' are rallying around Trump 'as if he is a normal candidate.'

Markowicz writes: 'What makes Donald Trump normal to so many is that theyve heard all the hysteria from people like Krugman before.

'If you use the most vile language available on a good man like Romney, or on real candidates like Rubio and Cruz, you find you have none left for the Donald Trumps of the worldand no one is listening to you anyway.'

The column was also derided by David A Graham in The Atlantic, Kevin Glass, policy director for the Franklin Center, and Kyle Smith, a columnist for the New York Post.

Smith wrote: 'Krugman's plea to "non-crazy Republicans" today would work better if it weren't the first time he has admitted not all Republicans are crazy.'
A federal watchdog has launched an investigation into sexual harassment at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) - more than a year after a 24-year-old intern said a 62-year-old employee had touched, groped and kissed her against her will.

The inspector general's office announced the probe in a letter to the agency earlier this month. It will look into allegations of sexual harassment at the EPA's region 5 office in Chicago - the same office that came under fire during the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.

The inquiry will look into how the agency handles sexual harassment complaints, based on a review of cases over the past five years.

Accusations of sexual harassment have surfaced at the EPA over recent years, with two interns in their twenties accusing senior employees of inappropriate conduct. One of those cases emerged at the Region 5 office.

The inspector general's office announced earlier this month it will look into allegations of sexual harassment at the EPA's region 5 office in Chicago (pictured)

A 24-year-old research fellow said in 2011 that 62-year-old Paul Bertram 'inappropriately hugged her, rubbed her back, grabbed her, rubbed her hands, touched her knees, kissed her, made suggestive comments, and engaged in unsolicited physical and verbal contact' and that this occurred 'countless times over a period of years', according to a congressional hearing in July last year.

These allegations surfaced at EPA's Region 5 office - the one under investigation by the inspector general.

The woman, referred to as Intern X in the hearing's transcript, was 'a wreck' as this behavior unfolded, according to equal employment opportunity officer Ronald Harris' testimony.

'She kept saying to me: "I just want it to stop. How do I get it to stop?"' Harris told Congress in July last year.

Bertram retired in 2011 according to the committee's summary of the hearing.

Harris blasted the agency's 'culture of arrogance' in front of Congress, saying it made employees feel 'untouchable'.

The DailyMail.com has reached out to EPA's Region 5 office for comment.

The EPA has come under fire for its handling of sexual harassment complaints in the past.

Another investigation by the inspector general found that former acting associate administrator for the EPA office of homeland security Peter Jutro harassed at least 16 women in a decade at the agency.

A 21-year-old intern from the Smithsonian Institution complained in 2014 that Jutro had made her feel 'uncomfortable and scared'.

The EPA has come under fire for its handling of sexual harassment complaints in the past. Pictured is the agency's building in Washington, DC

In his office, Jutro asked the 21-year-old 'what turned her on and what excited her' and later said he asked the questions 'from a career standpoint', according to a statement given by assistant inspector general for investigations Patrick Sullivan.

Jutro also took a picture of the young woman's face and toes, the statement adds.

The intern said Jutro had brushed up against her, tried to kiss her and grabbed her buttocks, which Jutro denied according to Sullivan's account.

But Jutro admitted to wiping something from her face during lunch, Sullivan added.

In addition to his inappropriate conduct with the Smithsonian intern, Jutro engaged in 'unwelcome' behavior with 16 additional women, the inspector general's office found.

The women said Jutro had touched, hugged or kissed them, took photographs of them, or made comments to them with sexual connotations.

The inspector general's office tried to interview Jutro in January last year, but he retired before that could happen, according to Sullivan's statement.

Jutro called Sullivan's testimony a 'vast exaggeration' with 'many key elements that are simply untrue' in a statement emailed to the DailyMail.com.

'It is true that I have hugged many people, both men and women, and have done so since childhood. My parents were German Jewish refugees who detested the coldness of their former country in the 1930s and strongly encouraged this warmer behavior in me,' Jutro's statement read in part.

'I also learned to sometimes kiss a person on the cheek or head as a greeting or farewell. In no case was there ever a sexual component to this.

'I recognize in retrospect that my behavior might have made someone uncomfortable and I feel bad and embarrassed about that, but it was never my intent.'

Sullivan has also accused top EPA employees of turning a blind eye to the claims made against Jutro.

Senior officials at the EPA 'did not take any actions' against Jutro even after finding out about the allegations, Sullivan said in a hearing before Congress in April last year.

A spokeswoman at the EPA told the DailyMail.com: 'While the agency does not comment on pending investigations, harassment of any kind is prohibited at the EPA and will not be tolerated.

'Within the last year, the agency issued an order which outlines the procedure for addressing allegations of workplace harassment. It applies agency-wide. In addition, the agency instituted mandatory online training for all employees that explains the relevant anti-harassment policies and protections, including our new order.
Grocery bills are set to be slashed this week as supermarkets unleash a new wave of price cuts.

Morrisons will launch the autumn offensive tomorrow with cuts of up to 20 per cent on meat and poultry and more than a third off vegetables.

Other supermarkets are understood to be preparing their own deep discounts in what is set to be one of the fiercest rounds yet of price cutting in the battle for shoppers.

Kick-starting the battle, Morrisons will announce cuts of 20 per cent on meat and poultry and more than a third off vegetables

The autumn offensive is the latest attempt by Britains biggest grocers to fight off the invasion by German discounters Aldi and Lidl.

Just last month, Lidl emerged as the fastest-growing supermarket in the UK, with Aldi a close second. Between them they have captured a 10.7 per cent share of the grocery market, up from 6 per cent five years ago.

Senior supermarket sources said the UKs grocery giants were beginning to close the gap on price and would continue to do so in the coming weeks.

One said: I think you can expect things to get pretty aggressive.

Among its cuts this week, Morrisons will reduce the price of topside beef steak from 12.50 to 10 per kilogram, 400g of wafer-thin cooked ham from 1.87 to 1.56, salad tomatoes from 65p to 56p and pre-packaged broccoli from 60p to 38p.

The price comparison website MySupermarket.com said this weekend that grocery prices had fallen 4 per cent in the past year  cutting billions of pounds off the nations bills. It said the price of onions was down 35 per cent, broccoli 20 per cent, mushrooms 11 per cent and bananas 9 per cent.

The Morrison's bid is an attempt to thwart competitiors such as Lidl, which has emerged as the fastest-growing supermarket in the UK

MySupermarket chief executive Gilad Simhony said the battle of the supermarkets meant a welcome drop in prices amid a period of uncertainty post-Brexit.

The sharp fall in the value of the pound since the referendum had been expected to push up the prices of imported food, feeding through to higher prices for shoppers.
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The designers of a Cold War-era satellite used to spy on the Russians more than 30 years ago have revealed they were able to take pictures better than anything you'll find on Google Earth today.

In an era long before smartphones and 'street view', a team of American engineers were hard at work creating top secret spy satellites, the Hexagon KH-9 Reconnaissance class.

Nineteen different satellite missions captured images of a staggering 877 million square miles of the Earth's surface between 1971 and 1986, according to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force.

The designers of a Cold War-era satellite used to spy on the Russians more than 30 years ago have revealed there were able to take photographs (pictured) better than anything you'll find on Google Earth today

The Hexagon KH-9 Reconnaissance Satellites were used by the U.S. for 19 missions between between 1971 and 1986

And now one of the engineers responsible for building the camera used by the Hexagons has revealed the pictures taken were much clearer and of a higher quality than some satellite images today.

'These were much better pictures than Google Earth,' Phil Pressel told CNN's Declassified.

Despite the satellites orbiting at heights in excess of 100 miles above the earth, the engineer said they were able to capture incrediblly detailed photographs thanks to its two-foot resolution - meaning objects that were about two-foot in diameter could be clearly seen.

'We could see a picnic blanket, count the number of people, and we might have been able to see a ball being tossed,' he said.

Despite the satellites orbiting at heights in excess of 100 miles above the earth, the engineer said they were able to capture incredible detailed photographs (pictured) thanks to its two-foot resolution

'We could see a picnic blanket, count the number of people, and we might have been able to see a ball being tossed,' engineer Phil Pressel said

For its panoramic cameras, the satellites used a Perkin-Elmer, 60-inch focal length f/3.0, aperture 20 inches

Each individual satellite weighed about 30,000 pounds and were about the same size as a school bus

HEXAGON SPY SATELLITE FACT SHEET Altitude: 80-370 nautical miles (92-426 miles) Mission duration: 124 days on average Panoramic cameras: Perkin-Elmer, 60-inch focal length f/3.0, aperture 20 inches Mapping camera: Itek, 12-inch focal length f/6.0, 9.5 in film, with two Itek 10-in focal length f/2.0, 70mm film cameras for star-tracking position reference Film: Length 320,000 feet (about 60 miles), width 6.6 inches Number of film return capsules: Four (five if mapping camera used) Maximum film load per capsule: 52,000-77,500 feet Maximum film weight per capsule: 500 pounds Capsule weight: 956 pounds (Source: National Museum of the U.S. Air Force) Advertisement

Pressel went on to say the satellites he played a crucial part in creating stopped the world from descending into complete chaos.

'I honestly think that the Hexagon program was responsible for preventing World War III,' he told the program.

Each individual satellite weighed about 30,000 pounds and were about the same size as a school bus.

They were launched aboard Titan IIID rockets in California, and dropped 'buckets' containing pictures stored in capsules down from the satellites so they could be scooped up.

Pressel believes the satellites, complete with their incredible cameras (pictured), played a crucial role in stopping World War III

Pictures taken by the satellites were stored on film and dropped to Earth in massive buckets (pictured), which were scooped up by the U.S. Air Force

An infographic shows some of the equipment included in each satellite and the basic dimensions

Once the buckets reached 50,000 feet somewhere above the Hawaiian Islands, parachutes were deployed and they slowly floated down towards Earth.

However, the never touched the ground, with Air Force pilots flying specialized cargo planes looking in on the buckets by using a tracking system and then collecting them out of mid-air.

Each satellite was able to spend an average of 124 days on a mission, and had more than 320,000 feet of 6.6 inch-wide film on-board.

The capsules the film was dropped down to Earth in weighed 956 pounds.

Another infographic details how the satellites were launched and then tracks each stage of the mission before they came back to Earth

Each satellite was able to spend an average of 124 days on a mission, and had more than 320,000 feet of 6.6 inch-wide film on-board
A new billboard is encouraging gun enthusiasts to post photos of themselves with their rifles and hunted animals to 'show their love of shooting.'

Beretta Australia, the country's largest supplier of guns and shotguns, unveiled a billboard on Melbourne's West Gate Freeway this week featuring Olympic shooter Catherine Skinner, who won gold in the trap event in Rio last month.

'I am a shooter. Join me,' the large billboard reads, encouraging other shooters to promote the sport on social media.

A Beretta Australia billboard (pictured) on Melbourne's West Gate Freeway is encouraging gun enthusiasts to post photos of themselves while hunting animals to 'show their love of shooting'

Within hours of the billboard being spotted, hunters and enthusiast began posting images of themselves with large deceased animals (pictured)

'Show your love for shooting by sharing one of your shooting pics! It can be an action photo, a hunting photo, a photo with your friends at the range - anything!' the company explained on their website.

'To enter share on Facebook or Instagram, and add the hashtag #IAMASHOOTER and tag in @BerettaAustralia and / or @SSAAnational to be in to WIN some great prizes!'

Within hours of the billboard being spotted, hunters and enthusiast began posting images of themselves with large deceased animals.

'Mates, guns, wild boar and great times :) Boys will be boys,' one man wrote with a picture of him and several friends dressed in camouflage as they waited on their prey in the bush.

The billboard features Olympic shooter Catherine Skinner (pictured), who won gold in the trap event in Rio last month

By using the hashtag, hunters are entering a competition for unspecified prizes from Beretta

Another man is pictured with two rifles and a large wild pig splayed on the ground.

A spokeswoman for the Sporting Shooters Association told The Herald Sun that they were proud of Ms Skinner, who is a member, and 'are getting behind her and raising awareness of the sport in general.'

'Hunting has been a recreational activity before Federation, the indigenous people were hunters. It's about getting outdoors, getting food for the table; it's something that hunters are passionate about,' the spokeswoman said.

'Shooting is a sport, a legitimate one, that's been around for a long time.

'Shooting is a sport, a legitimate one, that's been around for a long time,' a Sporting Shooters Association spokeswoman said

'I am a shooter. Join me,' the large billboard reads, encouraging other shooters to promote the sport on social media

'This campaign is an invitation for people to give shooting a try. It can take you places, just give it a go. We encourage people to put any misconceptions aside and give it a go.'

Not everyone is supportive though, including the Alannah and Madeline Foundation, which was created by Walter Mikac for his daughters and wife, Nanette, who were killed in the Port Arthur massacre.

Any promotion of weapons and guns is highly discouraged, the foundation's chief told The Herald Sun.
Two adults and six children were taken to hospitals in Tennessee after a ride shut down prematurely at the Delta Fair in Memphis on Saturday, officials said.

It was initially reported that 14 people were thrown from the Moonraker ride at Delta Fair, though s spokesman from the Shelby County Sheriff's office said reports were inaccurate.

The fair's owner, Mark Lovell, said the ride's restraint bar was released prematurely, but there were no serious injuries.

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Seven riders and the ride's operator were transported to local hospitals near Memphis, Tennessee after a ride shut down at the Delta Fair Saturday

It was initially reported that 14 people were thrown from the Moonraker ride at Delta Fair, though a spokesman from the Shelby County Sheriff's office said reports were inaccurate

Officials said the ride's computer detected a problem and immediately shut down, but the operator of the ride panicked and halted the ride, releasing the safety restraints before it had settled into its cradle

A father at the fair, however, told FOX 13 that he watched his children fall 30 feet from the ride, which is a vertical spinning ride that rotates while elevating to a near 90-degree angle to the ground.

A fair spokesman said on Facebook that 'no one was thrown from a ride' and that no one was injured.

The fair's safety director, Matt Snyder, said the Moonraker ride's computer detected a problem and immediately shut down.

Snyder said the operator of the ride panicked and halted the ride, releasing the safety restraints before it had settled into its cradle.

Seven riders and the ride's operator were transported to local hospitals after initially walking away from the ride at their own will, Snyder said, adding that no one had visible injuries.

A Delta Fair spokesman said on Facebook that no one was thrown from the ride and that there were no injuries

People on Twitter took to social media to suggest that people fell off the ride from heights of 30 feet

'Everyone walked away,' fair owner Lovell told The Tennessean. 'There were no cuts, no bruises, no broken bones.'

'Some people were scared,' he added. 'One man had had some type of surgery recently, and a mother was emotionally upset. But it's totally erroneous to say 14 people were "thrown" from the ride.'

Some of the riders, however, were 'nervous and scared' after the incident, according to WREG.

One rider told FOX 13 that she was at the top of the ride when it stopped and her safety harness was released. Though she was able to hang on, she said the scene was chaotic.

'We were still in the air, and it was still going when our things (belts) came off, and it was to the side,' another rider told WMCA. 'And I was trying to hold on, but I couldn't so I fell to the side.'

The rider said she suffered pain in her ankle, head, neck and leg, but had no serious injuries.

The ride has been shut down but the fair remained open Saturday. The fair owner said that he was unsure when the ride would re-open

'I was really scared,' she said. 'I didn't know what to do. I thought we were just coming to the fair to come and have fun, and this happened out of nowhere.'

People took to social media to suggest that people fell off the ride from heights of 30 feet.

A spokesman from the Shelby County Sheriff's office says initial reports that 14 people were thrown from the ride were inaccurate.

The ride has been shut down but the fair remained open Saturday. Lovell told the Tennessean he was unsure when the ride would re-open.
A magazine that aims to instil a love of nature in youngsters has come under fire for killing tens of thousands of exotic bugs as a marketing gimmick.

Insect lovers have also criticised the Natural History Museum for giving its backing to the mass killing of the creepy-crawlies, which are encased in resin and mounted on to the cover of Real Life Bugs And Insects.

Sixty issues of the magazine are planned, each sold with a different bug, including wasps, beetles, scorpions and spiders. Each issue is expected to sell thousands of copies.

Real Life Bugs And Insects, a magazine for children (pictured), has come under fire after it is set to release sixty issues all with a different dead bug encased in plastic resin

But zoologist Ross Piper, an insect expert who regularly appears on TV, said: You would not give a kitten encased in plastic resin away with a magazine. This is a gimmick to get people to buy the magazine.

He also claimed that the ploy encourages the idea that insects are just like stamps that can be collected.

Britains leading insect conservation charity, Bug Life, criticised the Natural History Museum for endorsing the magazine. The museum should not be providing the public face for an operation that imports and distributes possibly tens of thousands of dead insects, a spokesman said.

He acknowledged that scientists kill small numbers of bugs for study, but added: When youre mass killing like this for a giveaway with a magazine, it is not justifiable.

These creatures are being killed for financial gain.

The magazine, published under the National Geographic banner, has been launched with adverts on childrens TV channels. It shows a cartoon scorpion scurrying along before being encased in clear plastic for the magazine. The title is available in toy stores and newsagents, with each issue normally priced at 5.99.

Despite the criticism, experts at the Natural History Museum say they have endorsed the magazine  and its dead bug giveaway  because it has educational benefits.

Max Barclay, who manages the museums beetles collection, said in a blog post defending the magazine: I know from daily experience the power of natural history collections to inspire awe and fascination.

The Natural History Museum, who has given its backing to the magazine, insists the insects are farmed in China and humanely gassed to avoid any suffering when killed

A collection like the one this magazine provides, in the hands of a curious young person, is a valuable learning tool, and likely to engender serious interest.

He said that collecting the bugs was no worse than buying a packet of frozen prawns, which are invertebrates just like insects.

Bug Life has also raised concerns about where the insects are coming from.

The Natural History Museum insists the insects are farmed in China and humanely gassed to avoid any suffering when killed. But Matt Shardlow, Bug Lifes chief executive, suspects that they are being taken from the wild, which could damage the local environment.

Mass killings like this can't be justified

A number of the bugs are just not possible to farm because of the way their life cycle runs, he said. The stag beetle is a larvae for seven years and then only lives as an adult for a few weeks.

Who is going to set up a farm seven years in advance for the quantity of stag beetles they are using?

And we know that bounty-hunting for insects operates on an industrial scale in China.

A spokesman for the Natural History Museum said last night that a condition of its partnership with Real Life Bugs And Insects was that the preserved insects are not endangered or threatened species, and that the insects are bred, farmed or harvested in a sustainable way.
Izzard, 54, joined thousands of protesters marching from Hyde Park to the Houses of Parliament to lobby the Government to delay activating Article 50

He's known for his anti-establishment views  but the boys in blue still turned out in force when Eddie Izzard's pink beret was brazenly stolen during a Brexit protest march yesterday.

Six police officers sprang to the cross-dressing comedian's rescue when his colourful beret was swiped.

Izzard, 54, carrying a yellow handbag and wearing high heels, joined thousands of protesters marching from Hyde Park to the Houses of Parliament to lobby the Government to delay activating Article 50 and leave the EU.

But as the march neared Downing Street, a masked man  one of four demonstrators against the protest  snatched the beret.

Despite his high heels, Izzard gave chase and was joined by police.

The hapless thief was arrested after a scrum of officers piled on top of him  raising the question of how many policemen it takes to retrieve a pink beret.

The beret was returned to Izzard, who dusted it off and put it back on his head, before continuing on the march with gay rights champion Peter Tatchell.

A Metropolitan Police spokeswoman said a 26-year-old man had been arrested and taken into custody.

Six police officers sprang to the cross-dressing comedian's rescue when his colourful beret was swiped

Police officers form a cordon to seperate a pro-Europe anti-Brexit March for Europe from a pro-Brexit demonstration
Trickster: Charles Mogford

Theresa May was embroiled in an embarrassing controversy last night over a trickster jailed for a tax fraud.

Car dealer Charles Mogford, who lives in the Prime Ministers Maidenhead constituency, was last week sentenced to two years in prison for an 86,000 VAT scam.

Mrs May has previously admitted lobbying on behalf of Mogford who sought a 500,000 taxpayer-backed loan to boost his business.

She was unaware he had previously been jailed in the US after pleading guilty to grand theft and theft of state funds, involving a Florida luxury boat business.

Mogford, who supplied specially modified Land Rovers for the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall, said he saw no need to tell Mrs May about his criminal record in America.

He obtained an Enterprise Finance Guarantee (EFG) loan under a scheme to help small businesses, introduced by the Coalition Government in which she was Home Secretary.

Theresa May has previously admitted lobbying on behalf of Charles Mogford, who sought a 500,000 taxpayer-backed loan to boost his business

The company later went bust.

Mogford said he needed the cash to relocate his business as a result of the new Reading to London Crossrail high-speed rail link that passes through Maidenhead.

The Coalitions EFG scheme was designed to help small companies unable to get conventional bank loans due to a lack of security or track record.

In 2013, Mogford duly obtained a 580,000 EFG loan.

Details of his US prison record are widely available on the internet  including a photograph and a 2008 US court judgment refusing to reduce his sentence.

Shortly after his release, he returned to the UK and set up a new business in Maidenhead.

Mogford, who lives in the Prime Ministers Maidenhead constituency, has a history of crime

The firm went bust  despite the 500,000 EFG loan, owing more than 1 million to more than 100 businesses and individuals, some in Ms Mays constituency.

Mrs May has said that she raised Mr Mogfords concerns with various bodies, but had not provided any assistance for him to obtain the loan.

Sentencing Mogford, 53, at Reading Crown Court last week, Judge Johannah Cutts said: You had the leading role in this offence.

Julia Smith, 51, a fellow ex-director of Mogfords Auto Exporters UK Limited, formerly Berkshire Land Rover, was given a suspended 18-month prison sentence for the same offence.

The court heard the pair submitted a VAT claim in 2010 for 31 Land Rovers, when only two vehicles had been bought.

The fraudulent invoice was used to make a false VAT repayment claim, and was exposed after an investigation by HM Revenue and Customs.

Both pleaded guilty. They were also banned from holding any company directorships for up to ten years.

An HMRC spokesman said: Mogford and Smith had traded legitimately, but greed led them to commit VAT fraud.




She made the confirmation at the second Eastern Economic Forum held in Russias Vladivostok, noting that the two sides finished the ratification of the deal and it will come into force after 60 days.

The EAEU-Vietnam FTA features the two sides obligations pertaining to such spheres as trade, services, investment and movement of natural persons.

With the formation of the EAEU-Vietnam free trade area, bilateral trade can increase from USD4 billion at present to USD8-10 billion. EAEU exporters can save about USD40 million in tax in the first year the pact takes effect, according to the Eurasian Economic Commission.

Under the agreement, Vietnam will immediately remove import tariffs on 59 percent of the goods from the EAEU, including meat products, wheat flour, alcohol, mechanical equipment and steel products. The tariffs on another 30 percent of goods will be gradually reduced to 0 percent in the transitional period.

Indonesia and Singapore also suggested similar FTAs with the EAEU, but procedures will be more complicated, Nikishina said.

The EAEU consists of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. The union and Vietnam signed the agreement in Kazakhstan on May 29th, 2015 after eight official rounds of negotiations./.
A Labour MP tipped as a future party leader last night reacted with fury after he was accused by allies of Jeremy Corbyn of holding secret talks with Tory MPs about forming a new party.

Dan Jarvis was targeted after warning last week that Labour faced annihilation if Mr Corbyn won next months leadership contest against Owen Smith.

Mr Jarviss remarks angered members of Mr Corbyns inner circle, who fought back by claiming that the former paratrooper was positioning himself to lead a breakaway group combining moderate Labour MPs and Left-wing wet Tory MPs.

Dan Jarvis was targeted after warning last week that Labour faced annihilation if Mr Corbyn won next months leadership contest against Owen Smith

One Corbyn ally told The Mail on Sunday: Jarvis clearly hopes he will be asked to head up some sort of Rightist faction, which is why he has been talking to Conservative wets. But he can do what he likes. Weve got control of the party.

Mr Jarvis emphatically denied the claims last night, saying: I havent spoken to anyone in the Tory Party about anything.

'Ive spent the summer working in the constituency and being with my family. You can draw your own conclusions about what is going on here. It is mischief making, and it is completely untrue.

With the polls pointing to a clear victory for Mr Corbyn over Mr Smith, moderate MPs opposed to his leadership  which amounts to most of the party  have been discussing whether to serve reluctantly under Mr Corbyn or form a breakaway group.

While Mr Jarvis, 43, a Blairite who served in Helmand before entering the Commons in 2011, denies any ambition to lead a breakaway party, in recent months he has been attracting the interest of Labour donors who have become estranged from the party under Mr Corbyn.

Mr Jarviss remarks angered members of Mr Corbyns inner circle, who fought back by claiming he was holding 'secret talks'

So far this year he has received more than 80,000 from private backers, with over 35,000 being pledged to him in the past six weeks alone.

The row comes as Mr Corbyn is accused of whipping up a lynch mob by deliberately holding rallies of Left-wing supporters in areas where moderate Labour MPs are facing the threat of deselection.

During the past week alone, Mr Corbyn has held a rally in Stoke  where the position of MP Tristram Hunt is under threat from the Momentum group of Left-wing activists  while his Shadow Chancellor ally John McDonnell addressed similar rallies in Ealing and Walthamstow.

Stella Creasy, the moderate MP for Walthamstow, is facing intense pressure from Momentum activists who want her removed.

Mr McDonnell told the Ealing rally that MPs who opposed Mr Corbyn  who include local MP Stephen Pound  would face increasing pressure from activists.
Home Secretary Amber Rudd announced last night that British homes have been found for the 20,000 Syrian refugees David Cameron promised to resettle a year ago.

Ms Rudd said that the commitment  made after pictures were flashed around the world of three-year-old Alan Kurdi drowned on a Turkish beach  has been met after receiving housing pledges from a total of 118 local authorities under the Vulnerable Person Resettlement Scheme.

The Home Office also announced a new 10 million funding package to boost English language tuition for the refugees.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd announced last night that British homes have been found for the 20,000 Syrian refugees

The latest figures show that 2,800 Syrians have so far arrived in the UK and are being housed in more than 100 local authority areas.

Ms Rudd said last night: Securing the 20,000 pledge within 12 months is testament to the immense goodwill and generosity of the British people and the effort and determination of local authorities across the UK.

We are on track and delivering our commitment to help the most vulnerable Syrians displaced by the conflict.
It is a feeling we all know - the sudden, stomach-dropping moment you realize you've forgotten something important, from locking the door to turning the oven off.

So spare a thought for Dr Ben Carson who had just such a moment in the middle of a live interview on CNN while visiting his childhood home in Detroit.

In bizarre footage, Dr Carson is being interviewed about Donald Trump's visit to the city when he remembers his bags are missing.

Dr Ben Carson caused a stir on Saturday when he walked out of a live CNN interview after apparently forgetting his luggage

Carson was being asked by reporter Jeremy Diamond about Trump's visit to his hometown of Detroit when he suddenly remembered his bags

When @JDiamond1 is interviewing @RealBenCarson live on CNN and Carson runs away to go find his luggage https://t.co/ram3K689iw  Noah Gray CNN (@NoahGrayCNN) September 3, 2016

With outstretched arms and a stunned expression on his face, Carson exclaims 'oh, my luggage!' before mumbling 'hold on' as he walks away from the camera.

Prior to that moment, reporter Jeremy Diamond had been asking Carson why he brought Trump to his old home.

Carson said: 'I just wanted him to see what it was like, what the neighborhood was like. We also went through some of the more blighted areas of Detroit.

'When I was growing up it was a very prosperous city, it was once the most prosperous city in America and has unfortunately undergone some pretty awful things.

'In order for our country to be great again, every aspect has to be great, including our inner cities.'

Diamond then tries to ask Carson about what Trump has learned on the trip before he excuses himself and wanders away to speak with staff in the background.

Rather than waiting until the segment was done, Carson turned and walked out of the interview to track the luggage down

As Diamond continued his piece to camera, Carson could be see wandering around in the background speaking to some staffers

While Diamond kept his cool and continued addressing the camera, the CNN anchor appeared flabbergasted by his behavior

While Diamond continues speaking to the camera, the anchor back in the CNN studios appears flabbergasted at Carson's actions, but before she can put her shock into words he returns to finish the interview.

It is not clear whether Carson actually managed to track down his missing bags.

The former Republican presidential hopeful, now an adviser to Trump, was on hand to help out with the billionaire's latest appeal to the African-American community.

Carson had gone with Trump earlier in the day as he visited the Great Faith International Ministries church for a prayer service, where the nominee was seen swaying to the music with his eyes closed.

Trump said: 'For centuries, the African-American church has been the conscience of this country. So true.

'The African-American faith community has been one of God's greatest gifts to America and its people.'

Trump also vowed that if he was elected president he would bring jobs back to impoverished black communities.

Carson eventually returned to the interview, but did not say what the problem with his luggage was or whether it got sorted

Carson had accompanied Donald Trump to his childhood home in Detroit where the men spoke with now-owner Felicia Reese (left)

Trump and Carson had earlier attended a service at the Great Faith International Ministries church as the Republican tries to appeal to African-Americans

He then visited Carson's bungalow-style childhood home in the city's southwest.

Trump and Carson chatted with the home owner Felicia Reese, who purchased the stone facing home in 1992, outside for a few minutes.

Trump joked that since Carson grew up there, the location was famous: 'This house is worth a lot of money!'

Manigualt told Reese: You're talking to a real estate genius!' and then said she would send Reese a copy of 'The Art of the Deal.'

As Trump left the area to return to the airport, he said: 'This is a great day!'

Asked what he thought of the day's visit to church and seeing Carson's home, he remarked: 'I loved it. I really liked it.'

Carson added: 'It was wonderful.'

This is not the first time that Dr Carson has caught media attention after leaving at an inappropriate time.

Back in January the former brain surgeon caused a stir after announcing he was returning home following the Iowa caucus rather than going to New Hampshire.
Britain's exit from the EU will not be 'plain sailing' and could lead to 'difficult times ahead' for the economy, Theresa May has admitted.

The Prime Minister's remarks follow last week's Cabinet decision that Britain should withdraw completely from the European single market as part of Brexit  a move which could lead to exporters having to pay tariffs when they trade with the EU.

In her first interview since entering Downing Street two months ago, Mrs May also:

Ruled out a snap Election;

Vowed there would be no second EU referendum;

And said there would not be a second Scottish independence vote.

Britain's exit from the EU will not be 'plain sailing' and could lead to 'difficult times ahead' for the economy, Theresa May has admitted

The Prime Minister's remarks follow last week's Cabinet decision that Britain should withdraw completely from the European single market as part of Brexit

The Prime Minister's comments on the impact of leaving the EU follow claims of a 'Brexit boom' with 'out' supporters pointing to better than expected growth and employment figures since the vote as vindication.

Mrs May, pictured during the interview to be broadcast on today's Andrew Marr Show on BBC1, said: 'We have had some good figures and better figures than some had predicted would be the case. [But] I'm not going to pretend that it's all going to be plain sailing.

'I think we must be prepared for the fact that there may be some difficult times ahead.'

A Cabinet meeting at Chequers on Wednesday concluded that the UK should pull out of the single market in order to secure greater control over immigration  because the country would no longer be obliged to accept the freedom of movement of EU nationals.

Mrs May told the BBC: 'The British people are very clear... they don't want free movement to continue in the way that it has done in the past.

'That was a message from the British people. But people also want to see the job opportunities, to see the economic opportunities, and so getting a good deal in trade and services is also obviously important for us.'

The Prime Minister's comments on the impact of leaving the EU follow claims of a 'Brexit boom' with 'out' supporters pointing to better than expected growth and employment figures since the vote as vindication

Mrs May, pictured during the interview to be broadcast on today's Andrew Marr Show on BBC1, said: 'We have had some good figures and better figures than some had predicted would be the case'

The Prime Minister also moved to quash speculation that she will take advantage of Labour's turmoil  and her own political honeymoon  to hold a snap Election, which experts say could boost her wafer-thin majority of 12 to more than 100.

'We'll be continuing the manifesto on which the Conservative Government was elected in 2015, so I don't think there's a need for an Election,' Mrs May said.

'I'm not going to be calling a snap Election.

'I've been very clear that I think we need that period of time, that stability, to be able to deal with the issues that the country is facing and have that Election in 2020.'

She also ruled out a second EU referendum, saying: 'We respect the wishes of the British people.

'The British people want us to leave the European Union and that's what we will do.'

And she rejected SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon's call for another Scottish independence vote, following her loss in 2014, in the wake of the Brexit vote.

The Prime Minister also moved to quash speculation that she will take advantage of Labour's turmoil  and her own political honeymoon  to hold a snap Election

'If you look at some of the results that are now coming out of polling in Scotland, they suggest that the Scottish people don't want there to be a second referendum,' she said.

Mrs May was due to arrive in China last night for the forthcoming G20 summit, where she is expected to hold talks about UK trade deals with the Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

British officials are also in discussion with New Zealand and Canada about exploiting the old imperial ties to boost British trade prospects in the aftermath of Brexit.

Mrs May said: 'We are going to make a success of Brexit and one way we will do that is by playing to Britain's strengths as a great trading nation and forging our own new trade deals around the world.
Despite accusations Yazdani was never charged with any offence

of Yazdani has now been lifted

The businessman who bankrolled some of Britains most notorious extremists with more than 1 million of taxpayers money can today be revealed as the elder brother of jailed hate preacher Anjem Choudary.

Yazdani Choudary, 53, employed at least 12 extremist associates of his 49-year-old brother, all of whom are now either in prison or have fled to Syria to fight for the Islamic State terror group.

The 12 were employed by the businessman at three front companies which included an IT training firm, a printing business and a halal sweet shop, all housed in a building in Whitechapel, East London.

Businessman Yazdani Choudary has been revealed as the older brother of hate preacher Anjem Choudary (pictured)

The Mail on Sunday revealed last week how the extremists were able to use the nondescript premises of the three firms to plot jihad on the streets of Britain as well as run sharia surgeries in its basement.

Now we have overturned a High Court ban which prevented us from identifying Yazdani Choudary as the owner of the three companies.

We can now also reveal that he had an asset-freezing order imposed against him by the Treasury, as MI5 and anti-terrorist police feared he was a fundraiser for his younger brothers banned organisation, Al-Muhajiroun.

Despite the accusations, he was never charged with any offence and has now won his appeal against the Treasurys freezing of his assets.

Yazdani Choudary  whose company, Best Training Solutions, received more than 1 million in grants from the Skills Funding Agency  could not be reached for comment last night.
A father who walked into a hospital with a gun pointed at the head of one of his young children has been arrested.

Waxahachie police were called to the Baylor, Scott and White Medical Center in Texas shortly after 7pm local time when a 'critical incident' was reported.

Police say a father, named by CBS Dallas as 33-year-old Lorenzo Zarate from Austin, came into the hospital with a child and held a gun to her head.

A father who walked into the Baylor, Scott and White Medical Center in Texas (pictured) and pointed a gun at the head of one of his children has been arrested after a standoff

Local media have named the man who was arrested as 33-year-old Lorenzo Zarate (pictured) from Austin, Texas

Zarate also said he had another child in his car parked outside.

The 33-year-old former soldier who served in Iraq was charged with one count of making a terroristic threat, one count of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and one count of trying to take a gun from an officer.

Staff in the emergency room were evacuated during the standoff between the man and officers.

Pictures posted on social media showed armed officers on the scene.

Police later issued a statement saying the issue had been 'resolved without injury'.

The medical center thanked police for their efforts in a statement released about 9pm.

Police were seen outside the medical center on Saturday night after the reports of a man with a gun to the head of his child

Waxahachie police in Texas were called to the Baylor, Scott and White Medical Center (pictured) shortly after 7pm local time when it was reported the man held a gun to one of his children's head

A social media user took this picture of a police officer armed with a rifle patrolling outside the hospital

'The safety of our patients, visitors and care team members is a top priority,' the statement read, according to the Dallas News.

'We are grateful for the leadership displayed by our care team and the Waxahachie Police Department as they helped to bring about a peaceful end to a situation in our emergency department this evening. Our hospital is open and operating normally.'
Outspoken Liberal senator Cory Bernardi has likened Jacqui Lambie to 'Dumb and Dumber' after she described him as an 'angry prostitute', as he is accused of trying to destabilise the Liberal leadership.

Senator Bernardi said he wasn't worried about the independent senator's insult, because he doesn't believe she demonstrates dignity.

'I think she is too thick to pay any attention to,' he told Sky News on Sunday.

Scroll down for video

Outspoken Liberal senator Cory Bernardi said independent senator Jacqui Lambie is 'too thick to pay attention to'

Senator Lambie last week said sex workers were a 'better bang for buck' than Senator Bernardi to defend Labor's Sam Dastyari.

The Tasmanian said Senator Bernardi's mock outrage was 'like an angry prostitute lecturing us about the benefits of celibacy'.

'Before I receive unfair criticism from the sex workers, I apologise to them profusely for comparing them to Senator Bernardi - I know that is a really terrible low-down thing to do,' she told the upper house on Thursday.

'Prostitutes are far more honest, sincere, humane, compassionate and better bang for buck than Senator Bernardi will ever be able to deliver.'

The news comes as Senator Bernardi is accused of disrupting the government's own agenda by seeking to water down the racial discrimination law.

Senator Lambie came to his Labor's Sam Dastyari's defence, saying Senator Bernardi's mock outrage was 'like an angry prostitute lecturing us about the benefits of celibacy'

Senator Bernardi said his push to water down section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act isn't a proxy for changing the party's leadership but an opportunity for the Liberal party to reconnect with its base.

He has so far managed to secure the backing for change from all Liberal members in the Senate bar one.

'The Liberal party clearly needs to reconnect with its base, and I think I'm pretty close to the base on this, they want the Liberal party to honour its commitment from the 2013 election and also Malcolm Turnbull who supported these reforms when he wanted to be prime minister,' the senator told Sky News.

Labor frontbencher Tony the fact that there's no chance for the changes to pass parliament showed Senator Bernardi and his supporters also wanted party instability.

'The only possible reason this is being advanced is to cause further instability within the Liberal party partyroom, and the signatures that Cory Bernardi got together, getting an extraordinary number of backbenchers together I think says it all.'
The search for a man who vanished has resumed after police find his black Nissan X-trail 500km away from his home.

Steven Allison, 43, has not been in contact with his family or friends since leaving his Clarkson home, north of Perth, on August 30.

Mr Allison's black Nissan X-trail was found along Coolcalalya Road in Ajana, more than 500km from Perth on September 2.

The land and air search for Steven Allison, 43, has resumed, he has been missing for a week since leaving his home in Clarkson, north of Perth

State Emergency Services and police have restarted the land and air search for him.

Police hold grave concerns for his welfare as the area is rough terrain.

He is described as being fair skinned, with a medium build and greying hair.

Police hold grave concerns for his welfare as the area is rough terrain in the mid-west region of Western Australia

Mr Allison was last seen wearing a white T-shirt, a dark coloured jumper, denim jeans and dark coloured shoes.
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A protest against a four-state, $3.8billion oil pipeline turned violent on Saturday after tribal officials say construction crews destroyed Native American burial and cultural sites on private land in southern North Dakota.

Morton County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Donnell Preskey said four private security guards and two guard dogs were injured after several hundred protesters confronted construction crews at the site just outside the Standing Rock Sioux reservation.

One of the security officers was taken to a Bismarck hospital for undisclosed injuries. The two guard dogs were taken to a Bismarck veterinary clinic, Preskey said.

Security agents (left in blue helmet) confront protesters on the worksite for the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) oil pipeline, near Cannonball, North Dakota, on Saturday

Native American protesters and their supporters clash with security guards just outside the Standing Rock Sioux reservation

Morton County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Donnell Preskey said four private security guards and two guard dogs were injured after several hundred protesters confronted construction crews

A man pours water over the eyes of a protestor after he was pepper-sprayed by security guards at a work site for the Dakota Access Pipeline

Tribe spokesman Steve Sitting Bear said protesters reported that six people had been bitten by security dogs, including a young child. At least 30 people were pepper-sprayed, he said.

Preskey said law enforcement authorities had no reports of protesters being injured.

There were no law enforcement officials at the site when the incident occurred, Preskey said. The crowd disbursed when officers arrived and no one was arrested, she said.

The incident occurred within half a mile of an encampment where hundreds of people have gathered to join the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's protest of the oil pipeline that is slated to cross the Missouri River nearby.

The tribe is challenging the Army Corps of Engineers' decision to grant permits for Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners' Dakota Access pipeline, which crosses the Dakotas and Iowa into Illinois, including near the reservation in southern North Dakota.

A federal judge will rule before September 9 whether construction can be halted on the Dakota Access pipeline.

Protesters help wash out the eyes of a man after he was pepper sprayed in the face by security guards at the construction site

Tribe spokesman Steve Sitting Bear said protesters reported that six people had been bitten by security dogs, including a young child

The Tribe spokesman said that at least 30 protesters were pepper sprayed during the incident, though law enforcement officials said no one was injured

The tribe is challenging the Army Corps of Engineers' decision to grant permits for Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners' Dakota Access pipeline

Energy Transfer Partners did not return phone calls and emails on Saturday seeking comment.

The tribe fears it's a project that will disturb sacred sites and impact drinking water for thousands of tribal members on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and millions further downstream.

The protest Saturday came one day after the tribe filed court papers saying it found several sites of 'significant cultural and historic value' along the path of the proposed pipeline.

Tribal preservation officer Tim Mentz said in court documents that the tribe was only recently allowed to survey private land north of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation.

Mentz said researchers found burials rock piles called cairns and other sites of historic significance to Native Americans.

The pipeline crosses the Dakotas and Iowa into Illinois, including an area near the reservation in southern North Dakota

A guard dog handled by a private security guard lunges toward protestors during a demonstration by hundreds of Native American protestors and their supporters

Tribe officials claim construction crews destroyed Native American burial and cultural sites on private land in southern North Dakota

A federal judge will rule on or before September 9 whether construction can be halted on the Dakota Access pipeline

Standing Rock Sioux chairman David Archambault II said in a statement that construction crews removed topsoil across an area about 150 feet wide stretching for two miles.

'This demolition is devastating,' Archambault said. 'These grounds are the resting places of our ancestors. The ancient cairns and stone prayer rings there cannot be replaced. In one day, our sacred land has been turned into hollow ground.'

Preskey said the company filmed the confrontation by helicopter and turned the video over to authorities. Protesters have also posted some of the confrontation on social media.

Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier said in a statement that 'individuals crossed onto private property and accosted private security officers with wooden posts and flag poles'.

A private security guard holds a dog back as protesters approach the construction site (left). Many had to have their eyes washed out after being sprayed with pepper spray (right)

Tribal preservation officer Tim Mentz said in court documents that the tribe was only recently allowed to survey private land north of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation

The protest Saturday came one day after the tribe filed court papers saying it found several sites of 'significant cultural and historic value' along the path of the proposed pipeline

Some protesters arrived on horseback to take part in the demonstration against the pipeline. The protesters forced construction workers and security forces to retreat and work to stop

'Any suggestion that today's event was a peaceful protest, is false,' his statement said.

Archambault called the pipeline a 'historic' wrong involving tribal sovereignty and land rights.

Archambault and others also have been sued by Energy Transfer Partners for interfering with the pipeline, which will pass through Iowa, Illinois, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Former North Dakota US Attorney Tim Purdon, who is representing Archambault and other tribal leaders in that suit, said that it's nothing more than an attempt to silence the tribal leader.

'I think they think he is a voice for the people that no one can control,' Purdon said. 'From the first day I met him, I could tell he is a very serious person who really has the best interests of his people - and the people of North Dakota - at heart. What I see now is the same thing: He is focused on what he believes is best.'

Archambault has for years spoken of concerns among the leaders of North Dakota's five American Indian reservations about 'the increasing number of environmental incidents' in western North Dakota's oil patch - far from his own territory.

Protesters, pictured walking toward work being done on the pipeline, also fear the Dakota Access Pipeline will pollute their water

Officials said in a statement that 'individuals crossed onto private property and accosted private security officers with wooden posts and flag poles'

He appealed to lawmakers to do more to protect public safety and the environment.

That was before his tribe was aware of the Dakota Access pipeline, for which developers have promised safeguards, noting that workers monitoring the pipeline remotely in Texas could stop any leak within three minutes.

It's not enough for Archambault, who worries a breach would destroy sacred sites and ancestral burial grounds well beyond the reservation's boundaries.

'Anything that is man-made is going to come apart,' he said, pointing to a 2013 spill in northwestern North Dakota that was among the largest inland spills in North America.

It was discovered only after a farmer got his tractor stuck in the muck while harvesting wheat; it's only half cleaned up, despite crews working around the clock since it happened, state health officials say.

Archambault has the full backing of the leader of North Dakota's oil-rich Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation.

The large crowd disbursed when officers arrived and no one involved in the incident was arrested, officials said on Saturday

Standing Rock Sioux Chairman Dave Archambault II called the demolition in the area 'devastating', adding that 'sacred land has been turned into hollow ground'

'Standing Rock is standing for something and we're there standing with them,' Three Affiliated Tribes Chairman Mark Fox said. His reservation produces about 20 per cent of the state's daily oil output.

'We want oil production but we want it done responsibly and respectfully,' Fox said. 'Our basic position... is to figure another way around the river and the reservation. There are other ways.'

Fox called Archambault a lifelong friend who he says has become 'weary but remains strong' and is 'under a heavy burden.'

Still, Archambault is clearly buoyed by the scores of protesters who have come to help his tribe's fight. On a recent afternoon, Monte Lovejoy, a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, embraced Archambault and thanked him.

'I really couldn't afford to come up here,' he told Archambault, whom he'd never met before. 'But I really couldn't afford not to, for my kids and for my people.'

One man protested by attaching himself to heavy equipment at the site of construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline
A 32-year-old man has been arrested and refused bail after he was found using a pizza pan as a steering wheel for his defective, uninsured and unregistered car.

Police were called to Norman Street in Adelaide just after 8am on Sunday morning following reports of a suspicious red Mazda sedan and a loitering man in the street.

They arrived to find the man driving the dodgy vehicle turning into a car park.

The metal pan steering wheel had a bizarre message messily scrawled across it in white, reading: 'Uncontrollable and driven to love only a beating heart.'

Other messages written illegibly in black and white on the wheel appear to reference to a date of birth and the phrase RIP.

'Uncontrollable and driven to love only a beating heart': A number of bizarre phrases were scrawled on the metal pan that the man had installed as an impromptu steering wheel

Upon inspection, police noticed the car's number plate had been altered and a recent defect label had been removed.

The Adelaide man was charged with driving unregistered, uninsured, drive contrary to defect, remove defect label, alter number plate and breach of bail.

He has been refused bail and will appear in the Adelaide Magistrates Court on Monday.

His car was also impounded for 28 days.




The following is the full text of the Joint Statement.

JOINT STATEMENT

Between THE SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM AND THE REPUBLIC OF INDIA

on the Official Visit of Prime Minister of the Republic of India Narendra Modi to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam

(Hanoi, September 2nd-3rd, 2016)

At the invitation of H. E. Mr. Nguyen Xuan Phuc, Prime Minister of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the Prime Minister of the Republic of India H.E. Mr. Narendra Modi paid an Official Visit to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam from September 02nd-03rd 2016.

On September 3rd, 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was accorded a ceremonial reception. This was followed by bilateral talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc. Thereafter, the two Prime Ministers witnessed the signing of bilateral documents. Prime Minister Narendra Modi met H.E. Mr. Nguyen Phu Trong, General Secretary of Vietnam Communist Party, H.E. Mr. Tran Dai Quang, President of Vietnam, and H.E. Mrs. Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan, Chairperson of the National Assembly of Vietnam. Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid a wreath at the Memorial of National Heroes and Martyrs and Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, visited the Ho Chi Minh Residential Complex and the Quan Su Pagoda in Hanoi.

Leaders of Vietnam and India reviewed and expressed their satisfaction over the strong and comprehensive development of the relations of long-standing traditional friendship and Strategic Partnership between the two countries so far. Both sides welcomed the fact that the two countries will be celebrating the 45th anniversary of establishment of diplomatic relations (January 7th, 1972 - January 7th, 2017) and the 10th anniversary of establishment of Strategic Partnership (July 6th, 2007  July 6th, 2017) in 2017, and emphasized that this marks a milestone and opens a new stage for the bilateral relations.

They shared the view that Vietnam - India relations have been built on a firm foundation, with close links in culture, history and civilization, mutual trust and understanding as well as the strong mutual support in international and regional fora. The Vietnamese side reaffirmed Vietnam's support for India's Act East Policy and welcomed a greater role for India in the regional and international arena. Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed that Vietnam is an important pillar of India's Act East Policy.

Based on the current excellent relations, in order to meet the expectation of the Leaders and people of the two countries, and with the desire to contribute to regional peace, stability, cooperation and prosperity, Vietnam and India agreed to elevate the current Strategic Partnership to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership . The two Prime Ministers agreed to assign the two Ministries of Foreign Affairs to be the focal points, in collaboration with other ministries and agencies of both sides, to build the Plan of Action to bring the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership to reality in all areas of cooperation.

1. Political relations, defense and security:

Both sides shared convergence of views on various bilateral and international issues, including the regional security situation in Asia. They expressed happiness at the success of recent high level visits of President Pranab Mukherjee and Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj in 2014, Speaker of Lok Sabha and National Security Adviser in 2015 from the Indian side, and the visits of General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam Nguyen Phu Trong in November 2013, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung in October 2014 and President of Vietnam Fatherland Front in 2015 from the Vietnamese side. Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated the Vietnamese Leaders and people on the successful outcomes of the 12th National Communist Party Congress and of the elections for the 14th National Assembly and People's Councils tenure 2016-2021. Once again, he reiterated sincere congratulations to Vietnam's newly-elected leaders.

Both sides agreed to increase the exchange of high-level and other visits, step up relations between political parties and legislative institutions of both sides, establish relations between provincial/state governments on both sides, uphold established bilateral cooperation mechanisms, and effectively implement the agreements signed between two countries.

The two Prime Ministers expressed satisfaction at the significant progress made in defence cooperation, including exchange of high level visits, annual high-level dialogue, service-to-service cooperation, naval ship visits, extensive training and capacity building, defence equipment procurement and related transfer of technology, and cooperation at regional fora such as ADMM-Plus.

Both sides agreed to effectively implement the Joint Vision Statement on India-Vietnam Defence Relations of May 2015. Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed India's significant interest in promoting defence industry cooperation between the two sides and committed to provide a new Line of Credit for Vietnam in this area. Both sides welcomed the signing of the contract for Offshore High-speed Patrol Boats between M/s Larsen & Toubro and Vietnam Border Guards utilizing the USD100 million Line of Credit for defence procurement extended by India to Vietnam. Prime Minister Modi announced a grant of US$ 5 million for the construction of an Army Software Park at the Telecommunications University in Nha Trang.

The Prime Ministers welcomed the signing of the MOU on Cyber Security between Ministry of Public Security of Vietnam and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology of India and the transfer of equipment to the Indian funded Indira Gandhi High-Tech Crime Laboratory. They agreed to an early conclusion of the MOU for cooperation between the National Security Council Secretariat of India and the Ministry of Public Security of Vietnam, emphasized the need to establish the Deputy Ministerial level dialogue and to enhance cooperation on traditional and non-traditional security matters, cyber security, counter-terrorism, transnational crimes, disaster management and response, and undertaking training and capacity building programmes.

2. Economic relations, trading and investment:

The two Leaders emphasized that enhancing bilateral economic engagement is a strategic objective. In this regard, they requested the related ministries and agencies on both sides to explore substantive and practical measures to achieve the trade target of USD15 billion by 2020, including but not limited to: utilizing established mechanisms such as the Joint Sub-Commission on Trade, intensifying the exchanges among states of India and provinces of Vietnam, strengthening exchanges of delegation and Business-to-Business contacts, regular organization of trade fairs and events such as the India-CLMV Business Conclave and Vietnam - India Business Forum.

They welcomed the effective implementation of India-ASEAN Trade in Goods Agreement and the conclusion of India-ASEAN Trade in Services and Investment Agreements (AITGA). They also called for close cooperation towards realization of Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (RCEP).

The Prime Ministers urged leaders of business and industry to explore new business opportunities in the identified priority areas for cooperation: hydrocarbons, power generation, renewable energy, infrastructure, tourism, textiles, footwear, medical and pharmaceuticals, ICT, electronics, agriculture, agro-products, chemicals, machine tools and other supporting industries.

Both sides encouraged greater two-way investment between Vietnam and India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomed Vietnamese companies to take advantage of the various schemes and facilities offered under the 'Make in India' programme. Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc welcomed Indian companies to invest in Vietnam and affirmed Vietnam's commitment to create favourable conditions and facilitation for Indian investments in accordance with Vietnamese laws. Prime Minister Modi sought facilitation of the Government of Vietnam for major Indian investments such as Tata Power's Long Phu-II 1320MW thermal power project for achieving contractual conclusion.

3. Energy:

The Vietnamese side welcomed the long-standing investment and presence of ONGC Videsh Limited (OVL) and its partnership with PetroVietnam (PVN) for exploration of oil and gas in Vietnam. The Prime Ministers agreed to further enhance cooperation in the oil and gas sector and urged both sides to actively implement the Agreement signed in 2014 between PVN and OVL on cooperation in new blocks in Vietnam. The Vietnamese side also welcomed Indian oil and gas companies to avail of opportunities in participating in mid-stream and down-stream sectors in Vietnam.

Both Prime Ministers highly value the importance of renewable energy and expressed the belief that both India and Vietnam would immensely benefit from enhancing the share of renewable energy in the overall power generation. The Vietnamese side welcomes Prime Minister Modi's ambitious plan for deployment of 175 GW of renewable power capacities by 2022, including 100GW of solar and 60GW of wind power in India. In this regard, the two Leaders urged both sides to step up their cooperation in this sector.

4. Connectivities:

Both sides reiterated the importance of connectivity between Vietnam and India. They urged airlines of both sides to soon open direct flights between major cities of Vietnam and India. They sought accelerating the establishment of direct shipping routes between the sea ports of Vietnam and India. Both sides agreed on the need to further strengthen physical connectivity between India and ASEAN.

The Indian side urged Vietnam to utilize various initiatives of India for CLMV countries and the India - ASEAN Line of Credit for physical and digital connectivity.

Both sides agreed to enhance banking and financial sector linkages between the two countries for facilitating more intensive economic engagement. The Vietnamese side welcomed the opening of a branch of Bank of India in Ho Chi Minh city in July 2016 and took note of the Indian side's request on licensing international foreign exchange transactions of Bank of India to assist Indian business and industry in Vietnam.

5. Science and Technology:

The Prime Ministers expressed satisfaction at three decades of bilateral cooperation in the use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes pursuant to the agreement signed by the two countries in 1986. They welcomed the discussions aimed at concluding the Agreement on Cooperation between the Indian Global Centre for Nuclear Energy Partnership and Vietnam Atomic Institute and agreed to expedite the negotiation and conclusion of the new Inter-Governmental Framework Agreement on Cooperation in the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy, which will set a strong foundation for further cooperation in civil nuclear energy.

The Prime Ministers expressed satisfaction at the signing of the Inter-Governmental Framework Agreement between the two countries for Exploration and Use of Outer Space for Peaceful Purposes and urged both sides to soon conclude the Implementing Arrangement between the Indian Space Research Organisation and Vietnam Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment on Establishment of Tracking and Data Reception Station and Data Processing Facility in Vietnam under the India-ASEAN Space Cooperation. The Vietnamese side welcomed the establishment of the facility which would increase capabilities of Vietnam and ASEAN countries in remote sensing with numerous commercial and scientific applications.

6. Training:

Both Prime Ministers welcomed ongoing cooperation in the establishment of capacity building institutes in Vietnam in IT, English language training, entrepreneurship development, high-performance computing and other areas and expressed satisfaction at the finalization of development partnership projects including the establishment of Vietnam-India English and IT Training Centre at the Telecommunications University in Nha Trang, the Centre for Excellence in Software Development and Training at Ho Chi Minh city.

Vietnam welcomed the offer to train 15 Vietnamese diplomats at the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, New Delhi and 25 Vietnamese students of Vietnam National University Faculty of Oriental Studies at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.

The Indian side affirmed that it would continue to provide training through Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) and provide scholarships for Vietnamese students and Government officials. Vietnam welcomed India's assistance under the framework of Mekong - Ganga Cooperation, especially the Quick Impact Projects Fund (QIPF).

7. Health, Culture, Tourism and People-to-people links:

Both sides welcomed the conclusion and signing of the MOU on Health Cooperation. They also emphasized the importance of encouraging traditional medicine.

Both sides agreed to strengthen exchanges and cooperation in culture, tourism, people-to-people links, especially exchanges between the youth of Vietnam and India. Prime Minister Modi thanked Vietnam for facilitating the establishment of the Indian Cultural Centre in Hanoi which will open shortly. The Prime Ministers instructed officials to quickly follow-up the implementation of the Memorandum of Understanding on conservation and restoration of Cham monuments at My Son, Quang Nam Province, by the Archaeological Survey of India.

Vietnam highly appreciated the support and assistance of India in organizing activities highlighting the role and contributions of President Ho Chi Minh. Prime Minister Narendra Modi thanked Vietnam for its leadership in facilitating the inscription of the Archaeological Site of Nalanda Mahavihara as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

India announced the offer of special annual scholarships for Vietnamese students for advanced Buddhist studies at Masters/Doctoral level courses and annual scholarships of one year duration for study of Sanskrit in Indian institutes for the members of the Buddhist Sangha in Vietnam.

8. Regional and international cooperation:

The Prime Ministers valued the cooperation and coordination between both sides at regional and international fora and agreed to strengthen cooperation particularly in UN, NAM, WTO, ASEAN and related forums including ARF, ADMM Plus, EAS, ASEM and as well as other sub-regional cooperation mechanisms. India welcomed the realization of ASEAN Community and expressed full support for ASEAN's centrality in the evolving regional structure. India welcomed and highlighted the significant contribution of Vietnam to the ASEAN - India Strategic Partnership in its capacity as ASEAN Coordinator for India for the period of 2015-2018.

Both Vietnam and India stressed the need for reform of the United Nations and expansion of the UN Security Council in both the permanent and the non-permanent categories of membership, with enhanced representation from developing countries. Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed gratitude for Vietnam's consistent support to India's candidature for permanent membership of a reformed and expanded UNSC. The Prime Ministers reaffirmed support for each other's candidature for non-permanent membership of the UNSC, Vietnam for the term 2020-21 and India for the term 2021-22. Both sides expressed satisfaction at the conclusion of the Program of Cooperation in UN Peacekeeping Matters. The Indian side expressed its commitment to capacity building and training to enable Vietnam's participation in UN peacekeeping operations.

Both sides reiterated their desire and determination to work together to maintain peace, stability, growth and prosperity in Asia and beyond. Noting the Award issued on July 12th, 2016 of the Arbitral Tribunal constituted under the Annex VII to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of Sea (UNCLOS), both sides reiterated their support for peace, stability, security, safety and freedom of navigation and over flight, and unimpeded commerce, based on the principles of international law, as reflected notably in the UNCLOS. Both sides also called on all states to resolve disputes through peaceful means without threat or use of force and exercise self-restraint in the conduct of activities that could complicate or escalate disputes affecting peace and stability, respect the diplomatic and legal processes, fully observe the Declaration on the conduct of parties in the South China Sea (DOC) and soon finalize the Code of Conduct (COC).They also recognised that the sea lanes of communication passing through the South China Sea are critical for peace, stability, prosperity and development. Vietnam and India, as State Parties to the UNCLOS, urged all parties to show utmost respect for the UNCLOS, which establishes the international legal order of the seas and oceans.

The following Agreements were signed in the presence of the two Prime Ministers: (i) Framework Agreement on Cooperation in the Exploration and Uses of Outer Space for Peaceful Purposes; (ii) Protocol for Amending the Agreement on Avoiding Double Taxation; (iii) Program of Cooperation in UN Peacekeeping Matters; (iv) Protocol between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Vietnam and the Ministry of External Affairs of India on Celebrating 2017 as the Year of Friendship;

(v) MOU on Health Cooperation; (vi) MOU on cooperation in Information Technology; (vii) MOU on Cooperation between the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences and the Indian Council of World Affairs; (viii) MOU on cooperation in Cyber Security; (ix) MOU between the Bureau of Indian Standards and Directorate for Standard, Metrology and Quality for Cooperation in the Fields of Standardization and Conformity Assessment; (x) MOU on Establishment of the Centre of Excellence in Software Development and Training; (xi) Technical Agreement on Sharing of White Shipping Information; (xii) Contract for Offshore High-speed Patrol Boats.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's interactions with the entire leadership of Vietnam were marked by warmth, friendship and mutual respect. Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed his gratitude for the warm reception and hospitality accorded to him and his delegation. He extended an invitation to Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc to visit India at a mutually convenient date. Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc accepted the invitation with pleasure. Dates for the visits will be finalized through diplomatic channels./.
Obama said the US has 'no better partner in the world' than the UK and vowed to '

President Obama has held his first meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May and vowed that the US and UK will 'continue to strengthen the special relationship'.

Obama, who is approaching the end of his eight-year term as Mrs May establishes herself in office, said the US 'doesn't have a stronger partner in the world.'

He added that the two countries will keep cooperating closely on cyber security, terrorism and trade despite the 'turbulence' of recent political events.

Theresa May has met with President Obama for the first time since becoming Prime Minister as the two held face-to-face talks at the G20 summit in China

Obama vowed to 'continue strengthening the special relationship' despite recent 'turbulence' - seeming to reference his comments about Britain being at the 'back of the queue' for a trade deal if voters chose Brexit

The President had risked a rift after suggesting that the UK would be 'at the back of the queue' while negotiating a trade deal if voters chose Brexit.

Obama rowed back those comments slightly on Saturday, saying he never suggested the Britain would be punished, but said the first priority for the UK should be establishing trade with Europe before negotiating with America.

Meanwhile the US will be pushing ahead with a broad trade deal it is negotiating with the European Union, he added.

Mrs May, who has committed to leaving the European Union, vowed to 'pursue the opportunities that Brexit presents' saying the two nations will 'make a success of it'.

Earlier in the day she had restated her commitment to the outcome of the referendum, saying there would be 'no second vote' on the issue.

She said the U.K. plans to continue pursuing an aggressive trade relationship with the U.S. despite the decision to leave the EU.

Mrs May and Obama met at the G20 summit in China, where the President is conducting a farewell tour before he leaves office in January.

It is the first time the pair have met face-to-face. They shared a 'warm' 15 minute phonecall after Mrs May took office in July following David Cameron's resignation.

Mrs May, who has committed to withdrawing from the European Union, vowed to 'pursue the opportunities that Brexit presents' saying the two countries will 'make a success of it'

Obama, who is conducting a farewell tour of the Far East before he leaves office in January, said that America has 'no better partner in the world' than Britain

Mrs May is also expected to hold her first face-to-face meetings with Chinese premiere Xi Jingping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Many key personnel attending the summit in Hangzhou are believed to have favored remain, according to sources who spoke to the International Business Times.

But Mrs May is determined not to let that overshadow negotiations, the publication added, saying the important thing now is to focus on the future.

The official said: 'The Prime Minister will want to look at how we look to the future and now start planning for those relationships once the UK has left the European Union.'

Elsewhere European Council President Donald Tusk reiterated that there will be no negotiations on Britain's relationship with the European Union until Article 50 is triggered, the first administrative step toward leaving the alliance.

Tusk said such pre-negotiations are not in the interests of the remaining 27 EU members.
Rescuers brought everyone back to safety; all were taken to the hospital

On board were 15 sea scouts and one adult, all wearing life jackets

Fifteen children and their adult chaperone were rescued in the San Francisco Bay area on Saturday after their catamaran flipped over.

The boat capsized around 3.30pm near the Aquatic Park area. The children, who were sea scouts, and the adult, were all wearing life jackets.

A witness saw the 30-foot catamaran flip over and called the Coast Guard, CBS reported.

Half of the children were still hanging on to the boat by the time the Coast Guard and marine police arrived.

The Coast Guard and marine police pulled 15 children and one adult out of the water after their catamaran capsized in the San Francisco Bay Saturday. Rescuers are pictured at the scene

Rescuers got everyone back to safety within half an hour and gave them blankets.

It is not known yet why the boat capsized.

All 16 people were taken to the hospital as a matter of precaution, the Coast Guard told ABC 7.

The children had minor bruises and cuts.
'There's the possibility at least for us to make some progress,' Obama said

President Barack Obama says U.S. and Russian negotiators are working 'around the clock' to try to strike a deal to reduce violence in Syria.

Obama, speaking on the sidelines of the Group of 20 economic summit in China, said the U.S. and Russia still have 'grave differences' about what's needed to end Syria's civil war and which opposition groups are legitimate targets for the U.S. and Russian militaries.

But he said 'it is worth trying' to secure an agreement nonetheless.

'We're not there yet,' Obama said. 'I think it's premature for us to say there's a clear path forward, but there's the possibility at least for us to make some progress.'

President Barack Obama says U.S. and Russian negotiators are working 'around the clock' to try to strike a deal to reduce violence in Syria

Obama's comments came as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are deep in talks over a deal to boost U.S. and Russian military cooperation to fight ISIS and other extremists in Syria - a step Moscow has long sought.

The emerging deal is expected to also include provisions to ensure aid can reach besieged areas of Syria and steps to prevent Syrian President Bashar Assad's government from bombing areas where U.S.-backed rebels are operating.

Though negotiators have been hopeful a deal could come together while world leaders are gathered in Hangzhou for the G20, that optimism has been tempered by the failure of previous ceasefire deals to hold.

The U.S. has long been wary of increasing military coordination with Russia in Syria's civil war because it says Russia continues striking moderate, U.S.-backed opposition groups in a bid to prop up Assad.

Obama, speaking on the sidelines of the G20 in China, said the U.S. and Russia still have 'grave differences' about what's needed to end Syria's civil war but are willing to work together

'We're not there yet,' Obama said. 'I think it's premature for us to say there's a clear path forward, but there's the possibility at least for us to make some progress'

The U.S. wants Russia to focus exclusively on IS and al-Qaeda-linked groups.

'These are difficult negotiations,' Obama said. He added later: 'If we do not get some buy-in from the Russians on reducing the violence and easing the humanitarian crisis, then it's difficult to see how we get to the next phase.'

Discussions about the intractable Syria conflict and the related fight against IS have been a major focus as world leaders gather for the G20, which brings together the world's major economies.

Obama, who met first Sunday with new British Prime Minister Theresa May, also planned to discuss Syria when he meets with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, their first sit-down since the summer's failed coup in Turkey.

Obama's (pictured arrived in China on Saturday) comments came as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are deep in talks over a deal to boost U.S. and Russian military cooperation to fight ISIS

Russian President Vladimir Putin is pictured during a meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ahead of the G20 Summit

As part of the potential U.S.-Russia deal, President Obama would want Russian forces to stop bombing areas where U.S.-backed rebels are based. Putin is pictured with Chinese President Xi Jinping before their bilateral meeting

The attempted overthrow in Turkey has accelerated the deterioration in the relationship between Turkey and the United States.

It led to Turkish accusations of U.S. involvement, and those tensions have been aggravated by growing clashes between Turkish forces and U.S.-backed Syrian Kurds.

The Obama administration has expressed concerns about Erdogan's crackdown on the press and, in the weeks since the coup, mass firings of teachers, military personnel and others accused of associating with the opposition.

The U.S. has also expressed concern about Turkey's recent operations across its border into Syria.

Russian President Vladimir Putin talks to US President Barack Obama following a working session on day two of the G20 Turkey Leaders Summit on November 16, 2015

Any potential deal would likely include provisions that would prevent Syrian President Bashar Assad (pictured) bombing U.S.-backed areas

The Pentagon has backed the incursions, but said they should only be aimed at IS fighters.

Turkey has used the operations to push back Syrian Kurds it accuses of seeking to claim more territory.

For the U.S., the dispute is a reminder of its increasing entanglement in the long-standing local rivalries and conflicts exposed by Syria's civil war.

Since the failed coup, the U.S. has been alarmed by Turkey's diplomatic flirtations with Russia, Syrian President Bashar Assad's patron, and apparent softening of its tone about the need for Assad to be excluded from a political transition.
Another said her uncle had signed a consent form but she did not know

One woman discovered she had been sterilised years after procedure

Pregnant women in Uganda are tested for HIV as part of routine screening. File image

HIV-positive women in Uganda are being subject to forced sterilisation, a new report shows.

Pregnant women in the country are tested for HIV as part of routine screening for the virus.

However some health workers abuse their positions and sterilise women without asking for consent, believing it to be the best course of action, the report by the International Community of Women living with HIV Eastern Africa (ICWEA) found.

One woman, who gave her name as Ida, told the group that she was sterilised at a government hospital in Kampala after she sought treatment for abdominal pains while pregnant.

She lost her baby and was given the news she was HIV positive.

She said she woke to find dressings on her stomach but only discovered that she had been sterlised after she spent years trying to conceive.

She said: 'I was in a lot of pain and the situation was bad. They told me they were going to clean my womb. They took me to the examination room and asked me how many children I had. I told them I had four.

'They were using English. I did not understand what they were saying because I never studied English. They told me they were going to give me treatment. Later when I gained consciousness I saw a dressing on my belly, but because I was in great pain, I couldn't ask questions.'

After the miscarriage, Ida tried for some years to get pregnant again. Eventually she went to another hospital, where she was examined and told her fallopian tubes had been cut without her knowledge.

Another woman claims she was told she was being given an injection 'to stop her falling pregnant for five years' and only later found out that her uncle had signed a form consenting to her sterilisation.

She said: 'Upon hearing that, I started shedding tears. This has greatly affected my health. I just struggle to accept the situation.'

The report said most violations of women's sexual and reproductive health rights occurred during childbirth, particularly when women were delivering by Caesarean section. File image

Of the 744 HIV-positive women surveyed by the ICWEA, 72 had been sterilised. Twenty of them had been forced to undergo the procedure, or it had happened without their consent.

Hajarah Nagadya of ICWEA said that 18 of the 20 forced sterilisations had been carried out in government hospitals, and two cases occurred in private clinics.

None of the 20 women who underwent forced sterilisations had sought legal redress and said they felt there was no one to support them, the ICWEA report said.

'I have not heard of any organisation or laws for addressing my problem,' one of the women was quoted as saying in the report.

'I think the government should put in place a law and sensitise women about the issues related to sterilisation and the laws that can support women living with HIV.'

The ICWEA report said most violations of women's sexual and reproductive health rights - including forced sterilisation - occurred during childbirth, particularly when women were delivering by Caesarean section.

A spokesman for Uganda's Ministry of Health said it was not government policy to sterilise women living with HIV/AIDS.

Asuman Lukwago, the permanent secretary at the ministry, said such cases of forced sterilisation were a criminal offence. However, he said there may be exceptional circumstances in which doctors may decide to sterilise women if they believed their lives would be in danger in pregnancy.
His son Benjamin, 14, and brother-in-law Andrew Allen, were both injured

When he arrived he realised his son and brother-in-law were involved

Auckland paramedic Philip Butler was called to scene of a serious crash

An Auckland paramedic arrived at the site of a serious motorcycle crash only to find out it was his 14-year-old son lying limp on the ground alongside his brother-in-law.

Philip Butler, a St John officer, received a work call to attend a collision on State Highway 1, just north of Auckland, on January 23, NZ Herald reported.

After ignoring a number of calls from his wife, he finally picked up his phone only to learn the tragic news that his son Benjamin had been involved in a crash.

However his worst fears were realised when he stepped out of the ambulance and spotted two of his family members sprawled out on the asphalt highway.

Nightmare: Auckland paramedic Philip Butler arrived at a crash site only to find out his 14-year-old son was involved and had broken his collar bone (pictured together moments after)

'The worst thing any emergency service person could go to is your own family and not even know it,' Mr Butler told NZ Herald.

Benjamin was riding pillion (passenger) on a motorbike with his uncle Andrew Allen when the rear wheel burst and the pair shot towards oncoming traffic.

The teenager, who suffers from mild case of Aspergers syndrome, was flung from the bike headfirst. The impact tore the helmet off his head as his head hit the ground a second time.

Mr Allen, who performed a risky manoeuvre in an effort to catapult Benjamin from the motorbike and into safety, was also thrown awkwardly from the bike.

Benjamin Butler (pictured) was riding pillion (passenger) on a motorbike with his uncle Andrew Allen when the rear wheel burst and the pair shot towards oncoming traffic

Unable to treat his son for fear of the worst, Mr Butler tended to his brother-in-law as a fellow paramedic assessed Benjamin.

'I could hear Benjamin screaming, so I knew he was with it,' Mr Butler said.

Benjamin took over treatment of his son when they had been loaded into a Westpac Rescue Helicopter and were on their way to hospital.

According to stuff.co.nz, Benjamin suffered a broken collar bone and a serious concussion in the crash.

Mr Allen was hit far worse, with 14 breaks in seven ribs, a punctured lung and fractured collar bone, scapula and shoulder blade.

The pair are both still recovering from their injuries.
A Western Australian woman has detailed the moment she questioned former prime minister Tony Abbott about same-sex marriage and refugees.

Beth Cole, from Perth, said she spotted Mr Abbott in her home state on Saturday as he sipped on a coffee after finishing a 40km bike race and took the opportunity to ask him some pointed questions.

Ms Cole said she posed for a photo with Mr Abbott 'while barely containing [her] rage' before sitting down beside him and asking him for a chat.

Scroll down for video

Perth woman Beth Cole and former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, pictured together before she confronted him about the same-sex marriage plebiscite

Christine Forster (right), the sister of former prime minsiter Tony Abbott, and partner Virginia Edwards attend a vigil in solidarity for the victims of the Orlando nightclub mass shooting

Ms Cole posted on Facebook about her exchange with Mr Abbott over the weekend

She later posted the awkward photo and detailed the conversation on Facebook.

'I'm a lesbian and your own sister is gay so I don't understand why you oppose same-sex marriage. The plebiscite will hurt me and my LGBTIQ community, especially young kids who aren't out yet,' Ms Cole said.

Tony Abbott and his sister, Christine Forster

She claims she went on to tell Mr Abbott about the higher suicide rates for LGBTI youth.

'It's not because of some inherent fault in us, it's because of homophobia and transphobia. And the non-binding plebiscite will end up hurting and probably killing people in the LGBTI community,' Ms Cole claims she told Mr Abbott.

She said Mr Abbott responded saying marriage is 'not a religious thing' and 'as an institution has been around a lot longer than the laws.'

'A lot of people have strong deeply held beliefs about marriage being between a man and a woman. A plebiscite will allow an open discussion and will mean those people who have those strong beliefs will be less resentful if same-sex marriage is voted on by all Australians,' Mr Abbott allegedly continued.

Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott pictured during a coalition meeting in Canberra in August

The discussion continued and Mr Abbott decided the pair would have to 'agree to disagree' before standing up and trying to walk away, Ms Cole said.

But Ms Cole said she insisted on pressing further, asking Mr Abbott about the treatment of refugees at camps.

'Keeping them there is causing trauma and death,' she said.

Mr Abbott allegedly responded: 'Well, at least we stopped the boats and stopped people dying at sea.'

Soon after Mr Abbott hastily walked away, she said.
This is the shocking moment two migrants brazenly try to board a lorry in Calais after pushing a tree branch into its path - but it is just one of thirty similar incidents taking place across the area every single night.

The clip starts with the makeshift barricade already blocking the road, and the car slowly reversing away.

It was captured by Mail on Sunday journalists who were over in France investigating the worrying new tactics being used to try and gain access to Britain

Scroll down for video.

This is the shocking moment two migrants brazenly try to board a lorry in Calais after pushing a tree branch in front of its path

The pair desperately signalling and waving to get the attention of a lorry that has pulled up alongside

The pair then appear, desperately signalling and waving to get the attention of a lorry that has pulled up alongside.

As they get closer, the HGV driver honks his horn to try and deter the migrants, but instead one of them climbs up onto the lorry.

For a moment it looks as if he is going to try and open one of the doors, but instead he tries to wedge himself between the vehicle's cab and trailer.

Before he is able to do so the lorry begins pulling away and he jumps off, with both men fleeing when police arrived.

Later on in the video, in a separate clip, a man can also be seen fiddling with the back of a lorry that is waiting in a queue.

As they get closer, the HGV driver honks his horn to try and deter the migrants

But instead one of them climbs up onto the lorry. For a second it looks as if he is going to try and open one of the doors, but instead he tries to wedge himself between the vehicle's cab and trailer

Pushing debris into the road in a bid to try and stop vehicles is becoming more common, putting the safety of drivers in jeopardy.

UK-bound migrants are building up to 30 barricades a night to try as they attack vehicles travelling through Calais, French officials have revealed.

Regional highways boss Xavier Delebarre said: 'The gangs have tools including chainsaws. There is a strategy to their concerted, simultaneous assaults.'

He said it amounted to a sinister 'game' and described how workers have come across a number of dead bodies of migrants who had been hit by lorries after they had run into the road.

Mr Delebarre said his teams were working in two shifts from 11pm until 7am, constantly clearing debris thrown by the migrants.

He said dead bodies were a common sight, as migrants running on to the road died after being hit by lorries.

David Sagnard, President of Frances National Federation of Lorry Transport said: The violence of the migrants has not gone up a notch, but by ten floors.

Do we have to risk their lives on the motorway, through doing our work as road transporters, or because were tourists, or simply because we live in Calais, or are police?

'Its unacceptable on the part of the state, which needs to take on its responsibilities.

Frederic Houtecoeur, a lorry driver from Belgium, added: 'Every night we are coming up against migrants and our lives are put at risk. It is extremely dangerous.'

Currently a record 1,900 French police are deployed in Calais. But Keith Vaz, chairman of the Home Affairs Committee - who has since stood down - last night called for British police to be sent to France to help deal with the violence.

He said: 'This is becoming a war zone with wanton violence being perpetrated against drivers. It is totally unacceptable that the situation has reached crisis point.'

It is a method that almost proved fatal for three MoS journalists, whose car smashed into a lorry when they swerved to avoid a log that had been pushed in front of them.

Migrants from the Calais Jungle camp are using a deadly new tactic in their attempts to get to Britain. Pictured, the MoS team's car crushed by a juggernaut

Our reporting team was investigating the worrying phenomenon when they came under attack in the early hours of Friday on the N216. Pictured, Ben Ellery (left) and photographer John McLellan

Reporter Ben Ellery and photographers Steve Burton and John McLellan were all injured when their British-registered Audi swerved to avoid the missile.

They then hit the lorry, sending their vehicle spinning out of control. The juggernaut dragged the car sideways for about 50 yards.

The three men were later rushed to hospital for treatment.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd said: 'It's vital that people feel safe when using the Channel ports. This shows just how it is in all our interests to combat attempts to enter the UK illegally.'
The decision to make Apple pay 11billion in unpaid taxes was not an attack on the US, EU chief Jean-Claude Juncker said today.

EU antitrust regulators last week ordered the tech giant to pay the staggering sum to the Irish government after ruling that a special scheme to route profits through the country was illegal state aid.

Apple's Chief Executive Tim Cook dismissed the ruling as 'total political crap' and vowed to fight the landmark ruling - the biggest tax bill imposed on a firm outside the US.

Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, said the decision to make Apple pay 11billion in unpaid taxes was not an attack on the US

Apple's Chief Executive Tim Cook last week dismissed the ruling as 'total political crap' and vowed to fight the landmark ruling - the biggest tax bill imposed on a firm outside the US

He said: 'When you are accused of something that is so foreign to your values, it brings out an outrage in you. That's how we feel.

'Apple has always been about doing the right thing, never the easy thing.'

France and Germany have spoken out in support of the decision.

Today Mr Juncker said the ruling was clearly based on facts and was 'not a decision against the United States of America', pointing to the fact that EU Commission investigations on taxation had mainly targeted European companies.

The European Commission claimed the Irish government gave Apple a 'sweetheart deal' to funnel its profits through the country without having to pay the appropriate level of tax

The decision comes amidst a coordinated global initiative to crack down on tax evasion by multinational companies, spearheaded by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Mr Juncker's comments appeared designed to reassure US lawmakers who fear the move by the European Commission would mean more US profits flowing into EU tax coffers.

The Apple tax bill dwarfs the previous EU record for a state aid case - 1.3 billion for the Nurburgring race track in Germany.
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Mother Teresa has been proclaimed a saint by Pope Francis in front of 100,000 Catholics this morning.

Mother Teresa, the tiny nun who cared for the world's most unwanted and became an icon of the Catholic Church, was canonised at a ceremony in St Peter's Square.

Two supposedly miraculous cures have been attributed to Mother Teresa by the Vatican, paving the way for her sainthood.

Pope Francis presided over the morning Mass and called on the 100,000 pilgrims and tourists gathered in the square to 'carry her smile in our hearts'.

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Mother Teresa has been proclaimed a saint by Pope Francis (pictured leading the morning Mass) in front of 100,000 Catholics this morning

Mother Teresa, the tiny nun who cared for the world's most unwanted and became the icon of the Catholic Church, was canonised at a ceremony in St Peter's Square

Pope Francis waves to the faithful as he leaves after a Holy Mass and the canonisation of Mother Teresa of Calcutta

A vast crowd congregated in St Peter's Square for the ceremony this morning which saw Mother Teresa canonised

St Peter's Square was packed with thousands of Catholics and curious tourists as Pope Francis made Mother Teresa a saint

Tens of thousands of Catholics gathered in the Vatican as they made their way to St Peter's Square for the canonisation

'For the honour of the Blessed Trinity... we declare and define Blessed Teresa of Calcutta to be a Saint and we enroll her among the Saints, decreeing that she is to be venerated as such by the whole Church,' the pontiff said in Latin.

Speaking from the steps of St. Peter's Basilica, Francis said Mother Teresa spent her life 'bowing down before those who were spent, left to die on the side of the road, seeing in them their God-given dignity'.

'She made her voice heard before the powers of the world, so that they might recognise their guilt for the crimes of poverty they themselves created.'

He added: 'Mother Teresa loved to say, "perhaps I don't speak their language but I can smile".

The Pope is pictured arriving at Mother Teresa's canonisation

'Let us carry her smile in our hearts and give it to those whom we meet along our journey, especially those who suffer.'

Applause erupted in St Peter's Square even before Francis finished pronouncing the rite of canonisation at the start of Mass, evidence of the admiration Mother Teresa enjoyed from Christians and non-Christians alike.

For the Pope, Mother Teresa put into action his ideal for the church to be a merciful 'field hospital' for the poorest of the poor, those suffering both material and spiritual poverty.

Yesterday he praised the care Mother Teresa had for the poor and the sick, while taking a swipe at world leaders for their 'sin of indifference' to suffering today.

'Tomorrow, we'll have the joy of seeing Mother Teresa proclaimed a saint,' he said. 'She deserves it!'

The pontiff decried those who 'turn the other way not to see the many forms of poverty that begs out for mercy'.

Choosing 'to not see hunger, disease, exploited persons, this is a grave sin. It's also a modern sin, a sin of today,' he told the gathered thousands.

Later today the Pope will feed 1,500 homeless people with free pizza.

Mother Teresa died in 1997 and was beatified - the first step towards becoming a saint - in 2003, after her first cure - of a woman with an ovarian tumour - was recognised by the Church.

Pope John Paul wanted to declare her a saint immediately, bypassing the beatification process, but was dissuaded by cardinals.

Her second 'miraculous cure' - of a man supposedly healed of a brain infection - was recognised last year, leading to her canonisation.

Throughout last night, pilgrims prayed at vigils and flocked before dawn to the Vatican under heavy security to try to get a good spot for the morning Mass.

Priests filmed Pope Francis, second from left, on their phones as he arrived at the canonisation ceremony in the Vatican

A vast tapestry depicting Mother Teresa - who is now a saint - was unfurled in the facade of Saint Peter's Basilica

Pope Francis was accompanied by fellow Catholic priests as he arrived at the canonisation ceremony this morning

On a sweltering day in the Vatican, Pope Francis needed help changing garments in St Peter's Square after the canonisation

Pope Francis is mobbed by a mixture of catholic pilgrims and tourists as he blesses a bay by touching its forehead

Pope Francis waves to the adoring faithful in St Peter's Square as parents hold out their babies for the pontiff to bless

THE SAINT'S FIRST 'MIRACLE': HOW MOTHER TERESA 'CURED' A WOMAN'S TUMOUR Indian woman Monica Besra claims Mother Teresa healed her ovarian cancer tumour Mother Teresa canonisation comes after she is said to have 'miraculously cured' two sick followers of the Catholic Church. The first came in eastern India, where Monica Besra vividly recalls the 'blinding light' emanating from Mother Teresa's photo that she believes helped cure her ovarian cancer. Besra, a tribal woman from West Bengal, became an overnight sensation in September 1998 when she claimed that a picture and a medallion of the world's most famous Roman Catholic nun had cured her ovarian tumour. On September 5, 1998 - exactly a year after Mother Teresa's death - nuns placed a tiny aluminium medallion that had been blessed by the future Saint Teresa of Calcutta on Besra's stomach and prayed for her. 'Two sisters carried me to the church since I was too weak to stand or walk by myself,' the 50-year-old said. 'As soon as I entered (the church), a blinding, divine light emitted from Mother's photo and enveloped me. I closed my eyes, I couldn't understand what was happening. It was indescribable, I felt faint.' 'I got up from my bed feeling so light and good. I looked down to see the giant lump had disappeared. I couldn't believe it. I touched that part, poked it, pinched it. It was really gone. I wasn't dreaming it,' said Besra, who still wears the medallion around her neck. The next day she was proclaimed cured, a feat hailed by the Vatican as a miracle leading to Mother Teresa's beatification - a crucial step on the path to sainthood - that took place in October 2003 in Rome. Besra claimed that a picture and a medallion of the world's most famous Roman Catholic nun had cured her ovarian tumour Advertisement

'Everything she did gave an example to the entire world,' said 17-year-old student Massimiliano D'Aniello, from Grosseto, Italy, who will watch the ceremony today.

'She showed we can't all do everything, but little gestures made with so much love are what's important,' she added.

Pramod Sharma, a resident of Calcutta - now called Kolkata - who grew up near a convent school and childcare centre where Mother Teresa worked, said she had chosen India as her home.

'(She) belonged to our India and stayed with the Indians and will forever stay in our hearts,' Ms Sharma said.

'I think most of all we are thankful to her for the message, for really changing our lives with her example, humility, being close to the poorest of the poor,' said Simone Massara as he prayed with his wife at a vigil at the Basilica of Sant'Andrea della Valle before the Mass.

Mother Teresa was born to ethnic Albanian parents in what is now Macedonia in 1910.

Deeply religious, she became a nun at the age of 16, joining the Loreto abbey in Ireland. Two years later she was given the name Sister Teresa.

In early 1929 she moved to Calcutta, where she became a teacher and, 15 years on, headmistress at a convent school.

In 1946 she received 'a call within a call' to found the Missionaries of Charity, officially established as a religious congregation in 1950. Nuns of the order began calling her Mother Teresa.

In 1979 Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work for the world's destitute. 'I am unworthy,' she said.

On September 5, 1997, Mother Teresa died of a heart attack at her order's headquarters in Calcutta. An array of world dignitaries attended her funeral.

THE SAINT'S SECOND 'MIRACLE': HOW MOTHER TERESA 'CURED' A BRAIN INFECTION Mother Teresa's second supposed miracle saw a Brazilian man claim she healed him of a viral brain infection. Marcilio Haddad Andrino was due to have brain surgery but doctors could not intubate him, leaving him in crippling pain. His wife, Fermanda Nascimento Rocha, said she and her family began praying for Mother Teresa's intercession after receiving a relic of her in September 2008. Marcilio Haddad Andrino, pictured with his wife, Fernanda Nascimento Rocha, was said to have been cured of a brain infection after Mother Teresa's intercession Andrino and his wife were special guests at today's ceremony in the Vatican, where 100,000 Catholics gathered By December of that year, despite powerful antibiotics, the brain abscesses and fluid had built up so much that Andrino was suffering debilitating headaches. 'I asked Mother to cure Marcilio if this is God's will, and if not, to take him by the hand and bring him to the house of the Father to feel his caress,' Mrs Rocha said She said she went to her mother's home and prayed 'with all the strength I had'. When the surgeon returned to Andrino's room, he was awake, pain-free and asymptomatic, according to the priest spearheading Mother Teresa's sainthood cause, the Reverend Brian Kolodiejchuk. Within six months, Andrino said Friday, he had returned to work. Soon after, the couple conceived the first of their two children, though Andrino had been told that the powerful drugs he had taken had made him infertile. He calls his two children 'the extension of that miracle'. 'We are very grateful to Mother Teresa for our family,' he said. Pope Francis decreed Andrino's cure a miracle in December after Vatican doctors and theologians determined that it was medically inexplicable and due to the intercession of Mother Teresa. Advertisement

The streets were filled with pilgrims, tourists and curious onlookers as the Vatican was filled with people gathering for the canonisation of Mother Teresa

Faithful and pilgrims wait to enter St Peter's Square at the Vatican before Mother Teresa's canonization ceremony

Thousands of pilgrims flocked before dawn to the Vatican under heavy security to try to get a good spot for the morning Mass

Irma Escuero, from New York, holds a statue of Mother Teresa before the start of a mass presided over by Pope Francis

At least 100,000 pilgrims and tourists were expected at the ticketed ceremony, as well as dozens of heads of state

The relics of Mother Teresa are carried by nuns prior to the start of the tiny nun's canonisation ceremony in St Peter's Square

A man holds up an Indian flag in the Vatican this morning. In Calcutta, where Mother Teresa spent a lifetime dedicated to the poor, a special Sunday Mass was held in her honour

Since her death, the Vatican has ruled that two people were miraculously cured by Mother Teresa.

A year after her death, nuns placed an aluminium medallion blessed by Mother Teresa on an Indian woman who had a tumour caused by ovarian cancer.

The sick woman, Monica Besra, claimed a bright light suddenly burst from the necklace and she was instantly cured.

WHAT MAKES A SAINT? The Catholic Church defines as saints those believed to have led such holy lives they are now in Heaven and can intercede with God to perform miracles - two of which are needed to confer sainthood. The Catholic Church has more than 10,000 saints, including 29 canonised by Pope Francis. Advertisement

'A blinding, divine light emitted from Mother's photo and enveloped me. I closed my eyes, I couldn't understand what was happening. It was indescribable, I felt faint,' she said.

'I got up from my bed feeling so light and good. I looked down to see the giant lump had disappeared. I couldn't believe it. I touched that part, poked it, pinched it. It was really gone. I wasn't dreaming it,' she added.

The supposed cure was recognised by the Vatican in 2002 and led to Mother Teresa's beatification.

Another cure, recognised by Pope Francis last year, is said to have seen Mother Teresa heal a Brazilian man's brain tumour.

Marcilio Haddad Andrino and his wife, Fermanda Nascimento Rocha, said they received a relic of the nun's in 2008, after he contracted a viral brain infection.

'I asked Mother to cure Marcilio if this is God's will, and if not, to take him by the hand and bring him to the house of the Father to feel his caress,' Mrs Rocha said.

She said she went to her mother's home and prayed 'with all the strength I had'. Later that day, Mr Andrino was healed.

Nuns from the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, India, watch a live broadcast of the canonisation of Mother Teresa a

There was a huge security operation in the Vatican this morning as the throngs of people made their way to the ceremony

A priest kisses the relics of Mother Teresa prior her canonization ceremony in St Peter's Square at the Vatican on Sunday

A nun of Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity kisses Pope Francis in the Vatican yesterday as he met pilgrims

Critics say she did little to alleviate the pain of the terminally ill and nothing to tackle the root causes of poverty. Atheist writer Christopher Hitchens made a documentary about her called 'Hell's Angel'.

She was also accused of trying to convert the destitute in predominantly-Hindu India to Christianity, a charge her mission has repeatedly denied.

Sunday's festivities honoring Mother Teresa were not limited to Rome and the Vatican.

In Calcutta, where Mother Teresa spent a lifetime dedicated to the poor, a special Sunday Mass was held at the order's Mother House.
Former Home Secretary Alan Johnson married award-winning businesswoman Carolyn Burgess in a private ceremony last December.

Despite wedding nine months ago the news was kept quiet until this weekend by Labour's Hull West and Hessle MP.

Alan Johnson pictured with his new wife Carolyn Burgess. He divorced from his previous wife in 2011

Only a few close colleagues in Westminster knew Johnson had tied the knot with his partner of four years.

Last night a friend of the 66-year-old told the Express that: 'Alan is fiercely protective of his personal life which is why he wanted to keep it so quiet. They are a lovely couple.

'It is wonderful to see them so happy together, clearly enjoying married life.'

The former postman split with his wife of 19 years, Laura Patient, in 2011 after reports emerged she had been having an affair with his body guard.

Johnson has rarely spoken of his private life but two years ago he said he had reached the 'happiest point' in his life after staring a relationship with Burgess, who was awarded an MBE for services to businesses in Hull.

The news of his third marriage comes just weeks before Johnson's third memoir is to be released.

The Long And Winding Road, which is the follow-up to his multi-award winning This Boy and Please, Mr Postman, will delve into his early career as a trade union leader and getting noticed by Tony Blair for his negotiating skills.

It will be available on the www.mailbookshop.co.uk from September 22.
Kimberley Miners posed naked for the Sun but is now in danger of arrest for speaking with Isis recruiters online

A former Page 3 model is reportedly being groomed online by Isis to become a jihadist bride.

Kimberley Miners, who has posed topless for the Sun, has been using Facebook to speak with a British fighter in Syria who is trying to recruit women to the 'caliphate'.

Anti-terror police are said to be fearful the 27-year-old is being groomed.

Speaking to Dipesh Gadher and Jonathan Corke for the Sunday Times, Ms Miners said her interest in Islam was sparked last year and she found 'peace' through it.

She has been to Turkey twice and ended up at refugee camps close to the Syrian border.

She said: 'I've shared a lot of bombs and stuff [on Facebook]; I've shared a lot of videos.'

Ms Miners said she was told Isis is there to protect the religion but not really knowing as 'got her into trouble'

Ms Miners first found fame in 2009 as she split her time between being a street cleaner in Bradford and working to become a topless model

Ms Miners said she was told Isis is there to protect the religion but not really knowing has 'got her into trouble'.

She said: 'I've gone from glamour model to something completely different. But that again makes you wonder. You don't get s*** for wearing nowt but the second you start wearing the veil you get accused of extremism.'

According to the Daily Star, the model flew to Turkey in 2012 to have breast surgery after winning 1,000 on horse racing.

She is said to be going by the name Aisha Lauren al-Britaniya and speaking with Abu Usamah Al Britani, who is believed to be an Isis recruiter.

Ms Miners' case could mirror that of Sally Jones, above, who took her younger son to Turkey after converting to Islam several years ago

He frequently has social media account shut down but his latest Facebook profile includes an image with the words 'A freedom fighter is always labelled a terrorist'.

He also shared a screenshot of his disabled Instagram account with the comment 'Why do they even bother blocking when i just return back again and again. Die in your rage kaafirs'.

He also posted a tribute to Shaikh Muhammad Al Adnani.

One of the pictures Abu Usamah Al Britani has shared on Facebook is a kitten in a mock suicide vest

He wrote: 'He was a Lion of this ummah. He answered the call of jihad instead of siiting back like the cowards are doing now.

'Dogs will crowd around a body of a lion and bark. But no matter how loud they bark the dogs will always remain dogs whilst the lion will always remain the lion.'

Ms Miners' father drowned in a freak accident in 2010, when he fell headfirst into a frozen lake in Bradford.

Ms Miners' case could end up being similar to Sally Jones', who converted to Islam and left the country three years ago, becoming an Isis recruiter.

Jones took her young son to Turkey on holiday over the Christmas period in 2013 and the pair failed to return to the UK.

Jones abandoned a disastrous career as a punk rocker to convert to Islam, and recently revealed she is now hiding in the ISIS-held city of Mosul in Iraq.
A child protection officer in Victoria has been charged with two sex offences which took place more than two decades ago while she was worked as a youth detention officer.

The 50-year-old woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, worked for the child protection division at the Department of Health and Human Services, reported The Age.

The woman allegedly molested a 16-year-old boy in 1995 who was in custody at the Melbourne Juvenile Justice Centre.

A 50-year-old child protection officer has been charged with two sex offences dating back to 1995, after she allegedly molested a 16-year-old boy who was in custody at the Melbourne Juvenile Justice Centre (pictured)

The allegations were first reported in 1996 by a unit manager at the centre, who submitted a complaint to the then-secretary of the DHHS.

The complaint was accompanied by signed witness statements from the alleged victim, other youth officers and a YMCA employee.

An investigation in the same year reportedly found the woman had engaged in inappropriate conduct, but the department decided not to take any action.

The allegations were reported to Victoria Police in 2015, after the same whistleblower in the DHHS who reported the incident in 1996, passed on the evidence to the royal commission into child sex abuse.

The unit manager was not interviewed by police regarding the incident until 2015.

The woman has been charged with sexual penetration of a child 16 or 17 years old under her care, supervision or authority, and committing an indecent act with a child 16 or 17 years old under her care, supervision or authority.

She has now also been stood down from her job.

While working as a youth detention officer, the woman allegedly initiated the sexual contact with the 16-year-old.

The incident was first reported to the Department of Health and Human Services in 1996, but it was only reported to Victoria Police in 2015, after the same whistleblower who altered the DHHS decades earlier, passed on the evidence to the royal commission into child sex abuse

She is said to have visited his room at night and performed sex acts on him in the toilets.

After he was released from juvenile detention the conduct allegedly escalated.

On Friday the Victorian Government ordered an independent investigation on the department, which has been accused of covering up the alleged abuse.

The Minister for Families and Children Jenny Mikakos has appointed former Supreme Court judge Frank Vincent to oversee the investigation.

Because the disclosure was made before Victoria passed its whistleblower protection legislation, the unit manager who initially reported the abuse in 1996, and again in 2015, alleged his job was threatened and was transferred despite protest.
Theresa May endured a bruising first appearance on the world stage today, finding herself on the fringes of the G20's 'family photograph' after a thinly-veiled rebuke from Barack Obama.

The Prime Minister lined up for the traditional group shot following a series of difficult meetings with fellow leaders.

In an awkward joint press conference, Mr Obama refused to recant his statement during the EU referendum campaign that Britain would go to the 'back of the queue' for a trade deal with the US if it left the Brussels club.

And he also delivered a stark warning that action is needed to stop the Brexit process 'unravelling' the special relationship.

Theresa May (pictured on the left of the second row) found herself on the fringes of the G20's family photograph today after bruising comments from Barack Obama warning that the UK would not get a quick trade deal

US president Barack Obama was condemned for warning during the EU referendum campaign that a post-Brexit UK would go to the 'back of the queue' for a trade deal with America

The US president's original comments, made alongside David Cameron in April, were roundly condemned as an intrusion into domestic politics.

Polls have also suggested they were counterproductive - as the public were turned off by his threat,

But asked whether he regretted them today, a defiant Mr Obama - who leaves office in January - refused to back down.

While stressing that he never said Britain would be 'punished' for voting to cut ties with Brussels, Mr Obama repeated his view that the 'world benefited enormously from the UK's participation in the EU'.

And he made clear that the TTIP trade deal being hammered out with the EU would remain the US's priority - even though the talks appear to have ground to a halt.

Mr Obama refused to back down on his remarks during a press conference with Theresa May at the G20 summit this morning, saying the TTIP trade deal with the EU was the priority

Speaking at a press conference with Theresa May in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, where the summit is taking place, Mr Obama said: 'Those negotiations are proceeding.

'It would not make sense for us to put those efforts aside particularly at a time when my working assumption was that if in fact the people of the UK were to leave the EU their first priority would be to renegotiated their terms of trade with the economic unit they sell half of their goods to.'

Both Mr Obama and Mrs May said they would try to minimise the impact of Brexit on the Special Relationship.

Mr Obama - who leaves office in January - said the US remained committed to the Special Relationship with the UK but action was needed to ensure it did not 'unravel'

'What I committed to Theresa is that we will consult closely with her as she and her government move forward with Brexit negotiations to ensure that we don't see adverse effects in the trade and commercial relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom,' he said.

'We're going to do everything we can to make sure that the consequences of the decision don't end up unravelling what is already a very strong and robust economic relationship.'

Mrs May said there could be some turbulence as Britain left the Brussels club, but said the country would be able to make a success of the move by seizing 'opportunities' it brought.

Mrs May is holding talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the international gathering

The PM has also had an encounter with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Hangzhou

In a pre-recorded interview with the BBC's Andrew Marr show, Mrs May said: 'I'm not going to pretend that it's all going to be plain sailing.

'I think we must be prepared for the fact that there may be some difficult times ahead.

'But what I am is optimistic and, indeed, this is the message that came from the Cabinet when we were sitting around the table this week, it's the same message I've had from businesses, is an optimism about the future, about the opportunities that are now open to the UK. As I say, an independent UK forging our own way in the world.'

JAPANESE FIRMS COULD RELOCATED AFTER BREXIT, WARNS REPORT The Japanese government has warned that Brexit could mean the country's firms relocating their European headquarters. A report says the firms might want to move 'if EU laws cease to be applicable in the UK'. It reportedly urges the government to address the concerns as quickly as possible. An estimated 140,000 workers in the UK are employed by Japanese companies. Manufacturing giant Hitachi and carmakers Honda, Nissan and Toyota all have significant bases. The letter warns: 'Japanese businesses with their European headquarters in the UK may decide to transfer their head-office function to Continental Europe if EU laws cease to be applicable in the UK after its withdrawal.' Advertisement

The PM has been meeting a range of leaders as she makes her first appearance at a major international summit.

Mrs May was braced for a potentially difficult encounter with Chinese Premier Xi, after the Hinkley Point nuclear power plant project was dramatically put on hold.

She has told journalists that the security services are reviewing the scheme amid fears about the growing influence of the communist giant on key infrastructure.

Government sources last night played down Mr Obama's intervention, saying it was 'not surprising' he was prioritising big multilateral trade deals in his final months as president.

A source said Mrs May had won agreement to start official-level talks on mapping out the framework of a future trade deal, although she acknowledged any agreement was 'a way off'.

Meanwhile, Mrs May rebuffed overtures from Vladimir Putin to reset the UK's frosty economic relations with Russia.

The Prime Minister challenged the Russian president over Moscow's intervention in Syria and warned him there could not be 'business as usual' in the relationship between the UK and the Kremlin.

During a tense 30-minute meeting at the G20 summit, described as 'formal and frank' by Number 10, Mrs May pushed the Russian leader over the need to secure access for aid convoys and demanded an end to the bombing of civilians.

Relations between the UK and Moscow have been severely strained by the crisis in the Ukraine, the war in Syria and the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.

A UK official said: 'The Prime Minister was clear that we can't have a relationship that is business as usual, there are a number of complex and serious issues of concern.

'But where it is in our interest to engage and work together, particularly on the safety of our citizens, then that is where we would be seeking to engage with the Russians.'

In contrast to outgoing president Mr Obama, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has said he wants an early free trade agreement after Britain leaves the EU.

'They've got to put in place free trade agreements and we are enthusiastic and supportive; we're providing Britain with as much assistance as we can at a technical level,' Turnbull told reporters in Hangzhou.

Mrs May, pictured arriving in Hangzhou with Chancellor Philip Hammond on the new Prime Ministerial plane,
Eighteen seconds. That is all it took for James Porritt's (right) world to be irrevocably changed in a way that he still struggles to comprehend. That is the timeframe in which the 42-year-old business consultant was savagely attacked in the packed carriage of a London Underground train by a man wielding a machete who had picked him entirely at random. 'This is not a terror attack,' the assailant told terrified onlookers. 'I want only him.' What followed next was an onslaught of extraordinary savagery: as James tried to flee for his life, the attacker - 35-year-old Ricky Morgan (left and inset)- hunted him down, slashing at his head, hands, elbow and legs. That James survived at all is little short of a miracle: the few seconds of security footage from the incident released to the public show scenes akin to a horror film. 'When I saw the footage, all I could think was how the hell I walked away from it,' says James today. 'I know I'm lucky to be alive.' The impact has nonetheless been catastrophic: alongside bone-deep cuts to his head and shin, James's right and once dominant hand was so severely injured that it is of little use now. 'I can't dress myself, I have to eat from a bowl with my left hand, I've had to give up my driving licence and I am now registered disabled,' he says quietly. 'I can't even hold my girlfriend's hand as it hurts too much. All the basic things I used to take for granted I can no longer do.'
A British mother who was arrested by French police on suspicion of suffocating her five-month-old baby was tonight admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

The child was found dead by police on Saturday morning after being called to a gite holiday home in Saint-Pee-sur-Nivelle, a village in the Basque province of Labourd.

The woman, who is understood to be 42 and from a London subyrb, was with her husband and another child, aged three, but the baby was lying lifeless in a bed.

The family had been due to return to the UK on Saturday following a week-long holiday.

A British mother is being held by French police on suspicion of suffocating her five-month-old baby while on holiday in Saint-Pee-sur-Nivelle (pictured) in France

Bayonne prosecutor Marc Mariee said: 'The suspect death of a baby was recorded at the scene'.

Mr Mariee said that an initial inquiry 'very quickly moved towards the mother, who was placed under criminal investigation.'

The custody period was extended on Saturday morning, as the mother was held to answer further questions from detectives.

And late on Sunday, a psychiatric examination suggested that the woman needed to be admitted to hospital, said Mr Mariee.

He told AFP, Frances national news agency, that he was not in a position to say whether she had suffocated the baby intentionally, or not.

She was arrested in an area in the south west of France and remains in custody today

All were sleeping in a single bedroom in the gite, and the mother is thought to have got up at around 9am on Saturday.

This was when the husband inspected the bed, and found his child was dead.

He immediately called the emergency services.

A coroner visited the property in Rue Karrikartea Karrika, and found that the baby's death was not a natural one, and was almost certainly caused by suffocation.

An autopsy will be performed early next week.

The criminal investigation is being led by the Bayonne prosecutor, along with officers from the city's judicial police.

The entire family is expected to remain in France, at least during the early stages of the inquiry.
Immigrant men have groped and sexually assaulted a number of women in a German city in copycat attacks of the New Year's eve sex frenzy in Cologne.

Police said the four women who filed complaints after the incidents in Essen late on Friday could be 'only the tip of the iceberg.'

Women who may have been attacked at the Essen Original city party have been offered a confidential hotline by officers to contact them.

Immigrant men have groped and sexually assaulted a number of women in a German city in copycat attacks of the New Year's eve sex frenzy in Cologne (shown in file picture)

The police presence at the festival was beefed up over the weekend as a result of the sexual assaults.

All said that men came up to them in groups, danced around them, harassed and groped them.

This mirrored the attacks in Cologne on December 31 when mobs of North African migrants assaulted hundreds of women in attacks which served to turn Germany against the open-door refugee policy of Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Despite defending her record in a long interview on Saturday with the BILD newspaper, the chancellor is braced for a beating at the hustings on Sunday when the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is set to defeat her own CDU conservatives in a regional election in her home state.

Attacks in Cologne served to turn Germany against the open-door refugee policy of Chancellor Angela Merkel

Police said the Essen victims were attacked in three parts of the city by North African men in groups of four and six 'who drove their victims into corners and groped them all over.'

Most of the abusers are still being hunted but police apprehended several lone suspects shortly after the complaints were made. Two 16-year-olds and a 46-year-old man were questioned but later released.

Police spokesman Peter Elke said: 'The heavy police presence on the ground meant we could promptly identify and arrest some suspected attackers.' All suspects are immigrants or of a migrant background.

Elke added: 'The sequence of events has to be determined. Therefore we are looking for witnesses to the attacks as enquiries continue.'

The festival continued on Sunday and will end on Monday night.

Organisers have promised to work with police to provide greater security for women in the hours of darkness when bands play and people stroll among food stands, acrobats and street artists.

The chancellor is braced for a beating at the hustings on Sunday when the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is set to defeat her own CDU conservatives in a regional election. Pictured is AfD party leader Frauke Petry

The news could not have come at a worse time for the chancellor as the AfD is set to score a bigger percentage of the vote in her home state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern on Sunday.
The Venezuelan President has been chased through the streets of Caracas after a political event as protesters call for him to step down.

Nicolas Maduro had attended a routine political event on Friday and was met by hoards of angry protesters banging pots and pans and shouting 'we are hungry, we are hungry.'

Nicolas Maduro had attended a routine political event on Friday and was met by hoards of angry protesters

It comes days after desperate Venezuelans broke into a zoo and killed a horse for meat as the country's economic crisis is leaving people starving.

In one video, President Maduro tries to calm the crowd by walking among them but he is shouted at more by the protesters.

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In one part of a video, the president tries to calm the crowds by walking among them but he is met with more abuse

Venezuelan authorities briefly rounded up 30 people in the rare public confrontation

President Maduro's popularity has plummeted since his narrow election victory in 2013

Venezuelan authorities briefly rounded up more than 30 people on Margarita island for heckling President Maduro, activists said on Saturday, in what appeared to be a rare public confrontation with the unpopular leader.

Videos published by activists, purportedly from the Margarita locality of Villa Rosa on Friday night, show scores of people banging pots and pans and jeering their president during a visit to inspect state housing projects.

Since narrowly winning an election to replace Hugo Chavez in 2013, Maduro's popularity has plummeted due to an economic crisis. The opposition say this week's protest drew more than a million people in what appeared to be the biggest such demonstration in more than a decade.

Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro speaks during a Council of Ministers meeting at Miraflores Palace in Caracas in July

'The people loathe him and last night they made that very clear with the pots-and-pans protest,' said opposition leader Henrique Capriles.
The body of a 23-year-old promising artist has been found at the bottom of a steep hillside in dense bushland after he disappeared nearly three weeks ago.

Jesse Southam-Marsh was last seen on Tomewin road in Tomewin, north west of Murwillumbah in northern NSW on the afternoon of August 17.

But the desperate search for the young Queensland man ended in tragedy on Saturday morning after authorities recovered his body at the base of a steep terrain, a NSW police spokesperson has confirmed to Daily Mail Australia.

The body of Jesse Southam-Marsh (pictured) has been found after vanished three weeks ago

The 23-year-old was found at the bottom of a steep hillside in dense bushland in Tomewin

A report will be prepared for the Coroner after his body was found as it is believed the circumstances are not being treated as suspicious.

His grieving father Dallas Southam-Marsh has paid tribute to his 'lively' son after being alerted to the tragic news by police.

'I'm going to miss him terribly. I had a lot of plans to help him along with his career. He will always be my loving son and I will always pay tribute to him,' Mr Marsh told the Tweed Daily News.

'I'm so glad that they did find him and I was not left the rest of my days wondering where he was.'

The young Queensland artist was last seen in northern NSW on the afternoon of August 17

The budding artist had been living out of his van when he was working away from home

His grieving father Dallas Southam-Marsh has paid tribute to his 'lively' son (pictured)

The heartbreaking tribute comes after his family initially feared Mr Southam-Marsh may have been abducted as his disappearance was 'out of character'.

The budding artist had been living out of his van when he was working away from home in an effort to save money.

More than 2,000 missing posters were handed out between Murwillumbah and Currumbin Valley in the weeks leading up to his death.
Migrants trying to enter Europe by crossing the Mediterranean will soon face a new obstacle - in the shape of one of Britain's biggest warships.

In recent years, hundreds of thousands have made the dangerous trip from Libya to Italy on overcrowded dinghies that they have been squashed onto by organised human trafficking gangs.

After gaining EU consent, destroyer ship HMS Diamond will join up with other boats as part of Operation Sophia, aimed at tackling people smugglers.

As well as arresting members of these organisations, HMS Diamond's crew will also be tasked with detaining anyone trying to bring weapons to the continent and preparing the country's coastguard to deal with the crisis more effectively, according to The Observer.

After gaining EU consent, destroyer ship HMS Diamond join up with other boats as part of Operation Sophia, aimed at tackling people smugglers (file image)

HMS Diamond's crew will also be tasked with detaining anyone trying to bring weapons to the continent and preparing the Libya's coastguard

However, the head of parliament's foreign affairs committee, Crispin Blunt, believes that establishing a solid parliamentary system should be the top priority.

'The smugglers are taking advantage of the fact there is no coherent government in Libya,' he said.

'Until there is a political settlement in Libya that encourages a Libyan government to accept assistance in territorial waters, I fail to see how this can be effective.'

A House of Lords report earlier this year suggested that an increased number of EU ships in the Med could actually make crossing the sea seem safer and increase the number of crossings.

Just last week, More than seven hundred migrants fleeing war-torn Libya were rescued in the Mediterranean Sea by the Italian navy

Members of Proactiva Open Arms NGO, a group set up to help rescue migrants at sea, helped pull them from their inflatable boats

Just last week, more than 700 were pulled from their small, inflatable dinghies by the Italian navy.

Members of Proactiva Open Arms NGO, a group set up to help rescue migrants at sea, helped pull them from their inflatable boats before handing them over to the Italian coastguards operating in the area.

Christopher Stephen's Observer report says that migrants making the trip from Italy to Libya have now reached record levels.
A man and woman were discovered dead inside a Sydney home on Sunday afternoon, sparking suggestions of a possible murder-suicide.

The bodies of the the pair were discovered by a relative at around 12.30pm at the address on The Horsley Drive, Smithfield.

Police say a four-year-old girl was also found unharmed at the property in the city's western suburbs.

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A man and woman were found dead inside a home (pictured) on The Horsley Drive in Smithfield in Sydney's west on Sunday afternoon

The Homicide Squad is currently on the scene investigating the 'suspicious' incident. Police are yet to release the identity of the man or the woman

She was discovered asleep in a bed in a separate room of the house.

The Homicide Squad is currently investigating the incident which is being treated as suspicious.

Neither the man or the woman have been formally identified.
Lord Powell of Bayswater arrives at a summit in Milan with Margaret Thatcher

Former Prime Minister Lady Margaret Thatcher would not have supported Britain leaving the European Union according to one of her most trusted foreign advisors.

Lord Powell of Bayswater told Toby Helm for the Observer, that the PM would have preferred to battle the problems from within the organisation rather than leave it.

He said: 'Of course she got fed up with it, but I don't believe that as prime minister she would ever have campaigned to take Britain out of Europe or had a referendum to allow that to happen.

'She wanted to change Europe and she set out to change it with great vigour but I don't believe she would have chosen this way.

'She never had any truck with referendums and frequently spoke out against them.'

Lord Powell of Bayswater said that the PM would have preferred to battle the problems from within the organisation rather than leave it. Pictured, Lord Powell centre with Lord Patten left, and Lady Thatcher, right

Lady Thatcher spoke against increased integration with the then European Community during her time as Prime Minister, saying in 1988 that she had not 'rolled back the frontiers of the state to see them re-imposed at a European level'.

Lord Powell served as a key foreign policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and during his time with her, he helped broker the al-Yamamah arms deals with Saudi Arabia.

Since 1992 he has been a businessman and is currently the chairman of Louis Vuitton. He sits as a crossbench peer in the House of Lords although he is associated with the Conservative Party.

His comments come as the second female Prime Minister Theresa May heads to the G20 summit in China, where she will be fighting for Britain's position after Brexit.

President Obama said Britain would be at the back of the queue for a US trade deal.
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When you're stuck in a traffic jam or waiting for a rail replacement bus on Monday morning, spare a thought for these workers in a small mining town in Georgia who have to travel to work in 62-year-old rusted cable cars.

Miners in the former Soviet town of Chiatura face a death-defying commute every day as they take the cable cars up a huge gorge.

Built in the 1950s by the Soviet Union to transport workers around the mining town more quickly, the cable cars are still in place and serve as a means of transport to workers and tourists.

High life: Workers in Chiatura, a small mining town in western Georgia, have to travel to work in 62-year-old rusted cable cars

Miners and residents in the former Soviet town of Chiatura face a death-defying commute every day as they take the cable cars up a huge gorge

The cable cars were built in the 1950s by the Soviet Union to transport workers around the mining town more quickly

The cable cars are still in place more than six decades later and serve as a means of transport to workers and tourists

Dubbed the 'rope road', the cable car network was built as a way to efficiently transport workers to and from the mines during the height of production in the 1950s - and was needed due to the town's rugged landscape.

The town was once the manganese mining capital of the world and was a considered vital to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

But the fall of the USSR brought an abrupt end to most industry in the area, leaving the cable car network as a relic of a bygone era.

The town's manganese deposits were discovered at the turn of the turn of the 20th century but for decades workers had to climb up and down the steep gorge every day as they made their way to and from work.

In an effort to conquer the town's extreme geography, the network of tramways were built so almost every corner of the mining town was accessible.

The system transported the town's 4,000 workers from their homes at the bottom of the gorge to the mines that dotted the mountains. It was also used to transport the manganese to the various factories in the area.

Dubbed the 'rope road', the cable car network was built as a way to efficiently transport workers to and from the mines. It is still used today by workers, residents and tourists in the Chiatura

The town was once the manganese mining capital of the world and was a considered vital to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, making the cable cars an important fixture in the town

The fall of the USSR brought an abrupt end to most industry in the area, leaving the cable car network a relic of a bygone era

In an effort to conquer the town's extreme geography, the network of tramways were built so almost every corner of the mining town was accessible. Pictured, a girl waits for a cable car to arrive

Photographer Ioanna Sakellaraki travelled to Chiatura and took these jaw-dropping pictures of the cable car network, which still boasts 17 functioning cabins and car lines that span more than 3.7miles.

'The mining town of Chiatura, with its post-Soviet identity, had always been one of the must-visit destinations on the top of my list, mostly due to its interesting historical and political background dating back to the late 1950s and the Stalin era,' Ms Sakellaraki, 26, said.

Speaking about the cable cars, she added: 'Six decades after their original construction, even if rusted away, they are considered the quickest way to get around.

'The ride was relatively smooth, even if most of the cable cars have rusted away throughout the years and are crumbling during the ride through the valley.

'The cable cars of Chiatura are a symbol of the city's identity and a landmark of its past,.'

The system transported the town's 4,000 workers from their homes at the bottom of the gorge to the mines in the mountains

Sorry state: The now rusting cable cars were also used to transport the manganese to the various factories in the area
An alleged daytime drug deal on a busy public footpath in Melbourne has been busted by a reporter and camera crew, less than two weeks after shocking images showed what appeared to be brazen drug use in the city's popular Hosier Lane.

The stunning moment was recorded as a man appeared to deal with two customers until noticing the news crew and they fled the scene.

Following one of those involved, a 9 News reporter challenged him about what had just taken place.

A suspected drug deal occurring in broad daylight on the side of a Melbourne street

Those involved in the alleged drug deal quickly fled the scene when they noticed the news crew

One of those involved in the alleged exchange was confronted by a reporter

'Were you selling or buying?,' the reported asked.

The man told him: 'Mate, I've got a family, F*** off'.

Asked if he was part of the problem, he said: 'I'm caught up in it, sure'.

It comes after images from inner city Melbourne's Hosier Lane, taken during the day, showed numerous people using pipes to smoke what appeared to be drugs.

Two men photographed smoking from pipes while sitting in Melbourne's Hosier Lane

Several people in Hosier Lane were photographed and appeared to be smoking cannabis

This man used a makeshift bong fashioned from a plastic bottle

The lane, known for its colourful street art, is popular with tourists who visit it in large numbers every day.

Just metres away from where one man smoked from a makeshift bong, sightseers snapped photographs with their smartphones.

Frank Cammora, who runs MoVida on Hosier Lane, told The Herald Sun confrontations were becoming more common in the area.

'I've personally seen tourists being abused by people that are living there.

'It's getting to a point where confrontation is happening and it's only getting worse.'

According to 9 News, it's just part of a growing drug crisis in wider Melbourne.

As well as Hosier Lane, Richmond - where the alleged drug deal took place - Footscray and Collingwood were all hot spots for drug use.

A Hosier Lane business operator said the problem of drug users in the area was getting worse

Hosier Lane is adorned with a multitude of colourful street art

It reported drug use was increasingly causing deaths in Victoria.

In 2015, 420 people in the state died from overdoses, more than the 387 in 2014.

There's also a push for a safe injecting facility in Richmond, with the hope it could save lives.

A similar site in Sydney operates seven days a week and despite there being thousands of overdoses there in the past decade, no-one had died, 9 News reported.

However, while the local council supports the idea, the state government does not.

Mental Health Minister Martin Foley called safe injecting rooms a '1990s response to what is now a very different drug problem'.

It intended to instead trial drug support services in Melbourne and surrounding areas.

Just metres away from where one man smoked from a makeshift bong, sightseers snapped photographs with their smartphones
Footage of a truck refusing to let a car merge into its lane before the pair are eventually involved in a crash has divided the internet.

Video captured on a dash camera of a car on Thursday shows the large truck and Toyota jostling for position in the single lane of a tight Sydney tunnel.

While many online commenters were divided about who they believed to be at fault for the incident, police say the blame is split between both drivers.

'This clearly highlights that those two drivers involved arent sharing the road like they should,' New South Wales chief inspector Phillip Brooks told Daily Mail Australia.

'The car has attempted to anticipate the truck movements which road users should never do and sadly people's preparedness to take risks and share the road is costing lives at the moment.'

Footage of a car and truck jostling for position in a single lane in a tunnel in Sydney has divided the internet

The incident took place at the Marsh Street entrance to the M5 motorway in Sydney.

With the tunnel narrowing, there's eventually no longer enough room for both the car and truck to fit side-by-side.

While the truck seemingly could have easily avoided the crash by slowing down to let the car in, his determination not to has been a source of controversy.

More than 160,000 people have viewed the video since it was posted to prominent Facebook page Dash Cam Owners Australia and has become the subject of breakfast television commentary.

But despite the incident being a hot topic of conversation, police are not investigating it.

'The critical factor for us is that weve received no support or complaint, so its hard to determine what happened without speaking to the two involved,' chief inspector Brooks said.

While authorities said both drivers had a role to play in the incident, chief inspector Brooks confirmed that a driver who hits the other from behind is normally at fault.

Senator Derryn Hinch claimed the truck driver deliberately hit the car, while his colleague Pauline Hanson argued the car was in a blind spot.

The large truck refused to slow down and provide enough room for the car to merge into the lane. Eventually the two vehicles collide, the impact jolts the car while the truck remains sturdy

Video of the crash was posted to Facebook with commenters divided as to whether the car or the truck was at fault for the incident

Senator Derryn Hinch claimed the truck driver deliberately hit the car, while his colleague Pauline Hanson argued the car was in a blind spot

'I think it was deliberate. It looks like something out of a movie,' Mr Hinch told Sunrise.

Ms Hanson said: 'I have driven in those rigs on a big trip... the driver to me is indecisive. He is either tourist or not used to the roads and driving in tunnels. He didn't take the objective to get up there and merge at a couple of points.

'The truckie was holding back, but then again the truckie should have held back a bit more to be courteous. I can understand hitting the back of the car, because that is that truckie's blindspot to hit the back of the car.'

Hundreds more have commented on the video, including one man who praised the truckie by arguing he had every right to hold his ground.

'All these people saying the truck should let the car in and what ever else is the reason why these accidents happen,' he commented.

'These dumb car drivers just think 'He will see me and let me in', well no we can't always see you when your trying to squeeze in.

But others weren't as impressed saying the truck should have done more to avoid an accident, regardless of whether the driver of the car had pushed in.

'Regardless of who has right of way, the truck driver at no point avoided the collision and in fact knew exactly what he was doing and the consequences what would occur because of his negligence,' another man wrote.

'What if there was a child in the vehicle?'

Eventually after coming together the car managed to make its way in front of the truck

Eagle-eyed viewers of the video alleged that not only had the truck done nothing to avoid a crash, he had in fact sped up to prevent the car from merging.

'Car indicates, truckie obviously sees it because he immediately accelerates and closes the gap,' one person wrote.

Others agreed, saying the car had been indicating his intentions for an extended period of time and the truck was at fault.

The incident comes just days after another crash on Sydney's roads was captured on camera.

That crash saw a ute run into the back of a car after a Lexus was indecisive about which exit it should take on the Anzac Bridge.
A family has discovered unwelcome guests at their home - two massive pythons battling on the rooftop while dangling from their drainpipe.

The Queensland homeowners found something rather unpleasant when they spotted two giant carpet pythons fighting in mid-air on the roof of their property.

Snake catcher Max - who shared the video on Sunshine Coast Snake Catchers 24/7 Facebook page - said the display shows the rival reptiles combating at the start of breeding season.

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A family has discovered unwelcome guests at their home - two massive pythons on the roof

'Who says males can't multi-task!' the caption read.

'Check out these two male Carpet Pythons caught combating while hanging off a ladies gutter!

'Breeding season has definitely begun now, so this male to male combat may be a common sight throughout the coast over the next couple of months.'

The footage, which was uploaded on Sunday evening, shows two reptiles hanging from the second-storey, twirling and twisting around each other.

The video has been met with a significant amount of mix comments after being viewed more than 14,000 times.

The Queensland family spotted two giant carpet pythons combating from the drainpipe

The footage shows two reptiles hanging from the second-storey, twirling around each other

Lynda Hunt said: 'That's enough to give me nightmares. I hate snakes.'

Alex Don wrote: 'Bloody hell their tails are strong.'

Ros Wilson posted: 'Awesome vid.'

Karen O'Sullivan said: 'Wow the weight of the two twisted hanging from their bodies incredible....'

And Val Hoffman wrote: 'Love it. Amazes me howl long they do this for. Ours did it for well over an hour.'

The discovery comes as giant snakes continue to roam the streets of the Sunshine Coast in search of a mating partner.
Labour MP Keith Vaz (pictured with his wife Maria in 2005) allegedly met two male prostitutes

Married Labour MP Keith Vaz was keen to keep his real identity a secret when he allegedly met two male prostitutes - by claiming he was a washing machine salesman called Jim.

The father-of-two, 59, was caught on camera meeting two Eastern European prostitutes for sex eight days ago, according to a Sunday newspaper.

The footage appears to show him speaking to the men - believed to be Poles - and he reportedly boasted about having unprotected sex.

But it seems he wanted to keep his name under wraps and quickly came up with a new one while speaking to the pair, reports the Sunday Mirror.

The men asked Mr Vaz - who has been chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee for nearly a decade - about his work.

But instead of revealing who he was the chairman of the committee which monitors crime, immigration and drugs policy, he allegedly lied and claimed he was a salesman.

Mr Vaz reportedly told the men: 'These are industrial washing machines, that I sell. Industrial. For big  for hotels.'

He made up a fake name and said they should call him Jim after one of the men asked him: 'What's your name, by the way?'

Mr Vaz, who has a son and a daughter with his wife Maria, even spelled it out and said 'J-I-M', according to the newspaper.

The Sunday Mirror claimed Mr Vaz, a lawyer by profession, had at least two meetings with the escorts.

During one 90-minute rendezvous on August 27, the former Minister for Europe allegedly offered to cover the cost of cocaine if it was brought to the flat.

He also reportedly told the men 'We need to get this party started' and asked the pair to bring the legal sex-enhancing drug, poppers.

Mr Vaz also reportedly texted one of the men saying: 'You. I'm getting very horny', after he was asked what he wanted.

He has previously said he is 'not convinced' men who pay for sex should be prosecuted.

And following the allegations, he decided to stand down from his position on the committee.

And today he was outraged by the allegations and told the BBC in a statement: 'It is deeply disturbing that a national newspaper should have paid individuals to have acted in this way.'

There was no answer at his 2.1million family home in Edgware, north London, today.

Mr Vaz, 59, danced next to a belly dancer at the Labour Party 'diversity' night in Brighton

It was reported that the veteran MP paid the men in cash following the meeting at his 390,000 flat near his main property.

Last night Mr Vaz said in a statement: 'I am genuinely sorry for the hurt and distress that has been caused by my actions in particular to my wife and children.

'I will be informing the Committee on Tuesday of my intention to stand aside from chairing the sessions of the Committee with immediate effect.'

Labour shadow health secretary Diane Abbott said it must be a 'dreadful' experience for Mr Vaz, and his wife and children.
President Obama has tried to calm tensions after an eventful first day at the G20 summit in China.

A Chinese official was seen furiously telling off members of the traveling press and White House staffers for being 'too close' to the president moments after Air Force One landed in host city Hangzhou.

It has since emerged Obama opted to use the presidential jet's in-built staircase rather than the airport's, stepping off onto the tarmac rather than a customary red carpet.

President Obama has tried to calm tensions after an eventful first day at the G20 summit in China

Obama opted to use Air Force One's in-built staircase (pictured) rather than the one at host airport Hangzhou

'This is our country!' the Chinese official, in a dark suit, shouted at her in English. 'This is our airport!'

Obama played down the dispute over his arrival by reminding everyone the countries have different values when it comes to media freedom.

He said: 'It can cause some friction. It's not the first time it has happened. It doesn't just happen in China.

'It happens in other countries where we travel. I think that this time, though, the seams were showing a little more.'

'We think it's important that the press have access to the work that we are doing, that they have the ability to answer questions. And we don't leave our ideals and values behind when we take those trips.'

Leaders pose for a family photo during the G20 Summit in Hangzhou, China

Obama played down the dispute over his arrival by reminding everyone the countries have different values when it comes to media freedom

The staircase incident stemmed from their own decision to use Air Force One's own staircase

'We don't leave our ideals and values behind when we take those trips,' Obama said of his traveling reporters

In what appeared to be a diplomatic tiff, a Chinese official who wanted US reporters travelling with the president to move shouted at White House staffer.

'This is our country! This is our airport!' he told National Security Advisor Susan Rice when she moved closer to Obama as he stepped off the presidential jet.

The staircase incident stemmed from their own decision to use Air Force One's own staircase, rather than the one proffered by airport authorities, sources have since said.

The South China Morning Post newspaper quoted a Chinese foreign ministry official as saying: 'US side complained that the driver doesn't speak English and can't understand security instructions... And insisted that they didn't need the staircase.'

'It would do China no good in treating Obama rudely.'

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, U.S. President Barak Obama and International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde arrive for a group photo during the G20 Summit in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China

U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice and senior White House staffer Ben Rhodes were blocked from getting close to the president until Secret Service stepped in and escorted them

Chinese authorities have imposed extremely tight security precautions for the G20 summit, which cause tempers to flare on the tarmac

Both Chinese President Xi Jinping and Obama are eager to smooth over their differences and find common ground as the American leader approaches the end of his second term.

When Obama travels, the reporters accompanying are brought under the wing of the Boeing 747 to watch him come down the aircraft stairs.

On Saturday they were penned off behind a blue rope installed by Chinese security.

But that was not far away enough for the Chinese personnel, one of whom screamed at White House staff, demanding the US press leave the scene.

Not even U.S. National Security Adviser Rice and the White House press corps was exempt.

One Chinese official (pictured) shouted at a group of reporters for being too close to the president, despite the fact they followed protocol

A female White House official (pictured), handbag over her arm, told him that it was an American plane and the U.S. president

After the tense landing, Obama was on his way to the G20 summit - his last as president of the United States

At the international forum of nation leaders in Hangzhou, China and the U.S. ratified the Paris Agreement for both countries (Chinese President Xi Jinping, pictured, left)

The Paris Agreement is part of the UN's Convention on Climate Change, which began in 2015

Moments after the heated argument, the U.S. president's motorcade was seen rolling away.

Hangzhou is a city of nine million people but it has been denuded of around a quarter of its population for the event.

Factories have been closed to ensure blue skies, potential troublemakers detained, and the wide boulevards of a city lauded by Venetian traveler Marco Polo are empty.

'They did things that weren't anticipated,' Rice told reporters later.

Obama is attending the G20 summit - his last as president, this week.

At the international forum of nation leaders in Hangzhou, China and the U.S. ratified the Paris Agreement for both countries.

This G20 summit is being held in Hangzhou, Zhejiand province, China, which is home to nine million people

The pair were seen walking around a pavilion after the day's events before stopping in for tea

Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping (left) drink tea in a pavilion at West Lake State Guest House in Hangzhou

The Paris Agreement, which is part of the UN's 2015 Convention on Climate Change, is an arrangement to begin greenhouse gases emissions mitigation, adaptation and finance in the year 2020.

Last year 195 countries negotiated the language of the agreement and came to a consensus that was agreed upon by all the nations.
Europe is 'close to the limits' of its ability to accept waves of refugees and economic migrants, one of the EU's most senior officials has warned.

European council president Donald Tusk delivered the stark message as he joined world leaders at the G20 summit in China.

The comments will fuel the raging row within the EU over how to deal with the huge movements of people displaced by war and poverty.

Thousands of migrants have been making perilous journeys across the Mediterranean hoping to find safety and a better life.

Donald Tusk delivered the stark warning at the G20 summit in China today

But leaders of the Brussels club are split on how to deal with the issue. German Chancellor Angela Merkel previously pledged to take in a million migrants, but is now facing a major domestic backlash, while other countries have imposed tougher border controls.

Speaking as the high-powered G20 gathering kicked of in Hangzhou, Mr Tusk said 'The practical capabilities of Europe to host new waves of refugees, not to mention irregular economic migrants, are close to the limits.'

Mr Tusk urged member countries to do more to support the world refugee population.

'In light of an unprecedented number of 65 million displaced people all over the world, the G20 community needs to scale up its share of responsibility,' he said.

'Only global efforts supporting refugees and their host communities will be able to bear fruit.

'That is why we want to encourage our partners to increase humanitarian and development aid, as well as refugee resettlement. We need to address the root causes that force millions of people to leave their homes and seek shelter elsewhere.'

The meeting in Hangzhou, about one hour outside of Shanghai, is due to tackle issues including trade, terrorism and climate change.

It is the first major international gathering being attended by Theresa May.

The Prime Minister has held talks with Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and Chinese premier Xi among other leaders.
Labour MP Keith Vaz (pictured) allegedly met two male prostitutes

Labour MP Keith Vaz has hit back at allegations that he met two male prostitutes by saying he was a victim of a 'deeply disturbing' newspaper sting.

The 59-year-old was forced to quit his esteemed role as the chair of the Home Affairs Committee after footage emerged which appeared to show him paying for sex.

Mr Vaz, a married father-of-two, was reportedly caught on camera boasting about having unprotected sex when talking to the men, believed to be Poles.

He is said to have met the pair at his 390,000 flat, close to his 2.1million family home in Edgware, north London.

But today he was outraged by the story and told the BBC in a statement: 'It is deeply disturbing that a national newspaper should have paid individuals to have acted in this way.

'I have referred these allegations to my solicitor, Mark Stephens of Howard Kennedy, who will consider them carefully and advise me accordingly.'

His response to the video, reported in the Sunday Mirror, came as fellow Labour MP and shadow health secretary Diane Abbott said it must be a 'dreadful' experience for his family.

She told Sky News: 'I have known Keith for over 30 years, I think this must be a dreadful time for him, and his family - his wife and his two children.'

According to the newspaper Mr Vaz told the men, 'We need to get this party started' as talk ranged from unprotected sex to pets.

One of the men reportedly asked Mr Vaz what he wanted and he is said to have replied: 'You. I'm getting very horny.'

Keith Vaz's messages (in grey) were sent to one of the escorts (whose replies are in blue)

Keith Vaz was photographed next to a belly dancer at the Labour Party diversity night in 2014

The newspaper reported that Mr Vaz asked the men to bring the sex-enhancing drug poppers to the meeting at his flat.

He allegedly paid the men in cash following the meeting in a 390,000 property he owns near his 2.1million family home in Edgware, north London.

And it seems he desperately tried to keep his real identity a secret as he reportedly told the men he was a washing machine salesman called Jim.

He reportedly said: 'These are industrial washing machines, that I sell. Industrial. For big  for hotels.'

Minutes later, as the men said they undressed, one of the escorts asked Mr Vaz: 'What's your name, by the way?' He replied: 'Jim' before spelling it out 'J-I-M.'

The Sunday Mirror claimed Mr Vaz, a lawyer by profession, had at least two meetings with the escorts.

The newspaper claimed Mr Vaz (pictured with his wife Mari) had at least two meetings with the escorts

On August 27, the former Minister for Europe reportedly offered to cover the cost of cocaine during a 90-minute meeting. Mr Vaz said he did not want any for himself.

The Home Affairs Committee is also currently looking into the harm caused by the Class A drug.

The newspaper reported that Mr Vaz made contact with the two younger men after meeting a fellow escort they knew in London.

On the afternoon of the meeting, the escort texted Mr Vaz say he was buying the sex drug. The MP replied 'great', according to the newspaper.

And the Mail on Sunday reported that a friend of Mr Vaz revealed the politician accepted he had been foolish.

But his friend added that Mr Vaz suggested he may have been drugged when he met the two men and thought he was the victim of a newspaper sting.

Last night Mr Vaz said in a statement: 'I am genuinely sorry for the hurt and distress that has been caused by my actions in particular to my wife and children.
Eventually he won his appeal and was allowed to remain in New York City

Lennon even had his visa revoked and begged for an

John Lennon was nearly deported by the U.S. government as it attempted to make the legendary Beatles front-man's life a living hell, a new book has revealed.

Lawyer Leon Wildes, whose book 'John Lennon vs. The U.S.A.' was released last month, said he had never seen 'the government so determined to remove anyone from the United States'.

The book written by Wildes, who represented Lennon during an immigration case, explains the Nixon administration's battle to deport Lennon purportedly for an old conviction in the UK for possessing hashish.

But behind the facade of wanting to deport Lennon on the 1968 drug conviction, was the reality that the government feared the musicians influence on young voters in the 1972 election.

In lawyer Leon Wildes new book he discusses how the U.S. government attempted to deport John Lennon (right) and Yoko Ono (left)

Lennon had tremendous sway with 18- to 20-year-old voters, just after the election age had been lowered.

Federal agents with the FBI feared Lennon was heading the to Republican National Convention in Miami that year and warned the he and wife Yoko Ono would be arrested for 'interstate travel in the furtherance of conspiracy to incite a riot' if they tried to attend.

It is still unclear to this day if Lennon and Ono ever had plans to attend the RNC but they were politically active.

The couple moved from London to the Greenwich Village on a temporary visa after Lennon's drug arrest.

After seeing Lennon's influence among thousands of young voters after he helped to free John Sinclair, the government became anxious and revoked Lennon's visa

They attended a rally for MC5 band manager John Sinclair, who was serving ten years in prison for selling two marijuana joints.

Lennon performed the song 'John Sinclair' for a crowd of 15,000 people and urged them to stay involved.

Sinclair, who had served two years, was released by the end of that week.

And it was this kind of influence that frightened the government.

Sinclair was involved in the White Panther Party and 'obtain(ed) guns and dynamite, (to) blow up the CIA office in Ann Arbor and la(id) plans for guerrilla actions in northern Michigan', according to Wildes.

In light of this, anxious South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond warned US Attorney General John Mitchell, who oversaw the Immigration and Naturalization Service that Lennon's new ally could be dangerous.

Days later Lennon's visa was revoked citing Lennon's previous drug conviction.

Wildes then became Lennon's immigration attorney.

Lennon told Wildes: 'Everything in our world  were artists, you know  now comes up in the USA.

'Its like the time of the Impressionist artists, when everything took place in Paris, or in early Rome. Its all here now.

'This is where its at, and wed love to be here. We just understand that it cant be arranged.'

Wildes then became Lennon's immigration attorney, who helped him fight deportation in the late 1960s

Wildes said as they fought to keep Lennon in the country 'the Nixon administration made life intolerable for John Lennon and Yoko Ono'

After researching the statute regarding immigration and marijuana Wildes concluded two thing: That the U.S. could exclude people who have been convicted of narcotic drug or marijuana possession and that hashish was not either.

Wildes then requested a six-month extension for the couple's visa but was given only one month.

Sol Marks, the INS district director for New York, told Wildes: 'These people will never get another extension . . . Leon, tell them to get out!'

Wildes said after that point 'the Nixon administration made life intolerable for John Lennon and Yoko Ono'.

'Alleged phone repairmen came to "check" the Lennons telephone but left promptly when ID was requested

'Alleged phone repairmen came to "check" the Lennons telephone but left promptly when ID was requested,' Wildes writes in the new book

Finally, Lennon was given permission to be a permanent resident and Ono by that time had already won the same status, too

'Two men, stationed just across Bank Street, seemed to be fixing a bike interminably. When John and Yoko got into an automobile, the same two men appeared in a car behind them, making certain the Lennons knew they were being followed,' Wildes wrote.

Lennon began mimicking a woman's voice when he called Wildes in fear the phones were tapped.

The four-year investigation began to tear away at Ono and Lennon's marriage.

Lennon spent 18 drunken months in Los Angeles during this period.

Finally, Lennon was given permission to be a permanent resident and Ono by that time had already won the same status, too.

Nixon had left office and Lennon was free to live in his beloved New York City.

'Throughout his fight to stay in the United States, he felt most welcomed by New Yorkers.
The boys stole money from the safe before trying to set the pub ablaze

They forced themselves into the pub where they beat a member of staff

based teenagers have been held for attempted murder

Police have arrested four teenagers on suspicion of attempted murder following an alleged arson attack on a village pub.

Officers were called to the Greyhound Inn, in Newnham-on-Severn, Gloucestershire, at 10.15pm on Friday - shortly after the establishment had shut for the night.

A Gloucestershire Constabulary spokesman said: 'Police have arrested four teenagers in connection with an armed robbery and arson at the Greyhound Inn.

Investigation: Police cordoned off the pub to continue their examination of the crime scene

The quiet country pub lies around 13 miles from Gloucester and is located in the scenic Gloucestershire countryside

Police cars parked outside the pub. The teenagers have been arrested for attempted murder but a motive for the crime has yet to be ascertained

'A 19-year-old man, two 16-year-old males and a 14-year-old boy, all from Gloucester, remain in police custody arrested on suspicion of attempted murder.

'The pub remains closed because of fire damage and to allow detectives to examine the scene.'

According to local news outlet The Forester a woman, in an apparent smokescreen, knocked on the door of the pub asking a barman for help claiming her car had broken down.

The four teenagers then forced their way into the premises where they kicked and punched the member of staff to the floor and threatened him with a knife.

The young males proceeded to take money and watches from the safe before attempting to set the pub alight.

After smelling burning the victim called the fire brigade who successfully dealt with the flames before substantial damage could be done.

The man didn't suffer any serious injuries and police detectives continued to examine the scene on Sunday.

Officers said inquiries into the incident were ongoing and they are appealing for anyone with information to get in touch.

Those able to assist police should call Gloucestershire Constabulary via the 101 phone number - quoting incident 20 of September 3.

People can also contact Crimestoppers anonymously by calling 0800 555 111 or via the independent charity's website.
Lt Mark Tiller (pictured), who shot dead an unarmed South Carolina teen, is being fired from the force more than a year after the incident

A police officer who shot dead an unarmed South Carolina teen is being fired from the force more than a year after the incident.

Seneca Police Chief John Covington said in a short statement that Mark Tiller was being terminated.

He refused to give a reason, calling it a personnel matter.

Tiller was not charged with any crime following the shooting death of Zachary Hammond in a drug deal sting gone wrong 13 months earlier.

Tiller has been on paid leave ever since.

The sting, in which Hammond was killed, was actually targeting Tori Diana Morton, 23, who was a passenger in Hammond's car.

The pair were on their first date when Tiller but Morton had arranged a drug deal with an undercover cop.

Tiller pulled a gun on the couple and Hammond tried to drive away when Tiller opened fire.

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Tiller shot 19-year-old Zachary Hammond in a drug sting on a woman in the passenger seat of his car. Hammond was on his first date with Tori Diana Morton, 23, who had tried to buy drugs from an undercover cop when they were stopped by Tiller (pictured)

Morton was later only charged with possession of marijuana.

The officer said he thought the 19-year-old was trying to run him over.

A state prosecutor said Tiller might have made a bad decision heading toward Hammond's moving car, but the officer had less than three seconds to react and broke no law.

Tiller will stay on the payroll until Friday but Hammond's family have slammed the department for taking so long to make a decision.

'As has been the case for the last year, the taxpayers of Seneca have paid and continue to pay Lt. Tiller's salary.

Hammond (pictured) tried to flee the scene and Tiller said he thought Hammond was trying to run him over. No charges were filed against Tiller but federal authorities are still investigating

'This defies logic. All lives matter, and it is an injustice to each and every American when an officer-related shooting is not handled with sensitivity and absolute transparency.

'Anarchy is not the answer,' the family said in a statement.

Tiller was making $18.25 an hour at the time of the shooting. He had been promoted three times in 18 months and had no personnel problems on his record since joining the department in 2010, the New York Daily News reported.
A woman who has been accused of murdering her husband openly grieved in front of his family at his funeral before his open coffin.

Sofia Sam, 32, and her friend Arun Kamalasanan, 34, were charged by Victoria Police in August with the murder of her 33-year-old husband Sam Abraham.

Detectives believe Ms Sam poisoned Mr Abraham with cyanide before he was found dead in his Epping home in suburban Melbourne in October 2015, the Herald Sun reports.

Sofia Sam, 32, pictured with her hand on the casket, is shown grieving at the funeral of her husband Sam Abraham, 33, months before she was charged with his murder

Ms Sam (left) and her friend Arun Kamalasanan, 34, were charged by Victoria Police in August with the murder of her husband Mr Abraham (right)

Pictures of his funeral show Ms Sam sitting with Mr Abraham's relatives in mourning next to his open casket, with her arm outstretched holding the edge of the casket.

Another image shows Ms Sam leaning down over the casket to kiss the top of her husband's head, placing her hands on his cheeks.

Ms Sam and Mr Kamalasanan are said to have become friends while studying engineering in India and had remained in touch.

Mr Kamalasanan is also facing a separate charge of attempted murder.

The Melbourne Magistrates Court heard police intercepted months of phone calls as part of their investigation.

Ms Sam and Mr Kamalasanan have been jailed to reappear for a committal mention on February 13 next year.

Detectives believe Ms Sam (right) poisoned Mr Abraham (left) with cyanide after he was found dead in his Melbourne home in 2015
Shami Chakrabarti has hinted that she could take a job in Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinet amid anger over her 'whitewash' report into anti-Semitism in Labour.

The former director of human rights group Liberty flatly denied there was any connection between her mild conclusions and Mr Corbyn's decision to give her a peerage.

She insisted neither herself nor Mr Corbyn were 'corrupt' and there was nothing 'transactional' about her agreement to carry out the inquiry.

Shami Chakrabarti refused to rule out serving in the shadow cabinet if Jeremy Corbyn wins the leadership battle later this month

And Ms Chakrabarti pointedly failed to rule out serving on the front bench if - as widely expected - Mr Corbyn defeats challenger Owen Smith this month.

The comments - during an interview on the BBC's Andrew Marr show - will cause fresh fury among moderates.

There have been claims that the award of the peerage - despite Mr Corbyn previously having insisted he would not send anyone to the Upper House - 'stinks'.

Ms Chakrabarti accused critics of 'slinging mud' to tarnish her reputation.

'Jeremy Corbyn is not a corrupt man and I am not a corrupt woman,' she said.

'I stand by the report. There was nothing remotely transactional about it.'

She added: 'I know what it is like to be offered transactional favours by prime ministers; not by beleaguered leaders of the Labour Party.

'I wrote a report to try and civilise discourse in the Labour party. I have yet to completely succeed in that enterprise but I stand by it.'

Ms Chakrabarti stressed that the pair did not discuss the possibility of a peerage ahead of the report.

'I did my report into racism and anti-Semitism with no inducements, no offers, no threats, no interference,' she said.

Labour's deputy leader Tom Watson last month described the timing of the appointment to the Lords as 'a mistake'.

Fellow Labour MP Wes Streeting has complained that the situation 'stinks'.

However, Shadow Health Secretary Diane Abbott defended the behaviour of her aly Mr Corbyn and Ms Chakrabarti today.

'Shami Chakrabarti is one of the most distinguished people in public life. She would have had a peerage under a number of Labour leaders,' she told Sky News.

'To say her appointment 'stinks', what message does that give to young women of Shami's background about stepping into the public space?'
ball of light on video as it fell to earth

A fiery ball was caught shooting through the sky in Portland Oregon early Saturday morning.

The mystery object was spotted by more than 130 people and has not been identified despite being caught on camera by several viewers.

According to the American Meteorology Society people as far north as British Columbia in Canada witnessed the event and some as far down south as southern Oregon did, too.

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A giant fireball (pictured, upper center) was spotted over Portland, Oregon, early Saturday morning

The mystery object was spotted by more than 130 people and has not been identified despite being caught on camera by several viewers

Most of the reports came from Willamette Valley.

Jim Todd, director of space education at Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, told KOIN 6 News its 'hard to say if it was a spacecraft debris or not'.

He added it was 'very bright, lasted for roughly seven to eight seconds'.

'That is fairly fast, and bright white, bluish in color, seems to have broken up into pieces.'

He said the object appeared to be moving west to east.

Jim Todd, director of space education at Oregon Museum of Science and Industry said it is hard to determine whether the item is spacecraft debris or not

There has been no official report on what the object is but Todd is hoping OMSI can triangulate its landing area

In one video of the fireball captured on a dash cam, the object flies from the left of the screen to the right.

The light stays consistent and seems to be relatively slow for a meteor hurdling toward earth.

The streak of light lasts for 13 seconds before it vanishes into the night sky.

It is unclear if there was an impact heard.

Several people took to Twitter to report what they had seen.

'Pretty awesome streak of light across the sky above Portland about 10 minutes ago. Meteor?' one person wrote.

'If it survived at all, its probably in the Rocky Mountains,' Todd said of the unidentified object

Another said: 'Meteor or UFO just fell from the sky in Portland and I am dead sober.'

'This thing was crazy fast and very large and bright and appeared to be at cloud level,' one person reported, according to KGW.com.

There has been no official report on what the object is but Todd is hoping OMSI can triangulate its landing area.
A man has been charged with theft after comedian Eddie Izzard's pink beret was snatched from his head during a pro-European Union march in London.

The entertainer chased after the alleged thief in his high heels after his beret was snatched during the March for Europe demonstration in Whitehall on Saturday, September 4.

Eddie Izzard, on the right near the officer, chased the man who had swiped his beret from his head on Saturday

Six police officers restrained the man after the incident in central London

The man was arrested and has now been charged with theft following the incident

Mr Izzard was at the March for Europe, campaigning to get the government to delay invoking Article 50

The suspect was wrestled to the ground on the corner of Downing Street by six police officers and members of the public.

Once he had retrieved the beret the comedian put it back on his head and continued with the march.

Video footage from the incident also shows Mr Izzard picking his yellow bag back up from the ground as well.

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Mr Izzard went back to the protest after the incident on Saturday

The beret is said to have been taken and sealed as evidence by police after Mr Izzard took to the stage to address the rally where he commended police for their efforts.

David Czerwonko, 26, of Brentford was charged with theft on Saturday, September 3.
A mental health episode starting with one family member may have affected the whole Tromp family, resulting in their bizarre interstate journey, it has been reported.

The Silvan, Victoria family of five - father Mark, 51, wife Jacoba, 53, and their adult children Mitchell, Ella and Riana - fled to New South Wales last week, overwhelmed with paranoia and fear, but split up, and it was days before they were all located.

Their mysterious ordeal was caused by one member of the family having a mental health episode which affected them all except son Mitchell, The Herald Sun says it was told.

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Mark Tromp, 51, (pictured with his daughter Ella Tromp) was missing for four days

Riana Tromp (left) and her mother Jacoba (right) are being treated in a mental health facility in Goulburn

Mark Tromp (right) was picked up by police on Saturday night and flipped the bird at media when he was released from custody

Mitchell Tromp was the first to leave the family during the strange trip

Mark Tromp's father George said: 'There's no sinister, no cult, no one else involved, that's why this is such a puzzle.

'I can understand why everyone is so intrigued. One day we'll know.'

Mark and Jacoba's children Mitchell, 25, and Ella, 22, have said they can't wait for the family to go back to normal after police found their father on Saturday.

The entire family is now accounted for after Mark was spotted near Wangaratta airport on Saturday evening and picked up by police.

He was later released from police custody and flipped the bird to media and is now staying with his brother Ken.

Jacoba turned up at a hospital in Yass in rural NSW on Thursday after separating from her husband.

Before Mark was found his family told the media they believed their father was still in Victoria after a series of break-ins in Milawa, a small town south-east of Wangaratta, Sydney Morning Herald reported.

The Tromps left their home in Silvan, Melbourne on Monday without their mobile phones, credit cards or passports.

Mark was reportedly paranoid that someone was going to kill them, but police have said the family were never in danger.

Mitchell Tromp and his sister Ella have returned to their home at Silvan, where they addressed media on Sunday morning

The couple's three children went with them on the off-grid holiday before leaving when they realised their parents were 'delusional'.

Mitchell was the first of the couple's children to leave. He got out of the car in Kelso, near Bathurst on Monday where he took public transport back to Melbourne.

Riana, 29, and Ella left their parents at Jenolan Caves. Ella allegedly took a ute and drove towards Melbourne with her sister on Monday night  but they became separated in Goulburn.

The children reported their parents missing in Goulburn. Riana was found there the next day in the back of a stranger's ute and appeared 'catatonic' when she was found.

Riana and her mother are both in a mental health facility in Goulburn.

Speaking to media on Friday, Mitchell said he couldn't explain the family's paranoia.

'I've never seen anything like it. It's really hard to explain or put a word on it but they were just fearing for their lives and then they decided to flee,' Mitchell said.

Mitchell and Ella Tromp addressed media on Sunday after their whole family had been accounted for

Mark Tromp (pictured) fled fearing people were out to hurt him and his family

Mitchell and Ella said they couldn't comment on what caused their panicked road trip as police were investigating

But t he reason could be a shared delusional schizophrenia, The Goulburn Post reported.

The newspaper claimed a police circular shown to them suggested the family had been diagnosed with the mental illness.

And the Herald Sun earlier speculated it could have been a condition known as folie a deux.

The condition almost always occurs in tight-knit families between partners and siblings who could be otherwise socially isolated.

People affected by the condition fall into a cycle of reinforcing each other's paranoid delusions.

The couple's family, including their children, have reinforced how tight-knit they were.

They worked together on the family farm and had unbreakable friendships.

Two of the three adult children live with their parents.

Speaking to media on Sunday after the whole family had been found, Mitchell and Ella said they couldn't comment on what triggered the family's panicked road trip, saying it was the subject of a police investigation.

'The main thing is everything worked out well,' Mitchell told reporters.

'He thinks people are after him. He's not in a good state of mind,' Mitchell said of his father
It's 100 times as strong as fentanyl and 10,000 times more powerful than heroin.

And after terrorising everywhere from Scandinavia and China, to Canada and the United States, W-18 has arrived on Australian shores.

Dubbed the world's most deadly synthetic drug, the opioid produces a heroin-like high and has been responsible for increased overdoses among users who think they are taking fentanyl.

Following several recent seizures of the drug - which comes in pill and powder form - the Australian Border Force has issued a dire warning, according to the Daily Telegraph.

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A new drug called W-18 that is 10,000 times as powerful as heroin has made its way to Australian shores after terrorising the United States and Canada

'There are a couple of derivatives out there that dont even have a name yet ... chemical analogs known as W, which are even more potent than fentanyl,' Border Force boss Roman Quaedvlieg said.

'We are finding small incidents of fentanyl being seized at the border. It is a highly potent form of opiate which is coming into this country.'

The devastating affects of drugs far less potent than W-18 in the United States and Canada has Australian authorities on their toes.

In the space of one year in just two US states, fentanyl overdoses were responsible for the deaths of a combined 500 people.

While between 2009 and 2014 in Canada there were an estimated 655 deaths linked to fentanyl, according to Vice News.

W-18 potentially poses 100 times the risk.

Australian Border Force boss Roman Quaedvlieg said finding the new drug on local shores was worrying and that he had been speaking with authorities in the United States and Canada about the best ways to combat the drug

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull speaks to Border Force officers as he inspects new patrol boats earlier this year

After discussions with overseas authorities, the Australian Border Force has commissioned research into the drug.

But as it was only discovered two years ago, there currently is no way to test for W-18 in the bloodstream.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has pulled into an effective tie with Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos national tracking poll.

Trump has managed to erase a substantial deficit as he consolidates support among his party's likely voters with just two months to go before election day.

The poll showed 40 per cent of likely voters supporting Trump and 39 per cent backing Clinton for the week of August 26 to September 1.

Clinton's support has dropped steadily in the weekly tracking poll since August 25, eliminating what had been a eight-point lead for her.

Trump's gains came as Republican support for their party's candidate jumped by six percentage points over the past two weeks, to about 78 percent.

That is still below the 85 per cent support Republican nominee Mitt Romney enjoyed in the summer of 2012, but the improvement helps explain Trump's rise in the poll.

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The crossing lines at the right edge of this graph from the Reuters/Ipsos poll shows that Donald Trump has caught Hillary Clinton

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has closed in on his rival, Hillary Clinton

The Reuters/Ipsos poll is conducted online in English in all 50 states. The latest poll surveyed 1,804 likely voters over the course of the week; it had a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of three per cent.

Different polls have produced widely different results over the course of the campaign.

In part that's because some, like Reuters/Ipsos, have attempted to measure the preferences of who's likely to vote, while others have surveyed the larger pool of all registered voters. And even those that survey likely voters have different ways of estimating who is likely to cast a ballot.

Polling aggregators, which calculate averages of major polls, have shown that Clinton's lead has been shrinking for the past few weeks.

Those averages put her advantage over Trump at between three and six percentage points. Some of the more recent individual polls, however, have the race even tighter.

Voters don't elect the American president directly, of course, but through the Electoral College, an assembly representing each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia based on the number of legislators they have in Congress.

As of last Friday, the separate Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation polling project estimated Clinton was on track to win the Electoral College, by about 332 votes to 206. Those numbers were scheduled to be updated later Friday.

In recent weeks, Clinton has come under renewed criticism over her handling of classified information while serving as U.S. secretary of state, and her family's charitable foundation has come under fresh scrutiny for the donations it accepted while Clinton served in the Obama administration. Meanwhile, Clinton hasn't been campaigning as actively as Trump.

Trump, meanwhile, has reshuffled his campaign leadership and sought to broaden his appeal to moderate Republicans and minorities.

He recently suggested that he would be a better president than Clinton for African Americans, and has taken steps, including a meeting this week with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, to reach out to immigrants. It remains to be seen whether those efforts will click.

Mr Trumps favor among Republicans has also bounced six percentage points to 78 per cent over the past two weeks, despite staff shake ups and his wavering stance on immigration

Clinton has led Trump through most of the campaign for the November election, though neither candidate appears to have inspired America.

In the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, more than 20 per cent of likely voters opted for a choice other than the two major nominees, whether an alternative candidate, 'would not vote' or 'unsure.'

That figure is significantly higher than the 10 per cent to 14 per cent of respondents who answered similarly at this point in the 2012 campaign. Both President Barack Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney enjoyed substantially stronger support at this point in the summer of 2012 than either Trump or Clinton does now.

And while Trump has consolidated his support among Republicans, likely voters are expressing an increasingly sour view of Clinton: The share of likely voters with an unfavorable view of the former secretary of state has grown to 57 per cent, compared with Trump's 54 per cent, her worst showing on that metric in a month.

Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said he remains convinced Clinton is ahead, somewhere in the range seen among the polling aggregators.

'There has been a closing that's completely natural,' Sabato said. 'Every four years, you have two national party conventions that produce a bounce of varying sizes. Clinton got a substantial bounce this year that lasted for a full month. It's usually gone around Labor Day, and by then we'll be where we should be, which is right around four to five points' for Clinton.
Mitch Winehouse (left) was photographed next to Labour MP Keith Vaz (right) outside parliament in 2011

Labour MP Keith Vaz launched an investigation into the harmful effects of cocaine with Amy Winehouse's father - and then allegedly offered to cover the cost of the drug for two male prostitutes.

The revelation comes as the 59-year-old was allegedly recorded saying he would pay for the class A drug after he met the Eastern European escorts at his flat in north London.

Following allegations that he paid the pair for sex, the married father-of-two stepped down from his role as chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee.

During his time in his esteemed position, he discussed the impact of drugs and launched an inquiry into the impact drugs can have on people's lives.

Mr Vaz, the MP for Leicester East, teamed up with Mitch Winehouse, whose daughter died after become addicted to class A drugs in 2011, aged 27.

The Sunday Mirror reported he paid the men in cash following the meeting in a 390,000 flat he owns near his 2.1million family home in Edgware.

And seven years ago - two years before Amy died - he told the Leicester Mercury that the committee would be analysing the 'human cost' of drug taking.

He said in 2009: 'As part of our investigation into the cocaine trade we want to explore the human cost of drug taking, particularly on users and their families.

'We are pleased Mitch Winehouse, the father of Amy, has agreed to share with us research for a documentary on the damaging effects of drug abuse and of the effectiveness of drug rehabilitation.'

Two years before Amy Winehouse (pictured) died, Mr Vaz said the committee would by analysing the 'human cost' of drug taking

Mr Vaz (right) was photographed dancing next to a woman at the Labour Party 'diversity' night

The revelation comes the Sunday newspaper reported that he told the men 'We need to get this party started' after they allegedly arrived at his flat.

He also reportedly texted one of them: 'You. I'm getting very horny', after he was asked what he wanted.

In a series of texts, printed by the newspaper, he allegedly asked them to bring the sex-enhancing drug, poppers, to the meeting.

And the topic of the legal drug has also been discussed by Mr Vaz, who reportedly told the House of Commons that he was 'shocked' when he heard that some MPs had taken it.

In January this year, he told the Commons: 'The shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown), has said - this was a bit of shock for me after 28 years in this House - that Ministers have stood at the Dispatch Box having had poppers.

'I think that is what she said and it was a great surprise to the House. She obviously knows more than I do about such issues.'

His comments were just eight months before he allegedly asked for the legal sex drug to be brought to his flat.

And he even guaranteed to ban poppers if a review found they were harmful.

Mr Vaz added: 'Without equivocation, I give him a guarantee that if the review decides that poppers are harmful, I will be the first in the Division Lobby with him, supporting that view.'

Mr Vaz was photographed with his wife Maria Fernandes on their wedding day in London

Mr Vaz's messages (in grey) were sent to one of the escorts (whose replies are in blue)

In 2012, Mr Vaz said Britain's war on drugs was not working and called on the Government to look at drugs law and policy.

He said: 'Drugs cost thousands of lives and the taxpayer billions of pounds each year.

'This is a critical, now or never moment for serious reform. If we do not act now, future generations will be crippled by the social and financial burden of addiction.'

And in July this year, the committee chaired by Mr Vaz said the said the Home Office should immediately change legislation so that soliciting is no longer an offence.

Mr Vaz said: 'As a first step, there has been universal agreement that elements of the present law are unsatisfactory.
Fears are growing for a heavily pregnant woman who was last seen leaving a hospital a week ago and failed to turn up for treatment later that day.

Katie Miles, 29, was last seen leaving Poole Hospital, Dorset, but did not turn attend her later appointment on August 30.

Officers have been growing increasingly concerned as she has not been seen or heard of since.

Katie Miles, 29, was last seen leaving Poole Hospital, Dorset, but did not turn attend her later appointment on August 30

She missed her later appointment at Poole Hospital and police are now becoming 'increasingly concerned' for her welfare

Police inquiries and address checks have drawn a blank and officers are now urging her to get in touch.

She is described as white, 5ft 5ins tall, of slim build and has light red hair with a piercing on her top upper lip.

Inspector Lorna Gallimore, of Dorset Police, said: 'We are becoming increasingly concerned for the welfare of Katie and we would ask that anyone who has information about her whereabouts contacts police urgently.
But the NYPD is afraid of people making

Families of the victims of the September 11th attacks are still waiting to receive possessions and personal items from loved ones 15 years later.

New York City officials have held on to more than 3,500 items found in the rubble of the World Trade Center.

Relatives say the inability to receive these items has prolonged heartbreak.

Families are now begging the NYPD to let next-of-kin see the items so they can reclaim them, the New York Post reported.

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Families who lost relatives in the September 11, 2001 attacks are begging the city to release items to them from their loved ones (stock image of IDs found in the wreckage)

New York City officials have held on to more than 3,500 items found in the rubble of the World Trade Center (stock image of IDs found in the wreckage)

'It's outrageous because the items belong to us  not them.

'They should set up a system so that families can identify the property, instead of just putting it away and forgetting about it,' Debby Jenkins, whose older brother Joseph Jenkins, 47, an office relocation manager, was killed in Tower 2, told The Post.

The city initially tried to come up with a way to return the items. In 2004, the NYPD asked relatives to fill out forms describing the items they were looking for and staff would attempt to match the description.

The program lasted six months and shut down in June 2005.

NYPD does not intend to release images of the items due to its fear of false claims, but in 1995, after the Oklahoma City bombing, officers laid out recovered items for families to claim and never had reports of fraud or mistakes.

While 87 per cent of items have been returned so far, the people looking for the remaining items are heartbroken they have been unable to get them back

Retired NYPD sergeant Will Sekzer is still hoping to recover his son Jason's $22,000 Rolex. He has suggested setting up a website for the items.

Sekzer tried to retrieve the Rolex showing the NYPD a photo, receipt and serial number.

It was all for naught though as he still hasn't retrieved the watch.

Sekzer says a private website that lists each item with a photo could be the solution to the problem.

'A lot of people have given up hope of ever recovering anything belonging to a lost loved one.

Retired NYPD sergeant Will Sekzer, (right) who is still hoping to recover his son Jason's (left) $22,000 Rolex, has suggested setting up a website for the items so families can identify and claim them

'This web site might help them recover an item lost on that terrible day and bring some comfort to the family,' he said.

The items retrieved from Ground Zero were found in debris sifted at Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island and retrieved from medical examiner's morgues.

So far the NYPD has returned 87 per cent of the items found to their rightful owners, but the 13 per cent remaining still have open wounds.

'It has always been our goal to return as much property from the 9/11 disaster as possible,' Deputy Chief Jack Trabitz, who was chief of the NYPD property bureau for more than 12 years, told The Post.

But the efforts to return items have stalled during the last three years as DNA identifications have begun to dry up.

The items are kept at NYPD's One Police Plaza headquarters in plastic bar coded bags (stock image items recovered from the world trade center held in the National September 11 Memorial Museum)

The items retrieved from Ground Zero were found in debris sifted at Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island and retrieved from medical examiner's morgues (stock image of IDs found in the wreckage)

That means nearly 3,500 invoices for missing items like jewelry, wallets, keys, clothing and knicknacks are still pending.

The items are kept at NYPD's One Police Plaza headquarters in plastic bar coded bags.

'It is beyond my comprehension why these items are kept out of view considering what they might mean to the victim's survivors,' said Michael Connor, whose wife Margaret, 57, a Cantor Fitzgerald receptionist, was killed.

Images of the items have not been released but last week the New York Post was allowed to photograph 15 objects that had never before been displayed, including a softball with illegible autographs, a brass bull paperweight, a brass frog, car keys on a holder, an empty black wallet, an ornamental two-headed eagle, a metal bust of a woman with one wing, and a silver desktop clock.
Five women have been arrested in California after authorities found they allegedly kept 20 children and 18 dogs living in 'uninhabitable conditions.'

Police in Victorville say the kids and dogs didn't have enough food or water in the home described as 'complete filth,' CBS Los Angeles reported.

There was black mold throughout the place and 'several serious health and safety issues,' Victorville police said in a statement.

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Five women have been arrested in California after authorities found they allegedly kept 20 children and 18 dogs living in 'uninhabitable conditions' (pictured)

Police in Victorville say the kids and dogs didn't have enough food or water in the home described as 'complete filth'

There was black mold throughout the place and 'several serious health and safety issues'

'The sleeping conditions were inadequate, there was no electricity or gas, and the carpet, walls, and furniture were in severe disrepair,' police said.

There were broken toys covered in dirt, dirty dishes, piled ash trays and human waste in the house, KLTA reported.

Cops also found two dead dogs inside the home.

The five women are believed to be the kids' grandmother and mothers.

Two of them  Matosha Martinez, 35, and Virginia Mann, 61  were arrested on suspicion of being under the influence of a controlled substance and child cruelty, cops said.

The other three were booked on charges of child cruelty: Cherish Lewis, 22, Dajanet Smith, 25, and Thereca Griff, 42.

Police said sleeping conditions were inadequate, there was no electricity or gas, and the carpet, walls and furniture were in severe disrepair

The women arrested at the filthy house are believed to be the children's grandmother and mothers

There were broken toys covered in dirt, dirty dishes, piled ash trays and human waste in the house, KLTA reported.

Matosha Martinez, 35, and Virginia Mann, 61, were arrested on suspicion of being under the influence of a controlled substance and child cruelty

The children were removed by the county's Department of Children and Family Services, the Daily Press reported.

Neighbors complained for months about the home, where kids ages two months to 17-years-old often played unsupervised on local streets  dirty and barefoot.

'One night I had to call the police because there was about 15 people, both male and female, all beating up a young girl in the middle of the street,' neighbor Stephanie Gomez told the Daily Press. 'Few days later the young girl returned to the house.'

Three other women were taken into custody from the house (pictured): Cherish Lewis, 22, Dajanet Smith, 25, and Thereca Griff, 42

The children were removed by the county's Department of Children and Family Services

Neighbors complained for months about the home, where kids ages two months to 17-years-old often played unsupervised on the street

Gomez's husband, Bert, said the couple would 'pass by that house every day and there was always something going on.

'We would see too many different types of people that were out of place leaving and entering the house every night,' Bert Gomez told the Daily Press. said

'There would be 15 to 20 cars parked around the house every night too, with people sleeping inside.'
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Rita Ora sang at a concert in honour of Mother Teresa last night ahead of the nun being proclaimed a saint by Pope Francis.

Ora, 25, performed What Child Is This at a concert celebrating the life of Teresa, who was canonised today.

Pope Francis was set to attend the event at the Papal Basilica of St Paul, however he did not appear to be among the hundreds of priests and dignitaries inside the venue.

'Singing What Child Is This to celebrate her life and legacy will be a moment I cherish forever,' Ora tweeted before she sang.

Ora, who is from Kosovo but moved to Britain as a refugee, was chosen to sing because Mother Teresa was herself born in Kosovan territory.

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Rita Ora sang at a concert in honour of Mother Teresa last night ahead of the nun being proclaimed a saint by Pope Francis

Singer Rita Ora, 25, performed What Child Is This at a concert (left) celebrating the life of Teresa, who was canonised today. She is pictured, right, at the MTV Video Music Awards last week

Pope Francis was set to attend the event at the Papal Basilica of St Paul, however he did not appear to be among the hundreds of priests and dignitaries inside the venue

Mother Teresa has been proclaimed a saint by Pope Francis (pictured leading the morning Mass) in front of 100,000 Catholics this morning

Mother Teresa, the tiny nun who cared for the world's most unwanted and became the icon of the Catholic Church, was canonised at a ceremony in St Peter's Square

WHY WAS RITA CHOSEN? The choice of Rita Ora to sing at the Mother Teresa concert may seem odd, but they are connected by nationality. Mother Teresa was born in Skopje, which was part of Kosovo in the Ottoman Empire in 1910 and is now the capital of Macedonia. She was born to a Kosovar Albanian family and later became an Indian citizen. Rita Ora was born in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, but moved to the UK as a refugee child. Advertisement

Speaking before she sang, Ora said: 'Tonight on the eve of the canonisation of Mother Teresa, we, the daughters and sons by blood and soul, are here to honour and express our gratitude to her outstanding life and work dedicated to the poorest people of the world.

'A humble woman managed to united all mankind without any discrimination, based only on the power of faith and love.

'The concert and your presence shows it better than anything else. Our concert is a journey, an itineray, an expression of gratitde through music

'This can be summarised by one quote of Mother Teresa herself: "It is only love that will save the world".'

Ora was born in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, but came to Britain as a refugee as a child.

Mother Teresa was born in Skopje, which is now the capital of Macedonia, but was then a Kosovan district of the Ottoman Empire. She was born to a Kosovar-Albanian family and later became an Indian citizen.

Ora revealed that she was to perform for the Pope to Jimmy Fallon on late night American chat show last week.

'I looked at the guest list and I saw P.O.P.E.Pope?!' she told Fallon.

'It's a real honour and I don't know if anyone's done the whole Vatican venue thing before, it's a bit interesting that the Vatican's someone's venue but it's going to be fantastic.'

Ora's gig came the night before Mother Teresa was proclaimed a saint by Pope Francis in front of 100,000 Catholics at a ceremony in St Peter's Square.

Pope Francis waves to the faithful as he leaves after a Holy Mass and the canonisation of Mother Teresa of Calcutta

A vast crowd congregated in St Peter's Square for the ceremony this morning which saw Mother Teresa canonised

St Peter's Square was packed with thousands of Catholics and curious tourists as Pope Francis made Mother Teresa a saint

Tens of thousands of Catholics gathered in the Vatican as they made their way to St Peter's Square for the canonisation

'For the honour of the Blessed Trinity... we declare and define Blessed Teresa of Calcutta to be a Saint and we enroll her among the Saints, decreeing that she is to be venerated as such by the whole Church,' the pontiff said in Latin.

Speaking from the steps of St. Peter's Basilica, Francis said Mother Teresa spent her life 'bowing down before those who were spent, left to die on the side of the road, seeing in them their God-given dignity'.

'She made her voice heard before the powers of the world, so that they might recognise their guilt for the crimes of poverty they themselves created.'

He added: 'Mother Teresa loved to say, 'perhaps I don't speak their language but I can smile'.

The Pope is pictured arriving at Mother Teresa's canonisation

'Let us carry her smile in our hearts and give it to those whom we meet along our journey, especially those who suffer.'

Applause erupted in St Peter's Square even before Francis finished pronouncing the rite of canonisation at the start of Mass, evidence of the admiration Mother Teresa enjoyed from Christians and non-Christians alike.

For the Pope, Mother Teresa put into action his ideal for the church to be a merciful 'field hospital' for the poorest of the poor, those suffering both material and spiritual poverty.

Yesterday he praised the care Mother Teresa had for the poor and the sick, while taking a swipe at world leaders for their 'sin of indifference' to suffering today.

'Tomorrow, we'll have the joy of seeing Mother Teresa proclaimed a saint,' he said. 'She deserves it!'

The pontiff decried those who 'turn the other way not to see the many forms of poverty that begs out for mercy'.

Choosing 'to not see hunger, disease, exploited persons, this is a grave sin. It's also a modern sin, a sin of today,' he told the gathered thousands.

Later today the Pope will feed 1,500 homeless people with free pizza.

Mother Teresa died in 1997 and was beatified - the first step towards becoming a saint - in 2003, after her first cure - of a woman with an ovarian tumour - was recognised by the Church.

Pope John Paul wanted to declare her a saint immediately, bypassing the beatification process, but was dissuaded by cardinals.

Her second 'miraculous cure' - of a man supposedly healed of a brain infection - was recognised last year, leading to her canonisation.

Throughout last night, pilgrims prayed at vigils and flocked before dawn to the Vatican under heavy security to try to get a good spot for the morning Mass.

Priests filmed Pope Francis, second from left, on their phones as he arrived at the canonisation ceremony in the Vatican

A vast tapestry depicting Mother Teresa - who is now a saint - was unfurled in the facade of Saint Peter's Basilica

Pope Francis was accompanied by fellow Catholic priests as he arrived at the canonisation ceremony this morning

On a sweltering day in the Vatican, Pope Francis needed help changing garments in St Peter's Square after the canonisation

Pope Francis is mobbed by a mixture of catholic pilgrims and tourists as he blesses a bay by touching its forehead

Pope Francis waves to the adoring faithful in St Peter's Square as parents hold out their babies for the pontiff to bless

THE SAINT'S FIRST 'MIRACLE': HOW MOTHER TERESA 'CURED' A WOMAN'S TUMOUR Indian woman Monica Besra claims Mother Teresa healed her ovarian cancer tumour Mother Teresa canonisation comes after she is said to have 'miraculously cured' two sick followers of the Catholic Church. The first came in eastern India, where Monica Besra vividly recalls the 'blinding light' emanating from Mother Teresa's photo that she believes helped cure her ovarian cancer. Besra, a tribal woman from West Bengal, became an overnight sensation in September 1998 when she claimed that a picture and a medallion of the world's most famous Roman Catholic nun had cured her ovarian tumour. On September 5, 1998 - exactly a year after Mother Teresa's death - nuns placed a tiny aluminium medallion that had been blessed by the future Saint Teresa of Calcutta on Besra's stomach and prayed for her. 'Two sisters carried me to the church since I was too weak to stand or walk by myself,' the 50-year-old said. 'As soon as I entered (the church), a blinding, divine light emitted from Mother's photo and enveloped me. I closed my eyes, I couldn't understand what was happening. It was indescribable, I felt faint.' 'I got up from my bed feeling so light and good. I looked down to see the giant lump had disappeared. I couldn't believe it. I touched that part, poked it, pinched it. It was really gone. I wasn't dreaming it,' said Besra, who still wears the medallion around her neck. The next day she was proclaimed cured, a feat hailed by the Vatican as a miracle leading to Mother Teresa's beatification - a crucial step on the path to sainthood - that took place in October 2003 in Rome. Besra claimed that a picture and a medallion of the world's most famous Roman Catholic nun had cured her ovarian tumour Advertisement

'Everything she did gave an example to the entire world,' said 17-year-old student Massimiliano D'Aniello, from Grosseto, Italy, who will watch the ceremony today.

'She showed we can't all do everything, but little gestures made with so much love are what's important,' she added.

Pramod Sharma, a resident of Calcutta - now called Kolkata - who grew up near a convent school and childcare centre where Mother Teresa worked, said she had chosen India as her home.

'(She) belonged to our India and stayed with the Indians and will forever stay in our hearts,' Ms Sharma said.

'I think most of all we are thankful to her for the message, for really changing our lives with her example, humility, being close to the poorest of the poor,' said Simone Massara as he prayed with his wife at a vigil at the Basilica of Sant'Andrea della Valle before the Mass.

Mother Teresa was born to ethnic Albanian parents in what is now Macedonia in 1910.

Deeply religious, she became a nun at the age of 16, joining the Loreto abbey in Ireland. Two years later she was given the name Sister Teresa.

In early 1929 she moved to Calcutta, where she became a teacher and, 15 years on, headmistress at a convent school.

In 1946 she received 'a call within a call' to found the Missionaries of Charity, officially established as a religious congregation in 1950. Nuns of the order began calling her Mother Teresa.

In 1979 Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work for the world's destitute. 'I am unworthy,' she said.

On September 5, 1997, Mother Teresa died of a heart attack at her order's headquarters in Calcutta. An array of world dignitaries attended her funeral.

THE SAINT'S SECOND 'MIRACLE': HOW MOTHER TERESA 'CURED' A BRAIN INFECTION Mother Teresa's second supposed miracle saw a Brazilian man claim she healed him of a viral brain infection. Marcilio Haddad Andrino was due to have brain surgery but doctors could not intubate him, leaving him in crippling pain. His wife, Fermanda Nascimento Rocha, said she and her family began praying for Mother Teresa's intercession after receiving a relic of her in September 2008. Marcilio Haddad Andrino, pictured with his wife, Fernanda Nascimento Rocha, was said to have been cured of a brain infection after Mother Teresa's intercession Andrino and his wife were special guests at today's ceremony in the Vatican, where 100,000 Catholics gathered By December of that year, despite powerful antibiotics, the brain abscesses and fluid had built up so much that Andrino was suffering debilitating headaches. 'I asked Mother to cure Marcilio if this is God's will, and if not, to take him by the hand and bring him to the house of the Father to feel his caress,' Mrs Rocha said She said she went to her mother's home and prayed 'with all the strength I had'. When the surgeon returned to Andrino's room, he was awake, pain-free and asymptomatic, according to the priest spearheading Mother Teresa's sainthood cause, the Reverend Brian Kolodiejchuk. Within six months, Andrino said Friday, he had returned to work. Soon after, the couple conceived the first of their two children, though Andrino had been told that the powerful drugs he had taken had made him infertile. He calls his two children 'the extension of that miracle'. 'We are very grateful to Mother Teresa for our family,' he said. Pope Francis decreed Andrino's cure a miracle in December after Vatican doctors and theologians determined that it was medically inexplicable and due to the intercession of Mother Teresa. Advertisement

The streets were filled with pilgrims, tourists and curious onlookers as the Vatican was filled with people gathering for the canonisation of Mother Teresa

Faithful and pilgrims wait to enter St Peter's Square at the Vatican before Mother Teresa's canonization ceremony

Thousands of pilgrims flocked before dawn to the Vatican under heavy security to try to get a good spot for the morning Mass

Irma Escuero, from New York, holds a statue of Mother Teresa before the start of a mass presided over by Pope Francis

At least 100,000 pilgrims and tourists were expected at the ticketed ceremony, as well as dozens of heads of state

The relics of Mother Teresa are carried by nuns prior to the start of the tiny nun's canonisation ceremony in St Peter's Square

A man holds up an Indian flag in the Vatican this morning. In Calcutta, where Mother Teresa spent a lifetime dedicated to the poor, a special Sunday Mass was held in her honour

Since her death, the Vatican has ruled that two people were miraculously cured by Mother Teresa.

A year after her death, nuns placed an aluminium medallion blessed by Mother Teresa on an Indian woman who had a tumour caused by ovarian cancer.

The sick woman, Monica Besra, claimed a bright light suddenly burst from the necklace and she was instantly cured.

WHAT MAKES A SAINT? The Catholic Church defines as saints those believed to have led such holy lives they are now in Heaven and can intercede with God to perform miracles - two of which are needed to confer sainthood. The Catholic Church has more than 10,000 saints, including 29 canonised by Pope Francis. Advertisement

'A blinding, divine light emitted from Mother's photo and enveloped me. I closed my eyes, I couldn't understand what was happening. It was indescribable, I felt faint,' she said.

'I got up from my bed feeling so light and good. I looked down to see the giant lump had disappeared. I couldn't believe it. I touched that part, poked it, pinched it. It was really gone. I wasn't dreaming it,' she added.

The supposed cure was recognised by the Vatican in 2002 and led to Mother Teresa's beatification.

Another cure, recognised by Pope Francis last year, is said to have seen Mother Teresa heal a Brazilian man's brain tumour.

Marcilio Haddad Andrino and his wife, Fermanda Nascimento Rocha, said they received a relic of the nun's in 2008, after he contracted a viral brain infection.

'I asked Mother to cure Marcilio if this is God's will, and if not, to take him by the hand and bring him to the house of the Father to feel his caress,' Mrs Rocha said.

She said she went to her mother's home and prayed 'with all the strength I had'. Later that day, Mr Andrino was healed.

Nuns from the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, India, watch a live broadcast of the canonisation of Mother Teresa a

There was a huge security operation in the Vatican this morning as the throngs of people made their way to the ceremony

A priest kisses the relics of Mother Teresa prior her canonization ceremony in St Peter's Square at the Vatican on Sunday

A nun of Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity kisses Pope Francis in the Vatican yesterday as he met pilgrims

Critics say she did little to alleviate the pain of the terminally ill and nothing to tackle the root causes of poverty. Atheist writer Christopher Hitchens made a documentary about her called 'Hell's Angel'.

She was also accused of trying to convert the destitute in predominantly-Hindu India to Christianity, a charge her mission has repeatedly denied.

Sunday's festivities honoring Mother Teresa were not limited to Rome and the Vatican.

In Calcutta, where Mother Teresa spent a lifetime dedicated to the poor, a special Sunday Mass was held at the order's Mother House.
Several weeks of anti-Mugabe protests have taken place in the country

President Robert Mugabe has slammed Zimbabwe's judges for being 'reckless' for allowing anti-government protests to take place.

He said that he hoped they had 'learnt a lesson' after several demonstrations turned violent over the past few weeks.

It comes as the 92-year-old joked that he had been 'resurrected' following rumours over his health.

President Robert Mugabe has slammed Zimbabwe's judges for being 'reckless' for allowing anti-government protests to take place

Anti-Mugabe protests have taken place over the past few weeks amidst a serious economic crisis in the country.

These included a demonstration in Harare on August 26, which later resulted in violent clashes between opposition supporters and security forces.

Around 70 people were arrested, and nearly 60 remain in detention after refusing to be released on bail.

Police on Thursday banned protests in the capital for two weeks, on the eve of a demonstration planned by a newly formed coalition of opposition groups.

Mugabe said: 'Our courts, our justice system, our judges should be the ones who understand even better than the ordinary citizen.

'They dare not be negligent in their decisions when requests are made by people who want to demonstrate, to hold these demonstrations.'

He said that he hoped they had 'learnt a lesson' after several demonstrations turned violent. Pictured are protesters in Harare last week

He added that by giving permission when judges know 'that it is going to be violent or [there is a] probability that there is going to be violence is to pay reckless disregard to the peace of this country.'

He continued: 'We hope now they have learnt a lesson.'

Mugabe arrived back in the country on Zimbabwe after his spokesman had denied reports that the president was ill.

He said he had been away attending to family matters.

Arriving back in the country, Mugabe told reporters: 'It is true that I was dead. And I resurrected. As I always do.'

Anti-Mugabe protests have been taking place over the past few weeks amidst a serious economic crisis in the country
ISIS militants have lost all territory along the Turkey-Syria border - and in a double blow to the terror group, authorities have also seized an arsenal of weapons in Iraq.

Turkish troops and allied Syrian rebels have driven the Islamic State group from the last strip of territory it controlled along the Syrian-Turkish border, a Turkish news agency reported.

The advance effectively seals the extremist group's self-styled caliphate off from the outside word, shutting down key supply lines used to bring in foreign fighters, weapons and ammunition.

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According to a state-run Turkish news agency, ISIS has lost all its territory along the Syrian-Turkish border

Turkish forces and Syrian rebels expelled the Islamic State group from the last areas of the Syrian-Turkish border under their control

Meanwhile in Falluja, Iraq, a mass grave for Islamic State militants can be seen

The Anadolu news agency today reported that Turkey-backed Free Syrian Army rebels had cleared the area between the northern Syrian towns of Azaz and Jarablus.

It said the advance 'has removed terror organisation Daesh's physical contact with the Turkish border in northern Syria'.

Daesh is an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group.

Turkey has launched two incursions into Syria since August 24 in an operation designed to drive IS away from the border and prevent the advance of US-backed Kurdish forces, which are also battling the extremist group.

Weapons that belonged to Islamic State militants are seen at an Iraqi army base in Camp Tariq near Falluja, Iraq

The Observatory said 'rebels and Islamist factions backed by Turkish tanks and warplanes' had taken several villages on the border

The loss of the Turkish border will deprive IS of a key transit point for recruits and supplies

Documents belonging to Islamic State fighters were found in a court formerly run by the Islamic State group in Fallujah some 40 miles west of Baghdad

'IS has lost its contact with the outside world after losing the remaining border villages,' said the UK-based news agency, monitor.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights added: 'rebels and Islamist factions backed by Turkish tanks and warplanes' had taken several villages on the border 'after IS withdrew from them, ending IS's presence... on the border.'

The advance come after Turkey launched an operation dubbed Euphrates Shield on August 24, saying it was targeting both IS but also Syrian Kurdish forces that have been key to driving the jihadists out of other parts of the Syrian-Turkish border.

In Misrata, members of the Libyan Air Force can be seen at the Air College, a base for jets targeting the positions of ISIS in Sirte as well as in the north-central and north-western Libya

A girl, who fled from the town of Garma due to Islamic State violence, is seen at a makeshift camp in Falluja

The Kurdish YPG militia is a key partner of the US-led coalition against IS, and has recaptured large swathes of territory in Syria from the extremist group.

But Ankara considers the YPG a 'terrorist' group and has been alarmed by its expansion along the border, fearing the creation of a contiguous, semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Syria.

The loss of the Turkish border will deprive IS of a key transit point for recruits and supplies, though the group continues to hold territory in both Syria and Iraq.

An arsenal of weapons seized from ISIS militants were pictured at an Iraqi army base camp in Iraq
Chancellor Angela Merkel was hammered in an election in her home state on Sunday by the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

Exit polls in the Mecklenburg Western-Pomerania election show Mrs Merkel's CDU conservatives slumped to a tied second place with the AfD which has eroded her power base because of her open door immigration policy.

Both parties scored 22 percent of the votes cast exactly a year after Mrs Merkel took the decision to open the country up to unregulated refugee immigration. The AfD now have seats in 11 regional parliaments in Germany.

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Chancellor Angela Merkel was hammered in an election in her home state on Sunday by the hard-right Alternative for Germany party (Pictured, on the eve of the election in Bad Doberan)

The figures may change when the final count is in but the result is seen as a clear disaster for Mrs Merkel.

The result will further plunge her prospects of serving a fourth term in office in doubt when Germany stages its general election in the autumn of 2017.

The vote on Sunday in the state - where she has had her own constituency since 1990 - was a referendum on her controversial refugee programme which has seen more than a million people enter the country in the past 12 months.

Germans are frightened of losing their national identity, of terrorism - two refugees carried out attacks in the country in July - and of escalating sex crime. In Essen on Friday night there were more incidents of immigrant men sexually assaulting women at a street festival.

Mecklenburg-Western Pormerania is Germany's poorest state and elections are usually decided on economic issues. But this one was fought solely on the refugee question.

After the AfD win the party leader Frauke Petry said: 'We have made history here today.'

Alexander Gauland (left) of the Alternative for Germany party and lead candidate Leif-Erik Holm (centre) celebrate after the election results

The result in the state, currently ruled in a coalition with her CDU and the centre-left SPD, proves that Mrs Merkel is failing to connect with voters. A new poll out on Friday showed that her approval levels have slumped to their lowest for five years.

The SPD came out on top in Mecklenburg Western-Pomerania with 30 percent of the vote, meaning it can still form a coalition with the CDU but could also go into power with the hard-left Die Linke party and the Greens.

The result is seen as Mrs Merkel's fault alone she continues to ignore public opinion and insists that there will be no U-turn on her asylum policy.

Supporters of the AfD celebrate after the first exit polls in Schwerin, Germany, earlier today

The result is seen as Mrs Merkel's fault as she continues to ignore public opinion and insists that there will be no U-turn on asylum policy (Pictured, Mrs Merkel speaks an election event)

In an interview published in Bild prior to the election, she said: 'We did not reduce benefits for anyone in Germany as a result of the aid for refugees. In fact, we actually saw social improvements in some areas.

DAILY MAIL COMMENT After Angela Merkel threw open Germanys borders to all-comers, few can be surprised to see her party trounced by both Left and hard Right in her home state. Such is the penalty faced by politicians who ignore their voters concerns about mass migration in the self-righteous belief that they know best. With extremist parties gaining strength across the continent, fuelled by the racial tensions and unemployment stoked up by Brussels, this is yet another warning to the Euro-elites that they must start listening. It is also yet more evidence of how wise Britain was to vote for Brexit. Advertisement

'We took nothing away from people here.

'We are still achieving our big goal of maintaining and improving the quality of life in Germany.'

Delivering a closing campaign speech on Saturday, in the state of 1.3 million voters north of Berlin, she continued to encourage a focus on Germany's role to help those in need.

She said: 'The vast majority of people are ready to help people in distress in the world. For that I am very thankful. We must maintain this stance.'

Hans-Herman Tiedje, a former policy adviser to legendary German chancellor Helmut Kohl, said: 'The German people has not been asked once if it wants this demographic restructuring of our country.

'The good people of this world will maybe give her the Nobel Peace Prize--but domestically her politics are devastating.
Forbush reportedly crashed through at least two buildings, a fence, light pole and a tree

A driver in Wisconsin was traveling at such high speeds, he lost control of his car and crashed through at least two buildings, a fence, light pole and a tree, cops said.

The incident happened on August 26 when Mitch Forbush, 35, lost control of his 2001 Ford Taurus as he traveled down Oakton Avenue in Pewaukee,Lake Country Now reported.

A driver in Wisconsin is seen in surveillance footage crashing through this village hall sign in Pewaukee

Cop say Mitch Forbush, 35,also crashed through at least two buildings, a fence, light pole and a tree

Surveillance video shows the white vehicle zooming through on a sidewalk, taking with it a village hall sign and a tree.

Cops estimated his speed to be about 70 and 100mph  in a 25mph.

The Ford Taurus came to a stop when it crashed into an accounting firm, leaving behind a trail of debris 100 feet from the crash.

Contributing factors for the crash included excessive speed and inattentive driving, Lake County Now reported.

Contributing factors for the crash included excessive speed and inattentive driving, Lake County Now reported.

Police have not said if drugs or alcohol played a role in the crash. Local officials continue to investigate the crash

Authorities have not said if drugs or alcohol played a role in the crash. Local officials continue to investigate the crash.

No charges have been filed.

Police said Forbush was partially ejected from the vehicle and got an 'incapacitating injury,' Lake Country Now reported.
Clinton's former Chief of Staff served as one of Hillary's lawyers in the private server investigation, muddling her role as both witness and legal counsel.

Cheryl Mills worked under Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State before the adviser was later hired as a lawyer when the email scandal emerged.

Mills reviewed emails culled by campaign worker Heather Samuelson, appearing to have a final say in which files were included on a USB thumb drive that was handed over to the FBI, according to documents released on Friday.

Despite Mills' involvement, she served as Clinton's lawyer and invoked the attorney-client privilege to avoid questions during the federal investigation as well as a separate civil case.

Clinton's former Chief of Staff served as one of Hillary's lawyers in the private server investigation, muddling her role as both witness and legal counsel

In documents released on Friday, Mills was listed as an attorney during Clinton's July 2, 2016 interview with the FBI

The convoluted process of culling emails to hand over to the State was described on page 16 in the FBI's summary of its investigation on Clinton's use of a private email server.

Mills had all of Clinton's emails sent and received during her tenure as Secretary of State exported on to both her and Samuelson's laptops.

Samuelson later told FBI she transferred any emails sent or received from a .gov and .mil email address into a folder to be handed over to the State.

It is likely emails exchanged with Huma Abedin, who had an account on the clintonemail.com server, were not included.

Samuelson then added additional emails to the folder by searching key words including the names of officials contacts like foreign leaders and members of Congress.

She also used a keyword search that included 'Afghanistan', 'Libya' and 'Benghazi' and added the returns in the same folder before printing a hard copy of all the files she collected.

Mills, along with Clinton's lawyer David Kendall, reviewed the emails Samuelson gathered, removing any digital copies that were not deemed work related before the hard copies were shredded.

In the documents released on Friday, Samuelson, Mills and Kendall are all listed as Clinton's attorneys present during her July 2, 2016 interview with the FBI.

Mills (left) had all of Clinton's emails sent and received during her tenure as Secretary of State exported on to both her and Samuelson's laptops, before she removed any files she concluded were not work-related

The convoluted process of culling emails to hand over to the State was described on page 16 (pictured) in the FBI's summary of its investigation on Clinton's use of a private email server

In May, when Mills was questioned by the FBI, she briefly walked out after an investigator asked her a question related to the process by which the emails were collected and handed over to the State Department.

Her lawyer Beth Wilson and the Justice Department had agreed those questions would not be asked on the grounds of attorney-client privilege, the Washington Post reported.

Mills was considered cooperative although Wilkinson asked for breaks to speak privately with her client, according to the Washington Post.

A similar incident occurred later that month during a civil case.

Conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch filed a long-running public records lawsuit against the State Department over Clinton's emails.
A student is funding her medical degree thanks to her famously grumpy pooch that has taken social media by storm.

Jasmine Milton, 20, from Shropshire, has already raised 20,000 through her two-year-old Siberian Husky Anuko, who found fame because of his steely glare.

Since hitting the headlines last year Anuko has amassed nearly 11,000 Instagram followers, hundreds of gifts and even modelling jobs.

A student has been able to fund her medical degree thanks to her famously grumpy pooch that has taken social media by storm

Jasmine Milton, 20, from Shropshire, has already raised 20,000 through two-year-old Siberian Husky Anuko, who found fame because of his steely glare

But despite his fierce looks, Jasmine says he is a lovable and affectionate pet.

Now she is set to spend the cash on her dream career in medicine.

Just months before she bought Anuko, Jasmine had attempted to end her life in 2013, after struggling with an undiagnosed case of bipolar.

She said: 'I was 18 and I went through a really bad down phrase.

'I didn't know I had bipolar at the time.

'I had fallen out with all of my friends and I knew I hadn't done well in my GCSEs.'

While in hospital another patient with similar mental health issues told Jasmine sufferers often benefited from getting a dog.

Just four months later, Jasmine took little Anuko home and she says he was the 'perfect puppy' from the start.

Since hitting the headlines last year, Anuko has amassed nearly 11,000 Instagram followers, hundreds of gifts and even modelling jobs. Pictured, the famous 'betrayed' look that made Anuko an internet phenomenon

But despite his fierce looks, Jasmine says Anuko is a lovable and affectionate pet

Within no time Jasmin and Anuko were inseparable and Jasmine's mental health improved as she went out socialising with her puppy, meeting other owners and taking long walks.

And Anuko's looks were turning heads from an early age.

Jasmine said: 'People would cross the other side of the road to come and stroke him when we were out walking.'

But Anuko's striking appearance lay in the pattern of his fur, which gives him a near-permanent steely frown.

Jasmine said: 'He looks really grumpy, but actually he is really friendly, affectionate.'

Curious about how many followers he could attract, Jasmine set up an Instagram account for Anuko.

Just months before she bought Anuko, Jasmine had attempted to end her life in 2013, after struggling with an undiagnosed case of bipolar

While in hospital another patient with similar mental health issues told Jasmine sufferers often benefited from getting a dog

Slowly but surely Anuko gained a following of 2,000 but in June 2015 Jasmine's life was turned upside down when she took shots of Anuko after she tricked him with a ball.

Anuko's 'betrayed' look attracted the attention of journalists and fans from around the world.

Within no time, Jasmine was being interviewed by reporters across the world, including America and Japan.

Jasmine said: 'It was amazing, there were hundreds of people contacting me. It was crazy.'

Anuko's pictures were retweeted 25,000 times and Jasmine raked in 5,000 in just a fortnight.

Jasmine said: 'For quite a while I wasn't asking for money, but then a company told me: 'You can make money out of this'.

Just four months later, Jasmine took little Anuko home and she says he was the 'perfect puppy' from the start

Slowly but surely Anuko gained a following of 2,000 but in June 2015 Jasmine's life was turned upside down when she took shots of Anuko after she tricked him with a ball

Within no time, Jasmine was being interviewed by reporters across the world, including America and Japan

'That's when I had the idea to use it to bring in cash.'

As Anuko's Instagram followers soared and a modelling contract, website and YouTube channel raked in cash, thousands poured into Jasmine's account.

Jasmine regularly receives gifts such as treats and toys as well as paintings of the pooch.

One fan even painted little pictures of Anuko on her nails.

The teenager said: 'I have always been that person who would put even a penny in the bank.

'I was looking at all this money and knew I had to decide what to do with it and what to do with my life.

'My dad is a clinical psychologist and having gone through my own struggles, I decided I wanted to be a clinical psychiatrist.'

Since his big break, Anuko has gained 10.6k Instagram followers, over 2 million YouTube views and 20,000.

With A grades predicted in her A-Levels, Jasmine is set to attend Plovdiv Medical University in Bulgaria next year.

And with her future and fortune to thank her pup for, Jasmine is forever grateful.

Jasmine said: 'He is my whole world - he is like my baby.'
Republican vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence has put Hillary Clinton in the company of the only U.S. president to resign in disgrace, saying Sunday that only Richard Nixon has eclipsed her level of dishonesty in presidential politics.

Friday's revelations from the FBI, the Indiana governor said on NBC's 'Meet the Press,' are 'just more evidence that Hillary Clinton is the most dishonest candidate for President of the United States since Richard Nixon.'

'Whats evident from all of the revelations over the last several weeks is that Hillary Clinton operated in such a way to keep her emails, and particularly her interactions while Secretary of State with the Clinton Foundation, out of the public reach, out of public accountability,' Pence said.

'And with regard to classified information she either knew or should have known that she was placing classified information in a way that exposed it to being hacked and being made available in the public domain even to enemies of this country.'

TRICKY HILL?: Republican VP nominee Mike Pence said Sunday that 'Hillary Clinton is the most dishonest candidate for President of the United States since Richard Nixon'

FADED MEMORY: Clinton told FBI agents that she couldn't remember much about her training on how to handle classified documents, and didn't recall some meetings because of a concussion in 2012

Pence said he was outraged at the news of 'a frantic effort by her staffers' in 2015 'to wipe her servers with high-tech technology after The New York Times revealed that she had her private server.'

'I think it all truly does disqualify her from serving as president of the United States,' he concluded.

In addition to the disclosure that Clinton used 18 different portable digital devices to access her unsecured private email server  she claimed last year that there was just one  the FBI's notes from her July 2 law-enforcement grilling showed she blamed a 2012 concussion for her failure to remember key details about her email account and what it contained.

PANTS ON FIRE: Pence compared Hillary Clinton to former U.S. President Richard Nixon, who resigned his office as the Watergate scandal unfolded and his role  along with his lies about it  became clear to Americans

'It's very troublesome,' Donald Trump booster Ben Carson said Sunday morning on 'Fox News Sunday.'

'Do you want somebody with the inability to remember in the white House? Or do you want somebody who is a prevaricator in the White House? We get a choice.'

Clinton aides destroyed some of her digital devices with a hammer, or by breaking them in half, the FBI revealed.

'She had a private email server for one device, so she could use one device,' New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, another Trump backer, said Sunday on 'Face the Nation.'

'We now know from the FBI she had 13 devices, one of which was destroyed with a hammer by her staff.'

'I can tell you this as a former prosecutor,' Christie fumed: 'I'm stunned, given what I saw in the FBI files that were released Friday, that Hillary Clinton was not prosecuted.'

LOCK HER UP: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, formerly his state's top federal prosecutor, said Sunday that he's shocked Clinton was not prosecuted

CHOOSE: Donald Trump supporter Ben Carson said on Fox News Sunday that Americans don't have to have 'a prevaricator' or someone with a failing memory as president

FBI agents noted that Clinton could not recall being trained to handle classified materials as secretary of state, and had no memory of anyone raising concerns about the sensitive information she received at her private address.

The Democratic presidential nominee also 'did not recall receiving any emails she thought should not be on an unclassified system,' the FBI's report declared.

She could not remember all of the briefings she received on handling sensitive information as she made the transition from her post as secretary of state, due to a concussion she suffered in 2012.

Clinton, a former first lady and U.S. senator in addition to her tenure as secretary of state, also told investigators she was unfamiliar with basic markings of classified materials, such as the '(C)' mark that denotes confidential portions of emails.
His annual pay package comes to 879,000 with a 480,000 salary

Governor spent 67,000 on travel expenses in his first year in his role

The boss of the Bank of England has spent 250,000 of tax-payers money on jet setting around the world.

Mark Carney has made 30 official foreign trips since taking his role in July 2013, including visits to New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and Sydney.

Carney, 51, who often stays in luxurious hotels during his business excursions, also splurged 157,000 for a 'secure car' so that he could carry out secret meetings and private phone calls with associates, reports the Sunday Times.

Mark Carney has made 30 official foreign trips since taking his role in July 2013, including visits to New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and Sydney

The figures were revealed after a Freedom of Information request by the newspaper.

Despite claiming a fortune in expenses, Carney earns a substantial wage with an annual pay package of 879,000 - which includes a salary of 480,000.

Also included in that yearly package is a housing contribution that comes to almost 5,000 a week.

Sir Bill Cash, a Eurosceptic Tory MP, has called for the Bank of England to offer further transparency on Carney's spending.

He told the Sunday Times: 'The Bank needs to provide details of what this spending was for. This may need to involve the public accounts select committee.'

However, the Bank of England has defended Carney, who is currently in China with Prime Minister Theresa May for the G20 summit, and said travelling regularly is part of his job.

Carney is currently in China with the Prime Minister as the richest nations in the world meet for the G20 summit

A Bank of England spokesman said last night: The Bank always acts to ensure best value for money, but clearly costs can vary according to the location of international meetings.
Daniel J. Wooters, 38, was fatalloy shot by cops in Evansville, Indiana, after making a series of threats to kill officers and stealing a squad car

Police in Indiana have released bodycam footage showing a homeless man being fatally shot after he charged an officer with a knife and stole her squad car.

Daniel J. Wooters, 38, was shot by officers March 15 after a series of disturbing incidents in Evansville.

Now police have released the footage showing how a knife-wielding Wooters got out of a squad car he had allegedly stolen and refused to cooperate with officers.

Wooters is seen spread his arms defiantly, slowly walking toward the three officers.

They open fire  and strike Wooters seven times. He was rushed to a hospital but succumbed to his injuries.

Daniel J. Wooters, 38, was shot by officers March 15 after a series of disturbing incidents in Evansville, when he threatened cop with a knife and stole a squad car (pictured)

Before the shooting, o fficers had been called to a restaurant in the city's Eastland Mall because Wooters was acting aggressively and making threats to kill someone and, then specifically, police officers.

'I'm going to kill some cops,' Wooters told bystanders, police said then..

Wooters walked to a nearby bank parking lot and was looking into an unoccupied car when the first officer arrived and got out of her squad car to try to stop him, police said.

Wooters pulled out a knife and confronted the officer, and when she moved behind her cruiser to get away from Wooters, he jumped inside and drove off, police said.

A chase ensued until Wooters lost control of the vehicle.

In bodycam footage of the incident, Wooters is seen as he is shot by cops while holding a knife (pictured)

Police shot Wooters seven times. He was rushed to a hospital but succumbed to his injuries

He exited the car with his knife in his hand, and three officers fired at him, police said.

The situation 'went from 0 to 60 in half a second,' police spokesman Sgt. Jason Cullum said, adding that officers performed CPR on Wooters before he was transported to the hospital.

No officers were injured. The officers who fired on Wooters were placed on paid administrative lead.
The ex-wife of the canoe conman who faked his own death now works at an RSPCA shelter as she continues to rebuild her life after leaving jail.

Anne Darwin, 63, was jailed for six and a half years after helping husband John fake his own death in a canoeing accident to claim more than 500,000 in insurance money.

But the mother-of-two, who was released from prison in 2011, now appears to be making a fresh start, earning 10-an-hour at the dog home in York.

Anne Darwin, 63, was jailed for six and a half years after helping husband John fake his own death in a canoeing accident. Their cover was blown when a picture of them together in Panama appeared on the internet

A source told The Sun: 'Since getting out of prison Anne has found work hard to come by but now loves her new job.

'She works five days a week and even goes in on days off. She loves working with dogs.'

Anne had previously been working at the RSPCA charity shop in the city before taking up the new receptionist job.

She is now earning 10-an-hour at an animal shelter in York and was previously working at a RSPCA charity shop

She is now said to be living in a one-bedroom flat - in contrast to the six-bedroom house she used to live in.

The couple had been facing bankruptcy due to rising mortgage payments on their 12-home property portfolio when they hatched their plan.

In 2002, Darwin, 65, faked his death after paddling out to sea in a canoe at Seaton Carew, near Hartlepool, and ditching his boat to give the impression that he had drowned.

The following year he was declared dead, but he was actually living in a flat that adjoined Annes house.

The pair moved to Panama in 2007, but their scam started to unravel that December when Darwin returned to Britain to renew his Panamanian visa.

After becoming sick of leading a double life, he went to a police station and claimed he was suffering amnesia and suspected he was a missing person.

Meanwhile, Anne pretended to be delighted that her husband had reappeared.

But her cover story was blown when a picture of them together in Panama appeared on the internet.

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE DARWINS March 2002: John Darwin, then aged 51, paddled out to sea in a canoe at Seaton Carew, near Hartlepool, before ditching it to give the impression that he had drowned. April 2003: Former prison officer is declared dead by coroner, who records open verdict. John was actually secretly living in flat that adjoined Anne's house. 2007: The pair moved to Panama, with Anne buying an apartment there. December 2007: John Darwin went to a police station and claimed he was suffering amnesia. He said he believed he was a missing person. He was later arrested on suspicion of fraud and his wife on suspicion of deception. July 2008: The pair were both jailed for over six years. January 2011: John was released from prison after serving half of his sentence. March 2011: Anne was released from prison. September 2013: Anne was pictured working at RSPCA charity shop. December 2013: John was arrested for breaching parole terms after flying to Ukraine to meet woman he met on a foreign brides website. February 2015: John married Mercy May Avila, a Filipina woman in her 30s. Advertisement

Both were imprisoned in July 2008 - Darwin for deception and his wife for fraud.

Darwin has since remarried, wedding Mercy May Avila, a Filipina woman in her 30s, in February 2015.

He is said to be making 138 a week on a market stall in Manila, where he lives in a cramped apartment.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin has invested in top-secret reinforced bunkers across Moscow, according to reports.

It has been claimed the Russian hardman has invested heavily in the structures around the capital city in the event of war with the West.

In reports that first emerged last month Russia began building 'dozens' of underground bunkers across the country several years ago, according to US officials.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin has invested in top-secret reinforced bunkers across Moscow, according to reports

'Russia is getting ready for a big war which they assume will go nuclear, with them launching the first attacks,' Mark Schneider, a former Pentagon nuclear policy official told the Washington Free Beacon. 'We are not serious about preparing for a big war, much less a nuclear war.'

Few details about the new nuclear bunkers have been released, but Russian state-run media says they are being built in Moscow as part of a new national security strategy.

Russia has also constructed a large-scale bunker near Mount Yamantau in the Urals.

The relationship between the West and Russia has soured in recent years since the annexation of Crimea and the ongoing conflict in Syria.

Tensions have also been raised at NATO drills in the Baltic states in eastern Europe.

It has been claimed the Russian hardman has invested heavily in the structures around the capital city (pictured) in the event of war with the West

In reports that first emerged last month Russia began building 'dozens' of underground bunkers across the country several years ago, according to US officials

A US-led exercise in June involved around 6,000 troops, 50 ships, 60 aircraft and one submarine.

Earlier this year reports emerged of Russia preparing to test a nuclear missile which is so advanced it could get past NATO defences and decimate a large slice of Europe within seconds of launching.

The RS-28 Sarmat missile, dubbed Satan 2, has a top speed of seven kilometres (4.3 miles) per second and has been designed to outfox anti-missile shield systems.

The Sarmat missile could deliver a warhead of 40 megatons - 2,000 times as powerful as the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Zvezda reported the missile could destroy an area the size of France or Texas.

The Sarmat missile could deliver a warhead of 40 megatons - 2,000 times as powerful as the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 (pictured)

It is expected to have a range of 10,000 km (6,213 miles), which would allow Moscow to attack London and other European cities as well as reaching cities on America's west and east coasts.

Dr Loren Thompson, a top defence expert from the US think-tank Lexington Institute, told The National Interest: 'The possibility of nuclear war between America and Russia not only still exists, but is probably growing.

'And the place where it is most likely to begin is in a future military confrontation over three small Baltic states  Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Yusuf Rahim (pictured), a man who will be familiar to most as Levi Bellfield, has denied that he is 'getting extra security in jail after Muslim inmate gangs threatened to kill him'

Serial killer Levi Bellfield has denied that he is being targeted by fellow Muslim inmates following reports that he was being granted extra security for protection against threats to kill him.

Representatives at Frankland Prison confirmed to Mr Bellfield that there is no evidence he is at risk.

Bellfield, 48, from south west London, was convicted in 2008 of the murders of Marsha McDonnell and Amelie Delagrange and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy, and sentenced to life imprisonment.

In 2011 he was also convicted for the murder and rape of 13-year-old schoolgirl Milly Dowler.

Serving time at Frankland Prison, Co Durham, Bellfield or Yusuf Rahim, is believed to have converted whilst at Bellmarsh Prison so his Muslim brothers would provide him with some level of protection during his time inside.

The Sun reported that he is getting extra security inside because of threats he was going to be killed, however these claims have been expressly denied by Bellfield.

The serial killer given life inside in 2008 was also convicted for the murder and rape of 13-year-old schoolgirl Milly Dowler (pictured) in 2011

In recent years, the number of Muslim prisoners has increased dramatically. Ministry of Justice figures show a rise from 6,571 in 2004 to 12,255 a decade later, meaning that Muslims now account for almost 15 per cent of all inmates.

Bellfield, who had been attending weekly prayers in the West Yorkshire jail's gym, was beaten up inside in 2009 and got 4,500 compensation.

Bellfield was attacked in Wakefield Prison (pictured), West Yorkshire, in 2009 and received 4,500 compensation
A US spy agency apologized for a sarcastic tweet after President Obama's visit to Asia kicked off with a Chinese security official yelling at White House staff.

The Defense Intelligence Agency linked to a NYTimes article about the incident and wrote, 'Classy as always China' to its 83,000 followers before deleting the tweet.

About four hours later, the DIA wrote: 'Earlier today, a tweet regarding a news article was mistakenly posted from this account & does not represent the views of DIA. We apologize.'

The Defense Intelligence Agency linked to a NYTimes article about the incident and wrote, 'Classy as always China' to its 83,000 followers before deleting the tweet

About four hours later, the DIA issued an apology and said the offending tweet was 'mistakenly psoted'

The DIA tweet seemed to be a response to Obama's arrival in Asia after Chinese official shouted at members of the White House press corp for being too close to the president

A female White House official told him that it was an American plane and the US president, to which the Chinese official retorted in English: 'This is our country! This is our airport!'

Obama landed in Hangzhou on Saturday ahead of the G20 Summit, but his arrival was marred by a Chinese official who was shouting at members of the White House press corp for being too close to the president.

When Obama travels, the accompanying reporters are usually brought under the wing of the Boeing 747 to watch him disembark.

The reporters were corralled behind a blue rope installed by Chinese security, but one official deemed it was still 'too close'.

A female White House official told him that it was an American plane and the US president, to which the Chinese official retorted in English: 'This is our country! This is our airport!'

US National Security Adviser Susan Rice was also told off when she and senior White House staffer Ben Rhodes tried to get closer to the president before a Secret SErvice agent ushered her forward.

Obama also opted to use the presidential jet's built-in staircase rather than the airport's rolling ladder in a move usually reserved for high security landings in countries like Afghanistan.

Obama also opted to use the presidential jet's built-in staircase rather than the airport's rolling ladder in a move usually reserved for high security landings

The president tried to smooth things over and said similar incidents happened in numerous countries

The president tried to smooth things over when he addressed the incident, saying: 'It can cause some friction. It's not the first time it has happened. It doesn't just happen in China.

'It happens in other countries where we travel. I think that this time, though, the seams were showing a little more.'
A man has been arrested after he allegedly broke into a house in Martha's Vineyard and painted the family dog purple.

Felix Reagan is facing multiple charges after he was detained in Oaks Bluff on the Massachusetts island popular with tourists - including President Barack Obama.

He then kicked a police officer and tried to escape the patrol car while he was being taken to jail.

Cops were called after a vehicle that had been reported stolen crashed at the end of the street.

Felix Reagan has been arrested after he allegedly broke into a house in Martha's Vineyard and painted the family dog purple

Just 10 minutes later, officers then responded to a call about a burglary at a nearby home.

The victim said a window had been forced in, then they found the family pet had been covered in paint, a statement from Oakes Bluff Police Department said.

A number of items had also been stolen.

Another neighbor said a man had been looking into their windows. Police then determined Reagan was the suspect.

He had already been arrested on June 3 for breaking into another house while the owner was at work.

Police searched the area and found Reagan and took him into custody.

They then found him carrying stolen prescription pills, credit cards and a drivers licence.

Reagan also had purple paint on his pants matching what was found on the dog.

He was charged with: Breaking & Entering in the Daytime with the intent to commit a Felony; Larceny of a Motor Vehicle; Destruction of Property; Cruelty to Animals; Possession of a Class A Substance; Possession of a Class E Substance; Assault & Battery on a Police Officer, 2 counts.
A couple aboard the plane that made an extraordinary landing on the Hudson River seven years ago, are thankful for the remarkable event, which they said was a big reason for their marriage.

Karin and Chris Rooney, both 31, now live in Fort Worth, Texas with their two children, four-year-old daughter, Elaina, and two-year-old son, Clark.

But back in 2009 as they sat on US Airways Flight 1549 bound, for Charlotte, North Carolina, their relationship was on the rocks and their future together was uncertain.

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Karin and Chris Rooney, both 31, live in Fort Worth, Texas pictured with their two children, four-year-old daughter, Elaina, and two-year-old son, Clark

But back in 2009 when they were on US Airways Flight 1549 bound that ended up landing on the Hudson River, their relationship was on the rocks and their future together was uncertain

'We were at a crossroads,' Karin told the New York Post as she recalled the status of their relationship at the time when they were both 24 years old.

'We had been together three years, and I loved Chris, and he loved me, but I didn't know where the relationship was going.'

However, everything changed that day after Captain Chesley 'Sully' Sullenberger III saved 155 passengers when he landed the plane onto the Hudson River.

'It was this miraculous thing that happened and brought us closer,' Chris told the Post as he recalled the day of the crash on January 15, 2009.

And less than a year later, the couple married and went on to have their two children.

The Rooneys had first met in 2004 when they were in their first year of college at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Two years later, they began dating.

They had purchased tickets to visit some friends in New York City during the summer of 2008, but by that December, the future of their relationship was already in question.

Chris, pictured left, said the life-changing event brought them closer

Karin, pictured with her husband and two children, said had the crashed not happened, they would not have their children

At the time, Karin was working as a caregiver in Boulder after taking time off from school, while Chris was working as an engineer in Colorado Springs.

She noted they were trying to get through their trip to New York and afterwards they would talk about where their relationship was going.

However, the pair never got a chance to have that conversation, according to the Post.

On the last day of their vacation, they were seated in row 18 when they boarded Flight 1549. They meant to have a connecting flight to Boulder.

However, the couple recalled how within minutes after the plane took off from LaGuardia Airport, the plane started to shake, with Chris adding 'it sounded like an explosion.'

He told the Post they looked at each other, Karin with tears in her eyes, and he put his arm around her, telling her everything would be alright.

Chris said the plane then made a left turn and he glanced out the window, seeing water.

'I thought, "If we're not making it back to the airport, we have one option, and it's the river,"' he told the Post.

Moments later, Sullenberger - who gained instant fame for his calm handling - could be heard over loudspeaker telling passengers to brace for impact.

They were unaware that a flock of geese disabled the engines, but Sullenberger safely glided the plane to a water landing and all 155 passengers and crew members were rescued in what became known as the 'miracle on the Hudson.'

Following the crash, the couple stayed at the Crowne Plaza hotel next to the airport for two days after the airline had placed survivors there following the ordeal.

Their friends in the city who they were visiting came to see them as well as Chris' father, who was then a pilot for Aloho Airlines.

When they decided to head into Manhattan for pizza the next day, they called the airline and asked if they could get a cab, but they sent a limo instead, Chris told the Post.

On January 15, 2009, Captain Chesley 'Sully' Sullenberger III saved 155 passengers when he landed the plane onto the Hudson River (scenes from the ordeal pictured)

AT the time of the crash, a flock of geese disabled the engines. Passengers are pictured at the time while waiting to be rescued

Emergency personnel on boats came to the rescue to search for passengers after the plane landed on the river

They were met by a group of cheering loved ones when they finally returned home, and eventually, they went back to their respective cities.

A few months later in June, Chris proposed to Karin while they were on vacation in Rhode Island.

The couple experienced a huge milestone during that trip, as it was their first time boarding a plane since Miracle on the Hudson.

Karin, who now works as a foster-care recruiter, recalled how she was shocked by the proposal.

She told the Post: 'We were sitting on this rock, and I was thinking, "You know, it's OK if Chris isn't ready to get married, because we're building memories and conquering our fears and I'm flying again and he's worth waiting for."

'And then he stood up and proposed!'

The couple wed that New Year's Eve, with their wedding including a surprise champagne toast from Sullenberger over video.

'He was a big reason for our getting married,' Karin told the Post.

Her daughter Elaina, would eventually meet Sullenberger during a segment on Katie Couric's, Katie show, on babies born to victims of the Hudson River crash.

Retired pilot Chesley B. (Sully) Sullenberger III pictured above. The Rooney's wedding included a surprise champagne toast from Sullenberger over video

Sullenberger pictured with actor Tom Hanks. Hanks plays Sullenberger in the upcoming drama, Sully, that recounts the Miracle on the Hudson

Just weeks after their wedding, they flew back for a reunion marking the anniversary of Flight 1549.

However, as they flew via the same route that they had taken once before on the day of the Miracle on the Hudson, it all became too much.

'I think those first few months [after the crash] I had this survivor's high,' Karin told the Post.

'And it was like, "Well, of course we should be happy: We just survived this crazy experience." And we were really happy.

'And then went to the reunion, and by March I was like, "Something is not right."'

Her husband noted he thinks it was particularly bad for Karin because she had never looked out the window, so she was unaware where they were crashing.

He explained that she was under the impression they were going back to the airport but instead went into a panic when she realized they had landed in the river.

Karin noted that she soon became consumed with 'death and dying' and how she eventually sought various forms of counseling, including eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, EMDR, which proved to be helpful.

Tom Hanks pictured in a scene from Sully, which is scheduled to hit theaters on Friday

The couple later traveled to Paris in April 2011, with Karin still anxious about flying, where she got pregnant with their daughter.

'It was like I conquered a fear,' she told the Post as she recalled flying on a plane during that trip, 'and then this awesome blessing of our little girl came from that.'

For the most part, they do not speak about the ordeal in front of their children in order to not make them fearful of flying, Karin said.

She said they do plan on telling the kids about the ordeal but not until they are older.

However, she noted she does still get anxious about flying on planes, particularly when she is with them.

Karin noted that Elaina is aware about Sully, the upcoming drama Sully starring Tom Hanks who plays Sullenberger in the film, that is scheduled to hit US theaters on Friday.

She 'does know that there is a movie coming out about a pilot we know whose flight we were on, but we haven't told her it crashed in the water,' Karin told the Post.

Journalist and television personality Katie Couric makes a cameo in the biographical film and interviews Sullenberger in the movie.

The couple are planning to go see the movie, with Karin saying the life-chanigng event gave them 'wisdom and empathy.'

'I think it would have been a lot harder had not everyone survived, but it feels more like a celebration than anything else,' Chris said of the upcoming movie.

Karin added that if the crash had not happened, 'We wouldn't have our children.'
Eight teenagers have been arrested over a series of aggravated burglaries and an attempted car-jacking in Melbourne's north-western suburbs.

Police arrested the group on Sunday evening after a spate of incidents earlier that day, including a botched car-jacking which saw two offenders hit by a vehicle.

The arrests come as five other teenagers are on the run for ramming a police car with a stolen vehicle in Northcote in Melbourne's north-east on Monday morning.

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Eight teenagers were arrested overnight after a spate of home invasions and carjackings in Melbourne at the weekend

Two home invasions and a botched car-jacking have been linked to the notorious Apex gang

The first break-in took place just after 5am on Sunday, when two teenagers smashed a rear sliding door of a house in Williams Landing and threatened the homeowner with a knife.

They demanded the victim's car keys before fleeing in his car, a red Ford Festiva.

During the second incident four men broke into a house in Tarneit, smashing a rear glass sliding door before allegedly stealing a set of car keys along with a black 2009 Holden Commodore.

That afternoon police attended a home where they had earlier arrested two of the alleged offenders, seeking the other six.

In one home invasion on Sunday morning a black 2009 Holden Commodore was stolen (file photo)

In another incident five teens fled from police after ramming a cop car while trying to escape the scene on Monday morning

When police arrived they noticed a red Ford, believed to have been the car stolen from Williams Landing, turn away from them with six people on board.

Police followed the allegedly stolen car to Baratta Road where it stopped and all six teens were arrested.

Investigators are also looking in to whether those arrested were involved in an attempted carjacking in Jamieson Way, Point Cook about 5am yesterday morning.

In this attack eight men, including two armed with iron bars, surrounded a vehicle and tried to open the car doors which were locked.

Officers were called to Frank Ford Court about 5.30am on Monday after reports of teenagers causing trouble

The rear window of the car was then smashed and shattered before the victim managed to accelerate away, hitting two of the offenders who rolled onto the bonnet and off the side of the car.

Six of the eight teens, aged between 14 and 16, remain in custody while two have been released pending further inquiries.

Police are also hunting for five more teenagers after they crashed past a police car in a stolen vehicle in Northcote on Monday morning.

Officers were called to Frank Ford Court about 5.30am, before the group fled when they spotted police, hitting their car on the way out.
Speaking from the G20 summit in China Theresa May said people look for 'confidence in their politicians'

MP then went to Commons where he asked a question about Britons who have fled to fight for ISIS in Syria

of 23 years Maria Fernandes appears to be standing by husband and left house with him today

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The Prime Minister today took a swipe at Keith Vaz as the scandal-hit politician broke cover for the first time since he was exposed for paying rent boys for sex.

Addressing the lurid allegations from the G20 summit in China, Theresa May said 'people look for confidence in their politicians' and that it is the duty of MPs 'to provide for those who elect us'.

Mr Vaz, 59, was today told he is 'not fit' for office as 1,850 joined a Facebook group calling on him to quit immediately. But in the face of hostile criticism it was business as usual for the Leicester East MP, who headed straight to Parliament to address his fellow MPs.

The Labour politician looked tired as he left his north London home with his wife of 23 years Maria Fernandes, who appears to be standing by her husband despite the alleged sex scandal.

He later appeared in the Commons to ask a question about Britons going off to fight for ISIS in Syria. One observer on Twitter said: 'Vaz was speaking in the Commons as if nothing's happened'.

And fighting back further the shamed MP threatened libel action against a Tory MP who called on him to resign and urged police to investigate him.

Back in public: Keith Vaz left home with his wife Maria Fernandes today - the first time he had been seen in public since his alleged use of rent boys was exposed

Back to work: Keith Vaz walked into the Commons this afternoon, pictured, and sat in his usual seat as he refused to quit

Business as usual: Mr Vaz asked a question about passports in a show of defiance to critics who want him to resign

Defiant: There was complete silence from MPs as Mr Vaz spoke to MPs in the House Of Commons earlier today

There was complete silence from MPs as he spoke to the Commons and congratulated Amber Rudd on being appointed Home Secretary, with some claiming he may still try to remain Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee.

Speaking in a calm voice with no hint of the scandal that has embroiled him, he referred to the case of Siddhartha Dhar, who was alleged to have appeared in a propaganda video released by ISIS after fleeing Britain in 2014 despite having been arrested six times.

Mr Vaz said: 'Will she follow the advice of Mark Rowley, the head of counter terrorism, and expect suspects to hand over their passports as a precondition for bail?'

There was silence as Ms Rudd thanked Mr Vaz for 'raising this very important matter' and added: 'It was a very distressing case where he was able to go away, on bail, and go away to do such damage and join Daesh out in Syria'.

He then stayed for more than an hour where he asked a question about Yemen.

Clinging on: The Facebook group 'P45 for Keith Vaz' is filled with people calling on the MP to resign immediately - he has not

Under pressure: Mr Vaz looked serious as he got into a taxi with his wife, seen right, which had been loaded with suitcases

Back to work: Mr Vaz looked preoccupied as he left his London home in a car this morning before returning to the Commons

Calm: The politician, carrying just a mobile phone and an iPad, looked stony faced on the steps of his north London home

Mr Vaz spoke briefly to his wife as the pair got into a waiting car outside their 2.2million north London home

The married father of two has been urged to 'do the honourable thing' and resign from Parliament after he allegedly paid male escorts to attend a sordid party at his London 'sex flat'.

The Facebook group 'P45 for Keith Vaz' is filled with people calling on the MP to resign immediately.

Mr Vaz has apologised to his wife and children for the 'hurt and distress' he caused them after he was allegedly filmed meeting two rent boys at his flat where he pretended to be a washing machine salesman called 'Jim'.

KEITH VAZ THREATENS TO SUE CRITICAL RIVAL MP Keith Vaz has threatened to sue a rival MP he has accused of 'spreading highly defamatory scuttlebutt'. Tory Andrew Bridgen, right, has received a letter from law firm Howard Kennedy. It warns the Tory MP, who represents the neighbouring North West Leicestershire constituency, he is being put 'on formal notice that if this shabby behaviour continues our client will no longer turn a blind eye'. Mr Bridgen has been highly critical of the Labour MP and is expected to write to Scotland Yard calling for Mr Vaz to be investigated for misconduct in a public office and conspiracy to supply controlled substances. A source close to Mr Bridgen said the legal letter was 'desperate'. 'It's an attempt to close down any further investigation and suppress information. It's a badly worded, hurried and fairly shabby letter.' Advertisement

A series of texts allegedly showed he asked the Eastern European sex workers to bring poppers  sex-enhancing drugs  to a liaison.

In one meeting with the pair, Mr Vaz is said to have offered to pay for cocaine if it was brought to a sex party - but stressed he did not want any himself.

Mr Vaz, who took part in a safe sex campaign in his Leicester East constituency last year, apparently told the male escorts that during an encounter with another prostitute they all knew, the man had forgotten to bring a condom but they had sex anyway.

Fellow Leicestershire MP Andrew Bridgen has said he would be contacting the parliamentary standards watchdog to demand a full inquiry, and said the police should also investigate.

Today Mr Bridgen was sent a letter from Mr Vaz's lawyers warning him they might sue him.

The letter said: 'You have been maliciously spreading false and highly defamatory scuttlebutt about him. We are writing to put you on formal notice that if this shabby behaviour continues our client will no longer turn a blind eye to this and take steps to sue you personally'

Silver Star, a diabetes charity set up by the Leicester East MP, has also brought in law firm Carter Ruck as his fightback continues.

A source close to Mr Bridgen said the legal letter was 'desperate'.

'It's an attempt to close down any further investigation and suppress information. It's a badly worded, hurried and fairly shabby letter.'

Mr Bridgen had told the Mail Mr Vaz was not a 'fit and proper person' to remain an MP and said the police should investigate.

He said: 'I think misconduct in public office and conspiracy to supply a controlled substance - they're both criminal offences.

'I really think this is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Keith Vaz's activities and I think there is a lot more to come out about him.

'He certainly should resign as chairman of the home affairs select committee and quite honestly I have long been of the opinion that Keith Vaz is not a fit person to be a member of parliament.

Relaxed: Mr Vaz is covertly filmed on his sofa during the alleged encounter involving two Eastern European sex workers

Intimate: Keith Vaz with one of the Eastern European escorts at his 390,000 flat in north London, 10 minutes from his family home

Deal: The MP's x-rated text message exchange with the escorts - Mr Vaz's alleged texts are in grey

Encounter: MP Keith Vaz, who told the men he was a washing machine salesman called Jim, leaves his north London flat after the alleged sexual rendezvous with the rent boys on August 27

'His position is completely untenable and he brings Parliament into disrepute by hanging on like this when he should do the decent thing and resign.

'But I don't think Keith Vaz knows the decent thing to do'.

He said that he has been 'dropping information' to Leicestershire Police over the past 18 months.

He said: 'I would call on the people of Leicester who know an awful lot about Mr Vaz's various activities to come forward now to the police and the authorities and let's see what he has really been doing.

'I believe that these disclosures are merely the tip of the iceberg of his sexual transgressions.'

As the Labour MP for Leicester East clings to power his constituents are also unhappy.

City cafe owner Sammy Davies said: 'No one wants him representing us for a moment longer.

'He's a dirty, pompous rat and has brought shame on the good name of Leicester'.

Retired B&Q shop assistant John Worthington, 63, said: 'I'm ashamed to say he is my MP. Hopefully not much longer. He cannot stay in power'.

Mark Jordan wrote: 'He is dodgy and he has always been dodgy. it is time for him to go and never be involved in Public life again in any capacity.

Stephen Laycock said: 'GO NOW VAZ ... as a politician you represent NO-ONE !!!'

Theresa May also appeared to take aim at Mr Vaz over the lurid allegations.

Speaking at the G20 summit in China she said: 'I have always been clear throughout my political career, I think what is important for people is to feel they're able to have confidence in politicians. That is what I think we all have a duty to provide for those who elect us.

'What Keith does is for Keith, and any decisions he wishes to make are for him.

'But I think overall what people look for is confidence in their politicians.'

Upset: More than 1,850 people have joined the P45 for Keith Vaz group on Facebook and have produced these memes based on him calling himself a washing machine salesman and the perilous position he faces as an MP

Invite: The rent boys were paid by bank transfer following the session in a 390,000 flat (pictured) he owns near his 2.2million family home in Edgware, north London

The Charity Commission is also facing calls to investigate whether cash from Mr Vaz's charity was used to pay for sex with rent boys.

Two deposits of 150 were paid last month into an account by a man linked to Silver Star, a diabetes charity set up by the Leicester East MP when he developed the illness, The Sunday Mirror alleged.

Scandal: This is the door of the flat where Mr Vaz is accused of paying men for sex

There is no suggestion that the man knew the real purpose of the payments.

Dr Malde Modhwadia, a former trustee of Silver Star, told the Mail: 'Everything is done in accordance with Charity Commission rules. I can guarantee that nothing illicit or illegal happened, as far as I am aware.

'If he allegedly paid money from Silver Star to the prostitute, that cannot be correct. Silver Star only pays money with an invoice and when we know what the money is for, so as far as that matter is concerned, it can't be right.'

Referring to the sex allegations surrounding Mr Vaz, Dr Modhwadia said: 'I have nothing to do with his private life. I have known him since he was elected, we are friendly but I don't know about these allegations.

'There is nothing wrong with being gay but [constituents may feel] he has been leading a double life. But he's a good guy, he helps constituents. We don't want the charity to be associated with this.'

Asked about a member of Silver Star staff allegedly paying money into an account, he said: 'No, that can't be true. The clear instruction is, you can't pay cash to anybody. Petty cash is also accounted for.

'If that allegation is true I would be shocked. That would be silly. He had his own money.'

The Charity Commission said: 'The Commission has asked journalists to forward any evidence they have to determine whether there is a regulatory role for the Commission.'

Mr Vaz has refused to step down immediately as a Labour MP or from his position as chairman of the Commons home affairs committee.

He said he would wait until tomorrow before revealing whether he would continue in his key role on the panel monitoring crime, migration and sexual exploitation. And he even blamed the scandal on the Sunday newspaper that uncovered his hypocrisy and sordid sex life.

Love of the limelight: He performs with a belly dancer at the Labour Party conference in 2014

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn appeared to back Mr Vaz last night, saying: 'It should be treated as a private matter.

'He is going to meet the home affairs committee and discuss with them what his role will be in the future. I'm not sure what that decision will be but I leave it to him to decide on that.

KEITH VAZ VS THE PRESS Keith Vaz has blamed the scandal on the Sunday newspaper that uncovered his hypocrisy and sordid sex life. This is not the first time the Labour MP has taken aim at the Press. In December 2012 the politician publicly critisised an Australian radio station over the death of nurse Jacintha Sadanha, who killed herself after transferring a hoax phone call from two DJs about the Duchess of Cambridge. Mr Vaz, who acted as a spokesman for Mrs Sadanha's family, condemned the response of Southern Cross Austereo, parent company of Sydney radio station 2Day FM where the two DJs worked. He said: 'There has been no written apology, no request for a meeting with the family and no attempt to travel to the United Kingdom to express contrition.' In 2008 Mr Vaz unsuccessfully complained to the Press watchdog over an article that appeared in the Daily Telegraph about a 'reward' he allegedly expected to receive in exchange for backing the measure to hold terror suspects for up to 42 days without charge. The newspaper printed a handwritten letter sent by then chief whip Geoff Hoon to Mr Vaz the day after the vote, saying that he expected the MP's support to be 'appropriately rewarded'. Mr Vaz wrote to the Press Complaints Commission about the story, complaining it was inaccurate, that the letter had been obtained by subterfuge and that he had not been contacted before publication. The PCC did not uphold the complaint. In 2000 Mr Vaz, then the Minister for Europe, criticised what he perceived to be 'xenophobic' Press coverage over the UK's membership of the EU. Advertisement

'He hasn't committed any crime that I know of. As far as I'm aware it is a private matter and I will obviously talk to Keith.'

Mr Vaz, whose political career has been dogged by scandal, has previously said he is 'not convinced' men who pay for sex should be prosecuted. According to the Sunday Mirror, the 59-year-old politician told two male prostitutes: 'We need to get this party started' as they discussed unprotected sex.

In a series of texts reproduced by the newspaper he allegedly asked the Eastern Europeans to bring poppers  sex-enhancing drugs  to a liaison. In one meeting with the pair, Mr Vaz is said to have offered to pay for cocaine if it was brought to a sex party. He stressed he did not want any himself.

The rent boys were paid by bank transfer following the session in a 390,000 flat he owns near his 2.2million family home in Edgware, north London. There was no answer at his house yesterday. Last night a string of MPs called on Mr Vaz to step down as committee chairman. Police and the Charity Commission indicated they would investigate if complaints were made about his conduct.

Mr Vaz failed to adequately explain how he paid almost 400,000 in cash for his 'sex flat'. And he faces questions over suggestions that a man linked to his charity Silver Star was asked to pay money to male prostitutes on his behalf  allegations that he denies.

According to the Sunday Mirror, Mr Vaz tried to hide his identity from two male escorts by claiming to be a washing machine salesman.

Asked by the men about his job, he reportedly said: 'These are industrial washing machines, that I sell. Industrial. For big  for hotels.' Later one of the escorts asked Mr Vaz: 'What's your name, by the way?' Mr Vaz replied: 'Jim'.

A senior member of the home affairs committee said Mr Vaz's position was untenable: 'We have oversight of the police and he's talking about poppers and cocaine. He can't stay on.'

In a statement, Mr Vaz attacked the Sunday Mirror for exposing his sex life. He said: 'It is deeply troubling that a national newspaper should have paid individuals who have acted in this way. I have referred these allegations to my solicitor Mark Stephens of Howard Kennedy who will consider them carefully and advise me accordingly. At this time I do not want there to be any distraction from the important work the home affairs select committee undertakes so well. I will of course inform committee members first of my plans when we meet on Tuesday. My decision has been based entirely on what is in the best interests of the committee which I have had the privilege of chairing for the last nine years.'

When the scandal broke on Saturday night he had said he would step down as chairman.

Mr Vaz's committee produced its first ever report on the legality of prostitution only this summer. In July, he said: 'The criminalisation of sex workers should therefore end.' The Charity Commission said it was 'aware of the allegations made regarding an individual linked to the charity Silver Star'.

Fellow Labour MP Jess Phillips suggested that using prostitutes was 'sexual exploitation'.

She tweeted: 'I don't give a toss what people do in their private lives, I do give a toss about sexual exploitation. Nothing funny about today's news.'

Disgraced Labour MP Simon Danczuk, suspended in a scandal caused by him sending sexually explicit message to a 17-year-old, expressed sympathy for Mr Vaz.

He told LBC Radio: 'He's clearly being struggling with his sexuality. It won't be easy in terms of his family.'

Riddle of the 'loan' that let shamed Labour MP Keith Vaz pay 400k cash for luxury 'sex flat'

Keith Vaz last night could not explain exactly how he paid almost 400,000 in cash for his sex flat.

The millionaire MP purchased the two-bedroom property earlier this year without the assistance of a mortgage. Land Registry documents show he is the sole owner.

The sparsely-furnished apartment, a ten-minute walk from the 2.2million five-bedroom house he shares with his wife, was the alleged venue for a sordid party with two rent boys.

'Sex Flat': This is the block of luxury flats where Keith Vaz allegedly met two male escorts

Confusion: The Mail spoke to the occupants of the Uppingham Road house the MP says is about to be sold - the family seemed unaware of any sale

Explanation: Mr Vaz, pictured with his wife Maria holding son Luke, said the loan on his new flat would be repaid once Mr Vazs house on Uppingham Road in Leicester  which he inherited from his mother Merlyn, right, who died in 2003

In June, Mr Vaz put down 387,500 in cash to buy the flat  more than four times his 89,951 salary as a senior backbench MP.

Last night the explanation of how he afforded it begged more questions than answers. His lawyer Mark Stephens said the property had been bought with the help of a personal loan.

Asked if this loan was from a friend, or a bank, Mr Stephens replied it was a traditional lender.

He said the loan would be repaid once Mr Vazs house on Uppingham Road in Leicester  which he inherited from his mother who died in 2003  had been sold. It has been on the market for three months and has been sold subject to contract, said Mr Stephens.

He said the Labour MP had waited to sell the house, 13 years after his mother died, to get the best price.

The Mail spoke to the occupants of the Uppingham Road house, a family who seemed unaware of any sale. They said they moved in two months ago and had a one-year tenancy, paying 750 a month via an agency.

When this was put to Mr Stephens, he said the current occupants were definitely leaving in three months and there was no agreement in place for them to stay another 12 months.

The Mail was unable to find any estate agent that had advertised the property for sale, and a check of Land Registry documents still show Mr Vaz as the owner, although it can take several weeks for official records to be updated. It remains unclear why Mr Vaz opted for a personal loan to buy his new apartment in London, rather than a mortgage.

Family home: This is the detached house owned by Mr Vaz and his wife Maria in Middlesex

Neighbours of the new flat, in a block containing 20 apartments built by Barratt, said that they had never seen the MP.

One said: The flats have only just gone up and theyre pretty expensive so its hard to believe that something like that would happen here.

Keith Vaz was caught meeting two Eastern European male prostitutes, believed to be Poles, for sex

A ten-minute walk from the flat, past a Tesco and a McDonalds, is the Vaz familys large detached home in Stanmore, Middlesex.

It is jointly owned by the MP and his wife Maria Fernandes. They purchased it for 1.15million in 2005 and have a mortgage with First Direct bank.

Mr Vazs complex finances have long been the subject of scrutiny. The Cambridge-educated socialist once had half a million pounds in the bank, leading Scotland Yard detectives who probed his finances to suggest the money was of a suspicious nature.

Mr Vaz has bought and sold a string of properties in London and his Leicester constituency.

He has always strenuously denied any wrongdoing and has never faced any criminal charges over the money, which he said was not suspicious in any way and explained by a house sale and a drawdown of equity. His MPs salary is 74,926 and he receives a 15,025 top-up as a select committee chairman.

On the MPs register of interests, he declares occasional outside income from writing newspaper articles or making TV appearances.

In 2012, it emerged he held almost 500,000 in a series of mystery bank accounts.

He had seven or eight mortgages between 1996 and 2001, at one stage juggling arrangements from four different lenders at once.

In October 2008, Mr Vaz was alleged to have made mortgage payments totalling 26,500  more than seven times higher than his income as a backbench MP. At the time, when banks typically lent only about three to four times a buyers earnings, this was 45,066 a year, and his wife ran a small firm of solicitors, reportedly earning an estimated 60,000 a year.

In June, Mr Vaz put down 387,500 in cash to buy his flat  more than four times his 89,951 salary as a senior backbench MP

Scotland Yard examined seven high street bank accounts belonging to Mr Vaz and his wife. There is no suggestion that she has ever done anything wrong.

Detectives found that over a six-year period, almost 500,000 was apparently deposited in the MPs accounts  in addition to his salary between 1996 and 2001, which varied from 43,860 to 82,697.

In one HSBC account, 28,959 in cash was paid in during a single year. One payment was made into a personal account by Mapesbury Communications Ltd, a firm run by Mr Vazs wife.

In the MPs expenses scandal, exposed in 2009, it emerged Mr Vaz had flipped his designated second home from his London flat to his Leicester constituency office. This was not illegal, but he was asked to pay back a four-figure sum.

Mr Vaz has always denied doing anything wrong, saying all his finances are above board and explained by property deals.

We need to get this party started: What Keith Vaz told Eastern European rent boys filmed during sex sting

By Sam Greenhill and Claire Ellicott

As the rent boys undressed, one asked Keith Vaz: 'What's your name, by the way?'

'Jim', replied the chairman of the Commons home affairs committee. He spelt it out: 'J-I-M', telling the young men he was a washing machine salesman.

But the ruse by the MP for Leicester East was pointless because at least one of the escorts already knew his true identity.

Rendez vous: The encounter took place nine days ago, on August 27. But according to the newspaper it was not the first time Mr Vaz had met the pair

And as the married father of two casually discussed drugs, unprotected sex and money with the male escorts, their conversation was being secretly recorded.

Yesterday the Sunday Mirror published extracts from the extraordinary exchange. It casts new light on the man whose committee monitors crime, immigration and drugs policy on behalf of the nation.

Mr Vaz has deplored the 'dangerous' cocaine trade, but allegedly offered to buy some for an Eastern European prostitute.

Later he was heard exhorting: 'We need to get this party started.'

INTIMATE TEXTS AND CASH PAYMENTS

The encounter took place nine days ago, on August 27.

But according to the newspaper it was not the first time Mr Vaz had met the pair, who are believed to be Polish. Earlier that month, two cash deposits of 150 each were allegedly paid into a bank account.

On August 4, Mr Vaz is said to have texted one of the escorts that he would send him 100 as a gift. When asked to make it 150, he replied: 'OK but next time you and [the other man] see me, you better be extra nice.'

The MP requested bank details and on August 5 a 150 payment was made, with the reference 'Painting', said the newspaper.

The second payment was made on August 24. In a text, Mr Vaz allegedly discussed setting up a foursome involving the two Poles and a Romanian, saying: '150 for you, me, bf (boyfriend) and Romanian.'

Then on August 26, he allegedly texted the rent boy asking him to get poppers, the legal drug amyl nitrate taken to enhance sex. He texted: 'Try and pick up some poppers.'

On the afternoon of August 27, texts between Mr Vaz and one escort were exchanged to set up the sex party. Suggesting it start at 11pm, Mr Vaz demanded: 'I want a good time please.' The MP went on to ask if a Romanian rent boy who was supposed to join them liked poppers and whether he spoke English.

Mr Vaz married his wife Maria Fernandes in London and the couple have a son and a daughter

'I WANT A GOOD TIME, PLEASE'

At 11.30pm on August 27, Mr Vaz met the two male prostitutes at his 400,000 flat, a ten-minute walk from his family home. Both men were wearing shorts and T-shirts, and the 59-year-old MP sported black trousers and a short-sleeved shirt.

He began by asking them the whereabouts of the Romanian escort. They told him he had been paid 900 by another customer, to which the MP allegedly replied: 'Really? That's fantastic. I hope he's giving you some of the money.'

Mr Vaz, who famously welcomed Romanian arrivals at Luton airport when the EU expanded in 2014, asked to see pictures of the escort who has failed to show up.

The MP then suggested using the mobile phone app Grindr to find someone else.

Grindr searches for gay men nearby, using mobile phones' GPS data, and Mr Vaz wanted to know if there were any other users in the same block as his apartment. 'See who's in the building. There must be someone around here,' said the MP.

When shown the profile of an Asian man, the MP allegedly said: 'He is fit', and on being shown another person's profile, he said: 'Oh, he's nice, yeah, ask him what he's doing. Would he like to join a private party?'

Mr Vaz allegedly suggested offering 50 for a Grindr user to take part in a foursome.

Mr Vaz jokingly called the older of the two escorts 'a naughty b****r' and told the younger one: 'I feel as if I'm his bank manager. Or his mother. He treats me very badly.' He called him the other man's pimp.

Asked by the elder man what he wanted, the MP allegedly replied: 'You. I'm getting very horny.'

AN ALLEGED OFFER TO PAY FOR COCAINE

Exposed: Keith Vaz with his wife Maria Fernandes. The pair have two children

As the trio waited for the Romanian, the conversation turned to cocaine. Mr Vaz, who in 2010 demanded action to combat the 'dangerous' cocaine trade, allegedly offered to pay for some.

The two escorts had told him the Romanian prostitute liked taking cocaine during sex. According to the Sunday Mirror, Mr Vaz said there was no 'coke' in his flat. The MP said he did not want any of the drug himself.

When told the Romanian might be able to bring the drug, Mr Vaz said: 'How much is it going to be?' He later added: 'He can buy and I will give him the money.'

The conversation then switched to poppers. In the Commons, Mr Vaz has argued against a proposed ban on the drug during a debate on the Psychoactive Substances Bill. Poppers was later removed from the list of substances to be outlawed by the bill. During the liaison, Mr Vaz was asked whether he had ever taken poppers and replied: 'Yeah.' But he said he was an infrequent user, but added: 'I like giving it to people, it is nice.'

CLAIMS OF UNPROTECTED SEX

As an MP, Mr Vaz took part in a safe sex campaign in his constituency last year. But in his flat, he apparently admitted he did not practise what he preached. He told the male escorts that during another encounter, with another prostitute they all knew, the man had forgotten to bring a condom but they had sex anyway.

Asked how he could be sure the rent boy had not had a sexually transmitted disease, Mr Vaz replied: 'I didn't know.' He was then asked if he wanted to use a condom this time, and said: 'No'.

I'M JIM, A WASHING MACHINE SALESMAN

As matters turned to sex, one of the escorts who was undressing asked Mr Vaz about his work.

Instead of revealing he was the chairman of an influential Commons committee, or an MP, Mr Vaz said he sold washing machines.

He blurted out the pseudonym 'Jim' and said the washing machines were industrial size, for hotels to clean towels in bulk.

Then he turned to the younger of the two escorts and said: 'Take your shirt off. I'm going to attack you.'

After their 15-minute sexual encounter, Mr Vaz asked the escorts to wash up their whisky glasses. On their way out, he asked them: 'You've got your stuff? Got everything you need to take with you?'
A Sydney mother has argued 'Islamic law' was the reason why she and her new husband were unable to look after her children.

Her refusal to look after her children forced two of them into foster care and another child, a 17-year-old boy, was allowed to live with his father who had a history of violence.

The mother, who was born in Lebanon, told the Family Court Islamic law, which is also known as Sharia law, meant her children could not live with her as her husband was not obligated to look after them.

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A Sydney mother has successfully argued 'Islamic law' was the reason why she and her new husband was unable to look after her children. Pictured is a stock image

The case heard in the NSW Family Court involved a nine-year-old and a 14-year-old whose mother married again after divorcing from their father.

'The mother has completely abrogated her responsibilities as a parent in refusing to have the children live with her and proffering as an excuse that her new husband should not be required to care for another man's children as it's contrary to Islamic law,' the judge said.

But Islamic law expert Dr Hossein Esmaeili told The Australian the mother's argument was not based on any legal basis he had heard of.

In a previous research paper, Dr Esmaeili had noted 'an increasing number of cases in Australian courts where... Muslims apply Shariah principles in their personal relationships as part of their religious observance'.

As well as following traditional Western laws, Dr Esmaeili said Muslims living in Australia also integrate parts of Sharia law into their legal agreements.

'While many Muslims in Australia do not support the introduction of Shariah law in Australia (or elsewhere), many Australian Muslims follow certain Shariah legal principles as part of their religious observances,' he wrote in a research paper.

This move forced her two children to go into foster care and her third child, a 17-year-old boy, was allowed to live his father who has a history of violence. Above is a stock image

'These include matters which ordinarily are legal issues in Australia, such as inheritance law, wills, paying special [religious] taxes (zakat), marriage and divorce, and matters relating to personal property, banking and finance.'

Dr Esmaeili also said the introduction of some elements of Sharia law into the Australian legal system could help the integration of Muslims into society.

'Recognising certain personal Muslim laws such as those dealing with marriage, divorce, wills and inheritance, banking and business, may help Muslims to access Australia's justice system more effectively and realise that the Australian legal system can accommodate certain Shariah practices by Muslims,' he argued.
This pooch is a real adrenaline junkie!

Piper the border collie took a break from his busy work schedule at a Michigan airport to try on his first skydive.

He put on a special vest attached to human Jimmy Hatch, who runs anonprofit dedicated to supporting working dogs, and jumped 5,000 feet off an airplane above Cherry Capital Airport.

Piper the border collie took a break from his busy work schedule at a Michigan airport to try on his first skydive (pictured)

Piper's human, Brian Edwards (pictured), says the pooch used a special vest designed specifically for aerial insertions of dogs to do the jump

Piper took on the view as his ears flapped in the wind.

When he landed, he shook himself off and walked away happily.

'As you can see, Piper is a BOSS,' wrote Piper's human, Brian Edwards, on a Facebook video of the dive.

'He can't wait to go again!' he added.

Edwards, who trains Piper, said the vest his best canine friend wore to jump was 'designed specifically for aerial insertions of dogs.

'For Pipe's first jump, Jimmy decided on 5000 FT, less time in the plane and free fall, just to make sure we didn't over do it.'

The hardworking pooch can be found four days a week keeping Michigan's Cherry Capital Airport free from pesky birds

Piper's job keep ensures the safety of pilots trying to land, as birds pose a serious threat to aircraft

Donning a ski mask to protect his eyes from the wind and boots to shield his paws from the heat of the tarmac, the big-hearted worker has become a star, both on the runway and online

The hardworking pooch can be found four days a week keeping Traverse City Airport (Cherry Capital Airport) free from pesky birds, which can pose a serious threat to pilots trying to land aircraft.

Donning a ski mask to protect his eyes from the wind and boots to shield his paws from the heat of the tarmac, the big-hearted worker has become a star, both on the runway and online.

Most of K-9 Pipers training revolved around obedience and off lead control, although chasing wildlife was said to come pretty naturally to the four-legged fur ball, as the breed are natural herders.

Extra training was given to get him accustomed to aircraft noise, and he has specially made MuttMuffs to protect his hearing when they are nearby.

Committed K-9 Piper is on duty for four, ten hour shifts a week on a rotating basis - with plenty of breaks to keep him in full health.

One of the seven-year-old's other important jobs is boosting morale of employees, tenants and visitors, something he is said to excel at.

Most of K-9 Pipers training revolved around obedience and off lead control, although chasing wildlife was said to come pretty naturally to the four-legged fur ball

Extra training was given to get him accustomed to aircraft noise, and he has specially made MuttMuffs to protect his hearing when they are nearby

One of the seven-year-old's other important jobs is boosting morale of employees, tenants and visitors, something he is said to excel at

Although it may seem like a small job, bird strikes can prove fatal for planes. In total the airport experienced 37 bird strikes and one skunk strike from 2010-2015.

One of the most dangerous cases occurred in May 2014, when a loon struck an incoming plane located 10 miles from the airport and crashed through into the cockpit.

Thankfully the pilot, flying at about 3,500 feet, managed to land safety at the airport but serious damage was done to the plane according to the airport's operations director.

Many companies rely on sirens or pyrotechnics to alleviate the risks of bird strikes, but in 2014 the secret weapon of Piper was trialled.

The Federal Aviation Administration requires that the Cherry Capital Airport has a Wildlife Hazard Management Plan in place to mitigate wildlife hazards to aviation.

Although it may seem like a small job, bird strikes can prove fatal for planes. In total the airport experienced 37 bird strikes and one skunk strike from 2010-2015

Many companies rely on sirens or pyrotechnics to alleviate the risks of bird strikes, but in 2014 the secret weapon of Piper was trialled

Trained by Operations Supervisor Brian Edwards, the other half of the airport's vital K-9 Team, the pair seek out rodents and small mammals who could attract circling birds, and the keen-nosed mutt has proved their best chance of keeping runways bird-free.

Accident-causing loons, snowy owls, ducks and geese, which would quickly return to airfields after the sirens, are said to stay away for longer periods now.

In fact, they now are said to fly off as soon as they see the red SUV that Piper rides to work in.

He is the only Wildlife Control K-9 on staff at an airport in Michigan and the airport believes one of less than ten in the United States.

Nothing gets in the way of Piper giving 100 per cent effort on the job, but the black and white mutt sadly suffered a fracture on the job chasing a snowy owl on the taxiway in 2015.

At the time he had chased off 2,450 birds that year, said Edwards.

Donning a brightly-coloured cast, Piper has spent the last few months being reassigned the role of the airports Chief Morale Officer, now tasked with getting hugs and attention off the airport staff and bringing a smile to all.
As the rent boys undressed, one asked Keith Vaz: Whats your name, by the way?

Jim, replied the chairman of the Commons home affairs committee. He spelt it out: J-I-M, telling the young men he was a washing machine salesman.

But the ruse by the MP for Leicester East was pointless because at least one of the escorts already knew his true identity.

Intimate: Keith Vaz with one of the Eastern European escorts at his 390,000 flat in north London

Relaxed: Mr Vaz is covertly filmed on his sofa during the encounter

And as the married father of two casually discussed drugs, unprotected sex and money with the male escorts, their conversation was being secretly recorded.

Yesterday the Sunday Mirror published extracts from the extraordinary exchange. It casts new light on the man whose committee monitors crime, immigration and drugs policy on behalf of the nation.

Mr Vaz has deplored the dangerous cocaine trade, but allegedly offered to buy some for an Eastern European prostitute.

Later he was heard exhorting: We need to get this party started.

Deal: The MP's text message exchange with the male escorts

INTIMATE TEXTS AND CASH PAYMENTS

The encounter took place nine days ago, on August 27.

But according to the newspaper it was not the first time Mr Vaz had met the pair, who are believed to be Polish. Earlier that month, two cash deposits of 150 each were allegedly paid into a bank account.

On August 4, Mr Vaz is said to have texted one of the escorts that he would send him 100 as a gift. When asked to make it 150, he replied: OK but next time you and [the other man] see me, you better be extra nice.

The MP requested bank details and on August 5 a 150 payment was made, with the reference Painting, said the newspaper.

Rendez vous: The encounter took place nine days ago, on August 27. But according to the newspaper it was not the first time Mr Vaz had met the pair

The second payment was made on August 24. In a text, Mr Vaz allegedly discussed setting up a foursome involving the two Poles and a Romanian, saying: 150 for you, me, bf (boyfriend) and Romanian.

Then on August 26, he allegedly texted the rent boy asking him to get poppers, the legal drug amyl nitrate taken to enhance sex. He texted: Try and pick up some poppers.

On the afternoon of August 27, texts between Mr Vaz and one escort were exchanged to set up the sex party. Suggesting it start at 11pm, Mr Vaz demanded: I want a good time please. The MP went on to ask if a Romanian rent boy who was supposed to join them liked poppers and whether he spoke English.

Encounter: After alleged rendezvous

I WANT A GOOD TIME, PLEASE

At 11.30pm on August 27, Mr Vaz met the two male prostitutes at his 400,000 flat, a ten-minute walk from his family home. Both men were wearing shorts and T-shirts, and the 59-year-old MP sported black trousers and a short-sleeved shirt.

He began by asking them the whereabouts of the Romanian escort. They told him he had been paid 900 by another customer, to which the MP allegedly replied: Really? Thats fantastic. I hope hes giving you some of the money.

Mr Vaz, who famously welcomed Romanian arrivals at Luton airport when the EU expanded in 2014, asked to see pictures of the escort who has failed to show up.

The MP then suggested using the mobile phone app Grindr to find someone else.

Grindr searches for gay men nearby, using mobile phones GPS data, and Mr Vaz wanted to know if there were any other users in the same block as his apartment. See whos in the building. There must be someone around here, said the MP.

When shown the profile of an Asian man, the MP allegedly said: He is fit, and on being shown another persons profile, he said: Oh, hes nice, yeah, ask him what hes doing. Would he like to join a private party?

Mr Vaz allegedly suggested offering 50 for a Grindr user to take part in a foursome.

Mr Vaz jokingly called the older of the two escorts a naughty b****r and told the younger one: I feel as if Im his bank manager. Or his mother. He treats me very badly. He called him the other mans pimp.

Asked by the elder man what he wanted, the MP allegedly replied: You. Im getting very horny.

AN ALLEGED OFFER TO PAY FOR COCAINE

As the trio waited for the Romanian, the conversation turned to cocaine. Mr Vaz, who in 2010 demanded action to combat the dangerous cocaine trade, allegedly offered to pay for some.

The two escorts had told him the Romanian prostitute liked taking cocaine during sex. According to the Sunday Mirror, Mr Vaz said there was no coke in his flat. The MP said he did not want any of the drug himself.

When told the Romanian might be able to bring the drug, Mr Vaz said: How much is it going to be? He later added: He can buy and I will give him the money.

The conversation then switched to poppers. In the Commons, Mr Vaz has argued against a proposed ban on the drug during a debate on the Psychoactive Substances Bill. Poppers was later removed from the list of substances to be outlawed by the bill. During the liaison, Mr Vaz was asked whether he had ever taken poppers and replied: Yeah. But he said he was an infrequent user, but added: I like giving it to people, it is nice.

Mr Vaz married his wife Maria Fernandes in London and the couple have a son and a daughter

CLAIMS OF UNPROTECTED SEX

As an MP, Mr Vaz took part in a safe sex campaign in his constituency last year. But in his flat, he apparently admitted he did not practise what he preached. He told the male escorts that during another encounter, with another prostitute they all knew, the man had forgotten to bring a condom but they had sex anyway.

The married father of two, pictured with wife Maria, casually discussed drugs, unprotected sex and money with the male escorts

Asked how he could be sure the rent boy had not had a sexually transmitted disease, Mr Vaz replied: I didnt know. He was then asked if he wanted to use a condom this time, and said: No.

I'M JIM, A WASHING MACHINE SALESMAN

As matters turned to sex, one of the escorts who was undressing asked Mr Vaz about his work.

Instead of revealing he was the chairman of an influential Commons committee, or an MP, Mr Vaz said he sold washing machines.

He blurted out the pseudonym Jim and said the washing machines were industrial size, for hotels to clean towels in bulk.

Then he turned to the younger of the two escorts and said: Take your shirt off. Im going to attack you.

After their 15-minute sexual encounter, Mr Vaz asked the escorts to wash up their whisky glasses. On their way out, he asked them: Youve got your stuff? Got everything you need to take with you?

The next day, Mr Vaz suggested they meet again, signing off a text message with a smiley face emoticon.
Keith Vaz last night could not fully explain how he was able to pay almost 400,000 in cash for the flat where he allegedly entertained two rent boys.

The millionaire MP purchased the two-bedroom property earlier this year without the assistance of a mortgage. Land Registry documents show he is the sole owner.

The sparsely-furnished apartment is a ten-minute walk from the 2.2million five-bedroom house he shares with his wife.

In June, Mr Vaz put down 387,500 in cash to buy the flat  more than four times his 89,951 salary as a senior backbench MP.

'Sex Flat': This is the block of luxury flats where Keith Vaz allegedly met two male escorts

Confusion: The Mail spoke to the occupants of the Uppingham Road house the MP says is about to be sold - the family seemed unaware of any sale

Explanation: Mr Vaz, pictured with his wife Maria holding son Luke, said the loan on his new flat would be repaid once Mr Vazs house on Uppingham Road in Leicester  which he inherited from his mother Merlyn, right, who died in 2003

Last night the explanation of how he afforded it begged more questions than answers.

His lawyer Mark Stephens said the property had been bought with the help of a personal loan.

Asked if this loan was from a friend, or a bank, Mr Stephens replied it was a traditional lender.

Scandal: This is the door of the flat where Mr Vaz is accused of paying men for sex

He said the loan would be repaid once Mr Vazs house on Uppingham Road in Leicester  which he inherited from his mother who died in 2003  had been sold. It has been on the market for three months and has been sold subject to contract, said Mr Stephens.

He said the Labour MP had waited to sell the house, 13 years after his mother died, to get the best price.

The Mail spoke to the occupants of the Uppingham Road house, a family who seemed unaware of any sale. They said they moved in two months ago and had a one-year tenancy, paying 750 a month via an agency.

When this was put to Mr Stephens, he said the current occupants were definitely leaving in three months and there was no agreement in place for them to stay another 12 months.

The Mail was unable to find any estate agent that had advertised the property for sale, and a check of Land Registry documents still show Mr Vaz as the owner, although it can take several weeks for official records to be updated. It remains unclear why Mr Vaz opted for a personal loan to buy his new apartment in London, rather than a mortgage.

Family home: This is the detached house owned by Mr Vaz and his wife Maria in Middlesex

Neighbours of the new flat, in a block containing 20 apartments built by Barratt, said that they had never seen the MP.

One said: The flats have only just gone up and theyre pretty expensive so its hard to believe that something like that would happen here.

A ten-minute walk from the flat, past a Tesco and a McDonalds, is the Vaz familys large detached home in Stanmore, Middlesex.

Keith Vaz was caught meeting two Eastern European male prostitutes, believed to be Poles, for sex

It is jointly owned by the MP and his wife Maria Fernandes. They purchased it for 1.15million in 2005 and have a mortgage with First Direct bank.

Mr Vazs complex finances have long been the subject of scrutiny. The Cambridge-educated socialist once had half a million pounds in the bank, leading Scotland Yard detectives who probed his finances to suggest the money was of a suspicious nature.

Mr Vaz has bought and sold a string of properties in London and his Leicester constituency.

He has always strenuously denied any wrongdoing and has never faced any criminal charges over the money, which he said was not suspicious in any way and explained by a house sale and a drawdown of equity. His MPs salary is 74,926 and he receives a 15,025 top-up as a select committee chairman.

On the MPs register of interests, he declares occasional outside income from writing newspaper articles or making TV appearances.

In 2012, it emerged he held almost 500,000 in a series of mystery bank accounts.

He had seven or eight mortgages between 1996 and 2001, at one stage juggling arrangements from four different lenders at once.

In October 2008, Mr Vaz was alleged to have made mortgage payments totalling 26,500  more than seven times higher than his income as a backbench MP. At the time, when banks typically lent only about three to four times a buyers earnings, this was 45,066 a year, and his wife ran a small firm of solicitors, reportedly earning an estimated 60,000 a year.

Intimate: Keith Vaz with one of the Eastern European escorts at his 390,000 flat in north London

In June, Mr Vaz put down 387,500 in cash to buy his flat  more than four times his 89,951 salary as a senior backbench MP

Scotland Yard examined seven high street bank accounts belonging to Mr Vaz and his wife. There is no suggestion that she has ever done anything wrong.

Detectives found that over a six-year period, almost 500,000 was apparently deposited in the MPs accounts  in addition to his salary between 1996 and 2001, which varied from 43,860 to 82,697.

In one HSBC account, 28,959 in cash was paid in during a single year. One payment was made into a personal account by Mapesbury Communications Ltd, a firm run by Mr Vazs wife.

In the MPs expenses scandal, exposed in 2009, it emerged Mr Vaz had flipped his designated second home from his London flat to his Leicester constituency office. This was not illegal, but he was asked to pay back a four-figure sum.
The sordid revelations about Labour MP Keith Vaz and male prostitutes have not come as a great surprise to many of his parliamentary colleagues.

Some suspect that Vaz, a Roman Catholic who has two children with Maria Fernandes, his wife of 23 years, may have been living a double life.

Whatever the truth, the MP for Leicester East, emboldened by his huge ego and thirst for publicity, has flown dangerously close to the sun for too long. But it was his friendships with billionaires, corrupt police officers and dodgy solicitor  rather than his libido  which most assumed would bring him crashing to earth.

Family man: Keith vaz weds Maria Fernandes in April 1993. The couple have two children

In his chequered Commons career Vaz has faced Parliamentary inquiries, resigned as a minister, was suspended from Parliament, and abused Parliamentary expenses.

But he always slithered out of the sort of trouble that would finish most politicians.

The fact that for nine years he has chaired the influential Commons home affairs select committee, which holds the countrys most senior police officers to account, just proves his extraordinary resilience.

As a former minister, a knighthood should have been a formality for the longest serving Asian MP. He would have assumed hed become a peer on leaving the Commons.

But his dreams, like his Parliamentary career, are in ruins. For self-important Vaz, the fall from grace will be hard to bear.

Born in Aden, Yemen, to Indian parents, he attended Latymer Upper School in London and Cambridge University before working as a solicitor. After he was elected MP for Leicester East in 1987, he became one of Britains most influential Asians.

Love of the limelight: He performs with a belly dancer at the Labour Party conference in 2014

That is why he was rewarded in 1999 by Tony Blair  deeply conscious of the importance of the Asian vote  with the post of Minister for Europe, becoming the first Asian to hold such high ministerial office.

His influence on his community was considered so important that a lavish party to celebrate his 25th year in parliament was attended by Tony Blair, Theresa May, then Home Secretary, and Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe.

Many guests will have grimaced on receiving his gilt-edged invitations. But they went because their absence would have been seen as a snub to Asian VIPs attending.

Now, after 15 years of gliding through scandals and seemingly endless watchdog inquiries, the mud has finally stuck to the man they called the Teflon MP  or Vaz-eline. But as the charge sheet shows, it is a miracle hes survived this far.

Vaz was criticised in 2009 for claiming more than 75,500 in expenses for living in a Westminster flat even though his 1.5million family house was only 12 miles away

The first sleaze inquiry

It didnt take long for the whiff of controversy to engulf Vaz after he was appointed Europe minister. In early 2000 Elizabeth Filkin, the parliamentary commissioner for standards, began an investigation into whether Vaz had secretly taken thousands of pounds from a solicitor called Sarosh Zaiwalla to fund his parliamentary office, which he had not declared. He denied it.

The inquiry ran into a wall when Vaz refused to co-operate. Most complaints were not upheld, but many were listed as not completed rather than rejected.

The Select Committee report said: The commissioner had not been able, because of the unsatisfactory way in which information was provided by Mr Vaz and Mr Zaiwalla, to reach a conclusion as to whether Mr Vaz received any benefit from Mr Zaiwalla.

A key element of the inquiry was the involvement of Mapesbury Communications, a firm Vaz set up in 1994 for his earnings outside parliament. The sole shareholder was his wife. Filkin wrote that, despite repeated requests, Vaz refused to divulge the precise sources of the companys income or where it goes to.

Billioniare Hinduja brothers

Just months later in 2001, Filkin was looking again at Vazs tangled financial affairs. This time the allegation was that he had received payments via Mapesbury from billionaire brothers Gopichand and Srichand Hinduja.

The tycoons were already linked to an Indian corruption inquiry, which was eventually dropped, and had sought help from Vaz with their applications for British passports. Vaz was forced to admit he had made representations on behalf of the Hindujas who had paid money into Mapesbury. He quit as Minister for Europe on health grounds.

The affair cost Peter Mandelson his job as Northern Ireland secretary in 2001 after he intervened with the Home Office on behalf on Srichand Hindujas passport application.

French fraud scandal

That year, Vazs connections to another tycoon caught up with him. Vaz helped the Anglo-Iraqi billionaire Nadhmi Auchi, a former business associate, to avoid extradition to France where he was facing investigation for his alleged role in a fraud scandal which led to the arrest of a former French foreign minister. No action was taken against Vaz and he denied any wrong-doing.

Suspended from the Commons

Now a backbencher, Vaz was in trouble again. He was alleged to have made false allegations about retired policewoman Eileen Eggington, who he said had upset his elderly mother in a phone call.

Vaz had been accused by an ex-employee of his wife  and a friend of Eggington  of employing an illegal immigrant as a nanny and receiving gifts from Asian businessmen including the Hindujas.

No evidence was found to support the allegations, but police concluded that the former officer had not called Vazs mother. He was suspended from the Commons for a month for wasting police time over the phone call and blocking the Filkin inquiry into the Hinduja money.

The corrupt solicitor

Vaz was one of a handful of Labour MPs who publicly defended the late Janner against child sex abuse allegations at a time when prosecutors now admit the peer should have faced trial

In 2008, a year after he began chairing the select committee, the Mail told how Vaz intervened in a High Court case for friend and Labour donor Shahrokh Mireskandari, who had fraud convictions in the US and bogus legal qualifications.

Vaz became involved as the conman was on the brink of losing a 400,000 case against an airline. Astonishingly, he wrote to the judge in his capacity as chairman of the select committee, which has a key role in law-and-order issues.

In the letter Vaz played the race card saying: We are deeply concerned about the apparent way in which this ethnic-minority firm of solicitors has been dealt with. We have received a number of complaints from community representative authorities about this matter.

Vaz had not sought the consent of the committee members when he tried to help the conman from whom he had enjoyed lavish hospitality. Four years later, in a victory for the Mail, Mireskandari was kicked out of the legal profession.

Vaz and Mireskandari were close associates of Ali Dizaei, the former Met commander jailed in 2010 for perverting the course of justice.

The expenses fiddle

Vaz was criticised in 2009 for claiming more than 75,500 in expenses for living in a Westminster flat even though his 1.5million family house was only 12 miles away.

Shortly after claiming the flats 2,073 service charge and 1,022 council tax bill, he flipped his homes, designating his Leicester constituency property as his second home to enable him to claim more expenses. In Leicester, he used his allowances to spend 16,000 on furnishings including more than 480 on silk cushions; 2,614 for a pair of leather armchairs and foot stool; 1,000 on a dining table and leather chairs; 750 on carpets. Commons guidelines said MPs should avoid purchases which could be seen as extravagant or luxurious. He repaid thousands of pounds.

Questions over 500,000 in his bank account

In 2012 Scotland Yard revealed that funds believed to have been of a suspicious nature were paid into current and savings accounts either in Vazs name or linked to him.

Detectives found that, over a number of years, almost 500,000 was apparently put in the accounts  in addition to his salary. Vaz denied any wrongdoing and claimed that any money passing through his bank accounts came from the proceeds of property deals.

Death of nurse in Kate Middleton phone hoax

Indian nurse Jacintha Saldanha, working at the London hospital where Kate Middleton was being treated for morning sickness, hanged herself in December 2012 after being hoaxed over the phone by two Australian DJs claiming to be the Queen and Prince Charles.

Vaz quickly became her grief-stricken familys self-appointed media minder, parading them with her 14-year-old daughter Lisha in front of the TV cameras outside Parliament. His involvement was a mystery. The family was from Bristol, not his Leicester constituency. The only link was their Indian heritage. Labour MPs were aghast at Vazs shameless grandstanding.

Protecting paedophile Lord Janner

Vaz was one of a handful of Labour MPs who publicly defended the late Janner against child sex abuse allegations at a time when prosecutors now admit the peer should have faced trial. Vaz said Janner had been the victim of a wicked attack in 1991 when the allegations surfaced. He campaigned for a change in the law to prevent any repeat.

The future

When he celebrated his quarter of a century in Parliament, Vaz wrote a modestly titled book 25 Incredible Years. Next year will be his 30th in the Commons  but its unlikely he will be adding a final chapter.
Theresa May (pictured) hailed the strength of the British economy yesterday amid signs that the country will avoid recession after the Brexit vote

Theresa May hailed the strength of the British economy yesterday amid signs that the country will avoid recession after the Brexit vote.

The Prime Minister warned of difficult times ahead but insisted that the economy has performed better than many expected since the referendum.

We have had some good figures and better figures than some had predicted would be the case, she said.

Im not going to pretend that its all going to be plain sailing. I think we must be prepared for the fact that there may be some difficult times ahead. But what I am is optimistic.

A series of statistics in recent weeks have undermined doom-laden warnings by Remain campaigners, including David Cameron and George Osborne, that a vote to leave the EU would be a disaster for the economy. Mr Cameron warned that a vote to loosen our ties with Brussels would put a bomb under the economy, while Mr Osborne said it would cause a DIY recession.

But many experts now believe that a recession  two consecutive quarters of falling output  will be avoided.

The Bank of England thinks growth will slow from 0.6 per cent in the second quarter to 0.1 per cent in the current third quarter.

Matthew Turner, an analyst at investment bank Macquarie, said there was strong evidence in favour of our view there wont be a recession in the second half of this year.

James Knightley, senior economist at European banking giant ING, added: The UK economy is weathering the Brexit storm remarkably well. Jake Trask, an analyst at currency firm UKForex, said: Although the UK economy has undoubtedly been affected by the Brexit vote, the damage done seems far away from some of the apocalyptic predictions.

All eyes will be on a report into Britains powerhouse services sector due to be published today for further signs of how the economy is faring.

A series of statistics have undermined the warnings from Remain campaigners David Cameron (left) and George Osborne (right) that a vote to leave the EU would be a disaster for the economy

The Markit survey of private sector businesses, from hotels and restaurants to accountants and lawyers, is expected to show the economy stabilised in August following a slump in July after the referendum.

It follows upbeat reports into the manufacturing and construction sectors last week.

Research group Markit said its index of activity in British factories  where scores below 50 show decline and scores above 50 show growth  jumped five points to 53.3 last month.

It was the joint biggest increase since records began nearly 25 years ago.

The construction index rose from a seven-year low of 45.9 in July to 49.2 in August. Although that signalled output in the industry is falling, it was the best performance for three months and far stronger than expected.
Superbug strains of E.coli have been found in one in four supermarket chicken samples.

The revelations raise serious concerns about factory farms and the safety of fresh meat.

Antibiotic-resistant E.coli was detected on 22 of 92 chicken pieces bought from seven major supermarkets.

The samples included whole roasting chickens, packs of legs, thighs, drumsticks and diced breast meat.

Superbug strains of E.coli have been found in one in four supermarket chicken samples (file photo)

Antibiotic-resistant E.coli was detected on 22 of 92 chicken pieces bought from seven major supermarkets - including Tesco

E.coli, which kills more than 5,500 people a year in England, is associated with sepsis and urinary tract infections.

Modern farming techniques have been blamed for the emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria such as E.coli, campylobacter and salmonella.

Common bugs that make animals sick are mutating to become resistant to the antibiotics that farms use to eradicate them.

When people contract the same bugs doctors find it difficult to clear up their infections.

Meat from Tesco, Asda, Sainsburys, Morrisons, Waitrose, the Co-op and Aldi was involved in the testing.

HORROR INFECTION LEFT TV DOCTOR AT DEATH'S DOOR Ordeal: Chris Steele's heart was starting to fail Chris Steele came close to death after developing blood poisoning triggered by an E.coli infection. The resident doctor on ITVs This Morning could barely breathe and was on the brink of heart failure as sepsis took hold. It was only a 999 call by his wife and a race by ambulance to hospital that led to the treatment that saved his life. Virulent E.coli infections have struck down many more victims since Dr Steeles ordeal in 2009. Speaking at the time, he said: I had no idea what it was. I didnt have my doctor hat on  all my knowledge flew out of the window. All I could think of was that my breathing was so bad I must be at severe risk of heart failure and I needed help fast. Dr Steele was taken to Wythenshawe Hospital in south Manchester where it was discovered that his body was fighting a massive infection. Test results together with scans of his kidney, abdomen and chest revealed the trigger was E. coli. The bacteria, which normally live in the colon, had without any obvious cause escaped the intestine and moved to the kidneys, from where they had entered the bloodstream. This then triggered sepsis or blood poisoning, which is caused by the bodys response to the infection. Dr Steele was prescribed strong antibiotics through a drip which effectively saved his life. He said: After a few hours the antibiotics kicked in, the shaking stopped and I started drifting in and out of sleep. When they transferred me to a ward I spent most of the next two days sleeping while my body recovered. During that time my consultant had the lab results which confirmed my blood poisoning had been caused by E.coli. When he told me, I was absolutely staggered. As a doctor I knew the bug could strike like this. But as a patient I was absolutely shocked at the sheer randomness of it. Its quite frightening how it can strike at any time and theres nothing you can do about it. Advertisement

A total of 189 chicken and pork samples were examined by Mark Holmes, reader in microbial genomics and veterinary science at the University of Cambridge.

The levels of resistant E.coli that we have found are worrying, he said, adding that families can protect themselves by handling fresh meat carefully and cooking it thoroughly.

Every time someone falls ill, instead of just getting a food poisoning bug they might also be getting a bug that is antibiotic resistant.

If they end up developing sepsis or a urinary tract infection they may well find they have a bug that is resistant to the first choice antibiotic.

By the time they get on to the right antibiotic the bug could be out of control. It can even lead to death.

I am concerned that insufficient resources are being put into the surveillance of antibiotic resistance in farm animals and retail meat.

These results highlight the need for improvements in antibiotic stewardship in veterinary medicine.

Meat from Tesco, Asda, Sainsburys, Morrisons, Waitrose, the Co-op and Aldi was involved in the testing

A total of 189 chicken and pork samples, including items from Asda, were examined by Mark Holmes, reader in microbial genomics and veterinary science at the University of Cambridge

The study, which is the first of its kind to look for the presence of antibiotic-resistant strains of E.coli on high street meat, was commissioned by the campaigning group Alliance to Save our Antibiotics.

The group is made up of health, medical, environmental and animal welfare groups, including the Soil Association, Compassion in World Farming and Sustain.

Its scientific adviser, Coilin Nunan, said: These findings should be a wake-up call for supermarkets and the Government.

They show that many consumers are being exposed to high levels of antibiotic resistance daily at meal time. Scientific evidence is accumulating that the overuse of antibiotics on farms is an important contributor to antibiotic resistance in E.coli infections.

E.coli is now killing more than twice as many people as MRSA and Clostridium difficile combined, so the price of any further inaction will be measured in human lives.

The samples included whole roasting chickens, packs of legs, thighs, drumsticks and diced breast meat (file photos)

The Governments chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, has said the use of antibiotics on farm animals has been instrumental in the rise of superbugs.

Dame Sally has called on ministers and the farming industry to radically reduce the use of such drugs, which are deployed particularly on intensive factory farms.

She has painted an alarming scenario where in the future even minor infections could become untreatable.

Nineteen per cent of the E. coli were resistant to gentamicin, a very important human antibiotic used to treat more serious upper urinary-tract infections (file photo)

Antimicrobial resistance poses a catastrophic threat, she said. If we dont act now, any one of us could go into hospital in 20 years for minor surgery and die because of an ordinary infection that cant be treated by antibiotics.

The Cambridge research found 24 per cent of chicken was positive for ESBL E.coli, which is resistant to the critically important modern cephalosporin antibiotics used in human medicine.

The study also found that half of all chicken and pork samples  51 per cent  were resistant to the antibiotic trimethoprim, which is used to treat over half of lower urinary-tract infections.

Nineteen per cent of the E. coli were resistant to gentamicin, a very important human antibiotic used to treat more serious upper urinary-tract infections.

Antibiotic-resistant E.coli was found in samples from all the seven supermarkets surveyed. Researchers collected 174 samples from stores across England and another 15 from Scotland.
Jeremy Clarkson caused controversy when he appeared to fly a drone in a protected area for rare birds of prey on the South East coast.

The former Top Gear presenter was spotted filming for his new show The Grand Tour at Beachy Head, East Sussex.

Jeremy Clarkson caused controversy when he appeared to fly a drone in a protected area for rare birds of prey

The former Top Gear presenter was spotted filming for his new show The Grand Tour at Beachy Head

The filming of the drone stunt took place in a protected area for peregrine falcons

But his appearance provoked a reaction because the drone was flown in a key nesting area for peregrine falcons.

The birds of prey are the fastest animal on Earth and have legal protection from persecution.

Council bosses are thought to have complained to the filming crew about the stunt.

But Clarkson should be able to escape criticism because although it looked like he was piloting the drone - a producer appears to be actually in charge of the controller.

Clarkson should be able to escape criticism because although it looked like he was piloting he drone - a producer appeared to actually be in charge of the controller

The film crew went to the East Sussex beauty spot for the scenes which feature in The Grand Tour - Amazon Prime's new motoring show

Jeremy took a break in the filming to relax and take in the sea air in East Sussex

The Grand Tour will air on Amazon Prime in the autumn and is highly anticipated after the latest Top Gear series struggled for ratings following his Clarkson's departure.

The stunt comes just days after images of Amazon's secret drone testing were published.

The Internet retail giant has built a high wall of hay bales to hide its testing area in a field around five miles east of its research and development centre in Cambridge.

Amazon wants to use drones to deliver packages to people's homes in under 30 minutes, claiming they are greener and safer than its vans.

The drama comes after Clarkson accidentally gate-crashed Danny Dyer's wedding in Hampshire.

The petrol-head had travelled to Chewton Glen Hotel for a break but had a shock when hundreds of guests turned up to a wedding.

Hotel staff said Jeremy 'couldn't believe' that the Eastenders' star's wedding was taking place at the same hotel.

Danny Dyer who tied the knot with Joanne Mas pictured together on the red carpet
Lottie Elliott, 28, accused British Medical Association bosses of showing disregard for patient safety after stepping down

A junior doctors leader has quit amid a growing backlash over next weeks five-day strike.

Lottie Elliott accused British Medical Association bosses of showing disregard for patient safety.

In a sign of growing division within the union, the 28-year-old stepped down from its junior doctors committee over the weekend saying she felt bullied.

The BMA wants to stage five-day strikes every month until Christmas which are expected to cause the cancellation of 125,000 operations and one million appointments.

But senior union bosses are said to be in a real panic as so many junior doctors have told them they cannot afford to take part because they will lose pay.

Thousands of doctors are planning to cross picket lines and work normally when the first of the walkouts starts next Monday. And today the General Medical Council issues a stark warning to junior doctors informing them they face being struck off if patients come to harm.

A&E trainee Miss Elliott, who was the committees representative for Merseyside, said: I cannot associate myself with a group of people with such a disregard for patient safety. I think its just gone too far now, she told the Mail.

The doctor hit out at the ridiculous lack of time for NHS hospital trusts to organise cover and said five days of strikes was not a suitable escalation from previous action.

The action theyre proposing is disproportionate to what theyre asking for, she said. Its not just five days of action, its flanked by the weekends  patients would be going nine days without properly seeing anyone.The NHS is already under strain and pressure and it concerns me that wed only be adding to that. I dont think theres any appetite now.

Dr Elliott, who was born in Yorkshire and trained at Liverpool University Medical School, said she felt bullied by the union and feared other junior doctors would troll her on social media for quitting and speaking out.

I didnt feel I was being listened to, she said. I felt bullied. The secrecy is quite a big thing, weve been kept in the dark. The [new] strike came as a surprise, we didnt know anything about it.

The BMA wants to stage five-day strikes every month until Christmas which are expected to cause the cancellation of 125,000 operations and one million appointments

For me as a personal choice I just cant be associated with the junior doctors committee any more. But Im worried that other junior doctors will come out and attack me. Dr Elliott said compared to the previous strikes this year, the feeling among junior doctors was very mixed.

A lot of people agree its too late, its something they would have supported in April. Its months down the line now, things have changed.

But theyre [the executive] in a very difficult position  how do they please the 56 per cent who voted no to the contract as well as those who voted to accept it? The strikes have been organised after junior doctors voted to reject a new Government contract in June, which will see them paid less for working weekends.

However, those who take part in action could lose thousands in pay. A trainee earning 34,000 a year would stand to lose 700 every month if action lasts until Christmas.

Thousands have already contacted hospital human resources departments to says they will work as normal so their pay isnt docked. Many have vowed on social media to cross the picket lines, believing the five-day walk-out is a step too far.

One wrote on Facebook yesterday: To drop tools and not attend to patients for five days a month for the rest of the year, seems a little too extreme.

The General Medical Council has issued a stark warning to junior doctors informing them they face being struck off if patients come to harm

Another wrote: Five days in a row at such short notice - its too far. Weve lost the support of many senior doctors and now the public will follow.

A senior union source said: The BMA is in a real panic about what will happen now. Its been a massive misjudgment.

The BMA organised the strikes after a referendum of junior doctors in June in which 58 per cent voted to reject the contract and 42 per cent were in favour.

But the unions own polling figures show that only 4 per cent of junior doctors in England actually voted to stage the five-day walkouts in protest.

It carried out a second survey  in secret  in July asking what action to take, of which about 7,000 junior doctors replied.

Fewer than a third  2,100  were in favour of staging all-out strikes, under 4 per cent of the 53,000-strong workforce.

Today the General Medical Council issues a statement to junior doctors reminding them that they face disciplinary action if patients are harmed during the walkouts.

Professor Terence Stephenson, chairman of the GMC said: We do not believe that the scale of action planned at such short notice can be justified and we are now calling on every doctor in training to pause and consider the implications for patients.

GMC chief executive Niall Dickson added: Where we are presented with evidence that a doctors actions may have directly led to a patient or patients coming to significant harm, we would be obliged to investigate and if necessary take appropriate action.
The tiny bones of infants in ancient cemeteries around Britain have given Romans a reputation of being cold and merciless.

But researchers using an innovative method of scanning bones have revealed that these tiny bodies were not the victims of vicious infanticide at all.

Instead it appears many of the infants were stillborns, buried in cemeteries alongside other adults, suggesting they were mourned by their families.

Researchers have used an innovative method of scanning bones in the hopes of improving our understanding of child mortality in Roman Britain

WHAT IS X-RAY MICROTOMOGRAPHY? X-ray microtomography is a non-destructive method that allows access to the inner vision of an object without cutting the sample. The imaging technique is based on the property of X-rays to pass through the material and be absorbed depending on the nature and density of the components they cross. Scans are taken at various angles, before a computer reconstructs the object in 3D. Advertisement

Historians had suggested the infants could have been murdered shortly after birth as an attempt to control family sizes or even to ensure a family had more boys than girls.

The results, however, suggest infanticide was not as widespread as previously believed, with many cases actually being stillborn.

The study was led by researchers from the Natural History Museum, Museum of London and Durham University.

Dr Thomas Booth, co-author of the study, said: 'Distinguishing between the remains of stillborn and liveborn infants is important to archaeologists to judge the health of past populations and to understand how past societies regarded these young deaths.

'There are many examples of cultures both past and present whose ideologies led them to regard these young deaths in a way that meant they had to be treated differently.

'This can be seen relatively recently in the exclusion of unbaptised infants from Catholic cemeteries.'

A x-ray microtomography (Micro-CT) scanner allowed the researchers to compare microscopic surfaces inside the bones, without causing any damage

WHAT IS BIOEROSION? Bioerosion is the removal of mineralised substrate through the action of organisms. It is the most common form of microbial attack on archaeological bone.

Although it was once believed that soil bacteria caused most of this bioerosion in bone, it is the gut microbia that is responsible for corpse putrification that causes this process. A few weeks into a child's life, gut bacteria begin to form, which will damage bones after death through bioerosion. The fact that the bones were undamaged suggests they belonged to stillborns who had not yet developed the gut bacteria. Advertisement

The researchers looked at ten infant skeletons from cemeteries around London.

A x-ray microtomography (micro-CT) scanner allowed the researchers to compare microscopic surfaces inside the bones, without causing any damage.

The scans showed that most of the bones were undamaged.

A few weeks into a child's life, gut bacteria begin to form, which will damage bones after death in a process called bioerosion.

The fact that the bones were undamaged suggests they belonged to stillborns who had not yet developed the gut bacteria.

Previous studies have cut open bone and tooth samples to look at the internal structure.

However, this was not representative of the whole bone, and damaged the skeleton.

The scans showed that most of the bones were undamaged. A few weeks into a child's life, gut bacteria begin to form, which will damage bones after death in a process called bioerosion. The fact that the bones were undamaged suggests they belonged to stillborns

ROMANS AND INFANTICIDE It was previously thought that Romans used infanticide to manipulate the sex ratio and were more likely to murder girls than boys. In 2014, Archaeologists examined 1,800-year-old skeletons of babies found in Britain to discover that baby girls were not killed more often than male infants. Infanticide was relatively commonly used to control the size of families. The Romans did not consider babies fully human and instead thought that children gained humanity over time, with milestones such as their naming and eating food all adding to them being human. Advertisement

Dr Booth said: 'The ability to more accurately differentiate between stillborn and short-lived infants, without having to alter precious archaeological skeletons, will profoundly impact on the study of past human life.'

The researchers now hope to do further studies to improve our understanding of the lives of people in Roman Britain.

Dr Rebecca Redfern, co-author of the study, said: 'The size of the Museum of London's 20,000-strong collection of skeletons means we are uniquely placed to investigate research questions such as this one, as well as to provide meaningful interpretation of the results with our detailed archive information.
This artist's impression shows a powerfully-built sailor believed to be the Mary Rose's carpenter

Almost 500 years after she sank, the Mary Rose is still giving up her secrets.

This artist's impression shows a powerfully-built sailor believed to be the ship's carpenter  a man in his mid to late 30s, who was around 5ft 8in tall and died below deck.

But the identities of hundreds of other drowned sailors remain a mystery, which British scientists hope to solve with help from international academics.

By assembling bones retrieved from the depths of the Solent, they already know the carpenter's teeth were rotten, with a major abscess, and he had arthritis and skull pitting suggesting scurvy.

His remains were found in a cabin used to store cable, he wore a tool belt, and the remains of a dog, a brown Jack Russell cross experts nicknamed Hatch, were discovered nearby.

Examination of his skull was used to create an image of a man with a broad face, deep-set eyes, thin lips and a boxer's nose.

While he is depicted with light brown hair and blue eyes, only DNA analysis would confirm this.

And by photographing and scanning thousands of other unidentified bones, experts hope to piece together whole skeletons by putting them online.

While much has been learnt about Henry VIII's favourite ship since she was raised in 1982, the remains of many  including the captain, navigator, boatswain and surgeon  are still unidentified.

Launched in 1511, the Mary Rose was the Tudor king's flagship for 34 years before she sank off Portsmouth in a battle with the French in 1545. Around 500 men were aboard and just 35 survived.

During excavation, some 10,000 bones belonging to more than 400 crew were recovered from the seabed.

Launched in 1511, the Mary Rose (pictured) was the Tudor king's flagship for 34 years before she sank off Portsmouth in a battle with the French in 1545

Some 92 skeletons have been partly assembled, including those of the carpenter, a gunner, purser and cook, plus several archers and officers.

But the bones are delicate and the work is complex, time-consuming and relies on a lot of luck.

Making them available to academics around the world via a password-protected website could vastly speed up the process, the British Science Festival in Swansea will hear this week.

Swansea University experts and the Mary Rose Trust have already put detailed images of ten skulls online.

The 3D images, created by stitching together hundreds of high-resolution photos, can be twisted and turned, magnified and shrunk.

By assembling bones (pictured) retrieved from the depths of the Solent, they already know the carpenter's teeth were rotten, with a major abscess, and he had arthritis and skull pitting suggesting scurvy

The Virtual Tudors site, launched today, also has a public section featuring the carpenter's skull.

Alex Hildred, head of research at the trust, said: 'Excavating the cabin was like stepping into a deserted workshop. There were things hanging up tucked between frames, like a grandfather's shed.'

Some of the carpenter's tools are also on display online and at the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth.

Dr Hildred added: 'If we can make that assemblage accessible in a number of ways, then we are engaging more people than we can just in the museum.'
Drake Bell has been released from jail after serving less than 48 hours.

The Nickelodeon alum, who was sentenced to the mandatory 96 hours behind bars after a second DUI conviction, walked free on Saturday evening around 6pm.

TMZ reports that the star was locked up on Friday but released early due to good behaviour.

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Jail time: Drake Bell has taken a plea deal which involves a sentence of 96 hours in L.A. County Jail following his second DUI conviction

It was reported on Saturday that Drake had struck a plea deal to serve 96 hours in L.A. County Jail.

He received his second DUI conviction this past January.

The sentence is mandatory for the 30-year-old, as the January offense was his second, after having been busted for a DUI in San Diego back in 2009.

As he was: Drake was an icon to children across American when he starred in Nickelodeon's Drake & Josh, which ran from 2004 until 2007

He will also be placed on four years probation and must attend an alcohol education program in addition to the jail time.

The second charge came in January as Drake was allegedly caught straddling a lane and driving 55 in a 35 MPH zone in Los Angeles County.

He had been pulled over in the early hours in the city of Glendale after officers supposedly spotted his erratic driving and saw him make a sudden stop at a red light.

A Glendale Police spokesman told People that he was stopped on December 21 at around 2:18 am, and that lawmen 'smelled an odor of alcohol' from him.

He was then ordered to take a sobriety test which he was unable to complete to the satisfaction of the police officers.

At the time Drake was arrested on suspicion of DUI and then later released after posting $20,000 bail.

Back in January Los Angeles District Attorney's office spokesperson Ricardo Santiago said that Drake had been charged with misdemeanor DUI, which has a maximum sentence of one year in county jail.

Taking a plea: Back in January Drake had been charged with misdemeanor DUI, which has a maximum sentence of one year in county jail (pictured in May 2015)

After appearing in commercials Drake became a child star when he scored a role on Amanda Bynes' comedy sketch vehicle The Amanda Show.

After he ended his spell on that show he was given his own, as aspiring musician Drake Parker on Drake & Josh, which ran from 2004 until 2007.

He has continued to work in television, notably as the titular role in Ultimate Spider-Man, and he has also been focusing on launching a more adult-oriented music career, with his most recent album being 2014's Ready, Steady, Go.
After 12 years of the X Factor, the judges have seen their fair share of unusual auditions.

But the panel proved they could still be left speechless after encountering living doll Sada Vidoo.

In scenes due to air on Sunday night's show, Simon Cowell, Nicole Scherzinger. Louis Walsh and Sharon Osbourne were left scratching their heads after the performance artist entered the room.

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Unexpected: After 12 years of the X Factor, the judges have seen a lot. But the panel proved they could still be left speechless after encountering living doll Sada Vidoo

With Sharon's first response being: 'she looks like a toilet roll!' the judges were in stitches before Sada even opened her mouth.

Explaining that her doll-like appearance just 'depended on her mood,' the bubbly blonde then burst into a rendition of Pat Benatar's Love Is a Battlefield.

As the judges were left undeniably shocked by the scenes, Simon finally found the words he was looking for as he remarked: 'You are fantastically nuts... and we encourage that.'

Confused: In scenes due to air on Sunday night's show, Simon Cowell, Nicole Scherzinger. Louis Walsh and Sharon Osbourne were left scratching their heads

Elsewhere on the episode, Simon caused controversy with his remarks towards Tom and Laura - a singing duo and real-life couple.

The couple - who have been dating for nearly three years, blew the audience away with their rendition of Kings of Leon's Sex on Fire.

Whilst Sharon remarked the performance had given her 'goosebumps', Simon encouraged Tom to ditch Laura and go it alone.

Bold look: With Sharon's first response being: 'she looks like a toilet roll!' the judges were in stitches before Sada even opened her mouth

Having a ball! Explaining that her doll-like appearance just 'depended on her mood,' the bubbly blonde then burst into a rendition of Pat Benatar's Love Is a Battlefield

Scared: Sharon appeared to be hiding behind her paper as the performance went on

Fan: After the judges were stunned into silence, Simon finally found the words he was looking for as he remarked: 'You are fantastically nuts... and we encourage that'

His suggestion was met with strong opposal from his fellow judges who yelled out at him, whilst the audience gasped in horror.

As Tom insisted that he would not leave his partner, Simon didn't seem surprised.

Still not backing down, he suggested Laura let her boyfriend 'take the lead' in the future.

Better alone: Elsewhere on the episode, Simon caused controversy with his remarks towards Tom and Laura - a singing duo and real-life couple - as he told them they should split

Giving it their all: Singing hopefuls Irina Dedyuk and Matt Terry weren't going down without a fight as they gave it their all in the audition room
HBO's The Deuce still has yet to nail down its 2017 release date.

But this Friday, the cast and crew of the James Franco-led series were hard at work filming it nonetheless.

Maggie Gyllenhaal was spotted perfectly capturing the look of the programme's 1970s milieu as she worked on set in New York City.

Hard at work: On Friday, Maggie Gyllenhaal was spotted filming her upcoming HBO series The Deuce in New York City

In an updo roughly redolent of Goldie Hawn at the 1973 Oscars, the 38-year-old's red hair complemented her rust-coloured vest and frilly mahogany scarf.

With several buttons undone, her sheer off-white blouse struck an elegant combination with her brown pencil skirt.

When not filming, she swapped out her character's ankle-strap stilettos for flat slippers. A Toby's Estate iced coffee in one hand, she tucked an orange water bottle under the other arm in order to keep a grip on her sides for the day.

Who's who: The James Franco starrer will feature the 38-year-old as a 1970s Times Square prostitute who enters the city's incipient porn industry

How to succeed: The This Is The End star will play the Martino twins, who become enmeshed in the mafia's domination of the industry

Sprawling: The programme will stretch into the 1980s, whereupon its characters will face such sea changes as the AIDS crisis and crack epidemic

Created by The Wire impresario David Simon and his co-writer on that programme George Pelecanos, The Deuce features Gyllenhaal as a Times Square prostitute who manages an entree into the city's burgeoning porn business.

Starring the The Interview actor as the based-in-reality Martino twins - who become enmeshed in the mafia's domination of the industry - The Deuce will cover a period stretching from the 1970s into the 1980s.

By then, the characters will contend with such sea changes as the crack epidemic and the emergence of AIDS.

Gyllenhaal and Franco, as well as Simon and Pelecanos, are among the producers. The This Is The End star will, on top of his other responsibilities, reputedly be directing an episode.

Time line: HBO picked up the pilot, which was shot last year, for an eight-episode series that will air in 2017

After its pilot was shot late last year, HBO picked the programme up this January for an eight-episode series slated to air sometime next year.

With an cast of regulars that include Gary Carr, Margaret Levieva and Lawrence Gilliard Jr, The Deuce will also feature several guest stars.

According to IMDb, David Krumholtz of Numbers fame will appear on four episodes as a character called Harvey Wasserman.

On Friday, he was in his character's full getup, which included high-waisted camel slacks and a light red shirt tucked in strategically where it would emphasise his corpulent frame.
The Bachelor's Lana Jeavons-Fellows has been enjoying a romantic trip to Indonesia with her partner Jake Meah this month.

And coming to the end of her vacation to Bali, has now expressed she's sorry to be leaving the 'perfect weather'.

In a photo posted to Instagram on Friday, she flaunted her toned physique in a hot pink bikini top and denim shorts, soaking up the last drops of sunshine before heading home at The Oberoi hotel in Lombok.

'Forever on vacation': Bachelor's Lana Jeavons-Fellows flaunts her toned physique in a hot pink bikini and denim shorts admitting that she will miss the perfect Bali weather once home from her romantic holiday with beau Jake Meah

She captioned the snap: 'I'm going to miss this perfect weather', along with the hashtags '#Bali #vacay #foreveronvacation #triangl'.

But if Lana's Instagram account is anything to go by, it seems her new boyfriend has been mysteriously absent for the last week.

There appears to be no 'trouble in paradise', for the pair with one snap of the two emerging last week with the loved-up couple at a five-star hotel in Lombok.

He's back! The Bachelor runner-up Lana shared a loved-up snap with her boyfriend Jake Meah (R) on holiday in Indonesia last week

In the snap, Lana is shown relaxing with Jake on a hammock as she gently places her hand on his muscular chest.

She captioned the image, 'Salty love', suggesting the couple recently enjoyed a dip in the ocean together.

Jake has been mostly absent on the brown haired beauty's Instagram page for most of the last week.

Camera shy? Despite being her travelling partner, Jake has only featured a few times on her Instagram page, preferring to stay behind the camera. Pictured on a cycling trip last week

True love: Jake has been dutifully playing the role of 'Instagram husband' by taking photos of his girlfriend posing in racy bikinis

But it would seem he is perfectly happy to let Lana take centre-stage while he remains behind the camera.

Jake has been dutifully playing the role of 'Instagram husband' by taking photos of his girlfriend posing poolside in racy bikinis.

The couple's most recent luxury destination was Lombok, located just 20 minutes from Bali, but the two are now on the home stretch and appear to be heading home.

Flawless: This is Lana's fifth visit to Indonesia, and she has been soaking up as much sun as possible before returning Down Under

This is Lana's fifth visit to Indonesia, and she has been soaking up as much sun as possible before returning Down Under.

In June, she announced her relationship with Jake in an exclusive interview with NW magazine.

They briefly dated before Lana filmed The Bachelor last year and rekindled their romance after she was left heartbroken by Sam Wood.
They have been plagued by rumours of a split after she was spotted without her wedding ring on numerous occasions.

But following their show of affection at the recent launch party of her latest drama Our Girl, Michelle Keegan has spoken out about her relationship with husband Mark Wright - insistent the reports are 'rubbish'.

The defiant 29-year-old actress lashed out at rumours in a chat with The Sun as she dismissed speak of a rift in her marriage to the presenter and former TOWIE star.

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Rubbish: Michelle Keegan has spoken out about her relationship with husband Mark Wright - insistent the reports are 'rubbish'

'We don't read what is written about us. Are the rumours rubbish? Yeah. We are all very good and everything is fine,' the former Coronation Street star said.

And having recently returned from filming for 8 weeks in South Africa, the brunette beauty revealed she thoroughly enjoyed a brief romantic break with her beau.

'I have been so busy and Mark has been so busy. But we have just had three days in Majorca which was lovely.

'It was so nice to have each other's undivided attention and not to have to plan anything. It wasn't like, 'I need to be up for filming' or 'I need to do the radio'. It was just downtime.'

Stronger than ever! The couple remain defiant in the face of their rumoured strife

Going strong: The 29-year-old actress spoke to The Sun and blasted rumours of a rift in her marriage to the presenter and former TOWIE star

Although she speaks of the delights of her trip with her husband, Michelle and Mark were photographed in tense conversation over a dinner on the holiday.

The image added further fuel to the reports of trouble, as the strained pair sat with frowning, contorted faces while seemingly having a serious conversation.

The absence of her eye-popping engagement ring has been a central element of the claims of trouble as insiders suggest their marriage is coming to a close.

Speak of a split comes after rumours surfaced claiming Michelle was growing increasingly close to her co-star Luke Pasqualino in forthcoming, long-awaited BBC drama Our Girl, in which she plays Lance Corporal Georgie Lane to Luke's character, maverick Special Forces officer Elvis Harte.

It's back! The absence of her eye-popping engagement ring has been a central element of the claims of trouble as insiders suggest their marriage is coming to a close

Back on! The absence of her eye-popping engagement ring has been a central element of the claims of trouble as insiders suggest their marriage is coming to a close

Laughing it off: Both Mark and Michelle continue to slam rumours

Just the two of us: The show launched at a swanky bash in London on Thursday, where the stunning actress ensured her wedding ring was in full focus during the recent launch party, Luke, who is reportedly dating Little Mix's Perrie Edwards, was nowhere to be seen

The show launched at a swanky bash in London on Thursday, where the stunning actress ensured her wedding ring was in full focus during the recent launch party, Luke, who is reportedly dating Little Mix's Perrie Edwards, was nowhere to be seen.

Reports surfaced claiming Luke had dodged the premiere in a bid to avoid questions about their union, although representatives for BBC and Luke told MailOnline his absence was down to work commitments.

Sources told The Sun: 'Michelle and Luke obviously formed a close bond while being away from home for so long. But he just wants to the talk to be about his performances, not face the inevitable questions about his relationship with Michelle. His responses could fuel even more rumours.'

'I have been so busy and Mark has been so busy. But we have just had three days in Majorca which was lovely', she said of her romantic break

Happy time: Michelle and Mark's love story has played out in the public eye

Standing strong: There was no sign of trouble as Michelle wowed at the bash

Earlier this year a previous story from New! magazine claimed the Heart presenter was concerned when fans linked Michelle to handsome co-star Luke.

Michelle had innocently shared a group picture with some of the cast at their read through which was captioned: Me and some of the boys at our cast read through for Our Girl 2! X

But a representative for Mark told MailOnline: 'It's a completely fabricated and made up story written by people desperate for content.'
Downton Abbey actress Lily James has been enjoying a thoroughly aristocratic break in Ibiza with her lover Matt Smith.

Lily, 27, who played Lady Rose in the ITV drama, looked totally immersed in the islands chilled vibe as she relaxed with former Doctor Who actor Matt, 33, who has just finished filming Netflixs production The Crown, in which he plays a young Prince Philip.

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Lily, 27, looked totally immersed in the islands chilled vibe as she relaxed with former Doctor Who actor Matt, 33

The Royal Family are said to be very, very aware of the programme and both nervous and excited.

Lilys image has become racier since her Downton days  she was seen in controversial sex scenes in the BBCs War And Peace earlier this year and has recently posed topless in ads for a fragrance by Burberry.

Thats not what Id call good timing.

On the day the UKs last BHS stores closed last week, Chloe Green rebooted her Instagram account.

Perhaps on the advice of her father, Sir Philip Green  the retail billionaire who has been heavily criticised following the BHS collapse  Chloe, 25, stopped using the account 18 weeks ago.

But on Monday, she posted a series of glamorous snaps of a life most BHS staff can only dream of, with her posing on a red carpet, in a yacht and pouting in a selfie while dripping in diamonds.

The wedding of Lydia Forte, daughter of hotelier Sir Rocco Forte, stunned even the most world-weary socialites.

The brides mother, designer Aliai, created a three-day extravaganza in Tuscany as Lydia tied the knot this weekend with shipping scion Dimitri Chandris.

All a big step from when the brides grandfather, the late Lord Forte, started his hotel empire with a small milk bar in Regent Street.

Guests included Princess Beatrice, stepping out in public for the first time since splitting from boyfriend Dave Clark.
Alessandra Ambrosio kicked off her Saturday morning with a sweaty workout session alongside her four-year-old son Noah at yoga class.

'Yoga with my buddie NAMASTE #labordayweekend #calilife #yogi!' the 35-year-old IMG Model - who boasts 12.8M followers - captioned the snap.

After freshening up, the NBC Olympics correspondent grabbed lunch at Cafe Habana in Santa Monica with the adorable tyke, two of his pals, and her fiance of eight years, Jamie Mazur.

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Partners: Alessandra Ambrosio kicked off her Saturday morning with a sweaty workout session alongside her four-year-old son Noah at yoga class

The 35-year-old IMG Model - who boasts 12.8M followers - captioned the snap: 'Yoga with my buddie NAMASTE #labordayweekend #calilife #yogi'

Like his big sister before him, little Noah reportedly attends the nearby private Cassidy Preschool where tuition is said to cost between $13K-18K.

Alessandra - whose stylist is Jamie's sister Jennifer - looked leggy in an orange floral top, matching espadrilles, and Daisy Duke cut-offs.

Ambrosio was rocking a gold bauble on her left ring finger, but has yet to walk down the aisle with the Re/Done owner.

'When I do the wedding it's going to be very special, so I want to take time for that,' the Brazilian brunette told Extra in December.

Cuban-Mexican eatery: After freshening up, the NBC Olympics correspondent grabbed lunch at Cafe Habana in Santa Monica with the adorable tyke, two of his pals, and her fiance of eight years, Jamie Mazur

All smiles! Like his big sister before him, little Noah reportedly attends the nearby private Cassidy Preschool where tuition is said to cost between $13K-18K

Boho babe: Alessandra - whose stylist is Jamie's sister Jennifer - looked leggy in an orange floral top, matching espadrilles, and Daisy Duke cut-offs

Lots of jewelry: Ambrosio was rocking a gold bauble on her left ring finger, but has yet to walk down the aisle with the Re/Done owner

The Brazilian brunette told Extra in December: 'When I do the wedding it's going to be very special, so I want to take time for that'

Alessandra later treated her darling boy and his friend to fun rides and games at the 35th Annual Malibu Kiwanis Chili Cook-off.

Noah cowered beside his famous mother as she triumphantly raised her arms alongside his enthusiastic pal on one attraction.

Mazur snapped pictures of the grinning trio as they sailed on the dizzying, nausea-inducing carnival ride.

It's unclear why the ale by Alessandra designer's eldest child Anja missed out on the end of summer festivities.

Weee! Alessandra later treated her darling boy and his friend to fun rides and games at the 35th Annual Malibu Kiwanis Chili Cook-off

No hands! Noah cowered beside his famous mother as she triumphantly raised her arms alongside his enthusiastic pal on one attraction

There's your Dad! Mazur snapped pictures of the grinning trio as they sailed on the dizzying, nausea-inducing carnival ride

Cradling his green turtle prize: It's unclear why the ale by Alessandra designer's eldest child Anja missed out on the end of summer festivities

The longtime couple celebrated their daughter's 8th birthday on August 24.

On Thursday, Alessandra shared a cute karaoke video of her privileged princess belting Taylor Swift's 2012 hit song I Knew You Were Trouble.

And on August 18, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles actress filmed the Victoria's Secret holiday campaign at the Paris Opera House with director Michael Bay.

'Growing too fast!' The longtime couple celebrated their daughter's 8th birthday on August 24

Sing it! On Thursday, Alessandra shared a cute karaoke video of her privileged princess belting Taylor Swift's 2012 hit song I Knew You Were Trouble

Impressively, the 5ft9in catwalker has been modeling for the San Francisco lingerie brand as far back as 2001.

'I have been working in the modeling industry for almost 20 years,' Ambrosio told Vogue in July.

'And have done so much, but there is always more I can do and learn. [Right now] I am most excited about new experiences.'

'#comingsoon!' And on August 18, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles actress filmed the Victoria's Secret holiday campaign at the Paris Opera House with director Michael Bay

2015 versus 2001: Impressively, the 5ft9in catwalker has been modeling for the San Francisco lingerie brand for 15 years
She has been plagued with rumours about how her marriage to former NRL star Stuart Webb is on the rocks.

But Kate Ritchie appeared to be playing happy families when she posted a sweet Father's Day tribute to her husband on Sunday.

The former Home and Away star shared a snap of Stuart playing on the beach with their two-year-old daughter Mae.

Playing happy families? Kate Ritchie posted a sweet Father's Day snap with her husband Stuart Webb and their daughter Mae, two, amid rumours their marriage is on the rocks

'These two.. #mutualadoration #happyfathersday #daddydaughter #truelove,' she captioned the image.

It is not known where the picture was taken, but the family moment may have been captured at Sydney's Palm Beach - where Home And Away is filmed.

The actress posted a selfie at Summer Bay on Saturday, saying the place still holds a special place in her heart.

Claims: Kate has been plagued with rumours about how her marriage to former NRL star Stuart Webb is on the rocks

She has remained quiet on the rumours surrounding the alleged breakdown of her marriage.

Woman's Day magazine has claimed that constant fighting and bickering over nothing led to the couple's alleged split.

According to the magazine, a mutual friend of the couple claimed that, 'Kate and Stu's relationship has been on the rocks since November last year'.

The mutual friend of the couple also claimed that 'Kate's the one who has been having second thoughts, not Stu.

'He is a mess, but she hasn't felt the spark for a while and has had enough of the constant fighting and bickering over nothing, which is why they are now living separately,' the source added.

But despite rumours, the brunette seemed keen to show her life was carrying on as normal when she stepped out with her two-year-old daughter last week.

The missing bling: The brunette beauty sparked speculation of a split after she was spotted without her wedding ring last month

Rough patch: Kate Ritchie and Stuart Webb's marriage of almost six years is said to be facing tough times as the couple allegedly spend their nights apart

She was seen holding Mae on her hip as the pair left a leisure centre in Sydney following the toddler's swimming lesson.

With her brunette locks tied back in a high ponytail, the radio presenter was seen carrying two towels and a black bag - as well as her toddler.

It was not possible to see whether she was wearing her diamond engagement ring.

The couple fuelled speculation that they may be about to split after they were both spotted without their wedding rings in recent weeks.

New Idea also reported that the troubled couple have allegedly been living apart as they sort out their issues.

Friends have voiced their concerns about Kate and Stuart's relationship as the couple prepare to celebrate their sixth wedding anniversary next month.

Split life: While Stuart is allegedly living separately in the couple's Burradoo home, Kate and their daughter Mae are still at their place in Randwick

'It's rare for Kate and Stu not to wear their wedding rings, and they have been spending a bit of time apart as well,' a friend told New Idea.

'So we're all naturally worried,' the insider added.

Kate was seen without her huge cushion-cut diamond engagement ring and wedding band while hosting her drive program on Nova 96.9FM last month.

Her former rugby league star husband was also spotted without his ring while out in Sydney recently.

Meanwhile, the retired St. George player has been staying at the couple's Burradoo home in the NSW Southern Highlands, which they purchased earlier this month.

Separate lives: Stuart has been staying at the couple's newly-purchased home, according to New Idea

Stuart appears to be 'living there full-time,' according to a neighbour who spoke to New Idea.

Kate and the couple's two-year-old daughter Mae are still living in their family home in Randwick.

'If she and Stuart do end up splitting, then Kate will be committed to them co-parenting together and keeping Mae shielded from any tension.

'There'll be no ugly custody battles or public slanging matches...it's not Kate's style,' the source added.




The last surviving Bee Gee believes his brothers may be stayin alive, after experiencing life-after-death visions of them.

In a moving interview with The Mail on Sundays Event magazine today, Barry Gibb says he and his wife, Linda, have seen deceased bandmate Robin as well as younger brother Andy  and found the manifestations disturbing.

Father-of-five Barry, 70, says: Its not fun because youre not quite sure what it was about. If it was real. I saw Robin and my wife saw Andy. Maybe its a memory producing itself outside your conscious mind or maybe its real.

In a moving interview with The Mail on Sundays Event magazine today, Barry Gibb says he and his wife, Linda, have seen deceased bandmate Robin as well as younger brother Andy

He adds: The biggest question of all is: is there life after death? Id like to know.

As the Bee Gees, Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibbs catalogue of hits includes pop classics Jive Talkin, Stayin Alive, Night Fever, How Deep Is Your Love and Tragedy. Barry, the oldest of the three Bee Gee brothers, also went on to enjoy success outside the band, most notably on Guilty, his duet with Barbra Streisand.

He says the loss of three of his brothers had a devastating effect on those left behind, including his mother, now 95. His younger brother, Andy, a star in his own right but not part of the band, died aged 30 in 1988 after years of drug abuse.

There was further heartbreak in 2003 when Maurice, then 53, died in hospital after he suffered complications from a twisted intestine. And Robin died from cancer at the age of 62 in 2012.

Barry says: Mo was gone in two days. Maybe thats better than long and tortured? Which is what Robin went through. Andy went at 30. All different forms of passing and for our mum, devastating.

Robin Gibb (left) and Barry hold their CBE's after receiving them from the Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace in 2004

The star admits he considered turning his back on music altogether following Robins death.

But after winning rapturous applause when he joined Coldplay on stage at this years Glastonbury Festival, he is looking forward to promoting In The Now, his first solo album in more than 30 years. And the star reveals that the pain of no longer being able to perform with his brothers has been eased by the fact that he now shares the stage with his son Stephen, 42.

He adds: Its not hard if your eldest son is standing next to you. Hes not a Bee Gee. He wouldnt like that. Hes Stephen. Hes covered in tattoos. Hes a metalhead with a heart of gold.

In a searingly emotional interview, Barry Gibb  the last surviving Bee Gee  opens up as never before about the pain of losing all three of his brothers... and how they haunt him to this day

By Chrissy Iley

Barry Gibb is telling me he has seen ghosts. Yes and its not fun because youre not quite sure what it was about. If it was real. Ive seen two brothers. Which brothers? I saw Robin and my wife saw Andy.

Maybe its a memory producing itself outside your conscious mind or maybe its real. He likes pondering the big questions. Yes. The biggest of all, is there life after death? Id like to know.

Barry still has the leonine quality he has been famous for throughout his career

Andy, the youngest Gibb brother, died in 1988 aged just 30 after years of drug abuse, Maurice died 13 years ago at the age of 53, and Robin died in 2012 at 62 after a protracted battle with cancer. And Barry, who has never spoken with such emotion about his loss, is clearly haunted by their deaths.

I meet the last surviving Bee Gee in his local Indian restaurant just around the corner from his rarely visited British family home in Beaconsfield (he has lived mainly in Florida for the past 20 years). The sole remaining brother, who turned 70 on Thursday, still looks leonine, with a full-ish mane of hair and thick beard.

He talks about the death of his brothers almost without prompting. After Rob died I just sat moping around thinking that was the end of it and I would just fade away. I thought I was quite happy about fading away, but then the President of Columbia Records, Rob Stringer, came to see me and signed me and said: Were gonna move your ass! And I thought: Oh well, thats OK. So Im back.

Robin, Maurice and Barry Gibb in 1989. Like all siblings, the brother often argued, but, as barry says, they were incredibly close

A few months ago there was his rapturous appearance at Glastonbury with Chris Martin and Coldplay. He performed Stayin Alive to a blissed-out ovation. Glastonbury came out of the blue. The whole experience is amazing. Chris is such a gentleman, and I met Gwyneth. He says he also met Noel Gallagher and that theyd arranged to have a curry together soon.

Hes written some of the greatest pop songs of all time  Stayin Alive, Jive Talking, Massachusetts, How Deep Is Your Love, To Love Somebody, Words, and sold more than 220 million records. In 2012, Billboard ranked the Bee Gees third for the most Hot 100 No 1 hits in history, with nine in total, behind the Supremes 12 and The Beatles 20. Yet Im not sure he believes in himself. Ive never had self-esteem. Every person that Ive met and admire has the same lack of self-esteem. Ive seen it with Michael Jackson, Ive seen it with Barbra Streisand.

He goes on to explain: Self-confidence and self-esteem are very different things. Ive always been trying, trying, trying and I think thats good. Thats the hunger that keeps you alive no matter what and theres been bad times where I didnt really want to.

After the death of his remaining brother he certainly had a slump. But Im amazed when he tells me what he turned to for solace in those dark days.

Barry at Robins funeral. Barry says: You are in a kind of tunnel. You have to come out the other side and I waited for that and I watched television. Downton Abbey  that got me through it, and Ray Donovan and Billionaire'

You are in a kind of tunnel. You have to come out the other side and I waited for that and I watched television. Downton Abbey  that got me through it, and Ray Donovan and Billionaire. I love them more than movies. I love the cliff-hangers. We get British television in America because I have Apple TV.

Its a surprising confession but Downton helped him recover. We loved it. My wife was sitting next to Maggie Smith recently at Wimbledon and told her.

He reveals that Paul McCartney also helped him through the grieving process.

He always got me through everything, he says of the man whos been a lifelong friend. I met him for the first time at the Saville Theatre in 1967. He brought Jane Asher to see a show and he said: You guys have got something, you should keep going, and I always found that very encouraging.

The Bee gees playing together in 1998. Andy, the youngest Gibb brother, died in 1988 aged just 30 after years of drug abuse, Maurice died 13 years ago at the age of 53, and Robin died in 2012 at 62 after a protracted battle with cancer. And Barry, who has never spoken with such emotion about his loss, is clearly haunted by their deaths

'The last time I saw him was at Saturday Night Live in 2013 when we were both playing. We had adjoining dressing rooms. We started talking about the time before we had any success. We talked about being naive. Not understanding what was happening. About being a great band and being happy and not competitive.

Competitive with The Beatles? No... about not being competitive with each other. Hes in a cloud of nostalgia now. Those days of not understanding the business and not knowing why everybody wanted to know when for a long time they didnt. That naivety.

How intense was the sibling rivalry in the Bee Gees? Well, I dont think its any different from any other brothers or sisters. A mix of competition and closeness? Yes. All of those things, and you have enormous arguments. Then you become incredibly close and you have really angry moments with each other. Nothing different from any other family except our obsession with music. Thats how it was.

There was always competition within the group. We werent competitive with The Beatles. We were just another pop group, but they changed the world.

McCartney gave him fascinating singing tips, as well as style inspiration. McCartney hasnt changed his keys down. Hes still singing in the keys he always did and Im still doing that. A lot of artists have lowered their keys. Hes always been inspiring to me. What he said was, Always look down [when youre singing] on your highest note, and I said yes, OK.

The Beatle was also responsible for his famous Bee Gee beard. I grew it in 1968 because McCartney grew a beard for The Long And Winding Road. Hes always been that big of an influence on me. Even when The Beatles broke up! I thought, Thats it, we should break up.

Did he feel as the oldest Bee Gee he was always the leader? Yes, yes, because the oldest brother is always put in that position. Watch over Maurice and Robin, watch over Andy. And often they didnt want to be watched over. Maurice and Robin were twins so they were always secretly chatting. I was the one that had to make sure we got paid.

I had to look out for business. I enjoyed it. It was important that we were not cheated and I think that was pretty common. You hear all these horror stories about the manager making a fortune. Robert Stigwood was kind to us. We were all given about 100 per week and in 1967 you could live well on that money  and that was before we had any real success.

The Bee Gees in their late Sixties and Seventies heyday were known as Medallion Men. Today Barry is wearing beaded bracelets under his black shirt and a discreet silver neck chain with a mystic symbol on it (Ive outgrown all that gold and diamonds and chains that I used to wear, but I do love jewellery.)

They were never style icons. Kenny Everett used to do a fabulous take-off of the Brothers Gibb. They were mocked at the time when the cool kids were into Bowie and Roxy, but over time Bee Gees songs have been reassessed, with How Deep Is Your Love lauded as a pop song as flawless as Queens Bohemian Rhapsody. By the time they created the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever in 1977, their falsetto came into its own.

The Bee Gees (with brother Andy, right) in 1975. They were unbelievably productive. Some of the most famous songs, such as How Deep Is Your Love and Jive Talkin were written in less than a day

They were unbelievably productive. Some of the most famous songs, such as How Deep Is Your Love and Jive Talkin were written in less than a day. Yes, there was a half-day when we wrote Too Much Heaven, Tragedy and Shadow Dancing and a couple of other songs in one afternoon. I think we were high. Amphetamines, nothing heavy. We never took heavy drugs like heroin or cocaine. There were no songs written on that, he says adamantly.

Does he have any vices now? I never drink alcohol except sake, which I love. You dont get a hangover. You never feel bad. He tells me that the last time he got drunk was as a teenager. I got so drunk mixing different drinks at a convention, I woke up in the bridal suite. I was so violently ill they put me in the room and left me but when I woke up I did wonder if there was a bride. Fortunately there wasnt.

He starts to talk about his new album In The Now but hes drawn irresistibly back to his brothers. Its about the denial of the past and the future. Yet its about the moment and how to seize it. Its about the loss of the people closest to you so its live in the moment, grab every moment because you see what happens. The eyes tangibly sadden. Mo was gone in two days. He died from complications from a twisted intestine in hospital in Florida. Maybe thats better than long and tortured? Which is what Robin went through. Andy went at the age of 30. All different forms of passing and for our mum devastating. Shes 95. She had a mild stroke two weeks back.

He seems overcome with sadness. Theres been so much passing in my family that at one point I said Id prefer to go in my sleep or on stage but I never said [that] while singing Stayin Alive [as was reported a few years ago]. Perhaps that was made up because its a funny line.

There are 12 songs on the new album and three bonus tracks. Daddys Little Girl is one of them and thats written for my daughter Ali. Shes 24 and still lives with us. Ive never met a lady with a stronger opinion. Star Crossed Lovers is written for [his wife] Linda. They met at a taping of Top Of The Pops in London when she was the reigning Miss Edinburgh.

After the death of his remaining brother Barry certainly had a slump. Its a surprising confession but Downton Abbey helped him recover

When we first met our manager didnt want me to have a girlfriend so she always had to stay at home. I always had to seem available. Everyone was against it but that made her stronger and were still together 49 years later.

After the high of Glastonbury, is he up for another tilt at the summit, this time without his brothers? Ill happily hit the road if this album means something. Its an enormous effort to go on tour without that momentum and I want that momentum. Is it harder to go out on stage when hes been used to his brothers standing beside him? Its not hard if your eldest son is standing next to you. Hes not a Bee Gee. He wouldnt like that. Hes Steven. Hes covered in tattoos. Hes a metalhead with a heart of gold. He plays on the album. Hes part of the band, in fact its the best bunch of musicians Ive ever had. I want to be on tour so I need to create a reason for people to come and see me. I need to feel that full-cycle feeling, you know? That I can come back.

Many people think he never actually went away. While there was no conscious decision to stop, there was no decision to write a new album while Robin was alive either. His illness took a toll on any creative output. The feeling is I am reintroducing myself as an individual. When he did Guilty with Streisand, a huge hit in 1980, he was an individual, not a Bee Gee. But I was never allowed to go on about it. We won best duet at the Grammys and my brothers never mentioned it. Its that kind of brothers and sisters thing. If I would ever say we won this many Grammys they would always go one less saying No, no, it was this many.

Is there a vault of unreleased Bee Gees songs? No. Robin always emptied it out. I would always say, Thats not good enough to go on the album, Robin and he would say, Yes, but its another song. Lets put it on. In the eyes of the record company the more songs you give them the better deal it is for them, but I dont feel it was necessary.

Does he see the Bee Gees influence in any of the current music-makers? I always felt that I used to hear it with Prince and Michael Jackson. The multi harmonies, the grooves. A lot of people have told me that I made a difference to them, and Id like to keep doing it for as long as I possibly can.

This year theres been a pop icon death overload. Bowie, Prince. How did this affect him? Prince! he says adoringly. Ive always loved Prince. I didnt quite understand a lot of David Bowie because he was such an artist. I admire it but I was more involved with people like Prince. The R n B influence, the falsetto is more me. We worked in his building where he lived in Minneapolis. We did a performance for the music industry of Minneapolis at one point. He was there but hiding behind a speaker so we never met. Hiding behind a speaker? I know. You cant be that shy, right? But there you are.

Does he have a bucket list of things he wants to do before he dies? No, I have a f*** it list. I have a list of things that I know Ill never do. Ill never walk through the Grand Canyon, not with my ankles. Ill never get to the top of the Eiffel Tower. I hate heights. I just think in terms that Im going to be quite happy with whatever comes around the corner.

Ive grown up in three different cultures. Ive seen the Pyramids and Im a real fanatic on the ancient worlds. There is no evidence of how that civilisation developed. Those people might already have been there before. Im fascinated by civilisations that were around 20,000, 30,000 years ago that could be as advanced as we are now in different ways.

Does he feel hes been here before? Perhaps. Ive had a few incarnations. I try not to question it. Theres been so much loss in my family, for me its a standing mystery. Does he believe he will see them again? I dont want to question it. Dont want to go there.

Barry with his good friend Sir Paul McCartney

Part of him is very modern. His shirt and bracelets, his attitude. And part is very old school. I dont do Instagram or emails but I do text. I have a Twitter account that goes through Ashley, my second-eldest son. I try not to think about that stuff too much.

In the olden days he always used to see himself as a lion with his virile mane. In a 1979 authorised, illustrated biography of the brothers called The Greatest, there were caricatures of him as a lion, Robin as a red setter and Maurice as a badger.

I assumed he would have been a Leo and he says, Im actually a Virgo. Im ambidextrous, left-footed, play the guitar right-handed and I think Im a little too old for a lion but Ive still got a bit of a mane going on. Pause. Although I have always associated myself with a lion, he says rather proudly. In South Africa I bought a walking cane with a silver lions head on it so if theres ever a time when I cant walk Ill be able to be helped by the lion and itll still be a lion walking.

Although hes known pretty well at his local Indian, he says restaurants are rare for him. Im such a home body. I dont rise early and I dont get going till about noon. Im still useless to everybody till 2pm and then I get sharp and I start to look forward to whats on TV that evening. I read three books at a time. I love ancient history. At the moment Im reading a book about the French Revolution, another about the conscious mind and Im obsessed with Egyptology. Im into the unknown, the supernatural. All that world. I like things that cant be explained  like ghosts.

In the meantime his album ponders all kinds of shadows, yet hes not a sad man. He laughs a lot and jokes with me. And I love a good curry, he says.
She is both knocked and cheered up.

Katherine Heigl could not have looked happier as she grabbed a bite to eat with husband Josh Kelley in Los Feliz on Saturday.

The 37-year-old wore a huge smile with some comfy boots and tight jeggings for her lunch date.

On a Hei! Pregnant Katherine Heigl looked in top form as she lunched with her husband Josh Kelley in Los Feliz on Saturday

She also rocked a loose top that hid her burgeoning bump, which houses the couple's third child, due in January.

The actress finished her look with shades and a bandolier style bag, while her 36-year-old hubby didn't even seem to mind that she wore her headphones in as they walked together, either.

The couple of nine years were then spotted chatting with a friend before heading off to do some grocery shopping together.

The baby will be their first boy, and is also their first pregnancy; they are also adoptive parents to daughters Naleigh, seven, and Adalaide, four.

Cosy: The 37-year-old wore a huge smile with some comfy boots and tight jeggings for her lunch date

Although it was nigh on impossible to tell she was even pregnant on Saturday, the The former Grey's Anatomy star admitted recently she 'feels chubby'.

'I feel great. I dont feel pregnant, I just feel chubby and thats hard as an actress in Hollywood,' she told News.com.au.

The American beauty added how she wants to snack all the time.

Under cover: She also rocked a loose top that hid her burgeoning bump, which houses the couple's third child, due in January

'You work so hard and so diligently to not feel that way and not to look that way, and now all I want to do is eat,' she said with a laugh.

Heigl is currently filming for her upcoming CBS show Doubt, which follows a defense lawyer who falls for a client who could very well be guilty of a violent crime.

The show co-stars Laverne Cox, Steven Pasquale and Dule Hill, and is set to premiere later in the 2016-2017 season.
If you've got it, flaunt it is a saying that this hitmaker may have heard a few times.

Justin Bieber was doing just that as he enjoyed a shirtless hike in the hills above Los Angeles on Saturday.

The 22-year-old showed off his impressive physique as he pulled off his shirt to reveal a muscular chest and arms covered with various tattoos.

If you've got it...: Justin Bieber flaunted his impressive physique during a hike in LA on Saturday

He flexed his biceps just wrestling with the charcoal-grey garment that ended up in a bunch around his hands at one point.

He wore a pair of light grey cargo shorts with the white waistband of his Calvin Klein's showing.

Justin smiled a little as though he were hearing a wave of applause.

Off with the shirt: The 22-year-old hitmaker pulled off his shirt to reveal his assorted tattoo collection along with his muscly torso

Thanks a bunch: The imaginary applause could be heard as bare-chested Justin traversed the steep incline

The What Do You Mean crooner wore no shades and was seen squinting in the glare as he made his way back to level land.

His short-cropped hair looked even lighter in the California sunshine.

Clearly Justin's workouts have paid off as he traversed the steep incline with no apparent trouble at all.

Me and my Calvins: Justin wore grey cargo shorts that showed the waistband of his Calvins

Great outdoors: This is the second time this week that Justin decided to hit the hills for a rigorous workout

On Tuesday, Justin did a good deed by taking his little sister Jazmyn Bieber shopping at American Girl doll store at The Grove in Los Angeles.

Justin's sibling made out like a bandit by the looks of things - she emerged carrying a doll and Justin's bodyguard bore a bag filled with more purchases.

Meanwhile, Justin's romance with Sofia Richie seems to have cooled following a weekend trip to Los Cabos last week.

Cool down: Justin worked up a good sweat and obviously felt the clothing was in the way

He did it: The Baby crooner had a satisfied smile on his face as he neared the end of the trail

She was spotted out and about with her famous crooner father Lionel Richie on Friday.

On Thursday, while Justin went club-hopping with friends, Sofia went out to dinner with a mystery man.

Justin was seen getting flirty with model Bronte Blampied in London recently/

And then on Tuesday night he was apparently exchanging digits with a beautiful brunette outside of Villa nightclub in Los Angeles.
The Victoria's Secret Angels are known for their long and lean physiques.

And Stella Maxwell, who was crowned by the lingerie brand last year, emphasised her slender limbs whilst strolling across the street in New York City on Saturday.

Black fitted jeans highlighted the 26-year-old's pencil thin legs during her outing, a small open black jacket doing the same for her torso.

City girl: On Saturday, Stella Maxwell was spotted listening to music and having a walk in New York CIty

Black leather platform-heeled boots matched most of the outfit as she crossed to the pavement opposite a subway station.

The pop of a different colour was her white top, which was tucked into her trousers to stretch around her miniscule torso.

As accessories went, the Belgium-born model complemented a white pair of Beats headphones with a clear-rimmed pair of sunglasses that had blue lenses.

The Northern Irish bombshell's platinum hair was bundled into a high ponytail that then cascaded down her back.

The woman in black: The 26-year-old became a Victoria's Secret Angel last year

Once she'd crossed over, she appeared to have a conversation with a man with a rug bearing the word 'BALENCIAGA' slung over his shoulder.

Black and white have been a winning combination recently for the woman who topped Maxim's Top 100 list this year.

On Sunday, after she attended the MTV Video Music Awards, she was spotted leaving the West Village nightclub Up&Down, whilst wearing a black and white mesh dress so translucent her underwear shone through.

Stopping for the best: After she crossed the street, the Belgian-born model met up with a man carrying a rug with the word 'BALENCIAGA' scrawled on it

Plan for the night! Stella opted to stay home and do yoga on Saturday night
Modern Family's Eric Stonestreet revealed that he can finally tick off his goal of joining the dog-eat-dog world of animation - a career path he first pursued when he started as a budding actor.

Best known for playing Cameron Tucker on Modern Family, Stonestreet opened up about his new role as a shaggy rescue dog named Duke in Universal Pictures' new animation The Secret Life of Pets.

Eric admitted that the role was a great opportunity and revealed that he had to 'grunt 25 times in a row' or 'fall from varying heights and fall funny and fall quicker' to nail his character, reported The Daily Telegraph.

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Dog-eat-dog world! Modern Family's Eric Stonestreet opened up about his new role as a shaggy rescue dog named Duke in Universal Picture's new animation The Secret Life of Pets

The film follows the lives of Max, a terrier voiced by comedian Louis C.K., who lives in a New York apartment with his owner and Duke, voiced by Stonestreet, who is brought home from the pound.

The two dogs don't meet eye-to-eye and end up lost in the city and wind up on an adventure trying to find their way home.

Among the characters in the animation flick is a star studded cast including the voices of Kevin Hart, Ellie Kemper, Albert Brooks, Dana Carvey and Steve Coogan.

Star studded cast: The film follows the lives of Max, a terrier voiced by comedian Louis C.K. (R), who lives in a New York apartment with his owner and Duke, voiced by Stonestreet (Centre). Kevin Hart (L) will also play a role in the new film

Stonestreet's role as duke has been described as complex with the 44-year-old revealing that he's like 'people are sometimes when trying to protect something'.

'Duke is pretending to be something he's not because he's scared. He's found a home and he doesn't want to lose it.'

The Modern Family actor said that he's never been the 'funny voice guy' and said there is a 'unique work ethic' going into a role like this.

'We're not digging coal  But it's a unique work ethic that is required to go in and grunt 25 times in a row or fall from varying heights and fall funny and fall quicker.'

New challenges: Best known for playing Cameron Tucker (R) on Modern Family the 44-year-old said the new role will be challenging because he's never been the 'funny voice guy'

In a bid to promote the new movie Stonestreet has followed his journey adapting his character posting pictures and videos on social media along the way.

In a video post to Instagram in June, prior to the release of the film, Stonestreet captioned: 'When your job is working with puppies all day, you know you have a good job. @secretlifeofpets.'

Following the post with videos of the film's billboards in Time Square and a video of himself with Kevin Hart at the premiere on June 26.

If Stonestreet's Instagram is anything to go by, his millions of followers would know his love for animals easily recognisable by a number of posts of his late dog Coleman.

Tribute: A heart wrenching post on Instagram about the death of Stonestreet's dog Coleman came in April just months before The Secret Life of Pets premiere in the United State's

A heart wrenching post on Instagram about the death of his dog Coleman came in April just months before The Secret Life of Pets premiere in the U.S.

A tribute photo highlighting Coleman's best pictures was collaged in the snap and captioned: 'I can't believe I'm writing this post.

'I had to say goodbye to Coleman.

'He was diagnosed with lung cancer on Monday and he's gone today. He was my best pal for the past 15 years and he changed my life forever.

Complex character: Stonestreet's role as duke (pictured) has been described as complex with the 44-year-old revealing that he's like 'people are sometimes, when trying to protect something'

'I encourage you all to find a rescue or any pet that needs a home and bring them into your life. You won't regret it.'

Adding: 'I'll miss you pal.'

Whether Stonestreet's character was in anyway inspired by his own dog Coleman is not clear at this time.

The Secret Life of Pet's premiered in the United States July 8 this year and is set to hit cinemas in Australia on September 8.
Earlier this week she revealed that she got up to some racy fun in The Bachelor mansion with fellow contestant Olena Khamula.

And despite being booted off the hit dating series, Stephanie Dixon doesn't look to be taming her raunchy ways anytime soon.

The 25-year-old was all smiles as she was spotted carrying a phallic shaped pinata out of a Melbourne sex shop on Sunday.

That's a ballsy move! The Bachelor's Stephanie Dixon, 25, was spotted carrying a phallic shaped pinata out of a Melbourne sex shop on Sunday

Dressed to impress in a form-fitting ensemble with semi-sheer detailing, Stephanie appeared content as she exited well-known adult retailer, Club X.

Flaunting her svelte figure in the flirty lace number, the Victorian model's most eye-catching accessory was a pink pinata in the shape of a man's genitalia.

Allowing her signature blonde locks to fall in loose waves around her face and shoulders, Stephanie highlighted her striking facial features with subtle kohl-rimmed eyes, lashings of mascara and a glossy lip.

Not shy: Flaunting her svelte figure in the flirty lace number, the Victorian model's most eye-catching accessory was a pink pinata in the shape of a man's genitalia

Party mode: Accompanied by a female friend, the short-lived Bachelor hopeful appeared to have well and truly forgotten about Richie Strahan, as she happily made her way to her next destination

Accompanied by a female friend, the short-lived Bachelor hopeful appeared to have well and truly forgotten about Richie Strahan, as she happily made her way to her next destination.

Despite being unable to capture the heart of the Perth-based hunk, Stephanie revealed to news.com.au, she got so close with fellow contestant Olena Khamula, 23.

'We'd steal the alcohol and go skinny-dipping after the rose ceremonies,' she revealed to the publication.

'It was our tradition,' the blonde bombshell added.

Steph explained: 'We [Olena and I] just tried to have as much fun as possible. The other girls would go to bed after the rose ceremonies, and wed stay up chatting about life'.

Skinny-dipping: The short-lived Bachelor hopeful revealed she and fellow contestant Olena Khamula were so close in The Bachelor mansion they would go skinny dipping after rose ceremonies

Steph was one of the three women who entered the competition as an an intruder and came in to a very hostile rose ceremony.

She clearly bonded with the Ukrainian beauty and the pair have been spotted out together in recent weeks.

Her time on the reality show was short lived and she struggled to contain her emotions as she was sent home, leaving the mansion with tears streaming down her face.

Sent home: Her time on the reality show was short lived and she struggled to contain her emotions as she was sent home, leaving the mansion with tears streaming down her face

Stephanie blamed a lack of time on the show for her sudden departure and said: 'Since the day I walked in, I felt like I, you know, had to play catch-up, and it's a very hard situation to walk into.

'Fighting against time, fighting against so many things.

'I'm a bit upset right now, but things happen for a reason and, you know, I guess I've just gotta [sic] suck it up,' she concluded while sitting in the limousine on the way to the airport.
She left The Vampire Diaries last year to sink her teeth in meaty film roles.

Nina Dobrev got a chance to mingle with a few 'zombies' at Activision's The Ultimate Fan Experience in celebration of Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 game in Los Angeles on Saturday.

The 27-year-old actress showed her own modern edge in tight black jeans and black camisole with a black leather zip-up jacket heavily embellished with leather florettes.

Edgy style: Nina Dobrev looked ravishing in an all black ensemble at The Ultimate Fan Experience Call Of Duty event in LA on Saturday

Adding some 'love' to the mix was a black patent leather handbag with the word spelled out in bold bright letters.

Nina wore her burnished brunette locks loose and layered and there was minimal make-up on her face.

She took a few moments to pose on the arrivals line with her chic handbag in her grasp.

Lovely in leather: The 27-year-old actress wore a black leather jacket heavily embellished with leather florettes that she dressed up with a 'LOVE' clutch

Beauty and the beasts: Nina was surrounded by a gaggle of ghouls at the fan event

But then she was nearly eclipsed by a group of 'ghouls' including a not-so-funny clown and some scary ladies in need of some tender loving care and perhaps a good plastic surgeon.

Nina just kept on smiling, obviously impressed by the freaky masks and costumes.

That was all part of the fun at what's considered the biggest Call Of Duty fan event in history, taking place at The Forum.

It's a scream: The Perks Of Being A Wallflower star was practically eclipsed here

Deja vu: Nina was torn between two vampires as Elena Gilbert on The Vampire Diaries but that small potatoes compared to this

Nina's appearance comes on the heels of news that she might be making a return to The Vampire Diaries for its eighth and final season.

In August, The CW president Mike Pedowitz said Dobrev was 'welcome' to revisit the show, as upi.com reported.

'We would have loved Nina to stay,' Pedowitz said. 'She did a great job for the six years she was on the show. She is welcome back any time she wants to come back.'

Plans to revisit? The brunette beauty left The Vampire Diaries last year but the door remains open if she chooses to return for the show's eighth and final season

Meanwhile, Nina has a few projects on the pipeline including Crash Pad co-starring Domhnall Gleeson and Christina Applegate and xXX: The Return Of Xander Cage opposite Vin Diesel and Ruby Rose.

Nina is currently filming Flatliners with Ellen Page, while another film, Arrivals, is still listed as in pre-production, according to IMDB.com.
It's the final fling of summer and Robert De Niro quit the Big Apple to spend Labor day in The Hamptons.

The Oscar-winning actor arrived at East Hampton Airport casually dressed for the long weekend in shorts and a polo shirt.

He had on a pair of deck shoes and a peaked cap and carried a shoulder bag as he made his way to his waiting vehicle.

Long weekend: Robert De Niro was seen arriving at the East Hampton Airport on Long Island on Saturday as he prepared to spend the Labor Day holiday in The Hamptons

De Niro, 73, sported a graying goatee and donned a pair of sunglasses against the Long Island sunshine.

The Hamptons has long been the preferred playground of the rich and famous based in New York.

And De Niro was no doubt headed to his Montauk oceanfront mansion for some rest and relaxation, and perhaps a barbecue.

Ready for the holiday: The legendary actor, 73, was spotted getting some help loading his baggage into the back of a large SUV upon arrival at the airport

Called the shots: He appeared in charge as he made sure everything was in order before heading off to his Hamptons home

Ready for the off: De Niro, who sported a gray goatee, wore a shirt and shorts with deck shoes and had a peaked cap on along with some sunglasses

The Godfather star got a helping hand with his luggage from a couple of airport employees.

And De Niro wasn't the only big name spotted flying into the small airport.

Jon Bon Jovi, who owns a historic home on Lily Pond Lane in east Hampton, flew in with his wife Dorothea.

Rocking The Hamptons: Jon Bon Jovi was also seen at the airport as he arrived to spend the holiday at his Montauk mansion home in a cotton shirt and shorts and wearing leather flip flops

Happily married: The rocker, 54, was accompanied by his wife Dorothea

The rocker, 54, was dressed in teal shorts with a blue cotton shirt unbuttoned at the top.

He had a cap on and strolled around in leather flip flops.

He was seen getting behind the wheel of a classic automobile with his wife in the passenger seat and drove off for the holiday in the convertible with the top down.
It appears Niall Horan and Simon Cowell are going in two different directions.

The 22-year-old has snubbed his mentor by signing a 'mega solo album deal' with Universal Music, according to the Daily Star.

'This will come as a real blow to Cowell who has been talking to Niall for months, wanting him to sign a deal with his label Syco,' the paper quoted a US source.

Different direction: Niall Horan 'has snubbed Simon Cowell's Syco label to sign with Universal in a mega solo album deal', according to the Daily Star

'He made a number of big money offers to try and persuade Niall to sign up but, in the end, Universal came in and put even more money on the table.

'They're chuffed to have got one over on Cowell and have taken one of 1D,' the insider said.

The report claimed Universal's subsidiary label Capitol had originally been expecting to do a solo deal with Horan's bandmate Harry Styles.

But when the 22-year-old decided remain loyal to Sony - which owns the other half of Syco - the rival label reportedly turned its sights on the Irishman.

Snubbed? 'This will come as a real blow to Cowell who has been talking to Niall for months, wanting him to sign a deal with his label Syco,' the paper quoted a US source

Running errands: The Irish heartthrob was seen stopping by Capitol records on Sunday afternoon as news of his record deal broke

'Universal said they would pay Niall whatever it took,' the source said. 'They heard his solo music and they all think it's got good potential.'

'Cowell will be unhappy about it. But Niall's thrilled. He's been telling pals he is really excited about his new music and this solo deal.

'It's anyone's guess where this decision leaves One Direction now,' they added.

A representative for Syco declined to comment on the report.

Meanwhile the Sun on Sunday reported Horan has recruited Adele's writer and producer Greg Kurstin to work on his solo album.

'Niall wrote with One Direction but he's got a real talent, and the bosses are hoping to make the most of that by teaming him up with some brilliant people,' a source claimed.

Plenty to smile about: The former boyband star was dressed casually in a striped tee and cargo shorts as he headed out with his manager in the Californian sunshine

Break: One Direction are currently on an indefinite hiatus and Niall's bandmates are all hard at work on solo projects

'He wants to move away from boyband stuff and show what he can do, and he's being doing some great work with Greg, among others.

'There was a worry at first that because he came from a manufactured band, he wouldn't be taken seriously.

'But people are queuing around the block to record with him. It's early days, but this record looks like it could really be something special.'

One Direction are currently on an indefinite hiatus and Niall's bandmates are all hard at work on solo projects.

Liam Payne has signed a solo deal with Capitol UK, while Styles - who recently finished filming Christopher Nolan's 'Dunkirk' is believed to have an $80m deal with Columbia, which is owned by Sony.

Louis Tomlinson is believed to be planning to focus on his record label during the break, and he recently teamed up with Cowell to launch a new girl group, who Simon says are 'as good as I have ever heard'.
It is no wonder she wanted to be the centre of attention on her 21st birthday.

And Kady McDermott ensured all eyes were on her on Saturday night, as she headed out to celebrate at the Cafe de Paris in London's West End.

Dressed in a rather revealing pink mini dress, the Love Island star was not afraid to flash some skin and show off her petite figure as she partied into the night.

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Pretty in pink: Kady McDermott ensured all eyes were on her on Saturday night, as she headed out to celebrate her 21st birthday at the Cafe de Paris in London's West End

The Sunderland-born star opted for a thigh-skimming baby pink number which rose high at the hem, flaunting her enviably slender legs for all to see.

The halterneck dress featured a plunging neckline with straps that alluringly crossed over at her bust.

Completely backless, the figure-hugging frock also showed off a saucy hint of sideboob as she fiercely posed with her back to the camera.

Saucy: The Sunderland-born star opted for a thigh-skimming baby pink number which rose high at the hem, flaunting her enviably slender legs for all to see

Keeping all eyes on the head-turning outfit, the star accessorised with a simple nude clutch and sandals.

She scraped her hair back into a chic high bun to display her naturally pretty features and glowing skin.

Heading into the swanky Cafe de Paris at Picadilly Circus, the brunette looked excited for her night out on the town as she beamed and pulled funny faces at the camera.

Work it: Completely backless, the figure-hugging frock also showed off a saucy hint of sideboob as she fiercely posed with her back to the camera

While she enjoyed a night with her closest pals, her beau Scott Thomas, who she met and fell in love with on the ITV2 reality show Love Island, was nowhere to be seen.

Making the most of reaching the milestone, Kady had already kicked birthday celebrations off on Thursday night with her man, as they headed to Juju Club in Chelsea.

Dressed in an equally as glamorous and raunchy grey fitted dress, the happy couple partied late into the night alongside a host of their celebrity friends, including Geordie Shore's Vicky Pattison.

Its my birthday! Heading into the swanky Cafe de Paris at Picadilly Circus, the brunette looked excited for her night out on the town as she beamed and pulled funny faces at the camera

However despite missing the main event on Saturday the curly-haired hunk, 28, took to Twitter to celebrate his girl's big day - and prove the couple were still as loved-up as ever, despite his absence.

He wrote in an emotional ode on Instagram: 'Happy 21st Birthday to this little beauty @kadymcdermott ! Can't actually get my head round how young she is when she really does have such a strong and wise little head on those shoulders of hers!'

'I don't like to admit it because she drives me absolutely nuts but I've learnt so much from her and I continue to do so every day!

Keeping things simple: Ensuring all eyes on the head-turning outfit, the star accessorised with a simple nude clutch and sandals as she partied with her friends

This girl knows what she wants in life and trust me she will achieve it! What a journey we've been on together and I hope we have many more adventures to come!

I know I'm hard work so thanks for putting up with me and not giving up on me just yet.'

The handsome duo have been inseparable since departing ITV2's Love Island last month, with Kady visiting Scott's native Manchester and the hunky star heading down south to meet her parents and pals.

Scott and Kady finished in third place on the reality show followed by Alex Bowen and Olivia Buckland in second and Nathan Massey and Cara De La Hoyde in first.

Flying solo: While she enjoyed a night with her closest pals, her beau Scott Thomas, who she met and fell in love with on the ITV2 reality show Love Island, was nowhere to be seen

Gushing about their immediate connection on This Morning after they left the Mallorca villa, Scott coyly disclosed to presenters Holly and Phil: 'I promised myself this year I'd try and let some girls in, I've been single for six years, and I thought what better way to do it? But I just didn't expect this to meet someone.

'We're both so excited about each other, and I can't wait to spend some time with her off camera.'

While the relationship is going from strength to strength however, the couple are still taking things slow.

When asked if marriage could be on the cards, Scott told Reveal: 'Well, I'd never thought I would ask Kady to be my girlfriend, so you never know. One step at a time.'
In May, the couple were yet to set a wedding date.

But it seems the big day is fast approaching for former Hi-5 star Fely Irvine, who shared pictures of herself on what appears to be a hens weekend in Las Vegas on Sunday.

The pictures feature the songstress in a pale pink bob wig, wearing a sash which reads 'Bride to Be', alongside two female friends.

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Bride to be! Though she is yet to announce a wedding date, Fely Irvine shared photos of herself celebrating her bachelorette party in Las Vegas on Sunday

The 27-year-old celebrated in the sun, and rocked the beach-babe look.

Teaming a pair of high waisted black cutoffs with white Converse sneakers and a lace detail white kimono, Fely showed off her taut torso in a yellow floral print strapless bikini.

She traded her trademark long brunette locks for a pale pink wig, and finished off her look with a pair of oversized reflective sunglasses.

Sizzling: The 27-year-old cooled off in a plunge pool, flaunting her enviable figure in a strapless yellow floral print bikini

Later, the former The Voice contestant ditched her sash and her clothes to take a dip in the pool.

Fely flaunted her enviable figure as she emerged from a pool at Las Vegas club Wet Republic.

She replaced the sash with a backwards trucker cap which read 'Bride to Be', and her two friends donned matching caps which told onlookers they were part of the 'Bride Tribe'.

Bride Tribe: The Australian songstress posed in her eyecatching bikini alongside friends as they showed off their matching trucker caps

Wedding bells! Fely and fiance Tai Hara (pictured) were yet to pick a date for their wedding in May, but it seems the ball has begun to roll with Fely's bachelorette party

The Australian actress used her own hashtag for the photos: 'felysgettinghitched'.

The trio also called in a special guest for their bachelorette photos.

Before they took off for Vegas, Zach Galifianakis posed with the ladies wearing his outfit from The Hangover.
American Crime star Richard Cabral is divorcing his wife Janiece Sarduy.

The actor, who was nominated for an Emmy for playing Hector Tontz in season one, has been married to the actress and producer for just under two years.

Court documents reveal the pair have been separated since June and Richard is asking for custody of their two-year-old daughter, reports TMZ.

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Split: American Crime star Richard Cabral is reportedly divorcing his wife Janiece Sarduy

Ex gang-member Richard, who once served five years in jail for shooting a man, is reportedly filing the divorce himself without the help of lawyers.

MailOnline has contacted Janiece Sarduy while Richard Cabral could not be reached for comment.

Since doing jail time in his twenties, Richard has been praised for turning his life around and forging a successful career.

The actor, 32, has never talked in detail about the violent crime he committed other than to say he got caught up in gang warfare.

Short-lived: The actor, who was nominated for an Emmy for playing Hector Tontz in Season 1, has been married to the actress and producer for just under two years

Last year Daily Mail Online revealed the full details behind the attempted murder charge that saw him facing a 35-year sentence.

According to court documents, reformed character Cabral shot his 20-year-old victim simply because he felt 'disrespected'.

Chillingly, the shooting was also carried out to prove that he was a 'main player' and not afraid to kill leaders of a Mexican gang.

Going it alone: Ex gang-member Richard, who once served five years in jail for shooting a man, is reportedly filing the divorce himself without the help of lawyers

Further court documents reveal that his victim Joseph Torres was so scared of reprisals that he lied in court and denied Cabral shot him.

'He was an enforcer for the gang and was considered very violent,' said Detective Sgt Julio Calleros, who was involved in Cabral's arrest.

'He was pretty notorious in the area and like most 213 gang members he always carried a gun.'

Star: Richard was nominated for an Emmy for playing Hector Tontz (pictured) in Season 1
Her husband, Oliver Curtis, was sentenced to two years imprisonment in July for Insider Trading.

And just three weeks later she announced she was battling breast cancer.

On Sunday, Roxy Jacenko showed off her slimmed down figure as she dressed in figure-hugging exercise attire as she headed to Bondi Beach in Sydney's east.

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New her: Roxy Jacenko showed off her new slimmed down figure on Sunday as she dressed in exercise attire on Bondi Beach in Sydney's east on Sunday

For the beach outing with her two children, Pixie, five and Hunter, two, the PR Queen slipped her slender frame into a white tank top which fitted perfectly over her toned torso.

She paired the simple garment with aqua blue tights, which featured a peach-coloured panel down the side.

The fitted leggings highlighted the 35-year-old's toned legs as they finished inches below the knee.

Slim down: For the outing with her two children, Pixie, five and Hunter, two, the PR Queen slipped her slender frame into a white tank top

Showing off: She paired the simple garment with aqua blue tights, which highlighted her toned legs and buttocks

Details: The stylish garment featured a peach and white coloured panel down the side

For the family day outing - which was the first Father's Day for the children without their dad, Oliver - Roxy tied her blonde hair back into a low ponytail.

She opted for minimal makeup and covered her eyes with a pair of oversized Ray-Ban sunglasses.

Last week, Roxy showed off her rocked hard abs for the first while dressed in a two-piece exercise attire.

Out of the way: She tied her blonde hair back into a low ponytail

Under cover: She opted for minimal makeup and covered her eyes with a pair of oversized Ray-Ban sunglasses

On show: Before leaving her home for the beach, she showed off her slim figure as she posed for a mirror selfie in the leggings and a crop top

At the time, the businesswoman slipped her slimmer frame into a black and yellow crop top as well as a matching pair of tights.

Roxy cut out her face in the frame, only giving her smartphone the view of her fuller lips.

Her celebrity personal trainer, Dan Adair seemed impress by her transformation, posting on the image: 'Haha, The Lord was in fine form!!'

She made a return to the gym with Jesinta Campbells personal trainer last week following a quick trip to Hong Kong.

Where have they been hiding? Last week, Roxy showed off her rocked hard abs for the first while dressed in a two-piece exercise attire

'And so it begins': She made a return to the gym with Jesinta Campbells personal trainer, Dan Adair the week earlier following a quick trip to Hong Kong

Health: Earlier this month, she underwent surgery to remove the cancerous tumour from her breast - with the process being filmed for Sunday's episode of 60 Minutes

Taking to social media, the Sydney-based PR shared a snap of herself in stylish Skins gym wear, consisting of a plain white T-shirt, a navy hoodie and black leggings.

Following a rejuvenated fitness session, she told her followers: And so it begins. @danjadair cracking session @skinsau.

Earlier this month, she underwent surgery to remove the cancerous tumour from her breast - with the process being filmed for Sunday's episode of 60 Minutes.

Roxy is set to undergo radiation therapy in Sydney in the coming days following her shock breast cancer diagnosis in July.
She took out the Miss Universe Australia crown in 2010.

And Jesinta Campbell showed no signs of slowing down as she bared her pert posterior in a behind the scenes snap from her recent David Jones photo shoot on Friday.

The Australian supermodel looked every bit the beach babe as she posed in a black and white checkered peplum shirt with off the shoulder detail.

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Beach goddess: Jesinta Campbell worked her magic in a checkered peplum shirt with off the shoulder detail as her pert posterior remains uncovered which she posted to Instagram on Friday

She teamed the shirt with a colourful head scarf, wrapped around her honey blonde locks, which were heaped into a messy bun at the crown of her scalp.

The 25-year-old appeared to have thrown the shirt on over a purple swimsuit as she posed with her hands to her cheeks and her eyes closed.

Jesinta was painted with a natural makeup palette, a pale pink lip accentuating her tanned skin, and minimal silver jewellery gave the look a finished feel.

Ambassador: Her work as David Jones Ambassador also saw her attend Vogue Fashion's Night Out in Sydney on Thursday

The shoot, which will be used to promote David Jones' new Spring Summer collection, took place as part of her duties as Ambassador.

Also in the role of Ambassador, Jesinta appeared at Vogue Fashion's Night out in Sydney on Thursday.

The blonde beauty looked nothing short of sensational in a long-sleeved white shirt with the word 'Vogue' emblazoned across the front.

Leggy display: Her A-line black skirt featured hand stitched embroidery down the front and finished before her knees to show off her lithe and toned legs

Her shirt was tucked neatly into her A-line black skirt which featured hand stitched embroidery down the front and finished before her knees to show off her lithe and toned legs.

She boosted her petite frame with a pair of open-toed boots which laced-up at the front and only added to elongating her famous model silhouette.

The 25-year-old styled her glamorous outfit with minimal accessories, opting for a pair of simple drop pearl earrings.
They shared a series of bizarre nude photos to their social media accounts last week before deleting them off Instagram just days later.

And on Sunday, The Bachelor's Tiffany Scanlon took to the picture-sharing application to defend her naked photoshoot with fellow contestant Megan Marx.

Posting an image of herself sunbaking on a blow-up floaty, she wrote: 'For Love or Fame? I feel insulted I even have to defend myself.

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No shame: The Bachelor's Tiffany Scanlon took to Instagram on Sunday to defend her recent nude photoshoot with Megan Marx, days after they deleted the images from social media

'I went with an open mind and an open heart, of 25 women, 1 will find love, are the rest of us meant to crawl into a cave & hide?

'It just so happens that I met a kindred spirit who also likes to take risks, push boundaries, question convention, is liberal, open minded, free thinking and creative.'

Tiffany continued: 'In regards to the recent images that we posted and removed, I did not have a "sudden change of heart", I am not ashamed, I am not sorry and I look forward to being able to post them back up eventually.

No worries: Posting an image of herself on a blow-up floaty, she wrote: 'For Love or Fame? I feel insulted I even have to defend myself...I'm tired of people making assumptions on my behalf'

Up front: Tiffany continued: 'In regards to the recent images that we posted and removed, I did not have a "sudden change of heart", I am not ashamed, I am not sorry'

'If you look back through my Instagram (and Megan's) you will realise these photos are not out of character for either of us.

'I'm tired of people making assumptions and speaking on my behalf so I hope this clears some things up, if indeed it is allowed to stay up ,' she concluded her post.

Days earlier, the two blonde beauties mysteriously deleted the headline-making pictures from their accounts.

The array of removed images included snaps of the blonde exhibitionists posing topless while sharing a plate of spaghetti.

Second thoughts? Days earlier, the two blonde beauties mysteriously deleted the headline-making pictures from their accounts

Parody: Will McMahon and Woody Whitelaw of radio show Hit929 recreated the scene and also shared it to social media

In the photos, which appear to have been inspired by the famous pasta-eating scene in Disney's Lady And The Tramp, the bronzed babes posed in their underwear while slurping down the same piece of spaghetti.

Megan had previously uploaded the racy image to her Instagram account, while remarking nonchalantly in the caption: 'The spaghetti was fairly good tonight.'

Another risque snap deleted by Megan depicted her and Tiffany giggling while gulping down single strands of spaghetti.

In the buff! Megan and Tiffany have also erased photos of themselves posing naked aside from their sneakers as they posed on wooden chairs in the Chapman Valley, Western Australia

At the time, Tiffany also shared a parodied version of her and Megan's controversial photo, in which Will McMahon and Woody Whitelawof radio show Hit929 recreated the scene.

The image has since been deleted from Tiffany's page.

Megan and Tiffany have also erased recent photos of themselves posing naked aside from their sneakers as they posed on wooden chairs in the Chapman Valley, Western Australia.

Just hanging out: The girls managed to hide their modesty as they posed in the extremely provocative images, thanks to the use of clever angles and strategic posing

Damning post: Adding to the list of deleted posts is an update that Megan shared, which she compares Richie to a 'Barbie boyfriend' while claiming that The Bachelor is a 'prison'

Adding to the list of deleted social media posts is an Instagram update that Megan shared on Wednesday, in which she compared Richie Strahan to a 'Barbie boyfriend' while claiming that The Bachelor was like a 'prison'.

The sassy stunner posted an image of herself enjoying a date with Richie, taken during her time in The Bachelor, accompanied with the caption: 'When I had long hair and a barbie boyfriend. Ohhhh how life changes. Hahaha.'

Adding insult to injury, Megan also tagged her location as being: 'Bachelor Prison', before promptly deleting the entire post less than a day later.
A new billboard ad has prompted Kylie Jenner to consult lawyers after the company behind it used a model in her likeness to promote their services.

The reality star reportedly believes an advertising campaign for a weight loss procedure that promises to freeze your fat is wilfully deceiving potential clients into thinking she endorses the company behind it.

Promotional material posted across Los Angeles over the weekend show a slender, lingerie clad brunette alongside a web address and telephone number for local company DoctorFatOff.com.

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Lookalikes: A new billboard ad has reportedly prompted Kylie Jenner to consult lawyers after the company behind it used a model in her likeness to promote their services

Kylie is said to be particularly aggrieved with the model, whose high cheekbones, sculpted eyebrows and fuller lips draw strong similarities with the 19-year old.

TMZ report that Kardashian-Jenner family members have since alerted their legal team in a bid to end the new campaign.

MailOnline have contacted Kylie's representatives for further comment.

Not happy: The reality star reportedly believes an advertising campaign for a weight loss procedure that promises to freeze your fat is wilfully deceiving potential clients into thinking she endorses the company behind it

The reported move comes after the brunette took to Instagram to show off her toned stomach in a short video on Saturday.

She later deleted the video, in favor of a close-up shot of her outfit, focusing on the showstopping crop top.

The raven-haired beauty simply captioned the close-up picture: 'Happy Saturday.'

Meanwhile: The reported move comes after the brunette took to Instagram to show off her toned stomach in a short video on Saturday

Meanwhile over on Snapchat the star could be seen looking a bit upset as Caitlyn Jenner shared the first app she had purchased on her new phone - and it wasn't Kylie's.

Caitlyn teased her daughter regarding the purchase, telling Kylie to look at her phone to see what it was, after which the teen shouted: 'Facetune!' - an app used to clean up selfies to make them blemish-free and ready to post on social media.
She is the five-time Oscar nominated actress who holds a host of awards under her belt.

But Amy Adams' success is only going from strength to strength, as she was awarded with the coveted silver medallion at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, on Saturday.

The redhead, 42, looked every inch a star in a floor-length floral shirt dress as she elegantly collected her prize.

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Star quality: Amy Adams, 42, looked every inch a star in a floor-length floral shirt dress as she collected the silver medallion at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado on Saturday

The American Hustle actress looked truly radiant in the formal frock, which was completely covered in a chic print of red, pink and white flowers.

The trendy dress was styled like a shirt, featuring a collar and buttons down the front and worn with a Lola James 'mini me' necklace.

It also accentuated her enviable womanly figure with a ribbon tie cinching in at her waist, before the delicate chiffon flowed effortlessly to the floor.

Flower power: The American Hustle actress looked truly radiant in the formal frock, which was completely covered in painted images of red, pink and white flowers

She left her famous red hair loose across her shoulders for the appearance, showcasing her natural beauty.

Taking to the stage to collect her prize, the actress beamed at the crowd in light of the exciting win, before posing for the cameras with her new bit of silver bling proudly hanging around her neck.

The award is a big nod for the actress, with the medallion being given in recognition of huge achievements in the film industry.

Overjoyed: The star looked elated as she beamed onstage collecting her prize

Gorgeous: She left her famous red hair loose across her shoulders for the appearance, showcasing her natural beauty and her Lola James 'mini me' necklace

It has been won in the past by director Danny Boyle, Robert Redford, Penelope Cruz and Daniel Day Lewis.

However Amy also appears at the festival to promote two highly-anticipated upcoming movies that she stars in.

First is sci-fi drama Arrival, which sees Amy join forces with Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker to investigate a mysterious spacecraft that has touched down on Earth.

She also saw her new blockbuster Nocturnal Animals with Jake Gyllenhaal and Isla Fisher premiere at the Venice Film Festival last week.

Winner! Taking to the stage to collect her prize, the actress beamed at the crowd in light of the exciting win, before posing for the cameras with her new bit of silver bling around her neck

Famous face: The award is a big nod for the actress, with the medallion being given in recognition of huge achievements in the film industry

The flick follows Amy as an art gallery owner who is haunted by her ex-husband's novel, a violent tale which she interprets as a veiled threat.

Directed by Tom Ford, it is competing for the Golden Lion at the Venice event - the highest prize a film can receive at the festival.

Fully established as a Hollywood A-Lister after an array of hugely successful films, Amy had been spotted earlier in the day talking to big name in the industry Clint Eastwood, having worked together on Trouble With The Curve.

Reunion: Sully director Clint eastwood, 86, found time to catch up with actress and festival tribute recipient Amy Adams, 42, who worked with hom on Trouble With The Curve

Adams kept things simple as she left her red hair loose over her long gray wool cardigan.

She added a blue shirt and blue jeans that matched Eastwood's ensemble almost perfectly.

The 86-year-old actor and director paired his shirt and jeans combo with a shiny blue bomber jacket.

Relaxed: Adams left her signature red hair loose and wore a long gray wool cardigan over a blue shirt. Eastwood wore a blue bomber jacket over a shirt and jeans

Also at the festival was Jennifer Garner, dressed for the Rockies when she made her appearance on Saturday.

The actress, 44, wore a green padded vest over a lumberjack-style shirt paired with skinny jeans and lace-up shoes.

She left her long hair loose and falling around her shoulders as she promoted her film Wakefield that was being screened for festival-goers.

Dressed the part: Jennifer Garner, 44, paired a lumberjack-style shirt and padded green vest with skinny jeans and lace-up shoes as she made an appearance at the Telluride Film Festival

Emma Stone was also dressed for the Colorado weather as she showed up to support her movie La La Land that won raves when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival last week.

The 27-year-old paired skinny jeans and wet-look black shoes with a black sweater decorated with stars.

Her shoulder-length hair was styled in soft waves and the actress kept her make-up light with a spalsh of pink lip color and a touch of eye-liner.

Far from Hollywood: Emma Stone, 27, also headed to the bucolic town in the Rockies Saturday for a screening of her new film La La Land. She wore skinny jeans and black sweater with stars

Song and dance duo: Stone reteams with her Crazy, Stupid, Love co-star Ryan Gosling in Damien Chazelle's La La Land, that won rave reviews at the Venice Film Festival last week

While in Venice, Stone spoke with Variety about re-teaming with Ryan Gosling for the Damien Chazelle film.

The two had previously worked together on the 2011 romantic comedy Crazy, Stupid, Love.

'Its wonderful to work with somebody you know, trust and respect so much. Hes my buddy,' the actress said of Gosling.

'I knew he could sing and dance,' she added. 'Once youve learned to ballroom dance with someone, youve learned everything you need to know.

Ready for Sully screening: Tom Hanks was also part of the star-studded line up and cut a low-key figure in dark denims and brogues along with a black rain jacket over a zipped-up sweater

The festival drew quite a gaggle of celebrities on Saturday with Tom Hanks joining in along with Clint Eastwood.

Hanks's new big release Sully is being show at the festival and he cut a low-key figure in dark denims and brogues with a black rain jacket.

Adams is being honored with a tribute at the weekend event and her aliens film Arrivals, that won plaudits at Venice, is also being screened.
Desmond Doss was a simple God-fearing boy from rural Virginia who became a hero in World War II, despite having registered as a conscientious objector, by single-handedly moving 75 of his wounded comrades from the battlefield during the brutal 1945 assault on Okinawa.

That's simple in the sense of uncomplicated, by the way, rather than mentally deficient, though in the first half of Mel Gibson's powerful if somewhat calculating film, Andrew Garfield plays Desmond more or less as Forrest Gump with a bible.

Let's just stick with the film's power, though, because as the lights came up in the auditorium at the Venice Film Festival, where it premiered today, I saw an elderly woman, sitting on her own, clapping and weeping all the way through the credits.

Desmond Doss (played by Andrew Garfield, pictured, in Hacksaw Ridge) was a simple God-fearing boy from rural Virginia who became a hero in World War II

Doss (played by Garfield, pictured) single-handedly moved 75 of his wounded comrades from the battlefield during the brutal 1945 assault on Okinawa

And this is Venice, Italy, so heaven knows how it will play in Venice, Illinois.

After all, Gump rhymes with Trump, and this film is due to come out in the US just four days before presidential election day in November. You never know, it could swing more than a few votes the way of The Donald. At any rate, it seems certain to go down a storm with the Christian right, who will relish the way Desmond is driven by his faith, even if he also refuses to pick up a rifle. We all know how American conservatives, churchgoers or not, love their right to bear arms.

Whatever, Gibson has found a true story undoubtedly worth telling, and he does so in a thunderously crowd-pleasing way, although the more squeamish folk in the crowd might want to hide behind their seats during the battle scenes. For a film about a man who abjured violence, it could hardly be bloodier or more graphic, with particularly gruesome shots of men being burnt alive by flamethrowers.

But it starts in backwoods Virginia, where Desmond and his brother are raised as Seventh Day Adventists by their mother (Rachel Griffiths), while their abusive father (Hugo Weaving) drinks himself silly. He is still trying to come to terms with his experiences in World War I, from which his three best friends returned in coffins.

Meanwhile, Desmond grows up and Forrest Gumpishly pursues a pretty nurse, Dorothy (Teresa Palmer). Then he joins the army, but only on condition that he will never have to wield a rifle. Not that his conditions cut much ice with his superiors at militarytraining camp, where, in the time-honoured way of the movies, every possible barrack-room cliche is wheeled out to make his life a misery.

Doss gets a hard time from shouty sergeant (Vince Vaughn), as well as all his other recruits in the feature film, which premiered at Venice Film Festival today

Desmond grows up and Forrest Gumpishly pursues a pretty nurse, Dorothy (Teresa Palmer)

For a film about a man who abjured violence, it could hardly be bloodier or more graphic

Can Desmond reconcile his urge to serve his country in the fierce crucible of warfare, with his conviction that it is a sin to kill? 'Ah don't know how ahm gonna live with mahself if ah don't stay true to what ah believe,' he says, Gumpishly, and maybe Trumpishly too.

So, will all his fellow recruits, and his shouty sergeant (Vince Vaughn), stop being horrible to him and learn to respect and eventually revere him? Naturally we know the answers to all these questions long before they're resolved, but Gibson keeps the story chugging along extremely watchably, and Garfield, once we stop half-expecting him to seek out 'Lootenant Dan', gives a winningly good performance.

Moreover, the scenes in which Desmond drags wounded soldiers to the edge of an escarpment called Hacksaw Ridge, and contrives a way of lowering them to safety below, are terrifically well done. Even though the director is Australian, the hero played by a Brit, and his parents and girlfriend by Aussies, here is a film which will all but manipulate entire US audiences into standing up and bellowing the Star-Spangled Banner. Especially when footage of the real Desmond Doss, who died in 2006, pops up at the end.
It's been promoted as the biggest meltdown in the history of reality TV.

And Zumbo's Just Desserts contestant Ali King admits her emotional breakdown on Monday's episode is one for the ages.

'It was a really, really bad day. It wasn't pretty, was it?' she told News.com.au.

The 28-year-old, who says she doesn't like to watch herself on television at the best of times, is dreading tuning in on Monday night.

'I think I'll need a bottle of wine for Monday. And maybe some vodka,' Ali told The Canberra Times.

She can't reveal exactly what happened, but the promo video shows Ali completely rattled when a challenge goes horribly wrong.

Meltdown: Zumbo's Just Desserts contestant Ali King admits her emotional breakdown on Monday's episode is one for the ages

'It's not happening, it's not going to happen,' she repeatedly gasps, seemingly hyperventilating.

The reality star lets out an almighty scream before falling to her knees in tears.

'My friends and family saw (the promo) and they were like, ''Oh, my god!''. And all my work colleagues. I was getting all these messages like, ''Oh my god, I'm crying!''. And I'm like, ''I'm sorry!'',' she told Fairfax.

'It's not happening, it's not going to happen': The 28-year-old was an emotional wreck when a challenge went horribly wrong

Rattled: The reality star lets out an almighty scream before falling to her knees in tears

'By this point in the competition, I think this is when everyone was starting to get exhausted and emotional.'

Ali is down to the final seven contestants, after the show started with 12 hopeful pastry chefs.

The Melbourne insurance broker is strongly fancied to win the competition.

Zumbo's Just Desserts is on Channel Seven on Monday at 7.30pm.
Her social media feeds are littered with racy images.

And Nicola Hughes was once again setting the Internet alight as she wowed in a barely-there bikini for her latest Instagram post on Sunday.

The Made In Chelsea star opted for a mismatched two-piece for her latest venture in front of the mirror, in which she no doubt thrilled some of her 218,000 followers on the photosharing site.

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Sizzling: Nicola Hughes was once again setting the Internet alight as she wowed in a barely-there bikini for her latest Instagram post on Sunday

Making sure all eyes were on her in the snap, Nicola jutted out her washboard abs while sporting floral bikini bottoms which sat loosely on her slender hips.

The Irish beauty wore minimal make-up in the image, allowing her naturally stunning good looks to glow through.

Her bikini top helped emphasise her cleavage, which was partially concealed by her wave of bright blonde hair.

Nicola's skin was a stunning bronze colour, undoubtedly from her many jaunts abroad, including holidays with the cast of the E4 show.

Stunner: Nicola's social media feeds are littered with racy images

Earlier this week, Nicola was making waves as she hit the high Spanish seas during a trip to Puerto Banus.

The girls chartered a yacht with her pals on Monday, making the most of the bank holiday weekend.

The 26-year-old Irish model showcased a series of sexy swimming costumes in which she ensured her perky derriere was stealing the full focus of her holiday album, as she contorted into a host of sexy poses.

Nicola, who burst onto the E4 show in the ninth series last year, appeared to be loving her jaunt in the sun as she lapped up the luxury of the stunning yacht and the beaming sun surrounding her.

Wowzers! Nicola was making waves as she hit the high Spanish seas during a trip to Puerto Banus, in which she chartered a yacht with her pals on Monday, making the most of the band holiday weekend

Her raciest pose came as she stretched her body into an elegant form with her arms aloft her head while standing on her tip-toes as she showed off her incredible legs and peachy posterior.

The neon hue of the swimsuit helped empahasise her deeply bronzed skin and bright blonde tresses, as she partially shielded her face to ensure she gave her 218,000 Instagram followers a look at her stunning figure.

Another snap saw Nicola grab a pal to help capture not only their figures but also the exquisite setting before them. The girls threw their arms in the air while clutching -glasses - evidently loving life on the vessel.

All I need is my girlfriends! The 26-year-old Irish model showcased a series of sexy swimming costumes in which she ensured her perky derriere was stealing the full focus of her holiday album, as she contorted into a host of sexy poses

Wrapping up the fun: Following their day in the sun, Nicola and her pal pals headed out for the night, for which she rocked a deeply plunging red gown while styling her sun-kissed blonde locks into a centre parting

Following their day in the sun, Nicola and her pal pals headed on a night out, for which she rocked a deeply plunging red gown while styling her sun-kissed blonde locks into a centre parting.

Her holiday was undoubtedly taking her mind off her previous trip in which she was left heartbroken when her boyfriend Alex Mytton broke up with her over text while she was on a family holiday in Florence, Italy.

Nicola then laid into her former flame - who she dated on and off for almost two years - in an interview withnew! magazine, in which she also revealed she is dating another of co-star Binky Felstead's exes.

Sad times: Her holiday was undoubtedly taking her mind off her previous trip in which she was left heartbroken when her boyfriend Alex Mytton (pictured) broke up with her over text while she was on a family holiday in Florence, Italy

Ex bashing: Nicola then laid into her former flame - who she dated on and off for almost two years - in an interview with new! magazine, in which she also revealed she is dating another of co-star Binky Felstead's exes

Talking about discovering Alex, 25, had slept with Olivia Bentley, 21, during their summer stint in the South of France, Nicola branded her ex a 'gross, vile human'.

The model said: 'It was upsetting but then I laughed about it. He's gross, a vile human.'

Talking about moving on from the famously tumultuous romance, Nicola revealed she has now fallen out with Binky, 26 - who also previously dated Alex - over her latest choice of man.

Stunner: Talking about discovering Alex, 25, had slept with Olivia Bentley, 21, during their summer stint in the South of France, Nicola branded her ex a 'gross, vile human'

She said: 'I'm definitely single. I'm not seeing anyone but I have been on dates with one of Binky's exes, who she dated two years ago. She's so angry about it.'

Binky - real name Alexandra Felstead - didn't seem too impressed by Nicola's public declaration about their feud, taking to Instagram last week to post a cryptic message.
Having worked on a war epic, it is likely that their time together on set was a far more serious affair.

But when the cameras aren't rolling, actors Mel Gibson and Andrew Garfield appear to get on like a house on fire, despite their 30-year age gap.

The two hunks were spotted in a fit of hysterics - perhaps making a joke about the Australian's ever-growing beard - as they arrived at the 73rd Venice Film Festival on Sunday.

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Having a ball! Mel Gibson, 60 and Andrew Garfield, 33, were spotted in a fit of hysterics as they arrived at the 73rd Venice Film Festival on Sunday

Dressed in a crisp white shirt and perfectly tailored suit trousers, The Social Network star, 33, looked effortlessly suave as he headed to the festival.

Keeping his trendy style intact, he added a pair of vintage sunglasses to his classic ensemble alongside a skinny black tie.

Meanwhile his director Mel Gibson, 60, opted for a more low-key look, arriving at the luxurious Lido island by boat in a navy polo top and jeans.

Casual: Mel opted for a more low-key look, arriving at the luxurious Lido island by boat in a navy polo top and jeans

Growing boy: Having grown his salt and pepper beard for his role in Blood Father, the star's facial hair appeared to have sprouted even further

Making an extravagant entrance the star seemed to almost trip as he stepped onto the deck, possibly causing the subsequent hilarity.

The two stars then stopped to chat for a while before they headed inside, with Andrew tipping his head back in raucous laughter at his funny companion.

Having grown his salt and pepper beard for his role in Blood Father, the star's facial hair appeared to have sprouted even further, now fading from grey to white and meeting his collar in length.

'LOL': The two stars then stopped to chat for a while, with Andrew tipping his head back in raucous laughter at his funny companion

The two boys are present at the festival for the premiere of their new blockbuster Hacksaw Ridge.

Garfield stars in war drama Hacksaw directed by Gibson, which follows Desmond T. Doss, the first soldier in US history who refused to bear arms but was still awarded the coveted Medal of Honor.

Talking of the emotional story, Andrew told Vogue Italy recently how difficult the noble character was to portray, having carried his fellow soldiers to safety across the war terrain in place of fighting.

Stylish: Keeping his trendy style intact, he added a pair of vintage sunglasses to his classic ensemble alongside a skinny black tie

Whoopsie daisy: Making an extravagant entrance the star seemed to almost trip as he stepped onto the deck, possibly causing the subsequent hilarity

The actor said: 'Im not in bad shape but after about one or two guys I needed to lie down. Dragging a full-grown man, its ridiculous, I have no idea how he did it.

No matter what preparation I did I could never match up to what he did, who he was.'

But it seems the feat was made possible by his A-List director, who was able to advise Andrew after a successful career spanning more than 30 years.

Gushing of Mel on set, the British actor continued: 'Hes so respectfully honest with actors and is totally with you in every single moment, working so hard to create the right environment for you to live the character youre playing.'

Buddies: The actors have recently worked together on war epic Hacksaw Ridge

The film is set for release on November 4.

Moving on from the Hollywood scene however, Andrew is moving from screen to stage for his next venture.

The Spiderman star is confirmed to star in the National Theatre's production of play Angels in America, written by Tony Kushner.

Taking on the role of Prior Walter, he stars alongside Being Human star Russell Tovey.

Meanwhile the future for Mel Gibson holds more tension, as he endures a lengthy child custody battle with his ex Oksana Grigorieva and their daughter Lucia, 18.
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She reportedly wants more children, but Kourtney Kardashian only had eyes for the three she already raises with estranged partner Scott Disick on Saturday afternoon.

The TV personality, 37, enjoyed some quality time with her family as their European break off the coast of Capri gets into full swing.

Kourtney revealed her cleavage in a busty crop top and matching shorts teamed with a breezy white shirt as she indulged Penelope, second of her three children with Disick.

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Eye-catching: Kourtney Kardashian revealed her ample cleavage in a very sexy crop top as she took a break with her family in Capri on Saturday

Quality time: With her hair teased into a messy top knot, Kourtney cradled her four-year old daughter Penelope as they idled outside a local restaurant

With her hair teased into a messy top knot, she cradled the four-year old as they idled outside a local restaurant.

Simple white trainers completed an effortless, summer ready look, while heavily tinted sunglasses and a white leather handbag proved to be the only visible accessories.

Meanwhile Penelope looked adorable in a yellow top and monochrome striped skirt.

Special moments: She reportedly wants more children, but Kourtney Kardashian only had eyes for Penelope on Saturday afternoon

Summer ready: The reality star looked tanned and toned in a busty crop top and matching shorts teamed with a breezy white shirt as she indulged the second of her three children with Scott Disick

Evidently keen to document their family holiday, Kourtney took numerous shots of her daughter as she gazed out at the ocean.

Not to be outdone, year-old son Reign soon joined the pair, and was promptly scooped up by his mother as they stood close to a set of railings.

The family are currently enjoying an extended sunshine break on the picturesque Italian island with Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner and her boyfriend, Corey Gamble.

Strike a pose: Evidently keen to document their family holiday, Kourtney took a number of shots of her daughter as she gazed out at the ocean

Snap happy:The TV personality ensured her daughter's trip to Capri was captured from every angle during the outing on Saturday

Here comes trouble: Mother and daughter were joined by youngest child Reign over an alfresco lunch

In her element: The 37-year old had her hands full with an excited Penelope and Reign

Kourtney's oldest son Mason completed the group as they occupied an outdoor table overlooking the ocean.

The tranquil surroundings appeared to have worked their magic on Kris, 60, who looked stress free while chatting with her loved ones.

A bohemian smock dress and accentuated her relaxed demeanour, while large tinted sunglasses rounded off a very casual ensemble.

Keep it in the family: Kardasdhian matriarch Kris Jenner looked relaxed after joining daughter Kourtney for a bite to eat

In good company: Mother Kris and her boyfriend Corey Gamble joined Kourtney for a bite to eat

Over there: Kourtney kept a protective arm around Penelope's waist while pointing out some of the sights

A bit of all white: The TV star later removed her breezy shirt, revealing a set of nicely toned abs

But the low key outfit was soon traded for something a little more colourful as the family chartered a small boat and made their way across the bay of Naples for a spot of sightseeing.

The self-styled 'Momager' looked rather more noticeable in a vibrantly pattered trouser suit as she strolled through the small harbour town.

Having also opted for a quick outfit change, Kourtney once again caught the eye in a clinging white vest top and simple black shorts.

Boho chic: Kris kept it casual in a printed bohemian smock top and heavily tinted sunglasses

Tucking in: Kourtney appeared to enjoy a healthy pasta lunch with her family

Idyllic: The family are making the most of their sunshine break on the Italian coast

The family were in high spirits after making their way into the harbour, where Kris was given a helping hand as she gingerly made her way into dry land.

Mingling easily with fellow tourists, Kourtney and Kris enjoyed an animated chat while browsing a selection of local stores and stalls.

The trio were later seen idling outside a local homeware store after Kourtney purchased a few essentials for her Los Angeles pad.

Life through a lens: Kris ensured she took her fair share of pictures during their latest outing in Capri

Say cheese: Oldest child Mason posed for his grandmother while Penelope idled in the background

Outfit change: K later traded her crop top for a white vest as the family chartered a small boat and made their way across the bay of Naples for a spot of sightseeing

Picture perfect: The mother of three couldn't resist taking snaps of the sweeping coastline

The TV star recently revealed that she and Disick 'definitely tried for a long time' to make it work before ending their nine-year relationship last year.

'The idea of having my family together is amazing, but it's not the way things ended up,' she told Cosmopolitan, but then added: 'They may end up there. I'm not sure.'

Kourtney is reportedly keen to extend her brood by any means possible following her split with Disick.

A source told RadarOnline: 'Kourtney is at the point where she wants to have more children and she does not care how she does it.

'She has been thinking about adopting, but ultimately she would like all of her kids to have the same father.'

Hard to miss: Kris' low key outfit was soon traded for something a little more colourful as she strolled through the harbour town with Kourtney and Corey

Eye-catching: The self-styled 'Momager' looked rather more noticeable in a vibrantly pattered trouser suit

Splashing out: Kourtney and Corey idled outside a local homeware store after purchasing some essentials

Faces in the crowd: The famous trio mingled with fellow shoppers as they browsed a selection of local stores and stalls

Good times: The family were in high spirits during their Italian shopping spree on Saturday
She's no stranger to Venice, having spent her Dad's 69th birthday there with her family last year.

But Sylvester Stallone's daughter Sistine appeared to be on a solo trip when she was spotted on the Lido at the famous Italian resort on Sunday.

The 18-year-old flashed the famous two-finger peace sign as she strolled, or it could have stood for V for Venice as she timed her arrival for the first weekend of the Venice Film Festival, when the city is flooded with film stars.

Stepping out: Sylvester Stallone's daughter Sistine was seen on the Lido in Venice on Sunday

And the model made sure all eyes were on her, wearing a very little black dress that skimmed the top of her thighs and barely covered her derriere as she turned the Lido into her her own personal catwalk.

The shift style dress was embellished with pleats that ran vertically from the neckline to the hem.

Sistine teamed it with black sneakers and a grey leather shoulder bag.

She left her long, honey blonde hair free to cascade down her back and wore very little make-up aside from some eye liner and pink lipstick.

Love and peace: The 18-year-old, who appeared to be in the Italian resort on a solo trip, flashed the famous sign as she puckered up

Comfortable in front of the camera: It isn't hard to see why Sistine's modelling career is taking off

Career move? The model timed her arrival for the first weekend of the Venice Film Festival, when the city is flooded with film stars, or she may have been there on an assignment

Sistine is signed to IMG Models and she could have been in Venice for a work assignment.

The beautiful middle daughter of Sylvester, now 70, and his wife Jennifer Flavin, 48, a former model herself, has posed for Teen Vogue, Harper's Bazaar Kazakhstan and Express.

And she has just covered her first magazine - the September issue of Town & Country - shot by photographer Terry Richardson.

Smile and wave: The honey blonde made sure all eyes were on her, wearing a very little black dress that skimmed the top of her thighs and barely covered her derriere

Strutting her stuff: Sistine, who is signed with IMG Models, turned the Lido into her own personal catwalk

She told the magazine about her plans for the future, saying: 'I feel that a smart move would be for me to go to college in New York and continue modeling there.

'My parents would love to keep me near. They're protective, and they want their little girl home.'

Sly and Jennifer also share daughters Sophia, 20, and Scarlet, 14.

Keeping comfortable: The rising star teamed her tiny dress with black trainers
He's often seen packing on the PDA with girlfriend Morgan Brown.

But Gerard Butler could not stop himself from admiring a whole host of other lovely ladies, as he enjoyed a drink without his girl in London last week.

The actor, 46, relaxed at the Queen's Pub in Primrose Hill, where he eyed up not one, but seven women that walked by, according to theSunday People.

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Ladies man: Gerard Butler, 46, enjoyed an afternoon at the Queen's Pub in Primrose Hill, where he eyed up not one, but seven women that walked by

Yes or no? Gerard could not stop himself from admiring other lovely ladies as he enjoyed a drink without his girlfriend Morgan Brown

Attempting to keep a low-profile in a cap, the actor seemed to be rather enjoying himself as he openly checked out his female passers-by for everyone to see.

According to the publication, he smiled at his first female acquaintance, before sharing pointed looks with the next five.

In one instance he shared a giggle with a pair of dark-haired beauties, flashing a cheeky smug smile after they appeared to recognise him.

Cheeky chappie: The Irish hunk could not help himself from smiling at a host of female onlookers

Corr: He seemed particularly impressed by the behind of one passer-by

How you doin'? Attempting to keep a low-profile in a cap, the actor smiled and giggled at several as he openly checked out his female passers-by

He was then seen in an expression of satisfaction, looking very impressed at the derriere of one woman.

Later he moved across to a standing position on the opposite side of his table - perhaps hoping for a better view of any approaching beauties who may come his way.

Retiring to the pub itself, he then embarked on a conversation with the seventh lady through the pub window.

The pair chatted animatedly for some time before he leaned down to cuddle and kiss the pet dog she had with her.

Working the angles: Gerard then moved from his table to stand outside the pub, perhaps hoping for a better view of any approaching beauties

Unashamed by his open observations, this behaviour is not entirely out of character for the actor, who is often seen enjoying public displays of affection.

He and his girlfriend Morgan were seen in Mayfair just last week, looking the picture of passion as they indulged in some window-shopping on Bond Street.

It was evidently a romantic walk for them both, as they were seen stopping to kiss and touch each other at every opportunity.

At one point the couple could be seen getting very cheeky as they placed their hands on each other's backsides.

New tactic: Retiring to the pub itself to find more potential admirers, he embarked on a conversation with the seventh lady through the pub window

Puppy love: He then leaned down to cuddle and kiss the pet dog she had with her

Despite his open admiration of other talent from afar, Gerard has actually been dating Morgan since May 2014.

The couple are believed to have reunited in April following a brief break earlier this year.

A renowned ladies man, the relationship followed his split from Romanian model Madalina Ghenea, 27, in 2013.

Gerard has been open about his love life in the past, admitted in an interview with InStyle last year that he has searches for a certain type of girl.

Funny man: The brunette appeared to laugh profusely at Gerard's conversation

'I love a woman who has a good sense of her own style--when, no matter how simple it is, you can just tell she wears it well,' he explained.

'Often times when I go to awards shows, sometimes it feels like a hassle, like "gosh, I have to go through all this?" Then you get there, and you see a woman dressed up with her hair and makeup done, wearing a beautiful dress, and they look so elegant and sexy and beautiful. It's nice to play dress-up.'

'The woman I will fall in love with will look great in that, but she is also somebody who can completely kick it in a pair of sandals and jeans and t-shirt. That's my [kind of] girl.'

Tactile: this behaviour is not entirely out of character for the actor, who is often seen enjoying public displays of affection
Michelle Keegan's latest role will show her enjoying a raunchy love scene with her chiseled co-star Luke Pasqualino.

And while the 29-year-old star was captured passionately kissing Luke in just her bra for the scene, she maintains her husband Mark Wright won't be left feeling jealous.

Speaking about the raunchy romp, which takes place in the first episode of Our Girl, she said the 30-year-old presenter knows that 'it's a job' fore her - and nothing else.

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'Hes seen me kiss a lot of men': Michelle Keegan insists her on-screen romp with Our Girl co-star Luke Pasqualino hasn't left her husband Mark Wright feeling jealous

It's just a job: Speaking about the raunchy romp, which takes place in the first episode of Our Girl, she said the 30-year-old presenter knows that 'it's a job' fore her - and nothing else

Speaking to the Daily Star, the former Corrie Star explained her husband was fine with her on-screen antics, revealing it's something he's seen before.

'He has seen the first episode of Our Girl already,' explained Michelle. 'But Ive been with Mark for four years now, so hes seen me kiss a lot of men on screen.'

Quizzed on his reaction to her on-screen romances, she batted away any suggestions Mark disagreed with the scenes, saying:

'He knows its a job and that its in the script It is a little bit awkward for me watching that scene back.'

'He knows its a job and that its in the script': Speaking to the Daily Star, the former Corrie Star explained her husband was fine with her on-screen antics

However, she said she felt most awkward about her parents seeing the scenes, saying: 'Id feel a lot more awkward if I was watching it with my dad. Id be cringing.'

Michelle's comment followed the revelation that she and Luke are set to engage in a VERY steamy romp during the premiere episode of the new BBC drama.

The scene sees the actress strip down to just her bra as she enjoys a saucy romp with Luke - who she was rumoured to have formed a 'close bond' with on set, fuelling further speculation of a split with Mark.

Look at the smiles! Michelle and Mark stepped out for a celebratory night out after the show's launch, on Thursday, as the duo remain defiant in the face of rumoured strife in their marriage

Arms wrapped around each other in a dark bedroom, the pair are seen sharing a passionate kiss as they engage in skin-to-skin contact in the heart-racing scene.

As if the dalliance wasn't enough, Mark may have even more reason to look away from his wife's new war epic - with her character Corporal Georgie Lane also sharing a second kiss with co-star Royce Pierreson.

Talking of the on-set antics at the Our Girl screening on Thursday, the former Coronation Street star remained coy about her steamy scenes.

Look away, Mark! Her husband Mark Wright may have even more reason to shield his eyes from his wife's new drama - as she shares kisses with both Luke and co-star Royce Pierreson

'I'm going to say both of them were very good!' she laughed, when asked which of her acting beaus was the better lip-lock.

Michelle and Mark stepped out for a celebratory night out after the show's launch, as the duo remain defiant in the face of rumoured strife in their marriage.

The beauty could not stop smiling as she strode along arm-in-arm with her spouse of one year, having enjoyed a night of post-work festivities at London's Mahiki nightclub.

Happier than ever! Michelle went further than showing off her ring as she later stepped out with the former TOWIE star for a celebratory night out after the launch

Michelle stole the show at the launch, as she flashed her engagement ring from her husband in a defiant display having set tongues wagging with the absence of the jewellery in recent weeks.

In the face of bold claims about their romance, the couple, who have just returned from a beach break in Majorca, seemed happier than ever as they giggled their way out of the swanky club in the capital before hopping in a cab.

The former Coronation Street actress remained in her stunning tuxedo from earlier in the night.

Moment to himself: Mark appeared to be lost in thought as Michelle screamed with laughter at a joke from co-star Ben Aldridge

A laugh a minute: In the face of bold claims about their romance, the couple, who have just returned from a beach break in Majorca, seemed happier than ever as they giggled their way out of the swanky club in the capital before hopping in a cab

Flying the flag: As the duo clamboured into a taxi they were caught in a fit on the giggles, while Michelle held on to a camouflage flag, no doubt a souvenir from the triumphant launch of the show

Mark meanwhile, who had not been seen at the premiere, was suitably more low-key in a denim ensemble.

The handsome star, who soared to fame in TOWIE's 2010 inauguration, wore tight jeans with a complementary grey T-shirt and denim jacket for his night out with his stunning wife.

As the duo clambered into a taxi they were caught in a fit on the giggles, while Michelle held on to a camouflage flag, no doubt a souvenir from the triumphant launch of the show.

Having a giggle: It was a squeeze in the car as the whole gang looked to be heading to their next venue while cracking up with Michelle sat in the centre of the taxi

What a laugh! Mark seemed to be the jester of the pack as he giggled away

Stoney: Some moments appeared more stern as the laughs dissipated

A great night had by all! The happy couple seemed joyous at the end of the evening

Stunner: Michelle's gleaming white smile was stunning as she beamed

Hometime: The couple looked ready for bed as they left the party

Something on your mind? The former TOWIE star seemed preoccupied with his phone

More serious moments: Mark and Michelle gazed into the distance as they waited for the car to depart

Also in their cab was her co-star Ben Aldridge, who seemed to have been enjoying the party alongside the couple.

It was a squeeze in the car as the whole gang looked to be heading to their next venue while cracking up with Michelle sat in the centre of the taxi.

While the happy couple seemed joyous at the end of the evening, reports were once again circulating, with insiders claiming Michelle's Our Girl love interest Luke Pasqualino dodged the premiere to avoid questions about their relationship.

Glimmering: Michelle's dazzling good looks were radiant in the London night

Wrapping up: It was no doubt time for bed after a night of work and partying for the pair

Serious: Mark frequently looked lost in thought as he headed out

Three's a crowd? Michelle was in a fit of giggles with her co-star Ben

What's so funny? While her husband was lost in thought, Michelle was having the time of her life

Was it something he said? The actress is obviously great mates with her co-star

The glamorous event in London saw Michelle arrive on the arms of handsome co-stars Ben and Royce Pierreson although Luke was nowhere to be seen.

Insiders tell The Sun that the 26-year-old former Skins star sought to avoid any awkward line of questioning about the 'close bond' they formed, in fear his responses would further fuel rumours.

The speculation was not helped when Luke and Michelle filmed scenes in Manchester in July, where they looked totally at ease with one another.

Leading lady: Michelle was keen to celebrate after her big night on the red carpet

Hunky husband: Mark didn't appear at the premiere earlier in the evening but was there to party with his wife later

This way? Michelle looked for the couple's car as they walked out into the crowd

Party time! Michelle chose to celebrate her new TV project at popular haunt Mahiki

I got you babe: Gentleman Mark held the door open for his wife

Keeping her close: Mark made sure his gorgeous girl stuck by his side in the crowds

Where to next? The party spirit seemed to be strong in the cab ride home

In the mood: Mark seemed to brighten up as he joined in the fun and japes

Michelle plays Lance Corporal Georgie Lane to Luke's character, maverick Special Forces officer Elvis Harte.

While the stunning actress ensured her wedding ring was in full focus during the evening, Luke, who is reportedly dating Little Mix's Perrie Edwards, was nowhere to be seen.

Sources tell the publication: 'Michelle and Luke obviously formed a close bond while being away from home for so long.

Time out: Michelle Our Girl love interest Luke Pasqualino reportedly dodged Thursday night's premiere to dodge questions about their relationship

Work time! Insiders tell The Sun that the 26-year-old former Skins star sought to avoid any awkward line of questioning about the 'close bond' they formed, in fear his responses would further fuel rumours

Work friends: The glamorous event in London saw the former Coronation Street star, 28, arrive on the arms of handsome co-stars Ben Aldridge and Royce Pierreson although Luke was nowhere to be seen

'But he just wants to the talk to be about his performances, not face the inevitable questions about his relationship with Michelle. His responses could fuel even more rumours.'

MailOnline has contacted representatives for BBC and Luke for comment.

As she walked the red carpet, Michelle looked incredible in a black two-piece suit, with a plunging white vest top worn beneath to flash a hint of her cleavage yet remaining demure and sophisticated.

Where was he? While the stunning actress ensured her wedding ring was in full focus during the evening, Luke, who is reportedly dating Little Mix's Perrie Edwards, was nowhere to be seen

New love? Luke is rumoured to be dating Little Mix star Perrie Edwards

Ring the alarm! Michelle stole the show at the launch, as she flashed her engagement ring from her husband of a year Mark Wright in a defiant display having set tongues wagging with the absence of the jewellery in recent weeks

Stunner: The actress, who has just returned from a beach break with her husband in Majorca, looked incredible in a chic tuxedo as she prepped to unveil her latest work in the BBC series

Michelle looked incredible in a chic tuxedo as she prepped to unveil her latest work in the BBC series.

Her blonde tresses, recently bleached for her role in forthcoming biopic Bobby And Tina, were beginning to show the faintest hints of her natural raven roots although she ignored the contrast with a pulled back style.

The most stand out element of her incredible outfit was undoubtedly her eye-watering engagement ring, gifted to her by Mark in September 2013.

Hunky! The most stand out element of her incredible outfit was undoubtedly her eye-watering engagement ring, gifted to her by the former TOWIE star in September 2013

Pals: Royce meanwhile looked sharp in a cobalt blue polo shirt for his turn at the premiere, where he was lucky enough to receive a warm hug and affectionate poses with his stunning co-star

Her hands were laden with delicate costume jewellery rings, while she wore a dazzling gold watch although her eye-popping wedding ring was the stand-out element of her accessory choices.

Mark and Michelle's marriage has been plagued with rumours of strife, with the whispers being heightened by Michelle's frequent public appearances without her wedding ring of late - although the couple have frequently slammed the reports.

Michelle was beaming as she walked the red carpet in her suit while sandwiched between her two co-star pals, with Ben going casual in a bomber jacket.

A handsome pair: Michelle was beaming as she walked the red carpet in her suit while sandwiched between her two co-star pals, with Ben going casual in a bomber jacket

Suited and booted: Michelle's ensemble was perfect for the evening ahead

A gorgeous group: The trio proved to be an extremely good looking group

Royce meanwhile looked sharp in a cobalt blue polo shirt for his turn at the premiere, where he was lucky enough to receive a warm hug and affectionate poses with his stunning co-star.

Earlier this year a previous story from New! magazine claimed the Heart presenter was concerned when fans linked Michelle to handsome Ben.

Michelle had innocently shared a group picture with some of the cast at their read through which was captioned: 'Me and some of the boys at our cast read through for Our Girl 2! X'

But a representative for Mark told MailOnline: 'It's a completely fabricated and made up story written by people desperate for content.'

Slammed! Earlier this year a previous story from New! magazine claimed the Heart presenter was concerned when fans linked Michelle to handsome Ben

Innocent: Michelle had innocently shared a group picture with some of the cast at their read through which was captioned: 'Me and some of the boys at our cast read through for Our Girl 2! x'

Gorgeous: Michelle's role as Corporal Georgie Lane in the new series takes over the lead role from Lacey Turner, who will reprise her character of Molly Dawes but in a minor capacity due to her hectic filming schedule with EastEnders

Working it out: Michelle looked ready for business for the night ahead

Michelle's role as Corporal Georgie Lane in the new series takes over the lead role from Lacey Turner, who will reprise her character of Molly Dawes but in a minor capacity due to her hectic filming schedule with EastEnders.

Speaking about the second season of Our Girl, a BBC spokesperson announced: 'It won't be an easy posting as [Georgie] has to earn the love and trust of her fellow soldiers, and the greater respect of her commanding officer, while working alongside aid workers in the world's biggest refugee camp.

'Kenya will be full of surprises that will challenge Georgie professionally and personally.'
TOWIE's Megan McKenna isn't afraid to flash some flesh and the stunner uploaded a very sexy NAKED snap of herself and her boyfriend Pete Wicks on Sunday.

The 23-year-old posted the racy image to Instagram ahead as the couple ran a bath together, with Megan covering her modesty with her arms and legs.

Pete, also not too shy, stood behind her, allowing his girlfriend's body to cover his intimate areas as she sat in front of him.

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Making a splash: TOWIE's Megan McKenna posted a very intimate NAKED Instagram picture of herself and boyfriend Pete Wicks ahead of bath time on Sunday

It was Pete who took the snap on his phone, with Megan sharing the image and no doubt delighting their fans.

She captioned the image with a simple bath emoji.

Megan is no doubt keen to spend some time relaxing as she was partying in Magaluf the week before.

Barcelona baby! The couple looked to be enjoying their time away, and headed out for a romantic meal after their antics in the bathroom

'When bae comes back with roses': It seems that Pete was determined to make the night a romantic one, as he gifted his beloved with a bouquet of roses

However, she didn't look at all worse for wear as she headed out to a meeting in Camden last Thursday afternoon.

She looked stylish in an off-the-shoulder blue top and tight black jeans teamed with a pair of high heeled black boots.

The top served to show off her holiday tan, while she looked in cheerful spirits after her break away.

Blue beauty: Megan looked stylish in an off-the-shoulder blue top and tight black jeans teamed with a pair of high heeled black boots last Thursday

A lacy black choker and perfectly applied eye make-up completed the look, while the star's hair was tied into a practical top knot.

'Up & ready for Towie meetings today... Then onto something very exciting this afternoon! Which I can tell u very soon.....' she tweeted somewhat cryptically.

Just a day earlier, Megan was partying the day away during a VIP appearance at a packed party in Magaluf.

They're fans: Megan and Pete recently attended FriendsFest in Haggerston Park together on August 23

Sweet: The couple looked rather in love when they were pictured filming scenes for ITVBe reality show at the start of last month

While she had the time of her life on Wednesday, a few hours later it was a different story as Megan was caught up in flight delays as she headed home to the UK that night.

'Fuminggggggg ellllllllll my flight is delayed 2 hourssssssssss noooooooo,' she told her Twitter followers.

And later she added: 'How am I delayed another half hour on top of the 2 hours... F**k sake and I have to be in a meeting tomorrow morning in London! I HATE Liberty takers.'

Megan finally made it back to the UK, tweeting in the early hours: 'How have I just landed. literally gonna get home the time I woke up for the airport this morning. Wow.'

The CBB star joined the cast of the Essex-based reality shows earlier this year, finding love with hunky co-star Pete Wicks.
She's normally the one in front of the camera.

But it seems model Gigi Hadid had other plans on Sunday when she was spotted out with her Fujifilm Polaroid Instax 210 in New York.

The 21-year-old, who is signed with IMG Models, flashed her long legs in a pair of Daisy Dukes.

Oh, snap: Gigi Hadid flashed her tummy and long legs in a pair of Daisy Dukes when she was spotted out with her Fujifilm Polaroid Instax 210 in New York on Sunday

And she gave a glimpse of her taut and toned tummy in a white blouse that she tied above her waist.

The fashionista completed her look with a tan leather jacket, a Lola James 'selfie' necklace, a yellow satchel handbag and colourful, eye-catching platform slides.

Gigi smoothed her blonde tresses into a high pony tail as she walked along.

Peek-a-boo: The 18-year-old model also gave a glimpse of her taut and toned tummy in a white blouse that she tied above her waist that she wore with a Lola James 'selfie' necklace

Stepping out: The fashionista completed her look with a tan leather jacket, a yellow satchel handbag and colourful, eye-catching platform slides

It's been a busy few days for the jetsetter who flew to Germany on Friday for the European launch of her new collaboration with designer Tommy Hilfiger, Tommy X Gigi, at the Bread & Butter Trend Show in the Berlin Arena.

She posted a snap of herself in a nautical-themed outfit before her trip, captioned: 'It's been over a year since @tommyhilfiger and I began this journey.

'I cant believe it's finally here!!!!! So excited to be headed to BERLIN for the European launch of #tommyxgigi at #breadandbutter16 TOMORROW with @zalando! Can't wait to meet some of you there!'

Looking rear-ly good: The model attracted plenty of attention as she made her way to her destination

Nautical but nice: On Thursday Gigi posted this snap on Instagram proudly announcing that she was heading to Germany for the bow of her new line with Tommy Hilfigur, Tommy X Gigi, at the Bread & Butter Trend Show in the Berlin Arena

Gigi was pictured at the show on Friday in a black vest with a white G on the front in rope intertwined around an anchor that she paired with white skinny-leg trousers with side buttons and black bootees.

Meanwhile, it seems her love life is back on track.

Gigi recently returned from a trip to Tahiti with her British beau Zayn Malik, 23, after a brief split in June.

Ahoy, there! On Friday she was decked out in a T-shirt and white skinny leg trousers from the nautical-themed line of clothing that she's been working on with Hilfigur for a year
Fans of Poldark are more used to seeing her inflaming the passions of Captain Ross in a suitably period ensemble.

But Eleanor Tomlinson ditched her 18th Century wardrobe for something a little more modern as she attended the Poldark series two premiere, on Sunday evening.

Arriving at a cinema in St Austell, Cornwall alongside co-star Aidan Turner, the 24-year-old actress put on a pulse-raising display thanks to her white lace mini dress.

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Pins on parade: Eleanor Tomlinson ditched her 18th Century wardrobe for something a little more modern as she attended the Poldark series two premiere, on Sunday evening

Ensuring that the spotlight fell firmly on her as the stars of the series arrives at the White River Cinema, the Yorkshire beauty put on a VERY leggy display.

Slipping into a fitted white mini dress, which featured lace layer over a bone white underlining, Eleanor couldn't help but highlight her slender figure.

With the undulating hem of the garment grazing her thighs, the actress ensured that her lithe legs were firmly in the spotlight.

Adding a pair of camel suede stilettos to the mix, Eleanor further highlighted her alabaster pins whilst adding a high-fashion flourish to her look.

Thigh's the limit: Arriving at a cinema in St Austell, Cornwall alongside co-star Aidan Turner, the 24-year-old actress put on a pulse-raising display thanks to her white lace mini dress

She accessorisied the delicate sleeveless dress with a simple leather handbag, with the star careful not to let any other items clutter her look.

Wearing her fiery mane styled into a wavy ponytail which she wore over one shoulder, Eleanor ensured her features were left unobscured by any stray hairs.

Wearing a simple and pale make-up palette, the stunning star added a flash of colour to her look with a bold slick of red lipstick.

All white on the night: Slipping into a fitted white mini dress, which featured lace layer over a bone white underlining, Eleanor couldn't help but highlight her slender figure

They're back! The flame-haired beauty's appearance in the episode was very much at odds with her choice of red carpet attire

Her co-star, and the man of the hour, Aidan Turner, went for a more casual ensemble at the premiere.

The Hobbit actor, 33, teamed an olive bomber with a white tee-shirt, black jeans and biker boots.

Wearing his long dark hair slicked back off of his face, the Hollywood star added a macho edge to his look thanks to a heavy layer of stubble.

Leg's ahoy! Adding a pair of camel suede stilettos to the mix, Eleanor further highlighted her alabaster pins whilst adding a high-fashion flourish to her look

Casually does it: Aidan , 33, teamed an olive bomber with a white tee-shirt, black jeans and biker boots

Her leading men: She was joined on the red carpet by the Hobbit star and Jack Farthing (who plays George Warleggan)

Matching mates: The 30-year-old actor opted for a similar look to Aidan, teaming a blue bomber with a grey tee, jeans and tan boots

The duo were joined by their co-star Jack Farthing, who plays Poldark's nemesis George Warleggan.

The 30-year-old actor opted for a similar look to Aidan, teaming a blue bomber with a grey tee, jeans and tan boots.

The successful series, directed by Edward Bazalgette and Will McGregor, follows soldier Ross Poldark, who returns home from the American War of Independence to his father dead, estate ruined and former lover married to his cousin.

He then sets out to regain his village and control of the mines lost during his time in battle, with the help of his newly enlisted housemaid Demelza.
They were meant to be dating after falling for one another in the Celebrity Big Brother house.

But it looks like things could already be over between Stephen Bear and Chloe Khan after he was pictured holding hands with busty EOTB star Lacey Fuller.

The pair looked fairly into one another as they headed to Gallery nightclub in Maidstone, Kent, together on Sunday night.

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Nothing to see here: CBB's Stephen Bear holds hands with busty Ex On The Beach star Lacey Fuller after his CBB lover Khan was pictured with previous winner Jason Burrill

The snaps come after Chloe was spotted on a cosy night out with Big Brother winner Jason Burrill in London the evening before.

Taking the news that his love interest could have moved on without him, Stephen looked like he didn't have a care in the world as he headed out with Lacey.

She made sure all eyes were on her, wearing a perilously plunging black top which showed off her ample assets.

New romance? The couple wore matching outfits as they headed to Gallery nightclub together in Maidstone, Kent, without a care in the world

Teaming the top with a khaki pencil skirt, she added some height to her frame with a pair of platform heels.

Carrying a Chanel bag in her hand, Lacey's locks were styled to perfection, into loose curls as they fell down past her shoulders.

Stephen appeared to have carefully thought out his look for the night out, wearing a T-shirt in the same hue as Lacey's skirt.

Getting his own back? The snaps come a day after Celebrity Big Brother star Chloe Khan was spotted on a cosy night out with Big Brother winner Jason Burrill in London

He also wore a pair of light-coloured jeans as the pair prepared to let down their hair.

On Saturday, 25-year-old Chloe looked as though her in-house flame and eventual champ Bear was miles away from her thoughts, as she clutched on to the handsome winner Jason Burrill's hand and nuzzled into his neck.

Chloe ensured all eyes were on her for her night on the town as she showed off eye-popping assets in a skin-tight pink mini dress with dazzling sequinned panels.

Attempting to protect her modesty somewhat and keeping out the unseasonable chill, the X Factor reject draped a stone coloured leather jacket over her shoulders.

Showing off her attention to detail, Chloe sported matching pink heels of a teetering height with two delicate straps at the ankle and toe.

Adding an injection of superstar glamour, she tucked an envy-inducing Christian Dior handbag under her arm.

A thing for winners? The 25-year-old beauty looked as though her in-house flame and eventual champ Stephen Bear was miles away from her thoughts, as she clutched on to the handsome winner's hand and nuzzled into his neck

Busty! Attempting to protect her modesty somewhat and keeping out the unseasonable chill, the X Factor reject draped a stone coloured leather jacket over her shoulders

Her raven tresses, enhanced with extensions, tumbled over her shoulders in stunning waves pulled over one shoulder.

Chloe ensured her make-up was perfectly applied as she sported lashings of mascara while outlining her famously plump pout with a matte lipstick.

Jason, who judged Pup Aid 2016 with the model days before, cut a handsome figure in a sharp blazer and waistcoat combination while wearing tight jeans and suede loafers.

Chloe's stint in the famed house came shortly after Jason reigned victorious during the civilian show, after which Chloe got hot and heavy in the real show.

Bear who? Chloe ensured all eyes were on her for her night on the town as she showed off eye-popping assets in a skin-tight pink mini dress with dazzling sequinned panels

Getting to know you: On Saturday Chloe and Jason co-hosted the Pup Aid event in London's Primrose Hill

Oops! A number of steamy dalliances with Bear saw the Playboy model devote herself to him before his eventual departure upon winning the show last month

Kiss and make-up? The busty model seems to have a penchant for winners as she appeared to get cosy with Jason - perhaps in response to Bear's recent revelation that he'd like to build bridges with his ex Vicky following their acrimonious split

A number of steamy dalliances with Bear saw the Playboy model devote herself to him before his eventual departure upon winning the show last month.

The busty model seems to have a penchant for winners as she appeared to get cosy with Jason - perhaps in response to Bear's recent revelation that he'd like to build bridges with his ex Vicky Pattison following their acrimonious split.

In a candid chat, Bear told Mirror: 'I would finally like to speak to Vicky and get things off my chest. Theres a lot that needs to be said. After we broke up she blocked me on WhatsApp so I havent been able to talk to her.

'I want to clear the air. Thats not to say I want to get back with her but it would be nice to sort things out and get a bit of clarity.'
He has been busy filming scenes for the hotly-anticipated new film Dunkirk over the last seven months as he forges a career for himself as an actor.

And One Direction megastar Harry Styles, 22, looked every inch the heartthrob as he posed for an Instagram snap to celebrate the end of filming.

Standing alongside two lucky crew members for the picture, costume designer Krista Guggia marked the occasion by posting the snap onto social media.

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What a trooper! Harry Styles looks devilishly handsome as he poses in an Instagram snapto mark the end of filming war epic Dunkirk

She captioned the image with the words: 'And thats a wrap on Dunkirk! Its been an absolute pleasure to work with this true class act.

'7 long, crazy months and I cant wait to see the final product!'

Christopher Nolan's upcoming movie, Dunkirk tells the story of one of the most successful rescue missions in British history.

And action... Christopher Nolan's upcoming movie, Dunkirk tells the story of one of the most successful rescue missions in British history

Historical: Code-named Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of soldiers from Dunkirk beach took place between 26 May and 4 June 1940 under the supervision and mastermind of Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay

Code-named Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of soldiers from Dunkirk beach took place between 26 May and 4 June 1940 under the supervision and mastermind of Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay.

Set to be released in 2017, the movie also stars Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance, Cillian Murphy and Kenneth Branagh.

Previously speaking about his One Direction co-star, Mark told the Evening Standard:

'What's really surprised me is he's really witty, really funny - he really makes me laugh. He's been ever so brave, not making any fuss.

'He seems remarkable ... one of those people - Sean Penn has it too - a kind of panache.

'I look at them and think, "How did you get that? How do you get so that life is easy?" But he has got a lovely, lovely character. It's a gift.'
Simon Cowell found himself hot under the collar on Sunday night's X Factor auditions, as one hopeful took a bit of a shine to him.

LA-based Russian model Irina Dedyuk, 28, had her sights set on the judge, describing him as 'hot' before her audition even began.

Her appearance on the show comes as Irina denied reports that she is a 60-an-hour dominatrix who goes by the name of Katerina, after starring on an adult website.

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It's a YES from him: Simon Cowell found himself hot under the collar on Sunday night's X Factor auditions, as sexy Russian model Irina Dedyuk one hopeful took a bit of a shine to him

The appearance comes as Irina told MailOnline she's not a 60-an-hour dominatrix after she starred in a raunchy video on an adult website

Appearing in a red dress and sporting a whip in the promo video she said: 'I get a kick out of turning an egotistical man into a completely obedient and submissive pet.'

However, Irina told MailOnline: 'The video was just a fun acting project which was used completely out of context.

'I have never been a dominatrix, nor charged money for such a thing. I was simply playing a character.'

Meanwhile, Irina made sure all eyes were on her during her vampy audition, which was aired on Sunday night.

She told cameras: 'Simon won't have a choice I will try my best to make him like my voice and I'm pretty insistent. He's a king,' the hopeful purred as she strutted towards the auditions room.

Wearing skintight leggings and a plunging sheer top showcasing her ample cleavage, she stormed in confidently to see her idol Simon.

She knows what she wants: Wearing skintight leggings and a plunging sheer top showcasing her ample cleavage, she stormed in confidently to see her idol Simon

He has the X Factor! Russian model Irina Dedyuk, who resides in LA, had her sights set on the judge, describing him as 'hot' before her audition even began

As she stood in front of the panel giving Simon the eye, the father-of-one's own eyes almost popped out of his head.

Having asked her where she's from, he seemed entranced when she revealed she's from Russia.

Giggling at each other while Nicole Scherzinger, Louis Walsh and Sharon Osborne looked on in amusement, the brunette beauty finally launched into an impressive rendition of Simply The Best.

And the rest of the panel seemed to be intruding, as Irina gave Simon what appears to be his own performance of the song.

Embarrassed, Simon appeared to blush as he stared bashfully at the model-who gave a powerful performance.

Only eyes for one man: Giggling at each other while Nicole Scherzinger, Louis Walsh and Sharon Osborne looked on in amusement, the brunette beauty finally launched into an impressive rendition of Simply The Best

Powerful: Irina gave a booming performance of Simply the best- singing personally to Simon

'You're slightly scary but I love it', Simon mumbled at the end of her performance as she pouted seductively at him

'You're slightly scary but I love it', Simon mumbled at the end of her performance as she pouted seductively at him.

'You're a Russian tigress and I love it,' Nicole exclaimed, giving her seal of approval.

And Sharon proclaimed: 'She's got more front than Selfridges!', before joining the rest of the panel in getting her through to the next round.

Bold! Appearing in a red dress and sporting a whip, she says: 'I get a kick out of turning an egotistical man into a completely obedient and submissive pet'

Talented: 'She absolutely does not charge any money as a dominatrix. She filmed the video as an acting project' a spokesperson said

Meanwhile the night's episode saw a whole host of talented individuals make it through to the next round.

In the London round of auditions Matt Terry set Twitter alight with his uncanny resemblance to Louis Tomlinson.

Sharing a bonding moment with Nicole, he explained how he left his job and moved areas after being dumped by his girlfriend of three years.

'It was holding me back': Sharing a bonding moment with Nicole, hoepful Matt Terry explained how he left his job and moved areas after being dumped by his girlfriend of three years

'I feel you!' Nicole chimed in an apparent dig at ex Lewis Hamilton

'It was holding me back', he admitted.

'I feel you!' Nicole chimed in an apparent dig at ex Lewis Hamilton, before the panel unanimously voted them through.

Also sailing through were adorable couple Tom and Laura, who melted audiences' hearts with their unbreakable bond.

Unbreakable: Also sailing through were adorable couple Tom and Laura, who melted audiences' hearts with their unbreakable bond

As they surprised the panel with their talent, Simon exclaimed: 'Laura you're good but Tom you're great- you should consider going it alone.'

But Tom stayed loyal, responding: 'I wouldn't do that'.

Also making it through to the next round was Ryan Wilkins from the Manchester leg of the tour impressing the judges with Rihanna's Yellow Diamonds.

And Freddie Parker, 18, won the panel over with his pretty boyband looks as he recited Amy Winehouse's Love is Losing Game in soulful tones, playing the piano.

And 17-year-old Chanel wowed the judges with Lauren Hill's Ex Factor, with Simon proclaiming: 'I love you!'.

Wowing them! Also making it through to the next round was Ryan Wilkins from the Manchester leg of the tour impressing the judges with Rihanna's Yellow Diamonds

Turning heads: Freddie Parker, 18, won the panel over with his pretty boyband looks as he recited Amy Winehouse's Love is Losing Game in soulful tones, playing the piano

Talent: And 17-year-old Chanel wowed the judges with Lauren Hill's Ex Factor, with Simon proclaiming: 'I love you!'

And X Factor hopeful Marianna Zappi reduced judge Nicole Scherzinger to tears as she revealed her traumatic past.

Before her rendition of Bob Marley's Redemption, the 34-year-old campaign coordinator- who is originally Italian, explained why the song was a particularly poignant choice for her.

Brave! Marianna Zappi reduced judge Nicole Scherzinger to tears as she revealed her traumatic past

'I'm here with my best friend,' she explained.

'I've been singing for a very long time and my journey came to a stop suddenly as I was in an abusive relationship.'

The news was met by a stunned silence by the panel, with Nicole and Sharon Osborne looking particularly struck.

Touched: As Marianna explained her past, Nicole became increasingly emotional as she listened to her story

And as Marianna explained her past, Nicole became increasingly emotional as she listened to her story.

'It was a hard time in my life but I'm able to stand here in front of you guys today and I'm like yes,' the X Factor hopeful continued.

'I can't even tell you how grateful I am.'

Throwing back to her VT, Mariana explained: 'Music is the only thing that kept me going.

Personal: Following her rendition of Bob Marley's Redemption, the 34-year-old campaign coordinator- who is originally Italian, explained why the song was a particularly poignant choice for her

'I told myself I wouldn't cry and you made me cry. I think a lot of women can relate to your story.' Nicole said

'After four years I walked out and went to the Woman's Trust. I was very lucky' Marianna explained

'After four years I walked out and went to the Woman's Trust. I was very lucky.

'For someone who was caged for so long freedom is such a blessing.

'These are tears of happiness.'

And Marianna launched into a soulful rendition of Bob Marley's hit song, with the panel entranced.

It's a yes! Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh gave her the thumbs up, with Simon adding: 'It was beautiful- it meant something, you have passion and you feel real. I loved it'

Impressed! Sharon added: 'It was amazing, she'll be a great example to women of her age group'

As she continued to sing, Nicole started crying, touched by the brunette's raw performance.

'I love you to bits,' says Nicole. 'I told myself I wouldn't cry and you made me cry. I think a lot of women can relate to your story.'

And her bravery paid off, with the panel recognising her talent and each judge voting her through to the next round.

Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh gave her the thumbs up, with Simon adding: 'It was beautiful- it meant something, you have passion and you feel real. I loved it'.

Sharon added: 'It was amazing, she'll be a great example to women of her age group'.

'The best voice I have heard in the auditions so far. Definitely. An incredible voice you have.'
Sir Bob Geldofs eldest daughter Fifi was a vision of happiness this weekend as she married sand sculptor Andrew Robertson.

It was a poignant moment for the whole family as the 33-year-old, who works in PR, wed at the same church where her sister Peaches, who died of a drug overdose at the age of 25 in 2014, and mother, Paula Yates who suffered a similar fate, are buried.

Emerging with a beaming smile on her face from St Mary Magdalene and St Lawrence church in Kent on Saturday, Fifi looked elegant in a white lace bridal gown and veil, while her smiling new husband held her hand.

Sir Bob Geldof pictured with Fifi, his eldest daughter, in 2013

Broadchurch star Olivia Colman

Women who are not stereotypically beautiful are entering a golden age in British TV, claims Broadchurch star Olivia Colman.

To be a lead here you dont have to be breathtakingly gorgeous, because stories are written for every woman and that creates just many more parts, says Colman, 42.

It gets slightly daunting if youre watching the telly and everybodys gorgeous. Its just so rubbish.

Colman, who has complained in the past about never playing the love interest and never getting a call from Hollywood, adds: Off the top of my head theres Happy Valley with Sarah Lancashire and also Marcella with Anna Friel.

'That was a woman taking the lead. So, theres much, much more and its improving.

Fearne gets Bowie tattoo for birthday

Its my birthday and Ill get a David Bowie tattoo if I want to'

Despite the fact that Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood is her father-in-law, former Radio 1 presenter Fearne Cotton chose to honour a different musical legend with her latest tattoo.

The mother of two, who is married to Ronnies son Jesse, got a tattoo of a lightning bolt in tribute to the late David Bowie for her 35th birthday on Saturday.
One question dominated the first episode in the new series of Poldark.

No, not how long it would be before he took his shirt off. Something even more gripping and important than that, namely: was our noble, bare-chested, hero heading for the hangmans noose?

Admittedly it seemed unlikely. Killing off Poldark at the start of the series would have been a radical/kamikaze storyline with which to launch it, and clearly cause too much grief for the nation to cope with. It was Sunday evening after all.

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Is his time up? He may have taken his shirt off, but fans were left wondering in the premiere of Poldark series two if our noble, bare-chested, hero heading for the hangmans noose

Nonetheless, Series Twos debut did climax with what appeared a devastating, violent, death.

The sight of Poldarks cousin Francis preparing to blow his brains out as back at home the old lady played the Death card was surprisingly brutal, not least because his motives for shooting himself werent entirely clear. He was feverish to say the least, positively rambling. Well, more negatively than positively...

Even in the first series, Francis never had been what youd call a happy bunny. Humiliated by his fathers disdain, by his cousin Ross impossibly handsome heroism, and by financial ineptitude that had driven him into alliance with the loathsome George Warleggan (a right banker), Francis always did have issues.

He suffered from frankly tedious self-loathing and self-pity despite the fact that he had ended up marrying Poldarks fiancee Elizabeth while his rival was away fighting the American War of Independence (long story).

Now in Series Two, several factors that could have contributed to his desperate state of mind included his contempt for Warleggan who he had unwisely insulted, lambasting: You may flaunt your guineas on lavish garments and fancy carriages. You may purchase a coat of arms and deck out your servants in gaudy livery. You may even buy your way into every club, mine, and drawing room in the county. But what you will NEVER buy is nobility, or breeding or even common decency.

Ouch !

End of the road? The sight of Poldarks cousin Francis preparing to blow his brains out was surprisingly brutal, not least because his motives for shooting himself werent entirely clear

Elizabeth hadnt helped either, turning him down when he had virtually begged his wife to let him with sleep with her.

He was also consumed by guilt over the death of the Poldarks daughter Julia from an infection the baby contracted when Ross wife Demelza had selflessly come to help Francis, Elizabeth and their own child.

By and large though, his reason for committing suicide seemed to be that he wasnt Poldark. But then again, who is?

Why is it that I amount of precisely nothing? Francis had whined to Verity. While Ross is considered such a threat that men will spend a fortune to get him hanged. And yet I envy him.

Or, he feared the worst about the corrupt forces aligned against Poldark and, like us, couldnt face what might lie ahead.

Its a terrible thought is it not? A world without Ross... he had mused distractedly to Elizabeth. Which of us does not secretly adore him?

Which indeed? Certainly none of us....

If Francis is dead it will was all be very tragic and no doubt Poldark, Demelza, and particularly Elizabeth will be bereft.

But the main thing was that Poldark was fine, for now at least.

Cold to the touch: Elizabeth hadnt helped either, turning him down when he had virtually begged his wife to let him with sleep with her

Perhaps the fate of poor Francis will be what somehow spares Poldark from the gallows.

Quite why the evil local aristocracy and the Warleggans in particular had conspired to bring Poldark down quite so determinedly was bewildering, considering he was such a reformed character - no longer the black sheep of the family, the blaggard, gambler, womaniser and overall degenerate that shaped his reputation at the start of Series One.

These days he was married (to Demelza), obsessed with reviving the family mine, organising co-operatives and feeding the poor with all the fervour of a Cornish Bob Geldof.

The finale of the last series had seen him and his army of village peasant followers profiting from the Warleggans ship sinking off the coast and scooping up the spoils from the beach (pilchards mostly).

For the high jump? Ross had been arrested, escorted to jail, and now taken to Bodmin assizes to face charges ranging from inciting a riot, theft, striking a customs officer and wrecking

So you approve of entire families having insufficient food to keep them alive?: Poldark countered the accusations from the dock - like Jeremy Corbyn if he looked like Adam Ant

Poldark had been arrested, escorted to Truro jail, and now taken to Bodmin assizes to face charges ranging from inciting a riot, theft, striking a customs officer and wrecking.

Mr. Poldark, it is alleged that you roused the neighbourhood and led a bloodthirsty mob down to the beach, thundered the judge.

Incorrect! declared Poldark, although he indubitably aroused the entire country.

So you approve of entire families having insufficient food to keep them alive? Poldark countered from the dock - like Jeremy Corbyn if hed had the fashion sense and the glamorous scars of Adam Ant.

The charges of gratuitously strutting around with his shirt off and murdering the Warleggans cousin Matthew had been dropped  much to Georges irritation.

I wanted murder! he harrumphed.

Cousin Matthew was dead before he washed on the shore, his father pointed out. Poldark had left him there but this was not a crime.

But it is a personal affront to this family and one I personally intend to make him regret! George pledged.

He was true to his word too and, to be fair to him, did a good job of it. He secured the services of a corrupt, impressively amoral, attorney uttering the immortal line: Can I rely on you Tankard?

'It is a personal affront to this family and one I personally intend to make him regret! George Warleggan was up to his old trick - namely trying to kill off Captain Ross

Warleggan also produced a scurrilous pamphlet detailing Poldarks more scandalous exploits (some of them actually untrue).

But if this is believed it will prejudiced the jury! Complained Elizabeth, not realising that was the whole idea of it.

Poldarks trial restricted some of his previous/favourite activities that usually fill up the episodes: charging up and down the cliff on his horse, skinny-dipping, and getting his scythe out (as it were).

Poldarks wife Demelza was dismayed by his cavalier/irresponsible response to the growing campaign against him and the possibility that he could hang because of it. This consisted mostly of spending his time furiously/futilely hammering for copper with his shirt off.

Where are you going?! She cried when, yet again, he refused to discuss how to counter the accusations.

To the mine - where its still possible to do an honest days work! He pronounced pompously, flouncing out, even though the mine hadnt produced a shillings worth of metal since he had revived it.

Why Demelza didnt simply make some money as a supermodel wasnt clear.

I decline to be distracted by matters beyond my control! He vowed valiantly, even though we should probably be more distracted by those, not less.

Scandalous! He also produced a scurrilous pamphlet detailing Poldarks more scandalous exploits (some of them actually untrue) to try and ensure a noose was fitted around his neck

His improbably-named pal Dr Dwight Enys (a posho who looked like Simon Le Bon) was as concerned as Demelza.

He cannot just bury his head! Said the good doctor, although he could  particularly when rejecting the advice to grovel to the court and lessen his sentence.

Poldarks lawyer was also worried.

I advise you to consider your attitude, he told Poldark sternly. Its no detriment to me if you choose to run your neck into a noose. But I suspect it might be to yours.

Finally Francis concurred, telling Elizabeth something must be done or he will walk his head into a noose while sitting as far away from her as possible at their enormous dining table as they breakfasted on mutton and cider.

Eventually Elizabeth was so worried about her former fiance she threw herself at the mercy of evil George Warleggan  almost literally  asking him to intervene to save Poldark.

The family would be so grateful, she suggested.

The family means little to me. Its you alone that I wish to please, he leered.

It is I who would be indebted to you George, she replied, fluttering her eyelashes.

They quickly understood each other and George offered to point the judge in the right direction.

The price was, he said, not one that Poldark personally would have to pay - meaning Elizabeth would pay it for him (the prostitute).

Dismayed Demelza: Poldarks wife was dismayed by his cavalier/irresponsible response to the growing campaign against him and the possibility that he could hang because of it

Hammering those issues out? This consisted mostly of spending his time furiously/futilely hammering for copper with his shirt off

Warleggan duly went to see Poldark in his cell, mentioning that he could remove the hostile witnesses or even give a character statement... What do you say Ross? Will you take the hand of friendship?

The hand though was indubitably oily and untouchable.

Are you truly so deluded? Do you think I would ever shake your hand? Poldark scoffed magnificently.

But this was what Warleggan had really wanted.

No, he answered. But when you go to the gallows I will be able to say hand on heart I offered Ross Poldark my help and he turned me down. So thank you. Thank you for being every bit as predictable as Id hoped youd be.

What can save him now?

Demelza told Verity: I have one last thing I must try.

She had been cultivating a relationship with Bergerac (Ray Penvenen), uncle of the regions prospective MP Unwin Trevaunance, although it was hard to say if Demelza really knew what she was doing or how smart she was.

Doctor Dwight had made some inroads here too, albeit unwittingly, by treating a pug belonging to Bergeracs beautiful, blonde, niece Caroline when it suffered a seizure. He advised her to stop carrying the little mutt and proscribed it black cherry water and opium.

This was certainly better than Winalot and surely merits the Penvenens stepping in to save our handsome hero from the noose.

After all, something surely must.
Call Leslie Jones the reigning queen of comebacks.

After an 11-day stretch that saw the actress quit Twitter following an attack at the hands of hackers, the resilient Ghostbusters star took to the social media site and lauded those who provided her with support in the wake of the humiliating security breach.

'Thanks to my fans and friends!' she wrote Sunday. 'I'm soooooo ok really. And I will always be funny been through a lot in my life and I ALWAYS GET BACK UP!'

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Can't keep her down: Leslie Jones, seen her at the Hollywood Ghostbusters premiere in July, reassured and thanked her supporters following a grueling stretch that saw her targeted by both hackers and trolls

Keep on keeping on: The 48-year-old comic explained how she's not one to cave in when a problem presents itself

Among the friends that publicly supported the Trainwreck actress following the hack included her Ghostbusters director, Paul Feig; SNL castmates Aidy Bryant and Taran Killam; and Girls star Lena Dunham.

The Saturday Night Live beauty's website was taken down on August 24 after hackers breached security measures and posted a number of personal images to the page, including nude photos, the star's driver's license and passport, and shots of Jones with fellow celebs such as Rihanna and Kim Kardashian.

The hackers also took their attack to a racist level, presumably after Jones in July outed a number of bigots by sharing their awful messages on her Twitter page, and even quit the social media site for a short time, citing the unending hate.

Focused on fun: The Saturday Night Live beauty turned the subject to her upcoming birthday Wednesday

Big day: Other notable names who celebrate their birthday September 7, like Leslie, include NBA star Kevin Love, actress Evan Rachel Wood and I Will Survive singer Gloria Gaynor

Down time: The actress went on a self-imposed break from Twitter after her personal information was hacked and uploaded to her website August 24

The hackers posted on Leslie's site an image of Harambe, the Cincinnati Zoo gorilla who was killed in May after a boy fell into his zoo enclosure.

She said in a July 21 appearance on Seth Myers that she was fed-up with the unending stream of abuse she faced from the cyber bigots, leading her to speak up.

'Whats scary about the whole thing is the insults didnt hurt me - unfortunately, Im used to the insults - what scared me was the injustice of a gang of people jumping against you for such a sick cause,' Jones said.

She's back: Jones on Saturday returned to the site with an amusing anecdote about her love for The Golden Girls

Who ya gonna call: Leslie played Patty Tolan in this summer's remake of Ghostbusters, which also featured Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig and Kate McKinnon

'Everybody has an opinion, and it all comes at you at one time. They really believe in what they believe in, and its so mean. Its so gross and mean.

'So it was one of those things where, OK, so, if I hadnt said anything, nobody wouldve ever known about this. All those people would still have an account.'

But on Sunday, Jones, who turns 49 on Wednesday, had turned her attention to a more positive outlet: plans for her upcoming birthday celebration.

Firebrand: The actress has spoken out about her negative experiences on social media - many of which are predicated on racially-fueled attacks

'Ok y'all must know I celebrate the whole week of my bday. Use to the whole month but I was young then lol. Now I just want to have fun!!' the Memphis-born comic tweeted.

'So let's make my birthday week THE BOMB!! Cause I'm about to act a fool YALL!! CHEAH! #LJBDAY.'

Jones on Saturday began tweeting again with her usual upbeat humor, posting a video in which she explained how much the 80s NBC sitcom The Golden Girls entertained her.

Prejudiced cowardice: Jones has been the receiving end of tweets such as this one

Muting the haters: Jones, fed up with the racism in July, briefly took a break from the social media site

She said of the show: 'I don't care what nobody say, these b****** make me laugh no matter what the hell is going on. For real!'

Another tweet was of a comic book titled 100 bullets, with the premise centered around a briefcase given to a man containing a gun and 100 untraceable bullets.
Amber Heard will return to Australia this year to film a new movie after illegally bringing her pet dogs into the country last year and subsequently breaching customs laws.

Heard and her ex-husband Johnny Depp made headlines when they flew their dogs Pistol and Boo Down Under, despite the pooches not having been declared to customs.

The actress will film Aquaman in Queensland, and will stay for an extended period of time, according to The Daily Telegraph.

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Bringing the dogs? Amber Heard will return to Australia this year to film after she and ex-husband Johnny Depp illegally brought their pet dogs into the country last year and she was found to have breached customs laws

The publication also reports that it remains unclear if the dog debacle will affect her visa application.

The 30-year-old is set to play the lead role of Mera in the DC Comics film alongside Jason Momoa, who is taking on the role of Aquaman.

In May last year, Amber was accused of smuggling the couple's tiny terriers aboard the actor's private jet when they returned to Australia to resume filming the 'Pirates' movie.

Australian politician Barnaby Joyce threatened to have the former couple's beloved pooches euthanised if they failed to take them out of the country.

Her pets: In May last year, Amber was accused of smuggling the couple's tiny terriers aboard the actor's private jet when they returned to Australia to resume filming the 'Pirates' movie

Her fur babies: Australian politician Barnaby Joyce threatened to have the former couple's beloved pooches euthanised if they failed to take them out of the country (seen in the US in 2012)

Australia has strict quarantine regulations to prevent diseases such as rabies from spreading to its shores.

Bringing pets into the country involves applying for a permit and quarantine on arrival of at least 10 days.

'If we start letting movie stars  even though they've been the sexiest man alive twice  to come into our nation (with pets), then why don't we just break the laws for everybody?' Joyce said at the time.

'It's time that Pistol and Boo buggered off back to the United States.'

Tough: Australia has strict quarantine regulations to prevent diseases such as rabies from spreading to its shores

Laws: Bringing pets into the country involves applying for a permit and quarantine on arrival of at least 10 days (seen in the US in 2012)

The pair's dogs were transported back to Los Angeles via a private jet later that month, accompanied by Heard's father David after being given 50 hours notice to take their pets back to the US.

The now divorced couple returned to Australia in April this year to appear in a Gold Coast court.

A video of the duo saying they are 'truly sorry' for sneaking their Yorkshire terriers into Australia was then presented before a magistrate hit Heard with a one-month good behaviour bond and a $1,000 fine over the debacle.

In May this year, news emerged that Johnny and Amber had called time on their relationship after 15 months of marriage.

Apologising: A video of the duo saying they are 'truly sorry' for sneaking their Yorkshire terriers into Australia was then presented

The actress was granted a restraining order after accusing him of domestic abuse.

Amber alleged Johnny threw a phone at her during an argument and insisted there were other occasions where he had been violent towards her.

But she filed court papers to dismiss her domestic violence case against him once they agreed on a reported $7 million divorce settlement.

Amber Heard has publicly pledged to donate her settlement to charity.

Over: In May this year, news emerged that Johnny and Amber had called time on their relationship after 15 months of marriage

But the actress' team spoke out against her estranged husband after he made a payment on her behalf - saying he had done so in order to benefit from substantial tax deductions.

Johnny would get around half the money back from his taxes if he were to make the payments - something her team were quick to call attention to.
US hits IS targets with 'newly deployed' mobile rocket

US forces have hit Islamic State group targets along Syria's border with Turkey using a "newly deployed" mobile rocket system, American officials said Saturday.

A US Army High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) carried out a successful strike on Friday on a tactical unit and building belonging to the IS group, Major Josh Jacques, a spokesman for US Central Command, told AFP.

US President Barack Obama's anti-Islamic State envoy Brett McGurk said on Twitter US forces hit the jihadist targets with the "newly deployed" system.

Smoke rising close to the Syrian-Turkish border town of Jarabulus Bulent Kilic (AFP/File)

The detachment, which allows the United States to strike a target "with a high degree of accuracy and a significantly greater range," was deployed to Turkey in support of the US-led anti-IS mission, Jacques said.

"HIMARS is unique in reducing the potential collateral damage as it impacts a target at a high angle, has a relatively small blast radius for the effect achieved, and functions in all weather conditions," he said.

The US embassy in Ankara posted on Twitter that it was the "latest step in US-Turkey cooperation in the fight against ISIL (IS)."

HIMARS has been used over several years in previous operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The weapon system is incorporated into our normal deliberate targeting cycle and has been for quite some time," Jacques said.
Hong Kong elections: Five things you need to know

Over 3.7 million Hong Kongers go to the polls Sunday in the semi-autonomous city's closest thing to a fully democratic vote, as stark political divisions widen.

With fears growing that Beijing is tightening its grip, some young activists are campaigning for a complete break from China. On the other side, pro-establishment parties warn they are risking the stability and prosperity of the finance hub.

Here are five key points on Legislative Council vote:

League of Social Democrats chairman Avery Ng (C) holds a placard as he participates in a rally against the banning of pro-independence candidates in the upcoming legislative council elections, in Hong Kong Tengku Bahar (AFP/File)

What's so important about this election?

The election for members of Hong Kong's lawmaking body is the biggest public poll since the mass "Umbrella Movement" pro-democracy rallies of 2014, when Beijing and the city's government brushed aside calls for political reforms.

It is the first time that young activists calling for independence for Hong Kong have stood in the vote.

Polls show that one or two of them could win seats -- which would be a landmark for the fledgling movement.

How does the vote work?

Half the council's 70 members will be directly voted by the public on Sunday and represent geographical constituencies. Pro-democracy candidates tend to fare well in these seats.

However, 30 other members are appointed by special interest groups, including transport, tourism and business sectors -- who tend to be pro-Beijing.

The remaining five "super seats" are not attached to any constituency and will be on the ballot paper for all residents, except for those who have voted as part of the special interest groups.

So, is Hong Kong really democratic?

A British colony for over 150 years until it was handed back to China in 1997, and semi-autonomous since then, Hong Kong has never experienced full democracy.

The system of having 30 members of the Legislative Council appointed by pro-Beijing special interest groups makes it almost impossible for the democratic camp to take a majority in the legislature.

Currently, pan-democratic lawmakers hold 27 of the Legco's 70 seats, enabling them to block bills.

But if they drop just four seats on Sunday, they will lose that veto power.

What does the city's parliament do?

The traditional role of the Legislative Council is to introduce, examine, and approve bills, budgets and expenditures.

But frustrated pro-democracy lawmakers have long turned to filibustering to disrupt proceedings, delaying the passage of multiple bills.

Much of the previous council session was deadlocked, with the pro-establishment camp accusing the opposition of blocking progress and democrats slamming pro-government legislators as yes-men.

What is Beijing's take on the vote?

Central Chinese authorities say pro-independence candidates are acting illegally, going against the city's mini-constitution, and Beijing is likely to keep up pressure on the breakaway camp.

Some strident pro-independence activists have been banned from standing in Sunday's election and the Hong Kong government has warned action may be taken against those who have advocated independence while campaigning.

However, if new young candidates draw support away from more established pro-democracy parties, it could work in Beijing's favour, splitting the vote and giving more seats to pro-establishment candidates.

The British colonial-era Hong Kong flag is seen as weekend pedestrians walk past a holding area for demonstrating activists ahead of a rally against the banning of pro-independence candidates in the upcoming legislative council elections Tengku Bahar (AFP/File)
US Army gives combat medics new type of tourniquet

Throughout the history of modern warfare, countless wounded fighters have been saved from bleeding to death by tourniquets -- the straps or ties that wrap around a damaged limb and staunch hemorrhaging.

But what if a soldier is shot through the pelvis, or in the armpit, where a tourniquet would be of no use?

Militaries the world over have grappled with the question for decades, and the issue took on new urgency during the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Photo provided by the US Army shows soldiers practicing applying a junctional tourniquet during training at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland Ellen Crown (US ARMY/AFP/File)

Now the US Army has found an answer.

The service currently is training and equipping its combat medics with a new device, called a junctional tourniquet.

It looks a bit like a belt, but comes with two inflatable bladders that can be pumped up to put pressure over a wound, even in locations where a traditional tourniquet would be ineffective.

"Exsanguination (bleeding to death) is the most common cause of potentially survivable death for wounded warfighters," said Ellen Crown, a spokeswoman for the US Army Medical Materiel Agency.

The junctional tourniquet is designed so "a person can position it in under a minute -- a crucial factor for combat medics who only have mere minutes to save a fellow warfighter's life if he or she is hemorrhaging."

The first recorded combat use of a junctional tourniquet was in Afghanistan in 2014, when US and Afghan medics saved a young Afghan National Army soldier who had been shot by insurgents.

The bullet lodged high in his upper thigh, likely severing a femoral artery, a location where a normal tourniquet would have little effect.

By inflating one of the junctional tourniquet's bladders over the wound, medics stemmed the blood loss, and he ultimately survived.

"The junctional tourniquet is a way to see how can we save more lives," said the Army's new surgeon general, Lieutenant General Nadja West.

- Improving outcomes -

Regular tourniquets had gone in and out of vogue among battlefield medics over the years, West noted.

Their use was sometimes questioned because, if badly applied, they can damage nerves or tissues on a wounded limb.

Now the US Army teaches its combat soldiers to correctly use tourniquets.

"They are usually the ones that are right beside their buddies when something happens," West said.

"If they are in the vehicle that is hit by an IED (bomb), they may or may not have a medic on that vehicle, but a survivor who can put a tourniquet on within minutes."

According to West, as many as 93 percent of US troops currently survive being wounded in combat, a record up from 84 percent in Vietnam and 80 percent in World War II.

The US military gained wide experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, where shrapnel and gunshots accounted for about three-quarters of battlefield wounds, according to a study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery.

After regular tourniquets were given to all US soldiers in 2005, the rate of deaths from hemorrhaging dropped 23.3 per year to just 3.5 per year, the study said, and Army officials hope junctional tourniquets will reduce numbers still further.

But nearly a quarter of combat deaths are still considered potentially survivable, according to the study that focused on 4,596 fatalities between 2001 and 2011. In nine cases out of 10, these avoidable deaths were due to massive blood loss.

The US military has also spent millions developing a novel solution to battlefield bleeding.

Called XStat, the technology is essentially a large syringe-like applicator filled with 92 small, tablet-shaped sponges.

The sponges are injected directly into a wound, expanding and swelling to fill the cavity after approximately 20 seconds upon contact with water from blood or bodily fluid.
Five things to know about the G20 summit in Hangzhou

The Group of 20 summit opens Sunday in the scenic city of Hangzhou, providing China's image-sensitive rulers an opportunity to showcase the country's emergence as a global powerhouse.

The government has spruced up the city, best known for its island-dotted West Lake, shut down thousands of factories to ensure telegenic blue skies, and rolled out restrictive security precautions.

But although the leaders meet in a climate of economic uncertainty and sluggish global growth, the absence of an urgent crisis means the forum will be short on breakthroughs, analysts say.

Chinese paramilitary stand guard minutes before Italy's Prime Minister Matteo Renzi disembarks his plane at Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport, on September 3, 2016 Nicolas Asfouri (AFP)

As heads of state from around the world gather, here are five things to know:

What is it?

The Group of 20 (G20) comprises 19 of the world's largest economies and the European Union, representing 85 percent of world GDP and two-thirds of its population.

The annual summit is primarily about financial and economic policy, but it is also an opportunity for a disparate group of leaders to hobnob and tackle pressing issues of the day, from geopolitical crises to climate change.

How did it start?

The G20 was born in 1999 after the shock of the Asian financial crisis showed the need to improve global economic coordination.

The Group of 7, the exclusive club for the world's most developed countries, did not include powerhouses such as China, India and Brazil that were playing an increasingly critical role.

At first it hosted fairly technical meetings among ministers. But after the 2008 financial crisis it was upgraded to leadership level in the hope of staving off the collapse of the global financial system.

What has the G20 accomplished?

That depends on who you ask. Some experts say it is an important venue for coordinating economic policy. Others think it is little more than a gab fest.

What can be said for sure is the meetings have produced a long list of promises. At last year's gathering in Turkey, for example, leaders made 113 commitments on issues ranging from cutting subsidies for fossil fuels to increasing aid to refugees.

But the forum's failure to deliver on past pledges has raised questions about the credibility of future promises.

Compliance with 13 priority commitments made in 2015 stands at 77 percent, according to an analysis by the University of Toronto.

What should we expect from this year's meeting?

Observers say this year, in particular, is unlikely to produce any serious results. Without an acute crisis to galvanise change, rising anti-globalisation sentiment makes it difficult for many leaders to make any meaningful commitments.

IMF chief Christine Lagarde warned this week that the world faces a potentially toxic mix of low long-term growth and rising inequality, creating political temptations to populism and raised trade barriers.

Why is this such a big deal for China?

Since the world turned to China to help power it out of the 2008 financial crisis, Beijing has increasingly felt it deserves a more prominent role befitting its status as the world's second-largest economy.

The G20 is the largest, most prestigious summit that China has ever held.
Pope hails Teresa: now a saint, always a mother

Pope Francis on Sunday proclaimed Mother Teresa a saint and hailed the revered Catholic nun as an embodiment of maternal love who talked truth to power on behalf of the poor.

"We may have some difficulty in calling her 'Saint' Teresa," the pontiff said. "Her holiness is so near to us, so tender and so fruitful that we continue to spontaneously call her Mother."

He added: "She made her voice heard before the powers of this world, so that they might recognise their guilt for the crime - the crimes! - of poverty they created."

Mother Teresa, who was declared a saint, spent all her adult life in India, first teaching, then tending to the dying poor

Teresa's canonisation mass was attended by more than 100,000 pilgrims, including heads of state and hundreds of sari-clad nuns from her order, the Missionaries of Charity.

Queen Sofia of Spain and around 1,500 homeless people also looked on as Francis described Teresa's work in the slums of Kolkata as "eloquent witness to God's closeness to the poorest of the poor".

To applause, he added: "Mother Teresa loved to say, 'perhaps I don't speak their language but I can smile'. Let us carry her smile in our hearts."

Candles and flowers were laid on Teresa's tomb at the headquarters of her order in the Indian metropolis she is so closely associated with.

Lighting a candle, Konica Cecilia said Teresa had given her impoverished parents money to help them send her to school.

"I was fortunate to meet Mother. She was a living saint and an inspiration to me," the 32-year-old said. "My memories of her comfort me when I am in trouble."

Francis also used his sermon to recall Teresa's fervent opposition to abortion, which she termed "murder by the mother" in a controversial Nobel Peace prize speech in 1979.

She "ceaselessly proclaimed that the unborn are the weakest", he said.

- Pizza lunch at Vatican -

With the 16th century basilica of St Peter's glinting in the late summer sun, Francis led a ritual mass that has barely changed for centuries.

Speaking in Latin, he declared "blessed Teresa of Calcutta (Kolkata) to be a Saint... decreeing that she is to be venerated as such by the whole Church."

After the mass, the 79-year-old pontiff boarded an open-topped jeep and toured around St Peter's square and surrounding streets to a rapturous reception from tens of thousands of well-wishers.

Solangel Rojas had come from Cali in Colombia. Clutching a picture of Teresa to her heart, she said: "It is wonderful that she has been canonised. She was an example to us all."

Among those in the front rows at the mass were 1,500 people from shelters run by the Italian branches of Teresa's order. Later they were Francis's guests for a giant pizza lunch served by nuns and priests.

Teresa spent all her adult life in India, first teaching, then tending to the dying poor for decades before her death in 1997.

It was in the latter role, at the head of her now worldwide order, that Teresa became one of the most famous women on the planet.

Born to Kosovan Albanian parents in Skopje -- then part of the Ottoman empire, now the capital of Macedonia -- she won the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize and was revered around the world as a beacon for the Christian values of self-sacrifice and charity.

But she was also regarded with scorn by secular critics who accused her of being more concerned with evangelism than with improving the lot of the poor.

- Contested legacy -

The debate over Teresa's legacy has continued after her death, with researchers uncovering financial irregularities in the running of her order and evidence mounting of patient neglect, insalubrious conditions and questionable conversions of the vulnerable in her missions.

By historical standards, Teresa has been fast-tracked to sainthood. John Paul II was a personal friend and as the pope at the time of her death, he was responsible for her being beatified in 2003.

Achieving sainthood requires the Vatican to approve accounts of two miracles occurring as a result of prayers for Teresa's intercession.

The first one, ratified in 2002, was of an Indian woman, Monica Besra, who says she recovered from ovarian cancer a year after Teresa's death -- something local health officials have put down to medicine rather than prayer.

In the second, approved last year, Brazilian Marcilio Haddad Andrino says his wife's prayers to Teresa led to brain tumours disappearing. Eight years later, Andrino and his wife Fernanda were in the congregation on Sunday.

Also presented was London-based Indian expatriate Abraham. "She practised Christianity," he said. "The majority of Christians only spend their time talking about it."

Mother Teresa's elevation to Roman Catholicism's celestial pantheon came in a canonisation mass in St Peter's square in the Vatican that was presided over by Pope Francis Andreas Solaro (AFP)

An Indian nun showers rose petals to a statue of Mother Teresa unveiled at a church in Chennai on September 4, 2016 Arun Sankar (AFP)

Nuns of the Missionary of Charity, the religious order founded by Mother Teresa of Kolkata, carry the mother's relics, in Saint Peter square at the Vatican, on September 4, 2016 Andreas Solaro (AFP)

The debate over Mother Teresa's legacy has continued after her death, with researchers uncovering financial irregularities in the running of her order and evidence mounting of patient neglect Roslan Rahman (AFP/File)
Iran's pistachio farms are dying of thirst

The pistachio trees at the village in southern Iran are long dead, bleached white by the sun -- the underground water reserves sucked dry by decades of over-farming and waste.

The last farmers left with their families 10 years ago, and the village has the look of an abandoned Martian colony.

The dome-roofed, mud-walled homes are crumbling, once-green fields are now nothing but dirt furrows, and the only sign of life is a couple of drifters camping out in an old storehouse.

Dead pistachio trees are seen in a abandoned village near the southern Iranian city of Sirjan Atta Kenare (AFP)

Pistachios are Iran's biggest export after crude oil, with 250,000 tonnes of the nut produced last year -- a figure only recently topped by the United States.

In Kerman province in southern Iran, cities have grown rich from pistachios, but time is running out for the industry as unconstrained farming and climate change take a devastating toll.

Near the city of Sirjan, a long line of enormous sinkholes like bomb craters mark the points where an underground aquifer was pumped completely dry, and the ground simply collapsed.

"Farming is being destroyed," says Hassan Ali Firouzabadi, who has lived in the nearby village of Izadabad for half a century.

His business is barely clinging on. Some of his pistachio trees are old enough to remember the golden age of Shah Abbas in the 17th century, but the leaves have turned yellow-green from the salty water he now dredges up.

"The well was six to 10 metres (deep) when I was a child, but now it's 150, and the water is bitter and salty," he says.

"This used to be a village full of people. Most have left to become labourers and drivers. Ten more years and there will be nothing left."

- 'A long-held illusion' -

Iran faces two key challenges -- dealing with a years-long nationwide drought that shows little sign of abating, and trying to convince farmers to stop the uncontrolled pumping of water.

Some 300,000 of Iran's 750,000 water pumps are illegal -- a big reason why the United Nations says Iran is officially transitioning from a state of "water stress" to "water scarcity".

In 2013, Iran's chamber of commerce carried out a survey showing that Kerman province was losing about 20,000 hectares (49,400 acres) of pistachio farms every year to desertification.

For centuries, Iran relied on one of the world's most sophisticated irrigation systems -- a web of underground canals known as "qanats" that carried water from under mountains to the arid plains.

But then came the electric pumps and chaotic politics of the last century. The need to preserve water was little understood and secondary to self-sufficiency in food production -- an attitude that persisted into the sanctions era.

"We are slowly moving past a long-held illusion that we have endless resources," says Mohsen Nasseri at the National Climate Change Office in Tehran.

He says the government is finally looking at financial incentives to encourage water conservation. One scheme offers funding for farmers to buy modern irrigation equipment, but changing ingrained attitudes will take time.

"It's late, but it's happening," Nasseri says.

- 'A crisis point' -

Some farmers have taken matters into their own hands.

The lushly green pistachio trees of Farhad Sharif's farm near Sirjan are an oasis against the flat brown landscape.

The family installed a drip-irrigation system eight years ago that carefully controls the amount and quality of water delivered to each plant.

"We get more quality and more quantity from our pistachio trees, and we use 70 percent less water," says Sharif, who runs the business with his father.

They strictly limit the size of the farm to ensure the underground water levels can be replenished naturally.

"Everyone should do it," he says, but he knows the problem is money.

Sharif's family had cash and connections in Tehran that helped them secure a loan for the system, but even their farm cannot avoid the wider problems in the area.

Each year, he says, they have to pull up the pipes and shorten them as water tables deplete and the land gradually sinks.

"The problem is more dangerous than people realise. There is just not enough oversight," Sharif says.

"What is happening around here is a catastrophe -- it has reached a crisis point."

Hassan Ali Firouzabadi works at his pistachio farm in Izadabad, a village in the southern Iranian Kerman province Atta Kenare (AFP)
Beyond the baguette: France's food legacy in Vietnam

It has been more than six decades since the end of French colonial rule in Vietnam, but when President Francois Hollande arrives this week he'll struggle to avoid a quintessential legacy of his country's rule: the baguette.

Smeared with pate and loaded with fresh coriander and cucumber, or just enjoyed with a pat of fresh butter, "banh mi" are a delicious symbol of Vietnam's lasting links with its former occupiers.

"The French were very proud of banh mi. I think French cuisine has had a lot of influence on Vietnamese cuisine," baker Nguyen Ngoc Hoan told AFP from his busy boulangerie in Hanoi's French Quarter.

'Banh mi' are displayed for sale on a sidewalk in central Hanoi Hoang Dinh Nam (AFP)

Hoan started baking banh mi - which refers to plain bread or the popular "petit pain" loaded with meat, vegetables or fried egg -- in 1987 and five years later got a stint at the bakery in the storied Metropole hotel, built by the French at the turn of the 20th century.

The sandwich has become a foodie favourite in hipster enclaves around the globe, sold from food trucks and sipped with craft beer in both its classic form and a flurry of new varieties.

Hoan's father was also a baker but discouraged his son from following in his floured footsteps.

"The baking profession chose me, it was not my decision," Hoan said, speaking in front of a wall of ovens as his workers tirelessly knead dough nearby.

He started his career baking what he called Vietnamese bread - airy on the inside, crusty on the outside - but after training with a French baker in Shanghai decided to switch to the denser French-style.

Now, he churns out thousands of warm baguettes daily, along with croissants, creme caramel and homemade pate.

- 'Petit pain' 

French bread was first made in Vietnam to feed hungry soldiers in Indochina, France's empire which spanned much of Southeast Asia from 1858 to its crushing defeat in the Dien Bien Phu battle in Vietnam in 1954.

But the French became known for more than food, gaining a brutal reputation for crushing anti-imperialist movements and putting Vietnamese laborers to work in gruelling conditions on rubber plantations, while heavily taxing citizens during periods of drought and famine.

Most French who came to Vietnam weren't interested in low-level jobs like baking.

To fill the gap, Chinese and Vietnamese worked in boulangeries -- often hidden away in the back so customers wouldn't know who was baking their bread.

"By 1910, little baguettes or 'petit pain' were sold in the street to (Vietnamese) people who were on their way to work," according to Erica Peters, food historian and author of "Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam".

In the years that followed, meat, vegetables or fish appeared in the bread -- precursors to the modern-day banh mi sold all over Hanoi, a city rife with French colonial architecture, bistros and cafes.

Other culinary influences leaked in too.

Local cooks used meat scraps and unused bones from French butchers to create pho -- the national dish of beef or chicken noodle soup, according to Peters. Coffee and creme caramel are some of the other French culinary leftovers.

The ubiquity of those influences will not be lost on President Hollande, who arrives late Monday for talks with Vietnam's leadership and French businessmen.

- Hybrid cuisine 

Today, Vietnam's commercial capital Ho Chi Minh City is dotted with chic cafes serving croque monsieur and macarons at Paris prices.

But the $1 banh mi still rules Hanoi's street food scene.

It is so engrained in Vietnam's culinary culture that few draw its lineage back to France.

"I don't know and don't care whether it's French, I just serve it like this," said Nguyen Thi Duc Hanh, sitting in front of her shop as the lunchtime rush begins.

She sells hundreds per day and keeps her menu simple: banh mi served with pate and a fried egg, beef steak or her very own version of "boeuf au vin" made with local spices.

One of her regulars, Nguyen Van Binh, said he has been eating banh mi for 50 years, and unlike Hanh, thinks of it as a hybrid dish.

"Banh mi came from France but it was changed and adapted to suit Vietnamese tastes," said Binh, before digging into his fried egg and pate served with a crusty roll.

A street vendor sits in front of 'Hoan Boulangerie' shop in Hanoi Hoang Dinh Nam (AFP)

An employee prepares to bake croissants at 'Hoan Boulangerie' in Hanoi Hoang Dinh Nam (AFP)

Local Vietnamese cooks used meat scraps and unused bones from French butchers to create pho - the national dish of beef or chicken noodle soup Hoang Dinh Nam (AFP/File)
'Crocodile Hunter' commemorated decade after death

Australians paid tribute to the memory of "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin on Sunday on the tenth anniversary of the death of the iconic television celebrity and conservationist.

Irwin, world-famous for his daring stunts with dangerous animals, died on September 4, 2006 after being stabbed in the heart by a giant stingray while filming on the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland.

As the nation marked Father's Day on Sunday, his daughter, Bindi Irwin, who was eight years old when her father died, wrote a tribute on Instagram and Twitter alongside an image of her beaming father carrying her as a baby:

Wax figure of Australian TV celebrity and conservationist Steve Irwin is seen at Madame Tussauds in Sydney Peter Parks (AFP/File)

"You'll be my hero for my entire existence. I love you more than words can describe."

The 18-year-old, a media star, promotes her father's conservation causes.

Irwin's close friend and manager John Stainton, who was with Irwin when he died, said it was still "hard to talk about" what happened.

"It was never a put on, he was larger than life in life," Stainton added, speaking to ABC radio on Friday.

"He burnt a hole in the fabric of our lives as he jumped through the television and grabbed you by the scruff of the neck. He had that magnetism and there was nothing like him before."

Irwin's son, Robert, told the Brisbane Times news website he was working towards being a wildlife photographer to "carry on in his (father's) footsteps".

Earlier this week, Irwin's father Bob released a letter his son wrote to his parents when he was 32 to thank them for their support, but which he only found this year.

"Probably one of the most unfortunate things in a bloke's life is that it takes over 30 years to realise how essential you have been to build my character, my ethics and, most importantly, my HAPPINESS," Irwin wrote.

Other Australians took to social media websites to recall where they were when they heard the news of Irwin's sudden death, while sharing their appreciation for his conservation efforts.
Afghan road crash inferno leaves 35 dead

At least 35 people were killed on Sunday when a bus collided with a fuel tanker and burst into flames in southern Afghanistan, in the latest road accident in the war-torn country.

Many of the victims, including women and children, were burned beyond recognition in the accident in Zabul province, one of the areas worst hit by the Taliban insurgency.

"The passenger bus was on its way from Kandahar to Kabul when it collided with a fuel tanker in Jildak area of Zabul," provincial governor Bismillah Afghanmal told AFP.

At least 35 people were killed early September 4, 2016, when a passenger bus struck a fuel tanker in a head-on collision in Afghanistan's southern province of Zabul Fidha Hussain (AFP/File)

"In the accident, 35 people were killed and more than 20 others were wounded."

Some of the injured were rushed to hospitals in the provincial capital Qalat as well as in neighbouring Kandahar province, said Ghulam Jilani Farahi, deputy Zabul police chief.

The Kabul-Kandahar highway passes through militancy-prone areas and many bus drivers are known to drive recklessly at top speed so as not to get caught in insurgent activity.

"President Ashraf Ghani expressed deep sadness over the death of our countrymen in the accident," the presidential palace said in a statement.

"Ghani has ordered the relevant authorities to help the victims and their families as soon as possible," it added.

Afghanistan has some of the world's most dangerous roads, often in dilapidated condition, and traffic rules are seldom enforced.

Many in the country rely on old and rickety passenger vehicles and road accidents with high casualty rates are common.

In May 73 people were killed when two buses and an oil tanker burst into flames in a head-on collision in the eastern province of Ghazni.

And in April 2013 a bus hit a wrecked fuel tanker in the southern province of Kandahar, killing 45 people.

The World Bank last November signed off on a $250 million grant to upgrade roads crossing Afghanistan's Hindu Kush mountains, crucial trade links that are often closed in winter by snow.

Insecurity is growing across Afghanistan as the Taliban press on with their 15-year insurgency against the Western-backed Kabul government.
Electoral fraud in Africa getting trickier: experts

As Gabon is rocked by violence following the contested re-election of President Ali Bongo, experts says electoral fraud in Africa is becoming harder, thanks to civil society vigilance and spread of mobile technology.

Opposition leader Jean Ping on Friday declared himself the rightful president of Gabon and called for a recount, following Bongos claim of victory with a razor-thin margin of just under 6,000 votes in the August 27 election.

But recent elections in Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Benin and Burkina Faso have all been held largely without dispute, overseen by engaged citizens who assured careful monitoring of the process, said Mathias Hounkpe, Political Governance Programme Manager for the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA), which promotes greater government transparency.

Gabonese police pass barricaded streets as they patrol in Libreville following violence that erupted after President Ali Bongo was declared victor of a disputed election Marco Longari (AFP/File)

"It is more and more difficult to commit fraud," he said.

Preventing fraud with ballot papers was down to a clear legal framework for organising elections, electoral bodies "in a position to respect the rules", independent figures such as international election observers and a free press and active social media users who would guarantee a fair vote, according to Hounkpe.

For Aboubacry Mbodji, secretary-general of the African rights group RADDHO, west and central African countries such as Senegal, Ghana and the Atlantic island of Cape-Verde have shown Africa how a successful democracy holds an election.

A strong civil society and the combination of free media and citizens with access to new technology to disseminate information was "extremely important", he told AFP.

Senegal, where RADDHO is based, saw "a change at the top" in 2000 when liberal candidate Abdoulaye Wade challenged the socialist regime that had held power for 40 years, and was elected president for two terms.

- Government fightback -

But Wade himself was booted out in 2012 after angering voters with attempts to stay on for a third stint in power, showing the maturity of the electorate, Mbodji said.

"(The 2000 election) was in large part thanks to the use of mobile phones, but also the internet," he added.

Any party members tempted to tamper with ballots had to face the large numbers of Senegalese who remained in place at voting stations to ensure it passed off peacefully, he said, and reporters who called in the results to media from mobile phones, especially radio stations, covering the event.

The last 15 years have seen organisations such as "Y en a marre" (We are sick of it) in Senegal, "Balai citoyen" (Citizen sweep-up) in Burkina Faso and "Lutte pour le changement" (Fight for change) in the Democratic Republic of Congo appear, intent on pressing governments to be less opaque.

Despite the trend towards more transparent elections, heavy handed government reactions have not entirely vanished, with internet and social media shutdowns during presidential elections in Uganda in February and in Congo-Brazzaville in March, and now in Gabon.

"The African Union observers couldnt even communicate properly to complete their tasks," Mbodji said, referring to the Congo election that returned longtime leader Denis Sassou Nguesso to power.

But even the continent's most entrenched leaders couldnt escape the effect of the tidal wave of information the internet made possible, said Hounkpe.

"Those in power have less and less capacity to manipulate the process."

The last 15 years have seen the appearance of organisations such as "Balai citoyen" (Citizen sweep-up) in Burkina Faso, intent on pressing governments to be less opaque Sia Kambou (AFP/File)
Stray dogs find shelter in battered Gaza

In an impoverished and war-battered territory suffering food shortages and a scarcity of jobs, Saeed al-Ar knew it was a tall order opening a dog shelter in Gaza.

The Palestinian coastal enclave crammed with 1.9 million people has been devastated by three wars against Israel since 2008, and it remains under blockade by the Jewish state and Egypt.

The fate of hundreds of stray dogs outside towns or near the Israeli security fence have been anything but a priority.

A Palestinian volunteer trains a stray dog at the Al-Soulala Association for Protection, Rehabilitation and Training, dog shelter in central Gaza Strip Mohammed Abed (AFP/File)

"How can we create a shelter for strays when we need shelter ourselves?" is the typical view, as expressed by a 27-year-old unemployed Gazan, Jasser al-Sheikh.

"We must first feed our children and find jobs for thousands of unemployed graduates."

But Ar, a 45-year-old father of seven, has taken it upon himself to intervene, spending his own money to rescue the strays.

Last month, he opened the territory's first dog sanctuary in a relatively well-off suburb south of Gaza City.

His Al-Soulala Association for Protection, Rehabilitation and Training covers 2,700 square metres (29,000 square feet), complete with kennels which currently house around 75 former strays.

Behind beige tarpaulin on a vast sandy expanse, dogs are fed and given training to run and jump obstacles.

"This is the first kennel in Palestine that supports stray dogs and domesticates them," Ar told AFP.

He used to run a police unit for dogs specialising in the detection of explosives and drugs, and admits that canines have always been his passion.

When the Islamist movement Hamas seized power in Gaza in 2007, Ar found himself out of a job. But he still collects a salary and now dedicates all his time to the dogs.

- Shot or poisoned -

In the predominantly Muslim territory, religious authorities consider dogs to be unclean or impure.

Some Gazans even shoot at stray dogs that approach their children or orchards, while others find them scary and blame them for accidents.

The authorities lack the resources even if they were inclined to intervene.

In the past they even tried to poison strays, but stopped the culling over concerns that it was also dangerous to humans, a municipal official said on condition of anonymity.

The kennel aims to catch stray dogs, provide veterinary services and help domesticate them.

Since its opening, the kennel has attracted a growing number of visitors, many of them children. Some have asked to adopt a pet, a trend picking up in Gaza.

The phone rings constantly with people reporting strays in their neighbourhood.

In such cases, search teams are sent out, said Mohammed al-Hindi, 24, a recently graduated nurse and one of 25 volunteer helpers.

Every morning, the volunteers tour participating restaurants and stores to collect leftover meat and chicken for the dogs, in a sign of changing attitudes in Gaza.

But Ar said he has already spent $35,000 and cannot make ends meet on his own much longer.

The centre needs $5,000 a month to function properly, said Ar, who has launched an online appeal to animal protection groups and lovers across the world.

"We have to get help because at the moment we are doing this with our own money."

On a brighter note, he said local authorities have promised him a larger plot of land. He dreams of a giant kennel, "with a dog food factory and a veterinary clinic for all stray animals".

Saeed al-Ar used his own money to set up the Al-Soulala Association for Protection, Rehabilitation and Training, dog shelter in central Gaza Strip Mohammed Abed (AFP)
China tells G20 to avoid 'empty talk', cure global economy

Chinese President Xi Jinping urged world leaders to avoid "empty talk" and confront sluggish economic growth and rising protectionism as their summit opened Sunday in the scenic city of Hangzhou.

Xi welcomed Group of 20 presidents and prime ministers with a handshake, and an extended clasp with Barack Obama, as both men smiled despite protocol stumbles around the US leader's visit.

The Chinese leader said the world economy "still faces multiple risks and challenges including a lack of growth momentum and consumption, turbulent financial markets, receding global trade and investment".

US President Barack Obama (C) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) arrive at a pavilion to drink tea at West Lake State Guest House in Hangzhou, eastern China's Zhejiang province, on September 3, 2016 Carolyn Kaster (Pool/AFP)

The rise of protectionism is challenging economic globalisation, imperilling multilateral trade arrangements, and despite regulatory reforms market volatility is gathering pace, he said.

"We hope the Hangzhou summit will come up with a prescription for the world economy and lead it back to the road of strong, balanced, comprehensive and sustainable growth," Xi said.

The G20 brings together representatives of 85 percent of the world's GDP and two-thirds of its population.

But experts fear the gathering will be short on substance, with no acute crisis pushing leaders to defy rising populist sentiment and to take difficult steps such as liberalising trade.

In a circular conference hall in Hangzhou -- the eastern city left deserted by a vast security operation -- Xi told leaders the G20 "should work with real action, with no empty talk".

China is hoping a successful meeting will portray it as an assured and powerful nation ready to assume a role on the international stage that befits its status as the world's second-largest economy.

Authorities shut thousands of factories to try to clear the skies of smog, and encouraged residents to leave town on free holidays, as well as detaining dozens of dissidents to prevent any hint of unrest.

- No deal on Syria -

The summit was preceded by a flurry of diplomatic activity on issues ranging from climate change and the war in Syria to international trade.

The US and China on Saturday ratified the Paris climate accord, a crucial step towards bringing into force the pact against global warming.

There had been hopes for another breakthrough, on the long war in Syria, after the US said it was close to a deal with Russia on stemming the violence.

But negotiations between Secretary of State John Kerry and his counterpart Sergei Lavrov yielded only an agreement to convene again on Monday, with Russia accused of "walking back" on key issues.

Moscow and Washington support opposite sides in the conflict, which erupted in March 2011 after President Bashar al-Assad unleashed a brutal crackdown on a pro-democracy revolt.

Successive rounds of international negotiations have failed to end a conflict that has left more than 290,000 people dead and forced millions to flee, a key contributor to migrant flows into Europe.

EU President Donald Tusk said Europe was "close to limits" on its ability to accept new waves of refugees and urged the broader international community to shoulder its share of the burden.

The issue has become a political hot potato for European leaders as Islamist terror attacks and rising anti-globalisation sentiment fuel public resentment of immigration.

Pictures of a drowned three-year-old Syrian boy lying on a Greek beach briefly changed the discourse last year, with Germany throwing open its borders, but a major backlash swiftly followed.

Ahead of the summit, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned against "rampant" protectionism and nationalism, saying that "building walls" was not the solution."

The talks are being held in the wake of Britain's vote to leave the European Union, which leaves it with the task of renegotiating access to the markets of the rest of the world.

It is a huge job for the world's fifth-biggest economy, and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Canberra had "got things moving towards having a free trade agreement with the UK".

But European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker said he opposes such talks while Britain remains part of the EU, insisting they were an "exclusive matter" for the bloc on behalf of its members and "we are sticking to it".

- Shouting match -

China craves a polished summit but there were more wrinkles Saturday when a shouting match broke out over access for reporters travelling with Obama as Air Force One arrived on the tarmac.

"This is our country!" a Chinese official in a dark suit shouted at a White House staffer. "This is our airport!"

Obama took the fracas in his stride on Sunday, saying that although the US insists on press access and does not "leave our values and ideals behind", the travelling White House juggernaut could be intimidating.

"I think this time... the seams are showing a little more than usual in terms of some of the negotiations and jostling that takes place behind the scenes," he told a press conference.

Graphic showing the total GDP of the G20 countries - (AFP Graphic)

Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) welcomes Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) at the West Lake State Guest House in Hangzhou, on September 4, 2016 Wang Zhao (Pool/AFP)

(From L) UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama sit together during a joint ratification of the Paris climate change agreement, at the West lake State Guest House in Hangzhou, on September 3, 2016 How Hwee Young (Pool/AFP)
Philippines seeks three over deadly blast

Philippines police Sunday were searching for three people wanted for questioning over the bombing of a night market in President Rodrigo Duterte's home town blamed on a notorious group of Islamic militants.

The blast, which tore through a bustling market in the heart of Davao city on Friday, killed at least 14 people and led to the president imposing a "state of lawlessness" on the country.

Police are searching for two women and one man for questioning over the bombing, which has been widely been blamed on the Muslim extremist Abu Sayyaf group, said Chief Inspector Andrea de la Cerna on Sunday.

Human rights group members gather in front of Quiapo Church in Manila on September 3, 2016, condemning the bombing of a night market in Davao city Noel Celis (AFP)

Davao is the hometown of President Rodrigo Duterte, who had recently ordered an offensive against the Abu Sayyaf.

He has said that the explosion was in retaliation for the military operation against the group in their stronghold in the southern island of Jolo.

However De la Cerna, spokeswoman of a task force investigating the explosion, said they were not ruling out other motives for the attack.

"We have copies of the CCTV (closed-circuit television), we have eight possible witnesses but we have named no one (as suspects)," she told AFP.

She said the three "persons of interest" being sought were not yet considered suspects, but would not give further details.

Duterte believes the attack was "80 percent" likely an act of terrorism, his spokesman, Martin Andanar told reporters on Sunday.

After the bombing, Duterte declared a national "state of lawlessness", which his security adviser said gave the military extra powers to conduct law enforcement operations normally done only by the police.
Bangladesh hangs Islamist party's top financier

Bangladesh has executed a tycoon and top financier for the largest Islamist party for war crimes, dealing a major blow to its ambitions in the troubled Muslim-majority country.

Mir Quasem Ali, a key leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, was hanged late Saturday after being convicted by a controversial war crimes tribunal of murder and abduction during the 1971 independence conflict with Pakistan.

He was hanged at a high-security jail in Gazipur north of the capital. His body was taken to his ancestral village in the central district of Manikganj, flanked by police, for burial early Sunday.

Bangladeshi activists who fought in the 1971 war, celebrate after Mir Quasem Ali, leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, was executed at Kashimpur Central Jail on the outskirts of Dhaka, on September 3, 2016 Rehman Asad (AFP)

"Several dozen people, mostly family members, attended his funeral prayers," local police chief Nazrul Islam told AFP.

Ali is the fifth prominent Jamaat leader to have been executed for war crimes following their trials at the tribunal set up by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's secular government in 2010.

The 63-year-old's death is a major setback for the party which he had helped revive by setting up charities, businesses and trusts linked to it after it was allowed to operate in the late 1970s.

Security was tight before his execution, even though the party has in recent months eschewed violent protests in reaction to war crimes verdicts and there was no immediate sign of unrest.

The tribunal has divided the country, with supporters of Jamaat and the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) branding the trials a sham aimed at eliminating their leaders.

The hanging comes as the country reels from a rise in militant attacks including a siege at an upscale cafe in Dhaka in July that killed 22 people mostly foreigners.

Some 1,000 police were deployed in Gazipur before Ali's hanging, officials said.

Jamaat, which is banned from contesting elections, called a nationwide strike for Monday, saying Ali was "murdered" for playing a "key role in the Islamic movement" in Bangladesh.

Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan warned Islamists against any "unruly" activities.

Hundreds of people in Dhaka and Chittagong held impromptu street celebrations late Saturday as news of the execution was broadcast on television.

The conviction and execution of Jamaat officials plunged Bangladesh into one of its worst crises in 2013, when tens of thousands of Islamist activists clashed with police in protests that left some 500 people dead.

In the same year the government launched a nationwide crackdown on Jamaat activists in which tens of thousands of Islamists were either detained or charged over the protests.

- Notorious militia -

Prosecutors said Ali was a key commander of a notorious pro-Pakistan militia in the southern port city of Chittagong during the war, and later became a shipping, banking and real estate tycoon.

Before he was arrested in 2012, Ali headed a corporation which owns a pro-Jamaat daily and a television station that was shut down in 2013 for fuelling religious tensions.

He was convicted in November 2014 of a series of war crimes including the abduction and murder of a young independence fighter.

Hasina's government has defended the trials, saying they are needed to heal the wounds of the conflict.

But a group of United Nations human rights experts last week urged Dhaka to annul Ali's death sentence and questioned the fairness of the trial.

Mubashar Hasan, an expert on political Islam who teaches at the country's private North South University, said the executions have decimated Jamaat's leadership, with most of their "kingpins gone".

The party could be forced, as a result, to adopt a more moderate ideology given the strong backlash in Bangladesh against gruesome militant attacks, to retain supporters, Hasan said.

"Second, there is a possibility that some members of the party may be inclined be be violent," he told AFP.

Ambulance carrying the body of Mir Quasem Ali, leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, leaves Kashimpur Central Jail on September 3, 2016, after he was executed for war crimes committed during the 1971 independence war with Pakistan Rehman Asad (AFP)

Relatives of Bangladeshi Jamaat-e-Islam financier Mir Quasem Ali arrive at Kashimpur Central Jail on the outskirts of Dhaka, on September 3, 2016 Rajib Dhar (AFP)
Israeli tank fire targets Hamas post in response to shooting

Israeli tank fire targeted a Hamas post on the Gaza Strip border overnight after gunfire at Israeli forces in the area, with no injuries reported, officials said Sunday.

Palestinian security sources in Gaza run by Islamist movement Hamas, confirmed the post in the northern Gaza Strip in the Beit Lahia area had been targeted and said no one was hurt.

Israel's army said it responded with tank fire after its forces were targeted by gunfire along the border between the Palestinian enclave and Israel.

An Israeli tank rolls along the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip Jack Guez (AFP/File)

Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza have fought three wars since 2008 and there are frequent flare-ups along the border.

Israel regularly responds to rocket fire from militants in Gaza with air strikes.

Last month, it carried out dozens of strikes in Gaza in response to rocket fire, a far larger response than usual.
Dalai Lama Plans To Visit South Korea

The Dalai Lama asked for sympathy, mercy, and love and plans to visit in South Korea after meeting a South Korea Buddhist group that advocating his visit to the country.

"I have not been able to visit Asian countries except Japan. I am certain about my future visit to South Korea, if the South Korean believers' religious minds stay clean and faithful to religious oath," said by the 81-year-old Tibetan spiritual leader.

The Tibetan leader, who resides in Dharamshala, northwestern India, told the 10 representatives from the South Korea Buddhist group and the accompanying Korean journalists that he is certain for a future visit in South Korea. However, due to the Buddhist historical heritage, Dalai Lama was unofficially barred from visiting Asian countries.

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Dalai Lama's spiritual teachings are a source of moral inspiration to many people. On the basis of the Biddhist arch-principle, Dalai Lama was presented with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for his non-violent Tibetan Liberation movement.

Moreover, Dalai Lama still believed that there will be looming changes in china's global perspective regarding the THAAD issue between Seoul and Beijing.

"The Chinese government seems to be setting plans with the bigger picture in mind," Dalai Lama said.

The Dalai Lama emphasized his message to the South Korean Buddhist about being self-disciplined and continuous learning.

"Most of the Buddhists are faithful to the traditional mantra reading and worshiping, but have become loose on learning and self-discipline. I'm afraid the current circumstances might make them lag behind our time. Mere belief does not lead to the sustainable practice of Buddhism," the spiritual leader said.

The Dalai Lama expressed his words of gratitude and wisdom for the continue efforts to invite him in South Korea. The committee is led by the Venerable Kumkang and Venerable Jinok,

Dalai Lamas are believed to be incarnations of Chenrezig or Avalokiteshvara. The meaning of dalai is "ocean" while lama is a Tibetan word meaning "mentor, teacher, or guru".

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Selfies and silence as China shuts down G20 host city

The tranquil waters of Hangzhou's West Lake have inspired Chinese poets and painters for centuries. On Sunday the serenity was imposed by force as authorities deployed a vast security operation for the G20 summit.

The throngs of tourists who usually crowd the shores of the island-dotted lake were absent and the surrounding roads closed off -- except for police vehicles and the occasional motorcade of black luxury cars emblazoned with national flags.

But when a handful of locals living in the immediate area were allowed past the cordon, they took advantage of the empty streets to embrace an untraditional pursuit: road-top selfies.

A local resident cycles on a quiet street in Hangzhou, in China's eastern Zhejiang province, ahead of the opening session of the G20 Leaders Summit, on September 4, 2016 Greg Baker (AFP)

Young people sat on the tarmac taking pictures of themselves, while others made star-shaped poses with their arms and legs for friends to snap them.

The streets spruced up for the benefit of leaders, trees glowing with artificial lights, made an ideal backdrop.

State media say that more than two million people out of a population of some nine million have left Hangzhou, taking advantage of a paid holidays which local firms have been ordered to give employees.

Local reports said so many people visited Huangshan, a mountain range in the next province where Hangzhou residents were given free tickets, that hillside passes turned into human traffic jams.

Wealthier residents of apartments near the G20 venue were offered sizeable cash incentives to leave their homes.

But treatment was apparently harsher for Hangzhou's vast population of migrant workers, with several saying they were ordered to shut their small businesses without compensation.

"We were ordered to close our restaurant, so I've gone back to my hometown in Sichuan," said a woman surnamed Zhou whom AFP reached by telephone. "We are losing money."

"At the beginning we were told about compensation but it didn't happen," she added.

Security is generally tight for G20 summits wherever they are held, as they are a magnet for protesters seeking a global audience for their cause.

State media say that since December one million people have been mobilised as "volunteers".

Red-armbanded personnel stand, squat or sit on street corners and inside apartment compounds throughout Hangzhou, apparently with little to do.

A policeman prevented an AFP reporter from taking photos of the guards in one compound, and several volunteers said they needed authorisation to speak to foreign media.

"I work for a state-owned enterprise, who have organised this volunteer work," said one armbanded worker surnamed Wang, sitting on a stool near a bus stop.

"My job is to look our for people who get off the bus with dangerous items such as knives."

A man walks on a quiet street in Hangzhou, in China's eastern Zhejiang province, ahead of the opening session of the G20 Leaders Summit, on September 4, 2016 Greg Baker (AFP)
Pakistan suspends search for missing US climbers

Pakistan suspended a helicopter search Sunday for two American climbers who went missing six days ago while trying to summit a mountain in the country's far north.

Kyle Dempster and Scott Adamson began their ascent of the 7,285-metre (23,900-foot) Ogre-II peak off the Choktoi Glacier in the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan on Sunday August 21, but went missing the next day and have not been seen since.

"The helicopter-search was suspended after authorities did not get a go-ahead for today from families and friends of the two climbers," Karrar Haidri, a spokesman for the Alpine Club of Pakistan told AFP.

Pakistan has long been a draw for foreign climbers lured by some of the most spectacular mountains on Earth Aamir Qureshi (AFP/File)

However, a search by high-altitude rescuers is continuing, he said.

"Even on Saturday, the rescuers failed to find any sign of the two climbers," Haidri added.

Another official, who did not want to be identified, told AFP the helicopter-search can be resumed as and when Pakistani authorities are asked to do so.

Earlier, the helicopter search had been delayed for days because of adverse weather conditions.

Authorities said that a team of local high-altitude rescuers has been searching for the missing climbers for almost a week but bad weather prevented them from ascending the peak.
Apple tax decision not against US: Juncker

European authorities' decision to slap Apple with a huge bill for back taxes was not a decision "against the United States", European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker said Sunday as world leaders gathered in China for a major economic summit.

The 13-billion-euro demand for payment from the American electronics giant has raised hackles in the US, with the White House decrying what it described as a "unilateral" approach to rewriting global taxation norms.

Speaking to reporters before the Group of 20 leadership summit in Hangzhou, Juncker said the decision was not aimed at the US.

The White House has described the EC decision to slap Apple with a huge demand for back taxes as a "unilateral" approach to rewriting global taxation norms Daniel Leal-Olivas (AFP/File)

"It would be absurd to choose this territory of state taxation to attack the USA," he said, adding that most of the commission's punitive measures were against European companies.

"We are applying the rules," he said. "We are basing our decisions on facts and on the legislation."

Brussels said Apple, the world's most valuable company, avoided virtually all tax on its business in the bloc by illegal arrangements with EU member Ireland, which gave the company an unfair advantage over competitors.

Apple and the Irish government have said they will appeal against the European Commission ruling, with the iPhone maker warning it could cost European jobs.

Ireland has attracted multinationals over many years by offering favourable tax deals to generate much-needed jobs and investment.

But after a three-year investigation, Brussels said the arrangement with Apple broke EU laws on state aid.

The findings come amid growing tensions between Washington and Brussels over a series of EU anti-trust investigations targeting other giant US companies such as Google, Amazon, McDonald's, Starbucks and Fiat Chrysler.

Tax avoidance has moved sharply up the political agenda since EU governments adopted tough austerity policies to balance public finances, fuelling public resentment that the rich paid relatively little tax.

Speaking before the summit, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said President Barack Obama would seek to address tax avoidance with world leaders in Hangzhou.

"We need to find a way to make the global system of taxation more fair -- more fair to countries around the world, particularly countries like the United States," he said.
Songs and celebrations in Kolkata for Mother Teresa's sainthood

Singing nuns and followers clutching flowers flocked to Mother Teresa's tomb in the Indian city of Kolkata to celebrate her proclamation as a saint at the Vatican on Sunday.

People began gathering in the early morning at Mother House in Kolkata for a special mass for the "Saint of the Gutters" before the ceremony at St Peter's Basilica.

They placed candles and flowers on her tomb in sombre contemplation. But the atmosphere at the headquarters of the Missionaries of Charity, the order that Teresa founded, was also one of celebration.

Indian devotees pray around the Mother's Tomb at the Missionaries of Charity House on the eve of the canonisation of Mother Teresa in Rome, in Kolkata on September 2, 2016 Dibyangshu Sarkar (AFP)

Nuns were singing songs honouring her and giant television screens were erected so the gathering visitors could watch the ceremony.

"It's a day of rejoicing, a day of gratitude and a day of many, many blessings," said senior sister Mary Lysa.

"The Missionaries of Charity has decided to turn this into a celebration to further Mother's cause serving the poorest of the poor and the dying and sick."

"We will gather to witness the entire process at Vatican City as it unfolds," she said.

Teresa rose to fame in the eastern Indian city, where she devoted her life to helping the destitute and the sick in its teeming slums.

Lighting a candle and placing it on the tomb, Konica Cecilia said the beloved nun had given her impoverished parents money to help them send her to school as a child.

"I was fortunate to meet Mother. She was a living saint and an inspiration to me," the 32-year-old said, adding that the nun was the pride of Kolkata.

"My memories of her comfort me when I am in trouble."

A giant portrait of Teresa was erected near Mother House and there were rounds of applause as a growing numbers of nuns and followers gathered to watch the ceremony live on the screens.

In the city of Mumbai the Indian government unveiled a commemorative postage stamp of Teresa, born into a Kosovar Albanian family in 1910 in Skopje.

The mass at the Vatican came one day short of the 19th anniversary of Teresa's death, at age 87, in Kolkata.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner's path to canonisation was sealed after the Vatican last year recognised the second of two required miracles, following her death.

But she had long been regarded by many as a saint.

English literature teacher Madhura Banerjee described her as an inspiration to the younger generation in today's modern world.

"I was touched by her simplicity," said Banerjee, who visited Teresa in 1995 at the headquarters to celebrate her own birthday.

"When I think of her, it makes the difficult things look easy," she said.
Philippines concerned over Chinese boats near disputed shoal

The Philippines has asked China to explain the increased presence of Chinese vessels near the disputed Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea, the defence secretary said Sunday, expressing "grave concern".

Philippine Defence Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said a Philippine air force plane saw four Chinese coast guard ships, two barge-like vessels and two suspected troop ships near the shoal on Saturday.

"The presence of so many ships, other than coast guard in the area is cause for grave concern," Lorenzana said.

Vessels from China's South Sea Fleet take part in a drill in the Xisha Islands -- or Paracel Islands -- in the South China Sea on May 5, 2016

"The DFA (Department of Foreign Affairs) has already called the attention of the Chinese Ambassador and demanded explanation," he added.

The shoal, which is located just 230 kilometres (650 miles) from the main Philippine island of Luzon, has long been a bone of contention between the two countries.

Lorenzana said that earlier this year, the Chinese tried to bring in dredging barges in an apparent attempt to turn the Scarborough into an artificial island but were dissuaded by the United States.

"If they try to construct anything in Scarborough it will have far reaching adverse effect on the security situation," he added.

The Chinese Embassy in Manila could not be reached for comment.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has said he intends to ask Beijing -- possibly at a regional summit in Laos this week -- if they are building up the shoal despite an international court ruling rejecting most of China's claims in the resource-rich area.

Duterte said Friday he had received an "unsettling" intelligence report showing China had sent barges to the contested Scarborough Shoal and had appeared to begin construction in the area for the first time.

A UN-backed tribunal ruled in July that China's claims to almost all of the strategic sea had no legal basis and its construction of artificial islands in disputed waters was illegal.

The United States has warned of "actions" if Beijing extends its military expansion to the Scarborough Shoal.

China has sought to assert its claims in the South China Sea by building a network of artificial islands capable of supporting military operations.

Its massive land reclamation has prompted criticism from the US and claimant countries, with Washington warning it endangers freedom of navigation in international waters.

Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also have claims to the sea, through which over $5 trillion in annual trade passes.

The Scarborough Shoal, a rich fishing ground within the Philippines' exclusive economic zone and 650 kilometres away from the nearest major Chinese landmass, is a particular flashpoint.

China took control of Scarborough Shoal in 2012 after a stand-off with the Philippine navy.
Somalia pressed over media freedom, journalist death toll

The United Nations called on Somalia on Sunday to do more to protect the freedom of the press and expression in a country where 30 journalists have been killed in four years.

But in a report the UN noted progress on the issue over the last five years.

The report, drawn up by the UN Assistance Mission in Somalia (UNSOM) as well as the UN Human Rights Council, noted that adoption in January this year of a new federal media law, which "guarantees a number of freedoms, including the right to inform."

Somali soldiers patrol in a pickup truck in Mogadishu on June 21, 2015 Mohamed Abdiwahab (AFP/File)

But the report also expressed "concern about the laws unclear terminology, which allows for subjective interpretation and undue restrictions to freedom of expression".

"Despite the vibrant media culture in Somalia  which hosts more than 90 media outlets and scores of websites and blogs  numerous violations aimed at journalists and political leaders" are documented in the report.

These include killings, attacks, arbitrary arrests and detention, intimidation, harassment, closure of media outlets, confiscation of equipment and blocking of websites.

"The dangers facing media workers and public figures are illustrated by the fact that, between August 2012 and June 2016, a total of 30 journalists and 18 parliamentarians were killed in Somalia," it added.

While the greatest threat to journalists comes from the Al-Qaeda aligned Shabaab jihadist group, which has vowed to bring down the Somali government, the country's security forces are guilty of numerous violations against journalists and politicians.

"Political activists and journalists are detained in the NISA detention centre, together with Al Shabaab suspects, with no judicial oversight," lamented the report, referring to the National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA).

"In a worrying development, since February 2016, the NISA has started using the media to show Al Shabaab suspects confessing their crimes," it added.

Somalia is preparing to hold indirect elections in late September and October, in a process which will see 14,000 delegates chosen on a clan basis vote for deputies and representatives in a new upper chamber of parliament.

Those elected will then designate a new president at the end of October. Elections by universal direct suffrage are scheduled in 2020.

This year will be crucial for Somalia's political transition, said the UN report.

"Attacks against individual journalists and media organisations have a deeply corrosive impact on democracy, with profoundly negative repercussions on freedom of expression and human rights in general," said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad Al Hussein of Jordan.
UAE eases visas for Chinese visitors

Chinese visitors to the United Arab Emirates will now be granted visas on arrival, the Gulf state's prime minister announced on Sunday, in a new bid to boost tourism.

China, the world's second-largest economy, has a burgeoning and increasingly prosperous middle class that is travelling abroad in numbers greater than ever before.

"We have approved a decision to grant visas on arrival at the country's airports to visitors from the Republic of China," said Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, who is also the ruler of Dubai.

More than 14.2 million people visited Dubai in 2015, but the target is 25 million by 2020 when the Gulf emirate hosts the global trade fair Expo 2020 Karim Sahib (AFP/File)

"Our relations with China are strategic and a priority," he added in remarks published on his official Twitter account.

Chinese tourists previously had to obtain visas before travelling to the UAE.

The UAE has invested billions of dollars over more than a decade to put itself on the map as a regional business and tourism hub.

Among the UAE's seven emirates, Dubai is the most attractive for tourists.

More than 14.2 million people visited Dubai in 2015, but the target is 25 million by 2020 when the Gulf emirate hosts the global trade fair Expo 2020.

In February, local media quoted Dubai Tourism chief Issam Kazim as saying that 450,000 Chinese visitors made the trip to the emirate in 2015, in a 29 percent increase over the previous year.
Syria regime advances south of Aleppo, threatens new siege

Syrian government forces advanced on Sunday south of Aleppo city, a military source and state media said, as they pushed to once again encircle rebel neighbourhoods and reimpose a siege.

"The Syrian army, supported by allied forces, has total control of the armaments academy and expanded the territory it controls in the military academies zone," state news agency SANA said.

An AFP correspondent in the rebel-held east of Aleppo city reported heavy aerial bombardment on the combat zone in the south of the city, where three military schools are located.

Once Syria's economic powerhouse, Aleppo city has been ravaged by the war that began with protests against President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011 George Ourfalian (AFP/File)

Government forces have already recaptured the air force academy and rebels "are now besieged in the artillery academy," a military source said.

If they recapture the school, government forces could then "easily take Ramussa, a suburb south of Aleppo, and reimpose a siege of the rebel districts," said Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor.

Once Syria's economic powerhouse, Aleppo city has been ravaged by the war that began with protests against President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011.

It has been roughly divided between regime control in the west and rebel control in the east since mid-2012.

In mid-July, advancing regime forces encircled the rebel-held east, placing the opposition districts under a siege that provoked international concern.
Yemen cross-border shelling kills Saudi woman

Cross-border shelling from Yemen killed a Saudi woman on Sunday and wounded two other citizens, the kingdom's civil defence agency said.

The shelling at 2:00am local time (1100 GMT) in the southern Jazan region killed a woman and wounded a man and his son, according to the agency's spokesman Major Yehia al-Qahtani.

Saudi Arabia has lead a military coalition battling Iran-backed rebels in Yemen since March 2015 in support of Sanaa's internationally recognised government of President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi.

Cross-border attacks into Saudi Arabia have increased since a Saudi-led Arab coalition stepped up air strikes on insurgent targets inside Yemen Fayez Nureldine (AFP/File)

Attacks from Yemen on Saudi border areas have intensified since the suspension in early August of UN-brokered peace talks between the Shiite Huthi rebels and their allies and Yemen's government.

On Wednesday, a Saudi border guard was killed after shelling from Yemen hit a frontier post in Jazan.

And a week ago, similar attacks killed three children in Saudi Arabia and wounded nine other people.

Cross-border fire from Yemen has killed about 100 civilians and members of the security forces on the Saudi side since the war began.
Libya forces facing 'fierce' IS resistance in Sirte

Libyan pro-government forces are facing "fierce resistance" from Islamic State group holdouts in Sirte and it could take several days to gain full control of the city, a spokesman said Sunday.

Forces loyal to Libya's Government of National Accord (GNA) launched a new attack on Saturday against IS in Sirte, the coastal city seized by the jihadists last year.

Backed by weeks of US air strikes, pro-GNA fighters have recaptured nearly all of what had been the jihadists' main stronghold in North Africa.

Members of the forces loyal to Libya's UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) fire their weapons at enemy positions in the coastal city of Sirte Mahmud Turkia (AFP/File)

IS fighters are now cornered in a last district of the city but Reda Issa, a spokesman for loyalist forces, said it was proving difficult to dislodge them.

"IS is putting up fierce resistance in their last neighbourhoods," Issa told AFP. "They are trying to make the battle last longer although they know it will be over soon."

At least 10 pro-GNA fighters were killed and 60 wounded in Saturday's offensive, with most of the deaths caused by car bombs and suicide attacks, Issa said.

Fighting had eased on Sunday, he said, as pro-government forces sought ways "to minimise the casualties caused by IS suicide attacks the next time there will be an offensive".

"We hope to liberate Sirte before Eid," Issa said, referring to the Eid al-Adha Muslim holiday, which is due around September 12.

The forces loyal to the UN-backed GNA had said they were preparing to "liberate" the entire city after seizing several IS positions, including its headquarters, last month.

The city's fall would be a huge setback to IS's efforts to expand its self-proclaimed "caliphate" beyond Syria and Iraq where the jihadists have also suffered losses.
South Korea and Kenya Close Deal on Nuclear Energy

South Korea's state company Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEPCO) closed a deal with Kenya to develop a nuclear energy in the African country.

Kenya aims to improve its electricity sources by setting 4,000 megawatts of nuclear energy by 2033. The Kenyan Nuclear Electricity Board (KNEB) and KEPCO already signed the memorandum stating the nations' mutual understanding and partnership in the nuclear energy development project.

Kenya currently holds the largest economy in East Africa. However, electricity interruptions are common in the country due to inadequate capacity of generators and old energy networks. As a result, many business establishments in Nairobi have to secure back-up generators to support their operations.

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On the other hand, South Korea is known for its well-developed nuclear industry as it is the fifth biggest consumer of nuclear power worldwide. All operations are under the management of KEPCO. Fortune reported that in 2009, the state-owned company was awarded a contract to establish four reactors, currently under construction in the United Arab Emirates.

Generation of nuclear electricity in Kenya is planned to take place in 2027. Other than KEPCO, the African nation will also work with the Korean Nuclear Association for International Cooperation (KNAIC) and KEPCO International Graduate School (K-INGS) to iron the project.

The South Korea-Kenya partnership aims to provide knowledge, skills development and training to the latter nation's citizens to gear them up for the anticipated nuclear power project.

KNEB will conduct feasibility studies that will help in the identification of promising sites for the establishment of nuclear power plants in Kenya. In connection to these, sixteen students from Kenya enrolled in K-INGS Nuclear Power Engineering course, Citizen TV reported.

The International Atomic Energy Agency commended the progress of the project in Kenya and advised the nation to form a regulatory board.

Kenya also signed pacts with China, Russia and Slovakia for the nuclear power project.

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15 Yemen soldiers killed in rebel attacks

At least 15 pro-government Yemeni soldiers were killed in rebel attacks in the north and in a suspected jihadist bombing in Aden on Sunday, military and security sources said.

Shiite Huthi rebels and their allies launched twin attacks to try to retake the port of Midi in the northern province of Hajja, after loyalists had captured it, military sources said.

"Eleven soldiers were killed in the attacks and 28 others were wounded," a military official said.

A fighter loyal to Yemeni President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi stands guard in Taez's Misrakh District on November 26, 2015 Ahmed Al-Basha (AFP/File)

Meanwhile, Saudi-led coalition warplanes carried out 15 air strikes against the Iran-backed rebels to stop their advance in the area, military sources said.

Other air strikes hit rebel positions in the insurgent-controlled capital Sanaa and other provinces over the past 24 hours, they added.

The sources spoke of rebel casualties but AFP could not verify this as the Huthis and their allies rarely acknowledge their losses.

The coalition began its war on the Iran-backed rebels in March 2015.

It intensified operations since the suspension in early August of UN-brokered peace talks between the rebels and their allies and Yemen's government.

Also on Sunday, in Yemen's main southern city of Aden, a roadside bomb killed four soldiers and wounded one at a checkpoint in the Sheikh Othman district, a security official said.

He said jihadists, who have boosted their attacks in government-controlled Aden over the past few months despite efforts to increase security, are suspected of being behind the bombing.

Earlier, the official had given a toll of two soldiers killed and three wounded but said that two later succumbed to their injuries.
Ethnic Chinese demand 'security for all' in Paris protest

Thousands of ethnic Chinese staged a protest march in Paris on Sunday over the fatal mugging of a Chinese tailor last month, as crime against community members has spiralled.

The protesters, almost all wearing white T-shirts reading "Security for All" and many waving French flags, rallied at the Place de la Republique in central Paris.

Police estimated the crowd at about 14,000, while organisers said 100,000 people took to the streets against "anti-Asian racism."

A placard reads, "I love safe France" at a demonstration on September 4, 2016 in Paris Francois Guillot (AFP)

Zhang Chaolin, who was 49, was set upon on August 7 by three thieves who tried to snatch a bag belonging to a friend of his. He died a few days later from his injuries.

Zhang's image appeared on a giant banner in the middle of the square, under the words, splattered with red paint: "Zhang Chaolin, dead for nothing. Who will be next?"

"He came to France in search of a better life... he found violence and insecurity," a spokesman of France's 300,000-strong Chinese community told the crowd.

"These hooligans have destroyed our faith in France. Let our voice be heard," he said in Chinese.

"Stop violence, aggression, insecurity", one placard read amid the sea of white T-shirts worn by the protestors, who later marched towards nearby Place de la Bastille.

An umbrella organisation, Stop the Violence, Security for All, called the protest two weeks after around 1,000 people marched in the Aubervilliers suburb north of Paris where Zhang was killed.

Elected officials who joined Saturday's protest included the right-wing president of the greater Paris regional council, Valerie Pecresse.

Security for All is demanding police reinforcements, more security cameras and a recognition of anti-Asian racism.

- 'Easy prey' -

On Sunday, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve pledged to beef up the police presence in Aubervilliers and provide funding for security cameras.

Reported violent robberies targeting the Chinese community, who are seen as lucrative prey as they are thought to habitually carry large sums of cash, have tripled in the past year from 35 to 105.

The bag the thieves were after during Zhang's mugging contained only candy, cigarettes and sunglasses, according to a source close to the investigation.

The stereotype has prompted a string of attacks on Chinese tourists, including one early last month in which assailants sprayed teargas on members of a tour group before making off with their luggage.

In September last year, a Chinese tourist guide was robbed of 25,000 euros ($28,300) in cash and his new Rolex watch after he had prevented two of his group from being robbed themselves outside a hotel in a Paris suburb.

Protester Le Xu, who came to France as a child and is now 38, told AFP: "In the Asian community we are targeted because we are easy prey -- we are little and we are discreet. We often don't bring charges, so there aren't any consequences."

- 'Defence leagues' -

A lawyer for the community, Francois Ormillien, has warned that without an adequate response from city authorities the community could form "defence leagues" -- vigilante groups -- to defend itself.

"There are youths 17 to 19 years old who are more aggressive than their elders and want to let loose, but they are very much in the minority," Ormillien said.

He noted that authorities have begun cracking down harder on crime targeting the community, citing the example of a teenager with no prior police record who was jailed for two years for a violent theft.

Aubervilliers, home to generations of Chinese immigrants, is the hub of Europe's textile industry, where traders recently opened the continent's biggest garment centre.

Stop the Violence staged demonstrations in 2010 and 2011 in the eastern Belleville section of Paris, home to another sizeable Chinese community, after an attack on a wedding banquet there.

A placard reading, "To live, to survive, continuity..." at a demonstration on September 4, 2016 in Paris Francois Guillot (AFP)
Sri Lanka seeks more time for ethnic reconciliation

President Maithripala Sirisena Sunday pleaded for more time to bring about reconciliation and ensure accountability seven years after Sri Lanka's ethnic war that claimed over 100,000 lives.

Sirisena said he urged United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon during talks on Thursday to be patient with his administration which came to power in January last year on a promise of lasting peace and ethnic unity.

"I told him not to be in a hurry. Be patient, give me some more time to rebuild my country," he said. "The Secretary-General had a smile on his face and told me: 'You continue your work.'"

Maithripala Sirisena speaks during the Sri Lanka Economic Forum in Colombo on August 2, 2016 Lakruwan Wanniarachchi (AFP/File)

Speaking at the 65th anniversary celebrations of his Sri Lanka Freedom Party in the north-western town of Kurunegala, Sirisena said he has managed to end the country's international pariah status since coming to power in January last year.

Sri Lanka had faced international censure after his predecessor Mahinda Rajapakse insisted that not a single civilian was killed by troops under his command.

Rajapakse also refused to investigate allegations that up to 40,000 minority Tamil civilians perished in the final stages of the war in 2009. More than 100,000 people were killed in the conflict between 1972 and 2009.

Earlier this year, Sirisena pledged to provide state land to those affected by the war and unable to go back to their own homes which were either destroyed in the war or are still occupied by the military.

In a public lecture in Colombo on Friday, Ban welcomed what he called symbolic steps taken by Sirisena's administration to ensure reconciliation but called for more momentum to ensure lasting peace.

"I also urge you to speed up the return of (Tamil) land so that the remaining communities of displaced people can return home," Ban said.

"In parallel, the size of the military force in the (former war zones of) North and East could be reduced, helping to build trust and reduce tensions."

He also pressed for accountability for the "tens of thousands of civilians" who perished in the final months of the war in 2009, a figure disputed by the former government.
'Real heroes don't wear Spandex': Mel Gibson

"Real heroes don't wear Spandex," Mel Gibson told Venice Sunday as he unveiled his new World War II drama "Hacksaw Ridge", starring Andrew Garfield of "Spiderman" fame.

The film tells the true story of Desmond Doss (played by Garfield), who enlists and is determined to save lives on the front line as a medic, but refuses to carry a gun on moral grounds.

The flick's title comes from a battleground in Japan at the top of a towering cliff. US soldiers who climb its sheer face are met with bunkers and corpses, as well as Japanese bullets and flame-throwers.

Mel Gibson speaks on September 4, 2016 at the Venice Lido Filippo Monteforte (AFP)

Doss, despite being a conscientious objector, was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Harry S. Truman for single-handedly saving the lives of over 75 of his comrades during the brutal Battle of Okinawa.

While the first hour of the movie is essentially a love story between Doss and his future wife Dorothy (Teresa Palmer), the rest sees the bible-clutching medic first reviled then gradually accepted by the rest of his squadron.

"The man who refuses to touch a weapon and wants to do something much higher than something as venal as killing in a war is a very high calling," Gibson said, adding that he did believe "just wars" exist.

He said that with the violent but essentially uplifting film he hoped to "pay homage to and honour the warrier".

"It's a sad fact that veterans of wars harm themselves afterwards. In Vietnam so many people were killed in the conflict but afterwards over three times as many took their own lives."

His Academy Award-winning "Braveheart" (1995) was famed for its bloody battle scenes, but here Gibson has taken the blowing off of legs and slicing through of guts to an operatic level.

"The important thing with battle and depicting it on screen is to give the impression of chaos and confusion but to be absolutely clear what you want the audience to see," he said.

- 'Like a good Dad' -

"It's all about screen direction and knowing where the players are, you almost have to approach it as a sporting event. If you then put characters into that situation that you have actually come to care for it takes it up a level."

A bearded Gibson, whose first directoral offering in 10 years is in competition for the Golden Lion, said he had felt like "a traffic cop" director, while Garfield said he was more like a mother.

"Mel's really in the scene with you, he can't help it. He's always there with every single actor in every single moment. He's like a good dad or a good mum, with that kind of wonderful nurturing instinct," he joked.

Garfield, who shot to fame with the movie "The Amazing Spider-Man" (2012) before co-producing and starring in the 2014 thriller "99 Homes", said Doss was much more inspiring than the web-weaving hero, whose Spandex costumes prompted Gibson's jibe.

"The fact that this man, who is built as skinnily as I am, dragged men across the most rugged terrain under gun fire, sniper fire, the possibility of motors and shells, and then lowered them down a 75-foot escarpment... that's like when you hear about mothers who lift trucks off babies," said Garfield.

"He had a knowing in his heart and core that he wasn't supposed to take a man's life, but wanted to serve something greater than himself, and found his personal genius path to do that," he said.

He added: "It's a pretty wild time we're in societally speaking. There's a lot of violent uprising and separation and warring ideologies that are plaguing our beautiful planet right now.

"I think Desmond Doss is a symbol who embodies the idea of live and let live no matter what your value system is. You can't really argue with that, I think we could all learn a thing or two from Desmond."

Andrew Garfield (right) with Mel Gibson on September 4, 2016 at the Venice Lido Tiziana Fabi (AFP)
Syria regime cuts off rebel-held Aleppo, renewing siege: monitor

Syrian government troops on Sunday seized a military academy south of Aleppo city, once again encircling the rebel-held districts in the east and placing them under siege, a monitor said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor, said government forces backed by Syrian and Russian air strikes had now severed the alternate route into the rebel east that opposition forces opened up in August.

"The army took control of the artillery academy, so they control all the academies, and the eastern neighbourhoods are under a full siege," said Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman.

Opposition fighters drive a tank in an eastern government sieged neighbourhood of Aleppo as jihadists and their rebel allies pressed an offensive on August 5, 2016 Omar haj kadour (AFP/File)

There was no immediate confirmation in state media.

Government forces had been advancing in southern Aleppo for days, with the fighting already creating shortages for the estimated 250,000 people living in the rebel-held parts of the city.

But the capture of the academies, which straddle the road running to the eastern neighbourhoods, reinstates the government's encirclement of Aleppo.

Once Syria's economic powerhouse, Aleppo has been ravaged by the war that began with protests against President Bashar al-Assad's government in March 2011.

It has been roughly divided between rebel control in the east and government control in the west since mid-2012, and in recent months regime troops have gradually surrounded the city.

On July 17, they severed the only remaining route into the rebel-held east, the key Castello Road running down from the border with Turkey.

The road's capture led to shortages of food and fuel in the eastern neighbourhoods, and prompted international concern, including calls for 48-hour ceasefires to allow aid to enter.

On August 6, rebel forces including Al-Qaeda's former Syrian affiliate pushed government forces back from a key route south of the city, creating a lifeline back into the east.

While the reopening of the road allowed some goods into the city, it was inaccessible to most aid agencies, and negotiations to secure a route in for assistance have yet to succeed.
Mugabe raps Zimbabwe judges over protests

President Robert Mugabe has blasted Zimbabwe's judges for "reckless" rulings allowing demonstrations against his rule, saying he hopes they have "learnt a lesson" after several demos turned violent.

"It is not just we the ordinary people who should have the understanding" of the need for peace, the veteran leader said, cited in the Sunday News newspaper.

"Our courts, our justice system, our judges should be the ones who understand even better than the ordinary citizens," he added in the comments made on Saturday in Harare, at a meeting of the youth arm of his ruling ZANU-PF party.

Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe delivers a speech during celebrations marking his birthday in February 2016 Jekesai Njikizana (AFP/File)

He added: "They dare not be negligent in their decisions when requests are made by people who want to demonstrate, to hold these demonstrations."

But he said that giving permission when judges know "that it is going to be violent or (there is a) probability that there is going to be violence is to pay reckless disregard to the peace of this country.

"We hope now they have learnt a lesson."

Judges authorised an opposition demonstration in Harare on August 26 which degenerated into violent clashes between opposition supporters and security forces.

Around 70 people were arrested, and nearly 60 are still detained after refusing to be released on bail.

For several weeks demonstrations have been organised against Mugabe, who has been in power since 1980, and to protest the serious economic crisis facing Zimbabwe.

Security forces have mostly succeeded in dispersing them using tear gas and batons.

On Thursday police -- who operate as an arm of Mugabe's regime according to Human Rights Watch (HRW) -- announced a two-week ban on any demonstration in Harare.
Violence erupts as Native Americans resist oil pipeline

Protesters camping near Native American lands in North Dakota to protest the construction of an oil pipeline clashed late Saturday with construction company workers they blamed for destroying ancient sites.

Hundreds of protesters confronted a bulldozer crew in an area known as Cannon Ball, amid the vast grasslands of the northern US state.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe claims the crew dug up and destroyed sacred burial grounds, places of prayer and other cultural artefacts -- even after the pipeline developer had voluntarily paused construction in the disputed area less than a mile (1.6 kilometer) from the tribe's reservation.

Native Americans ride with raised fists to a sacred burial ground that was disturbed by bulldozers building the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), September 4, 2016 near Cannon Ball, North Dakota Robyn Beck (AFP)

Angry protesters broke through a fence and fought with private security guards, who employed dogs and pepper spray.

"They tried to push us back with their trucks and their bulldozers, but we just kept on coming," Seeyouma Nashcid, a protester from Arizona, told AFP.

Some protesters were left bloodied, and displayed signs of dog bites. The Morton County Sherriff's department said three private security guards were injured after being struck with fence posts and flag poles.

The tribe, whose reservation is located just south of where the 1,200-mile (1,900-kilometer) pipeline would cross the Missouri River, has been locked in a court battle to stop the project, which it says would endanger its drinking water and destroy historic sites.

Members of American Indian tribes from across the United States have rallied in support, gathering for months in a makeshift camp near the reservation.

On Saturday, protesters were suddenly alerted to renewed digging, a day after the tribe filed evidence in court of dozens of newly discovered artefacts, grave markers and sacred sites.

The tribe said in a statement that a two-mile stretch was destroyed before the bulldozer crew was confronted and stopped.

"This demolition is devastating," Standing Rock Sioux Tribe chairman David Archambault said in a statement. "These grounds are the resting places of our ancestors. The ancient cairns and stone prayer rings there cannot be replaced."

Witnesses said law enforcement officers were nearby during Saturday's clashes but did not immediately intervene. But sheriff's spokeswoman Donnell Preskey said deputies "were not on the scene when the conflict initially occurred," and arrived later.

The sheriff's office was notified of the situation by an emergency call from a private security officer.

Citing the safety and security of law enforcement, Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier said that the number of protesters made it "unsafe for officers to directly respond until further officers were able to respond."

A federal judge is expected to decide by September 9 whether to grant a temporary injunction to stop the pipeline construction under the river, as the tribe pursues its lawsuit.

The pipeline's US developer Energy Transfer Partners did not return a call for comment placed during a holiday weekend.

Native Americans march to the site of a sacred burial ground that was disturbed by bulldozers building the Dakota Access oil pipeline near Cannon Ball, North Dakota on September 4, 2016 Robyn Beck (AFP)

Protestors hang signs against the Dakota Access Pipeline, at the protest camp near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, on September 3, 2016 Robyn Beck (AFP)
Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence said in an interview Sunday he would release his tax returns this week but that Donald Trump had not budged from a plan that might see his own kept under wraps until after election day.

'Donald Trump and I are both going to release our tax returns,' Pence, the Indiana governor, said on NBC's Meet the Press.

'I'll be releasing mine in the next week. Donald Trump will be releasing his tax returns at the completion of an audit.'

Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence told NBC's Meet the Press he plans to release his tax returns

When the NBC interviewer suggested that the audit -- by the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) -- might not be completed until after the November 8 election, Pence replied only, 'We'll see.'

The release of such returns has been a tradition of American presidential politics for a half-century, and Democrat Hillary Clinton and her running mate Tim Kaine have already released theirs.

But Trump has deferred, saying he cannot release his until the IRS completes its audit. That agency has said Trump is free to release the returns whenever he wants.

His failure to do so has fueled speculation that he fears some embarrassing revelation: perhaps that his fortune is far smaller than the $10billion he speaks of, that he has donated far less to charities than he suggests, or that he has awkwardly close business ties to Russian interests.

Trump is pictured listening to music at a church service in Detroit

Clinton's returns, released last month, showed she and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, had adjusted gross income of $10.6million last year, placing them at the very top of American households. Kaine and his wife had income of $313,000.

Trump's campaign has said his wealth is 'in excess of $10 billion,' and he has tied his populist pitch to his acumen as a successful businessman and leader.
IS ousted from Turkey border as Syria army besieges Aleppo

Islamic State jihadists were expelled from their last positions along the Turkish-Syrian border, Turkey said Sunday, as Syrian forces again laid seige to rebel strongholds in war-torn Aleppo.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said his nation's forces and Syrian rebels had pushed back "terrorist organisations" on its southern border with Syria, depriving IS of a key transit point for recruits and supplies.

"From Azaz to Jarabulus, our 91 km border has been completely secured," Yildirim said during a televised speech while visiting the southeastern city of Diyarbakir.

A Turkish tank approaches from Syria during clashes on September 4, 2016 at Elbeyli, in the southern region of Kilis Bulent Kilic (AFP)

The news comes as Syrian government troops renewed the siege of rebel-held parts of Aleppo on Sunday as Washington and Moscow failed to reach a deal on stemming violence in the country's devastating war.

The more than five-year conflict has become increasingly complex, involving not only regime and rebels, but international backers on both sides, Kurdish forces, jihadists and now Turkey.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said earlier "rebels and Islamist factions backed by Turkish tanks and warplanes" had taken several villages on the Turkish-Syrian border "after IS withdrew from them, ending IS's presence... on the border."

Ankara began an operation inside Syria on August 24, using tanks and war planes to back opposition fighters with special forces also providing support.

Turkey's success is likely to deliver a blow to the Syrian Kurdish YPG, which has been gaining territory in Syria's north after working with the US-led coalition against the jihadist force.

But Ankara considers the YPG a "terrorist" group and has been alarmed by its expansion along the border, fearing the creation of a contiguous, semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Syria.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said Turkey would not allow a "terror corridor" on its southern border.

With Turkey's rapid success in less than two weeks, his position looks stronger with territory in between the two Kurdish "cantons" of Afrin and Kobane now in the hands of Ankara-backed rebels.

The loss of the Turkish border will also deprive IS of a key transit point for recruits and supplies, though the group continues to hold territory in both Syria and Iraq.

- Syria army besieges Aleppo -

Despite several rounds of international negotiations, a solution to the civil war that has killed more than 290,000 people and displaced millions remains elusive.

Syrian state media said the army and allied forces had taken an area south of Aleppo, severing the sole route left into the eastern neighbourhoods held by the opposition.

"The armed forces in cooperation with their allies took full control of the military academy zone south of Aleppo and are clearing the remaining terrorists from the area," state television said, citing a military source.

It said the advance "cut all the supply and movement routes for terrorist groups from southern Aleppo province to the eastern neighbourhoods and Ramussa."

The development leaves about 250,000 people living in rebel-controlled parts of the city cut off from the outside world once again, and will raise new fears about a humanitarian crisis in Aleppo.

Once Syria's economic powerhouse, the city has been ravaged by the war that began with anti-government protests in March 2011.

It has been roughly divided between government control in the west and rebel control in the east since mid-2012, but in recent months regime forces slowly began to encircle the east.

In July, they severed the only road into the rebel neighbourhoods, the key Castello Road running from the Turkish border in the north, creating food and fuel shortages in the east.

The siege prompted international concern, with aid agencies urging 48-hour ceasefires to ensure humanitarian access.

- US-Russia talks stumble -

In early August, rebel forces including Al-Qaeda's former Syrian affiliate battled regime forces south of the city to open a new route to the east, through Ramussa district.

But in recent days regime forces backed by Syrian and Russian war planes launched a counter-offensive.

A key regime ally, Moscow began an aerial campaign in support of President Bashar al-Assad's government last September, even as it continued to publicly support efforts for a negotiated solution to the five-year war.

Earlier Sunday, hopes were raised that Moscow and Washington might be on the verge of announcing a deal to halt the bloodshed.

US President Barack Obama said both nations were working "around the clock" on a ceasefire, and a State Department official said a deal was close.

But the hopes evaporated later in the day, with a State Department official saying Russia had "walked back on some of the areas we thought we were agreed on."

Instead, US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov are set to meet again on Monday in Hangzhou, China, where G20 leaders are gathered.

"We're going to review some ideas tonight, a couple things on these couple of tough issues, and come back together and see where we are," said Kerry.

"We're not going to rush," he said, stressing the importance of reaching a deal that was able "to try to get the job done".

Syrian soldiers in position on September 4, 2016 at a location on the southern outskirts of Aleppo George Ourfalian (AFP)

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim (R) speaks during a rally on September 4, 2016 in Diyarbakir Ilyas Akengin (AFP)

Syrian soldiers on September 4, 2016 at a location on the southern outskirts of Aleppo George Ourfalian (AFP)
Security Council meets S.Sudan leader to accept extra peacekeepers

UN Security Council officials on Sunday began a key meeting with the president of South Sudan to get him to accept the deployment of a regional protection force to beef up a large UN peacekeeping mission.

The meeting began late afternoon in the presidential palace in the capital Juba, where clashes between President Salva Kiir's guards and troops loyal to his former deputy Riek Machar erupted on July 8, shattering a fragile truce that has been breached several times.

Kiir showed the ambassadors from the council's 15 member states bullet marks in the heart of the building as well as shattered window panes. He said Machar had wanted to assassinate him that day but that he managed to flee.

US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power (L) speaks with South Sudan's Cabinet Affairs Minister Martin Elia Lomoro in Juba on September 3, 2016 Charles Atiki Lomodong (AFP)

Following the violence, the UN Security Council authorised the deployment of an additional 4,000 troops from East Africa with a stronger mandate than the 13,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission UNMISS.

The UN officials arrived on Friday in a bid to secure Kiir's agreement to the extra troops.

UNMISS has faced considerable criticism over its failure to protect civilians during the July violence, which included the rape of civilians sheltered in its camps.

Kiir had opposed the deployment of additional troops, initially touted as an "intervention force", as breaching national sovereignty.

South Sudan, the world's newest nation, descended into war in December 2013 after Kiir accused his former deputy Machar of plotting a coup.

During the fighting in July, Machar, who had been persuaded to return to Juba to join a national unity government agreed under a peace deal, fled the country and is now in Khartoum, having been replaced by Taban Deng Gai in Juba.

Aside from the tens of thousands of people killed, the United Nations has reported shocking levels of brutality including gang-rapes and the wholesale burning of villages.
Chinese President Xi Jinping addresses the deposit of China's and United States' instruments of joining the Paris Agreement in Hangzhou, capital city of east China's Zhejiang Province, Sept. 3, 2016. (Xinhua/Li Tao)

HANGZHOU, Sept. 3 -- Presidents of China and the United Stateshanded over their countries' instruments of joining the Paris Agreement separately to Secretary-General of the United NationsBan Ki-moonon Saturday in Hangzhou.

Chinese President Xi Jinpingsaid that climate change concerns the well-being and future of humanity. The Paris Agreement has charted the course for post-2020 global cooperation against climate change, and it indicates that a cooperative, win-win, equitable and fair climate governance mechanism is being shaped.

The handover of the legal document is a new and solemn commitment of the Chinese government, he said.

Depositing the documents together, China and the United States have displayed their ambition and determination to jointly tackle a global challenge, Xi said.

Taking advantage of implementing the Paris Agreement, the international community should make greater efforts to improve global governance mechanism and innovate on relevant actions, so as to facilitate the full operation of the agreement, the president said.

Developed countries should honor their commitments and provide financial and technological support to developing countries and enhance their capability in climate actions, Xi said.

China, a responsible developing country and an active player in global climate governance, will implement its development concepts of innovative, coordinated, green, open and shared growth, fully advance energy conservation, emission reduction and low-carbon development, and embrace the new era of ecological civilization, he said.
Obama: Young Americans 'completely reject' Trump on immigrants

Barack Obama believes that young Americans "completely reject" Republican White House hopeful Donald Trump's tough line on immigration and that most Americans share their stance.

"There's a long tradition in the United States of inclusion, immigration, diversity," the president said in an interview broadcast Sunday on CNN but recorded before he left for the Group of 20 summit meeting in China.

"I don't think that's going to change because Mr Trump's got a little more attention than usual," added Obama. He reiterated that he felt certain the 70-year-old real estate mogul would not succeed him as president next January.

US President Barack Obama reiterated that he felt certain Donald Trump would not succeed him as president Etienne Oliveau (Pool/AFP)

"If you look at the current polls," Obama said, "he's been able to appeal to a certain group of folks who feel left out or worried about the social change, who have legitimate concerns around the economy and (are) feeling left behind. But that's not the majority of America."

"And if you talk to younger people, the next generation of Americans, they completely reject the path" taken by Trump.

The president said it was important to "pay close attention" when there was a rise in intolerance and calls for "banning certain classes of people," a clear allusion to Trump's call last year to ban all Muslims from entering the country "until we find out what's going on."

But overall, Obama concluded, "I'm optimistic."

After issuing a series of contradictory signals on immigration -- reflecting the tensions within his campaign team -- Trump delivered a much-anticipated speech Wednesday in Phoenix, Arizona that essentially repeated the hard line on immigration that helped fuel his rise during the Republican primaries.

Detailing the arsenal of tough measures he intends to take if he defeats Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the November 8 election, he ruled out any path to citizenship for the undocumented immigrants -- most of them Mexicans -- living in the shadows in the United States.
Syria army besieges Aleppo as US, Russia talks stumble

Syrian government troops renewed the siege of rebel-held parts of Aleppo on Sunday, as Washington and Moscow failed to reach a deal on stemming violence in the country's devastating war.

Turkish forces and allied Syrian rebels meanwhile expelled the Islamic State group from the last stretch of the Syrian-Turkish border under its control, a monitor said.

Syrian state media said the army and allied forces had taken an area south of Aleppo, severing the sole route left into the eastern neighbourhoods held by the opposition.

Smoke billows on September 4, 2016 from a location on the southern outskirts of the Syrian city of Aleppo George Ourfalian (AFP)

"The armed forces in cooperation with their allies took full control of the military academy zone south of Aleppo and are clearing the remaining terrorists from the area," state television said, citing a military source.

It said the advance "cut all the supply and movement routes for terrorist groups from southern Aleppo province to the eastern neighbourhoods and Ramussa."

The development leaves about 250,000 people living in rebel-controlled parts of the city cut off from the outside world once again, and will raise new fears about a humanitarian crisis in Aleppo.

Once Syria's economic powerhouse, the city has been ravaged by the war that began with anti-government protests in March 2011.

It has been roughly divided between government control in the west and rebel control in the east since mid-2012, but in recent months regime forces slowly began to encircle the east.

In July, they severed the only road into the rebel neighbourhoods, the key Castello Road running from the Turkish border in the north, creating food and fuel shortages in the east.

The siege prompted international concern, with aid agencies urging 48-hour ceasefires to ensure humanitarian access.

- US-Russia talks stumble -

In early August, rebel forces including Al-Qaeda's former Syrian affiliate battled regime forces south of the city to open a new route to the east, through Ramussa district.

But in recent days regime forces backed by Syrian and Russian war planes launched a counter-offensive.

A key regime ally, Moscow began an aerial campaign in support of President Bashar al-Assad's government last September, even as it continued to publicly support efforts for a negotiated solution to the five-year war.

Earlier Sunday, hopes were raised that Moscow and Washington might be on the verge of announcing a deal to halt the bloodshed.

US President Barack Obama said both nations were working "around the clock" on a ceasefire, and a State Department official said a deal was close.

But the hopes evaporated later in the day, with a State Department official saying Russia had "walked back on some of the areas we thought we were agreed on."

Instead, US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov are set to meet again on Monday in Hangzhou, China, where G20 leaders are gathered.

"We're going to review some ideas tonight, a couple things on these couple of tough issues, and come back together and see where we are," said Kerry.

"We're not going to rush," he said, stressing the importance of reaching a deal that was able "to try to get the job done".

- IS expelled from border -

Washington is opposed to Assad's government, but has been accused by the opposition of failing to deliver concrete support.

And despite several rounds of international negotiations, a solution to the conflict that has killed more than 290,000 people and displaced millions remains elusive.

The conflict has become increasingly complex, involving not only regime and rebels, but international backers on both sides, Kurdish forces, jihadists and now Turkey.

Ankara began an operation inside Syria on August 24, dispatching troops to battle both the Islamic State group but also Syrian Kurdish forces it accuses of "terrorism".

On Sunday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said rebels backed by Turkish tanks and warplanes had seized the last parts of the border held by IS from the extremist group.

"IS has lost its contact with the outside world after losing the remaining border villages," the Britain-based monitor said.

Much of the earlier work to expel IS from elsewhere on the border was done by the Syrian Kurdish YPG, working with the US-led coalition against the jihadist force.

But Ankara considers the YPG a "terrorist" group and has been alarmed by its expansion along the border, fearing the creation of a contiguous, semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Syria.

The loss of the Turkish border will deprive IS of a key transit point for recruits and supplies, though the group continues to hold territory in both Syria and Iraq.

Syrian soldiers at a location on the southern outskirts of the Syrian city of Aleppo on September 4, 2016 George Ourfalian (AFP)

US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov continue to meet in Hangzhou, China to discuss a deal to halt the bloodshed in Syria Wang Zhao (Pool/AFP)

A Turkish tank coming from Syria on September 4, 2016 at Elbeyli, in the southern region of Kilis Bulent Kilic (AFP)
Media crackdown as Gabon hit by post-election violence

A media crackdown in Gabon left people on Sunday searching for loved ones aided mainly by rumour and hope, following days of violence since the announcement that President Ali Bongo had been re-elected.

The post-election violence has so far claimed seven lives throughout the country, according to an AFP count; six civilians, mainly in the capital Libreville, and a police officer in the main northern town of Oyem.

Rumours of a higher death toll, notably in the economic capital Port-Gentil, have been swirling around despite the lack of any internet access.

Burnt wreckage of cars belonging to the Radio Television Nazareth are seen on September 4, 2016 in Libreville Marco Longari (AFP)

Some 800 people have been arrested in the capital since the last weekend's election result was announced on Wednesday, according to official figures.

"We are calling for the list of those arrested" and which police stations they are being held in, said lawyer Jean-Pierre Akumbu M'Oluna.

Bongo was declared victorious by a razor-thin margin of just under 6,000 votes, but his main challenger Jean Ping, a veteran diplomat and former top African Union official, has insisted the vote was rigged and on Friday claimed victory for himself.

"The whole world knows who is president of the republic, it's me Jean Ping," he said.

- 'Deep concern' -

Ping is calling for vote recount, something the Gabonese authorities have categorically refused to contemplate.

The post-vote violence in this small but oil-rich central African nation, a former French colony, has sparked international concern with top diplomats calling for restraint as rights groups raise the alarm over the use of "excessive force".

In a special session on Gabon on Thursday, the UN Security Council expressed "deep concern" about the situation, urging all sides to "to refrain from violence or other provocations".

And Washington has urged all parties to work together to "halt the slide towards further unrest."

UN chief Ban Ki-moon spoke to both Bongo and Ping on Sunday and "deplored the loss of life" in post-poll violence, a UN statement said.

"He expressed concern about the continuing inflammatory messages being disseminated and called for an immediate end to all acts of violence in the country," it said.

Two people in Libreville told AFP Sunday that they are still searching for loved ones missing since Wednesday night, when security forces stormed Ping's offices.

"I'm looking for my son, Jocelyn. He was a Jean Ping's headquarters," said a woman who gave her name as Jacqueline.

A man, who preferred to remain anonymous, said he'd had no news of his brother since Wednesday.

"He's married, father of four children," said the man who has searched police stations, hospitals and even funeral parlours.

- Government silence -

Information is hard to come by. The government hasn't issued any statements for days and even the regime-friendly L'Union newspaper hasn't appeared since Wednesday.

"We were the object of an arson attack, we can't work," the paper's boss Lin-Joel Ndembet told AFP, adding that he didn't know when publication would resume.

The premises of private television channels Radio-Television Nazareth (RTN) and Tele Plus, have both been attacked.

The RTN offices were set ablaze late Wednesday "by hooded and heavily armed agents of the security forces," the channel's chief executive Georges Bruno Ngoussi said.

According to him, attacks on RTN began on August 28, the day after the presidential election, when it was reporting that Ping was ahead in the vote count.

Starved of information the Gabonese people have turned to French media, including RFI, France 24 AND TV5 Monde, which have special correspondents in Libreville but are largely absent in the provinces.

Some Gabonese TV channels are continuing to operate, if barely, notably Tele Gabon and Gabon 24 -- public broadcasters close to the powers that be.

Tele Gabon ran in-house ads for television series while Gabon 24 repeatedly announced that the opening of parliament had been delayed until September 6.

The country had previously enjoyed relative political stability, mainly because former colonial power France helped Omar Bongo rule for 41 years.

After he died in June 2009, his son Ali won an election but opposition media claimed he had essentially been installed by France.

Presidential elections in Gabon: national results and by region Paz Pizarro, Alain Bommenel, Jonathan Jacobsen (AFP)

A woman wearing a dress with the portrait of Gabonese opposition leader Jean Ping, dances at chruch on September 4, 2016 in Libreville Marco Longari (AFP)

An employee stands inside the vandalised studios of Radio Television Nazareth on September 4, 2016 in Libreville Marco Longari (AFP)
World's largest gorillas 'one step from going extinct'

The world's largest gorillas have been pushed to the brink of extinction by a surge of illegal hunting in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and are now critically endangered, officials said Sunday.

With just 5,000 Eastern gorillas (Gorilla beringei) left on Earth, the majestic species now faces the risk of disappearing completely, officials said at the International Union for Conservation of Nature's global conference in Honolulu.

Four out of six of the Earth's great apes are now critically endangered, "only one step away from going extinct," including the Eastern Gorilla, Western Gorilla, Bornean Orangutan and Sumatran Orangutan, said the IUCN in an update to its Red List, the world's most comprehensive inventory of plant and animal species.

A young mountain gorilla is pictured in 2015 in the jungle at Bukima in Virunga National Park, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo Peter Martell (AFP/File)

Chimpanzees and bonobos are listed as endangered.

"Today is a sad day because the IUCN Red List shows we are wiping out some of our closest relatives," Inger Andersen, IUCN director general, told reporters.

War, hunting and loss of land to refugees in the past 20 years have led to a "devastating population decline of more than 70 percent," for the Eastern gorilla, said the IUCN's update.

One of the two subspecies of Eastern gorilla, known as Grauer's gorilla (G. b. graueri), has drastically declined since 1994 when there were 16,900 individuals, to just 3,800 in 2015.

Even though killing these apes is against the law, hunting is their greatest threat, experts said.

The second subspecies of Eastern gorilla -- the Mountain gorilla (G. b. beringei) -- has seen a small rebound in its numbers, and totals around 880 individuals.

According to John Robinson, a primatologist and chief conservation officer at the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Rwandan genocide sparked a disastrous series of events that impacted gorillas, too.

"The genocide pushed a lot of people out of Rwanda, a lot of refugees into eastern DRC, who moved into areas which were relatively unoccupied by human beings," he told AFP.

"It was a situation that kind of unraveled," he said.

Some people hunted gorillas for bushmeat, while activities like mining and charcoal production and human settlement also infringed on gorillas' habitat.

"The people that moved into that part of DRC saw gorillas as a delicacy," Robinson said.

- 'Wrong direction' -

The IUCN Red List includes 82,954 species -- both plants and animals -- and undergoes a major update every four years.

Almost one third -- 23,928 -- are threatened with extinction, it said.

Compared with previous years, even more species are under threat.

Carlo Rondinini, mammal assessment coordinator at Sapienza University of Rome, said almost 28 percent of mammals are threatened with extinction, three percentage points more than in the previous mammal assessment in 2008.

"A takeaway point we would like to emphasize is we are not journeying in the right direction with respect to species conservation," said Andersen.

"We are losing species at a faster pace than we have ever done."

- Pandas improve -

There was good news for pandas, whose status changed from "endangered" to "vulnerable" due to intensive conservation efforts by China.

The Tibetan Antelope (Pantholops hodgsonii) has also improved, after protections helped it move from "endangered" to "near threatened" following a spate of commercial poaching for its valuable underfur, or shahtoosh, which is used to make shawls.

But the situation deteriorated for others, including the Plains Zebra (Equus quagga) which has been increasingly hunted for bushmeat and skins, and has moved from a species of "least concern" to "near threatened."

"The population has reduced by 24 percent in the past 14 years from around 660,000 to a current estimate of just over 500,000 animals," the IUCN said.

Illegal hunting and habitat loss also pushed three species of antelope found in Africa to "near threatened" status, including Bay Duiker (Cephalophus dorsalis), White-bellied Duiker (Cephalophus leucogaster) and Yellow-backed Duiker (Cephalophus silvicultor).

Among plants, the Red List highlighted the growing extinction threat to Hawaiian plants posed by invasive species, including pigs, goats, rats, slugs and non-native plants.

Some 38 of the 415 Hawaiian plant species were listed as extinct and four other species listed as extinct in the wild, meaning they only occur in cultivation.

A full 87 percent of native Hawaiian plants are threatened with extinction, it said.

Among the new entries to the Red List is the Psychedelic Rock Gecko (Cnemaspis psychedelica), which is listed as "endangered" and known only to exist on two small offshore islands in southern Vietnam and is highly, and illegally, sought for the commercial pet trade.

Four of the Great Apes a step away from extinction Paz Pizarro (AFP)

Sumatran Orangutans, like this one picture in Aceh province in May 2016, are critically endangered according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature Chaideer Mahyuddin (AFP/File)

Details of the latest Red List of endangered species from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Simon Malfatto (AFP)
S.Sudan leader agrees to extra UN peacekeepers

South Sudan's President Salva Kiir on Sunday agreed to the deployment of a regional protection force to beef up the UN's large UN peacekeeping mission in the war-scarred nation after initially opposing it as a breach of national sovereignty.

The announcement came after the leader of the world's youngest nation met with ambassadors of the UN Security Council at the bullet-scarred presidential palace in the capital Juba.

"The transitional government of national unity gives its consent for the deployment of the regional force," said a joint statement by the UN and the government, which was read out to the media by South Sudanese Cabinet Affairs Minister Martin Elia Lomoro.

South Sudan's President Salva Kiir (C) walks with a high delegation from the United Nations Security Council on September 4, 2016 Charles Atiki Lomodong (AFP)

"We will design the modalities," Lomoro said, without elaborating.

The presidential palace was the scene of clashes on July 8 between President Kiir's guards and troops loyal to his former deputy Riek Machar, shattering a fragile truce that has been breached several times.

Kiir showed the ambassadors from the council's 15 member states bullet marks in the heart of the building as well as shattered window panes. He said Machar had wanted to assassinate him that day but claimed he had helped his rival to escape to safety.

Following the violence, the UN Security Council authorised the deployment of an additional 4,000 troops from East Africa with a stronger mandate than the 13,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission UNMISS.

The UN officials arrived on Friday in a bid to secure Kiir's agreement to the extra troops.

- Words into action -

UNMISS has faced considerable criticism over its failure to protect civilians during the July violence, which included the rape of civilians sheltered just outside its camps.

Kiir had opposed the deployment of additional troops, initially touted as an "intervention force", as breaching national sovereignty.

Minister Lomoro also underscored that the government committed "to permit free movement to UNMISS in conformity with its mandate" and "improve humanitarian access, including by providing assistance by eliminating illegal check points."

Samantha Power, the US envoy to the Security Council, hailed the move but said it was now important to start translating words into action.

"What we need to do now is move from those very important high-level commitments into working up the modalities in an operational way," Power said.

"UNMISS has an impartial mandate to protect civilians, no matter who they are, no matter where they are. The number one obstacle for (the peacekeepers) fulfilling their mandate to this point has been the severe restrictions on their movements."

Earlier Sunday, the UN team met with displaced people in the northern town of Wau, the scene of bitter fighting in recent months.

Catherine Atanasyo, a local area chief from the south of Wau now living in the camp, said lawlessness was rampant.

"Looting is going on in town. We don't know when we'll be going home," she told them.

Speaking to AFP later, Atanasyo said the regional force was badly needed as members of the president's Dinka tribe were raping and killing people if they went into Wau.

"We cannot leave this camp without security and that security can be provided by the regional force," she said.

South Sudan descended into war in December 2013 after Kiir accused his former deputy Machar of plotting a coup.

During the fighting in July, Machar, who had been persuaded to return to Juba to join a national unity government agreed under a peace deal, fled the country and is now in Khartoum, having been replaced by Taban Deng Gai in Juba.

Aside from the tens of thousands of people killed, the United Nations has reported shocking levels of brutality including gang-rapes and the wholesale burning of villages.

An estimated 16,000 children have been recruited by armed groups and the national army in the conflict, and 2.5 million people have been driven from their homes.

South Sudanese Cabinet Affairs Minister Martin Elia Lomoro (L) announced, "The transitional government of national unity gives its consent for the deployment of the regional force" Charles Atiki Lomodong (AFP)

An internally-displaced person carries goods on her head while navigating between crowds and UN peacekeepers at a camp in Juba on September 3, 2016 Charles Atiki Lomodong (AFP)
Israel hits Syria army after Golan mortar fire

The Israeli air force hit Syrian government forces after mortar fire from its war-wracked neighbour struck the Israeli-held zone of the Golan Heights on Sunday, the military said.

It said in a statement that "mortar fire" from Syria hit an open area without causing any apparent injuries, but it did not specify how many shells fell.

Unlike a similar incident on August 22 the Israelis did not immediately characterise the incident as stray fire.

Israel has sought to avoid being drawn into Syria's complex war which is now in its sixth year, but it has attacked Syrian military targets when fire from the conflict spills over Jalaa Marey (AFP/File)

"In response to mortar fire earlier today, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) targeted cannons of the Syrian regime in the northern Syrian Golan Heights," the English-language statement said.

A spokeswoman told AFP that the Israeli fire came in an air strike.

"The Syrian government must be held accountable for this breach of Israeli sovereignty," military spokesman Peter Lerner wrote on his official Twitter account.

"The IDF will continue to act to safeguard Israel."

In the August 22 exchange, the Israeli air force hit what it said was a Syrian army rocket launcher in response to "stray fire from Syrian conflict".

There were similar events in July and previously.

Israel has sought to avoid being drawn into Syria's complex war which is now in its sixth year, but it has attacked Syrian military targets when fire from the conflict spills over.
2 officers shot, wounded by visitor at Fresno County jail

FRESNO, Calif. (AP)  Two unarmed officers were critically injured after being shot by a visitor in the lobby of a central California jail, authorities said Saturday.

Correctional Officers Juanita Davila and Toamalama Scanlan were shot in the head and neck areas during a struggle with a man who tried to cut to the front of the visitors' line and refused to take a seat when he began pacing near a secure area of the Fresno County jail, sheriff's spokesman Tony Botti said.

Scanlan, who has 10 years of experience, was hospitalized in critical condition. Davila, who has 18 years of experience, was listed in critical but stable condition, Botti said.

This undated photo provided by the Fresno County Sheriff's Office shows corrections officer Toamalama Scanlan. He was one of two unarmed officers critically injured after a man opened fire in the main lobby of the Fresno County Jail in downtown Fresno, Calif., Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016. Authorities said officers from the secured areas inside the jail ran to the lobby, where a lieutenant fired shots at the gunman, identified as 37-year-old Thong Vang, who was taken into custody. The injured officers were dragged out of the lobby and taken to the hospital to undergo surgery. (Fresno County Sheriff's Office via AP)

About 15 people, including small children, who were in the lobby ran to safety when the shots rang out around 8:30 a.m.

Christy Rodriguez told the Fresno Bee she and a woman with a walker hid in the bathroom after they heard the gunshots. Moments later, an officer yelled at them to get out of the building.

"This is crazy. This isn't supposed to happen," Rodriguez said.

Officers from the secured areas inside the jail ran to the lobby, where a lieutenant fired shots at the gunman, identified as 37-year-old Thong Vang.

Botti said Vang returned fire, but no one was hit. He said officers tried to subdue him with a stun gun, but he wouldn't give up and ran to the hallway of the jail records area. When confronted by sheriff's deputies and a Fresno police officer, Vang dropped his weapon and told authorities he wanted to be arrested, Botti said.

The injured officers were dragged out of the lobby and taken to the hospital to undergo surgery.

Vang was taken into custody and taken to the hospital for minor scrapes and cuts.

Botti said Vang is a convicted rapist who was released from prison in 2014 after serving 16 years for raping minors aged 14 and under. The parolee had no criminal violations since his release.

Botti said Vang will be booked into jail on several felonies.

This undated photo provided by the Fresno County Sheriff's Office shows corrections officer Juanita Davila. She was one of two unarmed officers critically injured after a man opened fire in the main lobby of the Fresno County Jail in downtown Fresno, Calif., Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016. Authorities said officers from the secured areas inside the jail ran to the lobby, where a lieutenant fired shots at the gunman, identified as 37-year-old Thong Vang, who was taken into custody. The injured officers were dragged out of the lobby and taken to the hospital to undergo surgery. (Fresno County Sheriff's Office via AP)

This undated photo provided by the Fresno County Sheriff's Office shows Thong Vang. Two unarmed officers were critically injured after being shot by a visitor in the lobby of a central California jail, authorities said Saturday. Authorities said officers from the secured areas inside the jail ran to the lobby, where a lieutenant fired shots at the gunman, identified as 37-year-old Vang, who was taken into custody. (Fresno County Sheriff's Office via AP)

Law enforcement officials and others are seen outside the lobby of the Fresno County Jail after reports of an active shooter in the main lobby of the jail in downtown Fresno, Calif., Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016. Two unarmed officers were critically injured after being shot by a visitor in the lobby of the central California jail, authorities said Saturday. Authorities said officers from the secured areas inside the jail ran to the lobby, where a lieutenant fired shots at the gunman, identified as 37-year-old Thong Vang, who was taken into custody. (Silvia Flores/The Fresno Bee via AP)

Fresno County sheriff's deputies and Fresno police officers stand on scene near an ambulance after reports of an active shooter in the main lobby of the Fresno County Jail in downtown Fresno, Calif., Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016. Two unarmed officers were critically injured after being shot by a visitor in the lobby of the central California jail, authorities said Saturday. Officers from the secured areas inside the jail ran to the lobby, where a lieutenant fired shots at the gunman, identified as 37-year-old Thong Vang, who was taken into custody. (Silvia Flores/The Fresno Bee via AP)

A law enforcement officer patrols a street after reports of an active shooter in the main lobby of the Fresno County Jail in downtown Fresno, Calif., Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016. Two unarmed officers were critically injured after being shot by a visitor in the lobby of the central California jail, authorities said Saturday. Officers from the secured areas inside the jail ran to the lobby, where a lieutenant fired shots at the gunman, identified as 37-year-old Thong Vang, who was taken into custody. The injured officers were dragged out of the lobby and taken to the hospital to undergo surgery. (Troy Pope/The Fresno Bee via AP)

The entrance to the Fresno County jail, where two correctional officers were shot in the lobby, is seen in downtown Fresno, Calif., Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016. Authorities say two unarmed officers were critically injured after being shot by a visitor. Officers from the secured areas inside the jail ran to the lobby, where a lieutenant fired shots at the gunman, identified as 37-year-old Thong Vang, who was taken into custody. The injured officers were dragged out of the lobby and taken to the hospital to undergo surgery. (Jim Boren/The Fresno Bee via AP)

Fresno County sheriff's deputies and Fresno police officers stand on the scene after reports of an active shooter in the main lobby of the Fresno County Jail in downtown Fresno, Calif., Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016. Two unarmed officers were critically injured after being shot by a visitor in the lobby of a central California jail, authorities said Saturday. Authorities said officers from the secured areas inside the jail ran to the lobby, where a lieutenant fired shots at the gunman, identified as 37-year-old Thong Vang. Vang was taken into custody and taken to the hospital for minor scrapes and cuts. (Silvia Flores/The Fresno Bee via AP)
The Latest: 3.7 percent Hong Kongers voted in 2 hours

HONG KONG (AP)  The Latest on elections in Hong Kong (all times local):

11:20 a.m.

Hong Kong's government says about 3.7 percent of 3.8 million registered voters turned out two hours after the polls opened.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying talks to reporters after voting at a polling station for the legislative council election Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. Polls opened in Hong Kong Sunday for the specially administered Chinese city's most crucial election since the handover from Britain in 1997. The vote for lawmakers in the Legislative Council is also the first since 2014 pro-democracy street protests rocked the Asian financial hub. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

The city's widely unpopular Beijing-backed leader, Leung Chun-ying, cast his ballot earlier Sunday and urged the public to turn out and vote.

At stake is the power to keep Leung and his government in check.

Pro-democracy lawmakers currently control 27 of 70 seats in the Legislative Council, compared with 43 held by lawmakers friendly to Beijing. The democrats are fighting to keep control of at least a third of the seats, which gives them veto power to block government attempts to enact unpopular legislation, such as Beijing's controversial election revamp that triggered the 2014 street protests.

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8:15 a.m.

Voting is underway in Hong Kong's legislative election, the first since 2014 pro-democracy street protests rocked the Asian financial hub.

At stake is the power to keep the city's pro-Beijing leader and his government in check.

The pro-democracy camp currently controls 27 of 70 seats, and must keep at least a third of the seats to retain veto power.

The election is set to test the unity of the pro-democracy camp as a new generation of radical activists who emerged after the protests compete with moderate mainstream parties to challenge formidable pro-Beijing rivals.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying votes at a polling station for the legislative council election Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. Polls opened in Hong Kong Sunday for the specially administered Chinese city's most crucial election since the handover from Britain in 1997. The vote for lawmakers in the Legislative Council is also the first since 2014 pro-democracy street protests rocked the Asian financial hub. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

A police officer stands near a polling station for the legislative council election Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. Polls opened in Hong Kong Sunday for the specially administered Chinese city's most crucial election since the handover from Britain in 1997. The vote for lawmakers in the Legislative Council is also the first since 2014 pro-democracy street protests rocked the Asian financial hub. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)
The Latest: Xi tells SKorea he is against US missile system

HANGZHOU, China (AP)  The Latest on the G-20 summit in China (all times local):

10:30 a.m.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has told his South Korean counterpart that China is opposed to the deployment of a powerful U.S. anti-missile system in her country.

French President Francois Hollande attends the opening ceremony of the G20 Summit in Hangzhou in eastern China's Zhejiang province, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, Pool)

During their bilateral meeting on Monday's final day of the G-20 meeting, Xi warned that "mishandling the issue is not conducive to strategic stability in the region, and could intensify disputes."

China has responded angrily to Seoul's decision to base the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, system south of the South Korean capital, Seoul.

While Seoul and Washington say the system is intended solely to defend against North Korea's missile threat, Beijing says it will allow the U.S. military to peer deeply into northeastern China.

Beijing's reaction has also stoked public outrage, threatening everything from tourism exchanges to appearances by K-pop stars in China.

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9 a.m.

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said his country is determined to provide its great friend and ally Britain with "all the support and assistance" it needs as it negotiates its exit from the EU.

Turnbull spoke ahead of a formal meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May on the sidelines of the G-20 economic summit in China.

May said she was grateful to Turnbull who had offered to discuss a free-trade agreement with Britain shortly after she became leader in July after the British people narrowly voted to leave the EU in a referendum.

May said she didn't want Britain to become inward looking. "We want to be even more outward looking around the whole of the world, and Australia, with our long standing ties and our close relationship, will be one of the first countries we will be looking to."

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1:45 a.m.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish leader Recep Tayypip Erdogan have met on the sidelines of the G-20 summit to discuss both Syria and improving their countries' frayed relations.

Russian news agencies on Sunday cited Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying that both countries' delegations met and then the meeting continued between the leaders one-on-one with their foreign ministers present.

Russia and Turkey suffered a roughly seven-month rupture in relations after Turkey shot down a Russian bomber on its border with Syria in November just as tensions mounted over Syria, where Moscow and Ankara back opposing sides in the conflict. Relations began improving in late June after Erdogan apologized for the plane's downing.

Russian and Turkish officials discussed the outlook for lifting Russia's ban on Turkish food imports as part of their rapprochement process on Sunday, Peskov said.

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10:50 p.m.

French President Francois Hollande says he wants other world leaders to better regulate the global economy to protect workers and the environment.

In a Facebook post laying out his goals at the Group of 20 summit in China, Hollande said Sunday that "France's role is to contribute to regulating the planet."

The socialist leader, whose country is known for its extensive labor rules, continued, "Our country refuses a globalization without rules, where social models are pit against each other and dragged downward, where inequalities grow and intellectual property rights, and therefore cultural diversity, are threatened."

Hollande argued against trade deals that don't respect worker rights. He hailed the U.S. and China for approving the Paris climate accord and said he would champion "green" treasury bonds at the G-20 to support environmentally sustainable investment.

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7:35 p.m.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she sees the possibility of a "positive outcome" to negotiations between Turkey and the European Union on a visa waiver for Turks, but that it will still take weeks of work.

The offer to scrap visas for Turks entering the EU was one incentive for Turkey to agree to a deal to curb the flow of migrants across the Aegean Sea. But it's conditional on, among other things, Turkey modifying its definition of terrorism and what constitutes a terror act to ensure that journalists and academics aren't arrested. Ankara has refused to make changes.

Merkel said after meeting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan Sunday at the G-20 summit that they didn't discuss a precise time frame but "we agreed that there is still work to do."

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6:40 p.m.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she's hopeful after meeting the Turkish president that Turkey will soon lift a ban on German lawmakers visiting their country's military personnel at a Turkish air base.

Merkel met President Recep Tayyip Erdogan Sunday at the Group of 20 summit in China. German-Turkish relations have been strained since the German Parliament voted in June to label as genocide the killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks a century ago.

Turkey has refused to allow German lawmakers to visit personnel stationed at its Incirlik air base with aircraft supporting the campaign against the Islamic State group.

German news agency dpa reported that Merkel said she expects "positive news" on that front in the coming days. On Friday, the German government stressed the parliamentary resolution isn't legally binding.

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6:40 p.m.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry says the United States will not rush into a deal with Russia to try to end Syria's civil war.

Kerry has been negotiating with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in China on the sidelines of the G-20 summit. They are discussing a cease-fire between Syria's government and moderate rebels, and a possible U.S.-Russian military partnership against extremist groups.

Kerry says they've worked out many technical issues but others are unresolved.

Kerry says he and Lavrov plan to meet again Monday. He says the U.S. will take the time needed to ensure the agreement has the best chance for success.

Several previous U.S.-Russia deals on Syria have failed to halt the violence.

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3:55 p.m.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has officially opened a two-day summit of the world's major economies, saying the Group of 20 should adopt new measures to generate growth momentum and avoid protectionism.

The 11th G-20 economic forum takes place in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou.

Xi shook hands and posed for photos Sunday afternoon with leaders including President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Vladimir Putin with a G-20 backdrop. The leaders then traveled up several flights of stairs to a summit conference room.

In opening remarks, Xi said the world economy is recovering but faces multiple challenges in finance, trade and investment.

He said the summit will discuss innovation-driven growth and more efficient global economic and financial governance.

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3:35 p.m.

In their first meeting together, British Prime Minister Theresa May has told Russian President Vladimir Putin that she wants a "frank and open relationship" with Moscow despite their differences.

Bilateral relations have been strained in recent years by the fighting in Ukraine, Russia's backing of Syrian President Bashar Assad and the poisoning death of ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London.

At their meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in China, May told Putin the world faces many challenges today.

She said: "And while I recognize there will be some differences between us, there are some complex and serious areas of concern and issues to discuss, I hope we will be able to have a frank and open relationship and dialogue."

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2:15 p.m.

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says there should be no distinction between "good terrorists" and bad ones.

Erdogan is meeting with President Barack Obama on the sidelines of the Group of 20 economic summit in Hangzhou, China.

Erdogan says all terrorism is bad. He says the U.S. and Turkey must adopt a common attitude against terrorism.

Turkey and the U.S. have been at odds over the role of Kurdish forces in fighting the Islamic State group in Syria. U.S.-backed Syrian Kurds have been the most effective fighting force against IS, but Turkey worries they are seeking a contiguous and autonomous zone along Turkey's border.

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2:10 p.m.

President Barack Obama is reassuring Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that the U.S. will work to ensure those responsible for a failed coup are brought to justice.

Obama is holding his first meeting with Erdogan since this summer's coup attempt. Obama says he condemns the attempted overthrow.

The U.S. president also says it's critical to "finish the job" of securing Turkey's border with Syria. That's where Islamic State fighters have flooded into Turkey and would-be recruits into Syria.

Obama also says Turkey mustn't carry alone the burden of addressing the Syrian refugee crisis.

The leaders met on the sidelines of the Group of 20 economic summit in Hangzhou, China.

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12:45 p.m.

European Council President Donald Tusk says there will be no negotiations with Britain on the terms of its departure from the European Union until London formally invokes the two-year leaving process.

Speaking ahead of the G-20 summit in Hangzhou, China, Tusk said such pre-negotiations are not in the interests of the remaining 27 EU members.

Tusk says: "We need to protect the interests of the members of the EU that want to stay together, not the one which wants to leave."

Speaking earlier Sunday, British Prime Minister Theresa May said: "There will be no second referendum, no attempt to turn the clock back or get out of this. (Britain) will be leaving the European Union."

The U.K. has to invoke Article 50, the EU treaty clause that sets up the departure of a nation from the current 28-member bloc.

The Brexit, as it's known, is one of the main topics of concern at the economic forum.

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12:15 p.m.

President Barack Obama says he doesn't think disputes over media access during his trip to China reflect trouble in the U.S.-China relationship.

Obama says tensions always arise when the White House negotiated how much access the U.S. press will get to the president and foreign leaders overseas.

The White House doesn't apologize for pushing to press access because "we don't leave our values and our ideals behind when we take those trips."

But Obama says he wouldn't "overcrank" the significance of a shouting match that broke out between White House and Chinese officials as he arrived in China Saturday.

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12 noon

British Prime Minister Theresa May says there will be "no second referendum" in the U.K. on exiting the European Union. She says the U.K. will be leaving the EU.

May is meeting with President Barack Obama in China. She says the U.K. plans to continue pursuing an aggressive trade relationship with the U.S. despite the decision to leave the EU.

May and Obama are downplaying concerns that Britain becomes a lower trading priority for the U.S. by leaving the European bloc. The U.S. has been negotiating a broad EU trade deal and said ahead of the Brexit vote that Britain would go to the back of a line for a two-country deal if it left the EU.

Obama says he never said Britain would be punished. But he says it wouldn't make sense for the U.S. to lose focus on its European trade talks. He says the first priority for Britain now that it's leaving is to figure out its new trading relationship with its European neighbors.

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11:55 a.m.

President Barack Obama says U.S. and Russian negotiators are working "around the clock" to try to strike a deal to reduce violence in Syria but says "we're not there yet."

Obama is addressing the Syria crisis during a meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in China.

Obama says the U.S. is skeptical given the fact that previous cessations of hostilities have failed to hold. He says the negotiations are difficult and the U.S. and Russia have "grave differences."

But Obama says it's "worth trying" given Russia's role in supporting Syrian President Bashar Assad.

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11:45 a.m.

President Barack Obama says the U.S. and the U.K. will continue strengthening their "special relationship" even as Britain pursues its exit from the European Union.

Obama is holding his first meeting with new British Prime Minister Theresa May since she took over. He says the U.S. doesn't have a stronger partner in the world. Obama says the two countries will keep cooperating closely on cyber security, terrorism and trade despite the "turbulence" of recent political events. He's referring to the British vote to exit the EU, or Brexit.

May says the U.K. and the U.S. will "pursue the opportunities that Brexit presents." She says they'll "make a success of it."

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11:40 a.m.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe arrived in China for the G-20 summit amid ongoing tensions between the Asian neighbors over claims to islands in the East China Sea.

It's Abe's first to China since attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum summit in November 2014  itself a breakthrough following a freezing of high-level contacts by China in 2012.

That was part of Beijing's furious reaction to Tokyo's move to nationalize a string of tiny uninhabited islands controlled by Japan but claimed by China.

Japan regularly complains about the presence of coast guard Chinese ships in waters surrounding the islands, called Senkaku by Japan and Diaoyu by China, and a recent sail-by by a Chinese navy ship further raised tensions.

Abe is also routinely excoriated in China over his party's conservative views on history and efforts to expand the military's range of activity, a reflection of lingering anger over Japan's invasion of China just before World War II that is constantly stoked by Chinese propaganda.

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10:55 a.m.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has touted what he called "the outstanding leadership" of the American and Chinese presidents, Barack Obama and Xi Jinping, for committing their nations to the Paris agreement on climate change.

At a news conference on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Hangzhou, Ban urged other leaders to accelerate their countries' ratification process "so we can turn the aspirational Paris into the transforming climate action the world so urgently needs."

China and the United States, the world's top two carbon emitters, delivered documents to Ban on Saturday certifying that their countries have taken the necessary steps to join the Paris accord.

A total of 26 parties accounting for 39 percent of global emissions are signed up to the agreement that sets nation-by-nation targets for cutting carbon emissions.

The agreement still needs 29 parties representing at least 16 percent more of global emissions to enter into force.

The U.N. leader also praised China's organization of this year's G-20 summit and its focus on sustainable development. He commended the G-20 for "moving from a short-term focus on managing global financing challenges to a long-term vision for sustainable development."

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10:50 a.m.

The leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa held an informal meeting to reaffirm their loose alliance known as the BRICS group of emerging market powerhouses.

In opening remarks, Chinese President Xi Jinping said the bloc should grow alongside the Group of 20, which holds its summit Sunday afternoon in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou.

The BRICS leaders will meet again next month when they hold their own summit in India.

Xi also congratulated Brazil on holding a "successful Olympics," despite the fact neither he or any of the other BRICS leaders attended to avoid offending Brazilian sensitivities amid a bitter struggle over the country's leadership.

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7:20 p.m.

The United Nations' top climate official is thanking the United States and China for ratifying the global climate agreement reached in Paris.

Patricia Espinosa said in a statement Saturday that the accord offers an "opportunity for a sustainable future for every nation and every person." She added: "The earlier that Paris is ratified and implemented in full, the more secure that future will become."

The agreement will take effect 30 days after the date when 55 countries representing at least 55 percent of global emissions have formally joined it. The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change says the U.S. and China joining up brings the total so far to just over 39 percent.

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7:10 p.m.

Secretary of State John Kerry says the U.S. and China "demonstrated their continued, shared commitment to climate leadership" by formally joining the landmark climate agreement reached last year in Paris.

Kerry said in a statement that when the U.S. and China "come together to take action on climate, it moves the needle in a way that no two other nations can accomplish."

He added, however, that "it is essential for the Paris Agreement to enter into force as quickly as possible."

The agreement reached last year will go into effect if ratified by at least 55 countries representing 55 percent of the world's man-made emissions. Together, China and the United States represent 38 percent of the world's total.

Earlier Saturday, President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping presented documents formally entering their countries into the climate agreement. China and the United States are the world's top two producers of man-made carbon emissions.

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6:50 p.m.

Chinese President Xi Jinping says the Group of 20's meetings should be transformed into a mechanism that delivers long-term guidance on the global economy, rather than one that just responds to crises.

Xi said in a speech Saturday that the G-20 was at a "crucial juncture," one day before its summit opens in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou.

The G-20 held its first leaders' summit during the 2008 economic crisis and now convenes annually with representatives from a mix of industrialized and developing economies.

China's hosting of the two-day summit is seen as part of its drive to cement its place among global economic leaders. In his speech Saturday, Xi said China would cut steel and coal production to reduce excess capacity and "sustain long-term development."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, left, and U.S. President Barack Obama, right, attend the opening ceremony of the G20 Summit in Hangzhou in eastern China's Zhejiang province, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, Pool)

British Prime Minister Theresa May, right, attends the opening ceremony of the G20 Summit in Hangzhou in eastern China's Zhejiang province, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, Pool)

U.S. President Barack Obama, left, shakes hands with China's President Xi Jinping before a group photo session for the G20 Summit in Hangzhou in eastern China's Zhejiang province, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

U.S. President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister Theresa May shake hands at the conclusion of a news conference after a bilateral meeting in Hangzhou in eastern China's Zhejiang province, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016, alongside the G20. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

U.S. President Barack Obama, left, shakes hands with China's President Xi Jinping before a group photo session for the G20 Summit in Hangzhou in eastern China's Zhejiang province, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
A police officer remains critically injured and a suspect is dead after two officers saw a robbery being committed outside an Atlantic City casino garage and were then fired upon.

Officers saw three men trying to rob another trio near a parking garage at Caesars casino about 2:30am on Saturday, acting Atlantic County Prosecutor Diane Ruberton.

The alleged robbers then opened fire on the two officers.

One was seriously wounded as he was shot getting out of his car. The second officer returned fire and hit one of the suspects, who was found dead a short distance away.

A police officer remains critically injured and a suspect is dead after two officers saw a robbery being committed outside an Atlantic City casino (pictured)

Martell Chisholm, 19, (left) and Demetrius Cross, 28, (right) are being held on two counts of attempted murder, three counts of robbery and weapons offenses

Police arrested two men Saturday night in connection with the shooting.

Martell Chisholm, 19, of Millville, and Demetrius Cross, 28, of Bridgeton, each were being held on two counts of attempted murder, three counts of robbery and weapons offenses, Ruberton said.

The dead suspect was identified as Jerome Damon, 25, of Camden. An autopsy is scheduled for Sunday.

Ruberton said local, county, state and federal law enforcement agencies 'worked tirelessly' Saturday to identify and locate the suspects. The three victims also cooperated with police.

Jerome Damon, 25, is the third suspect in the alleged robbery and shooting, but he was shot dead by one of the officers on Saturday morning

The unnamed officer who was shot during the incident was taken to a nearby hospital and underwent surgery. Pictured police are standing guard at the casino

The wounded officer, whose name was not released, was taken to nearby AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center.

He underwent surgery Saturday morning and remained in critical condition Sunday.

Atlantic City Mayor Don Guardian called the shooting 'a sad commentary on society.'

'These are good examples of what happens when too many of these assault weapons are in the wrong hands,' he said.

Atlantic City Mayor Don Guardian called the shooting 'a sad commentary on society.' Police are seen outside the casino on Saturday

Authorities had released video late Saturday afternoon showing six men they said were 'persons of interest' in the case. They sought the public's help in identifying the men, who in the video are seen walking along a sidewalk in two separate groups of three people.

The New Jersey State Policemen's Benevolent Association offered a $20,000 reward for information on the suspects.

'We ask for prayers for the officer, his family and the Atlantic City Police Department,' said Patrick Colligan, the association's president.

Cars are pictured at the scene where one police officer was shot after they and a fellow cop attempted to bust up a robbery
Visit the city of Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province capital in East China this period and see how a people could harness the opportunity on their hands for maximal economic good.

Taking a trip around the flashy city that looks brand new dressed for the world, you would recognize that the people are really set and took their time to get in tune with the benefits of the business on their hands today  the G20 Summit.

Having visited the city in May for the 100 Days Countdown media event and being there now, its a different Hangzhou from what it was four months ago. The city actually wears a new look and very set.

As at Saturday when the world leaders arrived, the mood of the city further took a different turn  busier, more conscious of security and racial mixed.

Friday night after most of the international media persons had arrived Hangzhou, the city had started getting rowdier but with situation of the security fairly relaxed but for the checks and re-checks at the hotels for every move.

At the downtown Hangzhou Friday night when Peoples Daily stepped out to feel the pulse of the city, the natives were busy in their hundreds like in dress rehearsal at the Renmin Guangchang (Peoples Square).

It was a bevy crowd where the entire city seemed to have emptied into with their loud music blaring late into the night and the people swaying to the rhythm of the largest pool of world citizens they awaited. They danced away in synchronized moves and cheerfully greeted the foreigners among them.

New look Hangzhou

It looked like the city of Hangzhou had passed all their residents through tutorials on courtesy and cordial felicitations. Everyone looked cheerful and with some touch of social grace to their pleasantries as you walk by. Even the kids were not left out of this as their mothers nudged and urged them to greet the visitors and have photo shots with them.

But the following day saw Hangzhou pick up slightly in a different direction. Things came at faster pulse and got somehow hurried as the leaders started arriving. It was towards late evening that most of them came into the city with the US President Barack Obama calling at around 3pm. His arrival was followed closely by that of the Egyptian president, one of the African leaders invited by China to take part in the session it announced had much in store to discuss for the benefit of the smaller economies of the world. Next to Egypt was Saudi Arabia contingent. Saudi Arabia is a member of the G20.

From every reason, Hangzhou was up to a huge task of entertaining the leaders of about 65% of the world population that control about 88% of the global economy.

While the waiting was on, the team of African and East Asian journalists was taken out for some official visits that actually turned out not just fun, but some key business trip that actually was a core component of the G20 Summit, or just the hidden or not-too-known component of it.

Cuisine Museum in Eco Park

During the outing that centered around the prominent scenic West Lake, a major landmark of Hangzhou, Peoples Daily found that the entire city had been wired into the cell and structure of the summit. Everything had fallen in line as the trips later proved. The business firms of Hangzhou had all readied themselves to have a piece of the action of at least marketing and positioning themselves for the benefit of the Summit.

The first call of the media team was the Jiangyangfan Eco Park located at the east side of the Lake and the prominent river and with mountains to the opposite sides. The park is an ecological reserve in a swampy area by the side of the hill which the tour guide explained to be one of the major attractions of the city today as a recreation spot where even researchers and families gather for study and leisure. She narrated that the park is developed in line with a resolve to preserve the natural ecology of Hangzhou and has no artificial interference in the floral and faunal composition. Within the park is also located the Hangzhou Cuisine Museum.

Away from the museum, the team saw the business side of the quiet neighbourgood that is located in the Yuhuang Shannan Fund Town located in a former train maintenance yard and with a focus to provide business service support.

The spot boasted it runs the capital cluster that creates Chinas number one fund town whose top service builds efficient ecological environment for finance.

Tour guide at Fund Town

It is a financial information centre, a venture service capital centre, private equity fund research base and fund managers club. Furthermore, the Town also provides academic exchange and cooperation, administrative services, financial talents cultivation and a Zhejiang financiers club.

The seriousness of the town and its business was demonstrated in the elaborate reception the natives and operators organised to market themselves that involved all the leaders of the community.

The Zheyin Capital, a financial company founded last year with asset base of half a billion yuan was not left out. The modest company located in the same neighbourhood with a wonderful business environment showcased what it is made of and all their services tend towards financing and investment. The other company also of enormous business bent and capital base was just described and known as Refine.

The way they all prepared to take advantage of the Summit to further their operations and be part of the world gathering was simply amazing.

New look Hangzhou

It was a sign that beyond the mere gathering of the world leaders, the entire Hangzhou had all got their houses in order and targeted to harvest the most they could from the summit as very rare opportunity they would not know when next it could come their way again.

Emewu is senior editor of The Sun Newspaper, Nigeria, Fellow of the China Public Diplomacy on Media Exchange, Beijing and intern with Peoples Daily ([email protected])
The Latest: High turnout in Hong Kong election

HONG KONG (AP)  The Latest on elections in Hong Kong (all times local):

11:45 p.m.

Voters have turned out in force for Hong Kong's crucial Legislative Council election.

People queue at a polling station to vote for the legislative council election, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. Polls opened in Hong Kong Sunday for the specially administered Chinese city's most crucial election since the handover from Britain in 1997. The vote for lawmakers in the Legislative Council is also the first since 2014 pro-democracy street protests rocked the Asian financial hub. AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

Turnout appeared to be higher than average, with long lines of people still waiting to cast ballots at some polling stations by the time voting was supposed to end Sunday night. Some 52.6 percent of nearly 3.8 million registered voters had turned out an hour before polls closed, matching the total turnout for the previous election four years ago. Turnout in the 2008 election was 45.2 percent, according to the government's website.

The vote for Legislative Council is seen as Hong Kong's most important election since the handover from Britain in 1997, and will test the unity of Hong Kong's pro-democracy camp.

___

1 p.m.

Radical activist Avery Ng was restrained by police after he threw a sandwich at Hong Kong's widely unpopular Beijing-backed leader, Leung Chun-ying.

The incident happened before Leung voted, and he avoided being hit by the tuna sandwich.

Ng, chairman of the League of Social Democrats, a radical pro-democracy party, earlier told reporters outside the polling station where Leung voted that he believed that the 2014 democracy street protests had awakened civil liberties "so hopefully today we can have a high voter turnout and use our votes to yell our discontent toward CY Leung."

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12: 25 p.m.

Three hours after polls opened in Hong Kong's legislative elections, 7.12 percent of registered voters have turned out.

According to government statistics, that's little below 7.48 percent in 2012 but over 5.66 percent in 2008 legislative elections.

The vote for Legislative Council lawmakers is the first major election since 2014 pro-democracy street protests rocked the Asian financial hub, and the outcome could pave the way for a fresh round of political confrontations over Beijing's control of the city.

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11:20 a.m.

Hong Kong's government says about 3.7 percent of 3.8 million registered voters turned out two hours after the polls opened.

The city's widely unpopular Beijing-backed leader, Leung Chun-ying, cast his ballot earlier Sunday and urged the public to turn out and vote.

At stake is the power to keep Leung and his government in check.

Pro-democracy lawmakers currently control 27 of 70 seats in the Legislative Council, compared with 43 held by lawmakers friendly to Beijing. The democrats are fighting to keep control of at least a third of the seats, which gives them veto power to block government attempts to enact unpopular legislation, such as Beijing's controversial election revamp that triggered the 2014 street protests.

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8:15 a.m.

Voting is underway in Hong Kong's legislative election, the first since 2014 pro-democracy street protests rocked the Asian financial hub.

At stake is the power to keep the city's pro-Beijing leader and his government in check.

The pro-democracy camp currently controls 27 of 70 seats, and must keep at least a third of the seats to retain veto power.

The election is set to test the unity of the pro-democracy camp as a new generation of radical activists who emerged after the protests compete with moderate mainstream parties to challenge formidable pro-Beijing rivals.

Radical activist candidate Avery Ng, left, is taken away by a police officer outside a polling station for the legislative council election in Hong Kong, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. Polls opened in Hong Kong Sunday for the specially administered Chinese city's most crucial election since the handover from Britain in 1997. The vote for lawmakers in the Legislative Council is also the first since 2014 pro-democracy street protests rocked the Asian financial hub. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying, right, arrives a polling station for the legislative council election as a radical activist candidate Avery Ng, left, is blocked by a police officer, in Hong Kong, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. Polls opened in Hong Kong Sunday for the specially administered Chinese city's most crucial election since the handover from Britain in 1997. The vote for lawmakers in the Legislative Council is also the first since 2014 pro-democracy street protests rocked the Asian financial hub. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying talks to reporters after voting at a polling station for the legislative council election Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. Polls opened in Hong Kong Sunday for the specially administered Chinese city's most crucial election since the handover from Britain in 1997. The vote for lawmakers in the Legislative Council is also the first since 2014 pro-democracy street protests rocked the Asian financial hub. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

A police officer stands outside a polling station for the legislative council election Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. Polls opened in Hong Kong Sunday for the specially administered Chinese city's most crucial election since the handover from Britain in 1997. The vote for lawmakers in the Legislative Council is also the first since 2014 pro-democracy street protests rocked the Asian financial hub. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying votes at a polling station for the legislative council election Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. Polls opened in Hong Kong Sunday for the specially administered Chinese city's most crucial election since the handover from Britain in 1997. The vote for lawmakers in the Legislative Council is also the first since 2014 pro-democracy street protests rocked the Asian financial hub. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)
Nationalists overtake Merkel's party in German state vote

BERLIN (AP)  A nationalist, anti-immigration party performed strongly in a state election Sunday in the region where German Chancellor Angela Merkel has her political base, overtaking her conservatives to take second place amid discontent with her migrant policies.

The three-year-old Alternative for Germany, or AfD, won 20.8 percent of votes in the election for the state legislature in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Merkel's Christian Democrats polled 19 percent, their worst result yet in the state.

The center-left Social Democrats, who led the outgoing state government in a coalition with the conservatives, remained the strongest party with 30.6 percent support.

AfD member Alexander Gauland, left, and Leif-Erik Holm, center, top candidate of the AfD, celebrate at the gathering of the AfD (Alternative for Germany) party in Schwerin, Germany, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016 after the state elections in the German federal state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Exit polls indicate that the nationalist, anti-immigration party has performed strongly in athe state election in the region where Chancellor Angela Merkel has her political base, likely overtaking her conservative party. (AP Photo/Michael Sohn)

Economically weak Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, in Germany's northeastern corner, is home to 1.6 million of the country's 80 million people and is a relative political lightweight. It is, however, the state where Merkel has her parliamentary constituency, and Sunday's regional vote was the first of five before a national election expected next September.

National AfD leader Frauke Petry celebrated "a blow to Angela Merkel." Local AfD leader Leif-Erik Holm told supporters: "Perhaps this is the beginning of the end of Angela Merkel's chancellorship today."

Merkel's refugee policies were a prominent issue in the campaign for Sunday's election, which came a year to the day after she decided to let in migrants who were waiting in Hungary to travel to Germany  setting off the peak of last year's influx. Germany registered more than 1 million people as asylum-seekers last year.

New arrivals have slowed drastically this year, policies have been tightened and Mecklenburg is home to few foreigners. Still, New Year's Eve robberies and sexual assaults in Germany blamed largely on foreigners, as well as two attacks in July carried out by asylum-seekers and claimed by the Islamic State group, have fed tensions.

Merkel has stuck to her insistence that "we will manage" the refugee crisis, and has also said that "sometimes you have to endure such controversies."

"This result, and the strong performance of AfD, is bitter for many, for everyone in our party," said Peter Tauber, her Christian Democrats' general secretary.

He said the state government's positive record took a back seat for many voters, "because among a recognizable part, there was an explicit wish to voice displeasure and protest, and we saw that particularly strongly in the discussion about refugees."

Sunday's result could make it more difficult for Merkel to bury a festering dispute with the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian arm of her conservative bloc, which has long criticized her decision to open the borders and advocated an annual cap on migrants.

CSU general secretary Andreas Scheuer said that "we feel vindicated in our course."

Merkel has yet to say whether she will seek a fourth term next year, as is widely expected. While polls this year have shown her popularity slipping from stellar to merely solid, there is no obvious conservative alternative and her bloc is ahead nationally.

"She is, in people's perception, personally responsible for the border opening, and she has to deal with that," political science professor Karl-Rudolf Korte told ZDF television. "But she can deal with it  she has a year."

Mecklenburg was the only one of Germany's 16 states where the far-right National Democratic Party was represented in a state legislature, but it lost its seats on Sunday. Its support dropped below the 5 percent needed to keep them, with many supporters switching to AfD.

The state has been run for the past decade by the parties that currently govern Germany. Popular Social Democratic governor Erwin Sellering has governed with Merkel's party as his junior partner. Both parties lost support compared with the last state election in 2011, when they polled 35.6 and 23 percent, respectively.

The opposition Left Party  once popular with protest voters  also lost support, slipping five points to 13.2 percent. The left-leaning Greens dropped just under 5 percent and lost their seats.

AfD is now represented in nine of Germany's 16 state legislatures and hopes to enter the national Parliament next year. Still, it fell short Sunday of its aim of becoming the strongest party in Mecklenburg, and also didn't match the 24.3 percent support it won in another eastern state, Saxony-Anhalt, in March.

There's no realistic prospect at present of AfD going into government. Other parties won't deal with it.

The next regional election is Sept. 18 in Berlin, where local issues are likely to play a stronger role.

Members and supporters of the AfD party react after first exit polls in Schwerin, Germany, Sunday Sept. 4, 2016 after the state elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Exit polls indicate that the nationalist, anti-immigration party has performed strongly in a state election in the region where Chancellor Angela Merkel has her political base, likely overtaking her conservative party. ( Daniel Bockwoldt/dpa via AP)

AfD member Beatrix von Storch, right, and Leif-Erik Holm, left, top candidate of the AfD, toast at the gathering of AfD (Alternative for Germany) party in Schwerin, Germany, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016 after the closing of the state elections in the German federal state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Exit polls indicate that the nationalist, anti-immigration party has performed strongly in a state election in the region where Chancellor Angela Merkel has her political base, likely overtaking her conservative party. (AP Photo/Michael Sohn)

AfD member Alexander Gauland, left, and Leif-Erik Holm, top candidate of the AfD, toast at the gathering of the AfD (Alternative for Germany) party in Schwerin, Germany, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016 after the state elections in the German federal state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Exit polls indicate that the nationalist, anti-immigration party has performed strongly in a state election in the region where Chancellor Angela Merkel has her political base, likely overtaking her conservative party. ( AP Photo/Michael Sohn)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel , center, poses with supporters during an election campaign event in Bad Doberan, eastern Germany, Saturday Sept. 3, 3016. Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision a year ago to open the borders to a surge of migrants is casting a long shadow over a state election this weekend in Germany's economically weak northeast, where an anti-immigration party is poised for strong gains. Polls suggest that the 3-year-old Alternative for Germany can expect to win over 20 percent of votes Sunday in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, a coastal region where Merkel has her parliamentary constituency. (Bernd Wuestneck/dpa via AP)

Secretary General of chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats, Peter Tauber, speaks about the results of the state elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania S, in Berlin, Sunday Sept 4, 2016. Exit polls indicate that a nationalist, anti-immigration party has performed strongly in a state election in the region where Chancellor Angela Merkel has her political base, likely overtaking her conservative party. (The exit polls for ARD and ZDF public television put support for Alternative for Germany, or AfD, in Sunday's election for the state legislature in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania around 21 percent. They put support for Merkel's Christian Democrats at 19 or 20 percent. (Gregor Fischer/dpa via AP)

AfD (Alternative for Germany) party chairwoman, Frauke Petry, speaks with journalists after first exit polls for the state elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, , in Schwerin, Germany, Sunday Sept. 4, 2016. The exit polls for ARD and ZDF public television put support for Alternative for Germany, or AfD, in Sunday's election for the state legislature in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania around 21 percent. They put support for Merkel's Christian Democrats at 19 or 20 percent. (Christian Charisius/dpa via AP)

Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania governor, Erwin Sellering, leading candidate of the Social Democratic Party, SPD, waving after the announcement of the first exit polls during the state election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in Schwerin, Germany, Sunday Sept. 4, 2016. The center-left Social Democrats, who lead the outgoing state government, were expected to be the strongest party with about 30 percent support. (Bernd Wuestneck/dpa via AP)

Top candidate of chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats for the state elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Lorenz Caffier, casts his vote in Neustrelitz, eastern Germany, Sunday Sept. 4, 2016. A nationalist, anti-immigration party looks set to perform strongly Sunday in state election in the eastern German region where Chancellor Angela Merkel has her political base. Polls ahead of the election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania show support for the three-year-old Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party running at over 20 percent. (Bernd Wuestneck/dpa via AP)

Leif-Erik Holm, leading candidate of the AfD party for the state parliament election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, smiles on his way to the TV studio in Schwerin, Germany, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. (Christian Charisius/dpa via AP)

Erwin Sellering, governor of German state of Mecklenburg Western Pomerania, smiles after first results of the state election have been published in Schwerin, northeastern Germany, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. (Christian Charisius/pool photo via AP)

Top candidate, governor Erwin Sellering of the Social Democrats, right, and top candidate of the Chrstian Democrats Lorenz Caffier, give statements in a TV studio in Schwerin, Germany after the state elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Sunday Sept. 4, 2016. ( Axel Heimken/Pool Photo via AP)
Trump tells black congregation he wants to fix 'many wrongs'

DETROIT (AP)  Criticized for urging black voters to support him while speaking to mostly white audiences, Donald Trump visited a predominantly black church to call for a "civil rights agenda for our time."

"I am here to listen to you," the Republican presidential nominee told the congregation at the Great Faith Ministries International, where he swayed to songs of worship and read scripture.

"I'm here today to learn," said Trump, who is Presbyterian.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gives a thumbs up during a church service at Great Faith Ministries, Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Trump, who vowed to fix the "many wrongs" facing African-Americans, has been stepping up his outreach to minority voters in recent weeks as he tries to expand his appeal beyond his GOP base. The church visit Saturday marked a rare appearance by Trump in front of a largely minority audience.

"This is the first African-American church he's been in, y'all!" said Bishop Wayne T. Jackson, who introduced Trump. "Now it's a little different from a Presbyterian church."

While protesters were a vocal presence outside, Trump made a pitch inside for support from an electorate strongly aligned with Democrat Hillary Clinton.

"Our nation is too divided," Trump said. "We talk past each other, not to each other. And those who seek office do not do enough to step into the community and learn what is going on."

Striking a rare unifying tone, he said, "I'm here today to learn so that we can together remedy injustice in any form."

Trump praised the black church as "the conscience of our country" and said the nation needs "a civil rights agenda of our time" that includes the right to a quality education, safe neighborhoods and good jobs.

"I fully understand that the African-American community has suffered from discrimination and that there are many wrongs that must still be made right," he said.

Before he left, he was presented with a Jewish prayer shawl, which Jackson draped over Trump's shoulders, and a Jewish Heritage Studies bible. Trump also met with a smaller group of church members and recorded an interview with the pastor.

Trump's efforts thus far to attract greater support from minority groups have largely fallen flat. Polls show Clinton with overwhelmingly more support from blacks and Hispanics.

African-American community leaders, in particular, have railed against Trump's dire depictions of minority life and dismissed his message as intended more to reassure white voters that he's not racist than to help communities of color.

Rev. Lawrence Glass, one of the clergy criticizing Trump's visit, said the Republican represents the "politics of fear and hate" and that "minorities of all kinds have much to lose taking a chance on someone like" Trump.

Outside the church, several separate protests swelled into a throng of about 400 people denouncing Trump. But inside, churchgoers said they thought it was important to hear directly from the Republican nominee as they weigh their options.

"I'm here to hear what he has to say," said Milton Lewis, 46, who works as a minister at another church.

"I have a very open mind," echoed Pierre Curtis, 69, a Great Faith Ministries International congregation member for more than 20 years.

After the church visit, Trump visited the southwest Detroit childhood home of Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who ran against Trump in the primaries and is now advising the campaign. Surrounded by security and a swarm of reporters, Trump spoke with the home's owner, Felicia Reese, and told her: "Your house is worth a lot of money," thanks to the Carson connection.

Meanwhile, Trump's running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, told NBC's "Meet The Press" in an interview set to air Sunday that he plans to release his tax returns next week. He repeated Trump's promise that the businessman will release his taxes upon the completion of an IRS audit.

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Follow Colvin and Williams on Twitter at https://twitter.com/colvinj and https://twitter.com/CoreyAPReporter

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, right, stands and listens during a church service at Great Faith Ministries, Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wears a prayer shawl during a church service at Great Faith Ministries, Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

In this Thursday, Sept. 1, 2016, photo, Toni McIlwain stands outside the building that housed her Ravendale Community nonprofit that offered education and drug prevention programs in Detroit. McIlwain believes that as a candidate for president, Donald Trump has a right to go anywhere he wants, but she says it takes a lot of nerve for him to return to Detroit after comments he made last month about blacks. Trump is planning to attend a service Saturday at an African American church in Detroit. (AP Photo/Corey Williams)

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a church service at Great Faith Ministries, Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

A local resident looks on as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, left, walks with Dr. Ben Carson, during a tour of Carson's childhood home, Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
May warns of 'difficult times' as UK prepares to exit the EU

LONDON (AP)  British Prime Minister Theresa May has warned that Britain faces some "difficult times" as it prepares to leave the European Union following the June referendum.

She told the Andrew Marr Show in an interview broadcast Sunday that not all would be "plain sailing" as Britain withdraws from the 28-nation bloc.

She said in her first extended interview since taking office that she will not call an early election because Britain needs stability.

British Prime Minister Theresa May talks to media with U.S. President Barack Obama after their bilateral meeting in Hangzhou in eastern China's Zhejiang province, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016, alongside the G20. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

The prime minister spoke to Marr before leaving for China for the G-20 summit. She said she would not "pretend" leaving the EU would be easy despite some encouraging recent economic news.
Investigators' persistence leads to break in abduction case

MINNEAPOLIS (AP)  To crack Minnesota's biggest cold case  the 1989 abduction of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling  authorities went back to the early days of the investigation.

They turned a renewed spotlight last year on a man who was questioned soon after Jacob's disappearance but was never charged. That ultimately led to Saturday's announcement that Jacob's remains finally had been found.

"On these kinds of cases it's really a tribute to law enforcement that they simply never give up. ... This is what persistence will reveal," Michael Campion, former superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and former commissioner of the state Department of Public Safety, said Sunday.

FILE - In this Aug. 28, 2009, file photo, Patty and Jerry Wetterling show a photo of their son Jacob Wetterling, who was abducted in October of 1989 in St. Joseph, Minn and is still missing, in Minneapolis. Patty Wetterling said Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016 that his remains have been found. Daniel Heinrich, who authorities have called a person of interest in the 1989 kidnapping, denied any involvement and was not charged with that crime. But he has pleaded not guilty to several federal child pornography charges. (AP Photo/Craig Lassig, File)

The case has not lain dormant for those 27 years, said Tom Heffelfinger, former U.S. attorney for Minnesota. To the contrary, he said, it's been a top priority for local and federal law enforcement the entire time.

When authorities last October announced the arrest of Danny Heinrich, now 53, of Annandale, on child pornography charges, they took the unusual step of calling him a "person of interest" in the Wetterling case, though they were careful to stop short of calling him a suspect. He has not been charged in Jacob's abduction and death.

Jacob was riding his bicycle near his home in the central Minnesota community of St. Joseph with his brother and a friend on Oct. 22, 1989, when a masked gunman abducted him and ordered the other boys to run. The case has haunted Minnesota ever since. Jacob's smiling face was burned into the state's collective psyche, appearing on countless posters and billboards seeking clues.

Jacob's mother, Patty Wetterling, became a nationally recognized advocate for the cause of missing and exploited children. A 1994 federal law named for Jacob requires states to establish sex offender registries.

As part of the fresh look into Jacob's abduction around its 25th anniversary, investigators took another look at the sexual assault of a 12-year-old boy from Cold Spring nine months before Jacob's disappearance. Investigators had long suspected the two cases were connected.

Heinrich was arrested in 1990 in the sexual assault case but wasn't charged due to a lack of evidence. While he was questioned extensively about Jacob's kidnapping at the time, he denied any involvement.

Using technology that wasn't available back in 1989, investigators found Heinrich's DNA on the 12-year-old's sweatshirt, Richard Thornton, special agent in charge of the FBI's Minneapolis office, said when authorities announced Heinrich's arrest last October. They used that evidence to get a search warrant for Heinrich's home.

While they didn't discover anything to firmly tie Heinrich to either Jacob's kidnapping or the assault on the other boy, they found a large collection of child pornography. Heinrich was charged with 25 child pornography counts.

At the time of his arrest last year, as he had done since 1989, Heinrich insisted he was innocent in Jacob's disappearance.

Heinrich, who has been jailed since his arrest, pleaded not guilty to the child pornography charges and is scheduled to go on trial on those counts in October.

A law enforcement official told The Associated Press on Saturday that a person of interest in Jacob's abduction took authorities to a field in central Minnesota the week before. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing case, said buried remains and other evidence were recovered.

"Once they realized they had a strong, legitimate case against Mr. Heinrich for other crimes, in this case child pornography, they aggressively prosecuted him for anything and everything they could get," Heffelfinger said.

The Stearns County Sheriff's Office released few details over the weekend about the new developments in the Wetterling case, and no fresh information Sunday, but said that authorities expect to be able to provide more details early this week.

Campion said he spent only a little time on the Wetterling investigation in 1989 but was still "at a loss for words" on Sunday, still processing the break in one of Minnesota's most enduring mysteries.

"I don't know that I ever thought I'd see that in the headlines," he said. "It's pretty astonishing."

FILE - This undated file photo provided by the Sherburne County Sheriff's Office, shows Daniel Heinrich. Patty Wetterling, the mother of Jacob Wetterling, missing since 1989, said Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016 that his remains have been found. Heinrich, who authorities have called a person of interest in the 1989 kidnapping, denied any involvement and was not charged with that crime. But he has pleaded not guilty to several federal child pornography charges. (Sherburne County Sheriff's Office via AP )

A white ribbon with a large J hangs on a post along Minnesota Street as residents there await confirmation that remains found belong to 1989 abduction victim Jacob Wetterling, Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016, in St. Joseph, Minn. The Stearns County Sheriff's Office says in a statement that Jacob's remains were identified on Saturday. Jacob was 11 when he was kidnapped from a rural road on Oct. 22, 1989, near his home in St. Joseph, about 80 miles northwest of Minneapolis. (Kimm Anderson/St. Cloud Times via AP)

Pedestrians walk past white ribbons hung along Minnesota Street as residents of St. Joseph, Minn., wait for confirmation that the remains of 1989 abduction victim Jacob Wetterling had been found, Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016. The Stearns County Sheriff's Office says in a statement that Jacob's remains were identified on Saturday. Jacob was 11 when he was kidnapped from a rural road on Oct. 22, 1989, near his home in St. Joseph, about 80 miles northwest of Minneapolis. (Kimm Anderson/St. Cloud Times via AP)

A bouquet of flowers is placed at the end of Jerry and Patty Wetterling's driveway as news has come out that the search for Jacob Wetterling may be over, Saturday afternoon, Sept. 3, 2016, in St. Joseph, Minn. Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton and other officials are offering support to the family of Jacob Wetterling after his mother said the remains of the boy missing for nearly 27 years have been found. In a statement, Dayton says Jacob's story "has touched the lives and hearts of Minnesotans for a generation." (Kimm Anderson/St. Cloud Times via AP)

A single bouquet of flowers is rested on the sign for Dr. Jerry Wetterling's chiropractic office as the town of St. Joseph, Minn., waited for confirmation that remains found were those of the 1989 missing boy Jacob Wetterling, Sat., Sept. 3, 2016. The Stearns County Sheriff's Office says in a statement that Jacob's remains were identified on Saturday. Jacob was 11 when he was kidnapped from a rural road on Oct. 22, 1989, near his home in St. Joseph, about 80 miles northwest of Minneapolis. (Kimm Anderson/St. Cloud Times via AP)
Significant events in the life of Mother Teresa

With Sunday's canonization of Mother Teresa, Pope Francis honored the tiny nun who cared for the "poorest of the poor" as the epitome of his call for mercy. Here are some significant dates in the life of the Catholic Church's newest saint:

1910: Agnes Gonxe Bojaxhiu is born on Aug. 26 in Skopje, in what is now Macedonia, the youngest of three children of an Albanian builder.

1928: Becomes a novitiate in Ireland of the Loreto order, which ran mission schools in India, and takes the name Sister Teresa.

FILE - In this Dec. 10, 1979 file photo, Mother Teresa receives the Nobel Peace Prize during a ceremony at Oslo University. At right is the Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Professor John Sanness. With Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016 making the canonization of Mother Teresa, Pope Francis honored the tiny nun who cared for the "poorest of the poor" as the epitome of his call for mercy. Here are some significant dates in the life of the Catholic Church's newest saint: (Henrik Laurivik/NTB via AP, File)

1929: Arrives in Kolkata to teach at St. Mary's High School.

1937: Takes final vows and the name Mother Teresa.

1946: Riding a train Sept. 10 to the mountain town of Darjeeling, she receives a "call within a call" from Jesus "to serve him among the poorest of the poor."

1948: Permitted to leave her order and moves to Kolkata's slums to set up her first school.

1950: Missionaries of Charity officially founded on Oct. 7 as a religious congregation.

1952: Opens Nirmal Hriday ("Pure Heart"), a home for the dying, followed next year by her first orphanage.

1962: Wins her first prize for her humanitarian work: the Padma Shri award for "distinguished service." Over the years she uses the money from such prizes to found dozens of new homes.

1979: Wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

1982: Persuades Israelis and Palestinians to stop shooting long enough to rescue 37 children from a hospital in besieged Beirut.

1983: Has a heart attack while in Rome visiting St. John Paul II.

1985: Awarded Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian award.

1989: Has a second and nearly fatal attack. Doctors implant pacemaker.

1990: Announces her intention to resign and a conclave of sisters is called to choose a successor. In a secret ballot, Mother Teresa is re-elected with only one dissenting vote - her own - and withdraws request to step down.

1991: Suffers pneumonia in Tijuana, Mexico, leading to congestive heart failure, and is hospitalized in La Jolla, California.

1996: Nov. 16, receives honorary U.S. citizenship.

1997: Dies Sept. 5 in Kolkata and is given a state funeral.

2003: Beatified before a crowd of 300,000 by St. John Paul II in St. Peter's Square.

2015: Is cleared for canonization after Pope Francis declares that the cure of a Brazilian man suffering from brain abscesses was miraculous.

2016: Is declared a saint on Sept. 4.
Turkey: IS has lost all territory along Syria-Turkey border

BEIRUT (AP)  Turkish troops and allied Syrian rebels expelled the Islamic State group from the last strip of territory it controlled along the Syrian-Turkish border on Sunday, effectively sealing the extremists' self-styled caliphate off from the outside world, Turkey's prime minister and a Syrian opposition group reported.

Also on Sunday, Syrian pro-government forces backed by airstrikes launched a wide offensive in the northern city of Aleppo, capturing areas they lost last month and besieging rebel-held neighborhoods, state media and opposition activists said.

Turkey-backed Free Syrian Army rebels have cleared the area between the northern Syrian border towns of Azaz and Jarablus, Turkey's prime minister, Binali Yildirim, said.

A Turkish army tank stationed near the Syrian border, in Suruc, Turkey, Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016. Turkey's state-run news agency says Turkish tanks have entered Syria's Cobanbey district northeast of Aleppo in a "new phase" of the Euphrates Shield operation. Turkish tanks crossed into Syria Saturday to support Syrian rebels against the Islamic State group, according to the Anadolu news agency. (AP Photo)

"From Azaz to Jarablus, 91 kilometers (57 miles) of our border has been completely secured. All the terrorist organizations are pushed back, they are gone," Yildirim said, speaking at a dinner with non-government organizations in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir.

The FSA's advance shut down key supply lines used by IS to bring in foreign fighters, weapons and ammunition.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said IS "has lost its link with the outside world after losing all border areas" with Turkey. It said the last two border villages that IS held were Mizab and Qadi Jarablus, which were taken Sunday afternoon.

IS had occupied the border area even before it declared its self-styled caliphate in June 2014, and it used the Turkish border to bring in fighters from around the world. The extremist group, which controls parts of Syria and Iraq, is now surrounded from all sides by hostile forces.

The loss of its territory along the Turkish border follows a series of recent defeats for IS, including its expulsion from the central Iraqi city of Fallujah and its defeat in the former stronghold of Manbij in northern Syria. Airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition have killed a number of the group's most prominent founding members and leaders.

In a statement, Turkey's armed forces said the "the Jarablus-Azaz line has been connected." Turkey has long pushed for a safe zone in Syria between these two towns, with a plan to house Syrian refugees there. Turkey hosts an estimated 3 million Syrian refugees, the highest number in the world.

Meanwhile, the recapture and return to siege of rebel-held parts of Aleppo dealt a major blow to insurgent groups. They have lost scores of fighters in recent weeks in the battle to open a corridor into the city and lift the government's blockade.

After the government laid siege on Aleppo for the first time in July, the United Nations said that nearly 300,000 residents were trapped in rebel-held neighborhoods, making it the largest besieged area in war-torn Syria. The city has been contested since the summer of 2012.

Sunday's push follows a month after insurgents captured several military academies south of Aleppo and opened a corridor into opposition-held parts of Syria's largest city and onetime commercial center. Since then, government forces and their allies have been trying to recapture the area.

State TV quoted an unnamed military official as saying that troops are now in full control of the military academies south of Aleppo and are "chasing the remnant of terrorists." It added that all roads linking rebel-held eastern Aleppo with opposition areas outside the city "have been cut."

The Observatory confirmed these gains. "The (rebel-held) neighborhoods are under siege again," said the Observatory's chief, Rami Abdurrahman, by telephone. "The whole areas are under complete siege."

Turkey has launched two incursions into Syria since Aug. 24 in an operation designed to drive IS away from the border and prevent the advance of U.S.-backed Kurdish forces, which are also battling the extremist group.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim on Sunday defended his country's intervention in Syria, pointing to their long shared border. "We are there to protect our borders, ensure the safety of our citizens' lives and property, and to protect the territorial integrity of Syria," Yildirim said in Diyarbakir.

Turkey has also said it will not allow Syrian Kurds to unite their "cantons," the regions under their control in northern Syria, which have emerged as autonomous zones during the civil war. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a joint press conference with U.S. president Barack Obama in China that "our wish is that a terror corridor does not form on our southern border."

Turkey views the Kurds as a threat and the Turkey-backed forces have clashed with them outside Jarablus.

In an emailed press statement, Turkey's military said the FSA have taken 20 villages from IS, adding that the Turkish army struck 83 Islamic State group targets. Since the Turkish operation began on Aug. 24, the army says it has hit 383 targets with 1,599 rounds.

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Bilginsoy reported from Istanbul. Associated Press writers Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria and Neyran Elden in Istanbul contributed to this report.
Obama and Putin meet in China amid struggle for Syria deal

HANGZHOU, China (AP)  The United States and Russia struggled Monday to keep alive negotiations to end the bloodshed between U.S.-backed rebels and Syria's Russian-aligned regime. Even as top diplomats vowed to keep trying, President Barack Obama expressed skepticism that an unlikely alliance between rivals would yield the breakthrough needed to end the 5-year-old civil war.

Still, as Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin attended an economic summit, the leaders were under pressure to push the negotiations beyond the sticking points that have thus far prevented a deal. White House spokesman Ned Price said Obama and Putin were huddling on the sidelines of the Group of 20 economic summit, with details of their informal meeting expected to be released later Monday.

A second day of talks in China between Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, ended Monday without a deal to announce. The two diplomats met for an hour but emerged still at odds on certain issues, said a senior State Department official, who wasn't authorized to discuss the talks by name and requested anonymity.

U.S. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference with British Prime Minister Theresa May after their bilateral meeting in Hangzhou in eastern China's Zhejiang province, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016, alongside the G20. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

The talks culminated a several weeks of searching for a cease-fire between Syrian President Bashar Assad's government and moderate rebels that would expand access for hundreds of thousands of civilians caught in the crossfire. The strategy has hinged on an unlikely U.S.-Russian militarily partnership against extremist groups operating in Syria.

But beyond the Islamic State group and al-Qaida, the two powers have conflicting views about who fits in that category - as well as a deep and mutual distrust that the other party will hold up its end of the bargain.

"We're not there yet," Obama told reporters Sunday. "It's premature for us to say that there is a clear path forward, but there is the possibility at least for us to make some progress on that front."

Obama's wariness was less apparent among his State Department negotiators, who had been so hopeful a deal could come together while world leaders gathered in China that they scheduled a press conference and announced plans to brief reporters on the pact. Those plans deflated throughout the day, as both the briefing and the press conference were canceled. After an aide scrambled to remove the podium once intended for his bargaining partner, Kerry eventually announced there was no deal - standing alone.

"I've said all along we're not going to rush," said Kerry, who has negotiated several failed truces with Russia in recent months.

Kerry said the two sides had worked through many technical issues but said the U.S. didn't want to enter into an illegitimate agreement. In recent days, the State Department has said it only wants a nationwide cease-fire between Assad's military and the rebels, and not another "cessation of hostilities" that is time-limited and only stops fighting in some cities and regions.

The talks faltered Sunday when Russia pulled back from agreement on issues the U.S. negotiators believed had been settled, the State Department official said.

As the diplomats were negotiating, Syrian pro-government forces backed by airstrikes launched an offensive in the northern city of Aleppo, capturing areas they lost last month and besieging rebel-held neighborhoods. It was a major blow to insurgent groups that was likely to raise fresh concerns about Russian support for the Syrian military's attacks on Assad's opponents.

The Syria conflict has killed as many as a half-million people since 2011 and caused millions of Syrians to flee their homes, contributing to a global migration crisis. Amid the chaos, IS has emerged as a global terror threat.

Kerry and Lavrov's talks represent their third significant attempt since July to finalize a new U.S.-Russian military partnership that Moscow has long sought. The package would include provisions so aid can reach besieged areas of Syria and measures to prevent Assad's government from bombing areas where U.S.-backed rebels are operating.

U.S. officials have said that as part of a deal, Russia would have to halt offensives by Assad's government, something it has failed to do over months of diplomatic efforts. And the U.S. must get rebels to break ranks with the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front, a task that grew tougher after its fighters last month successfully broke the siege of Aleppo, Syria's largest city and the site of fierce recent fighting.

Negotiators on both sides have spent weeks poring over maps of potential areas where opposition groups operate and where Assad's forces would be prohibited from launching airstrikes. The idea is for Russia to use its significant influence over Assad to ensure compliance with the deal.

But the U.S. has long been skeptical of the military coordination part of the deal, because it says Russia has mainly targeted moderate, U.S.-backed opposition groups in a bid to prop up Assad. The U.S. wants Russia to focus exclusively on IS and al-Qaida-linked groups. Both Defense Secretary Ash Carter and National Intelligence Director James Clapper have expressed misgivings about sharing intelligence and targeting information with Moscow.

Neither side explained Sunday in detail what sticking points remain. Kerry said the U.S. wanted a deal with the best chance for survival. Lavrov's deputy, Sergei Ryabkov, said a deal was "close" but that Washington had to dissociate itself from Nusra.

"Many of the groups considered acceptable by the U.S. have actually affiliated with the Nusra Front, while the Nusra Front is using them to avoid being attacked," Ryabkov told Russian media, citing a longstanding complaint of his government.

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Associated Press writers Bradley Klapper in Washington and Jim Heintz in Moscow contributed to this report.

Russian President Vladimir Putin sits before the start of the opening ceremony of the G-20 Summit in Hangzhou in eastern China's Zhejiang province, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, Pool)

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, center, walks through the Hangzhou International Expo Center during the G20 Summit in Hangzhou in eastern China's Zhejiang Province, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov were trying to hash out a deal Sunday to end years of brutal fighting between Syria's Russian-backed government and U.S.-supported rebels. (Chinatopix via AP)

U.S. President Barack Obama attends the opening ceremony of the G20 Leaders Summit in Hangzhou Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. (Nicolas Asfouri/Pool Photo via AP)
Nigerian military: Some officers selling arms to Boko Haram

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (AP)  Nigeria's military says some officers are selling arms and ammunition to Boko Haram, indicating the corruption bedeviling the country's fight against the Islamic extremists continues despite government efforts to halt graft.

The admission comes three weeks after the Nigerian army said a military tribunal is trying 16 officers and troops accused of offenses related to the fight against Boko Haram, including the theft and sale of ammunition.

Maj. Gen. Lucky Irabor, the theater commander in northeastern Nigeria, told a news conference on Thursday that military authorities have confirmed that some soldiers were selling arms and ammunition to Boko Haram. He called it a betrayal of the Nigerian people. He gave no more details.

FILE- In this Thursday, May 12, 2016 file photo, Nigeria President Muhammadu Buhari listens during a panel discussion at the Anti-Corruption Summit in London, England. Nigeria's military says some officers are selling arms and ammunition to Boko Haram, indicating the corruption bedeviling the country's fight against the Islamic extremists continues despite government efforts to halt graft. The admission comes three weeks after the Nigerian army said a military tribunal is trying 16 officers and troops accused of offenses related to the fight against Boko Haram, including the theft and sale of ammunition. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, Pool, File)

President Muhammadu Buhari has blamed corruption for the deaths of thousands in the seven-year Islamic uprising that has killed more than 20,000. Children who escaped Boko Haram are dying of starvation in refugee camps in the northeast, where the government is investigating the alleged theft of food aid.

A soldier on the frontline of the fight told The Associated Press that his brigade commander is among officers standing trial at the court-martial in this northeastern city, which is being held in secret. He said the army is investigating what happened to 21 anti-aircraft guns assigned this year to his artillery brigade. He said they only received one gun. The soldier spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared he would lose his job.

In addition, a slew of retired and current military officers are being investigated for diverting hundreds of millions of dollars budgeted to help curb the Islamic uprising. Among them is Alex Badeh, a four-star general whom Buhari fired from his post as chief of defense staff. Witnesses have told a Federal High Court that Badeh stole the equivalent of $24 million budgeted for salaries in 2013 and built a shopping mall in Abuja, the capital.

Civil society groups are demanding the investigation of the current chief of army staff, Lt. Gen. Tukur Buratai, for allegedly buying with cash two properties worth $1.5 million in Dubai. Buratai has said he bought the property on installment with savings.

Before Buhari took power, soldiers told the AP they were forced into battle with just 30 bullets each and no food rations. They said Boko Haram was better armed and that their officers were stealing parts of their salaries and allowances. Many ran away when the extremists attacked, allowing Boko Haram to take control of a large swath of northeastern Nigeria in 2014.

Under Buhari, a former military dictator, a multinational force has retaken most towns but Boko Haram remains active outside urban areas, carrying out hit-and-run attacks, suicide bombings and abductions of women and girls.

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On Road to 270, Arizona is home to best chance for a spoiler

PHOENIX (AP)  If Hillary Clinton carries Arizona in November, there's a good chance it won't be because Democrats on their own have flipped a reliable GOP state they hope to win consistently someday.

Instead, Clinton and Democrats may have Gary Johnson to thank.

The Libertarian Party nominee's best chance to influence the presidential race may come in Arizona, where the former New Mexico governor appeals to a group of finicky conservatives who make up part of the GOP base.

FILE - In this May 18, 2016 file photo, Libertarian presidential candidate, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson speak with legislators at the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City. If Hillary Clinton carries Arizona in November, theres a good chance it wont be because the Democratic Party alone has picked off a reliably red state it believes will someday be consistently blue. Instead, she may have Gary Johnson to thank. The Libertarian Party nominees best chance to impact the 2016 presidential race may well be in Arizona, a traditionally Republican state where he appeals to a group of finicky conservatives who make up part of the partys base. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)

"It could happen," said GOP Sen. Jeff Flake. "Donald Trump has managed to make this an interesting state in terms of presidential politics, and not in the way that Republicans have wanted."

Johnson "is an easy out for some people in our party," Flake told The Associated Press.

About a dozen of the most contested states will help determine which candidate gets the 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. In Arizona, where the Republican nominee has carried the state in 11 of the past 12 presidential elections, Johnson could play the spoiler, potentially putting 11 electoral votes in Clinton's column.

The GOP's recent struggle with independent-minded, small-government Libertarians was clear before Trump's speech Wednesday in Phoenix, when he reaffirmed a hard line on immigration. And his stance could alienate the roughly one-quarter of Hispanic voters in the state who usually align with Republicans.

"I think that right now we're at a tipping point, where at any moment we are going to begin to see an outpouring of support," said Latino GOP strategist Juan Hernandez, who works for Johnson in Arizona.

Sensing an opportunity herself, Clinton began airing television advertisements in the state Friday, and has reserved $500,000 in ad time through mid-September.

Democratic strategist Andy Barr said Hispanic turnout was "the multimillion-dollar question." About one-third of the state's population identifies as Latino, but their share of the vote ranges between 12 percent and 16 percent, according to public and private polling.

"This closer it gets to 20 percent, the more our chances of winning go up," Barr said.

Johnson will appear on the ballot in every state this fall, while Green Party nominee Jill Stein is on track to make it in at least half. Neither is remotely within reach of carrying a state. Neither seems in a position to tip any state toward Trump.

But Johnson could move a close race toward Clinton, in much the same way that Ralph Nader pulled enough votes away from Democrat Al Gore in 2000 to hand Florida to Republican George W. Bush.

Four years ago, Libertarian candidates in Arizona drew enough votes away from Republicans that Democrats Ann Kirkpatrick and Kyrsten Sinema won election to the U.S. House.

Flake, who had endeared himself to many Libertarians while serving in the House, won his Senate race that year, too.

"It's a really sore spot for the party," Arizona Republican Party spokesman Tim Sifert said of those 2012 results. "You could see people frustrated, throwing away their vote and going with a third-party candidate."

The views of most Libertarians, focused on personal liberty and small government, overlap more with Republicans than Democrats. Johnson's call for dramatically lower business taxes and regulation to unburden entrepreneurs resonates with Matthew Sherman of Phoenix, who describes himself as more as a conservative than as a Republican.

"I'm for whoever has the best plan on startup companies," said the 31-year-old who's working on a business networking app. "So far, that's Gary."

Republican Dave Richins, a councilman in Mesa City, said Johnson is conservative on spending, but tolerant on social issues, which he calls "a pragmatic combination."

"For me, a lifelong Republican, I don't agree with everything Johnson proposes," said Richins, a Johnson organizer. "But I find his pragmatism refreshing. That's how we get things done."

Johnson's hands-off approach to government also includes decriminalizing marijuana, and he could benefit from a November ballot proposal in Arizona on that question.

"That's another reason for Libertarians to vote in higher numbers," said Barr, who is running the decriminalization campaign. "We're inclined to believe that could increase Johnson's performance."

At the beginning of August, Johnson's campaign had $1.2 million after raising $1.6 million in July, according to Federal Election Commission reports. Since Aug. 1, he's raised more than $3 million, according to his campaign. That's a paltry sum compared with Trump and Clinton, whose campaign said it raised a total of $143 million last month.

Johnson is spending in a few competitive campaign states, including Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, and less competitive ones such as Oregon, New Mexico and Utah.

Arizona is not on that list, but aides say it likely will be this fall.

"As a New Mexican, he's fairly well known in Arizona," said Johnson's spokesman, Joe Hunter. "Arizona makes sense for us. We have a natural base of support there."

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Associated Press writer Chad Day in Reeds Spring, Missouri, contributed to this report.

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(Xinhua) 11:37, September 04, 2016

DAVAO CITY, the Philippines, Sept. 4 -- A moderate earthquake shook parts of southern Philippines on Sunday, sending panicky people to the streets, but there were no reports of damage.

The 5.7-magnitude quake struck around 10:38 a.m. local time and was centered some 6 kilometers northeast of La Paz township in Mindanao's Agusan del Sur, according to the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and

Seismology (Phivolcs).

The temblor has a depth of focus of 11 kilometers, Phivolcs said.

Residents in several areas across the southern Philippine island had felt the tremor which lasted for over 15 seconds.

"I was inside my room when things began to suddenly move. I soon realized there was an earthquake," said Frederick Divino, a disc jockey for a music station in Davao City, over 200 kilometers south of the epicenter.

In San Francisco, Agusan del Sur, some 50 kilometers from La Paz, radioman Richard Grande said he was feeling dizzy due to the strong movement caused by the quake.

"The shaking lasted for almost a minute," Grande said.

Phivolcs said aftershocks are expected following the quake.
Lawmakers likely to do what they do best: the bare minimum

WASHINGTON (AP)  Lawmakers return to Washington this week for an abbreviated election-season session in which they will likely do what they do best: the bare minimum.

All Congress must do this month is keep the government from shutting down on Oct. 1 and, with any luck, finally provide money for the fight against the mosquito-borne Zika virus. Republicans controlling Congress promise they won't stumble now, but the weeks ahead could prove tricky.

A chief motivation for the September session, especially for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is allowing lawmakers to return to campaigning as soon as possible. Republicans are scrambling to hold onto their Senate edge as GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump lags in the polls.

FILE - In this Jan. 27, 2014 file photo, the Capitol is seen from the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington. Lawmakers return to Washington on Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2016 for an abbreviated election-season session in which they will likely do what they do best: the bare minimum. In this case, that means preventing the government from shutting down and finally providing money for the government's battle against the mosquito-borne Zika virus. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

The short-term spending measure is sure to pass. The alternative is that Republicans would get the blame for a government shutdown, as they did in 2013.

But it's a complicated path for the temporary spending bill. Some House conservatives say the measure should last into next year, when there is a new president and a new Congress, and that would block any chance for a session after the Nov. 8 election. Leaders in both parties feel otherwise  as does President Barack Obama  and a temporary measure until December seems to be the consensus.

"We are not doing anything into next year and every Republican should be aware of that right now," said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

Lawmakers left Washington seven weeks ago without resolving a dispute over money for Zika. The virus can cause severe birth defects and is linked to a host of other maladies. Obama asked Congress in February for $1.9 billion in emergency money, but legislation to partially pay for his proposal collapsed in July amid various fights. Among them was a Republican provision to deny money to Puerto Rican affiliates of Planned Parenthood.

Because the shutdown-prevention measure simply has to pass, it's a tempting target for lawmakers seeking to use it as a vehicle for their preferences. For instance, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., is pressing for emergency grants to help communities in his flood-ravaged state to recover.

"I hope we can accomplish that in September," Cassidy said.

But GOP leaders probably will try to keep the spending bill as free of unrelated additions as possible, especially now. If GOP leaders were to grant Cassidy's request, it would make it more difficult to say no to others, such as Democrats seeking money for fixing the lead-tainted water system of Flint, Michigan.

House conservatives are looking to press ahead with impeaching IRS Commissioner John Koskinen over the destruction of agency emails and misleading testimony on whether the tax agency, before his arrival, improperly scrutinized conservative groups seeking nonprofit status. The impeachment drive is a headache for Republicans who believe that Koskinen's conduct isn't serious enough to warrant impeachment, but who may be reluctant to support the Democratic appointee in such a politically charged environment.

In a recent memo, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said lawmakers will take up legislation regarding the Obama administration's $400 million payment to Iran in January, made immediately after four U.S. prisoners were released. The payment, for undelivered arms to the shah of Iran, was made on the same day of the prisoner release, and Republicans call it "ransom." The as-yet-unreleased legislation is designed to prevent a repeat, but seems like an election-season messaging effort.

McConnell also wants to advance a popular water projects measure. But the priority is to simply adjourn the chamber to allow embattled incumbents such as Sens. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and Richard Burr, R-N.C., to get back home and campaign for re-election against the political headwinds created by Trump.

The abbreviated session should give GOP-run committees a final pre-election chance to hold hearings on the Obama administration and other targets such as EpiPen manufacturer Mylan, N.V. That company has come under withering criticism for steep price increases for its life-saving injector, which can stop potentially fatal allergic reactions to insect bites and stings, and foods such as peanuts and eggs.

House Republicans are promising hearings on Hillary Clinton's emails. FBI Director James Comey criticized Clinton's use of a homebrew email server to handle sensitive work-related emails as "extremely careless," but said his agency's yearlong investigation found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Republicans now are demanding that the Justice Department open a new investigation into whether Clinton lied during testimony last year before the House Benghazi committee. They claim the FBI note may show Clinton provided inconsistent answers to questions about her handling of emails containing classified information.

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This story has been corrected to reflect that Sen. Reid is D-Nev., not R-Nev.

In this May 24, 2016 photo, House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wis. faces reporters at Republican National Committee headquarters on Capitol Hill in Washington. Congress has a long to-do list when lawmakers return from a seven-week recess Tuesday, but its unclear if much of it will get done. Presidential election politics will hover over all business in the month before lawmakers leave Washington again to go home and campaign. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Ahead of fall election, Congress has a lengthy to-do list

Congress has a long to-do list when lawmakers return from a seven-week recess Tuesday, but it's unclear if much of it will get done.

Presidential politics will hover over all business in the month before lawmakers leave Washington again to go home and campaign. They're unlikely to make any progress on agenda items like gun control, trade, criminal justice or the confirmation of a new Supreme Court justice.

A few items on the shortened to-do list:

In this May 24, 2016 photo, House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wis. faces reporters at Republican National Committee headquarters on Capitol Hill in Washington. Congress has a long to-do list when lawmakers return from a seven-week recess Tuesday, but its unclear if much of it will get done. Presidential election politics will hover over all business in the month before lawmakers leave Washington again to go home and campaign. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

KEEP THE GOVERNMENT OPEN

Funding for the government expires Oct. 1 and policy disputes between the two parties have kept the House and Senate from passing spending bills. As in past years, this means that lawmakers will have to pass short-term legislation to extend current spending and keep the government open.

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ZIKA VIRUS

A dispute over abortion has stalled legislation to provide $1.1 billion to help the government combat the mosquito-borne Zika virus. This legislation will remain a priority as dozens of Zika cases have been confirmed in Florida since Congress left in July.

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DEFENSE POLICY

A House-Senate conference committee is trying to finish work on a defense policy bill that could require young women to sign up for the draft for the first time.

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HILLARY CLINTON

Republicans in Congress are pushing the Justice Department to open a new a new investigation into whether Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton lied during testimony last year before a House panel investigating the deadly 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

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IRAN

Republicans are expected to pass legislation addressing the Obama administration's $400 million payment to Iran in January, made immediately after four U.S. prisoners were released.

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IRS COMMISSIONER
Kuwait warns citizens on carrying extremist materials to US

KUWAIT CITY (AP)  The Gulf nation of Kuwait has warned citizens traveling to the U.S. to check their phones and laptops to ensure they do not contain any material that could be linked to extremist groups.

The official Kuwait News Agency reported Saturday that the Kuwaiti Embassy to Washington also urged citizens to "cooperate fully" with American airport officials seeking access to their devices.

It warns that immigration officials could interrogate Kuwaitis and cancel entry visas if extremist photos, videos or other materials are found.

FILE -- In this July 3, 2015 file photo, Sunni and Shiite worshippers attend joint Friday prayers at the Grand Mosque in Kuwait City, one week after a suicide attack by an Islamic State sympathizer on Shiite worshippers. Kuwait has warned citizens traveling to the U.S. to check their phones and laptops to ensure they do not contain any material that could be linked to extremist groups. The official Kuwait News Agency reported Saturday, Sept. 4, 2016, that the Kuwaiti Embassy to Washington also urged citizens to "cooperate fully" with American airport officials seeking access to their devices. (AP Photo, File)

The warning comes after Kuwaiti media reported that three Kuwaitis were refused entry to the U.S. earlier this year.
Turkey coop home of Burt's Bees co-founder to be saved

PARKMAN, Maine (AP)  The converted turkey coop that a co-founder of Burt's Bees once called home in Maine is going to be saved and displayed at the company's headquarters in North Carolina.

Burt's Bees has bought the structure where Burt Shavitz once lived and has moved it to Durham, where it's going on display this fall.

"It's a legacy project. It's going to be maintained so that people can see it and appreciate it," said Trevor Folsom, Shavitz's former personal assistant, who inherited the structure. "I just felt that it should always be taken care of, no matter what."

FILE-In this Friday, May 23, 2014 file photo, Burt Shavitz, co-founder of Burt's Bees, poses on his property in Parkman, Maine. The converted turkey coop in background that Shavitz once called home is going to be saved and displayed at the company's headquarters in North Carolina. Shavitz died in July 2015. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)

The 300-square-foot shelter with no running water is where Shavitz lived before finding fame through Burt's Bees. He ended up back there when his house was damaged by fire in February 2015.

Shavitz, who died in July 2015, went from a hippie making a living by selling honey into a corporate icon after a chance encounter with a hitchhiking Roxanne Quimby led to a partnership that became Burt's Bees. An image of Burt's face  and his wild beard  was featured on labels.

But fame never suited him. He preferred his reclusive life in Maine, where he returned when their business partnership soured after Quimby moved the company from Maine in 1994.

Quimby used some of the hundreds of millions of dollars she made when she eventually sold the company to purchase land that she donated to become a national monument, a designation granted last month by President Barack Obama.

Burt, meanwhile, cherished his own property in a heavily wooded corner of Maine. All manner of critters traipsed across his land in Parkman  deer, moose, pine martens, fox and coyotes  and he enjoyed passing the time by watching the wildlife while living in quiet solitude.

"The land is everything," he told The Associated Press in 2014.

Burt's Bees hopes that opening the humble, cedar-shingled home to the public in November will underscore the importance of nature and simple living to the company's co-founder.

"The whole purpose of the business is to reconnect people with the wisdom, power and beauty of nature. We think that's particularly important now as things become more urbanized, tech-driven and hurried," said Jim Geikie, the company's general manager.

After his death, Shavitz was buried quickly, in Jewish tradition. Quimby was among those who attended the funeral along with family and friends in Bangor, Maine.

Shavitz eschewed the corporate life, preferring to live simply, and didn't leave behind a vast fortune.

In his will, the former New York photojournalist left his 1961 BMW motorcycle with sidecar to a local man. Folsom inherited remaining assets including land in Parkman and Abbott, along with Shavitz's golden retriever and a $35,000 trust fund created for the dog, named Pasha.

These days, his property has a new look. A deck is all that remains from where the turkey coop once stood. His house is also gone, having been torn down after the fire. A barn and Folsom's home remain.

For Folsom, his time with the quirky and cantankerous Shavitz marked an extraordinary period in his life.

"I certainly miss Burt," Folsom said. "We had a fantasyland existence that was unlike any other. It certainly wasn't your average life."

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Follow David Sharp on Twitter at https://twitter.com/David_Sharp_AP. His work can be found at http://bigstory.ap.org/content/david-sharp.
Growing grapes, saving lives in Cleveland's tough east side

CLEVELAND (AP)  Rows of red and white grapes climb trellises surrounded by a crumbling brick building, an empty corner store and graffiti-covered apartments.

The man who planted the vineyard says his plan for the lot once occupied by a crack house goes far beyond bottling wine.

Mansfield Frazier wants to show there's still hope for the neighborhood and for those trying to move away from a life of crime, just like he did years ago.

This Friday, June 24, 2016 photo shows Mansfield Frazier walks by the vineyards at The Vineyards of the Chateau Hough, in Cleveland. Frazier started the vineyard in 2010, hoping to brighten his corner of Cleveland's impoverished Hough neighborhood. He works with former convicts who are just out of prison, giving them jobs at the vineyard and a fresh start. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)

Too often, neither one is given much of chance  at least not on the city's east side where the collapse of the manufacturing economy, poverty and racial inequality came together, leaving behind some of the nation's bleakest areas.

Home to oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller and other wealthy industrialists during the early 1900s, the mansions along "Millionaire's Row" have given way to desolate neighborhoods where every fifth house is vacant, over half the children live in poverty and crime is a constant worry.

"There's a pipeline from cradle to prison in too many homes in our community," said Frazier, 73, a former hustler whose dealings with stolen and counterfeit credit cards kept him in and out of prison until two decades ago.

An urban vineyard is the last thing anyone expects to find in the middle of Hough (rhymes with tough), a neighborhood still saddled by the memory of six days of looting and violence that left four dead 50 years ago this summer.

The idea of growing grapes started out six years ago, Frazier said, as a way to spruce up the weed-infested corner across from his home and take a stand for the community. So was building a new house in the neighborhood in 2000.

"It's up to us to solve the problem," he said. "We wanted to live where the problem was. That's why other middle class blacks are moving to Hough. You shouldn't have to move to improve your neighborhood."

Hough has seen a smattering of new homes go up during the past 15 years. It's not unusual to see a newly built house with a manicured lawn next to an empty lot and a boarded-up building.

Using a grant from the city, Frazier created the vineyard on the lot that covers less than an acre with help from ex-cons who were living in a nearby halfway house. They start out as volunteers and then he hires them afterward, if they are willing to work. They cut vines, prune, weed and learn to show up on time.

"That's part of our training, making them dependable. It's a challenge," Frazier said.

Frazier has gotten a few small grants over the years, along with fundraisers and donations from the community to help pay for the hired help. But mostly, he and his wife have put their own money into the venture.

About 50 have come through so far, with a little less than half going on to find new jobs.

"They're truck drivers, some are working construction, some in restaurants," he said. "The others, we don't know where they're at. Some are in incarceration. We get some guys who screw up, who like prison."

Joe McCulsky credits Frazier for giving him a chance when no one else would when he got out of prison three years ago after serving time on a drug charge. Frazier even gave him a loan so he could afford his first month's rent.

"A lot of people look at you like 'you're a convicted felon, we don't want anything to do with you,'" said McCulsky, who worked at the vineyard for eight months and now has a job at a tree service.

"If you want to change, he'll give you a chance," he said. "Wish there were more like him."

Marvin Foster Jr. has been with Frazier since the vineyard's first year. Before that, he said he was "a bad guy doing nothing"  stealing televisions, ripping metal siding off homes and dealing drugs.

"Without this, I'd probably be in prison like my brother," he said. "Everybody knows Hough from the riots. That's a negative, this is a positive."

But Foster, 26, knows the vineyard can't save everyone. His cousin lasted just two weeks and has been in and out of jail.

"We tried with him," Frazier said, his voice trailing off.

The vines will be fully mature next year, capable of producing 3,000 bottles. Frazier still needs a license to sell the wine, but he has made several bottles over the past few years.

Each has a label with a map of the neighborhood and says "The Vineyards of Chateau Hough."

"It's really a re-entry program that's parading as a vineyard," he said. "We become their family, but mentoring doesn't work without a paycheck."

This Friday, June 24, 2016 photo shows Mansfield Frazier checks his grapes at The Vineyards of the Chateau Hough, in Cleveland. Frazier started the vineyard in 2010, hoping to brighten his corner of Cleveland's impoverished Hough neighborhood. He works with former convicts who are just out of prison, giving them jobs at the vineyard and a fresh start. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)

This Friday, June 24, 2016 photo shows a bottle of Frontenac-Valdipina at The Vineyards of the Chateau Hough, in Cleveland. Mansfield Frazier started the vineyard in 2010, hoping to brighten his corner of Cleveland's impoverished Hough neighborhood. He works with former convicts who are just out of prison, giving them jobs at the vineyard and a fresh start. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)

This Friday, June 24, 2016 photo shows Mansfield Frazier standing at the entrance of The Vineyards of the Chateau Hough, in Cleveland. Frazier started the vineyard in 2010, hoping to brighten his corner of Cleveland's impoverished Hough neighborhood. He works with former convicts who are just out of prison, giving them jobs at the vineyard and a fresh start. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)

This Friday, June 24, 2016 photo shows Marvin Foster Jr. talking about his experience working at The Vineyards of the Chateau Hough, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)
French stage anti-racism protest after Chinese man's death

PARIS (AP)  Crowds rallied Sunday in the French capital to urge an end to violence against the Asian community, after the beating death of a Chinese tailor called new attention to ethnic tensions in Paris suburbs.

The prime minister tweeted his support for the march, organized by anti-racism and Chinese community groups calling for better police protection. Local officials and representatives of the governing Socialist Party also took part.

The spark for the protest was the death of Chaolin Zhangh last month in the Paris suburb of Aubervilliers after a robbery attempt. The victim's lawyer says the attack was ethnically motivated, and the area's Chinese immigrant community says it is routinely targeted by armed robbers and violence.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve met with Zhangh's family and the mayor of Aubervilliers, home to a large Chinese community and textile industry, and promised better security.

Three teenagers  two of them minors  have been arrested and handed preliminary charges in the death, the regional prosecutor's office said. They haven't been identified.

The incident came after years of simmering tensions in working class French suburbs with large populations with immigrant roots. Anti-racism group MRAP warned in a statement about Zhangh's death that minorities are being "artificially set against each other, which camouflages a social malaise that they are all victims of."
Dry weather could shorten New England's fall foliage season

Dry weather in New England, including drought conditions in southern reaches, could dull some of the region's famous fall foliage and cut the color short in some spots  but it all depends where the trees are.

Businesses that make money off leaf-peepers aren't too worried, even if the colors aren't as bright or stick around very long.

"The trees probably won't be as brilliant as usual, but it seems people book vacations well in advance and area hotels are already booked by now," said Lisa Davol, the marketing and membership manager for the Franklin County Chamber of Commerce in Massachusetts.

In this photo taken Friday, Sept. 2, 2016, dwarf corn stalks from lack of rain are seen in a field in Barnstead, N.H. The drought in southern New England and dry spells this summer further north mean fall foliage could come earlier this year and not last as long in some areas. (AP Photo/Jim Cole)

New Hampshire Travel and Tourism Director Victoria Cimino said it was too early to speculate.

"There's actually kind of a wide range of possibilities depending on where you are in the region and just how dry it is," said Paul Schaberg, a research plant physiologist with the U.S. Forest Service northern research station in Burlington, Vermont.

In particularly dry areas and those with thin soil, leaves on some trees could turn brown and crispy and fall off. Modest stress  such as dry conditions can also trigger a display of vibrant red in particular trees, boosting the range of color. But that splash won't last long in drought-stricken areas.

"They're having this burst of colors which won't last as long because it's dry and the leaves will drop sooner," said Esperanza Stancioff, of the University of Maine cooperative extension and Maine Sea Grant. This week Maine had abnormally dry conditions on the bottom half of the state with moderate drought along the mid- and lower coast and severe drought in two southern counties.

The pigment can also leave drought-stricken leaves quicker, muting the colors, according to Ken Gooch, forest health program director for the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation where much of the state this week is in severe drought conditions and even extreme drought in some spots.

Aside from the drought, this year gypsy moth caterpillars chewed leaves on 350,000 acres of trees, mostly in eastern Massachusetts, he said. Some of the trees aren't growing new leaves as well because of the drought, he said.

"So a lot of those oak trees probably will not have good color," Gooch said.

But in other areas of the state, such as western Massachusetts  where there's a high concentration of sugar maple and red maple, beech and birch  good color is expected, he said. The drought also

Christopher Martin, the director of forestry in Connecticut, said he wouldn't be surprised if trees started changing a little earlier this year because of the drought.

"It's a little bit up in the air, but I think it will be good," he said of the state's foliage season.

The foliage season hits the higher elevations of northern New England first. For now, it's expected to be good in Vermont, which did not have a drought but was abnormally dry.

"Except for a couple of minor locations here or there, it's looking pretty good so far," Schaberg said of the foliage season, which starts in mid-to-late September up north and spreads south through October.

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US congressman's daughter returns Hungarian award in protest

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP)  The daughter of late, Hungarian-born U.S. Congressman Tom Lantos is returning a distinguished state award to Hungary to protest the bestowing of the same award to journalist and writer Zsolt Bayer who has made anti-Semitic and racist references in his articles.

Katrina Lantos Swett, who received the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit in 2009, joined over 100 other recipients in returning their awards.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington earlier called on Prime Minister Viktor Orban and President Janos Ader, who respectively nominated and granted the award to Bayer to "immediately" rescind it.

Ader's office told news website hvg.hu that based on current laws the award couldn't be recalled.

Lantos Swett was honored for her work in setting up the Budapest-based Tom Lantos Institute, which focuses on minority rights. Tom Lantos, a California Democrat who died in 2008, was the only Holocaust survivor in the U.S. Congress.

Lantos Swett said that she had hoped to leave the award to her children, but felt Bayer's distinction had "sullied" the Knight's Cross.

"Mr. Bayer's despicable record of overt and hateful anti-Semitism and racism is beneath contempt. He deserves censure, not honor, for his loathsome writings and speech," Lantos Swett said in a statement, adding that she was sure her father "would call on Hungary to restore the honor and virtue of this award by stripping Mr. Bayer of this unmerited recognition."

Daily newspaper Magyar Hirlap was fined by media authorities in 2013 and earlier this year for hateful remarks about Roma and Muslims in Bayer's columns.

In 2013, writing about a New Year's Eve bar fight in which several people were seriously injured and some of the attackers were identified as Roma, Bayer wrote: "A significant part of the Roma are unfit for coexistence. They are not fit to live among people. These Roma are animals and they behave like animals."

In a November 2015 column about the migrant crisis and extremism, Bayer said all Muslims older than 14 were "potential murderers."

Bayer, a member of Orban's governing Fidesz party, was distinguished with the Knight's Cross on Aug. 20 for his writings about the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, the fates of Hungarian prisoners in the Soviet Gulag prison system and for his "exemplary journalistic activities."

Bayer told website Mandiner.hu that receiving the award required him to be more restrained and, for example, abandon the foul language he often uses in his columns. Last year, he also said he regretted using some of the phrases deemed to be racist or anti-Semitic.

The Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities issued an ironic statement saying that the government had given Bayer the award to cheer up the "unsuccessful and grumpy" journalist, since his "frustrated cursing, and monotonous, hysterical and pitiful hatred harms not only he himself but the public mood, as well."

Several earlier recipients of state awards, including Miklos Haraszti, a former OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, were planning to auction off their medals on Sunday in benefit of destitute children and families, but the event was canceled.
'Makerspaces' balance, challenge for test-heavy curriculums

SHAWNEE, Kan. (AP)  Fifth-grader Bella Bartlomi sits at a table full of circuits and small robots, trying to connect the right circuits to make a small wheel spin. Instructors are standing by in the room, called a "makerspace," but let the students at the suburban Kansas City elementary school figure out things by themselves.

Eventually, she finds the right combination, showing off the spinning wheel with a big smile. "It makes me feel smart," she said. "I made it work. I tried to figure out how to make this move and I did it, by myself."

The "maker movement" that's reached K-12 schools across the United States during the last two or three years encourages collaborative, creative, student-driven education, and many educators have enthusiastically embraced the move away from the traditional classroom, in which teachers are "the sage on the stage" dispensing information.

Fifth grade teacher Suni Haberland provides batteries for a makerspace workstation at Bluejacket Flint Elementary School in Kansas City, Kan., Thursday, Aug. 25, 2016. The "makerspace" movement sweeping through K-12 schools across the United States encourages collaborative, creative, student-driven education. But there are concerns about how already-busy teachers can incorporate a counterpoint to schools' increasingly test-based curriculums and emphasis on reading, writing and arithmetic. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner)

But there are concerns that already-busy teachers will have trouble incorporating a counterpoint to schools' increasingly test-based curriculums that emphasize reading, writing and arithmetic. Plus, some of the makerspaces are being instituted in school libraries, where the quiet, reading-oriented space can be disrupted by the sometimes noisy creation process.

The Shawnee Mission, Kansas, School District, where Bella's Bluejacket-Flint Elementary is located, is converting rooms at several schools to makerspaces. The room where Bella recently worked houses a wide range of materials, including a 3-D printer, building blocks, a sewing machine and baskets of old toilet paper rolls, yarn and buttons.

"When you give kids the opportunity to work with their hands, and to go and show it from start to finish, they become so engaged, that they can talk with passion about it," said Christy Ziegler, the district's assistant superintendent for curriculum, instruction and assessment. "The days of standing up and rote reporting because it was assigned to me is changing."

It's difficult to quantify the maker movement's growth nationwide because research on such spaces in schools has barely begun, said Stephanie Chang, director of programs for the Oakland, California-based Maker Education Initiative. She noted her nonprofit has "been busier each year (since the group started in 2012)."

The transition for teachers from lecturing and testing to facilitating students' self-discovery can be daunting, because they must also meet curriculum and educational mandates, such as the multi-state Common Core and Next Generation Science requirements. Plus, most states have significantly changed how teachers are evaluated since 2009, with test scores are becoming a more important component, according to the Center of Public Education. Forty-one states require or recommend that teachers be evaluated not only on test scores but on other measures, such as observations of their classes.

Chang said her organization constantly gets questions about whether students will do well on tests if instructional time is devoted to maker education. Data isn't available yet to answer that question but she said teachers can "absolutely" use makerspaces to integrate content required for testing while also developing "hard skills," such as hammering or computer coding, and "soft skills," such critical thinking and collaboration.

"Coupled together, that makes for a more holistic learner as opposed to memorizing and regurgitating facts," she said.

Heather Moorefield-Lang, an assistant professor with the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Carolina, notes that makerspaces "aren't for everybody."

"I tell folks all the time that you have to look at the school's culture, at the community, and ask 'Is this the approach for your faculty, your staff, your community?' These places don't work if there is no buy-in," she said, adding that there is little formal training for the maker movement.

The American Association of School Libraries is concerned about reports of some schools replacing credentialed librarians with innovation specialists who are not certified in library sciences, according to president Audrey Church. But she stressed the organization strongly supports the movement.

"As librarians, our mission is to help students become critical thinkers, enthusiastic readers, skillful researchers and ethical users of information," she said. "Certainly, makerspaces fit really well within both the association and the mission of librarians."

Angela Rosheim created a makerspace at the library at Lewis & Clark Elementary School in Liberty, Missouri, about three years ago. The teacher-librarian said she and the district overall work hard to maintain a balance between traditional and makerspace education. She emphasizes reading, taking notes, using citations and being responsible users of information, supplementing those lessons with maker projects.

"Keeping with my curriculum hasn't been a problem for me," she said. "It does require some research, some trial-and-error and a lot of flexibility. But I figure out a way to make it gel so it works for me and my kids."

Students work together to assemble a project in the makerspace at Bluejacket Flint Elementary School in Kansas City, Kan., Thursday, Aug. 25, 2016. The "makerspace" movement sweeping through K-12 schools across the United States encourages collaborative, creative, student-driven education. But there are concerns about how already-busy teachers can incorporate a counterpoint to schools' increasingly test-based curriculums and emphasis on reading, writing and arithmetic. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner)

Michelle Brown works with students in a makerspace at Bluejacket Flint Elementary School in Kansas City, Kan., Thursday, Aug. 25, 2016. The "makerspace" movement sweeping through K-12 schools across the United States encourages collaborative, creative, student-driven education. But there are concerns about how already-busy teachers can incorporate a counterpoint to schools' increasingly test-based curriculums and emphasis on reading, writing and arithmetic. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner)

A lego board greets visitors to the makerspace at Bluejacket Flint Elementary School in Kansas City, Kan., Thursday, Aug. 25, 2016. The "makerspace" movement sweeping through K-12 schools across the United States encourages collaborative, creative, student-driven education. But there are concerns about how already-busy teachers can incorporate a counterpoint to schools' increasingly test-based curriculums and emphasis on reading, writing and arithmetic. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner)

Michelle Brown welcomes student to the makerspace at Bluejacket Flint Elementary School in Kansas City, Kan., Thursday, Aug. 25, 2016. The "makerspace" movement sweeping through K-12 schools across the United States encourages collaborative, creative, student-driven education. But there are concerns about how already-busy teachers can incorporate a counterpoint to schools' increasingly test-based curriculums and emphasis on reading, writing and arithmetic. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner)
The University of Missouri is defending its research practices after a national pet-adoption group publicly decried an experiment that led to six female beagles being euthanized.

The California-based Beagle Freedom Project, which is suing the university system over $82,000 in fees it says it is being charged for an open-records request, said it learned of the dogs' deaths after happening upon a published study about treatment for damaged corneas.

As detailed in April in the Journal of Veterinary Ophthalmology, the study said roughly 1-year-old beagles had their left eyes intentionally damaged while they were anesthetized.

The University of Missouri is defending its research practices after a national pet-adoption group publicly decried an experiment that led to six female beagles being euthanized

Half of the animals then were given a topical acid treatment to determine if that healed the eye damage; it didn't, and the dogs eventually were put to death.

Kevin Chase, vice president of the BFP, which rescues former research animals ranging from ponies to goldfish for adoption, called Mizzou's experiment 'a colossal failure' and 'cruel,' noting the 'cornea's top layer is filled with thousands of tiny nerve endings'.

'Caging dogs in a laboratory, intentionally damaging their corneas, and then killing them is about as ethical as picking people off the street and hitting them over the head with a pipe in order to test new concussion treatments,' Chase said.

Animal-rights groups widely say nearly 400 U.S. research labs use nearly 70,000 dogs each year, the vast majority of which are beagles, usually because of their docility.

The university issued a statement saying the beagles were anesthetized during the procedure and were given pain medications if any discomfort was evident.

The research, meant to develop painless or noninvasive treatments for corneal injuries, 'improves the quality of life for both animals and humans,' the university insisted.

'Animal research is only done when scientists believe there is no other way to study the problem, and our researchers respect their research animals greatly and provide the utmost care,' the statement read. 'The animals were treated humanely and every effort was made to ensure dogs were as comfortable as possible during the tests to study the effectiveness of the new drug treatment.'

That statement did not say whether its research animals commonly are euthanized.

In the study's conclusion, the four researchers acknowledge the small sample size, saying it was determined before undertaking the study that two dozen of the dogs would be required to detect a significant difference in the healing rates.

The university issued a statement saying the beagles were anesthetized during the procedure and were given pain medications if any discomfort was evident

The BFP successfully has lobbied for 'beagle bills,' which essentially require healthy dog and cat test subjects to be offered up to rescue organizations instead of having them automatically euthanized.

The Humane Society of the United States says such laws now exist in Connecticut, California, Minnesota, Nevada and New York.

The BFP sued the University of Missouri in May, alleging it violated the state's Sunshine Law by charging more than $82,000 for documents that the group sought related to dogs and cats on the Columbia campus.

Chase called the fees 'exorbitant' and an effort to stymie disclosure.

His group routinely files open-records requests in search of post-research candidate dogs for rescue and was looking through previously published reports about University of Missouri animal research when BFP happened upon the study involving the beagles.
(Xinhua) 13:54, September 04, 2016

QALAT, Afghanistan, Sept. 4 -- At least 34 persons were killed and 21 others wounded after a long-distance bus collided with a truck along a main roadway in Afghanistan's southern province of Zabul on Sunday, provincial police chief said.

"The accident took place along Kabul-Kandahar highway in Jaldak locality roughly at 05:00 a.m. local time. The crash caused the vehicles to catch fire," Gen. Mirwais Noorzai told Xinhua.

The wounded, suffering from severe burns and fractures, were transferred to hospitals in provincial capital Qalat city and neighboring Kandahar province, the police chief added.

The number of the deaths was likely to rise as many of the injured were in critical condition and among the victims were several women and children, he noted.

Local officials said that the overloaded bus travelling from Kandahar to Kabul was carrying around 60 people.

Reckless driving might be the reason for the deadly accident and an investigation into the incident is underway, according to local officials.

Some 73 people were killed and several others wounded in a three-vehicle crash on the same highway on early May this year.
California's native salmon struggling in 5th year of drought

STINSON BEACH, Calif. (AP)  The sleek, flapping salmon that fishermen hauled aboard the rolling Salty Lady charter boat near the Golden Gate Bridge were the survivors of the survivors.

After five years of drought, the native Chinook salmon that the men were reeling in this past week were there only because state and federal agencies have stepped in to do much of the salmon-raising that California's overtapped rivers once did. Most of the fish were born at the agencies' hatcheries and carried in trucks for release downstream.

As the men watched and waited for one of their fishing poles to dip sharply, Victor Gonella, president of the Golden Gate Salmon Association, remembered his childhood in the 1950s and 1960s when the salmon population was healthy enough that he could fish most months.

In this photo taken Monday, Aug. 29, 2016, Jared Davis hauls in a salmon caught off the coast of Stinson Beach, Calif. After five years of California drought, the sleek, flapping salmon that fishermen were hauling aboard the rolling Salty Lady charter boat this week were the survivors of the survivors, there to be hooked and netted only because state and federal agencies have stepped in to do much of the salmon-raising that the state's overtapped rivers used to do. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

Gonella recounted fishermen struggling to land salmon that had made their way to the Pacific Ocean from the San Joaquin River in particular, the fish powerful from muscling their own way from river to ocean.

These days, he said, "if it weren't for these fish that were trucked, we wouldn't be fishing."

The San Joaquin River has been dry for dozens of miles at a stretch for decades, its water diverted to booming farms and cities.

With the drought bringing one of the driest periods in California's history, federal and state authorities increasingly have had to intervene mechanically to carry out key stretches of the life cycle of salmon, whose numbers were already declining.

In 2014 and 2015, authorities reared millions of young salmon in artificial hatcheries and trucked them downstream to keep the fishing industry's mainstay supply of fall-run Chinook salmon afloat.

Another kind of California Chinook salmon, the winter-run, won federal listing in 2015 as one of the eight U.S. species most in danger of imminent extinction, after too-low and too-warm water in state rivers all but wiped out the 2014 and 2015 populations of the youngest winter-run salmon.

Not all salmon from state and federal hatcheries are tagged, but on this day, after hours of fishing, two of the nine salmon that were caught bear the clipped fin and tiny metal tag of hatcheries.

Management of California's river water is a balancing act that's often described as fish versus farmers. With dams blocking more than 90 percent of the salmon's original river habitat, agencies have struggled in the drought to release enough water at the right times to suit the needs of both crops and wildlife in the San Francisco Bay-Delta complex, the West Coast's largest estuary.

Because the salmon grow, spawn and die in three-year cycles, the troubles of 2014 and 2015 made it "critical that everything go well this year" for winter-run salmon in particular, said Jason Roberts, a fisheries supervisor for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

So far, Chinook appear for now to have caught the critical break they needed, thanks to rain and snow from El Nino-related storms this past winter.

Chinook salmon are an anchor species in California, not just for the state's estimated $1.4 billion commercial and sport fishing salmon industry, but for the health of land, river and ocean habitats. Because salmon divide their lives between the ocean and rivers, they provide food for animals ranging from orcas to bears and eagles. Once the fish die upstream, their decomposing bodies supply nitrogen that helps sustain forests.

Along with putting the winter-run salmon on the highly endangered list, federal authorities announced this year that they would formally review their management of key state waterways and reservoirs with regards to survival of native species.

Farmers and some fishermen envision a different future for salmon, with more machinery aiding their life cycle and less water.

Paul Wenger, an almond farmer and president of the California Farm Bureau Federation, has urged water managers, unsuccessfully so far, to consider widespread use of prototype mist incubators, touted to hatch larger numbers of salmon eggs in temperature-controlled machines using a fraction of the water the eggs would get in river beds.

Gonella, the fishing industry representative, thinks California's hatcheries might have to be moved to the oceanside, eliminating young salmon's ancient migration down rivers that now have too little water.

Environmental groups want agencies to go the other way, with less machinery and more water.

"The fact that these fish can no longer survive in the system that they've become genetically adapted to over how many centuries says something about how badly we're managing the system," said Kate Poole, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. "What we really need to focus on is creating healthy river conditions so these fish can survive and thrive in the wild."

In this photo taken Monday, Aug. 29, 2016, a group of veterans stand on the Salty Lady charter boat while heading out under the Golden Gate Bridge at dawn to go salmon fishing near San Francisco. After five years of California drought, the sleek, flapping salmon that fishermen were hauling aboard the rolling boat this week were the survivors of the survivors, there to be hooked and netted only because state and federal agencies have stepped in to do much of the salmon-raising that the state's overtapped rivers used to do. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

In this photo taken Monday, Aug. 29, 2016, Jared Davis prepares rods for salmon fishing as the Salty Lady charter boat heads for the Golden Gate Bridge at dawn in Sausalito, Calif. After five years of California drought, the sleek, flapping salmon that fishermen were hauling aboard the rolling boat this week were the survivors of the survivors, there to be hooked and netted only because state and federal agencies have stepped in to do much of the salmon-raising that the state's overtapped rivers used to do. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

In this photo taken Monday, Aug. 29, 2016, a group of veterans stand on the Salty Lady charter boat while heading out at dawn to go salmon fishing near Stinson Beach, Calif. After five years of California drought, the sleek, flapping salmon that fishermen were hauling aboard the rolling boat this week were the survivors of the survivors, there to be hooked and netted only because state and federal agencies have stepped in to do much of the salmon-raising that the state's overtapped rivers used to do. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

In this photo taken Monday, Aug. 29, 2016, a veteran on the Salty Lady charter boat struggles to reel in a salmon off the coast of Stinson Beach, Calif. After five years of California drought, the sleek, flapping salmon that fishermen were hauling aboard the rolling boat this week were the survivors of the survivors, there to be hooked and netted only because state and federal agencies have stepped in to do much of the salmon-raising that the state's overtapped rivers used to do. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

In this photo taken Monday, Aug. 29, 2016, a charter boat fishes for salmon off the coast of Stinson Beach, Calif. After five years of California drought, the sleek, flapping salmon that fishermen were hauling this week were the survivors of the survivors, there to be hooked and netted only because state and federal agencies have stepped in to do much of the salmon-raising that the state's overtapped rivers used to do. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

In this photo taken Monday, Aug. 29, 2016, a salmon flails in a water tub after being caught off the coast of Stinson Beach, Calif. After five years of California drought, the sleek, flapping salmon that fishermen were hauling aboard the rolling Salty Lady charter boat this week were the survivors of the survivors, there to be hooked and netted only because state and federal agencies have stepped in to do much of the salmon-raising that the state's overtapped rivers used to do. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

In this photo taken Monday, Aug. 29, 2016, a group of veterans on the Salty Lady charter boat are silhouetted in the morning sky while salmon fishing off the coast of Stinson Beach, Calif. After five years of California drought, the sleek, flapping salmon that fishermen were hauling aboard the rolling boat this week were the survivors of the survivors, there to be hooked and netted only because state and federal agencies have stepped in to do much of the salmon-raising that the state's overtapped rivers used to do. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

In this photo taken Monday, Aug. 29, 2016, a pair of veterans sleep on the Salty Lady charter boat during their return trip from salmon fishing outside San Francisco. After five years of California drought, the sleek, flapping salmon that fishermen were hauling aboard the rolling Salty Lady charter boat this week were the survivors of the survivors, there to be hooked and netted only because state and federal agencies have stepped in to do much of the salmon-raising that the state's overtapped rivers used to do. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)
Promising outsiders, Trump team led by Christie insiders

TRENTON, N.J. (AP)  Donald Trump is pledging that the government he appoints will bring sweeping change to Washington's culture. So far, that promise comes with a heavy New Jersey accent.

Despite being passed over for the job of Trump's running mate, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and an entourage of his closest allies could leave a lasting mark on a Trump administration, should he win in November.

As chairman of Trump's transition team, Christie is building a coalition of advisers who will staff key federal government agencies and execute new policy prescriptions if Trump wins the general election. Among them, are two of his longtime aides, Rich Bagger, a lobbyist who helped lead Christie's gubernatorial transition team and Bill Palatucci, a top Christie adviser whose law firm has been showered with government legal work.

FILE - In this Aug. 29, 2016 file photo, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie laughs at a question from the media after speaking in Trenton, N.J. Donald Trump is pledging that the government he appoints will bring sweeping change to Washingtons culture. So far, that promise comes with a heavy New Jersey accent. (AP Photo/Mel Evans, File)

"The chairman is the public face, sets the tone and ensures the transition has good connectivity with the candidate," said Clay Johnson, who served as executive director of George W. Bush's transition team in 2000.

The team also includes Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner  a New Jersey native  along with some experienced government officials such as Jaime Burke, who was the personnel director for the Romney transition team in 2012 and a White House liaison to Health and Human Services under George W. Bush.

Christie is also hosting a transition team fundraiser in New Jersey later this month promising to give an inside look at the team for $5,000 a person.

Presidential transition teams lay the groundwork early since the winner is ultimately faced with the daunting task of readying the new administration in the two and a half months between Election Day and the inauguration.

"You have to be proactive," Johnson added. "We didn't know how fast warp speed was but a transition goes faster than that. It's a mind boggling challenge."

As a former presidential contender, Christie has taken some very public swings at his opponent-turned-ally. He's called the New York businessman "thin-skinned," and said Trump's proposed Syria policies are "painfully naive."

Also Christie, like a number of Trump's closest advisers, brings his own share of baggage to the campaign. The embattled governor is still grappling with the fallout from a scandal back home, after lanes were closed on the George Washington bridge for political retribution. Lawyers for former Christie appointee Bill Baroni recently revealed text messages sent from an administration staffer to a campaign staffer that Christie "flat out lied" about his knowledge of the scandal.

Christie, who has not been charged and denies wrongdoing, disputed the remarks and called them "ridiculous." The criminal trial against Baroni and another former Christie aide is scheduled to begin Sept. 19.

Personal relationships have counted for a lot in previous presidential transition teams: George W. Bush tapped his longtime appointments director and chief of staff Johnson along with Dick Cheney, who chaired the effort, and Barack Obama's close adviser and friend Valerie Jarrett co-chaired his 2008 transition.

In Trump's case, however, it appears to be Christie's relationships that count.

Palatucci, a good friend of Christie's and longtime adviser, is serving as the transition team's counsel and Bagger, Christie's first chief of staff who is now an executive at a biopharmaceutical firm with close ties to his administration, was hired as executive director.

A former law partner and Republican political player, Palatucci is a longtime lobbyist for Community Education Centers and helped the company get contracts to house convicted criminals in privatized halfway houses.

In late 2012, Palatucci left that job to join the law firm Gibbons, P.C.  which has been one of the biggest recipients of state contracts for outside legal work since Palatucci was hired. That includes more than $3 million to defend the state in a whistleblower suit involving an investigation of a Christie donor who received a fake law enforcement ID badge.

That donor founded Celgene, the New Jersey biotech firm Bagger left the Christie administration to work for.

As part of his lobbying job for the company, Bagger also accompanied Christie on international economic policy trips that many saw as precursors to his presidential campaign. They were funded by a nonprofit called Choose New Jersey, which is financed by business contributions from Celgene and other businesses.

FILE- In this Thursday, Dec. 22, 2011 file photograph, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, right, and Jeff Chiesa, listen to Christie's Chief of Staff Richard Bagger at the Statehouse in Trenton, N.J. Despite being passed over for the job of Trump's running mate, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and an entourage of his closest allies could leave a lasting mark on a Trump administration, should he win in November. As chairman of Trump's transition team, Christie is building a coalition of advisers who will staff key federal government agencies and execute new policy prescriptions if Trump wins the general election. Among them, are two of his longtime aides, Bagger, a lobbyist who helped lead Christie's gubernatorial transition team and Bill Palatucci, a top Christie adviser whose law firm has been showered with government legal work. (AP Photo/Mel Evans, File)
4 Hours in Huntington: how the heroin epidemic choked a city

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. (AP)  He found the woman slumped over the steering wheel, an empty syringe on the floorboard and her skin dulling to a purplish blue.

Dave McClure, an EMS supervisor, counted four faint breaths per minute. Without the antidote he carried, she'd be dead in five minutes.

It was 3:25 p.m. on what was, so far, an ordinary Monday. For an EMT in this struggling city, bringing an addict back from the brink of opiate-fueled death counts as routine.

In this Aug. 28, 2016 photo, Cabell County EMT Tabitha Perez demonstrates how medics administer naloxone to overdosing patients, in Huntington, W.Va. On Aug. 15, 28 people overdosed in Huntington and 26 survived. Without the life-saving drug, authorities suspect the death toll would have been much higher. The laced heroin was so potent, the typical dose failed to revive many of them. They used two, sometimes three doses to bring them back to life. (AP Photo/Claire Galofaro)

But as McClure searched for an unscarred vein in the young woman's arm, dozens of others were shooting or snorting the same toxic powder she'd just taken. They started dropping, their muscles seizing, pupils shrinking to the size of pinheads. The heroin epidemic that had been quietly killing by the thousands began boiling to a climax that would traumatize the city and exhaust its emergency responders.

McClure's radio squawked as he pushed in the IV full of a liquid called naloxone, which blocks the effects of opioids and jolts those overdosing back to life. "We've got another overdose," the dispatcher reported. "We've got two more."

The woman's eyes blinked open.

Red lights on the phone at the 911 dispatch center flashed faster and faster until all 16 lines were screaming. They called from the dining room of a rickety house, the parking lot of a fast food restaurant, the bathroom of a gas station.

"People are dying everywhere," one caller said.

___

In the next four hours of Aug. 15, 28 people overdosed in Huntington; 26 of them were saved. One man died at the hospital that night, and another was found dead and alone days later.

Ambulances darted around town as cars pulled up at the hospital, dropped overdosing people at the emergency room doors and sped away. The drugs were so potent that the ordinary dose of naloxone wasn't enough; responders had to use two, sometimes three doses to bring them back to life.

"It was chaos here," says Yohlanda Dixon, a 55-year-old who lives in the neighborhood where dozens overdosed. "They were all dropping the same time, like boom boom boom boom boom. That's what was so scary. You knew they were fixing to die. And that's the last thing you want to see, someone die right in front of you."

But it didn't stop there.

The string of mass poisonings stretched across Appalachia and the Midwest. The chaotic scene in Huntington has repeated day after day, in big cities and small towns, in Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana. Health and law enforcement officials in Tennessee alerted residents to the danger and asked them to seek help to end their dependency.

In Louisville last week, an emergency room doctor was so startled by the number of patients and the potency of the drugs that he declared a public health emergency.

Law enforcement had warned for months that batches of heroin were hitting the streets laced with potent drugs like synthetic fentanyl or carfentanil, an elephant tranquilizer 100 times more powerful than heroin.

"We knew this day would happen. We didn't know what it would be like, but we knew it was just a matter of time," says Jan Rader, Huntington's deputy fire chief and a registered nurse.

When the day came, a 36-year-old Huntington woman was among its victims.

The woman told her story to The Associated Press on the condition her name not be used, for fear of retribution. She's battled drug addiction for 20 years, starting with pain pills she got for an ankle injury at 16. Her mother was an addict too, she says, and it didn't take long to start crushing and snorting them. She turned to heroin about three years ago, when law enforcement cracked down on the painkiller trade that had ravaged Appalachia, and pills became harder to find.

She and her husband live in a house on Sycamore Street, adjacent to Marcum Terrace, a sprawling public housing complex of squat brick buildings that has long been at the heart of this city's drug epidemic. Police believe the laced drugs were sold there, and most of the overdoses happened in the complex and the tangle of narrow streets that butt up against it.

A friend brought the powder to the woman's house. Her friend took it first, then her friend's boyfriend, then the woman herself.

She knew something wasn't right as soon as she snorted it  she felt her throat closing.

Her friend dropped to the dining room floor.

The boyfriend turned blue.

She knelt over her friend and started CPR, watching her own fingernails turn blue as she pushed down on her chest. All the while, she struggled for air. It felt, she says, like she was being stabbed with an invisible knife.

She remembers little after that.

Her husband got home and found the three of them, their skin the color of his bluejeans. He thought they were dead, tried CPR himself, then ran out to the street and screamed.

Around 3:30 p.m., a police officer arrived and shot her twice with naloxone.

She remembers opening her eyes, feeling terror, then shame. She promised she'd never do it again, and still hadn't, she says, two weeks later.

___

The calls kept coming.

At 3:35 p.m., a man overdosed in a car in a Burger King parking lot.

At 3:39 p.m., three people had collapsed inside an apartment.

At 3:45 p.m., McClure arrived alone at a house and found a man in his 50s in the bathtub, not breathing. His friends had turned on the water to try to revive him; they were shouting, crying, smacking him in the face. A younger man lay dying in the same bathroom.

McClure was alone with them for a few minutes, but in the bedlam it seemed like an hour. Other medics arrived and they used naloxone to bring them both back.

He got in his truck and left for the next call.

Huntington sits on the Ohio River at the corner of West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio. It was once a bustling railroad depot where trains packed with coal barreled through. But the coal industry collapsed. People lost jobs, lost hope, and now nearly one-third of residents live in poverty.

West Virginia's rate of drug overdose deaths is the highest in the nation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Huntington's is higher still. At least 944 people overdosed last year in the county, says Scott Lemley, an intelligence analyst with the Huntington Police Department who estimates that nearly 14 percent of residents are addicted to drugs.

It seems to be growing worse. At this time last year, EMTs had administered 130 doses of naloxone, says Steve Murray, the EMS assistant director. This year, they've given 307.

In the chaos, detectives started searching apartments, trying collect evidence about who was handing out the tainted drug. Within days, police would arrest an Ohio man named Bruce Lamar Griggs in connection to some of the Huntington overdoses.

But they learned long ago that arresting dealers wouldn't solve the problem. People keep dying.

The city last year started an office devoted to drug control policy led by former police chief Jim Johnson. They train citizens every Wednesday on how to use naloxone; police officers started carrying the drug; even the mayor keeps a dose in his pocket. Many more would certainly have died on Aug. 15 without it.

Still, the people they brought back to life have no place to go for help, even if their experiences scared them enough to get clean.

West Virginia has only 28 detox beds. There are just eight in Huntington, and they're always full. Medics revive the same people, again and again and again.

___

The endless cycle of death and misery is taking its toll on first responders, Murray says. Three EMTs left the department last month alone.

Even Johnson, who heads the drug policy office, wonders if it will ever end.

"It consumes me," Johnson says. He considers himself a tough old cop, one who struggles to deal with problems that have no obvious solutions. "If you were working an armed robbery, eventually you're going to be able to figure it out. There's not an answer out there for this."

There are up days and down days, he says, and Aug. 15 was both: Yes, responders saved 26 lives, but only because they had had so much practice.

They brought people back to life in apartments, on street corners, in the bathroom of a gas station.

Dixon, who lives in an apartment in Marcum Terrace, stepped out of her back door to take out her trash around 5 p.m. She saw a man, scrawny and staggering near the wood line in her back lawn. She watched him topple over, face down into the grass, and ran to him. His lips were already turning gray.

She screamed for help and the paramedics ran over, shot him twice with naloxone and he finally came to. They told him "he came within a hair of dying," yet he got up and walked to an ambulance.

McClure recalls the rest of the day in flashes: a man lying on a trail in the woods at 5:15 p.m., surrounded by syringes; a man and woman in a house nearby at 6:20 p.m.; a middle-aged man who'd been dragged to the sidewalk and left for dead at 6:30.

Some cried when they awakened and realized they'd come within minutes of dying, McClure says. Some fought, some shrugged, some said thank you and apologized.

"Most of the time they don't want that life  what brought them there, I don't know. They don't want this for their children either, and they feel terrible guilt. But they're caught in their own battle," McClure says. "At the end of the day, we gave 26 people another chance at finding recovery. That's how I try to look at it. Hopefully, maybe they'll all live."

McClure's next shift, a few days later, returned to routine: 12 overdoses. It was a good day, by comparison.

This Aug. 28, 2016 photo shows the Marcum Terrace public housing complex in Huntington, W.Va. Police believe the drugs which caused a series of overdoses were distributed in and around the Marcum Terrace public housing complex, a neighborhood at the heart of the city's long battle with drugs. Most of those who overdosed did so in the complex or in the surrounding neighborhood. (AP Photo/Claire Galofaro)
IS group claims gun attack in Danish drug neighborhood

HELSINKI (AP)  Danish police say they have no evidence that a gun attack in a Copenhagen suburb known for its hashish trade was ordered by the Islamic State group.

The IS-affiliated Aamaq news agency posted a statement Friday saying that the attacker was "a soldier of the Islamic State who carried out the operation in response to calls to target coalition states."

But Copenhagen police officer Michael Anderson said Sunday that they didn't think "it was an attack ordered by Islamic State." He declined further comment.
New wave of anti-China activists set for Hong Kong vote win

HONG KONG (AP)  A new wave of anti-China activists appeared headed for victory in Hong Kong's most pivotal elections since the handover from Britain in 1997, which could set the stage for a fresh round of political confrontations over Beijing's control of the city.

While official results were yet to be released, preliminary tallies on Monday indicated that youthful candidates from groups that emerged in the wake of 2014 pro-democracy street protests are on track to win seats.

Counting in some areas was delayed because of the record turnout. About 2.2 million people, or 58 percent of registered voters, cast ballots for lawmakers in the Legislative Council, which was the highest since the handover.

Electoral officers count ballots at the central ballot counting station for the legislative council elections in Hong Kong, Monday, Sept. 5, 2016. Hong Kong voted Sunday in the specially administered Chinese city's most crucial election since the handover from Britain in 1997, the outcome of which could pave the way for a fresh round of political confrontations over Beijing's control of the city. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

The newcomers were riding a rising tide of anti-China sentiment as they challenged formidably resourced pro-Beijing rivals for seats. Some backed the previously unthinkable idea of independence for Hong Kong, which has added to divisions within the broader pro-democracy movement and overshadowed the election.

Last month, officials disqualified six pro-independence candidates in an attempt to tamp down the debate, though other candidates with similar views made the cut.

Student Nathan Law, who helped lead the 2014 protests, looked to be one of the biggest winners. The 23-year-old's party, Demosisto, which he formed with teen protest leader Joshua Wong, advocates a referendum on "self-determination" of Hong Kong's future. He was expected to win a seat in the Hong Kong Island constituency after receiving the second-highest number of votes, with 90 percent of ballots counted.

In another surprising result, two candidates from the group Youngspiration, 25-year-old Yau Wai-ching and 30-year-old Sixtus "Baggio" Leung, look set for victory. The latter stepped in to run after a friend, Edward Leung of Hong Kong Indigenous, was disqualified for advocating independence.

Voters are choosing lawmakers to fill 35 seats in geographic constituencies. Another 30 seats are taken by members representing business and trade groups such as accounting, finance, medicine and fisheries. Five more "super seats" are chosen by voters citywide.

At stake is the power to keep the city's widely unpopular Beijing-backed leader, Leung Chun-ying, and his government in check. "Pan-democrat" lawmakers currently control 27 of 70 seats, compared with 43 held by lawmakers friendly to Beijing.

The democrats need to keep control of at least a third of the seats, which gives them veto power to block government attempts to enact unpopular legislation, including a possible renewed attempt to enact Beijing's controversial election revamp that triggered the 2014 street protests.

___

Follow Kelvin Chan on Twitter at twitter.com/chanman

His work can be found at http://bigstory.ap.org/content/kelvin-chan

Electoral officers count ballots at the central ballot counting station for the legislative council elections in Hong Kong, Monday, Sept. 5, 2016. Hong Kong voted Sunday in the specially administered Chinese city's most crucial election since the handover from Britain in 1997, the outcome of which could pave the way for a fresh round of political confrontations over Beijing's control of the city. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

Electoral officers count ballots at the central ballot counting station for the legislative council elections in Hong Kong, Monday, Sept. 5, 2016. Hong Kong voted Sunday in the specially administered Chinese city's most crucial election since the handover from Britain in 1997, the outcome of which could pave the way for a fresh round of political confrontations over Beijing's control of the city. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

People queue at a polling station at night to vote for the legislative council election at a housing estate in Hong Kong Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. Turnout appeared to be higher than average, with long lines of people still waiting to cast ballots at some polling stations by the time voting was supposed to end Sunday night. Some 52.6 percent of nearly 3.8 million registered voters had turned out an hour before polls closed, matching the total turnout for the previous election four years ago. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

People queue at a polling station at night to vote for the legislative council election at a housing estate in Hong Kong Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. Turnout appeared to be higher than average, with long lines of people still waiting to cast ballots at some polling stations by the time voting was supposed to end Sunday night. Some 52.6 percent of nearly 3.8 million registered voters had turned out an hour before polls closed, matching the total turnout for the previous election four years ago. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)
World scout body: controversial Jerusalem troop not a member

JERUSALEM (AP)  The world's main scouting organization on Sunday said it has no connection to a Palestinian troop in Jerusalem that dedicated a recent training course to one of the killers of an Israeli-American man.

Stephen Peck, spokesman for the World Organization of the Scout Movement, said the Jerusalem troop is not a member of his organization's Palestinian affiliate and "has no right to speak or publish on their behalf."

The east Jerusalem troop last month hosted a course dedicated to Baha Alyan  one of two Palestinian attackers who shot and stabbed passengers on a Jerusalem bus last October. Alyan was killed by a security guard, while a second assailant survived and is now serving multiple life sentences in an Israeli prison.

FILE - This undated file photo provided by the Lakin family shows, Richard Lakin, a dual Israeli-American citizen originally from Newton, Mass., who died Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2015, after he was critically wounded in a Palestinian attack on a public bus in Jerusalem two weeks ago had died of his wounds. The son of an American-Israeli man killed in a Palestinian attack last year has asked the global scout movement to expel its Palestinian branch after local members dedicated a recent training course to one of his father's killers. (Courtesy of the Lakin family via AP, File)

Richard Lakin, a retired school principal from Connecticut and advocate for Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, was among three people killed in the attack.

Lakin's son, Micah Lakin Avni, had appealed to the world scouting movement to expel the Palestinian Scout Association, saying the Alyan course violated the group's core principles.

The Palestinians have two scouting organizations: the globally recognized Palestinian Scout Association and the similarly named Palestinian Scout and Guide Association. The Jerusalem branch belongs to the second group, Peck said.

"The World Organization of the Scout Movement strongly condemns any acts of terrorism and all actions which seek to support them," he said in an emailed statement. "WOSM also condemns any attempts which seek to link our members with any such actions."

"WOSM is the world's largest youth movement with a strong commitment to peace and we will always take the strongest action to uphold these values," he added.

Tawfiq Salem, the general secretary of the recognized association, said his group is "fully committed" to the standards of the world scouting movement.

"We did not do any course in Jerusalem," he said. He declined to comment on the course, saying he did not want to discuss a "political" matter.

Ahmed Mashahreh, leader of the Jerusalem troop, on Sunday confirmed that his group did not belong to the Palestinian Scout Association.

He had claimed earlier that the recognition of Alyan had "nothing to do with politics." He said Alyan had been a longtime activist in his troop and the dedication was to acknowledge his years of activities.

Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli group that monitors what it says is incitement in Palestinian media and society, rejected the scout movement's conclusions.

In a letter to the movement, it said it had found overwhelming evidence that the two Palestinian scouting groups work closely with one another, including dozens of pictures identifying the same people as leaders of both organizations. The photos indicate "that the organizations are one and the same," it wrote.

Avni said he was "appalled" by the global scouting movement's response.

"There is no question that the Palestinian scouting association has been systematically inciting to violence and murder," he said. "I can't believe any true scout would want its hand in incitement in terror."

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The Latest: Turkey says IS driven from Turkish-Syrian border

BEIRUT (AP)  The Latest on the Syrian civil war (all times local):

7:15 p.m.

Turkey's state-run news agency says Turkish troops and allied Syrian rebels have driven the Islamic State group from the last strip of territory it controlled along the Syrian-Turkish border.

Turkish tanks stationed near the Syrian border, in Karkamis, Turkey, Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016. Turkey's state-run news agency says Turkish tanks have entered Syria's Cobanbey district northeast of Aleppo in a "new phase" of the Euphrates Shield operation. Turkish tanks crossed into Syria Saturday to support Syrian rebels against the Islamic State group, according to the Anadolu news agency. (Ismail Coskun, IHA via AP)

The advance effectively seals the extremist group's self-styled caliphate off from the outside word, shutting down key supply lines used to bring in foreign fighters, weapons and ammunition.

The Anadolu news agency reported Sunday that Turkey-backed Free Syrian Army rebels have cleared the area between the northern Syrian towns of Azaz and Jarablus. It says the advance "has removed terror organization Daesh's physical contact with the Turkish border in northern Syria." Daesh is an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group.

Turkey has launched two incursions into Syria since Aug. 24 in an operation designed to drive IS away from the border and prevent the advance of U.S.-backed Kurdish forces, which are also battling the extremist group.

12:27 p.m.

Syrian state media and an opposition activist group are reporting that government forces are advancing near the northern city of Aleppo in an attempt to impose a siege on rebel-held parts of the city.

Sunday's push comes a month after insurgent groups captured several military academies south of Aleppo and opened a corridor into rebel-held parts of Syria's largest city and former commercial center.

Since then government forces and their allies have been trying to recapture the area.

State news agency SANA quoted an unnamed military official as saying that troops have captured the Armament Academy and are "continuing their advance in the area to impose almost a total siege on the gunmen in Aleppo."
Guyanese sugar company selling off land to reduce its debt

GEORGETOWN, Guyana (AP)  The Caribbean trade bloc's largest sugar exporter is trying to sell off tracts of coastal land to help reduce its debts.

The government-owned Guyana Sugar Corporation ran advertisements in newspapers Sunday seeking bids on 2,000 acres (809 hectares) of land on the eastern coast, as well as large plots in and near the capital.

The company has about $400 million in debts and had struggled to meet targets for exports to the key European Union market.

The company's also seeking a cash injection from government to meet its debts while overhauling operations.
The Latest: Fresno jail lobby reopens a day after shooting

FRESNO, Calif. (AP)  The Latest on a shooting inside a central California jail that wounded two officers (all times local):

7:30 p.m.

The lobby of a central California jail has reopened a day after an ex-convict shot and critically wounded two unarmed officers.

Fresno County sheriff's deputies and Fresno police officers stand on scene near an ambulance after reports of an active shooter in the main lobby of the Fresno County Jail in downtown Fresno, Calif., Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016. Two unarmed officers were critically injured after being shot by a visitor in the lobby of the central California jail, authorities said Saturday. Officers from the secured areas inside the jail ran to the lobby, where a lieutenant fired shots at the gunman, identified as 37-year-old Thong Vang, who was taken into custody. (Silvia Flores/The Fresno Bee via AP)

Fresno County sheriff's spokesman Tony Botti says people can resume visiting inmates Sunday evening.

The correctional officers were shot in the head and neck areas during a struggle with a man who tried to cut to the front of the visitors' line and began pacing near a secure area of the jail.

Authorities say the officers were trying to get him to sit down when shots rang out.

The suspect has been booked into jail on attempted murder and other charges. The officers remained hospitalized on Sunday.

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12:10 p.m.

Authorities say there are no immediate plans to change security arrangements in the lobby of a central California jail where two unarmed officers were shot and wounded.

Fresno County sheriff's spokesman Tony Botti said Sunday that officials will review what happened Saturday and decide whether changes need to be implemented. Thong Vang, an ex-convict, is accused of shooting correctional Officers Juanita Davila and Toamalama Scanlan, who are both in critical condition.

Botti says the lobby of the Fresno County jail is guarded by unarmed officers and visitors go through metal detectors leading to secure areas. He says the jail lobby is closed but may reopen later in the day.

Vang was released from prison in 2014 after serving 16 years for raping three girls.

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9:45 a.m.

Authorities have booked into jail an ex-convict accused of shooting and wounding two unarmed officers inside a central California jail.

The Fresno County sheriff's office says 37-year-old Thong Vang faces charges of attempted murder, being a felon with a handgun and bringing drugs into a jail. He also has been placed on a parole hold.

Correctional officers Juanita Davila and Toamalama Scanlan are hospitalized Sunday in critical condition.

Authorities say the pair approached Vang after he tried to cut in the jail visitors line and began pacing near a secure area Saturday.

Sheriff Margaret Mims says Vang opened fire as the officers tried to get him to sit down. She says he surrendered after a lieutenant returned fire.

Vang was released on parole in 2014 after serving a 16-year prison sentence for raping three girls.

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11:40 p.m.

Authorities say two unarmed officers were critically injured after being shot by a visitor in the lobby of a central California jail.

Correctional Officers Juanita Davila and Toamalama Scanlan were shot in the head and neck areas during a struggle Saturday with a man who tried to cut to the front of the visitors' line and refused to take a seat when he began pacing near a secure area of the Fresno County jail.

Sheriff's spokesman Tony Botti says officers from the secured areas inside the jail ran to the lobby, where a lieutenant fired shots at the gunman, identified as 37-year-old Thong Vang.

Botti says that when confronted by sheriff's deputies and a Fresno police officer, Vang dropped his weapon and told authorities he wanted to be arrested.

This photo provided by Fresno County Sheriff shows Thong Vang Two unarmed officers were critically injured after being shot by Vang, a visitor in the lobby of a central California jail, authorities said Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016. (Fresno County Sheriff via AP)

This undated photo provided by the Fresno County Sheriff's Office shows corrections officer Toamalama Scanlan. He was one of two unarmed officers critically injured after a man opened fire in the main lobby of the Fresno County Jail in downtown Fresno, Calif., Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016. Authorities said officers from the secured areas inside the jail ran to the lobby, where a lieutenant fired shots at the gunman, identified as 37-year-old Thong Vang, who was taken into custody. The injured officers were dragged out of the lobby and taken to the hospital to undergo surgery. (Fresno County Sheriff's Office via AP)
Fire strikes antique Hopalong Cassidy collection in Ohio

CAMBRIDGE, Ohio (AP)  A museum dedicated to fictional cowboy hero Hopalong Cassidy has burned in Ohio.

A building housing the museum and the 105-room Scott's Antique Mall caught fire around 7:30 p.m. Saturday.

WBNS-TV in Columbus reports firefighters from four departments responded. Losses were expected to be major. No injuries were reported.

The "Hoppy Museum" paid tribute to the cowboy character created in 1904 through the short stories of author Clarence Mulford. Radio and television shows, movies, even an amusement park followed.
The G20 summit meets against the backdrop of two interrelated global issues.First,since the international financial crisis global growth has been slow. Second, asa result social and geopolitical crises have persisted. Chinas proposals for the G20 summit  an innovative, invigorated, interconnected and inclusive economy simultaneously and in an integrated way address both issues.

Chinas four proposals are inseparably connected:

Innovation, in technology and in management, logistics, skills and ideas, is indispensable for sustained economic development.

But innovation purely in ideas is insufficient to lead to sustained economic development. Advances in ICT technology, for example, had to be embodied in investment in internet and computer technologyto produce productivity gains. Therefore, the global economy must be invigorated through increased investment, new trade liberalisation agreements, new financial institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and modifications in global economic governance. This requires drawing on numerous resources in global economy and finance.

Development is most powerful if internationally integrated. Since Adam Smithfounded modern economics it has been known that the most powerful force developing productivity is division of labour, which in a globalised economy necessarily includes international division of labour.Retreats into protectionism deeply damage the world economy. But advancing international division of labour requires not only legal trade and investment agreements but development of internationally integrated infrastructure making such trade possible and supporting international investment. Such integration highlights the importance of Chinas One Belt, One Roadinitiative,while China supports economic integration in Africa, Latin America, Europe and elsewhere.

Development must be inclusive both between and withincountries.Failure of sections of the worlds population to benefit from economic development is dangerous politically. Impoverishment of sections of the population and social disintegration has led to terrorist organisations gaining support, andin some cases open warfare, in parts of Africa and the Middle East. Within advanced economies failure of parts of the population to gain from economic growth strengthens protectionist and xenophobic forces which threaten global economic integration and therefore global prosperity.

Success in developing innovative, invigorated, interconnected and inclusive economic growth will therefore lessen geopolitical and social tensions.

China is in an unequalled position to give leadership on this G20 agenda not only theoretically but due to Chinas practical achievements in dealing both with the international financial crisis and over the longer term.From 2007, the last year before the financial crisis, to 2015 China accounted for 46% of world growth measured at current exchange rates  compared to 22% for the second placed US.China was the world economys most powerful engine to face the international financial crisis, benefitting both advanced and developing economies.

World Bank data shows 83% of the worlds population still lives in developing countries. Economic development therefore remains the most pressing issue facing humanity. China, the worlds largest developing economy, increased its per capita GDP, the fundamental index of economic development, from 2007 to 2015 by 86% - the fastest of any G20 country.

China playsa key G20 agenda setting role because, in addition to these shorter term anti-crisis trends, Chinas historical economic and social achievements areunprecedented.From 1978 onwards China experienced the most rapid economic growth in a major economy in human history. China lifted 728 million people from World Bank defined poverty, 83% of the reduction of those living in poverty in the world. This is greatest contribution of any country to human well-being.

But despite theseachievements Chinas stress on integrated inclusive growth means China has no conception it can successfully develop alone. Instead China advocates strengthening the G20s role. G20 economies account for 85% of world GDP, including the largest advanced and developing economies. The G20 is therefore provides an unequalled forum to coordinate measures to deal with the worlds most pressing economic issues.

Chinas proposals for an innovative, invigorated, interconnected and inclusive economy are therefore crucial not only for this years Hangzhou summit but a step towards the G20s strategic development.

John Ross is Senior Fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China.
2 dead, 79 rescued in Turkey tourist boat capsizing

ISTANBUL (AP)  A Turkish news agency says two people have drowned and 79 others have been rescued after a tourist boat capsized off the coast near the southern resort of Antalya.

The private Dogan news agency, citing authorities, said a Turkish woman and a Lebanese man were found dead on Sunday after search and rescue operations.

Dogan says the boat capsized Saturday in heavy rainfall and high winds.
California jail reviews security after unarmed officers shot

FRESNO, Calif. (AP)  A central California jail was examining security measures after an ex-convict shot and wounded two unarmed officers in the lobby, but officials said Sunday that they did not plan any immediate changes.

After reviewing Saturday's shooting that left correctional Officers Juanita Davila and Toamalama Scanlan in critical condition, authorities will decide whether to alter procedures in the public area of the Fresno County jail, sheriff's spokesman Tony Botti said.

Unarmed officers guard the facility and visitors go through metal detectors leading to secure areas, Botti said. Visiting hours resumed Sunday evening when the jail lobby reopened.

This photo provided by Fresno County Sheriff shows Thong Vang Two unarmed officers were critically injured after being shot by Vang, a visitor in the lobby of a central California jail, authorities said Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016. (Fresno County Sheriff via AP)

Thong Vang, 37, is accused of shooting the officers in the head and neck areas during a struggle and has been booked into jail on suspicion of attempted murder, possessing a handgun as a felon and bringing drugs into a jail. He was placed on a parole hold, Botti said.

Vang was released from prison in 2014 after serving 16 years for raping three girls aged 14 and under, Sheriff Margaret Mims said. He had no criminal violations since his release.

Botti said he didn't know if Vang had an attorney who could comment on his behalf.

Scanlan, who has 10 years of experience, and Davila, an 18-year veteran, approached Vang after he tried to cut to the front of the visitors' line and began pacing near a secure area of the jail.

The officers were trying to get him to sit down when shots rang out. About 15 people, including small children, ran to safety.

Officers inside the jail ran to the lobby, where a lieutenant shot at Vang, who returned fire, Botti said. No one was hit.

Officers tried to subdue Vang with a stun gun, but he would not give up and ran to the hallway of the jail records area, authorities said. When confronted by sheriff's deputies and a Fresno police officer, Vang dropped his weapon and told authorities he wanted to be arrested, Botti said.

The injured officers were dragged out of the lobby and taken to the hospital to undergo surgery. Vang was taken to the hospital for minor scrapes and cuts.

Christy Rodriguez told the Fresno Bee newspaper that she and a woman with a walker hid in the bathroom after they heard the gunshots. Moments later, an officer yelled at them to get out of the building.

"This is crazy. This isn't supposed to happen," Rodriguez said.

This undated photo provided by the Fresno County Sheriff's Office shows corrections officer Toamalama Scanlan. He was one of two unarmed officers critically injured after a man opened fire in the main lobby of the Fresno County Jail in downtown Fresno, Calif., Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016. Authorities said officers from the secured areas inside the jail ran to the lobby, where a lieutenant fired shots at the gunman, identified as 37-year-old Thong Vang, who was taken into custody. The injured officers were dragged out of the lobby and taken to the hospital to undergo surgery. (Fresno County Sheriff's Office via AP)

This undated photo provided by the Fresno County Sheriff's Office shows corrections officer Juanita Davila. She was one of two unarmed officers critically injured after a man opened fire in the main lobby of the Fresno County Jail in downtown Fresno, Calif., Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016. Authorities said officers from the secured areas inside the jail ran to the lobby, where a lieutenant fired shots at the gunman, identified as 37-year-old Thong Vang, who was taken into custody. The injured officers were dragged out of the lobby and taken to the hospital to undergo surgery. (Fresno County Sheriff's Office via AP)

Fresno County sheriff's deputies and Fresno police officers stand on the scene after reports of an active shooter in the main lobby of the Fresno County Jail in downtown Fresno, Calif., Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016. Two unarmed officers were critically injured after being shot by a visitor in the lobby of a central California jail, authorities said Saturday. Authorities said officers from the secured areas inside the jail ran to the lobby, where a lieutenant fired shots at the gunman, identified as 37-year-old Thong Vang. Vang was taken into custody and taken to the hospital for minor scrapes and cuts. (Silvia Flores/The Fresno Bee via AP)

Law enforcement officials and others are seen outside the lobby of the Fresno County Jail after reports of an active shooter in the main lobby of the jail in downtown Fresno, Calif., Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016. Two unarmed officers were critically injured after being shot by a visitor in the lobby of the central California jail, authorities said Saturday. Authorities said officers from the secured areas inside the jail ran to the lobby, where a lieutenant fired shots at the gunman, identified as 37-year-old Thong Vang, who was taken into custody. (Silvia Flores/The Fresno Bee via AP)

A law enforcement officer patrols a street after reports of an active shooter in the main lobby of the Fresno County Jail in downtown Fresno, Calif., Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016. Two unarmed officers were critically injured after being shot by a visitor in the lobby of the central California jail, authorities said Saturday. Officers from the secured areas inside the jail ran to the lobby, where a lieutenant fired shots at the gunman, identified as 37-year-old Thong Vang, who was taken into custody. The injured officers were dragged out of the lobby and taken to the hospital to undergo surgery. (Troy Pope/The Fresno Bee via AP)
Argentine magnate Carlos Bulgheroni dies at age 71

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP)  One of Argentina's richest men has died at age 71 and he's being honored by leading politicians and businessmen.

The government's Telam news agency says that Carlos Bulgheroni died Friday in Washington, where he was being treated for cancer.

President Mauricio Macri is among many prominent figures publishing condolences to Bulgeroni's family on Sunday.

Bulgheroni was co-owner and CEO of the Bridas Corporation, a major factor in Argentina's hydrocarbons industry. Forbes Magazine has calculated his fortune at $4.8 billion.
Eastern gorilla gets added to critically endangered list

HONOLULU (AP)  The world's largest living primate has been listed as critically endangered, making four of the six great ape species only one step away from extinction, according to a report released Sunday at the World Conservation Congress in Hawaii.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, cited illegal hunting in downgrading the status of the eastern gorilla on its Red List of Endangered Species. The list contains more than 80,000 species, and almost 24,000 of those are threatened with extinction.

"To see the eastern gorilla  one of our closest cousins  slide toward extinction is truly distressing," Inger Andersen, IUCN director general, said in a statement. "Conservation action does work and we have increasing evidence of it. It is our responsibility to enhance our efforts to turn the tide and protect the future of our planet."

FILE - In this Nov. 30, 2007 file photo, a gorilla looks on at Volcanoes National Park in Ruhengeri, Rwanda. The eastern gorilla has been listed as critically endangered, making four of the six great ape species only one step away from extinction, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Red List of Endangered Species, released Sunday Sept. 4, 2016. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe, File)

The organization said an estimated 5,000 eastern gorillas remain in the wild, a decline of about 70 percent over the past 20 years.

Of all the great ape species  the eastern gorilla, western gorilla, Bornean orangutan, Sumatran orangutan, chimpanzee and bonobo  only the chimpanzee and bonobo are not considered critically endangered. But they are listed as endangered.

For the gorillas of the Congo, where the majority of the population lives, conservation will be a struggle because of political instability, said primatologist Russell Mittermeier, executive vice chairman of the Conservation International environmental group and chairman of IUCN's primates specialist group.

"There are no simple solutions right now, other than a much greater investment in on-the-ground protection until the region stabilizes, at which time major ecotourism, as is happening in the neighboring countries of Uganda and Rwanda, can take place," Mittermeier said in an email to The Associated Press.

In an interview, Catherine Novelli, U.S. undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy and the environment, called the gorilla numbers a man-made tragedy.

The research by the Wildlife Conservation Society was accepted by the IUCN, which is made up of private and government entities and is hosting the World Conservation Congress. More than 9,000 delegates from over 180 countries are attending this week's conference in Honolulu, including several heads of state.

"Critical endangered status will raise the profile of this gorilla subspecies and bring attention to its plight. It has tended to be the neglected ape in Africa, despite being the largest ape in the world," the study's lead scientist, Andrew Plumptre, said in an email.

The IUCN compiles its peer-reviewed Red List alongside partners such as universities and environmental groups within animals' natural habitat. It is the most comprehensive analysis of endangered species and guides government policy around the world, said Cristian Samper, president and CEO of the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Other animals on the list fared better than the apes, including the giant panda, which was previously on the endangered list. It is now listed as "vulnerable" after conservation efforts helped protect its habitat.

"For over 50 years, the giant panda has been the globe's most beloved conservation icon," said Marco Lambertini, director general of the environmental group World Wildlife Fund. "Knowing that the panda is now a step further from extinction is an exciting moment for everyone committed to conserving the world's wildlife."

Hunting and habitat destruction are taking a toll on animals and plants in variety of areas, the report said.

In Hawaii, about 90 percent of native plants are threatened with extinction because of invasive species like rats, pigs and non-native plants, the IUCN said.

In Africa, the plains zebra population has declined by a quarter since 2002, according to the group's statement.

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Find more stories by AP's Caleb Jones at http://bigstory.ap.org/journalist/caleb-jones. Follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CalebAP.

FILE - In this Nov. 25, 2008 file photo, a baby gorilla is held by an adult in the Virunga national park, near the Uganda border in eastern Congo. The eastern gorilla has been listed as critically endangered, making four of the six great ape species only one step away from extinction, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Red List of Endangered Species, released Sunday Sept. 4, 2016. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay, File)

FILE - In this Aug. 23, 2016 file photo, a giant panda named Nuan Nuan is shown at the Giant Panda Conservation Center at the National Zoo in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The giant panda has been reclassified as vulnerable from endangered on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's list of endangered species, which was released Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016 at the World Conservation Congress in Hawaii. (AP Photo/Joshua Paul, File)
Israel targets Syrian army after errant fire hits Golan

JERUSALEM (AP)  The Israeli military says it has fired at Syrian army cannons in the Syrian Golan Heights in response to mortar fire from Syria that hit the Israeli-held Golan Heights.

The army says that the mortars appeared to be errant fire from Syria's civil war, and were not deliberately targeting Israeli-held territory.

No injuries were reported Sunday.

The military says it holds the Syrian government accountable for the "blatant breach of Israeli sovereignty."

Israel has taken pains to stay on the sidelines of neighboring Syria's war, but has carried out similar reprisals on Syrian positions when errant fire has previously landed in Israeli-controlled territory.
Five-set US Open loss to Stan Wawrinka a 'heartbreaker' for Britain's Dan Evans

Britain's Dan Evans said losing to Stan Wawrinka was a "heartbreaker" after he came within one point of a shock victory in the US Open third round.

Evans twice led by a set and had match point in the fourth against the world number three, but he failed to convert as Wawrinka came back to win 4-6 6-3 6-7 (6/8) 7-6 (10/8) 6-2.

The British number two left Louis Armstrong Stadium to a standing ovation, but it was Wawrinka who advanced to meet either Australia's Nick Kyrgios or Ukraine's Illya Marchenko in the last 16.

Dan Evans, pictured, had a match point against Stan Wawrinka in New York (AP)

"It's a bit of a heartbreaker really," Evans said. "I don't really know what to say. It was a tough one to take.

"It'll probably hurt a bit for a while. It's disappointing, how it played out."

Evans, ranked 64th in the world, took control after winning a thrilling third-set tie-break and his biggest chance came in the fourth when, in another tie-break, he led 6-5 for match point.

Wawrinka escaped with a cool volley and then Evans handed away the initiative at 7-7 when he failed to finish off a smash.

Three points later, the Swiss served out the set before storming clear in the fifth to seal a momentous triumph.

"I've never been in that situation before, especially against someone as good as him. It's just not easy, is it?" Evans said.

"Being that close, I was thinking about winning the match. Whoever says you don't think about winning the match at that point is full of it.

"I'm thinking about that smash, 'put it away'. I hit it down the middle. The small things in those matches make big differences.

"Why I hit it down the middle - I never hit the smash ever down the middle - is beyond me."

The missed opportunity appeared to stay with Evans, who was broken twice in the decider as Wawrinka raced into a 4-0 lead.

"I was physically pretty tired," Evans said.

"Subconsciously, mentally as well, I was hurt a bit in the fifth set. He's obviously a class opponent. I sort of knew that was the chance in the fourth set."

Evans was also suffering from a sore ankle towards the end and had an angry exchange with the tour physio Hugo Gravil.

"The physio said I had cramp, which I didn't have. My foot is sore," Evans said. "I didn't want to be treated by him because he was wrong."

Evans said the foot injury means he will withdraw from the men's doubles on Sunday where he was due to face Lukasz Kubot and Alexander Peya alongside Nick Kyrgios.

"I'm pretty badly hurt," Evans said. "I'd say that's squashed probably."

The 26-year-old, however, remained confident he would recover in time for Britain's Davis Cup semi-final with Argentina in two weeks' time.

Evans is vying for the second singles spot with Kyle Edmund, who plays Novak Djokovic in the last 16 on Sunday.

"I'll be at Davis Cup. I just need some time off," Evans said.

"I've had it before. It's pretty sore in the mornings and in the evenings, sort of later on in the day, it gets pretty sore.

"I think taking a bit of time off now would be good physically and mentally."

The US Open was Evans' sixth tournament in a row in America and he admitted he was looking forward to some home comforts.

"I've missed home," Evans said. "Things have just sort of come to a head tonight if I'm being deadly honest.

"When you miss that last ball, I'm ready to go now."
Nick Clegg reveals breakdown of working relationship with Michael Gove

Nick Clegg has said his relationship with Michael Gove "soured" so much while in government that it got to the point he could no longer work with him.

The former deputy prime minister makes the revelation in a memoir of his time in power in which he says David Cameron did not seem to be surprised that he wanted to stop personally dealing with Mr Gove, adding that Number 10 "clearly loathed Gove's principal adviser at the time".

Mr Clegg said Mr Gove was "charm personified" when they had dinner together in Putney soon after the coalition was formed, according to The Guardian which is serialising the memoir.

Nick Clegg and Michael Gove in happier times

An extract from the book in the newspaper states: "A little over three years (after the Putney dinner) our relationship had soured to the point that he banned Lib Dem special advisers from physically entering the Department for Education, hid on one occasion in the toilet to avoid speaking to David Laws, and let loose his somewhat unhinged advisers to brief against me, and even against Miriam, in the press."

The extract goes on: "On one of the last occasions I spoke to him in government, I asked him to come and see me in my office. He was keen to be accompanied by his assistant, but I insisted we meet alone, as I wanted to deliver a blunt message.

"Once we were alone, I asked him how he would react if someone on my behalf wilfully lied about his wife in the newspapers? (Miriam had, ludicrously, been accused in The Mail On Sunday by one of Michael Gove's advisers of seeking a Whitehall contract for a children's book charity - the contract had in fact been decided by Number 10). He mumbled that he thought he 'knew what had happened'. I was livid."

According to The Guardian, Mr Clegg says he told Mr Cameron soon afterwards that he was not prepared to "waste (his) time working with Michael Gove" and that Mr Laws would do so on his behalf.

"Given how much No 10 clearly loathed Gove's principal adviser at the time and were as exasperated as I was by his occasional public outbursts, this didn't seem to come as much of a surprise to Cameron," Mr Clegg writes.
Immigration control MPs to study Australian points system

MPs will seek to learn lessons from Australia's points-based immigration system as they look to draw up recommendations for post-Brexit British border control.

The All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Integration, chaired by Labour former frontbencher Chuka Umunna, will meet immigration experts on Monday as part of its inquiry into integration in the UK after the EU referendum.

It will hear evidence from Alexander Downer AC, the High Commissioner of Australia to the UK, on the merits of his country's immigration system. Leave campaigners suggested in the run-up to the referendum on June 23 that Britain could seek to imitate the Australian system.

A group of MPs chaired by Chuka Umunna will meet immigration experts

Speaking ahead of the meeting, Mr Umunna said: "Politicians from all sides have to accept that the British people, in the main, have rejected freedom of movement.

"Some Remain voters were no great fans of free movement either but felt risking access to the single market in order to avoid it was not worth the damage to our economy.

"So, Brexit is an opportunity to redesign our immigration system and make it into one that both works and reflects people's concerns.

"This new system needs to support both existing communities and newcomers to manage changes that come from extra pressure on our schools, hospitals and public services."

Mr Umunna has called on the Government to bring forward plans to create an infrastructure investment fund to help mitigate the impact of immigration.

Mr Downer said: "For Australia, migration is the key to building our economy, shaping society, supporting the labour market, reuniting families and providing protection in accordance with international protection obligations.

"We are immensely proud of the contribution of migrants to Australian society and culture. Today, almost half of all Australians were born overseas or had at least one parent born overseas.

"Our cultural diversity is one of our greatest strengths and is at the heart of who we are as a nation."

Other speakers due to address the group include Elizabeth Collett, director of Migration Policy Institute Europe, and Peter Bedford, the leader of Boston Borough Council.
Junior doctors suspend next week's planned strikes amid patient safety concerns

Junior doctors have suspended strikes planned for next week amid concerns over patient safety.

Last week the British Medical Association (BMA) announced training medics would perform a series of strikes by withdrawing labour, including emergency care, for a week each month until the end of the year. The first wave of strikes was supposed to start on September 12.

But the union has said the first wave of industrial action has been suspended after health leaders said they needed more time to plan for the escalated action to protect patients.

Junior doctors will be taking industrial action

However, further strikes scheduled for October, November and December will still go ahead, the BMA said.

Jeremy Hunt welcomed the announcement but said that the "most extreme strike action in NHS history" will be "damaging" for patients.

In a statement to the House of Commons, the Health Secretary said the forthcoming strikes would bring "unprecedented misery" on patients.

Mr Hunt told MPs: "This afternoon's news delaying the first strike is of course welcome but we mustn't let it obscure the fact that the remaining planned industrial action is unprecedented in length and severity and will be damaging for patients - some of whom will have already had operations cancelled."

He added: "It is deeply perplexing for patients, NHS leaders and indeed the Government, that the reaction of the BMA leadership, who previously supported this contract, is now to initiate the most extreme strike action in NHS history, inflicting unprecedented misery on millions of patients up and down the country.

"We currently anticipate that up to 100,000 elective operations will be cancelled and up to a million hospital appointments will be postponed."

He continued: "As with previous strikes we cannot give an absolute guarantee that patients will be safe but hospitals up and down the country will bust a gut to look after their patients."

Dr Ellen McCourt, chairman of the BMA's junior doctors' committee, said: "Patient safety remains doctors' primary concern which is why, following discussions with NHS England, the BMA has taken the decision to suspend next week's industrial action.

"While the BMA provided more than the required notice, we have taken this decision to ensure the NHS has the necessary time to prepare and to put in place contingency plans to protect patient safety.

"Our hospitals are chronically understaffed, our NHS is desperately underfunded - we have to listen to our colleagues when they tell us that they need more time to keep patients safe.

"Future action is still avoidable. The BMA has repeatedly said it will call off further action if the Government puts a halt to plans to force junior doctors to work under a contract they have rejected because they don't believe it is good for the future of patient care or the profession.

"I urge Jeremy Hunt to put patients first, listen to our concerns and end this dispute through talks."

Earlier, the doctors' regulator, the General Medical Council (GMC), warned that patients would "suffer" given the scale of the action at such short notice.

But after the BMA made its latest announcement, GMC chairman Professor Terence Stephenson said: "This delay will give hospitals and other providers more time to plan for reduced medical cover, thereby reducing the impact and potential harm to patients."

The next action is scheduled for October 5, 6, 7, 10 and 11, November 14 to 18 and December 5 to 9, which will see junior doctors withdrawing from labour between the hours of 8am and 5pm, in the ongoing dispute over a new contract for training medics.

The Government and British Medical Association (BMA) remain at loggerheads over the contract, which the Department of Health says will help to provide a seven-day NHS.

Mr Hunt set out a series of "reassurances" about how a seven-day service would work.

He told the Commons the Government had committed to employ many more doctors to help meet the commitment.

"That means our plans are not predicated on simply stretching the existing workforce more thinly or diluting weekday cover," he said.

"We recognise that junior doctors already work very hard, including evenings and weekends, and whilst we do need to reduce weekend premium rates that make it difficult to deploy the correct levels of medical cover, we expect this policy to have greater implications to the working patterns of other workforce groups including consultants and diagnostic staff.

"Finally, we have no policy to require trusts to increase elective care at weekends, our seven-day services policy is focused on meeting four clinical standards relating to urgent and emergency care, meaning vulnerable patients on hospitals' wards at weekends will get checked more regularly in ward rounds by clinicians, and clinicians will be able to order important test results for their patients at weekends."

Six strikes have already taken place across England during the lengthy dispute, causing disruption to hundreds of thousands of patients who have had appointments and operations cancelled.

In May it looked as though a breakthrough had been reached in the dispute after both sides agreed to a new deal.

Then in July, the Government announced that it would impose a new contract after junior doctors and medical students voted to reject the contract brokered between health leaders and the BMA.

Labour's shadow health secretary Diane Abbott, who at the weekend said she would join junior doctors on the picket line, welcomed the delay in action.

She claimed the Health Secretary has attempted to vilify junior doctors in a bid to win the support of the public and urged him instead to withdraw the contract.

"The public simply don't believe you in your attempts to demonise junior doctors", she told the House.

"You have failed to convince the public that doctors are the enemy within and mere dupes of the BMA."

She added: "What could be more confrontational than seeking to impose a contract and, even at this late stage, I would like to ask you if you will listen to the junior doctors' leader, Dr Ellen McCourt.

"The public is looking for you to try and meet the junior doctors, stop vilifying, stop pretending they are the enemy within, and meet their reasonable demands."
China 'open to a bilateral trade arrangement with the UK'

The prospect of a major free trade deal between the UK and China was raised by Xi Jinping in talks with Theresa May following the G20 summit after she said the "golden era" in relations with Beijing would continue.

A deal with the Asian superpower would be a major boost to the UK and new Prime Minister and comes despite the delay on whether to press ahead with the Chinese-backed Hinkley Point nuclear plant.

A Number 10 official said Mr Xi understood why Mrs May felt the need to take a fresh look at agreements made by her predecessor.

Prime Minister Theresa May meets Chinese President Xi Jinping at the State Guesthouse in Hangzhou, China

Although Hinkley Point was not specifically mentioned he said "he recognised the new Government would need to take some time before reaching decisions on some agreements pushed by the last government", the source said.

"President Xi said that they had the patience to wait for a resolution on those issues.

"He said that they wanted to look at how we could strengthen our trading and economic relationship and that China was open to a bilateral trade arrangement with the UK."

Mrs May said she was hoping to visit China next year.

Downing Street said the 30-minute meeting was "warm" and Mr Xi even referred to the UK on finishing second in the Rio Olympics medal table - ahead of China.

Before the meeting in Hangzhou, Mrs May insisted that the UK's "global strategic partnership" with Beijing will continue.

And she said that other world leaders had been "very keen" on talks on new trade agreements with the UK in the wake of its withdrawal from the European Union.

Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said he wants a "very strong" free trade agreement after talks with Mrs May on the sidelines of the Hangzhou summit and his trade minister will visit London later this week to take the project forward.

Mrs May said that the leaders of India, Mexico, South Korea and Singapore had also told her that they would welcome talks on removing barriers to trade.

Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe is understood to have pushed for greater clarity about Mrs May's plans during a brief meeting after his administration earlier issued a 15-page document setting out the assurances on the future of the economy being sought by Japanese companies operating in the UK.

The country's ambassador in London warned Japanese firms could move operations to the continent unless the UK remained the best place for them to be based.

Mrs May told a press conference in Hangzhou: "What I have found good about the discussions I've had with a number of world leaders, including discussions I had with Prime Minister Abe, is the willingness of other countries to talk with the UK about future trade arrangements and the confidence that they have in the United Kingdom."

She added: "I'm confident and others have been confident about the relationship we can build with them."

Asked whether her decision to delay final approval for the planned nuclear power plant in Somerset had damaged UK relations with her hosts, Mrs May said: "A decision about Hinkley will be made later this month, but our relationship with China is about more than Hinkley.

"If you look at the investment that there has been from China in various other parts of the UK and other infrastructure in the UK, we have built a global strategic partnership with China.

"I've been clear we will be continuing that global strategic partnership with China. It is a golden era of relations between China and the UK."

The official communique signed by the G20 leaders acknowledged the potential impact of Brexit and called for close ties between the UK and EU after the break from Brussels happens.

The document said: "The outcome of the referendum on the UK's membership of the EU adds to the uncertainty in the global economy. Members of the G20 are well positioned to proactively address the potential economic and financial consequences stemming from the referendum.

"In the future, we hope to see the UK as a close partner of the EU."
Two cadets walk at Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in Lexington, the United States, Sept. 3, 2016. VMI is a state-supported military college, one of the oldest institutions of the kind in the U.S. With lots of alumni including George Marshall, VMI has been called the "West Point of the South". (Xinhua/Yin Bogu)
France's Le Pen vows to hold referendum on EU if elected

BRACHAY, France, Sept 3 (Reuters) - France's far-right National Front party leader, Marine Le Pen, vowed on Saturday to hold a referendum on whether France stays in or leaves the European Union if she wins the 2017 presidential election.

In her first public meeting after a summer break in the tiny village of Brachay in northeastern France, Le Pen portrayed herself as the sole credible defender of law and order and national unity, saying the best way to combat terrorism was the ballot paper.

"This referendum on France belonging to the European Union, I will do it. Yes it is possible to change things. Look at the Brits, they chose their destiny, they chose independence ... We can again be a free, proud and independent people," she said.

The National Front was the only major French political party to call for Britons to vote to leave the European Union, hoping Brexit would boost its own eurosceptic agenda at home.

Le Pen's increasingly popular party thrives on anti-Europe and anti-immigration sentiment and opinion polls see her making it to an early May run-off in France's presidential election, but losing that second round to a mainstream candidate, as a majority of voters do not want her as president.

Some 700 supporters waving French flags repeatedly cheered the smiling Le Pen on Saturday, with shouts of "Marine, President" during her speech.

After being uncharacteristically quiet since a December regional election where her party won no constituency despite leading in first round, Le Pen slammed her rivals on the right and left of the political spectrum, accusing them of being "responsible" for what she called France's "decline".

The village of Brachay is dear to Le Pen's heart, and she described it as the symbol of France's "forgotten ones" away from the political elites.

It was in Brachay that she managed to secure the greatest percentage vote in any village in the country from among its 60 residents in the 2012 presidential election.
Five Turkish soldiers killed, six injured in southeast clashes -sources

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey Sept 3 (Reuters) - Five Turkish soldiers were killed and six more were wounded in clashes with militants from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) on Saturday, security sources said, adding to a recent spike in violence in the southeastern Hakkari province.
UK's May defends delay on Chinese-backed nuclear power plan

HANGZHOU, China, Sept 4 (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Theresa May on Sunday defended her decision to delay a partly Chinese-funded nuclear power deal, despite it causing diplomatic tension with China as she landed in the country to attend a G20 summit.

In July, May upset Chinese officials by delaying a $24 billion project that would see French firm EDF build Britain's first new nuclear power plant in decades with the help of $8 billion from China.

The decision caught investors by surprise and has cast doubt over whether May, who took power in July following Britain's vote to leave the European Union, will continue to court China as a major source of infrastructure investment.

"This is the way I operate," May told reporters on board her official plane on the way to Hangzhou for the summit, which will include a one-to-one with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The summit is May's first visit to China.

"I don't just come in and say 'I'm going to take a decision' - I actually look at the evidence, weigh up that evidence, take the advice and consider that and come to my decision."

A final decision is expected later this month.

May is reportedly concerned about possible national security risks of allowing China to invest in nuclear projects, with the EDF plant being seen as a gateway to a deal that would pave the way for Chinese involvement in another two nuclear plants.

She is expected to ask Britain's National Security Council to look at broader relations with China to fully understand the extent of the bilateral relationship.

Asked whether she trusted China, May said: "Of course we have a relationship with them, we're working with them... what I want to do is build on that relationship."

But, she also stressed a need to broaden the group of nations that Britain can trade with and tap for cash to help reinvigorate its power, transport and technology infrastructure.
Rising oil import costs may become Asia's growing pain

By Florence Tan and Gavin Maguire

SINGAPORE, Sept 4 (Reuters) - A widening gap between Asia's oil production and demand is creating a growing capital drain for the region and leaving countries vulnerable to global supply disruptions and a sudden surge in oil prices.

Asia's net oil imports surpassed the total amount of oil consumed in North America in 2015 and are set to rise after producers slashed spending on exploration and production on low oil prices, leaving oilfields at risk of sharp production declines in the next decade.

Activities across Asia-Pacific to search for energy resources have nearly ground to a halt in the past year while recent exploration finds have struck more natural gas than oil, analysts said.

As Asia's net imports grow and crude prices recover, the region's oil import bill is set to climb back above $500 billion in 2017 for the first time in three years, calculations based on forecasts by the International Energy Agency and a Reuters crude oil price poll in August showed. .

"With demand growth set to continue and outpace declining domestic production, this leaves Asia increasingly vulnerable to rising prices," said Energy Aspects analyst Virendra Chauhan.

FALLING OUTPUT

The oil price slump since mid-2014 had given Asian economies a breather from high import bills.

But oil demand in the Asia-Pacific is expected to grow by 800,000-900,000 barrels per day (bpd) this year and next, while the region's output could shrink by 240,000-330,000 bpd during the same period, Chauhan said.

The gap between oil production and demand has jumped over 30 percent since 2010 to an estimated 25.7 million bpd in 2016 and is set to grow by another 1.1 million bpd next year. Rising oil prices, however, means the cost could soar by a third in just one year to $566 billion.

"We have seen two years in a row in 2015 and 2016 oil investments declining," International Energy Agency (IEA) chief Fatih Birol said. "This would mean oil security and oil markets may face a challenge as a result of a huge drop in the investments in a very few years in the medium term."

Producers across the region are struggling, which is not being helped by international oil companies' capital and expertise leaving the region, said Chauhan.

Consultancy Wood Mackenzie expects Asia's oil production to fall to 5 million barrels per day in 2025 from 7.6 million bpd in 2016.

"We've seen a number of projects delayed - some cancelled - plus the level of investments in existing oil fields is falling," Angus Rodger, director of Asia-Pacific upstream research at Woodmac said.

"That has a minor impact in the short-term, but if you go out to 2020, it means oil production across the region will have declined significantly."

China is leading the decline, with output hitting a five-year low in July as producers shut-in marginal fields while imports hit a record.

Indonesian officials said they are looking at ways to shore up a production target of 780,000 bpd in 2017, the lowest since 1969 and 40,000 bpd lower than 2016's forecast.

"We are discussing how to make Cepu block production higher than now," Director General of Oil and Gas Wiratmaja Puja said, adding that output at the oilfield operated by Exxon Mobil may increase by 15,000 bpd.

Indonesia, the largest oil producer in southeast Asia, faces a potential 20-25 percent natural decline in production unless it steps up activities such as drilling and well servicing, said Muliawan, deputy for operations at regulator SKK Migas.

MIDEAST SUPPLY IMPASSE

China, Indonesia and India have been actively investing in overseas oil production assets to supplement domestic output.

China has also been broadening its sources of supply, taking more oil from Russia and Latin America to reduce its dependence on the Middle East, as well as building its strategic reserves to cushion itself in the event of an oil price shock.

The region's biggest oil consumer is also turning to gas and renewable energy, but these are long-term solutions.

Asia imports just over half of its oil from the Middle East and will continue to rely heavily on Gulf producers, analysts said, exposing the region to geopolitical risks that have disrupted oil production and exports.

"Asian production is on the decline, notably among others in China, and with increases in refining capacity that are unlikely to remain idle, the dependency of the region to Middle Eastern oil will remain," BNP Paribas Global Head of Commodity Markets Strategy Harry Tchilinguirian told the Reuters Global Oil Forum.

"It is, as you can imagine, hard to replace Saudi Arabia in your import mix for many an Asian refiner."
U.N. chief tolls bell for climate change sceptics

HANGZHOU, China, Sept 4 (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Sunday that climate change scepticism is over, the day after the United States joined China to ratify the Paris agreement to curb climate-warming emissions.

Climate change sceptics dispute the widely held understanding that excessive levels of emissions in the atmosphere cause global warming and harm the environment, and have become increasingly side-lined at international summits.

"The debate over climate phenomenon is over scientifically and environmentally," said Ban, adding that the influence of climate change deniers or sceptics has waned.

"It is affecting our day-to-day life," Ban said, at a new conference ahead of a G20 summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou.

U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping deposited the legal instruments to join the Paris agreement to curb climate-warming emissions to Ban on Saturday, Ban said.

Experts have said the temperature target is already in danger of being breached, with the U.N.'s weather agency saying 2016 is on course to be the warmest year since records began.
South Korea's Park to meet China's Xi on Monday - Yonhap

SEOUL, Sept 4 (Reuters) - South Korea's President Park Geun-hye will meet her Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, on Monday on the sidelines of a G20 summit in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, the South's Yonhap news agency reported on Sunday, citing Park's office.

The two will be meeting after a period of tension between them caused by a decision by South Korea and its ally, the United States, to deploy an advanced anti-missile system in South Korea to counter North Korea's growing missile capability.
China says should constructively handle disputes with India

BEIJING, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Chinese President Xi Jinping told Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday that the two countries should respect each other's concerns and constructively handle their differences.

The two nuclear-armed neighbours have been moving to gradually ease long-existing tensions between them.

Leaders of Asia's two giants pledged last year to cool a festering border dispute, which dates back to a brief border war in 1962, though the disagreement remains unresolved.

Meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, Xi said relations had maintained a steady, healthy momentum, and should continue to increase mutual understanding and trust.

"We ought to respect and give consideration to each other's concerns, and use constructive methods to appropriately handle questions on which there are disputes," Xi said, in comments carried by China's Foreign Ministry.

"China is willing to work hard with India the maintain the hard-won good position of Sino-India relations," Xi added.

China's Defence Ministry said last month that it hoped India could put more efforts into regional peace and stability rather than the opposite, in response to Indian plans to put advanced cruise missiles along the disputed border with China.

Indian military officials say the plan is to equip regiments deployed on the China border with the BrahMos missile, made by an Indo-Russian joint venture, as part of ongoing efforts to build up military and civilian infrastructure capabilities there.

China lays claim to more than 90,000 sq km (35,000 sq miles) ruled by New Delhi in the eastern sector of the Himalayas. India says China occupies 38,000 sq km (14,600 sq miles) of its territory on the Aksai Chin plateau in the west.

India is also suspicious of China's support for its arch-rival, Pakistan.

Modi arrived in China from Vietnam, which is involved in its own dispute with China over the South China Sea, where he offered Vietnam a credit line of half a billion dollars for defence cooperation.
Hermine lurks off U.S. East Coast, could regain hurricane strength

By Daniel Trotta and Chris Prentice

NEW YORK, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Atlantic storm Hermine lurked off the middle of the U.S. East Coast late on Sunday, threatening to regain hurricane strength but so far sparing the region the brunt of its wind, rain and tidal surge.

Forecasters warned the storm could produce deadly surf and ordered swimmers and boaters to stay out of treacherous waters during the Labor Day holiday weekend, when many Americans celebrate the end of summer.

Hermine, which came ashore in Florida as a hurricane on Friday, had churned up the southeastern seaboard as a tropical storm before being reclassified on Saturday as a post-tropical cyclone. Robbie Berg of the National Hurricane Center said it was not expected to make landfall again.

A tropical storm warning remained in effect Sunday night from the Delaware and New Jersey shores north to New York's Long Island and beyond to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket Island off Massachusetts.

Berg said potential storm-surge inundation levels of no more than 1 to 3 feet (30 cm to 1 meter) were expected in coastal areas.

Reflecting the waning storm threat in New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie ordered Island Beach Sate Park reopened for Monday, while warning that lingering rip currents and rough surf might still render the ocean unsafe for swimmers.

New York City appeared largely out of harm's way, with forecasters giving Manhattan just a 1-in-3 chance of being hit by tropical storm-force winds as Hermine creeps up the East Coast, Berg said.

Hermine's center was located about 370 miles east of Ocean City, Maryland, as of 8 p.m. EDT, according to the hurricane center. It was expected to "meander slowly" off the mid-Atlantic region, remaining at least 300 miles (480 km) from shore, before gradually beginning to weaken by Monday night, then drifting farther east and away from land around mid-week, the agency said.

WANING STORM THREAT BEYOND COAST

The storm, which claimed at least two lives, in Florida and North Carolina, was still packing maximum sustained surface winds of nearly 70 mph (113 kph) on Sunday night.

Forecasters said Hermine could intensify slightly, with winds reaching hurricane strength again before Hermine starts to diminish. But for now its strongest winds were extending outward by about 230 miles, failing to reach U.S. shores, the NHC said.

The widespread power outages and flooding that battered Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas had likewise yet to materialize farther north, where alarming news reports scared tourists away from the beach on Sunday.

Those who stayed awoke to sunshine but stronger-than-usual winds and choppy seas.

"It was a little overhyped by the media," said Andrew Thulin, assistant general manager of Daddy O Hotel Restaurant in Long Beach Township, New Jersey. "It killed the weekend for everybody down here. I talk to all my other colleagues in our business and everybody was like, 'Are we going to send the Weather Channel a bill?'"

Farther south in Cape May, New Jersey, tourists fled during rainstorms on Saturday only to have the weather improve.

"The temperature is great. It's beautiful out, the birds are out," said Kathleen Wilkinson, a Philadelphia lawyer with a vacation home in Cape May. "Knowing the storm is 100 miles out at sea is comforting."

Officials who were mindful of the devastation caused by Superstorm Sandy in 2012 took every precaution. In other parts of the state people reported coastal roads were flooded and beaches swallowed up by the surging sea.

Hermine became the first hurricane to make landfall in Florida in 11 years when it swept ashore on Friday near the Gulf Coast town of St. Marks with winds of 80 mph (129 kph), knocking out power for 300,000 Florida homes and businesses. Within five hours, it was downgraded to a tropical storm but still packed a wallop.

It left North Carolina with more power outages, flooding, downed trees and power lines, while rain and tides brought flooding along Virginia's coast.

The storm was reclassified on Saturday as a post-tropical cyclone as it merged with a conventional weather front. Hermine produced relatively few showers on land Sunday but was forecast to bring up to 2 inches of rain to southern New England on Monday.
Fuel tanker, bus collision in Afghanistan kills 38, injures 28

KABUL, Sept 4 (Reuters) - At least 38 people were killed and 28 were injured in Afghanistan after a fuel tanker collided with a passenger bus, causing a massive explosion, local officials said on Sunday.

The incident took place on a major highway connecting the southern province of Kandahar with the capital city of Kabul.

Ghulam Jilani Farahi, deputy police chief of Zabul province where the accident occurred, said authorities could identify only six bodies and the rest were totally burnt.

Farahi said several women and children were among the victims in the bus that was carrying more than 60 people.

The driver of the oil tanker and a co-passenger died immediately after the truck burst into flames during the early morning hours on Sunday.

The Kabul-Kandahar highway passes through areas prone to militancy and many drivers are known to drive at top speeds in hopes of avoiding insurgent activity.
People gather in downtown Taipei to call for respect of their contribution to the island amid discussions of pension reform, September 3, 2016. [Photo from Weibo]

Groups of people, including retired military personnel, civil servants and public school teachers, gathered in downtown Taipei on Saturday afternoon to call for respect of their contribution to the island amid discussions of pension reform.

Protesters, including retired army generals and young teachers of public schools, said they took to the streets because they believed the reputation of public sector employees had been damaged by the discussions.

The police said an estimated 117,000 people took part in the demonstration, while the organizers said there were about 250,000 protesters on the streets.

The move marked the first massive demonstration since the island's current leader Tsai Ing-wen took office, according to local authorities.

The Action Alliance to Monitor Pension Reforms, which organized the event, said it supported the drive to reform pension system, but opposed the acts of using distorted figures or extreme cases to stir up conflicts among different groups in the society.

The union warned the future of the island would be gloomy if the current administration were not concentrated on shoring up the economy and improving people's livelihoods.

The massive protests followed several small demonstrations staged on the island by civil aviation workers, tour bus drivers and fishermen since May.

Pang Chien-kuo, a professor with Taipei-based Chinese Culture University said the demonstration on Saturday attracted so many participants because the current administration has not breathed new life into the island so far.

"People will continue to take to streets to vent their dissatisfaction if the economy does not grow in a decent speed and the future of the island remains bleak," Pang said.
China's Xi at G20 says world economy at risk, warns against protectionism

By Kevin Yao and Kiyoshi Takenaka

HANGZHOU, China, Sept 4 (Reuters) - The global economy is being threatened by rising protectionism and risks from highly leveraged financial markets, Chinese President Xi Jinping said at the open of a two-day summit of leaders from G20 nations.

His warning on Sunday followed bilateral talks with Barack Obama that the U.S. president described as "extremely productive", but which failed to bring both sides closer on thornier topics such as tensions in the South China Sea.

With the summit taking place after Britain's vote in June to exit the European Union and before the U.S. presidential election in November, observers expect G20 leaders to mount a defence of free trade and globalisation and warn against isolationism.

The global economy has arrived "at a crucial juncture", Xi said, in the face of sluggish demand, volatile financial markets and feeble trade and investment.

"Growth drivers from the previous round of technological progress are gradually fading, while a new round of technological and industrial revolution has yet to gain momentum," he said.

G20 countries are set to agree in a communique at the end of the summit that all policy measures - including monetary, fiscal and structural reforms - should be used to achieve solid and sustainable economic growth, Japanese Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Koichi Hagiuda said.

"Commitment will be made to utilising all three policy tools of monetary and fiscal policies and structural reforms to achieve solid, sustainable, balanced and inclusive growth," Hagiuda told reporters on the sidelines of the summit.

Xi also called on G20 countries to match their words with actions.

"We should turn the G20 group into an action team, instead of a talk shop," he said.

But some of the G20 leaders have begun drawing battle lines in disputes over issues ranging from trade and investment to tax policy and industrial overcapacity.

BATTLE LINES

On Sunday, Xi held talks with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and told him he hoped Australia would continue to provide a fair, transparent and predictable policy environment for foreign investors.

China was angered when Australia blocked the A$10 billion ($7.7 billion) sale of the country's biggest energy grid to Chinese bidders last month.

China has accused Australia of bowing to protectionist sentiment in blocking the bid for Ausgrid, as well as an earlier one by a China-led consortium to buy cattle company Kidman & Co.

Beijing has also criticised Australia, a staunch U.S. ally, for running surveillance flights over disputed islands in the South China Sea.

Meanwhile, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said China must set up a mechanism to address its problem of industrial overcapacity, saying it was "unacceptable" the European steel industry had lost so many jobs in recent years.

"Overcapacity is a global problem but there is a particular Chinese element," he told a news conference.

Britain's future after its departure from the European Union was also subject to discussion.

Obama reassured Prime Minister May that Britain's closest political, commercial and military ally would stand by her.

But he did not shrink away from his stance that Brexit was a mistake and that London would not be able to jump the queue to arrange a bilateral trade deal.

Juncker said that if Britain wanted access to the European Union's common market, it needed to respect the rules of the common market.

Turnbull, meanwhile, said Australia wanted an early free trade agreement with Britain so markets could remain open between them when Britain formally left the European trading bloc.

LATE NIGHT TALKS

Obama held talks with Xi on Saturday that ran late into the night.

He urged Beijing to uphold its legal obligations in the disputed waters of the South China Sea, and stressed U.S. commitments to its regional allies.

Xi said China would continue to safeguard its sovereignty and maritime rights in the South China Sea.

But China is keen to keep the summit focused on economic issues and to prevent other disputes from overshadowing it.

According to a "fact sheet" on China-U.S. relations issued on Sunday, the two sides agreed on a range of issues, including avoiding competitive currency devaluations and not limiting deal opportunities for foreign information and communication technology providers.

Obama, now in the last five months of his presidency, is using the visit to put a final stamp on his signature policy shift toward the Pacific, setting the tone for his White House successor, who will be elected in November and take office on Jan. 20.

His visit began chaotically at the Hangzhou airport, where his staff argued with Chinese security over media access. Obama said on Sunday he "wouldn't over-crank the significance" of the airport events.

"None of this detracts from the broader scope of the relationship (with China)," he told a news conference. "The bilateral discussions that we had yesterday were extremely productive and continue to point to big areas of cooperation."
Germany's Merkel has "constructive" bilateral meeting with Erdogan

HANGZHOU, China, Sept 4 (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel discussed bilateral relations with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan before the start of the G20 summit in China, their first meeting since the failed July 15 coup, a German government spokesman said.

Already strained ties worsened after the coup attempt, when Ankara complained that Berlin had not been swift and decisive enough in condemning it.

"(Merkel and Erdogan) discussed German-Turkish relations, further implementation of the EU-Turkey (migrant) agreement and their mutual concerns about the ongoing Syrian civil war," the spokesman said. "The discussion was constructive."

The spokesman did not say whether the two leaders also spoke about Turkey's refusal to allow German lawmakers to visit German troops at Incirlik Air Base.

Turkey has banned the visits to the base near the Syrian border since Germany's parliament passed a resolution in June declaring the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces a genocide, but a German lawmaker on Saturday said he expected the issue to be resolved this week.

Turkey accepts many Christian Armenians were killed but contests assertions that up to 1.5 million died, and denies the killings were orchestrated. I

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Saturday told reporters in Bratislava that Turkey and the EU appeared to be "entering a new phase of talking with each other instead of talking past each other."

Steinmeier had on Friday sought to defuse the dispute over lawmaker visits to the air base by saying the genocide resolution was not legally binding.

Steinmeier also acknowledged that German statements after the failed putsch had perhaps lacked the expected empathy, though he also cautioned Turkey against seeing every critique from Europe as an attack or sign of ignorance.
Turkish warplanes pound 10 PKK targets overnight - Anadolu

ISTANBUL, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Turkish warplanes hit 10 Kurdish militant targets in Turkey's southeast and east overnight, the state-run Anadolu Agency said on Sunday, citing security sources.

The air strikes capped one of the most violent single days of fighting in the largely Kurdish southeast in recent years. The military has said that more than 100 militants from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) were either killed or injured in clashes on Saturday.

Turkey's southeast has been rocked by waves of violence following the collapse last year of a 2-1/2-year ceasefire between the state and the autonomy-seeking PKK.

Fighter jets pounded four PKK targets in the Cukurca district of the southeastern Hakkari province on Saturday evening, Anadolu said, citing the security sources.

Six more positions were bombed in the region between the eastern Agri and Van provinces shortly after midnight, it said.
To Iranian eyes, Kurdish unrest spells Saudi incitement

By Babak Dehghanpisheh

BEIRUT, Sept 4 (Reuters) - A decision by a Kurdish opposition group to take up arms against Iranian authorities has senior officials in Tehran worrying that Saudi Arabia is seeking to undermine its stability in a deepening of their regional rivalry.

Riyadh denies the charge. But tension between the two countries is surging, with Saudi Arabia and Iran supporting opposite sides in wars in Syria and Yemen and rival political parties in Iraq and Lebanon. The contest has largely hewed along sectarian lines as mainly Shi'ite Iran and Saudi Arabia, a predominantly Sunni country, vie for influence.

That competition, officials in Tehran worry, has now spread inside their borders, thanks to what they fear is Riyadh's exploitation of the Islamic Republic's communal rifts.

They point to clashes -- the first in almost 20 years -- between the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI) fighters and Revolutionary Guards in the northwest in June and July that left several dead on both sides.

As fighting escalated, Iranian forces shelled suspected Kurdish military bases in northern Iraq, raising the prospect that the conflict could spread across the border.

"(Saudi Arabia) gives money to any anti-revolutionary who comes near the border and says 'Go carry out operations,'" Mohsen Rezai, the former head of the Revolutionary Guards said after one round of clashes, according to the Tabnak website. "When they ask, 'Where should we carry out operations?' they say, 'It's not important. We want Iran to become insecure.'"

Iran's 8 to 10 million Kurdish community is mostly Sunni. In addition to the claims about Saudi funding for Kurdish armed groups, Iranian officials have also accused Riyadh of stirring up trouble among Iran's other Sunni ethnic minorities like the Baluch in the southeast of the country and Arabs in Iran's southwest.

The PKDI denies receiving Saudi support. And for their part, Saudi officials deny meddling in Iranian affairs. Riyadh in turn accuses Iran of stirring up trouble amongst its Shi'ite minority, a charge Iranian officials have denied.

Riyadh fears a nuclear deal with world powers signed last year gives Iran more scope to push its interests internationally by releasing it from many of the sanctions which have crippled its economy.

Alarmed by what it sees as a dangerous spread of Iranian activity overseas, the kingdom no longer relies heavily on Western allies to counter it, and is heightening its own efforts to contain Iranian influence.

PROXY WAR

Former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al Faisal showed up at a rally in Paris in July of the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO), the main exiled opposition group seeking to topple the country's clerical rulers.

While Prince Turki holds no official position, his presence suggests Saudi Arabia has crossed a line in terms of willingness to publicly support Iranian opposition groups.

"The proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran is becoming much more open and much more determined," said Abbas Milani, the director of the Iranian Studies program at Stanford University.

The Islamic Republic has had a tense relationship with its Kurdish minority since the revolution in 1979, which would potentially make them an ally of Iran's rivals, observers say.

The Revolutionary Guard fought Kurdish separatists immediately after the revolution and there have been periodic crackdowns on dissidents within the community since that time.

That tension has led Iranian officials to accuse members of Sunni minority groups, particularly the Kurds, of sympathizing with religious extremists, including Islamic State.

Last week, Iran's intelligence minister Mahmoud Alavi announced that 1500 Iranian youth had been prevented from joining Islamic State.

"It is a very convenient time to tie any act of persecution of the Sunnis to Islamic State," said Hadi Ghaemi, the director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.

TENSION

In early August, Iran executed 20 Kurdish inmates, allegedly Islamists, in the Rajai Shahr prison, ramping up tension between the central government and the Kurdish region of the country.

"The timing (of the executions) certainly appears to be sending a message to the Kurdish militant groups and the local Kurdish community," said Ghaemi. "It's really punishment of a community to spread fear and intimidation."

The PDKI, for its part, denies any support from Saudi Arabia and says Kurds have been forced to take up arms because they have no alternative to secure their political rights.

"Our main goal is not to pursue armed clashes," said Karim Parwizi, a member of the PDKI politburo who is based in Erbil in northern Iraq. "We want to have organizational, political and civil activities."

The operations by the PDKI come at a time when Kurds across the region appear emboldened: Kurdish armed groups in Syria have been gaining territory and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq is increasingly distancing itself from the central government in Baghdad.

PDKI members say they have no official ties or shared operations with other Kurdish parties in Iraq, Turkey or Syria.

In mid-August, the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani told a high level security delegation from the KRG that border security was a "red line", according to Mehr News.
Philippines worried, says more Chinese boats spotted at disputed shoal

By Manuel Mogato

VIENTIANE, Sept 4 (Reuters) - The Philippines expressed "grave concern" on Sunday and demanded an explanation from China's ambassador over what it said was an increasing number of Chinese boats near the disputed Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea.

A Philippines air force plane flew over the rocky outcrop on Saturday and spotted more boats than usual in a flotilla China has maintained since seizing the shoal after a tense standoff in 2012, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said.

"There were four Chinese coastguard ships and six other vessels, including blue-coloured barges, around Scarborough Shoal," he said in a text message sent to reporters.

"The presence of many ships other than coastguard in the area is a cause of grave concern."

China's embassy in Manila could not be reached for comment.

Though the shoal is merely a few rocks poking above the sea, it is important to the Philippines because of its tranquil waters and rich stocks of fish. Manila says China's blockade of the shoal is a violation of international law.

The dispute has become more significant since the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) on July 12 ruled that no one country has sovereign rights over activity in the Scarborough Shoal, a traditional fishing ground for Chinese, Filipino and Vietnamese.

China has refused to recognise the ruling and the latest comment from the Philippines could cause a stir ahead of two regional summits in Laos from Tuesday, where leaders of Southeast Asian states as well as China, Japan and United States will meet.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte wants China to abide by the ruling but has pledged not raise the issue next week. He wants to smooth the way for bilateral negotiations and last month sent former president Fidel Ramos as his special envoy to meet Chinese representatives in Hong Kong.

Defense Secretary Lorenzana said Beijing had earlier this year tried to send dredging barges to the shoal, but there was no sign of any reclamation activity so far.

China has previously used barges to dredge sand for its seven man-made islands in the Spratlys.

"We don't know yet if those barges are precursors of future dredging operations," he said.

"If they try to construct anything in Scarborough it will have far reaching adverse effect on the security situation."

China's maintains claims to almost the entire South China Sea, which is a vital waterway for global trade. Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Brunei and Vietnam have competing jurisdictional claims.

U.S. President Barack Obama pressed his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on Saturday on territorial disputes in the South China Sea, urging Beijing to uphold its legal obligations and stressing the United States' commitments to its regional allies.
Malaysia expects more Zika cases as virus spreads in Southeast Asia

By A. Ananthalakshmi

KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Malaysia is bracing for more Zika cases, officials said on Sunday, after detecting the first locally infected patient, which could further stretch a health system struggling with dengue, another mosquito-borne virus that can be fatal.

Both Zika, which is of particular risk to pregnant women, and the dengue virus are spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which is common in tropical Malaysia, Southeast Asia's third largest economy, and across the region.

Neighbouring Singapore has reported more than 200 cases of Zika.

Three days ago, Malaysia reported its first Zika infection - a woman living near Kuala Lumpur who contracted the virus during a visit to Singapore.

On Saturday, Malaysian authorities said they had detected the first local infection: a 61-year-old man in the city of Kota Kinabalu, in the Malaysian part of Borneo island.

"The confirmation of the second case of Zika in Kota Kinabalu suggests that the virus is already present within our communities," Health Minister Subramaniam Sathasivam said.

"Zika is present in our country. New cases will continue to emerge," he posted on his Facebook page.

Zika infections in pregnant women have been shown to cause microcephaly - a severe birth defect in which the head and brain are undersized - as well as other brain abnormalities.

The connection between Zika and microcephaly first came to light last fall in Brazil, which has since confirmed more than 1,800 cases of microcephaly.

In adults, Zika infections have also been linked to a rare neurological syndrome known as Guillain-Barre, as well as other neurological disorders.

DENGUE FIGHT

Since reporting its first Zika infection, Malaysia has increased insecticide spraying to kill mosquitoes. It has also stepped up health checks at its main border with Singapore, through which 200,000 people pass daily.

Malaysia, with a population of almost 30 million and a size 46 times bigger than Singapore, faces a much more challenging fight against Zika, doctors say.

"Zika will spread even faster in Malaysia than Singapore because our Aedes volume is so much higher and the breeding grounds are enormous," said Amar Singh, head of the paediatric department at Hospital Raja Permaisuri Bainun in the Malaysian town of Ipoh.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) ranks Malaysia's healthcare system as the world's 49th most developed. Singapore figures in the top 10.

There is no vaccine or treatment for Zika, which is a close cousin of dengue and chikungunya and causes mild fever, rash and red eyes. An estimated 80 percent of people infected have no symptoms, making it difficult for pregnant women to know whether they have been infected.

The WHO has declared the Zika outbreak an international health emergency, and if Malaysia's fight against dengue is any indication, it will struggle with Zika.

Malaysia recorded a total of 120,836 dengue cases last year, including 336 fatalities - the most since 1995, according to government data. This year, there have been 75,000 dengue cases and 166 fatalities.

Malaysian authorities say dengue is a bigger problem than Zika.

But regional health experts believe Zika is significantly under-reported in Southeast Asia as authorities fail to conduct adequate screening and also because of its usually mild symptoms.

The WHO lists Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam as countries with "possible endemic transmission or evidence of local mosquito-borne Zika infections in 2016".
France's Macron criticises government for holding back on reforms

PARIS, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Emmanuel Macron, who resigned from the French government on Tuesday, criticised President Francois Hollande's government in a newspaper interview for not pushing hard enough for reforms.

"I kept trying, proposing, pushing ... If you want to succeed you cannot leave work half done, and unfortunately many things were left half done! The choice was made not to launch a second wave of economic reforms as I was proposing it," he told Le Journal du Dimanche.

Macron, a 38-year old former investment banker tipped as a potential candidate in next year's presidential election, quit his economy minister post on Tuesday to devote himself to the political party he recently set up, saying he needed to be free "to transform France" next year..

Macron's place in the government had become increasingly awkward after he repeatedly criticised left-wing totems such as France's 35-hour work week and created his 'En Marche' (Forward) party in April, casting it as leaning neither left nor right.

Macron, however, did not say in the Journal du Dimanche interview if he would make a bid for the French presidency in the 2017 election.

If confirmed, a Macron bid for the presidency would further harm President Francois Hollande's chances of re-election, with polls already suggesting he would be very unlikely to even make it into the run-off round.
Mali president fires defence minister after gunmen seize village

BAMAKO, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Mali's President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita has fired Defence Minister Tieman Hubert Coulibaly after suspected Islamist militants briefly seized the village of Boni in the centre of the country on Friday, state television said late on Saturday.

Coulibaly is being replaced by Abdoulaye Idrissa Maiga, a former minister for territorial administration, who was also the president's campaign director at the 2013 election.

The attackers, who are suspected of belonging to the Ansar Dine group, burned public buildings and took an elected local official hostage before withdrawing after a few hours. No one was killed and the army is back in control, witnesses said.

The raid was the latest in a series this year in Mali, reflecting a rise in the power of Islamist groups that have spread a campaign of violence from the north to the centre of the country only a few hundreds miles from the capital Bamako.

Armed groups have proliferated since Islamists took advantage of an ethnic Tuareg uprising in 2012 to seize the north of the desert country.

A French-led intervention drove Islamists back in 2013 but instability has continued and undermines a fragile U.N.-backed peace process.
British government to set out plans on post-Brexit ties with EU in coming week

By Kylie MacLellan

LONDON, Sept 4 (Reuters) - The British government will set out in the coming week how it plans to shape its relationship with the European Union upon leaving the bloc, Prime Minister Theresa May said in an interview broadcast on Sunday.

Since taking office in July, May and her Brexit minister David Davis have given little detail about what Britain's future relationship with the EU will look like, saying only they want it to involve curbs on immigration and a good deal on trade.

"He (Davis) will be making a statement to parliament this week about the work that the government has been doing over the summer and obviously how we are going to take that forward in shaping the sort of relationship we want with the EU," May told the BBC in an interview recorded before she left Britain for the G20 summit in China.

On her way to the summit, May told reporters Britain's economy will suffer as a result of the decision to leave the EU despite signs in recent economic data that the impact has not been as severe as some predicted.

May told the BBC she would use the summit to begin talks with world leaders including U.S. President Barack Obama, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over future trade deals.

"I want to talk about how we can scope out what a trade deal and the negotiations on a trade deal would be like so that when the time comes, when we are able to sign those deals, we are able to do so," she said.

May, who upset Chinese officials by delaying a $24 billion project to build a partly Chinese-funded nuclear power plant, is also due to hold a one-to-one with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the summit. She told the BBC she would be making a decision on the deal later this month.

May has been clear she will not trigger Article 50, the formal process of leaving the EU, this year in order to give Britain time to prepare for upcoming negotiations, but said it would not be "kicked into the long grass".

May said there would be no early national election, despite some in her ruling Conservatives believing turmoil in the opposition Labour Party gives them an opportunity to increase their small parliamentary majority.

"We need that period of time, that stability to be able to deal with the issues that the country is facing and have that election in 2020," she said.
Syria deal could be announced soon, U.S. envoy tells armed opposition - letter

BEIRUT, Sept 4 (Reuters) - A deal in Syria being discussed by the United States and Russia, which would involve a country-wide ceasefire and focus on delivering aid to embattled Aleppo, could be announced soon, Washington's Syria envoy has said.

The deal would oblige Russia to prevent Syrian government warplanes from bombing areas held by the mainstream opposition, and would require the withdrawal of Damascus's forces from a key supply route north of Aleppo, according to a letter from Michael Ratney to the armed opposition, seen by Reuters and dated Sept. 3.
British Prime Minister Theresa May arrives in China's eastern city of Hangzhou to attend the 11th Group of 20 (G20) summit, Sept. 4, 2016. (Xinhua/Cai Yang)

HANGZHOU, China, Sept. 4 -- British Prime Minister Theresa May arrived in this eastern Chinese city on Sunday for the 11th leaders' meeting of the G20 major economies, her major international summit debut.

At the summit, themed "Toward an Innovative, Invigorated, Interconnected and Inclusive World Economy," Britain is to show it is "open for business as a bold, confident, outward-looking country" and will be a "global leader" on free trade, May said Saturday before leaving for China.

The European country's shock vote in June to leave the European Union (EU), led to the resignation of May's predecessor, David Cameron, and has put Britain's posture on regional integration and globalization in question.

On the sidelines of the two-day G20 summit, May is expected to have a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss bilateral relations and other matters of common concern.

Upon her departure for China, she said "this is a golden era for UK-China relations," and that in Hangzhou, she will talk to Xi "about how we can develop the strategic partnership that we have between the UK and China."

China and Britain can enhance cooperation in a number of fields, from infrastructure investment and international financial framework to cooperation on taxation, anti-corruption and anti-microbial resistance, said Liu Xiaoming, China's ambassador to Britain.

"Our joint efforts in these areas will be essential in the G20's transition from an organization for crisis control to an institution of long-term governance," he said in a signed article published by Britain's Daily Telegraph on Thursday.

During her stay in Hangzhou, May is also expected to meet with other world leaders including U.S. President Barack Obama, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Spacecom seeks to keep Xinwei deal alive after satellite destroyed

By Steven Scheer

JERUSALEM, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Israeli satellite operator Space Communications said on Sunday it was working on an amended deal to be acquired by Beijing Xinwei Technology Group after a Spacecom communications satellite was destroyed last week.

Xinwei last month agreed to buy Spacecom for $285 million, saying the deal was contingent on the successful launch of Spacecom's Amos-6 satellite - which was due to take place on Saturday.

But an explosion destroyed a Falcon 9 rocket belonging to Elon Musk's SpaceX as well as Amos-6 during preparations for a routine test firing at Cape Canaveral in Florida last Thursday.

Spacecom said the loss would have a significant impact on the company, with its equity expected to decline by $30 million to $123 million. Its shares lost 9 percent on Thursday, with the explosion occurring late in the trading day. They were suspended on Sunday morning and when they resumed trade lost another 34 percent.

Prior to Sunday's decline, Spacecom had a market value of 806 million shekels.

Spacecom "updated the acquirer (Xinwei) about the loss of the satellite and is examining, along with the buyer, the possibility to amend the agreement and adjust to the new situation," it said on Sunday.

In a conference call, Spacecom's general counsel Gil Lotan said it was still too early to provide any forecast regarding the prospect of the merger. "We hope to continue fruitful communications with the prospective buyer," he said.

The Amos-6 satellite was going to be used by a number of key clients, including Facebook to expand internet access in Africa.

Bezeq Israel Telecom, Israel's largest telecoms provider, said its digital satellite TV provider unit YES could be impacted by the loss of Amos-6. It said it had been using the older Amos-2 and Amos-3 satellites and that should a replacement not be found, it may have to remove some channels.

Spacecom said it was entitled to a full refund for Amos-6 from Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), the satellite's manufacturer, as well as interest of LIBOR plus 4 percent.

It will also receive $50 million in compensation from SpaceX, or it can choose to use SpaceX for a future launch at no extra cost.
Syria deal could be announced soon, U.S. envoy tells opposition in letter

BEIRUT/GENEVA, Sept 4 (Reuters) - A deal in Syria being discussed by the United States and Russia, which would involve a country-wide ceasefire and focus on delivering aid to embattled Aleppo, could be announced soon, Washington's Syria envoy has said.

The deal would oblige Russia to prevent Syrian government warplanes from bombing areas held by the mainstream opposition, and would require the withdrawal of Damascus's forces from a key supply route north of Aleppo, according to a letter from Michael Ratney to the armed opposition, seen by Reuters and dated Sept. 3.

In return, the United States would coordinate with Russia in fighting against al Qaeda, the letter said, without elaborating.

It said the rebels must cooperate in order for the agreement to take effect, but that guarantees were being sought that Moscow, Syria's most powerful ally, would respect the deal.

A truce brokered by the Cold War foes in February collapsed and peace talks crumbled earlier this year, with the Syrian government side and the opposition accusing each other of violating it.

Fighting has since escalated across the country, particularly around divided Aleppo, where advances by both sides have cut supplies, power and water to nearly 2 million people in government- and rebel-held areas.

The latest agreement would see government forces withdraw from a key supply route which led into the rebel-held east of the city and which was cut in July. The Castello Road would become a demilitarised zone, Ratney's letter said.
G20 to call for fiscal, monetary, structural policies to boost growth - Japan

HANGZHOU, China Sept 4 (Reuters) - G20 countries are set to agree that all policy measures, including monetary, fiscal and structural reforms, should be used to achieve solid and sustainable growth, a Japanese senior government spokesman said on Sunday.
Japan warns Brexit may drive banks, pharma investment to EU

TOKYO, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Japan has warned Britain that its exit from the European Union could prompt Japanese financial institutions to relocate from London and listed a raft of concerns from Japanese companies about the transition away of the EU.

In a 15-page report published on the eve of a summit of the Group of 20 big economies in China, a Japanese government task force formed to respond to "Brexit" also warned of a possible outflow of drug research and development investment from Britain, though it said it expected the British government to handle its exit from the bloc smoothly.

Recent economic data suggests the economic impact of Britain's vote to leave the EU has not been as severe as some predicted, although British Prime Minister Theresa May said on Sunday its economy will suffer as a result of the decision.

The Japanese report, published on the Foreign Ministry's website on Friday, cites numerous concerns including that Japanese financial institutions may have to apply for corporate status in the EU if Brexit means they lose the 'single passport' - the right to operate across the bloc. It also raises worries over ease of access to unskilled labour, tariff protection, and London's status as a clearing centre for euro transactions.

Formed in July shortly after Britain voted to leave the EU, the task force was headed by Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Koichi Hagiuda and comprises senior officials from the Prime Minister's Office, the foreign, finance, trade and agriculture ministries and the Financial Services Agency.

"Since the inception of the task force, three meetings were held and we've compiled the message, taking into account concerns from the private sector," a Foreign Ministry official told Reuters on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hangzhou, China.

"As a next step, we would like to relay this message to EU and UK leaders, taking advantage of a various diplomatic opportunities that are coming up including a G20 and UN high-level week," he said, declining to be identified.

END TO UNFETTERED ACCESS?

London will set out in the coming week how it plans to shape its relationship with the European Union upon leaving the bloc, Prime Minister Theresa May said in an interview broadcast on Sunday.

Many Japanese financial institutions and other companies, such as Nissan Motor Co, count Britain as their European headquarters. Nearly half of Japan's EU investment last year flowed to Britain, the report noted.

These Japanese companies have counted on unfettered access to the giant EU market in their investment decisions that the report says have created 440,000 jobs in Europe.

A British official said such reports were welcome.

"It's not unhelpful to also have some of our trading partners setting out some of the issues they are looking at and the types of concerns or issues that they would want to be addressed," the official said on condition of anonymity.

"This is all more information that helps to inform our thinking on what is the right deal for Britain."

As for pharmaceuticals, the task force warns that if the European Medicines Agency were to move to the continent, "the appeal of London as an environment for the development of pharmaceuticals would be lost... this could force Japanese companies to reconsider their business activities."
Saudi Arabia strives to prevent repeat of fatal crush at haj

By Katie Paul

RIYADH, Sept 4 (Reuters) - A year after the worst haj disaster in a generation, Saudi Arabia is issuing pilgrims with electronic bracelets and using more surveillance cameras to avoid a repeat of a crush that killed hundreds and damaged already strained ties with Iran.

The world's largest annual Muslim gathering, bringing some two million to Islam's most sacred sites in Mecca, will also be a focus of concerns about militant violence after a suicide bomber killed four soldiers in early July in the nearby city of Medina, Islam's second holiest.

Custodian of Islam's most revered places, Saudi Arabia stakes its reputation on organising haj, one of the five pillars of Islam which every able-bodied Muslim who can afford to is obliged to undertake at least once.

Its prestige was damaged by the 2015 disaster, in which Riyadh said 769 pilgrims were killed - the highest haj death toll since a crush in 1990. Counts of fatalities by countries who repatriated bodies showed that over 2,000 people may have died in the crush, more than 400 of them Iranians.

Iran, Saudi Arabia's main regional rival, blamed the disaster on organisers' incompetence. An official Saudi inquiry has yet to be published, but authorities suggested at the time some pilgrims ignored crowd control rules.

This year, efforts are being made to strengthen crowd management.

Thousands of civil servants, security personnel and medics have been conducting drills in preparation for the pilgrimage, which officially starts this week.

The kingdom says it is deploying extra staff and increasing coordination with haj missions from pilgrims' home countries to ensure worshippers comply with agreed schedules to perform various rituals. Hundreds of new surveillance cameras had been installed at the Grand Mosque.

"The scheduling programme is the most important part of the operational programme," Interior Ministry spokesman Major General Mansour Turki told Reuters.

"This is the area we have to concentrate on, to make sure pilgrims ...comply with it once they get there."

Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq al-Awsat said last month the Mecca Development Authority had set up electronic paths and gates to manage crowds heading to Jamarat, the symbolic stoning of the devil where many previous disasters have occurred.

The kingdom also is kitting pilgrims out with electronic wristbands to enable authorities to track the flow of people and get early warnings of crowd build-ups.

NO POLITICS

Relations between Shi'ite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia, which back opposing sides in Syria and other conflicts, plummeted after the 2015 crush.

Riyadh then broke diplomatic ties when its Tehran embassy was stormed in January over the Saudi execution of a Shi'ite cleric.

Wary that some pilgrims may seek to use haj for ideological purposes, Saudi Arabia said it would not tolerate any attempt to politicise haj - remarks widely seen as referring to Iran.

Iran said in May its pilgrims would not attend, blaming Riyadh for "sabotage" and failing to guarantee their safety. Saudi Arabia blamed Iran, saying it had demanded the right to hold demonstrations that would have created chaos.

But Saudi Arabia is worried that Iranian pilgrims coming from abroad or pro-Iranian pilgrims from other countries could still exploit the gathering to spread anti-Saudi messages.
Germany's Merkel upbeat on improving ties with Erdogan after meeting

HANGZHOU, China, Sept 4 (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel struck an upbeat tone after meeting Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on the sidelines of the G20 summit, and said she expected progress on two thorny issues that have marred German and European ties with Ankara.

Both Germany and the EU, which depend on Ankara to keep a lid on the movement of migrants to the bloc, are trying to ease tensions with Turkey after criticising Erdogan's crackdown on opponents following the failed coup in July.

Merkel said she was hopeful that the European Union and Turkey could resolve their differences over visa-free travel for Turks, but an agreement was likely still several weeks away.

"The discussions with the European Commission are very intensive and are continuing," she said.

Merkel also said she expected a resolution in Germany's dispute with Ankara over visits to an air base in Turkey. She and other German officials have insisted that Ankara must end its ban on German lawmaker visits to 250 German soldiers working at Incirlik Air Base as part of the U.S.-led coalition's air strikes against Islamist State targets.

"I believe it is possible that we will get positive news on the justified demand in the coming days," the German leader told reporters after meeting with Erdogan in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou.

Turkey banned German lawmakers from visiting the base near the Syrian border in June after the parliament passed a resolution declaring the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces a genocide. German lawmakers in turn threatened to end the military mission there.

Turkey accepts many Christian Armenians were killed but contests assertions that up to 1.5 million died, and denies the killings were orchestrated.

Rainer Arnold, defence spokesman for the Social Democrats in parliament, told Reuters earlier he expected Turkey to approve an Oct. 4 visit by lawmakers to the base next week.

The EU worries Turkey applies its anti-terror laws too broadly to go after Erdogan critics and has made easing them a precondition for granting Turks visa-free movement.

Ankara previously threatened to walk away from cooperation on migration should it not get more relaxed travel rules in October, but now appears willing to push the deadline to the end of the year, the Welt am Sonntag newspaper reported.
Asian consortium in talks to buy stake in data centre operator Global Switch

LONDON, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Data centre operator Global Switch, owned by Britain's billionaire Reuben brothers, said on Sunday its parent company was in talks with a consortium of Asian investors about a potential sale of a stake in the business.

The Sunday Times reported the brothers were in advanced talks for a 5 billion pound ($6.7 billion) deal to sell half of the company to a consortium led by Chinese firm Daily Tech and which includes a private financial subsidiary of state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China.

The newspaper said senior British politicians, including former foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind, had raised concerns about security risks if the sale went ahead.

Global Switch develops and operates data centres in Europe and Asia. The centres house IT servers for clients including government organisations, financial institutions and telecoms firms.

Global Switch said in a statement its parent company, Aldersgate Investments Limited, was in talks with "a consortium of high quality private sector Asian investors about a potential investment".

"If the investment is concluded by the consortium, there will be no change to the management or strategic direction of Global Switch. Aldersgate Investments Limited and the consortium will exercise joint control of Global Switch," the company said.

On Sunday, British Prime Minister Theresa May said she wanted her security advisers to help review a delayed nuclear power investment from China.

Global Switch said there were no security issues relating to its possible transaction.

"This is a potential financial investment into a real estate company. The investors will have no involvement in the operations or management of the company," it said.

"Global Switch has no access to customer data whatsoever and only provides space, power, cooling and physical security. Global Switch provides no IT services for its customers."
Syrian forces besiege rebel-held Aleppo as Turkish-backed fighters drive IS from border

By John Davison and Roberta Rampton

BEIRUT/HANGZHOU, China, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Syrian government forces and their allies again laid siege to rebel-held eastern Aleppo on Sunday, while Turkish-backed fighters drove Islamic State from all the areas along its border, in two significant but separate developments in the multi-sided conflict.

The fighting - two potential turning points in the conflict if the gains can be sustained - complicated efforts by the United States and Russia to reach a ceasefire deal for Syria, whose civil war is in its sixth year.

Talks by the Cold War foes on a ceasefire were set to continue on Monday, but "we're not there yet," U.S. President Barack Obama told reporters at the G20 summit in the Chinese city of Hangzhou.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad wants to fully recapture divided Aleppo, Syria's largest city before the war. Gains made by Damascus have relied heavily on Russian air support since September last year.

On Sunday, intense aerial and artillery attacks helped government forces and their allies drive insurgents out of the Ramousah military complex in Aleppo, according to rebels and a monitoring group.

The rebels had captured the complex in early August, breaking through a government siege of eastern Aleppo . Sunday's government advances resulted in a new siege of the area, said Zakaria Malahifji of the Fastaqim rebel group.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group monitoring the war, and a Damascus military source also reported the new siege.

Russian support has turned the war in Assad's favour in many areas, although rebels have made some gains, including in Hama province, further south.

Rebels launched a campaign on Sunday to try to capture the town of Maan, north of the city of Hama, the provincial capital, said Mohammed Rasheed, a spokesman for rebel group Jaish al-Nasr. Advances by the insurgents in recent days have brought them to within 10 km (six miles) of government-controlled Hama, the Observatory and insurgents say.

TURKISH OFFENSIVE DRIVES OUT IS

In a separate battle further east, rebels backed by Turkey - and made up of Aleppo-based factions - drove Islamic State militants from all areas they controlled along the Syrian-Turkish border, according to the rebels, Ankara and the Observatory.

Some 10 days ago, Turkey mounted its first full-scale incursion into Syrian territory since the conflict began in 2011, aimed at IS and at U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in the area, which have also been battling the jihadists.

The Turkish-backed advance denied Islamic State its main route to the outside world, through which it has moved fighters and weapons. It was another blow for the jihadist group, which is under pressure in its self-proclaimed caliphate in Syria and Iraq.

But Turkey's operation was focused just as firmly against U.S.-backed Kurdish forces, which it fired at last week and which it insists must withdraw to east of the Euphrates river.

Ankara fears that advances by the Kurdish YPG militia, which has been one of the most effective partners for the U.S. coalition fighting IS, will embolden Kurdish militants on its own soil.

With support from Turkish tanks and warplanes, the rebels now appear to have secured a roughly 90 km stretch of land that Turkey long wanted to control to keep out jihadists and to stop the advance of the YPG.

'GRAVE DIFFERENCES'

Sunday's advances illustrate the complexity of the Syrian conflict, which has drawn in most world and regional powers. Efforts to end the fighting have been repeatedly confounded.

A deal brokered in February by the United States and Russia fell apart earlier this year. Even before Sunday's battlefield developments, U.S. President Obama said that the two countries were struggling to reach a new ceasefire agreement between Damascus and rebels.

"We're not there yet," Obama told reporters after a meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May in Hangzhou. "We have grave differences with the Russians in terms of both the parties we support but also the process that is required to bring about peace in Syria."

An agreement that would stop the fighting and allow more humanitarian deliveries had looked set to be announced by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Hangzhou.

Two lecterns had been set up in a room for a news conference. But Kerry emerged alone to say a couple of issues still needed to be resolved and the two sides would resume talks on Monday. He did not elaborate.

Officials from the United States and Russia, which back opposite sides in Syria's civil war, have been meeting since Kerry travelled to Moscow in July with a proposal that would halt the fighting.

It would ensure that government fighters pulled back in some areas, including around Aleppo, to allow convoys of humanitarian aid to reach civilians caught in the fighting.

The ceasefire would be overseen through Russian-U.S. intelligence sharing and military cooperation, which would focus on fighting Islamic State and other militant groups such as al Qaeda.

The plan would need Russia to convince Assad to ground his air force, a move that Lavrov has said was not the goal.

A letter from Washington's Syria envoy, Michael Ratney, to the armed opposition, a copy of which was seen by Reuters, laid out some of the ceasefire terms.

It would oblige Russia to prevent warplanes from bombing areas held by mainstream opposition, require the withdrawal of Damascus's forces from a supply route north of Aleppo, and focus on delivery of humanitarian aid unhindered by warring sides to the city's population, said the letter, dated Sept. 3.

Fighting around Aleppo has recently cut supplies, power and water to nearly 2 million people in both government- and rebel-held areas.

In return, the United States would coordinate with Russia in fighting against al Qaeda, it said, without elaborating.

The Syrian government and Russia were also to avoid bombing areas where more moderate insurgent groups are operating close to Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, previously the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front.
MIDEAST STOCKS-Saudi leads Gulf up as foreign investor limits eased

By Andrew Torchia

DUBAI, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia led Gulf stocks higher on Sunday as Riyadh eased restrictions on foreign investment in its securities markets, while most other bourses in the region were buoyed by strength in oil prices and global equities at the end of last week.

As previously announced, the Saudi Capital Market Authority lowered minimum qualifications for foreign institutional investors in its markets and raised ceilings on foreign ownership in stocks.

The reforms are not expected to cause a sudden surge of new foreign money into the kingdom; actual foreign ownership of stocks is well below the previous ceilings. Many investors remain deterred by less-than-attractive valuations and a sharp economic slowdown caused by low oil prices.

Nevertheless, the reforms are expected to help stocks in the long term. The main index climbed 1.3 percent on Sunday in a broad-based rise, with petrochemical investment holding company Alujain rising 3.4 percent; before the reforms, foreign institutions directly owned over 4 percent of the company, a relatively higher percentage.

Emaar the Economic City (EEC) rose 3.5 percent after Reuters quoted a source familiar with the matter as saying Saudi Arabia's top sovereign fund, the Public Investment Fund, was in talks to invest in King Abdullah Economic City, the huge project being developed by EEC.

Insurer Wataniya, which had been languishing at a five-year low, jumped 6.9 percent in its heaviest trade in four years.

In Dubai, the index added 0.7 percent with GFH Financial, the most heavily traded stock, surging 4.6 percent.

Abu Dhabi edged down 0.2 percent because of weakness in banks, with First Gulf Bank losing 1.3 percent. Most of the 10 most heavily traded stocks barely moved.

Qatar's index edged up 0.1 percent as the market stabilised in thin trade after falling sharply for two days on profit-taking; late last month, it jumped on hopes for foreign fund inflows when FTSE upgrades Qatar to emerging market status in mid-September. Industries Qatar rose 1.5 percent on Sunday.

In Egypt, the index added 1.3 percent on the back of a 2.2 percent gain by Global Telecom Holding.

Egypt's top cigarette maker Eastern Company rocketed 7 percent after its board approved a capital hike of 750 million Egyptian pounds ($84 million) through the distribution of one free share per existing original share.

SUNDAY'S HIGHLIGHTS

SAUDI ARABIA

* The index climbed 1.3 percent to 6,099 points.

DUBAI

* The index gained 0.7 percent to 3,535 points.

ABU DHABI

* The index edged down 0.2 percent to 4,472 points.

EGYPT

* The index added 1.3 percent to 8,241 points.

QATAR

* The index rose 0.1 percent to 10,850 points.

KUWAIT

* The index fell 0.3 percent to 5,395 points.

OMAN

* The index rose 0.2 percent to 5,728 points.

BAHRAIN

* The index dropped 0.2 percent to 1,141 points.
Turkey will never allow 'artificial state' in northern Syria, PM says

By Hamdi Istanbullu and Melih Aslan

ISTANBUL, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Turkey will never allow the formation of an "artificial state" in northern Syria, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Sunday, referring to the U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters whose advance Ankara is now aiming to stop.

Turkey and its allies opened a new line of attack in northern Syria on Saturday, as Turkish tanks rolled across the border and Syrian fighters swept in from the west to take villages held by Islamic State and check the advance of the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish YPG.

Turkey launched its operation in Syria, called Euphrates Shield, on Aug.24 to drive out Islamic State and stop the YPG militia, fearing its growing control of northern Syria.

"We will never allow the formation of an artificial state in the north of Syria," Yildirim said in a speech in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, where he announced an investment programme to rebuild parts of the largely Kurdish region that have been destroyed by security operations.

"We are there with Euphrates Shield, we are there to protect our border, to provide for our citizens safety of life and property, and to ensure Syria's integrity."

Turkey is fighting a three-decade-old Kurdish insurgency in the southeast and fears that the YPG's advances will embolden militants at home. Turkey considers the YPG a terrorist organisation and an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

While the United States and Europe also regard the PKK as a terrorist group, Washington sees the YPG as a separate entity and as its most effective partner in the fight against Islamic State in Syria. That position has caused friction with Turkey, a NATO member and a partner in the fight against Islamic State.

OBAMA MEETING

Yildirim's comments echoed those of President Tayyip Erdogan at the G20 gathering of world leaders in China, who told reporters following a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama: "It is our wish that a terror corridor not be formed across our southern border".

Erdogan has repeatedly said that Turkey's allies should not be making a distinction between Islamic State and the YPG as both groups pose a threat to Turkey.

Separately, state-run Anadolu Agency said Turkish jets hit four Islamic State positions late on Saturday evening in Syria's northwestern Aleppo province as part of the operation, citing security sources.
Brazilian President Michel Temer receives an interview in Hangzhou, capital city of east China's Zhejiang Province, Sept. 3, 2016. (Xinhua/Jin Liwang)

HANGZHOU, China, Sept. 4 -- Newly-installed Brazilian President Michel Temer said here Saturday that he has high expectations for the upcoming G20 summit and believes it will bring benefits to all its members.

The Brazilian leader made the remarks in an interview with Chinese journalists prior to the leaders' meeting, which will mark his first appearance as head of state at a major international occasion.

He was sworn in as Brazil's president on Wednesday after lawmakers ousted his predecessor, Dilma Rousseff, in an impeachment vote.

Temer noted that the G20 is a heavyweight international organization and this year's summit features such subjects as innovation and climate change, which Brazil also cares about.

He said he is full of positive expectations for its outcome.

"I think this G20 summit will bring benefits to all its members, particularly to our country," said the president, who is to join other G20 leaders at the two-day summit starting Sunday.

He spoke highly of the integration and interaction among G20 members, and also spoke of the upcoming summit of the emerging-market bloc of BRICS -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- in October in India.

International mechanisms like the G20 and BRICS not only help their members strengthen relations but also help them boost their respective development, noted the Brazilian president.

The Hangzhou summit involves the largest number of developing countries in the G20's history, which will help these countries promote common development, he added. He also expressed confidence in the BRICS framework.

On Brazil-China relations, the Brazilian leader said the relationship enjoys a very solid foundation and is currently at its best in history, as high-level bilateral contacts have greatly boosted bilateral diplomatic and trade ties.

"China is one of Brazil's largest trading partners. Though geographically far apart, our two countries are getting closer and closer," the president said.

Citing a series of cooperation deals the two sides signed on Friday during his stopover in Shanghai en route to Hangzhou, Temer hailed the bilateral partnership as a paradigm for integrated development of the world economy.

He hoped China will continue to open up its market to Brazil's soybeans, meat and other agro-products.

The president, who has long served as the Brazilian chairman of the China-Brazil High-Level Coordination and Cooperation Committee, said the mechanism made new progress in each of its last four sessions and has laid a solid foundation for bilateral ties.

He suggested that he might continue to lead the committee in the future.

Commenting on China's economy, he noted that the world's second largest economy has registered higher growth rates than many other countries, and the Chinese model has inspired many followers.

"China sets an example by being confident in its own economy at a time when the global economy is beset with difficulties," he said, adding that China's development experience is very useful to Brazil.

The South American country is striving to ride out the worst recession in its recent history. Its economy contracted by 3.8 percent in 2015 and is expected to shrink by 3.16 percent in 2016.

Touching upon Brazil's domestic situation, Temer said he is committed to restoring public confidence and judicial security, and pledged to protect the interests of foreign investors.
Three Iranian banks to open branches in Munich - paper

BERLIN, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Three Iranian banks have told Bavaria's economy minister that they plan to open branches in Munich to help stimulate more business ties with German firms, the Muenchner Merkur newspaper reported on Sunday.

Middle East Bank, Parsian Bank and Sina Bank have received approval from Iran's central bank to set up branches overseas, the minister, Ilse Aigner, told the newspaper.

Aigner, a member of the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), spoke with the newspaper from Tehran during her second visit to the Iranian capital within a year.

"Business ties between Bavarian companies and Iran often fail today because of barriers in the payment process," Aigner told the newspaper in interview to be published Monday.

"That is why having branches of Iranian banks in Munich is particularly important for our businesses. Especially our small- to medium-sized firms have enormous export prospects to Iran that they will be able to utilise more easily in the future."

Many European companies complain that although U.S. sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programme were lifted in January, they still cannot secure financing from Western banks because they are worried about further sanctions still in effect in the United States, such as those against money laundering.

Under the nuclear sanctions, Iranian companies used methods such as transfers of funds through money changers to conduct trade, which was expensive, time-consuming and sometimes unreliable.

Aigner told the paper that the Iranian banks would now get professional help for setting up satellite offices in Munich and navigating the approval process.
Turkish-backed rebels clear IS from Turkey's Syrian border

By David Dolan and Orhan Coskun

ISTANBUL/ANKARA, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Turkish-backed rebels on Sunday cleared Islamic State from Turkey's Syrian border, securing a 90 km (55 miles) corridor and marking a substantial gain in Ankara's plan to drive out Sunni militants and stop the advance of Syrian Kurdish fighters.

The rebels, mainly Syrian Arabs and Turkmen fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, took charge of the frontier between Azaz and Jarablus after seizing 20 villages from the Sunni hardline group, the Turkish military said in a statement.

That puts Turkey in firm control of a stretch of land it sees as a bulwark against the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish YPG militia. However, that could sharpen tensions with the United States over Syria policy.

Turkey is fighting a three-decade-old Kurdish insurgency in its southeast and fears that gains by the Syrian Kurdish YPG will embolden militants at home. Turkey considers the YPG a terrorist organisation and an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

"We are there to protect our border, to provide for our citizens safety of life and property, and to ensure Syria's integrity," Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said in a speech on Sunday, discussing the incursion, which Ankara calls Euphrates Shield.

"We will never allow the formation of an artificial state in the north of Syria," he told a crowd in Diyarbakir, the largest city in the mainly Kurdish southeast.

The advance took place little more than a week after Turkey launched the Syrian incursion, deploying tanks and air power to support the rebels, who swept into the border town of Jarablus.

On Saturday, Turkey and its rebel allies opened a new line of attack in northern Syria, rolling across the border some 55 km (34 miles) west of Jarablus.

The United States had said on Saturday it some Islamic State targets in the region, but it did not say where.

While the United States and Europe also regard the PKK as a terrorist group, Washington sees the YPG as a separate entity and an effective client in the fight against Islamic State in Syria. That position has caused friction with Turkey, a NATO member and a partner in anti-IS coalition.

'TERROR CORRIDOR'

President Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday raised concern about the formation of a "terror corridor" along Turkey's Syrian border.

Speaking to reporters after a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama at the G20 gathering of world leaders in China, Erdogan said: "It is our wish that a terror corridor not be formed across our southern border".

Erdogan has repeatedly said that Turkey's allies should not be making a distinction between Islamic State and the YPG as both groups pose a threat to Turkey.

Some Kurds have criticised Turkey for its role in Syria. A demonstration broke out along the Syrian border on Friday, where Turkey is building a concrete wall. Police used tear gas and water cannon to drive the protesters back.

At a rally in Istanbul on Sunday, the co-head of Turkey's Kurdish-rooted Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) denounced the incursion into Syria as an "invasion".

"The government, which says it wants to stop ISIS (Islamic State) with the Jarablus invasion, has no credibility. The invasion of Jarablus is totally an adversarial approach against Kurds and we will never accept it," Selahattin Demirtas told reporters.

Separately, Anadolu said Turkish warplanes hit four Islamic State positions on Saturday evening in Syria's northwestern Aleppo province as part of the operation, citing security sources.
Turkish-backed rebels secure area from Azaz to Jarablus -Anadolu

ISTANBUL, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Turkish-backed rebels on Sunday secured the area in northern Syria stretching from Azaz to Jarablus along the Turkish border, pushing out Islamic State militants, state-run Anadolu Agency reported.
Bangladesh summons Pakistani diplomat to lodge protest in worsening row

By Ruma Paul

DHAKA, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Bangladesh on Sunday summoned Pakistan's acting high commissioner to protest its interference in its affairs after Islamabad said it was "deeply saddened" by the execution of a top Islamist party figure for atrocities committed during the war to leave Pakistan.

Mir Quasem Ali, 63, a key financier of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, was executed on Saturday at Kashimpur Central Jail on the outskirts of the capital, for murder, confinement, torture and incitement to religious hatred during the war.

Pakistan's foreign ministry said it was "deeply saddened" by Ali's execution, describing the proceedings of the war tribunal as "flawed".

Since December 2013 five prominent Jamaat members, including Ali, and a leader of the main opposition party, have been executed for war crimes.

Relations between the two countries have never recovered from the 1971 war when Bangladeshi nationalists, backed by India, broke away from what was then West Pakistan.

Official figures show about 3 million people were killed and thousands of women were raped during the war, in which some factions, including the Jamaat-e-Islami, opposed the breakaway. The party denies that its leaders committed any atrocities.

"By repeatedly taking the side of those Bangladesh nationals who are convicted of crimes against humanity and genocide, Pakistan has once again acknowledged its direct involvement and complicity with the mass atrocity crimes committed during Bangladesh's Liberation War in 1971," Bangladesh said in a statement.

"The Government of Bangladesh strongly rejects Pakistan's claim that these are 'recriminations for political gains'."

Critics say Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has used the war crimes tribunal, set up in 2010, to target Jamaat and weaken the opposition. The government denies the accusations.

International human rights groups say the tribunal's procedures fall short of international standards but Bangladesh rejects that and the trials are supported by many Bangladeshis.
Nigeria's state oil company says could be crippled by Delta militancy

LAGOS, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Militant attacks on energy facilities in Nigeria's southern Niger Delta threaten to cripple the country's state oil company if allowed to go unchecked, it said on Sunday.

Militants calling for a greater share of the country's oil wealth to go the impoverished region have reduced Nigeria's crude oil output by 700,000 barrels per day (bpd) to 1.56 million bpd since the start of the year.

Niger Delta Avengers, which claimed responsibility for most of the attacks, said last month it had ceased hostilities to pursue talks with the government, but others say they will continue attacks. Another group, the Niger Delta Greenland Justice Mandate, attacked a state oil company pipeline on Tuesday.

"If the current situation remains unchecked, it could lead to the crippling of the corporation and the nation's oil and gas sector, the mainstay of the Nigerian economy," the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) said in a statement.

Crude oil sales account for 70 percent of government revenues in Nigeria and the country, which has Africa's biggest economy, has slipped into recession for the first time in more than 20 years as a result of low crude prices.

The statement was issued by NNPC following a meeting on Saturday held by Maikanti Kacalla Baru, group managing director, and a number of his predecessors including the oil minister, Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu, whom he replaced in July.

"Insecurity is threatening production and damaging the Niger Delta environment. There is the urgent need for government and security agencies to refocus as well as engage the various host communities," said the statement.
Japan, China to hold summit meeting on Monday amid island row

HANGZHOU, China, Sept 5 (Reuters) - Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will hold talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday, the Japanese government said, the first such meeting in more than a year as Asia's two largest countries are locked in a territorial dispute.

The meeting will follow the conclusion of the two-day G20 summit that started on Sunday in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou.

Tension flared up last month after more than a dozen Chinese coastguard and other government ships sailed near a group of East China Sea islets controlled by Tokyo but claimed also by Beijing, making a meeting between the two top leaders on the sidelines of the G20 summit uncertain.
Sarfraz, Shoaib lead Pakistan to consolation ODI win

Sept 4 (Reuters) - Pakistan's Sarfraz Ahmed and Shoaib Malik shared a fluent partnership of 163 to lead the tourists to a consolation four-wicket win over England in the fifth and final one-day international in Cardiff on Sunday.

The hosts, put into bat, mustered a respectable 302 for nine from 50 overs but their bowling lacked penetration and Pakistan reached the victory target with 10 balls to spare.

England, who won the series 4-1, never produced the explosive power that has characterised their recent one-day batting.

Jason Roy made 87 off 89 balls and Ben Stokes 75 off 76 but they lost wickets at regular intervals, Pakistan seamer Hasan Ali completing figures of 4-60.

England fast bowler Mark Wood took two wickets in one over to reduce the touring side to 77 for three before Sarfraz and Shoaib assumed control.

They attacked England spinner Liam Dawson on his ODI debut and Sarfraz struck an excellent 90 off 73 balls before skying Dawson to Alex Hales on the boundary.

The experienced Shoaib also fell to a catch in the deep off Dawson for 77 but Mohammad Rizwan's unbeaten 34 guided Pakistan home.
Israel strikes Syrian positions after shells land in Golan-army

JERUSALEM, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Israeli aircraft attacked targets in Syria on Sunday after errant mortar fire from fighting among factions in Syria struck the Golan Heights, the Israeli military said.

There were no casualties from the shellfire.

The area where the shells landed in the Israeli-controlled Golan is close to where fighting in the Syrian civil war is taking place and in retaliation, an aircraft targeted "canons of the Syrian regime," an Israeli military statement said.

Israel has responded similarly in the past when there has been an overspill of fire into the territory.
Uganda end long exile from Nations Cup finals

By Mark Gleeson

JOHANNESBURG, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Uganda ended an almost four decade wait for a place in the African Nations Cup finals as Farouk Miya's goal secured a 1-0 win over the Comoros Islands in Kampala on Sunday.

Uganda finished second behind Burkina Faso in their group but took one of the two places reserved for the runners-up in the 13 qualifying groups for next year's tournament.

They last played at the Nations Cup in 1978 when they were beaten in the final by hosts Ghana.

A last-minute winner from Banou Diawara ensured Burkina topped Group D with a 2-1 home victory over nine-man Botswana as they tottered on the brink of elimination.

Democratic Republic of Congo, Togo and Tunisia filled the other three berths decided on the last day of the qualifiers.

Ten teams had already booked places after the penultimate round of matches in June and holders Ivory Coast were the 11th to qualify with a 1-1 draw at home to Sierra Leone on Saturday.

Togo were the other country to take a runners-up berth, edging out Benin and Ethiopia, who also finished on 11 points. A 5-0 home win over Djibouti on Sunday ensured Togo had the better goal difference despite Emmanuel Adebayor missing a penalty.

EMPHATIC TRIUMPH

The Congolese needed only a draw at home to the Central African Republic, who had to win, but made sure they finished first in Group B with an emphatic 4-1 triumph in Kinshasa.

Neeskens Kebano, Firmin Mubele, Mpangi Bolingi and Jordan Botaka were the scorers for the hosts.

An early goal from Wahbi Khazri set Tunisia on their way to a 4-1 win over Liberia in Monastir which ensured top spot in Group A. The home side also converted two penalties.

Already qualified Mali finished their campaign unbeaten with a 5-2 home win over Benin, as did Algeria and Morocco against lightweight opposition.

Morocco expected a goalfest against the tiny island nation of Sao Tome e Principe but had to settle for a 2-0 win in Rabat after being jeered off at the end of a goalless first half.

Two goals apiece from Algeria's El Arabi Soudani and Riyad Mahrez, who hammered home a long range free kick, helped secure a 6-0 win over Lesotho, with Soudani increasing his tally in the qualifiers to seven and finishing as top scorer.
China's Xi says hopes for fair Australia investment policy

By Sue-Lin Wong

HANGZHOU, China, Sept 4 (Reuters) - China hopes Australia can provide a fair and transparent environment for foreign investors, President Xi Jinping said on Sunday, as he met Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull for the first time since Canberra blocked a major deal.

Australia angered China last month after Turnbull's government stopped the A$10 billion ($7.57 billion) sale of the country's biggest energy grid to Chinese bidders after they failed to overcome security concerns.

After a meeting on the sidelines of a G20 summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, Xi said China "hopes the Australian side continues to dedicate itself to providing foreign investors a fair, transparent and predictable policy environment".

"This also accords with Australia's own interests," China's Foreign Ministry quoted Xi as telling Turnbull.

The decision has caused a rift between Australia and its biggest trading partner. China has accused Australia of bowing to protectionist sentiment in blocking the bid for Ausgrid, as well as an earlier one by a China-led consortium to buy cattle company Kidman & Co.

Speaking to reporters later, Turnbull said China understood as well if not better than anyone else that it was Australia's sovereign right to determine who invests there and the terms in which they invest.

"China has more freedom to invest in Australia, indeed all foreigners have more freedom to invest in Australia, than in almost any other country. We have a very open foreign investment policy," Turnbull said.

"So we mostly say yes, we almost invariably say yes, but from time to time we say no and we make no bones about that and China respects that."

He added that the Ausgrid case was not specifically mentioned in the meeting.

Australia, a staunch U.S. ally, has also drawn criticism from China for running surveillance flights over disputed islands in the South China Sea, and supporting U.S. freedom of navigation exercises there.

Xi said China and Australia should respect each other's "choices in their development paths and each other's core interests and major interests", the foreign ministry added.

Turnbull said he discussed the South China Sea with Xi, and the importance of complying with international law.

"We're a good friend of China and good friends are very honest with each other," he added.
Brazilian President Michel Temer tries on a pair of shoes in a shopping mall in Hangzhou, east Chinas Zhejiang Province on September 3, 2016. [Photo: Sina Weibo account of CRI News Radio]

Brazilian President Michel Temer, who is in Chinas Hangzhou for the G20 summit, took some time off his busy schedule to do some shopping in the downtown area on Saturday.

Shoppers were surprised to spot Temer trying on new shoes at a shopping mall. He even posed for a photo with the shop assistant who helped him with the shoes.

According to local media reports, Mr. Temer eventually spent 1,197 yuan or about 180 dollars on a pair of leather shoes and a toy dog that can understand voice commands and make various moves accordingly.

Temer also waved to a gathering crowd from time to time.

A local website reported that some shoppers went to buy shoes of the same design after Temer left.

Some netizens commented that shoes of the same design might become a hit on Chinese e-commerce websites soon.

The shopping excursion by the Brazilian president has received extensive media coverage in China, especially on social media.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi went for a one-day visit to Vietnam on his way to China for the G-20 summit. In this short trip, he signed a dozen agreements deepening bilateral engagement primarily on defence and security sectors with his Vietnamese counterpart.

Before leaving for Hangzhou, Modi has offered Vietnam a line of credit of half a billion dollars for "facilitating deeper defence cooperation". India has been trying to sell its supersonic BrahMos missiles to Vietnam. This line of credit is most possibly to that effect, though it has not been specifically announced.

In late 2014, India had given $100 million loan to Vietnam for yet-to-be built naval patrol boats. Recently Vietnam has become a major buyer of arms to modernise and strengthen its military. India is trying to take the advantage of it in its pursuit of increasing its arms export.

India's friendly relationship with Vietnam is not a new development. During the 1940s, the freedom fighters of both countries had developed close cooperation in their common struggle for liberation from foreign rule. After India achieved its independence, Jawaharlal Nehru had provided support to Ho Chi Minh and his followers in their struggle.

Nehru was the first foreign leader to visit Hanoi in October 1954 after a separate North Vietnam state was created and had provided a much-needed international acceptance to Ho Chi Minh with his public embrace. Since then India has consistently stood together with Vietnam in its fight against external intervention.

PM Narendra Modi at the historic Quan Su Pagoda, in Hanoi. (Photo credit: PTI)

India was among the few countries to raise its voice in support for Vietnam against US aggression in 1960s and 1970s. India was the first non-communist country to recognise the unified Vietnam. India had to bear considerable cost for its open support for Vietnam.

When China attacked Vietnam in 1979, the then foreign minister AB Vajpayee was on an official visit to China and he returned to India in protest. Since then, India has been consistent in its support to Vietnam at the political and diplomatic level.

After India initiated its Look East policy in 1991, the cooperation with Vietnam expanded to areas such as science and technology, and security and defence. India and Vietnam have signed major defence cooperation agreements in 1994, 2000 and 2003. In November 2007, both the countries upgraded their relationship to strategic partnership.

India's relations with Vietnam have always remained warm and friendly. It has grown from the political and diplomatic sphere in initial decades to include scientific exchanges, trade and even defence cooperation. However, both the countries had done their best to develop the relationship on its own merit rather projecting it as a front against any other country.

However, after Modi became the prime minister, the last two years has seen an unprecedented shift in India's approach regarding its relationship with Vietnam, focusing on arms sale and military cooperation. After the visit of foreign minister Sushma Swaraj, President Pranab Mukherjee went to Hanoi in September 2014 and emphasised upgrading the defence cooperation between two countries. Vietnamese prime minister Nguyen Van Dung came to New Delhi in October 2014 and Modi conveyed to him that the military sector was India's new priority.

In May 2015, Vietnamese defence minister came to India and in June 2016 his Indian counterpart went to Hanoi. The trajectory of India's bilateral military cooperation with Vietnam has included the sale of military hardware, besides intelligence-gathering and exchange, joint exercise of naval forces and training in warfare. Indian warships are frequently going on goodwill visits to Vietnamese ports. No doubt, China is extremely annoyed with India's flaunting of military partnership with Vietnam.

The foreign policy hawks in India argues in favour of India flexing its muscle in China's backyard. Some even have gone to the extent of assuming Vietnam playing the same role for India as Pakistan plays for China. These over-ambitious claims fail to reflect the careful understanding of Vietnam's realistic mindset.

It is not only India; even the US is eagerly trying to sell its arms to Vietnam. President Barack Obama, who has been the main salesman for American arms, visited Vietnam in May this year. Vietnam is now thinking about buying F-16s from the US.

Despite its improving relationship with the US and close defence cooperation with India, Vietnam is keen to maintain decent working ties with China as well. Vietnam and China share a complex relationship. In spite of increasing tension over disputed borders, China is Vietnam's biggest trading partner.

China contributes nearly 30 per cent of Vietnam's total imports and buys ten per cent of its exports. Chinese business investment has gone up from $312 million in 2012 to $2.3 billion in 2013 and $7.9 billion in 2014. Vietnamese leadership regularly visits China. In November 2015, Chinese president Xi Jinping visited Hanoi and even addressed the Vietnamese National Assembly.

Vietnam is an extremely proud nation and it is not going to be anyone's proxy. It is relishing the attention from India as it helps to enhance its bargaining power vis-a-vis China. Vietnam is smartly using the rivalry of China and India to that effect.

On the other hand, Modi is pursuing the arms sales-centric foreign policy with Vietnam in the hope of getting a strategic ally for creating a front vis-a-vis China. This policy might be appropriate in the case of a foe-turned-friend like US, but not for a time-honoured and trusted friend like India.

The people of Vietnam have tremendous love and admiration for India for its moral standing and being the voice of the oppressed against big powers. According to a Pew Research Center Survey in 2015, while 66 per cent of Vietnamese view India favourably, only 19 per cent hold that view towards China. Among the young Vietnamese having favourable views of India, the number is higher, at 72 per cent.

India has invested heavily for decades in building a strong bilateral relationship with Vietnam and a close bond with the Vietnamese people. This connection has been grounded on ideological affinity and mutual respect. India in the past has sacrificed its own interest, but always raised its voice against armed conflict and advocated for peace in the Indo-China region.

It is thus important for India to nurture the core of that relationship with Vietnam, and not to take advantage of it. Considering India is the largest weapon importer in the world, its ability to compete with established armed exporters in selling weapons to Vietnam is also very limited.

India might be able to sell a few BrahMos missiles and naval boats to Vietnam taking advantage of long-standing bilateral friendship and using the China as a bogey. However, this will affect India's moral standing as a nation in front of Vietnamese people and will significantly reduce its huge reserve of soft power in Vietnam. Arms sale invariably attracts suspicion, particularly in a non-democratic developing country. India just cannot afford to bank on the goodwill of the regime amidst growing popular unrest.
It is only an understanding of the history of the rape law going back centuries (the rule of corroboration goes back that far) that will give you an understanding of how rape is proved and how absence of consent is proved. There is no question that the "burden of proof" has been shifted to the accused in any case of rape, not just custodial rape.

Even in the case of custodial rape (Mathura's case), changes in the law did not shift the burden of proof. There is a difference between the "burden of persuasion" which is always on the prosecution and the "onus of proof". It is only the onus which shifts after the prosecution discharges the burden of persuasion.

Hence, in the case of custodial rape, the law says, after sexual intercourse is proved and the woman states that she did not consent, then the onus shifts to the accused. This means that the woman subjects herself to cross-examination on the issue of absence of consent.

This is ultimately for the judge to decide whether the witness is credible and has proved absence of consent. It does not dispense with proof beyond reasonable doubt the burden being on the prosecution alone, as has been suggested. This statement of law holds true not only for rape but for all crimes.

Where is the violation of human rights of the accused here? Where is the erosion of presumption of innocence here?

We look not only at the act of assault as an isolated act, but in the context in which it occurs.

Over the years, the law on sexual assault has moved from a focus on the act of assault, be it penetration or other forms of non-penetrative sexual assault, to additionally on what we call the "coercive environment".

Hence we look not only at the act of assault as an isolated act, but in the context in which it occurs. It is this critical shift which occurred in Indian law, when we recognised that the environment of a police station is different from any other, and the Supreme Court was wrong in holding that since there were no signs of injury, there was no absence of consent (the Mathura case).

It is the evidence of injury that was demanded as corroboration for absence of consent that was done away with. It is this that changed.

Hence, the Mathura dispensation did two things: it did away with the need to corroborate lack of consent by proof of injury, and focused on the environment in which rape took place. This change is also reflected in the judgments of the International Courts of Justice in Rwanda when rape in war settings was recognised as different from any other.

It is this which has led us to demand that rape during communal violence or in hospitals or in fiduciary relationships be looked at differently.

In the Mahmood Farooqui case also, the environment has been taken into consideration. Since guilt was proved by the prosecution beyond reasonable doubt, I wonder what the alleged erosion of human rights is?

Once guilt is proved, beyond reasonable doubt, the rest is a matter for sentence.

Minimum sentences for grave offences are well-known, and rape is one of the offences for which there is a minimum sentence with no discretion to reduce beyond the minimum. If there was, would just one day or till the rising of the court be sufficient punishment?

Any number of years would be considered arbitrary: one, two, three etc, where does the buck stop?

Once the concept of minimum is accepted, a figure will follow. It is the maximum that cannot be mandatory, and it has been so held by the courts, especially mandatory death penalty. This is because the sentence looks both at the crime and the criminal, and the actual punishment is decided.

It is true that there is no guideline as to how discretion is exercised between the minimum and the maximum, and the problem lies here.

As for a range of punishments, yes, in the case of rape, the range varies from seven years to life. The judge in the Farooqui case had the discretion to award more than the minimum of seven, and he exercised that discretion and awarded seven not eight, or nine, or ten.

As for incarceration as a form of punishment, yes, I would like to live in a world free from incarceration for everyone, including those unfortunate ones who killed Nirbhaya, more particularly for the economically deprived, the psychologically damaged, the neglected and ignored and the invisible ones who are put away by society into dirty, dingy prisons only to be further victimised.

The prison system in this county stinks and the sooner we do something about it, the better. One of them has just committed suicide and we will never know what went on in prison that made him do it.

There is too much to say, too little time to say it. So I must stop here. The real violation of human rights lies here.
Last night, my college friend called for an Uber to go home around 11 pm, after a get-together of old friends in the heart of Kolkata.

"Think he's drunk, I don't know if I should take this cab," she said, as my mother, also with us, grew paranoid and kept asking our personal driver to talk to the driver first and ascertain if he was really drunk or seemed sober enough to trust.

We constantly kept advising my friend to talk to her husband on the phone on the drive back, as our driver tacitly threatened the cabbie that her husband was a high-ranking officer at Laal Bazaar police station - one of the city's more feared police depots.

As she stepped inside nervously, we instructed her further, to text or call us the minute she reached her doorstep. I kept my phone on till I heard from her.

Last week, one of my cousins was stalked by three young men on a deserted highway in the UK, as she returned from her high-flying IT job after servicing clients. They blew kisses to her and tried to overtake her sedan, while she tried to avoid direct eye contact, feverishly calling her fiance living in another corner of the city, dialling a police helpline, next.

"She could have been raped, gangraped, like Nirbhaya," her father, an aging, widowed, retired army officer told my mother hysterically on a call the next morning.

Closer home, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Maharashtra reported the highest number of crimes against women in 2015, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. Uttar Pradesh reported 35,527 cases in 2015, or 10.9 per cent of such crimes in India. It was followed by West Bengal with 33,218 cases, or 10.1 per cent of the crimes against women in the country.

Maharashtra reported 31,126 such crimes. Assam and West Bengal have the highest rate of child trafficking at 11.1 and 3.8, respectively.

Why did CM Mamata Banerjee refrain from issuing as much as a statement 48 hours post the ghastly Salt Lake rape?

May 2016 hauntingly brings back memories of the controversial 2012 Park Street rape case: a 25-year-old woman was brutally raped by four persons in an Uber car in the Salt Lake area - the same locality a cousin lives in. After taking turns to rape her, the accused reportedly pushed her out of the car.

On Wednesday, a 12-year-old pavement dweller was gangraped, killed and dumped into a canal in Topsia by two Ola cab drivers, one of whom had allegedly been booked for armed robbery recently and later released.

The duo was drunk and took turns to rape the girl in the back seat as they drove around the city. A news piece that shocked the city into a forlorn, familiar, shrouded silence. And yet, barely 48 hours later, the same populace is agog with some banal All India Trade Union Bandh, most shops and schools are shut and the roads wear a deserted look, with local parties clashing with one another.

TV channels are agog with reports of sporadic violence and journalists harassing commuters with inane questions about how they made it to work this morning and if they were anticipating trouble.

This is no country for women. And we, its women, aren't safe, anywhere. Not even in the city of our birth where, as youngsters, we roamed around in short skirts and partied freely, using public transport, hailing the big, yellow taxi.

Gone are the days when we owned our freedom. Nights where our body was sacred and unspoilt, when frantic parents wouldn't keep calling for our whereabouts, and we didn't need to know the number of the Kolkata Police women's helpline by heart. When there was no mobile phone to track rented taxis and social media check-ins - no constant looking back over one's shoulder.

And yet, I can't help but wonder if we are gradually growing a tad too immune to sexual violence - why is it that after just one day, news about rape is somewhat stale and the ruling party TMC is busier celebrating Singur Dibosh (a tribute to martyrs of the anti-land acquisition movement), carrying out triumphant victory marches with green vermillion smeared on their proud faces, instead of hanging their heads in collective shame, given the recent sexual atrocities and fear in our hearts.

Why does chief minister Mamata Banerjee, a woman herself, prefer to keep silent and refrained from issuing as much as a statement 48 hours post the ghastly Salt Lake rape?

How come the crime investigation department of the state police failed to make headway in the alleged rape of a 71-year-old nun at a convent in Ranaghat area of Nadia district even five days after the incident?

Despite the demand for justice growing louder, the CM conveniently decided to hand over the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation in March.
After the Patel agitation in Gujarat, it seems that even Maharashtra has taken cue from that. There were widespread agitations by the politically strong Patels across Gujarat demanding reservation, which became a matter of worry for the ruling BJP government.

It's a rule in Gujarat politics that you can't agitate the Patel community which makes up 24 per cent of the population. Similarly in Maharashtra you can't do politics and ignore Marathas who comprise nearly 32 per cent of the state's population. Tension is brewing within the Maratha community since the last few years on the issue of reservation. And looking at pure politics no party from Maharashtra has opposed it.

During the Congress-NCP government a committee was formed under the then revenue minister Narayan Rane to submit a report regarding the reservation policy of the Marathas. The Rane committee recommended 16 per cent reservation for the community in government jobs and education institutions and the Maharashtra Assembly with overwhelming support from all the parties passed it.

The Marathas are a strong political community and their demands were met as no party wanted to cross them. The problem started when the provision for Maratha reservation couldn't stand in court of law and respective governments (Congress, NCP and BJP) is yet to come up with solution.

This has angered the community and tension was brewing in various WhatsApp and social media groups and the educated Maratha youth have been expressing their anger over this.

A leader like Sharad Pawar had also paid for antagonising the Marathas (PTI).

Rape and murder of a Maratha girl in Maharashtra's Kopardi district has added fuel to this anger and became reason for the flaring up of Maratha agitation. Their complaint was that these Dalit youth were a nuisance and whenever anyone tried to file a complaint against them to the police they used to threaten to use atrocity charges against the complainant.

So now the main demand of the Marathas is to curtail acts of atrocity in Maharashtra which they think is been used as a tool for blackmailing. Huge marches are being carried across Maharashtra under the banner of Maratha Kranti Morcha.

The accused who have been arrested by the police are Dalits. It has been said that the Marathas across party line are supporting these agitations but unlike the Patel agitation in Gujarat, these agitations have no particular leader.

But Sharad Pawar and the Congress have definitely smelled an opportunity here as they think that this anger can be turned against the ruling BJP. The Marathas are politically strong not only because as a community they have the highest numbers but also because their voting can change the course of election results, especially in western Maharashtra, Marathwada and north Maharashtra. Who knows this better than Maratha strongman Sharad Pawar and by and large he has managed to keep the caste with him.

He has seen in the past that if you go against the Marathas you pay political price. During his tenure as chief minister when Pawar added BR Ambedkar's name to the Marthwada University and made it Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University, against the wishes of the Marathas and gave in to the long-standing demand of Dalits and neo-Buddhists, he lost his clout in the Marathwada region.

Eventually, the Marathas in Marathwada drifted towards the Shiv Sena giving a strong footing for the Sena which had opposed the decision. In the 2014 Lok Sabha and Assembly elections, even the BJP managed to make their way into western Maharashtra and even Marathwada with Maratha votes. It was alarming for Pawar and the Congress. So senior leaders, including Pawar, have been visiting these recent Maratha agitations organised in various districts of Marathwada and western Maharashtra.

Pawar though denied any NCP leader being involved in organising these marches, terming them non-political marches but he surely has shared many of the feelings raised during these agitations and most important being the atrocity act being misused.

Pawar, who despite being a Maratha strongman has always been looked at as a progressive and bahujan leader in Maharashtra, supports the demands of the Maratha Kranti Manch, which surely has raised many eyebrows. Pawar's posturing on this issue certainly shows that like the Patel agitation in Gujarat, the Maratha agitation in Maharashtra is being looked at as a gamechanger in politics.

The only saving grace right now for the establishsed parties in Maharashtra is that there is no Hardik Patel for the Marathas and the marchs are being organised by a group of doctors, lawyers or businessmen. Many have openly taken pride in organising massive marches in Marathwada without turning violent like the Jat agitation in Harayana and Patel agitation in Gujarat.
Its hard not to believe in "conspiracy theories" when there is evidence of a real conspiracy. As French firm DCNS obtained an injunction from Australias Supreme Court against The Australian, a national daily, from publishing leaked documents of Indias Scorpene project, there were more questions than answers, and more than a whiff of a diabolical plan.

A report published in the newspaper last week is said to have revealed that a person who called himself a "whistleblower" had leaked the information as an act of public goodwill. The disclosure is a continuation of assaults on DCNSs reputation - meant squarely to weaken the companys credibility and competence vis-a-vis data protection.

Is it a mere coincidence that workers get sacked around the time DCNS is awarded Australias biggest defence contract? Photo credit: Reuters.

Last week, the Rear Admiral (Retd) John Padgett, the president of the US Naval Submarine League, spoke of the need for aggressive action to probe the leak and a former commander of US Pacific fleet Submarine Force warned that the expose would undermine the confidence in the ability of French companies to protect classified information.

All of this makes one wonder if the "whistleblower" theory is in itself a cover for a deeper, more sinister plot. Whatever dark secrets the Australian may have uncovered, there is something eerily doubtful about its story. To get a sense of the dire improbability of individual events, it is important to carefully recount the purported facts. If The Australian story is true, the Scorpene data was removed from DCNS by a former French Navy officer and his friend, both subcontractors with the company. The former naval officer, apparently, illicitly removed the material  in this case a scanned technical manual - to serve as a reference guide for his new job at a private firm in a Southeast Asian country.

A few months later, the two men are allegedly dismissed by their employer. This time, they fail to smuggle their secret disc out of the office building. The company takes possession of the CD and sends it to the head office in Singapore, where the IT chief tries to upload its contents on an internet server for a worker in Sydney, who is supposed to replace the two sacked French workers. Unable to dispatch a large file over the internet, however, the IT head sends it on a standard data-disk by regular post to Sydney.

When it reaches its destination, the receiver is stunned to find among the contents the secret capabilities of the new Indian submarine fleet. He proceeds to make a revelation through the pages of The Australian, in an apparent bid to save his country from a potential security breach at the hands of an unreliable company that has been awarded a contract to build submarines. The story appears outwardly plausible, until one begins to consider the odds favouring the individual events.

Then the questions begin to fly. Is it a mere coincidence that the workers get sacked around the same time as DCNS is awarded Australias biggest defence contract? That the French subcontractors have sensitive data on a disc without a password? And that they choose to keep their secret possession in their office building, with full knowledge of their employers and seniors, who then deny them entry into the building after their termination from service  even to collect their personal belongings?

Intriguingly, despite being aware of the discs "sensitive" information, company officials do not try and investigate its contents. Realistically, this could only be the case if there was a password protecting the discs contents, or if the firm in question wasnt a vessel-construction company at all. But we know neither of these possibilities is really true. According to the whistleblower, the companys senior executives had full access to the CDs contents (containing sensitive details of Indias premier submarine project) and recognised that the material in their possession could assist the replacement of the sacked French workers in an ongoing construction project.

Even assuming there was a series of coincidences that led to an unlikely set of actions by the protagonists, it is astonishing that company officials chose to send the disc to their head office in Singapore without appreciating the datas sensitive nature.

Shockingly, the IT head in Singapore too has no idea about the materials real significance. Yet, he tries uploading it on a server, in contravention of company laws that prohibit the placing of illegally obtained material on company servers. What happens next tests the limits of incredulity. The companys IT head, unable to email the data over the net, cuts a disc and dispatches it to a contact in Sydney, who, in an amazing twist of fate, suffers a conscience attack upon viewing the CDs contents - just in time to make a revelation in public interest.

There is more to confound the thinking mind. Apparently, the whistleblower knows exactly when the data was placed on the server (April 18, 2013), but cant remember when it was removed.

Could have been there from a few days for a few years, he says, raising two crucial sets of questions:

(1) if the idea of cyber-transmission of the data to the whistleblower proved unfeasible, why didnt company officials immediately remove the data from the server?

(2) If the whistleblower took note of the exact data when the data is uploaded on the server, why didnt he care to find out when it was removed? How is he even sure that the data was cleared from the server?

It is entirely possible then that the whistleblower theory is a convenient cover for a more dubious saga. The search for ammunition to scuttle DCNS Australian submarine contract may well have begun the day the company was awarded the tender. The plan would have been to find material that could discredit the French firm  in a way that the Australian government has little option but to reconsider the merits of the case and scrap the contract.

Contrary to what some analysts have suggested, the timing of the leaks does reveal a story. Until it was announced in May this year, no one really expected DCNS to clinch the submarine deal, and many were shocked when it finally emerged as the winner. The problem for the companys opponents was that the transparent nature of the award made it impossible for them to level allegations of corruption, bribery or favoritism to force the Australian government to reconsider the contract. The only available option now was to discredit the company by gathering information that would show the firm as being incompetent to undertake a venture of the scale and sensitivity.

It is well known in maritime circles that data-proliferation is hard to contain in the ship/ submarine construction business because of multiplicity of agencies and interests involved. In recent years, the use of subcontractors has been the bane of submarine construction, especially since it does not allow for centralised model of operations where secrecy can be effectively ensured. It is a problem that navies and ship building companies have to routinely deal with. But when no other excuse works to discredit rivals, movable classified data comes in handy.

The express motive to damage the DCNS reputation, has become clear through the repeated references in Australia and the US to dangerous compromises of data, rendered vulnerable to hacking or interception by foreign intelligence services.

The investigation team must now probe the culpability of media agencies in this expose. It would be interesting to know if there was really a quid pro quo involved.

More importantly, it is worth investigating if there was inter-governmental collusion in engineering the leak. With the naval chiefs of India, Australia, Malaysia, Chile and Brazil - countries that operate variants of the Scorpene or have ordered the submarine  set to discuss the scandal during an upcoming symposium in the US, there is certainly a great deal of concern regarding its revelations.
Chinese President Xi Jinping attends a BRICS leaders' meeting on the sidelines of a summit of the Group of 20 (G20) major economies in Hangzhou, capital city of east China's Zhejiang Province, Sept. 4, 2016. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, South African President Jacob Zuma, Brazilian President Michel Temer and Russian President Vladimir Putin also attended the meeting. (Xinhua/Li Xueren)

HANGZHOU, Sept. 4 -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Sunday urged BRICS members to jointly work to safeguard international equity and justice, and build a peaceful and stable environment for development.

BRICS countries -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- should continue to strengthen cooperation in political security while respecting each other's concerns and giving consideration to each other's interests, Xi said while addressing a BRICS leaders' meeting on the sidelines of a summit of the Group of 20 (G20) major economies in Hangzhou.

The president called upon the emerging-market bloc to help build new-type international relations featuring win-win cooperation and cultivate a peaceful, stable, equitable and reasonable international order.

The BRICS members should insist that each country chooses its development path in accordance with its national conditions, and resolutely opposes the interference in its internal affairs by external forces, Xi said.

The president also called for increased cooperation in the fields of counter-terrorism, outer space, energy security, and cyber security under the framework of BRICS.

Xi urged BRICS countries to build new-type global development partnership in line with the G20's action plan for implementing 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and push developed countries to fulfill their commitments and provide strong support for developing countries to reach development goals.

Related:

BRICS should play bigger role in int'l affairs: Xi

Chinese President Xi Jinping said Sunday that BRICS members should enhance coordination to make emerging-market economies and developing countries play a bigger role in international affairs.
The remedies given by Chinese President Xi Jinping to world economy not only demonstrates Chinas sense of responsibility as a major developing nation, but also helps revive the confidence and courage of world economy, said the commentary published by Peoples Daily after Xi delivered a keynote speech at the B20 Summit held on Saturday.

According to the article titled as Be pioneer in world economy, in his speech, Xi presented the world with Chinas development achievements and prospects and gave out prescription on world economy.

China will embrace even better prospects and make still greater contribution to the world, the article said.

The following is an abstract translation of the editorial:

The 11th G20 Summit finally drew curtain in Hangzhou, eastern Chinas Zhejiang Province. As todays world economy and global governance system are standing at a critical juncture, the whole globe expects the remedies given by the summit as well as Chinese proposals and Chinese wisdom contributed by the host country.

Amid the complicated global economy trapped in risks and challenges, more worlds attention is turning to China. They hope to know whether the worlds second largest economy can sustain a steady growth and whether it can avoid a middle income trap through continuing with its reform and opening up efforts.

By defining China as standing at a new historic starting point of development in five aspects, Xi provides satisfactory answers to these questions in his keynote speech at the B20 Summit.

According to the Chinese president, at the new starting point, China will steadfastly deepen reform in an all-round way and open up brighter prospects of development, pursue an innovation-driven development strategy to create stronger growth drivers, promote green development to achieve better economic performance, promote equity and sharing of development outcomes to deliver more benefits to the people, and open up wider to achieve greater mutual benefit and win-win outcomes.

In the first half year, China managed to maintain its economic growth at 6.7 percent and submitted a satisfactory answer sheet in many other sectors.

China is confident and capable of keeping growth at medium-high speed and continuing to provide the world with more development opportunities while realizing its own development, he said.

In order to revive the world economy, Xi also suggested to build an innovative world economy to generate new drivers of growth, build an open world economy to expand the scope of development, build an interconnected world economy to forge interactive synergy, and build an inclusive world economy to strengthen the foundation for win-win outcomes.

The four-pronged proposals, as a profound explanation of the theme of the G20 Hangzhou Summit, namelyTowards and innovative, invigorated, interconnected and inclusive world economy, also tells the world that G20 is not only a group of twenty countries, but also one of the whole world.

As the development of the G20 has come to a critical juncture, good faith and immediate actions are required to transform G20 from a crisis response mechanism focusing on short-term policies to one of long-term governance that shapes medium- to long-term policies, and to solidify its role as the premier forum for international economic governance.

In his speech, Xi urged the G20 members to, together with the international community, build a peaceful and stable international environment, build a new concept of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security, build a global partnership for win-win cooperation, build community of shared interests and destiny, improve global economic governance and build a new global economic governance that is based on openness, driven by cooperation and shared by all.

These proposals will also lay a new foundation for the global peace, stability and development and make new contribution to the welfare of all human beings.
Journalists covering the G20 Hangzhou Summit were recently presented with a backpack designed specially for them. A simple gift, behind this bag lies a legend story of a Hangzhou-based company that grew from a simple workshop into a multinational corporation.

The backpacks were manufactured by Hedgren, a famous Belgian brand that merged with the Hangzhou-based League Group in 2011 to become a major player in Hangzhous manufacturing industry.

Chen Xiaojun, the founder of League, started his company in 1997 as an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) of bags and suitcases. However, because of a sharp drop in overseas orders after the 2008 financial crisis, Chen had to find another path. He originally planned on establishing a new brand of his own, but gave up due to the huge risk involved.

He came across Hedgren in March of 2011, a time when the century-old Belgian company was on the edge of bankruptcy. League finished its acquisition of Hedgren in 3 months, taking full control of the Belgian company that was once hailed as the pride of the Belgium for $60 million.

League made the acquisition in the hopes of using Hedgrens global influence and internationalized design ideas to upgrade their own domestic brands, Chen, now the companys chairman of board, said.

In the following five years after the acquisition, Hedgren accelerated its overseas expansion. It now has more than 3,000 franchises in 50 countries. It even opened a store in the Galeries Lafayette in France.

In 2015, Chen established a new brand targeting students - H you. A highlight of these bags and suitcases, designed by Belgians, is that they have replaced previous monotonous colors of black, gray and blue with more fashionable elements.

Covering designing, manufacturing, brand operation and store operations, League is now the owner of seven industrial corporations, four of which are luggage manufacturers. A total of 12,000 employees work for the firm, manufacturing over 30 million suitcases and bags every year and generating an annual turnover of $400 million.

According to Chen, its business partners include a spate of well-known bag and supermarket brands such as Samsonite, Delsey, Targus, Vera Bradley, Ricardo, Macys, JCPenney, and ALDI.

The 6,000 media backpacks are exclusive for the G20 journalists. According to Chen, the bags are practical, attractive and environmentally friendly. Durable and light, the bags are made of micro nylon, a water-proof material used for parachutes.

Additionally, their ergonomic design endows them with more user-friendly features. The bags can be hung from the shoulder or carried by hand. Carrying capacity was enlarged in order to meet the demands of the journalists who always carry laptops and cameras, Chen added.

By adopting a business model of designed in Belgium, made in China, customer-oriented, League has transformed itself from a tiny workshop into an international corporation. With

increasing orders, the Hangzhou-based business has embarked on a track of rapid development.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) meets with Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, Sept. 4, 2016.

China and Thailand should enhance cooperation in all fields, President Xi Jinping said on Sunday.

Xi made the remarks when meeting with Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha on the sidelines of the G20 summit in the eastern city of Hangzhou. Prayuth is attending the summit as a leader of guest countries.

Xi said China attaches great importance to China-Thailand friendly relations and is willing to work with Thailand to continuously advance their comprehensive strategic cooperation.

Both China and Thailand are important developing countries in Asia and they have the same tasks of developing economy, improving people's livelihood and maintaining stability.

The two sides should strengthen strategic communication, further align their development strategies, forcefully promote cooperation in all fields, expand people-to-people exchanges, and enhance coordination in multilateral frameworks, Xi said.

As the leader of rotating chair of the Group of 77 (G77), Prayuth's attendance in the summit reflects developing countries' support for China's G20 presidency, Xi noted.

Prayuth expressed his appreciation for China's invitation to the G20 summit. The developing countries speak highly of China's effort in promoting cooperation between G20 and G77, he said.

Thailand will work to deepen the traditional friendship between the Chinese and Thai people, and expand cooperation in economy and trade, tourism, and infrastructure, the prime minister said.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept.4

Trend:

Armenian armed forces have nineteen times violated the ceasefire on the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops over the past 24 hours, using large caliber machine guns, said Azerbaijans Defense Ministry Sept. 4.

Armenian armed forces, stationed in the village Shavarshavan of Armenias Noyemberian district, on the nameless heights in Berd and Krasnoselsk districts opened fire at Azerbaijani positions located in the village Qushchu Ayrim of Gazakh district and on the nameless heights in Tovuz and Gadabay districtss.

Positions of the Azerbaijani army also underwent fire from the Armenian positions located near to the occupied villages Novruzlu, Marzili of Aghdam district, village Kuropatkino of Khojavand district and village Garakhanbayli of Fuzuli district, as well as in nameless heights in Goygol, Goranboy and Fuzuli districts.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
By Fatih Karimov  Trend:

Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 4

The National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) plans to sign a deal with the Switzerland-based Vitol company to sell crude oil and gas condensates, an informed source told Fars news agency Spt. 4.

The NIOC will sell oil to the European company with discount for two years.

In exchange, the Europian company will give Iran loan with high interest rate, the source said, without unveiling further details.

The NIOC has recently signed an agreement with Vitol for buying gasoline. Some costs will be paid in gas oil or crude oil to Vitol's Swiss subsidiary.

Vitol has also expressed interest in crude oil swap with Caspian Sea littoral states through Irans Neka oil terminal.

An expert delegation from Vitol has visited the oil terminal to study the issue, Hamid Reza Shahdoust, director of Iran's North Oil Terminal, said last month.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 4

By Fatih Karimov  Trend:

The Islamic Republic Ambassador to Moscow Mehdi Sanaei has requested that the Iranian ships to be permitted to use Russian waterways.

Iranian ships traffic in Russian waterways will pave grounds for boosting trade ties between the two countries, Sanaei said, IRNA news agency reported.

The Iranian diplomat made the remarks during a meeting with Alexei Molozhavenko, general director of Volgograd River Port.

There are various grounds for expanding mutual cooperation, in particular in transportation sector including marine transportation which will contribute to boosting trade value, the Iranian diplomat said.

Last month Asadollah Asgaroladi, head of Iran-Russia Joint Chamber of Commerce, said that trade turnover between the two countries has reached $1.5 billion, forecasting that the figure will be doubled by end of current fiscal year (March 2017).

The trade turnover between Iran and Russia in 2009 was $1.2 billion which sharply dropped following Western imposed sanctions on Iran.
TROY  Sprinkles the pit bull wagged his tail furiously as he poked his head out of the cone of shame and licked the face of a laughing Fluvanna County SPCA staff member.

Despite suffering from mange and heartworms, the energetic little dog is all smiles when people come to visit him and the other animals waiting for homes in the small rural shelter. And with about 160 cats and dogs in a facility with a capacity for 120, its getting more and more difficult to provide the care each animal needs, according to shelter manager Meaghan Szwejkowski.

Sandy Morris has been working at the shelter for a little more than a year and said she couldnt imagine a better job than taking care of animals in need. She said the shelter desperately needs help to help the animals.

I love animals, Morris said. Growing up, I wanted to be a veterinarian, but never really went that route, so this is the next best thing.

The best thing is seeing them get their homes  being adopted and finding their forever homes.

Though its at the tail end of kitten season, Szwejkowski said the no-kill shelter still has too many cats and not enough beds to go around. Even with 50 animals in foster homes, the shelter manager said more adopters are needed to make room for the constant flow of strays brought in by animal control. As the countys official pound, the Fluvanna SPCA cannot turn away any strays, Szwejkowski said.

In addition to some support from the county to help pay staff members wages, Szwejkowski said most of the shelters funding comes from donations, as well as the occasional grant and fundraising event.

Walking through the long tunnel of kennels, dogs yip with excitement at the prospect of receiving head pets and ear scratches. Out back, several dogs enjoy the feeling of grass between their toes and the sun on their fur. Szwejkowski said the shelter tries to give each dog as much time outside as possible, to get them out of the loud kennel.

Along with providing shelter for homeless animals, the SPCA also provides spay and neuter services, medical care and microchipping, and Szwejkowski said the shelter is desperate for monetary donations to cover the bills at local veterinary offices. So far, the shelter has raised about $10,000 of its $40,000 goal.

We love providing this kind of care for the communitys future pets and the more you spay and neuter, the less strays there are in the community in the future, said Szwejkowski. The more we microchip, the easier it is to reunite pets with their families that lost them.

Those are two great things that we never want to stop doing, but at the same time, theyre not as important as the basic care needs of food, water and shelter, she said. We really want to do that and more for these guys, but if we cant afford it, we wont be able to do it.

In addition to monetary support, Szwejkowski said the shelter can always use pine or paper-pellet cat litter, as well as Purina brand pet food and kitten milk replacer. The Fluvanna SPCA also is looking for volunteers to help with medical transports to allow for quicker care, as well as lower-cost veterinary options in Central Virginia.

The shelter also welcomes medical fosters to provide homes for animals while they recover from illness or injury and are waiting for a forever home, Szwejkowski said.

Were the county pound and also no-kill, so we have quite the undertaking here, she said. These funds are so desperately needed. There are so many fur-babies here to help, and its never-ending.

Donations may be mailed to the shelter at 5239 Union Mills Road, Troy, VA 22974 or made online at fspca.org.
Last of a three-part series.

A year ago this past June, Trevor Kemp and Darius P. Nabors were admiring the tumultuous beauty of Brandywine Falls in Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio.

The park was their first stop in an epic journey that has taken them to all 59 national parks. They checked off their final stop on Aug. 25, when they visited Acadia National Park in Maine.

The date marked the 100th birthday of the National Park Service, which was created by Congress through the National Park Service Organic Act. For more than a year, the two friends have ventured from the ice of Glacier Bay, Alaska, to the volcanoes of Hawaii and as far afield as Samoa.

Prior to heading for Maine, the two 31-year-olds hiked in Shenandoah National Park. Its a park they both know well, having lived in this area for years.

Having started their journey in Charlottesville, they symbolically closed the circle with their visit to the nearby national treasure. As one might expect, the final days of travel ushered in a mood of reflection.

Now that were at the end of this, my thoughts are that we have a really beautiful country, Nabors said. There were so many times when I just stopped, because the beauty was so incredible.

It makes you understand the spiritual and the divine that people experience with nature. A park ranger in Yosemite called it the Yosemite effect. He said if youre in Yosemite and you see somebody just standing in the valley, looking up and not talking, theyre totally fine. Theyre just having a spiritual moment.

Neither traveler was expecting the astounding diversity of natural wonders that they encountered. Kemp said there were so many breathtaking moments that its going to take a considerable amount of time to process all of it.

The amount of different environments you can encounter  from glaciers in Alaska to the Everglades and the deserts in the Southwest  is incredible, Kemp said. And its been a great experience learning about history, ecology, biology and even geology.

I think the individual moments that have been the most impactful for me have been the times when I have been humbled by the magnitude of nature. When we were in Alaska, we accidentally got too close to a grizzly bear that could have killed us if it had wanted to.

Another very humbling moment was when we were standing among the great sequoia trees, and realizing that theyre 2,000 years old.

***

Kemp recently had earned his doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia when Nabors suggested they team up for the trip. Nabors had been planning the journey since the fall of 2010, and he left his job as a fundraiser for UVas School of Nursing to go on the year-long odyssey.

Ever since I was young, Ive wanted to visit all the national parks, said Nabors, whose father had been a summertime park ranger at Olympic National Park in Washington. The 100th anniversary of the Park Service was the ideal time to do it.

There has been so much excitement about the Park Service this year that it has been fun just being wrapped up in all of that.

My worry is: What will happen on the 101st anniversary? Will people forget about the parks until the 125th anniversary comes along?

Thats not likely. According to AAA, visits to national parks reached an all-time high last year, with the NPS recording more than 307 million visitors. That number is expected to increase this year.

The demand for national parks is off the charts this year, and its exciting to see that Americans are poised to take even more national park vacations in the years to come, said Martha Mitchell Meade, manager of public and government affairs for AAA Mid-Atlantic. We have some beautiful national parks in Virginia that offer historic landmarks, stunning landscapes and outdoor activities for travelers of all ages.

The NPS is taking the view that the centennial celebration is all about kicking off a second century of stewardship for Americas national parks and for communities across the nation.

Susan Sherman is president of Shenandoah National Park Trust. She has been following the travels of Kemp and Nabors since they set out.

They used social media to their advantage, and really created a buzz around their adventure, Sherman said of the two outdoorsmen. They brought the beauty of our parks to thousands of people every day through social media, and countless more through other news outlets that picked up their story.

It does my heart good to see how much attention the centennial and our parks are getting this year. Visitation in Shenandoah has been up more than 10 percent this year. And the centennial has also afforded Shenandoah the opportunity to secure special project funding to restore the historic observation platform at the summit of Hawksbill Mountain.

The centennial offers a wonderful opportunity to celebrate the men and women of the National Park Service who dedicate their livelihoods to protecting these places we love. But after the partys over, and all the candles have been blown out, we cannot lose momentum.

Sherman knows that behind the bright smiles and upbeat celebrations are issues of serious concern regarding the health of our national parks. As the official philanthropic partner of Shenandoah National Park, the trust invests in programs and initiatives that likely wouldnt happen without its support.

***

The Hawksbill Mountain platform project is a prime example of what SNPT does. The trust raised private funds for half of the project expenses, which enabled the park to compete successfully for federal funds to finance the rest.

Shenandoah National Park covers an area of 311.2 miles, consisting mostly of forests. Protecting and maintaining these often huge repositories of wildernesses is a national responsibility that often gets overlooked or underfunded.

Our parks are struggling, Sherman said. Invasive species riddle our forests and rivers.

Buildings and infrastructure are in dire need of repair. Park rangers are asked to do more and more with less and less.

We all own these parks. And with ownership comes responsibility. The second century for national parks will rely more heavily on volunteerism, advocacy and philanthropy. If you love these parks, I hope youll make an investment in their future.

These days, Kemp and Nabors are often being asked to name their favorite parks. When their list was including nearly all of them, they started to get into specifics.

When its fall and the leaves are changing, I dont think theres many parks that can beat Shenandoah, Nabors said. I wouldnt want to be in Arches in July, but in April, its wonderful.

Voyageurs was a bummer, because we were sitting next to a lake with loud power boats flying by. But if we had had a canoe, it might have been another story.

The travelers spent quality time in each park, generally about a week. The Grand Canyon required three weeks, with much of that time spent rafting the Colorado River.

A particularly riotous stretch of water on the Colorado is called Hermit Rapid. The undulating water creates a set of nine waves, each of which is 14 to 18 feet high.

Its like a roller coaster of water, Nabors said. We made it through the first seven waves, but the last two crashed down on us.

When we hiked up Mauna Loa in Hawaii, that was less than pleasant. But once we got to the top of this 13,000-foot volcano and watched the sun coming up, it was spectacular.

After spending more than a year in the great outdoors, the two friends are finding it necessary to readjust to modern living. Everything from sleep patterns to their sense of time has been affected.

It feels like weve been in a time warp, Kemp said. When I think back to when we started, it seems like it was 30 years ago.

Theres this weird compression of time, too. Now that were finishing it, it seems like it has flown by. But when we were in the middle of it, it seemed like it had been a lifetime.

I enjoy cooking, so Ive missed working in the kitchen. Now I appreciate conveniences like running water so much more. And taking a shower is a glorious experience.

***

As the long journey was nearing its end, both men started to think about how it might have changed them. Aside from Nabors shoulder-length hair and Kemps sizable beard, they figure theyre much the same as when they started.

The trip has given me an appreciation for not only natural places, but for the enormous generosity of people we have met, Kemp said. There were so many strangers we came across who were unreasonably nice to us. That gives you renewed hope in the human spirit, and that were all in this together.

As far as camping goes, I think one of the big things is figuring out how much less you need than you think you do.

When we took off, we had all this stuff that could be categorized as, This could be useful. None of those scenarios came up, and we jettisoned a lot of stuff during the trip. You only need the bare essentials.

Nabors said the only downside of the trip is that his sleep cycle has been totally destroyed. And making a cup of coffee with a push of a button seems absurdly simple.

I got used to going to bed when it got dark, and then rising with the sun, Nabors said. Im not comfortable sleeping in a bed, and prefer sleeping in my sleeping bag.

Even making breakfast now is weird, because everything is so much more simple than when youre camping. But the entire experience has been wonderful.

The kind of narrative Ive always seen about going into nature has been that there has to be something wrong with you to want to do that, and, somehow, nature is going to repair your soul.

I wasnt going on this trip because I had something terribly wrong. I was going on this trip because we have beautiful things to see and experience in this country. And I couldnt be more happy that I did it.
In the past two years, drug overdoses have become more common and more deadly, with more than six out of 10 deaths involving opioids such as heroin and prescription pain relievers.

While these overdose deaths have reached epidemic proportions, with more people now dying from overdoses than car crashes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one University of Virginia professor thinks the opiate problem is probably even more prevalent than is officially known.

In a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Christopher Ruhm, a professor of public policy and economics at UVas Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, found that 20 percent to 25 percent of death certificate records from the CDC in cases of overdose deaths did not specify the types of drugs used. The CDC collects the certificates issued by local authorities, but the records are not completed to a set standard.

In his research, Ruhm said he used statistics to estimate that certain types of overdose deaths  such as the use of more than one drug  actually could be 30 percent to 50 percent higher than currently believed, according to a news release from UVa.

In Virginia, its not hard to find out which drugs someone took before dying of an overdose because the commonwealth runs on a medical examiner system and keeps fairly detailed records, according to Rosie Hobron, a forensic epidemiologist with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond. The state has medical examiners and toxicologists who figure out which drugs were in a persons system when they died.

Other states dont always have someone with a medical background to sign off on the death certificates, Hobron said. We shouldnt be as worried here.

However, when it comes to CDC standard records, Hobron said its often difficult to translate data from different localities into those standards  making it harder to accurately record the specifications surrounding an overdose death.

Hobron, who keeps track of overdose trends in Virginia, said prescription pills have historically been one of the biggest problems in the state, but heroin has been making a comeback since the crackdown on prescription pill abuse. Hobron said people also recently have been mixing heroin and the pain reliever fentanyl  sometimes unknowingly receiving it from drug dealers  and the potent combination can be quickly fatal, she said.

Were seeing a peak in overdoses because of that, Hobron said. And the CDC is seeing people hooked on prescription opiates and then turning to heroin because its getting harder to get prescriptions.

The scary thing is that people are then getting addicted to heroin and then unknowingly getting some that is mixed with fentanyl, she said. People dont know what theyre buying.

When the medical examiners office examines someone who died of an overdose, Hobron said the office will send blood samples to the lab at the Virginia Department of Forensic Science, where toxicology tests will be done to determine which drugs were in the persons system. The tests usually take about 90 days to complete.

Once a toxicologist is in possession of the blood samples, he or she can do a series of standard tests to look for different drugs, including heroin, fentanyl and other opiates, according to James Hutchings, toxicology program manager at the central lab in Richmond.

We give the results to the medical examiners office and they determine the cause of death, Hutchings said. If they suspect a certain drug, they specify the drug testing they want us to do, but it might be something they dont suspect.

Because fentanyl is becoming a commonly abused drug, Hutchings said testing for the pain reliever has become routine. The lab also can test for different structures of fentanyl, which can vary depending on who made the drugs.

We have to keep up with whats on the street, Hutchings said.

If there are low concentrations of certain drugs or an unknown drug in the blood samples, Hutchings said the lab might not be able to detect it. He said that because the lab cant see everything, there is always the possibility that a new drug could be causing overdose deaths.

In the Charlottesville-Albemarle area, heroin and fentanyl are big concerns for police, according to city police Lt. Cheryl Sandridge. For law enforcement, much of their data about which drugs are most prevalent in any given area come from arrests, she said.

The more information we have is always beneficial, Sandridge said. People cut drugs with other things, like heroin and fentanyl  someone could put whatever they want in it. If several people take something and all suffer overdoses, it can be hard to tell what caused it.

Police also can use information about the drugs people took before overdosing to try to track the substances back to the same dealer, which Sandridge said can help take dangerous drugs off the streets.

Police and rescue personnel can do more to treat it or prevent it if we know what were dealing with, she said.

In the Shenandoah Valley, methamphetamines are the most common drugs on the streets, according to Waynesboro police Capt. Mike Martin, who recently helped put together Skyline, a multi-regional drug task force that includes the Waynesboro and Staunton police departments, the Augusta and Nelson sheriffs offices, the Virginia State Police, U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Martin said about 90 percent of the drug problems in Waynesboro are related to methamphetamines, but prescription pills also pose a serious problem in the Valley. Martin said he is constantly looking at what people are overdosing on in order to make an effective plan to attack the situation.

We shape our enforcement efforts according to the crime, Martin said. If we dont have a good picture of what crime or drug is behind these deaths, then we cant adequately shape our response. I think its absolutely imperative that we define which drugs are killing our citizens so we can come up with an adequate strategy.

The opiate problem is probably bigger than what is on the surface, Martin said, because heroin and opiate use is easier to hide than the use of methamphetamines. Because meth is a stimulant, users are more likely to have a lot of energy and engage in activities that bring them in contact with police, such as fighting or stealing, Martin said. On the other hand, opiate addicts tend to stay home and use in private.

At the end of the day, in my experience, I think meth is a more social drug, Martin said. They have a higher propensity to have a run-in with police than people using opiates. We know we have a meth problem.

But we should be careful not to confuse the absence of heroin-related arrests with the absence of a heroin problem in this area, he said.

In his paper, Ruhm said its important to have better policies for collecting overdose data in order to better treat addicts, particularly when it comes to deadly combinations of drugs.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 3

By Umid Niayesh  Trend:

OMV, a leading international oil and gas company, has recently signed two documents with the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) for cooperation in the countrys oil projects.

A memorandum of understanding, signed by OMV and NIOC, concerns the evaluation of various fields in the Zagros area in the west of Iran, for potential future development, the company told Trend Sept. 2.

In addition, OMV and NIOC have signed a joint study agreement for evaluation of potential hydrocarbon prospects in the Fars area, for which a two-year study program has been agreed between the parties, according to the OMV Public Relations.

The OMV will use IOR/EOR (improved oil recovery/enhanced oil recovery) in the Zagros area in the west of Iran, the company said, adding that the OMV and the NIOC will jointly evaluate the hydrocarbon prospects of the Fars area.

The memorandum is an important first step in resuming OMVs activities in Iran and in the long-term cooperation with the National Iranian Oil Company, building upon OMVs previous positive experience in the country, the company said.

OMV will further evaluate its opportunities in Iran and the cooperation with NIOC to assess whether there are areas of potential cooperation in the exploration and development of oil and gas, the company added.

By holding 157.8 billion barrels of recoverable crude oil reserves, Iran possesses the worlds fourth largest reserves of crude oil.

The Islamic Republic also holds 34 trillion cubic meters of proven gas reserves, sharing 18.2 percent of total global gas reserves.
Aug. 26 was a good day for the University of Virginia, the General Assembly and what constitutes democracy around here.

Quickly on the last: In a functioning democracy  the character and nature of public discourse, meaning the actual manner in which we exchange views and resolve differences  shapes and determines outcomes. It matters how you get there. It matters how you say what you say. It matters whether you act with goodwill or simply chuck a brick.

It bears repeating: What we do in public spaces  in local government chambers, in the State Capitol or in courtrooms across the commonwealth  serves as an alternative to settling it in the streets or on the cable shows.

And if you dont think we risk slipping toward the latter, you might pay closer attention to the presidential campaign. Whatever that national contest has, this state does not need to catch.

So, on Aug. 26, when the General Assembly convened a panel  the higher education subcommittees of its money committees  to hear about UVas Strategic Investment Fund, it did so with admirable and appropriate restraint.

It was not to be an inquisition, calmly announced Senate Finance Committee Chairman Tommy Norment from James City County.

Good thing, too, because there was a prominent personage tossing bricks.

A whole wheelbarrow of them.

In early July, former UVa board member Helen Dragas hurled charges at her alma mater to the effect that a tight group of notables  a cabal, no doubt  secretly gathered in a Rotunda cloakroom (OK, we added that part) to conspire and amass a rather large load of loot drawn from unspecified sources and destined for unrevealed purposes.

This was damning stuff and delivered, without irony, from someone who four years ago secretly combined with a tight group of notables to fire UVa President Teresa Sullivan for unspecified reasons and left the school destined for undiminished chaos.

Just days from completing a second term on the board, Dragas set pen to paper and fired an essay off to The Washington Post (and later to The Daily Progress) saying, Its wrong when reputational rankings in magazines matter more than serving Virginians. But when public universities are run like private academic playgrounds, and boards act as unelected taxing authorities, perhaps its time for a higher power to weigh in. Which might have been a justified point if any of Dragas charges were just.

But they do not hold up, as the lawmakers patiently heard from the commonwealths Auditor of Public Accounts and UVa officials.

And Dragas was so informed. Or would have been had she appeared.

She was on an airplane, it was announced. Instead, a woman  who identified herself as a contractor  gave a dramatic reading of the latest Dragas testament, proffering her (Dragas) values as the North Star for the university to embrace.

In contrast, the state auditors report showed that the schools investment program complied with the law and that its Strategic Investment Fund pooled funds in a way similar to pooling of resources by the commonwealths Treasury for the General Account.

In other words, UVa was doing intelligent things in ways consistent with the practices and intents of the General Assembly.

It also pointed out that UVas Strategic Investment Fund was not one fund but the aggregation of nine  health plan self-insurance reserves, various gifts, medical center profits, etc.  that could be used to generate interest and help support projects yet-to-be-determined.

No money has actually been spent yet. And none of the money  from the nine funds  lent itself to reallocation willy-nilly, as Dragas seemingly advocates.

Can you argue about tuition rates? Sure.

Can you argue about the percentage of in-state students vs. out-of-state? Of course. Virginians have been doing so for the past 30 years.

Can you argue about the secrecy with which Virginias board set aside the money? Absolutely. The states weak open meetings law appears to have been broken.

But all debates about UVas finances  or any other of the commonwealths public colleges and universities  have to be done in the context of an ongoing balancing act.

Yes, these are public schools. They receive state financial support, but the relative amount of that support has dramatically declined over 25 years.

So the schools lean more on tuition and private philanthropy. In that sense, the schools operate within the free market. All the while, in UVas case, the school must be public and excellent; affordable and excellent; accessible to Virginians and excellent, President Sullivan told the General Assembly panel.

Of course, there is that business  quite explicit here  about being excellent. That has been the purpose and resolve of the University of Virginia from the moment of its founding and no one, to date, has suggested a retreat.

To the contrary, there is every indication  on a broad, public level  that UVas standing as perhaps the finest public institution of its kind in America remains a source of enduring pride, satisfaction and economic power.

In America, right now, we do heat. We do wrathful self-righteous indignation. We do anger and posturing and self-important pomposity.

To no good end.

The debate over higher education in general  and the University of Virginia, in particular  will continue.

But Virginia lawmakers demonstrated a preference for facts over innuendo, for dispassionate analysis over pitchfork accusations, for quiet reason over disparaging rhetoric.

They did so to the commonwealths everlasting credit and service.

This commentary originally ran as an editorial in The Virginian-Pilot, and is used here by permission. It has been slightly adapted to update time elements and reflect some local details.
By John Lowry

Earlier in this series, Kyle Redinger wrote a fine piece on land values in Albemarle County, asking, essentially: If the supply of land is constricted and demand for land continues, then what happens to the price? When land prices are driven higher due to scarcity, then the cost of housing also is affected, making it difficult for many families to find affordable housing in the county.

More recently, Neil Williamson offered a cogent summary of a quantitative review for the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors on land availability, offered by Faith McClintic, economic development director of Albemarle. Neil described this as: Yes, we have no bananas  meaning: yes, we would like to attract and develop appropriate development; but, no, we dont have land to accommodate development.

Land-conservation leadership

As a close corollary to these topics, land-use taxation and conservation easements in Albemarle is worthy of consideration.

For many decades, Virginia has been encouraging preserving the rural character of land in our state.

One mechanism is through land-use taxation.

Legislation has long been in place that allows counties to use tax tools as incentives encouraging property owners to keep their land in rural uses or as open spaces, as an alternative to development.

The theory is simple: If land is agricultural, forested or open space, then there is little or no need for fire, rescue and police services or for the cost of educating children for that property. Hence, taxes for such land are nominal.

Albemarle County has been a leader in embracing this policy, giving tax relief for properties in agricultural, forested or open-space uses.

Eventually, Albemarle reached a stabilized participation in which more than two-thirds of county land is enrolled in the land-use taxation program. Of the countys 470,000 acres, more than two-thirds is not taxed at the regular real-estate rate.

In the past 10 years, there have been three revalidation cycles, in which the land is examined to assure that it is being used as claimed.

Protection costs

But the forgone tax revenue is significant. In this past tax cycle, staff showed the Board of Supervisors that more than $2 million would have been collected had property not been taxed at the reduced rate (report of County Executive Tom Foley to Board of Supervisors meetings on March 15, March 17 and March 23).

With this policy, revenue is forgone each and every year; however, it is important to mention that if land comes out of the program, then rollback taxes apply.

While land-use taxation is not a new story, the growth of conservation easements is. Virginia is a nationwide leader in this newer version of policy to encourage rural land to stay rural.

Unless tax receipts in a given year are particularly grim, Virginia tries to budget $100 million annually for tax credits. Mostly, these tax credits are aimed at conservation easements.

Conservation option No. 2

Unlike with land-use taxation, property sequestered under conservation easements cannot have a change of use. It will never be rezoned, because the conservation grant is perpetual.

In Albemarle County, the growth of conservation easements has been pretty dramatic. In 1996, there were 20,000 acres of land in conservation easements in Albemarle. By 2007, that total had grown to 66,000 acres. At the end of 2014, the total had grown to 93,000 acres. Where are we now?

The good news is that the total amount of land affected in Albemarle County has not changed; the acreage reserved under these programs still amounts to two-thirds of total land in Albemarle. The properties have only changed categories under the land-use protection umbrella.

But this comes at a cost.

State tax dollars go to localities as tax credits. These tax credits are based on the value of the land going under easement.

State tax credits are not the only ones given for conservation easements. There are also federal income tax credits.

The size of the federal credits is determined by the size of the taxpaying income of the person granting the easement. This is why the well-to-do may be attracted like moths to the flame of conservation easements.

For example, if a high-income person nearing retirement were to put a 100-acre parcel under easement, he or she might get several hundred thousand dollars worth of federal income tax credits with a 15-year life.

The state credits are smaller  about half the size of federal credits, with a 10-year life  but they are transferrable. That means they may be sold for cash.

In addition to these credits, the landowner can reduce an eventual estate tax liability, because land under conservation easement is of lesser market value (remember, it can never be rezoned).

So think of a really well-to-do person whose estate will be taxed: The benefit could be significant. In the example of the high-income man or woman near retirement, total tax credits could exceed a million dollars for a 100-acre parcel.

Conservation easements are not only about altruism. Remember, it is taxpayer money that pays for these tax credits.

County ACEs it

The final touch for Albemarle in the land-use taxation story is the Albemarle Conservation Easement program. Albemarle County is a leader in granting its own easements with our own local taxpayer money. The 15-year-old ACE program has a goal of retiring development rights by paying an existing landowner who is land poor a sum of money negotiated between the county and the owner. Again, it is a perpetual easement, so the land will stay rural. To date, $11 million of county tax money has been used to purchase easements.

This year Albemarle was one of only a handful of counties to apply for a state matching grant. Of the six counties accepted in Virginia, Albemarle was the only one to get the full amount of the grant request; as a result, Albemarle will put up $414,000 in tax money and the state will match it. This money then goes into ACE.

For the first eight years of ACE, half of the revenue collected from the countys lodging tax was going into ACE on the theory that preserved land would make our county desirable to tourists. Since some of the parcels accepted by ACE were often miles from the general public viewshed, this practice was stopped (albemarle.org/upload/images/forms_center/departments/community_development/forms/Rural_Area/ACE_Map_of_Easements.pdf).

Time for a change?

The record shows that Albemarle is out front in using land-use policies to help the county stay looking, tasting and feeling rural. My question to readers: Is there too much of this good thing?

For the past three years, county staff and the supervisors have agreed that Albemarles annual budget is structurally imbalanced. The county has too many expenses and not enough income to cover those expenses.

To date, the supervisors answer has been to raise the tax rate each year.

It makes more sense to loosen the tight grip on useable land to help close the budget gap. Opening the supply of developable land just a bit would bring Mr. Redingers land values more into balance. Expanding light-industry zoning would foster Mr. Williamsons growth of the tax base. Steering development to include affordable housing would ease Dan Rosensweigs land crisis (as referenced in the Aug. 28 installment of the series).

The bright line of the areas drawn decades ago in Albemarle Countys Comprehensive Plan is not immutable. Our land-use policy is not law, but rather a guideline. Perhaps there should be a better balance between interests instead of being fascinated only with things rural.

John Lowry is immediate past chairman of the Albemarle County Economic Development Authority and immediate past chairman of the Albemarle County Equalization Board.
Tehran, Iran, September 4

By Mehdi Sepahvand Trend:

The Iranian Ministry of Petroleum has issued an announcement stating the price of sweet, dry gas to be delivered to small compression units that would export their products.

The prices are set so as to encourage investment in LNG units in Irans southern coasts with output capacities of up to 1.5 million tons per year, says the announcement signed by Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh, SHANA news agency reported September 4.

The formula for calculating the sweet gas delivered to the liquefaction units as dollar per Btu is:

Pn = 50% x PLNG-JKM if PLNG-JKM<12$/MMBTU

In which Pn is the price in dollars per million Btu of gas delivered to the factories for n months

and

PLNG-JKM is the average price of LNG in dollars per million Btu for n months

Note: The price per million Btu of sweet gas delivered to the liquefaction units should under no circumstances become less than the following floor price:

Pn-FLOOR = 6% x PBWAVE

Where Pn-FLOOR is the floor price in dollars per million Btu for n months

and

PBWAVE is the monthly average price of one barrel of the Brent crude oil, BWAVE

Contracts signed according to the announcement before September 22, 2016 will be valid until March 2032.

The price will be 10 percent less than calculated via the formula in the warm season (from March 21 to September 22 each year) and 10 percent more than calculated via the formula in the cold season (from September 23 to March 20 each year).

Iran has lacked LNG production units so far. But now it is considering such units in order to make its huge gas resources more marketable. The Oil Ministry says it eyes far markets such as Europe by launching LNG factories.

Iran will send its first LNG shipment to global markets by 2019, Ali Reza Kameli, head of National Iranian Gas Exports Company, said Aug. 29.

He referred to Iran LNG, Pars LNG and Persian LNG projects with an overall output capacity of 36 million tons per year as the countrys major LNG projects.

He said that Irans gas production is to continue increase over the coming three years to reach one billion cubic meters per day in 2019.
Recently, the accidental discovery of a handwritten letter in the Culpeper County packet of archived arrest warrants for the year 1893 sparked an investigation into the story of a mysterious Frenchman, the alleged son of a royal nobleman.

The findings were published in the Culpeper Star-Exponent on June 30, July 7 and July 14.

The letter, signed by the author as Lewis Philippe E__ Jerome Bonaparte Edgar De Duphane, eluded to royal family connections, the assassination of a Russian Czar, family members who had fought during the American Civil War and even an accusation of improper conduct supposedly perpetrated by the writer upon anothers wife.

The Frenchman was decidedly despondent and declared that he would end his life rather than endure continued misery. The historical investigation was closed for the lack of more detail, particularly the name by which this fellow was customarily known.

While researching another matter altogether and perusing in the same courthouse the criminal cases for the 1893 time period, the name Showalter leapt from the page. Showalter was the name of the man who accused the Frenchman of inappropriate behavior toward his wife.

Following the line across to the second page the name of the complainant was apparent: Edgar Duphane. Could this be the mysterious Frenchman, with a name that could now be further researched?

Edgar and Duphane were the last two names in the six-name signature at the close of the mysterious. The investigation was back on the table and the anticipation was tantalizing.

In the 1893 letter to the Citizens of Culpeper County and the Commonwealth, composed by the man we now know as Edgar Duphane, there were several references that have now been exposed in greater detail.

What has been discovered?

 The Frenchman living in Culpeper, Virginia in 1893, whose full name we can now verify as Edgar Sydolph Jerome Rodabert de Duphane, was born in Toulon, France about 1861allegedly to Count Henri Charles de Chambord and Anna Lamar of Savannah, Georgia: more about Count Henri later.

 He was educated at Woolrich and Oxfordboth in Englandand rose to the rank of captain in her Majestys Royal Navy by 1882.

 Records indicate that Duphane immigrated to the United States in 1884-85: sailed on the Carroll out of Nova Scotia and landed in Boston, Massachusetts.

 Two of his French relatives did indeed serve in a military position during the American Civil War, although the documented specifics differ somewhat from statements in his letter as to the nature of the familial relationship and which cause they supported.

 Edgar Duphane was engaged in a dispute with B. F. Showalter and was both a plaintiff and a defendant in court records in Culpeper.

The review of at least six different newspaper articles, a marriage record and a visit to the Find-A-Grave website not only substantiate Duphanes claims as stated above but also add more definition to the life of this fascinating character.

More about the Frenchman who lived in Culpeper County

 Despite the bleak tone of his missive to the Citizens of Culpeper, Duphane did not die in Culpeper County in 1893.

 He did, however, relocate to the Shenandoah Valley and was employed as a music teacher.

 In 1898, he married Sadie Hopkins of that same county.

 Edgar Duphane died in Washington, DC in 1901.

 There is no record of Edgar Duphane having any descendants.

A military man imbued with a hearty sense of duty to his adopted country, Duphane offered his services to President McKinley as an officer or a private in the Spanish American War, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer published May 1, 1898.

As yet, no response from the president has been found; nonetheless, Duphane was diligent in his efforts.

A poster dated May 17, 1898 was distributed by Duphane throughout the New Market, Virginia area calling for 100 Volunteer Crack Shots, For Immediate Service.

To date, there is no evidence that DuPhane served either at home or abroad for the United States during the Spanish American War.

On the subject of Duphanes parentage and the role of his father and uncle during the American Civil War there remains confusion.

As to the identity of his father, several newspaper accounts before and after his death claim that his father was Count Henri Charles de Chambord, the exiled heir to the French throne as Henry V.

Additionally, the articles stated that Edgar Duphane was the sole heir and the next Count of Chambord.

An article published on Sunday June, 16, 1901 after Duphanes death called Duphane Edward rather than Edgar and reported the following; At his funeral, a biography endorsed by the British Government, and proving him a genuine Count was read at the grave.

The biography recited that Edgar Sydolph Jerome Rodabert de Duphane, Count de Chaberd [sic] was a son of Henri Charles de Chamberd [sic]and Anna Lamar, daughter of Judge Lamor [sic] of Savannah, Georgia and born at Toulon, France, September 16, 1865. Note: according to census, marriage and immigration records his year of birth varies between 1861-1865.

In researching Count Henri Charles de Chambord 1820-1883, there has been no evidence discovered that the Count married an Anna Lamar. His wife of record was Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria-Este and they are noted as having no children. If indeed Edgar was Count Henris son, then possibly he was the illegitimate child of an unsanctioned union.

Or perhaps Edgar was the son of a different royal line.

Duphane stated in his letter to the citizens of Culpeper that his father and uncle fought for the Confederacy. A closer look at the military records reveals that in fact two Frenchman of the dOrleans line and sons of King Louis Phillipe served from 1861-1862but not with the Confederacy.

These two noblemen donned the blue uniform of the Union Army under the command of George McClellan. Louis Philippe dOrleans, Count of Paris, was also a contender with his cousin Henri Charles de Chambord for the throne.

The Count of Paris younger brother, Robert Philippe dOrleans, was known as the duc of Chartres.

Could one of these men have been Edgars father in a dalliance with Anna Lamar?

Edgar Duphane, regardless of his true parentage, suffered a tragic death cloaked in yet another letter of inconsolable misery. On June 8, 1901, The Washington Times reported that Edgar de Duphane was found dead in a cell at the second police precinct stationhouse, having been arrested the night before for drunkenness and incarcerated until sober.

The coroner indicated that Duphane died of heart disease. Duphane had 12 cents in his pocket, a photo of his wife and a receipt for a registered letter he had sent to his wife on June 4.

Based on new evidence, The Washington Times on June 11, 1901 amended the cause of death from heart disease to a probable suicide. Having received a letter dated June 5 on stationary from the St. James Hotel where Duphane had paid in advance for his lodging, a friend of Duphanes informed the newspaper that Duphanes mood was desolate and had written, When you receive this I shall be dead.

Captain Edgar Duphane is buried in St. Matthews Cemetery in New Market, Virginia.

We may never know the full story of this fascinating character, but the intrigue is cause to ponderjust who else has been living next door?
In this autumn of our electoral discontent, hope springs, as it so often does in the American republic, from unexpected precincts. Much of the country is distressed by the presidential candidates offered by the two conventional political parties. And for good reason. Neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton meets the fundamental moral and professional standards we have every right to expect of an American president. Fortunately, there is a reasonable  and formidable  alternative.

Gary Johnson is a former, two-term governor of New Mexico and a man who built from scratch a construction company that eventually employed more than 1,000 people before he sold it in 1999. He possesses substantial executive experience in both the private and the public sectors.

More important, hes a man of good integrity, apparently normal ego and sound ideas. Sadly, in the 2016 presidential contest, those essential qualities make him an anomaly  though they are the foundations for solid leadership and trustworthy character. (At 63, he is also the youngest candidate by more than half a decade  and is polling well among truly young voters.)

As the nominee of the Libertarian Party, Johnson is expected to be on the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. He is, in every respect, a legitimate and reasonable contender for the presidency  but only if the voters give him a fair hearing. And that can happen only if he is allowed to participate in the presidential debates that begin on Sept. 26 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. If the Commission on Presidential Debates wants to perform a real service to its country, it will invite Gary Johnson onto the big stage.

***

The Times-Dispatch editorial board began to explore the possibility of endorsing Johnson and his running mate, former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, several weeks ago, as scandal continued to engulf the Democratic nominee while the Republican candidates statements and behavior daily piled distress upon puzzlement.

Johnsons clear and consistent support for limited government, free enterprise, social tolerance and individual freedom appeals to our own philosophical leanings. An examination of his policy positions revealed that they often match our longstanding editorial creed. (Nearby, youll find an analysis of how the candidates fare when judged by the standards of that creed, as well as a look at the history of editorial endorsements by The Times-Dispatch.)

But our final decision to endorse the Johnson/Weld ticket, and to do so with great confidence and enthusiasm, came only after Johnson met with the editorial board last Monday morning. We found him to be knowledgeable but unscripted, reasonable and good-humored, self-assured but free from arrogance, willing and able to address every question, consistent in his beliefs without being dogmatic, even-tempered, curious  and in all respects optimistically, realistically presidential.

We have over the years interviewed hundreds of politicians  local, state, and national  and theres no doubt that Johnson belongs in the major leagues, and on the debate stage this fall. He is a skilled and experienced leader, an able communicator, an intelligent man.

***

In his meeting with us last week, Johnson explained why he and his running mate offer a sensible appeal to the voters.

I think were reflecting what 60 percent of Americans believe right now, broadly speaking  that being, fiscally conservative, smaller government, combined with being socially inclusive  and combined with a skepticism on our foreign policy, which doesnt seem to be making things better.

At its core, he added, libertarian philosophy always comes down on the side of personal choice, as long as those choices dont harm others. It also builds from a belief in smaller government. Government doesnt have the answers. Government taxes too much. Neither Bill Weld nor I raised taxes one cent  neither of us over both of our terms, not one penny. Weld and Johnson both faced Democratic state legislatures while in office, he added, so the opportunity to cut taxes didnt arise.

Johnson is not afraid to take stands that run counter to current trends in public opinion. Hes the only presidential candidate who backs the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We do support free trade. We think, ultimately, thats the way the world comes together.

He said the federal government should hand control of Medicaid  and eventually Medicare  to the states, as the only way to curtail runaway costs. Let the states have at it ... because there would be fabulous success. He calls for a balanced federal budget and promises to propose one soon after taking office, even if its initial effect is more aspirational than practical.

He advocates significant cuts in defense spending  and in the rest of the federal budget. We should have an impenetrable national defense, Johnson said, and we should strike back with overwhelming force whenever attacked. But he does not believe in nation-building.

Electing Trump or Clinton will make the countrys partisan divide even worse, Johnson said. But with a third party in the White House, Republicans and Democrats would have to compromise if they hope to accomplish anything. Well be a couple of guys in the big middle, hiring a bipartisan administration, ... calling out both sides to come to the table.

***

These are unsettling times. Americans across the political spectrum worry that our once-great institutions no longer work in the interests of the people  and sometimes dont work at all. Why not take this chance to reject the binary choice between Clinton and Trump that was created by our two-party system? We strongly urge the debate commission to invite Johnson onto the stage to give voters an opportunity to hear his positions, to evaluate his temperament, and, perhaps most important, to compare him with the candidates nominated by the two traditional parties.

We are confident that, if given the opportunity to make his case, Gary Johnson will persuade millions of Americans that he is the most capable and ethical candidate running this year. We endorse him and look forward to a rejuvenating surprise in November  a new birth of freedom.
With more than 40 beer selections and 18 Virginia wines on tap, Sundays Hoptoberfesta Gnarly Hops fall celebrationprovided a variety of spirits, food and music to keep downtown Culpeper buzzing for hours.

Richmond-based group Dalton Dash provided bluegrass, rock and folksy music while Dr. Yes of Northern Virginia played bluesy rock tunes.

Sponsored by the Culpeper Renaissance Inc., this event is designed to satisfy the palette of craft beer enthusiasts.

According to CRI program manager Jessica Jenkins, a total of 1,750 patrons filled the streets of downtown Culpeper for this event.

Kelsey Carlson Settle, Hoptoberfest committee chairwoman, said shes thrilled to kick off this exciting new event.

Weve had a lot of success for the past four years with Gnarly Hops. And weve gotten a lot of feedback from people who wanted a fall beer fest, so we listened. Culpeper is so receptive to new events and we appreciate people coming out to support us during our new endeavors, she said. And were thankful for the beautiful weather.

Many event goers said they were appreciative of Sundays mild, 80-degree temperatures and clear blue skies, especially with the slight threat of Tropical Storm Hermine barreling up the East Coast this weekend.

Underneath a small tent, Dave Kostelnik, general manager at Early Mountain Vineyards in Madison, poured three wines for patrons to taste: the 2015 Five Forks (a blend of five white wines); 2015 Rose and the 2014 Foothills (a blend of merlot and syrah).

We see a significant amount of our customer base within a half-hour radius of the winery so it makes sense to come out and support what Culpeper is doing, but also have another way to convene with some of our best customers, said Kostelnik.

Chef Leonidas Tarabay, owner of N&A Catering in Richmond provided Mediterranean and Greek fare for the hungry crowd. He sold gyros, popcorn shrimp, Italian sausages, kielbasas with green peppers and onions, steak and cheese and fried Oreos.

This event is great to help show our culture with the community, said Tarabay. We have a very diverse menu for people to try and to have a good time.

CRI volunteer Dave Kelly poured Liefmans fruit-flavored German beer: the Rosetta is matured with cherries while the Goudenband is a dry, caramelized dark brew with hints of nuts and dried raisins.

This is a great way to celebrate Hoptoberfest and its a nice mixture of American craft beers as well as German beers, he added.

Hoptoberfest patrons Jay Hobbs and Joseph Soley were complimentary of the inaugural event.

I like that theres shade here. Ive been to ones that were very sunny or others inside a gymnasium and thats not so awesome, said Hobbs.

Soley said the event was a lot larger than he thought it would be.

Asked what he thought about the music, Soley said it sounded great.
Chairman of the Expediency Council Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani underlined the importance of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei's support for nuclear talks, IRNA news agency reported.

The will of the Supreme Leader was behind this issue; despite all the issues, Ayatollah Khamenei supported them till the end, Ayatollah Rafsanjani said on Sunday.

It was quite clear for us that the Wests policy was to shift on food-for-oil, because they needed our oil and we needed food, he added.

Ayatollah Rafsanjani reiterated the role of Supreme Leaders supports in helping Iran to reach nuclear agreement with the West.
By Fatih Karimov  Trend:

Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 4

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) lost another high-ranking official in clashes in Syria.

General Dariush Dorosti, has been killed in fighting with the Jaysh al-Ezzah militant group in the northern part of the Syrian province of Hama, Irans Hayat news agency reported.

The body of the killed general is still held by the group.

In a post in Twitter, the Jaysh al-Ezzah group has published photo it claims is of killed Iranian general.

Over the past few years and since the crisis broke out in Syria and Iraq, several commanders of the IRGC have been reportedly killed in clashes with "terrorists".

Iranian officials have constantly denied that their servicemen have boots on ground in Syria and Iraq, saying the officers of the Islamic Republic are in Syria and Iraq as advisers at official request from both countries' governments.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 4

By Fatih Karimov  Trend:

President of French National Assembly Claude Bartolone is scheduled to visit Iran to hold talks with senior Iranian officials.

Heading a parliamentary delegation, Bartolone will visit Tehran on Sept. 5 at the invitation of Irans Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani, ISNA news agency reported.

During his trip, Bartolone will meet with Iranian officials including President Hassan Rouhani,

Chairman of the Expediency Council Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Parliament Speaker Larijani.

The two sides are expected to discuss ways for boosting bilateral ties as well as the latest regional developments.

Bartolone had been scheduled to visit Iran in mid-July but postponed his trip following a terrorist attack on July 14 in the southern French city of Nice.

Last Month French Minister of Environment, Energy and Marine Affairs Segolene Royal, heading a delegation including senior business figures from environmental and renewable energy firms specializing in water, pollution and energy efficiency, payed an official visit to Tehran and discussed the ways for following up the mutual agreements inked during President Hassan Rouhanis visit to France last January.

During the Rouhanis trip 35 MOUs and cooperation documents were sigend between the two countries.

In last September 2015, a high-ranking 150-member French economic delegation visited Iran to explore avenues for trade ties in meetings with Iranian ministers and top officials.

French Agriculture Minister Stephane Le Foll and Minister of State for Foreign Trade, Promotion of Tourism Matthias Fekl led the delegation which included representatives from 150 French companies and large industries.
Tehran, Iran, September 4

By Mehdi Sepahvand Trend:

Two Iranian news websites have been banned by authorities, but no explanation has been offered so far.

The websites of Borna News Agency, organ of the Ministry of Youth and Sports, and the privately held Moj News Agency were blocked following orders from the Workgroup on Criminal Content, Trend correspondent reported from Tehran September 4.

Although no official charges have yet been held against the two news agencies, experts believe technical issues related to security lie behind the bans.

An IT expert identifying himself as Nassir told Trend the issue has to do with Irans newly-launched national information network.

News agencies are required to move their servers inside the country or are blocked if they refuse, the expert said.

The first phase of Irans National Information Network (National Internet) was launched Aug. 28.

Since 2005 Iran has been developing its National Information Network to improve control over its content as well as speed. The project, which is separate from the World Wide Web was scheduled to be completed by the end of the fifth five-year development plan (2011-15).

This network will be separated from the rest of the internet and is specifically for domestic use.
Tata Sons said its intent is to pay but within the confines of the law.

New Delhi: Tata Sons said on Sunday it is disappointed with the lack of co-operation from Japanese company Docomo in arriving at an amicable resolution to the $1.17 billion dispute.

Tata Sons said its intent is to pay but within the confines of the law. We have been disappointed with the lack of co-operation from our partner in arriving at an amicable resolution.

Despite several attempts on our part, our partner has refused to come together with us to engage the government and the regulator on the issue, said Tata Sons.

The company said that position Tata Sons has taken in its affidavit filed in the Delhi High Court is in line with what we have stated from the outset  that Tata Sons is committed to honouring our contractual obligations to NTT Docomo, in compliance with Indian regulations and law.

Tata said that there is a judicial process that is underway and we need to pay due heed to the laws that bind us all.
New Delhi: Indicating further consolidation in the Rs 15-lakh crore mutual fund industry, at least four fund houses are said to be in discussions for possible takeover by rival players, including for reasons of cashing out at good valuation.

Some smaller ones are also looking to exit the market due to regulatory requirements such as higher networth and difficult business conditions in a market full of too many small fund houses and only a few large players.

The names doing the rounds for possible merger and acquisition deals include L&T Mutual Fund, which has built a significant asset base including through acquisitions.

Industry sources said L&T Finance, a part of diversified group Larsen & Toubro, is believed to be mulling over sale of its mutual fund business, which manages assets worth Rs 28,000 crore.

Sources said L&T Finance has begun discussions for a possible sale of its Indian mutual fund arm, although the firm officially declined to comment on the same.

When contacted a L&T Finance spokesperson said: "We do not comment on rumors and market speculations."

Sources said Peerless MF is also looking at potential M&A opportunities, but officials at the fund house maintained there was no truth in such speculations. L&T had entered in mutual fund space in January 2010 by acquiring DBS Chola Mutual Fund. Later in March 2012, L&T had acquired Fidelity's mutual fund business in India.

The total asset base of Indian mutual fund business crossed Rs 15 lakh crore last month, although the industry is highly scattered with 42 active players with most of them having small businesses.

In last few years, mutual fund houses faced a challenging time due to regulatory changes coupled with high redemption pressure from investors mainly on account of weakness in the equity markets. The conditions saw several players exiting the mutual fund space.

JP Morgan sold its mutual fund business to Edelweiss Asset Management, Goldman Sachs sold its MF business to Reliance MF and Morgan Stanley's offloaded its MF operations to HDFC MF.

Besides, ING MF operation was acquired by Birla Sunlife; Kotak MF has bought PineBridge MF and Pramerica MF has taken over Deutsche Bank's mutual fund business.

Moreover, experts believe in the coming months industry will see further consolidation as Sebi's deadline for mandatory Rs 50 crore minimum net worth for asset management companies is approaching.

The capital market regulator, in February 2014, has given three years to asset management companies to meet the minimum net worth norm. The move was aimed at weeding out non-serious players and ensure stability of the financial system.

"We will see further consolidation in mutual fund space as many small fund houses are not able to meet the Sebi's networth threshold," Quantum Chief Executive Jimmy Patel said.
A 26-year-old RSS worker was on Saturday attacked by a country-made bomb and hacked to death allegedly by the supporters of CPI(M) in Kannur, Kerala. (Representational image)

Kannur: A 26-year-old Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) worker was on Saturday attacked by a country-made bomb and hacked to death allegedly by the supporters of CPI(M) near panchayat's office in Thillankeri village, Kerala.

According to reports, the attackers allegedly hurled bombs at the RSS worker, identified as Bineesh, causing injuries to his head and leg, before attacking him with sharp-edged weapons.

Bineesh was immediately rushed to a nearby hospital where he succumbed to his injuries.

He was murdered just an hour after a Communist Party of India (Marxist) supporter sustained injuries when the car he was travelling in was attacked by a country-made bomb in Kannur. The CPI(M) worker, Jijesh, is undergoing treatment at a hospital in Kannur.

The BJP had called for a strike on Sunday in Kannur in protest against Bineeshs murder.

The RSS and CPI(M) have time and again blamed each other for attacks on their workers. At least four RSS activists were attacked on August 25 allegedly by the workers of CPI(M) in Kannurs Muzukkunnu area.
The former minister was arrested on Saturday night after a woman filed charges of rape against him. (Photo: Twitter)

New Delhi: Sacked Delhi Minister and AAP MLA Sandeep Kumar arrested on charges of rape on a complaint of a woman who figured in an objectionable video with him, was on Sunday produced in a Delhi court which remanded him in police custody for one day.

Kumar, 36, was produced before a magisterial court in Rohini here, which sent him to police custody till Monday on a Delhi Police plea for remand to quiz him in the case.

Read: Sacked AAP MLA demanded sex in exchange for ration card, claims woman

The former minister was arrested on Saturday night after a woman approached Sultanpuri police station in north Delhi with a complaint of sexual harassment against the former social welfare and women and child development minister following which a case was filed.

The police have booked him under section 376 (rape), 328 (causing hurt by means of poison with intent to commit an offence) of IPC, under section 67A of IT Act (punishment for publishing or transmitting of material containing sexually explicit act) and Section 7 of the Prevention of Corruption Act (public servant taking gratification other than legal remuneration for an official act).

In her complaint, the woman alleged that around 11 months ago she was raped by Kumar when she had gone to his office in Outer Delhi's Sultanpuri seeking help to obtain a ration card.

She alleged that Kumar had offered her a spiked drink and when she fell unconscious, she was taken to his house adjacent to the office and raped.

The woman alleged that Kumar had told her that he will get a ration card for her and also ensure jobs for her children.

Kumar was removed from the AAP government on August 31 by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal after the CD purportedly showing him in a compromising position with the woman surfaced.

The MLA from Sultanpur Majra had surrendered before the investigators at the office of DCP (Outer) in Pitampura where his statement was recorded, police officials had said.

Soon after the controversy, the MLA had defended himself, saying he has been targeted.

Kumar's wife has also come out in support of her husband, claiming that he was "falsely implicated" in the scandal.
Singh was going towards his home in Azadpur from Lajpat Nagar where his friends had hosted a bachelor's party for him. (Photo: Representational Image)

New Delhi: In a tragic turn of events, a 24-year-old man died after the car he was driving fell off a flyover in southeast Delhi on the day of his engagement on Saturday.

Abhijeet Singh, a builder, was returning home after partying with his friends when the BMW he was driving met with an accident, police said.

The incident happened when Singh lost control of his vehicle and it rammed into the grill of the Lodhi flyover and went over the edge on Saturday around 5 am, said a senior police officer.

Singh was going towards his home in Azadpur from Lajpat Nagar where his friends had hosted a bachelor's party for him, police said.

It hasn't yet been determined whether Singh was driving under the influence of alcohol as the post-mortem report is awaited, said the officer, adding that he was speeding and that is why the impact of the accident was quite severe.

Singh sustained severe head injuries and was rushed to the Moolchand Hospital where he succumbed during treatment, police said.

His family has been in a state of shock and the police hasn't been able to record their statement, said the officer adding that Singh was to get engaged to his girlfriend in the evening and the family hasn't been able to come to terms with what has happened. Singh has a younger brother who is studying in the US while his father is also a builder.

A case has been registered under sections 279 (rash driving or riding on a public way), 304(A) (causing death by negligence) IPC and police is trying to determine whether there was any other vehicle involved in the accident.
Srinagar: A day after Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti invited them to meet the all-party delegation, the separatist leaders on Sunday said it cannot be an alternative to a transparent, agenda-based dialogue to address the "core" issue.

One "fails to understand" what hope to attach with a delegation which has not "spelled out its mandate for any engagement on a clear agenda", separatist leaders Syed Ali Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Mohammad Yasin Malik said in a joint statement issued in Srinagar.

Read: All-party delegation led by Rajnath visits Kashmir on peace mission

These methods of "crisis management through Parliamentary Delegations and Track-Two... can't take the place of a genuine transparent agenda-based dialogue to address the core issue...," they said.

"That has been our consistent stand and has been spelled out recently as well in our letters to various international and global fora," they said.

The separatist leaders also lashed out at Mehbooba, alleging that she was playng the "role of obfuscation".

Read: Rajnath Singh approves PAVA shells as alternative to pellet guns

They said given this situation, it is "not surprising that even now her (Mehbooba's) dominant concern, as expressed in her letter, is to 'lend credence and credibility' to the Indian Parliamentary Delegation visiting Kashmir avowedly to ascertain wishes of the people".

They also referred to her "outburst" during a press conference with Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh recently, and said it seemed to even "embarrass" the minister.
Violence continues in the Valley, though curfew has been lifted in most places. On Saturday, 1 youth was killed and 150 people injured in clashes. (Photo: HU Naqash/DC)

New Delhi: An all-party delegation led by Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Sunday held talks with Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti in Srinagar, as it began a two-day visit to Jammu and Kashmir, during which it is expected to interact with a cross-section of people with a view to restore peace in the strife-hit Valley.

The meeting, chaired by Singh at Sher-I-Kashmir International Conference Centre soon after the 26-member delegation arrived in Srinagar, discussed the security situation in the Valley.

It also took stock of those injured in the violent protests since the killing of Hizbul militant Burhan Wani on July 8.

Initially, the delegation was proposed to be of 29 Members of Parliament, but only 26 MPs have come to Srinagar.

The Hurriyat Conference however, rejected the invitation for talks, saying the delegation 'has not spelt out its mandate and has no clear agenda of engagement.'

CM Mehbooba Mufti had written a letter to separatists leaders in her capacity as PDP Chief inviting them to engage with the delegation.

But the state government has placed chairman of moderate Hurriyat Conference faction Mirwaiz Umer Farooq under arrest at Chashme Shahi sub-jail, JKLF Chief Yaseen Malik at BSF camp in Humama while hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani continues to be under house arrest. This led to a jibe from former CM Omar Abdullah about the absurdity of calling Hurriyat for talks when its leaders were in jail.

However, cutting across party lines, leaders earlier said that they were hopeful of finding a solution for restoration of peace in the Valley which has been in the grip of violent protests that left 73 persons dead and thousands injured.

State Education Minister and Government Spokesperson Naeem Akhtar said it was necessary for all stakeholders to join the dialogue process. "How long can this continue? It has to end someday," he said.

When asked about Mehbooba not mentioning talks "within the ambit of Constitution" in her letter to the separatist leaders last evening, he said every party comes to the negotiating table with their stated position.

"It depends on how we carry forward the dialogue and ideas to find resolution to the issue," he said.

Akhtar refused to reply to a question whether there were any back channel talks with Hurriyat Conference.

A delegation of National Conference led by former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah is also likely to meet the MPs. The all-party delegation is on a two-day visit to the state during which it is expected to interact with a cross section of people.

However, the Valley based trade organisations have refused to meet the politicians.

"We intend to talk to individuals and groups who want peace and normalcy in Kashmir Valley," Singh said before the departure of the delegation.

Leaders said that they were hopeful of finding a solution for restoration of peace in the Valley where violent clashes have claimed 71 lives since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani on July 8.

Senior Congress leader and former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said that the delegation was ready to hear "everyone".

The visit "will be beneficial for Kashmir and for the country," he said, adding everyone wants peace in the state.

Azad said it will be an opportunity for the parties and Kashmiri people to interact. CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury, another member of the team, said the all-party delegation should have gone two months ago "but let's hope that even now, we can make a difference".

LJP Chief and Union Minister Ram Vilas Paswan said that the MPs are going with an open mind and want to interact with anyone who wants to talk within the framework of the Indian Constitution. "We are ready to talk," he said.

Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge said all parties were cooperating with the government and their sole aim was restoration of normalcy in the state.

"We will try our best to bring back normalcy. We are cooperating with the government. It is the responsibility of the government to deal with the situation very intelligently.

"All parties are cooperating for that. So we hope that it will be resolved," he said.

Yechury went so far as to endorse the participation of Pakistan in talks over Kashmir. Speaking to media persons after a consultation meeting with intellectuals here on the Kashmir issue, CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury and his CPI counterpart Sudhakar Reddy also urged Hurriyat leaders to discuss their positions with the delegation to find a solution to the problem.

"A final solution to this (problem) cannot happen without engaging with Pakistan. Yes, Pakistan's involvement in cross-border infiltration, terrorism, on that all of us have said unitedly that the country as a whole will face it. But at the same time, the engagement with Pakistan is also important," Yechury, who is part of the 30-member delegation, said.

On asked whether inviting Pakistan to come to discussion table will mean converting the issue as one associated with Pakistan and not India's internal matter, Yechury said "the Kashmir dispute is between Pakistan and India".

Prior to the visit, Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Saturday approved chilli-based PAVA shells as alternative to pellet guns in Kashmir.

Earlier, PM Modi on Friday called for development and trust as the two key elements required to address the problem dogging the troubled region.

The seeds (of the current unrest) were sown during Independence. Every government has had to face this problem. This not a new problem but an old one, he said.

Asserting that solution to the problem would be found, Modi said, Kashmir needs vikas (development) and 'vishwas' (confidence). 125 crore people of the country are ready to give vikas and there has never been dearth of vishwas.

I hope Kashmiri youth will not be misled and will move ahead with peace, unity, harmony. I hope Kashmir will remain the jannat (paradise), the Prime Minister said in an interview.
Kashmiri protesters throw stones as they clash with policemen in Srinagar. (Photo: AP)

Srinagar: Clashes broke out in south Kashmir's Shopian district on Sunday morning with protesters setting ablaze a mini-secretariat building while curfew remained clamped in parts of Srinagar on a day the all-party delegation was here on a two-day visit aimed at restoring peace in the Valley.

Normal life in the Valley was paralysed for the 58th day as restrictions continued in the rest of the Valley which has been hit by violence since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani in July.

People in Penjoora village of Shopian tried to take out a protest rally which was stopped by the police, leading to clashes, an official said.

The protesters also set afire the mini-secretariat building, housing the deputy commissioner's office in the area, the official said.

He said the security forces resorted to baton charge and tear-gas shelling to disperse the protesters.

"There are some injuries but more details are awaited," he said.

on Saturday, protesters in the neighbouring Kulgam district burnt a house of the ruling PDP's block president Gulzar Ahmad.

Ahmad had facilitated a meeting of Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti with the family of a victim of violence in the district. Mehbooba had visited the family of Late Mashooq Ahmed, firing victim of Kund, Kulgam and offered condolences to the bereaved family on Saturday.

"Curfew remains in force in five police station areas of downtown Srinagar," a police spokesman said.

He said curfew in these areas of the summer capital continued as a precautionary measure in view of the call given by separatists asking people to occupy Airport road, city centre Lal Chowk and district headquarters against the all-party delgation's visit.

The spokesman said curfew has been lifted from the other areas of the city where it was in force on Saturday.

The all-party delegation led by Home Minister Rajnath Singh reached here today for a two-day visit during which it is expected to hold talks with a cross-section of people.

"Curfew has been lifted from Batamaloo and Maisuma areas in the uptown city in view of the improving situation," the police spokesman said.

He, however, said restrictions on the assembly of people were in place in the rest of the Valley. The separatists have extended the shutdown till September 8.

As many as 73 persons, including two police personnel, have been killed and several thousand others injured in the clashes between protesters and security forces in the Valley since Wani was killed in an encounter in south Kashmir on July 8.
New Delhi: India has reportedly told interlocutors at the G20 summit that it has no problems with Pakistan becoming a member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, provided that due process is followed.

According to a report in Hindustan Times, admitting new members into the NSG has become a political compulsion for China because of Pakistans bid. China had opposed Indias bid in May on the grounds that India was not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and that procedural issues were not addressed.

Read: Modi meets Xi on sidelines of G20 summit, discusses bilateral ties

The report says that consultations for Indian membership are now taking place on two tracks - discussions undertaken by NSG chairs envoy Rafael Grossi with members of the group, and Indias bilateral efforts to increase support for its entry into the club by the year-end.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who met Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20 summit on Sunday, was expected to address the issue with the Chinese President. It is not clear if this materialised.

But Xi Jinping may in turn raise Indias recent signing of the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) with the US and ask Modi to clarify Indias foreign policy doctrine of non-alignment, the report said.
Jaipur: Ending a week-long tussle, the Jaipur Development Authority (JDA) on Sunday opened the main entrance to the Raj Mahal Palace heritage hotel following a meeting between Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje and Rajmata Padmini Devi, a member of the erstwhile royal family of Jaipur, which owns the property.

A committee of ministers was formed to look into the matter after a meeting took place between Devi and Raje on Saturday night.

Following the committee's recommendation, the orders to open the seal were issued and the gates were reopened.

Enforcement officer Kishore Singh opened the gates on Sunday morning.

The BJP appears to have stepped in to resolve the tussle after the 'Rajmata' took out a rally against the JDA on September 1 that spilled the confrontation between Raje government and the erstwhile royal family out in the open.

Senior BJP leader Saudan Singh met Raje and Devi's daughter Diya Kumari, also a party MLA, two days ago to discuss the issue.

Notably, in the protest rally taken out by the Rajmata, Diya was not present but her husband and son had participated in the march.

The gates of the heritage hotel were sealed over a week ago by the JDA, which claimed that the gates were on a land owned by the government  a move which Devi said had humiliated the family.

The former Jaipur royal family had moved the court in this regard.
Hyderabad: Union water resources minister Uma Bharati will hold the first apex council meeting with the Chief Ministers of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh this month. On the agenda will be the construction of the Palamuru Ranga Reddy and Dindi projects in Telangana using Krishna waters, thereby affecting inflows into AP.

The apex council was created by the AP Reorganisation Act. The council had not met even once despite both states asking for a meeting.

However, acting on the Supreme Courts directive, Union water resources ministry officer on special duty Amarjit Singh has now written to the chief secretaries of Telangana state and AP to indicate a convenient date for the Chief Ministers to meet. He has suggested September 11, 18 or 19.

In the past too, the AP government, through a Cabinet resolution, had urged Ms Bharati to convene an apex council meet to thrash out issues concerning utilisation of Godavari and Krishna waters by Telangana state without informing the lower riparian state of AP or obtaining permissions from the Godavari and Krishna River Management Bo-ards constituted by the AP Reorganisation Act.

Similarly, Telangana state too had written to the Union minister to convene a meeting to settle disputes like AP using more water through the Pothireddy padu head regulator without consent of the Krishna River Management Board.

It also claimed a share in Godavari waters that are being diverted to the Krishna basin through the Pattiseema Lift Irrigation Scheme as mandated in the agreement among states reached previously.

Complaints of a similar nature were filed with the Godavari and Krishna River Management Boards by the two state governments. The Boards had forwarded the complaints and obtained the replies and again circulated them among the states. While AP argues that Telangana cannot claim a share in Pattiseema since Polavaram is not yet operational, Telangana has informed the Board that they will obtain necessary clearances from the concerned agencies at an appropriate time.
Railway minister Suresh Prabhu has already sent letters to MPs of different parties for next years Rail Budget.

New Delhi: In a move to take the slogan of Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas forward, the Modi government is reaching out to MPs of all parties to solicit their views and suggestions for next years Budget. In a first-of-its-kind exercise, key ministers will invite suggestions from MPs as part of the Budget-making process.

The PM is learnt to have told ministers in charge of infrastructure and social sector portfolios to directly engage MPs and make them a part of the process to prepare the Budget.

The idea is to make the Budget live up to peoples aspirations. The finance ministry usually holds consultations with stakeholders, including business and trade bodies, but MPs have not been part of this process, though a few offer suggestions on their own. Railway minister Suresh Prabhu has already sent letters to MPs of different parties for next years Rail Budget.
Mumbai: A 26-year-old engineering graduate has moved the Bombay high court seeking that the University of Mumbai authorities be directed to take back his degree, which he said was secured in 2011 via fraudulent means.

According Vaibhav Patil, he had allegedly paid a bribe to obtain his engineering degree. The HC has now asked MUs lawyer to file an affidavit stating the policy of the university in such matters, and also whether it would revoke the degree.

According to Mr Patil, his conscience has been pricking him ever since he secured the fake degree. He added that he approached the court after certain university officials told him to consult a psychiatrist if the issue was troubling him.

Mr Patils move may have put the university in a bind. Speaking to The Asian Age, MUs lawyer Rui Rodrigues said, While there is a provision under the Maharashtra University Act to revoke a degree, there is no provision related to the surrender of a degree.

In a letter to the chancellor of the university, which was annexed to his petition, Mr Patil said, For the past four years, I have been trying to forget this incident, but I could not do so. Even today, I dont feel normal. I am mentally disturbed due to this one incident.

In the letter, Mr Patil also confessed, I failed in one subject in the second year of my engineering course. But I had managed to clear that subject after paying money to someone.
Hyderabad: Union water resources minister Uma Bharti will hold the first apex council meeting with the Chief Ministers of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh sometime this month. On the agenda will be the construction of the Palamuru-Ranga Reddy and Dindi projects in Telangana using Krishna waters, thereby affecting inflows into Andhra Pradesh.

Her ministry has sought convenient dates from the CMs for the meeting. Despite both state governments earlier asking for a meeting to sort out various issues concerning sharing of Krishna and Godavari waters among the two states, it took a Supreme Court directive for the Union water resources ministry to convene the apex council meeting.

Mr Alla Venkata Gopala Krishna Rao and others had approached the apex court to issue a direction to stop the Telangana state government from proceeding further on the construction of the Palamuru-Rangareddy and Dindi projects using Krishna waters thereby affecting inflows into the Prakasam barrage for Krishna Delta requirements. The council is constituted to take a final decision on any dispute among the two states in the irrigation sector.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 4

By Farhad Daneshvar  Trend:

Airlines appear to make a major contribution to the cooperation in tourism sector between Iran and Azerbaijan.

Following agreements between Tehran and Baku to expand cooperation in tourism sector, the number of flights made between Iran and Azerbaijan has significantly increased and airlines from both countries intend to considerable increase their number of flights, an Iranian tour operator told Trend.

The Chairman of Irans Aysan Parvaz travel agency, Mohsen Dastmalchi said that Iran earned about $1.5 billion in revenue from Azerbaijani visitors in 2015 as around 1.5 million tourists from the north-western neighboring country arrived in the Islamic Republic over the past year.

This is while the number of Iranian tourists arriving in Azerbaijan has also considerably increased, he added.

Iran currently launches nine flights to Azerbaijan on a weekly basis and it is capable of bringing about 1,350 tourists to the neighboring country per week.

In the meantime Azerbaijans flag carrier airline known as AZAL (Azerbaijan Airlines) continues its regular flights between the two countries.

Elaborating on the opportunities for cooperation in tourism sector between the two countries, he called on Azerbaijani tourists to visit various Iranian cities particularly the holy city of Mashhad.

Iran's revenue from tourism over the last Iranian calendar year (ended March 20) amounted to $8 billion.
KOZHIKODE: At last, the ordeal is over for the four Bangladeshi girls, victims of sex-trafficking. Their return to their native places in Bangladesh was put on hold due to legal formalities as there were a few pending cases in various courts of the state and in Karnataka. Seven men and a woman were released earlier. One of the four girls residing at the After Care Home will start her return journey on Sunday with the escort of police officials deputed by city police commissioner Uma Behra till the border.

The other three girls living at Mahila Mandir will return on September 6. Thanks to the efforts of the district administration headed by N. Prasanth which coordinated various departments, Arm of Joy, a city -based organization, Punarjani, the women advocates forum and the Kerala Legal Service Authority. It was Arm of Joy which first brought to light the plight of the victims, including girls trapped in various government-run homes. Sub-judge R.L. Baiju said that the procedures for the release from many technical hurdles of law was a big task, but all the officials concerned took special interest in the case.

The National Human Rights Commission and Kerala High Court had also intervened. The details of their release was passed officially to the girls at a get-together organized at Mahila Mandir on Saturday. The officials who played key roles in the release, including District Legal Services Authority chairman and district judge T.S.P. Moosath, sub-judge R.L. Baiju, city police commissioner Uma Behra, assistant commissioner M.P. Premdas and other officials were present at the Mahila Mandir.

Collector N. Prasanth, who was on a foreign trip, and Arm of Joy managing trustee G. Anoop, the two key architects of the release, were absent. Mr Anoop told DC that he was happy that the girls were finally being released. It is the result of almost eight months of struggle by Arm of Joy with the legal support of Punarjani, he said and added that he was not invited for the farewell party at the Mahila Mandir. More disgusting was the attempt by some top officials to claim that the release was the result of their own efforts, he added.
Chennai: I will come to the hospital only if you buy me a chocolate, Hemalatha told her father when he was trying to prepare the nine-year-old for the trip to the Institute of Child Health and Hospital for Children in Egmore on Friday morning.

The chocolate did not help to cheer the fourth class girl as she died in the hospital the following day. Doctors told the family from Ponneri it was meningitis, brain fever.

The doctors at the Ponneri general hospital could have saved my child. They delayed starting the right treatment. Even after the blood samples were checked, they kept saying she was normal and made us treat her normal, sending her to school and giving her the usual food. And then it became too late when we rushed her here, said the childs father Anbumani, fighting back tears.

Hemalatha died at 0130 hours Friday-Saturday night and after the usual hospital ritual, the family took the body back home in Ponneri in the evening for the last rites.

Barely 48 hours earlier, the girl was a bundle of lifedespite the temperature and fatigue. She was very active till about four in the (Friday) evening, chatting with her sister and asking us for food. There was no indication she was at the threshold of death, sobbed her mother.

While the family blamed the Ponneri GH for her death, it appears that precious time was lost in getting Hemalatha attended by a quack during the initial period.

The girl developed fever on August 24 and the family first took her to a quack and later to a private hospital. She was taken to the Ponneri GH on August 29 where the doctors did preliminary investigation and told them to come back the next morning. They did not turn up, said State Coordinator of National Rural Health Mission Dr S Srinivasan at the Egmore ICH, elaborating on the fatal mistakes that families sometimes commit while handling their kids feversfirst the quacks, then street-corner clinics and ill-equipped labs and only later, the competent hospitalby which time it often got too late.

By the time Hemalatha was taken to the Minjur hospital on September 2, she had already developed shock and convulsions, which meant acute central nervous infection. When she arrived at the ICH on Friday afternoon, she was in a bad shape and was taken into the emergency. We did our best, Dr Srinivasan told DC.

Denying rumours that Hemalatha died due to dengue, he said her blood platelet count was normal whereas the count would drop for dengue.
Chennai: The Madras high court has expressed displeasure over filmmakers corrupting the minds of the youth by using vulgar words in songs and by projecting violence in films, instead of inculcating moral values.

Granting bail to a youth detained on charge of sexually harassing a 16-year old girl, Justice S.Vaidyanathan said Media is a powerful teacher, whose teachings are never forgotten by people. Therefore, filmmakers should realise their responsibility to imbibe good thoughts in the minds of the youth, who are the pillars of the future society and should act upon to bring up a good society.

It was submitted by the government advocate that the petitioner waylaid the victim accompanied by her mother and sang a film song (Kalyanam Thaan Kattiittu Odipolaama, Odipoyee Kalyanathaan Kattikilaama) besides pulling her hands. On a complaint, Manali police registered a case against him under sections 341 (punishment for wrongful restraint), 294(b) (sings, recites or utters any obscene song, ballad or words, in or near any public place) 506(i) (punishment for criminal intimidation) IPC and section 12 (punishment for sexual harassment) of Pocso Act. He was remanded to judicial custody on July 24.

Stating that the police foisted case against the youth, the petitioners counsel submitted that the youth had a love affair with the girl and he was innocent.

Justice S.Vaidyanathan said that considering the facts and circumstances, he was of the view that no custodial interrogation was required at this stage and therefore he was granting bail to the petitioner.

The judge directed him to execute a bond for Rs.10,000 with two sureties each for a like sum to the satisfaction of the judicial magistrate, Tiruvottriyur.

He should appear before police daily at 10.30 am and 5.00 pm, until further orders and shall not tamper with evidence or witness either during investigation or trial. The judge also directed the accused not to abscond either during investigation or trial.
Thiruvananthapuram: Six lakh faithful are expected to attend the canonization of Teresa of Calcutta by Pope Francis at St. Peters Square at 2:30 IST on Sunday. The Pope led a prayer vigil for the Mother in the Vatican on Saturday, attended by thousands of the faithful. The sainthood is being conferred 19 years after the death of the Mother in Calcutta on September 5, 1997. The ceremony starts with Hymn of the Jubilee and the invocation of the Holy Spirit. A prelate then petitions the Holy See to enrol the Mother among the saints. This is followed by the litany of supplication (the litany of saints). The formula of canonization starts soon after. The Pope will declare Blessed Teresa of Calcutta as a saint, to be venerated by the whole Catholic Church.

Once the sainthood ceremony is over, the Holy Mass follows, with readings from epistles and the Gospel. The Gospel for the day is on Christs teaching: None of you can be my disciple unless he gives up all his possessions. The quintessential part of the Mass- the Liturgy of the Eucharist- marking the communion of the body and blood of Jesus Christ follows. The Mass ends with Angelus- Hail Mary- and the Papal blessing. A group of around 40 to 50 nuns from different parts of the country will be present at the ceremony, led by Missionaries of Charity Superior-General Sr Mary Prema. Besides, 45 bishops from all over the country, including Archbishop of Kolkata Thomas DSouza, Baselios Cardinal Cleemis Major Arch Bishop of the Syro Malankara Church and Cardinal Mar George Alencherry of the Syro Malabar church are also attending.

Mother Teresa autograph

The people of Kolkata where Mother Teresa lived and worked are awaiting the finale of the Mothers sainthood. On Saturday, the faithful paid homage at Mother House- headquarters of Missionaries of Charity-braving the incessant rain that lashed Calcutta since morning. Sisters at Mother House have organised a special prayer for Mother on Sunday. "Tomorrow, I would visit Mother House to pray for her. If she was with us today she would have accepted this honour for the sake of the poor. The second miracle was authenticated by the Vatican and it is a proud moment for all of us that she would be canonized," said Missionaries of Charitys Sunita Kumar, who was also a confidante of the Mother.

Ms Kumar recalled: "Days before death she was being shifted from one hospital to another. As she was being moved out to the other hospital in an ambulance, she asked the driver, 'Kemon Acho Ajay?' (How are you Ajay?). When I had asked her how she knew him, she said that she had made friends with all of them."Besides the special prayer at Mother House, giant screens have been put up for live coverage of her canonisation. The West Bengal Housing Infrastructure Development Corporation (HIDCO), which set up the Mother's Wax Museum, has put up screens at vantage locations in New Town.

Gautam Lewis, once a polio-stricken child who found his home at Missionaries of Charity, will release 'Mora Gaang' - a song dedicated to the Mother. The song will be launched simultaneously across 220 countries on Sunday. Lewis is also organising an exhibition of photographs depicting Mother Teresa's life and his own childhood and "Mother Teresa and Me" -- a film documenting the orphanage where he once lived. ArchbishopThomas D'Souza said: "Her legacy continues through us and it inspires us to help the poorest of the poor. The event should not end on the celebration but should lead us to action. The government, Church and the people from all walks of life should lend a helping hand to the poor." On Monday, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican Secretary of State, will celebrate the mass of thanksgiving and Feast of St Teresa of Calcutta in St Peters Basilica. The veneration of the relics of St Teresa will be held at St John Lateran in the evening the same day and next day.
The first phase, sources informed, will be completed by 2018, with two berths of 400 metre quay each, providing an annual capacity of 1.6 million TEUs.

Chennai: The Union Shipping Ministry has chosen Vinayaka Chathurthi to inaugurate the administrative office for the Enayam major port project in Colachel in the state, probably, hoping that Lord Ganesh will clear the obstacles on the way to establish this transshipment port at Enayam and ensure success in the venture.

When Union Minister of State for Road Transport, Highways and Shipping Pon Radahkrishnan inaugurates it at Enayam in his home district of Kanyakumari district on Monday, he would be the happiest person, as commencing the work for this major port signifies the fulfillment of the BJPs poll assurance.

It would ensure direct jobs to 5,000 people besides 20,000 jobs through indirect employment once established. But on the larger canvass, it will play a crucial role for the Indian shipping sector.

The project has already left the neighbouring Kerala distressed over the prospects of its Vizhinjam transshipment terminal project and now made Colombo apprehensive.

The port in the island nation has been enjoying the largest share in handling Indias transshipment cargo during 2014-15, accounting for 48 per cent followed by Singapore: 22 per cent and Port Klang at 10 per cent according to data.

The Enayam port is expected to reverse this trend and also dependency on the international hub ports, leveraging it to handle the bulk of Indias transshipment cargo, as it is located near the global East-West shipping route and endowed with adequate draft and access to a large hinterland, according to sources.

A Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) is likely to be formed between V.O. Chidambaranar Port Trust, Tuticorin, Kamarajar Port Trust (Ennore) and Chennai Port Trust with 40 per cent, 40 per cent and, at 20 per cent stake respectively, for the Enayam port development.

The first phase, sources informed, will be completed by 2018, with two berths of 400 metre quay each, providing an annual capacity of 1.6 million TEUs. The volume is projected to be 1.7 million TEUs by 2020, 4.9 million TEUs in 2025 and 6.7 million TEUs by 2030.
Thrissur: Lawyers had insulted the people in the state by not allowing reporters inside the court, writer and activist Sarah Joseph said. Speaking at the memorial meeting of veteran journalist T.V. Achutha Warrier here at the Sahithya Akademi Hall on Sunday, she said that by taking such a stand against journalists, the lawyer community had conveyed the message that the public need not know what happened inside the courts. Delivering her lecture on the topic Judicial Activism and Media Activism she said that the attack on mediapersons in the courts was ethically and politically wrong.

As the lawyers did not like what the media wrote about them, they retaliated. But the judges have a responsibility to get involved in the matter and find a solution , she said. She added that both the judiciary and media should function in a way that the democratic system got strengthened. It is relevant to think at this juncture of what the government had done in settling the issue between the media and the lawyers. The government was insensitive and silent on the issue. Democracy is getting undermined by shutting the court gates on journalists, she added. Agriculture minister V.S. Sunil Kumar was also present at the event.
The police has not yet succeeded in formulating effective steps to stop the formation of new criminal gangs. (Representational image)

Hyderabad: A large number of new criminals entered the crime scene last year in Telangana and AP. Most of these new criminals started off their career with thefts and chain-snatching.

The National Crime Records Bureau says that 90 per cent of the criminals arrested by the Telangana police last year were first timers. 83 per cent of those booked last year by the AP police also belonged to this category. Senior police officials said that habitual criminal behaviour had come down in Telangana due to the reformation drives of the police, the prison department and the PD Act.

NCRB said that 1,06,023 new criminals entered the scene in Telangana last year and AP had over 1,23,577 new offenders. Chain-snatching cases were one of the most frequent offences reported in Telangana last year. Police said the vast majority of snatchers were newcomers. Similarly in offenses like thefts, burglaries, sexual harassment, cyber crime, assault, drug cases and financial scams most of the offenders were first timers.

The police has not yet succeeded in formulating effective steps to stop the formation of new criminal gangs. There is also a significant number of students who take to chain-snatching and thefts for leading lavish lives.

Meanwhile, in AP 16.3 per cent of the criminals were old hands. 221 criminals, who were imprisoned three times, came out and committed new crimes last year.

In Hyderabad, the police has been running rehab programmes to reduce habitual crimes and it has proved effective. Last year, 35-year-old Marineni Raju, who was involved in around 100 chain- snatching cases, was helped by the Cyberabad police when he came out of prison. Police opened a tea stall for him to provide him a source of livelihood.

Police approach criminals after checking jail records. They counsel them along with their families and most criminals are ready to turn a new leaf. The Telangana prison department has also started rehab programmes for ex-convicts.
Hyderabad: The state government is treading a cautious path on issuing final notification for the creation of new districts by this month-end. This follows intense protests in some places against some of the new districts notified in the preliminary notification released in August.

Several Opposition leaders and civil organisations are planning to move the High Court against new districts, once the final notification is issued. The protesters and Opposition leaders allege that the new districts lack scientific-basis and are being created solely on political grounds.

Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao has convened a meeting with district collectors on September 6 to discuss these issues and advise officials on the precautions they need to take before issuing final notification. This is to ensure that the new districts are not stuck in legal dispute, enabling their smooth launch on Dasara as planned.

The government is expected to take all these factors into consideration before issuing final notification in the last week of this month. The Chief Minister said hthat e would inaugurate the new districts in the state on Dasara, launching Siddipet district on October 11. Ministers in respective districts would launch new districts on the same day.

Unseat TRS, Revanth asks people

TD working president A. Revanth Reddy on Sun-day asked people to dislodge the TRS government and demolish all TRS flag posts in villages to protest against the unscientific reorganisation of districts.

Addressing a news conference here on Sunday, Mr Reddy said Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao, who refused to carve out new districts till the delimitation of new Assembly seats earlier, is going ahead with the creation of new districts without rationale, scientific approach.

He said the draft notification on districts shows that six districts will have only seven lakh population each, while others will have 15 to 40 lakh. This, he said, will eventually affect the im-plementation of several welfare and development schemes in the districts.

He also said that there was no rationale in carving two districts  Wan-aparthy and Nagarku-rnool  as both of them nearby towns.

Mr Reddy accused the Chief Minister of showing favouritism to his friends and relatives in carving out Shamshabad as new district even wit-hout people asking for it.

He said Shamshabad has been given district status to favour a big industrialist, who is close to the Chief Minister and help his real estate business.

Pointing out Mr Raos reluctance to divide Hyd-erabad and Secunder-abad as they are historic, he wondered if the same logic does not apply to Warangal and Hanum-akonda  which were twin cities from ages.
Hyderabad: State Congress president N. Uttam Kumar Reddy on Sunday asked the state government to issue a fresh draft notification on the reorganisation of districts after including Jangaon and Gadwal as new proposed districts.

He slammed the state government for going ahead with the formation of new districts without any scientific criteria.

Mr Reddy along with former deputy chief minister Damodar Raja Narasimha visited the Dharna Shivir at Indira Park and offered lemon juice to Congress leaders D.K. Aruna, S.A. Sampath Kumar and Ponnala Laxmaiah who have concluded their 48-hour hunger strike.

Addressing the gathering, the Pradesh Congress Committee president accused Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao of ignoring suggestions of Opposition parties and public on new districts.

Before concluding her fast, Gadwal Congress MLA D.K. Aruna criticised Nizamabad MP Kavitha for calling her as Bommali of Gadwal fort  a term used for the lead actress in Tel-ugu movie Arundh-anthi. She further asked the Nizamabad MP if she was the Bommali, whether Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao was Pasupathi, the villain character in the movie.

Former PCC chief Ponnala Laxmaiah said their fast is only the beginning and more such agitations will follow to protest against not creating Jangaon district.
Hyderabad: Pressure is mounting on the state government to relook some of the proposed districts, even as the demand for new districts continues unabated.

The strong opposition to carving Hanamkonda out of Warangal district may force the government to rethink and opt for Jangaon district instead.

Though the state government had constituted a task force to look into the formation of 17 new districts for administrative convenience, Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao was reportedly getting his own feedback on districts were notified in the draft notification.

Warangal district has been cut into four pieces  Warangal, Hanamkonda, Prof. Jayashankar and Mahbubabad. Sources said the government was seriously considering some changes like replacing Hanam-konda with Jangaon.

The proposed Peddapally would be replaced with Ramagundam and a new district would be created between Wanaparthy and Gadwal instead of Wanaparthy.

There is certainly rethinking on Hanam-konda district. A large number of people are opposing it since it is closely linked to Warangal and Kazipet. If the government decides to drop Hanamkonda, chances of Jangaon being elevated as district is high, the source told this newspaper.

As per the draft notification, there will be 27 districts, 58 revenue divisions and 490 mandals in the state. The government has given 30 days to the public to come up with their suggestions, grievances and opinions. New districts will come into existence from Dasara.
Another stage of the military assault in the areas of higher military institutions began on Sunday night. At the moment, only a part of the artillery school remains under the control of terrorists, Sputnik International reported.

"Air Force school and logistics support college are under our control. It is necessary to clean up the artillery school. This is an important and strategic step for the liberation of the entire city of Aleppo from terrorists," a brigade commander of a militia group.

Syria has been suffering from an armed conflict since March 2011, which, according to the UN, has so far claimed more than 500,000 lives.

Militants from various armed groups are confronting the Syrian government troops. The "Islamic State" (IS), the YPG (Kurdish People's Protection Units) and the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) are the most active terrorist groups in Syria.
India and Vietnam have always maintained a warm relationship  going back to the time when Vietnam was engaged in its life-and-death war against the United States in which it ultimately emerged victorious. This relationship has, however, now attained geopolitical dimensions with China, which has also been beaten back by Vietnam, making threatening noises against Indian support for oil exploration in Vietnamese waters as Beijing claims almost the whole of the South China Sea as its own.

Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit to Hanoi cements this partnership, in which 12 agreements were signed, including in defence cooperation, trade expansion, oil exploration, cooperation in solar energy, the building of an IT infrastructure, and in the health sector. In the present context, however, the most noteworthy is India extending a line of credit of $500 million to Vietnam to strengthen its defence sector. Mr Modi made no bones about deepening defence and security engagements with Vietnam in order to advance the two countries common interests.

At his luncheon banquet speech on Saturday, the Prime Minister spoke of the two partners jointly facing emerging regional challenges, and to exploit new opportunities. He also spoke of India taking satisfaction from the nature and direction of the bilateral relationship. All concerned are aware that the principal regional challenge is Beijings aggressive posture in relation to the South China Sea. The opportunities in question are India seeking to deepen ties with Asean, particularly with Vietnam being the Asean coordinator for India.
The statement, coming from the CM, left everyone aghast since he has never been known to use harsh words even against his opponents.

Lady luck by Didis side

The year 2016 has been extra kind to West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. In the run-up to the Assembly elections, the Opposition and a large section of the media had launched a belligerent campaign against her party. The collapse of a flyover in Kolkata and the Narada sting video exposing top Trinamul Congress leaders taking money on camera dealt a deadly blow to her partys poll prospects. However, the election results stunned everyone: she stormed back to power with a bigger majority.

Only months after this electoral landslide victory, the Supreme Court order on Singur gave her another landmark victory. Only two days after the Supreme Court order, the Trinamul Congress was granted national party status, yet another feather in her cap. Her Singur movement will soon find place in the syllabus of schools. Didi has acquired the Midas touch. She can do no wrong. Those who think she has achieved this stupendous success only through luck must not forget the old dictum: fortune favours the brave, said a powerful state minister who is considered close to Didi.

Sting Alert

The wise man learns from the mistakes of others. Clearly, the Congress in Punjab is trying to follow this adage. The AAP was recently in the news for the wrong reasons as a sting on its leader Sucha Singh Chhotepur came to light, who was allegedly shown taking money from a person for securing a party ticket. Following the video, Mr Singh was removed as party convenor.

Taking a lesson from the AAP, the Congress in Punjab asked its leaders to remain alert and not to talk about money on the phone. In a meeting chaired by state Congress president Capt. Amarinder Singh, a warning was issued to all Congress MLAs to remain alert as in the coming days the AAP and Akalis might try to do a sting operation on some Congress leaders. The Congress asked its leaders who are seeking tickets not to believe any person who tells them they can get party tickets in lieu of money.

A Missive from Lord Shiva

When people are unable to ensure that their grievances reach their netas, they try to take divine help. It is well known that Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan is a devotee of Lord Shiva. During the month of Shravan, he participated in the royal procession of Lord Mahakaal in the temple town of Ujjain in MP every Monday, beating cymbals and singing hymns. So intense is his devotion that he was a host to a Parthiv Shivling Nirman festival at his official residence.

Hundreds of devotees joined him and his family members in creating miniature clay images of Shivlinga. The rituals also involved chanting of mantras praying for the well-being of the devotees who scribbled their names in slips along with the shivlingas they had built. When the priest started reading out the names, one slip read: The CM helpline is of no use. That is why we are not scribbling our names in protest. This led to an uproar with many saying that this is a missive from Lord Shiva for the CM. Embarrassed, Mr Chouhan was seen taking refuge in Lord Shiva as he kept singing bhajans after a brief interruption.

Akhilesh loses his smile

The ever-smiling and normally affable Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Akhilesh Yadav seems to be in an unpleasant mood these days. If the grapevine is to be believed, it has a lot to do with the tensions prevailing within the Yadav clan. The chief minister has been snapping at bureaucrats and is refusing to meet his own party legislators. While speaking in the Assembly, he even snapped at newly-appointed Leader of the Opposition Gaya Charan Dinkar (BSP), when he said: You are worse than even Swami Prasad Maurya (his predecessor).

The statement, coming from the CM, left everyone aghast since he has never been known to use harsh words even against his opponents. Then the media was asked to stay out of a function in which the gallery of portraits of former UP chief ministers and Speakers was inaugurated by Mr Akhilesh Yadav. All legislators, staff members, drivers and security personnel were invited to the lunch thereafter, but mediapersons were again not invited. Samajwadi Party leaders are hoping that the chief ministers mood is set right before the meeting for their tickets is held, or else many of them may end up on the chopping block.

A candid confession

Remembering the struggles of the past can be a humbling affair as those days of trials and tribulations remain etched in ones memory forever. All the luxuries and affluence is no match for the tough days of ones childhood. This is what Jharkhand Governor Draupadi Murmu told a capacity audience at an international seminar.

The lady Governor, who belongs to a tribal community in Orissas Mayurbhanj district, said: Those days were golden days of my life. Along with my friends, I would enter the forests almost to collect firewood. The ever-flowing streams, chirping birds and the soothing sound of cool breeze were alluring attractions for us I desperately miss all these blissful moments. The audience, that included delegates from around the world, looked at her in awe. Now thats some candid confession from a Governor.

Comedy of errors

In what may be called the mother of all bizarre cases, a four-member gang of thieves went to steal an ATM machine and succeeded. However, the Assam police acted swiftly and caught four of them  Sahab Ali, Saiful Rahman, Mainul Haque and Saddam Hussain, with the ATM machine that was stolen from the Vinobanagar State Bank of India building in Guwahati.

In what was the real comedy of errors for the gang, when the police caught them and brought them for interrogation to the police station, thieves came to know that instead of an ATM machine they had picked up a passbook-printing ATM. The police said that gang of the four musketeers were caught when they tried to run away with the machine in a Chevrolet car, which interestingly had a VIP pass. Now the police is also trying to find out how they had got the VIP car pass.
A team of researchers from Chongqing Jiaotong University, has developed a paste made of plant cellulose that, when added to sand, helps it retain water, nutrients and air.

Beijing - Chinese scientists have claimed to have converted sand into fertile soil by using a new method which they hope will be useful to fight desertification.

A team of researchers from Chongqing Jiaotong University, has developed a paste made of plant cellulose that, when added to sand, helps it retain water, nutrients and air. A 1.6-hectare sandy plot in Ulan Buh Desert in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, north China, has been transformed into fertile land, yielding rice, corn, tomatoes, watermelon and sunflowers, after being treated with the new method.

An issue of the English-language journal "Engineering," published by the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), will publish the research by the Chongqing scientists Yi Zhijian and co-author Zhao Chaohua.

"The new method will hopefully help turn desert areas into an ideal habitat for plants," state run Xinhua quoted Yi as saying.

The plants in the sandy test plot needed about the same amount of water as those grown in regular soil, but required less fertilizer and bore higher yields, according to estimates by experts.

Since 2013, scientists have been experimenting with outdoor cultivation at two sites with areas of approximately 550 and 420 square meters in Chongqing, where scientists simulated desert land form conditions.

According to the scientists, the plants have survived the heavy rain and high temperatures, the typical climate conditions in Chongqing. The crops, including rice, corn and potatoes, flourished in the newly converted soil.

To verify the method, a large-scale planting experiment in Ulan Buh Desert began in April this year. There is very little rainfall in the area. The converted sand has proved to be an ideal habitat for plant species with a strong resistance to wind erosion, according to the research findings.

The cost of sand conversion is between 22,500 yuan and 40,500 yuan (USD 3,373 to 6,071) per hectare, Yi said. The new method is an important breakthrough in combating desertification and may prove fundamental in transforming deserts into fertile, arable land, said Zhong Zhihua, an academic with the CAE.

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Amazon is already in talks with Lenovo on the possibility of adding Alexa to Lenovos computers and other devices.

Most tech giants are consistently improving their effort at developing a kind of voice assistant that can prove to be users personal Einstein. Among them is Amazon, who recently nabbed an AI expert, Hassan Sawaf of eBay, to especially focus on users and determine what they want.

Hassan Sawaf, who was previously the artificial intelligence executive at eBay, has now been appointed as Amazons director of artificial intelligence. According to Sawafs LinkedIn page, Amazon can now be expected to focus on the user experience of its search capability across all products and businesses.

"eBay has wide and deep capabilities in AI across the technology organization, and recently completed two acquisitions...that contribute tech and talent to our AI and machine learning/machine translation capabilities," an eBay spokeswoman said in an email to Wall Street.

With this advancement, Alexa holds the ability to eventually outsmart other rival voice assistants such as Siri, Cortona and Google Now. Whats more? Amazon is already in talks with Lenovo on the possibility of adding Alexa to Lenovos computers and other devices.

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Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Sunday assured Narendra Modi his country's support to India's bid for the NSG membership. (Photo: PIB)

Hangzhou: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday met his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull who assured his country's support to India's bid for the NSG membership and the two leaders agreed to deepen the bilateral defence and security cooperation.

Modi thanked Turnbull for Australia's pro-active support to India's membership of the elite nuclear trading club when the two leaders met on the sidelines of the G20 Summit, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup said.

"Prime Minister Turnbull assured that Australia will continue to support India's inclusion in the NSG," he said.

India's efforts to join the grouping suffered a setback in June when the NSG plenary held in South Korea decided against accepting its membership application after China and some other nations opposed entry of a non-NPT signatory.

"The two leaders discussed defence and security cooperation. In this context, both the sides positively accessed the recent Naval exercises held between the two sides and agreed to remain in touch," Swaup said after their talks.

"The issue of terrorism was also discussed during the meeting and Prime Minister Modi said that it is important for all the democratic forces to come together to counter this challenge," the spokesperson said.

Swarup said the Prime Minister told Turnbull that India's neighbourhood, in particular, is suffering from the destabilising effects of terrorism.

"Even Russia, China, Afghanistan were all facing terrorism threat emanating from our region and it was important for us to identify the suppliers, exporters and financiers of terrorism. Otherwise, the world is going to face a huge challenge in coming weeks and months," Modi said, apparently referring to Pakistan from where terror groups such as Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Taliban operates.

"Prime Minister Modi's overall message was that we need a unified approach on countering terrorism," Swarup said. Modi said India-Australia relations are full of energy and the implementation of the mutually agreed projects and programmes have been considerably speeded up under Turnbull's guidance.

The two leaders also discussed the possibilities of trade and investment ties between India and Australia.

In the context of trade, both the sides felt that much more can be done and if the comprehensive economic cooperation agreements between Australia and India could be speeded up that would certainly provide much more momentum to their ties.

Modi also sought the support of Turnbull in encouraging the Australian pension funds to invest in India. He also sought Turnbull's support for clean coal technology.

"Because of India's clean energy targets, it is important for us to adopt as much clean coal technology as possible and this is an area in which Australia has proven expertise.

Whether it is underground mining or other form of mining, Australian companies can provide us those technologies," he added.
At least 35 people were killed when a bus collided with a fuel tanker on Sunday morning. (Photo: AFP/Representational)

Kandahar: At least 35 people were killed early Sunday when a passenger bus struck a fuel tanker in a head-on collision in the southern province of Zabul, officials said.

"The passenger bus was on its way from Kandahar to Kabul when it collided with a fuel tanker. In the accident, 35 people were killed and more than 20 others were wounded," Zabul's Governor Bismillah Afghanmal said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi with the Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad Bin Salman at G20 Summit 2016 in Hangzhou, China, on Sunday. (Photo: PIB)

Hangzhou: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday met Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad bin Salman on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in China.

During the meeting, Modi sought greater cooperation in improvement of infrastructure, particularly assistance in modernisation of railway stations and called for greater Saudi investment in India through the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF).

Both the leaders also discussed in detail the reform needed in the United Nations Security Council and emphasized the need of its expansion to include more permanent members.

Presently, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, People's Republic of China, and the United States are the five permanent members of the body.

Prime Minister Modi also called for strengthened partnership with Saudi Arabia in sectors such as maritime and energy.

He said that India could also become a source of food supply to the Saudi Kingdom.

He further said that he looked forward to an early visit by the Saudi King to India.

Earlier, he also met G20 Summit host Chinese President Xi Jinping.

During the talks, Prime Minister Modi highlighted the menace of terrorism, saying the recent attacks show how it is spreading across the World and is, therefore, a matter of grave concern.

He also condemned the terrorist bomb attack at China's embassy in Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek.

Later he held meeting with BRICS leaders where he asserted that it is a shared responsibility of the group to shape an internal agenda in such a manner that developing nations achieve their objectives.

During the meeting, Prime Minister Modi insisted on deepening ties with the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) countries.

He also welcomed all the BRICS leaders to the BRICS Summit which will take place in Goa on October 15 and 16.

Prime Minister Modi also held bilateral talks with his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong goes to the polls Sunday in an election which for the first time sees young independence activists calling for a complete break from China running for office. The vote for members of the Legislative Council  Hong Kongs lawmaking body  is the most important election since major pro-democracy rallies brought parts of the semi-autonomous city to a standstill in 2014, calling for political reforms. Polls opened early Sunday morning and will close at 10:30 pm (0230 GMT) with vote counting taking place overnight.

The election comes as some in Hong Kong grow increasingly concerned that Beijing is tightening its grip in a range of areas, from politics to media and education. Those fears were exacerbated when five Hong Kong booksellers known for salacious titles about leading Beijing politicians disappeared at the end of last year, resurfacing in detention on the mainland. That fuelled the fire of the localist movement, which grew out of the failure of the 2014 rallies to win concessions on political reform from Beijing and is seeking much more distance from China.

Now some young campaigners are demanding outright independence, others the chance for Hong Kong to determine its own future in a referendum. Young Hong Kong independence activists have stood for the first time in a city-wide legislative elections. They were fighting for se Before the vote, some polls forecast victories for the young independence activists, but that could split the vote for the pro-democracy camp -- and end up playing into the hands of pro-Beijing parties. Most established pro-democracy politicians do not support the notion of independence and may lose seats to voters who now favour more radical new groups.

If the democrats lose just four seats overall, they will forfeit the one-third voting bloc they need to veto bills, stacking the already skewed legislature even more in favour of Beijing. The more strident independence activists  slammed by Beijing and Hong Kong authorities as acting illegally  were banned by the government from running in Sundays election, a move that sparked anger. A 30-year-old voter who gave her name as Sandy said she favoured independence. This is a very critical time, she said.
Mother Teresa, who was canonised by Pope Francis in a grand ceremony in Vatican City (Photo: file)

Vatican City: With Sunday's canonization of Mother Teresa, Pope Francis honored the tiny nun who cared for the "poorest of the poor" as the epitome of his call for mercy. Here are some significant dates in the life of the Catholic Church's newest saint:

1910: Agnes Gonxe Bojaxhiu is born on Aug. 26 in Skopje, in what is now Macedonia, the youngest of three children of an Albanian builder.

1928: Becomes a novitiate in Ireland of the Loreto order, which ran mission schools in India, and takes the name Sister Teresa.

1929: Arrives in Kolkata to teach at St. Mary's High School.

1937: Takes final vows and the name Mother Teresa.

1946: Riding a train Sept. 10 to the mountain town of Darjeeling, she receives a "call within a call" from Jesus "to serve him among the poorest of the poor."

1948: Permitted to leave her order and moves to Kolkata's slums to set up her first school.

1950: Missionaries of Charity officially founded on Oct. 7 as a religious congregation.

1952: Opens Nirmal Hriday ("Pure Heart"), a home for the dying, followed next year by her first orphanage.

1962: Wins her first prize for her humanitarian work: the Padma Shri award for "distinguished service." Over the years she uses the money from such prizes to found dozens of new homes.

1979: Wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

1982: Persuades Israelis and Palestinians to stop shooting long enough to rescue 37 children from a hospital in besieged Beirut.

1983: Has a heart attack while in Rome visiting St. John Paul II.

1985: Awarded Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian award.

1989: Has a second and nearly fatal attack. Doctors implant pacemaker.

1990: Announces her intention to resign and a conclave of sisters is called to choose a successor. In a secret ballot, Mother Teresa is re-elected with only one dissenting vote - her own - and withdraws request to step down.

1991: Suffers pneumonia in Tijuana, Mexico, leading to congestive heart failure, and is hospitalized in La Jolla, California.

1996: Nov. 16, receives honorary U.S. citizenship.

1997: Dies Sept. 5 in Kolkata and is given a state funeral.

2003: Beatified before a crowd of 300,000 by St. John Paul II in St. Peter's Square.

2015: Is cleared for canonization after Pope Francis declares that the cure of a Brazilian man suffering from brain abscesses was miraculous.

2016: Is declared a saint on Sept. 4.
Turkish warplanes hit 11 PKK terrorist targets in Turkey's eastern and southeastern provinces late Saturday evening, security sources said, Anadolu reported.

Four PKK targets were struck by Turkish fighter jets in the Chukurca district of Hakkari province between 8.42 p.m. and 9.07 p.m local time, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to restrictions on talking to the media.

Six terrorist positions were bombed in the Mount Tendurek region between the eastern Agr and Van provinces between 00.08 a.m. and 00.27 a.m local time, the sources added.

Sources added that a senior PKK terrorist figure, Hakan Yeni, code-named "Mahir", reportedly responsible for the Chaldran-Tendurek region was also killed during the operation.

Along with Yeni, a number of other terrorists were killed, the sources said without specifying the number of casualties during the operation which started four days ago.

Turkish security forces continue the air-backed operation, which began after intelligence that around a 40 or 50-strong terrorist group was present in the Mount Tendurek region.

The operation is still ongoing.

The PKK - listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the US and EU - resumed its decades-old armed campaign in July last year.

Since then, more than 600 security personnel more than 7,000 PKK terrorists have been killed.
Pictures show her fully veiled or with only her blue eyes on display, but in public she wears skinny jeans and leaves her long blonde hair uncovered. (Photo: Twitter)

London: A 27-year-old British glamour model is on an Islamic State related terror watch by UK authorities after she used social media to communicate with extremists, a media report said on Sunday.

Kimberley Miners, who has posed topless for The Sun, is believed to have secretly converted to Islam and her "liking" and sharing Islamic State (ISIS) videos have triggered an investigation by Britain's anti-terrorist police and MI5.

The model from Bradford appears on social media under the alias Aisha Lauren al-Britaniya and has posted images of Muslim women brandishing rifles and other weapons, The Sunday Times reported.

Pictures show her fully veiled or with only her blue eyes on display, but in public she wears skinny jeans and leaves her long blonde hair uncovered.

She said she was abused when she went out in Islamic dress.

Britain's anti-terror officers have reportedly spoken to her up to four times and referred her to an anti-radicalisation programme.

She has been warned that she faces arrest if she continues to engage in extremism.

Miners insists that she disagrees with ISIS beheadings and said she was primarily concerned about the plight of Syria's refugee children.

However, the former model admitted being in direct contact on Facebook with an ISIS recruiter called Abu Usamah al-Britani.

The fighter appears to be openly using social media to groom a new generation of jihadist brides from Britain and the West, the report said.

Miners, who comes from a Christian family, first appeared in the national media in 2009 when she was juggling her job as a street cleaner in Bradford with a fledgling career as a topless model.

"People think it's really odd that I can be something so glamorous yet do something so dirty by day but I love it," she told The Sun at the time.

Her transformation is thought to have begun about a year later when she was deeply affected by the death of her father, Anthony, in a freak drowning.

Miners appears to have found solace in the company of Muslim friends, including another white convert.

She said her interest in Islam was sparked last year. "I found peace through it all," she was quoted as saying.
The victim's mother told the court that she felt sad for all her children and that she wanted to do her best to support them -- including the accused. (Representational Image)

London: A 15-year-old schoolboy who raped his five-year-old brother and four-year-old sister has been jailed for five years after he was proven guilty by the court.

According to a report in the Daily Mail, the matter came to light when the accused's sister told her mother about the horrific abuse she had suffered at the hands of her brother.

The victim's mother then filed a police complaint, following which the accused was taken into custody.

Earlier, the accused denied all the charges against him, but later pleaded guilty to raping his younger sister and brother.

While the case was under trial at the Liverpool Crown Court, the accused admitted to two counts of rape. While the accused's sister said that whatever happened to her was 'disgusting and yucky', his brother said that the sexual assault happened several times and he did not like it.

The victim's mother told the court that she felt sad for all her children and that she wanted to do her best to support them -- including the accused.

The accused has been sent to five years in jail and has been put on the sex offenders list for life.
Hangzhou, China: Europe is close to limits on its ability to accept new waves of refugees, EU president Donald Tusk said on Sunday, urging the broader international community to shoulder its share of the burden. Tusk said there were 65 million displaced people around the world, and the G20 community should scale up its share of responsibility. We have enough space for all parties to discuss these problems including China, he said.
Dubai: Last week, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai, made headlines for forcing nine senior members of the administration into .retirement after he found offices empty during a surprise check. In a follow up move, the Sheikh, on Friday announced that he had ordered for doors and glass pane partitions to be removed from offices.

I made a surprise visit to government departments and I was surprised to see a number of directors sitting behind closed doors. So I gave orders to remove all the doors, Shaikh Mohammed said.

The move is being seen as an attempt by the Sheikh to get more young faces involved in administration.

In a major overhaul, Sheikh Mohammed last week forced nine high ranking officials to go into retirement.

He did this after making a surprise visit to the Department of Economic Development office and finding it entirely empty.

Videos uploaded by the government officials on Instagram showed the ruler wandering around in the deserted office, inspecting files and books abandoned on the table.

Officials and media claimed that the exercise was aimed at 'sending a message'.

Some of those laid off include Abdul Qader Al Jasmi, director of legal affairs, deputy director general Eisa Al Maidoor and assistant Director General for corporate support Mohammad Abdul Karim Julfar.

Thanking the nine retired officers for their services, the Sheikh said that he wanted to usher in a new generation of young leaders, handing them the reign to ensure delivery of quality services.

Al-Maktoum, who is known for his early morning visits, was also photographed waving to passers-by and locals on his visit to the government offices.

The ruler also made a visit to the airport, but thankfully found all the immigration officers in place.
A woman from Saudi Arabia was killed and two other persons were injured in cross-border shelling from Yemen. (Photo: AFP/Representational)

Riyadh: Cross-border shelling from Yemen killed a Saudi woman on Sunday and wounded two other citizens, the kingdom's civil defence agency said.

The shelling at 2 am local time in the southern Jazan region killed a woman and wounded a man and his son, according to the agency's spokesman Major Yehia al-Qahtani.

Saudi Arabia has led a military coalition battling Iran-backed rebels in Yemen since March 2015 in support of Sanaa's internationally recognised government of President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi.

Attacks from Yemen on Saudi border areas have intensified since the suspension in early August of United Nations-brokered peace talks between the Shiite Houthi rebels and their allies and Yemen's government.

On Wednesday, a Saudi border guard was killed after shelling from Yemen hit a frontier post in Jazan.

And a week ago, similar attacks killed three children in Saudi Arabia and wounded nine other people.

Cross-border fire from Yemen has killed about 100 civilians and members of the security forces on the Saudi side since the war began.

In Yemen itself, more than 6,600 people, mostly civilians, have been killed since March 2015, according to the UN.
hinese President Xi Jinping shakes hands with his US counterpart Barack Obama in Hangzhou. (Photo: AFP)

Hangzhou: Chinese President Xi Jinping on Sunday asked the US to "play a constructive role" in maintaining peace and stability in the disputed South China Sea, asserting that Beijing will "unswervingly" safeguard its sovereignty over the area.

Mr Jinping made the remarks during a meeting with US President Barack Obama here on the eve of the key summit of G20 nations, where the leaders of the world's 20 strong economies will meet.

Mr Jinping said China will continue to "unswervingly safeguard" its territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests in the South China Sea (SCS).

"In the meantime, China will stick to peaceful settlement of disputes through consultation and negotiation with parties directly concerned, and safeguard peace and stability in the South China Sea along with ASEAN member states," Mr Jinping was quoted as saying by state-run Xinhua news agency.

After several hours of talks, the White House said the leaders had a "candid exchange" over the arbitration case between China and the Philippines.

Mr Obama also told Mr Jinping that the US would keep monitoring China's commitments on cybersecurity, the White House said.

In the meeting, Mr Jinping also said that China is willing to work with the US to ensure bilateral ties stay on the right track.

He urged the two countries to follow the principles of non-conflict, non-confrontation, mutual respect and win-win cooperation, deepen mutual trust and collaboration, and manage and control their differences in a constructive manner, in order to push forward continuous, sound and stable development of bilateral ties.

Noting that the city of Hangzhou holds historic significance to Sino-US relations, Mr Jinping spoke highly of his previous meetings with Mr Obama since 2013, which "produced important consensus."

The US has voiced concern over Beijing's growing assertiveness in key waterways in the region.

The US has urged China to accept an international arbitration panel's ruling that sided with the Philippines in a dispute over claims in the South China Sea.

Beijing claims almost all of the South China Sea despite partial counter-claims from the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Taiwan.
A 2014 file photo of Jamaat-e-Islami leader Mir Quasem Ali. He was convicted of running Al Badrs torture cell that carried out killings of several people. (Photo: AFP)

Dhaka: Bangladesh hanged a top Islamist party figure on Sunday for atrocities committed during the 1971 war of independence from Pakistan, the law minister said.

Mir Quasem Ali, 63, a key financier of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, was executed at Kashimpur Central Jail on the outskirts of the capital, for murder, confinement, torture and incitement to religious hatred during the war.

Ali was hanged at 10.35 pm local time (4.35 pm GMT), Law Minister Anisul Haq said.

The execution took place amid a spate of militant attacks in the Muslim-majority nation, the most serious on July 1, when gunmen stormed a cafe in Dhaka's diplomatic quarter and killed 20 hostages, most of them foreigners.

The war crimes tribunal set up by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in 2010 has sparked violence and drawn criticism from opposition politicians, who say it is targeting her political foes. The government denies the accusations.

Human rights groups say the tribunal's procedures fall short of international standards, but the government rejects that assertion, and the trials are supported by many Bangladeshis.

Thousands of extra police and border guards were deployed in Dhaka and other major cities. Previous convictions and executions have triggered violence that has killed about 200 people, most of them Islamist party activists, and police.

Since December 2013, five Jamaat leaders, including former top leader Motiur Rahman Nizami, and a leader of the main opposition party, have been executed for war crimes.

Official figures show about three million people were killed and thousands of women were raped during the nine-month war, in which some factions, including the Jamaat-e-Islami, opposed the breakaway.

The party denies its leaders committed any atrocities.
Dhaka: Bangladesh on Sunday summoned Pakistan's envoy here to protest its "interference" in the country's internal affairs after Islamabad said it was "deeply saddened" by Jamaat leader and 1971 war criminal Mir Quasem Ali's execution.

Bangladesh additional foreign secretary for bilateral affairs Qamrul Ahsan summoned Pakistani High Commissioner Samina Mehtab and protested the reaction.

"The opinion that Pakistan gave over the execution of Mir Quasem Ali was entirely tantamount to interference in Bangladesh's internal affairs," Ahsan said after the meeting.

Pakistan reacted just an hour after the hanging of the 63-year-old media tycoon last night, the sixth Islamist to be executed for war crimes committed during the 1971 war.

Its Foreign Office said in a statement that Pakistan was "deeply saddened over the execution of the prominent leader... through a flawed judicial process."

Ahsan said he told the Pakistani envoy that Mir Quasem's trial "took place in a very transparent manner, in front of everybody."

"(Mir Quasem) had scopes to appeal against the judgment and he exhausted the scopes. The apex court thought he deserved the punishment what he was handed down as he took part in the genocides in 1971," Ahsan said as having told the envoy.

Officials said the meeting between the two senior diplomats lasted for 20 minutes.

"Nothing much to say," Mehtab told reporters after coming out of Ahsan's office.

Mir Quasem was the infamous pro-Pakistani Al-Badr militia's third most important figure. He was convicted of running Al-Badr's torture cell that killed several people.
Hangzhou: India on Sunday raised its concern with China over the CPEC which runs through PoK, and terrorism "emanating from the region" as Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Chinese President Xi Jinping the two countries need to be "sensitive" to each other's strategic interests.

Asserting that fight against terror should not be motivated by "political considerations", Modi said it is of "paramount importance that we respect each other's aspirations, concerns and strategic interests" to ensure durable bilateral ties.

In the bilateral meeting with Xi ahead of the G20 summit, Modi raised India's concerns over the USD 46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) being laid through PoK.

Read: Narendra Modi gifted Chinese translations of ancient Indian texts

Besides a host of energy-related projects, the CPEC consists of rail, road and pipelines to ferry oil and gas from Gwadar port to Kashghar in Xinjiang through PoK.

Replying to a question whether the terrorism emanating from the region where the CPEC is being laid through has been discussed, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup told reporters the issue has been raised during the meeting.

Modi said both India and China need to be "sensitive" to each other's strategic interests and called for specific actions to "prevent growth of negative perception".

"As a matter of principle, both countries would have to be sensitive to each other's strategic interests," Swarup said while touching upon broad themes that Modi stressed upon during his nearly 30-minute bilateral with Xi, their eighth meeting.

"In order to promote positive convergence, we would also need to prevent growth of negative perception. For this, the specific actions by both countries would play the major role," he said.

In particular, Modi highlighted that "we have succeeded in maintaining peace and tranquility on the border", he added.

Condemning the recent suicide bomb attack on the Chinese Embassy in Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan, in his opening remarks, Modi said it is yet another proof of the continuing scourge of terrorism.

"The Prime Minister reiterated that our response to terror must not be motivated by political considerations," Swarup said.

On his part, Xi said China is willing to work with India to maintain their "hard-won sound" ties and further boost bilateral cooperation.

"China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound relations and further advance their cooperation", state-run Chinese Xinhua news agency quoted Xi as saying.

About the bilateral relations, which experienced turbulence due to differences over a raft of issues, Modi said in order to make the Asian century a reality, the countries of the continent would have to take responsibility.

The meeting came amid differences over including listing of Pakistan-based terrorist organisations in the UN, China stalling India's membership at the elite Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and the CPEC being built through PoK.
U.S. President Barack Obama, left, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrive for the opening ceremony of the G-20 Summit in Hangzhou. (Photo: PTI)

Hangzhou: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday exchanged pleasantries with US President Barack Obama and other world leaders attending the G20 summit in Hangzhou.

Modi met Obama briefly when they were on a stage to pose for a family photograph at the venue in this eastern Chinese city.

Read: Modi discusses China-Pakistan corridor with Xi, raises issue of terrorism

Earlier in the day, Modi met Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull on the sidelines of the Summit.

Modi, who arrived here yesterday from Vietnam, is scheduled to meet Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Prince Mohammad bin Salman later today.

Tomorrow, the Prime Minister will meet his British counterpart Theresa May and Argentinian President Mauricio Macri before returning to Delhi.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 4

Trend:

Free Syrian Army has taken control of another six settlements, Anadolu reported.

On Aug. 24 morning, the Turkish Air Force with the support of the coalition aircraft launched an operation to liberate the city of Jarabulus from the IS militants in northern Syria, near Aleppo city.

The operation was carried out under the name Shield of the Euphrates.

Syria has been suffering from an armed conflict since March 2011, which, according to the UN, has so far claimed over 500,000 lives. Militants from various armed groups are confronting the Syrian government troops. The Islamic State (IS, ISIL, ISIS or Daesh), the YPG and the PYD are the most active terrorist groups in Syria.
Narendra Modi with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Hangzhou, China on the sidelines of the G20 summit. (Photo: PTI)

Hangzhou: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Hangzhou amid differences between the two countries over a raft of issues, including the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor which runs through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).

The meeting was held this morning on the sidelines of G20 leaders summit at the Hangzhou West Lake State Guesthouse. The meeting between the two leaders comes in the backdrop of contentious issues including listing of Pakistan-based terrorist organisations in the UN, China stalling India's membership at the elite Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and USD 46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

Read: China willing to maintain 'hard-won sound' ties with India: Xi JInping

"Had a very good meeting with Xi Jinping," Modi tweeted after the meeting.

The two leaders had last met at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit in June in Tashkent and again set to meet in Goa next month on the sidelines of BRICS summit.

China too has been concerned over the close ties of India with the US and the recently signed Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) which will give the militaries of both countries access to each other's facilities for supplies and repairs.

After his meeting with Xi Jinping, Modi attended the BRICS leaders' meeting. Speaking at the event , the PM invited all leaders to the BRICS Summit in Goa next month.

The Indian PM also met Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull. "PM Modi thanked PM Turnbull for Australia's continuous support for India's bid for NSG. The PM also said that a unified approach is needed to counter the scourge of terrorism," the MEA Twitter handle said. Modi also invited Turnbull to visit India next year.

Modi reached Hangzhou last night after concluding his two day visit in Hanoi. He will also have bilateral meeting with his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull and Saudi Arabia's Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.

Apart from attending the G20 summit, Modi will also meet British Prime Minister Theresa May and Argentinian President Mauricio Macri in the second and concluding session of the G20, before returning to Delhi.

A meeting between Modi and US President Barack Obama is, however, not on the cards during this trip, officials said.
An ambulance leaves Kashimpur Central Jail carrying the body of Jamaat-e-Islami partys senior leader Mir Quashem Ali, after he was executed in Gazipur, on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh. (Photo: AP)

Islamabad: Pakistan has said it was "deeply saddened" by Bangladesh's execution of Jamaat-e-Islami leader Mir Quasem Ali and alleged that he was hanged after a conviction "through a flawed judicial process".

Pakistan's reaction last night came just an hour after the hanging of 63-year-old media tycoon, the sixth Islamist to be executed for war crimes committed during Bangladesh's 1971 Liberation War.

"Pakistan is deeply saddened over the execution of the prominent leader of Jamat-e-Islami, Bangladesh, Mir Quasem Ali, for the alleged crimes committed before December 1971, through a flawed judicial process," a Pakistan Foreign Office statement said.

"The act of suppressing the Opposition, through flawed trials, is completely against the spirit of democracy. Ever since the beginning of the trials, several international organisations, human rights groups, and international legal figures have raised objections to the court proceedings, especially regarding fairness and transparency, as well as harassment of lawyers and witnesses representing the accused," it said.

Mir Quasem was the infamous pro-Pakistan Al-Badr militia's third most important figure. He was convicted of running Al Badr's torture cell that killed several people.

Pakistan also called upon the Bangladeshi government to uphold its commitment, as per the Tripartite Agreement of 1974, wherein it was "decided not to proceed with the trials as an act of clemency".

"Recriminations for political gains are counter productive. Pakistan believes that matters should be addressed with a forward looking approach in the noble spirit of reconciliation," the statement said.

It said Pakistan offers deepest condolences to the bereaved family members.
Hangzhou, China: The tranquil waters of Hangzhou's West Lake have inspired Chinese poets and painters for centuries. On Sunday the serenity was imposed by force as authorities deployed a vast security operation for the G20 summit.

The throngs of tourists who usually crowd the shores of the island-dotted lake were absent and the surrounding roads closed off -- except for police vehicles and the occasional motorcade of black luxury cars emblazoned with national flags.

But when a handful of locals living in the immediate area were allowed past the cordon, they took advantage of the empty streets to embrace an untraditional pursuit: road-top selfies.

Young people sat on the tarmac taking pictures of themselves, while others made star-shaped poses with their arms and legs for friends to snap them.

The streets spruced up for the benefit of leaders, trees glowing with artificial lights, made an ideal backdrop.

State media say that more than two million people out of a population of some nine million have left Hangzhou, taking advantage of a paid holiday which local firms have been ordered to give employees.

Local reports said so many people visited Huangshan, a mountain range in the next province where Hangzhou residents were given free tickets, that hillside passes turned into human traffic jams.

Wealthier residents of apartments near the G20 venue were offered sizeable cash incentives to leave their homes.

But treatment was apparently harsher for Hangzhou's vast population of migrant workers, with several saying they were ordered to shut their small businesses without compensation.

"We were ordered to close our restaurant, so I've gone back to my hometown in Sichuan," said a woman surnamed Zhou. "We are losing money."

"At the beginning we were told about compensation but it didn't happen," she added.

Security is generally tight for G20 summits wherever they are held, as they are a magnet for protesters seeking a global audience for their cause.

State media say that since December one million people have been mobilised as "volunteers".

Red-armbanded personnel stand, squat or sit on street corners and inside apartment compounds throughout Hangzhou, apparently with little to do.

A policeman prevented an AFP reporter from taking photos of the guards in one compound, and several volunteers said they needed authorisation to speak to foreign media.

"I work for a state-owned enterprise, who have organised this volunteer work," said one armbanded worker surnamed Wang, sitting on a stool near a bus stop.

"My job is to look out for people who get off the bus with dangerous items such as knives."
Muzaffarabad (PoK): Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin on Saturday vowed to prevent any peaceful resolution to the Kashmir conflict, even as an all-party team from India headed to the Valley for discussions with all stakeholders.

According to a report, Salahuddin threatened to train more Kashmiri suicide bombers, who would turn the Valley into a graveyard for Indian forces.

Justifying the use of suicide bombers, Salahuddin said, "If soldiers from Andhra Pradesh, Madras, Assam, Nagaland, Haryana, Bihar and Delhi violate the sanctity of our houses, we are compelled and justified to carry out a suicide attack."

Dismissing talks as futile, Salahuddin, 69, insisted that there was no solution to Kashmir except militancy, by launching a target-oriented armed struggle.

Salahuddin, who heads the United Jihad Council (UJC), a Pakistan-backed alliance of anti-Indian Kashmiri militant groups, said the movement in Kashmir had entered a critical phase after Hizbul commander Burhan Wani's killing, said the report. He claimed that Kashmir had been turned into a concentration camp after the Hizbul commanders killing, and that sacrifices will not go in vain.

Salahuddin called for India to recognise Kashmir as a disputed area, without which talks could not be held. However, he threatened to show his might and said Hizbul Mujahideen would take the struggle outside Kashmir, to other parts of the region and the globe.

The terror outfits chief had unsuccessfully contested the 1987 J&K assembly elections as a candidate of the Muslim United Front, an outfit sponsored by Jamaat-e-Islami  though he now abhors and rejects the electoral process.

He later fled to Pakistan and was provided protection by ISI and the establishment, and emerged as Syed Salahuddin.
Following the post on discriminatory rules enforced on students at St Aloysius PU College, which went viral on social media, the College authorities are contemplating filing a complaint to the cyber crime police within two days.



Speaking to DH, St Aloysius PU College principal Rev Fr Melwyn Mendonca denied such discriminatory rules being enforced in the college. The post of rules and regulations of the college uploaded in social media is far from true. We held a meeting on Saturday and are assessing the situation. The College is planning to file a complaint against the post, he said.



He said that the post citing the rules and regulations of the college is not written in the College letterhead, but was typed by someone before posting it on social media. The College conducts value education classes for its students regularly. There are over 3,600 students with more than 1,200 female students pursuing their education in PU section. In one of the orientation class for the students recently, the students were asked to adhere to the rules of the College pertaining to uniform and discipline. They were appraised on how to behave decently in the public, said the principal.



After a student eloped last year, the parents and guardians were asking the College to teach values to students. Accordingly, in a recently held orientation programme, the students were asked to focus on their studies and not get into relationships other than friendship, he added.



He said that rules at St Aloysius PU College are far lesser stringent compared to other PU colleges in the district, where students are not even allowed to talk to members of the opposite sex. The aim of these rules is to make students focus on study and inculcate moral values, the principal said. St Aloysius College has been imparting co-education for the last 27 years, where boys and girls mingle with each other freely.



Claiming to be an alumnus of St Aloysius College, the author of satshyatharien.wordpress.com blog posted about the new set of rules for students in the college on September 1. The author had even shared an anecdote of the time she was studying at St Aloysius PU College, where she was reprimanded for group study with boys and girls of her class.



For a long time, I would not let a boy sit next to me. If they told me I was crazy, Id just stand up and remain standing. Id rather spend hours standing than being put through that humiliating experience ever again. It changed (the incident) the way I viewed male-female relationships for a while. Every boy and girl talking to each other seemed suspicious to me. To my horror I was becoming exactly what I had loathed. This is how (on present set of rules) the cycle of abuse continues, she had written in the post.



Some of the rules and regulations mentioned in the blog are, No pubs and parties and no girl student can leave campus for afternoon food. During breaks, girls should not visit boys of other class. Mehandi can be applied only on palm and only for family functions and feasts with prior permission from class guide. No high bun or low bun. Interaction between a single girl and group of boys and a single boy and group of girls is also prohibited.


Asked whether Prime Minister Modi raised the issue of China blocking India's bid for the membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) during the bilateral, Swarup declined to get into the "nitty-gritty" of the issues discussed.



"I am not going into the nitty-gritty of each and everything that was discussed. Everything is not meant for public consumption. There are certain things (which) need to remain between the two governments," he said.



On yet another question on the NSG issue, he said: "I will not go into the specifics, if you read between the lines, you pretty much understand when you we talk about strategic interests, concerns and aspirations, it is not as if China is not unaware of our strategic interests, aspirations and concerns or we are unaware of their concerns. So, it is something both sides are well aware.



"This was a meeting at summit level between the two. They are meant to provide high-level guidance and direction to overall relations."



Citing that India has not signed the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT), China had opposed its bid to join the elite 48-member bloc during NSG's meeting in Seoul in June.

Modi said he always had a strategic vision for India- China relations. The India-China partnership is important not only for the two countries but for the entire region and the world.



"India has worked to make progress in the closer, developmental partnership with China.

"Cultural and people-to-people ties have also been increasing," Swarup said.



Modi said he always had a strategic vision for India- China relations. The India-China partnership is important not only for the two countries but for the entire region and the world.



Asked to comment on the Chinese state-media quoting Xi as telling Modi that China is willing to maintain "hard-won sound" relations with India, Swarup said "it would not be appropriate for me to characterise President Xi's remarks.



"After all we are in his country and it is for the Chinese side to amplify and clarify whatever he said. Not appropriate for me to characterise what the other side said," he said.



"In the context of India and China, he said that our peoples also have the expectation that we make every possible effort to fulfil their dreams of progress, development and prosperity," Swarup said.



The Prime Minister is here to attend the two-day G20 Summit.



Ahead of the 8th BRICS Summit next month, Modi also extended a personal invitation to Xi to come to Goa which Xi said he was very happy to accept.



India today raised its concern with China over the CPEC which runs through PoK, and terrorism "emanating from the region" as Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Chinese President Xi Jinping the two countries need to be "sensitive" to each other's strategic interests.Asserting that fight against terror should not be motivated by "political considerations", Modi said it is of "paramount importance that we respect each other's aspirations, concerns and strategic interests" to ensure durable bilateral ties.In the bilateral meeting with Xi ahead of the G20 summit, Modi raised India's concerns over the USD 46 billion China- Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) being laid through PoK.Besides a host of energy-related projects, the CPEC consists of rail, road and pipelines to ferry oil and gas from Gwadar port to Kashghar in Xinjiang through PoK.Replying to a question whether the terrorism emanating from the region where the CPEC is being laid through has been discussed, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup told reporters the issue has been raised during the meeting.Modi said both India and China need to be "sensitive" to each other's strategic interests and called for specific actions to "prevent growth of negative perception"."As a matter of principle, both countries would have to be sensitive to each other's strategic interests," Swarup said while touching upon broad themes that Modi stressed upon during his nearly 30-minute bilateral with Xi, their eighth meeting."In order to promote positive convergence, we would also need to prevent growth of negative perception. For this, the specific actions by both countries would play the major role," he said.In particular, Modi highlighted that "we have succeeded in maintaining peace and tranquility on the border", he added.Condemning the recent suicide bomb attack on the Chinese Embassy in Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan, in his opening remarks, Modi said it is yet another proof of the continuing scourge of terrorism."The Prime Minister reiterated that our response to terror must not be motivated by political considerations," Swarup said.On his part, Xi said China is willing to work with India to maintain their "hard-won sound" ties and further boost bilateral cooperation."China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound relations and further advance their cooperation", state-run Chinese Xinhua news agency quoted Xi as saying.About the bilateral relations, which experienced turbulence due to differences over a raft of issues, Modi said in order to make the Asian century a reality, the countries of the continent would have to take responsibility.The meeting came amid differences over including listing of Pakistan-based terrorist organisations in the UN, China stalling India's membership at the elite Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and the CPEC being built through PoK.
Chinese scientists have claimed to have converted sand into fertile soil using a new method which they hope will be useful to fight desertification.





A team of researchers from Chongqing Jiaotong University has developed a paste made of plant cellulose that, when added to sand, helps it retain water, nutrients and air.



A 1.6-hectare sandy plot in Ulan Buh Desert in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, north China, has been transformed into fertile land, yielding rice, corn, tomatoes, watermelon and sunflowers, after being treated with the new method.



An issue of the English-language journal "Engineering," published by the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), will publish the research by the Chongqing scientists Yi Zhijian and co-author Zhao Chaohua.



"The new method will hopefully help turn desert areas into an ideal habitat for plants," state run Xinhua quoted Yi as saying.



The plants in the sandy test plot needed about the same amount of water as those grown in regular soil, but required less fertilizer and bore higher yields, according to estimates by experts.



Since 2013, scientists have been experimenting with outdoor cultivation at two sites with areas of approximately 550 and 420 square metres in Chongqing, where scientists simulated desert landform conditions.



According to the scientists, the plants have survived the heavy rain and high temperatures, the typical climate conditions in Chongqing. The crops, including rice, corn and potatoes, flourished in the newly converted soil.



To verify the method, a large-scale planting experiment in Ulan Buh Desert began in April this year. There is very little rainfall in the area.



The converted sand has proved to be an ideal habitat for plant species with a strong resistance to wind erosion, according to the research findings.



The cost of sand conversion is between 22,500 yuan and 40,500 yuan (USD 3,373 to 6,071) per hectare, Yi said.



The new method is an important breakthrough in combating desertification and may prove fundamental in transforming deserts into fertile, arable land, said Zhong Zhihua, an academic with the CAE.
A one-and-half month old girl was on Friday evening miraculously found alive near the three-day-old body of her mother who had committed suicide in North Delhis Subzi Mandi area.





The starving infant was sent to Hindu Rao Hospital where she is being treated.



The childs mother Deepa, 26, was found hanging with a ceiling fan at her first-floor house in Aryapur. She is suspected to have committed suicide, although no suicide note has been found near the body.



Deepas parents have alleged that their daughter committed suicide because she was being harassed by her in-laws for dowry.



On Friday night, Deepas parents didnt let police take their daughters body away as they were demanding immediate arrest of their son-in-law and his parents.



A case has been registered at Subzi Mandi police station and after lot of persuasion police managed to send the body for post-mortem. Police have ordered investigation and all the aspects of the womans death are being probed.



According to police, Deepa had shifted in the house 15 days back. The house belongs to her husband only but he doesnt live here. She had recently separated from her husband, although they were not divorced. Her husband has a grocery shop in Indralok area.



The case came to the fore on Friday evening when Deepas sister Rita called on her sisters mobile phone but didnt get any response.



Meanwhile, at Deepas neighbourhood, people complained to police of foul smell coming out from Deepas house. Police arrived at the house and broke open the door.
The Delhi BJP on Saturday demanded expulsion of sacked minister Sandeep Kumar from the special session of Vidhan Sabha scheduled on September 9 after a woman claiming to be in the sex scandal CD alleged that the minister sexual exploited her.





BJP also demanded expulsion of AAP leader Ashutosh from the party for defending Kumar by giving examples of Mahatma Gandhi, former prime ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Atal Bihari Vajpayee.



Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said that Ashutosh's article reflects his personal views, but the party does not support Kumar's actions.



Delhi BJP Mahila Morcha workers held a meeting at Rajghat on Saturday to pray so that AAP leaders like Ashutosh get some good sense, it said.



Ashutosh had defended sacked minister Sandeep Kumar by giving examples of Mahatma Gandhi, former prime ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Atal Bihari Vajpayee's personal lives.



Delhi BJP President Satish Upadhyay said, After the woman's allegations of sexual exploitation, now the people of Delhi and the country want to know when will Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal expel AAP leader Ashutosh from Aam Aadmi Party? said Upadhyay.



Even Congress slammed the Aam Aadmi Party over the sex scandal row.



Kejriwal should have done a background check before of his ministers. In the past one year so many scandals have hit the party, said Sharmistha Mukherjee, Congress spokesperson.



For a party that has claimed high moral grounds, its one or the other minister is getting embroiled in a controversy, she added.



Kejriwal is responsible for choosing such ministers.



Delhi Pradesh Congress President Ajay Maken said comparing the acts of Kumar with Mahatma Gandhi and former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru "is a matter of shame".



Leader of Opposition Vijender Gupta asked Kejriwal if he would dare to take action against Ashutosh for defending the sacked minister. The inner dirt and filth of AAP has now come out in open. The women in AAP are considered to be mere objects of sexual gratification. That is why a number of leaders misbehave with women and exploit them, said Gupta.

Ashutosh reflects the ideology and policy of AAP.


Free Syrian Army (FSA) has connected the Syrian towns of Azaz and Jarablus on Sunday, providing full border security as Daesh presence is cleaned from the border, Anadolu reported.

The FSA, in cooperation with the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK), cleared the southern border of Daesh terrorists.

On Aug. 24 morning, the Turkish Air Force with the support of the coalition aircraft launched an operation to liberate the city of Jarabulus from the IS militants in northern Syria, near Aleppo city.

The operation was carried out under the name Shield of the Euphrates.

Syria has been suffering from an armed conflict since March 2011, which, according to the UN, has so far claimed over 500,000 lives. Militants from various armed groups are confronting the Syrian government troops. The Islamic State (IS, ISIL, ISIS or Daesh), the YPG and the PYD are the most active terrorist groups in Syria.
A ten month old infant was raped and dumped at a desolate place by a 38-year-old labourer in West Delhi's Vikaspuri area on Friday late night.





The infant was rushed to Deen Dayal Upadhyay (DDU) Hospital after police found her lying near a construction site. The girl had sustained injuries because of which she had to undergo an operation. The accused has been arrested.



The incident took place when the infant was sleeping with her family in a JJ cluster located near the construction site of the boundary wall of Delhi Polices Third Battalion police line.



The accused allegedly walked into their house and took away the girl and raped her near a desolate spot.



Fearing that the infant was dead, the accused fled the spot and mistakenly dropped his cell phone at the spot.



The family woke up around 12:15 am in the night and realised that the girl was

missing.



They alerted their neighbours and informed the police after which they reached the spot with police officers.



The family along with the police conducted search operations. The accused had also joined in the rescue operations in a bid to avoid suspicion.



After 20 minutes, faint cries of the girl were heard and the girl was reunited with her parents.



A mobile phone was also found lying near the girl. The accused was traced when the owner of the mobile was ascertained, said police.



We rushed her to DDU hospital where the MLC was made and rape was confirmed the girl had to undergo an operation but she is currently out of danger, the officer added.



The Delhi Commission for Women chief Swati Maliwal visited the family at DDU hospital in the morning.



Woke up to another brutal rape in the Capital. This time of a 1 year old. Horrific. Rushing to the hospital to see her(sic)," Maliwal tweeted.



After meeting the girls family Maliwal said: How many Nirbhayas Delhi needs for the deaf system to wake up. Despite our demand, no High Level Committee on women safety has been set up .These girls are no one's girls. State doesn't stand with them and they are reduced to mere stories.


BJP national president Amit Shah on Saturday launched a scathing attack on UP chief minister Akhilesh Yadav and BSP supremo Mayawati.





He said that Congress and JD (U) were helping SP and BSP defeat the BJP in the forthcoming assembly polls in the state.



The bua-bhatija (Mayawati-Akhilesh) politics has ruined the state... a change is essential so that UP can make progress and be at par with the other states in the country, Shah said while addressing party workers here.



Nitish Kumar and Congress are playing the role of vote cutters. They know that they can not form the government. They only want to help the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the BSP and defeat the BJP, Shah said.



He also said that Congress would not be able to revive itself in the state even if it undertook padyatras and roadshows.



The BJP leader also referred to the alleged scams during the UPA governments regime in the centre and said that both SP and BSP had then supported the UPA.



He said that jungle raj prevailed in the state. This government has failed to tame the criminals, he added.



Social media and masses



Shah asked the party workers to make use of the social media to reach the masses in the state.



The role of social media in the elections is very crucial. The party workers should take use it to inform the people about the works done by the BJP government for them, he said.



The BJP chief earlier took part in a training program of partys spokesmen and members of the media cell and called upon them to make extensive use of the social media in the forthcoming assembly polls in UP.


An all-party delegation led by Home Minister Rajnath Singh today held talks with Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti here as it began a two-day visit to Jammu and Kashmir during which it is expected to interact with a cross-section of people with a view to restore peace in the strife-hit Valley.



The meeting, chaired by Singh at Sher-I-Kashmir International Conference Centre soon after the 26-member delegation arrived here, discussed the security situation in the Valley.



It also took stock of those injured in the violent protests since the killing of Hizbul militant Burhan Wani on July 8.



Initially, the delegation was proposed to be of 29 Members of Parliament, but only 26 MPs have come here.



Cutting across party lines, leaders said that they were hopeful of finding a solution for restoration of peace in the Valley which has been in the grip of violent protests that left left 71 persons dead and scores of others injured.



State Education Minister and Government Spokesperson Naeem Akhtar said it was necessary for all stakeholders to join the dialogue process.



"How long can this continue? It has to end someday," he said.



When asked about Mehbooba not mentioning talks "within the ambit of Constitution" in her letter to the separatist leaders last evening, he said every party comes to the negotiating table with their stated position.



"It depends on how we carry forward the dialogue and ideas to find resolution to the issue," he said.



Mehbooba had written a letter to separatists leaders in her capacity as PDP Chief inviting them to engage with the delegation.



Akhtar refused to reply to a question whether there were any back channel talks with Hurriyat Conference.



The state government has placed Chairman of moderate Hurriyat Conference faction Mirwaiz Umer Farooq under arrest at Chashme Shahi sub-jail, JKLF Chief Yaseen Malik at BSF camp in Humama while hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani continues to be under house arrest.



A delegation of National Conference led by former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah is also likely to meet the MPs.



The all-party delegation is on a two-day visit to the state during which it is expected to interact with a cross section of people. However, the Valley based trade organisations have refused to meet the politicians.



"We intend to talk to individuals and groups who want peace and normalcy in Kashmir Valley," Singh said before the departure of the delegation.



Senior Congress leader and former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said that the delegation was ready to hear "everyone".



The visit "will be beneficial for Kashmir and for the country," he said, adding everyone wants peace in the state.



Azad said it will be an opportunity for the parties and Kashmiri people to interact.



All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen leader Asaduddin Owaisi said he would like to meet separatists as well as the injured who were undergoing treatment in various hospitals.



CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury, another member of the team, said the all-party delegation should have gone two months ago "but let's hope that even now, we can make a difference". Yechury also expressed desire to meet the separatists and the injured.



LJP Chief and Union Minister Ram Vilas Paswan said that the MPs are going with an open mind and want to interact with anyone who wants to talk within the framework of the Indian Constitution. "We are ready to talk," he said.



Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge said all parties were cooperating with the government and their sole aim was restoration of normalcy in the state.



"We will try our best to bring back normalcy. We are cooperating with the government. It is the responsibility of the government to deal with the situation very intelligently.



"All parties are cooperating for that. So we hope that it will be resolved," he said.
Pays to be polite! A Spanish cafe owner has put in place a novel policy to promote good manners under which rude customers are charged more while prices are cut for those who say "please" and "thank you".





Marisel Valencia Madrid, the owner of the Restaurant Blau Grifeu in Llanca on the Costa Brava in northeastern Spain, became so fed up at being barked at by customers that she has introduced a pricing system to penalise those who are impolite.



Those who demand a coffee will find they are charged an extortionate 5 euros while those who say please will pay a more affordable 3.5 euros, and those courteous enough to greet their server first with a 'Buenos dias' (good morning) will be charged a mere 1.30 euros, The Local reported.



"I put a sign in the window with the price system and it has made all the difference. People are now super polite in all matters and it has really improved daily life," she was quoted as saying.



"Yesterday some children even told their parents to say please, so it's working!" she said.

The 41-year-old is originally from Colombia and has run the restaurant with her husband for the last nine years.



"I'm not singling out Spanish people as rude. We are just off the seafront so have a lot of tourists here well, French, German and British, and I think generally people could just be more polite," Madrid said.



A customer took a photograph of the sign with the house rules and posted it on social media sparking a nationwide debate on politeness.



"I'm surprised at the attention but it's good to remind people to be polite to everyone, even when ordering a coffee," she said.



And she admitted that since putting up the sign she has not had to charge anyone the full price.



"The normal price of a coffee is 1.30 euros and thankfully I haven't had to charge more because everyone is giving me a greeting and saying please. Some even say thank you now too!" she said.
Clashes broke out in south Kashmir's Shopian district this morning with protesters setting ablaze a mini-secretariat building while curfew remained clamped in parts of Srinagar on a day the all-party delegation was here on a two-day visit aimed at restoring peace in the Valley.





Normal life in the Valley was paralysed for the 58th day as restrictions continued in the rest of the Valley which has been hit by violence since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani in July.



People in Penjoora village of Shopian tried to take out a protest rally which was stopped by the police, leading to clashes, an official said.



The protesters also set afire the mini-secretariat building, housing the deputy commissioner's office in the area, the official said.



He said the security forces resorted to baton charge and tear-gas shelling to disperse the protesters.



"There are some injuries but more details are awaited," he said.



Yesterday, protesters in the neighbouring Kulgam district burnt a house of the ruling PDP's block president Gulzar Ahmad.



Ahmad had facilitated a meeting of Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti with the family of a victim of violence in the district. Mehbooba had visited the family of Late Mashooq Ahmed, firing victim of Kund, Kulgam and offered condolences to the bereaved family yesterday.



"Curfew remains in force in five police station areas of downtown Srinagar," a police spokesman said.



He said curfew in these areas of the summer capital continued as a precautionary measure in view of the call given by separatists asking people to occupy Airport road, city centre Lal Chowk and district headquarters against the all-party delgation's visit.



The spokesman said curfew has been lifted from the other areas of the city where it was in force yesterday.



The all-party delegation led by Home Minister Rajnath Singh reached here today for a two-day visit during which it is expected to hold talks with a cross-section of people.



"Curfew has been lifted from Batamaloo and Maisuma areas in the uptown city in view of the improving situation," the police spokesman said.



He, however, said restrictions on the assembly of people were in place in the rest of the Valley.



Normal life remained affected in Kashmir due to the separatist sponsored strike on 58th day. Shops, business establishments and petrol pumps continued to remain shut during day time and open only in the evening. Public transport continued to be off the roads.

The separatists have extended the shutdown till September 8.



As many as 71 persons, including two police personnel, have been killed and several thousand others injured in the clashes between protesters and security forces in the Valley since Wani was killed in an encounter in south Kashmir on July 8.
India is the second most 'unequal' nation in the world where millionaires, or those with net assets of USD 1 million or more, control over half of its total wealth, says a report.





According to wealth research firm New World Wealth, after Russia, India is the most unequal country as 54 per cent of its wealth is in the hands of millionaires.



India is among the 10 richest countries in the world with total individual wealth of USD 5,600 billion, but the average Indian is quite poor.



Globally, Russia is the most unequal country where millionaires control over 62 per cent of total wealth.



In order to determine the level of inequality in the world, New World Wealth looked at the proportion of wealth controlled by millionaires, or high net worth individuals.



"The higher the proportion the more unequal the country is. For instance, if millionaires control over 50 per cent of a country's wealth then there is very little space for a meaningful middle class," the report said.



On the other hand, Japan is considered to be the most equal country on Earth. Millionaires in Japan control only 22 per cent of total wealth there.



Australia is also very equal  millionaires control only 28 per cent of total wealth.



Regarding the United States, the report said it is also "surprisingly" equal as millionaires control around 32 per cent of total wealth there. "This is surprising low considering all the negative press that the US gets in terms of income inequality," it added.



The United Kingdom is slightly less equal than the US - millionaires control around 35 per cent of total wealth there.



Another interesting measure is the proportion of a country's wealth held by billionaires (with net assets of USD 1 billion or more). Russia again tops this list with 26 per cent of total Russian wealth held by billionaires. Japan again is the most equal with billionaires only controlling 3 per cent of total wealth there.



Wealth refers to net assets of a person. It includes all their assets (property, cash, equities, business interests) less any liabilities, the report said adding that it excludes government funds from its figures.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today met his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull who assured his country's support to India's bid for the NSG membership and the two leader agreed to deepen the bilateral defence and security cooperation.





Prime Minister Modi thanked Turnbull for Australia's pro-active support to India's membership of the elite nuclear trading club when the two leaders met on the sidelines of the G20 Summit, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup told reporters here.



"Prime Minister Turnbull assured that Australia will continue to support India's inclusion in the NSG," he said.



India's efforts to join the grouping suffered a setback in June when the NSG plenary held in South Korea decided against accepting its membership application after China and some other nations opposed entry of a non-NPT signatory.



"The two leaders discussed defence and security cooperation. In this context, both the sides positively accessed the recent Naval exercises held between the two sides and agreed to remain in touch," Swaup said after their talks.



"The issue of terrorism was also discussed during the meeting and Prime Minister Modi said that it is important for all the democratic forces to come together to counter this challenge," the spokesperson said.



Swarup said the Prime Minister told Turnbull that India's neighbourhood, in particular, is suffering from the destabilising effects of terrorism.



"Even Russia, China, Afghanistan were all facing terrorism threat emanating from our region and it was important for us to identify the suppliers, exporters and financiers of terrorism. Otherwise, the world is going to face a huge challenge in coming weeks and months," Modi said, apparently referring to Pakistan from where terror groups such as Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Taliban operates.



"Prime Minister Modi's overall message was that we need a unified approach on countering terrorism," Swarup said.



Modi said India-Australia relations are full of energy and the implementation of the mutually agreed projects and programmes have been considerably speeded up under Turnbull's guidance.



The two leaders also discussed the possibilities of trade and investment ties between India and Australia.



In the context of trade, both the sides felt that much more can be done and if the comprehensive economic cooperation agreements between Australia and India could be speeded up that would certainly provide much more momentum to their ties.



Modi also sought the support of Turnbull in encouraging the Australian pension funds to invest in India. He also sought Turnbull's support for clean coal technology.



"Because of India's clean energy targets, it is important for us to adopt as much clean coal technology as possible and this is an area in which Australia has proven expertise.



Whether it is underground mining or other form of mining, Australian companies can provide us those technologies," he added.


European Union leaders called today for China to take action on its bloated steel industry and defended an order to Ireland to collect taxes from Apple, highlighting the trade tensions looming over a global economic summit.





The Group of 20 meeting of leaders of the United States, China, Germany and other major economies "must urgently find a solution" to excess steel production, said Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission. He called on Beijing to accept a monitoring mechanism for overproduction that Beijing's trading partners blame for low prices and job losses.



Juncker also rejected U.S. criticism of the order for Ireland to collect USD 14.5 billion in back taxes from Apple. An EU panel ruled the company's low taxes were improper government aid.



"Free trade must be fair trade," Juncker said at a news conference with Donald Tusk, president of the European Council.



The toughly worded comments reflected the political pressures on governments at a time of weak global economic growth that is fueling demands to protect local industries.



Another prominent issue at the summit is G-20 member Britain's June vote to leave the 28-nation European Union, a move seen by some analysts as the first in a wave of moves by other nations to retreat from free trade.



China, the G-20 host, has made trade a headline issue for the meeting in Hangzhou, a scenic lakeside city southwest of Shanghai. Chinese officials have said they will propose a plan to boost commerce through closer cooperation on regulation, finance, tax and other issues.



China hopes its status as G-20 host will bring it more influence in management of the global economy.



Chinese leaders say they want the G-20, launched to coordinate the response to the 2008 financial crisis, to take on a longer-term role overseeing global economic management.



Germany, South Korea and other governments say they also want to use the meeting to discuss climate, energy and possible reforms to the global tax system to reduce tax evasion.



The two-day meeting began Sunday on a diplomatic high note following a joint announcement by President Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, that their governments had submitted documents committing them to carrying out the Paris climate agreement.



But U.S. and other officials say they plan to bring up Chinese industrial overcapacity and other potentially thorny issues. Washington has imposed import duties of up to 500 percent on Chinese steel to offset what regulators say are improper subsidies.
Oil price of 50 dollars per barrel is not acceptable and we are going to discuss the issue ewith OPEC member states, says Algerian Minister of Energy, Noureddine Boutarfa, IRNA reported.

Boutarfa made the remarks on Saturday evening following a meeting with Iran's Minister of Petroleum Bijan Zanganeh in Tehran.

'I had a meeting with Mr Zanganeh and we talked about the future meeting of OPEC due to take place in Algiers,' he told reporters.

The main topic of our discussion was the oil market and its situation, the Algerian oil minister said.

OPEC members are demanding oil price to be between 50 to 60 dollars and the price of 50 dollars per barrel is not acceptable, Boutarfa said.

'That is why we are going to continue our discussions and efforts to reach a deal on a final price mark with the OPEC members,' he said.

'And this is going to be top on our agenda for the upcoming OPEC meeting,' he said.

The Algerian oil minister also said that the OPEC members are going to achieve the price mark of 50 to 60 dollars and we have called on the member states to help reach a deal on the price of oil.

Elaborating on the potential outcomes of the forthcoming OPEC meeting, the Algerian oil minister said that we expect positive outcomes.

All the member states, including Iran, are going to attend the OPEC meeting and The Islamic Republic is expected to play a central role, Boutarfa.

The unofficial meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is going to take place on the sidelines of the International Energy Forum in the Algerian capital from September 26-28.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Vietnam ahead of G20 summit here was aimed at jointly piling pressure on China and to raise their "bargaining chips" with the country, Chinese state media said today.





"Given the South China Sea issue, Beijing-Hanoi relations have not been smooth over the past years. Negative emotions toward Beijing among the Vietnamese people have also been rising," an article in the state-run Global Times website said.



"Under such a backdrop, Modi's visit to Vietnam has without doubt made Indians associate the tour with many strategic meanings, believing that New Delhi and Hanoi might jointly pile pressure on Beijing," it said.



"The fundamental reason behind it is the interests of India and Vietnam. New Delhi and Hanoi both wish to raise their bargaining position while having interactions with China, but neither of them wants direct confrontation with Beijing," it said.



While such a possibility cannot be totally excluded, but it will not play a vital role either, it said.



"India has always been cautious when it comes to directly putting the screw on China. In this regard, the US has never stopped drawing New Delhi over to its side for its rebalance to the Asia-Pacific strategy, but India only showed reluctance toward it and has not responded to Washington actively. "This has made the White House quite grouchy," it said.



Pointing to various commonalities between India and China which are emerging powers and members of BRICS, the editorial said, "India hopes it can improve its underdeveloped infrastructure with the help of Chinese investments and technology."



Vietnam just witnessed the first visit by an Indian prime minister in the last 15 years.



During the same period, Chinese former president Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, former premier Wen Jiabao, as well as sitting President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang have all paid formal visits to the country.



Some of them even visited Vietnam twice during their time in office, it said. "Such a comparison can well illustrate what is going on behind Sino-Vietnam ties and Indo-Vietnamese relations," it said.



"For Vietnam, with or without China, cooperating with an emerging power like India is beyond doubt of great value. However, such a bilateral relationship will have only limited influence on China.



"After all, strong support from Washington and Tokyo has not yet worked in piling enough pressure on Beijing as Vietnam hoped, thus, how effective can India's vague support be?" it said.



India extended a USD 500 million line of credit to Vietnam to deepen defence cooperation and signed 12 agreements including a deal to construct offshore patrol boats during Modi's two-day visit to Vietnam earlier this week.



The two countries also decided to elevate their strategic ties to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership to provide it a new momentum.




The blast is likely to disrupt Nasas cargo deliveries to the International Space Station, exposing the risks of the agencys growing reliance on private companies like SpaceX to carry materials and, soon, astronauts.





The explosion, at Cape Canaveral, Florida, intensified questions about whether Musk is moving too quickly in his headlong investment in some of the biggest and most complex industries, not just space travel but carmakers and electric utilities.





This is not the first problem Musk has suffered as he tries to create space travel that is cheap and commonplace. Each of his companies, including Tesla and SolarCity, has hit major stumbling blocks recently. The owner of a Tesla car died in May in a crash using the companys autopilot software, and SolarCity faces major financial challenges.





SpaceX is running a punishing schedule, said Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University and a former Nasa official.





There is probably some human factor involved here. To what extent was human error part of this? And if so, why? Are you running your people too hard? What are your safety requirements? Pace said an internal investigation would have to look at the companys operations as it tried to ramp up the pace of launches.





The companys president, Gwynne Shotwell, said in a statement, Our No. 1 priority is to safely and reliably return to flight for our customers, and we will carefully investigate and address this issue.





The Falcon 9 rocket burst into flames in a violent series of blasts starting at 9:07 am, spewing plumes of dark smoke around the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and sending vibrations felt by residents nearby. The rocket had been set to launch last Saturday, carrying a satellite for Spacecom, an Israeli company.





The explosion was particularly painful news for Facebooks chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, who is touring Kenya, promoting a programme reliant on the satellite, known as Amos-6, with entrepreneurs in the country. He had promised them connectivity.





Just hours after the news of the explosion broke, Zuckerberg expressed disappointment on his Facebook page that SpaceXs launch failure destroyed our satellite, a swipe at Musk and his team, who were still trying to figure out what went wrong.





Musk did not respond publicly to Zuckerberg. But he posted a brief explanation on Twitter: Loss of Falcon vehicle today during propellant fill operation. Originated around upper stage oxygen tank. Cause still unknown. More soon.





The Falcon 9, developed by SpaceX with Nasa financing, had had previous problems. In June 2015, a rocket carrying Nasa cargo to the International Space Station fell apart in-flight when a strut holding a helium bottle snapped, setting off a chain of events that destroyed the rocket moments later. This latest episode is likely to push back the timetable Nasa had after hiring SpaceX and Boeing to carry astronauts to the space station by the end of next year.





Nasa said it was too soon to say how the explosion would affect its space station operations, asserting that it remained confident in its commercial partners. Todays incident  while it was not a Nasa launch  is a reminder that spaceflight is an incredible challenge, but our partners learn from each success and setback, the agency said.





SpaceXs next cargo mission to the space station is scheduled for November. Coincidentally last Thursday, a report released by Nasas inspector general, Paul K Martin, said SpaceX and Boeing were likely to face additional delays in their launch schedules anyway.





Launches with crews will probably not lift off before the second half of 2018, three years later than planned, the inspector general said.





Changes that SpaceX is making to the design of the capsule, to allow landing in water instead of on land, are causing the latest delays, Martin said. In addition, Nasa has been slow in examining safety reviews submitted by the companies, and as a result, late and costly redesigns might be needed, Martin said.





SpaceX lists about 40 launches of satellites and other cargo on its manifest for commercial companies, Nasa and the US Air Force. Space industry experts say that Musk faces risks in balancing SpaceXs backlog of contracts  spanning the next few years  without cutting corners to stay on the companys busy schedule.





Whenever you have a failure along these lines, you of course face delays, which inevitably sets back some of your commercial and government satellite contracts, said Marco Caceres, senior space analyst and director of space studies at The Teal Group, an aerospace research firm. They have to fight the temptation to keep to a schedule, even if that means setting back their launches into next year. Rare episode





SpaceX had hoped for 18 rocket launches this year; so far, eight have occurred. Overall, SpaceX has had 27 successful launches of Falcon 9 rockets. An episode like Thursdays is rare.





Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who tracks rocket history, said the last time such an explosion happened on a Cape Canaveral launchpad, before the ignition of engines for liftoff, was in 1959.





SpaceX is rebuilding a separate launchpad, one of the two formerly used for Nasas space shuttle missions, for the astronaut launches. That launchpad is scheduled to be ready by the end of the year.





The demise of the satellite, called Amos-6, puts a significant damper on Facebooks Internet.org initiative, a grand plan spearheaded by Zuckerberg to provide wireless connectivity to nations across the world that do not otherwise have easy internet access.





In a partnership with Eutelsat, a French satellite provider, Facebook planned to use Amos-6 to offer internet coverage to large parts of sub-Saharan Africa.





Along with satellite coverage, Facebook is teaming with local internet providers to offer access, and is also building its own drones  the first of which is named Aquila  to beam internet connectivity down to cities.





Zuckerberg struck an upbeat tone in his post about the rocket failure, noting that the company has other strategies in the works to expand internet connectivity across the world. Still, the setback will delay Facebooks ambitious plans and even more ambitious timetable.





Shortly after his SpaceX comments, Zuckerberg struck a cheerier note by posting some good news from the region: A family of baby giraffes was seen on his safari.

A spectacular explosion of a SpaceX rocket last Thursday destroyed a $200 million communications satellite that would have extended Facebooks reach across Africa, dealing a serious setback to Elon Musk, the billionaire who runs the rocket company.
Union Minister for Chemicals and Fertilisers Ananth Kumar, on Sunday, said, the selfless and commendable effort of Sri Sathya Sai Loka Seva Trust in providing free education and boarding to the children from economically-weaker sections is worth emulating by others.



He said this while addressing the gathering at 16th annual convention of old students at Satyasai village in Muddenahalli, Chikkaballapur district. Every child is entitled to free and compulsory education. In fact education is now a fundamental right of every child in India.



Sri Sathya Sai Loka Seva Trust, through its institutions, is providing free education to the children from poor background. The governments state and the Centre  should emulate the example set by Sathya Sai Trust, the minister said.



The Union government is willing to support the extension programmes of Sri Sathya Sai Loka Seva Trust. As a representative of the institution. I will talk to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Human Resource Minister Prakash Javadekar. I will bring Javadekar in the next programme of the Trust, Ananth Kumar said.



Higher Education Minister Basavaraj Rayaraddi, speaking on the occasion, said, Baba always propogated Janaseve Janardhana Seve. His contributions in education and healthcare fields are immense and commendable. The Sathya Sai educational institutions doing a great job in providing free education to the needy.



The minister, who hails from Talkal in Koppal district, said that he would make sincere efforts to allot 50 acres of land to Sri Sathya Sai Loka Seva Trust in Koppal district, if the Trust is keen to set up educational institutions there.



MP K H Muniyappa, MLA Dr K Sudhakar, former minister V Muniyappa, Sri Sathya Sai Loka Seva Trust president C V Gangadhar Bhat, secretary B Narayanarao, Madhusudhan Naidu, trustee B N Murthy, Sri Sathya Sai deemed University Vice Chancellor Shashidhar Prasad and others were present.


An Irani gang leader, who had escaped when the car in which he was being brought to Bengaluru met with an accident near Tumakuru in July, has been arrested. The Pune City Crime Branch apprehended Ali Akram, 26, a resident of Loni Kalbhor, a village on the Pune-Solapur highway, in Mumbai, about two weeks ago.



He was hiding at Ambabari area in Mumbai after he escaped from Tumakuru on July 21. The Pune police claimed that they detected nine crimes committed by Akram after his interrogation. Akrams custody ends on September 6. The CCB police will seek his custody based on a body warrant for interrogation regarding chain snatchings that he committed in Bengaluru city, a senior police officer told DH.



The CCB police had shared information about Akram with Pune police after he had fled from Tumakuru. The Pune police were tipped-off about Akram hiding at Ambabari, where a large number of Irani gang members live, he added.



Akram leads a gang at Loni Kalbhor, which he visits once in six months. He has a network of jewellery shop owners. He pledges the stolen ornaments with them. He is an expert in committing two specific crimes -- chain snatching and robbery by diverting attention -- said the police.



Akram has committed more than 58 chain snatchings in Pune. The CCB police suspected that he committed more than 25 chain snatchings in Bengaluru between January and February this year. He was also involved in robberies committed by diverting attention in the city around the same time. He was involved in similar crimes in Andhra Pradesh and several parts of Maharashtra, said the police. The city police had constituted special teams to nab the Irani gang members after the number of chain snatchings shot up early this year. Akram and his accomplice had robbed a woman of her gold chain in Sanjaynagar. The duo were absconding on a black Pulsar mobike which was captured by a CCTV camera in Sanjaynagar. The police established Akrams identity based on the CCTV footage, said the police.






Following complaints about the delay in clearing Ganesha idols from immersion tanks and ponds, the BBMP has for the first time, formed special teams to remove them a day after immersion.



BBMP Joint Commissioner for Health and Solid Waste Management (SWM), Sarfaraz Khan, told DH, "Every year, it used to take three to four days and more to lift the immersed idols made of Plaster of Paris (PoP), due to logistical issues. In Ulsoor, the idols used to be cleared 11 days after the immersion. This year, we have formed special teams at immersion points. Resident Welfare Associations ( RWAs) will closely coordinate with us."

Ulsoor lake, where about one lakh idols were immersed last year, will have a special team of about 100 members, including local volunteers, life guards, Palike officials and labourers among others. Similarly, Sankey tank, that witnessed immersion of 35,000 idols last year, will have a special team comprising about 40 members.



At lakes like Yediyur, Hebbal and Ulsoor, a crane would be deployed to lift the idols . "We have instructed ward engineers and RWAs to ensure segregation of wet waste and dry waste so that garbage does not pile up. For the first time, we will hand over part of the lifted idols to Rock Crystals, a stone crusher dealer, he said.



Green warriors

To encourage people to use eco-friendly idols, 65 students from St Josephs College have been actively campaigning in the last few days. Outreach Co-ordinator Brother Philip said students distributed pamphlets and held placards at 16 traffic signals like Richmond Circle, Silk Board and Town Hall to raise awareness.



Another green warrior Niyati Mavinkurve, has started the One Less Waste Flower initiative, where she is asking residents via social media to compost flower waste this Ganapathi season.



She said: This is an open event. The flowers dumped from the festival can be chopped and added to the compost. Alternatively, one can add these flowers to a flower pot at home and prevent them from ending up in landfills.



SWM Expert Committee member, NS Ramakanth, who single-handedly monitored the waste generated during the last Ganesha festival at Sankey tank, said he hopes the use of PoP models would come down this year, given the workshops and awareness programmes conducted by the Palike with like-minded volunteers.




Outside Mother House, the gathering included thousands of Christians, rubbing shoulders with Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, to pay respects at her tomb and watch the ceremony on the moderate-sized TV set inside the buildings hall. Sisters also set up a blue-white tent on the street where they sang for the benefit of those who could not be accommodated inside.



Sheikh Nurul Islam, who was a part of the festivities, noted that this was probably the first such major gathering outside the Mother House since the nun passed away in 1997. Islam, who sells statues of St Teresa along with rosaries, said, Its wrong to speak of her just on the basis of her religion. She was truly a saint, an angel sent to take care of us.



Joyous chants erupted thousands of kilometres away from the Vatican, outside the Mother House in central Kolkata, as Pope Francis canonised Mother Teresa and declared her Santa Teresa di Calcutta on Sunday. While the canonisation turned out to be the fastest in the history of the Roman Catholic Church, Kolkata, home to most Nobel laureates in India, can now boast of a saint too.The scene outside Mother House, where St Teresa spent much of her five decades in Kolkata and the global headquarters of the Missionaries of Charity (MoC), has been the centre of all attention for the past few days. On Sunday, all roads led to the somewhat nondescript building near Moulali in central Kolkata, where thousands gathered to join in the celebrations. The rest of Kolkata stayed glued to hi-definition TV sets, taking in every step of the ritual that went into the making of St Teresa, while hundreds of others gathered before the giant LED screens set up at street corners.In their signature humility and simplicity, sisters of MoC watched the ceremony on a borrowed TV set as the rules of the Order does not allow any possessions other than three pair of sarees and a pair of sandals given to them at the time of joining, along with a canvas bag to carry a plate and spoon.
After film-maker Vinod Kapri termed minor swimmer Shraddha Shuklas claim of swimming 80 km in the Ganga river daily as fake, a probe has been ordered into the matter to ascertain the truth.



Sharaddha, a resident of Uttar Pradeshs Kanpur town, who was hailed as jalpari, had recently embarked on a mission to swim from Kanpur to Varanasi, a distance of around 300 km. Shraddhas father Lalit Shukla had claimed amid fanfare at Kanpur that she would cover a distance of 70-80 km in a day and would swim in swollen Gangas strong currents during the mission.



Lalit had also said that Shraddha would pass through crocodile-infested areas during swimming though she would be accompanied by a boat and would be swimming between the nets in the areas. The claim was, however, contested by Kapri, who arrived in Allahabad to make a film on Shraddha after hearing about the mission. I felt that the girls efforts must be shown to the people and so I decided to film her journey, Kapri said.



The film-maker, however, later said that the claim was fake. Shraddha only swims for a couple of kilometres when she approaches a ghat (bank) or when there are people around her... she spends the rest of the time on the boat, he said.



Lalit Shukla and Kapri had a showdown in Mirzapur district on Saturday and both lodged reports with the police against each other. While Lalit accused Kapri of humiliating his daughter, the producer, who had courted controversy with his film Miss Tanakpur Hazir Hon, said that he was threatened by Shukla.



Uttar Pradesh State Commission for Protection of Child Rights has asked the Kanpur district magistrate to investigate the matter to find out the truth. It is a serious matter and we need to know the truth, said Nahid Lari Khan, member of the commission here.


At least 300 people were injured, most of them with pellets, in clashes between protesters and security forces in Kashmir on Sunday, the day the all-party delegation arrived in the violence-hit Valley on a mission to restore peace.



Reports said at least 150 people were injured in clashes after security forces personnel used tear smoke shells and pellets to foil a protest rally in Shopian district of south Kashmir. Twenty two seriously injured have been referred to Srinagar from District Hospital Shopian for specialised treatment. Almost all the people shifted to Srinagar sustained eye injuries due to pellet, a health official said.



Witnesses said following the clashes, announcements were made from the public address systems of the masjids in several villages, urging people to come out on roads. In the ensuing clashes, angry protesters set ablaze the newly-inaugurated building of the deputy commissioners office in Shopian. In a similar incident more than 40 people, including some women, were injured in Ashmuji village of south Kashmirs Kulgam district. Villagers said that forces ran amok and thrashed whosoever came their way. Reports said another 45 people were injured after forces intercepted people near Fatehpora-Kabamarg in Anantnag district, who were proceeding towards the adjacent Sadoora village to attend a protest rally.



A doctor at district hospital Anantng said that the hospital received around 33 pellet injuries and also few of those who were beaten up. At least 20 people were also injured in Drubgam village of Pulwama district as forces thwarted another protest rally.



Pertinently, protest and freedom rallies of various sects  Deobandis, Barelvis, Jamiat-I-Ahlihadith and Jamat-I-Islami  under the banner of Itihad-I-Milat have become a norm in south Kashmir villages during the ongoing unrest triggered by the killing of Hizbul commander Burhan Wani on July 8. In Tral area of south Kashmir, more than 50 protesters were injured during the day-long clashes, reports said. The protesters also attacked the house of the ruling PDP legislator Mushtaq Shah with stones. In Srinagar, two photojournalists were hit by pellets, while covering a protest rally in Rainawari area of the old city. The injured photojournalists were identified as Zuhaib Maqbool and Muzamil Mattoo, working with a local English daily.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov discussed with US Secretary of State John Kerry at a meeting in Hangzhou further steps to resolve the conflict in Syria, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Sunday, Sputnik International reported.

China's Hangzhou is currently hosting the G20 summit.

"On September 4, during the summit of the "Group of Twenty" in Hangzhou (China), Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov held a separate meeting with US State Secretary John Kerry," the statement read.

According to the ministry, the sides discussed "further steps to assist in resolving the conflict in Syria, including the task of consolidating the cessation of hostilities and the Russian-US cooperation in the fight against terrorist groups."
Can the omnipresent bacteria work for us or run nano machines? Yes, say scientists from Bengaluru, who built the worlds first micro heat engine using a bacterial colony. The micro heat engine does not follow the 200-year-old principles of regular heat engines based on which every automobile, locomotive or aircraft engine works. But they have the potential to unravel the mystery behind biological motors responsible for limb movement.



From the first manufactured automobile, the Ford Model T, to a contemporary family sedan, the basic working principle of the heat engine has remained unchanged since it was first laid down by French Engineer Sadi Carnot in 1824.



At nano scale

The principles of heat engine didnt change in the last 200 years. For the first time we have demonstrated a new way of heat engine functioning using bacteria. Such microscopic heat engines in future can power micro-scale or nano-scale electro-mechanical devices, team leader Ajay Sood, professor of physics at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, told DH.



An interdisciplinary group of scientists comprising researchers from IIScs physics and molecular biophysics units and Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advance Scientific Research carried out a series of high-precision experiments to show how micro heat engine works.



Unlike the regular engines that work with less than 10% efficiency, the micro heat engine has 50% efficiency. A large number of futuristic applications can be thought of. The discovery may also lead to better understanding of biological motors, said Sood. The findings have been reported in the August 29 issue of Nature Physics.






He said terrorism remains the primary source of instability and the biggest threat to our societies and countries and the supply chains have a global reach. The use of social media to promote radical ideology is increasing (the) dimension of this threat, he added.



External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup, during a media briefing, said, (Modis address to the BRICS Leaders Meeting) tells you how strongly the prime minister intervened on the issue of terror.





India on Sunday called on other BRICS members to intensify joint efforts to combat terrorism as Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in an apparent reference to Pakistan, demanded coordinated actions by the grouping to isolate supporters and sponsors of terror.Leading from the chair, Modi in his hard-hitting address to the BRICS Leaders Meeting here said terrorists in South Asia, or anywhere for that matter, do not own banks or weapons factories.Clearly, someone funds and arms them and BRICS must intensify joint efforts not just to fight terror but to coordinate actions to isolate those who are supporters and sponsors of terror, he said, without naming Pakistan. But the reference was clearly aimed at Islamabada close ally of China.Describing BRICS as an influential voice in international discourse, Modi said it was the groupings shared responsibility to shape the global agenda and help developing nations achieve their objectives.
Separatist leaders on Sunday refused to meet members of the all-party delegation who visited them in their individual capacity. Left party leaders Sitaram Yechury and D Raja, and JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav had to wait for 10 minutes outside the uptown Hyderpora residence of hardline Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Geelani, who refused to open the door.



We came to hold talks and listen to his (Geelanis) viewpoint. But he didnt open the door, Yechury told reporters outside Geelanis home. Stating that only dialogue was the way to settle the issues, Yechury said, Only through talks can we move forward. The members were forced to leave the spot after some people started shouting anti-India and pro-freedom slogans.



Yechury, Raja and Yadav were also snubbed by incarcerated JKLF chief Yasin Malik at the Humhama police station, as he too refused to talk to them. You see the situation outside. What can we talk about in such a situation? Malik was quoted as saying by Yadav. AIMIMs Asaduddin Owaisi had a two-minute chat with moderate Hurriyat chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq at Chashm-e-Shahi sub-jail where he had gone to meet the separatist leader. Though Mirwaiz reportedly met Owaisi for a couple of minutes, he declined to hold a dialogue.



However, sources said Abdul Gani Bhat, a senior leader of moderate Hurriyat, held a meeting with Owaisi, Yechury, Raja and Yadav at his residence. I thanked the delegation members for visiting my home but told them that it is a collective decision of separatist leadership not to hold any dialogue with them, Bhat was quoted as saying by a local news agency.



The separatists had in the morning rejected Chief Minister Mehbooba Muftis invitation to meet the delegation, which she had sent on Saturday evening as the president of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party and not as a chief minister.



Terming the offer as deceitful, the separatist leaders in a joint statement said: These deceitful methods of crisis management through Parliamentary delegations and track-two diplomacy only prolong the sufferings of the people and cannot take the place of a genuine transparent agenda-based dialogue to address the core issue of the peoples right to self-determination in J&K. However, despite clear refusal by the separatists, the Opposition leaders in the all-party delegation had reportedly said they would make the effort to reach out even if they (Hurriyat leaders) refuse to meet them. National Conference leader and former chief minister Omar Abdullah, while criticising Mehbooba, said the state government should have released the separatist leaders first if she was serious about talks.


A tour boat in the Turkish Mediterranean with dozens of people on board capsized Saturday in a heavy rainstorm, authorities said, and 73 people have so far been rescued, Anadolu reported.

Antalya Governor Munir Karaloglu told Anadolu Agency that the boat, the Kurt-Ceyhan, left a yacht port in Kaleici, in the resort town of Antalya, southern Turkey, before capsizing off the coast of Konyaalti, some 26.5 kilometers (16.4 miles away).

The governor said that Turkish Coast Guard and marine police teams arrived at the scene and managed to rescue 73 people.

There are no reports of casualties, but Karaloglu said search and rescue operations continue.
The Free Syrian Army (FSA) has taken control of Al Athariyah, Sheikh Yakoub, Vukuf, Ayyasa and Al Mutminah and five more regions in northern Syria, Daily Sabah reported.

The FSA also took control of Idalat, Talyah Darbiyah, and the Kubba Turkuman Airport in the El Rai region.

The Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) also said in the statement that the Turkish army struck 300 targets 1,306 times on day 11 of Operation Euphrates Shield, which began on Aug. 24.

The military also destroyed two Daesh targets in the Vukuf region, south of El Rai, around 13.00 local time (1000GMT), the statement added.

Turkey has said Operation Euphrates Shield is aimed at bolstering border security, supporting coalition forces, and eliminating the threat posed by terror organizations, especially Daesh.

The operation is in line with the country's right to self-defense borne out of international treaties and a mandate given to Turkey's armed forces by parliament in 2014, which was extended for another year in September 2015.
International provider of software specialising in analytics, 'big data' and the 'internet of things', Fusionex , announced on Friday that it has signed an agreement with Bursa Malaysia Berhad , Kuala Lumpur's Stock Exchange.

The AIM-traded firm said the agreement entails the exchange's adoption of Fusionex Analytics (GIANT) for the purposes of its Enterprise Data Analytics initiative, which will elevate Bursa Malaysia towards being a data-driven organisation.

Fusionex GIANT's ability to process large amounts of complex data with high performance and speed is targeted to enable Bursa Malaysia to keep track of the multitude of stock and price movements in the market, the board reported.

Via Fusionex GIANT, Bursa Malaysia will also be able to view company performance, stock prices, and stock movements with ease in numerous areas including investor analytics, market performance, market risk analysis, peer comparisons and sentiment analysis.

Bursa Malaysia currently hosts almost 1,000 companies in more than 50 different industries, resulting in massively disparate data.

The project is a significant data analytics initiative that will allow Bursa Malaysia to consolidate a multitude of information from disparate sources and voluminous market data before carrying out trend-watching and analysis activities to arrive at insightful discoveries and decisions, Fusionex said.

Bursa Malaysia's vision to raise the bar and to better serve its customers is exemplary, said Fusionex CEO Dato' Seri Ivan Teh.

We are excited to be selected by Bursa Malaysia as their partner of choice as they embark on this journey to be among the most advanced data-driven organisations in this region.

Bursa Malaysia CEO Datuk Seri Tajuddin Atan said the organisation is pleased to appoint Fusionex as its preferred vendor to help integrate enterprise data analytics at the exchange.

By leveraging on the big data revolution we intend to provide greater value to the capital market by enhancing our processes, towards identifying new customer and product insights.

Bursa has fully embraced digitalisation as a strategy and transformative tool.
The City of London is girding itself for a 30bn frenzy of initial public offers (IPOs) in coming months as backers look to profit from the London stock market's impressive recovery since the Brexit vote. Flotations including the 10bn City debut of mobile operator O2, a 1.5bn issue for online bookmaker SkyBet, 5bn banking software provider Misys, 3bn for medical products maker Convatec and 2bn floats for cinema chain Vue and car parts maker TI Automotive, according to sources cited by the Sunday Telegraph,

Activity in Britains private sector rose marginally over the summer, according to an influential survey from the CBI, in the latest indication that businesses seem to be shrugging off the impact of the vote to leave the EU, the Sunday Times said. The CBIs 'growth indicator' report showed a net 8% of companies reported a rise in activity in the three months to August, up from 5% in the period to July, while businesses also became modestly more optimistic about growth in the coming quarter.

The long-term stability of the UKs housing market has begun to cause worries again, the Sunday Telegraph reported, with despite signs that the countrys biggest housebuilders have shrugged off the immediate aftermath of the vote to leave the European Union. While firms have reported a pick-up in sales in August, the number of new homes planned for next year and beyond appears to be waning, especially in London, with figures last week from the National House Building Council revealing the number of new sites registered in London since the referendum has fallen 62% year-on-year. The markets focus is now likely to turn to the Governments Autumn Statement, which is expected to contain stimulus measures to increase housing supply, which would boost the sector into 2017.

Currency speculators have scaled back record bets against sterling after being stung by the pound's recent rebound. Hedge funds last week eased off their short positions on sterling last week after upbeat economic data helped sterling recover to $1.33 from less than $1.29 in the middle of last month, bringing big losses for investors who bet it would fall and some investors throwing in the towel, the Sunday Times said.

The US government could face the might of Brussels bureaucracy in a showdown in the European Court over Apples 13bn tax row with the European Commission, legal experts have said. After the commissions ruling that Ireland granted the technology giant undue tax benefits, Apple is understood to have retained City lawyers Freshfields to handle its case, with competition lawyers telling the Mail on Sunday that the US government would also have the right to make its case in the European Court.

Marks & Spencer will cut 500 head office jobs this week as part of the turnaround plan unveiled by its new chief executive Steve Rowe, the Mail on Sunday reported. The redundancies will amount to 15% of workers at its headquarters in Paddington, London, with no stores rumoured to be affected.

The supermarket sector will this week dive into a new escalation of the food price war that has already decimated profits across the sector, as Morrisons launches a salvo of price cuts across 160 everyday grocery items. The Bradford-based retailer will look to hit domestic rivals Tesco and Sainsbury's where it hurts with an average 12% price cut as the larger grocers try to fend off German discounters Aldi and Lidl, the Mail on Sunday, Sunday Times and Oberver all reported.

Britain's largest listed companies could be set a targets of increasing female representation in corporate boardrooms to 25% or even 35%. Sir Philip Hampton, the chairman of GlaxoSmithKline who in February launched a government-backed review into equality in business, has concluded that FTSE 350 bosses should be given tougher targets for the campaign for 'equality' to suceeed, the Sunday Times revealed, with women currently occupying fewer than one in five FTSE 100 executive posts.

The takeover of Poundland by South Africa's Steinhoff is facing another potential intervention, with the Sunday Telegraph citing speculation that US hedge fund Elliott Management may scupper the 610m deal at a crunch shareholder vote this week. Elliott has built a near 25% stake in Poundland, making it the retailers biggest investor ahead of Steinhoffs 23.6% portion.

Vodafone faces growing tensions over its joint venture with Telecom Egypt, as the state operator prepares to launch its own rival mobile network, the Sunday Telegraph reported. In a move that raised fears at Vodafone and among its shareholders about the governance of its 45% owned Egyptian branch, Telecom Egypt said last week it had acquired a licence to build a 4G network, putting it in direct competition with Vodafone Egypt.

A consortium of powerful investors vying to buy National Grids 10bn network of gas pipes is attempting to lure an ex-director of the FTSE 100 group to spearhead its bid, according to the Sunday Times. Ahead of a deadline later this month, the group of Canadian, British and Middle Eastern investors is understood to have approached the energy industry veteran Philip Aiken, chairman of Balfour Beatty and the software company Aveva who was on the National Grid board until last year.

One of Americas largest money managers has pledged to prop up the rescue plan for struggling Kurdish oil explorer Gulf Keystone as the company tackles a multi-million-dollar restructuring while facing down a takeover bid from Norwegian rival DNO, according to the Sunday Telegraph. Los Angeles-based Capital Group, Gulf Keystones largest shareholder, is preparing to plough up to $20m into an emergency 2bn share offering which is needed to keep the company afloat while it restructures its hefty debt pile.

Planned changes to apprenticeship funding in England have been attacked by Labour MPs, who warn the shakeup risks cutting the number of schemes on offer and runs counter to Theresa Mays reported pledge to boost social mobility, the Observer reported. More than 50 MPs have written to Robert Halfon, the apprenticeships and skills minister, asking him to rethink proposals that would involve cuts in May 2017 of 30-50% to funding rates paid to some colleges and training providers that teach young apprentices.

Britains richest brothers are closing in on a 5bn deal to sell a 50% stake in London's biggest computer hosting network to a Chinese consortium. David and Simon Reuben's Aldersgate Investments is in advanced talks to sell half of Global Switch, which runs data centres in locations ranging from London to Hong Kong and Singapore, the Sunday Times reported.

Star UK fund manager Neil Woodford has begun government talks over a potential 250m fund that will focus on backing early-stage tech ventures outside London, the Sunday Times reported. Woodford, who would like the taxpayer to contribute half the funds, is working with the British Business Bank (BBB) and other institutional funds to launch the new investment company.

Boosted by songs such as Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson and Love Me Like You Do by Ellie Goulding, the pop music industry enjoyed a record year of earnings from public performances of their music in 2015, the industrys royalty collector has revealed. Money, money, money rolled in for musicians from broadcasters and internet companies, as well as from the thousands of shops, restaurants, bars, gyms, offices and nightclubs that are required to buy a licence to play music on their premises.
Defense helps Buckeyes rally, pull away for 44-31 win over Penn State

No. 2 Ohio State football used 34 decisive seconds midway the fourth quarter and then two knockout blows late for a 44-31 victory over Penn State.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday met with US President Barack Obama ahead of the G20 Summit in China, Daily Sabah newspaper reported.

Following his meeting with Obama, President Erdogan underscored Turkey's determination in its fight against terrorism and the extradition of Fetullah Gulen, who is accused of masterminding the deadly July 15 failed coup attempt.

The two leaders held a 45-minute long closed-door meeting with their delegations and held a brief press conference following the meeting, marking the first time they met face-to-face since the July 15 failed coup attempt.

Erdogan said once again that there should be no distinction between "good terrorists" and bad ones.

He noted that all terrorism is bad and said that the US and Turkey must adopt a common attitude against terrorism.

"Turkey's fight against all terror organizations including Daesh and YPG will continue with determination" he said.

President Obama highlighted that Turkey should not bear the burden of refugees alone, and said that he wishes the strong partnership between Turkey and the US continues.

Turkey is the largest refugee hosting country, providing shelter to over three million Syrian refugees who fled the conflict.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel ahead of the G20 Summit in China, Daily Sabah newspaper reported.

The meeting comes after Merkel defused tensions between Berlin and Ankara over a parliamentary resolution passed in Berlin in May that declared the 1915 events as "genocide".

The German government said Friday that the resolution was not legally binding.

There was no indication whether Merkel and Erdogan discussed a Turkish ban on German visitors to Incirlik air base.

Turkish officials have blocked German political delegations from visiting the military base in response to the parliamentary resolution.

On Aug. 29, Foreign Minister Mevlut havushoglu said that Turkey would authorize German parliamentarians to visit to the air base; however, Germany will need to take the necessary steps.

''We do not permit those who irresponsibly play around with our history to visit our exclusive zones,'' havushoglu had said, in reference to a recent motion passed by the German parliament on the 1915 events.

Merkel and Erdogan also discussed cooperation on the refugee crisis and July's failed coup attempt in Turkey.

It was their first face-to-face meeting since the July 15 failed coup attempt. Merkel had spoken by telephone several times since then.

The 11th G20 summit, attended by the leaders of the world's 20 most industrialized countries, will be held in Hangzhou in Zhejiang province Sept. 4-5.
The Junior Chamber International (JCI) Donegal Friendly Business Awards were held in the Warehouse Bar and Kitchen last Monday where some of Donegals friendliest businesses gathered for an awards ceremony.

The overall award winner was Evolve Menswear, Letterkenny.

The JCI Donegal Friendly Business Awards seek to recognise the important role played by small businesses in the continuous development and improvement of our economy and local communities.

The competition aims to reward businesses that go the extra mile and provide an outstanding service to their customers and their community at large.

It is particularly important in this economic environment to highlight businesses that don't allow their standards to slip and continue to provide quality services

Speaking at the awards ceremony Emma Boylan, JCI Donegal Business Officer, said: Tonights awards are about highlighting businesses that make the extra effort to be as friendly as possible to their customers and in Donegal there is a wide selection to choose from. We are famous for our warm welcome!

With over 50 nominations for excellent businesses this year competition was again intense.

On the night the winners were;

Digital Friendliness Award (sponsored by Zynda Media) - Lottie Dolls;

Lottie Dolls are award-winning, childlike dolls, that empower young minds and nurture individuality through play.

They have an impressive online presence with over 50,000 followers combine on their social media platform and a great website that is easy to use and sharp in design.

Disability Access Award (sponsored by Edwin Foley Chartered Accountants) - Letterkenny Shopping Centre.

Letterkenny Shopping Centre comprises 105,000 sq. ft. over a single level with over 36 stores and more than 660 free car parking spaces. They have disabled toilets car parking and access to meet everyone's needs.

When the shopping centre was mystery shopped by someone with a disability it stood out among any other as the most accessible and disability friendly.

Community Impact Award (sponsored by Donegal Local Development Company) - Brittons Pharmacy, Donegal town.

Brittons Pharmacy is a family run chemist that has been serving the community of Donegal town for over 30 years.

Having been set up by Joseph Britton Snr. in 1979 in the diamond, the heart of Donegal town, it has been going strength to strength. Joseph Britton Jr. took the helm of the business in 1999 and been developing it and bringing it into the 21st century whist still maintaining the values and ethics set up by his father.

Customer Care Award (sponsored by The Tax Clinic) was The Mad Hatter Tea Room.

The Mad Hatter not only serves great tea, coffee and food they do it with a smile! Described as a treat by customers, the Friendly atmosphere and staff make dining here a truly enjoyable experience.

Shop Layout and Design Award (sponsored CBM Signs) - Evolve Letterkenny.

Evolve's shop layout is as stylish as their clothes.

From the moment you walk through the door you feel the sense of style!

The shop is open planned and well merchandised.

Eco-Friendliness Award (sponsored by the Station House Hotel) - Simple Simons

JCI Donegals Overall Friendliest Business 2016 (sponsored by Kerry's Little Bakery) - Evolve Menswear.

The six winners will now go forward to be in with a chance to represent JCI Donegal in the All-Ireland final in Galway in October.

Thanks

JCI Donegal President Ann-Louise Mc Clintock thanked all the JCI branches, the sponors and the national sponsor Bank of Ireland:

It is projects like this that help in making Ireland a more competitive country that produces a better product and this will make Ireland a better place to do business, she said.

JCI Donegal invite the public to follow them on Facebook for more news and updates.

More information about the Friendly Business Awards project can be found on www.jciireland.ie.

If you would like to nominate a business for the 2017 competition or for information about the project please email secretary@jcidonegal.com

Pictured: Award winners at the JCI (Junior Chambers Ireland) Friendly Business Awards Donegal on Monday night last front from left are Barry Gallagher, Bank of Ireland, Veronica Keenan, Overall Winner Evolve, Daniel Lane, Evolve Shop Layout Award, Paddy McMenamin, The Hatter Tea Room, Customer Care Award and Ian Harkin, Lottie Dolls, Digital Experence Award. Back row from left Ian Farmer, Director of Business JCI, Emma Boylan, JCI Donegal,Anne Louise McClintock, President JCI, Donegal, Carmel Brennan, Bank of Ireland, and Louica McCauley, Bank of Ireland. Photo Clive Wasson
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Donegal actor Patrick McBrearty is part of the ensemble bringing a new trio of plays to the stage.

Tinderbox Theatre Companys What were made of, directed by Patrick J. OReilly, taps into current feelings of global upheaval.

What Were Made Of is at the Crescent Arts Centre in Belfast from Thursday, Sept. 15th to 23th at 7.30pm, with a preview on Sept. 14th and matinees at 3pm on Sept. 17th and 18th.

Patrick is part of the ensemble cast that includes Nicky Harley, Rhodri Lewis and Kerri Quinn.

Alternately cheeky, playful and poignant, What Were Made Of includes three one-act plays: History by Daragh Carville; Hiatus, a collaboration between playwrights from Northern Ireland and Croatia; and Hen, a solo performance.

Theyre all different styles  very interesting theatre, Patrick said. Its something I dont think Ive ever seen before and something youll definitely remember.

He said, Hiatus started out as a response to the refugee crisis but evolved to become about Europe more generally. It looks at the parallels between two post-conflict societies, and examines the impact on what its like to leave your own country and arrive in a new one.

Patrick was last on the Donegal stage in An Grianan Theatres celebrated 2014 production of Frank McCabes, Frank Pig Says Hello, which also toured the country.

I kind of grew up in An Grianan Theatre, he said, crediting the influence of An Grianan Director, Patricia McBride, and Pluincead O Fearraigh of Letterkenny Music and Drama Group.

Patrick, from St. Johnston, graduated from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 2013. He has also performed in The Importance of Being Ernest (Wilde Festival), Lovers (Friel Festival), Blackout (Lyric Theatre), Blinkered (Sole Purpose), The Tempest (Terra Nova), Under The Hawthorn Tree (Cahoots NI), After The End (Pintsize). Later this year, he will appear in the Lyric Theatres production of Three Sis.

Donegal Actor Patrick McBrearty is part of the ensemble bringing a new trio of plays to the stage.

Tinderbox Theatre Companys What were made of, directed by Patrick J. OReilly, taps into current feelings of global upheaval.

What Were Made Of is at the Crescent Arts Centre in Belfast from Thursday, Sept. 15th to 23th at 7.30pm, with a preview on Sept. 14th and matinees at 3pm on Sept. 17th and 18th.

Patrick is part of the ensemble cast that includes Nicky Harley, Rhodri Lewis and Kerri Quinn.

Alternately cheeky, playful and poignant, What Were Made Of includes three one-act plays: History by Daragh Carville; Hiatus, a collaboration between playwrights from Northern Ireland and Croatia; and Hen, a solo performance.

Theyre all different styles  very interesting theatre, Patrick said. Its something I dont think Ive ever seen before and something youll definitely remember.

He said, Hiatus started out as a response to the refugee crisis but evolved to become about Europe more generally. It looks at the parallels between two post-conflict societies, and examines the impact on what its like to leave your own country and arrive in a new one.

Patrick was last on the Donegal stage in An Grianan Theatres celebrated 2014 production of Frank McCabes, Frank Pig Says Hello, which also toured the country.

I kind of grew up in An Grianan Theatre, he said, crediting the influence of An Grianan Director, Patricia McBride, and Pluincead O Fearraigh of Letterkenny Music and Drama Group.

Patrick, from St. Johnston, graduated from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 2013. He has also performed in The Importance of Being Ernest (Wilde Festival), Lovers (Friel Festival), Blackout (Lyric Theatre), Blinkered (Sole Purpose), The Tempest (Terra Nova), Under The Hawthorn Tree (Cahoots NI), After The End (Pintsize). Later this year, he will appear in the Lyric Theatres production of Three Sisters.
There has been mixed response from Donegal deputies on whether the government should appeal the European Commission ruling that Ireland granted state aid to Apple of up to 13bn.

Joe McHugh, Fine Gael TD and minister of state, has described the situation is very complex, adding that a lot of clarity is needed.

He said: I have read what the commission ruled and it sets out a very dangerous precedent - the commission's interference in sovereign matters, and that is a very dangerous road to go down.

Fianna Fail Deputy Charlie McConalogue said he believed the government has a very, very strong position to stand over and a very defensible position in relation to its treatment of Apple.

He said if Ireland did not defend its position, companies that deal with the country, or have in the past, could lose faith in Ireland's position.

Independent TD, Thomas Pringle, said he had no doubt that a sweetheart deal was done with Apple, saying, obviously the commission has decided there was state aid there.

He agreed the commission has no competency with regard to corporate tax rates. But they do in terms of state aid, and what the commission is saying is they investigated whether Ireland's tax deal with Apple amounts to state aid, he said.

Pearse Doherty, Sinn Fein TD and finance spokesperson, has called for a public inquiry to establish who facilitated a sweetheart deal with Apple.

Given the state is chasing people who have not paid their water charges through the courts it is unimaginable that the government will appeal this ruling, he said.

Leas-Cheann Comhairle, Pat the Cope Gallagher, Fianna Fail TD, said he would express his views at a parliamentary party meeting.

Meanwhile, during a phone call with Taoiseach Enda Kenny, TD, Apple CEO, Tim Cook, recommitted himself to the company's operation in Ireland.

The Cabinet agreed on Friday morning to appeal the commission decision.
October is National Bullying Prevention month. We have all heard the phrase bullying, but what does it actually mean? Bullying is defined as unwanted aggressive behavior; observed or perceived power imbalance; repetition of behaviors or high likelihood of repetition.

Bullying is unfortunately a reality for far too many in our communities both young and old. Much like any other form of violence, bullying is not isolated to any particular age group, gender or demography. Just about everyone of us can look back in our lives and recall a time where either we were personally bullied or witnessed one of our friends or schoolmates being bullied. Its hard to believe that with all of the advancements and awareness, this type of behavior still exists, but it does and with the advent of social media, it had actually gotten much worse. This is because unlike in the past, the bully not only impacts your life on the playground or classroom; they now are able to follow you into your personal life due to the constant presence of social media.

There is good news in that we have learned a great deal about what creates these bullies and how to neutralize their ability to isolate and intimidate. The key is for those in authority to respond to reports of bullying immediately to show without question that bullying will not be acceptable. That message needs to follow to our homes with the messages we send our children not only by what we say but by our own actions in how we treat fellow adults. Bullying is without question a learned behavior. It is learned on the playground, in the classroom and follows through to the workplace and social interactions as adults. We need to send a strong message to our own children, a message of empathy and compassion not of ridicule and rumor.

Who are at risk of bullying the most? Typically those who are bullied have one or more of the following risks:

Are perceived as different from their peers, such as being overweight or underweight, wearing glasses or different clothing, being new to a school, or being unable to afford what kids consider cool

Are perceived as weak or unable to defend themselves

Are depressed, anxious, or have low self esteem

Are less popular than others and have few friends

Do not get along well with others, seen as annoying or provoking, or antagonize others for attention

However, even if a child has these risk factors, it doesnt mean that they will be bullied. The important lesson is that we as adults set the tone for how the next generation will interact with each other. Chances are if we show acceptance of others, our children will show acceptance of others. If we engage in demeaning others or spreading rumors, our children will follow suit. So often we as adults underestimate the influence, we have not only on our own children but even those who dont know us but witness our behavior.

While school or workplace policies are an important component, the only way to truly decrease bullying is by denying the bully their victim. We do this by raising strong, confident, resilient children, and speaking out and supporting those who find themselves on the receiving end of this type of behavior. We are all teachers in life lessons and we teach by our actions. Lets all be aware of what we teach.
Ronald Moede was born on December 21, 1934, in Rio Creek, WI. The son of the late Fred and Emily (Hanamann) Moede, he married Bonnie Neinas in Brussels on June 4, 1960, and they were married for 62+ years. He was a life-long resident of Rio Creek and was an innovative dairy farmer. He owned and managed a large dairy operation, Meade Manor Farms, which had been homesteaded by his grandfather, August Moede, in 1895. The log cabin home, barn, and herd grew to become one of the larger dairy farms in Kewaunee County under his guidance. Upon his retirement, it evolved into Meade Manor Pet Clinic, a vet service for small animals, but the land continued to flourish and produce. Ron graduated from Casco High School, Class of 1952 and Graham School for Cattlemen, Kansas. He was a member of the Wisconsin Holstein Breeders, Kewaunee County Holstein Breeders, and the National Holstein

Association. He was a charter member of the Algoma FFA Alumni. His family exhibited champion dairy cattle at local, state, and national dairy cattle shows. In 1984, in Madison, the Wisconsin FFA named him Outstanding Farmer and in 1995, he was named and honored at the Wisconsin State Fair as a Century Farmer. He served as an elder in his church for many years as well as a trustee and various committee appointments. In his younger days, he was active in dartball and also high school sports. He received the Algoma Honorary Chapter Farmer Award, and the Unified Board Business Award. In his retirement, he drove school bus for 15 years for the Algoma School District and was a member of the Great Lakes Sports Fishermen. A hobby later enjoyed was his chicken farming. He raised a small flock of chicken, and he enjoyed passing out extra eggs to friends and relatives when the supply was greater than the family could handle. He was an avid sports fan and he and Bonnie attended both Packers Super Bowl games in 1996 and 1997, and also the Milwaukee World Series in 1983. He enjoyed hunting and fishing, both here and in upper Michigan and Minnesota. He even got Bonnie to go along with him to Lake of the Woods on the Canadian border to do some ice fishing. He held Packers season tickets since 1960 and at the time they bought their tickets they were allowed to pick out where they wanted to sit on the sidelines --there were no end zone seats yet-- and the tickets cost $5.00 a piece! He traveled through most of the U.S. including Alaska and Hawaii as well as traveling to the Caribbean and Europe. He enjoyed a summer place in Door County for 20 years. He told many stories of farming with his dad and the fact that at the age of 12, he had his own team of horses to work with on the farm. Responsibility came early as he was left in charge whenever it was necessary for his parents to be gone for a few days. He learned to drive a truck at an early age and often drove himself to school in 8th grade and parked the vehicle a few doors down at a relatives. This was because chores need to be done before and after school. The first tractor purchased was in 1937. In his retirement, he had it restored and displayed in local fairs and tractor shows. He would tell of shocking grain and threshing crews traveling from neighbor to neighbor and the wonderful table his mother would set full of food. A vivid memory was the day WWII ended. The whole neighborhood and working crew quit in the early afternoon (unheard of) and celebrated With beer and music! Even the clergy arrived and joined in. It was a day to remember! In his lifetime he went from horses and the depression, to the digital age and unimagined luxuries. There was no electricity and no running water in his youth and now he had wireless phones, computer screens in his vehicles, along with heated steering wheels and heated seats. Who would have thought that back then.

Ron is survived by his wife Bonnie; son Robert (Debbie Harms) Moede; grandson Michael and granddaughter Megan; siblings, Terry (Jane) Moede, Paul (Roxie) Moede; sisters-in-law, Diane Fontaine, Sheila (Don) Baudhuin; and brothers in-law, Dan (Mary) Neinas. He was preceded in death by his parents, Fred and Emily Moede; sister, Marilyn (Arno) Schneider; father- and mother-in-law, Herman and Madeline Neinas, and brother-in-law, Gary Fontaine.

Visitation will be held at Kinnard Funeral & Cremation Services  Algoma, on Friday, October 7, 2022, from 4-7:30 pm with a prayer service at 6:30. Visitation will continue on Saturday, October 8th at St. Johns Lutheran Church  Rankin, from 9-11:00 am. Funeral service will be held at 11:00 am with Dr. Rev. Christopher Jackson officiating. Burial to follow in Evergreen Cemetery. Online condolence message may be shared at KinnardFCS.com. In lieu of flowers, please make donations to the Kewaunee County 4-H Dairy Fund and the Projection Screen Fund at St. Johns- Rankin.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday that Turkey is preparing files regarding the post-July 15 failed coup attempt and will submit them to the United States as part of the process to extradite Fetullah Gulen, who is accused of being the mastermind behind the coup attempt, Daily Sabah reported.

Erdogan's statements came during a meeting with US President Barack Obama ahead of the G20 Summit in China, who assured that his country is committed to bringing the perpetrators of the coup attempt to justice.

President Erdogan thanked Obama for the US's support against the coup attempt and noted that the file regarding the case of Fetullah Gulen has been updated with the addition of new documents in the post-coup period.

He said that the files will be given to the US delegation responsible for Gulen's extradition, and that a delegation from the Turkish Justice Ministry will also visit the US to work on the matter.

Obama said that the US is committed to bringing the perpetrators of the attempted coup to justice and condemned the attempt once again.

"We will make sure that those who carried out these activities are brought to justice" he said.

Turkey has requested the extradition of Gulenist terror-group (FETO) leader Fetullah Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile in the US state of Pennsylvania. Gulen and his followers are accused of masterminding the deadly coup attempt, which killed over 240 people and injured over 2,000, as well as infiltrating state institutions to take control.

A US delegation, including three officials from the US Justice Ministry and one from the US Foreign Ministry, arrived in Ankara in August to discuss FETO leader Gulen's extradition and analyze the evidence Turkey will grant.

Obama also noted that it's important to "finish the job" of securing Turkey's border with Syria.

Turkey is currently carrying out a military operation to clean its borders from terrorist organizations, including Daesh and the YPG and underlines there is no difference between various terrorist organizations and that all of them must be fought with determination.
Fine Gael Deputy Peter Fitzpatrick has said the loss of the eBay jobs in Dundalk is a terrible blow for the workers and their families but calls for a positive and united approach to securing new employment for the eBay staff.

I worked closely with the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation and the Minister Mary Mitchell OConnor to try and source alternative premises in the town for eBay, Mr Fitzpatrick said.

I want to see as many as possible of these employees offered alternative employment within the company in their Dublin base and I am also working hard to assist them in accessing job opportunities with other companies in Dundalk.

The Department of Jobs has given me a commitment that they will assist these workers as they try to source alternative employment.

Furthermore Louise Phelan, Vice President of PayPal Global has given me a commitment that PayPal will increase its Irish workforce to 3,000 people between now and 2018. I look forward to working with Ms Phelan in relation to this to ensure that as many as possible of these jobs are situated in PayPals Dundalk operation.

I know this is a very tough day for people whose jobs are affected.

However, the future is bright for Dundalk with the potential expansion of PayPal in the town.

Recent CSO figures show that this country has two million people at work for the first time since 2008 and that employment is growing in every region.

Deputy Fitzpatrick said that now is not the time talking down Dundalk.

He believes that a positive approach is required to avoid adding to the stress and worry of the workers.

I will leave no stone unturned in my efforts to help these staff source alternative employment and to ensure that jobs continue to be created in Dundalk and across Louth, said Fitzpatrick.
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Russia and Turkey have switched to discussing specific details of Turkish Stream pipeline construction, Russian Economic Development Minister Alexei Ulyukayev said after the meeting the presidents of Russia and Turkey Vladimir Putin and Tayyip Erdogan, TASS reported.

"As for the Turkish Stream it is also in progress. They are discussing specific details. For example, a certain place where the pipe will enter the Turkish coast, allocation of a land plot for it. Very practical issues..." Ulyukayev said.



Russia and Turkey may sign a mid-term program of economic and scientific and technical cooperation by the end of the year, Alexei Ulyukayev said.

We handed a draft medium-term program of economic scientific and technological cooperation to our Turkish colleagues. We plan to sign it before the end of the year. I think that in October we will complete all text work so that the text was signed before the end of the year," Ulyukayev said.

He also said that the work on the establishment of Russian-Turkish Investment Fund is about to be completed.

"In late August, the necessary legislative changes were made, a partner of our Russian fund of direct investments was set up in Turkey ... Now colleagues are work at the level of experts. I think that in October-November, we will have a list of projects and financing in order to start working on these issues," the minister added.

Russia and Turkey have approached signing of a free trade zone agreement, Russian minister also said on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Hangzhou.

"The meeting was focused on economic agenda, restoration of relations (in different areas) between our countries. We noted some progress on a number of issues, in particular, we are closer to an agreement on free trade in services and investments. Experts had a meeting in late August, and me and my colleague Minister (of Economy of Turkey Nihat - TASS) Zeybekci will meet in late October," Ulyukayev said.
Peter Turchins War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires offers a grand theory of conflict both within and among societies. Although it was published in 2005, it is an interesting book to read today, at a time when the United States appears to be suffering from both types of conflict.

One sentence from the book, written shortly after the war to depose Saddam Hussein in Iraq but several years before the appearance of ISIS, is striking:

The metaethnic frontier theory, however, predicts that the Western intrusion will eventually generate a counter-response, possibly in the form of a new theocratic caliphate, because that is the traditional way in which Islamic societies have responded to challenges from other civilizations.

Turchin explains his term metaethnic by writing,

People usually have multiple ethnic identities nested within each other The broadest groupings of people that unite many nations are usually called civilizations, but I prefer to call such entities metaethnic communities from the Greek meta, beyond, and ethnos, ethnic group or nation) Typically, cultural difference is greatest between people belonging to different metaethnic communities; sometimes this gap is so extreme that people deny the very humanity of those who are on the other side of the metaethnic fault line.

Although this description has some intuitive appeal, for me it lacks sufficient precision. I am still not certain how one distinguishes a metaethnic community from a subset of humanity that is not metaethnic.

For more on the work of Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), see Division of Labor, by Michael Munger, in the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.

Another term that Turchin introduces is asabiya, which he ascribes to Ibn Khaldun. Turchin writes,

Asabiya of a group is the ability of its members to stick together, to cooperate; it allows a group to protect itself against the enemies, and to impose its will on others. A group with high asabiya will generally win when pitched against a group of lesser asabiya.

Once again, I will note that I would have preferred a more precise definition of the term. If asabiya is supposed to predict the winner of an inter-group contest, then one must be careful to measure it in some way other than by counting victories in inter-group contests. However, for the remainder of this column, I will leave these caveats aside.

Turchin argues that asabiya rises when a group is under threat, and that such threats are most pronounced at the border between two metaethnic communities.

Turchin argues that asabiya rises when a group is under threat, and that such threats are most pronounced at the border between two metaethnic communities. When a society that finds itself on such a fault line manages to develop enough asabiya to survive, that level of internal cohesion can enable the society to evolve into an empire.

From the Mongols in the thirteenth century, to the Muscovites in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and then on to the Americans all empire builders. had a high capacity for concerted collective action originated from intense and prolonged fault-line frontiers.

For Americans, for example, the fault-line frontier was between the settler population and the natives.

One consequence of the life on the North American fault line was the famous American melting pot. Indeed, when confronted with such obvious aliens as painted, bloodthirsty, heathen redskins, two European settlers, even if they came from different countries, could not help but feel they were kin Because the fault line was defined in racial terms, immigrants belonging to non-White races, such as the Negroes and the Chinese, were not accepted as Americans. (This pattern began to change in the twentieth century.)

Turchin later writes that,

[British journalist] Anatol Lieven suggested todays Americans react the same way toward Arabs as early American settlers did toward Native Americans. It is as if such behaviors are written into cultural genes.

Throughout the book, Turchin gives examples of internal cohesion within a social group coinciding with an extreme hostility toward those outside that group. For example,

There is now a distinct Palestinian entity, where there was none prior to the massive immigration of European Jews into Palestine. The asabiya of Palestinians has increased enormously.

Turchin cites Francis Fukuyama, who pointed out that large firms can only be formed in high-trust societies, because in a large firm people must be comfortable cooperating in an environment where they do not know everyone with whom they must work. Turchin writes,

Ironically enough, although externally corporations brutally compete in the free market, their internal workings rely not on market forces, but on group solidarity! This is one of the best-kept secrets in the economic sciences.

Turchin writes,

It is much easier for equals to achieve the unity of purpose and to develop a common course of action. Egalitarianism enables cooperation.

This is because,

The capacity to sacrifice self-interest for the sake of common good is the necessary condition for cooperation.

Turchin sees a cyclical pattern embedded in agrarian societies regarding social cohesion.

 the very stability and internal peace that strong empires impose contain within it the seeds of chaos. Stability and internal peace bring prosperity; prosperity causes population increase. Demographic growth leads to overpopulation; overpopulation causes lower wages, higher land rents, and falling per-capita incomes for the commoners. At first, low wages and high rents bring unparalleled wealth to the upper classes, but as their numbers and appetites grow, they too begin to suffer from falling incomes. Declining standards of life breed discontent and strife. The elites turn to the state for employment and additional income, and drive up its expenditures at the same time that the tax revenues decline because of the impoverished state of the population. When the states finances collapse, it loses control of the army and police. Freed from all restraints, strife among the upper classes escalates into civil war, and the discontent among the lower classes explodes into popular rebellions.

Empires gradually lose asabiya over the course of several cycles. Moreover, the very success of an empire pushes away the frontier threat away from the core of the empire. As a result, the citizens close to the core lose the sense of solidarity that comes from being under threat.

Turchin acknowledges that his theory is meant to apply to agrarian societies in which many people live near the Malthusian margin.

When land becomes a scarce commodity Those who do not have enough land to feed themselves will have to start selling what they have to make up the difference. As a result, they become poorer. By contrast, those who have more land than they need to feed themselves will have a surplus income that they can use to acquire even more land. Thus, the rich get richer.

In our modern economy, are there nonetheless other mechanisms at work which naturally breed greater inequality and thereby erode asabiya? Turchin argues our economys disintegrative phase began late last century.

However, he hedges, noting that,

One cannot assume that the social and economic forces that operated in agrarian societies to produce secular cycles would continue behaving in the same way today We live in a very different world from that inhabited by the Romans or the Normans, or even the Europeans of the Napoleonic era.

 the main reason there is no famine in England or any developed nation today is that the productivity of an acre of cropland is now more than ten times what it was in the Middle Ages.

Still, Turchin finds a number of troubling trends, including the increased requirements for education in the job market.

By the late twentieth century, just finishing college was not enough to enter the increasingly competitive job market, and the number of college graduates earning PhDs started increasing.

 These trends are signs of a credentialing crisis, which reflects increased intra-elite competition Similar trends have been observed during pre-crisis phases of previous secular cycles.

In the end, he writes,

 can we design societies in such a way that asabiya is not constantly being degraded? Do humans always need the threat of imminent danger from some outside enemy to cooperate effectively?

For libertarians, these are crucial questions. In order for markets to function well, they must be embedded in cultures that promote pro-social behavior and are conducive to trust. If the absence of external conflict weakens the bonds that prevent internal conflict, then the libertarian goal of peaceful cooperation in all domains will prove elusive.
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Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has outlined the East Southeast development action plan in Turkey's southeastern province of Diyarbakir, Daily Sabah reported.

Yildirim annouced on Sunday that the government will make a TL 10 billion invesment in seven provincial centers damaged by PKK terrorism, in particular the historical Sur district of Diyarbakir.

"We will renew our centers damaged by PKK terror, making schools, buildings, parks, house of worships etc",- the Prime Minister said.

The Development Action Plan will provide a total of 16TL billion investment in 23 provinces, TL 10 billion of which will be concentrated in seven provinces.

The state will hire any location in a symbolic rental price to the investors who want to open new factories in southeastern Turkey.

The main aim of the plan is to construct 10 new factories in 23 provinces per year. The PM also announced that zero interests will be provided for investors for their loans on buying new equipment.

The PM highlighted the importance of finding solution to ending unemployment, saying that new job opportunities will be provided.

"67,000 new houses will be built. 15 new hospitals, 3 new stadiums and 51 new police stations will be constructed," - PM Yildirim said in Diyarbakir. He continued that "new attraction centers will be built in 23 provinces and we have divided them into five groups."

Aswell as explaining the details of the East Southeast Development Action Plan, PM Yildirim also spoke about the regional terror threat and Operation Euphrates Shield in northern Syria.

Speaking about Turkey's fight against terror along its borders, Yildirim emphasized that Turkey is not against Kurds but against all terror groups in the region.

Pointing out the importance of fighting against Daesh, the PKK and the PKK's Syrian wing PYD/YPG in the region, PM Yildirim said, "Operation Euphrates Shield is necessary not only for Turkey's border security but also for the stability of Syrian territories. We are there for this purpose."
Jamia Millia and Islamia is all set to start MD and PhD programmes in Unani medicine from this academic year in collaboration with the Hyderabad-based Central Council for Research in Unani Medicine (CCRUM) under the Union ministry of AYUSH.

They signed a memorandum of understanding recently after the ministry endorsed the proposal to foster research in indigenous systems of medicines in India.

The university plans to conduct an entrance test for these courses . There will also be interviews for the PhD. It will conduct the exam in consonance with the regulations of Central Council of Indian Medicine (CCIM) and the university within the broader framework and guidelines of the ministry. The university will award the degrees.

The CCRUM will also help set up Hakim Ajmal Khan Chair in the university to promote Unani studies and research.

Speaking on the occasion, Talat Ahmad, vice chancellor, emphasised the need to modernise the old discipline by actively collaborating with people in advanced sciences like biochemistry and biotechnology. CCRUM through the Central Research Institute of Unani Medicine (CRIUM) is supposed to provide facilities such as hospitals, laboratories and other resources to run the programmes.




According to a recent report by a Delhi-based consultancy, the international education sphere is seeing some shifts. After fluctuating for years, the number of Indians studying abroad rose to 3,60,000 in 2015. According to MM Advisory Services Indian Students Mobility report 2016, India is now one of the biggest players among countries, after China, sending students overseas. This is the second year in a row that Indias rate has been higher than China  12% growth in 2014 and now 17.8%. In 2015, most international students from India chose the US , with their numbers up overall by 10% after a long time. The next destination on their list was Australia  with a 9.4% rise, followed by Canada at number three with seven per cent. The growth rate of the Indian student population in the UK was 2.5%.

UNITED STATES

Most students these days want to keep their options open so as to switch from one field to another easily, as per the EducationUSA advisory. The US is seeing an interest in undergraduate studies where students are choosing interdisciplinary programmes and are exploring diverse programmes, it says. Business and management, and engineering continue to be Indians favourite subjects. Other popular fields of study include the life sciences, computer science, economics, and health sciences. In recent years, there has been a changing trend at both undergraduate and graduate level. There is a growing demand for career-oriented fields such as environmental science/ studies, biotechnology, media and communication, art and design studies, and law, according to EducationUSA.

Irrespective of the discipline you pursues, the education system helps build skills and traits required across the board for successful professional and personal lives, said Sriharsha Masabathula, who recently completed his undergraduate studies at Ohio Wesleyan University and now works with Unesco in Myanmar. In particular, I was trained in academic and non-academic writing and making compelling and cohesive arguments.

For both undergraduate and graduate degrees, the total cost of attendance (including tuition, living expenses, health insurance and personal expenses) ranges from US$20,000 to US$70,000 a year.

The fall session usually starts in August/ September and the spring session in January/February.



UNITED KINGDOM

Indians pick a variety of courses to study in the UK, the most popular being business and administrative studies; engineering and technology; computer science; subjects allied to medicine; biological sciences; social studies; medicine and dentistry; law; physical sciences, architecture, building and planning; creative arts and design; education; mass communication and documentation; mathematical sciences; languages; as also agriculture and related subjects.

Indian students are welcome to the UK. There is no cap on the number of Indian students. In the last decade, over 160,000 Indians have studied in the UK. Last year, more than 90% of applicants were issued with their student visa. This year, we have the largest number of scholarship awards ever for the UK. These include 292 GREAT scholarships, 160 Chevening awards as well as Commonwealth and Charles Wallace awards, said Richard Everitt, director education and society, British Council.

The living costs and fee structure vary from one region to another and one institution to another, depending on your lifestyle. According to UK Visas and Immigration, students will need around 1,000 for each month of their course up to a maximum of nine months in inner London or 800 a month for other regions of the country. The tentative fee structure/ average cost for undergraduate courses ranges from 4,000 (foundation courses) to 30,000 (clinical courses) a year.



AUSTRALIA

In June 2016, there were 53,709 Indians on student visas Down Under. Most study natural and physical sciences, IT, engineering and related technologies, architecture and building, and mixed field programmes. Education is an integral part of Australia-India relations. Students can make a choice based on official, authentic information. I was born and brought up in Singapore. My father told me to go to Australia to pursue my academic career. At that time, he knew that Australia was an upcoming country for education, said Harinder Sidhu, who received a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Economics degree from the University of Sydney and is now Australias higher commissioner to India.

A Bachelors degree costs A$15,000 to A$33,000 a year, excluding courses such as veterinary science and medicine.



CANADA

In 2014, Canada hosted around 52,000 from India, as per the Indian Students Mobility Report. Students from India prefer courses in engineering, business and computer science. Students are opting for biology, followed by biotechnology, neurology, genetics and the environment as well. In arts, they are studying sociology, international relations and law. UG diplomas in animation, film and game design, too, are popular, said Maria Mathai, director, MM Advisory Services. The average cost of a UG degree would be C$15,000 a year; it can be higher for engineering or business courses.



SAT STILL REQUIRED

There was confusion about standardised test requirements due to information on several foreign university websites recently. According to the Columbia University website: The redesigned SAT consists of two sections, each graded on an 800-point scale and the writing portion will be separate. Columbia does not require the optional writing section. You will be evaluated on the highest score you receive in any individual section. The SAT Subject Test scores are not required, but Columbia will accept scores from the exams if you choose to submit them. This means the SAT or ACT is a mandatory requirement to get into good US institutes. The essay-writing component of these tests is, however, optional. The SAT Subject Tests measure your knowledge in specific subjects such as physics, maths, chemistry, biology, languages and so on. Submitting results from these tests is now optional for some schools.



UK VISA PILOT

The British Home Office launched a tier 4 visa pilot scheme in July to simplify the visa process for international students who wish to study on postgraduate courses lasting up to 13 months at four UK universities. The universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Bath, and Imperial College London are piloting the scheme, which will affect visa applications decided on or after July 25, 2015. The scheme is open to students starting studies in 2016-17 or 2017-18. Initially for two years, it makes universities responsible for eligibility checks, so that student visa-seekers can submit fewer documents with their visa applications. All students must still fulfil immigration rules and undergo Home Office security and identity checks. Students will also be granted an additional six months on their UK visa after their course ends to find work or pursue further study and research.

-Compiled by Charu Narula and Sonali Sharma
Berkeley College

Berkeley offers partial academic scholarship s for international students. Students can qualify from 10% to a maximum of 25% off tuition. The scholarship is awarded based on both financial need and academic history.

Eligibility: Students need to submit official secondary or post-secondary transcripts of academic grades and proof of graduation. They also need to provide proof of their English language proficiency. They can opt of one of these exams:

Berkeley Colleges Language Test

TOEFL  a score of 500 PBT, 61 IBT (80 IBT for MBA)

IELTS  a score of 5.5 or higher (6.0 for MBA)

Link: http://berkeleycollege.edu/files_bc/Scholarship_International.pdf





Harvard College

After assessing your financial situation, Harvard covers the remainder of your need with scholarship assistance and the offer of a campus job. The scholarships are based on need, not merit.

Eligibility: Students must have completed the Common Application or the Universal College Application. Students are required to take the SAT or ACT with writing, and normally two SAT Subject Tests, as part of the application requirements.

Link: https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/types-aid/scholarships-grants





Northwestern University (NU)

The NU Scholarship is generally the final component of an aid package, meeting any remaining need after other forms of aid have been applied.

Eligibility: Awards ranging from $250 to more than $40,000 annually are based on demonstrated institutional financial need and availability of funding at the time the student applies. Recipients come from a wide range of income backgrounds.

Link: http://undergradaid.northwestern.edu





University of South Florida (USF)

The USF Office of Admissions offers three scholarships with awards ranging between $4,000 and $12,000 a year. Selection depends on the high school GPA and SAT or ACT test scores; post-secondary GPA must be at least 3.0.

USF Green & Gold Presidential Award  The eligibility requirement is 4.00+ GPA and 1350+ SAT (evidence-based reading and writing and maths only) or 29+ ACT

USF Green & Gold Directors Award  The eligibility requirement is 3.80+ GPA and 1280+ SAT (evidence-based reading and writing and maths only) or 27+ ACT

USF Green & Gold Scholars Award  The eligibility requirement is 3.60+ GPA and 1200 SAT (evidence-based reading and writing and maths only) or 25+ ACT

Link: http://www.usf.edu/admissions/international/intl-freshman/cost-scholarships/international-scholarships.aspx





-Compiled by Pooja Mahimkar

*Indicative listing
Every time, I visited my maternal grandparents in Chandigarh, I noticed how difficult it was for them to move into the technology age. My nanaji, now 80, always worked with a personal assistant who typed everything he needed and brought it to him for his signature. The shift of banking and utility services to mobile telephony and the internet present people like him new challenges. I always spent the better part of my visit in trying to help my grandparents manage and learn basic mobile functions.



Last summer, an opportunity to volunteer at Helpage India brought me face to face with a large number of seniors and made me think about the increasing ageing population of our country. A generation used to personal contact for most services from travel to making an appointment with the doctors now had to follow instructions or seek information over the phone. I witnessed similar problems during my internship at the senior care centre at Rashtrapati Bhavan this summer. Using a mobile phone did not come easily to those people. The keys were difficult to operate, the screen small and the fonts at times illegible. Slippery, sensitive touch screens, small fonts and complicated were some adjectives used to describe the mobile phone. A key concern for most was the seniors inability to find a phone which was easy to use and not too expensive. Mr Srinivasan, an octogenarian retired bureaucrat summed up, We need a phone that should do just the basic tasks and be easy to use. Can you suggest some phones?



This prompted me to identify mobile instruments that fulfilled their needs and had enhanced features of single-touch emergency buttons. I did not know of many phones that fell into this category and I am sure nor do many other people. So, I went started researching to look for some phones that would cater specifically to the growing senior population of India. Keeping ease of use and price as parameters, I came up with the following list:



1. iBall Aasaan 2 priced (Rs 3,000) is the first phone I found. It has a big display with large fonts. There large, tactile keys numbered both in English and Hindi. It also has a dedicated SOS button which triggers an alarm in the phone and sends a built-in message to preset phone numbers, among other features.



2. Phillips Xenium X2566 (Rs 3,800) is a similar phone but costs slightly more, with a few extra features. It has more room in the middle of the buttons to prevent accidental pressing and comes with dedicated buttons which increase and decrease the font size as required.



3. An alternative is the Swingtel SW50 Plus Senior Citizen (Rs 1,100). It comes with a dedicated SOS button like the other phones. One drawback is the small display with poor resolution and small fonts, so it is not recommended for the elderly with a weak eyesight.



4. After this, I came across the expensive Mitashi Play Senior Friendly, which runs on Android. Although it may have some of the complexities of an Android phone, Mitashi claims to have minimised this with its customised skin which runs on top of the operating system to provide a more user-friendly system. All the elements on the screen are bright with distinct and easily identifiable colours. Like other phones, it has an SOS button.



5. After all these, I found the Magicon Senior Duo (Rs 1,500). I was pleasantly surprised to see it had a magnifying glass attached to it which could be folded in and out at any time. This feature can benefit people trying to read small text on paper. It also comes with standard features like an SOS button, simple interface, etc. It has a big and high-contrast display. It has large buttons below the screen.




An Egyptian military band played the Israeli national anthem Hatikvah as the Jewish states new ambassador presented his credentials during a ceremony at the presidential palace in Cairo, the Hebrew news site Ynet reported.



According to the report, Ambassador David Govrin, whose appointment was approved in April, arrived in Egypt earlier this summer. But he was officially welcomed on Wednesday by Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who also received the credentials of the new ambassadors to Egypt from Belgium, Greece, the Netherlands, Mexico, Myanmar, the United Arab Emirates and Somalia.








BERLIN  Germanys normalization of relations with Iran are tied to Tehrans recognition of Israel, according to a letter released on Tuesday.



The letter, written in the name of German Chancellor Angela Merkels administration said, There cannot be normalized, complete relations with Iran so long as Iran does not recognize Israels right to exist.



The comments, released on Tuesday, were submitted to the head of the German-Israeli Parliamentary Friendship Group, Volker Beck, in response to a July 6 parliamentary questionnaire.




To share with friends and brethren The Gospel of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ (the Everlasting Gospel), and to prepare a people to stand when He returns to redeem His remnant. Also, to share relevant information of current events, and to show how they relate to prophecy; By means of articles, editorials, opinions, scripture readings, and poetry.

Disclaimer

Endrtimes does not necessarily endorse or agree with every opinion expressed in every article/video posted on this site. The information provided here is done so for personal edification; It's up to the reader to separate truth from error, and to examine everything (like the Bereans) from a Biblical perspective. Let the Holy Scriptures be you guide! - - - FAIR USE NOTICE: These pages/videos may contain copyrighted () material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available to advance understanding of ecological, POLITICAL, HUMAN RIGHTS, economic, DEMOCRACY, scientific, MORAL, ETHICAL, and SOCIAL JUSTICE ISSUES, etc. It is believed that this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior general interest in receiving similar information for research and educational purposes.
To reach me for collaborations, sponsorships, and event invitations, I am contactable at

the-ice-angel@hotmail.com


PATIENTS with non-small cell lung cancer which has spread to the brain could be spared whole brain radiotherapy as it makes little or no difference to how long they survive and their quality of life, according to a Cancer Research UK-funded clinical trial published today (Sunday) in The Lancet*.

Around 45,500 people are diagnosed with lung cancer in the UK every year and an estimated 85 per cent of cases are non-small cell lung cancer. Up to 30 per cent of patients with non-small cell lung cancer have the disease spread to the brain.

Typically these patients are given steroids and supportive care, such as painkillers, to control their cancer symptoms, but may also be offered whole brain radiotherapy daily for one to two weeks to improve symptoms. Before this trial, doctors had little evidence to prove whether giving these patients whole brain radiotherapy benefitted them.

Because whole brain radiotherapy can cause side effects** and involves daily visits to the hospital, the QUARTZ trial*** looked at whether it improves how long patients survived for and its effect on quality of life.

The trial, led by researchers from the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL, studied 538 patients from the UK and Australia. Half of the patients had whole brain radiotherapy and the other half did not, all the patients received steroids and supportive care.

The trial found no clear difference in survival and quality of life between the patients who did and didn't receive whole brain radiotherapy.

The patients who had whole brain radiotherapy lived for around five days longer (9.2 weeks after entering the trial compared with 8.5 weeks for those who didn't receive radiotherapy), and reported around five more days of good quality life****. These small differences could be down to chance and suggest that whole brain radiotherapy doesn't increase survival or quality of life. This means that patients could be spared the extra radiotherapy treatment.

While research has doubled cancer survival rates, progress has not been the same across all cancer types and survival remains low for people with lung cancer. To help tackle this Cancer Research UK increased investment in this cancer in its research strategy in 2014.

Dr Paula Mulvenna, the clinical chief investigator from the Northern Centre for Cancer Care in Newcastle, said: "This trial is changing treatment for patients. Before the QUARTZ trial clinicians weren't certain that giving whole brain radiotherapy enhanced our patients' quality of life, but did frequently offer it in good faith. These results confirm we can safely omit this treatment and concentrate on other ways of ensuring our patients and their families receive the best end of life care."

Professor Ruth Langley, from the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL, said: "We're extremely grateful to the patients, carers and clinicians who took part in this challenging trial and helped us identify this important information that could improve the final days for many patients around the world."

Martin Ledwick, Cancer Research UK's head information nurse, said: "These trial results could help patients with limited time choose how they spend the end of their lives. For many people spending time at home with family and friends is their priority so knowing that they can do this rather than going backwards and forwards to hospital could be their preference."

###

For more information about the trial call 0808 800 4040 to speak to Cancer Research UK's information nurses or visit http://www.cancerhelp.org.uk

For media enquiries contact Emily Head in the Cancer Research UK press office on 020 3469 6189 or, out of hours, on 07050 264 059.

Notes to editor:

* Mulvenna et al. Can whole brain radiotherapy be omitted from the treatment of non small cell lung cancer patients with brain metastases not amenable to stereotactic radiotherapy or surgery? Results from the UK Medical Research Council QUARTZ randomised clinical trial. The Lancet. 2016.

** These include hair loss, headache, tiredness, nausea, clumsiness, a dry or itchy scalp and poor concentration.

*** More information available here: http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/find-a-clinical-trial/a-trial-looking-at-the-treatment-of-lung-cancer-which-has-spread-to-the-brain

**** The trial measured quality adjusted life years (QALYs) which takes into account both length of survival and quality of life during that time. On average, those who had steroids, supportive care and whole brain radiotherapy had 46.4 days of good quality of life, and those who had steroids and supportive care 41.7 days of good quality life, a difference of 4.7 days.

About the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL

The MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL is at the forefront of resolving internationally important questions in infectious diseases and cancer, and delivering swifter and more effective translation of scientific research into patient benefits. It does this by carrying out challenging and innovative studies, and developing and implementing methodological advances. It is part of the Institute of Clinical Trials and Methodology at UCL, and is funded by the Medical Research Council.

About Cancer Research UK

Cancer Research UK is the world's leading cancer charity dedicated to saving lives through research.

Cancer Research UK's pioneering work into the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer has helped save millions of lives.

Cancer Research UK receives no government funding for its life-saving research. Every step it makes towards beating cancer relies on every pound donated.

Cancer Research UK has been at the heart of the progress that has already seen survival in the UK double in the last forty years.

Today, 2 in 4 people survive their cancer for at least 10 years. Cancer Research UK's ambition is to accelerate progress so that by 2034, 3 in 4 people will survive their cancer for at least 10 years.

Cancer Research UK supports research into all aspects of cancer through the work of over 4,000 scientists, doctors and nurses.

Together with its partners and supporters, Cancer Research UK's vision is to bring forward the day when all cancers are cured.

For further information about Cancer Research UK's work or to find out how to support the charity, please call 0300 123 1022 or visit http://www.cancerresearchuk.org. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
People with the most common type of lung cancer whose disease has spread to the brain could be spared potentially harmful whole brain radiotherapy, according to new research published in The Lancet. The phase 3 randomised trial found that whole brain radiotherapy had no beneficial effect on length or quality of survival over treatment with steroids and other supportive care [1].

Despite its widespread use, until now there has been no robust evidence to determine whether whole brain radiotherapy, which can have substantial side effects (eg, fatigue, nausea, neurotoxicity), is better than best supportive care alone in terms of prolonging life or improving quality of life.

The authors say that while whole brain radiotherapy may be beneficial in patients who are younger than 60 years old, it should no longer be considered standard treatment for the majority of patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) that has spread to the brain.

The findings will be presented at the European Respiratory Society meeting in London on Monday 5th September.

More than 1.8 million people will be diagnosed with lung cancer worldwide this year. Up to 30% of NSCLC will eventually spread to the brain and most are inoperable and have a poor prognosis. Secondary brain tumours are usually treated with whole brain radiotherapy along with supportive care including steroids (usually dexamethasone), but with limited success.

"Whole brain radiotherapy was widely adopted into clinical practice based on the assumption it improves tumour control in patients with brain metastases. But in our lung cancer clinics, we were not seeing the improvements we had hoped for in our patients. Survival times are poor and have hardly changed since the 1980s. What's more, the technique's toxicity can be substantial and it can damage cognitive function", explains study author Dr Paula Mulvenna, Consultant Clinical Oncologist, Newcastle Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. [2]

In order to see if patients could be treated as effectively without whole brain radiotherapy (WBRT), Mulvenna and colleagues designed the non-inferiority Quality of Life after Treatment for Brain Metastases (QUARTZ) trial. They recruited 538 NSCLC patients (aged 18 or older) with brain metastases from 69 centres in the UK and three in Australia between March 2007 and August 2014. Participants were randomly assigned to receive either best supportive care and dexamethasone, or best supportive care and dexamethasone plus whole brain radiotherapy (20 Gy in five daily fractions).

As the life expectancy of patients with advanced NSCLC is poor, the benefits of treatment were measured in terms of quality adjusted life years (QALYS) which combines length and quality of life (evaluated during weekly telephone assessments). The researchers decided that a reduction in QALYs of no more than 7 days would convince clinicians and patients that WBRT should no longer be considered as standard care. By October 2015, 536 patients had died (267 in the whole brain radiotherapy group and 269 in the best supportive care alone group).

Findings showed that patients in both groups lived a similar length of time after randomisation (average survival 64.4 days whole brain radiotherapy group vs 59.5 days best supportive care alone group ), and experienced a similar quality of life. Having one week of whole brain radiation showed no quality-of-life benefit. Furthermore, the difference between the groups in terms of average QALYs was just 4.7 days (46.4 days in the whole brain radiotherapy group vs 41.7 days in the best supportive care alone group. There were no clear differences in steroid use or the number of serious adverse events reported in both groups, although more episodes of drowsiness, hair loss, nausea, and dry/itchy scalp were reported while patients were receiving WBRT.

The authors note that although the patients recruited in this trial had a poorer prognosis than those in previous studies (which provided the basis for the use of whole brain radiotherapy), they are typical of patients in routine clinical practice, of whom very few (3.5%-7.5%) fall into the better prognosis groups. Dr Mulvenna explains, "Just 30 patients (6%) in our analysis fell into the best prognosis group. Most (301 of 533; 56%) fell into the intermediate group who have previously been thought to benefit most from whole brain radiotherapy, but actually appear to derive no substantial benefit from this treatment."[2]

The researchers point to several caveats including the fact that 11% of participants randomised to whole brain radiotherapy were in too poor health or did not live long enough to receive the treatment. Additionally, the quality of life assessment was limited to key measures to avoid overburdening patients.

According to Professor Ruth Langley from the Medical Research Council Clinical Trials Unit at University College London, where the study was designed and co-ordinated, "Whole brain radiotherapy cannot be considered as the standard treatment for all patients with brain metastases because it does not extend survival, improve quality of life, or reduce steroid use. Overtime, there's been a shift away from using whole brain radiation in favour of radiosurgery, which has minimal side effects. Our results could further restrict its use. In the future, potential new treatments (whether using drugs or stereotactic radiotherapy techniques) should be assessed in addition to best supportive care rather than in addition to, or in place of, whole brain radiotherapy."[2]

Writing in a linked Comment, Dr Cecile Le Pechoux from Gustave Roussy Cancer Campus, Villejuif, France and colleagues discuss whether there is still a place for whole brain radiotherapy in NSCLC patients with brain metastases. They conclude, "This trial might not rule out use of whole brain radiotherapy in all patients with NSCLC and brain metastases...We believe that optimised whole brain radiotherapy, given at the right time to appropriate patients, could lead to more individualised strategies. Both systemic and local treatments of brain metastases need to be discussed with patients, taking into account the results of this trial, classical prognostic factors, and the molecular status."

###

NOTES TO EDITORS:

This study was funded by Cancer Research UK and Medical Research Council Clinical Trials Unit at University College London.

[1] Supportive care involves treatment to control cancer symptoms and reduce the side effects of cancer therapies.

[2] Quotes direct from author and cannot be found in text of Article.

IF YOU WISH TO PROVIDE A LINK TO THIS PAPER FOR YOUR READERS, PLEASE USE THE FOLLOWING, WHICH WILL GO LIVE AT THE TIME THE EMBARGO LIFTS: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)30825-X/abstract
Kuwait has advised citizens to make sure their phones contain no material that might be seen as being linked to Islamist militants before travelling to the United States, local media reported on Saturday, after three men were denied entry in July.

State news agency KUNA quoted a statement by the Kuwaiti embassy in Washington as saying that authorities at "some U.S. airports may check the contents of mobile phones or other smart mobile equipment".

"The embassy of the state of Kuwait in Washington urged citizens to make sure that their phones do not contain any materials or photos of extremist nature, related to areas of conflict or terrorist organisations or footage of violence of all kinds before entering U.S. territories," KUNA said, citing a statement.

"(This is) so that students and citizens may be spared questioning by authorities in U.S. airports and to avoid any action against them that could result in cancelling their visas and banning them from entering U.S. territories," it added.

The Arabic language al-Rai newspaper reported in July that three businessmen were questioned for 21 hours at Los Angeles airport and had their telephones checked before they were turned back, in the second incident of its kind this year.

The Gulf Arab OPEC oil exporter is a key U.S. ally and a member of an international alliance led by the United States which is fighting against Islamic State in Syria.

In July, the United Arab Emirates, another close Gulf Arab ally of the United States, told its male citizens to avoid wearing traditional white robes and head dress when travelling abroad, after a businessman was wrestled to the ground at an Avon, Ohio hotel and held as an Islamic State suspect.

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The Japanese prime minister said that near future will witness more joint project agreed upon during Sisi's visit to Japan in February

Egypt's President Abdel-Fatah El-Sisi on Sunday met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on the sidelines of the G20 summit in China, the third meeting in less than two years.

According to Egypts presidency spokesman Alaa Youssef, El-Sisi hailed bilateral relations between the two countries, hoping to increase joint cooperation in various fields, especially development, economic investment and education.

For his part, the Japanese prime minister said that the upcoming period would witness the implementation of more joint projects agreed upon during El-Sisi's visit to Japan in February, particularly in the fields of energy, health and infrastructure.

He also underlined the importance of promoting cultural, scientific and technological cooperation, noting his country's continued support for the establishment of the Egypt-Japan University for Science and Technology.

Egypt's president arrived in China's Hangzhou for the G20 Summit where Egypt is a guest of honour Saturday.

El-Sisi met with the Japanese prime minister in February in Tokyo, during a trip in which he addressed the Japanese parliament, becoming the first Arab president to do so.

In February, Egyptian Minister of International Cooperation Sahar Nasr signed three concessional loan agreements with the Japan International Cooperation Agency worth more than $450 million, earmarked to finance projects in the energy and transport sectors.

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Saturday, September 3, 2016

Cady Wellness Institute

Manage Andropause Symptoms with Bio-Identical Hormone Replacement

Bio-Identical Hormone Therapy for Depression Management

What is EMDR Therapy?

Treating Depression with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

Evaluate the Condition of Your Health with Functional Medical Testing

When to Consider ADHD Treatment

http://cadywellness.com Mental Health and Wellness Newburgh IN - Thu, 25 Aug 2016 17:16:41 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.2 http://cadywellness.com/manage-andropause-symptoms-bio-identical-hormone-replacement/ Mon, 15 Aug 2016 09:00:59 +0000 http://cadywellness.com/?p=1559 Everyone talks about menopause and the symptoms that wreak havoc on a womans life. Andropause is a less understood condition that affects men, and its turning your world upside down. It all started when you hit 40. Every day it is a struggle to get out of bed and find enough energy to get through []

The post Manage Andropause Symptoms with Bio-Identical Hormone Replacement appeared first on Cady Wellness Institute.

]]>Everyone talks about menopause and the symptoms that wreak havoc on a womans life. Andropause is a less understood condition that affects men, and its turning your world upside down. It all started when you hit 40. Every day it is a struggle to get out of bed and find enough energy to get through the day. Youre irritable and youve lost your stamina during your daily workout. Your weight is creeping up even though you havent done anything different with your routine. Youve lost your libido, a problem that bothers you more than anything else. Theres a good chance that you are suffering from andropause. Bio-identical hormone replacement can help you to manage your symptoms and feel like yourself again.

What is Andropause and How Can Hormone Therapy Help?

When you were in your teens and twenties, your reproductive hormones were at their peak levels. For men, testosterone is the hormone that makes you feel like a powerhouse, giving you energy, strength and a healthy sex drive. Once you hit 30, your hormones began to drop. At 40 and beyond, you could experience a significant drop as your reproductive system gets ready to shut down. This decline in hormone levels is known as andropause. For some men, it is hardly noticeable. Others feel like you, as if they are on a roller coaster and want to get off.

Bio-identical hormone replacement involves using prescribed doses of bio-identical hormones to supplement your low hormone levels. The bio-identical hormones generally come from plant sources and match the makeup of the hormones that are found in your body.

How Can You Begin Bio-Identical Hormone Replacement?

You should always seek a doctors assistance when it comes to bio-identical hormone replacement. You want to be sure that you are using hormones that are safe for your body at the proper dosage. When you come in to see our doctor, you will be asked a series of questions about your symptoms. Expect a physical examination and a blood test. The blood test will be able to determine any low levels of hormones in your body. Dr. Cady will rule out any other condition that could be causing your symptoms, such as a thyroid problem or an issue with your heart. If hormones are to blame, our doctor can discuss your options for bio-identical hormone replacement.

Ask Dr. Cady About Bio-Identical Hormone Replacement

If you are frustrated by your symptoms and think andropause is to blame, its time to see our doctor at Cady Wellness Institute in Newburgh, IN. Learn more about how bio-identical hormone replacement can work for you. Contact us today to schedule your consultation.

The post Manage Andropause Symptoms with Bio-Identical Hormone Replacement appeared first on Cady Wellness Institute.

]]>http://cadywellness.com/bio-identical-hormone-therapy-depression-management/ Mon, 01 Aug 2016 09:00:13 +0000 http://cadywellness.com/?p=1555 You knew that your hormones could throw you for a loop. This especially holds true with reproductive hormones as middle age approaches. A significant drop in reproductive hormones, such as testosterone, estrogen and progesterone, can occur any time after the age of 40, making a person feel irritable, fatigued and weak. Fluctuations in these hormones []

The post Bio-Identical Hormone Therapy for Depression Management appeared first on Cady Wellness Institute.

]]>You knew that your hormones could throw you for a loop. This especially holds true with reproductive hormones as middle age approaches. A significant drop in reproductive hormones, such as testosterone, estrogen and progesterone, can occur any time after the age of 40, making a person feel irritable, fatigued and weak. Fluctuations in these hormones can also lead to, or aggravate, depression . If you have been suffering from depression, bio-identical hormone therapy could help you to manage your condition.

Battling Depression with Bio-Identical Hormone Therapy

As a woman, you can really be put through an emotional wringer when it comes to your hormones. You may feel like you are being dragged down as your body prepares for menopause. Anxiety is common as well while you battle hot flashes, night sweats, weight gain and insomnia. Its enough to make you feel like you are going crazy.

This is a time in your life when you are at the mercy of your hormones, but you do have options that can make you feel better. Bio-identical hormone therapy can help you to manage depression and the other troubling symptoms that have been bringing you down.

How Do Bio-Identical Hormones Work?

Bio-identical hormones usually come from plant sources, such as soybeans or yams. They are natural and have the same makeup as the hormones that are produced by your body. When you opt for a hormone replacement regimen that uses hormones that match your own, your body will accept them more easily. In time, you will begin to feel relief from your symptoms. You will be able to restore balance to your hormone levels, improving your well-being in the process.

Getting Started with Bio-Identical Hormone Therapy

To begin bio-identical hormone therapy to treat your depression, you need to schedule an appointment to see our physician at Cady Wellness Institute in Newburgh, IN. During this meeting, Dr. Cady will discuss your symptoms, look at your medical history and take a blood test. Your blood test will be able to determine if your hormones have dropped.

If you do have an imbalance in your hormone levels, our doctor can prescribe bio-identical hormones that are the proper dosage for you. In time, your mood will begin to improve. You can finally take charge of your emotions with a little bit of help from our experienced doctor. Contact our office today to schedule your consultation to learn more.

The post Bio-Identical Hormone Therapy for Depression Management appeared first on Cady Wellness Institute.

]]>http://cadywellness.com/what-is-emdr-therapy/ Mon, 18 Jul 2016 09:00:28 +0000 http://cadywellness.com/?p=1484 Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy, also known as EMDR therapy, is a form of psychotherapy designed to help people heal from extremely traumatic life events. EMDR therapy will help reduce the emotional distress, panic attacks, anxiety and other serious symptoms that most people experience after undergoing a disturbing experience in their life. EMDR therapy []

The post What is EMDR Therapy? appeared first on Cady Wellness Institute.

]]>Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy, also known as EMDR therapy , is a form of psychotherapy designed to help people heal from extremely traumatic life events. EMDR therapy will help reduce the emotional distress, panic attacks, anxiety and other serious symptoms that most people experience after undergoing a disturbing experience in their life. EMDR therapy combines several different popular treatment approaches into one extremely effective technique to remove as much psychological stress as possible.

While you will never forget what happened, EMDR therapy can help remove the upsetting symptoms you experience every time the event is brought up. This will stop you from constantly reliving the sights and sounds of the event. EMDR therapy uses eight treatment phases to provide effective results.

The first phase of EMDR therapy will have you reveal as much information about your past history as possible. You will have to be prepared to discuss the disturbing event that brought you to seek therapy. This information will help the therapist develop the right treatment plan for you. The first phase of EMDR therapy can usually be completed in one or two sessions depending on how many traumatic events you have experienced.

The second phase of EMDR therapy is called preparation. You will be taught several specific techniques to help you deal with your emotional stress. This will help you prepare for the upcoming treatment sessions while also making it easier to cope between treatment sessions. This phase of the therapy can usually be completely in one to three sessions.

Phases three to six of EMDR therapy will have you directly deal with the traumatic event, the negative thoughts this event brings up and the body sensations felt throughout the trauma. While you are visualizing a distinct image from the traumatic event, you will use eye movements, taps on the body and audible tones to help you cope with this image. This will help you desensitize your brain to the disturbing event.

After completing the eye movements, taps and tones, you will be instructed to let your mind go blank. This process will be repeated until you no longer have problematic symptoms associated with this image. Once you are no longer experiencing emotional distress when thinking of the traumatic event, you will be asked to think of a positive time in your life. This will help train the brain to start to associate something positive with the disturbing event. The goal is to complete these four phases of treatment in one therapy session, but that is not possible with everyone.

The entire process of phase three to six of EMDR therapy will be repeated if you have multiple traumatic events that need to be addressed. Phase seven of EMDR therapy is called closure, and it will be how you end each session. You will undergo a self-calming technique to ensure that you are ready to return to your normal life. You will come back for one more sessions during phase eight of treatment, which is called reevaluation. This session will consist of examining the progress you made throughout your previous sessions.

If you have experienced a traumatic life event and the aftereffects are interfering with your everyday life, we strongly encourage you to visit Cady Wellness Institute in Newburgh, IN to learn more information about EMDR therapy. Contact us today to schedule your consultation.

The post What is EMDR Therapy? appeared first on Cady Wellness Institute.

]]>http://cadywellness.com/treating-depression-transcranial-magnetic-stimulation/ Mon, 04 Jul 2016 09:00:06 +0000 http://cadywellness.com/?p=1480 Transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS for short, is a non-invasive procedure used to treat depression. It uses magnetic energy to stimulate nerve cells in the brain. Doctors often use TMS when other treatment methods havent worked. What Does the Procedure Involve? During a transcranial magnetic stimulation session, the medical professional will place an electromagnetic coil []

The post Treating Depression with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation appeared first on Cady Wellness Institute.

]]> Transcranial magnetic stimulation , or TMS for short, is a non-invasive procedure used to treat depression. It uses magnetic energy to stimulate nerve cells in the brain. Doctors often use TMS when other treatment methods havent worked.

What Does the Procedure Involve?

During a transcranial magnetic stimulation session, the medical professional will place an electromagnetic coil on the patients scalp near their forehead. The coil sends a pulse of electromagnetic energy into the patients brain that stimulates the nerve cells in the region that controls mood.

The treatment is simple, and it is usually an outpatient procedure. The patient will generally undergo daily sessions multiple times a week for four to six weeks. It generally takes a few weeks for the treatment to produce results.

The first session is the longest and takes about an hour. The medical professional will need to determine the best dose of magnetic energy and the best place for the coil. The doctor will place an electromagnetic coil on the patients head and begin mapping or trying to determine the best place. The coil will be turned on and off to produce the pulses. The patient will feel tapping on their forehead and may hear tapping or clicking noises during the process.

The doctor will then determine the appropriate amount of energy to use by increasing the dosage until the patients hands or fingers start twitching. The doctor will use that motor threshold as a reference point. The doctor may change the energy dosage during treatment.

Subsequent sessions will last around 40 minutes. The patient can resume their usual routine immediately after a session, including driving or working.

Who is a Good Candidate for TMS?

People in overall good health are usually good candidates for transcranial magnetic stimulation. It is not recommended for people with implanted devices or metal. People who are taking any kind of medication, be it prescription, over-the-counter or supplements, need to inform our doctor. Women who are pregnant or plan to become pregnant should also talk to our doctor before undergoing TMS.

Learn More During a Consultation

If you are suffering from depression, you know how debilitating this condition can be. Visit Cady Wellness Institute in Newburgh to learn more about how transcranial magnetic stimulation can help to treat your depression. This simple, non-invasive procedure may be all that you need to finally kick your depression to the curb. Contact us today to schedule your appointment.

The post Treating Depression with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation appeared first on Cady Wellness Institute.

]]>http://cadywellness.com/evaluate-condition-health-functional-medical-testing/ Mon, 20 Jun 2016 09:00:44 +0000 http://cadywellness.com/?p=1471 The processes of the body are many threads interwoven infinite times. Something as seemingly benign as prolonged stress can combine with other factors to make undesirable conditions like cancer into a reality. The key to decreasing the likelihood of acquiring these life-threatening conditions while improving a patients health resides with understanding the way functional factors []

The post Evaluate the Condition of Your Health with Functional Medical Testing appeared first on Cady Wellness Institute.

]]>The processes of the body are many threads interwoven infinite times. Something as seemingly benign as prolonged stress can combine with other factors to make undesirable conditions like cancer into a reality. The key to decreasing the likelihood of acquiring these life-threatening conditions while improving a patients health resides with understanding the way functional factors influence a patients overall health.

This practice is known as functional medical testing. It is one of the more robust ways of ensuring that a patient can stay healthy by examining how the parts of a persons health affect the whole.

What is Functional Medical Testing?

Functional medical testing attempts to look at a number of unique and interconnected aspects that may result in varying performance of the body, which in turn can lead to the development of health problems and other undesirable conditions.

Elements that functional medical testing may examine include:

Biological factors  This can include white blood cell counts, the presence of nutrients in blood and the bodys effectiveness at responding to biological pathogens.

Environmental inputs  Food allergies, the amount of nutrition a patient receives, physical exercise levels and stress factors are all things that functional medical testing seeks to examine and evaluate.

Genetic factors  DNA is both a starting point and an evolving blueprint for your bodys biological building blocks. By examining your genetic makeup, the ability of your body to repair and maintain itself can be evaluated.

Mind-body qualities  The many links between the mind and the body are undeniable. By examining how mind factors affect the body and vice versa, functional medical testing can help form more effective ways to treat and prevent problems.

The goal of examining these various, seemingly unrelated factors is to create a picture of how the patients body interacts with both internal and external stimuli. This can help to accurately pinpoint the cause of certain problems while forecasting the development of other conditions that could become lifelong chronic conditions if left untreated.

Why Can It Help You Evaluate Your Health?

The popular method of treating a patient first requires that a tangible problem develops. This allows a doctor to diagnose an issue before troubleshooting it. The problem with this is that it is like waiting until your car breaks down to visit a mechanic. The repairs can be costly; the repair process is lengthy; and the car may not perform as well as it did before the trauma was incurred.

Functional medical testing seeks to prevent problems before they develop. This minimizes the negative developments a patient will face while maximizing the overall status of a patients health.

To learn more about the uses of functional medical testing, schedule an appointment at Cady Wellness Institute in Newburgh, IN. Our experienced care providers will utilize their knowledge and experience with the latest in diagnostic technology to provide you with an effective diagnosis that successfully prevents and treats many conditions. Contact us today to book your consultation.

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]]>http://cadywellness.com/consider-adhd-treatment/ Mon, 06 Jun 2016 09:00:38 +0000 http://cadywellness.com/?p=1465 ADHD, more formally known as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, is a common neurological and developmental disorder. It is usually first diagnosed in childhood. Contrary to popular belief, children do not outgrow the disorder; teenagers and adults can have ADHD, too. Before seeking ADHD treatment, it is beneficial to know some general information about ADHD. What Are the []

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From: American Evaluation Association (AEA) For Immediate Release: Dateline: Washington , DC Saturday, September 3, 2016



Saludos! Greetings! I am Lisa Aponte-Soto, National Program Deputy Director of RWJF New Connections and Director at Equal Measure, AEA GEDI alumna, and LA RED TIG Chair.

Why I chose to honor this evaluator:

honors Arthur (Art) E. Hernandez, PhD for his leadership in culturally responsive evaluation (CRE) practices and commitment to diversifying the field.

Art Hernandez was Professor and Dean at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi, and Director of the

His first evaluation experience was with a project for the Texas school district. The program staff viewed him as a researcher and saw no distinction between research and evaluation. Art began expanding his scope of work to different settings. Before long, he became a respected evaluator valued for his bilingual and bicultural lens. However, it wasnt until he participated in the 2009 MSI cohort that he realized that he was conducting formal evaluation.

Art attributes MSI and similar traineeships for building his evaluation methodology skills. Equally, he accredits his lived experience and his perspective as a Latino as being critical to the quality of evaluation. His ethnic background and CRE training have also influenced his attention to cultural context in the work.

Art refers to culturally responsive evaluation (CRE) as an essential technical and quality-driven inherent value for all evaluation practice. And, he applauds AEA for being at the forefront of integrating cultural awareness and responsiveness in the field.

He also acknowledges the importance of AEAs community of learning fostered through Annual Meetings and Summer Institutes, where he has been able to engage and learn with seasoned evaluators. In turn, Art values giving back to AEA.

A lifetime educator, Art is passionate about mentoring the next generation of culturally responsive evaluators. When invited to lead the MSI Program in 2011, he didnt hesitate and continues in this role

As an active AEA member, Art is a founding member of LA RED, has served various TIGs, and most notably has contributed to the AEA

Rad Resources: Listen to his recent Coffee Break session,

Meet Art and other Latinx pioneers at Evaluation 2016, Senior Latin@ Evaluators Reflections on Culturally Responsive Evaluation + Design.

Get Involved: To learn more about evaluation theory and practice by, for and with Latinx communities join LA RED by emailing

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Labor Day Week in Evaluation: Honoring Evaluations Living Pioneers. The contributions this week are tributes to our living evaluation pioneers who have made important contributions to our field and even positive impacts on our careers as evaluators. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the

This is part of a two-week series honoring our living evaluation pioneers in conjunction with Labor Day in the USA (September 5).Saludos! Greetings! I am, National Program Deputy Director of RWJF New Connections and Director at Equal Measure, AEA GEDI alumna, and LA RED TIG Chair. LA RED TIG honors Arthur (Art) E. Hernandez, PhD for his leadership in culturally responsive evaluation (CRE) practices and commitment to diversifying the field.Art Hernandez was Professor and Dean at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi, and Director of the AEA Minority Serving Institution (MSI) initiative . He has recently transitioned to the University of the Incarnate Word. Art has rooted his career in his native Texas, yet his contributions span across the nation.His first evaluation experience was with a project for the Texas school district. The program staff viewed him as a researcher and saw no distinction between research and evaluation. Art began expanding his scope of work to different settings. Before long, he became a respected evaluator valued for his bilingual and bicultural lens. However, it wasnt until he participated in the 2009 MSI cohort that he realized that he was conducting formal evaluation.Art attributes MSI and similar traineeships for building his evaluation methodology skills. Equally, he accredits his lived experience and his perspective as a Latino as being critical to the quality of evaluation. His ethnic background and CRE training have also influenced his attention to cultural context in the work.Art refers to culturally responsive evaluation (CRE) as an essential technical and quality-driven inherent value for all evaluation practice. And, he applauds AEA for being at the forefront of integrating cultural awareness and responsiveness in the field.He also acknowledges the importance of AEAs community of learning fostered through Annual Meetings and Summer Institutes, where he has been able to engage and learn with seasoned evaluators. In turn, Art values giving back to AEA.A lifetime educator, Art is passionate about mentoring the next generation of culturally responsive evaluators. When invited to lead the MSI Program in 2011, he didnt hesitate and continues in this roleAs an active AEA member, Art is a founding member of LA RED, has served various TIGs, and most notably has contributed to the AEA Statement on Cultural Competence in Evaluation . Currently, he is working on an evaluation capacity building recipe book for community based organizations.Listen to his recent Coffee Break session, The Rise of Latinx presence, perceptions and contributions to notions of CRE and AEA Meet Art and other Latinx pioneers at Evaluation 2016, Senior Latin@ Evaluators Reflections on Culturally Responsive Evaluation + Design.To learn more about evaluation theory and practice by, for and with Latinx communities join LA RED by emailing lared.tig@gmail.com The American Evaluation Association is celebrating. The contributions this week are tributes to our living evaluation pioneers who have made important contributions to our field and even positive impacts on our careers as evaluators. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.


Sunday, September 4, 2016

The CIDER act was finally passed. What does this mean for NY wineries, breweries and cideries? It allows cider producers to produce a wider portfolio of products and still qualify for the tax breaks given to cider before it is taxed at the higher rates for other fruit wines or sparkling fruit wines. It also eliminates the discrepancy between the 7% federal limit on ABV and the state 8.5% ABV.

The savings? This change could save cideries about $3-$3.80 per gallon on taxes. The CIDER Act will allow for Cider made with up to 6.4 grams CO2 per liter and an ABV up to 8.5% to qualify for the TTB cider tax rate of only 22.6 cents per gallon.[1] There is one important thing to note. While these changes generally increase the cider varieties that can be made, if other fruit flavorings are added (for example, blackberry perry or raspberry apple cider), these fruit-flavored ciders are generally taxed as a fruit wine and must pay the full $1.07/gal tax subject to a $0.90/gal credit on the first 100,000 gallons produced.

The most important parts of the new law are the revised definition of hard cider. It now includes:

Alcoholic beverage derived primarily from apples, apple juice concentrate and water, pears, or pear juice concentrate and water;

contains no fruit product or fruit flavoring other than apple or pear;

contains 0.5%  8.5% ABV; and

carbonation level of which does not exceed 6.4 grams per liter.

The increase in the ABV is important for several reasons: first, with the sophistication of the consumer palette in the craft alcoholic beverage market, consumer expectations and demand for cider cover a broader range of flavors and alcohol content, and increasing the allowable ABV puts US cideries in a more competitive position internationally in the cider market. Now dry ciders can be produced for the same price as mass produced sweet ciders. Second, it recognizes and adjusts for the reality of cider making that apples produce a less predictable alcohol content than grapes because of the greater variety of apple types and range of growing conditions. Allowing a pure product to be sold without diluting it with water is better for both the producer and the consumer. Third, perry (pear cider) can now qualify as a hard cider. Lastly, the increased carbonation level allows more product variety and manufacturing methods (especially the champagne method and double fermentation).
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As the Tower of the Americas loomed behind a pair of bright yellow combatants Saturday inside the Convention Center, the gathered crowd knew there could be only one victor in this epic clash of the Pikachu onesies.

And so the Pokemon pretender Ashlynn Brown of San Antonio stood triumphant, having vanquished her fellow Pikachu player Sierra Rodriguez from Pleasanton in a friendly live-action Pokemon battle, where they performed attacks barked out by their pretend trainers.

You just have to act really animated and goofy, Brown said.

Perfect advice for anyone attending San Japan, San Antonios premiere celebration of Japanese animation known as anime and all other things otaku, affectionately known as your Japanese term for geek.

The all-ages extravaganza concluded Sunday at the Convention Center and nearby Grand Hyatt San Antonio.

San Japan specializes in fun with Japanese culture, featuring plenty of costume play known as cosplay and equally colorful activities for convention-goers, such as that pretend Pokemon combat and cosplay chess.

Other animated activities include an adults-only cosplay dating game and a grand cosplay show at the Lila Cockrell Theatre. There are also video games and tabletop gaming, plus concerts and electronic music for those who really want to get down with their costumed selves.

And, oh, those merry outfits at San Japan.

Downtown Saturday teemed with teens and young adults in vibrant wigs of varying colors, lengths and spikes, sporting gonzo costumes that ran the spectrum from revealing fantasy to frilly Victorian, many accented with chunky plates of EVA foam armor and giant EVA foam swords the size of third graders.

Plenty of giant slayers from the popular anime and manga (comic) Attack on Titan were in attendance, as were the magical girls of Sailor Moon, which included sisters Katrina and Cherise Welch, cosplaying for the first time as Sailor Moon and Sailor Chibi Moon, respectively.

And who could forget that dude trio dressed as the impostor Powerpuff Girls, right down to the colorful dresses and open-mouth masks revealing their facial hair?

Then there were all those Pokemon.

As if San Antonio didnt have enough Pokemon Go on the brain, several of those pocket monsters from the hit mobile game came to life at San Japan, with many dressed as their favorite Pokemon critters and trainers.

Proud papa Mike Palacios of San Antonio rocked his own Pikachu onesie, while holding in his arms the cutest little Ash the Pokemon trainer youve ever seen  his 1-year-old son Marcus.

Life is a fairy tale, you know. Its a dream, said Palacios, who with Marcus was attending his first San Japan. And Ive got to try to make the very best out of what Ive got because Im not promised to be here every day. So when Im dead and gone and hes telling stories about his dad, I want him to say, My dad was the most epic dad ever.

This years event was dubbed San Japan 009 for its ninth year, and as a nod to the classic Japanese anime and manga Cyborg 009 to highlight a theme of robots and androids.

The real robot star had to be Ramon Martinez, who made his San Japan debut as the giant robot Voltron, stomping through the convention in a towering suit made of corrugated plastic sheets that took him two weeks to make.

I just really like dressing up, Martinez said. Halloween is my favorite holiday. ... This just gives me an excuse to make some other stuff.

Billed as South Texas largest anime convention, San Japan draws record crowds year after year. Last years welcomed more than 18,000 unique attendees, a number San Japan community relations director S. David Ramirez hopes to meet or exceed for the Labor Day weekend.

Its all about celebrating San Antonio fandom, celebrating San Antonio as a community, Ramirez said. And when you support the community the community supports you.

Or as that Pokemon saying goes, San Japan has just gotta catch em all.

rguzman@express-news.net

Twitter: @reneguz
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As the fuel gauge neared empty aboard his C-46 Commando cargo plane over the Pacific in 1944, 2nd Lt. Donald Stinson thought about how a famous flier, Eddie Rickenbacker, had helped six other men stay alive while drifting in a vast ocean.

A seagull that landed on top of Rickenbackers head soon became lunch, a spot of luck Stinson wasnt sure would break his way after imagining his C-46  drained of gas by a bad headwind en route to Hawaii  going down in the middle of nowhere.

So thinking about having to ditch our airplane and get into a life raft, I decided to eat my sandwich, he wrote in a self-published book, The WWII History of Donald Stinson  A C-46 Pilot in the Pacific.

I looked over at my pilot. He was sweating profusely, wrote Stinson, a retired San Antonio school district cafeteria director. He looked over at me and became unglued, cussing like a sailor. How can you eat when we are about to ditch?! I should have offered him the other half of my sandwich.

On Saturday, after receiving six decorations earned during World War II but never presented to him, Stinson chuckled at the memory, recalling over bites of  yes  a sandwich, one mostly eaten, Ive never seen anybody perspire like he did.

Stinson, 93, received an Army Commendation Medal, American Campaign Medal, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with four bronze service stars, the World War II Victory Medal, the Philippine Liberation Ribbon with one bronze star and the Honorable Service Lapel Button.

The ceremony was full of light moments as U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, read each award while an aide presented them to Stinson, who is most proud of his later role supervising the implementation of the free federal lunch program in the San Antonio school district.

The year was 1967, and the action so controversial only one food supervisor supported it.

Four of the five supervisors that were against the new lunch program retired, Stinson wrote in the book. One even said she was going to run for the school board so she could fire me.

Donald David Stinson joined the Army Air Forces after talking with a couple of servicemen at the Double Dip, an Amarillo restaurant started by his dad during the Depression. He did his basic training in San Antonio and finished flight instruction at Ellington Field in Houston before joining the 7th Combat Cargo Squadron.

His near disastrous flight to Hawaii came in September 1944, but it had a happy ending when the crew found a remote airfield on Maui. They rested three days before heading to Australia, making a series of island hops along the way.

At Fanafuti, a Pacific atoll, they saw evidence of a bitter war  damaged American and Japanese planes, some of them sticking out of the water adjacent to the airstrip. The job involved flying men and materiel ever closer to Japans home islands, but the supplies werent always grenades and bullets.

On one run near New Guinea, where Japanese troops still occupied territory, they were part of a group of planes charged with bringing 20,000 cases of beer to thirsty Marines and GIs. Upon landing, a loading officer scoured the plane after checking through the manifest and realizing he was six cases short.

We told him they must have miscounted at Finchhaven, Stinson wrote, referring to his base in Australia.

The crew had hidden the extra cases of beer in a compartment below the cockpit.

The crew later found an idled C-47, decided it was airworthy and painted it green. They called it the Green Hornet and crews often made beer runs in it to Australia, but soon an agitated 5th Air Force got wind of its existence and sent out a memo.

It instructed everyone to report immediately any information you have about this unauthorized plane seen flying around, Stinson wrote.

There were sober moments, too.

Sleeping on cots underneath the wings of their plane one night on Okinawa, the crew was awakened by the sound of an enemy plane. It was a kamikaze and took aim at one of the aircraft on the ground, but fell 300 to 400 feet from their C-46. Stinson and his men eyed the dead pilot and then noticed that his bomb hadnt detonated.

They quickly walked away.

Later, Stinsons crew was sent to fly Army nurses out of the Philippines after special forces rescued them. The women, like other Japanese prisoners, were malnourished.

In fact, he said that was one of his war memories he was most proud of, said his daughter, Kim Barker, 61, of San Antonio.

They were in pretty bad shape.

On the taxiway before dawn with wounded soldiers in his cargo hold, Stinson was told to wait for a P-61 Black Widow, a new twin-engine fighter, to take off. An oil tanker rolled onto the runway just as the plane started to take off.

The sky, he wrote, lit up with a big ball of fire.

There was the mission when one of the landing gear collapsed as they landed. The plane skidded off to the side of the runway, but Stinson  the command pilot pressed on the right brake and one of the rudders to keep it from careening out of control.

The plane caught fire.

And so I hollered, Get out! Stinson said, laughing as he remembered the co-pilot jumping out of one of the cockpit windows and rushing past a spinning prop.

They took us to the hospital and gave us a shot of whiskey, he smiled.

sigc@express-news.net
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Seguin Independent School District officials say passage of Saturdays tax ratification election would boost district revenues, provide money for staff raises, and result in a lower 2016-17 property tax rate than if the measure fails.

The special election was called to take advantage of school finance laws that reward districts with more state aid for raising the portion of their tax levy that funds maintenance and operations (M&O) than for a similar increase in the Interest and Sinking (I&S) levy, which funds debt service.

In Seguin, officials say, a one-cent per $100 hike in the I&S tax rate would generate about $300,000 in state aid next year for the district, versus about $685,000 in aid for each penny increase per $100 in its M&O levy.

The ballot measure would increase the M&O levy by two cents per $100 above its current state-mandated cap of $1.04 per $100.

Voter approval of the proposal Saturday would result in a total tax rate of $1.42 per $100 in appraised property value, including $1.06 for M&O and 36 cents for I&S.

A defeat would likely result in a district tax rate of $1.43, with $1.04 for M&O and 39 cents for I&S, officials said.

Trustee Louis Reyes III fears the complicated issue may confuse local voters.

If its explained correctly, it will pass, he said Thursday. If people understand it.

Passage of the measure would fund raises of 4 percent for teachers and $1 an hour more for hourly workers, Superintendent Stetson Roane said. The pay hikes would total about $1.8 million with benefits, officials say.

Im not asking the taxpayers to give us any more, Roane said in pitching the election plan to trustees in June. By rolling the tax revenue from I&S to M&O, we get more bang for our buck.

The districts 2016-17 budget totals $71.9 million, including $56.4 million in general fund expenditures. Debt service payments will go to reduce the $83.3 million bond debt authorized by voters in 2013.

Educate Seguin, a local nonprofit formed to promote quality instruction, hasnt taken a position for or against the referendum, Bob Stephens, one of its co-presidents said.

However, he said funding staff raises should have been a priority, rather than a carrot dangled before voters to win support for the ballot measure. Stephens also complained theres been zero outreach by the district to enlighten voters.

Beside reviewing the ballot initiative at board meetings, the district has posted information on its website, sent out mailers to parents and conducted campus briefings.

Weve tried our best to explain it, saidTrustee Barbara Effenberger, reporting public feedback as mixed.

The people who are for our teachers support the issue, she said. There are some people who question how we spend money in our district, and they are probably going to say no.

The districts current tax rate is $1.41 per $100 in appraised property value, comprised of a M&O levy of $1.04, and 37 cents for I&S.

The election was required due to a June 21 vote by trustees to set the districts M&O levy for the new fiscal year at $1.06, exceeding the state-mandated M&O cap of $1.04, unless districts receive voter approval to go higher.

Trustees delayed action then on setting its I&S rate pending the outcome of the election.

Kevin OHanlon, the school districts attorney, said raising the I&S levy 3 cents per $100 would yield about $900,000 in state aid next year, but the 2-cent per $100 M&O increase would yield nearly $1.4 million.

Thats because aid tied to the I&S levy is calculated using a districts average daily attendance (6,700 in Seguin ISD), while aid tied to the M&O levy instead utilizes a multiplier called weighted average daily attendance (8,899 in Seguin ISD) that rises if districts offer specialized coursework like bilingual classes and special education, he said.

Ive looked it over every way I can and I see no downside to it, trustee John Holt said, though he also has fielded concerns about voter confusion over the ballot measure.

People have not understood what its really about and, unfortunately, because school finance is so difficult to explain  and how the reimbursement comes about  you lose em.

zeke@express-news.net
The visit marks the third meeting of an Egyptian-Russian military committee on military cooperation between the countries

Egypt's Minister of Defence Sedki Sobhi flew to Russia Sunday on an official visit for talks related to Egyptian-Russian military cooperation.

The Egyptian army said in a statement that the the visit "constitutes a third meeting for the Egyptian-Russian military committee to discuss aspects of military cooperation between the two countries in various fields."



Sobhi's visit is expected to last a couple of days. Heading a delegation, Sobhi is also accompanied by Egyptian Minister of Military Production Mohamed El-Assar.

This is the latest in a series of visits focused on boosting military cooperation between Egypt and Russia, who are partners in coordinating efforts to fight terrorism.

Last August, Egypt received a new advanced warship, the Molniya RKA 32, "as part of mutual military cooperation between Cairo and Moscow," according to an army statement.

Last year, Russia and Egypt held their first ever joint naval exercise off the coast of Alexandria.

The eight-day drills included supply and communication exercises, search operations, and defence and firing exercises.



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Tourism businesses in the countryside are being held back due to the uncertainty of Brexit, says rural organisation CLA.

Just as the Prime Minister suggests Brits staycation, fears of under-investment in rural areas is getting the industry worried.

In response to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Efra) Select Committee inquiry into tourisms role in supporting rural growth in England, the CLA has called for a bespoke plan to address the challenges faced by rural tourism businesses, such as poor broadband and lack of investment.

The submission comes in the week after the Prime Minister announced a national tourism plan.

Theresa May last week pledged Brexit will create real opportunities for growth in the tourism sector as she announced a new 40m fund for tourism projects across the country.

But the CLA has criticised the National Tourism Action Plan for failing to address core concerns specific to rural areas or address concerns about funding currently provided through the EU for economic development initiatives that support tourism in rural Britain.

Encouraging more to stay in the countryside<

The current level of funding to develop rural tourism post-Brexit "must be retained"

CLA President Ross Murray said: "We want to encourage more visitors to stay in the beautiful British countryside and enjoy all the activities it has to offer.

"Tourism supports rural businesses and local communities and already provides around 11billion a year to the English economy, but investment will be lost if barriers are not broken down to ensure rural tourism is sustained through Brexit and beyond.

"Rural tourism is unique and must have bespoke policies which meet its needs.

Mr Murray said the CLA recommends the introduction of a new rural-focussed policy which complements the current government agenda on tourism.

"The Government has to recognise that rural tourism is different from urban, and encourage greater collaboration between the industry, DCMS and Defra," he said

Mr Murray added that that the current level of funding to develop rural tourism in a post-Brexit world must be retained to give confidence to rural businesses to invest in the future.

He said: "Industry and Government need to start work now on establishing how vital funding that supports tourism across the countryside, and is currently provided under EU funding streams, will be replaced up to and beyond the UKs exit from the EU."

CLA's Five Point Plan for rural tourism

Removing fragmentation: a new structure that encourages and fosters greater collaboration between the rural tourism industry and government that promotes growth, innovation and productivity.

Boosting apprenticeships and skills: development and implementation of a dedicated apprenticeship programme that can meet the needs of rural business.

Creating a dedicated rural funding mechanism: post-Brexit will be "crucial" for the Government to put in place a definitive, long-term funding programme that can work with the private sector to increase levels of investment.

Improving digital connectivity: access to a range of alternative options and technologies that suit the needs of these businesses, exploring community and business collaboration and a dedicated training and skills programme to allow businesses to exploit the advantages of the digital revolution.

Clear and far-sighted intelligence: creation of a rural tourism intelligence function between government and the industry so the right business decisions can be made based on the most up to date statistical evidence that can reinforce economic growth.
The UK farming union counterparts have called on the whole supply chain to maximise the return to dairy farmers who continue to lose money daily.

Despite a slight turn in the market, with AMPE/MCVE indicators up 24 per cent this month, dairy farmers continue to suffer a loss with recent milk price increases from processors not going far enough to assist them.

Last week, dairy officials from the National Farmers Union, NFU Cymru, NFU Scotland and the Ulster Farmers Union, met to discuss the key issues currently facing dairy farmers across the country.

Whilst the unions accepted the commercial competitive challenges of milk processors, retailers and other end users are intense, they are asking them to seriously and genuinely reflect on the pressures primary producers are under.

The officials also agreed to work together to achieve more effective price transmission, margin insurance, future and fixed pricing, more effective professional farmer representation, and a much stronger assurance that contracts between producers and processors are fair.

'Producers plight'

Processors need to move away from "current destructive short-term culture"

Aled Jones, NFU Cymru Milk Board Chairman, said: "We hear platitudes that processors and end users have sympathy for producers plight.

"Some will be genuine, but the speed in reflecting positive market increase in value is not quick enough, particularly in the current exceptional circumstances.

"Actions speak much louder than words and all the UK farming unions ask of the supply chain is to seriously and genuinely consider the long term damage and consequences of a not delivering much more back to primary producers.

Mr Jones said farmers do not want to hear individual processors, their farmer representatives or retailers, "defending or justifying" the pace of price movement.

"What they want to hear is a genuine and collective assurance," Mr Jones said, "backed by price increases, from all in the supply chain, that primary production is a fundamental requirement to their business and to consider the impact and consequences on the primary sector.

"We ask the supply chain to reflect on the need to raise the bar and to consider the impact on their business if their income did not match costs for long periods.

Supply chain valuing farmers

Mr Jones said many dairy farmers are asking themselves and their families if the supply chain values them.

"We are putting pressure on responsible processors, retailers and other end users to consider how they can collectively, and without any compromise on legal requirements, move away from the current destructive short-term culture towards a position where all efficient, progressive businesses can prosper.

"It is essential the supply chain reflects on whether it is sustainable to be competitive based on the ability to drive the primary sector into the ground and effectively reducing the supply base in the UK to a dangerously low level.

"The crisis is not over, and all in the dairy supply chain have a reason to take collective action now and for the future," concluded Mr Jones.
"While the issues facing the WA dairy industry are significantly different from those in the eastern States, we were encouraged by the commitment to find a solution - and to safeguarding the livelihoods of Australia's dairy farmers and their families.
Fort Bragg to be known as Fort Liberty. Here's what to know.

When will Fort Bragg be renamed? Why will it be renamed Fort Liberty? How much will it cost?
Egypt's irrigation and water resources minister announced on Sunday the postponing of contract signing with two foreign consultancy firms  to study the impact of Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam on downriver countries  due to "unresolved issues."

In statements to the state-owned MENA news agency, ministry spokesman Waleed Haqiqi said that the delay was due to "outstanding issues between the consultancy firms conducting the technical studies and the legal firm wording the contracts."

Haqiqi added that another reason behind the postponing was that the firms' experts were not granted entry visas to Sudan.

The signing of the contracts between the two French firms  BRL and Artelia  and Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan was to take place on 5-6 September in Sudan's Khartoum, according to Egypt's foreign ministry.

The spokesman added that Egypt was currently coordinating with the consultancy firms and the Sudanese and Ethiopian sides to agree on a new date for the meetings.

The announcement by Egypt comes a few days after media reports quoted an unnamed Ethiopian source as saying that no date was set for the signing of the contracts as announced by Egypt's foreign ministry.

However, last week an official Egyptian source told Al-Ahram newspaper said that they were officially invited by Ethiopia to the meeting on 5-6 September and have not received any notice of a postponement, quelling the media reports.

Cairo has repeatedly expressed concerns that Ethiopias $4.2 billion dam could affect its historical share of Nile water, or, according to Prime Minister Sherif Ismail, that the hydroelectric dam could be used for reasons other than electricity generation.

Addis Ababa insists that the nearly complete dam project will not affect downstream countries negatively.

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Laura Whitmore was partnered with Giovanni Pernice as 'Strictly Come Dancing' returned to television screens on Saturday evening (03.09.16).

Laura Whitmore and Giovanni Pernice

The television presenter was paired with the Italian dancer and choreographer - who previously enjoyed a romance with his former 'Strictly' partner Georgia May Foote - as the couples for the upcoming series were announced in front of an excited studio audience.

The news of their paring comes only a few days after Georgia announced she had split from Giovanni.

And Laura has previously admitted to being up to finding love on the BBC One show.

She said at the time: "I did laugh when they were talking about your dance partner. I was like, 'Is it dance partner or is it a future husband?' Friends who have been on the show told me you make best friends for life. They said you do become close as your dance partner is such a big figure to you and you rely on them so much. So it's not actually romantic. Then again, the show has made a lot of couples. How many relationships have come out of it? Quite a few."

Elsewhere on the show, the programme's oldest contestant Lesley Joseph was partnered with 'Strictly' legend Anton Du Beke whilst model Daisy Lowe was teamed up with fan favourite Aljaz Skorjanec.

'Hollyoaks' actor Danny Mac was paired with Oti Mabuse and television presenter and DJ Melvin Odoom found out he'd be dancing with Janette Manrara.

Olympian Greg Rutherford will dance with Natalie Lowe whilst 'Judge Rinder' star Robert Rinder has been teamed up with 'Strictly' newcomer Oksana Dmytrenko.

'EastEnders' actress Tameka Empson will take to the dancefloor with Gorka Marquez whilst politician Ed Balls has been partnered with Katya Jones.

Will Young was teamed with Karen Clifton whilst her husband Kevin was partnered with Louise Redknapp.

Anastasia was matched with 'Strictly' superstar Brendan Cole.

The entire group then took to the dancefloor for the first time together where they performed an energetic routine to 'Shake A Tail Feather', promising an exciting series for 'Strictly Come Dancing' fans.

'Strictly' will return to screens on Friday 23 September.
MERIDIAN (dpa-AFX) - Tribune Broadcasting, a subsidiary of Tribune Media Co. (TRCO), and Dish Network LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dish Network Corp. (DISH), said Saturday that they have reached a long-term, comprehensive agreement on carriage and retransmission consent. Terms of the deal, which ends a three-month-long blackout, were not disclosed. Tribune had blacked out Dish customer access to 42 local channels in 33 markets in early June. At issue is the renewal of a new multi-year carriage agreement between Dish and Tribune. According to Dish, Tribune has asked for significant rate increases in the face of declining overall viewership. The agreement now restores Dish carriage of Tribune Broadcasting's 42 local television stations in 33 markets, and Tribune's cable network, WGN America. Both WGN America and Tribune's local stations are expected to again be available to Dish customers later today. In a joint statement, the two companies said, 'We want to thank our viewers and customers for their patience and support as we worked through this lengthy process. We're pleased to move forward and again be able to provide the content of Tribune's local stations and WGN America for years to come.' Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - The National Hurricane Center warned on Saturday that a dangerous storm surge is expected along the coast from Virginia to New Jersey from Tropical Storm Hermine. The cyclone is expected to intensify to hurricane force Sunday. According to the NHC, Hermine is currently off the coast of North Carolina and moving east-northeastward, but is expected to turn northward on Sunday. Hermine has a large windfield. The post-tropical cyclone is moving toward the east-northeast near 13 miles per hour. A turn toward the northeast and the north with a decrease in forward speed are expected on Sunday, followed by a slow northward to northwestward motion through Monday, the NHC said in a public advisory. On the forecast track, the center of Hermine will meander slowly offshore of the mid-Atlantic coast for the next couple of days. While little change in strength is expected tonight, the cyclone is expected to intensify to hurricane force Sunday and Sunday night, the NHC said. 'There is a danger of life-threatening inundation through tonight in the Hampton Roads area, and in the next 36 hours from Chincoteague, Virginia, to Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Persons within these areas should take all necessary actions to protect life and property from rising water,' according to the NHC. The NHC also warned that there was the possibility of life-threatening inundation during the next 48 hours at many coastal locations between Sandy Hook, New Jersey, and Bridgeport, Connecticut. 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.
FORT WORTH, TX--(Marketwired - September 04, 2016) - For those who plan to relocate, Texas continues to be one of the most attractive destinations, despite all volatilities of the evolving housing market. Marcus Hiles, Fort Worth based real estate mogul and CEO of Western Rim Property Services, suggests that the growing popularity of the area is largely due to the high income and low costs of living ratio in Texas. With the vision to offer the best opportunities for elegant lifestyle, the premier property developer advises on the following tips to rely on when choosing from a variety of housing options.

Whether you are looking to rent or buy a house, the constant dilemma is to understand if it is best to live an chic urban life or to settle in a luxurious suburban community. According to area's top real estate agents, in any given circumstance the cost per square foot in the city is twice as much as that of an outlying district. While it is crucial to think about financial aspects of the pursuit in order to stay on budget, the price is not the only thing that matters to buyers and renters. Employment factors are more important to take into account, as analysts suggest job creation rates to be several times higher in northern counties of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area than in the city itself. With the rise in labor market, the economy of the suburbs has soared significantly, with incomes increasing by approximately 30-50 percent compared with urban areas of Dallas and Fort Worth. As the average income goes up, the value of properties in the housing market moves upwards. Higher education, good health, and safety indicators are also associated with improved affluence and property value of the Fort Worth properties.

The internationally acclaimed real estate expert urges home seekers to search for communities that are sustainable and offer luxurious resort-like amenities. Before making the final decision, Marcus Hiles recommends to take into consideration features such as landscaping, private and public parks, and convenient parking. For those captivated by the dynamism and diversity of an urban life, Fort Worth is where artistic and cultural pursuits thrive most. Having a reputation for friendliness of the local population, the city was ranked as the "happiest" place among the United States' top ten markets, according to the Harris Poll Happiness Index. Fort Worth is famous with its stunning art shops, galleries, bars, and restaurants. Home to the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition and several world-class museums, this area of Texas has everything that "reflects the lifestyle you envision", says Hiles.

Marcus Hiles, Fort Worth visionary real estate developer, is the Founder of Western Rim Property Services and Newport Classic Homes. Coming from humble beginnings as the son of an inner-city minister, he manages over 15,000 upscale residential homes and apartments in Texas. Appealing to his community-centric vision, Hiles, a graduate of Rice and Pepperdine Universities, supports a number of charity initiatives, both in the United States and internationally, including public and private K-12 initiatives, after school programs, and university career services and placement programs.

Marcus Hiles Fort Worth Property Investor: http://marcushilesfortworth-news.com

Marcus Hiles Fortworth Texas - Real Estate: http://www.marcushilesfortworthtexas.com/

Marcus Hiles Revolutionizes the Dallas Fort Worth Real Estate Scene: http://www.newswest9.com/story/32742714/marcus-hiles-revolutionizes-the-dallas-fort-worth-real-estate-scene

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The Delhi government versus the citys Municipal Corporations combat surfaces in public space yet again after Delhis Health Minister on Sunday tweeted accusing the North Delhi Municipal Corporation of attempting to demolish some of the Mohalla Clinics.

The tweet also includes the image of an order copy issued by the Commissioner of the corporation, barring erection of porta cabins by Public Works Department, Government of Delhi on footpaths and pavements.

MCD planning to demolish some Moh Clinics saying its their land. These r temp structures n don't need permission pic.twitter.com/S9meaLA8Us  Satyendar Jain (@SatyendarJain) September 3, 2016

The order signed on 5 August also said, all such structures should not allowed to be erected on footpaths/pavements without approval of the corporation. It also mentions that the Engineer-in-Chief had to file compliance report latest by 19 August so that the Mayor could be apprised of the same.

But the Delhi Health Minister said in his tweet that these constructions are temporary in nature and do not need permission.

Sanjiv Nayyar, the Mayor of North Delhi Municipal Corporation while talking to Firstpost on Sunday said that he was not targeting the Mohalla Clinics as alleged by the Health Minister but any construction obstructing the right of way has to be regularised.

When asked how many Mohalla Clinics are on footpaths and pavements, he said that he had not received the report, that one that was to be submitted latest by 19 August.

The stand-off between the Delhi Government and North Delhi Municipal Corporation on the issue of constructing Mohalla Clinics brings to light another impediment on the way of implementing 1000 such primary health facilities in Delhi.

The Health Department is already pressed with the problem of lack of space to establish such large number of Mohalla Clinics which have now begun to construct the said dispensaries wherever space is available. But given the said order it is feared that these constructions will be demolished.

When pressed on the question of outcome of Delhi Government not regularising the constructions, the Nayyar said he "do not know about the legal consequences. Only the engineers know it."

The frequent combats between Delhi government and the BJP run municipal corporations of Delhi is now seen as a bitter part of the capital citys civic life.
Chandigarh: Aam Aadmi Party leader Jarnail Singh on Saturday tendered an unconditional apology for his party colleague Bhagwant Mann's misbehaviour with the mediapersons during a rally at Bassi Pathana in Fatehgarh Sahib district on Thursday.

"Media's anger is justified. Having been a journalist myself, I know that media has a big role to play in our democratic system. And media has also played a role in where AAP stands today," Jarnail, who is AAP's national spokesperson and party's Punjab co-ordinator, said replying to questions of mediapersons at a press conference here this evening.

Jarnail, who was flanked by party leaders Himmat Singh Shergill and Jasbir Singh Bir, said that AAP senior leader Sanjay Singh has talked to party's Sangrur MP, who has been in the line of fire on the issue.

"We need cooperation from the media. We respect the fourth pillar of democracy. If anyone has felt hurt, then I tender unconditional apology," Jarnail Singh said.

Facing a volley of questions from the media here, Singh said, "we will take up the matter with our MP."

When he was asked whether he can give assurance that in future his party workers will not interfere in media's working and misbehave with them, Singh replied: "I again say that it will be our endeavour that such incidents are not repeated in future."

"As party leader, I tender unconditional apology," he said.

However, mediapersons at the conference got angry when Jarnail Singh told them "I request (media) that incident (involving Bhagwant Mann) should not be given this importance".

On the backfoot on this issue, Jarnail Singh said, "I know that your anger is justified. We will ensure that this issue is taken up with Arvind Kejriwal."

The mediapersons reminded him that his party has maximum journalists in its fold and such a behaviour from its MP was

unacceptable.

"I again tender an unconditional apology and I think the matter should be ended here," he added.

Notably, in fresh trouble for Bhagwant Mann, the AAP's Sangrur MP was today booked along with some of his party activists by Punjab Police on a complaint alleging that they had misbehaved with mediapersons at a rally in Bassi Pathana.

"After receiving the report of the DSP to whom an enquiry had been marked and after getting legal opinion in this regard, we registered a case against Mr Bhagwant Mann and some of his party activists," Fatehgarh Sahib SSP H S Bhullar said on Saturday.

The media persons had yesterday filed a complaint against Mann who along with his supporters allegedly misbehaved with them and used derogatory remarks against the media at a political rally in Bassi Pathana in Fatehgarh Sahib district on Thursday.

Mann is alleged to have instigated AAP volunteers against media persons present there and they manhandled the scribes and even damaged the camera of one of them, the complaint read.

Mann even used the word "paid media" which hurt the feelings of journalists, it said. After the incident, Congress activists had burnt an effigy of Mann at Bassi Pathana.

Mann has been mired in controversies. The AAP MP recently drew flak for alleged security breach after he streamed a video of him entering the Parliament Complex in Delhi. The Lok Sabha Speaker had formed a panel to probe the issue and Mann was asked to stay away from proceedings of the house, pending the inquiry.
Mumbai: To celebrate the canonisation of Mother Teresa as a saint, IndiaPost on Sunday released a commemorative postage stamp on her.

Union Minister of State for Communications Manoj Sinha unveiled the postage stamp during a ceremony at the Divine Child High School here, an official statement said.

Bishop Agnelo Gracias and Sister Rubella, a representative from Missionaries of Charity, were present at the ceremony.

Teresa, who worked for the destitute in Kolkata and became a global icon of Christian charity, was declared a saint by Pope Francis at the Vatican on Sunday.

Her elevation to Roman Catholicism's celestial pantheon came in a canonisation mass in St Peter's square in the Vatican that was presided over by Pope Francis in the presence of 100,000 pilgrims. "For the honour of the Blessed Trinity... we declare and

"For the honour of the Blessed Trinity... we declare and define Blessed Teresa of Calcutta (Kolkata) to be a Saint and we enrol her among the Saints, decreeing that she is to be venerated as such by the whole Church," the pontiff said in Latin.

The ceremony came a day before the 19th anniversary of Teresa's death in Kolkata, the Indian city where she spent nearly four decades tending to the poorest of the poor.

Teresa spent all her adult life in India, first teaching, then tending to the dying poor.

It was in the latter role, at the head of her now worldwide order that Teresa became one of the most famous women on the planet.

Born to Kosovan Albanian parents in Skopje - then part of the Ottoman empire, now the capital of Macedonia - she won the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize and was revered around the world as a beacon for the Christian values of self-sacrifice and charity.
Srinagar: Aiming to bring peace in Jammu and Kashmir, an all-party delegation led by Home Minister Rajnath Singh was on Sunday in Srinagar for a two-day visit to the state, during which it is expected to interact with a cross section of people.

Delhi: All party delegation on Kashmir emplanes for Srinagar pic.twitter.com/XLxCxTKDvB  ANI (@ANI_news) September 4, 2016

"We intend to talk to individuals and groups who want peace and normalcy in Kashmir Valley," Singh said before the departure of delegation comprising 30 members from 20 parties.

Cutting across party lines, leaders said that they were hopeful of finding a solution for restoration of peace in the Valley where violent clashes have claimed 71 lives since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani on 8 July.

Senior Congress leader and former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said that the delegation was ready to hear "everyone".

The visit "will be beneficial for Kashmir and for the country," he said, adding everyone wants peace in the state.

Azad said it will be an opportunity for the parties and Kashmiri people to interact.

CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury, another member of the team, said the all-party delegation should have gone two months ago "but let's hope that even now, we can make a difference".

LJP Chief and Union Minister Ram Vilas Paswan said that the MPs are going with an open mind and want to interact with anyone who wants to talk within the framework of the Indian Constitution. "We are ready to talk," he said.

Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge said all parties were cooperating with the government and their sole aim was restoration of normalcy in the state.

""We will try our best to bring back normalcy. We are cooperating with the government. It is the responsibility of the government to deal with the situation very intelligently.

"All parties are cooperating for that. So we hope that it will be resolved," he said.

Reaching out to separatists, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti on Saturday invited their top leaders for talks with the delegation.

Mehbooba wrote letters to the leaders in her capacity as PDP chief, seeking their cooperation by engaging with the delegation.

Apart from the Home Minister and Minister of State in PMO Jitendra Singh, those who are part of the all-party team include Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, leader of opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad, his Lok Sabha colleague Mallikarjun Kharge, senior Congress leader Ambika Soni, Union Minister Ram Vilas Paswan (LJP), JD-U leader Sharad Yadav, CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury and CPI leader D Raja.

NCP's Tariq Anwar and Trinamool Congress' Saugata Roy, Shiv Sena's Sanjay Raut and Anandrao Adsul, TDP's Thota Narasimham, Shiromani Akali Dal's Prem Singh Chandumajra, BJD's Dilip Tirkey, AIMIM's Asaduddin Owaisi, AIUDF's Badaruddin Ajmal and Muslim League's E Ahamed will be party of the delegation.

TRS' Jitendra Reddy, N K Premchandran (RSP), P Venugopal (AIADMK), Tiruchi Siva (DMK), Y B Subba (YSR-Cong), Jaiprakash Yadav (RJD), Dharamveer Gandhi (AAP) and Dushyant Chautala (RLD) are also in the team.

BSP and Samajwadi Party have also extended their support.
Srinagar: Clashes broke out in south Kashmir's Shopian district on Sunday morning with protesters setting ablaze a mini-secretariat building, while curfew remained clamped in parts of Srinagar on a day the all-party delegation was here on a two-day visit aimed at restoring peace in the Valley.

Normal life in the Valley was paralysed for the 58th day as restrictions continued in the rest of the Valley which has been hit by violence since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani in July.

People in Penjoora village of Shopian tried to take out a protest rally which was stopped by the police, leading to clashes, an official said.

The protesters also set afire the mini-secretariat building, housing the deputy commissioner's office in the area, the official said.

He said the security forces resorted to baton charge and tear-gas shelling to disperse the protesters.

"There are some injuries but more details are awaited," he said.

Yesterday, protesters in the neighbouring Kulgam district burnt a house of the ruling PDP's block president Gulzar Ahmad.

Ahmad had facilitated a meeting of Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti with the family of a victim of violence in the district. Mehbooba had visited the family of Late Mashooq Ahmed, firing victim of Kund, Kulgam and offered condolences to the bereaved family on Saturday.

"Curfew remains in force in five police station areas of downtown Srinagar," a police spokesman said.

He said curfew in these areas of the summer capital continued as a precautionary measure in view of the call given by separatists asking people to occupy Airport road, city centre Lal Chowk and district headquarters against the all-party delgation's visit.

The spokesman said curfew has been lifted from the other areas of the city where it was in force yesterday.

The all-party delegation led by Home Minister Rajnath Singh reached here on Sunday for a two-day visit during which it is expected to hold talks with a cross-section of people.

"Curfew has been lifted from Batamaloo and Maisuma areas in the uptown city in view of the improving situation," the police spokesman said.

He, however, said restrictions on the assembly of people were in place in the rest of the Valley.

Normal life remained affected in Kashmir due to the separatist sponsored strike on 58th day. Shops, business establishments and petrol pumps continued to remain shut during day time and open only in the evening. Public transport continued to be off the roads.

The separatists have extended the shutdown till 8 September.

As many as 71 persons, including two police personnel, have been killed and several thousand others injured in the clashes between protesters and security forces in the Valley since Wani was killed in an encounter in south Kashmir on 8 July.
Jammu: Thousands of Kashmiri Hindu employees who migrated to Jammu following mob attacks on their transit colonies in Kashmir, on Sunday held a protest rally against the state and the Central governments for "not reaching out" to the community.

As their protest entered the 54th day, they wore black bands and took out a march demanding registration of FIR and compensation to affected employees besides a high-level dialogue with both the Central and the state governments.

"Both the governments are begging the separatists to hold talks with all-party delegation but they have failed to reach out to these Kashmiri pandit employees of Valley and not even a single minister or top officer has reached out to them," chairman of All Party Migrant Coordination Coommittee(APMCC), Vinood Pandita said.

"Kashmiri pandits cannot be made sacrificial goat by the Central government. We will not tolerate any talks with separatists," he added.

The Kashmiri pandit employees, who were working in various government departments under the Prime Minister's rehabilitation package in the Valley, returned to Jammu after their transit camps were attacked by stone-pelting mobs in the wake of the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani on 8 July.

The protesters demanded disbursement of their pending salaries, and forming of a comprehensive return and rehabilitation programme for entire Kashmiri Pandit community in the valley before their return resume duty.

"These employees have been sitting on protest for over 50 days. The governments are unmoved as if the Kashmiri pandit community does not exist," said All State Kashmiri Pandit Conference President, Ravinder Raina.

"The Central and state governments failed to protect these Kashmiri pandit employees from mob attacks. They were forced to migrate from there. Instead of reaching out to them and give them confidence, they are left feeling unwanted," he added.
The explosives were in a bag discarded by two suspects who fled when police attempted to stop them for 'suspicious behaviour'

Three policemen were injured on Sunday in Egypt's Damietta while attempting to defuse one of two explosive devices, the Ministry of Interior said.



The explosives were in a bag that was discarded by two suspects who fled when police attempted to stop them for "suspicious behaviour," according to a ministry statement.

Explosive specialists were able to defuse one of the devices before the second exploded, injuring three of the policemen.

In August, two Egyptian security personnel were shot dead in an attack on a checkpoint in the Nile Delta governorate of Menoufiya.

Over the past few years, improvised explosive devices have often been used by Islamist militants to target security forces.

While attacks have almost exclusively been focused in North Sinai, violence has also reached other areas of Egypt, including the capital. Hundreds of security forces as well as militants have been killed in the conflict.

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"Death...", said Jacob Needleman, a philosopher and author, "...is a great equaliser". Those who have a lot of material wealth cannot take it with them in death, and those who dont have anything, have nothing to take along anyway. But there is a difference between the deaths of the upper and lower classes. The better-off get decent funerals, but the poor sink further into the debt unless they get the paupers funeral with the help of local bodies.

Or in this case, face indignity even in death. The graphical description in this Saturday morning report is depicted in a way that a body, especially of the poor, deserves no respect. The ambulance service provider in this report cited "protocols" and "provisions" justifying why the crew denied to carry the 7-year-olds body back to its residence when she died en route hospital and off-loaded the child's parents. Unfortunately, rules prevail here.

Of course, rules dont always prevail. I have seen a body of an accident victim, which needed to be shifted to the AIIMS in Delhi for a post-mortem. But the family had to hire a private ambulance because a policeman told them that our ambulance has broken down. A private ambulance was suspiciously available, just 10 meters away. Rules dont require the police ambulances to be well-maintained. The family could afford it, but thats another matter.

Recently, Odisha man Dana Majhi had to carry his wifes body on his shoulder for 10 km because the hospital refused to provide a transport. It can well be argued that hospitals have to treat, not help in the last-mile journey to the funeral. But when the victim or patient is poor, everything becomes unaffordable, like life itself. However, officials had said he did not wait and waiting in India is difficult to measure, especially for the poor.

This news report listed how Majhi, and the likes of him who are penniless have waited for succour under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, the employment guarantee scheme, the Forest Rights, Food Security Act, etc. all adding up to at least a dozen. But delivery, of course, is a problem.

Delivery is where one should measure the quality of governance. It apparently is a long crawl from the Red Fort to a poor mans door. Manjhi was entitled to the power supply of 80W per month for a bimonthly bill of Rs 160. What prevented from keeping the power running in his house? Majhi could not switch on the lights in his house for the past several months because a tree had fallen on the power lines and was not set right because no one had complained. Since when have we heard the poor complain? Helpless, they trade their vote for a promise or cash.

When an 80-year-old Salamani Barak was run over by a train and had to be taken to a hospital in Odisha for post-mortem, the rigour mortis had set in. For want of an ambulance, the police tried to hire an autorickshaw but the driver demanded Rs 3,500. The hospital staff, reportedly at the behest of the police, broke her body at her hip, bundled her in a cloth and carried her by slinging it on a bamboo pole in Balasore district. Now, Odisha Human Rights Commission has sought a report. To the dead, these things dont matter, but to the kith and kin, even the cheapest life  which poor are assumed to be living  has some value: at least in their death.

What this denotes is: the poor can be preyed upon easily, and should be uncomplaining, like Ravindra Barik, her son. The Times of India quoted him saying, They could have been a little more human. I initially thought of filing a case against the policemen. But who would act on our complaint." Thats the nub of the matter, where announcements and schemes do not translate into action. Recall how a person in Tamil Nadu tried to shame an official for not delivering?

The Hindu had this harrowing narration about how, when the funeral expenses allowed under a government scheme, for a funeral did not reach a family, the deceaseds son and his friends group of youngsters in Ulundurpet organised a novel protest of seeking alms to raise money to bribe a revenue official to release Rs 12,500 sanctioned by way of funeral expenses to a bereaved family. Probably there are more such stories which have gone unreported.

On the other hand, in a city like Mumbai where hospitals are allotted lands under a condition that a certain number of beds be reserved for the poor and that they also be treated free or at concessional rates, instead about 11 leading private charitable hospitals in the city did not keep the commitment, states The Times of India report. They charged hefty deposits during the admission from the poor. Even though the Comptroller and Auditor General has sought its rectification but this is an age-old practice. Either the government is uncaring, or this is a modern version of Sisyphus' punishment.

The lives of the poor in India, as the above cases depict, are merely reduced to statistics.
Kathmandu: Nepal on Monday nominated Deep Kumar Upadhyay as its envoy to India, nearly four months after he was recalled by the previous Oli government over charges of 'non-cooperation' and indulging in 'anti-government' activities.

The Cabinet meeting chaired by new Prime Minister Prachanda at his office in Singha Durbar today nominated Upadhyay as ambassadorial candidate for India and Chief Secretary Lila Mani Poudel for China, Nepalese media reported.

Upadhyay, who was serving as Nepal's ambassador to India since April 2015, was suddenly recalled by the erstwhile KP Sharma Oli-led government on 6 May.

Upadhyay's nomination comes less than fortnight before Prachanda's maiden visit to India after assuming office last month.

The Oli-led government had levelled three charges against Upadhyaya to justify its decision to recall him and officials had said he was working 'against national interest'. "Envoys should follow government's directives and maintain diplomatic decorum," Minister for Defence Bhim Rawal had said after the move.

Upadhyaya, a leader of opposition Nepali Congress who was appointed as Nepal's envoy to India in April last year, was being seen as the first casualty of the cancellation of Nepalese President Bidhya Devi Bhandari's planned visit to India.

The diplomat was also charged with siding with the Nepali Congress opposition in supporting a threat by the Maoist party led by Prachanda to topple Oli's government. Besides, he was accused of breaching his jurisdiction without informing the government and visiting some western Nepal districts accompanying India's ambassador to Nepal Ranjit Rae, Rawal had said.
Mother Teresa, who dedicated her life to work for the poor and underprivileged in India, was finally declared a saint by Pope Francis in a canonisation ceremony on Sunday. Over a lakh of her followers from all over the world gathered in Vatican City to commemorate her sainthood. Mother Teresa, who is now remembered as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, also had wishes from across the web.

The ceremony came a day before the 19th anniversary of Teresa's death in Kolkata, where she spent nearly four decades tending to the poorest of the poor. Missionaries of Charity, or simply the Mother House in Kolkata, has become a pilgrimage for countless from home and abroad.

Social media acknowledged these fruits of Teresas labour that still help the poor and helpless even today. From Indian politicians to celebrities, heres how the nation and the world reacted:

"Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies"

Remembering a blessed soul #MotherTeresa pic.twitter.com/RbA6Nwg7aF  Ranveer Brar (@ranveerbrar) August 26, 2016

Let us imitate Mother Teresa who made works of mercy the guide of her life and the path towards holiness.  Pope Francis (@Pontifex) September 3, 2016

Let the example of Mother Teresa inspire all of us to dedicate ourselves to the welfare of mankind #PresidentMukherjee  President of India (@RashtrapatiBhvn) September 3, 2016

It is indeed a moment of great pride and honour. Bless us Mother, so that we can continue to serve the people.  Mamata Banerjee (@MamataOfficial) September 2, 2016

Even Donald Trump was pleased that Christians around the world were celebrating Mother Teresas legacy.



#MotherTeresa was an epitome of love & compassion.Her saintly life will continue to inspire us. pic.twitter.com/95nHNSE736  Partap Singh Bajwa (@Partap_Sbajwa) September 4, 2016

The UN will also recognise Saint Teresas work.

The World Food Program (WFP) posted this quote to further the cause that Teresa and WFP worked towards.

A symbol of service&compassion.Mother Teresa showed the world the extraordinary power of love.We celebrate 2day that enduring legacy of love  Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) September 4, 2016

Her life was a powerful message and a shining example to all of us of what humanity could be : compassion,solidarity and peace #MotherTeresa  Mohamed ElBaradei (@ElBaradei) September 4, 2016

On #MotherTeresas sainthood I hope qualities of compassion & concern will spread towards the path of gross national happiness & wellbeing  M S Swaminathan (@msswaminathan) September 4, 2016

Her life was a message to the world of what humanity could be: peace, compassion and solidarity #MotherTeresa pic.twitter.com/HLEFedquua  Raj Babbar (@RajBabbarMP) September 4, 2016

An extraordinary humane life!#MotherTeresa honoured as saint in a canonization mass at St. Peters Square, #Vatican pic.twitter.com/2Sieh8juav  Indian Diplomacy (@IndianDiplomacy) September 4, 2016

Unmatched fervour observed in the crowd at St. Peter's Square in the Vatican City. pic.twitter.com/LWiv2B71AL  Harsimrat Kaur Badal (@HarsimratBadal_) September 4, 2016

Mother Teresa achieves Saint hood today. May her dedicated devotion to serve poor and downtrodden keeps inspiring generations to come.  digvijaya singh (@digvijaya_28) September 4, 2016

On the historical occasion of #canonisation of #MotherTeresa , here are some of My SandArts on the great soul, pic.twitter.com/8MIBBRU1Sc  Sudarsan Pattnaik (@sudarsansand) September 4, 2016

Sainthood is being conferred on #MotherTeresa,I pay my heartfelt tribute & remember her selfless services to mankind pic.twitter.com/tUO1kfjrNX  C R Paatil (@CRPaatil) September 4, 2016

Homage to a life spent in service of people. EAM @SushmaSwaraj & Indian deleg'n at canonisation of Mother Teresa pic.twitter.com/gVvr4ubtqT  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) September 4, 2016

Many even chipped in on the contentious #FraudTeresa hastag that was trending on Twitter, urging people to focus on her years of service over the allegations that were recently unearthing against the saint.

Disagree with #MotherTeresa's views if you wish. I do. But I also know I would never have the courage to serve the poor the way she did.  Anna MM Vetticad (@annavetticad) September 4, 2016

They cannot understand #MotherTeresa . But then they never understood the Father of the Nation either. It is a DNA thing.  Sanjay Jha (@JhaSanjay) September 4, 2016

I too don't hold with 'miracles' of any kind but join in the celebration of Mother Teresa's great work for humanity. https://t.co/v2RIzcO7UK  N. Ram (@nramind) September 4, 2016

Mother Teresa was called the saint of the gutters even before she was canonized, with her followers already considering as a saint. After almost two decades of her death and despite her legacy being questioned, Mother Teresa was canonized as Saint Teresa of Calcutta.
On a rainy Thursday morning, inside the Click Art Museum in Chennai, an adolescent lies on the ground, curled up in a fetal position, as her family takes pictures of her. The wall she is in front of had a painting called 'Mama's Womb', depicted as a large bubble. The painting is one of the 24 trompe-l'il (French for 'deceive the eye') by artist AP Shreethar, on display in VGP's Snow Kingdom on the East Coast Road in Chennai.

In this 2000 sq ft display, Shreethar's 24 paintings include Adam throwing his apple away, Atlas his diamond, Bruce Lee delivering an angry kick, a dragon breathing fire, Mona Lisa pouring coffee and playing music. However, all of the paintings are 'incomplete'. To complete them, the artist invites the audience to join the paintings, enact a character and give the finishing touches to each story.

The audience is naturally thrilled. The two groups visiting the museum when I was there  a family and two couples on a double date  spent several minutes in front of each of those paintings, clicking near-perfect pictures. Some paintings were revisited, some photographs retaken.

As one enters the museum and glances at all the paintings at once, it does seem rather underwhelming. They are not paintings technically, they are digital reproductions of the artists originals. Neither are they 3D, they numbly stick to the white walls. The only way to bring them to life is by overlaying the audience and the inclusionary art of photography (in that, everything within the frame remains) on the exclusionary art of painting (where the artist can chose what to include and how).

A lady getting pictures taken at Mandai Theevu (skull fort, as translated by them) turned to her partner and asked, Reaction sariya irukka?" (Is my reaction all right?), before her picture was taken. An elderly gentleman opened his mouth against a painting titled 'Sudaadhu Neruppu' (fire will not burn) as if breathing water to fight a fire-breathing dragon. People come here for just Facebook pictures and Whatsapp profile pictures," the museum attendant told me  it is the experience of being in the painting that audience find rewarding.

Perhaps Shreethar too. Setting up an art exhibition in a gallery is very expensive. In spite of it, when we do set one up, its mostly family and other regulars who come by. Compared to that, Click Art Museum has done exceptionally well.

Why?

Kaila irukkara phone thaanga kaaranam, he says (It is the phone in everyones hand that is the reason). He claims that of the 60,000+ visitors to the museum so far since its launch in early May, 10,00,000 photographs have been taken, several of them uploaded to the internet. It is not hard to believe  every one of the eight people who were there while I was, took a picture with every single installation.

Mahalakshmi from Kuwait, who has heard of similar shows abroad, is delighted that this exists in India too. When I went to see the Mona Lisa, I found it rather underwhelming, its so tiny," she said, indicating its size with her hands. But this is exciting. Of course, she isnt comparing Mona Lisa as a painting with the digitally mastered replicas of Shreethars trick art. It is the novelty of immersion and participation in visual art that excites her.

This style of art has a 2000-year-old history. Even within each painting, Shreethar admits, the idea is not entirely new. In fact, it is this that he is counting on to make his museum successful. He has made the characters in these paintings identifiable  Mona Lisa, Atlas, Adam, Bruce Lee, a chimpanzee  to give the audience a natural connection that couldnt be achieved if he had created original characters. Rajini sirs films turn into hits, but films with newcomers will run empty shows. Its just like that," he says.

Even as I talked to him for a few minutes, it was evident that films hold a special position in Shreethars heart. Cinema accepted him; gave him an identity  he assisted Vijaysekar in the design team of Mani Ratnams Nayagan till Thiruda Thiruda, going on to work with successful directors like Bharathiraja, Parthiban and Lingusamy among others. He made friends who now own several of his paintings. It also gave him recognition and joy  to be associated with working in cinema, to make paintings for Vijay Awards (a television award show) is to be known widely.

He is also full of angst at the way artists are represented in cinema. "For us, cinema is the inspiration. When we say Raja Raja Chozhan, the image that comes to mind is that of Sivajis. If Sathyaraj acts as Thiruvalluvar, soon enough well forget the face of real Thiruvalluvar. And the idea of an artist is wrongly and in a very silly way recorded in our cinema. He appears to have fiercely taken this argument to directors K Balachander and T Rajendar who have made such characterisations: I once asked KB sir, Ipdi oru artist-a kaatna yevan saar ponnu kuduppan? (Who will give me a bride, if you keep portraying artists in this manner?)".

As an artist who weaves his art through popular culture (cinema and selfies, for instance), he understands the need for his art to reach common folk and he is ready to take it there. Given the risk and investment involved in setting up an art exhibit, Click Art Museums home, he argues, is indeed within a theme park.

To popularise the place where my art is displayed, I need to work for years. I am tired of giving directions, he says, only partly metaphorically. He is clear that does not have the time for this. So, hes decided to host all his 22 projects  at various stages of production  in well-known, popular locations. His argument is that people are already there to have a good time, I just need to be present there!

As I spent time observing groups of people come and go by, one thing stuck me as odd  nobody here seemed to have an attention problem. Each group took its time, each member taking several attempts to get the perfect picture, every other member enthusiastically guiding them to achieve it. For them, this museum of art was a background against which they can take uncommon pictures for their social profiles. So is this a narcissists paradise? Or is this art catching up with the times?

All images  the writer. All rights reserved.

Visit the Click Art museum's website for more details.
On 24 August, a message appeared on the website of the Himal Southasian, a magazine that had provided a distinctive voice for reporting from this region from 1996 (it had been around since 1987, but as a Himalayan journal). The message from S Mishra, member-secretary of executive board of The Southasia Trust (the non-profit entity that publishes the magazine) said that in the face of overwhelming non-cooperation from regulatory state agencies in Nepal, Himal was forced to close down operations.

The last issue (until such time as the team can resume publication in more favourable circumstances) would be in November 2016, the message stated.

Read the complete message about Himal Southasian's closure here.

Himal Southasian's closure comes months after its editor and founder Kanak Mani Dixit was arrested for allegedly holding wealth "disproportionate to his sources of income".

Read Firstpost's report here  Kind, gentle and fearless: Kanak Mani Dixit's arrest on corruption charges is absurd

Himal Southasian, as mentioned above, provided a distinctive view of the Indian subcontinent. At a time during when the press has accused of parking its conscience behind algorithms rather than stories, Himal defied what can now be considered as exacting your influence. It held aloft now-fossilised ideals of journalism, the shadows of which may soon be the meter with which we assert our failings.

In what could now turn out to be my only contribution to the magazine, I found in the editors a gaze, a kind of patient energy, that is perhaps necessary to shape the reporting of amateurs and at times, even experienced journalists.

Himals presence on the shelf of a library (be it at a mass media college) was a soothing reflection of the world we all want to report from, on our resumes, but are more than happy to avoid on our passports. In an ideal space, where storytelling merges with fact, there is more than just the facet, but also a body, a head, and the eyes of a story  by eyes I mean that self-referencing guilt, the first person accounts that magnetise visual detail. And within that space, the magazine had carved an identity for itself.

One of the greatest strengths of Himal was its emphasis on culture, an entry point that most media has given up on in terms of their reporting. In its unique ability to rise to a level from where the subcontinent could both be interpreted and dissected, the magazine was in essence the emergence of a new world-view not enslaved by self-identifications of the local media. In that sense Himal is perhaps even a collectors item.

I remember reading Himals Labour issue and wondering to myself, where if anywhere else, had I read such in-depth reportage on a side of the subcontinent which would otherwise be referenced only in dossiers distributed at Human Rights conventions. Who serves democracy better than the one who finds fault in its implementation? If all tailors were kings, not all men would get to wear suits. And there it was, tucked in my imagination, somewhere in a country I havent even visited, a tailor weaving his stories and helping us weave ours, to put into context this globally smudged account of our interrupted lives. It is no less than abuse, of not only power but diligence in the way forces (national or anti-national) claim our only outpost for reconnaissance on a human level. Journalism, like everything else now, has a nationality which decides what it may or may not amount to.

From publishing poetry to reporting that questioned the status quo, Himal surrendered to no one and continued undeterred by the cultural dispensation that now dictates what we may or may not be interested in. The format of recent events in connection to the magazine is what most vituperative accounts of power are made of. In the agency of the state, we can now identify with the monsters that we, as children, feared wed create.

Journalism is a labour of love. It is the unmatched account of half a life, with each half at all times looking at the other in search of an egress, the political milieu of which is defined not by what you stand for, but what you stand against. And Himal stood against a fair number of things. Journalists are after all, born and raised on the precipice of hopelessness. In between the margins they find purpose and at times even sanity. But alliances that are now being forged on devices set on failure have found a way to push the journalist into oblivion.

And soon  sooner than you think  well be adopting the many failings that oblivion is made of, and without Himal and its like to guide us through that dark time, we may come to rue our own ideas.

Of course the magazine could come back  and it should, because we are going to need it more than it needs us.
Kolkatas Bleak House that grabbed headlines last June  because of a 'hell boy' who slept with the dead  could eventually turn into a real estate slugfest, claim those following the bizarre case.

The palatial home at 3 Robinson Street that lies close to Park Street, Kolkatas only boulevard, is priced at a little over Rs 100 crore and is high on the radar of the citys notorious real estate mafia, a section of which is popularly referred to as syndicate by those in business.

But their plan could have one stumbling block: The 'hell boy' himself.

Partha De, the 44-year-old man who was found living in the house with the skeletons of his father, sister and two Labrador dogs, is keen to donate the entire property to the Missionaries of Charity (the group founded by Mother Teresa).

On his arrest on 11 June 2015, De was found to be in a 'mentally unstable' condition. The charred body of his 77-year-old father, Aurobindo De, was found inside one of the bathrooms in the house. The fully-clothed skeleton of a woman, Partha's sister Debjani De, was found in one of the bedrooms. Two bags full of bones  of the pet dogs  were also found in one of the rooms.

The investigation revealed that De had been living with the corpse of his sister since her death in December 2014. The dogs had died shortly before that, in August. Debjani reportedly went into deep depression after the death of the Labradors and the siblings refused to cremate the remains of their pets. As for keeping Debjani's remains, De told the cops that (he kept them because) his sister's spirit often visited him, and he regularly left food next to her body.

It's been over a year since the case first rattled Kolkata. Now, De has fallen off the map. And in his place has emerged a house that is worth many crores. We heard this has become a major bone of contention with the citys syndicate, said a top cop in Kolkata.

Read the full story from Firstpost's archives  Horror house on Robinson Street: Hidden notes, strange sex stories emerge from Kolkata police probe

Partha De is no longer staying with us, said Sister Blesilla, an official spokesperson for the Missionaries of Charity, where De lived for a month or two after his release from the Pavlov Hospital, where he was lodged after his arrest by officers of Kolkata Police in June 2015.

Sister Blesilla said she was unaware whether or not De had offered to donate his property to the Missionaries of Charity.

The police officer said they were keeping an eye on the developments, ostensibly because De is not in stable mental health.

He needs help, he cannot help himself. He has expressed his desire to donate the building to the Missionaries of Charity. And not many are liking it, said the officer, whose team commands the area close to Park Street.

The officer further said a team of scientists from Singapore had travelled to Kolkata early this year to study Des case, which they found extremely bizarre but apparently returned disappointed because of major inconsistencies in his statements.

What he spoke and what he wrote were simply not matching. He was courteous, well mannered and even showed the team books he was reading (including Rabindranath Tagores Gitanjali) but his statements were garbled and made no sense, said the officer.

Highly placed sources in Kolkata said real estate brokers in the city have zeroed in on De, pushing him to sell the property for a pittance so that they can create a multi-storeyed structure in its place. They have even impressed upon De that it is in his interest that he should not return to stay in the house where his father, sister and pets died, the sources said.

Those pushing De to sign on the dotted lines are members of the citys powerful real estate syndicate which has strong connections with the ruling Trinamool Congress, claim sources.

Two rounds of meetings have happened with De but with no result, a source told us, adding the real estate sharks were bolstered by the fact that the Kolkata Police did not even file a chargesheet more than a year after De was arrested in June 2015 and subsequently sent to the Pavlov Hospital. And now, even if a chargesheet is filed, the chances of it holding up to a judicial trial appear weak because the protagonist of the case is mentally unbalanced, our sources said.

Helping the real estate sharks is an uncle of De, who also claims to be an inheritor of the property on Robinson Street, the sources added.

De, a former employee of TCS, had lived abroad before moving to India. He was last seen in public when he was on his way to cremate the remains of his sister Debjani, on 15 September 2015, after being granted permission by the cops.

Sources told Firstpost that the delay by the cops in filing the chargesheet could also be deliberate. It is common practice in any city to bury the case after it has fallen off the consciousness of the masses. And this is exactly what is going to happen with De and his Robinson Street house, our sources added.

Sealed by cops, the house in Central Kolkata is  virtually  off the radar of the city and its people. Once, it triggered breaking headlines and even a bit of horror tourism in the city with hordes visiting the home  named Hitchcock House by the media  to hear macabre stories and take selfies.

But the house could be back in news, once the slugfest between De and the real estate sharks comes out in the open.
BSP's third Sarvajan Hitaye, Sarvajan Sukhaye rally in Allahabad on Sunday was a roaring success. This is the third grand rally in a row that established the party's unquestionable supremacy in attracting crowds. Prior to this, two of its rallies were organised in Agra and Azamgarh respectively. This time, BSP made efforts to gather its supporters from Pratapgarh and Kaushambi for the Allahabad rally. The unique feature of the Allahabad rally was the party's attempt to forge a strong social coalition of Dalit-Muslim and showcase it through the rally.

Out of the 22 Vidhan Sabha seats of Allahabad, Pratapgarh and Kaushambi, seven seats have already been reserved for the Muslim candidates. Two candidates were constantly on the move in villages and slums along with local Dalit leaders and were inviting people for the rally. Their discussion with the people was indicative of the fact that BSP's strategy for the forthcoming Vidhan Sabha elections would be aimed at consolidating the support base. The Allahabad rally has proved beyond doubt that Mayawati would be a formidable front-runner in 2017 state assembly polls.

BSPs endeavour to strengthen the Dalit-Muslim alliance for the forthcoming 2017 Vidhan Sabha elections has not begun now. It had started its work two to three years back. BSP has made the Bhaichara Samitis to strengthen the Brahmin-Dalit alliance as a part of its social engineering strategy and spread it to the grassroots prior to 2017 elections. BSP is also working in the direction of forming a core team of the local and regional Dalit-Muslim leaders for spreading fraternal feelings at the grassroots, local and regional level for strengthening the Dalit-Muslim alliance. I had documented numerous such teams during my field work in western and central UP.

For spreading Dali-Muslim unity, BSP leaders also visited the Dalit and Muslim slums. After the Muzaffarnagar riots, BJP and SP also sent such teams in these slums. On visiting the Muslim slums, the local-level BSP leaders called BJP a riotous party that had joined hands with SP. They also assured people that there wont be any riots after Mayawatis comeback and that BSP would fight for the reservation of poor minority brothers.

In order to strengthen the Dalit-Muslim alliance, Mayawati also aims to provide tickets to more than hundred Muslim candidates in the forthcoming Vidhan Sabha elections. She feels that the Muslim candidates in these regions might lure the Muslim voters to cast their votes in her favour and the Dalits would no doubt cast votes in her name which, in turn, would strengthen the Dalit-Muslim alliance. The BSP strategists hold the view that the Dalit-Muslim alliance will not only have a positive effect on the Muslim voters in regions having Muslim candidature but will also spread positive vibes in the other Vidhan Sabha regions.

However, BSP may have to encounter a few possibilities and limitations of this strategy. The possibilities are that the population of UP comprises 21.6 percent Dalits and about 20 percent Muslims who (if they amalgamate) will make up around forty one percent. If maximum of the Dalit-Muslim votes get polarised in BSP's favour, then no one can stop the party from attaining victory. BSP's strategy has its limitations too. During communal tensions, there have often been clashes between the Dalits and Muslims. BSP will have to take steps to delete these bitter memories from the minds of the people. The second limitation that BSP may come across is that BJP may accuse BSP of Muslim polarisation and, in this process, will leave no stone unturned to create a big alliance of the remaining Hindu majority and make them stand against BSP.

However, both the kinds of alliances are a mere possibility now. We just have to wait and watch how true they turn out to be.

(The writer is a teacher in the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.)
New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the ruling Samajwadi Party (SP) in Uttar Pradesh appear to be in a neck-and-neck contest in the state assembly election due early next year, with Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) projected to come third, a survey said on Friday.

The India TV-C Voter survey projects BJP to win within a range of 134 to 150 seats, while the SP is projected to win 133 to 149 seats, both short of a clear majority in the 403-seat assembly.

The survey projected Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) to win 95 to 111 seats, while the Congress, which has already started a high-voltage poll campaign in the state, is projected to win only 5 to 13 seats. Others, including independents, are projected to win within a range of 4 to 12 assembly seats.

The survey is based on a "random stratified sample" of 20,642 respondents interviewed across all 403 assembly segments between August 1 and 31, and the data has been weighted to known demographic profile, according to C Voter, which conducted the survey.

Percentage-wise, the BJP has been projected to get 27.79 percent vote -- with a huge swing of 12.78 percent in its favour -- compared to 15.01 percent that the party garnered in the 2012 assembly polls.

The SP comes next with 27.51 percent, a 1.64 percent drop from its 2012 vote share of 29.15 percent. The BSP comes third with 25.44 percent, a 0.47 drop from its 2012 votes share of 25.91 percent, while the Congress vote share appears to have dropped from 11.63 percent in 2012 to 6.19 percent in the current survey.

Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav leads the list of 'first choice for CM post' with 32.8 percent in his favour, closely followed by BSP supremo Mayawati with 28.2 percent.

"Any BJP leader" gets 26 percent support while Congress chief ministerial candidate Sheila Dikshit comes fourth with 5.1 percent.

The BJP is yet to announce its chief ministerial candidate in UP.

Asked whether they wanted a change in the current state government, 58.6 percent respondents answered in the affirmative, but 34.8 per cent said No, with 6.6 percent undecided.

The present UP assembly's tenure expires in March next year, and the elections are likely to be held in January-February.
Kandahar: At least 35 people were killed early Sunday when a passenger bus struck a fuel tanker in a head-on collision in the southern province of Zabul, officials said.

"The passenger bus was on its way from Kandahar to Kabul when it collided with a fuel tanker. In the accident, 35 people were killed and more than 20 others were wounded," Zabul's Governor Bismillah Afghanmal told AFP.

The collision sparked an inferno and many of the victims, including women and children, were burned beyond recognition, he said.

Some of the wounded were rushed to hospitals in provincial capital Qalat as well as neighbouring Kandahar province, said Ghulam Jilani Farahi, deputy Zabul police chief.

The Kabul-Kandahar highway passes through militancy-prone areas and many bus drivers are known to drive recklessly at top speeds so as not to get caught in insurgent activity.

Afghanistan has some of the world's most dangerous roads, often in dilapidated condition and traffic rules are seldom enforced.

Many in the country rely on old and rickety passenger vehicles, meaning that high casualty road traffic accidents are common.

In May at least 73 people were killed Sunday when two passenger buses and an oil tanker burst into flames in a head-on collision in eastern Ghazni province, in one of the worst road accidents in the war-battered nation.

And in April 2013 a bus hit a wrecked fuel tanker in the southern province of Kandahar, killing 45 people.

The World Bank last November signed off a $250 million grant to upgrade roads crossing Afghanistan's Hindu Kush mountains, crucial trade links that are often closed in winter by snow.
Hangzhou: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday met his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull who assured his country's support to India's bid for the NSG membership. The two leaders agreed to deepen the bilateral defence and security cooperation.

Prime Minister Modi thanked Turnbull for Australia's pro-active support to India's membership of the elite nuclear trading club when the two leaders met on the sidelines of the G20 Summit, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup told reporters in Hangzhou.

"Prime Minister Turnbull assured that Australia will continue to support India's inclusion in the NSG," he said.

India's efforts to join the grouping suffered a setback in June when the NSG plenary held in South Korea decided against accepting its membership application after China and some other nations opposed entry of a non-NPT signatory.

"The two leaders discussed defence and security cooperation. In this context, both the sides positively accessed the recent Naval exercises held between the two sides and agreed to remain in touch," Swaup said after their talks.

"The issue of terrorism was also discussed during the meeting and Prime Minister Modi said that it is important for all the democratic forces to come together to counter this challenge," the spokesperson said.

Swarup said the Prime Minister told Turnbull that India's neighbourhood, in particular, is suffering from the destabilising effects of terrorism.

"Even Russia, China, Afghanistan were all facing terrorism threat emanating from our region and it was important for us to identify the suppliers, exporters and financiers of terrorism. Otherwise, the world is going to face a huge challenge in coming weeks and months," Modi said, apparently referring to Pakistan from where terror groups such as Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Taliban operates.

"Prime Minister Modi's overall message was that we need a unified approach on countering terrorism," Swarup said.

Modi said India-Australia relations are full of energy and the implementation of the mutually agreed projects and programmes have been considerably speeded up under Turnbull's guidance.

The two leaders also discussed the possibilities of trade and investment ties between India and Australia.

In the context of trade, both the sides felt that much more can be done and if the comprehensive economic cooperation agreements between Australia and India could be speeded up that would certainly provide much more momentum to their ties.

Modi also sought the support of Turnbull in encouraging the Australian pension funds to invest in India. He also sought Turnbull's support for clean coal technology.

"Because of India's clean energy targets, it is important for us to adopt as much clean coal technology as possible and this is an area in which Australia has proven expertise. Whether it is underground mining or other form of mining, Australian companies can provide us those technologies," he added.
A North Cairo criminal court sentenced to death on Sunday four Islamist militants after they were convicted of forming a terrorist cell in Gharbiya's Tanta.

Today's verdict comes after the Grand Mufti's non-binding recommendation approving the initial death sentences, issued by the court in July, was delivered to the court as per Egyptian law.

The defendants were among 12 people convicted on charges ranging from forming a terrorist group advocating for the overthrow of the government, to planning attacks on police and army forces, possessing unlicensed weapons including scoped rifles as well as posters and publications promoting the ideas of the banned Muslim Brotherhood group.

The court also sentenced two of the 12 defendants to 15 years in prison and six others to 10 years.

One defendant was acquitted of all charges.

The sentences can still be appealed.

Of the four defendants sentenced to death, only one is in custody, with the remaining three still at large.

The six defendants who received 10-year sentences are in custody, while the two sentenced to 15 years are fugitives.

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Hangzhou: India on Sunday called for intensified joint efforts by other Brics members to combat terrorism as Prime Minister Narendra Modi sought coordinated actions by the grouping to "isolate supporters and sponsors of terror", in an apparent reference to Pakistan.

In a hard-hitting intervention while leading from the chair, Modi in his address to the Brics Leaders Meeting in Hangzhou said "terrorists in South Asia or any where for that matter do not own banks or weapons factories".

"Clearly someone funds and arms them and Brics must intensify joint efforts not just to fight terror but to coordinate actions to isolate those who are supporters and sponsors of terror," he said, without naming Pakistan which is a close ally of China.

Describing Brics as "an influential voice" in international discourse, Modi said it was the grouping's shared responsibility to shape the global agenda and help developing nations achieve their objectives.

He said terrorism remains the "primary source of instability and the biggest threat to our societies" and countries and the supplies chains have a global reach.

Use of social media to promote radical ideology is "growing dimension of this threat", he added.

External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup during a media briefing said, "this (Modi's address to the Brics Leaders Meeting) tells you how strongly Prime Minister intervened on the issue of terror and how be believes that this really is the central challenge facing the moment and unless we have collective approach to this, it will not be possible for us to defeat this."

Swarup said it was important to have informal discussions with the other Brics leaders ahead of the grouping's 8th annual Summit in Goa from 15-16 October.

Modi, in his address to the four other leaders of the grouping said: "We, as Brics, are an influential voice in international discourse. It is, therefore, our shared responsibility to shape the international agenda.

"Our shared responsibility to shape international agenda in manner that helps developing nations achieve their objectives," he said in this picturesque eastern Chinese city on the sidelines of the G20 Summit.

Brics brings together five major emerging economies, comprising 43 percent of the world population, having 37 percent of the world GDP and 17 percent share in the world trade.

Modi said that as chair of Brics, "'Building Responsive, Inclusive and Collective Solutions' is the theme we have chosen which mirrors central priorities at G20 Summit".

"We've taken Brics out of capitals to involve people from all walks of life. It will be an opportunity to deepen our ties and with Bimstec (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) countries.

The four other leaders who participated in the meeting of the five-member bloc included Brazilian President Michel Temer, Chinese President Xi Jinping - with whom Modi held bilateral talks earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin and South African President Jacob Zuma.

"Our summit next month would not only be an opportunity to deepen ties with ourselves, we will also interact with India's neighbouring countries of Bimstec - Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand, who have been invited for the outreach summit. We welcome you all to Goa next month," Modi said while concluding his brief address.

As a formal grouping, Bric started after the meeting of the Leaders of Russia, India and China in St Petersburg on the margins of G8 Outreach Summit in 2006.

The grouping was formalised during the 1st meeting of Bric Foreign Ministers on the sidelines of UN General Assembly in New York in 2006. The 1st Bric Summit was held in Yekaterinburg, Russia, on 16 June, 2009.

Bric was expanded into Brics with the inclusion of South Africa at the BRIC Foreign Ministers' meeting in New York in September 2010. Accordingly, South Africa attended the 3rd Brics Summit in Sanya, China in April 2011.
Hangzhou: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday met Chinese President Xi Jinping here amid differences between the two countries over a raft of issues, including the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor which runs through PoK.

The meeting was held this morning on the sidelines of G20 leaders summit at the Hangzhou West Lake State Guest House.

"First engagement in Hangzhou is a meeting with the host. PM @narendramodi meets President Xi Jinping," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted.

The meeting between the two leaders comes in the backdrop of contentious issues including listing of Pakistan-based terrorist organisations in the UN, China stalling India's membership at the elite Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and $46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) which runs through Pakistan- occupied Kashmir (PoK).

The two leaders had last met at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit in June in Tashkent and are again set to meet in Goa next month on the sidelines of BRICS summit.

China too has been concerned over the close ties of India with the US and the recently signed Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) which will give the militaries of both countries access to each other's facilities for supplies and repairs.

After the meeting, both the leaders will attend the Brics leaders meeting ahead of the G20 summit to finalise their strategy at the summit.

Modi reached Hangzhou last night after concluding his two-day visit in Hanoi. He will also hold bilateral meetings with his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull and Saudi Arabia's Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.

He will attend the two-day G20 summit to begin here later under the theme of "Strengthening Policy coordination and Breaking a new path for growth".

Tomorrow, he will take part in the second and concluding session of the G20 and hold bilateral meetings with British Prime Minister Theresa May and Argentinian President Mauricio Macri before returning to Delhi.

A meeting between Modi and US President Barack Obama is, however, not on the cards during this trip, officials said.
Vatican City: Tens of thousands of pilgrims - rich and poor, powerful and homeless - filled St. Peter's Square on 4th September, 2016 for the canonisation of Mother Teresa, the tiny nun who cared for the world's most destitute and became an icon of a Catholic Church that goes to the peripheries to find lost souls.

Pope Francis declared Mother Teresa a saint at a morning Mass, making her the model of his Jubilee Year of Mercy and in some ways his entire papacy. For Francis, Mother Teresa put into action his ideal of the church as a merciful "field hospital" for the poorest of the poor, those suffering both material and spiritual poverty.

Vatican: Pope Francis proclaims Mother Teresa as Saint pic.twitter.com/VI17MV7qzc  ANI (@ANI_news) September 4, 2016

Throughout the night, pilgrims prayed at vigils in area churches and flocked before dawn to the Vatican to try to get a good spot for the Mass being celebrated under a searing hot sun and blue skies.

Thousands gather at St. Peter's Square in the Vatican City to witness the canonisation ceremony of #MotherTeresa pic.twitter.com/44Hzq0DB4L  ANI (@ANI_news) September 4, 2016

"Her heart, she gave it to the world," said Charlotte Samba, a 52-year-old mother of three who travelled with a church group from Gabon for the Mass. "Mercy, forgiveness, good works: It is the heart of a mother for the poor."

While big, the crowds were not expected to reach the 300,000 who turned out for Mother Teresa's 2003 beatification, thanks in part to security fears in the wake of Islamic extremist attacks in Europe. Those fears prompted a huge, 3,000-strong law enforcement presence to secure the area around the Vatican and close the airspace above.

Nevertheless, those on hand were jubilant to have made the journey - nuns, priests, volunteers, pilgrims and tourists clutching the coveted 100,000 tickets issued for the Mass. One group of 40 Indian nationals traveled from Macerata, Italy to honour a woman given India's highest civilian and humanitarian awards for her work in the slums of Kolkata.

Another group of 100 drove from Kosovo toting a banner that read: "Mother Teresa: Pray for Us."

In addition, 13 heads of state and government led official delegations while 1,500 homeless people invited by Pope Francis had VIP seats and were going to be treated by the pope to a Neapolitan pizza lunch in the Vatican auditoriumn afterward.

While Francis is clearly keen to hold Mother Teresa up as a model for her joyful dedication to society's outcasts, he is also recognising holiness in a nun who lived most of her adult life in spiritual agony sensing that God had abandoned her. According to correspondence that came to light after she died in 1997, Mother Teresa experienced what the church calls a "dark night of the soul"- a period of spiritual doubt, despair and loneliness that many of the great mystics experienced. In Mother Teresa's case, it lasted for nearly 50 years - an almost unheard of trial.

For the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who spearheaded Mother Teresa's saint-making campaign, the revelations were further confirmation of Mother Teresa's heroic saintliness.

He said that by canonising her, Francis is recognising that Mother Teresa not only shared the material poverty of the poor but the spiritual poverty of those who feel "unloved, unwanted, uncared for."

"What she described as the greatest poverty in the world today (of feeling unloved) she herself was living in relationship with Jesus," he said in an interview on the eve of the canonisation.

Francis has in many ways modeled his papacy on Mother Teresa's simple lifestyle and selfless service to the poor: He eschewed the Apostolic Palace for a hotel room, he has made welcoming migrants and the poor a hallmark and has fiercely denounced today's "throwaway" culture that discards the unborn, the sick and the elderly with ease.

Sunday's festivities honoring Mother Teresa weren't limited to Rome: In Kolkata, where Mother Teresa spent a lifetime dedicated to the poor, a special Sunday Mass was held at the order's Mother House. Volunteers and admirers converged on Mother House to watch the canonisation ceremony, which was being broadcast on giant TV screens in Kolkata and elsewhere.

Sisters of Charity volunteers planned to distribute food to the poor nearby after the ceremony, and community meals were being served across Catholic parishes in India on Sunday - a symbolic reference to Mother Teresa's lifetime of service to humanity, said the Rev. Savarimuthu Sankar of the archdiocese of New Delhi.

"Let the example of Mother Teresa inspire all of us to dedicate ourselves to the welfare of mankind," said Indian President Pranab Mukherjee.

Ceremonies were also expected in Skopje, Macedonia, where Mother Teresa was born, and also in Albania and Kosovo, where people of her same ethnic Albanian background live. Born Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu on 26 August, 1910, Mother Teresa came to India in 1929 as a sister of the Loreto order.

In 1946, she received what she described as a "call within a call" to found a new order dedicated to caring for the most unloved and unwanted, the "poorest of the poor."

In 1950 she founded the Missionaries of Charity, which went onto become a global order of nuns - identified by their trademark blue-trimmed saris - as well as priests, brothers and lay co-workers.

She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. She died in 1997 after a lifetime spent caring for hundreds of thousands of destitute and homeless poor in Kolkata, for which she came to be called the "saint of the gutters."

St. John Paul II, her most ardent supporter, fast-tracked her for sainthood and beatified her before a crowd of 300,000 in 2003.
Hangzhou: Describing Brics as "an influential voice" in international discourse, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday said it was the grouping's shared responsibility to shape the global agenda and help developing nations achieve their objectives.

Leading from the chair, Modi addressed the Brics Leaders Meeting here, before the 8th annual Summit in Goa from 15-16 October.

"We, as Brics, are an influential voice in international discourse. It is, therefore, our shared responsibility to shape the international agenda," he said in this picturesque eastern Chinese city.

"Our shared responsibility to shape international agenda in manner that helps developing nations achieve their objectives," he added.

Brics brings together five major emerging economies, comprising 43 percent of the world population, having 37 percent of the world GDP and 17 percent share in the world trade.

Modi said that as chair of Brics, "'Building Responsive, Inclusive and Collective Solutions' is the theme we have chosen which mirrors central priorities at G20 Summit".

"We've taken Brics out of capitals to involve people from all walks of life. It will be an opportunity to deepen our ties and with BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) countries.

The four other leaders who participated in the meeting of the five-member bloc included Brazilian President Michel Temer, Chinese President Xi Jinping  with whom Modi held bilateral talks earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin and South African President Jacob Zuma.

"Our summit next month would not only be an opportunity to deepen ties with ourselves, we will also interact with India's neighbouring countries of BIMSTEC  Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand, who have been invited for the outreach summit. We welcome you all to Goa next month," Modi said while concluding his brief address.

As a formal grouping, Bric started after the meeting of the Leaders of Russia, India and China in St. Petersburg on the margins of G8 Outreach Summit in 2006.

The grouping was formalised during the 1st meeting of Bric Foreign Ministers on the sidelines of UN General Assembly in New York in 2006. The 1st Bric Summit was held in Yekaterinburg, Russia, on 16 June, 2009.

Bric was expanded into Brics with the inclusion of South Africa at the Bric Foreign Ministers' meeting in New York in September 2010. Accordingly, South Africa attended the 3rd Brics Summit in Sanya, China in April 2011.
Hangzhou: India on Sunday raised its concern with China over the CPEC which runs through PoK, and terrorism "emanating from the region" as Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Chinese President Xi Jinping the two countries need to be "sensitive" to each other's strategic interests.

Asserting that fight against terror should not be motivated by "political considerations", Modi said it is of "paramount importance that we respect each other's aspirations, concerns and strategic interests" to ensure durable bilateral ties.

In the bilateral meeting with Xi ahead of the G20 summit, Modi raised India's concerns over the USD 46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) being laid through PoK.

Besides a host of energy-related projects, the CPEC consists of rail, road and pipelines to ferry oil and gas from Gwadar port to Kashghar in Xinjiang through PoK.

Replying to a question whether the terrorism emanating from the region where the CPEC is being laid through has been discussed, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup told reporters the issue has been raised during the meeting.

Modi said both India and China need to be "sensitive" to each other's strategic interests and called for specific actions to "prevent growth of negative perception".

"As a matter of principle, both countries would have to be sensitive to each other's strategic interests," Swarup said while touching upon broad themes that Modi stressed upon during his nearly 30-minute bilateral with Xi, their eighth meeting.

"In order to promote positive convergence, we would also need to prevent growth of negative perception. For this, the specific actions by both countries would play the major role," he said.

In particular, Modi highlighted that "we have succeeded in maintaining peace and tranquility on the border", he added.

Condemning the recent suicide bomb attack on the Chinese Embassy in Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan, in his opening remarks, Modi said it is yet another proof of the continuing scourge of terrorism.

"The Prime Minister reiterated that our response to terror must not be motivated by political considerations," Swarup said.

On his part, Xi said China is willing to work with India to maintain their "hard-won sound" ties and further boost bilateral cooperation.

"China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound relations and further advance their cooperation", state-run Chinese Xinhua news agency quoted Xi as saying.

About the bilateral relations, which experienced turbulence due to differences over a raft of issues, Modi said in order to make the Asian century a reality, the countries of the continent would have to take responsibility.

The meeting came amid differences over including listing of Pakistan-based terrorist organisations in the UN, China stalling India's membership at the elite Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and the CPEC being built through PoK. Asked whether Prime Minister Modi raised the issue of China blocking India's bid for the membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) during the bilateral, Swarup declined to get into the "nitty-gritty" of the issues discussed.

"I am not going into the nitty-gritty of each and everything that was discussed. Everything is not meant for public consumption. There are certain things (which) need to remain between the two governments," he said.

On yet another question on the NSG issue, he said: "I will not go into the specifics, if you read between the lines, you pretty much understand when you we talk about strategic interests, concerns and aspirations, it is not as if China is not unaware of our strategic interests, aspirations and concerns or we are unaware of their concerns. So, it is something both sides are well aware.

"This was a meeting at summit level between the two. They are meant to provide high-level guidance and direction to overall relations."

Citing that India has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), China had opposed its bid to join the elite 48-member bloc during NSG's meeting in Seoul in June.

Modi said he always had a strategic vision for India-China relations. The India-China partnership is important not only for the two countries but for the entire region and the world.

"India has worked to make progress in the closer, developmental partnership with China.

"Cultural and people-to-people ties have also been increasing," Swarup said.

Modi said he always had a strategic vision for India-China relations. The India-China partnership is important not only for the two countries but for the entire region and the world.

Asked to comment on the Chinese state-media quoting Xi as telling Modi that China is willing to maintain "hard-won sound" relations with India, Swarup said "it would not be appropriate for me to characterise President Xi's remarks.

"After all we are in his country and it is for the Chinese side to amplify and clarify whatever he said. Not appropriate for me to characterise what the other side said," he said.

"In the context of India and China, he said that our peoples also have the expectation that we make every possible effort to fulfil their dreams of progress, development and prosperity," Swarup said.

The Prime Minister is here to attend the two-day G20 Summit.

Ahead of the 8th BRICS Summit next month, Modi also extended a personal invitation to Xi to come to Goa which Xi said he was very happy to accept.
When our public officials fall asleep while attending a meeting, or an official function, the standard Nigerian reaction is to have a hearty laugh at their expense. Harmless laughter. Youd remember many photographs of our lawmakers turning the National Assembly into an extension of their bedrooms, sometimes snoring loudly in the middle of a heated and loud debate: not that many of them would be of much use anyway even if they were awake. Governors, commissioners, high ranking government officials have also all been caught at one time or the other, sleeping on duty. Well, those whose circadian switches go off like that should count themselves really lucky they are Nigerians. If they were to try that in North Korea, they will face the firing squad!



Yes, in North Korea, such careless sleeping attracts the death penalty. In that country of 25 million people, there is a despot in power. He is Kim Jong-un. At 32, he is the worlds youngest leader but probably the most dangerous man in the world. He rules his country like a concentration camp and continues to commit some of the worlds most frightening crimes against humanity. Human lives mean nothing to him. He is so desperately paranoid, the slightest act of irritation in his presence could make him commit murder. His word is law. He is supreme commander, judge and executioner.

I was literally shivering when I read the latest horror story from Kim Jong-uns North Korea. Two high-ranking officials were ordered executed by the dictator. Ri Yong Jin, a senior official at the Ministry of Education, was accused of putting up an inappropriate posture while The Marshal was delivering a speech. Ri Yong Jins crime was that he dozed off. Former Agriculture Minister, Hwang Mins crime was that he dared to disagree with Kims guidelines for designing a working policy on agriculture. He developed his own ideas. He used his own initiative. He was accused of trying to undermine the leader. Both Jin and Min were marched to the stakeswithin 24 hours and executed with anti-aircraft guns. Kim Jong-un is not satisfied with an ordinary gun; his victims have to face anti-aircraft guns, and you can imagine the impact of such a special purpose gun, targeted at a human being.

Since assuming office in 2011, Kim Jong-un has murdered more than 70 persons, including elite government officials who all lived in fear. His own uncle, Jang Song-taek, was one of the earliest victims at the beginning of his dictatorship. Others include a military officer who was executed for drinking during the official mourning period for Kim Jong II, Kim Jong-uns father, and the proximate genetic source of his megalomania. In 2015, the architect who designed a new airport terminal in Pyongyang was executed because Marshal Kim did not like his design! And Ri Yong Jin wont be the first man to die for succumbing to the call of nature. In April, former Defence Minister Hyong Yong-Choi also faced the firing squad for falling asleep during an event. The North Korean Human Rights situation is a threat to the whole of mankind. The use of execution, extra-judicial killing, torture and forced labour as tools of political control is one of the worst abuses of power ever known.

The United States has imposed sanctions on Kim Jong-un. The United Nations has also officially condemned his atrocities, but Kim Jong-un is dangerous, again because of the nuclear power and missiles at his disposal. Starkly egoistic as he is, he could throw the world into utter chaos, were he to press a nuclear button. The United Nations Security Council has an obligation to take the situation in North Korea more seriously. Kim Jong-uns matter should be an urgent matter of concern for the International Criminal Court (ICC).

I mean, to kill a man for falling asleep? Polysomnographers insist that there is nothing any one can do about sleep. Even when you dont suffer from somnipathy, when it is time for the body clock to switch off, it does so on its own. The best option is to give in to nature so the body can rejuvenate. Many public officials and business executives run crazy schedules. They over-stretch themselves, either travelling over long distances and rushing from one meeting to another, without any opportunity to take a few moments of rest  jet-lagged, tired or exhausted, they could doze off. This is why at many meetings, there is always a coffee pot on standby or sweets or as I have seen, kolanuts and just about anything that you can put in your mouth to enable you focus on the event at hand. But even these offer limited help. Balancing work with rest is often a challenge for busy people. The whole world knows this, except Kim Jong-un who is so insecure he cannot stand other peoples humanity.

I think of all the government officials in Nigeria who sleep during meetings. If they were to be in North Korea, they would all be dead by now. I recall incidents involving soldiers on parade, even soldiers of the Guards Brigade, suddenly slumping, drawing sympathy, and one particular incident involving a former Minister of State for Defence, who suddenly slumped while standing at attention at a military event. Try that in North Korea: immediate execution by a firing squad would be the result. And if I were North Korean myself, and I had served as official spokesperson to Kim Jong-un, I would have been executed by a firing squad long before 2015.

I used to doze off too at meetings. My boss ran a tough schedule and he had more stamina than his staff. We could return from a foreign trip by 2 am, and we would all be expected to be at work by 8 am. If you know how these things work, it could take another two hours to properly disengage and go home, leaving you with only two hours of sleep. In our case, the principal would have been up and about by 6 am (only God knows how he always did it) to attend morning devotion and spend some time in the gym, all before 8 am. We the principal aides would struggle to arrive, still sleepy but struggling to appear capable. Sometimes, the source of the grogginess may not be jet-lag but just work (and God, we worked!).

From one meeting to the other or a function after another, in the course of the day, I used to doze off occasionally. Note taking often kept me awake, but there were moments when I simply lost control. You know that kind of thing: youd suddenly realize it and jerkily regain consciousness. On such occasions, I often caught the President glancing at me. But one day, I guess I overdid it. In the middle of a meeting, I must have snored  that kind of snoring that produces noisy decibels and note-changing, level-revising, rhythmic modulations. It was the Presidents voice that shook me out of the slumber.

Abati, what is that?

I opened my eyes.

Next time you are feeling sleepy, just go out, walk around for a few minutes and come back. But dont snore when we are having a meeting.

In North Korea, that would have earned me an appearance not before an anti-aircraft gun, may be an armoured tank! Kim Jong-un is crazy. The problem is not form; it is the psychology of power. The civilized world must stand up for the right of every human being to be human and not have to die because of a leaders ego. There is a nightmare going on in North Korea and that is probably better explained by the number of North Koreans who are fleeing to the neighbouring countries of Japan, China and South Korea.

North Korea  the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK!)  is a hermit state where even the right to information or free speech is impossible. People are not allowed to communicate with the outside world, there are restrictions on movement and rights of association, there are no labour rights, the state is so repressive, there is even a strict national policy on mens haircut: not more than 2cm hair growth is allowed. Why? You cant grow your hair higher than that of the self-styled great person born of heaven! What exists in that country is not leadership, but a cult of personality, and the only personality is the leader whose legitimation derives not from the people but dynastic inheritance. North Korea is a living demonstration of the dangers of power acquired not on the grounds of intellectual brilliance or competence or the peoples choice, but heredity.

Regime-change is a popular phrase in closed-door international circles, what is needed in North Korea is not just regime change, but a peoples revolution that takes power away from class dynasty and hands it over to the people. The world has enough dangerous men already, tolerating a schizophrenic in the Korean Peninsula who has access to nuclear power makes the world a bit more dangerous than it is already.





Reuben Abati was former President Goodluck Jonathans Senior Spokesperson
Sisi arrived in Hangzhou on Saturday to participate as a guest at the 2016 G20 Summit upon the invitation of Chinese president and summit chairman Xi Jinping

Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi met with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on Sunday in Hangzhou, where he is to attend the Group of 20 (G20) Summit, presidential spokesman Alaa Youssef said.



Xi Jinping expressed China's support of Egypt's efforts to "maintain stability and explore its own development path," the Xinhua news agency reported.

The presidents talked of strengthening cooperation between the two countries, Youssef said, adding that the Chinese president praised Egypt's development over the past two years, according to Egyptian state-run news agency MENA.

El-Sisi arrived on Saturday in China's Hangzhou for the G20 Summit, where Egypt is a guest of honour. El-Sisi will participate as a guest upon the invitation of Chinese president and summit chairman Xi Jinping.

Egypt and China have taken recent steps to increase cooperation and investment in a number of fields.

In January, Xi Jinping visited Egypt and signed a number of cooperation deals in the transportation, power generation and civil aviation sectors worth $15 billion.

El-Sisi arrived in China from India, where he held talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi, signed a maritime transportation agreement between Egypt and India, visited the tomb of Mahatma Gandhi and met with US Secretary of State John Kerry, who was also visiting at the time.

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Toyota (TM 2.23%) said on Thursday that its U.S. sales fell 5% in August, as good sales of key SUV models weren't enough to offset steep declines in sales of Toyota's bread-and-butter sedans.

Big sales declines for some of Toyota's best-selling and most-loved models

Sales at the mass-market Toyota brand fell 4.6%. A 6.2% increase in Toyota-brand SUV sales wasn't nearly enough to overcome a 10.5% year-over-year drop in sales of Toyota and Scion car models.

One of the biggest stories in the auto business over the last few years has been the strong and sustained shift in buyer preferences away from sedans and toward SUVs, particularly car-based "crossover" SUVs.

Toyota had been bumping up against supply limitations on some of its crossovers, but those seem to have been alleviated: Toyota's biggest-selling SUV and crossover models all posted solid sales gains in August. The compact RAV4, now Toyota's biggest-selling model in the U.S., gained 8.6%, while the midsize Highlander crossover (up 12.2%) and the truck-based 4Runner (up 15.7%) also posted strong results.

That strong demand was good news for Toyota and its dealers. But Toyota built its reputation in the U.S. on the strength of its sedan models, which have been among America's best-sellers for many years. But every Toyota sedan lost ground last month: The Yaris (down 48.7%), Corolla (down 3.1%), Prius (down 27%), Camry (down 12.6%), and Avalon (down 25%) all declined year over year.

"Coming off the strongest SAAR of the year at 17.9M units in July, the industry took a bit of a step back in August," said Toyota's U.S. brand chief, Bill Fay, in a statement. He said that Toyota's truck and SUV sales are "on track for another record year."

Lexus is faring even worse, but more SUVs are on the way

The trend away from sedans was even more pronounced at Toyota's luxury brand, Lexus. Overall Lexus sales fell 7.6% in August, and again it was good news for SUVs and bad news for car models.

Lexus's SUVs as a group gained 9.1% over year-ago sales totals. The best-selling RX was up just 1%, but the small NX (up 21.6%) and bigger GX (up 12.2%) models helped the group to a solid gain.

But that gain was more than offset by a 24% drop in sales of Lexus cars. Every single Lexus car model posted a double-digit percentage sales decline in August.

Not surprisingly, Lexus U.S. brand chief Jeff Bracken is looking to build on what's working. In a statement, he said that he expects better supplies of Lexus's SUV models in the coming months and is "looking for a strong close to 2016."

Toyota's pricing stayed strong and incentives remained modest

Analysts at TrueCar estimate that Toyota's average transaction price rose 2.9% from a year ago to $31,318 in August. (That includes the Toyota, Scion, and Lexus brands.) It estimates that Toyota's per-vehicle spending on incentives as a percentage of average transaction price rose to 7.6% from 7.3% a year ago -- but that's still well below the industry average of 10.3%.

The upshot for Toyota: Tough sailing in a choppy market

Like other automakers, Toyota is probably happy to sell SUVs instead of sedans, as SUVs typically have somewhat fatter profit margins. The challenge for Toyota has been to have enough of its SUVs to sell: While American rivals have long had strong SUV lineups, Toyota until recently still put most of its focus on its perennially popular sedan lineup.

Recent moves to boost supplies of Toyota-brand SUVs (particularly the RAV4) seem to be paying off. More Lexus SUVs will also help -- but in general, despite the market's slump in August, Toyota seems to be doing well enough to bring home a solid profit in North America in the third quarter.
Vanguard's 529 plans rank among the least expensive college savings plans in terms of management fees, which ensures that your investments' growth will fund your child's educational expenses rather than padding a broker's bank account. But fees shouldn't be your only consideration. Choosing the wrong 529 college savings plan can result in the loss of tax benefits that greatly exceed any other advantage.

Here are five things you should review and consider before choosing a Vanguard 529 over a 529 sponsored by your state.

1. Vanguard's 529 is not right for everyone

The biggest advantage of a 529 plan is that contributions frequently qualify for state tax deductions. However, because Vanguard's 529 plan is sponsored by Nevada, participants in other states may give up big tax savings by enrolling with Vanguard.

For example, the state of Illinois allows married couples filing jointly to take a state income tax deduction of up to $20,000 for contributions to 529 plans. This deduction only applies to the Illinois 529 plan; therefore, contributions to Vanguard's 529 plan would not qualify. Before proceeding with a 529 plan from any company, you should check to see if it will negatively impact the tax deductibility of your contributions.

2. Vanguard offers lower fees, but requires higher minimums

Vanguard's 529 plans generally carry a $3,000 minimum initial investment, although Nevada residents can get started with as little as $1,000, while those who enroll through an employer's automatic plan can get started with a smaller initial investment.

Maintaining a balance of $3,000 or more would be advantageous, however, as Vanguard levies an annual fee of $20 on accounts with less than $3,000 in assets. Once open, additional investments can be made in any amount exceeding the minimum investment of just $50.

3. Vanguard's age-based investments are excellent

Opening a 529 plan means having yet another financial account to manage. Investors who want to take a hands-off approach to saving for college costs might prefer to invest using Vanguard's age-based investments.

The age-based portfolios come in just three types: conservative, moderate, and aggressive. The difference between each option is generally the amount of stock in each portfolio. For example, the conservative option holds just 50% of its assets in stocks for children younger than five years old. However, the aggressive option holds 100% of its assets in stocks for this same group.

Though each option follows a different path, they all end up at roughly the same place. Once the beneficiary reaches college age, all three portfolios have 100% of their assets in bonds and/or cash equivalents. The plans thus operate in a similar fashion as a target-date retirement fund, which slowly shifts toward safer investments as an investor reaches retirement age. The best part is that it's all automatic.

For all the convenience of automatic rebalancing, investors pay very little in fees and expenses. All of Vanguard's age-based options carry an annual expense ratio of just 0.17% of assets, the lowest of any of its investment options in its 529 plans.

4. You can pick your own portfolios

Investors who would prefer to take a more direct role in allocating their investments can pick between 19 different portfolios that offer varying exposure to stocks, bonds, and cash.

Popular choices include an S&P 500 Portfolio, which tracks the performance of the S&P 500 Index for a small fee of 0.19% annually. Likewise, for the same price, one can invest in the Total Stock Market portfolio, which invests in virtually every stock listed on U.S. stock exchanges.

By charging higher fees, Vanguard seems to dissuade investors from making their own investment choices. Notably, the age-based options carry a fee of just 0.17% of assets, but those who do their own picking will pay anywhere from 0.17% for low-fee portfolios all the way up to 0.45% for the Morgan Growth Portfolio, which is based on the actively managed Vanguard Morgan Growth Fund. As a general rule of thumb, actively managed funds are much more expensive than index funds.

Vanguard allows up to five total investment choices. Thus, one could theoretically invest 80% of their contributions into a conservative age-based portfolio, and dial up the potential risk and return by investing the remaining 20% in its Growth Index Portfolio, for example.

5. Vanguard balances cost and convenience

Vanguard's 529 compares well to 529 plans offered by other brokerages. The table below compares the minimum investments and annual expense ratios on investments you can buy in 529 plans housed at Vanguard, Fidelity, and Charles Schwab.

Metric Vanguard Fidelity Charles Schwab Minimum investment $3,000 $50 (or $15 per month with automatic investments) $25 Minimum additional investment $50 $50 (or $15 per month with automatic investments) $25 Lowest expense ratio investment offerings 0.17% 0.11% 0.30% Sponsoring state Nevada New Hampshire Kansas

Ultimately, the decision on where to save for college expenses depends primarily on whether your state allows you to deduct contributions to 529 plans sponsored by another state. Expense ratios are a much smaller concern, as a 529 plan with a $10,000 balance would incur just $11 in annual fees at Fidelity vs. $17 at Vanguard and $30 at Charles Schwab, relatively insignificant differences that can be offset by the convenience of keeping a 529 at the same company as your IRA or 401K plan.

All in all, Vanguard's age-based 529 portfolios are a very attractive choice that balances the low fees and expenses of index funds with the convenience of automatic rebalancing as your loved one reaches college age.
Egypts foreign minister Sameh Shoukry headed the Egyptian delegation at the G20 Summit meeting of foreign ministers on Sunday, where he delivered a speech calling for the integration of developing countries into the global economy, according to a statement published on Shoukry's Facebook account.

During the meeting, which was held before the official start of the G20 annual economic summit, Shoukry underlined the necessity of strengthening cooperation between the worlds largest economies and developing countries to help the latter achieve sustainable development and tackle challenges such as climate change.

Shoukry also highlighted Egypt's efforts to overcome the economic challenges and obstacles to its economic reform programme, and talked about national projects  including the development of the Suez Canal area and the new administrative capital  that are the cornerstone of the governments reform plan.

Egypt is a guest of honour at the G20 Summit in Hangzhou, China.

Egypt reached a preliminary deal with the IMF in August for a $12 billion loan package to help in curbing the budget deficit, stimulating growth and creating more jobs.

President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi met with IMF managing director Christian Lagarde on Saturday on the sidelines of the G20 Summit, where Lagarde praised Egypts efforts to develop the economy by applying several reform plans to push the countrys economy forward.

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Egypt's health ministry has broadened the criteria for those eligible to receive subsidised baby formula amid a severe market shortage in baby milk that prompted protests last week, Ahram Arabic news website reported.

The new criteria includes families with two or more twins, mothers unable to produce enough natural breast milk, mothers suffering from chronic illnesses, or mothers taking prescription drugs that affect the quality of breast milk.

Under the current regulations, imposed three months ago, the death of the mother or the birth of triplets had been the only conditions under which citizens are eligible to receive the subsidised formula.

Dozens of Egyptian mothers blocked a major Cairo road last week while carrying their crying babies to protest the shortage.

Health minister Ahmed Emad El-Din said on Sunday that outlets providing the subsidised formula will be increased from 1,005 to 1,600 by the end of the month.

On Saturday, the army said it will start importing and selling baby formula at less than market value; at EGP 30 (around $3.4) instead of the current black market price of EGP 60 (around $6.8).

The state-run Egyptian Pharmaceutical Trading Company said it would import and distribute 30 million milk packs; 12 million in pharmacies and 18 million at health ministry outlets, company spokesman Karim Karam told Aswat Masriya on Sunday.

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Image source: Getty Images.

Americans have a bevy of retirement tools to choose from, but it's been argued that the Roth IRA is the greatest retirement tool of them all.

At the heart of the debate is the Roth IRA's tax treatment. A Roth IRA is funded with after-tax dollars, meaning investment gains within a Roth are completely free of taxation for the life of the account. Additionally, contributions to a Roth IRA (but not investment gains) can be withdrawn at any time, there are no required minimum distributions, and there's no maximum age at which you must stop contributing. All in all, the Roth IRA does offer a great combination of long-term growth opportunity and financial flexibility.

Say no to a Roth IRA?

However, nothing is perfect -- not even the Roth IRA.

In particular, the Roth IRA has six disadvantages that could make it a far less appealing retirement tool than you realize. If one or more of these reasons hits home for you, then it could be worth saying no to a Roth IRA.

Image source: Getty Images.

1. You have a short time horizon

One of the prime advantages of the Roth IRA is that it allows time and compounding to work their magic. But for retirees in their 80s, 90s, and up, those advantages may not be worthwhile.

Money contributed into a Roth IRA can be withdrawn at any time, for any reason. However, investment gains within a Roth IRA fall under the "five year rule": Accountholders aren't allowed to withdraw investment gains for five years following their initial contribution, which may not make sense for elderly Americans who will need their savings during retirement. If you withdraw investment gains before this five-year period is up, you could face ordinary income taxes and a penalty on top of it.

2. Your employer offers a better option

Image source: Getty Images.

While the tax advantages of a Roth IRA are hard to beat, the $5,500 annual contribution for workers aged 49 and under, and $6,500 for those 50 and up, pales in comparison to what you can contribute to a 401(k) through your employer. The 401(k) contribution limit in 2016 is $18,000 for workers aged 49 and under and $24,000 for workers aged 50 and up. Plus, quite a few employers that offer a 401(k) match a percentage of their employees' annual salary. Free money from your employer is hard to turn down, which is why a 401(k) could be the better choice in some instances.

Some 401(k)s also have lower fees on mutual funds thanks to the bargaining power of large plan providers. And these days, Roth 401(k)s are gaining popularity, offering many of the same tax benefits as a Roth IRA.

3. You plan to leave most of your assets to charity

Are you planning to give a large portion of your money to charity once your pass on? Then chances are you're giving your money to an organization that already enjoys tax-free status. It wouldn't make much sense for you to pay tax on money that would be going into a tax-free account since the donation upon your death will be headed to a tax-sheltered entity. Instead, it makes more sense to contribute to a tax-deferred investment tool, such as a Traditional IRA or 401(k), which gives you the benefit of an upfront tax deduction.

4. You worry about the future tax treatment of the Roth IRA

Another reason you might choose to forgo a Roth IRA is based on the fear of changes to the future tax treatment of these plans. There's absolutely zero predictability in deciphering what Congress will do next, which means there's always a possibility that the tax treatment of Roth IRAs could be changed in the future to perhaps add a surtax, or something of that nature. With a Traditional IRA you would receive an upfront tax break in the form of reduced current-year tax liability since the money you contribute is before-tax dollars. For some people, the certainty of this deduction might be appealing.

Image source: Getty Images.

5. Your ordinary income tax status is expected to stay the same or drop during retirement

The grandiose point of the Roth IRA is to minimize what you'll ultimately owe in federal taxes to the IRS. However, the Roth IRA isn't always the best solution to that end, despite its tax-free status. If your current ordinary tax rate is expected to stay the same during retirement, or even fall, it could be worthwhile to choose a Traditional IRA or 401(k) (if offered) instead.

The perfect candidate to consider a Roth IRA would be a worker in a relatively low tax bracket with time on their side. Comparably, a top-earning individual is more likely to see his or her tax rate fall during retirement, meaning the potential for an upfront deduction with a tax-deferred plan could be more appealing.

6. Conversion expenses could cost you your comfortable retirement

Finally, it can be tempting to consider converting a traditional IRA, or other qualified investment vehicle, into a Roth IRA, especially if you have plenty of years left ahead of you. A Roth conversion can also allow high earners to get around the Roth IRA's income-based contribution limits. However, converting to a Roth IRA may not always be in your best interests.

Image source: Getty Images.

For example, when converting funds from an investment account that offers an up-front tax benefit to a Roth IRA, which is funded with after-tax dollars, you'll be required to pay ordinary income taxes on those funds. If you don't have enough spare cash on hand to pay this tax, then you could be in for a rude awakening. If you've made a lot of money in your tax-deferred plan, it could mean paying tax at the highest rate, 39.6%. Sometimes staying the course with a qualified investment plan is your best option.

The $15,834 Social Security bonus most retirees completely overlook If you're like most Americans, you're a few years (or more) behind on your retirement savings. But a handful of little-known "Social Security secrets" could help ensure a boost in your retirement income. For example: one easy trick could pay you as much as $15,834 more... each year! Once you learn how to maximize your Social Security benefits, we think you could retire confidently with the peace of mind we're all after.Simply click here to discover how to learn more about these strategies.

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The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Try any of our Foolish newsletter servicesfree for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe thatconsidering a diverse range of insightsmakes us better investors. The Motley Fool has adisclosure policy.
Oil producers always want to do this more cheaply and efficiently. That's a big part of what makes Core Lab a great oil stock to own. Image source: Getty Images.

If you're looking for a stock to buy in the oil industry, a great place to start is with a company that can make money no matter what the current oil price is. The catch, of course, is there aren't a lot of companies that fit that bill. That can make it hard to find a great place to invest, particularly when crude oil prices continue to swing around but don't appear ready to push past $50 for the long term:

WTI Crude Oil Spot Price data by YCharts

This is exactly what I like aboutCore Laboratories N.V.(NYSE: CLB), and it's a key reason it deserves consideration as the best oil stock you can buy. Let's take a closer look at what sets Core Lab apart and why it should be on your radar.

Expertise that's valuable in every market condition

Core Lab's expertise is reservoir optimization -- providing analysis of the materials a reservoir is made of, chemical data about the fluids produced, and a variety of other critical information producers need to most cheaply and efficiently recover oil and natural gas.This data and analysis is important throughout a reservoir's life cycle, and Core Lab is able to assist producers with both new production and improving costs and efficiency at existing reservoirs.

The draw from producers is twofold. When oil or gas sells for high prices, the more product a company can produce, the more it can sell at higher prices. Core Lab helps producers do exactly this. On the other end of the cycle, when prices are low, producers are more focused on lowering costs and improving efficient operations. Again, Core Lab comes in, providing the expertise to improve existing reservoir production.

There are very few oilfield service companies that can lay claim to still being in demand whether oil is cheap or expensive.

Ideal business model for cyclical, commodity-driven industry

There are a lot of well-run companies in the oil industry that do a lot of different things. But generally speaking, they often have high operating expenses, which can make it much more difficult to navigate a cyclical downturn. Core Lab's model is a much more "asset light," based largely on its intellectual property and technical expertise instead of owning the "picks and shovels." This means lower operating expense as a percentage of total revenue, and that really pays off when oil prices are low.

Here's how Core Lab compares in this measure against a cross-section of other companies in the oil industry:

Company 2015 Revenue 2015

Operating

Expense %

of Rev. 2013 Revenue 2013

Operating

Expense %

of Rev. Core Lab $797.5 $103.8 13% $1,074.0 $77.1 7% ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM) $268,880 $58,340 22% $438,250 $65,270 15% Phillips 66 (NYSE: PSX) $100,950 $16,850 17% $174,810 $16,570 9% ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP) $30,930 $11,450 37% $58,250 $11,610 20% National Oilwell Varco (NYSE: NOV) $14,760.0 $3,453 23% $19,220.0 $1,905 10%

Numbers in millions. Data source: Ycharts; chart by author..

Comparing data in the table from 2015, when oil prices were at decade-plus lows, with 2013, when they were at historical highs, shows that Core Lab's operating expenses were far lower as a portion of revenue than any of its "picks-and-shovels" peers in both periods. Furthermore, it's worth noting that the companies listed are widely considered some of the best in the industry at what they do, with talented, capable leadership. It's simply the differences in the operating models of various parts of the oil industry.

Core also spends much less on capital projects:

CLB Capital Expenditures (Annual) data by YCharts

These raw numbers can be misleading, since Core Lab is much smaller in terms of revenue than its peers. But there's an important message here: Companies such as ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Phillips 66 must regularly invest huge amounts of capital simply to maintain their current capacities and production levels, much less grow them.

This isn't to say capital expenditures are bad -- far from it. The risk with these investments in the oil industry is that projects can take years to complete before they start generating any return. That's fine when oil and gas prices are high. But when the cycle turns negative, a project that was forecast to be profitable at $90 oil may lose money if it comes online in a prolonged downturn such as the current one.

Core Lab is able to avoid the pitfalls of poorly timed capital projects, simply because it doesn't need to spend huge sums of money on land and equipment. It also is able to avoid the higher operating expenses that come along with these new capital projects and can really weigh on profits when oil prices fall.

The ideal oil stock for long-term investors

Core Lab's relatively unusual business model for the oil and gas sector, as well as the value of its services to oil producers no matter crude oil prices, make it a solid company that stays profitable through the industry's ups and downs. Factor in top-notch leadership that has consistently used the company's steady cash flows to buy back shares over the past decade and fund a dividend that's on track to increase in coming years, and there's a lot to like about Core Lab as an investment.

For investors looking for an oil stock to buy today, there's a strong argument that Core Lab is the best oil stock you could buy now.

A secret billion-dollar stock opportunity The world's biggest tech company forgot to show you something, but a few Wall Street analysts and the Fool didn't miss a beat: There's a small company that's powering their brand-new gadgets and the coming revolution in technology. And we think its stock price has nearly unlimited room to run for early in-the-know investors! To be one of them, just click here.

Jason Hall owns shares of Core Laboratories, National Oilwell Varco, and Phillips 66. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Core Laboratories and National Oilwell Varco. The Motley Fool owns shares of ExxonMobil. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Ford's headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan. Image source: Ford Motor Company.

Well, welcome to the new reality that is the last few months of 2016: New-vehicle sales comparisons are going to be tough. With sales peaking, although remaining at historically strong and highly profitable levels, expect monthly gains to remain volatile. This month appears to have been a miss for the major automakers, with Ford Motor Company (NYSE: F) posting a fairly steep 8.4% decline compared to the prior year's August. Let's dig into the data and see how bad it really was, and if there were any bright spots.

By the numbers

If investors are merely glancing at the numbers, August's results were a bit of a punch to the gut. Ford's namesake brand posted a total sales decline of 9% compared to last August, down to 205,239 units. Lincoln managed to post a 7% gain last month compared to the prior year, to 9,243 units, and the two combined for Ford's total decline of 8.4%, to 214,482 units.

Not even the Mustang could avoid a sales decline in August. Image source: Ford Motor Company.

In the segment breakdown, Ford cars continued to get slaughtered in August, with sales dropping 26.5% compared to the prior year -- worse than the year-to-date decline of 11.3%. Every single passenger car posted double-digit declines, except for the Police Interceptor Sedan, which is almost irrelevant as the volume of sales is so small. Despite the surge in SUVs, the segment still wasn't able to top last year's August and posted a decline of just under 2%. Ford trucks also posted a 1.6% decline last month, led by the 6.1% decline from Ford's bread-and-butter F-Series.

Now, if you want to spin it in a slightly more positive light, you could argue that while this August had the same total selling days as last year's, this year's lacked a fifth weekend, which is substantial in the automotive industry. You could also point out that Ford had a large summer sale last August, which contributed to a very strong month and makes for an even tougher comparison.

Yet another factor contributing to Ford's total decline in sales was the planned reduction of fleet sales after the first-half fleet sales were higher than normal -- down 10% in August, to 45,939 units.

Those three factors certainly played a role in Ford's total sales decline last month, but the fact remains that even Ford's retail sales were down 8% in that period. It was a soft month for Ford, no matter the angle, and a soft month for the industry as a whole. But that doesn't mean there aren't some positive takeaways for investors.

The overlooked vehicle

When talking about Ford's sales, few bother to mention the company's surging van sales -- but these are profitable vehicles for the automaker. The Transit recorded a 17% jump in sales last month, to nearly 12,000 units, and remains up 34% year to date, to more than 100,000 units.

And speaking of overlooked vehicles, the MKX continues to be a major bright spot for Lincoln this year, with sales up 56.5% year to date and up 49.9% in August. The MKX has outsold the MKC, which was also a great success story for Lincoln when it debuted as a 2015 model, and is only a handful of units from overtaking the MKZ for the brand's best-selling vehicle in 2016.

Thanks to continued strong sales of SUVs, Lincolns, trucks, and vans, Ford's average transaction prices managed to move $1,200 higher compared to the prior year, which is higher than the industry average, according to Ford.

What happens down the road?

The main takeaway for Ford investors, or investors in other major automakers, is that the rest of 2016 is likely to be choppy in terms of monthlysales gains or losses. The critical thing to watch will be how automakers respond to the plateau in sales, and so far Ford's management noted it hasn't chased volume by increasing incentives -- at least, not yet.That means paying attention to monthly sales calls, and quarterly calls, will be much more important than it has been over the past few years.

A secret billion-dollar stock opportunity The world's biggest tech company forgot to show you something, but a few Wall Street analysts and the Fool didn't miss a beat: There's a small company that's powering their brand-new gadgets and the coming revolution in technology. And we think its stock price has nearly unlimited room to run for early in-the-know investors! To be one of them, just click here.

Daniel Miller owns shares of Ford. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Ford. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Top Trump campaign officials on Sunday expressed optimism about recent poll numbers amid the fallout from Democratic rival Hillary Clintons FBI email investigation and sought to defend the Republican presidential nominee's immigration plan in advance of the White House race intensifying after Labor Day.



The polling data that you showed earlier really tells the tale, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told ABCs This Week. Hillary Clinton is having a hard time being accepted as a truthful and honest candidate vis-a-vis the American people.

Clintons poll numbers have dropped in recent weeks amid further revelations about her use of a private email server while secretary of state and connections between Clinton Foundation donors and the State Department during and after her tenure at the agency.

The RealClearPolitics polls average showed Clinton leading Donald Trump by as many as 8 percentage points in mid-August, when the first-time candidate made a series of campaign missteps that some political analysts predicted would be too damaging to overcome.

However, the RCP average is now at about 4 points, though Trump trails by larger margins in such key battleground states as Ohio and Pennsylvania.

We're taking Pennsylvania very seriously, said Conway, acknowledging Democrats have won there in the past six presidential elections but dismissing the argument that the state is do-or-die for Trump.

We have several different paths to victory, she said.

The Trump campaign also faced repeated questions Sunday about Trumps immigration plan, which critics argue is vague on the issues of deportation for illegal immigrants and whether the United States or Mexico will pay for Trumps proposed wall along the southern U.S. border.

GOP vice-presidential nominee Gov. Mike Pence said on NBCs Meet the Press that the plan begins with building the wall for border security and makes a priority of enforcing the laws of this country," including removing criminal aliens and people who've overstayed visas.

The Indiana governor also shot back that voters understood the plan, despite repeated questions from some in the media.

"What the American people want to see today is to establish the borders of this country, enforce the laws of this country. And Donald Trump has created a road map to do that," said Pence, who bristled at the suggestion that Trump hadn't been definitive enough in explaining his plan.

"Some 10,000 people in Arizona last week, it wasn't the way they see it," Pence said. "As I travel across this country campaigning with Donald Trump and for Donald Trump, I think people hear him loud and clear. And he's been completely consistent on this point."



Conway faced similar questions -- including one about managing the deportation of millions of people -- after a week in which Trump hinted about a possible softening in his immigration stances, met Wednesday with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, then delivered the Arizona speech hours later in which he appeared to return to his hardline positions on immigration.

He'll manage it the way it should have been managed all along, by enforcing the law and relying upon those law enforcement officers and those (federal immigration) officers to do their job, Conway said. But at least you have a presidential candidate putting forth a 10-point plan.

She also criticized Clinton for failing to hold a full-fledged press conference in 274 days and for staying off the campaign trail for several days to fundraise in such wealthy enclaves as the Hamptons and Marthas Vineyard while campaign spokespeople and surrogates such as running-mate Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine pushed forward in the effort.

The Clinton campaign announced Sunday that Clinton would return to the trail Tuesday with an event in Tampa and issued a statement on Trumps immigration plan, saying its an attempt to mislead Americans.

Donald Trump has stated very clearly throughout his campaign that he will deport everyone who is undocumented, something that was reinforced in his speech in Arizona, the campaign said. What we saw today is Mike Pence and Trumps top campaign officials attempt to mislead voters about their mass deportation policy by using soft words to describe harsh tactics.

Kaine on Sunday brushed off repeated questions about the FBI investigation of Clinton's secret server, saying she requested the public release of her secretary of state emails and the release of the FBI notes from the agencys interview with her last month. The federal investigation found that some emails sent or received by Clinton included classified information. However, no criminal charges were recommended.

The reason these materials are being made public is that Hillary Clinton said I want the public to see them, Kaine told ABC. She said it was a mistake.

Kaine instead pivoted to Trump's refusal to release his tax returns -- many of which Trump says he can't release because they're under audit -- and statements from Trump that appear to show support for how Russian President Vladimir Putin runs his country.

Talk about national security, Kaine said. He has openly encouraged Russia to engage in cyber hacking to try to find more emails or materials, and we know that this cyberattack on the (Democratic National Committee) was likely done by Russia...This is serious business.
Ben Carson on Sunday supported Donald Trumps outreach to African-American voters, defending Trump against accusations that the Republican presidential nominee is pandering to minorities and arguing Democrats have the explaining to do.

Ive had many discussions with him about it. He becomes very animated during those discussions. This is a subject about which he cares deeply, Carson, a former 2016 Republican presidential candidate, told Fox News Sunday. "And what is going to be accomplished is something that many in the Democrat Party fear -- and that is an alternative."

The retired neurosurgeon made the comments a day after Trump attended services at the Great Faith Ministries International church in Detroit, where he vowed to listen to the concerns of black voters and to help them and other minorities in U.S. cities plagued by crime, high unemployment and underachieving schools.

The Republican Party has not made an extensive outreach to certain communities, including the African-American community because they've pretty much written that off as Democrat territory. Donald Trump is changing that narrative, said Carson, a Detroit native who accompanied Trump on his visit.

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, and other members of her party have repeatedly tried to discredit Trumps outreach efforts, arguing he has a long history of bigotry and criticizing his pitch to minorities of: What the hell do you have to lose?

The backlash follows weeks of Trump aggressively courting the black vote, accusing Clinton and other Democrats running major U.S. cities of implementing policies that have failed to help minority residents for decades.

Most polls show Trump is likely to get about 1 percent of the black vote in November.

Later on Fox News Sunday, New York Democratic Rep. Gregory Meeks said Trump was trying to con minority voters, including fellow blacks.

Its not real, he said. This was his first time visiting a black church. What you see here is a bait and switch.

Meeks stopped short of calling Trump a bigot but said he has said racist things and has exhibited racist tendencies.

Carson on Sunday also defended criticism that Trump has called for school choice though he's presented no formal plan.

You get to choose the school of your choice, said Carson, arguing that Trump supports a voucher system that will allow families to send their children to better schools if the ones in their neighborhoods are underperforming.

Its really the Democratic Party that has the explaining to do, Carson said. Theyve been in charge of our cities for a long time. ... Detroit was once the most prosperous city in the United States, some people say in the world. From there it went to the largest bankruptcy. That was not a coincidence. And we see that in our large cities across the nation under Democratic control."
About 150 Syrian refugees have arrived in Indiana in the months since a federal judge scuttled Republican Gov. Mike Pence's order blocking state agencies from helping their resettlement.

Refugee assistance groups expect more this year, even as lawyers for the state go before a federal appeals court Sept. 14 to try to have the judge's decision overturned. The judge said Pence's directive "clearly discriminates" against refugees from the war-torn country.

Syrians make up less than 10 percent of the refugees who've been resettled in Indiana since October, according to federal records. They also represent only tiny fraction of the 10,000 Syrian refugees that the Obama administration said Aug. 29 had been taken in by the United States under a year-old resettlement program.

Pence tried to halt Indiana's participation in that effort with his November order after the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris, saying he didn't believe the federal government was adequately screening Syrian refugees; the attackers primarily were from France and Belgium.

His position on the issue hasn't changed, governor's office spokeswoman Kara Brooks said of Donald Trump's vice presidential running mate. And Trump said Wednesday that he would suspend arrivals from Syria, portraying them as a potential security threat.

Indianapolis-based Exodus Refugee Immigration diverted one Syrian refugee family to Connecticut days after Pence's order, but says it hasn't encountered any troubles as it has brought nearly 100 Syrians to the state since the federal ruling in February.

"It has been overwhelming supportive from the Indianapolis community despite Governor Pence's directive," said Cole Varga, executive director of the group.

The Pence administration has sought to withhold money to resettlement groups for services such as job training, but hasn't denied a greater amount of federal assistance such as food stamps and health care benefits.

Pence issued a statement after U.S. District Judge Tonya Walton Pratt's Feb. 29 ruling, saying: "My administration will continue to use every legal means available to suspend this program in Indiana unless and until federal officials take steps to ensure the safety and security of our citizens."

Exodus argues that Pence's stance would interfere with its mission of helping refugees.

"A state cannot pick and choose -- they are either helping refugees or they're not," Varga said.

All of the Syrian refugees that Exodus has resettled, along with 40 more handled by Catholic Charities of Indianapolis, are living in Indianapolis or its suburbs. In comparison, about two-thirds more have settled in Chicago, and there are 205 in Erie, Pennsylvania, according to the U.S. State Department's Refugee Processing Center.

Of the 1,447 total refugees who arrived in Indiana from Oct. 1 to July 31, more than 75 percent were from Myanmar. Refugees from that country have been the most common in Indiana for several years.

Pence specifically asked Indianapolis Archbishop Joseph Tobin in December not to have Catholic Charities resettle a Syrian family in Indianapolis. Catholic Charities went ahead, however, and will do so even without state or federal money, archdiocese spokesman Greg Otolski said, noting that families wait two years or more to come to the U.S.

"It is one of the critical pieces of what we do to be welcoming to people from across the world who need a safe refuge," he said. "We're going to keep providing that service for families who are really fleeing horrible violence in various parts of the world, not just Syria."
President Barack Obama said Sunday his talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping were extremely productive and that the row between U.S. and Chinese officials at the airport upon his arrival shouldnt be over blown.

Obama said tensions always arise when the White House negotiates how much access the American press will get to the president and foreign leaders overseas. The White House didnt apologize for pushing to press access because "we don't leave our values and our ideals behind when we take those trips."

"I wouldn't overcrank the significance" of the tensions at the airport, Obama said in a news conference in Hangzhou where global leaders are meeting for a G20 summit.

The summit got off to a contentious start Saturday with Chinese officials reportedly confronting National Security Advisor Susan Rise and other U.S. officials in at least three separate incidents. Reporters on the tarmac said that as soon as Air Force One arrived, a member of the Chinese delegation started screaming at the White House staff.

One reporter described the scene as a bit of chaos, as the Chinese official appeared furious about journalists being so near Obamas arrival, though they purportedly were standing in the area Chinese officials had designated for them.

White House officials reportedly told the Chinese official that the U.S. press corps was staying for the American president arriving on a U.S. aircraft.

When the White House official insisted the U.S. would set the rules for its own leader, her Chinese counterpart shot back, the Associated Press reported.

"This is our country! This is our airport!" the Chinese official yelled.

The exchange with Rice reportedly happened when the Chinese official attempted to prevent her from walking to the U.S. motorcade, as she crossed a media rope line. The official purportedly spoke angrily to her before a Secret Service agent intervened.

Rice responded, but her comments were inaudible to reporters standing underneath the wing of Air Force One. It was unclear if the official, whose name was not immediately clear, knew that Rice was a senior official, not a reporter.

Foreign reporters are often physically prevented from covering sensitive stories, but altercations involving foreign government officials are rare.

U.S. officials also apparently got into a heated exchange with Chinese security official before Obama arrived at Chinas West Lake State Guest House, where he met with Chinese President Xi to formally enter their respective countries -- the world's two biggest carbon emitters -- into last year's Paris climate change agreement.

The ceremony included U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and took place ahead of the summit, which officially starts Sunday.

White House staffers and Secret Service officers trying to enter the state guest house separately from reporters were stopped at a security gate and purportedly argued about how many members of the U.S. delegation would be allowed to enter.

"The president is arriving here in an hour," one White House staffer was overheard saying in exasperation.

However, the most heated exchange purportedly occurred between a Chinese security official and a Chinese official helping Americans who got angry about how the guards were treating the White House staff.

You don't push people, the Chinese official purportedly yelled in Chinese. No one gave you the right to touch or push anyone around."

Another Chinese official stepped between the two when the security official purportedly looked ready to throw a punch.

"Calm down please. Calm down," White House official purportedly said.

A foreign ministry official said in Chinese: "Stop, please. There are reporters here.

Another heated exchange between White House press officers and Chinese officials purportedly occurred minutes later -- over how many American print reporters would be allowed inside the building.

The disagreement continued until about 20 minutes before Obama arrived and purportedly ended with 10 of the reporters being allowed inside, despite White House officials arguing there was plenty of empty space for them to stand at the back of the room.

Fox News Kristin Brown and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday that negotiations have stalled between the United States and Russia to stop fighting in Syria between Russian-backed government troops and U.S.-supported rebels.

Kerry said at the G20 economic summit in China that the talks have stalled over some "technical" issues but they would resume Monday. Obama and Putin were also expected to meet Monday.

The countries have tried for weeks to broker a cease-fire between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government and moderate rebels in an effort to expand access and humanitarian aid for the hundreds of thousands of civilians caught in the crossfire.

The strategy has hinged on an unlikely U.S.-Russian military partnership alligned against extremist groups operating in Syria.

But the two powers have conflicting views about who fits in that category, beyond ISIS and Al Qaeda.

"An awful lot of technical things have been worked out, a lot of things are clear, but there still remain, as I say, a couple of tough issues," said Kerry, who is negotiating the deal with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. "Weve got to figure out how to make certain both of us can be comfortable with the resolution to those issues, so thats what were working on."

Obama said the U.S. and Russia have "grave differences" but a deal was "worth trying."

"We're not there yet," Obama said. "I think it's premature for us to say there's a clear path forward, but there's the possibility at least for us to make some progress."

Kerry declined to say what specific issues are holding up the deal.

A senior State Department official said the talks faltered on Saturday when Russia pulled back from agreement on issues the U.S. negotiators believed had been settled.

Kerry and Lavrov were consulting with their governments before talks resume.

Lavrov's deputy, Sergei Ryabkov, said a deal was "close" but said Washington had to dissociate itself from Nusra.

The Syrian conflict has killed as many as a half-million people since 2011 and caused millions to flee their homes, contributing to a global migration crisis. Amid the chaos, ISIS has emerged as a global terror threat.

Kerry and Lavrov's talks on the sidelines of the summit represent their third significant attempt since July to finalize a new U.S.-Russian military partnership that Moscow has long sought.

The package would include provisions so aid can reach besieged areas of Syria and measures to prevent Assad's government from bombing areas where U.S.-backed rebels are operating.

U.S. officials have said that as part of a deal, Russia would have to halt offensives by Assad's government, something it has failed to do over months of diplomatic efforts.

And the U.S. must get rebels to break ranks with an Al Qaeda-linked extremist group, a task that grew tougher after its fighters last month successfully broke the siege of Aleppo, Syria's largest city and the site of fierce recent fighting.

Negotiators had been hopeful a deal could come together while world leaders gathered in China, and American officials were optimistic enough that they invited reporters to an expected announcement by Kerry and Lavrov.

But officials removed Lavrov's podium just before Kerry came out -- alone -- to announce that no agreement had been finalized. A planned conference call with journalists to discuss the deal was abruptly canceled.

In recent days, the State Department has said it only wants a nationwide cease-fire between Assad's military and the rebels, and not another "cessation of hostilities" that is time-limited and only stops fighting in some cities and regions.

Negotiators on both sides have spent weeks poring over maps of potential areas where opposition groups operate and where Assad's forces would be prohibited from launching airstrikes.

The idea is for Russia to use its significant influence over Assad to ensure compliance with the deal.

But the U.S. has long been wary on the military coordination part of the deal because it says Russia has mainly targeted moderate, U.S.-backed opposition groups in a bid to prop up Assad.

The United States wants Russia to focus exclusively on ISIS and al-Qaeda-linked groups.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter and National Intelligence Director James Clapper have expressed misgivings about sharing intelligence and targeting information with Moscow.

However, Kerry told reporters in response to questions about Pentagon concerns that, Everybody's signed off on what we're talking about right now.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The United States is skeptical an agreement with Russia to decease violence in Syria can work but will keep pursuing it nonetheless, President Barack Obama said Sunday as negotiators from both countries edged toward a deal.

Obama, speaking on the sidelines of the Group of 20 economic summit in China, said the U.S. and Russia still have "grave differences" about what's needed to end Syria's civil war and which opposition groups are legitimate targets for the U.S. and Russian militaries. But he said "it is worth trying" to secure an agreement nonetheless, adding that negotiators were working "around the clock."

"We're not there yet," Obama said. "I think it's premature for us to say there's a clear path forward, but there's the possibility at least for us to make some progress."

A deal could be announced as early as Sunday by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, said a senior U.S. State Department official, adding that the two countries were close to a deal but still had to resolve some issues. The official wasn't authorized to discuss the negotiations publicly and requested anonymity.

Kerry and Lavrov have been deep in talks for weeks over a deal to boost U.S. and Russian military cooperation to fight the Islamic State group and other extremists in Syria  a step Moscow has long sought. The emerging deal is expected to also include provisions to ensure aid can reach besieged areas of Syria and steps to prevent Syrian President Bashar Assad's government from bombing areas where U.S.-backed rebels are operating.

U.S. officials have said that as part of a deal, Russia would have to halt offensives by Assad's government, something it has failed to do over months of diplomatic efforts. They said the U.S. must get rebels to break ranks with the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front, a task that grew tougher after Nusra fighters last month successfully broke the siege of Aleppo, Syria's largest city and the site of fierce recent fighting.

Though negotiators have been hopeful a deal could come together while world leaders are gathered in Hangzhou for the G20, that optimism has been tempered by the failure of previous ceasefire deals to hold. The U.S. has long been wary of increasing military coordination with Russia in Syria's civil war because it says Russia continues striking moderate, U.S.-backed opposition groups in a bid to prop up Assad. The U.S. wants Russia to focus exclusively on IS and al-Qaida-linked groups.

Discussions about the intractable Syria conflict and the related fight against IS have been a major focus as world leaders gather for the G20, which brings together the world's major economies. Obama met first Sunday with new British Prime Minister Theresa May, then with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for their first sit-down since failed coup in his country in July.

Obama called the attempted overthrow "terrible." He assured Erdogan that his national security team and the Justice Department would ensure that those responsible are brought to justice, a reference to Turkey's extradition request for an exiled cleric it holds responsible. The U.S. is still weighing Turkey's evidence for the Pennsylvania-based cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Turkey's demands for the U.S. to hand over Gulen have coincided with growing clashes between Turkish forces and U.S.-backed Syrian Kurds. The Pentagon has backed the incursions, but said they should only be aimed at IS fighters. Turkey has used the operations to push back Syrian Kurds it accuses of seeking to claim more territory.

Obama called Turkey a key ally in the campaign to defeat the Islamic State and said "we now need to finish the job" of securing Turkey's border with Syria.

Since the failed coup, the U.S. has been alarmed by Turkey's diplomatic flirtations with Russia and Syrian President Bashar Assad's patron, and softening of its demand that Assad be excluded from a political transition.

Erdogan said it was important for the U.S. and Turkey to "embrace a common attitude against terrorism." In a reference to Washington's support for the Kurds, he said there are "no good terrorists or bad; all terrorism is bad."

In his first meeting with May since she took office in Britain, Obama sought to demonstrate American solidarity with the U.K. amid the tumult over its decision to leave the European Union. He and May said their countries would continue an ambitious trade agenda together, though Obama conceded that Britain's first task was to figure out its new trade relationship with its EU neighbors.
Israeli tank fire targeted a Hamas post on the Gaza Strip border overnight after gunfire at Israeli forces in the area, with no injuries reported, officials said Sunday.

Palestinian security sources in Gaza run by Islamist movement Hamas, confirmed the post in the northern Gaza Strip in the Beit Lahia area had been targeted and said no one was hurt.

Israel's army said it responded with tank fire after its forces were targeted by gunfire along the border between the Palestinian enclave and Israel.

Israel has launched three wars assaults on Gaza since 2008 and there are frequent flare-ups along the border.

Israel regularly responds to rocket fire from militants in Gaza with air strikes.

Last month, it carried out dozens of strikes in Gaza in response to rocket fire, a far larger response than usual.

Some analysts questioned whether the response was the result of a new approach by hardline Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who took office in May.

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Eight people were taken to hospitals after a ride suddenly shut down Saturday at a fair in Memphis, Tenn., officials said.

Riders were enjoying the Moonraker, which spins around an axis and tilts up and down on an angle, at the Delta Fair when the ride's computer detected a problem and immediately began safety shutdown, Matt Snyder, the fair's safety director, told the Associated Press.

As the ride stopped spinning and began to descend, the operator of the ride panicked and pressed a manual override button that released the safety restraints before it settled into its cradle.

"It scared everybody," Snyder said.

Initial reports that 14 people were thrown from the ride and taken to hospitals were "terribly inaccurate," according to Earle Farrell, a spokesman from the Shelby County Sheriff's Office. Fair officials denied that anyone was thrown from or fell from the ride.

Two adults and six children were transported to hospitals after walking from the ride under their own power. None had visible injuries, but some complained their ankles were hurting, Snyder said. Four more people were treated at the scene.

One of the two adults who went to the hospital was the ride operator, who was emotionally shaken by the accident, officials said.

Anna Jordan, who was on the ride, told Fox 13 Memphis her safety harness released as she was at the top of the ride. Jordan said she was able to hang on and was not injured, but described a chaotic scene as children were treated for their injuries.

"We thought it was just part of the ride and then it stopped. We were all holding on and everyone was screaming and crying," Jordon told Fox 13 Memphis.

The ride has been shut down but the fair remained open Saturday. The ride had received a technical inspection in the past three years, and two more inspections in the days before the fair opened this week, Snyder said.

A ride inspector is scheduled to check the ride on Tuesday, according to president Mark Lovell.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Former University of Missouri professor Melissa Click has landed a new job nearly 1,600 miles away in Spokane, Wash, according to Gonzaga University's website.

Click is listed on the faculty page of the university's website as a lecturer.

Click was fired from her position as an assistant professor of communications in February, and her appeal of the decision was denied in March. She achieved national attention after video footage of her assaulting a student journalist went viral. Later, video emerged of her yelling profanities at a police officer.

Her confrontation with a student journalist attempting to cover campus protests last November was caught on the journalists camera.

Elisabeth Mermann-Jozwiak, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Gonzaga, told the Kansas City Star in a written statement that Gonzaga officials knew of Clicks recent history and were confident in welcoming her to the university. The Kansas City Star first reported the hiring.

Click was hired for a one-year, non-tenure track position as a lecturer in the universitys communication studies department, Mermann-Jowiak told the newspaper.

Dr. Click was hired through an extensive national search process that revealed her to be the most qualified and experienced candidate for the position, the statement obtained by the newspaper read. Dr. Click has excellent recommendations for both her teaching and scholarship, which includes an extensive record of publication. We are confident she has learned much from her experiences at the University of Missouri and believe she will uphold the rigorous standards of academic excellence demanded of Gonzaga faculty and students.

Click for more from The Kansas City Star.
The convicted rapist accused of critically injuring two California correctional officers on Saturday morning during a jailhouse shooting was booked on charges of attempted murder as his alleged victims clung to life Sunday.

Thong Vang, 37, was also charged with being a felon with a handgun and bringing drugs into a jail, The Fresno Bee reported.

Correctional Officers Juanita Davila and Toamalama Scanlan remained in critical condition on Sunday morning after they were struck in the head and neck area during Saturdays incident near a secure area of the Fresno County Jail.

Officials said Vang opened fire in a lobby area where about 15 people were gathered. Vang, who entered the area at 8:30 a.m. to visit someone, exhibited odd behavior, including pacing back and forth and attempting to cut a line of people, Sheriff Margaret Mims told The Bee.

As Davila tried to get Vang to sit down, Vang pulled out a gun and began shooting, Mims said.

Neither corrections officer was armed. Both had at least 10 years of experience in the county.

Officers attempting to subdue Vang used a stun gun to no effect before firing shots at him, Mims said. The alleged shooter eventually gave up and said he wanted to be arrested, Mims said.

The injured officers were dragged out of the lobby and taken to the hospital to undergo surgery.

Vang was hospitalized for minor scrapes and cuts.

Sheriff's spokesman Tony Botti said Vang was released from prison in 2014 after serving 16 years for raping minors aged 14 and under. The parolee had no criminal violations since his release.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A British woman of Pakistani origin was raped before she was allegedly strangled to death by her ex-husband in a village in the country's eastern Punjab province, a police spokeswoman said.



Samia Shahid, a 28-year-old woman from Bradford, was found dead in July of what were assumed to be natural causes and buried in a local cemetery.



But a fresh inquiry was ordered after Shahid's husband Mukhtar Kazim publicly accused her family of killing her because they opposed Shahid's decision to divorce her first husband in 2014 and marry him. The inquiry concluded that Shahid had been strangled and her first husband Mohammad Shakeel has been detained as the prime suspect.



On Saturday, Nabila Ghazanfar, the police spokeswoman, told The Associated Press that a forensic examination confirmed that Shahid was raped before her death.



Kazim also accused Shahid's own family members of conspiring in the murder by telling her that her father was critically ill in order to lure Shahid back to Pakistan. The father has been detained by police as well.



Ghazanfar said a local police chief has been suspended for mishandling the case and allowing Shahid's mother and sister to flee the country. She said investigators are seeking their return for questioning.



Shahid's case surfaced less than two weeks after taboo-defying social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch was strangled by her brother for posting racy photographs that were deemed shameful in Pakistan, where nearly 1,000 women are killed every year by family members in so-called "honor killings."
A woman wearing a large cross necklace is being sought in a burglary inside a Georgia church that was captured by a surveillance camera.

The Hall County Sheriffs Office on Friday released photos taken from the camera inside Corinth Baptist Church in Gainesville and asked for the publics help in identifying the suspect, Fox 5 Atlanta reported.

The photos show a woman with a cross around her neck. She has on a dress and her hair is in a ponytail.

Deputies say she broke into the church overnight on Aug. 25 and stole musical instruments and electronics worth about $3,000, the station reported.

She looks like a normal person, Deputy Stephen Wilbanks told WXIA-TV. She doesnt fit the profile of our typical burglar that we see.

No one knows how she got into the church. No locks or windows were broken.

Pastor Chris Swan told the Gainesville Times he doesnt believe the woman is a member of the congregation.

He said the items were discovered missing the following Sunday morning.

When we went to do (a) sound check and things of that nature, we realized one thing was gone and then two things were gone, he told the paper.

Click here for more from Fox 5 Atlanta.
This Labor Day weekend marks one year since Fox Lake, Illinois Police Lieutenant Joe Gliniewicz staged his on-the-job suicide to look like murdersparking a massive investigation and nationwide manhunt for three "killers" who didnt exist.

Fox Lake officials are still picking up the pieces of the stunning event. It was a betrayal to the profession and the community, Chris Covelli, a Lake County Sheriffs Office detective, told FoxNews.com.

On Sept. 1, 2015, 52-year-old Gliniewicz radioed in from a rural area of Fox Lake that he was getting out of his cruiser to check on three suspicious men, two white and one black. A short while later Gliniewicz was found shot to death, one bullet hitting his bulletproof vest, the other striking him below the vest, near his heart. His glasses and other belongings were found strewn around the swampy area, leading investigators to believe the officer engaged in some type of struggle.

However, in a stunning twist, police discovered Gliniewicz carefully staged his suicide to look like murder. Investigators learned the corrupt cop apparently caved under the pressure of living a shocking double life for nearly two decades.

"It's unheard of in our profession that anyone would think to do something like that and it just shows the emotional state that he must have been in over all of this and knowing that we were getting closer to finding out what was really going on," said Fox Lake Village Administrator, Anne Marrin.

According to investigators, Gliniewicz embezzled tens of thousands of dollars from the Fox Lake Explorer program, the 'police academy for teens' he was hailed as a hero for managing for years. Police say Gliniewicz used the money for vacations, car repairs and even adult websites.

It was also discovered Gliniewicz had extramarital affairs and arranged for his own mistress to marry his son in order to gain added military benefits.

Perhaps the biggest bombshell was that Gliniewicz contacted a hit man to have Marrin murdered.

"It's crazy. I can't describe it any other way, Marrin said.

Marrin is credited with discovering Gliniewicz's corruption by asking the officer for paperwork to account for the spending and inventory of the Explorer program.

Following Gliniewicz's death, his wife Melodie immediately declared her husband a hero and murder victim.

However, through the massive federal and state investigation, officers concluded Melodie Gliniewicz was a partner in her husband's crimes. The pair even took an estimated $9,000 vacation to Hawaii -- allegedly on the Explorer program's dime.

Earlier this year Melodie Gliniewicz was indicted by a grand jury on charges of conspiracy, felony money laundering and misuse of charitable funds. She awaits trail. Attorneys for Gliniewicz say she is innocent and is a victim of her husband's schemes.

Melodie Gliniewicz also filed for her husband's pension, a total of $1.5 million in payments over 20 years, according to Marrin. The village pension board has approved a motion to withhold a decision on payment until after Melodie's criminal trial.

In addition to the embezzled funds, the couple obtained a substantial amount of military equipment including vehicles, helmets and vests through the 1033 Program, according to investigators. The federal program gives unused and dated military equipment to needy police departments.

Following Gliniewicz 's death, Marrin led the tedious task of itemizing each item Gliniewicz received. Marrin tells FoxNews.com the village has given items like flashlights and traffic cones to its police department. Military items have been placed in an inventory and will be returned.

The death of Gliniewicz came amid tensions between police and citizens in communities around the country and in the midst of the "Blue Lives Matter" movement.

Marrin says Gliniewicz's death marred that police support.

"Because of the betrayal, nationwide, it was a terrible thing that message was lost," Marrin said. "The worst part fell upon our police department. They had to carry the stigma of what that wayward officer did and that's unfair."
Authorities in Virginia were investigating an abduction and a rape of a female lifeguard that occurred Saturday.

According to Fox 5 DC, Alexandria police said the incident occurred at around 2:00 p.m. when a 24-year-old female lifeguard called to report that she had been abducted from the pool she was working at and was raped by an unknown suspect.

Police said an unknown man approached the woman while she was at work, and while no one else was at the pool. Authorities said he threatened the victim with a gun and then raped her. The victim was able to call for help after the suspect fled the scene.

The man was described as a white male in his mid-thirties, tall and thin, with short hair and dark eyes. He was wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt, light-colored jeans and a blue hat at the time of the incident.

Alexandria police are urging anyone with information about this incident or the suspect to contact them at 703-746-6613.

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Time could be running out for waves of refugees to enter Europe, the president of the European Union warned on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit on Sunday.

"The practical capability of Europe to host new waves of refugees, not to mention irregular economic migrants, is close to limits," Donald Tusk said at a news conference. He urged the rest of the world to share the burden of refugees escaping war and famine in the Middle East and Africa, AFP reported.

"Only global efforts supporting refugees and their host communities will be able to bear fruit. That is why we want to encourage our partners to increase humanitarian and development aid, as well as refugee resettlement. We need to address the root causes that force millions of people to leave their homes and seek shelter elsewhere," Tusk added.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she saw the possibility of a "positive outcome" to negotiations between Turkey and the European Union on a visa waiver for Turks, but that it would still take weeks of work.

The offer to scrap visas for Turks entering the EU was one incentive for Turkey to agree to a deal to curb the flow of migrants across the Aegean Sea. But it's conditional on, among other things, Turkey modifying its definition of terrorism and what constitutes a terror act to ensure that journalists and academics aren't arrested. Ankara has refused to make changes.

Merkel said after meeting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan Sunday at the G-20 summit that they didn't discuss a precise time frame but "we agreed that there is still work to do."

"We should build an open world economy," Chinese President Xi Jinping said before an audience that included President Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister Theresa May and leaders from Japan, South Korea, India and other governments.

"Group of 20 countries should abide by their commitment to avoid taking new protectionist measures, strengthen investment policy cooperation and take effective action to promote trade growth," Xi said.

China hopes to use its status as this year's G-20 leader to increase its influence in global economic management. Chinese officials say they want the G-20, created to coordinate the response to the 2008 financial crisis, to take on a longer-term regulatory role.

The World Trade Organization is forecasting this year's global trade growth at an anemic 2.8 percent -- its fifth straight year below 3 percent.

Leaders at the meeting have said they will call for "inclusive growth" -- a reference to efforts to defuse pressure to protect local industries by spreading the benefits of closer global integration to millions of people who have been left behind by wrenching changes.

Obama stressed that theme at a separate news conference with May.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The Israeli military says it has fired at Syrian army cannons in the Syrian Golan Heights in response to mortar fire from Syria that hit the Israeli-held Golan Heights.

The army says that the mortars appeared to be errant fire from Syria's civil war, and were not deliberately targeting Israeli-held territory.

No injuries were reported Sunday.

The military says it holds the Syrian government accountable for the "blatant breach of Israeli sovereignty."

Israel has taken pains to stay on the sidelines of neighboring Syria's war, but has carried out similar reprisals on Syrian positions when errant fire has previously landed in Israeli-controlled territory.

Israel is also believed to have carried out airstrikes on arms shipments believed to be headed toward the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, a close ally of Syria.
A deal in Syria being discussed by the United States and Russia, which would involve a country-wide ceasefire and focus on delivering aid to embattled Aleppo, could be announced soon, Washington's Syria envoy has said.

The deal would oblige Russia to prevent Syrian government warplanes from bombing areas held by the mainstream opposition, and would require the withdrawal of Damascus's forces from a key supply route north of Aleppo, according to a letter from Michael Ratney to the armed opposition, seen by Reuters and dated Sept. 3.

In return, the United States would coordinate with Russia in fighting against al Qaeda, the letter said, without elaborating.

It said the rebels must cooperate in order for the agreement to take effect, but that guarantees were being sought that Moscow, Syria's most powerful ally, would respect the deal.

A truce brokered by the Cold War foes in February collapsed and peace talks crumbled earlier this year, with the Syrian government side and the opposition accusing each other of violating it.

Fighting has since escalated across the country, particularly around divided Aleppo, where advances by both sides have cut supplies, power and water to nearly 2 million people in government- and rebel-held areas.

The latest agreement would see government forces withdraw from a key supply route which led into the rebel-held east of the city and which was cut in July. The Castello Road would become a demilitarised zone, Ratney's letter said.

The government and rebels would also be required not to block any aid entering the city, it said.

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The latest bomb attack by suspected Islamist militants in Davao City is Philippine President Rodrigo Dutertes biggest challenge since taking office in June, and his move to declare a nationwide state of lawlessness is rattling nerves.

At least 14 people were killed and dozens more injured in Fridays blast at a busy city-center night market. As paramedics and doctors attempted to treat the survivors, Abu Rami, a spokesman for the extremist Abu Sayyaf group, called local media and claimed its sympathizers had orchestrated attack, saying it was a reprisal for military operations to hunt to down and eliminate the Islamic State-linked group on the island of Jolo. In the past week, 15 soldiers and at least 25 militants were killed in fierce fighting on Jolo.

With the Philippine army now preparing to deploy more troops to Jolo, the Abu Sayyaf spokesman warned of further attacks. Mr. Duterte subsequently declared a nationwide state of lawlessness.

The presidents declaration falls short of imposing martial law, but it does allow military personnel to be deployed to support police in setting up checkpoints, or in carrying out searches. Some legal experts suggest declaring a state of lawlessness is a way of informing the Philippine army that it might be called upon to perform a policing role.

It isnt without precedent, either. Davao City and its neighboring areas were also placed under a state of lawlessness by then-President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in 2003, after two bombings claimed 38 lives.

But some observers fear Mr. Dutertes response might amplify the impact of Friday nights attack. The callous disregard shown by the attackers for peoples right to life must not be met by government action that itself disregards human rights, Champa Patel, Amnesty Internationals senior adviser for Southeast Asia, said in a statement.

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Turkeys military launched a second incursion into Syria Saturday against an Islamic State-held border town, in a move that U.S. officials view as a necessary step to flushing out the jihadist group from the war-torn country.

A Turkish armored unit supported by artillery strikes moved across the border into Al-Rai, a Syrian city that Syrian rebels lost to Islamic State earlier in May and which is located roughly halfway along the line of control bebetween the Turkish-Syrian border.

A statement from the Turkish military said that Syrian rebels fighting with the support of Turkish armored units and artillery had control of the Syrian town. It wasn't immediately clear when the operation started or what kind of resistance the forces met during the incursion.

The thrust follows a successful operation last week by Turkeys military and an estimated 1,000 Syrian rebels to seize Jarablus, which lies across the border from Gaziantep, a Turkish city of two million people that has been severely destabilized by the flow of foreign fighters entering Syria and leaving that war-torn country to spread Islamic States terror spree in their homelands.

Saturdays incursion took place 36 miles west of Jarablus and represents a new second front for the Turkish military in Syria. If Turkish-backed rebels can successfully hold the area, it would slice in half the approximately 62 miles of territory that Islamic State has controlled along the Turkish border and isolate its remaining forces in that corner of Syria.

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Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro reportedly was greeted by angry pot-banging protesters during a visit to Margarita Island.

Grainy cellphone videos said to be from the Friday night encounter were picked up by Venezuelan news sites and were trending on social media. The socialist leader is seen jogging through a crowd as residents loudly bang on pots and hurl obscenities.

His visit to Margarita Island earlier Friday evening was broadcast nationwide. Images of the protest were later posted by residents of the town where it reportedly occurred.

Maduro supporters sought to cast doubt about what happened, with one pro-government lawmaker posting on social media a short, edited video of what looks like the same appearance and in which Maduro can be seen greeting well-wishers as he jogs through the crowd with his fist raised.

There was no immediate government reaction.

The opposition said the protest illustrated the widespread anger among Venezuelans for Maduro during the country's economic crisis.

Hundreds of thousands of people poured into the capital's streets Thursday to demand authorities allow a recall referendum that could remove Maduro from office.
Libyan pro-government forces are facing "fierce resistance" from Islamic State group holdouts in Sirte and it could take several days to gain full control of the city, a spokesman said Sunday.

Forces loyal to Libya's Government of National Accord (GNA) launched a new attack on Saturday against IS group in Sirte, the coastal city seized by the militants last year.

Backed by weeks of US air strikes, pro-GNA fighters have recaptured nearly all of what had been the militants' main stronghold in North Africa.

IS group fighters are now cornered in a last district of the city but Reda Issa, a spokesman for loyalist forces, said it was proving difficult to dislodge them.

"IS is putting up fierce resistance in their last neighbourhoods," Issa told AFP. "They are trying to make the battle last longer although they know it will be over soon."

At least 10 pro-GNA fighters were killed and 60 wounded in Saturday's offensive, with most of the deaths caused by car bombs and suicide attacks, Issa said.

Fighting had eased on Sunday, he said, as pro-government forces sought ways "to minimise the casualties caused by IS group suicide attacks the next time there will be an offensive".

"We hope to liberate Sirte before Eid," Issa said, referring to the Eid al-Adha Muslim holiday, which is due around September 12.

The forces loyal to the UN-backed GNA had said they were preparing to "liberate" the entire city after seizing several IS group positions, including its headquarters, last month.

The city's fall would be a huge setback to IS group's efforts to expand its self-proclaimed "caliphate" beyond Syria and Iraq where the militants have also suffered losses.

The capture of Sirte by IS group sparked fears the militants would use the city as a springboard for attacks on Europe.

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By MICHAEL ROIZEN, M.D., AND MEHMET OZ, M.D.

Headlines call it a miracle: In the well-respected medical journal The Lancet, Canadian researchers reported that 23 people with debilitating multiple sclerosis had no relapses of their condition for up to 13 years after receiving stem-cell therapy. And this year, in a clinical trial at Stanford University School of Medicine, doctors injected modified human adult stem cells (they came from bone marrow) directly into the brains of 18 chronic stroke patients. Chronic stroke patients are those left with continuing disabilities six months (and longer) following a stroke. After receiving the stem cell injections, limbs woke up and wheelchairs were discarded.

Stem cell treatments, already in use for a small number of health conditions, do hold tremendous promise. Were excited, especially about breakthroughs for people with MS, heart conditions, stroke, diabetes and vision loss. But one Harvard expert has pointed out, The only stem-cell therapies that have been proven safe and effective are those constituting what is known as bone marrow transplantation for treatment of some cancers.

Most claims for stem-cell treatments are, well, frauds. That doesnt stop clinics from charging from $5,000 to $25,000 per treatment, with some patients reportedly racking up bills over $100,000.

Researchers from the University of California, Davis, found that at least 351 companies in the U.S. are operating about 570 clinics that offer unapproved (and unproven) stem-cell procedures. They tout therapies for everything from brain disorders and heart disease to spine injuries, breathing problems, autism, cerebral palsy, joint problemseven cosmetic procedures like facelifts. And more and more people are opting for risky treatments here and abroad for serious medical conditions that have no cure. Thats why its important to sort fact from fiction. Heres what you need to know about stem-cell treatments.

Research into their use as a therapy is especially advanced in:

Diabetes: One day, stems cells may be able to create new, insulin-producing beta cells that can control blood sugar.

When it comes to treating heart disease, stem cells may rebuild muscle damaged during a heart attack.

In cases of macular degeneration, stem cells may one day regrow light-sensing cells in the eye.

And as we mentioned, stems cells have been used in trials for treatment of MS and stroke.

Experimental and unproved therapies can carry big risks. In that Canadian study in which 24 people with MS received the therapy, 23 got big benefits, but one died. Experts who commented on the therapy in The Lancet called the results impressive, but said the death rate was unacceptably high.

An American stroke survivors story was published in the New England Journal of Medicine: He spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on stem-cell treatments in China, Argentina and Mexico and ended up with a painful growth on his spine.

Considering stem cell therapy? Ask questions. Dont base your decision on advertising or stories of other patients. The International Society for Stem Cell Research recommends you ask the treatment provider the following: Whats the treatment routine for my specific disease or condition? Is this therapy part of a clinical trial? (If not, taking part could make you ineligible for stem-cell studies in the future.) What are the proven benefits (who proved them and where) and what are the risks? Is the clinic prepared to handle serious side effects, such as an allergic reaction? For more on what to ask and what to know, we highly recommend the organizations consumer website atcloserlookatstemcells.org.

Steer clear of unproved therapies. Many Americans now live within a 15-minute drive of a stem cell clinic. Plenty more people head abroad for stem cell tourism in places such as the Caribbean, Latin America, China, India and nations of the former Soviet Union. Theres no proof that what clinics in the U.S. or abroad offer is safe or effective unless results have been duplicated by another reliable (stressing reliable) group. Fraud is everywhere, so do your homework!
Two Culpeper men are in jail facing charges as part of what federal authorities call a major drug distribution ring, with suspects based in Washington, New York City and Philadelphia.

Robert Bailey Apperson, 35, and Rodney Allen Simms, 42, are accused of being part of a criminal group that dealt an enormous quantity of cocaine and heroin, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court in Washington.

Appersons arrest was the most recent in the case, according to court documents. He was apprehended Aug. 24 at his home on Cottonwood Lane in the town of Culpeper, records show, and faces a charge of conspiracy to distribute one or more kilograms of heroin and five kilograms of cocaine. He remains incarcerated without bond and has a hearing scheduled Sept. 15 in U.S. District Court.

Simms was arrested in January. He faces the same charges as Apperson and about a half-dozen other suspects in the case. He also remains incarcerated without bond.

The arrests resulted from an FBI-led operation targeting an unnamed suspected drug trafficker in the D.C. area, which started in the fall of 2014, according to court documents.

Authorities eventually learned of the group that included the Culpeper men and tracked them from July 2015 through January. Documents state that the investigation involved undercover surveillance at a Philadelphia hotel as well as wire taps, and turned up details that indicate the suspects were making thousands of dollars a day at times.

Authorities allege that the Culpeper men used a Washington-based contact who would travel to Philadelphia to buy cocaine and heroin from a New York-based source.

In January, agents started arresting the suspects.

Simms was arrested Jan. 8 after a traffic stop in Culpeper. At the stop, police found $26,000 in cash in plastic bags inside the car, according to court documents. Authorities say a later search of Simms house in the Highpoint area turned up 249 grams of suspected crack cocaine and about 13 grams of cocaine, all hidden in plastic containers in the kitchen. A 9mm Smith & Wesson was found in the bedroom, according to authorities.

After the other suspects had been arrested, police allege that Apperson continued to deal heroin and cocaine in Culpeper. Court documents allege that for a time, he had a girlfriend dealing some heroin for him, but she was arrested in March and told police that Apperson supplied her with heroin to use and sell.

In June and July, confidential sources for the Blue Ridge Narcotics and Gang Task Force made three controlled buys of heroin. Appersons arrest soon followed.

Court records allege that Simms appeared to be the primary contact with the cocaine and heroin suppliers, but that both he and Apperson were dealing in large quantities and making a lot of money.

The men pooled money to buy large amounts of cocaine and heroin, authorities say, which police allege that they sold throughout Culpeper.

Court documents allege that in one recorded phone conversation in November 2015, Simms told his drug supplier about how he and Apperson would get together $80,000 to buy one shipment of heroin. In another conversation, according to the documents, Simms suggested that Apperson had pocketed $15,000 in three days. When he was arrested, Apperson had $40,000 in cash on him, according to a search warrant.

The charges the men face carry a prison term of 10 years to life, along with a possible $10 million fine.
At least 15 pro-government Yemeni soldiers were killed in rebel attacks in the north and in a suspected militant bombing in Aden on Sunday, military and security sources said.

Shia Huthi rebels and their allies launched twin attacks to try to retake the port of Midi in the northern province of Hajja, after loyalists had captured it, military sources said.

"Eleven soldiers were killed in the attacks and 28 others were wounded," a military official said.

Meanwhile, Saudi-led coalition warplanes carried out 15 air strikes against the Iran-backed rebels to stop their advance in the area, military sources said.

Other air strikes hit rebel positions in the insurgent-controlled capital Sanaa and other provinces over the past 24 hours, they added.

The sources spoke of rebel casualties but AFP could not verify this as the Huthis and their allies rarely acknowledge their losses.

The coalition began its war on the Iran-backed rebels in March 2015.

It intensified operations since the suspension in early August of UN-brokered peace talks between the rebels and their allies and Yemen's government.

Also on Sunday, in Yemen's main southern city of Aden, a roadside bomb killed four soldiers and wounded one at a checkpoint in the Sheikh Othman district, a security official said.

He said militants, who have boosted their attacks in government-controlled Aden over the past few months despite efforts to increase security, are suspected of being behind the bombing.

Earlier, the official had given a toll of two soldiers killed and three wounded but said that two later succumbed to their injuries.

More than 6,600 people have been killed in the Yemeni conflict since March 2015, the UN says.

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There were moments in the last two years when Luis Amador, 24, wondered if giving a teaching career a second chance was the right decision.

There was the moment a student showed up to school one Monday in Houston, Texaswhere Amador was placed with Teach for Americaaccompanied by a police officer, having tried to steal a car over the weekend.

Or the time a student told Amador his father had been shot and killed the night before. Or the seventh-grade girl who excitedly announced her pregnancy.

Or the day he attended the funeral of a student shot over a pair of sneakers.

It was tough, it kept me up at night sometimes, he said. Its just crazy. How do I respond to that?

Despite those challenges, Amador is about to step in front of his first class as a fully independent teachereighth grade English at Gayle Middle School in Stafford County.

Amador has had quite a journey since 2010, when he dropped his education major after less than a year. As a freshman in college, Amador, the American son of a Cuban father and Italian mother, just wanted to share his love of history by teaching the subject and inspiring students.

But his first-year education courses were both boring and a little daunting, especially after he heard more about what teachers faced: low pay, increasing scrutiny, red tape, politics and student issues outside the classroom.

Realizing how much time he would spend doing anything but teaching, Amador, who graduated from Orange County High School after moving around in a military family, decided to stop paying out-of-state tuition in Pennsylvania and headed back home, enrolling at Virginia Tech.

But as he watched friends head to law schoolhis second choicethey didnt seem that happy either, and law school was expensive. A friend who had participated in Teach for America had good things to say, so he gave it a shot.

And he has no regrets.

The mission kind of really aligned with me in terms of educational quality, not letting your ZIP Code determine your future, just making the world a better place and getting out of my comfort zone, he said. And then  I fell in love with teaching.

Teacher shortage, or shorting teachers?

Amador isnt alone in questioning a teaching career.

Since 2009, national enrollment in teaching preparatory programs has dropped by 30 percent, while post-secondary enrollment overall has dropped by just 3 percent, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Education using data as of July 2015.

In other words, almost as many students are going to college, but not as many of them are choosing to pursue a career in education.

Theyre in quite a great crisis, many divisions, not all, even as schools about to start, said Joan Johnson, the director of the office for teacher education in the Virginia Department of Education. Numbers available for hiring are very slim.

Stafford and Spotsylvania counties had the third- and fourth-highest student-teacher ratios in the state in 201415, according to information from the Virginia Department of Educationnearly 15 students per instructional staff member, while the state average is 13.

The counties class sizes are larger than this ratio (though within the states required staffing standards, according to staffing plans) because the instructional staff members counted by the state include teacher aides, guidance counselors, librarians, district-wide instructors, principals and assistant principals, and other categories of non-regular instructional staff employed by the district.

The reasons for the decline, though, can be tangled. During the economic crisis, many school districts cut teaching positions through layoffs and attrition. With fewer jobs available, teaching was a less-reliable career choice than in years past.

But other factors also likely affected the drop-off. According to the same federal report, the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher showed that teacher job satisfaction has dropped to its lowest point in 25 years: a drop of 23 percentage points since 2008. Teachers have reported high stress, low autonomy, and lower morale from impacts of budget cuts on educational programs, in addition to lower pay.

Its hard to define how much of a shortage exists, though, because there might be a surplus of teachers in one district or subject area at the same time there is a shortage in another, which would require time and money to re-certify.

And its hard to say whether districts cant find teachers, or cant pay them.

Virginia has critical teacher shortages in key areas, especially special education, but also middle school, career and technical education, math, English, and history and social science. But not all districts are affected equally.

Those with the highest pay or the greatest incentives sometimes end up in competition with districts that are higher-need and cant offer the same perks, Johnson said.

Some divisions are trying to create special incentives for certain teachers, she said. Other divisions that are not as wealthy cannot offer that.

It made me stronger

Those shortages are one reason Amador, who completed a certification during his second year in Teach for America, has a job in Stafford right now, even though he didnt apply until July.

The other reason is more personaland more painful.

His girlfriend, who was in the same program he was and who planned to teach in Austin with him this year, was in a car accident in March that took her left leg below the knee. She spent more than 40 days in a coma, Amador said.

She is now in physical therapy in New York, and Amador came home to be closer to his family.

By the time Amador experienced his own tragedy, the litany of his students problems could have left him numb. Instead, he said, the rapport he had with his students, and the perspective he gained as they shared their troubles, was comforting.

It made me stronger, he said. Having my kids talk to me, say, This is what Im going through too, and [thinking], Wow, if theyre going through it at 11, 12 years old, you know, then I need to be a role model, too, and be strong. That really helped, too.

Many of the things that consumed Amadors time in Houston are exactly what drove him away from teaching in the first place. Though the districts to which Teach for America members are typically sent often represent the toughest cases, teachers everywhere often expect to spend at least as much of their time addressing students emotional needs as their intellectual growth.

A lot of [training] also focused on being an emotional teacher for our kids and the backgrounds we serve, Amador said. Yes, its important to teach them these concepts, because they need to know that, but they also need to have an emotionally stable person in their life.

For Amador, embracing teaching the child, not just the subject, paradoxically made him more prepared to teachand gave him skills he feels will apply to any school district.

I want to work eye-to-eye with people, instead of pencil to paper, he said.
The Central Rappahannock Regional Library is partnering with the National Park Service to offer a speaker series each Thursday in September beginning Sept. 8, in honor of the National Park Services 100th anniversary. Each event is free and begins at 7 p.m. at Headquarters Library at 1201 Caroline St.

Sept. 8: The Making of a Park. Superintendent Kirsten TalkenSpaulding will discuss how a national park is created. Who decides whats significant and what gets to be a national park? What is involved in adding a unit to the National Park Service? As the first superindendent of Fort Monroe National Monument, TalkenSpaulding will explain how this incredible site became a park. TalkenSpaulding is currently serving as the 15th superintendent of Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park.

Sept. 15: The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation. Dr. Timothy B. Smiths talk is based upon his book by the same title, The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation: The Decade of the 1890s and the Establishment of Americas First Five Military Parks. Dr. Smith will first put the Golden Age into the larger context of Civil War battlefield preservation by discussing the various generations of preservation from the war until now. He will also look at the 1890s itself and examine why exactly it was so golden before launching into a discussion of the lasting importance of the Golden Age and its influence on later preservation. Smith is an author/historian and a professor of history at the University of Tennessee at Martin.

Sept. 22: Interpretation: From the CCC to Pokemon Go. Dr. Joan Zenzen will describe interpretation at the Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park over time and discuss the 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps transformation of the park, Mission 66 additions of the 1950s and 1960s and more recent challenges resulting from traffic congestion and developments. Zenzen will conclude with the effects of Pokemon Go on visitor experience and park management. Zenzen is an independent historian who has written extensively about the National Park Service, including official histories of five national parks and is the author of two books.

Sept. 29: Segregation in the Southern National Parks. Dr. Erin Krutko Devlin will explore her research on the evolution of NPS policy in relation to civil rights and illuminate the experience of African American park employees and visitors in the state of Virginia from the 1930s through the 1960s. In the mid-20th century, Southern national parks were segregated. Restrooms, picnic areas, lodges, lunch counters and cabins were designated for White Only or Negro Only. Devlin is an assistant professor of History and American Studies at the University of Mary Washington. She is the author of a National Park Service cultural resource study focused on segregation at Lewis Mountain in Shenandoah National Park. Her forthcoming book, Remember Little Rock, examines the public memory of the 1957 school desegregation crisis and its relationship to ongoing debates about race, education and public policy.

For more information, contact Michele Brown, adult services coordinator at Central Rappahannock Regional Library at mbrown@crrl.org or 540/372-1144.
FROM STAFF REPORTS

The Dahlgren Heritage Museum kicks off its 2016 Community Forum Series this week with a panel discussion on The Navy Comes to Dahlgren.

The two-part series highlights the history of Naval Support Facility Dahlgren, which will celebrate its centennial in 2018. The first forum will begin at 5 p.m. Thursday in University Hall on the University of Mary Washingtons Dahlgren Campus, 4224 University Drive, preceded by a reception at 4:30 p.m.

Speakers at this weeks panel discussion include Brucie Gouldthorpe, who was born on property purchased by the Navy, and who witnessed the early buildup of the Dahlgren base, as well as Marybelle Ashton who taught at the installations school for military and civilian dependent children following World War II.

Rounding out the panel will be Elizabeth Lee, director of the King George County Historical Society.

The second community forum on Oct. 13, From Proving Ground to R&D Center, will focus on critical transitional periods in Dahlgrens more recent history.

Panelists will include Jim Colvard, Robert Gates and Elizabeth Lyddane, who will be speaking about her father, Russell Lyddane.

Russell Lyddane and Colvard both served as technical directors of the Dahlgren base, and Gates was a senior executive at Dahlgren, as well as technical director for Naval Surface Warfare Center Indian Head Division. Completing the panel will be retired Navy Capt. Joseph McGettigan, who commanded Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division, from 200407.

The October forum will also start at 5 p.m. in the University Center, preceded by a reception 30 minutes earlier.

The community forums are free and open to the public.

The upcoming programs are the latest in a series of community forums sponsored by the Dahlgren Heritage Foundation as a means of preserving and promoting the history, traditions, heritage and culture of the Navy base and surrounding community.

We are squarely focused on the year 2018 as the Naval Support Facility at Dahlgren counts down to its centennial that year, foundation President Ed Jones said in a news release. We want to be a key contributor to that commemoration to continue to tell the story of this critically important military base and the community that surrounds it.

Located in the former Virginia Gateway Tourism Center near the Nice Bridge on U.S. 301, the museum focuses on the history of the Naval Support Facility Dahlgren and Northern Neck. It is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays.

Speakers at this weeks forum include Brucie Gouldthorpe, who was born on property purchased by the Navy, and who witnessed the early buildup of the Dahlgren base.
SEPTEMBER can produce the most beautiful weather and so it had that day: a brilliant blue, cloudless sky, just enough chill in the early morning to be refreshing, and the promise of a warm noontime.

As I entered the newsroom a little before 9 a.m., I saw a handful of reporters clustered around the television. Curious, I walked back to see what was going on. A friend turned to me as I approached: A plane flew into the World Trade Center.

Oh, wow, I responded. In my mind, I pictured some light-plane pilot incompetently striking the soaring building. I wondered if it could sustain that kind of blow. I continued upstairs to my office where my boss was preparing to leave for a multi-day conference. Did you hear what happened? He hadnt. Im going to go back downstairs for a while, I said.

By the time I re-entered the newsroom, the second planeclearly a passenger jethad hit the other tower. Now both were burning. A consuming fire and billowing smoke engulfed them. Something horrible was happening. Sept. 11, 2001, would change us forever.

Looking back on that day nearly 15 years ago generates so many memories. Our daughter was just three weeks into her freshman year at Christopher Newport University. She called me in tears a few minutes later, after the third plane crashed into the Pentagon. Just listen to the university, I told her. If they tell you to stay in the dorm, do that. If they close the campus, Ill come get you. Stay away from military bases, and remember, God is in control.

God is in control. I had to remind myself of that over and over that day. My chick was out of the nest. I couldnt protect her.

Immediately after the attacks, the FAA grounded all planes. Walking our dog under empty skies that evening, it seemed as if the nation was holding its collective breath. Transfixed by the news, I remember seeing the gaping, smoldering hole in the side of the Pentagon and hundreds and hundreds of rescue workers sifting through the rubble. Members of Congress from both parties stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, holding hands and singing God Bless America. Gradually, we began to learn the names of those who had diedand those who had survived.

We were so united then. It didnt matter what race you were, whether you were a liberal or a conservative, a natural-born citizen or an immigrant, on Sept. 11 you were first and foremost an American. Flags flew everywhere and God bless America became a meme. President Bush, who had a 90 percent approval rating, gave an eloquent speech at the National Cathedral that Friday, leading us as we began to process what had happened.

A few weeks later, the United States gathered its allies and launched an attack against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which had provided safe harbor for al-Qaida. Toppling the regime didnt take long. Finding Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, took 10 more frustrating years. In the meantime, fearful that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, we and our allies invaded Iraq in 2003.

About 3,000 innocent people lost their lives in the Sept. 11 attacks. Since then, 3.7 million have served in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Approximately 7,000 have died in combat, and almost 51,000 have been wounded. Surely many, many lives have been changed.

The way we live changed, too. On Sept. 10, 2001, airlines were responsible for security on planes. Today, over 46,000 TSA agents shuffle shoeless passengers through metal detectors, full-body scanners, and intrusive pat-downs to ensure box-cutters, multi-tools and, of course, guns, stay off the planes. The Department of Homeland Security, created in 2002, initially had a $16 billion budget. Today, DHSs budget has soared to $64.9 billion and the agency has 240,000 employees. In 2001, there were just 33 sky marshals tasked with averting plane hijackings to Cuba. Today, there are at least 5,000 (the actual number is classified). Back then, government spying on Americans was virtually unknown. Today, NSA is a household word.

But despite spending over $1 trillion since 9/11 in homeland security measures, we are not safe. FBI Director James Comey said in December that the United States was under the greatest threat of a terror attack since that dreadful day in 2001. Why? There are more people being radicalized and they are using simpler means to provoke terrora pressure-cooker bomb, a truck driven into a crowd, a slashing attack.

And that perhaps explains the most fundamental change in America since 9/11: We carry around a deep-seated realization that the next fireworks display that we go to, or the next concert, or the next club, could be the next target.

In Psychology Today, psychoanalyst Charles B. Strozier, director of the Center for Terrorism of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York writes, Despite the technological advantages, relative safety and general happiness, there is also a bit of fear. Beneath everything, theres a profound malaise about life and uncertainty about the future.

Todays college freshmen class was 3 years old when Sept. 11 happened. Ever so sensitive to triggers, some colleges are rejecting a Sept. 11 observance, fearful of increasing racist attitudes or violating a safe space.

But I say we must always remember Sept. 11 to honor those who died, those who fought, and all who have given limbs and health and psychological peace and spouses and parents and children to make this nation secure. Those who truly violated a safe space were the jihadists. That we must never forget.

Linda J. White, a former assistant editorial-page editor, lives in Fauquier County.
The Israeli air force hit Syrian government forces after mortar fire from its war-wracked neighbour struck the Israeli-occupied zone of the Golan Heights on Sunday, the military said.

It said in a statement that "mortar fire" from Syria hit an open area without causing any apparent injuries, but it did not specify how many shells fell.

Unlike a similar incident on August 22 the Israelis did not immediately characterise the incident as stray fire.

"In response to mortar fire earlier today, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) targeted cannons of the Syrian regime in the northern Syrian Golan Heights," the English-language statement said.

A spokeswoman told AFP that the Israeli fire came in an air strike.

"The Syrian government must be held accountable for this breach of Israeli sovereignty," military spokesman Peter Lerner wrote on his official Twitter account.

"The IDF will continue to act to safeguard Israel."

In the August 22 exchange, the Israeli air force hit what it said was a Syrian army rocket launcher in response to "stray fire from Syrian conflict".

There were similar events in July and previously.

Israel has sought to avoid being drawn into Syria's complex war which is now in its sixth year, but it has attacked Syrian military targets when fire from the conflict spills over.

Israel seized 1,200 square kilometres (460 square miles) of the Golan Heights from Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967 and later annexed it in a move never recognised by the international community.

*This story was edited by Ahram Online

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Keene First Responders Use Narcan 3 Times in 8 Hours, Drug and Alcohol Rehab New Hampshire Comments

( August 28, 2016 ) Manchester, New Hampshire -- In a little over eight hours, the Keene Fire Department had to administer Narcan 3 times for three opiate overdoses. Reportedly, two of them were heroin overdoses. The department said that they had to treat two or three other Suboxone overdoses. Drug and Alcohol Rehab New Hampshire asserts that, with all of these alarming drug overdoses occurring, residents must have an opinion on the issue. Residents in the community may question how safe their community really is against drug use. Residents who have commented on this issue have said that the amount of time the overdoses occurred in is very disturbing. Another resident also said that he hopes that the community can get its act together and that he does not know how long it will take. Many residents believe that the growing issue of drugs in their community should be solved soon. This will prevent an outbreak of drugs from taking place in their community.

An associate from Drug and Alcohol Rehab New Hampshire comments:

"With the amount of overdoses occurring in an eight hour time span, residents must be questioning what is going on in their community. It is very frightening to know that there may be an outbreak or increase of drug use in the area. This may make them feel like their community is not really protected against the use of drugs growing and spreading in their area. People must check with the people around them to ensure that drug use is not occurring within the area around them. By doing this, people may be able to stop overdoses from increasing and occurring in the community."

About Drug and Alcohol Rehab New Hampshire 03915:

Drug and Alcohol Rehab New Hampshire is an addiction treatment center that allows a client to address their addiction with addiction recovery programs. These programs include inpatient medical detoxification, intensive inpatient rehabilitation, inpatient drug and alcohol rehabilitation, intensive outpatient rehabilitation, outpatient drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and partial hospitalization programs. This facility also provides alcohol rehab in New Hampshire and heroin rehab in New Hampshire. With the correct treatment provided by Drug and Alcohol Rehab New Hampshire, clients are able to receive the appropriate treatment to become sober members of society. For more information visit http://drugandalcoholrehabnewhampshire.org/ or call (603)244-3372.

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$100K and Heroin Seized During North Columbus Drug Bust, Drug and Alcohol Rehab Columbus Comments

( August 28, 2016 ) Columbus, Ohio -- During an investigation of narcotics, the Franklin County Drug Task Force was able to seize heroin, cocaine, and large amounts of cash. At the home on Stinson Court, the Franklin County Sheriff's Office SWAT Team raided the home and were able to find 1.5 ounces of cocaine, 8.5 ounces of brown powder heroin, and $102,000 cash along with two handguns. Two individuals were arrested on drug charges and weapons charges during the investigation. Drug and Alcohol Rehab Columbus asserts that the arrest of these two individuals has allowed the community to feel safer. The arrest of these individuals shows a positive step toward solving the heroin epidemic in Columbus. By removing these individuals of the streets of Columbus, the community will become strong against the use of drugs.

An associate from Drug and Alcohol Rehab Columbus comments:

"The arrest of these two individuals will greatly benefit the community. With these two people out of the community, they can no longer bring these drugs to the community. The drugs that they had will not enter and spread throughout the community. Along with making the community safer, people will now feel safer against the growth of drugs in their neighborhood. With heroin, cocaine, and two handguns being discovered, the community is now safe against any illegal drug activity that would possibly harm the community as a whole. Hopefully, arrests like these will continue so that the community will see a decrease in drug use and the amount of drugs entering the community."

About Drug and Alcohol Rehab Columbus 47195:

Drug and Alcohol Rehab Columbus provides clients with addiction treatment in Columbus in order to become sober individuals. This center allows clients to receive heroin rehab in Columbus, alcohol rehab in Columbus, inpatient medical detoxification, inpatient rehabilitation, outpatient rehabilitation, partial hospitalization programs, and other addiction recovery services. These addiction treatment services allow a patient to overcome their addiction by addressing the emotional, physical, and psychological ties to their addiction. For more information visit http://drugandalcoholrehabcolumbus.com/ or call (614)945-4163.

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Drug Rehab Nashville Comments on 2 Arrested After Seizure of Thousands of Pills During Investigation

( August 29, 2016 ) Nashville, Tennessee -- After a drug investigation, two individuals were arrested by Metro Police for taking part in a sales operation for pain medication. These individuals were charged after the police seized over three thousand prescription pain pills. Along with these pills, $19,650 cash, 10 guns, and a vehicle were seized. Drug Rehab Nashville asserts that the arrest of these individuals will prevent more drugs from entering the community. The community will see a decrease in the amount of drug use occurring in the community. With this arrest, residents in the community will now feel safer and protected against drug use. By arresting these two individuals, law enforcement officers were able to remove another threat of drug use spreading throughout the community.

An associate from Drug Rehab Nashville comments:

"The arrest of these individuals will greatly benefit the community. These individuals are now unable to risk the lives of others with the sale of drugs. Hopefully, more arrests like these will be made so drug use in this area will decline. With the decrease of people distributing drugs, there will also be a decrease in the amount of drugs reaching the community. The illegal drug activity being removed from the community will slowly allow the community to become safer against drug use increasing. With less drugs being able to infiltrate the community, the community will become safer against the spread of drugs in the community."

About Drug Rehab Nashville 37739:

Drug Rehab Nashville is a drug treatment facility in Nashville that helps clients overcome their addiction by providing them with the correct addiction recovery treatment. The treatments available to clients include individual and group therapy, drug counseling, inpatient and outpatient rehabilitation, alcohol rehab, heroin rehab,and drug counseling in Nashville. By attending Drug Rehab Nashville, clients are able to learn how to make the correct choices and steps in life to achieve and maintain sobriety. For more information visit http://drugrehabnashville.org/ or call (615)348-5866.

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Exclusive Designer Black T-Shirt By Phatkid Laundry Launches 05/09/2016

Phatkid Laundry announced the availability of their new exclusive T-Shirt, the "Black & Red Olimaan T Shirt" beginning 05/09/2016. More information can be found at https://phatkidlaundry.com/product/olimaan-t-shirt-black/.

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Streetwise customers looking for the latest urban fashion will soon be able to purchase a black & red Olimaan T Shirt exclusively designed by Phatkid Laundry. Today Dafydd Kerswell, Founder at Phatkid Laundry releases details of the new black & red print Olimaan T Shirt's development.

This black & red Olimaan T Shirt is designed to appeal to hip hop music fans, skateboarders and discount urban streetwear fans and includes:

High quality material - This feature was included because the shirt will last a long time and is durable. This is great news for the consumer as it represents value for money while looking good.

Variety of sizes - The shirt is available in a variety of sizes such as UK Medium (M), UK Large (L) and UK Extra Large (XL). Customers who buy T Shirt's from Phatkid Laundry can enjoy a selection of different sizes on sale and even alternate colours depending on the item of clothing. Customers can also opt for a blue Olimaan T - Shirt on sale at the same time.

Unique print design - This exclusively designed Phatkid Laundry garment design is exclusive to PKL and can't be found elsewhere. Customers will likely appreciate this because this means there is a limited supply and the customer can feel exclusive and up to date.

Dafydd Kerswell, when asked about the new Olimaan T Shirt said:

"Our line of urban streetwear is of extremely high quality compared to inferior clothing made by more expensive well known brands."

This is Phatkid Laundry's 14th release of a new product and Dafydd Kerswell is particularly excited about this release because this shirt design is new and fresh but with a retro cool urban vintage feel. .

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Release ID: 131116

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Elephant Tranquilzer Tied to 60 Heroin Overdoses, Cincinnati Drug Rehab Comments

( September 04, 2016 ) Cincinnati, OH -- As reported by the Washington Post, two counties along the border between Ohio and Indiana recently experienced 60 reported heroin overdoses in the span of just two days. 50 of those overdoses occurred in Hamilton County, Ohio. The sudden flux in heroin overdoses was anticipated by medical and law enforcement authorities upon discovering that heroin cut with Carfentanil in the area.

Carfentanil is a tranquilizer used on large mammals such as elephants. It is 100 times more potent than Fentanyl, which in itself was already causing a massive increase in heroin overdoses. Carfentanil is so powerful it can negate the effects of overdose reversal drugs like Narcan.

As a heroin rehab in Cincinnati- at the heart of this public health crisis- Cincinnati Drug Rehab is deeply concerned about the consequences of laced heroin in our communities. Cincinnati Drug Rehab recognizes the urgent need for legislative action to prevent further crises and protect our communities.

A representative of Cincinnati Drug Rehab comments:

"The state of public health and safety is continuously threatened by crafty drug suppliers looking for cheaper ways to create more powerful, more addictive, and more lethal substances. Without considering the consequences these illicit drugs are being filtered into our communities, causing massive damage and claiming the lives of the vulnerable. While some measures were taken to attempt to mitigate the damages, the greater encompassing issue is still largely unaddressed and remains a threat to thousands of vulnerable people. It's time we demand real and effective action from our local, state, and national governments."

About Cincinnati Drug Rehab 73928:

Cincinnati Drug Rehab is committed to serving the communities of Ohio and citizens from across the U.S. By providing comprehensive, personalized care utilizing the most advanced methods of treatment, Cincinnati Drug Rehab works tirelessly to build a foundation for continued healing and rejuvenation. Clients of Cincinnati Drug Rehab receive individualized programs which marry traditional and holistic treatments to best suit their personal needs. Support from Cincinnati Drug Rehab goes well beyond the completion of rehabilitation with resources for aftercare and crisis support available to all alumni.

For more information, visit http://cincinnatidrugrehab.org/ or call (513) 679-5055.

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The official statistics body highlighted that there are 2.4 million small and micro-sized enterprises all over Egypt with 6.3 million employees

Women have contributed up to 50 percent to the 1.2 million micro enterprises across Egypt supported by the Social Fund for Development (SFD) from 2009 to 2015, the state's official statistics body CAPMAS announced on Sunday in a press release sent to Ahram Online.

In its study titled 'The reality of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) 2009 - 2015,' CAPMAS revealed that there is a total of 2.4 million small and micro-sized enterprises across Egypt with 6.3 million employees.

The study also found that women have contributed almost 25 percent to some 103,000 small enterprises funded by the SFD from 2009 to 2015.

Although Egyptian women make up around 50 percent of the country's population of 91 million, they constitute less than a quarter of the country's labour force, according to CAPMAS report in March 2016.

Egypt is home to 44.1 (49 percent) million women and 45.9 million men (51 percent), while the number of females in Egypt's workforce constitutes almost a quarter of that of men  23.5 percent as opposed to 72.3 percent.

Egyptian women are the heads of 17.8 percent of households, according to data released by CAPMAS in 2014.

In Egypt, micro enterprises are funded by the SFD, the Ministry of Social Solidarity and the Local Development Fund.

The SFD has funded 1.2 million micro enterprises at EGP 5.3 billion, providing 1.3 million job opportunities from 2009 to 2015, while the Social Solidarity Ministry has supported 82,000 micro enterprises with 82,000 job opportunities from 2009 to 2014.

The Local Development Fund supported 41,400 small enterprises in 2009/2010 and 2014/2015.

To support SMEs, the CAPMAS study recommends providing an integrated information system for businesses while facilitating access to credit and reducing interest to encourage the establishment of such projects.

The recommendations also include launching a marketing channel for the products of these businesses.

In January, Egypts central bank announced the launching of a four-year programme to increase financing of SMEs nationwide, as these businesses are key contributors to the states investment and production sectors.

The cabinet approved in August a draft law allowing individuals to launch single-person companies without the need for more employees, as part of its efforts to support SMEs.

With the country's ailing economy and unemployment at 12.5 percent in the second quarter of 2016, analysts believe SMEs constitute a great opportunity to boost the economy and create jobs.

Egypt's economy has been struggling due to a sharp drop in tourism and foreign investments - two main sources of hard currency for the import-dependent country - caused by political unrest that followed the toppling of president Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and later the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013.

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Fujitsu Limited and Microsoft Japan Co., Ltd. today announced that they are strengthening their alliance to promote the implementation of a global communications platform that will transform customers' work styles. This will help Fujitsu's and Microsoft's customers rapidly accelerate their digital transformations.

In Japan, Fujitsu is the leading vendor(1) of communication-systems solutions based on Microsoft products, and has implemented a private-cloud-based global communications platform centered on Microsoft products for its approximate 160,000 employees worldwide. Microsoft Japan provided technical assistance for Fujitsu's internal implementation of this platform. In addition, based on the knowledge and experience gained from this internal implementation, Fujitsu, in collaboration with Microsoft Japan, offers its global communication platform as a solution that helps customers transform their work styles, and is currently supporting 1.2 million people in Japan - more than any other vendor.

In order to promote a further transformation in work styles, Fujitsu, with technical support from Microsoft Japan, is now working to migrate its global communications platform from a private cloud to a public cloud, and to make FUJITSU Digital Business Platform MetaArc, the core of Fujitsu's cloud platform, compatible with Microsoft's integrated collaboration cloud service, Office 365, and its cloud authentication platform, Azure Active Directory Premium (Azure ADP), creating a multi-cloud environment. Fujitsu will begin operations for all of its approximate 160,000 employees around the world in March of 2017.

By using Office 365 in this initiative, Fujitsu will always be able to use the latest communication system services, providing a work style that improves business efficiency and the ability to respond to changes for each business unit. For example, by using the enterprise social networking service Yammer, this new system aims to strengthen ongoing co-creation capability through an improved ability to share knowledge and communicate between business units globally.

By adopting Azure ADP, this system provides single sign-on and multifactor authentication in a multi-cloud environment, including compatibility with over 2,000 cloud services from other companies. Moreover, by combining it with advanced cyber-attack detection functionality using machine learning, as well as Fujitsu's unique biometric authentication capabilities, such as palm vein authentication, this system provides even greater efficiency and even more robust security.

Fujitsu and Microsoft Japan are strengthening their alliance to encourage customers to implement this multi-cloud global communications platform, through such means as joint workshops, using the internal implementation at Fujitsu as a reference.

Summary of Strengthened Alliance to Promote Implementation of the Global Communications Platform

The two companies aim to expand customer implementations of this global communications platform, which combines Fujitsu MetaArc with Microsoft's Office 365 and Azure ADP, strengthening their alliance to promote implementation of this platform through joint use of the FUJITSU Digital Transformation Center (DTC), Fujitsu's co-creation workshop space aimed at achieving digital transformations, and the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC), where visitors can experience Microsoft's latest technologies. Through these initiatives, the partners aim to make over 200 proposals per year to customers on transforming work styles with ICT, with a focus on customer executives, who will be the internal drivers of work style transformations.

Start of the Digital Transformation Connect Program

The two companies will jointly start a Digital Transformation Connect Program, in which they carry out a process of proposing and evaluating digital transformations, such as work style transformations.

Microsoft Japan will provide informational briefings at its MTC for customers investigating work style transformations, introducing the latest global technologies, digital transformation case studies, and global management references. Fujitsu will then hold workshops with those customers at its DTC, supporting them in identifying current issues and ways to resolve them, as well as in establishing a management vision for their concept of the future, and then the two companies will work together to propose applications of ICT in the customers' businesses. With the program, Fujitsu and Microsoft Japan will offer consistent digital transformation proposals to the management class representing businesses, accelerating support for Japanese companies' work style transformations.

The partners aim to make over 200 proposals annually through this program, centered on management-level customers.

By strengthening its cooperation with Microsoft Japan, Fujitsu aims to expand its global communications platform business, based on Office 365 and Azure ADP and including new integrated telephony and network services, to 50 billion yen per year globally with an emphasis on Japan, by the end of March 31, 2019.

Through this initiative, Fujitsu and Microsoft are contributing to promoting work style transformations in Japan.

Details of this initiative will be exhibited at the Fujitsu booth at Microsoft Foresight, an event for Microsoft business users to be held from September 6, 2016, at the Westin Tokyo.

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Japan has warned Britain that its exit from the European Union could prompt Japanese financial institutions to relocate from London and listed a raft of concerns from Japanese companies about the transition away of the EU.

In a 15-page report published on the eve of a summit of the Group of 20 big economies in China, a Japanese government task force formed to respond to "Brexit" also warned of a possible outflow of drug research and development investment from Britain, though it said it expected the British government to handle its exit from the bloc smoothly.

Recent economic data suggests the economic impact of Britain's vote to leave the EU has not been as severe as some predicted, although British Prime Minister Theresa May said on Sunday its economy will suffer as a result of the decision.

The Japanese report, published on the Foreign Ministry's website on Friday, cites numerous concerns including that Japanese financial institutions may have to apply for corporate status in the EU if Brexit means they lose the 'single passport' - the right to operate across the bloc. It also raises worries over ease of access to unskilled labour, tariff protection, and London's status as a clearing centre for euro transactions.

Formed in July shortly after Britain voted to leave the EU, the task force was headed by Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Koichi Hagiuda and comprises senior officials from the Prime Minister's Office, the foreign, finance, trade and agriculture ministries and the Financial Services Agency.

"Since the inception of the task force, three meetings were held and we've compiled the message, taking into account concerns from the private sector," a Foreign Ministry official told Reuters on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hangzhou, China.

"As a next step, we would like to relay this message to EU and UK leaders, taking advantage of a various diplomatic opportunities that are coming up including a G20 and UN high-level week," he said, declining to be identified.

End to unfettered access?

London will set out in the coming week how it plans to shape its relationship with the European Union upon leaving the bloc, Prime Minister Theresa May said in an interview broadcast on Sunday.

Many Japanese financial institutions and other companies, such as Nissan Motor Co, count Britain as their European headquarters. Nearly half of Japan's EU investment last year flowed to Britain, the report noted.

These Japanese companies have counted on unfettered access to the giant EU market in their investment decisions that the report says have created 440,000 jobs in Europe.

A British official said such reports were welcome.

"It's not unhelpful to also have some of our trading partners setting out some of the issues they are looking at and the types of concerns or issues that they would want to be addressed," the official said on condition of anonymity.

"This is all more information that helps to inform our thinking on what is the right deal for Britain."

As for pharmaceuticals, the task force warns that if the European Medicines Agency were to move to the continent, "the appeal of London as an environment for the development of pharmaceuticals would be lost... this could force Japanese companies to reconsider their business activities."

The report also said that Japan "has no doubt that the UK and the EU will overcome such difficulties and lay the foundations for the creation of a new Europe."

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Microsoft Surface Pro 5 Release Date, News & Update: Kaby Lake Processor Confirmed! Surface Pro VS MacBook Pro! Specs & Features Revealed

There is no doubt that the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 is one of the best devices that Microsoft has made, and now people are expecting more for Microsoft. Fans are now anticipating for the release of the Microsoft Surface Pro 5, and it is expected to bring more features that will impress the users.

Even though Microsoft did not release any official announcements regarding the upcoming Microsoft Surface Pro 5, many fans believes that Microsoft is now working on their new device. It is stated on our previous report that the Microsoft Surface Pro 5 might have the Intel's latest Kaby Lake processor.

According to MNR, the giant chip manufacturer Intel has just unveiled their next generation processor, the Kaby Lake that is rumored to be one of the new features of the Microsoft Surface Pro 5. The Kaby Lake processor is the Intel's codename for the 14 nanometer successor to the SkyLake. The Kaby Lake was announced last Aug. 30, 2016. The Kaby Lake began shipping to manufacturers and OEMs in the second quarter of 2016, but the volume production for the retail channel is anticipated late 2016.

And now that Intel just announced their new processor, this could be a sign that the release of the Microsoft Surface Pro 5 might be near. The new Surface Pro might also have a 4k Ultra High Definition Panel screen. There are also rumors that the Microsoft Surface Pro 5 will come with a USB-C feature; this new feature is being used by many new devices nowadays because of its very fast data transfers.

Microsoft Surface Pro 5 vs Apple's MacBook Pro 2016

Fans are always wondering, which one is better, the Microsoft Surface Pro 5 or the Apple's MacBook Pro 2016? According to iTechPost, The MacBook Pro 2016 is expected to have the Intel's Skylake processor while the Surface Pro will have the latest Intel's Kaby Lake processor. So when we talk about processors the Surface Pro has the advantage.

The Apple's MacBook Pro is expected to have its rumored OLED bar and a USB 3.1 ports that will support the speed of 10 Gbps. While the Microsoft Surface Pro will have a branded Surface Pen that is attached to the battery magnetically, a 4K HD screen, USB-C feature, and a better camera than the previous Surface Pro's. Stay tuned to GamenGuide for more Microsoft Surface Pro 5 news and update!
'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2' Release Date, News & Update: Vin Diesel Speechless by New Film Footage, Calls James Gunn, Genius

July's San Diego Comic Con saw several trailers and previews for the upcoming highly anticipated franchises, including both DC and Marvel films. While DC chose to share the previews online, Marvel played coy, refraining from uploading the previews for both "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" and "Thor: Ragnarok" immediately after the convention.

"Guardians" director James Gunn, who is as social media savvy as anyone could get, took to Facebook to explain the reason behind their refusal to release any footage online yet. Claiming that it wasn't the finished product that he and the rest of his team wanted the world to see.

There's one less person who will worry about not seeing the new footage of the highly anticipated "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" though, as Vin Diesel, who plays the lovable Groot in the film, recently had the privilege to view the said footage. Also adept at social media, Diesel went live on Facebook to share his reaction.

It took a few minutes before the actor could compose himself as he sat beside Gunn (who he also called a genuis), trying to wrap his head around what he just saw. ET Online reports that Diesel likened what he saw to Christmas season, saying that "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is definitely a gift viewers would want to share to their friends and family.

In the highly anticipated "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2," fans will get to see more than just the return of Chris Pratt as Star-Lord, Zoe Saldana as the alien assassin Gamora, Dave Batista as Drax the Destroyer, Bradley Cooper as the animated Rocket, Michael Rooker as Yondu Udonta, and Karen Gillan as Gamora's adoptive sister, Nebula. They'll also get to see Kurt Russell as Peter Quill's father.

Both Gunn and Diesel had nothing but praises for Russell, who will also appear in next year's "Fast 8," which stars and is produced by Diesel. "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" is set to feature both new and returning players, including the young Groot, who stemmed from the original Groot that sacrificed himself to save the Guardians in the film.

This is the special Groot version of the script that only @vindiesel and I have, where every Groot line is printed in English instead of Groot, so Vin will know what the various "I am Groot"s mean. I love putting this thing together. A photo posted by James Gunn (@jamesgunn) on Sep 2, 2016 at 4:46pm PDT

Yahoo TV reports that Gunn shared a photo of Groot's script, which will be interpreted by Diesel in post-production. He even called it a "special Groot version" of the script of the film. "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" arrives on May 5 next year.
UK e-Retailer Just Unveiled Sony Xperia XZ and Xperia X Price; See Details Here

As the buzz surrounding Sony's latest mobile phone models emerges online, consumers can't help but ask; just how much the Sony Xperia XZ and Xperia X costs? The previous week has been all about the new models' leaked specs and release date. Now, it looks like we're all seeing a whole new information about the units.

e-Clove.UK took consumers for a ride after it unveiled the price of the Sony Xperia XZ model as well as the Xperia X model. For the Sony Xperia X Compact, expect the price of 379.00 for the 32GB model. Xperia X comes in three unique colors mainly Mist Blue, White and Universal Black.

The Sony Xperia XZ on the other hand has a price tag of 549 for the 32GB model. It also comes in three unique colors mainly Platinum, Mineral Black and Forest Blue. According to the GSMArena, the Sony Xperia X will start stocking in Clove as early as September 12, but the Sony Xperia XZ will not arrive until the mid part of October.

If things will remain steady in the next few weeks, consumers can expect the Xperia XZ to arrive in the US with a tag price of $749. The Xperia X comes out of the box with a SIM Free Sony Xperia X Compact, 3 pin UK Sony fast charger, USB Data Cable and Manual. The Sony Xperia XZ on the other hand will contain SIM Free Sony Xperia XZ, 3 pin UK Sony fast charger, USB Data Cable and Manual. Both units carry the Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS and are both available in 32GB internal storage.

Are you hoping to buy the next flagship phones from Sony? Don't miss the latest update on the Sony Xperia XZ and Sony Xperia X by visiting us here on GameNGuide.
Egypt's General Authority for Supply Commodities (GASC) purchased on Sunday 50,000 tonnes of Brazilian raw sugar, GASC vice chairman Ahmed Youssef told Reuters.

GASC bought the sugar for $491.50 per tonne, Youssef said.

The sugar is sought for arrival between Oct. 15-30.

Egypt plans to buy 450,000-550,000 tonnes of sugar in local and foreign markets to cover its needs until the end of February, a supplies ministry official said last week.

GASC received just four offers from two companies in the tender, held on Saturday, before deciding to postpone its purchase decision until Sunday, traders said.

The winning offer was made by Union company, traders said.

The state buyer had originally scheduled the sugar tender for last month, but postponed it until Saturday after receiving limited interest, traders said.

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Cologne demonstration : 30,000 Kurds hold peaceful protest against Erdogan

Cologne Five weeks ago, Erdogan supporters gathered for a rally in Cologne. On Saturday, thousands of Kurds demonstrated against the Turkish leader.

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Around 30,000 Kurdish demonstrators gathered In Cologne on Saturday for a peaceful protest against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Kurdish protestors called for a release of the jailed leader of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), Abdullah Ocalan. Many of the demonstrators held banners depicting Ocalan, and there was a picture of him on stage. He has not been heard from since the coup attempt in July.

Germany is home to roughly three million Turkish immigrants, with the largest Turkish population outside of Turkey. Many Turks began coming to Germany in the 1960s as so-called guest workers when Germany faced a huge labor shortage. Many of them stayed on permanently in Germany, never returning home. This explains why events in Turkey become important for many living in Germany. German officials are worried about deepening divisions between the Turkish groups within Germany.

The PKK is listed as a terrorist group by the European Union and is banned in Germany. Bernd Riexinger , head of the Links (Leftist) party, called for the ban to be lifted and for Turkish authorities to set Ocalan free. Selahattin Demirtas, head of the pro-Kurdish opposition party, attacked the Erdogan government as dictatorial and said the military coup attempt was like handing him an opportunity on a silver platter, with the only group remaining in his way being the Kurds.

Cologne Chief of Police Jurgen Mathies said after the rally that he was satisfied with how things went. He indicated that there had been many discussions with Kurdish and Turkish groups in advance. More than 1,000 police officers were on hand for the rally, which remained largely peaceful. Some banned PKK flags and banners were confiscated. The event took place in the same area where supporters of President Erdogan gathered five weeks ago.
The film will also compete in the Best Foreign Language Film category at the 2017 Academy Awards

A few days after the selection of Mohamed Diab's Clash to represent Egypt at the 2017 Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film category, the film was selected to compete in the official competition of the 60th British Film Institute (BFI) London Film Festival that this year will run between 5 and 16 October, according to a Saturday press release by MAD Solutions, a local film marketing and PR company.

Produced in 2016, the film, directed by Mohamed Diab and written by Mohamed and Khaled Diab, explores the confrontations between pro and anti-Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators that took place in the days following the ouster of president Mohamed Morsi on 3 July 2013.

The film was chosen to open the 69th Cannes Festival in the Un Certain Regard section, and it was released in Egyptian cinemas in July.

The film opens in a theatrical manner, where we see an empty police truck ready to host the actors: two journalists, several army supporters, Islamist protesters, and a police conscript.

"Starring Nelly Karim, alongside Tarek Abd El-Aziz, Hany Adel, Ahmed Malek, Ashraf Hamdi, Mohamed Abdel Azim, and Gamil Barsoum, as well as others, the casting will distinguish the film in the coming years. The characters are well studied and their limits, fears, and hopes can easily be extracted and delivered to the viewers. Many in the twenty-plus characters gave an astonishing performance, propping the realism in the film."

Diab wrote the scripts of several well-known Egyptian films, including El-Gezira 1 and 2 (2007 and 2014) and Decor (2014), among others.

His directorial debut came with Cairo 6,7,8 (2010), starring Bushra, Nelly Karim and Maged El-Kedwany.

Run by the British Film Institute (BFI), the 12-day festival will this year screen a total of 193 fiction and 52 documentary features, including 18 World Premieres, 8 International Premieres, 39 European Premieres. There will also be screenings of 144 short films, including documentary, live action and animated works, according to the festival's official website.

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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itel Mobile 6th in feature phone industry in India: Report News oi -GizBot Bureau

Chinese mobile phone manufacturer Transsion Holdings, which entered the Indian market with its itel Mobile brand, has been ranked sixth in the overall feature phone segment in the first quarter of operations in India.

According to the market research firm Cyber Media Research (CMR), itel garnered close to two per cent market share in the feature phones' category and has sold over 1.4 million handsets operating in 11 states.

SEE ALSO: ChampOne C1 Looks Like a Gimmick: First Flash Sale Gets Delayed

The company has announced 15 products till now with eight feature phones and seven smartphones. In July, itel said it has sold more than one million handsets its launch in May.

The company has also started its second phase retail roll-out in Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura.

SEE ALSO: Apple to remove unused apps from its App Store

Currently, itel has more than 500 distributors and close to 30,000 retailers and it aims to increase the number of distributors to 1,000 and retailers to 80,000 by the end of this year.

Source IANS

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Samsung announces swap for Galaxy Note 7 with Galaxy S7 variants News oi -GizBot Bureau

In a bid to repair the damage done by the global recall of its flagship premium device Galaxy Note 7 over battery faults, Samsung said they would start exchanging the smartphones as early as next week and customers could swap it with either the Galaxy S7 or S7 Edge.

Samsung late Friday issued an official statement on exchange of the Galaxy Note 7 devices for customers in the US.

SEE ALSO: Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Exploded: Here Are Other Smartphones That Exploded in Recent Times

"The US carriers have already halted sales and offered ways for customers who have already purchased the device to get refunds. Now Samsung has announced its own exchange programme, which will provide customers with a new device as soon as next week," The Verge reported on Saturday.

According to Samsung's exchange programme, customers can either exchange current Galaxy Note 7 device with a new Galaxy Note 7 as early as next week or they can exchange current Galaxy Note 7 for a Galaxy S7 or S7 Edge and replacement of any Note 7 specific accessories with a refund of the price difference between devices.

"In addition, affected customers will receive a $25 credit on their phone bill or a $25 gift card for their troubles. Samsung did not say when the Note 7 will be available for general purchase," the report added.

The global recall was a setback for Samsung and somewhat happy news for Apple as it prepared to launch iPhone 7 (on September 7), experts said.

After just two weeks on sale and 35 faulty phone batteries reported so far, Samsung on Friday issued a global recall of Note 7 and promised to replace every unit already sold.

"To date (as of September 1) there have been 35 cases that have been reported globally and we are currently conducting a thorough inspection with our suppliers to identify possible affected batteries in the market," the company had said in a statement.

According to experts, this is bad news especially at a time when Samsung had the momentum going in its favour.

"Market sentiments are not with Apple at the moment and Samsung had to have a good run in months to come, buoyed by its super-successful S7 and S7 Edge devices and now Note 7. The global recall news is a godsend for Apple which is prepared to unveil another flagship device iPhone 7 on September 7," Tarun Pathak, Senior Analyst, Mobile Devices and Ecosystems, Counterpoint Research in New Delhi, told IANS.

SEE ALSO: Here's How You Can Make Calls From Any 2G/3G Phone Using JioFi WiFi Hotspot

Giving a refreshing look to its Note series, the South Korean giant last month launched its Galaxy Note 7 in India for Rs 59,900 with iris biometric scanner for enhanced security, upgraded S Pen and a dual-curved screen.

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In Karimov's Shadow -- A Look At Shavkat Mirziyaev

September 02, 2016

by Bruce Pannier

In a country whose government kept silent for four full days after revealing that its only post-Soviet leader was in the hospital with an undisclosed ailment, it's tough to read the tea leaves about who might come to power in the wake of President Islam Karimov, whose death was announced by Uzbek state TV on September 2.

There have been hints, however, that Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyaev could be the most likely candidate.

Experts outside Uzbekistan spoke of Mirziyaev as a main contender for the helm in the first days after the government's August 28 announcement. There were further indications later in the week when Mirziyaev led a procession to lay flowers at the Independence Monument in Tashkent on August 31, the eve of Uzbekistan's Independence Day. That task had previously been reserved for Karimov.

And on September 1 -- a day before the government announced that Karimov was in critical condition after a stroke -- Mirziyaev abruptly flew to Samarkand, the president's native town. Reports from RFE/RL's Uzbek Service, known locally as Ozodlik, showed there was frantic activity under way cleaning streets and digging in the cemetery where Karimov's mother and one of his brothers are buried.

Mirziyaev, 58, has been in his post since 2003, making him the longest serving prime minister in Uzbekistan's 25-year history as an independent country. Prior to that he was the governor of the Samarkand Province (2001-03), and the Jizzakh Province (1996-2001).

He was reportedly born in the Jizzakh area. His parents were doctors. In his university years Mirziyaev trained in irrigation and mechanized farming. He became a local leader in the Komsomol, the Soviet-era youth group.

'Hot Temper'

Mirziyaev has spent his time as prime minister in the shadow of Karimov, drawing little attention despite what some who have known him say is a hot temper and a stubborn streak.

Sharaf Ubaidullaev, who served as Karimov's spokesman during the 1990s and is no longer in Uzbekistan, described Mirziyayev as an "unpredictable" man and one "who always believes he is right."

During his tenure as governor of Jizzakh, Mirziyayev was reported to have beaten up a farmer who dared complain about the situation in the province.

Ubaidullaev told RFE/RL that this happened to more than one farmer, and that it was known that people who failed to meet state production quotas were likely to be punished once Mirziyaev found out.

Asked whether he thought Mirziyaev would be a better or worse president than Karimov, Ubaidullaev was quick with his answer: "Worse."

He also expressed doubt that Mirziyaev could lead Uzbekistan effectively on his own, saying: "He is not independent like Karimov."

Ubaidullaev suggested that made it all the more probable that Mirziyaev would lead an "oligarchy," granting informal power to tycoons in what he said would be one of the worst scenarios for Uzbekistan.

Uzbekistan's constitution says that if the president dies or is unable to perform his duties, the head of the upper chamber of parliament assumes the president's authority for a period of three months, and a new election is held.

The current head of the upper chamber, Nigmatulla Yuldashev, is not widely seen as a likely contender for the presidency.

In addition to Mirziyaev, others viewed as potential successors of Karimov include Finance Minister Rustam Azimov, 56, and National Security Committee (SNB) chief Rustam Inoyatov, 72.

With reporting by RFE/RL's Uzbek Service and Reuters

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/uzbekistan- mirziyaev-karimov-successor/27964105.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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Uzbekistan Announces Death Of President Karimov

September 02, 2016

by RFE/RL

Uzbek state TV has announced the death of President Islam Karimov, following days of unconfirmed reports suggesting the only post-independence leader of Central Asia's most populous country had already died.

The Uzbek presenter read a statement from the Uzbek cabinet and parliament, which hailed Karimov as "a great historic figure."

The anchor said the 78-year-old Karimov had died at 8:55 p.m. local time the same day of a stroke. He also said a funeral would be held on September 3 in the late president's birthplace, the ancient Silk Road city of Samarkand.

Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyaev was appointed head of a commission organizing Karimov's funeral.

The former communist boss ruled for 27 years at the center of a tight inner circle and ruthlessly applied the country's security and intelligence forces to keep a firm lid on dissent. His regime was accused of routinely torturing detainees and jailing political opponents.

Karimov has no apparent successor, and speculation has raged for days that a secretive effort was under way to replace a figure who dominated Uzbek political life for a generation.

It is unclear who is currently in charge of the Central Asian nation of around 29 million.

The Uzbek Constitution states that if the president dies or is unable to perform his duties the head of the upper chamber of parliament assumes presidential authority for a period of three months. That is Senate Chairman Nigmatulla Yuldashev, who has led the upper house since January 2015.

Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed condolences to Yuldashev, saying Karimov's death was a "heavy loss for Uzbekistan."

"I grieve for the loss of a friend whom I worked with side-by-side for 30 years," Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbaev said.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, who visited Tashkent in June, mourned the loss of a "true friend" who he said had made "historic contributions" to Uzbekistan's development and prosperity, in part by cultivating ties with China.

U.S. President Barack Obama said "at this challenging time...the United States reaffirms its support for the people of Uzbekistan," in a statement that avoided lauding the deceased autocrat.

"As Uzbekistan begins a new chapter in its history, the United States remains committed to partnership with Uzbekistan, to its sovereignty, security, and to a future based on the rights of all its citizens."

Even before the official announcement of Karimov's death, foreign leaders were expressing condolences to Uzbekistan over Karimov's purported death.

Preparations also appeared to be under way for a major state event in Samarkand.

Security sources told RFE/RL's Uzbek Service that Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyaev, who has been touted by outsiders as a possible successor, had made a trip to Samarkand. In Karimov's absence, Mirziyaev led a commemorative event in Tashkent on August 31 that marked the start of Independence Day celebrations.

Karimov's funeral is certain to draw leaders from throughout the former Soviet Union and the region.

Tajik President Emomali Rahmon confirmed he will attend while Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani were reported to be also planning to go.

The Russian delegation at the funeral will be headed by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, his spokeswoman Natalia Timakova was quoted as saying.

Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Belarus said they were also sending delegations headed by their prime ministers.

Reuters reported that Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev was cutting short a trip to China to fly to Uzbekistan.

Rumors had swirled since the August 28 announcement of Karimov's hospitalization for what one of the president's daughters described the next day as a "brain hemorrhage."

Uzbekistan's cabinet broke days of silence when it announced on September 2 that Karimov was in critical condition.

But early on September 2, Reuters quoted three diplomatic sources as saying Karimov was dead.

Hours later, Turkey's prime minister, Binali Yildirim, was shown at a televised cabinet meeting saying that "Uzbek President Islam Karimov has passed away," adding, according to Reuters, "May God's mercy be upon him, as the Turkish Republic we are sharing the pain and sorrow of Uzbek people."

The presidents of Iran and Georgia also publicly expressed sadness over Karimov's passing before the official announcement.

RFE/RL's Uzbek Service reported that district mayors and other officials had been instructed to wear white shirts and black suits to work on September 2.

The instructions were issued late on September 1 amid what appeared to be rushed preparations in Samarkand, where central streets were blocked off as cleaning and apparent construction work took place. A large red carpet was laid in the city's historic Registan Square and loudspeakers were being installed.

There was also activity around the Chorraha Mosque in Samarkand, and public workers and university students were being bused to Samarkand's airport.

The Samarkand airport issued a notice saying it would be closed to all flights on September 3 "except operations officially confirmed for this date" and all previous permissions for this date were canceled, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

Karimov had not been seen in public since mid-August.

Muted Independence Day Celebrations

Uzbekistan celebrated Independence Day on September 1, with Karimov unprecedentedly absent but officials giving no indication of his condition.

Lola Karimova-Tillyaeva, Karimov's younger daughter, suggested via social media on August 31 that her father was alive and could potentially recover.

But two days of public ceremonies were scaled back and scheduled appearances by Karimov, who issued the Uzbek declaration of sovereignty 25 years ago and has ruled ever since, have been canceled.

A holiday speech traditionally delivered by Karimov was read out by a state television anchor during an evening news bulletin on August 31.

Along with Mirziyaev, who has been prime minister since 2003, observers have suggested that other possible successors might include Finance Minister Rustam Azimov and National Security Committee head Rustam Inoyatov.

'Repressive Regime'

International rights watchdogs and Western officials had long accused Karimov of brutal repression, and the country has never held an election deemed democratic by Western monitors.

Amnesty International says Uzbekistan's "repressive regime" is unlikely to change after Karimov's death.

Denis Krivosheev, the London-based group's deputy director for Europe and Central Asia, said on September 2 that his successor "is likely to come from Karimov's closest circle, where dissenting minds have never been tolerated."

"During [Karimov's] 27-year long rule, rights and freedoms were profoundly disregarded, with any dissent brutally crushed, and torture and arbitrary detentions became integral to the country's justice system," Krivosheev said in a statement.

"Any semblance of justice in the country will require deep political changes and a new, principled approach from Uzbekistan's international partners, something which has been totally lacking in recent years."

With reporting by RFE/RL's Uzbek Service, Reuters, AP, AFP, TASS, Gazeta.uz, RIA Novosti, and Interfax

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/uzbekistan- karimov-death-announced/27963980.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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Counter-ISIL Strikes Continue in Syria, Iraq

From a Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve News Release

SOUTHWEST ASIA, Sept. 3, 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

Coalition military forces conducted three strikes in Syria, using rocket artillery and remotely piloted aircraft:

-- Near Ayn Isa, a strike engaged an ISIL tactical unit.

-- Near Mar'a, two strikes engaged an ISIL tactical unit and a building.

Strikes in Iraq

Attack and fighter aircraft conducted three strikes in Iraq, coordinated with and in support of the Iraqi government:

-- Near Ramadi, a strike destroyed two ISIL vehicle bombs and four buildings.

-- Near Sultan Abdallah, a strike engaged an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed a vehicle.

-- Near Tal Afar, a strike destroyed three ISIL artillery systems, six tunnel entrances, and a weapons cache.

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 a 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 they pose to Iraq, Syria, the region, and the wider international community. The destruction of ISIL targets in Syria and Iraq further limits the terrorist group's ability to project terror and conduct operations, officials said.

Coalition nations that have conducted strikes in Iraq include the United States, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Jordan, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Coalition nations that have conducted strikes in Syria include the United States, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Denmark, France, Jordan, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom.

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Duterte declares "state of lawlessness" in S. Philippines after explosion

People's Daily Online

(Xinhua) 11:33, September 03, 2016

MANILA, Sept. 3 -- Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte declared Saturday "state of lawlessness" in southern island of Mindanao following a deadly attack allegedly perpetrated by the Abu Sayyaf Group in Davao City.

In an interview with reporters, Duterte said his declaration of state of lawlessness "would require nationwide, well-coordinated efforts of the military and the police."

He clarified that it is not a declaration of martial law.

"I have this duty to protect the country. I have this duty to keep intact the integrity of the nation," the president said.

Death toll from the explosion reached 14, while over 70 were injured.

In a separate statement, Presidential Spokesperson Ernesto Abella said the president's declaration of a state of lawlessness is rooted in Article VII Section 18 of the Constitution.

The declaration is limited such that he can only call out the armed forces to suppress the lawless violence, Abella said, adding that there was no suspension of the writ of habeas corpus.

"It is a different case from the existence of invasion or rebellion. Only if there is invasion or rebellion, and when public safety requires it, can he suspend the writ of habeas corpus or declare martial law," he explained.

According to Interior and Local Government Secretary Mike Sueno, the Abu Sayyaf Group has claimed responsibility for the attack at the Davao night market late Friday night.

Duterte came from Davao City and his daughter and son are the mayor and vice-mayor, respectively, of the city.

Prior to the attack, the military has been conducting intensified operation against the bandits in southern province of Sulu after they beheaded a Filipino hostage.

Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said he has directed all commands of the Armed Forces of the Philippines "to be on high alert especially in urban centers for possible other terroristic act attempts by this group."

The Eastern Command in Davao city has been directed to assist the Philippine National Police in maintaining peace and order in Davao City and in the apprehension of the perpetrators, he said.

"They will also aid in gathering intelligence information and in conducting investigations to get to the bottom of this unfortunate incident," he added.

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Malian army regains central town from militants

Iran Press TV

Sat Sep 3, 2016 5:49PM

The Malian army has managed to retake control of the central town of Boni from militants, officials say.

They "left Boni in the night and today around 8 a.m. the Malian army came back to take control of the town," an unnamed Malian security source told AFP on Saturday.

Meanwhile, another source, close to the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali, known as MINUSMA, said two helicopters were providing cover over Boni "to support the Malian army, who are now in control."

Unidentified militants invaded Boni on Friday and forced the few troops stationed there to withdraw from the town. According to witnesses, the militants were shooting in all directions, particularly on administrative buildings, and set ablaze the mayor's office.

Reports also say the militants left the town while abducting a Boni community official accused of giving information to security forces by phone.

So far, no group has claimed responsibility for the attack. Armed groups have proliferated in the African country ever since al-Qaeda's North African affiliate AQIM took advantage of a revolt staged by ethnic Tuareg rebels in 2012 to seize the north of the desert country, a region which they call Azawad.

The long-troubled north has been susceptible to militant attacks despite an ongoing French-led military operation launched in January 2013, which came after the deployment of MINUSMA.

Tuareg-led rebels signed a landmark peace deal with the government in June 2015. However, the peace accord has been ineffective as rebel groups and other militants continue to launch sporadic attacks against security forces from desert hideouts.

MINUSMA currently has nearly 13,300 military personnel in the country, according to figures by the UN.

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Related Big perfume makers smell threat from niche scents

Louis Vuitton has launched its first perfume range since the founding merger of its parent LVMH (LVMH.PA) in 1987, targeting middle-income shoppers amid a downturn in luxury spending.

This week's launch is an important step for the French brand as it tries to strike the delicate balance between increasing its number of more affordable goods while retaining its cachet.

Until now, shoppers on more modest incomes have only been catered for by Louis Vuitton's key chains and very small leather goods, costing around 200-300 euros apiece.

But the brand needs to boost sales growth after a sharp slowdown in the past three years, and with little sign of an industry recovery as security fears and geo-political uncertainty hit the tourism flows vital for luxury brands.

Louis Vuitton's collection of seven perfumes, with names including "turbulences" and "matiere noire" or "dark matter," are on sale for around 200 euros ($224) for a 100 ml bottle.

That is close to the price of niche perfume brands such as By Kilian, which have been enjoying sales growth four to five times higher than big, traditional fragrance providers whose prices cost under 100 euros.

Perfume has been more resilient to the industry downturn than some parts of the luxury market, with global sales estimated to have risen 2.9 percent to about 15 billion euros last year. Within that, sales by niche brands jumped about 15 percent to around 1 billion euros.

At first, Louis Vuitton will sell the perfumes in only about 180 of its 460 stores. Analysts estimate they could generate 60-80 million euros of sales in the first year.

By comparison, luxury giants such as Chanel and LVMH's Dior, whose products are much more widely distributed, make about 2.5 billion euros a year from perfumes and cosmetics.

Louis Vuitton, which declined to say how much it has invested in the project, gave star industry "nose" Jacques Cavallier-Belletrud four years to prepare the launch.

The perfumer, who worked for decades with fragrance producer Firmenich, created many commercially successful perfumes including L'Eau d'Issey for Issey Miyake and Poeme for Lancome and Acqua di Gio for Armani.

Some industry analysts said Louis Vuitton took its time with the launch partly out of concern the move could exacerbate its ubiquity problem - the result of having opened too many shops, which dented its perceived exclusivity.

Since 2012, the brand has worked to remedy this by putting the brakes on expansion and elevating its market positioning by producing more expensive handbags, with many available only in limited numbers.

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At least 3 killed in Saudi airstrikes on Yemeni province of Sa'ada

Iran Press TV

Sat Sep 3, 2016 4:6PM

At least three people, including a woman, have been killed in two separate Saudi aerial attacks against residential neighborhoods in Yemen's northwestern province of Sa'ada.

Saudi warplanes targeted a house in Baqim district south of Sana'a on Saturday, leaving a couple dead, Arabic-language al-Masirah television reported.

One more civilian was killed and four others injured when Saudi jets struck a civilian car in Wadi al-Jabal district.

In another airstrike, Saudi warplanes hit a civilian vehicle in Wadi al-Dhabian, wounding three people.

The casualties came after Yemen's army snipers fatally shot two Saudi soldiers in al-Rabu'ah town of kingdom's southwestern border region of Asir.

A Saudi military vehicle also went up in flames after Yemeni soldiers and their allies targeted it with a guided missile at a camp in the same southwestern Saudi city.

Saudi Arabia has been incessantly pounding Yemen since March 2015, with the UN putting the death toll from the military aggression at about 10,000. The offensive was launched in an attempt to reinstate Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a Saudi ally who has resigned as Yemen's president.

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Yemeni retaliatory attack leaves two Saudi soldiers dead: Report

Iran Press TV

Sat Sep 3, 2016 10:18AM

Yemeni army soldiers have reportedly launched retaliatory attacks against Saudi border guards in Saud Arabia's southwestern border region of Asir, leaving two soldiers dead.

Yemeni snipers fatally shot two Saudi troops in al-Rabu'ah town of the region on Saturday morning, Lebanon-based al-Mayadeen television news network reported.

A Saudi military vehicle also went up in flames after Yemeni soldiers and their allies targeted it with a guided missile at a camp in the same southwestern Saudi city.

The attacks were in retaliation for Riyadh's relentless aerial bombardment campaign against Yemen.

Earlier, the media bureau of the operations command in Yemen released footage showing locally designed and manufactured Borkan-1 (Volcano-1) missile blasting off from a launcher deployed in an unknown location in Yemen.

The solid propellant and Scud-type missile reportedly hit a stationary target in the Saudi city of Ta'if, located more than 700 kilometers (434 miles) southeast of the capital, Riyadh.

Also on Saturday, Saudi military aircraft struck a car as it was traveling along a road in Baqim district of Yemen's mountainous northwestern province of Sa'ada, leaving one civilian dead and four others wounded.

Saudi fighter jets also carried out two airstrikes against al-Nahdin district in the northern Yemeni province of Sana'a. There were no immediate reports about the number of casualties and the extent of damage caused.

Elsewhere, in the southwestern Yemeni city of Lahij, two police officers lost their lives and another seven were injured when a bomb explosion ripped through a public outdoor market.

Saudi Arabia has been incessantly pounding Yemen since March 2015, with the UN putting the death toll from the military aggression at about 10,000. The offensive was launched in an attempt to reinstate Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a Saudi ally who has resigned as Yemen's president.

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US Fires HIMARS Rockets at Daesh Targets in Syria From Across Turkish Border

Sputnik News

17:52 03.09.2016(updated 20:47 03.09.2016)

US forces hit Daesh targets near the Turkish border in northern Syria overnight using its newly deployed high-mobility artillery rocket system (HIMARS), the special envoy of the US president for the anti-Daesh coalition said Saturday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  He cited a Twitter message from the US Embassy in Turkey, which said HIMARS systems in Turkey were "in place and in action". This is the latest step in US-Turkish cooperation in the fight against the Daesh militant group, the diplomatic mission said.

"U.S. forces struck ISIL [Daesh] targets near Turkey's border in Syria last night via newly deployed HIMARS system," Brett McGurk tweeted.

Earlier, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said that the US deployed units to the Middle East that can operate the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) to aid the US-coalition against Daesh.

 Sputnik

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Uzbekistan's Karimov Laid to Rest

By VOA News September 03, 2016

Uzbekistan's long-time leader, Islam Karimov, was laid to rest in his birthplace of Samarkand Saturday.

Funeral rites were performed in Registan Square in the ancient Silk Road city by a mufti who said that "Islam Karimov served his people." Hundreds of men attended the burial.

Karimov's coffin, covered in intricate, colorful tiles and aqua cupolas, was buried in the city's Shah-i-Zinda cemetery.

Thousands of people lined the streets of the capital of Uzbekistan, Tashkent, earlier Saturday to pay final respects to their leader as his funeral procession passed by.

The government announced the authoritarian ruler's death Friday, ending days of speculation about whether Karimov was still alive following a massive stroke. Uzbek authorities said the 78-year-old ruler had been in a coma for days. He died one day after the Central Asian country's independence holiday.

Karimov had been in power for more than 25 years.

Karimov's younger daughter, Lola Karimova-Tillyaeva, mourned her father in social media messages: "He has left us. ... I am struggling for words. I can't believe it myself."

"May God show His mercy to him," she wrote in Uzbek on Facebook. Her thoughts drew thousands of responses.

Only leader since independence

Karimov, the only leader Uzbekistan has known since it became an independent nation following the collapse of the Soviet Union, crushed all opposition during his time in power, and he had not groomed anyone to take over after him. Analysts said they were concerned that the largest and most powerful Central Asian nation could face prolonged infighting, and they also warned that Islamic radicals could try to exploit uncertainty in Tashkent, the capital.

The solemn official announcement of the president's death did not make clear who would rule the country in the future. As stipulated by the Uzbek constitution, the speaker of the senate, Nigmatilla Yoldoshev, is "interim president."

Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev was named chairman of the commission organizing the state funeral  a development seen by some as an indication he would be one of the contenders to succeed Karimov. Yoldoshev, deputy chairman of the funeral commission, is not seen as a likely candidate to take power permanently.

From the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his condolences for the "heavy loss" Uzbekistan suffered. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev will lead Moscow's delegation at the funeral.

Alexei Pushkov, head of the Russian parliament's foreign affairs committee, told reporters that Karimov's passing "may open a pretty dangerous period of unpredictability and uncertainty in Uzbekistan."

President Barack Obama said the United States reaffirmed its support for the people of Uzbekistan "at this challenging time."

'New chapter in its history'

Obama's statement, issued late Friday before he left on a flight to Hangzhou, China, for a summit meeting of Group of 20 government leaders, said: "As Uzbekistan begins a new chapter in its history, the United States remains committed to partnership with Uzbekistan, to its sovereignty, security and to a future based on the rights of all its citizens."

Putin also will be at the summit of the G-20, the world's richest nations, and he has already signaled that he hopes to engage in talks on geopolitical issues with the other world leaders there.

Turkey announced Karimov's death to the world hours before it was confirmed in Tashkent.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim sent a message of condolence to the Uzbek people; the two countries have extensive ethnic, cultural and linguistic ties.

Uzbek authorities said they consulted with physicians from Russia, Germany, Finland and Monaco as the gravity of Karimov's medical situation became clear. The president's daughter said the cerebral hemorrhage that led to his death occurred August 27.

A senior official of Amnesty International said the rights group was not optimistic that Uzbekistan's repressive regime would soon change its policies, marked by the use of torture against domestic opponents.

'Human rights abuses'

Denis Krivosheev, Amnesty's deputy director for Europe and Central Asia, said: "Islam Karimov's death marks the end of an era in Uzbekistan, but almost certainly not of the pattern of grave human rights abuses. His successor is likely to come from Karimov's closest circle, where dissenting minds have never been tolerated."

Authorities in Uzbekistan apparently had been expecting Karimov's death for days. Fragmentary reports emerging from the country told of burial preparations in Samarkand, and the closure of the city's airport for all but official flights.

An Uzbek opposition blogger based in Western Europe, Nadezhda Atayeva, said Uzbek authorities appeared to be cracking down on communication channels with the outside world.

Speaking to the Associated Press from France, Atayeva said a contact in Uzbekistan told her government officials had been ordered to turn off their telephones, and that internet service was slowing down noticeably.

Atayeva said she spoke to her contact via Skype, but as he described the situation in Tashkent, the line went dead.

VOA's Uzbek Service contributed to this report.

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Bangladesh Hangs Islamist Leader for 1971 War Crimes

By VOA News September 03, 2016

Bangladesh on Saturday executed a senior Islamist leader who was found guilty of war crimes during the 1971 war in which Bangladesh broke away from Pakistan.

Mir Quasem Ali was hanged at a jail near Dhaka, the capital, after a final meeting with family members. The country's highest court had rejected his final appeal Tuesday, and Ali subsequently said he would not seek presidential clemency, thus assuring his execution.

Bangladesh has seen an increase in militant attacks in recent weeks. The most serious violence in the Muslim-majority nation occurred in July, when gunmen stormed a cafe in Dhaka's diplomatic quarter and killed 20 hostages, most of them foreigners.

News reports said a close aide to former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia from the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party also was executed Saturday.

Jamaat-e-Islami leader

Ali, 63, was a leader and financial backer of the opposition Jamaat-e-Islami party, which has called for a half-day general strike on Monday to protest the execution. He was the fifth Jamaat-e-Islami leader executed since 2010, when the secular government led by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina established a war crimes tribunal to examine the 1971 war.

Ali was convicted on eight charges that included the abduction of a young man and his killing in a torture cell during the conflict, during which the Bangladesh government says 3 million people died.

Jamaat-e-Islami opposed the war, which began in what was then known as East Pakistan as a revolution by Bengali nationalists opposed to the military junta then in control in Pakistan (known at the time as West Pakistan).

Jamaat-e-Islami denounced the charges against Ali as baseless and said its followers were not involved in war crimes.

India joined the war on the side of Bangladesh late in 1971, and after two weeks of intense fighting, Pakistan surrendered and accepted Bangladesh's independence.

Prosecutors contended that Ali commanded a notorious pro-Pakistan militia in the southern port city of Chittagong during the war. Hundreds of people in Dhaka and Chittagong celebrated in the streets Saturday night after Ali's execution was announced on television.

Prepared for protests

Anticipating possible protests, the government deployed thousands of extra police and border guards this week in major cities. Previous convictions by the war crimes tribunal and executions have triggered violence in which about 200 people, many of them members of the Islamist party, were killed.

After the 1971 war, Ali worked in shipping, banking and real estate and became wealthy. He is said to have spent millions of dollars on legal fees and international lobbying efforts to rebut the allegations against him.

Human rights monitors have challenged the objectivity of the Bangladesh tribunal, and a group of U.N. rights experts appealed to the high court last month to give Ali a new trial "in compliance with international standards."

Jamaat-e-Islami and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party both have criticized the war crimes cases as politically motivated efforts to eliminate their leadership.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry referenced human rights issues in Bangladesh on Monday during a speech in Dhaka in which he said "we have to uphold and not betray" democratic principles in the fight against extremism.

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DRC Political Dialogue Stalls Over Opposition Demands

By Nick Long September 03, 2016

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a political dialogue that started Thursday has been suspended over the weekend in the hope that more of the opposition will attend. But the main opposition bloc, known as the Rassemblement, has set pre-conditions for attending, which are some way from being met.

The bloc's pre-conditions for participating in the dialogue include freeing political prisoners, lifting bans on several TV stations and the resignation of the dialogue's current facilitator, Edem Kodjo, a former chairman of the Organization of African Unity.

Tensions have been on the rise in the DRC amid controversy over a court ruling that would allow President Joseph Kabila to stay in power beyond the two consecutive terms permitted by the constitution.

Key issues in the political turmoil have been a timetable for holding free and fair national elections and what should be done if a solution is not reached by the end of Kabila's mandate in December. Government authorities have said the elections, scheduled for November, must be delayed until next year to allow time to register millions of new voters.

Timing of poll at issue

Kabila's opponents accuse him of stalling the poll to hold on to power, a charge the president denies.

The United States and the European Union have encouraged Congo's politicians to take part in a dialogue so as to reach an agreement on holding elections.

So far, few opposition parties have agreed to take part. Leading the opposition group in the dialogue is Vital Kamehre, a former president of the National Assembly.

Speaking at the opening session Thursday he insisted the group would not accept a third term for Kabila.

Everyone knows, he said, that the country is about to enter a crisis, if it's not already in one. That's why we must have these talks, he added, so that when they are over we can tell the Congolese people clearly when the presidential election will be held and when power will be transferred.

He noted the government has gone some way to meeting opposition demands, saying some prisoners of war and political prisoners have been released, and two TV stations have been reopened in Kinshasa. But five remain closed in Katanga province. He called on the government to go all the way with freeing prisoners and reopening media.

Eight pro-democracy activists, most of whom had been in jail since early last year, were freed this week.

Some positive steps

Human Rights Watch researcher Ida Sawyer said this was a positive step but stressed that others remain to be freed.

"Human Rights Watch has documented at least 20 other political prisoners who remain in detention. These people were arrested after speaking out against attempts to extend president Kabila's stay in power beyond the end of his mandate or after participating in peaceful political activities," Sawyer said

Several of these prisoners are leaders of opposition parties and most have been held for long periods.

Another 170 prisoners were also released from two of the country's jails this week but Sawyer said it is not known how many of them might have been held for political offences.

Meanwhile 85 opposition demonstrators were arrested in Kinshasa on Thursday.

The U.S. government, in its latest statement on the DRC dialogue, welcomed the release of the pro-democracy activists this week but said others also need to be freed and some lawsuits against opposition leaders dropped.

The dialogue facilitator agreed to Vital Kamehre's suggestion that the talks should be suspended over the weekend while he tries to persuade the Rassemblement to take part.

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Operation Euphrates Shield

On 24 July 2015, Turkey officially launched its two-front campaign against PKK in northern Iraq and the Islamic State jihadist group in Syria, marking Turkey's first military involvement in the US-led campaign against ISIL. The week had seen a surge in violence in Turkey, which shares southern borders with war-torn Syria and Iraq, stretching 510 miles and 220 miles respectively.

Turkey said it had secured an agreement with the Obama administration to jointly secure a zone in a small part of northern Syria. But while US officials confirmed the outlines of the deal, discrepancies in how Washington and Ankara view the buffer suggests the accord was not complete. The zone's proposed area would extend along a 68-mile stretch of the Turkish border and reach 40 miles into Syrian territory, west of the Euphrates River, and into the province of Aleppo. The area was controlled by the Islamic State group (IS), between two areas of Syria currently held by Kurdish separatist militias linked to Turkeys outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

ISILs strategy to re-establish a 7th century caliphate relied on its shrewd exploitation of 21st century technology. It was especially adept at exploiting the explosion in social media to establish its legitimacy, create fear in its enemies, attract more fighters, carry its message across the globe, and spread its network. Peter Kassig was beheaded in Dabiq, Syria.

Dabiq features in a recorded statement attributed to the Prophet Mohammed, known as hadith. The hadith are very important to Muslims and are regarded as providing another source of law alongside the Koran. Dabiq features strongly in the eschatological aspects of normative Islamic belief. Dabiq was referenced by Mohammed as the location for an end-of-times battle of the crusaders before taking Istanbul.

The zone being talked about by the Turks not only includes towns of strategic and symbolic importance for the Islamic State group like Dabiq, but also towns such as al-Bab, which has been targeted by Syrian helicopters and warplanes, risking clashes with the Syrian government.

Syria's Kurds or the YPG, which is linked to Turkey's Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), now controlled half of the country's 800km border with Turkey by 2016 - stretching from the Iraq border to the town of Kobane.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization held an emergency meeting in Brussels following a formal request by Turkey to discuss the security situation on its borders. The extraordinary meeting at the NATO headquarters on Tuesday was the fifth in the organisation's 66-year history. It was requested by Turkey under Article 4 of the treaty that founded the US-led alliance, which empowers its 28 member states to seek such consultations when they consider their "territorial integrity, political independence or security" to be in jeopardy.

A US official told news agencies the goal is to create an "Islamic State-free zone" to "ensure greater security along Turkey's border with Syria." But the official said the joint US-Turkey military operation would not include the imposition of a no-fly zone in the region, a long-standing Turkish demand.

On 24 August 2016, Ankara sent its warplanes, tanks and special forces assisted by the Free Syrian Army across the border to ostensibly free the town of Jarablus and prevent the Kurds from advancing further West. Damascus denounced the intervention as a breach of its sovereignty. Euphrates Shield operation is considered to be the first Turkish ground intervention in Syria since the Syrian crisis started in 2011. In 2015 Turkish authorities launched a military operation in the southeastern regions of Turkey, populated mostly by the Kurds. In response, Kurdish militants carried out terrorist attacks in the country.

Official Ankara stated that the military operation had only the purpose of the fight against terrorist groups. "We strongly condemn all attempts to present the operation as a struggle with the Syrian Kurds and their military achievements",Ibrahim Kalyn, a spokesman for the Turkish President, stated 21 August 2016. Turkish authorities also intended to fight the Kurdistan Workers' Party and the Democratic Union (PYD), considering them terrorist organizations, said Kalyn.

Another purpose of the operation, according to Kalyn, was Al-Bab ["the gate"], a major city halfway between Aleppo and Jarabulus. Al-Bab is located in the middle of the stretch of territory controlled by Daesh militants, and was their stronghold in the area. The Kurdish forces were also seeking Al-Bab, to connect with the territory they control in the west of the country. According to Erdogan's press secretary, this task interfere with the action of the Kurdish units in the rear of the Turkish army in their progress to liberation Jarabulus. "We are not talking any more about any deadline for the retreat of the Kurds to the eastern bank of the Euphrates. We simply demand the retreat as soon as possible", said Kalyn.

Al-Bab can become a place of serious clashes between Kurds and Turkey. Washington, which supports both the Kurds and the Turks, was trying to prevent this, and tried to slow down the advancement of the Kurds by diplomatic means.

At the outset, the United States verbally supported the operation. In fact, according to one report, the Pentagon even offered Turkey the possibility of a joint operation with the participation of 40 US commandos, a plan that was allegedly shelved as a result of the White House's slow response. But nevertheless, the US was supportive of the operation in its initial stages. US officials called upon the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), the Kurdistan Workers' Party's (PKK) sister organisation in Syria, to withdraw to the east of the Euphrates river and threatened to withhold support should they not comply.

As time went on, the US changed the tone, calling on Turkey to refrain from clashing with the YPG and instead has begun urging it to focus on the common enemy, ISIL. Interestingly, both Turkey and the YPG are Washington's key allies in the region. This is why the Turkish military and Kurdish militias largely refrained from large-scale armed hostilities, although occasional fighting had taken place. The United States pressured both sides to focus on fighting Daesh and not each other, urging the Kurds to move east of the Euphrates. This standoff could escalate if Turkey did not pull its forces out of Syria.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said the operation was also aimed at preventing the YPG from taking more territory with the aim of linking the Kurdish cantons of Kobani and Afrin, which would create a continuous corridor of territory under YPG control running along Turkey's border. The Turkish Armed Forces expected the Kurdish troops will leave the city of Manbij. If they departed, Turkey would be able to open a corridor to Aleppo for the Syrian opposition. Ankara was likely seeking to carve out a region under its control along the border about 100 kilometers long and 30 kilometers deep, running between the Syrian border towns of Jarabulus to al-Rai. That, say analysts, would provide Turkey with a base to prevent further YPG gains.

The most important point is the duration of the military operation, which Turkey holds. If the "Euphrates Shield" becomes protracted (more than 2 months), it will certainly lead to serious losses for Turkish troops, who did not miss an opportunity once again to strike the forces of Syrian Kurds. Soldiers of the People's Self-Defense Kurds (YPG) have already demonstrated that they can force the fight Turkish forces - they destroyed Turkish tanks using anti-tank missile system (ATGM) on 27 August 2016.

By 27 August 2016 the SDF had continued advances at the western bank of the Euphrates, seizing 2 more villages from ISIS. Since the start of Turkish military operations in northern Syria, the SDF had captured over 10 villages south of Jarablus. The Turkish Air Force responded to these actions with fresh air strikes on SDF targets south of Jarablus. Air strikes were reported at the vilalge of Amarna and allegedly inflicted civilian casualties.

Near the Turkish border, the Free Syrian Army claimed dramatic advances against the Islamic State, capturing Zughrah, al-Kulliyah and Tal Aghbar. However, PR statements were alloyed with significant loses to ISIS west of Jarabulus. Meanwhile, a large armored brigade of the Turkish Armed Forces were reported to have deployed 11 kilometers away from Manbij, where Kurdish forces are set to evacuate.

On the temporary cease-fire in the north became known in the evening on 30 August. Manbij Military Council, part of the "Democratic Syria forces" together with Kurdish groups agreed to a pause in the fighting with Turkish forces. But the ceasefire does not mean a truce, officials said on both sides. "We will liberate our lands from the Turkish army and its allies", - quotes Reuters the words of Ali Hajj, the speaker of the Military Council. "This is not peace and cease-fire, it is a pause, which will take some time", according to one of the leaders of groups supported by Turkey.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on August 31 his country's troops were to stay in Syria as long as "threats" against the Turkish state remained. The stated objective of operation "Euphrates Shield"  to remove "terrorists" from the Turkish border  is vague, prompting growing speculation over Ankara's long term intentions.

Turkish tanks entered al-Rai town in northern Aleppo 02 September 2016, as the Euphrates Shields forces began a push to meet with Jarablus pocket. Turkish armored vehicles on 02 September 2016 crossed into Syria through the border town of Cobanbey, the Syrian side of which is located in Aleppo Province and is known as Al Rai in Arabic. The opposition Free Syrian Army managed to take control of the town. The move was intended to open up another front against the DAESH terrorist organisation as part of Turkeys Operation Euphrates Shield.

Iran expressed concern over the continuation of Turkey's military incursion into Syria, urging all countries to respect the Arab country's national sovereignty and territorial integrity. "Although the fight against terrorism and efforts to maintain regional stability and security are an unchangeable and important principle in the foreign policy of peace-seeking countries in the region, this issue cannot and should not be used as a justification for violating the territorial integrity of another country by conducting military operations against that country without coordination with its central government, and by overlooking its national sovereignty," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qassemi said.

The Russian stance on Turkey's incursion into Syria illustrated that previous Russian support for the PYD was instrumental and motivated by the dynamics of the Turkish-Russian dispute. Once both countries mended their ties, the PYD's value for Russia declined significantly, but not completely.

US President Barack Obama's special envoy for the global coalition to counter ISIL, Brett McGurk, said: "We want to make clear that we find these clashes [between Turkey and the YPG] - in areas where ISIL is not located - unacceptable and a source of deep concern." The US was trying to tread a fine line between its partnership with the YPG and relations with its longtime NATO ally Turkey.

Turkey's move effectively halted the YPG's westward expansion. Before the operation the YPG was hoping to connect its Kobane and Afrin cantons and hence creating a linked-up statelet on the Turkish border. This was a prospect that Turkey had long denoted as its red line, inviting military intervention.

Turkey on 29 March 2017 announced its military campaign inside northern Syria was over, without specifying whether it will pull its troops out from the neighboring country. Turkey's top advisory national security council chaired by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the half-year long offensive in Syria has been "concluded successfully." Prime Minister Binali Yildirim also said the operation has been completed but did not rule out new military campaigns inside Syria under a different name.

Turkey-backed Syrian rebels had captured from jihadists several towns including Jarabulus, Al-Rai, Dabiq and finally Al-Bab, where the Turkish army sustained heavy casualties. The strategic town of Al-Bab, just 25 kilometers (15 miles) south of the Turkish border, had been the jihadists' last stronghold in the northern Syrian province of Aleppo.

The major goal of the operation was to capture Manbij and to prevent the Syrian Kurds from maintaining control over the Syrian-Turkish border. But Ankara failed to take Manbij under its control. In early March 2017, Turkey and the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) nearly clashed in Manbij. Moscow stepped in and brokered a deal between the Turks, the Kurds and Damascus. The Manbij Military Council handed control of several areas west of the city of Manbij to the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), as part of a Moscow-brokered deal to create a buffer zone between the Kurds and the Turkish armed forces. Ankara accepted the deal and signaled that it by no means opposed the establishment of the SAA's control over the northern Syrian city of Manbij.

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THAAD controversy rises in ROK amid president's slight change in position

People's Daily Online

(Xinhua) 09:21, September 03, 2016

Controversy resurfaced here over the deployment of a US missile shield, or Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), in the Republic of Korea (ROK) as ruling party lawmakers boycotted all parliamentary procedures in protest against the National Assembly speaker's remarks on THAAD.

Parliament Speaker Chung Sey-kyun said in his opening speech at the Assembly's first regular session on Thursday that it would be hard to agree with the government's attitude to the THAAD deployment from the perspective of dealing with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)'s nuclear program.

The former lawmaker of the main opposition Minjoo Party accused the government of failing to communicating with the public over the US missile defense system that resulted in split and confusion among people.

Chung urged the government to stop a "chicken game" between the two Koreas, calling for talks with the DPRK that can start with smallest possible issues.

Saenuri Party lawmakers walked out of the chamber, demanding the speaker's apology and resignation. The ruling party has boycotted all parliamentary procedures until Friday, including the passage of a supplementary budget plan for the second half, strongly advocated by President Park Geun-hye to reinvigorate the faltering economy.

Members of the ruling party occupied the speaker's office for a rally against Chung's comments. The governing party lost its majority in parliament in the April 13 elections amid mounting dissatisfactions with income equality and slowing economy.

Chung Jin-suk, the governing party's floor leader, reportedly claimed the speaker violated his duty of political neutrality, but Chung Sey-kyun said his remarks were made to reveal public opinion on a current issue without any political intention.

Park Jie-won, interim chairman and floor leader of the People's Party, said the speaker's remarks were "excellent" as it reflected public concerns about THAAD, depicting what the country's No. 2 said as the greatest opening speech in parliament.

Meanwhile, President Park Geun-hye on Friday made her first mention of a conditional deployment of the US missile shield on South Korean soil, before leaving for Russia to participate in the Eastern Economic Forum.

"The essence of the problem in this matter is the North's nuclear and missile threats. If these threats are eliminated, the need to deploy the THAAD system would naturally disappear," Park said in a written interview with Russia's Rossiya Segodnya posted on a Cheong Wa Dae website.

It marked the first time the ROK leader mentioned the conditional THAAD deployment, showing signs of a slight change in her hard-line position ahead of her trips to Russia and China that have strongly opposed the US missile defense system.

Park is set to visit Vladivostok for two days to attend the second Eastern Economic Forum and hold a bilateral summit with her Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. The forum was launched last year to speed up development of the Russian Far East.

She will travle to China to attend a Group of Twenty (G20) summit scheduled to be held in Hangzhou on Sunday and Monday.

Park, however, reiterated that the THAAD deployment is a measure of self-defense to protect from the DPRK's "ever-escalating" nuclear and missile threats.

She said there is no reason, nor practical benefit, for the THAAD system to target any third country, contrasting with repeated expressions of strong objections and worries from China and Russia.

Chinese and Russian objections to THAAD in the ROK came as the US missile shield's X-band radar can peer deep into Chinese and Russian territories, breaking strategic balance in the region and damaging security interests of the two countries.

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Brazil's Ousted President Promises Strong Position Against New Government

By VOA News September 03, 2016

Dilma Rousseff, ousted this past week as Brazil's president, says she has not elaborated on future projects but confirmed she has political plans.

Speaking to the international media Friday in Brasilia, Rousseff decried the process that led to her impeachment.

"I'm going to oppose this government regardless of where I might be.  Our role, the role of those that did not support the coup is to keep an eye on the Brazilian institutions and respect them. I will appeal in all instances because this is the right way to fight," she said.

The Brazilian Senate voted Wednesday to remove Rousseff from the presidency for practicing pedaladas fiscais - the practice of using public money to fund state or federal social programs without the approval of Congress.

According to various reports, independent auditors did not find Rousseff involved in breaking fiscal responsibility laws. But many of those who voted for her impeachment are being investigated. Those senators deny any wrongdoing.

Michel Temer, the conservative vice president, was confirmed as president for the remainder of Rousseff's term through 2018.

Two days after Rousseff's impeachment, the new vice president, Rodrigo Maia, signed legislation allowing for the amendment of an existing law addressing new rules for credit without Congress' approval.

Maia is the acting president since Temer is attending the G-20 Summit in China.

News websites such as O Estadao and G1 reported that the amendment introduces flexibility on using public money to fund programs without Congress' approval.

The executive can now use up to 20 percent as credit for necessary adjustments in the federal budget. Before the amendment, this number was 10 percent.

The change, reports say, was proposed under the argument that 20 percent allows public officials more flexibility to make necessary alterations in the budget, especially in years of income restriction.

According to officials from the Joint Budget Committee, this change would have no effect in the process that resulted in Rousseff's dismissal.

"Dilma's case was not about the percentage, but the lack of authorization. I understand the law does not impact our case," Janaina Paschoal, lawyer and author of the impeachment request, told G1.

These same changes were proposed by Rousseff in April. It was approved by Congress on Aug. 23 and signed on Sept. 1.

Rousseff has also filed an appeal with the country's highest court to challenge the Senate's decision to remove her from office for breaking budgetary rules.

The appeal before Brazil's Supreme Federal Court, filed by Rousseff's attorney, Jose Eduardo Cardozo, demands "the immediate suspension of the effects of the senate decision."

Cardozo's appeal accused the opposition attorneys of violating her right to due process. If the court grants the injunction, Temer would return to being interim president while the Senate trial is repeated.

So far, all requests made by Rousseff's defense on the merits of the impeachment process against her have been rejected by the high court, whose chief justice, Ricardo Lewandowski, presided over her impeachment trial.

Millions took to the streets across Brazil this year to demand Rousseff's removal less than two years after she was re-elected, as Brazil slid into its deepest recession in decades and a graft scandal at state oil company Petrobras tarnished her coalition.

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North Hamgyong Province of DPRK Suffered from Flood Damage

Korean Central News Agency of DPRK via Korea News Service (KNS)

Pyongyang, September 3 (KCNA) -- It rained heavily with strong wind in North Hamgyong Province and other parts of the DPRK from August 29 to September 2, affected by a combination of typhoon-10 and low pressure field formed in the northwest.

According to data available at the State Hydro-meteorological Administration, the rainfall reached 320 mm and 290 mm in Kyonghung and Puryong counties of North Hamgyong Province from 00:00 Monday to 12:00 Friday.

And over 150 mm of rain fell in Onsong, Kyongsong, Kyongwon, Yonsa and Hwadae counties of the province as well as some parts of Ryanggang Province including Taehongdan County.

The River Tuman flooded some areas of Hoeryong and Rason cities, Musan, Onsong, Kyongwon, Kyonghung and Yonsa counties, causing big damage.

Especially, flood heavily hit Hoeryong City, Musan and Yonsa counties, claiming 15 people missing in Hoeryong.

17 180 houses were partially or completely destroyed with at least 44 000 people homeless in North Hamgyong Province.

Damage investigation goes on there.

And a campaign to help victims and heal the damage is being conducted in the flood-stricken areas. -0-

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India's Deal for 36 Dassault Rafale Stealth Fighter Jets Reaches Final Phase

Sputnik News

21:38 03.09.2016(updated 02:19 04.09.2016)

The Rafale fighter jet is believed to be the most dangerous warplane in the skies today combining semi-stealth capabilities with unparalleled thrust maneuvering providing air superiority.

India's quest to modernize its fighter aircraft fleet with the acquisition of 36 Rafale multirole fighter jets appears set to become a reality as the deal has been transmitted to the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) for final approval. The deal follows January negotiations between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Francois Hollande on an intergovernmental agreement providing for the sale of Dassault Rafale fighter jets to India.

The transmission of the acquisition file to the Prime Minister came as the Ministry of Defense cleared the negotiation committee's report to be sent to the Cabinet Committee for Security (CCS) which consists of the Prime Minister's Office, the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Ministry of External Affairs, the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Defense.

The 36 fighter jets are to be acquired for $8.8 billion and include advanced weapon systems modified for the Rafale including the Meteor beyond visual range (BVR) missile adding substantial lethality to the warplane. Initially, the deal was projected to be for $11.2 billion before New Delhi negotiated the price down threatening to walk if the arrangement was too expensive.

The 1,188 mile per hour Dassault Rafale is slower than a number of fourth generation fighter jets, but fits into the category of 4.5 generation fighter jets  with some analysts considering it a full-force fifth generation jet  due to its semi-stealth capabilities.

The Dassault is not a full-spectrum stealth aircraft, but its design reduces radar cross-section (RCS) and it has a minimal infrared signature due to modifications of the tail-fin, fuselage, engine placement as well as the use of composite materials and serrated patterns for construction of the wing edges.

As a result, the fighter jet possesses many of the same stealth capabilities of the high-cost American F-35 fighter jet at less than half the unit cost of the beleaguered Lockheed warplane making it a favored vehicle for reconnaissance and anti-ship strike missions while still possessing air superiority.

 Sputnik

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Iraqi cleric calls for two-day strike against corruption

Iran Press TV

Sat Sep 3, 2016 6:9AM

Prominent Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has called upon Iraqi people to stage a two-day walkout along with a hunger strike in protest at what he calls Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's failure to properly fight against corruption and misappropriation of public funds.

Sadr, in a statement released by his office on Friday, urged his supporters and government employees, except members of security personnel, to strike on Sunday and Monday.

The 43-year-old cleric added that those employees who will go on the strike must stage a sit-in in front of their government offices and only work in emergency cases.

Sadr also called on all Iraqi people to go on hunger strike inside mosques, churches and other houses of worship, as well as in cultural and social institutions, from September 9 until the morning of September 11.

Over the past few months, hundreds of Iraqis have been gathering at Tahrir (Liberation) Square in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, and elsewhere in the country every Friday, urging the containment of quote corruption and also the formation of a technocrat government in the country.

The establishment of such a government has been stalled by persisting differences among various Iraqi political factions.

Baghdad witnessed uproarious protests in July, when demonstrators, mostly the supporters of Sadr, rallied against what was described as rampant corruption within the country's ruling structure. A large number of people were killed or injured during the rallies.

Earlier in May, Sadr's followers broke into the parliament compound inside the capital's fortified Green Zone, protesting a stalled vote to endorse Abadi's ministerial nominees in the chamber.

Later, however, they stormed Abadi's own office building, also in the Green Zone, apparently in protest at government corruption.

On May 20, Abadi called on the nation to set aside political differences and unite against the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group, which has been ravaging the country since June 2014.

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Libya's unity government pushes to retake Sirte from Daesh

Iran Press TV

Sat Sep 3, 2016 1:35PM

Forces loyal to Libya's Government of National Accord (GNA) have launched a final offensive to retake the city of Sirte from the Takfiri Daesh terrorists.

"We are attacking the last Daesh positions in district three," said a soldier with the GNA on Saturday.

Other sources inside the GNA confirmed the final attack had begun in Sirte, with the government's media service saying on its Facebook page that pro-government forces were closing in on Daesh terrorists in the coastal city.

The media center said the forces were "advancing inside the areas where Daesh is, in district three," adding that so far, they have taken control of the buildings of two banks and a hotel.

Medical sources in Misrata, a city located to the west of Sirte, said one pro-government fighter had been killed in the fighting. Witnesses said ambulances were rushing out of Sirte to transfer the wounded to hospitals in Misrata.

Sirte, located on the Mediterranean coast, is the main urban center Daesh has managed to seize outside Iraq and Syria. Recapturing the key city would inflict a huge blow to the terrorist group in its drive to expand the militancy outside the Middle East.

GNA forces managed to liberate neighborhood Number One in central Sirte earlier in the week, marking a major advance in their months-long operation against Daesh in the city.

At least six fighters were killed and a dozen wounded in the offensive on August 29, which saw Daesh terrorists using mines, car bombs or artillery to slow the advance of Libyan troops.

Libyans announced a pause in the fighting two weeks ago to allow women and children leave the battle zone before the final push began.

The large-scale military operation began in May, when the UN-backed government decided to purge the militants from the city, which is the hometown of former dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Daesh, which captured Sirte last year, had taken advantage of a chaos gripping Libya since 2011, when a NATO military intervention followed the 2011 uprising that led to the toppling and killing of Gaddafi.

The GNA, endorsed by the United Nations and several Western governments, has yet to fully establish its authority across Libya. The cabinet is made up of representatives from a parliament based in the east, which formerly enjoyed support from the UN, and a militia government based in the capital Tripoli in the west.

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Russia Aims To Raise $11 Billion From Selling Stake In Rosneft

September 03, 2016

by RFE/RL

Russia is pushing ahead with plans to try to raise over $11 billion through the sale of nearly one-fifth of state oil company Rosneft before the end of the year, President Vladimir Putin said.

Putin said in an interview with Bloomberg News published on September 2 that Moscow is looking to sell a 19.5 percent stake in Rosneft to strategic investors through a private placement rather than through a public securities offering, in an effort to maximize revenue for the government.

"I think we should be aiming precisely for that type of investment. We are getting ready and are planning to do it this year," Putin said.

The Rosneft sale will show Russia's continued commitment to reducing the state's role in the economy despite setbacks since 2014 caused by a collapse in oil prices and western sanctions on Russia over its aggression in Ukraine, he said.

"We are committed to carrying out our plans," Putin told Bloomberg. "The question isn't whether we want to or not, the question is whether it makes sense or not, and at what moment?"

Rosneft is Russia's most valuable company and its partial privatization would raise considerably more revenue for the cash-strapped government than the sale in July of a 10.9 percent stake in diamond miner Alrosa.

After privatization, the government would retain 50 percent plus one share of Rosneft, which is the world's largest oil firm by reserves and produces over a third of Russia's output of 10.7 million barrels a day.

At its first public offering of securities a decade ago, Rosneft was worth nearly $80 billion. But its market value has fallen to $55 billion since then as a result of low oil prices and the sanctions imposed on Russia, Rosneft, and its chief executive Igor Sechin, who is one of Putin's closest allies.

The sanctions will make it difficult for western investors to purchase a stake in Rosneft, but their place could be taken by Asian investors, including from China and India, which have been seeking to help develop Russia's vast natural resources.

Russia last month postponed the sale of a 50 percent stake in Bashneft, a smaller state oil firm, after Rosneft indicated its interest in joining the bidding, pitting Kremlin insider Sechin against rival bidders and posing a dilemma for Putin.

"Probably it's not the best option when one company under state control acquires another purely state company," Putin told Bloomberg.

But he left the door open for Rosneft participating in the Bashneft sale, saying it wasn't strictly speaking a state company because Britain's BP owns almost 20 percent of its shares.

"In the end, the important thing for the budget is who gives the most money," he said. "In this sense we can't discriminate against market participants, not a single one of them."

With reporting by Bloomberg News, TASS, and Reuters

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/article/27964676.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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Putin Says Russia, OPEC Should Agree To Freeze Oil Output

September 03, 2016

by RFE/RL

Russian President Vladimir Putin said he'd like to see Russia and the OPEC cartel reach a deal to bolster oil prices by freezing production, and he expects a dispute over Iran's involvement can be resolved.

"From the viewpoint of economic sense and logic, then it would be correct to find some sort of compromise," Putin said in an interview with Bloomberg News published on September 2. "I am confident that everyone understands that. We believe that this is the right decision for world energy."

Putin's comments, which contradicted a recent statement by Russia's energy minister that a production freeze may not be necessary, sent oil prices soaring on September 2, with premium crude gaining $1.38 to close at $44.44 in London trading.

Talks between Russia and OPEC on an output freeze collapsed in April after Iran insisted that it should be able to keep raising production that was depressed for years by international economic sanctions.

Saudi Arabia at the time refused to go ahead with a freeze unless Iran joined in. But Putin said all countries now recognize that Tehran should be allowed to continue raising output to reach its goal of pumping at Iran's pre-sanctions level of 4 million barrels a day.

The Russian president said he may recommend reviving the output freeze plan when he meets with Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the Group of 20 summit in China next week.

Oil prices rallied more than 10 percent last month on speculation the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries would revive discussion of an output freeze with Russia and other major producers outside the cartel at a meeting in Algiers this month.

The prolonged slump in crude prices has been battering the economies of Russia and other producers, giving the oil-market rivals reason to cooperate.

"I would very much like to hope that every participant of this market that's interested in maintaining stable and fair global energy prices will in the end make the necessary decision," Putin told Bloomberg.

Prince bin Salman "is a very reliable partner with whom you can reach agreements, and can be certain that those agreements will be honored," he said.

While Putin seemed enthusiastic about reviving the output freeze plan, Russian Energy Minister Aleksandr Novak said on September 1 that no accord would be necessary as long as prices are around $50 a barrel.

Prices have been trading not far below that level for weeks, but seem stuck in the mid-$40 range, which is less than half the levels over $100 seen in 2014.

Novak took a different tack on September 2 after Putin's comments were published, saying Russia is ready to take part in informal talks with OPEC later this month, even if a deal isn't immediately reached.

"I think this is just the first step," he said.

With reporting by Bloomberg and AFP

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/putin-says-russia- opec-should-agree-freeze-oil-output- iran-participation/27964625.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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Over 100 PKK militants killed or injured in clashes with Turkish security forces

Iran Press TV

Sat Sep 3, 2016 6:7PM

More than 100 members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) militant group have been killed or wounded in clashes with Turkish army forces in the restive southeastern part of the country.

Turkish military said in a statement on Saturday that over 100 PKK militants had been "neutralized" during the clashes, without specifying how many were killed and how many wounded.

The casualty toll from Saturday's clashes was one of the highest in a single day of the conflict in recent years.

Turkish forces suffered a bloody 24 hours after 13 soldiers and a village guardsman were killed in three separate incidents in the country's east and southeast, blamed on Kurdish militants.

Three soldiers were killed and 20 others wounded during a clean-up operation against the PKK in the southeastern province of Hakkari on Saturday morning.

Another eight soldiers were killed during clashes with the Kurdish militants in the eastern province of Van on Friday. Eight others sustained injures during the operation.

And late on Friday, two soldiers and a village guard were killed in an attack on a military post in restive eastern provinces of Mardin.

Turkish military forces have been conducting ground operations as well as airstrikes against PKK positions in Turkey's troubled southeastern border region and Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan region over the past year.

The campaign began following the July 2015 bombing in the southern Turkish town of Suruc, which claimed more than 30 civilian lives. Turkish officials held the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group responsible for the act of terror.

PKK militants, who accuse the Ankara government of supporting Daesh, launched a string of supposed reprisal attacks against Turkish security forces after the bomb attack, in turn prompting the Turkish military operations.

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More Turkish tanks cross into northern Syria: Report

Iran Press TV

Sat Sep 3, 2016 2:9PM

Turkish tanks have crossed into northern Syria from Kilis province in a new phase of operation against Kurdish-led forces.

Around 20 tanks, five armored personnel carriers, trucks and other armored vehicles on Saturday crossed the border near the Turkish village of Cobanbey, which lies across from the Syrian village of Ra'i, Turkish media reported.

The area is some 55 kilometers southwest of Jarablus, where last week Turkish-backed Syrian militants launched "Operation Euphrates Shield", Turkey's first major incursion into Syria since the start of the foreign-backed militancy in the Arab country more than five years ago.

The reports also said that Turkish howitzers pounded alleged Daesh positions in the area as the fresh armored contingent advanced.

In response, Daesh terrorists reportedly fired three rockets into the southeastern city of Kilis.

Ambulances, police and rescue units were dispatched to the area.

Turkey launched an incursion into Syria on August 24. It said the incursion was meant to engage the Daesh Takfiri terrorists in the Syrian-Turkish border area as well as Kurdish fighters, who were themselves fighting Daesh.

The Turkish forces engaged the fighters of the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which Turkish authorities say is allied with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). The PKK has been fighting for an autonomous Kurdish region inside Turkey since the 1980s.

Hours after the beginning of the operation, Turkish-backed militants seized Jarablus.

Since then, militants have reportedly been seizing villages along the Turkish border near Jarablus and the western Cobanbey district from Daesh.

Ankara has said its military campaign is aimed at "cleansing" the region of Daesh and preventing Kurdish forces from gaining power in the ensuing void.

Iran and Russia have warned against Turkey's military presence in Syria and called on Ankara to immediately pull out Turkish troops from the Arab country. Syria has also denounced Turkey's military incursion as a violation of its sovereignty.

Meanwhile, the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that Turkey-backed militants took control of three villages close to the border on Saturday, two on the Jarablus front and one on the new Ra'i front.

The head of the UK-based group, Rami Abdel Rahman, said that "they are trying to take control of the border area between Jarablus and Ra'i" from Daesh.

Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011.

Ankara has been blamed for supporting militant groups that have been fighting to topple the Syrian government.

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Nearly dozen Turkish soldiers killed in clashes with PKK militants

Iran Press TV

Sat Sep 3, 2016 8:35AM

Nearly a dozen Turkish soldiers have been killed during separate clean-up operations against Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) militants in Turkey's restive eastern provinces of Mardin and Van.

Military officials said three soldiers were killed after Kurdish forces attacked a military post in the Dargecit district of Mardin Province, situated about 1,100 kilometers (683 miles) east of the capital, Ankara, on Friday.

The unnamed officials added that three village guards and a civilian also sustained gunshot wounds during the assault.

Separately, eight soldiers lost their lives during fierce exchanges of gunfire with PKK members in a mountainous area of the eastern Turkish province of Van.

The Turkish General Staff also said in a statement that 33 PKK militants had been killed and 30 others injured after Turkish government forces launched a series of aerial and ground operations against the Kurds' positions in the southeastern Turkish province of Hakkari.

Turkish military forces have been conducting ground operations as well as airstrikes against PKK positions in Turkey's troubled southeastern border region and Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan region over the past year.

The campaign began following the July 2015 bombing in the southern Turkish town of Suruc, which claimed more than 30 civilian lives. Turkish officials held the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group responsible for the act of terror.

PKK militants, who accuse the Ankara government of supporting Daesh, launched a string of supposed reprisal attacks against Turkish security forces after the bomb attack, in turn prompting the Turkish military operations.

The Turkish military recently attacked Kurdish positions inside Syria in a ground incursion as well.

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Turkish Forces Open New Front in Syria, Enter Aleppo Province

Sputnik News

19:04 03.09.2016(updated 21:12 03.09.2016)

The Turkish military opened a new front in its Euphrates Shield operation in neighboring Syria.

Turkish tanks and other armored vehicles entered the Syrian province of Aleppo and shelled positions of Daesh militants, Hurriyet Daily news reported.

Turkish forces crossed the border from the Turkish province of Kilis, near the town of Cobanbey, some 25 kilometers from the place where the operation began.

According to the newspaper, Turkey sent Leopard tanks in addition to M60T tanks involved the operation. Moreover, several combat armored vehicles equipped with the Kirpi mine defense system were deployed to Syria.

In order to enter the Syrian territory, Turkish troops dismantled part of a wall which is currently being built on the border, DHA news agency reported citing military sources.

The Euphrates Shield operation started on August 24 in the northern Syrian city of Jarablus and was backed by a US-led international coalition. At the time, nearly 40 Turkish tanks backed by some 1,000 Syrian rebel forces entered Syria.

In response, Damascus accused Ankara of violating its national sovereignty.

According to the Turkish government, the operation is aimed against Daesh militants and Kurdish forces and will last as long as needed.

On Thursday, the General Staff said that over 260 targets had been hit by airstrikes since the start of the operation without specifying whether some of these were Kurdish forces, which are also targeted by the operation, instead of Daesh.

On Monday, the Turkish Foreign Ministry issued an ultimatum to Kurds and demanded from them to withdraw to the east from the Euphrates. The United States, in turn, criticized Turkey for attacking Kurds and called for strikes against Daesh.

The Russian Foreign Ministry called for Turkey not to attack Syrian opposition forces and Kurds. Moscow also stressed that all military operations in Syria should be coordinated with the Syrian government.

 Sputnik

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More Turkish Tanks Roll Into Syria to Support Anti-IS Rebels

By VOA News September 03, 2016

Turkey has sent more tanks into the northern Syrian village of al-Rai from Kilis province to support Syrian rebels fight Islamic State, Turkish media reported.

At least 20 tanks, five armored personnel carriers, trucks and other armored vehicles crossed the border, marking Turkey's second incursion since it launched the so-called "Euphrates Shield" operation along with Free Syrian Army units on August 24.

Since then, rebels have been seizing villages along the Turkish border near Jarablus and the western Cobanbey district from IS, the reports said.

The Turkey-backed Free Syrian Army units have also been fighting U.S.-backed Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG).

Meanwhile, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Saturday that terrorism is a long-term issue for discussion by members of the Group of 20 nations gathering in China's Hangzhou coastal city for their 2016 summit.

Turkey's top priorities since the G-20 summit in Turkey last year have been the refugee crisis and counterterrorism, Erdogan said in an interview with the Chinese broadcaster CCTV, adding that a principled stance against all terrorist groups is needed.

Erdogan arrived Saturday in Hangzhou for the G-20 summit and was greeted by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

He also had a closed-door meeting with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.

His trip comes after he defeated an attempted coup by members of the Turkish military on July 15.

Erdogan did not directly address the failed coup, saying that he welcomed the summit's focus on investment and innovation. China is Turkey's third-largest trading partner.

Erdogan is expected to meet with President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the gathering.

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The president of the Heritage Preservation Association said the organization is waiting to see whether the Virginia Supreme Court will take up the groups appeal in the Confederate flag case in Danville.

The issue is not going away because other towns and cities are also awaiting the courts decision, said Wayne Byrd, HPA president.

Other localities [in Virginia] are looking at this, Byrd said Friday.

The organization is trying to get clarification on state law regarding the display of Confederate flags and monuments on local government property, he said.

Were just trying to get an honest hearing on the issue and we just havent had that yet, he added.

There are a lot of monuments across the state, Byrd said.

Its not just Danville, he said. This affects the whole state of Virginia.

A three-judge panel of the Virginia Supreme Court on June 20 declined to hear the HPAs initial appeal of a local judges decision that upheld Danvilles removal of the Third National Confederate flag from a monument on the grounds of the Sutherlin Mansion.

The Heritage Preservation Association filed a petition for a rehearing in the Virginia Supreme Court following the courts decision.

Doug Robelen, chief deputy clerk with the court, said last week he expects the seven-justice court to consider the petition for a rehearing at the end of this month. A decision on whether to hear the appeal could come by the middle of October, Robelen said.

The HPA could appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court if the state court decides against hearing it, but the chances of it making it into the high court would be small, the HPAs attorney, Kevin Martingayle, said. The case does not present a clear federal constitutional issue and would be unlikely to catch the high courts attention, Martingayle said.

Byrd declined to comment on the HPAs next step if the Virginia Supreme Court denies the petition for a rehearing.

Since the flags removal from the Sutherlin Mansions property, HPA members and other flag supporters have been flying the flag on the sidewalk in front of the mansion on Saturdays. Theyre there to answer questions and remind people of the flag that once flew there, Byrd said.

Also, 14 flags have been erected on private property within five miles of Danville since its removal, Byrd said.

In March, Gov. Terry McAuliffe vetoed a bill extending protections to all war memorials in Virginia. The bill, drafted by Del. Charles Poindexter, R-Glade Hill, sought to clarify a protection of monuments in Virginia to include all monuments regardless of when they were erected.

Danville City Council approved a measure banning certain flags from city property in August 2015, bringing down the Confederate flag flying outside the city-owned Sutherlin Mansion.

Poindexter said earlier this year comments from Danville Circuit Court Judge James Reynolds prompted him to draft the bill.

On Oct. 29, Reynolds dismissed a lawsuit seeking to bring back the flag, saying the monument is not covered by state law protecting war memorials because the 1998 law did not specifically protect memorials retroactively.

A 1994 resolution between the HPA and the city allowing the group to install and replace the flag as needed was not a contract, Reynolds said in the ruling.

In McAuliffes veto statement, he said localities, rather than the commonwealth, should determine the proper actions to take regarding memorials.

Martingayle said in May that the version of the states statute that existed when the monument was erected  in 1994  would not protect it, but the current version does. Jeremy Carroll, an attorney representing the city in the case, said the statutes language does not apply retroactively to the flag that flew at the mansion.
SHARE This photo was taken in 1931 as Nip Blackstone and Will Rogers left the San Angelo Municipal Auditorium following a speech by Rogers.

19,200-acre ranch is still with family today

By Jerry Lackey

Founded: In 1909 by Napoleon D. "Nip" Blackstone and W. Lon Slaughter

Current owners: Steve Elkins, Mike Elkins and sons Mark and Chad Elkins

Location: Headquarters seven miles west of Barnhart, which is 52 miles southwest of San Angelo

Livestock: Hereford and Angus cattle

In 1909, after buying some cattle in San Angelo, Napoleon D. "Nip" Blackstone and W. Lon Slaughter caught the train for the return to their ranch operations in the Indian Territory of Oklahoma.

As they boarded the train, a man handed them a map of the Hayden and Rucker Ranch at Barnhart, about 50 miles west of San Angelo, and told them the ranch was for sale.

"Uncle Nip (Blackstone) said they came to West Texas to buy cattle only and weren't interested in ranchland," Mike Elkins recalled from family archives. "The story passed down to us was they started to throw the map away, but Uncle Nip didn't have anything to read on the train, so he started looking at the map."

The Blackstones had grown up ranching on family land in Indian Territory that became the nation's 46th state of Oklahoma on Nov. 16, 1907.

In a short two-year period, the free range of the new state was being divided and plowed by farmers. The 28-year-old Nip Blackstone was feeling the squeeze, and the ranching business in West Texas seemed to be a good idea after all.

The Hayden and Rucker Ranch deal involved a purchase of 5,120 acres of deeded land and more than 40,000 acres of lease land from the University of Texas.

Nip Blackstone, who was born Oct. 28, 1881, in Webbers Falls, Okla., met Gilliean Mabson of San Angelo soon after he purchased the ranch. They married a year later on Nov. 7, 1910, and lived on the Barnhart ranch for several years.

"In 1925, Uncle Nip's brother and our grandfather George Blackstone moved to the Barnhart ranch, and Uncle Nip and Aunt Gilliean moved to San Angelo," Mike Elkins said. The ranch was operated under the partnership of the Blackstone brothers for 20 years.

Nip Blackstone was a roommate of Will Rogers, the famous cowboy humorist, at the Male Seminary in Tahlequah, Okla. They remained friends throughout Rogers' lifetime. Rogers, who died in 1935 in a plane crash in Alaska with aviator Wiley Post, spoke in San Angelo on two occasions, and on both trips he had supper with the Blackstones in their San Angelo home.

A few years later, Blackstone and brother-in-law W. Lon Slaughter, purchased the Gray Ranch in Pecos County and the Ketchem Ranch in Terrell County.

When Nip Blackstone died at age 62, George and his wife decided to retire in San Angelo.

George Blackstone's daughter, Nina Blackstone Elkins, and her son, Steve Elkins, were living in Muskogee, Okla., while her husband, Fred Elkins, was in the military. When he came home from Europe at the end of World War II, they moved to the Barnhart ranch in 1945. A year later, their second son, Mike, was born.

Presently, Steve Elkins, Mike and Mary Lou Little Elkins and their sons, Mark and Chad Elkins, operate the 19,200 acre Blackstone-Elkins Ranch together.

Mike Elkins said his ranch house, seven miles west of Barnhart, is on the county line of three counties ? Irion, Crockett and Reagan ? and during the years he served as Reagan County judge, he officially claimed the kitchen as his legal residence.

Steve's ranch house is a couple of miles east in Irion County.

At the time of Blackstone's death in March 1944, he and his sister, Josephine Blackstone Slaughter, owned the old Ketchum Ranch at Sheffield and the firm of Blackstone & Slaughter had leased out all of the acreage, around 65,000 acres. The firm of Blackstone & Woodward, under the management of Fonnie Woodward, also a Blackstone partner, operated about 11,000 acres of the ranch.

"Our mother grew up in Muskogee and our father in Houston," Steve Elkins said.

"The ranch life was a new experience for us both," wrote Nina Blackstone Elkins. "We had a lot to learn, but soon learned that ranch work came before anything else and that the most important topic of conversation in West Texas was rain."

Tepee Draw, which flows only during big rain events, and Spring Creek, which starts on the ranch, is one of the main tributaries, which flows into the Twin Buttes Reservoir at San Angelo.

The ranch cattle brand has been a "Q" for nearly 100 years.
SHARE photos by MICHELLE GAITAN/STANDARD-TIMES Major flooding on San Angelo's Avenue P has long frustrated residents, but recent moves by the city may help relocate citizens who live along the street. Some residents who live on San Angelo's Avenue P have asked the city to appraised their property in anticipation of a buyout. The city is responding to flooding problems that have plagued the site.

By Rashda Khan, Rashda.Khan@gosanangelo.com/@rashda_SAST

While most San Angeloans rejoice at the first sign of rain, the residents of Avenue P get nervous.

Rainstorms transform Avenue P into a small river  water rushing through some parts and standing in others. Water flows into the area from as far as Knickerbocker Road and Angelo State University.

In a city staff report, the situation was described as "a major health, safety and welfare issue for decades. Damages caused by the deep, swift water include stalled/flooded vehicles, numerous flooded homes and other property and possible drowning."

The 2000 Master Drainage Plan prepared by Freese & Nichols, Inc. ranks this project as the second most recommended drainage improvement project in San Angelo.

The city has been dealing with flooding issues on Avenue P, a stretch about four-tenths of a mile between South Bryant Boulevard and Chadbourne Street, since the early 1970s. While Avenue P might be a small road, the scope of the Avenue P drainage area is much larger.

"It's way bigger than a Walmart or Sam's parking lot. It's actually 642 acres," said Project Engineer Lance Overstreet at a community meeting in late August. "Imagine 60 to 80 Walmarts and trying to deal with all their water."

At the meeting, city representatives said the city of San Angelo wants to buy about 30 lots  17 with homes  on Avenue P, build large detention ponds and turn the neighborhood into a usable green space.

Overstreet said the city came up with this idea after considering a lot of other possibilities, including putting in larger pipe, elevating houses, putting up walls and changing street elevation.

This is the most recent proposal city officials have put forward, but is it the final fix?

"If the city can acquire the properties then this would actually be a final solution," Overstreet said.

The key word in Overstreet's statement is "If."

In the recent past, attempts to solve the issue included:

City Council on November 1, 2011, approved funding for this project at $1.7 million for design and construction.

Of that, $755,000 was appropriated from the 2011-2012 budget at the December 6, 2011, City Council meeting; $1,045,000 was budgeted in fiscal year 2012-2013, bringing the total budgeted amount at that time to $1.8 million.

Council approved additional funds in the amount of $640,000 during the May 14, 2013, general meeting. The total budgeted amount is $2.4 million.

The project was awarded July 2013 to Reece Albert Inc. for $2.4 million. However, work never started because the city was unable to obtain two easements from private property owners.

Overstreet said the city considered buying property upstream from Avenue P last year to try and address the overflow problem, but again couldn't make the required purchases.

Despite past difficulties, the city is not willing to go the route of "eminent domain," under which a government has the right to take private property for overall public benefit with compensation to the owner based on prevailing market values.

"We would rather work with the citizens in the neighborhood to find solutions than force people out of their homes," said City Manager Daniel Valenzuela in an email interview. "We want to develop a solution that is thoughtful and considerate of the citizens we serve, while still remaining fiscally responsible."

The city plans to pay for these properties using the $2.4 million allocated for the Avenue P Drainage Project. These moneys have carried over for the past three years in the city budget.

The city's newest proposal received a mixed review at the August meeting attended by about 50 people. Several have long ties to the neighborhood and childhood memories. Others thought the city was on the right track. The hum of conversation erupted around the room afterward.

"I see all these folk arguing," one man said. "My idea is, the city needs to buy out all these people."

"It's easy for you to say," said the man sitting next to him. "You don't live there."

Another concern expressed by attendees was that the project only addressed properties on one side of Bryant Boulevard.

"They use my street, Avenue P, like a drain," said Imelda Flowers, who manages property on both sides of Bryant. "If they build something on the other side maybe it'll help. Hopefully."

Her niece Gina Muniz disagreed. "It's just like they are fixing a piece of the puzzle," she said.

Finally someone asked the question on everyone's mind: "What happens if you can't get enough properties?"

"We'll have to go back to the drawing board," said City Engineer Russell Pehl. "But at this point we're running out of ideas and solutions."

City representatives ended the meeting, urging people to fill out forms giving the city permission to appraise their homes.

"This is just one step; you're not obligated to continue further," Valenzuela told meeting attendees. "We can't discuss value of lots or the potential without that appraisal." The city will foot the bill for the appraisals.

Five individuals signed up for appraisals at the meeting site, and the city has received one more form since then. The next step is to complete appraisals and enter into negotiations for purchase of property.

Valenzuela is optimistic that more residents will sign up for appraisals.

"I believe that citizens understand the tough issues we are facing in helping to resolve their flooding concerns," the city manager said. "We have looked at many different options to reduce/eliminate flooding, but some were too cost prohibitive or only served as a 'Band-Aid' fix, rather than a long-term answer."
UTSA was held to a season-low. 163 hitting percentage by Army in the final match of the American Campus Classic as the Black Knights swept the Roadrunners on Saturday night (12-25, 19-25, 23-25).Three players registered a team-best seven kills behind the efforts ofand. Slan also boasted a .875 hitting percentage (7-0-8) with one block while Boskovic added five digs.Meanwhile,posted 23 assists with four digs, whileadded five kills, six digs and an ace.Army (2-4) hit .420 for the match and was led by Amber Clay with her 14 kills, five digs and one block. Allie Strong added 11 winners for the Black Knights with six digs and a block.The Black Knights made quick work of the Roadrunners in the opening set as they were off to a 6-0 start. Boskovic put the Roadrunners on the board with a kill and UTSA scored the next two points before a serving error gave Army the ball. UTSA scored its final point of the frame on a miscue by Army as the Black Knights closed out with five straight points.In the second set, UTSA stepped it up and battled it out with the Black Knights as the set featured 13 ties and eight lead changes. UTSA's final point was also the final tie of the set at 19 on a setting error by Army but the Black Knights rolled out six straight points to win 25-19.UTSA had a chance late in the third set to win after a block by Boskovic and Slan put the Roadrunners up 22-21 but Army held UTSA off the board and went on a 5-0 run for the sweep.The Roadrunners will hit the road next week as they visit Norman, Okla., for the 2016 Nike Invitational hosted by Oklahoma. UTSA will face off with Lamar, Ohio and host Oklahoma.
A few weeks ago, I ran into Steven Fox, who is an industry expert and longtime friend. He gave an excellent presentation at a local Michigan ISSA event . The topic of Stevens presentation was: Social Aftermath  Responding to Social Engineering Incidents.His fascinating presentation opened my eyes (anew) to the vast (and underreported) world of social engineering attacks through a wide variety of channels. Our own data is being used against us in evolving ways  including the basic information that many of us voluntarily give away online via Facebook, LinkedIn and other online sources. Steven F. Fox has spoken at hacker events such as the Black Hat Executive Summit, the RSA Conference, DefCon and Hacker Halted. He has extensive professional experience in the public and private sectors, and his practical stories are unique and powerful.What you wont see on Stevens online profiles (because he practices what he preaches) are the many examples he can provide of top businesses getting duped by their own marketing teams that reveal information that is used to penetrate companies sensitive databases.Steven is a humble security pro who I respect and admire for his expertise, style and practical advice. I know that we can all learn from what he has to say. So on to the interview with Steven F. Fox.Steven Fox (SF): I like Chris Hadnagys definition of social engineering (SE)   All social engineering exploits use the social queues that create rapport and trust in order to accomplish some goal; one that is not always negative. For example, Ive used social engineering techniques to work the room in professional networking meet-ups. Ive also used them to gain access to server rooms during professional consulting engagements.Are these attacks serious? The release of over 20,000 FBI agency contact records and the Office of Personnel Management breach are attributed in part to social engineering campaigns. SE attacks bypass the rigid, digital defenses of the enterprise and go after the malleable social analog interface that many organizations use to connect with their customers and business partners.SF: According to the PCI Security Standards Council, 156 million phishing emails are sent globally every day. Sixteen million of those make it past enterprise spam filters. Users open 8 million of those emails  80,000 users tend to click on the links. Indiscriminate phishing email may catch users with low-value system authorizations, lowering the value of that breach. However, attackers that target high-value managers/executives through spear-phishing can gain information of greater sensitivity.I see it as a matter of prioritization rather than neglect. Social engineering was a component of approximately 25 percent of my penetration testing engagements when I was a private-sector consultant. While the 75 percent of my clients recognized the social exploit risks, their compliance and business mandates emphasized infrastructure testing. Many of the security leaders with whom I spoke at Black Hat 2016 are starting to view enterprise risk from a supply-chain perspective. This view expands the scope of a risk discussion beyond the boundaries of the organization to include its partners and suppliers.SF: What do most of us do when we are preparing for a job interview? We research the company, its mission, its leaderships  individual pieces of information that taken together help build rapport with the prospective employer. In this case, the objective is to collect information that increases the chances of employment. The first step in a social engineering attack is identifying the campaigns goals and analyzing what is needed to accomplish them. The next step is identifying the targets processes, people and technology associated with the assets sought. Third, the social engineer identifies the best means by which he/she can blend into the organization. This step is a blend of art and science in that the social engineering must be flexible and responsive to their interaction with the target.SF: Building profiles for the organization and its people is critical to social engineering success. In early 2015, I taught intelligence analysis at Eastern Michigan University. The students thought at first that intelligence analysis and social engineering were just about gathering a lot of information and looking for useful patterns. I refined this perspective by assigning five public companies to five student teams. The semester-long project required that each team build a profile highlighting high-risk business processes, along with the supporting people and technology. Each team also needed to build a high-level map of how money flowed through these processes.This exercise showed the students that profiles provide an important context for any information you gather during the intelligence process. A profile helps focus an engagement on what information is important and what constitutes noise. It also informs the way that information is used to influence your targets personnel. For example, I constructed a profile for a popular discount retail chain that allowed me to identify the official code words used over their public announcement system. This helped me pass myself off as a person from corporate that needed to get sensitive store information.SF: The attacker is trying to influence a user to take some desired action. The infiltration process that allows this to occur will vary with the target process. For example, the increased use of online process interfaces has led to greater use of phishing attacks. Such attacks take advantage of a user who is already authenticated and authorized on a given system. On the other hand, some business processes require face-to-face contact. In these situations, an on-premises SE attack may occur.As noted before, the SE target profile will inform many aspects of the attack.SF: Business and security professionals should understand that the same information they use to connect with and serve customers can be used to attack the organization. A handful of enlightened businesses that rely on social media to do business also have business intelligence teams monitoring what information is available on the Internet. At the extreme end of the spectrum, large pharmaceutical and energy firms secure counterintelligence services from the likes of Deloitte, E&Y and PwC.The common theme in these examples is being aware of, and in some instances controlling, the information that cyber-miscreants use to attack the business. The first step is to communicate with your marketing teams to understand what is published  remember always that marketing owns information associated with the customer experience. The second step is to understand how that information flows through your business process. Third, make sure that processes exist to escalate suspicious interactions to  whether they are in-person, over email or phone-based. Last, ensure that the organizations security awareness training incorporates these insights to ensure that everyone benefits from shared knowledge.SF: Internet Relay Chat was my first exposure to the seductive allure of connecting with others without the constraints of distance. I spent hours on end every day forging relationships on the fledgling Internet  until I realized that all my public messages were saved on several computers and could never really be deleted. This put a major damper on my usage.Today I use LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter  sites that view me as a data asset. And I am OK with that. I choose to share information that supports my personal and professional brand. I am also aware that my status as a federal employee increases the risk that I will be profiled as part of an SE campaign. Thus, I am very careful with what I post and I make judicious use of each sites privacy controls.SF: I know people that over-share on social media and open themselves, and their employers, to social exploits. I also know people that work in the defense sector that choose a misinformation approach to their social media activities. There is a middle ground that we can all maintain, but that requires understanding the value of the data you share and the context in which you share it. Most of us that use social media have digital personae on the Internet. We have the power to influence how representative those avatars are.
(TNS) -- Upholding an unprecedented fine, the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission this morning affirmed its $11.4 million penalty levied against Uber Technologies Inc. for giving rides in Pennsylvania without state permission in 2014.The commission voted 4-1 to deny Ubers appeal to reconsider the fine, which was approved in April at the end of a contentious case stemmed from the San Francisco ride-sharing giants first weeks in Allegheny County.Saying Uber raised no new or novel evidence that wasnt in the record already, PUC Chairman Gladys M. Brown said the fine was a fair punishment when considering the violations.We were faced with an unprecedented number of violations by Uber, Ms. Brown said during the meeting. When a regulated entity is given notice that it is violating the law and it ignores those notices, it does so to its own detriment.Commissioners John F. Coleman Jr., Andrew G. Place and David W. Sweet voted along with Ms. Brown to reject Ubers appeal. Robert F. Powelson dissented.In a statement, Uber said it will appeal the fine in the Commonwealth Court."We are shocked that the PUC would compound its past mistakes and send the troubling message that Pennsylvania is unwelcoming to technology and innovation," the company wrote.Before the vote, individual commissioners rehashed many of the arguments for and against the amount of the penalty  more than six times the PUCs next-highest fine and significantly more than a $250,000 settlement with Lyft in 2015 for similar violations. Mr. Powelson pointed out Uber has caused little actual harm in the Commonwealth and that it provides a useful service that customers like.Uber was supplying a much needed benefit to customers, Mr. Powelson said.Mr. Sweet, who joined the commission in June after the fine was issued, suggested he would not have supported such a large fine had he been on the governing body in April.And while he voted to deny the appeal given that no compelling new evidence (has been) unearthed that was unavailable during the proceeding, he said the case gets at a bigger issue that needs to be addressed.While the law must be obeyed, it must also be modernized, Mr. Sweet said. Otherwise well be in this same room again trying to put the proverbial square peg and in a round hole.The penalty has generated sharp criticism from state and local officials.Shortly after the April vote, Gov. Tom Wolf, Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald and Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto signed a letter to the commission calling the fine chilling and saying it constitutes a civil penalty on innovation, threatening the companys ability to harness new technologies and create the jobs of tomorrow.Ms. Brown said, We reiterate and emphasize that this commission supports TNC models, using the acronym for transportation network companies  an umbrella term for ride-sharing services that includes Lyft and zTrip, launched by Yellow Cab of Pittsburgh.Thats why the commission granted Uber, Lyft and zTrip temporary licenses at the end of 2014, she said, under which the carriers have been operating since. The commission is encouraging the General Assembly to approve legislation that would allow the commission to grant permanent authority, she said.
Felipe Massa's father says it is possible the retiring F1 driver will switch to another category in 2017.

Brazilian Massa, 35, announced at Monza that he will not be extending his long F1 career into a sixteenth consecutive season next year.

But his father, Luis Antonio, told Sportv: "He could race somewhere because that's what he loves to do. In a top category, no doubt, with a chance to be champion.

"There are some options," Massa snr revealed. "WEC, DTM, Formula E. No choices are made, but it will not be other than those three categories."

(GMM)
The deal is definitely done on the sale of F1's majority stake by current owners CVC, according to multiple authoritative publications.

Auto Motor und Sport (Germany), La Gazzetta dello Sport and Sky (Italy), the Sunday Times (Britain) and Auto Bild (Germany) all agree that Liberty Media, headed by US tycoon John Malone, is buying F1 for $8.5 billion.

The Sunday Times said F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone is "refusing to deny" that the first transaction will be done early next week.

And Auto Motor und Sport claimed: "When we asked, Bernie Ecclestone confirmed that the sale will be done in the coming week."

The reports claim the sale will be done in two stages, with Ecclestone to definitely stay as chief executive in the initial, transitional phase.

"I will do what I have always done," Auto Motor und Sport quoted the 85-year-old as saying.

"It is my decision what role I take."

The report linked Formula E chief Alejandro Agag with Ecclestone's role beyond the first phase.

Germany's Auto Bild claimed that Ecclestone is still pushing for CVC to sell to a Qatar group, so that he definitely retains his role at the top.

F1 legend Gerhard Berger welcomed the news that CVC is selling.

"It will bring in fresh ideas," he told the Italian broadcaster Sky at Monza, adding that the fact the new owner is American will also help.

"America is a nut that formula one never really cracked," Berger added.

(GMM)
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Growing up in Queens my mother would regularly point to some statistic or information bite about teen traffic fatalities in Connecticut as a good reason not to live there. Theres nothing to do except drink and drive, shed say. Nevermind that our Westport cousins were growing up fatality-free, and that she could never cite hard evidence of rampant drinking and driving deaths. She was sure Connecticut was the mechanized death capital of the world, even if people who lived there didnt want to admit it.

Fast-forward a couple of decades to 2014 when I started receiving letters from a woman who was very concerned about heroin and opioid use in and around Greenwich. This was a big story, she contended, one that was being swept under the rug by the police, parents afraid of public embarrassment, even funeral directors who (she claimed) were fudging the cause of death on official documents. Her allegations were shocking if true. Six Greenwich teens over a period of months dying from heroin overdoes that were being hidden from the public. Each rebranded with alternative causes of death so as not to shame the families or cause a panic.

Was it hyperbole? Some of it. But motivated local news outlets were starting to look into heroin use, and lo and behold it turned out that yes, theres something going on that we should be concerned about. Heroin and opioid use and subsequent overdoses in Connecticut are increasing significantly, with the number of deaths tripling in the state from 2012 to 2015. According to Greenwichs own Social Services commissioner Alan Barry, our town isnt immune to the threat.

Recently though, following a noticeable uptick in local arrests, deaths and emergency room visits, a public/private study has been commissioned here in Greenwich that will hopefully shine a light on opioid and heroin use. The studys results have been delayed, but if the working group needs some more time to get all the facts right then so be it. Getting it right, and maybe getting a clearer understanding of how and why opioid use has grabbed hold of so many seemingly smart enough to know better people should be invaluable information.

So while we wait, lets reflect for a moment on my mothers ideas all those years ago and how that applies here. Yes, some teens died driving drunk on the twisty roads of Connecticut. Mom stitched that inconvenient truth together with the perception that with our lack of New York-style diversions, all there was to do as a Nutmeg teenager was drink. Was she wrong? Not entirely. Broken clocks are right twice a day, so of course there was some truth to her prejudice. Some kids did drink and drive out of boredom, and some died.

In 2016 however, does Moms logic work when it comes to drug use? Unfortunately, I believe so. Listen to the stories of young addicts in our local press and there are some common threads that seem as current today as they did in the 1970s. Boredom, easy access, enabling parents and friends. If the Greenwich study truly is thorough, Im pretty sure there are going to be some uncomfortable truths exposed that Greenwichites dont want to hear.

Think about it. A month ago a dealer in Bridgeport gets busted selling heroin (some of which is laced with elephant tranquilizer) to Greenwich kids and the kicker to the story is how our little darlings are paying six, seven times the going Bridgeport rate. Theyre dropping $1,000-1,500 for what they think is the good stuff. What should we read into that? These arent kids from the street looking for a fix. Theyre affluent kids with time on their hands, access to money and cars, and very likely, no oversight at home as to where they, or their money, are going.

The study will be out soon, and I hope its comprehensive. But even without a study, I know two things to be true. One, Connecticut needs boredom and stress-reducing opportunities for our youth that arent drug and alcohol-related. And two, parents must recognize theyre not only the first, but often the only line of defense between drugs of all types and their children.

David Rafferty is a Greenwich resident.
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Familiar faces on the chart this week, but a few new entries as well to spice things up.

The Galaxy J7 Prime is among the latter, announced this week and already in Top 10. Judging by the long-lasting success of Samsung's J series on the chart (4 representatives this week), we won't be surprised to see this one quickly climb up the ladder.

The iPhone 7 is another new addition, and we find it in 7th spot. September 7 is the launch date of this one, so we're expecting top spot next week?

The Sony Xperia XZ is the third new entry this week and the most successful one. The Japanese company's latest flagship shot straight to number 2, as soon as it was announced at IFA on September 1.

The rest are all usual suspects. Redmi Note 3 has been in 3rd for a while, the Galaxy J7 (2016) rules again, after a brief stint of the Note7 on top, and crowd favorites J5 (2016) and J2 (2016) are around as well.




Haiti - Health : Distribution of anti-Zika kits to pregnant women





Friday, U.S. Ambassador to Haiti, Peter Mulrean, and the Director General of the Ministry of Public Health and Population (MSPP), Dr. Gabriel Timothe, visited the Martissant Community Clinic, which is supported by the US Agency for International Development (USAID).



Ambassador Mulrean and Dr. Timothe also took part in the distribution of Zika prevention kits to pregnant women in their first trimester.



Responding to a request by the Ministry of Public Health, the Security Cooperation Office (SCO) of the SOUTHCOMs Humanitarian Assistance Program, purchased over 700 Zika Prevention Kits (Repellents, citronella candles and condoms).



During this distribution, Ambassador Mulrean highlighted the necessity to reinforce community programs to prevent the spread of Zika in Haitis vulnerable areas "The United States actively supports the Haitian Ministry of Healths Action Plan against Zika. This plan focuses on the prevention, detection and the response to the disease. As part of prevention, we distributed the anti-Zika kits to pregnant women in their first trimester, a at risk category."



Note that the Martissant Community Clinic is one of USAIDs 164 integrated healthcare service delivery sites in Haiti, serving a community 250,000 people. Every month, the clinic provides prenatal services to over 450 pregnant women.



See also :

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-18359-haiti-health-first-case-of-microcephaly-confirmed-in-haiti.html

https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-17949-icihaiti-health-more-than-2-600-confirmed-cases-of-zika-in-6-months.html



HL/ HaitiLibre
























Haiti - Education : D-1, Back to School and accompanying measures of the Government





In a note, the Ministry of National Education, confirms to the general public and the education community in particular, that the date of Monday, September 5, 2016 is maintained for Back to School of the new academic year 2016-2017.



In addition, the Ministry states that with the support of the highest State authorities, a set of actions is initiated to support families for back to school and fulfill the promises of the government...:



List of measures :



"The subsidy program and staffing of textbooks is being implemented. The books are available in several outlets for certain suppliers ;



School feeding services will be available in different schools from the first days of class with emphasis on the quality of services and the use of local products ;



School buses will also be available in different circuits to facilitate the transportation of children ;



Financial resources were identified to pay the schools involved in the Universal Schooling Program Free and Compulsory (PSUGO). Once verified by the inspectors of the Ministry of Economy and Finance, the schools will be paid ;



Teachers appointed in post will gradually start receiving their due before the end of September .



Moreover, Benjamin Jean-Claude Deputy Spokesperson of the National Police of Haiti (IGPNH), reassures parents and the public and says that the National Police of Haiti (PNH), has a safety plan for assist citizens, especially as part of the official reopening of classes (hich coincides with the electoral campaign). As part of this plan, officers of specialized police units are invited to accompany as necessary, pupils and students.



See also :

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-18461-haiti-education-550-million-gourdes-to-facilitate-the-back-to-school.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-18433-haiti-education-transfer-of-private-school-children-to-public-schools.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-18390-haiti-education-new-meeting-around-the-new-school-year.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-18273-haiti-politic-summit-meeting-around-the-back-to-school.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-18233-haiti-flash-reduction-of-school-subsidies-for-families.html



HL/ HaitiLibre


















Minnesota State Baptist Convention Choir's brand new debut album We Are Better Together makes its debut on Billboard's Gospel Albums chart. The set lands at #6 selling 1,000 copies. It's the first Billboard chart appearance for the act, which represents 30 churches across Minnesota.

The Minnesota State Baptist Convention Choir, is a combined choir comprised of members from 30 churches that make up the Minnesota State Baptist Convention. The choir is under the leadership of Rev. Dr. Charvez Russell of Greater Friendship Missionary Baptist Church and produced by Rev. Steven Daniels of Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church. In an effort to promote unity in our community the project is appropriately titled "We Are Better Together." When asked about the concept of the project Dr. Russell stated, "We wanted to be true to our roots so our goal was to create a mix of traditional and contemporary Gospel songs that would be encouraging and uplifting as well as simple enough for choirs in churches. We want our message of Jesus to be heard so we decided on songs that would represent us as a ministry and promote the message of Jesus Christ."



The project is not short of talent as it is produced by Rev. Steven Daniels of Xcentric Records who also wrote some songs in addition to writers such as: Jovonta Patton, Darnell Davis, David Hurst, William Duncan, Rev. Ronald Terry (former National Baptist Choir Director), Jewel McLaurin, and Dr. Charvez Russell. Some of the guest soloists include President Billy G. Russell, Paris Bennett, Marie Graham, Pastor Bruce Carpenter, and many other talented artists and soloists.



The proceeds from this project will go towards expanding the ministry of the choir in addition to the Brianna Lark Scholarship Fund. Supporting this project will not only uplift your spirit, it will also go towards giving a scholarship to a graduating high school senior.

Tags : Minnesota State Baptist Convention Choir we are better together Minnesota State Baptist Convention Choir new album Minnesota State Baptist Convention Choir news
Published on 2016/09/04 | Source

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Six women forced into prostitution for the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II on Wednesday rejected a compensation package from Japan that stops short of admitting official guilt.

The women, who live in a care facility for victims, say the money comes in the form of donations to support organizations or agencies rather than legal compensation.

A dozen victims earlier filed a suit against the government over the landmark agreement it signed with Japan last year, promising 1 billion yen.

They filed the suit with the Seoul Central District Court, seeking W100 million in compensation each. The victims said the agreement violates a Constitutional Court ruling from August 2011 which said the Foreign Ministry's inaction in ensuring compensation for the victims is unconstitutional.

The government here has been walking on eggshells since there was no hope of extracting a full admission of guilt from the current rightwing government in Tokyo, and the halfway house seemed the best deal that could be achieved to resolve an impasse in relations.

Meanwhile, the Japanese government on Wednesday sent the money to Korea, a week after the Japanese cabinet approved the deal.

Korea agreed in late December to accept an ambiguously worded apology and the 1 billion yen to establish a foundation here to support the former sex slaves.

The foundation will in turn pay W100 million to each of the 46 surviving victims and W20 million to the heirs of each of the 199 who have died (US$1=W1,115).

Now only 40 remain alive, but the heirs of the six who have died of old age since the deal was struck will also receive the full amount.

Eighty percent of the 1 billion yen will be given in cash to the former sex slaves or their heirs, making the deal effectively a fig leaf for direct compensation. The remaining 20 percent will be used to fund various projects to help the survivors and cover overheads.

Read this article in Korean
By Panos Kotzathanasis | Published on 2016/09/03

"Musa" is one of the most expensive productions in the history of Korean cinema (it was the most expensive when it first screened, in 2001) and one of those films that turned the global audience towards the country. Based on historical facts, with an attention to detail that even resulted in each protagonist using his tribe's language, and featuring a great cast of Korean actors plus Zhang Ziyi, "Musa" is a truly impressive film.

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The story takes place in 1375 China, where Ming dynasty has just succeeded Yuan. The respective Korean one, Koryo, wishes to strengthen its relationship with the new rulers, and towards that purpose, sends an envoy to the Ming court. Unfortunately, the diplomats are obstructed in their mission to deliver their message and subsequently are accused as spies and exiled in a remote desert.

The script focuses on the adventures of this team, as they try to cross the desert and reach their country, amidst extremely harsh conditions and the continuous attacks by the Yuan. Four characters stand apart: Young general Choi-jung, ex-slave turned bodyguard Yeo-sol, low-ranking veteran Jin-lib, and Ming princess, Bu-yong, who is added to the company after she is rescued from the Yuan. A love triangle eventually is shaped among her, Choi-jung and Yeo-sol.

Kim Seong-su focuses chiefly on the action, putting aside the rest of the story's aspects and particularly the romantic relationships, which are not developed at all. On the other hand, the characters' analysis is thorough, considering the nature of the film.

The various battles are impressive as they are realistic, benefitting the most from Kim Hyun's editing and Kim Hyung-koo's cinematography, which also presents images of beauty in various surroundings, including desert, forests and rivers.

In the protagonist roles, Joo Jin-mo is mediocre as Choi-jung, Jung Woo-sung rarely talks and mostly fights as Yeo-sol, Ahn Sung-ki gives the best performance in the film as Jin-lib, and Zhang Ziyi acts relatively good as Princess Bu-yong, although her part mostly involves her looking fragile and beautiful, something she accomplishes with ease. In general, the actors chiefly service the action, as is the case, usually, in similar films.

"Musa" is a very entertaining film, despite its lack of depth, which stands apart from the plethora of action movies due to its attention to historical detail and realism.

Review by Panos Kotzathanasis

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"Musa" is directed by Kim Seong-su and features Ahn Sung-ki, Jung Woo-sung, Joo Jin-mo and Zhang Ziyi.

Available on DVD from YESASIA



DVD HK (En Sub)
By William Schwartz | Published on 2016/09/03

Joong-pil (played by Shin Ha-kyun), Soo-tak (played by Park Hee-soon), and Eun-dong (played by Oh Man-seok) are three close college friends who unexpectedly reunite quite later in life upon some unexpected news. Their life positions are in varying states of malaise. Eun-dong has a semi-famous job but he's kind of bored. Joong-pil has a decent job but he's fixated on a long finished romance. Soo-tak has no job at all and is contemplating suicide. The solution to all of these problems is, of course, a trip to Jeju Island.

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I really do admire the Jeju Film Commission. Most film commissions, you can only tell they were involved at all by reading the credits. But time and again the Jeju Film Commission always makes a point of throwing their support behind films and dramas that are so explicitly about Jeju they're practically advertisements. It does help that at this point South Korean culture writ large considers Jeju a magical getaway. Note how Soo-tak's suicidal impulses are briefly curbed by the prospect that on Jeju Island he might get laid.

That bit of dark comedy was my favorite part of "DETOUR". Yes it's crude and doesn't necessarily make Soo-tak a more sympathetic character but it's an all too accurate characterization of the male psyche that the best way for a man to feel less impotent is by having sex. Luckily, by the end Soo-tak is mostly satisfied simply by having had the chance to act like a real man. Even so, Park Hee-soon is a remarkably convincing pathetic desperate guy who steals most of his scenes.

Everyone else...eh, they're all right. Joong-pil has the main central character arc of having to get over the distant past and life live in the present. His love story, while not altogether exciting, does have its moments- like a visit to Love Land prompted by a suggestion from a person who obviously does not know anything about Love Land aside from the name. The light comedy is what permeates "DETOUR" rather than character arcs, and on these points the movie well acquits itself.

Eun-dong ends up being the main useful perspective character, even though he's the least well in-focus, because he's a reminder that even a "successful" person is not necessarily constantly happy all the time. It's also interesting to note that Eun-dong is clearly more a loving father than a loving husband. Against the backdrop of Joong-pil and Soo-tak trying to find validation in romance, Eun-dong is a reminder that there is more to life than just that.

"DETOUR" is generally pretty fun and self-aware. While the hand of the Jeju Film Commission is obvious, at the same time the movie takes some light-hearted jabs at Jeju Island stereotypes. Observe the ultimate outcome of the spontaneous street band scene, the problems which come up as a result of the protagonists staying at a guest house so far from the city, or the obvious familarity of Jeju Island's "traditional" laundry detergent. "DETOUR" is more funny than witty- and for me, at least, that's a nice change in tone from the usual.

Review by William Schwartz

"DETOUR" is directed by Chae Doo-byeong and features Shin Ha-kyun, Park Hee-soon and Oh Man-seok.
By William Schwartz | Published on 2016/09/03

Not to be confused with "Shadow Island", "The Island of Shadows" does offer a similar perspective about a seemingly random, obscure part of the South Korean landscape- it too, a portrait of the Yeongdo district in Busan. But where "Shadow Island" was a fictional depiction of the malaise of an urban wasteland, "The Island of Shadows" is a documentary that deals with hope in the midst of darkness- it's the story of the Hanjin shipyard worker's union.

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Initially "The Island of Shadows" is a simple portrait of solidarity. While the union's activities ultimately end up having a predictably political slant, what initially unites the various workers is just, well, just the fact that they like each other. They're not just a motley band of blue collar workers in it for a paycheck. They all came to Hanjin shipyard because of similar hopes and dreams for living a normal life.

The real irony, though, is that these hopes and dreams were obviously borne from South Korean propaganda about the country's love of freedom. Back during the eighties this was more an abstract hypothetical than an actual real-life working condition, so they end up having to fight, and fight, and fight. Mild real-life spoilers- the union never really "wins" against Hanjin. Even as time progresses away from the last South Korean dictatorship into dubious democracy and finally a political ruling power not affiliated with past dictatorships, the struggle remains borderline unwinnable.

The ultimate most insulting swipe is when Hanjin announces a new project in the Phillipines for the sole purpose of trying to curb domestic labor union impulses. The contrast to the newsreel propaganda of the earlier part of the film is rather striking. Whenever sacrifices were necessary "for the sake of the Korean people", Hanjin shipyard workers were expected to happily oblige any hardship. Yet evidently Hanjin itself only owes its loyalty to the almighty dollar.

What director Kim Jeong-Keun really emphasizes is that the Hanjin shipyard workers are, themselves, the Korean people. Contrasting the faces of the union with the faceless corporation begs a lot of questions about what exactly the Korean people were fighting to accomplish during all of those years of dictatorship. The documentary proves to be very informative, not just with the facts of this union's history, but also in underlining the emotional sentiment that allows organized labor to be a potent political force to this very day, as was demonstrated in parliamentary elections earlier this year.

It's very much worth noting- even for South Koreans, stories like what we see in "The Island of Shadows" are almost entirely obscured from public view. Even horrific events that by any rational logic should get major news coverage never do because...well, because the freedom loving country of South Korea, like most other freedom loving countries in the world, has ways of restricting information that do not fall under the traditional definition of censorship. That only makes "The Island of Shadows" all the more essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand the historical, political, and emotional context for South Korean labor unions.

Review by William Schwartz

"The Island of Shadows" is directed by Kim Jeong-Keun.
Korean Movie | 2001

 Action  War  Historical  Romance

Directed by Kim Seong-su ()

Written by Kim Seong-su ()

158min | Release date in South Korea: 2001/09/07

Also known as "The Warriors" and "Musa - The Warrior"

Synopsis

It is 1375 and China is in constant turmoil. Koryo, one of Koreas ancient kingdoms, sends a delegation of diplomats and soldiers as envoys to the new Chinese dynasty in power, Ming. However, the delegation is accused of spying and sent in exile to the desert. Duty and patriotism are reduced to mere burdens as they trudge on east over the vast Chinese continent with the single hope of returning to their beloved home and families. The vertical chain of command breaks down into a horizontal line of relationships and the warriors gradually come to understand each other as individuals. They are neither marital arts masters nor even knights, but they give their lives for the Han refugees they meet on the way, seeing the faces of their loved ones reflected in the refugees, and act out the true spirit of warriors.

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Festival bears the fruit of volunteers' labor

Apple Festival President Gwenn Lanning, on stage, thanks members of the Apple Festival Board of Directors during the opening ceremony.

Twenty years ago, Gwenn Lanning started working on an Apple Festival subcommittee in charge of recruiting volunteers.

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Working with a friend, she found she liked the work. She never left. Lanning takes the stage as the North Carolina Apple Festival president this year. In that capacity, on opening day, she will welcome the crowd. Although the festivals four days will lie ahead, most of the work is done before that day arrives.

Apple Festival board members may serve for years on a committee that does a defined and discrete function, as Lanning did with the sponsorship and then the hospitality committee. As she moved up, she began to see the bigger picture.

On the executive committee, you learn so much more about it, she says. When youre just on the board, you really dont know what goes on at the festival.

The festival has had 69 years to get it right, so theres lots that is unchanged from one year to the next. Even so, because the festival is volunteer-run the leadership ascension relies on a ladder.

You start as second vice president, then first vice president, then president, she said. Theres so many things that have to be organized.

Gwenn LanningBecause this is the festivals 70th year, Lanning and the rest of the board decided to have a new venue and some new features for the sponsor breakfast on Friday morning. They moved the event moved from the courthouse lawn to the community room in the Historic Courthouse. Organizers have added decorations, a historic display of Apple Festival T-shirts through the years and Flat Rock Playhouse actors in period costumes from 1947.

David Nicholson, the executive director of the Apple Festival, said the volunteers are more than just a nice-to-have addition.

Im a part-time executive director, he said. I served on many nonprofit boards in my career. Most of them come in at lunchtime, eat lunch, vote and go home. When you join our board you are assigned something to do. You can look on our website and youll see what theyre assigned to do.

I kind of watch over things to make sure things happen. The street fair is my responsibility clearly but everyone on the board works for the festival. It takes 35 people (on the board) to put on this festival. We take one month off a year. We take December off and we start right back in January.

Just the T-shirt and merchandise booth alone requires volunteers working three-hour shifts from festival opening to closing.

On the street well have 35 to 40 people anytime, he says. Its hundreds of people.

Among the new features this year is the Drive the Future of Tough display in the 600 block of North Main Street. Ford Motor Co. will show off the new 2017 Super Duty, a 6.7-liter V-8 powered pickup. Ford is offering test drives of the new pickup on Friday only.

People always say that the Apple Festival has the same arts and crafts booths every year. Not true, Nicholson says. A third of them rotate out every year.

The festival also added more bathrooms.

Last year because of the crowd, lines were longer than we would have preferred, he said. Weve almost doubled our capacity.

Although she is not from an apple growing family, Gwenn Lanning is a Jones from Edneyville. Many of her classmates at Edneyville High School were from apple families.

I grew up in the apple country, she says.

She gets a lot out of the work she does to make sure the festival runs smoothly.

I enjoy everyone I work with, she says. Were all really good friends. Its something thats very enjoyable.

Apple Festival is the biggest event we have and it brings in so many people, she adds. Figures of annual attendance generally range from 250,000 to 300,000 people. The festival closes downtown for a full four days, attracts throngs and snarls traffic on the downtown streets that remain open.

Sometimes the locals dont like that but it fills the restaurants, fills the hotels, Lanning says. Its a great boom for the community.
Beware of bicycles on county roads on Labor Day

More than 300 bicyclists will cover more than 100 miles of roadway in Henderson County for the fourth annual Four Seasons Rotary Club Tour d'Apple on Monday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

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Riders will choose routes covering 15 to 100 miles on roads from Hendersonville to Edneyville to Flat Rock, Kanuga Lakes, the Big Willow area and Laurel Park. Riders can still register for the event starting at 7 a.m.

Here's the schedule:

7:00 AM Registration and packet pickup for all routes

8:00 AM Official start of the Tour d'Apple

9:30-10:00 AM Registration for Kids Crabapple Mini-tour and Bicycle Safety Clinic

10:00 AM Breakfast for 25 milers begins

10:00 AM Kids Bicycle Safety Clinic, Balance Skills Drills 10:30 AM Kids Crabapple (3 mile tour of Blue Ridge Community College)

11:00 AM Post Ride Meal Begins

4:00 PM Post Ride Meal Ends

4:30 PM All Routes Close



Routes include:

 Honey Crisp Unbelievable 100-Mile Century with 8,000 feet of ascent and climbs of Sugarloaf Mountain, Bearwallow Mountain, Terrys Gap, Pinnacle Mountain and Jump Off Rock.

 Gala Challenge Metric 100 Kilometers (66 miles) with more than 4,000 feet of ascent over three mountain climbs: Sugarloaf Mountain, Bearwallow Mountain and Terrys Gap.

 Jonagold Lite with 45 miles of hills and apple orchards and 1,500 feet of ascent. (The revised Jonagold skips the steep Oleta Road and Lamb Mountain, Spicer Cove, Bald Rock lop. Riders can add a tough 10-mile climb by taking the Bearwallow Mountain-Terry's Gap loop.)

 Green Apple Enthusiast, a 25-mile ride with just 1,000 feet of climbs.

Cyclists can view the four routes at www.tourdapple.com and register at Active.com or at 7 a.m. at BRCC the day of the event.

Sponsored by Pardee Hospital and Ingles Markets, the ride supports projects of the Four Seasons Rotary Club.
Growers overcome frost, hail, labor shortage to bring in apples

Ask Jerred Nix, an apple farmer in the Bearwallow community, about this years apple crop and you will get a "depends greatly on the location of your orchard" kind of answer.

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It looks decent, he said of the outlook. Its a mixed bag again this year  hail, frost, freeze. Theres light (yield), theres heavy. Theres a little bit of everything.

And thats just on his farm. Its a hit-or-miss across the county, too, depending on whether a grower escaped freeze damage in April, hail damage later in the summer or bitter rot damage caused by the recent wet spell.

Ive heard different stories, Nix said. Everybody you ask has got a different story. Theyve got some of everything.

Hail damage demoted a lot of fresh fruit to juice or process grade, meaning a much lower price per pound.

It started out at 12 then 10 or 9 (cents a pound). Itll be 4 to 5 cents as more apples ripen and flood the market, he said.

But in the end, neither frost nor hail nor a shortage of labor could stay the noble apple from its appointed round: the place of honor the 70th North Carolina Apple Festival.

'Challenging weeks'

Agriculture Extension Director Marvin Owings said a series of weather-related issues has cut the crop.

I would say its similar to last year as far as the volume, he said. Weve got all the varieties we normally have. The crop is a little short of a full crop. We have plenty of good quality apples. But we have had some challenging weeks during the summer. We had dry weather until July and then we got into rain and it seems like weve had showers or thundershowers almost daily so thats been a challenge to try to spray and also harvest the fruit between showers.

Along with those weve had a number of hailstorms so that has affected some of the orchards especially the fresh fruit blocks that were really looking good. Its a difference between $19 a bushel to $3 or 4 a bushel for juice.

The wet weather promoted the spread of Glomerella, a disease than form rot on the apples and damage the leaves.

Two years ago we had it so bad it was mainly because of all the rain and last year it was so dry that we hardly even found it, Owings said. This year because of all the rain its come back with a vengeance, particular on Galas and on some of the Goldens and another variety that is very susceptible is Pink Lady.

A scientist at the Mountain Horticulture Research Station warned growers about the disease.

Ive been hard-pressed to find an apple grower in the region who hasnt seen at least a few spots of Glomerella in their blocks of Gala or Golden Delicious this year, Sara Villani, a plant pathologist at the Research Station, told growers in an advisory. While June was so incredibly dry that I did not think Id see disease in my fungicide trials at MHCREC this year, July and August have been relentless in regards to rainfall and humidity.

Villani documented a 30 percent increase in the leaf spot disease, which aside from affecting this seasons fruit can weaken the trees ability to generate carbohydrates for next years crop. She recommended increased spraying and re-spraying in orchards that had gotten heavy rain.



Labor supply short

Another challenge now that harvest is under way is labor.

Most growers need more labor, Owings said. Thats a big problem for growers as well as vegetables, any of these specialty crops that require labor. Apples, vegetables, small fruit  most all are short as far as labor.

Nix said hes heard the same thing.

Not too good, he said when asked about the availability of pickers. Everybody you talk to is short. Tomato guys, theyre short on labor, too.

Trey Enloe, the president of the Blue Ridge Apple Growers, said the freeze is causing a quick release of the fruit, putting more pressure on the harvest.

We had that freeze early on and the apples seem to be dropping really quick. As soon as theyre ripe weve got to go and get em.

It can be a race against time  and the market  to pick fruit, especially early, when North Carolina is ahead of growers in other apple regions.

We do what we can to keep the ball rolling, he said. It started out decent just like it does every year. We have about a 2-3 week window. We generally get a good price early on. Once everybody else starts picking we course correct and we get a little bit less.

Enloe farms about 100 acres at his Lewis Creek Farm with his dad and uncle.

We had a lot of rain while we were starting to pick, he said. Everything was sped up to be a little early anyway. Couple that with some hail damage and then the rain came through at the worst possible time.

I would say overall the volume is probably there but some of the market not going to be the same as it was last year, Enloe said. And I think thats kind true for the whole Eastern Seaboard. Were a little bit of down this year.

Farmers are short on labor and short on price but this time of year long on hustle and on hours getting fruit to market. Whether strolling up and down Main Street this weekend, shopping at an apple stand in Edneyville or visiting a pick -your-own orchard, people wont notice a shortage.

There will be plenty of fresh fruit around for people to get, Enloe said.



Apple tasting offered in 500 block of Main

The Cooperative Extension Service and Blue Ridge Apple Growers Association will be conducting the annual Apple Taste Test during the Apple Festival in the 500 block of Main Street in front of Kilwins ice cream shop. Festival attendees have the chance to sample a variety of apples and provide feedback. The Henderson County Beekeepers Association will have an educational booth and offer honey samples.




The country's oldest TV star, Bessie Nolan (104), is enjoying a well-deserved holiday after she captured the nation's heart on RTE's Older Than Ireland.

The tea-drinking, chain-smoking Dubliner became an overnight sensation after 367,200 viewers tuned in on Wednesday to watch the award-winning documentary.

The show looked back at 100 years of life through the eyes of 30 Irish centenarians who were born while the country was still part of the United Kingdom.

Viewers fell for stylish and no-nonsense Bessie, from Drimnagh, describing her as "a legend" and "a hero" as she joked about how "everybody should die at 70".

"She's a phenomenon, still going strong at 104," said Snackbox Films' co-founder Colm Nicell, who worked as the chief researcher for the show.

"She defied people's expectations and that's why I think the audience warmed to her.

"She's a very independent lady, doing all her own shopping and cooking, and is away all the time.

"She's been all over the world and has probably seen more of it than any of us will in our lifetimes.

"She's actually in Kildare at the moment on a week's holiday."

To add to her fame, Bessie holds the record for being the oldest woman ever to fly on an Aer Lingus plane, which she did in 2014 while travelling to France.

"She's some woman all right - her son is 84 and still he's her baby boy," said Colm.

The film-maker told the Herald that the studio had been delighted with the reception for their documentary, which won best feature at last year's Galway Film Fleadh.

"Hopefully, it dispelled a few assumptions people have about the older generation," he said.

"The film for us was more a celebration of old age rather than saying it's all doom and gloom.

Clock

"It would have really been easy for us to make a documentary that was a terrible tale about getting old, but that wasn't the point we wanted to make.

"There are plenty of people out there who are of Bessie's age and full of spirit."

Snackbox Films is now working on a new project called Under the Clock, which aims to tell the stories of those whose relationships began under one of Ireland's most iconic landmarks, the Clerys clock on O'Connell Street.

"We were inspired by the closure of the department store last year," said Colm.

"That building has such a history that it seems strange for it to be gone now.

"Thousands of people must have met under that unassuming clock, whether as friends, lovers or strangers, so there must be plenty of fantastic stories to tell.

"We're really keen to feature a large cross-section of people from every county and community in Ireland who used it as a place to meet."

Anyone interested in being involved in the new project can contact Colm at theclock@snackboxfilms.com
THAAD controversy rises in ROK amid president's slight change in position

2016-09-03 04:44

SEOUL -- Controversy resurfaced here over the deployment of a US missile shield, or Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), in the Republic of Korea (ROK) as ruling party lawmakers boycotted all parliamentary procedures in protest against the National Assembly speaker's remarks on THAAD.

Parliament Speaker Chung Sey-kyun said in his opening speech at the Assembly's first regular session on Thursday that it would be hard to agree with the government's attitude to the THAAD deployment from the perspective of dealing with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)'s nuclear program.

The former lawmaker of the main opposition Minjoo Party accused the government of failing to communicating with the public over the US missile defense system that resulted in split and confusion among people.

Chung urged the government to stop a "chicken game" between the two Koreas, calling for talks with the DPRK that can start with smallest possible issues.

Saenuri Party lawmakers walked out of the chamber, demanding the speaker's apology and resignation. The ruling party has boycotted all parliamentary procedures until Friday, including the passage of a supplementary budget plan for the second half, strongly advocated by President Park Geun-hye to reinvigorate the faltering economy.

Members of the ruling party occupied the speaker's office for a rally against Chung's comments. The governing party lost its majority in parliament in the April 13 elections amid mounting dissatisfactions with income equality and slowing economy.

Chung Jin-suk, the governing party's floor leader, reportedly claimed the speaker violated his duty of political neutrality, but Chung Sey-kyun said his remarks were made to reveal public opinion on a current issue without any political intention.

Park Jie-won, interim chairman and floor leader of the People's Party, said the speaker's remarks were "excellent" as it reflected public concerns about THAAD, depicting what the country's No. 2 said as the greatest opening speech in parliament.

Meanwhile, President Park Geun-hye on Friday made her first mention of a conditional deployment of the US missile shield on South Korean soil, before leaving for Russia to participate in the Eastern Economic Forum.

"The essence of the problem in this matter is the North's nuclear and missile threats. If these threats are eliminated, the need to deploy the THAAD system would naturally disappear," Park said in a written interview with Russia's Rossiya Segodnya posted on a Cheong Wa Dae website.

It marked the first time the ROK leader mentioned the conditional THAAD deployment, showing signs of a slight change in her hard-line position ahead of her trips to Russia and China that have strongly opposed the US missile defense system.

Park is set to visit Vladivostok for two days to attend the second Eastern Economic Forum and hold a bilateral summit with her Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. The forum was launched last year to speed up development of the Russian Far East.

She will travle to China to attend a Group of Twenty (G20) summit scheduled to be held in Hangzhou on Sunday and Monday.

Park, however, reiterated that the THAAD deployment is a measure of self-defense to protect from the DPRK's "ever-escalating" nuclear and missile threats.

She said there is no reason, nor practical benefit, for the THAAD system to target any third country, contrasting with repeated expressions of strong objections and worries from China and Russia.

Chinese and Russian objections to THAAD in the ROK came as the US missile shield's X-band radar can peer deep into Chinese and Russian territories, breaking strategic balance in the region and damaging security interests of the two countries.
More women, juveniles help drive need for more space at the jail
10 killed, 60 wounded in blast in Philippine president home city

2016-09-03 05:44

DAVAO CITY, Philippines -- At least 10 people have been confirmed dead and scores others wounded in an explosion in the hometown of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on Friday night, officials said on Saturday, amid fears the toll could further rise.

Aside from the fatalities, some 60 others were rushed to different hospitals following the blast in downtown Davao City, according to presidential spokesperson Ernesto Abella.

The blast of still unknown origin happened as thousands of people were shopping at the night market along Roxas Avenue just across the Catholic-run Ateneo de Davao University around 10:30 p.m. local time, said Captain Rhyan Batchar, regional army spokesperson.

"An explosion hit in front of the Ateneo de Davao university. There were many fatalities," Batchar told Xinhua by phone.

Duterte was in the presidential guesthouse in Panacan village, some 15 kilometers away when the explosion happened, his aides said.

The tough-talking Philippine leader, who had been mayor in the city with 1.2 million people for over 20 years before winning the presidency in May, was expected to go to the site of the incident, officials said.

Friday's incident was the latest in the southern Philippine city since 2005 when suspected Islamist terrorists set off a bomb in a bus terminal in Ecoland village, killing a child and wounding five others.

Police said they could not yet determine if the latest blast was caused by a bomb and an investigation was now underway.

In 2003, more than 30 people were killed and over 130 others wounded when alleged Muslim insurgents bombed the city's old airport and passenger harbor within a month.
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This week two religious preachers from Pakistan will finish their tour around several British cities and towns and then probably head back home. Normally, this would not be controversial. Except that just a few months ago, both men stood in front of a large rally in Rawalpindi to praise Mumtaz Qadri, the terrorist who had murdered politician Salman Taseer for defending Christians and Hindus in Pakistan. How were these two preachers of hate allowed to enter Britain? When I asked the British Home Office, they refused to give me an answer.

This isnt a one-off incident. A few months earlier another hate-preacher from Pakistan, Mohammad Hanif Qureshi, who had also praised Mumtaz Qadri, was allowed in too. When I raised the issue, a government source told me they think he entered under a false name. Even British Pakistanis were angry that these hate-preachers had no problems getting visas even as many ordinary people did.

Britain has been trying to combat extremist Islamic preachers and their followers for over ten years now and yet, as these incidents show, it still does not have a consistent approach. It was only a few weeks ago that Anjem Choudhary, a notorious trouble-maker who privately urged Brits to join terrorist groups, was finally locked up by the police. British Muslims had become so angry with his hate-mongering that he had been banned from every mosque in Britain, and yet he was still allowed by the police to preach hatred from the streets for over ten years.

Read | Radical UK Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary guilty of inviting support for IS

But the problems that Britain faces from extremists is nowhere as bad as for other European countries. In just two years the rise of ISIS and other jihadi groups in Syria and Iraq has become a huge headache  an even bigger one than al-Qaeda posed when Osama bin Laden was alive.

Its estimated that since June 2014 over 27,000 Muslims from around the world have gone to Syria and Iraq to fight. An astonishing 5,000 of those fighters are from Europe. But even more surprisingly: there are four times as many Muslims in India compared to all of Europe, and yet less than 30 of them have gone to Syria to fight. That is an estimate from Indian spy agencies themselves.

Does this mean the worlds largest democracy has lessons to offer to Europe, or can it learn from problems there? The answer is somewhere in the middle: Daesh has focused more on recruiting from and attacking Europe, it is cheaper and easier for Europeans to get to Syria, and there are more alienated and angry European Muslims who hate their country than in India. All these factors put India at an advantage, for now, but it could soon change.

Since January 2015 France has faced seven different terrorist attacks, killing hundreds and injuring more - all inspired by groups in the Middle East. Recently there have also been attacks in Belgium and Germany, plus big arrests in Britain and Spain. Over 1,000 people were arrested for terrorism-related offences across Europe just last year. You can see why Europe is starting to panic.

I think there are three lessons that India can learn from Europes mistakes and experiences.

The first: Muslim citizens are the best allies security services have in their fight against extremists. They have helped foil countless terror attacks in the US and UK, either by reporting suspicious behaviour or helping with operations. Belgium and France in contrast have been much less effective because police and spy services are overwhelmingly white and have little contact with those communities. There is little trust on either side.

Read | French suburbs: Tinderboxes of terrorism?

Second, extremists recruit by convincing the weak they have to pick sides in a coming clash of civilisations. They tell people that co-existence between different people isnt possible. But we know this isnt true because jihadi groups kill other Muslims far more than non-Muslims. So it doesnt help if a government helps the terrorist narrative by discriminating against Muslims, pass laws targeting them (like in France), and denying them a bigger stake in society. They are fellow citizens, not an alien force. By giving asylum to nearly a million refugees over the past year, Germany has done more to counter the Daesh narrative than any of its neighbours.

Third, governments must take all types of extremism seriously if they pose a threat. Britain largely ignored the threat of white far-right extremism until a man opposed to immigration murdered an MP in June this. Many Indian Muslims rightly complain that while the focus is on them, the threat from extremist Hindu groups is ignored.

Britain may not have the perfect record in battling extremism but its salad bowl approach  which allows immigrants to maintain their culture and religions as they integrate into society  has been more successful than places like France which demand assimilation. The fight against religious extremism isnt one between religions, but one between the fanatics and everyone else. India should learn from the mistakes that Europe is making to avoid doing the same.

Read | Islamic State can find no ground in India

Sunny Hundal is a writer and lecturer on digital journalism based in London. The views expressed are personal.

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It is rare that a serving armed forces chief says something which could be seen as critical of the civilian government in India. Indian Air Force chief Arup Raha seems to have bucked the trend by saying that PoK could have been taken militarily had India not adopted the high moral ground and gone to the United Nations. The problem was not solved, he says, but continues to be thorn in our flesh. This seems to be the view held by some that India did not use its armed might to settle the Kashmir problem at a time when Pakistan did not have nuclear weapons.

Read | PoK would have been ours had we opted for military solution: Arup Raha

These remarks will cause some disquiet in government circles because the army is not meant to speak out on the efficacy or otherwise of decisions taken by elected governments. In fact, this has been often showcased as the difference between India and Pakistan where it is the army which calls the shots. There have been moments of concern with armed forces officials refusing to fall in line with civilian orders. One was when the government had to dismiss Navy chief Vishnu Bhagwat when he stood in the way of the cabinet appointing his deputy as his successor. Fears of a coup have preyed on the minds of the government of the day. Indira Gandhi is said to have famously asked her army chief Sam Manekshaw whether he intended to topple her in a coup. The inimitable Manekshaw apparently replied, Madam Prime Minister, dont you think I would not prove to be a worthy replacement, assuring Indira Gandhi that he had no such intentions.

Read | Posters asking Pakistan Army chief Sharif for military coup raise eyebrows

At a time when Pakistan is seeking any excuse to suggest malafide intentions on Indias part, especially vis-a-vis Balochistan, it was not a wise move on the part of the IAF chief to open this can of worms. This also raises once again the issue of better integration between the defence ministry and the services which it presides over as a means of defusing any tensions that may arise. His reference to the utilisation of air power and the blending of the three forces to create Bangladesh is both unnecessary and counterproductive in this charged atmosphere. India has long tried to maintain that it is not a proactively aggressive force in the region. Mr Rahas words seem to suggest that the armed forces are resentful of the curbs placed on them by the civilian government. His words should not encourage similar sentiments from other sections of the armed forces. The sooner he is told that he was out of line, the earlier the damage can be contained.

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Actor Richa Chadhas debut production Khoon Aali Chithi was screened at the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne recently. The actor who was in Melbourne, Australia for the event also gave a master class on Women in Bollywood at the festival.

A source close to the actor says, Like every other girl, Richa loves shopping. Australia is a great place to shop and on one of the days, she took off to indulge herself. While she was shopping in one of the stores, a girl who was the manager of the store approached Richa for help. She looked scared and on enquiring further, she told Richa that a guy in the store had been stalking her and harassing her. On hearing this, Richa not only decided to help her but also waited with her till it was time for the store to close for the day. After that, she took her out for a quick bite and assured her that everything would be fine and she should lodge a complaint.

Read: Actor Richa Chadha is a happy producer

About the incident, Richa says, I was shocked to find an upset girl at the counter when I was shopping at Chapel Street. Since it was winter and it was getting deserted, I decided to stick around till the girl was done with work and then took her out for a sweet treat. She lodged a complaint the following day I think. Its shocking how this happens everywhere in the world.

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Can one be proud to be an Indian and ashamed to be an Indian?

One cannot be one without the other.

This reflection has been occasioned by two recent court judgments.

The first of these is the extraordinary judgment of Madras high courts chief Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Justice Pushpa Sathyanarayana in the writ petitions pertaining to the right of free thought and expression. Occasioned by the psychological tormenting of the Tamil novelist Perumal Murugan for his story One Part Woman, the order says Surprisingly, on the issue of a liberal ethos on the relationship of man and woman, sex and religious mores, the ancient scriptures seemed to be more liberal than at times what appears to be the current norm. And affirming the right to free speech, it says: The authorshould be able to write and advance the canvas of his writings. In a final sentence that has an all-time and everywhere resonance to it, Justice Kaul and Justice Sathyanarayana observe: Let the author be resurrected to what he is best at: Write.

Read | High Court orders immediate action against brutal Jalandhar cop

The judgment recalls the words of Milton in Areopagitica: Lords and Commons of England, consider what Nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a Nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, suttle and sinewy to discours, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

The second is the judgment of the Supreme Court of India in which Justice Madan Lokur and Justice Uday Lalit have ruled that the armed forces cannot escape investigation for excesses in the discharge of their duties even in disturbed areas. Hearing a PIL demanding an inquiry into 1,528 deaths in counter-insurgency operations and related incidents in Manipur, the court said the provisions of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act have to yield to the larger principles of human rights. Responding to the arguments of the government, the judges said: The submission of the learned attorney general is nothing but a play on words and we reject it and hold that an internal disturbance is not equivalent to or akin to a war-like situation and proceed on the basis that there is no war or war-like situation in Manipur but only an internal disturbance, within the meaning of that expression in the Constitution  nothing more and nothing less. The 85-page order makes it clear that action against terrorists cannot be indistinguishable with disappearances and extra-judicial killings.

Read | Inquiry initiated against police post in-charge, staff for custodial torture

It is a matter of pride that our courts can call the shameful to account. It is a shame that so much that is shameful thrives in India.

Our criminal investigative system has some truly remarkable achievements to its credit. The rule of law owes a great deal to our police. Bravehearts among their ranks keep us from personal and collective harm. The martyrdom of Hemant Karkare in Mumbai on November 26, 2008, places him in the worlds annals of duty performed in the face of death. The recent killing of two police officers in Mathura at the hands of a violent cult whose unauthorised headquarters they were sent to break up, is another example of policemen courting death for the security of the State and society. The loss suffered by their bereaved families is no different from that of soldiers killed in war. These instances can and should make us proud of them, honour them.

Read | Disclose plan to prevent custodial deaths: Bombay HC to govt

But India does not permit pride to stay where it is.

We have had earlier this year a masterpiece of a research document placed in our hands by the Centre on the death penalty set up by the National Law University (NLU), Delhi. The product of direct interviews with persons on death row in different states, Death Penalty India Report 2016 gives hard evidence to tell us that India is home to some of the grossest of criminal investigative malpractices. The report tells us: Of the 270 (Death Row) prisoners who spoke about their experience in police custody, 216 (80%) admitted to have suffered custodial violence. The report is about convicts on death row but there is no reason to doubt that what is true of them is also true, more or less, of other prisoners as well, many if not most of who will be found later to have been innocent. Custodial torture degrades not just the system within which it operates but all of us. From needles inserted into fingernails, heads crashed against walls/glass, water-boarding, being forced to sit on a slab of ice, have electric current passed through the wet body, we have them all in India, the India that is asking the world to visit India, Incredible India! with its upside down exclamation mark, to Make In India, Trust India, Adore India.

That it is possible in India to investigate shaming truths, as the NLU has done, reassures us. That torture, custodial torture, is rampant in India, shames us.

The government should tell us why India, which signed the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (commonly known as the United Nations Convention against Torture) in October 1997, has yet not ratified it. Why has the Prevention of Torture Bill, which will pave the way for ratification, not yet been passed? Is India afraid that the world will castigate it, call it hypocritical? Or is one part of the State unwilling to shake off this secret weapon in its investigative armoury?

Read | Visaaranai review: Vetrimaaran shows realism at its harshest best

We, as a people, are not asking these questions. But do we really care about custodial torture? Do we look upon it as a national shame? In truth, we do not. And there lies the bigger shame.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi is distinguished professor of history and politics, Ashoka University . The views expressed by the author are personal.

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NEW DELHI: The Aam Aadmi Party suspended legislator Sandeep Kumar from the outfit on Saturday, three days after chief minister dropped him from his cabinet over an objectionable video.

The action was taken after the political affairs committees decision to suspend Kumar pending inquiry.

The party is taking action. Whatever Sandeep Kumar has done is wrong. He has been suspended from the primary membership. The matter has been sent to the disciplinary committee and whatever recommendations will come from it, the party will follow it. But, the PAC has suspended him from primary membership after discussing the issue this (Saturday) morning, said deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia said.

Sources said the decision to sack Kumar was taken before Kejriwal left for the Vatican City on Friday to attend the canonisation of Mother Teresa.

Meanwhile, the senior leadership distanced itself from party spokesperson Ashutoshs views in defence of Kumar that the video showed two adults with their consent indulging in sex and even public figures are entitled to private space.

A day after Sandeep was sacked Ashutosh wrote a blog titled The Sex Was Consensual, Private Act. Why AAP Punished Its Man.

The deputy CM described the post as his (Ashutoshs) personal views. In AAP, any charges on character, corruption and crime wont be tolerated. If there are such charges against me, same action will be taken as has been taken against Kumar, he added.

In a related incident, Delhi water minister Kapil Mishra in a blog post without naming Ashutosh said on Saturday, While it was easy to connect anything directly with certain incidents of Gandhis life, but it was not correct.

AAP leader Ashutosh had written in his blog, Indian history is full of examples of our leaders and heroes who had lived with their desires beyond social boundaries .

The video clearly establishes that both individuals (minister and the woman) knew each other and consented to sex in a private space away from the public glare. The question then is that if two consenting adults are physically involved with each other, is it a crime, Ashutosh has asked in his blog defending Kumar.
NEW DELHI: A group of Dalits and the womens wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party held protests against former Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) minister Sandeep Kumar and demanded his resignation as MLA.

Kumar is among the AAPs Dalit leaders.

The Dalit protest was held outside Kumars house and the BJP protest was held at Rajghat. The BJP womens wing also protested against AAP leader Ashutosh for his comments on Mahatma Gandhi in a blog post.

We prayed to Mahatma Gandhi to bestow good sense to chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and his party. The entire country is shocked due to the attempt of character assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by AAP leader Ashutosh. The incidents in Aam Aadmi Party today have demoralised the women workers in the political and social field, said the womens wing president, Kamaljeet Sehrawat.

Delhi BJP chief Satish Upadhyay also criticised the AAP. The entire country knows that Arvind Kejriwal and his colleagues do not believe in any principles, they believe in using and throwing persons. But we did not know that he will degrade so much that he will insult Mahatma Gandhi also for political gain by whose name he used to swear, he said.

The Delhi Congress also threatened to hold a silent protest at Rajghat on Monday against AAP leaders for their comments against Mahatma Gandhi, Jawahar Lal Nehru and Atal Behari Vajpayee. The party also threatened to protest outside the Delhi Assembly on September 9 during the one-day assembly session against the governments failure.

We along with all senior leaders of Delhi Congress will hold a maun vrath to pray that good sense prevails on Kejriwal and Ashutosh, said Delhi Congress president, Ajay Maken.
NEW DELHI: India is 35 tanker-trucks short of the blood it requires for medical procedures, yet some areas of the nation wasted blood because there was too much of it, according to an analysis of government data.

The shortage was estimated at 1.1 million units  as blood is measured, with a unit being either 350 ml or 450 ml  in 2015-16, minister JP Nadda said in July 2016. The data was converted into tankers, assuming a standard tanker-truck of 11,000 lt and a 350 ml unit. India has 2,708 blood banks, but 81 districts still lack one. Rural areas find blood supplies harder to access. Shortages may be due to the fact that there is no central collection agency. Some areas may collect too much blood at the same time, instead of doing it at a constant run.

This leads to two issues, said Zarin Bharucha of the Federation of Bombay Blood Banks. ...that area is likely to experience a shortage of donations in the future... If everyone donates at the same time, they wont show up for a while. Second, you might have so much blood that you wont need it. So, a part of it will be wasted.
GURGAON: Jailed gangster Ashok Rathi was on Saturday sent to four-day police remand in connection with the murder of his estranged wife, Sushma Rathi.

Sushma, 32, was shot dead by two Santro car-borne assailants in Alipur village on Gurgaon-Sohna road on Friday morning. Her sister, Neetu, named Ashok and his brother Nishu as prime suspects for the murder in her police complaint on Friday.

Ashok Rathi, who has been booked in 28 cases, including murders, is serving life imprisonment at Bhondsi jail. Police investigating the murder sought a warrant from the court to interrogate him with regard to Sushmas murder.

We have taken him in remand and will interrogate him in connection with the murder of his wife, said Sukhbir Singh, assistant commissioner of police (ACP), Sohna.

Police sources, however, revealed that Rathi has confessed to having Sushma killed.

Sushma, had separated from Rathi, 37, over a property dispute. The discord between the two started after the couple married in 2004 and Ashok tried to grab Sushmas ancestral land, police said.

Police have also managed to trace the details of the Hyundai Santro car that was apparently used by the shooters to kill Rathis wife. The car (HR51 AA 8725), police said, was stolen from Sector 7 of Faridabad on August 22. A case of car theft was lodged in Faridabad by its owner Tejpal, a resident of Sector 3, Faridabad.

We are trying to trace the people who stole the car. This will help us trace the shooters, said a police spokesperson. Sources said teams of police are looking for suspected shooters in Uttar Pradesh, where Rathi had many contacts.

After dating for a year, Sushma and Ashok Rathi had married in 2004, against the wishes of her mother, Anguri Devi, and brother, Dharmender Kumar. The discord started when Rathi began eyeing his in-laws property and Sushma objected to it. Her father had left two houses and agricultural lands for the family.

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MUMBAI: Indias financial crime investigating agency on Saturday took possession of assets worth more than Rs6,500 crore of liquor baron Vijay Mallya, the second such action against the businessman once known as a king of good times.

The assets attached by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) include a farmhouse near Mumbai, residential properties in Bangalore, shares and fixed deposits, an ED official said. The ED is probing a laundering case against Mallya, 60, who left India in March owing more than Rs9,000 crores to a group of banks. The ED has charged the Rajya Sabha member of diverting parts of loans he had taken for the now-defunct Kingfisher Airlines to acquire properties abroad.

The ED has described the assets as proceeds of crime. Our next step will be working towards filing a prosecution case against Mallya and get a trial against him in the special court. We are seeking evidence against him, asking foreign jurisdictions including UK and other places not everything is in our hands, an official said.
NEW DELHI: A 32-year-old man was allegedly stabbed to death and three others sustained severe wounds after a group of men clashed over the parking of a vehicle in central Delhis Paharganj area, barely 50 meters away from the police station, around 10pm on Saturday.

The police said the brawl started after the three men had an argument over who will park their motorcycle outside a juice shop in the area.

The police said Bablu, 27, a rickshaw puller and Rahul, 19, a delivery boy, had gone to Bharat juice shop outside the police station to have fresh juice. Meanwhile, three men came on a motorbike and parked their two-wheeler outside the shop, also a stand for rickshaw pullers. When one of the rickshaw pullers, Sunil, asked them to remove the vehicle, the men started abusing him.

This led to an argument and a scuffle ensued between the groups. Bablu and Rahul reportedly intervened but were thrashed by the three men. Bablu and Rahul retaliated. The men allegedly threatened to return and teach them both a lesson.

The matter was resolved by the locals. But a few minutes later, the three men arrived with their associates, armed with knives and sticks to attack Bablu and Rahul. When Bablu tried to resist, the men attacked him with a beer bottle.

They smashed the bottle on his head and then stabbed him with the broken glass. Bablu collapsed on the spot. When Rahul tried to intervene, even he was stabbed. The juice shop owner, Vinod along with a bus driver, Chikna, who tried to stop the men also sustained severe injuries, a senior police officer said.

The men then fled towards Delhi Gate. Locals rushed Bablu to the JPN hospital and he died during treatment. The other three have been admitted and are recuperating.

Police said that worked as a rickshaw puller, while Rahul was a delivery boy with a courier company.

We have accessed the CCTV footage from the area and are examining it to identify the men. We have also sought help from the local intelligence to trace the men. A case of murder and attempt to murder has been registered at Paharganj police station and the investigation has begun, a senior police officer said.

The police have set up two teams to track down the men. Raids are being carried out in different areas. Sources said the police had zeroed down on two persons and detained them for questioning.

The teams are also getting the sketches of the three persons made. We have recorded detailed statements of the eyewitnesses who were present at the spot during the scuffle. We have also got the registration number of the bike from a local that will help us trace the owner. We have given the details to the transport authority, an investigator said.
NEW DELHI: The pan-India strike of the nursing union was called off late on Saturday night after the government assured the agitating nurses that FIRs lodged against them will be withdrawn and there would be no pay deduction for the two days they were on strike.

The government also assured the nurses that opinion of the major nursing unions would be considered during the September 12 meeting on the Seventh Pay Commission.

Nurses at 33 Delhi government hospitals and several dispensaries had earlier refused to join back work on Saturday, despite the government having invoked the Essential Services Maintenance Act (ESMA).

Thousands of nurses from Delhis CGHS dispensaries and hospitals run by the MCD, Delhi government and the Central government had joined the strike under All India Government Nurses Federation (AIGNF) on Friday to demand non-practicing allowance and changes in grade pay.

We will not go back to work till the government accepts our demands. If they want to send us to jail, we will happily oblige. This will be our Jail Bharo Abhiyan, Sister GK Khurrana, secretary general of AIGNF, had said earlier in the day.

Under ESMA, striking nurses can be arrested without a warrant. If convicted, they can be imprisoned for up to six months. The prison term is double for those instigating others to participate in the strike.

The Delhi government, too, had upped the ante against the agitating nurses. The names of absent nursing staff are being taken and FIRs would be lodged against them if they fail to report for duty. Action will also be taken against them under ESMA, which involves arrest and detention with the likely consequences of termination of services, said a government release.

The government has also advertised for posts of contractual nursing staff and the medical superintendants of the Delhi government hospital have been asked to hold walk-in interviews. Medical superintendents of all Delhi government hospitals will hold walk-in interviews for engaging nurses on daily wages with effect from Monday, September 5, the release read.

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NEW DELHI: Seventeen candidates will be in fray this time for the Delhi University Students Union (DUSU) polls, with seven candidates standing for the presidents post and four contesting for the vice-presidents post.

There are three candidates for the post of secretary and three for joint secretary, officials said.

With just one week left for the Delhi University Students Union polls, all student parties on Saturday announced the final list of candidates for the four central panel posts.

RSS-affiliated Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), which has been winning the DUSU elections for the last three years, will focus on the nationalism debate along with raising issues concerning students like hostel scarcity.

Congress-backed National Students Union of Indias (NSUI) campaign will focus on women issues and problems of students from northeast states. NSUI is bringing a separate manifesto each for women students and for northeastern students.

Left-leaning All India Students Association said it will focus on lack of hostels and problems faced by students staying at private accommodations. AISA will be demanding for implementation of Right to Accommodation and construction of more hostels.

While NSUI and Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad have named one woman candidate each for the central panel, All India Students Association has named three woman candidates.

The Delhi University Students Union poll will be held on September 9. Students who study in morning colleges will vote between 8.30am and 12.30pm while those in evening colleges will vote between 3.00pm and 7pm.

Last year, the Delhi University Students Union polls were swept by the RSS-affiliated Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad with Congress- backed National Students Union of India and AAPs Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Samiti (CYSS) failing to win even a single seat out of the four seats.
NEW DELHI: The US and China, the worlds two biggest carbon emitters, on Saturday announced ratification of the Paris climate accord aimed at zero emissions by the turn of the century. India, however, is unlikely to join the bandwagon soon.

The countrys absence though will not make any difference to the deal that comes into force this winter. As per the United Nations climate convention, at least 55 countries contributing minimum 55% of the emissions should ratify the deal to make it effective.

Today is a landmark day in fighting climate change, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said after US President Barack Obama and Chinese premier Xi Jinping presented papers to him in Hangzhou, China, ratifying the deal. But officials in New Delhi said they were not in a hurry to ratify the deal and would wait for the response of the top leaders towards its bid to be a member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) at the G-20 summit.

PM Narendra Modi is expected to raise the issue of NSG membership in Hangzhou as India had previously said becoming an NSG member was key to achieving its green targets under the Paris deal.

India has committed that it will reduce the emission intensity of its economy by 33-35% by 2030 and for that, it will have to ramp up its nuclear energy generation to 63 gegawatt by 2032. We need committed supply of nuclear fuel to run our power stations for which NSG membership is important as it creates a climate of predictability, a senior government functionary said.

Sources said the Paris treaty was discussed when US Secretary for State John Kerry was in Delhi this week, but consensus eluded the talks.

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NEW DELHI: The police have arrested a senior employee of Delhis Rakab Ganj Gurdwara, who is said to be close to an of fice- bearer of the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee, for allegedly raping a 40-year-old woman on the pretext of providing her a job in the media.

Shiromani Akali Dal (Delhi) president and former DSGMC chief Paramjit Singh Sarna on Saturday termed the alleged rape an example of the revival of mahant control over Sikh religious institutions. He has demanded action against the accused, Bhupinder Singh, and his boss - - DSGMC adviser Kulmohan Singh --as well as DSGMCs president Manjit Singh GK.

Bhupinder Singh was arrested by the Delhi Police on August 29.

He was presented before a magistrate here on August 30 and remanded in judicial custody till September 13.

The complainant has demanded strict action against Singh, said a close associate of the woman.

The complainant said Singh was an employee at the Rakab Ganj Sahib Gurdwara and had taken Rs 2-3 lakh from the complainant on the pretext of providing her a job.

The woman told the police that she knew Singh for the past two years. Singh did not return the amount or provide her a job, she alleged.

On August 28, Singh called the woman to an of fice in Bharat Nagar, Paharganj, and raped her, the woman said in her complaint.
NEW DELHI: The woman seen with sacked AAP minister Sandeep Kumar in a purported sex tape has appealed to the police to punish the man on strict terms for allegedly tarnishing her image and ruining her life.

In her video statement, the woman told the police that 11 months ago, she met Kumar in the market and mentioned that she wanted help getting a ration card made.

Kumar allegedly promised to help her and called her to his office alone with the documents.

Then he called her to his residence. When she went there, she was asked to wait in a room and was served a drink with sedatives. After that she could not remember anything. She told us that he did things to her said an investigator.

Kumar then raped her and asked her to leave the following morning, she said.

The woman said she had no clue that Kumar was recording a video of her. She was dizzy and did not know what she was doing. She said she was framed and that he took advantage of her, the official added.

That morning she reportedly told Kumar he did not do the right thing and that the episode would break her marriage.

He told her that she will have to give in if she needed a ration card. She said that Kumar also told her to keep quiet to save her marriage, the police said. Kumar, she claimed, promised jobs for her children when they grew up.

She said Kumar did not even help her get a ration card after the incident and that she changed her house.

She demanded that Kumar be punished. I am a poor woman. I am someones wife and a mother of two children. I do not have the resources to fight the case. Since he has tarnished my image by leaking that video in the public domain, the society will not accept me.., she said in her statement.

She also said she did not go back to him because she was afraid he would take advantage of her again.

Kumar was sacked on Wednesday after two videos, each showing him in a compromising position with different women, surfaced. The former minister has maintained that the videos were doctored.

Police summoned Kumar to the Sultanpur Majra police station. The crime branch and local police jointly questioned him. They recorded a detailed statement.

He was apprehended by the police at the Sultanpur Majra station. After around of questioning, he was placed under arrest late on Saturday night under sections of Prevention of Corruption Act, IT Act, charges of rape and poisoning.

Meanwhile, Om Prakash, a political worker from Sultanpur Majra, who had handed over the CD to news channels and the Delhi government, was also questioned by Delhi Police.

He reportedly told the police that the CD was given to him by a stranger and that he did not know anything about its source.

He will be questioned again, said police.
The woman seen with sacked AAP minister Sandeep Kumar in a purported sex tape has appealed to the police to punish the leader for allegedly tarnishing her image and ruining her life.

In her video statement, the woman told the police that 11 months ago, she met Kumar in the market and mentioned that she wanted help getting a ration card made.

Kumar allegedly promised to help her and called her to his office alone with the documents.

Then he called her to his residence. When she went there, she was asked to wait in a room and was served a drink with sedatives. After that she could not remember anything, said an investigator.

Kumar then raped her and asked her to leave the following morning, she said.

The Dalit face in Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwals Aam Aadmi Party was arrested on Saturday night for the alleged rape.

The woman said she had no clue that Kumar was recording a video of her. She was dizzy and did not know what she was doing. She said she was framed and that he took advantage of her, the official added.

That morning she reportedly told Kumar he did not do the right thing and that the episode would break her marriage.

He told her that she will have to give in if she needed a ration card. She said that Kumar also told her to keep quiet to save her marriage, the police said. Kumar, she claimed, promised jobs for her children when they grew up.

She said Kumar did not even help her get a ration card after the incident and that she changed her house.

She demanded that Kumar be punished. I am a poor woman. I am someones wife and a mother of two children. I do not have the resources to fight the case. Since he has tarnished my image by leaking that video in the public domain, the society will not accept me.., she said in her statement.

She also said she did not go back to him because she was afraid he would take advantage of her again.

Kumar was sacked on Wednesday after two videos, each showing him in a compromising position with different women, surfaced. The former minister has maintained that the videos were doctored.

Police summoned Kumar to the Sultanpur Majra police station. The crime branch and local police jointly questioned him. They recorded a detailed statement. However, no arrest was made till the filing of this report.

Meanwhile, Om Prakash, a political worker from Sultanpur Majra, who had handed over the CD to news channels and the Delhi government, was also questioned by Delhi Police. He reportedly told the police that the CD was given to him by a stranger and that he did not know anything about its source. He will be questioned again, said police.

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Former Delhi minister Sandeep Kumar has been sacked from his ministerial post, deserted by his party members and arrested on rape charges after sex tape featuring him being intimate with two women surfaced last week. His wife, though, has stuck through it all and has thrown her weight behind him.

I am with my husband. The truth will come out in the court. The allegations are false. We will support him, Ritu Kumar, who had come to the Sultanpuri police station to meet her jailed husband, told reporters on Sunday.

Without naming anyone, she said the CD scandal was a conspiracy against Kumar.

No matter what happens, I know my husband is innocent. I will continue to support him till the end, she said refusing to comment on the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)s decision to sack him.

Read | Sacked minister Sandeep Kumar arrested for rape, suspended from AAP

Last week, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal fired Kumar after a nine-minute video featuring the former women and child development minister leaked to news channels.

On Saturday, one of the women seen in the video approached police and alleged that the video was of Kumar raping her 11 months ago. She claimed that she had gone to meet the former minister for his help in acquiring a ration card. During that meeting, he allegedly spiked her drink and forced himself on her. She claimed she was unaware of the act being filmed. That was the only time she met Kumar, she stated.

Based on her complaint, Kumar was arrested that night. He was booked under sections of the Prevention of Corruption Act, IT Act rape and poisoning.

Read | He has tarnished my image: Woman who appeared in Sandeep Kumar sex tape

On Sunday evening, he was produced before a duty magistrate at the Rohini court, and police sought custody of him for 14 days. They were, however, given just a days custody.

An investigating officer said it appeared that MLA Kumar shot the video and shared it with one of his friends, Praveen, who may have leaked it. The officer also stated that Kumar gave misleading statements about the women on the tape.

We have got a days police custody. This morning, we could not quiz him and he had to be taken for medical examination. He did not say anything about the tape being stolen from his laptop or cell phone. His statement will be recorded tonight, said an investigating officer on Sunday.

A police team visited the MLAs house in Sultanpuri F-Block and spent 15-20 minutes there. Sources said the tape was recorded in one of the rooms. Police could not open a locked room as Kumars wife was at the local police station.

We are trying to find Praveen. A case under the IT Act could be registered against him too, an officer said.

Read more | No sex, please: Sandeep Kumar pays the price of prudish politics
Development is our only issue and it will remain so. These words from Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a recent interview to a news channel suggest that he is clearly trying to put the focus back onto the main issue for which he got such a huge mandate  development. While these sentiments are welcome, the PM now has to act to curb trends of social discrimination and fundamentalism that have become are prevalent in many parts of the country. The PM may be right in saying that there is statistical evidence that communal violence and atrocities on tribals have gone down as opposed to during the terms of previous governments but he cannot escape the fact that the public perception is that there is some sort of political sanction for these now. This was the result of the PMs long silence when cow vigilantes and other criminals were attacking Dalits and other minorities under guise of protecting Hindu sentiment.

The call to stop giving political overtones to social problems is a valid one but the BJP has also indulged in this. When he came to power, Modi proudly proclaimed his credentials as the ultimate outsider. Perhaps, in a way this insulated him from the Byzantine intrigue and machinations associated with politics in the Capital. His references to Deve Gowda being viewed by the privilegentsia in Delhi as a man who only slept, Morarji Desai as a man known for his partiality to a particular drink and Sardar Patel as an uninformed villager may be valid, but if he is serious about letting his work speak for him, he should not dwell too much on the views of the Lutyens zone elite on governance and who is best suited for it. There are many schemes which were begun with much fanfare that need to be seen through like Swachh Bharat Abhiyan and the Namami Gange plan. Finding a solution to the Kashmir issue should be of prime concern. The initiative of sending the all-party delegation is affirmation that the way out is political. This is one issue on which the BJP and Modi cannot afford to take their eye off the ball.

The other thing that the PM must do a little more than halfway through his term is to rein in those within his party and government whose loose remarks have caused much embarrassment and damage to India both nationally and internationally. The lack of tolerance of dissent and bureaucratic red tape, commented on by US secretary of state John Kerry on his recent visit are perhaps an indication of how the outside world views India. Modi has the mandate and time to engage in some much needed course correction. He has signalled in the interview that this is what he means to do. He should not let short-term political compulsions derail these efforts.
Regressive, backward, patriarchal, shameful  even these four strong words are woefully ineffective if one has to explain the defence by that archaic organisation  The All India Muslim Personal Law Boards  of the validity of triple talaq before the Supreme Court last week.

In a disgraceful attempt to support the practice (triple talaq), the Board told the court that if it is discontinued, a man could murder or burn his wife alive to get rid of her. It added that divorce instead of triple talaq could damage a womans chances of re-marriage if the husband indicts her of loose character in court.

The Board also had the audacity to tell the apex court to desist from taking a stand on the issue because the principles of marriage, talaq and polygamy are interwoven with the religious and cultural rights of the community and those cannot be touched upon on the ground of violation of fundamental rights.

The Supreme Court on June 29 decided to examine if Islamic laws governing marriage and inheritance violated the fundamental rights of women and then take a call on how far it can intervene to modify the existing laws.

Read | Triple talaq: The inhuman practice that violates rights and dignity of women

India has separate sets of personal laws for each religion governing marriage, divorce, succession, adoption and maintenance. While the Hindu law overhaul began in the 1950s and continues, activists have long argued that Muslim personal law, which has remained mostly unchanged since 1937, is tilted against women.

The Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937 allows a man to divorce his wife by uttering divorce or talaq thrice in one sitting. He can also send a letter with talaq written three times in it. India is one of the few countries that still recognises oral triple talaq.

Read | Muslim women rise against triple talaq

In recent years, this has taken an altogether new turn with men pronouncing triple talaq over the phone, and by other modern mediums (strangely the Board allows these mediums when it abhors modernity/social reform) --- by SMS, email, on Skype, WhatsApp and Facebook.

The debate around triple talaq had received a shot in the arm earlier this year when a victim, Shayara Bano of Uttarakhand, filed a petition in the apex court seeking a ban on the practice. She had also challenged the practices of polygamy and nikah halala, which mandates that a woman has to marry another man and consummate it if she and her divorced husband wish to get back together.

A survey of 4,710 Muslim women in 10 states by Mumbai-based Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan in 2013 revealed that 92% wanted a ban on oral and unilateral talaq.

A high-level committee set up in 2012 to assess family laws has recommended a complete ban on oral, unilateral and triple divorce, amendments in the Dissolution of Muslim Marriage Act, 1939 to make triple talaq and polygamy void and payment of maintenance mandatory after separation or divorce. Last July, the panel submitted its report to the government, which is yet to take a call on it.

Read | Muslim men lend support to campaign against triple talaq

Activists say that there is a nexus between the male-dominated Muslim clergy and elected representatives which allows Muslim men to interpret the laws to suit themselves. This nexus needs to be broken, and it is not possible until the highest court of the land steps in and redresses the situation once and for all.
When the only teacher goes on leave, tiny tots read out lessons to instructions from a classmate. The shiksha mitra staffer takes care of the rest of the days work in the school.

Last week, the Uttar Pradesh capital saw a Class 1 boy loudly reciting numbers, facing a handful of students seated on a mat in a modest room that has no electricity. It is an attempted mathematics session at the primary school in Gehru. The lone teacher, Ravi Krishna Mishra, is absent, and the para teacher (shiksha mitra) is busy signing papers, as the van carrying mid-day meal had just arrived.

That scene on Thursday isnt a one-off. The countrys most populous state has close to 16,000 single-teacher schools, where the sole teacher taking leave would mean the children are left to fend for themselves.

Often we take the responsibility of teaching when the teacher fails to turn up, said a Class 5 student of Gehrus primary school enrolled with 76 children. I have to manage the class by also ensuring discipline.

Read more: Government schoolteachers double up as clerks!

No encouraging is the situation at the primary school in the citys Makka Kheda area. It has one teacher giving classes to students of Class 1 to 5 in one room. I have to handle all the five classes at the same time, the master said. Its very difficult.

All this, amid the governments claims of quality education in the state.

Lucknow district alone has 35 single-teacher schools out of its 1,840 government-run primary-education institutions. The state, overall, has 15,843 government and aided schools that have just one teacher. Invariably, the students give classes when the lone teacher is on leave or engaged in other professional work.

Read more: 45 single-school teachers in Punjab agri minister Tota Singhs segment

Parents of the children in single-teacher schools say the students have to occasionally do more than just teaching classmates. Sometimes, even the keys of the school are handed over to one of the students. He is the one who opens the doors, a resident said, seeking anonymity.

Basic Shiksha Adhikari (Lucknow) Praveen Mani Tripathi said things will improve. Very soon, additional teachers will be deputed, he added.

Lucknow district alone has 35 single-teacher schools out of its 1,840 government-run primary-education institutions. (Deepak Gupta/ HT photo)

Right to Education crusader Samina Bano has a different view. It is a misconception that there is a shortage of teachers in UPs government schools. The state has nearly 6 lakh regular-cum-contract teachers, she said. The real challenge is an irrational distribution of the teachers. There are schools having more than sufficient teachers when the children are just a few. There are other schools with just one teacher on hundreds of students.

Besides, teachers transfer is a major issue as big money changes hands. Most of the teachers get their desired postings in cities, while rural areas are neglected. In many cases, teachers are posted in one school while they live and work in a different city, Bano said.

Data by the District Information System for Education says 53% children in UP go to private schools. In fact, government schools are no longer the largest service provider in education, said Bhano. Private schools are flourishing due to inadequacies in the government school system. We need educational reforms. The private sector must be regulated to stop them from exploiting the situation.

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Each year, 5.5 million newborns die before birth or within the first 28 days of life. Its like losing the entire population of Finland.

Most newborn deaths result from three preventable and treatable causes  prematurity, complications around birth and severe infections. Three million babies can be saved without intensive care, mainly though quality care around birth and treating small and sick newborns, say experts in Colombo to attend World Health Organisation (WHO) Regional Committee meeting from September 5-9.

Maternal and newborn deaths, emergency response to outbreaks like Zika virus, and neglected tropical diseases like kala-azar and leprosy that affect the poorest populations in most countries will take centre stage at the regional committee meeting, which will be attended by health ministers from 11 nations in the region, including Indias health and family welfare minister, JP Nadda.

Read | Lack of vital equipment caused childs death at Indore hospital

Read | The death of a baby in UP shows the crisis in Indias primary healthcare system

The target is to stop preventable deaths by launching a rapid and effective response to emergencies and neglected and chronic conditions, said Dr Mohamed Jamsheed, regional advisor, neglected tropical diseases, WHO South East Asia office (SEARO).

There are evidence-based interventions  increasing deliveries in hospitals and clinics, trained health workers, immediate drying and delayed cord clamp, and skin-to-skin contact between the mother and baby  that can prevent mother and new born deaths, but the challenge is the delivery of these interventions. Taking good quality care to pregnant women, for example, can save 40% maternal deaths, says Dr Neena Raina, coordinator, maternal, newborn and adolescent health, WHO SEARO.

Unsafe World for Newborns 5.5 million babies die each year globally, which is like losing the entire population of Finland each year.

babies die each year globally, which is like losing the entire population of Finland each year. 2.9 million newborns die within 28 days of birth, 2 million in their first day of life.

newborns die within 28 days of birth, 2 million in their first day of life. 3.3 million babies are stillborn each year.

babies are stillborn each year. 3 million babies of the can be saved with low tech, low cost care, like skin-to-skin contact with the mother.



The Death List Half of all newborn deaths occur in five countries. India, which has 26 million live births, tops the list. 7.79 lakh deaths : India.

: India. 2.76 lakh deaths : Nigeria.

: Nigeria. 2.02 lakh deaths : Pakistan.

: Pakistan. 1.57 lakh deaths : China.

: China. 1.18 lakh deaths : Democratic Republic of Congo.

Source: WHO, Unicef Half of all newborn deaths occur in five countries. India, which has 26 million live births, tops the list.

While maternal and child mortality rates have improved dramatically over the last two decades, 2.9 million newborns die within the first four weeks of birth. Another 3.3 million are stillbirths, defined as dying in the womb in the three months of pregnancy.

Newborn deaths account for 44% of all under-five-years-old deaths worldwide, with a babys risk of death in the first four weeks of life being nearly 15 times greater than any other time of his or her life.

Half of all newborn deaths occur in five countries. India, with 26 million live births and 7.79 lakh newborn deaths, tops the list, followed by Nigeria, Pakistan, China, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

There is some progress, with fewer mothers dying at childbirth today than every before.

In 1990, there were 2,10,000 maternal deaths, in 2015, there were 61,000. The south-east Asia region has registered a 69% decline in maternal death rates, which is well above the worlds average decline of 44%, said Dr Raina.

Read more | India failing: 1.2 million children died of preventable diseases in 2015

Read more | WHO report questions qualification of doctors in India

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The arrival of an all-party delegation on Sunday failed to dissuade the protesters in Kashmir valley.

Protests raged across the valley as people in many places tried to organize pro-freedom rallies which were foiled by security forces.

Officials and locals said that over 150 people were injured in the clashes which continued throughout the day in the districts of Shopian, Anantnag, Kulgam, Pulwama, Srinagar and Sopore town.

Kashmir has been convulsed with violence since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani in an encounter on July 8.

The valley was completely shut even as authorities had imposed curfew in Srinagars Khanyar, Safakadal, Nowhatta, Rainawari and M R Gunj areas.

Most of Sundays violence was reported from Shoipan district where a crowd set ablaze the deputy commissioners office after clashes erupted between security forces and protesters. Police control room in Shopian said that there was no one in the building.

Health officials said that over 50 people have been injured during the clashes after security forces fired pellet guns and tear gas shells to disperse protesters in Pinjura village of the district.

Read | Separatists shut doors on Kashmir all-party team, criticise CM Mufti

In the neighbouring district of Anantnag, protesters clashed with security forces when they tried to scuttle a pro-freedom rally in Fatapora Larkipora area of the district. Chief medical officer of Anantnag, Dr Fazil Kochak said 32 people were admitted in various hospitals of the district.

Locals said that more than 60 protesters were injured in south Kashmirs Tral in Pulwama district after security forces fired pellets and tear gas shells near the shrine of Shah-e- Hamadan in the town.

A police spokesman said that a huge mob pelted stones on the police and security forces in Tral. Some of the miscreants who were chased away, entered in a shrine and again started pelting stones from the compound. Police are cautiously handling the situation, the spokesman said.

He also said that ten incidents of stone pelting were reported from Srinagar, Anantnag, Pulwama, Kulgam, Shopian, Awantipora and Sopore.

Two photo journalists were hit by pellets in Srinagars old city area of Rainawari when forces fired to break up a protest.

In another incident, a mob torched the house of a Peoples Democratic Party leader in Kulgam district, where chief minister Mehbooba Mufti had gone on Saturday to offer condolences to a man whose son had been killed in the violence.

PDP leader Gulzar Ahmad Shaikh had facilitated Mehboobas visit to the family of Mashooq Ahmad, almost two months after his death.

Protesters asked Shaikh to quit the PDP and ensure the release of four young men arrested for protesting against the CMs visit.

Anger against the PDP is growing. Houses of many leaders have been targeted and many have been asked to leave the party.
Bibhuti Lahkar, an Assam-based conservationist, was chosen Heritage Hero 2016 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Hawaii on Saturday.

Lahkar, the first Asian to get the award, was among 30 nominees. The list was narrowed to three sets of conservationists ranked according to votes garnered on IUCNs site.

The other two were joint nominees  Bantu Lukambo and Josue Kambasu Mukura of Congo, and Yulia Naberezhnaya and Andrey Rudomahka of Russia.

This award goes to Manas National Park, Lahkar said while receiving the award.

Manas was declared a natural World Heritage Site in 1985 due to its biodiversity and ecosystems, which provide critical habitat to rare and endangered species, including the tiger, greater one-horned rhino, swamp deer, pygmy hog and Bengal florican.

But it bore the brunt of tribal militancy forcing Unesco to downgrade it to a World Heritage Site in Danger. Lahkars tireless work for almost 20 years to change the parks fortune saw the danger tag being removed from Manas in 2011.

Lahkar, 43, started working at the site in 1999 as part of his PhD, focusing on the management of grasslands of Manas with particular reference to the critically endangered pygmy hog, found nowhere else in the world.

His work made him traverse a landscape that was greatly ravaged by activities of militant groups operating in the area. He built ties with forest personnel of Manas as well as villagers on the fringes, who were suspicious of strangers.

Lahkar drew his own roadmap to support local communities while bringing positive changes on the ground.

I questioned myself as to whether my studies would be useful to people. I was able to translate science to the common people, for example how to monitor wildlife and vegetation; some of them are illiterate and thats a reason why I was motivated to constantly engage with communities, he told IUCN.

In strategic places where wildlife was particularly vulnerable, Lahkar held public meetings during which locals were made aware about the value of Manas as an ecological site and as an ecotourism destination.

With no external aid available, he single-handedly motivated about 100 youths to learn the basics of wildlife monitoring and act as tour guides. Today they are engaged in ecotourism ventures and support their families.

Lahkar also played a critical role in the rehabilitation of surrendered poachers, enabling them to lead a dignified and socially meaningful life. His team trained about 600 members of local grassroots NGOs, including ex-poachers who now act as protectors of Manas.

Manas was listed as in danger for 20 years as a result of human destruction and overexploitation. Now the same people come forward as volunteers to protect the park. We need more conservationists so that our future generations can see tigers, rhinos, in real and not in picture, Lahkar said.

As a step toward empowering communities, he focused on women and offered them regular income opportunities. More than 100 self-help groups were formed, encouraging women to engage in alternative livelihoods such as food processing, weaving and fishery. This came as a succor in an area where income avenues were scanty.

Lahkar oversaw the installation of a 14-km long electric fence to safeguard around 1,000 economically weak households from elephant depredation in a buffer area of the World Heritage site. No causality of humans or elephants was recorded since it was installed in 2013.

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A section of Muslims and Hindus in Bhopal have come together to protest against global fast food chain KFC accusing it of hurting their religious sentiments.

While Muslims accused the multinational giant of serving Jhatka chicken or meat in the name of halal chicken, Hindus have joined the protests to save cows, considered sacred animal by the community.

However, no scientific tests of the KFC food items were done by any of the groups.

KFC spokesperson denied the charges vehemently, saying, KFC holds the highest respect for the law of the land and complies with all government rules and regulations. These accusations are baseless and seem to be driven with malicious intent to harm our brand.

We serve chicken sourced from reputed Indian suppliers like Venkys and Godrej. We are always willing to provide consumers any clarifications they may require on the food served in our restaurants. We will be approaching the authorities to investigate this false propaganda and take appropriate action against those spreading misinformation, the spokesperson said.

In Islam, meat obtained by severing the head of an animal instantly i.e. jhatka is considered diseased and not fit for eating. They have halal chicken or meat which is obtained by making a deep cut on the neck of a bird or animal from which blood is drained out completely.

On Friday, a joint group of protesters assembled at Iqbal Maidan and launched a signature campaign demanding a KFC-free India, with Shahar Qazi Syed Mushtaq Ali Nadvi and superintendent, Masajid Committee, Yasir Arafat appealing to people to take part in the campaign.

Anam Ibrahim who is leading the campaign claimed they had signatures of 50,112 persons and warned that if action was not taken against KFC, they would protest at the shopping mall in MP Nagar which has a KFC outlet next Friday.

Ibrahim and others had lodged a complaint at MP Nagar police station against the KFC outlet on August 6. However, KFC employees lodged a counter complaint against Ibrahim and others for their creating ruckus at the outlet.

In his complaint, Ibrahim said during Ramzan, when he sought a halal certificate from the KFC outlet, the staff showed him a certificate issued by a mufti in Mumbai Anwar Khan to a company named Venkys, for only 1,000 halal chicken whereas, KFC outlets in the country sold 2,000 to 2,500 chickens per day on an average. It did not have any mention of KFC on it.

Hence, the company did not have any certificate for halal chicken and was cheating customers who might be eating the meat of any animal in the name of chicken, which the company bought from slaughter houses in various states, he said.

Talking to HT, Arun Chawariya of Balmiki Samaj, who joined the signature campaign, said his protest was to save cows.

We will continue our campaign till KFC closes its chain in the country, he said.

Nadvi told HT that KFC must declare if it was selling halal or jhatka meat, where it procured the meat, what meat it was, and also if it had any certificate in this regard.

If they are transparent, we dont have any problem. Then the option will lie with the consumers if they wish to have the kind of meat offered by KFC with a declaration, he said.

SP Anshuman Singh said police were looking into the complaints from both sides.

He said as far as Ibrahims complaint is concerned he had also written to the Bhopal collector to see if it was a case of adulteration and violated provisions of Food Safety and Standard Act.

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Describing BRICS as an influential voice in international discourse, Prime Minister Narendra Modi today said it was the groupings shared responsibility to shape the global agenda.

Leading from the chair, Modi addressed the BRICS Leaders meeting here, before the 8th annual Summit in Goa from October 15-16.

We, as BRICS, are an influential voice in international discourse. It is, therefore, our shared responsibility to shape the international agenda, he said.

Our shared responsibility to shape international agenda in manner that helps developing nations achieve their objectives, he added.

Modi said that as chair of BRICS, Building Responsive, Inclusive and Collective Solutions is the theme we have chosen which mirrors central priorities at G20 Summit.

Weve taken BRICS out of capitals to involve people from all walks of life. It will be an opportunity to deepen our ties and with BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi- Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) countries.

The four other leaders who participated in the meeting of the five-member bloc included Brazilian President Michel Temer, Chinese President Xi Jinping - with whom Modi held bilateral talks earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin and South African President Jacob Zuma.

Our summit next month would not only be an opportunity to deepen ties with ourselves, we will also interact with Indias neighbouring countries of BIMSTEC - Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand, who have been invited for the outreach summit. We welcome you all to Goa next month, Modi said while concluding his brief address.
Uncertainty prevails over an all-party delegation meeting Kashmiri separatist leaders even after chief minister Mehbooba Mufti sent an invitation to the Hurriyat Conference leaders, some of whom are in jail.

A 28-member delegation, led by Union home minister Rajnath Singh, arrived in the Valley on Sunday for a two-day visit to assess the ground situation and look for ways to end weeks of unrest in the Valley that has left 73 people, most of them civilians, dead.

Situation continues to be tense is some parts. The deputy commissioners office was set on fire in southern district of Shopian after clashes between security forces and protesters on Sunday, a day after a PDP leaders house was targeted in Kulgam.

Hardline Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani has refused to meet the delegation unless the government accepted the political nature of the Kashmir dispute. Two other influential separatist leaders, Yasin Malik and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, are in jail.

Geelani is under house arrest for months and is not allowed out of his Hyderpora residence in Srinagar.

The opposition has criticised Mufti for asking jailed separatist leaders to spell out a convenient time and place for the meeting.

Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader MY Tarigami, whose party favours meetings with separatists, has put the onus on the government.

In 2010, his party leader Sitaram Yechury, who is part of the delegation this time as well, had led a five-member group to Geelanis house who refused to meet them.

Tarigami didnt rule out a visit this time as well but said other separatists leaders should also be engaged with. Its not only Geelani sahib, there are other separatists as well and some of them are in jail, government has to facilitate meetings with them, he told HT.

Mufti on Saturday invited Hurriyat leaders for talks, asking them to lend credence and credibility to the outreach by the countrys political leadership.

She sent the invitation in her capacity as the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chief, indicating its junior coalition partner the BJP was not part of the push to talk to the separatists to defuse the most volatile phase in the Valley since 2010.

The states main opposition, the National Conference, was critical of the invitation.

Mirwaiz is in a Govt sub-jail, Yasin is in central jail, others are spread in various prisons & she asks them to suggest the time & place!!! , former chief minister Omar Abdullah tweeted.

She should just give a list of the prisons used & the official visiting hours to the delegation and allow them to visit the detainees, the NC leader said. Instead of sending them the invite, Mufti should have released them, he said.

The delegations first meeting is planned at around 11am. It is expected to talk to Mufti, then members of mainstream parties and meet governor NN Vohra later in the day.

After 2pm, they were free to hold any unscheduled meeting, government sources said.

The local traders will not meet the delegation, saying such half-hearted measures wont serve any purpose.

At an emergency meeting, they said meeting the delegation would amount to rubbing salt on the wounds of Kashmirs worst-ever humanitarian crises.

In 2010 we had met them and given our feedback, they went to Delhi and forgot about it. Now they want to hear the same thing, it is a mockery. Some of the members of the present delegation are the same as the last time, Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industry president Mushtaq Ahmad Wani said.

Doctors associations will also boycott the delegation.

In Srinagar, a curfew and restrictions have been imposed in wake of the visit. Security forces refuse to accept curfew passes and have put up concertina wire barriers across the city.

A 20-year-old man, identified as Basit Ahangar, was killed in Kulgam in south Kashmir on Saturday after he was allegedly hit by pellets. Police said the man jumped into a river in panic, locals alleged that he was thrown off the bridge after he suffered pellet injuries.

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The enforcement directorate (ED) may begin hunting for liquor baron Vijay Mallyas hidden properties to further tighten screws on the industrialist whose now-defunct airline owes thousands of crores to multiple lenders.

ED last week attached the largest-yet clutch of assets belonging to Mallya, who is said to have diverted the credits taken in the name of his Kingfisher Airlines to purchase properties abroad.

Mallya may be owning much more (properties and assets) which are not directly in his name... that needs to be ascertained too and the authorities are expected to now focus on that, a senior official at the State Bank of India told HT. The countrys biggest lender is co-ordinating with ED in its investigation against Mallya.

SBI is leading the 17-member consortium of lenders that gave loans to Kingfisher Airlines and has been has been pushing for more stringent action against Mallya, who is in the United Kingdom and has ignored multiple summons from courts in India.KFA owes about Rs 7,000 crore.

ED has been pursuing the recoveries under the prevention of Money Laundering Act since the funds were obtained from banks by resorting to a criminal activity of cheating, Manoj Kumar, legal expert and managing partner Hammurabi and Solomon, added.

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The Shiromani Akali Dal-led government in Punjab has put the Centre in a fix over a request to upgrade the security cover for three important members of the states ruling first family  the Badals.

The problem is how to go from the highest security, which is Z-Plus, for the countrys VIPs to the next level. For, chief minister Parkash Singh Badal, his son and deputy chief minister, Sukhbir Badal, and a key minister, Bikram Singh Majithia, are already getting Z-Plus security.

Revenue minister Majithia is the brother-in-law of Sukhbir Badal.

A central government official said the request came last week and the Union home ministry has not been able to decide what security upgrade can be granted to someone getting the highest cover already.

The elite commandos of the National Security Guard protect the 88-year-old chief minister, while the junior Badal and his brother-in-law get round-the-clock protection from the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF).

Around 30 to 40 central security personnel guard VIPs under Z-Plus protection; and they get two escort vehicles as well.

The home ministry is likely to assure the state government the trios security is not lax, but is as tight as it should be under Z-Plus.

The Akali government said the Badals face threats from militants. It argued that a security upgrade is necessary in the light of an attack on an RSS leader in the state.

Retired Brigadier Jagdish Gagneja, the RSSs deputy chief in Punjab, was shot at by two men on a motorcycle in August.Terrorists are suspected be behind the attack on Gagneja; and the state passed the investigation to the CBI.

On the political front, the Akalis are battling an anti-incumbency mood and a hard push by Delhi chief minister and Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal to offer an alternative to Punjab voters who have been voting the Akali-BJP coalition partners or the Congress all along.

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To celebrate the canonisation of Mother Teresa as a saint, IndiaPost on Sunday released a commemorative postage stamp on her.

Union Minister of State for Communications Manoj Sinha unveiled the postage stamp during a ceremony at the Divine Child High School here, an official statement said.

Indian bystanders pose for a picture near a board displaying a commemorative postage stamp of Mother Teresa during its release function in Mumbai. (AFP)

Bishop Agnelo Gracias and Sister Rubella, a representative from Missionaries of Charity, were present at the ceremony.

Teresa, who worked for the destitute in Kolkata and became a global icon of Christian charity, was declared a saint by Pope Francis at the Vatican on Sunday.

A Christian displays a commemorative postage stamp of Mother Teresa after its release function in Mumbai. (AP)

Her elevation to Roman Catholicisms celestial pantheon came in a canonisation mass in St Peters square in the Vatican that was presided over by Pope Francis in the presence of 100,000 pilgrims.

For the honour of the Blessed Trinity... we declare and define Blessed Teresa of Calcutta (Kolkata) to be a Saint and we enrol her among the Saints, decreeing that she is to be venerated as such by the whole Church, the pontiff said in Latin.

A Christian woman looks at a board displaying a commemorative postage stamp of Mother Teresa during its release. (AP)

The ceremony came a day before the 19th anniversary of Teresas death in Kolkata, the Indian city where she spent nearly four decades tending to the poorest of the poor.

Teresa spent all her adult life in India, first teaching, then tending to the dying poor.

A Christian Nun and a priest walk pass a board displaying a commemorative postage stamp of Mother Teresa. (AFP)

It was in the latter role, at the head of her now worldwide order that Teresa became one of the most famous women on the planet.

Born to Kosovan Albanian parents in Skopje - then part of the Ottoman empire, now the capital of Macedonia - she won the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize and was revered around the world as a beacon for the Christian values of self-sacrifice and charity.

A Christian poses as she displays the commemorative postage stamp of Mother Teresa after its release. (AFP)
Mother Teresa, the nun whose work with the dying and destitute of Kolkata made her a global icon of Christian charity, was made a saint on Sunday.

Her elevation to Roman Catholicisms celestial pantheon came in a canonisation mass in St Peters square in the Vatican that was presided over by Pope Francis in the presence of 100,000 pilgrims.

A tapestry depicting Mother Teresa is seen in the facade of Saint Peter's Basilica during a mass, celebrated by Pope Francis, for her canonisation in Saint Peter's Square at the Vatican. (Reuters)

The ceremony came a day before the 19th anniversary of Teresas death in Kolkata, the city where she spent nearly four decades tending to the poorest of the poor.

With the 16th century basilica of St Peters and an azure sky providing the backdrop, the faithful basked in the late summer sun as Francis presided over a ritual mass that has barely changed for centuries.

Pope Francis leads the canonisation of Mother Teresa. (AFP Photo)

Such was the demand from pilgrims, the Vatican could easily have issued double the number of tickets but for space and security restrictions.

Helicopters had earlier buzzed over the headquarters of the Roman Catholic church, testifying to the huge but relatively discreet security operation under way. Some 3,000 officers were on duty to ensure the day passed off peacefully.

Nuns belonging to the global Missionaries of Charity, bow in front of a relic of Mother Teresa during a mass, celebrated by Pope Francis, for her canonisation in Saint Peter's Square at the Vatican. (Reuters)

Among the assembled crowd were some 1,500 poor people looked after by the Italian branches of Teresas order, the Missionaries of Charity.

After the mass they were to be Franciss guests at the Vatican for a giant pizza lunch served by 250 sisters and 50 male members of the order.

St. Peter's Square is crowded with faithful attending a Canonisation Mass by Pope Francis for Mother Teresa, at the Vatican, Sunday. (AP Photo)

Teresa spent all her adult life in India, first teaching, then tending to the dying poor.

It was in the latter role, at the head of her now worldwide order that Teresa became one of the most famous women on the planet.

Indian nuns from the Catholic Order of the Missionaries of Charity watch a live telecast of the canonisation of Mother Teresa. (Subhankar Chakraborty/HT Photo)

Born to Kosovan Albanian parents in Skopje -- then part of the Ottoman empire, now the capital of Macedonia -- she won the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize and was revered around the world as a beacon for the Christian values of self-sacrifice and charity.

External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj arrives with a delegation for the canonisation ceremony of Mother Teresa. (Twitter/MEAIndia)

But she was also regarded with scorn by secular critics who accused her of being more concerned with evangelism than with improving the lot of the poor.

Faithful and pilgrims wait to enter in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican before the canonisation ceremony. (AP Photo)

The debate over the nuns legacy has continued after her death, with researchers uncovering financial irregularities in the running of her order and evidence mounting of patient neglect, insalubrious conditions and questionable conversions of the vulnerable in her missions.

Nuns of the Missionaries of Charity, the religious order founded by Mother Teresa, carry the mother's relics, as the Pope leads a holy mass for her canonisation, in Saint Peter square at the Vatican. (AFP Photo)

Sceptics were absent from the Vatican Sunday however as Francis prepared to pay homage to a woman he sees as the embodiment of his vision of a poor church for the poor.

A man holds an icona of Mother Teresa as he arrives for the holy mass and Canonisation of the nun. (AFP Photo)

By historical standards, Teresa has been fast-tracked to sainthood, thanks largely to one of the few people to have achieved canonisation faster, John Paul II.

A woman displays the commemorative postage stamp of Mother Teresa after its release function in Mumbai. (AFP Photo)

The Polish cleric was a personal friend of Teresa and as the pope at the time of her death, he was responsible for her being beatified in 2003.

A woman from Goa with a statue of Mother Teresa. (Samir Jana/HT Photo)

Achieving sainthood requires the Vatican to approve accounts of two miracles occurring as a result of prayers for Teresas intercession.

People pay tributes to Mother Teresa in Kolkata. (Samir Jana/HT Photo)

The first one, ratified in 2002, was of an Indian woman, Monica Besra, who says she recovered from ovarian cancer a year after Teresas death -- something local health officials have put down to medical advances rather than the power of prayer.

Sisters of Charity arrive to attend the holy mass and Canonisation of Mother Teresa. (AFP Photo)

In the second, approved last year, Brazilian Marcilio Haddad Andrino says his wifes prayers to Teresa led to brain tumours disappearing. Eight years later, Andrino and his wife Fernanda were in the congregation on Sunday.

The relics of Mother Teresa are carried by nuns prior to the start of a Mass celebrated by Pope Francis. (AP Photo)

Also in the crowd at St Peters was Teresa Burley, an Italy-based American teacher of children with learning difficulties who says the new saint inspired her vocation.

A man holds an Indian flag before the start of a canonisation ceremony in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican. (AP Photo)

Im also named Teresa, she told AFP. I remember growing up admiring the things she did for children and the poor.

We need to remember we are here to help each other. We need to be here for those who cant help themselves. Its the same for refugees arriving here: we have to be there to help them transition into their new lives.

Nuns of Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity stand near a Swiss guard prior to the start of a mass celebrated by Pope Francis. (AP Photo)

Many Indians have made the trip to Rome, among them Kiran Kakumanu, 40, who was blessed by Teresa when he was a baby and grew up to become a priest.

A nun holds a photo of Mother Teresa before the start of the canonisation ceremony in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican. (AP Photo)

Abraham, an Indian expatriate in London, said Teresas life had set a unique example to the world.

She practised Christianity. The majority of Christians only spend their time talking about it.
Thousands of Kashmiri Hindu employees who migrated to Jammu following mob attacks on their transit colonies in Kashmir, held a protest rally against the state and the central government on Sunday for not reaching out to the community.

As their protest entered the 54th day, they wore black bands and took out a march demanding registration of FIR and compensation to affected employees besides a high-level dialogue with the Centre and the state government.

Both the governments are begging the separatists to hold talks with all-party delegation but they have failed to reach out to these Kashmiri pandit employees of the Valley and not even a single minister or top officer has reached out to them, chairman of All Party Migrant Coordination Committee (APMCC), Vinood Pandita, said.

Kashmiri pandits cannot be made sacrificial goats by the central government. We will not tolerate any talks with separatists, he added.

The Kashmiri pandit employees, who were working in various government departments under the Prime Ministers rehabilitation package in the Valley, returned to Jammu after their transit camps were attacked by stone-pelting mobs in the wake of the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani on July 8.

The protesters demanded disbursement of their pending salaries, and forming of a comprehensive return and rehabilitation programme for the Kashmiri Pandit community in the Valley before their return resume duty.

These employees have been sitting on protest for over 50 days. The governments are unmoved, as if the Kashmiri Pandit community does not exist, said All State Kashmiri Pandit Conference President, Ravinder Raina.

The central and state governments failed to protect these Kashmiri Pandit employees from mob attacks. They were forced to migrate from there. Instead of reaching out to them and give them confidence, they are left feeling unwanted, he added.
Opposition National Conference said on Sunday Kashmir unrest was due to New Delhis continued refusal to undo the wrongs of history and restore constitutionally legitimate rights of Jammu and Kashmir.

From 1953 till 2016 today, New Delhis continued refusal to undo the wrongs of history and restore the constitutionally legitimate political rights of J-K and its people have resulted in a pervasive sense of alienation and isolation in Kashmir, it said in its memorandum submitted to the all-party delegation here.

It is this sense of alienation and isolation that fuels all agitations in Kashmir including the current one, it said.

The Opposition party said in recent years in successive efforts to pacify recurring agitations in the state, New Delhi has taken political initiatives in times of unrest only to abandon them in times of peace.

The failure to implement the recommendations of the Prime Ministers Working Groups on Kashmir as well as the shocking indifference and contempt shown towards the Interlocutors Report are recent examples of this pattern of apathy and callousness, the party said.

Similarly, the then central government refused to even acknowledge the Autonomy Resolution passed by the J-K Legislative Assembly in 2000 with a two-thirds majority. These glaring failures have provoked violence and instability in Kashmir, it said.

The NC said there was a need for an acknowledgement of historical injustices perpetuated against the people of Jammu and Kashmir under the fig-leaf of national interest and integration.

The fact that J-K has acceded to the Union of India under a certain set of conditions and has not merged with the Union needs to be respected. The erosion of the states autonomy from 1953 to 1975 needs to be reversed to uphold the integrity of promises made by the Union of India with the people of Jammu and Kashmir, the party said.

The relationship between the state and the rest of the country is unique and constitutionally validated and no amount of shrill rhetoric or jingoism can change this reality, it said.

The party said that the genesis of the political issue in Kashmir lay in the erosion of the states internal autonomy and a number of broken promises that violated good-faith agreements between the leadership of the state and successive central governments.

The dismissal of a popular, elected government in 1953 and the incarceration of J-Ks prime minister, late Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, was the first blow that demolished the bond of good faith between Kashmir and New Delhi, it said.
It is estimated that 1,00,000 people flocked to Itaewon streets for the Halloween festivities.


Congress leader Sheila Dikshit asked on Saturday Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal to resign on moral ground over his former cabinet colleague Sandeep Kumars alleged sex scandal.

The former Delhi chief minister accused Kejriwal of shaming the country after an objectionable CD emerged which showed Kumar in a compromising position with a woman.

She was in Varanasi as part of partys campaign team under the Congress ongoing 27 Saal, UP Behaal slogan.

Dikshit also slammed the remarks of AAP leader Asuthosh, who, while seeking to defend Kumar, had written, Mahatma Gandhi, JawaharLal Nehru and Atal Bihari Vajpai too allegedly had relations with other women, which was on the basis of their mutual consent, though such issues in their personal life did not suffer their political career.

The partys chief ministerial nominee for Uttar Pradesh elections said the remarks are an insult to the father of our nation and asked the Union government to take punitive action against the AAP leader.

Dikshit, along with party state unit chief Raj Babbar and other leaders embarked on campaign march to Azamgarh and Ghazipur district.

Diskhit headed the Yatra to Azamgarh and Raj Babbar to Ghazipur district. They addressed gatherings there.

On their way, the congress leaders paid floral tributes to the martyrs of 1942 movement at Shaheed Smarak at Cholapur in Varanasi.

Asked to comment on Prime Minister Narendra Modis reference to Balochistan on his I-Day speech and his Vietnam visit, Dikshit replied in a lighter tone saying, As he is PM, so no comment.
Pope Francis on Sunday proclaimed Mother Teresa a saint, hailing her work with the destitute of Kolkata as a beacon for mankind and testimony of Gods compassion for the poor.

The revered nuns elevation to Roman Catholicisms celestial pantheon came in a canonisation mass in St Peters square presided over by Pope Francis in the presence of 100,000 pilgrims.

For the honour of the Blessed Trinity... we declare and define Blessed Teresa of Calcutta (Kolkata) to be a Saint and we enroll her among the Saints, decreeing that she is to be venerated as such by the whole Church, the pontiff said in Latin.

Francis said that even though the nun had been declared a saint, she would always be Mother Teresa to the Catholic family.

Below are the highlights:

3:22pm: Bishops attend a mass leaded by Pope Francis for the canonisation of Mother Teresa of Calcutta in Saint Peters Square at the Vatican.

(Reuters Photo)

EAM Sushma Swaraj & Indian delegation attend #MotherTeresa's canonisation ceremony at St. Peter's Square in Vatican pic.twitter.com/TzKGW6GxrR  ANI (@ANI_news) September 4, 2016

3:02pm: Pope Francis (2nd-R) prays as he leads the canonisation of Mother Teresa of Kolkata, on Saint Peter square in the Vatican.

(AP Photo)

2:55pm: Hundreds of people inside the headquarters of the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata clapped with joy as Mother Teresa was declared a saint by Pope Francis. They congregated around Mothers tomb, which was decorated with a single lighted candle, flowers and a photo of the tiny saint. A caption on the tomb read Saint Teresa of Calcutta. Pray for Us.

2:30pm: In Kolkata, nuns from the Catholic Order of the Missionaries of Charity, watch a live telecast of the canonisation of Mother Teresa.

(Subhankar Chakraborty/HT Photo)

2:14pm: Pope Francis declares Mother Teresa a saint. For the honour of the Blessed Trinity... we declare and define Blessed Teresa of Calcutta (Kolkata) to be a Saint and we enroll her among the Saints, decreeing that she is to be venerated as such by the whole Church, the pontiff said in Latin.

(REUTERS)

2:10pm: The canonisation Mass began with hymns and proceeded almost immediately to the rite of canonisation.

2:05pm: Queen Sofia of Spain attends the canonisation ceremony by Pope Francis for Mother Teresa, in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican.

(AP Photo)

2:00pm: Pope Francis leads Mother Teresas canonisation mass at St. Peters Square in the Vatican City

1:55pm: Mother Terseas canonisation ceremony begins at Vatican

A faithful holds a statue of Mother Teresa atSt. Peter square in the Vatican. (AFP Photo)

1:48pm: Visuals from St. Peters Square in the Vatican City

#VaticanCity gets set to celebrate sainthood for #MotherTeresa ,my SandArt at PuriBeach ,india pic.twitter.com/UTwGTzFVvj  Sudarsan Pattnaik (@sudarsansand) September 4, 2016

Visuals from St. Peter's Square in Vatican city where #MotherTeresa's canonization ceremony will begin, shortly pic.twitter.com/rwEGKonUSq  ANI (@ANI_news) September 4, 2016

#MotherTeresa's canonisation: Special prayers being offered at Sacred Heart Cathedral, New Delhi. pic.twitter.com/uGtBgdNtz0  ANI (@ANI_news) September 4, 2016

#MotherTeresa's canonization: Visuals from Vatican square where ceremony will commence shortly pic.twitter.com/p04EIEtGnH  ANI (@ANI_news) September 4, 2016

Faithful and pilgrims wait to enter in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican before a canonisation ceremony. (AP Photo)

12:25pm: Congress president Sonia Gandhi hailed the canonisation of Mother Teresa saying it was a recognition of her service to the poorest of poor, the dying and destitute. Describing the life of Mother Teresa as an epitome of grace, compassion and love, Gandhi said that her saintly life will forever inspire humanity to commit to the cause of those who have no voice, no community, no home, no care and no love.

12:05pm: Pope Francis is following in the footsteps of Mother Teresa by offering some 1,500 homeless people a pizza lunch at the Vatican after her canonisation Mass. The homeless, most of who live in shelters run by Mother Teresas Sisters of Charity order, came to Rome overnight on buses from across Italy to take part in Sundays Mass. Theyre getting seats of honour for the celebration and will then be served lunch in the lobby of the Vatican auditorium.

11:45am: Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi tweeted on Mother Teresas canonisation

A symbol of service&compassion.Mother Teresa showed the world the extraordinary power of love.We celebrate 2day that enduring legacy of love  Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) September 4, 2016

11:25am: Sisters of Charity sisters plan to distribute food to the poor nearby after the ceremony, and community meals are being served across Catholic parishes in India .

Canonisation ceremony of Mother Teresa to be held shortly. Visuals from Vatican City Square pic.twitter.com/JCQIpoM9qy  ANI (@ANI_news) September 4, 2016

#MotherTeresa's canonisation: Special prayers being offered at Sacred Heart Church, Bengaluru. pic.twitter.com/61uSQQtm52  ANI (@ANI_news) September 4, 2016

#MotherTeresa 's canonisation : A statue of Mother Teresa unveiled at Seashore St. Anthony's Shrine in Chennai pic.twitter.com/MeCeVyeLGa  ANI (@ANI_news) September 4, 2016

10:30am: Throughout the night, pilgrims prayed at vigils in area churches and flocked before dawn to the Vatican under heavy security to try to get a good spot for the Mass that was expected to draw more than 100,000 people.

10:15am: At the Mother House in Kolkata , a special mass will be organised and the nuns will celebrate the occasion with the poorest of the poor.

A Missionaries of Charity nun greets Pope Francis upon his arrival in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican for a jubilee audience for workers and volunteers of mercy. (AP Photo)

10:00am: Mother Teresa died in 1997 and the late Pope John Paul, who met her often, bent Vatican rules to grant a dispensation allowing the procedure to establish her case for sainthood to be launched two years after her death instead of the usual five.

UP: Procession taken out in Allahabad celebrating #MotherTeresa 's canonisation pic.twitter.com/nzyteIhrE1  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) September 4, 2016

I visited the Vatican and some historical places of Rome. Some pictures are uploaded here for all of you pic.twitter.com/0953r3MOSP  Mamata Banerjee (@MamataOfficial) September 4, 2016

9:45am: Foreign minister Sushma Swaraj is leading the Indian delegation

Addressing Indian community in Rome. pic.twitter.com/pF0mxYwoCZ  Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) September 3, 2016

9:00am: Pope Francis will lead the ceremony at St Peters Square

Let us imitate Mother Teresa who made works of mercy the guide of her life and the path towards holiness.  Pope Francis (@Pontifex) September 3, 2016

Preparations underway for Mother Teresa's canonisation ceremony in Vatican city pic.twitter.com/C3wB7WpNOk  ANI (@ANI_news) September 3, 2016

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The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) conducted searches at the residences of two-time former Haryana CM Bhupinder Singh Hooda, a sitting UPSC member, a serving IAS officer and several retired and serving employees of the state town and country planning department on Saturday in a case of acquisition of land at Manesar in Gurgaon district in which farmers were allegedly cheated of Rs 1,500 crore.

The raids were carried out simultaneously at 24 places in Delhi, Rohtak, Chandigarh, Panchkula and Gurgaon since Saturday morning. Besides Hoodas residence and election-cum-camp office in Rohtak, his official flat in Sector 3 of Chandigarh was also searched.

Also watch | Ex-Haryana CM Bhupinder Hoodas residence raided by CBI

The searches were conducted in an ongoing investigation of a case. The incriminating documents/material recovered during searches are being scrutinised, CBI spokesperson RK Gaur said.

The premises of UPSC member Chhatar Singh, retired IAS officer ML Tayal, both posted in the chief ministers office at that time, and a serving IAS officer and the then town and country planning director Sudeep Singh Dhillon were also searched.

Others whose premises were searched included then officers on special duty (OSDs) Mahender Singh Chopra and Randhir Singh, former chief town planner Dhare Singh, ABW Infrastructure Limited founder director Atul Bansal and another businessman Amit Bansal, according to sources.

The role of firms such as Innovative Infra Developers, Flair Private Limited is also under the scanner.

Case background

The CBI registered the case in September 2015 on allegations that private builders in conspiracy with public servants of the state government had bought 400 acres from farmers and land owners of Manesar, Naurangpur and Lakhnoula in Gurgaon district at throwaway prices, under the threat of acquisition by the government between 2004 and 2007.

There is an allegation that the state government had issued notices for acquisition of 912 acres for setting up an Industrial Model Township. When private builders bought the land from the farmers and other land owners, the land was released in violation of the government policy, in favour of the builders, their companies and agents, instead of the original landowners, it is alleged.

After the BJP came to power in the state two years ago, the state police registered a case in Gurgaon that was handed over to the CBI last year. In Rohtak, the CBI teams carried out searches at Hoodas farmhouse on Gohana road, his paternal residence in Adarsh Nagar and his election-cum-camp office in Model Town.

Congress activists protest

While the former CM was in Delhi, his brother-in-law Chandersen Dahiya was the only family member in the house. As soon as the news of raids spread, Congress MLAs and supporters started gathering outside Hoodas residence, but not allowed to enter the premises.

While Congress MLAs Shakuntala Khatak, spokesperson Krishan Murti Hooda and ex-MLA Bharat Bhushan Batra tried to go into the house, others created a ruckus. They raised slogans against the government, calling the CBI action politically motivated. The police responded by putting up barricades and sealing the road. The administration also deployed men from the Rapid Action Force to cordon off the area.

Batra said that the search party had sealed a computer and monitor, besides studying documents. The CBI asked questions about cash of Rs 14 lakh in the house. Batra said the money was the proceeds from the sale at a petrol pump and was returned. A CBI officer went to the petrol pump to check if the sales data matched with the cash in the house, he said.
Promising the return of achhe din in Uttar Pradesh, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati on Sunday appealed to the people to vote her party back to power with absolute majority in the forthcoming assembly polls.

Addressing a sarvjan sukhay-sarvjan hitay rally here, Mayawati tore into the Congress and BJP, accusing the latter of failing to keep the tall promises made in last elections. She also criticised the Samajwadi Party government for the poor law and order situation in UP.

Post-Independence, Congress ruled UP for 37 years. It is owing to its poor policies and governance that the party first lost power in the state and then at the Centre. Today, the party lacks leaders and has been forced to rope in an old woman from Delhi as its CM candidate who, while in power, blamed people of UP and Bihar for the ills of Delhi, the BSP chief said.

Mayawati said before coming to power, BJP and its PM candidate Narendra Modi made tall promises of better days but only gifted worse days to the people.

The government at the Centre is being run by rich industrialists and it is trying to benefit them. They are trying to frame a law for easy land acquisitions to benefit the rich besides also marketing their products. Central government waived off loans of industrialists and the rich worth `1.14 lakh crore, even as farmers and workers who have taken small loans of `1-2 lakh were hounded and harassed so much that many of them committed suicide, she said.

The BSP chief also asked the Congress why it did not implement 10% reservation for upper castes on economic grounds when it was in power at the Centre.

Mayawati said she had been demanding reservation for Muslims and other religious minorities on economic lines but the Congress and the BJP had turned a deaf ear to her.

Under the garb of reviewing reservation policy, the BJP was acting on RSS agenda and trying to undermine the constitutional rights of the Dalits, tribals and the backwards. If Congress ended reservation in promotions, the BJP privatised majority of works of various ministries, benefitting industrialists and gradually ending reservation benefits, she added.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi met deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad bin Salman here on Sunday and held discussions on United Nations Security Council reform and on enhancing bilateral ties in various areas, including energy and maritime security.

In the meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit, Modi said the Saudi deputy Crown Prince has been a strong friend of India, sources said.

They held a detailed discussion on UN Security Council reform, with both leaders emphasising the need for expansion of the UNSC to include more permanent members, they said.

The Prime Minister called for strengthened partnership with Saudi Arabia in various areas such as maritime security, infrastructure, low-cost housing and energy sector.

He invited greater Saudi investment, mainly through the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF), and sought greater cooperation in infrastructure, particularly modernisation of railway stations, according to the sources.

Modi told the Saudi deputy Crown Prince India could also become a source of food supply to the oil-rich Gulf Kingdom.

The deputy crown prince, who is the son of Saudi King Salman, holds the key defence and economic policy portfolios.
India called on China on Sunday to join a unified global effort to counter terrorism and urged it to stop politicising the issue, emphasising that problem was emanating from south Asia and gradually destabilising the region.

In a 35-minute meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping and later addressing BRICS leaders, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the issue of terrorism was the central challenge facing the world.

Pakistan wasnt mentioned in a briefing by ministry of external affairs spokesperson Vikas Swarup on Modis meetings, but Indias assertion of Islamabads involvement in spreading terrorism in the country was made clear to Xi and other BRICS leaders.

Modi is in Hangzhou to take part in the 11th G20 Summit in the eastern Chinese city. He spoke to Xi about Indias aspirations, concerns and strategic interests.

Modi began his meeting with Xi by extending his condolences over a recent terror attack on the Chinese embassy at Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, last week.

Condemning the terrorists attack on the Chinese embassy in Bishkek, he said this was yet another proof of the continuous scourge of terrorism. He reiterated that our response to terrorism should not be dictated by the political considerations, Swarup said.

Modi conveyed Indias concerns over the $46-billion China- Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) being laid through Pakistan occupied Kashmir.

Besides a host of energy projects, the Chinese government and banks will finance Chinese companies to lay rail tracks, roads and pipelines to ferry oil and gas from Gwadar port in Pakistans south to Kashghar in Xinjiang in Chinas northwest.

India has opposed the project as it claims Gilgit-Baltistan and PoK, which New Delhi says are occupied territories.

Swarup said Modi made a hard-hitting intervention on terrorism during his meeting with BRICS leaders.

I must emphasise how strongly the PM intervened on the issue of terrorism. He said, in fact, it remains the primary source of instability and the biggest threat to our society and countries. He said the supply chains and reach are global. The abuse of social media to promote radical ideologies is the growing dimension of this threat, Swarup quoted the PM as saying during the BRICS meeting.

He (Modi) said in a very hard-hitting intervention that nowhere for that matter do they (terrorists) do not own banks or weapon factories. Clearly someone funds (them) and the BRICS must intensify its joint efforts not just to fight terrorism but to coordinate its action to isolate those who support and sponsor terrorism, Swarup added.

Modi told the leaders of China, Russia, Brazil and South Africa that he believed that terrorism is the central challenge facing the world at the moment and unless we have a collective approach, it will not be possible for us to defeat this menace.

In a bilateral meeting with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, Modi again stressed on fighting terrorism.

The two leaders discussed the continuing scourge of terrorism. PM said it was important for all demo forces to come together to counter this challenged. Our neighbourhood, in particular, he said was now suffering from the destabilising effects of terrorism.

even Afghanistan, Russia, China, they were all facing the terrorism threat emanating from our region and it was important for us to identify the suppliers, the exporters and financiers of terrorism.

Otherwise the world is going to face a huge, huge problem in the coming weeks and months, Modi said.
A modest north Bengal chapel in the name of Mother Teresa held a special service on Sunday morning, hours before the iconic Catholic missionary was to be canonised in faraway Rome. But there was more to the ceremony at the village 460 km from the state capital.

The eight-month-old church is housed in remote Nakor, which is the native place of a middle-aged lady on whom the iconic Albanian-Indian nun performed a miracle that proved key in the sainthood of Mother at a ceremony in Pope-ruled Vatican.

Monica Besra, 50, celebrated the day with her sons and residents of her village near Harirampur in South Dinajpur district, beginning with a prayer at the Mother Teresa church. We have a TV at home. We will be watching the Mothers sainthood ceremony on it, she told HT. What can I say? I am so happy.

Besras eldest son Gopinath said the family would celebrate the whole day together. I have never seen my mother so happy, he added.

Monica Besra(L) and her husband Shelku Murmu walk out from the newly built Mother Teresa Church close to her home village of Nakur in Danogram (AFP)

The family, which owns five bighas of land, will not hit the fields on Sunday. In the evening, Besra is going to the nearest town of Raiganj with the father of her neighbourhood church to attend an evening service for the Mother.

The church at Nakor has arranged a television for community viewing of the canonisation live.

In 1998, a penury-riddled Besra reported cure of her ovarian tumour following sustained prayers to late Mother Teresa who she never met in life. A mother of five children, the tribal womans story was well-chronicled, enabling the Vatican to take notice of itand list it as a miracle: the first milestone in the two-step trip to sainthood as per Catholic norms.

On Sunday, a beaming Besra reiterated her strong belief that her faith in the Mother enabled her to cure of the tumour. I feel so happy (about the sainthood). It was Mother Teresas blessings that gave me a new life. I could walk properly and eat rice, she gushed, with her two songs seated alongside.

Monica Besra, beneficiary of Mother Teresa's first "miracle" at her house at Nattor village near Harirampur (PTI)

Besra is all praise for the Missionaries of Charity which Mother Teresa founded at Kolkata in 1950. In October 2003, when the nun was beatified six years after her death at age 87, a team of the Missionaries of Charity took Besra as well to the Italian capital.

We spent 22 days in Rome. It was an amazing place, recalled Besra. I enjoyed it a lot.

It was on September 5, 1998exactly a year after Mother Teresas deaththat nuns placed a tiny aluminium medallion on Besras stomach and prayed for her. Two sisters carried me to the church since I was too weak to even stand, she said. As soon as I entered (the church), a blinding, divine light emitted from Mothers photo and enveloped me. I closed my eyes and almost fainted. The next day the pain was gone.

Besras claim was contested by doctors and rationalists alike. Countering her claim in 1998, doctors at the district hospital stated the patient was cured by medicines since her disease (malignant ovarian tumour) was detected at an early stage.

The Pope last year recognised a second miracle attributed to Mother Teresathe 2008 recovery of a Brazilian man suffering from multiple brain tumors, paving the way for her canonisation.

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Hold it up higher. Everyone here should be able to see it. Forty-five-year-old Elisa Matthew was instructing her friends, who were unfurling the Tricolour at St. Peters Square in Vatican City.

For Elisa, September 4, was the highlight of her life in Rome so far. She has lived on the fringes of a foreign culture for a year, but Sunday it was her nation, and her culture that were suddenly at the focal point of all discussion  be it the international media or over pizza and wine at Romes teeming cafes.

Although the atmosphere in Rome is very welcoming for us, expats, we have always lived on the sidelines here. But today, it is a very different and proud feeling to see India in the spotlight in Italy like never before, said Elisa, dressed in a demure brown salwaar kameez.

The Indian flag, hoisted by Elisa and her friends, stood out alongside an Italian flag, that another group had raised, amid thousands of people from different nationalities and race. The crowd stood in stoic silence, broken only by the soft clang of church bells and accordions lilting music.

Like Elisa, Nibin Matthew and Smijo Anthony, both Indian expats in Italy, travelled over 300km from Salerno, in the south of Italy, to Rome on Sunday to be a part of the historic event, wearing their love for their birth country on their sleeves.

It is a proud moment for us to see people talking about Mother Teresas love for India and her work in India, said 27-year-old Nibin who has been living in Italy for nine years and works with a manufacturing company.

Minutes before the canonisation ceremony was set to begin, 55-old Rajan Vaidyakkare was clicking selfies with his wife, Jancy, to send to his folks back home in Kerala. Living and working in Rome, Rajan and Jancy say India has given them a number of occasions to feel proud in Rome.

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West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee gifted a Bible in Bengali that was bound in Baluchuri silk to Pope Francis at Vatican City after the canonisation ceremony of Mother Teresa.

In a tweet, the chief minister -- who was in the Vatican to attend the function -- said Missionaries of Charitys superior general Sister Prema and Archbishop of Kolkata will hand over the holy book to the Pope.

Sr Prema & Kolkata Archbishop met @MamataOfficial today. This Bible bound in Baluchuri to b handed over to @Pontifex, Banerjee tweeted on Sunday.

Banerjee was leading a 12-member official delegation to the Vatican as a guest of the Missionaries.

Team Bengal walked all the way from the hotel with songs on our lips pic.twitter.com/EPbWQeo0n1  Mamata Banerjee (@MamataOfficial) September 4, 2016

The chief minister and her delegates, including MPs Sudip Bandopadhyay and Derek OBrien, were also seen walking to the venue of the ceremony by singing songs of Rabindranath Tagore.

Banerjee walked with members of her delegation to St Peters Basilica, where Mother Teresa was conferred sainthood.

Sporting a white saree with a blue border, Banerjee -- flanked by Bandyopadhyay and OBrien among others - covered the distance from Rome to the St. Peters Basilica by doing a traditional Bengali prabhat pheri (morning choir).

Crowds gathered and passersby also stopped to listen to Tagores Aguner Poroshmoni and Prano Bhoriye Trisha Horiye.
Former Goa chief minister and Union defence minister Manohar Parrikar arrived in Goa amid rumblings in RSS state unit following the ouster of its chief Subhash Velingkar. Parrikar, who landed in Panaji on Saturday night, was expected to meet chief minister Laxmikant Parsekar on Sunday.

He is likely to meet the chief minister to take stock of the situation, a senior BJP leader told PTI on the condition of anonymity. The crucial meeting between the two leaders is kept away from the media glare considering the sensitivity of the issue.

Parrikar is also expected to meet state BJP leaders during his stay in the state capital.

He is likely to be in Panaji till Tuesday as the state will celebrate Ganesh festival on Monday.

The senior BJP leader would be attending festivities at his ancestral place in Parra near Mapusa town.

Velingkar had taken on the BJP government in Goa over its support for English-medium schools and was ousted from his post as RSSs state unit chief on August 31.

He had blamed Parrikar and Union minister Nitin Gadkari for the action against him.

Velingkar, who claimed that hundreds of RSS workers and supporters have rallied behind him, had also asserted that the Sangh unit in the state will function independently of the parent body, at least till the Assembly polls.

However, later striking a conciliatory note he had said there was no rift in the organisation and the differences would be sorted out soon.
India on Sunday raised with China its planned economic corridor with Pakistan that runs through PoK, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi telling Chinese President Xi Jinping that the two sides should be sensitive to each others strategic interests.

Asserting that fight against terror should not be motivated by political considerations, Modi said it was of paramount importance that we respect each others aspirations, concerns and strategic interests to ensure durable bilateral ties.

In his meeting with Xi ahead of the G20 summit, Modi conveyed Indias concerns over the $46-billion China- Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) being laid through Pakistan occupied Kashmir.

Besides a host of energy projects, the Chinese government and banks will finance Chinese companies to lay rail tracks, roads and pipelines to ferry oil and gas from Gwadar port in Pakistans south to Kashghar in Xinjiang in Chinas northwest.

India has opposed the project as it claims Gilgit-Baltistan and PoK, which New Delhi says are occupied territories.

To a question if the terrorism emanating from the CPEC region was discussed, external affairs ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup told reporters the issue was raised during the meeting.

Modi said both India and China need to be sensitive to each others strategic interests and called for specific actions to prevent growth of negative perception.

In order to promote positive convergence, we would also need to prevent growth of negative perception. For this, the specific actions by both countries would play the major role, Swarup quoted Modi as saying.

On his part, Xi said China was willing to work with India to boost bilateral cooperation. China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound relations and further advance their cooperation, state-run Chinese Xinhua news agency quoted Xi as saying.
A building that houses the deputy commissioners office in Kashmirs Shopian was set on fire by a crowd on Sunday after clashes erupted between security forces and protesters. More than 50 people were injured in the violence, an official said.

The incident came on a day an all-party delegation arrived in the Valley to hold talks to end a wave of violence triggered by Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wanis killing on July 8.

No official was present in the building when it was attacked, the police control room said.

Several people were earlier injured after forces fired pellets and tear gas shells to disperse protesters in Pinjura village of the district.

Residents said violence broke out after the police and CRPF personnel tried to disperse a protest rally.

The all-party delegation will review the ground situation and explore ways to end the ongoing unrest that has paralysed life in the Valley for the past 58 days.

Seventy four people -- 71 civilians and three local policemen  have been killed in clashes since Wanis killing.

PDP leaders house set on fire

In another incident, a mob torched the house of a Peoples Democratic Party leader in Kulgam district, where chief minister Mehbooba Mufti had gone on Saturday to offer condolences to a man whose son had been killed in the violence. The PDP leader had facilitated Muftis visit to the family of Mashooq Ahmad, almost two months after his death.

Protesters asked Gulzar Ahmad Shaikh to quit the PDP and ensure the release of four youth arrested for protesting against the CMs visit.

Anger against the PDP is growing. House of leaders have been targeted and many asked to leave the party.

With inputs from Toufiq Rashid
The Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM), an affiliate of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), has upped the ante against governments policies that it blames for the proliferation of Chinese products in Indian markets.

The announcement came on the day when Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in Beijing for the G20 Summit, raised concerns with China over the CPEC. SJM functionaries said a ban on the import of Chinese goods will be the theme of its Swadeshi Saptah, a week-long event to mark the birth anniversary of Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyay on September 25 and Mahatma Gandhi on October 2.

At a meeting of its central working committee, it was decided to intensify campaign against FDI reforms announced by the government, import of Chinese goods and GM crops.

The SJM has been at odds with the BJP over the issue of allowing FDI in key sectors such as defence, food processing and pharma. It has criticised the NDAs economic policies for not creating jobs or giving impetus to small and medium businesses.

There is an invasion of goods from China, which is killing our own manufacturing. We want the government to put curbs on imports from China. Even developed countries are beginning to turn from globalisation to protectionism, Ashwani Mahajan, co-convenor of SJM, told HT.

SJM, which supports domestic production, will organise public events to create awareness about the pitfalls of GM foods.

We dont want to lose sight of what is happening in the field of GM foods, we want to keep up the pressure on the government, not to give in, he said.

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A 26-year-old Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh worker was hacked to death by suspected CPI (M) supporters in the politically volatile Kannur district on Saturday after a party member was injured in a bomb attack.

This is the fifth political murder in the district after the Left Front government came to power in Kerala three months ago.

Bineesh was killed by a suspected group of Communist Party of India (Marxist) workers who hurled home-made bombs at him and then attacked him with sharp-edged weapons in Thillankeri village, police said.

Bineesh suffered serious injuries to his head and died in a private hospital. The RSS has called a shutdown in the district to protest the killing.

Bineesh was assaulted two hours after a CPI (M) worker was seriously wounded in a bomb attack allegedly carried out by RSS workers.

The enmity between the two parties in Kannur goes back three decades and has claimed more than 250 lives.

Kannur is to the CPI(M) in Kerala what Nagpur is to the RSS. Feudalism, poverty, a rigid caste system and little development offered the CPI (M) a fertile ground in the district. Bulk of the partys star leaders including AK Gopalan, EK Nayanar and KPR Gopalan come from this area.

When the RSS started making inroads, tension was bound to rise.

Streets have been bloodied by the cadres of both sides, which blame each other every time a life is lost or a new cycle of violence and revenge killings begin.

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Pope Francis on Sunday declared the Blessed Mother Teresa a saint at the canonization mass held at St Peters Square in the Vatican City.

Thousands were gathered at the square that leads to St Peters Basilica, an Italian Renaissance church and home to the Pope, to witness the canonization that was fast-tracked. Mother Teresa, popularly known as the saint of the gutters for her humanitarian work for the destitute, was declared saint just 19 years after her death. In most cases, saints have been declared scores of decades after their deaths.

Read | Pope Francis declares Blessed Teresa a saint at Vatican canonisation

Saint Teresa of Calcutta  the city where she dedicated her life to her work and set up the Missionaries of Charities  became the fifth Indian to be made a saint. The others to be canonised are Father Kuriakose Elias Chavara, Sister Euphrasia and Sister Alphonsa. Saint Gonsalo Garcia, though of Portuguese parentage, was born in India and is considered an India-born saint. So is Joseph Vaz, the first saint from Sri Lanka. Born in Goa, Vaz was educated and ordained as a priest in India, and the Vatican said the two countries had special significance at his being raised to sainthood.

Sister Alphonsa, October 2008

The Catholic nun was born in Kudamaloor, a village near Kottayam in Kerala, to Joseph and Mary in 1910. She took the veil in 1928, naming herself in honour of St Alphonsus Ligouri. From 1930 till the end of her life, Sister Alphonsa struggled with many health issues. In 1936, it is said that she was cured of some of her ailments through Kuriakose Elias Chavara (yet to be made saint at the time). However, she finally died from liver issues in 1946 in Bharnanganam, near Kottayam.

Almost immediately after her death, claims of miracles began circulating. These often involved the children from the school she had taught at. Most were claims of medical cures, and in many cases, the straightening of clubbed feet.

In 1953, Cardinal Tisserant initiated the process for her beatification. Four decades after her death, Pope John Paul II beatified her in 1986. On June 1, 2007, Pope Benedict cleared Sister Alphonsas name for canonization, and eventually named her saint on October 12, 2008. Sister Alphonsa became the second India born and the first Indian woman to be canonized.

Read | Sister Alphonsa becomes Indias first woman saint

Father Kuriakose Elias Chavara, November 2014

Kuriakose Chavara was born in 1805 to Catholic parents in Kerala. He took up priesthood in 1829.

The process for his beatification was initiated by the Archbishop of Changanassery in 1958.

Twenty eight years later, in 1986, when Pope John Paul II visited Keralas Kottayam, he declared the priest as Blessed, recognising one miracle of his. Finally, on November 23, 2014, Pope Francis canonized him as saint after a second miracle was recognised.

The two miracles that raised Chavara to sainthood include the cure of Joseph Mathew Pennaparambil who was born with club-feet and the cure of Maria Jose Kottarathils squint eye.

Read | Indians, Chavara and Euphrasia, conferred sainthood by Pope Francis

Mother Euphrasia, November 2014

Mother Euphrasia was canonized at the same time as Saint Kuriakose Elias Chavara.

Born in October 1877 at Arnattukara in Thrissur, Kerala, she was popularly known as Evuprasiamma.

Euphrasia was more meditatively inclined, and chose to live in the confines of a convent in Thrissur helping people through prayers and wise counsel. She died in 1952.

She was declared Servant of God in 1987 and beatified in 2006 after the approval of a miracle attributed through her intercession by the Vatican panel set up to consider her case for Sainthood.

She is known for the cure of Thomas Tharakans bone cancer. A day before surgery, scans showed that Tharakans tumour had simply vanished.

Joseph Vaz, January 2015

Joseph Vaz was born in April 1651 in the seaside town of Benaulim in southern Goa, which was under Portuguese rule. His parents, Cristovao Vaz and Maria de Miranda, were devout Catholics. He was ordained a priest in 1676 and volunteered to go to Sri Lanka, where the Dutch were persecuting Catholics and imposing Calvinism.

A few years later, he entered Jaffna in north Sri Lanka disguised as a coolie. Taken for a Portuguese spy, he was imprisoned in 1691 and sent to Kandy. He was released two years later by King Vimaladharna Surya II, a Buddhist, after his prayers are believed to have brought rain to end a prolonged drought. He tended to the sick when the king fled Kandy during a small-pox epidemic. He died in Kandy in January 16, 1711.

Credited with the revival of Catholicism in Sri Lanka, Vaz was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1993 and was declared a saint on January 14, 2015 by Pope Francis at an open-air mass in Colombo.

Read | Indian who revived Catholicism in Lanka

Saint Gonsalo Garcia, June 1862

Gonsalo Garcia was born in Vasai near Mumbai (then Portuguese India) to an Indian mother and Portuguese father in 1556. He was accepted to the Franciscan order. He was eventually sent to Japan as a part of a delegation, under the orders of the King of Spain, because of his fluency in Japanese. However, during a political fall out, missionaries were rounded up, including Garcia, and sentenced to death.

Afterwards, a series of miracles in Nagasaki were attributed to Father Garcia, and in 1627, Pope Urban VIII declared Garcia and his co-martyrs Blessed. On June 8, 1862, Pope Pius IX canonized him as Saint Gonsalo Garcia.

For full coverage on Mother Teresas canonization click here
Thousands of pilgrims thronged to St Peters Square on Sunday for the canonisation of Mother Teresa, the tiny nun who cared for the worlds most unwanted and became the icon of a Catholic Church that goes to the peripheries to tend to lost, wounded souls.

Pope Francis is declaring Mother Teresa a saint at a morning Mass, making her the model of his Jubilee Year of Mercy and in some ways his entire papacy. For Francis, Mother Teresa put into action his ideal for the church to be a merciful field hospital for the poorest of the poor, those suffering both material and spiritual poverty.

Read: From Gonxha Agnes Bojaxhiu to Saint Mother Teresa: A storyboard

Throughout the night, pilgrims prayed at vigils in area churches and flocked before dawn to the Vatican under heavy security to try to get a good spot for the Mass that was expected to draw more than 100,000 people.

Christians gather to pray in front of a statue of Mother Teresa at The Our Lady Queen Church in Siliguri. (AFP Photo)

I think most of all we are thankful to her (Mother Teresa) for the message, for really changing our lives with her example, humility, being close to the poorest of the poor, said Simone Massara as he prayed with his wife at a vigil at the Basilica of SantAndrea della Valle before the Mass.

While Francis is clearly keen to hold Mother Teresa up as a model for her joyful dedication to the poor, he is also recognizing holiness in a nun who lived most of her adult life in spiritual agony sensing that God had abandoned her.

Click here for live updates

According to correspondence that came to light after she died in 1997, Mother Teresa experienced what the church calls a dark night of the soul - a period of spiritual doubt, despair and loneliness that many of the great mystics experienced. In Mother Teresas case, it lasted for nearly 50 years - an almost unheard of trial.

For the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who spearheaded Mother Teresas saint-making campaign, the revelations were further confirmation of Mother Teresas heroic saintliness. He said that by canonising her, Francis is recognising that Mother Teresa not only shared the material poverty of the poor but the spiritual poverty of those who feel unloved, unwanted, uncared for.

A Missionaries of Charity nun greets Pope Francis upon his arrival in St Peter's Square at the Vatican for a jubilee audience for workers and volunteers of mercy on Saturday. (AP)

What she described as the greatest poverty in the world today (of feeling unloved) she herself was living in relationship with Jesus, he said in an interview on the eve of the canonization.

Sundays festivities honouring Mother Teresa werent limited to Rome: In Kolkata, where Mother Teresa spent a lifetime dedicated to the poor, a special Sunday Mass was held at the orders Mother House. Volunteers and admirers converged on Mother House to watch the canonisation ceremony, which was being broadcast on giant TV screens in Kolkata and elsewhere.

Sisters of Charity sisters planned to distribute food to the poor nearby after the ceremony, and community meals were being served across Catholic parishes in India on Sunday - a symbolic reference to Mother Teresas lifetime of service to humanity, said the Rev. Savarimuthu Sankar of the archdiocese of New Delhi.

A giant picture of Mother Teresa is displayed outside the Missionaries of Charity Mother house in Kolkata. (AP Photo)

Ceremonies were also expected in Skopje, Macedonia, where Mother Teresa was born, and also in Albania and Kosovo, where people of her same ethnic Albanian background live.

Born Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu August 26, 1910, to Albanian parents in Skopje, Mother Teresa came to India in 1929 as a sister of the Loreto order. In 1946, she received what she described as a call within a call to found a new order dedicated to caring for the most unloved and unwanted, the poorest of the poor.

In 1950 she founded the Missionaries of Charity, which went onto become a global order of nuns - identified by their trademark blue-trimmed saris, as well as priests, brothers and lay co-workers.

She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

She died in 1997 after a lifetime spent caring for hundreds of thousands of destitute and homeless poor in Kolkata, for which she came to be called the saint of the gutters.

St John Paul II, her most ardent supporter, fast-tracked her for sainthood and beatified her before a crowd of 300,000 in 2003.

Full coverage of Mother Teresas canonisation here
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday met his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull who assured his countrys support to Indias bid for the NSG membership and the two leaders agreed to deepen the bilateral defence and security cooperation.

Prime Minister Modi thanked Turnbull for Australias pro-active support to Indias membership of the elite nuclear trading club when the two leaders met on the sidelines of the G20 summit, external affairs ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup said.

Prime Minister Turnbull assured that Australia will continue to support Indias inclusion in the NSG, he said.

Indias efforts to join the grouping suffered a setback in June when the NSG plenary held in South Korea decided against accepting its membership application after China and some other nations opposed entry of a non-NPT signatory.

The two leaders discussed defence and security cooperation. In this context, both the sides positively accessed the recent Naval exercises held between the two sides and agreed to remain in touch, Swarup said after their talks.

The issue of terrorism was also discussed during the meeting and Prime Minister Modi said that it is important for all the democratic forces to come together to counter this challenge, the spokesperson said.

Swarup said the PM told Turnbull that Indias neighbourhood, in particular, is suffering from the destabilising effects of terrorism.

Even Russia, China, Afghanistan were all facing terrorism threat emanating from our region and it was important for us to identify the suppliers, exporters and financiers of terrorism. Otherwise, the world is going to face a huge challenge in coming weeks and months, Modi said, apparently referring to Pakistan from where terror groups such as Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Taliban operates.

Prime Minister Modis overall message was that we need a unified approach on countering terrorism, Swarup said.

Modi said India-Australia relations are full of energy and the implementation of the mutually agreed projects and programmes have been considerably speeded up under Turnbulls guidance.

The two leaders also discussed the possibilities of trade and investment ties between India and Australia.

In the context of trade, both the sides felt that much more can be done and if the comprehensive economic cooperation agreements between Australia and India could be speeded up that would certainly provide much more momentum to their ties.

Modi also sought the support of Turnbull in encouraging the Australian pension funds to invest in India. He also sought Turnbulls support for clean coal technology.

Because of Indias clean energy targets, it is important for us to adopt as much clean coal technology as possible and this is an area in which Australia has proven expertise. Whether it is underground mining or other form of mining, Australian companies can provide us those technologies, he added.


Parts of the Great Indian Desert and the barren Rann of Kutch could be a thriving economy with no water problems if Union minister Nitin Gadkaris dream of building a 850-km long canal from Gujarat to Rajasthan becomes a reality.

I have a dream project to make a 850-km long canal from Kandla at the border of Gujarat/Rajasthan to Jaisalmer and Jalore. This will change the economy of Rajasthan and Gujarat, the road transport, highways and shipping minister told PTI.

The project, he says, is in a preliminary stage and will use Arabian sea water from Gujarat to Rajasthan to transform the barren Rann of Kutch and Thar Desert regions into thriving economy.

The project will not only solve the water crisis in Rajasthan but will also result in clean drinking water, salt, gas to run urea plants, reduce power tariff and promote coastal movement of coal, lime and other products besides employing at least 1,000 youth, he said.

We will make water ports in that canal. It is in a preliminary stage. The project will have 1,000 MW electricity generating capacity from sea water. Its byproduct will be salt. From salt we will manufacture gas to run CNG vehicles, drinking water will be there. We will leave this water in canal, the minister said.

He said all adjoining rivers will be linked to the canal and during floods the river water will be released in the canal.

While one side of the canal will have highways, the other will see coming up of railways, he said adding that land will be no problem for the project as it is all desert and a government company has already surveyed it.

Funding too will not be a problem as WAPCOS (Water and Power Consultancy Services), a Government of India undertaking, was ready to invest in the project.

On funding requirements, he said it is yet to be assessed though the preliminary assessment estimated roughly Rs 5,000 crore expenditure.

The minister was hopeful that the gas obtained from salt manufacturing will be used to set up a urea plant there that in turn will reduce the urea prices by at least 30 per cent there.

Elaborating about the project, the minister said the idea was to select about 1,000 unemployed youth who in turn would be provided with Rs 2 crore loan each to buy three trucks, two JCBs and one pokland.

He said the idea was to provide 1 km earth work to each of the selected unemployed youth and they can recover the machinery cost from the project.

Also, once the project is operational, lime from Rajasthan can be sent to Odisha through waterways as at present lime was being imported in the state from Dubai, Gadkari said.

Explaining further, the minister said Talcher, which has 60 million coal production has planned to ramp it up to 300 million and the entire coal can be transported for Maharashtra and Gujarat power plants through Mahanadi Brahmani waterways which is under construction.

While returning, the ships carrying coal to Kandla could take lime from Rajasthan and this way it could easily be transported.

Transportation of coal through waterways alone could benefit the country by Rs 16,000 crore while coal transportation cost would be cheaper by Rs 1,200 per tonne. Power cost in turn will reduce by 75 paise to Rupee one per unit, the minister said.

He said regions like Jaisalmer and Jalore where water has to be transported even during rainy season through railways will have sufficient water.

Gadkari exuded confidence that the project will make Rajasthan accessible by water transport.
The Kashmiri separatist leadership was cold on Sunday to advances of a breakaway group from an all-party delegation, which tried to meet and speak to them at their homes and in prisons.

The snub reaffirmed their remarks that the 30-member political team, led by Union home minister Rajnath Singh, from New Delhi was in the Valley for a photo-op, and not to solve the crisis.

Hurriyat hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani turned back CPI(M)s Sitaram Yechury, JD(U)s Sharad Yadav, D Raja of the CPI, Jaiprakash Narayan Yadav of the RJD  all leaders of opposition parties at the Centre  from the gates of his Hyderpora home in Srinagar.

The octogenarian Geelani, who is under house arrest, sent a message  that he doesnt want to meet the politicians  through a small opening in the locked gate.

The group called on former Hurriyat head Abdul Ghani Bhat at his home in Jawahar Nagar, JKLF leader Yasin Malik at Humhama jail, and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Shabir Shah at Cheshma Shahi guesthouse, which is a temporary prison.

Separately, AIMIM leader Asaduddin Owaisi met the Mirwaiz, the Valleys chief cleric and moderate Hurriyat leader, Shabir Shah.

Read | Over 150 injured in clashes as MPs delegation visits Kashmir Valley

The response for the politicos was cold all along, and the separatists refused to discuss the Kashmir situation. The state has been on the edge as 73 people have died in clashes with security forces since the killing of a militant leader on July 8.

The all-party delegation reached the Valley for a two-day visit to review the situation and look for ways to end the unrest, which has drawn comparison to the crisis in 2010.

Shahidul Islam, a close aide of the Mirwaiz, said: There should be formal talks with all three top leaders (Geelani, Malik and the top cleric). What is the point of meeting like this?

The group of four from the delegation, however, remained upbeat. CPI(M) leader MY Tarigami said the quartets aim was to tell the separatists their fellow countrymens concern about Kashmir.

Their visit was for a limited purpose ... and they did it, he said.

The delegates faced anti-India and pro-freedom slogans outside Geelanis home. Why dont you release the leaders from house arrest and jail, and talk, a protester said.

The separatists denounced the delegations visit, saying such measures will prolong peoples sufferings in the troubled state.

They didnt spare chief minister Mehbooba Mufti either. The sickness of her mind touched a new low when she recently tried to justify Indian brutalities, saying Kashmiri boys dont go out to camps with milk and toffees; that seemed to even embarrass her Indian boss sitting beside, a statement said.

For her part, Mufti invited the separatist leadership for talks with the all-party team. She, however, insisted the invitation was in her capacity as the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chief, indicating coalition partner BJP was not part of the push to talk to the separatists.

Hyderabad parliamentarian Owaisi tried to corner the chief minister, asking why large-scale incidents are occurring in south Kashmir, a PDP stronghold.

National Conference leader and former chief minister Omar Abdullah was sceptical, though. Efforts like this have lost credibility as there was no follow-up of the previous visit in 2010, he said.

During his hour-long interaction with the team, he recalled visits of such delegations since 1990 and cited former Prime Minister PV Narasimha Raos unfulfilled promise of sky is the limit for Kashmiris.

More than 100 people were killed in the 2010 uprising and the separatists met a breakaway delegation at their homes.

Ahead of the current teams visit, the Centre approved a chilli-based shell as an alternative to pellet guns to control mobs. Pellet guns, considered a non-lethal weapon for mob control, have maimed and blinded hundreds of protesters, adding to the anger in the Valley.

The move failed to impress the people. Kashmir-based trade associations decided not to meet the delegation, saying such half-hearted measures wont do.

In 2010, we met them and gave our feedback; they went to Delhi and forgot everything. Now they want to hear the same thing again. Its a mockery. Some members of the current delegation were here last time as well, said Mushtaq Ahmad Wani, the president of the Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Reporters and photographers had waited for more than an hour outside separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelanis residence in Hyderpora area of Srinagar on Sunday before all-party delegation members Sitaram Yechury, D Raja and Sharad Yadav arrived in a cavalcade.

A police van, complete with a makeshift facility for the men to lie down and make tea and snacks, stood next to the gate of the house where Geelani is under detention.

Yechury was the first to come out his car and a horde of mediapersons surrounded him, bombarding with questions. The CPI(M) leader walked past the journalists towards the green gate, followed by D Raja and Sharad Yadav.

But a man peeped out of an opening in the gate and told the leaders that Geelani would not be meeting them. It was breaking news. As the three leaders started their walk back, reporters called up their bureaus and blared out Geelani refuses to speak to leaders. Policemen on duty, including some top cops escorting the delegation, waited and watched.

Television journalists surrounded the leaders asking them for a byte. The leaders told reporters about working together to find a solution, about ending the turmoil and ensuring peace in Kashmir.

Yechury said the visit was part of an outreach to end the unrest while Raja said that they wanted to hear what the separatist had to say but regretted that they did not want to talk. When a journalist asked Raja about whether Kashmiris would get azadi, he replied about winning back the hearts of Kashmiris.

By then, local residents, mostly middle-aged men in kurta-pyjama had gathered around the leaders. One asked Yadav why the government hasnt released the separatist leaders if they wanted to talk to them.

For these locals, elected representatives seemed to be irrelevant.

Talking to Omar Abdullah or Mehbooba Mufti is of no use. Talk to the separatists if you want to hear the actual thing, one shouted at the leaders.

In a few minutes, intense sloganeering started. Shouts of Hum Kya chahte ... Azaadi and Go India Go Back reverberated in the air while the cavalcade tried to move out of the lane into the main road.

Yadav, Yechury and Raja had earlier gone to meet Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) chief, Yasin Malik at a police hub turned into a prison at Humhama, near the Srinagar airport. Malik met them for a few minutes.

Separately, Asaduddin Owaisi of the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen went to meet moderate Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq at Chashma Shahi where a tourist hut has been converted to a sub-jail. But the meeting was quite short.
Almost 7,200 kms away from the Vatican and 400 kms from Kolkata, all eyes are glued to the television inside a small house in West Bengals Nakor village. However, despite excitedly waiting for Mother Teresas canonization for days, and in some cases years, the audience missed it due to a prolonged power cut.

For 50-year-old Monica Besra, Mother Teresas first miracle, Sunday was unforgettable, and also disappointing.

Read | Pope Francis declares Blessed Teresa a saint at Vatican canonization

What can I say? I am so happy. But also sad at the same time. There was a power cut and I missed it on TV. For me seeing it was a life ambition, Besra said over the phone to Hindustan Times.

A prayer service took place in the morning at a chapel in the village located at Harirampur, South Dinajpur. Inaugurated in January this year, the chapel was named in hounour of Mother Teresa.

We have a new chapel here and its named after Mother. We had a special service. At home, we have a TV. My eyes were glued to the TV, but suddenly there was a power cut and I missed it. Now I have to wait till the evening when they show it once again, Besra said.

Apart from the Besras, a priest at the local church also arranged for a television for all villagers to watch. But the power outage left them disappointed too.

Read | Monica Besra: Teresas miracle woman in Bengal begins day with special prayers

Besra, a mother of five, suffered from ovarian cancer. But in September 1998, a medallion and a photograph of Mother Teresa was placed over her, and Besras cancer was cured. This is the first miracle that led to the beatification of Mother Teresa.

The Pope last year recognised a second miracle attributed to Mother Teresa -- the 2008 recovery of a Brazilian man suffering from multiple brain tumors, paving the way for her canonisation by the Vatican.

We are all happy. I have never seen my mother so happy. We all celebrated together but only for the power cut we could not see it. Power cut is a major problem in our area, the womans eldest son, Gopinath said.

Besra was scheduled to travel to Raiganj, the nearest town, with a priest of a local church to attend an evening service for Mother.

For full coverage of Mother Teresas canonization click here

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The right-wing Hindu Yuva Vahini (HYV) on Sunday honoured 70 gau rakshaks (cow vigilantes) in Varanasi, which is Prime Minister Narendra Modis parliamentary constituency.

The felicitation was held around a month after the PMs remark denouncing anti-social elements masquerading as gau rakshaks.

The HYV, which held the event at the Nagar Nigam auditorium, is headed by Yogi Adityanath, the firebrand BJP MP from Gorakhpur. Adityanath was not present at the event.

The outfit honoured 70 gau rakshaks from several districts, including Azamgarh, Chandauli, Ghazipur, Mirzapur, Bhadohi, Jaunpur, Mau and Varanasi at the Hindu Yuva Sammelan.

Those who have been honoured here are true gau rakshaks. They deserve to be honoured. They are protecting and serving the cows with utmost dedication, said Sunil Singh, the HYV state president.

Singh said such events were also organised in other parts of the state where those serving cows were felicitated. He added that HYV activists were involved in cow protection across the state.

The PM, first at his MyGov Town Hall in New Delhi on August 6 and then again at a rally in Hyderabad, had said that he felt immense anger at anti-social elements donning the garb of gau rakshaks to conceal their criminal activities.

Asked about his take on the PMs statement, Singh said, I agree with him. We have honoured the true gau rakshaks. They serve the cows and protect them.

Several hundred HYV activists from different parts of the eastern UP districts participated in the event where the slogan Jai Shri Ram was shouted. A souvenir: Rashtra Gaurav was released on the occasion.

Singh called upon the HYV workers to work to achieve the goal of making India a Hindu nation.
Her family didnt want Preeti to keep seeing her much-married boyfriend, a father of two. So the couple hatched a plan -- to murder and elope.

On Sunday morning, 19-year-old Preeti Bhadana and 26-year-old Sonu were arrested by the Noida police for the murder of her parents, her aunt, a cab driver and a tantric, almost a week after their bodies were pulled out of a canal in Badaun, 180km from here.

The two have confessed to the murders, police said, adding the body of the tantric (occultist) was recovered a day later but that of the driver is yet to be found.

The Bhadanas, who came from Greater Noidas Nawada village, had on August 26 decided to visit a Badaun shrine the family frequented and hired a Maruti Eeco taxi.

These visits were an opportunity for Preeti to meet Sonu. Preeti and Sonu wanted to marry but her family was against it, as Sonu was married and had two children, Greater Noida superintendent of police (rural) Abhishek Yadav said.

They were in a relationship for two years and every time the family visited Badaun, Sonu would follow them, Yadav said. Preeti would trick her family into spending some time with Sonu, a resident of Meerut.

As soon as the family reached the shrine, Preeti offered them a bottle of water in which she had mixed 30 pills of a sedative, police said.

The family -- father Raje Bhadana, mother Dharmwati, uncle Rajender, aunt Priti, brother Lalit  driver Om Pal and tantric Saleem, a local, went into a stupor.

Her sister-in-law Sheetal, who is pregnant, threw up after drinking the water and escaped the worse effects of the drug.

As the drug began to take effect on others, Lalit convinced his family to see a doctor after they offered a chadar at the shrine. He was driving the family -- Pal was in no condition to move -- when Preeti insisted that he offer a separate chadar, Yadav said.

Lalit, Sheetal and Rajender went back to the shrine and that is where the police found them, drugged but alive.

Preeti by then had called Sonu, who was in the area. He was driving the Maruti Eeco when a Badaun police patrol stopped the vehicle and asked about Raje and Dharmvati, who were lying unconscious. But Preeti somehow managed to convince them and they were allowed to go.

Sonu headed for the canal with Raje, Dharmvati, Preeti, Om Pal and Saleem in the car.

The two pushed the vehicle into the canal, killing all five, Yadav said.

Preeti and Sonu then fled to Allahabad. They waited for things to cool down and were planning to return to Sonus house in Meerut but were nabbed at Bulandshahr railway station. Sonus phone location tied him to the crime and also helped police to trace the couple.

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One person was killed and at last 15 were injured when a tempo hit a motorcycle on the Chintpurni road near Manguwal, 15 kilometres from here, before rolling down a 70 feet deep ditch on Sunday.

The tempo was carrying pilgrims from a religious place in Himachal Pradesh. Locals and police rushed the injured to a hospital.

The tempo was hired by pilgrims from Ludhiana for to and fro journey. The injured said the driver was drunk and just a few minutes before the accident, he had asked another person to drive.

Motorcyclist Hardip Singh, 24, of Jagraon died on the spot while the pillion rider Chand Singh, also of Jagraon, sustained serious injuries and has been admitted to a hospital. They were returning from Chintpurni.

Two of the injured tempo occupants were referred to the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh.

Police have registered a case against the tempo driver.
Two youths in their twenties died of drug overdose at Daulewala village in Moga district last week.

The village, 17km from Moga, is notorious as the drug haven of Punjab with most of the villagers, including children, indulged in drug smuggling.

Sukhchain Singh, 25, of Manava village in Kot Isse Khan was found dead at an isolated place at Daulewala village on Saturday night. In a statement to police, his father Gurdeep Singh said Sukhchain went to see an orthopeadician on Saturday morning at Daulewala but didnt return. I and my younger son went to look for him and found him dead at an isolated place, he said.

Investigating officer Jaswinder Singh said the youth died of drug overdose and the body was handed over to the family after initiating inquest proceedings under Section 174 of the Code of criminal Procedure (CrPC) at the Fatehgarh Panjtoor police station.

Also read | Kanjli wetland: From a picnic spot to haven for drug addicts

Earlier on Wednesday, Gurbinder Singh, 20, of Rauke Kalan village also died of drug overdose at Daulewala. In the first information report, his father Thana Singh stated that Gurbinder and his friend Sandeep Singh, an alleged drug peddler, had gone to Daulewala to meet Kishan Kaur, who used to supply drugs. Gurbinders condition deteriorated after taking the drug and he died on way to the hospital, he said.

Also read | Udta Punjab: Facts, figures and falsehoods of states drug problem

Police have registered a case against Kaur and Sandeep under Section 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

There have been incidents when villagers have thrashed policeman when they went to nab drug peddlers. On June 16, twelve people, including a woman, helped a drug peddler escape after thrashing five cops of the anti-narcotic and drug cell. Earlier on June 1, a police team from Fatehgarh Panjtoor was overpowered by the villagers when they went to arrest the proclaimed offender, Tirlok Singh, of Daulewala. As soon as the police took him into custody, the villagers started pelting them with stones.

Also read | Punjab police recruitment: 63 test positive for drugs in Malwa belt

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Stepping in to set the partys Punjab house in order, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) national convener Arvind Kejriwal will station himself in the state till the assembly polls early next year.

In a three-minute video clip recorded by Punjab-origin supporters of the party in Italy on Saturday, Kejriwal said he would be in the poll-bound state from September 8 to 11 after which he would be off for 10 days for a surgery. After that, I will be in Punjab and will take charge of the state unit in my hands, he said.

The appointment of an otherwise political lightweight Gurpreet Singh Ghuggi as the partys convener in Punjab also points towards the AAPs top leader taking over the party reins in the state.

Seven of the 13 zone coordinators of the party split on September 2 throwing their weight behind the sacked convener Sucha Singh Chhotepur.

Read | Exit Chhotepur, enter more trouble for AAP: Outsider faultline exposed

Hinting at taking a final decision on Chhotepur, who is yet to be removed from the party following a cash packet sting video, Kejriwal said all those who have done anything wrong would be thrown out. He added that those who were upset with the party, including volunteers, would be coaxed to come back. Kejriwal added that the party was a victim of a misinformation campaign of the opposition parties.

Party sources add that Kejriwal will be meeting party men working at various levels, hoping to get a direct feedback about AAP leaders in Punjab. He will also hold meetings with volunteers supporting the breakaway faction.

Read | In damage-control mode, AAP asks Delhi observers to leave Punjab

AAP leader Durgesh Pathak being is blamed for the organisations disintegration in Punjab. (HT File Photo)

Party rebels allege that Kejriwal was not open to feedback against the national organisation building in-charge Durgesh Pathak and his team of Delhi observers. Whenever we sent a message to Kejriwal for a meeting, we are told by his personal assistant that we should meet Durgesh or Sanjay Singh (the party affairs in-charge in Punjab). He never appreciated that we wanted to meet him about them. Where do we go if we have something to share in confidence about Durgesh? said Jeevanjot Kaur, member of the intellectual wing of the party.

Must read | Durgesh Pathak: AAPs builder getting the bricks

Non-resident Indian Amandeep Singh Boparai, a party volunteer who founded the partys unit in the San Francisco Bay area in 2013, and is working with the anti-corruption wing of the party, said he met Kejriwal on August 19 after the first two lists of candidates were announced. We had gathered inputs about the candidates from party volunteers. Some did not come clean on the three C criteria (corrupt, characterless, criminal) of the party for a candidate. We shared the inputs with him after which he said: Have you found anyone qualified or not? After saying this, he walked out of the meeting, Boparai said.

The final programme of Kejriwals tour from September 8 to 11 is yet to be decided. He will be in Moga on September 11 to release the farmers manifesto. The partys top man is also likely to finalise the location of a new home in Punjab during this trip.

Read | AAP donation graph in Punjab falling

AAPs co-incharge in Punjab and Delhi MLA Jarnail Singh said the party would not purchase a house for Kejriwal but would take one on rent or would ask a party volunteer make the national convener his guest till the elections. Where will it be located is still to be decided, he said at a press conference on Saturday.

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A petite 20-year-old girl looks nervous reciting the ardas (prayer) on Thursday at Bhaini Sahib, headquarters of the Namdhari sect, near Ludhiana. Suba (area head) Balwinder Singh hears the ardas and announces her pass. He then asks her brother to deposit sawa rupaye (one rupee, 25 paise), the amount the dera charges for organising the marriage ceremony. Before leaving, the girls mother asks him if her daughter can wear a white dupatta with white beads  a taboo in the sect that preaches simplicity and puritan way of life. The suba nods and adds: We have to change with changing times.

Not far away, boys as young as seven are practising the tabla in the kala kendra and girls riyaaz of santoor and dilruba. The voice of peacocks mingles with the evening kirtan at the gurdwara. But the tranquillity is broken by a police escort vehicle that announces the arrival of Jagtar Singh, the once-powerful son-in-law of sect matriarch Chand Kaur, in a SUV. The sprawling bungalow of the satguru is out of bounds for commoners and commandos of Punjab Police at every gate remind you of the bloody feuds that have convulsed the community distinguished by its white attire.

Exactly five months after two men had murdered the 85-year-old matriarch in broad daylight, many Namdharis have reconciled to the two factions headed by elder brother Thakur Dalip Singh and the anointed head, Satguru Uday Singh. But Chand Kaurs murder remains unsolved. It is the precise knowledge of Kaurs whereabouts to the killers that has the police working on the insider hand theory. But it has not gone beyond tracing mobile call records and confiscating phones of the absentee driver, Kesar Singh Ladi. Though the bitter succession war between the brothers over control of the multi-crore Namdhari empire is seen as the motive for the murder, many palace intrigues abound the sect. Some believe Kaur was trying to forge unity between the brothers and some others see a property angle as she had a huge inheritance. Both the brothers have openly accused each other of having a motive.

Between them, they have also entangled the two governments of Punjab and Haryana, where Sirsa-based dera of Dalip is located. The cloak-and-dagger games in the Namdhari Darbar even before the last sect head, Satguru Jagjit Singh, passed away in 2012 without nominating his successor saw Bhaini Sahib, which used to issue a hukumnama (edict) to its followers to vote for Congress, align with the ruling Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD). Dalip, with his area of influence in Haryana and parts of Punjabs Doaba and Majha, has openly announced his support to the SAD and BJP governments in the two states.

Must read | HT Spotlight: Many intrigues in bitter Namdhari succession war

Why not CBI probe ?

Many Namdharis believe the police probe to be influenced by political pressure and question if the Punjab government could refer attack on RSS leader Jagdish Gagneja to the CBI then why not Kaurs murder. But Ludhiana police Commissioner Jatinder Aulakh denies any political pressure. The political pressure is to solve the case. We have announced Rs 10 lakh reward and so has the dera. But we have not been able to get any concrete evidence, Aulakh adds. So far the faction of Uday Singh has been silent on demand for a CBI probe. That of the Thakur too does not want to discredit the police probe. The police is doing its investigation. If they cannot solve it, we can explore other options, says Suba Balwinder Singh, also Satgurus close aide. We are fully satisfied with the police probe. But if the government decides to go to a higher authority, we will support it, says Thakur Dalips close aide Navtej Singh.

Divided sect

Though most Namdharis have accepted one or the other brother as Satguru, the factional war continues. In an open letter liberally distributed among followers, Satguru Udays faction has accused Thakur Dalip of lies, being disobedient to Satguru Jagjit Singh and inciting violence. Dalips followers describe the allegations as falsehood. Dalip is also trying to widen his base by reaching out to Hindus and Sikhs. Last year, he had asked his followers to wear the kirpan (sword)  in a bid to align with the Akalis  and last month held Janmashtami celebrations in Ludhiana with saffron-clad sandhus and political leaders to woo Hindus.

Split within families

The divide can be seen even within families -- between brothers, sisters, even husband and wife. Many faithfuls are even losing the faith. I have sent my children to a school in a neighbouring village. We no longer want them to hear and get influenced by the hostility. Earlier we were proud to be Namdharis. Now people link our community clad in white with bloody feuds, says a sweet shop owner in Bhaini Sahib, requesting anonymity. Outside the Bhaini Sahib gurdwara, 75-year-old Master Darshan Singh, who has taught both the brothers, fondly remembers the old times. Its all in the hands of the almighty. We did not create any divide between them nor can we bridge it, he says.

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The decision of state government to again hand over Government Adarsh School at Hardasa in Ferozepur, to private players has irked students, parents as well as staff members. Adarsh school has remained in controversy since its inception in 2011. After being run for two years by Baba Ishwer Singh Education Society till 31 March 2013, it was handed over to another private company, Educom.

But when the latter could not run it, its administration was facilitated to Zira sub divisional magistrate which has been running the school for past three years.

The state government has decided to handover the said school besides the other six in the state to private players.

There are more than 1,900 students from 129 villages and after collective efforts school functioning has come on track but state government decided to re-hand the same to private players who have no aim for education but to exploit it monetarily, charged a parent Sukhdev Singh.

In case of any dispute, future of students is on stake so government should, he demanded further.Teaching and non- teaching staff have been managing the school for the past five years, rued one of the staff member.

Even though state government assured to facilitate students with free books, uniform and transportation but nothing was done. Still the strength has increased manifold every year, revealed a staff member pleading anonymity. They have been contributing from their own pockets. Even the building is incomplete, added staff member.

On Friday, a number of parents, students along with staff member of Adarsh school Hardasa, had protested against the decision of state government apprehending embezzlement of funds by private organisations.

They demanded rolling back of government decision and also the salaries of staff to be given as per government employees.

The Adarsh schools scheme was initiated among much fanfare in 2011 by the chief minister (CM) Parkash Singh Badal.

The basic objective was facilitating quality education to promising rural students.

Under the said policy, poor rural students are entitled to free education, for which the Punjab Educational Development Board (PEDB) was set up under the chairmanship of CM.

Under the public private partnership (PPP) model for schools, the monthly operational cost was to be shared in 70:30 ratio by the Punjab government and private players respectively. Panchayat land is provided to these schools free of cost, while the construction has to be borne by the government and the private player in equal proportion.
Even as nominations were filed on Friday, student organisations took a different turn after members withdrew and alliances were finalised on Saturday. The day of withdrawals for the Panjab University Campus Student Council (PUCSC) 2016 elections saw inter-party bickering and mergers at the same time.

Panels of SOI-ABVP, NSUI-SOPU, NSUISF-PUSU alliances after withdrawals at Panjab University on Saturday. (Ravi Kumar/HT Photos)

Also read | Panjab University: We dont matter, say intl students

According to the final list of candidates, seven candidates are contesting for the post of president. With poll math and departmental presence coming into play, the student council elections narrowed down to a three-way battle. The list was released after withdrawal of nominations by a number of candidates, following which major parties worked on forming alliances till late in the evening. A major and the oldest student body Panjab University Students Union (PUSU) was divided into two parts just before the release of candidate list.

Led by Satwinder Singh, PUSU president Naval joined hands with NSUISF and NSO, who jointly declared biotechnology student Nishant Kaushal as the presidential candidate.

The party split when senior member Amandeep Kamboj took some members to join with NSUI, SOPU, PUHH, HIMSU and HPSA. The president of this huge alliance is law student Siya Minocha, the first female presidential candidate to be named from a major student party.

Students Organisation of India (SOI) has formed an alliance with Indian National Students Organisation (INSO), Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) and HPSO. The alliance fielded Piyush Anand from the Urdu department as its presidential candidate.

Must read | PU polls: Violence a possibility as April 9 firing main accused still at large

Society for Students (SFS) is contesting only for the post of president. Amritpal Singh is their presidential candidate.

Youth Congress chief Amrinder Singh Raja Warring was also spotted on campus.
While verbal battle continues among the leaders of different political parties in the state, on the sidelines, an accessory war is underway here in the wake of upcoming assembly elections.

The parties are using customised accessories such as badges, car stickers, key chains and caps to score points over the rival parties and woo the voters.

Presently, Congress seems to be leading as accessories in large number are being distributed, especially in Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD)-dominated constituencies and villages of the district.

Read more | Halke Vich Captain: As Amarinder sweats it out, Congress rank and file smiles

During the Halke Vich Captain and Coffee with Captain programmes of Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee (PPCC) chief Captain Amarinder Singh, which were held in different constituencies, what stood apart was the long queue of people to get the blue-coloured badges with blue turban drawn on it and stickers with Captains photograph for mobile phone covers.

With Punjab Da Captain and Chahunda Hai Punjab, Captain Di Sarkaar written on them, these accessories are now being distributed among youth in rural areas by teams of Prashant Kishor - the political strategist of Captain.

The team is offering maximum variety as of now with their products ranging from 3D key chains, T-shirts and soon to be launched car stickers - which the SAD and AAP have already come up with. The SAD workers arent behind either as they have been asked by the leadership to flood these areas with promotional accessories of the party. SADs Proud to Be Akali badges - which deputy CM Sukhbir Singh Badal flaunts at almost every public appearance - has reached the youth in rural areas.

Even the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) workers can be seen distributing their signature cap in rural areas like Sahnewal, Jagraon, Dakha.

Captains team has already paced up its drive to catch up. Speaking to HT, a staff member of Prashant Kishor team said, So far, we have distributed around 20,000 badges, 15,000 caps, 2.5 lakh 3D key chains and 2 lakh non-3D key chains to people but maximum demand is for mobile stickers. Almost five lakh stickers have already been distributed. We are also coming up with car stickers.

Gurpreet Singh Gogi, district chief of the Congress said, This is another battle that Congress is winning in most of the areas of the district. It is also an important part of the strategy,said Gogi.

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A day ahead of their planned indefinite protest in Chandigarh, several farmer union leaders and activists were on Sunday taken into preventive custody in a crackdown by Punjab Police.

Krantikarti Kisan Union president Shinder Singh Nathuwala was detained in Moga, while the bodys general secretary, Satbir Singh was taken into custody from Ludhiana district.

Seven farmer organisations had last month given a call for an indefinite protest in Chandigarh from Monday demanding the waiver of outstanding private and government loans for farmers and labourers.

They also sought Rs 5-lakh compensation to families of suicide victims as well as a government job for one of their kins and new tubewell connections along with the installation cost.

They are also demanding land ownership rights for cultivators.

Bharatiya Kisan Union (Ekta Ugrahan) general secretary Sukhdev Singh Kokri said, We were anticipating police crackdown. That is why we had left homes, but some of our leaders were apprehended by the police.

It is high-handedness on the part of the SAD-BJP government, which is snatching our democratic right to protest. We want to protest peacefully, but police are unnecessarily provoking us and picking up our men, he alleged.

Kokri alleged that some 300 leaders and members were held in Bathinda, Moga, Faridkot, Ludhiana and Patiala districts.

Police said that they have detained members of the outfits but refused to specify the number.

The farmer unions include BKU (Ekta), BKU (Ugrahan), BKU (Dakaunda), and Krantikarti Kisan union.
Two persons, including a woman, were killed in a blast that occurred when they were trying to extract metal from a shell-like object that came in scrap in a hutment at Bhangi Choe on the outskirts of Hoshiarpur on Sunday.

Although the area dwellers feigned ignorance as to what caused the blast, police said some persons were trying to extract metal from a scrap mortar which exploded. The blast was so powerful that the body parts of the victims flew several metres away.

One of the five injured, Gulshan, of Shastri Nagar said she had gone to the migrants settlement to collect money when the blast took place. I was thrown a few meters away and limbs of one of the victims fell on me. It was so scary, she said.

Dalbir, in whose hut the blast took place, said he had gone out at the time of incident. His mother Mamo, 60, was killed and his 8-year-old daughter Amarvati received injuries. The other victim was identified as Mohan Lal, 25.

The injured were admitted to the local civil hospital. Additional deputy commissioner (development) Harbir Singh, superintendent of police Kulwant Singh and other officials visited the blast site.

An army training camp is situated in Dada village, 10km from the city from where scrap dealers gather shells and sell the same to earn livelihood. Accidents are common as many a times the devices explode.
Ashok Kumar, a migrant worker, was running high fever and was waiting for his turn to get a bed in the dengue ward of the government-run Guru Nanak Dev Hospital here. As the bed was not available, the hospital authorities asked him to arrange one for himself.

Ashoks brother Manoj, who was accompanying him, had no option but to get a cot on rent from a vendor at hospitals parking. He had to pay Rs 1,000 as security besides a rent of Rs 50 per day. Ashok, who was admitted to the hospital five days ago, was discharged on Saturday.

Another patient, Amar Kaur of Beas, who visited the hospital on Friday, was told that all beds were occupied in the medicine ward. Her daughter-in-law, Kulbir Kaur, then got a bed on rent from a vendor. A visibly upset Kulbir said: I am disappointed. No one cares for a patient. It is difficult for me to do everything alone. I have paid Rs 1, 000 as security for a cot and will have to pay Rs 50 per day as rent. The hospital staff didnt even provide a bed sheet. People come here to get affordable treatment, but it does not even have sufficient number of beds.

Denying that there was shortage of beds at the hospital, medical superintendent Ram Sarup Sharma said: The problem is that the patients outnumber the beds at the hospital. We have 900 beds in all and it all depends on the patients rush.

Kamlesh Kaur of a village near Gurdaspur, who was sitting outside the gynaecology ward said: We brought two beds from home. They (hospital staff) dont allow us to sit inside the ward. Amarjit Singh Nagli, who was accompanying Kamlesh, complained of lack of seating arrangements for attendants.

We purchased a bed instead of depositing Rs 1,000 as security and then paying Rs 50 per day. We got it at Rs 800, said Satnam Singh of Talwindi village near Amritsar.

Lakwinder Singh, who was accompanying his ailing father Rajbir Singh of Verka said: We needed two beds. So, we brought one from our home and took another on rent.

A vendor, who gives beds on rent, told HT that at least 10 patients visit him on a given day, but most of them return as they are not able to deposit the security.
The first Saturday of every September is observed as International Vulture Awareness Day to highlight the substantive decline of the birds population across the globe due to various factors such as pollution, shooting and poisoning, among others. Despite their obvious value to the environment, these birds remain stigmatised and language uses them as a metaphor for predatory, vampiric traits. The parallel in the human world are the Dalits. For centuries they have been trapped into occupations regarded ritually unclean because of their association with scavenging and the cleaning up of death, human waste and menstruation. All scavengers work hard so that the living can thrive in a disease-free environment. The consequences of the loss of scavengers is evident in the vultures decline, and in Gujarat where Dalits are abandoning dead cows with a reprise of Dr BR Ambedkars words, Your mother, you bury her.

But who are the real vultures as popular culture and lazy, traditional use of language would have us believe? The metaphorical use got a fresh lease of local life when Panjab University V-C Arun Grover delivered a broadside on August 29. He termed the 90 senators (who hold multiple memberships of faculties) as a flock of 540 vultures out to tear this prestigious institution apart. Those words got a rejoinder from the powerful community of senators the very next day with Grovers bete noire, Rajesh Gill, coolly declaring, Vultures are meant to clean up and if we senators are vultures, then we are only undertaking a cleanliness drive!

Had Grover described senators as hawks, he would have rendered justice to bird behaviour and the figurative use of language because hawks can rip the living. On the other hand, vultures patiently wait for a creature in the throes of death. Observations at Pinjores Jatayu Conservation Breeding Centre reveal that vultures love baths after feeding, are well-mannered and observe queues while living in groups. Their only inhuman trait is that they will not leave their watchful perch to render help or a glass of water to the dying.

Wheel of fortune

Simmi Bhambra with her pug, Candy, and rescued parakeet, Mithu. (PHOTO: SIMMI BHAMBRA)

The fledgling of a Rose-ringed parakeet stolen from the nest, wings clipped and then abandoned could not have expected such a turnaround of fortune. The stranded parakeet took shelter under the car of Simmi Sherdil Bhambra, a working woman residing in Chandigarhs Sector 45. Fortunately, Bhambra discovered the fledgling before the wheels crushed the hapless bird. She found that it was terrified and could not fly. Bhambra offered the parakeet water and fed it fruits, chillies etc and within a few hours the parakeet had recovered its confidence. The bird started to strut around Bhambras house, playful with her pet pug, and obliged her with some memorable selfies prompting quite a stir on social media apart from eliciting concerns from friends that she should beware of Mithus formidable peck.

The helpless bird gave me such happiness. But I realised it will be better off under care. So, I handed the bird over to the animal care centre (SPCA) in Sector 38. When I came back home after handing over the parakeet, I was happier. The bird will now be with its other parakeet friends at the centre where it will find its own happiness, Bhambra told this writer.

A pictures limitations

(Left) The mystery viper from Kibithu; (right) Musk Larkspur blooms from Ladakh. (PHOTOS: INDO-TIBETAN BORDER POLICE)

In my column from July 10, I had highlighted the remarkable pictures of flora and fauna and high-altitude landscapes that the Indo-Tibetan Border Polices photographers were streaming to its vibrant Twitter handle (@ITBP_official) operated from New Delhi by its competent media specialist, Vivek K Pandey. In the interim, the Twitter handle has posted such delectable images as wrestling Himalayan marmots and Musk Larkspur blooms sprinkled with sugary snow from 17,000 feet in Ladakh. But the ITBP is not able to identify all these nuggets of nature and the mystery image remains a viper photographed on the eastern-most fringe of India in the Kibithu region (Arunchal Pradesh) at 9,000 feet. The ITBP soldiers face snakes by the dozen in these rain forests but have not suffered a casualty - a fortunate outcome as no anti-snake venom serum is available for North-east snakebites.

I asked Indias leading snake taxonomist, Pune-based Ashok Captain, for an opinion by emailing him the vipers photograph. Captain, who is a stickler for counting scales and teeth before he arrives at opinions on complex snake identities, told me, Definitely a pit viper - some kind of Protobothrops. Most probably a form of P.jerdonii; close to P.kaulbacki. Could also be P.himalayanus.

Not satisfied with Captains ambiguous (though precise) assessment, I suggested to him another experts view that it was probably P.jerdonii xanthomelas. That was like fingering an enraged King cobras fangs and Captain came down on me hard. It would be prudent to adhere to the view that the picture cannot establish identity conclusively and the snake is a pit viper from the genus Protobothrops. Aye aye, Captain, point well taken!

(vjswild1@gmail.com)
All illegal immigrants may not be deported from the US if Donald Trump is elected as the next president of the country, a top aide of Republican presidential candidate said on Sunday.

The former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani told CNN in an interview that decision of the rest of the illegal immigrants would be taken only after all criminal aliens are deported.

This is what Trump said in his major policy speech on immigration early this week, he said.

The speech is consistent with what he said in the past, and it leaves a very big opening for what will happen with the people that remain here in the US after the criminals are removed and after the border is secure, he said.

He says in a very, very important sentence, that, at that time, when America is safe, we will be open to all of the options, meaning that Donald Trump, as he expressed in one of his interviews recently, would find it very, very difficult to throw out a family thats been here for 15 years, and they have three children, two of whom are citizens, Giuliani said.

That is not the kind of America he wants. His main focus of that speech, and I think the reason for the emotion in it was because of all of those mothers who came up whose children were killed by illegal criminal immigrants, he said.

What he said in the speech is, after we secure the border and after we remove the criminal illegal immigrants, to a large extent -- youre never going to get to 100% -- then and only then can we look at this in a very rational way in which we can look at all the options and be open to all the options, he added.

The former New York mayor said not all illegal immigrants would have to go back.

There are other options too. I mean, its going to depend on the person. Some of these people could have been on welfare for the last 30 years, or taking benefits or cheating. And maybe some of them have to be thrown out, but not necessarily all of them, he said.
Besides about 300 Indians who live and work here and three Indian restaurants, this eastern Chinese city famous for its tea and the West Lake has an e-connection with India  Chinas e-commerce giant Alibaba which is rapidly expanding its virtual footprint in the Indian market is headquartered here.

Besides investing in Paytm, an e-payment platform in India, the company plans to invest in two logistic companies specialising in deliveries for online retail companies.

The company has been highlighted by the local media as one of the great success stories of Chinese entrepreneurship to have emerged from Hangzhou, which is hosting the G20 summit.

In the first quarter this year, Paytm has become the fourth largest wallet worldwide. It is a third-party payment company in India invested by Ant Financial, which is the sister company of e-commerce giant Alibaba. The number of users of Paytm has been 135 million, 5 times last year when the Ant Financial began its strategic cooperation with it, state-run China Radio International (CRI) said in a report.

Alipay, which is Alibabas third-party payment application, has over 450 million registered users.

Yang Xinyun from the international business department of Ant Financial, told CRI: Paytm has provided Indian users various services including money transfer, tuition payment, utility fees payment and offline payments in places such as gas stations, beverage shops and coffee shops.

According to Yang, Paytm has been able to bring financial services to Indian users whom traditional financial institutions were unable to reach.

With the smart phone and the internet costs lowering, the inclusive finance has already been equipped with the hardware needed. What we need to do is just to enrich and develop the condition to put it into use, concerning not only the payment but also the financial services, Yang added.

Besides the investment, Alipays experience in the e-payment market over the years will enrich the Indian companys functioning, Yang said.

We will give them the experience of more than 10 years of Alipays development. Many obstacles will appear during the development of a production, and sharing with them our past problems will shorten their development cycle to some extent, Yang told CRI.
China on Sunday said it wants to maintain the hard-won sound relations with India and work on deepening synergy and handling bilateral differences.

In a markedly toned-down version of the bilateral meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the ongoing G20 Summit, state media, quoting the President, said: He said both sides had seen healthy, stable and speedy development of their relationship, and that as neighbours and developing countries, they should continue high-level exchanges.

The official news agency, Xinhua, did not mention any of the issues brought up by Modi during their meeting such as terrorism, China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) or for that matter the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) issue.

Instead, the official statement used the rare phrase hard-won sound relations to describe what Xi thinks of the bilateral ties.

It was possibly used to indicate that both countries were working hard to maintain steady ties despite differences.

The only indication that problems plaguing the relations could have been discussed was the line that said Xi told Modi that the two countries should respect and care for each other on issues of major concern, and handle differences in a constructive way.

China and India should continue dialogues at various levels and in various areas, and frequently exchange views on major issues of common interest to enhance understanding and trust, Xi said.

The Chinese president added that the two countries should seek synergy between their development strategies and discuss the implementation of pragmatic cooperation in large projects in infrastructure construction and production capacity.

He proposed that the two sides strengthen people-to-people exchanges and promised that China would continue to encourage Chinese companies to invest in India.

Xi told Modi that China would deepen cooperation with India to jointly contribute more to world economic growth and better global governance within the G20 framework, and support India's efforts to host the upcoming BRICS summit.
Building international opinion on countering terrorism and isolating Pakistan was on top of Prime Minister Narendra Modis agenda during his meetings with world leaders including a crucial talk with President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the 11th G20 Summit in Hangzhou on Sunday.

Modi emphatically brought up the issue of terrorism emanating from south Asia during his bilateral meetings with Xi and Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull and in his speech at an informal meeting of the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) leaders ahead of the G20 Summit.

But Chinas official statement did not mention any of the concerns Modi raised. Instead, it said it wants to maintain the hard-won sound relations with India and work on deepening synergy and handling bilateral differences

In his 35-minute meeting with Xi, Modi said, To ensure development of bilateral ties and their steady development, it is of paramount importance that we respect each others aspirations, concerns and strategic interests.

MEA spokesperson Vikas Swarup said the issue of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC)  which passes through Pakistan-Occupied-Kashmir (PoK)  was brought up during the meeting.

The mention of Indias aspirations would have included New Delhis entry to the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).

Swarup indicated that Modi brought up Chinas decision to block New Delhi from becoming a member of the group with access to sensitive nuclear technology.

But terrorism was the central theme of Modis talks through Sunday.

Tellingly, Modi began his meeting with Xi by extending condolences over the recent terror attack on the Chinese embassy at Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan last week.

Condemning the terrorists attack on the Chinese embassy in Bishkek, he said this was yet another proof of the continuous scourge of terrorism. He reiterated that our response to terrorism should not be dictated by the political considerations, Swarup told Indian journalists.

Modis interventions on terrorism were hard-hitting during his address to the Brics leaders.

I must emphasise how strongly the PM intervened on the issue of terrorism. He said in fact it remains the primary source of instability and the biggest threat to our society and countries, Swarup said.

He said terrorisms supply chains and reach are global. The abuse of social media to promote radical ideologies is the growing dimension of this threat, the MEA spokesperson quoted the PM as saying during the Brics meeting.

Swarup added: He (Modi) said in very hard-hitting intervention that terrorists in south Asia or anywhere for that matter do not own banks or weapon factories. Clearly someone funds (them) and the Brics must intensify its joint efforts not just to fight terrorism but to coordinate its action to isolate those who support and sponsor terrorism.

In a bilateral meeting with Australian PM Turnbull, Modi again talked of terror.

Modi said it was important for all democratic forces to come together to counter this challenge. He said South Asia was now suffering from the destabilising effects of terrorism.

even Afghanistan, Russia, China are facing the threat of terrorism emanating from our region and it is important for us to identify the suppliers, the exporters and financiers of terrorism. Otherwise the world is going to face a huge, huge problem in the coming weeks and months, Modi said.

China focuses on bilateral ties

Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Chinese President, Xi Jinping during a bilateral meeting in Hangzhou, China on Sunday. (PTI)

While Modi made his anti-terror pitch, the Chinese state media in a markedly toned down version of the bilateral meeting between Modi and Xi, quoted the President as saying, Both sides had seen healthy, stable and speedy development of their relationship, and that as neighbours and developing countries they should continue high-level exchanges.

The official news agency, Xinhua, did not mention any of the issues brought up by Modi during their meeting like terrorism, China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) or for that matter the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) issue.

Instead, the official statement used the rare phrase hard-won sound relations to describe what Xi thinks of the bilateral ties.

It was possibly used to indicate that both countries were working hard to maintain steady ties despite differences.

The only indication that problems plaguing the relations could have been discussed was the line that Xi was quoted as saying, China and India should respect and care for each other on issues of major concern, and handle differences in a constructive way.

China and India should continue dialogues at various levels and in various areas, and frequently exchange views on major issues of common interest to enhance understanding and trust, Xi said.

The Chinese President added: Two countries should seek synergy between their development strategies and discuss the implementation of pragmatic cooperation in large projects in infrastructure construction and production capacity.

Modi meets Obama

US President Barack Obama, centre, talks with India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, at the start of the G20 Summit welcome dinner hosted by Chinese President Xi Jinping, in Hangzhou, China, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016. (AP)

Prime Minister Narendra Modi also met Barack Obama, albeit briefly, on Sunday on the sidelines of the G20 summit in China with the US president praising the bold policy move on GST reform in a difficult global economic scenario.

Modi first met Obama briefly when they were onstage to pose for a photograph at the G20 Summit venue in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou. The two leaders had another opportunity to exchange views during an informal evening programme.

(With inputs from PTI)
Becoming a Catholic saint today is much easier than it was at any point of time in the history of papacy, courtesy a far liberalised Church, according to conclusions drawn from a Harvard research paper.

There had been 434 beatifications (blessed) and canonisations (sainthood) in the last 35 yearsan average of 12 per yearcompared to 259 in a 393-year period of 1585-1978, when the annual average was just 0.65.

The maths apart, sainthood has been expanding along another path: geography. More and more people from outside Italy/Western Europe have been anointed as saints in the past three-and-a-half decades by the Rome-headquartered Church, which is one of the worlds oldest religious institutions and has more than 1.27 billion members across continents.

Before we delve into finer details, here is an introduction to the saint-making process and also some basic assumptions for this analysis:

Definitions

Beatification is a step in the process of Canonisation. By it, the Pope allows public veneration of the in the local Church, within the religious congregation with which he or she was associated, and in other places by those who receive such permission. A person who has been beatified is addressed as Blessed.

Canonisation is the act by which the Pope declares that a person practised heroic virtue and lived in fidelity to Gods grace, is with God in heaven and is to be venerated through the whole Church.

You need to perform at least one miracle for beatification and another one for canonisation. A miracle is an extraordinary event, which is scientifically inexplicable and, in a cause for canonisation. It is directly attributed to the person who is being canonised. In the causes of saints, the miracles investigated are usually cures, because they are more easily documented.

Assumptions

For the purpose of this analysis, we are considering a period starting from 1585 to this year. Before 1585, papal approval was not required for canonisation and beatification.

Also for this analysis, we are going to ignore mass canonisations and include only individual canonisations. The numbers boil down to 693 beatifications and 290 canonisations in the above-mentioned period.

Now let us take a look at the pope-wise break-up of canonisations and beatifications.

As can be seen from the graphic, the number of saints and blessed grew manifold in the last three-and-a-half decades compared to the previous 400 years.

About 37% of all beatifications and 43% of all canonisation in the history of papacy happened in the last 35 years.

This was achieved in the recent years, following an alteration in the rules of making saints and the blessed. While the authorities brought down the number of miracles required for the process, they ignored in a lot of cases the waiting periodthe number of years after ones death, before which they cant be considered for sainthood.

Now let us take a look at pope-wise number of beatifications per year.

Number of beatifications per year

As can be clearly seen, the rate of beatification hardly rose above 2 in the 400 years. Then we saw a spurt in it over the last 35 years. As also seen, the curve shows a rising trend that points to a much-higher number of the blessed in the following years.

Number of canonisations per year

This graphic mirrors the results of the previous graphic. As seen above, there is a steep rise in the number of saints anointed each year. Also, a rising curve points to a future, where expect more saints and blessed can be expected.

Let us take a look the number of saints and blessed geographically. The place was decided according to the place of death of each person.

Region-wise saints

As seen from the graph, a chunk of the saints and the blessed have come from Italy, while a meagre 2% belong to Asia. But this trend is clearly changing, according to the initially-mentioned Harvard research paper titled Economics of Sainthood by Prof Robert J Barro.

According to him, through the 1970s, blessed persons were predominantly from Western Europe (including Italy). However, at least since 1980, there has been a clear globalization of the process. For example, from 1980 to 2009, the shares of beatifications were thus: 10% Eastern Europe, 3.5% Asia, 1.9% Africa, 10% Latin America and 5% North America.

Read| Pope Francis declares Blessed Teresa a saint at Vatican canonisation
Danish police say they have no evidence that a gun attack in a Copenhagen suburb known for its hashish trade was ordered by the Islamic State group.

The IS-affiliated Aamaq news agency posted a statement on Friday saying that the attacker was a soldier of the Islamic State who carried out the operation in response to calls to target coalition states.

But Copenhagen police officer Michael Anderson said that they didnt think it was an attack ordered by Islamic State. He declined to comment any further.

On Thursday, Danish police wounded a gunman accused of shooting two officers and a bystander during a drug raid. Police identified him as Mesa Hodzic, a Danish citizen who apparently sympathised with Islamic extremists, but said they didnt believe this influenced the shooting.


Donald Trump shut his eyes and swayed ever so gently to the beat of a gospel song at a church for African Americans in Detroitthe Republican nominees first such visit as part of a larger effort to court a community that has been deeply hostile to him.

Our nation is too divided, Trump said after the service on Saturday, reading from a script. The septuagenarian spoke softly in a measured tone devoid of his usual bombast. We talk past each other, not to each other. And those who seek office do not do enough to step into the community and learn whats going on. They dont know. They have no clue.

At Michigan states most populous city, the presidential candidate spoke for nearly 10 minutes  short by his standard; invoked his partys icon Abraham Lincoln who ended slavery; and called for a civil rights agenda our time. But Trump did not use the you dont have anything to lose line he has deployed lately to ask Blacks to give him a chance, arguing Democrats have only taken advantage of their support.

African Americans have voted mostly Democratic for decades now and overwhelmingly since 2008 when President Barack Obama first ran for the White House. His Republican rivals John McCain (2008) and Mitt Romney (2012) managed only 4% and 6% of Black votes respectively. Trump will do even worse if his current numbers hold  he managed only 1% in a recent poll to rival Hillary Clintons 91%.

Trump cannot win the White House without expanding his support among African Americans and Hispanics, the two largest ethnic minorities in the country. And he is struggling with both.

Trump started out with the Hispanic community on the wrong foot, describing illegal immigrants, most of whom are of Hispanic, as rapists and criminals. He proceeded to compound his problems questioning the impartiality of a federal judge overseeing cases against Trump University because he was of Mexican descent.

The 70-year-old nominees problems with African Americans run deeper, and for much longer. His company was once accused of discriminating against African Americans who wanted to rent housing structures it constructed.

Trump also became a leading member a section of conservatives called birthers who questioned President Obamas fitness to be president fanning conspiracy theories about him being born outside the US, which would disqualify him for the White House, and his faith  that he is Muslim, like his Kenyan father.

And earlier this year, the nominee, who was then in the middle of the primaries, refused to denounce support from a former member of the racist Ku Klux Klan, saying he didnt know him.

Now, all of that is coming to haunt him as he seeks the communitys support. Tristin Wilkerson, co-founder of Black and Brown People Vote, a bipartisan activist group, told The Washington Post that Trumps message is getting no traction because he has been so flat-out disrespectful and inconsiderate of African Americans and people of colour and their contributions to this country.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday raised with Chinese President Xi Jinping the issue of terrorism emanating from Pakistan, Beijings all-weather friend, in a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hangzhou.

Modi told Xi that countries have to be responsive to each others sensitivities, Indias external affairs ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup said at a press briefing after the meeting.

The two leaders were meeting for first time after new irritants have cropped up in the already tenuous Sino-India relations plagued by a festering border dispute, Beijings close ties to Islamabad and a massive trade surplus in favour of China.

China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound relations and further advance their cooperation, President Xi said during the 30-minute meeting.

The Sino-India partnership was important for the region and also for the world, Modi told the Chinese leader. India and China should understand each others aspirations and concerns for better ties, Swarup quoted the PM as saying.

The leaders of the worlds 20 biggest economies, including the US President Barack Obama, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the new UK Prime Minister Theresa May, have gathered in this scenic city -- about an hour on a bullet train from Shanghai in eastern China  for the two-day summit.

US President Barack Obama and China's President Xi Jinping, with their delegations, hold a bilateral meeting ahead of the G20 Summit, at West Lake State Guest House in Hangzhou, China. (Reuters )

Ever since the beginning of this year, there have been new disturbances in our bilateral relations. But I am glad to find that after foreign minister Wang Yis visit to India, the situation is stabilising, said Hu Shisheng, south Asia expert at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

Hu said it was a good move by the two foreign ministries to establish a new mechanism at the level of the foreign secretary and the deputy foreign ministers to discuss all kinds of sensitive issues. The most important part is that the two sides should communicate... frankly and candidly.

The list of old and new differences between the two neighbours is long: China taking the lead in blocking Indias bid to enter the NSG that controls global trade in nuclear technology, Beijing opposing UN sanctions against Jaish-e-Muhammed chief Masood Azhar, the suspected mastermind of the Pathankot airbase attack, to name a few .

Though officially China has been calm about it, it will not be a surprise if Xi raises with Modi Indias recent signing of the logistics exchange memorandum of agreement (Lemoa) with the US, asking him to clarify the countrys doctrine of non-alignment.

Read | China, US ratify Paris climate change accord, India likely to see pressure

China though is not worried about the agreement, an expert said.

There is no panic in China over Lemoa. It doesnt mean US will use Indian bases... China is not worried. China and India relations are not a zero sum game, Ye Hailin, director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at the elite Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Cass) told HT.

India will not give up its independent foreign policy. There is no formal military alliance with the US and there is no shift in Indias strategic doctrine.

Bilateral trade needs some impetus, experts say.

In 2016, the bilateral trade from January to May has fallen nearly 6% to $26 billion compared to the same period last year. The chronic problem of trade deficit for India  and trade surplus for China  for the five months in 2016 is nearly a whopping $20 billion.

Indian community from Hangzhou welcomes PM Modi at his hotel. (HT Photo)

Hangzhou, the host city

Modi reached Hangzhou late Saturday night and was welcomed at his hotel by an enthusiastic group of the city-based Indians.

For the resident of Hangzhou, recent weeks have meant living through increasingly tight security  so much so that nearly two million residents have left the city to avoid the inconvenience.

For one, you might not get a glass of fresh fruit juice, which for some inexplicable reason is being seen as a security threat and banned in many places.

Then, you as a conscientious citizen of the city might be asked to contribute by wiping out four pests  flies, cockroaches, mosquitoes and rodents. A campaign to wipe out the pests has been on since March and is reaching a crescendo this weekend, according to reports in state media.

Airports and railway stations have been on alert for days and armed personnel deployed across the city to keep a watch.

As many as 150 checkpoints have been put up on the streets and traffic re-routed especially around the summit venue.

According to official news agency Xinhua, more than 3,900 volunteers recruited from universities will help in the summit logistics.

The volunteers, who are mostly college students and teachers who can speak a foreign language, were chosen from over 26,000 applicants from 15 universities across Zhejiang province, volunteer coordinator Wang Huilin told Xinhua.

China has temporarily shut down more than 200 companies around Hangzhou and put restrictions on vehicles to check pollution.
The G20 Summit beginning in Hangzhou on Sunday is a platform where world leaders should discuss the role Multilateral Development Banks can play in bridging infrastructure gap and generating balanced growth, a top official of the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) has said.

A month ago, in the run-up to the summit, the Chinese government called a meeting of all major MDBs such as the AIIB and the New Development Bank (NDB) of the Brics to discuss the road ahead.

India is one of the founding members of AIIB, which was launched in April 2015 and now has 57 members. A broad consensus emerged after the meeting of MDBs in Beijing.

Asian banks have to work together and find a way so that growth can be generated. It has to be generated across the globe. I think the G20 has to discuss it (growth) and it is here that MDBs like the AIIB can play a vital role in fulfilling the vision and bridging the gap, DJ Pandian, AIIBs vice-president and chief investment officer, told Hindustan Times in Beijing.

The focus of this years G20 Summit is growth, Pandian said.

Worldwide, growth hasnt been as expected in the last seven to eight years. How to put growth as the main agenda for the world economy is the focus (at the G20). This is where AIIB has a big role, said Pandian, a former chief secretary of Gujarat.

Big infrastructure projects usually cost more than $1 billion to $1.5 billion and private banks or even individual MDBs might not have the capacity to fund such projects, he said.

It is here that the G20 can streamline cooperation between different entities by setting an agenda and readying a framework for growth.

We need to come together. The collaboration between various banks will be discussed whether it is AIIB or NDB. It is the time for collaboration and cooperationit is time for leveraging advantages, Pandian said.

It is also important to launch mega projects to trigger growth, he added.

Elaborating on projects the AIIB is looking at, Pandian said: We are looking at roads, highways, high-speed rail networks, dedicated freight corridors and development of ports. These are the major infrastructure projects which can take two to three years to complete and require capital upfront.

India is looking at AIIB to partially meet its huge demand for infrastructure.

India has a huge unmet demand for investment in infrastructure and is preparing a basket of projects worth $2-3 billion for AIIB funding in urban development (including smart cities), energy, urban transport, railways, inland waterways and water supply, an Indian embassy statement had said during finance minister Arun Jaitleys visit to China in June.


The United States and Russia are working around the clock to try to strike a deal to reduce violence and improve access to humanitarian help in Syria, President Barack Obama said Sunday, but added that the US was skeptical it would work.

Obama, speaking on the sidelines of the Group of 20 economic summit in China, said the US and Russia still have grave differences about whats needed to end Syrias civil war and which opposition groups are legitimate targets for the US and Russian militaries. But he said it is worth trying to secure an agreement nonetheless.

Were not there yet, Obama said. I think its premature for us to say theres a clear path forward, but theres the possibility at least for us to make some progress.

Obamas comments came as US secretary of state John Kerry and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov are deep in talks over a deal to boost US and Russian military cooperation to fight the Islamic State group and other extremists in Syria  a step Moscow has long sought. The emerging deal is expected to also include provisions to ensure aid can reach besieged areas of Syria and steps to prevent Syrian President Bashar Assads government from bombing areas where US-backed rebels are operating.

Though negotiators have been hopeful a deal could come together while world leaders are gathered in Hangzhou for the G20, that optimism has been tempered by the failure of previous ceasefire deals to hold. The US has long been wary of increasing military coordination with Russia in Syrias civil war because it says Russia continues striking moderate, US-backed opposition groups in a bid to prop up Assad. The US wants Russia to focus exclusively on IS and al-Qaida-linked groups.

These are difficult negotiations, Obama said. He added later: If we do not get some buy-in from the Russians on reducing the violence and easing the humanitarian crisis, then its difficult to see how we get to the next phase.

Discussions about the intractable Syria conflict and the related fight against IS have been a major focus as world leaders gather for the G20, which brings together the worlds major economies. Obama, who met first Sunday with new British Prime Minister Theresa May, also planned to discuss Syria when he meets with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, their first sit-down since the summers failed coup in Turkey.

The attempted overthrow in Turkey has accelerated the deterioration in the relationship between Turkey and the United States. It led to Turkish accusations of US involvement, and those tensions have been aggravated by growing clashes between Turkish forces and US-backed Syrian Kurds.

The Obama administration has expressed concerns about Erdogans crackdown on the press and, in the weeks since the coup, mass firings of teachers, military personnel and others accused of associating with the opposition.

The US has also expressed concern about Turkeys recent operations across its border into Syria. The Pentagon has backed the incursions, but said they should only be aimed at IS fighters. Turkey has used the operations to push back Syrian Kurds it accuses of seeking to claim more territory.

For the US, the dispute is a reminder of its increasing entanglement in the long-standing local rivalries and conflicts exposed by Syrias civil war.

Since the failed coup, the US has been alarmed by Turkeys diplomatic flirtations with Russia, Syrian President Bashar Assads patron, and apparent softening of its tone about the need for Assad to be excluded from a political transition. At the same time, the US continues to work toward an agreement with Russia to cooperate more closely in the fight against IS in Syria.

In his first meeting with May since she took office in Britain, Obama sought to demonstrate American solidarity with the UK amid the tumult over its decision to leave the European Union. He and May both said their countries would continue an ambitious trade agenda together, though Obama conceded that Britains first task was to figure out its new trade relationship with its EU neighbors.

Obamas previous suggestions that the US would prioritize ongoing US-EU trade talks over a one-on-one deal with Britain rankled London, but Obama said it was never intended to be a punishment.

The bottom line is we dont have a stronger partner in the world than the United Kingdom, Obama said. And despite the turbulence of the political events over the last several months, we have every intention of making sure that continues.

May, echoing Obamas commitment to continue close cooperation with the US on economic and security issues, sought to put to bed any notion that the U.K. would hold another referendum or reverse course on the EU exit, or Brexit.

The UK will indeed be leaving the European Union, she said.


US President Barack Obama held candid discussions with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the thorniest issues in the relationship between the worlds two largest economies, the White House said in a statement on Saturday.

Obama emphasized to Xi that China should abide by a recent arbitration ruling against its claims in the South China Sea, live up to a bilateral deal on hacking and cybersecurity issues, and uphold human rights including religious freedom.

The president reaffirmed that the United States will work with all countries in the region to uphold the principles of international law, unimpeded lawful commerce, and freedom of navigation and overflight, the White House said in a lengthy statement after the meeting.
Bangladesh summoned Pakistans envoy in Dhaka on Sunday to protest its interference in the countrys internal affairs after Islamabad said it was deeply saddened by Jamaat leader and 1971 war criminal Mir Quasem Alis execution.

Bangladesh additional foreign secretary for bilateral affairs Qamrul Ahsan summoned Pakistani high commissioner Samina Mehtab and protested against the reaction.

The opinion that Pakistan gave over the execution of Mir Quasem Ali was entirely tantamount to interference in Bangladeshs internal affairs, Ahsan said after the meeting.

Pakistan reacted just an hour after the hanging of the 63-year-old media tycoon last night, the sixth Islamist to be executed for war crimes committed during the 1971 war.

Its Foreign Office said in a statement that Pakistan was deeply saddened over the execution of the prominent leader... through a flawed judicial process.

Ahsan said he told the Pakistani envoy that Mir Quasems trial took place in a very transparent manner, in front of everybody.

(Mir Quasem) had scopes to appeal against the judgment and he exhausted the scopes. The apex court thought he deserved the punishment what he was handed down as he took part in the genocides in 1971, Ahsan said as having told the envoy.

Officials said the meeting between the diplomats lasted for 20 minutes.

Nothing much to say, Mehtab told reporters after coming out of Ahsans office.

Mir Quasem was the infamous pro-Pakistani Al-Badr militias third most important figure. He was convicted of running Al-Badrs torture cell that killed several people.
Pakistan on Saturday night said it was deeply saddened by Bangladeshs execution of Jamaat-e-Islami leader Mir Quasem Ali and alleged that he was hanged after a conviction through a flawed judicial process.

Pakistans reaction came just an hour after the hanging of 63-year-old media tycoon, the sixth Islamist to be executed for war crimes committed during Bangladeshs 1971 Liberation War.

Pakistan is deeply saddened over the execution of the prominent leader of Jamat-e-Islami, Bangladesh, Mir Quasem Ali, for the alleged crimes committed before December 1971, through a flawed judicial process, a Pakistan foreign office statement said.

The act of suppressing the Opposition, through flawed trials, is completely against the spirit of democracy. Ever since the beginning of the trials, several international organisations, human rights groups, and international legal figures have raised objections to the court proceedings, especially regarding fairness and transparency, as well as harassment of lawyers and witnesses representing the accused, it said.

Pakistan also called upon the Bangladeshi government to uphold its commitment, as per the Tripartite Agreement of 1974, wherein it was decided not to proceed with the trials as an act of clemency.

Recriminations for political gains are counter productive. Pakistan believes that matters should be addressed with a forward looking approach in the noble spirit of reconciliation, the statement said.

It said Pakistan offers deepest condolences to the bereaved family members.


In an impoverished and war-battered territory suffering food shortages and a scarcity of jobs, Saeed al-Ar knew it was a tall order opening a dog shelter in Gaza.

The Palestinian coastal enclave crammed with 1.9 million people has been devastated by three wars against Israel since 2008, and it remains under blockade by the Jewish state and Egypt.

The fate of hundreds of stray dogs outside towns or near the Israeli security fence have been anything but a priority.

How can we create a shelter for strays when we need shelter ourselves? is the typical view, as expressed by a 27-year-old unemployed Gazan, Jasser al-Sheikh.

We must first feed our children and find jobs for thousands of unemployed graduates.

But Ar, a 45-year-old father of seven, has taken it upon himself to intervene, spending his own money to rescue the strays.

Last month, he opened the territorys first dog sanctuary in a relatively well-off suburb south of Gaza City.

His Al-Soulala Association for Protection, Rehabilitation and Training covers 2,700 square metres (29,000 square feet), complete with kennels which currently house around 75 former strays.

Behind beige tarpaulin on a vast sandy expanse, dogs are fed and given training to run and jump obstacles.

Dogs play at a shelter of the Al-Soulala Association for Protection, Rehabilitation and Training, in the Al-Zahra municipality in central Gaza Strip. (AFP Photo)

This is the first kennel in Palestine that supports stray dogs and domesticates them, Ar told AFP.

He used to run a police unit for dogs specialising in the detection of explosives and drugs, and admits that canines have always been his passion.

When the Islamist movement Hamas seized power in Gaza in 2007, Ar found himself out of a job. But he still collects a salary and now dedicates all his time to the dogs.

Shot or poisoned

In the predominantly Muslim territory, religious authorities consider dogs to be unclean or impure.

Some Gazans even shoot at stray dogs that approach their children or orchards, while others find them scary and blame them for accidents.

The authorities lack the resources even if they were inclined to intervene.

In the past they even tried to poison strays, but stopped the culling over concerns that it was also dangerous to humans, a municipal official said on condition of anonymity.

The kennel aims to catch stray dogs, provide veterinary services and help domesticate them.

Since its opening, the kennel has attracted a growing number of visitors, many of them children. Some have asked to adopt a pet, a trend picking up in Gaza.

The phone rings constantly with people reporting strays in their neighbourhood.

In such cases, search teams are sent out, said Mohammed al-Hindi, 24, a recently graduated nurse and one of 25 volunteer helpers.

Palestinian children look at dogs behind a fence at a shelter of the Al-Soulala Association for Protection, Rehabilitation and Training, in the Al-Zahra municipality in central Gaza Strip. (AFP Photo)

Every morning, the volunteers tour participating restaurants and stores to collect leftover meat and chicken for the dogs, in a sign of changing attitudes in Gaza.

But Ar said he has already spent $35,000 and cannot make ends meet on his own much longer.

The centre needs $5,000 a month to function properly, said Ar, who has launched an online appeal to animal protection groups and lovers across the world.

We have to get help because at the moment we are doing this with our own money.

On a brighter note, he said local authorities have promised him a larger plot of land. He dreams of a giant kennel, with a dog food factory and a veterinary clinic for all stray animals.
Turkish troops and allied Syrian rebels expelled the Islamic State group from the last strip of territory it controlled along the Syrian-Turkish border on Sunday, effectively sealing the extremists self-styled caliphate off from the outside world, Turkeys Prime Minister and a Syrian opposition group reported.

Also on Sunday, Syrian pro-government forces backed by airstrikes launched a wide offensive in the northern city of Aleppo, capturing areas they lost last month and besieging rebel-held neighbourhoods, state media and opposition activists said.

Turkey-backed Free Syrian Army rebels have cleared the area between the northern Syrian border towns of Azaz and Jarablus, Turkeys Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, said.

From Azaz to Jarablus, 91 kilometers (57 miles) of our border has been completely secured. All the terrorist organizations are pushed back, they are gone, Yildirim said, speaking at a dinner with non-government organizations in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir.

The FSAs advance shut down key supply lines used by IS to bring in foreign fighters, weapons and ammunition.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said IS has lost its link with the outside world after losing all border areas with Turkey. It said the last two border villages that IS held were Mizab and Qadi Jarablus, which were taken Sunday afternoon.

IS had occupied the border area even before it declared its self-styled caliphate in June 2014, and it used the Turkish border to bring in fighters from around the world. The extremist group, which controls parts of Syria and Iraq, is now surrounded from all sides by hostile forces.

Read | Islamic State says its spokesperson al-Adnani killed in Syria

The loss of its territory along the Turkish border follows a series of recent defeats for IS, including its expulsion from the central Iraqi city of Fallujah and its defeat in the former stronghold of Manbij in northern Syria. Airstrikes by the US-led coalition have killed a number of the groups most prominent founding members and leaders.

In a statement, Turkeys armed forces said the the Jarablus-Azaz line has been connected. Turkey has long pushed for a safe zone in Syria between these two towns, with a plan to house Syrian refugees there. Turkey hosts an estimated 3 million Syrian refugees, the highest number in the world.

Meanwhile, the recapture and return to siege of rebel-held parts of Aleppo dealt a major blow to insurgent groups. They have lost scores of fighters in recent weeks in the battle to open a corridor into the city and lift the governments blockade.

After the government laid siege on Aleppo for the first time in July, the United Nations said that nearly 300,000 residents were trapped in rebel-held neighbourhoods, making it the largest besieged area in war-torn Syria. The city has been contested since the summer of 2012.

Sundays push follows a month after insurgents captured several military academies south of Aleppo and opened a corridor into opposition-held parts of Syrias largest city and onetime commercial centre. Since then, government forces and their allies have been trying to recapture the area.

State TV quoted an unnamed military official as saying that troops are now in full control of the military academies south of Aleppo and are chasing the remnant of terrorists. It added that all roads linking rebel-held eastern Aleppo with opposition areas outside the city have been cut.

The Observatory confirmed these gains. The (rebel-held) neighbourhoods are under siege again, said the Observatorys chief, Rami Abdurrahman, by telephone. The whole areas are under complete siege.

Turkey has launched two incursions into Syria since August 24 in an operation designed to drive IS away from the border and prevent the advance of US-backed Kurdish forces, which are also battling the extremist group.

Read | 40 dead as Turkish shelling, raids hit Syrian civilians

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim on Sunday defended his countrys intervention in Syria, pointing to their long shared border. We are there to protect our borders, ensure the safety of our citizens lives and property, and to protect the territorial integrity of Syria, Yildirim said in Diyarbakir.

Turkey has also said it will not allow Syrian Kurds to unite their cantons, the regions under their control in northern Syria, which have emerged as autonomous zones during the civil war. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a joint press conference with US President Barack Obama in China that our wish is that a terror corridor does not form on our southern border.

Turkey views the Kurds as a threat and the Turkey-backed forces have clashed with them outside Jarablus.

In an emailed press statement, Turkeys military said the FSA have taken 20 villages from IS, adding that the Turkish army struck 83 Islamic State group targets. Since the Turkish operation began on August 24, the army says it has hit 383 targets with 1,599 rounds.

Read | Turkey does not accept ceasefire with Syrian Kurd militia
US forces have hit Islamic State group targets along Syrias border with Turkey using a newly deployed mobile rocket system, American officials said Saturday.

A US Army High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) carried out a successful strike on Friday on a tactical unit and building belonging to the IS group, Major Josh Jacques, a spokesman for US Central Command, told AFP.

US President Barack Obamas anti-Islamic State envoy Brett McGurk said on Twitter US forces hit the jihadist targets with the newly deployed system.

The detachment, which allows the United States to strike a target with a high degree of accuracy and a significantly greater range, was deployed to Turkey in support of the US-led anti-IS mission, Jacques said.

HIMARS is unique in reducing the potential collateral damage as it impacts a target at a high angle, has a relatively small blast radius for the effect achieved, and functions in all weather conditions, he said.

The US embassy in Ankara posted on Twitter that it was the latest step in US-Turkey cooperation in the fight against ISIL (IS).

HIMARS has been used over several years in previous operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The weapon system is incorporated into our normal deliberate targeting cycle and has been for quite some time, Jacques said.

Precision strikes conducted by HIMARS are similar to the (US-led anti-IS) coalitions precision airstrikes; HIMARS is a complementary asset and involves US troops operating artillery from the soil of a NATO ally, he said.
Keith Vaz, the senior-most British MP of Indian origin, announced his resignation as chairman of a key parliamentary committee after he was caught in a sting operation with male prostitutes in his London flat, details of which were splashed by tabloids on Sunday.

The mass circulation Sunday Mirror reported that Vaz, who is chairman of the influential Home Affairs Committee of parliament, paid for the services of four male escorts in August. A long-time Labour MP from Leicester East, Vaz, 59, is a married father of two children.

The tabloids went to town with photographs from the sting operation, his remarks during the encounter as well as his purported text messages to the male escorts, reported to be European.

After the story broke, Cambridge-educated Vaz suggested that the Sunday Mirror may have paid the male escorts involved in the sting operation. The committee he chairs has been examining the issue of laws related to prostitution in Britain.

He told BBC: It is deeply disturbing that a national newspaper should have paid individuals to have acted in this way. I have referred these allegations to my solicitor Mark Stephens of Howard Kennedy who will consider them carefully and advise me accordingly.

Born to Goan parents in Aden in 1956, Vaz is the fourth Indian-origin MP to be elected in the history of Britains parliament in 1987 (the previous three were Dadabhai Naoroji in 1892; Mancherjee Bhownagree, 1895; and Shapurji Shaklatvala, 1922).

He has held the Leicester East seat since 1987, and has been in the forefront of Indian/Asian participation in British politics.

Active in Britains Indian community, Vaz has several friends in Indian politics and films, some of whom campaign for him during elections. His sister, Valerie Vaz, is also a Labour MP from Walsall South.

In a statement reported by the Mail on Sunday, Vaz said: I am genuinely sorry for the hurt and distress that has been caused by my actions in particular to my wife and children. I will be informing the Committee on Tuesday of my intention to stand aside from chairing the sessions of the Committee with immediate effect.

At this time I do not want there to be any distraction from the important work the Committee undertakes so well, he added.

A Labour Party spokesman said: Keith Vaz has issued a statement on this matter. As with all departmental select committees, Keith was elected to the chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee by the House of Commons, and his position is a matter for him and the House.

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DHAKA: Bangladesh hanged a top Islamist party figure on Saturday for atrocities committed during the 1971 war of independence from Pakistan, an official said.

Proshanto Kumar Bonik, a senior jail superintendent, told reporters that Mir Quasem Ali, known as a business tycoon and top financier for the party, was hanged at 10.30pm. (Bangladesh time) inside Kashimpur jail in Gazipur district.

Hours after his family members met Ali inside the jail house, the excursion happened amid tight security.

The execution took place as Ali on Friday told authorities that he would not seek presidential clemency for his crimes.

It followed Tuesdays rejection by the countrys Supreme Court of a final appeal for scrapping the death sentence given by a special tribunal in 2014.

Ali is the sixth man to be hanged since 2010 when Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina formed the special tribunal to try suspected war criminals. Five of them were from Jamaat-e-Islami party, which is the main partner of opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).

Ali became a business tycoon with connection in Saudi Arabia and other middle eastern nations and turned out to be a top financier of Jamaat-e-Islami that was banned after Bangladesh gained independence. But later the party returned to the political landscape following the assassination of independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1975.

On Tuesday, Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha rejected the appeal by Ali, clearing the last legal barrier.

Reacting immediately after the execution, Jamaat-e-Islami called an eight-hour general strike across the country on Monday in protest.
Chinas role in the recovery of the global economy remains crucial despite the worlds second largest economy having itself slowed down, New Development Bank (NDB) president KV Kamath has said.

Kamath, the first president of the multilateral bank established by BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), is also confident of growing economic ties between India and China, calling it a win-win opportunity for both sides.

Emerging markets will play a key role in the global economys recovery, he told HT ahead of the G20 Summit in Hangzhou.

Emerging markets have spearheaded the global recovery post the financial crisis. China is the worlds second largest economy and remains an important powerhouse for global growth, Kamath said over email.

Even though Chinas growth rate is slowing down and (it) is undergoing transition, it still makes a significant contribution to global growth.

Elaborating on focus areas for the summit, Kamath said: The global recovery still looks fragile and there is a need that the next chapter of development unleashes economic growth  not just for the few at the top, but inclusive and sustainable growth that lifts the fortunes of many.

China is expected to seek a stronger voice for developing countries and showcase itself as an important business centre, he said.

With strengthening of economic relations between the two countries, Indian companies will have better access to the vast Chinese market and will be able to leverage global opportunities out of China, he said.

DJ Pandian, vice-president and chief investment officer of the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), said the G20 Summit is a platform where world leaders should discuss the role Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) can play in bridging infrastructure gap and generating balanced growth.

In the run-up to the summit, the Chinese government called a meeting of all major MDBs such as the AIIB and NDB to discuss the road ahead. India is one of the founding members of AIIB, which was launched in April 2015 and now has 57 members.

Asian banks have to work together and find a way so that growth can be generated. It has to be generated across the globe. I think the G20 has to discuss it (growth) and it is here that MDBs like the AIIB can play a vital role in fulfilling the vision and bridging the gap, Pandian, a former chief secretary of Gujarat, told HT in Beijing.
HANGZHOU: China and the United States ratified the Paris deal to cut climate-warming emissions on Saturday, on the eve of the 11th G20 Summit, a meeting of the worlds leading heads of states.

The move by the worlds two biggest polluters is a major step forward for the 180-nation accord, which sets ambitious goals for capping global warming and funnelling trillions of dollars to poor countries facing climate catastrophe.

The National Peoples Congress (NPC), Chinas Parliament, ratified the document at meeting in Beijing on Saturday.

Ratifying the agreement accords with Chinas policy of actively dealing with climate change, official news agency Xinhua quoted the proposal a saying, adding that addressing climate change would help the country realise sustainable development.

The ratification will further advance Chinas green, low-carbon development and safeguard environmental security, it said.

The Xinhua report added that China had signed the Paris Agreement at UN Headquarters in New York on April 22.

Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli, the special envoy of President Xi Jinping, signed the document and announced that China aimed to finalise domestic legal procedures to ratify the pact before the G20 Summit in Hangzhou, the report said.

Just as I believe the Paris agreement will ultimately prove to be a turning point for our planet, I believe that history will judge todays efforts as pivotal, US President Obama said here after he and Chinese President Xi Jinping handed their respective ratified documents to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Ban said he will hold a highlevel event in New York to which he will invite country leaders to formally ratify the Paris climate change agreement. He particularly lauded Obama for his leadership on climate change

We have a saying in America that you need to put your money where your mouth is. And when it comes to combating climate change, thats what were doing. Both the United States and China, were leading by example, Obama said.

Xi said the joint action speaks to the shared ambition and resolve of China and the United States in addressing global issues.

China and the United States, jointly responsible for about 38% of global emissions.

Until Beijing and Washington joined the club, 24 nations emitting just over 1% of global gases had officially acceded to the deal to cap global warming at two degrees Celsius over pre-Industrial Revolution levels.

China has committed to reduce its carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product by 60-65% by 2030 from 2005 levels, increase non-fossil fuel sources in primary energy consumption to about 20%, and peak its carbon emissions by 2030.

China and India had issued a joint statement during Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit to the country in May 2015, signaling a convergence of views on climate change and pressing developed countries to take the lead in the problem.

The two sides urged the developed countries to raise their pre-2020 emission reduction targets and honour their commitment to provide $100 billion per year by 2020 to developing countries, the statement had said.
WASHINGTON: Documents from an FBI investigation into Hillary Clintons private email server system show she did not fully grasp what constituted classified information and had left it largely to her staff to determine what was sensitive.

The documents reveal that Clinton considered information about drone strikes as routine and did not understand classification procedures.

The 58-page summary of the investigation that was released on Friday provides no major revelation, but some new details that her opponents will be able use in the months leading up to the presidential election.

The controversy over use of a private email server housed at Clintons family home in New York during her tenure as secretary of state cast a shadow on her campaign early with the Republican demanding her prosecution.

While agreeing that Clinton was extremely careless, the FBI said there was not enough to prosecute her.

Her campaign said: While her use of a single email account was clearly a mistake and she has taken responsibility for it, these materials make clear why the Justice Department believed there was no basis to move forward with this case.

The Trump camp had fired back arguing the documents reinforced their charge that she was not fit for the White House. Hillary Clinton is applying for a job that begins each day with a top secret intelligence briefing, and the notes from her FBI interview reinforce her tremendously bad judgment and dishonesty, said spokesman Jason Miller in a statement.

The new details revealed by the documents show there were attempts by hackers to access the private server and an email with a link to a pornographic website, which she had earlier claimed could have been an attempt to hack her mail.

Clinton told the FBI that she had received no guidance or training on to handle sensitive information on emails. She had even communicated with the president through her private email when travelling abroad, when it was most vulnerable.
DHAKA: Amid a crackdown on suspected Islamist militants, police in Bangladeshs capital have killed an alleged military commander of a banned group blamed for a string of attacks including the July 1 Gulshan bakery attack that killed 17 foreigners, authorities said.

The latest raid took place at Rupnagar residential area in Dhakas Mirpur zone late on Friday when police killed Murad alias Jahangir alias Omar after he allegedly opened fire at security officials before using a knife. Until early Saturday, details remained sketchy and the mans family and personal background was still being investigated. Police said he was the military commander of the Jamatul Mujahidin Bangladesh (JMB).

Monirul Islam, head of a counterterrorism unit, said police raided the six-storey house on a tip-off that the man entered the home to take his belongings on Friday night. He had left the rented home after an August 27 raid outside Dhaka in which a leading JMB figure was killed along with two accomplices. Local media said the man as Major Murad.

Islam said he was the man to train militants who opened fire on Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka on July 1.
DAVAO: Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte declared a nationwide state of lawlessness on Saturday after suspected Abu Sayyaf extremists detonated a bomb that killed 14 people and wounded about 70 in his southern hometown. Duterte, who inspected the scene of Friday nights attack at a night market in downtown Davao city, said his declaration did not amount to an imposition of martial law. It allows troops to be deployed in urban centers to back up the police in setting up checkpoints and increasing patrols, he said. An Abu Sayyaf spokesman, Abu Rami, claimed responsibility for the blast near the Jesuit-run Ateneo de Davao University, but Duterte said investigators were looking at other possible suspects.

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LONDON: Dalit issue facing UK Prime Minister Theresa May took a new turn on Friday after her government announced a full public consultation on the matter  a process that usually precedes parliament legislation, but is taking place on an issue that has sharply divided the Indian community.

The issue also has implications for India-UK relations, with the Indian government opposed to Britain codifying caste in law. Groups opposed to legislation on the issue welcomed the new consultation, while those supporting it reacted with fury on Saturday, accusing the May government of pandering to upper-caste individuals and groups.

A key aim of the consultation will be to obtain the views of the public on whether additional measures are needed to ensure victims of caste discrimination have appropriate legal protection and effective remedies under the 2010 Equality Act, official sources said. Before taking any decisions, the government will carefully consider the responses to the consultation, which will run for 12 weeks from its commencement date, they added.

Rival groups have been lobbying the government intensely this week, with some denying the existence of caste-based discrimination in Britain and as such rejecting any law for the purpose, and others seeking the law to deal with the alleged discrimination.

Governments headed by David Cameron since 2010 have supported the view of Hindu-Sikh-Jain groups opposing the legislation, not acting on the issue after it was written into the Equality Act of 2010. The groups see Mays decision on Friday as another positive step.

Caste-based discrimination is not expressly prohibited under the equality legislation, but section 9 of the Equality Act 2010, as amended, requires the government to introduce secondary legislation to make caste an aspect of race, thereby making caste discrimination a form of race discrimination.
If youve been anywhere near social media today, youll know good and well that its Beyonces birthday, or as most celebrating will tell you  the most important event of the year. While her fans bring in the occasion with gleeful praise of their queen, Bey will be out in Camp David, spending the weekend with Michelle Obama and her two daughters, Malia and Sasha, and shes brought her own daughter, Blue Ivy along with her.



Bey and Blue were spotted getting off a private jet in Maryland, where there were set to meet up with the Obamas. Barack is currently on a trip to China, and so far, theres been no sign of Jay Z, so we could be looking at an all girls Labor Day, here (though its certainly possible Hov could show up at some point).



Were sure a teenage music fan like Malia didnt need much convincing to chill with mom this weekend when she was told Bey would be around.



In case you missed it, Beyonce stole the show at last weeks MTV VMAs. You can relive her performance of the perfectly abridged LEMONADE here.
Oaklands Philthy Rich, whos been around for awhile, and Sacramentos Mozzy, a more recent sensation, have teamed up for a joint album, entitled Political Ties. More so than many of the other artists popping in The Bay, both Philthy and Mozzy are sharply focused on street-level content. The project arrives after Philthy had been embarking on an impressive run of far-reaching collabs, featuring the likes of Migos, Shy Glizzy, Birdman, and G Herbo. Political Ties is entirely situated in killer California. Mozzy had been relatively quiet after dropping his Mandatory Check album in June, though this year has seen him release a total of four projects and guest on tracks from big names like Nipsey Hussle and YG.

Political Ties includes guest appearances from Skeme, Zoey Dollaz, E Mozzy, Hitta J3, Lil Blood, and more. The beats come from guys like AK47, Zaytoven, Hitman Beatz, and Tae Da Kiid.

Stream Political Ties below via Spotify or head here to listen to the whole thing on YouTube. Buy the album here.

Philthy Rich
While the Republican presidential nominee exhibits symptoms of dual personality disorder on immigration, his Democratic opponent has laid out serious policy positions on a number of serious issues. With the Labor Day weekend the moment when Americans traditionally start paying attention to the presidential race, we'd like to do our small part to shift attention from all Trump all the time to matters of substance. Mental health, particularly mental health parity, fits that description.

"Parity" is the notion that the government should require insurance plans to cover both physical and mental illnesses on an equal basis, given the fact that mental illnesses or mental disorders are diseases of the brain. Parity is, in fact, the law, but there's more work to be done in Washington and in Austin to make sure that the law is enforced.

Two years after President Bill Clinton's health care initiative crashed and burned - his wife led his health-care task force - the president signed the Mental Health Parity Act in 1996. The law secured the same lifetime and annual dollar limits to mental health coverage as for coverage of medical and surgical benefits, but insurers found ways around the law by restricting the number of hospital days and outpatient visits for mental health services.

In 2008, then-U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton cosponsored a more ambitious effort called the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act. Her legislation required employers with more than 50 employees to provide equal mental and physical benefits if employee insurance plans covered mental health treatments. President George W. Bush signed the bill into law. Passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 expanded federal parity requirements to individual and small-group plans and required that mental health and substance abuse be covered in any plan sold on the federal marketplace or state exchanges.

Still, we have a problem. The law is not adequately enforced and few people know that it even exists. Nearly 20 million Americans struggle with substance abuse and 42.5 million adults live with some form of mental illness, according to a Mental Health America report released a couple of years ago. In theory, help is available; in practice, it doesn't always work out that way.

Writing about mental health parity earlier this year, Chronicle reporter Jenny Deam quoted Dr. George Santos, chief medical officer and executive medical director at Houston Behavioral Hospital: "In fact, certain managed care groups are well known within the Houston behavioral care community of having a 'predictably higher rate of denials' and a 'higher hassle factor'. "

Deam went on to note that Texas ranks 47th out of 50 states and the District of Columbia for access to mental health care, 50th in the number of mental health providers. According to a study conducted by Mental Health America, in other words, Texans are struggling to find therapists and psychiatrists who participate in their insurance plans. And they continue to face more frequent coverage and treatment denials.

As on a great many other issues, Hillary Clinton offers a comprehensive policy statement on mental health, including a national initiative for suicide prevention; more community health centers providing substance abuse and mental-health treatment as well as traditional medical care; prioritizing treatment over jail for non-violent, low-level offenders; and a continued push for parity. A number of observers suggest that Clinton's mental-health strategy has a real chance of becoming law, given the bipartisan backing many of these initiatives enjoy.

Meanwhile, in Texas, state officials and patient advocates need to push for parity enforcement. That could mean random audits to detect parity violations, more attention to requirements that insurance companies disclose decisions they make regarding behavioral health care and creating a simple process for patients, families and providers to report parity violations.

Mental health parity isn't sexy. Trump won't be bloviating about it until he's red, or redder, in the face, and his acolytes won't be chanting "USA!" when he mentions the word. All it does, though, is help men, women and children dealing with deeply serious problems get the assistance they need.
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Category: Best Mentoring Program Rank: 6 Company Name: Businessolver Program Name: Professional Development Program Address: 1025 Ashworth Rd., West Des Moines, IA 50265. Visit: www.businessolver.com Our editorial team interviewed Kirsten Anderson from Businessolver at the Leadership Excellence Awards this past February. Here are some excerpts from the exclusive interview. What is the overall objective of your program? The ultimate goal of the Professional Development Program is developing well rounded Businessolver employees who understand the intricacies of our patented technology system, Benefitsolver, and how all company roles work together to drive company success. We hope these employees are not simply working a job but are growing their professional skill set and creating a career with Businessolver. Program participants complete three different role rotations over two years. The curriculum is a balance of technical and soft skill building and training while experiencing and working three distinct company roles. In all rotations, young professionals work with clients and our clients employees on a daily basis. Who do you impact with your program? The Professional Development Programs primary audience are young professionals and recent college graduates who have a desire to continue learning, growing professionally and maki...
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A truly engaged workforce is one of those rare and hard-to-come-by assets that can raise the bar in any setting. Having the right mix of skills on staff can get the job done, but tapping into the extra energy and creativity of your people can yield outstanding results. Theres also a growing need to optimize employee performance as protection against new and growing challenges. From increased regulatory burdens and economic uncertainty to a flattening marketplace that encourages more global competition, there is a wide range of risks facing todays large employers.



To improve engagement, business leaders have tried a range of social and recognition programs, with mixed results. Gamification has its place, but not every process can be a contest, and not every task can have a prize. So, as engagement strategies evolve, theyve brought a renewed focus on the core functions of the business. For instance, helping employees get better visibility into how schedules are created, time off is approved, and work is measured and recorded. These aspects of workforce management are both essential to business success and central to the employee experience, but you need the right mix of tools and practices to meaningfully boost morale.



Join this webinar to refine your understanding of the connections between workforce management, self-service, and engagement. Learn how leveraging workforce management solutions can help create a more rewarding and motivating experience for all employees.



This presentation will be especially valuable for HR professionals working at large employers, or those with diverse employee groups and distributed locations.



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A racist incident caught on video earlier this week showed a sour side to Edmonton, but the city's mayor and the man involved have turned it into a call to action to #MakeItAwkward.

Jesse Lipscombe was shooting a video about living in Edmonton when a passenger in a car nearby called out, "The n*****s are coming, the n*****s are coming."

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Lipscombe calmly went over to the car, opened the door and asked the man to repeat what he said, to which the passenger denied he said anything and shouted another slur as the driver sped off.

Ive heard casual racism throughout my life and its appalling.

The actor and former athlete told The Canadian Press that's how he usually responds to uncomfortable situations like that. By making them more awkward.

The sentiment inspired Edmonton Mayor Don Iveson and sparked the #MakeItAwkward campaign which is meant to encourage bystanders to do something, rather than stay silent when they witness racism, sexism, homophobia or any kind of bigotry.

Iveson met with Lipscome along with his partner Julia Lipscombe and the three launched the campaign on Friday in a Facebook live video.

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"It's time to stand up and say something. And you don't have to get all up in someone's face, you just have to not be afraid," the mayor said in the video. "It's time to make it awkward.

Ive heard casual racism throughout my life and its appalling, Iveson told the Edmonton Journal. We have to stop. We have to have an awkward conversation around the dinner table, in the locker room, wherever its happening.

Within 48 hours, the campaign took off around the nation and garnered praise from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Alberta Premier Rachel Notley.

Another notable politician who championed the campaign was Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman, a city which Maclean's magazine called one of the most racist in Canada. Bowman called it a great new campaign, The Canadian Press reports.

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Congratulations @thelipscombe & Mayor @doniveson for their bold campaign against racism. In Edmonton - in any city - let's #MakeItAwkward.  Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) September 4, 2016

Saskatchwan - time to #makeitawkward Your racist slurs against first Nations people is unacceptable & shameful  Vye One (@VyeOne) September 2, 2016

#MakeItAwkward... As a proud Edmontonian, there is no place for ignorance, racism + social injustice in my city #yeghttps://t.co/srMdWLDu4y  Sophia Birchall (@allthebirches) September 2, 2016

According to the Edmonton Journal, Iveson and his staff will be consulting with other minority groups and advocacy groups already involved before taking their next steps.

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With files from The Canadian Press

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Image: Computer programming. Stock Photo. Pixabay.com

A Russian computer programmer whom Armenia had detained briefly at America's request is back in Moscow in a case that cast a spotlight on U.S. efforts to arrest other countries' nationals overseas and Armenia's compliant relationship with Russia.

The programmer, Sergei Mironov, wasn't released until some theatrics on Armenia's part, however.

It made a show of giving consideration to handing Mironov over to the Americans before it did what all Armenians knew it would: Give him back to Russia instead.

The decision came from a court that rejected the United States' request to extradite Mironov, who was arrested on August 28.

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The United States alleges that Mironov, who works for the Moscow-based high-tech company Synesis, illegally sold military-applications technology to another country. Mironov denied that.

America sought his arrest because Synesis has a U.S. presence -- in North Carolina.

The United States has declined to specify the country that bought the technology. Presumably it was a U.S. enemy.

American officials also want to charge Mironov with money laundering. This suggests they think he used illegal means to hide proceeds from the tech sale.

The amount the United States accuses Mironov of laundering is a pittance as these cases go: $50,000. The money laundering cases that Western prosecutors usually pursue range from millions of dollars to the hundreds of millions.

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Synesis is one of a couple of dozen companies around the world that has developed video-analytics technology.

The systems alert clients who use video surveillance to patterns on the video indicating the presence of an intruder.

Until the technology came along, humans would have to monitor video surveillance 24/7 for signs of intruders.

Those who have developed the technology say its spots patterns -- such as changes in shadows that indicate an intruder -- better than humans do.

The potential market for the technology is enormous, starting with governments and companies. Militaries, in particular, are salivating over it because it will give them a greater ability to spot, and ward off, sneak attacks.

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Here's the dilemma that Armenia faced when Mironov and his wife Yuliya flew in to Armenia's capital, Yerevan, for a vacation:

The United States, which has given Armenia a lot of foreign aid, demanded that the Russian be handed over.

Russia, which has a huge economic and military presence in Armenia, said no way.

Russia snarls every time the United States arrests Russian citizens in other countries for crimes against America. And it refuses to extradite any of its citizens, no matter how heinous the overseas crimes they are accused of committing.

An example of the snarling occurred when Thailand arrested the Merchant of Death, Russia's notorious international arms dealer Viktor Bout. The Thais turned him over to the United States, where he was convicted of breaking a number of American laws and is now serving a long prison sentence.

It's one thing for a country that is not a Russian ally to turn over a Russian citizen to the United States, however -- and quite another for a virtual Russian colony like Armenia to do so.

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So Armenia engaged in a tap dance, arresting Mironov as the Americans requested, but letting a member of its judiciary -- which is supposed to be independent -- decide whether to hand him over to the FBI for good.

It was no surprise when the judge let Mironov go three days into his detention. Armenian judges have a history of doing what the country's officials expect.

Even though the Mironov's release was the outcome that Moscow wanted, Russian big shots growled about Armenia's decision to arrest him in the first place.

"Friendly countries don't do such things," the Russian news agency Vestnik Kavkaza quoted political analyst Andrei Yepifantsev as saying.

News of the detention outraged Russians, he said -- and that blowback led to Armenia realizing it had gone too far.

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A Russian defense official charged that the United States had demanded Mironov's handover with the deliberate intent of driving a wedge between Armenia and Russia.

The case was also "about the U.S. attempt to have the whole world bow down to its jurisdiction," said the official, Franz Klintsevich, the first deputy chairman of Russia's Council on Defense and Security.

Meanwhile, Mironov played dumb, saying he had no idea why he had been arrested.

He noted that he had had no access to military technology and that he had been to the United States only once -- in 2013.

His contention that he had no access to military technology was disingenuous. It's obvious that video-analytics technology has important military as well as civilian applications.

Although Mironov was never in danger of having Armenia extradite him to the United States, it's a good bet that he's already decided to take his vacations in the former Soviet Union from now on.

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If he ventures into a country outside the Commonwealth of Independent States, he may find himself on a free flight to Washington with FBI agents as his conversation mates.
Russia seeks spheres of influence in the neighboring states of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova or otherwise.

China claims spheres of influence in the South China Sea and the East China Sea, including disputes with Japan over the Senkaku-Diaoyu Islands and with Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Brunei over the Paracels and Spratlys.

The United States should be flattered. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery. And Russia and China are imitating our claims to spheres of influence for two centuries in the name of national security.

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Our War of 1812 with Great Britain was fought in part to annex Canada.

The 1823 Monroe Doctrine placed all of North and South America off limits for new European colonization. It asserted that the United States might resort to war against any European nation that interfered with the independence of newly formed states in Central and South America that had emerged from rebellions against Spanish or Portuguese colonization:

"But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintain it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States."

In 1846, President James K. Polk justified the Mexican-American War to expand our borders by falsely asserting that an American soldier had been killed on American soil by the Mexican military. General Ulysses S. Grant condemned the war as "wicked" in his War Memoirs.

In 1893, the United States collaborated in the overthrow of Hawaii's monarchy. Annexation followed five years later.

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The 1898 Spanish-American War was fought to expand our sphere of influence in the Caribbean and the Pacific. We acquired the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. We occupied Cuba militarily until it enshrined the conditions of the Platt Amendment in the Cuban Constitution. Among other things, they required granting the United States a permanent naval base at Guantanamo Bay, and authorizing us to intervene in Cuban affairs for "the preservation of Cuban independence, [and] the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, liberty, and individual freedom...." Acting under the Platt Amendment, the United States intervened militarily in Cuban affairs in 1906-1909, 1912, and 1917-1922.

The United States intervened militarily in Panama from 1903-1914 to secure its independence from Colombia, and to negotiate a treaty to construct and exercise sovereignty over the Panama Canal.

From 1914-1917, the United States intervened militarily in Mexico, including the capture of Vera Cruz and General John Pershing's northern expedition, in response to Pancho Villa's raids.

The United States occupied Haiti militarily from 1915-1934 in response to chronic political instability there.



We occupied the Dominican Republic militarily from 1916-1924 in response to threatened insurrections that threatened our interests.

The United States occupied Nicaragua militarily from 1926-1933, including fighting the rebel forces of Cesar Sandino against a Nicaraguan government we supported.

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In 1954, the United States overthrew the Socialist government of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in favor of a genocidal military dictatorship.

In 1961, the United States launched the ill-starred Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro.

In 1962, the United States quarantined the shipment of Soviet offensive missiles to Cuba to force the dismantling of Soviet missiles already there when the United States had Jupiter nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles aimed at the USSR along its border with Turkey.

In 1965, the United States dispatched troops to the Dominican Republic to prevent the restoration to power of a political leader we opposed, Juan Bosch.

In 1973, we collaborated in the overthrow and killing of Chilean President Salvador Allende because we opposed his Marxist-Socialist politics.

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From 1981-1986, we supported the Contras militarily to fight the Sandinista government of Nicaragua because of its political hostility to the United States.

In 1983, we invaded Grenada to oppose a Marxist government.

From 1994-1996, the United States dispatched troops to Haiti in the name of restoring democracy. "Haitian democracy," however, has been an oxymoron for two centuries.

Contrary to conventional wisdom or intuition, spheres of influence claimed by great powers are superfluous to their national security. Its backbone is the willingness of peoples to fight and die for their country. The Vietnam War is exemplary.

Spheres of influence persist, nevertheless, for twofold reasons: they gratify tribal cravings for domination; and, their optical effect, like a placebo, is to make citizens of great powers feel safer.

In any event, we should not risk war with Russia or China over spheres of influence which we are unwilling to renounce for ourselves. Neither should we lecture them for following our instruction. The optimal solution is peaceful co-existence that acknowledges the inevitability of spheres of influence--an affirmation of Immanuel Kant's gospel that, "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."
In this July 21, 2016 photo, striking union members rally outside the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, N.J. On Thursday Aug. 4, the strike by Local 54 of the Unite-HERE union will have lasted 35 days, making it the longest in the city's 38-year casino era. (AP Photo/Wayne Parry)

As my late friend, zoology professor Mark Rowland, liked to say when addressing the emotional issue of pro-life vs. pro-choice: "Some people see the uterus as half-empty, and others see it as half-full." That mordant, binary sentiment could apply to the current state of organized labor.

According to some observers, the once vaunted American labor movement is either already dead or is in the process of dying a hideous death. Granted, these pessimistic observers consist largely of sheltered academics, Chamber of Commerce officers, and Michigan Republicans.

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But other, more optimistic observers happily note that, with 14.8 million people belonging to unions (11-percent of the workforce), the U.S. labor movement is still a vital--if unfocussed and demoralized--force to be reckoned with.

Do the math. If the National Rifle Association (NRA), with a membership of barely five million, can strike terror in the hearts of America's lawmakers, surely 14.8 million union workers have the ability to make some noise.

Union people will tell you that there are two legislative moves required to level the playing field. The first is passage of the EFCA (Employee Free Choice Act), which would make "card check" the law of the land, effectively eliminating the bureaucratic morass and stalling tactics regularly used by management.

While hypocritical businessmen pretend that, like the powdered wig set of the 18th century, they abhor Big Government, when it comes to workers being allowed to freely join a union, they beg the feds to intervene, beg them to step in and make joining a union as complicated a procedure as becoming a U.S. citizen.

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And this isn't an ideological or constitutional issue for these profit-takers; it's an economic one. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2015), the average weekly wage for a union employee is $980, and the average weekly wage for a non-union worker is $776. Simple as that.

The second thing is repeal of half the provisions in the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act (including prohibition of secondary boycotts and sympathy strikes). This anti-labor law, passed over the veto of President Truman, defanged the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act), ushered in the toxic phenomenon of "right to work" states, and rendered organized labor more or less powerless by cutting its nuts off.

Beginning in the late 1970s, in response to the implementation of UAW "emergency concessions," and continuing into the early 1980s, when President Reagan declared "open season" on organized labor by firing more than 11,000 PATCO workers (air traffic controllers), union activists have been engaged in a lively debate over how best to spend AFL-CIO funds. One thing the House of Labor has plenty of is money.

While some people want to see the lion's share of AFL-CIO discretionary spending used for national organizing drives, others want to see it spent on stuff like advertising, community awareness, "education" and political donations.

Not that the Democrats have done organized labor any favors lately, but I've always favored the political donation route. Consider: If reactionary, draconian laws were what crippled us, then progressive, labor-friendly laws must be what makes us whole.

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An officer with an International that must remain nameless, once suggested a crazy idea. Given that the AFL-CIO spent an estimated $50 million trying (and failing) to organize Walmart, and given that lobbyists and donors are the mother's milk of politics, and given that money has already poisoned the well, the AFL-CIO should consider bribery.

They should identify 50 congressmen who could a make difference in the outcome of critical labor votes and then have a bag man discreetly deliver each of them $200,000 in cash. Don't call it a "bribe." Call it a "donation."

Donations of $200,000 to 40 key House members and 10 key senators would amount to $10 million, which the AFL-CIO could easily afford. It's clean, it's quick, and it beats the hell out of wasting money on futile Wal-Mart campaigns. In return, unfair labor laws are repealed and the American worker is given a fighting chance.


Nocturnal Animals photo by Merrick Morton, Universal Pictures International

With Tom Ford, chances are that if he throws a rock in the wind, he will hit gold.

When it comes to fashion, Ford has conquered it, he "shut it down" as fashionista Rachel Zoe would say. Fragrances, well as a Jasmin Rouge aficionado myself, I'll say he got that down. Sunglasses, check. Bespoke menswear, check. He's even got a song named after him, by Jay-Z. And film? Wow, yes, yes, oh yes. Nobody does haunting images on the big screen quite like Tom Ford.

In his latest oeuvre, well his second after a seven year hiatus from filmmaking, Ford puts together another stellar cast -- which includes Jake Gyllenhaal, Amy Adams and Michael Shannon -- and then mixes up the batch by throwing in a story within the story, a book that fills up the pages of the movie script. It's brilliant, of course we all knew that before going into the Venice Film Festival, where Nocturnal Animals world premiered. As proof of its magnificence, it was impossible to get a hold of any publicists for the movie and the press conference seemed more like a Justin Bieber public appearance than a film delegation meeting the press.

Lets face it, even if he's yet to make his first record, Tom Ford is a rockstar.

Nocturnal Animals does not disappoint, in any way, shape or form. From the first frame to the last it's haunting and can't-turn-your-eyes-away captivating. I'll admit, the first shots of the voluptuous burlesque women inspired by Fellini made me wonder, and I wrote it down, if Ford's genius had gotten so big for his shoes that people around him were too scared to say something was a bit heavy handed. But once the intent of those images, beautiful and grotesque at once, was known, I quickly crossed out that sentence from my notebook.

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The story within the story has to do with a book Jake Gyllenhaal's character Edward has written. Edward is Susan's ex, a chronic insomniac played by Amy Adams. In his novel, he tells the tale of a family, Tony (again Gyllenhaal), his wife Laura (Isla Fisher) and their daughter India (Ellie Bamber), who are harassed and attacked on a desolate Texas road, by three rednecks -- including the chilling Aaron Taylor-Johnson -- one dark night. The outcome requires another phenomenal character, detective Bobby Andes, played by personal favorite Michael Shannon, to come in and help bring the story home.

Ford comfortably weaves three threads into Nocturnal Animals, the past of Susan and Edward, her present with new husband Armie Hammer, and the story of Tony and his family, with Andes. The result is spellbinding.

At the press conference, Ford confessed that what captured him in the book his film is based on, the 1993 novel Tony & Susan by Austin Wright, is "loyalty -- that's very important to me. When you find those people in your life, you hold on to them. [It's a] cautionary tale of what can happen when you let go of people."

Gyllenhaal instead confessed that what drew him to the script was "the color of paper the script was printed on, a particular hue of red I'd never seen." But of course, once opened, the pretty packaging held "one of the best scripts I'd ever read. Gripping and emotional and somehow went into a space where the metaphor of heartbreak stepped into real life."

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For Adams, the pull was this "very personal story... I wanted to be a part of telling this story of loss and regret." But she admitted that, "when I first started preparing Susan, I didn't like her. And I can't play a character I don't like so I had to find my way into her." This is where the true talent of Ford's directing came in, she confessed "Tom's skilled hand was so patient. I really credit Tom for trusting that the stillness and the silence would be filled with the story."

As Ford added, about regrets, those we all have once we stop being 20 and 30, he shared that someone once said to him, "midlife is when you get to the top of the ladder and find out all along you've had it on the wrong wall." And he also disclosed his secret for picking stories that stay in our heart, long after his haunting images are gone, "I think I may be old fashioned but I believe there needs to be a moral to a story. If you leave a theater and it doesn't stay with you, it doesn't haunt you, it's not worth it." Nocturnal Animals releases in mid-November.

Franca Sozzani, to those of us who love fashion, is a legend. Her signature long, blond, wavy hair I've seen from NYC to Florence, from Dubai to Saudi Arabia and now Venice. She's a journalist, and has been the Editor in Chief of Vogue Italia since the late 80s. But she's also a mother, and her son Francesco Carrozzini has made a tribute film to his mother, titled Franca: Chaos and Creation. While I've yet to watch the film, it was interesting to burst in on the press conference for the documentary, since Sozzani and Carrozzini have an explosive dynamic. Hidden beneath the surface of her beauty, and his talent, there are crosscurrents these two feel, quite obviously, about each other's work.

As the daughter of a strong mother who claimed something similar to what Sozzani declared -- that "in the moment I leave work the magazine could burn down!" -- I know that's true, but to some extent. My mother was always the artist, and while I never lacked for anything, as I'm sure Carrozzini never did either, I felt mom's aloofness during her hard days of creation.

But creative women are forever struggling with that, the idea that they have to be mothers and wives and then also powerful work machines. I see that struggle even in Sozzani beautifully put together persona. I yearned to hear her secret for that ever blissed-out look that always completes her outfits. "I've never stopped dreaming," she admitted, and perhaps that's why film is so powerful. Because even when we have, stopped dreaming, or forget to, cinema reminds us to -- with a vision on the big screen. A technicolor dream.

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The Bleeder I knew I needed to watch in Venice because it stars Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts. Those two could read the phone book, and as long as they do, together, I would listen to them from A to Z. Their chemistry in this film, though Watts is only on screen for about 15 minutes tops, is so powerful that it left me wanting for more.

The Bleeder is the story of real-life Rocky inspiration Chuck Wepner, the boxer most famous for having gone fifteen rounds with Mohammad Ali, before being defeated by Ali. Directed by Oscar nominated filmmaker Philippe Falardeau, The Bleeder is the kind of film that cannot be separated from its stars. I dare not think of it without Schreiber, who holds the audience's attention from the first shot to the last, and the real life chemistry that Watts brings to her role as Wepner's second wife and salvation, Linda.

When I asked Schreiber if Wepner is somehow Shakespearean, he enthusiastically answered, "he's absolutely Shakespearean! But you're talking to a guy who thinks everyone is Shakespearean." Then, pushing him further, I asked him what makes him so, and Schreiber continued, "the duality, the conflict, the human tragedy, also his vulnerability, his openness, his innocence, his naivete; he doesn't hide his mistakes, he makes them beautifully out in the open, exquisitely clumsy. And that's Shakespearean." The Bleeder screens next at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Finally, Wim Wenders latest, The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez in 3D. Why 3D? Wenders was quick to point out, because "3D is a very tender language and technology, it's a very kind technology, it corresponds to our two eyes if you use it naturally... I don't think I could have included you in any other way." And include us in he does, into an delicately intimate conversation between a man and a woman, sitting at a table somewhere in the countryside outside Paris, while a man with a typewriter, sitting inside, seems to write their dialogue. Is this God? Are the couple Adam and Eve, since there is an apple on the table? Could be, but they are also every day men and women, struggling to find a way to communicate even though words and thoughts are exchanged between them.

At first, I'll admit I felt slightly confused by The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez, but the more time passes after watching it, the stronger I appreciate Wenders genius to be. Apart from the great luxury of watching lavender on the big screen in full 3D wonder and the filmmaker's wonderful choice of music -- including a live performance by Nick Cave -- Wenders teaches us, his audience, a new way to breathe. He slows down our inner rhythm to match his art and it all somehow makes for an outer-worldly experience.

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And that's what cinema is all about, after all, finding new eyes to help us view the world. Even if those eyes turn out to be bulky 3D glasses!
In 2015, Salman bin Abdul-Aziz ascended the throne of Saudi Arabia. He wasted little time in turning his tribe's long-held rule of succession, designed to maintain tribal harmony, on its head, by nudging aside the Crown Prince and imposing a nephew as the new Crown Prince and making his 30-year old son Deputy Crown Prince and effective day-to--day ruler of the realm and ahead of hundreds of senior princes.

The young Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, now all of 31 years, wasted no time in essentially admitting much of what those outside the Al-Saud tribe have said for years: (i) the Saudi model of inefficient consumer and input subsidies, lavish military outlays, bloated public sector as employer of last resort and other wasteful expenditures is not sustainable, especially now, in the face of low oil prices and the accelerated global transition to non-carbon energy sources; (ii) bankruptcy looms in 10-15 years if they continue on this path; (iii) a thriving and productive private sector is needed to replace the oversized public sector and to provide good jobs for the rapidly growing labor force, which should include women; (iv) the public sector must be weaned from oil revenues, and increasingly, oil revenues need to be channeled into a super sovereign wealth fund to replace the oil capital in the ground that is being depleted and that is the birthright of all generations of Saudis; (v) transparency in policymaking and its implementation must be initiated; (vi) taxation (possibly Value Added or a VAT system that taxes consumption) is needed to provide revenues for the government in place of oil revenues; (vii) most public assets, possibly including oil resources, must be privatized; and last, and most important of all, (viii) the country must develop institutions (a collection of rules, including the rule of law) that support the private sector, afford confidence, lower business transaction costs and encourage investment, both domestic and from abroad.

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Prince Mohammad embraced a report from the management-consulting firm of McKinsey and Company, entitled Vision 2030 (available on the internet), as his blueprint. While we agree with the report's broad recommendations, there is a glaring omission in the report. How can the young prince put these recommendations into practice and build the institutions that must be at their foundation?

What are the major issues and hurdles when it comes to implementation?

Has the Al-Saud clan bought into Prince Mohammad's rapid ascension or will they depose him when his father dies? To us the answer is clear, but we leave this to the reader's imagination, without even a reference to Shakespeare.

Has the prince had sufficient dialogue with all the important constituencies to persuade them to buy into the plan? Namely, are the members of the Al-Saud clan including his own father, older cousins and even older brothers ready to abandon their obscene lifestyle and cut their access to the treasury? Are the Al-Sauds and their cronies ready to see their rent-seeking (corrupt) business activities ended by institutional reform that prohibits, monitors and punishes corruption? Are ordinary Saudi citizens, who may have been willing to trade their political rights for economic security likely to accept a world of no handouts, accompanied by taxation with a vague promise of jobs in the future? Will they accept a no handout and no subsidy approach when for 45 years or so others before them had it so good? Will they accept hardship while they watch the Al Sauds and their cronies enjoy the ill-gotten fortunes they have amassed? Will the pampered military accept the cutbacks? Again, we leave what are human reactions to the reader's judgment.

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At this point, an obvious comment is in order. It is always much easier to give handouts than to take them back, especially when it comes to handouts that have been doled out for a long time and are ingrained into the social fabric, which an entire citizenry have come to expect as their birthright.

As we have said, institutional reform must be at the foundation of Prince Mohammad's vision. Can he establish institutions (essentially the rules of the economic game with the aim of reducing business transaction costs) that include a legal system that is fair and just, where all Saudis are equal before the law; with transparency in public decision-making; sound business regulations, their monitoring and enforcement; the protection of private property; contract enforcement; and a tax system that is accepted as fair and is universally enforced. We do not see even the beginning of such institution building.

If the above is considered in its totality, one thing should resonate. Namely, these initiatives and reforms are a pipe dream without accompanying political reform. Is the Al-Saud clan willing to consider political reforms that would strip them of their "inherited rights" for long-term survival? Are they willing to accept a timetable toward a constitutional monarchy, with representative governance? Again, we want the reader to decide but with a little reminder about the Al-Saud mindset. Al-Saud princes believe one fact in their heart of hearts--their father, grandfather, great grandfather or their great great grandfather, as the case may be, took over the land with about forty men, swords, knives and treachery, and Saudi Arabia is theirs--it is their "ranch." Now the reader should decide if peaceful political reform is possible.

In short, we do not believe that Vision 2030 can be peacefully and effectively implemented. Instead, Saudi Arabia will implode. When it implodes, will the US and the UK come to the rescue of their Al-Saud clients? We believe not. The US and the others have made thousands of hollow speeches in support of human rights and representative governance, but they have continued to support their client as long as they buy arms and do their bidding. The West has shed crocodile tears for the death of civilians and the plight of refugees, yet it continues to sell Saudi Arabia bombs that kill and maim civilians in Yemen. The duplicity of Western powers is beyond the pale. Yet the day when they see the end at hand, they will extricate themselves rapidly as they have no stomach for another Middle Eastern civil war or conflict, especially now that oil matters less.

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PHILADELPHIA, PA - JULY 25: A delegate holds a sign that reads 'Stronger together' on the first day of the Democratic National Convention at the Wells Fargo Center, July 25, 2016 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. An estimated 50,000 people are expected in Philadelphia, including hundreds of protesters and members of the media. The four-day Democratic National Convention kicked off July 25. (Photo by Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images)

Labor Day is a time to celebrate the essential contributions workers make to our collective wealth and wellbeing. It is well past time that American workers receive their fair share of that wealth.

Americans work extremely long hours and are incredibly productive. Yet, for the last three and a half decades, they have not received the just fruits of their labor. From 1948 to 1979, two-thirds of aggregate income growth in the United States went to the bottom 90 percent. But from 1979 onward, nearly two-thirds of growth went to the top 1 percent. Meanwhile, the aggregate income of the bottom 90 percent actually declined!

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We are the wealthiest country in the world at the wealthiest moment in our history. Shamefully, we have tens of millions of people living in poverty. The middle class is being squeezed out, caught between those with unprecedented wealth and those who suffer food insecurity, who go to bed hungry.

This rising and perilous income and wealth inequality did not happen by accident. It is the foreseeable consequence of a persistent upward redistribution of wealth, resulting from decades of public policies that favor corporations and the wealthiest Americans over everyone else. These public policies constitute a war on workers. Attacks on unions, privatization of public functions, huge tax breaks for those at the top, deep cuts to domestic spending, weakening of regulations protecting workers, an eroding minimum wage, and attacks on our Social Security system are all part of the war. Predictably, they have resulted in stagnating wages and longer hours for everyday workers, and the income and wealth inequality we see all around us.

Fortunately, workers can help themselves this November 8. Hillary Clinton and the Democrats have concrete plans to reverse these destructive policies, stop the upward redistribution of wealth, and make sure that workers receive their fair share. In sharp contrast, Donald Trump and the Republican Party have concrete plans to double down on the war on workers.

It is long past time that workers receive a substantial raise. Total compensation packages should be increased. That means take-home pay should be larger. So should deferred compensation, in the form of larger Social Security checks at retirement. So should Social Security's life insurance and disability insurance benefits, earned with every pay check. And, Social Security's protections should be expanded to include other vital protections, including paid sick leave and paid family leave. Workers' ability to fight for higher compensation should be strengthened. So should regulations protecting workers' health and safety.

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Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party advocate a substantial, long-overdue increase in the federal minimum wage, while Donald Trump and the Republican Party are fine with a starvation federal minimum wage. Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party want to protect and strengthen workers' ability to bargain with their employers, while Donald Trump and the Republican Party propose to intensify their war on collective bargaining. Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party want to improve worker health and safety, while Donald Trump and the Republican Party want to further weaken these protections. Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party favor paid family leave, paid sick days, and paid vacation. Donald Trump and the Republican Party apparently do not think these benefits, available to workers around the world, are worth even mentioning.

The stance of the two parties and their presidential standard bearers are well exemplified by their divergent Social Security positions.

In their new book, Stronger Together, Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine identify and repudiate the "years of mythmaking, claiming we cannot afford Social Security and that the only solution is to cut the benefits on which 90 percent of American seniors rely."

In sharp contrast, Donald Trump and the Republican Party are aggressively promoting the myth. The Republican Platform, in fear-mongering fashion, labels its Social Security plank, "Saving Social Security, "(emphasis added), and claims that Social Security's "current course will lead to a financial and social disaster."

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Hillary Clinton, Tim Kaine, and the Democratic Party advocate expanding Social Security's modest but vital benefits. They recognize that an expanded Social Security is a solution to many challenges facing the nation, including a looming retirement income crisis and our immoral, destabilizing income and wealth inequality.

In contrast, Donald Trump and the Republican Party want to cut and privatize -- that is, dismantle -- our Social Security system. While Donald Trump promised during the primaries that he wouldn't cut Social Security, this is clearly a lie. Immediately after he clinched the nomination, his top policy adviser told a closed door meeting, that Trump would indeed be open to cuts, the Trump campaign is filled with policy advisors who support cuts, the Republican Platform advocates cuts and privatization, and Trump's past statements, prior to running, advocate cutting and privatizing the program he slanderously labeled a "Ponzi scheme." He apparently understands the politics though, having warned Republicans in 2011 that openly advocating cuts to Social Security would cost them at the ballot box.

Clinton's book title and her campaign rallying cry, Stronger Together, could be used to describe Social Security. Stronger Together describes perfectly Social Security's conceptual underpinning. Social Security recognizes that all of us face common economic risks. Rich or poor, any of us can die prematurely, leaving young children behind. Rich or poor, any of us can suffer a devastating, disabling accident or illness. Rich or poor, all of us hope to grow old. When we do, we need, for a dignified and independent retirement, a guaranteed steady income which we cannot and will not outlive. Social Security recognizes that the best way to protect ourselves and our families against the economic consequences of those risks is to join together and pool them, sharing both our risks and our responsibilities. Stronger together.

Under the powerful watchword, Stronger Together, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party advocate raising the income and improving the economic security of every one of us, while eliminating gender and racial income and wealth inequalities. In stark contrast, Donald Trump and the Republican Party scapegoat, seeking to turn us against each other - against immigrants, against Mexican-Americans, against Muslim-Americans. Keep us divided, so we are too weak and distracted to fight together for what we have earned.

The Republican divide-and-conquer strategy is nothing new. President Franklin Roosevelt recognized and confronted it, when, a few days before the 1936 presidential election, in a speech defending Social Security against vicious and misleading attacks, he proclaimed, "It is an old strategy of tyrants to delude their victims into fighting their battles for them."

That strategy is alive and well in the person of Donald Trump.

In the election of 1936, Americans understood who was with them and who was not. After their electoral victory, Roosevelt and Democrats in Congress successfully fought for laws providing a federal minimum wage, maximum hours, and protection of collective bargaining. They succeeded in increasing Social Security's benefits and expanding its protections to the families of workers.


LA Swim Week model in Pauleth Swimwear 2016 (photo:Jon Malan)

"Why should Miami be the only place to show beachwear? We have better weather anyway!" says Connie Borja, executive producer of L.A. Swim Week, which returned for the second year in Los Angeles in July and which was held in the Skirball center. The day long event was a splashing success as the attendance doubled this year from last year's spectator headcount of 550.

Borja's inspiration for the swimwear fashion show was to secure a foothold for beachwear designers in the city with some of the most famous beaches in the world. Amazingly, a swimwear fashion event doesn't exist in Los Angeles and is the domain of Miami.

The one day event also had pop up shops and designers with trendy fashion selections on sale in the foyer as well as a red carpet.

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Borja, who designs her own beach fashion line Amour, originally thought up the event to showcase her own line but the event has blossomed beyond her expectations. "Last year we had 10 designers, this year we have 22 with three returning." And some of those designers are heavy hitters, Leonisa, 60 years in the business, has returned as well as Beachflirt22 from Greece, Duskii from Australia and Sezuki Kenzo from Tokyo.



Leonisa 2016 (photos Vincente Tabora)



Beachflirt22 with designer Eleni Armaos (photo Vincente Tambora)



Ladyswim 2016 (photo: Derrick Bracks)



Pauleth Swimwear 2016 (photo: Derrick Bracks)



Sezuki Kenzo 2016 (photo: Derrick Bracks)



Duskii 2016 (photo: Philip Morton)

The evening was inspiring, exciting and at times jaw dropping. The designs were thoughtful, colorful, running from risque to traditional, and always sensual, alluring and evocative.

Dustin Quick and Medi EM perform at LA Swim Week open (photo: Vincente Tabora)

Vanessa Sanchez, at 15, is a new comer to the fashion scene and launched her own swimwear line last year: 'Nessy Swimwear." Keeping it simple her designs have great lines and color choices.



Nessy Swimwear 2016 (photo: Vincente Tabora)

And Amour Swimwear, bold, athletic, exciting:



Amour 2016 (photo Vincente Tabora)

"Our dream is to add more days next year, and grow to have a full week for designers who want to be known in Los Angeles," said Borja. Pop up shops and platinum level seating sold out for her event this year, proving the demand for an event like this in Los Angeles.

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We're new, and we're excited to create a platform where designers can get connected and come together.



Borja also had buyers from Macy's and Diane's swimwear in attendance so that designers could connect directly to the actual market place.

LA Swim Week is a smart and stylish addition to the LA fashion scene, one you might have thought we already had as the beach is synonymous with all things LA,. From Malibu to Zuma down to Redondo and up to Matador we have some of the most iconic beaches in the world and now it seems we have a local fashion platform to properly strut our stuff.
I have often said that my worst professional mistake was leaving the clangorous world of daily newspapers for magazines and book writing. Of course, that was back in 1985, a very different time for the media, and for the world.

The digital era had not yet dawned, and we "hacks" - as print journalists, particularly foreign correspondents, were known - scrambled around in search of stories. We then scrambled around some more to find a post office with a telex machine to file our dispatches to our home offices. No email in those days, no satellite phones either. Your dispatches depended on the caprice of the telex operation. He was more influenced by the graft you gave than the novelty, timeliness and piquancy of your stories.

My search for stories took me to Africa, where the New York Times had posted me in the lovely Kenyan capital of Nairobi. From there I crisscrossed the vast continent. I felt a little bit like Marlow, the narrator of "Heart of Darkness," the celebrated novella by Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad, about a voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State, in the heart of Africa.

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That novella has been the basis of several films, perhaps the best known being Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," released in 1979. As Wikipedia puts it: "In Vietnam in 1970, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) takes a perilous and increasingly hallucinatory journey upriver to find and terminate Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a once-promising officer who has reportedly gone completely mad. In the company of a Navy patrol boat filled with street-smart kids, a surfing-obsessed Air Cavalry officer (Robert Duvall), and a crazed freelance photographer (Dennis Hopper), Willard travels further and further into the heart of darkness."

It was a romantic time to be a foreign correspondent. The Times was generous with travel budgets; it no longer is. But, on occasion, a skeptical accountant at headquarters would ask if it was really necessary to fly to Paris from Nairobi in East Africa in order to get to the Senegalese capital of Dakar in West Africa. Well, yes. Especially if the stopover in Paris lasted at least a day during which to sample the delights of Montmartre. After all, being a hack in those days wasn't easy - all that traveling, all those stopovers, all those missed flights. You understand, right? The accountant didn't, and would scrutinize my travel expenses with a beady eye.

I still remember him well. Turned out to be a jolly fellow who, after a pint of ale or two, regaled me with hilarious stories of the outrageous expense reports that some correspondents filed.

I'm now at that age when memories are far more restive than anticipation of the future. The journalism that I grew up in, that nourished me, that transported me around the world, that offered me opportunities to listen to dramatic stories of everyday people and the exaggerations of potentates - that journalist era has evaporated, and its great practitioners are dead or dying.

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But what adventures they were, however long ago.

I ask myself: Did it all really happen? Was I really that fortunate? And what happened to the scores of people I met in a multitude of societies, and ate with and laughed with and sometimes shed tears with? Did their dreams of a better life materialize? And what about the ambitions of their children in a world that, because of technology and the exigencies of politics, would soon be so different from the one in which their forebears were raised?
The G20 summit in China that starts in Sunday will be an occasion for learning the orientations of the world's most powerful countries and a test for personal relations between their leaders, as they assume their respective positions in the emerging world order with eyes trained on the others. The center of suspicions at the summit will no doubt be Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He has a problem of trust with both his US and Russian counterparts, as a result of his major intervention in Syria, despite Putin and Obama's ostensible support for Turkey's decision to join the war on ISIS. Erdogan's violent authoritarianism worries other coolheaded leaders. He has become obsessed with power following the failed coup attempt against him, and is determined to consolidate and expand his powers by all means necessary. Erdogan has judged Syria to be a favorable arena for him to show his determination and strength, in the process reshuffling the regional and international deck of cards. Some believe his actions prove he is weak. Others say he has strong cards and can impose fait accompli(s) in Syria and Europe itself. What is clear is that he has decided to play all his cards but without revealing all of them. His about face in Syria has left many stakeholders confused or suspicious, including both Moscow and Washington. Indeed, he has paradoxically coordinated with the US, aligned himself with Russia, and sought accord with Iran under pretexts like the fight against ISIS and the suppression of Kurdish nationalist aspirations from Iran to Syria via Iraq. He has signaled he might backtrack from his absolute opposition to Assad remaining in power, by accepting a temporary role for him during the transitional process. And yet, Erdogan has provided air support and ground fire cover to Syrian Rebels as they made a major comeback in northern Syria. Many are thus confused by Edogan's moves especially in Syria. Some Gulf states are not just confused but annoyed by Erdogan's lack of coordination with his erstwhile allies in the Gulf. Russia and Iran, which initially welcomed Turkey's about face in Syria and saw it as deviation from the the US and Gulf policy in their favor, are now worried by Turkey's military presence in Syria and support for rebel groups on the ground there. For its part, the Obama administration is stunned by Erdogan's new post-coup attempt posture, which disregards US priorities in Syria including its alliance with the Kurds there. Everyone is asking whether Erdogan's assertiveness is temporary, the product of a man in a bind now implicated in quagmires in Syria as well as at home in Turkey; or whether the Turkish president has determined the weaknesses of all the stakeholders in Syria and decided the time is right to make his move and simultaneously bolster his power and position of his country in the regional security order. There are two opinions in the Gulf on how to deal with Erdogan's u-turn and paradoxical policies. The first recommends not antagonizing him and waiting until the dust settles around his hasty and dubious policies. After that, the special relation with him could be resumed. The other view is that the Gulf has lost trust in Erdogan and has no choice but to forgo of him. Erdogan controls many important keys needed by Gulf states's policies via a vis the players in Syria, and can cut off their arteries if the mistrust reaches the point of estrangement. For this reason, the proponents of this view say the Gulf interest requires prudence. And perhaps then what Erdogan is doing will lead to a breakthrough in Syria. The proponents of the other view counter by saying Erdogan is fighting an unwinnable battle in Syria against the Kurds that will have implications internally. In addition, he is fighting groups like ISIS which not long ago did not see Turkey as an enemy, but now could start mounting more reprisal attacks there. Regardless of the conflicting views, and the contradictory positions of the Turkish leadership and other powers, Turkey's military role in Syria is a major development irrespective of its outcomes. On the one hand, Turkey's incursion has brought back to life Syrian rebel groups that were on the verge of extinction. So the question is this: Does Erdogan intend to develop the abilities of these groups to bargain politically with Russia, Iran, and the regime in Damascus? Would that bargain be about the future of Syria and the opposition, or would it be about Turkish interests and national security? Perhaps there is a deal being prepared, wherein Kurds are Erdogan's to deal with, and Aleppo is Assad's, as some press reports suggested, with blessing from Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Russia. However, the deal does not appear convincing. Indeed, it is not easy for the Turkish president to abandon Aleppo and offer it as downpayment for a deal that may or may not guarantee him concrete gains compared to Assad's in Aleppo. Everything is possible in Syria today, but there is a risk involved in over interpreting these deals. Aleppo remains a major juncture that is crucial for the future of all players in Syria. Just like there are signs the military escalation could lead to political accords, there is a possibility for Syria to become a quagmire for all those who intervened, including Russia, Iran, Turkey, the militias and the regime, while possibly sparing the US and the Gulf countries who have not intervened directly. The UN could fall into a moral quagmire in Syria, if the various allegations against the general secretariat are true, and the Security Council which seems willing to forgo of its duty regarding the chemical weapons evidence condemning the regime and ISIS. The US is intimidated by the Russian attacks on the commission of inquiry, which concluded that the regime used chemical weapons after the Russian-American deal to dismantle its chemical weapons arsenal, the event that led Obama to backtrack from his famous red lines. Certainly, Moscow and Damascus had no option but to double down, because confessing to the crime would trigger sanctions or referral to the ICC. But it seems Washington so far accepts this, because it would otherwise have to take action, and the US does not want to rock the boat at this phase of the life of the Obama administration, which deliberately avoided involvement in Syria. The Europeans raise the voice then lower it, hiding behind America's dithering. Despite ethnic cleansing clearly taking place in Syria, no one in the West is raising their voice, despite their habitual claim of the moral highground. The images of Syrian children burning from napalm and outlawed weapons have been ignored by the international conscience without anger or action. When the leaders of the G20 meet this week and take group photos with broad smiles, perhaps they will remember the images of Syria's children . But then this is unfortunately unlikely. As those leaders will meet then decide the future direction of the global economy, policy, and security as the world's most powerful leaders, it is their fear of Syrian refugee inflows, and the expansion of jihadist groups to their countries that will impose Syria on the agenda, not the suffering of Syrians. Erdogan is now the star player in Syria meanwhile. He will be the focus of G20 leaders, because of the implications of his game for their interests rather the the weight of the Syrian tragedy, fueled by local, regional and international policies in equal measure. Translated by Karim Traboulsi http://www.alhayat.com/m/opinion/17168622
Hutchinson steamrolls Liberal 35-7, setting up rematch with Bishop Carroll

The Hutchinson Salthawks overcame several Liberal short-field opportunities in the first half to beat the Redskins 35-7 Friday night at Gowans Stadium
The primary election is on Thursday.

Senate Candidates Debate at UCP in North Adams

NORTH ADAMS, Mass.  In the seventh of eight debates in six days, the candidates for the Democratic nomination for the state Senate seat continued to show their differences.

United Cerebral Palsy held a nearly 3-hour forum Friday night with Executive Director Salvatore Garozzo moderating. The primary election is on Thursday and the winner will take on Republican Christine Canning-Wilson in the general election in November.

The three kicked off by telling a little bit about themselves. Adam Hinds grew up in Shelbourne Falls and was the son of a public school teacher and a part-time librarian. As a child, Hinds said his father tried to get an upholstery tool company off the ground and, little to his knowledge, the family struggled financially. But his parents gave him the opportunity to go to college and then he worked for the campaigns of U.S. Rep. John Olver and of John Kerry in presidential run. He spent time in the Middle East as a negotiator with the United Nations. He returned to Pittsfield to become the first coordinator of the Pittsfield Community Connection and is currently on leave as executive director of the Northern Berkshire Community Coalition.

"No one on Beacon Hill is going to intimidate me and we need a strong voice for Western Massachusetts," Hinds said.

Rinaldo Del Gallo's tagline for the campaign is "you know who I am and you know what I stand for." Del Gallo cited his years of writing columns in The Berkshire Eagle and as the leading force behind Styrofoam and single-use plastic bag bans in numerous towns. He's been active in the Berkshire Fatherhood Coalition and running free legal clinics, and is running as a self-described "Bernie Sanders progressive" looking to take the revolution the Vermont senator began in his presidential bid to the local level.

"I actually have legislation passed in the city of Pittsfield regarding the environment. I also have animal rights legislation passed," Del Gallo said. "I've been here since the turn of the century, I've involved in a highly visible way."

Andrea Harrington is a criminal defense and family law attorney. She grew up in Pittsfield, where her grandparents were "rank and file" at General Electric. She was the first to go to college and then law school. For three years, she worked in fighting death penalty convictions in the state of Florida. She moved back to the Berkshires to start her own practice and raise her family; her husband purchased the Public Market in West Stockbridge.

"It was tough for us to figure out how we are going to make a living and support our family," Harrington said. "I see two Berkshire Counties. This is a great place to live if you can make money, usually from somewhere else."

The candidates then fielded an array of questions  mostly centered around health care. A list of questions was provided to them ahead of time and Garozzo had them pick numbers that related to one of those questions. The candidates had not been aware of the numbering system beforehand.

Del Gallo pulled a question of how to increase the amount of health-care specialists in the area. He responded that the most important way would be to have tuition-free and debt-free college. When it comes to professions or specialties that do not pay a lot, debt-free college would encourage more people to pursue those careers.

"When you graduate with a boatload of student debt, you have to choose professions that pay a lot of money to pay off that debt. That is why it is important for debt free college," Del Gallo said.

Hinds pulled a question about how to reduce the homelessness population. He said the role of a senator would be to serve as a "conceiving" role in bringing organizations to solve the problem. He said he'd be able to pull people together to create more housing for homeless people.

"It is an issue we are seeing across the county and it is pretty alarming," Hinds said. "There is a shortage of housing for homelessness and the services available, we all need to make sure they are there."

Harrington drew a question about how to fund community integration programs. She said those social services are always the first to get cut, and it shouldn't be. She wants to invest in programs for people that will reduce spending in the criminal justice system.

"I see that we as a society need to lift up our most vulnerable and struggling people," Harrington said. "I will be a strong advocate in Boston fighting for resources for us."

The candidates were surprised when UCP had another section of questions asked by staff members, which they didn't have ahead of time. All three candidates answered those questions, which started with the question of a full-service hospital in North Adams.

"I think having a full-service hospital is incredibly important for the community," Harrington said, adding that North Adams Regional didn't close because it wasn't financially viable but because of debts incurred when the leadership opted to purchase nursing homes.

Harrington said people are leaving Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield against medical advice because it is too far away and there is a significant shortage of drug treatment programs in North Adams. She said she'd work on a bill with state Rep. Gailanne Cariddi, D-North Adams, to change reimbursement rates of hospitals not deemed "critical access" with those which are. And Harrington said she'd work with Berkshire Health Systems in an attempt to get them to reopen the campus as a full-service operation.

Hinds said BHS continues to add services, which is good news, but there are many other underserved areas of health in North Adams. With the NBCC, he said the focus has been tackling the shortage of primary-care physicians as well as rally around programs to keep people healthier, such as smoking cessation programs.

"The impact was devastation when the hospital closed, in jobs and the feeling of security," Hinds said, adding that North Adams often can't apply for some programs like that expansion of the CSS unit at Berkshire Medical Center, which is aimed for drug abuse recovery. "I'd push for rural exceptions when we face things like that on the state level."

Del Gallo said he'd push for the state to move to a single-payer heath care system and then opening a public hospital.

"I've lost faith in the private sector's ability or willingness to put in a hospital or expand it," Del Gallo said. "The difference in my approach than my two opponents is that I want to start a public hospital."

When asked about the Northeast Energy Direct pipeline that Kinder Morgan proposed to cut through the Berkshires but later withdrew, all three candidates said they oppose it.

"They are coming back. They spent $60 million on that pipeline. They're coming back," Del Gallo said. "Global warming is the biggest problem facing society, mankind and the earth. We are seeing the storm of the century every three years."

Del Gallo said he was always against the pipeline, and that his opponents had been wavering early on. He also said he is the only one who supports putting wind turbines on Berkshire mountaintops.

Harrington admitted that during her first interview, she said she was uncertain. That was because she was advised to stay away from issues and focus on her background. However, she said she regretted not taking a stance and has since made it clear that she opposes it.

"I am not a politician, I am not a politically correct person," Harrington said.

Hinds also said he opposes the pipeline and is calling for a large increase in renewable energy. He said there needs to be enough renewable energy to offset the cost impacts made by when more and more fossil-fuel generators come offline. That means expanding off-shore wind and lifting the net metering cap for solar.

"I think we can work toward a net-zero Berkshires," Hinds said.

The candidates were also asked why then want to represent the largest district in the state.

"The reason I got into this race and the reason politics is appealing is because I am sick of politics as usual," Hinds said. "I'm in this race because I think we can inspire people from this seat, this county, this district. We can inspire because we take on the big issues."

Harrington said she wants the seat because she is tired of seeing the loss of middle class jobs and more and more people struggling. She said her grandfather was a mold and tool maker but his work got shipped overseas. Luckily, the family was able to survive on her grandmother's pension from GE, but those jobs are gone and so are the pensions. She said she is constantly seeing in the courts clients who are struggling financially and she wants to increase opportunities.

"When I am advocating for my clients, I bring all of my experiences with me," she said, referring to the experience of her parents and grandparents struggling and her own experiences in the courtroom, as a woman and as a mother who's cried at school meetings about her child's individualized educational program. "I bring all of that with me."

Del Gallo said he is bringing the Sanders revolution to the local level. He'd like to see the state look more at the Nordic countries that are more socialist than the United State but also have little poverty or homelessness, debt-free college, and happier people. He also wants to usher in higher taxes for the rich to help support the country as a whole.

"I'm for taxing capital gains, wealth accumulation and estates," Del Gallo said.

No surprise, when Del Gallo was asked who his hero is, the answer was Sanders.

"He made the word socialism a clean expression. He didn't hide it. He said he was a democratic socialist and look how well he did," Del Gallo said. "He totally changed the dialogue of American politics."

Hinds said it is his uncle. He said his uncle devoted his life toward implementing Civil Rights legislation in the 1970s and then ran for office.

"He stood up for what is right. He stood up and went on the ballot as well. He believe you could have an impact in the Legislature. That's a big deal... He did it all for all of the right reasons," Hinds said.

Harrington credited her mother who worked two jobs to allow her to go to college.

"She taught me so much about perseverance, grit, and the value of family. They worked all of the time for us. I didn't appreciate that until I became a parent myself," Harrington said. "I'm just overwhelmed how much she's done for me. She's babysitting my kids right now."
Letter: Adam Hinds Embraces The Details

To the Editor:



I have lived in the Berkshires for 20 years. I was born and raised here, and while I attend Brandeis University during the school months, my Berkshire pride never falters.



This Sept. 8, I am driving from school to cast a vote for Adam Hinds for state Senate because I know who he is, and I believe that he is uniquely qualified to represent our entire community in Boston, alongside the rest of our tireless Berkshire delegation.



As a young person with a love for the place where I grew up, I think often on the question of what our region needs to cement a bright future. The Berkshires have incredible beauty and even better people. But for what we have in character, we lack in many critical services. That is why this election is so important.



Jacob Edelman

Monterey, Mass.
Imperial Valley News Center

NASA Selects Proposals for Advancing Adaptive Space Robotics, 3-D Printing and Other Key Exploration Technologies

Washington, DC - NASA has selected 21 research and technology proposals from American small businesses and research institutions that will enable NASA's future missions into the solar system and beyond while benefiting America's technology-driven economy here on Earth.

The Phase II selectees of NASA's Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program are permitted to enter negotiations for possible contract awards worth a combined total of approximately $15.8 million. The program selected 21 innovative technologies and projects from 41 U.S. firms and research institutions in 20 different states.

"Just as small businesses are driving our economy, technology is driving exploration," said Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator for the Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "These selected proposals demonstrate the creativity of American entrepreneurs and, along with our other technology investments, will contribute to ensuring the U.S. remains a leader in technology development and space exploration."

A sampling of proposals from the selected small businesses and research institutions demonstrates the breadth of research these awards will fund, including technology developments and advancements in the following areas:

Autonomous communications systems

Gas sensing technology advancements for spacesuits

Space weather prediction

Technologies for planetary compositional analysis and mapping

Information technologies for intelligent and adaptive space robotics

Advanced propulsion system ground test and launch technology

One study will explore the use of a fuel grain as propellant. The proposed green propellant system offers significant advantages over competing technologies in the areas of cost, safety and mission capability. This effort will build on the successful studies, design, and testing activities completed during Phase I research. The resulting technology will fulfill the ever-growing mission demands of the extensive small satellite market, including CubeSats and NanoSats, by enabling dedicated launch for CubeSat-scale payloads. Comparable launch vehicle stages in this size class currently are not commercially available.

A second study involves a new generation of CubeSats that take advantage of in-situ resources -- living off the land -- while exploring space. The proposal combines existing CubeSat technology with 3-D printing technology and an in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) water extraction system. The 3-D printing technology enables development of steam thrusters, as well as tanks that fit within the available space within the CubeSat. The ISRU module captures and extracts water, and takes advantage of the heat generated by the CubeSat electronics system, with supplemental power from solar charged batteries.

NASA's STTR Program uses a highly competitive, three-phase award system that provides collaborative opportunities between qualified small businesses, including women-owned and disadvantaged firms, and research institutions, to address specific technology gaps in NASA programs. Selected projects provide a foundation for future technology developments and are complementary to other NASA research investments.

STTR Phase II projects will expand on the results of recently completed Phase I projects, which received six-month contracts valued as much as $125,000. Phase II projects will last up to two years and receive contracts valued as much as $750,000 per award. Phase III, the commercialization of an innovation, may occur after successful completion of Phase II.

Selection criteria for these awards included technical merit and feasibility, along with experience, qualifications and facilities. Also, selectees must meet requirements of effectiveness of the work plan, and commercial potential and feasibility.

NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, manages both the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and STTR Programs for STMD, with individual project oversight from across the agencys 10 field centers.

For more information about NASA's SBIR and STTR Programs, and a list of selected proposals, visit:

http://sbir.nasa.gov/prg_selection/node/56313

STMD is innovating, developing, testing and flying hardware for use in NASA's future missions. NASA's investments in technology provide the transformative capabilities to enable new missions, stimulate the economy, contribute to the nation's global competitiveness and inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers and explorers.

For more information about NASA's investment in space technology, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/spacetech
Governor Brown Issues Proclamation Declaring Labor Day

Sacramento, California - Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. today issued a proclamation declaring September 5, 2016, as Labor Day in the State of California.

PROCLAMATION

When government and business recognize the intrinsic right of workers to organize and bargain collectively, it is possible to maintain an orderly system of industrial relations, avoiding the chaos and bloodshed that often marked labor disputes in the past. The industrial growth that our nation enjoyed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came at a great human cost. While men, women and children suffered under brutal working conditions, their attempts to improve their situation were often met with violence by employers and the government. In response, many workers became radical or violent themselves, leading to a seemingly unbreakable cycle of destruction and terror.



There were countless instances of labor actions leading to tragedy during this period. One of the earliest and most infamous of these was the Haymarket Affair of 1886, a bombing and shooting incident during May Day rallies in Chicago that took the lives of seven police officers, four civilians and four anarchists that were hanged for plotting the attacka sentence whose justness is still debated. In 1894, a nationwide wildcat strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company led to a disproportionate response from the federal government. Twelve thousand United States Army troops were deployed to break the strike, killing 13 workers and wounding dozens more.



Though unions and craft organizations had begun to hold Labor Day picnics as early as the 1870s, it was not until the aftermath of this tragedy that the observance became an official holiday for all Americans. In that year President Grover Cleveland established the national Labor Day as part of his efforts to heal the nations wounds. However, lacking an orderly system to address labor disputes, the country continued to suffer similar events for several decades after this symbolic act of reconciliation. During a textile workers strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912, police clubbed women and children attempting to flee the embattled town. In San Francisco, on July 5, 1934, two men participating in a longshoremens strike were killed by police gunfire in an incident that came to be known as Bloody Thursday.



The following year, on July 5, 1935, President Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Actalso known as the Wagner Actthe foundational law of our modern system of industrial relations. By legitimizing workers organizations as political entities and creating a legal framework for the resolution of workplace disputes, the Wagner Act effectively ended the decades of bloodshed and despair that attended our nations birth as an industrial giant. Today, disagreements between management and labor are typically worked out at the bargaining table with paper and pens, not in the streets with guns and bombs. For this we can all be thankful.

This year, as we enjoy traditions ranging from beach outings and barbecues to an annual change in the rules of high fashion, we should remember how much progress has allowed us to celebrate this Labor Day. I urge all Californians to take this opportunity to appreciate not only the vast contribution of labor to our economy, but also the privilege of living under a fair and well-regulated system of industrial relations.



NOW THEREFORE I, EDMUND G. BROWN JR., Governor of the State of California, do hereby proclaim September 5, 2016, as Labor Day.



IN WITNESS WHEREOF I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Great Seal of the State of California to be affixed this 1st day of September 2016.







___________________________________

EDMUND G. BROWN JR.

Governor of California





ATTEST:







__________________________________

ALEX PADILLA

Secretary of State
Bureau of Reclamation Launches Prize Competition Seeking Ideas to Protect Canals, Levees and Earthen Dam Embankments from Burrowing Rodents

Washington, DC - The Bureau of Reclamation is launching a new prize competition seeking methods to prevent rodents from burrowing into canals, levees and earthen dam embankments. Winners of this prize competition will share $20,000.

Rodents can burrow through both sides of an embankment providing a pathway for water to move through and erode the embankment, potentially causing serious issues for the surrounding communities. Burrows may also intersect and expose other anomalies in the embankment that may also result in a failure of the embankment. Rodents include squirrels, badgers, moles, muskrats, mice and beavers.

Reclamation is partnering with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the State of Colorado Department of Natural Resources Dam Safety Division, federal canal operating entities including the Boise Project Board of Control and the South Columbia Basin Irrigation District, to design and judge this competition.

To register and learn more about Reclamations prize competitions, visit www.challenge.gov. To learn more about Reclamations Water Prize Competition Center, visit www.usbr.gov/research/challenges/.

Recently, Challenge.gov celebrated its fifth anniversary. Challenge.gov is a historic effort by the federal government to collaborate with members of the public through incentive prizes to address the most pressing local, national and global challenges. True to the spirit of President Obama's charge from his first day in office, federal agencies have collaborated with more than 200,000 citizen solversentrepreneurs, citizen scientists, students and morein more than 440 challenges on topics ranging from accelerating the deployment of solar energy to combating breast cancer to increasing resilience after Hurricane Sandy.
Supplement-not-Supplant under Title I of the Every Student Succeeds Act

Washington, DC - The U.S. Department of Education (the Department) released proposed regulations to implement the requirement in Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), as recently revised by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), that federal funds must supplement, and may not supplant, state and local funds. The proposal will help ensure that federal funds are additive and do not take the place of state and local funds in low-income schools, in keeping with the longstanding commitment under Title I that the nation's highest need students receive the additional financial resources necessary to help them succeed.

The proposed regulation would mean up to $2 billion in additional state and local funding for high poverty schools.

"For too long, the students who need the most have gotten the least," said U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. "The inequities in state and local funding that we see between schools within districts are inconsistent not only with the words 'supplement-not-supplant' but with the civil rights history of that provision and with the changes Congress made to the law last year. No single measure will erase generations of resource inequities, and there is much more work to do across states and districts to address additional resource inequities, but this is a concrete step forward to help level the playing field and ensure compliance with the law."

Wade Henderson, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said, "Plainly put, our system of funding education is unfair and unwise and this draft rule is an important step toward improving an intolerable status quo. Our states and districts routinely spend less money to educate children facing greater challenges. This rule doesn't solve this massive problemno single rule couldbut it's a step in the right direction and brings us closer to a more just education system."

Civil Rights History of the "Supplement-not-Supplant" Provision

ESEA was first passed in 1965 to address enormous inequities in educational opportunities provided to low-income students and children of color. It became law around the same time as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and was intended to reduce, and ultimately eliminate, disparities in educational quality. The original purpose of the law was, at its core, to support educational opportunity for economically disadvantaged students in the spirit of providing all children across the country a high quality education. To that end, the law provided funds to schools with high concentrations of povertythrough Title Ito ensure those schools receive additional resources relative to their peers to support their high-need students.

Four years after ESEA became law, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Education Fund did a study on how states were spending federal education resources provided under Title I. The report revealed egregious misuses of funds, including an example from Mississippi where a superintendent admitted in federal court that the highest state and local per-pupil expenditure for schools serving black students in his district was half of the lowest per-pupil expenditure for schools serving white students. Although Title I funds were intended to provide high-need students with additional resources relative to their peers, the gap in state and local funds was making that impossible.

In 1970, in the wake of these findings, Congress added a provision to ESEA designed to ensure that districts did not use Title I funds simply to shirk their responsibilities to provide equitable state and local funding to all schools. In revising ESEA last year, Congress specified a new requirement under supplement, not supplant that indicates that schools receiving Title I federal funds must receive all of the State and local funds the school would have otherwise received if it were not receiving the federal resources.

More than forty years after ESEA was enacted, our nation has still not achieved the law's original promise of providing all students with equitable access to educational resources. The vast majority of districtsmore than ninety percentalready ensure that their Title I schools receive at least as much state and local funding per student as their non-Title I schoolswhich does not necessarily ensure adequate funding for a high-quality education for students who often need more, but is consistent with the statute. However, 3.3 million children remain in Title I schools that receive less. Currently, schools receiving Title I funds educate more than two-thirds of our low-income children and children of color, and yet approximately 5,750 Title I schools nationwide received substantially less state and local funding than their non-Title I peers within the same district. on average, these Title I schools are shortchanged by about $440,000 per year, and the federal funds spent in these schools are often, in effect, being used to make up some or all of that shortfall, instead of providing the additional resources needed in high poverty schools. In total, these schools are underfunded compared to their non-Title I peers by $2 billion in state and local funding. In part because of those disparities, but also because of further resource inequities including disparities in funding between districts and between states, our low-income students do not have the same access to rigorous and varied coursework, excellent educators, and college-level experiences that we know are necessary for them to get a fair shot and succeed in higher education or a career.

Resource Inequities in Schools Serving Students of Color and Low-Income Students

This proposed rule is designed to mitigate clear discrepancies in educational resources and opportunities, while ensuring compliance with the statute:

Low-poverty and low-minority schools are twice as likely to offer a full range of math and science courses as high-poverty and high-minority schools;

On average, low-poverty schools offer three times as many AP classes as high-poverty schools;

Low-minority schools are twice as likely to offer dual enrollment or dual credit opportunities, compared with high-minority schools;

Educators in high-poverty and high-minority schools are more than twice as likely to be in their first or second year of teaching, compared to their peers in low-poverty and low-minority schools.

Proposal Details

No single federal rule can make up for decades of resource inequities, and going forward we must continue to fight for full equity in funding between schools, districts and states, but today's proposal would mean up to $2 billion in additional funding annually for our nation's poorest children, though the precise amount will depend on how districts comply with the requirements. That's a significant step forward in the ongoing fight for resource equity in our nation's schools, and to ensure federal dollars are spent as they are intended under the law: to ensure that our highest need students receive the additional resources they need to be successful.

Recognizing that this is not a simple undertaking, the draft regulations reflect the robust and thoughtful input provided during the negotiated rulemaking process, and feedback the Department received from stakeholders across the education system over the past few months. Compared to the proposal put forward during negotiated rulemaking, the new proposed regulations would allow districts and states significantly greater flexibility in complying with the supplement, not supplant provisions. As a number of negotiators suggested, it also builds upon the non-regulatory guidance the Department issued in 2015.

Specifically, the proposal clarifies for school districts options for how to demonstrate compliance with the supplement, not supplant, provision in Title I. Notably, the ESSA for the first time contains a statutory directive around how districts must demonstrate compliance with supplement, not supplant. The law states that districts must use a methodology to allocate state and local funds to each Title I school that ensures each such school receives all the state and local funds it would otherwise receive if it were not a Title I school. The proposal affirms that funds-based requirement and allows each district the flexibility to demonstrate compliance in a number of ways:

A weighted student funding formula that provides additional resources for students with characteristics associated with educational disadvantage, such as students in poverty, English learners, and students with disabilities, and ensures that each Title I schools receives all of the actual funds to which it is entitled under that system;

A formula that allocates resources including staff positions and non-personnel resources directly to schools, and that ensures each Title I school gets all of the funding it is entitled to, as measured by the sum of (1) the number of personnel in the school multiplied by the district's average salaries for each staff category, and (2) the number of students in the school multiplied by the district's average per-pupil expenditures for non-personnel resources;

An alternative, funds-based test developed by the state and approved by a panel of expert peer reviewers that is as rigorous as the above two options; or

A methodology selected by the district that ensures the per-pupil funding in each Title I school is at least as much as the average per-pupil funding in non-Title I schools within the district.

Regardless of how they choose to demonstrate compliance, the Department encourages districts to meet the requirement by:

Increasing overall funding for education, with a focus on putting new resources in Title I schools, rather than shifting resources from other schools;

Avoiding forced staff transfers and instead investing in providing the resources that students need to learn and that will attract staff to choose to work in Title I schools. Such resources might include high quality early learning opportunities, wraparound supports such as healthcare and counseling, improved working conditions, or financial incentives for effective educators who choose to work in high-need schools.

Flexibilities for Districts

Understanding that school budgeting is complicated and often requires varied approaches from district-to-district and year-to-year, the proposed rule provides several flexibilities that take into account feedback given during negotiations, including:

Exceptions for those cases in which discrepancies in state and local funding within districts are the result of investments in students with disabilities, English Learners or special schools.

Flexibility for minor fluctuations from year to year within a district's budget.

Flexibility for very small schools, where 100 or fewer students are enrolled.

Opportunity to comply on a districtwide or grade span basis, as the cost of running a high school is often quite different than the cost of running an elementary school.

Opportunity to exclude state or local funds expended for programs that meet the intent and purposes of Title I, Part A (e.g. a state-funded preschool program that provides additional services only for students most at risk of not meeting challenging State academic standards).

Flexibility to exclude state and local funds spent on districtwide activities (e.g. districtwide administrative costs or districtwide summer school), provided that each Title I school receives an equal or greater share of those activities as it would otherwise receive if it were not a Title I school.

Finally, we recognize that this is challenging work that will take time to implement. The proposal provides additional time for districts that cannot demonstrate compliance by the statutory deadline in ESSA: December 2017. Those districts must submit to their state a plan in December 2017 for how they will fully comply beginning in the 2019-2020 school year. The Department encourages districts to take advantage of this time in order to implement strategies that increase funding for Title I schools in which federal funds may not currently be supplemental, consistent with the statutory requirement.

Building on Progress

Today's proposal builds on the Administration's efforts to promote equal educational opportunity across the country. High school graduation rates are now at an all-time high, with students who are historically further behindlow-income students, students of color, students with disabilitiesmaking faster progress. Since 2009, the Administration has invested more than $7 billion in turning around low-performing schools and provided $4.2 million to the Excellent Educators for All initiative to help states develop and implement plans to ensure that low-income students and students of color are not taught at higher rates than their peers by unqualified, out-of-field, or inexperienced teachers. The Administration's investments in Promise Neighborhoodsa cradle-to-career program that places schools at the center of a community's revitalization efforts and aligns comprehensive supports such as high-quality early learning, after school activities, mental health services, job training, and crime prevention to the needs of students and familiesenshrined in the ESSA, has improved opportunities in very high- need communities across the country. The Administration has also worked to invest over $1 billion additional dollars in expanding access to high-quality preschool, one of the best investments we can make to close the achievement gap. We have also worked to improve college readiness by redesigning America's high schools, expanding access to community college through America's College Promise, and starting a pilot program allowing 10,000 high-school students to access Federal Pell Grants to pay for college-level courses.

The promise of ESSA is to provide all children with access to a high-quality, well-rounded education and prepare them to succeed in college or a career. We have come a long way as a country since the original passage of ESEA in 1965, but we must do better, and this proposal is an important step forward in providing our highest need children with the additional resources they need to succeed.

The full text of the proposed regulation is available here, and is on track to be published in the Federal Register on Tuesday, September 6. The Department welcomes comments on these proposed regulations during the 60 day public comment period.
Congratulations to Sao Tome and Principe's New President Evaristo Carvalho

Washington, DC - The United States offers congratulations to the people of Sao Tome and Principe on successfully holding free, fair, and transparent elections on July 17 and August 7, and to new President Evaristo Carvalho on his September 3 inauguration.

This election is a yet another demonstration of Sao Tome and Principes long-standing commitment to democratic values. Through their exemplary conduct, the people of Sao Tome and Principe continue to serve as a beacon of democracy for other countries. We look forward to working with President Carvalho and his government to further enhance our bilateral relations, and to promoting democracy, development, stability, and maritime security in the region.
Special Envoy for Climate Change Travel to Dakar, Abuja, Johannesburg, and Pretoria

Washington, DC - U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Dr. Jonathan Pershing will travel September 4  9 to Senegal, Nigeria, and South Africa. His trip is an important opportunity to discuss implementation of the Paris Agreement, and advance climate and clean energy efforts with leaders across Africa ahead of this years UNFCCC annual climate conference, COP-22, in Marrakesh, Morocco, on November 7-18.

Special Envoy Pershing will travel to Dakar, Senegal, on September 4 for meetings with government officials and civil society to highlight our strong partnership based on common interests in addressing climate change and how it impacts coastal communities, food security, power production and inclusive economic growth.

On September 6, Special Envoy Pershing will travel to Abuja, Nigeria, for meetings with government officials and civil society to discuss climate finance and investment, youth engagement on climate change, and the importance of joining and implementing the Paris Agreement.

Special Envoy Pershing will then travel to Johannesburg and Pretoria on September 8 for meetings with South African government officials, private sector, and civil society to discuss climate negotiations, leadership on renewable energy, and priorities going into COP-22 in Marrakesh later this year.
Watch: Man's Fire Stunt Goes Horribly Wrong, Beard Up in Flames
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The Young Pope is already making a splash, though it's yet to hit TV screens.

The opening episodes of Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty, Youth)'s new television series hit Venice Film Festival, to rave reviews and plenty of comparisons to the machinations of House of Cards.

Sorrentino has joined forces in a three-pronged collaboration between Sky, HBO, and Canal Plus to bring his first English-language series to screen. Here, Jude Law plays the conflicted, chain-smoking first American pontiff Pius XIII; introduced on the morning of his first day in office, ready to enter into the secretive struggles of the Vatican state.

The series also features Diane Keaton's first recurring role in a TV series, as nun Sister Mary; alongside Silvio Orlando, Scott Shepherd, Cecile de France, Javier Camara, Ludivine Sagnier, Tony Bertorelli, and James Cromwell.

It's a typically beautiful, extravagant-looking production from the Italian film director; with the shoot taking place primarily in Rome, including near the Vatican, as well as Venice and New York.

Here's the full synopsis:

Lenny Belardo, aka Pius XIII, is the first American Pope in history. Young and charming, his election might seem the result of a simple and effective media strategy by the College of Cardinals. But, as we know, appearances can be deceptive. Especially in the place and among the people who have chosen the great mystery of God as the guiding light of their existence. That place is the Vatican and those people are the leaders of the Catholic Church. And the most mysterious and contradictory figure of all turns out to be Pius XIII himself. Shrewd and naive, old-fashioned and very modern, doubtful and resolute, ironic, pedantic, hurt and ruthless, Pius XIII tries to walk the long path of human loneliness to find a God for mankind. And for himself. <p> </p>

The Young Pope airs in October exclusively on Sky Atlantic.
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Dir: Martin Koolhoven, 149 minutes, starring: Dakota Fanning, Guy Pearce, Carice van Houten, Kit Harington

Brimstone is a blood-soaked revenge western epic, very violent, extremely vivid and full of overwrought biblical references. In the brutal, misogynistic world that its Dutch writer-director Martin Koolhoven conjures up, women are preyed on by their menfolk as a matter of course. They are whipped and assaulted. Their rights are non-existent and sadistic measures are taken to silence them. Nonetheless, they are the strongest and most admirable characters while the men here are, almost without exception, despicable.

The film is divided into four chapters, all with portentous titles like Genesis, Exodus and Retribution. Dakota Fanning gives arguably the performance of her career so far as the long-suffering heroine, Liz. It is a role she took at short notice when the original star Mia Wasikowska pulled out weeks before shooting but she excels. As first encountered, Liz is mute. She is living contentedly in a small rural community full of Dutch settlers with her farmer husband Eli (one of the few men in the film who is remotely sympathetic), her daughter and her truculent stepson.

It doesnt take long for evil to arrive in the shape of a hellfire preacher (Guy Pearce) who is keen to let everyone in the community know that they are doomed. Liz has a connection with this man, one that Koolhoven deliberately refuses to make clear until very late in the picture.

The early scenes very briefly evoke a Laura Ingalls Wilder-like world of prairie innocence. Then, as a woman goes into labour in the church and no one knows how to help her, it rapidly becomes apparent just how brutal this world is. Koolhoven argued in Venice this weekend that much of the violence in the film is implied rather than shown directly. Even so, there are still scenes of brains seeping out of the heads of men whove been shot, stabbings, whippings, hangings and characters getting their tongues ripped out.

There isnt much spaghetti western-style humour either to leaven the very grim mood. During the first chapter, Fannings Joanna doesnt speak at all. However, she has an extraordinarily expressive face, one that rekindles memories of silent stars like Lillian Gish in old DW Griffith movies. She also demonstrates her resilience. Soon, she and her daughter are on the run with the preacher coming after them.

Pearce gives an eccentric but chilling performance as this preacher. He speaks English with a grating Dutch accent and has a beard that makes him look like an Amish elder. He dresses in black and walks in the same menacing and deliberate way that Robert Mitchum did in Night Of The Hunter. Koolhovens screenplay goes back in time and shows him terrorising his wife (Carice van Houten) on the grounds that she wont sleep with him. Spurned by her, in some of the films most disturbing and distasteful scenes, he preys on much younger women.

Early Oscars 2017 contenders Show all 19 1 /19 Early Oscars 2017 contenders Early Oscars 2017 contenders La La Land Whiplash director Damien Chapelle opens this years Venice Film Festival with this original musical starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling as a couple of dreamers trying to make it big in Hollywood: she, a lonely aspiring actress; he, a cocky jazz pianist. The trailer promises a neon-soaked, dreamy take on the classic Golden Age musical, all big-hearted romance and wholesome glamour. Expect La La Land to explore some darker emotional territory alongside all the toe-tapping, too. In cinemas here on 13 January. Early Oscars 2017 contenders Silence Martin Scorseses passion project since 1991 is yet to receive a release date but rumours abound that it will be out in time for the Oscars. Based on a novel of the same name by Japanese author Shusaku Endo, the story centres on two Jesuit missionaries sent to 17th century Japan to spread Christianity and find their mentor Once there, they endure brutal persecution at the time of Kakura Kirishitan (Hidden Christians) following the defeat of the Shimabara Rebellion. Silence sounds weighty, intense and full of hard-hitting promise. Early Oscars 2017 contenders Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi director Ang Lee has narrowly missed out on a Best Picture win twice now but this adaptation of Ben Fountains acclaimed novel could be the film that finally wins him some overdue glory. The cast includes Kristen Stewart and Vin Diesel with newcomer Joe Alwyn in the lead as 19-year-old soldier Billy, who is brought home for a victory tour after serving in Iraq. Told in flashbacks, the drama reveals the horror of what really happened to his squad in contrast to Americas flashy, patriotic perceptions. Out here 6 January. Early Oscars 2017 contenders A United Kingdom Oyelowo plays Prince Seretse Khama, inaugural Botswana president from 1966 to 1980, in this follow-up to 2015s Belle. Films about real life people often hold clout with the Academy when done well and with Gone Girls Rosamund Pike playing Khamas eventual wife Ruth Williams, A United Kingdom should pull in cinemagoers. Khama sparked a global stir when he married the white Londoner in the late Forties and the first pictures from the movie promise beautiful costumes and cinematography. A United Kingdom will open the London Film Festival before its general release on 25 November. Early Oscars 2017 contenders Loving Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton star as Mildred and Richard Loving in this historical drama about an interracial couple sentenced to prison in Virginia in 1958 for the crime of getting married. Out here just in time for the Oscars on 3 February. Written and directed by Jeff Nichols, Loving earned positive reviews from critics when it competed for the Palme dOr at Cannes and received a standing ovation for understated, strong performances. Early Oscars 2017 contenders Manchester by the Sea One of the best scripts co-producer Matt Damon had ever read, this tragedy about an uncle who is forced to take care of his teenage nephew after the boys father dies while trying to reconcile with his ex-wife stars Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams and newcomer Lucas Hedges. It was bought at Sundance by Amazon for $10 million and arrives in the UK on 13 January. Early Oscars 2017 contenders Nocturnal Animals Designer Tom Ford has cinematic strings to his bow, as proved with 2009s Venice premiere The Single Man. Hes back in the chair for this drama-thriller starring Amy Adams as a remarried art gallery owner whose ex-husbands violent new book begins to haunt her. Jake Gyllenhaal, Isla Fisher and Armie Hammer also star. Due in UK cinemas on 4 November. Early Oscars 2017 contenders The Light Between Oceans Michael Fassbender stars alongside last years Best Supporting Actress winner Alicia Vikander in the big screen adaptation of ML Stedmans 2012 novel of the same name. Derek Cianfrance is the man behind the camera for this story about a lighthouse keeper war veteran who rescues a baby girl with his wife after she washes up on an adrift rowboat. Then, in steps another Oscar winner, Rachel Weisz, as the woman who threatens to break their happy family apart. Out in the UK on 4 November - bring tissues. Early Oscars 2017 contenders American Pastoral Ewan McGregor makes his directorial debut with this period adaptation of Philip Roths novel American Pastoral. The drama - set in the 60s - centres on a successful businessman (McGregor) whose missing daughter (Dakota Fanning) is accused of a violent bombing in post-war America. Out in the UK on 11 November. Early Oscars 2017 contenders Queen of Katwe Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding) is the director behind this long-awaited biopic of Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi. That Mutesi is played by 12 Years a Slave Oscar-winner Lupita Nyongo is reason enough to anticipate this Disney-produced film, out here 21 October. Disney Early Oscars 2017 contenders Free Fire Ben Wheatleys new action thriller will close the London Film Festival. Set in Massachusetts in the late Seventies, Free Fire stars Oscar-winning Room actress Brie Larson in the lead alongside Cillian Murphy. It follows the heart-stopping game of survival after shots are fired during a meeting between Justine, two Irishmen and two arms dealers who are selling them a stash of guns. Expect blood, sweat and irony with bravura filmmaking from the High-Rise director. Reaches UK cinemas sometime in 2017. Early Oscars 2017 contenders Paterson Jim Jarmuschs Palme dOr contender sees Adam Driver take the lead as a bus driver poet from Paterson, New Jersey. Each night after work, he has dinner with his wife Laura before walking his dog (2016s Palm Dog winner) to the bar for one beer. Then one day, a small disaster strikes. Early Oscars 2017 contenders The Founder Michael Keaton has starred in the last two Best Picture winners Spotlight and Birdman. Here, he takes on the role of ruthless McDonalds founder Ray Kroc, with the film telling the story of the fast food empires origins. The ambitious entrepreneur on a journey to theme didnt end so well for last years Joy, so it remains to be seen whether The Founder can live up to expectations as an Oscars contender. Out here 30 September. The Weinstein Company Early Oscars 2017 contenders Sully Clint Eastwood returns with Sully: Miracle on the Hudson, about the hero pilot who, in 2009, successfully landed his plane along the Hudson River after it was disabled by a flock of geese, saving all 155 crew and passengers. Tom Hanks takes the lead as Chesley Sullenberger in a biopic that sounds like it could tick a lot of Oscars boxes. Based on the autobiography Highest Duty, the thriller marks Eastwoods first directorial effort since 2014s American Sniper. Out 2 December. Early Oscars 2017 contenders Jackie Pablo Larrain directs Oscar winner Natalie Portman as late first lady and fashion icon Jacqueline Kennedy in what he has promised will not be another classic biopic. Set in the days immediately after John F Kennedys 1963 assassination, the film sparked great excitement among distributors after a seven-minute promo screened at Cannes. Release date unknown at this stage. Early Oscars 2017 contenders The Girl on the Train The Helps Tate Taylor is in the directors chair for this years Gone Girl about a troubled woman who becomes embroiled in a murder case after developing a fixation on a beautiful couple from her commuter train. Expect a film pulsating with creepy, voyeur vibes, a la Rear Window, based on Paula Hawkins bestselling thriller. Out in the UK on 7 October. Early Oscars 2017 contenders Florence Foster Jenkins Meryl Streep has been widely praised for her turn as the 1940s New York heiress who couldnt sing (and we mean really couldnt sing) yet somehow became an opera singer with the help of her patient husband St Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant) and pianist Cosme McMoon (Simon Helberg). Directed by two-time Academy nominee Stephen Frears, the film proved heartwarming and inspiring upon its release earlier this year and was embraced by both film lovers and critics. Early Oscars 2017 contenders Christine Rebecca Hall set Sundance ablaze in January, earning five-star reviews for the performance of her career in Christine, about the news anchor who killed herself live on air in 1974 after suffering from depression. Yet to receive a UK release date, Christine arrives in US cinemas in October, with Antonio Campos also one to watch for directorial accolades come awards season. Courtesy of Sundance Institute Early Oscars 2017 contenders Arrival Paramount Pictures



There is a spirited performance from 14-year-old British actress Emilia Jones as the youthful Joanna, a girl on the cusp of womanhood who sees the very darkest side of male behaviour but shows remarkable endurance. Kit Harington (Jon Snow from Game Of Thrones) makes an effective if brief appearance as a wounded but still dashing outlaw hiding out in a barn.

The sombre, elegiac music from Junkie XL (the Dutch composer who also scored Mad Max: Fury Road) helps give the film an epic and solemn quality in spite of its frequently squalid subject matter. Koolhoven cant resist throwing in a few western cliches  high noon style gunfights, a saloon full of drunken miners and kind hearted whores. Sometimes, the action sequences (one outlaw trying to throttle another in the outhouse, a character grabbing the gun pointing at his head and aiming it the other way) feel contrived and cartoonish.

What Koolhoven does have in spades is the ability to find lyricism amid squalor. In its own sulphurous way, Brimstone is raw and very powerful filmmaking, a movie that cant help but get under your skin.
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The largest primate on Earth  the eastern gorilla  is now critically endangered, it has been officially announced after a staggering decline in their population in just 20 years. The decision by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) means that four out of the six great apes  both types of gorilla and both types of orangutan  are feared to be on the brink of extinction.

It would perhaps not be surprising if they were to die out. Of more than 82,000 species assessed by the IUCN, nearly 30 per cent are facing that fate  almost entirely because of the actions of humans.

Geologists are currently considering reclassifying the Earths present geological epoch as the Anthropocene  a name that reflects the extent of our impact on the planet  partly because of what some scientists are already calling the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth. If they are correct, it is a slaughter comparable to the disappearance of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, when a massive asteroid is thought to have hit what is now Mexico, sending a blanket of thick smoke around the Earth.

The new critically endangered classification for the eastern lowland gorilla, also known as Grauer's gorilla, was announced at the IUCNs World Conservation Congress in Hawaii after researchers found its population had fallen by at least 77 per cent in just two decades.

The other type of eastern gorilla, the mountain gorilla, numbers only a few hundred.

Inger Andersen, the IUCNs director-general, said: To see the eastern gorilla  one of our closest cousins  slide towards extinction is truly distressing.

We live in a time of tremendous change and each IUCN Red List update makes us realise just how quickly the global extinction crisis is escalating.

Conservation action does work and we have increasing evidence of it. It is our responsibility to enhance our efforts to turn the tide and protect the future of our planet.

The updated IUCNs Red List now includes 82,954 species of which 23,928  28.8 per cent  are threatened with extinction. Other species added to those in trouble include the plains zebra, which has moved from the least concern category to near threatened after a 24 per cent decrease in its population in 14 years from 660,000 to about 500,000, largely because of hunting.

Three species of African antelope  the bay duiker, white-bellied duiker and yellow-backed duiker  were also moved from least concern to near threatened.

But it is perhaps the prospect of losing the gorillas that is the most shocking.

A female mountain gorilla in Bwindi forest on the border between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda (AFP) (Simon Maina, AFP)

Mountain gorillas have been critically endangered for 20 years with only about 300 mature individuals left, although recently wildlife tourism has been credited with helping their numbers start to recover.

Two decades ago, Grauers gorilla had a relatively healthy population of some 17,000. But the "Great African War" which broke out in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the late 1990s turned the area into one of the most violent places on the planet. Despite the formal end of the conflict in 2003, armed gangs continue to control parts of the forests where the gorillas live  largely because of the money to be made from mining for gold, diamonds and metals such as coltan, which is used in mobile phones.

Animals in decline Show all 8 1 /8 Animals in decline Animals in decline Harbour seal (Phoca vitulina) Where: Orkney Islands. What: Between 2001-2006, numbers in Orkney declined by 40 per cent. Why: epidemics of the phocine distemper virus are thought to have caused major declines, but the killing of seals in the Moray Firth to protect salmon farms may have an impact. Alamy Animals in decline African lion (Panthera leo) Where: Ghana. What: In Ghanas Mole National Park, lion numbers have declined by more than 90 per cent in 40 years. Why: local conflicts are thought to have contributed to the slaughter of lions and are a worrying example of the status of the animal in Western and Central Africa. Animals in decline Leatherback turtle (Dermochelys coriacea) Where: Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Costa Rica. What: Numbers are down in both the Atlantic and Pacific. It declined by 95 per cent between 1989-2002 in Costa Rica. Why: mainly due to them being caught as bycatch, but theyve also been affected by local developments. Alamy Animals in decline Wandering albatross (Diomedea exulans) Where: South Atlantic. What: A rapid decline. One population, from Bird Island, South Georgia, declined by 50 per cent between 1972-2010, according to the British Antarctic Survey. Why: being caught in various commercial longline fisheries. Alamy Animals in decline Saiga Antelope (Saiga tatarica) Where: Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Russia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan. What: fall in populations has been dramatic. In the early 1990s numbers were over a million, but are now estimated to be around 50,000. Why: the break up of the former USSR led to uncontrolled hunting. Increased rural poverty means the species is hunted for its meat Animals in decline Swordfish (Xiphias gladius) Where: found worldwide in tropical, subtropical and temperate seas. Why: at risk from overfishing and as a target in recreational fishing. A significant number of swordfish are also caught by illegal driftnet fisheries in the Mediterranean Animals in decline Argali Sheep (Ovis mammon) Where: Central and Southern Asian mountains,usually at 3,000-5,000 metres altitude. Why: domesticated herds of sheep competing for grazing grounds. Over-hunting and poaching. Animals in decline Humphead Wrasse (Cheilinus undulatus) Where: the Indo-Pacific, from the Red Sea to South Africa and to the Tuamoto Islands (Polynesia), north to the Ryukyu Islands (south-west Japan), and south to New Caledonia. Why: Illegal, Unregulated and Unreported (IUU) fishing and trading of the species

These mines are often deep in the forest, where there are no farms to supply food  so the miners go out hunting. Easy to track through the forest, the gorillas have been shot in high numbers.

Dr Andrew Plumptre, of the Wildlife Conservation Society, was the lead author of a report published earlier this year, which estimated the total population of Grauers gorilla at just 3,800  a decline of more than 77 per cent in 20 years. Other methods of estimating their population put the decline even higher at 94 per cent.

If the current situation persists, we are going to lose them and we could lose them in as soon a time period as 10 to 15 years, Dr Plumptre told The Independent. Its the largest ape on the planet. It would be very sad if that happened and the world wasnt willing to move and to do more to try and stop it.

He said the increase in the small number of mountain gorillas was because they generate so much money from tourism. Needing an economic reason to save them  its sad, but it seems to be the only thing thats saving them, Dr Plumptre said.

 Gorillas eat ice lollies

However, wildlife tourism is currently not an option in the area of the Democratic Republic of Congo that is home to most eastern gorillas, because of the presence of the armed gangs.

Attempts to disarm them are being made by the government but Dr Plumptre said more had to be done to restore order.

It would improve security for people in the region. There are many benefits for people as well as the apes, he said. It is the rape capital of the world. Hundreds of people are killed every year just for small things and everyone turns a blind eye to it.

The two sub-species of western gorilla, the western lowland and cross-river, are also both critically endangered, as are the Bornean and Sumatran orangutans. Chimpanzees and bonobos, the remaining two great apes, are classed as endangered.

Last month, the head of charity International Animal Rescue (IAR) controversially claimed orangutans could become extinct in the wild within 10 years because of widespread deforestation.

However Erik Meijaard, a member of the IUCNs primate specialist group and conservation group Borneo Futures, told The Independent: I think unless theres a meteor strike or some kind of Ebola, they are not going to go extinct  because were not going to let them go extinct.

Its really going downhill very rapidly but there are also a number of populations that are almost not threatened. Some populations are really quite safe and stable and increasingly stable with good support from government.

On the IARs fears, he added: I dont mind people speaking nonsense but I think its really counterproductive. It gives the impression of hopelessness.
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Keith Vazs political career may have been plagued by accusations and investigations but the latest headlines about him could prove to be the most damaging yet.

The Labour MP has been forced to stand down as chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee following allegations he paid for the services of two male escorts at his London flat.

Routinely referred to as a smooth operator and a vehement self-publicist, the MP for Leicester East is the longest-serving British Asian MP.

Hailed as a politically nimble, dexterous politician, Mr Vaz has found himself attached to varying parts of the political spectrum within the Labour Party during his career.

Throughout his time in the corridors of power, he has gone from a member of the Socialist Campaign Group, a left-wing, democratic socialist grouping of the Labour Party, to a key proponent of the New Labour cause.

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.

Dubbed the the Teflon MP and Keith Vazeline, he is renowned for his ability to bounce back from allegations and supposed scandals.

Recommended Read more Vaz stands down as committee chairman after male prostitute claims

He was previously a solicitor and then a barrister

Born in Aden, in Yemen, in 1956, his full name is Nigel Keith Anthony Standish Vaz. Both his parents are originally from the Indian state of Goa and he is a far-flung relative of Saint Joseph Vaz, a 17th-century missionary.

It was not until 1965 that he moved to England with his family and settled, in Twickenham, in London, where his father embarked on a career in the airline industry and his mother juggled two jobs, one as a teacher and another in Marks & Spencer. His father killed himself when he was just 14.

After excelling at Latymer School in Hammersmith, he secured a first-class degree in Law at Cambridge and went on to study at the College of Law before practising first as a solicitor and then as a barrister. In 1982 he joined the Labour Party and in the space of a few years, he was elected as MP for Leicester East with a majority of just under 2,000 in 1987.

He served as Britains Minister for Europe under Tony Blair and was later elected as Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee in 2007. He was re-elected in 2010 and again in June 2015.

He has been described as an relentless self-publicist

Mr Vaz has been noted for his knack for networking and self-promoting.

Political commentator Kevin Maguire once said: The most dangerous place in Britain? Between Keith Vaz and a camera.

In a similar vein, former Lord Chancellor Lord Irvine described the politician as the most incredible networker I have ever met.

To put this into context, a party thrown to celebrate his 25 years as an MP was attended by some of the most influential names in the country, including Theresa May, Tony Blair, Ed Milliband and police chief Bernard Hogan-Howe.

His family are well-connected

The politician is by no means the only member of his family to have found himself in the political sphere. His sister, Valerie, has been the MP for Walsall South since 2010 and his wife, Maria Fernandes, runs a law firm.
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Two Polish men have been attacked hours after a vigil in honour of a Pole who was murdered in the same town, in what police are treating as a possible hate crime.

Poland has announced three cabinet ministers will be making an urgent visit to London following recent attacks on Polish citizens in Brtiain.

A Polish foreign misitry spokesman said Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski, Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro and Interior Minister Mariusz Blaszczak will lead the delegation, AFP reports.

Officers are investigating after the men, who are both in their thirties, were assaulted by a group of four or five males outside a pub in Harlow, Essex. Police were called to the vicious incident in the early hours of Sunday morning.

One of the men suffered a cut to his head and the other suffered a broken nose. Both victims have since been discharged from the Princess Alexandra Hospital.

The attack comes a week after the murder of Polish national Arkadiusz Jozwik, 40, who was killed outside a takeaway in The Stow in Harlow on 27 August.

The latest incident is not being linked with the murder but police said they were stepping up patrols in the area to protect the community.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

Superintendent Trevor Roe said: This was a vicious and horrible attack. Although we are considering this matter as a potential hate crime, it is not being linked with the attack at The Stow last weekend.

I want to reassure the public and the community in Harlow we are treating this very seriously and do not tolerate assaults of any kind."

The incident comes as Boris Johnson dismissed claims the UK is lurching towards xenophobia and invited Polish people to come to Britain as immigrants.

An estimated 700 people gathered to mourn the death of Mr Jozwik, with Polish nationals travelling from different parts of the country for the silent march, which was conducted on roads closed by Essex Police.

A wave of xenophobic abuse against Polish people was reported following the Brexit vote. Polish Ambassador Arkady Rzegocki has said his staff have dealt with "15 or 16" hate crimes since the referendum.
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Barack Obama has said the US and UK will have to do everything they can to make sure strong trade links do not start "unravelling" as a result of Brexit.

In a blow to Brexiteers' hopes of a quick trade deal with the US, he stood by his comment that the UK was now at the "back of the queue" for trade talks.

Speaking at the G20 Summit alongside Theresa May, he said the US trade negotiations with the EU was his priority.

Mr Obama said: "We have a lot of investment, including British companies in the United States and US companies in the United Kingdon.

"That's not going to stop. We're going to do everything we can to make sure that the consequences of the [Brexit] decision don't end up unravelling what is already a very strong and robust economic relationship."

Mr Obama gave a warm welcome to Mrs May at her first big international summit, but the meeting was tainted by Mr Obama's intervention during the referendum campaign in which he said the UK would go to the "back of the queue" for trade talks.

When he made the intervention it was hailed by Remainers as proof of the damaging results of a potential vote to quit the EU, but it outraged Leave campaigners who accused him of unduly meddling in British politics.

Boris Johnson, now Foreign Secretary, claimed the Americans would never have stood for being part of something like the European Union themselves.

Challenged over whether he still stood by the remark in front of Mrs May, he defended it and went on to set out that it was still the case.

The US President said negotiations on the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership were ongoing and could not be set aside.

He said: "It is absolutely true that I believe pre-Brexit vote and post-Brexit vote that the world benefitted enormously from the United Kingdom's participation in the EU.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

"But I also said at the time [of making the comment] that ultimately this was a decision for the British people."

Mr Obama said that he never meant to say that the US would "punish Great Britain", but simply that he wanted to challenge the "notion" that the consequences of Brexit were negligable and that Brexiteers would "just go ahead and light-up a whole bunch of free trade agreements."

Mrs May said she had used the meeting with the President to discuss Britain's decision to leave the EU, the Brexit process and what it means to the UK's relationships with European states and other nations.

She said: "The UK has always been a strong partner for the US and that will remain to be the case. We have a thriving economic relationship.

"British business export twice as much to the United States as they do to our next largest market and the United States is the largest inward investor in Britain with total investments providing more than one million jobs."
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Theresa May has left a question mark hanging over whether she fully trusts the Chinese government after failing to directly answer a question on the matter.

The Prime Minister was quizzed on how she views Beijing by reporters on the plane taking her to the G20 Summit in Hangzhou, where she will meet China's president.

Earlier she had said she wanted a "golden era" in relations with the country, a phrase coined by George Osborne, despite security concerns over Chinese involvement in the Hinkley nuclear power project.

But asked directly if she trusts Beijing she said only: "Of course we have a relationship with them, we're working with them.

"We have seen significant Chinese investment into the United Kingdom."

It could make an already difficult bilateral meeting with Xi Jinping more awkward, as she will likely be asked to explain delaying the 18 billion scheme at Hinkley, for which the Chinese are providing a third of the money.

The Independent has already reported how officials are said to be looking for potential ways to back out of the deal which Mrs May paused on taking office.

She said on the plane: "This is the way I operate. I don't just come in and say I'm going to take a decision.

"I actually look at the evidence, weigh up that evidence, take the advice and consider that and come to my decision.

"That is exactly the process I'm going through. I've said a decision will be taken in September and it will."

One of Mrs May's most senior advisors has suggested the Chinese could use their involvement in Hinkley to control the UK's power supply.

The pursuit of "golden era" relations with China by Mr Osborne was criticised by some at home and abroad who said it risked alienating other nations.

Mrs May also signalled that she wanted to broaden the UK's trading horizons from the Osborne era.

She said: "What's happened over the last few years is that the Government has built a new strategic partnership with China, a golden era of relationships between the UK and China.

"We want to continue to build on that. Obviously I'll be meeting President Xi and talking to him.

"I'll be meeting other world leaders as well and wanting to talk to them about the opportunities that we can develop between the UK and other countries."
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Boris Johnson has invited Polish people to come to Britain as immigrants, dismissing claims that the UK is lurching towards xenophobia.

After a visit to a British Council language school in Poland Mr Johnson said he was impressed with the students and welcomed them to come to the UK. We look forward to welcoming them to Britain in a few years time, he told reporters at a press conference.

Recommended Read more Hundreds march through Harlow out of respect for murdered Polish man

During the visit Mr Johnson sought to reassure the Polish government that there was no room for xenophobia in Britains capital city.

The Foreign Secretarys intervention however comes as Theresa May signalled that there are likely to be restrictions put on freedom of movement. What leaving the European Union does enable us to do is say what I think the British people were very clear about: which is that they dont want free movement to continue in the way that it has done in the past, she told the BBCs Andrew Marr Show in an interview broadcast on Sunday morning.

They do want to see controls of movement on people coming in from the European Union. But people also want to see the job and economic opportunities so getting a good deal in trade and services is also obviously important for us.

Theresa May said British people wanted an end to freedom of movement in comments broadcast on Sunday (AFP/Getty)

She also refused to confirm that Polish nationals resident in the UK would definitely be allowed to stay in Britain following Brexit  saying this would be contingent on British nationals resident elsewhere not being sent home.

The Foreign Secretary gave a press conference alongside his Polish counterpart Witold Waszczykowski.

Brexit racism and the fightback Show all 9 1 /9 Brexit racism and the fightback Brexit racism and the fightback Demonstrators protest against an increase in post-ref racism at London's March for Europe in July 2016 PA Brexit racism and the fightback These cards were found near a school in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, the day after the EU referendum Twitter/@howgilb Brexit racism and the fightback Getty Brexit racism and the fightback Romford, Essex, June 25 @diamondgeezer Brexit racism and the fightback A worker at this Romanian food shop was asleep upstairs at the time of this arson attack in Norwich on July 8, but escaped unharmed. Hundreds later participated in a love bombing rally outside the shop to express their opposition to racism and their support of the shop owners. JustGiving/Helen Linehan Brexit racism and the fightback This neo-Nazi sticker was spotted in Glasgow on June 26 Courtesy of Eoin Palmer Brexit racism and the fightback But after news emerged of neo-Nazi stickers appearing in Glasgow, some in the city struck back with slogans of their own. Courtesy of Eoin Palmer Brexit racism and the fightback Getty Brexit racism and the fightback More signs began to appear in some parts of the UK, created by people who wanted to show their opposition to post-referendum racism Courtesy of Bernadette Russell

Mr Johnson told reporters at the conference: London is the most welcoming, multicultural, happening city on earth  no disrespect to Warsaw  and there is no room for xenophobia.

The reassurance comes a day after hundreds of people marched through the Essex commuter town of Harlow in silent defiance and remembrance after the brutal killing of Polish national Arek Jozwik.

 Fear and Loathing in Great Britain

Mr Jozwik, 40, was beaten to death in an unprovoked attack in the Stow area of town. Six local teenagers have been arrested on suspicion of his killing, which police have said may have been racially motivated.

The killing and Mr Johnsons reassurance comes after a dramatic increase in recorded anti-immigrant hate crimes following the EU referendum result, particularly in areas that voted strongly for Brexit.

The Polish foreign ministry is reported to have privately raised the issue with Mr Johnson during his visit, and the countrys government has opened its own investigation into the murder.

Under Polish law, foreigners who commit crimes against Polish citizens are subject to trial before a Polish court, Warsaws regional prosecutor, Jakub Romelczyk, told Polands TVP Info public broadcaster.
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The immigration system lauded by Boris Johnson, Liam Fox and other top Brexit backers has been rubbished by Theresa May in a move that could spark fresh Cabinet divisions.

The Prime Minister said there is no silver bullet for tackling immigration and that it was not clear that a proposal for an Australian-style points based system, that formed the corner-stone of the Leave campaigns referendum pitch, actually worked.

She also paved the way for allowing EU citizens preferential treatment in any Brexit deal, and would not commit to other key promises of the leave campaign - such as removing VAT on fuel or giving freed-up funds to the NHS.

Mrs May also refused to rule out paying money into the EU budget, as other non-member countries that seek access to the single market do.

The Australian style points-based immigration system became the flagship policy of the Leave campaign during the referendum, touted as the answer to the UKs immigration problems.

Mr Johnson, now Mrs Mays Foreign Secretary, regularly expressed support as he travelled the UK on the Brexit campaign bus. International Trade Secretary Mr Fox made the system one of the first policies of his Tory leadership bid.

International Development Secretary Priti Patel, Transport Secretary Chris Grayling and Environment Secretary Andrea Leadsom have all said such a system could help the UK better manage the inflow of people.

But questioned on the policy, Mrs May said: One of the issues is whether or not points-based systems do work.

She explained: A lot of people talk about a points-based system always being the answer in immigration. There is no single silver bullet that is the answer in terms of dealing with immigration.

Brexit racism and the fightback Show all 9 1 /9 Brexit racism and the fightback Brexit racism and the fightback Demonstrators protest against an increase in post-ref racism at London's March for Europe in July 2016 PA Brexit racism and the fightback These cards were found near a school in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, the day after the EU referendum Twitter/@howgilb Brexit racism and the fightback Getty Brexit racism and the fightback Romford, Essex, June 25 @diamondgeezer Brexit racism and the fightback A worker at this Romanian food shop was asleep upstairs at the time of this arson attack in Norwich on July 8, but escaped unharmed. Hundreds later participated in a love bombing rally outside the shop to express their opposition to racism and their support of the shop owners. JustGiving/Helen Linehan Brexit racism and the fightback This neo-Nazi sticker was spotted in Glasgow on June 26 Courtesy of Eoin Palmer Brexit racism and the fightback But after news emerged of neo-Nazi stickers appearing in Glasgow, some in the city struck back with slogans of their own. Courtesy of Eoin Palmer Brexit racism and the fightback Getty Brexit racism and the fightback More signs began to appear in some parts of the UK, created by people who wanted to show their opposition to post-referendum racism Courtesy of Bernadette Russell

You have to look across the board, you have to look at the whole range of issues. Not just how you bring control through the rules you have for people coming in.

But also making sure you are rooting out abuse in the system and obviously dealing with people if they are discovered here illegally.

Mrs May promised last week that curbs on migration would be a key demand of her Brexit negotiations with other EU states.

But asked specifically if EU citizens could be given special treatment as part of some deal to retain access to the single market, the Prime Minister said: I think what people wanted to see, what came out of the vote, that people wanted to see, was control.

They wanted to see an ability to be able to control movement of people from the European Union and obviously, that's why I say not free movement as it has been in the past and we need to respond to that voice of the British people.

During the referendum the Leave campaign promised contributions paid to the EU would be diverted to the NHS after Brexit and that VAT on fuel would be scrapped, something they said European regulation prevented.

Vote Leave argued: "It isn't right that unelected bureaucrats in Brussels impose taxes.

But Mrs May would not commit to working towards either of the pledges when directly challenged, saying only: Im going to work forthe best possible deal for the United Kingdom, in terms of the relationship that we have with the EU following is leaving.

Countries such as Norway gain access to the single market but only by making contributions towards EU funds, something Mr Johnson has signalled he opposes.

Asked if she was prepared to pay any money as part of a deal to secure access to the market, she said: What we're doing at the moment, is looking at making our preparations before we actually trigger Article 50, going into the formal negotiating process.

Only last week the Cabinet put on a show of unity at Chequers after reports of a rift between ministers over whether the UK should seek access to the single market.

Mr Johnson, Dr Fox and Brexit Secretary David Davis are said to have made peace after a Whitehall turf war.
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There will be difficult times ahead as Britain moves to leave the European Union, the Prime Minister has said.

In her first major broadcast interview since taking office Theresa May warned that the Brexit process would not be be plain sailing  but that she is nevertheless optimistic about the future.

The intervention comes as Ms May makes her first trip to a major international summit as PM. On Saturday she flew to Beijing to meet G20 leaders, who she will try to reassure regarding Britains departure from the trading bloc.

Im not going to pretend that its all going to be plain sailing. I think we must be prepared for the fact that there may be some difficult times ahead, she told the BBCs Andrew Marr Show in a prerecorded interview to be aired on Sunday morning.

But what I am is optimistic, and indeed this is what  the message that came from the Cabinet when we were sitting around the table at Chequers this week and talking about these things, its the same message Ive had from businesses, is of optimism about the future, about the opportunities that are now open to the United Kingdom.

As I say, an independent Britain forging our own way in the world. And I think what we see following the referendum vote is that British spirit which says weve had the decision, now lets get on with it, lets get on with putting it into practise, and lets make sure that we take those opportunities and make a success of it.

 What happened on the first day of the G20 summit

Ideas suggested by the PM this weekend to keep Britain afloat in a post-Brexit world include closer ties with China, the summits host country.

This is a golden era for UK-China relations and one of the things I will be doing at the G20 is obviously talking to President Xi about how we can develop the strategic partnership that we have between the UK and China, she said as she boarded her RAF Voyager plane to the summit.

Brexit racism and the fightback Show all 9 1 /9 Brexit racism and the fightback Brexit racism and the fightback Demonstrators protest against an increase in post-ref racism at London's March for Europe in July 2016 PA Brexit racism and the fightback These cards were found near a school in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, the day after the EU referendum Twitter/@howgilb Brexit racism and the fightback Getty Brexit racism and the fightback Romford, Essex, June 25 @diamondgeezer Brexit racism and the fightback A worker at this Romanian food shop was asleep upstairs at the time of this arson attack in Norwich on July 8, but escaped unharmed. Hundreds later participated in a love bombing rally outside the shop to express their opposition to racism and their support of the shop owners. JustGiving/Helen Linehan Brexit racism and the fightback This neo-Nazi sticker was spotted in Glasgow on June 26 Courtesy of Eoin Palmer Brexit racism and the fightback But after news emerged of neo-Nazi stickers appearing in Glasgow, some in the city struck back with slogans of their own. Courtesy of Eoin Palmer Brexit racism and the fightback Getty Brexit racism and the fightback More signs began to appear in some parts of the UK, created by people who wanted to show their opposition to post-referendum racism Courtesy of Bernadette Russell

But I will also be talking to other world leaders about how we can develop free trade around the world and Britain wants to seize those opportunities. My ambition is that Britain will be a global leader in free trade.

Controversy surrounds Britains close relationship with China, however  with human rights groups lambasting it for its poor human rights record and one-party rule. Ms May also faces a row with Chinese leaders over delays to the construction of the new Hinkley point C nuclear power-plant, which China is supposed to be investing in.

Despite the potential difficulties of leaving the bloc, the PM has resisted any calls to re-think the policy. She and her officials have consistently repeated the refrain that Brexit means Brexit  though they have yet to lay out policy specifics regarding trade and any potential changes to freedom of movement.

Even the timetable of when Britain will actually begin leaving is still uncertain. Senior Conservative has signaled that they would like Britain to have left by 2020, after having triggered article 50 in sometime early next year. Estimates for how long it takes to leave the bloc vary between two years and ten years and will depend on negotiations.

Ms May again signaled on Sunday that she would not accept a second EU referendum, after protesters took to the street in cities such as London, Birmingham, Edinburgh, and Cambridge calling for public input on whether to accept the eventual Brexit package.

No second referendum, she said. We could try and say, look, this is, you know, we  we wish that hadnt happened so were going to try and somehow wish it away.

What Im saying, what the Conservative Party is saying, its the only party that are saying this, is we respect the wishes of the British people. The British people want us to leave the European Union and thats what we will do.
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Prime Minister Theresa May is set to use talks with Australian premier Malcolm Turnbull to shape the broad outline of what could be the UK's first post-Brexit trade deal.

Ms May is currently in China for the G20 summit, where she hopes to portray the post-Brexit vote UK as a "global leader" for free trade, and will meet Mr Turnbull on Monday.

The Prime Minister said she wants to talk to fellow leaders "about the opportunities that we can develop between the UK and other countries".

She said: "Looking at free trade, we've already seen in some of the early conversations I've had with some of these leaders, they're interested to talking to us about trading arrangements; the Australians for example."

 Inside Theresa May's cabinet meeting at Chequers to discuss Brexit

Prime Minister Turnbull said on Sunday his country and Britain were both committed to having an early free trade agreement after Britain leaves the EU.

"Prime Minister May and I are very committed to having an early free trade agreement put in place so that when Britain leaves the EU, we have very open markets between Australia and Britain," Mr Turnbull told reporters.

"They've got to put in place free trade agreements and we are enthusiastic and supportive; we're providing Britain with as much assistance as we can at a technical level."

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

On Sunday, Ms May held her first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

She said she wants a "frank and open relationship" with Moscow, but acknowledged there would be "some differences" between them and "complex and serious areas of concern".

She is also scheduled to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping after the summit concludes on Monday, where they will likely discuss her decision to delay her decision on the Hinkley Point nuclear power station.

When asked if she would specifically raise security concerns about the project, she said: "I am going to be talking to President Xi about a whole range of issues."

Additional reporting by agencies
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An emergency response was initiated at a school in Ohio after around 40 children ingested Bhut Jolokia peppers  one of the hottest species in existence.

An unidentified student brought the peppers into Milton Union Middle School, West Milton, and apparently shared them among other students aged 11 to 14.

Police and emergency responders were contacted on Friday after the students began to exhibit symptoms such as blotchy skin, hives, sweating, watering eyes and general discomfort, the Dayton Daily News reported.

Five students had to be hospitalised.

The students took these peppers voluntarily, according to a police investigation.

We all drank like 10 cartons of milk, eighth grade student Cody Schmidt told the newspaper, adding that the pepper was really hot.

The schools superintendent, Brad Ritchey, said: The response of emergency services was amazing, deputies and help from surrounding paramedics.

We really had a lot of help here this afternoon. This was serious but sometimes situations at schools become far more serious than this.

School staff are now looking into whether to pursue disciplinary action.

The bhut jokolia, or ghost pepper, is one of the hottest in the world (Asit K/Wikipedia)

The Bhut Jolokia pepper has a Scoville rating of over one million units  compared to the 8,000 held by Tabasco sauce.

It was declared the worlds hottest chilli pepper in 2007, but was overtaken by a number of other varieties. Since 2013, the worlds hottest chilli has been the Carolina Reaper, which measures 1.57 million Scoville units.

 Cheese triggers same part of the brain as drugs

The active ingredient of chillies is capsaicin, which is an irritant to mammals. In addition to causing a burning sensation on flesh it comes into contact with, it can also cause tissue inflammation in the lining of the stomach or intestines in large doses.

The ten best chilli sauces Show all 10 1 /10 The ten best chilli sauces The ten best chilli sauces 556932.bin The ten best chilli sauces 556935.bin The ten best chilli sauces 556931.bin The ten best chilli sauces 556933.bin The ten best chilli sauces 556930.bin The ten best chilli sauces 556934.bin The ten best chilli sauces 556974.bin The ten best chilli sauces 556927.bin The ten best chilli sauces 556929.bin The ten best chilli sauces 556928.bin

But taken moderately, capsaicin is thought to have health benefits.

Research conducted in 1980 found a 68 kilogram human would need to eat at least 1.3 kilograms of the hottest chillies in one sitting for the peppers to have a lethal effect.
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A primary school teacher and his husband were found dead on a beach in a murder-suicide after allegations they sexually abused teenage boys.

Aric Babbitt, 40, and his partner Matthew Deyo, 36, came under investigation when a 16-year-old boy told police he was in a sexual relationship with the couple.

Court documents revealed the men were accused of sexual contact with at least three underage boys.

Police tried to speak to the couple about the claims at their home in Minnesota in August, but Mr Babbitt and Mr Deyo refused to give a statement.

Officers instead searched the house, finding a camera hidden in the bathroom and a computer folder named 'Kiddies', local media reported.

Soon after the police visit, the couple borrowed Mr Deyos brother's gun, saying they were going camping and needed it to protect themselves from bears.

They travelled to Lopez island, hundreds of miles away in Washington, where Mr Deyo shot Mr Babbitt and then himself, a coroner said.

The two bodies were found by a kayaker the following day, according to San Juan County Sheriff Ron Krebs, who said local people had heard gunshots at about 8.30pm the night before.

Matthew Deyo, 36 (Handout)

Investigations into the sexual abuse allegations are ongoing.

Mr Babbitt, who had been a primary school teacher at Lincoln Center Elementary School since 2002, was suspended following the allegations, but neither Mr Babbitt nor Mr Deyo had been charged with any crime at the time of their deaths.

The 16-year-old boy reportedly told detectives Mr Babbitt offered to support him when he came out as gay to his family, and the teacher gave him gifts such as underwear. He also said the couple asked for photos of him before he was 16, according to an application for a search warrant seen by local media.

The boy told police that shortly after he turned 16, Mr Babbitt and Mr Deyo asked his parents, who were friends of the couple, if they could take him to a concert in Minneapolis.

Mr Babbitt and Mr Deyo then gave the boy alcohol and marijuana, the court documents said. Instead of going to the concert they took him to a hotel, where the three had unprotected sex.

The boy told police he woke the next day in the hotel room with Mr Deyo touching him.

The teenager, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is believed to have given the police pictures of himself naked with Mr Babbitt.

The boy told police he didn't want to get involved in a relationship with the couple, but didn't know how to say no to his former elementary school teacher and mentor.

At least two other victims are thought to have come forward, claiming they were also pressured into sexual activity with the couple.

Another of the accusers said Mr Babbitt had shared naked photographs of himself with him and encouraged him to masturbate in the bathroom, where police found the hidden camera.

School and University mass shootings in America Show all 12 1 /12 School and University mass shootings in America School and University mass shootings in America Craghead County, Arkansas - 24 March, 1998 Students Mitchell Johnson,13, and Andrew Golden, 11, killed four students and one teacher, wounding ten others at Westside Middle School Reuters School and University mass shootings in America Springfield, Oregon - 21 May 1998 After killing his parents at home, 13- year-old Kip Kinkel drove to Thurston High School where he shot and killed two students and a teacher at a school dance, wounding 23 others. Getty School and University mass shootings in America Columbine, Colorado - 20 April 1999 Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, killed twelve students and one teacher at Columbine High School. They wounded 23 others before committing suicide. Getty School and University mass shootings in America Santee, California - 5 March 2001 Charles Andrew Williams, 15, opens fire on at Santana High School, killing two students and wounding thirteen others. Getty School and University mass shootings in America Red Lake, Minnesota - 24 September 2005 Jeffrey Weise, 16, kills his grandfather before driving to Red Lake Senior High School. He proceeded to shoot and kill five students, one teacher and security guard before committing suicide. Seven others were wounded. Getty School and University mass shootings in America Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania - 2 October 2006 Charles Carl Roberts IV,a 32-year-old milk truck driver, shot to death five Amish girls and wounded five more in an Amish school in the hamlet of Nickel Mines before committing suicide. Getty School and University mass shootings in America Blacksburg, Virginia - 16 April 2007 Seung-Hui Cho, 23, shot and killed 32 students and faculty members and wounded 17 others at Virgina Tech University. It is the deadliest attack by a lone gunman in US history. Getty School and University mass shootings in America DeKalb, Illinois - 14 February 2008 Steve Kazmierczak, 27, killed 6 and wounded 21 at Northern Illinois University before committing suicide. Getty School and University mass shootings in America Oakland, California - 2 April 2012 Gunman One L. Goh, 43, shot shot and killed seven students in a classroom at Oikos University, a small Christian college. Goh was deemed unfit for trial in January 2013 after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Getty School and University mass shootings in America Newtown, Connecticut - 14 December 2012 Adam Lanza, 20, killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School. He first killed his mother before taking her guns and driving to the school. He killed 20 children in the first grade along with six adults before killing himself. Getty School and University mass shootings in America Santa Monica, California - 7 June 2013 John Zawahri, 23, shot and killed five people on, or near, the campus of Santa Monica College. Getty School and University mass shootings in America Isla Vista, California - 23 May, 2014 22 year-old-Elliott Rodger went on a stabbing and shooting rampage just outside of the main campus of University of California, Santa Barbara. He killed 7 people and wounded 13 more. Getty

The men left a suicide note, which was reportedly found with the gun near their bodies.

Mr Babbitt's sister told local media the letter made reference to the child abuse investigation, saying the couple felt like they didn't have an out and ending their lives was best for them.

She added: We are all devastated and in a lot of pain.
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Armed protesters stood outside the home of Brock Turner  the man convicted of sexual assault while attending Stanford University  who was released from jail after serving only three months of a six-month sentence.

Recommended Read more Brock Turner released from jail after serving only three months

Turner, 21, left a Santa Clara County jail on Friday and will now serve out the rest of his three years probation. He left California for his parents home in Ohio where he is required to register as a sex offender.

About a dozen protesters waited outside the Sugarcreek Township home on Friday, and others returned Saturday. Some brandished rifles while others brandished placards calling for Turner - whose light sentence sparked a national uproar - to be castrated.

Protesters scrawled messages into the street and sidewalk using chalk.

Hes not going to live some happy pleasant life, a protester told WCPO. Were going to never let him forget what he did.

One mother brought her children to the protest because she saw it as a teaching moment.

The reason we decided to bring the kids is to teach them, at a young age, that 20 minutes of wrongdoing to someone...that can ruin your life forever, the woman, declining to give her name, told WHIO.

She added that she is furious the Turner family lives in the neighbourhood, describing them as a cancer to us and we need to get them out of here.

The UN's statistics on sexual violence shock, but point to change Show all 3 1 /3 The UN's statistics on sexual violence shock, but point to change The UN's statistics on sexual violence shock, but point to change prevalence_of_ipv.jpg UN The UN's statistics on sexual violence shock, but point to change where_we_did_the_study.jpg UN The UN's statistics on sexual violence shock, but point to change ways_of_being_a_man.jpg UN

Within five days of his arrival in Ohio, Turner is required to be photographed for the county sex offender registry.

Turner was convicted of the January 2015 sexual assault of an unconscious woman outside a party on the Stanford campus. Two cyclists caught Turner in the act and tackled him as he attempted to flee.

Despite prosecutors recommendation that Turner spend six years in prison, Judge Aaron Persky sentenced him to only six months. Turner was released early on good behaviour.

 Brock Turner leaves prison

Mr Perskys ruling set off a national campaign for his recall. He has since stopped presiding over criminal cases, and has defended his ruling.

Michelle Dauber, who is leading the charge to recall the judge, said: Judge Perskys bias is a threat to the rule of law and we will continue until he is no longer a judge."

When Turner was given his lenient sentence, BuzzFeed published the impact statement read by his victim in court. In it, she outlined the effect the attack has had on her life and hoped to stand as a beacon for women and girls who feel alone in the wake of sexual assault.

On nights when you feel alone, I am with you, she wrote. When people doubt you or dismiss you, I am with you. I fought every day for you. So never stop fighting, I believe you."
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Donald Trump's advisers are telling conflicting stories when it comes to the Republican presidential candidate's message on immigration.

Recommended Read more Trump insists Mexico will pay for border wall in immigration speech

Former New York mayor and vociferous Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani said Mr Trump no longer plans to implement mass deportations of undocumented immigrants if elected; while campaign manager Kellyanne Conway insists his tone has never shifted regarding the wall.

Their comments follow Donald Trumps Wednesday speech where he returned to his hard-line stance against undocumented immigrants after criticism for appearing to soften his platform on the issue.

What he said in the speech is after we secure the border and after we remove the criminal illegal immigrants, to a large extent, youre not going to get 100 per cent, Mr Giuliani told CNNs Jake Tapper. Then, and only then, can we look at this in a very rational way in which we can look at all of the options and be open to all the options.

There are other options, too  it's going to depend on the person," he added. "I mean some of these people could have been on welfare for the last 30 years, or taking benefits or cheating.

Maybe some of them have to be thrown out, but not necessarily all of them, and that's the point he was making in the speech.

Reconciling what he was saying with the New York businessmans actual prepared speech delivered from a teleprompter, Mr Giuliani explained that the message got lost to some extent in the emotion of the moment.

 Donald Trump hopes his new deportation taskforce can deport Hillary Clinton

Trumps newest campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, illustrated a more clear and consistent candidate Sunday morning.

Although what Mr Trump said about mass deportations differs from how Mr Giuliani believes he feels, Ms Conway insisted that when it comes to building a wall along the southern border, his position has never changed.

He will build that wall, and he has been consistent on that since day one of his candidacy; he will have Mexico pay for it, Ms Conway told ABC. His position has never changed, on this side of the border or that side of the border.

Although Mr Trump did focus on what he called criminal aliens in his , he still promised to deport millions of undocumented immigrants living in the country during his first hour as president, while insisting that he will build a massive wall.

People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Show all 8 1 /8 People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Miley Cyrus 'God he thinks he is the f***ing chosen one or some shit!  Honestly f*** this sh*t I am moving if this is my president! I dont say things I dont mean!' Jemal Countess/Getty Images People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Whoopi Goldberg 'I dont think thats America. I dont want it to be America. Maybe its time for me to move you know' People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Samuel L. Jackson 'If that mother**er becomes president, Im moving my black ass to South Africa' People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Raven Symone 'My confession for this election is, if any Republican gets nominated, Im gonna move to Canada with my entire family. Is that bad? I already have my ticket. I literally bought my ticket, I swear' People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Cher 'If he were to be elected, I'm moving to Jupiter' People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Neve Campbell 'Im terrified. Its really scary. My biggest fear is that Trump will triumph. I cannot believe that he is still in the game ... [I'll] move back to Canada' People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Jon Stewart 'I would consider getting in a rocket and going to another planet, because clearly this planets gone bonkers' People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Randy Blythe 'He could just be a clown. If he is the president, though, I am leaving America 'till he's gone'

In a Trump administration, all immigration laws will be enforced  no one will be immune or exempt from enforcement, he said. Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation  that is what it means to have laws and to have a country.

Mr Trumps definition of criminality is muddy, however, as he highlighted a number of violent crimes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants in the US. Yet, by definition, unauthorised entry into the country criminalises immigrants according to hardliners like Mr Trump.

The candidate who appeared with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto on Wednesday appeared to have a different take on Mexican immigrants and their families, saying he has a "great respect" for them and that they are "beyond reproach".

Mr Trump launched his campaign with a now infamous speech accusing Mexico of sending "criminals" and "rapists" into the US. An accusation Mr Pena Nieto attempted to discredit at the Wednesday press conference.

"[Mexicans are] good people that respect family, they respect the life in the community, and they are respecful of the law," he said. "As such, Mexicans deserve everybody's respect."

According to a new poll from Latino Decisions taken prior to his immigration speech, a meager 19 per cent of Latino voters support Mr Trump. The number is a stark contrast to the 27 per cent received by 2012 candidate Mitt Romney. In contrast, the last Republican to take office, George W Bush, earned 44 per cent of the Latino vote in 2004.
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A man who was the focus of a police search in Florida was rather easy to identify on social media, as he used the wanted poster from a previous allegation as his Facebook profile photo.

Recommended Read more Emergency services respond to mass chilli consumption at US school

Police in Stuart  a coastal city 100 miles north of Miami  were on the hunt for 42-year-old Mack Yearwood, a suspect in a battery case, when they discovered the unusual photo choice.

The patrol guys, to look where he was and for some intelligence, they went to his Facebook page, Cpl Brian Bossio told ABC News. They discovered that he use his wanted poster for his Facebook profile.

Mr Yearwood had two outstanding warrants for two counts of battery in the state.

Is there a cure for Britain's most dangerous criminals? Show all 9 1 /9 Is there a cure for Britain's most dangerous criminals? Is there a cure for Britain's most dangerous criminals? 460701.bin DONALD MACLELLAN Is there a cure for Britain's most dangerous criminals? 459584.bin Independent Is there a cure for Britain's most dangerous criminals? 459585.bin PA Is there a cure for Britain's most dangerous criminals? 459586.bin Rex Features Is there a cure for Britain's most dangerous criminals? 459587.bin PA Is there a cure for Britain's most dangerous criminals? 459588.bin Rex Features Is there a cure for Britain's most dangerous criminals? 459589.bin Getty Images Is there a cure for Britain's most dangerous criminals? 459590.bin Getty Images Is there a cure for Britain's most dangerous criminals? 459591.bin Getty Images

Police responded to the new battery call on Monday and arrested Mr Yearwood by Tuesday after the alleged victim supplied them with an address of where he was staying.

Investigators found Mr Yearwood at his brothers house on Tuesday. According to the police report, the suspect was sleeping at the home when police arrived and asked an officer to hand him his trousers.

When he was putting his jeans on, a bag of weed fell out, Mr Bossio said, which resulted in a cannabis possession charge. The incident report says Mr Yearwood asked officers to not charge him for the cannabis at the time of the arrest, but the request was in vain.

Police were quick to discourage future suspects of making similar decisions in a Wednesday post on the Stuart Police Departments Facebook page.

Facebook is a great way to communicate and connect with old friends and family, Mr Bossio wrote. If you are wanted by the police, its probably not a good idea to use the Wanted of the Week poser of yourself as your profile pic.

Mr Yearwood has not been charged with battery in connection with the arrest, as the investigation is ongoing.
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Angela Merkel's ruling CDU party has been beaten into third place by the anti-migrant Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), following elections in a German state.

The right-wing populist AfD won 20.8 per cent of votes in the election for the state legislature in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Ms Merkel's Christian Democrats polled 19 per cent, their worst result yet in the state.

The centre-left Social Democrats, who led the outgoing state government in a coalition with the conservatives, remained the strongest party with 30.6 per cent of the vote.

Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, in Germany's northeastern corner, is home to 1.6 million of the country's 80 million people and is a relative political lightweight. It is, however, the state where Ms Merkel has her parliamentary constituency, and Sunday's regional vote was the first of five before a national election expected next September.

Chancellor Merkel's refugee policies were a prominent issue in the campaign for Sunday's election, which came a year after she decided to let in migrants from Hungary. Germany registered more than 1 million people as asylum-seekers last year.

Ms Merkel has stuck to her insistence that we will manage the refugee crisis, and has also said that sometimes you have to endure such controversies.

National AfD leader Frauke Petry celebrated a blow to Angela Merkel. Local AfD leader Leif-Erik Holm told supporters: "Perhaps this is the beginning of the end of Angela Merkel's chancellorship today."

The AfD, however, fell well short of its aim of becoming the strongest party, and also didn't match the 24.3 per cent support it won in another eastern state, Saxony-Anhalt, in March.

Earlier in the year, the centre-right CDU party was expected to help form the region's coalition government along with the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SDP) mirroring the arrangement at the federal level.

 Frozen cake thrown at right wing politician in Germany

This result, and the strong performance of AfD, is bitter for many, for everyone in our party, said Peter Tauber, Ms Merkel's Christian Democrats' general secretary.

He said the state government's positive record took a back seat for many voters, because among a recognisable part, there was an explicit wish to voice displeasure and protest, and we saw that particularly strongly in the discussion about refugees.

Sunday's result could make it more difficult for Ms Merkel to bury a festering dispute with the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian arm of her conservative bloc, which has long criticized her decision to open the borders and advocated an annual cap on migrants.

CSU general secretary Andreas Scheuer said that we feel vindicated in our course.

The AfD is now represented in nine of Germany's 16 state legislatures and hopes to enter the national Parliament next year. There's no realistic prospect at present of the AfD going into government as other parties will not deal with it.

Associated Press contributed to this report
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A German man has made a startling discovery after finding the body of a woman in his father's attic - 40 years after she was reported missing.

The 33-year-old man, who has not been named in reports, had been renovating the loft in his father's house in Cloppenburg, Lower Saxony when he unearthed the woman's skeleton, which was covered in leaves and straw.

Police said they received a call about the "very unusual" discovery on 28 August and found the skeleton in a lying position wearing several jackets and a pair of trousers and shoes, the German newspaper Bild reports.

Following a post-mortem and dental analysis of the skeleton, authorities believe the bones belong to a 28-year-old woman who disappeared in 1977, five kilometres from the house.

According to authorities, the woman had disappeared before and had been declared missing for six weeks in 1976, before being found in a wood.

The mother-of-three had a history of mental illness, police said. Her husband died in 2012.

"A discovery of this type is a very unusual event," police spokesman Josef Schade told Bild.

"We assume she lay down to sleep and froze to death in the attic," he added.

The son believes he is the first person to have entered his father's attic for four decades, The Local reports.

Police said they do not suspect another person to be involved in the woman's death.
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A mother from the UK has reportedly been arrested in the south of France after her five-month-old baby was discovered dead during a family holiday, according to officials.

The woman was reported to have been on holiday with her husband and her two children  aged five months and three years old  in Saint-Pee-sur-Nivelle, a village in the Basque province of Labourd.

On the last day of their week-long break, the father reportedly woke up early and left the room the family were sharing.

After he returned and the mother woke around 9am, he found the baby was dead and contacted the emergency services, according to preliminary information.

She was arrested on Saturday and was being held in police custody.

A coroner said the death was not from natural causes, according to Sud Ouest.

"The suspect death of a baby was discovered at the scene" deputy prosecutor Marc Mariee told AFP.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

Mr Mariee said investigators "very quickly" focused on the mother.

A port-mortem will be carried out next week.
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French custom officials have seized a record 51 kilograms of methamphetamine hidden in a shipment of breakfast cereal.

The haul is estimated to have a street value of over 3 million, the customs department said in a statement, and is the biggest single seizure of the drug on French territory.

Customs officers at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris were checking cartons containing bags of cereal when they found them to be "unusually heavy".

They opened the bags and found crystals of the drug wrapped in aluminium foil in 40 of the 70 bags, which were being transported from Cameroon to Malaysia.

Methamphetamine is a strong and highly addictive stimulant, popular for recreational use and to help workers stay alert and energetic during long and night shifts.

Users of the drug experience an intense rush, heightened attention and curbed appetite. Over time addicts often suffer anxiety, weight loss and tooth decay.

The drug has been popular in poorer Asian countries for many years, but is now thought to be gaining popularity in richer nations such as South Korea, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia.

The substance is sold in various forms in Asia including as a component of a local drug called yaba, which is extremely prevalent in southeast Asia. The drug is the most popular illegal substance in the region and can cost less than a fast food meal at Burger King.

Meanwhile, a Reuters investigation in July found west Africa was playing a "new and fast-growing role" in the global drug trade, "not just as a transit point for drugs but also as a producer of amphetamine-type stimulants".

Local and international officials told Reuters west African criminal groups are now producing and exporting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of methamphetamine every year, most of which is shipped to Asia.

The synthetic drug is derived from ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, two common medicines used to treat conditions like nasal decongestion and asthma. It can be manufactured with basic equipment and is extremely profitable. One kilo of meth costs just over 1000 to make in West Africa but sells for more than 100,000 in Japan.

Smugglers hide drugs in food Show all 11 1 /11 Smugglers hide drugs in food Smugglers hide drugs in food Methamphetamine in chocolate bar This July 2012 photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows methamphetamine disguised as a chocolate candy bar in Los Angeles. Officials said a California man tried to smuggle more than 4 pounds of methamphetamine out of the country disguised as 45 individually wrapped chocolate bars at Los Angeles International Airport. AP Smugglers hide drugs in food Cocaine in coffee This October 2015 photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows a packet of cocaine hidden in a bag of ground coffee in Miami. Three bags of roasted, ground coffee arriving at Miami International Airport in a package from Guatemala in October were actually filled with more than 3 pounds of heroin, customs officials said. AP Smugglers hide drugs in food Cocaine in powdered milk This November 2014 photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows bags of powdered dairy product that contained cocaine in New York. A woman arriving at Kennedy International Airport in New York from Guyana was found with six bags of milk and custard powder that were filled with cocaine. AP Smugglers hide drugs in food Cocaine in custard powder This November 2014 photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows bags, marked as holding powdered dairy products, that hold cocaine in New York. A woman arriving at Kennedy International Airport in New York from Guyana was found with six bags of milk and custard powder that were filled with cocaine. AP Smugglers hide drugs in food Cocaine in various foods This October 2015 photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows an array of food products concealing cocaine in Newark, N.J. A U.S. citizen arriving from Peru at Newark Liberty International Airport in October had an assortment of food in his luggage that customs officials found also included 10 pounds of cocaine. AP Smugglers hide drugs in food Cocaine in vanilla wafers This April 2015 photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows vanilla wafers filled with cocaine in Houston. AP Smugglers hide drugs in food Cocaine in vanilla wafers A Guatemalan citizen arrived at George Bush Intercontinental Airport from Guatemala City in April with packages of vanilla wafers. But when customs officials opened them up, they said they found they were filled with cocaine instead of cream filling. AP Smugglers hide drugs in food Liquid cocaine in rum bottles This December 2014 photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows rum bottles filled with liquid cocaine in New York. A man arriving from Guyana at Kennedy International Airport in New York was found to be carrying the bottles that customs officials said were filled with 18 pounds worth of liquid cocaine. AP Smugglers hide drugs in food Cocaine paste in chocolate syrup This February 2012 photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows plastic packets of chocolate syrup and salad dressing concealing cocaine paste in Los Angeles. A mother and daughter traveling from Spain were carrying bags of condiments that customs officials at Los Angeles International Airport decided felt unusually thick. They opened it up to find a plastic bag with cocaine paste placed inside, and then found another syrup packet in their checked-in luggage that contained more cocaine paste. AP Smugglers hide drugs in food Opium in cinnamon packets This June 2012 photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows packets of opium covered in cinnamon hidden inside a rice cooker in Los Angeles. Officials found the rice cooker stuffed with 3 pounds' worth of black opium, which had been coated in cinnamon and wrapped in plastic, being transported by a man arriving at Los Angeles International Airport from Iran. AP Smugglers hide drugs in food Cocaine in frozen meat This undated photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in October 2015 shows a block of cocaine concealed in a package of frozen meat in New York. A man arrived at Kennedy International Airport from Trinidad with three large packages of frozen meat in his suitcase. AP

According to officials spoken to by Reuters, west Africa is an easy place to produce the drug because of weak controls on the import of ingredients.

Production has increased from virtually zero five years ago, Pierre Lapaque head of UNODC in West and Central Africa said, to around 1.5 tonnes per year.

In 2015, French customs seized a total of nearly 513 kg of amphetamines including 96.5 kilograms of methamphetamine.
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Pope Francis has declared Mother Teresa a saint as part of his Holy Year of Mercy.

Applause erupted in St. Peter's Square even before he finished pronouncing the rite of canonisation at the start of the Mass.

Hundreds of Missionaries of Charity sisters in their trademark blue-trimmed saris had front-row seats at the Mass, alongside 1,500 homeless people and 13 heads of state, including Queen Sofia of Spain.

Pope Francis' predecessor Pope John Paul II bent Vatican rules to fast-track Mother Teresa to sainthood  a process which usually does not start until five years after the candidate's death two years after she died in 1997.

 The life of Mother Teresa

Since her death, two alleged miracles have been attributed to Mother Teresa, paving the way for her classification as a saint.

In 2002, the Vatican ruled that an Indian womans stomach tumour had been miraculously cured after she prayed to Mother Teresa, leading to her beatification  the first stage towards sainthood  in 2003.

Pope Francis attributed a second miracle to her after a man with a bacterial infection in his brain purportedly recovered after praying to Mother Teresa.

Sisters of the Missionaries of Charity, stand before the canonisation portrait of Mother Teresa at The Saint John Paul II National Shrine, Washington (Getty)

Despite being widely revered as one of the holiest women of the 20th century, Mother Teresa's legacy has been called into question by several critics.

In a 2003 essay for Slate, the late journalist Christopher Hitchens wrote: "MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God.

"She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction."

Mother Teresa accompanied by children at her mission in Calcutta (Getty)

In his pamphlet The Missionary Position, he also criticised her for accepting money from dictators, such as the Duvalier family in Haiti, and running a "cult of suffering".

In 1994, Mr Hitchens and the British Pakistani journalist Tariq Ali produced an extremely critical documentary on Mother Theresa titled "Hell's Angel".

The Indian doctor Aroup Chatterjee said people who worked with her order, the Missionaries of Charity, described the medical care given to the sick and dying as meagre and said treatment conditions were unhygienic.

He also said the order's claims of the assistance it gave to the city's poor were exaggerated.

Mother Theresas writings were also problematic for her entry into sainthood, with entries apparently suggesting a wavering faith in God.

Born Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu to Albanian parents, Mother Teresa grew up in the then Macedonian capital Skopje, which used to be part of the Ottoman Empire.

When she was 19, she joined the Irish order of Loreto and later was sent to India, where she first taught and then tended to orphans and the sick.

She founded the Missionaries of Charity religious order in 1950. The mission started with 12 nuns and has expanded across the globe.

Mother Theresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. She died in 1997.

Mother Teresa meeting the Princess of Wales meeting in 1992 (Reuters)

Pope Francis praised Mother Teresa as the merciful saint who defended the lives of the unborn, sick and abandoned  and who shamed world leaders for the "crimes of poverty they themselves created."

Speaking from the steps of St. Peter's Basilica, Pope Francis said Saint Teresa spent her life "bowing down before those who were spent, left to die on the side of the road, seeing in them their God-given dignity."

He added: "She made her voice heard before the powers of the world, so that they might recognize their guilt for the crimes of poverty they themselves created."

As if to emphasise the point, Pope Francis repeated the line "the crimes of poverty they themselves created."
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A Russian driver received a fine because of his car's shadow.

The driver was fined for allegedly crossing a full-line on the Moscow Ring Road on 25 August.

However, photos taken by traffic cameras show only his car's shadow had crossed the line.

"Cameras want us to pay fines even if car shadows violate traffic rules," the man wrote on the website drive2.ru.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

The man also published images of his apparent "violation" taken by the traffic cameras.

He submitted a complaint to the traffic police and they promised to annul the fine, explaining that it was the result of a technical malfunction.

Another driver had a similar issue in the past, when he was fined because the glare of his headlights on the wet road crossed the line.

"Traffic police are reviewing his complaint and he will get a reply in the near future," a police source told TASS.
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Isis has lost control of its last territories on the border with Turkey, monitoring groups say, in a major blow to the group's ability to receive foreign fighters from the rest of the world.

Speaking to The Independent, a spokesperson for the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Isis had conceded control of its last two villages on the border, retreating to positions around 7-8km to the south.

It completes an operation to take control of the area by the rebel Free Syrian Army, backed by a Turkish ground offensive that began at the town of Jarablus on 24 August.

On Saturday, more Turkish tanks rolled over the border into Al-Rai, a town some 55km (34 miles) west of Jarablus, and over the weekend a pincer Turkish-rebel offensive has been closing the gap between the two.

Rami Abdulrahman, from the UK-based Observatory, said: "Everything is finished. There is no more Isis at the border."

Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency also reported that the advance had removed terror organization Daesh's [Isis] physical contact with the Turkish border in northern Syria."

After three years in control of portions of the border, Isis's grasp over the last villages dissolved in a matter of hours.

Three hours before the Turkish-rebel advance was complete, Isis was still reported as holding four villages. Two hours before, the Observatory had told The Independent: "There is only 4-6km still under Isis control at the border, just two villages and a farm, and after that they [FSA] will control the whole area.

"It will be a few hours, and then Isis will be cut off from the rest of the world."

Turkish-backed rebels have been closing in on Isis on two sides from Jarablus (circled in NE) and Al-Rai (circled to W), leaving only a tiny stretch still connecting Isis with the rest of the world. It became apparent Isis was losing control of the border area when the key town of Manbij (circled, SE) fell in early August

Asked how the Turkish-led offensive had been able to secure a stretch of 55km in just two days, mopping up a dozen or more towns and villages, Mr Abdulrahman said: "Isis have stopped fighting there, they are moving out.

"We said after they lost Manbij, Isis would start to lose everywhere. Sure enough, when the Turkish forces went into Jarablus that was not really fighting, there was no one killed from either side."

For Isis, it seems the link to Turkey became too hard to maintain. "Isis is losing the border because they had operations againt the Free Syrian Army, and also operations against the Kurdish, and against the regime," Mr Abdulrahman said, suggesting Isis will redeploy their fighters elsewhere.

Turkey launched its operation in Syria, which it has named Euphrates Shield, with the dual purpose of driving out Isis and stopping the advance of the Kurdish YPG militia, fearing its growing control of northern Syria as Isis's power waned.

 Aftermath of attack in the Phillippines

Speaking at the G20 gathering of world leaders in China, President Tayyip Erdogan made no distinction between Turkey's goals against Isis and the YPG, which controls the rest of the Syrian border area. He told reporters following a meeting with Barack Obama: "It is our wish that a terror corridor not be formed across our southern border."

Indeed, with Isis almost pushed back from the border, Turkey appears already to have turned its full attention to the US-backed YPG.

In pictures: Civilians freed from Isis in Manbij Show all 11 1 /11 In pictures: Civilians freed from Isis in Manbij In pictures: Civilians freed from Isis in Manbij Women and children celebrating after being freed from Isis in Manbij, Syria, on 12 August Reuters In pictures: Civilians freed from Isis in Manbij A man cuts the beard of a civilian who was freed from Isis by the SDF in Manbij on 12 August Reuters In pictures: Civilians freed from Isis in Manbij Women carry newborn babies while running after being freed from Isis in Manbij, Syria, on 12 August Reuters In pictures: Civilians freed from Isis in Manbij A woman freed from Isis hugs an SDF fighter in Manbij on 12 August Reuters In pictures: Civilians freed from Isis in Manbij A woman adding her veil to a pile of niqabs burning in Manbij, Syria, after being freed from Isis on 12 August Reuters In pictures: Civilians freed from Isis in Manbij Children celebrating on top of a lorry after being freed from Isis in Manbij, Syria, on 12 August Reuters In pictures: Civilians freed from Isis in Manbij A man and child freed from Isis by the SDF in Manbij on 12 August Reuters In pictures: Civilians freed from Isis in Manbij A woman carrying her children walks towards SDF fighters after being freed from Isis in Manbij, Syria, on 12 August Reuters In pictures: Civilians freed from Isis in Manbij A woman and child freed from Isis in Manbij, Syria, on 12 August Reuters In pictures: Civilians freed from Isis in Manbij An SDF fighter kisses a crying man who was freed from Isis in Manbij, Syria, on 12 August Reuters In pictures: Civilians freed from Isis in Manbij Hundreds of civilians freed from Isis in Manbij, Syria, on 12 August Reuters

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said in a speech on Sunday in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir: We will never allow the formation of an artificial state in the north of Syria, referring to the Kurdish desire for autonomy in the region.

"We are there to protect our borders, ensure the safety of our citizens' lives and property, and to protect the territorial integrity of Syria."
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Turkey will never allow the formation of an artificial state in northern Syria, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has said, referring to the US-backed Kurdish fighters whose advance Ankara is now aiming to stop.

Turkey and its allies opened a new line of attack in northern Syria on Saturday, as Turkish tanks rolled across the border and Syrian fighters swept in from the west to take villages held by Issisand check the advance of the US-backed Syrian Kurdish YPG.

Turkey launched its operation in Syria, called Euphrates Shield, on 24 August, driving out Isis from the border town of Jarablus. Much of the focus since has been on the YPG militia, as Ankara fears its growing control of northern Syria.

We will never allow the formation of an artificial state in the north of Syria, Mr Yildirim said in a speech in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, where he announced an investment programme to rebuild parts of the largely Kurdish region that have been destroyed by security operations.

We are there with Euphrates Shield, we are there to protect our border, to provide for our citizens safety of life and property, and to ensure Syria's integrity.

Turkey is fighting a three-decade-old Kurdish insurgency in the southeast and fears that the YPG's advances will embolden militants at home. Turkey considers the YPG a terrorist organisation and an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

While the United States and Europe also regard the PKK as a terrorist group, Washington sees the YPG as a separate entity and as its most effective partner in the fight against Isis in Syria. That position has caused friction with Turkey, a Nato member and a partner in the fight against Isis.

 Turkish military opens up new front against ISIL in Syria

Some Kurds have criticised Turkey for its role in Syria. A demonstration broke out along the Syrian border on Friday, where Turkey is building a concrete wall. Police used tear gas and water cannon to drive the protesters back.

At a rally in Istanbul on Sunday, the co-head of Turkey's Kurdish-rooted Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) denounced the incursion into Syria as an invasion.

The government, which says it wants to stop Isis with the Jarablus invasion, has no credibility. The invasion of Jarablus is totally an adversarial approach against Kurds and we will never accept it, Selahattin Demirtas told reporters.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday raised concern about the formation of a terror corridor along Turkey's Syrian border.

Speaking to reporters after a meeting with US President Barack Obama at the G20 gathering of world leaders in China, Mr Erdogan said: It is our wish that a terror corridor not be formed across our southern border.

Mr Erdogan has repeatedly said that Turkey's allies should not be making a distinction between Isis and the YPG as both groups pose a threat to Turkey.

Reuters
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Q I am heading to Albania for a few days via Corfu. Any suggestions regarding currency, apart from taking euros?

Penny Proudlock

A Corfu provides an excellent gateway to southern Albania, with several ferries a day in summer across the Corfu Strait to the port of Sarande with Ionian-cruises.com; the journey takes half an hour aboard a Flying Dolphin hydrofoil, or 70 minute on the old ferry.

Albanias currency is the lek (plural leke). Like other minority Balkan currencies, it is difficult to exchange abroad. So on my last couple of trips  both of them short  I have stuck to euros. Everyone in Albania knows the value of 1 in lek (its between 130 to 140), and will gladly offer prices in euros  typically, and understandably, at a rate advantageous to them. So you might prefer to change euros (sterling is also acceptable) at one of the prominent exchange bureaux. Change only small amounts of cash  say 10 or 20 a time  because it is pointless leaving Albania with local currency unless you intend to return.

Every day, our travel correspondent, Simon Calder, tackles a readers question. Just email yours to s@hols.tv or tweet @simoncalder
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Steve Jobs must be revolving in his grave. Not only has his successor, Tim Cook, introduced one of those stylus pens the Apple founder always regarded as an indicator of technological failure but Cooks now also demolished Apples carefully cultivated cool image.

When youre accused of doing something that is so foreign to your values, it brings out an outrage in you, and thats how we feel, Cook blustered in an interview last week in response to the verdict of the European Unions Competition Commissioner that Apple had benefited from a 25-year sweetheart tax deal from Ireland and now needs to stump up 13bn in avoided corporation tax.

As he hyperventilated over the injustice, Cook sounded eerily like the uncool PC character from one of those Hello, Im a Mac adverts from the late 1990s. What a way to undermine a brand.

Recommended Read more Why iPhone 7 will be the least important thing at the iPhone 7 launch

Yet there is one substantive economic argument that the Apple boss advanced this week. Taxes for multinational companies are complex, yet a fundamental principle is recognised around the world: a companys profits should be taxed in the country where the value is created, he said in a statement.

Heres a serious case to grapple with. So where is Apples value created? Apples implied answer seems to be that it is at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, the address of the companys California headquarters.

Thats where many of its brilliant designers and engineers work. Thats where its executives like Cook are based. But this raises the awkward question of why Apple registered the profits of all its sales in Europe, the Middle East and Africa in an Irish subsidiary, rather than back in the US parent company.

Or, rather, why did Apple, with the connivance of the Dublin authorities, register those surpluses in a stateless shell corporation, meaning that some 16bn of its profits a year incurred virtually no corporation tax at all?

This suggests that the value of all those billions of dollars of profits was created not in Cupertino, but came out of the ether (or perhaps the cloud). Apple now suggests it always intended to repatriate these profits to the US, at some stage, to be subject in full to Americas 35 per cent corporation tax. If you believe that, Tim Cook has a stylus hed like to sell you.

The simple fact is that multinational companies have long been able to exploit variations in national corporation tax regimes for the benefit of their shareholders by artificially shifting profits across borders with the stroke of an accountants keyboard.

They have been effectively picking and choosing where they pay corporation tax. And Apple, with the help of Dublin, pushed this strategy to its extreme by deciding that it would pay corporation tax on a large slug of its profits nowhere at all.

Cook really shouldnt be surprised when that kind of aggressive tax shopping and dodging sticks in the throat of many people  even the ones who love Apple products.

Gadget and tech news: In pictures Show all 25 1 /25 Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gun-toting humanoid robot sent into space Russia has launched a humanoid robot into space on a rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS). The robot Fedor will spend 10 days aboard the ISS practising skills such as using tools to fix issues onboard. Russia's deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin has previously shared videos of Fedor handling and shooting guns at a firing range with deadly accuracy. Dmitry Rogozin/Twitter Gadget and tech news: In pictures Google turns 21 Google celebrates its 21st birthday on September 27. The The search engine was founded in September 1998 by two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in their dormitories at Californias Stanford University. Page and Brin chose the name google as it recalled the mathematic term 'googol', meaning 10 raised to the power of 100 Google Gadget and tech news: In pictures Hexa drone lifts off Chief engineer of LIFT aircraft Balazs Kerulo demonstrates the company's "Hexa" personal drone craft in Lago Vista, Texas on June 3 2019 Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures Project Scarlett to succeed Xbox One Microsoft announced Project Scarlett, the successor to the Xbox One, at E3 2019. The company said that the new console will be 4 times as powerful as the Xbox One and is slated for a release date of Christmas 2020 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures First new iPod in four years Apple has announced the new iPod Touch, the first new iPod in four years. The device will have the option of adding more storage, up to 256GB Apple Gadget and tech news: In pictures Folding phone may flop Samsung will cancel orders of its Galaxy Fold phone at the end of May if the phone is not then ready for sale. The $2000 folding phone has been found to break easily with review copies being recalled after backlash PA Gadget and tech news: In pictures Charging mat non-starter Apple has cancelled its AirPower wireless charging mat, which was slated as a way to charge numerous apple products at once AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures "Super league" India shoots down satellite India has claimed status as part of a "super league" of nations after shooting down a live satellite in a test of new missile technology EPA Gadget and tech news: In pictures 5G incoming 5G wireless internet is expected to launch in 2019, with the potential to reach speeds of 50mb/s Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Uber halts driverless testing after death Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona. March 19 2018 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty

Leaving that aside for a moment, Apple is right that there is a general principle that corporation tax should be levied in the place where value is created, known as a source-based tax.

Yet is it true that the value of a multinational company is created in the place where the firm has its headquarters, or its research base? Apples development teams in California are certainly crucial in generating its profits. But so are its marketing and finance teams based around the world. So are its retail teams in every country it operates.

There is usually no single source of profit, argue the corporation tax experts Michael Devereux and Rita de la Feria. Profits arise from many locations as the multinational takes advantage of local conditions to maximise its worldwide profit.

If this is true, there is a powerful case for a new approach to taxing companies, especially multinationals. Devereux and de la Feria propose a destination-based corporation tax.

So instead of trying to work out where value is created or the source of the profit, national authorities would simply levy the tax on firms where their products or services are sold and consumed by customers.

So for Apple its UK corporation tax bill would simply be calculated by taking its UK sales, subtracting the cost of employing its British-based workforce and other local investment overheads, and taxing the difference.

There are several major advantages of moving to such a system.

It would eliminate the incentive for multinational firms to spend time and energy employing accountants to shift reported profits across borders.

It would fit with the general public view of what constitutes substantive (and thereby taxable) economic activity by a company within a territory.

It could also be introduced unilaterally. The UK is a large enough market that it could face down the inevitable threats from multinationals to desert our shores. Is it remotely plausible Apple would decide not to sell iPhones to Britons? Or that Starbucks would go on coffee strike? Or that Amazon would stop selling us books?

Double taxation would not be an issue as multinationals required to pay extra UK corporation tax under the new regime would be able to proportionately lower their tax dues to governments elsewhere in the world on the grounds their corporate income had already been taxed.

Indeed, this would, helpfully, give a nudge to other governments to follow the UKs lead in imposing their own destination-based corporation taxes for fear of losing out on their share of the overall multinational taxation pie.

Sensible politicians are aware there is something fundamentally awry with the manner global companies are taxed.

It doesnt matter to me whether youre Amazon, Google or Starbucks, you have a duty to put something back, you have a debt to fellow citizens and you have a responsibility to pay your taxes, proclaimed Theresa May earlier this year.

If the prime minister wants to live up to those fine sentiments, she should look seriously at imposing a destination-based corporation tax. The alternative could well be an infinite loop of multinational tax dodging and growing public anger.
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As honeymoons go, and as a premier whose rise to power was the direct result of national trauma, Theresa May has enjoyed a remarkably warm public reception. At her first major international summit, the G20 in China, she is being her usual business-like, straightforward, and diplomatic self. At 60 next month, she is the new kid on this particular block, busily making friends and, less easily, influencing them.

The daunting challenges she and her Government face are coming into sharper focus at this meeting, and the picture is an increasingly disturbing one, both for the Prime Minister and the country she leads. No wonder she has started to temper expectations with a warning that the next few years "won't be plain sailing" and that we face "difficult times": we are being softened up. One wonders what the Treasury and Bank of England have been telling her about future job losses.

The G20 is, after all, a gathering of the most powerful economies on the planet, a mix of the established powers, maturing emerging economies such as China and Korea, and the "next wave" of players, such as Brazil and Indonesia. What do they think about Brexit? Not much. President Obama, in his courteous way, repeated that America's economic priorities lie in sorting out its relationship with the EU and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Treaty, which is stalling badly. Famously, and counterproductively, he said in the referendum campaign that Britain would be at the "back of the queue" in trade talks, and he has refused to budge from that view. Maybe Donald Trump, if elected, would be a better bet; yet given his hard protectionist beliefs, we shouldn't place too much faith in The Donald.

How about the Japanese, such prominent investors in Britain? Unusually forthright, a Japanese government taskforce has published a 15-page memo arguing that Japanese car makers, pharmaceutical firms and banks will pull out of Britain, or at least reduce their investment, if access to the European single market is disrupted. Before Brexit, half of inward investment to the EU came to the UK. How much longer will jobs in Swindon, Sunderland and Derbyshire be supported by Honda, Nissan and Toyota? Or those in the City by Nomura? When they come to make decisions about future tranches of investment do we think they are more likely to favour, say, Slovakia or Romania or France?

Then there are the hosts, the Chinese. Ms May meets them shortly, but we already know their displeasure about her decision to review the Hinkley Point nuclear deal. She may be wise to do so  the expense is vast  but in the context of Brexit it is doubly concerning. For the Chinese they see a British Prime Minister, David Cameron, dedicated to making the UK China's "gateway" into Europe and ushering in a "golden age" of cooperation being replaced by a Prime Minister who apparently doesn't trust them much.

Ms May has spoken of wanting "frank relations" with Russia, which may not mean a very fruitful relationship if Britain, rightly, opposes Putin's expansionism. In the case of Korea and India, relatively closed and regulated economies, trade talks on services and over non-tariff barriers with the UK are likely to be problematic. Only Australia seems keen on rebuilding some older imperial patterns of trade.

Ms May, in other words, is more dependent on the kindness of foreign strangers than any British prime minister in half a century. One day the "independent Britain" she talks about may be able to make the most of the "opportunities" Brexit offers; but even she seems ready to recognise that this vision will not materialise rapidly.

Still, that process will be incremental, slow and, in a way, invisible. No critic of Brexit will be able to point to an empty field or office block and say they can see foreign investment in a factory or financial services that would have come to a Britain inside the EU but instead went elsewhere. The harshest economic impact will take years to feed through, long after the next election and perhaps the one after that. Outside Scotland, moreover, there remains no cogent, united, worthy opposition ready and able to govern the nation and supplant Ms May's Tories. Winning by default in 2020, or earlier, will suit Ms May fine. She has indicated her willingness to build on the social ambitions of her predecessor and spoke boldly on the steps of Downing Street of her instinct to help those at the bottom of the heap and the victims of race discrimination. She would be wise, for the sake of social harmony, to deliver on those words. For the moment, she has the benefit of the doubt.

Plenty in politics can go very wrong very quickly, but Ms May's prospects look far brighter than she has any right to expect. Difficult times ahead, though.
Britain needs to speed up its exit from the EU, the former head of the European central bank has insisted.

The UK needed to accept the four pillars of the single market, including free movement of labour, if it wanted to remain in the trading area after withdrawal, said Jean Claude Trichet.

"We know in advance that we have quite a long period of uncertainty and I would call for that period to be as short as possible, and for the position of the British government to be as clear as possible, as soon as possible," he told the BBC.

Former Irish prime minister, and ex-EU ambassador to the US, John Bruton also criticised London's failure to prepare for Brexit.

"I think there is a lot of surprise in other European countries that the government, which decided in its manifesto that it would have a referendum, hadn't prepared in advance what it would look for once it left, given that there was always going to be a possibility that was going to be the result.

"One would have thought they would have prepared in the event that the people voted to leave," he told the BBC.

Former Italian prime minister Mario Monti warned that giving Britain a "full Monty" deal without free movement of labour could destroy the single market as other nations demanded special treatment in certain areas as well.

The rebukes came as Theresa Villiers said it is "crucial" that the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic remains open and unfortified.

The former Northern Ireland secretary, who quit front bench politics after declining Theresa May's offer of another Government position, said there was a reasonable chance of keeping the crossing between the two countries open despite the Brexit vote.

Ms Villiers told the Murnaghan programme on Sky News that there had never been a "truly hard border" and that softer measures could be taken to combat illegal migration.

"What has encouraged me since the referendum result is that we have the new Prime Minister, the Brexit secretary, we have the Taoiseach in Ireland all saying we need to keep this border open - it is crucial.

"If you have both countries determined to keep the border open I think there must be a reasonable chance that we can do that."

Concerns about whether the free movement of people and goods will be impacted after Brexit have dominated the political discourse across the island since the vote.

The MP for Chipping Barnet said there were "plenty of ways" to "crack down" on those who do not have the right to work in the UK without the need for "physical border checks".

"Of course we'd need measures to control EU migrants who came to the UK and chose to work if they didn't have appropriate entitlements but we've already got legal mechanisms to deal with that because we've criminalised working without proper permission," she told the programme.

"The best way to enforce rules of immigration is not through physical border checks at our land border with the Republic of Ireland, because as I say that's never been a properly enforced border, no one wants it on either side of the border to become a hard border again.

"There are other ways in which we can deal with the risks around illegal migration."
The road was closed following the incident

An elderly woman has died from injuries suffered in a collision involving a car and a pedestrian in Dublin.

The incident happened on the Navan Road at about 8.15am.

The 39-year-old male driver of the car was arrested but has since been released from Finglas Garda station and a report is being prepared for the Director of Public Prosecutions.

The woman, whose name has not been released, died at Mater Hospital.

The road has been closed in both directions to facilitate a forensic collision examination of the scene but is expected to reopen at about 1.30pm.

Diversions have been put in place at the Nephin Road and Kinvarna Avenue junctions with the Navan Road.

Gardai have appealed for witnesses to contact them at Cabra Garda station on 01 6667400.
When Irish businesspeople want to get a deal done, Tom Godfrey is likely to get a call.

Godfrey, the chief executive of IBI Corporate Finance, has spent his whole working life with the same company.

He's been involved in some of the most high-profile transactions in the history of Irish business, including the State's sale of its stake in Aer Lingus and the merger of Paddy Power with Betfair.

But it's not always the biggest deals that provide the most satisfaction.

"I keep talking about the purchase of a stake in Birmingham International Airport to anybody who talks to me about these things," Godfrey says.

"We bought a stake in that company on behalf of Aer Rianta from seven district councils in Birmingham, and they were only selling it because they were required to do so, in that Government regulations at the time indicated that they had to raise money themselves from then on. So they had to go out reluctantly to get a shareholder in Birmingham Airport and I think it was a 40pc stake but Aer Rianta at the time didn't have sufficient resources to conclude a transaction of that quantum, so we got NatWest Ventures, which became Bridgepoint subsequently, in to partner with us ... it was a complicated enough transaction.

"It was absolute hell negotiating a purchase with seven county councils, all with different views, so I think the sheer relief of getting the thing done, and the nature of the transaction itself, was very pleasing. And I think most interestingly, exactly 10 years after we bought that on behalf of Aer Rianta, we sold it as well, and they made a 30pc IRR (internal rate of over 10 years), which is unprecedented. So because we bought it and we sold it, and it was a hard deal, and it was a great deal in the end that the State benefited from, it's a transaction that I think very favourably about."

Just are there are ups, there are downs. Godfrey says experience has taught him that in every transaction, there's something that goes "chronically wrong" at some point.

"I really am a very firm believer in proceeding with a transaction at the quickest pace that you possibly can, because again, experience teaches you that things happen," Godfrey says.

"I've more scars on my back, as indeed anybody in this game will have, of transactions that just took too long. Just something happened, there was a stock market meltdown, or an interloper came along and stole the deal from under you, or something happened that you hadn't anticipated when you kicked off the deal.

"The one I think with the most scars on our back is we were endeavouring to do a take-private of Barlo, the radiator company - it must be more than ten years ago. It was an MBO (management buy-out) effectively and we were pulling together the equity for that transaction. We pulled together the equity and we pulled together the debt, but it was a hard slog to do it.

"And then, at the very last minute, Sean Quinn came in and bought stock from IIU (Dermot Desmond's International Investment & Underwriting) which had a significant stake, and the whole thing was over in the space of five minutes. So having worked very hard to produce the transaction - and it wasn't the biggest transaction there ever was - to have it just snapped from underneath you like that is something that you don't forget easily."

A native of Blackrock, Godfrey went straight into IBI from the BComm in UCD, as part of the company's first foray into graduate recruitment. He had studied a corporate finance module and liked the idea of doing deals for a living.

"I was very young, I was 21 or 22 when I came in, and at that age you really spend your time just learning the ropes and trying your best not to speak at meetings, because you're too nervous, and you don't know what you're talking about anyway.

"You're just there listening to what your elders and betters are talking about and finding it incredibly different to understand how they're talking about these things, and to penetrate how they get to the conclusions they reach so quickly. But I had some really fantastic teachers, Richard Hooper, who was the doyen of corporate finance in this country for many years, and also Danny Kitchen who worked here for many years was a guy I worked directly with - he's one of the smartest guys I've ever come across," Godfrey says.

"What I've discovered over the years is actually it's experience that enables you ... there's no shortcut, it is about putting years under your belt, understanding the various types of things that might happen with a transaction, and having seen it all before at some stage or another, heading into those memory banks, it is experience that counts in this business really.

Last year was a bumper year for M&A but this year has been much quieter. A more robust approach from the US regulators towards international M&A - witness the collapsed Pfizer-Allergan deal - has combined with the uncertainty before and after the Brexit vote to stymie potential transactions, Godfrey says. His industry seems like it's full of drama but Godfrey comes across as a calm fellow.

"2016 has been a much slower year than 2015 but I'm not surprised that that is the case. I thought it would be the case. I felt to a certain extent that you just couldn't repeat that, and I also felt to a certain extent that valuations had got a little bit high to be perfectly honest with you.

"I can see that the volume and value is down significantly on 2016 (in Ireland), and who knows what will be the end result but it is significantly down.

"We're heavily weighted this year, just as it happens, towards the second half so more of our transactions are going to conclude in the second half than in the first half. We can't deny that Brexit is going to have a significant impact on activity in Ireland just by virtue of the close ties. So 2016 is going to be more muted, but it's not the end of the world, it's not a financial crisis. It's just we happen to have had the Brexit vote in 2016 and that's going to cause things to be a little quieter."

IBI celebrates its 50th anniversary this year and is hosting a celebratory bash for the business community next month. The number of deals discussed at that dinner will provide an insight into how Ireland Inc is doing.

"When the Irish economy's doing well we're doing well. And when it's not doing well, we can do okay because there's companies that need some help on those occasions," Godfrey says,

"I think people underestimate the improvements that have happened over the last number of years. I know that M&A activity in 2016 is off from 2015 and that's fine. But notwithstanding Brexit, and notwithstanding the very strange figures that have come out in relation to GDP, if you think about what commentators are saying about the underlying growth of GDP ... these are significant growth figures they're talking about.

"The problem I think has been that for the vast majority of people they haven't seen this in their pay packet. But I think we are going to see that happen. So I'm very positive about the Irish story. I think there's more to go. I think we shouldn't be down in the mouth about Brexit, we should be looking at the opportunities that might arise as a consequence. There's no point crying over spilled milk."

He's relaxed too about the EU Commission's decision on Apple's tax bill.

"I think it's worth noting that it does not impact Ireland's corporate tax system generally which is a key driver of our attractiveness as a location for FDI. We need to keep a sense of proportion in that no other companies in Ireland are subject to this decision.

"I am sure Ireland's focus will remain firmly fixed on continuing to attract and retain FDI which is crucially important to the Irish economy. This decision is unhelpful in that regard but is not in my view catastrophic."

IBI is owned by Bank of Ireland, and is based in the bank's headquarters in Dublin's Burlington Plaza. I ask Godfrey how IBI's relationship with the bank - and its chief executive Richie Boucher - works. Does Godfrey have to report to Boucher about what's going on?

"The key point with Bank of Ireland, and this has always been the case, is that we have an independence policy, the bank respects that independence policy and supports it, recognising that we have to act in the best interest of our client - whoever they are at any particular moment in time," Godfrey says.

"We must act in their interests and their interests solely. And when we act in the bank's interest we act in the bank's interest solely. But they understand that and they recognise that and the independence policy is critical to our success.

"I would meet Richie in a client-facing context really. To the extent that there is something that the bank needs assistance on, we will give them that assistance. So my relationship with Richie is more of a client-type relationship.

"And then I report into Michael Torpey (chief executive of the bank's corporate and treasury division) from a P&L perspective, and he may not see all of the pieces of the jigsaw that make up the P&L because some of them will be confidential. But it works very smoothly and we've never had a problem with it."

IBI's fee model is "very success-orientated," according to Godfrey. Typically it charges clients a "work fee" for ongoing work, and then a "significant" success fee if a deal proceeds.

"If the thing doesn't happen, we're kind of significantly out of pocket. And that works from the client's perspective in that you only get paid if you get the result at the end of the day. And it is a negotiation. The smaller the deal the bigger the percentage because there's a certain limit, you have to pay people. And the bigger the deal the smaller the percentage, generally speaking."

For fee volume to pick back up in line with M&A activity, Godfrey believes there needs to be a restoration of certainty around Britain's relationship with the EU.

"The reality of the situation is that nobody wants a bad outcome from Brexit, Europe doesn't want a bad outcome from Brexit, the UK doesn't want a bad outcome from Brexit.

"And yes, after the vote there was a bit of Britain-bashing by Europe, but I think the reality of the situation is the Germans are going to want to sell their BMWs into the UK, and reciprocity indicates the UK will want to sell their stuff into Europe.

"So fundamentally I think what's going to happen. And this isn't a Bank of Ireland view or anything, there's going to be some sort of associate membership of the EU with a fudge on immigration ... I think it'll be more or less okay. My only worry is that it takes a while to get there."
An investment partnership including some of the most high-profile names in Irish business has held discussions with the NTMA about recovering almost $500,000 from the IBRC under the Eligible Liabilities Guarantee (ELG) scheme introduced in the wake of the blanket bank guarantee.

Members of the partnership include Paddy Power Betfair chairman and former Anglo non-executive director Gary McGann, property developer Bernard McNamara, Ardagh chairman Paul Coulson and John Olan Sisk, according to UK companies office documents.

The partnership - entitled Anglo Irish JCF 1 Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) - was incorporated in October 2008, four weeks after the blanket bank guarantee.

The partnership's latest accounts state it was owed a sum of $484,495 from the IBRC as of December 31, 2014. The accounts - filed last autumn - state that recovery of the sum was "still under discussion" with the NTMA in its role as operator of the ELG scheme.

The accounts state the LLP also made a claim as a creditor in the special liquidation of IBRC "as a precautionary step in the event of the ELG Scheme operator failing to make a payment".

"It is anticipated recovery of this amount should occur in late 2015 or early 2016," the accounts state.

Both the NTMA and the special liquidators of IBRC declined to comment on whether the sum had been paid.

Members of the partnership contacted by the Sunday Independent also declined to comment.

The accounts state the partnership's principal activity is to invest in a Cayman Islands-registered fund entitled JC Flowers II Limited Partnership. The value of its investments stood at $4,416,492 at December 31, 2014, down from $4,190,877 at December 31 2015.
The European Commission's conclusion that Ireland must recover unpaid tax from Apple - up to 13bn, plus interest - is the result of a political and economic battle between the world's two largest trading blocs, with Ireland caught in the middle.

The decision has been described by Apple's CEO Tim Cook as an effort to rewrite Irish tax law and upend the international tax system. The Irish Revenue Commissioners have said the decision defies common sense. However, at its heart, it is ultimately a legal question as to whether the Commission is correct when it makes findings of this nature.

The starting point, from an Irish legal perspective, is that Apple was subject to Irish tax under the rules as they stood at the time. The Commission has decided that Ireland's tax rules, and how it implemented them, were illegal. As a result, they have effectively disregarded Irish tax law and restated Apple's Irish tax bill.

The Commission's decision is principally about transfer pricing. These are rules developed by the OECD and implemented into the national laws of many countries.

Under transfer pricing, companies which trade with other members of the same corporate group calculate their taxable profits using prices which are equivalent to those charged by independent third parties (the 'arm's length' basis of pricing).

This is intended to prevent groups from using internal arrangements to divert their profits towards low-tax countries. Prior to 2010, Ireland did not have such rules.

In 1991 and 2007, Ireland agreed to tax Apple under the applicable Irish rules. Apple's only Irish income was the relatively small amount generated by the Apple branch in Cork. As the remainder of Apple's income was (and continued to be) generated outside Ireland, it was not subject to tax here.

In determining the profits of the Cork branch, Ireland did not subject Apple to a formal transfer pricing exercise. Such rules did not exist in Ireland.

They were not applied in the case of Apple or any other company operating in Ireland. This was not a secret and could be learned in the first few pages of any Irish tax guide.

The Commission has now decided that Irish law, as it applied to Apple, was contrary to EU law. Ireland should have calculated Apple's taxable income for the last 25 years using a formal transfer pricing regime.

The obscure art of transfer pricing is elevated to a core requirement of EU membership.

The Commission has calculated that about 60pc of Apple's non-US profits should be attributed to, and taxed, in Ireland. Ireland's failure to collect this tax constituted illegal State aid and this must be recovered from Apple.

The retrospective nature of the fine has led to the Commission being accused of imposing taxation under the guise of the EU competition law.

The clarity and certainty of the Commission's press release belies the novelty of its position. Transfer pricing is not referred to in the EU treaties. Based on other decisions, the Commission appears to justify its view by reference to two paragraphs from a 2006 European Court of Justice decision which involved Belgian back-office hubs or "co-ordination centres".

In 2016, those brief extracts have morphed into the Apple decision. It is something which practitioners, governments, tax authorities and companies would have struggled to comprehend during the periods for which Apple's tax position is being reviewed.

To illustrate this point, imagine that the Irish Revenue had contacted the Commission in 1991 and asked, "can you tell us how to apply transfer pricing please? We don't appear to have any Irish rules on it." They would have been met, at best, with a mystified response.

There is a risk that this issue is viewed as being an Irish story. It isn't. The decision in relation to Apple is one of a series emerging from a European Commission investigation into tax rulings.

Initially this focused on whether countries offered "secret deals" to multinationals. However, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and perhaps other countries, are finding that key parts of their tax laws, which were considered an issue of national sovereignty, breach EU competition law.

Unsurprisingly, arguments over retrospective tax, national sovereignty and logic are being employed by other countries in their appeals before the European Courts.

One final question is how this could impact other technology companies in Ireland. It is important to say that these are EU competition law investigations, not investigations into the general Irish tax regime.

This is not a direct challenge to Ireland's general taxation regime, or the 12.5pc corporate tax rate.

In the Commission's own words "the decision does not call into question Ireland's general tax system or its corporate tax rate."

In addition, the structure involved in the Apple case is being consigned to the history books. According to the Commission's decision, Apple itself ceased to use the structure in 2014 and, as a result of unilateral changes to the Irish tax code, it is unavailable to new companies and is being phased out.

Ireland's attractions as a low-tax and business-friendly economy should remain, and although we face challenges, it is encouraging that new international business continues to establish and expand their operations here.

In summary, there is much about the Apple decision which appears novel and controversial as a legal matter.

This is not the end of the road. It is only the beginning of a lengthy legal process. At the time of writing, the Commission has not yet made its written decision publicly available. That alone could take several months. The European Court of Justice will take several years to provide its view on any appeal.

The direct impact of the case on other Irish companies is likely to be small. However, the political and economic debate between the EU, the US and other countries as to how best to tax international business has certainly been reignited.

William Fogarty is a tax partner at Maples and Calder with extensive cross-border experience in corporate and finance transactions. The views expressed are those of the author and no other person
The EU's announcement last week that Apple owed 13bn in unpaid tax was a watershed moment: the biggest state aid decision in history involving the biggest company in the world. For those who want to listen, the message is clear: our tax rules need to change.

Not everyone will listen, of course. Some have already come out to oppose the EU's decision, calling it an unfair "fine" and pointing out that Apple has not broken the law. This is to completely - and perhaps deliberately - miss the point.

Firstly, the 13bn is not a fine; it is simply the amount of tax that Apple should have paid since 1991 had they been charged Ireland's corporation tax rate. The same rate of tax that every other Irish business has to pay, because they don't have a fleet of expert lawyers and accountants to advise them.

Secondly, Apple may not have broken the law, but they certainly got a favourable outcome. And Apple merrily took that deal, with the pretty clear unspoken arrangement being that they would just up sticks and move to another country if Ireland didn't accommodate them.

The day that your local plumber can walk into the Revenue Commissioners and get a special tax deal by hinting that he'll take his business elsewhere is the day you can say that Apple have been unfairly treated. Unfortunately for your plumber, he can't. Ordinary people and businesses do not get to negotiate special tax deals - they follow the rules of the country and pay their taxes accordingly. And so should Apple.

Sadly, that message does not seem to be getting through. Apple will appeal the ruling, and the Irish Government will too. That might be a hard sell to Irish taxpayers, though: after years of economic difficulties following the crisis, Ministers want to turn down the opportunity to recoup the equivalent of the entire annual health budget.

That's not to mention how taxpayers in many other European countries might be feeling at the moment. Apple made European profits of 87bn over the last ten years - from sales in France, Germany, the Czech Republic - and paid just 334m in tax, almost all of it to Ireland. In the Czech Republic, Apple had sufficiently engineered things so they were eligible for a tax credit of 45,000!

We now live in an increasingly digital world, in which companies can hop across national borders until they find a suitably "accommodating" tax regime. And it's not a zero sum game - we can't just say that if Apple isn't paying taxes in one EU country, it's at least paying them in another. An effective of tax rate of 0.005pc in 2014 meant Apple basically wasn't paying taxes to anyone: we are all losers here.

To get ourselves out of this situation, countries are going to have to work together - designing a tax system that works for all of our citizens, not constantly undercutting one another in a race to the bottom that serves no one's interests.

That is important for most countries, but it is vital for two economies as closely intertwined and dependent as those of the UK and Ireland.

The EU is a world leader when it comes to the kind of cooperation we need to tackle tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance.

I campaigned with all my might for the UK to remain in the EU to be part of that project.

Now that the UK is leaving the EU, it's more important to me than ever that we - and all our European neighbours - continue to uphold the kind of high moral standards exemplified in the decision in the Apple case.

In short, no one should be above the law - and taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society, not a bargaining chip in a game of poker between multinational companies and governments.

Anneliese Dodds MEP is the UK Labour Party's tax spokesperson in Europe
Pamela Ryder of Rye River Brewery, who have just inked a deal with a US craft brewing giant. Photo: Gerry Mooney

Rye River Brewing, one of Ireland's largest craft brewers, is making all its beers unpasteurised.

Founder Niall Phelan told the Sunday Independent that the move was designed to enhance the flavour of its products.

"The whole purpose is about quality. Pasteurisation isn't good for the flavour ... you're basically taking a delicate product that's been made by hand and boiling it up to 100 degrees," he said.

The company has raised two thirds of a target of 11m this year. The move to stop pasteurising has been enabled by its investment in an in-house bottling line, Phelan said.

"Initially when we started we had to brew under contract in the UK, and then it took us about a year to get the brewery up and running in Ireland.

"Then when we got the brewery up and running we still didn't have a bottling line so we were sending our product out to get bottled, and bottling houses have pasteurisation as standard. So it's as we've invested in the bottling line here, brought everything in house, that we've made that call."

Rye River has received planning permission for a visitor centre at its premises in Celbridge, Co Kildare, and aims to start construction early next year, Phelan said,

The company has also signed a partnership with Atlanta-based craft brewer Sweetwater. It will distribute Sweetwater products in the Dublin area initially.

"There's a bigger demand from consumers now and particularly there's an awareness around American craft beers.

"We spent the last couple of years looking at who we'd like to partner with over there and the guys from Sweetwater just sort of fit culturally with us," Phelan said.

"We're looking at whether there are opportunities for us in Europe or Asia. Sweetwater might be ten times bigger than us but in the world of beer we're both minnows, so you need a bit of support to go against the big guys and you need some collective thinking."
The EU Commission's ruling on Ireland's tax affairs wasn't as bad as had been feared - it was much, much worse.

Announcing its finding that Apple had underpaid its Irish tax by up to 13bn, Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager gave it to this country with both barrels.

"Member states cannot give tax benefits to selected companies - this is illegal under EU state aid rules. The Commission's investigation concluded that Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple, which enabled it to pay substantially less tax than other businesses over many years.

"In fact, this selective treatment allowed Apple to pay an effective corporate tax rate of 1pc on its European profits in 2003 down to 0.005pc in 2014".

The Commission then went on to detail how since 1991, Apple had used two Irish-registered subsidiary companies, Apple Sales International and Apple Operations Europe, to minimise its tax bill. The Irish Revenue Commissioners issued tax rulings to Apple in 1991 and 2007 allowing these two companies to allocate their profits to a "head office" which was not subject to tax in any country.

"The Commission's investigation has shown that the tax rulings issued by Ireland endorsed an artificial internal allocation of profits within Apple Sales International and Apple Operations Europe, which has no factual or economic justification.

"As a result of the tax rulings, most sales profits of Apple Sales International were allocated to its 'head office' when this 'head office' had no operating capacity to handle and manage the distribution business, or any other substantive business for that matter".

According to the Commission, this "head office" was not based in Ireland, or in any other country, and had no premises or staff of its own.

Evidence presented to the US Senate's Investigations Sub-Committee in 2013 revealed that Apple Sales International recorded profits of $22bn in 2011 but that it only paid tax on about $70m of those profits.

Ireland was ordered to recover 13bn in unpaid taxes, plus interest, from Apple for the years 2003 to 2014. This was much more than had been predicted by even the most pessimistic observers in this country.

Up until last week's announcement of the ruling, it had been widely expected that the Commission would order the Irish Government to recover a couple of hundred million euro, perhaps a billion at most, in back taxes from Apple.

While the Commission's ruling has been justified on competition grounds, that the alleged tax deal done with Apple constituted illegal state aid and put competitor companies at an unfair disadvantage, it's hard not to suspect that it is also the latest manifestation in its long-running campaign against Ireland's 12.5pc company tax rate.

Indeed, the Commission seemed to come close to implicitly admitting as much when it stated that:

"In fact, the tax treatment in Ireland enabled Apple to avoid taxation on almost all profits generated by sales of Apple products in the entire EU Single Market. This is due to Apple's decision to record all sales in Ireland rather than in the countries where the products were sold. This structure is however outside the remit of EU state aid control.

"If other countries were to require Apple to pay more tax on profits of the two companies over the same period under their national taxation rules, this would reduce the amount to be recovered by Ireland".

Whatever one thinks of Apple's Irish tax arrangements, and they haven't always shown this country in the best light, serious questions need to be asked about the approach adopted by the Commission in reaching its decision. It is applying today's standards to decisions made up to 25 years ago. Most of the structures that permitted Apple to do what it did, most infamously the so-called "double Irish", have since been scrapped.

Last week's ruling had its origins in the 2013 US Senate hearings which laid bare Apple's Irish tax affairs and prompted the Commission to launch its own investigation in June 2014.

Ireland has been in the Commission's crosshairs ever since the Investigation Sub-Committee's then chairman Senator Carl Levin accused Ireland of having done "a sweetheart deal" with Apple that allowed the tech giant to avoid tens of billions of euro in taxes.

These allegations of "a sweetheart" deal have been strongly denied by Apple and the Irish Government.

Both Apple and the Finance Minister Michael Noonan came out fighting following the Commission ruling.

"The European Commission has launched an effort to rewrite Apple's history in Europe, ignore Ireland's tax laws and upend the international tax system in the process. The opinion issued on August 30 alleges that Ireland gave Apple a special deal on our taxes.

"This claim has no basis in fact or in law. We never asked for, nor did we receive, any special deals. We now find ourselves in the unusual position of being ordered to retroactively pay additional taxes to a government that says we don't owe them any more than we've already paid," said Apple in a statement.

"The Commission's move is unprecedented and it has serious, wide-reaching implications. It is effectively proposing to replace Irish tax laws with a view of what the Commission thinks the law should have been.

"This would strike a devastating blow to the sovereignty of EU member states over their own tax matters, and to the principle of certainty of law in Europe. Ireland has said they plan to appeal the Commission's ruling and Apple will do the same. We are confident that the Commission's order will be reversed".

Our own Mr Noonan was equally emphatic in his rejection of the Commission's ruling.

"I disagree profoundly with the Commission's decision. Our tax system is founded on the strict application of the law, as enacted by the Oireachtas, without exception".

At its meeting on Friday, the Cabinet agreed with Mr Noonan to appeal the Commission's ruling to the European Court.

"I believe that there are some very important principles at stake in this case and that a robust legal challenge before the Courts is essential to defend Ireland's interests.

"The full amount of tax was paid in this case and no state aid was provided. Ireland did not give favourable tax treatment to Apple. Ireland does not do deals with taxpayers," said Mr Noonan.

Regardless of the eventual result of any such appeal, the Commission's ruling comes against a background of growing concern at the aggressive tax-avoidance strategies pursued by many multinationals. It is not just Apple's tax affairs that have been put under the microscope.

France has slapped a 1.6bn demand for back taxes on Google, Starbucks has "voluntarily" agreed to pay more tax in the UK after the revelation that it had paid just 8.6m British tax over the previous 14 years while former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, introduced a new diverted profits tax, quickly dubbed the "Google tax", in his 2015 budget.

The Google tax was quickly followed by a deal between Google and HMRC under which Google agreed to pay 130m in back taxes in the UK.

At the same time the rich countries' organisation the OECD has been introducing new global rules designed to crack down on tax avoidance by the multinationals. Its BEPS (base erosion and profit shifting) proposals were published in October 2015 and approved by the G20 leaders the following month.

The OECD estimates that "profit shifting" by multinationals is costing between $100bn and $240bn in lost tax revenue every year. Those are taxes that have to be paid by other taxpayers instead.

When it is fully implemented, BEPS will tighten up the rules on "transfer pricing", the practice by which multinationals maximise the profits of their subsidiaries in low-tax countries and minimise the profits of their subsidiaries in high-tax countries by having the subsidiary in the low-tax country bill the subsidiary in the high-tax country an artificially high amount for goods or services it has supplied.

BEPS will force companies to report on a country-by-country basis, detailing profits, sales, employee numbers and assets for each country in which they operate.

This will make it much, much more difficult for companies to "shift" profits to more fiscally-benign locations. From now on the underlying principle will be "the economic rather than the paper reality", according to the OECD.

So what implications does the Commission's ruling have for us in Ireland? Ireland is more dependent on foreign direct investment than any other EU country. There were over 187,000 people directly employed by IDA-supported companies at the end of last year with almost as many more jobs in supplier companies.

What this means is that close to 350,000 jobs, over a fifth of all private sector employment, are either directly or indirectly dependent on the multinationals.

Despite last June's Brexit vote, the IDA had been predicting that it would match its 2015 performance, when almost 19,000 new jobs were created by the multinationals and net employment at these companies increased by almost 12,000, this year.

Will the Commission ruling create uncertainly and undermine our ability to attract FDI? IDA chief executive Martin Shanahan doesn't think so.

"I don't think it creates huge uncertainty. The Government has decided to appeal. It will now be decided by the courts. We have moved on to a new stage in a process that has already gone on for three years. The Commission is saying one thing. The company and Ireland are saying something different," he says.

Clearly anything that reduces Ireland's attractiveness as a location for foreign direct investment is potentially very bad news for this country.

Ironically, Ireland has almost certainly benefited, at least so far, from the international crackdown on tax avoidance by the multinationals. Company tax revenue jumped 49pc to 6.9bn in 2015 and by a further 13pc to 3.3bn in the first seven months of this year.

This sharp rise in company tax revenue seems to have been caused by multinationals responding to the crackdown on tax avoidance by shifting some subsidiaries to politically less contentious locations such as Ireland.

But can we rely on this trend continuing?

Almost certainly not.

Regardless of the outcome of any appeal against the Commission's ruling in the Apple case, the tide of public and political opinion is now running strongly against perceived tax avoidance by the multinationals. For Ireland to be seen to be swimming against this tide is almost certainly not a good idea. The introduction of country-by-country reporting will further increase the pressure on this country.

That's not how Martin Shanahan sees it:

"I'm not disputing that there is greater awareness of this issue. I don't agree that we are on the wrong side of it. We have one of the most transparent tax systems in the world. It is written into law. The Revenue Commissioners have no discretion in how they apply it".

Shanahan also insists that Ireland's success in attracting FDI isn't just about tax.

"It is also about our talent, access to the EU market and our pro-business environment. We should not be apologetic about our competitive tax rate. All countries compete on tax. Some do it better than others"

Even so, the Commission's ruling represents a body blow to Ireland's efforts to attract foreign direct investment. Given the Commission's long-standing hostility to our 12.5pc company tax rate it almost certainly won't be the last.
The European Commission has done Ireland a favour in its Apple tax ruling. Not because we are likely to get our hands on a massive pot of unexpected revenue - our final share will probably be a lot smaller, as other states claim the tax they missed out on.

Apple CEO Tim Cook admitted this week that most of their research spending took place in the US, so that is where the profits and tax revenue will most likely end up.

No, the favour they have done is sending out a clear signal that the days of massive corporate tax avoidance are coming to an end. That process was already starting with the winding down of other tax loopholes but this judgment has brought the whole process into the limelight.

As it stands, European governments lose out on one trillion euro per annum in taxes through avoidance mechanisms exploited by multi-nationals. The public, quite rightly, will no longer tolerate this.

This process of change should not be a negative one for the Irish economy. Favouring tax justice does not mean we have to support full tax harmonisation.

We still need some mechanism to overcome the disadvantage of our peripheral island location. However, standing by our 12.5pc corporate taxation rate is a world away from justifying an effective 0.005pc tax rate.

Europe may be bitter about our competit-ive corporate tax rates but Ireland is not being singled out by this ruling. Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg have all been subject to similar judgements involving Fiat, Starbucks, BP and other companies.

What makes the Apple case different is the amount that has to be repaid. Some see that as a punitive measure but it is more likely a function of the massive profits the company was able to make. Those profits came for the most part from Apple's own ingenuity but they were also helped by the fact that they had a 200bn cash float, which gives them a real edge over their rivals.

The Green Party believes the Government should not be appealing the Commission's decision, which we see as fundamentally correct. I don't think we will win an appeal, and even if we do it could prove to be a pyrrhic victory. We would only be reinforcing Ireland's reputation as a tax haven, when we need to be seen as a fair-trading nation.

Whatever the legal arguments, it seems clear that Apple was one of only a few companies that was allowed to avail of this 'stateless' company structure.

While there were other elaborate offshore avoid tax avoidance measures, the exclusivity and unique structure of this loophole was the reason it was chosen as the real test case.

Those who argue that the Commission is infringing on our national sovereignty, ignore the fact that state aid rulings are an everyday factor in the work of most Government departments.

Usually the criticism is that the Commission does not sufficiently take into account social and environmental objectives and that their market approach only works out for the big guys.

But on this occasion the Commission is standing up for the smaller people and for the wider public good.

We still need to promote our country as a location for foreign direct investment. The economic strategy initiated by Lemass and Whittaker has served us well and we are a trusted country which is known for high quality in the work we do.

However we also know that our economic model has to change and that we need to start putting in place the training and enterprise supports that help the development of our local businesses.

Ironically, the Government's decision to appeal the Apple tax case could do more than anything else to damage our long-term reputation and hinder the transition we need to make.

It is a real contradiction to say we are making the appeal and say at the same time that 'Ireland will be taking the lead' on tax justice. We will end up instead under a cloud of suspicion, as legal wrangling goes on for years. It would have been far better to put our hands up now, admit what we did was wrong and gain some credit for being honest and proactive in changing our ways.

I welcome the fact that we are going to have a Dail debate on the issue next week. We also need more detailed investigations within the budget oversight committee and must see the full Commission ruling in advance of the debate, so we can see exactly what went on.

We also need to be mindful of this whole issue in the upcoming Brexit negotiations. Whatever outcome the UK authorities might expect, we have to make it clear that continuing corporation tax havens is no longer an option.

It is time for every country to set out where it stands on this issue. Unfortunately the message from Irish Government is that we want to be virtuous - but not just yet. That is the wrong signal to send to the rest of the world.

Eamon Ryan is leader of the Green Party
Irish mergers & acquisitions (M&A) activity is "significantly down" on last year and is likely to remain below 2015 levels for the rest of the year, according to the chief executive of one of Ireland's top corporate finance houses.

Tom Godfrey, chief executive of IBI Corporate Finance, told the Sunday Independent that uncertainty surrounding the Brexit referendum had a negative impact on Irish deals.

"I can see that the volume and value is down significantly on 2016 (in Ireland), and who knows what will be the end result but it is significantly down," Godfrey said.

He said IBI was set to conclude more transactions in the second half of the year than in the first.

"We're heavily weighted this year, just as it happens, towards the second half so more of our transactions are going to conclude in the second half than in the first half. We can't deny that Brexit is going to have a significant impact on activity in Ireland just by virtue of the close ties. So 2016 is going to be more muted, but it's not the end of the world, it's not a financial crisis. It's just we happen to have had the Brexit vote in 2016."

He said that for M&A activity to pick up, there needs to be more certainty around Britain's future relationship with the EU.

"The reality of the situation is that nobody wants a bad outcome from Brexit... I think it'll be more or less ok. My only worry is that it takes a while to get there."
IT will be politically very difficult to turn down 13bn plus interest that could accrue to the Irish exchequer from the Apple tax ruling. Aside from the many useful things we could do with the money, we have to ask ourselves, whose money is it anyway? Well, obviously it is Apple's. But is it?

Under US corporate tax law multinationals do not have to pay the American revenue authorities 35pc corporation tax on these kinds of profits as long as the money is held in offshore subsidiaries.

This was an incentive to help American multinationals in the past to re-invest the money in international expansion. It is assumed by the US tax authorities that it will be brought home at some point in the future and will then incur tax.

The corporations themselves, who hold an estimated $2 trillion in overseas profits, are hanging on for as long as they can.

They are waiting for the US tax system to change so when it is finally repatriated, it will incur a lower charge. Back in 2005 the US government tried to encourage them to bring the money home by charging just 5pc tax, instead of 35pc tax, on overseas profits held through the likes of Cayman Islands subsidiaries.

Instead of using the money to stimulate investment at home, corporations which brought profits back, used them for dividends and share buybacks, which bolstered the value of shares held by executives at these companies.

US president Barack Obama suggested in 2015 that there could be a one-off 15pc tax placed on all of this overseas money regardless of whether it was taken home or not. He hasn't mentioned it since.

The Americans need to change their tax system. Apple Inc and many others are waiting to see what happens there.

The tax authority that lost out from the Apple/Ireland corporate structure could ultimately be the US.

Why should we care? It isn't like they need the money. However, if the ruling survives the appeals process, and we spend the money, the European Commission will become the foremost investigative tax authority in Europe which could crack open dozens of deals on a retrospective basis.

US multinationals might want to invest in Ireland but simply will not know what the future holds. If we lose the appeal, that may happen anyway. In which case, Ireland will have done its best to honour the commitments it entered.

The Apple Inc money never would have been booked in Ireland as a taxable profit unless the Irish Revenue Commissioners had agreed to the structure.

In that sense, the 13bn was never going to go to Ireland.

The tourism sector and regional VAT rates

Every year since Michael Noonan cut the VAT rate for the tourism and hospitality sector to 9pc, trading in the sector seems to have gone up and up. So every year, when we hear about rising room rates and profits in the hotel sector, questions are asked about whether the minister should hike it back up to 13.5pc again.

The latest figures come from the Crowe Horwath annual hotel survey which found that hotel profits are up 30pc on the back of rising hotel prices and an increase in tourist numbers.

The problem is that Dublin is booming, particularly the high end of the hotel sector. However, outside the capital, profits are rising but not as uniformly.

The average profit per room for a hotel in Dublin last year was 16,913, compared to 13,797 the year before. Revenue per available room (RevPar) was 65.52 nationally, but it was 90.25 in Dublin.

In the Midlands it was 54.73, where average profit per room is around 10,628.

So, who needs a special lower VAT incentive and who doesn't?

We have to be careful with averages. The figure for the average Dublin hotel profit or room rate combines the Four Seasons in Ballsbridge or the Shelbourne with other cheaper hotels.

But in the capital, it is becoming more difficult to get a room in any hotel at certain times of the year.

Dalata Hotel Group, the biggest hotel chain in the country has around 20pc of all the hotel rooms in Dublin. According to figures from STR Global, average revenue per room at its Dublin hotels was running at 127.56 in July, an increase of 19.4pc on a year earlier.

A room at a three star Dalata hotel in Dublin (not even in the city centre) last Friday night was 149 without breakfast. Not cheap.

Of course hoteliers will argue that prices are not so high all year round; that the lower VAT rate brought our tourism rate closer to other countries; and the net cost of the VAT reduction is more than covered by a larger spend, more jobs and more visitors.

The stark reality is that Dublin no longer needs a lower VAT rate and there is a case that the subsidy it delivers is effectively going straight into shareholder pockets.

However, the picture is not so clear cut in other parts of the country. Hotels took a huge hammering during the crash. While some have turned into little gold mines between the two canals in Dublin, it isn't true of the whole sector.

There is a real problem with putting the VAT price back up. We don't do regional VAT rates in Ireland so having one rate in Dublin and others elsewhere seems unlikely.

In Dublin, the demand for hotel rooms is so great that prices are likely to keep rising anyway. Punters would simply end up paying higher prices, which would reduce the city's competitive position at a time when things are going well.

Fewer visitors from the UK, on the back of a weaker sterling, would hit non-Dublin hotels harder than those in the capital. Dublin hotels have wider sources of revenue.

Some have even argued that putting the VAT rate back up to 13.5pc would deter new hotel builds in Dublin, which should bring the new supply to lower prices in the first place. With average annual profits of 16,913 per room, I think that is stretching it a bit.

Ryanair resumes hostilities with DAA

It was a real case of deja vu this week as Ryanair decided to blame the Dublin Airport Authority for its decision to reduce capacity out of the airport next summer. The 3pc cut will see 1,900 fewer Ryanair flights out of Dublin.

Michael O'Leary blamed the DAA for not saying if it was renewing its growth incentive scheme. This was a three-year programme aimed at providing rebates to airlines that grow their passenger numbers out of Dublin.

But Ryanair alluded to the possible negative impact Brexit and the subsequent fall in the value of sterling could have on UK visitor numbers to Ireland next year, while also pulling capacity out of Dublin.

It raises the question of whether Ryanair knew it wouldn't grow passenger numbers next year out of Dublin anyway, which meant it wouldn't have qualified for the rebate incentives anyway.

"I'm not sure if we've topped out in terms of growth at Dublin," O'Leary said.

It is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation around exactly what triggered the capacity cut.

It might seem better from Ryanair's point of view to blame the DAA for a capacity cut that was coming anyway.

O'Leary used another opportunity this week to accuse the airport authority of building a gold-plated runway at a cost of over 300m. Sounds like Terminal Two all over again.

Does it herald a resumption of old hostilities with the DAA or it is just fun and games? We shall have to wait and see.
The new owners of Clerys have held out the prospect of employing "some" of the former department store's employees if its plans for the redevelopment of its historic O'Connell Street premises are approved by Dublin City Council.

The tentative commitment is contained in a report prepared on behalf of Deirdre Foley's OCS Properties by DKM Economic Consultants, in which the potential economic benefits of 'Project D1' are assessed. The report was submitted to council planners as part of OCS's overall application to develop offices, retail space and a boutique hotel within the Clerys building.

Clearly mindful of the public opprobrium provoked by the shock closure of the store and the resultant loss of 430 jobs of its direct and indirect employees, the report says that the store's redevelopment would create a total of 1,450 FTE (Full-Time Equivalent) jobs, with 330 of these employed in its retail offering alone.

"This sizeable expansion in terms of employment opportunities could benefit some of the staff previously engaged at the Clerys department store, while also providing new retail opportunities for other elements of the Dublin labour force," the report adds.

Calls for OCS Properties to provide employment for former Clerys workers were included in a number of the submissions made to Dublin City Council on its planning application.

The deadline for observations on the plan closed last Friday.

Referring to the obligations imposed on property owners under the scheme, one member of the public wrote to council planners to say that OCS Properties should only be granted planning permission if its application includes a 'social clause' that provides for "local employment, protection of workers' wages and jobs for former Clerys workers".

And while Green Party councillor Ciaran Cuffe says in his submission that the proposal's inclusion of a new hotel is "welcome", he too refers to the plight of the former Clerys workers.

Cuffe states that OCS Properties should "ensure that all workers are assured fair working conditions in the proposed development given the historic significance of union leader Jim Larkin's speech from the window of Clerys 103 years ago, and the more recent moral failure of the owners to deliver on justice for the Clerys workers".
It was broadcast just once -on January 22, 1984 - during a break in that year's Super Bowl, but Apple's commercial to introduce its new Macintosh computer is still regarded by many industry insiders as the greatest television ad ever made. It is certainly one of the most fabled.

Directed by Ridley Scott, and heavily inspired by George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the film depicted Apple as the non-conforming little guy taking on Big Brother, in the form of IBM. It was 60 seconds that encapsulated how Apple viewed itself then - and now: the plucky outsider sticking it to the Man.

On Tuesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook tried a similar tactic, only this time it wasn't IBM that was in his sights, but the European Commission. Margrethe Vestager's decision to force Apple to pay Ireland 13bn in unpaid taxes was strongly criticised by Cook, whose open letter suggested "the European Commission has launched an effort to rewrite Apple's history in Europe, ignore Ireland's tax laws and upend the international tax system in the process".

He was in a similarly combative mood in an interview with the Irish Independent's technology editor, Adrian Weckler, on Thursday when he dismissed the Commission's ruling as "total political crap".

But efforts to portray the brand as the underdog failed abysmally according to Cult of Mac, an Apple-obsessed website with 765,000 Twitter followers. "While railing against the EU's massive assessment of 13bn in back taxes owed by Apple," the site notes, "Cook ignores the facts of the matter - and seems tone-deaf about painting the world's biggest company as an underdog.

"The discrepancy between what Apple pays and what smaller companies must pay is the big story here - not the way Cook frames it, as plucky underdogs Apple and Ireland against the monstrous European Commission. EU member states are compelled by law to follow approved taxation laws. Turning this into a story about Ireland's place in the EU is sleight of hand on a grand level."

Apple's estimated $200bn cash reserve means it can comfortably afford to meet the EU's demand, but what about the impact such a ruling will have on its brand and that carefully nurtured outsider image?

Michael Cullen, editor of Marketing magazine, believes it's bound to cause damage. "It's likely that this story will rumble on and on," he says. "Any appeal taken by Ireland and Apple could take years and that's a lot of time for the company to be in the news for the wrong reasons."

Cook, who become CEO in 2011 following the death of founder Steve Jobs, will be hoping that next week's launch of the new iPhone 7 will generate the sort of positive publicity the company has long been used to. Yet, with most of the expected new features already leaked - not least the removal of the headphone jack - there's something of an air of ennui.

"Apple launches don't attract quite the sort of excitement they used to," Cullen says, "and many of those who admire the company might feel that it's been a while since they introduced something completely new rather than simply improve on the products they already have."

The iPhone is the firm's most important product in sales terms - accounting for almost two thirds of its revenue - and it's rumoured that it will be thoroughly reinvented next year in time for its 10th anniversary (it was released in 2007 in the US, and the following year in this country). With that in mind, some would-be buyers of the iPhone 7 may hold off upgrading. There's already plenty of evidence that customers hang on to their existing phones longer than Apple might like.

The most recent sales figures make for stark reading for bigwigs at Apple's HQ in Cupertino, California. In the second quarter of this year, Apple reported that the company's iPhone sales slowed for the first time ever since the product's launch - down 16.3pc (from 61.17 million units sold in Q2 2015 to 51.19 million in Q2 2016). As a result, Apple also reported a quarterly sales decline for the first time since 2003.

"There's no doubt about it; Apple's iPhone business is in a slump," noted America's leading business magazine, Forbes, in June.

"Although Apple is still the largest company in the world by market capitalisation, Wall Street has soured on the company as its main growth engine slows. Apple's stock is trading down more than 20pc over the past 12 months. The real question is whether the slowing growth signals a sustained decline in iPhone sales or only a temporary setback for the company."

It's not the only setback the company has faced. Its heavily hyped smart-watch has largely failed to excite since its launch in April last year, with sales far lower than originally projected. US-based business magazine Quartz gave the product a withering appraisal on its first anniversary. Writer Mike Murphy noted: "I wear it every day, possibly out of determination to get something out of the $400 I spent on it, but when someone asks me if I think they should buy one, I usually tell them no."

It was Apple's first entirely new product in five years -the first since the death of Steve Jobs and the first to be entirely conceived and developed under Cook's tenure. That it has failed to connect in the way the iPod or the iPad did is likely to have been a major disappointed to Cook while also giving fuel to the fire of those who feel the company desperately misses the messianic zeal of Steve Jobs.

As Walter Isaacson's award-winning biography demonstrates, Jobs was an obsessive perfectionist who demanded everything of his staff. He worked out early on that in order to survive and thrive in Silicon Valley one needed to innovate constantly - to merely rest on laurels was verboten.

He was also a brilliant marketeer who had a genius for grasping the emotional pull of his products. A feature-length documentary from earlier this year, The Man in the Machine, made by the respected filmmaker Alex Gibney, zeroed in on Jobs' unerring ability to arouse passions whenever he was launching a new product - whether that was the Macintosh in 1984 or the iPod in 2001. He was so gifted at talking his 'babies' up that it became common for Apple's most ardent fans to queue overnight in order to be among the first to own such and such a product.

"I do think a revision is overdue," Gibney said at the time of the film's release.

"And I think also we're beginning to understand partially as a result of what we're seeing with Facebook and also Google - but also with Apple - that these companies have enormous power over our lives. They exert enormous influence, and I think we're beginning to reckon with the idea that it may not all be that good and we better understand what they're about. That we've bought into a kind of myth that they're automatically all good and that's not necessarily so.

"We're all a little bit less innocent. I did intuit the idea that somehow by using Apple products I was sticking it to the Man, without realising I was working for the Man. And so I think I've come to view the products themselves differently."

While Apple was seen as the innovative upstart in the late '70s and the brave challenger in the 1980s, it had a rough 1990s following Jobs's forced departure at the hands of the Apple board. His return in 1997 - facilitated by Apple's acquisition of the NeXT computer firm, of which Jobs was a founder - immediately helped turn its fortunes around and for the best part of a decade between the iPod launch in 2001 and the unveiling of the iPad in 2010, the company could hardly put a foot wrong.

But there were rumblings of discontent about the way the company operated, particularly when it came to labour practices in Foxxconn, the giant Chinese firm that makes most of its products.

The revelation that it had been compelled to erect safety nets around the perimeter of its factory in order to put a halt to the spate of suicides caused by desperate staff jumping to their deaths caused shock-waves around the world. There have been other threats too, especially from rival firms whose game has been upped significantly. While the iPhone felt ahead of the pack in 1997, challengers like Samsung are now delivering handsets that are routinely cited as being comfortably the match of the latest iPhone, if not better for certain features.

Despite its troubles, the brand is still seen as aspirational according to Michael Cullen and that appears to be borne out in the annual CoolBrands survey conducted by a UK ad agency: it's been number one for four consecutive years, ahead of the likes of Ray Ban, Sonos and Spotify.

The price point of its products - from its MacBooks to iPad Pros - reinforces that aspirational ideal and the firm appears to be content to ignore a mass market by offering more affordable devices. It's little wonder, then, that Apple's iOS operating system accounts for just 20pc of the global market. Android is so far ahead that its lead looks unassailable.

It will be intriguing to see if Cook tackles the EU head-on at Apple's launch day on Wednesday, or if he will let the new iPhone and the much trumpeted iOS 10 do the talking. One thing is for sure, Apple appear up for the fight - that's been the case since Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak founded the company 40 years ago.

THE WOMAN WHO TOOK A BITE OUT OF APPLE

She was the inspiration behind Borgen - the cult Danish political TV drama - but this week Margrethe Vestager (48) became famous in her own right when she delivered the Europe Commission's verdict on Apple's fast and loose tax arrangements with Ireland.

The EU Competition Commissioner ordered Apple to pay Ireland unpaid taxes of up to 13bn - plus expenses - in a verdict that shook the financial world and drew a shaky Irish Government into a fresh crisis.

In Borgen the main character is Birgitte Nyborg, a feminist leader of a political party who finds herself becoming Prime Minister of Denmark.

Nyborg actress Sidse Babett Knudsen reportedly spent a few days shadowing Vestager before she began shooting the drama.

Vestager, the mother-of-three daughters, served as an MP from 2001 until 2014, representing the Social Liberals.

As Deputy Prime Minister and Economic Minister she rode her bicycle to meet the Danish Queen.

She was regarded by political commentators media as the most powerful person in government.

But this weekend her influence is global.
The inheritance tax take has almost doubled in the last five years - and with moves afoot to tighten up the rules around this death tax, more people could get caught for it in the coming years.

Finance Minister Michael Noonan is currently examining the rules around a popular tax relief which allows houses and apartments to be inherited tax-free. The relief - known as the dwelling house exemption - has increased in popularity in recent years and sparked concerns that it is being abused.

Last year, about 741 people claimed the dwelling house exemption - up from almost 500 in 2012. The rules around this relief may well be tightened to restrict the numbers of people using it.

"My department - and the Revenue Commissioners - have encountered some evidence that individuals may be using the relief as a way of passing on wealth tax-free in a manner which is not in line with the core aim of the relief," said Noonan in response to a parliamentary question during the summer.

"We are currently working to gather and assess information relating to such possible practices and to consider whether the current scope of the relief is in line with its original spirit. The underlying purpose of the relief, which I consider to be reasonable, is to prevent so far as possible cases of hardship arising from a tax perspective - when a person is gifted or inherits what is, in effect, their home."

The dwelling house exemption is probably the only way which a valuable family home can be passed on to one child tax-free. The property being passed on doesn't have to be a family home - it could be a second property or holiday home. Neither does it have to passed onto a relative.

As long as the person inheriting the property has been living in the property for at least three years - and continues to live there for six years after inheriting it, he should qualify for the exemption and so inherit it tax-free (provided some other conditions are met).

When asked by the Sunday Independent if the rules for the dwelling house exemption could be tightened in the upcoming Budget or Finance Bill, a spokeswoman for the Department of Finance said she could not comment on any changes that might be made in the Budget. "As with all other areas of tax, inheritance tax is kept under regular review as part of the annual Budget and Finance Bill process," she said.

It's anyone's guess when Noonan might make any changes to the rules around the dwelling house exemption. The review of the relief might see Noonan limit the extent to which children can use it to inherit a house tax-free, according to Michael Gaffney, a tax expert with KPMG.

"The law around the exemption as written is not complicated and if certain basic conditions are met, a house can be transferred to any person who has lived in it for three years," says Gaffney. "It's hard to see how someone who meets the simple conditions of the law is abusing it.

"The problem may be that when the law was introduced, one of the situations it was said to address was where elderly brothers or sisters lived together and eventually one inherited the family home from the other. However, when the law was written and passed, it contained a more general exemption (rather than one which was restricted to siblings)."

The law could therefore be changed to restrict the use of the exemption to certain people, properties, or circumstances.

It is less than two years since Noonan tightened up other rules around inheritance tax, which have made it more difficult for adult children to get tax-free digouts from their parents.

The increased scrutiny of, and tinkering with, inheritance tax rules makes it even more important to understand the rules of any inheritance tax relief you claim - and to ensure you qualify for such relief. Otherwise you could face a crippling tax bill - and, if you have incorrectly claimed a relief, penalties.

So where are people getting caught out most when it comes to inheritance tax?

Dwelling house exemption

"People often get caught out because they get a gift of a house and claim the dwelling house exemption - but they haven't met all the conditions," says Gaffney.

"For example, the person who receives the house must not have any ownership interest in any dwelling house at the date of the gift. A dwelling house includes houses or apartments which are rented out. So, for instance, if a parent gifts a house to a child, but that child owns, say, a quarter share of an apartment which is rented out, the child cannot get the exemption."

Even if you get your child off the hook for inheritance tax when passing on a property under the dwelling house exemption, you could trigger a capital gains tax (CGT, a tax paid on the sale or disposal of assets) bill for yourself. "Occasionally, I see parents triggering a CGT bill for themselves here because they're disposing of an asset which has increased in value since they acquired it," says Oonagh Casey-Grehan, partner with Fagan & Partners.

Digouts for adult kids

Before December 2014, parents could pay for the support, maintenance or education of their children without triggering a tax bill for their child - regardless of how old that child was.

However, in December 2014, the Government tightened up the law around inheritance tax so that only children under the age of 18, or those in full-time education and not more than 25 years of age, are exempt from tax on such financial support.

"Many parents believe that it's no problem to provide for a child financially if the child is over 25 and studying," says Casey-Grehan. "Quite often, you have children leaving school at the age of 19. They may go on and do a four-year course - followed by a masters - or they may do a seven-year degree in medicine."

Such children could still be getting some financial support from their parents when they're older than 25. "Once a child over 25 gets more than 3,000 a year from each of his parents [6,000 in total], a tax bill could be triggered for the child in the future," says Casey-Grehan.

"You could be paying their tuition fees for example. If the child is living away from home and renting somewhere, you may be paying their rent. You may be providing them with money to cover food, transport, college books and so on. You might be providing them with free use of a second home." All of these things could trigger a tax bill for an adult child.

The family business

When passing on a family business, a tax break known as business relief can slash the inheritance tax bill - as long as the rules are played by.

"When a family business, usually in a company, is passed to the next generation, you can have some bad surprises," says Gaffney.

"The gift or inheritance tax should be low - around 3.3pc or less - due to the business relief tax break. However, there are detailed rules to be met. For instance where there are assets in the company, such as investments, which are not needed for the business, the tax on these will be up to 33pc. This includes cash.

"I have seen many cases where individuals genuinely feel that the business needs to hold a certain level of cash, so that the cash should be seen as part of the business - and not taxed at the higher rates. However, if this is disputed it can be hard to prove the individual's case, and if the dispute goes to the courts, that is a lengthy and expensive process."

Light at the end of the tunnel?

Inheritance tax bills have forced many children to sell the family home. The current government has promised to make it easier for children to inherit the family home tax-free by increasing their tax-free thresholds (the amount of wealth they can inherit tax-free).

At 280,000, the current tax-free threshold for children is very low - particularly if the inheritance includes a home in Dublin or in a valuable country estate. That threshold, will eventually be increased to 500,000 - if the government lives up to its promise. Most tax experts expect the threshold to be increased further in next month's Budget, though not by a huge amount.

Any increase in the thresholds will be welcome - but not if a tightening of inheritance tax rules undoes any easing of the burden of death taxes on Irish families.

The 60-second guide to... chopping your children's inheritance tax bill

Stick within inheritance tax thresholds, which allow relatives and others to inherit a certain amount of wealth from you tax-free over their lifetime. Doing so could eliminate inheritance tax entirely for those to whom your leave your estate. A son or daughter can get up to 280,000 over their lifetime tax-free; a brother, sister, niece, nephew or grandchild can get up to 30,150; an in-law, friend or stranger can get up to 15,075.

Make full use of the tax-free thresholds by passing on your inheritance to your extended family, rather than restricting it your children. "If leaving an inheritance to three of your own children (and) those three children are married and have children of their own, pass on some of your inheritance to your grandchildren and in-laws so you can use up all of your tax-free thresholds," says Oonagh Casey Grehan of Fagan & Partners.

For example, let's say your son is married and has two children. Rather than leaving 350,000 to your son and triggering a tax bill in doing so (because the inheritance is over his 280,000 tax-free threshold), you could eliminate the tax bill altogether by leaving 30,150 to each of his two children, 9,700 to his wife and 280,000 to your son.

Get up to speed on any exemptions which might get a child off the hook for inheritance tax, such as the small gift exemption (which allows a child to get 6,000 worth of tax-free gifts from his parents a year) and the dwelling house exemption.

"The conditions to be met for retirement relief are different to the conditions which must be met for business relief," says Michael Gaffney of KPMG. So hire a tax advisor if passing on a family business - then you can take full advantage of retirement and business relief.
The Netherlands and Ireland have a lot in common. Both are geographically small Eurozone countries that have overcome relatively low levels of mineral wealth to operate advanced, open economies with world-leading levels of Foreign Direct Investment and agricultural output.

Both countries could also lay claim to being the land of the giants. While the basis for Ireland's assertion is mythical, the Dutch can make this claim for real. The average height for males is 6ft, the tallest in the world. At an average of 5ft 6in, Dutch women are the second tallest females in the world.

With so much in common and close geographic proximity, it should come as no surprise to discover that the Netherlands is Ireland's seventh biggest export market.

It may seem ironic for a country that is the second largest food exporter in the world, but one of its biggest imports from Ireland is meat and dairy. However some 30pc of Irish sales here are medtech, hi-tech instruments, with machinery and IT equipment also featuring strongly.

Enterprise Ireland clients are even more embedded in this market than the wider Irish business community recording over 950m in sales last year with non-food exports accounting for 339m, making the Netherlands our clients' third largest export market. Other top sectoral exports include construction, engineering, software, life sciences and agricultural technology.

Many Irish exporters have established a presence here, sometimes through acquisition or joint ventures. In construction, Kingspan, and in electronics, Nualight have made acquisitions while companies such as Ventac, DPS Engineering, Forest Produce, CRH and Openmind Networks are among the many who have established a presence on the ground.

For many centuries the Netherlands has been a centre for world trade and it remains so today. Rotterdam is Europe's largest port, and Schiphol is the world's fifth busiest airport for international passengers and the world's 16th busiest for cargo tonnage, making the Netherlands a key logistics hub for the through-transportation of goods.

The business culture here is direct and early-adopting which makes for shorter sale cycles, reducing client risk. The Dutch are number two in the world for English proficiency and the business environment is SME-friendly providing an excellent first-step onto mainland Europe for exporters to the rest of Europe and beyond.

The Netherlands' economy has experienced a modest recovery driven by consumer activity and increased investment in recent years with growth forecast at a little over 2pc this year and next.

In its strategic development plan, the government has identified nine sectors of focus in terms of policy and investment, all of which are a good fit for Irish capability. Agri-food, water, ICT, energy, life sciences and health are among the top opportunities for Irish sales.

There is also potential in Construction with significant investment planned in greenfield and refurbishment projects by pharma companies such as Abbott, Genzyme, Astellas, Teva and MSD. Google and Microsoft are planning data centres and large projects in food processing are in the offing by companies such as Arla Foods, Danone and FrieslandCampina.

Many of the multinationals in Ireland also have a presence here. Considered one of the most wired countries in the world, the Netherlands is Europe's hotspot for ICT and one of the most advanced countries in Europe for E-commerce.

Some 60pc of all Forbes 2000 companies active in the IT industry have established operations in the Netherlands. Cisco, Interxion, Infosys, Huawei, Oracle, Intel, IBM, and Verizon all have a significant presence.

The Netherlands is also a hotspot for the gaming industry. Considering the mutual familiarity, Irish firms really should consider coming to play with the big boys and girls.

Paul Barreveld is an Enterprise Ireland Market Advisor in the Benelux region based in Amsterdam
An aerial photo of Electric Picnic. Pic: An Garda Siochana

Aerial photos from the Garda Traffic Twitter account reveal the sheer size of Electric Picnic.

The images show scores of tents and stages in between the patchwork fields of Stradbally as 55,000 people attended Electric weekend for a bumper weekend of music and culture (and plenty of messing).

Electric Picnic from the air. Good drying there today. pic.twitter.com/Uz0XFDCILy  An Garda Siochana (@GardaTraffic) September 4, 2016

From above, the annual festival site looks like a sprawling, majestic, colourful city of tents in the sunshine - despite yesterday's torrential downpours.

Gardai urge all those revellers at #ElectricPicnic to take the Pledge! https://t.co/77jljNqvpP pic.twitter.com/jdhOSYA0a7  An Garda Siochana (@GardaTraffic) September 4, 2016

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Getting into the spirit of Electric Picnic, An Garda Siochana urged attendees to "take the pledge" in a cheeky, follow-up tweet.

And on Saturday they shared a photo of two gardai taking in the action of the main stage, arms wrapped around each other as they posed with their backs to the camera like good sports.

Even we've found the time...'For the life of Riley' at #EP2016 Enjoy, be nice & pls behave! pic.twitter.com/HzMB7PeESO  An Garda Siochana (@GardaTraffic) September 3, 2016

They also made sure GAA fans weren't left out of the aerial action.

Earlier today the team tweeted an incredible aerial shot of Croke Park ahead of today's All-Ireland Hurling final between Tipperary and Kilkenny.

All Ireland Hurling Final 2016. May the best team win! pic.twitter.com/0O4nsNnqVX  An Garda Siochana (@GardaTraffic) September 4, 2016
From Tony Soprano to Walter White, television has always loved a conflicted bad guy, but are audiences ready for the Holy Father as antihero?

That's the question posed by The Young Pope, acclaimed Italian director Paolo Sorrentino's audacious new drama series starring Jude Law, which received its world premiere at the Venice film festival last night, winning over even the notoriously hard-to-please Italian press with a glittering, irreverent tale of faith, doubt and papal intrigue.

The 10-episode series, which is broadcast on Sky Atlantic next month, is the Oscar-winning Sorrentino's first foray into television. Beautifully shot - Sorrentino's camera swoops through the Vatican's corridors and enclaves (in reality an immaculately constructed film set in Rome's Cinecitta studios) illuminating saints and sinners alike.

Often wickedly funny, The Young Pope centres on Law's Lenny Belardo, a seemingly insignificant American cardinal who finds himself elevated to the highest office in the Roman Catholic church thanks to the machinations of the college of cardinals.

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The Vatican's biggest players swiftly discover that Belardo, who takes the inauspicious name Pope Pius XIII, is not quite the pushover they presumed and the stage is set for both an almighty tussle for power and, perhaps more importantly, a tussle for the power of the almighty.

"It's the sort of subject that doesn't come up often on television," says Andrea Zappia, chief executive of Sky Italia (the series is a Sky Original Production co-produced with French company Canal+ and US cable giant HBO), adding that The Young Pope's complicated treatment of faith - Belardo is by no means a progressive in the Pope Francis mould - may make it a hard sell.

"It's not an easy treatment, so we are aware that it may have a selective appeal, [but] when I first read the script it surprised me.

"I felt that it was both a very deep story and a surprising one, which ultimately develops into a great journey about faith."

Expand Close Close up: Guests pose on the red carpet before the premiere of The Young Pope in Venice Photo: TIZIANA FABI/AFP/Getty Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp Close up: Guests pose on the red carpet before the premiere of The Young Pope in Venice Photo: TIZIANA FABI/AFP/Getty Images

Not everyone is likely to agree. The decision to make Belardo a conservative, God-fearing pontiff is a potentially controversial one, albeit true to the character's American roots, as is the show's often satirical tone, which reaches its apogee with a scene in which Belardo talks to his own confessor about whether God's representative on Earth actually believes in Him.

It's a scene which may well enrage devout Catholics - bloggers in the US have already questioned HBO about the show's depiction of the Church, leading the channel's programming chief, Casey Bloys, to concede: "It's not wildly inaccurate but ... there is some creative licence."

Sorrentino himself remains unconcerned by any potential backlash.

"It would be a mistake to think the Catholic church is now on a long march to modernity," he says.

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"Obviously our pope is very different from the current pope, but that's not to say that you couldn't get a conservative pope like this after a liberal one. In fact I think that's very realistic."

The first two episodes ask a number of questions about the role of the Catholic church in the 21st century and the director admits he's keen to examine the nature of faith and what it means to possess, or lose it. "I have always been fascinated by the church and the role it plays in our society, and I wanted to be able to examine that in depth," he says.

"Working in television gave me the chance to combine the strengths of that genre - the chance to tell a more in-depth narrative - with the visual strengths of cinema. I see this as a 10-hour film."

It helps that the cast is so strong. Diane Keaton stands out as Sister Mary, the nun who raised Belardo from boyhood and who has her own opinion on the role he should play in the world, while James Cromwell is on fantastically bitter form as the young pope's former mentor who believed becoming il papa was his destiny.

The real revelation though is Law, who gives Belardo both a slippery, shifting charisma and just enough vulnerability to ensure that, like the increasingly confused cardinals, we're never quite sure where he really stands.

"Initially I got involved simply because of the opportunity to work with Paolo and play a character who was rich in contradictions and character; then it suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks that I would be playing the pope, and I really didn't know how to do that in a believable way," says Law.

"But Paolo kept reminding me that I wasn't playing the pope; I was playing a man who happened to be the pope."

The Young Pope isn't the only screening causing controversy at Venice this year. Brimstone, Dutch director Martin Koolhoven's revenge western starring Dakota Fanning as a young woman on the run from Guy Pearce's diabolical preacher, was loudly booed at the press screening yesterday, with many critics condemning the levels of violence.

Today will see the return of Mel Gibson, who presents the second world war drama Hacksaw Ridge, his first film as a director in ten years, having revealed this weekend that he is also working on a sequel to his surprise 2004 hit The Passion of The Christ, tentatively titled Resurrection.

Critics will be closely watching these other highlights of the Venice Film Festival:

La La Land

Damien Chazelle's swooning hymn to the Hollywood musical stars has Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as two lost souls in love in modern-day Los Angeles. Heartstoppingly romantic, it's an early Oscar frontrunner.

Frantz

French director Francois Ozon's latest is a surprisingly straight but deeply moving period piece inspired by Ernst Lubitsch's 1932 drama Broken Lullaby and is set in a small German town just after the first world war.

Nocturnal Animals

The second film from fashion designer Tom Ford is a gloriously melodramatic take on Austin Wright's 1993 novel Tony and Susan.

Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal are the stars getting taken for a ride in this addictive mash-up of David Lynch and Jim Thompson.

Prevenge

We all know pregnancy can be murder - literally so in the case of Alice Lowe's delirious black comedy, which sees a heavily pregnant mother-to-be embark of a killing spree apparently. The Young Pope begins its run on Sky Atlantic on 27 October

Observer
Replaced: Grainne Seoige will present The People of The Year Awards. Her Crimecall slot goes to Keelin Shanley Photo: Gerry Mooney

Grainne Seoige has been axed from Crimecall - in favour of Keelin Shanley.

Ms Seoige presented Crimecall for the past five years alongside Philip Boucher-Hayes, and the move marks the last major presenting role Ms Seoige held at the station.

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Once a year, Grainne will continue to host Up for the Match, which aired last night, and The People of the Year Awards.

The Galway presenter was once a leading light in RTE - but she has been "left out in the cold" in recent years. The news comes only weeks after the Sunday Independent reported that the star was in limbo over her future on the show.

A source said: "After 10 years the show went to another production company and, after some consideration, Grainne was no longer seen as the right fit.

Her co-host Mr Boucher-Hayes told the Sunday Independent: "I won't be presenting Crimecall this coming season. I have a full-time job in radio on Drivetime and Liveline and a full-time job in TV working on a new series of What Are You Eating?

"On top of which I'm also developing some very interesting TV projects," he said.

"Trying to squeeze in Crimecall too wasn't practical any longer. After five years it was time to move on." Mr Boucher-Hayes finished by offering the best of luck to Keelin Shanley.

This weekend a spokesperson for RTE released a statement which read: "The hugely successful series has been on air for over 10 years with a variety of presenters at the helm. This season, RTE has decided to change the look and feel of the show with Keelin replacing Grainne and Philip as the presenter of the series.

"We'd like to thank Grainne and Philip for their fantastic work over the past six years and we're looking forward to working with them again on different projects for RTE One in the coming months."

Although Ms Seoige was not present at the autumn launch and was not linked to any upcoming projects, the statement went on: "Grainne will be hosting Up for the Match and The People of the Year Awards and we will also be talking to her about other potential projects in the coming months.

It continued: "Philip is busy working on the second series of What Are You Eating? for broadcast later this year along with his Radio One commitments on Drivetime and Liveline."

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"Crimecall has been on air for more than 10 years with different presenters at the helm so we felt it was time to review the series and change the look and feel of the show."

Earlier this month there was shock as Coco Productions, the company which made Crimecall, was told it would no longer be given the task, after more than a decade producing the series.

At the time a RTE source said: "Coco Television created, developed and produced it from its inception. But RTE told the company in the last few weeks that they were putting the show's production up for tender and it has now gone to a production company in the North who will make it for the foreseeable future."

The source went on: "I'd say it did come as a surprise to Coco.

"It's been one of RTE's most successful brands, outperforming the schedule average."

The show plays a valuable role in Garda investigations, so news that it has gone to a production company outside the state also raised eyebrows.

"When you think about it, it's a different legislation, another police force, confidential information about victim's cases will be going outside the state.

"It's a strange decision but I think it's part of bigger things that are happening now in RTE."
A Portadown woman has been accused of killing her friend and injuring three more by careless driving while unfit.

However, 23-year-old Claire Gough did not attend a Craigavon Magistrates Court' hearing yesterday, and defence solicitor Lloyd McKeag said that the defendant herself was receiving "respite care."

Gough, from the Tartaraghan Road, is charged with causing the death of Katherine Kelley by driving carelessly and while unfit through drink or drugs on November 3, 2012.

She faces three further allegations of causing grievous bodily injury to Scott Houston, Daniel Dougan and Trevor Foster arising from the same single vehicle crash on the Armagh Road in Portadown.

District Judge Peter King adjourned the death by dangerous driving case and listed it for mention in two weeks' time.

Miss Kelley was just 21 when she sustained her fatal injuries and it was reported at the time that Gough herself was also in a "critical condition."

After the tragic death, Kathy Lennon, Miss Kelley's devastated mother, spoke of her "pride" that her daughter's organs had been donated, and that her liver had been given to a seriously ill infant.
Gardai are appealing for witnesses following the discovery of a man's body in a woods in Co Kildare on Friday night.

A murder investigation is now underway.

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The body found in the shallow grave in rural Kildare is believed to be that of a Dublin criminal who disappeared last month.

Philip Finnegan (24), from Aikenhead House, Dublin 8, went missing Wednesday August 10.

The man's body was partially buried and an attempt had been made to set it on fire.

Gardai believe he was killed by associates of jailed gang boss Brian Rattigan.

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Detectives had been working on the theory Finnegan was abducted by people known to him and killed before his body was dumped in Rahin Woods on the Kildare-Meath border around 8km outside Edenderry, Co. Offaly.

Gardai had already being carrying out searches in the area when a local person was out walking their dogs in the woods made the grim find of a body around 8.30pm on Friday night.

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Assistant State Pathologist Dr Margaret Bolster visited the site yesterday and gardai suspect the body is that of Finnegan.

Gardai already intensified a search operation in the area this week before the body was found.

There were workers cutting timber in the forest on the night of Finnegans disappearance.

It looks like they either panicked or were amateur in what they were doing because the body was only partially buried and was always going to be found, said a source.

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The woods have been the site of a number of illegal raves in recent times.

Gardai have identified two criminals known to Finnegan who they suspect may have been involved in his death and are extremely hopeful of bringing charges in the case.

Gardai received information that two people known to Finnegan who were in prison at the same time as him may have been involved in his disappearance.

They are investigating whether he was killed after falling out with associates of Rattigan who said he owed them money.

He previously escaped death when a gunman opened fire at him and Owen Gaffney in a drive-by shooting on Lower Basin Street in July 2013.

Five shots were fired in the incident but neither man was injured.

In December that year Finnegan was caught up in a bloody brawl when two rival groups met by accident in McDonalds on Grafton Street.

Later that day a hatchet was thrown through the front window of his home at Mary Aikenhead House but no complaint was made.

Last year he was acquitted of firearms possession after a semi-automatic handgun capable of firing blanks was found during a raid of his home.
A local paramedic has been hailed a hero after he saved the life of a 48-year-old father who suffered from anaphylactic shock after a wasp sting.

Paul Newport (48) from Wexford stopped breathing after the attack and local paramedic Ger Carthy kept him alive.

The paramedic had to call on Wexford gardai to take him to Wexford General because there was no ambulance available.

Paul's wife Sarah said her husband would have died without the help of paramedic Ger Carthy.

"It was very frightening. It was the third time he had been stung, but this reaction was the worst.. his lips swelled up and his throat constricted.. by the time we got him to the hospital he had turned blue, I thought he was going to die," she said.

Ger Carthy said he kept Paul alive by using his paramedic's equipment to breathe for him as he was taken to hospital in the garda van.

"He had stopped breathing.. I was breathing for him. He is extremely lucky to be alive."

Ger had previously administered three epi-shots used to treat people suffering from anaphylactic shock.

Sarah and Paul were at their home at Our Lady's Island on Friday evening when he was stung on the head by a wasp.

"He has antihistamine, but didn't have it with him. I called Ger who told me what to do, but by the time I put the phone down his symptoms had worsened. I rang again because things were getting worse and Ger told us to keep going.. to keep him alive. I could see his lips swelling and was unconscious, I thought he was going to die."

Sarah said there was no change in Paul's condition after the epi-shots were administered at Ashield Cross during a nightmare journey to Wexford, however, he slowly improved after being rushed to hospital where he received emergency treatment in the resuscitation unit.

"He was unconscious for about four hours,' said Sarah, visiting a local doctor with Paul yesterday (Monday) to make sure he had a ready supply of Epi-Pens in the event he was stung again.

"If he had had one that night when he was stung, things wouldn't have been so bad. I was just like a robot when it happenened. We have three small children at home and I just wanted to tell them their daddy was still alive when we were at the hospital," she said.

The National Ambulance Service can confirm that a 112/999 call was received at 19.40hrs on the 26th August, 2016 for person who had received an insect sting.

A spokesperson said: "The patient was treated at scene by a National Ambulance Service paramedic who was not on duty but happened to be in the area at the time. A Garda car also passing the area stopped to offer assistance. The paramedic examined and stabilised the patient at the scene and deemed the patient appropriate for transport via car under their care. The patient was transported to Wexford General Hospital by the Garda and paramedic in attendance who offered assistance.

No delay was experienced by the patient and care delivery was maintained during transport by the paramedic."
Childless couples desperately seeking costly fertility treatments may be able to avail of a State-funded scheme in a matter of months, the Sunday Independent has learned.

And a set of legal guidelines governing highly controversial fertility-related issues - ranging from embryo implantation to stem cell research - are also currently being finalised.

This landmark development will regulate a range of controversial health issues in Ireland for the first time.

Among the more contentious areas to be covered are sperm and egg and embryo donation for assisted human reproduction. The guidelines will also include surrogacy and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) of embryos.

Ireland remains one of only three countries in the EU where IVF is not yet funded by the State.

This is despite the fact that around one-in-six couples here have trouble conceiving.

IVF is specifically recommended for women with absent, blocked or damaged fallopian tubes. It is also used in cases of unexplained infertility.

Treatment costs between 4,000 to 4,500 per course and is only available from private clinics.

Often several courses are needed before success, putting the treatment process outside the financial range of many families.

Last February, former Health Minister Leo Varadkar announced new funding proposals for couples unable to conceive naturally.

It has now been confirmed his successor, Simon Harris, aims to finalise the process, and has ordered Department officials to complete a review of international funding models before the end of the year.

This review, which includes countries such as the UK, will determine the most efficient system for the State to provide treatment through our public health network.

In February 2015, the government gave approval to draft a general scheme of legislative provisions, dealing with assisted human reproduction. While it was due to be finalised in the first half of this year, a Department of Health spokesperson has now confirmed it will be published in 2017.

The aim of the legislation will be to promote and ensure the health and safety of parents, others involved in the process (such as egg/sperm donors and surrogate mothers), and children who will be born as a result of assisted reproduction.

The Department also intends to conduct a public consultation on the matter.

The proposals will be submitted to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children for pre-legislative scrutiny. The spokesperson said that once the general scheme is completed, and the assisted human reproduction legislation is enacted, the State will be in a position to provide free fertility treatments.

Almost 8,000 Irish couples undergo fertility treatment every year. And while the procedures are not now provided in the Irish public health service, individuals can avail of tax relief for medical expenses and the cost of certain approved fertility medicines are covered under the Medical Card or Drugs Payment Scheme (DPS).

Internationally, figures show that about a third of patients experience a live birth after one IVF cycle, and that this rises to around 70pc of patients for those who go through three cycles.

Spurred on by the high cost of fertility treatment here, many Irish couples travel abroad for treatment.In the Czech Republic, costs are roughly half, at between 2,000 and 2,500 for one round of IVF.
Irish politicians and social media users alike have condemned the Sunday Times for its presentation of an interview with Scotlands First Minister Nicola Sturgeon about never having children.

Sturgeon spoke to the Sunday Times in a brave interview about her miscarriage and how children never happened for her.

Alongside the article, the newspaper featured a panel entitled Childless Politicians.

Many have referred to the panel as irrelevant and crass.

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Fianna Fail TD Anne Rabbitte, spokesperson for Children and Youth Affairs, told Independent.ie that she was outraged at the article.

Its absolutely ridiculous. What has having children got to do with politics? she told Independent.ie.

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Would they do the same on an article about nurses and teachers? What has it got to do with the job?

The panel of childless politicians featured a range of UK and Europe-based politicians including UK Prime Minister Theresa May and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Im a female politician with three children and, yes I understand education and childcare, but if I didnt have children Id still be doing the same thing, said Rabbitte.

Its ridiculous. Its irrelevant. What has this got to do with politics?

As long as the elected person is doing their job, who cares whether they have children or not?

Rabbitte asked if it was an attempt to scare women out of politics.

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Are they trying to scare women? Are they afraid of us? she asked.

Independent TD Maureen OSullivan described the panel as strange.

You shouldnt have to explain whether or not you have children. Its a personal matter for every man and woman and nobody else.

Im not defined as a person on whether Im fertile or infertile, she told Independent.ie.

What an appallingly sad state when women explain why they have no children! A disgusting article in Sunday Times. https://t.co/P93m9MJ0Eb  Jeffrey Morris (@jmbrighton) September 4, 2016

Thanks to the Sunday Times for reminding us about everyday sexism. Why does this matter & why only women? #crass https://t.co/WrogzlQD6y  Jayne Bryant AM (@JBryantWales) September 4, 2016

The Sunday Times really printed headshots of "childless politicians" (women). I can't even retweet that - it's disgusting  Class of 199# (@recentlyhatched) September 4, 2016

Oh, I do SO enjoy when I'm catagorised as a "childless politician".... https://t.co/bZyPqZ0aej  Ruth Davidson (@RuthDavidsonMSP) September 4, 2016

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall a male politician ever having to explain their childless status. It's no one's business!  JenP (@jenp2) September 4, 2016

Social media users were also united in condemnation at the article.
The LE James Joyce and its crew has been rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean

Irish naval personnel who have helped save the lives of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea are to be given a medal.

Defence Minister Paul Kehoe made the announcement during a visit to Cagliari in Sardinia where he met crew from the LE James Joyce who have been assisting the Italian authorities with the ongoing crisis

Irish naval vessels have rescued some 11,500 migrants so far as part of Operation Pontus.

The minister said those who have taken part in the humanitarian mission should be recognised for their "outstanding role".

The Defence Forces International Operational Service Medal will be presented during a ceremony in Rosslare late next month.

Mr Kehoe added: "Those who serve the State in these important humanitarian missions will receive a recognition which is deserving of the contribution which they have made."

The minister also thanked the families and partners of naval personnel. They were often the "unsung heroes of such missions," he said.
A man aged in his 40s has died following a road crash in Derry, and another man in his 70s has died following a separate crash in Co Fermanagh.

The PSNI has confirmed that a man, aged in his 40s, died following a two vehicle crash that happened on the Clooney Road in Derry at approximately 12.50am on Sunday.

A man aged in his 50s and a woman aged in her 50s were taken to hospital for treatment to their injuries which are not believed to be life threatening.

Inspector Smyth said a silver coloured Ford Ka and a grey coloured Peugeot 308 were involved in the incident.

"I would ask anyone who may have witnessed the collision or the cars in the area to contact Strand Road Police Station or the Collision Investigation Unit on the non-emergency number 101," he said.

The Clooney Road re-opened to traffic on Sunday afternoon.

The crash in Fermanagh took place on the A3 Cavan Road close to Newtownbutler on Saturday afternoon.

The road has been closed on both sides of the border.

A man in his 70s died in the crash. No further details have yet been released.

Motorists are advised to expect delays in the area and to find an alternative route if possible.

Meanwhile in Co Down one person has been injured in a serious road crash.

Police said the crash close to Ballywalter on the Ards Peninsula happened at about 4.50pm on Saturday afternoon on the Dunover Road.

It is understood that the car caught fure. A local farmer went to the aid of the driver.
A body found in rural Kildare is believed to be that of a man whom gardai suspect was murdered last month.

Philip Finnegan (24), from Aikenhead House, Dublin 8, went missing on Wednesday, August 10.

Gardai believe he may have been killed on the date he went missing - and was murdered by associates of jailed gang boss Brian Rattigan.

It's believed Finnegan may have been abducted by people known to him on August 10. Afterwards, his body was dumped in Rahan Woods in Carbury on the Kildare-Meath border, and just 8km from Edenderry in Co Offaly.

The body was found partially buried in the woods by a local person out walking their dogs at around 8.30pm last Friday night.

Assistant State Pathologist Dr Margaret Bolster visited the site yesterday and gardai suspect the body is that of Finnegan.

Gardai already intensified a search operation in the area last week before the body was found.

"It looks like they either panicked or were amateur in what they were doing because the body was only partially buried and was always going to be found," said a source.

It is believed gardai had previously received information that two people known to Finnegan, who were in prison at the same time as him, may have been involved in his disappearance. They are investigating whether he was killed after falling out with associates of Rattigan who said he owed them money.

Killer and drug dealer Rattigan is serving life in prison for murdering Declan Gavin - the first man to be killed in the Crumlin-Drimnagh feud.

Finnegan previously escaped death when a gunman opened fire at him and another man in a drive-by shooting on Lower Basin Street in July 2013. In December that year, Finnegan was also caught up in a dispute between two groups in Dublin's city centre.

Later that day, a hatchet was thrown through the front window of his home at Mary Aikenhead House but no complaint was made.

Separately, a man remains in garda custody after a number of shots were fired at the home of John Hutch, the innocent brother of crime boss Gerry 'The Monk' Hutch.

Up to six shots were fired at the home in Drumalee Park, off the North Circular Road in Dublin's north inner city. John Hutch managed to run to safety and was not injured.

The attack - which involved two gunmen and is linked to the ongoing feud between the Hutch gang and the Kinahan cartel - occurred at 5.25pm on Friday evening.

The gunmen escaped in a car which was found burnt out a short distance away near Blackhorse Avenue.

A 32-year-old man - described as a senior associate of the Kinahans - was arrested nearby and is detained at Store Street garda station.

John Hutch - who has no involvement in crime - is the father of Jonathan and Gareth Hutch. Jonathan was the target in the fatal shooting of innocent dad-of-three Trevor O'Neill in Majorca; Gareth was the victim of a feud-related murder on May 24.

The ongoing feud has claimed the lives of 10 men since September of last year.
Fine Gael ministers are now seriously concerned the Government will not be able to pass October's Budget following a week of drama over the EU Commission's 13bn tax judgment against US tech firm Apple.

Senior Cabinet ministers are incensed with their Independent Alliance colleagues Shane Ross and Finian McGrath and are now openly talking about the prospect of bringing down the Government.

Despite eventually reaching a deal on the Apple tax controversy, there is still bad blood between Fine Gael and the Alliance over the embarrassing spat that made international headlines.

Last night, Fine Gael ministers accused Mr Ross of "showboating" on the issue and insisted the Transport Minister was ready to sign off on an appeal of EU judgment at the first Cabinet meeting.

Several Cabinet sources said he backtracked on the decision when concerns were raised by Independent Children's Minister Katherine Zappone.

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But the Independent Alliance hit back and branded Fine Gael "liars" and insisted concerns were raised by the group when the Dail motion agreed by the Cabinet was changed without their consent.

"Fine Gael's problem is they don't like any dialogue and just want it all their own way," a senior Independent Alliance source said.

The deteriorating relationship between Fine Gael and the Alliance will be brought into sharp focus in the coming weeks as Budget negotiations begin.

With just fives weeks to go before the Budget, a senior Fine Gael minister warned that the latest Cabinet row "does not auger well for the Budget".

"This is the first time since the Government was formed that a lot of people in Fine Gael are saying 'is it worth it' because the limitations of this particular minority government have become apparent for all to see," the Cabinet minister told the Sunday Independent.

"We will get to the point where one day Fine Gael ministers will say 'we can't budge - goodnight and good luck,'" the source added.

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The minister pointed out that most minority governments are collapsed by the government rather than the opposition. Another minister said Fine Gael will soon "put a gun to Ross's head" and ask him if he wants an "election or to be in government?".

However, in an interview with the Sunday Independent , Government Chief Whip Regina Doherty said Mr Ross is an "extremely sincere man" despite her colleagues believing he wants to "cause trouble".

In-fighting between Government departments and concerns over Finance Minister Michael Noonan's position in Cabinet are also threatening to shorten the lifetime of the Government.

Fine Gael backbenchers have described Mr Noonan's handling of the Apple tax scandal as "poor" and "weak".

"He looked and sounded out of it during the week," a Fine Gael TD said. Another said the Finance Minister was caught "flat footed" by Europe and was not prepared for the scale of the 13bn judgment.

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Backbenchers are also tired of Taoiseach Enda Kenny failing to stand up to the Independent Alliance ministers, especially last week and during the recent debacle over a Dail motion on abortion in cases of fatal foetal abnormalities.

"Kenny looked like a wimp again. The Independents are kicking him around the place," a source said.

Meanwhile, the Taoiseach's office and the Department of Finance have also locked horns in a blame game over whose responsibility it was to brief Independent ministers ahead of the Apple judgment.

There is massive concerns over the lack of communication between the Taoiseach's office and Fine Gael's partners in Government.

There are also fears of a brain drain in the Department of the Taoiseach after the departure of Mr Kenny's key economic advisor Andrew McDowell.

Mr McDowell, who was the architect of Fine Gael's disastrous general election campaign, officially left last week to take up his role as vice president of the European Investment Bank, which comes with an 275,000 salary, plus expenses.
Communications Minister Denis Naughten will this week tell the new RTE director general Dee Forbes there will be no increase in the TV licence fee, the Sunday Independent has learned.

Ms Forbes is due to meet Mr Naughten on Tuesday in the Department of Communications, where she will learn that she cannot rely on additional taxpayer funding to revive the struggling broadcaster.

The minister is also expected to discuss other revenue-generating measures with the RTE chief, such as potentially selling some or all of the station's site in Montrose, Dublin 4.

Ms Forbes has already been hit with an exodus of senior managers since her appointment and will now not be able to rely on additional financial resources to hire new talent for the station.

Ahead of his departure, former RTE director general Noel Curran issued a stark warning about the future of the station if it did not receive more State funding.

Mr Curran said RTE will have to cut back services and restructure the organisation due to massive funding shortfalls.

Last year, RTE reported losses of 2.8m as the cost of TV and radio production outweighed commercial revenue.

The licence fee generated 179m for the station last year alone.

However, Mr Naughten is understood to believe now is not the time to burden householders with more expensive licence fees, which currently stand at 160 a year.

Instead, the minister will focus on clamping down on licence fee evaders who are costing the station an estimated 40m a year.

A senior government source said the minister believes there is an "unacceptably high degree of evasion".

According to the latest figures, 13.5pc of households are not paying for a TV licence compared with 5pc in the UK.

An Post is responsible for targeting evaders and TV licence inspectors were recently given new powers to make unannounced calls in the evening when people are more likely to be home.

Inspectors have also begun working on Sundays as part of a renewed effort to catch those refusing to pay their licence fee.

There is currently 45 full-time inspectors working nationwide, along with an additional 10 who have been hired on a temporary basis.

A Department of Communications source said the minister is ruling out both a licence fee increase and the introduction of a broadcasting charge.

However, he plans to focus on measures which will "enhance the current TV licence system".

"The department is currently examining the possibility of overhauling the current technical architecture of the TV licence database to improve its usefulness to TV licence inspectors," the source said.

"Independent consultants have just completed a review and this is being analysed," the source added.

RTE is also working on a television and radio campaign with An Post aimed at increasing licence fee compliance.

An independent review of RTE's finances suggested more State funding would be needed to keep the station operating at an optimal level.

The New ERA Report also indicated that before any consideration was given to additional funding it was necessary to review both the advertising market and consider options for selling all or part of the Montrose site.

In a recent interview with the Sunday Independent, Mr Naughten revealed he had clashed with RTE ahead of the General Election over the coverage given to Independent candidates.

"I felt there was an issue in relation to some of the Independents but when I actually sat down and went through it with RTE you could see where they were coming from and part of the problem was our own failure to get our own message across to RTE," he said.

He also said he would like to see more head-to-head debates on RTE between government ministers and members of the Opposition.

However, he insisted there was no political bias or left-leaning agenda in the State broadcaster.

Since her appointment, Ms Forbes has seen the departure of head of news and deputy director general Kevin Bakhurst, managing director Glen Killane, and head of RTE2 Bill Malone.

Mr Bakhurst, who was in the running for the director general job, quit RTE soon after Ms Forbes's appointment to take up a senior position with UK television and radio regulator OfCom.

Ms Forbes, a Cork native, has held a number of senior roles with major television networks before taking up her new position. She was the managing director of Discovery Networks in northern Europe and held a number of senior roles with Turner Broadcasting, which counts the Cartoon Network, Boomerang and TCM among its channels.

She is the first female director general of the State broadcaster.
Union chiefs have described as "bizarre" claims by Transport Minister Shane Ross that managing the transport sector has been a "doddle" since taking office.

As over 330,000 passengers face travel chaos after workers at Dublin Bus announced six days of industrial action for later this month, SIPTU assistant divisional organiser, Paul Cullen, says Mr Ross needs to appreciate the scale of the task facing him in the coming months.

"A key issue is the matter of subvention. How is he dealing with that situation?" asked Mr Cullen. "How is he dealing with the fact that subvention has been reduced over a long number of years, while passenger numbers are up? It's a huge brief. I can't understand how it can be a doddle - it's a bizarre comment."

Minister Ross caused surprise on Friday's Late Late Show when he insisted the brief has been easy to manage since taking office.

"Transport has been a doddle, although there are some strikes coming shortly," he said.

NBRU general secretary, Dermot O'Leary, said while the Minister holds a wide-ranging brief, he has a responsibility to "keep the wheels turning" in the transport sector.

"Over the past number of years there's been one dispute after another, and that's no way to run a transport system."

Mr Ross's comments come as commuters face further travel chaos as the country's train drivers have now warned of industrial action this winter.

Union chiefs representing Irish Rail workers have ramped up pressure on management, by threatening to ballot for industrial action, should talks break down in the coming days.

The warning emerged less than a week after Dublin Bus workers announced strike action in a dispute over pay conditions. Workers are set to down tools on September 8, 9, 15, 16, 23 and 24.

The NBRU and SIPTU, representing Irish Rail workers, last month suspended putting a vote to workers to ballot for strike action in order to attend Workplace Relations Commission talks.

Speaking at the time, they stressed that if agreement is not reached on a number of issues, they will be under pressure from members to resolve the dispute with the company on a range of issues, by way of industrial action.

Among the items for discussion are a shorter working week, and issues relating to productivity.

SIPTU instructed members the work-to-rule could include an overtime ban, non-cooperation on roster changes, and a refusal to carry out senior roles or to work in depots other than their own.Now, SIPTU's Paul Cullen has warned talks over the coming days will prove pivotal, on whether they move to ballot workers for industrial action.

Speaking to the Sunday Independent, Mr Cullen said while progress is being made, further talks will take place early next week.

"The ballot for industrial action is frozen at this point in time. The company will continue to engage with us over the next couple of days and matters have not broken down at this stage.

"We have a proposal on the table at the moment and the company are willing to discuss that proposal. There are a lot of things we have to go through to get over the next couple of days, and get to a point where we'll have some form of a document to put to the drivers. But if these discussions don't come up with some form of joint agreement, then it looks like there will be some form of industrial action.

"We're aiming to have a form of a conclusion by the end of next week."

Mr O'Leary said while significant progress has been made over the past few weeks, the next 10 days will ultimately decide if an agreement can be reached.

"In the event of us not getting to that point, then obviously the string will be pulled in terms of industrial action.

"The issue of rosters will also be looked at over the coming days," he added.
Concerns have been raised in government about Horse Racing Ireland's (HRI) decision to reappoint CEO Brian Kavanagh for a third term.

Documents seen by the Sunday Independent show the Department of Agriculture wrote to HRI prior to the reappointment, questioning Mr Kavanagh's salary, entitlements and terms of employment.

A letter sent to the HRI in March this year said: "Mr Kavanagh's current salary is 190,773 while the specified salary range for the position of HRI CEO, post 2011, is 137,356 to 164,231".

HRI has confirmed Mr Kavanagh will be retained on the same salary under the terms of his new contract despite the concerns raised by the Department of Agriculture.

Mr Kavanagh has served as CEO since HRI was established in 2001. He was re-appointed to the position in July for a further five years.

However, under Government guidelines, CEOs of commercial State bodies can only serve a single term of seven years.

Officials at the department also questioned the term of Mr Kavanagh's contract, as well as the potential for additional bonus payments. They also sought reassurance "that an extension to the CEO's contract would not have implications for pension entitlements."

"The current contract provides for a performance-related bonus which, per Government policy, is not included in CEO contracts," said a letter to HRI.

"Concerns have been raised that an extension to the existing contract may have the potential for a contract of indefinite duration under the Protection of Employees (Fixed-Term Work) Act."

HRI said Mr Kavanagh was not seeking an indefinite contract and insist his terms will not lead to additional pension entitlements.

"The re-appointment of the CEO was based on a combination of HRI's short and medium-term challenges and Brian Kavanagh's particular expertise and skill set as well as his ongoing membership of various international racing bodies," said a spokesperson.

"Mr Kavanagh waived his contractual right to a performance-related bonus in 2010 and has not been in receipt of a bonus since then. The new contract has no provision for bonus payments."

However, Mr Kavanagh was ordered in 2011 to pay back bonuses awarded to him by his board.

The then Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney said the bonuses, relating to 2008 and 2009 totalling 37,550, were to be paid back "immediately" and that no further bonuses were to be paid out.

HRI said the development of the Curragh Racecourse and the implementation of a new strategic plan for the industry were issues Mr Kavanagh can assist with in his role.

The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, who ratified the appointment with the Department of Agriculture, said HRI's business case plan was submitted to it by HRI's board and was strongly supported by the Minister for Agriculture before Mr Kavanagh's reappointment.

"The extension was required because of the substantial importance of the role played by the HRI CEO."
Tragedy: Four hearses containing the remains of the Hawe family leave the scene at Oakdene, Ballyjamesduff on Monday. Photo: Colin Keegan

As black hearses wound slowly through the streets of Ballyjamesduff this week, just one question hung in the air: 'Why?'

The Hawe family will be laid to rest in Castlerahan today after a week that shook the Cavan townland to its core.

School teachers Alan and Clodagh Hawe, and their sons Liam (13), Niall (11) and Ryan (6) all perished in the latest murder-suicide to blight rural Ireland last Sunday.

Investigators believe "all the answers" lie within the ordinary family bungalow where dad Alan - who was deputy principal at his local national school - is believed to have pinned a note to the back door warning visitors to "Call the gardai" before taking his own life.

Speaking to Review in the wake of the tragedy, one local mum seemed to speak for the entire community when she wept: "How could he kill those poor boys?"

As the contents of a second note found on the kitchen table of the family home were this week examined by forensic officers, one suicide expert warned there may be more questions than answers in the days and weeks to come.

"There's no idea or no understanding that makes the tragedy of murder-suicide or suicide completely palatable," says Dr Eoin Galavan, a Senior Clinical Psychologist with the HSE and CAMS (Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality)-care Consultant. "It's a tragedy no matter what way you think about it.

"(But) there are a couple of (ways of) understanding that I think can help people process the experience of it. One of the things is that you have some sense of the kind of motivation people have when they enact self injury or a murder-suicide.

"For example, if you look at the notes that people leave behind when a murder-suicide takes place, sometimes they will say things like, 'We didn't want to leave them in this terrible life', so in a way, the virtue is trying to save their children from what they perceive to be unmanageable pain.

"Of course, that's a distortion of that virtue, and we're not saying that that's a valid way to try and address that problem, but that's often reflective of what's often in the minds of people when they enact something of this nature."

Although just 2pc of suicides are murder-suicides, according to the most reliable data on the subject from the US, familicide has become an all too familiar headline here in recent years.

Two years ago this month, nine- year-old twins Paddy and Thomas O'Driscoll were stabbed to death in their Charleville home by older brother Jonathan (21), whose body was later found by the banks of the nearby Awbeg River.

While in July, Marco Velocci (28) and his toddler son Alex died when the car Marco was driving was involved in a head-on collision with an articulated lorry on the Limerick to Tipperary road.

Amid tears and tea, as neighbours rallied to comfort family, friends and each other whatever way possible, Castlerahan - and indeed Oristown in Meath where mum Clodagh was also a primary school teacher - was this week the latest parish tragically brought closer by the unthinkable.

"We have a concept called post-traumatic growth that is evident after tragedy," explains Siobhan O'Neill, a professor of Mental Health Sciences at the University of Ulster and director of the Irish Association of Suicidology (IAS).

"We see that people become more connected, there can be increased social awareness, the community may become kinder, in a way, and these are all the positives that we can draw from a horrendous situation.

"But that's not to take away from the intense grief and sadness and trauma that a community collectively can experience after such a tragedy too, so it's important that that is acknowledged."

She continues: "In small connected communities like that, these things aren't supposed to happen, and they're certainly not supposed to happen in family contexts. It shakes our faith in human nature and that can be quite destabilising.

"Often people turn to the Church in a way that they haven't before at times of tragedy like this, so the Church can have a really positive influence.

"But there are all sorts of other community leaders and community groups that can be important in drawing people together in trying to restore that sense of trust and stability that has been shaken when these tragedies happen.

"It's (about) giving everybody an opportunity to express the grief and to acknowledge the different forms of grief."

Facing into the new school year beside the empty seats of three pals, without two beloved teachers, nowhere is that grief likely to be more evident than the classrooms of Cavan and Meath, among the counties' youngest residents touched by the nightmare.

For mums and dads in the area, the greatest lesson this term won't be learned from a book, according to Helen Culhane of the Children's Grief Project, a Limerick-based support service for school-aged children affected by loss through death, separation or divorce.

"Most adults think that children don't grieve and that it goes over their heads and if we tell them the little white lie, they'll have forgotten," she says. "But I know in my work, if the grief isn't addressed it will erupt - usually at about the age of ten because ten is now the new teenage.

"If someone dies from natural causes or (an illness such as) cancer, there is a preparation and they're going in to see the person.

"Murder adds an additional pressure because now children are going to wonder, 'How could my teacher, who I loved, do this?' or 'Will my dad murder me?' Their world becomes unsafe, like, 'Who can I trust if I can't trust my mum or dad?'

"Sometimes we haven't got all the answers and usually we say things like, 'We don't know why this man did what he did, but as a mum and dad, we love you'," she adds. "What you tell a 14-year-old and what you tell a four-year-old (will be different), but you still have to be truthful.

"We can start saying we need to send in the psychologists and the art therapists and the play therapists. From my experience, what the children will need (most) is that there (is) someone there to listen. The most important people would be their parents."

Ahead of World Suicide Prevention Day next Saturday, some questions are even more pertinent.

"One of the great tragedies of suicide is in the aftermath you're looking backward thinking, 'Where was the evidence?'," argues Dr Galavan, who will host a workshop for parents on Understanding Youth Suicide at Connolly Counselling Centre in Dublin to mark the awareness day on September 10.

"(Some) of the main things that people go through on their way towards a suicide attempt - things like hopelessness, feeling like you're a burden - can occur completely privately. In other words, there isn't always going to be a 'We should have seen it coming' because for a lot of people there isn't.

"About 70pc of people who die by suicide talk about it before they do, so when people do talk about it we should take it seriously even if it is incongruent with what we think looks like a totally fine life. Isolation is a good friend of suicide and the opposite of that is also true," he adds. "A community is actually a very potent prevention strategy (against suicide) - so connectedness, togetherness.

"A great way that communities can consider prevention a kind of a bedrock would be: Is there an air of inclusiveness in the community - do people feel that they can talk to each other?"

In the meantime, Castlerahan - like the 27 other communities across the country devastated by murder-suicide since 2000 - must not become synonymous with the tragedy visited upon it, urged Professor O'Neill.

"Suicide is stigmatised, murder-suicide is horrendously stigmatised," she says. "We need to be so careful about how this is discussed and manage that in a way that acknowledges the complexity of it and the fact that it is quite, quite rare.

"We can get negative stigmas around particular communities that have been (affected). I'm thinking of Dunblane in Scotland (where 16 school children and their teacher were killed in a murder-suicide in 1996).

"Even to hear Dunblane portrayed in a positive light is quite unusual and challenging, so those associations that we have with these events and particular communities can be damaging and destructive. But communities can pull through that, it just requires a bit of structure."

For now, books of condolence, memorials and even tweets may go some way towards helping loved ones and strangers alike process the unprocessable loss of the lives of Clodagh, Liam, Ryan and Niall, as well the man who took them.

"Anything that gives people the opportunity of being able to say how they feel, whether it be on social media, whether it's talking to a friend, is hugely important," believes consultant psychologist Owen Connolly of Connolly Counselling Centre.

"I think the big thing we need to be getting across to everybody is please, please if something is eating you (up), talk to somebody - don't keep it inside.

"Pretending it didn't happen, not expressing your real concern about the situation, doesn't allow you to give comfort as well," he continues. "What the community needs is to feel comforted and also the community needs to feel that the nation is with them - that whatever happens to any one of them, happens to all of us."
The sight of so many schoolchildren around this country town once more - "with satchel and shining morning face, creeping like a snail unwillingly to school" reminds us that those schooldays really aren't that easy. (Stock)

The sight of so many schoolchildren around this country town once more - "with satchel and shining morning face, creeping like a snail unwillingly to school" reminds us that those schooldays really aren't that easy.

Speaking of young ones, nine-year-old Ellie held her fourth annual cake sale for charity recently. While a wonderful achievement, such tasty treats are unimaginable for some of Ellie's counterparts - who silversmith Eva Lynch is trying to raise funds for next weekend.

Eva's 'A River Walk for Varanasi' along the beautiful 12km stretch of river from Inistoige to Thomastown seems appropriate, given that the northern Indian city - which Mark Twain described as "older than history, older than tradition, older than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together" - is where Hindu pilgrims flock to bathe in the River Ganges' sacred waters, and to perform funeral rites.

Hindus believe that dying in Varanasi releases you from the cycle of birth and death. Making it all the more poignant that so many poor children there perish because of malnutrition.

This latest in a long line of efforts by Eva to help these most vulnerable of Varanasi is the result of her "life-changing" encounter with Paddy McMahon - a former nurse who quit his UK job because he "felt he was not making the most of his skills, just gathering money for stuff he didn't need," as Eva puts it.

Eva, at the time visiting Varanasi, had heard about Paddy and intended contacting him through social media - until serendipity got there first.

Her usual cafe wasn't open one rainy morning, so Eva "hurried along to the next place and sat at the only available chair at a table opposite a scruffy looking western guy. He said something like 'woeful day out there!' in a broad Cork accent. We chatted for a bit - and lo and behold, it was Paddy!"

Eva joined Paddy the following day at one of the mobile medical units that he runs "out in the sticks" which provides cheap check-ups for the locals and draws malnourished children to them.

"We watched this woman carry in the tiniest little child in her arms, who I thought was a newborn," Eva recalls, "but in fact she was two years old. It was horrifying: she was in so much pain there weren't even tears, just grief etched on her tiny face. It was so disturbing and so, so sad".

"That evening I posted an appeal on Facebook, offering an earring sale: 20 for a pair of earrings = one child's life saved.

"The response was brilliant - 130 pairs, I think it was. Which I then had to make," she laughs. Eva and her fiance, John, have since volunteered with Paddy many times.

After more than a decade of devotion, the passionate Irishman now needs to come home. He is seeking corporate funding to keep the Varanasi Children's Hospital going.

So any companies out there are most welcome to walk this way next Saturday.
To be clear from the outset, I did not visit the JoBurger restaurant in Rathmines on this occasion, but ordered from it via Deliveroo. The scoring for food and value is based on my experience of the food as delivered, and the score for ambience is a 10 because I ate at home with my family and the chat and company were both excellent. (I have visited the three JoBurger restaurants on numerous occasions and they too are convivial places.)

For those living outside Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway and Belfast, where the service operates, a quick explanation. Deliveroo is an online and app-based food delivery service, to which over 200 Irish restaurants have signed up. The company has created over 400 jobs in Ireland and is successful - although its employment practices, which involve its riders working on a per-delivery commission-only basis with no hourly wage, are controversial.

In essence, Deliveroo takes on the delivery function for restaurants, so that the number of eating establishments from which it is now possible to order has increased exponentially. In my area of Dublin, at the time of writing, there are 69 restaurants ready, willing and able to send over my lunch within the next hour.

In logistical terms, it works like this: the customer places an order with Deliveroo, this is communicated to the restaurant, the restaurant accepts the order and Deliveroo advises the customer when the order will arrive. The restaurant lets Deliveroo know when the food will be ready for collection and Deliveroo assigns the job of collection and delivery to one of its riders. Any delays to the advised delivery time are communicated by text to the customer.

This all sounds relatively straightforward, and indeed it is, although I have had less satisfactory experiences with Deliveroo in the past, when weather and traffic have caused delays in the delivery time, the packaging has leaked and the food that has arrived has suffered as a result. Last night, though, the Deliveroo service worked perfectly, the packaging was the best we'd seen - robust and stylish - and the food that arrived was hot. As good as if we had eaten in the restaurant? Well, perhaps not quite, but not far off.

Joe Macken's JoBurger is one of the longest-established players in the crowded Dublin burger scene and it's a testament to how well it does what it does that it continues to thrive.

The way that the menu is configured, there are a dozen or more different types of burger on offer and each of these can be ordered in either 28-day-aged Charolais beef, Lough Erne lamb, char-grilled chicken, fish or one of two different vegetarian forms. And you can choose whether you want your burger served on a Breton bun, in a tortilla wrap or nude with extra leaves.

Having written that, I'm embarrassed to say that each of the four of us ordered a beef burger on a bun and two of those were the same, which means that I need to go back to reviewing school - the only excuse that I can offer is that I let a family member take charge of the order in an attempt to limit my controlling tendencies, and that was clearly a mistake. (By way of mitigation, I have eaten the lamb and fish versions before and they have been just as good as the beef.)

Anyway, the burgers are enormous - the kind that it's hard to get your hands around, let alone your mouth - flavoursome and juicy, and they ooze generously with whatever toppings you've chosen.

The Moroka comes with bacon, brie and a tomatoey relish, while the Dobson has maasdam cheese, rocket and relish. My Molestane featured a terrific spicy peanut, chilli and coriander sauce that had more than a decent kick to it. We liked both the bush and sweet potato fries (the latter count as a health food now, right?) and the beer-battered onion rings, but the ruby coleslaw was too sweet, as were the house-made pickles.

The broccoli salad that we put on the order as an experiment underwhelmed - it was monotone, lacking crunch or texture, and badly in need of some citrus or vinegar to perk it up.

The next time I order from JoBurger, I'll stick to the burgers and try to remember that one portion of fries between two is enough. Our bill for four on this occasion came to 93.30 including the 2.50 delivery charge and a 5 tip for the rider. We ordered way too much food; it would be possible, and indeed prudent, to spend less.

The rating

7/10 food

10/10 ambience

9/10 value for money

26/30

ON A BUDGET

At lunchtime during the week, a Pure burger with either fries or lemonade is 10 eaten on the premises. Delivered by Deliveroo, two Pure burgers with a shared portion of fries will cost 25.30 plus a tip for the rider.

ON A BLOW-OUT

Ikqezi burgers (with caramelised chilli banana, bacon and goats cheese) and sweet potato fries for two, with pickles and a shared order of coleslaw, would come to 44.40, including the

2.50 Deliveroo delivery charge, but excluding a tip.

THE HIGH POINT

Simply excellent burgers.

THE LOW POINT

The broccoli salad.

Whispers from the gastronomicon

On Wednesday, September 28, Rob Krawczyk is putting on a special Tuscan menu at Tankardstown House near Slane, Co Meath. Each of the five courses will be matched with different wines from the family owned Castello Banfi winery, voted best winery in Italy 11 times since 1994. Their flagship wine  the 2010 Brunello de Montalcino, awarded 92 points by Robert Parker and Wine Spectator  will feature. Dinner including wines is 65 per person with packages available for those who wish to stay over. Bookings: 041 9824621
Tempt the summer to linger just a little longer by stocking some cool Loire wines. Here is a selection of one of the most famous expressions of Sauvignon Blanc - Pouilly-Fume. Grown in vineyards near the town of Pouilly on the banks of the River Loire, the soils, embedded with marine fossils were once the floor of an ancient sea.

Also featured among our favourites is the unpretentious and pretty fruity pale pink, Rose d'Anjou. Made from the local Grolleau black grape near the town of Anjou, Rose d'Anjou/ Anjou Rose enjoyed a peak of popularity in the 1980s. Chill and chill.

1) Pouilly-Fume 2011, Pascal Jolivet, 12.5pc

This has a classic and intense smoky gun-flint bouquet. Exceptional complexity and at peak of perfection with the salty and flinty oyster shell minerality infused with the lemony acidity. For a wine like this, it comes in at exceptional value. Marry with a mature and piquant Corleggy goat's cheese.

14.99 online at winesoftheworld.ie

2) Pouilly-Fume 2014, Guy Saget, 12.5pc

Typical flinty aromas from the marine-rich soil. The flavours slowly evolve on the palate - pour into a chilled decanter to highlight the elegant and salted lemon character. Reunite with oysters.

18.99 at SuperValu nationwide

3) Pouilly-Fume 2014, Jean Pabiot, Domaine des Fines Caillottes, 12.5pc

The palate delivers green apple, lemon peel and a mineral salty finish. Serve with a baked Gortnamona round of goat's cheese to dunk with raw carrot and celery.

21-23.95 at Shannon Knights, Shannon; Ardkeen Stores, Waterford and No21 Off-licences Group Waterford, Carrick-on-Suir, Midleton, Charleville, Blarney, Ballincollig and Coburg Street, Cork. Also, The Little Green Grocer, Kilkenny, and in Dublin at Corkscrew and Baggot Street Wines.

4) Lamarte Rose d'Anjou 2014, Ackerman, 10.5pc

Palest pink and medium dry with crunchy crisp red berry fruity flavours softened with a little icing sugar sweetness. Excellent partner to contrast with a salty hard cheese or chilli-hot Asian seafood.

9.99 online at winesoftheworld.ie

Value buy

Ros Apple & Rhubarb Cider, Limited Edition 2016, Stonewell, Co Cork 5.5pc

Delicately scented with fresh rhubarb. Medium dry and delicious with the ultra-refreshing rhubarb lifting acidity to new heights.

3.20/330ml in Dublin: at Gibney's Malahide and Cheers at the Laurels, Perrystown. 1601, Kinsale; Pat Sheahan, Killarney; No. 21, Listowel and The Wine Centre, Kilkenny.

Tasting notes

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Ireland's first Sherry Festival is taking place every Friday in September, hosted by Spanish restaurant Cava Bodega, on Middle Street, in Galway. The 'Sherry Fiesta' will include special dishes with sherry pairings to sample, as well as a series of four sherry masterclasses by various experts: Cava Bodega owner and Michelin-starred chef JP McMahon (pictured); Elizabeth Fox, wine lecturer at GMIT; and Paddy Murphy, the certified sherry educator behind The Vine Inspiration blog. Tickets are 45 per masterclass, and include a copy of JP McMahon's cookbook Tapas: A Taste of Spain in Ireland. Each masterclass is limited to 25 people and reservations are essential. See cavarestaurant.ie
Back to school isn't just for the children, and this is the time of year when we all feel the need to learn about something new.

The 2016 autumn series at the Fumbally Stables is a programme of educational workshops, talks, and events running from mid-September until mid-November. The focus is on food and health, community and sustainability, and the series aims to convey the power that food has as a connector.

The event that caught my eye is a dinner by Takashi Miyazaki and Katie Sanderson on November 12 entitled 'Ichi-go Ichi-e' - "one time, one meeting". The prospect of a collaboration between two of Ireland's most exciting chefs - Miyazaki serves truly authentic Japanese food in the country at his tiny restaurant in Cork City, and Sanderson (pictured) is the woman behind the Dillisk pop-up in Connemara that ran during the summers of 2014 and 2015 - is tantalising. Tickets for the six-course dinner showcasing both Japanese and Irish influences will go quickly, even at 110 per head.

Other events in the series are less expensive, and some are free (although all are ticketed), and there's another chance to sample Sanderson's food at a Zuka Yoga Brunch with Eithne Kennedy on October 22.

Shane Murphy is hosting a tasting of raw and wild wines on September 22, and over the subsequent weeks there will be opportunities to learn about urban composting, fermentation, and seaweed foraging.

Coffee nerds will not want to miss a chance to spend the day with one of the world's most innovative coffee roasters: Denmark's The Coffee Collective, on October 16.

There's an introduction to bee-keeping with Sinead Finn on October 18, and also workshops on seed saving on November 5.

Domini Kemp and Patricia Daly will talk on food and cancer on October 19, and Shane Palmer, a baker who has worked in San Francisco for the past two years, is teaching a sourdough workshop on September 27 and again on October 25.

There's a 'blend your own bitters' workshop with Jarrod Cuffe on November 2 - not just for mixologists, say the organisers - and a workshop on mental health in the hospitality industry by Yvonne Scanlon and Colin Harmon on November 9 that will be of interest to those steeling themselves for the challenging run up to Christmas.

The full programme is online at thefumballystables.ie

Bites..

Lunar lunch

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The Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival runs from September 11 to 18, and is when families give thanks for the harvest by lighting coloured lanterns, sharing traditional mooncakes, and admiring the full moon - a symbol of family reunion. For event info email midautumn@asiamarket.ie

Harvest brews

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A full harvest moon is set to rise on Friday, September 16. A special Harvest evening at Hook Lighthouse will feature a barbecue and the Arthurstown Brewing Company's Hook beers made from locally-harvested hops. Tickets for the moonlight experience are available from hookheritage.ie

Catered to you

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Linda Reid's Sandycove Kitchen is a new cookery school set up by the Ballymaloe graduate in her own rather lovely, state-of-the-art kitchen. Demonstrations, supper club evenings and corporate team building events are all - ahem - catered for, with classes on everything from Italian food to burgers. sandycovekitchen@gmail.com
Add personality with large typography and look to suitable wall sconces for a change from the desk lamp; cuckooland.com

If, up until now, the kitchen table has been the main homework hub in the house, a space dedicated to study may well be on your to-do list as school season returns. The aim is to eliminate any distractions and create a stylish space that will inspire your student instead of fill them with dread. While it may seem like a challenge in a busy and bustling household, this is where clever design comes into play.

The good news is that you don't need a fully-designated room for a successful homework space. You can repurpose a nook or an alcove, add a mezzanine platform or customise a bed with a built-in desk to one side. However, if you are introducing a study space to a living room or kitchen nook, then it's essential to set the space apart and install enough storage so that books and stationery can be left there.

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"You need to give the space importance and define this zone within whichever room you're using," says Louis Weyhe Funder of interior design firm and store, Nordic Makers. "The most important thing is to treat it as a genuine functional space and not just as a second-rate space within your home - especially if a separate room is not an option," he says.

Arlene McIntyre of Dublin-based Ventura Design suggests an ideal spot: "If you don't have an entire room available, consider the space under the stairs as a great alternative. Pick multifunctional pieces - desks can eat up space, so opting for a built-in solution can be a simple way of creating the surface space you need in the most minimal way possible."

A retractable desk, that's smart in size, can sit comfortably in a bedroom, a family room or other shared spaces.

However, this emphasis on function doesn't mean looks are thrown out the window; there are ample ways for school-goers to express their style through fun decor. Personality-packed desk accessories and stationery are really having a moment.

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Online stores like Hippenings.com and stylish stationers, Dusty Boy Designs, as well as nationwide stores Tiger and Penneys are clearly leaving their stamp on the market and allowing students to revamp as tastes' change.

Don't forget about colour; it can play a large part when it comes to motivation, so introducing it through the furniture and accessories that your teens love to work with, is essential.

"Low wavelength colours like soft greens and blues improve efficiency, focus and an overall feeling of happiness," advises Arlene. "Also, I love the freshness of yellow and the bigger bonus is it triggers innovation, energy and optimism."

Anna Shelswell-White is editor of House and Home interiors magazine

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In 1807, an elegant stranger appeared at the Escorial, the vast palace outside Madrid that was home to the Spanish royal family. He claimed to be a wealthy 'man of sciences' who was looking for the restoration of an ancestral title. While out taking her daily constitutional, Queen Maria Luisa noticed this dashing young man driving past in his gilded carriage.

The queen had a fondness for handsome men. She was already cheating on her husband King Charles IV with his prime minister, Manuel Godoy.

And it wasn't long before she had welcomed the newcomer into her boudoir. What the queen didn't realise was that her new lover was not a wealthy French aristocrat but James Florence Bourke, an Irish spy working for the British government.

"I was acquainted with the character of women in general, but particularly with hers," he boasted in a report to his London spymaster.

"Consequently I was honoured with her personal society in the most private manner."

Bourke's mission was to force the highly dysfunctional Spanish royal family and its government to ally with the British interest. He had already discovered from the French ambassador at the court that Napoleon was about to invade Spain. Within days of seducing the queen, Bourke realised that the real power at court was Godoy and set about trying to gain his confidence.

Once he was alone with Godoy, he produced a note from a secret compartment in his snuff box which confirmed the French invasion. However, Godoy was a vain, corrupt man and refused to take the note. Bourke, revealing his true identity, threatened him with a pistol and "told him with some vehemence" that it would be in his interests to read it.

The threat did the trick. Godoy persuaded his lover the queen, and her cuckolded husband, that it would be in their interests to work with the British.

"From that moment I directed all the operations of the court," Bourke wrote. "I was presented to the queen and king as the savior of the crown."

But just who was this 18th- century superspy? Born in Lorient in Brittany, France, on May 5, 1771, James Bourke was the son of Richard Bourke, a Jacobite refugee from Lacken in Co Mayo who had served in one of the French army's Irish regiments.

James and his brother Jean-Raymond-Charles Bourke also joined the French army.

While Jean-Raymond-Charles rose through the ranks to become a general under Napoleon - the name Bourke is inscribed on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in recognition of his victories - James's career in the French army was over in 1793 when his regiment was captured by the British.

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Realising they had a valuable asset on their hands, the British turned Bourke into one of their agents. Bourke became adept at his trade. He had a natural facility for languages and employed many different personas to elicit information.

On various occasions he passed himself off as a French philosophe, a Prussian officer and a sailor from Trieste.

He enjoyed employing many of the methods that have become familiar thanks to the modern spy thriller. He used lemon juice to write invisible letters, made use of false compartments and was adept at concealing weapons. Much like a certain Ian Fleming character with the same initials, his powers of seduction were his most powerful weapon.

He used them to good effect when the British sent him to South America to report on conditions in Buenos Aires. Before travelling to the city, he stopped off at Rio de Janeiro where the Portuguese royal family was living in exile. Having already seduced her mother Queen Maria Luisa, Bourke turned his attentions to Princess Carlota, the Spanish-born wife of the Portuguese prince regent who had ambitions to rule over her own South American empire.

But she had a rival, Ana O'Gorman, the beautiful French wife of one of Bourke's old acquaintances, Thomas O'Gorman, a merchant from Ennis who was based in Buenos Aires.

Ana was a beautiful woman who provoked scorn and jealousy in equal measure because of her scandalous affairs. Revolutionaries, diplomats, soldiers and spies mixed at glamorous parties. In 1805, she became acquainted with James Bourke. They soon became lovers.

It is possible that Bourke persuaded Ana to work for the British government, which was desperate to wrest control of South America's lucrative markets from the Spanish in order to open them to British-manufactured goods.

Four years later, Ana O'Gorman was the mistress of Santiago de Liniers, the viceroy of Buenos Aires. Liniers had become a hero in 1807 for thwarting two British invasions of the city. His rivals suggested that Ana exerted political influence over Liniers. It is indeed possible that Bourke had recruited Ana O'Gorman as a British spy.

In Rio, Princess Carlota was fiercely jealous of Ana's influence and power. Bourke attempted to reassure her. "I acquainted with what I knew of said woman and that I would endeavour to remove her," he wrote.

When Bourke arrived in Buenos Aires, he accused Liniers, a Frenchman, of working for Napoleon, and made insinuations about Ana.

Liniers was furious and ordered Bourke out of Buenos Aires.

Eventually Liniers, who was coming under pressure from both conservatives and liberals, gave way to a Spanish-appointed viceroy, but not before deporting his mistress to Brazil.

Neither were Princess Carlota's ambitions achieved. In May 1810, the last Spanish viceroy was swept away and the path became clear for those seeking to achieve an independent Argentinian republic.

Bourke retired in 1826, but as is often the case for those engaged in undercover work, his efforts went largely unrewarded and unrecognised.

He died in Lorient, France, in 1841.

Tim Fanning's book 'Paisanos: The Forgotten Irish who Changed the Face of Latin America' is published by Gill, at 24.99.
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We were never ready to go back to school when I was a child. Back then, it always seemed to fall on the morning after the All-Ireland hurling final, after a black and amber retinue of near and distant relations landed on our doorstep in Clondalkin, looking for a bed for the night, with only a scattering of tickets between them. The children were assigned sleeping bags on the floor in the big room. The first day back at school for culchie kids was a blur, especially if Kilkenny won, which they usually did.

Fifteen years ago, my mother packed her bags and returned to the banks of the Suir that flows down by Mooncoin. She still scrounges for match tickets and can't understand why working in media doesn't give me a licence to print them. On Monday, she'd some business in Dublin and while she was on the train, I was queuing to buy school shoes for her grandson. My phone pinged with a message from The Anton Savage Show: Henry Shefflin was in studio with the Liam McCarthy Cup and was happy to pose for pictures. A photo of her grandson with King Henry would please my mother greatly, but if I abandoned the queue, the child would be going to back to school barefoot. So I stayed and shelled out 70 for a pair with tractor-tyre soles.

No matter what radio station I turned on in the car, parents were giving out about back-to-school costs. The price of shoes is no small thing. In 1982, Kilkenny won the All-Ireland and the Fine Gael-Labour government collapsed after John Bruton tried to impose VAT on children's shoes. I was discussing this with my mother as I drove her to back to Heuston on Tuesday. Blueshirts, she hissed. And they'd the nerve to say that women with small feet could abuse the system. She waved her travel pass at me - at least Charlie got me this. And off she went.

When I'm driving around with my son and the radio on, the only news blackout I impose is when something horrible happens to children. I hear it coming and turn off before he hears it. How do you explain what befell Clodagh Hawe and her children in Cavan this week? You don't. You can't. It doesn't bear thinking about.

It's easier to talk about shoes and the Apple tax. If a child's shoe can bring down a government, it should be a doddle for a 13bn tax rebate. On The Last Word, Matt Cooper was in pugilistic form and Junior Minister Eoghan Murphy was floundering on the ropes. Why don't you take the money and run? It's not that simple, came the reply. By Wednesday it had become a refrain. It's not our money to take, the ruling is a commercially sensitive document far too complex for ordinary people to understand, we would scare foreign investors and lose thousands of jobs. It had a familiar ring. Paddy's at the bar without an arse in his trousers, buying drink for all and sundry.

Still, hasn't it always been thus: one tax for the rich and plenty more for the rest of us. There's nothing that can't be and hasn't been taxed: hats, salt, windows, dogs, televisions, ink, tampons. The Tudors taxed beards, making them the accessory du jour in 16th-century England: the more extravagant the growth the wealthier the owner. Peter the Great did the same thing in Russia, dispatching beard police to check that hairy men had on their person a bronze coin to show their bristly smigs were tax compliant. To this day, the Hungarians tax soap, and in case you've ever wondered why there are more hipsters in Oregon than in Arkansas - the latter imposes a 6pc tax on all body piercings, tattoos and hair removal. There could be something in that, a levy on preening - the Vanity Tax. Michael Noonan could eradicate hipsters and the much-loathed USC in a single stroke.

His lepping to the defence of Apple's taxation position (not a "deal" - we don't do "deals") wasn't going down well at all, at all, with the Independents at the cabinet table. They'd have to be seen to do a lot of harrumphing before getting into line. That said, Shane Ross must have been relieved to have something other than Rio to think about. At the height of the Apple tax furore, Pat Hickey was released from Bangu jail with a considerably smaller kerfuffle than when he entered it. In Thursday's papers, he looked healthy and composed, with his head unshaved, which must have been disappointing for the newspaper snappers lying in wait.

The 70 shoes, meanwhile, are proving most unsatisfactory. By Thursday evening, my young lad is rightly crippled. All week I'd been promising a popcorn session on the sofa watching Willy Wonka. He tells me his granny will be dead in 12 years if she lives to be as old as Gene Wilder. I tell him Kilkenny women live to be 100, and he works out that she has 29 years to go. I'm glad he's learning something at school, and that he's not good enough at sums to become an accountant or a banker. I rub his feet and we talk about who's a good egg and who's a bad egg. He roars laughing when Veruca Salt is sucked down the rubbish chute. Fare thee well and thank you, Gene Wilder, for teaching my son all he needs to know about greed.

Aingeala Flannery, producer of Neil Delamere's 'Sunday Best' on Today FM
Aside from a one-off return following the death of Ryan Tubridy's father, Pat Kenny presented his last Late, Late Show in May 2009, ten years after taking over from Gay Byrne on the iconic Friday night programme.

He'd presented Kenny Live on Saturday nights for even longer before that, and was a stalwart on Today Tonight from the mid 1980s, and most viewers surely agreed that a change was due; it was time for him to step aside and let younger upcoming broadcasters have their place in the sun.

Seven years on from that decision, there's just one question: Where are they? What happened to all the bright young things who were supposed to leap into the gap left by the departing Kenny?

To say that they've been notable by their absence is putting it mildly. Ryan Tubridy has an engaging, if sometimes awkward persona, and he's proved solid and dependable on the Late, Late Show; he's certainly more comfortable with showbiz fluff than Kenny ever was. But it hasn't exactly been an exciting era.

Ray D'Arcy, who's now roughly the same age as Kenny when he took over from Gay Byrne, was brought back to RTE from Today FM with a great fanfare, but his Saturday night show turned out not to be worth waiting for either; it was roundly mocked by critics and public alike, many of whom tuned in purely to see what new disasters might await each week. The infamous night of the Jack Nicholson lookalike was car crash TV at its most mortifying.

As for TV3 and UTV, neither of those networks has managed to bring through new broadcasters with the stature of their long-standing predecessors on Irish TV.

So it's less than surprising to hear from the launch of TV3's autumn schedule at Dublin's National Concert Hall last week that Pat Kenny will soon be back on screen, beginning a new, so far unnamed series on Wednesday evenings alongside Colette Fitzpatrick.

Unsurprising, and welcome. Today Tonight showcased Kenny's facility for hard hitting current affairs right from the start, and he returned to that role on RTE's The Frontline after his time at the Late, Late came to an end, complementing his daily radio show; but since leaving RTE for Newstalk in 2013, he has been strikingly underused.

There was a short-lived series called Pat Kenny In The Round on UTV Ireland, and he handled TV3's election debates with no-nonsense authority; but his appearances on television have been intermittent, which is a shame, considering that he's not only an exemplary broadcaster, but has arguably become a much better one in recent years.

The switch from RTE to Newstalk was risky. There was a job for life for the veteran presenter in Donnybrook. He could easily have seen out the remainder of his career there as one of the station's highest-paid and respected names.

Instead he took a leap into the dark, at a time when most people in his position, having recently turned 60 and with nothing left to prove, would be content to rest on their reputations. The move came with a big marketing budget for the new show, but it could all have gone horribly wrong very quickly. Instead, it prodded him into upping his game.

Newstalk doesn't have the vast teams of researchers which throng RTE, so the presenter has to rely more on instinct, wit and natural intelligence. Kenny proved to have those in spades. He was more relaxed. He was funnier. He seemed to relish both the change and the challenge.

He hasn't managed to catch up on those listenership figures for Today With Sean O'Rourke, who replaced him in the same time slot, which must have been disappointing; but that has simply proved the inbuilt advantage which RTE has over its rivals.

Quality seems to matter less than familiarity. Irish radio audiences are innately conservative. They don't like altering their habits, especially older listeners on whom the Joint National Listenership Research figures consistently show that RTE relies.

Nonetheless, he has built The Pat Kenny Show into an essential part of the Newstalk schedule, its importance confirmed by the earlier starting time and longer running length in the new schedule.

Obviously, he's not without his weaknesses or foibles. He can be a bit of a show off, especially when it comes to talking about science, and his occasional over-scrupulousness was roundly sent up on The Savage Eye. Sometimes satire gets so close to the truth that it hurts, though Pat can at least console himself that his comic alter ego is a much less vicious creation than that of Joe Duffy on the same show.

Despite all that, it's hard not to think that Pat Kenny deserves an apology from all those who have been so scathing about him down the years, this writer included. Oops. He had the misfortune that his time overlapped with one of the most brilliant, iconic broadcasters of the modern era, not only in Ireland, but anywhere. Nobody could have replaced Gay Byrne. He made it look so easy. Any successor was a lamb to the slaughter.

Pat Kenny faced that firing squad and just got on with it. Over time, he proved his worth, and is now having the last laugh over those younger, inferior rivals. It's an admirable trait to still have that hunger after more than 40 years in the business.

That's probably the most impressive thing about his return to television. His deal with TV3 is worth a reputed 500,000 over three years; he'd have been mad to turn it down. But one does still sense from him that a far bigger motivation than money is knowing that he can still do this better than the rest. He wants the big stories, the landmark interviews; if anyone is going to fire the hard questions, he still wants it to be him.

"There just isn't anyone like him on Irish TV," said a TV3 source last week.

That's his legacy.

But what an indictment of the younger generation of radio and TV broadcasters that none of them has yet risen to the standard set by the generation which preceded them.
If your child started school this week, you'll have approached that classroom with more trepidation than they did. You know, after all, that our large classes are a huge challenge for a single teacher. You know that your "big" boy or girl is really just a baby. Then imagine how you'd have felt if your child had special needs.

Luckily, as Richard Bruton announced earlier this year, every child with special needs will have access to a Special Needs Assistant (SNA) this year. This is lucky for those kids and your typical kids, who also benefit from another adult in the room. Not that, officially, SNAs help the other kids. Hell, SNAs aren't even, officially, supposed to be doing half the stuff they do for the kids with special needs. That's the truth.

"You'd have to love this job to do it," an SNA said to me last week. "The people who do it - mostly women, mostly mothers - fit a particular profile, and we don't just like our jobs, we love them.

"But you just get punched every now and then to remind you not to get above your station. You are a second-class citizen. I'm not a person with a chip on my shoulder. I'm lucky; I love my job. But the way SNAs are treated, it's just mean. And parents don't have a clue."

In your child's class this week, you might well have seen an SNA welcoming children to the classroom, helping to prise them from parents, wiping the children's tears.

Not just for the child with special needs, but the typical kids too. Not that the SNAs should, officially, have been doing any of it. That's not their job description. But then, when it comes to the SNAs' job description, most of us "don't have a clue."

And not just the parents of typical kids, either, but also of the kids with special needs.

Last week, an SNA contacted the Sunday Independent with a notice that had been distributed to all of the SNAs in her school as the new term began. It was a 2014 document from the National Council of Special Education (NCSE) reminding them of what they can and cannot do.

One section listed the "care needs" that fall into their remit, for example, medical needs, mobility needs, Assistive Technology set-up that the teacher may not have time for, and preventing dangerous behaviour to the child themselves or others.

The second section listed "examples of need that may be referred to in professional reports but are not consistent with DES (Department of Education and Skills) circulars."

In other words, "you do this stuff, but that's your look out". This list itemised things like keeping the child on task, helping communication with their peers, assisting with reading and writing, helping to keep the child organised.

You know, you know you know, that SNAs do all of those things. And more. And not just for the children with special needs, as one SNA told me last week, but for kids with non-diagnosed scattiness, or emotional issues, or shyness. Or just immature childishness. Apparently a lot of kids have that.

But SNAs do it above and beyond for the kids to whom they are assigned, the kids with the disabilities. They keep them in mainstream schools not just by making sure they can stay in the yard (thus meaning the teacher doesn't have to bolt after them), or putting any toileting items in place (so the teacher doesn't have to leave the class to do it), or making sure they don't do something awful with a scissors (because, to be fair, the teacher has 28 or more other kids brandishing scissors to watch, too).

They keep them in mainstream school by working on things other than "care needs". We all know this happens. The DES has to know that this happens. But to acknowledge or condone it is to say that SNAs are sort-of teachers. And if they are sort-of, then they have to be trained as such. Then they have to be paid as such.

Why would we walk ourselves into that, when we're currently getting above and beyond out of them anyway?

The SNA who contacted the Sunday Independent last week knows, after many years working as an SNA, what the job description is, officially. But she also knows what she does every day. And to be reminded of the difference between the two feels like a slap in the face.

My daughter has Down Syndrome. There is an SNA in her class and she has wonderful access to her. I couldn't walk away from her every day if I didn't see the SNA there; but to explore how much an SNA does for her is to walk in to a minefield. You could get a person in trouble that way.

And "in trouble" was how the SNA I spoke to last week felt after she received the reminder of her job description.

"We're all willing to do the work," she said. "We're not meant to do teachers' work, but we all help out in all kinds of ways. All of us do; sticking spellings in to copy books, making sure homework is collected. The items in the list that we're not supposed to do, sure I've spent more than a decade tapping on tables, keeping children on task. That's seen as a nothing? I've spent my life doing that."

"We're not militant people," she went on. "We could be. We could down tools and not do all the extra stuff we do and see how they managed; but we won't. I've never met an SNA who wasn't devoted their job, but there's a very warped thinking about it and it comes from the top. It's all about money and not about caring for children.

"If I was a principal, and I read this from the NCSE, I would want to write to them and say that the criteria is a lie, and it's fake. We do so much more that is not acknowledged.

"Every parent knows how much we do in the classroom, but they don't know that we're not supposed to," she said.

Last week, I heard of SNAs helping subbing teachers keep charge of 30+ newly-arrived Junior Infants whose teacher was out sick. I heard of SNAs compiling large homework plans for kids to whom they were assigned. I heard about SNAs helping Junior Infants without special needs to relax enough to use the school toilets.

I heard about SNAs opening lunch boxes and finding stationery and hanging up coats of kids who had no special needs beyond that they no longer had their mammy and their teacher was overstretched.

Sure all of our kids have special needs, in their own ways. And, all of the teachers in the too large classes have special needs too. And the SNAs assist them all.

But we pretend it's not happening, and send circulars to warn that it shouldn't be happening, for fear that if we admit it, all will be lost. That they might be lost. And we'd all be lost without them.
On a bathing platform in Turkey, I found myself sunbathing next to a Muslim family. The father strutted about in a pair of teeny red trunks, just visible beneath the landslide of his vast belly. The mother wore a black and orange burkini, which left only her face, hands and feet exposed. She looked like a broiling penguin, clearly suffering in the intense heat.

Their lovely children - two girls and a boy - jumped into the water again and again, as lithe and playful as porpoises.

I gazed at the girls and wondered how long. How long before they had to put away their pretty bikinis and their Caramac tummies, how long before they would never know the bliss of sun and sea on their skin again? I gave them about two years, poor mites. No such loss of freedom or pleasure would trouble their brother.

As the battle of the burkini rages in France, some have claimed that at least this ludicrous garment affords Muslim women the opportunity to go swimming, when they might otherwise be locked away. I find that argument gives me the same sinking feeling as a sign on the gate to a meadow saying, "Dogs must be kept on a lead". What appals is the way that Western women protested outside the French embassy waving a sign saying: "Non Islamophobia. Oui aux burkinis." How dim and deluded can you be? France's objection to the burkini, and its ugly sister the burka, arises from a love of women, not a hatred of Muslims.

On UK's Radio 4's Any Questions, the British Labour MP Cat Smith said: "It is absolutely offensive in the 21st century ... when men with guns start policing what women should and shouldn't wear." Ms Smith was referring to cops on the beach in Nice who had been trying to enforce a ban on the burkini. It genuinely didn't seem to occur to her that the men who are most keenly policing what women should and shouldn't wear in the 21st century are the ones who belong to a repressive, misogynistic culture that denies females agency over their own bodies. That's what I call offensive.

Sorry to break this to you, Cat, but Islamists aren't actually in the 21st century; they've barely made it into the 20th and, unless they're stopped, they fully intend to turn the clock back to the 14th, when girls were for breeding purposes only.

It's much more comfortable for outraged liberals to attack their own culture for trying, however clumsily, to protect its values than it is to address the vexed question of what you do about a fanatical religious minority that despises our freedoms. As one scathing wit put it on Twitter: "This burkini ban is ridiculous. It's 2016 and we live in a liberal, tolerant society. People should be free to enslave whomever they choose."

After a murderous summer in which toddlers were mown down by a truck in Nice and an 85-year-old priest had his throat cut before his own altar, France is setting out what a modern, equal society can and cannot tolerate. It deserves our sympathy. Socialist prime minister Manuel Valls is surely right to call the burkini "a symbol of the enslavement of women". If it isn't, then why aren't Muslim men wearing them, eh?

And I'm afraid the fact that a woman may "choose" to wear a burkini doesn't mean that her "choice" must always be respected. Not if it ends up intimidating other Muslim women into feeling ashamed for exposing their own flesh, making integration even harder. It's not what the burkini is, but the poisonous ideology it represents.

The key question is where does authority lie if too much is conceded to minorities? Consider a small clash of cultures closer to home. At a graduation ceremony for one college in the University of London, proud parents look on as their offspring queue up to receive a handshake from the principal. The audience includes my friend Jackie. It should be a joyful occasion, but there is unease in the room. The female Muslim students put on gloves to shake hands with the principal or they hold out their programmes to signal they do not wish to make physical contact with him.

Many people feel uncomfortable, but no one objects. Jackie says: "You think, how weird is it that a university, of all places, is pandering to a minority instead of saying, 'I'm sorry, but this is how we do things here'. Actually, we don't think it's wrong for a man and a woman to shake hands. We think it's nice and polite, so deal with it."

Is this multiculturalism in action, or is it cowardly pandering to a sexist custom the majority of us find alien? How long before the university decides to dispense with handshakes at its graduation ceremony lest it cause offence to those who won't participate?

Compare and contrast with the German response. In June, Hamburg teachers staged a walk-out during an end-of-term ceremony for students after a Muslim pupil refused to shake the hand of his female class teacher. "No offence," he said, "my religion won't let me do that."

Fellow teachers did take offence, however. They insisted that the boy be sent home. When the headmaster refused, members of staff walked out.

On the surface, this may seem like a minor discourtesy that can easily be overlooked to keep the peace. But where do you draw the line, and, more importantly, who gets to draw it?

Segregated sessions for Muslim women at a public swimming baths look harmless enough, less so a segregated political meeting involving senior British politicians with the women banished to an adjacent room. I admire Nicolas Sarkozy for saying last week that the French republic will never ever accept segregated bathing. He knows it's the thin end of the wedge.

When she was British home secretary, the present Prime Minister Theresa May launched an inquiry into the state of Sharia law to examine whether Islamic courts "are being used to support forced marriage and issue unfair divorces".

Again, it sounds unobjectionable, doesn't it? But why is a parallel legal system, one that weighs a woman's evidence as worth half that of a man, allowed to exist in a democracy in the first place?

Slowly and insidiously, Islamic laws and practices are allowed to take root and it then falls to the host country to challenge them. It ends up making us look intolerant, when what we are guilty of is being too tolerant by half.

We don't need an inquiry into how well or how badly Sharia courts are discriminating against women. We simply need a ban so discrimination isn't even a possibility.

And please spare me the howls of concern for the rights of women to dress as they please when there is zero anger about the rights of women forced into ugly, repressive garments by a bunch of medieval misogynists. Just look at the smiles of those women in Syria the other week who cast off their burkas as soon as Isil had left.

Burkinis? We shall fight them on the beaches. We shall defend our bikinis.

We shall never surrender the rights men and women died for.
'My grandfather had bought the guns and bullets from a renegade IRA man who skipped the country. When the IRA found out, they made a call to Tudor Road looking for their missing ammunition back' Stock photo: Depositphotos

My grandfather had flaming red hair like mine. When he died, aged 53, his hair had gone pure white.

Recently, I was in Skerries, with a cooling breeze moving inshore, when I remembered his story, told to me by my own father before he died.

February 1944. Christopher Egan had come home for his tea. He knew there was something up when there was no noise of his five sons fighting over food to greet him.

They were all locked under the stairs.

"The IRA are here," said my grandmother Cecelia, motioning first towards the stranger at the door and then towards the front room of their home in Tudor Road, Ranelagh, where another fellow was waiting to have a chat with him.

As well as being a senior insurance salesman and trade union representative for the Royal Liver, and part of the Labour party in Rathmines, Christopher was the assistant commanding officer to Herman Good of the Local Defence Force in Portobello Barracks. At a meeting the previous month, the officers had complained that they had neither guns nor bullets.

Through his years of selling insurance around Dublin, my grandfather had met some characters - one particular character, claiming to be in charge of the IRA's large, and illegal, armoury, said he would be willing to let the LDF have a few tonnes of guns and bullets if the price was right. Some days after that conversation, the guns and ammo were dropped off at dawn through the back gate of my grandfather's house in Tudor Road.

And before the sun had come up, the LDF had picked up the top-secret booty and unloaded it in the nearby Portobello Barracks.

My grandfather had bought the guns and bullets from a renegade IRA man who skipped the country. When the IRA found out, they made a call to Tudor Road looking for their missing ammunition back.

Christopher was confronted in the front room and a gun was produced. This wasn't panto. There was no ambiguity about what would happen if he didn't start talking about where the guns were.

Then - there was a loud bang and, with it, a scream came from under the stairs. The five young boys thought their father had been shot dead in cold blood.

But it was the sound of the IRA banging the door behind them as they left, none the wiser about their missing ammo.

A week later, a letter felt heavier than usual on the mat of the house in Tudor Road. It was addressed to Mr Christopher Egan. My father, Peter, brought it in to his dad as he had his breakfast.

A bullet fell out when he opened it. 'The next one won't be posted,' the letter read. Within the hour, the police were in the kitchen.

That night, it was on the front page of one of the evening national newspapers: 'LDF Chief Threatened with Bullet.' The morning papers were full of the same story.

The following day, someone shot at the front window in with a pellet gun. Overnight, a cabin box was erected to the side of the house - which had the railway line, now the Luas, running behind it - and a police officer was posted there. (A police commissioner also lived on Tudor Road. So the police officer was busy watching up and down the road.)

A police protection officer would also accompany my grandfather at a safe distance on his trips around Dublin. The culprits who posted the letter were soon apprehended. The letter was traced backed to a typewriter with certain broken keys. At a specially convened military court, one of them was sentenced to 14 years. The Irish government immediately put Christopher under 24-hour police protection. He was also advised to stop working for his own safety. It wouldn't have been in his own best interests to be calling randomly to houses in Dublin's inner city when there was an alleged IRA threat over his head.

Two months later when things began to heat up, the police suggested it would be in Christopher and his family's best interests if they moved away from Tudor Road for a time.

They moved for six months to Skerries. When they took the train from Dublin to Skerries there were two armed police officers in plain clothes in the seat behind them.

The family would take walks around the strand in Skerries with an armed, plain-clothes policeman behind them pretending to be out for his evening stroll.

And whenever the Egans took a boat out in the harbour on a nice day, an armed officer watched from the shoreline.

By the time they returned to their home in Ranelagh, time and circumstances had taken their toll on Christopher. His mind must have been an impermeable tangle of thoughts and fears.

His physical, and maybe psychological, decline was obvious. He had been aged by stress. His eyes lacked their old steadiness, his voice its assurance. He wasn't the same man. He was thin as a rake (ironically his wife's nickname to her sons was Fat Ma).

I was told a sketchy story that in late 1948 one of the men charged to mind Christopher and his family was shot dead on his motorbike on Holles Street. Christopher Egan never slept properly again after that. What didn't help his sleep was that in the mid-1940s, his second youngest son Paul, then only a baby, died of diphtheria; then seven months later, Paul's big brother Patrick, only two, managed to climb out of his pram despite being strapped in ("he was a tiny tot Houdini", I used to be told growing up) and hit his head on the hard kitchen floor. Patrick was taken to Clonskeagh Fever Hospital where he died in his daddy's arms. I remember my own father tell me that he had never seen his dad cry before.

On Sunday morning, August 17, 1952, after attending nine o'clock mass in the church in Beechwood Avenue, Christopher Egan died in his sleep in the upstairs bedroom. With his red hair by then the colour of a sheet, he was in his early 50s but looked closer to 70. He was finally out of the way of bullets, posted or otherwise.

Soon after, they took down the police box outside the house on Tudor Road. I pass by the house on the Luas sometimes and think of what went on behind those walls over 70 years ago.
Poldark will do battle with Victoria when the much-loved BBC series returns on Sunday night.

The Cornish-set drama starring Aidan Turner and Eleanor Tomlinson returns for its second series on BBC One, while a third series is also in the works.

The ratings-winning finale of the first series last year saw Poldark arrested for murder and plundering a shipwreck and his wife Demelza left alone on the Cornish cliff-top.

In the new series Ross faces capital crimes while he and Demelza are still dealing with the death of their daughter, Julia.

Irish actor Turner has won legions of fans with his brooding role as Ross, and his topless scything has become one of the drama's most famous moments.

Victoria, with Jenna Coleman in the lead, beat the opposition when it made its debut on ITV last weekend.

Former Doctor Who star Coleman stars as the young monarch in the period drama, inheriting the throne at the age of 18.

The drama, which also stars Rufus Sewell as prime minister Lord Melbourne and will later feature Tom Hughes as Prince Albert, attracted 5.7 million viewers and 6.1 million at its peak on its debut episode.

Both shows are made by the same producer, Mammoth Screen.

:: Poldark (BBC One) and Victoria (ITV) are both broadcast at 9pm.
The church of St Mary Magdalene and St Lawrence, the venue for the funeral for Peaches Geldof, is seen in Davington, southeast England April 21, 2014. Geldof was found dead at her home on April 7, 2014. REUTERS/Neil Hall (BRITAIN - Tags: OBITUARY RELIGION)

Bob Geldof's eldest daughter has tied the knot in the same church where sister Peaches and mother Paula Yates are buried.

The 33-year-old married her long-term boyfriend, sculptor Andrew Robertson near their family home on Saturday.

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In a touching tribute to her mother and sister, the ceremony took place at the St Mary Magdalene and St Lawrence, with Peaches and Paula buried in the graveyard outside.

Peaches' widower Thomas Cohen was photographed arriving to the Kent church with their two sons, Astala (three) and Phaedra (four), alongside Fifi's other sister, model Pixie (25).

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PR girl Fifi has enjoyed a life away from the spotlight and went to great lengths to ensure that all details of the wedding remained private.

Guests arriving at the church had to hand over their phones and cameras to security guards before entering the venue.

Expand Close Bob Geldof and (from left to right) his sister Lynn and daughter Peaches; his partner Jeanne Marine; and his daughters Tiger Lily and Fifi Trixibelle, look on as the coffin of Geldofs father, Bob Geldof Snr, arrives at St Joseph's Church, Glasthule. Photo: Frank McGrath / Facebook

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Whatsapp Bob Geldof and (from left to right) his sister Lynn and daughter Peaches; his partner Jeanne Marine; and his daughters Tiger Lily and Fifi Trixibelle, look on as the coffin of Geldofs father, Bob Geldof Snr, arrives at St Joseph's Church, Glasthule. Photo: Frank McGrath

The Mail on Sunday reported that the bride wore a Jasper Conran gown and her dog Lola was also in attendance, decked out in a customised collar, decorated with flowers and pearls.

In January Fifi posted pictures of floral dog collars on Instagram and wrote: Finding some inspiration for Lolas ring bearer outfit.

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Earlier this year Geldof's first-born revealed that she couldn't disclose any information about the big day but did say that the couple had paid a special licence fee of 250 from the local council to ensure that the wedding wouldn't be announced in advance, as is normally custom.

The event marked a happy time for the family to come together in the church after Peaches' funeral took place there in 2014, after she died of a drug overdose. Her mother Paula was also laid to rest there after dying from a drug overdose in 2000.

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Fifi recently admitted that she suffered has battled with depression on and off since she was 11.

Speaking to the Mail on Sunday, she said: I woke up crying about everything and nothing. I remember thinking what the f*ck is going on in my head. I thought I was going crazy.

It wasnt a slow and gentle descent into depression. Something totally switches in your mind. Im still trying to work out whats wrong with me now.
Two modern-day adventurers have completed a 1,200-mile kayaking expedition from Greenland to Scotland.

Olly Hicks, 34 and George Bullard, 28 arrived at Balnakeil Bay in the north of Scotland on Sunday morning following over two months of negotiating Arctic sea ice and freezing temperatures.

Mr Hicks tweeted shortly after arriving in Scotland, saying: "We've done it! Greenland to Scotland Challenge complete, what an amazing feeling!"

He said on Facebook: "We did it! We made it to Durness this morning kayaking over night and have completed the Greenland to Scotland Challenge! Thank you to all our sponsors and supporters, now for some sleep!"

The duo who are the first modern-day explorers to complete the journey are said to be "exhausted but happy" according to a website following their journey.

Fellow adventurer and broadcaster, Ben Fogle tweeted Mr Hicks shortly after their arrival saying: "Well done @ollyhicks on completing the epic kayak from #greenlandtoscotland."

The Greenland to Scotland Challenge is a 1,200-mile journey over six weeks which saw the pair spend 12 nights at sea paddling by the light of the midnight sun.

The boat the men were travelling in was a custom-modified Inuk Duo 6.8 metre sea kayak which is made of carbon fibre with Kevlar in the bottom of the hull for ice protection.

It is fast and light and designed to cover large distances whilst carrying sufficient expedition supplies, and has special canopies that can be sealed around the cockpits allowing the paddlers to squeeze into the hull of the boat to rest and sleep.

The explorers were inspired to take up the challenge after hearing a legend about a similar journey made centuries ago by a mysterious group called the Finnmen.

Reports of "bizarre visitors" appearing on the coasts of Scotland in strange boats go back as late as the 17th century.

One report says that one of these unknown visitors made landfall and spoke an unintelligible language and was "all over hairy".

It is unknown where these travellers had come from, but it is thought they may have come from Finland or Greenland.

Mr Hicks, a seasoned ocean rower and friend of Prince Harry, became the first person to row solo from America to England in 2005 at the age of 23.
Islam Karimov, the Uzbek president, who died last Friday aged 78, was one of the nastiest of the dictators who rose to power in central Asia following the collapse of the Soviet Union; yet he was a man with whom the West was prepared to do business, and was regarded as a "key ally" in the US-led war against terror.

Karimov rose to power under the USSR, becoming general secretary of the Communist Party of the Uzbek SSR. In 1991, he promoted himself to "elected" president of the new independent republic of Uzbekistan.

He adapted old Soviet methods to the new era, replacing the hammer and sickle with a phoenix and crescent moon, and the KGB with a near-identical security bureau, the SNB. Using the excuse of maintaining stability in a turbulent region, he set about imposing one of the most brutal and corrupt dictatorships in the world.

Karimov's economic policies owed nothing to ideas of perestroika and made Stalin's five-year plans look almost enlightened. In the 15 years following independence, he closed the country's borders, slapped a 70pc tax on imports, shut down bazaars, forbade the development of private property rights and imposed stringent price controls.

Soviet-era collective farms remained unreformed; laws were passed ending cash trading and forcing all business transactions to go through state-owned banks. Living standards, low even in Soviet times, collapsed. Only Karimov and his cronies prospered thanks to his practice of forcing collective cotton farms to sell their produce to the state at a nominal fee, then selling it on the international market at enormous profit.

Criticism was suppressed; religious observance was restricted. By 2005, 10,000 dissidents languished in the country's jails where, according to a UN report, there was "rampant" use of torture, with electrocution, chlorine-filled gas masks, drowning and rape. In 2002, two of Karimov's critics were boiled alive - an "accident with a kettle". Not that Karimov made any bones about his methods. "I'm prepared to rip off the heads of 200 people, to sacrifice their lives... to save peace in the republic. If my child chose such a path, I would rip off his head myself," he said.

Yet he became a favoured western protege after becoming the first regional leader to support the US "war on terror" following 9/11. In return for the use of an airbase at Khanabad for "Operation Enduring Freedom" in Afghanistan, Karimov was rewarded with US aid worth $200m a year. There were other considerations. Uzbekistan holds a strategic position at the heart of the Central Asian oil and gas producing region, which meant America and Britain played down Karimov's tyranny.

Islam Abduganievich Karimov was born in Samarkand on January 30, 1938, the son of an ethnic Tajik mother and Uzbek father. Orphaned as a child, he was raised in a state orphanage. He studied engineering and economics and, in 1966, joined Uzbekistan's State Planning Department and became chairman in 1986.

Ironically, it was Mikhail Gorbachev's attempt to purge parties of corrupt officials that provided Karimov with his opening. In 1989, with his rivals removed, he was elected First Secretary of the Uzbek Communist Party. In 1991 his hard-line stance led Karimov to support the anti-Gorbachev coup attempt. But when the coup failed, he executed a U-turn. He outlawed the Communist Party and declared Uzbekistan independent.

Elected in a marred presidential campaign, Karimov reinvented himself as a patriotic Uzbek Muslim. He was then "re-elected" several times, the result of a ban on all genuine opposition parties.

Karimov, who was married twice and has three children, was the subject of frequent reports of ill-health and suffered a stroke on August 26.

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Police inquires 'very quickly' focused on the mother (Photo: Google maps)

A mother from the UK has reportedly been arrested in the south of France after her five-month-old baby was discovered dead during a family holiday, according to officials.

The woman was reported to have been on holiday with her husband and her two children - aged five months and three years old - in Saint-Pee-sur-Nivelle, a village in the Basque province of Labourd.

On the last day of their week-long break, the father reportedly woke up early and left the room the family were sharing.

After he returned and the mother woke around 9am, he found the baby was dead and contacted the emergency services, according to preliminary information.

She was arrested on Saturday and was being held in police custody.

A coroner said the death was not from natural causes, according to Sud Ouest.

"The suspect death of a baby was discovered at the scene," deputy prosecutor Marc Mariee told AFP.

Mr Mariee said investigators "very quickly" focused on the mother.

A port-mortem will be carried out next week.
Police have arrested a man in his 70s following an alleged knife attack on a fellow pensioner.

Detectives were called to a home in Wellington Terrace, Falmouth, Cornwall, at around 8am on Sunday amid reports of a stabbing.

A 73-year-old woman was later airlifted to Derriford Hospital in Plymouth. Her condition has been described as "stable".

Devon and Cornwall Police said a 77-year-old local man has been arrested on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm and remains in police custody.

A force spokesman added inquiries were ongoing and anyone with any information about the incident should contact police via the 101 telephone number.

People can also contact Crimestoppers anonymously by calling 0800 555 111 or via the independent charity's website.
Labour MP Keith Vaz is reportedly standing down as chairman of the influential Commons Home Affairs committee after a newspaper alleged he paid for the services of male escorts.

The newspaper reported that Mr Vaz had issued a statement to them, saying: "I have referred these allegations to my solicitor Mark Stephens, of Howard Kennedy, who will consider them carefully and advise me on what is published."

In a statement issued to the Mail on Sunday, the Leicester East MP said: "I am genuinely sorry for the hurt and distress that has been caused by my actions, in particular to my wife and children.

"I will be informing the Committee on Tuesday of my intention to stand aside from chairing the sessions of the Committee with immediate effect."

Naz Shah, a member of the Home Affairs Committee, told Sky News she had spoken to Mr Vaz, adding "he has done the right thing" by standing aside.

A Labour Party spokeswoman told The Press Association: "Keith Vaz has issued a statement on this matter.

"As with all departmental select committees, Keith was elected to the chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee by the House of Commons, and his position is a matter for him and the House."

The Home Affairs Committee is currently probing a review of prostitution laws.

Former culture secretary John Whittingdale said that Keith Vaz's reported resignation seemed "sensible".

"I haven't read the whole of the allegations and therefore it's difficult to comment on them," he told Sky News's Murnaghan programme.

"But Keith Vaz as I understand it is that he will stand aside from the chairmanship of the select committee.

"Given the areas of which the committee is responsible, that does seem to me to be a sensible course of action. I wouldn't want to comment beyond that."

Labour shadow health secretary Diane Abbott said this was a "dreadful" experience for Mr Vaz, and his wife and children.

"I have known Keith for over 30 years, I think this must be a dreadful time for him, and his family - his wife and his two children. And I would rather not comment," she told Sky News.

The BBC reported a statement from Mr Vaz, saying: "It is deeply disturbing that a national newspaper should have paid individuals to have acted in this way.

"I have referred these allegations to my solicitor, Mark Stephens of Howard Kennedy, who will consider them carefully and advise me accordingly."
The first hurricane to hit Florida in more than a decade has wiped away beachside buildings and toppled trees onto homes before ploughing inland on a path that could send it rolling up the East Coast with heavy rain, high winds and flooding.

Hermine quickly weakened to a tropical storm and was spinning inland along the North Carolina coast late last night. But the National Hurricane Centre predicted it would regain hurricane strength late in the weekend after emerging over the Atlantic Ocean.

The system could then lash coastal areas as far north as Connecticut and Rhode Island. "Anyone along the US East Coast needs to be paying close attention this weekend," said Dennis Feltgen, a spokesman for the National Hurricane Centre.

The National Weather Service has issued a flash flood watch for northeast North Carolina and southeast Virginia, including Virginia Beach and Norfolk. The watch is in effect through this evening. Rainfall totals of three to six inches are possible for southeast Virginia and four to seven inches for northeast North Carolina.

In Florida, Hermine's main impact came in the form of power outages and damage from storm surges. A homeless man south of Gainesville died when a tree fell on him, governor Rick Scott said.

He later took to a helicopter to visit the coastal communities of Cedar Key and Steinhatchee hit hard by the damage from flooding and a storm surge that crumpled docks and washed out homes and businesses.

Mr Scott pledged that businesses would be eligible for help from the state. But it is unclear whether Florida will get any federal disaster assistance as the state begins to clean up from the storm.

An estimated 325,000 people were without power across the state and more than 107,000 in neighbouring Georgia, officials said.

At 8am, the hurricane centre said the tropical storm's centre was about 10 miles north-northwest of Oregon Inlet, North Carolina. Forecasters said the storm is expected to move over the Atlantic Ocean soon and threatens a dangerous storm surge into Hampton Roads in southeast Virginia.

Hermine had top sustained winds of 60 mph (95 kph) and was moving northeast at 21 mph (33 kph).

Dominion Virginia Power said more than 53,000 customers were without power in Virginia. North Carolina Emergency Management reported nearly 45,000 customers without power this morning, with most of the outages in the eastern part of the state.

About 21,000 customers remained without power in South Carolina.

Forecasters said the system could strengthen back into a hurricane by Monday off the Maryland-Delaware coast before weakening again as it moves north. Tropical storm watches and warnings were posted up and down the coastline.

Back in Florida, a storm surge at Dekle Beach damaged numerous homes and destroyed storage buildings and a 100-yard fishing pier. The area is about 60 miles southeast of St Marks, where Hermine made landfall at 1.30am in the Big Bend area, where Florida's peninsula and panhandle meet.

In nearby Steinhatchee, a storm surge crashed into Bobbi Pattison's home. She wore galoshes and was covered in black muck as she stood in her living room amid overturned furniture and an acrid smell. Tiny crabs darted around her floor.

"I had a hurricane cocktail party last night and God got even with me," she said. Where her bar once stood was now only wet sand and rubble. Ms Pattison and two neighbours managed to set upright a large wooden statue of a sea captain she had carved from wood that washed ashore in a 1993 storm.

In Keaton Beach, about two dozen people waited on a road just after sunrise on Friday, trying to get to their homes. Police blocked the road because of flooding.

Dustin Beach, 31, rushed there from a hospital in Tallahassee where his wife gave birth to a girl on Thursday night to see if his home still stood.

"When my wife got up this morning, she said, 'Go home and check on the house. I need to know where we're going after we leave the hospital,'" he said.

Cindy Simpson was waiting near her car, hoping her beach home and boats survived. "It's a home on stilts so I put everything upstairs. We have two boats in the boat house, and I hope they're still there," she said.

High winds knocked trees onto several houses in Tallahassee, injuring people inside.

It was sometime after midnight when Alan Autry, 48, started hearing the large pines in his Tallahassee neighborhood start to crack and fall to the ground.

Then he heard one come down on the top floor of his house. The tree did not initially crash through the roof, and Mr Autry and his wife went to a neighbour's house. Sometime before dawn, the corner of his house collapsed from the weight of the tree.

"We've been married 13 years and this is our fifth hurricane," said Mr Autry, who moved from central Florida six years ago. "By far, this is the worst damage we've ever had."

Tampa and St. Petersburg escaped major damage. Up to 17 inches of rain fell in the area over the last two days.

The last hurricane to strike Florida was Wilma, a powerful Category Three storm that arrived on in October 2005. It swept across the Everglades and struck heavily populated south Florida, causing five deaths in the state.

The Florida governor declared an emergency in 51 counties and said about 6,000 National Guardsmen stood ready to mobilise for the storm's aftermath. The governors of Georgia and North Carolina also declared emergencies.
Islamic State forces have been pushed back by Turkish troops and Syrian rebels

Turkish troops and allied Syrian rebels have driven the Islamic State group from the last strip of territory it controlled along the Syrian-Turkish border, a Turkish news agency reported.

The advance effectively seals the extremist group's self-styled caliphate off from the outside word, shutting down key supply lines used to bring in foreign fighters, weapons and ammunition.

The Anadolu news agency reported on Sunday that Turkey-backed Free Syrian Army rebels have cleared the area between the northern Syrian towns of Azaz and Jarablus.

It said the advance "has removed terror organisation Daesh's physical contact with the Turkish border in northern Syria".

Daesh is an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group.

Turkey has launched two incursions into Syria since August 24 in an operation designed to drive IS away from the border and prevent the advance of US-backed Kurdish forces, which are also battling the extremist group.

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France will have a referendum on membership of the European Union if Marine Le Pen is elected president

The leader of France's far-right National Front set the tone for her campaign for the French presidency on Saturday, calling to fight an Islamist "offensive" and promising to hold a nationwide referendum on European Union membership if she is elected next spring.

At a rally in a small eastern village, Marine Le Pen focused on her favourite issues, such as national sovereignty, immigration control, Islamism and what she calls "savage globalisation".

The far-right candidate for the April-May election pledged to back the "France of the forgotten, the abandoned and the voiceless".

Ms Le Pen, who announced her presidential bid months ago, delivered her annual speech in Brachay, a hamlet of a few dozen inhabitants and the French municipality where she symbolically won the largest share of votes in the last election.

Along with the economy, the relationship between France's Muslims and non-Muslims has been a recurring theme as presidential hopefuls have kicked off their campaigns.

Ms Le Pen claimed she was right before all other presidential hopefuls because her traditional issues are now at the centre of the political debate and have found a "considerable resonance" among French voters.

Some politicians on the left say she is using the issue to encourage racism in France, yet polls suggest that she is increasingly likely to make it to the run-off in the presidential election.

Following the British precedent, Ms Le Pen promised to hold a nationwide referendum on whether France should leave or remain in the European Union if she is elected president.

"I will do it in France," she said and hailed the British who had "the courage to choose their destiny" by voting to leave the EU.

Referring to the controversy over local French bans on the burkini swimwear, she denounced a "relegation of women behind fabrics" and said that women should have the same right as men "to enjoy the French way of life on the beach and at school, in the street and at work".

She said she fears "dress segregation" will eventually pave the way for a "physical and legal" relegation of women.

"When are we going to have a ban on make-up? Then a ban (for women) to appear in public?" she asked.

The National Front leader also accused former French conservative president Nicolas Sarkozy, one of her potential presidential opponents, of pledging allegiance to a hard-line branch of Islam after he reportedly met the Saudi King in Morocco last month.

Ms Le Pen branded the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as the "new totalitarianism of the 21st century" and suggested terrorists were hiding among migrants.

"The best weapon against terrorism is the ballot," she said.

Since January 2015, Islamic State group-inspired attackers have killed at least 235 people in France.

French citizens or French-speaking residents have committed the overwhelming majority of strikes, often employing suicide tactics alongside command of their home surroundings.

AP
The man is broken. He moves slowly. Abdullah Kurdi has learned that the heaviest weights we carry do not belong to the physical present. They lie in the memories that live with him as a daily penance. He has survived but he is haunted. "Every day I think of them but today I felt as if they had come to me and slept with me and this makes me sad again," he says.

When I first met him a year ago there was so much to deal with. It was a day after the drownings. We were standing together outside the mortuary near Bodrum. The sun pounded and pushed us all towards the shade. These were the almost merciful hours. The immensity of the shock and the accumulation of demands meant Abdullah Kurdi had little time to ruminate. He was fighting to get his boy's bodies released from the mortuary, appealing to whoever could help get them back to Kobani, the family's ancestral home in Syria. He already knew that his three-year-old, Alan, was becoming a posthumous icon of the refugee crisis. The toddler's body on the shore a rebuke to the world, the dead symbol of a nation butchered and betrayed.

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Alan Kurdi was the face and name that brought Syria's tragedy home. His father told me he hoped it would make world leaders act to stop the war. For a week or so the pressure was intense. Something must be done. Something would be done. And then? Well we all moved on. The Twittersphere, the media, the politicians. The Kurdi boys and their mother were buried and Alan's name drifted away. Like the girls of Chibok abducted by Boko Haram and so many other social media cause celebres Alan was overtaken by events. But something was done. Oh yes. By the end of 2015 the European Union had cooked up a deal with Turkey to keep the Syrian masses from getting to Europe. Out of sight out of the headlines. Out of mind.

I meet Abdullah Kurdi in Erbil, the Kurdish capital of northern Iraq where he now lives. He is setting up a foundation in his son's name. There will be many more Syrians fleeing and he wishes to help. "At first the world was anxious to help the refugees," he says "but this did not even last a month. In fact the situation got worse. The war has escalated and more people are leaving."

His year has been a bitter one. At first he was falsely accused of being one of the smugglers who operated the boat which overturned, drowning his children and several other refugees. The arrest and conviction of the real smugglers didn't stop the abuse. To the anti-immigrant hard right, Syrian parents who bring their children across the seas to escape war are the real criminals, not Assad and his allies, or the so-called Islamic State, or the numerous other bands of butchers roaming Syria. Backed by the warplanes of Putin, the new darling of the hard left in the West, Assad has been bombing civilians and displacing thousands more of his own people.

Where now are those who damned American bombing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan? Where are the demonstrations on European streets against Putin's military intervention in Syria? Do those who condemn the actions of the Pentagon really believe Russia's claim to be fighting a clean war in Syria? Of course not. But either they rationalise their own self-deception - all those flattened homes and bodies broken by Assad's barrel bombs are really the fault of the west - or they stay silent for fear of giving comfort to the enemy.

Abdullah Kurdi, and many thousands like him, are the living victims of a war unbounded in its ruthlessness. He tells me he wishes the leaders of world would get together and bring the Syrian conflict to an end. But he knows it will not happen. I read occasional articles which suggest we are in fact living in a less violent age. War is declining. This analysis misses the point. What matters is the temper of the times. And our times are cynical and ugly, dismissive of fact and reason, gorging on hatred. Every so often there comes a defining moment which turns out not to be defining at all. Alan Kurdi's death was one. A brief season of outrage and then back to the same old lies and evasions.

On the eve of the anniversary Abdullah Kurdi kept thinking of what it would be like if the boys were alive. He had a picture in his head. Three-year-old Alan and five-year-old Gilab. He had his arms wrapped around them. It was the most wonderful picture. And it was the saddest.

********

From northern Iraq to the Laois town of Stradbally in 24 hours. I have just arrived at the Electric Picnic. My car is packed with happy kids: my son Daniel, his cousin Rachel from Canada and the Keating's lad Stephen from Whiting Bay. They have all known each other since they were toddlers and have been blessed to grow up in peace. I tell a garda I am appearing at the festival - to host a debate. He is under the impression I am an ageing rocker and replies: "Are you any good?" I offer a verse of a song which is politely declined.

The atmosphere could not be warmer. A happy army of young people, and a few codgers like myself, are pouring across the fields. Rain is forecast, but who cares? In Erbil I had driven past huge security gates and concrete blast walls into a hotel protected by a small private army. The killers of the so-called Islamic State were about an hour up the road. I met a man whose life was destroyed by war. In Stradbally I have the urge to tell everybody I meet to be grateful that they live in Ireland in this time. It is the luckiest of breaks.

Fergal Keane is a BBC special correspondent
Elevating the "saint of the gutters" to one of the Catholic Church's highest honours, Pope Francis on Sunday praised Mother Teresa for her radical dedication to society's outcasts and her courage in shaming world leaders for the "crimes of poverty they themselves created".

An estimated 120,000 people filled St Peter's Square for the canonisation ceremony, less than half the number who turned out for her 2003 beatification.

It was nevertheless the highlight of Francis' Holy Year of Mercy and quite possibly one of the defining moments of his mercy-focused papacy.

Francis has been dedicated to ministering to society's most marginal, from prostitutes to prisoners, refugees to the homeless.

In that way, while the canonisation of St Teresa of Kolkata was a celebration of her life and work, it was also something of an affirmation of Francis' own papal priorities, which have earned him praise and criticism alike.

"Let us carry her smile in our hearts and give it to those whom we meet along our journey, especially those who suffer," Francis said in his homily.

Born Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu on August 26 1910, Teresa came to India in 1929 as a sister of the Loreto order.

In 1946, she received what she described as a "call within a call" to found a new order dedicated to caring for the most unloved and unwanted, the "poorest of the poor" in the slums of her adopted city, Kolkata.

The Missionaries of Charity order went on to become one of the most well-known in the world, with more than 4,000 sisters in their trademark blue-trimmed white saris doing as Teresa instructed "small things with great love".

At the order's Mother House in Kolkata, hundreds of people watched the Mass on TV and clapped with joy when Francis declared her a saint.

They gathered around Teresa's tomb which was decorated with flowers, a single candle and a photo of the wrinkled saint.

"I am so proud to be from Kolkata," said Sanjay Sarkar, a high school student on hand for the celebration. "Mother Teresa belonged to Kolkata, and she has been declared a saint."

For Francis, Teresa put into action his ideal of the church as a "field hospital" for those suffering both material and spiritual poverty, living on the physical and existential peripheries of society.

In his homily, Francis praised her as the merciful saint who defended the lives of the unborn, sick and abandoned, recalling her strong opposition to abortion which often put her at odds with progressives around the world.

"She bowed down before those who were spent, left to die on the side of the road, seeing in them their God-given dignity," he said.

Teresa's most famous critic, Christopher Hitchens, has accused her of taking donations from dictators - charges church authorities deny. Francis chose to emphasise her other dealings with the powerful.

"She made her voice heard before the powers of the world, so that they might recognise their guilt for the crimes of poverty they themselves created," he said, repeating for emphasis "the crimes of poverty."

Hundreds of Missionaries of Charity sisters had front-row seats at the Mass, alongside 1,500 homeless people and 13 heads of state or government and even royalty: Queen Sofia of Spain. For the homeless, Francis offered a luncheon afterwards in the Vatican auditorium, catered by a Neapolitan pizza maker who brought his own ovens for the event.

"Her heart, she gave it to the world," said Charlotte Samba, a 52-year-old mother of three who travelled with a church group from Gabon for the Mass. "Mercy, forgiveness, good works: It is the heart of a mother for the poor."

While big, the crowd attending the canonisation wasn't even half of the 300,000 who turned out for Mother Teresa's 2003 beatification celebrated by an ailing St John Paul II. The low turnout suggested that financial belt-tightening and security fears in the wake of Islamic extremist attacks in Europe may have kept pilgrims away.

Those fears prompted a huge, 3,000-strong law enforcement presence to secure the area around the Vatican and close the airspace above. Many of those security measures have been in place for the duration of the Jubilee year, which officially ends in November.

While Francis is clearly keen to hold Teresa up as a model for her joyful dedication to the poor, he was also recognising holiness in a nun who lived most of her adult life in spiritual agony, sensing that God had abandoned her.

According to correspondence that came to light after she died in 1997, Teresa experienced what the church calls a "dark night of the soul" - a period of spiritual doubt, despair and loneliness that many of the great mystics experienced. In Teresa's case, it lasted for nearly 50 years - an almost unheard of trial.

For Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who spearheaded Teresa's saint-making campaign, the revelations were further confirmation of Mother Teresa's heroic saintliness.

He said that by canonising her, Francis is recognising that she not only shared the material poverty of the poor but the spiritual poverty of those who feel "unloved, unwanted, uncared for".

"If I'm going to be a saint, I'm going to be a saint of darkness, and I'll be asking from heaven to be the light of those who are in darkness on Earth," she once wrote.

Francis has never publicly mentioned this "darkness," but he has in many ways modelled his papacy on Teresa and her simple lifestyle and selfless service to the poor: he eschewed the Apostolic Palace for a hotel room, made welcoming migrants and the poor a hallmark and has fiercely denounced today's "throwaway" culture that discards the unborn, the sick and the elderly with ease.

Teresa's Missionaries of Charity went on to become a global order of nuns, priests, brothers and lay co-workers.

She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and died in 1997. Soon thereafter, John Paul placed her on the fast-track for sainthood.

Francis has confessed that he was somewhat intimidated by Teresa, knowing well she was as tough as she was tender. He quipped during a 2014 visit to Albania that he would never have wanted her as his superior because she was so firm with her sisters.

But on Sunday, he admitted that even he would find it hard to call her St Teresa, since her tenderness was so maternal.

"Spontaneously, we will continue to say Mother Teresa," he said to applause.

AP
A nationalist, anti-immigration party performed strongly in a German state election on Sunday in the region where Chancellor Angela Merkel has her political base, overtaking her conservatives to take second place amid discontent with her migrant policies, projections indicated.

The three-year-old Alternative for Germany, or AfD, won 21 to 22% of votes in the election for the state legislature in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, according to projections for ARD and ZDF television based on exit polls and partial counting.

They put support for Mrs Merkel's Christian Democrats between 19 and 20%, their worst result yet in the state.

The centre-left Social Democrats, who led the outgoing state government, were the strongest party with about 30% support.

Economically weak Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, in Germany's north eastern corner, is home to 1.6 million of the country's 80 million people and is a relative political lightweight. It is, however, the state where Mrs Merkel has her parliamentary constituency, and Sunday's regional vote was the first of five before a national election expected next September.

National AfD leader Frauke Petry celebrated "a blow to Angela Merkel". Local AfD leader Leif-Erik Holm told supporters: "Perhaps this is the beginning of the end of Angela Merkel's chancellorship today."

Mrs Merkel's refugee policies were a prominent issue in the campaign for Sunday's election, which came a year to the day after she decided to let in migrants from Hungary - setting off the peak of last year's influx. Germany registered more than one million people as asylum-seekers last year.

New arrivals in Germany have slowed drastically this year, policies have been tightened and Mecklenburg is home to few foreigners. Still, New Year's Eve robberies and sexual assaults in Germany blamed largely on foreigners, as well as two attacks in July carried out by asylum-seekers and claimed by the Islamic State group, have fed tensions.

Mrs Merkel has stuck to her insistence that "we will manage" the refugee crisis, and has also said that "sometimes you have to endure such controversies".

"This result, and the strong performance of AfD, is bitter for many, for everyone in our party," said Peter Tauber, her Christian Democrats' general secretary.

He said the state government's positive record took a back seat for many voters "because among a recognisable part, there was an explicit wish to voice displeasure and protest, and we saw that particularly strongly in the discussion about refugees".

Sunday's result could make it more difficult for Mrs Merkel to bury a festering dispute with the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian arm of her conservative bloc, which has long criticised her decision to open the borders and advocated an annual cap on migrants.

CSU general secretary Andreas Scheuer said that "we feel vindicated in our course".

Mrs Merkel has yet to say whether she will seek a fourth term next year, as is widely expected. While polls this year have shown her popularity slipping from stellar to merely solid, there is no obvious conservative alternative and her bloc is ahead nationally.

"She is, in people's perception, personally responsible for the border opening, and she has to deal with that," political science professor Karl-Rudolf Korte told ZDF television. "But she can deal with it - she has a year."

Mecklenburg was the only one of Germany's 16 states where the far-right National Democratic Party was represented in a state legislature, but it appeared to have lost its seats on Sunday.

Its support dropped below the 5% needed to keep them, with many supporters apparently switching to AfD.

The state has been run for the past decade by the parties that currently run Germany.

Popular Social Democratic governor Erwin Sellering has governed with Mrs Merkel's party as his junior partner. Both parties lost support compared with the last state election in 2011, when they polled 35.6 and 23%, respectively.

The opposition Left Party - once popular with protest voters - also lost support, slipping about six points to 12.5%. The left-leaning Greens were hovering around the 5% mark.

AfD is now represented in nine of Germany's 16 state legislatures and hopes to enter the national Parliament next year. Still, it fell well short Sunday of its aim of becoming the strongest party in Mecklenburg, and also didn't match the 24.3% support it won in another eastern state, Saxony-Anhalt, in March.

There is no realistic prospect at present of AfD going into government. Other parties will not deal with it.

The next regional election is on September 18 in Berlin, where local issues are likely to play a stronger role.

AP
Aric Babbit, 40, was found dead with his partner after the couple were accused of abusing teenage boys

A primary school teacher and his husband were found dead on a beach in a murder-suicide after allegations they sexually abused teenage boys.

Aric Babbitt, 40, and his partner Matthew Deyo, 36, came under investigation when a 16-year-old boy told police he was in a sexual relationship with the couple.

Court documents revealed the men were accused of sexual contact with at least three underage boys.

Police tried to speak to the couple about the claims at their home in Minnesota in August, but Mr Babbitt and Mr Deyo refused to give a statement.

Officers instead searched the house, finding a camera hidden in the bathroom and a computer folder named 'Kiddies', local media reported.

Soon after the police visit, the couple borrowed Mr Deyos brother's gun, saying they were going camping and needed it to protect themselves from bears.

They travelled to Lopez island, hundreds of miles away in Washington, where Mr Deyo shot Mr Babbitt and then himself, a coroner said.

The two bodies were found by a kayaker the following day, according to San Juan County Sheriff Ron Krebs, who said local people had heard gunshots at about 8.30pm the night before.

Investigations into the sexual abuse allegations are ongoing.

Mr Babbitt, who had been a primary school teacher at Lincoln Center Elementary School since 2002, was suspended following the allegations, but neither Mr Babbitt nor Mr Deyo had been charged with any crime at the time of their deaths.

The 16-year-old boy reportedly told detectives Mr Babbitt offered to support him when he came out as gay to his family, and the teacher gave him gifts such as underwear. He also said the couple asked for photos of him before he was 16, according to an application for a search warrant seen by local media.

The boy told police that shortly after he turned 16, Mr Babbitt and Mr Deyo asked his parents, who were friends of the couple, if they could take him to a concert in Minneapolis.

Mr Babbitt and Mr Deyo then gave the boy alcohol and marijuana, the court documents said. Instead of going to the concert they took him to a hotel, where the three had unprotected sex.

The boy told police he woke the next day in the hotel room with Mr Deyo touching him.

The teenager, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is believed to have given the police pictures of himself naked with Mr Babbitt.

The boy told police he didn't want to get involved in a relationship with the couple, but didn't know how to say no to his former elementary school teacher and mentor.

At least two other victims are thought to have come forward, claiming they were also pressured into sexual activity with the couple.

Another of the accusers said Mr Babbitt had shared naked photographs of himself with him and encouraged him to masturbate in the bathroom, where police found the hidden camera.
The Killer Clown craze has spread from the US

Any person dressed as a clown in a South Carolina town could face arrest after reports of mystery figures frightening members of the public, police say.

Residents of Greenville have been told to call police if they see any clowns, following reports that people donning luminous noses and oversized shoes may be trying to lure children into woods in the town

Police have warned anyone 'politely terrorising' the town in clown outfits could face charges, warning: We will arrest you. We don't want to, but we will.

Greenville police added there is an order that prohibits molesting, disturbing or following persons.

It's illegal. It's dangerous. It's inappropriate, and it's creating community concern so it needs to stop, explained Greenville Police Chief Ken Miller to Grenville Online.

They only stand in an area to be seen and watch the reaction of individual.

He added that the clowning around needs to stop.

Deputies were called last week to an apartment complex where people had reported seeing creepy clowns. Officers said they found no evidence of anyone in the woods behind.

An apartment complex is warning residents about a clown trying to lure kids into the woods https://t.co/vCPZ9gWJW8 pic.twitter.com/Ler4bKDkpm  CNN (@CNN) August 29, 2016

A family later reported that their child had seen a man wearing a clown mask in woods at another nearby apartment complex.

There was a third report from a 12-year-old who said they saw someone dressed as a clown in the back yard of another complex.

The latest sighting was reported by a woman who saw a man in a clown outfit standing outside a laundrette silently staring at her.

This is something that were taking very seriously, especially because of the allegations of people dressed in clown outfits trying to lure children into the woods, said Master Deputy Ryan Flood.

Jessie Owen, a 29-year-old Greenville mother-of-two, said she was concerned about the clown reports.

I will usually let my son play in our backyard where I can see him from the kitchen, but now I won't let him go outside the house without me, she told Reuters.

All it would take is one second. One promise of candy and he would be gone.

One theory is that the clowns are a PR stunt connected to the release of the independent horror movie 31, by director Rob Zombie.

In the UK, a mystery clown was previously spotted roaming the streets of Portsmouth scaring strangers.

At a glance - Strange clown activity around the world

* In 2014, police in Agade, France, arrested 14 teenagers who were dressed as clowns, carrying weapons.

* A man known as the Northampton Clown terrified children and caused parents to become irate when he dressed as a clown and stood on street corners.

* In 2013, Lincolnshire police warned residents that there had been a spate of people dressing as clowns and intimidating locals.

* Also in 2013, police in Kings Lynn warned residents to stay away from clowns after reports of men dressed up in clown outfits terrifying residents.

* Again in 2013, a man known as the Mansfield Clown was known for terrifying residents in Nottinghamshire.

* In 2013, in Normanton, near Wakefield, West Yorkshire, residents urged police to take action after clowns were spotted scaring residents.
Patty and Jerry Wetterling pictured in 2009 show a photo of their son Jacob, who had been abducted in 1989 (AP)

The remains of Jacob Wetterling, an 11-year-old boy kidnapped from a rural US road nearly 27 years ago, have been found.

The discovery provides long-awaited answers to a mystery that has captivated residents and sparked changes in sex offender laws.

A masked gunman abducted Jacob in October of 1989 near the boy's home in St Joseph, about 80 miles north-west of Minneapolis.

The Stearns County Sheriff's Office confirmed late on Saturday that "Jacob Wetterling's remains have been located" and the Ramsey County medical examiner and a forensic odontologist had identified them.

Additional DNA testing will be conducted and investigators are continuing to evaluate new evidence in the case, the sheriff's office said, adding that authorities expect to be able to provide more details early next week.

A law enforcement official told The Associated Press earlier on Saturday that a person of interest in Jacob's abduction took authorities to a field in central Minnesota last week.

The official said remains and other evidence were recovered and that the remains had been buried.

Jacob's mother, Patty Wetterling, sent a text message to KARE-TV earlier on Saturday, saying that Jacob "has been found and our hearts are broken".

Jacob was riding his bicycle with his brother and a friend on October 22 1989, when a masked gunman abducted him.

Authorities said the man held on to Jacob and told the other boys to run. Jacob had not been seen since, despite extensive searches, tens of thousands of leads and offers of a monetary reward.

No-one has been arrested or charged over his abduction, which led to changes in sex-offender registration laws.

But last year, authorities took another look at the case, and were led to Danny Heinrich, a man they called a "person of interest" in Jacob's kidnapping.

Heinrich, 53, of Annandale, denied any involvement in the abduction, and was not charged with that crime.

But he has pleaded not guilty to 25 child pornography charges and is scheduled to go on trial on those counts in October.

The FBI has said previously that Heinrich matched the general description of a man who assaulted several boys in Paynesville from 1986 to 1988.

Earlier this year, Heinrich's DNA was found on the sweatshirt of a 12-year-old boy who was kidnapped from Cold Spring and sexually assaulted just nine months before Jacob's abduction.

Heinrich was questioned by authorities shortly after Jacob's disappearance, but he denied involvement.

Court documents say his shoes and car tyres were "consistent" with tracks left near the site of Jacob's abduction, but could not be ruled an exact match.

The authorities also searched the home where Heinrich lived with his father at the time and found scanners, camouflage clothing and a picture of a boy wearing underwear.

Jacob's abduction shattered childhood innocence for many in rural Minnesota, changing the way parents let their kids roam.

His smiling face was burned into Minnesota's psyche, appearing on countless posters and billboards over the years. Each year, Minnesota residents were asked to keep their porch lights on for Jacob's safe return.

Patty Wetterling always hoped her son would be found alive. She became a national advocate for children, and with her husband, Jerry, founded the Jacob Wetterling Resource Centre, which works to help communities and families prevent child exploitation.

In 1994, Congress passed a law named after Jacob Wetterling that requires states to establish sex offender registries.

Officials with the Jacob Wetterling Resource Centre posted a statement on its website saying they are in "deep grief".

"We didn't want Jacob's story to end this way," the statement said.

"Our hearts are heavy, but we are being held up by all of the people who have been a part of making Jacob's Hope a light that will never be extinguished ... Jacob, you are loved."

AP
To the hard-bitten, journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, she was a revelation, an example of how faith can be transformative. To an idealistic young convent schoolgirl like me, watching his documentary in the early 1970s, she was the embodiment of Christianity, caring for the dying, unwanted children, abandoned lepers.

When Muggeridge's film and subsequent book about Mother Teresa of Calcutta first appeared more than 40 years ago, the world sat up and took notice.

Here was a remarkable story of a nun who had given up everything to found her own missionary order in India and serve the poorest of the poor.

From then on, in a world that usually bestowed its admiration on the rich and those with artistic and sporting talent, she became one of the most celebrated people on the planet. She was known as a living saint or the 'saint of the gutters' and received that secular accolade of sanctity, the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1979.

Today her sanctity is confirmed when Mother Teresa is canonized by Pope Francis and becomes Saint Teresa of Kolkata in front of a congregation at St Peter's in Rome that will include members of her Missionaries of Charity order and representatives of the Indian government and of the Balkan nations of Albania and Macedoni - where she grew up before becoming a nun by joining the Loreto Sisters in Rathfarnham, Dublin and moving to India to join the Loreto order there in her 20s.

Her links with Ireland remained and in 1993, she was given the Freedom of Dublin during a ceremony on Dawson Street, and she also met President, Mary Robinson.

Pope Francis last night, ahead of the ceremony, told the sea of cheering supporters gathered beneath a portrait of Mother Teresa, her head graced by a halo: "She deserves it!"

"We'll have the joy of seeing Mother Teresa proclaimed a saint," he said.

He took the opportunity to urge others to follow her lead, decrying those who "turn the other way not to see the many forms of poverty that begs out for mercy". Choosing "to not see hunger, disease, exploited persons, this is a grave sin. It's also a modern sin, a sin of today", he said.

Among those in the square for the prayer vigil, were nuns from Teresa's Missionaries of Charity order as well as volunteers who helped rescue survivors of the recent deadly earthquake in central Italy, whom the Pope hailed as "artisans of mercy".

It has taken 19 years since her death for her to be canonized - not the fastest to be raised to the altars, but far from the slowest either. Pope John Paul II became a saint nine years after his death in 2005; Joan of Arc, who died in 1431, was not canonized until 1920.

The Catholic Church investigates those put forward for sainthood by collecting evidence, arguing the case with theologians, talking to doctors about miracles claimed.

Two are required for canonization and in Mother Teresa's case, these include a woman cured of an abdominal tumour through Mother Teresa's intercession in 1998, on the first anniversary of the nun's death. Pope Francis also decreed last year that she would be given a sainthood, after attributing to her the "miraculous" cure of a Brazilian man who was suffering from a viral brain infection that had left him in a coma.

Mother Teresa was not without controversy, however. She was criticised, particularly by Christopher Hitchens, the newspaper columnist, for failing to address the causes of poverty and dealing only with its symptoms.

She was too willing to take tainted money from the likes of Robert Maxwell and did not spend it on the most up-to-date medical care for the dying, he argued.

But as far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the mud didn't stick.

The Vatican's Congregation for Causes of Saints, which oversees canonization, says that she matches the definition of a saint: an example of holiness, a channel of God's love, through whom we can learn what God is like.

But why has the Church decided that now is the time for Mother Teresa to join around 10,000 people who have been named saints?

As well as their holiness, saints can be useful to the Church in conveying particular messages.

During her lifetime, Teresa was particularly approved of by Pope John Paul II. She was fiercely opposed to abortion and contraception, as was John Paul, who declared they were part of the culture of death. In embracing every unwanted child, every dying person she encountered, Mother Teresa for him embodied the culture of life and John Paul oversaw her beatification - the final stage before full sainthood - in 2003.

She is also a useful exemplar for Pope Francis.

He has made mercy the theme of his pontificate and declared December 8, 2015 to November 20 this year, to be the Year of Mercy.

He has called upon people to be moved "from indifference to compassion".

The Church, for many, has historically represented judgement and a focus on sin, but Pope Francis urges it to offer "more evident signs of God's presence and closeness". These, he said during Easter 2015, should be especially offered to the suffering, the alone and abandoned and those "without hope of being pardoned or feeling the Father's love".

Mother Teresa is therefore an ideal saint for what the Pope is trying to teach during his Year of Mercy.

There is another reason, though, she is seen by the Church as a saint for this particular age.

While she was perceived as someone of immense faith, the nun suffered from a terrible burden.

She believed herself to be unloved, feared God not wanting her.

This spiritual trial, what the Church calls a dark night of the soul, went on for years. It came to light after her death, in letters saved by her spiritual director.

The woman who focused on the unloved and unwanted shared those feelings. She not only felt compassion for those who felt lonely and abandoned, she identified with them. Her compassion and her heroic spiritual struggle make her a saint for modern times.

While no major events are planned in Kolkata, reflecting a heated debate over religious intolerance in Hindu-majority India, prayers will be held by the city's small Christian community, marking today's ceremony.

Catherine Pepinster is editor of 'The Tablet', the Catholic weekly. Additional reporting by the 'Sunday Telegraph'
#flight resumption Flights from Gimpo airport to Osaka, Taipei to resume Sunday Flights from Seoul's Gimpo International Airport to Osaka and Taipei will resume later this week, the state-run airport operator here said Saturday, more than two years after the r...
Voters in Hong Kong headed to the polls on Sunday for their most crucial election since the handover from Britain in 1997.

The vote for politicians in the Legislative Council is the first since 2014 pro-democracy street protests rocked the Asian financial hub, and the outcome could pave the way for a fresh round of political confrontations over China's control of the city.

The election is set to test the unity of Hong Kong's pro-democracy camp as a new generation of radical activists, who emerged in the wake of those protests, joined the race.

They are competing with moderate mainstream pro-democracy parties to challenge formidable pro-Beijing rivals.

At stake is the power to keep the city's widely unpopular Beijing-backed leader, Leung Chun-ying, and his government in check.

"Pan-democrat" politicians currently control 27 of 70 seats, and must keep at least a third of the seats to retain veto power.

The new wave of activists running for office hope to ride a rising tide of anti-China sentiment among residents, especially among young people, who are chafing under Beijing's tightening hold.

Following a rash of incidents, notably the disappearance of five Hong Kong booksellers who later resurfaced in mainland Chinese detention, many fear Beijing is undermining the "one country, two systems" framework that guarantees Hong Kong's wide autonomy.

The risk is that the pro-democracy vote will be split, allowing pro-Beijing candidates to take more seats and clearing the way for the government to attempt to enact unpopular and controversial laws which in turn could lead to a new round of political confrontations.

Some 3.8 million registered voters are choosing politicians to fill 35 seats in geographic constituencies. There are 84 lists of candidates, so the results will be hard to predict.

Another 30 seats are taken by members representing business and trade groups such as accounting, finance, medicine and fisheries. Five more "super seats" are chosen by voters citywide.

AP
Turkish-backed rebels on Sunday cleared Islamic State from Turkey's Syrian border, securing a 90 km (55 miles) corridor and marking a substantial gain in Ankara's plan to drive out Sunni militants and stop the advance of Syrian Kurdish fighters.

The rebels, mainly Syrian Arabs and Turkmen fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, took charge of the frontier between Azaz and Jarablus after seizing 20 villages from the Sunni hardline group, the Turkish military said in a statement.

That puts Turkey in firm control of a stretch of land it sees as a bulwark against the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish YPG militia. However, that could sharpen tensions with the United States over Syria policy.

Turkey is fighting a three-decade-old Kurdish insurgency in its southeast and fears that gains by the Syrian Kurdish YPG will embolden militants at home. Turkey considers the YPG a terrorist organisation and an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

"We are there to protect our border, to provide for our citizens safety of life and property, and to ensure Syria's integrity," Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said in a speech on Sunday, discussing the incursion, which Ankara calls Euphrates Shield.

"We will never allow the formation of an artificial state in the north of Syria," he told a crowd in Diyarbakir, the largest city in the mainly Kurdish southeast.

The advance took place little more than a week after Turkey launched the Syrian incursion, deploying tanks and air power to support the rebels, who swept into the border town of Jarablus.

On Saturday, Turkey and its rebel allies opened a new line of attack in northern Syria, rolling across the border some 55 km (34 miles) west of Jarablus.

The United States had said on Saturday it some Islamic State targets in the region, but it did not say where.

While the United States and Europe also regard the PKK as a terrorist group, Washington sees the YPG as a separate entity and an effective client in the fight against Islamic State in Syria. That position has caused friction with Turkey, a NATO member and a partner in anti-IS coalition.

President Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday raised concern about the formation of a "terror corridor" along Turkey's Syrian border.

Speaking to reporters after a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama at the G20 gathering of world leaders in China, Erdogan said: "It is our wish that a terror corridor not be formed across our southern border".

Erdogan has repeatedly said that Turkey's allies should not be making a distinction between Islamic State and the YPG as both groups pose a threat to Turkey.

Some Kurds have criticised Turkey for its role in Syria. A demonstration broke out along the Syrian border on Friday, where Turkey is building a concrete wall. Police used tear gas and water cannon to drive the protesters back.

At a rally in Istanbul on Sunday, the co-head of Turkey's Kurdish-rooted Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) denounced the incursion into Syria as an "invasion".

"The government, which says it wants to stop ISIS (Islamic State) with the Jarablus invasion, has no credibility. The invasion of Jarablus is totally an adversarial approach against Kurds and we will never accept it," Selahattin Demirtas told reporters.

Separately, Anadolu said Turkish warplanes hit four Islamic State positions on Saturday evening in Syria's northwestern Aleppo province as part of the operation, citing security sources.

The warplanes hit three targets in the al-Kaldi area and another in the Wuguf region, Anadolu said, citing the sources.
An 11-month-old baby was allegedly abducted and raped by her neighbour in west Delhi's Vikaspuri late on Friday. The 36-year-old accused worked as a construction labourer at the office-cum-residential complex of Delhi Police's 3rd battalion.

According to the police, the infant was sleeping with her mother at a make-shift shelter within the police housing complex. Around 10pm, the accused, finding her mother asleep, spirited away the child to a nearby jungle. The police were informed when the mother found the infant missing around 11pm.

indiasamvad.co.in/Represenatational image

Senior officers said that the survivor was found in an unconscious state by a police team from Vikaspuri police station. The cops informed her parents and took her to Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital and had her admitted to the intensive care unit there. "The girl was bleeding profusely.

Doctors at the hospital have said that her condition is serious," said a senior officer. At the spot where the police located the child, they also found a cell phone. "The police team was helped by the recovery of the mobile phone to track the location of the accused," said the officer. "We traced him to the labour camp."

Reuters/Represenatational image

The accused initially denied being involved in the crime, but on sustained questioning admitted to the rape. Police said that he was a resident of Bihar and travelled to Delhi periodically to work as a construction labourer.

"The survivor's father and the accused were both employed by the same contractor to construct a boundary wall around the police office," said the officer.

Police said the accused lived with the other labourers engaged in building the boundary wall. In his confession, he told police that he picked up the infant around 10pm. "He said he then took her to the bushes beside a drain and raped her for nearly two hours," the officer said. Fearing that she had died when she became unconscious, he left the child in the bushes and fled to his shack.

BCCL/Represenatational image

When the girl's mother raised an alarm, he made sure to be noticed as one of the men helping the police and family to search for the infant. Pushpendra Kumar, DCP (West) said that an FIR for rape under Section 376 of the Indian Penal Code and Section 6 of the POCSO Act had been registered and the accused sent to Tihar Jail.

Police have also recorded the statements of the child's parents. "I was horrified to see my daughter's condition," said the shocked father. "Her clothes were torn and she had nail marks all over the body. The severe injuries might have a lifelong impact on her health."

Swati Maliwal, Delhi Commission for Women chief, visited the hospital and met the child's family members.
Mother Teresa is not the first Indian to be be raised to sainthood, 3 other personalities from Kerala's Christian community have received this honour from the Vatican.

1. Saint Alphonsa

Sixty years after her death, Kerala-born nun Sister Alphonsa became the first Indian woman to be conferred sainthood. Since 2008, her name is invoked in Church masses the world over. Sister Alphonsa's beatification - recognition by Church of a dead person's accession to heaven - was ordained by Pope John Paul II during his visit to Kerala in February 1986. She has also been the subject of about 50 books till date. 9 CDs of songs and dramatic narratives and telefilms are also available. Miniatures and images of St Alphonsa can now be purchased from the main bookstalls in Kerala.



Miracle (s) considered for sainthood



Healing of a one-year-old boy, Jinil, who could not walk because of a disability, who then regained control of his legs the day his parents took him to the Sister's tomb for prayers.

2. Saint Euphrasia Eluvathingal

Sister Euphrasia was born as Rosa Eluvathingal Oct 7, 1877, at Edathuruthy (Ollur) in Thrissur district. She joined Congregation of the Mother of Carmel and received her veil as a nun in May 1900. "Evuprasiamma", as she is known to the members of the local community around her convent in Ollur, brought spiritual solace to the people who approached her through prayers and wise counsel. Sister Euphrasia, who was born on October 17, 1877 at Arnattukara in Thrissur and died in 1952, was significantly a member of the Congregation of Mother of Carmel (CMC), founded by Chavara for women.

She was declared Servant of God in 1987 and beatified in 2006 after the approval of a miracle attributed through her intercession by the Vatican panel set up to consider her case for Sainthood.



Miracle (s) considered for sainthood

1. She reported healed a carpenter from bone cancer in Ollur. The man's sister, Rosy, later claimed that cure was the result of her prayer to Euphrasia.

2. She also reportedly healed seven-year old child named Jewel from Aloor in Thrissur District, after his grandmother prayed to Euphrasia.

3. Saint Kuriakose Elias Chavara

In 2014, Pope Francis declared Fr Kuriakose Elias Chavara a saint, giving the centuries old Syro Malabar Catholic Church three Saints, the first being Sister Alphonsa. The CMI has over the decades set up a large number of educational and charity organisations within and outside Kerala, drawing inspiration from the work and vision of its founder. He was born in a family of modest means at Kainakari village in Kuttanad in Alappuzha district on February 10, 1805. He entered the seminary for training as a priest at a young age. After his ordination in 1829, he took the initiative to form the CMI in 1831, the first congregation for men in the Syro Malabar Church.

Chavara was also a social reformer and believed that intellectual development and education of women was the first step towards overall social welfare. He first introduced the system called "A school along with every church", which was successful in making free education available for everyone.

According to church scholars, Syro Malabar Church, which traces its origin to the visit of Apostle St Thomas to the Kerala coast in the first century AD, is one of the 22 Eastern Churches in Full Communion with Rome.

Miracle (s) considered for sainthood

According to a site managed by the (CMI) Chavara Institute Of Indian And Inter-Religious Studies, the miracle considered for Chavara's sainthood was "instantaneous, total and stable cure of the squint eye of a Maria Jose Kottarathil", who suffered from a "defect of congenital squint (alternating esotropia) in both her eyes"
India is 35 tanker-trucks short of the blood it requires for medical procedures, yet some areas of the country wasted blood because there was too much of it, according to an IndiaSpend analysis of government data.

BCCL

The shortage was estimated at 1.1 million units -- as blood is measured, with a unit being either 350 ml or 450 ml -- in 2015-16, Minister for Health and Family Welfare J.P. Nadda told the Lok Sabha in July 2016.

We converted these data into tankers, assuming a standard tanker-truck of 11,000 lt and a 350 ml unit.

In percentage terms, India is 9 per cent short of its needs -- the shortage reducing from 17 per cent in 2013-2014. The 9 per cent national shortfall hides local shortages and oversupply.

Bihar is 84 per cent short of its blood requirements, more than any other state, followed by Chhattisgarh (66 per cent) and Arunachal Pradesh (64 per cent). Chandigarh had almost nine times the blood it needed, Delhi three times, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Mizoram, and Pondicherry twice, according to government data.

Reuters

Also Read: Once Afraid Of Needle Pricks, This Young Man Created A Pan-India Network Of 10,000 Blood Donors

India has 2,708 blood banks, but 81 districts still lack one, according to government data. Chhattisgarh has the most districts without a blood bank (11), followed by Assam and Arunachal Pradesh (9). Blood donations are largely from and for the same community, said Zarin Bharucha, pathologist and Chairperson of Federation of Bombay Blood Banks.

Rural areas find blood supplies harder to access.

"India has a huge rural population, almost 70 per cent, and we need to be able to provide blood in the most remote areas also," Bharucha said.

Shortages may also be due to the fact that there is no central collection agency, leaving the logistics of collecting blood to single blood banks and local governments. Some areas may collect too much blood at the same time, instead of doing it at a constant run.

BCCL

"This leads to two issues," said Bharucha. "First, that area is likely to experience a shortage of donations in the future. In a country without a donation culture, if everyone donates at the same time, they won't show up for a while. Second, you might have so much blood that you won't need it. So, a part of it will be wasted."

Between January 2011 and December 2015, 63 blood banks across Mumbai wasted 130,000 litres of blood, the Asian Age reported in May 2016, quoting a reply that Right to Information (RTI) activist Chetan Kothari received from the Mumbai District AIDS Control Society, which revealed that the blood was discarded because it was stored for too long.

Reuters

Also Read: Pakistani Youth Will Line Up At An Indian Blood Donation Camp On Mahatma Gandhi's Birth Anniversary

World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines on blood donations require all blood to come through voluntary donations from low-risk populations. The National Aids Control Organisation (NACO), a division of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, running HIV/AIDS control programmes, reported that blood donated voluntarily increased from 54 per cent in 2006 to 84 per cent in 2013-2014.

Activists said this figure is misleading. They argue that NACO started counting family donations as voluntary, a practice that goes against WHO's definition of voluntary donation.

Paid "donations" were banned by a Supreme Court ruling in 1996, but the practice continues. Hospitals that are short of blood often ask a patient's family to find what are called "replacement donors".

BCCL

"Not everyone has a donor available, so they might land up getting a paid donor, someone masked as a family member who already knows the question they will be asked," said Bharucha.

Getting paid donors may not be safe: donors might either not be tested or provide a false medical history just in order to get paid, increasing the chances for the blood-receiver of getting a transfusion-transmitted infection (TTI) such as HIV, hepatitis A and B and malaria.

Shortages of blood also lead to a black market. In 2008, 17 people were kidnapped for two-and-half years and forced to donate blood so that the kidnappers could sell it to blood banks and hospitals, some of which were accused of being complicit, the BBC reported in January 2015.

BCCL

They were forced to donate blood three times a week.

The Red Cross says blood should be donated no more than once in 8-12 weeks.

"Since the need for blood is increasing, not least because the surgery field is improving and medical tourism is expanding, we need to spread awareness through the communities," said Bharucha.

"We need to create a culture of regular donations: giving blood every three months will increase blood supply as well as blood safety."

Also Read: The Japanese Are Developing Artificial Blood And It Could Potentially Do Away With Blood Donation
All are equal before the law, they say. But it's not so in dry Bihar where air passengers carrying liquor to the state are let off while trains passengers land in the slammer for the same offence.

catchnews.com/Represenatational image

The Nitish Kumar government imposed prohibition in the state on April 5 this year. In the five months or so, the Government Railway Police arrested 460 train passengers at different stations. They were forwarded to jail following seizure of bottles containing 6,268 litres of India-made foreign liquor (IMFL) from them.

That's the official figure as maintained by the state excise department for the period from April 5 to August 28. A copy of the excise department records is with TOI.

Reuters/Represenatational image

During the period, however, not a single flyer landing at the Patna's Jayaprakash Narain Airport was nabbed for carrying booze bottles in his baggage. Not that they were not carrying any.

Deployed at the arrival lounge to randomly frisk flyers for the purpose, excise sleuths detected IMFL bottles in the luggage of 38 people. Asked to "surrender" the bottles before exiting out of airport terminal, the flyers of course obliged the authorities.

pri.org/Represenatational image

Excise department sources admitted 60 bottles containing 34 litres of IMFL were "surrendered" by 17 air passengers arriving at Patna in May; nine air passengers in June; seven in July; three in August and two air passengers arriving at Patna on the first two days of the current month.

While policemen across the state and GRP men at railway stations are on the prowl with altogether 289 breathalysers in hand, the air passengers are exempt from such a test. For, the sources said, the excise officials on "prohibition duty" at the airport were ordered to "deposit" their breathalysers after a VIP flyer complained to the powers-that-be against the "humiliating experience".

Reuters/Represenatational image

The state government's proposal to install baggage X-ray scanners at the airport is also hanging fire. There's a plan to purchase 14 such machines for six major railway stations and the Patna and Gaya airports. "The department has floated a fresh tender for the purpose," excise department's PRO Om Prakash Mandal said on Friday.

In the five months, the GRP arrested 460 train passengers at different stations. During the period, however, not a single flyer landing at the Patna's Jayaprakash Narain Airport was nabbed for carrying booze bottles in his baggage.
Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi, who is on a visit to his constituency Amethi had to face angry anganwadi protesters, seeking an increase in their wages.

This is the second group of protesters that the Nehru-Gandhi scion had to encounter in Amethi in as many days.

BCCL

The women workers gathered at Gauriganj town of Amethi on the route that Rahul was to take to air their grievances. A fracas ensued when police tried to prevent them from blocking the Congress member's way. After arriving at the scene, Rahul was forced to come out of his car and listen to the their grievances.

BCCL

On Thursday, an expelled Congress member and his supporters had staged a dharna, demanding the removal of party chief Sonia Gandhi's representative K L Sharma. Rahul asked party workers, who were involved in groupism, on Friday "to mend their ways" so that a united Congress could win the UP assembly polls.

BCCL
At least ten persons, including a woman, have been injured in Bangladesh when a clash erupted between Hindus at an Iskcon temple and Muslim devotees from a nearby mosque, forcing police to fire blank shots to disperse them.

The clash took place after Friday prayers when Muslim devotees went to the temple to request the authorities to stop playing the devotional songs that were being played on occasion of a kirtan, said Sylhet Metropolitan Police Additional Commissioner S.M. Rokan Uddin.

intoday.in

Muslim devotees went to the temple before the jumma prayers and had requested the temple authorities to stop the devotional songs while the prayers are held. However, when the songs were not stopped, the devotees went there again and got locked in an altercation, Mr. Uddin said.

jihadwatch.org

At one point, both groups started hurling bricks leaving ten people injured, he added. On being alerted, police rushed to the spot and fired several blank shots.

surmanews24.com

When contacted, Iskcon temple Principal Gaurango Brahmachari said the temple authorities were considering filing a case.
Pakistan police has charged the ex-husband and father of British national Samia Shahid, believed to be the victim of a "honour killing", with her murder. Shahid, a dual national, died in July after she visited her family village in Pakistan's Punjab.

Her second husband, Mukhtar Kazam, claims she was murdered for bringing "dishonour" on her family.

dawn.com

Kazam has said his wife had angered her parents by converting to Shia Islam, his sect, before their wedding.

Pak Teenage Girl Burnt By Her Own Mother And Brother For Marrying A Man She Loved

"We have completed our investigation and concluded that her ex-husband Mohammad Shakeel and father Mohammad Shahid were involved in her killing," said Abubakar Buksh, deputy inspector general of police in the region.

telegraph.co.uk

"Her ex-husband has also been charged with raping her," he told AFP. "The abetment of Samia's mother and sister in the crime has also been proved but they have fled to the UK. We have also arrested the chief of the local police station for helping them escape."

Shahid's father has denied the charges, claiming his daughter died of natural causes.

huffingtonpost.com

Hundreds of women are murdered by relatives each year on the pretext of defending what is seen as family honour. Rights groups and politicians have for years called for tougher laws to tackle perpetrators of violence against women in Pakistan.

thesun.co.uk

Police charged the ex-husband and father of a British woman believed to have been the victim of an 'honour killing' with her murder on Saturday. Samia Shahid, a dual national, died in July during a visit to her family village in Punjab. Her second husband, Mukhtar Kazam, claims she was murdered for bringing "dishonour" on her family.

Pakistan loses 1000 lives every year to honour killings, and victims are usually women

Pakistani Shoots Sisters Before Their Wedding, Because They Chose Their Own Husbands

According to Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, around 800 women were killed last year in Punjab in "honour killings". The Punjab government has introduced more strict legislation for protection of women.
A 29-year-old Bulgarian wrestler vigilante is on the ISIS radar for patrolling Bulgarias borders on horseback. Dinko Valev is a bounty hunter who catches immigrants who illegally try to cross the countrys border.

Image Credit: Dinko Valev/Facebook

The beefy wrestler has a team of enforcers who patrol the border and arrest refugees and hand them over to authorities.

This, however, hasnt gone down well with the ISIS who want the wrestler dead. The ISIS has declared 38,000 (Rs 33 Lakh) bounty on his head. They have described him as the leader of a paramilitary unit operating on the BulgarianTurkish border.

The Bulgarian State Security has warned Valev that he is the prime target of ISIS. Valev considers his work as a sport and a public service to Bulgaria. Hes suddenly so famous that been offered a place on the countrys version of Big Brother in his country.
Pentagon And CIA at War in Syria

By Eric Margolis

September 03, 2016 "

Information Clearing House

" - What a mess! In the crazy Syrian war, US-backed and armed groups are fighting other US-backed rebel groups. How can this be?

It is so because the Obama White House had stirred up the war in Syria but then lost control of the process. When the US has a strong president, he can usually keep the military and intelligence agencies on a tight leash.

But the Obama administration has had a weak secretary of defense and a bunch of lady strategists who are the worst military commanders since Louis XV, who put his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, in charge of French military forces during the Seven Years War. The French were routed by the Prussians. Frances foe, Frederick the Great of Prussia, named one of his dogs, la Pompadour.

As a result, the two arms of offensive US strategic power, the Pentagon, and CIA, went separate ways in Syria. Growing competition between the US military and militarized CIA broke into the open in Syria.

Fed up with the astounding incompetence of the White House, the US military launched and supported its own rebel groups in Syria, while CIA did the same.

Fighting soon after erupted in Syria and Iraq between the US-backed groups. US Special Forces joined the fighting in Syria, Iraq and most lately, Libya.

The well-publicized atrocities, like mass murders and decapitations, greatly embarrassed Washington, making it harder to portray their jihadi wildmen as liberators. The only thing exceptional about US policy in Syria was its astounding incompetence.

Few can keep track of the 1,000 groups of jihadis that keep changing their names and shifting alliances. Throw in Turkomans, Yazidis, Armenians, Nestorians, Druze, Circassians, Alawis, Assyrians and Palestinians. Oh yes, and the Alevis.

Meanwhile, ISIS was inflicting mayhem in Syria and Iraq. But who really is ISIS? A few thousand twenty-something hooligans with little knowledge of Islam but a burning desire to dynamite the existing order and a sharp media sense. The leadership of these turbaned anarchists appears to have formed in US prison camps in Afghanistan.

The US, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey armed and financed ISIS as a weapon to unleash on Syria, which was an ally of Iran that refused to take orders from the Western powers. The west bears a heavy responsibility for the deaths of 450,000 Syrians, at least half the nation of 23 million becoming refugees, and destruction of this once lovely country.

At some point, ISIS shook off its western tutors and literally ran amok. But the US has not yet made a concerted attempt to crush ISIS because of its continuing usefulness in Syria and in the US, where ISIS has become the favorite whipping boy of politicians.

Next, come the Kurds, an ancient Indo-European stateless people spread across Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. They have been denied a national state by the western powers since WWI. Kurdish rebels in Iraq have been armed and financed by Israel since the 1970s.

When Americas Arab jihadists proved militarily feeble, the US turned to the Kurds, who are renowned fighters, arming and financing the Kurdish Syrian YPG which is part of the well-known PKK rebel group that fights Turkey.

I covered the Turkish-Kurdish conflict in eastern Anatolia in the 1980s in which some 40,000 died.

Turkey is now again battling a rising wave of Kurdish attacks that caused the Turks to probe into northern Syria to prevent a link-up of advancing Kurdish rebel forces.

So, Turkey, a key American ally, is now battling CIA-backed Kurdish groups in Syria. Eighty percent of Turks believe the recent failed coup in Turkey was mounted by the US  not the White House, but by the Pentagon which has always been joined at the hip to Turkeys military.

This major Turkish-Kurdish crisis was perfectly predictable, but the obtuse junior warriors of the Obama administration failed to grasp this point.

Now the Russians have entered the fray in an effort to prevent their ally, Bashar Assad, from being overthrow by western powers. Also perfectly predictable. Russia claimed to be bombing ISIS but in fact, is targeting US-backed groups. Washington is outraged that the wicked Russians are doing in the Mideast what the US has done for decades.

The US and Russia now both claim to have killed a senior ISIS commander in an air strike. Their warplanes are dodging one another, creating a perfect scenario for a head-on clash at a time when neocons in the US are agitating for war with Russia.

Does anyone think poor, demolished Syria is worth the price? Hatred for the US is now seething in Turkey and across the Mideast. Hundreds of millions of US tax dollars have been wasted in this cruel, pointless war.
In Attempted Hit Piece

NYT Makes Putin Hero of Defeating TPP By emptywheel September 04, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " emptywheel " - In an remarkable hit piece NYT spent over 5,000 words yesterday trying to prove that all of WikiLeaks leaks are motivated from a desire to benefit Russia. That of course took some doing. It required ignoring the evidence of the other potential source of motivation for Julian Assange  such as that Hillary participated in an aggressive, and potentially illegal, prosecution of Assange for being a publisher and Chelsea Manning for being his source  even as it repeatedly presented evidence that that was Assanges motivation. Putin, who clashed repeatedly with Mrs. Clinton when she was secretary of state, [snip] In late November 2010, United States officials announced an investigation of WikiLeaks; Mrs. Clinton, whose State Department was scrambled by what became known as Cablegate, vowed to take aggressive steps to hold those responsible to account. [snip] Another person who collaborated with WikiLeaks in the past added: He views everything through the prism of how hes treated. America and Hillary Clinton have caused him trouble, and Russia never has. It also required dismissing some of the most interesting counterexamples to the NYTs thesis. Sunshine Press, the groups public relations voice, pointed out that in 2012 WikiLeaks also published an archive it called the Syria files  more than two million emails from and about the government of President Bashar al-Assad, whom Russia is supporting in Syrias civil war. Yet at the time of the release, Mr. Assanges associate, Ms. Harrison, characterized the material as embarrassing to Syria, but it is also embarrassing to Syrias opponents. Since then, Mr. Assange has accused the United States of deliberately destabilizing Syria, but has not publicly criticized human rights abuses by Mr. Assad and Russian forces fighting there. As I have noted, there is a significant likelihood that the Syria files came via Sabu and Anonymous from the FBI  that is, that it was actually an American spy operation. Even aside from how important a counterexample the Syrian files are (because they went directly contrary to Putins interests in protecting Assad, no matter how bad they made Assads western trade partners look), the provenance of these files and Assanges current understanding of them deserve some attention if NYT is going to spend 5,000 words on this story. But the most remarkable stunt in this 5,000 screed is taking Wikileaks efforts to show policies a great many people believe are counterproductive  most importantly, passing trade deals that benefit corporations while hurting real people, but also weakening other strong hands in climate change negotiations  and insinuating they might be a Putinesque plot. This bit requires editorial notes in line: From November 2013 to May 2016, WikiLeaks published documents describing internal deliberations on two trade pacts: the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would liberalize trade [ed: no, it would protect IP, the opposite of liberalizing trade] between the United States, Japan and 10 other Pacific Rim countries, and the Trade in Services Agreement, an accord between the United States, 21 other countries and the European Union. Russia, which was excluded, has been the most vocal opponent of the pacts [this is presented with no evidence, nor even a standard of evidence. I and all of Americas TPP opponents as well as TPP opponents from around the world must redouble our very loud effort], with Mr. Putin portraying them as an effort to give the United States an unfair leg up in the global economy. The drafts released by WikiLeaks stirred controversy among environmentalists, advocates of internet freedom and privacy, labor leaders and corporate governance watchdogs, among others. They also stoked populist resentment against free trade that has become an important factor in American and European politics. [Here, rather than admitting that this broad opposition to these trade deals shows that Putin is not the most vocal opponent of these pacts  contrary to their foundational assumption in this section  they instead portray a wide spectrum of well-considered activism as unthinking response to Putinesque manipulation. And note, here, a news outlet is complaining that ordinary citizens get access to critically important news, without even blushing? Also note the NYT makes no mention of the members of Congress who were also begging for this information, which makes it easier to ignore the profoundly anti-democratic nature of these trade agreements.] The material was released at critical moments, with the apparent aim of thwarting negotiations, American trade officials said. [In a piece obscuring the unpopular and anti-democratic nature of these trade deals, the NYT gives these sources anonymity.] WikiLeaks highlighted the domestic and international discord on its Twitter accounts. American negotiators assumed that the leaks had come from a party at the table seeking leverage. [That anonymity again: NYT is protecting some bitter trade negotiators whove invented a paranoid conspiracy here. On what grounds?] Then in July 2015, on the day American and Japanese negotiators were working out the final details of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, came what WikiLeaks dubbed its Target Tokyo release. Relying on top-secret N.S.A. documents, the release highlighted 35 American espionage targets in Japan, including cabinet members and trade negotiators, as well as companies like Mitsubishi. The trade accord was finally agreed on  though it has not been ratified by the United States Senate  but the document release threw a wrench into the talks. The lesson for Japan is this: Do not expect a global surveillance superpower to act with honor or respect, Mr. Assange said in a news release at the time. There is only one rule: There are no rules. [That the US spies on trade negotiations was of course not news by this point. But it is, nevertheless, worthy to point out.] Because of the files provenance, United States intelligence officials assumed that Mr. Assange had gotten his hands on some of the N.S.A. documents copied by Mr. Snowden. But in an interview, Glenn Greenwald, one of the two journalists entrusted with the full Snowden archive, said that Mr. Snowden had not given his documents to WikiLeaks and that the Target Tokyo documents were not even among those Mr. Snowden had taken. The next paragraph goes on to note that the same NSA documents focused on climate negotiations between Germany and the UN, which seems to suggest the NYT also believes it is in petro-state leader Putins interest for the US attempts to dominate climate change negotiations to be thwarted, even as Assange describes US actions as protection petroleum interests, which of course align with Putins own. In other words, as a central piece of evidence, the NYT spent 11 paragraphs repackaging opposition to shitty trade deals  a widely held very American view (not to mention a prominent one is most other countries affected)  into something directed by Russia, as if the only reasons to oppose TPP are to keep Russia on an equal shitty neoliberal trade footing as the rest of us, as if opposing the deals dont benefit a whole bunch of red-blooded Americans. Thats not only logically disastrous, especially in something billed as news, but it is very dangerous. It makes legitimate opposition to bad (albeit widely accepted as good within beltway and I guess NYT conventional wisdom) policy something disloyal. NYTs argument that Putin was behind WikiLeaks NSA leaks doesnt hold together for a lot of reasons (not least that those two topics are probably not what Putin would prioritize, or even close). But it also has the bizarre effect, in a hit piece targeting Assange and Putin, of making Putin the hero of the anti-TPP movement. And yet, NYTs three journalists dont seem to understand how counterproductive to their journalistic endeavor that argument is. Update: Oy. As Trevor Timm notes, NYT worked with WL on the TPP release.
Pathology Incorporated; The Facade Of American Democracy By Nozomi Hayase September 04, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - With the rigged Democratic presidential nomination behind us, the US election reality show continues. The mass media is creating sensations around what has become a national embarrassment with this contest of the lesser of the two crazies. On the one hand we have Donald Trump, depicted as a quintessential narcissist and on the other, Hillary Clinton who is often portrayed as a sociopath. Hype is created by putting these labels on the candidates, pitting one personality disorder against the other. This is a corporate sponsored election charade doing business as usual and distracting people from the real power behind the veil. In The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profits and Power, filmmaker and law professor Joel Bakan (2004)examined the consistent character attributes of corporations and concludes that if they were a human, they are a textbook example of a psychopath. Psychopathy is a personality disorder that cuts off those who are affected by it from the emotional reality of others. The core of this pathology is the inability to put oneself into someones shoes. Empathy is the seat of conscience, and without it comes an incapacity for love. These candidates are just symptoms of a system run by corporations, which is now revealing the full fledge of pathology incorporated here in the United States. When a society lacks understanding of the depth of its darkness, this unaccounted power sees no bounds for its pursuit of a single vision. The Perversion of Humanity In his seminal work The Mask of Sanity, first published in 1941, psychiatrist Hervey M. Cleckleyarticulated how, among the traits of psychopathy such as superficial charm, emotional poverty and egocentricity, its essential characteristic lies in its deceitful nature. Those who are devoid of empathy hide their lack of internal structure in a facade of normalcy. By emulating good human attributes, these unknown members of society prey on the rest. They have found the best way to mask their vice by infiltrating governments and directly altering the definition of the norm. Through control of monetary supply and monopoly over markets, these 1% pathological beings have financially engineered a perversion of humanity through a pyramid Ponzi scheme of Darwinian survival of the most callous and cunning. By turning morality upside down, they not only make their deviance invisible, but actively incentivize these disturbing characters, making all people engage in this race to the bottom. By seducing masses with the allure of middle class lifestyle and material pursuit of happiness, the beast within humanity unlocked citizens unconscious desires and opened the door to unbridled commercial interests. The government that was hijacked by corporate lobbyists established a symbiotic relationship with its own people, making voters become the host, through manufacturing consent. While people are busy chasing the American dream in shopping malls and trying to climb a corporate ladder of success, these parasites latch onto the vulnerable, sucking the blood of innocents in the Middle East and the laboring sweat of disadvantaged populations around the world. Like adventurous American eagles who have no fear of soaring too high, corporate patronage networks with wings of oil companies on the right and the Wall Street banking industries on the left take flight to conquer the globe. Vultures circle around the Bermuda Triangle of the TPP, TTIP and TISA, creating a vortex of unregulated greed. When their conquest turns sour, they make sure they get bailed out by the taxpayers and then move on to their next fraud or crime. Devouring Conscience Waves of whisleblowers in recent years have brought true resistance against this corporate takeover of democracy. Human beings who feel the pulse of conscience in the heart are a real threat to this authoritarian state that works in secrecy. They punish with impunity these truthtellers who reveal their crimes. Chelsea Manning, who shed light on government illegal wars, is in prison serving 35 years, being placed in a solitary cage and denied basic care. After her recent suicide attempt, the state tried to punish her even more. Edward Snowden, who blew the whistle on NSA mass surveillance remains in exile. Admins of this merciless autocratic system deflect issues and project characteristics that belong to them. With smear campaigns and character assassination, the mainstream media attacks anyone who dares to hold an accurate mirror of what they are really doing. WikiLeaks, the publisher of last resort, has been a target of this coordinated assault. After the organization released troves of US classified military records of the Afghan war, joint Chief of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen saidWikiLeaks might have blood on their hands, when in reality these documents revealed the US Governments own murder of 20,000 people by assassination, civilian massacres and night raids. This assault on global free press never ends. Called by US officials a high tech terrorist and incited for assassination, WikiLeaks editor in chief, Julian Assange remains detained in the Ecuadorian embassy, despite a UN Working Groups ruling clearly stating this detention as unlawful. Recent WikiLeakspublication of DNC emails that led to the forced resignation of top officials has shown the Democratic Partys collusion with corporate media in undermining Bernie Sanders campaign and rigging the presidential primary. This Democratic Partys habit of destabilizing democracy is nothing new. A lawsuit was filed against their use of groundless and abusive litigation to bankrupt third party Ralph Naders campaign, obstructing his ballot access in 18 states during his run in 2004. Back then, pundits and progressive news outlets in unison kept silent about such injustice and instead created an echo chamber, calling him a spoiler. We are now seeing the same old knee-jerk reaction. In response to the DNC leaks, the establishment media and the left has attacked Assange and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, slandering them as colluding with Vladimir Putin. New DNC chair Donna Brazile has now joined the attack, twisting reality by callingAssange a cyber-criminal. These apologists for power pledge their allegiance to the Clinton Foundation  the flag of Goldman Sachs, Google and Exxon, and fiercely defend this pathological pursuit of the Corporate States of America. The Barbarian Within These developments are all a part of their psychological makeup. Psychopathic abuse unfolds in three stages, defined as idealization, devaluation and discard. With charm and feigned empathy, they allure potential victims into their snare. As soon as they seal the relationship and take what they want, they begin looking for their next victim to exploit. At one point, sooner or later, the mask of the psychopath slips and the monster beneath reveals itself. Psychopathy has been running throughout the history of America, dragging people into a mission of Manifest Destiny. The indigenous of this country were terrorized and murdered, while blacks were enslaved and brutalized. The poor and people of color have been continuously abandoned and impoverished. They have all seen the barbarians inside Western civilization and now even the crumbling middle class is beginning to see the face of this savage beast. Obamas campaign was a mastery of deception. Now, the devaluation is moving into the final stage. The masks are blowing off and corporate masters behind the scenes dont even care to maintain a semblance of democracy anymore. The lesser of two evils in this election cycle, showcasing the two most disliked presidential candidates in US history, is a testimony of this. Trump blazes through his campaign trail with bombardment of racism, bigotry and word salads of mouthy contradictions. When reflecting on the death of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, Hillary Clinton cackled; We came, we saw, he died- showing a total lack of compassion and laughing at the role she played then as secretary of state in the complete destruction of a country and leader, who might still be alive if he hadnt challenged the petrodollar hegemony by trying to create a new currency for Africa. The US election as a center of oligarchic control is now having its own pathology and disdain for life in full display. When the mask of sanity slips, the system comes into the final stage  the discard phase. Cure Is in the Pain It is clear now that this election is just another smoky mirror, yet what is not generally known is that the American people have already been discarded. Many are still enmeshed in the illusion or simply refuse to see it. In the eyes of corporate personhood, which is nothing but a legal fiction, our humanity is becoming more and more disposable. This artificial entity is run by cannibalistic desires and cunning intelligence with no heart that can feel for others. It is driven by relentless destructive urges for control and power, even if it may destroy the world and itself in the process. Bakan (2004) argues how they are in a word, inhumanand its goal, as Noam Chomsky states, is to ensure that the human beings who [it is] interacting with, you and me, also become inhuman. We are now seeing this vision of a future with trans-humanism agendas. Cybernetic technology and Artificial Intelligence is attempting to marry machines with humans, while efforts like Bill Gates vaccine project, presented as saving lives, apparently aims to depopulate through what amounts to 21st century eugenics. With this trend, a plan to reprogram humanity to become just a cog in a wheel seems to have reached a new stage. When robots replace labor, corporations wont need workers anymore. When drones and missiles are automated, they dont need soldiers anymore who are still willing to fight for this bloody pathological pursuit of power. Psychopaths move on when resources are depleted or their targets just arent useful anymore. They have no remorse for victims of their crimes; the unemployed, elderly, indebted, foreclosed and veterans with PTSD. Where does this lead us? Many who have endured psychopathic abuse in their personal life escaped these toxic relationships and became survivors. They woke up in the midst of horror and found the strength to defy illegitimate authority that had been installed in their minds. Hope now can be found in the courage of our fellow humans and simply in walking away from a society maligned with these heartless agendas. We can regain sanity by breaking the entrapment of this agreement and change the terms of engagement. While these giants appear very powerful, they are mere shadows magnified by our insecurity, fear and unrecognized potential. They are the few and we are the many. When we stop playing along with this virtual fantasy of grandeur, their world dissolves. Psychopaths do not possess the creativity that we have. Without an ability to feel deeply, they cant generate life and all they can do is mimic and feed off of others. Carl Jung once said, one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The cure is in the pain and our conscious suffering. Our ability to feel our own pain awakens compassion  reminds us of our inherent obligation to one another. What doesnt kill us makes us stronger and can help build a more resilient immunity. With the power of empathy and imagination that is an innate gift in all of us, we can network new pathways, creating a world that truly embodies what it is to be human. Nozomi Hayase , Ph.D., is a writer who has been covering issues of freedom of speech, transparency and decentralized movements. Find her on twitter @nozomimagine
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has denied warning President Muhammadu Buhari against seeking for a second term in 2019.

The former president, who was reacting to a report credited to his former Chief Press Secretary (CPS), Alex Nwokedi, in an on-line publication (not Information Nigeria) on Saturday that he warned Buhari against seeking re-election, described it as completely false and destructive.

A statement by Kehinde Akinyemi, media aide to Obasanjo in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital on Sunday, said there has been no communication between the elder statesman and Nwokedi in the last three years, and wondered why any news would be attributed to him, as published by the on-line publication.

He said My belief is that democracy allowed for anybody including President Buhari for that matter to contest any election and it is the prerogative rights of Nigerians to vote or not to vote for them.

I have not communicated with Alex in the last three years, so how could a story be credited to me, when I did not authorize such or communicate with him in the last three years? Obasanjo queried.

He further said not even me, can advise my children not to seek for elective post. It is part of freedom of democracy.

I condemn in the most highest (sic) manner the story and those behind it. And for those behind it, they are simply enemies of democracy and freedom of expression.

Mr. Obasanjo said that he is still committed to the peace and progress of the countrys democratic development, which he assures would bring relief in no distance future with patience and understanding of the countrys masses.
The Chief of the Air Staff (CAS), Air Marshal Sadique Abubakar, has disclosed that the Nigerian Air Force (NAF) will deploy additional personnel to the Niger Delta as part of the resolve to combat militancy and other forms of internal security challenges in the oil-rich region.

The Air Chief was quoted as making the disclosure while on operational visit to NAF Mobility Command in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State on Saturday.

A statement issued by the spokesman of the NAF, Group Captain Ayodele Famuyiwa, said the planned deployment is aimed at strengthening the Forces existing manpower disposition, especially in Bayelsa State, and to enhance its involvement in Operation Delta Safe.

It added that preparatory to the deployment, new facilities were recently put in place to cater for accommodation and other welfare needs of the personnel.

These facilities include construction of new blocks of accommodation for officers and men, office accommodation, airmen mess, and provost squadron, which were commissioned recently.

Two of the airmens block of accommodation were named after Corporal Omaka V.I and Aircraft man Ofonih E.F, both of whom were killed recently in Bosso, Niger State during an Internal Security Operation, the NAF spokesman said in the statement.

Famuyiwa also said Air Vice Marshal Larry Koinyan (retd.) commissioned the newly constructed projects as the Guest of Honour.

He said while speaking at the commissioning ceremony, the retired AVM lauded NAF personnel for their courage and successes brought about by the renewed vigour at ensuring peace and stability in the various theatres of operations across the country.

Mr. Koinyan, he noted, also called on Bayelsans to partner with the Federal Government to provide holistic solutions to the problems of the Niger Delta.

Group Captain Famuyiwa further said, earlier during Air Marshal Abubakars courtesy call on the Governor of Bayelsa State, Henry Seriake Dickson, the governor declared support for the NAF.

Dickson was quoted in the statement as saying his administration is ready to partner with the NAF and other Security Agencies because the Government of Bayelsa understands the importance of security and the need for the State to be safe for economic prosperity.

It said Governor Dickson also promised that his government would partner with the Air Force to build NAF Primary and Secondary Schools in the State to enable Bayelsans benefit from the quality education provided by NAF Schools.
23 year-old American woman Hannah Michel Gavios was seriously injured and her legs broken in a 45-metre fall from a cliff at Ao Nang in Krabi, Thailand in attempt to escape a sexual attack from a man in Thailand.

Pol Lt Songpol Bunchai, a duty officer at the Ao Nang police station said the attacker identified as Apai Ruengvorn, 28, tried molesting her twice, once at the top of the cliff and again after she fell onto the rocks below on Thursday, Sept. 1.

The second time, she bit his ear and he fled. He then called 191 to alert authorities that a tourist needed to be rescued. Miss Gavios then endured a night of pain, trapped between rocks near the sea with a suspected broken back, before rescuers found her on Friday morning.

Officials received a call reporting that a tourist had been injured after she had fallen down a mountain in the Railay area, Krabi Tourist Rescue Centre Director Nitiphat Mongkolpradit explained. Rescue workers were searching for her last night, but they could not find her, so this morning we when out to search again and discovered her lying in between rocks about 45 metres from the trail at the top of the mountain. She was only 15 metres from the water below, he added. Sarayuth Tantein, Chief of the Haad Nopparathara National Park  Moo Ko Phi Phi said, Last night, park officials, Railay residents and people from the local cliff climbing club, all led led by park officer Boonnam Chuyradom, went to look for the victim. They found one man, later identified as Apai Raingworn, who admitted that he became aroused and made sexual advances toward a tourist while taking her from Railay to Tonsai, he said. Apai told officers that the woman panicked and ran away, causing her to fall down the mountain, Chief Sarayuth explained. The suspect was arrested on Friday after admitting to the crime. No charge have been filed as of yet, as police are waiting to question the victim, Col Piyapong told the media.

The victim was taken to a clinic in tambon Ao Nang before being transferred to Krabi Hospital. Doctors report she suffered a broken lower back and nerve damage requiring urgent surgery, she was transferred to Bangkok Hospital Phuket where she underwent surgery Friday night. The surgery was successful but doctors reported numbness in her legs. Ms Gavios is experiencing numbness on both of her legs and doctors have yet to confirm whether either of her legs are broken, Nitiphat said.

Authorities notified the US Embassy, which contacted the hospital and arranged for the victim to be transferred to Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok. Her current condition is not known.

Source: Bangkok Post/Phuket News
The Senator Ahmed Makarfi-led National Caretaker Committee of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, has said the current economic recession in the country is a result of the incompetence and lack of vision displayed by the governing All Progressives Congress (APC).

The party said the economic policies of the APC-led federal government is responsible for the current stagnation of the economy.

The PDP said former President Goodluck Jonathan should be spared the blame game for the nations economic woes.

The opposition party was reacting to a statement credited to Governor of Jigawa State, Abubakar Badaru that the Jonathan-led government laid the foundation for the nations economic recession.

Nigerias economy formally entered recession last Wednesday after the countrys Gross Domestic Product (GDP) witnessed negative growth for two consecutive quarters.

The Jigawa governor had in an interview he granted a national daily, blamed years of systemic maladministration under Jonathan for the economic recession in the country, adding that people should stop expecting President Muhammadu Buhari to wave a magic wand that will suddenly make all the problems to disappear.

Do you know that illicit funds traced to a few individuals under the last PDP administration can fund several months of foreign exchange auctions? I think we should thank our stars and heave a sigh of relief that a change at the helm of affairs has probably brought this country back from the brink of collapse, because a continuation of the former government would not only have exposed the mess we were in, we would also have woken up one day to find that they have taken their private jets and handed over what is left of the country to Boko Haram, he said.

But the PDP caretaker committee, in a statement by its spokesman, Prince Dayo Adeyeye, described the comment by Gov. Badaru as disappointing.

The statement said the APC should be reminded that great leaders take over countries either in recession or war and still succeed in turning them around, adding that the governing party has plunged Nigerias economy into an avoidable recession only to turn round and begin to whine helplessly like a baby.

The party said: Will Badaru and his party men continue to blame Jonathan and the PDP till 2019 and use Jonathan for the 2019 campaign instead of showing their scorecard? The good thing is that Nigerians who were being hoodwinked at first, are now seeing through the deception of this unending blame game.

Any dispassionate assessment of economic performance under Jonathan would obviously frown at Governor Badarus type of impulsive conclusion without recourse to the strong macroeconomic fundamentals recorded under Jonathan, which laid the foundation for meaningful growth.

Badaru and those who still think like him should tell Nigerians the character of the economic team in place that has been managing the Nations economy since 29th of May 2015.

Governor Badaru should know that you cant plant grapes and harvest mangoes.

It is no secret that the policies and statements made by key government actors have not been business friendly and Nigerians and foreign business men took their hard currencies out of the country. When professionals were advising the government to woo investors, characters like Badaru were busy de-marketing Nigeria all over the world.

We make bold to tell Governor Badaru that Jonathan and the PDP government saw this coming since 2011, and wanted to deregulate the sale of hydrocarbons in 2012, but Badaru and his co-travelers who are now in the All Progressives Congress (APC) frustrated the effort.

The former administration also wanted to encourage more savings in the Excess Crude Account (ECA) and set up the Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) but the Badarus of this world who play politics with serious national issues and were state governors at the time took the Federal Government to Court and did everything to frustrate the effort. Thank God some of them are among the best brains in the APC federal government of today.
President Muhammadu Buharis recent comment that his government is willing to swap detained Boko Haram commanders with over 200 abducted Chibok schoolgirls, has aroused interest in a number of individuals and groups who have approached the Federal Government with offers to facilitate the deal, his spokesman has said.

It was learnt that multiple groups with claims of contact with Boko Haram had come forward with the proposal to link government up with the faction of the terrorist sect that is holding the girls, after the president gave indication that he was open to a swap deal.

Buhari had told journalists on the sidelines of the 6th Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) in Nairobi, Kenya last weekend that his government was prepared to take all the necessary measures to ensure the release of the girls.

The president said government was ready to enter into discussions with genuine leaders of the sect with the knowledge of the whereabouts of the girls.

He said such leaders could reach the Federal Government through an internationally recognised non-governmental organisation and show proof that they have the girls.

Confirming that some groups had made contact, the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu, however, said the Federal Government was being prudent, careful and scrupulous in every line of action it was taking to secure the freedom of the girls.

The comments by the president have aroused interests and offers in certain quarters, from people who claim to have contacts with the group (Boko Haram). The intelligence agencies are scrutinising them. They are being careful this time around because of what happened in the past.

Every offer is being investigated and verified. The president has always maintained that he wants to see a group that has the mandate of the sect and has a proof of possession (of the girls) and the willingness to discuss, Shehu said in a chat with Daily Trust on Sunday.

In addition to the groups, the presidential spokesperson said security agents who have served in the North-East were also supplying information that could aid the girls rescue, just as Boko Haram members currently in detention, were also trying to prove their capacity to lead the way to their leaders, in order to get the girls returned.

Nobody knows the way to the girls, but all options are being followed. Every line of action will be followed to a logical conclusion, with the hope that this time around, we will get it right. The president is very passionate about returning these girls to their parents, Shehu added.

The presidential spokesman also stressed that in discussing the swap deal with the terrorist group, government would be guided by the provisions of the constitution.

There is nothing the government will do in releasing the commanders that will violate the constitution of the country. Everything will be done in accordance with the provision of our laws, he stated.
A member of the All Progressives Congress and senator representing Kogi West, Dino Melaye, has called on President Muhammadu Buhari to go beyond barking, and bite by sacking three prominent members of his Economic Team in view of the current economic hardships being faced by Nigerians.

The senator, in a statement he personally signed and issued in Abuja on Sunday, said the president must shake up his cabinet, and accused most of the members of gross incompetence, inexcusable ineptitude and a distressing lack of capacity to deliver on the mandate of their ministries and agencies.

Those to be shown the exit door without further ado if the economy must be effectively rebooted to deliver on the Change Agenda of the present administration, according to Melaye, include the Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun; her Budget and National Planning counterpart, Senator Udoma Udo Udoma and Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, Godwin Emefiele.

He said: At the moment, it must be crystal clear to all discerning minds that the presidents widely-acclaimed magical body language has lost its presumed aura and efficacy.

His no-nonsense demeanour is equally neither instilling fear nor commanding respect and loyalty from amongst his cabinet members. It is therefore obvious that the time for barking is over, now is the time to bite and boot out all those who have demonstrated, in the past several months, a crass lack of capacity to effectively carry out the functions of their office.

The Finance Minister has not only displayed gross incompetence on the job, she also lacks the basic and rudimentary grasp of economic fundamentals necessary to run a critical sector of the Nigerian economy like the Finance Ministry.

It is time for her to go now and pave way for a qualified and experienced person to steer the Nigerian economy away from the dark woods it has sunk presently under her stewardship.

On Udoma, he stated: To be sure, Senator Udoma Udo Udoma is a very charismatic man, an accomplished lawyer, and a quintessential gentleman with a fairly untainted reputation.

In everyday parlance, he is a good man. But the critical job of Budget and National Planning Minister for a huge country like Nigeria, with her prevailing economic challenges requires much more than being a good man with a great personality.

It is for someone with the relevant qualification, professional knowledge and experience in public sector finance, development economics, strategic thinking, budgetary planning and management.

As a lawyer, accomplished in this field as he is, Udomas appointment to that position is nepotism taken to very ridiculous heights; and a classic case of putting round pegs in square holes  it will, and can never fit. It is akin to saddling a carpenter with a tailors responsibility.

The outcome under the circumstances, as has become evidently clear, is bound to be catastrophic for the economy. President Buhari must therefore do the needful now by relieving Udoma of this huge burden that is constituting a clog to the revival of the Nigerian economy.

The senate committee chairman on the FCT did not spare Mr. Emefiele either, who he lambasted for his disastrous handling and release of the so-called Dasuki-gate funds, which he noted, amounts to about 15 per cent of the nations foreign reserves.

Other sins of the CBN governor in the view of Mr. Melaye, are his policy flip-flops, summersaults and inconsistencies, which he stressed are clear evidences of gross incompetence in the management of the nations fiscal and monetary policies.

The net effect of this inconceivable ineptitude on the part of Emefiele, is the free fall in the value of the naira and the total loss of faith and confidence by the international community on the Nigerian economy.

To reverse this trend, the Kogi senator urged President Buhari to summon courage to wield the big stick and give Emefiele the boot, to be replaced by a fiscal and monetary policy guru.

We have these qualified Nigerians in abundance, and the President must beam his searchlight to find them to help him, the Nigerian economy as well as the suffering Nigerian masses, he said.

He further called on the president to immediately discountenance the Economic Team currently under the supervision of the Vice President, Professor Yemi Osibanjo as their decisions will not be; and has never been respected by the economic managers and the bureaucracy in Nigeria.

In its stead, he advised President Buhari to constitute an Emergency Ad hoc Economic Team, whose membership should comprise all former ministers of finance, budget and national planning, CBN governors as well as members drawn from the academia with deep knowledge of developmental economics to drive the economic revival programme.

He said: The president must immediately transit from mere rhetoric to drastic but positive action to save the economy and Nigeria from total collapse.

The hunger in the land is real, pervasive, widespread and debilitating for the poor masses. As I walk the streets of my constituency these days, I constantly harbour a foreboding that I could be stoned by my angry constituents for the failure of Mr. President to fulfil his campaign promises and expectations to Nigerians, Melaye said.

He warned: Nigeria is tottering on a dangerous precipice, sliding perilously to a certain catastrophe if the current economic malaise is not halted immediately, he declared, even as he said his criticism is borne out of an altruistic fervour, and not a product of sour grapes akin to some traditional critics of Every Government in Power (EGIP).

Nigerians and Mr. President, he said, should be able to recall with little difficulty that he was a permanent fixture at the APCs Presidential campaign rallies and events, functioning mostly as the Master of Ceremonies, MC.

I am a proud APC Member, a party bonafide with a great stake in the success or failure of this administration, so no one can accuse me of sour grapes or meddlesomeness.

I am a truly concerned stakeholder presently bothered by the imminent, clear and present danger of a still-birth of a Change Agenda that held so much hope and promise for Nigerians a little over a year ago.

While there is a lot of hunger, anger, anguish and despair currently in the land, I have a firm belief that the situation is not beyond redemption for Mr. President, hence my call for urgent and drastic remedial action now, Melaye concluded.
Doctors at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, LASUTH, Ikeja, are battling to save the life of a two-year-old girl, who was raped by a 28-year-old tailor, called Itua, in Oshodi area of Lagos.

Itua Its Devils handwork

Mother of the baby, Mrs. Ajibade, was reportedly going out with the baby, but left her to urinate behind their 1, Masako Street residence, only to return to find that her daughter had vanished.

The suspect, a tailor whose shop was located opposite Ajibades home denied seeing the baby, when asked.

However, the toddlers mother told Vanguard: My baby later came to me crying, pointing at her private part and, at the same time, calling Itua, Itua.

I checked her private part and discovered that her pant was blood-stained. When I asked Itua what he did to my daughter, he said nothing. He admitted that my daughter came to meet him in his shop, but that he drove her out to go and meet me.

At that point, I started shouting at the top of my voice, until people gathered. A mob gathered and apprehended him.

When Vanguard visited the area yesterday, the suspects shop was under lock and key. Other apprentice were said to have fled for fear of being arrested.

A resident, who simply gave his name as Matthew, said: This is not the first time. He has been caught several times, but would beg to be freed. This is the first time he has been taken to the police. Policemen from Akinpelu Division took him away.

I only fingered her

During interrogation, Itua, an Esan man, from Edo State, said: I didnt put my manhood in her. I only fingered her. It was the devils handwork.

The Child Protection Network Coordinator, Mirabel Centre, at LASUTH, Mr. Ebenezer Omejalile, described the incident as the worst case ever received at the centre.

He said: The girl was in a pool of blood, with her private part very expanded. It is not easy patching her up. The girl is still there receiving treatment.

Relatives of the suspect appealed to the family of the baby to withdraw the case from the police station, but Vanguard gathered that the Centre refused, saying rape was a case against the government and justice must be done.

Source: Vanguard
The National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) arrested a 55-year-old Saudi Arabia-bound female pilgrim at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport (NAIA), Abuja, for alleged narcotic ingestion.

The suspect identified Basira Iyabo Binuyo, from Kwara State, who was headed to Medina to perform the annual pilgrimage has excreted seventy-six (76) pellets of cocaine so far.

NDLEA commander at the Azikiwe Airport Abuja, Hamisu Lawan, said Binuyo is still under observation until she expels all the ingested pellets of drugs.

Mrs Binuyo was arrested during the outward screening of passengers on an Emirate flight to Medina through Dubai. She has so far excreted seventy-six (76) pellets of drugs that tested positive for cocaine. Meanwhile, she is still under observation until the drugs are completely expelled.

According to The Nation, in her statement to the NDLEA, the married mother of three and a trader at Dosumu Market, Lagos, said she wanted to expand her cosmetic business but I had no money.

My sponsor offered to foot my expenses to Saudi on pilgrimage. I was excited until I was asked to take drugs along. I wanted to decline but considering the offer of a million naira, I accepted. I swallowed the drugs in Lagos and took a flight to Abuja on my way to Medina but I was caught in the process.

Meanwhile, officials at the Murtalla Muhammed International Airport (MMIA) intercepted a 37-year-old man from Imo State after he was found to have inserted seven wraps of cocaine weighing 355 grammes in his anus at the MMI. He was apprehended during outward screening of passengers on an Ethiopian Airline flight to Hong Kong, China through Addis Ababa.

NDLEA commander at the airport, Ahmadu Garba said that the suspect, holds a dual citizenship of Nigeria and Mali.

He hails from Imo State but was travelling with a Malian international passport. The name on his passport is Diara Sauduo while his Nigerian name is Okpalanem Henry. The case is under investigation.

The suspect in his statement said: I know that there is capital punishment for drug trafficking in China but I was optimistic of safe passage. Unfortunately, I was caught with only seven wraps. Maybe that is my destiny. I am married with three children.

Chairman/Chief Executive of the Agency, Col. Muhammad Mustapha Abdallah (rtd.) expressed satisfaction with the arrests, stating that it is a product of diligence and vigilance. The arrest of the suspects is commendable. We will continue to be on the alert in protecting all exit and entry points from drug trafficking organisations. I am glad that the suspects were arrested here thus preventing them from untimely death and also protecting the image of our country from disrepute.

Source: The Nation
Abdulkadir Islamiyat Oluwatoyin, who lost both parents before she was six, has emerged the best graduating student of the International University of Africa, IUA, Sudan. She had her primary and secondary school education on scholarship, thanks to one Alhaja Sekinah Adekola the proprietress of Ad-din International College, Ibadan.



Islamiyat, who once won the Oyo state essay writing competition on poverty eradication, had to work for a year after her secondary school education before she registered for JAMB. She finally got admitted to the University Of Ibadan, to study medicine, around the same time, she got a scholarship to study Nursing at IUA.



She had to choose Sudan because it was a scholarship and studying medicine in Nigeria without a full pocket could be difficult. She, however, ended up graduating as a doctor because in her primordial year, she had a GPA of 3.61/4.00, above 3.50 (the school highest score then) and the Faculty of Medicine chose her to be one of her students.

In her speech at the graduation ceremony, she said: One certain thing I know about myself which cant be disputed is that I am a living miracle of Allah. If you have searched for a proof of miracle but to no avail, look no further as I am here to testify to miracles of God.



I will always be grateful to Allah, and my parents despite not living long to know more about them. To my mum and namesake, I know you were proud of me but I am much more proud and envious of you because you had a beautiful life crowned and gifted with a daughter that will never let your dream go with the wind.

I miss you and I wished you were here to witness today. You are blessed mum and I wont say I love you instead I will say I love my existence for you because aside Allah and His prophet, the next person I live and exist for is YOU, I shall live to fulfill all your dreams. I Love you till the end of time, mom. continue to rest in peace.

Source: Instablog
Mr. Azibaola Robert, a cousin to former President Goodluck Jonathan, has landed in fresh trouble with the Nigerian Army over an alleged security threat posed by his company, Kakarta Civil Engineering Limited.

The construction site of the company, said to be sharing a boundary with the Lungui Barracks on the Kubwa/Asokoro Expressway, Abuja, was yesterday taken over by armed soldiers, who sealed of the premises.

Azibaola, his wife, Stella and their firm are currently on trial over alleged payment of $40million into the bank account of one of their companies, One Plus Holdings Nigeria Limited, by the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA).

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, said the cash came from the account of the Special Services Office of the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF).

It was gathered that the Kakarta Civil Engineering Limited site was allocated to Azibaola by the last administration despite fears raised by the army.

The company is providing engineering infrastructure for the Maitama Extension District in Abuja, home to new official residences of the Senate President and some principal officers of the National Assembly as well as other highly-placed Nigerians.

The army is said to be uncomfortable with the construction site sitting so close to the Lungui Barracks. Of particular concern, is the blasting of rocks and crushing of granite, which raised fears that Boko Haram could take advantage of the site to attack the barracks.

It was learnt that the former president gave approval for the allocation of the land to his cousins company following a strong recommendation from the Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA).

Soldiers who were drafted to the site at about 8pm on Friday, sealed off the site yesterday, preventing workers from gaining access to the construction site, which serves as a base for the coordination of the provision of services for the owners of plots in the District.

The soldiers said they were acting on orders from above.

Aside encroaching on land, which was clearly demarcated as a military zone, a top military source said whenever the company was blasting rocks, it affected soldiers in the barracks, who are forced to mobilize many times as if enemies were around.

The Public Affairs Manager of Kakarta Civil Engineering Limited, Mr. Austin Ekeinde, confirmed that soldiers had taken over the site.

He said: I can confirm to you that armed military men have suddenly taken over our site in Maitama and we have asked our workers to go back to their respective homes till further notice, while we try to get clarification from the military on their provocative action.

This action has led to huge losses as even asphalt we cooked overnight for laying this morning has been allowed to cake and waste, Mr. Ekeinde added.
A man, Mr. Kehinde Etu, yesterday morning had a close shave with death after his jealous wife, Mrs, Oluwakemi Etu, hacked him down with a machete in his sleep.

It was learnt that Mrs. Eku and her husband had an argument over his alleged plans to marry a second wife.

According to The Nation, the woman had invited her husband over to spend the weekend at her residence in the Erinlu area of Ijebu-Ode, Ogun State.

Oblivious of the danger that laid ahead, the man was treated warmly during the visit and even got to make love with his wife.

But while he slept after the lovemaking, the woman attacked him savagely with a machete, inflicting several deep cuts on his chest, arms, shoulder and lower part of the head.

The Acting Police Public Relations Officer, Ogun State Police Command, Mr. Abimbola Oyeyemi, who confirmed the incident, said Mrs. Eku has been arrested by policemen from the Obalende Divisional Police Headquarters, Ijebu-Ode.

Mr. Oyeyemi, an Assistant Superintendent of Police, affirmed that the woman had a quarrel with her husband earlier that night before carrying out the surprise attack on him.

The injured husband is currently receiving treatment at the State General Hospital, Ijebu-Ode.
By Lukas Gleason and Mike Gong

With todays competitive business environment, self-storage owners are relentlessly looking for ways to shrink their expenses and grow their bottom line. What can be trimmed? What can be streamlined? Ultimately, what costs are expendable? Although it may be tempting, the next time you take a look at your expenditures, try not to visualize workers compensation insurance coverage as an expense. Instead, consider the value it brings.

Any business owner whos dealt with a workers comp claim can attest to how rapidly the charges rack up. When an incident occurs, those with a workers comp policy stand under an umbrella of relief, while their counterparts scramble to keep out of the rain. Medical care, rehabilitation treatment and lost wages are all covered by this insurance. Employee health is a daily risk, and you, as the employer, are held responsible for workers who get hurt or ill while on the clock. Heres a look at the costs and unique challenges of this coverage, and how to choose the right carrier.

Cost

How much will a policy cost? Premiums are calculated by multiplying a rate per hundred against your payroll. So naturally, the higher the payroll, the higher your exposure, and the greater premium youll pay.

The second half of the equationthe ratevaries by state and employee classification. The typical premium-rate range for self-storage classifications in various states is $2 to $10 per hundred of payroll depending on the state. Rates may also vary depending on other factors such as number of years in business, loss history and other credit aspects. Understanding the calculation behind workers comp will allow you to properly communicate your concerns with your broker upon renewal.

Challenges

Some challenges unique to self-storage are often associated with safety protocol. The remote nature of some facilities can increase the chance of failed safety practices. It can be difficult to recognize lapses when the business owner isnt on site. In contrast, for businesses in which all staff members work at one site or a headquarters, management can easily recognize and correct a problem immediately.

While completely eliminating the risk of broken safety protocols is impossible, there are ways you can mitigate it. Examples might include mandatory safety training, including education on proper form and equipment operation. Many insurance carriers offer safety-training programs you can take advantage of to better educate your staff. Its the job of the carrier and you as the business owner to make a joint effort in making employees aware of procedures. A proactive and constant reminder of a safe work environment starts at the top.

Carrier Selection

So, how do you and your insurance broker decide on a carrier? While price is important, theres much more to the decision. Here are important things to consider:

Whats the carriers financial solvency? Many carriers are rated by independent agencies that review their financial strength at least annually. The most common rating-review agencies for the insurance world are A.M. Best Co. and S&P Global Ratings. A low premium is irrelevant if you file a claim and the carrier doesnt have the financial strength to pay for it.

How long has the carrier been in business? Longevity is a great indicator of a carriers ability to properly rate for risk. If the premium rates being charged are too low, the carrier wont be able to sustain itself to pay for claims. If the rates are too high, it wont be able to generate the necessary volume to run a successful insurance program. Longevity will prove a carriers ability to properly rate risk.

Does the carrier work with many lines of insurance or only workers comp? With all other factors remaining constant, when faced with the option of selecting a generalist or a specialist, well take the specialist every time. In our experience, specialists respond more quickly and are generally more efficient because they dont have any other lines of insurance clogging traffic and competing for attention. Response time is a great transition into our next concern.

How does the carrier handle claims? Adjuster responsiveness is crucial in mitigating claims. We like to consider carriers that employ a caseload ceiling for their adjusters. An adjuster whos constantly being bombarded with new cases wont have the best chance at a proper response time. Carriers can limit this influx to a certain amount of claims per adjuster. This provides the adjuster with a reasonable workload and gives him the best opportunity for an appropriate response time.

What are the safety and risk controls? Many carriers offer services to mitigate risky activity that could give rise to a workers comp claim. Theyre more than willing to do their part in educating your employees. Dont forget, insurance companies want to avoid claims just as much as you do!

We love to consider carriers that have the ability to create modified work programs to get employees back to work. These may include duties the doctor has approved for an employee. The tasks might not be what the employee did before his injury, but this approach helps close cases, reducing your workers comp costs.

This is a general overview of items providers see day in and day out while insuring self-storage properties. Hopefully, it demonstrates the real value of workers compensation coverage. Without a policy, the costs of an everyday occurrence can turn into a catastrophic loss, wrecking your hard-earned profit. The next time you take a look at your balance sheet, dont look at workers comp as an expense, but rather for the value it brings.

Luke Gleason and Mike Gong are property- and casualty-insurance professionals for Arthur J. Gallagher Risk Management Services. Since 1990, the company has provided a full range of insurance solutions to the self-storage industry. Gallagher is one of the largest insurance brokers in the world, with more than 250 offices throughout the United States. For more information, call 800.568.0833; e-mail [email protected]; visit www.ajg.com.
This content is from: Opinion

Cryptos descent into hell, rather than sending institutional investors straight for the exits, has triggered a hunt for the next big bet.(Part of the crypto column series.)
The 16th annual ITR Global Transfer Pricing Forum will provide insight, analysis and advice from a distinguished group of keynote speakers and panellists. Multinationals are struggling to comply with BEPS, country-by-country reporting, and issues surrounding their reputations in light of the European Commissions $14.5 billion ruling against Apple.

Discussions will revolve around BEPS documentation strategyand technology responses to BEPS; financial services; PE, supply chain and allocation of risk; an update on dispute resolution; and IP planning and profit split strategies.

Among the celebrated keynote speakers, Edward Kleinbard, professor of law at the University of Southern California, Gould School of Law, will be a featured on September 22. Professor Kleinbard is also an author and Fellow at the Century Foundation.

Stephen Moore, Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Project for Economic Growth, The Heritage Foundation, also joins the Forum as a keynote speaker on Day 1. Moore is an economic writer, policy analyst and adviser to Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump.

John Hughes, an IRS (Transfer Pricing Operations) Senior International Adviser, will be joining the Forum at the opening of Day Two as the keynote speaker.

Alan Krueger is an American economist and Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He was chairman of President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers and is an adviser to Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Dozens of other panellists and speakers will be featured, including Todd Wolosoff, Global Managing Partner - Transfer pricing, Deloitte; Bradley Shumaker , Tax Counsel, Transfer Pricing, Zimmer Biomet; Ognian Stoichkov, Director, Transfer Pricing, PepsiCo.; William Morris, Director - Global Tax Policy, GE; and Eduardo Goldszal , Finance Senior Director, NCR Corporation.

In-house counsel, private practice and advisers will have an opportunity to discuss the issues in New York on September 22 & 23. The 16th annual ITR Global Transfer Pricing Forum is being held at the Ritz Carlton, Battery Park.

An overview of the conference and registration can be found here.
Nel terzo trimestre del 2016 il prodotto interno lordo, espresso in valori concatenati con anno di riferimento 2010, corretto per gli effetti di calendario e destagionalizzato, e aumentato dello 0,3% rispetto al trimestre precedente e dello 0,9% nei confronti del terzo trimestre del 2015. Lo sostiene lIstat.

La crescita congiunturale e la sintesi di un aumento del valore aggiunto nei comparti dellindustria e dei servizi e di una diminuzione nellagricoltura. Dal lato della domanda, vi e un contributo ampiamente positivo della componente nazionale (al lordo delle scorte), in parte compensato da un apporto negativo della componente estera netta.

Nello stesso periodo il Pil e aumentato in termini congiunturali dello 0,7% negli Stati Uniti, dello 0,5% nel Regno Unito e dello 0,2% in Francia. In termini tendenziali, si e registrato un aumento del 2,3% nel Regno Unito, dell1,5% negli Stati Uniti, dell1,1% in Francia. Nel complesso, il Pil dei paesi dellarea Euro e cresciuto dello 0,3% rispetto al trimestre precedente ed dell1,6% nel confronto con lo stesso trimestre del 2015.

I dati Istat sul Pil sono in linea con le stime del governo ha commentato il ministro dellEconomia, Pier Carlo Padoan, arrivando alla Camera per lincontro con il gruppo Pd sulla legge di Bilancio. ll titolare di via XX Settembre in un tweet, poco prima, aveva sottolineato come i dati Istat confermano che leconomia e sulla strada giusta e le stime di crescita sono affidabili. Ma occorre spingere per accelerare
The underlying theme of the "Shark Tank" TV series is for either the Sharks (the investors) or the entrepreneurs (pitching their business) to convince the other side to accept the valuation of their business and negotiate a deal based on it. The entrepreneurs tend to come in with high valuations, and the Sharks counter with lower valuations.

How entrepreneurs and the Sharks value businesses presented on the show varies, but a good valuation of a company takes into account certain factors such as revenue, earnings, and the value of companies within the same sector.

Key Takeaways The Sharks on "Shark Tank" typically require a stake in the businessor a percentage of ownershipas well as a share of the profits.

A revenue valuation, which considers the prior year's sales and revenue and any sales in the pipeline, is often determined.

The Sharks use a company's profit compared to the company's valuation from revenue to come up with an earnings multiple.

Understanding How a Business Is Valued on "Shark Tank"

"Shark Tank" is a popular show on which investors (or Sharks) hear pitches from business owners who want funding from them. In exchange for their money, the Sharks typically require a stake in the business, which is a percentage of ownership and a share of the profits. In return for giving up a stake in the company, the entrepreneur gets funding, but often, more importantly, they get access to the Sharks, their network of contacts, their suppliers, and their experience.

Determining the amount to invest in the company and the percentage of ownership that each is willing to consider comes down to forecasting revenue, earnings, and applying a valuation to the company.

Revenue Multiple

Typically, an entrepreneur will ask for an amount in exchange for a percentage of ownership. For example, an entrepreneur might ask for $100,000 from the Sharks in exchange for 10% ownership in the company. From there, the Sharks begin to determine whether it's properly valued.

The Sharks will usually confirm that the entrepreneur is valuing the company at $1 million in sales. The Sharks would arrive at that total because if 10% ownership equals $100,000, it means that one-tenth of the company equals $100,000, and therefore, ten-tenths (or 100%) of the company equals $1 million.

If the company is valued at $1 million in sales, the Sharks would ask what the annual sales were for the prior year. If the response is $250,000, it will take four years for the company to reach $1 million in sales. If the response was $75,000 in sales, the Sharks would likely question the owner's valuation of $1 million. However, if last year's sales were $250,000, but the entrepreneur recently entered into a sales agreement with Walmart to sell $600,000 worth of product, the valuation would be more attractive to the Sharks based on the sales forecast. In other words, the valuation doesn't only consider the prior year's sales and revenue but also what the company has in its sales pipeline.

Earnings Multiple

The companies on "Shark Tank" are not publicly traded, meaning they don't have equity shares or published earnings multiples for investors to consider. However, the Sharks can still use the company's profit as compared to the company's valuation from sales revenue to come up with an earnings multiple.

For example, if the company is valued at $1 million and the owner earns $100,000 in profit, the company would have an earnings multiple of 10 or ($1 million / $100,000). However, we have no idea whether an earnings multiple of 10 is good for the company or not.

This is where comparative analysis comes into play. Let's say in our earlier example that the company is a clothing retailer. The Sharks can compare the multiple to those of other companies within the same industry.

For example, let's say the entrepreneur is pitching a clothing brand with $1 million in annual sales with $100,000 in profits. The entrepreneur could apply the metrics of the specialty retail apparel sector by using the sector's earnings multiples. Let's say the sector has an average earnings multiple of 12.

At 12x earnings, this would value the business at $1.2 million or (12 x $100,000). Based on this valuation, the entrepreneur can justify the deal for a 10% stake in the business for a $100,000 investment from the sharks.

Future Market Valuation

A future valuation could also be calculated in the same way the revenue and earnings multiples are. The only drawback is that the numbers are forecasts and can be inaccurate. The Sharks would likely ask what the entrepreneur is forecasting for sales and profits in the next three years. They would then compare those numbers to those of other companies in the retail clothing industry.

The entrepreneur might forecast that earnings in the next three years would lead to $400,000 in net income in year three. If the retail industry typically has a 14.75x forward earnings multiple, the future valuation would be $5.9 million in sales or (14.75 x $400,000).

The Sharks ultimately want to get their investment back and earn a profit. If the Sharks agree that the company could possibly generate $5.9 million in business by year three, a 10% stake for $100,000 might be attractive. However, it's possible that the business might not generate $400,000 in profit by year three. As a result, the sharks would likely demand a higher ownership percentage, counteroffer with a lower loan amount, or propose some combination of both.

The Intangibles of Valuation



If the Sharks valued a company solely based on figures, then the show would be without drama or excitement. But the intangibles of valuation on Shark Tank is one of the reasons it is so popular. Much like other seasoned investors, the Sharks consider the whole packagenumbers, story, and experiencein their valuation of companies, though the numbers are often the most significant part of this exercise.

But other intangibles are also important. For example, the storyboth, personal and product relatedcan help sway their valuation decision. If an entrepreneur has a compelling story of hard work and determination, then the Sharks might agree to his or her valuation, without much debate.

The Sharks also ask a series of questions about the company. For example, they might ask what it costs to manufacture the company's product and its selling price. This will help them calculate product margin. They will inquire about other costs, such as marketing, and also ask for the previous year's sales and future sales pipelines to ascertain demand for the product. Increasing demand and sales is always a good sign. But if sales declined, remained stagnant, or increased by only a slight amount, then the Sharks will ask for the reason they did. If the reason is unconvincing, then the Sharks will opt out.

Special Considerations: Risks to Valuation

The Sharks might say they can't apply the same valuation to the entrepreneur's company based on valuation metrics from publicly traded companies. There are several distinctions between a small business and a public corporation.

A large, established retailer might have thousands of stores worldwide, but a small business may only have a few locations. Though the growth rate is justifiably higher for the small business, the risk is much larger due to the risk of failure and liquidity risk in terms of an exit strategy. Liquidity is a measure of how easily an investment can be bought or sold. If there are many buyers and sellers vying for an investment, there is ample liquidity. If there are few buyers and sellers, there's illiquidity.

The lack of liquidity creates more risk for the Sharks to bear, which entails applying risk-adjusted discounting to make the reward worth the risk. As a result, the Sharks have much more wiggle room to base their offers on a risk-adjusted discounted valuation.

The Sharks could counteroffer with a higher stake in the company, say 30% ownership for a $100,000 contribution. Even if the valuation metrics (based on revenue and earnings) indicate that the Sharks should have a lower stake, the risk of loss from investing in an unknown company usually adds to the Shark's ownership stake.

The Sharks could also increase their ownership stake based on the intangibles they bring to the table. Those intangibles might include their experience, access to retail outlets for selling products, or supply chains.

When Did "Shark Tank" Premier on TV? The very first episode of "Shark Tank" debuted on Aug. 9, 2009 on ABC in the United States. The show itself, however, is the American version of the international show "Dragons' Den." The very first iteration of the format is though to be Japan's 2001 "Money Tigers".

Who Is the Wealthiest "Shark" on Shark Tank? Mark Cuban is the richest of the Sharks on Shark Tank with an estimated worth in excess of $4.7 billion as of 2022.
It seems that the laments of those who feel the sounds of bagpipes are akin to suffering an extremely long, slow, and painful death may be truer than they imagined: the traditional instrument could be the cause of death for some of its players.

In a report published last week in the medical journal Thorax, researchers from the University Hospital of South Manchester in England revealed they found a slew of harmful fungi and yeast in the bagpipes of a man who died from an unexplained lung problem.

The team of researchers have now highlighted how important it is to carry out proper clinical history checks that include the hobbies and pastimes enjoyed by patients when attempting to diagnose an unknown illness.

This case highlights the importance of a careful clinical history including hobbies, researchers wrote. Thorough clinical history exploring occupation, environmental triggers and pastimes is very important in cases of HP.

The man in question was unnamed throughout the report but later revealed as Edinburgh-born Bruce Campbell who came from a long-established piping family. His family was upset to discover the cause of his illness from a medical paper and criticized the hospital for what they felt was a breach of privacy. The hospital has since apologized

Campbell arrived at Wythenshawe Hospital, a Manchester lung disease clinic, in April 2014 after seven years of finding it harder and harder to breath. He had five years earlier been diagnosed with hypersensitivity pneumonitis, or HP, a serious inflammation of the lungs.

Once able to run 10km, he could now barely walk a couple of meters with his lungs working at just a third of their normal capacity.

HP has gone by many other names before as doctors attempted to find a cause for the condition. Among them were farmers lung, hot tub lung, humidifier lung, and the strangest of all, pigeon fanciers lung (technical term for pigeon keeper).

The five doctors from the clinic who studied Campbells case, however, have now dubbed HP Bagpipe lung as despite searching his home for mold, and treating him with different courses of drugs, it was only posthumously they discovered the large numbers of bacteria living within his daily hobby: his bagpipes.

With cocktail after cocktail of drugs failing to cure him, Campbell received a respite from his troubles during a three-month stint to Australia only to quickly deteriorate again as soon as he returned to the UK, what the doctors now understand to be a return to his bagpipes, which he did not bring with him to the land down under.

Despite their best efforts, Campbell died on October 10, 2014.

On inspecting his bagpipes after his death, researchers found a plethora of nasty species making a home for themselves in all different parts of the instrument.

Read more: Learn to play Irish music, Part 1: Choosing an instrument

Within the airbag alone they discovered a mixture of Paecilomyces variotii, Fusarium oxysporum, Rhodotorula mucilaginosa, and Penicillium species, a chilling rainbow of growth when placed in a petri dish.

Pink yeast was also found in the instruments mouthpiece as well as fungi on the neck, chanter, chanter reed, chanter reed protector, bass drone and tenor drone, the report states.

If that had been identified earlier, and he had stopped playing the bagpipes or cleaned them regularly, he may well have just gotten better, Jenny King, the studys lead author said, explaining how he inhaled this mixture of mold every time he picked up the pipes.

The family are now calling for a full investigation into his death, however, and how a professional piper, who cleaned his instrument regularly could have been so affected by mould, and why the hospital has not informed them of the possible danger.

"He knew exactly what he had to do, his daughter Erin Tabinor told The Telegraph.

"He was an expert in this. I want to find out exactly what has happened. I want to know how it was missed... why they didn't tell us?

"Why they didn't bother to let us know about this? I want a full investigation into his death."

This is not the first time mold inside bagpipes has been shown to cause illness in its musicians.

Professional piper John Shone told The Guardian newspaper how he fell seriously ill in 2013 only to discover the breathlessness and weakness was caused by fungus growing inside his instrument.

It was very much life-threatening, I was near death Shone said, explaining that although modern materials now used in the making of bagpipes do make them airtight, they also lack the seasoning bag of the old-fashioned pipes which had antiseptic properties.

And so a lesson to all bagpipe players: if you really must pick up the instrument make sure to clean it out as regular as possible to avoid bagpipe lung!

Read more: The history and origins of traditional Irish music

H/T: Washington Post
September 2 is Kevin J. Farrells birthday. And what kind of present should the Dublin native be expecting?

Well, to suddenly become one of the most influential Irish Americans in the Catholic Church, among other things.

On August 17, Pope Francis named Farrell, who had served nearly a decade as bishop of Dallas, the leader of a new Vatican department designed to reach out to the Laity, the Family and Life.

The respected Jesuit journal America called Farrell's appointment a surprise but also a highly significant move.

This, of course, means Farrell suddenly becomes a central figure in not only the Catholic Church but also the Francis papacy. After getting the unabashed rock star treatment, culminating with his visit to the U.S. last year, Francis has sort of fallen off of the American radar. Perhaps that is due to the carnival-like presidential race unfolding in the U.S.

Either way, after initially energizing many American Catholics with hints at reform, it has become increasingly unclear what kind of changes Francis will actually be able to institute.

Divorce? Gays and the church? Women serving as priests and in other positions of power within the church?

Pope Francis humble demeanor and bold talk put these once-unthinkable issues on the table. But will they merely stay on the table? Or will Francis -- and millions of other wavering American Catholics -- actually live to see their church change in meaningful ways?

Farrell is now a central figure in this drama. Happy birthday!

The choice of an Irish American for such an influential position would seem to suggest a surprising warmth towards the U.S., which is often viewed skeptically by Vatican insiders.

While large in number, Catholics still only represent 25 percent of the U.S. population. And even that number is split between older Irish, Italian and Polish ethnics, and more recently-arrived Hispanics.

And, finally, American Catholics generally have a -- shall we say -- liberal interpretation of Catholic law, especially on issues such as birth control, divorce, gay rights and other bedroom matters.

You know, precisely the kinds of issues Farrell will be delving in to.

According to Gerard OConnell in America magazine, Pope Francis decision to choose an American bishop to head this new department is a clear sign of his high esteem for the church in the United States and for the people of this country that he came to know during his visit last year.

People familiar with Pope Francis thinking added that he was deeply moved by the faith of American Catholics and by the enthusiastic and warm welcome given to him by the president, the Congress and the American people when he visited Washington, D.C., New York and Philadelphia.

Farrell speaks fluent Spanish and Italian and earned praise for changing the tone set by previous church leaders in Dallas, in the wake of the sex abuse scandals of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

As The Dallas Morning News put it a few weeks back, the city was straining to deal with the aftermath of some of the nation's worst sexually predatory priest scandals. And internal tensions, partly arising from those scandals, created a frosty relationship among diocesan leaders and with the community.

One critic told the paper, Farrell was a tremendous leader. He broke the defensive bunker-like mentality of the diocese.

And so, now, Kevin Farrell has another daunting task set before him. Lets state it plainly: to make the church relevant to families in the 21st century.

Of course, people in America, Africa and Australia have rather different interpretations of relevant. That is one thing Farrell is certainly going to struggle with. Just to make the task more difficult, time is of the essence, simply because of Pope Francis age.

All of which means Farrell will have plenty to wish for when he blows out those candles on his birthday cake. Hell need all the help he can get.
There were heartbreaking scenes in a County Cavan graveyard as the bodies of five members of a local family were buried together, four killed by the father who later hung himself.

Alan Hawe a local school teacher, brutally murdered his wife Clodagh before killing his sons Liam, 15, Niall, 11, and six-year-old Ryan in their bedrooms. He then hung himself.

Alan Hawe left a chilling note, according to the Irish Star, stating that he believed his family could not have coped without him leading to speculation that he planned his own suicide then decided to take his family with him.

A source told the paper: "He wrote that he was taking the family with him because he did not think they would be able to cope without him."

The Irish Independent stated that It's understood that Mr Hawe had a history of mental health difficulties.

However, womens groups are complaining bitterly about the manner in which Alan Hawe was being portrayed in the media as an unfortunate victim himself.

Margaret Martin, the director of Womens Aid said: It is very clear he was a murderer, that is fairly conclusive. Does committing suicide mitigate you killing other people before that act? We have to stop the denial here.

Martin told The Guardian newspaper: In terms of domestic violence, people have stereotypes of the victim and the perpetrator. There is a disconnect between an act like this and someone who is seen as a pillar of community, who is well liked or seen as respectable.

But our experience dealing with women feeling under threat every day is that. It does not matter how rich, how educated or how well off they are. Abusers cut across all social classes... That is the ultimate level of control: to decide who lives or dies. It is the most extreme form of domestic abuse.

The murders were especially brutal, with knives used to kill the three boys and possibly a hatchet to kill his wife. He later hung himself after the killing spree.

Questions continue as to how such a bloody family murder could have happened in the middle class home of the ordinary highly-respected couple and their children in a small townland near Ballyjamesduff.

On the surface all seemed well. The family had just returned from a camping vacation and were seen in a nearby town on Sunday at church. Sometime on Sunday night and Monday morning the bloody killings occurred.

Hawe was assistant principal at a local school while his wife, also a grade school teacher, though in a nearby town.

A tantalizing clue may be contained in the final text of oldest son Liam who texted a friend the cryptic statement from evil comes good.

Hawe left several notes, including one warning anyone approaching the house not to enter inside and call the police.

The woman who found that note, Mary Coll, Clodagh Hawe's mother, told friends she has forgiven her son-in-law.

She is beyond heartbroken but she has forgiven him. It cant be easy but she knows the truth of the man, the heart of the man.

She said the man that did this to her daughter and her beautiful boys was not the Alan she knows and loves.

This person was a stranger, a total stranger and she knows if Alan had been in his right mind he would never, ever have touched a hair on the heads of those boys or her daughter. He loved them. Everything he did, he did for them.

Father Felim Kelly, a family friend of the deceased stated at the funeral mass: There is a dark side too. How so much goodness could be destroyed? How such happiness could be invaded? How? Why?

It is not for us to seek answers or to surmise about behavior. We all are trying to cope with a tragedy beyond our understanding.

He explained: I would invite you to come with me as I called to see Alan and Clodagh and Liam, Niall and Ryan on a Christmas morning a couple of years ago.

Christmas is about family, is centered on children and is about giving and receiving.

I know I was calling to see close friends and knew the welcome, Clodagh with her scones, red jam and mug of coffee, Liam, Niall and Ryan busily like budding engineers building all kinds of Lego.

More importantly they invited the old man and indeed showed him how to go about some intricate structures.

Alan standing with his back to the kitchen sink totally at ease enjoying the bean an ti (his wife) and the antics of unspoiled and respectful sons.

Police inquiries are continuing into the deaths.
Kubo and the Two Strings

Those stop motion masters at Laika follow up Coraline, ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls with this Eastern spiced adventure that's full of heart, amazing visuals and a lot of music. A boy goes on a quest to find out what happened to his father. With the voices of Charlize Theron, Matthew McConaughey and Ralph Fiennes.

Ben-Hur

The classic reimagined for a whole new generation as the man who walked at the same time as Jesus gets into some familar bother. English actor Jack Huston is the main man Judah with his nemesis reimagined as his best friend/adoptive brother played by Toby Kebbell. And it's all reimagined from Lew Wallace's influential book by none other than Timur Bekmambetov- who helmed Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter! No vampires this time, sadly...

Anthropoid

Irish fellas Jamie Dornan and Cillian Murphy star as real life Czech soldiers who worked behind the scenes during World War 2 in an attempt to assassinate a high ranking Nazi officer. This true story is written for the screen and directed by Sean Ellis, known for Cashback and The Broken.

Captain Fantastic

Viggo Mortensen stars in this intense family dramedy as a father who has raised his kids in the wilderness but is forced to return to civilisation because of reasons-which-would-be-spoilers. And so they have to try to integrate into society, but no one is making that easy.

Don't Breathe

There's a simple set up here- some teens break into a house to steal money from a blind guy. And then all hell breaks loose. This is one for true horror fans with an incredible sense of tension throughout and some visceral shocks. Stephen Lang is the blind fellow here and you might recognise him from Avatar. He's even scarier here.

Hell or High Water

Scottish director David Mackenzie deserves to be a huge deal with past efforts like Perfect Sense and Starred Up- maybe this will be the one that really puts him on the map. It stars Chris Pine and Ben Foster as brothers who get into the bank robbing game, while lawman Jeff Bridges follows just behind. From the writer of Sicario.
A Greenford man fell to his death on a Southall building site, a coroner's court heard on Wednesday last week.

Frederick Bourke, 52, of Ruislip Road lost his balance after walking on loose scaffolding in Liberty Market Hall in South Road, which he was refurbishing.

But scaffolding put up the previous day, in August last year, still had loose boards laying across it.

Health and safety inspectors are still looking into the accident. Police believe Mr Bourke strayed too far onto the boards when they tipped up and he fell 25 feet.

Coroner Alison Thompson recorded a verdict of accidental death.

A builder fell from the roof of a warehouse to his death, an inquest heard on Tuesday last week.

Aneel Sampa, 45 of Kempston in Bedford was at Nijjar's Dairy in Eastman Road, Acton, in May last year when he lost his footing.

His son Anand was also working on the site, and alerted the site manager. Mr Sampla was taken to the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, but died from multiple injuries.

A verdict of accidental death was recorded at Hammersmith Coroner's Court.
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By Guy Dinmore | (Inter Press Service) |  

HONOLULU, Hawaii (IPS)  The worlds super-polluters  the United States and China  have formally joined the Paris Agreement on climate change in a symbolic show of unity.

At a ceremony in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, where China is hosting a summit of G20 industrialised nations, President Barack Obama and President Xi Jinping handed their documents of ratification to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

In contrast to the excitement in Honolulu among the worlds leading environmental activists and scientists, the announcement that Obama had used his executive authority to accede to the Paris Agreement was widely ignored by the major U.S. networks.

The joint move by the U.S. and China, which account for nearly 40 percent of global carbon emissions, paves the way for the Paris Agreement forged last December to enter into force, most likely by the end of the year. For the agreement to enter into effect and start to be implemented, at least 55 countries representing at least 55 percent of global emissions need to formally join.

The UN Secretary General praised Obama for his inspiring leadership. He said Obama and Xi had both been far-sighted, bold and ambitious.

The joint accession by the worlds biggest polluters was enthusiastically welcomed in Honolulu where the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which groups governments and NGOs, is holding a key congress that aims to chart the future path for stopping the planets slide into environmental ruin.

This is a momentous event, Xavier Sticker, Frances ambassador for the environment, said of the ratification by the U.S. and China. He told IPS it was expected to pave the way for many other countries to follow. But he cautioned that the European Union needs to accede as a bloc and that the internal complexities of national political systems could lead to delays. Belgium requires the assent of seven legislative assemblies, for example. France has already ratified but the UK has not.

Delegates at the IUCN World Conservation Congress warned that there was a risk for the European Union that the Paris Agreement implementation taskforce would be formed next month without EU involvement.

Patricia Espinosa, head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, urged IUCN delegates representing the global conservation community to lobby governments on what must be done to achieve the Paris Agreement targets on emissions and limiting the rise of global temperatures.

We are very excited about this good news, for the early entry into force of the Paris Agreement. No one had imagined it would be this year, she said shortly before official confirmation arrived from Hangzhou.

In contrast to the excitement in Honolulu among the worlds leading environmental activists and scientists, the announcement that Obama had used his executive authority to accede to the Paris Agreement was widely ignored by the major US networks in their news bulletins. Ironically, however, there was considerable coverage of Tropical Storm Hermine moving up the east coast of the U.S. on Labour Day weekend, possibly turning back into hurricane force, and also of Hurricane Lester brushing past Hawaii.

We are here together because we believe that for all the challenges that we face, the growing threat of climate change could define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other challenge, Obama said in a speech in Hangzhou.

And someday we may see this as the moment that we finally decided to save our planet, he added. There are no shortage of cynics who thought the agreement would not happen. But they missed two big things: The investments that we made to allow for incredible innovation in clean energy, and the strong, principled diplomacy over the course of years that we were able to see pay off in the Paris Agreement. The United States and China were central to that effort. Over the past few years, our joint leadership on climate has been one of the most significant drivers of global action, Obama said.

Xi was reported as calling the Paris Agreement a milestone that marks the emergence of a global government system for climate change. Our response to climate change bears on the future of our people and the well-being of mankind, Chinas president said.

The accession of China and the U.S. bring to 25 the number of countries to have ratified so far. Diplomatic pressure is expected to be ramped up on other major polluters, such as India and Russia.

But scientists and activists are warning that the Paris Agreement target of keeping temperature rises well below 2 degrees centigrade, with a soft target of 1.5 degrees, is already on its way to being breached as the world records a succession of the hottest months on record.

Whats needed is comprehensive and urgent action now to slash emissions and build a low-carbon future, Friends of the Earth commented.

The Paris Agreement also provides for 100 billion dollars a year in climate finance for developing countries by 2020, with a commitment to further finance in the future.

The U.S. and China have set widely differing targets on carbon emissions, because of their different stages of economic development. The U.S. plans over the next 10 years to reduce emissions by over a quarter below the level of 2005, while China says it intends to stop increasing its emissions by 2030.

Licensed from Inter Press Service



Related video added by Juan Cole:

Euronews: China and US ratify Paris climate change deal
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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) |  

Stars and Stripes reports that US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov may be very near a new US-Russian deal on Syria.

The key elements are reported to be:

1. Syrian Air Force stops bombing cities, including Aleppo and Homs

2. Humanitarian aid allowed to reach millions of civilians

3. Russia will also stop its bombing campaign on all groups except Daesh (ISIS, ISIL)

4. Once these steps have been taken, the US will join Russia in bombing positions of the Army of Syrian Conquest (Jabhat al-Nusra), whose leader is loyal to al-Qaeda

Although skeptics were scathing about this plan, it appears as I write that it may be announced imminently.

This is Lavrovs own take at a news conference in Tokyo, from the Russian Foreign Ministry web site:

Question: How do you assess the current situation in Syria? How much longer can the Russian Aerospace Forces operation in Syria last? Sergey Lavrov: The question is not how long the operation may last. We are fighting against terrorism, working to create a truly universal antiterrorism front, as President Putin proposed at last years session of the UN General Assembly. For several weeks now, in conjunction with the United States, as two co-chairs of the ISSG, as two countries that are effectively engaging terrorist targets in Syria, we have been conducting intensive consultations to develop a single plan of action based on the coordination of antiterrorist efforts. This was the focus of my meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry on August 26 in Geneva, as well as of our numerous telephone conversations. This issue began to be addressed in a substantive way after Mr Kerry visited Moscow on July 15 and was received by President Putin. Daily and weekly contacts between the Russian and US militaries and special services continue in order to develop such a plan. We expect this work to be finished in the near future. Practically all components of this task are already clear. Mutual understanding has been reached on most issues. The most important thing, however, is that none of our agreements with the Americans on practical actions and the coordination of operations against terrorists and the coordination of Aerospace Forces operations with the USAF and the US-led coalition will be implemented unless our US partners fulfill the promise they made a long time ago to separate opposition groups working with the United States from terrorists, primarily Jabhat al-Nusra. Many groups, which the Americans deem to be acceptable for negotiations, have effectively teamed up with Jabhat al-Nusra (or whatever it is called now). Jabhat al-Nusra is using them to avoid being attacked. This situation cannot go on forever. To reiterate, the resolution of this major problem is crucial for the implementation of plans for an antiterrorist operation that have already been largely coordinated between us and the Americans. Source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs website in English 0800 gmt 3 Sep 16

From the beginning, Russian intervention in Syria has been more about defeating the Nusra Front than about destroying Daesh, though Moscow wants to end both. Daesh hasnt been a mortal threat to Damascus and opportunistically for the most part avoids fighting the Syrian Arab Army. The Nusra Front led the other fundamentalist militias into a conquest of Idlib Province, from which it could threaten the key port of Latakia and the Alawite population there. Had Nusra and its allies taken Latakia they could have cut Damascus off from resupply and could have ethnically cleansed the 2 million Alawites there, who are the backbone of the regime. Game over. So Russia came in to destroy Nusra (which is linked through al-Qaeda to Chechen and Central Asian terrorist groups that anyway threaten Moscow).

And Russia is making no deal that holds Nusra/ al-Qaeda harmless. It has to be destroyed, from Moscows point of view, or the other negotiations and arrangements would just prolong the struggle.

Turkeys intervention on the side of the fundamentalist militias probably worries Russia and may help convince Moscow to try to freeze positions before, as a side effect, the Nusra Front can gather strength.

The US in Syria, or at least the CIA, seems to be soft on al-Qaeda, probably because of a realization that the other fundamentalist militias dont amount to much without it.

For its part, apparently the Pentagon is grumpy about having to work with Russia at all and doesnt trust it, feeling that Moscow used the last cease fire to hit US-backed rebels southwest of Aleppo in an attempt to cut off and starve out rebel-held East Aleppo. (If the Syrian regime could have taken back all of Aleppo, it would have been well on the way to simply winning outright).

Those policy figures who have as a priority the overthrow of al-Assad and are willing to wink at the prominent role of an al-Qaeda-lined group on the side of the fundamentalist rebels objected on two grounds. 1) the plan would not lead to regime change and 2) because for the US to cooperate with Russia and to target the Army of Syrian Conquest would alienate the remnants of the Free Syrian Army from the US.

Personally I think that if the relative success of last springs ceasefire could be replicated and civilians could get some relief, it would be well worth it. If the FSA doesnt want to get bombed they should move away from al-Qaeda elements. And if they dont like the US bombing al-Qaeda-linked groups, then they arent suitable allies to begin with.

The main thing is to convince the Russians that they and al-Assad cant win outright and so ultimately some accommodation is going to have to be made with the Sunni Arab rural areas. On the other hand, the plan of the Gulf & the CIA to put the rural Sunni Arab fundamentalists in charge of the Christians, Alawites, Druze, Kurds and urban Sunni leftists is guaranteed to make the half of Syrians still not homeless into a new wave of refugees.

Better a ceasefire.



Related video:

Press TV: Russia, US could reach cooperation deal on Syria
Ethiopias opposition leader and leader of the Oromo ethnic group, Tiruneh Gamta, demanded on Saturday the release of all political prisoners regardless of any political stand or religion or creed. The Oromo ethnic group, representing the largest group among the protestors, is largely credited with starting the protests last November when the government announced its plan to expand the capital into the Oromia region. Although the Oromos initially started protesting against what they viewed as a plan to remove them from fertile land in the region, the protests started taking on a different theme even as the government dropped its plan to expand the capitalone calling for the release of political prisoners [Al Jazeera report]. According to rights groups, at least 500 people have been killed and thousands arrested since the unrest began. No one has heard from many of the individuals who have been detained. Many reports have also surfaced of attacks by protestors on foreign-owned business such as flower farms and horticultural companies. Esmeralda farms reported losses of over US$11 million as crowds of protestors torched many foreign flower farms perceived as having links to the government. The government rejected claims that violence from the security forces was part of any systemic plan, and stated its intention to communicate with the opposition groups to listen to their grievances. The government also promised to hold accountable those officers found guilty of abuse.

Ethiopia has used its broad anti-terrorism laws to detain political opposition before. In January several Ethiopian rights groups called on the international community to address the killing [JURIST report] of protesters. In December HRW reported that activists had witnessed security forces firing into throngs of protesters [HRW report]. That report came a day after Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn [BBC profile] warned [IBT report] of merciless legitimate action against any force bent on destabilising the area. Ethiopian officials have been claiming that the demonstrations are a front for those involved in the protests to insight violence and threaten the stability of the nation. In October five of nine Ethiopian bloggers who landed in jail in connection with publications critical of the government were acquitted of terrorism charges [JURIST report]. That same month UN Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights Ben Emmerson [official profile] expressed concern [JURIST report] over the rising use of counter-terrorism measures around the world. Emmerson stated that many nations have used counter-terrorism as an excuse to restrict public assembly and stop the activities of public interest groups.
The Puducherry (former Pondicherry) Legislative Assembly ratified [Indian Express report] the Goods and Services Tax (GST) constitutional amendment [text, PDF] passed [Diplomat report] by the Parliament of India [official website] earlier this month amid a walkout staged by the primary opposing party and ruling party of Tamil Nadu, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK or ADMK). All members of the All India NR Congress (AINRC) [official website] continued their own boycott [Indian Express report] against the ratification of the amendment, which is seen as the biggest tax reform in the country in decades. Specifically, opposition assembly leader and member of Parliament from the ADMK, Anbalagan Arumugam expressed concerns that the GST will be injurious to the union territory of Puducherry and stated that the government should have given time for consideration of the resolution ratifying the amendment. But Puducherry Chief Minister Narayanasamy Velu assured his constituents and the voters that he has taken steps to protect the interests of Puducherry including winning assurances from India Finance Minister Arun Jaitely toward that end. The chief minister also stated that the Puducherry government will continue to enjoy its power to levy and enforce its own service tax and tax on liquor. According to Assembly Speaker Vaithilingam Venkatasubha, the resolution was passed unanimously.

Much like in the US, ratification of a constitutional amendment by a minimum number of states, approximately half or 15 in India, is required before the amendment becomes effective. This would be Indias 122nd constitutional amendment, making the longest constitution in the world even longer. Puducherry is not a state, but a union territory akin to the US Virgin Islands or Puerto Rico for the US. Thus, ratification by Puducherry itself is of minimal consequence to the overall country, and will not be counted toward the 15-state-ratification requirement. According to Ernst & Young India (EY India) [corporate website], the benefits of the GST [EY India report] include, among other things, a wider tax base and lower tax rates, elimination of a multiplicity of taxes, streamlining of national and state tax administrations, and automation of compliance procedures. The EY India study further points out that [t]he GST structure would follow the destination principle. Accordingly, imports would be subject to GST, while exports would be zero-rated. In the case of inter-State transactions within India, the State tax would apply in the State of destination as opposed to that of origin. The GST amendment seeks to empower both the central and the state governments of India to levy tax on goods manufactured and services provided in the country. Currently, the central government cannot [Indian Express report] impose any tax on goods beyond manufacturing (Excise) or primary import (Customs) stage, while states do not have the power to tax services. India Prime Minister Narendra Modi [official website], a proponent of the GST, stated [Financial Express report]: People joke on WhatsApp about the bills they have to pay when they go to restaurants. They highlight the food payment and the cess. With GST, all this will be simplified. Also, the state and centre will trust each other more. The entire federal structure will be strengthened.
New U.K. Treasury chief Jeremy Hunt has reversed most of an economic package announced by the government just weeks ago, including a planned cut in income taxes. Hunt said Monday he was scrapping almost all the tax cuts announced last month by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Liz Truss, and also signaled that public spending cuts are on the way. It was a bid to soothe turbulent financial markets spooked by fears of excessive government borrowing. The move raises questions about how long the beleaguered prime minister can stay in office, though Truss insisted she has no plans to quit. She vowed to lead the Conservatives into the next general election, but many in the party want her gone.
Dear KFBers hope you had a splendid weekend? We have got loads of interesting stories in tonights #MajorHeadlinesYouMissedToday featureenjoy









Sultan of Sokoto announces Monday, September 12th as Eid el-Kabir Day



The committee in conjunction with the National Moon Sighting Committee had received reports from various Moon sighting committees across the country. The reports confirmed the sighting of the New Moon of Zulhijja,1437 AH, on Friday, Sept. 2, 2016,

which was the 29th day of Zulkaada, 1437 AH. The Sultan and President, Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA), accepted the reports and accordingly declared Saturday, Sept. 3, as the first day of Zulhijja, 1437 AH. Therefore, Monday, Sept.12, which will be equivalent to 10th Zulhijja, and will be marked as this years Eid el-Kabirthe statement read. The Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Saad Abubakar III, has announced Monday, September 12th as the Eid-El-Kabir Day. The announcement is contained in a statement signed by Sambo Junaidu, Chairman, Advisory Committee on Religious Affairs, Sultanate Council of Sokoto.The committee in conjunction with the National Moon Sighting Committee had received reports from various Moon sighting committees across the country. The reports confirmed the sighting of the New Moon of Zulhijja,1437 AH, on Friday, Sept. 2, 2016,which was the 29th day of Zulkaada, 1437 AH. The Sultan and President, Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA), accepted the reports and accordingly declared Saturday, Sept. 3, as the first day of Zulhijja, 1437 AH. Therefore, Monday, Sept.12, which will be equivalent to 10th Zulhijja, and will be marked as this years Eid el-Kabirthe statement read.

Church of England bishop becomes first cleric to declare he is in a gay relationship



Speaking with the Guardian in an exclusive interview he said: People know Im gay, but its not the first thing Id say to anyone. Sexuality is part of who I am, but its my ministry that I want to focus on.

He disclosed that his superiors including the archbishop of Canterbury who is the leader of the Anglican church worldwide knew of his sexuality. I was myself. Those making the appointment knew about my sexual identity he said.

Chamberlain said he adhered to church guidelines, under which gay clergy must be celibate and are not permitted to marry. In the appointments process, We explored what it would mean for me as a bishop to be living within those guidelines, he said.

In a statement, Welby said: I am and have been fully aware of Bishop Nicks long-term, committed relationship. His appointment as bishop of Grantham was made on the basis of his skills and calling to serve the church in the diocese of Lincoln. He lives within the bishops guidelines and his sexuality is completely irrelevant to his office. NECO begins registration for 2022 common entrance Nicolas Chamberlain, the Bishop of Grantham has become the first Church of England bishop to publicly declare that he is gay and in a relationship. The Bishop who said his sexuality has not been a secret was forced to go public after a newspaper threatened to reveal his orientation.Speaking with the Guardian in an exclusive interview he said: People know Im gay, but its not the first thing Id say to anyone. Sexuality is part of who I am, but its my ministry that I want to focus on.He disclosed that his superiors including the archbishop of Canterbury who is the leader of the Anglican church worldwide knew of his sexuality. I was myself. Those making the appointment knew about my sexual identity he said.Chamberlain said he adhered to church guidelines, under which gay clergy must be celibate and are not permitted to marry. In the appointments process, We explored what it would mean for me as a bishop to be living within those guidelines, he said.In a statement, Welby said: I am and have been fully aware of Bishop Nicks long-term, committed relationship. His appointment as bishop of Grantham was made on the basis of his skills and calling to serve the church in the diocese of Lincoln. He lives within the bishops guidelines and his sexuality is completely irrelevant to his office.

Lagos state government says owners of demolished structures in Ikoyi were duly served contravention notices



In a statement issued by the Commissioner, Ministry of Information and Strategy, Mr. Steve Ayorinde, the Government said it had noted with dismay, the flagrant disobedience of Building Regulations, and has therefore resolved to ensure removal of all structures that are in contravention of the law.

Speaking against the backdrop of recent demolition of some illegal structures in Ikoyi, Ayorinde reiterated Governments determination to rid the State of Illegal developments saying In our effort to maintain a sustainable, organized, liveable and friendly environment, the Government will not renege on its declared stance of zero tolerance for structures and properties without development permit or approved building plans. The Lagos State Government on Saturday said owners of the buildings demolished in Ikoyi were duly served with contravention, removal and quit notices before the exercise was carried out, just as it vowed to intensify efforts to rid the State of illegal structures.In a statement issued by the Commissioner, Ministry of Information and Strategy, Mr. Steve Ayorinde, the Government said it had noted with dismay, the flagrant disobedience of Building Regulations, and has therefore resolved to ensure removal of all structures that are in contravention of the law.Speaking against the backdrop of recent demolition of some illegal structures in Ikoyi, Ayorinde reiterated Governments determination to rid the State of Illegal developments saying In our effort to maintain a sustainable, organized, liveable and friendly environment, the Government will not renege on its declared stance of zero tolerance for structures and properties without development permit or approved building plans.

APC has destroyed Nigerias economy  Delta Speaker Speaker of Delta State House of Assembly, Hon Monday Igbuya has blamed the All Progressives Congress (APC) for the countrys economic problems.

Accusing the party of mis-managing Nigerias economy, he said: The APC has not fulfilled its promises. It has not solved the social problems, neither has it solved the economic problems. It has destroyed the economy, particularly the nations currency.

The poor can no longer buy garri, rice and other foodstuff. APC is making a mess of the nations situation he lamented.

Urging Nigerians to reject the APC in 2019, he said, The APC preaches the gospel of change. Who is deceiving who? As a people, we must face realities squarely and decide what we want.

He commended Okowa for doing very well, adding that he is a listening governor.

The dualization of Amukpe- Ajogodo Road is aimed at making Sapele a modern city. Governor Okowa will work on all the roads in Sapele. He will complete the Sapele market and the stadium.

The PDP government will continue to empower the people of Sapele. We have received letter from telcos to increase call, data tariffs - NCC PDP in a state of comatose  Obasanjo tells Sheriff



Speaking at his Hilltop residence in Abeokuta, Ogun State, after a closed door meeting with embattled factional Chairman of PDP, Sen Ali Modu Sheriff, Obasanjo said the party had lost its soul.

Obasanjo, who presided over the affairs of the party for eight years said, And, as they all want to say now, well, you were once the father of PDP, I was once the leader, for eight years. I was the leader of PDP but the PDP that I was the leader of is not the PDP of today. Following the leadership crises currently rocking the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, on Saturday, said the party has gone into comatose.Speaking at his Hilltop residence in Abeokuta, Ogun State, after a closed door meeting with embattled factional Chairman of PDP, Sen Ali Modu Sheriff, Obasanjo said the party had lost its soul.Obasanjo, who presided over the affairs of the party for eight years said, And, as they all want to say now, well, you were once the father of PDP, I was once the leader, for eight years. I was the leader of PDP but the PDP that I was the leader of is not the PDP of today.

How government jailed my father for not sending me to school  Atiku

Former vice president, Atiku Abubakar has disclosed how local authorities in Adamawa State imprisoned his father for refusing to send him to school.

He made the disclosure at the Ford Foundation Special Reunion to mark the 80th Anniversary of Ford Foundation in Lagos.

The former Vice President revealed that like many parents of his generation, his father attempted to stop him from acquiring western education because he needed his help in the farm.

He said, Although he later relented, my father was put in prison by local authorities for refusing to send me to school. Like many parents of his generation, he needed my help in the farm.

My encounter with Peace Corps teachers in the 1960s had a profound impact on my life. It helped to instill in me the virtues of hard work, critical thinking, and commitment to excellence.

The teachers encouraged us to develop a can-do spirit and never to despair in order to bring out the best in us to enable us to succeed in life. In my young eyes those Peace Corpers represented excellence. They instilled in me a burning desire to look to a wider horizon to have a global outlook.

So, my encounter with the Peace Corps changed my life and education is responsible for the modest success I have achieved thus far. Because of the education I received which was paid for by the Northern Regional Government and local authorities, I was able to rise from a small village in Adamawa to the topmost level of the Nigeria Customs Service.

My exposure to education encouraged me to embrace savings and investment from very early in my career. Upon retirement, I went into business. And when my mentor, the late General Shehu Musa YarAdua, invited some of us to join politics to help restore democracy to our country, I agreed, guided by that same can-dospirit. Since then, both in and out of public office, my commitment to democracy has not wavered.

The PDP of today, if you can talk of a party again as PDP, its soul has been taken out of it and those who allowed that to happen are, unfortunately, either in the country or out of the country unperturbed about the fate of the party and indeed the fate of the country.

I have said to my brother (Sheriff), that I wish him well in the dying baby they have put on his laps, because PDP is in comatose and he was of course not in the PDP, he has never been in the PDP until now. 2023: PDP speaks on 'punishing' Wike over comments on Atiku Police arrests prophetess running brothel in Ogun state
Focus on long-term governance is correct approach to boost sustainable growth Updated: 2016-09-04 09:20 By TED CHU HAOQUAN(China Daily)

LUO JIE/CHINA DAILY

Slow and unpredictable economic growth is the greatest challenge we face today. But to identify new sources of growth we have to understand some fundamental challenges in the global economy and how to address them.

The first one is demographic changes. New labor force growth is concentrated in low-income countries, as almost all high-income countries and many middle-income countries face the challenges of an aging population.

The second is the narrowness of technological advances, which are concentrated in information and communications technology and are not yet impacting the bulk of the real economy. The digital economy only accounts for 45 percent of GDP and 12 percent of jobs.

Economists and government leaders have increasingly recognized that these are structural problems, and pro-cyclical monetary policies have reached their limits. Pro-cyclical fiscal policies are not the answer either, as debt-to-GDP ratio continues to rise in both rich and developing countries.

Therefore, new sources of growth must be found by stimulating innovation, more investment in new industries, and more labor participation.

The private sector cannot be forced to spend, but will do so when G20 leaders create a more favorable business environment, while continuing to maintain political and macroeconomic stability.

The Chinese economy is so large today that its recent slowdown is another fundamental structural challenge that the global economy is still having a difficult time dealing with, particularly resource rich emerging markets that used to rely on exports to China as a growth engine.

Therefore, maintaining growth itself will be the biggest contribution that China can make to help the global economy recover.

Business and personal decisions on whether to invest and to spend are largely based on expectations of the future, so China's ability to maintain growth will boost confidence all over the world.

China must strike the balance between letting its old economy go and allowing the new economy to grow.

When you go to the Northeast region, you see the sunset industries such as coal and steel under heavy debt with little demand for their output, but when you go to Shenzhen then you see a very exciting new technology sector booming.

The challenge today is that the new economy has a smaller base, and although it is growing fast, it's not enough to compensate for the decline and stagnation of the old economy.

This is not just a problem for China. It's the same for most G20 countries. So if China's transitional experience is successful, it can be a useful lesson for others.

When the forum was formed during the Global Financial Crisis in 2008/9, the G20 leaders demonstrated their determination and willingness to make joint efforts to prevent the global economy from falling off a cliff.

We are not facing an imminent global crisis, but the challenges we face today are very serious. It is the structural issues that if not addressed could bring a bigger crisis further down the road, whether its debt sustainability or income inequality.

So I believe China's call to focus on long-term governance is correct. The difficulty is how to motivate the political will to make tough choices when there is no strong economic pressure.

I think one thing we can do is to increase the exposure of government performance in governance and other areas, and deepen the understanding of how effective government and other structural issues impact investment, innovation and resources mobilization.

When people can clearly see in which areas they lag among peers, and how much reward can be expected when the tough work is done, then they will be more motivated to act, and if they don't, they will face more public pressure to act.

The author is chief economist at the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group.
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By Barbara McMichael

Gone to Gold Mountain  Peter Ludwin

MoonPath Press  104 pp.  $15

In 2009, this column covered "Massacred for Gold: The Chinese in Hells Canyon," a nonfiction book by Oregon author R. Gregory Nokes that exposed a shameful 1887 incident that had been covered over and nearly forgotten.

That work had a profound impact on another writer, Kent poet Peter Ludwin, who responded with an array of poems that over the years have found their way into more than a dozen journals, including the prestigious Prairie Schooner, Floating Bridge Review and The Comstock Review.

Now these pieces have been gathered together in one volume and published by MoonPath Press. "Gone to Gold Mountain" retells the story of Chea Po and his fellow Chinese immigrants, who came to America to try to make their fortunes, but whose dream of returning to their families in China was denied by a band of pioneer thugs.

In the book's Prologue, a poem written in the form of a letter from Chea Po to his wife back in China, Chea deplores his situation on a roughshod frontier run by white men (gweilo):

Despised by gweilo

who once sought our labor,

we linger like dogs

on the edge of camp, desperate

or a scrap.

The poems in the first section of this volume convey Chea Po's hopes as he leaves his family to travel overseas to try his luck at the American dream, or Gum Shan  Gold Mountain. But those hopes are soon dashed, and life (" reduced to heat and cold, / labor and solitude") becomes a bitter fight for subsistence, only partially assuaged by the opium pipe and coarse jokes cracked by Chea's colleagues.

The chilling epigraph that precedes the second section of this book foretells the trauma to come. It is the remark  ironically and tragically heedless  that was made in 1885 by U.S. territorial Judge A. Heed: "There is nothing that can be said in favor of the Chinese. We must get rid of them."

The Chinese Expulsion Act was passed by Congress in 1882, and racist sentiments like these were not uncommon. They gave rise to terrible acts of brutality throughout the West  white mobs descended upon Chinese communities in Washington, Idaho, California, Wyoming and elsewhere  attacking, robbing and murdering the residents and setting fire to their communities.

In May of 1887, the xenophic fury caught up with the Chinese miners in Hells Canyon, when a gang of local white men ambushed Chea Po and the rest. The victim count has never been precisely determined  there may have been as many as 34 miners who were brutally killed.

Powerfully and lyrically, Ludwin's poems consider different fragments of this travesty  from the wife's futile wish for her husband's return, to Chea Po's story of grinding work and dashed hopes, to the machinations of a court whose operatives scuttled to provide justification, rather than justice.

"Gone to Gold Mountain" strives to embroider poetic flesh back onto history's bare bones, and it serves as a reminder that now, as then, xenophobia can have terrible consequences.
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With all this talk about building walls, resorting to extreme vetting and suspending immigration from countries associated with terrorism, I am surprised that no one seems to be concerned about one of the easiest ways for those who mean us harm to slip into the country  our student visa program.

In the aftermath of 9/11, there was a common misconception that all the hijackers held student visas. According to FactCheck.org, only one of the 19 had entered the U.S. with a student visa. The others held tourist or business visas. Still, a little profiling is not a bad thing. The Islamic extremists most likely to be jihadis are young and can easily pass for college students. Moreover, there is no way to compel student-visa holders to report to school. They can simply disappear into America.

In all fairness, schools are now required to report no-shows using the online Student and Exchange Visitor Program. That is all well and good. But I doubt that either the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency or the FBI has the resources to go looking for those who don't report to school.

To borrow a phrase from George Will, we would hear university presidents "hissing like cornered cats" should Homeland Security propose shutting down the student-visa program. American universities covet international students for two reasons: First, they pay full out-of-state tuition, no small attraction in these straitened times; second, they bolster a university's commitment to enlightened internationalism, universities wanting to appear cosmopolitan and not provincial.

I happen to have firsthand knowledge of how easily the student-visa system can be manipulated. Back in the 1990s, when I was a professor and department chair at a small college in the heart of the heart of the country, I was also saddled with trying to keep our struggling international program going.

The key to getting a student visa, I learned, is the I-20 form. When an international student applies to an American college or university, the school sends that student an I-20 form confirming his or her acceptance. The student then takes that form to an American embassy or consulate. The two main hurdles at that point are convincing an embassy or consulate officer of his or her intention to return home at the end of the course of study and establishing that he or she has enough money for tuition and living expenses. Once those hurdles are cleared, the student is issued a visa.

The rub in our case was that we were an open-admission college in a provincial setting. Through an agent in Japan, we could count on getting six or seven Japanese students each year, but I wanted to internationalize our international program so that English would have to be the lingua franca among our students. And because we were desperate to grow our program, we didn't require that students achieve a certain score on the Test of English as a Foreign Language  a hurdle that selective schools require international students to clear.

These were innocent, pre-9/11 times, and I was naive to the ways in which the student-visa program could be misused. I really thought our program was about to flourish when we started getting I-20 requests from students in Columbia, Nigeria, and a couple other African countries. I promptly issued the forms, but the students didn't show up and were never heard from again. And at that time, there was no set reporting mechanism for no-shows.

We can resort to all the measures that Trump and his alt-right backers are proposing to keep out Islamic extremists and outright jihadis. We could restrict student visas to applicants from Western countries, but even that would prove futile. Radicalized Muslims reside in France and England as well as the Middle Eastern countries. And barring Muslims in general would play into the hands of the extremists, reinforcing their recruiting narrative of the West waging a crusade against Islam.

The only answer, for lack of a better term, is "extreme vetting." We need to conduct reasonably thorough background investigations on those applying for student visas. That would slow down the process and reduce the number of foreign students admitted to our schools. The cornered cats of academia would not just hiss. They would caterwaul. But so be it.

The question remains, however, would tightening the student visa program guarantee our safety? Of course not. Having grown up at the height of the Cold War, I'm reminded of what we were told about the threat of those Russian bombers: "Despite our best efforts, some will get through." The same applies to terrorists  both those from abroad and homegrown ones inspired by extremist ideologies. But that doesn't mean that we should stop trying to find and tighten all the loopholes we can. The student visa program represents just such a loophole.
Shenandoah, IA (51601)

Today

Partly cloudy this evening, then becoming cloudy after midnight. Low 41F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy this evening, then becoming cloudy after midnight. Low 41F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph.
SHARE Harold Black

Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and now Hillary Clinton oppose North American Free Trade Agreement saying that it was a bad deal and cost American jobs.

Well if Trump, Sanders and Clinton all agree, then the truth is likely different.

When the pact was proposed in the early 1990s, it was met with strong opposition from both Canadians and the Mexicans who were afraid that the sheer size of the U.S. economy would overpower their economies. Although many in the U.S. point to the lost of American automobile jobs, Mexico bemoans the displacement of a million Mexican farmers who were driven out of business by the influx of heavily subsidized American corn. However, those who talk about job loss forget to mention the jobs gained.

Many studies find that job losses were offset by gains. Yes, manufacturing jobs in the U.S. have declined but so has manufacturing output keeping its relationship to GDP unchanged. Trade causes only about 20 percent of the job loss while technology has accounted for 80 percent. This is similar to what happened in agriculture where once the majority of the labor force was employed in agriculture and now its only 2 percent.

Consider that Michigan is estimated to have lost around 220,000 manufacturing jobs due to NAFTA. However, the Congressional Research Service estimates that overall there has been a net gain in jobs. Michigan now has over 1 million jobs directly linked to international trade and workers in trade intensive industries earn 18 percent more than in other industries.

A politician railing about job loss should first address why those jobs left in the first place. Consider that Audi chose to build its new $1 billion plant in Mexico rather than in Chattanooga because Mexico has more than 40 free trade agreements giving the company more duty-free access than if it were in the U.S.

So the lack of free trade agreements is also costing the U.S. jobs.

Promising to impose large tariffs on China and Mexico or forcing companies to stay won't solve the problem either.

Countries would retaliate by imposing large duties on American goods. Importers would buy the goods from some other low-cost country. Companies would pay Hillary Clinton's proposed exit tax and leave.

Consider that after the passage of NAFTA, trucks from Mexico were banned from entering the U.S. to protect American truck drivers' jobs. The Mexican government retaliated by imposing $2 billion in tariffs on American goods. U.S. companies complained but it still took 20 years for the ban to be lifted.

Yes, trade causes disruptions in the labor force but it accounts for only about 5 percent of the 20 million Americans who annually change jobs involuntarily yearly due to layoffs or plant closures.

Technology imposes a larger threat to American jobs. Over 50 percent of American jobs are vulnerable to technology.

I guess the presidential aspirants will now campaign advocating huge taxes on companies that displace workers due to technological change.

Ned Ludd lives!
Georgiana Vines/Special to the News Sentinel Former GSMNP superintendent Dale Ditmanson, second from right, attended a luncheon in the park on Aug. 25, the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service. With him were, from left Michael Hall, Bruce Graves, Ditmanson's wife, Suzanne, Dana Soehn and Phil Ellenburg. The men are on the facility management staff. Dana is the public affairs specialist.

SHARE Kayci Cook Collins/special to the news sentinel John E. Cook, who retired from the National Park Service in 1999 after serving as superintendent of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, is shown with his daughter Kayci Cook Collins, when she was superintendent of Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine in Baltimore. She is now superintendent of the Flagstaff Area National Monuments, which include Walnut Canyon, Wupatki and Sunset Crater Volcano National Monuments. They are part of a four-generation family of Park Service employees. Randall Pope

By Georgiana Vines of the Knoxville News Sentinel

Two former superintendents of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park have retired in Gatlinburg after working in parks throughout the country. That means they could have retired anywhere and chose to call East Tennessee their home.

Dale Ditmanson, superintendent in 2004-2014, and Randall Pope, who served in 1987-1993, say they enjoy their personal lives and privacy after the public exposure that the high-profile job brings.

Some of that preferred obscurity was interrupted, by choice, on Aug. 25, when they attended a luncheon for GSMNP employees at park headquarters on the 100th anniversary date of the National Park Service. Current superintendent Cassius Cash made a point of introducing them to the hundreds who were there.

Three other living Smokies superintendents are John E. Cook, superintendent in 1983-86 who now serves as a night city judge in Page, Ariz.; Karen Wade, 1994-1999, retired to Montana; and Michael Tollefson, 2000-02, who established a consulting business after retiring from Yosemite National Park and the Yosemite Conservancy.

All these superintendents precede Cash, who's been in the post since February 2015. He's the 16th superintendent, not counting those who served on an interim basis.

When he was considering retirement in 2014, Ditmanson said he also considered staying around until the Park Service's 100th anniversary, knowing it would be a special time. But he had gotten some projects completed, such as the Collections Preservation Center in Townsend, that has artifacts and records of the Smokies and other national sites in the region, and presided at the 75th anniversary of the Smokies in 2009.

"I was in the chair almost 10 years," he said, deciding that was enough.

He said he and wife Suzanne have enjoyed the past two years on personal interests and spending time with adult sons and families in Fort Worth and Washington, D.C. He also likes being a proud grandpa to 2-year-old Oliver when going to Washington.

Early mornings may find him riding a bike in Cades Cove to enjoy the scenery, he said.

Randy Pope, credited with initiating the Friends of the Smokies support group, and wife Kathy are known to stay in touch with friends in the area. He said he preferred not to be interviewed now that he's retired. Much of his career was in the Midwest before coming to the Smokies. The couple used to travel in the summertime to Colorado, where they had a house, but aren't doing that now.

John Cook is one of the more active retirees and frequently travels to Kingsport, Tenn., where his son, Lafe, is band master at Dobyns-Bennett High School. That's the band that became known for representing Tennessee at the 2013 presidential inauguration instead of the University of Tennessee band going, Cook said.

Cook retired in 1999 after a varied career at different parks and as NPS associate director in Washington. He's run for elective office in Page and then was appointed a city judge.

"I fell and broke my back," so had to cut back to working as a relief judge, he said.

Before the fall, he was 6'2" and weighed 250 pounds. Now he is 5'7" and weighs 200 pounds, he said.

"I'm missing all of those inches and 50 pounds," he laughed.

Cook's daughter, Kayci Cook Collins, is superintendent of Walnut Canyon, Wupatki and Sunset Crater Volcano National Monuments. Cook and his daughter are members of a four-generation family which has worked for the Park Service.

Neither Karen Wade nor Michael Tollefson could be reached for this update.

Wade, who replaced Cook at the Smokies, became director of the Intermountain Region in Denver when she left the Smokies, and retired in 2003. She lives in Fortine, Mont., west of Glacier National Park.

Tollefson left the Smokies to be superintendent at Yosemite National Park. When he retired, he became president/CEO of what's now the Yosemite Conservancy in San Francisco. Since 2015, he has had a consulting business and is based in Gold River, Calif., in the Sacramento area.

Georgiana Vines, retired News Sentinel associate editor, may be reached at 865-577-6612 or gvpolitics@hotmail.com.
Mary Ann and I celebrated the National Park Service's centennial roughly 1,150 miles northeast of the Great Smokies.

We were at Acadia, oldest national park this side of the Mississippi.

It was our second visit to Maine, one of the most beautiful chunks of real estate on Earth. I could happily live there from Memorial Day 'til Halloween. But outside those parameters? No way. I much prefer snow in inches, not feet.

Coastal Maine and eastern Tennessee differ up and down the line: birdlife, geography, weather, you name it. Even on rare "hot and humid" days (insert laugh here), the air along Maine's rugged shore felt like Tennessee in mid-October.

Speaking of temperatures, the Atlantic was perking along at a tooth-rattling 55 degrees the day we trekked to Acadia's popular Sand Beach. Only a handful of "swimmers" were brave enough to venture beyond their ankles.

Brrr! I'll take Little River or the West Prong, thank you very much.

There's another marked difference between Up There and Down Here. And it shames me to say it.

In Maine, there's very little litter  at least that we saw while driving between towns outside the park. Not so in Tennessee. Doesn't matter if our folks are on a rural road or a major highway, they fling trash at every turn.

It boggles my mind to understand why.

How come those people can take pride in their land while we bury ours in bottles, cups, cans, wrappers, household garbage and heaven-only-knows what else?

I'm not the only Knoxvillian to notice this nauseating disparity.

"I've lived in several cities in my lifetime, and I've never seen a populace treat its green areas with more disdain than we do here," Jim Doncaster told me in a recent email.

Doncaster grew up in Pennsylvania. He's a University of Tennessee graduate and has lived in K-town off and on since the early 1960s. He and wife Jane are back in retirement after careers in mental health, counseling and special education.

"We raised our children and taught our students with a conservation ethic," he said. "Whether in a classroom, campsite or ballpark, we made sure they cleaned up after themselves, leaving it in better condition than they found it."

The Doncasters walk for exercise in Victor Ashe Park. They're blown away by two-legged swine who share the area.

"We see kids and adults alike mindlessly throwing trash on the ground, even within a few feet of a trash can," he said. "We make vain attempts to pick it up, but we're not making much of a dent."

To reiterate a shameful point: Why this difference between North and South?
SHARE In this Oct. 2, 2015, file photo, John King Jr. speaks in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington. King will speak at Pellissippi State Community College Sept. 13 as part of his back-to-school bus tour. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)

By News Sentinel Staff

U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. will be at Pellissippi State Community College the afternoon of Sept. 13 as part of his back-to-school bus tour.

King will discuss America's College Promise, the proposal President Barack Obama unveiled here last year that would proposal make two years of community college free for students who undertook certain responsibilities, letting those students earn the first half of a bachelor's degree and earn skills needed in the workforce at no cost.

King will come to Knoxville from a morning program at Vance Middle School in Bristol, Tenn., on ConnectED, a federal program that aims to connect most American students with broadband or wireless Internet. After speaking in Knoxville, he'll drive to Chattanooga, where he'll speak on "Teacher leadership and lifting up educators" and Battle Academy.

It's the second day of "Opportunity Across America," King's seventh back-to-school bus tour, "celebrating progress in communities and states," the White House said. The tour kicks off Sept. 12 in Washington, D.C., and ends Sept. 16 in Louisiana.

Obama kicked off America's College Promise, patterned after Gov. Bill Haslam's Tennessee Promise scholarship program, last year when he traveled to Pellissippi State. There, he proposed that as many as 9 million students should have access to two years of tuition-free community college, then pitched the proposal during his State of the Union address a couple of weeks later.

The plan, projected to cost $60 billion over the next 10 years, met with resistance from the GOP-controlled Congress. It would pay only tuition; non-tuition items such as: textbooks, supplies, transportation, and room and board are not included.
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UT on Princeton's 'best colleges' list

The University of Tennessee has landed on the annual list of the 381 best colleges in the U.S. published by the Princeton Review, which produces college prep and guide books.

The school was also ranked No. 17 on a list of the least beautiful campuses, a longtime gripe of students and the community, and No. 10 on list of the least LGBTQ-friendly schools.

The lists and rankings are based on surveys of 143,000 students across the country, in which they rated such topics as financial aid and on-campus food.

In its description of the university, the publisher said students called the campus a "family-like atmosphere full of opportunity and support" with "atmosphere, affordability and school spirit."

The school was also named among the best colleges in the Southeast and made the lists of "Colleges that Pay You Back" and "Green Colleges." Earlier this year, UT was named a "best value" public university by Princeton Review.

Two to be inducted as nursing fellows

University of Tennessee faculty members Nan Gaylord and Lynda Hardy have been named to the American Academy of Nursing's 2016 Class of New Fellows.

Gaylord is a professor of nursing, the director of UT's Center for Nursing Practice and the director of the Vine School Health Clinic.

"She saw a need and had a vision 20 years ago to provide school-based health care to underserved children in the Knox County area," said Victoria Niederhauser, dean of UT's College of Nursing." This recognition is a tribute to the enormous impact that she has made in providing comprehensive health care in our community. She has also trained the next generation of advanced practice pediatric nurses quietly and humbly."

Hardy is a professor and the associate dean for research. Her nursing research background specializes in the areas of child health, HIV/AIDS and trauma. She has been involved at the national level in work groups focusing on big data, biomedical informatics and Ebola.

"Her ability to work interprofessionally with a focus on informatics and data analytics will continue to advance our understanding of health, illness and wellness," said Niederhauser.

The academy fellows, with the addition of this newest class, represent all 50 states, the District of Columbia and 28 countries. Academy fellows include hospital and government administrators, college deans and renowned scientific researchers.

Selection criteria include evidence of significant contributions to nursing and health care and sponsorship by two current academy fellows.
PHOTOS BY SAUL YOUNG/NEWS SENTINEL From left, Juanita Jimenez, Joshua Henley, Brenden Weaver, Miriam Taylor, and Lori Dixon pack up their belongings after social studies class at Career Magnet Academy on Aug. 25.

By Megan Boehnke of the Knoxville News Sentinel

The first time social studies teacher Laura Webb taught a lesson on Sept. 11, she asked her students: "How do you feel?"

"Where were you?" she asked. "What were you doing? Do you know anyone who joined the military because of this?"

That was in 2002, on the first anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history.

This week, for the first time, she will teach the event to a classroom of Career Magnet Academy students who weren't alive when the attack happened. This year marks the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Now, my kids were all born in 2002," Webb said. "They've seen it, but briefly. I can't say, 'Where were you?' because they weren't thought of yet.

"I have to elaborate on (how) this is an actual, horrific event, because they tend to be a little hardened from things they see."

Instead of asking where students were at the time, she asks where their parents were. She shows them video from ground zero and connects the attack to other events in history, such as the Dec. 7, 1941, bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Unlike those 20th-century events, where students might examine yellowed newspaper clippings or early war photography, the terrorist attacks and the aftermath were captured on live television as they happened.

Anyone can watch YouTube videos of the second plane striking the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Students can see video of the first, and then the second, tower collapse.

Images shot on the ground show people running from the wall of debris after the collapse.

"There was this one video I had seen  it wasn't too long ago, I was still a teenager or a pre-teen  and it was from the ground," said Jamari Smith, 15, a sophomore at Career Magnet, which is based at Pellissippi State Community College's Strawberry Plains campus. "It was a video, a man holding (the camera) and he started running and you could see the debris and the smoke and stuff just going everywhere and people going into the smoke to help others. That still sticks with me."

Classmate Jake Willson, 14, also a sophomore, said he was 10 or 11 years old the first time he watched the video in class at Carter Elementary School.

"Some of the footage I saw was planes flying into the Twin Towers, then we listened to phone calls that were made by the people in the plane, by people on the ground," Jake said. "We listened to their experience on the plane and on the ground of (how) they're going to lose their family members. It's just really sad and uncomfortable at the time, at my young age."

In the early grades, the lesson plans on Sept. 11 center around broad themes of heroism and helping people, said Judy Newgent, K-12 social studies specialist, who coordinates curriculum for the district.

"In kindergarten, I would not go into (details), but we talk about firefighters and police officers and heroes, and our teachers might have our students ... by second grade ... write a thank-you card and deliver to local police and firefighters," Newgent said.

By fourth grade, teachers often talk about volunteering and character traits.

"This is a good time in elementary grades to talk about helping others in times of need," she said. "I just think back in the beginning with President (George W.) Bush, but also President (Barack) Obama, throughout his eight years, urging people with acts of volunteerism."

In high school, teaching about Sept. 11 and the aftermath, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, are part of required state teaching standards.

Mike Wyatt, who teaches U.S. history to eighth-grade students at Carter Middle School, said most of his students know little about the details of the attack before reaching his classroom.

"They may have been taught about it through the years, but not in the perspective of American history," Wyatt said. "They know very little about it. When they see the real-time video of the planes going into the building and the animation they have on the internet, they sit there going, 'Oh my gosh.' "

Last year, Carter Middle took a group of about 100 students to visit the National Sept. 11 Memorial Museum in New York City for the first time. Students spent more than two hours in the museum, poring over every detail.

Not only are his students now born after 2001, but the memories of Sept. 11 are fading even from teachers.

Wyatt notes one of his colleagues, a second-year teacher at Carter, was in fourth grade when the attack took place.
Do you remember when social media was fun?

You connected with friends, shared photos and videos, stayed in touch with loved ones from afar, etc.

It was a lovely time.

Now it has evolved into one giant marketing platform, a constant slew of advertising in our faces at all times.

It seems even regular posts from people we follow are "sponsored content," and often we don't even know it.

Last week the Federal Trade Commission announced it was cracking down on deceptive social media ads. It turns out that many of these high-profile people like the Kardashian and Jenner sisters are failing to disclose when they are being paid to push products and services in their posts.

Celebrities with 1 to 3 million Instagram followers can earn thousands of dollars per post, according to CBS News, so we as the consumer should be informed when it's happening. Last December an enforcement policy was issued by the FTC saying we must be informed in a "clear and conspicuous" way, including the hashtags #ad or #sponsored so there's no mistake that a social media post is paid for.

What do they have to gain by being deceptive?

It's not just celebrities making money pushing products in our faces on social media.

One social media savvy woman has made a huge success out of her Instagram account, "Girl with No Job." Claudia Oshry began posting "relatable humor" on Instagram after she was fired from an internship while a freshman at New York University. Now the 21-year-old has gained over 2.3 million followers and has turned her Instagram account into a full-time job.

"A lot of the things that I post remind people of their friend, or they can relate to it so much that they feel the need to tag their friend and be like, '@Amanda, look at this,' " Oshry said in a recent interview with ABC News. "And that's the best thing for me, 'cause that's how I grow: them tagging their friends who might not follow me."

Advertisers notice the high level of engagement in users like Oshry and the level of influence she has on young social media users. She has even managed to get a branding partnershp with Captain Morgan, as she fits the brand personality of the company, appealing to the 20-something crowd.

This is nothing new; people have been capitalizing on social media for quite some time now, but it's interesting that any person with a knack for analytics and a computer or smartphone can make this into a full-time job.

There's no way around the avalanche of advertising that will continue to increase throughout our newsfeeds, but hopefully there will be more accountability in the meantime. If they're getting paid thousands of dollars because of us faithful followers, the least they can do is let us know.
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The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, is also well-known for the trouble it keeps getting into. The most recent chapter could be the next to last.

Big insurance companies, thinking there are better ways to make necessary profits than by losing money, are saying goodbye to the program's exchanges. This and others departing could make the program collapse, and some of the remedies being floated about could make it even less sustainable.

In a way, all this should be no surprise.

The overriding issue plaguing these companies, the exchanges and those in the program has been there from the start. It is the idea of an all-encompassing, enormous, comprehensive project making sure all of us are in health care heaven.

What President Barack Obama and the other founders wanted was not some cautious outing in which particular problems were cautiously but reliably solved on an individual basis. They wanted to revamp pretty much everything in a hurry, and there is a problem.

The human intellect is not up to it.

It is difficult to know the consequences of any act we undertake, even something simple, such as driving home from a movie. There could be an accident or a heart attack or a road could be closed and on and on. When you decide to reframe virtually the whole works in a system constituting a sixth of the economy in a continental nation of 300 million people, you are dealing with something complex almost beyond imagining.

Central-planning hubris was nonetheless riding high in hatching the plan, and lawmakers and bureaucrats didn't think there was a detail they could not manage. Thus we got 2,000 pages of law, 10,000 pages of regulations and one mistake after another, from computer confusion to language that apparently did not mean what it said to reinventions of the free market system that were not free and did not work.

As an instance of big brains doing dumb things, our D.C. superiors redefined insurance from a guarantee of money if something goes awry with one's health to a guarantee of money if something is already awry. If they were working on fire insurance, they would have said you can buy it and cash it in after your house had already burned to the ground.

Yes, we needed to find a way to help the uninsured with threatening preconditions. Unfortunately, the way the Democrats did it made insurance companies depend on unusually huge numbers of young, healthy individuals signing up for Obamacare to compensate for all those who were already sick. It has not worked out so well. Despite penalties, too many of the healthy are staying away from insurance policies irksome in a host of ways.

What this means is that, even with government subsidies, the insurance companies dish out more money than they take in and turn to sky-high deductibles and ever heftier premiums that do still more to keep the healthy at bay. Finally, opting for survival, they skedaddle from the program.

Defending the program as a whole, some say it was, after all, a huge accomplishment to finally insure 20 million of a planned 50 million uninsured Americans. But given the flimsy structure, that could mean now you see it, now you don't.

A favored remedy of the left amounts to assisted suicide for the economy. These folks cheer for a single-payer system  something like Medicare for everyone  that would cost the government trillions on top of entitlement programs that are already set to crush us in not too many more years minus readjustments.

Other plans have issues, too, and what is needed is gradual repeal and replacement by means of legislative prudence  one small step at a time, building on what works and discarding what doesn't. A comprehensive, all-at-once junking of Obamacare could be as bad as its comprehensive creation. There are lots of good ideas around, but Congress should proceed slowly and carefully.

Jay Ambrose is a columnist for Tribune News Service. He may be reached at speaktojay@aol.com.
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Last month delivered one of the most remarkable moments of this most remarkable political season. A major politician defended the conservative movement and the Republican Party from guilt by association with a fringe group of racists, anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists who have jumped on the Donald Trump train: the so-called alt-right.

"This is not conservatism as we have known it," the politician said. "This is not Republicanism as we have known it."

That politician was Hillary Clinton, and that's astonishing. Clinton is normally comfortable unjustly condemning conservatism and the GOP for the sins of bigotry and prejudice, not exonerating it. After all, she coined the phrase "vast right-wing conspiracy."

Her husband's administration tried, unfairly, to pin the Oklahoma City bombing on conservative critics, specifically radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh. Less than a decade later, she revived the charge in her book "Living History."

Just last year, Clinton was comparing the entire GOP presidential field to "terrorist groups" for their views on abortion.

This history suggests that Clinton's attempt to distinguish the party of Paul Ryan from the alt-right was not the product of high-minded statesmanship, but political calculation. The goal was to demonize Trump so as to make moderate voters feel OK voting for a Democrat.

(Trump is not an alt-righter, but his political inexperience, his anti-establishment persona, and his ignorance of, and hostility to, many basic tenets of conservatism created a golden opportunity for the alt-righters to latch onto his candidacy.)

If I were a down-ballot Democrat, I'd be chagrined. By exonerating the GOP from the stain of the alt-right, Clinton has made it harder for Democratic candidates to tar their opponents with it. What's truly extraordinary, though, is that Clinton is doing work many conservatives won't.

There is a diversity of views among the self-described alt-right. But the one unifying sentiment is racism  or what they like to call "racialism" or "race realism." In the words of one alt-right leader, Jared Taylor, "the races are not equal and equivalent." Taylor recently asserted on NPR's "The Diane Rehm Show" that it is racialism  not religion, economics, etc.  that unites alt-righters.

If you read the writings of leading alt-righters, it is impossible to come to any other conclusion. Some are avowed white supremacists. Some eschew talk of supremacy and instead focus on the need for racial separation to protect "white identity." But one can't talk about the alt-right knowledgeably without recognizing their racism.

And yet that is exactly what some conservatives seem intent on doing. For example, my friend Hugh Hewitt, the influential talk radio host, has been arguing that there is a "narrow" alt-right made up of an "execrable anti-Semitic, white supremacist fringe" but also a "broad alt-right" made up of frustrated tea partiers and others who are simply hostile to the GOP establishment and any form of immigration reform that falls short of mass deportation.

This isn't just wrong, it's madness. The alt-righters are a politically insignificant band. Why claim that a group dedicated to overthrowing conservatism for a white nationalist fantasy is in fact a member of the conservative coalition? Why muddy a distinction the alt-righters are eager to keep clear?

In the 1960s, the fledgling conservative movement was faced with a similar dilemma. The John Birch Society was a paranoid outfit dedicated to the theory that the U.S. government was controlled by communists. William F. Buckley recognized that the Birchers were being used by the liberal media to "anathematize the entire American right wing." At first, his magazine, National Review (where I often hang my hat), tried to argue that the problem was just a narrow "lunatic fringe" of Birchers, and not the rank and file. But very quickly, the editors recognized that the broader movement needed to be denounced and defenestrated.

Buckley grasped something Hewitt and countless lesser pro-Trump pundits do not: Some lines must not be blurred, but illuminated for all to see. Amazingly, Clinton is doing that when actual conservatives have not.

Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review. He may be reached at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com.
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Hundreds of thousands of children, including my own 8-year-old, returned to primary school this month in Finland. They also returned to a new national curriculum framework in a country that has achieved global acclaim for its highly efficient education system and its history of world-topping test scores.

Finland's teachers, schools and teacher training universities are the envy of educators all over. To me, an outsider living here for six months "embedded" in one of those universities, it becomes increasingly clear that the main reason for the success of Finland's schools is not because they are ethnically Finnish, but because they are correctly organized and supported by society.

But all is not well in Education Utopia.

Social and economic pressures are increasing sharply. Inequity is growing among schools. Severe budget cuts are hitting vocational and higher education. High-performing students often don't feel challenged, and Finnish children face problems common to many the world over  bullying, big drop-offs in math and reading skills, digital overload, and feeling bored or disengaged from school. The performance of Finland's 15-year-olds in international tests has fallen in recent years.

The United States for more than a decade has responded to its own education challenges with a bizarre, bipartisan and ineffectual mix of mass standardized testing, de-professionalization of teachers, dismal quality "cybercharter schools," the elimination of arts and recess for children, and the botched, now politically toxic Common Core attempt at national curriculum guidelines.

Finland is taking largely the opposite approach. It is doubling down on many of the things that made its schools great in the first place.

Consider it Finland's anti-Common Core. To some self-styled education reformers, many of the ideas in the new curriculum are blasphemy and irrelevant to non-Finnish children, especially those from poor backgrounds. To many of the globe's teachers and childhood development experts, however, they will represent evidence-based education for all children, and a beacon of hope in an education world increasingly dominated by forced standardization, political interference and childhood stress, shaming and punishment based on bad or irrelevant data.

Finland's brand new National Core Curriculum emphasizes a child's individuality and says "children have the right to learn by playing and experience joy related to learning." It says they should be encouraged to express their opinions, trust themselves, be open to new solutions, learn to handle unclear and conflicting information, consider things from different viewpoints, seek new information and review the way they think. Teachers are directed to give students daily feedback and measure them against their starting points, not other students. In grades one through seven, schools now have the option of dropping numerical grades in favor of verbal assessments. (Failing students will still receive a "fail" grade, and can be held back as a last resort.)

The new guidelines strengthen traditional roles of play and physical activity. Preschool and kindergarten students will continue to learn through songs, games, conversation and playful discovery, not military-style drilling and stress at ages 4, 5 or 6 as is increasingly the case in American schools. A number of studies have supported the advantages of play-based early education for children, including those from low-income backgrounds. Formal academic training in Finland will continue to start at age 7, when many children are best ready for it. That corresponds with research indicating that any advantage gained by earlier instruction, when children are not developmentally ready, washes out a few years later.

Finland is also continuing other policies that work: Primary school teachers will still have to earn master's degrees and undergo at least two years of in-classroom training by master teacher-trainers before being allowed to lead classes of their own. Grades one through nine will offer instruction not only in math, science and history, but also in two or three languages, physical education, music, visual arts, crafts and religion or ethics. And home economics, a rare subject in American schools, will be taught in grades seven, eight and nine.

Finland's reforms were based on research and evidence and developed by educators, with lots of input from parents and children. Its latest education vision could hardly be less like the one that ill-informed politicians are imposing on public schools in the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere. In the U.S., this has exacerbated widespread system failure and confusion.

In a famous episode of "Seinfeld," the long-failing George Costanza character achieved spectacular success by doing the total opposite of everything he had done before. Perhaps American public schools should consider following his example.

William Doyle, a best-selling author and an award-winning TV producer, is a 2015-16 Fulbright scholar and visiting scholar and lecturer on education and media at the University of Eastern Finland. This column was published first in USA TODAY.
East Tennesseans and law enforcement families across the nation mourn the death of Maryville police officer Kenny Moats, who died in the line of duty on Aug. 25. Moats, a 32-year-old father of three, was shot and killed responding to a domestic violence call.

We join the thousands who paid tribute to Moats last week in offering condolences to his family, and pause to reflect on his sacrifice and that of his brothers and sisters in law enforcement.

A nine-year veteran of the Maryville Police Department, Moats and his partner on the 5th Judicial District Drug Task Force heard the second domestic violence call of the day at a home on Alcoa Trail. Deputies had responded to the first call at the home around 10:45 a.m., but made no arrests.

The second call to E-911 came around 4 p.m. The caller, the father of the accused shooter, Brian Keith Stalans, told the dispatcher his son was armed. Because of their proximity to the address, Moats and his partner volunteered to take the call.

The officers arrived, parked at another home about 70 yards behind Stalans' house and moved the father to safety, then took cover behind their vehicle. Stalans went to the basement garage and opened fire on the officers with five shots from his .45-caliber pistol, Blount County Sheriff James L. Berrong said. One round struck Moats in the neck, just above his bullet-resistant vest.

Berrong said officers executing a search warrant at Stalans' home found in the basement a letter "blaming the Blount County Sheriff's Office and family members for his misfortunes," as well as a "makeshift barricade that would protect him while he fired and also a place to rest his arm while he fired."

"It was our speculation that it was definitely an ambush that had been set up," Berrong said.

Stalans, 44, who has a history of mental illness and also had been accused of violence in the past against his ex-wife and daughters, is being held in the Blount County Jail in lieu of a $1.5 million bond. He was arraigned last Monday, charged with criminal homicide and aggravated assault. Prosecutors could seek to upgrade the homicide charge to first-degree murder.

On Tuesday more than a thousand mourners paid their respects to Moats' family at a visitation and public service at Sevier Heights Baptist Church.

"He was a cop who was doing it for the right reasons," said one of his fellow Maryville police officers, Matt Fagiana. "He treated people right, and he worked hard. He cared about his family. He cared about his friends. He was the epitome of a good, humble cop  a good servant."

The next day thousands lined the procession route from Smith Mortuary in Maryville to Keeble Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in Walland, where a private ceremony was held.

Many of those in the procession were law enforcement officers and officials who came from departments near and far to accompany Moats' body as far as they could. Like Moats, they risk their lives every day they are on the job and know the dangers well.

Sadly, often it takes the death of an officer like Moats to remind the general public of the perils of police work. Routine calls for service and traffic stops can turn deadly in an instant. We owe them our respect and appreciation.

Memorial donations for Moats' family are being accepted through the Kenny Moats Memorial Fund at CBBC Bank and can be brought to any CBBC Bank branch or to the city of Maryville Municipal Building, or mailed to CBBC Bank: Kenny Moats Memorial Fund, P.O. Box 9730, Maryville TN 37802. Country music artist Trace Adkins and The Back Porch On The Creek also are donating $10,000 to the Moats family. Other collections for the family have been underway at the Maryville Police Department and at Heritage High School.

East Tennessee has lost one of its finest. We honor Kenny Moats' service and his sacrifice.
Chindren have fun at the 7th Pfizer Dream Camp in Yangpyeong, Gyeonggi Province, Sunday. / Courtesy of Pfizer Korea



By Park Si-soo



Pfizer Korea hosted a recreational event for children raised by their grandparents.

Fifty children were invited to the 7th Pfizer Dream Camp in Yangpyeong, Gyeonggi Province, Sunday. The Korean unit of the American drug giant has hosted the event since 2010 in collaboration with the Korean Medical Women's Association and Child Fund Korea.

The children enjoyed a variety of events prepared under the theme "Dream House" with volunteers from the hosting organizations.

"We hope the event gives the children the courage to have a dream and realize it against all odds," said Pfizer Korea country manager Oh Dong-wook. "Pfizer will continue its support to them to make their lives full of happiness."

Pfizer Korea has hosted various health-related campaigns.

Its "Healthy Aging" campaign promotes ways to stay in good health as we age. The company has offered scholarship to students in financial trouble. It has also offered financial support to doctors and medical experts.
By Lee Hyo-sik





Cho Kil-soo, Diageo Korea CEO

Diageo Korea will change the whisky industry by appealing to the younger generation and introducing innovative products geared to young tastes, according to company CEO Cho Kil-soo.

Cho said the Korean unit of the world's largest premium whisky maker will improve consumer perceptions of hard liquor and create a casual drinking culture in which people of all ages can enjoy whisky anytime, anywhere.

"Diageo Korea believes that the whisky market can rebound from its current slump," the CEO told reporters Friday. "We can learn from Japan where the whisky market has been growing again since 2009. We will play a significant role in revitalizing whisky in Korea as an industry leader."

According to Cho, who also oversees Diageo's operations in Japan, sales of whisky there were on the decline until 2008 after peaking in 1988. But the consumption of hard liquor in Japan began picking up in 2009 and has since been growing steadily. In contrast, Korea's whisky consumption plunged 38 percent last year from 2008.

"We think that for the past few years, Korea has been experiencing what Japan did in the 1990s and the 2000s. If we can repeat what Japanese whisky makers did, we can jumpstart Korea's sluggish market too," he said. "Japanese companies have made every effort to offer their customers the correct information about their products, helping them become more familiar with whisky. So, Japanese people, both young and old, enjoy whisky at home and at other informal places."

However, about 90 percent of whisky is consumed at restaurants, bars and other establishments in Korea, creating the public perception that hard liquor should be consumed in formal, business-like settings. But in Japan, only 50 percent of the hard liquor consumed there is sold at drinking establishments, with the other half consumed at home and other places.

"What we are trying to do is to change this notion in Korea. We would like to see consumers feel free to enjoy our whisky whenever and wherever they feel like it," Cho said. "Diageo will diversify its lineup of products and introduce varieties that allow consumers to experience our premium products in various places at more reasonable prices."

As part of these efforts, the company plans to introduce a 200-milliliter bottle of Johnnie Walker in October, making one of its flagship brands of Scotch whisky more readily available and affordable for its fans. Normally, whisky is sold in 450-milliliter or larger bottles.

"We believe that introducing a small-size bottle will bolster the sale of Johnnie Walker because people, particular those in their 20s, can enjoy it without feeling much of a burden," the CEO said. "As an industry leader, we feel a great responsibility to reinvigorate Korea's whisky market. As we did in Japan, we will continue to take innovative steps to get closer to our Korean customers and create a consumer-oriented whisky culture."
By Jhoo Dong-chan



The Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) and Booyoung Group are having a difference of opinion about plans to rebuild seven decaying buildings in central Seoul, where the land is worth its weight in gold.



The buildings are located on a 6,562-square meter piece of land in Sogong-dong, central Seoul, across from the Westin Chosun hotel by a road that leads to the Bank of Korea. Built in the 1930s during the Japanese occupation, exposed obsolete water pipes and outdoor air conditioner units can be seen on their walls.



A restaurant in one of those buildings put a banner up that reads, "We are closing our business on Dec. 22 due to building reconstruction." A 1.5 meter-wide sidewalk next to the buildings is only wide enough for two pedestrians to pass at a time.



"The walkway is too narrow. It takes too long to pass the area on foot especially during rush hour," said an office worker in the area. "It is also kind of desolate after restaurants close at night."



Booyoung Group bought the area encompassing the seven buildings from Samwhan Group four years ago with the intention of building a 27-story hotel with 850 rooms. It then submitted its reconstruction proposal last October and got conditional approval from the construction committee under the SMG.



Shortly after the approval, however, the local government reversed its decision as it suddenly decided to preserve and designate five of the seven buildings as one of 210 pieces of modern architectural heritage in downtown Seoul.



Booyoung Group has since convinced SMG that it would relocate what remains of the buildings temporarily and then restore them as a part of the hotel's ground exterior, but SMG is dismissing the nation's 19th largest conglomerate's pitch, ordering it to preserve the old buildings' top floor structure and widen the sidewalks as well.



A Booyoung Group official said the SMG demands are too much.



"The Seoul city government is suggesting solutions that are unrealistic and are restricting us from building the hotel," he said.



"The SMG ordered us to preserve the pillars where they are now while making the sidewalks wider and leaving the upper parts of the building intact. Under the SMG's order, we cannot guarantee the safety of pedestrians who walk by the buildings."



A city official said that the SMG is not a safety advisory organization and Booyoung Group should be responsible for the construction and its related safety measures.




SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won delivers a speech during an event in celebration of the completion of SK hynix's M14 factory in Icheon, Aug. 25.



Chairman spares no efforts to help revitalize Korea Inc.



By Kim Tae-gyu

Anyone who spends 31 months behind bars would want to rest for a while after getting out of jail. But not SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won  he set to work as soon as he was free.

On Aug. 14, a day ahead of Liberation Day, he received a special presidential pardon after as many as 926 days inside.

Instead of spending the national holiday at home, the 55-year-old went to the SK Group office located in downtown Seoul to handle major issues in the country's third-largest conglomerate.

"We all know that Chey is not a health nut, but we expected that he would take care of his health for at least a few days. But he did not do so," said an SK insider who asked not to be named.

"He works really hard to take meticulous care of all the important issues facing the group. He seems to feel great pressure about his role as one of the business leaders helping to revitalize Korea's economy."

Indeed, Cheong Wa Dae underscored an urgently needed boost to the country's moribund economy as the main reason for granting a special pardon to Chey who was imprisoned in 2013 for misappropriating company funds.





SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, left, poses after a meeting with National Iranian Oil Company CEO

Roknoddin Javadi in Tehran, Sept. 3.



Excruciatingly tight schedule



On Aug. 16, senior leaders of the group reported to Chey and on the next day he convened chief executives of the conglomerate's 17 crucial subsidiaries including SK Telecom, the country's primary mobile carrier, top oil refiner SK Innovation and the world's second-largest chipmaker SK hynix.



At the CEO meeting, a decision was made that SK would channel 46 trillion won to SK hynix semiconductor factories  around two-thirds of which will be spent on two new plants while the remaining will be invested in the facilities of a plant under construction.



"As far as I know, Chey demanded a more proactive stance, saying that corporations are required to frontload investments and expand them when the economy is in poor shape," the insider said.



On Aug. 18, he visited the SK Group-invested Creative Economy Innovation Center situated in Daejeon, around 145 kilometers south of Seoul, to stress the significance of science and technology in nurturing corporate and national competitiveness.



The next day, Chey headed for SK hynix, which became a SK Group unit in 2012 with SK Telecom funds upwards of 4 trillion won. Back then, most were against the idea but Chey forged ahead with the mega-deal.



Afterwards, SK hynix became the goose that lays the golden egg by setting new sales and profit records every year. Last year, the company chalked up an 18.8 trillion won revenue from an operating profit of 5.3 trillion won.



On Aug. 20, Chey went to SK Innovation's complex in Ulsan. He also dropped by creative economy innovation centers in the city and in Daegu to wrap up his hectic first week after discharge from prison.





SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, left, shakes hands with an SK Innovation official at the oil refiner's Ulsan complex, Aug. 20.



Meeting with President Park

On Aug. 25, Chey took part in a ceremony marking the completion of SK hynix's M14 factory, of which construction took one full year and 2.38 trillion won, in Icheon, a city southeast of Seoul.



The 53,000-square-meter facility is the largest single DRAM production plant in the world and is expected to further enhance the company's bottom line once it starts production during the current quarter.



SK hynix is locked in global competition with business bellwether Samsung Electronics as well as distant second-tier rivals Micron Technology and Toshiba.



"I sincerely appreciate the central and regional governments, communities and suppliers for the successful completion of the M14 line. Today, we make momentum in rewriting the country's semiconductor history," Chey said.



"And today we also declare the great challenge facing us in the future. Investing in human resources is the essence of management. Thus, we will help Korea sharpen its competitiveness by recruiting young workers and nurturing cutting-edge technology."



President Park herself made it to the ceremony and smiled at Chey's remarks, as they align with her priority of dealing with youth unemployment, which shows no signs of improvement.



"We need a strong will and utmost efforts to overcome the current crisis in the manufacturing industries," she said. "Toward that end, big companies have to spend money in a brisker fashion."



Going global



On Aug. 27, Chey flew to China to inspect the SK hynix fabrication plant in Wuxi that churns out about half of the company's DRAMs. Over the next two days, the tycoon met senior Chinese bureaucrats and business leaders.



On Aug. 31, he visited Hong Kong for a series of meetings including one with China Gas Holdings President Liu Ming Hui. SK Group is the third-biggest shareholder of the leading piped natural gas distributor and operator in the world's most populous nation.



The next day, he was in Taiwan to meet businesspeople like Terry Gou, the founding chairman of Foxconn, the world's foremost contract electronics manufacturer by any measure.



SK employees say that Chey's vigorous activities both at home and abroad are breathing energy into the group.



"In the past, there was pessimism and depression among staff members. Now, the atmosphere is different. I think that Chey brings dynamism to the group," a group official said. "It is hard to explain. But it is reminiscent of a commander-in-chief returning to the front lines in a hard-fought war. I feel a sense of security and relief. My peers appear to have similar sentiments." .
By Kim Tae-gyu



A listed company's accounting reports must be thoroughly reviewed by accounting firms and regulators also need to keep an eye on them to prevent irregularities such as window dressing.



But the conventional monitoring system fails often, as amply demonstrated by the Enron debacle in the United States and the now-defunct Daewoo Group in Korea. The most recent case would be the embattled Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering (DSME).



Kim Sang-kyung, CEO of the Korea International Finance Institute, says that there is a loophole in the traditional way of overseeing corporate financial reports.



"In the past, we focused on liabilities of a company's balance sheets to check whether or not its debts are too great," Kim said on Sunday. She doubles as a founding chairwoman of the Korea Network for Women in Finance.



"Such an approach has a loophole and we should plug it by shifting our focus from credit to debit," she said. "Then, we will be able to pinpoint the new-type bad companies, which tend to inflate their assets to hide their problems or exaggerate their profits."



Under this belief, Kim's institute worked together with local consultancy DMG to come up with a unique product this July called the E-Warning System, oriented to analyzing assets' portfolio.



The system compares any firm's asset values adjusted through a weighted format to its stock price. If there are substantial gaps between the two, a warning flag will be raised for investors.



Kim said that the new scheme will make it very tough for corporate con artists to rig a company's accounting.



"A retrospective analysis shows that DSME balance sheets included a rising amount of problematic assets in 2008. Matters are similar with STX Offshore & Shipbuilding," said Kim, who is well-known for being the country's first female foreign exchange dealer.



"Back then, our ratings agencies gave top ratings to STX but our system shows a clear sign of downward risks in its analysis of the 2008 accounting report. If we could have dealt with the risks preemptively beginning in 2008, we would have been able to save a substantial amount of taxpayers' money."



STX Offshore was the world's fourth-largest shipbuilder but eventually filed for bankruptcy this year despite years of being in expensive court receivership  up to 6 trillion won in taxes were channeled to revive it.



Kim said that the E-Warning System would also be helpful for investors.



"The Gini coefficient of our system is around 80 percent between 1995 and 2016, which is around 20 percentage points higher than other global contenders. That means our tool is second to none in predicting which corporations will collapse."



"Along the same lines, its hit ratio is 99.6 percent. In other words, corporations that receive good investment ratings under our system hardly ever go under."




A container terminal is shown above in Singapore, Sep. 3, containing seized cargo from Hanjin Shipping. Analysts say that Hanjin's court receivership could be just the tip of the iceberg for the shipping industry as the long-running global economic downturn has left it drowning in excess capacity. / AFP-Yonhap



Shipping company faces lawsuits from customers



By Yoon Ja-young

Hanjin Shipping's filing for court receivership is inflicting far larger-than-expected negative impacts both at home and abroad as major routes for trade are being suspended.

The government and creditors are facing growing criticism that they are responsible for having thrown global ports and traders into confusion.

About half of Hanjin's fleet is stuck in ports around the world as the authorities there fear the shipper whose assets have been frozen is unable to pay fees.

The government will not be able to avoid criticism for underestimating the fallout of the bankruptcy of the world's seventh largest shipper.

It is still pondering over contingency plans to contain the backlash, creating a task force to ensure there are no delays in the flow of cargo.

The Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries will lead the task force along made up of ranking officials from nine related ministries and agencies.

"The government will make sure that the fallout from Hanjin Shipping doesn't lead to chaos in logistics or a transmission to the real economy including exports," said Oceans and Fisheries Minister Kim Young-suk, after an emergency meeting held Sunday.

"We will closely cooperate to support damaged industries, taking all possible policy measures," he said.

However, officials from the shipping industry criticize the government for allowing the shipper to go bankrupt without having drawn up proper countermeasures.
A scene from "Age of Shadows" / Courtesy of Warners Bros.



By Park Jin-hai

Among a slew of recent films set during the Japanese occupation (1910-1945), director Kim Jee-woon's new espionage movie "The Age of Shadows" clearly stands out.

The film tells the story of a Korean-born naturalized Japanese police officer Lee Jeong-chul, played by seasoned actor Song Kang-ho, who becomes friends with the leader of a freedom fighting group called Uiyeoldan to get information about the group's bombing plans against the Japanese authorities.

The film is Warner Bros.' first Korean-language production and is a strong contender for a foreign film Academy Award. Kim's latest work bears all the hallmarks of his cinematic esthetics and places it in a league of its own.

From the opening sequence, where the camera dynamically follows a chase and gun-fight between Japanese police and an independence fighter, to a highlight action sequence on a train, the film reminds viewers of Kim's acclaimed 2008 film "The Good, the Bad, the Weird," while the beautifully colored mise-en-scene of the film reminds the audience of the director's earlier mystery thriller "A Tale of Two Sisters."

Unlike the other occupation-period films, which intentionally strike the chord of nationalism and patriotism, the "Age of Shadows," while dealing with the independence movement, doesn't portray a role of strictly good and bad, or us against them.

Instead, it adopts the double-agent device to depict a world of uncertainty as the poster states, "The enemy has always been within," and reveals the thin and blurry line that separates the traitor from the freedom fighter.

Protagonist Lee, based on the controversial real-life figure Hwang Ok, a Korean-born Japanese officer, who was arrested in 1923 for his alleged involvement in a bomb plot led by Uiyeoldan, is cleverly portrayed by Song.

Song, who became the first Korean member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences last year, portrays Lee not as a notorious and cold-blooded betrayer but as an ordinary secular and shaky person who acts based on the situation he has found himself in during the turbulent times.

As a former leader of the independence movement who became a Japanese police officer chasing down his former friend, Lee shows his inner guilt throughout the movie. At the same time he warns that "I don't know who I will be the next time (I meet you)" to the secret request of becoming a double-agent by the independence fighters.

For a spy thriller, however, the movie plot is rather loose. Lee has became a double agent with few reasonable explanations which tends to fizzle out the thrill of the movie a little too early and prevents viewers from feeling empathy with the character.

What saves the film is the great acting of the two protagonists Song and Gong Yoo. Song depicts a multi-layered character, while Gong Yoo acts the part of a soft but charismatic freedom fighter in detail. The force of actor Lee Byung-hun, who plays the leader of Uiyeoldan, is significant, despite his short appearance. As the director said, the movie starts with depicting the historical pains of the tumultuous times, but ends leaving a long aftertaste about shaky and fragile characters who are destined to live out the lives they are faced with. This is something that we can relate to living today.

"The Age of Shadows" has a 140-minute running time and will hit the local theaters on Sept. 7.
Managing Director of Crocodile International Trisno Kemat Leono, left, talks to the brand's model Lee Jung-jae, center, and the CEO of Dawnfield Alpha Seo Soon-hee during the fashion brand's press presentation at Ban Yan Tree Club and Spa Hotel in Seoul, Wednesday. / Courtesy of Crocodile Internationa

By Kim Jae-heun

The fashion brand Crocodile has long been sought as a home grown company by many Koreans who know the local founder copied the brand logo and concept from French clothing company Lacoste.

However, the Singaporean brand held a press presentation last Wednesday to promote the fashion brand's history and its achievements as a global clothing company which holds over 50 licenses worldwide, making a five hundred million dollar profit every year.

"Definitely we are different," said Trisno Kemat Leono, the managing director of Crocodile International during an interview with the Korea Times at the Banyan Tree hotel in Seoul. "Some people say we are similar to Lacoste but if you look closely at the product, in style, and in pricing, it's different.

"We focus on customers in each country. We customize every single country's taste while Lacoste, for example, has uniformed products across all the countries. You see the same product in Korea that you would see in Africa," said Leono.

During the event, Crocodile held a small exhibition at the venue for visitors to learn about the 70 years of the company's history led by the founder Tan Hian Tsin, who started the business in 1947. After opening its first factory in Hong Kong in 1953, Crocodile grew to own nearly 3,000 stores in 14 countries and last year it was recognized by the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore as one of the top five corporations in the country in boosting the city-state's economy. In Korea, the brand first opened its doors for menswear in 1993 and a women's line in 1980s.

The fashion company held a 2016 Fall/Winter collection show as part of their promotion in men's and women's appeal the product's design and quality.

"Where I see this brand's strength is how it relies on its licensing partners. Of course our brand started off as fashion business in Singapore, but then when we grew, we knew it cannot grow without resources. We found licensing partners in each countrywho adjust the product to the local market taste," said Leono.

"Our founder believes since the beginning of the crocodile expansion, the sharing profit is the best way to grow the business. So what he means is instead of growing the business by itself, we find good partners in each country, who are experts in its field, specializing in its field," added Leono.

The managing director said the system particularly plays an effective role in Korea as Korean customers are more fashion forward than other Asian customers and it is important to bring the trend to Seoul quickly. He pointed out the dwindling outdoor gear market in Korea as one example that were once the best selling items in the fashion industry in Korea up until two years ago.

"I feel like fashion trends always move fast anywhere in the world. But how it is different nowadays is how to get the trends to market a lot faster than before and making it affordable. For example Zara and H&M are the largest retailers in the world. They do not create the trend. They bring the trend from the catalog to the store within the weeks and make it affordable.

"How we feel we can compete against these brands is by providing more value to our customers and what I mean by more value is not making things cheaper but providing better quality at the same price. We make better products, but maintain the price. Cost effective but not cost cutting," said Leono.
Celine Condorelli's "On the Right and on the Left (Without Glasses)" is on display at the 2016 Gwangju Biennale. Courtesy of Gwangju Biennale







Maria Lind, 2016 Gwangju Biennale artistic director

By Kwon Mee-yoo

GWANGJU  People might expect large installations and visual spectacles at contemporary art biennales, but some of organizers take the opposite approach, and the 11th Gwangju Biennale (GB11) has fresh food for thought instead of eye-catching attractions.

Titled "The Eighth Climate (What does art do?)," GB11 employs emptiness and imagination instead of spectacle to unleash contemplation on contemporary art.

GB11's artistic director Maria Lind from Sweden re-imagined Asia's largest contemporary art festival based on a kaleidoscopic nature.





Dora Garcia's reconstruction of "Nokdu Bookstore" / Courtesy of Gwangju Biennale



"I am not particularly interested in spectacle for the sake of spectacle," Lind said during the press conference for GB11, Thursday. "If I engage with it, it has to be smarter than a normal spectacle."

The spectacle Lind prepared for GB11 could look plain at first sight, but it creates a kaleidoscopic world of diversity and complexity coming from an inner spectacle. Different encounters with artwork may be meditative, but they can be more confrontational.

The title eighth climate is a notion borrowed from the 12th century Persian philosopher Sohravardi and modern French philosopher Henry Corbin, Lind said. "It indicates an inter-world, a zone between material and material and a sphere full of imagination. The way they imagined this zone is similar to contemporary art  not about what art is but what it does," Lind said.





Gunilla Klingberg's "Lunar Cycle," "Bamboo-Curtain" and "Sun-Prints" installed at Uijae Museum of Korean Art on Mudeungsan Mountain in Gwangju



Lind created her team for GB11, led by curator Choi Binna and assistant curators Azar Mahmoudian, Margarida Mendes and Michelle Wong. When asked why she had the all-woman team, Lind simply said "Because they are the best and women are the future."

As an attempt to reinforce stronger connections to the city, Lind invited artists to come and visit Gwangju ahead of the festival instead of just commissioning them to create works of art. As a result, 25 artists among the total 120 from 37 countries produced works related to the city's history, such as the political turmoil that peaked during the 1980 Gwangju Uprising.





An installation view of the Gallery 1 at the 2016 Gwangju Biennale / Courtesy of Gwangju Biennale



Not-to-miss artwork

The 66-day contemporary art festival kicked off Friday. There are over 250 pieces on display throughout the main exhibition hall and other locations in Gwangju and it would take at least a full day to appreciate all of them.

The artistic director picked a handful of works that resonate well with the biennale's theme of seeking the role of art in society covering a variety of themes from the environment, labor, human rights and politics. "Each artwork has its reverberations depending on where, when and how it is presented," Lind said.

Upon passing through colorful chain curtains to enter the biennale's exhibition hall, which is Ruth Buchanan's "Split, Splits, Splitting," visitors encounter a replica of a bookstore.

Spanish artist Dora Garcia's installation "Nokdu Bookstore for the Living and the Dead" is an example of how an artist feels, engages and unravels history into art. The Nokdu Bookstore was a gathering place during the Gwangju Uprising in 1980 and Garcia re-created the community bookstore in Gallery 1, filled with donated books. Lind elaborated that Garcia wanted the bookstore to live beyond being just a monument of the uprising.

Gallery 2 is darkened to mainly feature artwork using light  moving images, still projections and light installations.

"You can watch videos without being isolated in a black box. It is about navigation and it creates a dynamic viewing experience from multiple viewpoints, at the same time with other people," Lind said.

Korean artist Jung Eun-young's video "Act of Effect" questions traditional gender roles by exploring the long-forgotten style of female-only theater, while Jun So-jung's "The Habit of Art" discovers the raison d'etre of art in everyday life.

Works related to labor issues are on view in Gallery 3. Julia Sarisetiati's "Indo K-Work" is based on the artist's research on Indonesian migrant workers in Korea

New York-based artist Doug Ashford presents a set of photos featuring people holding a green canvas at politically important places in Korea in "Photographs of Paintings Carried to Places where the Movement for Democracy in South Korea Happened, and Four Examples of what was Produced" in Gallery 4. The artwork presents Ashford's way of combining politics and aesthetics in historical context.

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz's video works "Toxic," "Opaque" and "To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation" are screened in Gallery 5.

Art galore throughout the city

Lind wanted people to engage with art in many different ways through this biennale and she expanded the exhibit from the main exhibition hall in eastern Gwangju to eight other venues in the city from a roundabout in front of the station to art museums in mountains.

Architect Apolonija Sustersic joined hands with Bae Da-ri to create a community-based collaboration project, "Master Plan for Duamdong" at a neighborhood in northern Gwangju. The result of the project seeking performative ways of urban planning is on display at Nuribom Community Center in Duam-dong, Gwangju.

At the 5.18 Archives commemorating the Gwangju Uprising, three artist teams, Cooperativa Crater Invertido, Christian Nyampeta, and Jasmina Metwaly & Philip Rizk present their works inspired by the significant event, giving it a contemporary context.

At the Daein Market, Michael Beutler opened "Daein Sausage Shop" where the artist makes sausages from recycled paper.

Three museums in the Mudeungsan Mountain area are also featuring artists as part of the biennale  Gunilla Klingberg at the Uijae Museum of Korean Art, Bernd Krauss at the Mudeung Museum of Contemporary Art and Saskia Noor van Imhoff at the Woo Jaeghil Art Museum.

At the Asia Culture Center, Christopher Kulendran Thomas's project "New Eelam" is on view. Eyal Weizman's site-specific installation "The Roundabout Revolution" near Gwangju Station is also not to be missed.

GB11 runs through Nov. 6 at various venues in Gwangju. Admission is 11,000 won in advance and 14,000 won at the door for adults. For more information, visit www.gwangjubiennale.org or call 062-608-4114.
The first in a four-part series of a guided tour program along the ancient fortress wall in Seoul kicked off Sunday, with a local professor giving a detailed explanation on the history engraved in the surrounding areas.



The Seoul Metropolitan Library in cooperation with a Seoul-based think tank Center for Story Managing offered the guided tour of Donam district in Seongbuk Ward, northeast of the capital, where different types of traditional Korean houses, or hanok, are preserved.



The district was developed in the 1930s under the Japanese colonial occupation of the Korean Peninsula as part of an effort to expand the city area, said professor Kim Young-soo at Institute of Seoul Studies under the University of Seoul.



"It provides a unique overview of the transition of residential area from the colonial period (1910-45) to the present," he said.



Around 50 people took part in the half-day trip to the area with professor Kim.



The tour began at a hanok village near Bomun station in the subway line No. 6, where redevelopment was being carried out.



"It is different from what I saw just a few months ago," the professor said, pointing to the newly built dwellings. "You see these traditional hanok on one side and new buildings at the other end."



After making stops at the developing areas and a block of hanok, the tour ended in front of a two-story commercial hanok building which is hard to find in the city area.



"Some people might say this district is lagging behind, but it definitely holds historical significance," professor Kim said. "Experts are voicing the need to protect the region and the borough office has also been putting efforts to preserve it."



Yun Jung-hyun, a fan of the think tank's guided tour programs, said the experience is like discovering gems.



"As I participate in the tours, I realize how much I was ignorant about the history and culture of the city I live in," she said. "After taking part in the guided tours, the same streets and areas hold different meanings to me."



Professor Kim said the remaining three sessions will focus more on the villages that developed right next to the Seoul City Wall.



The 18.6-kilometer-long wall, which follows the ridges of four inner mountains surrounding the center of Seoul, was well-kept under regular repairs throughout the 500-year Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910) since it was first constructed in 1396.



"The fortress wall of Hanyang is a place of past, as well as those of present and future where Seoul's identity can be found," said Lee Hoon, the chief of the think tank. "I hope this program gives our citizens an opportunity to find the meaning of the fortress and a chance to pass down the wisdom of our ancestors to the future generation."



Lee said the think tank is planning to expand the program to include foreigners sometime next year. The current program does not provide guided tours in foreign languages.



The next tour at villages near Mount Nak, or Naksan, in eastern Seoul, is slated for Oct. 16. (Yonhap)




Gil Won-wok, 88, a former sex slave, records her album at a studio in Yeongdeungpo-gu in western Seoul, Friday. / Yonhap



By Kim Bo-eun

A former sex slave has started recording an album, according to a civic group representing the victims, Sunday.

The group said Gil Won-wok, 88, recorded 20 songs  which includes some of her favorites.

On the list were songs such as the Korean folksong "Arirang" and others about yearning for one's hometown in the North. Gil's hometown is in North Pyeongan Province and she was forced into sexual servitude in 1940 in Harbin, northeastern China.

The group selected songs that were familiar to Gil as it is difficult for her to learn and memorize new songs due to her age.

"The victims had their own dreams and talents, but when they were forced into sexual slavery, these were shattered," said a member of the group.

"Gil has a special voice  from her voice we hear the history and sorrow of her past. But her memory has started to falter, so we decided to let her dream come true, before it was too late."

The group said the album is intended as a recording of the existence and voice of a sex slave victim to remember her.

The album will be completed within the year and sold at the weekly Wednesday rally held in front of the former Japanese Embassy in central Seoul.

Gil is among 40 remaining victims of sexual enslavement by the Japanese military before and during World War II.

It's estimated that almost 200,000 women were mobilized to service Japanese troops. The biggest number came from Korea  other countries included Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan and the Netherlands.

Last December, the Korean and Japanese governments reached a deal in which they agreed to put the disputed issue to rest with Tokyo providing 1 billion yen (10.7 billion won) to Seoul for the victims.

Seoul set up a foundation that will determine the use of the money, which was transferred last week. Many of the surviving comfort women are opposed to the deal, citing that Tokyo did not take legal responsibility for its atrocities.
By Kim Se-jeong

A new startup support center has opened to attract foreign residents who have good ideas for new businesses, the Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) announced Monday.

The Seoul Global Startup Center will open within Yongsan Electronics Market in August, the SMG said.

It will select 40 teams and provide each of them with a free space at the center, as well as mentoring and visa services and assistance in legal, accounting, patent and business registration processes.

"We will support anyone with a good idea," a city official said. "We expect the economy of Seoul to be stimulated via a growing number of startup companies founded by foreigners."












By Kim Bo-eun



South Korea's spy agency reportedly arranged the defection of 13 North Korean restaurant workers in China to the South in April.



Citing an "unidentified source familiar with the matter," the Hankyoreh local daily reported "A National Intelligence Service (NIS) employee provided 60,000 yuan (10 million won) for the workers' defection."



The defectors bought flight tickets to Malaysia with the money, because the NIS official advised them to enter South Korea "via a third country," the report said.



The defectors became familiar with the NIS employee through a Chinese Korean based there, who they became acquainted with while they were working for another restaurant.



The Ministry of Unification did not confirm the report, while the NIS was not available for comment.



"This will need to be confirmed by the NIS," Unification Ministry spokesman Jeong Joon-hee said Sunday.



According to the report, the defectors' process of entering and leaving Malaysia was swift  after landing at the airport there, they went to the South Korean Embassy and left for the airport the same day, guarded by a special police team.



They had Korean passports and boarded a plane to South Korea without an inspection by immigration.



The defection process of the 13 North Korean restaurant workers was exceptionally swift, as most defectors spend at least two to three months in a third country before they make their way to the South.



In an exception, the Korean government also disclosed the defection of the 13 workers just a day after they arrived in the South.



The workers had not anticipated they would get exposed to the media openly.



"I did not know that the government would publicize our defection," the restaurant manager was quoted as saying by the Hankyoreh.



The defectors were placed in a protection center within the NIS instead of the state-run settlement agency Hanawon, where defectors are usually sent to.



The NIS cited that this was because it was "a high-profile case." The defectors left the center in small groups from Aug. 8 to 11.



A progressive lawyers' group Lawyers for a Democratic Society, had attempted to interview the defectors while they were at the center, in order to check whether they had experienced any human rights violations, but was denied its request.



The progressive vernacular reported the intelligence agency told the defectors that the lawyers group members were "pro-North Korean" and "bad people."



"I thought the lawyers group was pro-North and bad. If we met with its members, we thought our parents in the North would be killed," the restaurant manager told the newspaper.



The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights officials had a brief meeting with the defectors on Aug. 18.



The defectors were presumed to have left the Pyongyang-run restaurant in China's eastern city of Ningbo, due to sales pressure from the North amid sanctions placed on the isolated regime in March following earlier military provocations. The sanctions were aimed at cutting off sources of hard currency to prevent financing of nuclear and missile development.




President Park Geun-hye and Russian President Vladimir Putin hold talks in Vladivostok, Saturday. / Joint press corps



By Kang Seung-woo

VLADIVOSTOK  The leaders of South Korea and Russia reaffirmed their stances against North Korea's nuclear program and agreed to strengthen dialogue during talks, held in Vladivostok, Saturday.

President Park Geun-hye and Russian President Vladimir Putin also had discussions about South Korea's plan to allow a U.S. anti-missile shield on its soil "in a cordial mood," according to Cheong Wa Dae officials. The leaders, however, did not mention the thorny issue during a joint press conference after the talks, which appeared to mean that they did not want bilateral relations to be affected by the dispute over the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system.

"In order to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue as well as other items, we agreed to further enhance our strategic dialogue," Park said during a joint press conference following her fourth summit with Putin.

"The summit confirmed that South Korea and Russia are partners in handling the North Korean nuclear issue and other matters."

Putin also said, "We had in-depth discussions about the current situation on the Korean Peninsula and reached an agreement that the two nations do not accept the self-proclaimed nuclear status of Pyongyang."

Speaking at the EEF, Putin urged North Korea to stop repeated military provocations and to adhere to United Nations resolutions that were imposed in March for its nuclear test in January and a long-range rocket launch the following month.

"Ahead of the bilateral talks, there were concerns over Russia's possible lukewarm stance on international sanctions on the North due to South Korea's plan to host a THAAD battery on the peninsula, but the summit confirmed that Moscow will not renege on the punishment, which was a great achievement," said Park Won-gon, a professor at Handong Global University.

Putin gave Park a surprise gift _ a work of calligraphy written in Chinese by Park's father, the late former President Park Chung-hee in 1979.

Putin handed over the piece to Park, expressing his appreciation for a New Year's gift that Park gave to his daughter earlier this year. Putin bought the calligraphy piece from an art market, Cheong Wa Dae said.

The piece, which means "With strong teamwork, let's move forward together," carries Park's New Year's wish for 1979.

Russia and China have strongly opposed the THAAD deployment, claiming its presence would hurt their security interests. In response, South Korea has stressed that it is not targeting any third countries.

"The two heads of state exchanged constructive opinions about THAAD and other issues on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia in a cordial mood," the presidential office said.

However, Park and Putin indicated that they each still retain their initial stance.

"The nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula should be resolved within the overall military and political detente in Northeast Asia," Putin said, stressing the need for relevant countries to defuse military tension.

Park responded, saying, "A responsible government cannot help but craft a way to safeguard the safety of the nation and the lives of its people."

Economically, the leaders also agreed to seek a free trade agreement (FTA) between South Korea and the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), comprised of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia.

The two sides have conducted a joint feasibility study of their free trade pact over the past nine months and plan to begin negotiations for an FTA next month.

The EAEU, launched in January 2015, is a customs union. It has a combined population of 180 million with its gross domestic product reaching $1.6 trillion.

In addition, South Korea and Russia signed 24 memoranda of understanding that will expand the scope of bilateral economic cooperation into more diverse fields in the Far East, including fisheries, agriculture, infrastructure, healthcare and medical services, according to the presidential office.
By Hong Dam-young, Park Si-soo



Seoul City will host a startup idea competition for foreign residents in the city next month.

Seoul Global Center, a comprehensive support center for expats in Seoul, is receiving applications through email (sgcbiz1@gmail.com or logmis@sba.seoul.kr). The deadline is Oct. 3.

Foreigners who have technology-based ideas can apply as individuals or teams. Having a Korean as a team member is accepted.

The center will announce a shortlist of 10 applicants and they will be given an opportunity to give a first-hand presentation about their ideas to judges on Oct. 14.

Ideas should be considered helpful to establishing tech-intensive manufacturing startups or business systems taking advantage of information and communication technology.
President Park Geun-hye and Chinese President Xi Jinping shake hands on the opening day of the two-day G20 summit at Hangzhou International Exhibition Center, Sunday. The two leaders will hold a bilateral summit today on North Korea's nuclear program and South Korea's plan to allow the deployment of a U.S. anti-missile system. / Yonhap



By Kang Seung-woo

HANGZHOU, China  President Park Geun-hye will seek to narrow the gap with Chinese President Xi Jinping over the deployment of a U.S. anti-missile system on Korean soil when they meet Monday on the sidelines of the G20 summit, Cheong Wa Dae officials said Sunday.

She will stress the inevitability of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system on the Korean Peninsula as a defensive means against North Korea's growing nuclear and missile threats, they said.

There are calls for Park to use the upcoming meeting to ease complaints from China due to concerns that the country may become reluctant to faithfully enforce the latest set of United Nations Security Council sanctions against Pyongyang.

The sanctions were imposed in March in response to the repressive state's nuclear test in January and long-range rocket launch the following month.

South Korea has stressed that the envisioned deployment is inevitable to protect against North Korea's growing nuclear and missile threats, but China claims that the THAAD presence would undermine its security interests.

"North Korea' nuclear and missile issues are a matter of life and death to us," Park said during a joint press conference following her summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the eastern Russian city of Vladivostok on Saturday. Russia is also voicing objections to THAAD, but Putin did not clarify his opposition in the press conference.

However, Xi is not likely to follow suit, given his recent remarks on the issue.

In a speech to a business forum being held alongside the G20, Saturday, he stressed that the world should dismiss the "Cold War-like mentality of the bygone era," which seems to clarify his opposition to the THAD deployment.

During his bilateral talks with U.S. President Barack Obama on the same day, he told his American counterpart that China is opposed to the THAAD presence in South Korea, asking the United States to respect China's strategic security interests, according to the state-run Chinese Xinhua news agency.

In order to convince the Chinese side during the summit, President Park may mention a conditional THAAD deployment again.

She said in an interview with Russia's Rossiya Segodnya, released on Friday, that if North Korea's nuclear and missile threats were eliminated, the need to deploy the THAAD system would naturally disappear.

"President Park is expected to make it clear that the planned deployment of THAAD will not target any country other than North Korea, while referring to the conditional THAAD deployment again," said Park Won-gon, a professor at Handong Global University.

While seeking understanding over the THAAD issue, Park is expected to urge China to play an aggressive role in North Korea's denuclearization, given that Beijing is the only country to exert influence on the North thanks to its status as the country's chief diplomatic protector and economic benefactor.

Since the U.N. sanctions, the Kim Jong-un regime has stoked tensions on the Korean Peninsula, firing ballistic missiles on 19 occasions, including submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). In addition, it is expected to carry out a fifth nuclear test in the near future.

Along with a meeting with Xi, Park plans to hold summits today with her counterparts from Saudi Arabia and Italy.
By Lee Kyung-min



A fourth confirmed cholera patient, a 47-year-old male resident of Busan, may have contracted the waterborne disease during an overseas trip, health authorities said Sunday.



Despite this suggestion, the number of customers visiting seafood restaurants in the southern part of the country plummeted further following a report that he had dinner at one such restaurant in Busan, a day after he returned home.



According to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), the man, whose identity is being withheld, tested positive for the disease Saturday morning.



The man went to the Philippines from Aug. 24 to 28. After returning home, he and his wife had dinner with two acquaintances at a seafood restaurant near his home, Aug. 29.



He came down with diarrhea two hours after dinner, and visited a hospital the next day after the symptoms did not subside. Currently, he is in an isolation ward.



The KDCD almost ruled out the possibility of his infection coming from the restaurant, given that the incubation period for cholera is at least two days.



"His symptoms started two hours after dinner. For the food in the Busan restaurant to be cited as the cause of his infection, his symptoms should have begun at least Aug 31 or Sept. 1," a KCDC official said.



"Also, we found no vibrio cholera bacteria during an inspection of food ingredients at the restaurant," she added.



In additional tests run by the KCDC, 15 people who came into contact with the man all tested negative including his two acquaintances, three family members, hospital officials, and restaurant workers.



DNA fingerprinting is underway to determine whether the genotype of the bacteria from the fourth patient matches that of the first three, the KCDC said.



It is reviewing the food and places he went upon his arrival here to determine whether he contracted the disease elsewhere in the country.



In cooperation with health authorities and medical institutions in Busan, the KCDC said that it has increased monitoring of patients with diarrhea in the region.



If he is confirmed to have contracted the disease overseas, he would be the first such case this year. The first patient who contracted cholera domestically this year was a man, 59, living in Gwangju, who ate sushi and marinated crabs during a trip to Geoje. The second patient, a 73-year-old woman living on Geoje Island, ate mackerel at her church. The third patient, 64, purchased squid and sardines at a fish market on Geoje and ate them at home. He said he blanched the squid and roasted the sardines; but was later found to have also consumed sushi.



The breakout of the infectious disease has hit the seafood industry in the southern region hard.




Cho Yoon-sun Kim Jae-soo



President Park Geun-hye officially approved the appointment of two Cabinet ministers and a Supreme Court justice through an electronic endorsement system on Sunday, her office Cheong Wa Dae said Sunday.

Her approval for incoming Culture Minister Cho Yoon-sun and Agriculture Minister Kim Jae-soo came amid objections from opposition parties that have called them unfit for the Cabinet posts, citing their alleged ethical lapses and other issues.

Parliamentary approval for Supreme Court Justice Kim Jae-hyung came without any serious partisan conflict.

Park is currently in Hangzhou, eastern China, to attend the summit of the Group of 20 leading economies. Hangzhou is the second leg of her three-nation tour that includes visits to Vladivostok, Russia, and the Laotian capital of Vientiane.
South Korean President Park Geun-hye pledged Thursday to further facilitate startups by young people from South Korea and France as Seoul seeks to expand trade and investments with the European country.

She said the two countries are set to sign a cooperation deal on creative economy following her summit with French counterpart Francois Hollande on Friday.

Park has been pushing for a creative economy by viewing it as the only viable growth engine for Asia's fourth largest economy.

The president's signature creative economy is meant to, among other things, turn new ideas into real businesses with the help of cutting-edge science and information technology.

France opened the French Tech Hub in Seoul in March to help its own startup companies make inroads into South Korea.

Currently, South Korea and France have been running a program under which both sides select five startups each and help them enter their respective markets.

Park called on South Korea and France to diversify trade, noting Seoul and Paris are set to establish a dialogue channel between their top officials in charge of their economies.

"I hope you will play a leading role in expanding trade and investments by taking advantage of dialogue and information channel," Park told about 220 South Korean and French business executives at a hotel.

She also asked French business executives to invest in South Korea in such sectors as the Internet of Things, biotechnology and energy.

The two countries can enjoy "a win-win situation in new energy industries, ICT and biotechnology if French scientific and technological prowess is combined with South Korea's technology for application and production," Park said.

Park also said Seoul and Paris can stay ahead in the hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle market if liquefaction technology of French Air Liquide S.A. and South Korea's Hyundai Motor Co. join forces.












President Park Geun-hye will hold a summit with her Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Hangzhou, China, on Monday amid tensions over the planned deployment of an advanced U.S. antimissile system to South Korea.

Seoul's presidential office Cheong Wa Dae on Sunday said Park and Xi will hold the summit in the morning on the sidelines of a summit of the Group of 20 advanced and emerging economies in China's eastern lakeside city.

The two-way summit has been arranged as Beijing remains opposed to the plan by Seoul and Washington to station a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, a core element of America's global missile defense program, to the Korean Peninsula by the end of next year.

Seoul has defended its deployment plan as an "inevitable, self-defense" measure to counter Pyongyang's evolving nuclear and missile threats. The communist regime's recent test of a submarine-launched ballistic missile has further strengthened the case for THAAD.

But Beijing has argued that the THAAD deployment would needlessly escalate regional military tensions and undermine its strategic security interest.

Fresh tensions between Seoul and Beijing have spawned concerns that Beijing could become less willing to faithfully enforce the latest set of U.N. Security Council sanctions against Pyongyang, which were imposed in March in response to the provocative state's nuclear test in January and long-range rocket launch the following month.

A day earlier, Xi stressed in a speech at a business forum that the world should dismiss the "Cold War-like mentality of the bygone era." Observers say this appears to further underscore Xi's opposition to the planned THAAD deployment to the peninsula.

China believes the deployment of another U.S. missile defense asset in a nearby location could tip the security balance in favor of the U.S. amid an intensifying rivalry between the two major powers over regional preponderance, observers said.

In particular, a THAAD battery can undermine China's so-called anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) strategy, the centerpiece of which is to mobilize a series of military assets, such as coastal artillery, to keep any hostile forces -- namely U.S. forces -- at bay. (Yonhap)
President Park Geun-hye shakes hands with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi during a bilateral meeting held on the sidelines of of the summit of the Group of 20 advanced and emerging economies in China's eastern lakeside city of Hangzhou, Sunday. / Yonhap



President Park Geun-hye on Sunday called for greater business cooperation with Egypt, particularly in the Middle East nation's infrastructure development field, her office Cheong Wa Dae said.

During her summit with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Park also expressed hope that the two nations can keep up the momentum to realize the full potential for the development of their "mutually complementary" partnership.

Their meeting was held on the sidelines of the summit of the Group of 20 advanced and emerging economies in China's eastern lakeside city of Hangzhou. The multilateral economic forum kicked off its two-day run on Sunday.

During the summit, Park, in particular, asked the Egyptian leader to support South Korean firms seeking to make inroads in the large North African market.

Currently, Egypt is pushing for a set of infrastructure expansion schemes, including a major desalination project in the country's northeastern city of Port Said and a project to purchase 520 metro trains for the capital city of Cairo.












President Park Geun-hye shakes hands with British Prime Minister Theresa May during a bilateral meeting held on the sidelines of of the summit of the Group of 20 advanced and emerging economies in China's eastern lakeside city of Hangzhou, Sunday. / Yonhap



By Kang Seung-woo



HANGZHOU, China -- President Park Geun-hye met with new British Prime Minister Theresa May, Sunday, to discuss ways to boost bilateral cooperation and promote free trade in the global economy, according to Cheong Wa Dae.

Their summit, the first of its kind since the British premier took office in July, was held in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou when Park and May along with other global leaders are attending the G20 summit. Britain's shock vote to leave the European Union (EU), better known as Brexit, led to the resignation of May's predecessor, David Cameron.

Describing Britain as the leader of free trade, Park asked May to make efforts to tackle rising trade protectionism, and they shared the view that it was important to equally distribute the benefits of free trade as well as promote it, according to the presidential office.

May pledged to make Britain's departure from the EU as smooth as possible, while maintaining strong and close relations with other countries, including Korea.












Laotian Planning and

Investment Minister

Souphanh Keomixay

By Yi Whan-woo

Korea can expand its business opportunities in Laos through investment in agriculture, tourism and other prospective industries there, a top Laotian government official said in Seoul last week.

Calling Laos a place where "the business potential and opportunity are abundant," Laotian Planning and Investment Minister Souphanh Keomixay said Korea's investment would be crucial for his country's goal to become a "high middle-income country."

"Korea is one of the fastest growing economies ... Korea has several great expertise in heavy and light industry and other sectors, in which this expertise could be transferred to other less-developed or developing countries, for instance the Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR)," Keomixay told Investment and Business Environment Seminar on the Lao PDR at The Plaza Hotel in downtown Seoul, Thursday.

"I strongly believe that when you come to Laos, you will find good opportunities and success in the business in Laos as reflected in the letters of our country: Land of Ample Opportunities and Success."

The ASEAN-Korea Centre in Seoul and the Laotian Ministry of Planning and Investment organized the conference. It was aimed at helping Korean investors get a better understanding on the business environment in Laos. Other dignitaries included ASEAN-Korean Centre Secretary General Kim Young-sun.

Pointing out that Korea was the fifth-largest of 53 foreign investor countries in Laos, Keomixay said his country still has more to offer to benefit Korean business people.

Korea's investment mainly centers on five sectors  electricity, construction, trade and service, agriculture, and handicrafts  according to Keomixay.

The minister said flat land and weather in Laos were adequate to grow crops and other agricultural products and that investors were welcome to improve the irrigation system and supply agricultural technologies to help develop the country's agricultural industry.

Concerning his country's competence in tourism, Keomixay said Korea could build more hotels, carry out maintenance works on tourist attractions, and improve tourism-related services to international standards.

The minister speculated that direct daily flights by Korean Air and Lao Airline between Seoul and the Laotian capital would help expand tourism businesses between the countries.

"The service and tourism sector is leading sector in Laos, especially natural tourism, historical tourism and cultural tourism, which are unique and can not find anywhere else in the world," he said.

He claimed the location of Laos could be advantageous in international trade over land.

His remark was in line with a theory of "a land-linked country" against a skeptical view toward landlocked countries, such as Laos.

Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand and China surround Laos, which has no access to open waters, which often seen as a political and economic handicaps.

"Laos is included in development triangle of the three countries (Laos-Vietnam-Cambodia) and the East-West Economic Corridor, which has moderate infrastructure and a legal framework to support the economic integration and international arena under the cooperation framework of ASEAN," Keomixay said.

Keomixay introduced the free economic zones (FEZs) in Laos, including Savan Park in Savannakhet Province.

He also listed mining, education and medical care as prospective industries.

The Laotian government wants international investment to bolster the country's economic growth so Laos join the World Bank's list of "upper middle income countries" by 2030 under the economic plan "Vision 2030.

In 2011, the World Bank re-grouped Laos from a low- income country to a low middle- income country.
The Esmeralda, the Chilean Navy's training ship, is seen docked. The ship will visit Busan

from Sept. 6 to 10 as part of its 61st round-the-world voyage worldwide. / Courtesy of Carlos Schnaidt



By Yi Whan-woo

The Esmeralda is more than just a Chilean Navy ship.

With a pristine white hull, brass portholes and four masts topped with Chilean flags, the training ship has served as a floating embassy since she was built in Spain and delivered to Chile in 1954.

The ship has travelled to hundreds of ports worldwide since then. They include Busan, which she will visit for the eighth time from Sept. 6 to 10.

"As Chilean diplomats, we are keenly aware of the significance of a port call of this training ship," Chilean Ambassador to Korea Fernando Danus said in an-email last week. "Sometimes the Esmeralda is given the name of Chile's Ambassador' and that portrayal corresponds to reality." The ship visited several cities where Danus served, including New York (1986), Wellington (1993), Singapore (1995, 2012) and Bali (2002).

"To some extent, my path along Chile's foreign service has been marked by this imposing ship," the ambassador said.

"I am looking forward to receiving the Esmeralda and its crew once again. My mission as Chilean Ambassador to the Republic of Korea will be enhanced by their visit."

Esmeralda commanding officer Carlos Schnaidt voiced a similar view.

"It's a messenger of friendship to all the countries where she goes," he said in an e-mail. "To arrive in a foreign port means to show the culture and traditions of Chile and its navy.

"It improves the ties between our countries because the knowledge between each other creates confidence, and that opens the doors for both countries."

The Esmeralda's visit to Busan is part of the ship's 61st voyage for seven months until January 2017.

Her trip so far has included Easter Island, Honolulu and Tokyo.

There are 310 crew plus 15 international guests. One guest is from the Korean Navy, according to the Chilean Embassy in Seoul.

The crew will join a press conference on board at 9:30 a.m. on Sept. 6.

From Sept. 7 to 9, the ship will be open for two hours to a pre-registered group of visitors at 10 a.m. for two hours.

The crew will hold a commemorative ceremony at the United Nations Memorial Cemetery in Busan on Sept. 9.

The Chilean and Korean Navy bands will hold a concert at Gwangalli Beach later the same day.

The crew will also visit Jinhae Naval Base in South Gyeongsang Province and several defense companies.

After a five-day stay in Busan, the ship is scheduled to sail to Shanghai, Bali, Sydney, Auckland in New Zealand and Papeete in Tahiti before returning to Chile.
Chilean Ambassador to Korea Fernando Danus, center, poses with embassy officials, children and social welfare workers during his visit to a children's home in Eunpyeong-gu, Seoul, Wednesday. His visit was part of efforts to bolster relations between Chile and Korea on the 206th anniversary of Chile's Independence Day on Sept. 18. The ambassador, the children and other visitors from the embassy made Chilean empanada, a stuffed bread or pastry that is baked or fried. The children learned about Chile's traditional clothes and customs.



/ Courtesy of Chilean Embassy in Korea
Sabena Hijacking: My Version'

By Yi Whan-woo

The Israeli Embassy in Korea screened an Israeli thriller submitted for the Seoul International Drama Awards 2016 in Seocho-gu, southern Seoul, Thursday.

Titled "Sabena Hijacking: My Version," the 2015 movie is based on a true story about Israeli commandos who rescued passengers held as hostages by the Black September Organization, a Palestinian terrorist group.

Four terrorists from the Black September Organization hijacked Sabena Flight 571, a Boeing 707 jet on May 8, 1972 and threatened to blow up the plane if Israel did not free 300 Palestinian terrorists jailed there.

The commandos saved the hostages after the plane made an emergency landing at an airport near Tel Aviv. Two of the commandos were Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, who both later became Israeli prime ministers.

The 104-minute film is among more than 60 films that will compete in the TV movie category at the annual Seoul International Drama Awards. The films are from Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, France, Germany, Iran, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Spain, the U.K. and other countries. The winner will be announced on Sept. 8.

Israeli Ambassador to Korea Chaim Choshen said "Sabena Hijacking: My Version" was "one more masterpiece of the flourishing Israeli film industry," while introducing the film at the Israel Culture Center Korea.

The screening was the Embassy's first event held since Choshen took office on Aug. 29.

The movie shows "strong human characteristics and a lot of dramatic moments and moral dilemmas, exposing the viewers to the points of view of the two sides of the conflict: Israelis and Palestinians," the ambassador said.

"There are even moments when we tend to fall into the trap of sympathizing with the hijackers/ terrorists, but we should not forget that terrorism is the most despicable way to fight," he said.

He wished the film's producers and director "a lot of success" at the Seoul International Drama Awards.
By Yi Whan-woo

The government will set up an archive to record North Korea's state-perpetrated human rights violations under an ordinance endorsed by the Cabinet, according to the Ministry of Unification, which was announced on Tuesday.

Under the ordinance for the North Korean Human Rights Law, the government will also begin a foundation to oversee and support projects aimed at improving Pyongyang's dire human rights records. The law will take effect, Sunday.

Based on the law, the Park Geun-hye administration is expected to press North Korea's Kim Jong-un regime harder in collaboration with the United States and Japan, which have been addressing North Korea's human rights through their own sanctions against the North.

The ordinance had been awaiting the Cabinet approval after the National Assembly passed the related bill in March.

Rival parties passed the North Korean human rights bill more than a decade after it was first introduced in 2005.












North Korean scientists involved in the development of technologies for submarine-launched ballistic missile visit Pyongyang on Friday at the invitation of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in this photo released on Saturday by the North's state media Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). / Yonhap



North Korea mobilized some 100,000 people to mark the successful launch of its submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) in August, its main media outlet said Sunday.

The daily Rodong Sinmun, an organ of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea, said a large scale welcoming ceremony was held in Pyongyang on Friday to praise the dedication of those that contributed to the successful launch of the SLBM.

The missile launched in the early hours of Aug. 24 flew some 500 kilometers and landed within Japan's air defense identification zone in the East Sea. The latest test-fire of the missile was the third this year and the longest flight achieved by that type of North Korean missile to date.

The newspaper said people lined the streets of the capital city to fete the scientist and engineers that made the missile launch a success.

It said the contributors to the SLBM arrived in Pyongyang last Sunday and took in the various sites of the capital city, enjoyed rest and attended celebratory concerts.

The paper said North Korean leader Kim Jong-un even took photos with people who played a role in the missile test.

Related to the public mobilization, North Korean watchers in Seoul said Pyongyang reported that some 100,000 people also welcomed those who carried out the country's fourth nuclear test in January.

"The regime uses these accomplishments to build up its public support and get the people to rally support for the leadership, which is facing tough challenges in the face of tightened international sanctions," a Pyongyang watcher said. (Yonhap)
By Yi Whan-woo



South Korea's new law aimed at documenting human rights abuses in North Korea went into effect, Sunday  the latest in a series of efforts to put pressure on the Kim Jong-un regime.



Analysts say North Korea may react furiously because the body responsible will collect, record and preserve details of crimes against humanity committed by Kim and his aides.



"The law may not have practical effects on North Korea in the short term and we have to admit that," said Kim Jin-moo, a research fellow at the Korea Institute of Defense Analysis. "But Pyongyang will eventually realize that this law can pose a threat to the regime as it will reveal every detail of Kim's human rights abuses, raise global awareness about these crimes and humiliate the despot."



Park Won-gon, an international relations professor at Handong University, agreed.



"Revealing human rights violations in North Korea will be one of the most effective elements to press the country because it deals with issues that the country views as serious offenses against its leader."



He cited that the dictatorial regime was infuriated when the United States put Kim Jong-un on a sanctions list in July for human rights abuses.



"I believe the new human rights act will be critical in bringing momentum in the fight to improve Pyongyang's dire human rights record," Park said.



Kim Yong-hyun, a professor of North Korean Studies at Dongguk University, pointed out that the new law is in line with President Park Geun-hye's move to urge ordinary North Koreans to join inter-Korean unification efforts while putting pressure on the ruling class there.



"It seems the government will capitalize on the human rights act to speed up its strategy of separating North Koreans from their leadership," he said.



Under the law, a research center will be started under the Ministry of Unification to study human rights conditions based on North Korean defectors' testimonies.



The research center will hand over its findings every three months to the Ministry of Justice, which will keep them in an archive.



It is speculated that the archive will be used to refer Kim Jong-un and his aides for trial if the two Koreas are united.



The government will establish a foundation as well to fund non-governmental organizations and other advocate groups for North Korean human rights.



The human rights act also approves setting up a 10-member advisory committee concerning Pyongyang's human rights record under the unification ministry.



Meanwhile, analysts said the act should be supplemented with measures that can help stop torture, public executions and other forms of human rights abuses in Pyongyang.



"The new law may help in putting pressure on North Korea but it doesn't mean it will give up human rights abuses considering that the country's leader is using a reign of terror to tighten his grip on power," Kim Jin-moo said.



He warned that Pyongyang may make military provocations in protest of the act.




In your prestigious newspaper on Aug. 31, an editorial with the title "Expelling refugee" has taken a swipe at my country by misquoting facts about Pakistan which will mislead your leadership and has maligned the good name of my country. I will request that you may publish the following reply in your prestigious newspaper.



Balochistan is the largest province of Pakistan and the Baloch people willingly joined Pakistan on its creation in 1947. This is the truth and the factual position which the Editorial Expelling Refugee' tried to distort by stating that "Balochistan has been under Pakistan's rule since it was liberated from India in 1947. Reports have it that many Balochs have been killed while hundreds of thousands have been relocated." This is not only a misstatement of facts but a grave allegation against my country.



The Father of Nation Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah visited Balochistan several times before the creation of Pakistan and actively lobbied with the British Colonist to give Balochistan the status of the Province. The then Baloch leadership made an unflinching commitment with the Quaid and the latter's love for Quetta is symbolized by the fact that Quaid-i-Azam spent his last days in Ziarat Residency, a city of Balochistan.



The historical facts can be corroborated from historical record that the British decided to hold a referendum on June 30, 1947 in Shahi Jirga of Balochistan and extra ordinary joint session of the Shahi Jirga was held on 30th June 1947 and to the dismay of the Congress party, 54 members of the Shahi Jirga and Quetta Municipality voted en-block to join the new Constituent Assembly to be set up in Pakistan. Consequently upon Pakistan's creation on 14th August 1947 the area of Balochistan under the British rule joined Pakistan immediately while the remaining four princely states called KHANATES namely Makran, Kharan, Lasbella and Kalat joined after a referendum in March 1948.



Balochistan has been victim of subversive activities by India. On 3rd March 2016 Commander KulbushanYadav the RAW operative (Indian intelligence agency) was apprehended by our authorities when he was trying to enter in Pakistan illegally. In the press conference a confessional video statement of the RAW officer was released. Yadav revealed his identity as Indian Naval officer whose objective was to instigate Baloch insurgents and finance Baloch Liberation Movement in order for them to carry out subversive activities in Balochistan resulting in the killing of Pakistani citizens. The arrest of Yadav and his confessional statement has vindicated Pakistan's longstanding position.



Last but not the least Pakistan was not "liberated" but was "created" as a result of unparalleled constitutional struggle.



ZahidNasrullah Khan

Ambassador, Pakistan




By Maija Devine

Say "Comfort Women," and watch the sparks fly. Inaccurate wordings pour out. For decades, academics and media professionals, among others, have indiscriminately flung around the terms "comfort women," "camp followers," "prostitutes," "sex workers," and "human trafficking victims."

Similarities do run through these groups. However, when one analyzes elements, as listed below, the differences between each group may become more clearly distinguishable.

The Comfort Women of WWII: (1) The Japanese government established the use of the women as a systematized, formalized, and large-scale (not matched by any other governments) part of its overall military operation; (2) The Japanese military indirectly and directly forced or coerced recruitment of women and girls, a majority of whom were not already sex workers; (3) The military provided transportation (including military ships and vehicles); (4) The military provided management over housing, security and food and other supplies; (5) The military printed tickets as a means of payment to the women, supposedly to be converted to cash after the war (they were not readily tradable with currency, and, at war's end, they became worthless); (6) In post-war maneuvers, the military abandoned, relocated or murdered the women (for a limited number, Japanese authorities disguised them as nurses to cover up the government's involvement with comfort women and assisted with their escape).

Some professional sex workers were mixed in with comfort women. This has caused the general public and media alike to use the terms of prostitutes, sex workers, and comfort women interchangeably.

Since ancient times, "camp followers" in wars were almost always volunteers (including family members of soldiers), who performed services not provided by a government or military, such as nursing, mending, laundry work and cooking. Sexual services, which were not provided by a government or military, were offered by camp-following prostitutes operating on their own or with brokers. These women received pay in currency directly from their clients, unlike comfort women of WWII, who were "paid" in government-printed tickets. Sometimes, government or military provided medical and security supervision to camp followers to minimize health hazards for its soldiers.

Considering the difficulty of distinguishing these groups, it's almost understandable when in the "Introduction" of U.S. Military Report #49, the U.S. soldiers who interrogated Korean comfort women along the Burma border in 1944 incorrectly categorized them as "camp followers, or professional prostitutes." Such misnaming has caused pro-Japanese activists to hold up the quote out of context as evidence that the Korean comfort women were prostitutes. The activists send e-blasts (with a photo) propagating how the women followed Japanese military camps with smiles on their faces. However, the rest of the report clearly describes the recruitment and treatment of the women that fit the description of the comfort women of WWII, rather than camp followers or professional prostitutes.

On Vietnamese "comfort women," reports of extreme abuse by Korean soldiers have made news. However, no documentation to date identifies the Korean government or military as the agent for the establishment of a comfort women system as a formal military policy or as the provider of operational control over recruitment, transportation, housing and supplies, management, payment and the post-war dealings with victims.

Likewise, prostitutes working around U.S. military bases in South Korea and elsewhere do not meet the definition of wartime comfort women.

Victims of ongoing human trafficking have similarities to comfort women of WWII, both being victims of brokers who use force and deception. But, while bribery and corruption exist, no government or military seems systematically and officially involved in the establishment, transportation and operational phases.

Generating a universally agreed-upon dictionary of terms should be the first task for all committed to finding a permanent resolution to comfort women issues.
Americans trust the U.S. military to protect lives and freedoms, but they cannot trust it to perform an honest accounting of its own budget. "The United States Army's finances are so jumbled it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced," Reuters recently reported.



According to a report from the Defense Department's Office of Inspector General, the Army "materially misstated," or simply made up, accounting figures totaling $6.5 trillion for 2015. The errors eclipse the DOD's total budget, which is $573 billion for 2016, because errors in one account cascade down to multiple levels of subaccounts as well.



"DOD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions," the IG's report concluded. In some cases, the Army simply did not maintain required data, in other cases data was woefully inaccurate and sometimes data was lost. For example, the Defense Finance and Accounting Services, which performs accounting functions for the DOD, was unable to produce accurate year-end financial statements for the Army "because more than 16,000 financial data files had vanished from its computer system," Reuters noted.



In order to fill these gaps in the financial statements, DFAS staff engaged in what some employees refer to as "the grand plug"; in other words, pulling numbers out of the air to make things add up. "As a result," the Reuters story observed, "there has been no way to know how the Defense Department  far and away the biggest chunk of Congress' annual budget  spends the public's money."



These revelations call into question whether the Defense Department will be able to meet a deadline to be ready for a comprehensive audit by September 30, 2017. The long overdue audit would be the first in the history of the DOD, which for 20 years has flouted a law requiring all federal departments to conduct annual audits.



The DOD has a long history of waste and a lack of accountability. In recent years, it has wasted billions of dollars in doomed Afghanistan reconstruction efforts, spent $1 billion to destroy $16 billion worth of obsolete and unused ammunition and lost more than $500 million worth of weapons, aircraft, patrol boats and equipment given to Yemen, some of which might have fallen into the hands of terrorists.



Politicians plead for more defense spending "for the troops" with almost as much regularity as they seek more money for other programs "for the children." But the DOD IG's latest report, and many others preceding it, clearly illustrate that much of the Pentagon's funding has nothing to do with the troops' welfare or the readiness of our military services.



While both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have called for increased defense spending to "strengthen" our military forces, our hope is that these reports will not only reiterate the need for the Defense Department to undergo that long-delayed comprehensive audit, but also spur an honest discussion about its budget and the need to eliminate its wasteful spending and frivolous defense contracts.



This editorial appeared on the Orange County Register and was distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.




National Assembly Speaker Chung Sye-kyun showed a grave lack of judgment by making politically sensitive remarks during a speech last week.



There are many among the Korean public who agree with the Assembly speaker, who criticized the government's decision to host the U.S. military's Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system in Korea. His call for a more thorough investigation of crimes and corruption by senior government officials is also in line with the people's wish for a corruption-free public service.



However, Chung sounded more like an opposition leader rather than a speaker of the Assembly, who is obliged to maintain political neutrality and operate the Assembly in a non-partisan manner. The six-term lawmaker formerly belonged to the main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea which is opposed to the U.S. military's plan to host the THAAD battery here.



By making such divisive remarks, Chung has instigated parliamentary wrangling, which will adversely affect the regular session of the Assembly that needs to process some crucial bills to improve the economy and the people's livelihood over the next three months. In protest of Chung's speech, the ruling Saenuri Party announced a boycott of all Assembly sessions, however, the parties did  barely  manage to pass the extra budget bill late Friday, with vice speaker Park Joo-sun of the minor People's Party chairing it on behalf of the speaker.



This kind of political discord hampering Assembly sessions is not something the people wish to see repeated in the new 20th National Assembly.



Chung's speech was particularly ill-timed as it was intended to commemorate the opening of the first regular session of the new Assembly. The focus of the speech should have been to unite the parties for the non-partisan goal of advancing the people's livelihoods rather than slamming the government.



Speaker Chung, a veteran lawmaker and former industry minister during the Roh Moo-hyun administration, should conduct himself as is befitting of his current position as Assembly leader.




Tech giant should do utmost to recover reputation



Samsung, the world's largest smartphone manufacturer, announced Friday a mass recall of its Galaxy Note 7 model after reports that some of them caught fire while being charged.



The decision to recall all 2.5 million devices sold in 10 countries, including Korea and the U.S., came just two weeks after the product's Aug. 19 release. Customers who purchased the latest Samsung smartphone model will be able to swap them for new ones in about two weeks. The defective phones have overshadowed the strong reviews of the Note 7 and will likely dent the higher-than-expected demand. It also comes at a bad time for Samsung, as Apple will release its new iPhone later this week.



Samsung has already been hurt by a drop in smartphone profits and a lack of new businesses for growth. Against this background, the swift recall decision is a strategic move to protect the company's image. The costly recall, which is expected to be one of the largest in the smartphone industry, is a step in the right direction to recover its reputation. The recall is expected to cost Samsung about 1.5 trillion won ($1.3 billion).



Despite this, it is hard to deny that the brand's credibility has been damaged. It has caused a lot of dismay to customers that the model, which had been aggressively promoted by the company, was found to be defective only days after it was released.



Samsung Electronics should use the incident as an occasion to renew its commitment to the basics and the quality-first policy. The company had trumpeted new technologies such as the iris scanners applied to the Note 7 models. But no amount of technology innovation can inspire customers if the phone they have bought is unsafe and prone to malfunctions. Customers want quality, reliability and safety in their smartphones. Attention to the basics is crucial for Samsung to stay ahead in the increasingly competitive smartphone war.



A recall does little to assuage the frustration of the affected customers because there is much inconvenience from having to wait for a new product. And there is also no guarantee that the new product will be without defect. After experiencing this kind of inconvenience, customers are likely to shun buying products again from the company.



For more effective damage control, there are two things Samsung needs to do in the coming weeks.



First is a public apology from the company's top leadership given the gravity of the incident. This is necessary because Samsung is the nation's flagship conglomerate, and the company's exploding phones will undermine the image of other Korean brands in the global market.



Second, Samsung should conduct a thorough investigation into what caused the fires in some of its products and provide a clear explanation to assuage the customers' concerns. There is speculation that the explosions were due to defective batteries produced by Samsung SDI, the battery-making unit of Samsung Group.



If Samsung fails to satisfy customers in dealing with this incident, tech-savvy Koreans will dismiss the Samsung brand for more dependable and budget-friendly devices from its global competitors. There are many Koreans who are fed up with pricy local brands with substandard customer service.




Cho Seong-jin, head of LG Electronics' home and appliance (H&A) business division introduces his business blueprint, focusing on business-to-business (B2B) and premium sectors, in Berlin, on the sidelines of this year's IFA tradeshow, Friday (local time). / Courtesy of LG Electronics



LG's home appliance division plans to generate half of its revenue in B2B

By Lee Min-hyung

LG Electronics has reaffirmed its plan to tackle growing market uncertainty by realigning its revenue stream focusing on a stable business-to-business (B2B) sector.

"We plan to make our B2B sectors take up half of our sales," LG Electronics' home and appliance (H&A) division chief Cho Seong-jin said in a press conference, on the sidelines of this year's IFA tradeshow in Germany, Friday (local time).

"B2B is a stable revenue source, compared to the volatile business-to-consumer (B2C) sector," he said. "We are on a track to shift our business portfolio by offering not just components, but also systems. At the moment, some 20 percent of our sales come from the B2B sector. In particular, the parts business can become a long-term, stable revenue source, once we establish trustworthy relations with our clients."

The B2B solutions include turnkey projects for its clients. The H&A chief cited a recent partnership with Incheon International Airport over deploying humanoid robots there.

The move is in line with LG's group-wide strategy to focus on the more stable yet profitable B2B sector. Earlier this year, LG Group Chairman Koo Bon-moo urged heads of its affiliates to push for what he calls a two-track expansion strategy into the B2B and premium sectors.

As part of the new blueprint, the H&A division has sought to diversify its revenue streams into both areas. In March, the company launched its premium appliances brand  LG Signature  whose selection includes an organic light-emitting-diode (OLED) TV, a refrigerator with a touch-screen and a dual tub washer.

At Europe's most influential technology fair, the company also unveiled a concoction of Signature products tailor-made for European customers.

During the press conference, the appliance chief of LG Electronics highlighted that the Signature brand will have an impact on its other lineups.

"We expect the LG Signature's premium image to help drive up sales for our cheaper lineups," he said.

"Once LG Signature is acknowledged as a premium brand in the market, other products in the non-Signature lineup will also be regarded as near-premium items, due to Signature's brand power. That is what we aim for," he said.

The H&A division is LG Electronics' most profitable unit, making up more than 80 percent of the company's operating profit last year.



Growing threat from Chinese rivals

The H&A chief also called its Chinese rivals "threatening," even if they still face a long road in establishing their own brand identity.

"Chinese manufacturers still leave much to be desired in terms of brand identity, but their price competitiveness in the mid- to low-end products is threatening," he said.

The Chinese companies are shifting to overseas market, amid sluggish domestic demand, he said. As part of their globalization strategy, they are focusing on manufacturing cost-effective products, according to Cho.

"They are very threatening, as they are sparing no effort to keep track of technology trends, and continue to eye foreign markets. This is because of weak domestic demand," he said.
By Lee Min-hyung



Will Samsung Electronics' plan to recall Galaxy Note 7 smartphones drive up sales of its major competitors, Apple and LG Electronics? Officials here remain poles apart over whether the Galaxy recall plan will help its rivals enjoy benefits ahead of the release of their flagship devices.



Samsung's unprecedented recall of the 5.7-inch handset came on Friday when Samsung Electronics' mobile chief Koh Dong-jin officially announced the plan to replace all the Note 7 smartphones amid growing controversy over its explosion. The company halted shipments of the latest flagship model.



The decision came at a critical time when Samsung's major rivals, Apple and LG Electronics, plan to unveil their new flagship handsets next week. Apple will launch its new iPhone series  iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus  on Sept. 7, while LG also will hold the introduction for its large-screen flagship handset, V20, on the same day.



"If Samsung fails to resume shipments for Note 7 at the earliest, this will, to some extent, drive up sales of new handsets from Apple and LG," an IT industry source familiar with the matter said, Sunday. "But Samsung made a quick decision to recall the device, providing customers trust that the company prioritizes their safety. In this respect, Apple and LG may not enjoy substantial, long-term benefits following the issue."



The source said that it is true that the issue has hurt the image of world's largest handset manufacturer, but the rapid decision to recall all the handsets, regardless of the purchasing date, can offset the damages in the long run.



The Samsung mobile chief on Friday apologized for the quality issue of Note 7 and said the company decided to halt sales of the handset and replace the handsets with new ones.



Koh said in a meeting with reporters: "It will take two weeks for us to prepare for new products. Preorders for the Note 7 exceeded that of Galaxy S7. We are going to exchange more than one million Note 7 smartphones with new ones."



Samsung said it had received 35 claims of explosion for the new flagship handset at home and abroad through service centers, as of Sept. 1. This is equal to 24 out of a 1 million. The company attributed the explosion to faults in battery cells.



Another source familiar with the matter, however, claimed the recent controversy will come as a severe blow to Samsung Electronics' mobile business.



"Potential risks will continue to linger over its explosion, unless all the customers visit service centers to replace their devices," said the source.



If explosions of the phones continue to be reported, this will undermine customers' purchasing appetite," he said. "This will also lead some customers to buy smartphones from its rivals  including Apple and LG."




Mother Teresa stands with children in Calcutta, India. / Korea Times file



By Park Si-soo



Mother Teresa of Calcutta, a Nobel peace laureate widely known as the "saint of the gutters" during her lifetime, was proclaimed a saint of the Roman Catholic Church.



Her elevation to Roman Catholicism's celestial pantheon came in a canonisation mass in St Peter's square in the Vatican that was presided over by Pope Francis in the presence of 100,000 pilgrims.

"For the honour of the Blessed Trinity... we declare and define Blessed Teresa of Calcutta (Kolkata) to be a Saint and we enroll her among the Saints, decreeing that she is to be venerated as such by the whole Church," the pontiff said in Latin.



The sainthood ceremony came one day short of the 19th anniversary of Teresa's death, at 87, in the Indian city where she spent her adult life, first teaching, then tending to the dying poor.

"Her testimony makes us reflect and transform ... and make a better world," Brazilian priest Carlos Jose Nacimento was quoted as saying in a Reuters story.

Critics say she did little to alleviate the pain of the terminally ill and nothing to tackle the root causes of poverty. Atheist writer Christopher Hitchens made a documentary about her called "Hell's Angel.

She was also accused of trying to convert the destitute in predominantly Hindu India to Christianity, a charge her mission has repeatedly denied.

But Pope John Paul II, who met her often, had no doubt about her eligibility for sainthood, and put her on a fast track to elevation two years after her death instead of the usual five years.

The Church defines as saints those believed to have led such holy lives they are now in Heaven and can intercede with God to perform miracles -- two of which are needed to confer sainthood.

She is credited with healing an Indian woman from stomach cancer in 1998 and a Brazilian man from a brain infection in 2008.
Monsieur Behseta et sa famille vous font part du deces de leur chere Julie, rose du nord de l'Angleterre, pour une separation qu'ils savent temporaire. Elle ne connaissait aucune frontiere sur cette terre porteuse de tant de beaute et de richesse. Il suffit d'ouvrir les yeux pour les contempler.

Julie est decedee d'un cancer contre lequel elle s'est battue jusqu'a son dernier souffle pour profiter de ce don le plus doux qu'est la vie. Le samedi 27 aout, a 15 h 02, elle a rendu son dernier soupir et son cur, debordant d'amour, s'est arrete de battre.

Julie avait choisi de venir en France pour reposer en cette terre au pied des Pyrenees, si belles et si romantiques, entouree de l'amour de ceux qui ont eu le privilege de la connaitre. Sa famille souhaite remercier tous ceux qui ont fait preuve de tant de generosite et d'amour a son egard durant cette derniere etape du voyage. Merci pour l'accueil et l'amabilite du personnel de l'hopital de Tarbes qui a su veiller a son confort avec soin et compassion. Merci a l'equipe de l'aumonerie, au pretre, au diacre et M. l'eveque pour son bapteme et la celebration de l'Eucharistie. Ils ont tous ete d'un grand soutien spirituel. Merci aux habitants d'Ordizan qui ont accepte le Brexit jusqu'a nous accompagner et tous ceux et celles qui ont su nous soutenir par des paroles d'amitie.

Ce fut une histoire ou l'essence meme de l'humanite a ete vecue et partagee en famille et ou nous avons fait l'experience de l'unite dans l'amour de tous ceux qui nous ont entoures.

Version en anglais

We, the Behseta family, would like to announce the temporary separation of our beloved Julie, a rose from the north of England who knew no frontiers on gods' earth full of its beautiful creation and gifts for all of us. We just open our eyes and we see.

She died of cancer but fought until her last breath to enjoy every moment of the sweet gift bestowed to upon us. Life. On Saturday 27th August at 3.02pm she drew her last breath and her loving heart stopped beating.

She chose to come to France and give her body back to Mother Earth at the base of the loving and romantic Pyrenees surrounded by a host of kind people that have the privilege to live around it.

As a family we wish to humbly thank all of the welcoming and loving people that we have been fortunate enough to encounter during this last part of Julie's journey. Firstly, the hospitality and gentle loving care of every member of staff that we met in the hospital in Tarbes that work with care and compassion to maximise her comfort. The chaplaincy team, local priest, Deacon and bishop who organised her baptismal and Eucharistic celebrations, who have been a pillar of spiritual strength. The people of Ordizan who are embracing a brexit to come and rest among their loved ones and every friendly person that passed with kind words and heartfelt stories to share.

It truly has been a story where the essence of humanity has been shared with us as a family, and where we have experienced unity in the love of all the people that have surrounded us. Thank you.
A woman falling into the water with her child as they disembark off a dinghi as refugees and migrants arrive at the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey (AFP Photo/Aris Messinis) (AFP/File)

Perpignan (France) (AFP) - Agence France-Presse photographer Aris Messinis was honoured Saturday at photojournalism's biggest annual festival, for moving images of the massive arrival of migrants in Greece last year.

Messinis, 39, won the Visa d'Or for News, the most prestigious award handed out at the "Visa Pour L'Image" festival in Perpignan, southwestern France.

"I documented their struggle for a better life," he said.

This is the second year in a row that an AFP photographer has taken home the coveted prize, with Bulent Kilic winning in 2015 for dramatic images of refugees fleeing across the Turkish border.

"Our photographer Aris Messinis has done outstanding work with this powerful, moving and disturbing series of images," AFP's chief executive and chairman Emmanuel Hoog said in a statement.

"This Visa d'Or also recognises all the AFP teams throughout Europe and the Middle East who are reporting on the migrant crisis," he added.

Messinis' photos rocketed around around the world, showing life jackets as well as boat debris at the foot of a cliff, men crying with joy upon their arrival in Europe and harrowing rescue operations.

Messinis joined AFP in 2003 and has risen to become the head of the agency's photo desk in Athens.

His first major theatre was the Libyan conflict in 2011 when he recorded the battle for Syrte, days before the death of dictator Moamer Kadhafi.

For his courage and coverage of that conflict he was in 2012 awarded the Bayeux-Calvados war correspondents' award for photography.

After Libya he made the world's front pages with images from Syria and from the mass anti-austerity demonstrations in cash-strapped Greece.
This fall, the University of Southern California, home to the nations most highly-regarded video game design program, will host IndieCade, one of the gaming industrys most respected festivals. Celebrating its 10th year, the festival, which drew about 7,000 people in fall 2015, has long called Culver City home.

Increasing development in Culver City  the bulk of IndieCade was held outdoors in a parking lot  forced festival organizers to relocate. USC, whose professors and students often showcase games at the event, will hold the festival in and around the School of Cinematic Arts Oct. 13-16.

The festivals growth mirrors that of the independent game movement, and the 200-plus games at IndieCade often showcase the more experimental and risk-taking side of the industry. Last years games included Cibele, which chronicled a young womans first love and heartbreak; Line Wobbler, a game made entirely of LED lights; and the Goonies-inspired teen thriller Oxenfree, among many others.

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IndieCade is vitally important to the vibrant Los Angeles game development scene for the community that it provides  not just for developers in L.A., but for the people from all around the world who come to our wonderful city for the festival each fall, said Richard Lemarchand, a game designer and associate professor at USC.

Last year, Lemarchand brought his game The Meadow  a meditative, surreal virtual-reality experience in which players come face to face with inquisitive, red-hued, one-eyed creatures  to the festival.

[IndieCade]s also important  and almost unique  in the way that it brings the world of artistic and experimental games to the general public, Lemarchand said. Its always great to see families and people who might not normally play games discovering one of the brand-new creations being shown in the festival.

Stephanie Barish, one of the primary architects of IndieCade, said she didnt consider leaving Los Angeles when she realized the festival would have to give up its Culver City space. She cited L.A.s robust game-design community as a reason to stay.

Indeed, L.A. helped fuel the underground game movement, thanks in part to the runaway success of thatgamecompanys Journey, a calming game of exploration from veterans of USCs game design program.

Though IndieCade features industry-only panels, the bulk of the festival is geared toward the general public and is home to a mix of games  board, virtual reality, video and even playground  many attempting to put the player in previously unexplored territory.

Among the festivals past success stories was Johann Sebastian Joust, a game, ultimately released for Sonys PlayStation platforms, that is centered entirely on motion controls. Players walk around one another, moving in time to music, and try to keep the controller as still as possible.

Im always most excited about seeing games at IndieCade that just go places we havent gone before, Tim Schafer, an industry veteran who founded the Bay Areas Double Fine Productions, told The Times at last years festival.

Life is very broad, said Schafer, who previously worked for LucasArts. Games look at a small part of it. So any time people try to look at a different part of it, its exciting.

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President Obamas emissaries spent much of Sunday talking with Russian officials here about how to quell the violence in Syria, but the president all but shrugged his shoulders when asked about the prospects of a successful deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Given the previous failures of cessations of hostilities to hold, we approach it with some skepticism, Obama said, but it is worth trying.

Hours later, Obama engaged in delicate talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose military has recently clashed with U.S.-backed fighters in Syria, complicating the American strategy there and in Iraq.

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We discussed ways in which we can further cooperate in that regard, Obama said politely after his meeting with the unpredictable-yet-crucial NATO ally, whose country is still reeling from a failed military coup and a wide domestic crackdown on suspected instigators.

Obamas final presidential appearance at the Group of Twenty world leaders summit here has been a complicated waltz of diplomacy with an array of difficult partners.

Despite the strained relationships, Obama is obligated by a long list of simmering world problems to engage with leaders from Erdogan to Putin, with whom White House officials say he is planning to meet in the next day or so.

It is a signature feature of the foreign policy approach Obama promised when he ran for president  that he would talk even with the worst of the worst.

You dont negotiate deals with your friends, his oft-stated mantra goes, you negotiate them with your enemies.

Seldom has that been truer, or more personal. The moment he set foot in China for this weeks summit, Obama got a reminder of just how many ways foreign leaders might insult him on this, his 10th and final presidential tour of Asia.

As Air Force One taxied on the tarmac, Chinese officials were refusing to let the U.S. Secret Service wheel stairs to the plane so that Obama could make his usual grand entrance from the front door. Instead, they ended up wheeling short stairs to a side door, where the traveling White House press corps could barely see him to record the moment.

An official of the Chinese delegation yelled at White House staff for allowing the press in the area at all and then physically blocked National Security Advisor Susan Rice and her deputy from moving closer to the arrival scene.

They did things that werent anticipated, Rice said later.

Much of the difficulty Obama is encountering this week was anticipated, however. The Turks, for example, repeatedly have tried to blame the U.S. in the weeks since the failed military-led coup against Erdogan.

Erdogans government has complained about the U.S. failure thus far to extradite Fethullah Gulen, the Turkish cleric and onetime ally of Erdogans who now lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania. Erdogan blames him for plotting the coup and a host of other ills in his country.

In public, of course, Turkish officials have been saying all the things Americans want to hear, particularly when they are talking to U.S. officials, including Vice President Joe Biden, who visited the country recently.

On Sunday, Erdogan was politely oblique. There should be no distinction between good terrorists or bad, he said, an indirect reference both to Gulen and to U.S. support for Kurdish fighters in Syria whom the Turks regard as a threat to their national security.

The U.S. and Turkey should adopt a common attitude against terrorism, he said.

Obama, who has now dealt with Erdogan for nearly eight years, reassured the Turkish leader that the U.S. will work to make sure the parties responsible for the coup come to justice. He condemned the overthrow before quickly noting the need to further cooperate.

U.S. officials say they are awaiting sufficient evidence to justify Turkeys request for the extradition of Gulen, who is 75 and claims to be in ill health.

In the same way, Obamas White House aides maintained a sense of reserve as Secretary of State John F. Kerry met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in an effort to work out a ceasefire between Syrias government and at least some rebel groups as well as possible enhanced military cooperation between Russia and the U.S. in Syria.

State Department officials were optimistic that a deal would come together. But as Obama spoke to reporters early in the day, the president was doubtful.

Every experience he has had with Putin tells him to be skeptical about whether a deal is possible and whether Putin would stick to one, said a senior aide, speaking anonymously to comment on diplomatic talks.

Kerry said he and Lavrov have worked out a number of technical issues, but not all of them. They plan to reconvene on Monday to try to reach a final agreement.

Throughout his presidency, Obama has sought one-on-one and small-group meetings with leaders like Putin, Erdogan and Chinas Xi Jinping, to try to form a sense of what motivates them and how they act.

As he closes out his final year in office, that experience has largely been disappointing.

Despite seemingly endless talks, for instance, efforts to get Russian cooperation in ending the Syrian civil war have gotten nowhere.

With Xi, Obama and his staff have concluded that the only breakthrough they will achieve is the climate deal they worked out over the last year and ratified Saturday.

Xi wants to clear the air in his smog-choked cities, and by signing onto the Paris climate accord he can get U.S. technical assistance in reaching that goal as well as a figurative global Good Citizen medal.

The White House believes that on all the other important items on the Chinese-U.S. agenda  trade, cooperation on cyber-security, human rights  Xi has determined it is not in his interest to work with Obama.

You dont develop real trust between the U.S. and China, said Jeffrey Bader, a former China advisor to Obama. What you can develop is transparency, where you can say, I know what he thinks and I know where hes going. Thats what the president has done.

One volatile leader Obama will meet with on this trip presents a new challenge for the president. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was elected earlier this summer despite charges that, as mayor of Davao, his government had death squads that targeted suspected criminals.

Since taking office two months ago, Duterte has been accused by international human rights organizations of fostering the same type of extra-judicial killings of suspected drug traffickers.

But the Obama administration wants to lay a foundation for American interaction with the leader of a nation that remains crucial to U.S. strategic interests in the region. The Philippines has been a leader in opposing Chinas expansionist efforts in the contested South China Sea.

Obamas basic principle applies to Duterte as to other leaders with troubling records: Engage rather than shun.

Staff Writer Tracy Wilkinson contributed to this report from Washington.

Christi.Parsons@latimes.com

For more on the Obama administration, follow me on Twitter: @CParsons

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Lying in unremarkable repose, the last piece of steel to be raised atop the Wilshire Grand skyscraper rested among the dirt and debris of the job site Friday, a baton waiting for Saturday mornings performance.

At 7:22 a.m., the tower crane began to lift the 58-foot section of the buildings spire on an eight-minute journey to the top, where, once bolted into place, it would give the Wilshire Grand the distinction of being the tallest building in the western United States.

Rising 1,100 feet  not counting a 2-foot lightning rod attached to the top  the towering high-rise under construction at Figueroa Street and Wilshire Boulevard since February 2014 has earned its place in history as the tallest structure to be built in an active earthquake zone.

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But for Angelenos, the Wilshire Grand is most remarkable for changing the skyline of Los Angeles.

After years of negotiations in its early planning stages, its architects won concessions from city officials to shake off the old requirements of high-rise design  boxy and flat-roofed  and create a more stylish, vertical ornament for the buildings roof.

For more than 40 years, the skyscrapers of Los Angeles have followed a building code that required landing sites for helicopters on top of all high-rises to be used in the event of emergencies. Architects for the Wilshire Grand, however, proposed an alternative that took a more modern approach to safety, which the city accepted and soon adopted for future construction.

Today the Wilshire Grand offers a preview of what a more liberated skyline in the city might look like. Urban designers and architects have applauded the change, believing that one day the airspace above the ubiquitous sprawl will incorporate the more daring and aesthetic shapes that have emerged in cities around the world.

The flat-topped building has created one appearance to the high-rises of downtown, said Los Angeles-based architect Michael Maltzan, but this evolution allows architects to do more and to have a broader palette.

The spire, designed in tandem with an adjoining structure of steel and glass known as the sail, will serve as the Wilshire Grands calling card. Its final 18 feet, a column of perforated stainless steel, will glow with one of four LED lights: red, blue, green or gold.

Luminous by day, illuminated by night and branded with the logo of the buildings owner, Korean Airlines, the spire and the sail will be visible throughout the region and for visitors downtown, an invitation from the street to gaze skyward to some imaginary vanishing point.

Who knows what this will lead to and how skyscrapers will continue to evolve in the city? said Maltzan.

Conceived by architect David Martin, the spire and the sail rise almost 300 feet above the hotels rooftop bar and terrace on the 73rd floor. Hidden inside the sail is window-washing and elevator equipment, but functionality is not its purpose.

Its sculptural, said Martin. Look to the Gothic cathedrals, the Eiffel Tower. They all rise to the sky. The most fundamental way for that composition to end is with a point. It is not chopped off.

As neighboring buildings  the US Bank Tower, the AON Center, Two California Plaza and the Gas Company Tower  evoke an earlier era of design, the Wilshire Grand joins a more futuristic and international gallery.

The layered ascension of the Chrysler Building in New York, the pyramid of the Transamerica Tower in San Francisco, the tapered fragments of Londons Shard  each breaks from measured utility to offer a more playful expression of its achievement.

See the most-read stories this hour 

For Martin, who viewed the spires final assembly from a rooftop two blocks away, the end of construction culminates a dream put in motion nearly 10 years ago when he first began drawing a concept for the $1-billion complex.

The hotel opens next April, and Martin never doubted he would succeed.

The nature of being an architect, he said, is to be a dreamer.

But the journey was not without difficulty.

::

The sail and the spire challenged the best intentions of city planners, the fire department and the architectural community, who believed that a 1974 building code requiring helicopter landing pads on all buildings higher than 75 feet should be inviolable.

Martin and his team at A.C. Martin Partners, however, argued that the Wilshire Grand should change the status quo, and they took their inspiration in part from the ziggurat-inspired crown of City Hall, which their firm had designed in the 1920s.

In 2011, they made their case for the compatibility of fire safety and aesthetics.

Helicopter pads had become mandatory for skyscrapers in Los Angeles after a high-rise inferno in Brazil that killed more than 175 people. In the ensuing years, the skyscrapers in downtown Los Angeles, with their lopped-off demeanors, became anomalies in the world of tall-building design.

Nearly 30 years later, in the wake of 9/11, critics argued that the ordinance was antiquated.

Evacuating high-rises with helicopters can be hazardous especially during a fire, said Nathan Wittasek, a fire protection engineer who worked on behalf of the Wilshire Grand. Money spent engineering a helicopter pad can be applied to more efficient abatement measures.

From an engineering perspective, there are many ways to fight fires in these buildings, Wittasek said, and what we have learned is the greater robustness you have with automatic systems, the better off you are.

An alternative to a rooftop helipad  including a tactical landing platform, an elevator designed exclusively for firefighting and a video surveillance system  was proposed and approved by the city. Three years later, the building department changed the code for new development.

We recognized that the Wilshire Grand was a pilot project, said Wittasek. It helped set the stage for the new ordinance.

::

But the citys approval of the sail and spire did not ensure their success. They still had to be designed.

Martin had wanted the sail to look delicate and lacy with long A-frame diagonals, but engineers on the project had to add more steel to keep it from collapsing during a severe and probable earthquake, measured at 8.6.

Even designing the spire proved challenging, like raising a building nearly 30 stories tall.

During Santa Ana windstorms, this hollow column risked whistling, or, worse, vibrating  a phenomenon known as galloping  that could lead to its collapse. In addition, workers needed an interior ladder to access the lighting systems at its tip. It even has its own exterior cleaning system.

As the cost of building these elements rose, some on the construction team talked about eliminating them entirely.

It was art for arts sake, said Carey McLeod, lead project manager for A.C. Martin. We questioned it, but we concluded that the design wouldnt be complete without it.

Then there was the Federal Aviation Administration.

The Los Angeles Basin is often considered one of the most complicated and congested airspaces in the country, and for nearly three years the FAA considered the Wilshire Grand a presumed hazard not just as an obstruction but also for having an adverse physical or electromagnetic interference effect upon the airspace and its navigation facilities.

Nationwide, the federal agency is required to study any structure that rises more than 200 feet and to make recommendations that local governments and building departments enforce. In 2006, for instance, it raised concerns about the proximity of a 12-story building in San Diego to a local airport, and the builder had to remove the top two floors.

The FAAs first report on the Wilshire Grand followed the letter of the law, a regulation stating that any object of greater height than 499 feet would be an obstruction to air navigation. The team at A.C. Martin was puzzled  499 feet?  but they knew they had precedent on their side.

One of the first skyscrapers downtown  the Union Bank building, completed in 1967  was 516 feet tall. Since then, a half-dozen high rises have pushed into the 700- to 1,000-foot range, including the US Bank Tower at 1,018 feet. The Wilshire Grand was a tree in a forest of tall trees, as they explained to FAA officials in their early conversations.

But last November  with the engineering for the sail and the spire finalized at 1,100 feet  the FAA issued what seemed to be its final report. If reduced in height so as not to exceed 1,065 feet, it read, the Wilshire Grand would not be an obstruction.

The team thought there was a mistake. The prospect of lopping off 35 feet from the spire was not just untenable; it would be a huge embarrassment, said Chris Martin, chief executive of A.C. Martin Partners. The city, the architects and the owner had touted the building as the tallest in the West, and they were not about to cede ground to Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, coming in at 1,070 feet.

After last-minute negotiations, the FAA finally agreed that at 1,100 feet the Wilshire Grand would pose no hazard.

I cant imagine what would have happened, said Casey McCormick, a consultant who helped secure the building permits. To go back and reduce a skyscraper  with the engineering that had gone into it  I imagine it would have been a long, drawn-out battle trying to avoid that.

::

By 8:06 a.m., ironworkers finished bolting together the inside collar of the spire assembly, and the connection to the crane was released. The FAA navigational beacon on its tip glowed red.

Towers first and foremost represent the ambitions, aspirations and identity of the developers and the corporations inside of them, Maltzan said,  but they also represent the city that they are in.

The aspirations of the Wilshire Grand have yet to be interpreted, and for his part, Martin underplays the symbolism, riffing instead on a classic jazz melody to suggest a more mischievous intent.

What makes Wilshire Grand somewhat unique, he said, is that the building and the spire are part of the same story. Its about the composition.

He cites Miles Davis famous piece, So What, a piece whose baseline and two chords keep repeating, baseline da-da, baseline da-da.

The da-da sounds like so what, he said. If the skyline of L.A. were a jazz composition, all the buildings would be saying so, so, so, and the Wilshire Grand would be up there saying so what.

thomas.curwen@latimes.com

Twitter: @tcurwen

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The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels held a special Mass on Sunday afternoon to honor the canonization of Mother Teresa, whose decades of work in the slums of Calcutta gained her renown and inspired a global network of shelters and orphanages.

During the service, Archbishop Jose H. Gomez praised the Albanian-born nun as a model of holiness. She died in 1997 at the age of 87, and Pope Francis declared her a saint Sunday morning in Vatican City.

Mother Teresa came to show us the way, Gomez said in his homily. Like Pope Francis, she tells us that we must follow Jesus into the peripheries  to the margins of society where we find the poor and the prisoner, the immigrant and the refugee, the sick and the lonely.

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The service in downtown Los Angeles featured the presentation of a relic honoring Mother Teresa, who founded the Missionaries of Charity religious order. The relic consists of pieces of her hair in the form of a cross.

After Mass, Gomez blessed a new chapel dedicated to Mother Teresa and officially opened the space, which contains photos and testimonials documenting her visits to Los Angeles over the years.

She established the only home of the Missionaries of Charity Brothers in the U.S. during a visit to L.A. in the 1970s, and she opened a home for pregnant women in Lynwood during a 1989 visit, according to a statement issued by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

While addressing a crowd of 120,000 in Vatican City, Pope Francis spoke of her mission to help the poor and downtrodden.

She bowed down before those who were spent, left to die on the side of the road, seeing in them their God-given dignity, the pontiff said.

Mother Teresas official name as a saint will be St. Teresa of Calcutta.

Special correspondent Tom Kington contributed to this report.

frank.shyong@latimes.com

Twitter: @frankshyong

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The last time Los Angeles celebrated the completion of its tallest building, one politician christened the moment with a joke about the citys skyward ambitions at the time.

It was 1989, and the skeleton of the 73-story Library Tower  later the First Interstate World Center, now the US Bank Tower  was completed.

I thought I told them to build a 100-story building. What happened? Gilbert Lindsay, then the city councilman for downtown, quipped to The Times.

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Back then, the Library Tower capped a skyscraper building boom in downtown Los Angeles that included a crop of new towers on Bunker Hill and in the flats. The rapid development radically altered Los Angeles skyline and reflected the roaring economy of those years (around that time, Donald Trump tried and failed to build 125-story tower at the site of the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard).

But the Library Tower also came as Southern Californias economic fortunes were about to change. The aerospace collapse and corporate consolidation would slow and then finally halt the downtowns vertical growth for years. Downtowns skyline remained fairly unchanged through the 1990s and early 2000s, before another boom began.

Now the 73-story Wilshire Grand has replaced the Library Tower as Los Angeles tallest, at at 1,100 feet. This was made official Saturday with the final installation of a 58-foot, hollow cylinder spire, weighing 20,000 pounds, atop the building.

The Wilshire Grand is still under construction, so the reviews are still to come.

But the Library Tower, for its size and long shadow, arrived with mixed reviews. Civic boosters and many residents loved the tapered tower, designed by I. M. Pei & Partners. But as The Times reported back then, architecture critics had a harsher verdict:

From there the citys skyline, recently crowned by the tallest building on the West Coast, looked good enough to a group of visiting architecture critics who gathered here Saturday to survey the citys latest attempts to beautify its downtown.

Up close, however, it was the same old story. Downtown Los Angeles, long a target of disdain by Eastern critics, took it in the chops once again.

Ordinary, said Michael Sorkin of the Village Voice. Were living in a fairly exciting time. There are some exciting propositions out there, he said, referring to buildings in other cities. How come none of them are appearing here?

Robert Campbell of the Boston Globe replied that certain extraordinary cities, such as Paris, are full of ordinary buildings, but he seemed to find little about this citys latest face-lift to get excited about.

Campbell said that the downtowns newest and proudest achievement, the 73-story First Interstate World Center, made for a pretty eloquent form on the skyline but from street level was another matter. I dont like what I see so far, Campbell said of the buildings unfinished base.

Back in 1989, Lindsay remained bullish that Los Angeles skyline would reach farther into the skies.

Before I leave the council, were not only going to have a hundred-story building downtown, he said. Were going to have one with a restaurant on top. That will be my restaurant.

Lindsay died in 1990, just as the Library Tower was beginning to fill with tenants.

shelby.grad@latimes.com

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Remains found in central Minnesota in recent days are those of Jacob Wetterling, who was abducted in 1989, authorities said Saturday in an announcement that provided some long-awaited answers to a mystery that captivated the state for decades and sparked changes in sex offender laws.

Jacob was 11 when he was kidnapped from a rural road near his home in St. Joseph, Minn., about 80 miles northwest of Minneapolis.

The Stearns County Sheriffs Office said in a statement it confirms that Jacob Wetterlings remains have been located. The statement said that the Ramsey County medical examiner and a forensic odontologist identified the remains on Saturday.

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A law enforcement official told the Associated Press that a person of interest in Jacobs abduction took authorities to a field in central Minnesota last week. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing case, said remains and other evidence were found.

Jacobs mother, Patty Wetterling, sent a text message to KARE-TV earlier Saturday, saying that Jacob has been found and our hearts are broken. She did not immediately respond to calls and text messages from the Associated Press.

Jacob was riding his bicycle with his brother and a friend on Oct. 22, 1989, when a masked gunman abducted him. He hadnt been seen since.

No one has been arrested or charged in his abduction.

But last year, authorities took another look at the case and were led to Danny Heinrich, a man they called a person of interest in Jacobs kidnapping.

Heinrich, 53, of Annandale, denied any involvement in Jacobs abduction, and was not charged in connection with the kidnapping. But he has pleaded not guilty to 25 federal child pornography charges and is scheduled to go on trial on those counts in October.

The FBI has said previously that Heinrich matched the general description of a man who assaulted several boys in Paynesville, Minn., from 1986 to 1988. Earlier this year, Heinrichs DNA was found on the sweatshirt of a 12-year-old boy who was kidnapped from Cold Spring and sexually assaulted just nine months before Jacobs abduction.

Heinrich was questioned by authorities shortly after Jacobs disappearance but denied involvement. Court documents said his shoes and car tires were consistent with tracks left near the site of Jacobs abduction but couldnt be ruled an exact match. Authorities also searched the home where Heinrich lived with his father at the time and found scanners, camouflage clothing and a picture of a boy wearing underwear.

Heinrichs attorney did not respond to emailed requests for comment Saturday.

Jacobs abduction shattered childhood innocence for many in rural Minnesota, changing the way parents let their kids roam. His smiling face was burned into Minnesotas psyche, appearing on countless posters and billboards over the years. Each year, Minnesota residents were asked to keep their porch lights on for Jacobs safe return.

Patty Wetterling always kept hope her son would be found alive. She became a national advocate for children, and with her husband, Jerry Wetterling, founded the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center, which works to help communities and families prevent child exploitation. In 1994, Congress passed a law named after Jacob Wetterling that requires states to establish sex offender registries.

Officials with the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center posted a statement on its website Saturday, saying they are in deep grief.

We didnt want Jacobs story to end this way, the statement said. Our hearts are heavy, but we are being held up by all of the people who have been a part of making Jacobs Hope a light that will never be extinguished.... Jacob, you are loved.

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Clinton could win Arizona, GOP senator says

Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, left, with the states other senator, John McCain. (Charlie Leight / Associated Press)

With the presidential race entering its final stretch, Donald Trump continues to face divisions among GOP senators.

Half a dozen Senate Republicans have either refused to support Trump or said they are still on the fence  a level of division not seen since Sen. Barry Goldwaters ill-fated campaign in 1964.

On Sunday, Sen. Jeff Flake, who represents Goldwaters home state of Arizona, said he believes that Trump could deliver the usually Republican state to Hillary Clinton.

The senator has said he would like to be able to support his partys nominee, but so far, I simply cant.

We cannot, for the future of the party, be associated with this kind of message and with this kind of tone and tenor, Flake said on CBS Face the Nation.

Its just a  its not good for the party. It really isnt.

Arizona should still be a red state, Flake said. Trumps characterizations of, you know, many of the states population, have put the state in play, he added.

It becomes increasingly difficult to see that hes going to change, so I dont expect that Ill be able to support him in November, Flake said.

Id like to; hes the Republican nominee. I just dont see how I can.

Trump later responded on Twitter that he had recently held a massive rally in Arizona, and that Flake was a weak and ineffective senator.
Donald Trumps passionate revival last week of his hard-line stance on immigration looks more and more like a political disaster for the Republican nominee and his party.

Trumps angry speech in Arizona, in which he promised to deport not only criminal aliens but millions of other immigrants living in the country illegally, prompted at least three members of his Hispanic Advisory Council to resign. It instantly became fodder for Democratic efforts to mobilize millions of Latino voters in swing states such as Florida and Nevada. And it probably didnt convince many undecided voters that Trump can be a unifying force in a deeply divided country.

But winning undecided moderates may not have been Trumps goal. Instead, his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, said on CNN that the speech was aimed principally at white males, to ensure he has locked them in.

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After alienating so many nonwhite voters, Trump needs to win 65% of the white vote... Its not going to happen.  Republican pollster Whit Ayres

To non-Trump Republicans, thats precisely the problem: Their nominee is focused on voters hes already got.

Preaching to the converted is fine if youre leading, GOP pollster Whit Ayres told me. If youre behind, its not what you need to be doing.

Ayres, who worked for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio in the primaries, has never been a Trump fan, but he has spent years studying the demographics of the electorate  and hes convinced that the nominee is leading his party to calamity.

After alienating so many nonwhite voters, Trump needs to win 65% of the white vote, Ayres estimates. Only one candidate has done that in the last 40 years, and that was Ronald Reagan in a 49-state landslide in 1984. Its not going to happen.

And the stakes are even bigger than the outcome of this years election. Trumps campaign could shape Latino voters behavior for a generation to come.

Already, Latinos have been trending Democratic. In 2004, then-President George W. Bush won roughly 40% of the Latino vote; in 2012, Mitt Romney won about 27%. This year, according to a poll released last week, Trump is on track to win no more than 20% of their votes, a modern low.

Over the long run, Ayres and other GOP strategists worry, Latinos Democratic allegiance could become a habit thats hard to break.

Were in a hole, Ayres said. We can dig our way out of it if we make the Republican brand distinct from the Trump brand. But at this point, Trump is making the hole even deeper.

But in his speech last week, Trump said he would subject immigrants who are in the country illegally but havent been accused of crimes to deportation, too. He called for new restrictions on legal immigration, which he said is too high. And he argued that the quality of recent legal immigrants, often admitted thanks to family ties, has been too low. We take anybody, he complained.

Trump supporters who say he makes a clear distinction between immigrants here legally and those in the U.S. illegally havent been paying close enough attention.

And guess what? The sponsors of those family reunification immigrants  often their parents or siblings  are citizens who have the right to vote. Theyre not only Latinos; theyre Asian, African and European. Trumps complaint that their relatives arent classy enough isnt likely to make him many friends.

Theres a legitimate debate, of course, about whether legal immigration has leaned too far in the direction of family reunification at the expense of places for highly skilled professionals. And theres a legitimate debate about how best to handle the more than 10 million immigrants who are here illegally and havent committed serious crimes.

Wait a minute, some may object: Trump hasnt been demonizing Latinos in general; hes praised Mexican Americans as great people. And Trump hasnt attacked immigrants in general; hes focused on criminal aliens, who he says have been allowed to freely roam our streets [and] do whatever they want to do.

But Trumps problem  and the Republicans  isnt policy, its that he frames immigration as a crisis that has unleashed millions of nonwhite foreigners to roam our streets, commit grisly crimes and steal Americans jobs. That portrayal is inaccurate, and it exacerbates racism.

Several times in recent months, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) has worried out loud about the growth of identity politics in his own party  meaning political allegiances defined by race or ethnicity.

If we try to play our own version of identity politics and try to fuel ourselves based on darker emotions, thats not productive, he told the New York Times. I dont think it will be successful, and I dont think it is the right thing to do.

Unfortunately, these days, its bubbling up on the right, he told reporters at the Republican National Convention.

Whether Trump wins or loses, Ryan and the rest of his party have their work cut out for them.

doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com

Twitter: @DoyleMcManus

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President Obama expressed fresh optimism Sunday that his sweeping trade pact with Pacific Rim nations would still be approved by Congress, despite widespread political opposition that has left the 12-nation deal all but dead.

Both Democrats and Republicans have soured on the Trans-Pacific Partnership as overseas trade has emerged as a campaign trail scapegoat for all that remains wrong in the shifting U.S. economy. Hopes for passage by the end of Obamas term have largely faded.

Look, the politics of trade have always been complicated, Obama said in an interview with CNN that was recorded before his trip to China and Asia.

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President Obama: "For a decade, we have not been paying attention to Asia" https://t.co/6OZtrfIwim https://t.co/jHYTWB1WkA  CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) September 4, 2016

Obama noted what he called a vocal segment of the Democratic Party, a nod to the popularity of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and the influence of labor union opposition to the deal, as well as the emergence of a new populist anti-trade sentiment among some Republicans led by Donald Trump. The two have combined to potentially derail the deal.

But the administration appears unwilling to walk away from the years-long negotiations with its partners from Asia and the other countries without a final push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP.

In addition to potential economic benefits from the deal, Obama sees it as a central element of the U.S. effort to counter Chinas growing influence in east Asia and the Pacific region.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a historic agreement, cobbled together among a very diverse set of countries, and the basic argument is simple: This is going to be the worlds largest market. And if were not setting the rules out there, somebody else is, Obama said.

I remain confident that we can get TPP passed.

The ambitious trade pact was once viewed as a likely capstone to Obamas second term, a rare chance to find common ground between the two parties, but the election year changed that dynamic.

Even though Congress returns to work this week after its long summer campaign recess, any action in the House or Senate on trade remains nowhere near the top of the agenda. Most lawmakers would prefer to avoid the issue before the November election.

Congress is expected to conduct a post-election lame-duck session, and those final weeks often provide an opportunity for last-ditch legislative maneuvers.

So many issues have been deferred to this years lame-duck session that a coalition of conservative groups, particularly those aligned with the billionaire Koch brothers, are trying to stop it altogether.

Obama is on his final Asia trip this week where he intends to reassure global leaders at the G-20 summit in Laos that the U.S. is not backing away from its commitment to the continent.

lisa.mascaro@latimes.com

Twitter: @LisaMascaro

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The latest food craze to sweep Orange County is all about raw fish, rice and seaweed.

But its not sushi  its poke.

The poke scene down here is pretty amazing, said Steven Maybeno, owner of Tuna Block Poke in Dana Point. Theres a lot of competition but a lot of good poke spots.

Poke, pronounced poh-kay, is a Hawaiian word meaning to cut or slice. The dish, which originated in the Hawaiian islands, traditionally consists of raw fish  usually ahi tuna  cubed into three-quarter-inch pieces and seasoned with ingredients such as soy sauce, sesame oil, onions or seaweed.

For Maybeno, who was previously executive chef at the Hawaiian restaurant A-Frame in Los Angeles and opened Tuna Block Poke in June, the reason for Orange Countys poke craze is clear.

Its healthy, its clean, its quick and its a way fair price, he said. People can spend $10, $12 and be full of really good quality food and have talented chefs make their food.

If you go out to eat sushi, its $50, $60 for two people  its pretty expensive. But people love sushi. Poke makes it a little more affordable, a little quicker, a little more casual but still have the same flavors.

Poke has long been a staple of Hawaiis local cuisine but only recently took off in Orange County, which now boasts dozens of poke restaurants (or eateries that sell poke as one of many seafood or Hawaiian offerings), most of which, like Tuna Block Poke, have popped up in the past year.

There are six poke spots within 5 miles of here, said Maybeno. Its saturated.

While native Hawaiians have long eaten raw fish mixed with seasonings, Rachel Laudan, author of The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaiis Culinary Heritage, said it wasnt until the 1960s, after Hawaii became a U.S. state, that poke first emerged in its current form.

With statehood, she explained, disparate ethnic groups that had long inhabited the islands  including ethnic Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese, Koreans and Filipinos  needed a common culture to bind them. This took the form of whats known as local food, a type of cuisine that incorporated ingredients enjoyed across ethnic groups but was not owned by any one.

By incorporating raw fish, rice and seaweed  staples for most ethnic groups in Hawaii  poke developed into one of the most popular forms of local food.

Poke  raw fish with seasonings  is a very nice case of a food that is distinct from the mainland, enjoyed by lots of groups in Hawaii and takes on a much greater importance as part of local food than the similar raw fish dishes of the distinct ethnic groups prior to statehood, Laudan said. It was something they could all share together.

Hawaii-based food writer Martha Cheng likened poke to the mainlands ubiquitous hamburger.

Almost every potluck Ive been to has poke, every tailgate, every first baby luau. Any social gathering has poke, she said.

Hamburgers became popular with the explosion of cheap beef, which is similar to poke, because even though Hawaiians had always been eating small, raw reef fish, poke didnt take off until the long-line fishing industry gave access to cheaper fish that were much easier to cut and cube.

Cheng, author of the forthcoming The Poke Cookbook: The Freshest Way to Eat Fish, said she has wondered why it took people in Southern California so long to get into poke.

We love sushi on the mainland, she said, and this is more casual, appealing, and the flavors arent challenging. Its just easy and good.

Many attribute pokes slow arrival to Southern California to evolving tastes on the mainland  since raw fish wasnt considered palatable until sushi and ceviche were popularized. Boosting its acceptance was the migration of Hawaii locals to the mainland and a growing number of tourists looking for poke when they returned home from Hawaii.

Tim Aupperle, Whole Foods Markets seafood coordinator for the southern Pacific region, said that when the Whole Foods Jamboree in Tustin started offering poke in 2008, customers were hesitant to buy it.

A good percentage of them knew what it was from their trips to Hawaii on vacation, but they were afraid to try it because it was raw fish, he said. But then the sushi craze was happening as well, so we passed out samples, and pretty soon the whole category began to grow.

Now in addition to offering poke in bulk at the seafood counter, many Whole Foods locations also sell customizable poke bowls that include ingredients such as watermelon, almonds, onions, garlic, soy beans, mango, pineapple, seaweed and quinoa.

Poke now takes up a large percentage of our department sales, said Aupperle, who was tasked several years ago with studying poke in Hawaii in order to develop recipes for the grocery store chain. Customers really like it, and theyre telling their friends, and their friends will come in and theyll tell their friends. The response has been fantastic.

Now, he said, Whole Foods locations across the country call him about setting up poke stations in their own stores, even in states far from the coasts, like Ohio and Illinois.

Fred Fukushima, owner of CaliPoke in Costa Mesa, pointed to the customizable nature of poke bowls as the biggest reason the food is suddenly hot in Southern California.

It all started from the Chipotle style. If there was no Chipotle, there would be no CaliPoke here, he said, noting the Mexican food chains process of letting customers select their own incredients. Almost any kind of food nowadays, people like to customize. Thats the newest trend.

At CaliPoke, which opened in 2015, customers select a base (salad, brown or white rice), fish (tuna, salmon, yellow tail, octopus, shrimp or scallops), sauce (original, spicy, wasabi mayo, or teriyaki), additions (cucumber or onion) and toppings (avocado, crab meat, green onion, ginger, wasabi, fried onions or fish eggs), and watch as their meal is prepared on the spot.

Fukushima, who launched CaliPoke after owning the Japanese and sushi restaurant Zipangu for 12 years, said that customization sets Southern California poke apart from the poke in Hawaii, which is more commonly sold in bulk at grocery stores, instead of as a meal at a restaurant.

What makes the poke in Southern California different from the poke in Hawaii is that we mix different kinds of fish to the customers liking  its mix and match, he said. So you could get five scoops of different fish  one tuna, one salmon, one yellow tail, one octopus and one shrimp  or you could get five scoops of salmon. In Hawaii, its usually all salmon poke or all tuna poke.

While Laudan sees a certain irony in Hawaiis signature local dish becoming the latest mainland food craze, she said it makes sense.

If youve got access to reasonably good fish. Its a breeze for a restaurant on the mainland because pokes really easy to make, she said.

You dont have to have a trained chef. Anyone who can hold a knife and cut, then sprinkle on shoyu or whatever else it happens to be, can turn out poke.
The fate of Banning Ranch in Newport Beach could be decided Wednesday after years of debate among the lands developer, the city, state officials and environmentalists, all of whom hope to have a say in the future of the coastal spread.

During a meeting in Newport Beach, the California Coastal Commission  whose 12 members have final say over development along the coast  will consider a proposal by Newport Banning Ranch LLC to build 895 homes, a 75-room hotel, a 20-bed hostel and 45,100 square feet of retail space on 62 acres of the 401-acre property.

The land, some of which has been occupied by oil operations for decades, is said to be the largest undeveloped coastal property in Southern California.

As part of its proposal, Newport Banning Ranch has set aside about 329 acres as preserved, natural open space with public trails.

However, Coastal Commission staff is recommending approval of only about a third of the proposed development. In a report released in late August, staff indicated it would sign off on developing about 19.7 acres that fall outside of areas identified as environmentally sensitive habitat, particularly for burrowing owls.

Newport Banning Ranch representatives have said staffs recommendation amounts to a denial of the project and have vowed to challenge the reports conclusions during Wednesdays hearing.

Michael Mohler, senior project manager for Newport Banning Ranch, said staffs plan would allow development on only about 10 acres after buffers from environmentally sensitive habitat and fire safety are taken into consideration. He said the project likely would not be economically viable if the commission follows staffs recommendation.

We have invested years and spent millions on planning, engineering and working with Coastal Commission staff, Mohler said. Our proposed plan is based on over 20 years of site research and provides appropriate habitat for the one burrowing owl that has appeared on the site for no more than three to four weeks annually. This is a de-facto denial of the project that will result in the oil field remaining in place for decades to come.

The back and forth among the developer, state officials and those seeking to preserve Banning Ranch as open space has been an arduous process for all involved.

Newport Banning Ranch originally proposed 1,375 homes, 75,000 square feet of retail space, a hotel, a hostel and several parks on about 95 acres. That plan was approved by the Newport Beach City Council in 2012.

But after an eight-hour hearing last October, the commission sent the developer back to the drawing board to make significant cuts to the projects footprint and scope.

Commissioners and staff suggested at the time that they likely would favor less intense development. They also cited merits of the project, including opening the land for public use and condensing oil operations.

In May, staff recommended approval of the development with a series of conditions to further reduce its footprint, but Newport Banning Ranch opted to postpone a hearing before the commission, arguing that some issues remained unresolved and that it needed more time to review the staffs proposal.

At the time, commission staff identified about 55 acres of the site as having potential for development.

The latest reduction in the recommended buildable area boiled down to a foraging area for burrowing owls, which have been present at Banning Ranch for decades.

In May, staff members determined that the owls wintering burrows were an environmentally sensitive habitat area, so they assigned a buffer to it. However, according to the most recent staff report, they did not identify the owls separate foraging habitat as a protected area. Biologists said that without protecting the foraging space, protecting the birds habitat was basically pointless.

Thus, even with their burrow habitat protected and designated [environmentally sensitive habitat area], there would be no food source and the owls would be extirpated from the site and from the region, commission staff wrote.

Staff also is recommending conditions to eliminate a proposed thoroughfare known as Bluff Road, which would run north-south through the property to connect West Coast Highway with West 17th Street.

Staff noted that the plan for Bluff Road tries to minimize effects on two arroyos on the property but still would have a direct impact on wetland habitat and other sensitive areas. Staff wrote that the project instead could be supported by existing roads around the site.

Steve Ray, executive director of the Banning Ranch Conservancy  a nonprofit group that has long butted heads with the developer and the city over the land  said that while hes pleased staff has incorporated the groups arguments about preserving foraging area for burrowing owls, the developments footprint is still too large.

Ray said there are vernal pools and wetlands at Banning Ranch that staff has not identified as environmentally sensitive habitat.

Those 19.7 acres they have delineated would shrink considerably if those areas were included, he said. We still hold with the original recommendation that there should be no development onsite.

The Coastal Commission meeting will begin at 9 a.m. Wednesday at the Newport Beach Civic Center, 100 Civic Center Drive.
By Kevin Yao and Kiyoshi Takenaka HANGZHOU, China (Reuters) - The global economy is being threatened by rising protectionism and risks from highly leveraged financial markets, Chinese President Xi Jinping said at the open of a two-day summit of leaders from G20 nations. His warning on Sunday followed bilateral talks with Barack Obama that the U.S. president described as "extremely productive", but which failed to bring both sides closer on thornier topics such as tensions in the South China Sea. With the summit taking place after Britain's vote in June to exit the European Union and before the U.S. presidential election in November, observers expect G20 leaders to mount a defence of free trade and globalisation and warn against isolationism. The global economy has arrived "at a crucial juncture", Xi said, in the face of sluggish demand, volatile financial markets and feeble trade and investment. "Growth drivers from the previous round of technological progress are gradually fading, while a new round of technological and industrial revolution has yet to gain momentum," he said. G20 countries are set to agree in a communique at the end of the summit that all policy measures - including monetary, fiscal and structural reforms - should be used to achieve solid and sustainable economic growth, Japanese Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Koichi Hagiuda said. "Commitment will be made to utilising all three policy tools of monetary and fiscal policies and structural reforms to achieve solid, sustainable, balanced and inclusive growth," Hagiuda told reporters on the sidelines of the summit. Xi also called on G20 countries to match their words with actions. "We should turn the G20 group into an action team, instead of a talk shop," he said. But some of the G20 leaders have begun drawing battle lines in disputes over issues ranging from trade and investment to tax policy and industrial overcapacity. BATTLE LINES On Sunday, Xi held talks with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and told him he hoped Australia would continue to provide a fair, transparent and predictable policy environment for foreign investors. China was angered when Australia blocked the A$10 billion ($7.7 billion) sale of the country's biggest energy grid to Chinese bidders last month. China has accused Australia of bowing to protectionist sentiment in blocking the bid for Ausgrid, as well as an earlier one by a China-led consortium to buy cattle company Kidman & Co. Beijing has also criticised Australia, a staunch U.S. ally, for running surveillance flights over disputed islands in the South China Sea. Meanwhile, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said China must set up a mechanism to address its problem of industrial overcapacity, saying it was "unacceptable" the European steel industry had lost so many jobs in recent years. "Overcapacity is a global problem but there is a particular Chinese element," he told a news conference. Britain's future after its departure from the European Union was also subject to discussion. Obama reassured Prime Minister May that Britain's closest political, commercial and military ally would stand by her. But he did not shrink away from his stance that Brexit was a mistake and that London would not be able to jump the queue to arrange a bilateral trade deal. Juncker said that if Britain wanted access to the European Union's common market, it needed to respect the rules of the common market. Turnbull, meanwhile, said Australia wanted an early free trade agreement with Britain so markets could remain open between them when Britain formally left the European trading bloc. LATE NIGHT TALKS Obama held talks with Xi on Saturday that ran late into the night. He urged Beijing to uphold its legal obligations in the disputed waters of the South China Sea, and stressed U.S. commitments to its regional allies. Xi said China would continue to safeguard its sovereignty and maritime rights in the South China Sea. But China is keen to keep the summit focused on economic issues and to prevent other disputes from overshadowing it. According to a "fact sheet" on China-U.S. relations issued on Sunday, the two sides agreed on a range of issues, including avoiding competitive currency devaluations and not limiting deal opportunities for foreign information and communication technology providers. Obama, now in the last five months of his presidency, is using the visit to put a final stamp on his signature policy shift toward the Pacific, setting the tone for his White House successor, who will be elected in November and take office on Jan. 20. His visit began chaotically at the Hangzhou airport, where his staff argued with Chinese security over media access. Obama said on Sunday he "wouldn't over-crank the significance" of the airport events. "None of this detracts from the broader scope of the relationship (with China)," he told a news conference. "The bilateral discussions that we had yesterday were extremely productive and continue to point to big areas of cooperation." Security was extremely tight in Hangzhou, with parts of the city of 9 million people turned into a virtual ghost town as China seeks to ensure that the G20 summit stays incident-free. (Additional reporting by Sue-Lin Wong, Michael Martina, Roberta Rampton, Ruby Lian, Kiyoshi Takenaka, Vladimir Soldatkin, William James and Engen Tham in HANGZHOU, and Ben Blanchard, Nick Heath, Jason Subler and John Ruwitch in BEIJING; Writing by Raju Gopalakrishnan and John Ruwitch; Editing by Ryan Woo)
A bill that would prevent the sale of the Orange County Fair & Event Center in Costa Mesa is awaiting Gov. Jerry Browns review.

Assembly Bill 1907, from Assemblyman Tom Daly (D-Anaheim), cleared both houses of the state Legislature by wide margins over the summer and now requires the Democratic governors signature to become law.

My bill simply strikes the provisions of law exposing the property to another potential sale and ensures that the Fair & Event Center remains the special place that it has long been for the people of Orange County, Daly said in a statement Friday.

Daly introduced his bill in February. It cleared the state Assembly on June 1 and passed through the Senate on Aug. 17, according to legislative records.

Let me just say the wheels of government move really, really slow, but this is welcome legislation and obviously we thank Assemblyman Daly, Theresa Sears, a member of the Orange County Fair Preservation Society, said in an interview Friday.

The society has always opposed selling the fairgrounds to a private interest, Sears said, because it belongs to the public ... its a public asset and it was very important it stay in the hands of the public.

In 2009, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed selling the 150-acre, state-owned property to help ease the states budget deficit during the recession.

The proposal was challenged and eventually scrapped under Brown.

Allegations were made as to the legality of a sale, though two investigations from the Orange County district attorneys office concluded that no Fair Board members committed any wrongdoing.

Since 2011, Daly said, the Fair & Event Center has been self-sustaining and operated at no cost to taxpayers.

The recently concluded Orange County Fair drew 1,344,976 guests over its 23-day run  a 3.3% increase over 2015s attendance numbers, the fair said.
Even as he began his life in exile in a cramped one-bedroom apartment with his wife and two children, Chinese human rights lawyer Chen Taihe was thankful that he is no longer losing any sleep.

Before, Id wake up in the middle of the night, Chen said. Now I sleep like a baby.

The bouts of insomnia came after Chen and nearly 300 lawyers and their staff members were detained last summer during a mass roundup by the Chinese government.

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In August, one of the lawyers and several activists were sentenced in China, and another was released after airing a confession in which she renounced her work representing clients with grievances against government officials. Chen said their words were coerced.

I was jailed before, and I know exactly what it was like. So I can see that theyve buckled under government pressure and would say anything out of the yearning to be freed, Chen said. All this is a show staged by the authorities. We all have been practicing law based on our conscience, and the respect for human dignity and justice. Its absurd to say we colluded to overthrow the government.

After 42 days of detention, at times with death row inmates, and an additional month of house arrest, Chen became the first Chinese national in nearly four years to be released into exile in the U.S. when he was put on a plane bound for San Francisco in March. Weeks into his detention, his pregnant wife and their 7-year-old son fled China on visas previously approved for Chens cultural exchange at a law school.

Chens voice will go out, and itll reach many people. No one can stop that.  John Kamm, founder of the Dui Hua Foundation

The 45-year-old law professor with salt-and-pepper hair said he hasnt heard from his colleagues, because even those who were since freed still remain under electronic surveillance. He has managed to glean the goings-on from Chinese state media reports and on the social media platform WeChat.

Chen has worked on a case in Beijing with some of the lawyers still facing trial. All of them are accused of subverting the state, as was Chen.

This is the governments tactic to consolidate its power, Chen said. And the suppression on the lawyers has been effective.

Wang Yu, a lawyer who is married to Chens onetime co-counsel, was set free this week after giving her confession on video. As a show of contrition, Wang rejected an award that the American Bar Assn. planned to bestow on her at its annual meeting Aug. 6.

I know her as one of the bravest lawyers, said Chen, now a visiting scholar at the University of Californias Hastings law school, adding that her sudden snub has caused the ABA some embarrassment.

A moderate legal scholar with no history of antagonizing the state, Chen has long been pushing for China to adopt the jury system. After studying juries in the U.S. and Britain in 2013, he led four Chinese lawyers to observe a jury trial at a Honolulu courthouse. It was the friendship he forged with a retired judge there that eventually helped win his freedom.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times )

We hit it off right away. He has an intense interest in the subject, in the idea of having citizens participate in the process, said Shackley Raffetto, who as the chief trial judge in the 2nd Circuit in Maui, headed Hawaiis jury reform committee. He is trying to help his country. He loves China; he isnt a radical.

When Raffetto spotted Chens name on the list of lawyers in detention, he immediately started looking online for help for him and got in touch with the Dui Hua Foundation, a Bay Area nonprofit that advocates for prisoners of conscience in China.

I hope the Chinese government will see the positive reaction to Chens release and resettlement and grant clemency and mercy to other lawyers, said John Kamm, the foundations founder and executive director, declining to detail how he had secured Chens release. Chens voice will go out, and itll reach many people. No one can stop that.

The son of a railyard worker in southern China, Chen got a chance at a better education when his family moved to Guilin, in Guangxi province, a picturesque city that has long been a magnet for foreign tourists. Beginning from grade school there, Chen said, he became exposed to American values such as freedom, justice and equality. As a college freshman in the northern coastal city of Qingdao, he traveled 400 miles north by train to join the Tiananman Square student uprising of 1989.

Even as Chen is saddened by the hefty sentence handed down to his fellow human rights lawyers, his faith in legal advocacy is little shaken.

China needs these lawyers to maintain stability and harmony, Chen said. When ordinary people have no choice but rise up in their own defense, those in power will reap what theyve sowed: heightened social tension and chaos.

Meanwhile, Chen plans to use his newfound freedom to conduct legal research to serve the interests of China and the United States, such as in the area of intellectual property rights. He said he hopes to return to his native country when it becomes more democratic.

His son, now 8, was often punished by his teachers in China for speaking his mind, Chen says; now, he relishes his newfound freedom to do so.

So his father teases him: If youre naughty, Ill send you back to China.

Law is a special correspondent.

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Anti-refugee activists clad in black quickly scaled the 85-foot-high Brandenburg Gate in the heart of Germanys capital and attached a giant banner atop the monument reading: Secure the borders  Secure the future.

The early-morning takeover of the countrys best-known landmark a week ago didnt last long: Dozens of heavily armed police brought down the 15 activists after less than an hour. And Berlin Mayor Michael Mueller later called the protest despicable.

But the ominous message from the right-wing extremists has been reverberating in Germany. Their bold stunt briefly revived dark memories of the political instability before the Nazi era.

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It came as the country is struggling to cope with the arrival of about 1 million refugees after Chancellor Angela Merkels controversial decision a year ago to essentially open the borders for migrants fleeing war and turmoil in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Her conservative party is badly split over her policies and is bracing for potentially heavy defeats in two state elections in large part because an upstart far-right party, Alternative for Germany, has siphoned away large numbers of conservative voters.

Merkels conservative Christian Democratic party is forecast to be the big loser in state elections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern on Sunday and two weeks later in the city-state of Berlin. Such defeats could increase pressure on her to abandon her refusal to introduce limits on the numbers of refugees coming into Germany.

Members of Alternative for Germany and the partys supporters are upset by what they describe as an an Islamization of Germany, a country of 82 million, and critics say they are playing on the publics xenophobic fears. That anxiety was further exacerbated in July when refugees were involved in two separate Islamic State-inspired terrorist attacks, although the assailants were killed and there were no other fatalities.

Merkels approval rating has plunged to a five-year low of 45%, down from 67% a year ago, according to a poll released Friday for the ARD TV network by Infratest Dimap, and her future has become less clear after 11 years in office. Her archconservative Bavarian allies in the Christian Social Union are, at least for now, withholding their backing for her to run for a fourth term in the next election for chancellor in September 2017.

A national poll released by the Forsa Institute on Wednesday found that only 33% of voters support Merkels party and its CSU allies, down from 41% a year ago.

In this Sept. 5, 2015, picture, a man holds a sign welcoming arriving refugees at the train station in Saalfeld, central Germany. (Jens Meyer / Associated Press )

Merkels pro-refugee policies have also exposed rifts in the European Union, where countries have resisted taking in refugees though many EU leaders made announcements deploring the deaths of thousands who drown attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.

The narrow victory in June for voters in Britain who favored leaving the EU was due in part to Merkels welcoming of refugees, some analysts said. The surge of refugees into Germany last year, they said, bolstered fears in Britain that the country could be overrun by foreigners.

From a moral point of view, Merkel may have done Germany a great service, but she has rubbed a lot of people here and across Europe the wrong way by forging ahead on her own by taking in so many refugees without a real plan, said Hans Vorlaender, a political scientist at Dresdens Technical University.

Among the concerns in Germany are that Merkels government has allowed too many refugees to come into the country too quickly and that newcomers may claim low-cost housing and low-skilled jobs that should be available to Germans. Some citizens also worry that helping refugees will be costly to taxpayers, and that the refugees, who are 70% Muslim, will change the predominantly Christian culture.

Merkel has steadfastly opposed demands to introduce an upper limit on the numbers of refugees arriving and insists that Germany can do it when it comes to handling the influx.

The numbers of doubters in her own party are growing by the day, and its possible that roughly half the conservative members in Parliament dont want to follow her on this path anymore, said Gero Neugebauer, a political scientist at Berlins Free University.

A year ago conditions did not seem anywhere near as dire. Thousands of Germans were at the Munich train station, the first point of entry for refugees who had been stranded in distressing conditions in Budapest, Hungary, for weeks, and at border crossings handing out food, water and clothing and cheering.

There had been a lot of empathy in part because many millions of Germans had arrived in earlier waves of displaced people after World War II, or refugees from the communist East Bloc during the Cold War, or ethnic Germans or Jews after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Merkels popularity soared in light of her leadership and humanity, and she seemed to be sending signals to invite even more migrants to make their way to Germany by posing for selfies with several refugees at their new temporary quarters.

Rodin Saouan became briefly famous in the Arab world for the selfie he took with Merkel days after arriving in Berlin.

I thought it was something normal. I sent the picture home to my parents, Saouan, a 26-year-old farmer from outside Damascus, Syria, said in a recent interview. It was like telling them Look, Im with Merkel, Im safe here in Germany.

But the euphoria in Germany and for refugees such as Saouan soon began to fade as the numbers soared and troubles mounted.

The tide turned on New Years Eve when, according to police reports, more than 1,200 women were abused and sexually assaulted across Germany by thousands of foreign men. Most of the victims  about 600  were in Cologne, Germanys fourth-largest city.

The attacks triggered a storm of protest in Germany and instantly raised doubts about Merkels policies, leading to some deterioration in support for refugees.

Saouan, nevertheless, learned to speak passable German after spending 20 hours a week in a language course and is looking for a job. He said he fled his home near Damascus last year because he was afraid hed end up in the army and have to kill others  or be killed himself.

I didnt have a future there, he said. But it looks like I might not have a future in Germany either. Its become very difficult for me here.

Tarik Bashir, a 25-year-old from Damascus, said he arrived nine months ago and has been stuck with thousands of others at a giant refugee center in a vacant and drafty hangar at the former Tempelhof Airport.

At first I really liked Germany, but things are going downhill, Bashir said. The food is bad, the sleeping situation is bad. The German people arent friendly. Everything is bad at Tempelhof.

Several refugees in Berlin said they sensed a shifting sentiment in Germany, although they said they were still glad to be living in the countrys biggest city. They said they like being in one of Europes most multicultural capitals and not in a small provincial region like many of their compatriots.

Feras Homsy of Damascus spends hours studying German. (Erik Kirschbaum / For The Times )

Hamza Dalawi, who arrived a year ago from Baghdad, said he feels born again in Germany and is trying to learn the language. He said he hopes to pass a test for his crane operator license.

Its really good here, said Dalawi, 23, who found a part-time job helping haul away junk. In Iraq, it was bombs every day. There arent any bombs to worry about here.

For Feras Homsy, the focus has been on spending several hours each day at a Berlin library studying German.

Id like to find a job as a manager in Germany one day and know that German is the key for that, so thats why Im working on it every day, said Homsy, a 24-year-old from Damascus. Id like to stay in Germany.

Kirschbaum is a special correspondent.

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For Islamic State, the 500-mile border between Syria and Turkey has been the main gateway for arms and foreign fighters entering its self-proclaimed caliphate.

Jihadis would fly to Istanbul, Turkey, then travel to remote hamlets in southern Turkey to be smuggled into Syria.

But that passageway has now been cut off by Syrian rebels and Turkish-backed Islamic factions that snatched a 54-mile strip of territory Sunday, Turkish officials and rebels said.

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The Turkish border with Syria was cleared Sunday of Daesh, the Turkish state news agency Anadolu reported, using Islamic States Arabic acronym. The gains came 12 days after Turkey announced an offensive known as Operation Euphrates Shield.

The newly seized territory stretches between the cities of Jarabulus and Azaz in northwestern Syria and includes the Syrian border town of Rai, which for the last two years has flipped back and forth between Islamic State and rebel control.

The Turkish news agency reported that factions collectively known as the Free Syrian Army  a loose-knit group whose members say they espouse a secular non-Islamist vision for the country and have received Western support  now control a belt of land extending two to three miles inside the country.

One group, the Be Upright As You Were Commanded Brigades, posted a YouTube video showing its members storming positions near Rai.

But the effort also included the hard-line Islamist faction, Faylaq Al-Sham, which said on its official Twitter account Sunday that its fighters  shown earlier in photographs preparing for battle with Islamic State  were responsible for linking border territory west of Jarabulus with areas east of Rai.

Such collaboration speaks to the complexity of the conflict in Syria. Rebel groups have common enemies in Islamic State and the government of President Bashar Assad  which are also fighting each other  but different outside backers and long-term goals.

Turkey supports only some of the rebel factions. It is a sworn enemy of the Kurdish militia known as the Peoples Protection Units, which it views as an ally of the Kurdish insurgents it is fighting at home.

But among the various factions fighting in Syria, the Kurdish militia is the most important U.S. ally against Islamic State.

The territorial gains follow other steps the Turkish government has taken to seal the border, including constructing a series of modular walls. Turkish crews continued building the first of these concrete barriers Saturday near Suruc, the state news agency reported.

Turkey says the walls are meant to stop all terrorists, including Kurdish rebels.

Bulos is a special correspondent.

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UPDATES:

5:40 p.m.: This story was updated with staff reporting.

This article was originally published at 10:15 a.m.
By Sue-Lin Wong HANGZHOU, China (Reuters) - China hopes Australia can provide a fair and transparent environment for foreign investors, President Xi Jinping said on Sunday, as he met Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull for the first time since Canberra blocked a major deal. Australia angered China last month after Turnbull's government stopped the A$10 billion ($7.57 billion) sale of the country's biggest energy grid to Chinese bidders after they failed to overcome security concerns. After a meeting on the sidelines of a G20 summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, Xi said China "hopes the Australian side continues to dedicate itself to providing foreign investors a fair, transparent and predictable policy environment". "This also accords with Australia's own interests," China's Foreign Ministry quoted Xi as telling Turnbull. The decision has caused a rift between Australia and its biggest trading partner. China has accused Australia of bowing to protectionist sentiment in blocking the bid for Ausgrid, as well as an earlier one by a China-led consortium to buy cattle company Kidman & Co. Speaking to reporters later, Turnbull said China understood as well if not better than anyone else that it was Australia's sovereign right to determine who invests there and the terms in which they invest. "China has more freedom to invest in Australia, indeed all foreigners have more freedom to invest in Australia, than in almost any other country. We have a very open foreign investment policy," Turnbull said. "So we mostly say yes, we almost invariably say yes, but from time to time we say no and we make no bones about that and China respects that." He added that the Ausgrid case was not specifically mentioned in the meeting. Australia, a staunch U.S. ally, has also drawn criticism from China for running surveillance flights over disputed islands in the South China Sea, and supporting U.S. freedom of navigation exercises there. Xi said China and Australia should respect each other's "choices in their development paths and each other's core interests and major interests", the foreign ministry added. Turnbull said he discussed the South China Sea with Xi, and the importance of complying with international law. "We're a good friend of China and good friends are very honest with each other," he added. "We are consistent and our position is very clear that we expect and encourage all parties to comply with the rule of law, to show restraint and not act in a way that would exacerbate or create tensions." ($1 = 1.3210 Australian dollars) (Writing by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Robert Birsel and Kim Coghill)
Thousands of ethnic Chinese staged a protest march in Paris on Sunday over the fatal mugging of a Chinese tailor last month, as crime against community members has spiralled.

The protesters, almost all wearing white T-shirts reading "Security for All" and many waving French flags, rallied at the Place de la Republique in central Paris.

Police estimated the crowd at about 14,000, while organisers said 100,000 people took to the streets against "anti-Asian racism."

Zhang Chaolin, who was 49, was set upon on August 7 by three thieves who tried to snatch a bag belonging to a friend of his. He died a few days later from his injuries.

Zhang's image appeared on a giant banner in the middle of the square, under the words, splattered with red paint: "Zhang Chaolin, dead for nothing. Who will be next?"

"He came to France in search of a better life... he found violence and insecurity," a spokesman of France's 300,000-strong Chinese community told the crowd.

"These hooligans have destroyed our faith in France. Let our voice be heard," he said in Chinese.

"Stop violence, aggression, insecurity", one placard read amid the sea of white T-shirts worn by the protestors, who later marched towards nearby Place de la Bastille.

An umbrella organisation, Stop the Violence, Security for All, called the protest two weeks after around 1,000 people marched in the Aubervilliers suburb north of Paris where Zhang was killed.

Elected officials who joined Saturday's protest included the right-wing president of the greater Paris regional council, Valerie Pecresse.

Security for All is demanding police reinforcements, more security cameras and a recognition of anti-Asian racism.

- 'Easy prey' -

On Sunday, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve pledged to beef up the police presence in Aubervilliers and provide funding for security cameras.

Reported violent robberies targeting the Chinese community, who are seen as lucrative prey as they are thought to habitually carry large sums of cash, have tripled in the past year from 35 to 105.

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The bag the thieves were after during Zhang's mugging contained only candy, cigarettes and sunglasses, according to a source close to the investigation.

The stereotype has prompted a string of attacks on Chinese tourists, including one early last month in which assailants sprayed teargas on members of a tour group before making off with their luggage.

In September last year, a Chinese tourist guide was robbed of 25,000 euros ($28,300) in cash and his new Rolex watch after he had prevented two of his group from being robbed themselves outside a hotel in a Paris suburb.

Protester Le Xu, who came to France as a child and is now 38, told AFP: "In the Asian community we are targeted because we are easy prey -- we are little and we are discreet. We often don't bring charges, so there aren't any consequences."

- 'Defence leagues' -

A lawyer for the community, Francois Ormillien, has warned that without an adequate response from city authorities the community could form "defence leagues" -- vigilante groups -- to defend itself.

"There are youths 17 to 19 years old who are more aggressive than their elders and want to let loose, but they are very much in the minority," Ormillien said.

He noted that authorities have begun cracking down harder on crime targeting the community, citing the example of a teenager with no prior police record who was jailed for two years for a violent theft.

Aubervilliers, home to generations of Chinese immigrants, is the hub of Europe's textile industry, where traders recently opened the continent's biggest garment centre.

Stop the Violence staged demonstrations in 2010 and 2011 in the eastern Belleville section of Paris, home to another sizeable Chinese community, after an attack on a wedding banquet there.
A scam artist posing as a senior citizen's granddaughter requested $2,000 worth of iTune gift cards and told the grandfather she was in a detention center, Lower Saucon Township police said.

The caller just before 5 p.m. Friday told the Wildberry Road victim she was his grandchild in Las Vegas, Nevada, skipped class for the day and was just involved in a car crash involving a wealthy family. She was arrested and placed into a Clark County Detention Center.

The scammer pleaded with the grandfather "not to tell her father" and said she "screwed up" and "needed his help." The caller said she found an attorney who would represent her, but he needed a $15,000 deposit.

The caller then put a man on the phone posing as an attorney who told him he could be paid in gift cards. The scammer instructed the grandfather where to go to buy the gift cards and to call him back with the numbers to redeem the cards.

The victim bought the cards, called back the phony lawyer and provided the gift card numbers.

The victim a short while later caught on he was being scammed and called the Clark County Detention Center to confirm his granddaughter was not there. He also called his granddaughter and learned she was safe.

However, the gift cards were redeemed by the time the victim learned he was being scammed and he was duped out of $2,000, police said.

Pamela Sroka-Holzmann may be reached at pholzmann@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @pamholzmann. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
A group of motorcyclists held a vigil Saturday night to honor police officers who lost their lives in the line of duty.

Bikers Against Cop Killers (BACK), a non-profit motorcycle group from Easton, formed last year to support fallen police officers and their families.

The group gathered Saturday evening at Fairview Park in Palmer Township to hold a vigil honoring fallen Mount Arlington Officer Joseph Wargo, Freemansburg Officer Robert Lasso, Pennsylvania State Trooper Bryon Dickson and others.

Saed Hindash may be reached at shindash@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @SaedHindash. Find lehighvalleylive on Facebook.
The pastries will soon be in the oven.

Construction crews broke ground last month on the Norac USA commercial bakery at 4200 Braden Blvd. in Forks Township.

It will be the first American facility for the subsidiary of Norac, a family-owned agro-food group based in France that manufactures bread and bakery products.

J.G. Petrucci Co. is the developer behind the 79,160-square-foot facility. Martin K. Till, Petrucci's regional president, said the company began site work about three weeks ago.

"We should be should be starting the foundations in the next few weeks," he said Thursday.

The project, with an estimated construction period of between nine and 12 months, should be complete by next summer or early fall, Till said.

It's been identified as a key economic development initiative by Gov. Tom Wolf.

His administration in March made the announcement about the project and credited state and local groups with using grant money to attract Norac to the region.

The bakery will initially employ about 30 people running one or two shifts, with the goal to expand to three shifts and employ up to 70 people.

The company employs more than 3,700 worldwide and under the brand Bakerly makes French-inspired bakery snacks such as crepes, croissants and brioche with no preservatives or additives.

The company began selling goods in the U.S. under the Bakerly name last summer.

Norac USA representatives previously said they had hoped to open by early 2017.

Nick Falsone may be reached at nfalsone@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @nickfalsone. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
The Pennsylvania House of Representatives and the Lehigh County Commissioners are facing First Amendment challenges that should be easy to resolve. But where government and religion interests overlap, nothing is ever simple -- and it doesn't help that the courts keep moving the boundaries.

The Lehigh County flag. The Freedom From Religion Foundation included this image in its lawsuit against the county seeking to end the county's use of its seal and flag, which feature crosses.

In case you have been focused on other things lately -- say, Donald Trump's wall or Hillary Clinton's email/foundation worries -- two groups of plaintiffs have taken on government leaders in Harrisburg and Allentown, claiming that each is too cozy with Christianity, and should be brought back into constitutional balance.

Pennsylvania-based groups of nonbelievers and "freethinkers" are challenging the state House hierarchy, saying that excluding them from the religious folks chosen to deliver the daily invocation is discriminatory. They say humanists and atheists are capable of providing inspirational messages at government meetings, and have done so many times.

Their suit, which names House Speaker Mike Turzai, Parliamentarian Clancy Myer and others as defendants, could be resolved quickly by means of inclusion -- allowing nontheists to have a chance to give a motivational message, as the state Senate already permits. A little pragmatism and fair-mindedness would save the taxpayers of Pennsylvania from a needless fight.

In Lehigh County, the argument isn't as clear-cut. The Freedom from Religion Foundation is suing the county commissioners, seeking the removal of a cross from the county seal and flag.

Sure, the county could easily remove the cross, which is at the center of images of the courthouse, farms, factories and cattle. The commissioners say the cross represents the faith of the settlers who founded the county, and should remain as a tribute to them. In a 2015 letter to the nonprofit group, they said they have no intention of altering the seal and flag.

The plaintiffs -- four Lehigh County residents who are represented by the foundation -- say the cross is a de facto endorsement of religion, violating the First Amendment's Establishment Clause and the 14th Amendment's equal protection provision. They're seeking "nominal" damages and payment of the foundation's legal costs.

Predicting the outcome of this case is something of a crapshoot. Court rulings are all over the map, and conflicting. Northampton County and the state capitol in Austin, Texas, were allowed to display the Ten Commandments in public spaces; a courthouse in Kentucky was not. In cases challenging a cross on a government seal, Las Cruces, N.M., was allowed to retain its namesake; the cities of Edmund, Okla., and Stow, Ohio, lost in court.

Lehigh County's burden will be to show the cross's primary message is one of heritage, not religious preference.

It would help if the U.S. Supreme Court would take a case to settle this conflict: Does the phrase "Congress shall make no law respecting an Establishment of religion" permit historical references to Christianity in monuments and symbols, "respecting" that connection? Or do such images wade into government endorsement?

Before that happens, though, the U.S. Senate should show respect for its own constitutional responsibility, and appoint a ninth member of the court.
A 54-year-old New Mexico man was intoxicated when his car flipped Saturday along Route 57 in Lopatcong Township, police said.

Keith Allen Young, of Rio Ranche, shortly after midnight was driving along Route 57 west when he crossed over into the grassy median near the merger with Route 22 east, police said.

The Lincoln MKZ proceeded to strike several traffic signs, as well as the guardrail on the ramp from Route 22 east to Route 57, causing the vehicle to overturn and skid up the ramp before coming to rest, police said.

The impact led to a small engine compartment fire; a township police officer put it out with a fire extinguisher.

Emergency workers found Young trapped inside the vehicle. He was suspended upside down in the driver's seat with a head injury, but was alert, according to police.

Young was taken to St. Luke's University Hospital in Fountain Hill with non life-threatening injuries, police said.

Young is charged with reckless driving, driving while intoxicated and failure to maintain lane. Test results on Young's blood alcohol content are pending.

The road was closed briefly following the accident.

Also assisting were Fountain Hill police, Greenwich Township police, Phillipsburg police, Pohatcong Township police, New Jersey Department of Transportation officials, the Warren County Prosecutor's Office, Lopatcong Township Fire Dept., Lopatcong Emergency Squad and paramedics from Hunterdon Medical Center in Raritan Township.

Pamela Sroka-Holzmann may be reached at pholzmann@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @pamholzmann. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Smuggled cigarettes that were first detected in Portlaoise and Athlone Mail Centres, have led on to further discoveries.

Last Wednesday August 24, in two intelligence-led operations, Revenue officers seized over 18,000 cigarettes in Limerick and Dublin.

In the first of the two follow-up operations, Revenue Officers acting under court warrant and assisted by detector dog Harvey searched a house in Newcastle West, Limerick. They interviewed a Lithuanian man and seized 8,880 cigarettes branded NZ Gold.

In the second operation, officers searched another house in Dublin, interviewed a Bulgarian man and seized 10,000 cigarettes, branded Marlboro and Karelia.

Investigations are continuing in both cases, with a view to prosecution.

The cigarettes, with a total retail value of over 9,400 represented a potential loss in taxes of over 7,800.

The smuggled cigarettes had originated in Bulgaria and Ukraine.

The seizures are part of ongoing operations targeting the supply and sale of illegal cigarettes.

Anyone with information is asked to contact Revenue in confidence on free phone number 1800 295 295.
(Adds quotes, background)

HANGZHOU, China, Sept 4 (Reuters) - An EU ruling that Apple Inc must pay a huge tax bill to Ireland was clearly based on facts and existing rules and was not a decision aimed against the United States, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Sunday.

Last week, European Union antitrust regulators ordered Apple to pay up to 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion) in taxes to the Irish government after ruling that a special scheme to route profits through Ireland was illegal state aid.

Apple's Chief Executive Tim Cook last week described the ruling as "total political crap", but France and Germany have come out to back Brussels on the decision.

Juncker said EU Commission investigations on taxation had mainly targeted European companies.

The decision comes amidst a coordinated global initiative to crack down on tax evasion by multinational companies, spearheaded by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The ruling against Apple has pushed the issue into the limelight and raised the risk of significant push-back from the United States, analysts say, where some lawmakers are saying the result represents a European encroachment on the U.S. potential tax base.

In separate comments to Reuters on the sidelines of the G20 on Saturday, Pascal Saint-Amans, director of the OECD Center for Tax Policy and Administration, called Apple's tax planning "outrageous" but, like Juncker, said the decision was based on enforcing current regulations.

Saint-Amans said he believed it would be unlikely to serve as a precedent for enforcement on future income earned by multinationals.

Juncker's remarks appeared designed to reassure U.S. lawmakers, who have bickered for years over the treatment of off-shore income but now fear that the European Commission move would mean more profits earned by U.S. corporations flowing into European tax coffers.

"This is not a decision against the United States of America," said Juncker. ($1 = 0.8966 euros) (Reporting by Nathaniel Taplin; Editing by Robert Birsel)
The Heritage Week 2016 events at Heritage House, Abbeyleix were a resounding success.

The kids archaeological dig on Thursday was booked out weeks in advance and the weather was perfect for digging in the dirt to find ancient bones, pottery and shells. We were very lucky to have Steve and Lissane from Dig it Kids on board to give the budding archaeologists an experience to remember said Paula Maher, manager of Heritage House.

Such was the clamour for places on the dig that Heritage House hopes to run it again in the near future.

There was also an interactive toy workshop run by Cormac Bowell of Sandymount Education who has been collecting old games for years. He had a vast selection on display with interesting names like shut-the-box from 1840 to deflection from 1990 and was delighted with the turnout each day and the interest shown by young and old alike.

Cormac, an Abbeyleix native, who has lived in Chester for many years is also involved with re-enactment groups and living history societies among other things and would very much like to bring his brand of interactive education back to Ireland on a more regular basis.

Abbeyleix Heritage Company would very much like to thank all who called to Heritage House during the week and especially all the enthusiastic and curious kids who filled the place with noise and laughter.

They also want to thank Catherine Casey, Laois Heritage Officer, for her continued support and enthusiasm and Jonathan Carthy, Shane Lewis and Trudy Earls for their extra hard work.
Mohill's funny woman Katherine Lynch is one of four celebrities to take part in Operation Transformation this year.

As part of the programme, Katherine will lead the Lough Key 5km parkrun on September 10.

Lough Key parkrun is a free timed weekly 5k run/jog/walk, intending runners/walkers can register online, get a barcode, print it out and come along at 9.30am on Saturday mornings. Following the 5K run participants get an email with very detailed results of their run/walk .

Up to now the parkrun has been attracting numbers of up to 150 runners/walkers ever Saturday from all over Ireland and also plenty of parkrun tourists.

Katherine Lynch has had several television series broadcast on RTE Two, with titles like Working Girls, Wonderwomen and Single Ladies.

Lynch also participated as a bainisteoir in the second series of the RTE One's Celebrity Bainisteoir.

The line-up for Celebrity Operation Transformation includes comedians Katherine Lynch and Karl Spain, solicitor Gerald Kean, face of TV3s Midday Elaine Crowley, and RTE Radio 1 reporter Brenda Donohue.

A main focus will be to motivate the public to register and participate in the nationwide campaign The Million Pound Challenge.

The show will air on RTE One on Wednesday evenings at 9.30pm, where Katherine Thomas will present three one hour episodes commencing on September 7.

The public are urged to participate follow one celebrity for the duration of the monthly plan.

As part of their road to fitness the celebrities will complete a 5k parkrun and Lough Key parkrun has been chosen to host Katherine Lynchs attempt at that distance.

Lough Key parkrun have appointed an ambassador to assist Katherine and also to liaise with the many people who will register with operation transformation and parkrun.

So anyone wishing to follow Katherine on her journey can register on the OT website and then come along to Lough Key at 9.30am on Saturday mornings to complete a regular 5k walk/jog/run.

The 5K run on September 10 in Lough Key will include Katherine Lynch and she will be filmed for the programme.
Thousands of people across the UK Marched for Europe yesterday, with demonstrations in London, Bristol, Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge plus many more.

In London we put on a huge Lib Dem splash, with more than 300 Lib Dems joining us at the start in Marble Arch. An army of volunteers distributed placards, balloons and flyers. There were so many of us, police escorted us down to the main march on Park Lane!

President Sal Brinton fronted the march, leading a rally of Lib Dems from a banner at the front, flanked by Catherine Bearder MEP and Baroness Sarah Ludford as well as Parliamentary Candidate for St Albans Daisy Cooper and some of our Newbie members Ukonu Obasi and Elizabeth Barnard.

The march took on quite a pace, leading us down Picadilly and on to Trafalgur Square before ending at Parliament Square. Along the route we were chanting We love you EU, we do and We dont want no Brexit with the use of a small megaphone and Bradley Hiller-Smiths melodic tones!

Lib Dems had come from Southport, from Norwich, from Cardiff and Manchester to join us on the day and fly the Libby in the centre of the Lib Dem flag.

We signed up at least two new members on the day and flyers went to thousands of people on and watching the march. Paolo from Harrow also decorated his Classic Ciquento car and drove it along side the march getting cheers from all sides!

At Parliament Square, unprompted, some Lib Dem placard holders photobombed TV interviews with Owen Jones, Peter Tatchell and Eddie Izzard, but we didnt steal his beret, we promise!

Catherine Bearder took to the main stage and was cheered as she told thousands about the solidarity with EU Parliament members, the need to work together to tackle the refugee crisis and the importance of getting European voices heard in the UK.

Thank you to everyone who came along and made it such a fantastic day  we were the only party there to continue to demonstrate, unequivocally, we remain 100% committed to Europe and will continue to be so!

Photo credit: Elizabeth Barnard

* Kelly-Marie Blundell is a member of Federal Policy Committee, Vice Chair of the Social Security Working Group and previous parliamentary candidate
So, its term-time again. After a frenetic and dramatic end to the last parliamentary session, everyone has done their best to make sure it looks like nothing is happening over the past 6 weeks.

Thats all over now, though. The Westminster and Scottish parliaments are back in session this week. Wales has another week off.

Its time to get to grips with the major issues around Brexit. Thats going to be the only game in town for quite some time.

Holyrood

There are three major items of business this week. The first is a two day debate on the SNP Governments plans for the year ahead.

They will include a Social Security Bill to take account of the new powers coming to Holyrood. The government has also stated that its key priorities are educational attainment (which it intends to tackle by national testing rather than more resources) and the economy. They will also be introducing measures on warm homes and climate change.

Nicola Sturgeon will be making a statement on Scotlands place in Europe. Last week, Willie Rennie said that she was talking too much about independence. Will she offer any other approach?

Finally, there will be an update on the controversial named person scheme which was ruled illegal earlier this Summer. How will the government tackle the requirements of the court judgement?

Westminster

House of Commons

Its a fairly easy week back. The main business is the tail end of the Finance Bill.

Of course, Theresa May will be making a statement on the G20 and taking her second Prime Ministers Questions.

Labour has an opposition day, but theres barely an opposition to organise any business for it.

The Scottish Affairs Committee is looking at Scotlands place in Europe and taking evidence from academics. This is very different from the last Parliament. The committee is now chaired by an SNP MP.

House of Lords

In the Lords, our Roger Roberts has a question on reuniting children in Calais and Dunkirk with their families in the UK.

Jenny Randerson is pushing the Government on Southern Rail.

Jonny Oates asks about UK financial institutions and bailout funds to the Zimbabwean government.

The terrible Investigatory Powers Bill is discussed at Committee stage. Will the Lords take out some of the worst of its provisions?

European Parliament

The next Strasbourg session takes place on 12th September.
What is truth? Who is God? What is the meaning of life? On this blog we explore the interactions between Christianity and topics like culture, politics and philosophy. The word says we must love God and love others. Jesus Christ is God come to us; He is alive. God will call all of us to give an explanation of how we lived. Trust in Jesus and receive forgiveness; a new life. Stand for the truth. Glorify Christ in how you live. A new world awaits.
A NEW innovative remote-controlled surgical robot has been installed at University Hospital Limerick, marking a further advancement in cancer treatment in the Mid-West.

The Limerick Leader can reveal that the unique machine  the Da Vinci Xi Dual Console Robotic Surgical Platform  is the first of its kind in Ireland, and has received major international praise amongst worldwide medical circles.

It is confirmed that the new high-tech device has already performed keyhole surgery on several patients at UHL.

The surgical robot, which is fitted with numerous arms, is hand-operated by surgeons and is understood to be less invasive than regular forms of surgery that require precise incisions and, afterwards, months of recovery.

Described by UHL as a magnificent, state-of-the-art system in the hospitals surgical advancements, the new device is believed to be effective in relation to cancer care. Though robotic surgery is not a new medical phenomenon, the Da Vinci Xi can operate on a number of different parts of the body, with more accuracy, at the same time.

The Da Vinci device was donated by the Mid-Western Hospitals Development Trust, which received funding of more than 2m through the JP McManus Benevolent Fund.

Welcoming the installation and funding of the device, the UL Hospitals Group said: UL Hospitals acknowledges and thanks the Trust for this generous donation and the continued, invaluable support which it provides to UL Hospitals.

According to the spokesperson, a number patients have already been operated on, using the new system.

It is used to perform the most advanced form of keyhole  or laparoscopic  surgery across a number of surgical disciplines, including colorectal cancer and cancer of the kidney. The Da Vinci robotic platform offers unrivalled precision and accuracy in surgery with benefits to the patient including reduced recovery times and reduced postoperative pain.

This positive breakthrough in the hospitals colorectal cancer treatment comes three years after UHL launched its high-tech Stryker iSuite theatre.

The theatre for bowel cancer patients, which was launched in June 2013, was also donated by the Mid-Western Hospitals Development Trust, and has been described as the most advanced in western Europe.

Specific, minimally invasive keyhole surgery is performed in this state-of-the-art theatre, which received support from the JP McManus Charitable Foundation.

The Trust also helped launch UHLs new 3m neurological centre and stroke unit. A number of organisations, including the JP McManus Trust, Parkinsons Association and Cystic Fibrosis Association of Ireland contributed to the project. A launch for the Da Vinci robot is due to take place in the coming months.
Standing beneath the fuselage of the replica Yankee Clipper in the Foynes Flying Boat Museum, John Walsh is transported back to the glory days in Foynes when it was truly the crossroads of the world.

He was in his early 20s in 1937 when the Short flying boat, Caledonia, completed the 1,900 mile flight across the Atlantic from Foynes to Newfoundland.

At the time, his father was the manager of the BP terminal in the village.

I would have pumped petrol into the Caledonia, he said.

Born in Clonmel, Co Tipperary, John moved with his family to Foynes in 1927 after his father was appointed manager of the BP terminal.

The remarkably fresh and active 100-year-old recently made headlines after buying an electric car. Last week, he returned to the village in which he grew up and paid a visit to his old home, which now forms part of the museum.

We spent the first night or so in a little hotel near the Post Office and backing up on to the railway, and then took up residence in part of the building known as the Hotel, he recalled.

Since getting in touch with museum director Margaret OShaughnessy some years ago, John has become a regular visitor to Foynes and always looks forward to his trips there. While I lived in Foynes I never really became a Foynes person, but by God, I am really in there now, he said.

His memories include watching the big oil tankers unloading their cargo at the port before undertaking the tricky process of turning around and setting out to sea again. It was quite spectacular with the bigger ships and tricky if there was a westerly wind counteracting the tide, he said.

Another memory is of meeting the renowned sailor Conor OBrien - who some years previously had made headlines for his successful circumnavigation of the globe - at the port. However, the maritime legends rather earthy language left John cold.

Of all the foul-mouthed sailors, he must have been the king, he noted.

Having spent much of his teenage years in Foynes, John then took up an accountancy apprenticeship in Limerick city. It was there he met the woman that would later become his wife, Brigid, or Ciss as she was known. After moving to Dublin with his job, John continued to travel to Limerick regularly to meet Ciss, whom he married in 1943.
CALLS have been made to immediately replace the 10 gardai who are to be transferred to Templemore to become garda instructors.

Since 2015, the Limerick Garda Division has lost two sergeants and 15 regular gardai to Templemore, and it is understood that arrangements have yet to be made to replace the latest transfers.

According to Minister for Justice, Tanaiste Frances Fitzgerald, 12 new recruits will be assigned to Limerick Garda Division in November, out of 150 graduates.

Fianna Fail councillor and retired detective garda, Sean Lynch said that Limerick has been hit the hardest and that the highest number of transfers are coming from Limerick.

You take Mayorstone, there are four in a unit in Mayorstone and there are two members on leave and two have been summoned to go the garda college. It has been taken out of the hands of the chief superintendent, he has no power over it. We are crying out for members.

We got four new gardai from the last passing out at the college, we are getting nothing in the next passing out parade and we are down 10 that wont be replaced from going to the garda college, he told the Leader.

Cllr Lynch, who is chairperson of the joint policing committee, said retired members with vast amounts of knowledge and experience in specialist areas should be brought back on 12-month contracts to teach the garda trainees.

Fianna Fail TD Niall Collins said: Limerick has suffered a disproportionate hit in the reduction of the number of gardai resulting in many communities being left without any garda presence.

Now that recruitment has finally recommenced, we need to see Limerick receive its fair share of new recruits emerging from Templemore. Limerick deserves better from this Government and, for far too long, people and communities have been living in fear and this must end soon.

Chief Supt David Sheahan told the Leader this week that, while it is positive that Limerick is seen as a good training ground, the negative is that it is bodies off the street.

What I try to do is to put the right people into the right positions. Because, for me, it is important. These people have ambition, they want to take on responsibility and they want to learn and grow. And with the right values and standards, these people drive the performance within the garda division here.

I create a talented and ambitious staff in the division, and I have seen the creation of a new dynamic of young people here, who deliver high quality policing in all facets of the job. My commitment to the whole organisation is to develop future leadership capacities within the gardai.

One senior garda source said that the large number of gardai leaving is down to the high calibre of the applicants.

It is highly complementary to Limerick, but what we might argue, here, is that when the organisation selects a certain amount of people from a particular division, it is critical that those people be replaced. And they have not to date.

When asked if there are arrangements to replace these gardai, a spokesperson for An Garda Siochana said:

Garda resources are deployed at a local level by garda management and are deployed as and when it is deemed necessary. It would be inappropriate for us to discuss local management arrangements.

The spokesperson said that the Garda Commissioner constantly reviews local and national resources, and that comprehensive consultation takes place when resources are being allocated. The spokesperson added: Where a deficiency in resources is identified the matter is considered fully and addressed accordingly.

Independent councillor John Gilligan said that it is not about the numbers of gardai leaving Limerick; it is about the quality of the gardai who are leaving.

We should be fighting to hold onto experienced gardai. A new recruit coming in is fine, but that new recruit wont have the same street smartness as the people who were taken out. And it will take them years to come up to speed.
HANGZHOU, China (Reuters) - An EU ruling that Apple Inc must pay a huge tax bill to Ireland was clearly based on facts and existing rules and was not a decision aimed against the United States, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Sunday. Last week, European Union antitrust regulators ordered Apple to pay up to 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion) in taxes to the Irish government after ruling that a special scheme to route profits through Ireland was illegal state aid. Apple's Chief Executive Tim Cook last week described the ruling as "total political crap", but France and Germany have come out to back Brussels on the decision. Juncker said EU Commission investigations on taxation had mainly targeted European companies. The decision comes amidst a coordinated global initiative to crack down on tax evasion by multinational companies, spearheaded by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The ruling against Apple has pushed the issue into the limelight and raised the risk of significant push-back from the United States, analysts say, where some lawmakers are saying the result represents a European encroachment on the U.S. potential tax base. In separate comments to Reuters on the sidelines of the G20 on Saturday, Pascal Saint-Amans, director of the OECD Center for Tax Policy and Administration, called Apple's tax planning "outrageous" but, like Juncker, said the decision was based on enforcing current regulations. Saint-Amans said he believed it would be unlikely to serve as a precedent for enforcement on future income earned by multinationals. Juncker's remarks appeared designed to reassure U.S. lawmakers, who have bickered for years over the treatment of off-shore income but now fear that the European Commission move would mean more profits earned by U.S. corporations flowing into European tax coffers. "This is not a decision against the United States of America," said Juncker. (Reporting by Nathaniel Taplin; Editing by Robert Birsel)
AN ark containing a 1,500-strong cargo of animals will depart Shannon for warmer climes in October.

Aid agency Bothar  which is headquartered in Limerick  will mark its 25th anniversary airlift by sending the biggest multi-species airlift ever from Ireland and one of the largest in the world to Rwanda.

The ark, complete with a live cargo of 40 in-calf dairy cows, 260 pigs, 200 dairy goats and 1,000 chicks, will depart Shannon for the African country on October 10.

The historic flight marks the 25th anniversary of the first Bothar flight, which left the same airport with a cargo of just 20 cows.

Bothar CEO Dave Moloney said that final preparations were in place for what will be the most significant airlift of Bothars quarter of a century of livestock aid activity.

This is the most important airlift we have ever pulled together, for many reasons, he said.

Its our biggest airlift in terms of numbers and species and, in that regard, a record in an Irish context. It also marks our 25th birthday as an aid organisation and what a journey it has been. Theres also a great deal of nostalgia, not just because of the birthday but because we are back where it all started, at Shannon Airport.

Shannon is the official aviation partner for the airlift and Mr Maloney said Bothar is like an old friend now for us and we are delighted to support them.

See www.bothar.ie for more.
A CALIFORNIAN family with strong Limerick roots are looking to purchase and renovate a row of derelict houses on Kings Island, where their late mother grew up and where they hope to relocate.

Michael Russell, 53, and his family have been visiting Limerick for the past four years to discover their family heritage. His mother, Mary Gleeson, was born in 1920 and lived in a small bungalow at Verdant Place, before moving to the United States in the late 1930s.

However, there is a question mark over the ownership of the derelict properties, and they are seeking assistance from the public. According to their solicitor, there are no records.

Ms Gleeson, who died in 2010, was the daughter of Margaret Gleeson and Thomas Gleeson, who were from the city.

The father-of-six first visited Ireland with his mother in 1998.

He said that the house has huge sentimental value.

 I want to move to Ireland. We are citizens and we are very proud of our Irish citizenship.

His wife Ashli is particularly interested in the prospects of renovating the home, as she works in real estate in Fresno.

If successful in purchasing the property, they face the challenge of renovation.

How do you make it livable without changing the historical aspect of it? I definitely would sacrifice comfort over the maintaining of the cultural and architectural character of the building.

Michael has asked the public to e-mail mikerussell.kw@gmail.com, should someone have any information on the property.
JIMMY Webb, who wrote MacArthur Park and Wichita Lineman among hundreds of other hits, will play in the Lime Tree as part of the upcoming Richard International Film Festival.

Securing Webbs services for the October 27 show represents a major coup for a festival, now hitting its fourth year and expanded to five days in October, that has major plans for expansion.

Festival director and co-founder Zeb Moore said booking Webb, who wrote MacArthur Park that Harris sang and released in 1968 and which was a massive hit worldwide, was incredible.

When we asked him first, he was absolutely thrilled, because of the association with Harris, said Zeb.

He was delighted to come over and the interest in him is huge, there will be people travelling from all over Ireland to see this gig, so we are really excited about it, he added.

Zeb confirmed that Harris son Jared  star of Mad Men  would be returning yet again, as is the agreement with the estate of the late Limerick actor for family members to attend.

The festival again boasts a link-up this year with the Newport Beach film festival and Zeb said there had been a significant increase on submissions for the competition. As well as a large number of screenings and workshops  including an acting workshop with award winning director Terry McMahon  there will be a cultural trail this year, incorporating a number of venues.

A gala screening of Harris classic A Man Called Horse will take place and Zeb hinted at the possibility of a major screenwriter coming to Limerick for a reading of a yet to be filmed script during the festival.

See www.richardharrisfilmfestival.com.
Sep 4, 2016, 10 AM

The scarcest set of a series of 1924 semiofficial stamps issued by Italy for quasi-state entities, inscribed Opera Naz. Protez. Assist. Inv. Guerra (National Organization for the Protection and Assistance of War Invalids), sold for $12,650 at Cherryston

Cherrystone Auction Galleries offered a rare mint Italy 50-centesimo King Victor Emmanuel III definitive with a Fezzan overprint in New York in early August. It sold for $8,050.

By Matthew Healey, New York Correspondent

Worldwide auctions continued apace in July and August, with important philatelic holdings crossing the block in Hong Kong and New York, as well as at the American Philatelic Societys annual Stampshow in Portland, Ore.

Here is one of five recent auctions we are recapping in our latest International Auction Roundup:

Cherrystone Auction Galleries in New York held a sale Aug. 9-10 with extensive worldwide offerings. Here, too, one could find the philatelic legacies of otherwise obscure World War II conflicts.

The region that today makes up the troubled North African nation of Libya was historically three territories: Tripolitania in the northwest, Cyrenaica in the east and Fezzan, a largely empty desert area, in the southwest. The former two places have familiar stamp histories under Italian, British or independent control, but the latter is less well-known.

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Fezzan, with the rest of Libya, was part of the Ottoman realm and then nominally under Italian control between the world wars. In 1943, it was taken over by Free French forces from Chad, and remained under French control until it rejoined independent Libya in 1951.

Stamps of Italy and Libya were provisionally overprinted at first, although the Scott Standard catalog lists only stamps of Fezzan (at the end of Libya) beginning in 1946, when engraved stamps of typically French design were issued for the territory.

A mint Italy 50-centesimo King Victor Emmanuel III definitive, with a circular overprint reading R.F. 0,50 Fezzan (listed as Sassone 11 in that catalog of Italy) was described as one of fewer than 10 of the 343 originally produced to still have original gum. It sold for $8,050, including Cherrystones 15 percent buyers premium.

In 1924, Italy issued a series of semiofficial definitive stamps for quasi-state entities, including a number of libraries. Comprising eight denominations in three basic designs, with the (typically abbreviated) name of the institution imprinted in a panel at the bottom, there were a total of 77 such enti semistatali stamps. They are not listed by Scott, although they do appear in Sassone and other catalogs. Some are extremely hard to find.

The scarcest set of the group, inscribed Opera Naz. Protez. Assist. Inv. Guerra (National Organization for the Protection and Assistance of War Invalids), listed in Sassone as ES50-ES57, was offered as fresh and fine in mint never-hinged condition. It sold for $12,650.

Keep reading our International Auction Roundup:

What sold during InterAsias sale of largest-ever public offering of North Korea?

Czechoslovakia propaganda issue sold at Regency-Superior auction

OSS Hitler propaganda sheet brings $17,250 at Harmer-Schau sale

Scarce Australian error stamp tops Harmers International auction
By Steve Keating NEW YORK (Reuters) - A tearful Nick Kyrgios, a dark horse to win the U.S. Open, retired from his third-round match against Ukraine's Illya Marchenko with a hip injury on Saturday, ending the Australian's bid for a maiden grand slam. A limping Kyrgios was trailing 4-6 6-4 6-1 when he decided he was unable to carry on playing. The 14th seed was seeking to reach the last 16 at Flushing Meadows for the first time. "It's tough, I don't like to retire, that is probably the second or third time I've done it," offered a dejected Kyrgios. "I've got a lot of belief in my game to still win matches when I'm not feeling great but his (Marchenko's) strength is to make balls and move me around, it's not great. "To be fair my hip was bothering me my first two matches and I got through, so I guess it was just a matter of time." Kyrgios had looked ready to cruise into the fourth round behind a blazing serve and some brilliant shot-making but nothing is ever straight-forward with the big Australian, who began to rub his right hip after taking the opening set. By the end of the second set won by Marchenko, Kyrgios was ready to quit. He left the court and took a medical time out before deciding to continue. He opened the third holding serve but Marchenko moved in for the kill upping the pressure on the lame 21-year-old and sweeping the next six games. After Marchenko took a 4-1 lead, Kyrgios went to his chair and was in tears as he discussed with a trainer whether to carry on. With his mother watching from the stand, he decided to continue the third set. It soon became clear, however, there was no way back for Kyrgios as Marchenko took the set for a 2-1 lead. At the changeover Kyrgios again consulted with a trainer and this time decided not to risk further injury, conceding the match and walking over to shake Marchenko's hand. "It is a dream come true, a win is a win." said the 63rd ranked Marchenko. "I cannot explain how happy I am. "I had to fight every point, I got a small chance in second set and I took it. He started to feel his injury in the third set and you have to keep focused. "Sometimes the guys will wait a few games then start to play, I lost a couple of matches like this." (Editing by Andrew Both)
This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Many employers and employees love the thought of a four-day workweek. Supposedly, a four-day work schedule allows workers extra time to pursue leisure activities and family togetherness. Spurred on by visions of spending more time at the beach, many people are now encouraging businesses to adopt this kind of work plan.

There are many purported advantages. Some authorities say that a four-day work schedule facilitates the ability to provide child care and assistance for the elderly.

Proponents of such "compressed" work schedules  those in which employees work longer hours for fewer days of the week  point to gains in productivity that result from decreased overhead costs, such as not having to keep the lights on when nobody is working. Additional cost savings can be obtained from reducing total weekly commuting time.

A variety of businesses have tested the four-day concept, including Amazon, Google, Deloitte and a host of smaller firms. Amazon announced in late August that it is experimenting with an even shorter workweek of 30 hours for select employees, who would earn 75 percent of their full-time salary, should they choose to opt in.

Many of the pilot programs have shown promising results. Statistics from the Society for Human Resource Management indicate that 31 percent of employees were in a compressed workweek schedule as of 2015. That's the case, however, for only 5 percent of large companies.

This is an issue in which I have considerable experience. I have been studying the health effects of long working hours for nearly 30 years. All the studies point to the potential dangers that can occur as the result of the additional risks created when work demands exceed a particular threshold. Most of the studies I have performed suggest that the dangers are most pronounced when people regularly work more than 12 hours per day or 60 hours per week.

It sounded like a good idea

The idea of a four-day workweek is not new. Labor experts have been studying and advocating these approaches since the 1970s. For example, in 2008, researchers from Brigham Young University conducted a series of surveys among employees and community members to assess their perspectives about a four-day workweek. The researchers found that about four-fifths of the employees reported a positive experience working that type of schedule.

Based on these positive results, Utah's governor enacted a mandatory four-day workweek for all state employees. The state's goal was to curb energy costs, improve air quality, ensure that needed services would still be available (for instance, garbage collection) and help to recruit and retain state employees. In 2011, however, Utah reversed course, saying that savings never materializied.

Other research has also supported the development and adoption of compressed work schedules. A 1989 study found that compressed schedules were related to high levels of job satisfaction and employees' satisfaction with their work schedules; supervisors also reported they were pleased with the four-day workweek schedules.

Are there hidden dangers?

Despite the widespread enthusiasm for a four-day week, I am not convinced that kind of schedule is beneficial for employees or for businesses. The primary problem with the idea is that whatever work needs to be done, needs to get done in the same amount of total time. Despite wishes to the contrary, there are still only 24 hours in a day.

The math is simple: working five eight-hour shifts is equivalent to working four 10-hour shifts. That's true. But the implications of these schedules are different. The danger is in disregarding the health effects that can occur as a result of fatigue and stress that accumulate over a longer-than-normal working day.

I performed a study showing that the risk of suffering an industrial accident is raised by 37 percent for employees working more than 12 hours in a day. The risk is 61 percent higher for people in "overtime" shifts. Working more than 60 hours in a week is related to an additional injury risk of 23 percent. As the hours worked in those schedules increase, the risks grow accordingly.

More recently, Dr. Xiaoxi Yao, a colleague of mine who is now at the Mayo Clinic, and I recently performed another study using 32 years of work-hour information to analyze the relationship between long working hours over many years and the risk of being diagnosed with a chronic disease later in life. We found that the dangers were quite substantial, especially for women.

Women working more than 60 hours per week, equivalent to 12 hours per day, were more than three times as likely to eventually suffer heart disease, cancer, arthritis or diabetes, and more than twice as likely to have chronic lung disease or asthma, as women working a conventional 40-hour workweek. Working just a bit more, an average of 41 to 50 hours per week, over many years appeared to substantially increase the long-term risk of disease.

These studies show that not all hours are created equal. The research suggests that harm may occur past a certain point. A four-day week causes workers to squeeze more hours than usual into a day. For workers who are already prone to overwork, the additional burden of compressing five days into four could literally break the camel's  or worker's  back.

Is the stress worth it?

Besides the health issues, employers and workers also need to consider the effect that compressing hours into a four-day period has on workers' mental health, stress levels and fatigue.

Occupational psychologists realize that people do not function as effectively when tired or stressed. This may be even more of a concern for older persons.

Moreover, just squeezing five days of 10-hour-a-day work into a compressed 40-hour schedule can create more rigidity and reduced flexibility for families and children. For example, if the two additional work hours per day are added onto a conventional day schedule that begins in the morning at approximately 8 or 9 a.m. and extends into the late afternoon hours at about 4 to 5 p.m., then many working parents will lose the ability to interact with their children just at the "prime time" of about 5 to 7 p.m. when kids otherwise would be most likely to be in the house and potentially available to socialize with their siblings and parents  before their bedtime arrives.

There are many obvious ways to address these concerns and make life easier for workers and their families. Don't overwork. Don't stay too long at work. Find a job with an employer that has flexible working hours.

I don't know about you, but the prospect of a four-day week scares me. I already have a hard enough time getting my regular weekly work done over five days. And it's always so tempting to glance at my work email  just a couple more notes to jot down.

Instead, why not just pull back at a certain point? Maybe it's time to take Friday off every so often. How about ending work at noon on Fridays, as is the practice of many Jews, to bring in the weekend in a gradual way? The trade-off, if necessary, would involve adding a small increase of one hour per day to the normal Monday through Friday schedule. That approach is actually my personal favorite.

My friend Lonnie Golden, a professor at Pennsylvania State University - Abington, advocates adopting a "Goldilocks" workweek: one that is not too long, not too short and that satisfies the employer's interest in productivity and the employee's interest in attaining good health and well-being.

Allard Dembe, Professor of Public Health, The Ohio State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Known for facilitating flight, visitors to Abbeyshrule Airfield could be forgiven for being a bit confused on Monday, August 15 as seven people fell from the sky.

82-year-old Ursula McGoey was among the skydivers, naming themselves 'The Magnificent Seven in the Flying Machine' who took the plunge to raise money for Abbeyshrule Tidy Villages 'Illuminate the Cistercian Abbey' fund.

The Magnificent Seven included Kate Dardis (Forgney), Mick Doherty (Lenamore), Betty Dowler (Clonbrin), Emer Keenan (Ratharney), Gretta King (Abbeyshrule), Eddie Leahy (Abbeyshrule) and Ursula McGoey (Abbeyshrule).

A self-proclaimed adventurer, Ursula has worked all over the world but has now retired to her homestead in south Longford.

If there was ever a doubt in your mind about doing a skydive, Ursula would soon put it at ease, describing the initial flight as being; just like a regular plane, it was like going on holiday.

She continued, We got on 100%. We were talking and laughing amongst ourselves and at five thousand feet they gave us the warning.

We were not expecting the door to shoot open at ten thousand feet, then we were just ejected out into space.

While those thoughts are enough to make even the strong-hearted feel faint, Ursula revealed that she enjoyed every moment.

It was really lovely, for the first five thousand feet we were free falling, it was really windy and I could just see clouds.

Then the parachute went out and it was a wonderful view all across the Midlands. I could have stayed floating up there forever, away from all the upsets and troubles of the world. I would recommend it to everybody.

Spectators cheered on the group as they made what Ursula described as a soft landing.

When asked if she would do it again, she laughed, saying, I wanted to go up again straight away.

The Cistercian Abbey was founded in 1150 AD by the Cistercians who came to Abbeyshrule, and this jump was to fundraise for eco-friendly and cost-efficient LED lighting powered by solar panels to light up the Abbey.

We are working with the Heritage Officer Mairead Ni Chonghaile on the project as it is a protected building, Ursula explained, saying the lights will be placed outside of the walls of the Abbey.

The adventurer then laughed; We don't want to break any laws and end up in prison. I've kept out of it this long, before concluding with a note of thanks.

'The Magnificent Seven' would like to thank Tandem Masters Paul Breaker Moran, Damian Cahill and Karl Carey; Trainer, Terry Shaw; Pilot John Beirne; Packers Cathal Beirne, Derek Thomas and Catherine and Ground Staff Matt Purcell, Tom Mullen and Paul Mullen.

Without their combined excellent assistance, 'the jump'; would not have been so successful, Ursula explained.

A sincere word of thanks also to Father Charlie Healy who included us in his prayers and also to our very generous sponsors, family, friends and neighbours who gave us a great send off - mile buiochas!
Nature & Weather, Local News, Press Releases

By Long Island News & PR Published: September 03 2016

Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today urged New Yorkers to prepare for potentially hazardous weather due to Tropical Storm Hermine that is moving up the East Coast.

Albany, NY - September 3, 2016 - Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today urged New Yorkers to prepare for potentially hazardous weather due to Tropical Storm Hermine that is moving up the East Coast, and will impact Southern Westchester, New York City and Long Island  areas which are now both under a Tropical Storm Warning  beginning Sunday through Tuesday. The storm is expected to last longer than initially anticipated across the downstate region. The Governor is activating the State Emergency Operations Center beginning Sunday at noon, and State Emergency Personnel are actively monitoring the storm as it approaches. Stockpile resources in the downstate region  including sandbags, high-axle vehicles, pumps and generators  are prepared for deployment, and the National Guard is on alert throughout the region.



"As Hermine approaches, we are taking every action necessary to protect New Yorkers and our most vulnerable infrastructure across downstate, Governor Cuomo said. "We are monitoring the storm's progression around the clock and, while the latest forecasts spare our state from the brunt of the storm, I have directed emergency response officials to pre-deploy high axle vehicles and swift water rescue teams in the event of localized flooding. I urge residents and visitors to check local weather reports before traveling tomorrow and Monday and to stay informed by using NY Alert ."



Tropical Storm Hermine is moving east/northeast and is expected to slow down Sunday and into Monday and stall over Long Island through Wednesday. All coastal areas in New York are in a Storm Surge Watch and it is expected to escalate into a Storm Surge Warning as the storm nears New York State. The storm will bring heavy rains, dangerous rip currents, high waves, beach erosion and coastal flooding, especially in the back bays of Long Island. Wind gusts of 60 mph are predicted for the Long Island area beginning Sunday morning. While the center of the storm is expected to remain south and eventually east of Long Island, impacts will occur well away from its center.



Governor Directs Additional Pre-Deployment of Essential Assets to Region

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has deployed additional personnel to assist with storm preparations throughout the region. Most weekend work has been canceled and their Incident Command Center will be activated as of 8 p.m. this evening. Crews are out inspecting pumps and drains throughout the system and pump trains are also being staged and readied for deployment. Trains are also being moved out of the Coney Island and 207 St Yards to secure areas of the system ahead of rainfall. Additionally, the NYC Subway system, the Long Island Railroad, New York City Buses and Bridges and Tunnels are preparing for any storm surge and are closely monitoring wind conditions that could impact any part of the system.



The Port Authority of NY and NJ has positioned and is prepared to deploy nearly four miles of flood barriers to protect critical transportation facilities, in addition to more than 170 generators and pumps to ensure continuity of service. The Port Authority will have a full complement of staff at all of its transportation facilities to ensure that the hundreds of thousands of customers are safely accommodated, and will continuously coordinate with its federal, state and local partners throughout the storm.



The Public Service Commission is in constant communications with all utility companies and starting communication with partner utility companies in the case that requirements exceed capability. PSEG has also secured 500 additional foreign linemen and 250 additional tree personnel. Utilities in the region are ready to respond in the event of wide spread power outages.



The New York State Office of Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation has closed Long Island ocean beaches beginning tomorrow to swimming until further notice, and will continue to monitor surf conditions. Nassau County has also requested the use of one sandbagger and one pallet of sandbags to prevent flooding. While all state parks will remain open, water areas will be closed to the public.



The Department of Transportation has more than 1000 operators and supervisors positioned in the Hudson Valley and on Long Island ready to respond with 379 large dump trucks, 86 loaders, 29 chippers, 9 bucket trucks, 9 excavators, 2 graders, 6 vacuum trucks with sewer jets, 14 water pumps, and 14 traffic signal trucks.



The New York State Thruway Authority has over 150 supervisors and staff in the region. Assets ready to respond include 47 large dump trucks, 67 medium dump trucks, two low boy trailers, one tilt bed trailer, two flatbed trailers, four backhoes, 30 portable variable message systems, three chippers, eleven front end loaders, 27 chain saws, 25 generators, 13 pumps, and seven aerial trucks.



The Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Services has prepositioned three High Axle Vehicles to the Brentwood stockpile location. Each has been equipped with personal flotation devices, hand lights, hand tools (forcible entry and shovels), blankets and an inflatable boat. Additionally, two, three-person DHSES OFPC Swift Water Rescue Teams are pre-deployed to the Brentwood stockpile along with four logistics and planning staff and the STR communications team, ready to respond if necessary.



The National Guard is on alert and prepared to immediately respond as necessary to any coastal storm which impacts New York City, Long Island, and the lower Hudson Valley. The National Guard has Initial Response Forces throughout the region  personnel and equipment include 180 Soldiers and Airmen and 45 vehicles that include high-axle trucks and high mobility multi-purpose vehicles. The National Guard also has two Engineer Initial Response Forces with front end loaders, dump trucks and smaller Bob Cats available for use if necessary.



The State Police has swift water teams prepped and on standby and is fully staffed in the region.



The Department of Environmental Conservation has 64 Department of Environmental Conservation police available in the downstate area, 23 boats, 14 ATVs, and 64 four wheel drive patrol vehicles.



Governor Activating State Emergency Operations Center

At the direction of Governor Cuomo, the New York State Emergency Operations Center will be activated on Sunday at noon. The following agencies will be represented:

Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services

New York State Police

Division of Military and Naval Affairs

Metropolitan Transportation Authority

Port Authority of NY and NJ

Office of Emergency Management

Office of Fire Prevention and Control

Office of Interoperable Emergency Communications

Department of Health

Department of Transportation

New York State Thruway Authority

Department of Environmental Conservation

Public Service Commission

Information Technology Services

American Red Cross

Additionally, personnel from State Office of Emergency Management, State Police, Department of Transportation, Military and Naval Affairs, and MTA are staffing the Nassau and Suffolk County Emergency Operations Centers in advance of the storm.



Stockpile Resources Prepared for Deployment

In addition to the assets pre-deployed ahead of the storm, New York State stockpiles in Brentwood and John F. Kennedy International Airport contain additional resources available for use:

29 generators

58 light towers

252,000 bottles of water

97,104 ready-to-eat meals

19,200 Kosher ready-to-eat meals

155 pumps that range from 2, 3, 4 and 6

Two sandbaggers; 200,000 sandbags

Through NY Responds, the States incident management system, Nassau County Emergency Management has requested the use of one of the two sand baggers and one pallet of sandbags for use in some of their typical coast line inundation areas.



Additional resources from stockpiles and agencies across the state are available for transport to the affected region if necessary.
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
(Repeats item issued on Sunday)

* Asia oil output to shrink on lack of investments

* Region's net oil imports rise as demand-supply gap widens

By Florence Tan and Gavin Maguire

SINGAPORE, Sept 4 (Reuters) - A widening gap between Asia's oil production and demand is creating a growing capital drain for the region and leaving countries vulnerable to global supply disruptions and a sudden surge in oil prices.

Asia's net oil imports surpassed the total amount of oil consumed in North America in 2015 and are set to rise after producers slashed spending on exploration and production on low oil prices, leaving oilfields at risk of sharp production declines in the next decade.

Activities across Asia-Pacific to search for energy resources have nearly ground to a halt in the past year while recent exploration finds have struck more natural gas than oil, analysts said.

As Asia's net imports grow and crude prices recover, the region's oil import bill is set to climb back above $500 billion in 2017 for the first time in three years, calculations based on forecasts by the International Energy Agency and a Reuters crude oil price poll in August showed. (OILPOLL-1).

"With demand growth set to continue and outpace declining domestic production, this leaves Asia increasingly vulnerable to rising prices," said Energy Aspects analyst Virendra Chauhan.

FALLING OUTPUT

The oil price slump since mid-2014 had given Asian economies a breather from high import bills.

But oil demand in the Asia-Pacific is expected to grow by 800,000-900,000 barrels per day (bpd) this year and next, while the region's output could shrink by 240,000-330,000 bpd during the same period, Chauhan said.

The gap between oil production and demand has jumped over 30 percent since 2010 to an estimated 25.7 million bpd in 2016 and is set to grow by another 1.1 million bpd next year. Rising oil prices, however, means the cost could soar by a third in just one year to $566 billion.

"We have seen two years in a row in 2015 and 2016 oil investments declining," International Energy Agency (IEA) chief Fatih Birol said. "This would mean oil security and oil markets may face a challenge as a result of a huge drop in the investments in a very few years in the medium term."

Story continues

Producers across the region are struggling, which is not being helped by international oil companies' capital and expertise leaving the region, said Chauhan.

Consultancy Wood Mackenzie expects Asia's oil production to fall to 5 million barrels per day in 2025 from 7.6 million bpd in 2016.

"We've seen a number of projects delayed - some cancelled - plus the level of investments in existing oil fields is falling," Angus Rodger, director of Asia-Pacific upstream research at Woodmac said.

"That has a minor impact in the short-term, but if you go out to 2020, it means oil production across the region will have declined significantly."

China is leading the decline, with output hitting a five-year low in July as producers shut-in marginal fields while imports hit a record.

Indonesian officials said they are looking at ways to shore up a production target of 780,000 bpd in 2017, the lowest since 1969 and 40,000 bpd lower than 2016's forecast.

"We are discussing how to make Cepu block production higher than now," Director General of Oil and Gas Wiratmaja Puja said, adding that output at the oilfield operated by Exxon Mobil may increase by 15,000 bpd.

Indonesia, the largest oil producer in southeast Asia, faces a potential 20-25 percent natural decline in production unless it steps up activities such as drilling and well servicing, said Muliawan, deputy for operations at regulator SKK Migas.

MIDEAST SUPPLY IMPASSE

China, Indonesia and India have been actively investing in overseas oil production assets to supplement domestic output.

China has also been broadening its sources of supply, taking more oil from Russia and Latin America to reduce its dependence on the Middle East, as well as building its strategic reserves to cushion itself in the event of an oil price shock.

The region's biggest oil consumer is also turning to gas and renewable energy, but these are long-term solutions.

Asia imports just over half of its oil from the Middle East and will continue to rely heavily on Gulf producers, analysts said, exposing the region to geopolitical risks that have disrupted oil production and exports.

"Asian production is on the decline, notably among others in China, and with increases in refining capacity that are unlikely to remain idle, the dependency of the region to Middle Eastern oil will remain," BNP Paribas Global Head of Commodity Markets Strategy Harry Tchilinguirian told the Reuters Global Oil Forum.

"It is, as you can imagine, hard to replace Saudi Arabia in your import mix for many an Asian refiner."

(Reporting by Florence Tan and Gavin Maguire in SINGAPORE, additional reporting by Wilda Asmarini in JAKARTA and Jane Chung in SEOUL, editing by Richard Pullin)
- By Dr. Paul Price





For big gains, follow the money.

Value investors seek out stocks that appear cheap on fundamentals. That usually only happens when the markets are getting pounded or the underlying firm is having some, hopefully, temporary problems.

Buying interest from company officers can help ratify your view that a sell-off is an opportunity rather than a value trap.





Two high-quality stocks at rock bottom valuations just attracted major open market interest, which points to the likelihood for future gains.

The first one is Dollar General (DG). Two directors ponied up a combined $1.363 million to own shares in the $75 to $76 price range, down from what was an overpriced annual peak of $96.88. The stock got even cheaper over the next few days, closing on Sept. 2 at $73.32.

Media outlets were falling all over themselves trying to explain why the shares were down while ignoring the spectacular results since DG came public again on Nov. 13, 2009.

FY 2016 and 2017 estimates were trimmed to $4.51 and $4.94. Both would still represent all-time bests for this well-managed company.

As of last Friday, the shares fetched a slightly lower than average multiple on this year's already reduced projection. Its P/E on expected FY 2017 EPS is under 14.9x.

Perhaps those DG directors are on to something. A simple regression to a more typical valuation supports a Dec. 31, 2017 target price of at least $83 to $84. The 25-cent quarterly dividend provides a better-than-bank-account 1.36% current yield while you wait for a rebound.

The recent pullback should not have surprised anyone. DG typically topped out (red-starred periods above) whenever its P/E approached or exceeded 20x current profits. Every sell-off since 2009 (green-starred) has proven to be a great entry point for those with reasonable time horizons.

Story continues

Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings (NCLH) is another stock with great appeal right now. CEO Frank Del Rio, the company's most informed investor, couldn't resist adding $3 million dollars worth of shares on Aug. 31, 2016 at an average cost of $35.94.

NCLH touched an all-time peak of $64.27 in the fall of 2015, on EPS of $1.86. The mid-point of this year's guidance now sits at $3.35.

The news of his purchase initially sent NCLH flying. It rose briefly to over $38 before settling back to close last week at just $35.61. Media coverage of tropical storm Hermine and the Zika virus might have been taken as short-term dampers.

Before getting too upset about Zika, think back to Ebola and SARS, both of which were going to destroy the travel industry. Few people even remember them these days. Late summer and autumn storms? They are just normal, though irregular, road bumps in the travel industry.

Like Dollar General, NCLH cut its forecasts for this year and next. Also like DG, however, both new expectations would still be record results.

Growth metrics since the firm's IPO have been fabulous. The low share price simply made the stock available at a price that does not reflect the huge business improvements logged since 2013.

At 10.6x this year's, and about 8.8x 2017's projection, NCLH has never offered better value than it does today.

Value Line sees profits rising to $5 to $6 per share and 16x as a sustainable P/E over the coming three to five years. That suggests a target price north of $53 by Dec. 31, 2016. Around $65 seems possible by the end of 2017.

Independent research house Morningstar came to a similar conclusion. They assign NCLH their highest 5-star rating, while calling present-day fair value as $61.

Morningstar's price to fair value relationship chart clearly illustrates the huge degree of current undervaluation. No wonder the CEO was buying.

Individual investors in Dollar General and Norwegian Cruise Lines can now get in more favorably than the insiders did.

Option savvy traders might also consider selling puts out to March 2017 on NCLH, or as far away as Jan. 19, 2018 with DG. Both stocks should be nicely higher well before those expiration dates.

Disclosure: Long shares of NCLH, short puts on DG and NCLH.

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This article first appeared on GuruFocus.






Banner from Voice of Jihad celebrating the Talibans capture of Omna district.

The Taliban and Afghan officials confirmed that the jihadist group overran the district of Omna in the eastern province of Paktika after Afghan forces retreated earlier today. The district is the second in the east to fall to the Taliban in the past week as the group continues to press operations in all areas of the country.

Afghan soldiers and special unit personnel were sent to the district to halt the Taliban advance, but beat a tactical retreat, an anonymous Afghans security official told Pajhwok Afghan News. An Afghan official confirmed the Taliban had seized control of Omna.

The Taliban said it was able to completely liberate Omna district after four days of fighting in two separate statements that were released on its official website, Voice of Jihad.

The attack in which heavy and light weapons were used resulted in the district administration buildings and all 6 defense posts overrun, 7 enemy personnel killed, 5 wounded and the rest utilizing the dark to flee, one statement declared. Similarly Mujahideen also seized 6 pickup trucks, a motorbike as well as a sizable amount of weapons and ammunition.

The Taliban also claimed that 21 Afghan security personnel were killed and 16 more were wounded, while five of its fighters were killed and four were wounded. The Talibans claims on casualties cannot be independently confirmed; the group frequently exaggerates casualties sustained in its operations.

Omna is the second district in the Afghan east to fall to the Taliban since Aug. 26. On that day, the Taliban overran Jani Khel in neighboring Paktika province after laying siege to the district center for more than two weeks. Afghan officials in the district pleaded for reinforcements to prevent the collapse of the district but the Ministry of Defense failed to send any. [See LWJ report, Taliban storms district in eastern Afghanistan.]

Paktika province is a known haven for several Taliban groups, including the Haqqani Network and the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan, as well as al Qaeda. These groups have fought pitched battles against US forces in the province when the US military had a presence there  before the drawdown that began in 2012.

The Talibans overt influence in Paktika is difficult to assess as reporting from the province is scarce and the Taliban often controls the rural areas of districts but leaves the district centers under government control. Of the 19 districts in Paktika, the Taliban controls two (Waza Khwa and Omna), and contests another nine, The Long War Journal estimates based on reporting from the province. The number of contested districts is likely higher; for instance, distircts such as Jani Khel and Sarobi were battlegrounds while US forces maintained bases in the area, and it is unlikely Afghan forces are faring any better.

The Taliban currently control or contest more than 80 of Afghanistans 400 plus districts, according to a study by The Long War Journal (see map below). Again, that number may be higher as reports from some districts known to be Taliban strongholds are unavailable.

Security in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate as the Taliban presses offensives in all areas of the country. The Afghan military is struggling to contain the group, despite limited US military support. The US military has sent more than 100 special forces troops to Helmand to prevent the fall of its capital, Lashkar Gah. Kunduz, which fell to the Taliban for two weeks in September 2015, is again threatened. Al Qaeda has capitalized on the worsening security situation by establishing training camps in remote areas of Afghanistan.

The Obama administrations response to the deteriorating security situation has been to slow the withdrawal of US forces from the country, leaving 8,400 troops in Afghanistan instead of the 5,400 originally planned. That means nearly 1,400 US troops will be withdrawn by the end of the year despite the fact that President Barack Obama described the security environment in Afghanistan as precarious.

The US military continues to downplay Taliban gains and exaggerate the performance of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces. On Aug. 25, Brigadier General Charles Cleveland, deputy chief of staff for communications for Resolute Support, NATOs mission in Afghanistan, said that Afghan forces are generally on a positive trajectory.

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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Abu Walid al Sahrawi, when he was a spokesman for the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO)

Islamic State forces loyal to Adnan Abu Walid al Sahrawi, the emir of the Islamic States Sahara branch, claimed an attack in Burkina Faso yesterday according to Mauritanian news agency Al Akhbar. The claim, which has not yet been confirmed in a statement from the Islamic State, marks the first time this fledgling branch has claimed an attack in its one year of existence.

Al Akhbar, which has previously published statements from Sahrawi and other Saharan-based jihadists, reports that Sahrawi sent a message claiming that an attack on Sept. 2 in Burkina Faso, near the borders with Niger, was the work of his men. The assault, which occurred on a Burkinabe gendarmerie post in Markoye, left a border agent and a civilian dead.

If confirmed, this would mark the first operation claimed by the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS). However, the group has issued threats to North African states in the past. In May, Sahrawi sent an audio statement to Al Jazeera in which he threatened attacks on the United Nations mission in Western Sahara, Western tourists in Morocco, the headquarters of Moroccan security, and on foreign companies, according to the report. (See LWJ report, Report: Head of the Islamic States Sahara branch threatens Morocco.)

Sahrawi was originally the spokesman and a senior leader for the al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) splinter group, the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO). In 2013, MUJAO merged with Mokhtar Belmokhtars Al Mulathameen Brigade to form Al Murabitoon. The new combined entity immediately swore allegiance to al Qaeda emir Ayman al Zawahiri.

After the groups first emirs were killed in counterterrorism raids, Sahrawi became Al Murabitoons head. Last May, Sahrawi released an audio statement in which pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State and Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. He claimed to do so on behalf of the entire Al Murabitoon group. (See LWJ report, Confusion surrounds West African jihadists loyalty to Islamic State.)

However, only some of MUJAOs fighters joined Sahrawi in defecting to the Islamic State. Belmokhtar, an al Qaeda loyalist, quickly released a statement saying that Al Murabitoon remained in al Qaedas camp. [See Threat Matrix report, Alleged statement from Mokhtar Belmokhtar denies his group swore allegiance to the Islamic State.]

After this occurred, clashes between Sahrawis men and fighters loyal to Mokhtar Belmokhtar were widely reported in local media. Additionally, Belmokhtar was elected leader of Murabitoon by its shura council last August and remerged with AQIM in early December. Since the clashes between the two opposing sides of Murabitoon, Sahrawi has been largely quiet since the aforementioned threats to Morocco.

Now, Sahrawi has claimed his ISGS has perpetrated its first military operation since being founded. While this does not bode well for the regions stability, ISGS has experienced difficulty operating in the area. According to US officials contacted by The Long War Journal, Belmokhtars men intended to assassinate Sahrawi in the clashes in order to quell the jihadist dissidents. Al Qaedas domination of the jihadist landscape in Mali and neighboring states will also likely prove difficult for the Islamic State to gain any real foothold in the area.

While Sahrawi is loyal to al Baghdadi and the Islamic State, neither of the two audio statements sent to Al Akhbar and Al Jazeera have been released by official Islamic State media outlets. The Islamic State has not acknowledged any fighters, let alone a branch, in the Sahel either. This could mean that the Islamic State sees the fledgling group as too weak at this point or that the region is not a viable option for expansion at this point in time. Communication between ISGS and the mother organization in Iraq and Syria could also be an issue.

Caleb Weiss is a research analyst at FDD's Long War Journal and a senior analyst at the Bridgeway Foundation, where he focuses on the spread of the Islamic State in Central Africa.

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On Sept. 2, The Long War Journal reported on a curious story published in Al Masra, an al Qaeda newsletter. Masras authors claimed that Ayman al Zawahiris two daughters, a third jihadi widow and their children were exchanged for the son of General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, Pakistans former spymaster who also served as the Chief of Army Staff until 2013. As we noted, the claim could not be independently verified, there was no public reporting saying Kayanis son had been abducted and al Qaeda may be making up the details of what transpired.

Anonymous Pakistani military sources have now reportedly denied Masras story, but their denial only raises additional questions.

The update was published by Praveen Swami of The Indian Express. In addition to the anonymous Pakistani officials, Swami also cites an Islamabad resident familiar with the family who said the younger Kayani had been attending work regularly in recent months, and was also seen at social events.

According to intelligence and military sources contacted by Swami, the women were released in return for the life of Ali Haider Gilani, son of former Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, who was held by the al Qaeda since 2013, before being rescued in a raid this summer.

However, this version of the story only adds to the mystery and the timing is inconsistent with other details.

As we originally reported, Ali Haider Gilani was rescued in a joint US-Afghan raid in May. Four enemy combatants were killed as a result of the operation, NATOs Resolute Support mission said in a statement at the time. No other injuries or damage was observed or reported.

The Defense Department didnt describe the raid that freed Gilani as part of a hostage exchange. I want to commend the US Special Operations personnel and the Afghan special operations forces for the professionalism and skill they demonstrated in the raid this morning in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said in a statement. Carter described the raid as a counterterrorism operation targeting Al Qaeda operatives.

Gilani confirmed afterwards that al Qaeda had been trying to exchange him for Zawahiris daughters. But the three al Qaeda widows were not released in May or June. In fact, al Qaeda threatened the Pakistani government over the matter in July, claiming that all negotiations had failed. Al Qaeda said in a statement that it would hold the Pakistani government and its American masters responsible for their criminal behavior in holding the women and their children.

Therefore, the following reasons all make the claim that Gilani was part of a hostage swap especially curious: US and Afghan sources claimed that Gilani was rescued in a counterterrorism raid; NATO said four jihadists were killed, Afghan officials added that they didnt know Ali Gilani was there, Al Qaeda publicly threatened the Pakistani government two months later for failing to negotiate the release of the women, and al Qaedas women and children werent released until early August.

If al Qaedas women and their children were really exchanged for Ali Haider Gilani, then the joint US-Afghan raid in May and the details provided by officials were part of a ruse.

The fact that Masra published an account of Kayanis alleged abduction is significant. The Indian Express notes that Masra is published by a media house linked to the Jamaat Ansar al-Sharia, a Yemeni jihadist coalition that includes several al-Qaeda linked groups. But Ansar al Sharia in Yemen is simply an alias for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), as the US State Department announced in 2012. The Indian Express also claims that Masra is not an official al Qaeda publication. But this isnt really true. Masra is clearly produced by AQAP media operatives and possibly other al Qaeda members. The Long War Journal has tracked the newsletter for months and it routinely publishes stories from across al Qaedas global network, even providing the perspective of al Qaedas senior leadership on events.

The reason that The Long War Journal found the story newsworthy in the first place is that it was promoted by Masra, which is an al Qaeda publication. The Twitter feed that published the account (WARNING: graphic images) appears to have been set up solely to push the claim that Kayanis son had been kidnapped and exchanged for Zawahiris daughters. Masras editors then promoted this story on the front page after the Twitter feeds quick suspension. Therefore, the story isnt just the product of al Qaedas online supporters. It was promoted by an al Qaeda media shop.

According to The Indian Express, some in the intelligence community speculate that al Qaedas cyber-supporters may have conflated the story of Zawahiris daughters release with an earlier kidnapping of Amir Aftab Malik, son of Lieutenant-General Tariq Majeed, in 2013. Like Kayani, Majeed is a former senior Pakistani military official.

But this seems unlikely. Malik, who was kidnapped in 2010, was reportedly freed from captivity in early 2012. That is, Malik was freed more than two years before al Qaeda says Zawahiris daughters were detained by the Pakistani government and more than four years before the women were released in August of this year.

Of course, the Pakistani officials contacted by Swami may very well be right and Masra is making up key details about the whole matter. Al Masras story may be erroneous, even if there are a number of reasons to doubt the version offered by anonymous Pakistani officials in the press. Then again, wed expect the Pakistanis to deny the story even if it is true.

We are left with a series of questions:

Why were the al Qaeda women and their children held in the first place? And how were they freed? Was anyone exchanged for them?

If Ali Haider Gilani was swapped for the three women and their children, then why werent they released earlier and why did al Qaeda threaten the Pakistani government two months after Gilani was freed?

Were US and Afghan officials lying to the press when they described the counterterrorism raid that recovered Gilani? If Gilani was part of a hostage exchange, then why did NATOs Resolute Support say four al Qaeda operatives were killed in the process?

Can al Qaeda or Masra provide any proof that Kayanis son was really kidnapped? Or is Masras story an example of jihadi fiction?

Thomas Joscelyn is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Senior Editor for FDD's Long War Journal.

Are you a dedicated reader of FDD's Long War Journal? Has our research benefitted you or your team over the years? Support our independent reporting and analysis today by considering a one-time or monthly donation. Thanks for reading! You can make a tax-deductible donation here.
Kenya on Saturday inaugurated the first part of a new container terminal at Mombasa which is expected to boost by 50 percent the volume of cargo handled by East Africa's largest seaport.



Construction of the 30 billion shilling ($296.74 million)terminal began in March 2012 and was completed in February this year.



The project was financed by a loan from Japan through the Japan International cooperation agency (JICA), and Kenya will repay the loan over a 40-year period.



A gateway to East and Central Africa, the Indian Ocean port funnels imports of fuel and consumer goods as well as exports of tea and coffee from landlocked neighbours such as Uganda and Rwanda.



President Uhuru Kenyatta, who opened the facility, said the terminal heralded "a whole new era in the development of our ports and facilitation of the region's international trade".



A bigger cargo capacity for Mombasa was crucial because of the discovery of oil and gas in the region, he said.



British explorer Tullow Oil and partner Africa Oil discovered oil in Lokichar in northwest Kenya in 2012.



Recoverable reserves are an estimated 750 million barrels of crude and commercial production is expected to commence in 2017.



Uganda also has confirmed crude reserves while Kenya's other neighbour Tanzania has huge gas discoveries.



The new terminal can handle 550,000 twenty foot equivalent units (TEUs) per year and will ramp up Mombasa's existing annual cargo handling capacity from 1.05 million TEUs to 1.6 million TEUs.



"In five years' time, we expect to have hit 2.5 million TEUs after completing the second phase," Kenya's finance minister, Henry Rotich, said.



He added the country had already signed an agreement with JICA for credit worth 32 billion shillings to fund construction of the new terminal's second part. 1 = 101.1000 Kenyan shillings)



(Editing by Elias Biryabarema and Angus MacSwan)
Indian Naval ships Kolkata and Aditya, under the Command of the Flag Officer Commanding Western Fleet, are in Mauritius since 1st September 2016, in a demonstration of India's commitment to its ties with Mauritius and to promote maritime security in the Indian Ocean region.

INS Kolkata is commanded by Captain Rahul Vilas Gokhale and INS Aditya is commanded by Captain Vidyanshu Srivastava.

The ships are part of the Indian Navys Western Fleet based at Mumbai under the Western Naval Command and are on a two month long deployment in the Western Indian Ocean.

The four-day visit of the two naval ships will contribute to further strengthen maritime security cooperation between the Indian Navy and the Mauritius National Coast Guard (NCG) with a view to ensuring a secure and stable regional maritime environment for unhindered economic development in the region.

India and Mauritius have very close and cordial political and diplomatic relations with a sizeable settlement of people of Indian origin settled in Mauritius. India and Mauritius have accorded centrality to each other in their respective foreign policies.
Parker Kittiwake today launched the Condition Monitoring Starter Kit. The kit combines the Parker Kittiwake DigiCell combined kit, the Holroyd MHC-Bearing Checker, and a PC tablet with a condition monitoring routine and log book pre-loaded on it to help guide the user in using the products for maximum effect.



Created with the aim of introducing the power of condition monitoring to those owners and operators less familiar with it, the Condition Monitoring Starter Kit combines essential tools that protect vulnerable equipment and prevent failure. It utilises modern condition monitoring technology to simplify everyday maintenance observations and provide advance warning of possible maintenance requirements. Using deskilled, intuitive technology, the starter kit empowers crew members with data that enables them to take corrective action and safeguard against potentially catastrophic damage in the worst case, and allows them to prioritise everyday maintenance to maximise operational efficiency.



The Parker Kittiwake DigiCell is a state-of-the-art analysis tool that gives engineers a rapid indication of the levels of water in oil as well as an indication of the lubricants residual Base Number (BN). Its one of shippings most popular test methods for onboard testing, providing fast, accurate results in real time, enabling easy monitoring of vital trends. Also included in the starter kit is the Holroyd MHC-Bearing Checker, a hand held pocket instrument that provides engineers with a quick and easy-to-operate analysis of bearing condition using unique Holroyd acoustic emmissions monitoring technology. By monitoring the high frequency acoustic emissions signals naturally generated by deterioration in rotating machinery, the Holroyd MHC-Bearing Checker is able to identify developing machinery faults and provide engineers with condition related information in the easiest possible form, as either a ranked ditress number or a dB (decibel) value. The bearing checker provides data which can trend even the simplest pump or motor to show its degradation over time.



Larry Rumbol, condition monitoring market development manager, Parker Kittiwake explained: For those ship operators that adopt condition monitoring practices, the value it brings is self-evident. We know, however, that many owners, managers and operators, especially of small fleets and smaller vessels, arent necessarily aware of the condition monitoring tools and technology available, or the return on investment that a proactive approach can quickly deliver, whatever the vessel or fleet size. This is why weve created the Condition Monitoring Starter Kit, which we believe provides a compelling introduction to the power and potential of condition based maintenance, without the requirement for knowledge of ConMon before or after. 



To coincide with the launch of the starter kit, Parker Kittiwake has launched a simple eight-question survey which aims to explore condition monitoring practices, barriers to deployment, and the wish list for condition monitoring tools and technology. Open for completion now, the online survey will also be conducted throughout this years SMM in Hamburg, 6-9 September 2016, and will be open for responses for two weeks thereafter. By better understanding not only the barriers to adopting condition monitoring practices, but also highlighting the equipment failures that owners and operators are struggling most with, Parker Kittiwake aims to offer practical support and counsel to help overcome these issues.



When the survey closes post-SMM, three participating shipowners or operators will be selected to receive a complimentary Condition Monitoring Starter Kit, worth 2,500. The three awarded shipowners or operators will also receive ongoing support and consultancy from Parker Kittiwake free of charge, to ensure that their organisations extract the greatest value from the kit.



To take Parker Kittiwakes short survey please visit this link or come meet the team on stand 209, hall A3 where youll be able to complete the 5 minute survey via a tablet.



Rumbol concluded: For more than two decades, Parker Kittiwake has designed, developed and manufactured condition monitoring and test equipment for lube oil, hydraulic oil, fluids and fuels. Engineers the world over use Parker Kittiwake equipment to gain vital insights into the health of their vessels engines and machinery or to measure fuel quality and compatibility. We want to ensure that ship owners and operators understand that condition monitoring is accessible to everyone, no matter what the size of your vessel or fleet- ConMon has come of age and is accessible to and viable for everyone.


The Port of Rotterdam is pioneering a new technology it says will make the port smarter: a water drone.

Ever since the 'insane' plan of Pieter Caland to build the Nieuwe Waterweg, new solutions that make the port of Rotterdam smarter, more efficient, better and more sustainable are thought up constantly. One of the latest developments is the water drone.

Innovation flows through Rotterdam, like the water through the Maas, a poetic entrepreneur once said. That is definitely true. Not because it is 'nice to have', but because it is a necessary step towards a successful future. Therefore, the Port Authority is fully committed to all possible ways of innovation, says Allard Castelein, Chief Executive Officer of the Port of Rotterdam Authority.

Allard added: Innovation cannot be forced. However, you can create an environment in which innovation is likely to take place and be in line with the market.

The Port Authority achieves this through an Innovation Eco System. Castelein: We support research in conjunction with universities, such as the Port Innovation Lab with Delft University of Technology and of course our own Erasmus University in Rotterdam. And we collaborate with contests for students. In addition, we support Dutch start-ups that are relevant to the port, but we also scout worldwide via PortXL; the first accelerator that focuses on port start-ups on a global level.

The water drones active in the port today are among the results of the Innovation Eco System. The AquasmartXL, for instance. This is a small, unmanned boat, equipped with a camera. It sends images in real time to the quay, thus providing a flexible solution for surveillance and inspection from the water surface.
Following the leak of secret data about Scorpene submarine capabilities, in The Australian newspaper last month, India is believed to have decided not to let French naval contractor DCNS a fresh proposal for three new submarines, as per a report in the Reuters.

The DCNS is building six Scorpenes in Mumbais Mazgaon Docks shipyard. The trial of one of the submarines was conducted in May this year. All six will be inducted into Indian Navy by 2020.

An unnamed defence ministry official has told Reuters that New Delhi will not go for more submarines from the French company.

Quoting the official, Reuters reported: We had an agreement for six, and six it will remain. A spokesman of the Indian Navy confirmed that the orders would not be placed for three more submarines.

"Indian has ordered only six Scorpene submarines and orders have not been placed for three more as reported by some media. Therefore question of cancellation does not arise," the spokesman said

However DCNS has said there were talks going on for more submarines, even as the Indian Defence Ministry denied that any such negotiations were on.
In the United States, we take our bathrooms seriously.

It may seem to us in Virginia that the hoopla about North Carolinas bathroom law (which limits access to public bathrooms on the part of transgender people on the basis of their sex they were assigned at birth) has died down. However, if you spend any time just across the state line, youll see that the battle is still raging.

Traveling in other countries will really open your eyes to how prissy we are in the States about our bathrooms.

In travels, Ive dealt with bathrooms with no running water; curtains instead of doors; the Turkish toilet (treads to give your feet traction on either side of a hole) and even official bus-route bathroom stops where people who pay a small fee are allowed to relieve themselves on the ground between a bush and a cinderblock wall.

I thought Id done a good job of getting along in (and without) bathrooms  until I got to France. The physical facilities were fine, but in many places, there would be just one bathroom for both men and women to share.

My more adaptable sisters, with whom I was traveling, sometimes chuckled at the provincial prudery that kept me choosing discomfort over sharing public restrooms with men. However, my limits were tested one night.

We were in Avignon, the charming city that in the 14th century was the seat of Catholic popes. We slept in a tent in a campground outside the rustic stone wall that surrounded the glorious city.

We were out dancing one night, and when the nightclub closed, we walked the few kilometers back to the campground. I really had to go to the bathroom, so my sisters went on to the tent without me.

To my horror, there was a man in there. It was only me and him, in the wee hours of morning.

He was Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love with a dash of Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. The tall, trim, muscular dreamboat had piercing eyes and long black hair, and he was dressed in Elizabethan garb. Oh la la.

Bonne nuit, he said, nodding politely in my direction. I was mortified.

I thought about leaving, but I decided just to bite the bullet and do what I went there for. It was a long walk back to the campsite, and this was the only bathroom. Plus, hed think me a fool (a prissy American prude no doubt) if I turned and fled.

My face burning with embarrassment, I entered a stall.

Moments later, two toilets flushed at nearly the same time.

We met side by side over the sinks. I was shocked by my reflection in the mirror: melting makeup sliding over splotchy skin showing the beginnings of wrinkles and sweaty, stringy hair. He, on the other hand, looked marvelous.

This was the kind of stunning man a lady would be intimidated to meet even if she wearing an evening gown and had spent the day in the care of a beautician.

Normally Id be embarrassed for a man to see me without makeup, but at that point washing my face only could be an improvement.

As we washed our hands and face and scrubbed at our teeth, we struck up a bit of conversation. Pierre was an actor in the summer Shakespeare festival.

We walked together to the campsites, and he invited me to continue the conversation in a hammock as his cast mates murmured to each other over the campfire nearby. He brought out a bottle of red wine (mais bien sur) and we giggled our way through a half-English, half-French conversation, sharing stories of life on both sides of the Atlantic (except for the important bathrooms issue, which I, being an American, was too reserved to mention).

He invited me on a proper follow-up date, but I declined. I was only there to travel with my sisters.

Plus, Pierre could do nothing to surpass that one magical night  of sitting on a hammock with a long-haired, dashing French actor dressed in puffy pants, hose, a suede doublet and a feathered hat. I didnt want a Pierre in shorts and a T-shirt at a creperie in the daytime to dilute the memories of His Majesty on a hammock under the moonlight.

And to think one of the storybook nights of my life started as a mortifying encounter in the bathroom.
MARTINSVILLE  Again this year, the city is asking residents with artistic talents to design a Martinsville-themed ornament that might be used on this years Christmas tree at the governors mansion in Richmond.

The request is part of an effort by the Virginia Municipal League (VML) to have localities represented on the tree. About 200 cities and towns submitted ornaments for last years tree, the organizations website shows.

According to a request for proposals, city officials suggest that the Martinsville ornament focus on a specific unique aspect of the city, such as a historic home or building, a well-known resident or a distinct animal, plant or feature of the areas environment.

A handmade ornament is preferable. It should be made of materials such as clay, glass, shells, wood or fabric, or items found in the community or the local environment. Also, it should be no larger than six inches tall or wide and be lightweight because if it is too big or heavy, it will not be able to hang on the tree, the request shows.

No more than $40 worth of materials should be used to design the ornament, according to the request.

Artists living in the city are asked to submit either a drawing or sketch of their proposed ornaments to the city managers office at the municipal building uptown by 4 p.m. Sept. 15.

A selection committee then will evaluate proposals based on factors such as uniqueness; creativity; attention to architectural, historical, geographical and cultural contexts; and craftsmanship, the request shows.

The name of the city and the artist should be on the ornament, either on the back or bottom.

The artist who submits the winning entry will be notified by Sept. 19. The person must finish the ornament which will not be returned to him or her  by Oct. 24 and submit it to VML by Nov. 1.

The contest is open to city residents ages 18 and older. The governors mansion may feature a tree with ornaments designed by youth in the future, according to City Manager Leon Towarnicki.

Towarnicki and other city officials were not available Friday afternoon for further comment.

The full request for proposals is available on the citys website at www.martinsville-va.gov under the purchasing department section or the Martinsville-Henry County Chamber of Commerces website at www.martinsville.com under the procurement portal section.

The Virginia Association of Counties is spearheading a similar ornament-design contest for counties.

Henry County will provide an ornament for the governors mansion tree this year if we get a good one, said Deputy County Administrator Dale Wagoner.

The county is not seeking proposals from local artists. Wagoner said he did not know why.

Rather, county departments are being asked to design proposed ornaments, he said.

Last year, teachers in the Henry County Public Schools were asked to design ornaments, he added.
MARTINSVILLE  Sometimes students need a bit of a push, in order to get motivated. When free tickets to a race at Martinsville Speedway are the prize, it can help encourage both parents and kids, at least thats the hope of Speedway president Clay Campbell.

The Martinsville Speedway is working with local school districts this fall on the Read Your Way to the Race program. The program isnt just targeted toward Henry County or Martinsville schools. All total, more than 15,000 students from districts here in Virginia and across the border in North Carolina can take part. Last year, the program drew interest from just over 2,000 students in the area. Students from Pre-K all the way through 5th grade have a challenge. If they read 15 books or chapters in five weeks, theyll get a free ticket, as well as a discounted ticket for a parent or guardian. Thats a free ticket to their choice of the Texas Roadhouse 200, the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race or the Goodys Fast Relief 500 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race this year.

Reading is such an important part of life, Martinsville Speedway President Clay Campbell said. Its the one subject that really gets applied to all subjects and is used every day. To know that we have a role in encouraging students to read is a good feeling.

Local teachers say theyve seen an impact not just with their students, but with entire families, with parents getting actively involved.

Henry County Public Schools has participated in Read Your Way to the Race for over 10 years and its by far one of the most successful ways to get our kids to read for enjoyment, Dr. Melissa Lannom, a reading specialist at Rich Acres Elementary School, said. This reading incentive is completed in the home environment and encourages interaction with family members, which develops oral language as well as reading skills. The parents and grandparents enjoy this time with their children and grandchildren, and the adults look forward to attending the race too.

Theres more than just the ticket at stake. The students who qualify also get entered into a drawing to participate in the Texas Roadhouse 200 race day festivities. That includes the pre-race ceremonies, sitting in for a pace car ride and a victory lap with the winning driver.

Classrooms also benefit. The ones with the highest participation have the chance to win prizes ranging from leading the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance before the Texas Roadhouse 200 or the Goodys Fast Relief 500. Plus the winners get a pizza party and tour of the speedway.

The competition comes at a time when local districts are working to improve test scores. In Henry County, 76 percent of students this May passed their reading Standards of Learning tests. Thats up from 74 percent the year before. Martinsville classrooms also saw an uptick in reading scores, with 63 percent of students passing the exams this year. Thats up from 62 percent in 2014-15 and 54 percent the year before that.

If a student wants to take part in the competition, time is running out though. Those 15 books or chapters have to be read before the Texas Roadhouse 200, which is on Oct. 28. The Truck Series race is the next day and the Goodys 500 is Oct. 30. If any classrooms want to compete, they can call the Speedway for more information at (276)-956-7229.
WILLIAMSBURG

James F. Cahillane's latest book, "The Pilot's Satchel," contains 21 dreams/poems that he recalled from a 10-day induced coma following emergency colon surgeries in 2010 at

Cooley Dickinson Hospital

in Northampton.

He was in the hospital and rehab for three months before writing these tales once home. "Each dreamt poem is followed by my interpretation of when and where in my life it may owe its origins," the Williamsburg resident explained. "Poetry by itself is hard for some, and this concept is meant to make this I.C.U. (intensive care unit)-sparked wordage more accessible to the reader."

Most of the time he has a dream and forgets it soon after waking. "These 21 were far stronger than most, and I wrote them out of my head and onto the page to free up my aging memory for new things."

In the poetry and commentary he attempts to reconcile his life experience with the comatose words.

Born in 1933 in Northampton, the writer and poet is a Korean War Air Force veteran married to Maureen Stone of Wiltshire, England; they have five children and 14 grandchildren.

He earned a business degree and a master's in English from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

He managed his family's former new car dealership for 50 years. A 1992 sabbatical led to graduate school and a new writing career: essays, poetry, journalism and creative nonfiction.

The author of six books, his opinion columns and articles have appeared in magazines and newspapers for 24 years.

"I believe that I've written a book of importance to the medical community and those secular readers interested in how dreams interact with our conscious lives," he said of "The Pilot's Satchel."

In one poem, "The Musical Money Tree," he writes, "The tree was up the lane on the hillside/ Singularly, it moved in circles. Coins/Fell below like a slot machine payoff."

In the commentary about the poem, he explains, "Now we go from mystery to mystical and on to medical. In this adventure I am off with the little people, the fairies, the Gypsy travelers who wend their way through clannish sagas on the bended backs of stories and tales, oral beginnings and endings of those gone before."

The dreams were rattling around in his head months after the hospitalization. "So, being a writer, I decided to make use of them," Cahillane said. "In talking to nurses and health professionals I have heard them speak of patients with similar dreams. In rebuttal, I argued my case, 'But this time there was a writer in the room.'"



The Greater Northampton Chamber of Commerce Citizen of the Year for 1985 was in 2009 awarded a grant from the Northampton Arts Council toward "On History's Front Steps," a book of historical poetry and essays. He serves on the University of Massachusetts Friends of the University Without Walls and Williamsburg's Council On Aging. His readings have included speeches at Irish-American, Memorial Day and Veterans Day events.



"The Pilot's Satchel" - in paperback -- was designed by Linda Cahillane Smith and published by Off The Common Books in Amherst. It is for sale at Collective Copies in Amherst and Florence and at local bookshops for $15.


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(JOHN SUCHOCKI / THE REPUBLICAN FILE)

SPRINGFIELD Linda H. Hillman believes that God is everywhere, so she can worship God anywhere, but she's happy to be attending services now in a church building rather than in a hotel conference room.

One of the nearly 100 members of the Fresh Anointing Ministries Church of God in Christ, she likes attending services in the congregation's new home at 961 St. James Ave. in Springfield. "We know the church is the body of Christ of which He is the head...the church is the people," she said, but to be in their own building - a former Episcopal church -- is more personal than the LaQuinta Inns and Suites where members had met for five years.

To celebrate their new home, the congregation will have a grand opening beginning with a Sept. 9 service at 7 p.m. at which Pastor Zachary Reynolds of the Greater Harvest Church of God in Christ in Springfield will speak.

The celebration will continue on Sept. 11 at 5 p.m. when Bishop Bryant Robinson Jr., prelate of the Greater Massachusetts Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction, will preside at the church dedication. A social with refreshments will follow the service.

"God is blessing us," said Pastor Anthony D. Roberson Sr. "It is a great blessing to be in this building."

He said the building is "part of the vision set by God" for the Fresh Anointing Ministries Church of God in Christ. "Now we will be able to flourish as a ministry and expand working in the community... and be a stable presence in the community we serve."

The congregation currently is involved with religious education, youth ministry and outreach to incarcerated men dealing with addiction.

The church's motto is: "It's a new day and a fresh anointing is flowing your way."

Roberson, who is the financial chairperson for the Greater Massachusetts Jurisdiction, expects the congregation will grow as a result of the new church and its place in the community.

A fourth generation member of the Church of God in Christ, he was born in Monroe, Louisiana, the third of six children. His family relocated to Springfield when he was an infant, and he was educated in the Springfield public school system. He graduated from the High School of Commerce and attended Salem State College and Cambridge College, receiving a bachelor's degree in human services and a master's in addiction studies, both from Cambridge College.

Under the leadership of the late Bishop J.P. Morgan Sr. of Holy Trinity Church of God in Christ, he accepted his call to Christ in 1987. He was appointed deacon at Holy Trinity in 1998 and accepted a call to ministry in 2003. He was ordained as elder in 2009 under the leadership of Pastor J.P. Morgan Jr.

"We actually started (a) church in my parents' living room," he said of the current congregation.

Now the St. James Avenue church has Sunday School at 10 a.m. with the Sunday worship service following at 11:30. On Wednesdays there is prayer and Bible study at 7 p.m., and on Fridays a prayer service begins at 7 p.m.

For more information, call 413-363-8025.
BILLERICA A 2-year-old girl was seriously burned when she fell into a burning fire pit at a family birthday party Saturday evening.

Witnesses told authorities the little girl,was running in the backyard of a home on Bridle Road when she fell into the pit at about 6 p.m. The Lowell Sun reported.

Officials said adults at the party quickly took the little girl into a cool shower to slow the burning. She had suffered second and third-degree burns, but the injuries did not appear to be life-threatening, officials said.

The fire pit was dug below ground level, and the little girl was running in the yard of the home when she tripped into the hole.

She was transported from the scene by ambulance to Billerica Memorial High School where a MedFGlight helicopter flew her to Massachusetts general Hospital in Boston. She was later transferred to Shriner Hospital for Children.

FGire officials said the incident was "purely accidental," and no criminal charges are contemplated.
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CHICOPEE - The Chicopee Fire Department will join the Police Department for a Coffee-with-a-Cop this month.

The event will be held at 9 a.m., Sept. 24 at Chick-fil-A on Memorial Drive. The public is invited to come to meet police and firefighters, ask questions and air concerns, said Michael Wilk, public safety officer for the Chicopee Police Department.

This month Police and Fire departments will have child seat installers and inspectors to help residents with young children ensure their car safety seat is installed properly and safely.
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A 45-year-old city resident has been charged with shooting two people outside his home on Melha Avenue.

(Lucas Ropek/The Republican)

This story updates reports published at 7:32 a.m. and 10:06 p.m. Saturday.

SPRINGFIELD - A city resident has been charged with two counts of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon after shooting a man and woman outside his home at Melha Avenue.

Israel Lopez, 45, of 133 Melha Ave., was arrested Saturday night following the about 9 p.m. shooting. He is also charged with two counts of discharging a firearm within 500 feet of a dwelling and improper storage of a firearm, Police Capt. Cheryl Clapprood said.

He is being held in the Springfield Police Department jail and is expected to be arraigned in Springfield District Court Tuesday morning.

The victims, an 18-year-old man and a 21-year-old woman, were driven to Baystate Medical Center in a private car. Their conditions are unknown but both underwent surgery Saturday night, Clapprood said.

There was some type of confrontation outside the home before the shooting, but the circumstances are still under investigation, she said.

"The is an investigation on whether they (the victims) got into the home," Clapprood said.

Lopez did have a firearms permit for the .38-caliber gun he discharged, she said.
BOSTON  A Goodwill employee from Dorchester was arraigned in Roxbury Municipal Court on Friday on charges that he assaulted a man in a wheelchair, according to The Boston Globe.

On Aug. 23, Marques Bell, 23, allegedly punched and threatened to kill a 72-year-old man in a wheelchair who had attempted to enter the Goodwill store at which Bell worked.

The man was attempting to enter the store at 7:20 p.m., after the store had closed for the day. Bell allegedly took the man's cane and swung it at him, before threatening the man and storming out of the store.

Prosecutors for the case say that security footage of the incident was captured by cameras in the store. The footage was later used by Boston police to help identify Bell as the assailant.

Bell was taken into custody on Thursday. He has been charged with assault and battery on an elderly or disabled person.
kulik stan and scibak.jpg

Rep. Steve Kulik (D-Worthington), Sen. Pres. Stan Rosenberg (D-Amherst) and Rep. John Scibak (D-South Hadley) appealed to state utility regulators for full intervenor status in the matter of Berkshire Gas and its ongoing moratorium on new and expanded service. August 31, 2016, Greenfield.

(Mary Serreze photo)

BOSTON -- Four towns and six state legislators have been granted permission by state utility regulators to fully participate in high-level discussions regarding Berkshire Gas Co. and its moratorium on new and expanded service in the Pioneer Valley.

However, Pipe Line Awareness Network for the North East (PLAN-NE), a broad coalition which opposes new natural gas pipelines, was rejected in its bid for a seat at the table.

The Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities on Wednesday approved interventions by Deerfield, Montague, Amherst and Hadley, and a joint intervention by Sen. President Stan Rosenberg (D-Amherst) and Reps. Steve Kulik (D-Worthington), Ellen Story (D-Amherst), Peter Kocot (D-Northampton), John Scibak (D-South Hadley) and Paul Mark D-Peru). The lawmakers represent the affected towns.

The department made the announcements the day after a Greenfield hearing where Rosenberg read joint testimony from the lawmakers. Rosenberg told DPU Chairman Angela O'Connor that "harm will occur if we are denied intervenor status," and that alternatives to lift the moratorium must be fully explored in the absence of a new, interstate natural gas pipeline.

Berkshire in 2014 and 2015 stopped all new and expanded natural gas service in eight Hampshire and Franklin County towns, citing pipeline constraints. Berkshire said the moratorium would stay until Kinder Morgan's Northeast Energy Direct pipeline was built. However, Kinder Morgan pulled the plug on the 420-mile pipeline in April. Rosenberg and others have since pressured Berkshire to devise a "Plan B," saying the moratorium is unacceptable.

The leverage is Berkshire's five-year forecast and supply plan, which needs departmental approval. A 245-page draft contains reams of data, and was expedited following a request from Rosenberg and Kulik. This year's version lists potential ways to lift the ban, including increasing liquefied natural gas storage at a facility in Whately. Berkshire has not yet committed to any course of action.

At Wednesday's public hearing on the long-range plan, business leaders testified on the economic impact of the moratorium, saying it has stymied new development, added costs, and caused restaurant deals to fall through. Berkshire Gas president Karen Zink defended the moratorium and said it would have been unwise for the company to invest in stopgap measures when the pipeline was under federal review.

Some who spoke called for a complete end to fossil fuel use in Western Massachusetts, a view not taken by Rosenberg.

"Promoting the use of natural gas as an environmentally attractive fuel is the only viable long-term solution to increase new sources of gas supply to meet the growing needs of our communities," said Rosenberg in a statement. "The moratorium will continue to create a negative impact on our economy and harm consumers and the environment. I join with our residents, businesses and local communities in being extremely concerned about the moratorium and I call on Berkshire Gas to find a solution without delay."

The parent company of Berkshire Gas, UIL holdings, in 2015 announced it would make an $80 million or 2.5 percent investment in the Kinder Morgan pipeline. Berkshire and UIL are now part of the publicly-traded Avangrid.

Berkshire Gas opposed PLAN-NE intervention

In rejecting a petition for intervention from the anti-pipeline group PLAN-NE, DPU hearing officer Laurie Weisman said the group "has not shown that it is substantially and specifically affected by this proceeding."

Berkshire itself had opposed granting the group full intervenor status, saying DPU filing that protecting ratepayers is not the primary purpose of PLAN-NE.

"The fact that some of PLAN's members may coincidentally be customers of Berkshire is an insufficient basis for intervention. PLAN's stated organizational purpose is not as a ratepayer advocacy group," wrote a lawyer for Berkshire Gas.

At the Greenfield hearing, PLAN-NE president Kathryn Eiseman countered that the coalition's corporate purpose "specifically includes protecting consumer interests in relation to proposed and existing gas infrastructure." She said the DPU's justifications for denying the group full intervenor status "do not hold up."

DPU hearing officer Laurie Ellen Weisman in her ruling instructed Boston attorney Richard Kanoff to submit to the department by Sept. 8 a plan for "minimizing any appearances of conflict, real or perceived."

Kanoff, an energy lawyer, represents the six legislators, along with Deerfield, Hadley, and Montague in their role as full intervenors. However, Kanoff is also representing PLAN-NE as a limited participant, and has worked with the group since March of 2015. Weisman wrote that Kanoff's diverse role "raises procedural, privilege, and confidentiality concerns."

In 2015 the DPU denied PLAN-NE and Kulik intervenor status related to the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline. The rejection was appealed to the state's Supreme Judicial Court, but the case was dismissed as moot following the pipeline's demise.

Gov. Charlie Baker's Department of Energy Resources will also enjoy full intervenor status in the matter of Berkshire Gas and its five-year plan. Conferences and an evidentiary hearing will be held in Boston.
Trevor Cox

Trevor Cox of Lynnfield, Massachusetts is accused of forcing his way into a Maine home and assaulting a deputy sheriff at the scene.

(York County Jail )

NEWFIELD, MAINE -- A Massachusetts man was arrested Saturday after authorities said he broke into a home in Maine, grabbed a woman living there and then attacked a deputy sheriff who had responded to the scene.

Officials from the York County Sheriff's Office responded to a home in Newfield Saturday evening after receiving a report of a robbery in progress.

"The caller stated a man was on her porch screaming that somebody was after him and that he had taken drugs," the sheriff's office said in a news release. "The woman opened the door and a male forced his way in."

The man, later identified by police as 19-year-old Trevor Cox of Lynnfield, Massachusetts, is accused of grabbing a woman by the wrist when he entered the home. The woman had told her two children, ages 12 and 17, to go into another room.

As Cox allegedly held the woman, the family dog began to growl. Cox released his grip, authorities said.

While Cox was still inside the home, a car drove into the home's driveway with two other men inside. The men were apparently Cox's friends. One man got out and tried to tell Cox to leave.

Cox did leave and walked onto the porch. The woman slammed the door and called police.



"The woman heard yelling on the porch between the two men and the intruder got agitated and put his fist through her living room window," the sheriff's office said. "The vehicle containing his two accomplices fled the scene before the first deputy arrived."

The deputy sheriff confronted Cox, who was now bleeding from his forearm. The deputy sheriff handcuffed Cox, but he was able to break free. Authorities said Cox began punching the deputy in the face, head and neck area with the hand that was still handcuffed.

"The deputy tried to restrain the intruder but he would not stop resisting and fighting,"according to a news release. "The deputy was forced to Taser the man several times but after the Taser completed its cycle, the man continued the assault on the deputy."

Another deputy sheriff arrived on scene and authorities were able to control Cox. The injured sheriff was treated at a local hospital. Cox was treated at a local hospital for minor injuries and evaluated for drug abuse.

Cox was booked at the York County Jail on charges of assault on a police officer and aggravated criminal trespassing. He is being held on $5,000 cash bail.

Authorities said a woman saw the first deputy sheriff struggling with Cox and stopped. She offered to help the deputy sheriff, but other law enforcement officers arrived at the same time. The woman left the area and authorities are hoping to identify her and thank her.
ROCKWOOD, Maine -- A 54-year-old woman has died after falling 10 feet from the sleeping loft of her sister's home in Rockwood, Maine, in what authorities are calling a "tragic accident."

Kendra Donovan, from the Buzzards Bay area of Massachusetts, died early Friday when she fell from the loft, the Somerset County Sheriff's Office said.

Donovan apparently got up, possibly disoriented in the dark and fell, Sheriff's Department Chief Deputy James Ross told the Morning Sentinel. The loft was only partially enclosed by railings.



The death is not considered suspicious, authorities said, and neither drugs nor alcohol was involved.

Officers who investigated "found it to have been a tragic accident" Ross said.

The call reporting the accident occurred about 5:14 a.m., authorities said. No other details were released.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic rival Hillary Clinton continued to push their policy platforms and campaign messages this week, despite facing respective criticism over immigration proposals and personal email servers.

Trump, who set his campaign's focus on immigration, traveled to Mexico ahead of a high-profile policy speech to meet with President Enrique Pena Nieto.

The visit, as well as the businessman's decision to double-down on hardline immigration policies, however, drew pushback from Democrats and some former Mexican officials.

Clinton, who tried to steer focus toward her health care-related policies, meanwhile, continued to face criticism over her use of a private email server as secretary of state, as the FBI released documents relating to its investigation into the matter.

Here's what happened in presidential politics this week:

Trump questioned Clinton's judgement after top aide, Huma Abedin's, announced separation from husband Anthony Weiner.

Clinton strategist @benensonj on Trump weighing in on Huma Abedin's separation: "He thinks everything is about him." https://t.co/z4tVzPENZJ  New Day (@NewDay) August 30, 2016

Jumping on the news that Abedin would separate from Weiner after a New York Post story suggested he exchanged sexually explicit messages with another woman, the GOP presidential nominee accused Clinton of having poor judgement.

"I know Anthony Weiner well, and she will be far better off without him," he said of Abedin in a Monday statement issued by his campaign. "I only worry for the country in that Hillary Clinton was careless and negligent in allowing Weiner to have such close proximity to highly classified information. Who knows what he learned and who he told?

"It's just another example of Hillary Clinton's bad judgment. It is possible that our country and its security have been greatly compromised by this."

Clinton campaign strategist Joel Benenson called Trump's remarks "another one of the outlandish things this man tosses about."

"This is what he does," he said. "He thinks everything is about him, his political opportunism. It shows why the man is temperamentally unfit to be president of the United States."

Anne Holton, wife of Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine campaigned in Boston.

Holton, the former Virginia secretary of education, traveled to Massachusetts Wednesday for a Women for Hillary roundtable at Suffolk University Law School and phone bank at a Boston field office.

Talking to roundtable attendees, Holton took the feminist perspective on her husband playing a supporting role in Clinton's White House run.

"Isn't it about time we have strong men be willing to step up to the plate and be supportive of strong women? We've done it for them all these years," she said.

Holton further stressed Clinton's commitment to issues like equal pay and the availability of paid family and medical leave and sick leave.

Trump faced criticism over his Mexico visit, meeting with president.

The billionaire businessman, who has made hardline immigration policies a keystone of his 2016 White House bid, drew pushback from Mexican officials Wednesday after meeting with Pena Nieto.

Former Mexican President Vincente Fox told CNN that he doesn't understand why Pena Nieto extended an invitation to the billionaire businessman, saying he thinks it's "nothing more than a political stunt."

"He is not welcome to Mexico by 130 million people," he said of the GOP presidential nominee in a Wednesday morning interview. "We don't like him, we don't want him, we reject his visit...Trump is using Mexico, using President Pena to boost his sinking poll numbers."

Former Mexican first lady Margarita Zavala de Calderon also stressed that the GOP nominee is "not welcome" in the country.

"Mexicans have dignity and repudiate his hate speech," she wrote on Twitter early Wednesday -- a message which her husband, former Mexican President Felipe Calderon retweeted.

Trump delivered a high-profile speech detailing his campaign's immigration policy.

Highlighting his plans to address immigration Wednesday, the Republican presidential nominee stressed that he would not provide amnesty to millions of people living in the country illegally, if elected.

The businessman, who detailed his policy platform during a prime time speech, further pledged to build a wall along the United States' southern border with Mexico, increase the number of border patrol agents and create a special task force to prioritize the deportation of criminals.

Clinton's campaign slammed Trump's speech as "his darkest" yet, contending that the billionaire businessman is promoting divisiveness and hate through his hardline policy proposals.

A report found that taxpayer dollars helped subsidize Clinton Foundation staff pay.

A Politico investigation based on General Services Administration records reportedly found that taxpayer dollars under the Former President's Act were used to purchase equipment and servers at the Clinton Foundation, as well as to supplement several aides' pay and benefits.

Although the investigation does not reveal any illegal activities, the news outlet said, it offers additional insight into the ties between the non-profit foundation, the U.S. State Department under Hillary Clinton's leadership and aides' business dealings -- relationships which have plagued the former secretary of state's Democratic White House run in recent weeks.

According to Politico, records reveal how Bill Clinton's representatives directed spending allocated by the GSA under the act -- which authorizes the agency to fund pensions, correspondence, support staff and travel of former presidents -- to supplement staff income and provide them with federal government benefits.

The GSA, however, offered that former presidents have "broad discretion" over how they spend the more than $96,000 provided each year for staffing.

Polls found most voters support third party candidates' inclusion in presidential debates.

More than three quarters of likely voters surveyed said they believe third party candidates should be included in the presidential debates this fall, according to a Suffolk University/USA Today poll released Thursday.

Support for allowing third party candidates to compete in the debates was echoed in a Morning Consult survey also released Thursday, which found that more than half of registered voters believe Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson should partake in the event and 47 percent believe the Green Party's Jill Stein should.

David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, offered that the 76 percent of likely voters who support third party candidates participating in presidential debates, suggests Americans are open to entertaining other options.

"The U.S. electorate is welcoming - with open arms - serious third-party candidates into the national conversation," he said in a statement.

Clinton released a plan to address price hikes for EpiPens, other medications.

The former secretary of state announced a plan Friday to protect Americans against what she called "unjustified price hikes" of the life-saving allergic reaction treatment and other long-available prescription drugs.

Clinton, who recently called on drug manufacturer Mylan to lower the price of EpiPens, proposed a set of actions that would allow the government to take action when such price hikes put public health at risk, according to her campaign.

Stressing that there have been too many examples of drug companies excessively raising prices for long-standing, life-saving medications with little-to-no new innovation, Clinton argued that "it's time to move beyond talking about these price hikes and start acting to address them."

The FBI released documents related to Clinton's email investigation.

Among the documents the federal agency made public online include a summary of Clinton's July 2 interview with FBI officials over allegations that she stored or sent classified information on a personal email server as secretary of state, the agency reported.

The FBI, which also announced the release of a factual summary of its investigation into the matter, attributed its decision to make the information public to having received several requests for the documents.

According to the documents, the FBI investigation and forensic analysis did not find evidence confirming Clinton's email accounts or mobile devices were compromised by cyber means.

Its inability to obtain all mobile devices and various computer components associated with the account, however, prevented it from conclusively determining whether classified information transmitted and stored was compromised, the FBI noted.

Trump's campaign contended that the documents show Clinton "cannot be trusted with the presidency."

"The notes from her FBI interview reinforce her tremendously bad judgment and dishonesty," campaign spokesman Jason Miller said in a statement. "Clinton's secret email server was an end run around government transparency laws that wound up jeopardizing our national security and sensitive diplomatic efforts."
Steven Wright

Boston Red Sox starting pitcher Steven Wright delivers to the Tampa Bay Rays in the first inning of a baseball game at Fenway Park, Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2016, in Boston. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)

(Elise Amendola)

OAKLAND, Calif. - Steven Wright will miss his next scheduled start for the Red Sox in San Diego and there's a chance he could miss more time.

The knuckleballer admitted on Saturday afternoon in Oakland that he's been pitching at about "50 percent" since returning from the disabled list with right shoulder inflammation on Aug. 26.

"It's OK, it's not great," Wright said of his shoulder. "Trying to throw through a lot of the pain and the discomfort and it's not getting better. I'm no help going out there at 50 percent. The last two games I didn't have the same effectiveness with my knuckleball, I had some pain throwing, I tried throwing through it and it's at that point where I need another set of eyes on my shoulder, hopefully it's nothing more serious."

Wright injured the shoulder on Aug. 8 in Los Angeles when he was serving as a pinch-runner and dove back to a bag, jamming his shoulder.

Clay Buchholz is expected to make the Tuesday start in San Diego.

The Red Sox placed Wright on the disabled list on Aug. 14 and he returned 12 days later but was nearly as effective as he had been before the injury.

Wright made two starts, allowing nine runs in 10 innings of work. Prior to the injury, he'd post a 3.01 ERA in 22 starts for the Red Sox.

"The tough read on this has been that, he was able to make the two previous starts, even with some downtime, the building back, the ability to get to nearly 100 pitches," manager John Farrell said. "That doesn't suggest that there's something severe here, and yet he doesn't feel quite right."

Wright said it hasn't been one start that's aggravated the shoulder, but that he thought he could pitch through the pain upon his return.

"Not so much worse, it just kind of plateaued," Wright said. "That's kind of why I went out there to try and throw through it because we had such significant gains and structurally with the MRI everything was clean. Just more about pain management because structurally I was fine. For me it was more about the tolerance of the bursitis. It got to the point where it wasn't getting any better. So hard for me to throw a pitch with conviction because every time I did throw it the way I did pre-injury, it would just hurt and I felt like I was up there basically throwing batting practice."

Wright will see a shoulder specialist in Los Angeles this week, but a date has yet to be set because of the holiday weekend.

Wright wouldn't rule out getting a cortisone shot. He's not ready to rule out the rest of his season, though.

"I think that's the hardest thing mentally to get over is that it's structurally fine it's just the feeling that I'm getting is that it doesn't feel right and it doesn't feel like stuff I've had before and that's why it's getting shut down for right now," he said.

Follow MassLive.com Red Sox beat reporter @jcmccaffrey on Twitter. She can be reached by email at jmccaffr@masslive.com.
If you are going to have a blood pressure test within the next 2 days, you might want to keep off the coffee. Research published in the American Journal of Hypertension has found that patients who drink the occasional cup could be reducing the effect of medication for lowering blood pressure. Share on Pinterest Drinking coffee before a blood pressure test can affect the results. Coffee is popular around the world. In the United States, over 50 percent of people drink coffee, jointly spending some $40 billion a year on the beverage. Studies show that caffeinated coffee can acutely increase blood pressure, but decaffeinated coffee does not. Caffeine seems to be a major factor in affecting blood pressure, and experts suggest that as such, it is also a trigger for cardiovascular events. However, people who consume coffee and caffeine regularly are not thought to face such a risk, because they develop a tolerance. This suggests that the intervals at which people drink coffee are of some significance. However, for occasional rather than regular consumers, it might be a different story.

How does coffee affect a blood pressure test? A team from Western University and Lawson Health Research Institute in London, Ontario, in Canada, came up with some surprising results when they measured the effect of occasional coffee consumption on blood pressure, and especially how coffee consumption impacts the action of calcium channel blockers. Calcium channel blockers are a type of medication for lowering blood-pressure. They are commonly prescribed for patients with hypertension. Calcium channel blockers, such as felodipine, relax and widen the blood vessels, making it easier for blood to flow. In this way, they reduce blood pressure. Led by Dr. David Bailey, a Lawson Scientist and researcher at Westerns Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, the team wanted to find out what would happen to the blood pressure if a person abstained from caffeine long enough to eliminate the caffeine from the blood. They expected to see a higher blood pressure the next time a person drank coffee, because eliminating caffeine and then consuming it again could cancel out the pressure-lowering effects of felodipine.
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These findings and the earlier study only became possible because of technological advances in gene sequencing and computational analysis. These studies ultimately involved review of 1.5 billion bits of data."This study builds on our previous genetic research on colorectal cancer," said Sanford Markowitz, MD, PhD, a co-author and principal investigator of the $11.3 million federal gastrointestinal cancers research program (GI SPORE) that includes this project. "It illustrates the extraordinary impact that dedicated, collaborative teams can make when they combine scientific experience and ingenuity with significant investment."Announced in 2011, this GI SPORE program is one of just five in the country. Dr. Markowitz, Ingalls Professor of Cancer Genetics at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine and a medical oncologist at UH Seidman Cancer Center, included studies of the disease's behavior in minority patients as part of his team's original grant application. The disparity between colorectal cancer rates in African Americans and other groups has long existed; the most recent federal statistics, for example, put age-adjusted incidence at 46.8 cases for every 100,000 African Americans, and 38.1 cases for every 100,000 Caucasian Americans. Yet scientists have struggled to determine what factors -- biological, economic, environmental, or others -- account for this disparity.From the very start, Dr. Markowitz and colleagues believed the answer to this question would be found through genetic analysis."Identifying gene mutations has been the basis of all the new drugs that have been developed to treat cancer in the last decade," Dr. Markowitz said. "Many of the new cancer drugs on the market today were developed to target specific genes in which mutations were discovered to cause specific cancers.""We wondered if colon cancer is the same disease molecularly in African American individuals as it is in Caucasian individuals. Or could colon cancer be the same disease behaving differently in one population compared to another," he said. "This study gave us our answer. Colon cancer in African American patients is a different disease molecularly."The scientists made their discovery by using DNA sequencing to compare 103 colorectal cancer samples from African American patients with 129 colorectal cancer samples from Caucasian patients, all of whom had received care at UH Case Medical Center in Cleveland. The scientists examined 50 million bits of data from 20,000 genes in every cancer.Source: Eurekalert
Russia This Week is a weekly review by the MEMRI Russian Media Studies Project, covering the latest Russia-related news and analysis from media in Russia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe.

Cartoon Of The Week



Pravdareport.com, September 1, 2016.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel portrayed as the Fuhrer of the EU, the new Nazi regime.

Zakharova Dixit

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova is one of the most-quoted Russian officials. She is known for using colorful language when describing Russian foreign policy in her weekly press briefings. The following are Zakharova's quotes of the week:



(Source: Mid.ru)

The US Is "Hunting" Russian Citizens

"We have repeatedly stated that the US is 'hunting' Russian citizens. We have already warned Russian people that Washington and the relevant law enforcement agencies in the US are truly hunting our compatriots. We believe that this is an element of an anti-Russian campaign. Such actions on the part of the US violate all conceivable norms of international law."

(Mid.ru, August 31)

Calls On Turkey To Avoid Strikes Against Kurds In Syria

"We are following closely the Turkish armed forces' actions in northern Syria. We share Turkey's desire to combat the international scourge that is '[the]Islamic State'...We urge our Turkish partners to select carefully their targets in this antiterrorist operation and avoid strikes against positions held by opposition and ethnic minority groups, including the Syrian Kurds, already combating ISIS. Let me say once more that the main task now is to fight as a common front and direct the efforts of all concerned parties against the terrorist threat, above all ISIS."

(Mid.ru, August 31)

US Policy Has No 'Consistency' In Syria

"Is there at least some consistency in US diplomacy today in what it is doing? Hours-long, grueling talks between the heads of the Russian and US foreign services have just ended, in the course of which the settlement of the Syria crisis was discussed along two tracks: the fight against terrorism and the political process. What forcible scenario could be considered in a few days, when for several hours and in the course of numerous telephone conversations, which are definitely not going to end any time soon, the issue of a peaceful resolution of the Syria conflict has been constantly discussed? There should be some consistency.

"There is the sense that sometimes our US colleagues use the UN Security Council for their own PR ends. This is another dangerous trend, because the UN Security Council is the supreme executive body of the entire present system of international law. It is unacceptable to use it as a platform for one's own PR campaign, including possibly for some domestic political purposes...The main question is what the US, our American colleagues, are after, because unfortunately, at least on the Syrian track, we have lately been seeing a kind of 'shooting with both hands,' so to speak, in an unknown direction. [Their] aims are incomprehensible. [Their] actions are chaotic. There is no consistency."

(Mid.ru, August 31)

Accusations That The West Is Exploiting The Humanitarian Situation In Aleppo

"Obviously, the sponsors and patrons of the armed Syrian opposition have again failed to do their 'homework', and are either unwilling or unable to exert influence on the antigovernment forces. They are in effect allowing the entire population of Aleppo to be held hostage to unseemly political games, and are tacitly approving the brazen demands of the militants in what can be interpreted as an attempt to aid extremists and terrorists. One gets the impression that instead of seeking to ease the suffering of the residents and normalize the situation in Aleppo, some are eager to achieve a different goal - to make the Aleppo tragedy and the lack of a solution front-page news for as long as possible. The current situation yet again confirms that the opposition, which is paradoxically preventing relief to the districts under its control, cannot be controlled. We hope that our colleagues from the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) will finally bring to heel their impudent clients to prevent the complete failure of UN humanitarian efforts in Aleppo".

(Mid.ru, August 29)

Quotes Of The Week:

Speaking at the MGIMO University, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said:

"I don't see any prerequisites for the new edition of the Cold War to become a reality...Our American colleagues have developed a genetic code whereby the most important thing is that they decide everything themselves. But life is more complicated than a genetic code. So I hope that in the historically foreseeable future they will eventually come to understand the need to be in sync with the objective trends of global development."

"[We] are ready to resume normal full-fledged relations with the European Union and the United States, but only on an equal basis without any attempts to turn these relations into a one-way street."

"[Western partners] operate on the premise that they 'have been calling the shots' in this world for several centuries now (which is, in fact, true), and want to continue to dictate solutions to all problems from their own perspective. In fact, they claim to own 'the monopoly on the truth' and use, to this end, a wide range of mostly illegitimate coercion methods and unethical means of pressure on their partners ranging from rewriting history and conducting powerful and fairly aggressive information campaigns to imposing unilateral sanctions, sponsoring coups, fomenting regional conflicts, and even engaging in direct military interventions."

"We refer to our foreign policy as a 'multi-vector' foreign policy as we strive to cover all the bases while maintaining our independence, because Russia as a country, no matter what name it had throughout history, has always pursued a path of its own, which is what it is all about. We promote a policy which does not split the international community but rather consolidates it; we promote a peace-loving policy, which implies resolving problems through political and diplomatic methods and based on international law."

"The situation in Ukraine is very complicated. The crisis in that country has truly become a catalyst of processes that have laid bare the imperfections of the security structure in Europe and the Euro-Atlantic region as a whole and the systemic flaws of this structure, which could not be reformed for many years. The proposals that we put forward came up against the egoism of political elites in a number of states, which clearly sought to obtain geostrategic advantages at the expense of other countries' interests, grossly violating the solemn declarations that were made in the 1990s at the OSCE and between Russia and NATO at the highest level, namely that security is indivisible and no one [country] will strengthen its security at the expense of the security of others. These political obligations were grossly violated and continue to be violated. Our proposals to upgrade the status of these obligations from ordinary political declarations to legally binding obligations were rejected out of hand. I hope that our partners remember this. If they forgot, we will, of course, remind them about it. It will no longer be business as usual either with the US or with the EU, let alone with NATO."

(Mid.ru, September 1)



Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (Source: Mid.ru, September 1, 2016)

In The News:

Putin On Leadership

Speaking at a Vladivostok school Putin claimed that arrogance was not a leadership trait a person should not hold his nose up and think he was better than others "as soon as a person begins to assume that he is better than everybody, from that moment he begins to lose. Ambition is good being puffed up is bad."

(Interfax.ru, September 1)

Russia In Syria And The Kurdish Issue

The US slammed Russia's announcement that it killed ISIS spokesman Mohammad Al-Adnani, saying that the US killed the terrorist leader. The US defense official said: "We conducted a strike that targeted Al-Adnani. We are assessing the results of that strike." According to Russia, Al-Adnani has been killed in Aleppo as a result of an airstrike delivered by Russia's Sukhoi Su-34 bomber.

(Cnn.com, August 31; Tass.ru, August 31)

On August 26, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met in Geneva, to reach a deal on Syria. The negotiation lasted for 12 hours and did not conclude with any signed document. A Russian expert on Middle East, affairs Aleksandr Shumilin, said in his blog on the Russian outlet Echo Moscow that the fact that no documents of the meeting were made public might lead to a conclusion that the main goal of Lavrov and Kerry is to create negotiations for the sake of negotiations, while imitating the process' progress.

(Eecho.msk.ru, August 27)

Concerning the role of the Kurds in the political process in Syria, Lavrov stated during the news conference in Geneva: "The Kurds must remain part of Syria and part of the settlement, rather than a variable that could be used to split the country as this will result in a chain reaction across the entire region. No one wants this."

(Mid.ru, August 26)

Commenting on the Kurdish issue in Syria and the Turkey's intervention in northern Syria, Maxim A. Suchkov, an expert at the Russian International Affairs Council, said: "There's a strong opinion among many experts in Russia that of all other reasons, the Kurdish issue was a prime incentive for Ankara to seek reconciliation with Russia...Given the Russian military presence in Syria, Turkey could do little to change what it perceived as a negative trend for its interests [i.e. Russia helping the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD)]. So the rapprochement was instrumental in helping to change this."

(Rudaw.net, August 29)

Commenting on Turkey's intervention in Syria, the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet wrote: "Recently, Ankara has been trying to change the tide by accommodating its foreign policy to its new enemies, namely the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, Russia and Iran - perhaps at the expense of losing some friends like Saudi Arabia. Thank God, Turkey's old Western allies have no problem with this rapprochement concerning Syria, but Western tolerance for friendship with Russia does not extend to relations with NATO. Therefore, Turkey's foreign policy change still faces some very steep challenges."

(Hurriyetdailynews.com, August 31)

As mentioned above, during her weekly briefing, Zakharova called on Turkey to avoid strikes against "Syrian Kurds," already combatting ISIS.

(Mid.ru, August 31)

Russia has expressed its reservations about the UN report, which accuses the Syrian government forces of responsibility for the chemical attacks in the province of Idlib. Russia's Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin said that the data contained in the report of the OPCW-UN joint mission to investigate chemical attacks in Syria does not suffice to place responsibility for some incidents on Damascus and pursuantly impose Security Council sanctions against it.

(Tass.com, August 31)

Russia-Iran Relations

Iran has deployed the Russian-supplied S-300 surface-to-air missile defense system around its Fordow underground uranium enrichment facility.

(Rt.com, August 29)



Fordow Nuclear and Physics Research Center (Source: Rt.com, August 29)

Video - Iran deploys S-300 missiles at Fordow nuclear facility: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z9tMGz45x8

In an interview to Iranian media outlet Tasnimnews.com, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said that Russia agrees with Iran that during the nuclear negotiations some countries had displayed a notable spirit of partnership, but during the JCPOA's implementation they dropped this attitude and are refusing to remove the obstacles that they themselves created. Russia believes that the obstacles should be removed and unilateral actions have no place in international relations. He said that the JCPOA's implementation will be followed up during the foreign ministers meeting in New York, adding that was crucial to agree on better conditions in implementing the JCPOA. The Russian Deputy Minister also stated that Russia will pressure the US to achieve this matter and that the JCPOA will be an immediate priority for the next US president. However, Russia hopes that the next American president will not reevaluate the JCPOA.

Discussing the Syrian crisis, Ryabkov said that Russia and the US are but a few steps away from reaching a major agreement on Aleppo. He added that during the Syrian negotiations, Russia would agree on something with the US, and the next day Washington would discuss additional conditions and demands. However, Ryabkov stated that progress has been made and that Russia consult with its "Iranian friends" about what is happening. He also commented that Moscow is interested in strengthening its military cooperation with Washington in Syria and Russia will welcome deeper cooperation such as intelligence-sharing and contacts between military forces. "Sometimes Americans do something that is clear and necessary, but later they panic and think about what others are saying about what they did and withdraw from that. This is unfortunate," Ryabkov stated. The Deputy Minister also said that Russia did not "use" Iran's Hamadan Air base, stating that "there was coordination between the two countries, and this was the result that Tehran and Moscow mutually reached." He declared himself "happy" that the S-300 missile defense system is in Iran, and that it can be used to strengthen Iran's national defense and security.

(Tasnimnews.com, September 1)



Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov (Source: Tasnimnews.com, September 1)

Russia-Germany Relations

While German Chancellor Angela Merkel maintains a stern approach towards Russia, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke in favor of inviting Russia to a G8 meeting. Steinmeier said: "The conflicts in Syria and Ukraine demonstrate our interest not to exclude Russia from close cooperation between the world's leading economies...If substantial progress is made in eastern Ukraine and at the talks on the ceasefire in Syria, the G7 member-countries will be able to discuss this issue with Moscow. The key to returning to the G8 is in Moscow."

(Rbth.com, August 31)

In an article published in German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Steinmeier called for a new arms control deal with Russia. He said that a new nonproliferation deal on conventional arms would be "a proven means for transparency, risk prevention and trust building."

(Dw.com, August 26)

Steinmeier wrote on his SPD party's website Vorwarts (Forward): "It is our duty to maintain dialogue [with Russia] in order not to only minimize the risk of military misunderstandings, but, even more, to facilitate the process of trust building...Where do we get in foreign policy when the desire to understand is being labeled as a dirty word?"

(Sputniknews.com, August 25)

German media outlet Thelocal.de published an article, titled "Is German Diplomacy Getting too Chummy with Russia?" The article claimed that Steinmeier's idea of detente with Russia led critics to deride the German Foreign Minister as a Russland-Versteher (Russia-sympathizer) "due to his seemingly sympathetic stance, especially in comparison with his party's conservative coalition partners in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), like Chancellor Angela Merkel." The German media outlet continued: "While Merkel earlier this summer blamed Russia's actions in Ukraine for a breakdown of trust with NATO, Steinmeier himself appeared to point a finger at NATO, warning it in June against 'warmongering'. And while Merkel has insisted that the sanctions against Russia for their interference in Ukraine hold, Steinmeier said in June that he was in favor of gradually lifting the sanctions if Russia showed it was making progress on the peace plan for Ukraine."

Thelocal.de also referred to criticism of Steinmeier's policy towards Russia that appeared in the mass circulation German tabloid Bild and titled "Steinmeier Should not Speak the Language of the Kremlin". The paper's journalist cited a recent speech by Steinmeier at Ural State University in Russia, in which the German FM was skeptical about the concern aroused in Europe by Russia's annexation of Crimea. The correspondent was stupefied by the remark:"The fact that a German foreign minister asked before a Russian audience whether one should be worried when Russian tanks are rolling through a sovereign land mocks the consensus that Europe's borders should never again be pulled apart by force."

(Thelocal.de, August 29)



Russian President Vladimir Putin with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. (Source: Thelocal.de)

Nord Stream 2 Gas Pipeline

At the same time, Germany has approved the building of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which connects Northern Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea. The 1.200 km. Nord Stream 2 pipeline would run alongside the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. Russia's Gazprom and its European partners Engie, OMV, Shell, Uniper and Wintershall submitted an earlier application to establish the joint venture to antimonopoly regulators in Germany and Poland. Germany approved the decision but the Polish regulator presented objections. Later, the companies withdrew their joint venture application under Nord Stream-2, which they had furnished to the Polish authority. First Deputy Energy Minister Alexei Teksler said that "chances to revive the project remain. All the parties confirmed [their] interest in participation, but the participation format undergoes changes due to approval problems."

During a recent visit to Sweden, US Vice President Joe Biden said that the US regards Nord Stream 2 as a "bad deal" for Europe. He explained that the pipeline would "lock into greater reliance on Russia" and "will fundamentally destabilize Ukraine". American policy was guided by the considerations that: "No country should be able to use energy as a weapon...Russian gas can and should be a part of the European energy market, but that market must be open."

(Gazprom.com, Tass.com, September 1, Sverigesradio.se, August 25)



Nord Stream gas pipeline and Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline (Source: Gazprom.com)



(Source: Nord-stream2.com)

Speaking at the MGIMO University, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the US is trying to benefit from the cooled relations between Russia and the EU in order to supplant Russia and sell it liquefied natural gas on the European market. Lavrov said: "Apart from war and peace and the related issues, present-day diplomacy deals with practically everything without exception, including climate and energy, which remain subjects of grueling negotiations...energy. Serious political games are being played around [energy]. This is what is happening in Europe. This also involves gas transit via Ukraine, which has more than once demonstrated its complete unreliability, and our plans to diversify gas supply routes to Europe for EU members, build our own routes and expand western pipelines with eastern and southern pipelines. This also involves the EU's wish, while ignoring economic realities and its own financial interest, to politicize issues related to our gas supplies to Europe, and look for new suppliers to its own detriment. Meanwhile, the United States is trying to take advantage of the present cooling in our relations with the EU to foist on the Europeans its liquefied natural gas, which requires very expensive infrastructure, and once it is built, it will be very difficult to get rid of it."

(Mid.ru, September 1)

It is worth noting that the US government expanded the list of Russian individuals and legal entities subject to US economic sanctions. The list of those subject to sectorial sanctions has in particular been expanded to include a number of the Russian energy giant Gazprom's subsidiaries. Kremlin's spokesperson Dmitri Peskov said that Russia will retaliate.

(Vestnikkavkaza.net, September 2; Echo.msk.ru, September 2)

The Turkish Stream Gas Pipeline

Gazprom CEO Aleksey Miller went to Turkey to discuss the Turkish Stream pipeline project. The project was suspended after a Russian Su-24 aircraft was downed by a Turkey in November, 2015. Following the normalization of relations between Turkey and Russia, the Turkish Stream pipeline project has been revived.

On July 29, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said that the Turkish Stream gas pipeline system is becoming more attractive to Russia and Turkey, since the cost of gas transit through Ukraine is rising. Novak said: "Of course, if the cost of transit is higher, as our Ukrainian colleagues say, it will affect the cost of transportation and the final gas price for Turkey's consumers. Therefore, Turkey is interested in receiving gas directly, bypassing other transit countries." However, Novak added that work can begin only on the line servicing Turkish consumers, since work renewal on the line servicing EU consumers was contingent on a European Commission guarantee that it would not block the project. One part of the Turkish Stream was designed exclusively for Turkey's domestic consumers. However, as Putin explained during his August 9 meeting with Erdogan, the start of the second Turkish Stream pipeline to route energy to Europe depends on Brussels, and therefore work on the pipeline won't start any sooner. However, Putin said that work on the Turkish domestic pipeline will start soon.

It is worth noting, that during the meeting with Erdogan, Putin discussed the suspended South Stream pipeline project, which was slated to transport Russia's natural gas through the Black Sea to Bulgaria and via Serbia, Hungary and Slovenia onwards to Austria, and the possibility of resuming it. On that occasion, Putin said: "Now we see that Bulgaria would like to resume this project, but we incurred some losses due to the refusal of our European partners to carry out this project. So now we will not settle for just intentions and need absolutely rock solid legal guarantees. They have not been forthcoming."

(Rbth.com, July 29, 2016; Novinite.com, August 9, 2016. See MEMRI Special Dispatch No.6564, At Putin-Erdogan Meeting, Putin Says: 'Regarding The Full Restoration Of Relations - Do We Want It Or Not? Yes, We Want It And Will Do This'; Erdogan: 'Turkish-Russian Relations Are Not Limited To Trade And Economic Ties', August 10, 2016)

Russia-Netherlands Relations - Geert Wilders: 'Restoring Ties With Russia Is A Priority Direction'

On August 18-19, the Russian media quoted the founder and leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV) Geert Wilders calling for a Nexit referendum and then restore ties with Russia. In an interview with Russian newspaper Izvestia, Wilders said: "Brussels should not dictate who we can have economic and political relations with. Restoring ties with Russia is a priority direction for the traditionally trade oriented country which is what the Netherlands has always been. For centuries our countries have benefited from bilateral cooperation despite conflicts. And today lifting the anti-Russian sanctions is a mandatory condition for our positive future."

He then described the EU as an "expansionist monster" that makes decisions purely for its own intersts. Wilders predicted that the Netherland will be stronger outside the EU and via securing closer ties with Russia.

(Izvestia.ru, August 19; Sputniknews.com, August 19)



Dutch politician Geert Wilders cutting the Netherlands out of the EU flag (Source: Ria.ru)

Dutch fruit growers are being hit by Russia's import ban in retaliation for the EU embargo. Russia was the Dutch pear growers' biggest export market, but with that market now blocked, the surplus of apples and pears on the European market has depressed prices by as much as 30%.

(Dutchnews.nl, August 4)

Poland and Croatia Refuse To Send Election Observers To Duma Elections

"The Polish State Elections Commission regrettably informs that the tasks that it confronts in the period of the aforementioned elections, will not allow it to take advantage of the invitation." The Croats begged off by saying that they were actively preparing for their own parliamentary elections.

(Interfax.ru, August 30)

Russia-Poland Relations

Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo has said that the country is closely watching the developments of Russian military exercises, after Russian troops were put on full combat mode in regions surrounding Ukraine and the Baltic states, at the end of August. Szydlo said: "We know that what is happening today in the military relations between Russia and the countries in this part of Europe is to some extent a psychological game."

(Thenews.pl, August 25)

Lithuania Buys 88 Boxer Personnel Carriers



Boxer personnel carrier. (Source: Army-technology.com)

On August 22, 2016, Lithuania signed a contract for the purchase of 88 Boxer personnel carriers worth 385.6 million euro. Produced by the German-Dutch ARTEC consortium, the vehicles are fitted with Israeli-made turrets. The pro-kremlin think tank Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) stressed that this is the largest defense contract in the post-Soviet history of all the Baltic States. RIAC published the following comment: "The contract for the purchase of advanced and costly German armored vehicles is yet another sign of the militarization of the region. However, experience shows that short-term spending on military equipment and increasing the number of military personnel are not nearly as important for defense capabilities as sustained work and investments into mastering this equipment. Whether or not the country's politicians, who are often more than willing to quietly usher through large contracts that are likely bring them financial gain, forgetting completely about the army, will have the money or desire to do so is another question entirely. Lithuania's less prosperous neighbors have only been able to find the money to buy outdated CVR(T) armored vehicles from the United Kingdom (in the case of Latvia), and unarmed BMP CV90 chasses (Estonia), which they plan to equip themselves.

"In any case, even the modest efforts made by these countries are counterproductive against the backdrop of Russian militarization, as they create even more pressure to aggravate the situation to justify expenditures and whip up anti-Russia hysteria. Lithuania has committed itself to forming an army - albeit a relatively small one - that is equipped to European standards. The question is whether the country will have the willpower to stick it out to the end. We are able and should treat the statements made by Lithuanian politicians on history and military strategy with irony and sarcasm, but that still does not change the unequivocal answer to question: Does Russia need another Bundeswehr-esque infantry on Kalinigrad's doorstep?"

(Thelocal.de, August 22; Russiancouncil.ru, August 26)



Vk.com/13studiya, August 28

Russian President Vladimir Putin focusing on Kaliningrad.

Paralympic Games

The International Paralympic Committee banned Russia from the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Games, in South Korea.

Following the ban of Russia's Paralympic team from the Paralympics Games in Rio de Janeiro, Russia plans to hold alternative Paralympic games in Moscow for its banned para-athletes.

(Rbth.com, August 31)



Vitaly Podvitsky, vk.com/13studiya, August 28, 2016.

The US bought its Olympic medals.

Death Of Russian Journalist In Kiev Ruled A Suicide

On August 27, the Russian journalist Alexander Shchetinin was found dead in his Kiev apartment with a gunshot wound to his head and the gun was found next to his body. Shchetinin, who died on his birthday, was the founder of the Novy Region information agency and called Putin his personal enemy. The Ukrainian media outlet Kyiv Operatyvnyi reported that the case has been ruled a suicide. The media outlet reports that Shchetinin sent an email to one of his friends, saying that he wanted to kill himself.

(Pravda.com.ua, August 28; Facebook.com/KyivOperativ, August 28)

News In Brief

Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov's death was confirmed. Russia fears Islamic radicalization in the country. (Sputniknews.com, September 2; Rbth.com, Aug.31)

Russia resumed charter flights to Turkey on September 4-5. (Tass.com, August 29)

Recently, the Chechen capital of Grozny hosted approximately a hundred Muslim scholars-theologians and religious leaders from Russia and foreign countries. (Realnoevremya.com, September 1)

Germany assumed responsibility for air policing of the Baltic and its planes use the Estonian Amari air base (Postimees.ee, August 29)

On August 30, the Chinese Embassy in Kyrgyzstan was attacked by a terrorist suicide bomber. Security guards at the diplomatic mission were injured. (Mid.ru, Aug.31)

Strange But True

A family of Uzbek descent in the rural area of Vladimir decided to rename their son after president Putin, and henceforth his first name will be Putin. The decision came after the boy's grandfather, who adores Putin, heard that an Egyptian journalist had named his son after the Russian president.

(Lenta.ru, August 30)



(Source: Lenta.ru, August 30)
Dipa Karmakar, the 23-year-old athlete, became everyones apple of the eye after performing the Produnova vault at the Rio Olympics, which is believed to be the toughest of all and also known as the vault of death. Although she finished 4th in the vault finals and missed the bronze medal by just a few points, she garnered a lot of admirers across the world for her courage and talent. One such admirer is Simone Biles, who won gold at the vault finals.

 Reuters

According to Biles, Produnova vault is extremely tough and life-threatening and she was really impressed by Dipa for performing this. In fact, Biles even feels that the Produnova should be renamed as the Karmakar vault. Listening to this compliment is nothing but sheer pleasure for us. Biles is considered to be one of the best athletes and when such compliments come from her end, we feel more proud for Dipa and the skills and courage she has.

 Reuters

In fact, Dipa even mentioned to The Times Of India that, She is a champion and I got to meet her at Rio. She is incomparable, dont think any gymnast can match her. She told me that my routine on the vault should be called the Karmakar Vault, not Produnova. I was so happy that I told myself I will work very hard and one day, hopefully, there will be a vault in my name too.

Well, the feelings are mutual Dipa, we are so proud of you and we hope that a vault in your name comes soon. Dipa Karmakar is the only Indian female athlete to have successfully completed the Produnova vault. It was named after Yelena Produnova of Russia, who was the first person to complete this difficult vault in 1999.
Mother Teresa has been declared a saint by Pope Francis in a canonization ceremony today at the St. Peters Square at the Vatican City. Mother Teresa is honoured and respected globally for her efforts in India and a special Mass was also celebrated at the Missionaries of Charity, an order that was founded by her in Kolkata. In fact, large TV screens were installed at Mother House in Kolkata from where people could see the Vatican ceremony.

 Reuters

The ceremony saw thousands of pilgrims gathering at the St. Peters Square for the mass and the canonization including hundreds of sisters from Missionaries of Charity and more than 10 heads of state or government. In fact, nearly 1500 homeless people across Italy were also brought to Rome to be given the seats of honour at this celebration. In the ceremony, Cardinal Angelo Amato read a brief biography of the work done by Mother Teresa and then asked the Pope to canonize her in the name of the Church.

 Reuters

Nobel Peace Prize winner, Mother Teresa, died in the year 1997 and was beatified in 2003. Beatification is said to be the first step to sainthood. This decision is attributed to the miraculous cures of two sick people after Mother Teresas death. Moreover, in the year 2002, the Vatican also ruled that an Indian woman with stomach tumour was cured miraculously after praying to Mother Teresa. Another miracle case is that of a man who was suffering from multiple brain tumours.

 Reuters

Mother Teresa was born in the year 1910 as Agnese Gonxha Bojaxhiu and grew up in Skopje which is the modern republic of Macedonia. At the age of 19, she joined the Irish order of Loreto and then moved to India in 1929 where she taught at a school in Darjeeling. She then shifted to Kolkata in 1946 to help the poor and founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950. Mother Teresa is known for helping the people in need and when she was asked about her identity she said, By blood, I am an Albanian. By citizenship, I am an Indian. By faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to the heart of Jesus.

Source: BBC
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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.
Whether they're creeping eastward or hitching a ride on a migratory bird, one thing some Mid-Michigan veterinarians say is clear: The deer tick is here and in larger numbers than before.

The deer tick can infect dogs and humans with Lyme disease, which, if left untreated, causes in people a host of issues with joints, the heart and the nervous system. The tick must feed for somewhere between 24 to 48 hours in order for the disease to transmit.

Within a month of being infected, a person might experience a bull's-eye rash near the bite, and "fever, chills, headache, fatigue, muscle and joint aches, and swollen lymph nodes," according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While not the only tick in Michigan -- there's a more common variety in the state which doesn't harbor Lyme disease called the American dog tick -- the deer tick made headlines in the 2000s as it worked its way up the western coast of the Lower Peninsula from south of the state border.

It has maintained a foothold there ever since.

This year, some veterinarians in the Great Lakes Bay Region and the Flint area say they've seen a significant increase of both country and city dogs ridden with ticks.

"I've been in the practice a long time, we've rarely saw a tick," sais Connie Mall, a veterinarian at the Midland Animal Clinic. "That's not the case anymore."

Dan Deciechi, a veterinarian with the Fohey Veterinary Hospital in Clio, said this year he's had 18 cases of ticks needing to be removed from an animal and 11 cases of tick-borne illness in an animal.

Compare this to 11 instances of pulling off ticks and three tick-borne illnesses this time last year, he said.

"For the east side of the state, this seems to be the worst I've seen it," Deciechi said. "The majority of the Lyme disease dogs are those in the woods hunting, camping, but we've had a handful of regular backyard dogs without access to typical woods."

Apart from Lyme disease, which is less harmful to dogs than humans, some ticks can transmit Ehrlichiosis, which Deciechi said leads to anemia in dogs.

Medications are available in chewable and topical varieties, along with those in collar form, that protect dogs and other animals from ticks.

The veterinarians who identified the tick species on the dogs said deer ticks are the majority of what they're finding.

Some veterinarians such as Cheralyn Asa, who works at the Bangor Veterinary Clinic in Bay County, use ID cards to determine the type of tick. In the deer tick's most troublesome phase, when they're smallest and least noticeable, they're about the size of a poppy seed.

"We've been seeing deer ticks and brown dog ticks, more deer ticks than anything else," Asa said. "We noticed a really big jump between this year and last year. Before that, things seemed more steady."

So far this year, five people in the Tri-Cities and Flint area have been infected with Lyme disease, said Erik Foster, a medical entomologist with the Michigan Department of Health & Human Services.

But of those five -- one in Genesee County, two in Midland County and two in Saginaw County -- four cases were travel-related. Investigators don't know if the fifth person got it locally or through travel.

An August 2016 map sent out by the state's health department that labels counties as either having a known risk of Lyme disease or a potential risk shows Genesee, Midland, Bay and Saginaw counties in the clear.

The counties bordering that group, such as Shiawassee, Gratiot and Livingston, show a potential risk for a Lyme disease problem.

Deer ticks hitchhike on migratory birds and on deer, so it's possible for an isolated case or two in those counties dubbed no risk, Foster said.

The criterion for a county to be labelled as having a potential risk for Lyme disease is if there are "field confirmed populations of infected blacklegged ticks or laboratory confirmed human cases," according to the health department's risk map.

One of the reasons the state and other experts are skeptical of there being a large, thriving and breeding population of deer ticks in Mid-Michigan is that submissions to state labs for the identification of the ticks' variety and whether they harbor Lyme disease have been low, said Michigan State University Entomologist Howard Russell.

None of the six vets contacted for this story had sent their ticks in for identification and testing.

Russell said his lab has received some ticks from the Tri-Cities and Flint area. Most have been of the dog tick varieties, but there's been low numbers of deer ticks, he said.

"It indicates that they're present," he said. "I don't think they're a big problem yet there. I would expect they occur in very low numbers right now."

Those who want a tick identified can send a photo of the back of a tick to Russell's email, bugman@msu.edu. Foster said a tick submission to Russell led to the state's health department determining there was a deer tick problem in Ingham County, which is now listed as endemic for Lyme disease.

Russell tracked the deer ticks as they moved up the Lower Peninsula's western coast from south of the state border, then across the southern counties and now, he said, into the east.

The question of why deer tick populations have taken off in the Lower Peninsula since the 2000s but not before then is a puzzling one, Russell said.

Russell said he expects Mid-Michigan and the eastern Lower Peninsula to follow suit of the trajectory set before by deer tick populations on the western coast of the Lower and Upper Peninsulas.

"They're here to stay, for sure," he said. "They're not going anywhere."
LATHRUP VILLAGE -- A Navy veteran and convicted sex offender is facing child porn charges after a mother of a 14-year-old girl tipped off police about the pair's "online sexual relationship."

Mitchell Chadwick Stankiewicz, 22, is charged with online coercion and enticement of a minor, producing child pornography, receiving child pornography and sending obscene material to a minor, according to federal court documents filed Friday.

In June 2015, Stankiewicz pleaded guilty to sexual assault of a child and enticement of a person under 18 to engage in sexual activity, according to a U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General's Corps document.

He received a "bad conduct discharge," was forced to surrender all pay and allowance, and 6-months of confinement.

He is listed as a tier-two sex offender as a result of the charges.

The 22-year-old's fresh set of charges come from an alleged relationship with a 14-year-old, developed on the Whisper cellphone application.

Under the online alias of "Drowning Cactus," Stankiewicz exchanged sexually explicit images with the girl, in addition to vulgar messages, according to court documents.

Court documents include several explicit exchanges between the two, which were obtained by officers using an IP address linked to "Drowning Cactus" to connect the account to Stankiewicz.

The 14-year-old admitted to police that she used her cellphone to send nude photographs on the Whisper, according to court documents. Whisper is a free app that allows users to send messages and images anonymously.

Stankiewicz, who is in federal custody, is due in court 1 p.m. Sept. 6 for a detention hearing.
geraldford.jpg

Late President Gerald Ford during his 1978 visit to Flint that included a lecture at the University of Michigan-Flint.

(MLive.com File Photo)

FLINT, MI -- A lot of history comes with the University of Michigan-Flint after 60 years in the city, from the Vietnam War to space shuttle launch, the Sept. 11 attacks and numerous presidential campaigns.

The university is celebrating the milestone with a party next week at the Flat Lot in downtown Flint, as well as raising $60,000 for student support as part of the 60for60 Initiative in the Victors for Michigan-Flint campaign.

Here's a look back at the some interesting facts about the university, its students, and events that took place on its grounds over the years.

September 1956: Classes begin for 167 students for the first time at Flint College of the University of Michigan on the campus of Mott Community College, with the Mott Memorial building opened in fall 1957.

June 1958: The university, then a two-year school, celebrates its first graduation at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor. There were 76 seniors in the inaugural graduation class.

October 1963: Civil rights leader Malcolm X visited the university's campus, then on the grounds of Mott Community College on East Court Street, on behalf of the World Affairs Club.

1965: The Michigan State Board of Education approved a four-year college in Flint under the University of Michigan. The university officially changed its name to its current moniker in 1971.

1972: John Lennon recorded the song "John Sinclair" in support of the UM-Flint alum's prison sentence over two marijuana cigarettes. Sinclair was freed three days later.

March 1978: Former President Gerald R. Ford visited campus as a lecturer at the university, giving then-President Jimmy Carter a C-minus grade on his performance.

November 1994: Then-President Bill Clinton visited the campus to rally voters' support for Democratic congressional members during a mid-term election in his first term in office.

February 1997: After William S. White pledged $40 million to help the university purchase the AutoWorld property, implosion begins to clear room for a building named in his honor.

August 2008: The university opened its first space for student housing, the First Street Residence Hall. Students have also since taken up residence at the Riverfront building along the Flint River.

April 2014: Susan E. Borrego becomes the university's seventh chancellor, 33 years after William Moran was named the first after the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools granted accreditation to the Flint College of the University of Michigan in spring 1970.
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Rhonda Jones, a senior studio arts major, gets ready to leave after studying on the University of Michigan-Flint campus Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2016 in downtown Flint. Tegan Johnston | MLive.com

People visit the University of Michigan-Flint campus Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2016 in downtown Flint. Tegan Johnston | MLive.com

FLINT, MI - Audrey Lattie doesn't recall many parties taking place during her time at what came to be called University of Michigan-Flint.

In 1956, the foundations of the university Lattie attended sat on the grounds at Mott Community School that she called Flint Senior College.

There were no fraternities or sororities at the time, but Lattie did recall one aspect that took the staff coming from the parent school and Stanford University a bit aback among the student population.

"I remember one of them describing the buildings looking like factories, not looking like Ivy League," said Lattie, 81, a Flint native. "They were all surprised that we were pretty serious... the people were serious about getting their degrees."

The university is set to celebrate the six-decade milestone with an event from 8 p.m.-9:15 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 8, in the Flat Lot at the intersection of Saginaw and Kearsley streets in downtown Flint.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

It was a letter in 1837 by Ann Arbor resident Sarah C. Miles Case that called for a branch of the university to open in Flint.

But it wasn't until nearly 120 years later that a $1.6 million bond passed by voters to bring a four-year university to the city was added to a $1 million pledge from the C.S. Mott Foundation that the idea became a reality.David M. French was named first dean of the Flint College of the University of Michigan.

Susan Borrego, the university's seventh chancellor, said that push from the community to begin the school is part of what makes it a special place.

"A lot of times, universities move into other areas because they see a revenue source," she said. "What's really powerful for me and what attracted me here is this is a university that was born out of the will of the people of the city of Flint."

On Sept. 23, 1956, 167 students began to pursue degrees at the school in one of three programs -- business administration, teaching and liberal arts and sciences.

The Mott Memorial building was opened and dedicated the following year, with 76 seniors in the first graduating class in June 1958, according to the university's timeline.

A retired Mott Community College English professor, Lattie was part of the university's first graduating class in 1958 that took place at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor.

"We were kind of the stepchildren, but we were there," laughed Lattie, of the 76 graduates who lined up to receive their degrees at the historical stadium in June 1958. The event has ballooned to more than 1,000 in the spring 2016 commencement at Dort Federal Event Center in Flint.

The C.S. Mott Library came a few years later. Mott helped keep the university in the city and become a four-year school after threats to withdraw funding came when the Michigan State Board of Education discussed ending UM's involvement in 1965.

Its current name -- University of Michigan-Flint -- was officially established in 1971, with William Moran becoming the first chancellor in the school's history after it received accreditation as a four-year institution.

Flint Mayor Karen Weaver has witnessed the university's growth, including the Classroom Office building, or CROB, later named after French, in the downtown area in the late 1970s, as the university began moving toward its current riverfront location.

"I have a special place in my heart for University of Michigan-Flint. That's where I started college," she said. "It's an anchor for downtown. It's an anchor for Flint and one of the finest universities in the country."

Much like Lattie, Weaver was researching options for school and wasn't sure where to go.

"It's the University of Michigan. It's got that great reputation, great academic reputation," she said. "Who knows where I would be if I had not gotten that start?"

While Weaver attended graduate school at Michigan State University and bleeds green and white, "I do have great respect and admiration and I take pride in that I went to University of Michigan-Flint."

The university completed moving the last of its programs from the Mott campus to the riverfront area in summer 1988 and purchased the former Water Front Pavilion and skating rink from the city in September 1990.

Expansion continued in December 1995, after the Board of Regents accepted the AutoWorld property from the Flint Downtown Development Authority. It was imploded in February 1997 to clear space for the William S. White building.

Students officially moved onto campus in September 2008, after the First Street residence hall was opened, the first student housing building on campus.

Hundreds of other students have also taken up residence in the 16-story, 340,000-square-foot Riverfront Residence Hall and Banquet Center, which was donated to the university in December 2015 by Uptown Reinvestment Corp.

Future of UM-Flint in the city

The university furthered its footprint in downtown Flint in October 2015, with the purchase of a portion of FirstMerit's property, the 16,000-square-foot, 10-story north tower along Saginaw Street for $6 million that increased its space by 11 percent.

Architects will determine the best way to utilize the space, Borrego said. A strategic planning process begins this month.

Having seen the transition of the university into the city center, Lattie is hopeful for what it can bring to the city.

"I think it certainly helped revive downtown Flint," she said. "Having them present in the downtown area, all the little restaurants and clubs have all been beneficial. I think the students provide vitality to the downtown area because of their youth and energy."

Weaver said the university has shown they are invested in helping the city, working to identify and map where lead-tainted services lines are located to being pipe replacement for residents amid the water crisis.

"University of Michigan-Flint has always been a source of pride, a source of pride to help the city of Flint grow," she said. "They've not only been an anchor but part of the solution moving forward."

Nursing students also volunteered 100,000 hours for assistance in the water crisis, or 2,500, 40-hour work weeks, along with the university serving as a place for residents to pick up water resources.

"I feel like the community, in my two years here, has been very open to partnering with us," Borrego said.

She added it's important to foster that relationship with the community, much as students give back through volunteerism as part of clubs, organizations, and classes and fostering the university's place of purpose in the area.

The university also benefits the community, Weaver said, in providing students with a competitive edge for their future careers.

"That's important to know that I can stay right here and get an education that you can go anywhere with," she said. "You can compete with anybody."

University officials are looking for fields that foster community growth, including science, technology, engineering, and mathematics being pushed in secondary education, along with doctorate programs in the medical field to go along with 100-plus available fields of study.

With 80 percent of UM-Flint graduates remaining in Michigan, including roughly 60 percent in Genesee County, Borrego said it shows the potential of growth through education and the university's place in the region's future.

"I think it's a real privilege for us to be an anchor in downtown Flint and we look forward to the next 60-plus years," she said.
GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- Fire caused significant damage to a Madison Avenue SE house late Saturday, Sept. 3 and displaced two families.

Fire investigators were trying to determine the cause.

Firefighters responded to the fire, at 2134 Madison Ave. SE, just before 6:30 p.m.

Grand Rapids Fire Acting Battalion Chief Dave Noorman said the first firefighters at the scene could see flames on the first level.

Fire extended into the second floor before firefighters brought it under control.

The American Red Cross of Greater Grand Rapids was called to help the two families that lived in the rental house. The families consisted of eight adults and four children.

The fire initially was reported as a couch fire, but tenant Brianna Johnson said it was misreported.

Her sister was alone in the downstairs unit, sleeping on the couch, when she awoke to choking smoke in the apartment. She was able to safely evacuate, but did not know the fire's origin.
Donald Trump,Hillary Clinton

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, left, and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016 file photos.

(AP)

With less than 70 days left until the November presidential election, a state that's gone Democratic since 1988 has remained in the national conversation thanks to continued attention from presidential candidates and their surrogates.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and their respective vice presidential picks, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence and Virginia U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, have all visited Michigan at least once since the official party nominations.

Trump made his third appearance, since clinching the nomination, in Michigan Saturday, Sept. 3, where he vistied a Detroit church and gave an interview with Bishop Wayne T. Jackson of the Impact Network as part of his outreach to African American voters. His last Michigan appearance was at an Aug. 19 rally in Dimondale.

Clinton was last in Michigan Aug. 11, where she discussed her economic plan in a Warren manufacturing plant. That trip was her only personal appearance in Michigan since her nomination, but the campaign has been active in beefing up campaign staff and offices throughout the state.

Even third party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein are getting in on the Michigan action -- Stein, of the Green Party, spoke at a Sept. 3 campaign rally in Detroit, while Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, will address the Detroit Economic Club Sept. 14.

Dave Waymire, a partner with public relations firm Martin Waymire, said the two major party presidential candidates' activity in Michigan is indicative of their vastly differing campaign strategies.

Every time Trump comes to Michigan, he keeps his base engaged and helps drum up enthusiasm in a state the campaign has determined a is a potential pickup for Republicans, Waymire said. By contrast, Clinton's campaign has spent more time organizing at the grassroots level and relies less on her presence to encourage support, he continued.

"Her campaign in Michigan is more about the ground game, not her personality," Waymire said. "His is vice versa - it's all about his personality."

At this point in the election, Waymire said it will come down to which strategy will lead to voter turnout from the candidates' support base come Election Day.

The Real Clear Politics polling average for the Michigan presidential election shows Clinton ahead in the state by 8.6 points, although a recent survey from Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation Project found Trump and Clinton running nearly even in Michigan.

Former Michigan Republican Party chair Saul Anuzis said Michigan is a "purple state that can go red under the right circumstances."

Trump's strategy thus far has catered to his strengths, relying heavily on personal appearances and earned media to get his message out there, Anuzis said.

Whether that strategy is successful depends on whether he can keep the electorate motivated, but if Trump succeeds in breaking Michigan out of the "blue wall" of likely Democratic electoral votes, the state could be a key player in the election, Anuzis said.

"Both Democrats and Republicans and their surrogates keep coming back here -- in the political landscape that we're in, Michigan could be in play big," Anuzis said.

Matt Resch, president of Resch Strategies in Lansing, said the attention in Michigan is likely due to the fact that Trump believes he has something in the state.

Although there are many voters in Michigan that feel disaffected and distrustful in the government -- the types of voters Trump is looking to attract -- the Clinton campaign's Michigan activity shows the extensive experience she has in campaign planning.

"They know where their voters are, and they know what states they need to turn out," Resch said. "The ground game is critically important, because no one can win elections on TV commercials alone."

For Trump supporters, Resch said the Trump campaign's recent efforts in Michigan to bolster campaign staff is "better late than never," but also noted that Trump has tapped into voter sentiments that many political professionals are still trying to better understand and shouldn't be underestimated.
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Legislative leaders are looking at items like an energy overhaul and auto insurance changes as they return to Lansing Sept. 6.

(MLive file photo)

LANSING, MI -- There's one missing check mark on the list of major legislation Senate Majority Leader Arlan Meekhof set out to pass this year, and it's for energy reform. Going into fall, it's his top priority.

"Energy reform is a complex issue that impacts every citizen in Michigan. For the average person, energy boils down to cost and reliability. 'How will changes to energy policy affect my utility bill and will the lights come on when I flip the switch?'" Meekhof wrote in response to an inquiry from MLive.

The House and Senate are each considering different versions of changes to the state's energy laws. Each set of bills has been vetted by the relevant committee, but has not passed the full chamber.

The two men leading the way are Senate Energy and Technology Committee Chairman Sen. Mike Nofs, R-Battle Creek; and House Energy Policy Committee Chairman Rep. Aric Nesbitt, R-Lawton. Gideon D'Assandro, spokesman for House Speaker Kevin Cotter, R-Mt. Pleasant, said the two energy chairs had made progress through meetings this summer.

Lawmakers haven't met in Lansing since July 10. They return from that summer hiatus on Tuesday, Sept. 6.

Here's what else leaders are eyeing for the rest of 2016:

House Republicans: No-Fault, FOIA

Gideon D'Assandro, spokesman for House Speaker Kevin Cotter, said that the issues of no-fault auto insurance and FOIA were still outstanding.

The Senate passed Senate Bill 248, which would overhaul the state's no-fault auto insurance law in hopes of making it less expensive, in April of 2015. The House has been deliberating on it since then. D'Assandro said that House Insurance Committee Chairman Tom Leonard, R-DeWitt, has been talking with stakeholders.

"I think they've had some really productive discussions and it's something that you could see a lot more work on in the fall," D'Assandro said.

He said too that bipartisan legislation extending the Freedom of Information Act to the governor's office and providing some disclosure for the legislature was something the House could look at on the floor.

House Democrats: Energy, FOIA

"We are hopeful the House Republicans will begin to prioritize policies that will make our economy work for everyone -- not just the wealthy and well-connected -- and that means fixing our roads now, not in 2021, and making college more affordable for all families in our state," said the House Democrats in a statement.

"More specifically, we would like to see meaningful energy legislation move and the House pass the FOIA reform package of bills so that Michigan can join 48 other states in having an open and transparent government."

Flint water crisis reform

Senate Minority Leader Jim Ananich, D-Flint, would like to see the Senate pass meaningful reforms stemming from the Flint water crisis this year.

"Obviously, I'd like to see a number of reforms passed related to the Flint water crisis and the conditions that led to it, because strengthening oversight and protections for public health are important -- not just for my community, but also for so many others across Michigan. I believe refocusing on infrastructure is a part of this as well, but that is likely a longer-term project," Ananich said.

Cooperation between chambers

One measure that's been stuck in neutral is a bill to improve education for kids through focusing on third grade reading. But differences between the House and Senate versions put the bill in conference committee, where it's been since April of this year.

D'Assandro said Cotter was looking forward to finalizing that.

"He's looking forward to third-grade reading being wrapped up, trying to reach a deal with the Senate. I think we're getting close on what a compromise deal might look like," D'Assandro said.

Ananich is hoping for bi-partisan cooperation as well as cooperation between chambers on education issues.

"I also believe, based on the issues we're seeing in our schools -- including scores that are below where they need to be, the threat of closing schools, the funding adequacy study earlier this year and a lot of unfinished business -- that education has to be a bipartisan, bicameral priority this year and for sessions to come," Ananich said.

Meekhof would like to see progress on auto no-fault reform, and noted that to become a law any bill has to hit majorities in both chambers and get the signature of Gov. Rick Snyder.

"It takes 20, 56 and 1 for a bill to become a law in Michigan. Every issue requires cooperation," Meekhof said.

Marijuana dispensaries



One thing the Senate considered but left undone earlier this year was legislation to legalize and regulate medical marijuana dispensaries.

Meekhof said discussions on that topic would resurface as the Senate came back into session.

"I expect the caucus to discuss medical marijuana at length over the next couple weeks, but I have no timeline for the issue," Meekhof said.

Ananich would like to see it accomplished before the year ends.

"I know a lot of folks are working on this and I'm hopeful that we can get something done by the end of the year," he said.
MUSKEGON COUNTY, MI - A Muskegon County man is accused of repeatedly sexually assaulting a young girl.

Timothy Scott Bissell, 51, of 457 Ashland in Twin Lake, was arraigned last week for second degree criminal sexual conduct with a child under age 13. Bissell also gave the court an address of 697 Forest Ave. Apt. B.

Muskegon County Chief Assistant Prosecutor Timothy Maat alleged that Bissell repeatedly sexually assaulted the child between 2009 and 2011. He faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted of the felony.

Maat said he didn't know why there was a delay in reporting the abuse, but Michigan State Police began an investigation in February. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services also conducted an investigation, and a warrant for Bissell's arrest was sought from, and issued by, the prosecutor's office on Aug. 8, Maat said.

Bissell is being charged as a second-time habitual offender. He has a 2004 conviction for resisting and opposing police, court records show.

Bissell has posted a $50,000 bond, and his preliminary examination is scheduled for 10 a.m. Sept. 7 in front of District Court Judge Harold Closz.
United Nations (United States) (AFP) - The UN Security Council will vote Friday on whether to impose an arms embargo and sanctions on South Sudan, but diplomats said they expected the measure to fail.

The council will meet at 9:30 am (1430 GMT) to decide on the US-drafted resolution calling for a one-year ban on weapons sales to the war-torn country.

The United States, backed by Britain and France, has argued that cutting off the arms flow was urgently needed following UN warnings that the country faced the risk of mass atrocities.

Diplomats however said the measure fell short of the nine votes needed for adoption in the 15-member council.

Russia, China, Japan, Malaysia, Venezuela and more importantly the three African council members -- Angola, Egypt and Senegal-- have all expressed serious reservations.

Under the proposed resolution, South Sudan's rebel leader Riek Machar, army chief Paul Malong and Information Minister Michael Makuei would be put on a sanctions blacklist, subjected to an assets freeze and a global travel ban.

Japan, which has some 350 troops serving in the UN mission in South Sudan, has argued that the measures, if adopted, would antagonize President Salva Kiir's government and put peacekeepers' lives at risk.

Opponents of the sanctions point to the Kiir's call earlier this month for a national dialogue to restore peace, saying that initiative must be given a chance.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is backing the US call to ban arms deals with South Sudan, saying an embargo would reduce the capacity of all sides to wage war.

"If we fail to act, South Sudan will be on a trajectory towards mass atrocities," Ban told the council on Monday.

The draft resolution provides for a one-year ban on the "supply, sale or transfer" of "arms and related materiel of all types, including weapons and ammunition, military vehicles and equipment" as well as spare parts.

The world's youngest nation, South Sudan descended into war in December 2013, leaving tens of thousands dead and more than 3.1 million people displaced.

The country won independence from Sudan in 2011 with strong support from the United States.
Juba (AFP) - South Sudan's President Salva Kiir on Sunday agreed to the deployment of a regional protection force to beef up the UN's large UN peacekeeping mission in the war-scarred nation after initially opposing it as a breach of national sovereignty.

The announcement came after the leader of the world's youngest nation met with ambassadors of the UN Security Council at the bullet-scarred presidential palace in the capital Juba.

"The transitional government of national unity gives its consent for the deployment of the regional force," said a joint statement by the UN and the government, which was read out to the media by South Sudanese Cabinet Affairs Minister Martin Elia Lomoro.

"We will design the modalities," Lomoro said, without elaborating.

South Sudanese Cabinet Affairs Minister Martin Elia Lomoro (L) announced, "The transitional government of national unity gives its consent for the deployment of the regional force"

The presidential palace was the scene of clashes on July 8 between President Kiir's guards and troops loyal to his former deputy Riek Machar, shattering a fragile truce that has been breached several times.

Kiir showed the ambassadors from the council's 15 member states bullet marks in the heart of the building as well as shattered window panes. He said Machar had wanted to assassinate him that day but claimed he had helped his rival to escape to safety.

Following the violence, the UN Security Council authorised the deployment of an additional 4,000 troops from East Africa with a stronger mandate than the 13,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission UNMISS.

The UN officials arrived on Friday in a bid to secure Kiir's agreement to the extra troops.

Words into action

UNMISS has faced considerable criticism over its failure to protect civilians during the July violence, which included the rape of civilians sheltered just outside its camps.

An internally-displaced person carries goods on her head while navigating between crowds and UN peacekeepers at a camp in Juba on September 3, 2016

Kiir had opposed the deployment of additional troops, initially touted as an "intervention force", as breaching national sovereignty.

Minister Lomoro also underscored that the government committed "to permit free movement to UNMISS in conformity with its mandate" and "improve humanitarian access, including by providing assistance by eliminating illegal check points."

Samantha Power, the US envoy to the Security Council, hailed the move but said it was now important to start translating words into action.

"What we need to do now is move from those very important high-level commitments into working up the modalities in an operational way," Power said.

"UNMISS has an impartial mandate to protect civilians, no matter who they are, no matter where they are. The number one obstacle for (the peacekeepers) fulfilling their mandate to this point has been the severe restrictions on their movements."

Earlier Sunday, the UN team met with displaced people in the northern town of Wau, the scene of bitter fighting in recent months.

Catherine Atanasyo, a local area chief from the south of Wau now living in the camp, said lawlessness was rampant.

"Looting is going on in town. We don't know when we'll be going home," she told them.

Speaking to AFP later, Atanasyo said the regional force was badly needed as members of the president's Dinka tribe were raping and killing people if they went into Wau.

US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power speaks on September 4, 2016 in Juba

"We cannot leave this camp without security and that security can be provided by the regional force," she said.

South Sudan descended into war in December 2013 after Kiir accused his former deputy Machar of plotting a coup.

During the fighting in July, Machar, who had been persuaded to return to Juba to join a national unity government agreed under a peace deal, fled the country and is now in Khartoum, having been replaced by Taban Deng Gai in Juba.

Aside from the tens of thousands of people killed, the United Nations has reported shocking levels of brutality including gang-rapes and the wholesale burning of villages.

An estimated 16,000 children have been recruited by armed groups and the national army in the conflict, and 2.5 million people have been driven from their homes.
A leader and financial backer of the biggest Islamist party in Bangladesh has been executed for war crimes committed in 1971, officials say.

Media tycoon Mir Quasem Ali, 63, of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, was sentenced to death two years ago.

He had been convicted of offences including murder and torture committed during the war with Pakistan.

The tycoon was hanged at a high-security prison outside Dhaka on Saturday evening.

He was arrested in 2010 and convicted in 2014. He declined to seek a presidential pardon, which would have required an admission of guilt.

His execution follows several attacks by Islamist militants in Bangladesh, including an assault on a cafe in Dhaka in July in which 20 hostages, most of them foreigners, were killed.

.

At his trial, Mir Quasem Ali had been accused of involvement in a reign of terror in the city of Chittagong. He was found guilty of eight of the 14 charges he faced.

Six opposition leaders have been executed for war crimes since the Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, set up a war crimes tribunal in 2010. Five were top leaders of the Jamaat party.

Critics of the court say the government has been using the tribunal to target political opponents. Human Rights Watch has previously said the courts procedures are not up to international standards.

Mr Hasinas government has defended the trials, saying they are necessary to heal the wounds of the conflict.

The Awami League, which leads the current government, says it is necessary to help the country come to terms with its past.

Bangladeshi police in June launched a wide-ranging operation against Islamists, arresting more than 3,000 people in what was said to be an effort to stop attacks on minorities and secular citizens.

Government figures suggest as many as three million people died in the nine-month war to secede from Pakistan, although some say the number of deaths is unverifiable and probably less than that.

-bbc
Dakar (AFP) - As Gabon is rocked by violence following the contested re-election of President Ali Bongo, experts says electoral fraud in Africa is becoming harder, thanks to civil society vigilance and spread of mobile technology.

Opposition leader Jean Ping on Friday declared himself the rightful president of Gabon and called for a recount, following Bongo's claim of victory with a razor-thin margin of just under 6,000 votes in the August 27 election.

But recent elections in Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Benin and Burkina Faso have all been held largely without dispute, overseen by engaged citizens who assured careful monitoring of the process, said Mathias Hounkpe, Political Governance Programme Manager for the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA), which promotes greater government transparency.

"It is more and more difficult to commit fraud," he said.

Preventing fraud with ballot papers was down to a clear legal framework for organising elections, electoral bodies "in a position to respect the rules", independent figures such as international election observers and a free press and active social media users who would guarantee a fair vote, according to Hounkpe.

The last 15 years have seen the appearance of organisations such as "Balai citoyen" (Citizen sweep-up) in Burkina Faso, intent on pressing governments to be less opaque

For Aboubacry Mbodji, secretary-general of the African rights group RADDHO, west and central African countries such as Senegal, Ghana and the Atlantic island of Cape-Verde have shown Africa how a successful democracy holds an election.

A strong civil society and the combination of free media and citizens with access to new technology to disseminate information was "extremely important", he told AFP.

Senegal, where RADDHO is based, saw "a change at the top" in 2000 when liberal candidate Abdoulaye Wade challenged the socialist regime that had held power for 40 years, and was elected president for two terms.

Government fightback

But Wade himself was booted out in 2012 after angering voters with attempts to stay on for a third stint in power, showing the maturity of the electorate, Mbodji said.

Despite the trend towards more transparent elections, heavy handed government reactions have not vanished, with internet and social media shutdowns in Uganda in February polls

"(The 2000 election) was in large part thanks to the use of mobile phones, but also the internet," he added.

Any party members tempted to tamper with ballots had to face the large numbers of Senegalese who remained in place at voting stations to ensure it passed off peacefully, he said, and reporters who called in the results to media from mobile phones, especially radio stations, covering the event.

The last 15 years have seen organisations such as "Y en a marre" (We are sick of it) in Senegal, "Balai citoyen" (Citizen sweep-up) in Burkina Faso and "Lutte pour le changement" (Fight for change) in the Democratic Republic of Congo appear, intent on pressing governments to be less opaque.

Despite the trend towards more transparent elections, heavy handed government reactions have not entirely vanished, with internet and social media shutdowns during presidential elections in Uganda in February and in Congo-Brazzaville in March, and now in Gabon.

"The African Union observers couldn't even communicate properly to complete their tasks," Mbodji said, referring to the Congo election that returned longtime leader Denis Sassou Nguesso to power.

But even the continent's most entrenched leaders couldn't escape the effect of the tidal wave of information the internet made possible, said Hounkpe.

"Those in power have less and less capacity to manipulate the process."
04.09.2016 LISTEN

A 64-year-old woman and her granddaughter met their untimely death when they were crushed by a fuel tanker at Adako Jachie Junction near Ejisu in the Ashanti region, Friday.

Madam Yaa Achaia died on the spot when the speeding truck from the direction of Accra on the Accra-Kumasi road hit and dragged her to about 10 meters in the middle of the road.

Her 3-year-old girl, identified only as Charity was who with her grandmother when the accident happened, died on arrival at the Ejisu Government Hospital.

The deceased, a native of Dormaa Ahenkuro in the Bono Ahafo Region was attending a funeral at Tikrom, about three kilometers from the scene of the incident when she was crushed to death whilst crossing the road to the other side of the dual-carriage road at about 9 p.m on Friday.

Surprisingly, not even the presence of dead speed ramp on that stretch could force the driver of the truck, with registration GS 2325-Y to slow down.

Police say Saarikibu Adamu who is currently in police custody was behind the steering wheel.

Ejisu District Commander of the Police Motor, Traffic and Transport Department (MTTD), ASP George Owusu Aboagye tells Nhyira FM police have already started investigations into the accident.

According to him, although that stretch of the road has two-speed ramps at each end, drivers take advantage of a worn out portion to speed.

He is pleading with drivers to pay attention to road signs and respect other road users.

Meanwhile, the mortal remains of the victims have been deposited at the Juaben Government Hospital morgue pending an autopsy.
Outgoing Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, Reverend Professor Emmanuel Martey, has in his recent streak of revelations, disclosed that some government officials approached him to lobby for the position of Chairman of the National Peace Council, but he refused.

This time around, the outspoken named Deputy Minister of Interior, James Agalga, as the one who placed a telephone call to him asking him to lobby for the position as they were ready to back him.

The outspoken Rev. Martey has come under fire for alleging that some politicians attempted bribing him with an amount of 100, 000 dollars ostensibly to silent him from commenting on critical national issues.

Speaking at the Abetifi Presbyterian College of Education, Reverend Martey said he will continue to speak on national issues.

I don't want any political appointment that is the reason why I rejected the Peace Council appointment. I heard some people also saying that sack him from the Peace Council. I've never been a member and I will never ever be a member, he said.

Prof. Martey said the Christian Council nominated me to be on that council, I know if I go there something will happen but that thing I don't know.

So I told God about it. I don't do anything without first consulting my friend the Holy Spirit. Few days to the inauguration of the Peace Council, I had a missed call; I didn't know the person so I didn't call back. So the person sent a text message, it was the Deputy Minister of Interior, [James] Agalga. So immediately something said call so I called back. He was then at the house so he came out.

First I said, yes this is the Rev. Prof. Martey, moderator of the Presbyterian church of Ghana, but you know something, the Holy Spirit blinded his mind so he didn't even hear that it was the Presby moderator who was talking to him. The Holy Spirit wanted him to tell me what he has for me, to help me decide whether or not to be a member of the Peace Council. He said he had a meeting with the Minister of Interior and they both agreed that I become the Chairman of the Peace Council.

He said Mr. Agalga told him to lobby his other colleagues so they approve of his chairmanship.

Before the inauguration of the thing itself, before members will meet for the first time, he said if you know some people give us their names so we talk to them on your behalf.



By: Godwin A. Allotey/citifmonline.com/Ghana

Follow @AlloteyGodwin
Anti-corruption campaigner and a member of Occupy Ghana, Sydney Casely-Hayford, has described recent claims made by the outgoing moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, that he rejected some bribes from politicians, as a waste of the Ghanaian publics time.

According to him, it was needless for Professor Martey to make the revelations if he did not accept the bribes that were allegedly offered him.

I don't see the purpose of what Rev. Martey has done. If he didn't take the money then there's no point talking about it. If he did take the money, then he should tell us who he took it from so that we can make our own decisions as to whether it's a good thing or bad thing in society, Casely-Hayford said on Citi FM's news analysis programme, The Big Issue.

I think that the revelation that somebody came to bribe me to keep my mouth quiet is a waste of the public's time.

He added however that, if the Presby Moderator felt strongly about the issue he should name the people who tried to induce him so that the public can get a better understanding of the matter.

If the moderator is serious and feels passionately about what happened and that somebody is trying to influence him to keep quiet and he feels aggrieved about it, he should tell us who the person was. He should give us a name or names. It doesn't matter if he can prosecute or not; at least he would bring up the matter and the public would be aware of what happened, Sydney said.

If it turns out that he's not telling the truth and he puts someone's name out in the public domain, then the person can sue him, we'll know where we stand and the truth will come out.

'A Rawlings thing'

Sydney Casely-Hayford likened Professor Martey's rant to similar outbursts by Former President Jerry John Rawlings, who has, on several occasions publicly criticised government officials.

According to Sydney, the tendency of these public personalities to make allegations without mentioning the names of people involv

ed was unfortunate and could lead to unnecessary panic.

It's a Jerry Rawlings thing. He'll come and say there are people in the country who are trying to destabilize the country and turn us into a pack of beggars but he won't tell you who. It's fear-mongering and trying to make people worried and scared about things, trying to create some panic and mayhem

I rejected $100,000 bribe  Rev Martey

The outspoken Moderator revealed last Tuesday that he rejected several attempts by politicians to buy his conscience with money and keep him from criticizing the government.

He claimed that he had been offered gifts by politicians including 100,000 dollars and a Trasacco House, all of which he rejected .

Politicians had tried all means to muzzle me, to get me but they can't, they come with bribes, fat envelopes, $100,000.

He added that, some of these politicians also come with the promises that if you keep quiet we will give you a house at Trasacco with swimming pool We will give you Four Wheel drive [vehicle] but you know what; these people were lucky that I do not have big dogs in my house else I would have released the dogs for them to bite them, Professor Martey added.

However, a former Public Relations Officer of the church, Emmanuel Osei Akyeampong, has said that Professor Martey accepted the bribe of $100,000, a claim which has since been denied by the Presbyterian Church.



By: Edwin Kwakofi/citifmonline.com/Ghana
Celebrated Ghanaian writer and poet, Professor Ama Ata Aidoo, on Saturday walked out of a ceremony in her honour because her name was wrongly spelt.

She was supposed to be honoured by the University of Ghanas Centre for Gender Studies & Advocacy (CEGENSA), but her name, Ama Ata Aidoo, was instead captured on the brochure as Ama Atta Aidoo.

Unlike most Ghanaians, she spells her Ata with one T.

My mother walked out of a CEGENSA event today [Saturday] meant to celebrate her and the winners of a short story competition in her honor, her daughter, Kinna Likimani said.

Ama Ata Aidoo honorary short story competition launched

CEGENSA as part of its 10th anniversary celebration organized a short story competition in honour of Prof. Aidoo for her multiple roles as a pan-African feminist, an author, poet and playwright.

The climax of the event, which was held at the African Regent Hotel on Saturday, was to honour the poet and other award winners of the story competition.

But his daughter said her mother had to leave the ceremony because both the banner (hanging in the hall at the African Regent Hotel) and the programme cover had her name as Ama Atta Aidoo and not Ama Ata Aidoo, which is the correct spelling of her name.

Kinna explained that this peculiar and contrived confusion over the spelling of her Ata is a uniquely Ghanaian problem. And this sloppiness is even a recent thing.

Shes been battling this for a while now, culminating in her walking out of an event in her honor today [Saturday]. Of course, she couldnt have stayed. I know my mum. She would have felt bad throughout the event, Kinna added.

Kinna, who is also the project lead of Ghana Decides, said the whole thing is messy. We must really pay more attention to the details of things. Its more disheartening because CEGENSA is an academic institute. They know her, her name and her work.



By: Godwin A. Allotey/citifmonline.com/Ghana

Follow @AlloteyGodwin
The Chairman of Pilgrims Affairs Office of Ghana (PAOG) is expecting the last batch of prospective pilgrims to be airlifted to Saudi Arabia on Sunday, September 4.

Abdul Rauf Tanko Ibrahim said the check-in time for the last flight is at 6 p.m. but Hajj pilgrims are expected to report early for pre-arrangement ahead of departure formalities.

There were chaotic scenes at the Hajj Village in Accra on Friday as stranded prospective pilgrims demanded answers from the Hajj Board.

The frustrations were born against the backdrop of accusations of favouritism to enplane party faithful of the governing National democratic Congress (NDC) on the last flight.

However, interacting with some of the unsuccessful pilgrims at the Hajj Village Saturday, the Hajj Board Chairman revealed he has so far refunded a colossal amount of money to most of the unsuccessful Hajj hopefuls with few left settle.

Explaining the reason behind the situation of having stranded prospective pilgrims, Mr Tanko explained that PAOG per Ghana's quota of 5424 this year, scheduled 11 flights to airlift Ghanaian pilgrims which were done successfully from August 19-30.

However, he said his office was confronted with the unexpected situation of an overpayment which came about as a result of an assurance he received from the Saudi Arabia Minister of Hajj.

During the Hajj conference this year, he said the Minister promised them an additional 1000 seat to the original quota of 5,424.

For that reason, PAOG extended the July 15 deadline to July 23 for payments because of the assurance of an increase in quota but unfortunately, the Saudi Arabia Government through the Minister of Hajj failed to live up to their promise.

He said eventually created a backlogged of would-be Pilgrims who were denied Visa for this year's Hajj.

This is in clear contradiction to what the Board had communicated to Joy News before the start of this year's Hajj pilgrimage.

Communication Director of the Board, Mohammed Amin Lamptey had told Joy News Ghana was to fly 5,424 pilgrims this year prior to the commencement of the Hajj in Tamale.

Related: Hajj Committee secures visas for all 1500 Tamale pilgrims

The Hajj Board Chairman expressed worries and apologised to Ghanaians and appealed for support and corporation from the affected individuals and their relatives.

The Chairman of Hajj Agents Association of Ghana, Issah Umar, popularly called Meishinkafa appealed for calm from the unsuccessful travelers.

The 2016 Hajj pilgrimage is expected to begin on September 10 and end on September 16.

Ghanaian pilgrims are expected back home from September 22 -25 starting at the Tamale International Airport and ending on October 2 in Accra.

Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com | Abubakar Ibrahim | Email: [email protected]
The British High Commissioner to Ghana, Jon Benjamin has said with an interim Economic Partnership Agreement duly ratified by the Ghanaian Parliament, Ghana will continue to enjoy duty and quota free access to the United Kingdom (UK) market.

This, he said, could create the much needed employment opportunities amongst Ghanaian export companies.

Mr Benjamin said this during the launch of the UK-Ghana Chamber of Commerce (UKGCC) in Accra.

He said the UKGCC would promote, foster, and represent UK business interest in Ghana; directly helping UK companies to identify market opportunities and providing them with a first point of call when looking to do business in and trade with Ghana.

Mr Benjamin said this would also be another avenue for UK exporters to access high quality market support.

"It will represent the interests of UK investors looking to bring investments to Ghana and provide tailored support to existing UK investors," he stated.

He said the Chamber would also support Ghanaian companies who want to connect with the UK to help their companies grow.

He said as the Chamber develops, it would be able to provide services to help Ghanaian companies who want to export to, and invest in, the UK.

Mr Benjamin said it is important to recognize that UK companies have a huge choice as to where they trade and invest worldwide, as such; they were naturally driven by hard business calculations, not sentiments.

He said, however, market conditions and sound economic management in Ghana would be a key consideration for those companies; they were encouraging to become involved here.

The High Commissioner said in that respect, they have noted the continued progress the Government of Ghana has made in tackling various macroeconomic challenges in line with its programme with the International Monetary Fund.

He said such progress was essential to boost investor confidence and growth, along with action to tackle other potential barriers to business, such as the regulatory environment, including licensing rules, customs procedures and land registration issues.

Mr Benjamin said they were happy to be making a major investment through its Department for International Development to promote some of Ghanas most promising start-ups with the best potential for creating jobs for young Ghanaians, and to build up a more structured public-private dialogue.

He said it was also aimed at further improving the overall business environment; adding that as an example of that support, their Business Enabling Environment Programme would be hosting a Better Regulation Forum in Accra later this month.

Ms Hannah Tetteh, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, tasked UKGCC to establish a common platform where both countries could promote trade in all products that could penetrate through the UK market from Ghana and vice versa.

She said Ghana is the fifth largest trading partner of the UK in Sub- Saharan Africa and are both members of the Commonwealth; which implies they have shared values within the greater frame of the Commonwealth.

The Foreign Minister said it was important to make use of this relationship to be able to set a framework that does not only creates a platform for increased business between Ghana and the UK, but Ghana, UK and other Commonwealth countries.

In his remarks, Mr Tony Burkson, Chief Executive Officer for UKGCC, expressed gratitude to his colleagues at the British High Commission and particularly the Department for International Trade who have been supportive and helpful during the process of setting up the Chamber.

He said the Chamber currently has a membership of 20 companies and was hopeful of seeing more companies would be joining with time.

He said in the coming weeks, UKGCC would be organizing investment tours from the UK, breakfast meetings with business leaders and networking events.
Nairobi (AFP) - The United Nations called on Somalia on Sunday to do more to protect the freedom of the press and expression in a country where 30 journalists have been killed in four years.

But in a report the UN noted progress on the issue over the last five years.

The report, drawn up by the UN Assistance Mission in Somalia (UNSOM) as well as the UN Human Rights Council, noted that adoption in January this year of a new federal media law, which "guarantees a number of freedoms, including the right to inform."

But the report also expressed "concern about the law's unclear terminology, which allows for subjective interpretation and undue restrictions to freedom of expression".

"Despite the vibrant media culture in Somalia - which hosts more than 90 media outlets and scores of websites and blogs - numerous violations aimed at journalists and political leaders" are documented in the report.

These include killings, attacks, arbitrary arrests and detention, intimidation, harassment, closure of media outlets, confiscation of equipment and blocking of websites.

"The dangers facing media workers and public figures are illustrated by the fact that, between August 2012 and June 2016, a total of 30 journalists and 18 parliamentarians were killed in Somalia," it added.

While the greatest threat to journalists comes from the Al-Qaeda aligned Shabaab jihadist group, which has vowed to bring down the Somali government, the country's security forces are guilty of numerous violations against journalists and politicians.

"Political activists and journalists are detained in the NISA detention centre, together with Al Shabaab suspects, with no judicial oversight," lamented the report, referring to the National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA).

"In a worrying development, since February 2016, the NISA has started using the media to show Al Shabaab suspects confessing their crimes," it added.

Somalia is preparing to hold indirect elections in late September and October, in a process which will see 14,000 delegates chosen on a clan basis vote for deputies and representatives in a new upper chamber of parliament.

Those elected will then designate a new president at the end of October. Elections by universal direct suffrage are scheduled in 2020.

This year will be crucial for Somalia's political transition, said the UN report.

"Attacks against individual journalists and media organisations have a deeply corrosive impact on democracy, with profoundly negative repercussions on freedom of expression and human rights in general," said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein of Jordan.

He called on Somali authorities to investigate violations of freedom of expression "irrespective of the identity of the perpetrators."
Chinese officials rolled out a red carpet but failed to extend a staircase to Air Force One  leaving President Obama hanging and touching off a near fistfight.

Obamas Saturday arrival at the airport in Hangzhou was a mess from the start.

As Obamas staff scrambled to get airplane stairs in place, a Chinese official began screaming at White House press photographers after they took position to snap the President stepping off Air Force One.

A White House official immediately confronted her Chinese counterpart, saying the U.S. would set the rules for its leader.

Its tradition to grant White House photographers the opportunity to take a photo of an American president arriving in a foreign country.

But the Chinese official wasnt having it.

This is our country! This is our airport! the official yelled.

The drama was just beginning.

That same Chinese official tried to keep Obamas national security adviser Susan Rice from walking to her motorcade  prompting the Secret Service to intervene.

Later, several White House protocol officers were barred from entering a diplomatic compound ahead of Obamas meetings.

The dispute escalated  and two Chinese officials had to be physically separated from each other after nearly coming to blows.

One of the warring Chinese government staffers was trying to intervene on behalf of the Americans.

Calm down please. Calm down, a White House official pleaded, according to the Washington Post.

The skirmishes put a damper on the opening day of what will likely be President Obamas final trip to Asia.

Obama travelled to China for the G20 summit, which kicked off today.

By: Nana Kyei Baffour; Bsc MBBS ( Klasik Radio, GA - USA +8615580214166/+14049942294)

[email protected]
04.09.2016 LISTEN

Indiscriminate destruction of biodiversity across the country spurred the Vice-Chancellor of University of Uyo and Shell Professorial Chair on Biodiversity and Climate Change, Professor Kingsley Akpabio to summon a one day workshop in March 2016 to find out ways to arrest the issue, said Agro Nigeria, a leading voice in agriculture.

Over the years, outsized population in Nigeria, poor land use planning, inter-communal wars, bush burning, domestic, commercial and industrial activities, high percentages of illiteracy, socio-cultural characteristics, food and trade connections, corruption of logging controls, unemployment and poverty have undermined the efforts by the successive governments and professionals to arrest the destruction of biodiversity effectively, opinion leaders on biodiversity and climate change have said.

Biodiversity Conservation and Challenges of Climate Change was the discourse that inundated the summit held in collaboration with Shell and the school. The keynote address presenter, Jonathan Ombo Amakiri, Ph.D (London), DIC, M.Sc., M.Inst.Pet., C.Biol., in his paper  Environmental Management, Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainable Development  said that Nigeria has always been involved in meetings on climate change but has not fared well with lessons of the summits, adding that the country is a shrub among poplars in the understanding of what biodiversity means.

Other nations have moved on. Being a signatory to Rio and later conventions, constituting large country delegations at huge expense for conferences, summits and other international responses to climate change and threats to biological diversity have not adequately addressed the unprecedented biodiversity depletion and reckless deforestation in our country, said Amakiri.

The chief of discourses at the convention was "The conservation of the nations vast and rich biodiversity in the face of increasing climate unpredictability and variability  climate change."

Because individual plants and therefore species can only function physiologically, and successfully complete their life cycles under specific environmental conditions (ideally within a subset of these), changes to climate are likely to have significant impacts on plants from the level of the individual right through to the level of the ecosystem or biome," said researcher Ishita Haldar, in his work: Global Warming: The Causes and Consequences.

Loses/Destruction

In the period between 2000 and 2005, Nigeria lost about 2,048, and 3000 ha of forest according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation while the USAID Report on Biodiversity and Tropical Forestry Assessment recorded that there were too many environmental threats in Nigeria affecting biodiversity, Daily Trust, November 17 2015, reported.

Discoveries are further that the rich ones in the society have been sending the poor ones to be degrading biodiversity for livelihood.

The poor are pushed by the affluent and influential majority to destroy their own source of livelihoods for meagre financial returns and the poor, due to deprivation find it difficult to secure any other alternative than to erode the very foundation of their own long term survival.

Biodiversity is always at the receiving end being the readily available option for food, fibre and minimal commercial gain by the rural poor.

The need for protection of biodiversity is therefore seen as elitist by the rural poor whose deprivation in terms of food and domestic needs have been pushed to the wall, reported Clearing House mechanism of Nigeria.

Flaws By Authorities

Local and State authorities have been unable to arrest the situation due to the mounted pressure by exploiters to trade on biodiversity.

The National Biodiversity Committee, being an umbrella body that sees to conservation of biodiversity, has been churlished by illegal traders, making conservatory checks on forestry and biodiversity associated matters to fail.

There has been no shortage of talk-shows on threats to the environment or more specifically on global biodiversity and anthropogenic climate change.

What is in short supply in most nations of Sub-Saharan Africa is getting in-step with the rest of the world to benefit from the incentives that have been generated towards the stabilization of green house gas (GHG) concentration in the global effort to combat climate change and promote biodiversity conservation, added Professor Amakiri.

Additionally, the professor said, The Carbon Finance Unit of the World Bank has played a pioneering role in carbon finance development since it began the worlds first carbon finance known as the Prototype Carbon Finance (PCF) in 1999.

By 2012, the end of the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, more than US 5 billion Dollars has been channeled to developing countries through carbon finance transactions.

The World Bank board of executive directors approved the creation of Carbon Partnership Facilities (CPF) whose target size over the first five years of operation is 5 billion Euros. Over US 100 billion dollars have been channeled annually to developing countries as incentives to conservation and the combating of climate change.

Constituted Bodies Failed

Different groups have been said to have failed in arresting deforestation in Nigeria. They include Nigeria Park Service, Federal Executive council approved a National Policy on Climate Change and Response Strategy (NPCC-RS), Federal Ministry of Environment, Nigerian Conservation Foundation.

Others include United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Forestry Research Institute of Nigeria, Bioresources Development and Conservation Programme (BDCP), National Institute for Pharmaceutical Research and Development, and so on.

Since the committees and groups have not achieved the expected results, investigations are that the locals have taken over the supervision of forests for royalty and profit sharing.

Findings by this writer revealed that the aforementioned are the major propellants that increase demand on the remaining biodiversity that has been severely affected by climate change, causing over 70-80% of Nigerias original forest to vanish and currently, the part dominated by forests has diminished to 12%.

Evidence-based field studies have confirmed that natural processes of regeneration are not able to cope with the over-exploitation in high magnitude, reported Biological Diversity, an international agreement established by the United Nations.

This happened regardless that the Nigerian government had built many forest reserves for the conservation of forest resources. While managerial prospects beset their maintenance, climate change has taken a toll on them. But the environment and by inference, biodiversity, insulates behind other sectors in policy and legislative reforms, leading to deforestation.

Effects

Experts said that deforestation has contributed to climate change in the area of dangling earth temperature.

"The earth has experienced a constantly changing climate in the time since plants first evolved. In comparison to the present day, this history has seen earth as cooler, warmer, drier and wetter, and CO 2 (carbon dioxide) concentrations have been both higher and lower.

These changes have been reflected by constantly shifting vegetation; for example, forest communities dominating most areas in interglacial periods, and herbaceous communities dominating during glacial periods," accounted media reports.

In 2012, research showed that what has been happening in Nigeria in term of deforestation was due to poor land use planning; and this did not start today, but since 1976; approximately 24 million hectares had been deforested. Over 15 million hectares were deforested in 1995, and by 2011, 9.6 million hectares had followed deforestation.

Competing land uses such as agriculture and human settlements, have been said by specialists, to be contributing to the decline of forests and woodlands together with the rising demand for fuel wood and charcoal.

Over harvesting, agricultural encroachment and unregulated burning are believed to be contributing to the decline of many species in the wild. The depletion and degradation of the natural resource base have extended to less stressed areas in the different ecological zones of Nigeria, reported Clearing House mechanism of Nigeria.

Defining Biodiversity

Professor Akpabio said that biodiversity is the "sum total and variety of plants, animals and other organisms that exist on earth; the most essential component of nature which ensures the survival of human species and contributes to the quality of life through the provision of food, shelter, medicine and other resources to mankind."

Further, he added, High Biodiversity Value Areas (HBVAs) are allowed to be destroyed in all sorts of guises. The challenge to the industry, government and society is then, how to find ways of meeting the public demand for abundance, low-cost oil and gas products and, at the same time, meet societys expectations for social and environmental responsibility, including biodiversity conservation.

Odimegwu Onwumere is an award-winning journalist based in Rivers State. Email: [email protected]


The National Association of Graduate Teachers, (NAGRAT), has accused the government of not devoting ample time and resources to education in the country.

According to the President of NAGRAT, Christian Addae-Poku, Government's policy of building schools across the country is more for the approval of voters than it is for the benefit of the sector.

We don't think it's prioritized. It's a lip-service that government pays to education trying to tell everybody that education is a priority. As far as we practitioners are concerned, education is never a priority. If education was a priority, teachers would not be recruited and made to serve for two or three years without a salary. If education was a priority, why are district offices suffering with their subventions in arrears for four years.? If education is a priority, why is government concentrating only on building schools and not on other aspects of the system that will education run on, he said

As far as we are concerned, we are playing to the gallery, pleasing the populace by implementing populist policies meant to get votes.

Prof Jane Naana Opoku Agyemang, Education Minister

Pay all arrears in two month or else

NAGRAT had earlier given government a two-month ultimatum to settle all arrears owed public Senior High Schools and teachers otherwise they will advise themselves.

According to NAGRAT, the failure of the government to invest in education had resulted in the declining standards in the sector.

When government subventions to various directorates are not paid it pacts negatively on all spheres of educational activity. Just as regional and district directorates of education have been starved of funding, we have reasons to conclude that even the Ghana Education Service Headquarters has not been spared. The situation is that bad at all levels but our directors are tight-lipped in voicing their ordeals for fear that they might be victimized, the President of NAGRAT, Christian Addae-Poku said.

NAGRAT expects that the issues raised regarding the payment of outstanding subventions to our education offices, payment of all salaries and allowances in arrears owed teachers, the conduct of promotion interviews and promotion of teachers to be fully addressed by the end of October, 2016. The failure of which teachers will advise themselves.

He called on President John Dramani Mahama to intervene as lack of investment in the Ghana's educational sector could be detrimental to the country's developmental agenda

The plain language is that our education is failing, Our district offices are virtually non-functional and neither the government nor the ordinary citizen can be proud of this. Mr. President we humbly implore you to step in and save this situation, Mr. Addae-Poku appealed.

NAGRAT blasts gov't over unsustainable education programmes

The Association also wants government to look beyond introducing social intervention programmes in the education sector, merely to score what it calls cheap political points .

President of the Association, Christian Addae-Poku, argues that government after introducing such programmes, has not been able to provide adequate funding to run and sustain them.

GNAT, NAGRAT, CHASS fight GES

Following weeks of agitations by the Conference of Heads and Assisted Secondary Schools (CHASS), the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) and the National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT), the Ghana Education Service (GES) announced that it had released some money to cover subsidies which were owed the secondary schools.

CHASS had issued a threat to close down Senior High Schools (SHS) nationwide, following delays by the government in paying the subsidies.

GNAT hinted that, they might declare a nationwide strike in September 2016, if the subsidy arrears of the various second-cycle institutions were not paid.

NAGRAT also insisted that the unions had a say in the matter as the work of the teachers were affected by the situation.

NAGRAT is not happy with the way things are because we can't just imagine how you fail to fund education and you still expect education to function well. We are reducing ourselves to mediocrity where people think that whether we have the resources or not, education must go on, Christian Addae Poku told Citi News at the time.

-citifmonline
Accra, Sept. 4, GNA - Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) Timothy Yoosa Bonga, the Greater Accra Regional Police Commander, has called on the police to be mindful of their role in the coming polls.

Commander Bonga was speaking during the End of Year Get-together organized at the premises of the Madina Divisional Police Headquarters.

He urged the police to continue to work hard to ensure that peace and security of the nation.

He said the police administration would not deal leniently with and personnel found doing wrong and urged them to be professional in all their deliberations.

Chief Superintendent of Police Mr Aggrey Nantogmah Yakubu, the Madina Divisional Police Commander, said in 2014, there were 102 vehicular accidents and this reduced to 93 vehicular accidents in 2015.

He said the Domestic Violence and Victim Support Unit (DOVVSU) recorded 601 cases in 2014 while in 2015, the number also reduced to 309 cases.

Chief Superintendent Yakubu commended the Madina DOVVSU unit for their effort in creating awareness on matters concerning domestic violence to the public, hence the reduction of cases.

He said in 2014 there were 872 criminal cases reported while in 2015 the cases reduced to 740.

Chief Superintendent Yakubu thanked the personnel for their hard work as a result of which in the Greater-Accra Region, the Madina Divisional Police Command was adjudged the Second Best Police Station by the Police Administration recently.

The Chairman of the function, Commissioner of Police (COP) Mr Joseph Boakye Appiah (rtd), appealed to the police not to involve themselves in chieftaincy matters and land disputes.

He also cautioned them to handle their weapons and suspects with care.

In attendance at the event was the Deputy Regional Police Commander and former Madina Divisional Police Commander, ACP Paul Ayittey.

GNA
Accra, Sept. 4, GNA - Thirteen traders were fined on Saturday by a joint Sanitation Task Force of the La-Nkwantanang-Madina Municipal Assembly (LaNMMA) and the Police, for various sanitation offences during the national cleanup exercise organised in Madina.

In an interview with the Ghana News Agency, Mr Joseph Quacoe, the Municipal Environmental Health Officer, said the exercise begun as early at 0600 hrs with participants including market women, roadside traders and the staff of LaNMMA.

Mr Quacoe said areas earmarked for the exercise included Zongo-Junction to Social Welfare, Randy Pharmacy to Madina Rawlings Circle and Ritz junction to Atomic Junction.

The cleanup exercise entailed sweeping and de-silting of the main gutters in the municipality.

A water tank hired by the Assembly was used to flush all choked gutters within the Madina Central Market with the assistance of the market women.

Alliance Waste Limited assisted with compaction trucks to cart the collected filth for disposal.

Mr Quacoe said participation in the exercise was un-encouraging and appealed to the members of Madina community to assist in keeping their environment clean.

GNA
The outgoing moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, Rev. Professor Emmanuel Martey, has rejected calls on him to name the people who allegedly offered him bribes to silence him.

According to Professor Martey, he had consistently stayed away from personalising his comments on issues and did not intend to change that trend despite the pressure on him to do so.

They also say those who attempted to bribe professor Martey, if we give the names, we'll all be happy. But you go back, I've been consistent. Never before have I mentioned any name, even those who mention my name and insult me, he said while addressing a gathering at the Presbyterian College of Education at Abetifi in the Eastern Region.

I don't discuss personalities, I discuss issues. Issues of corruption, issues of bribery, issues of malfeasance, issues of reckless dissipation of public funds, issues of incompetence. I have never mentioned personalities because I don't discuss personalities.

The outspoken Moderator revealed last Tuesday, that he turned down several attempts by politicians to buy his conscience with money and keep him from criticizing the government.

He claimed that he had been offered gifts by politicians including 100,000 dollars and a Trasacco House, all of which he rejected .

Politicians had tried all means to muzzle me, to get me but they can't, they come with bribes, fat envelopes, $100,000.

He added that, some of these politicians also come with the promises that if you keep quiet we will give you a house at Trasacco with swimming pool We will give you Four Wheel drive [vehicle] but you know what; these people were lucky that I do not have big dogs in my house else I would have released the dogs for them to bite them, Professor Martey added.

However, a former Public Relations Officer of the church, Emmanuel Osei Akyeampong, has said that Professor Martey accepted the bribe of $100,000, a claim which has since been denied by the Presbyterian Church.

Sydney Casely-Hayford is Convenor for Occupy Ghana

Waste of Ghanaians time

An anti-corruption campaigner, Sydney Casely-Hayford, described described the claims made by Professor Martey as a waste of the Ghanaian publics time.

According to him, it was needless for Professor Martey to make the revelations if he did not accept the bribes that were allegedly offered him.

I don't see the purpose of what Rev. Martey has done. If he didn't take the money then there's no point talking about it. If he did take the money, then he should tell us who he took it from so that we can make our own decisions as to whether it's a good thing or bad thing in society, Casely-Hayford said on Citi FM's news analysis programme, The Big Issue on Saturday.

I think that the revelation that somebody came to bribe me to keep my mouth quiet is a waste of the public's time.

He added however that, if the Presby Moderator felt strongly about the issue he should name the people who tried to induce him so that the public can get a better understanding of the matter.

If the moderator is serious and feels passionately about what happened and that somebody is trying to influence him to keep quiet and he feels aggrieved about it, he should tell us who the person was. He should give us a name or names. It doesn't matter if he can prosecute or not; at least he would bring up the matter and the public would be aware of what happened, Sydney said.

If it turns out that he's not telling the truth and he puts someone's name out in the public domain, then the person can sue him, we'll know where we stand and the truth will come out.



By: Edwin Kwakofi/citifmonline.com/Ghana
The 2016 presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, says President Mahamas tenure of office has been nothing short of a disaster for the country, resulting in unprecedented levels of hardship and suffering amongst Ghanaians.

With President Mahama urging Ghanaians to ignore Nana Akufo-Addos try me appeal and not to experiment with a new President in 2016, the NPP flagbearer noted that the experience of the person there now has been a disastrous experience for our country.

In view of this disastrous experience, Nana Akufo-Addo asked: So what is the purpose of the continuity? Are we going to continue the disaster? Is that what we want to do? We want to get rid of the disaster, and bring in a man with new ideas and a fresh direction for our nation.

The NPP flagbearer was addressing hundreds of residents at Nandom, on Saturday, September 3, 2016, on the first day of his 2-day tour of the Upper West Region, when he made these remarks.

Appealing to residents, and Ghanaians to have confidence in him, Nana Akufo-Addo assured that I am not coming to fill my pockets with your money. I am coming to work to straighten up our country and bring it back to prosperity again.

I have no interest in Ford Expeditions

Having visited Hamile, in the Lambussie constituency, prior to his tour of Nandom, Nana Akufo-Addo noted that the first road one drives on, upon entering Ghana from Burkina Faso, is the road from Hamile to Nandom, which leads further down south. These roads, he stated, are in deplorable conditions, having driven on them on his way to Hamile.

This is not the road Ghana should be introduced to people from Burkina Faso. This dirt road? We are going to do something about it, take it from me. People should have a better impression of our country than this road, he added.

The NPP flagbearer assured residents that his government, God-willing from January 2017, will ensure that the link road from Hamile to Nandom and further down into the Upper West Region is constructed.

The award of the contract for the road, he added, will be done by competitive tendering, and not sole sourcing, which has been the norm and method for the award of contracts under the Mahama administration.

We are going to find the contractor by a process of competitive bidding. We are not going to go into a room and sit down with one person and say yes (you have the contract). I have no interest in Cadillacs or Fords or whatever. We want to do a job for Ghana, a good job for that matter, he said.

Additionally, he assured residents of Nandom and the Upper West Region, who have fallen prey to microfinance scams, that if by the time 7th January comes, and, by the Grace of God, I have taken the Oath of Office, and all these matters of the Microfinance institutions have not been sorted out, I am coming to make sure that things are sorted out.

Nana Akufo-Addo urged residents of Nandom to vote for the NPPs candidate for the constituency, Hon. Ambrose Dery, stressing that the change that is blowing across the entire country has to embrace one of the best men you have in the politics of the Upper West.

Hon. Ambrose Dery, the NPP flagbearer added, was a brilliant Minister from the Upper West Region. He was a brilliant Regional Minister, and I have no doubt the he is going to be a brilliant Minister in Akufo-Addos cabinet.

In concluding, the NPP flagbearer appealed to residents of the Upper West Region to restore their links with the NPP, explaining that the Region is where some of the important leaders of the NPPs political tradition hailed from.

Their names are written in gold in the history of Ghana  S.D. Dombo, B.K. Adama, Jato Kaleo, Mumuni DImbie, Abaayifa Karbo. These are the names of the men who got up to fight for freedom for our country, at great personal cost, to build Ghanas democracy. They are turning in their graves knowing that, today, we dont have a political presence in the Upper West. I am pleading with you. This election, let us restore the NPP to its heritage and connect it to the people who built that heritage.
The man who was at the center of the Ghc51.2 million judgement debt, Alfred Agbesi Woyome, was today [Sunday], spotted at the inauguration of the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC) Volta Regional campaign task-force in Ho.

The task-force, which is being led by the party's Director of International Relations, Kofi Attoh, is aimed at championing the NDC's campaign in the region.

Mr. Woyome, whos a known financier of the NDC, was on March 10, 2016, cleared by the Court of Appeal of any criminal offence in the payment of the money.

But opposition parties have largely accused government of pretentiously putting forward a weak case ostensibly to free Mr. Woyome whos a crony.

The event was attended by NDC's General Secretary, Johnson Asiedu Nketia, Deputy General Secretary Koku Anyidoho, National Vice Chairman, Ofusu Ampofo, Director of international relations of the party Kofi Attoh, National youth Organiser and deputy, regional chairman, National Organiser, Kofi Adams, Joseph Amenowode, Dzifa Gomashie, Dzifa Ativor, among others.

Confusion on NDC front

Some eleven executives of the party in the region had earlier threatened to boycott the inauguration on Friday over claims of sabotage in the formation of the task-force.

However, Citi News has gathered that the impasse among the executives has been resolved amicably as they aggrieved persons attended the inauguration.

Volta Region has been described as the world bank of the NDC.

The party had earlier launched agenda one million votes in the region geared towards widening the winning vote gap for President John Mahama in the upcoming December 7 polls.

The party, during the inauguration, also commissioned a new regional office at Ho.



By: Godwin A. Allotey & King Norbert Akpablie/citifmonline.com/Ghana

Follow @AlloteyGodwin
Juba (AFP) - South Sudan's President Salva Kiir has agreed to the deployment of a regional protection force to beef up the UN's large UN peacekeeping mission, a joint statement from the UN and the government said Sunday.

"The transitional government of national unity gives its consent for the deployment of the regional force," said the statement, which was read out to the media by South Sudanese Cabinet Affairs Minister Martin Elia Lomoro.
Libreville (AFP) - A media crackdown in Gabon left people on Sunday searching for loved ones aided mainly by rumour and hope, following days of violence since the announcement that President Ali Bongo had been re-elected.

The post-election violence has so far claimed seven lives throughout the country, according to an AFP count; six civilians, mainly in the capital Libreville, and a police officer in the main northern town of Oyem.

Rumours of a higher death toll, notably in the economic capital Port-Gentil, have been swirling around despite the lack of any internet access.

Some 800 people have been arrested in the capital since the last weekend's election result was announced on Wednesday, according to official figures.

Presidential elections in Gabon: national results and by region

"We are calling for the list of those arrested" and which police stations they are being held in, said lawyer Jean-Pierre Akumbu M'Oluna.

Bongo was declared victorious by a razor-thin margin of just under 6,000 votes, but his main challenger Jean Ping, a veteran diplomat and former top African Union official, has insisted the vote was rigged and on Friday claimed victory for himself.

"The whole world knows who is president of the republic, it's me Jean Ping," he said.

' Deep concern'

Ping is calling for vote recount, something the Gabonese authorities have categorically refused to contemplate.

A woman wearing a dress with the portrait of Gabonese opposition leader Jean Ping, dances at chruch on September 4, 2016 in Libreville

The post-vote violence in this small but oil-rich central African nation, a former French colony, has sparked international concern with top diplomats calling for restraint as rights groups raise the alarm over the use of "excessive force".

In a special session on Gabon on Thursday, the UN Security Council expressed "deep concern" about the situation, urging all sides to "to refrain from violence or other provocations".

And Washington has urged all parties to work together to "halt the slide towards further unrest."

Two people in Libreville told AFP Sunday that they are still searching for loved ones missing since Wednesday night, when security forces stormed Ping's offices.

"I'm looking for my son, Jocelyn. He was a Jean Ping's headquarters," said a woman who gave her name as Jacqueline.

A man, who preferred to remain anonymous, said he'd had no news of his brother since Wednesday.

"He's married, father of four children," said the man who has searched police stations, hospitals and even funeral parlours.

Government silence

Information is hard to come by. The government hasn't issued any statements for days and even the regime-friendly L'Union newspaper hasn't appeared since Wednesday.

"We were the object of an arson attack, we can't work," the paper's boss Lin-Joel Ndembet told AFP, adding that he didn't know when publication would resume.

The premises of private television channels Radio-Television Nazareth (RTN) and Tele Plus, have both been attacked.

The RTN offices were set ablaze late Wednesday "by hooded and heavily armed agents of the security forces," the channel's chief executive Georges Bruno Ngoussi said.

According to him, attacks on RTN began on August 28, the day after the presidential election, when it was reporting that Ping was ahead in the vote count.

A woman holds a sign reading "Free Gabon" during a demonstration at the Old Port of Marseille on September 4, 2016

Starved of information the Gabonese people have turned to French media, including RFI, France 24 AND TV5 Monde, which have special correspondents in Libreville but are largely absent in the provinces.

Some Gabonese TV channels are continuing to operate, if barely, notably Tele Gabon and Gabon 24 -- public broadcasters close to the powers that be.

Tele Gabon ran in-house ads for television series while Gabon 24 repeatedly announced that the opening of parliament had been delayed until September 6.

The country had previously enjoyed relative political stability, mainly because former colonial power France helped Omar Bongo rule for 41 years.

After he died in June 2009, his son Ali won an election but opposition media claimed he had essentially been installed by France.
The 2016 presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, says President Mahama's tenure of office has been nothing short of a disaster for the country, resulting in unprecedented levels of hardship and suffering amongst Ghanaians.

With President Mahama urging Ghanaians to ignore Nana Akufo-Addo's try me appeal and not to experiment with a new President in 2016, the NPP flagbearer noted that the experience of the person there now has been a disastrous experience for our country.

In view of this disastrous experience, Nana Akufo-Addo asked: So what is the purpose of the continuity? Are we going to continue the disaster? Is that what we want to do? We want to get rid of the disaster, and bring in a man with new ideas and a fresh direction for our nation.

The NPP flagbearer was addressing hundreds of residents at Nandom, on Saturday, September 3, 2016, on the first day of his 2-day tour of the Upper West Region, when he made these remarks.

Appealing to residents, and Ghanaians to have confidence in him, Nana Akufo-Addo assured that I am not coming to fill my pockets with your money. I am coming to work to straighten up our country and bring it back to prosperity again.

I have no interest in Ford Expeditions

Having visited Hamile, in the Lambussie constituency, prior to his tour of Nandom, Nana Akufo-Addo noted that the first road one drives on, upon entering Ghana from Burkina Faso, is the road from Hamile to Nandom, which leads further down south. These roads, he stated, are in deplorable conditions, having driven on them on his way to Hamile.

This is not the road Ghana should be introduced to people from Burkina Faso. This dirt road? We are going to do something about it, take it from me. People should have a better impression of our country than this road, he added.

The NPP flagbearer assured residents that his government, God-willing from January 2017, will ensure that the link road from Hamile to Nandom and further down into the Upper West Region is constructed.

The award of the contract for the road, he added, will be done by competitive tendering, and not sole sourcing, which has been the norm and method for the award of contracts under the Mahama administration.

We are going to find the contractor by a process of competitive bidding. We are not going to go into a room and sit down with one person and say yes (you have the contract). I have no interest in Cadillacs or Fords or whatever. We want to do a job for Ghana, a good job for that matter, he said.

Additionally, he assured residents of Nandom and the Upper West Region, who have fallen prey to microfinance scams, that if by the time 7th January comes, and, by the Grace of God, I have taken the Oath of Office, and all these matters of the Microfinance institutions have not been sorted out, I am coming to make sure that things are sorted out.

Nana Akufo-Addo urged residents of Nandom to vote for the NPP's candidate for the constituency, Hon. Ambrose Dery, stressing that the change that is blowing across the entire country has to embrace one of the best men you have in the politics of the Upper West.

Hon. Ambrose Dery, the NPP flagbearer added, was a brilliant Minister from the Upper West Region. He was a brilliant Regional Minister, and I have no doubt the he is going to be a brilliant Minister in Akufo-Addo's cabinet.

In concluding, the NPP flagbearer appealed to residents of the Upper West Region to restore their links with the NPP, explaining that the Region is where some of the important leaders of the NPP's political tradition hailed from.

Their names are written in gold in the history of Ghana  S.D. Dombo, B.K. Adama, Jato Kaleo, Mumuni DImbie, Abaayifa Karbo. These are the names of the men who got up to fight for freedom for our country, at great personal cost, to build Ghana's democracy. They are turning in their graves knowing that, today, we don't have a political presence in the Upper West. I am pleading with you. This election, let us restore the NPP to its heritage and connect it to the people who built that heritage.
The 2016 presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, says President Mahamas tenure of office has been nothing short of a disaster for the country.

This he said had resulted in unprecedented levels of hardship and suffering amongst Ghanaians.

With President Mahama urging Ghanaians to ignore Nana Akufo-Addos try me appeal and not to experiment with a new President in 2016, the NPP flagbearer noted that the experience of the person there now has been a disastrous experience for our country.

In view of this disastrous experience, Nana Akufo-Addo questioned why the president will ask Ghanaians to vote and retain him in power.

So what is the purpose of the continuity? Are we going to continue the disaster? Is that what we want to do? We want to get rid of the disaster, and bring in a man with new ideas and a fresh direction for our nation.

The NPP flagbearer was addressing hundreds of residents at Nandom, on Saturday, September 3, 2016, on the first day of his two-day tour of the Upper West Region.

Appealing to residents, and Ghanaians to have confidence in him, Nana Akufo-Addo assured that I am not coming to fill my pockets with your money. I am coming to work to straighten up our country and bring it back to prosperity again.

The NPP flagbearer assured residents that his government, God-willing from January 2017, will ensure that the link road from Hamile to Nandom and further down to the Upper West Region is constructed.

The award of the contract for the road, he added, will be done by competitive tendering, and not sole sourcing, which has been the norm and method for the award of contracts under the Mahama administration.

We are going to find the contractor by a process of competitive bidding. We are not going to go into a room and sit down with one person and say yes, you have the contract. I have no interest in Cadillacs or Fords or whatever. We want to do a job for Ghana, a good job for that matter, he said.

Additionally, he assured residents of Nandom and the Upper West Region, who have fallen prey to microfinance scams, that if by the time 7th January comes, and, by the Grace of God, I have taken the Oath of Office, and all these matters of the Microfinance institutions have not been sorted out, I am coming to make sure that things are sorted out.

Nana Akufo-Addo urged residents of Nandom to vote for the NPPs candidate for the constituency, Hon. Ambrose Dery, stressing that the change that is blowing across the entire country has to embrace one of the best men you have in the politics of the Upper West.

Hon. Ambrose Dery, the NPP flagbearer added, was a brilliant Minister from the Upper West Region. He was a brilliant Regional Minister, and I have no doubt the he is going to be a brilliant Minister in Akufo-Addos cabinet.

Akufo-Addo appealed to residents of the Upper West Region to restore their links with the NPP, explaining that the Region is where some of the important leaders of the NPPs political tradition hailed from.

Their names are written in gold in the history of Ghana  S.D. Dombo, B.K. Adama, Jato Kaleo, Mumuni DImbie, Abaayifa Karbo. These are the names of the men who got up to fight for freedom for our country, at great personal cost, to build Ghanas democracy. They are turning in their graves knowing that, today, we dont have a political presence in the Upper West. I am pleading with you. This election, let us restore the NPP to its heritage and connect it to the people who built that heritage.

Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com
The flagbearer of the opposition New Patriotic Party says the country cannot be sitting on wealth whilst its residents starve.

Nana Akufo-Addo believes the Mahama government he describes as incompetent is to blame for the starvation.

"We are sitting on gold and yet we are starving. We have a poor government in place that cannot do the work it is supposed to be doing and that is the problem we have in Ghana today.

"A government is going to use the money for the welfare of the people of Ghana not a government that is putting the monies of Ghana in their pockets," he said.

The NPP flagbearer was speaking at a rally in Nandom as part of his tour of the Upper West region.

Nana Akufo-Addo does not understand why Ghana has to be importing tomatoes, plantain and other foodstuffs from Burkina Faso and other neighboring countries when Ghana has what it takes to grow all that.

He again took a swipe at the president, accusing him of collapsing the single biggest social intervention program introduced by the New Patriotic Party.

"One of the biggest legacies of Kufuor was the National Health Insurance Scheme. It has collapsed under the John Mahama's NDC. When the bill was going through Parliament, the NDC members in Parliament, including the then MP for Bole Bamboi, John Dramani Mahama walked out of the House. They didn't believe in the bill and walked out.

"It is not surprising that when they come into power this important tool of social engineering, of social stability of equity has been discarded and sent into the dustbin.

"We are going to bring it back," he said.

Story by Ghana|Myjoyonline.com
The Presidential Candidate of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), Nana Akufo Addo, has admonished the people of the Nadowli-Kaloe Constituency in the Upper West Region, to vote out their incumbent Member of Parliament, Alban Bagbin.

Nana Addo argued that, Alban Bagbin, who is the current Majority Leader has been in Parliament for too long and must be replaced.

Nana Addo was addressing residents of the constituency as part of his campaign in the Upper West Region, when he made the remark.

He said the people of Nadowli-Kaleo should instead vote for the NPP's 26-year old candidate, Elvis Bortaa to replace Bagbin.

The Member of Parliament, majority leader, Alban Bagbin was in Parliament when I went to Parliament in 1997. He had already served one term. I left Parliament in the year 2008 and Bagbin my good friend is still in Parliament. I think that we will all do Alban Bagbin a good favour if we retire him so that he can go and have a good retirement. Let's work on that and retire him so he can go and have a rest so we push this young man Elvis Bortaa to come in his place, he added.

Mr. Bagbin has held the seat since 1992.

I'll unseat Alban Bagbin

Elvis Botaa, had earlier said he is optimistic of winning the seat come December 7. According to him, the people of Nadowli- Kaleo are hungry for a leader who will spearhead developments in the constituency.

I am competent and well-equipped with what it takes to lead the people. All it takes is for you to understand the suffering of the people and to have adequate knowledge of what options you need to make available to salvage the situation.

The 26 year old said I would not want to admit that I am too young; the bottom line is that I am bringing to finality the long reign of Alban S.K. Bagbin whose tenure of office in my estimation has not yielded anything too good for the good people of Nadowli.



By: Godwin A. Allotey/citifmonline.com/Ghana

Follow @AlloteyGodwin
By Amadu Kamil Sanah, GNA

Accra, Sept. 4, GNA - Ms Mercy Abena Arthur of Nav-West Basic School at Old Seko in Western Region, the winner of the Zoomlion National Quiz competition, has received a prize for an all-expense paid trip to Dubai.

The quiz competition which involved members of Zoomkids Club in basic schools was under the direct supervision of the School Health Education Programme (SHEP) and club patrons of selected schools.

The competition was organized by Zoomlion Foundation in collaboration with Ministry of Education for basic schools across the country to help raise the level of environmental sanitation awareness among school children and the general public.

The purpose of the trip for Mercy is to help her experience first-hand information of how a clean city looks like and help champion environmental cleanliness.

She would be travelling during the school vacation with her club patron, a volunteer teacher of the Zoomkids Club, and will visit special areas of environmental and educational interests.

All well placed contestants received deserving awards.

Dr Joseph Siaw Agyepong, the Executive Chairman of Zoomlion/Jospong Group of Companies, said 'as the company celebrates its 10th anniversary it is important to engage the school children to appreciate their contributions towards sanitation improvement'.

Mrs Florence Larbi, Managing Director of Zoomlion Ghana Limited, expressed the hope that the quiz competition will improve on the knowledge of young people on environmental issues.

She said Zoomlion has operated the Zoomkids club which is environmental sanitation and health clubs in schools across the country for the past eight years and there is the need to continuously improve on the knowledge of children and youth on environmental sanitation.

The Director of SHEP, Mrs Nana Esi Inkoom said, there is the need for more collaboration between Zoomlion and SHEP to bring about improvement in school health and sanitation.

Ms Arthur expressed delight and gratitude to God and the Foundation for organizing the event, adding, 'I feel so excited; Zoomkids Club is the best club every student should join. Not only does it increase your knowledge in personal hygiene, your confidence is boosted as you are not shy to speak to your peers about the need to observe environmental sanitation'.

The various stages of the quiz competition including Northern Sector Zonal competition, Southern Sector Zonal competition, and Semi-final and Final competitions were aired live on Ghana Television.

The quiz master, Mr Afari Yeboah of 'What do you know' fame took the contestants through the various exciting moments.

GNA
By Amadu Kamil Sanah, GNA

Suhum (E/R), Sept. 4, GNA - Mr George Aguadze, Eastern Regional Manager of Zoomlion, a waste management company, has called for a collective effort by all stakeholders in waste management to help ensure a clean and safe environment.

Mr Aguadze made this known to the Ghana News Agency after a clean-up exercise organised as part of the National Sanitation Day (NSD) exercise at Suhum in the Kraboa Coaltar Municipality of the Eastern Region.

He called for attitudinal change from the citizenry and urged all the Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDA's) to continue the education on the need to protect the environment from filth.

Mr Aguadze said his outfit has deployed about 80 Youth Employment Agency beneficiaries and 20 sprayers of the National Mosquito Control in Suhum to augment the existing staff in the municipality.

He said the Eastern Regional Office of Zoomlion had just take delivery of 20 trucks and also dispatched 180 communal containers to the various Assemblies in the region.

The Regional Manager express satisfaction that residents in the various MMDA's now accept the household door to door collection of rubbish which used to be a big problem in the past.

This, he said, has reduced the indiscriminate dumping of refuse in various areas and enhanced the distribution of the refuse bins to residents.

He urged the citizenry to keep their environment clean as it's everybody's responsibility.

The NSD was instituted in 2014 by the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development under the directive of President John Dramani Mahama to revive the spirit of communal labour in our communities.

The first Saturday of every month has been set aside to observe the exercise nationwide.

GNA
Accra, Sept. 4, GNA - Dr Bernice Adiku-Heloo, the Deputy Minister for Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation, has urged women to help reverse the increasing incidence of teenage pregnancies in the communities.

She said as mothers and sisters, there was the urgent need to bring the children, especially the girls, back on track so as to arrest the situation.

'The economic demands of the day should not cause us to neglect the children. They are our future,' she said.

Dr Adiku-Heloo was speaking at the official opening of the 2016 Tema/Accra Presbytery Women Ministry rally in Accra on the theme: 'Thy Kingdom Come, Establishing Women for the Kingdom Business.'

She said women hold the key to societal transformation and their well-being should necessarily be of concern to all.

It is in this direction, she said, that the government is putting much effort into passing the Affirmative Action Bill to enhance women participation in governance and decision-making at all levels.

Dr Adiku-Heloo urged the Church leadership and the Women's Ministry not to relent on efforts to put up an ultra-modern vocational institute.

She urged the women to be ambassadors of peace as the country moves towards the December 7 polls.

'So as electioneering continues and as we march towards the polls, be the ambassador for peace, in your home, workplace, community and wherever you find yourself, before, during and after the elections on the 7th of December,' she said.

In a speech read on behalf of the two presbyteries, Mrs Euphemia Gifty Agbavitor, the Accra Presbytery Leader, said through the Women Ministry, some women were realising their God given potentials while some have used the skills acquired to earn a living.

She said the objective of the rally is to remind women of the call and duty to win souls for the Kingdom of God, adding that children, spouses and close relations must be brought to the kingdom.

'If we are mindful and established in the kingdom business, our children will be positively impacted which will affect the church, the nation and the world as a whole,' she said.

On the December 7 polls, Mrs Agbavitor appealed to Ghanaians to be mindful of their utterances in the election year and urged the media to be circumspect in their reportage.

Besides political campaigns should be issues based instead of personality attacks while political parties should control the utterances and activities of their followers, she said.

'Ghanaians should be more tolerant in dealing with each other. Our tribal or political differences should not tear us apart,' she added.

GNA
Accra, Sept. 4, GNA - The women ministry programmes must be tailored in ways that meet the various needs of the diverse members, Dr (Mrs) Shine Ofori, the wife of the Moderator of the Global Evangelical Church, has said.

Speaking at the Accra/Tema Presbytery Women's Rally, Dr Ofori said senior women must be treated with respect and not be cut off from the group.

'Senior women must be treated with respect. They should not be cut off. They must belong,' she said, stressing the importance of recognising the various needs of members.

'We need Bible study, prayer, friendship, caring, sharing, encouragement and even fun!' Dr Ofori said.

Touching on the theme: 'Establishing Women for the Kingdom Business' Dr Ofori said the Kingdom business comes in different ways in worshipping God, child upbringing, husband support, serving the family, the church and the nation.

She said everything 'we do when we come to know the Lord, is Kingdom Business. In other words, everything is ministry.'

Dr Ofori reminded Christians that there would be challenges and difficulties as is in the world today but gave the assurance that God's day of rest would come.

She said the gospel did not teach Christians that there would be no suffering in the world but only needed to pray to God to grant strength to carry and deal with the trials.

'The weeds would continue to grow with the children of God. This is the evil we find in the world. Jesus gospel did not teach us that there will not be suffering in the world. A day of rest will come,' she added.

Dr Ofori said as Christians we have the responsibility to be very discerning of the spirits.

She said while there are many big churches today, thousands of people flock there to see wonders and not to worship God and cited instances where the chapels overflow during revivals only for the people to go on break when the revivals end.

GNA
By Afedzi Abdullah, GNA

Takoradi, Sept. 4, GNA - The Ahmadiyya Muslim Movement has reiterated the need for religious, political and traditional leaders to be positive role models in the practice of tolerance as we approach the December polls.

It said tolerance was a key moral traits required for promoting peace in the world and an indispensable tool for holding a violence-free elections in December 2016 and beyond.

It appealed to Ghanaians to make conscious efforts to tolerate one another.

Mr Ayyub Morgan, National Education Secretary of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Mission, made the call at the opening of the 37th annual national rally of the Majlis Khudam-ul-Ahmadiyya, Ghana held in Takoradi.

The annual rally which was on the theme:'Tolerance, an indispensable tool for peaceful co-existence', was aimed at working towards improving the spirituality, moral, social and physical development of members to increase their faith in Allah.

Mr Morgan said man could not develop spiritually, morally and materially without tolerance.

In this regard, he urged political leaders of the various political parties to educate their members to be peace-loving and whole-heartedly tolerate opposing views and refrain from insults in their campaigns.

'All politicians must embrace inter-party dialogue, commitment and engagement. Tolerance must manifests in patience, self-control and willingness to forgive, instead of condemnation, retaliation, confrontation wickedness and brutality', he said.

He said tolerance was indispensable and that religious leaders' especially Islamic leaders could not be tired of admonishing goodness, patience, togetherness, forgiveness and avoidance of extremism among the entire citizenry as espoused in the Holy Quran.

'Above all, let us all promote inter-party and intra-party tolerance as well as inter and intra religious tolerance. Peaceful co-existence and national development are only achievable through tolerance of each other's views and excesses. Let us love all, and hate none as Ahmadiyya advocates', he added.

Maulvi Mohammed Bin Salih, Ameer and Missionary in Charge of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Mission, Ghana urged Muslim youths in the country to be bold and shun political leaders who engaged them to perpetrate mayhem to salvage the image of the religion.

He said Islam has reached a state where people have used its name to create unnecessary insecurity in the world and that it was incumbent on its youth to behave in a manner that mirrors the true teachings of the religion.

He said there is the need for world leaders to come to a round table conference and make conscious efforts to collectively work towards avoiding the occurrence of another world war and ensuring World peace.

Maulvi Salih said the impact of the first and second World wars were devastating such that the whole mankind could be obliterated with the sophisticated systems in this era, should there be a third world war.

Maulvi Salih described the theme for this year's rally as apt at a time where there 'was heated environment' as a result of an impending election and expressed the hope that it would be useful to the youth.

He urged political leaders to accept the results of the elections in good faith only if they cherished the development of the country as they claimed.

GNA
Awiebo (W/R), Sept. 4 GNA - Vice President Kwesi Amissah-Arthur has called on foot soldiers of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) to go out to the communities and highlight the achievements of government to the people.

He said the NDC also has a superior record in terms of achievements which its opponent cannot much.

Vice President Amissah-Arthur was speaking at the inauguration of the NDC's Western Regional Campaign Task Force at Awiebo in the Ellembele District of the Western Region.

Vice President Amissah-Arthur and his entourage were welcomed by a tumultuous crowd of NDC sympathizers who sang and chanted party slogans.

Vice President Amissah-Arthur also inaugurated the Western Regional Campaign Task Force with Mr Armah Kofi Buah as its Co-ordinator and introduced the parliamentary candidates contesting on the ticket of the NDC in the region to the crowd.

Vice President Amissah-Arthur urged the party sympathizers to embark on house to house campaigns to ensure a 'one time' victory for President Mahama.

He cautioned the rank and file of the party to guard against complacency and work diligently to ensure a win for the party.

Vice President Amissah-Arthur also reminded the party supporters to conduct their campaign in a peaceful manner.

He, however, warned NDC sympathizers against voting skirt and blouse because President Mahama would need more Members of Parliament (MPs) to help him deliver on his second term mandate.

The Second Lady, Mrs Matilda Amissah-Arthur called Ghanaians to renew the mandate of President Mahama because the NDC is already delivering on its promises.

She warned the party foot soldiers to guard against complacency but work hard to ensure total victory in the December 7 elections.

Mr Johnson Asiedu Nketia, General Secretary of the NDC, warned that those failed parliamentary aspirants who would want to contest as independent candidates would be automatically banned from the party.

He said the NDC party has opportunities for everybody and that those seeking to go independent must rather work with the elected candidates to ensure massive win for the party.

Mr Asiedu Nketia also debunked claims that the NDC is waiting for the NPP to launch its manifesto before they do theirs.

He said the party already has a message which it is carrying in terms of the government's developmental agenda.

GNA
04.09.2016 LISTEN

By Albert Futukpor/Kamara Osman Faisal, GNA

Tamale, Sept. 4, GNA - The National Media Commission (NMC) in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme has trained selected journalists in the Northern Region on promoting peace.

The one-day training, which was held in Tamale, formed part of the overall initiative by the NMC to promote peace journalism in the upcoming general election.

Dr Seidu Alidu, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Political Science of the University of Ghana, who was the resource person for the training, urged journalists to firm up their gate-keeping roles by guarding against the use of intemperate words in their reportage.

He said elections were the very crucial deciding factors that determined who governed the country, and there is the likelihood that people might dwell on those factors to cause mayhem hence the need for journalists to use their platforms to promote peace.

He urged journalists to use their work to strengthen people's resolve to achieving peace since the country could only consolidate her democracy when there was peaceful co-existence.

GNA
By Amadu Kamil Sanah, GNA

Accra, Sept. 4, GNA - Subah Info Solutions has awarded scholarships to 15 distinguished 2015/2016 National Service Personnel of the Urban Sanitation Module (USM) under the National Waste Bin Distribution (NaWaBin) for their hard work.

The award winners totalling 92 people have also been guaranteed with employment by Subah Info Solutions whilst others received tablets, various cash amounts, and other consolation prizes.

The distinguished 15 winners will be fully sponsored by Subah to India and the Netherlands for further studies at a cost of not less than $15,000 for each student.

The objective of the programme is to develop data sharing and data security policy to ensure the continued integrity of the platform and establish the governance structure required to optimise the benefits from geospatial resources.

It was also to develop collaborations with the geospatial community of Ghana to foster integration and seamless harmonization of existing geospatial infrastructure whilst defining strategies for quality spatial data discovery, timely access and use to prevent duplication of data collection, updating and investments, to develop strategy for the promotion and awareness of the platform and incorporate the platform into a broader global SDI system.

Mr Birendra Sasmal, Chief Executive Officer of Subah, said the students will partake in courses such as Geo-technology, Soft and Hardware Management and Spatial Data Management.

He said the sponsorship which would be an annual affair is to encourage the youth to go into the learning of technology.

Dr Joseph Siaw Agyepong, Executive Chairman of the Jospong Group, said National Service Personnel who proved to be excellent ought to be supported and lifted for success.

He said Suba is partnering with GENESIS, an Indian company, and the beneficiaries would work to improve on their skills whilst schooling more so the company is supporting Subah with $3 million every year for their operations.

Dr Kpesah Whyte, Executive Director of the NSS, said the scheme is a programme of national responsibility and that institutions must emulate Subah to support service personnel in learning.

Mr Mahama Ayariga, Minister for Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation, said his outfit led Town and Country Planning Department to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with Subah to use the data collected for good planning.

The National Waste Bin Distribution Programme is a nationwide private financing and technical initiative between Melchia Investment Ghana Limited, a Ghanaian firm and the National Service Scheme of Ghana.

The programme which commenced in June 2015 was to develop a Geospatial platform with an integrated waste bin distribution and collection database system to optimise waste bin distribution and collection.

This effort has evolved further - building on previous government's initiatives such as the Ghana Street Naming Exercise, to expand Ghana's digital geospatial footprint to facilitate public and private sector decision making, retrieval and updating of information, revenue mobilization enhancement and development controls.

GNA
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West Texas Permian Basin has held the hottest oil land in the United States for about two years.

And its not slowing down.

Last week, another energy firm bought in. Denver-based PDC Energy bought 57,000 acres from New York-based private equity asset manager Kimmeridge Energy for $1.5 billion, or about $21,000 per undeveloped acre.

Since 2015, about 1 in 3 dollars in the U.S. energy mergers-and-acquisitions market has picked up Permian assets, according to oil market analysts Wood Mackenzie.

Things are definitely getting hotter in the Permian Basin right now, said Wood Mack analyst Ben Shattuck. Youve got a substantial asset base that you can drill at todays prices and still make money on.

Over the past three months, the firm has tracked eight deals worth more than $400 million each  some, far more.

In June, San Antonios Pioneer Energy bought 28,000 acres from Oklahoma City-based Devon Energy for $435 million, or about $14,000 per undeveloped acre. A few days later, Denvers QEP Resources bought 9,000 acres for $600 million from an undisclosed seller, spending more than $60,000 an acre  a sum that made oilmen raise eyebrows.

In July, Midlands Diamondback Energy bought 19,000 acres from Austins Luxe Energy for $560 million or $27,000 per undeveloped acre. Houston-based Silver Run Acquisition, run by former EOG chief executive and renowned shale driller Mark Papa, bought 38,000 acres from the private, Denver-based Centennial Resource Production for $1.38 billion, or $29,000 an acre.

And in August, companies booked four big deals, including Denver-based SM Energys purchase of 25,000 acres from Houstons Rock Oil for $980 million, or $31,000 per undeveloped acre; Midland-based Concho Resources pickup of 40,000 acres from Midlands Reliance Energy for $1.63 billion, or $30,000 an acre; and Austin-based Parsley Energys 9,000-acre buy from an undisclosed seller for $400 million, or $43,000 an acre.

About three-quarters of the Permian deals in recent years have been in the regions northern and eastern area, called the Midland Basin.

This year, the Permians western half, the Delaware Basin, is heating up.

Small private firms like Brigham, Jagged Peak, Three Rivers, Silver Hill and Luxe Space also have dipped into the Delaware. And, belatedly, so have the big public companies like Shell, Chevron and Conoco.

This summers Diamondback, PDC and Silver Run purchases were all in the Permians western basin.

Papa, the former EOG chief, said Silver Run had been looking for a meaningful position in one of North Americas premier oil shale basins.

There has been a lot of recent excitement about the Delaware Basin, but we believe its potential is still significantly underappreciated, Papa said in a statement. He described the deal as a launching point for the new company.

I look forward to replicating the culture and philosophy that made EOG Resources such a success during my time there, Papa said, and using the Centennial assets as a platform to build something truly special.

The Delaware wasnt a secret, Wood Mack analysts said. But the basins geology is more complex than that of the neighboring Midland. And drilling technology didnt allow efficient production in the Delaware until late 2014.

Thats when rigs began flocking to the basin, Wood Macks Shattuck said, even as oil prices crumbled and drillers moth-balled other plans.
At least once a year, an official from a property-wealthy Texas school calls Christy Rome and tells her theyre just not going to do it. They dont want to send a big chunk of their tax dollars to the state, even though theyre required to do so under a state law meant to buoy poorer districts.

I cant recommend that, the Texas School Coalition chief always tells them, citing a host of potentially worse financial consequences.

The resistance dates back to the mid-1990s, when Texas lawmakers  under the gun of a court order  enacted a plan known as Robin Hood that was meant to ease vast funding inequities among school districts fueled by a property tax-based funding system.

For years, getting rid of the scheme altogether was the primary legislative goal of Romes 140-member coalition of school districts, which has unsuccessfully fought Robin Hood in the courts. Now, she says, the goal is simply to rein it in.

With major pushback from property-poor schools and decades of case law reinforcing the take-from-the-rich, give-to-the-poor concept, whether that will happen is a big question.

But Rome says the group is hopeful for reform during the 2017 legislative session. Resistance from property-wealthy schools has exploded, along with the number of districts  including very big ones  required to pay up under the Robin Hood plan.

The frustration is particularly rife in the states largest school district, Houston, which is making its first-ever recapture payment this year because the state now considers it too property-wealthy. The obligation  estimated at more than $160 million  drove a $95 million shortfall the district is closing by cutting funding to some campuses, along with administrative and tutoring positions and a controversial teacher bonus program.

Officials there are calling for a vigorous lobbying effort, as are those from other large and politically powerful school districts such as Austin, which has seen recapture payments skyrocket over the years amid rapid property value growth and declining student enrollment. The states sixth-largest district is expecting to send more than $400 million to the state this year.

Robin Hood has far exceeded its life-hood as a law, Houston school board trustee Greg Meyers said recently.

House Speaker Joe Straus has also ordered state representatives to study Texas increasing reliance on Robin Hood as a method of funding public education ahead of the 2017 legislative session, which begins in January. The San Antonio Republicans directive came in early June, just after a Texas Supreme Court ruling upheld the states method of funding public schools as minimally constitutional and urged state lawmakers to enact reforms.

Rome said the coalition had hoped the political motivation to banish, or at least change, the system would bubble up 16 years ago when the Austin district began making recapture payments.

That wasnt the tipping point, though, she said. Maybe Houston will be.

The coalition will face fierce resistance from property-poor schools, represented by the Equity Center, which agree with wealthier districts that the state has grown too reliant on local tax revenue to fund public education and underfunds schools in general. But they also believe Robin Hood is crucial to easing funding inequities. The system is far kinder to property-wealthy districts even if they have to make recapture payments, said Equity Center Executive Director Wayne Pierce.

Contrary to popular belief, he said, that money isnt funneled directly to poor districts but instead into a big pot of money distributed to all of the states more than 1,200 public and charter schools. And he said schools like Houston and Austin still get hundreds more dollars per student than the average school district.

Recapture is a salvation to public education, Pierce said. Those that pay it are still funded at higher levels and have lower tax rates, so its not hurting those schools but it is helping the state.

The only way the Equity Center would support eliminating Robin Hood, Pierce said, is if the state totally changed the way it funds public schools, replacing local property taxes with a statewide property tax or other statewide tax  a concept that has had little to no political traction.

Houstons problems are more important than other peoples problems for political reasons, he added.

But even some of those who are most frustrated with Robin Hood arent hopeful much will change.

State Sen. Kirk Watson, an Austin Democrat, says the Republican-dominated Legislature is more interested in attacking local entities for skyrocketing property taxes than acknowledging that rising recapture payments, and property values, have decreased by billions of dollars the amount of money the state is required to spend on public education every year. He notes that the average Austin homeowners annual tax bill is $1,400 higher because of recapture.

Im most of the time the glass-is-half-full kind of guy, but Im not seeing any momentum toward doing anything other than the practice of blaming others and not fixing the system, Watson said.

We just feel like its gotten out of hand. I dont think anyone ever imagined Robin Hood would grow to the level it has now. Christy Rome, executive director of the Texas School Coalition

Rome acknowledges the coalition faces an uphill battle. Robin Hood has become a reliable and ever-increasing source of income for a thrifty Legislature that is eager to cut taxes whenever possible, she said. It also is facing declining state revenue amid a slump in oil prices.

Recapture payments now make up a sizable chunk of what the state spends on public education, with more than $2 billion in payments expected in 2017. (That is notably more than $1.2 billion the Texas Lottery generates annually for public schools, Rome likes to point out.)

The Robin Hood program started out small, with only 34 school districts paying up  mostly smaller rural ones near big industrial plants or other major tax-generating properties. But as property values have skyrocketed across the state, an increasing number of school districts have hit the maximum level of wealth generation set in state law. Most of them are required to send money to the state because they raise more tax revenue than they are allowed to keep.

Of the states more than 1,200 school districts and charters, 257 are expected to make recapture payments this school year. That is up from 142 districts that made recapture payments in 2006.

We just feel like its gotten out of hand, Rome said. I dont think anyone ever imagined Robin Hood would grow to the level it has now.

Lawmakers have tweaked the system a few times over the decades to ensure it includes only the most property-wealthy districts, thus saving some schools from recapture payments. (Dallas ISD, for example, is doing everything it can to avoid having to pay up.)

As the number of school districts required to pay recapture has grown, along with the size of payments for many schools, so has the resentment.

It was on full display at a recent meeting of the Houston school board board, where trustees grudgingly voted to place an item on the November ballot that would authorize the district to send a recapture payment to the state. Some trustees have said they may encourage voters to reject the measure, in essence placing a bet that the Legislature will bail out the district next year. But they also acknowledge its failure could have negative consequences  namely, the education commissioner would then have the authority to sever select commercial buildings from the tax rolls.

I think at this point what I would love to see is a very, very concerted  very concerted  effort to go up to Austin to talk to our legislators to continue to educate them on the impacts, said Meyer, who represents southwest Houston on the board. Because I can promise you $162 million  thats going to affect kids. That will affect teachers.

State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican who has lambasted local school districts for a rising debt load that they blame on insufficient state funding, warned that HISD will be forced to hike taxes if voters reject the recapture measure. He described trustee resistance as retaliatory following the recent state Supreme Court ruling that upheld the states school finance system.

They want to make a major statement, but making a major statement could have major consequences associated with it, he said.

Many tiny, rural school districts in South Texas Eagle Ford Shale that saw property tax values skyrocket during the oil boom are having to pay up for the first time, too. These districts are frustrated that recapture payments lag a year behind and so dont reflect their current dire financial state during the oil bust.

Weve got to now make sure were starting to talk to state lawmakers and legislators about where we are, Runge schools interim superintendent Pam Seipp told The Texas Tribune in an interview this summer.

The situation is more or less a disaster, said Cuero schools interim superintendent Ben Colwell.

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Online: www.texastribune.org/
SALT FLAT  Dont even think of trying to drive out on those salt flats, Shirley Richardson told me one afternoon this week as we stood outside the Salt Flat Cafe and bus stop. Shirleys grandparents opened the cafe in 1929 in whats now a desolate ghost town near the base of the spectacular Guadalupe Mountains. She had to close it eight months ago, she told me, after she fell and broke her knee, wrist, ribs and shoulder while chasing after a dog that had run out on the highway with a butane truck bearing down.

The salt flats cover a portion of her familys ranch, 5 miles east of the cafe in Hudspeth County in West Texas. Theyre a remnant of an ancient, shallow lake from the Pleistocene Epoch, approximately 1.8 million years ago. From U.S. Highway 62, the surface looks densely packed, like the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. Its not.

We talked a bit about the cafe and about how the little town has hosted a couple of flight pioneers. Amelia Earhart touched down in Salt Flat three times in the 1930s, Shirley said. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos had the cafes green-chili enchiladas not long ago. The vast acreage across the road from the cafe is part of his Blue Origin spaceflight services company.

Driving past the flats again, I noticed a westbound car slow down and pull off the pavement. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the driver do exactly what Shirley had warned about. The car plowed through the glistening, gray flats for about 50 yards before bogging down, tires spinning as the driver got out and tried to push. I made a U-turn and stopped on the shoulder. A young man in shorts and T-shirt, arms waving, came running through the salty muck toward my car.

Unclaimed property

The salt flats have caused consternation before. They even sparked a short-lived war.

To get a sense of their significance, imagine a train of 16 cottonwood carts pulled by 60 yoke of oxen making its creaking, tedious way across the arid waste of far West Texas. The 80 or so men driving the stolid animals are salineros, salt gatherers from the El Paso Valley communities of Ysleta, Socorro and San Elizario. Salineros have been making the 160-mile trip since the 1700s.

Nearly all the residents downriver from El Paso, most of them farmers and livestock grazers, were Mexican in language, ethnicity and culture (and still are). Salt was integral to their daily lives. Not only did they rely on it to preserve meat and cure hides, but also they sold it to silver miners around Chihuahua, who used tons in the refining process. And they sold to the U.S. Army.

Under Spanish law, the salt beds were common property. After the Mexican War, they became unclaimed lands under American law, available to anyone who filed on them. The Mexicans  who became Mexican-Americans when the Rio Grande changed channels in the 1820s  believed that everybody had a right to the salt, a right guaranteed by the Spanish crown centuries earlier and affirmed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Enduring the heat and the threat of Apache attack as they had for generations, they never thought to file claims.

They didnt realize that after the Civil War and the chaos of Reconstruction, their world was changing drastically. The late Paul Cool, author of the definitive history of the Salt War (Salt Warriors: Insurgency on the Rio Grande), put it this way: If salt was the excuse for war, the underlying reason was this struggle between the rights of the community and those of hustling individualists.

The hustlers included El Paso businessmen W.W. Mills, Albert J. Fountain and Louis Cardis, who attempted to acquire title to the salt deposits and charge for the resource. Fountain was elected to the Texas Senate expecting to secure title for the people of the El Paso area. When Mills and Fountain began feuding, Cardis and Mills joined forces with Charles H. Howard, a Missouri lawyer and former Confederate officer. Cardis helped get Howard elected district attorney, but then Howard turned on Cardis.

In September 1877, Howard arrested two San Elizario residents heading for the salt beds. An angry mob captured and held the district attorney for three days at San Elizario. (See last weeks column.) He gained his freedom by vowing to give up claim to the salt beds and leave the state. He retreated to nearby Mesilla, N.M., but soon returned and killed Cardis in an El Paso store. Arraigned for the murder, he was placed under bond to appear in court in March.

Four-day gunbattle

The mule-headed Missourian couldnt leave well enough alone. In December, awagon train of Mexicans from both sides of the border left the valley, headed for the salt deposits; Howard filed suit. When he went down to San Elizario to press charges, he and a handful of Texas Rangers were besieged by a mob of several hundred locals. Howard and the Rangers took cover in the Rangers fort, and a gun battle raged for four days. On the fifth day Howard gave himself up.

The Rangers also surrendered, believing they had an agreement with the insurgents to free Howard.

Thats not what happened. On Dec. 17, he lined up against a wall before a firing squad of eight men from Mexico. Cool quotes an eyewitness account: When all was ready, Howard spoke. He could not speak Spanish very fluently, but enough to make himself understood; he said, You are now about to execute 300 men, then, baring his breast, he gave the word, Fire! 

They did. The insurgents executed two of Howards associates, as well, but allowed the Rangers to leave the fort after forfeiting their arms. Within a few days, several detachments of troops and a posse of American citizens arrived in San Elizario, where they killed or wounded an untold number of residents. Most of the insurgents already had fled into Mexico, and no one was ever arrested or brought to trial. President Rutherford B. Hayes and Army Gen. Phillip Sheridan resisted public pressure to invade Mexico.

Saved from folly

There were no salineros from San Elizario in Salt Flat this week, but there was one very distressed young man from Japan. Toku (he asked that I not use his full name), his wife and 8-year-old son, Japanese citizens living in New Jersey, were on the last day of their American Southwest vacation when they got stuck on the flats. I drove Toku back to Shirleys place, where she greeted him with, You stupid idiot!

Despite his limited English, Toku understood what she had said. Yes, idiot, yes, he said. Shirley told him it would cost $5,000 to get atow truck from El Paso, 87 miles away. Tokus mouth fell open.

Despite her exasperation, rescuing people from their temporary folly on the flats is for Shirley a common occurrence. She led us into the cafe, where she started making calls to tow-truck operators in Van Horn. No one could help. She mentioned to Toku that the Greyhound to El Paso would be coming through in about half an hour. Passengers have to stand beside the road and wave it down.

As Toku considered the bus option, his cellphone beeped. It was his wife back at the car. A man driving a pickup had stopped and was able to pull the car out.

The young man from Japan, the now-dried muck on his shins and shoes a souvenir of his West Texas adventure, was near tears. Such wonderful people, he said, smiling at Shirley and me. Such wonderful people.
We have been cursed with leaders ...
Columbia College logo View Photos

Columbia, CA  Federal funding will help Columbia College launch an Education Opportunity Center to encourage and assist adults interested in college and career training.

The US Department of Education has awarded a five-year grant totaling $1.18-million. The college will partner with over a dozen local agencies in the central Mother Lode to serve an estimated 1,000 individuals per year with information related to financial literacy, educational and career training options, financial aid and college applications.

Columbia College is one of 143 colleges and organizations across the nation selected for the five-year EOC program, and one of just four in California. College President Dr. Angela Fairchilds says, We are very proud that, once again, Columbia College has successfully competed with the much larger institutions across the nation for resources to support our community needswe are small but mighty. This funding allows us to extend our reach to underserved communities in our region with a goal of helping more adults to access education and training beyond high school.

The funding will be used to support a part-time director, two transition specialists, and an administrative assistant who will work with public and non-profit partners in Tuolumne, Calaveras, Amador, Mariposa and Stanislaus counties.

Regionally, only one in five adults age 25 and older hold a college degree, according to Columbia College. Of the regions 300 occupations that now pay at least $20 per hour, 68% require at least some college or post-secondary training.
The body of a teen who was swept away by the current on the Peace River Saturday morning while trying to save his 11-year-old sister has been recovered.

Body of Austin Welch, 18, recovered Sunday



Welch fishing with sister, mother at Peace River Canoe Launch

Sister, Crystal Droze, fell from the dock into the water

Welch, mom, both jumped into water to save her

Barbara Engle, 35, was out at the Peace River Canoe Launch in Bartow fishing with her two children, Austin Welch, 18, and Crystal Droze, 11, Saturday morning, officials said. At some point in the morning, Crystal lost her footing on the dock and fell into the water.

Both Austin and Engle jumped into the water to help Crystal. Engle and Crystal were able to grab onto each other, but Austin was swept away by the fast-moving current.

"He's always been a protector and he's just so selfless," his mother Engle said. "The most amazing kid you could ever know."

Mother and daughter were able to pull themselves to shore, run out to nearby State Road 60 and flag down a passerby for help.

Polk deputies arrived on scene at approximately 11:30 a.m. Polk Fire EMS and Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation personnel were also deployed to the scene to assist in the search.

The search for Austin continued Sunday morning. FWC used side-scanning sonar from their boats, which detected the presence of something near where Austin was last seen going underwater (in the same area where his mother and sister were able to grab some grass/brush and pull themselves to shore, a couple hundred yards from the dock where they all went in.)

The sheriff's office dive team entered the water where the image was seen on the sonar, and recovered Austin's body.

"Austin lost his life saving the life of his 11-year-old sister. We had hoped and prayed that we would find him safe on the shore somewhere. We searched for him for 24 hours, as if he were one of our own family members. Please keep his family in your prayers," Sheriff Grady Judd said in a statement.

"(Crystal) is still in shock," Engle said. "She's upset. She's blaming herself. We keep telling her it's not her fault," Engle said.

An autopsy will be conducted to determine exact cause of death, however, this appears to be an accidental drowning, deputies said.

Devastated loved ones are now remembering Austin for his kind heart.

"He's always been a great person always helping everybody," friend Tequila Chance said.

Friends and family also said they will never forget the sacrifice he made to save his family.

"Know that he's a hero," said Engle. "He did the one thing that he would do without hesitation. Everybody loves him. He loves everybody."


CLARION  While racism was cited in the defeat of a pork processing plant in Mason City, its approval by Wright County officials was done so amid more revealing prejudices.

And similar to the Mason City process, most of the electronic communication was against Prestage Foods.

The Wright County Supervisors on Aug. 22 approved the final steps in securing the $240 million pork processing plant, which is planned about 5 miles south of Eagle Grove. At full strength, a development agreement stipulates the company must employ about 1,750 workers.

The Globe Gazette informally requested all Prestage-related emails from Wright County supervisors and Economic Development Director Bryce Davis.

The newspaper received 116 emails from Davis and Wright County supervisors Stan Watne and Rick Rasmussen. Most of the emails included constituent names, email addresses and other identifying information.

Emails from Supervisor Karl Helgevold were not provided to the Globe Gazette as of Friday. County officials said they were still working on the request.(tncms-asset)797726b8-7154-11e6-a9cd-00163ec2aa77(/tncms-asset)

(tncms-asset)a4a12046-7154-11e6-82f3-00163ec2aa77(/tncms-asset)(tncms-asset)d319dfd0-7154-11e6-bcb6-00163ec2aa77(/tncms-asset)Wright County Attorney Eric Simonson, who provided emails for the two supervisors, said Helgevolds emails were duplicates of messages other supervisors also received.

Watne and Davis emails range from July 5 to Aug. 10, when the request was initially filled. Rasmussens emails were provided Aug. 31.

Many emails provided to the Globe Gazette were duplicates sent to all three supervisors.

There were 73 emails arguing against Prestage, 37 from for it and six that were neutral.

Davis, the development director, received 13 emails from the public. They are mostly congratulatory, with 10 positive and three against the project.

Watne received 41 emails. Of those, 26 emails were against the plant and were sent by 18 different individuals.

Rasmussen received 62 emails from July 5 to Aug. 22, and 44 of those were against the plant.

Several offered letters of support sent to all the supervisors, representing other county governments and organizations like the Iowa Turkey Federation. Some against the plant sent links or attachments to articles and studies for consideration.

Overtones





Of the 116 emails provided, there are nine emails with racial overtones.

Mike and Kate Wibholm of Dows said the plant would bring flies, stink, illegal Mexicans, low-income families, our schools flooded with kids/parents who cannot speak English, our communities property values drop, etc.

The Wibholms also mentioned in the email to Davis the types of students who would go to local schools if the plant located in Wright County.

Who do you want your kids to go to school with? Children who houses your kids can play at? their email read.

Doug Volz sent an email to the supervisors referencing his hometown, Perry, in Dallas County, basing his argument against Prestage on the influx of Latino workers to that area. Perry is home to a Tyson Foods pork plant.

No one wants to move to Perry because the schools are over 50 percent Latino, Volz said.

Volz asked the county to take a look at Perry before voting on Prestage.

The whites will move out, the Latinos will move in, Volz said. In Perry every bank has Latino tellers. Every auto parts store has Latinos behind the counter. The doctors offices have Latino receptionists and the waiting rooms are full of Latinos. Packing plants are the scourge of Midwestern towns.

Volz notes that he spends six months per year in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, so he has no problem with Latinos but I wish my hometown, Perry, was not a packing plant town!

Some citizens were more subtle with their work force objections.

With the type of workforce expected comes new diseases, including TB and MRSA, Fawn Roberts of Eagle Grove said.

MRSA is an infection caused by a type of staph bacteria, according to the Mayo Clinic. It is resistant to many antibiotics commonly used to treat staph infections.

There are other emails not counted in the nine referencing cultural diversity, quality of life, school and work force population make-up.

More comments





On Aug. 8, Kathy Schnell of Belmond expressed concern that the supervisors were not considering emails, and that only reading mailed letters was misleading. She also asked why emails were not read aloud at the public meetings like the letters sent to the courthouse.

Schnell had sent several emails to each of the supervisors.

Watne responded at the public hearing, saying the supervisors do read their emails.

As individuals, we read and take into account all emails, we listen to residents support or concerns, and we work to provide the public with the most accurate information, Watne said in an email. We do not take any decision lightly or quickly without listening to the public. This entails the information we receive through our email accounts.

For public hearings and drainage hearings, written comments will be read as sent letters with a signature.

Written comments require a signature which provides for a greater form of fraud mitigation, Davis said. Emails can be manipulated and an individual can create many emails and identities that can influence the amount of support or opposition to any proposal.

Watne said the county has always read and stored signed letters submitted to the courthouse for any government business.

It is important for us to maintain consistency and fairness for all Wright County residents, Watne said.

At the meeting, Helgevold said some of the emails he received appeared to be form emails.

The emails are almost identical in wording, with the subject line, TAKE ACTION: Vote NO on Prestage!

Rasmussen received five of the form emails and Watne received three.

Paul Adams of Mason City emailed each supervisor, speaking against the plant, voicing concerns on wages and turnover rate. He attached an MIT study on living wages.

This decision is going to have a long-term impact not just on Eagle Grove or Wright County, but on the entire region of North Iowa as well, Adams said. In my opinion, the risk of being a guinea pig for Prestage in launching their first hog processing plant and the negatives that come with it far outweigh the positives.
Senator Marco Rubio's re-election campaign stopped in Orlando Saturday at the Orange County Convention Center for the 10th annual Defending the American Dream Summit.

Rubio one of several keynote speakers

Event hosted by Americans for Prosperity

Rubio plans to return to Washington D.C. on Tuesday

Rubio was one of about a dozen keynote speakers during the summit, hosted by Americans for Prosperity, an influential conservative political group partially backed by oil billionaires Charles and David Koch.



After his speech, Rubio answered some questions one-on-one. He said he plans to head back to Washington when Congress returns to work on Tuesday.



"Hopefully one of the first things we'll do is find funding for Zika," said Rubio. "Should have happened a long time ago, you know I've supported every funding bill for Zika."



Rubio also didn't hesitate to talk about his Democratic opponent in November, South Florida Congressman Patrick Murphy.



"We've had real things we've achieved, and then you've got Patrick Murphy, the democrat, who has been in Congress for four years and has nothing to point to, has never passed a law," said Rubio.



Patrick Murphy's campaign, in turn, released a statement Saturday in regards to Rubio's appearance at the summit:



"While Marco Rubio abandoned Florida in the U.S. Senate, he has always shown up for the Kochs and now theyre returning the favor. But, Marco Rubio has a problem. He refuses to commit to a full term in the Senate and has the worst vote attendance record of any Florida Senator in nearly 50 years. Voters want a Senator who shows up and works hard, and no amount of Koch money is going to distract from the fact that Marco Rubio is not fighting for them.



Murphy is scheduled to campaign at a Labor Day picnic in Miami on Monday.
An Ocala man was killed after he jumped from a moving pickup truck in Volusia County, according to the sheriffs office.

Ocala man was with co-workers getting tattoos in Volusia County

The co-workers didn't want to wait for the man's tattoo to be finished

On the way back to Marion, the man jumped from the pickup



The incident occurred in along West State Road 40 in Pierson Saturday night.

According to deputies, the 34-year-old man, identified as Bryan Robinson, was with two co-workers from Marion County getting tattoos.

The co-workers told deputies they didnt want to wait for the mans tattoo to be finished. They told Robinson that they were leaving and he could go with them or stay behind. He became upset, but left with them anyway, according to deputies.

According to the co-workers, Robinson became increasingly angry during the drive back to Marion County. As the pickup truck passed through Pierson, he opened the door and jumped out.

The driver of the truck pulled over and he and the other co-worker searched for the man. After searching for about half an hour, they called the sheriffs office, authorities said.

Deputies launched a search for Robinson, but were unable to find him until Sunday morning. A helicopter crew spotted Robinson's body on the grassy shoulder along West S.R. 40 during a flyover.

The investigation is ongoing.
(AP)  Authorities say a driver and two passengers are dead after their car crashed in Connecticut after fleeing from a traffic stop in suburban New York.



Putnam County authorities say a sheriffs deputy in a marked cruiser began following the Nissan Maxima after he observed it driving erratically about a mile from the Putnam-Connecticut border early Saturday.



They say the deputy sheriff attempted to pull the car over but it crossed into Danbury, Connecticut, where it accelerated and went off the road, crashing into a metal utility pole a short time later.



Authorities say the three victims, all male, were killed on impact. Two female passengers in the car suffered non-life threatening injuries.



The incident is under investigation.






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At a time when Republicans are skittish about Donald Trump costing them their congressional majority, House Speaker Paul Ryan will raid Greenwich for campaign cash for his caucus.

Ryan, of Wisconsin, will command $41,100 per plate for dinner Sept. 19 at the Conyers Farm estate of Clifford Asness, the billionaire founder of the Greenwich hedge fund AQR Capital Management, Hearst Connecticut Media has learned.

The haul will benefit Team Ryan, a joint fundraising vehicle for Ryans personal campaign, his leadership PAC and the National Republican Congressional Committee. The host committee for the event, which includes a $5,400 reception option for the more budget-conscious, includes former WWE chief executive and two-time Senate candidate Linda McMahon.

Ryans visit comes as a GOP faction has expressed concern about Trump dragging down Republicans on the under-ticket and squandering their majorities in the Senate and possibly the House. The current breakdown in the House is 246 seats to 188 for Republicans, whose control of the Senate (54 to 46 seats) appears to be more tenuous.

This guy is our problem, said Gian-Carlo Peressutti, a former press secretary and aide to George H.W. Bush in his post-presidential life. Once he goes down in flames and we exorcise our demons, then the grown-ups can be back in charge.

Peressutti, who is from Ridgefield, supported former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush during the primary.

The sad reality of this race is Republicans are running against the weakest and, I would argue, most corrupt Democratic nominee in history, but because of the bad choice we made were not likely to take advantage of a generationally winnable race, he said.

Trumps boosters in Connecticut, where the GOP nominee walloped his primary opponents John Kasich and Ted Cruz in April, dismissed the doomsday scenario.

Hell be the next president of the United States, said Charles Glazer, a former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador from Greenwich who is on the host committee for the Ryan event. Hillary Clinton cant win. The go-hide strategy is not going to work for Mrs. Clinton.

But Former U.S. Rep. Rob Simmons, R-Conn., said congressional Republicans  of which there are none in the state  would be foolish to rely on Trump.

Trump will cost the Republicans who cant make it on their own, who believe that they have to have coattails to win, Simmons said. Theyre going to be in trouble.

There have been palpable tensions during the campaign between Trump and Ryan, who was the 2012 GOP vice presidential nominee, with Trump waiting until four days before Ryans primary landslide in Wisconsin last month to endorse the speaker. Ryan has pledged his support for Trump, but said it isnt a blank check when it comes to the controversial actions and rhetoric of the nominee. Ryan was also slow to render aid to Trump on the fundraising front.

Republican Themis Klarides, of Derby, the House minority Leader in the Legislature, said its anyones guess whether Trump will hurt the GOPs chances on the congressional level.

He certainly wasnt my first choice, Klarides said of Trump, for whom she was a delegate to the Republican National Convention. It is an unknown entity, I think, on both sides. (Clinton) is not exactly loved.

Last October, Ryan was elected as house speaker after the resignation of Ohios John Boehner from the leadership post. His tenure has been marked by a June sit-in by House Democrats over gun control that Ryan characterized as a stunt. All five members of Connecticuts House delegation took part in the sit-in, with Ryan calling the chamber into recess and ordering C-SPAN cameras to stop rolling.

In 2012, Ryan visited Greenwich, Darien and West Hartford during the final month of the presidential race to prime the fundraising pump for himself and running mate Mitt Romney.

Jim Campbell, a Trump delegate to Julys Republican National Convention and former Greenwich GOP chairman, said the momentum is shifting in favor of Trump.

Itll stay a Republican majority, Campbell said. There are some districts where Trump will not run as strongly as a typical Republican candidate and there are some districts where he will run more strongly than a typical Republican candidate.

Leora Levy, a Republican National Committee member from Greenwich who is on the host committee for the Ryan fundraiser, said the outlook for the GOP isnt gloomy in this unusual election year.

Any thinking person cant help but be concerned, but Im also cautiously optimistic, Levy said. I think theres a lot of grassroots support for Trump that may not necessarily be reflected in the polls.

neil.vigdor@scni.com; 203-625-4436; http://twitter.com/gettinviggy
An Amish woman was preparing to do laundry Saturday afternoon unaware her house was on fire  until a passerby rushed the home telling her to get out.

The unidentified woman passing by called 911 and left. Firefighters from Gladwin, Beaverton, Coleman, Clare and Harrison along with Gladwin County sheriff deputies arrived moments later at the Dan Troyer residence on the 2000 block of South Bard Road near Parker.

Gladwin Fire Department Assistant Chief Greg Alward said when firefighters arrived, smoke and flames were shooting from the rear of the two-story house. Firefighters sprayed an estimated 20,000 gallons on the blaze and extinguished it in about two hours.

Alward said the woman at the home was heating a pot to wash clothes and the fire possibly got too hot, catching an exterior wall on fire. The blaze was contained to a kitchen and entry way on the west side of the structure.

The house was constructed so well, that it didnt break past a knee wall and helped in suppressing the fire, Alward said, noting that the blaze never reached the second floor.

It did not breach the area up near the attic space, Alward said. Otherwise, I would still be there.

However, the fire did render the house uninhabitable, he said.

While firefighters were still on scene, about 30 Amish residents arrived with wagons and began unloading furniture, clothing and other items from the ravaged structure. Alward said the womans husband was in New York at the time.

They will probably begin rebuilding (Sunday), Alward said of the Amish community.

The assistant chief isnt aware of insurance on the house, but said Amish often dont have it.

There was good cooperation between the departments and everything went really well, Alward said.
MASON CITY  Blatant racism was not evident in any of the emails sent to City Council members during the deliberations on the proposed Prestage Foods pork processing plant.

Prestage Foods of Iowa sought to build a $240 million plant in Mason City that would have employed nearly 2,000 workers within several years.

On May 3, the City Council rejected a development agreement for the project on a 3-3 vote.

Five days later, Councilwoman Janet Solberg, who voted in favor of the plan, was quoted as saying, Racism was a huge factor in its defeat and mentioned, among other things, emails she received.

The Globe Gazette, through an open records request, received copies of thousands of emails sent to the mayor, city administrator and council members while the council was considering Prestage.

Among the Globe Gazettes findings:

Many were multiple copies  one email sent to all council members simultaneously.

Many were from people expressing opinions, both pro and con, on how council members should vote.

Others asked questions about Prestage and about the councils process of deliberations.

Some informed city leaders of petitions being circulated in the community.

Solberg said in a May 8 interview with a statewide media outlet, Racism was a huge factor. There is no doubt in my mind. Most of my phone calls and emails were, We dont want those people in our community. It played a very large factor in all of this, sad to say. Im so disappointed in our citizens.

Very apparent





Solberg was reacting to a comment by Ron Prestage, president of Prestage Farms, who told the Brownfield Ag News publication, It was very apparent among some that racism is alive and well in Mason City and northern Iowa as well. He also referred to kooks and racists in North Iowa.

Also on May 8, responding to an email, Solberg wrote, This has been a very trying time for me and my family. I received many threats and hate mail. I still have to leave all personal feelings aside and do what is best for 28,000 citizens.

I dont feel my colleagues were able to leave family, religion, Democratic Party out of their final vote. This is so disappointing.

Solberg said Friday she received racist comments in many different forms during the Prestage deliberations  from phone calls to texts to Facebook to on-the-street comments. It was just crazy.

I got phone call after phone call after phone call at work when I was trying to make a living. I had people texting me at 1 oclock in the morning. I got phone calls from Florida and California and Colorado, and Im wondering, What do they care about whats going on in Mason City, Iowa?

Regarding her published comments regarding racist emails, she said, It was a very, very difficult time. When I got the phone call from the reporter, he caught me at a bad time. I talked with him for four to five minutes, and he asked me a lot of questions. And out of that, he took parts of a couple of sentences and turned it into one quote that made me look bad.

She did not elaborate on any offensive calls or comments she received.

Eighty-seven Prestage-related emails were sent to Solberg from people outside of city government or the project between March 30 and May 3. City officials, under the direction of City Attorney Randy Nielsen, redacted the names and emails addresses from the copies provided to the Globe Gazette.

Of the 87 emails Solberg received, 65 were in opposition to the project, 15 were in support and seven were written without clear indication either way.

Racial overtones





Five of the emails had racial overtones, citing a rise in violence and crime related to immigrants. One suggested that children of immigrants would be prone to more behavior problems. None of the emails included any racial slurs or insults related to ethnicity. None of the emails were threatening.

Not included in the totals were 127 identical emails submitted in opposition to the project and signed using a web form.

Mason City Police Chief Jeff Brinkley said Friday, There were no specific calls for service to the Police Department during the process from city officials  appointed or elected  about threats, harassment, calls or emails that anyone received related to Prestage.

I did speak personally with a couple of officials who had received calls that concerned them, but they did not share specifics and they were not interested in our department looking into the calls at that time. I dont think there was any formal action that was documented on our end.

In the emails, people who supported the project cited economic and population growth and increased diversity.

People opposed to the pork processing plant cited environmental impact, lack of livable wages, influx of new hog confinement operations, pressure on schools, Prestages corporate character, decreased property values, smell, disease (MRSA), location of the plant in proximity to homes and truck traffic.

Those who were undecided suggested the council slow down, get more information before making a decision, get an economic impact study and require Prestage to donate more money to schools.

Prestage Farms, based in Clinton, North Carolina, first contacted Mason City economic development officials in December about the possibility of locating in Mason City. For several weeks, city and EDC officials met with Prestage personnel to work out details.

On March 21, the plan was announced at a press conference in which Gov. Terry Branstad, Mason City Mayor Eric Bookmeyer, North Iowa Corridor EDC President Chad Schreck and Prestage President Ron Prestage all spoke.

The plan met organized opposition from some North Iowans and the Des Moines-based Citizens for Community Improvement, an environmental advocacy group.

The City Council held three public hearings, two of them lasting seven hours, in which citizens got a chance to speak, the overwhelming majority of whom were against the plan.

About 2 a.m. on May 3, the council cast its tie vote, killing the plan.
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Despite Hermine's downgrade from hurricane status, the storm moving northeast into the Atlantic Ocean is closing hundreds of miles of beaches on the Labor Day holiday and causing concern in areas slammed by Superstorm Sandy four years ago.

In New York, areas from southern Westchester County to Long Island were under a Tropical Storm Warning Sunday, as Hermine  which remained a post-tropical cyclone  will hover slowly out to sea until mid-week.

The National Weather Service says there is a chance that dangerous storm surges could cause flooding and beach erosion in coastal communities particularly in areas previously devastated by Sandy in 2012 like Coney Island and the Rockaways.

There is a high risk of life-threatening rip currents, according to the weather service, and strong winds and rain could also come with the storm's arrival.

Coastal areas of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Cape Cod were also under a Tropical Storm Warning going into the Monday holiday.

Some winds from Hermine might be felt as far north as Poughkeepsie, but the Capital Region will be apparently left out of the weather event.

Hermine was a hurricane when it made landfall in Florida early Friday. As it moved toward Georgia, the National Hurricane Center said it weakened to a tropical storm. But Sunday it strengthened again to a post-tropical cyclone.

Hermine caused two deaths, damaged properties and left hundreds of thousands without electricity from Florida to Virginia.

"The combination of a storm surge and the tide will cause normally dry areas near the coast to be flooded by rising waters moving inland from the shoreline," the Hurricane Center said in a Sunday morning advisory.

The National Weather Service is anticipating that New York City will feel the effects of Hermine well into the week.

The state Department of Transportation had more than 1,000 people in the Hudson Valley and on Long Island ready to respond to possible road damage and flooding, and the Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Services has positioned three High Axle Vehicles to a stockpile location on Long Island. The National Guard and State Police also have been put on alert.

About 1,500 state emergency personnel had been working in preparation for the storm, said Kristin Devoe, spokeswoman for the state Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Services.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio urged residents and visitors to be prepared, saying the main concern is the "extremely dangerous" rip currents that are expected. Speaking at a news conference Friday, the mayor said the rip currents will be the most intense the city has experienced in 10 or 15 years.

"Do not go in the water," de Blasio warned. "It will be unusually dangerous."

City beaches were closed Sunday, which meant no swimming was permitted, but people could still be at the beach, the mayor said. He added that it is likely the beaches will be closed to swimming Monday and Tuesday as well. The threat of strong currents will last until Wednesday, the mayor said.

The Staten Island Ferry will likely have delays or cancellations through Tuesday, the mayor said. There may also be restrictions on the bridges if winds become too strong.

De Blasio said the parades on Labor Day have not been canceled yet, but the city will be monitoring the weather closely.

The mayor also cautioned that other coastal neighborhoods, like Howard Beach, Midland Beach, Oakland Beach and Throgs Neck, could flood.

Meanwhile in New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie warned that minor to moderate flooding was still likely in coastal areas and said the storm will cause major problems, even as it tracks eastward into the Atlantic.

"Don't be lulled by the nice weather," Christie said, referring to the bright sunny skies along the Jersey Shore on Sunday afternoon. "Don't think that nothing is going to happen, because something is going to happen. ... The eastern track means a less severe impact, but you're still going to see beach erosion, storm surges and dangerous rip currents. There will be impact from this storm."
MASON CITY  Officials in Mason City and Wright County had differing responses to the Globe Gazettes request for thousands of emails sent to public officials about the proposed Prestage hog slaughterhouse.

The Globe Gazette first requested Mason City emails in May, after the City Council turned down the pork plant proposal on a tie vote. It requested the Wright County emails in August, about a month after Prestage Foods of Iowa announced it would shift its plant proposal to a site about 5 miles south of Eagle Grove.

The Globe Gazette first requested the emails from Mason City after Councilwoman Janet Solberg was quoted in a May 8 article by a statewide media outlet, saying most of the email shed received about a failed bid to build the plant in Mason City contained racist comments about plant workers.

Many presumed the workers would be Hispanic.

The Globe Gazette in mid-May requested all emails related to the pork processing plant that were received by the Mason City administrator, mayor and all City Council members.

On May 31, the city provided 218 emails between officials but none from the public, citing an exception in state law regarding communications from persons outside of government.

The Globe Gazette resubmitted its request on May 31, allowing the city to redact the names and email addresses of any non-government officials on the emails.

On July 5, Mason City provided the Globe with 437 emails. It provided another 206 emails on July 21 and a final batch of 1,607 emails on Aug. 2.

The city billed the Globe Gazette $750 for the information, which is allowed by state law.

Mason City Administrator Brent Trout said the city does not normally bill for public records requests, but felt it needed to bill the Globe Gazette due to the time it took city staff to locate, review and redact all the emails.

Emails included in the request, which was the largest Trout is aware of the city ever receiving, were reviewed by Mason City Attorney Randy Nielsen.

Trouts assistant, Pam Stecker, spent an estimated 40 hours redacting sender email addresses and names from the emails, he said.

We need to charge to get the city reimbursed for something that was so time-consuming and exhausting, Trout said.

On Aug. 9, the Globe Gazette asked Wright County officials for emails about the hog slaughterhouse sent to Wright County supervisors Rick Rasmussen, Stan Watne, and Karl Helgevold, as well as Bryce Davis, the countys economic development director.

Davis provided his 13 emails on Aug. 10.

Forty-one emails sent to Watne were provided on Aug. 11 by Wright County Attorney Eric Simonson. On Aug. 31, Simonson sent the Globe Gazette 62 emails sent to Rasmussen. Most of the emails included constituent names, email addresses and other identifying information.

The Globe Gazette, which was not charged for the information, has not yet received emails sent to Wright County Supervisor Karl Helgevold.

Simonson said Helgevold was still working on getting him the emails for review. Watne and Rasmussen contacted the countys technology director for assistance, he said.

Public officials in the county are asked to have Simonson review records before they are released.

I usually suggest to them that they run any kinds of records requests through my office at least to double-check there arent any records or documents that are being disclosed that shouldnt, Simonson said.
If you live in Texas, you probably don't need another reason to eat more beef brisket, but researchers at Texas A&M just gave you one: it's healthy.

Brisket has a high level of oleic acid which regulates cholesterol levels, according to Dr. Stephen Smith, a professor in the animal science department at Texas A&M.
San Antonio Police arrested a suspect Saturday night in the Aug. 31 drive-by shooting that wounded a child and a teenager inside a house on the 2700 block of East Houston Street.

Michael Anthony Martin, 17, has been charged with three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Martin, who allegedly shot several bullets into a house where an 8-year-old and a 15-year-old were staying was arrested at 11:30 p.m. Saturday without incident during a traffic stop on the Walters Street Bridge near Interstate 35.
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Buoyed by recent rainfall thousands of tubing tourists packed the Guadalupe and Comal rivers on Sunday for Labor Day weekend and one last summer hurrah.

According to estimates from Texas Parks and Wildlife rangers about 4,000 people hit the waterways across Comal County on Sunday alone.

The holiday is widely considered the last big weekend of tubing's summer season. Total attendance for the entire three-day weekend is expected to climb past 10,000, according to Texas Parks and Wildlife.

RELATED: San Japan animated San Antonio during Labor Day weekend

The weekend was a positive end note for a tubing season filled with turbulence - both weather related and man-made.

Frequent August storms helped keep the rivers flowing, but also might have kept away more cautious visitors. Then there was a new $2 fee instituted by the City of New Braunfels for out of town floaters who brought their own tubes, which figured to take a chunk out of annual tourism tallies.

Still, local business owners like Matthew Hoyt, 34, owner of Corner Tubes, said the summer was a success.

"Business was great this summer - it was a good year," he noted. "The weather in August certainly set us all back a little bit, but we had a slightly better spring, which offset that."

As for the $2.00 tubing fee, Hoyt said the burden wasn't too much of a hassle for most people visiting the river.

"It could potentially make us less competitive in the future with other markets that don't charge the fee, but on the other hand, it's just two dollars," Hoyt continued. "Plus, it helps offset some of the expenses the city incurs to clean up (the river)."

With the Comal flowing at 380-cubic-feet-per-second and the Guadalupe at 685-cfs, according to the U.S. Geological Survey website, conditions were perfect on Sunday for tourists to soak up as much sun as possible before fall sets in.

Ana Marie Jefferson, 18, was one of the first to hit the Comal River water Sunday morning, along with friends David Cook, 17, and Dani Parros, 16. The trio, who all brought their own tubes, said the $2.00 fee wasn't a big deal.

"School just started, so this feels like we are stealing some of our summer back," said Jefferson, a freshman at Texas State. "We couldn't care less about the two bucks."

Cook and Parros, both former high school classmates of Jefferson, said this was the group's first solo trip to the river.

"We've grown up a bit," Parros said. "Our parents used to have to drive us here, but this is the first time we've done this on our own."

That independence wasn't entirely a plus, Cook noted.

"We did have to pay for our own food and gas," he laughed. "Maybe next time we'll invite (Jefferson's) parents again."

Hundreds of tubers gathered near Prince Solms Park, one of the biggest entrance points on the Comal. In the wading area, Monica and Juan Azevedo, both 36, horsed around with their three young kids.

"We usually go to Schlitterbahn, but this year we're changing it up," Monica Azevedo said. "Floating on the river is much easier than having them (the kids) fight over snacks ... and what ride to go on."

One of the biggest challenges to future tourists in Comal County might be where to stay, said Jonathan James, 68, a retired mechanic from Dallas. James said he ended up having to bring his family down in an RV.

A granddad of seven, James said he had trouble finding hotel space near the river among the Labor Day weekend influx.

"I'll tell you, if anyone wants to open a bed and breakfast in the area, they'd start making a killing," James said.

jgerlach@express-news.net
The Rev. Dr. Ellis L. Hewitt Jr. was a multi-tasker who enjoyed integrating faith into his work.

At one time, Hewitt had three jobs: he served as an Air Force master sergeant at Lackland Air Force Base; was a Bexar County adult probation officer; and pastor of the Westridge Park First Baptist Church, wife Ella Hewitt said.

He had a lot on his plate, but he would never fail you, friend Lucy M. Hall said. If he told you he was going to do something, he did it.

Hewitt died of cancer Aug. 23. He was 74.

Hewitt graduated as class valedictorian from Calvert Colored High School and took classes at Texas Southern University in Houston before making the decision to join the Air Force. He married Ollie Harvey in Germany but became a widower after ten years of marriage. By then, he had four children.

While in the military Hewitt was stationed in the Phillippines, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, Germany and San Antonio.

Hewitt met his second wife at Lackland Air Force Base in the late 1960s. She worked at a nearby IRS office, but it was her habit to buy lunch at the base cafeteria. She first noticed him there.

It was love at first sight, Ella Hewitt said.

The two married in 1973. With the addition of his new wifes children, the family grew to seven.

More Information Ellis L. Hewitt Jr. Born: June 2, 1942, Calvert Died: Aug. 23, 2016, San Antonio Preceded by: Parents Lillie Mae Williams and Ellis L. Hewitt Sr.; wife Ollie Harvey; son Ellis Eugene Hewitt Survived by: Wife Ella Faye Collins Hewitt; sons Gerald Hewitt and daughter-in-law Pam, Vernon Walker and daughter-in-law Jutta, Nathaniel Hewitt and daughter-in-law Darla and Eric Hewitt; daughters Vernicia Walker and son-in-law Michael, Urie Baily and son-in-law Kelvin. Services: Held Saturday. See More Collapse

While at Lackland Air Force Base, Hewitt completed a bachelor of arts degree in religious studies from Our Lady of the Lake University in 1985, a master of arts degree in pastoral ministry from Oblate School of Theology in May 2000, and a doctor of divinity degree from Guadalupe Baptist Theological Seminary in June 2000.

Hewlett served three different churches. After arriving at Westridge Park First Baptist Church in 1981 he went on to found the Saving Faith Baptist Church in 2005. Hewlett did a lot of commuting in 2015, driving to Mount Olive Baptist Church in Crystal City to pastor for 1 half years.

He left Bexar County Adult Probation after 18 years and retired from the Air Force with 24 years of service.

His emphasis on education was not lost on the children at Westridge Park First Baptist Church. Not only did he help the church grow spiritually and financially, but he encouraged the children to finish high school and go beyond, Hall said.

A lot of those kids finished high school, college and two became doctors, she said.

iwilgen@express-news.net
Alamo Colleges proposed 2017 May bond plan needs to be reworked.

The upside of an Alamo Colleges bond is its potential to be a catalyst that boosts economic opportunity in an area. But in looking at building a $35 million regional center in Boerne, the community college districts plan is headed in the wrong direction  serving Boernes affluent residents rather than the underserved areas of San Antonio, specifically the South Side, West Side and East Side.

Of particular concern is that the current bond provides nothing for the Westside Education and Training Center, or WETC. Despite WETC being a model for the Boerne campus, WETCs own needs are being overlooked. For more than 10 years, the Edgewood and West Side communities have planned and patiently waited for a permanent and signature Alamo Colleges campus at WETC.

During that decade, WETC has continuously delivered critical job-skills training in one of the citys most economically distressed areas, as well as higher education pathways in one of the citys most educationally lacking communities. Considering the success of the WETC model, WETC should be a bond priority for Alamo Colleges.

Currently, everything proposed in Boerne  a state-of-the-art community college campus with increased early college/high school pathways, leadership training academies, more workforce readiness and multiuse facilities  is included in the WETC master plan, which was updated in 2013 in anticipation of this upcoming bond election.

At that time, the WETC Advisory Board led a communitywide, strategic master plan update effort to further secure Alamo Colleges impact and presence in the West Side. The effort secured a crucial and long-overdue Concurrent Dual Credit College Enrollment Program pathway for Edgewood Independent School District students; produced a long-term 10-year lease commitment among Edgewood ISD, Alamo Colleges and the Westside Development Corp.; and generated almost $1 million in capital improvements to a facility in need of $10 million.

This success at WETC is fueling an even more impressive education and training center on the East Side in partnership with San Antonio Independent School District, as well as fueling south central San Antonio Alamo Colleges facility talks.

Located at the repurposed Lincoln Elementary School, a formerly shuttered 65-year-old Edgewood ISD campus near Texas 151, WETC was designed to provide an entry point into higher education for a community that suffered from staggeringly low educational attainment levels. At the time of its founding, fewer than half of neighboring residents had a high school diploma, and only 4 percent had a college degree.

Since opening its doors in 2006, WETC has operated at maximum capacity and provided more than 15,000 West Side residents with the opportunity to continue their education via access to critical workforce training and job skills certifications that serve as the ladders of opportunity for students and their families.

WETC came into being from the hopes and aspirations of the Edgewood community for equal access to education and opportunity, which had been denied to them. This is a testament to the extraordinary success of WETC and, most important, to the purpose and function of Alamo Colleges and the impact it has on the communities it serves.

The bond as currently planned begs the question  are we willing to forgo the opportunity to invest in our West Side and South Side communities in favor of one of the most affluent thats not even our own?

Magdalena Miranda is an Alamo College student and the student representative of the WETC Advisory Board.
Sunny Texas summers are beautiful  and deadly.

Since scorching, triple-digit temperatures are the norm during the summer months in Texas, skin cancer is a significant public health issue here. Nationally this year, about 75,000 Americans will receive a diagnosis of melanoma, the deadliest type of skin cancer.

Biopharmaceutical companies are hard at work developing medicines to treat this lethal and fast-spreading disease. But recent proposed changes to Medicare, the health insurance program for seniors, could put these medications out of the reach of Texans who need them most.

The alterations affect Medicare Part B, which covers the powerful drugs that doctors administer in their offices and clinics. These include infusion treatments for cancer and long-acting injectable medicines to treat bipolar disorder, opioid addiction, schizophrenia and other mental illnesses.

The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently announced a test of a new funding model for Medicare Part B. In its first phase, set to start this fall, CMS will change reimbursement procedures and rates for half of the doctors and clinics participating in Part B.

CMS claims this is merely a demonstration. In actuality, its a backdoor way for the government to work around reimbursement rates that Congress, with bipartisan support, set last year in the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act. CMS is looking to save money, but it could endanger patients in the process.

Part B currently reimburses physicians and clinics for the average sales price of the medications they administer, plus a small markup to cover overhead costs such as personnel, handling and storage. A few years ago, before across-the-board budget cuts took effect, the markup was 6 percent. Its now about 4.3 percent. The CMS test would decrease the effective markup to less than 1 percent and add a small flat-rate reimbursement per treatment.

Some may speculate that for many advanced medicines, reimbursements will decline significantly under CMS new model. In fact, others worry that payments wont even cover the costs of treatment in some cases.

When doctors and clinics face reimbursement rates that dont cover their costs, they have to turn away patients or risk going out of business. The American Society of Clinical Oncology reports that half the doctors it represents sent chemotherapy patients elsewhere for treatment the last time reimbursement rates were cut.

More than half of the 254 counties in Texas are rural, and the Texans who live in those areas will especially suffer if clinics again have to turn away patients. Thats because theyll need to drive long distances to find doctors who can afford to treat them.

With the tiny markup and flat-rate reimbursement per treatment, oncologists may no longer be able to afford to provide cutting-edge medications.

In efforts to find savings, the CMS demonstration seems to be strong-arming doctors into relying more heavily on older medications  regardless of whats best for patients. Thats why the new formula increases relative reimbursements for older medications while cutting rates for newer ones.

Its not just todays patients who will suffer. If doctors are priced out of administering advanced medications to Medicare patients, the market for these drugs would collapse. That would reduce drug developers incentives to create the next generation of treatments. As a Medicare recipient myself, it is critical that we not only support biopharmaceutical R&D but also ensure diversity in clinical trial populations so that new, targeted treatments and cures will continue to be developed.

No amount of Texas heat could change the fact that the CMS plan is half-baked. Its time the agency withdrew it  before it harms thousands of Texans who depend on Part B to help them fight cancer and other life-threatening diseases.

Armin Weinberg, Ph.D., is co-founder of the Intercultural Cancer Council, board member of the Texas Life Science Foundation and past chair of the Cancer Alliance of Texas.
Funeral services will be held at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, Sept. 7, at the First Church of the Nazarene with Pastor Dan Carlson of Hanford Community Church officiating. Interment will follow in the Elmwood-St. Joseph Cemetery.
Oil and gas is not only a big part of our states economy  it is a Texas way of life. In certain areas of the state, entire communities either work within or are connected to the oil and gas industry.

In fact, today it is impossible to separate Texas from discussions about U.S. energy production and the prolific strides our nation has made as the top oil and gas producer in the world. Even through the downturn, more than 30 percent of both total U.S. oil and natural gas is produced in Texas and energy supports more than 30 percent of the Texas economy.

The oil and gas industrys significance to the state of Texas is precisely why I have launched the Texas Oilfield Relief Initiative.

High-paying oil and gas jobs are important to the families who hold them and to the overall strength of our states expert workforce. The revenue generated by the energy industry in Texas supports every facet of our lives: public schools, higher education, childrens health care, infrastructure and economic development  the list goes on.

The success of our states relationship with energy production and the many benefits associated with it are the result of decades of hard work. The Railroad Commission provides the stability the industry needs for growth and world-renowned regulatory leadership, which safeguards our residents and resources.

As an extension of our commitment to best serve Texas, the commission constantly reviews its rules to ensure we protect the public and environment while at the same time taking care not to impede industry progress. The downturn makes these efforts even more critical today and for the long-term success of our states oil and gas industry.

With a growing list of needed efficiencies and after a comprehensive processes review, the Texas Oilfield Relief Initiative builds upon the successes we have already achieved and makes the agency more effective in the way it regulates the production of energy.

Most important, the initiative will save countless hours of staff time and tens of millions of dollars for oil and gas operators in Texas without hindering our ability to keep the state safe. We are making government work better, faster and more economically  for taxpayers and the industry alike.

In streamlining the commission, the initiative goes beyond speeding up our review processes. It eliminates unnecessary paperwork that costs oil and gas producers time and money without yielding any real benefits for Texas residents. It restructures reporting and compliance conditions to save costs for both the state and industry. It adjusts the requirements for oil and gas wells with minimal production to allow every well in Texas to produce to its full potential. It makes better use of taxpayer resources by prioritizing drilling inspections in sensitive areas.

What exactly does all of this mean? It means we are applying common sense to reduce bureaucracy so that oil and gas companies can save costs they would have spent complying with overburdensome rules and instead use those dollars to put Texans back to work in the oil field.

Ultimately, it means business is easier to conduct in Texas, attracting more oil and gas producers to our state, creating more jobs and safely producing more energy. It means Texas can help move the U.S. that much closer to energy independence.

With 125 years of strong regulatory leadership at the Railroad Commission on the books, we have the tools we need to ensure Texas remains a top oil and gas producer for the benefit of our state and our nation.

Christi Craddick is a member of the Texas Railroad Commission.
Texas secretary of state will certainly be held accountable for his effort to educate voters on recent court-ordered changes to the voter ID law.

The question is when? In our view, transparency upfront is better than belated openness.

The state will spend $2.5 million for the outreach, with about half of the money going to an advertising campaign. The effort will include digital tool kits sent to an estimated 1,800 groups in Texas to help with the outreach.

But Texas successfully prevailed on a federal judge to seal key details, namely which markets the advertising will hit and which groups will be used to interact with local communities on voter ID education.

In an Express-News article by David Saleh Rauf, Alicia Pierce, a spokeswoman for the Texas secretary of state, said the ad buys will be disclosed when airtime is purchased. Such information, if doled out in dribs and drabs, may not be sufficient to gauge early on if the right markets are being reached.

At least two federal courts have found Texas voter ID law to be discriminatory, disproportionately to the states minority communities. These are the markets it is crucial to reach. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals required a U.S. District Court in Corpus Christi to impose changes to mitigate the discrimination.

Under an agreement with the state and suing parties, the court ordered that options be available for voters lacking one of the seven photo IDs that the law had required. They will sign a reasonable impediment declaration, and provide an alternate form of identification  a valid voter registration certification, an original birth certificate, or a copy of a current utility bill, bank statement, government check, paycheck or other government document that shows the voters name and an address.

On the forms are options for voters to cite as a reasonable impediment. They are lack of transportation; disability or illness; lack of birth certificate or other documents needed to get an acceptable photo ID; work schedule; family responsibilities; lost or stolen photo ID; or photo ID applied for but not received. The form also has a space allowing the voter to write in what other reasonable impediment or difficulty exists.

And therein is something the secretary of state really needs to make clear: Poll workers will not be able to question the reasonableness of the impediment for getting one of the acceptable forms of photo ID or the difficulty in obtaining one.

These changes represent a reasonable accommodation for the more than 600,000 Texas without the acceptable forms of identification. But it also injects confusion. Making the changes crystal clear to voters is imperative.

The state requested the sealing of details on the claim that their release includes proprietary or confidential information from the firm designing the states outreach campaign, Burson-Marsteller.

A Texas Supreme Court ruling in a case involving Boeing in San Antonio reaffirmed public entities ability to do this when they are dealing with private firms.

It is difficult, however, to understand how disclosing the markets advertised to and the organizations given the digital tool kits are proprietary or confidential information.

We hope this reluctance to be transparent early does not indicate lack of enthusiasm for doing this outreach correctly. If it is inadequate, the federal court  and voters  must indeed hold Texas accountable.

This is about confidence. The Texas Legislature has a history of instilling very little of this when it comes to voting. The states voter ID law, the court rulings make clear, look more like discrimination  voter suppression, in other words.

It is now up to the secretary of state to restore some measure of confidence.
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

As our Bataan Death March toward Tuesday, November 8 continues  I wont say progresses  we may find a measure of relief if we focus not on electoral outcomes, but on other lessons we can draw from the experience. In this post, I want to focus on the balloting systems we use in this country, which are so rickety and fraud-prone that each (major party) candidate is laying the groundwork to use charges of fraud to undermine the legitimacy of the others election come voting day. Well, any balloting system capable of producing  or even serving as a pretext for  a legitimacy crisis is, to say the least, problematic (except, perhaps, to whoevers left standing after the crisis resolves itself, if anyone is). So, in this post Ill look (again) at our election system, then look at how the candidates are preparing the ground for a legitimacy crisis, and finally consider the pros and cons of hand-marked paper ballots, counted in public. Such a system wouldnt prevent a legitimacy crisis, which could happen for any number of reasons, but at least the country could be sure which Presidential candidate we voted for, and so a crisis wouldnt happen for that reason.[1]

Our Rickety, Fraud-Prone Election System

Heres the hair-not-on-fire conventional wisdom on election systems in general. From the International Foundation for Electoral Systems on legitimacy crises as a tool for political actors to gain power:

In multiple countries, we have witnessed the emergence of a campaign strategy whereby candidates, often supported behind the scenes by international communications strategists, cast doubt on the integrity of the electoral process and the institutions that manage it during the pre-election period, initiate post-election litigation challenging the results and take advantage of vulnerabilities in the process to derail or establish lasting doubts about the legitimacy of the outcome.

But it cant happen here:

This challenge to electoral integrity is particularly acute in developing democracies , where legal frameworks are often ambiguous, processes may be less resilient to manipulation and a climate of insecurity, impunity and unaccountability may exist.

By IFES standards, then, the United States is a developing democracy, since every single one of the characteristics they list applies to us. In Florida 2000, we had the voter roll cleansing debacle followed by Bush v. Gore; in Ohio 2004, we saw every trick in the book used (including what looked rather like a man-in-the-middle-attack on tabulation machines); in the Democratic Texas primary in 2008, we have prima facie evidence of caucus fraud; and in Ohio 2012, we have body language from Karl Rove, along with some technical evidence, that a fraudulent scheme was in play, but misfired (or possibly was foiled by Anonymous, or less possibly by a lawsuit filed by activists). This list shows, if it needed showing, that our election system is not resilient to manipulation at all. We might as well be a developing country, and call in UN observers.

This is just a mess. Now, to some extent the chaos protects us, because theres no single vulnerable spot for evil-doers to attack:

One of the principal criticisms of the American election system is the topsy-turvy and sometimes inconsistent mix of federal, state, and local laws and regulations that govern the voting process in the more than 10,000 election districts around the country. But this very decentralization is actually the best bulwark against any large-scale, or even statewide, effort to skew the outcome.

Nevertheless, as the examples above show, its clearly possible for either major party to swing a close presidential primary or general election in the United States through election fraud in a few key districts in a few key states. Odds are, in fact, that each party has already done so.

Potential Legitimacy Crisis in 2016

Before we look at what the two (major) campaigns are doing, lets glance at two straws in the wind. First, the election fraud issue spookily popped up in May 2016[3], with this Bloomberg article, with this piece of hagiography on one Andres Sepulveda:

How to Hack an Election Andres Sepulveda rigged elections throughout Latin America for almost a decade. He tells his story for the first time. For eight years, Sepulveda, now 31, says he traveled the continent rigging major political campaigns. Sepulvedas career began in 2005, and his first jobs were smallmostly defacing campaign websites and breaking into opponents donor databases. Within a few years he was assembling teams that spied, stole, and smeared on behalf of presidential campaigns across Latin America. He wasnt cheap, but his services were extensive. For $12,000 a month, a customer hired a crew that could hack smartphones, spoof and clone Web pages, and send mass e-mails and texts. The premium package, at $20,000 a month, also included a full range of digital interception, attack, decryption, and defense. The jobs were carefully laundered through layers of middlemen and consultants. Sepulveda says many of the candidates he helped might not even have known about his role; he says he met only a few.His teams worked on presidential elections in Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Venezuela. Campaigns Usually, he says, he was on the payroll of Juan Jose Rendon, a Miami-based political consultant whos been called the Karl Rove of Latin America.

Now, when you read this story, Im sure you thought, just as I thought, Whos hired this guy for campaign 2016? Trump, or Clinton? Bloomberg is equivocal:

Last year, based on anonymous sources, the Colombian media reported that Rendon was working for Donald Trumps presidential campaign. Rendon calls the reports untrue. The campaign did approach him, he says, but he turned them down because he dislikes Trump. To my knowledge we are not familiar with this individual, says Trumps spokeswoman, Hope Hicks. I have never heard of him, and the same goes for other senior staff members. But Rendon says hes in talks with another leading U.S. presidential campaignhe wouldnt say whichto begin working for it once the primaries wrap up and the general election begins.

Nothing can be inferred, then, since based on anonymous sources could well mean planted by David Brock. But that Sepulvedas kind of expertise is out there And not used by anybody, would seem to go against the idea of a phishing equilibrium. Eh?

Second, election 2016 may not be settled, as was election 2000, with a Bush v. Gore-style decision (for those who came in late). IFES writes:

Looking at the electoral dispute resolution system, the U.S. legal system is in a uniquely vulnerable position due to the current 4-4 liberal-conservative split on the Supreme Court. If a candidate refuses to accept the election results for whatever reason, including claims of rigging, he or she will need to file cases in each state in which the results are contested. Given recent discourse on aging voting technology, voter-identification challenges and the vulnerability of mail-in ballots, this kind of litigation seems inevitable.

That could get ugly.

And speaking of ugly, lets look at the two campaigns. First, Trump:

Donald Trump has taken to saying it over and over again: that the November election is going to be rigged, that crooked Hillary and her scheming accomplices will somehow manage to steal a victory that should rightfully be his. He has said this in many ways, about the election nationwide and about the election in specific places. As he told his supporters at a recent rally in Altoona, The only way we can lose . . . is if cheating goes on.

(The problemss with dismissing Trumps charges on a priori grounds are that fact, presidential elections have been rigged, as we have shown, and that Vote for the crook! Its important! has been used by some Clinton supporters as a rationale for voting for her. The real reason Trumps charges are wrong in detail, even if correct directionally, are that he claims elections are stolen through voter fraud:

Trump said law enforcement and his supporters have to be on the lookout for voter fraud to keep Trump from getting cheated out of a win. Without voter ID theres no way youre going to be able to check in properly, [Trump] said.

This is as good a time as any to distinguish election fraud, where insider political actors manipulate the result, from voter fraud where people vote who have no right to vote cast a ballot. Trump is charging the latter, but there is no evidence of significant, systemic voter fraud. (On the other hand, there is evidence that voter ID requirements disenfranchise Democrat voters, a topic for another day[3].)

Trump, then is boldly lying outright. Democrat dis- and misinformation, as usual, takes a subtler and more complicated form. Harry Reid:

Democrats in Congress, including party Senate leader Harry Reid, asked the FBI to investigate concerns that the Russian government may be attempting to undermine the U.S. presidential election through cyber attacks that could include tampering with voting results. The prospect of a hostile government actively seeking to undermine our free and fair elections represents one of the gravest threats to our democracy since the Cold War, Reid said in a letter to FBI Director James Comey. Reids letter, dated Saturday, was first obtained by The New York Times and shared on its website on Monday. It was followed on Tuesday by a letter from four Democrats asking Comey to assess whether campaign officials working for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump may be colluding with Russian interests to carry out recent hacks against the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in order to interfere with the U.S. presidential election.

Whatever. Lets just look at one example of follow-on coverage of Reid  that is, of the Democrat nomenklaturas  charges. From McClatchy:

The Russian internet nodes used to hack into voting systems in Illinois and Arizona were also used in recent penetrations of Turkeys ruling party, the Ukrainian Parliament and a political party in Germany, a U.S. cybersecurity firm said Friday. Forensic analyses of the nodes led ThreatConnect to determine that some of the same nodes had been used for hosting a Russian cybercrime market and were the source of a takedown of the Ukrainian power grid in 2015, the company said One particular node, it said, was the source of digital penetration targeting Turkeys ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party, Ukrainian Parliament and German Freedom Party figures from March-August 2016 that fits a known Russian targeting focus and modus operandi. The attacks are more suggestive of state-backed rather than criminally motivated activity, although we are unable to assess which actor or group might be behind the attacks based on the current evidence, the firm said.

Read that carefully. First, if this were the Street, it would be obvious the cybersecurity firm is talking its book and fishing for clients (and cyber is an excellent bullshit tell. The guys and gals with beards and ponytails who cast The Great HTTP Runes dont use that word). Second, and all these stories are like this, the qualifications paragraph follows the scare paragraph, and invariably totally undermines it. I mean, we are unable to assess which actor or group might be behind the attacks based on the current evidence. So if you dont know that, what do you know? Nothing.

Anyhow, after the Democrats beat the Putin war drums, Jeh Johnson, Obamas choice for head of the Department of Homeland Security jumped in:

In the wake of hacks that infiltrated Democratic campaign computer systems[4], Mr. Johnson said he was conducting high-level discussions about election cyber security, a vastly complex effort given that there are 9,000 jurisdictions in the United States that have a hand in carrying out the balloting, many of them with different ways of collecting, tallying and reporting votes. We should carefully consider whether our election system, our election process is critical infrastructure, like the financial sector, like the power grid, Mr. Johnson told reporters in Washington. Theres a vital national interest in our electoral process. A national commission created as part of a voting overhaul enacted in 2002 in response to the controversy surrounding the 2000 presidential election raised the bar on security, Mr. Johnson said. But there is more to do , he added. The nature of cyber threats has evolved.

(More to do is a Clinton catchphrase; see here, here, and here. To translate, more to do means more walking around money for insiders and an ever-receding horizon of actual accomplishment. Ka-ching.)

To sum up the state of play: We have both candidates preparing their supporters for charges that the election results are illegitimate, we have a Supreme Court that is unlikely to be able to arbitrate the result, and we have the Department of Homeland Security proposing to legitimate the electoral system by putting it under the control of the executive branch of the Federal government (and hence under a political appointee). Its hard to see how this ends well. If only we had an alternative! If only there were a simple, rugged, and proven system we could adopt!

Advantages and Disadvantages of Paper Ballots

As it turns out, there is such a system: hand-marked paper ballots, counted by hand in public.[5] These systems are far more likely to produce legitimate results than any electronic system, and they have been proven all over the world. These systems are the international standard for voting; see Naked Capitalism here for an extensive discussion with examples. To Jerri-Lynns example of India last week, I will add two more. First, the UK:

The lesson of Britains Brexit referendum, like the hotly contested presidential election I witnessed and covered in Taiwan in 2004, both of which contests were conducted using paper ballots, and the latter which was subjected to a recount that returned an almost identical result after tons of paper and millions of ballots were painstakingly inspected and hand-counted all over again, is that democracy can only work if voting is scrupulously honest and absolutely verifiable. On both those counts the US fails miserably, meaning that besides all the other problems that make American democracy a joke  the grotesquely biased (and inane) media coverage, the widespread voter apathy and ignorance, a stultifying two-party political system that limits candidate choices to two virtually identical candidates and to two political positions that only differ in meaningless, but emotionally powerful ways, and a campaign-funding system that in reality is nothing but legalized bribery  American voters cannot really expect their votes to be honestly counted in the end.

Second, Chile:

We use the pencil & paper tech in Chile too, and fraud is not easy. I was a volunteer for Lagos in the last election, and personally counted each vote at my voting table before signing off the official vote tally (along with the other candidates volunteer and the randomly selected people in charge of the table). I then informed my party of the results and they double-checked it when the offical results came out. The vote boxes were sealed and stamped, and can be re-opened for a recount. Each person is assigned to one specific table, and the total number of votes in a box have to match the amount of people assigned to it. Counting it took about an hour. If any votes were in doubt, the other candidates volunteer and me discussed and agreed on what it said. How is fraud easy?

The main advantage of hand-marked paper ballots, counted by hand in public is that you get a reliable count perceived as legitimate:

For those who dont understand how fully observable, precinct-based, Election Night hand-counting of hand-marked paper ballots works, one need look no further than those polling places in New Hampshire where the entire process is a matter of civic pride and community participation. We are not speaking about the centralized, behind-closed-doors, party-boss-counted paper ballots of the days of Boss Daley in Chicago or Landslide Lyndon in Texas. In short, after polls close, a new, bi-partisan counting crew is typically brought in to relieve tired poll workers at each precinct. Each precincts crew counts its own ballots in carefully overseen, publicly observed groups of four  two calling out every vote, two marking each one down  as the citizenry watches, video tapes, and otherwise assures the process is on the up and up. The results are posted publicly before ballots are moved anywhere. They are never out of public oversight until the counting has been completed, which is usually done by enough counting groups to be completed before midnight on Election Night (often before some machine-counted precincts have finished!) Its a very difficult system to game  at least without being easily caught.

Sounds hard to hack, no? Especially by evil Russkis?

To be fair, lets consider the disadvantages. A little hysteria from Richard Clarke:

Beyond this 60-day crash to secure our democracy, when this election is over, Congress and the new president need to establish high security standards for the election of federal officials and come up with the money to meet those standards. No Russian hackers or anyone else should be able to undermine the basis of our democracy by cyber election fraud.

Let me translate that: Paper ballots mean no subsidy to our bloated and incompetent IT sector. (Note that Clarke erases simple, rugged, and proven paper ballots entirely, rather like an ObamaCare advocate erasing simple, rugged, and proven single payer.)

A second disadvantage is that DHS will not be able to expand its budget and bureaucratic reach by providing security for our democracy. (The habits of thought here are also rather like ObamaCare advocacy, in that Johnson and Clarke are advocating complicated and expensive fixes for a system, like health care delivered through the private health insurance system, that shouldnt exist in the first place.)

A third disadvantage is that you would have to print and store the paper ballots:

The disadvantages to a paper ballot would be the cost to produce, transport, store, and dispose of used and unused ballots. Depending on quantity, ballots cost from 25 cents to 31 cents each. The orders are delivered on pallets that weigh thousands of pounds per election. Once the election is completed, [paper] ballots are stored for 22 months. With the approval of the Florida Department of State, voted ballots are securely shredded and disposed of.

So, let me take a moment to break out my calculator: There are 146,311,000 registered voters, so 146,311,000. * $0.31 = $45,356,410.00. I think the country that built the F-35 can handle it[5].

How can any of these disadvantages outweig the advantages of being certain that elected officials are legitimately elected?

Conclusion

I dont agree with the Archdruid on everything, but I think on the notion of progress he get it absolutely right:

I kept walking. Everything I saw around methe horsedrawn cabs, the streetcars, the comfortable and attractive brick buildings, the clothing on the peoplehad been quarried out of the past and refitted for use in the present, because they worked better than the alternatives.  Id been in the middle of the groupthink that made progress look like the only option even when progress was half a century into negative returns. Everyone I knew was well aware that newer had stopped meaning better a long time ago, that every upgrade meant more problems and fewer benefits, that the latest must-have technologies did less and cost more than the last round, but nobody seemed to be able to draw the obvious conclusion.

Every upgrade? Probably not. I mean, I dont want go back to Macintosh System 7 even if the current crop of swipers and tappers at Apple is gradually crapifying OS X. That said, on elections, progress to more IT, more Homeland Security agents, more fearmongering just isnt a good idea. We should go back to what we know works: Hand-marked paper ballots, counted by hand in public. That wont help us avoid a legitimacy crisis this year; only the parties pulling back from the brink can do that. But paper ballots will prevent a legitimacy crisis in the future; at least one caused by election fraud. If you dont want rigged elections, that is the way to go.

NOTES

[1] Obviously, the headline is a joke. I blame Putins weather controllers for parking Hermine off the East Coast, but I think the Democrat charges that Putin is hacking our electoral system are overheated and tendentious (although, to be fair, they do help Clinton to gin up a war scare, kick the left and, and expose that wily, canny ex-KGB operatives cunning plan to use a mentally unstable squillionaire who cant keep to a script as a Russian agent of influence). Kidding!

[2] Im not including a discussion of irregularities in the 2016 Democrat primaries to keep it simple.

[3] Thats why the Democrat party considers voter registration a 24/7/365 core party function, and operates voter registration drives year round, including a program to get IDs for people who need them in voter ID states. Oh, wait.

[4] Voter rolls, not voting systems.

[5] The Federal Election Commission defines paper ballots this way:

Paper Ballots A Paper ballot systems employs uniform official ballots of various stock weight on which the names of all candidates and issues are printed. Voters record their choices, in private, by marking the boxes next to the candidate or issue choice they select and drop the voted ballot in a sealed ballot box./p> This paper ballot system was first adopted in the Australian state of Victoria in 1856, and in the remaining Australian states over the next several years. The paper ballot system thereafter became known as the Australian ballot. New York became the first American State to adopt the paper ballot for statewide elections in 1889./p> As of 1996, paper ballots were still used by 1.7% of the registered voters in the United States. They are used as the primary voting system in small communities and rural areas, and quite often for absentee balloting in other jurisdictions.

Its unfortunate that the SEC, while giving information on paper stock, omits to mention that the ballots should also be counted by hand in public.

[6] There is also the argument that ballots can get complex, because of ballot initiatives, referenda, etc. That strikes me as an implementation detail.
STACYVILLE  Kenneth S. Ken Kozak, age 66, of Stacyville, died Thursday, Sept. 1, 2016, at his home in Stacyville.

Memorial services will be held at 2:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 8, 2016, at Champion-Bucheit Funeral Home in Osage with Pastor Gary Gilbert officiating. There will be a gathering of family and friends from 5 to 7 p.m. Wednesday at Champion-Bucheit Funeral Home.

Ken was born Feb. 12, 1950, in Osage, Iowa, the son of Steven and Geneva (Cary) Kozak. He graduated from Osage High School in 1968 and received an Associate of Arts degree in general studies from NIACC in Mason City. He served in the U.S. Army Reserves as a radio communication specialist from 1970 to 1976.

On Aug. 6, 1977, he married Debra Krebsbach at Visitation Catholic Church in Stacyville. Ken worked for Winnebago in Forest City, and at Mon-Ray Windows in Osage for a number of years. He enjoyed hunting, fishing, and collecting carnival glass. He was involved with HAM (Amateur) Radio and enjoyed talking to people all over the world, some as far away as South Africa.

Ken is survived by his wife, Debra Kozak of Stacyville; his daughters, Alicia Kozak and Kellie Kozak, both of Stacyville; sister, Jean (Gordon) Matthews of Phoenix, Arizona; and nieces and nephews.

He was preceded in death by his parents; an infant brother, Larry; and an infant sister, Janet.

Information available and condolences accepted at www.champion-bucheitfuneralhome.com.

Champion-Bucheit Funeral Home is in charge of the arrangements, 6410732-3706.
MINNEAPOLIS (AP)  The remains of Jacob Wetterling, an 11-year-old boy kidnapped from a rural Minnesota road nearly 27 years ago, were identified Saturday, authorities said, providing long-awaited answers to a mystery that has captivated residents and sparked changes in sex offender laws.

A masked gunman abducted Jacob in October of 1989 near the boys home in St. Joseph, about 80 miles northwest of Minneapolis.

The Stearns County Sheriffs Office confirmed in a statement that Jacob Wetterlings remains have been located and that the Ramsey County medical examiner and a forensic odontologist identified them Saturday.

Timeline of events in Jacob Wetterling abduction A timeline of events related to the abduction of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling of St. Joseph,

Things to know about 1989 abduction of Minnesota boy MINNEAPOLIS (AP)  The 1989 abduction of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling from a deserted road h

Additional DNA testing will be conducted and investigators are continuing to evaluate new evidence in the case, the sheriffs office said, adding that authorities expect to be able to provide more details early next week.

A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that a person of interest in Jacobs abduction took authorities to a field in central Minnesota last week. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing case, said remains and other evidence were recovered.

Jacobs mother, Patty Wetterling, sent a text message to KARE-TV earlier Saturday, saying that Jacob has been found and our hearts are broken.

She did not immediately respond to calls and text messages from The Associated Press.

Jacobs father, Jerry Wetterling, is a 1967 graduate of Mason City High School.

Jerry Wetterlings parents, Erwin Erv and Lillian Wetterling, were longtime Mason City residents until their deaths in 1997 and 2008.

Jacob was riding his bicycle with his brother and a friend on Oct. 22, 1989, when a masked gunman abducted him from a rural road near his home in St. Joseph, about 80 miles northwest of Minneapolis. He hasnt been seen since.

You cant help but think about it, Lillian Wetterling told the Globe Gazette in 1989. We think, what are they doing with him? We wonder, will we ever see him again? Thats the thing of it. Thats whats so hard.

No one has been arrested or charged in his abduction, which led to changes in sex offender registration laws.

But last year, authorities took another look at the case, and were led to Danny Heinrich, a man they called a person of interest in Jacobs kidnapping.

Heinrich, 53, of Annandale, denied any involvement in Jacobs abduction, and was not charged with that crime. But he has pleaded not guilty to 25 federal child pornography charges and is scheduled to go on trial on those counts in October.

The FBI has said previously that Heinrich matched the general description of a man who assaulted several boys in Paynesville from 1986 to 1988.

Earlier this year, Heinrichs DNA was found on the sweatshirt of a 12-year-old boy who was kidnapped from Cold Spring and sexually assaulted just nine months before Jacobs abduction.

Heinrich was questioned by authorities shortly after Jacobs disappearance, but he denied involvement.

Court documents say his shoes and car tires were consistent with tracks left near the site of Wetterlings abduction, but couldnt be ruled an exact match.

Authorities also searched the home where Heinrich lived with his father at the time and found scanners, camouflage clothing and a picture of a boy wearing underwear.

Heinrichs attorney did not respond to emailed requests for comment Saturday.

Jacobs abduction shattered childhood innocence for many in rural Minnesota, changing the way parents let their kids roam. His smiling face was burned into Minnesotas psyche, appearing on countless posters and billboards over the years.

Each year, Minnesota residents were asked to keep their porch lights on for Jacobs safe return.

Patty Wetterling always kept hope her son would be found alive. She became a national advocate for children, and with her husband, Jerry Wetterling, founded the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center, which works to help communities and families prevent child exploitation.

In 1994, Congress passed a law named after Jacob Wetterling that requires states to establish sex offender registries.

Officials with the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center posted a statement on its website Saturday, saying they are in deep grief.

We didnt want Jacobs story to end this way, the statement said. Our hearts are heavy, but we are being held up by all of the people who have been a part of making Jacobs Hope a light that will never be extinguished. ... Jacob, you are loved.
(NaturalNews) Honeybee deaths have spread across Dorchester County, South Carolina, with millions of worker bees collapsing in little groups by their hives' entrances. However, this pattern of death does not suggest colony collapse disorder; most of the bees were trying to get to their hives, probably for safety. Rather, the evidence indicates that these poor little bees were the victims of acute pesticide poisoning This heartbreaking news is not terribly surprising; the tidal wave of bee deaths follows a local government decision to spray a number of areas across the country with Naled, a type of pesticide that's being used in the name of Zika prevention. On Sunday, August 28, Dorchester County sprayed the hazardous insecticide across the region.Flowertown Bee Farm and Supply, an apiary located in Summerville, has reported that 46 of their hives died on the day of the spraying; that equates to about 2.5 million bees. A scientist from Clemson University collected soil samples from Flowertown to investigate the cause of the bee deaths, but to bee farmers the reason is already quite clear: The bees were poisoned and killed by pesticides. Naled, their poison of choice, is known to be very toxic to bees, as well as mosquitoes.Even though no one in the country has been infected by a locally-acquired Zika infection, officials have taken it upon themselves to go ahead and spray the area anyway. Normally, the country utilizes trucks to promote ground-based mosquito control efforts. For whatever reason, on Sunday they decided to try something new and sprayed across their skies for the first time. The county says it posted plenty of warnings about the pesticide mist set to rain down on citizens. They put out one notice in the newspapers on the Friday before, and one Facebook post on Saturday. Unfortunately, it appears that bees can't read and didn't know they were supposed to stay home that morning.Local beekeepers do not feel that they were given any advance notice about the spraying. Honestly, if you use social media at all, you know that you don't always see every single story an organization posts in your news feed, and not everyone buys a newspaper seven days a week.Even county administrator Jason Ward has admitted that the county did not follow the usual procedures before engaging in the mass spraying (and subsequent killing of bees). Ward told, "We usually call registered beekeepers prior to spraying in their zone." The county official also conceded that they had, for some unacknowledged reason, skipped that step this time.Juanita Stanley of Flowertown Bee Farm and Supply said, "My bee yard looks like it's been nuked." Stanley is absolutely heartbroken, not over the loss of income, but because she feels that her bee yard is supposed to be a sanctuary for her bees, where they can be safe and protected. County mistakes have led to the death of millions of bees, just in that one apiary.While the county has acknowledged the bee deaths and expressed their displeasure, no real apology has been issued. Instead, the county maintains that the spraying was done to protect people from mosquitoes. However, the CDC itself has stated that adulticide (killing of adult insects) is the least efficient way to control the mosquito population, regardless of whether spraying takes place on the ground or in the air.Naled is an organophosphate that is regarded as "safe" by the EPA because it "dissipates so quickly it is not a hazard to people," as per the. However, the agency does note that exposure to humans is not advised. Naled exposure is linked to a variety of cancers and other adverse effects, such as impaired brain development in unborn children. One of Naled's breakdown products is dichlorvos, which is another type of organophosphate that is also toxic. In studies, exposure to dichlorvos has been linked to a number of ill effects, including increased aggression, impaired memory and impaired prenatal brain development.Naled, like just about every other pesticide on the market, clearly harms way more than the intended target. Perhaps we should stop spraying pesticides and look for more natural means of protection
Good Samaritans helped rescue 26 passengers from a sinking fishing boat near the Coronado Islands Saturday morning, U.S. Coast Guard officials in San Diego confirmed.

At around 5 a.m., watchstanders at the Coast Guard Sector San Diego Joint Harbor Operation Center (JHOC) received a report that Invicta, a 63-foot sportfishing boat, struck rocks near the Coronado Islands and was taking on water.

Those aboard the boat had deployed their life rafts in the waters off the Mexican coast after initially being jolted awake by the collision, according to one of the people who was rescued.

The Coast Guard said the JHOC quickly transmitted and urgent marine information broadcast and obtained permission from the Mexican government to enter Mexicos airspace and territorial waters so they could rescue the passengers.

A Sector San Diego MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter crew was launched and the crew of the Coast Guard Cutter Sea Otter was diverted to assist the passengers and crew.

Meanwhile, a civilian crew aboard a 35-foot commercial fishing boat called Sweet Marie overheard the urgent broadcast and diverted to also help the passengers of the sinking boat.

Sweet Marie's crew got to the group in distress first, and the good Samaritans were able to help transport all 21 passengers and five crew members onto Sweet Marie.

Sweet Marie then began making its way toward San Diego. En route, the Coast Guards Sea Otter crew arrived and transferred all of the passengers onto the cutter, and took them to the San Diego Harbor Police dock on Shelter Island, near H&M Landing, where the group arrived safely between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m.

All passengers and crewmembers were wearing lifejackets, Coast Guard officials confirmed. One passenger suffered a back injury, but declined medical treatment. Everyone else was unharmed.

The Invicta was reported to have broken apart.

A passenger on the doomed Invicta, Darian Fox, told NBC 7 on Saturday that the ship sunk before his eyes.

Fox told NBC 7 the vessel was on out on a plumbing companys annual fishing trip at the time of the incident.

The boat left Friday night and Fox said most, if not everyone, on board was asleep when the boat struck the rocks. They quickly outfitted themselves with life vests before the boat began taking on water.

Fox said the boat was going in circles right before it hit the rocks near Coronado Island. He had just woken up when the crash happened.

"I was walking out of the bathroom - that's when the boat went full on collision with the islands, the Coronado Islands, and it threw everybody and just put everybody in a frenzy," he recalled.

Everyone on board put on their life jackets and hopped off the boat and onto emergency rafts.

"[We] stayed calm and made sure everybody else was calm, Fox recounted. "[We] worked as a team to get out of it.

A flare was then shot into the air, the passenger said. The Sweet Marie saw the flare and got the passengers onto their vessel where they all safely waited for the U.S. Coast Guard crews to arrive.

Fox told NBC 7 people aboard the sinking boat lost all of their fishing gear, phones, wallets, keys and other personal items in the incident.

He's grateful everyone made it out alive.

Its a cool story. Nobody can beat that one, Fox added.

Coast Guard officials said the incident is under investigation.

The Coast Guard is speaking with Mexico's Secretaria de Marina (SEMAR) regarding any environmental impacts of the sunken vessel. Officials said the crew aboard Sweet Maries was able to collect all life rafts from the Invicta.

NBC 7 reached out to H&M Landing in San Diego, a booking agency for boats. A rep from the Landing told NBC 7 Invicta was one of the boats booked out by the agency. All of the boats that go through the Landing are independently owned and operated, the rep said.
Police say a mentally ill homeless man sneaked through a vehicle entrance at a Los Angeles airport, boarded an executive jet  and then when confronted put out a cigarette, causing $5,000 in damage to the plane's interior Thursday.

The man walked through an unmanned gate at the Van Nuys Airport fence line which had opened for a vehicle. The airport serves noncommercial flights.

Once inside, the man walked to a hangar, where he boarded a Gulfstream G4.

That's where employees found him, smoking. He extinguished the cigarette in a bandanna, which began smoldering.

Police arrested him on suspicion of trespassing and vandalism.

The airport has seen several other intrusions in recent months. An Associated Press investigation showed that, nationally, people breach airport perimeter security more often than authorities acknowledge.
One day removed from a rescue near Aquatic Park in San Francisco, emergency responders were back in the same waters Sunday afternoon saving one person.

A 40-year-old male, who is now listed as being in critical condition, was saved by two good Samaritans visiting San Francisco from the United Kingdom. After noticing the man struggling in the water, the tourists jumped from a pier and kept the victim afloat until first responders arrived, according to San Francisco Fire Department Public Information Officer Jonathan Baxter.

The man was wearing a life jacket and CPR was administered immediately after rescue crews pulled the victim from the water, according to fire officials.

The current state of his condition is unknown at this time, according to fire officials.

Stay tuned for details.
Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence reacted to the FBI's release of its notes on its interview with Hillary Clinton by calling her "the most dishonest candidate for president of the United States since Richard Nixon."

"It is a tough charge, but come on," Pence said during an interview for NBC's "Meet the Press."

The Indiana governor said it was evident that Clinton "operated in such a way to keep her emails, and particularly her interactions while secretary of state with the Clinton Foundation, out of the public reach, out of public accountability."

Asked whether the Trump campaign would have higher ground on the issue of transparency if Pence and Trump released their tax returns, Pence said he would release his next week.

He would not commit to a timeline for when Trump's returns would come out.
Two of Donald Trump's most high-profile critics spoke at a convention in a Chicago suburb on Saturday, urging American Muslims to vote for what they believe is right without mentioning the Republican nominee by name.

Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the Gold Star parents of fallen U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, made national headlines in an emotional speech at the Democratic National Convention this July as Khizr spoke out against Trump's proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country.

On Saturday night, both Khizr and Ghazala addressed the Islamic Society of North America's 53rd Annual Convention at Rosemont's Donald E. Stephens Convention Center, imploring activism in the Muslim community.

"You are all my children and I feel very close to you because you have shown me lots of love and respect," Ghazala Khan said in her brief remarks.

Trump criticized the Khan family following their widely lauded DNC appearance, where Khizr offered to lend his copy of the Constitution to the nominee.

"I still carry the Constitution," he noted Saturday, clutching the pocket U.S. Constitution he brandished during his DNC speech.

Trump also suggested Ghazala was silent while Khizr spoke because she may not have been allowed to talk during her husbands speech.

In response, Ghazala wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, saying it was too difficult for her to speak because she cannot be in the same room as photos of her son. The backlash against Trump is often credited with knocking him down in the polls after the convention.

"May Allah give you a power to fight against yourself, bring all the goodness of your heart out and give to others. You will receive more  look at me, I am big example for that," she continued in her remarks Saturday.

Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson also spoke at the event, becoming the first sitting Cabinet member and the highest-ranking U.S. government official to ever address the convention, the largest gathering of Muslims in the United States.

Khizr Khan's speech was in part a call to action, as he requested "three favors" of the attendees.

"I ask you today to stand up, stand up in the name of your creator to clean that smear of violence from the name of Islam," he said. "And through you, I ask 1.6 billion Muslims that have been quiet today  no more, no more, no more, it ended today." [[392305951, C]]

He asked those listening to participate in democracy.

"This generation, all of us, are banner-bearer of the message of Islam, universal message of Islam, which is peace," he said. "Register, vote, let your voice be heard so that tomorrow, our future generation, our children dont have to hear this ugly political rhetoric that we have heard. Enough."

Khan's third request was that everyone protect and care for newly-arriving immigrant families.

"Be their mentor, and be their caretaker, and be their brother and sister in time of need," he said.

Ghazala described how their lives have changed since the DNC: "Everywhere I go, people's eyes full of tears, and their faces full of love."

"We take solace in this, that somehow we have started a conversation for the better of our country, for the better of our nation," Khizr added.
In recognition of National Suicide Prevention Week Sept. 5-11 and Sept. 10 being Word Suicide Day, I would like to use this letter to encourage the public to learn more about suicide and ways to prevent it.

Learning some of the key warning signs such as feeling hopeless, withdrawing from friends or family and making suicidal statements can help save lives. If you or someone you know is feeling suicidal or just needs to talk, help is available by calling 800-273-TALK.

Local efforts this week include a Be the Voice billboard being placed in Mason City that encourages everyone to #stopsuicide.

Suicide is the 10th-leading cause of death in this country. It touches millions of lives -- people of all ages, ethnicities and backgrounds -- but the research is clear: Suicide is preventable, and the more people who stand up for suicide prevention and mental health, the more lives we can save.

The 10th annual Out of the Darkness Community Walk for Suicide Prevention will take place in Mason City on Saturday, Oct. 1.

Funds raised are supporting local use and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and its bold goal to reduce the annual suicide rate in the United States 20 percent by 2025 through research, education, advocacy and support.

These walks are truly uplifting experiences, and they grow every year. Hope to see you there. Please register at www.outofthedarkness.org and look for the Mason City Walk.

Also available locally is the Touched by Suicide support group that meets the third Thursday of each month in Mason City. To learn more about these local efforts, please contact me at 641-420-0049 or email touchedbysuicidemasoncity@gmail.com.

Wendy Martinez, AFSP Iowa Chapter Board Treasurer, Mason City
Thirteen people were killed and at least 52 others, including a pregnant woman, wounded across Chicago over the Labor Day Weekend, as a late surge in violence lifted the city to a grim milestone.

The long weekend was the deadliest holiday weekend this summer, after Memorial Day had six people killed and Fourth of July had five fatalities.

The most recent killing happened around 10:45 p.m. Monday, when five people were shot, two of them fatally, in the city's Lawndale neighborhood.

Police said the group of men were standing on the sidewalk when someone in a silver minivan fired shots at the them. Two 22-year-old men were shot in the chest. One was pronounced dead at the scene while the other was taken to John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County, where he later died. A 17-year-old boy and a 20-year-old man were seriously wounded and a 16-year-old boy was in critical condition as they were taken to Mount Sinai Hospital for treatment.

Just after 7 p.m., two people were killed in a shooting near the city's Ogden Park. Police said two men, were shot in the 1200 block of West Marquette, and taken to Stroger Hospital in critical condition. Authorities later said the pair had died of their injuries.

Minutes earlier, a 33-year-old man was fatally shot while walking in the 900 block of West 58th Street. A gunman got out of a white vehicle and opened fire at the man, striking him in the torso multiple times. The victim was taken to Saint Bernard Hospital where he was pronounced dead.

Around 4 p.m., a 44-year-old man was fatally shot in the head, neck and back while driving in the 4500 block of South Hermitage.

Hours earlier, a 22-year-old man was found with wounds to the chest and back as officers responded to a call of a man passed out in a driveway in the 4500 block of South Whipple. Police initially said the wounds may have been from gunshots but later revealed the man had been stabbed. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

On Monday morning, two people were shot, prompting SWAT and officers to call for a possible barricade situation in the city's Englewood neighborhood.

The shooting happened around 9:30 a.m. in the 6800 block of South Emerald.

Officers responding to a report of two people shot found a 24-year-old man with gunshot wound to the head and a 26-year-old man with a gunshot wound to the thigh and head. The 24-year-old was pronounced dead at the scene and the 26-year-old was taken to John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County in stable condition. Witnesses reported the suspected gunman fled into a nearby building. Police were on the scene searching for the suspect.

Also Monday, an 80-year-old man was found fatally shot in the city's South Shore neighborhood.

Police said just before 6:30 a.m. the man was found unresponsive with a gunshot wound to the face in the 2800 block of East 77th Street. No one was in custody for the shooting as of Monday morning. Area South detectives were investigating.

On Sunday, four people were killed in shootings across the city.

Around 10:30 p.m., a 17-year-old boy was standing on the street in the 7800 block of South Cornell when two men walked up and fired shots at him. The teen was shot in the back and taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in critical condition, but he was later pronounced dead, police said.

Just after 6 p.m., officers responding to a call of a person shot in the 5200 block of South Sangamon found a 19-year-old man on the ground with multiple gunshot wounds to the body. The teen was taken to Stroger hospital and was later pronounced dead.

Less than an hour earlier, two people were shot while unloading boxes from a vehicle in the 6700 block of South Green Street. The two men, ages 45 and 27, were approached by a man wearing all black clothing who fired multiple shots at them before fleeing on Halsted through vacant lots.

The 45-year-old man was shot in the torso and chest and pronounced dead at Advocate Chris Medical Center and the 27-year-old suffered wounds to the back and right wrist and was listed in serious condition at the same hospital.

Two people were shot early Sunday in the Archer Heights neighborhood on the Southwest Side.

Two men, ages 22 and 32, were standing in an alley about 12:10 a.m. in the 4800 block of South Kildare when they heard gunfire and both felt pain, police said.

The older man was shot in the head and taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, police said. The Cook County medical examiners office did not immediately confirm the fatality. The younger man suffered gunshot wounds to the arm and chest and later showed up at Holy Cross Hospital, where he was listed in serious condition.

At least 45 others have been wounded in shootings across the city over the long holiday weekend.

Around 3 a.m. Tuesday, a 20-year-old man was shot in the 6300 block of South Winchester, but police said the man was not cooperating with police. The man said he was walking down the street when he heard shots and felt pain. He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital in stable condition.

Just after 2:15 a.m., an 18-year-old man was shot in the bakc and buttocks while walking in the 900 block of North Long. The teen told police he heard shots and felt pain. He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital in stable condition.

Around 12:40 a.m., a man and woman were shot when someone in a white sedan fired shots at them while they drove on the 5600 block of South Green Street in the city's Englewood neighborhood. A 36-year-old man was shot in the left knee and a 25-year-old woman suffered graze wounds to her legs. Both were listed in stable condition.

Minutes before 11:30 p.m. Monday, a man was shot while driving on the Dan Ryan Expressway on the city's South Side, police said. The shooting happened on the inbound expressway between 83rd and 85th Streets. The man suffered non-life threatening injuries, according to authorities.

Just after 11 p.m. Monday, A man and a woman were shot while sitting in a parked car in the 3300 block of West Flournoy. The pair said they heard shots and felt pain. A 39-year-old man suffered a graze wound to the neck and a 36-year-old woman was shot in the right arm and back. Both were listed in stable condition at Mount Sinai Hospital.

Minutes earlier, three men were wounded in a shooting in the 3300 block of West Douglas Boulevard. Two men who were in a vehicle traveling westbound on Douglas said they heard shots and felt pain. They drove themselves to Mount Sinai Hospital where they were listed in stable condition. A 32-year-old man later walked into Stroger Hospital with a wound to the left arm. Police said the man had been standing on the sidewalk in the same area when he was shot. He was last listed in stable condition.

At 8:45 p.m., two teens were shot when someone in a red SUV fired shots at them as they walked in the city's Rogers Park neighborhood. A 15-year-old boy suffered a gunshot wound to the upper back and a 17-year-old boy was shot in the lower back. Both were taken to St. Francis Hospital in stable condition.

Just after 3:15 p.m. Monday when two people, including a woman who was nine months pregnant, were wounded in a shooting in the 900 block of West 53rd Street. Police said a 27-year-old man was walking with a 23-year-old woman when someone walked up and opened fire at them. According to fire officials, the man and woman were both transported from the scene to Stroger Hospital in critical condition. The baby was delivered Monday as both parents remained in surgery, according to family members.

Around 10 a.m. Monday a 30-year-old man was shot while walking in the South Austin neighborhood. Authorities said two people in a van pulled up alongside the victim before one person exited the vehicle and opened fire. The man was shot in the left shoulder and fled to the 300 block of North Central Avenue where he sought help. He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital in critical condition, police said.

Around 4:30 a.m. Monday, a 35-year-old man was shot while stopped at a red light in the 7900 block of South South Shore Drive. Police said the man was shot in the right knee and left foot after someone in a dark-colored sedan fired shots at his vehicle. The victim drove himself to South Shore Hospital where he was listed in stable condition.

Just before 1 a.m., two people were shot in Chicago's Fernwood neighborhood. An 18-year-old men and a 19-year-old man were sitting in the back of a parked veihcle when someone walked up and fired shots at them. The 18-year-old was shot in the back, torso and left leg and the 19-year-old was shot in the right leg. Both were taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center in stable condition.

Thirty minutes earlier, a 24-year-old man was shot in the arm while driving in the 5800 block of South Laflin. Police said the victim was driving southbound on Laflin when someone got out of a red sedan and fired shots at the vehicle, striking the man in the left arm. The victim drove to St. Bernard's Hospital and was listed in stable condition.

Around 7:15 p.m. Sunday, a 19-year-old man was shot while playing basketball in a park, police said. The teen suffered a gunshot wound to the right leg after a man on a bicycle opened fire in the 9700 block of South Yates Boulevard. The victim was taken to Trinity Hospital in good condition.

Less than an hour earlier, an 18-year-old was shot in the 2800 block of South Kedvale. The teen had been standing on the street when someone opened fire at him, sending the teen running into a nearby storefront. The gunfire continued, damaging the storefront and the teen was shot in the leg. He was transported to Mount Sinai Hospital in good condition but refused to cooperate with authorities, police said.

Around 5:30 p.m., a 22-year-old was shot while driving in the 200 block of South Allport, police said. The victim drove to the 1600 block of West 21st Street with a gunshot wound to the leg, where he called for help. He was taken to Stroger Hospital in good condition.

At 4:30 p.m., a 22-year-old man was shot while standing outside a home in the 7100 block of South State Street. The victim was transported to Stroger Hospital where his condition was stabilized.

About 30 minutes earlier, a 23-year-old man was shot while sitting outside a home in the 7400 block of South Kenwood. Police said a passenger in a green vehicle exited the car and opened fire on the man before fleeing westbound on 75th Street. The man took himself to Jackson Park Hospital with a wound to the left torso. He was last listed in stable condition.

Around the same time, a 19-year-old man was shot in a drive-by shooting while walking in the 7000 block of South Eberhart. The teen was shot in the right leg and taken to Stroger Hospital in stable condition, police said.

Around 11:30 a.m., a 15-year-old boy was shot in an alley in the 5200 block of West LeMoyne Street. The teen was in a vehicle parked in an alley when a grey car pulled up and two people exited the vehicle. One person pointed a gun at the teen and fired shots before the two got back in the vehicle and fled the scene. The teen was taken to Loyola University Medical Center in stable condition with gunshot wounds to the right hip, according to authorities.

A 25-year-old woman was shot just before midnight Saturday in the Irving Park neighborhood on the Northwest Side. The woman was outside in the 3400 block of West Irving Park when someone in a black SUV fired shots at another vehicle and a bullet ricocheted, striking the womans right leg, police said. She declined medical treatment.

Around 9:30 p.m. Saturday, a 21-year-old man was shot and critically wounded in a in the city's West Pullman neighborhood. The man was standing outside in front of a home in the 12400 block of South Perry Avenue when someone in a passing gray Chevy Malibu opened fire. The victim was shot in the head and transported to Advocate Christ Medical Center in critical condition.

Just before 8:30 p.m. in the Back of the Yards neighborhood on the South Side, a 63-year-old man was shot in the back by someone who robbed a store in the 1800 block of West 47th Street, police said. He was taken to Stroger Hospital in critical condition.

Around the same time, a 17-year-old boy and a man were shot in the 4900 block of North Kenmore in Uptown. The two suffered gunshot wounds to their backs and took themselves to Weiss Memorial Hospital, where their conditions were stabilized, police said.

Just after 8 p.m., a 16-year-old boy was critically wounded in a shooting in the Austin neighborhood on the city's West Side. Authorities said someone walked up to the teen at a park in the 5000 block of West Hirsch and opened fire, striking him in the head. He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital in critical condition.

Minuntes earlier, an 18-year-old man was shot in the right leg in the 5500 block of South Troy in the Gage Park neighborhood, police said. A family member took the teen to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was listed in good condition.

Minute after 6 a.m. Saturday, a 64-year-old woman was shot in the South Side Gresham neighborhood. The woman was shot in the calf in the 8100 block of South Paulina, according to police, and was taken to Holy Cross Hospital in good condition.

About two hours earlier, a man was shot in the city's Austin neighborhood. The 24-year-old man heard gunfire in the 5000 block of West Adams and realized hed been shot in the right leg, police said. He was taken to Stroger Hospital in stable condition.

Around 3:30 a.m., on Chicago's Near West Side, four men were wounded in a shooting. The men walked in to Stroger Hospital with gunshot wounds and were listed in good condition. They told police they were shot in the 100 block of North Seeley, though the victims were not cooperating with investigators, police said. A 21-year-old man was shot in the right ankle, a 34-year-old in both legs and two men, ages 36 and 39, were each shot in their right legs. A gun was recovered at the crime scene, but no further information was available.

About an hour earlier, someone in a white vehicle shot a 20-year-old man as he stood outside in the West Englewood neighborhood. The man was shot in the left hand in the 5600 block of South Marshfield, police said. He was taken to Holy Cross Hospital in good condition.

Two women were shot around 2 a.m. in the Back of the Yards neighborhood when someone in a gray minivan opened fire in the 4700 block of South Laflin. A 26-year-old woman was shot in the back and taken to Stroger Hospital in critical condition, while the other, 31, declined treatment for a graze wound to the left shoulder, according to authorities.

Just before 9:30 p.m. Friday, a 29-year-old man was shot while driving in the 1000 block of North Monticello in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. Police said someone in a black Cadillac SUV opened fire at the man, hitting him in the abdomen. The Cadillac continued to follow the victim as he drove east in the 3100 block of West Augusta. It then rammed his car, sending it spinning into two other vehicles in oncoming traffic, police said. The victim was taken to Stroger Hospital in critical condition, police said. Two people in the vehicles he crashed into were transported to Stroger and Mount Sinai hospitals in serious-to-critical condition, according to the Chicago Fire Department.

The weekends first shooting happened around 9 p.m. in the Austin neighborhood, when someone in a vehicle pulled up to a 17-year-old boy in the 100 block of North Parkside and opened fire. The teen was shot in the back and elbow, police said. He took himself to West Suburban Medical Center in good condition.

An off-duty Chicago police officer also suffered a graze wound in a shooting around 5 a.m. Sunday in the city's Bridgeport neighborhood.

Prior to the start of the long weekend, Chicago Police arrested 77 peopleand recovered several weapons as well as thousands of dollars in narcotics during an organized takedown on the city's West Side.

Last year, 54 people were shot, 8 fatally, over Labor Day Weekend.
An off-duty Chicago Police officer was grazed by a bullet early Sunday on the city's South Side, authorities said.

Around 5 a.m., the officer had completed his overnight shift and was driving westbound on West 31st Street near South Loomis Ave in the city's Bridgeport neighborhood, Chicago Police spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement.

He saw a brown mini van speed up behind him, and slowed down to let the vehicle pass, authorities said. As the van pulled alongside the officer's car, someone inside the van pointed a gun in his direction and opened fire.

The officer suffered a graze wound to the upper left arm, according to police, and returned fire as the offenders fled the scene.

The officer was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in good condition, police said, and he was expected to be treated and released.

The motive for the shooting is unclear, police said, though officials are not ruling out the possibility that the officer was targeted.

No one is in custody for the shooting, and authorities continue to investigate.
Chicago Police have issued a warning about groups of males robbing, and in some cases groping, victims in the North Park and Edgebrook neighborhoods on the city's Northwest Side.

The suspects walked up to victims and pulled out a blue steel handgun before punching them, Chicago Police said. The suspects then took money, wallets and cellphones from the victims. In two cases, the suspects groped female victims through their clothes.

The incidents happened:

about 10:20 p.m. Aug. 26 in the 5700 block of North Kimball;

about 10:30 p.m. Aug. 29 in the 3400 block of West Carmen; and

about 9:30 p.m. Sept. 1 in the 6400 block of North Hiawatha.

The suspects were described as three to five black males, 14-25 years of age, standing 5-foot-5 to 5-foot-10 and weighing 150-190 pounds, police said. Two possible suspects were seen on the CTAs surveillance footage using a victims Ventra card.

If anyone has information about the incidents call Area North detectives at (312) 744-8263.
After a standoff Saturday night, an 18-year-old man who police believe was involved in the carjacking of a state trooper on Monday was arrested at his home on Chicago's West Side.

An off-duty Illinois state trooper was carjacked at gunpoint by three males on Monday near the intersection of West 18th St and 51st Court in suburban Cicero, according to Cicero spokesperson Ray Hanania.

All three offenders fled, according to Cicero police, who apprehended two of the suspects in a foot chase. The third evaded officers, allegedly stealing the trooper's truck as well as the firearm inside, police said. Authorities were able to identify that third suspect, who was subsequently sought by the Cicero, State, and Chicago Police.

The man was tracked to his home in the 4200 block of West 16th Street in Chicagos Lawndale neighborhood around 8 p.m., according to police. Authorities surrounded the home, waiting for a court order to enter as the suspect barricaded himself inside along with his mother and possibly his sister.

The two women exited the home around 8:30 p.m. and the suspect surrendered to police shortly thereafter.

The troopers gun and vehicle were recovered, according to police, and charges were pending.
A 17-year-old boy was seriously injured after a 50-foot fall at Starved Rock State Park Sunday afternoon, according to fire officials.

The boy, from Belvidere, Illinois, was with two friends when he climbed off the marked trail at Pontiac Canyon, plunging 50 feet to the ground, according to Utica Fire Chief Ben Brown.

Fire officials responded to the call at 12:40 p.m., Brown said. The boy was flown to OSF Saint Anthony Medical Center in Rockford, and was listed in serious condition.

The Illinois Conservation Police, Ottawa River Rescue, and Life Flight also responded to the incident.

Starved Rock has signs posted at every trailhead reminding visitors that they're required to stay on the park's 12 miles of marked trail, the Illinois Conservation Police said in 2015 after three people fell in fewer than three months.

Shortly before the boy's fall, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources closed Starved Rock State Park just before 12 p.m. when the parking lots reached capacity.

The DNR tweeted around 3:30 p.m. that the park had reopened.
The University of Missouri is defending its research practices after a national pet-adoption group publicly decried an experiment that led to six female beagles being euthanized.

The California-based Beagle Freedom Project, which is suing the university system over $82,000 in fees it says it is being charged for an open-records request, said it learned of the dogs' deaths after happening upon a published study about treatment for damaged corneas.

As detailed in April in the Journal of Veterinary Ophthalmology, the study said roughly 1-year-old beagles had their left eyes intentionally damaged while they were anesthetized. Half of the animals then were given a topical acid treatment to determine if that healed the eye damage; it didn't, and the dogs eventually were put to death.

Kevin Chase, vice president of the BFP, which rescues former research animals ranging from ponies to goldfish for adoption, called Mizzou's experiment "a colossal failure" and "cruel," noting the "cornea's top layer is filled with thousands of tiny nerve endings."

"Caging dogs in a laboratory, intentionally damaging their corneas, and then killing them is about as ethical as picking people off the street and hitting them over the head with a pipe in order to test new concussion treatments," Chase said.

Animal-rights groups widely say nearly 400 U.S. research labs use nearly 70,000 dogs each year, the vast majority of which are beagles, usually because of their docility.

The university issued a statement saying the beagles were anesthetized during the procedure and were given pain medications if any discomfort was evident. The research, meant to develop painless or noninvasive treatments for corneal injuries, "improves the quality of life for both animals and humans," the university insisted.

"Animal research is only done when scientists believe there is no other way to study the problem, and our researchers respect their research animals greatly and provide the utmost care," the statement read. "The animals were treated humanely and every effort was made to ensure dogs were as comfortable as possible during the tests to study the effectiveness of the new drug treatment."

That statement did not say whether its research animals commonly are euthanized. In the study's conclusion, the four researchers acknowledge the small sample size, saying it was determined before undertaking the study that two dozen of the dogs would be required to detect a significant difference in the healing rates.

The BFP successfully has lobbied for "beagle bills," which essentially require healthy dog and cat test subjects to be offered up to rescue organizations instead of having them automatically euthanized. The Humane Society of the United States says such laws now exist in Connecticut, California, Minnesota, Nevada and New York.

The BFP sued the University of Missouri in May, alleging it violated the state's Sunshine Law by charging more than $82,000 for documents that the group sought related to dogs and cats on the Columbia campus. Chase called the fees "exorbitant" and an effort to stymie disclosure.

His group routinely files open-records requests in search of post-research candidate dogs for rescue and was looking through previously published reports about University of Missouri animal research when BFP happened upon the study involving the beagles.

"Had they just given us the records for current protocols, we probably wouldn't have dug that deep," Chase said.
Brookfield police sprang into action Friday when they received a report of a dog locked in a vehicle.

Police were notified by a business employee that someone locked their dog inside a vehicle. According to police outside it was 80 degrees, and in the car it was 114 degrees, even with the windows cracked.

Officers rescued the dog. Police reminded residents that even as we move into September it is still warm and pets are better off at home than in a hot vehicle.
The unofficial end of summer came early for thousands of people who made plans to camp in Connecticut when all state campgrounds closed Sunday afternoon in anticipation of Hermine.

Campers at Hammonasset Beach State Park woke up to a picture perfect morning and some expressed confusion as to why they had to leave.

Some people just set up yesterday, yesterday late in the day they got to leave today, said John Carroll of Guilford.

Governor Dan Malloys decision to close the states 11 campgrounds came while there was still a fair amount of uncertainty about the forecast. The potential for storm surge flooding and wind gusts was enough of a threat to call for the campground closure.

I understand they rather be safe than sorry so we go along with that judgment, Patty Stein of Vernon said.

As the storm crept closer to Connecticut it looked like the impact would be less than originally feared.

I think it was a little premature. I think they could have waited until this morning. A lot of people started to leave last night because theyve got a long way to go, Carroll said.

Its disappointing but you understand you got to weigh safety versus the enjoyment of the weekend, Greg Mattesen of Portland said. I can kind of understand it but its disappointing, but well live with it. Well come back next year.

While some campers didnt waste any time waiting for the campground to close, packing up and heading out, others like Frank Mayhew soaked up every last minute before it was time to leave.

Were just taking our time. Somebody has to be last, Mayhew, of Middletown, said.

Hammonassett Beach State Park and Rocky Neck State Park both stay open through the Columbus Day. Anyone who has a reservation for later in the week is asked to call on Tuesday afternoon to find out when both of these parks will reopen.

Refunds are available for anyone with reservations during the closure through Reserve America.
Dallas police confirm that a missing 77-year-old man with Alzheimer's disease has been located.

Officers said Edward Hiers Saxon is safe and has returned home.

An alert was issued when he left on foot on Sunday afternoon.
Two veteran California corrections officers were in critical condition Saturday after they were allegedly shot by a gang member visiting the Fresno County Jail, according to authorities.

Juanita Davila, with 18 years of experience, and Toamalama Scanlan, with 10 years of experience, were both undergoing surgery Saturday after suffering bullet wounds to their heads and their necks, according to a statement from the Fresno County Sheriff's Office, NBC News reported.

The suspect, Thong Vang, 37, was also hospitalized with minor injuries after the incident, which occurred at 8:30 a.m., the statement said.

Vang is a known gang member who served 14 years in prison for multiple rape charges before he was released in 2014. The sheriff's office said he was at the jail to visit someone Saturday morning and became disgruntled when he was told he could not cut the line.

Vang was later charged with attempted murder, being a felon in possession of a gun, and a bringing drugs into jail.
Grassley works for the super-rich

Recently, Sen. Chuck Grassley has been making an effort to contact everyday Iowans like me to donate money to his re-election effort.

Grassley wants everyday Iowans to give him their hard-earned money to send him back to Washington. Back to Washington to work for whom?

I still can see Grassley with his signature red vest standing behind President George Bush in 2004 while Bush signed the now-disastrous drug bill allowing drug companies to overcharge hard-working Americans and thus providing excessive profits to these legalized thieves. Grassley was proud to assist in this bills passage. Today, one in five Americans cannot afford their prescription drugs.

When in Iowa, Grassley talks a good story. When Grassley is in Washington, he works under the radar for the super-rich, the 1 percent, not us. Sen. Grassley, you sold out to the drug companies; now ask the drug companies to finance your campaign, not the Iowans who no longer can afford many of these lifesaving drugs, thanks to you.

Sue Walk, St. Ansgar
The world's largest living primate has been listed as critically endangered, making four of the six great ape species only one step away from extinction, according to a report released Sunday at the World Conservation Congress in Hawaii.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, cited illegal hunting in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in downgrading the status of the eastern gorilla on its Red List of Endangered Species. The list contains more than 80,000 species, and almost 24,000 of those are threatened with extinction.

"To see the eastern gorilla  one of our closest cousins  slide toward extinction is truly distressing," Inger Andersen, IUCN director general, said in a statement. "Conservation action does work and we have increasing evidence of it. It is our responsibility to enhance our efforts to turn the tide and protect the future of our planet."

The organization said an estimated 5,000 eastern gorillas remain in the wild, a decline of about 70 percent over the past 20 years.

Of all the great ape species  the eastern gorilla, western gorilla, Bornean orangutan, Sumatran orangutan, chimpanzee and bonobo  only the chimpanzee and bonobo are not considered critically endangered. But they are listed as endangered.

For the gorillas of the Congo, where the majority of the population lives, conservation will be a struggle because of political instability, said primatologist Russell Mittermeier, executive vice chairman of the Conservation International environmental group and chairman of IUCN's primates specialist group.

"There are no simple solutions right now, other than a much greater investment in on-the-ground protection until the region stabilizes, at which time major ecotourism, as is happening in the neighboring countries of Uganda and Rwanda, can take place," Mittermeier said in an email to The Associated Press.

In an interview, Catherine Novelli, U.S. undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy and the environment, called the gorilla numbers a man-made tragedy.

The research by the Wildlife Conservation Society was accepted by the IUCN, which is made up of private and government entities and is hosting the World Conservation Congress. More than 9,000 delegates from over 180 countries are attending this week's conference in Honolulu, including several heads of state.

"Critical endangered status will raise the profile of this gorilla subspecies and bring attention to its plight. It has tended to be the neglected ape in Africa, despite being the largest ape in the world," the study's lead scientist, Andrew Plumptre, said in an email.

The IUCN compiles its peer-reviewed Red List alongside partners such as universities and environmental groups within animals' natural habitat. It is the most comprehensive analysis of endangered species and guides government policy around the world, said Cristian Samper, president and CEO of the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Other animals on the list fared better than the apes, including the giant panda, which was previously on the endangered list. It is now listed as "vulnerable" after conservation efforts helped protect its habitat.

"For over 50 years, the giant panda has been the globe's most beloved conservation icon," said Marco Lambertini, director general of the environmental group World Wildlife Fund. "Knowing that the panda is now a step further from extinction is an exciting moment for everyone committed to conserving the world's wildlife."

While threats to the survival of the species are still present, studies show that protection policies put in place by the Chinese Government are working. Experts believe that nearly 2,000 giant pandas now exist in the wild, and believe that a majority of those pandas are adults. Researchers from San Diego Zoo Global had a hand in the initial research that helped the Chinese government set effective conservation policies, according to the Panda Conservationist Committee.

Hunting and habitat destruction are taking a toll on animals and plants in variety of areas, the report said.

In Hawaii, about 90 percent of native plants are threatened with extinction because of invasive species like rats, pigs and non-native plants, the IUCN said.

In Africa, the plains zebra population has declined by a quarter since 2002, according to the group's statement.
Police in Long Beach are looking for a man who they said targeted college students, making comments about their feet and legs, while peeping through their apartment windows.

One of the apartment's residents Megan Nebestich described the Monday morning incident to NBC4.

"We had the window open ... and a man came up and put his face against the screen and said something like 'You have beautiful legs,'" Nebestich said.

Nebestich's roommate woke up and she then heard the man ask, "Do you wear stockings?" The man then casually walked away, she said.

In a separate incident around 11 p.m. Thursday, one of the women in the apartment was working at her computer when she heard a man's voice say, "I like your feet."

After this incident, the women reported the suspicious man to authorities.

Multiple residents shared a letter that was sent Aug. 11 detailing other incidents happening just like these in the area.

The apartment complex, located only 2 miles from California State University, Long Beach, backs up to an alleyway. The women targeted are asking for a more secure lock on the apartment gate.

Anyone with information is asked to call the Long Beach Police Department at 562-435-6711.
A man linked to social media posts threatening a Pulse-style attack against the LGBT community of Wilton Manors was arrested by the Florida Highway Patrol on an unrelated charge.

Craig Jungwirth, 50, was arrested Saturday for a violating bond conditions in an unrelated pending misdemeanor case, FBI officials say.

According to WESH, the FBI had received tips from local law enforcement and concerned citizens of "alarming threats," which contained statements such as "None of you deserve to live."

One of Jungwirth's Facebook postings said, "If you losers thought the Pulse nightclub shooting was bad, wait till you see what I'm planning for Labor Day."

Another statement said, "... I have a better solution to exterminate you losers."

Jeff Black says Jungwirth has harassed him for months and he's been trying to alert law enforcement.

"His campaign against me is that I'm criminally vectoring HIV; he has swatted me which is the process of posting a picture and saying you're a threat to the community."

In a news release sent Sunday, FBI spokesman Michael D. Leverock said Jungwirth has been charged with transmitting threatening communications and will appear in federal court on Tuesday.

Jungwirth has been charged in connection with online threats made in his name, and police say Facebook posts on Aug. 30 mentioned the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando and made threats planned for Labor Day weekend in the Wilton Manors area.

His attorney, Ron Baum, did not respond for comment.

Jungwirth is in federal custody at the Seminole County Jail and is expected to appear before a judge on Tuesday at the federal courthouse in Orlando.
Thousands gathered at the Vatican Sunday as Mother Teresa was canonized as a saint. In Miami, a packed church celebrates Saint Teresa of Calcutta.

"This is really important because Mother Teresa really was for our time the face of mercy," Thomas Wenski, Archbishop of Miami.

As a nun, she devoted her life to the impoverished and was famed for her work in India. She's also a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

The Archdiocese of Miami held a special mass Sunday with the missionaries of charity recalling her visits to Miami.

"We were in the presence of saints and we still are in the presence of saints," Wenski said.

Inside the church many gathering for the importance Mother Teresa not only is for the Catholic community, but what she symbolizes for some local families

"She's such a great person and a good influence to others," said Veronica Cueto.

The Cueto family rejoicing this Sunday at mass, as the new saint holds a special meaning to their hearts.

"Her birthday was on Mother Teresa's feast day and Mother Teresa has always been very important to us a big part of it missionaries of charity and they were at our wedding and the little kids that we work with every Sunday in the neighborhood," William Cueto said.

Saint Teresa now joins more than 10,000 saints in the Roman Catholic Church.

Many of these saints were not elevated until centuries after their deaths; Mother Teresa died in 1997.

"Mother Teresa reminds us that there is no one who is so poor that he doesn't have something to give nor is there someone so rich that he cannot receive from someone else," Wenski said.
Pope Francis declared Mother Teresa a saint on Sunday, honoring the tiny nun who cared for the world's most destitute and holding her up as a model for a Catholic Church that goes to the peripheries to find poor, wounded souls.

Applause erupted in St. Peter's Square even before Francis finished pronouncing the rite of canonization at the start of Mass, evidence of the admiration Mother Teresa enjoyed from Christians and non-Christians alike.

For Francis, Mother Teresa put into action his ideal of the church as a merciful "field hospital" for the poorest of the poor, those suffering both material and spiritual poverty. By canonizing her during his Jubilee Year of Mercy, he in some ways is making her the icon of his entire pontificate.

Hundreds of Missionaries of Charity sisters in their trademark blue-trimmed saris had front-row seats at the Mass, sitting under a searing hot sun and blue skies alongside 1,500 homeless people and 13 heads of state or government, including Queen Sofia of Spain.

"Her heart, she gave it to the world," said Charlotte Samba, a 52-year-old mother of three who travelled with a church group from Gabon for the Mass. "Mercy, forgiveness, good works: It is the heart of a mother for the poor."

While big, the crowds were not as large as the 300,000 who turned out for Mother Teresa's 2003 beatification, thanks in part to security fears in the wake of Islamic extremist attacks in Europe. Those fears prompted a huge, 3,000-strong law enforcement presence to secure the area around the Vatican and close the airspace above.

Nevertheless, those on hand were jubilant to have made the journey  nuns, priests, volunteers, pilgrims and tourists clutching the coveted 100,000 tickets issued for the Mass.

One group of 40 Indian nationals traveled from Macerata, Italy to honor a woman given India's highest civilian and humanitarian awards for her work in the slums of Kolkata. Another group of 100 drove from Kosovo toting a banner that read: "Mother Teresa: Pray for Us."

While Francis is clearly keen to hold Mother Teresa up as a model for her joyful dedication to society's outcasts, he is also recognizing holiness in a nun who lived most of her adult life in spiritual agony sensing that God had abandoned her.

According to correspondence that came to light after she died in 1997, Mother Teresa experienced what the church calls a "dark night of the soul"  a period of spiritual doubt, despair and loneliness that many of the great mystics experienced. In Mother Teresa's case, it lasted for nearly 50 years  an almost unheard of trial.

For the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who spearheaded Mother Teresa's saint-making campaign, the revelations were further confirmation of Mother Teresa's heroic saintliness. He said that by canonizing her, Francis is recognizing that Mother Teresa not only shared the material poverty of the poor but the spiritual poverty of those who feel "unloved, unwanted, uncared for."

"What she described as the greatest poverty in the world today (of feeling unloved) she herself was living in relationship with Jesus," he said in an interview on the eve of the canonization.

Francis has in many ways modeled his papacy on Mother Teresa's simple lifestyle and selfless service to the poor: He eschewed the Apostolic Palace for a hotel room, he has made welcoming migrants and the poor a hallmark and has fiercely denounced today's "throwaway" culture that discards the unborn, the sick and the elderly with ease.

In keeping with her spirit, he was treating 1,500 homeless people bussed into Rome for the Mass to a pizza lunch in the Vatican auditorium afterward.

Sunday's festivities honoring Mother Teresa weren't limited to Rome: In Kolkata, where she spent a lifetime dedicated to the poor, a special Sunday Mass was held at the order's Mother House. Volunteers and admirers converged on Mother House to watch the canonization ceremony, which was being broadcast on giant TV screens in Kolkata and elsewhere.

Sisters of Charity volunteers planned to distribute food to the poor nearby after the ceremony, and community meals were being served across Catholic parishes in India on Sunday  a symbolic reference to Mother Teresa's lifetime of service to humanity, said the Rev. Savarimuthu Sankar of the archdiocese of New Delhi.

"Let the example of Mother Teresa inspire all of us to dedicate ourselves to the welfare of mankind," said Indian President Pranab Mukherjee.

Ceremonies were also expected in Skopje, Macedonia, where Mother Teresa was born, and also in Albania and Kosovo, where people of her same ethnic Albanian background live.

Born Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu on Aug. 26, 1910, Mother Teresa came to India in 1929 as a sister of the Loreto order. In 1946, she received what she described as a "call within a call" to found a new order dedicated to caring for the most unloved and unwanted, the "poorest of the poor."

In 1950 she founded the Missionaries of Charity, which went onto become a global order of nuns  identified by their trademark blue-trimmed saris  as well as priests, brothers and lay co-workers.

She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

She died in 1997 after a lifetime spent caring for hundreds of thousands of destitute and homeless poor in Kolkata, for which she came to be called the "saint of the gutters."

St. John Paul II, her most ardent supporter, fast-tracked her for sainthood and beatified her before a crowd of 300,000 in 2003.
The families of two U.S. mountain climbers missing for almost two weeks in Pakistan ended the search and rescue effort late Saturday.

Kyle Dempster, 33, and Scott Adamson, 34, well-known alpinists from Utah, were ascending a mountain peak known as Ogre II on Aug. 21 and were supposed to return to their base three days later, said Black Diamond Equipment, an outdoor company sponsoring Dempster.

They were trying to scale the 23,901-foot mountain's North Face, the company said.

Global Rescue, a travel risk and crisis management firm involved in the search, said a Pakistan military helicopter conducted flights over the the climbers' likely locations Saturday. A second helicopter was dispatched after the first one had to refuel, but there were no immediate signs of the men, NBC News reported.

The last confirmed sighting was of the men's headlamps on Aug. 22 by a Pakistani member of their base camp team. Neither climber was believed to be carrying satellite communication or messaging capabilities, Global Rescue added.
The much-maligned cruise ship that was damaged in rough waters earlier this year appears to be sailing near some of the stormiest sections of Hermine Sunday evening.

Several vacationers posted videos and photos to social media showing rolling seas and steely gray skies from aboard the Anthem of the Seas on Sunday afternoon.

"Ready to get away from Hermine #seasick #stuck in cabin," Louise Hardag tweeted.

The Bermuda-bound cruise ship left Bayonne, New Jersey, on Friday and was reported a few hundred miles off the East Coast Sunday night, southeast of Cape Cod, according to ship tracking site Cruisemapper. At least one other cruise ship was also in the area.

Medical team from @nypd has come out to meet the ship pic.twitter.com/YkoZ1KldlY  Mike Ritchie (@sdmike) July 1, 2016

19-year-old Ruth Jebet of Bahrain took home gold in the 3000m steeplechase, while Emma Coburn won bronze, the first ever medal in the event for the United States women

Robert McHugh of Point Pleasant, New Jersey, posted a video of pounding waves on social media. He's traveling with dozens of family members for a wedding in Bermuda. He said a majority of his relatives were getting motion sickness.

"The seas were churning up a little bit," McHugh said in a Skype interview. "There were a lot of people who weren't feeling well."

The motion of unsettled sea was rough enough that passengers had to hold onto handrails as they navigated the ship.

"When you're walking down the hallway, the ship is lifting up and dropping down," McHugh said.

Royal Carribbean, which owns and operates the ship, said in a statement that the boat is safely sailing to Bermuda in winds of about 40 mph  the minimum wind speed threshold for a tropical storm  and was more than 140 miles from the center of the storm.

"Earlier today, our captain informed guests that we had experienced higher winds and gusts for a 2-3 hour period," the cruise liner said. "We'll continue to share weather information with our guests throughout their trip."

In an unfortunate twist of fate, passengers Deena Abbate and Steve Matyasovsky were onboard the same ship in February when it encountered a raging tempest. They received a refund and a credit towards their next trip, which happened to be this weekend's cruise during Hermine.

"I guess it is pretty funny that here we are again," Abbate said.

"We booked this a long time ago, and who knew," Matyasovsky said.

While Hermine was downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm after it made landfall in Florida, forecasters expected it to strengthen as it went out to sea Sunday night, and it could turn back into a hurricane.

Sunday's storm appears to be the latest in a string of incidents involving the ship this year.

In June, an 8-year-old boy drowned while in one of the Anthem's pools, and in February, it sailed into another Atlantic storm that tossed passengers and furniture about the vessel. Passengers described that voyage as "a cruise from hell."
Police have arrested a man who they say fatally stabbed a 60-year-old woman in Queens on Wednesday after she refused to give him money, according to prosecutors.

Yonatan Galvez-Marin, 22, of Queens, has been charged with second-degree murder, first-degree robbery and criminal possession of a weapon, police said Sunday. There was no information available as to whether he had obtained a lawyer who could comment on the charges.

Officers responded to reports of an assault in front of a home on Normal Road in Jamaica Hills around 9:15 p.m. Wednesday. When they arrived, they saw Nazma Khanam bleeding with a stab wound to her torso.

Sources told NBC 4 New York that a man approached her and stabbed her as she and her husband carried groceries into their home. A piece of the knife was recovered at the scene.

Khanam, who is the aunt of a police transit officer, was rushed to Jamaica Hospital where she was pronounced dead.

Prosecutors say Galvez-Marin admitted that when she refused to give him money, he stabbed her then left the scene.

The NYPD Muslim Officers Society said Thursday morning that Khanam was the aunt of an NYPD transit officer.

The New York City Muslim community has been on edge since an imam and his associate were gunned down in broad daylight in Queens several weeks ago. Their alleged killer was arrested and charged with murder.
Police say a man was shot to death underneath an elevated transit line in Philadelphia and two other people were injured by gunfire around the city.



The 35-year-old man was found with gunshot wounds to the chest under the Market-Frankford El in Kensington just after 1 a.m. Sunday. He was taken to Temple University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead less than a half-hour later.



Police in west Philadelphia said a 21-year-old man who struck several parked vehicles in west Philadelphia shortly before 11 p.m. Saturday may have been trying to flee the scene on foot when he was shot in the neck, stomach and buttocks.



In south Philadelphia, a 21-year-old man was critically injured in a shooting in a breezeway adjacent to a home shortly before 8:30 p.m. Saturday.
Authorities have identified the man and woman found dead in an eastern Pennsylvania home, but more tests are needed to determine why they died.

The Lehigh County coroner's office said 47-year-old William McConnell and 44-year-old Corinna Rismiller were pronounced dead Thursday in their Salisbury Township home.

Autopsies were done Friday, but a ruling on the cause and manner of their deaths were deferred pending toxicological studies.

The district attorney's office has termed the deaths "suspicious'' and the county homicide task force is investigating.

Officials have said they believe the two may have died several days before they were found. Officials said the man hadn't reported to work for four days and garbage cans set outside the home Sunday were still outside Thursday, although they were normally brought back inside Monday.
Authorities in central Minnesota say the remains of Jacob Wetterling, missing since 1989, have been found.

Patty Wetterling said in a text message to NBC affiliate KARE Saturday morning that 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling "has been found and our hearts are broken." She did not immediately respond to calls and text messages from The Associated Press.

The Stearns County Sheriff's Office said in a statement hours later that Jacob's remains were identified on Saturday.

Jacob was riding his bicycle with his brother and a friend on Oct. 22, 1989, when a masked gunman abducted him from a rural road near his home in St. Joseph, about 80 miles northwest of Minneapolis.

No one has been arrested or charged in his abduction, which led to changes in sex offender registration laws.

[NATL] Top News Photos: Pope Visits Japan, and More

But last year, authorities took another look at the case, and were led to 53-year-old Danny Heinrich, a man they called a "person of interest" in Jacob's kidnapping.

Heinrich denied any involvement in Jacob's abduction, and was not charged with that crime. But he has pleaded not guilty to 25 federal child pornography charges and is scheduled to go on trial in those counts in October.

A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that Heinrich took authorities to a field in central Minnesota last week. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing case, said remains and other evidence were found.

The FBI has said that Heinrich matched the general description of a man who assaulted several boys in Paynesville from 1986 to 1988. Earlier this year, Heinrich's DNA was found on the sweatshirt of a 12-year-old boy who was kidnapped from Cold Spring and sexually assaulted nine months before Jacob's abduction.

Heinrich's attorney did not respond to an emailed request for comment Saturday.

Patty Wetterling always kept hope her son would be found alive. She became a national advocate for children, and with her husband, Jerry Wetterling, founded the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center, which works to help communities and families prevent child exploitation. In 1994, Congress passed a law named after Jacob Wetterling requiring states to establish sex offender registries.

Officials with the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center posted a statement on its website Saturday, saying they are in "deep grief."

"We didn't want Jacob's story to end this way," the statement said. "Our hearts are heavy, but we are being held up by all of the people who have been a part of making Jacob's Hope a light that will never be extinguished. ... Jacob, you are loved."

A timeline of events related to the abduction of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling of St. Joseph, Minnesota:

Oct. 22, 1989: Jacob Wetterling, 11, is abducted him from a rural road as he rode bikes with his brother and a friend by a masked gunman near his home about 80 miles northwest of Minneapolis.

Oct. 26, 1989: Deputies on horseback and hundreds of people search for Jacob, but find nothing.

Oct. 29, 1989: About 225 National Guard troops and 80 Minnesota Department of Natural Resources workers unsuccessfully search for clues. Supporters of the boy's family release more than 1,000 white balloons after a church service.

December 1989: Investigators are deluged with tips after they release a new sketch of a suspect. Authorities also say they believe the man who kidnapped Jacob was responsible for the January 1989 abduction and sexual assault of a boy in nearby Cold Spring.

1990: Jacob's parents, Patty and Jerry Wetterling, set up the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center, which works to help communities and families prevent child exploitation. Patty Wetterling becomes a national advocate for missing children.

October 1990: An FBI spokesman says about 2,000 people have been interviewed. More than 700 people attend an anniversary vigil less than two miles from where Jacob was taken.

1994: Congress passes the Jacob Wetterling Act, legislation for a sex offender registry.

2004: Patty Wetterling runs as a Democrat against Republican U.S. Rep. Mark Kennedy in Minnesota's 6th District. She loses by 30,000 votes in her first political campaign but does not rule out a future run.

2006: Patty Wetterling again runs for Congress but loses to Republican Michele Bachmann.

2010: Investigators spend two days searching and digging at a farm near where Jacob Wetterling was last seen. The sheriff later says forensic tests on items taken from the farm show no link to the crime.

Oct. 29, 2015: Federal authorities say a Minnesota man is a "person of interest." Danny Heinrich, of Annandale, is arrested on unrelated child pornography charges. Heinrich denies involvement in Jacob's disappearance and has not been charged in the case.

Sept. 3, 2016: Patty Wetterling says in a text message to KARE-TV that Jacob's remains have been found "and our hearts are broken."
U.S. Border Patrol agents in San Diego discovered the bodies of two people washed ashore Saturday morning north of the international border in Imperial Beach, officials confirmed.

Agent Eduardo Olmos, of U.S. Border Patrol San Diego Sector, told NBC 7 that agents found two men dead along the shore at Border Field State Beach. The mens names were not immediately released.

Olmos said agents  as well as officials with the U.S. Coast Guard  searched the water for other possible bodies but, as of 1:20 p.m. Saturday, no one else had been found.

The San Diego Medical Examiners (ME) office is conducting autopsies on the bodies and will determine their cause and manner of death. Those details are forthcoming.

The San Diego County Sheriff's Department (SDSO) sent investigators to the scene early Saturday morning, but the investigation has been turned over to the ME, the SDSO told NBC 7.

The SDSO said the call about the bodies came in around 7:20 a.m. The men may have floated up to Imperial Beach from south of the border, the SDSO said.

At this point, officials have not confirmed if the men were Mexican nationals.

Check back for updates on this developing story.
The County of San Diego Vector Control Program will spray a two-block area of Mount Hope, after a resident returning from abroad tested positive for the Zika virus.

A resident developed symptoms of Zika upon returning home, said officials. The area that will be sprayed is bordered by F Street on the north, Raven Street on the east, Market Street to the south and Quail Street to the west.

City officials said the hand-spraying will take place on Tuesday or Wednesday. It's part of a preventative measure to stop the spread of Aedes mosquitoes and the Zika virus.

Travel to Zika-affected countries is common, and actions to prevent Zika from spreading to local Aedes mosquitoes are vital to inhibit locally acquired human cases of this disease, Wilma Wooten, M.D., M.P.H., County public health officer said, in a statement.

State officials were able to confirm that the person had the Zika virus, which was not acquired in the United States. So far, no Aedes mosquitoes have ever been found in San Diego County carrying the Zika virus.
An 18-year-old San Diegan battling cancer, who drew strength from the superheroes in the "Captain America" film, died early Saturday morning.

His death was confirmed on social media, via the "Team Ryan" Facebook page dedicated to his recovery.

The Facebook post announcing the passing of Ryan Wilcox read: "Ryan we love you so much and we'll miss you always and forever. Love you to heaven and back. Fly high SuperMan...you are free."

Wilcox, a student at Grossmont High School, was so beloved by his classmates that earlier this year they held a social media campaign and a school rally in his honor. Students dressed up in Captain America garb and held a banner that read: "#RyanStrong."

After his passing, the Grossmont High School Associated Student Body (ASB) posted a quote from Ryan on Facebook, with a picture of the high school rallying behind him, that reads: "Strength doesn't really come from your muscles. It comes from your spirit, your heart and love."

At the rally this past spring and on social media, the students asked for Wilcox to receive a visit from his idols, the cast of Captain America.

He isnt doing too well and this would be a major way to boost his spirits and quite frankly be the best moment of his life if he literally got to meet his hero, read a Facebook post from the Grossmont High School ASB, just four months ago.

Hollywood actor Chris Evans, who portrays Captain America, responded to the request with a video played at the school May 6. In the video, Evans said, "Just wanted to say stay strong. I know you're fighting the good fight. It's people like you, with strength like yours, that inspire people like me."

Two weeks after the rally in May, Wilcox received a surprise visit from Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Patrow, aka Captain America, Iron Man and Pepper Potts.
An infant boy has been found safe and unharmed after police say a man took the child from its mother last week in Dumfries, Virginia.

Prince William County police said officers found the suspect, Russell Carnell Walker, and arrested him in the 15100 block of Cardin Place in Woodbridge about 3:45 p.m. Sunday. The 3-month-old child was found safe and unharmed nearby, police said.

Officers had responded to the Motel 6 on Dumfries Road on Thursday to investigate a domestic situation.

A 22-year-old woman from New Mexico told police she had been involved in an altercation with 44-year-old Walker the night before and he took her 3-month-old son, Zion LeBron Favors, and left after the fight.

Walker allegedly assaulted the woman and she sustained minor injuries, police said.

The woman originally told police Walker is Zion's father, but on Saturday she reported he is not the infant's father, police said.

Walker was wanted for abduction, domestic assault and battery.
Two people were killed in an accident early Sunday morning in District Heights, Maryland, Prince Georges County police said.

Howard Jackson, 27, was turning from Parkland Drive onto Pennsylvania Avenue about 1:15 a.m. when another vehicle traveling eastbound on Pennsylvania Avenue slammed into Jackson's vehicle. The driver of that car apparently ran a red light and was speeding, police said.

Jackson and his mother, 57-year-old Pandora Bracmort, were pronounced dead at the scene. The crash happend not far from the apartment where Jackson and Bracmort lived.

Pennsylvania Avenue was closed for about six hours while the scene was cleared.

The driver of the other vehicle has been released from the hospital, police said Monday.

Police are asking anyone who witnessed the crash to come forward.

Editor's note: A previous version of the story reported the crash happened in Capitol Heights. That information from police was incorrect.
With Hermine churning off the coast, communities on the Massachusetts coast, are preparing for the storm.

At the Westport Marina on Sunday, many boats were still in the water but people were showing up throughout the day to either take them out or secure them with extra lines in preparation for the heavy winds and high surf the area was expected to get overnight and on Monday.

"This is the calm before the storm," said Christopher Leonard, Director of Marine Services, Westport. "This is very deceiving. It's a beautiful day."

Leonard said he's been following the forecast closely.

"We might get a light brush from this storm or we might get a heavy brush from this storm," he said.

Leonard spent the day helping people get their boats out of the water. Winds were already picking up to 35 mph and meteorologists said Westport could see higher wind gusts of up to 60 mph by Monday.

"The last time we saw winds here of 70 to 80 mph was Hurricane Bob and it's just too close to comfort for us," said Leonard.

Paul Macomber is a longtime fisherman and wanted to make sure his boat was in a safer spot at the Westport Marina.

"I normally tie up over and across but that's more exposed to the wind, to bring it around and tie it to this guy, it's more protected," said Macomber as he secured his boat.

The high waves at nearby Horseneck Beach were perhaps the first signs of Hermine's wrath off the coast. Head lifeguard Sean Sweeney said Sunday was the first time the beach had closed to swimmers all summer.

"We noticed when we came in, the water was a lot stronger, high risk to rip currents, so we shut down the water to swimming," said Sweeney. "No one is allowed in."

Officials at the beach said they will survey conditions Monday morning and make a decision whether to keep the area closed to swimmers again.
CHARLOTTE, N.C., Sept. 04, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Omni Wellness Center would like to announce that they will be hosting a Patient Appreciation Day and Anniversary Party on September 19th. The event will take place on-site at their Charlotte chiropractic clinic between the hours of 7:30 am and 6:30 pm. Clients are welcome to stop in anytime throughout the day to sample and enjoy the food provided as well as browse the vendors in attendance. Omni Wellness Center is offering chiropractic adjustments during this event for $20, which will serve as a donation to Feed the Hungry.

Feed the Hungry, a Christian-based organization, is dedicated to providing meals to those in need in nations across the globe, including regions struck by natural disaster. The organization works with the local governments in the regions of need, and distributes food and aid through community churches who then reach out to the most affected. Feed the Hungry reports that five children can be fed monthly from each $30 donation they receive.

The staff at Omni Wellness Center looks forward to many more years of providing chiropractic care to Charlotte area residents. They are honored to offer their adjustment services in exchange for donations to Feed the Hungry during this event. Their goal is to raise $3,000 to benefit as many of those in need of nourishing meals as possible.

The event celebrates the clinics pride and success in providing chiropractic care to the residents of Charlotte, Belmont, Woodford Green, Mt. Holly, Huntersville and the surrounding areas. It is an opportunity to give something back to the community and show appreciation to the many clients they have served during their time in Charlotte.

Dr. Darcey W. Ladner of Omni Wellness Center is an award-winning chiropractor who is passionate about providing quality care for her patients. Chiropractic care attends to health and well-being based on a system that largely depends upon having the correct alignment, which enables cooperation and communication of the spine along with the rest of the adjacent body parts. When an area of the spine is misaligned, pain and a reduction in range of motion can result. Left untreated, longer-term problems can manifest.

Dr. Darcey says, We greatly appreciate all of our clients, and are proud to offer them the opportunity to benefit from our services while also contributing to a wonderful and impactful cause. We look forward to celebrating many more anniversaries serving the city of Charlotte and outlying areas.

Omni Wellness Center is located at 10220 Couloak Drive in Charlotte, North Carolina. Those in the area who would like more details about the upcoming celebration, or who would like to book a chiropractic appointment, may do so by calling (704) 392-9999. Additional information about the practice and their suite of services can be accessed on their website at http://omniwellnesscenter.com/.
Massachusetts State Police are searching for a man they believe is armed and dangerous in Berlin.

Authorities said they are using a K9 crew to search the area around River Road West and South Street for the suspect.

They are also urging residents in the area to stay indoors and bring in any pets.

The suspect was last seen wearing black shorts, a black shirt and white socks.

Residents are urged to call 911 if they see any suspicious activity.
Police have identified a suspect involved in a fatal hit and run pedestrian crash in Mattapan, Massachusetts.

Massachusetts State Police have charged 39-year-old Anthony E. Buchanan of Dorchester with offenses including motor vehicle homicide while operating under the influence, leaving the scene of a crash that caused death, speeding and a marked lanes violation.

The victim was identified as 46-year-old Johnette Sims, of Dorchester.

Investigations determined that Buchanan was operating a rented 2016 Dodge Charger erratically and at high speed eastbound on Morton Street.

Police say the Charger struck Sims at a crosswalk at the intersection of Morton and Canterbury Street at around 10:30 p.m. Saturday. The Charger's driver then stopped briefly and drove away toward American Legion Highway.

Buchanan turned himself in early Sunday morning.

Police say the Charger was recovered on Pleasant Street and is being processed for evidence.

Buchanan is being held in the State Police Barracks in Milton, awaiting arraignment Tuesday at Boston Municipal Court.
Police say a 2-year-old girl suffered burns after she tripped and fell into a fire pit in Billerica, Massachusetts.

Billerica police received report around 6 p.m. Friday that a toddler tripped and landed into an active fire pit while attending a birthday party on Bridle Road.

Police say the child was quickly removed and placed into water to lessen her burn injuries.

Out of caution, the child was lifted to a Boston hospital by medical helicopter.

Her injuries are not considered life-threatening.

Police say no charges are expected to come from the incident.

They do not believe carelessness, drugs, or alcohol played any role in the accident.


Joy as new sisters welcomed at Swaffham convent Joy as new sisters welcomed at Swaffham convent

A Norfolk-based vice-province of Catholic nuns has received a huge boost with the addition of five new or prospective young sisters, almost doubling its previous total of seven, and the first from England in almost 40 years. Keith Morris reports.
Lively action packed home top of canine wish list

A CHEEKY terrier is hoping to win the affections of a new owner in a lively new home.

Monkey is an adorable two-year-old terrier who is hoping to win over a new owner with his cheeky personality.

Jenny Hopkins, assistant manager at Dogs Trust Newbury, said:

Its certainly Monkey by name and monkey by nature when it comes to this adorable boy! He is such a busy chap who has a real zest for life and is never happier than when hes playing with his toys or bounding about on his daily walks.

Monkey is looking for an active home with owners who can keep him on his paws and continue his training. He can live with children age 14 and over and would like a busy household with people who can be around for most of the day to keep him company.

Do you think you could give Monkey a loving home? Please call the staff at Dogs Trust Newbury to arrange a visit on 0300 303 0292.

Dogs Trust Newbury is located at Plumbs Farm, Hamstead Marshall, Newbury, Berks, RG20 0HR.

Dogs Trust is the UKs largest dog welfare charity and cares for nearly 17,000 stray and abandoned dogs each year through its network of 20 Rehoming Centres across the UK and one in Ireland.

For more information about the charitys work, visit www.dogstrust.org.uk
Profile Review - GMAT Score: 690 [ #permalink

Hi guys! I would really appreciate an evaluation of my profile for admission to following schools (courses):



- St. Gallen (MiM)

- HEC Lausanne (Msc. in Management)

- University of Mannheim (MiM)

- WHU Beishem (Msc. in Management)

- HHL Leipzig (Msc. in Management)



Profile:



- Male, 25, Indian

- GMAT: 690 (Q49,V35)

- Education:

=> Diploma in Marketing Management from NMIMS (Currently Pursuing)

=> Bachelor in Technology from Mumbai University (Graduated in 2013)



- Extracurriculars:

=> Served in a Not-for-profit organization called AIESEC for 3 years; wherein I started as a new recruit and ended my experience as the president of the office in Mumbai.

=> Handled responsibilities such as project management, business operations, sales & marketing, recruitment and organizational governance.

=> Managed large teams and the entire local office eventually of ~80 members.

=> Currently serving as a mentor for underpriviliged youth in a Mumbai based NGO



- Full Time Work experience:

=> Worked for a global digital advertising agency as a business operations & sales executive for around 2 and half years

=> Got promoted within 12 months of joining to a Sr. Executive and handled the largest projects for the company at the time (Annual Projections worth over $5million)

=> Played a key role in product development, training, recruitment & mentorship for new joinees, besides my primary job role.



- Languages: Native English, Native Hindi (Plan to learn German in the coming few months; A1 & A2)



- International experience: No work experience. However, was selected by the international committee of AIESEC to be a part of the International Congress in 2013, which was hosted by Egypt and represented by over 130+ nations.





I know that schools in Germany & Switzerland require a prior degree in business for the program I have selected. In this case, will my work experience in business operations throughout my professional career help? Also, the reason for me to choose tech for my undergraduate program was so that I could work in the tech industry and understand the operations of the industry better. If not, does that mean an MBA is the only option for me?



Additionally, I am not confident in my score and I am currently studying towards a target of 740 (Which I happened to score in my GMAT Prep mocks). My current financial situation is not the best and will need financial aid for my education. Does my current profile stand a chance to receive scholarships in any of these schools?



I desperately am searching for some advice. Any help?
Antibiotics are chemical substances that kill or inhibit the growth of bacteria. The success of antibiotics against disease-causing bacteria is one of modern medicines great achievements. However, many bacteria harmful to humans have developed ways to circumvent the effects of antibiotics, and many infectious diseases are now much more difficult to treat than they were just a few decades ago. Antibiotic resistance is an especially difficult problem for hospitals with critically ill patients who are less able to fight off infections without the help of antibiotics.



Bacteria can develop antibiotic resistance because they have the ability to adapt quickly to new environmental conditions. Most commonly, bacteria share with each other genetic material called resistance plasmids; these shared plasmids, which contain the genetic code enabling antibiotic resistance, can spread throughout a bacterial population to create a strain of resistant bacteria. Less commonly, a natural mutation that enables antibiotic resistance takes place within the chromosome of the bacteria, and the resulting strain of bacteria can reproduce and become dominant via natural selection. In the absence of human involvement, however, bacteria in the wild rarely develop resistance to antibiotics.



In the United States, animals raised on industrial-scale factory farms are routinely administered low levels of antibiotics in their feed not as a cure for ongoing maladies, but primarily as a growth-enhancing agent to produce more meat and also as a prophylactic measure to compensate for overcrowded and unsanitary conditions. Currently, several antibiotics that are used in human medical treatment are administered non-therapeutically to healthy livestock and poultry. Examples include tetracycline, penicillin and erythromycin. This long-term non-therapeutic feeding of antibiotics to animals creates the ideal conditions for the development of antibioticresistant bacteria, as it kills the susceptible bacteria while leaving the resistant strains to reproduce and flourish. Europe is far ahead of the United States in the responsible use of antibiotics: On January 1, 2006, the European Union banned the feeding of all antibiotics to livestock for nontherapeutic purposes. This sweeping policy follows a 1998 ban on the non therapeutic use of four medically-important antibiotics on animals. The time has come for the United States to follow Europes lead.

Show Spoiler D

1. Based on the information in the passage, to which of the following practices would the author most likely be opposed?

Show Spoiler E

2.Based on the information in the passage, which of the following statements can be inferred?

Show Spoiler C

3. Which of the following best describes what the phrase prophylactic measure in the third paragraph means?

Show Spoiler A

4. The passage is primarily concerned with

Show Spoiler D

5.According to the passage, which of the following describes how bacteria can develop antibiotic resistance?

Show Spoiler B

6. According to the passage, why are antibiotic-resistant bacteria problematic for humans?

Show Spoiler D

7. Which of the following can be inferred about antibiotic-resistant bacteria?

A. Hospitals are hiring higher numbers of infectious disease specialists than ever before.B. Many health insurance policies do not or only partially reimburse patients for prescriptions of the newest and most effective antibiotics.C. The industrial farm industry contributes more than $100 million to incumbent members of Congress each year.D. Physicians routinely prescribe antibiotics to patients with viral diseases, even though antibiotics have no effect on viruses.E. Hospitals are enforcing more stringent hand-hygiene standards in an effort to reduce infections.A. Most industrial farms do not meet the standards for sanitation required by the United States government.B. If the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics were halted worldwide, there would be no new resistant strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria.C. European livestock and poultry are raised in more sanitary conditions than are those in the United States.D. Hospitals are better learning to cope with the growing spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria.E. It is possible for antibiotic-resistant bacteria in animals to be passed on to humans.A. a measure to cure the animals of any existing infectious diseasesB. a contraceptive measure to prevent the animals from spreading genetic diseasesC. a pre-emptive measure to kill bacteria in the animals before the animals become illD. an antiseptic measure to kill surface bacteria in the surrounding environmentE. a measure that creates a physical barrier that protects the animals from the bacteria in the surrounding environmentA. advocating the banning of a practiceB. explaining the mechanism of a processC. explaining the practices of a particular industryD. describing the history of a phenomenonE. weighing the costs versus the benefits of a practiceA. Radiation from medical devices such as x-ray machines weaken the immune system in both humans and animals.B. Resistant strains developed through genetic engineering dominate a bacterial population through natural selection.C. Medical practitioners over-prescribe antibiotics in hospitals which encourages bacteria to adapt and form resistant strains.D.Genetic material containing the resistant trait is shared among a bacterial population.E. Many antibiotics lose potency and become ineffective over time.(A) Antibiotics are no longer effective in treating disease.(B) Some diseases are harder to treat because some antibiotics are less able to fulfill their prescribed function.(C) Bacteria spread more easily in a hospital setting due to the close proximity of many patients who may harbor different bacteria.(D) Bacteria can infect both humans and animals.(E) Bacteria gain resistance via the exchange of plasmids.(A) If bacteria did not contain antibiotic-resistant plasmids, then they would be incapable of developing resistance to antibiotics.(B) Human involvement is necessary in order for bacteria to develop resistance to antibiotics.(C) The United States should ban the use of antibiotics for non-therapeutic uses.(D) If bacteria were not able to adapt quickly to new environments, it would be more difficult for bacteria to develop resistance to antibiotics.(E) Critically ill patients with infections due to antibiotic-resistant bacteria are more likely to die.
A 22-year-old man has been arrested for allegedly fatally stabbing a 60-year-old Queens woman this week. Yonatan Galvez-Marin was arrested in Jamaica Hills close to where he is accused of killing Nazma Khanam as she walked home.

Khanam, a retired teacher, had been walking home with her husband from their souvenir shop around 9:15 p.m. on Wednesday when she was attacked outside of 160-12 Normal Road in Jamaica. Her husband, 75-year-old Shamsul Alam Khan, suffers from asthma, and had stopped to catch his breath as she walked ahead. He heard his wife utter a "blood curdling scream" out of view from him. When he reached her, she was bleeding on the sidewalk with a part of a knife sticking out.

"Somebody killed me," Khanam reportedly told her husband as he held her in his arms. Khanam was rushed to Jamaica Hospital and pronounced dead shortly afterwards.

The couple had come to the U.S. in 2009 and became citizens in June. Family members have decried the murder as a hate crime, noting Nazma was wearing traditional Muslim clothing at the time, and no personal possessions were taken. Her nephew, Transit Officer Humayun Kabir, told the News his "family doesnt deserve to be going through this."

Galvez-Marin, who has no prior criminal record in NY, has been charged with murder, robbery and possession of a weapon. The Post adds that police sources say he admitted to attempting to rob Khanam.
An Atlantic City officer is in critical condition and a suspect is dead after an early morning shootout yesterday.

Police say the shootout went down around 3:30 a.m. Saturday morning. Police were apparently stopping a car outside the Caesars Atlantic City casino; when cops got out of the car, they were allegedly ambushed by five men. "At this point I don't know what the reason for the initial stop was," Atlantic City police Chief Henry White told reporters. "But as the officers were getting out of the car, the males opened fire on our officers, striking one."

The officer was taken to AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center, where he went through surgery. He is currently listed in critical condition. One suspect is dead; police are still looking for the rest.

The NJ Cop Shot program is offering $20,000 to anyone with information leading to the arrest and conviction of the suspects. "Our hearts are heavy at this hour, but our resolve to captured these suspects remains undeterred," New Jersey State PBA President Patrick Colligan said in the statement. "We ask for prayers for the officer, his family, and the Atlantic City Police Department."

Update: New Jersey State Police have now arrested Martell Chisholm, 19, and Demetrius Cross, 28. The two suspects along with their slain companion, 25-year-old Jerome Damon, were allegedly attempting to rob three other men when cops came upon them.

Chisholm and Cross have been charged with two counts of attempted murder, three counts of robbery, two counts of conspiracy to commit robbery, two counts possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose and two counts of conspiracy to commit possession of a firearm for an unlawful purpose.
Champaign, IL (61820)

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Hangzhou: Describing BRICS as "an influential voice in international discourse", Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday said it was the grouping's shared responsibility to shape the global agenda.



Leading from the chair, Modi addressed the BRICS Leaders Meeting, before the 8th annual Summit in Goa from October 15-16.



"We, as BRICS, are an influential voice in international discourse. It is, therefore, our shared responsibility to shape the international agenda," he said.



"Our shared responsibility to shape international agenda in manner that helps developing nations achieve their objectives," he added.



Modi said that as chair of BRICS, "'Building Responsive, Inclusive and Collective Solutions' is the theme we have chosen which mirrors central priorities at G20 Summit".



"We've taken BRICS out of capitals to involve people from all walks of life. It will be an opportunity to deepen our ties and with BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) countries.



The four other leaders who participated in the meeting of the five-member bloc included Brazilian President Michel Temer, Chinese President Xi Jinping - with whom Modi held bilateral talks earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin and South African President Jacob Zuma.



"Our summit next month would not only be an opportunity to deepen ties with ourselves, we will also interact with India's neighbouring countries of BIMSTEC - Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand, who have been invited for the outreach summit. We welcome you all to Goa next month," Modi said while concluding his brief address.
Secretive British street artist Banksy could be none other than the frontman from British trip-hop band Massive Attack, according to a newly emerging theory that links the pair's global whereabouts.A theory by Craig Williams is now gaining momentum, linking fresh Banksy artworks from around the world with Massive Attack concerts in the same areas.Specifically, Banksy pieces found or shown in Melbourne, Australia (March 2003), in Disneyland and Los Angeles (September 2006), again in Melbourne (March to April 2010), in San Francisco, Toronto, and Boston (May 2010), and New York (September to October 2013) can all be tied to stops on Massive Attack tours.Like Banksy, Massive Attack co-founder Robert Del Naja has been recognized for his ability as a street artist, Banksy acknowledging Del Naja's impact on his own development.Supporting the theory is a geographic profiling analysis published in March (via Guardian UK) indicating Banksy was, like Del Naja, from Bristol, southwest England; that line of thinking identified the anonymous mural-maker as ex-public schoolboy Robin Gunningham, in agreement with a British tabloid newspaper report from 2008 (Daily Mail).And Banksy wrote an introduction for Del Naja's "3D and the Art of Massive Attack," published 2015.Now it seems like the two people might be one and the same.Or, perhaps less excitingly, Gunningham has been making sure his global travels cross paths with those of his friends in Massive Attack.
TV presenter Steve Harvey's role as presenter of the Miss Universe' pageant could be under threat, due to the disapproval of the President of the Philippines.



Rodrigo Duterte is not keen to let the presenter back on the Miss Universe stage when the 2016 pageant hits Manila in January, CNN Philippines reports.







Harvey hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons last year when he announced Miss Philippines Pia Wurtzbach as the first runner-up in the competition. In fact, the Filipina beauty was the winner, but Miss Colombia Ariadna Gutierrez had already been crowned before the mix-up came to light, causing confusion on stage.



However, the country's tourism secretary Wanda Teo pointed out that Harvey has a five-year contract with the pageant organization.
Vatican City: Affectionately called the "saint of the gutters" during her lifetime, Mother Teresa of Calcutta will be made an official saint of the Roman Catholic Church on Sunday, just 19 years after her death.



A Nobel peace prize winner, Mother Teresa was one of the most influential women in the Church's 2,000-year history, acclaimed for her work amongst the world's poorest of the poor in the slums of Kolkata.



Hundreds of thousands of faithful are expected to attend the canonisation service for the tiny nun, which will be led by Pope Francis in front of St. Peter's basilica.



Although criticised both during her life and following her death, Mother Teresa is revered by Catholics as a model of compassion who brought relief to the sick and dying, opening branches of her Missionaries of Charity (MoC) order around the world.



"Even in popular culture she's identified with goodness, kindness, charity," said Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the MoC priest who campaigned for her sainthood.



In novels or movies often characters say, "'Oh, who do you think I am? Mother Teresa?'" he told Reuters.



Her critics view her differently, arguing she did little to alleviate the pain of the terminally ill and nothing to stamp out the root causes of poverty.



In 1991, the British medical journal the Lancet visited a home she ran in Kolkata for the dying and said untrained carers failed to recognize when some patients could have been cured.



Kolodiejchuk said her detractors missed the point of her mission, arguing that she had created a place to comfort people in their final days rather than establish hospitals.



"We don't have to prove that saints were perfect, because no one is perfect," he said.



Christianity 'not the only way'



In her adopted India, Mother Teresa has been accused of looking to convert the destitute to Christianity - something her mission has repeatedly denied.



The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), also accuses Mother Teresa of revelling in the misery of others.



"As a resident of Kolkata, I feel insulted to see its poverty being glorified by the MoC. As a Hindu nationalist I also feel that Christianity is not the only way of salvation," said Jishnu Bose, the RSS spokesman.



But Mother Teresa still has legions of supporters in India, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi.



"All her life she worked to serve poorer sections of Indian society. When such a person is conferred with sainthood, it is natural for Indians to feel proud," Modi said on Sunday.



Mother Teresa was born Agnese Gonxha Bojaxhiu of Albanian parents in 1910 in what was then part of the Ottoman Empire and is now Macedonia. She became a nun at 16 and moved to India in 1929, creating her mission in 1950.



The Roman Catholic Church has more than 10,000 saints, many of whom had to wait centuries before their elevation.



But Mother Teresa, one of the most recognizable faces of the 20th century, was put on the fast track to sainthood after dying of a heart attack on September 5, 1997.



The late Pope John Paul II bent Vatican rules to allow the procedure to establish her case for sainthood to be launched two years after her death instead of the usual five, and she was beatified in 2003.



The Church defines saints as those believed to have been holy enough during their lives to now be in Heaven and able to intercede with God to perform miracles. She has been credited with two miracles, both involving the healing of sick people.



The latest involved a Brazilian, Marcilio Andrino, who unexpectedly recovered from a severe brain infection in 2008. He and his wife Fernanda will attend the canonisation, which is considered the highlight of Pope Francis's Holy Year of Mercy.
Hangzhou (China) : In an indirect reference to Pakistan, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked the BRICS member nations to "isolate supporters and sponsors of terror".



In a meet with the leaders of the BRICS ahead of G20 summit, Modi said "terrorists in South Asia, or anywhere for that matter, do not own banks or weapons factories".



"Clearly, someone funds and arms them, and BRICS must intensify joint efforts not just to fight terror but to coordinate actions to isolate those who are supporters and sponsors of terror," he said.



In the meet, Modi said terrorism was the primary source of instability and the biggest threat to societies.



He also raised the issue with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on the sidelines of the G20.



"In a very hard-hitting intervention, he said terrorists in South Asia or anywhere for that matter do not own banks or weapons factories," Indian External Affairs Ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup quoted Modi as saying.



Without directly naming Pakistan, Modi told Turnbull, "Our (India's) neighbourhood, in particular, was suffering from destabilisation effects of terrorism". He stressed the need to "identify the suppliers, exporters and financiers of terrorism".
Mother Teresa of Calcutta, a Nobel peace laureate known as the saint of the gutters during her lifetime, was made a saint of the Roman Catholic Church on Sunday.

More than 100,000 pilgrims attended a service led by Pope Francis in St Peters Square at the Vatican to honour the tiny nun who worked among the worlds neediest in the slums of Kolkata.

Her legacy fits neatly with Franciss vision of a poor church that strives to serve the poor, and the ceremony will be a highlight of his Holy Year of Mercy which runs until November 8.

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New translations, old traditions! PM @narendramodi is presented Chinese translations of ancient Indian texts pic.twitter.com/DUrfL4tmPJ  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) September 4, 2016

A gift to cherish! PM @narendramodi receives an oil painting of him by Prof Shen Shu pic.twitter.com/IB0gGLq8jR  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) September 4, 2016

Prime Minister Narendra Modi was on Sunday presented with a hand-painted oil-painting of himself by a Chinese painter and Chinese translations of ancient Indian texts including Bhagavad Gita and essays of Swami Vivekananda.Modi, who arrived on Saturday for the G20 summit, was gifted a set of 10 Chinese translations of the ancient Indian texts by Indophile Professor Wang Zhicheng, who teaches Hindi at the prestigious Peking University.The translations include Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Narada's Bhakti Sutras, Yoga Vasistha among others."New translations, old traditions! PM Narendra Modi is presented Chinese translations of ancient Indian texts," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted.The Prime Minister was also gifted a portrait of himself by Professor Shen Shu from Hangzhou's Zhejiang Kaiming Art Gallery.The painting took nearly four months to complete, Swarup said in a tweet.Modi landed in Hangzhou on Saturday night after concluding his two day visit to Vietnam.


The ongoing China-Pakistan Economic Corridor passes through the restive regions of Balochistan, Gilgit-Baltistan and the Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

In his meeting with BRICS leaders, Modi said "terrorists in South Asia or anywhere for that matter do not own banks or weapons factories and are funded.



: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday told Chinese President Xi Jinping about India's concerns over terrorism emanating from Pakistan's restive regions through which the $46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is being built.In his 35-minute long meet with Xi on the sidelines of the G20 leaders' summit in Hangzhou city, Modi conveyed to him that Delhi and Beijing "would have to be sensitive to each other's strategic interests"."He (Modi) said it is of paramount importance that both countries respect each other's aspirations, concerns and strategic interests," External Affairs Minstry spokesperson Vikas Swarup told Indian journalists here.In his interaction with Xi, Modi said the attack on the Chinese embassy in Bishkek was yet another proof of "scourge if terrorism".Modi told Xi that our response to terrorism "must not be motivated by political consideration" -- an apparent reference to Pakistan, India's arch-rival and China's all-weather friend.Swarup refused to divulge if the issue of India's membership to the Nuclear Suppliers Group figured in the meet with Xi."If you read between the lines when we are talking about our strategic interests, concerns and aspirations, it is not that China is unaware of our strategic interests, concerns or aspirations or that we are unaware of theirs. It is something that both sides are aware of," Swarup said.Xi told Modi that China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound relations and further advance their cooperation, Xinhua news agency reported.
Hangzhou: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday exchanged views with Barack Obama on the sidelines of the G20 summit with the US president praising the "bold policy" move on GST reform in a "difficult" global economic scenario.



Modi first met Obama briefly when they were onstage to pose for a family photograph at the G20 Summit venue in this eastern Chinese city. The two leaders had another opportunity to exchange views during an informal evening programme.



Obama in his intervention during the G20 summit praised Modi for the recent tax reform as an example of "bold policy" in an otherwise "difficult global economic scenario".



On August 8, Parliament cleared the landmark Constitution (122nd Amendment) Bill, 2014, on the Goods and Services Tax.



The government has set April 1, 2017 as the target for rolling out the GST, considered the biggest tax reform in a long time.



Earlier on Sunday, Modi met Chinese President Xi Jinping and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on the sidelines of the summit.



Modi, who arrived on Saturday from Vietnam for the summit, also met Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad bin Salman and discussed ways to enhance bilateral ties.



The prime minister called for strengthened partnership with Saudi Arabia in sectors such as maritime, infrastructure, low-cost housing and discussed further cooperation in energy sector, they said.



Modi will meet British counterpart Theresa May and Argentinian President Mauricio Macri on Monday before returning to Delhi.
Landed up in Chennai! Shooting my action packed scenes for @shankarshanmugh #Robot2.0   Amy Jackson (@iamAmyJackson) September 2, 2016

: Actress Amy Jackson, who has rejoined the sets of superstar Rajinikanth's Tamil science-fiction action drama 2.o after a brief hiatus, will be shooting for some action sequences from Monday here."She joined the sets back on Saturday. In the latest schedule, the makers will shoot some action scenes featuring Amy Jackson and Rajinikanth. One of the most important portions of the film will be shot in the following weeks," a source said.An elated Amy shared the news on her twitter page, "Landed up in Chennai! Shooting my action packed scenes for @shankarshanmugh Robot 2.0."Being helmed by S. Shankar, the film also stars Akshay Kumar as the antagonist, Sudhanshu Pandey and Adil Hussain.Tipped to be produced on a budget of Rs 350 crore, the film which is being bankrolled by Lyca Productions, will hit the screens in the summer of 2017.Double Oscar-winning composer A.R. Rahman is composing the film's tunes.
Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan on Saturday picked up brooms to clean up the sprawling Sir JJ Hospital complex as part of the 'MahaCleanathon' campaign."We have not come here to make speeches.. We want to set an example and hope this movement continues and we can keep our cities clean," Fadnavis said as he dug his hands into dirt at the event.He pointed out that all the hill stations in the state once had 'kachra points' which are now known as 'Swachch Points' to drive home the mission philosophy.The campaign brand ambassador, Bachchan swished around with a broom along with Fadnavis, and then picked up the accumulated garbage with his bare hands to dump it in a cane basket."If each one cleans up 10 yards around their homes, the entire city will sparkle. When you see somebody littering, tell them if you keep doing this, it will have an impact," Bachchan said on the occasion.Later, he tweeted: "At MahaCleanathon to acknowledge the Swachch Bharat campaign in Maharashtra and to work so many others follow."The campaign, launched in January 2016, aims to complete 50 lakh manhours to the Swachch Bharat Abhiyan and has already clocked in over 33 lakh manhours, with the rest scheduled to be completed by the year-end, said Principal Secretary, Urban Development Manisha Mhaiskar in the Maharashtra Government.Fadnavis said that by October 2 this year - marking Mahatma Gandhi's 147th birth anniversary - 50 cities in Maharashtra shall be 'swachch' or clean, and around 7,000 villages have already become open-defecation-free.Several other celebs like Priyanka Chopra, Dia Mirza, Sonakshi Sinha, Arjun Kapoor, several ministers, government officials and commoners joined the initiative today, with many applauding when Bachchan and Fadnavis picked up the cleaning brooms.
Mother Teresa, the nun whose work with the dying and destitute of Kolkata made her a global icon of Christian charity, was made a saint on Sunday.Her elevation to Roman Catholicism's celestial pantheon came in a canonisation mass in St Peter's square in the Vatican that was presided over by Pope Francis in the presence of 100,000 pilgrims."For the honour of the Blessed Trinity... we declare and define Blessed Teresa of Calcutta (Kolkata) to be a Saint and we enroll her among the Saints, decreeing that she is to be venerated as such by the whole Church," the pontiff said in Latin.The ceremony came a day before the 19th anniversary of Teresa's death in Kolkata, the city where she spent nearly four decades tending to the poorest of the poor.With the 16th century basilica of St Peter's and an azure sky providing the backdrop, the faithful basked in the late summer sun as Francis presided over a ritual mass that has barely changed for centuries.Such was the demand from pilgrims, the Vatican could easily have issued double the number of tickets but for space and security restrictions.Helicopters had earlier buzzed over the headquarters of the Roman Catholic church, testifying to the huge but relatively discreet security operation under way. Some 3,000 officers were on duty to ensure the day passed off peacefully.Among the assembled crowd were some 1,500 poor people looked after by the Italian branches of Teresa's order, the Missionaries of Charity.After the mass they were to be Francis's guests at the Vatican for a giant pizza lunch served by 250 sisters and 50 male members of the order.Teresa spent all her adult life in India, first teaching, then tending to the dying poor.It was in the latter role, at the head of her now worldwide order that Teresa became one of the most famous women on the planet.Born to Kosovan Albanian parents in Skopje -- then part of the Ottoman empire, now the capital of Macedonia -- she won the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize and was revered around the world as a beacon for the Christian values of self-sacrifice and charity.But she was also regarded with scorn by secular critics who accused her of being more concerned with evangelism than with improving the lot of the poor.The debate over the nun's legacy has continued after her death, with researchers uncovering financial irregularities in the running of her order and evidence mounting of patient neglect, insalubrious conditions and questionable conversions of the vulnerable in her missions.Sceptics were absent from the Vatican Sunday however as Francis prepared to pay homage to a woman he sees as the embodiment of his vision of a "poor church for the poor".By historical standards, Teresa has been fast-tracked to sainthood, thanks largely to one of the few people to have achieved canonisation faster, John Paul II.The Polish cleric was a personal friend of Teresa and as the pope at the time of her death, he was responsible for her being beatified in 2003.Achieving sainthood requires the Vatican to approve accounts of two miracles occurring as a result of prayers for Teresa's intercession.The first one, ratified in 2002, was of an Indian woman, Monica Besra, who says she recovered from ovarian cancer a year after Teresa's death -- something local health officials have put down to medical advances rather than the power of prayer.In the second, approved last year, Brazilian Marcilio Haddad Andrino says his wife's prayers to Teresa led to brain tumours disappearing. Eight years later, Andrino and his wife Fernanda were in the congregation on Sunday.Also in the crowd at St Peter's was Teresa Burley, an Italy-based American teacher of children with learning difficulties who says the new saint inspired her vocation."I'm also named Teresa," she told AFP. "I remember growing up admiring the things she did for children and the poor."We need to remember we are here to help each other. We need to be here for those who can't help themselves. It's the same for refugees arriving here: we have to be there to help them transition into their new lives."Many Indians have made the trip to Rome, among them Kiran Kakumanu, 40, who was blessed by Teresa when he was a baby and grew up to become a priest.Abraham, an Indian expatriate in London, said Teresa's life had set a unique example to the world."She practised Christianity. The majority of Christians only spend their time talking about it."
Ankara: Ankara stepped up its fight against militants in Turkey and northern Syria with air strikes on Kurdish rebel positions in the restive southeast and IS extremists in northern Syria, security sources said.



Jets bombed four PKK targets in the Cukurca district of the southeastern province of Hakkari close to northern Iraq yesterday evening, the sources told state-run Anadolu news agency.



The bombing took place after a bloody 48 hours during which at least 22 Turkish soldiers and a village guardsman were killed in clashes and an attack blamed on PKK militants.



Twelve soldiers were killed in two separate clashes in the Cukurca and Semdinli districts in Hakkari, the provincial governor's office said, while in Van province, eight soldiers died during fighting between soldiers and militants. Two more died in southeastern Mardin, Anadolu said.



The village guard, killed in an attack in Mardin on Friday, was part of a group of local residents who cooperate with Turkish security forces against the PKK, listed as a terror group by Ankara and its Western allies.



Another six PKK positions were hit in the Mount Tendurek region between Agri and Van provinces in the country's east yesterday evening, Anadolu said.



The Turkish military said more than 100 PKK fighters were "neutralised" during clashes in Cukurca with its security forces yesterday, without explaining how many were killed and how many were injured.



Meanwhile Turkish warplanes destroyed Islamic State (IS) group targets in northern Syria on Saturday, hours after Ankara sent more tanks from the southern Kilis province to support Syrian rebels.



A two-year ceasefire between Ankara and the PKK collapsed last year, after which Kurdish rebels launched frequent attacks on security forces in the country's southeast.



Prime Minister Binali Yildirim vowed that billions of lira would be invested in centres "damaged by PKK terror" during a televised speech in Diyarbakir today.



He promised 1.9 billion lira (643 million dollars) would be invested in the historic Sur district of Diyarbakir, which has been ravaged by renewed violence.



Another seven "terror-damaged" areas would receive 10 billion lira and Yildirim promised thousands of new homes would be built in the southeast.



More than 600 Turkish security force members have been killed since July 2015 while more than 7,000 militants have been killed in Turkey and northern Iraq, Anadolu said.



It is not possible to independently verify the toll.Activists claim innocent civilians have also been killed in the offensives.



More than 40,000 people have been killed since the PKK first took up arms in 1984. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday that NATO countries needed a common approach to all terrorist acts and organisations after talks with US President Barack Obama on the sidelines of the G20 summit in China's Hangzhou.



"There is no good terrorist or bad terrorist. All types of terrorism are bad. We must stand against them."
During one of my visits with Jens Soering in prison, I asked him what seemed to be a perfectly reasonable question.

Even if youre right, and youre innocent, have you thought about just saying that you did it? It was a long time ago, and youre a different person now. Maybe the fact that you would be deported to Germany might convince them to let you go. You could go back to where most people have never heard of this case and start a new life.

He looked at me seriously and said: I cant do that. Im not guilty.

OK, then. The problem is, parole boards like to hear petitioners express remorse. And since they tend to assume that the person before them has been rightfully sentenced, a disclaimer like Soerings tells them the prisoner is either (a) delusional or (b) incorrigibile.

So what might Soering be thinking? Perhaps it gives him hope that new information keeps popping up in this, the Murder Case That Would Not Die. Earlier this year, for instance, a lab in Germany made an interesting discovery when it followed up on blood samples from the 1985 crime scene. According to a Washington Post article:

The blood tests are decades old: a 1985 blood typing test and a 2009 DNA test. Soerings attorney Steven D. Rosenfield said what is new is a belated comparison of the two tests. No one compared the 1985 blood type report with the DNA report until July, when Rosenfield began preparing to file a petition with McAuliffe on other grounds, including unrelated revelations in a forthcoming German documentary, The Promise, about Soerings case.

The only way the commonwealth can now argue for Jens guilt is to assert that he committed the crime with an unknown accomplice, who was injured and left Type O blood at the scene, Rosenfield said. The accomplice cannot be Ms. Haysom, who has Type B blood. Until now, there has been no suggestion by the commonwealth that there was a third murderer involved. The commonwealths position has always been that Jens acted alone, committed this crime and left his Type O blood at the crime scene.

This was followed by an admission by Chuck Reid, one of the Bedford County sheriffs deputies who investigated the case, that he always had some doubts about it. For one thing, Reid said he doesnt understand how Soering  who barely knew the Haysoms  could have roused himself to the kind of fury reflected by the multiple stab wounds.

Soering initially confessed to the crimes when he and his girlfriend, Elizabeth Haysom, were arrested in London. Later, however, he recanted, saying he only confessed to protect her, and that she and an unknown accomplice hacked and stabbed her parents to death in their Boonsboro area home.

Even three decades later, a number of questions still hover over Central Virginias Crime of the Century. There were, of course, no witnesses. The murder weapon was never found. Letters discovered between Jens and Elizabeth seem to have dark implications, but never contain a direct admission.

It is this irresistible opportunity to play amateur detective that perhaps accounts for the cases lasting fascination.

For example: Since it has been shown that DNA tests can be conducted even on long-buried corpses, why couldnt it be conclusively proven whether or not the other Type O sample matches Soering?

If so, it only proves that he committed the crime along with someone else, which hardly gets him off the hook. If not, he might very well be innocent of the actual murder.

(Of course, Soering was seen wearing a bandage over his hand shortly after the crimes were committed, something he maintained was a coincidence).

Also, do investigators know whether the other Type O sample might have belonged to Derek Haysom? Given the grisly nature of the killings and the amount of blood shed and scattered, that doesnt seem beyond the realm of possibility.

Am I missing something here?

But Soerings contention that Elizabeth killed her parents and then told him after the fact makes no sense, either. If he thought she only intended to talk to her parents about their opposition to the couples relationship, why go through all the trouble of establishing an alibi in Washington? Why not just leave from Charlottesville, where they were students at the University of Virginia, thus avoiding all the extra (and ultimately unexplainable) miles on their rental car?

And about that rental car  why was not even a trace of blood found inside it, despite the ferocity and messiness of the murders? A possible alternative explanation surfaced in March of 2011 when a Lynchburg mechanic named Tony Buchanan suddenly revealed that Elizabeth Haysom and an unknown man (not Jens) brought in a car to be cleaned that had bloodstains on the upholstery and a bloody knife on the floor. But that fizzled quickly.

I dont know what his deal is, said Bedford investigator Ricky Gardner  who, unlike his cohort Reid, has never been in doubt about the trial verdict  but hes lying.

Indeed, it seemed far-fetched that someone as intelligent as Elizabeth Haysom would have taken that kind of risk  or, given all the publicity about the murder, that Buchanan wouldnt have immediately gone to the police. Why wait all those years to come forward? What changed?

Plus, if another vehicle was used, why all the extra miles on the rental?

At the very least, its hard to avoid the fact that Soering is at least an accessory after the fact. Of course, thats quite different from capital murder.

Maybe at some point, given the advancement of crime scene technology, a little more information will come out that will settle Jens Soerings actual role once and for all. And perhaps well all stop talking about it.

For now, it appears, hes willing to keep pushing for recourse from whomever happens to be governor of Virginia. And watch the time go by.

Laurant is the retired local columnist for The News & Advance and author of several books, including the recently released Inspiration Street: Two City Blocks That Helped Change America, which chronicles the history of Pierce Street in Lynchburg. His 1992 book, Even Here: A Small Virginia Community, A Violent Decade, follows several high-profile murders in 1980s Bedford County, including the Haysom killings.
Dingolay around the world

This time around, the young adventurer targeted destinations in Europe and Africa but has travelled extensively throughout Asia in the past. Clarke has now been to a total of 45 countries within the past ten years.

On this particular trip, though, Clarke had a special intention in mind: he wanted to accomplish the majority of his mission before his 30th birthday last September.

Why? By 30, society pressures you to have your life in order or at least be on the right path, he said in a Sunday Newsday interview.

If you try something crazy or make a mistake in your twenties it is more easily forgiven. Make the same mistake in your thirties and many times it is viewed less favourably.

I knew I wanted to try living outside the confines of the proverbial rat race and with my twenties coming to an end, it felt like now was the least risky time.

I am still young and I knew that even if I had failed miserably and had to return home prematurely, I would be a better me for trying. Clarke, who began travelling five years ago, has accomplished a feat most people only dream about: its not every day that an average person can just uproot - leaving behind their loved ones and a secure job - to travel the world.

But, for this Kelly Village, Caroni native, who took a complete year off from work as a merchandiser, accumulating the money for the journey was the easy part.

I had just gotten my pension refund from a short stint working abroad. I should have probably put it in a savings account but felt like at no point in my life again would I have both the time and money to do this trip, so it was either now or never, he said.

The way I look at it, you can recoup money that youve spent, but you cant recapture the time youve lost. Deciding on where he should go first also was not a problem.

Backed by his mantra, Follow The Sale, Clarke found a relatively cheap airline ticket to Tanzania, the first stop on his year-long journey.

Cape Town, South Africa, though, proved to be his most enjoyable visit.

It can appeal to even the most discerning of travellers, Clarke said of Cape Town.

It has great weather, a beautiful scenery with table top mountain, history with Robben Island (prison in which late South African president and freedom fighter Nelson Mandela was incarcerated), beaches, night-life, vineyards, safaris, surfing, great white shark cave diving and so much more.

There is something for every traveller in Cape Town. The young man said although apartheid was abolished in South Africa some 25 years ago, the country still had its struggles with the racists system.

But there is visceral hope, Clarke said, adding that Poland also was an eye-opener.

This was primarily because of Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

Its kind of chilling the magnitude at which the Holocaust (the Nazis killing of millions of Jews throughout Europe during the early 1940s) destroyed lives. Clarke said Budapest, Hungary, also ranked among his favourite destinations, largely because of the stunning architecture of its historic buildings. Clarke said he also loved Germanys culture and the warmth of its citizens.

Germans were very straightforward and pragmatic, yet warm and hospitable. As a tribute to his travels, Clarke established Dingolay Adventures in May for anyone with a passion for the unknown.

We know how daunting it can be to shed your anxieties and embark on a solo adventure to countries like Cambodia or Kenya, so at Dingolay, we aim to alleviate such trepidations by organising educational small-group tours to exotic locales, he said.

But the company, he stressed, was not a superficial entity.

We want our expeditions to be more engaging than just selfies at an old church in Italy, or partying at the best nightclubs in Miami, Clarke said.

We strive to create a personalised travel experience for our customers. Whether it be camel riding in the Thar Desert of India or sharing a tea with a Masai Warrior in Tanzania, we guarantee a truly immersive cultural experience. He added: Our mission is to also provide a platform where like-minded adventurers can interact and share stories, photos and advice with each-other. We want to help travellers who dont have the time or know-how to plan an epic adventure, to take that first step in exploring a new culture. According to Clarke, potential travellers seeking his companys assistance are required to fulfil basic requirements: a proposed time for departure and budget.

Well prepare a detailed itinerary that is personalised to your taste. Or travel advisory service is more affordable than you think, he said. Clarke said the company also aimed to provide a platform from which like-minded adventurers can interact and share stories, photos and advice with one-another.

Dingolay Adventures, he said, hosts its first cultural tour in Mexico from October 29 to November 5. The tour will cover the Yucatan Peninsula and Dia de los Muertos, Mexicos biggest festival.

Growing up in what he called a quintessential middle-class household, Clarke migrated to the US as a teenager to study Environmental Engineering at Howard University. Living overseas, he said, whetted his appetite for adventure.

I always wanted to see more of the world and felt emboldened after reading a quote by Henry Ford which read, If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability. After internalising the quote, Clarke said he vowed to travel the world. Clarke also found that he was becoming very consumeristic. He told Sunday Newsday: I was making decent money and buying many shiny new toys but wasnt getting any more utility out of them. I remember buying myself a US$500 watch as a graduation present.

I was working to buy stuff and I felt trapped by my possessions.

I wanted something more. I figured I should try to find my niche in this world while I still could.

I wanted to live life on my own terms. Clarke received support from his mother, whom he said, shared his adventurous spirit.

She encourages me to see the world as much as possible before settling down. I probably got my adventure genes from her, he joked. My Dad is a little more apprehensive about me travelling the world. Hes significantly more risk averse. Clarke said many of his friends had no idea about what he was doing until they saw the photos posted on social media.

I think some of them wish they had to fortitude to do the same, he said with a laugh. Clarke said navigating between destinations was remarkably easy. I feel as if humans are meant to be on the move, he said. Transportation between countries with contiguous borders was never a problem. There is always a bus, train, or plane linking neighbouring countries. Noting that Malawi was perhaps the hardest country through which he had to travel, Clarke said comfort was his only concern.

Because I didnt really have a clearly defined plan per se, plane tickets were bought on the basis of cost.

For example, I flew from South Africa to Germany because Berlin was the cheapest city in Europe to fly into from Johannesburg. Clarke said although he has travelled extensively, he was never truly alone.

My favourite thing about travel is meeting new people, he said.

Sightseeing can be monotonous if Im by myself too much. Its the people that youre with that make travel enjoyable. Clarke said meeting new people also enabled him to keep costs down. He recalled that a French guy he met while travelling in Zambia hosted him at his apartment during his stay in Paris.

Asked what has been the most important lesson he has learnt during his travels, Clarke alluded to the complexities of man.

Im never surprised by the brutality of man, yet at the same time, I am never surprised by the humanity of man, he said.

Yes, there may be a few people hell-bent on destruction but they are vastly outnumbered by good people. The world is nowhere as dangerous as it is portrayed in the news. His message to those who desire to travel the world: Go for it! You have nothing to lose by going somewhere new or trying something different. It may seem daunting, but there will always people willing to help you if you are brave enough to ask..

The first step is the hardest but once you take it, you wouldnt believe how easy it is to find people who share the same outlook, Clarke said. Clarke said if given the opportunity, he will do it all over again. Ive never felt as free as when I was wandering the world, he said.
AzATT hosts Alzheimers Cafe Promotes love, acceptance of patients

The movement quickly spread all over Europe and in 2008 Dr.

Jyette Lokvig started the first Alzheimers Caf? in the US.

Her Santa Fe, NM caf? remained the only one in the northern hemisphere until a short notice in the AARP Bulletin in April of 2011 brought the concept to the attention of the greater elder care community.

Dr Lokvig advised many other communities in getting their own caf?s started, and as of July 2013 there were more than 85 Alzheimers and Memory caf?s in the US.

The Alzheimers Cafe and its cousins, the Memory Cafe, Dementia Cafe, Nostalgia Cafe, etc.

are all a little different from each other, but they tend to fall into one of the two general categories: The European model features presentations and information on Alzheimers issues combined with a social hour, and caregivers are offered consultation and support.

The American Model focuses on the person, and is a celebration and a respite from the disease. Participants explore art, music, poetry and socialisation and laugh a lot.

It is the aim of the Alzheimers Association of Trinidad and Tobago (AzATT) to host quarterly cafes, with the next event carded for September 10, at Bon Air High School in Arouca, from 9 am to 1 pm, in commemoration of World Alzheimers Month.

Ann Smith, vice president of AzATT says: We plan a morning of fun activities, music and light refreshments. The cost is just $25 and we are asking guests to please bring coins, lots of coins to support our Coins For Caring Fundraiser.

Please call 292-4387 for bookings with the Arima Support Group.

We will also guide participants through the process of opening a cafe, the keystones of which are Love and Acceptance.

Donations to help us fund future Alzheimer cafes would be greatly appreciated  either cash, refreshments or use of premises.

AzATT can be contacted through 225-8764 or 632-4791. Smith says the running of these cafes are meant to be low cost to the persons attending.

In order to keep our costs down, we need to look for low cost venues, or ideally, at no cost.

Of course, these must be easily accessible for elderly, less mobile persons. Remember also that the more of these services we provide and the oftener we host them, there will be a need for helpers.

Volunteers are being asked to offer their services. Smith is an active caregiver of a family member with Alzheimers.

The philosophy behind Alzheimer cafes is great and helps to reduce the stigma associated with Alzheimers and other forms of dementia. Dont keep your loved one hidden away or excluded just because they have dementia.

Dementia is only a part of their life; a mask with a person behind that mask - a person who should not be left behind but should still be allowed to express themselves, to socialise and interact with family and friends while meeting new people - a person who still deserves to have fun. She said many times family and friends stop communicating and socialising with their loved ones with Alzhiemers because they simply dont know how to, or because of the stigma associated with the disease.

They do not wish to be seen in public with them. We have successfully held an Alzheimer Caf? in 2015 and 2016 and found that there is a demand for them so we plan to have them more often.

Feedback from those attending has been very encouraging.
BOY DROWNS IN BELMONT DRAIN

According to police, Josiah and his seven-year-old sister, Christine Gray, were home alone after their father, Jerome Henry, left for work around 7.30 am on Friday. Around 12.25 pm, Henry received a call that Josiah fell into a drain during heavy rainfall and was washed away into the East Dry River.

Police, Fire Service, and Coast Guard were called and they, along with neighbours and relatives, conducted a search of the area.

Unfortunately, around 10 am yesterday, the Coast Guard and police received a call that a body was sighted in the Gulf of Paria close to the hotel. The Coast Guard sent an interceptor to retrieve the body which was then handed over to the waiting police and the District Medical Officer.

When Sunday Newsday visited the Serraneau Road home yesterday, Henry was not at home. The small, one-storey house was situated in a yard with another house which overlooks his home. However neighbours noted the children had only recently moved there to live with their father who was separated from their mother.

One neighbour, who was at home at the time of the incident, said children of the area were playing in the rain while Josiah and Gray were inside. However, when the rain slowed to a drizzle, the siblings joined the others outside and jumped into the drain to play in the water.

She said around noon, her son ran into the house to tell her that Jojo had jumped into the water.

She and her niece ran out the house and down the road, scanning the drain to see if they could find Josiah to no avail.

They returned to the house, called the police and rushed back out to continue looking for the boy. The water was really coming down. The children in the area know not to go in the drain when the water is like that. They wont even go close to the edge, but Josiah wasnt from around here, she said.

Another neighbour, who described Josiah as a jovial, playful, bright-eyed little boy, said she was on her way home in a taxi when she heard the news. She immediately jumped out the taxi and kept a close eye on the drains as she walked home. When she arrived, she said she saw almost the whole neighbourhood, including Henry, in the drains, checking the tunnels and searching desperately for the boy.

At that point she said they got a call that a body was found near Sea Lots. On their way, they noticed people checking the drains almost every step of the way.

Ive never seen anything like that. Down by the Harp, almost every step of the way, we saw people in the canal, looking underneath the bridges, in the little tunnels.

And then it looked like the whole of Sea Lots was out searching the banks or out in boats prodding the bottom with poles. It was something else, she said.

The police added that when Henry was taken to the Belmont Police Station on Friday to give a statement, he collapsed and had to be taken to the Port-of-Spain General Hospital for treatment. However he was released from hospital yesterday and was being questioned by police and remained at the station up to last evening.

Josiahs aunt Joanne Henry yesterday told Sunday Newsday that the childrens mother, Jamie Gray, will take care of Christine.

It is just so sad that he had to die this way. He was so young and innocent. But God knows best, Joanne said in a soft voice.

As investigations continue into Josiahs drowning, police in Tobago are also investigating the circumstances surrounding the drowning death of 16-month-old Loren Daniel.

Loren, reports stated, was left asleep in a bed while her mother, Shirla Kerr, carried out duties at the a villa at Tobago Plantation property where she worked as a cleaner.

The child went missing and when checks were made her body was found in the pool at the back of the property.

The drowning deaths of the two children have not gone unnoticed as Chief Fire Officer Roosevelt Bruce yesterday issued advice to parents asking them to exercise extreme caution with their children around open water sources.

He said, We have a situation in Tobago where a 16-month-old girl drowned in a pool. Parents must be extremely careful with their children around open water sources and more where there are floods and rivers. It is very easy (for them) to be taken away with the motion, the momentum of the water.

Keep your children away. If you have heavy rainfall and you know that the area is prone to flood, keep the children inside.. 17
King Austin dies at 73

His only son Marvin Lewis, who also sings calypso as Mr King, told Sunday Newsday yesterday that his father had been ailing with Alzheimers disease for the past five years and had to be placed in a home some three months ago.

Marvin added that he, together with King Austins only friend Rawle Thompson and promoters, the Virgo Girls, were in the process of producing a show called A Tribute To King Austin, scheduled to be held at SWWTU Hall in Portof- Spain on September 17 to commemorate the 17th anniversary of the Virgo Girls of which he was very much a part. He sang on the show every year up until a few years ago.

Asked if the show will now be cancelled young Marvin said no as the show must go on in his fathers honour.

The distraught Marvin also stated it was only two months ago that Kings Austins mother Louisa Bull died at age 104, the oldest person living in Laventille at the time of her passing.

King Austin was well-known for his classic calypso and, perhaps one of the best of all time, Progress, released in 1980.

He placed second in the National Calypso Monarch that year with the song, a Winsford Joker Devine composition.

The song, criticising progress from an environmental point of view, questioning sustainability, as well as addressing exploitation and inequality, appealed to the public at large on a very big scale, hence its popularity.

King Austin, who was modest, soft spoken and unassuming, also produced a number of other classics including Who are to Guard the Guards and The World Today is a Ball of Confusion.

He began his career in calypso in 1976, singing with the CDC (Carnival Development Committee) Calypso Tent for one year then went across to the Regal Calypso Tent (RCT) run by the Mighty Chalkdust (Dr Hollis Liverpool), deceased Mighty Duke (Kelvin Pope) and Lord Superior (Andrew Marcano).

The next year, he moved to another tent before going to the Sparrows Young Brigade Calypso Tent, then run by Calypso King of the World, Slinger Mighty Sparrow Francisco.

On King Austins passing, Chalkdust told Sunday Newsday, When he started singing he was an instant hit because of his voice. He had a charming sweet little voice. It was Lord Blakie (Carlton Joseph) who discovered him. Chalkdust said of King Austins personality, As a human being he was very humble. He was always by himself in the tent and never gave any trouble. He was very personable.

We are going to miss him because he was proud to be Trinidadian and proud to be from Laventille. Commenting too on King Austins death was Superior, who said to Sunday Newsday, When he started with me in the RCT, I was very impressed with him as a renderer.

He recorded one of the greatest calypsos ever (Progress). It will have a very long shelf life. He will be missed as a great performer. God bless his soul. Chairman of Trinbago Unified Calypsonians Organisation (TUCO) South Central Zone, Steve Ras Kommanda Pascall, lamented the death of King Austin is another reminder of the need to preserve the work of calypso legends and ensure younger calypsonians carry on the tradition. Calypso as an artform is within an aging population and we have to continue asking the younger ones to maintain this art form or else eventfully it will just die out, Pascall observed, also hailing King Austins signature song, Progress.

Legends are humans and so just as we come we have to leave. He was a brother who had us mesmerized with a song - Progress- and many others over the years. We are losing a lot of our icons, Pascall said.

Pascall reminisced that King Austin was a cool and casual sort of artiste who delivered his songs in a nice and charming way, but observed the calypso bard was not a dancer.

He was a dresser, a saga boy.

One thing I remember is years ago, when he was singing Progress his hat fell off on stage. While singing he just pick it up, put it on and that was something to see. People talked about that a lot. Some say he lost points for the hat coming off his head but others say he should have gotten more points for the way he put it back on. On behalf of TUCO, especially the South Central zone, Pascall extended his deepest condolences to Lewis friends and family.

May he rest in eternal peace. He was a good one, a very cool gentleman.

He visited me some years ago with Franz Delamo Lamkin and we had a great Sunday evening. I could never forget that. King Austin was a jovial man and will surely be missed.
Dad, 91, son, 65 die in fire

Their deaths increases the number of senior citizens who have perished in fires to four, over the last 30 days.

Lucky to escape from the inferno were Shiva Swaratsingh, his wife, Melly, son Sanjeev, 15, and daughter, Samara, who is 12-years-old.

Speaking to Sunday Newsday, yesterday, Swaratsingh said he was alerted that something was wrong at their 23 Thavenot Street home when he heard noises coming from upstairs which Samuel, his grandfather, and Kenneth, his uncle, occupied.

I had gone to bed at about 11.30 pm when I heard the noise.

I thought it was bandits because they robbed me of my car three weeks ago. I heard my uncles voice and sounds coming from the ceiling which was part concrete, part wood.

I went outside and walked to the side and looked to the back of the house where his room was situated, and that was when I saw there was fire coming out from upstairs. We dont know what caused the fire because they did not use candles or lamps, and there were no electrical problems, Swaratsingh said.

Swaratsingh said his children were traumatised by the incident as they heard their relatives screaming as the fire engulfed them. The wooden floor collapsed on to the ground floor and Swaratsingh said he feared that little or none of their belongings could be salvaged.

What Swaratsingh was questioning was the response by the Fire Services.

I cant exactly recall how long the response from the Fire Services took. They came here I believe in a reasonable time, but the water in the tender lasted about five minutes. I heard people saying that the tender was not full.

When they (fire officers) were going upstairs they were told not to go up although there were two people trapped upstairs. They did not have equipment, they were using a broom to break windows, they did not even know where the fire hydrant was located, he said Swaratsingh said he did not want to sound harsh or criticise the Fire Services, but felt better could be done.

My grandfather and uncle have already gone, but if these things can be fixed, it would be a good thing, he said.

Swaratsingh estimated the familys loss at about $1.2 million.

Now homeless, he said his wife and children would move in with his in-laws in Sangre Grande, while he would be staying with his father until other arrangements could be made. Sunday Newsday was advised that fire appliances from Tunapuna and San Juan fire stations responded to the emergency but it was too late as Samuel and Kenneth were found dead and may have died smoke inhalation. Officers from the Arouca and Tunapuna police stations also went to the scene. Autopsies are expected to be conducted tomorrow at the Forensic Science Centre, St James.

Chief Fire Officer: Make homes fire proof too Chief Fire Officer Roosevelt Bruce, in extending his condolences to the bereaved relatives yesterday, appealed to families to ensure that together they regularly practise fire escape routines to avoid such tragedies.

Families must practise a fire escape routine, Bruce told Sunday Newsday as he called on citizens to put a plan in place in all homes in case fire breaks out.

Rehearse it on a regular basis. Bruce also warned against installing burglar-proofing in homes without any escape routes through the same spaces they have barred up.

Also when installing burglar proofing, you should always ensure that at least one window per room is hinged and the keys kept close by.

You should practise using that burglar-proof to get out, so that if that if a fire occurs, it will not be the first time you are trying it. Bruce said in most cases that is not being done in homes and often upon inspection investigators realised that there are no hinges on burglar-proofing.

It was only on Independence Day, last Wednesday, that pensioner Jaglal Rampersad, 73, burnt to death inside his room on the ground floor apartment of his home at St Croix Road, Princes Town.

Rampersads charred remains were found during dampening operations carried out by fire-fighters of the Princes Town Fire Station who received assistance from Mon Repos Fire Headquarters, San Fernando.

A police report stated that at about 2 am on Wednesday, neighbours reported hearing loud explosions and saw Rampersads son Alexander Baksh and Bakshs common-law wife, Chantal Huggins, jumping through the window from the top floor.

An alarm was raised but by the time the fire appliances arrived, the entire ground floor was engulfed in flames.

They were informed that Rampersad never made it out.

And on August 3, Jean McLeod, a stroke victim who for the past 14 years had been laid up in bed, perished in the fire at her home in Sixth Company, New Grant.

The efforts of her husband Alfred Mc- Leod, 82, to save her were all in vain and he too suffered severe burns about the body and was warded at hospital.

Neighbours had to pull Alfred out the house through a window to save his life. The familys four-bedroom home and thousands of dollars worth in compressors, other pieces of heavy equipment along with two cars that were stored in a painting/ straightening garage in front their home were also destroyed.

A total of $60,000 hidden under a mattress to purchase more equipment also went up in flames.
Lalla: Picking CoP convoluted

Lalla said, however, that in order for this to take place, the Constitution would need to be amended to allow the Commission to be completely independent of the political directorate .

He was responding to claims by Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley that there may have been deliberate efforts to frustrate the appointment of a Police Commissioner within recent years .

Following talks with Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar on crime, last Friday at the Office of the Prime Minister, in St Clair, Rowley also said he learnt that the Public Service had taken the position that an important part of the process to select a Police Commissioner must be done by the Central Tenders Board. The Prime Minister wondered if the situation constituted a conflict of interest .

Stephen Williams, who served five stints as Acting Police Commissioner without confirmation, proceeded on 25 months vacation leave in March. Deputy Police Commissioner Harold Phillip is currently serving in an acting capacity, pending the appointment of a new, full-time Commissioner, under new legislation .

Lalla yesterday described as complexed and convoluted, the current exercise to appoint a Police Commissioner. Imagine, after 54 years of independence, we have not been able to appoint a substantive Police Commissioner when there has been a vacancy for six years, he told Sunday Newsday .

Lalla recalled that toward the end of the tenure as PSC chairman, late prime minister Patrick Manning had requested that the commission terminate the services of former police commissioner Jules Bernard, who died in March 2007 .

We had no objection but we needed facts and circumstances to justify the termination of the appointment, which, when supplied, were inadequate. So, we did not terminate the appointment, he said. Lalla recalled that the then administration subsequently brought three bills to the Parliament, one of which got the requisite support from the opposition and was passed .

The legislation, he said, replaced the former commission with what currently exists .

This PSC vests power into the hands of the political directorate in deciding who should be CoP or not and as a result, the current controversy exists, he said .

The first commission was totally independent of the political directorate and was also equivalent to the then Public Service Commission. Lalla recalled that if a police commissioner, during his years as PSC chairman, was found to be incompetent, all the Government had to do was supply particulars to justify his removal .

The commission would do precisely that bearing in mind the rules of natural justice entitled a commissioner to go to the courts to challenge his removal by the commission, he said .

Rowley had said in April, 2015, ahead of the general election, that one of the PNMs priorities if elected, would be to revamp the process by which a police commissioner was appointed .

Rowley had said, then, that the time had come for robust measures to tackle the scourge, firstly by abolishing the existing, cumbersome procedure for appointing police commissioners.
Chaguanas tackles Boroughs youth

I live close to Enterprise and, to me, it is a community in which I have a lot of friends relatives, and acquaintances. Its a nice community.

Its just that, in recent times, we have had a problem with crime, he told Sunday Newsday in a recent interview.

In 2011, Enterprise was labelled a crime hot spot with criminal activities ranging from robberies to murder.

The most recent incident was the shooting death of Selwyn Robocop Alexis at his car wash business on Freedom Street, Enterprise, at about 4.30 pm on July 17.

Boodhan reiterated that he has called for a joint police/army post set up in the community so that there could be a security presence in the area, not only for the peace of mind of visitors and immediate residents, but to provide a faster response time for the general Chaguanas community.

However, this does not mean that the borough is being left unsupervised. In addition to regular police patrols, Boodhan noted there were close to 100 operational surveillance cameras throughout the borough and its outskirts and expects 200 more to be go online in due time.

At the regional corporation office, a branch of the National Operations Centre has been set up in order to monitor the cameras on the streets of central Trinidad.

The Chaguanas Borough Corporation continues to work with all stakeholders and agencies, including the police and religious organisations.

We continue to do as much as we can to make Chaguanas safe and secure.

This is one of our mandates, he said.

One way in which the corporation is taking proactive steps is by helping to engage, guide and encourage the youth of the area.

Boodhan noted that, annually in Chaguanas, primary school students place in the top 200 in the country in the Secondary Entrance Assessment (SE A) exam, and secondary school students win national scholarships.

These successes, as well as those in the field of sports, arts and culture, are celebrated by the corporation.

A new initiative called Chaguanas Through the Eyes of Our Youth has also been launched through the schools.

Students are ask to paint what they want Chaguanas to look like in the next five years and their work will be showcased on the walls of public spaces, including the Boroughs 36 recreation grounds.

This, said Boodhan, would encourage self-confidence, as well as pride in each community.

The corporation is working with the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service in the establishment of a few more Police Youth Clubs.

The Police Service, along with corporate citizens, is also assisting with the construction of a building to house the Cunupia Police Youth Club, to which other clubs would have access.

He added councillors would recommend youths in their communities who need skills training to the Civilian Conservation Corps, which has been invaluable in instilling a level of discipline in youths, while giving the youths a basis for a financial future.

In addition, Boodhan said the corporation is in the process of reactivating Cubs, Scouts, Girls Guides, Cadets and similar childrens establishments in 14 schools in the area.

This civic responsibility project is the part that we are playing as a regional corporation, for the youths to respect law and order, so they will have some level of training and not go astray when they get older.

My goal is to make sure all primary and secondary schools have these programmes, he said.
It appears that there will be a new place to eat just off McHugh Drive, 625 Barney St., called Ranch House Restaurant. This is the same area that is getting a new pizza restaurant. With 216 apartments filling up at the new Remington Apartments, this will be a great location for new dining options.

Queen City Framing and Art Supplies, owned by Deb Parsons Martha Johnson, is about to open at the east end of the former Ben Franklin location in the Lundy Center. They will offer expert framing, ready-made frames and art supplies. Watch for their grand opening on Labor Day Monday. Martha has many years of experience as a framer and was the manager of the framing department for Ben Franklin. Deb also has many years managing their art department. They will feature old favorites and some new products -- check them out.

We have a new business to keep your motorboat or other watercraft in tip-top running condition. About a quarter mile before you get to East Helena on Highway 12 is Motorboatin. Patrick McCorkle is the owner and a qualified marine technician. Not only can they fix any issues you might have -- they can winterize your boat this fall before you put it in storage for the winter. Give him a call at 459-9518.

Impressive work at Capital High

I was invited to attend an event at Capital High School this past week that left a lasting impression and admiration for a teacher and a program that is making a difference.

They are producing high school graduates that have not only gained work skills but also acquire college credits that enable them to get a jump start on their two-year associates degree from any Montana two-year college. Instructor Jim Weber says they are making a difference one student at a time. Even if college is not in their future, these students can also start a meaningful and good-paying careers in metal work/manufacturing right out of high school. Weber requests that students registered for his welding and manufacturing classes along with their parents, attend a mandatory first day of school barbecue and meeting.

At that meeting, he not only outlined expectations for the classes, he asked for the parental support necessary to help the student be successful. He brought in speakers from manufacturing businesses in Montana such as Spika Design & Mfg. from Lewistown, Boeing Helena, Montana Iron Workers, Montana Manufacturing Extension  MSU, Twenty-6 Products  Bozeman, Helena College and more.

Weber has incorporated a work-ethics curriculum into his classes that help the students become better workers, better citizens and even better family members. These business owners and CEOs impressed upon those attending the importance of work ethic to their businesses and opportunities they might have for the students after graduation.

With local businesses in the throes of very low unemployment rates -- causing a high number of job openings that are difficult to fill -- it would seem that programs such as Webers should be part of every curriculum in all high schools. Schooling at all levels (including high school) is truly a preparation for students to be good workers and provide for themselves and their families. What an amazing opportunity for them to have much of the work skills needed upon high school graduation. This program is a plus for the students, for the businesses and for the community.

Cathy Burwell is the president/CEO of the Helena Area Chamber of Commerce.
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BILLINGS -- The operator of the Two Rivers Detention facility in Hardin has left town after failing to negotiate a new contract with its main vendor for nine months.

Emerald Correctional Management, which operated the prison, left the facility earlier this year, according to CEO Steve Afeman. The company was working to renegotiate a contract with the Bureau of Indian Affairs to provide inmates.

The prison draws its revenue from contracts that bring inmates to the facility.

On Oct. 31, 2015, the Bureau of Indian Affairs dropped its contract with the prison and pulled the prisoners. There were as many as 250 prisoners at the facility under the contract.

There were no prisoners at the facility by January, and Emerald suspended its operations in late April.

Warden Ken Keller said in April that they were still hoping to negotiate a new contract with the BIA, but the company pulled out soon after that. Afeman said that Keller, the last employee at the prison, left to work at another facility in Texas.

The future of the facility is unclear.

"We'd have loved to stay," Afeman said. "But the BIA has decided that they want to run the facility themselves."

BIA spokeswoman Nedra Darling said in an email said that the agency is "looking at all of our options to ensure we are providing safe and secure correctional services."

She added that it was not her understanding that there are serious talks about the BIA taking over operations.

Afeman said that if the BIA decides to operate the facility, the company would vie for a smaller role in providing programming services.

"We don't want to see this thing go dark," he said. "We spent a lot of money getting it back up."

The Two Rivers facility was opened in 2007. The Two Rivers Authority, an economic development unit of Hardin, issued $27 million in bonds to build it.

The prison sat empty for seven years before Emerald took over. Without revenue, the facility sunk into deep debt. As of June 2015, the bondholders owed $12.4 million in unpaid interest on top of the $27 million bond value, according to an audit of city finances.

The bonds have been in default since 2008.

Under Emerald, the prison generated some revenue from 2014 to 2015. That money was directed to Emerald, according to a city finance audit. The prison still didn't make enough money to pay on its debt.

The bondholders for this project are private, and the agreement stipulates that the city of Hardin has no obligation to the debt. The Two Rivers Authority owns the building.

Jeff McDowell, executive director of the Two Rivers Authority, did not respond to requests for comment.
(Newser)  Just a month after starting at a Silicon Valley startup, a marketing professional from Dallas has taken to Medium to accuse her already former employer of fraud and moreand the startup is suddenly scrubbing its online presence clean. Penny Kim detailed her life since a July 2016 job offerwhich included promises of a $135,000 salary, equity, and a $10,000 signing bonuswith an initially anonymous firm that readers quickly sorted out is WrkRiot. The details of Kim's "horrible nightmare" are so dismal that Business Insider is calling it "one of the ugliest start-up stories we've ever heard," though for his part WrkRiot founder Isaac Choi tells the New York Times that Kim is just a "disgruntled" former employee with an ax to grind. WrkRiot, which promised to help people find the perfect job, has since gone offline.

In the days since Kim published her expose, which she says she wrote "so that others may know major red flags to look out for when choosing to work for a startup," people like Daniel Tunkelang, a data scientist who advised WrkRiot as well as Pinterest and Etsy, have been publicly denouncing the startup. Meanwhile, the very resume of Choi, including where he went to business school, is being called into question. Among other things, Kim alleges that the company forged wire-transfer receipts from a bank to dupe employees into thinking the company had issued paychecks, when it actually hadn't. She also says the company had no clear vision and was repeatedly rejected by investors. Tech Crunch calls the firm "in meltdown mode" as the WrkRiot Twitter, Facebook, and business sites, as well as Choi's LinkedIn page, have all been wiped clean. (Tech startups are often nightmares.)
(Newser)  Paper? Pencils? Laptops? Robots? Teachers are increasingly relying on crowdfunding efforts to stock their classrooms with both the mundane and sometimes big-ticket items, reports the AP. Contributions to education campaigns have climbed on GoFundMe and DonorsChoose, from just more than $31.2 million in 2010 to nearly $140 million in 2015. Both sites are on pace to eclipse that in 2016. GoFundMe has collected $58 million in just the last 12 months, and DonorsChoose saw more than 50,000 campaigns live for the first time this back-to-school season. In her first year as an elementary school teacher, Shannon Raftery raised $340 through crowdfunding to supplement the money she took out of each paycheck to pay for classroom supplies. Now in Philadelphia, she's looking to raise $500 for her new kindergarten classroom at Roosevelt Elementary School.

She has a supportive principal, but says there is just not enough money in the notoriously cash-strapped Philadelphia district to equip her classroom. In her case, reality is a $200 budget allocated to cover 25 students in a school where at least 40% of students live in poverty. She has spent that even before the start of classes. "I'd rather spend my own money than have my kids go without something," she said. But even as Raftery pulls $100 to $150 from each paycheck, she knows it won't be enough. She has bought cleaning supplies, bulletin board paper, and peach and sky blue paint for her stark white walls. "I don't want a cold environment to ruin a kid's first impression of school," Raftery said. Donors can scroll through all education campaigns listed on the sites, resulting in millions of dollars' worth of supplies and equipment infused into both high-poverty schools and more affluent districts. "There still is that group of teachers that has amazing ideas even in the most well-funded districts, like the sixth-grade teacher wanting and currently campaigning for an underwater robot to restore fisheries," said Chris Pearsall, DonorsChoose spokesman. (Read more public schools stories.)
(Newser)  Turkish troops and allied Syrian rebels expelled ISIS from the last strip of territory it controlled along the Syrian-Turkish border on Sunday, effectively sealing the extremists' self-styled caliphate off from the outside world, Turkey's state-run news agency reported. Also on Sunday, Syrian pro-government forces backed by airstrikes launched a wide offensive in the northern city of Aleppo, capturing areas they lost last month and besieging rebel-held neighborhoods, state media and opposition activists said, per the AP. Turkey-backed Free Syrian Army rebels have cleared the area between the northern Syrian border towns of Azaz and Jarablus, the Anadolu news agency reported. It said the advance "has removed terror organization (ISIS)'s physical contact with the Turkish border in northern Syria." The FSA's advance shut down key supply lines used by ISIS to bring in foreign fighters, weapons, and ammunition.

Meanwhile, the recapture and return to siege of rebel-held parts of Aleppo dealt a major blow to insurgent groups. They have lost scores of fighters in recent weeks in the battle to open a corridor into the city and lift the government's blockade. After the government laid siege on Aleppo in July, the United Nations said that nearly 300,000 residents were trapped in rebel-held neighborhoods, making it the largest besieged area in war-torn Syria. State TV quoted an unnamed military official as saying that troops are now in full control of the military academies south of Aleppo and are "chasing the remnant of terrorists." It added that all roads linking rebel-held eastern Aleppo with opposition areas outside the city "have been cut." Turkey has launched two incursions into Syria since Aug. 24 in an operation designed to drive ISIS away from the border and prevent the advance of US-backed Kurdish forces, which are also battling the extremist group. (Read more ISIS stories.)
(Newser)  The music manager who played a large and controversial role in the rise of gangsta rap is dead at age 75. Jerry Heller, who helped launch N.W.A. with rapper Eazy-E in the mid-'80s, suffered a heart attack while driving and died at a hospital in Thousand Oaks, California, his cousin tells AP. Heller co-founded Ruthless Records with Eazy-E, and the label's Straight Outta Compton by N.W.A.in 1988 has since become a classic. Heller, however, eventually parted on bad terms with the label and high-profile performers such as Ice Cube and Dr. Dre, all of which of was retold in the recent Straight Outta Compton movie. Heller hated how he was portrayed so much that he sued. (He comes off as a greedy villain who takes advantage of the label's stars.) In fact, his lawyer blames the film for his death.

"Jerry Heller would be alive today if not for that movie," Mickey Shapiro tells TMZ. He says his client had been stressed, "heartbroken," and unable to sleep well because of the movie. Before his collaboration with Eazy-E, Heller worked with acts such as Creedence Clearwater Revival, Black Sabbath, Marvin Gaye, and the Who, notes Rolling Stone. But it was his work in rap that has largely defined him. "As far as I'm concerned, there would never be a Dr. Dre or an Ice Cube if it wasn't for Jerry getting (N.W.A) their first deal, which was really difficult," says cousin Gary Ballen. "Nobody wanted to sign them." (Read more obituary stories.)
(Newser)  Facebook isn't the only company smarting after last week's explosion of a SpaceX rocket on the launchpad. The Israeli company that owned the satellite destroyed in the fire may seek either $50 million or a free flight as compensation, reports Reuters. The loss of the AMOS-6 satellite is a huge blow to Israel Space Communication: It reduces the company's equity by $30 million to $123 million and may jeopardize a planned merger with a Beijing company. As for Facebook, it hoped to use the satellite to expand access to the internet in Africa, though the New Yorker reports those plans aren't dead yet. Facebook, for instance, has had success in experiments with autonomous aircraft that could accomplish the same feat. There's still no word on what caused the explosion. (Read more SpaceX stories.)
Microsoft, is a tech giant famous for its well known operating system around the world. The windows 10 anniversary update released on start of August was experienced with bugs which disabled the webcams of the computers and login freeze problem. Microsoft had promised the consumers that the company will release its update to fix the bugs and the update was released on August 31, 2016 as per PC Mag.

Windows 10 anniversary update was released on August 2, 2016 with different new features and improvements for the consumers and enterprises such as Windows Ink, Cortana enhancements, a "more power-efficient" Edge browser, security upgrades, new gaming experiences, and more.

According to CBC, the anniversary Windows 10 update was enabled to have new features for Corona digital assistant and support for hand written and hand drawn with a digital stylus. But, the update ended up with the disabled Webcams, but its worst offense was freezing when users logged in on devices that put their operating system on one logical drive and app data on another. .

Microsoft said in an official statement emailed to CBC News "We are aware of a situation where support of some apps that use compressed MJPG and H.264 streams for webcams has some incompatibilities with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. We are currently rolling out a fix that should go public shortly."

The update doesn't address all the bugs reported by users of windows 10 anniversary update, it does correct different problems which are also a big concern for the users as per Tech Crunch

According to Engadget, Even though login freeze issue was fixed by Microsoft, the webcams disabling is still to be taken care and yet to be delivered by Microsoft. For the users still experiencing login problems can follow the step-by-step instructions on Microsoft's tech forum.
Huawei, the ruler in Chinese smartphone market, targets to surpass Apple to become second-biggest smartphone maker in the world by 2018.

Huawei, whose position in the Chinese smartphone market is continuously being firm and hitting to the top spot in the list of biggest smartphone manufacturers in China surpassing its rival companies Apple, Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo. Huawei grabbing the top spot with Q2 shipment volumes of 19.1 million units of smartphones for the quarter ending June 30, with the increasing pace in the Chinese market from 15.6 percent to 17.2 percent as per the IDC report Tech Crunch.

The company, which already attained its top position in China and third in the world, is targeting to make itself second biggest smartphone maker in the world by increasing its shipments. The company has 8.9 percent market share in smartphone world currently.

According to WSJ, Richard Yu, The chief executive of the company's consumer business group, told The Wall Street Journal "This year and next will be critical for the success, we are working very hard," and he also stated that when company attains the second position, at that moment the company will predict whether it can grab the top spot or not.

Yu gave a brief on the shipments which the company aims and details shows that the company plans to ship 140 million devices by 2016 and expects growth next year.

According to Asia Nikkei, Richard Yu said "In China, Samsung has almost disappeared completely and Apple continues to decline... It's likely for Huawei to become number two in the world after 2016 and 2017, probably in 2018."

According to WSJ, Yu said "The competition in China is a concern to me, but not a big one," and he added "We have the latest technology, and this is what people want."

Regarding to Huawei in United States, Yu stated "I have to admit, that our management in the U.S was too weak in the past, so we changed it," and added "It will take time to build trust in the U.S."
Its no surprise to Montana art lovers that Montana is a national leader in arts participation.

But recent research by the National Endowment of the Arts now confirms it.

Montana is third in the nation for attending performing arts events and movies, said Montana Arts Council director Arlynn Arni Fishbaugh.

Montanans participated in attending performing arts, visual arts and movies at a rate of 80.6 percent, compared to the U.S. average of 66.2 percent.

Not only are Montana adults more likely to attend a play or music performance than the average U.S. adult, they are also more likely to be one of the performers onstage.

Montana adults rank in the top 10 states per capita for:

attendance of art exhibits (10th)

reading literature (5th)

performing or creating art (3rd)

attending a live arts performance or movie (3rd)

visiting a historic site (3rd)

The new research is the first deep look at state-by-state data on how U.S. adults engage in the arts, said Sunil Iyengar, NEA director of research and analysis.

And he admits he was surprised to find how high Montana and some other Western states ranked in arts participation and the amount of arts and cultural events they offered.

The study confirms what Fishbaugh has suspected all along -- many Montanans have a long history of loving the arts.

The whole arts movement in Montana started with community theaters back in the 40s and 50s, said Fishbaugh. In addition, symphonies have always been part of Montanas culture. And even in the 1800s communities had opera houses.

Montana currently has at least 559 arts organizations, according to the Montana Arts Council database (see info box).

Montanas theaters are particularly strong, Fishbaugh said, citing in particular the Montana Repertory Theatre, Missoula Childrens Theatre and Montana Shakespeare in the Parks and the sheer number of performances and the large audiences they reach across Montana.

She also credits the number of museums and art galleries in the state, in towns as small as Hardin and Red Lodge, and how they have broadened their reach to bring in new visitors.

Fishbaugh also credits the NEA and its funding of state arts councils like MAC for helping create an environment where the arts can thrive.

Theres a synergy that develops when you have a strong arts organization like the Archie Bray Foundation ... and it leads to arts organizations growing around it.

This attracts new artists to communities and boosts the economy.

One out of every 60 people in Montanas labor market is a working artist, said Fishbaugh, referring to a report by the Montana Department of Labor in recent years. The number of artists as a percentage of the Montana labor force has grown three times as fast as the rest of the Montana labor force, which has been the case for more than three consecutive decades.

There are an incredible number of people creating art in the state, she said, not only art, but good art.

One need look no further than Grandstreet Theatre, Helena Theatre Company, Helena Symphony and State Capital Band to see a wide array of local engineers, lawyers, social workers, Realtors and teachers performing on stage.

What it says to me is how rich Montana is in artistic talent, Fishbaugh said, and how much that adds to community vitality in our state and the important role that the arts play in making Montana the very best place on earth to live, learn, work and play.

This information (in the new NEA research) really reinforces for our political leaders the importance of the arts as part of our states infrastructure.

Artists have an economic impact in Montana -- close to one-quarter billion dollars a year, she said, referring to a Montana study done a decade ago.

What makes Montanans so interested in the arts?

Iyengar suspects that there might be a connection between high arts participation and living in a scenically beautiful place.

The aesthetics and beauty of the place may have something to do with people wanting to make or experience art, he said, noting that all the Northwestern states and Alaska have high arts participation rankings (see maps at rankings.https://www.arts.gov).

And Montanas and its neighboring states per capita arts participation rankings are higher than more metropolitan states that have strong arts reputations, such as New York and California.

That was an eye opener, Iyengar said. Its really exciting to think about what the implications of this (report) could be for art and cultural policy or for funding decisions. ... It suggests theres a real demand for these kinds of activities in these places.

Theres a lot of potential for economic growth that could be derived from engaging with the arts -- consuming art and creating art.

We know at the national level just how significant the arts are now as part of the overall economy as it relates to gross national product" ($698 billion in 2013 or 4.3 percent of Gross Domestic Product).

States like Montana could do more to engage more of their population in this creative economy, he said.

One likely factor in why adults participate in the arts appears to be exposure to the arts as children.

Adults who visited an art museum as a child were 4.8 times more likely to visit an art museum or gallery as an adult, said the NEA study.

There are also correlations with higher education levels and with the number of arts organizations per capita.

For this report, the NEA used data collected in the NEAs Annual Arts Basic Survey and the 2012 Survey of Public Participation, which are conducted in partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau. See www.arts.gov for more details.
Beijing:

A cautious India on Saturday said it has warded off pressure from the US and China to set this year as the deadline to ratify the Paris Agreement, even as the two countries ratified the climate deal ahead of the G20 summit in Beijing on Sunday.



India besides several other countries felt that they can not ratify the Paris Agreement due to various legal impediments, the Vice Chairman of NITI (National Institution for Transforming India) Aayog, Aravind Panagariya said.



UN Secretary General has earlier suggested that the Paris climate deal be ratified this year so that it could be implemented.



There is no deadline to my mind but we will make submissions of progress, said Panagariya, summing the feeling of India and many other countries in this regard.

Also read:

China, US jointly ratify Paris climate deal ahead of G20 meet



The joint statement to be released at the end of the G20 summit on September 5 will take into consideration the difficulties in this regard, he said.



My stand is we could not commit for 2016, Panagariya, Indias official representative at the G20 summit, said.



His comments came as China and US in a bid to put pressure on other countries ratified the deal today and handed over their countries instruments of joining the Paris Agreement separately to the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.



Chinese President Xi Jinping said that climate change concerns the well-being and future of humanity.



The Paris Agreement has charted the course for post-2020 global cooperation against climate change, and it indicates that a cooperative, win-win, equitable and fair climate governance mechanism is being shaped.



Depositing the documents together, China and the US have displayed their ambition and determination to jointly tackle a global challenge, Xi said.

Developed countries should honour their commitments and provide financial and technological support to developing countries and enhance their capability in climate actions, Xi added.



Panagariya said besides the climate change, the draft joint statement also refers to refugees, terrorism and anti-microbial resistance.



G20 members include Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States and the European Union.

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Varanasi:

Congress leader Sheila Dikshit on Saturday launched an attack on Arvind Kejriwal over his former cabinet colleague Sandeep Kumars alleged sex scandal and asked the Delhi Chief Minister to resign on moral ground.



The former Delhi chief minister accused Kejriwal of shaming the country after an objectionable CD emerged which showed Kumar in a compromising position with a woman.



She was in the city as part of partys campaign team under the Congress ongoing 27 Saal, UP Behaal slogan.

Also read:

Sacked AAP minister Sandeep Kumar held by Delhi police after woman lodges complaint in objectionable CD case



Dikshit also slammed the remarks of AAP leader Asuthosh, who, while seeking to defend Kumar, had written, Mahatma Gandhi, JawaharLal Nehru and Atal Bihari Vajpai too allegedly had relations with other women, which was on the basis of their mutual consent, though such issues in their personal life did not suffer their political career.

The partys chief ministerial nominee for Uttar Pradesh elections said the remarks are an insult to the father of our nation and asked the Union government to take punitive action against the AAP leader.



Dikshit, along with party state unit chief Raj Babbar and other leaders embarked on campaign march to Azamgarh and Ghazipur district.



Diskhit headed the Yatra to Azamgarh and Raj Babbar to Ghazipur district. They addressed gatherings there.On their way, the congress leaders paid floral tributes to the martyrs of 1942 movement at Shaheed Smarak here at Cholapur in Varanasi.



Asked to comment on Prime Minister Narendra Modis reference to Balochistan on his I-Day speech and his Vietnam visit, Dikshit replied in a lighter tone saying, As he is PM, so no comment.

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WASHINGTON -- Donald Trump has warned us about those Mexican rapists. Apparently the country also has body snatchers.

The Republican presidential nominee immigrated briefly to Mexico on Wednesday for a hastily arranged visit with the leader of the country he has made his No. 1 scapegoat. He spent all of an hour with President Enrique Pena Nieto -- but when the two men emerged, whoever was occupying Trump's body sounded nothing at all like the bombastic billionaire.

"In the United States, first-, second- and third-generation Mexicans are just beyond reproach -- spectacular, spectacular, hard-working people. I have such great respect for them and their strong values of family, faith and community," this Trump look-alike declared in Mexico City.

The impostor gushed about a "common interest in keeping our hemisphere safe, prosperous and free," and waxed poetic about "joint operations between our two countries." Trump said the countries should be "working beautifully together, and that, I am sure, will happen."

And the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Trump had called a "disaster" and promised to "rip up"? This Trump doppelganger spoke instead about "improving NAFTA" and making sure it's "updated." He pronounced Pena Nieto "a friend."

A reporter asked: Did they talk about his constant vow to get Mexico to pay for the border wall he wants to build?

"We didn't discuss that," warm-and-fuzzy Trump said.

What had they done with Trump?

Alas, within hours, he was back to his xenophobic self. The bickering began even before he cleared Mexican airspace, as Pena Nieto, contradicting Trump, said he had told Trump at the beginning of the meeting that Mexico would not pay for a wall.

But Trump, having completed his photo op with the Mexican president, discarded the "friend" he had apparently just used as a prop. Trump landed in Phoenix for what was supposed to be a detailed "policy address" on immigration but was a familiar, nativist rant. Preceded at the lectern by Joe Arpaio, the Arizona sheriff and anti-immigration hard-liner, Trump launched into a lament for the "countless Americans" who are "victims of violence" by illegal immigrants who are "dangerous, dangerous, dangerous criminals."

"We will build a great wall along the southern border!" he said to an enormous cheer.

"And Mexico will pay for the wall! One-hundred percent. They don't know it yet, but they're going to pay for the wall."

So much for working beautifully together.

This was the Trump we all knew, the Trump who questions the judicial independence of an American-born judge because of his Mexican heritage, who fights with Mexican American journalists, and who asserts that Mexico is "killing us."

Trump's trip to Mexico was something of a Hail Maria, as polls show Democratic rival Hillary Clinton with a yuuge advantage and Democrats with a better than even chance of taking back the Senate. And from Arizona and Florida on Tuesday came new signs that Trump's rebellion has fizzled.

In Arizona, Kelli Ward, a pro-Trump primary challenger, had been trying to oust Sen. John McCain, whose war heroism Trump famously belittled, with a "defeat the establishment" theme like Trump's. She lost by 13 points. In Florida, Carlos Beruff said that he "supports Donald Trump 100 percent," while his primary opponent, Sen. Marco Rubio, did not. Beruff lost by 54 points.

But Trump's attempt at appearing diplomatic was only a feint. If his core supporters were worried -- and if the rest of Americans were reassured -- that he was softening his hard-line position, they had to wait only until he spoke in Phoenix on Wednesday night.

In Mexico City, Trump endured without complaint a lecture from the Mexican president, who said that NAFTA has been good for "the U.S. as well as Mexico" and that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce thinks that more than 6 million American jobs rely on trade with Mexico. Pena Nieto said that immigration from Mexico to the United States peaked 10 years ago and is now at a net negative. "Mexican nationals in the United States are honest people, working people," he said. "Mexicans deserve everybody's respect."

Trump almost seemed to agree. "Illegal immigration is a problem for Mexico as well as for us," he said. "We will work together and we will get those problems solved."

But back on American soil, he returned to his familiar lines: "It's called America First! ... There will be no amnesty! ... You cannot obtain legal status or become a citizen of the United States by illegally entering our country."

The real Donald Trump was back. Alas.

Dana Milbank is a columnist for The Washington Post.
Srinagar:

A youth was on Saturday killed in clashes between protesters and security forces in Qazigund area of South Kashmir taking the death toll in the ongoing unrest to 71 even as curfew continued in parts of Srinagar in view of the separatists call for occupying Lal Chowk and Airport Road in Srinagar.



Curfew-like restrictions remained in force in rest of Kashmir even as normal life remained paralysed for the 57th day.



24-year old Basit Ahmed Ahanger was brought to the district hospital in Anantnag with pellet injuries sustained during clashes, a police official said, adding he was declared brought dead by the doctors.



Curfew remains in force in five police station areas of downtown Srinagar and Batamaloo and Maisuma areas in uptown city, a police official said.

Also read:

J&K CM Mehbooba Mufti invites separatists for talks with all party team

Home Minister Rajnath approves chilli-filled Pava shells as an alternative to pellet guns



He said curfew in these areas of the summer capital continued as a precautionary measure in view of the call given by separatists asking people to occupy Airport Road, city centre Lal Chowk and district headquarters on Saturday and Sunday to protest the visit of Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh-led all-party delegation to the Valley.



An all-party delegation led by Home Minister Rajnath Singh will visit Jammu and Kashmir on Sunday to interact with a cross section of people as part of efforts to bring peace in the Valley.



The delegation includes senior leaders such as Arun Jaitley, Jitendra Singh, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Ram Vilas Paswan , Ambika Soni, Sharad Yadav and Sitaram Yechury, among others.



The delegation is expected to meet a cross section of people, individuals and organisations in its efforts to bring peace in Kashmir Valley which has been witnessing unrest after the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani.

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Chandigarh:

Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar on Saturday night said that searches conducted at the residence of his predecessor Bhupinder Singh Hooda and other officers were not done out of malice or political vendetta.



Anybody, including the former chief minister or present chief minister or any officer who is involved in any wrong doing, will have to face the law, he told reporters.



Answering a query, he said CBI is an independent body and conducted the raids on the basis of facts which came up during the course of its investigation.



Asked about the Justice Dhingra Commission report, Khattar said the government was in process of studying it and action would be taken once the findings have been thoroughly gone into.
Hangzhou:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Hangzhou, China to hold talks on irritants in bilateral ties like India's NSG bid and the CPEC, which runs through PoK. The meeting, on the sidelines of the G20 summit, was their second meeting in less than three months.



The two leaders had last met on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit in June in Tashkent.



Sundays meeting is viewed as important in the backdrop of steady decline in the bilateral relations over a raft of issues including the USD 46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor which runs through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).



The two leaders, who enjoy a good rapport, are expected to have discuss contentious issues, which will also include listing of Pakistan-based terrorist organisations in the UN and China stalling India's membership at the elite Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).



This would be followed by a meeting of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) leaders ahead of the G20 summit, which would begin later in the day.Modi will also hold bilateral meetings with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Saudi Arabias Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.



He will attend the G20 summit that begins tomorrow with this years theme of Strengthening Policy coordination and Breaking a new path for growth followed by a number of cultural programmes organised by the Chinese government.



On Monday, he will take part in the second and concluding session of the G20 and hold bilateral meetings with British Prime Minister Theresa May and Argentinian President Mauricio Macri before returning to Delhi.



In all, he would reside in this picturesque city for about 48 hours, officials said.

A meeting between Modi and US President Barack Obama is, however, not on the cards during this trip, they said.

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Jammu:

On the eve of the visit of an all-party delegation to Jammu and Kashmir, a frontline Kashmiri Pandit organisation on Saturday demanded carving out a separate union territory for the community in the valley to permanently rehabilitate them.

Panun Kashmir said no other solution was acceptable to the pandits of Kashmir who were forced to leave their homes during the onset of militancy in Kashmir.

We want the entire political class of India to recognise the need of carving out a Union Territory of Panun Kashmir north and east of river Jhelum for the rehabilitation of internally displaced Hindus of Kashmir, said convener of Panun Kashmir, Agnishekhar.

In Kashmir there is total rejection of coexistence and genocidal war on Hindus is continuing unabated. Kashmir has become a den of religious fascism and anti-India rebellion and to defeat it dividing Kashmir has become a necessity, he said.

Claiming Kashmir had become an ungoverned zone, the organisation members also advised the members of the all-party delegation not to make any compromise with separatists.

We ask the government of India to desist from encouraging soft separatists and recognise the reality that present seditious unrest has been a result of accommodating soft-separatism, said Agnishekhar.

It is a national responsibility of all the leaders of the all-party delegation to recognise that soft-separatist enterprise has acted as an over ground support structure to the religious fascist upsurge in Kashmir valley, he added.

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Skopje:

When Pope Francis canonises Mother Teresa on Sunday, two Balkan countries will be celebrating the sainthood of a woman they both fiercely claim as their own. While she is famed for her work with the poor in the Indian city of Kolkata, the late missionarys origins have been hotly disputed in southeastern Europe, where she grew up.

Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in 1910 in multi-cultural Skopje - then part of the Ottoman Empire and now capital of the Republic of Macedonia - Mother Teresa had an ethnic Albanian mother whose family came from Kosovo.

Her fathers roots are more debated: most people, especially in Albania, say he too was ethnically Albanian, although some Macedonians have argued he was a Vlach, another Balkan ethnic group.

The squabble exposes old ethnic rivalries in the Balkans, with neighbours Albania and Macedonia taking competitive pride in the Nobel Peace Prize winner - both countries have statues, roads, hospitals and other monuments in her name.

Mother Teresa was born in Skopje but she never declared herself a Macedonian, said Albanian historian Moikom Zeqo, author of a study on the nuns links to Albania. She always spoke about her Albanian origins and her universal mission, Zeqo told AFP. Macedonians, however, suggest her birthplace is all important.

We call her Skopjanka (citizen of Skopje) because we know she is ours, said Valentina Bozinovska, director of the national commission for relations with religious communities. The region changed dramatically in Teresas lifetime, with the end of Turkish rule, two world wars, the rise and fall of communism and Yugoslavia, and the nationalistic Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Teresa was baptised Roman Catholic, a minority religion in Skopje, where she spent her childhood and decided early on she would take up a religious life. She left home aged 18 for a spell at an Irish abbey before travelling to India in 1929.

In the 1930s her mother and sister moved to Tirana in Albania, where communist dictator Enver Hoxha barred Teresa from visiting. She eventually made her first of three trips to Albania in 1989, after Hoxhas death and a year before communism began to fall, to visit the graves of her family and the house where they lived for many years.

Genc Zajmi, 78, still resides in the building and recalls Teresas loving letters to her mother, insisting the nun never forgot her Albanian roots. Muslim-majority Albania celebrates a public holiday on the anniversary of Teresas beatification in 2003.

As for Teresa, she was quoted describing herself both as a Skopjanka and as an Albanian by blood, but insisting she belonged to the world. Her adopted home country of India - which gave her citizenship in 1951 - flatly refused Albanias request in 2009 to hand over her remains, saying she was resting in her own country, her own land.

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New Delhi:

An all-party delegation led by Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Sunday held a meeting with several representatives from a cross section of society as part of efforts to bring peace in the Valley.

"We intend to talk to individuals and groups who want peace and normalcy in Kashmir Valley," Singh said before the departure of delegation comprising 30 members from 20 parties.

Cutting across party lines, leaders said that they were hopeful of finding a solution for restoration of peace in the Valley where violent clashes have claimed 71 lives since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani on 8 July.

Also read:

Kashmir unrest: Protesters burn government building in Shopian

Hizbul chief threatens to turn Kashmir into graveyard for Indian forces: Reports

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's incharge for Kahsmir issues, Indresh Kumar on Sunday said that separatists do not represent Kashmiris, as they speak for just 5 per cent of the population. Kumar was speaking to media right before heading to Srinagar as part of the all-party delegation on Kashmir.

The delegation, led by Home Minister Rajnath Singh, is on a two-day visit to Jammu and Kashmir to interact with a cross section of people as part of efforts to bring peace in the Valley.

It includes senior leaders such as Arun Jaitley, Jitendra Singh, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Ram Vilas Paswan, Ambika Soni, Sharad Yadav and Sitaram Yechury, among others.

Speaking to media in the morning, LJP leader Ramvilas Paswan said, "We are going with an open mind, we can agree on a solution as long as it is within consitutional limits."

Congress leader Gulam Nabi Azad, however, was more skeptical over the possibility of an immidiate decision. "Of course we won't be able to take decisions on the spot but it will be an opportunity for parties and Kashmiri people to interact," Azad said.



He added, "I hope we will be able to find solutions, our delegation will be beneficial for Kashmir and for the country."



The delegation is expected to meet a cross section of people, individuals and organisations in its efforts to bring peace in Kashmir Valley which has been witnessing unrest after the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani.

Also read:

On the eve of all party delegation, Kashmiri Pandits demand separate UT



Kashmir unrest: Pelet gun kills youth, toll rises to 71 ahead of all party delegation visit



Here is the full schedule:

Programme of the All Party Delegation in J&K

September 4, 2016, Sunday



8:45 am: Departure by Special Aircraft for Srinagar

10:00 am: Arrival at Srinagar

11:00 am: Meeting with CM Mehbooba Mufti at SKICC

11:45 am to 7:30 pm: Meeting with Representatives of Political Parties at SKICC

8:00 pm: Meeting with Governor at Raj Bhawan followed by Dinner



September 5, 2016, Monday



9:00 to 11:30 am: Meeting with Delegations

12:15 pm: Departure for Jammu

1:15 pm: Arrival

2:15-4:15 pm: Meeting with Delegations at Convention Centre

5:00 pm: Depart for New Delhi

6:15 pm: Arrival at New Delhi

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New Delhi:

Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin on Saturday vowed to block any peaceful political resolution to the Kashmir conflict.



Speaking to Times of India from Muzaffarabad PoK, Kashmirs most-wanted terrorist threatened to train more Kashmiri suicide bombers, who would turn the Valley into "a graveyard for Indian forces", and to take his struggle outside Kashmir.



"The Kashmiri leadership, people and mujahideen should know there is no formal, peaceful way." There wasn't any option but to "launch a target-oriented armed struggle", he told TOI in an interview at his office in Baila Noor Shah area of Muzaffarabad.



Salahuddins remarks came a day ahead of the visit of a delegation of major political parties led by home minister Rajnath Singh to Jammu and Kashmir as part of the effort to de-escalate tensions.



Talks, he said, could not be held without India's acceptance and recognition of Kashmir as a dispute. "If you do not accept it as an issue, then what is the need for dialogue," he asked. "We will have to display our might," he threatened.



Salahuddin warned Hizbul's "struggle" wouldn't remain confined to Kashmir but "take the entire region into its fold". Salahuddin and his Hizb have been a crucial factor in J&K militancy.



Unlike the terrorists who belong to Pakistan and are deployed by Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, Hizbul draws its ranks from among the youth in the valley  which helps Pakistan argue that the secessionist movement is an indigenous fight for self-determination.

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London:

Pay to be polite! A Spanish cafe owner has put in place a novel policy to promote good manners under which rude customers are charged more while prices are cut for those who say please and thank you.

Marisel Valencia Madrid, the owner of the Restaurant Blau Grifeu in Llan a on the Costa Brava in northeastern Spain, became so fed up at being barked at by customers that she has introduced a pricing system to penalise those who are impolite.

Those who demand a coffee will find they are charged an extortionate 5 euros while those who say please will pay a more affordable 3.5 euros, and those courteous enough to greet their server first with a Buenos dias (good morning) will be charged a mere 1.30 euros, The Local reported.

I put a sign in the window with the price system and it has made all the difference. People are now super polite in all matters and it has really improved daily life, she was quoted as saying.

Yesterday some children even told their parents to say please, so its working! she said.

The 41-year-old is originally from Colombia and has run the restaurant with her husband for the last nine years.

Im not singling out Spanish people as rude. We are just off the seafront so have a lot of tourists here well, French, German and British, and I think generally people could just be more polite, Madrid said.

A customer took a photograph of the sign with the house rules and posted it on social media sparking a nationwide debate on politeness.

Im surprised at the attention but its good to remind people to be polite to everyone, even when ordering a coffee, she said.

And she admitted that since putting up the sign she has not had to charge anyone the full price.

The normal price of a coffee is 1.30 euros and thankfully I havent had to charge more because everyone is giving me a greeting and saying please. Some even say thank you now too! she said.

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Srinagar:

An all-party delegation led by Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Sunday held talks with Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti in Srinagar as it began a two-day visit to Jammu and Kashmir during which it is expected to interact with a cross-section of people with a view to restore peace in the strife-hit Valley.



The meeting, chaired by Singh at Sher-I-Kashmir International Conference Centre soon after the 26-member delegation arrived in Srinagar, discussed the security situation in the Valley.



It also took stock of those injured in the violent protests since the killing of Hizbul militant Burhan Wani on July 8.Initially, the delegation was proposed to be of 29 Members of Parliament, but only 26 MPs have come for the visit.

Also read:

Kashmir unrest: Protesters burn government building in Shopian

Hizbul chief threatens to turn Kashmir into graveyard for Indian forces: Reports



Cutting across party lines, leaders said that they were hopeful of finding a solution for restoration of peace in the Valley which has been in the grip of violent protests that left left 71 persons dead and scores of others injured.State Education Minister and Government Spokesperson Naeem Akhtar said it was necessary for all stakeholders to join the dialogue process.



How long can this continue? It has to end someday, he said.



When asked about Mehbooba not mentioning talks within the ambit of Constitution in her letter to the separatist leaders last evening, he said every party comes to the negotiating table with their stated position.



It depends on how we carry forward the dialogue and ideas to find resolution to the issue, he said.



Mehbooba had written a letter to separatists leaders in her capacity as PDP Chief inviting them to engage with the delegation.



Akhtar refused to reply to a question whether there were any back channel talks with Hurriyat Conference.



The state government has placed Chairman of moderate Hurriyat Conference faction Mirwaiz Umer Farooq under arrest at Chashme Shahi sub-jail, JKLF Chief Yaseen Malik at BSF camp in Humama while hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani continues to be under house arrest.



A delegation of National Conference led by former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah is also likely to meet the MPs.The all-party delegation is on a two-day visit to the state during which it is expected to interact with a cross section of people. However, the Valley based trade organisations have refused to meet the politicians.



We intend to talk to individuals and groups who want peace and normalcy in Kashmir Valley, Singh said before the departure of the delegation.

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Islamabad:

Alarmed by the growing Indo-US defence ties, Pakistans cabinet has given the go-ahead for negotiating a long-term defence agreement and security cooperation with its all-weather ally China, a media report said on Sunday

Pakistans cabinet in a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on July 15 at the Governor House in Lahore gave the go-ahead for negotiating a long-term defence agreement with China, The Express Tribune reported.

The cabinet considered the summary to initiate negotiations on a draft agreement between Pakistan and China on a long-term strategic framework agreement for enhancing defence and security cooperation in diversified fields.

The cabinet held detailed discussions on the proposed agreement before giving the nod of approval, the report said.

The cabinet was informed that the draft agreement was based on principles of mutual respect for each others territorial integrity, sovereignty, non-integration and non-interference in each others internal affairs, equality and cooperation for mutual benefits, and peaceful coexistence for strategic gains in defence and security, including arms and technology transfers.

It was also informed that input from ministries of foreign affairs, interior and defence production as well as the Joint Staff Headquarters had been obtained and incorporated in the draft agreement which was subsequently vetted by the law and justice division.

In April 2015, when Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Pakistan, the two countries agreed that their relationship had acquired greater strategic significance against the backdrop of complex and changing international and regional situations.

They agreed to elevate the Pakistan-China relationship to the all-weather strategic cooperative partnership.

The reports of defence agreement surfaced a week after the US signed a key logistics agreement with India governing the use of each others land, air and naval bases for repair and resupply.

Pakistan had called the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement between the US and India as an agreement between the two sovereign states and hoped it would contribute to peace and stability.Pakistan would like to see that such arrangements do not contribute to polarising the region by disturbing the strategic balance in South Asia and escalating the arms buildup, Foreign Office spokesperson Nafees Zakaria told a news briefing on Thursday.

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Labor Day is a time for us to celebrate the workers who make our economy grow -- the people without whom businesses could not survive and thrive.

Yet for many, it can sometimes feel like American workers dont get the kind of respect they deserve. Wages remain low (and arent rising fast enough) relative to productivity, we lag behind other developed nations on guaranteeing benefits like paid leave, schedules are often set without enough input from employees who have families to take care of.

But we now have an opportunity to improve how workers are treated. That may not surprise you. What may surprise you is that theres a strong incentive for those changes to come from businesses themselves. One area in particular is giving workers a greater ownership stake in the companies they work for -- in essence, celebrating workers and businesses at the same time.

There are two main ways to do this -- employee stock ownership plans, or ESOPs, and worker cooperatives.

According to the National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO), about 32 million Americans own stock in their employers, whether through ESOPs, options, stock purchase plans, or 401(k)s. But theres a big difference between just owning a few shares of your companys stock and being part of a company thats essentially worker-owned.

When workers have decision-making power, they often understand better whats working in the company and what isnt. And they certainly have an incentive to address any problems, because as owners, their profit-making potential is tied to the companys success.

Were already seeing the potential -- just look at employee-owned companies, like New Belgium Brewing and Dansko (both ESOPs) or Clevelands Evergreen Cooperative, that have strong balance sheets, create hundreds of jobs and boost their local economies.

Take ESOPs -- businesses that choose to give their employees shares of the company, even 100 percent in some cases. According to the NCEO, nearly 7,000 ESOPs in the United States employ 14 million workers and cover $1.23 trillion in assets. And lest you think this is a new trend, that data also found that more than half of all ESOPs today have been around since before the turn of the century.

Or take worker cooperatives, where decision-making power is shared amongst employees. There are fewer of them in the United States - only 300 to 400, according to the Democracy at Work Institute -- but they employ 7,000 people and generate $400 million in revenue annually.

Not only do these firms provide longer-lasting, better-paying jobs, they also give workers the chance to build their skills and take a more active role in growing the company -- because as owners themselves, they do better when the company does better. For Americans who are struggling, worker ownership can be a pathway to prosperity, one that can help revitalize local economies.

One way to continue this trend would be to support bipartisan legislation that would make stock options more attractive to employees by letting them defer the taxes they would pay on those options. Another would be for the Small Business Administration (SBA) to increase lending support for ESOPs through its Section 7(a) loan-guarantee program, a program designed to help either start a new business or expand an existing one.

Thats all well and good, but for worker cooperatives, we need to ensure that they are treated equally compared to ESOPs when it comes to those kinds of tax benefits. Right now, they are not, and ESOPs remain the top choice for investors due to various existing tax benefits. While ESOPs are an important piece of the puzzle, we cant discriminate against workers who want to build assets, and become owners, but cant find work at a company that offers an ESOP.

Its a common misconception that we have to choose between employees and employers. Thats not the case, of course -- what company could survive without its workers? But now there are new types of companies challenging that idea. This Labor Day, lets stop treating workers and business owners like enemies, and lets support the companies that are making them one and the same.

Richard Eidlin is vice president of policy for the American Sustainable Business Council, which helps business leaders advocate for policy change that supports a sustainable economy.
Hangzhou:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday exchanged views with Barack Obama on the sidelines of the G20 summit here with the US president praising the bold policy move on GST reform in a difficult global economic scenario.

Modi first met Obama briefly when they were onstage to pose for a family photograph at the G20 Summit venue in this eastern Chinese city. The two leaders had another opportunity to exchange views during an informal evening programme.



Obama in his intervention during the G20 summit praised Modi for the recent tax reform as an example of bold policy in an otherwise difficult global economic scenario.



On August 8, Parliament cleared the landmark Constitution (122nd Amendment) Bill, 2014, on the Goods and Services Tax. The government has set April 1, 2017 as the target for rolling out the GST, considered the biggest tax reform in a long time.



Earlier today, Modi met Chinese President Xi Jinping and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on the sidelines of the summit.



Modi, who arrived here yesterday from Vietnam for the summit, also met Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad bin Salman and discussed ways to enhance bilateral ties.



The prime minister called for strengthened partnership with Saudi Arabia in sectors such as maritime, infrastructure, low-cost housing and discussed further cooperation in energy sector, they said.Tomorrow, Modi will meet British counterpart Theresa May and Argentinian President Mauricio Macri before returning to Delhi.

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MISSOULA -- Congolese refugees and the people trying to help them get settled in Missoula are facing a housing crisis.

Five families from refugee camps in East Africa will be in town by the end of September, none of them with a source of steady income or credit history.

Its the job of the local resettlement agency, the International Rescue Committee, to help them secure both as quickly as possible, said IRC director Molly Short Carr.

But record home sales prices in Missoula have placed rentals at a premium. And in a town that swells this time of year with university students  many with no credit ratings themselves  property managers and landlords can afford to be picky about who they rent to.

Were kind of hitting a bit of a brick wall, Carr admitted.

The Congolese family of six that arrived Aug. 18 is adjusting well but lives in temporary housing. Its not ideal, when stability is the goal, to have to uproot them again when a more permanent home is found, Carr said.

A second family consisting of a mother, father and five children  the youngest an infant  is due in as soon as domestic booking is finalized. Carr was close this week to an agreement with a homeowner on a three-bedroom house for them but by week's end it hadn't panned out.

"They're still thinking about it," she said. "It's understandable. This is a totally new thing. But I'm happy they talked to me."

Missoula has been approved as the destination for families of five, four and three people  25 refugees in all  in the next few weeks, so the hunt for housing is becoming critical.

Were really trying to reach out to everybody who has a unit that would be sufficient to our needs, Carr said. So far the response has not been very great. We dont fit into a mold.

Landlords and property managers have a structure they use to vet potential tenants, she said. That includes credit checks and background checks, which is something you cant do with refugees.

The IRC doesnt allow its offices to co-sign for refugees.

Our focus is really on getting them self-sufficient, said Carr. Co-signing is kind of a contradiction to self-sufficiency and being able to guide their own lives.

In a newsletter this week, Soft Landing Missoula said its volunteers have reached out to some property managers and received a "very positive response, so we know there is interest and available housing.

Louise Kreis, who owns Professional Property Management, feels sure there's a solution.

The way our company looks at it is that no credit history is better than bad credit history, so that should not be a stumbling block, Kreis said. What we look at is the care, how the rent will be paid, and that they dont establish bad credit.

John Sinrud, a licensed Realtor in Kalispell and former state legislator, is the lobbyist for the Montana Landlords Association. While hes not familiar with the situation in Missoula, Sinrud said hes not surprised that landlords are gun shy about renting to refugees.

Just bringing people in, theres a lot of issues with that for landlords, businesses and everything else, he said. Unless you have your ducks in a row and have some surety for the landlord and their ability as sanctioned individuals that are able to sign a contract and understand it, how do you get through those hurdles?

Carr said interpreters and a five-member family mentor team coordinated by Soft Landing Missoula help each new refugee family with transportation, housing applications, job applications and schooling.

Our focus is employment, self-sufficiency and integration, and that helps the refugees get on steady feet faster, the Missoula IRC director said.

The U.S. State Department supplies a one-time grant of $1,125 for each arriving refugee, including children, to cover housing and other costs for the first 90 days. The money is managed by Carrs office, not turned over in a lump sum to the family.

Follow-up federal programs, such as one that provides refugees matching grants for financial support for up to six months, allow local agencies to focus on securing employment for adult refugees. Carr said the newcomers are immediately eligible for either Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or refugee cash assistance through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement.

We do have significant financial support to get refugees into permanent housing, Carr said. Were not looking for housing thats, like, low income, and were not looking for any kind of special assistance. What were looking for is to find a way to collaborate with property managers and landlords that allows them to take into account that you dont have a way to do credit checks, and they dont have jobs when they get here.

Incoming refugees have been thoroughly screened by the State Department, which prohibits anyone with a criminal record from migrating to the United States. Records of the vetting, however, are off limits to property managers and everyone else.

Sinrud said a bigger concern for those with available housing to rent is financial.

A lot of landlords still have mortgages on property they have or some sort of lien against them, he said. They need to get their bills paid. If somebodys late on their rent  Thats why youve got late fees. If (landlords) are late on their mortgage payment they will have late fees too. So youre trying to be equitable all the way around.

Carr said Missoula is far from the only city struggling to provide sufficient housing for refugees. But in cities with established resettlement agencies, refugees have developed good relationships with landlord/property managers.

Ive been working in this field a very long time and Ive never had a refugee experience an eviction, said Carr, who owns rental property herself in her home state of New York.

They are looking for a place to call home. That first home is like the foundation to their lives in the United States. They take a lot of pride and care in that home.

Kreis agreed the ability of a refugee family to pay its rent after the initial government aid is exhausted is sure to be a concern for a property owner.

What happens then? she said. But I can also say many of our property owners would be willing to help.

Were starting to break down some barriers," Carr said. "But if there are property management companies and landlords out there who are interested in working with us, itd be helpful if they let us know who they are.

It's common in Missoula to charge application fees of $30 to $36 to cover the cost of background checks and obtaining credit reports. Short said she and her husband paid upwards of $600 in application fees when they moved to Missoula this summer, only to be turned down by many because they have a dog.

Even those who arent interested in renting to refugees arent going to say that up front, Short pointed out.

We dont want to spend money on application fees on behalf of our client with someone who has no interest in renting to us, she said. So it would be helpful if they come forward and contact us.

Kreis said in her 34 years of property management in Missoula she's seen the "ebbs and tides and changes, and the different personalities come and go."

Refugee resettlement is "a wonderful program," she said.

"Certainly our intent would be to help in any way we can. Our job is to rent units."
KALISPELL  To demonstrate the importance of health care to Kalispells economy, Bryce Ward asked local people on Tuesday to imagine the city without it.

Subtract 6,300 jobs directly associated with health care, he said, and another 6,700 indirectly tied to it.

Take away the patients who travel from surrounding areas to Flathead County for their health care services, and the money they bring in. Then, figure out how much local money would leave town as county residents traveled elsewhere for their health care needs.

If you want to cut to the chase, just suck $1 billion in personal income directly or indirectly attributable to health care in Flathead County out of the local economy.

Its never going to happen, Ward, the associate director at the University of Montanas Bureau of Business and Economic Research, told a large crowd at a Kalispell Chamber of Commerce luncheon. But if it did, you could also figure on people like me moving somewhere else.

Health care and schools are two of the most important factors people consider when choosing a place to live, said Ward, who authored a new report on the contributions of health care to the Flathead Valley economy for the Chamber.

His analysis produced some eye-catching figures.

The biggest number, literally, was that $1 billion in total personal income directly or indirectly attributable to health care, but there were plenty of others for the Chamber crowd to sort through:

 Wards report says that $147 million will be spent building new doctor offices, hospital facilities, nursing homes and the like between 2012 and 2018.

 The total payroll paid to health care workers in the county is $313 million. The 6,300 workers represent 16 percent of Flathead Countys total employment, and the payroll is 21 percent of the countys total payroll.

 Thirty percent of all the jobs in the county  13,000 of them  are directly or indirectly attributable to health care.

 If Flathead County grows at the nationally forecasted rate  and it will almost certainly exceed this, according to Wards report  another 1,300 health care jobs will be added in the next 7  years alone.

 The number of health care jobs in the county has already grown by 180 percent since 1990.

All those numbers point to health care playing an even bigger role in Kalispells future, according to Ward.

There will be more health care, which means more economic activity, and more money thats not leaking out of the local economy, Ward said. That means people are more likely to stay here, and others are more likely to move here.

Kalispell Regional Healthcare, which includes Kalispell Regional Medical Center, has gone from 928 full-time equivalent jobs in 1999 to 2,725 today, President and CEO Velinda Stevens told the luncheon crowd.

She also showed how the economic impact reaches beyond Kalispell. Of those employees, 2,108 live in Kalispell, 313 in Columbia Falls, 284 in Whitefish, 158 in Bigfork and 108 in Kila and Marion.

Another 92 live in Somers or Lakeside, 48 in Polson or Ronan, 39 in Eureka and 17 in Missoula.

Dr. Federico Seifarth, a pediatric surgeon who relocated to the Flathead Valley from Cleveland this spring, talked about Kalispell positioning itself as a leader in neonatal health care in Montana, and spoke of other projects, including a major expansion of the hospitals emergency room, from 8,000 square feet to 37,000 square feet.

At the other end of the lifespan, Jason Cronk, CEO of Immanuel Lutheran Communities in Kalispell, told the crowd about the multiple multi-million-dollar constructions and expansions under way at its senior housing campus just south of Kalispell Regional Medical Center.

By 2030, one-quarter of Montanas population will be seniors, Cronk said, and their residential and health care needs will play a major role in Kalispell.

Our state is growing older than the national average, Cronk said, and we live in a county that is growing older than the state average.
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DANBURY  Even as the steep losses of manufacturing jobs in Connecticut seem to have leveled off, business organizations continue to insist that the state is a difficult place to run a company.

Connecticut has a high-tax, high-regulation business environment, they say. That has led states such as North Carolina, Texas, Florida and New York to actively recruit Connecticut businesses with promises of lower taxes and lower cost of living for employees.

I got calls today from Indiana and Maine, Chris Ann Allen, vice president of Danbury Square Box, said on Wednesday.

Danbury Square Box has been in Danbury for 110 years, yet the calls keep coming to try to lure the manufacturer, and its 20 employees, out of state.

Were rooted here so we cant move, Allen said. But for start-up companies  its tough doing business here.

Ending the slide

According to the 2017 Connecticut Manufacturers Register, the state added 811 manufacturing jobs between June 2015 and June 2016, the first year-over-year jobs gain in the industry in more than a decade. The gains are modest, but at least the needle seems to be headed in the right direction, those who watch the industry closely said.

High business costs and aging infrastructure have made it difficult for Connecticut manufacturers to thrive and recoup losses suffered during the recession, said Tom Dubin, president of Manufacturers News, an industrial information company. However, the states efforts at improving capital funding and easing regulation have helped to slow losses in recent years.

Connecticut offers manufacturers tax exemptions on expenses such as newly acquired machinery and equipment, software and certain commercial vehicles. The state also offers a Manufacturing Reinvestment Account program whereby companies can put aside money on a tax-deferred basis for uses such as purchasing machinery or training employees.

The states Economic and Manufacturing Assistance Act includes a wide-ranging set of incentives to businesses when there is a strong economic development potential.

While many companies have left Connecticut, many others have made investments in their business to remain in the state. Belimo and Praxair in Danbury are two examples. Cheshires Consolidated Industries is in the middle of a $10 million improvement to its facility.

Manufacturers seem to have the backing of politicians, especially those who represent the state in Washington D.C.

U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., has been paying weekly visits to state manufacturers during his Murphys Monday Manufacturer tour. He has also introduced two pieces of legislation that would prioritize the purchase of U.S.-made products and strengthen existing manufacturing standards. His proposals are titled 21st Century Buy American Act and American Jobs Matter Act.

Similarly, U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Esty, D-5, has been visiting manufacturers in the state. She recently visited Consolidated Industries, the Cheshire forging company that makes, among other products, nozzles for jet engines.

Thats precision manufacturing. That kind of work is being done in Connecticut. They could have gone elsewhere to expand and they considered it, but they stayed here, Esty said. Im very bullish on manufacturing here. We have to listen to the companies and learn what their needs are.

Paying the price

John Wilbur, president of Consolidated Industries, said he is making the investment because the company was founded in Connecticut and he did not want to displace his roughly 100 employees. He admitted, however, that he is holding out hopes that Connecticut eases regulations and the cost of doing business here.

There are some things that need to be addressed in the state and we are really rolling the dice in a sense. Its certainly not cheap to do business here. We are competing against people who dont have those regulations. The regulations are costly, including taxes, Wilbur said. Its a beautiful state with nice people, but its not an easy state to do business in, Ill tell you that.

Allen, from Danbury Square Box, said high taxes and insurance costs are a big drain on her companys bottom line. She said her companys third-largest expense is paying the various required insurances, including workers compensation, health care, business liability and truck insurance.

Taxes are another problem, she said.

State unemployment tax is huge. Theres also gas taxes and diesel taxes, Allen said. Now theres a highway tax in New York and that impacts our deliveries. They are talking about a highway (toll) in Connecticut. Thats just not pro-business.

The Tax Foundation, which collects data on U.S. tax policies, ranked Connecticut 44th in its 2016 State Business Tax Climate Index.

Stephen Bull, president and CEO of the Greater Danbury Chamber of Commerce, said instead of continuing to add burdens on manufacturers, the state should be offering more incentives  such as subsidies, job training and other programs  to keep them here.

We have to continue to support manufacturing. We need new policies and programs to keep them from going elsewhere  Canada, Mexico or elsewhere, said Bull, who is also a board member of the Housatonic Industrial Development Corp. Connecticut has one of the highest costs of doing business in the country. We are constantly setting regulatory burdens that other states dont. Then we question why they are leaving.

Bull said the unfair regulations vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, but fees on businesses in general are high and onerous. Esty said the answer to attracting and retaining manufacturers is educational reform that prepares students  starting in elementary school  for the jobs of the future.

Connecticut is never going to win a race to the bottom in terms of low-cost manufacturing. We should be winning the race to the top in terms of offering the highest value. That starts with a strong, smart workforce, she said. Im not saying cost isnt important, but the really important thing is value. We shoot for the best and were seeing that. Thats why we are seeing a resurgence.

cbosak@hearstmediact.com; (203) 731-3338
BROOKFIELD - Officials reopened Route 25 between Long Meadow Hill Road and Oak Grove Road after a car crash early Sunday morning.

The Brookfield Police Department reported on its Facebook page at 1:47 a.m. that a car crashed into a utility pole on Route 25. Police said the road was closed between Long Meadow Hill Road and Oak Grove Road and asked drivers to avoid the area.
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Traffic jams are a daily headache on I-84 in Newtown and other places where the highway goes from three lanes to two. It can be frustrating seeing a stretch of that third lane sit empty as motorists move over to the other two and wait ... and really frustrating when the stray car zips by you using every last inch of the lane thats disappearing before moving over and cutting in front of everyone else.

The etiquette around when, exactly, you are supposed to move over, can be tricky. Connecticut is an early merge state, meaning you are supposed to move over as soon as you can after seeing signs saying that the lane you are in is going away.

But other states, including Minnesota and Kansas, have implemented an alternative approach favored by many traffic engineers, and Connecticut is considering using it for construction zones.

Its called the zipper merge, and calls for drivers to wait to merge until their lane is almost closed and then take turns with the car in the open lane when merging over.

Kevin Nursick, a spokesman for the Connecticut Department of Transportation, said that the state has favored the early merge bo prevent drivers from getting stuck in a lane that is about to close or angering the drivers who poked along in the open lane.

But the state may ask drivers to use the zipper merge in construction zones when two lanes go down to one. This would allow drivers to use all lanes for longer, preventing congestion.

If everyone is paying attention and takes their turn, then you can really keep the traffic moving, Nursick said.

John Ivan, a civil and environmental engineering professor from the University of Connecticut who studies road safety, said he supports the zipper merge. When drivers wait to merge, the majority of drivers in the designated lane wait a long time, while drivers who merge late cut the line, he said. If drivers use the zipper merge, the wait times are even and the line is not as long.

Then, because that queue doesnt extend as long, its a bit safer as far as drivers being surprised by sudden stopped traffic, Ivan said.

Still, the state is only considering the zipper for construction zones, Nursick said. In other merging situations, the DOT feels that traffic is moving too fast to safely pull off the zipper merge.

You don't want to be waiting on someones good nature and getting in at the last minute, Nursick said.

And the zipper merge only works if everyone knows to use it, he said.

Weve all seen it where folks will streak down that lane before it comes to end only to bypass more traffic, Nursick said. And what does that result in? That results in traffic congestion for folks that are following the rules.
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BROOKFIELD  When John Barile took the helm of the school district last year, he faced a laundry list of problems uncommon for most new superintendents.

His predecessor, Anthony Bivona, had been fired amid a financial scandal that embarrassed the district and also resulted in criminal theft charges against two former finance officials just months into his tenure. There were also contentious municipal elections where school spending and curriculum issues were hotly contested.

But as students flooded hallways last week for the first days of school, Barile, now beginning his second year as superintendent, focuses more on matters facing the students than on cleaning up messes left by past administrations.

(The community) was in a state of, Do we trust what were being told? Barile said. The energy was put into some of that questioning and skepticism rather than on the students. Now were building momentum and weve got the heavy flywheel moving forward.

Were putting the energy into what is good for the kids, he said. Thats where it should always be, and its really there now.

Barile said the curriculum has changed in several ways this year, including a new K-8 math program, an improved reading foundations program for the elementary school and a readers and writers workshop at the middle school.

New high school teachers have also been hired to reduce class sizes in business and social studies classes.

We are making sure that we are not only implementing the Common Core, but developing curriculum changes that have not necessarily been done to the level expected for our district, Barile said.

The district has also launched a new website and developed a new communications plan, which Barile said has helped stabilize the schools.

Through communication and the establishing of relationships, weve been able to build trust, he said. After that, you continue to build credibility by delivering on goals and bringing stability to the district.

First Selectman Steve Dunn, who was elected just a few months after Barile was hired, praised the superintendent, but said there remains much more work to do. The two have been working closely to move the district onto new accounting software and rectify the slipshod accounting practices that a consultant said required a culture change in the town and schools.

I think John has done an incredibly good job, Dunn said. The primary goal is get the schools onto the MUNIS (accounting) system. That requires an incredible amount of work.

After auditors determined in 2014 that the district overspent its budget by $1.2 million over the previous two years, the publics trust in the school district deteriorated. Barile said the transition to MUNIS, which he hopes to complete by July 2017, is crucial to getting the schools back on sound financial footing.

That has to be done right, Barile said. You dont want to make a mistake on peoples paychecks; you dont want to pay people late. These are things that have to be done right. Its a big deal, were doing something, finally, in the community.

awolff@newstimes.com; 203-731-3333; @awolffster
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DANBURY  Police have identified the three men and two women who were in the triple fatal car accident early Saturday morning.

Police said the driver, Raymond Rivera, 31; Waner Nunez, 29; and Nelson Osegueda, 36, all of Danbury, were killed after the Nissan Maxima they were traveling in crashed into a utility pole on Mill Plain Road.

The two women in the car  Beatriz Grajales, 34 and Elena Albarran, 23, both of Danbury  were injured and taken to Danbury Hospital.

Following the crash, a memorial was created near the utility pole, where loved ones have gathered to pay their respects to the three men killed in the crash. Mourners brought flowers, balloons and written messages. Thirteen candles were placed on the pavement in the shape of a heart.

A candlelight vigil is planned for 8 p.m. on Monday at the parking lot, near where the accident occurred, according to Facebook posts. A GoFundMe page was also started for Rivera, seeking to fundraise $5,000 to pay for his burial costs. As of Monday afternoon, $925 had been raised.

As you all know we have lost one of the most beautiful souls that have ever existed ... Just as he would look out for any of us its only right we all do the same, according to a statement on Riveras GoFundMe page.

Nunez and Osegueda attended Danbury High School, according to their Facebook pages.

The Putnam County, N.Y., Sheriffs Department said at 4:20 a.m. Saturday, an officer saw a Nissan Maxima swerve over the center line about three-quarters of a mile from the state line near Kass Bar and Restaurant in Brewster, N.Y. The officer tried to pull the car over, believing the driver was intoxicated.

The driver continued traveling below the speed limit, but sped up a quarter-mile before the border. The officer slowed as he approached Connecticut, and called Danbury police. Seconds later, the car sideswiped the steel pole on the drivers side, according to police.

Authorities are determining the speed of the car when it hit the pole and why the driver did not pull over for the officer. The officer averaged about 65 miles per hour during the chase, with top speeds of 80 miles per hour for about 15 seconds, according to the police report.

Death leaves a heartache no one can heal. Love leaves a memory no one can steal. Love you Ray, is written in red marker on the pole.

RIP Waner. We love you boy, your smile will never be forgotten, is written in brown.

For many of the mourners, the loss was too fresh to talk about.

One man, who asked to remain anonymous, said he knew Rivera and Nunez from middle school in Danbury. He had lost touch with Rivera for many years, but they reconnected when Rivera got a job at the Cheesecake Factory with him. Rivera had been released from prison, and was now on a great track, the friend said.

Theres nothing I can say but rest in peace, he said.

The only thing I can do is pray for them, he added.

Others shared their condolences on social media.

One woman, Leslie Dyana, posted on Facebook that she saw Nunez on Friday night and never thought it would be for the last time.

You were sooo full of life, so generous, she wrote. Your smile was by far my favorite and honestly I don't think anyone will ever top your smile, it was my favorite thing about you.

Another woman, Heather Marie, wrote RIP Nelson Osegueda our family is deeply sadden over ur loss...its completely heartbreaking to accept that ur gone...

This story was updated Monday, Sept. 5, 2016 with the Danbury police providing the names of the people who were inside the car.
Steel producers, Steelworkers union call for action from Prime Minister

OTTAWA, Sept. 1, 2016 /CNW/ - Canadian steel producers and the United Steelworkers (USW) are jointly urging Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, during his official visit to China, to strongly pursue a multinational solution to a steel crisis caused by global overcapacity and unfair trade.

In an open letter to the prime minister, the Canadian Steel Producers Association (CSPA) and the USW warn of "irreversible harm" to Canada's steel industry, which supports more than 120,000 jobs.

Meaningful solutions must be adopted internationally and on the domestic front, states the letter, signed by CSPA President Joseph Galimberti and USW National Director Ken Neumann.

"We, the undersigned, wish to encourage you on behalf of the Canadian steel industry and its employees to continue pressing China at the upcoming G20 meetings in Hangzhou, for multinational solutions to the problem of global overcapacity in the steel sector," the letter states.

"We equally urge you to quickly continue your government's work domestically to ensure Canada's trade remedy system is protecting Canada's steel producers, Steelworks and steel workers from the well documented and corrosive effects of global overcapacity we are feeling at home."

Trudeau, on an official visit to China this week, also will attend the G20 Summit on Sept. 4-5 in the Chinese city of Hangzhou.

Global overcapacity in steel production has risen to nearly 700 million tonnes, with China alone maintaining 425 million tonnes of surplus capacity  almost 30 times the size of the entire Canadian steel market, the CSPA and USW point out.

"Massive state ownership of and support for China's steel sector is the single largest force disrupting established trade patterns and degrading pricing of steel products globally today," the joint letter states.

"Despite recent efforts, the problems of overcapacity in steel and associated increases in the volume of damaging and unfairly traded goods entering the Canadian market persists. The location of the forthcoming G20 meetings in Hangzhou, China, represents a unique opportunity to address this issue directly with the nation most responsible for destabilizing the sector."

Canadian steel producers and workers continue to suffer from "a significant increase in market distorting dumping and circumvention practices, both from China directly and from a host of other global producers whose home markets have in many cases suffered as a result of Chinese competition," the letter states.

"Unfairly traded goods pose a clear and present threat to the livelihoods of the over 22,000 middle-class Canadians employed directly in steel production and the additional 100,000 Canadians whose employment is indirectly supported by our sector."

The CPSA and USW also are urging the federal government to immediately adopt new legislation to combat dumping and unfair trade and to encourage investment in the domestic steel sector.

"If the government fails in this regard, irreversible harm will occur," the joint letter states.

"Two of Canada's major primary steel producers  Essar Steel Algoma and U. S. Steel Canada  are currently operating under Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) protection, while other producers have cut jobs and production due to the ongoing crisis in the sector.

"The price deterioration and market instability associated with illegal trade have contributed significantly to our industry's challenges and are hurting middle class Canadian families."

Read the CSPA-USW letter to the prime minister

SOURCE United Steelworkers (USW)

For further information: Joseph Galimberti, President, Canadian Steel Producers Association (CSPA), 613-238-6049, [email protected]; Ken Neumann, USW National Director for Canada, 416-544-5951; Bob Gallagher, USW Communications, 416-544-5966, 416-434 2221, [email protected]
The dust raised by the death of son of Nigeria's former Aviation minister and presently the Senator representing Anambra North Senat...

The dust raised by the death of son of Nigeria's former Aviation minister and presently the Senator representing Anambra North Senatorial District in the red chambers of the National Assembly,Senator Princess Stella Oduah, has finally settled as the remains of 28 year old, Maxwell,Chinedu Oduah-Etoromi was at exactly 2:15 pm Saturday, interred at the Oduah family mausoleum in Akili- Ozizor,Ogbaru local Government of Anambra State amidst tears and eulogiesThe Metropolitan Archbishop of Onitsha, Most Reverend Valerian Okeke,was represented in the burial mass by the Episcopal Vicar of Dunukofia Region, Very Rev Fr Theophilus Odukwe who presided over the mass with 57 other priests concelebrating,among whom was a Papal Chamberlain and Chaplain of the Catholic Women Organization(CWO) Onitsha Archdiocese, Monsignor Greg Adibe.In their midst were 3 Anglican priests. In his homily,the President of the West African Association of Priests,Very Rev Fr (Dr) Martin Onukwuba condoled with Senator Oduah and other members of their family saying that death is a mystery and universal experience which every mortal must pass through.According to him,the death of a Christian is nothing but a passage to meet the risen Christ adding that upon death,every believer must look forward to dying in order to open his or her eyes to the light of eternity.In his contribution, the representative of the Archbishop, Very Rev Fr Theophilus Odukwe described the late Chinedu Oduah as a chip of the old block, meaning that he took over from her mother in generosity and kindness to the less privileged.Fr Odukwe conveyed Archbishop Valerian Okeke's condolences to Senator Oduah who he described as a true daughter of Igbo land going by her achievement as Aviation Minister. The Senate President,Dr Olusola Saraki, represented by Senator Dino Melaye who led other senators and House of Representatives members to the funeral laced his remarks with humour and jokes,said the Senate President was pained by the death of Chinedu whose mother,Senator Stella Oduah she described as a reliable and hard working colleague.He pledged that the Senate will donate generously to the newly formed Foundation for the deceased.Also in his remarks,the governor of Anambra State,Chief Willie Obiano represented by the Deputy Governor,Dr Nkemdiche Okeke,described the death of Chinedu in his prime as painful as it woul not be the wish of any mother to experience such.He prayed that God will give the entire family the fortitude to bear the irreparable loss.Chairman of Princess Stella Oduah Campaign Organization and former Rep member, High Chief (Hon) Okwudili Add to dictionary gratitude to God for his marvelous works in making the week long funeral peaceful.While speaking on the death of his brother,Master Tuoyo,the immediate junior brother to the deceased spoke at length on the sterling qualities of his late brother who he described as generous to a fault. Among the dignitaries that attended the burial are former Gov Peter Obi(represented)the PDP chairman,Anambra State,Chief Ken Emeakayi,Hon Obinna Chidoka,former Anambra Speaker,Chief Anayo Nnebe ,Hon Eucharia Azodo,Chief Mrs Comfort Obi,member of board of the Police Service Commission,Abuja, the Okpala of Akili Ozizor,Prfessor Stella Okunna,Chief Mrs Odife,Chief Dubem Obaze,etc.PDP stalwarts at local and state levels attended.The liturgical coordinator of the burial committee,Rev Fr Donald Uzoh,the coordinator of burial logistics,Prince Joe Agwunobi Oduah and the Chief of Staff of Princess Stella Oduah Foundation,Princess Nwaka Ononuju,the Knights of St Mulumba,St Mary's Subcouncil led by its Grand Knight,Sir Joseph Nsika,the director of Princess Stella Oduah campaign Organisation,Chief Pandola Okwuosa among many others were present.
Former aviation minister, Femi Fani-Kayode has lent his voice in defence of his country in the ongoing Twitter feud between citizens in N...

Former aviation minister, Femi Fani-Kayode has lent his voice in defence of his country in the ongoing Twitter feud between citizens in Nigeria and Kenya.Fani-Kayode, who gave his verdict on his official Twitter account, @realffk, stressed that Kenyans are far behind Nigerians in every aspect.He furthers, He noted
Ayodele Fayose, governor of Ekiti State, has crticised Ali Modu Sheriff, factional leader of the Peoples Democratic Party, over his visit...

Ayodele Fayose, governor of Ekiti State, has crticised Ali Modu Sheriff, factional leader of the Peoples Democratic Party, over his visit to former President Olusegun Obasanjo.Sheriff held a closed door meeting with Obasanjo at his hilltop mansion in Abeokuta on Saturday, The Cable reports.He later told journalists that he decided to consult the former party leader over the crisis in the PDP.But Fayose described the visit as the coming together of PDP enemies, alleging that both men collaborated to destroy the All Nigerians Peoples Party.The meeting was a coming together of collaborators in the total annihilation of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Fayose said in a statement issued on his behalf by Lere Olayinka, his media aide.No genuine lover of the PDP will go to the house of a man who openly destroyed his membership card and worked assiduously to ensure the partys failure in the 2015 presidential election, to seek advice on how the way forward for the PDP.Sheriff can as well begin to sleep in Obasanjos house, it is good riddance to bad rubbish.Since Obasanjo is no longer a member of the PDP and he has consistently maintained that he can never return to the PDP, only those in the same league with him can go about visiting him, he said.He alleged that despite the fact that no one benefited from the party more than Obasanjo, the elder statesman still worked against his former party.Fayose asked Nigerians to beware of Obasanjo, saying; The result of Obasanjos imposition of President Muhammadu Buhari on the country is the hunger and sufferings that Nigerians are facing now.
The United Kingdom plans to assist Nigeria overcome its current economic and security challenges, UK Minister for International Developme...

The United Kingdom plans to assist Nigeria overcome its current economic and security challenges, UK Minister for International Development, James Wharton, has said.Wharton told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in an interview in Abuja that he was in Nigeria to assess some of the definite challenges.He described Nigeria as a country with great potential in human and natural resources as well as opportunities to overcome the current challenges.This is clearly a country with incredible opportunity with amazing people, with a real deep, strong link and friendship with United Kingdom but which faces challenges, he said.The Government of the United Kingdom must help Nigeria to overcome some of the challenges in the overall interest of the people of Nigeria and the UK.There are security and humanitarian issues in the North-East, there are clearly economic challenges, the price of oil hasnt helped.Wharton noted that there were institutional challenges which UK would be able to help and strengthen institutions of government and the civil society.We want to be very clear that the UK recognises the scale of the challenges and is committed to supporting Nigeria through what is a very significantly very difficult period.But I have no doubt that Nigeria has a very bright and positive future and the UK has a role to play in that, he said.He said UK spends nearly 500 million pounds annually in support of Nigeria, from technical assistance, strengthening of institutions to security assistance in the North-East.The UK minister said he was in Nigeria to ensure that the UK aid was well spent to make a difference to the lives of Nigerian people.Wharton said London was monitoring the situation in the Niger Delta and the negative impact on the economy of Nigeria and the communities that were directly affected.It is clearly a very difficult situation and we will work very closely, we will continue to have talks, discussions with those who are currently trying to address the challenges.It is important things are done in the right ways and support is planned in the right way and delivered very appropriately.Wharton, who is on a three-day official visit to Nigeria, also said that his country was committed to the anti-corruption agenda of President Muhammadu Buharis administration.
Wife of the President, Hajia Aisha Buhari yesterday said that women should be seen as bridge builders to help men in developing the econo...

Wife of the President, Hajia Aisha Buhari yesterday said that women should be seen as bridge builders to help men in developing the economy.She assured that women will continue to support their husbands in achieving positive results.Allaying the fears of former Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, who said women are gradually taking over all spheres of the nation, Mrs. Buhari called on men not to be threatened about the successes of women.Wife of the President spoke at the RAiSE Foundation fund raising launch and unveiling of the Cancer screening centre, a pet project of the wife of Niger State Governor, Dr. Amina Abubakar Bello in Minna.According to her: Men should not be threatened because women have not taken over. We only see ourselves as bridge builders to help the men.Mrs. Buhari further urged women to be supportive in the agendas of their husbands.According to her: There is nothing more gratifying than having a woman who is very active in all areas of life.She added that women are working towards ensuring that the future of the nation is secured, stressing the roles of women should no longer be limited to certain aspects.In his address, Abubakar called on the male gender in the country to stand up and raise foundations as men are fast becoming endangered species.He challenged the men in the nation to rise up to the task of establishing foundations that will carter for men and the old.According to him: Men are becoming engendered species. Women are gradually over taking. There are a lot of problems that men go through that needs to be addressed.Let us try to raise a foundation that will take care of us at old age.Niger State Governor Abubakar Sani Bello extolled the roles of women, describing them as strong supporters and pillars of the nations political endeavor.His wife, Dr. Amina Bello called on government and non- governmental organisations to work together in achieving results and prevent post-delivery hemorrhage at the community level.She stated that the foundation was to ensure that no woman in the state die from pregnancy- related causes.
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-- Two Cumberland County men were charged Saturday in the

as he foiled an armed robbery near a casino parking deck, prosecutors said.

State Police arrested Martell Chisolm, 29, of Millville, and Demetrius Cross, 28, of Bridgeton, without incident, according to Acting Atlantic County Prosecutor Diane Ruberton. Both men face charges, including attempted murder, robbery and weapons offenses. A third suspect was shot by police and died on a nearby street.

Chisholm, Cross and Jerome Damon were robbing a group of three other men near the Caesars casino Atlantic City parking lot on Arkansas Avenue around 2:30 a.m. Saturday when two uniformed city officers spotted the holdup and intervened, Ruberton said.

One officer was shot immediately after he got out of the marked patrol car, the prosecutor added. His partner returned fire and hit Damon. Both the alleged robbers and the others scattered in different directions.

Police discovered Damon, 25, of Camden, dead about a block away near Missouri and Pacific Avenues, according to authorities. Chisholm and Cross escaped and law enforcement officers from around the region launched a manhunt.

The wounded officer, who was not identified, underwent surgery and remained in critical condition, according to a statement from the prosecutor Saturday night.

Authorities released video footage showing two groups of three men, but said one group was later identified as the robbery victims. The other three were identified as Chisholm Cross and Damon, officials said.

The robbery victims cooperated with investigators and were released, the prosecutor added.

"These charges are the result of an unprecedented effort by law enforcement from local, county, state and federal agencies who worked tirelessly throughout the day to identify and locate the suspects," Ruberton said in a statement.

State troopers captured Chisholm in Bridgeton and Cross in Millville, according to authorities. The prosecutor's office worked with the FBI, Attorney General's Office, State Police and neighboring police departments in the probe.

The gunfire was the second shooting to occur in Atlantic City's main tourist district since Thursday. In that incident, Luis Maisonet, 55, of Somers Point, allegedly shot and killed Christopher Romero, 26, of Absecon, at the The Walk outlet mall in what authorities described as a domestic-related killing.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct the age of Martell Chisolm and the spelling of his name.

Noah Cohen may be reached at ncohen@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @noahyc. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS -- A group of New York men led police on a chase Friday that reached speeds of more than 100 mph.

Palisades Interstate Parkway Police got a call at about 10:30 p.m. reporting a hit-and-run crash on the northbound parkway north of the Rockefeller Lookout.

As police responded, the New York City Police Department called saying they had chased a vehicle wanted for shots fired over the George Washington Bridge and onto the northbound Palisades Parkway. The same vehicle was reported in both incidents: a white 2016 Volkswagen Tiguen.

Parkway Police Officer Timothy Conboy tried to stop the Volkswagen near Alpine Lookout but it fled northbound at more than 100 mph, Parkway Police said in a statement. Two more Parkway Police officers joined the chase near Interchange 2.

The Volkswagen crashed near State Line Lookout, police said. Four men got out and ran.

Police arrested three of them immediately. The fourth, Justin Cabrera, ran into the woods, police said.

Several police agencies established a perimeter. Police learned that Nunez had exited the western edge of the woods and crossed Route 9-W in Alpine.

Police cornered Nunez within a 2-square mile radius. There, they noticed two vehicles lurking in the area and learned Caberera, 22, had called them to pick him up.

At 2 a.m., one of the occupants got in touch with Cabrera on a cell phone.

Parkway Police Chief Michael Coppola got on the phone and convinced Cabrera to surrender. A Closter Police Officer arrested Cabrera at Kiku Restaurant in Alpine.

Police charged the driver, Miguel A. Nunez, 22, with eluding a police officer and resisting arrest. Cabrera, Anthony Javier, 25; and Francisco J. Gonzalez, 23; were charged with resisting arrest. All four men are from the Bronx.

During the chase, a Closter Police Officer suffered a shoulder injury and a Bergen County Sheriff's Officer was hurt in a motor vehicle crash, police said.

Myles Ma may be reached at mma@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MylesMaNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
CAMDEN -- Deyonna Jackson, 17, said that her biggest fear when she has to walk home from Camden High School -- or the 20 minutes to where the marching band practices after school -- is the unwelcome attention she might get from men.

"Being a teenager, some older men talk to kids like me," Jackson said.

But she is also aware that sometimes, kids are shot just because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. An 8-year-old girl was killed by a bullet not intended for her in front of her Camden home on the evening of Aug. 24.

"I think about that sometimes when I walk," Jackson said.

She was at Camden High School Thursday to speak about the Camden City School District's decision to spend $150,000 to provide busing for high school students who live between 2 and 2.5 miles of their schools.

Schools Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard speaks at Camden High School Sept. 1, 2016. Listening, left to right, are Village founder John Royal, senior Deyonna Jackson, 17, and sophomore Jacynna Trusty, 15.

It won't directly affect her, as she is only a 10-minute walk away and usually gets a ride to school, but she said it's still good news that more of her peers will get NJ Transit bus passes.

The district's announcement comes three months after the community group the Village hosted a 2.4-mile trek from the school to show community members and school officials how far some are walking, many of them twice a day.

School districts in New Jersey are required to provide busing to high school students living 2.5 miles or farther from the school or kindergarten through grade eight students who live more than 2 miles away. Providing busing to students who live closer is optional and referred to as "courtesy busing."

Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard said the new universal 2-mile policy will mean 223 students in the five district high schools will no longer have to walk or find rides to school. This is also the first year that students who opt to attend a different city school instead of their neighborhood schools will get busing guaranteed.

John Royal, a founder of the Village, said before the announcement that the new policy is a great step in the right direction, "but you know we're going to keep pushing."

He said the group is very pleased with the district's "almost immediate response" after the "Walk 2.4 Miles in my Shoes" event in June.

Rouhanifard credited the Village with bringing attention to the issue of student safety while getting to and from school.

"It's one thing to look at data and budgets on a spreadsheet and a whole other thing to walk the walk," he said. "We all felt it. It was a serious walk. And some us didn't walk back."

State Assemblyman Arthur Barclay, who has been active on the issue of inner city school transportation, said at the press conference Thursday that he hears from people in the gang task force that it is not unusual for youth to get "beat up" on the way home from school.

A teenager who gets beat up going to school is more likely to stay home, and staying home can turn into dropping out altogether, Barclay said. "That's kind of a lost life," he said.

His office has submitted a draft resolution for addition funding for courtesy busing in Camden, Paterson, Atlantic City, Newark, Trenton and Jersey City. In Camden alone, it would cost $3.5 million to provide busing to everyone in the district. The district already pays $3.7 million on transportation for its more than 1,150 students.

Barclay said the resolution is still being worked on in the legislature, "but money's always the issue."

Rebecca Everett may be reached at reverett@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @rebeccajeverett. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
AVALON -- As out-of-town visitors packed up their cars and headed off the island on Saturday ahead of a coastal storm, Robert Ossichak prepared for another round of flooding in his bike shop in Avalon, lifting inventory off the ground and moving bicycles to the mainland.

Then he woke up Sunday morning to sunny skies and a forecast that spares the Jersey Shore from the worst-case scenario of Tropical Storm Hermine. He opened up his store. But many of his customers were already gone.

"This is our second busiest weekend of the year and it really turned into a nothing weekend so far," said Ossichak, the owner of Hollywood Bicycle Center on Dune Drive. "Hopefully, it will turn around. But who knows who left, who came back."

While the change in weather is welcome news for flood-weary business owners on the state's coastline, the uncertainty over the forecast for a critical holiday weekend left merchants like Ossichak frustrated.

"I think it was overhyped, very much so," he said. "I think it's just overexaggerated."

The Jersey Shore isn't in the clear yet. A tropical storm warning remains in effect for the entire coastline and there is still the risk of major to moderate flooding. Rough seas and strong rip currents are also concerns as Hermine churns off the coast.

But on Sunday morning in Avalon and Stone Harbor, visitors took advantage of the better-than-expected weather.

Bicyclists cruised down the street. Banner planes flew over the beach. Tourists sipped coffee at outdoor tables.

It almost felt like a typical summer day, except for the diminished crowds and some businesses that had sandbags stacked outside their doors or had sealed off their entrances with plywood. Stores that would otherwise be packed had just a few shoppers walking the aisles and restaurants that would see lines out the door on a holiday weekend had seats available.

Tiffany Albrecht, the owner of Uncle Bill's Pancake House on 96th Street in Stone Harbor, said she wasn't sure if they'd be open on Sunday.

But then, she said, "I woke up this morning and saw the sun shining." They put the chairs they had raised the day before back and opened, as usual, at 6:30 a.m.

"It's a little bit slower than what it would normally be. We didn't have the long line today," she said. "But we definitely had a lot of regulars that stayed and the homeowners that stayed at their houses and decided to ride out the storm and stay in town."

Further north on the Jersey Shore, businesses in Atlantic City had hoped for a big holiday weekend fueled by two beach concerts. But both of those events were cancelled as Hermine became a threat.

"I feel like the forecast ruined the whole weekend when it's absolutely beautiful right now," said Michelle DiPiazza, the bar manager at the Chelsea Pub. "The forecast was wrong and now we are paying the price for that."

Frank Tileggi, the manager of the Irish Pub, put it this way: "This storm wasn't a weather disaster, but instead it was an economic disaster."

Meteorologists and top officials are defending concern over the storm, saying it posed a real risk to the Jersey Shore -- and still has the potential for flooding.

Following a meeting with local officials in Middle Township on Sunday afternoon, Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno echoed a statement made earlier in the day by Gov. Chris Christie about declaring a state of emergency over the storm.

"This is a situation where you are damned if you do and you are damned if you don't," she said. "We had to rely on the National Weather Service to give us the best possible information they had and they did. We only declared an emergency late in the day. People were complaining we weren't declaring an emergency so now they're complaining we did declare an emergency."

"I think we made the right call and that is to err on the side of caution so people knew we were prepared," she said.

Michael Mavromates, broker and branch manager at Long & Foster Real Estate's Avalon office, said when he woke up and saw the sun out this morning: "I was glad, don't get me wrong, but I was stunned."

Sandbags surrounded the real estate office at 30th Street and Dune Drive, a precaution Mavromates said the office took "to play it safe." The office was previously flooded in January and during Hurricane Sandy.

The real estate business is a little more immune to the weather, Mavromates said. But, he said, for other businesses in town that need to make their money in the summer months losing a holiday weekend is "devastating to them."

The weather forecast didn't keep everyone from spending the weekend at the Jersey Shore.

Cheryl and Justin Alexander of Blue Bell, Pa., thought about cancelling their plans to visit Avalon this weekend but headed down anyway.

While stopping for a moment during their morning bike ride near a sea wall near Dune Drive and 6th Street in Avalon, Cheryl Alexander said, "the forecast didn't sound very good but we have friends down here so we thought we'd give it a try."

"We were pleasantly surprised by the change in the weather," she said.



"I'm happy they were wrong," Justin Alexander added.

Though the weather was working out for their vacation, Cheryl Alexander added: "I feel bad Avalon didn't get all the business it could have gotten. It was like the finale for the summer and people didn't get that but on the other hand you got to go with the weather predictions as they stand."

NJ Advance Media staff writer Don Woods contributed to this report.

Erin O'Neill may be reached at eoneill@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @LedgerErin. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Haniyah Woods.jpg

Via Haniyah Woods' Facebook

NEWARK - A teacher's aide at West Side High School said Sunday that it will be difficult for her to go back to school without Haniyah Woods, the incoming sophomore who sought her out every morning before the day started.

It won't be the same, Iesha Daniels said, without Haniyah, who started calling her "mom" after people at school suggested they looked alike.

Daniels said she doesn't yet know the school's plan to address the death of Woods, who was fatally shot in the early morning hours on Saturday. Woods would have been starting her school year at West Side when school resumes on Tuesday.

Woods was fatally shot at the 100 block of South 10th Street in Newark and was later pronounced dead after she had been transported to the hospital.

"She really touched my heart. It was genuine. It wasn't fake or phony. This is a tragedy. Just a tragedy," Daniels said.

Daniels said Woods was a dancer in the school's band troupe and had a core group of girlfriends.

Darrell Shoulars, director of bands and the leadership and membership of the West Side Campus Marching Band and Drum Corps, posted online that he spoke for the band and drum corps when he said that they loved Woods and that she would be "forever in our hearts.

"To the Woods family, my staff and I and the entire West Side Campus Family are here for you during your time of healing and bereavement! We love you and God will see us all through this!" he wrote.

While funeral arrangements could not be confirmed as of Sunday, Daniels said the school had counselors who would be available to talk with Woods' classmates.

Requests for comment from Woods' family were not immediately returned.

Another woman, who is 25, was grazed in the shooting and taken to the hospital. Neither her name nor condition have been released. A spokesman for the Essex County's Prosecutor's Office said Sunday that the investigation was active and ongoing, but had no further updates.

Sara Jerde may be reached at sjerde@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter

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NEWARK -- Police on Saturday arrested a 15-year-old suspected of stealing a car.

Newark Police saw the black 2002 Honda Accord at 1 a.m. at Quitman Street near Martin Luther King Boulevard, the city Department of Public Safety said.

The car had been reported stolen out of West Orange. NPD1, the Newark public safety helicopter, helped officers track the car to Murray Street near Pennsylvania Avenue.

The 15-year-old got out and ran, police said. Police arrested him.

Police found a loaded handgun in the car.

The teen was charged with receiving stolen property, unlawful possession of a weapon, criminal mischief, eluding and resisting arrest.

Myles Ma may be reached at mma@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MylesMaNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
WASHINGTON TWP. -- A grand jury has indicted a Winslow Township man on charges that he robbed a gas station and later assaulted a resident while stealing his car.

Michael Meyers, 30, of Winslow Township, was indicted on carjacking, robbery and assault charges in connection with a March incident in Washington Township. (Salem County Correctional Facility)

Michael Meyers, 30, allegedly robbed a gas station attendant at knifepoint on the morning of May 12. He fled the Shell station on Route 168 with cash and cigarettes, police said.

About six hours later, authorities say he forced his way into a Forrest Drive home near the gas station to steal the keys for a vehicle.

The homeowner tried to stop him, but during the struggle Meyers allegedly cut the man's forearm with the knife, causing what police described at the time as a "significant" injury.

Meyers took off in the victim's vehicle and was later captured by police from Berlin and Winslow on Route 73 in Camden County.

He was indicted on charges of first-degree carjacking, second-degree burglary, second-degree aggravated assault, second-degree resisting arrest and third-degree possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose, according to the Gloucester County Prosecutor's Office.

Meyers remains jailed in Salem County Correctional Facility on $250,000 bail.

Matt Gray may be reached at mgray@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MattGraySJT. Find the South Jersey Times on Facebook.
Jersey City police car

A car was damage early Sunday morning after gunfire erupted on the south side of the city, officials said.

(Journal File Photo)

JERSEY CITY -- A car was damaged early Sunday morning after gunfire erupted on the south side of the city, officials said.

Shots were fired at about 3:30 a.m. on Lexington Avenue near Bergen Avenue. No one was injured in the shooting that damaged one car, city spokeswoman Jennifer Morrill said.

Morrill did not comment on how many shell casing were found at the scene. The shooting remains under investigation.

This morning's shooting is the second report of gunfire in the city this weekend. A 32-year-old Newark man was shot near Grant Avenue and Martin Luther King Drive on Friday evening.

Caitlin Mota may be reached at cmota@jjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter @caitlin_mota. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.
N.J. waits for the arrival of Tropical Storm Hermine

A crew of utility linemen from C.W. Wright Construction Company, based in Richmond, Va., wait at a JCP&L staging area in a field by Monmouth Race Track. (Robert Sciarrino | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

RED BANK -- Hundreds of miles from a storm called Hermine, the skies in New Jersey this morning may have been sunny and bright, but power company officials still didn't like what what they were seeing.

And said they were bringing in more manpower.

Despite the storm's shift overnight further to the east, a spokesman for Jersey Central Power & Light Co. said there remains a potential for damage to lines and substations along Monmouth and Ocean counties due to winds and storm surge they expect to accompany the tropical storm.

"Most likely right along the coast," said Ron Morano, whose company has opened an Emergency Command Center in Red Bank to manage its response to Tropical Storm Hermine.

Public Service Electric & Gas Co., the state's largest utility, said nothing has changed in terms of their preparations despite the errant track of the storm.

"We're ready for whatever the storm may bring," said spokeswoman Karen Johnson.

The moves come after New Jersey's electric utilities came under harsh criticism in the wake of their failure to keep the public informed, and long outages that kept customers in the dark for days and weeks after Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

JCP&L, with 1.1 million customers in 13 counties across the state, this morning said it has more than 2,400 linemen, forestry workers and other support personnel on standby if high winds and flooding interrupt service.

That workforce includes more than 800 JCP&L personnel, along with another 525 workers from sister utilities in Ohio, West Virginia and Maryland. Company officials said they also have 490 outside electrical contractors and more than 655 foresters ready to be mobilized. Outside crews and vehicles are being staged at Monmouth Race Track in Oceanport; Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson; Blue Claws Stadium in Lakewood; and the Forked River Power Plant in Forked River.

The utility also has eight helicopters ready to be deployed for power line inspections once the severe weather passes through the area. Tony Hurley, JCP&L vice president of operations, said crews have also set up flood barriers and pumps in several key substations.

PSE&G has also contracted for outside line crews and contractors to be in New Jersey, ready to assist with power restoration. The utility said it expects to have a total of 1,150 line and tree personnel, including its own employees, for deployment if needed, including 334 linemen from Hydro Quebec and area contractors, and 133 additional tree contractors .

"All reports indicate that Hermine will stall off our coast until possibly Wednesday," said John Latka, senior vice president-electric and gas operations. "We want to ensure that we have additional line and tree crews ready to respond should the strong winds bring down tree limbs and power lines."

A number of PSE&G switching and substations were elevated or had flood barriers installed as a result of lessons learned after Sandy.

The utility said crews are prepared to work 16-hour shifts after the storm, if needed.

PSE&G also has multiple staging areas set up and said it will set up mobile customer outreach centers to provide ice and bottled water if needed.

Atlantic Electric urged its customers to prepare for the possibility of outages.

"We have internal crews as well as contractor and tree trimming crews on standby and ready to mobilize and assist in any restoration effort," said spokesman Frank Tedesco. "We also have resources from the Exelon utility companies as needed."

To report downed wires or power outages and track outages live:

PSE&G: Call the utility's customer Service line at 1-800-436-PSEG. Click here to view the company's live outage map.

JCP&L: Call 1-888-LIGHTSS (1-888-544-4877) or click "Report Outage" link on www.jcp-l.com. In the event of downed wires, customers should immediately contact the utility or their local police or fire department. Click here to view JCP&L's live outage map.

Atlantic City Electric: Customers can report outages by calling 1-800-833-7476, visiting www.atlanticcityelectric.com or through the utility's mobile app, available for download here. Click here to view ACE's live power outage map.

Rockland Electric Co: The utility, which serves customers in northern Passaic and Bergen Counties, can be reached at 1-877-434-4100. To view Rockland Electgric's live outage map, click here.

Ted Sherman may be reached at tsherman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TedShermanSL. Facebook: @TedSherman.reporter. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
NEW CASTLE, Delaware -- Authorities arrested a New Jersey man on drug charges after a traffic stop yielded 1,499 packets of heroin, according to Delaware State Police.

Authorities seized nearly 1,500 packets of heroin and about $8,000 in cash following a traffic stop. (Delaware State Police)

A state trooper stopped a Cadillac SUV for speeding on Interstate 95 near New Castle on Saturday afternoon.

After smelling the odor of marijuana from the vehicle, the trooper asked the 27-year-old driver and her passenger, identified as Jamal Wade, 32, of Paterson, to exit the vehicle, police said.

A search of the SUV turned up 22.48 grams of heroin, police said, and nearly $8,000 in cash, which is believed to be drug proceeds.

Wade was charged with possession of heroin and jailed on $60,000 secured bond.

The driver, who was released, was issued citations for speeding, driving while suspended, driving without valid insurance and possession of marijuana. State Police did not release the driver's name.

Matt Gray may be reached at mgray@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MattGraySJT. Find the South Jersey Times on Facebook.
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ATLANTIC CITY -- A police officer in critical condition after he was shot Saturday morning is showing improvement, according to a report by the Press of Atlantic City.

The Press quoted a union delegate who reported that the officer has shown slight improvement.

A spokesman for the Atlantic County Prosecutor's Office said the agency had no updates to release as of late Sunday afternoon.

Two city police officers encountered three men robbing three others near Caesars Atlantic City casino around 2:30 a.m. Saturday, authorities said.

One officer was shot right after he got out of his patrol car while his partner returned fire and struck Jerome Damon, 25, of Camden. Damon was found dead nearby, according to the prosecutor's office.

State Police troopers arrested his alleged accomplices, Martell Chisholm, 19, of Millville, and Demetrius Cross, 28, of Bridgeton, in Cumberland County later Saturday.

The injured officer has not been identified. A GoFundMe page has been set up to raise $50,000 for the officer. As of Sunday night, $5,330 has been raised.

Matt Gray may be reached at mgray@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MattGraySJT. Find the South Jersey Times on Facebook.
To the Editor:

Regarding the recent article "(Gov. Chris) Christie vetoes $15 minimum wage pushed by Democrats" in New Jersey:

Here we go again!

Proponents still want to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. It would still be the MINIMUM wage! The prices of goods would have to be raised to pay workers that much.

At $15, some workers could have less buying power than they do now, because they would be paying more in taxes. With rising prices, they would still be hurting.

The only way to win in our economy is to work to get an income higher than the minimum wage.

I praise for Christie for vetoing the recent New Jersey bill. He is not my favorite person, but he got this one right.

As I see it, the ones who higher minimum wages really hurt are senior citizens who have worked and saved so they can enjoy their golden years. Are they going to get a big Social Security benefit increase to offset any big cost-of-living increase related to the minimum wage boost?

How is state Senate President Stephen Sweeney, a major proponent of the $15 minimum, going to take care of that?

Chuck Garrison

Elmer

Trump's deportation idea sounds familiar

To the Editor:

Donald Trump's call for a deportation task force to remove millions of undocumented immigrants from our country is not a new concept.

In Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler had his own deportation task force whose task it was to remove persons it classified as non Aryans, including Jews, as well as communists, gay people, mentally ill persons and Gypsies. Millions were rounded up and, as we know, sent to extermination camps.

Trump does not want to kill the estimated 11 million immigrants who are here illegally; he simply wants them sent back to their countries of origin.

Since many of these 11 million have called the United States their home for many years -- in some cases, for decades -- Trump cannot claim to want to send them "home." America is their home.

Paul S. Bunkin

Turnersville

Send a letter to the editor of South Jersey Times at sjletters@njadvancemedia.com
To where would Donald Trump deport Paul Anthony Ciancia?

Ciancia is the 23-year-old former Pennsville resident who offered a guilty plea Thursday to killing a Transportation Security Officer at Los Angeles International Airport on Nov. 1, 2013. He wounded three others with his semi-automatic rifle, and was himself shot by authorities.

The Associated Press reports that because he will switch his court plea to "guilty," Ciancia will avoid the death penalty and spend life in prison.

His attack on LAX and its federal security personnel sent frightened passengers scurrying through a terminal. It's precisely the kind of event that reminds us of foreign terrorists responsible for carnage at airports and train stations worldwide. But it was committed by an all-American young man, a graduate of prestigious, private Salesianum High School in Delaware. Former neighbors and local police agreed that Ciancia comes from a "good family."

So, here's the conundrum posed by Trump's immigration speech Wednesday night: If Ciancia had entered the United States illegally, or had affirmed loyalty to radical Islam, the GOP presidential candidate would likely have cited the 23-year-old as someone who should never have been on our soil. Yet, American citizens, even those with a warped view of America, have a right to be here.

The motives for Ciancia's rampage aren't verified. But he carried a note stating that he "wanted to kill TSA," signed "Pissed-off Patriot." In other comments cited in press reports, he called TSA screenings "Nazi checkpoints" and described his actions as '"water(ing) the tree of liberty."

We should all feel compassion for the relatives of slain Americans who shared the stage with Trump on Wednesday to speak about how immigrants who were here illegally did the horrific crimes. Clearly, the immigration system, the criminal justice system, or both, failed the victims and their families.

But it's beyond comprehension how the widow and two children of Gerardo Hernandez -- the TSA agent killed by Ciancia -- feel any less pain because he was murdered by a domestic "liberty seeker," not an ISIS terrorist or Mexican national.

Right-wingers once went into an uproar when former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said armed-to-the-teeth homegrown radicals posed a bigger U.S. security threat than al Qaida forces from the Middle East. She may have exaggerated the scale, but cases like Ciancia's prove that she wasn't totally wrong.

Let's patrol our borders better and stop losing track of visa holders. Understand, though, that no one would have dared require that Timothy McVeigh take a loyalty oath to U.S. government, pre-Oklahoma City, in order to stay here. No one had a right to question Paul Ciancia, pre-LAX, about how much he loved federal law-enforcement screeners. It's clearly unconstitutional.

We should indeed try to send immigrants convicted of serious crimes back to their original countries. The full scope of Trump's immigration plan, however, makes a false assumption that we'd be markedly safer as a nation. You can't deport away crime when most of the people who commit it have no place else to go.

Follow NJ.com Opinion on Twitter@NJ_Opinion. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.
The Bridgegate trial opens in just three weeks, and Chris Christie's political fate isn't the only question on our minds. Here's another: Is Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, a man aspiring to be governor, also going to be one of its casualties?



Fulop is not charged in the case, but he has been asked to testify, likely regarding the attempts by the governor's office to win his endorsement. The problem for the mayor is this: E-mails released during the pre-trial maneuvering suggest that the governor's office tried to buy Fulop's endorsement by doing favors for a private firm the mayor represented.



In the end, Fulop did not endorse Christie. The question is whether he engaged in those slippery discussions, and how far they got. If he made a deal, and later reneged, even that could be a crime. It would most certainly be a stain on his already troubled reputation.

Fulop's 2012 job with Port Authority tenant draws scrutiny



Separately, Fulop's previously undisclosed work as a lobbyist for a private client may have violated local ethics rules.



Fulop himself is fueling these concerns by refusing to answer legitimate questions about them. When exactly did he work for the private firm, and how much was he paid? Did he discuss his client's business privately with David Wildstein, the governor's henchman at the bistate agency and a plotter behind the Fort Lee lane closures?



Why would Fulop refuse to answer those questions? Is he hiding damaging information? Is he reflexively secretive? Or is he just an amateur when it comes to damage control?



Some backstory: In 2012, when Fulop was still a councilman, he told the press he was quitting his job in finance to focus on his mayoral campaign. Yet soon after, he quietly accepted another position working for a car company called FAPS. This firm, which modifies foreign cars as they are imported, was seeking an extension on its lease at a Port Authority property, even though it hadn't paid outstanding rent.

Emails shed light on Christie effort to get Fulop support in 2013



Here's where the new e-mails come in. Wildstein emailed Christie's top aide, Bill Stepien: "We have a deal with FAPS, Fulop owes you big time."



Stepien responded, "I hope it's voidable ... pending what happens next year. Thanks a lot -- I know it was a pain in the ass."



Two weeks later, Wildstein wrote Stepien that he had a "good meeting with Fulop today," who was "very open about his intent to endorse." Stepien replied, "Good to hear," but added, "I give him less of a chance than most of our other targets....quite the snake. We'll see....you can't say we haven't tried!"



As predicted, Fulop ultimately endorsed Christie's Democratic opponent in 2013, infuriating the governor's allies. But if Fulop ever dangled the offer of a quid pro quo, it would be criminal.



Fulop says he won't take the fifth at trial. Curiously, he's switched his account of his role at FAPS, first telling the press he was just a "regular employee" working in finance, then acknowledging he was involved in the lease negotiations.



He's refused to comment further on the grounds that he was asked to testify by U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman. But that's a phony excuse. Even the prosecutor's office said it never told Fulop to avoid discussing his role at FAPS.



Fulop hasn't been nailed on anything, but stay tuned. We already had strong evidence that he used city police to create a mini-Bridgegate traffic jam at a Jersey City port terminal to pressure Port Authority over a $400 million lawsuit, and awarded city contracts to Middlesex County political activists in an explicit exchange for their political support.



These emails only add to the doubts he keeps raising about himself, when he calls himself a reformer but in many ways behaves like an old school politician. The bottom line is this: If he did nothing wrong, what does he have to hide?

Follow NJ.com Opinion on Twitter @NJ_Opinion. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.
U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, a rising star in national Democratic politics, isn't up for re-election until 2020, but that hasn't stopped his campaign committee from sending out fundraising solicitations.

The money isn't to re-elect Booker but rather to help him help his colleagues.

In a fundraising letter, Booker sought funds to help him travel around the U.S. and "do everything I can to bring about change" by helping to elect Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Senate Democratic candidates. The mailing was funded by Booker's campaign committee.

It's the latest example of Booker helping his fellow Democrats and raising his own profile. He also raised money for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and campaigned around the country for her.

This time around, Booker is seeking to help Democrats win back the Senate majority they lost in 2014. The effort, if successful, would give Booker a subcommittee chairmanship or two and could restore New Jersey's senior U.S. senator, Robert Menendez, to the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, if he is acquitted of federal corruption charges. (Menendez's term expires in 2019)

"I need your support to help progressives up and down the ticket in 2016. Are you in?" Booker said on a special page on his website earmarked for helping Democrats win back the Senate majority.

He also has sent out separate fundraising solicitations for Senate Democratic candidates for Republican-held seats in Missouri and Wisconsin.

The senator has worked with Republicans on issues such as overhauling the criminal justice system and broke bread with U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), one of the conservative members of the Senate and an unsuccessful candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

Booker's letter discussed the Senate Democratic filibuster to force votes on legislation to ban those on the terrorist watch list from buying weapons and to require background checks for all gun purchases.

He was on the floor for the entire filibuster, which ended when Senate Republican leaders agreed to votes on both measures. They then blocked action on the bills once they reached the Senate floor.

Ten Republican-held Senate seats are viewed as competitive this year, according to the Cook Political Report, compared with just one Democratic seat. Democrats need a net gain of five seats to win the majority, or four seats if Clinton is elected president.
DECATUR  Bringing a taste of Broadway to Decatur on behalf of Decatur Christian School last year was such a success, it's coming back this year.

Investment Planners and IPI Wealth Management will again sponsor the show, this year featuring The Jersey Tenors, featuring former Phantom of the Opera star Brian Noonan. The performance will be on Nov. 12 at the Lincoln Square Theatre. General admission is $25 and reserved seating is $40. Block ticket purchases are also available at $25 per ticket. A special presale is now going on through Sept. 15 and tickets are available at Investment Planners, 226 W. Eldorado St. or by phone at (217) 425-6340.

It's the same kind of Broadway features and very light opera (as last year), said Julie Hovis, director of marketing, events and communications at Investment Planners. It's fun and fast-paced.

Several downtown restaurants are partnering with Investment Planners and are giving a percentage of their sales that night to Decatur Christian as well. Participating establishments will have window cards on display.

The Decatur Club is offering a three-course dinner package from 5 to 7 p.m. For $30, patrons receive a mixed greens salad, beef medallions with herb espagnol, roasted root vegetables, julienne of zucchini, squash and carrots and New York cheesecake with choice of strawberry or blueberry topping. Post-show meet and greet is $10 and includes olive tapenade on crostini, tomato bruschetta, spinach and artichoke dip with toasted pita points and a cash bar.

This is not just to benefit (Decatur Christian), Hovis said. It's great for the whole community, I think. The whole downtown last year was lit up and everyone was excited and all the businesses were ready to have a full house for dinner and a party afterwards. It was just like you were in New York.

I think we have a really nice downtown, and people just don't get out as much as they used to, said Jeff Ingle, general manager of the Decatur Club. At least, I feel like in the last couple of years, everyone was all abuzz when it was fresh and new, and now people come downtown less than they have in the last couple of years, especially on the weekends. I think this is a great opportunity to flood all the restaurants downtown, especially with people who many not otherwise choose to be there on a Saturday.

Mayor Julie Moore Wolfe and WSOY's Brian Byers will be on hand again, as they were last year, and speed painter Karl Jendry will be back, too. He will create three paintings in 10 minutes each to be auctioned off.

I was surprised at how many people had never been in the Lincoln, and were excited to see the inside of the Lincoln, Hovis said. I know after our show, the Lincoln said website hits went through the roof and they feel that sort of jump-started some people coming back for some other things they've done since then.

The event is a big fundraiser for Decatur Christian School, and last year the show sold out. Sponsoring businesses will be included in publicity materials for the event.
WASHINGTON -- Hermine, the unpredictable coastal storm, is shifting east, and that's "good news" for New Jersey coastal communities, Gov. Chris Christie said Sunday.

Appearing on CBS' "Face the Nation," Christie said he still expected some flooding in Atlantic, Cape May and Ocean counties beginning later Sunday, but less severe than originally feared.

"We got some good news overnight," Christie said. "Unless it makes a turn back west, I think we'll look at moderate flooding rather than a very severe impact."

Christie on Saturday declared a state of emergency for the three coastal counties, saying, "the impending weather conditions constitute an imminent hazard, which threatens and presently endangers the health, safety, and resources of the residents."

Tropical storm warnings remained in effect and New Jersey utilities had extra crews on standby in case they were needed.

Christie is scheduled to discuss the storm in Morristown shortly after noon.

Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JDSalant. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.
DECATUR  The nation is in the midst of an epidemic of fatal overdoses from heroin, which is flooding in from Mexico to fill a demand partly caused by people who get hooked on powerful opioid prescription drugs, following surgeries or other painful challenges.

In Macon County alone, there were 11 known deaths from heroin overdoses in 2015.

In response to this crisis, the Macon County Sheriff's Office is offering users of heroin and other dangerous drugs a new deal.

Users who want to break free of their addictions are invited to bring drugs, paraphernalia or just themselves into the Law Enforcement Center, in exchange for a new lease on life through a drug treatment program.

Those who walk in will not be prosecuted, said Undersheriff Howard Buffett, whose foundation is funding the At Risk Program. The difficult thing is building trust between the sheriff's office and those who want help.

Buffett, who goes out on routine service details, said he has been assigned to three fatal overdose calls in the past nine months. the victims were women, about 18 to 36 years old.

In one of the tragic cases, Buffett recalled that it was difficult to locate the parents of the deceased woman.

The woman just left home, he said. Her mom didn't know where she was and this was the outcome.

Buffett recently read a news article about a program that was initiated by the police chief of Gloucester, Mass., in which addicts have been placed in rehab facilities instead of jails.

About 50 percent of the inmates in our jail are drug addicts, who are involved with drugs just for personal use. Our jails can not handle this, Buffett said. They might have stolen something. They're not violent criminals, not dealers, not bad people. What they have is similar to a drinking problem.

Sheriff Tom Schneider said they are working with local agencies to procure bed space for people who come into the program, which started in February. In some cases, individuals could be referred to outpatient programs.

We have a lot of community partners who are eager to assist, Schneider said.

Addictions to heroin and other drugs damage entire families, including children. In one case, Buffett and a deputy interviewed a female heroin addict and her daughter, who was about 12.

The mother used her daughter to steal items in order to fund her habit.

She broke down and started crying. She said, 'I don't want to be like my mom,'  Buffett recalled.

The sheriff's department has also initiated a First Time Offender program, in which those arrested with small amounts of marijuana or paraphernalia will receive amnesty if they agree to stay off drugs for six months. A police report is completed but is later discarded if the individual completes a seminar on drug abuse and submits to six months of random drug testing.

As long as we can determine they're not trafficking, not driving under the influence, we can assist them and stop them before they get into the more life-damaging substances like heroin and cocaine, said deputy Mike Miller, director of the amnesty programs.

Miller, who formerly served two terms as sheriff of Shelby County, said giving people who use marijuana an option instead of a criminal conviction could be critical to their well-being, because it could affect their future employment, education or acceptance in the military.

Turning a young person away from marijuana, considered a gateway drug, could prevent more serious drug use.

Many people believe they will never get addicted to heroin.

With heroin, you can't control it after the first time you use it. It has you, once that addiction kicks in, Miller said. A majority of folks who try it the first time are constantly trying to match that first time high. You know it's wrong. You know it's not good for you.

But none of it matters. The only thing that matters is getting that high. You'll put everything aside to get that high. They separate themselves from their families. The addicition is much stronger than the love of their family or even for themselves.

The key to success is to open the doors to treatment facilities for addicts to enter as soon as they agree to do so. The temptation is great to change their minds later.

Miller said he is working on agreements with treatment facilities, including HSHS St. Mary's Hospital and Gateway Alcohol and Drug Treatment Center, Springfield.

They have the most availability, Miller said. They're 24 hours a day. That's the most important to us. When they come and they ask for help we feel that is the time we need to get the ball roling for them.

In some cases, delaying treatment could mean not receiving any help at all.

If that addiction is strong and they have a chance to get home and rethink the situation, they could put it off, Miller said.

One of the first people Miller spoke with decided he did not want to go into treatment right away. He said he had some personal matters to take care of.

He called in the next day and said he changed his mind. He admitted he went home and got some heroin. Otherwise, he would have been sick.

They are sometimes afraid of going through the pain of detoxification from the drug.

When they run out of money, they get sick and then they become desperate and steal an do things they would not normally do to get the drugs.

When Miller ran across addicts during his 18 years with the Shelby County sheriff's department, he viewed their activities as criminal behavior. It is a criminal offense to possess drugs such as heroin and cocaine, both labeled as controlled substances by state statute.

That is a complete backward way to look at this, Miller said, adding that drug addiction is a disease.

In recent years, the explosion of use of opiod pain medication such as oxycodone and fentanyl has caused people who have become addicted to these drugs to turn to heroin after their prescriptions run out.

Heroin is cheaper, Miller said.

Individuals from every background are finding themselves hooked on heroin.

I am seeing more and more people who have come from families which gave them many opportunities who have turned to this, Miller said. Your stereotype of an addict does not always apply. It can be an executive. It can be a co-worker. Our stereotypes come from TV and movies, the skinny people, unkempt, dirty with sunken features.

Miller considers himself fortunate to be able to work on such a positive program.

I know I can't help everyone, but this is very rewarding, knowing we have this resource, Miller said. Howard is really big on helping people. We can reach out to a lot of people. Even if we can help a few, it can be great.

The sheriff's program is modeled after the Police Assisted Addiction and Recovery Initiative, co-founded by Gloucester Police Chief Leonard Campanello and businessman John Rosenthal.

Rosenthal said about 450 people have been placed in treatment since June 2015, after contacting the Gloucester police deparment.

Two hundred and fifty treatment providers have partnered with PAARI and offered scholarships, Rosenthal said. Free treatment is offered for people without the ability to pay. One hundred and forty police departments in 20 states have partnered with PAARI and replicated all or part of our Angel Initiative.

One of the main causes of the fatal opioid epidemic is the practice of cutting heroin with fentanyl, a drug 50 times more potent than heroin, which was originally manufactured for surgery patients.

There is a heroin related death in the United States every 11 minutes.

More people will die this year from heroin than from auto accidents, Rosenthal said. What's criminal is 80 percent of people addicted to heroin or opioids start with legallly prescibed and aggressively marketed painkillers.

Ironically, the same system that is complicit in causing addictions, is often reluctant to help with the cure.

Because of the stigma of addiction, the health care system discriminates against people with the diesease of addiction unlike other chronic diseases that require long-term care, such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes. At hospitals, emergency rooms routinely discharge people who are overdosing to the street to die. Police are on the front lines of overdoses, because the health care system has abandoned people with this disease. So police are the new entry point for treatment: Police are the heroes.

Rosenthal, who became associated with the Gloucester chief through working with law enforcement to reduce gun violence, said he got involved with the effort to curb addictions because of seeing the effects in his family.

I buried my own nephew in February 2016 from a fentanyl overdose, he said. He was oversprescribed painkillers. He was a successful stockbroker with an MBA, just 34 years old.

Buffett also experienced the heartache of a personal tragedy, the death of his cousin, Billy Rogers, who died of a heroin overdose when he was 37.

That was one of the toughest phone calls I ever had to make, Buffett recalled. Buffett's mother found Rogers, a talented, well-known guitarist, in his room, unresponsive. My mom calls me at 8 o'clock at night. She said, 'You've got to call your cousin, Billy's brother, and tell him what happened.' 

Buffett said his passion for helping drug addicts and preventing addiction was born through the tragedy of losing the cousin he loved.

It sticks with you," Buffett said. A drug problem is not just that person's problem.
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.
URBANA  A civil lawsuit has been filed in U.S. District Court alleging that the Macon County Sheriff's Office, Decatur Memorial Hospital and individual medical personnel and correctional officers were responsible for the wrongful death of a 35-year-old inmate who died in custody last year.

Michael A. Carter, a 35-year-old Decatur man who was being housed in federal custody in the Macon County Jail, died July 18, 2015, as a result of a complication of diabetes.

The suit alleges that Carter's death was the result of medical malpractice and denial of medical care, as the defendants improperly confiscated and withheld Carter's diabetic medication without providing him with a replacement.

According to the complaint, filed July 18, the defendants failed to monitor Carter's condition and failed to take action when his condition did not improve. There are also allegations of brutality by correctional officers.

Carter, who was booked into the Macon County Jail on July 13, was deprived of emergency medical care for an obviously serious diabetic condition and denied emergency ambulatory transport to the hospital, the complaint said. He died just five days after his arrest, alone in a jail cell due to diabetic ketoacidosis.

After Carter was assigned a jail cell, he began to complain that he was ill and requested medical attention and his medications, the complaint says. During the following two days, he repeatedly complained to his fiancee on the phone about extreme abdominal pain, vomiting, weakness, fatigue, and shortness of breath.

On July 15, he was transferred to the medical unit in the jail, but was still not given medication to treat his diabetic condition. He was transferred back to a cell in general population, where he was not monitored while in medical distress, and received no treatment for his worsening diabetic condition.

Two days later, Sheila McGee, Carter's mother, called the jail and spoke with Jo Bates, a nurse at the jail, named as a defendant in the case. McGee told Bates that she, too, was a nurse, and that her son was diabetic and having respiratory distress, shortness of breath, vomiting and was clearly disoriented. McGee warned defendant Bates that his symptoms sounded like diabetes ketoacidosis, an emergency life-threatening medical situation.

When McGee asked the nurse to immediately transfer him to a nearby hospital for medical attention, Bates refused, telling Mr. Carter's mother that Dr. (Robert) Braco would check on him the following day.

Braco is also named as a defendant, along with DMH Corporate Health Services and five correctional officers.

According to the narrative in the complaint, Carter was returned to the jail's medical unit July 17. Dr. Braco continued to refuse to give Mr. Carter diabetic medication to treat his deteriorating condition. Despite his obvious and serious medical distress, Dr. Braco ordered his return to a general population cell the following morning.

The following morning, Carter was disoriented, unable to stand on his own and could not speak clearly, the lawsuit alleges. His glucose level was dangerously high. He still had not been given insulin or his prescribed diabetes medication.

Carter was forcibly removed from his medical cell by correctional officers, whose actions included kicking him, stepping on his hand and placing him in a wheelchair by picking him up around his neck, the complaint said. He was placed in a segregated housing area reserved for uncooperative inmates. His cell was not equipped with video surveillance for medical monitoring.

When Bates told defendant Dr. Braco that Mr. Carter was in obvious medical distress, Dr. Braco refused to allow Mr. Carter's emergency transfer to the hospital, saying he would evaluate him on his regular rounds later that day. At the urging of a jail officer, Braco later relented and authorized the transfer, but only by patrol car because he didn't want to incur the $1,000 bill for an ambulance.

While discussions about transferring him to a hospital were under way, Michael Carter was found unresponsive in a jail cell. He was transported by ambulance to Decatur Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 12:35 p.m., according to testimony at a coroner's inquest held Aug. 31, 2015.

The plaintiff in the case is Felita McGee, the administrator of Carter's estate. Rahsaan A. Gordon of Chicago is the plaintiff's attorney.

Sheriff Thomas Schneider, who was not named as a defendant, said he can not comment on anything in relation to the Carter's death due to pending litigation.

There is no greater loss than the loss of a loved one, Schneider said. I continue to offer my prayers for the family of Michael Carter.

Carter was taken into federal custody in the jail, where he was awaiting trial on charges of attempted distribution of cocaine and discharge of a firearm during and in relation to a drug trafficking crime.
The United States Geological Survey said a 5.6 magnitude earthquake happened at 7:02 a.m. Saturday in north-central Oklahoma, on the fringe of an area where regulators had stepped in to limit wastewater disposal. That temblor matches a November 2011 quake in the same region.

An increase in magnitude 3.0 or greater earthquakes in Oklahoma has been linked to underground disposal of wastewater from oil and natural gas production.

The Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which since 2013 has asked wastewater-well owners to reduce disposal volumes in parts of the state, is requiring 37 wells in a 514-square-mile area around the epicenter of the earthquake to shut down within seven to 10 days because of previous connections between the injection of wastewater and earthquakes.

"All of our actions have been based on the link that researchers have drawn between the Arbuckle disposal well operations and earthquakes in Oklahoma," spokesman Matt Skinner said Saturday. "We're trying to do this as quickly as possible, but we have to follow the recommendations of the seismologists, who tell us everything going off at once can cause an (earthquake)."

Skinner said the commission's "area of interest" includes another 211 square miles in Osage County, but doesn't know how many wells may be involved because the area is under the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency. The commission is working with that agency.

"EPA decides on the wells in Osage County. We don't know anything about Osage County; legally, we're not even allowed to ask," Skinner said.

People in Kansas City and St. Louis; Chicago; Gilbert, Ariz.; Fayetteville and Little Rock, Ark.; Des Moines, Iowa; Memphis, Tenn.; and Big Lake in southwest Texas, all reported feeling the earthquake. Dallas TV station WFAA tweeted that the quake shook their studios, too.

Pawnee County Emergency Management Director Mark Randell said no buildings collapsed in the town of 2,200 about nine miles southeast of the epicenter. "We've got buildings cracked," Randell said. "Most of it's brick and mortar, old buildings from the early 1900s."

Randell also said a man suffered a minor head injury when part of a fireplace fell on him as he protected a child.

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin has declared a state of emergency for the county, allowing state agencies to make emergency purchases related to disaster relief and preparedness. The declaration is also the first step toward seeking federal aid, should it be necessary

The damage is not as severe as the 2011 quake near Prague, Okla., about 60 miles south of Pawnee, despite being the same magnitude and approximately the same depth. Saturday's was 3.7 miles deep, compared to 3.1 miles in 2011. Both are shallow quakes, during which shaking is more intense, similar to setting off "a bomb directly under a city," USGS seismologist Susan Hough said.

However, hard bedrock beneath the surface in north-central Oklahoma is likely the reason for less damage, Oklahoma Geological Survey geophysicist Jefferson Chang said, adding that the subsurface around Prague is softer.

"It's pretty much comparable to the Prague event," Chang said. "But in harder rock, it won't shake as much."

Pawnee furniture store owner Lee Wills said he first thought it was a thunderstorm.

"Then it just ... Everything went crazy after that. It just started shaking," said Wills, who lives about 2 miles outside of town. "It rocked my house like a rubber band. Threw stuff off cabinets and out of cabinets, broke glasses."
Dear Dr. Roach: My grandmother had very advanced Alzheimer's disease by the time she died. My mother, who is now 60, is showing frequent signs of memory loss, but she doesn't want to admit that she has Alzheimer's. What should I do? I've understood for a long time that she's going to suffer the same fate as her mother, but if there's any action I can take now, I want to know.

 D.T.

A: It is up to your mother whether she wants to move forward and try to get a diagnosis. However, I would recommend that she do, as there are several benefits.

First, what she has might not be Alzheimer's: It may be something very treatable. Not everybody with a family history of Alzheimer's gets the disease. This may be causing you undue stress. Another reason to seek a diagnosis is that the treatments we have for Alzheimer's, though limited, are best when begun early. It also might be possible to enter into a trial for new treatments. Finally, she can make plans for the future, including financial and end-of-life care. All adults should do that anyway, but now is really the time for her to make sure.

Blood donations

Dear Dr. Roach: I am a 65-year-old woman who contracted hepatitis C 40 years ago from a life-saving blood transfusion. I was fortunate to receive effective treatment for hepatitis C, and have been cured. I have no liver damage and am in good health. I would like to be able to donate blood and become an organ donor. Has there been any research done to see if this is possible?

 S.C.

A: You cannot donate blood with any history of hepatitis B or C, even if it is thought that you have been cured for many years. The blood banks are extra vigilant to maintain the safety of the blood supply, and are very reluctant to change policies, even if they seem to be outdated.

However, the many people still living with hepatitis C often need organs, especially the liver and kidneys, and people with a history of hepatitis C (active or cured) certainly may donate organs, which are donated to people who have hepatitis C.

We need more organ donors. Over 120,000 people in the U.S. alone are waiting for organs. It's easy to sign up at www.organdonor.gov in the United States, or www.cantransplant.ca in Canada.

The booklet on hepatitis explains the three different kinds. Readers can obtain a copy by writing: Dr. Roach, Book No. 503, 628 Virginia Dr., Orlando, FL 32803. Enclose a check or money order (no cash) for $4.75 with the recipient's printed name and address. Please allow four weeks for delivery.

Fillings and ALS

Dear Dr. Roach: Does the dental amalgam that is used for fillings cause ALS?

 Anon.

A: Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, often called Lou Gehrig's disease, is a progressive degenerative disease of the nervous system. The cause of ALS is not known. Most experts believe that there is a genetic predisposition to ALS (an interesting gene, NEK-1, has just been identified), and that certain environmental exposures can lead to the disease. Although heavy metals like lead, arsenic and mercury (found in dental amalgam) are toxic to the nervous system in large doses, there is no reliable evidence connecting them to ALS.

Veterans of the Gulf War have higher-than-expected rates of ALS, and one theory is that bacteria found in desert sand, disturbed by military vehicles, might trigger ALS. We still have a great deal more to learn about both the cause of and treatment for ALS.

The ALS Association, www.alsa.org, does research, advocates for people with the disease and has much good information on its website.
A Wisconsin Court ruled last week that giant inflatable rats are protected by the First Amendment.

"Scabby the Rat," as the inflatable rat is called, was invented in Chicago in 1990 and is often displayed at work site protests in Northwest Indiana when contractors use non-union labor. The name and scabs on its belly are a reference to scabs, union slang for strikebreakers and non-union construction workers.

Scabby was a prominent companion on the picket lines when United Steelworkers Local 7-1 struck at the BP Whiting Refinery last year.

The town of Grand Chute in Wisconsin sued Laborers Local Union No. 330 after it displayed Scabby the Rat outside a masonry contractor in 2014, arguing it violated the town's sign ordinance. The union contended the town did not enforce the ordinance against other signs and that it was violating its right to free speech.

A U.S. District Court sided with the town, saying the sign ordinance was about aesthetics and safety, not the content of speech. The union appealed the case to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, which found selective enforcement of the sign ordinance went against the First Amendment.

"The giant rat in this case no doubt causes distress to the executives of the car dealership that the rat is picketing, though less distress than that of the women seeking to enter the abortion clinic through a mob of abortion protesters," the Court of Appeals wrote in its decision. "Yet after McCullen it is clear that both forms of rude speech are protected by the First Amendment."

The judges said union rats were protected political speech and even suggested they might be "handsome."

"The town cites two such concerns: aesthetics and safety. Both are spurious as applied to the union rat," the judges wrote in their ruling. "Some people may indeed think it rather handsome, in a way that one might find a dinosaur rather handsome (in fact the rat bears at least a faint resemblance to Tyrannosaurus Rex)others that it is repulsive (those protuberant teeth!), but government cannot be allowed to suppress the visual equivalent of political speech without a more substantial aesthetic complaint; there are negative reactions even to great art."

The court sent the case back to the District Court, ordering it to find judgment in favor of the union.
NEW YORK  Fifteen years after the Sept. 11th attacks, Lower Manhattan has been reborn.

The revitalization of the citys downtown, powered by $30 billion in government and private investment, includes not just the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site, but also two new malls filled with upscale retailers, thousands of new hotel rooms and dozens of eateries ranging from a new Eataly to a French food hall, Le District.

The statistics alone are stunning. There are 29 hotels in the neighborhood, compared to six before 9/11. More than 60,000 people live downtown, nearly triple the number in 2000. And last year, the area hosted a record 14 million visitors, according to the Alliance for Downtown New York.

And while theres plenty to do downtown for free, including seeing the 9/11 memorial park, visitors have also shown a willingness to pay relatively steep prices for certain attractions. The 9/11 museum, which charges $24, has drawn 6.67 million visitors since its May 2014 opening. The observatory atop One World Trade Center, which charges $34, has drawn 3 million people in the 15 months since it opened. In comparison, the Statue of Liberty gets about 4 million visitors a year.

I dont think anyone would have expected that we would have rebounded so robustly, so quickly, said Jessica Lappin, president of the Alliance for Downtown New York. Theres the physical transformation at the site itself, but theres also the neighborhood. Theres an energy here. People could have given up after 9/11 and nobody would have blamed them. Instead there has been a tenacity, a dedication that is inspiring.

The Alliance for Downtown New York was founded before 9/11, in 1995, when the neighborhood was on its heels, Lappin recalled. The vacancy rate was going through the roof. At the time, downtown was a strictly 9-to-5 area, keyed to the workday rhythms of Wall Street and City Hall, deserted at night and on weekends. Revitalization efforts were just getting underway when 9/11 hit and changed everything.

But as government funding for disaster recovery began to pour in, private investment followed, spurring a massive rebuilding that continues to this day. For blocks surrounding One World Trade, half-built towers and cranes still clutter the sky, barricades and scaffolding line the streets, and the whine and clatter of jackhammers fill the air. Construction workers in hardhats are as ubiquitous as tourists.

The recession hampered efforts to bring businesses back, but Lappin said private sector employment  266,000 workers  is finally nearing pre-9/11 numbers. Conde Nast and Time Inc. have relocated downtown. Group M, one of the worlds biggest advertising firms, will move into Three World Trade Center when its complete.

So far, three towers have been built with plans for more.

The neighborhood also is becoming a shopping destination. Brookfield Place opened last year with luxury retailers like Gucci and Diane von Furstenberg. It also houses Le District, a French food hall with a creperie, cafe, bar and more, as well as Hudson Eats, with outposts of popular local eateries like Mighty Quinns BBQ and Num Pangs Cambodian sandwiches.

A second shopping center, Westfield, opened in August inside the Oculus, a striking white structure designed by famed architect Santiago Calatrava. The curves of the Oculus two ribbed wings are silhouetted by One World Trade rising behind it. Inside the Oculus, retailers range from Apple to Kate Spade to The Art of Shaving. The complex connects to Four World Trade, where the new Eataly NYC Downtown offers a bounty of bread, cheese, coffee, produce, pasta and more. Below ground a massive transit center houses subways and a New Jersey PATH train station.

Elsewhere in Lower Manhattan, a Tom Colicchio restaurant is planned for the just-opened Beekman Hotel; the soon-to-open Four Seasons hotel will host a Wolfgang Puck restaurant, and the storied Nobu restaurant will move downtown from Tribeca. Other downtown attractions include Alexander Hamiltons tomb in the graveyard of Trinity Church, the National Museum of the American Indian and the SeaGlass Carousel, which opened last year near where boats leave for the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.

But near the top of many visitors New York itineraries these days is a pilgrimage to the place where planes turned the twin towers into smoking piles of twisted steel and rubble. The tranquil park formally known as the National September 11 Memorial features tree-lined walkways and reflecting pools in the footprints of the twin towers. Bronze parapets around the pools bear the names of the nearly 3,000 dead.

On Monday, park visitors included three siblings from Barcelona, Arantxa, Meus and Pau Saloni, on their first trip to New York. Its really sad to see all the names, but its nice to remember them, Meus said.

Also visiting Monday were Su-Ting Fu and his family, in town from suburban Westchester. We lived in New York City when 9/11 happened, he said. But we hadnt come to see this until today. Its nice to see everything theyve done to memorialize it, but I also love the greenery, and how it feels very much like a living type of memorial.
INDIANAPOLIS  Its not unusual for a politician to write a book.

Up-and-comers often put pen to paper to sell an agenda or promote a campaign. Prominent or controversial officials tend to cash-in at the end of their careers by writing about what theyve learned serving the people.

But Hoosiers this year have a rare opportunity to slip into the minds of the two major party candidates for Indiana governor through the books each wrote and self-published long ago, when neither expected to find his name on the 2016 ballot.

Democrat John Gregg wrote From Sandborn to the Statehouse in 2008. It details his political journey from a small town in west-central Indiana to become a three-term Speaker of the Indiana House only to leave politics behind in 2003 to ensure hed be there for his two sons as they grew up.

Republican Eric Holcomb in 2012 wrote Leading the Revolution: Lessons from the Mitch Daniels Era. The biography of his former boss and history of Daniels two terms as governor (2005-13), also is a primer on how to apply Daniels management style to business and other enterprises.

While its not entirely possible to use either book to predict how Gregg or Holcomb would lead Indiana or address specific policy issues if elected Nov. 8, both books do reveal the authors personality and provide a greater sense of his political philosophy than youre likely to encounter at a campaign event.

The books are available at some public libraries and can intermittently be found at used bookshops throughout Indiana or online.

From Sandborn to the Statehouse

Unsurprisingly, the book by the ever gregarious Gregg is loaded with anecdotes from a time before instant social media posts and cell phone cameras made many lawmakers afraid of their own shadows and sapped most of the fun from Indiana politics.

For example, Gregg explains that one of the most important qualities for a successful Hoosier candidate is being able to eat copious amounts of food.

You gotta be able to eat at two or three dinners a night and gotta be able to eat pie and homemade cake at each one of them. And, of course, we all know the best pie crust is made with lard, Gregg writes. You gotta be able to eat some good homemade cookies, and you gotta be able to eat corn dog after corn dog at the county fair and really enjoy it.

I rose to that occasion many times.

Gregg says given a choice hed always prefer to skip a Democratic Party function to attend a community chili dinner, fish fry, chicken dinner or church social because thats where real, everyday Hoosiers are.

Though his book also is peppered with stories about past and present politicos, including President Bill Clinton, then-Gov. Evan Bayh, Republican House Speaker Brian Bosma, current Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett and pure Lake County former state Rep. Chet Dobis, D-Merrillville, among others.

In the Statehouse, Gregg said he learned early in his first term in 1987 that he could make a difference, even with Republicans in charge, simply by reading legislation and being prepared to point out problems and suggest changes during House committee meetings.

At the same time, during debate on Republican Gov. Robert Orrs A+ education plan, I also learned that sometimes when people tell you theyre against something it doesnt mean theyre always against something  theyre just against it at that time, he writes. Valuable experience.

He praises lawmakers who take time getting to know their colleagues across the aisle because it bolsters chamber camaraderie and produces better policy: Its hard to chew out a person after youve chewed a meal with him.

Gregg was elected House Speaker in 1996 and improved operations by starting on time, prohibiting staffers from casting votes for absent legislators, banning smoking and promoting civility.

He described the House under his watch as: Nothing but an organization of your friends and neighbors who have decided they want to help make the place better. Theyre human, theyve got a sense of humor and theyre just a lot like me and you.

In an ironic bit of foreshadowing, Gregg declares in his book that hed never run for governor because modern candidates have to spend so many hours fundraising  which is exactly what Gregg has been doing most of the time since announcing his bid for governor in 2015.

Leading the Revolution

Holcombs book, similar to the man, is more restrained than Greggs as he strives to be useful in an under-the-radar kind of way.

The focus is almost entirely on Daniels, for whom Holcomb worked in various capacities starting in 2003, including as re-election campaign manager and chairman of the Indiana Republican Party from 2010-13.

Holcomb, who Gov. Mike Pence appointed lieutenant governor in March but never has been elected to public office in his own right, says until he met Daniels he was a hyper-partisan operative willing to tug as hard as the opposition pulled and that his outlook on what could be achieved through the political process was set on low.

Over the course of nine years working with My Man Mitch, however, my belief in our governmental system has been reinforced as I have witnessed proof that it can still work, Holcomb writes. Mitch eloquently spoke a different political language, one in which ideas, no matter whose they were, remained paramount.

Holcomb uses examples of challenges overcome during the Daniels administration to teach short lessons that he says are as applicable to business as they were in politics, including the need for clear plans, a focus on people, unwavering dedication to beliefs, quality staff, boldness, staying disciplined, taking calculated risks and leaving something behind.

To illustrate his call for creating your own convention wisdom, Holcomb explains that in Daniels first run for office he repeatedly campaigned in heavily unionized and Democratic Lake County to send the message that Mitch would leave no community behind and he would root for the whole state, not just attend to particular parts of it that rewarded him.

Holcomb said that effort paid off two years later when union leaders happily stood beside Daniels as he announced the $3.8 billion windfall from leasing the Indiana Toll Road for 75 years would be used to construct and rebuild highways throughout the state  employing thousands of union workers.

Be the creator of your own alliances, Holcomb writes. If you are on opposite sides one year and won without them, consider forgiving them and offering an olive branch. As Mitch always said, Im too lazy to carry a grudge.

Holcomb emphasizes that leaders always have to be open to new ideas and should look for them everywhere, which is why Daniels stayed in Hoosier homes while traveling instead of hotels, but a leader should also keep a literal list of things he or she will never compromise on and stick to it.

Voters will understand, accept and even reward candidates whom they perceive to mean what they say and say what they mean, even if they do not agree 100 percent of the time, he writes. If you tell taxpayers you will balance the books, they will understand when you have to make tough choices to get there.
The Hanover Central High School student council received notification that the Indiana Association of Student Councils Inc. recognized the group as an Honors Council for the 2015-2016 school year. IASC is a statewide nonprofit organization that provides leadership training and opportunities focusing on education, service and character development for local student councils and their members in the state of Indiana.

As their sponsor I am so incredibly proud of our Hanover students, said teacher and sponsor Tracey Haskell. The Student Councils hard work on many projects earned them the recognition. The 2015-2016 HCHS Student Council efforts included: homecoming week events, spirit games, attendance at the state convention, hosting candidates night, a food drive to benefit local food pantries, food pantry service in East Chicago, coordination and hosting a Veterans Day program, two blood drives, and recognized Hanover staff members during Teacher/Staff Appreciation week. The council also remembered the tragic loss of two Hanover classmates and planted a memorial tree at the Hanover Central High School in honor of Alton Bradley, who died in March 2015 and Chloe Burks died in May 2012.

School year 2015-2016 was the second consecutive year teams of students at Hanover Central High School led by student council members competed to raise funds for Riley Childrens Hospital.

Many schools participate in raising funds for Rileys and raise several hundred dollars in the process, but our students raised $6,000, Haskell said. I love our kids, they are awesome.
WASHINGTON -- Mark Burns has done well for himself as a Donald Trump surrogate.

The African American pastor, in his Twitter bio, says he "can be seen on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC & Fox Business Network" and provides a link to a Time profile titled "Meet Donald Trump's Top Pastor." He got a speaking slot at the Republican convention, and the Trump campaign has sent out his quotes validating the candidate.

On Monday, this Trump mouthpiece took it upon himself to tweet a cartoon of Hillary Clinton in blackface, holding a sign proclaiming "#@!** THE POLICE" and saying, "I ain't no ways tired of pandering to African-Americans."

In the ensuing (and predictable) backlash, Trump senior adviser Boris Epshteyn tried to disown the surrogate, telling MSNBC's Kristen Welker that Burns "speaks for himself." Burns, unchastened, called in to the same show to defend himself, saying "we're not playing the political PC game to make you feel good." Only hours later did he delete the offending image and tweet: "I want to Apologize for my Twit."

But there's no way to apologize for all of the twits speaking for Trump.

Trump's surrogates are a decidedly B-list group of Trump supporters who argue his case on the airwaves. Though all presidential campaigns have surrogate networks, Trump has a complication: Credentialed conservatives and elected Republicans generally won't defend him. And so the cable news outlets scrape the bottom of the barrel to find people willing to make Trump's case. Little wonder veteran GOP operative Kevin Kellems quit as head of Trump's surrogate operation earlier this summer after less than two weeks on the job.

As Burns was provoking the blackface brouhaha, CNN was dealing with an ethical morass over Trump surrogate Corey Lewandowski, whom CNN put on contract as a commentator after he was ousted as Trump's campaign manager. But it turned out Lewandowski continued to be paid $20,000 a month by the campaign; "severance," the campaign said. Late Monday, ABC News reported that Lewandowski  still with CNN  was back to advising Trump, talking to the candidate almost every day and "running the show" at Trump rallies.

Yet Lewandowski is hardly the most exotic animal in Trump's surrogate circus.

Al Baldasaro, a surrogate for Trump on veterans' issues, said in a radio interview that Clinton should be "put in the firing line and shot for treason." He also suggested Khizr Khan, the Gold Star father who spoke at the Democratic convention, is a "Muslim Brotherhood agent."

Surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes, a TV regular, said after Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine spoke in Spanish: "I'm hoping I'm not going to have to start kind of brushing up on my 'Dora the Explorer' to understand some of the speeches."

Rudy Giuliani, once revered as "America's mayor," has become a punchline as Trump surrogate for playing doctor on Fox News: "Go online and put down 'Hillary Clinton illness.' Take a look at the videos for yourself."

Surrogate Omarosa Manigault, once a contestant on "The Apprentice," defended violence against demonstrators at Trump events: "You get what's coming to you." Andrew Dean Litinsky, also a former "Apprentice" contestant, defended a 78-year-old Trump supporter who sucker-punched a black protester at a Trump event: "It looks like good exercise."

On CNN, surrogate Jeffrey Lord has distinguished himself by saying the Ku Klux Klan is "a function of the left." After Trump said the U.S.-born judge in a case against him was a "Mexican" whose heritage disqualified him, Lord said those criticizing Trump were the real racists. And young Trump surrogate Kayleigh McEnany cheerfully defended waterboarding as a "bit of discomfort."

Paid mouthpieces for the Trump campaign don't fare a whole lot better. Trump lawyer Michael Cohen last year defended Trump against an old allegation by his first wife by falsely saying "you cannot rape your spouse." Cohen recently became an Internet star when, asked on CNN about Trump's poor poll numbers, he responded repeatedly and nonsensically: "Says who?"

Then there's national spokeswoman (and reality TV star) Katrina Pierson, whose pre-Trump days include 2012 tweets asking if 9/11 was "an inside job" and lamenting that both President Obama's and Mitt Romney's fathers were born abroad. "Any pure breeds left?" she asked.

This month on CNN, she blamed the death of Army Capt. Humayun Khan (Khizr's son) on Obama and Clinton: "It was under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that changed the rules of engagement that probably cost his life."

Khan died in 2004, during George W. Bush's first term. But no matter: In Trump's surrogate circus, anything goes.
CROWN POINT  Crown Point High School is making a difference within its own building by starting a food, hygiene and clothing pantry.

The founder is student Bryan Hatami who feels people dont realize how large the need really is. Theres now a room dedicated for food, hygiene items and clothing for students of the school

Besides the high schoolers qualifying for free or reduced lunch, there are students or families struggling from sudden financial trouble who are embarrassed to ask for help. Hatami said he hopes the new food pantry gives them a little extra boost.

Hatami came up with the idea after realizing a good friend was needing basic hygiene items like deodorant and toothpaste after his parents had divorced and living conditions were transitioning day by day.

The mission of the Student Pantry is to provide basic need items to fellow student classmates confidentially, without any questions, with easy anonymous access. The pantry was made possible with the guidance of 11th-12th grade Principal Russ Marcinek, and help from the Pulse Club last year. But this year the pantry is launching in full gear with its own club, Students Helping Students, to run and stock the pantry.

How can someone focus on studying or tests when youre hungry, said Kyle Ramus, who is part of the new club officers. Other club officers Brendan McShane and Brad Kurtz also echo the pressure that comes with being in high school with having basic needs met, they want to help those who have the added personal pressure of needing food, hygiene items and clothing.

I want everybody to be able to have a place where they can come and get food, Hatami said. I dont want one of my peers to have to go hungry, be embarrassed because they have no hygiene supplies at home and not be able to do the best they can in high school. Because it might affect someones self-esteem forever.

Other Student Helping Student officers Kyla Bruce and Tyler Phillips are hoping that local businesses will donate along with their classmates throughout the year to keep the pantry stocked.

If interested in donating, email bryanhatami@aol.com.
EAST CHICAGO  Sara and Mauro Jimenez put their East Calumet home up for sale more than a year ago, but those plans have been put on hold.

Like hundreds of others homeowners in the East Chicago neighborhood, the couple is awaiting test results from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency about the level of lead and arsenic in the soil outside their homes.

We have a buyer already. But I cant let someone else live here, in good conscience, until I know, Sara Jimenez said.

The Jimenez family lives in an area designated by EPA as zone 3 of a residential cleanup area within the USS Lead Superfund site. Zone 3 is bounded by the Elgin & Joliet Railway Line to the west, Parrish Avenue to the east, East Chicago Avenue to the north and 149th Place to the south.

Though much of EPAs focus in recent weeks has been to clean units within the highly contaminated West Calumet Housing Complex, the agency said last week it will begin remediation in September in zone 3. Just more than 400 properties in zone 3 of the Calumet neighborhood have been tested.

EPA will begin removing contaminated soil from 19 properties this month. According to EPA, letters were sent out last week to residents in zone 3 notifying them of test results based on soil samples taken previously.

Properties with lead levels above 1,200 parts per million and arsenic concentrations above 68 ppm  EPAs standards for emergency soil removal  will be targeted for remediation first.

Residents of the remaining zone 3 properties will begin to receive the results of their testing this week. Arsenic concentrations found during sampling in 2014-15 remain pending, because it currently is being collected and validated, according to EPA.

EPA will address remaining properties needing cleanup this fall or in the spring, according to the agency. A public meeting will take place this month for zone 3 residents to discuss the cleanup process and answer questions.

EPA records show the agency did not expect lead contamination to be as severe in zone 3 as it is in zone 1. However, limited sampling conducted between 2006 and 2010 revealed that soils most frequently exceeded arsenic screening levels in the eastern part of the neighborhood, according to EPA records.

Despite installing a new roof and windows to increase home value, Jimenez said she is worried about how contamination could affect a final offer.

Her husband said hes also concerned about their grandchildren who, for years, have played in the couple's yard.

Im ready to tell them not to come here, anymore. I feel guilty now ... I feel bad, Mauro Jimenez said last month.

'I worry about my neighbors'

Nearly seven years ago, EPA found elevated lead levels in the soil when it tested Earlie Bradens property in zone 2 near the corner of 151st Street and McCook Avenue in East Chicago.

The 71-year-old woman lives in a brick home just west of the public housing complex. She said EPA excavated the contaminated soil and replaced it with clean soil soon after notifying her of the results in 2010.

According to a letter dated April 29, 2010, from EPA, lead concentrations in Bradens yard reached as high as 4,230 parts per million in the top 6 inches of soil. Under EPA guidelines, 400 ppm in the soil is considered safe for residential use. The agencys time-critical removal action level is 1,200 ppm. For arsenic, 26 ppm is considered safe for residential use.

EPA also tested and excavated soil in her neighbor's yard immediately to the west, according to EPA documents obtained by The Times. EPA discovered lead concentrations above the 400 ppm threshold on another property along 151st Street between McCook and Alexander, but no further testing was conducted at the time at that property or elsewhere on the block, according to EPA documents.

She wonders what results her neighbors will have, now that soil testing is underway in zone 2.

Why were my neighbors yards not tested back then? I worry about my neighbors. I worry about the children, Braden said.

The U.S. Department of Justice reached a $26 million agreement in a fall 2014 consent decree with Atlantic Richfield and DuPont for a cleanup in zones 1 and 3.

The 2014 consent decree does not address zone 2, and it has not yet been determined who ultimately will pay for the remedial work in that zone. The EPA hopes to sample all 586 properties there, if owners consent. More than 320 property owners had agreed to allow the sampling as of Aug. 26, EPA said.

EPAs initial focus was south of East 149th Street in zone 2, because there is a higher probability that area is contaminated, the agency said.
During the first days of school, elementary school students all across Valparaiso were being asked, What does STEM stand for? Some knew right away, while others had no idea. Once every student learned that STEM stood for Science Technology Engineering and Math, they were asked what kinds of STEM jobs a person could have. Students at Central Elementarys answers ranged from nurses to neuroscientists.

While STEM education in Valparaiso certainly isnt a new concept (teachers across the district have been teaching STEM activities in their classrooms for years), it is now being intentionally taught to every elementary student through a weekly class using the Project Lead the Way Curriculum (projectleadtheway.org).

Introducing young students to this curriculum promises to address many Indiana State Academic Standards, but as importantly, will teach students the value of working together, problem solving, and critical thinking. Through the Project Lead the Way curriculum, students are challenged to think outside the box, analyze which way is best to attack and solve a problem when there may be more than one route to get there, and compromise with classmates when disagreements arise.

As parents working with students at home, there are many ways to foster a STEM Mindset. When your child is struggling with a problem (how to make all of her shoes fit neatly in the closet, or how to fill up a flat bike tire with air), start by asking about the problem and how might that problem be solved? Instead of giving children the answer right away, give them time to come up with possible solutions on their own.

Im bored! Seems to be a staple phrase for kids. Have a STEM bag of tricks ready to go. Challenge your child to make the tallest tower possible out of a stack of 10 cups. Have a box of Q-Tips ready to make a challenge maze for a small action figure to navigate, or build a structure with marshmallows and pretzels. Search STEM activities for kids online and watch the pages of ideas start to appear.

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, by 2018 STEM jobs will have increased by 17 percent since 2008. While theres little doubt that STEM-related jobs are on the rise, it would be hard to find any employer who doesnt appreciate an employee with excellent critical thinking, problem solving, and teamwork skills.

Spending time in a STEM Education class like Project Lead the Way at school, and practicing these same skills at home will not only help to prepare your child for a successful future in education and career, but is also extremely fun and hands on.

Grab some random household items today, stick them in a paper bag, and send your kids off to create something. Youll be amazed with what they can do.
A local music festival and some local wineries are in the running for Best of Indiana recognition, and people have until Oct. 31 to go online and vote for them.

Summer Rhapsody Music Festival in Central Park in Valparaiso is competing in the Best Indiana Musical Festivals category.

Andersons Winery in Valparaiso, Butler Winery in Bloomington (which has a tasting room in Chesterton) and Shady Creek Winery in Michigan City are among the local wineries in the Best Indiana Winery Experience category.

Area residents are encouraged to go to visitindiana.com/best-of-indiana to vote for the local nominees in Visit Indianas contest.

Porter County has a growing winery scene and is home to great music festivals, including the Summer Rhapsody Music Festival, said Ken Kosky, promotions director for Indiana Dunes Tourism. It is great to have Porter County represented in this contest, and it would be even better if our nominees come out on top.
A recently dug pond has a Hebron couple in a battle with the town, and the official who they say gave them permission to create the pond has lost his job.

When Jon and Tammy Grdinich moved to Hebron in September and built two homes on the property they bought, one for them and one for their mothers, they wanted a water feature. The property, described by the couple as a mosquito-infested swamp, already included a small pond.

They decided to make it bigger, expanding it to a half acre after receiving a verification from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

I got their approval," Jon Grdinich said. "It was submitted with my plans to the town when we started this whole thing.

At issue is whether the town granted the couple permission to expand the pond.

There was no issue with the pond next to their Jefferson Street house until four months later when, according to the minutes from a Hebron Plan Commission meeting, Joanne Hansen, secretary to Town Attorney Ted Fitzgerald, asked why the pond wasn't fenced. This led to the town requesting the Grdiniches to construct a fence, which they refused to do, stating a private pond did not have to be fenced.

Then at a February Plan Commission meeting, the minutes stated that Fitzgerald said without the fence the commission could revoke the permit.

The Grdiniches said that implies the town approved the pond when issuing the permit. But in a letter to the Grdiniches in April, Fitzgerald said the couple had a permit to construct a single-family residence, and there is nothing in the Hebron Master Plan which authorizes the construction of a lake or pond in their single-family resident district (R1).

He states in the letter that "Indiana Zoning Law lists permitable uses and does not list all non-permitted uses. Ponds are not shown under R1 zoning because they are not a permitted use."

Fitzgerald did not return calls and emails requesting a comment.

A month later the Plan Commission voted 7-0 to require the Grdiniches to remove the pond and restore the property to its original condition by May 31. By this time the couple had hired an attorney.

In June, the Plan Commission extended the deadline to remove the pond to July 12, or fines would be assessed.

The Grdiniches have yet to receive notice of a fine, and yet another new development came in the form of a letter from Fitzgerald's office on Aug. 10 stating the town would hire an engineering firm and remove the pond themselves  at no cost to the Grdiniches.

The couple is against this also. They have a petition signed by more than 30 neighbors and area residents stating the pond is an improvement over the prior conditions, which caused drainage and flooding issues in the neighborhood.

The pond remains. But what doesn't remain is the job of Hebron Building Inspector Robert Clemons, who said he was fired over the pond issue.

"I was wrongly dismissed by Hebron," said Clemons, who also serves as a Crown Point city councilman.

Clemons said Hebron Town Council President Dave Peeler told him, "we've got a couple of issues with you."

Peeler did not return emails or calls requesting a comment.

Clemons said the Grdiniches didn't do anything wrong when they built the pond.

"I permitted him on everything he was going to do," Clemons said. "His permitting was all in line. As far as I'm concerned, he did nothing wrong. He took care of a drainage problem that was badly needed over there."

Clemons said he told the Plan Commission to give the Grdiniches a variance "and be done with it."

Clemons' signature was on the building violation notice instructing the Grdiniches to restore the pond to its original condition, but he said he was only doing what the Plan Commission told him to do  despite the fact he saw no ordinance violation of the pond.

Town Councilwoman Kimberly Mouratides said the general principle with zoning ordinances is that if a use isn't specifically permitted, then it is prohibited.

Personally, Mouratides said she doesn't believe any safety concerns associated with the pond are more serious than those for any other body of water in the area.

"The pond itself is not bordering a main road; its set back behind homes on three sides and farmland on the fourth so anyone entering the pond area would need to walk across a private yard to access it," she said. "I also believe that it improves the drainage in the immediate area, which is a problem that has plagued Hebron for years. It is an improvement over the marshy area that was there before as it does not hold and allow mosquitoes to breed as they would in a marsh."

The Grdiniches were told in the Aug. 10 letter the date the engineer would enter their property and remove the pond was up to the engineer's discretion.

So far the engineer has not made a move to remove the Grdinich pond.

Tammy Grdinich said she wants the town to withdraw their efforts against the pond, including any fines, and put in writing that they will not "come back at us" and if they ever sell the property, to not go after the new owners.

If they can't settle with the town, the case will go to court, she said.

In the meantime, their attorney fees have cost $6,000 and they continue to increase, she said.

"They gave us permission and now we're under financial harm for all they're doing to us," she said. "We want this town to move forward. We thought about opening a business in town. But now probably not. What's the point?"
VALPARAISO  Debra Silvert has a gift she kept under wraps for 20 years.

With good reason, the 200-year-old flute made of crystal glass given to her by her husband left Silvert, an experienced flutist, intimidated.

Silvert, of Valparaiso, discussed and displayed the rare instrument Thursday at An 1816 Flute  Crystal Clear at the Porter County Museum.

The Silverts first learned of crystal flutes made in the 1800s by Frenchman Claude Laurent when they visited a collection of such flutes in the Library of Congress in 1987.

Laurent, a watchmaker, received a patent on his flute in 1806. Only a few more than 100 Laurent flutes have survived, most of them made of clear glass, but some of uranium green and cobalt blue glass. Some flutes are truly heavy leaded glass, or crystal, while others are potash glass that contains potassium.

Many features of the Laurent flutes were completely innovative at the time, Silvert said. Keys were made of brass or silver, and endcaps and keys were embellished with quartz, mother-of-pearl, garnet and citrine.

Silvert said the skill with which Laurent created the crystal flutes in his time was amazing.

To duplicate it is considered impossible today, Silvert said.

The instruments were popular with heads of state, as U.S. President James Madison, Emperor Napoleon I of France, and King Louis Napoleon of Holland, among others, each owned one.

After seeing the crystal flutes at the Library of Congress with her husband, Debra Silvert was smitten.

Boy, oh boy, that was the beginning of the end for me, Silvert said.

Silvert said it took her husband ten years to find a flute to purchase, which became a surprise gift to her.

Over the next 20 years, she would occasionally take it out to admire it, but then put it back safely in its protective case. She finally learned to play the rare flute for the 2014 National Flute Convention.

Silvert said Library of Congress officials would like to evaluate her flutes condition and composition with high-powered microscopes and X-rays, as they do with the glass flutes in their collection.

They are super interested because Im playing it, said Silvert. They want to see whether playing it has an impact on its preservation.

As a result, Silvert said she is mindful of how her bodys pH levels might be affecting this flute.

I dont drink coffee right before I play because of the acidity, Silvert said.

Likewise, Silvert is also mindful when she handles the flute. She never walks around with it in case she were to trip, and she lays it on a faux fur pelt or keeps it in a specially-designed case to protect it when she is not playing it.

I am fully present when Im handling the flute, said Silvert. Its kind of a Zen thing.

Silvert and classical guitarist Paul Bowman, who make up the group Duo Sequenza, will feature a musical piece commissioned especially for the glass flute at a concert Nov. 16 at the Memorial Opera House.

We take new instruments and play old music, so why not take a really old instrument and play new music on it? Silvert said.
PORTAGE  If any veteran has a question about his or her benefits they need to mark Wednesday on their calendar.

A town hall meeting will be held to discuss the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs at 5 p.m. Wednesday at Woodland Park, 2100 Willowcreek Road. Representatives from the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center and Veterans Benefit Administration will be in attendance.

This is the first time a Veterans Integrated Service Network 12 town hall meeting has ever been held outside of Illinois or Lake County, said Tom Pappas, chairman of the Portage Mayors Advisory Committee on Veterans.

These are the administrators who have the answers or have connections to get the answers, said Pappas, adding it would be a good time for those having trouble with the Choice Act to attend and ask questions.

Pappas said the administrators will give a presentation followed by a questions from the audience.

All veterans and spouses of veterans in Northwest Indiana are invited to attend.
Nearly 20 years after an EPA project manager told state and federal health officials about a long-demolished lead smelter that once operated on the site of a public housing complex and elementary school in East Chicago, residents are just learning the full extent and magnitude of the contamination in the land some of them have lived on for generations.

Contamination leaked or spilled on the ground by that factory, or spewed into the air by several other lead- and metal-processing plants and other heavy industries that surround the neighborhood, potentially has affected tens of thousands of people.

Over the years, officials at every level of government have shown concern about the health risks posed by living on land saturated with lead and arsenic. But why it took so long for anyone to act with any sustained sense of urgency depends on who you ask.

Several federal and state agencies discussed the ghost factory during a May 1997 visit to East Chicago's West Calumet, Calumet and East Calumet areas. The visit appears to be the first documented mention of the factory in the EPA's extensive administrative record for the site.

At the time, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had not yet included the predominantly African-American Calumet neighborhood in a cleanup effort focused on another lead smelter, USS Lead.

USS Lead, which went dormant in 1985, sat south of the West Calumet Housing Complex and Carrie Gosch Elementary School.

The 1997 conversation between EPA and state and federal health officials was documented in a 1998 exposure investigation report prepared by the State Department of Health under an agreement with the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, or ATSDR.

"An elementary school that services both communities (West Calumet and Calumet) is undergoing construction," the report said. "Per the EPA project manager, this is the site of an old lead smelter (Anaconda)."

"The Calumet community, per the EPA project manager, is built on an old metal processing plant (Eagle Pitcher)."

An IDEM spokeswoman said Friday that Anaconda and Eagle Picher are one and the same.

The factory's main buildings stood toward the south end of present-day West Calumet Housing Complex, and some of the highest lead concentrations have now been found in an area where a lead refinery was located, according to a Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of Eagle Picher published in 2012 by USA Today, and data provided in July by residents and EPA. Direct deposits from factory operations are likely to result in greater concentrations of contaminates in the soil, EPA has said.

After the 1997 site visit, East Chicago, state and federal health officials collaborated to offer blood lead-level tests to residents of the area, and what the tests found was alarming.

A total of 95 residents were tested in July 1997  30 of them children age 6 or younger  and 30 percent of those children had blood lead levels of 10 micrograms per deciliter or more, records show. That was the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Preventions level of concern at the time; the CDC changed that standard in 2012 to 5 micrograms per deciliter. The lead crisis in Flint, Michigan, has spurred calls for even further reductions.

The 1998 ATSDR report recommended, in part, Remediate the area of lead contamination at the Anaconda site, including the vicinity of the elementary school, to prevent further exposure.

After learning May 24 this year of the full extent and magnitude of the contamination in the first of three cleanup zones, the city in July advised 1,000 West Calumet Housing Complex residents  including 680 children  to relocate. Residents  many of whom own homes in the other two cleanup zones  are still awaiting testing results.

Preliminary results from a new round of blood sampling are again a cause for concern.

A total of 672 children and adults have been tested so far, and final results show 10 children age 8 and younger have blood lead levels between 5 and 10 micrograms per deciliter, according to the Indiana State Department of Health. A number of others preliminarily tested above the 5 micrograms per deciliter level of concern, department officials said last month. The city has said hundreds of children may be affected and some preliminary results have been as high as 33 micrograms per deciliter.

Pregnant women and children, especially those younger than 6, are particularly at risk when exposed to lead. Even low levels of lead in the blood of children can cause irreversible behavior and learning problems and, in extreme cases, coma or death, experts say.

1906 to 1996: A history of lead

The Delamar Copper Refinery Co. began construction around 1906 on the factory that later would come to be known as USS Lead; it ceased operations in 1985.

To the southwest and downwind of the Calumet neighborhood, cleanup is ongoing at a DuPont facility that manufactured lead arsenate insecticide from 1910 to 1949, records show. IDEM sampled soil at a third factory site, U.S. Reduction Co., just north of the neighborhood, as part of the listing process for the USS Lead site, IDEM records show.

Atlantic-Richfield, a successor to Anaconda Lead, and DuPont reached a $26 million settlement in 2014 with the United States and Indiana to clean up the western and eastern parts of the neighborhood. It has not yet been determined who will pay for cleanup in the middle part of the neighborhood, say spokesmen with the Department of Justice and Indiana attorney general's office.

Aerial photographs show the Anaconda buildings still were standing as late as 1959, the same year the original Carrie Gosch Elementary School was built and dedicated, records show. A new Carrie Gosch would be rebuilt in the late 1990s.

In 1970, the city received a $313.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to build the West Calumet Housing Complex, according to a recent housing discrimination complaint filed by the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law.

East Chicago built the public housing complex in the footprint of the Anaconda factory between 1970 and 1973, and it's believed no remediation was done, records show.

USS Lead first entered into the EPA's RCRA program in 1980. The federal agency sampled soil in 1985, the same year USS Lead ceased operations. Samples taken in the area of the West Calumet Housing Complex ranged from 100 parts per million in the park south of Gosch Elementary, to 160 ppm at the southwest corner of a park near Magnolia and Aster Streets, records show. EPA's residential cleanup standard is 400 ppm.

EPA first proposed the USS Lead site for the Superfund National Priorities List in 1992, but the consideration was put on hold when EPA pursued cleanup under its RCRA program, which works with companies that can pay for cleanup. USS Lead began a cleanup in 1993.

1997 to 2013: Health concerns raised

The 1997 site visit that led ATSDR to recommend remediation of the Anaconda site and in the vicinity of Gosch Elementary was done at the request of EPA, records show.

Two August 1997 Indiana Department of Environmental Management memos, which were included in the EPAs administrative record, show several soil samples were taken on the Gosch Elementary property, including two with lead levels above the EPAs residential cleanup standard of 400 parts per million.

One of those memos noted the former Anaconda site was six blocks south of Gosch Elementary  at the south end of the West Calumet Housing Complex. Yet, the department tested just two samples at the north end of the complex, according to a hand-drawn map at the end of the memos.

Lead levels in those samples were below 400 parts per million, EPA's standard for residential cleanup. One memo said, No further assessment is planned for the West Calumet Housing Complex.

IDEM said Friday it sampled soil in 1997 near Gosch Elementary and at the north end of the housing complex at EPA's request.

"Taking samples at the south end of the complex would have been outside the scope of EPA's request to IDEM," IDEM spokeswoman Courtney Arango said.

The new Gosch Elementary, which had been under construction next to the old school building, was dedicated in 1999.

USS Lead concluded its cleanup in 2002, when it finished confining hazardous materials on-site, records show.

EPA said studies by the State Department of Health and ATSDR in the 1990s "indicated additional contamination and exposure concerns."

In 2008, 10 years after the ATSDR exposure investigation was released, EPA repurposed the site to the Superfund National Priorities List to include the residential areas, EPA said. The 79-acre USS Lead property and approximately 320-acre Calumet neighborhood were listed as one site in April 2009.

According to the city, it wasn't until 2009 that EPA conducted further soil testing in the West Calumet Housing Complex.

During that round of sampling, the agency tested just nine properties at the complex out of more than 100 in what had become known as zone 1, a cleanup area that includes the complex and Gosch Elementary.

EPA Acting Superfund Administrator Doug Ballotti said Friday that sampling done in 2003 and 2006 as part of the Superfund listing process, and in 2009-10 as part of a remedial investigation, was intended to take a broad view of all three zones in the residential cleanup area.

That area is composed of the West Calumet Complex and Carrie Gosch to the west; a small area just north of Gosch Elementary and the middle part of the neighborhood; and the East Calumet area.

"The goal of the testing is to investigate the extent of the contamination as best you can," Ballotti said.

EPA generally does not perform extensive testing in a specific area until it begins preparing a detailed plan for excavation, he said.

2014 to today: Cleanup underway

EPA finally conducted extensive testing of the West Calumet Complex in 2014-15, as part of design work for a plan for all three zones selected in 2012 to excavate down to 2 feet, cap any remaining contamination and replace soil.

East Chicago Mayor Copeland objected to that plan in 2012, calling instead for EPA to excavate down to native sand, which is generally not contaminated, and replace the soil. A city consultant in 2012 said plans for the area included demolition, new construction and a mixed use development and expressed concerns about costs to the city associated with work in the area, EPA records show.

Though the city built the West Calumet Housing Complex between 1970 and 1973 on what apparently was known to be the footprint of an old lead smelter, Copeland's administration has said it didn't learn of the full extent and magnitude of the contamination until May 24, 2016. That is when the city received zone 1 data for sampling done in 2014-15.

The city has said it repeatedly asked EPA for the data. EPA officials admitted to various reasons for the delay and promised to work more closely with the city. In two letters to EPA this summer, Copeland accused the agency of failing to fully investigate the Anaconda site sooner, failing to fully investigate health risks in recent years and more.

The mayor also accused EPA of failing to provide health officials with enough data for a 2011 report by ATSDR that resulted in the report being most favorable to the EPA-preferred cleanup plan.

The report concluded, in part: "Breathing the air, drinking tap water or playing in the soil around the USS Lead site is not expected to harm people's health, as indicated by the declining blood lead levels in small children."

Copeland laid out the city's concerns about the 2011 report in a July 14 letter to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy: "The assessment erroneously assumes that all contamination in the residential areas was from airborne deposition of lead; it fails to mention the existence of the Anaconda Lead factory at all; it fails to factor in the pertinent information that the West Calumet Housing Complex was built directly on the footprint of the Anaconda facility; it failed to include the East Chicago Health Department in any discussion or knowledge sharing; and failed to consider data from blood-lead testing which the East Chicago Health Department collected between 1991 to 2011."

The report does not indicate ATSDR collaborated, as it did in 1997, with state and local officials to gather any current blood lead level data. An ATSDR spokeswoman said the agency is gathering information to determine if it needs to re-evaluate past health assessments for the site.

Copeland said this week the city's talks with EPA grew more productive after East Chicago hired an environmental attorney. He said he needed "people much smarter than myself" to look at and decipher the available information.

After receiving the EPA data in May, the city immediately began asking to relocate residents from the West Calumet Complex and demanded EPA suspend plans to excavate soil in the area out of fear airborne particles would put residents at further risk, records show.

Another letter the mayor sent to EPA in June said the complex is "at the end of its useful life" and "utilities are collapsing and require the city to perform dig-out repairs below the 24-inch barrier many times per year."

The city submitted an application in July to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to demolish the complex.

"The city believes relocation and demolition are necessary to protect residents' health," City Attorney Carla Morgan said. "We don't feel people could ever safely live in this housing stock again unless all lead and arsenic, including under foundations, sidewalks, etc., is removed."

Now that EPA is re-evaluating its cleanup plan for zone 1, Copeland said he's not sure to what use the land ultimately will be put.
Police have arrested a man they say admitted to stabbing a 60-year-old woman to death in Queens last week.

Investigators say 22-year-old Yonatan Galvez-Marin admitted that he tried to rob Nazma Khanam while she was walking home in Jamaica Wednesday night.

He allegedly stabbed Khanam after she refused to give him money.

He's now facing charges of murder, attempted robbery and criminal possession of a weapon.

Police have dismissed the idea that the killing was hate crime, but Majeda Uddin, the victim's niece, believes Khanam was killed because of her faith.

She says negative rhetoric from the presidential election has fueled backlash against Muslims.

"No. I think every month is creating new people, because of racism, because of hate crimes, many more, because all the months, this is an election year. How is it going, happening all of a sudden?" Uddin said.

However, a local resident says neighbors are accepting of one another.

"Some of the people, the reaction on their face, they felt it was a hate crime. I think they understand that all their fellow neighbors give them the support that it's not," the resident said.

Khanam was a Bangladeshi immigrant and the aunt of an NYPD officer. She will buried in her native country.
New Braunfels, TX (78130)

Today

Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. Low 51F. Winds NW at 10 to 20 mph..

Tonight

Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. Low 51F. Winds NW at 10 to 20 mph.
In the wake of Escobars coordinated mass killing of police officers in Medellin, Carrillo isnt prepared merely to tiptoe around the law to get things done, but to conduct his own bloody campaign of extrajudicial murders and torture methods in order to catch his man. His macho bravado is at once exhilarating and disquieting, like a scene where he orders a Search Bloc caravan into the heart of Escobars territory for the sole, symbolic purpose of urinating on a mural of him. Carrillos the only person courageous enough to punch the worlds biggest bully in the nose. He can do this because he, too, is a bully.

Our Man in Madrid sharply compares Escobar and Carrillos methods in two scenes of a similar shape. In the first, Escobar invades Moncadas estate  and her refrigerator  but finds nothing but a handful of guards, who are disarmed and lined up on their knees.

Everything you have is because I allow you to have it, he reminds them, since Moncadas operation is merely a piece broken off from the larger Medellin Cartel. He wants to know the locations of her labs, offices and safe houses, and the dire consequences for not cooperating neednt even be vocalized. Escobar has likened himself to God: If I say a man dies, he dies the same day. Killing a half-dozen of his enemys guards in cold blood wont trouble him for a nanosecond.

In the second, Carrillo rounds up a group of boys who works as spotters for Escobar, spying on the authorities from rooftops and helping to undermine their efforts. The boys are not intimidated, because they assume Carrillo has to act within the limits of the justice system, which would be ineffectual against underaged kids, especially in a city essentially run by their employer. Carrillos solution is to shoot one of them in the head and ask one of the boys, David, to tell Escobar what hed witnessed. Carrillo wants Escobar to know that the rules of engagement have changed, which is bad news for the drug kingpin in the short term and perhaps worse news for the rule of law in the long.

It also pushes Murphy closer to antihero status than ever before. Hes been stationed in Colombia long enough to realize the futility of a fair fight against Escobar, because the D.E.A. has neither the resources nor the legal flexibility to meet their enemy on equal footing. Because even when Escobar is captured and thrown in prison, he loses few of his creature comforts and he can break himself out at any time. Now Murphy, a man whom Pena had once deliberately kept in the dark over shadier tactics, presents himself to Carrillo as someone who can be trusted to ride with the devil.
Brittany Lynn Piehl and Adam Andrew Miller are to be married Sept. 4 at the Carondelet House, an event space in Los Angeles. Sophie Speth, a friend of the bride who was ordained by American Marriage Ministries for the occasion, is to officiate.

The bride, 30, will be taking the grooms name. She is the associate director of fund-raising and membership campaigns for the KCETLink Media Group, a nonprofit television production company in Los Angeles. She graduated from the University of Iowa and received a masters in museum studies and an M.B.A. from John F. Kennedy University in Pleasant Hill, Calif.

She is a daughter of Vicki L. Piehl and Gregg W. Piehl of Waverly, Iowa. The brides father is a financial adviser at the First National Bank there. Her mother is an administrator in the life insurance department in Waverly for the life insurance subsidiary of the CUNA Mutual Group of Madison, Wis.

The groom, 32, works for NASA as a Hubble fellow at the California Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where he tracks stellar explosions and builds software. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received a masters in physics from Cambridge University and a masters and Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley.
David Franklin Wong and Dennis Che-Wei Yu were married Aug. 30 at the New York Marriage Bureau by Edwina Townes, a staff member in the office of the New York City Clerk. On Sept. 3, the couple held a second ceremony in Copenhagen for family and friends, led by Katherine Taylor Johnson, a friend of Mr. Yu.

Mr. Wong (left), 32, is a senior vice president for product leadership at the Nielsen Company in New York, where he develops strategies for the creation of research products used to measure digital advertising and media consumption. He graduated from the University of Toronto.

He is a son of Raquel Ngan-Kuen Wong and Samuel Chun-Keung Wong of Toronto. His mother, a registered nurse, retired from Wellesley Hospital in Toronto. His father retired from the Mississauga, Ontario, office of Bell Canada, where he analyzed cellular network performance.

Mr. Yu, also 32, is the chief of staff for the chief executive of Betterment, an automated investment management firm in New York. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, magna cum laude.
Temidayo Folasade Olopade and Walter Ramon-Manuel Lamberson are to be married Sept. 4 at the El Dorado Hotel in Santa Fe, N.M. The Rev. Kara Wagner Sherer, an Episcopal priest, is to lead an Anglican ceremony incorporating Nigerian and Mexican elements.

The bride, 31, who goes by Dayo, works on the strategic partnerships team at Facebook in New York, helping media companies with digital products and publishing. She is the author of The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa. She graduated from Yale, from which she also received a law degree and M.B.A.

She is a daughter of Dr. Funmi Olopade and Dr. C. Sola Olopade of Chicago. The brides father, a pulmonologist, and her mother, a hematology oncologist, are professors at the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago, where her mother is the director of its Center for Global Health and her father is its clinical director. Her father is also the director of the Pritzer Schools international programs and her mother is a professor of medicine and human genetics as well as the director of the Center for Clinical Cancer Genetics.

The groom, also 31, is pursuing a masters in finance at the London Business School in England. Until August, he was a senior project manager at Dalberg Global Development Advisors in New York. He graduated from the University of Chicago.
Emma Rachel Sokoloff-Rubin, a daughter of Dr. Shoshana R. Sokoloff and Jeffrey W. Rubin of Amherst, Mass., is to be married Sept. 4 to Samuel Russakoff Purdy, a son of Dale Russakoff and Matthew Purdy of Montclair, N.J. Rabbi and Cantor Alan H. Sokoloff, an uncle of the bride, is to lead the ceremony at Lighthouse Point Park in New Haven.

The couple met at Yale, from which they graduated, she magna cum laude and he cum laude.

Ms. Sokoloff-Rubin, 27, will be keeping her name. She is now a second-year law student at Yale.

The brides father, a professor of Latin American history at Boston University, has written or co-written books on social movements and politics, including one with the bride, Sustaining Activism: A Brazilian Womens Movement and a Father-Daughter Collaboration. The brides mother is a child, adolescent and adult psychiatrist in Amherst.

Mr. Purdy, 28, is pursuing a Master of Education degree in school leadership at Harvard. He is on the board of the Ulysses S. Grant Foundation in New Haven, which oversees a summer academic-enrichment program for New Haven middle-school students.
METROPOLITAN

The Big City column last Sunday, about the assumption that New York City psychotherapists are no longer taking long summer vacations, misstated, in some editions, the purpose of the Cape Cod Institute, a forum for psychiatrists near Wellfleet, Mass., that is known for its summertime sessions. It raises money for the academic activities of its founder, Gil Levin  not to supplement his income.

MAGAZINE

An article on Aug. 21 about Flints water-contamination crisis referred incorrectly to Scott Smiths relationship with Water Defense when he was named the groups chief water scientist. He was appointed to the post and receives no compensation beyond expenses; he was not hired.



An article on Aug. 28 about 16 counties in America that have recently imposed a high number of death sentences misstated the year the governments of Duval County and the City of Jacksonville in Florida consolidated. It was 1968, not 1959.

REAL ESTATE

A cover article on Aug. 21 about development projects in Newark described a building at 540 Broad Street incorrectly. It has several types of windows, but it does not have double-hung windows.
Beyond land and money, the new museum needed things to show and a building to show them in. No Smithsonian museum had ever started life without a collection. The museums team collected artifacts from around the nation in an Antiques Roadshow-style program in 15 cities called Save Our African American Treasures. The program yielded many of the 40,000 objects the museum now holds  3,500 will be exhibited when the building opens  and elevated the museums profile.

For the design of their new home, museum officials created a selection committee and displayed the final six plans at the Smithsonian Castle in an effort to be transparent about the process.

The winning design, by a team led by the Tanzanian-born British architect David Adjaye, spoke of uplift, resiliency and spirituality, Mr. Bunch said, and the bronze color gave the building the symbolism he sought.

I love the notion of a darker building, he said, adding: Theres always been a dark presence in America. There have always been African-Americans in this country shaping it whose story gets overlooked or undervalued.

It was also a vast departure from some of the design proposals he had been sent within days of his appointment as director in 2005. One envisioned a building shaped like a black-power fist, hardly appropriate for the museum he foresaw or that Congress had agreed to finance. He quickly moved on to other options.

I knew what I didnt want, he said.
The Australian drama series 800 Words will remind you in one way of Sex and the City. Its hero, George Turner (Erik Thomson), writes a column for a Sydney newspaper  its exactly 800 words long  and like Carrie Bradshaw, he reads snippets of it aloud as narration. Unlike her, he actually reads them onscreen, sitting at his laptop and occasionally looking into the camera, as if to make sure were listening.

That tic should tell you that in every other way, 800 Words (online at Acorn TV beginning on Monday) is nothing like Sex and the City. Its a style of show in short supply on American television, even amid the current drama glut: an explicitly heartwarming, happy-sad family tale, targeting an age range from tween to adult. An example of a common genre on Australian TV, its somewhere between Gilmore Girls and the more sophisticated Disney or Nickelodeon series.

And its surprisingly watchable  the humor isnt too broad or saccharine, and the central performers are skillful enough to make the emotions feel real. (Apparently not all of Australias good actors have left to do American TV.) Mr. Thomson is a little bland but winning, overall, as George, whose wife has died as the show starts. A dreamer who had let his more practical spouse handle the details of life, George decides to start over by uprooting his family  brittle teenage daughter, geeky teenage son  and moving to the small town in New Zealand where he spent summers as a child.

From there, the story proceeds along two predictable but satisfying tracks. Theres the family drama, in which the endearingly bumbling George (for starters, he buys the wrong house in New Zealand) learns to be an adult under the withering but loving gaze of his children. Then theres the culture-clash comedy, in which the three Aussies are seen as interloping, clueless snobs by the New Zealanders. Tension is provided by the question of which nubile, available Kiwi woman  there is a surprising number of them for a ramshackle small town  will catch Georges eye, and how his daughter, Shay (an excellent Melina Vidler), will react.
RIFFA, Bahrain  I write this from a Bahraini jail cell where I have been detained, largely in isolation, since the beginning of summer. This is not new to me: I have been here before, from 2012 to 2014, in 2015, and now again, all because of my work as a human rights defender.

Nor am I alone: There are some 4,000 political prisoners in Bahrain, which has the highest prison population per capita in the Middle East. This is a country that has subjected its people to imprisonment, torture and even death for daring to desire democracy. My close colleague Abdulhadi al-Khawaja was tortured and sentenced to life in prison in 2011 for his human rights work.

No one has been properly held to account for systematic abuses that have affected thousands. In 2015, I was arrested on new charges of insulting a statutory body and spreading rumors during a time of war for posts on Twitter. The police held me from April to July last year. I was released only after the king of Bahrain issued a pardon in an earlier case, also related to views I had expressed.

Despite the pardon, the 2015 charges and a travel ban remained in place, and I was threatened with further action. The head of the cybercrimes unit at the Criminal Investigation Directorate in Bahrain summoned me and my family to a meeting, where  in front of my children  he warned me that if I didnt stop my advocacy work, I would face up to 15 years in prison.
Lindsey Ferrentino has won the National Arts Clubs 2016 Kesselring Prize for her play Ugly Lies the Bone. Since 1980, the prize has been awarded to a playwright on the verge of recognition, and now comes with a $25,000 award.

Ugly Lies the Bone had its premiere Off Broadway in a Roundabout production last year, and follows the struggles of a war veteran returning from Afghanistan to civilian life. Charles Isherwood made it a New York Times Critics Pick, and wrote that Lindsey Ferrentino is a writer of dauntless conviction.

Past winners include Tony Kushner, Anna Deavere Smith and Rajiv Joseph. The award will be presented to Ms. Ferrentino on Nov. 14 at the National Arts Club in Gramercy Park in Manhattan, and she will also receive a two-week residency there to develop new work.
ATLANTA  The powerful post-tropical cyclone Hermine lurked off the Eastern Seaboard on Sunday, and its evolving path made the storm more likely to be a bother than a threat.

Yet even as the storm churned hundreds of miles from the shoreline and positioned itself farther east than anticipated, officials, fearful of floodwaters and skeptical of shifting forecasts, often kept beaches closed, roads shut down and Labor Day weekend concerts canceled.

Its gone east, it could wobble back west or wobble further east, said Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who on Saturday declared emergencies for three counties. All those things will decide what impact it has, especially in our coastal areas.

By Sunday evening, the National Hurricane Center said the storm, which made landfall on Friday in Florida as a Category 1 hurricane, was about 335 miles east of Ocean City, Md.
ROSEMONT, Ill.  An imam of a mosque in New York City and his associate shot dead while strolling following afternoon prayers. A presidential candidate calling for Muslims to be barred from entering the United States. Muslim women harassed and physically attacked in Chicago while walking to their car.

During the Islamic Society of North America convention that started here on Friday, official speakers said these actions had become all too commonplace in the United States.

In this political climate, weve seen a normalization of bigotry, said Altaf Husain, an associate professor at Howard University and a vice president of the society, whose convention here is the largest Muslim gathering in the United States and Canada.

But Mr. Husain, expressing what he said was the sentiment of many other American Muslims, said the Obama administration had made it a priority to bolster engagement with Muslims across the country. The latest example of the administrations engagement came Saturday night when Jeh Johnson, the secretary of Homeland Security, became the first sitting cabinet member to address the Islamic Societys convention.
Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia on Sunday compared Donald J. Trumps encouragement of Russia to hack Hillary Clintons emails to the Watergate scandal, which led to President Richard M. Nixons resignation.

Mr. Kaine, Mrs. Clintons running mate, made the remarks on ABCs This Week while he was being questioned about Mrs. Clintons use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, an issue that has dogged her throughout her campaign.

Mr. Kaine used the moment to attack Mr. Trumps refusal to release his income tax returns and to attack his comments this summer that Russia should make public anything they might have stolen from Mrs. Clintons emails, remarks he made in the wake of the disclosure that hackers had accessed emails from the Democratic National Committee.

He has openly encouraged Russia to engage in cyberhacking to try to find more emails or materials, and we know that this cyberattack on the D.N.C. was likely done by Russia, Mr. Kaine said of Mr. Trump on Sunday.
HANGZHOU, China  President Obama sought on Sunday to heal a rift with Turkey, expressing his wholehearted support for its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in the wake of a failed effort to oust him and promising Americas help in bringing the coup plotters to justice.

Mr. Obamas comments, after he met with Mr. Erdogan before a Group of 20 summit meeting here, seemed calculated to smooth over hard feelings in Turkey, where some officials had blamed the United States for fomenting the July 15 uprising by elements of the military.

He said nothing about Mr. Erdogans crackdown after the coup, in which tens of thousands of people were arrested. And his reference to helping Turkey bring the perpetrators of the uprising to justice was not accidental: Mr. Erdogan is demanding that the United States extradite Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish Muslim cleric living in Pennsylvania whom he accused of inciting the coup.

This is the first opportunity that Ive had to meet face to face with President Erdogan since the terrible attempted coup, Mr. Obama said, facing the Turkish leader across a long table. Were glad youre here, safe, and that we are able to continue to work together.
BERLIN  Voters in Chancellor Angela Merkels political home state delivered her a stinging rebuke on Sunday, propelling a far-right party to second place in the state legislature, ahead of her center-right bloc.

It is the first time in an election in modern Germany that a far-right party has overtaken Ms. Merkels bloc of Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union.

Official results released early Monday showed that Ms. Merkels Christian Democrats had received 19 percent of the vote, against 21 percent for the far-right Alternative for Germany. The center-left Social Democrats, with whom Ms. Merkel governs nationally, got 31 percent in the state, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and are likely to continue their coalition there with Ms. Merkels bloc.

The vote took place a year to the day after Ms. Merkel agreed with Austria that the two countries would admit thousands of mostly Syrian refugees then trapped in Hungary, with several hundred desperately marching on foot toward the West.
LONDON  A recent semi-scandal over seats on a train illuminates the deep problems of Britains Labour Party. Its left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn, made a video sitting on the floor of a train, calling for the renationalization of the railways while claiming that there were no empty seats and that travelers were ram-packed.

Virgin Trains, which operates the service, then released closed-circuit television images showing numerous vacant seats bypassed by Mr. Corbyn, who was later filmed in a seat for most of the journey.

That many of Britains privatized railways are badly overcrowded, especially in southern England, is indisputable. But the episode was another indication that the Labour Party is in shambles: Its leader and its members of Parliament are in a virtual civil war, and it is deeply unpopular with the broader electorate.

Yet the partys membership is soaring. Under Mr. Corbyn, some 300,000 people have joined Labour in the last year. Labour has more members, about 500,000, than all the other British political parties put together.
VATICAN CITY  She was known throughout the world as Mother Teresa, considered a saint by many for her charitable work among the poorest of the worlds poor. On Sunday morning, Pope Francis officially bestowed that title at her canonization ceremony in St. Peters Square.

I think, perhaps, we may have some difficulty in calling her St. Teresa: Her holiness is so near to us, so tender and so fruitful, that we continue to spontaneously call her Mother Teresa, the pope said in off-the-cuff remarks during his homily.

It was a festive atmosphere at the Vatican, under a broiling summer sun, and several flags fluttered in the light breeze: from Albania, representing the Roman Catholic nuns ethnic origins; from Macedonia, to note her birthplace, Skopje; from India, where she spent most of her life, working in the slums of Kolkata; and from the many other countries where her humility and selflessness touched countless lives.

When Francis proclaimed her St. Teresa at the end of the formal ceremony, in Latin, the crowd erupted in sustained applause.
BEFORE RUSSIAN JETS DROPPED THEIR FIRST BOMBS IN SYRIA LAST SEPTEMBER, THE REGIME OF BASHAR AL ASSAD WAS FOUNDERING. NATPOP: http://newswire.storyful.com/storylines/*/stories/109365?q=russian%20airstrikes%20syria%20september&sort=oldest VO: A DRAMATIC SHIFT HAS HAPPENED SINCE THEN. THE REBEL FORCES, TRAINED AND SUPPLIED BY THE UNITED STATES C.I.A, WERE PUSHED BACK FROM THE TERRITORY THEY SEIZED. THE RUSSIAN BATTLEFIELD VICTORIES GAVE AN ADVANTAGE TO THE SYRIAN GOVERNMENT, AND CHANGED THE OUTCOME OF THE PROXY WAR BETWEEN MOSCOW AND WASHINGTON. NATPOP: Vladimir V. Putin in April, 2016 [8.03] Our goal was to support the state system in Syria NATPOP: Kerry in OSLO, NORWAY. 15 JUNE 2016 We are not going to sit there while Assad continues to offensively assault Aleppo, and while Russia continues to support in that effort. TITLE CARD: PROXY WAR IN SYRIA: UNITED STATES VS. RUSSIA VO (map): THE AREA OUTSIDE ALEPPO SHOWS HOW THE SYRIAN GOVERNMENT MANAGED TO REGAIN CONTROL OVER THE TERRITORIES, PREVIOUSLY LOST TO OPPOSITION FORCES AND ISIS. NATPOP: Vladimir V. Putin in April, 2016 [9.30] Syrian army continues to advance and frees more cities with our help VO: FOLLOWING RUSSIAN BATTLEFIELD VICTORIES NEARLY CUT THE OPPOSITION FROM THEIR SUPPLY LINES OVER THE BORDER IN TURKEY. IN THIS FOOTAGE, YOU CAN SEE U.S.-BACKED FIGHTERS DESTROYING A VEHICLE ON CASTELLO ROAD. IT SERVED AS SUPPLIES ROUTE FOR HUMANITARIAN AID FOR CIVILIANS AND SUPPLIES FOR REBELS. HELPED BY RUSSIAN AIRSTRIKES, PRESIDENT ASSADS FORCES MANAGED TO RETAKE THIS ROAD RECENTLY, PUTTING OPPOSITION-HELD ALEPPO UNDER SIEGE. NATPOP: from hyperlink above VO: AND NOW, U.S. -BACKED REBEL GROUPS ARE FIGHTING TO BREAK IT. NATPOP: from hyperlink above VO: THE RUSSIAN SUCCESSES IN SYRIA HAVE GIVEN MOSCOW NEW LEVERAGE IN DECISION ABOUT THE FUTURE OF THE MIDDLE EAST. NATPOP: Putin in April 2016 Our active work against international terrorism helped our relationship with other countrie VO: AND IT SEEMS THAT PRESIDENT OBAMAS PREDICTION WAS OVERLY OPTIMISTIC. NATPOP: Obama on October 2015 An attempt by Russia and Iran to prop up Assad ....is just gonna get them stuck in a quagmire and it wont work.  VO: THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION IS NOW TALKING TO PUTINS GOVERNMENT ABOUT SHARING INTELLIGENCE TO COORDINATE AIRSTRIKES AGAINST ISIS. NATPOP: Putin on July 14 Moscow I wanted to note our mutual efforts to resolve the conflicts that we consider to be important NATPOP: Kerry on August 1 State TV, via Reuters, in Washington,It is critical, obviously, that Russia restrain both itself and the Assad regime from conducting offensive operationsW VO: THE QUESTION IS, HOW MUCH LEVERAGE THE WASHINGTON HAS NOW TO WIN THE CHESS MATCH WITH RUSSIA ON THE GROUND, AS MOSCOW SEEMS TO BE WINNING THE PROXY WAR IN SYRIA, AT LEAST FOR NOW. NATPOP OBAMA on August 4 Washington: Im not confident that we can trust the Russians or Vladimir Putin, which is why we have to test whether or not we can get an actual cessation of hostilities ....(( Russia may not be able to get there, either because they dont want to or because they dont have sufficient influence over Assad )) [SUBS req] END
JERUSALEM  In an abrupt resurrection of Israels Sabbath wars, a key train line was disabled for repairs on Sunday, snarling tens of thousands of Israeli commuters and soldiers returning to base in traffic jams at the start of the workweek  all because of a political spat involving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his transportation minister and their ultra-Orthodox coalition partners.

Ostensibly, the disruption and the ensuing national uproar were caused by a government prohibition on the carrying out of nonessential public works during the Sabbath, which falls from sundown on Friday to nightfall on Saturday.

In reality, though, and of little consolation to the commuters, the train shutdown appeared to have had more to do with unholy bickering and muscle flexing inside Israels fractious government, which is dominated by right-wing and religious parties, and tensions within Mr. Netanyahus governing Likud Party.

More broadly, it underscored the complexities of running a state that defines itself as Jewish and democratic, in which Orthodox and secular political parties coexist, often uneasily, in fragile coalition governments.
Arguing that several of its top leaders have been arrested during the July-August public protests in Yerevan and that the party must divert its attention to obtaining their release, the Heritage Party (Zharangutyun) announced today that it would not systematically participate in upcoming local elections in Armenia.

The party says individual members can participate on their own accord.

The Heritage Party says that while Armen Martirosyan, Davit Sanasaryan and Hovsep Khourshoudyan have been free on bail, they are still being politically hounded by the regime on false charges.

These individuals and many other public and political figures were detained and arrested during the Sasna Dzrer protests.

Thus, argues the Heritage Party, the legitimacy and legality of elections in Armenia have been damaged further than normal.
Two East Alabama wineries and one brewery were among honorees in the second annual Alabama Commercial Wine Competition last month in Huntsville.

Hodges Winery in Camp Hill received three gold medals and four silver; Whippoorwill Vineyards in Notasulga earned four silver medals; and Red Clay Brewing Company in Opelika received one silver medal.

Steve Young, director and founder of Alabama Wine Inc., the non-profit organization that runs the Alabama Commercial Wine Festival, said the mission of Alabama Wine Inc. is to promote Alabama wines. He was pleased that this years competition entries showed a 50% increase over the first years competition and all but three of the states commercial wineries participated. In all, 50 awards were presented to 13 Alabama wineries and two Alabama breweries.

Judges for the competition included Steven Bunner, chef/owner of 1892 East Restaurant in Huntsville; associate professor of horticulture at Auburn University Dr. Elina Coneva; WHNT vice president of news Denise Vickers; Matt Mell, owner of Church Street Wine Shoppe; and American Wine Society judges Marj Ducote, Scott Montgomery, Jaime Zapata and Kristen Lindelow, chief judge.

Hodges Vineyards & Winery received gold medals for its Lenoir, Southern Blend and Sweet Peach wines, and silver for its Carlos Sweet, Sunset Sweet, Muscadine Blush and Noble Sweet.

Whippoorwill Vineyards received honors for its Harvest Moon, Cynthiana, Lenoir and Sunset wines.

Red Clay Brewing was honored for its Lakeside Hard Cider.

Best of Class, Winery of the Year and Wine of the Year will be announced Sept. 24 at Big Spring Crush wine festival VIP awards ceremony.
Opelika Chamber of Commerce President Barbara Patton adores her job, and loves watching the businesses she planted continue to blossom. Thats why she said her retirement from the chamber next year will be bittersweet.

Theres been a nudging in my mind that its time for someone new and vibrant to take my place," she said. I love helping businesses grow, and I will miss every aspect of it. I hope to still be involved in the chamber, but in a different way.

Patton said she plans on retiring sometime next year, but doesnt have an exact date because a search committee has to begin the process of interviewing candidates for her replacement.

Before her position at the chamber, Patton was a woman of many titles. Her resume reads like a brochure, and it includes positions, such as being Opelikas mayor from 1996 to 2004, United Way division chairperson, administrative chair of First United Methodist Church and much more.

Although Patton has had her hand in everything from the Genealogical Society of East Alabama to the City of Opelika Christmas Parade, she said the greatest job shes held has been being a wife to her husband, Bob, and mother to her three sons, Michael, Richard and Forrest. She is also a grandmother of four.

When Patton clears her desk and officially retires, her leadership will be missed, said Dinah Motley, business marketing director at the chamber.

Shes always looking for ways to make the chamber and community better, she said. Were doing three times more since she came, and we now see the big impact. Were really going to miss her. She brought things to the chamber that many people could not.

Vivian Anthony, administrative assistant, described Patton as a sweet and forward-thinking woman.

She is a well-rounded entrepreneur and business-minded person, she said. I hope to have the energy she has when I reach her age. She has an open-door policy for her staff to express work-related problems, and she is always available.

With her seventh year of leadership approaching, Patton said her time at the chamber has been rewarding. She said she has seen the face of Opelika change from the work she, the staff and board at the chamber have put in place. Patton said she and her team have seen the chamber and the city grow so much that its hard to point out just one great thing shes proud of as president.

When she retires, Patton said, she wont be too far from the chamber because she plans on working with the new president, if he or she doesnt mind her help. She advises the new president to listen to the staff and have dreams that will be implemented in the community.

Make sure youre focused on your mission, Patton said. So, you know the direction to take the chamber.

When her final day as president comes, Patton said, she wants the community to know she put her all into making sure Opelika bloomed into the city it is today.
STANDING ROCK SIOUX RESERVATION, N.D.  High on a hill overlooking the confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball rivers, Dave Archambault II knelt and touched a stone that bears a handprint worn into it by thousands of his ancestors who have done the same for centuries.

There, the leader of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe said a prayer for peace.

Below, Archambault can see Native Americans from across North America gathered at an encampment a half-mile away, joining his tribes growing protest against a $3.8 billion four-state oil pipeline that will cross the Missouri River nearby. Its a project they fear will disturb sacred sites and impact drinking water for thousands of tribal members on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and millions further downstream.

Our cause is just, the laconic, soft-spoken 45-year-old said. What we do today will make a difference for future generations.

His contemporaries say hes the right person at the right time to lead the fight, which has led to the arrests of about 30 people, Archambault included, for interfering with construction of the Dakota Access pipeline.

Since becoming the leader of about 9,000 people in 2013, Archambault has sought to improve housing, health care, employment, education and other grim realities faced by the people on his 2.3 million-acre reservation that straddles the North and South Dakota border and reservations nationwide face.

Now, hes dealing with added pressure of the pipeline, which he has called yet another historic wrong involving tribal sovereignty and land rights.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe sued federal regulators for approving the pipeline, challenging the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decision to grant permits. The company has temporarily halted construction, and a federal judge will rule before Friday on whether that break will last.

Archambault and others have been sued by Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners for interfering with the pipeline, which will pass through Iowa, Illinois, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Former North Dakota U.S. Attorney Tim Purdon, who represents Archambault and other tribal leaders in that suit, told The Associated Press that its nothing more than an attempt to silence the tribal leader.

I think they think he is a voice for the people that no one can control, Purdon said. From the first day I met him, I could tell he is a very serious person who really has the best interests of his people  and the people of North Dakota  at heart.What I see now is the same thing: He is focused on what he believes is best.

Archambault has for years spoken of concerns among the leaders of North Dakotas five American Indian reservations about the increasing number of environmental incidents in western North Dakotas oil patch  far from his own territory. He appealed to lawmakers to do more to protect public safety and the environment.

That was before his tribe became aware of the Dakota Access pipeline, for which developers have promised safeguards, noting that workers monitoring the pipeline remotely in Texas could stop any leak within three minutes.

Its not enough for Archambault, who worries a breach would destroy sacred sites and ancestral burial grounds beyond the reservations boundaries.

Anything that is man-made is going to come apart, he said, pointing to a 2013 spill in northwestern North Dakota that was among the largest inland spills in North America. It was discovered only after a farmer got his tractor stuck in the muck while harvesting wheat; its only half cleaned up, despite crews working around the clock since it happened, state health officials say.

Archambault has the full backing of the leader of North Dakotas oil-rich Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation.

Standing Rock is standing for something and were there standing with them, Three Affiliated Tribes Chairman Mark Fox said. His reservation produces about 20 percent of the states daily oil output.

We want oil production but we want it done responsibly and respectfully, Fox said. Our basic position  is to figure another way around the river and the reservation. There are other ways.

Fox called Archambault a lifelong friend who he says has become weary but remains strong and is under a heavy burden.

Still, Archambault is clearly buoyed by the scores of protesters who have come to help his tribes fight. On a recent afternoon, Monte Lovejoy, a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, embraced Archambault and thanked him.

I really couldnt afford to come up here, he told Archambault, whom hed never met before. But I really couldnt afford not to, for my kids and for my people.
FULLERTON  Police are looking for two men in a black sedan who are suspected of being involved in an alley shooting that sent a 22-year-old man to the hospital.

Fullerton Police officers responded to a call from Fullerton Fire Department at 10:07 a.m. Sunday, after the man had been shot in the leg, said Fullerton police Lt. Robert Bastreri.

The shooting was reported in an alley in the 200 block of Truslow Ave., close to Harbor Blvd. and Valencia Drive. The alley is in a densely populated neighborhood close to downtown Fullerton.

Bastreri said details are limited but witnesses told police the man had been shot by one of two men in a black sedan.

He did not speak English and wasnt very forthcoming, Bastreri said.

The mans injuries were not life threatening and he was taken to a local hospital, Bastreri said.

Detectives are looking into the case and ask anyone with information to call: 714-738-6716.

Contact the writer: 714-796-2254 or eritchie@ocregister.com or on Twitter:@lagunaini
If seeing is believing, the Mission Viejo Rotary Club and La Paz Optometric Center in Laguna Hills make new believers once a year.

The two organizations have donated time and resources into providing vision exams and eyewear for children at Door of Faith, an orphanage in La Mision, Mexico, for 25 years.

Initially, we heard about the orphanage and I went down there with some of the Rotarians, said Dr. Richard Frieder, a retired optometrist and member of the Rotary Club. We made sure we would go down there to have an annual eye checkup for the children and weve been doing it ever since.

The goal is to provide vision care and equipment for children in need. La Paz Optometric estimates that of the eye exams it administers, 30 percent of those children need glasses.

But these arent just cheap throwaway frames.

Theyre very professional, said D.J. Schuetze, who, with his wife Lynette, have run the orphanage since 1993. Theyll bring down all sorts of frames and theyll let kids try them on and pick them out.

Frieder started La Paz Optometric Center in 1973 and brought Dr. Aaron Sako on board to treat patients. Frieder has since sold the practice to Sako, but the two continue to work together on the project.

Each year, shortly after New Years Day, about 10 to 15 people representing both organizations head to Door of Faith to conduct the vision tests, fit kids for glasses and give surgical consults.

The kids really benefit from it and we feel gratified to do it, Frieder said.

The Rotary Club also raises money and writes grants for the orphanage to fund Christmas gifts for the children. In the past, the club has also helped pay for school uniforms, tires for the organizations vans and kitchen equipment.

Frieder praises the way the Schuetzes run the orphanage.

Every child, after primary education, is inclined to go to college, Frieder said. They get them involved in either college or trade school. A lot of those kids have become doctors or lawyers.

Sako has worked with the project for 16 years and recognizes many of the faces he and the group have treated in years past.

Kids I had seen who were barely walking now walk up like adults, Sako said. Its amazing to see. D.J. and Lynette, theyre from O.C. and theyve dedicated their lives to this, so its just a great feeling.

Door of Faith has accepted children for more than 50 years, according to its website.

Each child has a story, Frieder said, and they arrive at Door of Faith through different avenues of abandonment or abuse.

The Schuetzes recognized a need for care in the community after years of accompanying youth on mission trips from Vineyard Church in Anaheim.

They said they run the orphanage with three goals in mind: Give children a life as close to normal as possible, make sure theyre well-educated and teach them how to give back to the community.

Were an hour away from some of the wealthiest places in the world, D.J. Schuetze said. We knew if we tried, something good could happen. It was a complete lifestyle change for us, but there was an incredible need.

Schuetze, originally from Huntington Beach, and Lynette, from Whittier, owned a business in Corona before moving to La Mision, a small town in Baja California between Rosarito and Ensenada.

Door of Faith provides care for 118 children entirely through private donations, D.J. Schuetze said. Frieder estimates the eye exams and equipment contribute roughly $4,000 to $5,000. In the past, the Rotary Club sent Christmas gifts to the orphanage, but because of stricter guidelines along the border, the club recently has sent money instead. Schuetze takes older kids with him to department stores to help in picking out gifts for the younger children.

We love working with Rotary, theyre service above self, Schuetze said. We want to teach kids how to serve others. Our older kids make Christmas fun for the younger kids.

The eye exams and glasses help in multiple ways with education and interaction. The volunteer staff also examines Door of Faiths staff members.

We have an older laundry lady and shes never had a lot of resources. Nobody knew how bad her eyes were, Schuetze said. To see her just come alive when she could see what was going on was very cool.

Sako said the woman had never had access to health care and being able to provide for her was significant. She has also been provided with dental work, he said.

We take vision and access to health care for granted, Sako said. We put the lenses in front of her eyes for the chart and she started crying. She had never seen before. I practically had tears of joy.

Contact the writer: npercy@scng.com
HANOI, VIETNAM (AP)  Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has offered Vietnam a loan of $500 million to strengthen its defense capacity amid Chinas intensifying presence in the disputed South China Sea.

The so-called Line of Credit was announced after Modis talk with Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc during his official visit to Hanoi, a day before he is scheduled to travel to China to attend the G-20 summit.

Military cooperation tops the discussions between Modi and Phuc.

A dozen agreements were signed, including one on cooperation of Indian and Vietnamese navies and a contract between an Indian shipbuilder and Vietnams coast guard.

India, which also has a border dispute with China, has been vocal on the issues in the South China Sea, calling for freedom of passage in the international waters.
At a private fundraiser Tuesday night at a waterfront Hamptons estate, Hillary Clinton danced alongside Jimmy Buffett, Jon Bon Jovi and Paul McCartney, and joined in a singalong finale to Hey Jude.

I stand between you and the apocalypse, a confident Clinton declared to laughs, exhibiting a flash of self-awareness and humor to a crowd that included Calvin Klein and Harvey Weinstein and for whom the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency is dire.

Trump has pointed to Clintons noticeably scant schedule of campaign events this summer to suggest she has been hiding from the public. But Clinton has been more than accessible to those who reside in some of the countrys most moneyed enclaves and are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to see her. In the last two weeks of August, Clinton raked in roughly $50 million at 22 fundraising events, averaging around $150,000 an hour, according to a New York Times tally.

And while Clinton has faced criticism for her failure to hold a news conference for months, she has fielded hundreds of questions from the ultrarich in places like the Hamptons, Marthas Vineyard, Beverly Hills and Silicon Valley.

Its the old adage, you go to where the money is, said Jay S. Jacobs, a prominent New York Democrat.

Clinton raised about $143 million in August, the campaigns best month yet. At a single event Tuesday in Sagaponack, N.Y., 10 people paid at least $250,000 each to meet her, raising $2.5 million.

If Trump appears to be waging his campaign in rallies and network interviews, Clintons second presidential bid seems to amount to a series of high-dollar fundraisers with public appearances added to the schedule when they can be fit in. Last week, for example, she diverged just once from her packed fundraising schedule to deliver a speech.

Robby Mook, the Clinton campaign manager, said 2.3 million people had contributed to the campaign, which has significantly increased the number of donors who give online in small increments.

The public has gotten used to seeing Clintons carefully choreographed appearances and her somewhat halting speeches and TV interviews over the course of the long  and sometimes seemingly joyless  campaign, but donors this summer have glimpsed an entirely different person.

It is clear from interviews with more than a dozen attendees of Clintons finance events this summer and a handful of pictures and videos of her at the closed-press gatherings that Clinton, often described as warm and personable in small settings, whoever the audience, can be especially relaxed, candid and even joyous in this company.

Clintons aides have gone to great lengths to project an image of her as down-to-earth and attuned to the challenges of what she likes to call the struggling and the striving. She began her campaign last year riding in a van to Iowa from New York and spent much of last summer hosting round-table discussions with a handful of what her campaign called everyday Americans in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Yet some of the closest relationships Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have are with their longstanding contributors. If she feels most at ease around millionaires, within the gilded bubble, it is in part because they are some of her most intimate friends.

Its like going to a wedding or a bar mitzvah: you catch up, explained Mitchell Berger, a Democratic donor in Florida, about the familial nature of the events. Berger would know: He has been raising money for the Clintons since he held a fundraiser in his Fort Lauderdale office for Bill Clinton the day after he announced his candidacy in 1991.

Berger, who joined Hillary Clinton last month at a donor event in Miami Beach, said many of the individual conversations before and after she speaks at the gatherings are centered more on grandchildren than weighty policy matters.

But when she has had a give-and-take this summer about issues, Clinton, who has promised to reshuffle the deck in favor of the middle class and portrayed Trump as an out-of-touch billionaire, has almost exclusively been fielding the concerns of the wealthiest Americans.

To businessmen who complain to Clinton that President Barack Obama has been unfriendly to their interests, she says she would approach business leaders more like Bill Clinton did during his administration, which was widely considered amicable to the private sector.

When financiers complain about the regulations implemented by the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul, Clinton reaffirms her support for strong Wall Street regulation, but adds that she is open to listening to anyones ideas and at times notes that she represented the banking industry as a senator.

The wealthy contributors who host Clinton often complain about her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and express concerns that Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont pushed her to the left on trade and other issues. Clinton reminds them she has both opposed and supported trade deals in the past.

And, as she noted at an event last month on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, Clinton points out that she worked cooperatively with Republicans when she served in the Senate and would do so as president.

Id say the major themes are small business, regulation and getting people back to work, said Alan Patricof, a financier and longtime donor to Clinton.

The campaigns finance team is led by Dennis Cheng, previously the chief fundraiser for the Clinton Foundation, and it employs a couple dozen staff members. Cheng, who attends the events with Clinton, offers donors a number of contribution options that provide them and their families varying levels of access to Clinton. John Morgan, a Florida lawyer and donor, described Cheng as the master concierge.

For a donation of $2,700, the children (under 16) of donors at an event last month at the Sag Harbor, New York, estate of the hedge fund magnate Adam Sender could ask Clinton a question. A family photo with Clinton cost $10,000, according to attendees.

Another advantage to choosing private fundraisers over town halls or other public events is that Clinton can bask in an affectionate embrace as hosts try to limit confrontational engagements.

Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, a backer of Democrats and a friend of the Clintons, made sure attendees did not grill Clinton at the $100,000-per-couple lamb dinner Forester de Rothschild hosted under a tent on the lawn of her oceanfront Marthas Vineyard mansion.

I said, Lets make it a nice night for her and show her our love, Forester de Rothschild said.

Cash-seeking candidates from both parties often rely on August to reach vacationing donors who open their wallets, and their palatial homes. In 2012, the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, brought in close to $4 million over a single weekend from events in the Hamptons. And Trump, while netting $64 million through online and direct-mail fundraising in July, also made the trek this summer to the eastern end of Long Island to raise cash.

But the Clintons have occupied a particular place in the social fabric of the enclave. Over the past several summers, they have spent the last two weeks of August in a rented 12,000-square-foot home with a heated pool in East Hampton and in a six-bedroom mansion with a private path to the beach in Sagaponack. This year, the former first couple stayed in the guesthouse of Steven Spielbergs East Hampton compound built on 9 acres overlooking Georgica and Lily Ponds.

Trumps candidacy has allowed Clinton to reach out to a new set of donors in the area who typically give to Republicans but dislike the current nominee. (Trump feels more at home at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., than in the Hamptons, where the exclusive Maidstone Club once denied him a full-time membership, according to The New York Post.)

The Hamptons is full of powerful, wealthy people who are bored and go to constant social events to see who else got invited and to show your status, said Ken Sunshine, a veteran Democratic activist and public relations executive with a home in Remsenburg, New York.

This year, he added, going to a Clinton event is at the very top of the list.
Walter Sundling's World War II POW medal. Sundling died while he was living at the Wisconsin Veterans Home at King.
I wish to express my appreciation to the entire Chapman community for all the caring, thoughtful and generous support I have received over the years. Together, we have accomplished a great deal, and I believe we all have a right to be proud of the transformation that has occurred at our university.

Perhaps most significant has been our razor-sharp focus on building an exciting, vibrant and involving intellectual life on our campus. It has served as a magnet for recruiting the best and brightest students and faculty, and brought staff and administrators to Chapman fully committed to serving our mission with passion and pride.

Last week, in welcoming the Class of 2020, I had an opportunity to talk with some of our newest students. One of them was a young woman by the name of Alastair Mecke. She was born in France, attended high school in New York City and speaks three languages fluently. When I asked why she selected Chapman among the many distinguished schools that offered her admission, Alastair responded without hesitation, When I visited Chapman, I immediately sensed that it was a place with a special spirit.

What a wonderful affirmation of our university.

It is important to recognize, though, that the special spirit Alastair identified is something that always needs to be nourished and sustained. Perhaps most important in doing that is to reaffirm the fundamental value of freedom of speech as an essential ingredient in our ongoing search for truth.

In his farewell address to the nation, President George Washington warned of the danger of getting involved in entangling alliances. A danger that President Dwight Eisenhower warned of in his farewell address was that of the military-industrial complex. Now, in this farewell of mine, I, too, wish to warn of a danger to our university, other universities and, hence, to our nation and world.

An ever-present danger to Chapmans flourishing intellectual life is any compromise to our belief in the underlying value of freedom of speech. While we should always respect the feelings of others, we must never let that respect interfere or impede ones right to speak or write freely and openly without fear of retribution.

I feel a sense of pride that our university has never disinvited a speaker from being on our campus out of fear of what that speaker may say. Our willingness to hear views that may be objectionable, and perhaps even hurtful, is a testament to the underlying intellectual strength of our learning community.

The place of the university is unique in our society. If not here, where else can ideas once thought out-of-bounds, and offensive to prevailing views and sensibilities, be evaluated on their merits, perhaps to be tossed aside, or perhaps to display a glimmer of gold among some silt? Where else but here? Without such freedom, the theory of evolution would still be banned, and now-discarded theories, like eugenics, never disproved.

I particularly caution against the conformity of thought which is the natural outcome of silencing voices in service of creating safe spaces of ideas. No idea should be safe from evaluation at a great university.

Now, as I pass the baton to Daniele Struppa, I know we will have a president who not only values our ethos but will do all he can, working with all of us, to nurture and sustain it. He will be a strong and value-centered president, fully worthy of our support and confidence. That is a comfort to me as I turn my attention now to preparing for my business statistics lecture this evening.

Jim Doti is a professor of economics and the former president at Chapman University. This originally appeared in a newsletter and is reprinted here with permission.
A vigil has been planned for a 15-year-old Santa Ana student killed early Sunday as he sat in the back of a 2009 Honda that was stopped on the shoulder of the southbound 57 in Fullerton.

The vigil for Luis Torres will be held from 4 to 9 p.m. Saturday at Brown Colonial Mortuary, 204 W. 17th St. in Santa Ana. A GoFundMe account has been set up to help pay funeral expenses at gofundme.com/2nccezw

Luis Torres, 15, hung out with the football crew and the custodians.

He sang in choir and smiled just about everywhere.

That was the picture painted by teachers and administrators at Century High School in Santa Ana on Sunday evening, according to principal Michael Parra.

Torres, of Santa Ana, was killed early Sunday as he sat in the back of a 2009 Honda that was stopped on the shoulder of the southbound 57 in Fullerton.

The crash occurred at 1:59 a.m. on the freeway just north of the Yorba Linda Boulevard off-ramp when a woman driving a 2015 Honda swerved off the freeway lanes and onto the shoulder, striking the 2009 Honda, said California Highway Patrol Officer Stephan Brandt.

Torres was a sophomore at Century High.

In an email, Parra said: A common theme (teachers and staff) all shared was just how extremely kind, respectful, and helpful he was in school. His academic counselor shared that she was struck by his great personality and smile whenever he came to talk to her about new activities he was interested in participating in.

Torres was in the left rear seat and died as a result of head trauma.

A woman identified as Jennifer Baca of Santa Ana, who also was sitting in the stopped 2009 Honda, had fractured ribs and sternum as a result of the crash, Brandt said.

Two other people from the 2009 Honda were standing outside the car when the crash occurred and were not injured, Brandt said.

The driver of the 2015 Honda was identified by the CHP as Nicole Cortinas, 28, of Moreno Valley.

Baca and Cortinas were taken to UCI Medical Center.

Cortinas, who suffered a broken back, was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, Brandt said.

Torres acted as a student-coach for the football team after a medical issue prevented him from making the team, and he often spent his lunch chatting with the schools custodians and security officers.

The school, Parra said, will have grief counselors available to students and teachers.

It is unclear what memorials are planned, and even though financial assistance for Torres family is in the works, nothing is set yet, Parra said.

Contact the writer: 714-796-2254 or eritchie@ocregister.com or on Twitter:@lagunaini
HANGZHOU, China  Efforts by the United States and Russia to forge a deal for a cease-fire in Syria and coordinate their counterterrorism operations there faltered again on Sunday, even as a major new Syrian-Russian offensive in the besieged city of Aleppo appeared to undermine key components of the proposed agreement.

After an anticipated news conference did not take place, Secretary of State John F. Kerry told reporters that his negotiations here with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had snagged on a couple of tough issues  nearly identical to the language he used when the two failed to reach agreement in their last meeting, eight days ago in Geneva.

Officials said they would meet again Monday.

Meanwhile, Monday morning, Chinese President Xi Jinping has told his South Korean counterpart that China is opposed to the deployment of a powerful U.S. anti-missile system in her country.

During their bilateral meeting on Mondays final day of the G-20 meeting, Xi warned that mishandling the issue is not conducive to strategic stability in the region, and could intensify disputes.

China has responded angrily to Seouls decision to base the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, system south of the South Korean capital, Seoul.

While Seoul and Washington say the system is intended solely to defend against North Koreas missile threat, Beijing says it will allow the U.S. military to peer deeply into northeastern China.

Beijings reaction has also stoked public outrage, threatening everything from tourism exchanges to appearances by K-pop stars in China.

Kerry and Lavrov are in Hangzhou for a meeting of the G20, also attended by President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin. In his own news conference Sunday, Obama said he was skeptical that Russia and Syria would abide by any agreement, but said a long-term solution to Syrias civil war is still urgently needed.

It is worth trying, he said, to the extent that there are women, children, innocent civilians who can get food and medical supplies. To get some relief from the terror of constant bombings.

Citing grave differences, Obama said its premature for us to say theres a clear path forward, but theres the possibility at least for us to make some progress.

The administration, which has long been reluctant to intervene directly in the civil war, nonetheless believes it is a distraction to what it considers the more important, separate battle against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, and must be resolved.

Kerry, with approval from Obama, traveled to Moscow in mid-July to propose an agreement under which the United States would share intelligence and coordinate its bombing of terrorist targets with Russia if Moscow would agree to ground the Syrian air force and stop its own bombing of U.S.-backed opposition forces.

Russia has complained of increasing overlap between the opposition and terrorist groups on the ground, and said it was up to the United States to separate them before a deal could be struck. U.S. failure to do so has allowed the Russians to claim they are only targeting terrorists of the Front for the Conquest of Syria  or Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, the al-Qaida affiliate formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra  and the Islamic State.

In comments to Russian journalists earlier in the day, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov indicated that the separation of forces remains an issue. There is a great phrase: nothing is agreed until everything is agreed, Ryabkov said. For months, he said, Russia had been asking the Americans for a real, genuine demarcation between terrorists and the so-called opposition.

But he insisted the two sides were close to agreement. There is no basis to expect that all of this will collapse.

On Aug. 26, Kerry met with Lavrov in Geneva to try and build momentum for the proposal. The two sides said then that they were close to agreement and that military and intelligence teams from both sides were ironing out technical details. Kerry predicted a deal could be struck within a week.

Since then, the bombardments have continued, including in the city of Aleppo  divided between rebels in the east and the government in the west  where the United Nations says nearly two million people are now without food, water and medical care. The northern route out of the city to Turkey, previously held by the rebels, has been cut by the government. U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura has pleaded with all sides to allow aid to travel into the city along the corridor, but the rebels have refused unless government forces withdraw from what is known as the Castello Road.

In a letter to rebel leaders Saturday, the U.S. liaison to the opposition groups, Michael Ratney, outlined the parameters of the Kerry proposal and asked for their agreement, Reuters reported.

In the meantime, however, the Syrian government this weekend has made important new battlefield gains around Aleppo that challenge basic assumptions of a proposed cease fire that was to freeze last weeks battle lines.

While Front-led forces last month broke through government encirclement from the south to join with opposition rebels occupying the eastern half of the city, that route now also appears to be closed as a conduit for aid as the government launched a major new push to retake it.

Late Sunday, Syrian forces, backed by Russian airstrikes, had seized control of the area, known as the Ramouseh corridor, and fully laid siege to Aleppo.

Russian support for the offensive prompted U.S. officials to raise questions over whether the Russians could be relied upon to implement an agreement to freeze battle lines and ground the Syrian air force.

The Russians must have known that if Ramouseh falls, the deal would have to be scrapped and started over, said Faysal Itani of the Washington-based Atlantic Council. The deal was not a good deal for the Russians. . If they have a chance to make gains on the ground and start over, its not bad for them.

Beyond Aleppo, Russia and the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad have continued to refuse to allow U.N. humanitarian aid convoys to enter more than a dozen besieged towns and cities held by various rebel forces. In recent days, two Damascus suburbs that have been under siege for years  Daraya and Moadamiya  have given in to government proposals to evacuate civilians and withdraw rebel forces.

De Mistura has criticized those arrangements, and outside experts have charged the Russians and the Assad government with violating earlier agreements to allow aid to pass, and dragging their feet on a ceasefire until they can starve the besieged communities into submission.
A typical day in the Santa Ana Civic Center is filled with hazard.

Open drug use. Assaults and rape. Urine and feces on public walkways. Untreated illnesses. Sex acts in public.

The exploding transient population in the countys seat of government is clashing in increasingly uncomfortable  and harmful  ways with some 18,000 people who work there and thousands more residents who come on public business.

It has grown so bad in the past year that county workers continually call for increased protection. Members of the public express shock at what they call Third World conditions.

Crime statistics show violence is increasing. Homeless activists say contagious diseases are spreading. And no one is at greater risk than the homeless themselves.

Police admit how tough it is to make much headway.

All this has led the Santa Ana City Council to consider declaring a public health and safety crisis in an ordinance council members will take up Tuesday.

Tensions at the Civic Center ratcheted up Aug. 1, when police shot a homeless man during an altercation outside the county courthouse. Richard Gene Swihart, 32, died two weeks later from his wounds.

Both the city and the county have stepped up efforts to help fix the growing problems at the Civic Center. But workers question the sense of urgency among administrators and elected officials who dont have to walk through the plaza to get to their offices.

The executives park under the building and take an elevator up, said Jennifer Muir Beuthin, general manager for Orange County Employees Association.

Theyre not confronted with the same thing every day that rank-and-file workers are confronted with when theyre walking through the encampment.

PERPETRATORS AND VICTIMS

To someone like Anna Mae Mama Brizy Gonzalez, a homeless woman who has slept at the Civic Center the past nine years, change cant happen soon enough.

Slowed by triple bypass surgery last year, the 66-year-old Gonzalez said that when she first arrived at Civic Center, things were calmer. There were fewer transients and fewer severe mental and behavioral problems. And there was less violence.

We have 5150s, she said, using street slang for the mentally ill who need to be hospitalized. Then youve got people who really dont want to listen.

A mid-August survey by county workers recorded a 14 percent increase in the areas homeless population, up from 406 to 461 people, over the past year. Most of those people can be found in a 1-square-mile area between Broadway and Flower Street, bounded by Santa Ana Boulevard and Civic Center Drive.

The population surge has come during a long-term jump in crime. From 2011 to 2015, the number of assaults with a deadly weapon in the Civic Center nearly quadrupled and robberies grew almost threefold, according to Santa Ana police records.

Gonzales said dope is everywhere, drawing people from surrounding neighborhoods and making it harder for the homeless to keep the peace among themselves.

Santa Ana Police Chief Carlos Rojas said the Police Department is limited in what it can enforce. Officers can patrol and make arrests on charges of drug possession, violent behavior and public indecency or can issue tickets for illegal camping.

But Rojas said its not illegal to be homeless; they have civil liberties and rights governing their possessions. The police, he added, try to treat them with dignity.

We understand that these people need services. At the same time, were trying to balance that with the public safety.

Its not an easy job.

FEAR AND DANGER

On seven occasions in February, county employees at the Civic Center requested that sheriffs deputies escort them to their cars after work. They were too fearful to walk alone through the darkness of winters early evening hours.

That same month, just outside the county courthouse, Santa Ana police arrested a 55-year-old man accused of using a 4-foot-long wooden stick to beat his girlfriend in the back and bludgeon another person in the head. He also was found with methamphetamine, police said.

Records from the county and City of Santa Ana make it clear: Though public employees routinely feel unsafe and occasionally are accosted at the Civic Center, the victims of violent crime there are almost always homeless people.

Last year, 23 aggravated assaults and 20 robberies were reported in the Civic Center, according to Santa Ana police. Homeless people were by far the chief victims.

And since 2011, at least six women have reported being raped at the Civic Center  most of them waking up during an assault or discovering evidence of an attack after a deep or intoxicated sleep.

Advocates suspect assaults are much higher than what is reported to police.

Weve gotten quite a few reports of rapes. Its almost like its happening weekly, said Paul Leon, founder and chief executive of Illumination Foundation, an Irvine-based nonprofit that works with the homeless.

Most of the women down there will tell you (theyve) been at least fondled or (their) clothes have been ripped off.

But he and others said homeless victims often dont report a crime because they feel dismissed by the police.

Gonzalez said she and other homeless people routinely are ignored by the Santa Ana police unit that is permanently assigned to patrol the Civic Center, though she admits the homeless community sometimes adopts a dont snitch attitude.

We would call police and they dont come out, Gonzalez said, adding that the police tell them anything that goes on at night, you have to handle it.

Police Chief Rojas denied that officers ignore complaints. He said rampant drug use and mental illness in the homeless population can make proving some cases difficult. But, contradicting what others say, Rojas contended his officers have been successful in gathering information and gaining trust at the Civic Center. 

We encourage them to call the police, and if someone was telling them otherwise, that would not be appropriate, Rojas said. Its not something we would ignore or not investigate.

In 2012, the department formed the Homeless Evaluation Assessment Response Team  a program that teaches officers to track individuals among the homeless and try to refer them to the services they might need.

We cant arrest ourselves out of homelessness, Rojas said. Just like we cant arrest ourselves out of crime.

Its not as though public officials have sat idly as the homeless population boomed.

In the past year, the county has bought an Anaheim warehouse to convert into the first countywide, year-round homeless shelter, hired a director to coordinate the countys services for the homeless, stationed a special sheriffs officer on a main walkway and received a grant for new mental health facilities.

On Thursday, county Supervisor Andrew Do proposed moving quickly on a longstanding goal of converting a nearby former bus terminal into a permanent shelter.

For its part, the city has increased power washing in the area, approved a project to convert a local motel into 71 new dwellings for the chronically homeless and will consider stepping up police patrols and code enforcement.

But government employees dont feel enough is being done to ensure their safety.

INTIMIDATION AND DISRUPTION

Civic Center workers have reported being attacked near their workplaces at least seven times in the past two years. A log of 194 county employee complaints details many of those attacks.

Those include: a woman punching a county worker in her head; a man charging a Public Defenders Office investigator; a woman attacking a Santa Ana police meter worker and a county intern in a parking lot; and a man leaping onto a sheriffs special officer after being discovered hiding in a government office service closet.

Employees also complain of people shooting heroin in public bathrooms, brawling near building entrances, challenging pedestrians to fights, intimidating and following workers, hiding behind cars in the parking lot and exposing their genitals.

One man even was seen stalking another with a pickax.

Apprehension among workers and others at the Civic Center has grown to the point that its disrupting some civic business.

In May, Orange County Superior Court CEO Alan Carlson wrote a letter to county supervisors and Santa Ana City Council members saying jurors have asked to serve in county courthouses elsewhere and that the staff doent want to work past 5 p.m. because of the homeless encampment that is engulfing the courthouse.

Alan Clow, a senior investigator with the Orange County Public Defenders Office and an OCEA board member, said secretaries in his office dont go out to lunch anymore. And attorneys have stopped coming to the office on weekends to prep for Monday jury trials.

You have to be on guard when you go out there because anything can happen, Clow said. I tell them walk in numbers. I didnt have to do that three or four years ago.

The county has made some security upgrades  increasing the number of sheriffs special officers who are stationed at county buildings, performing perimeter checks and escorting employees to their vehicles after work.

Another part of the countys interim solution: Asking employees to learn to protect themselves.

On Wednesday, at an employee safety training, a Sheriffs Department slideshow advised workers to take elevators instead of stairwells, to walk tall and express confident body language and to stay on busy streets, avoiding shortcuts.

They were also told how to respond to an attacker with a gun vs. a knife  and what to do if an altercation cant be avoided.

Strike first, strike hard, strike as many times as you can  (in) the eyes and nose and end the fight as quickly as possible, the department advised.

Lezlee Neebe, a veteran courtroom clerk who goes to the Central Justice Center three times a week, said Superior Court employees were given permission a few months ago to begin carrying pepper spray.

Why should employees even need to carry pepper spray to work? Neebe asked. I have compassion for the homeless, but it has grown to the point where you cant avoid it.

RULES AND DISREGARD

Gonzalez, whose nickname comes from her maiden name of Briseno, is looked upon as a street mother who provides leadership in her makeshift community.

The young people that are coming in here, a lot of them dont know theres rules to follow, she said.

Shes talking about rules the homeless establish among themselves to maintain some sense of civility.

Gonzalez also wishes drug users would throw away used syringes, pointing to a brown needle disposal container sitting atop a low concrete wall.

Instead, more needles  many handed out as part of a health program aimed at preventing the spread of HIV and hepatitis C  end up on the ground.

We had a member who stepped on a used syringe and it stuck in their shoe, said Muir Beuthin, whose union represents more than 10,000 county workers.

During an early-morning walking tour of the Civic Center, she peered over a small concrete railing that borders the Superior Court building. At least two dozen used syringes were on the ground, many with caps off and needles exposed.

Its always like this, according to Muir Beuthin. Sixty feet away, another seven needles lay exposed on landscaping alongside a well-traversed path outside an area called the Plaza of Flags.

Regularly, our members have to step over feces and urine and drug paraphernalia when theyre coming to work. The public has to do that, too, when theyre coming to get birth or marriage certificates or pay their taxes.

The Santa Ana Central Library, one of two serving a city of more than 340,000 and the only one with full services, has been hit particularly hard. The award-winning civic institution recently reopened after a two-week hiatus to redesign the ground floor, changes made mainly to handle the many homeless people who seek refuge. Signs in the library restroom ask visitors not to bathe, shave or wash items.

The library also increased the number of security guards from one to four. It also hired a contractor, at a cost of about $20,000 a year, to clean the restrooms repeatedly throughout the day. Before, when cleaning took place only once in the morning, restrooms had to be closed by 11 a.m. as they were such a mess, said Heather Folmar, library operations manager.

About the same time the library closed temporarily, the county installed three portable toilets, open 24 hours, on Ross Street near a construction site that displaced some homeless people from their Civic Center spots. Those toilets, heavily used by the homeless, are expected to remain.

Folmar said people camped at the Civic Center when she started working at the library 25 years ago. Today, she said, its 20 times worse.

I dont blame the homeless; they have no alternative, Folmar said. Where are they to go? Where are they to sleep? Where are they to take a shower?

HEALTH AND HYGIENE

The lack of facilities for the homeless to practice the most basic hygiene can have deadly results.

Illumination Foundation staffers, who are at the Civic Center every day, hear about and see suspected cases of various infections that include E. coli, Clostridium difficile or C. diff and the antibiotic-resistant MRSA.

It really is a silent epidemic, said nonprofit founder Leon.

Leon remembers one call about a man whose open sores caused consternation among other homeless people at the Civic Center. Leon and staff couldnt find him until someone pointed out the man at a nearby fast-food restaurant, where he had just handed the cashier money for a drink.

When the man pulled up his sleeves and pants legs, It was probably the worst case of MRSA Ive ever seen, Leon said. It was to the bone.

A bacterium, MRSA is spread by contact. The Illumination Foundation got the man to UCI Medical Center, where he died two months later.

But since 2011, the only Civic Center outbreak recorded by the county Health Care Agency came in 2013, a cluster of eight cases of Shigella, a gastrointestinal illness that causes fever and diarrhea.

The Health Care Agency does not do any formal surveillance in the Civic Center other than as part of countywide tracking of specific diseases, such as influenza, that are required by state law to be reported, said Dr. Matthew Zahn, the countys medical director of epidemiology and assessment.

But county public health nurses regularly walk at the Civic Center, Zahn said, mostly to educate the homeless on illness prevention and to address self-reported health problems.

Social workers and mental health workers from the county also cruise the Civic Center to assess the needs of the homeless and direct them to services. They greet people with clipboards in hand and do intake from a mobile unit parked weekly on the mall.

The reality is the reason our staff is there is because that population is at a higher risk for health issues, Zahn said.

A lot of germs we talk about may spread through that community.

Madeleine Spencer, a member of Project Homelessness Coalition, said outbreaks of the flu and staph infections regularly sweep through the Civic Center.

The county, Spencer said, provides insufficient health care to address communicable diseases that can spread beyond the homeless community.

If someone is touching a doorknob, your workers are all going to get it, too.

Cleaning offers only temporary relief, said Neebe, the courtroom clerk.

They can power-wash and clean, she said, but its there again by the next morning.

For now, workers, the public and the homeless must coexist.

Albert Torres, a friend of Brizy Gonzalez, has a tattoo across his chest that reads, Only God Can Judge Me. Torres, 45, another leader in the Civic Center, said much fear could be eased if other people stopped to talk to the homeless.

I think its exaggerated, Torres said, because they dont know us.

Contact the writers:

Theresa Walker is at 714-796-7793 or twalker@ocregister.com. Jordan Graham is at 714-796-7960 or jgraham@ocregister.com.

Contact the writer: 714-796-7793 or twalker@ocregister.com
RANCHO CUCAMONGA  The final decision might not come for a day or two, after Clayton Kershaw has time to determine just how much 34 pitches to Class-A hitters affected his back.

But if he has any input, and if he feels as good as he did Saturday evening, his next appearance will be in a National League game.

I think Im pitching in four days, or five days, Kershaw said after a one-hit, five-strikeout performance for the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes against the Modesto Nuts.

I think theyre still ironing some stuff out, but at this point its still kind of a pitch count deal, making sure that I can contribute and not just go out there. It helps that its September, and weve got a lot of guys out there in the bullpen.

Were still working the kinks out, but well see.

If Kershaw is about to return to the rotation, odds are that it will be Friday in Miami, the opener of a 12-game trip. It would be his first appearance in a big league game since June 26, when he was roughed up in a 4-3 loss at Pittsburgh right before going to the disabled list, with what turned out to be a herniated disc.

Not a bad September call-up, at all, for a team trying to expand on a two-game lead in the National League West: A guy with an 11-2 record and 1.79 ERA, whose team was 14-2 on days he pitched before he went to the disabled list.

For the record, the Dodgers were 27-34 in games he didnt pitch before he went to the DL. Theyre 10 games over .500 since, following Saturday nights 5-1 victory over San Diego. Just imagine the possibilities.

Certainly, the way Kershaw toyed with California League hitters allowed Dodgers pulses to race a little bit. He threw 22 strikes in his 34 pitches, was between 92 and 94 mph with his fastball most of the night, and overmatched a lineup with no one hitting over .280 or driving in more than 59 runs.

He had a 10-pitch first inning, striking out the first two hitters he faced and getting a first-pitch ground ball for the third out. He threw 11 in the second, getting a broken-bat grounder and two more strikeouts, both swinging.

The only hit he allowed? Catcher Robbie Perkins hit a 2-2 pitch maybe 10 feet, at most, and beat catcher Will Smiths throw for an infield single with one out in the third. Kershaw got a double-play grounder to finish the inning, then went to the bullpen to fulfill his mandate of 45 to 50 pitches.

He gave the kids the full mix of pitches.

The fastball and slider were pretty decent, he said. The curveball needed a little work. It wasnt there at times. I threw a couple of good ones, but a few got away from me. I guess for as much time as Ive missed, Ill take it.

But once you get into pitching real games in the major leagues, theres not going to be so much forgiveness. I definitely need to be more consistent.

Performance, however, was less important than the condition of his back. The full verdict might not come for a couple of days, but Kershaw said he felt progress, building on what he experienced following a simulated game Tuesday in which he pitched to Quakes hitters at Dodger Stadium.

I felt good, he said. I was able to warm up and sit in between innings and everything, stuff thats bothered me in the past. Its fun to pitch in a game setting again, and have some normal game-type situations.

The last few times when Ive pitched, once I cool down and kind of sit for a little bit, itll stiffen up. As long as Im OK doing that tonight, itll be a good test.

These rehab stints are necessary, and theyre fun for the fans who are more used to seeing the prospects. Still, its kind of weird to see Kershaw wearing a Quakes jersey, or to hear the LoanMart jingle after his strikeouts instead of the opening bars of Beethovens Fifth, as he hears at Dodger Stadium.

Brett Anderson would have been happy with those problems. He pitched only two innings of a scheduled five-inning stint and gave up six runs and nine hits, including two doubles and a triple.

For some reason, no one was asking when his next start might occur.

Contact the writer: jalexander@scng.com
I have seen the best minds of my generation, to steal a phrase from the late Allen Ginsberg, driven to heights of self-absorption, advocating policies that assure the failure of the next. Nothing so suggests the failure of my generation  the boomers  than its two representatives running for president.

What Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump reflect are two sides of the same nasty boomer coin.

On one side, there are aging boomers embracing Trump, an icon of materialistic obsession and a lack of concern for losers. On the other is a control-freak determination to tell everyone how to live, with instructions coming from entitled boomer politicians and bureaucrats.

Boomers benefited from the strongest economy in American history  they account for 44 percent of the population but 70 percent of the wealth, and have enjoyed far better income growth than later generations. Yet, despite their good fortune, many seem determined to pull ever more out of the economy as they age, while those stuck with the bills for their profligacy and indebtedness  the next generation  will have to do with less.

The Ive got mine crowd

Trumpian boomerism is easily evidenced in my own neighborhood of Villa Park in Orange County. Our lovely, well-maintained and aging little enclave is friendly, civic-minded and civil. But it also is the center of opposition to such things as school bonds that would improve local schools now in a shocking state of disrepair. Villa Park residents helped defeat the last school bond, and its a former (thank heaven) City Council member who seeks to lead the effort to overturn the one on the ballot this year.

The arguments of the anti-bond advocates, like those backing Trump, base their pitch on accusations of public incompetence but rest on a culture of selfishness. Many opposing the bonds, which would cost them a few hundred dollars a year on their property tax bill, think nothing of spending lavishly on luxury vacations or home upgrades. The fact that better schools might increase their own property values seems to sail against their mind-set, which apparently renders them oblivious to the penury imposed on the next generation.

This phenomenon can be seen in many communities across the country, notably, in boomer retirement havens like Missoula, Mont. Some of it seems plainly racial: The majority of children in our local schools, which my youngest daughter attends, are Latino and Asian. In other words, many dont want to help their children, even though here in Southern California they are our future.

It takes a village to destroy a generation

Then lets look at Hillary Clintons progressive boomerism. Clinton has long talked about her concern for children. Who could forget her immortal It takes a village slogan? But the policies she advocates, particularly on energy, urban planning and economics, will prolong the slow growth that makes upward mobility problematic for future generations.

Even worse are the influential green progressives, increasingly dominant in Democratic politics, especially here in California. Led by our illustrious and aged governor, our environmental zealots advocate reducing the living standards of the next generation, but many are from the older generation of property owners who reap the benefits of an increasingly scarce, and valuable, asset like houses.

Lately, green activists have taken their generational attitudes a step further. In a recent National Public Radio program, leading lights of the climate change establishment suggested that perhaps we shouldnt be creating a new generation at all. The best way to keep the planet safe from rapid toasting, they suggest, is getting people in high-income countries  where birth rates are already low  to stop having babies. Its OK for those who nobly live in poverty in the developing countries to keep having kids, just as long as they stay poor.

A look at our legacy

Someday, boomers will lose power, but right now they make up almost a third of the American voting-age population and hold nearly two-thirds of the seats in Congress.

Millennials, the next big generation, in the long run may prove better than their parents. But they are not well served by the insufferably smug, self-appointed spokespeople (many from the same upper classes that dominate the greens) who brag about how they purposely eschew cars and big homes in favor of riding bikes and living in group homes. I doubt they speak for the vast majority who dream of buying a house, usually in the suburbs.

There are also some promising aspects to millennial attitudes, notably, their rejection of the racialism associated with Trump. Less noted is that they also seem to reject the top-down progressive boomerism epitomized by Clinton. Millennials may largely be liberal on issues such as immigration and gay marriage, but one recent survey found that less than a third of them favor federal solutions over locally based ones.

The fact that millennials both reject Trump and voted heavily against Clinton in the primaries reflects their nascent rejection of boomer politics. Hopefully, their changes will come soon enough to allow the republic, and its institutions  including our local schools  to survive the current boomer plague.

Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism (www.opportunityurbanism.org).
SANTA ANA  A man was arrested Saturday after he was found in a stolen vehicle and was bitten by a police dog, a police official said.

At about 4:15 p.m., the Santa Ana police spotted a stolen vehicle near Flower Street and 1st Street, Sgt. David Lima said. A police helicopter was following the car when it crashed into a parked vehicle in the 500 block of South Poplar Street.

The driver, a man in his mid-20s, fled into the backyard of a nearby house, Lima said. He refused to come out of the backyard after police officers asked him to surrender, Lima said.

A K-9 dog was then released and bit the man before he was taken into custody, Lima said.

The unidentified man was arrested on suspicion of stealing a vehicle, Lima said.
Its unlikely that anyone will ever write an opera  or even a soap opera  titled Trump in Mexico, but it would have seemed even more improbable four decades ago that an opera would be performed called Nixon in China. But it has been staged, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, no less.

Richard Nixons 1972 visit to China was so surprising that it entered the lexicon. Nixon goes to China came to mean something dramatic and out of character  with a connotation of being savvy. Depending on the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trumps Mexico City gambit may be remembered the same way.

In the 1960s, Nixon asserted that recognizing Red China would be disastrous to the cause of freedom. A few years later, hes quoting Mao in a toast and clinking glasses with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai.

In Trumps presidential announcement speech, he snarled that Mexico is not our friend, believe me, adding that when Mexico sends its people, theyre bringing drugs, theyre bringing crime, theyre rapists.

Nearly 15 months later, Trump found himself at a lectern at Mexicos National Palace and looking presidential. Why not? He was standing beside Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto.

Trumps performance, coming as new polls show the race tightening, should put shivers down the spines of those in Clintons camp, wrote political columnist Roger L. Simon. Im not sure Clinton was spooked, but Trumps Nixon-goes-to-China gambit clearly stuck in her craw.

It certainly takes more than trying to make up for a year of insults and insinuations by dropping in on our neighbors for a few hours and then flying home again, Clinton said before Trump even arrived in Mexico City. That is not how it works.

It seemed to be working just fine for Trump Wednesday afternoon. I had a very open and constructive discussion with Donald Trump, Pena Nieto said at the joint press conference. Even though we may not agree on everything, I trust that together we will be able to find prosperity and security.

Trump was just as gracious. We are united by our support for democracy, a great love for our people and the contributions of millions of Mexican-Americans to the United States, he said. He also spoke warmly about first-, second- and third-generation Mexican immigrants in the United States  spectacular, spectacular, hard-working people.

Mexican academics, government officials and social commentators have long had a simple litmus test for Americans when discussing border issues. Yes, they acknowledge that illegal drugs and millions of people, many of them unwanted, flow north into the States. But this does not happen in a vacuum: Cash and guns flow south  with terrible consequences for Mexican society.

If the gringo denies these facts, or minimizes them, or even says, Yes, but (Si, pero ), the Mexican heart hardens. Side-stepping this truth is a sign of bad faith. Freely admitting it allows for dialogue. Guess what? Trump aced this test  he brought up Americans culpability on his own, in a way consistent with his campaign message.

We all share a common interest in keeping our hemisphere safe, prosperous and free, Trump said. No one wins in either country when human smugglers and drug traffickers prey on innocent people, when cartels commit acts of violence, when illegal weapons and cash flow from the United States into Mexico or when migrants from Central America make the dangerous trek  into Mexico or the United States without legal authorization.

As Trump followed this up by answering reporters questions with a calm grace he has rarely displayed stateside, Pena Nieto had a pained look on his face. Why did I invite this guy down here again? he must have been asking himself. Later, Pena Nieto sent out a tweet disputing Trumps assertion that the two men never discussed the toxic issue of which country would pay for Trumps infamous wall along the border.

For decades, Americans have fanaticized about how a business executive might govern in the White House. These impulses predate Trump, going back to the days of Ross Perot and Lee Iacocca. Here was evidence that it might work. Trump wasnt detailing his entire program, as a politician would. He was having an ice-breaker to assess the other side prior to opening actual negotiations.

This was The Art of the Deal, not Yalta. So Trump was presidential in the way he needed to be, while coming across as a citizen politician for voters unimpressed by recent U.S. presidents.

Then it was on to Arizona, where Trump undid whatever goodwill hed engendered among Latino voters. At a raucous rally at the Phoenix Convention Center, his tone came across as harsh when he tried to clarify his position on illegal immigration. If his intention was to take a subtle step back from his hard-line stance on a complicated issue, this was the wrong venue and the wrong crowd. In any event, he didnt succeed.

Perhaps Trump should have stayed in Mexico longer. Nixon, remember, spent eight days in China, which put me in mind of legendary Orange County right-winger John G. Schmitz. When asked about Nixons historic visit, Schmitz quipped that he didnt mind Nixon going to China, I only object to his coming back.

Carl M. Cannon is executive editor and Washington Bureau chief of RealClearPolitics.
SANTA ANA  The police are looking for a man who fled after trying to cash a counterfeit check on Saturday.

At about 5:54 p.m., the Santa Ana Police department received a call about a man in his 20s trying to cash a counterfeit check at a business in the 1200 block of West Warner Avenue, Sgt. David Lima said.

Before police arrived, the man left the business and got into a vehicle where a male driver and a female passenger was waiting, Lima said. The car came to a stop when it crashed into several vehicles near St. Gertrude Place and Rosewood Avenue.

Police officers found the driver and the female passenger in the car, which had been reported stolen, Lima said. The officers also found a handgun in the car, Lima said. The two were arrested.

However, the man who is accused of trying to cash the counterfeit check fled the scene, Lima said.

Anyone with information about this case is asked to contact the Santa Ana Police Department at 714-245-8701.

Contact the writer: 949-445-6397 or tshimura@ocregister.com
Junior swimmer Eva Merrell, who last competed for Corona del Mar as a freshman and is coming off a strong summer on the U.S. national scene with the Aquazot club, has decided to enroll at Crean Lutheran, she in a direct message on Twitter on Sunday.

I recently was named to the 2016-2017 USA Swimming National Team and I realized my travel schedule would be busier than before, she wrote. While the school is amazing, I feel like at CdM I wouldnt be able to accomplish my training, travel and academic goals.

At Crean Lutheran, Merrell said she will be part of a hybrid program with three classes on campus and three online.

More info to come
The Madison Labor History Mural fills three walls inside the south entrance at the Madison Labor Temple, 1602 S. Park St., and traces highlights of the area's labor union history, dating back more than 150 years.
South Carolina Cop Who Dragged Girl Across Classroom Wont Face Charges William Ketchum III is a journalist who covers music, pop culture, film/TV, race,

The former South Carolina police officer who dragged a black high school girl across a classroom in a jarring viral video will not face criminal charges.

The October 2015 video at Spring Valley High School showed Richland County police officer Ben Fields grabbing a girl who was sitting at her desk, refusing to give up her cell phone. After flipping her and the desk over, he dragged her on the floor across the classroom before telling her to put her hands behind her back.

But Solicitor Dan Johnson said that he found no probable cause to charge Fields with any crimes.

Johnsons 12-page report includes witness accounts, one of which reads the incident looked worse in the video than it did in the classroom. Fields maintained his stance, stating, I realized that I was going to have to physically remove the student from her seat to effectuate her arrest.

According to a report from NY Daily News, Ben Fields was fired from the police department after the incident. Sheriff Leon Lott said the video made him want to throw up, and he called on the FBI and the Justice Department to investigate.

Johnson said that Fields firing and calls for investigation were injurious to the prosecution of the case.

NY Daily News reports that the student who recorded the video, Niya Kenny, and the student who was arrested both faced disturbing schools charges. The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against the state of South Carolina for the charges; on Friday, Johnson said those charges would be dismissed.

Watch a video of the incident below.
Your Right to Know: Coveted records exemption wrong for Wisconsin
Until recently she worked at a Home Depot checkout counter, scanning west Omahans purchases of paint and mulch, another smiling employee wearing an orange apron and a name tag that identified her only by an easy-to-pronounce nickname: G.

But there seemed something different about this employee, a few teenage co-workers noticed, something curious about her accent, the way she talked and moved. She seemed poised. Self-assured.

G seemed  regal.

So they started asking questions, as teenagers do. They crowded around her checkout counter during a break and asked: How long have you been here? What did you do before you worked at Home Depot?

Where did you come from, G?

She smiled and paused, buying time, calibrating her answer, as good politicians do.

She did not tell them that she is the youngest women ever elected to Afghanistans Parliament, or how that election made her both famous and a target.

She did not tell them about the death threats delivered to her husband, Feroz, a onetime aide to Afghan President Hamid Karzai. She didnt mention the car bomb, or the day someone tried to kidnap the baby.

It is hard to explain how she and Feroz went from Kabuls young political power couple to hiding out in Turkey to her standing behind this cash register at a west Omaha Home Depot, so G thought about it, and decided not to try.

I didnt want to make their heads, you know, boom! she says, and makes the explosion motion with her hands.

Instead, she smiled at the curious teenagers. Before I worked here, I raised my kids, she said.

And that is true, but it leaves out the part where Afghan hard-liners smeared her and her husband as CIA spies and secret Christians. It leaves out the part where some Americans loathe the couple because of their skin color, their accents, their Muslim faith. And it leaves out the real reason they fled Afghanistan, a reason confirmed by U.S. military officers and American diplomats.

G and Feroz fled Afghanistan, their homeland they long worked to change, less than 24 hours after they endangered their own lives by warning U.S. officials of a possible plot to kill Americans.

You do not know our story, says Feroz, the first time I meet the couple. If we tell you what we did, then maybe you will want to hug us.

***

The text messages popped onto his smartphone screen early each day in Kabul, becoming a regular part of Feroz Mohmands morning ritual, like your cup of coffee or bowl of Cheerios.

He would glance down at a text that said: Say goodbye to your children. Or: This is going to be your last day. Or: Cooperate or else. You know what we can do to your wife. We have shown you.

He would read those texts, and then he would leave for work, riding in a car that bumped down Kabuls uneven streets toward Afghanistans heavily guarded presidential palace.

Gharghashta G Katawazai, his wife, would leave for her job, too, accompanied by bodyguards as she attended a session of the Afghan Parliament or, far more dangerously, visited the province she had been elected to represent.

My family was always telling me, No, stop, its too dangerous,  G says. But he supported me, she says, glancing at Feroz as we sit in a west Omaha Starbucks. And that is one of the reasons I married him.

How a lawmaker and a presidential aide came to be hunted by extremists is an all-too-Afghan story, a story that began with the hope that the toppling of the Taliban could lead to a new, better Afghanistan.

Ferozs family returned to Afghanistan in 2002, shortly after the U.S.-led invasion. They, like hundreds of thousands of Afghans, had been living as refugees in Pakistan, where his family was running a cosmetics store.

Gs family came back that year, too, also from Pakistan. There G had graduated from high school at the top of her class, even while facing years of schoolyard bullying as an Afghan teen living in often-hostile Pakistan.

Both are from politically connected families. Gs father served as a delegate at the 2003 Loya Jirga, which hashed out Afghanistans new constitution. Ferozs father and uncle worked for government ministries.

And both re-entered the country believing there were only two reasons to return to war-ravaged Afghanistan. It was home. And they could help make it better.

I always felt like this was my country, and I had to build it. If I dont, who will? G asks.

She advocated for womens rights during the Loya Jirga process. Then in 2005 she decided to run for Parliament in her familys native Paktika province in southeast Afghanistan  a remote, undeveloped area bordering Pakistan where both deeply conservative tribal leaders and Taliban fighters have long held power.

A woman running for office was shocking enough. But she was a young single woman advocating for womens rights and girls education. A young single woman so eloquent and impressive that in 2006, President Karzai himself picked her as one of six young Afghans to come to the United States  in fact, to Omaha  to attend a leadership training session at the University of Nebraska at Omahas Center for Afghanistan Studies.

When we met her, we were so impressed with her sense of responsibility, her perceptive qualities, her poise, says Tom Gouttierre, the longtime director of the center. She was just something.

Those qualities did not endear her to the Taliban or their allies.

How was that campaign for Parliament? I asked G. She smiled faintly. It was so hard, she said.

For much of the two-month campaign, she couldnt even travel in Paktika because of the ever-present threat of assassination. When she did, she was protected by U.S. and international forces, who provided security to female politicians after dozens faced death threats. And yet, buoyed by family connections and a new law mandating that a quarter of Parliament be female, she won.

She was now the youngest woman  the youngest person  elected to the Afghan Parliament.

As she took office, Feroz was climbing his own Afghan ladder. He started at the bottom. He started as the presidential palaces IT guy.

I was the guy wearing jeans and a T-shirt who would come and fix your computer and leave, he says.

But his boss in the administrative office soon got promoted to presidential spokesman. He took the young computer guy along, because Feroz also spoke fluent English and related to people as well as he did computers.

By 2008, Feroz served as a go-between for the Karzai government and foreign embassies, frequently working with President Karzai, the U.S. State Department and the U.S. military on things like logistics for upcoming meetings.

Around this time he met a young politician named G. He offered her a ride home after a late-night meeting. They talked and talked. They realized they had the same vision for the future of Afghanistan. They talked more and more, for months. They realized they had the same vision for the rest of their lives.

We were married in 2008, Aug. 26! Feroz says. It was Aug. 25, G says, and rolls her eyes.

It was soon after the wedding that G got the warning. She was in Paktika to visit after-school girls programs she had helped create and to advocate for a womens hospital she wanted to build.

The Taliban were no fan of either project. They are looking for you, the warning said. Your two-car convoy may be attacked on the way home.

G huddled with her bodyguards, and they devised a plan. She would switch to the convoys other car, the one that usually carried her security detail. The two cars would split up, so no attack could get both.

Her new car took the lead, rolled smoothly north through Paktika and entered a flat, dusty stretch of highway as the sun dipped in the sky.

Then she heard the explosion. She spun around in her seat and watched the cloud of smoke rising miles behind her on the highway. I knew, she says.

Ten minutes behind, the second car  Gs normal car  had been incinerated by an IED. Two of the couples friends died in the attack.

They were like family, Feroz says.

I was eight months pregnant at the time, G says.

The threats escalated over the next year, the anonymous text messages popping daily into Ferozs phone, You are in love with the Americans. We showed you we can kill your wife. You will pay.

You will pay.

And then, one day in 2009, they almost did.

The day care called. Their longtime housekeeper had shown up to pick up Feroz and Gs son. Was that OK?

Yes, of course, except ... the housekeeper had called in sick that morning. Why would she be there to pick up the child? Something was wrong.

Feroz rushed to the day care, and found security guards detaining the housekeeper, who was sobbing.

I didnt have a choice, she said. My husband was forcing me to take your son. I didnt have a choice.

Feroz and G were used to the drumbeat of threats, numb to the ever-present violence thats a fact of Afghan life. But no one had ever tried to kidnap their child.

I knew I had to leave, G said. I said, I need to go for a visit to Omaha. 

***

Feroz picked up the phone, started to dial, and hesitated.

It was March 5, 2012, and life had gotten worse.

G had returned from Omaha, where she had taken their infant son and lived for six months following the kidnapping attempt. During that time, stories in an Afghan newspaper had falsely claimed that she had gone to the United States to convert to Christianity. When she did return, she rarely left the relative safety of Kabul, making only two brief and dangerous trips to Paktika province.

Feroz had moved up at work, becoming a press officer for Karzai, spending more time around the Afghan president, American military leaders like Adm. Mike Mullen and politicians from all over the world. With that responsibility came more accusations. Karzais aide was too close to the Indians, or the Italians, or the Pakistanis, the hard-liners said. And he is too close to Americans, they said. Hes an American puppet.

These accusations took place in a country where it had gotten ever-more dangerous to align yourself with the Karzai government and the U.S.-led coalition.

I think Feroz is just amazing. They both are. The whole family is incredible, says Eileen OConnor, Yale Universitys vice president for communications and a former CNN war correspondent who served as an adviser to then-Ambassador Ryan Crocker in Kabul in 2012. He was definitely targeted for supporting a better future for Afghanistan. For supporting ... democracy, free speech, pluralism among ethnic groups.

The Taliban and related groups were busy retaking areas of the country they had been pushed out of a decade earlier. Just weeks earlier in 2012, nationwide protests erupted over the burning of a Koran at Bagram Airfield near Kabul. And two American military officers had just been murdered inside Afghanistans Ministry of the Interior, casualties in a spasm of anti-American violence that threatened to spread  and endangered Afghans like Feroz and G.

It was during these dangerous and uncertain days that G learned something that caused Feroz Mohmand to pick up the phone.

The couple say she learned of an Afghan plot to attack military and diplomatic officials during a seemingly routine joint Afghan-U.S. briefing.

They say the plots aim was simple: Kill important Americans.

And after hesitating, Feroz dialed a contact at the U.S. Embassy and warned him of the attack.

I knew that (after this) that was it for me in my home country, he says. Thats it. Its done.

The World-Herald is withholding a few details of this alleged plot, both because those details cant be corroborated and because other details could endanger the couples family members still living in Afghanistan.

But two Americans working closely with Feroz at the time, one a highly placed official and one a military officer stationed at the U.S. Embassy, confirmed the following: Feroz did call the embassy and warn of a looming attack. That phone call prompted the Americans to cancel the joint briefing. And soon after, the military and diplomatic officials threatened by the plot left Afghanistan for safety reasons.

Basically Feroz saved the team that was there, at least eight people, the military officer says. He was being a good person. He was doing the right thing.

A day after that phone call, Feroz called G. Grab the important documents, he said. I dont think we will be coming back.

They pulled $2,000 out of their checking account. They got a ride to the airport. And, with their son, the young political power couple of Kabul got on a plane bound for Turkey.

We didnt know how long we would be gone, Feroz says. We just knew we had to go someplace safe.

***

Not long ago, if you wandered bleary-eyed into the Hampton Inn next to the Baltimore airport looking for a room, the smiling employee who greeted you at the front desk may have been a man who knows both Afghanistans ex-president and the former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Feroz was used to being ushered into hotels at the right hand of Hamid Karzai. Now he was working in one.

G was used to TV appearances, handshake photo-ops, a chauffeured car to the Afghan Parliament. Now she was pregnant with their second child, taking the Baltimore city bus to her new job at McDonalds.

My son was so happy. Free Happy Meals! G says. I would look at him and think, OK, if this makes you happy, I will try to let it make me happy. But mentally I was not ready for it. How could you be?

They had fled Afghanistan for Turkey, then received help from U.S. officials who knew the couple in Kabul and sped their refugee application process to get them into the United States.

Now they were here, and they felt safe for the first time in years. That doesnt mean it was easy.

They hopped from Baltimore to Virginia to San Diego, chasing better jobs, better weather, more opportunity. They learned bus routes and employment forms in a foreign language, learned to navigate the speed and bureaucracy of cities so very far from home. They met many Americans who welcomed them with open arms, but also grew used to the hard stares and the query that too often felt like an accusation. Where you from, again?

At a San Diego gas station, Feroz says he got verbally attacked by a man who heard him listening to Koranic verses in his car and called him a terrorist, and worse.

And then G suggested the first American city she had ever visited, the place where she had returned when her son was nearly kidnapped. It was a place where she knew people, a place that had long had a soft spot in her heart. Why dont we move there?

Feroz agreed, which is how the young political power couple of Kabul came to live, work and raise their family in Omaha.

Today, Feroz works at Lutheran Family Services, where the 30-year-old helps new refugees resettle in the city. After a short stint at Home Depot, G is raising the couples two children and trying to decide what to do next.

Maybe the 31-year-old will remain a homemaker for a while longer, away from the prying questions of curious American teenagers. What did you do before Home Depot? Why are you here?

Maybe she will return to college, carve a new path, lead in a different way.

She will graduate at the top of her class, I guarantee you that, says Gouttierre, who has known G for a decade. Omaha is simply lucky to have them. They will become excellent citizens here, just as they were in Kabul.

When she is alone in the familys small apartment kitchen or at the playground with the kids, now 7 and 2, her thoughts drift to Afghanistan.

She thinks about the girls schools she helped build, and the womens hospital never completed. She thinks about the hope of 2002 and the heartbreak of 2012, the speeches, the threats, that cloud of smoke rising behind her on the highway.

She thinks about how scared she should have been, but rarely was. She thinks about how happy she was, in the beginning. She thinks about Afghanistan, how it feels unfinished.

I want to tell you one thing, she says inside a west Omaha Starbucks. When I ran for Parliament, one thing I promised the people, the women and girls, is that I would be there for them, that I would help them so that one day they could replace me. Now I am afraid they can look at me and say, OK, so what is the end? You become a refugee?

I cannot let those people feel hopeless! G says, her voice rising. I dont want them to see my work as incomplete!

She falls silent. She looks down at the table for five seconds, 10, thinking about the next sentence, calibrating her answer.

Finally she lifts her head and locks her eyes onto yours.

So now Im waiting, she says. When my kids grow up, I will go back. I will go back, and I will never hide again.
When fans of beloved brunch spot Dixie Quicks heard the news that co-owner Rene Orduna had been diagnosed with stage 4 kidney cancer, they did what Orduna and his husband, Rob Gilmer, have done for so many others: They came together in support.

Orduna and Gilmer  who together have run Dixie Quicks and the RNG Gallery for more than 20 years, at two different Omaha locations and now in downtown Council Bluffs  are known not only for the eggs Benedict and towers of French toast that Orduna cooks for hungry brunchgoers every weekend but also for their support of local musicians and artists.

Now friends of the restaurant have organized efforts to raise money to help the couple pay for travel and medical expenses. In its first week, an online fundraiser collected more than $10,500, and a Sept. 11 concert and silent auction aims to raise even more.

Gilmer said hes been astounded by the outpouring of support.

Its been amazing, just amazing, he said. Its so wonderful.

Omaha artist Kim Darling and musician Orenda Fink organized the online fundraiser.

Jason Kulbel, owner of Slowdown, said Fink, Darling and others wanted to play host to a live auction and concert for Gilmer and Orduna. Slowdown offered its north downtown space, and musicians Simon Joyner, High Up and Closeness are scheduled to play, with drag performances between sets.

The event already has drawn about 50 donations for the silent auction, including original works of art, gift certificates from

businesses in Omaha and Council Bluffs and prize packages, including free admission for two to every concert at Slowdown through the end of the year, and a 2017 Maha music festival package of tickets and swag.

Kulbel said the auction received so many donation offers that the organizers had to cap the number of items.

Its crazy, he said. Everyone obviously loves (Rene). People have come out of the woodwork.

Gilmer said though he and Orduna are not working at Dixie Quicks right now, the restaurant remains open.

Things are as usual at Dixie Quicks, he said. The staff has been amazing and stepped forward to keep the food at the high standard Rene has set.

Dixie Quicks Public House opened in downtown Council Bluffs in fall 2011 after moving from 1915 Leavenworth St. in Omaha, where it had been located for 10 years. Before that the restaurant operated as Dixie Quicks Luncheonette at 15th and Dodge Streets.

Chef Jennifer Coco, who runs J. Coco in midtown, said Ordunas effect on the local food scene cant be underestimated.

Hes always done it his way, she said. He stays true to his roots. It was farm to table before that was ever a term.

Coco, who will be working with other local chefs to provide food at the Slowdown benefit, said when she contacted Omaha restaurants, no one balked at her request for help.

He would be there for us, she said of Orduna. Everyone is just, like, What more can we do? 

Gilmer said Omahans also can show support by dining at Dixie Quicks, 157 W. Broadway.

Kulbel said its unlikely that Gilmer and Orduna will be at the Slowdown benefit  they headed to the Mayo Clinic last week. But all the funds raised that evening, including donations and money from auction items, will go to the couple.

They have a great restaurant, but it goes so far beyond that, Kulbel said. They are supporters. They have been around and supported artists for so long. This is a good example of Omaha stepping up and helping friends.

Rene Orduna benefits

 Sept. 11 at Slowdown, 729 N. 14th St. Doors open at 6 p.m. and the event is from 7 to 11 p.m. A donation of $15 is suggested at the door. The concert, featuring High Up, Simon Joyner and Closeness, is all ages. Dixie Drag will perform as well. The silent auction includes about 50 items, including art, prize packages, gift certificates and more. Chef Jennifer Coco will provide food. All the funds raised will be donated to Orduna and his husband, Rob Gilmer. For more information, visit facebook.com/events/290010664698254/.

 An online fundraiser is at gofundme.com/2mjpfcg4.

 Dixie Quicks, at 157 W. Broadway in Council Bluffs, remains open. Its hours are Wednesday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturday brunch 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and dinner from 5 to 9 p.m.; and Sunday brunch from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. The restaurant is closed Mondays and Tuesdays.
The days when big U.S. technology companies could easily slice tax bills in Europe are coming to an end.

For decades, businesses like Apple that generate significant revenue abroad flocked to Ireland, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, where they counted on amenable fiscal regimes to reduce their taxes, even if they had minimal operations on the ground.

Last week European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager sent the strongest signal yet that she wont abide these strategies when she demanded Apple pay an estimated $14.5 billion in back taxes.

Every global company that is exposed to EU taxes in individual nations now has to look back and ask whether any of their agreements are subject to similar attacks, said Thomas Cooke, a professor at Georgetowns McDonough School of Business. This is the first signal of a long play thats going to take place over many, many months.

Every time an iPhone or iPad is purchased in London, Paris or Milan, Apple books the profit at a subsidiary in the Irish city of Cork. The process is part of a decades-long arrangement with the Irish government thats allowed the company to pay lower taxes on these European sales. The European Commission ruled that Ireland gave Apple illegally favorable tax treatment, letting it pay an effective tax rate on European profits of 1 percent in 2003 and down to 0.005 percent in 2014. Later in the week Apple CEO Tim Cook called the figures total political crap, and the company and Ireland vowed to appeal.

Apples Irish tax arrangement was considered the most brazen among multinational U.S. technology companies, said Aisling Donohue, a partner at tax and business advisory firm MGPartners in Ireland. While other companies should be concerned, they arent likely to face as much scrutiny, she said.

Still, Vestagers move is part of a broader push to close loopholes that European regulators think give foreign companies an advantage. Google parent Alphabet Inc. has also been a beneficiary of Irelands tax regime, using the Double Irish mechanism to save billions in tax on its international earnings. Ireland is phasing this out, although companies have until 2021 to adjust.

Amazon.com used a similar process to effectively send profit through Luxembourg. In Europe, the e-commerce giant told authorities that the intellectual property behind its web shopping platform was immensely valuable, justifying the billions in tax-free revenue it collected there since moving its technology assets to Luxembourg a decade ago. In the U.S. it played down the value of those same assets to explain why it paid so little in taxes for licensing them. That prompted investigations on both sides of the Atlantic, and Amazon changed its policy in 2015, largely eliminating the practice.

You cant bank on achieving the savings in post-tax profits that you might have once expected, said Jolyon Maugham, a British trial lawyer specializing in tax cases at Devereux Chambers. That makes the pursuit of such strategies rather more difficult to justify.

About six months ago Netflix told an investor that the company will likely pay higher international tax rates than other large U.S. technology companies currently pay. Netflix, which recently began expanding aggressively abroad, said it views other U.S. tech companies international tax strategies as unsustainable, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Multinationals with aggressive tax planning strategies can expect to pay more tax, Sarah Jane Mahmud, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst, wrote in a recent research note. EU reforms will require income to be taxed where generated through, among other things, new restrictions on use of controlled foreign companies.

While $14.5 billion represents the EUs estimate of how much Ireland should claw back from Apple, the final amount, which also will include interest, is still not set in stone.
The Holland Foundation of Omaha will continue its philanthropy in the spirit of the late Richard Holland, his daughter Mary Ann Andy Holland of Omaha said.

Dick Holland, who died Aug. 9 at age 95, made a fortune through his businesses and from investments with Warren Buffett since the 1960s.

Andy Holland, a trustee of the Holland Foundation, told The World-Herald that the foundation would honor its existing commitments and continue pursuing the missions set by her father, who was chairman of the foundation.

Its contributions supported groups focused on the arts, education, the environment and childrens issues.

Dick Holland and his late wife, Mary, were major donors for the Holland Performing Arts Center. Groups receiving its support included Opera Omaha, Omaha Performing Arts, the University of Nebraska, the Nebraska Nature Conservancy and the Child Saving Institute.

The Holland Foundations latest tax filing showed assets of $158.8 million at the end of 2014 and contributions that year totaling $19.1 million to more than 100 organizations.

It is one of Omahas largest charitable foundations, although smaller than two Buffett family foundations.

The Sherwood Foundation, operated by Warren Buffetts daughter, Susie, had $264 million in assets and made $98.2 million in contributions in 2014. The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named after his late wife, had $3.1 billion in assets and made $534.5 million in contributions in 2014.
Nebraska trucking companies are calling their latest investments in new vehicles good business.

Grand Island Express has ordered 90 new trucks with the latest safety gear: cameras, radar, automatic braking and other equipment known as a collision mitigation system, President Tom Pirnie said.

We have 30 in service so far of those we have ordered, Pirnie said. We think the collision mitigation will pay for itself over time.

Pirnie decided to lease his new trucks over a 36-month term; to buy outright, he was quoted $144,000 each.

Lincoln-based Crete Carrier, with about 5,000 trucks, has been using trucks fully equipped with the latest safety gear for several years, President Tonn Ostergard said.

So I guess you could call that a vote of confidence, he said.

Both Crete and Grand Island say they mechanically limit the speeds on their trucks to about 65 mph, ahead of a proposal last month by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to make such limiters mandatory.

Pirnie said such limits shouldnt matter for good drivers  they shouldnt have to rely on sudden acceleration above the imposed limit to avoid danger.

Good drivers dont put themselves in those kinds of situations to begin with, Pirnie said.

He also said post-accident examinations of incidents involving his trucks have failed to uncover one example where accelerating quickly beyond the imposed limit would have made a difference.

Ostergard said he has heard the same about speed limiters.

Its been argued to me before, Ostergard said. Unsuccessfully, so far.
NEW YORK (AP)  Some major retailers are scrambling to work out contingency plans to get their merchandise to stores as the bankruptcy of the Hanjin shipping line has thrown ports and retailers around the world into confusion.

They dont have a lot of time. Giant container ships from the South Korean-based Hanjin shipping line are marooned with their cargo of what experts say are TVs, printers, home furnishings and clothing.

Hanjin, the worlds seventh-largest container shipper, filed for bankruptcy protection Wednesday and stopped accepting new cargo. Ships from China to Canada were refused permission to offload or take aboard containers because there were no guarantees that tugboat pilots or stevedores would be paid. Its also been a factor in shipping rates rising and could hurt some trucking firms with contracts to pick up goods.

The South Korean giant represents nearly 8 percent of the trans-Pacific trade volume for the U.S. market. While some retailers may already have merchandise for the holiday season affected, experts say whats most important is that the issue be resolved before the critical shipping month of October.

Retailers always have robust contingency plans, but this degree of uncertainty is making it challenging to put those plans in place, said Jessica Dankert, senior director of retail operations for the Retail Industry Leaders Association, a trade alliance with members including companies like Best Buy, Walmart and Target.

J.C. Penney said Hanjin is one of several ocean freight carriers that it uses and when it learned there might be an issue it began to divert and reroute its containers. It said it uses a variety of transportation methods and ports and right now does not expect a significant effect on the flow of merchandise.

Target Corp. said it is watching the situation closely and Walmart said it is waiting for details about Hanjins bankruptcy proceedings and the implications to its merchandise before it could assess the effect.

As of Friday, 27 ships had been refused entry to ports or terminals, said Hanjin Shipping spokesman Park Min. Chris Rogers, a research analyst at Panjiva, which tracks international imports to the United States, said the situation isnt yet dire but could become so. October is the busiest month for cargo from South Korea to the U.S., accounting for about 11.5 percent of the annual total.

But South Koreas maritime ministry said Hanjins troubles would affect cargo exports for two to three months, given that August-October is a high-demand season for deep-sea routes.

Copyright 2016 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Ten years ago I had borrowed my wifes cellphone (because I didnt have one) for the day and was driving down Farnam Street, just west of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.s headquarters, when it buzzed.

Not having learned to ignore cellphones, I answered it while at the wheel.

It was Susie Buffett, announcing her fathers marriage to longtime companion Astrid Menks.

Let me find a place to park, I said.

The next morning, the headline on our scoop started with, Buffetts special acquisition.

The story dutifully described the wedding partys apparel (a business suit for Warren Buffett; a blue silk top and white pants, to go with a bouquet of white roses, for the bride) and the post-wedding dinner party at Regencys Bonefish Grill.

The anniversary, Tuesday of last week, falls on the same date as Buffetts birthday.

So far no word on anniversary gifts or parties for Mr. and Mrs. Buffett. Tradition calls for tin or aluminum on 10th anniversaries, although jewelry stores are promoting something else these days: diamonds.

A Texas connection

Indirectly, Berkshire is affiliated with the buyer of a piece of the North Star Mall in San Antonio, Richard Webner reported for the Express News of that Texas city.

A partnership controlled by Clarence Kahlig, president of Kahlig Auto Group, bought 6.7 acres of land next to the dealership property. The land now holds a Family Leisure store that sells pools, spas and patio furniture.

The auto group recently sold control of its Toyota dealership to Berkshire Hathaway Automotive Group.

Another connection: Kahlig and Berkshire CEO Warren Buffett are members of their respective home cities business halls of fame.

Imagine a dividend

Its inevitable that Berkshire will pay dividends to its shareholders, according to an article on SeekingAlpha.com.

Well, maybe.

Its inevitable that the Earth will burn up in the sun, too. The question is, will todays investor live to see either?

The articles reasoning is that if you keep drawing Berkshires financial line into the future, its cash pile, now about $70 billion, will reach into the trillions.

At a growth rate of 10 percent a year, 50 years from now Berkshire would have a $45 trillion market value and nowhere to put its cash that would make a meaningful difference to its value.

The alternative is lower and lower returns to shareholders, the article said, eventually leading to a clamor for dividends.

By making the company smaller, the article argued, Buffett and his successors would have more options to make investments and acquisitions that would give adequate returns to the corporation.

So far, Buffett and his board of directors believe they can find better uses for the money. The shareholders agree, voting 97 percent in 2014 to reject a shareholder-originated dividend proposal.

Just for fun, what would a dividend be like?

For each $1 billion Berkshire paid out, each Class B share would get about 40 cents and each Class A share about $608.

Thats before income taxes, one reason the change is unpopular with shareholders.

Kickoff for UNO course

Buffett taught investing at Omaha University, now the University of Nebraska at Omaha, in the 1950s.

His successors will host a public reception from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday as a kickoff for UNOs Genius of Warren Buffett course, offered through the College of Business Administrations executive MBA program.

Robert Miles, who has written books about the Omaha investor, teaches the course based on Buffetts life, character, investments, management, business and charitable career.

Fridays event, at UNOs Mammel Hall, includes speakers, refreshments and a drawing for one free entry into the fall class, to be held Sept. 29-Oct. 1 and Oct. 20-22. RSVP to erinhockinson@gmail.com.

Already gone

One of the 86-year-olds listed here last week in recognition of Buffetts 86th birthday isnt doing as well as the others.

Thats actor Richard Harris, who died in 2002 and didnt actually make it to 86.

(You try to double-check everything, but sometimes you miss.)

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. owns the Omaha World-Herald.

Can't see the chat, app users? Click here.
A little more than 10 years ago, Markell D. Brewer was an Omaha high school graduate who had been honored for his work during his school years and the promise his life held.

Early Sunday, as he was standing outside talking with friends and family, he became the citys 17th homicide victim of the year.

Police say Brewer, 29, was shot at least once near 31st and Decatur Streets about 12:20 a.m. Sunday.

Police were in the area on an unrelated matter when they heard gunshots and found Brewer in the street.

Paramedics attempted to save Brewers life as he was rushed to the Nebraska Medical Center, where he later died.

Brewer lived in the area and was outside with friends and family when someone shot him, police said.

When officers arrived, two people were assisting Brewer. Police interviewed witnesses, but investigators have not released any further information.

Later in the morning, about 10 hours after the shooting, two weary men, Curtis Patterson, Brewers uncle, and, Wesley Williams, a Brewer friend, worked to wash blood from the street where the shooting took place. Patterson first used a broom and a bucket in an attempt to wash away the blood, which had coagulated into a thick pool.

Then a neighbor woman helped out, providing a second hose that enabled Williams to reach the center of the street and wash the blood to the other side.

The men had little to say as they finished their grim task.

Youd think the city would have done something to clean this up, Williams said.

A few hours later, a man who answered the door at Brewers home identified himself as the victims stepfather. He confirmed that Brewer had graduated from Central High School in 2005, where he was recognized during the 16th annual African-American Academic Achievement Awards ceremony.

The awards recognize black seniors in the Omaha districts high schools who have achieved academic excellence, contributed to their community, are actively involved in extracurricular activities and, through positive leadership, serve as role models for their peers.

In a statement Brewer's family provided about him, they said he was a loving father, brother, son, uncle and friend.

"He was always able to put a smile on your face at any time of day," the statement reads. "His daughter is his life, there wasn't one day he didn't go without speaking to or seeing her. He showed his parents unconditional love and was a great role model for his little brother and sister."

"... There is no way to replace such a beautiful soul no matter how hard we try. With his little brother being his best friend, they were inseparable."

Brewer's family said he was "very smart, very humble. He wouldn't hesitate to help anyone. You can tell how many lives he touched with all the love and support via social media and in general. He will be missed dearly by everyone. His family appreciates all love, support and condolences."

In addition to his stepfather, uncle, mother and daughter, Brewer also is survived by three siblings.

Anyone with any information about this incident is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 402-444-STOP (7867) or go to omahacrimestoppers.net. Tipsters remain anonymous and may be eligible for a $25,000 cash reward for an arrest in a homicide case.

World-Herald photographer Kent Sievers contributed to this report.
Oops.

Three men opened the outer door to the Premier Bank at 4318 Dodge St. about 10 a.m. Saturday, hoods over their heads and masks over their faces. One had a handgun.

But any plan to rob the bank quickly fell apart.

When they tried to open the banks interior door, the men found it was locked. Foiled, the three turned and fled.

Omaha police were notified of the robbery attempt and given the account by witnesses. Authorities also have bank video of the attempt to enter the building.
Camp Fontanelle fundraiser: Camp Fontanelle in Fontanelle, Nebraska, will host an open house and homecoming fundraiser for camp supporters and the general public on Sept. 18. The day will begin with a worship service at 11 a.m. Meals will be served from 12 to 3 p.m. at two locations at the camp.

The menu includes: homemade rolls, pulled pork, homemade pigs in a blanket, grilled hamburgers and hot dogs and grilled chicken. Free will donations will be accepted for meals. Concessions will be available at the corn maze beginning at 1 p.m.

Other activities include a silent auction and a live quilt auction, face painting, tree climbing, puppet shows, bounce house and all of the activities up at the corn maze area. All money received will be put back into supporting the summer camping ministry. For more information, go online to campfontanelle.com.

Retail Scan Campaign: The SpartanNash Foundation will host a company-wide fundraising effort to help end hunger in the communities it serves. During the Retail Scan Campaign customers who visit any of the SpartanNash-owned retail stores or fuel centers will have the opportunity to donate $1, $5 or $10 at any checkout lane. When customers make a donation during the fundraising effort, they will receive four coupons toward Spartan or Our Family brand products. Proceeds raised will support community food pantries selected by each of SpartanNashs 160 corporate-owned stores. A complete list of participating stores and their partner pantries can be found at SpartanNash.com/End-Hunger.

MOHMs Place receives funds: A $750 grant from the All Care Health Center Foundation and $740 from a grant awarded by the Pottawattamie County Community Foundation were used to purchase an emergency defibrillator for the new All Care Health Center Clinic at MOHMs Place.

Toilet Paper Tour: To celebrate National Toilet Paper Day last month, Outlook Nebraska loaded up their truck with more than 12,000 rolls of toilet paper to deliver to Heart Ministry Center, Youth Emergency Services and Heartland Family Service, donating 4,000 rolls of toilet paper to each organization. Outlook Nebraska is the states largest employer of the blind and visually impaired. The goals of the Toilet Paper Tour were to give back to those in need and to raise awareness of the capabilities of the blind and visually impaired.

Great Books for Great Kids: In August, 83 Runza Restaurants in Nebraska, Colorado, Iowa and Kansas donated 10 percent of sales to purchase books for libraries, schools and school foundations in communities with a Runza location. The fundraiser, titled Great Books for Great Kids, promotes the importance of reading and literacy. This years effort raised $28,609.64.

CASA volunteers: The Cass County Court Appointed Special Advocate Program is proud to announce that two new CASA advocates were sworn-in by Judge John Steinheider in August. The new CASA advocates are Laurie McMullan and Roneisha Williams. A brief reception was held following the swearing in to wish the new advocates well in their advocacy for Cass Countys abused and neglected children.
Nebraskans and Iowans who sensed swaying in their sleep Saturday morning werent dreaming.

An earthquake that originated in Oklahoma caused mirrors to move and buildings to sway just after 7 a.m. in eastern Nebraska. Residents throughout the Midwest and beyond, from Texas to Iowa and Tennessee to Arizona, felt the earthquake.

I just knew I was feeling an earthquake, said Artie Doyle, 82, of Bellevue. Man, Ill tell ya.

Nebraska Public Power Districts Cooper Nuclear Station declared the earthquake an unusual event and stepped up monitoring of its equipment. The utility said the plant continued to operate safely and with no threat to the public or NPPD personnel.

Two earthquake experts at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln said its possible that the process of wastewater injection  pumping salty, dirty water into the earth after oil and gas production work  caused the earthquake. One of the professors, Caroline Burberry, said earthquakes, while rare in Nebraska, appear to be increasing because of human-induced activities such as wastewater injection and fracking.

The U.S. Geological Survey determined the earthquake Saturday was magnitude 5.6. A weaker earthquake from Oklahoma could be felt by some in southern Nebraska early this year, Burberry said.

Tracy Frank, chairwoman of UNLs department of earth and atmospheric sciences, said a fault in Oklahoma possibly was affected by wastewater injection. She dismissed the notion that Nebraskans could be at risk of severely destructive earthquakes.

Here in Nebraska? No, I dont think so, she said. Were in a very stable area.

In Omaha, Douglas County dispatchers fielded about 50 calls Saturday morning from people who reported feeling the earthquake, said shift supervisor Todd Connely. None mentioned damage, he said. The force of an earthquake diminishes as it moves from the epicenter.

Rose Harbison, 64, of Omaha said her husband, Marvin, told her the mirror on our bedroom wall bounced against the wall and swayed for a while. I was sound asleep, she said.

Facebook contained many descriptions of the event. My bed started shifting and the clothes in my closet were moving from left to right! one wrote.

Another said: I thought the dog was shaking the couch.

********

Nebraska's most powerful earthquakes

Nov. 15, 1877: The strongest earthquake ever recorded in Nebraska. The magnitude 7 quake caused damage from North Platte to Lincoln and Sioux City, Iowa. The quake was felt in most of Nebraska and portions of Iowa, Kansas, the Dakotas and Missouri.

March 28, 1964: Strong (magnitude 7) earthquake rocked western Nebraska, South Dakota, parts of Wyoming and Montana. In Nebraska, roads cracked in Merriman, and some banks of the Niobrara River collapsed.

June 30, 1934: Strong (magnitude 6) earthquake in Dawes County. The shock was reported as far away as Sterling, Colo., and damaged some chimneys in Chadron.

March 1, 1935: Strong (magnitude 6) earthquake near Tecumseh. Some buildings were damaged in Tecumseh. Damage also was reported in Humboldt, Pawnee City, Peru, Shubert, Stella and St. Mary and in parts of Iowa, Kansas and Missouri.

July 28, 1902: Moderate (magnitude 5) quake near Battle Creek in northeastern Nebraska.

World-Herald staffers Rick Ruggles and Jeanne Hauser contributed to this report.
Ceremonies and memorials will take place across the Omaha metro area to mark the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Ongoing

Flags planted at Memorial Park feature the names of those who died during the attack, color-coded to indicate the location of death.

The flags will remain through Sept. 12. The Irvington Fire Department will display a steel beam artifact from the World Trade Center by the flags during weekends and evenings.

Sept. 11

 Omahas Minute of Silence will be held at 9:11 a.m. at Stinson Park in Aksarben Village. Afterward, speakers include Gov. Pete Ricketts, Omaha Mayor Jean Stothert, FBI Agent Randy Thyssee, Omaha Interim Fire Chief Dan Olsen and Omaha Deputy Police Chief Dave Baker.

Crews will be filming a video from several rooftops showing Omahans honoring 9/11 victims, officials said.

Family activities will be offered throughout the day. A patriotic concert also will be held.

The American Red Cross will host several blood drives in honor of 9/11.

To find the one closest to you, visit redcrossblood.org.

 Sarpy County police, fire, rescue and 911 dispatchers will be saluted, beginning at 7:30 a.m., at Hy-Vee at Shadow Lake Towne Center in Papillion.

Hy-Vee will provide free breakfast to first responders, and organizers will deliver meals to area police and fire staff who are unable to attend.

The public is invited and asked to bring flags, if possible.

 The Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum in Ashland, Nebraska, will describe how the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, changed national security. The Patriot Day program includes a light lunch starting at 12:30 p.m., with the presentation starting at 1 p.m.

Military and first responder guests will receive free entry and lunch; all other guests will receive lunch with their paid admission. RSVP is required by Thursday.

 The Honor and Remember Nebraska Chapter is putting on a 26-mile walk to honor fallen military and first responders. Participants can organize teams and walk as far as they would like. The goal is to reach 1.3 million steps.

The walk begins at 7:30 a.m. at 260 Riverside Drive in Waterloo and ends with a ceremony at Omahas Heartland of America Park at 4:30 p.m.

For more information, contact Jim Meier, director of the Honor and Remember Nebraska Chapter, meier260@cox.net or 402-490-9293.

 SumTur Amphitheater in Papillion will host a 15-year remembrance and military tribute beginning at 6 p.m. The event features musical performances and a 21-gun salute.

The first 100 people to arrive will receive a free American flag. Attendees are asked to bring a can of food for a local food bank.

 Trinity Episcopal Cathedral will host a memorial prayer service beginning at the cathedrals flagpole on 18th Street between Dodge Street and Capitol Avenue.

It begins with prayer at 7:40 a.m. The flag will be lowered to half-staff at 7:46 a.m. (the first plane hit the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time).

After the ceremony, the cathedral welcomes attendees inside for prayer and reflection.

 Tri-Faith Initiative hosts an event at Temple Israel, 13111 Sterling Ridge Dr. The event is a circle of peace open to all denominations. At 1 p.m., attendees will join hands to form the circle.

 The Kiwanis Club of Bellevue hosts a 9/11 Memorial Ceremony beginning at 5 p.m. at the Lied Activities Center, 2700 Arboretum Drive in Bellevue. The ceremony will honor fallen and wounded soldiers, first responders and gold star families. The event is also in remembrance of those who died on Sept. 11, 2001. The event includes a citizenship ceremony where 41 people will take an oath of citizenship.

Have another event we should note? Let us know at 402-444-1149 or andrea.k@owh.com.
Running an Omaha restaurant was a snap for a woman who as a child had helped the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation of World War II.

Simonne Balogh, 87, spent her last 50 years in Omaha, but grew up in Bourges, France. When France fell to the Germans, Baloghs hometown of Bourges was occupied by troops, and thus began her role with the French Resistance.

We lived about 5 miles from the demarcation line, she told The World-Herald in 1988. When I was 10 years old I began riding my bicycle, with my milk pail, into the non-occupied zone. I had permission from the Germans to go to a small farm to get milk.

Balogh also carried money, messages and other things that were useful to the French Resistance forces and which could be concealed under the false bottom of her milk pail or between the inner tube and front wheel of her bike. She said she made the 10-mile round trip two or three times a week.

Baloghs son said his mother didnt make a big deal out of her wartime exploits.

Mom didnt talk about the war a lot, said Steve Balogh, an attorney in Rockford, Illinois. Her dad owned a garage, and she told us some things  like about the time the Germans came to make sure the gasoline tanks were all drained.

Simonne Balogh died Aug. 29 of natural causes at her home, her son said. She made an anatomical gift of her body to the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

At the time of her death, Balogh was being cared for by longtime friend and former employee Jackie Saunders of Omaha.

We so appreciate everything Jackie did for mom, Steve Balogh said. She would (say) I promised you that Id take care of your mom, and thats exactly what she did.

Simonne Baloghs journey to Omaha started in Indochina. After working a stint in the postal service in Orleans and Paris, she joined the French army, which was fighting to save its colonies in Indochina.

The 95-pound soldier in the signal corps told The World-Herald that she was never wounded, although she was shot at several times, usually when she traveled with a convoy. One time she and a friend missed the convoy and drove five hours to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, only to arrive and find about 50 members of the convoy had been killed in an ambush.

At her next station, in Rabat, Morocco, Balogh met and married Lt. Stephen Balogh of the U.S. Air Force. He was later promoted to major and the family lived in several U.S. cities before arriving at Offutt Air Force Base in 1967.

Steve Balogh said his mother, who became a citizen in 1964, decided to open Simonnes restaurant in the early 1980s after the couple divorced. She did whatever was necessary, whether as it was as a cook, bookkeeper, waitress, cashier or maitre d.

She would also sew and knit constantly, her son said. I think she made most of the clothes she wore.

All three of us kids graduated from Benson High School, and mom was one of those parents that your classmates always wanted to talk to. I think they loved that accent.

Simonne Balogh also insisted that her three children excel at whatever career they chose. Steve Balogh, the attorney, is admitted to practice before several jurisdictions, including the U.S. Supreme Court. His brother, Dr. Scott Balogh, is an associate professor of medicine at the University of Tennessee in Memphis.

Their sister, Shaula Balogh, was a model and dancer who died three years ago after a long illness.

Their mother was old school, Steve Balogh said.

My mom was just 4-foot-11 but she obviously didnt take any guff from anyone, he said. She always expected the best from us. Shed say I dont need to tell you I love you because you know that. But I am going to be in your face if you screw up. 
LINCOLN  If you ask the state, motorists in Omaha are getting used to the troublesome merge on westbound Interstate 80 near 60th Street that caused a spike of accidents last year.

If you ask drivers, theyre still wary of that stretch of the Interstate leading out of the downtown area.

I hate it. I absolutely hate it, said Grant Giesselmann, who commutes weekdays from west Omaha to a sales job downtown.

A co-worker, Keith Bryan, who lives near 168th and Harrison Streets, said hes seen no improvement.

The highway almost comes to a complete standstill at rush hour, Bryan said. I dont know how they can say its gotten better.

The Nebraska Department of Roads, at the request of The World-Herald, recently provided updated accident figures for I-80 in the vicinity of the merge.

It showed that crashes had dropped significantly from last year, from 153 reportable and non-reportable (less than $1,000 in damages) accidents during 2015 to only 13 in the first three months of 2016. That figures to more than a threefold drop in the accident rate.

State officials said that it usually takes motorists about six months to adjust to changes on a roadway, and that is likely a major contributor to the decrease. Plus, they said, drivers just might be living up to the states Nebraska Nice motto and letting motorists merge.

Our hope was that over time people would merge over, said Tim Weander, the district engineer for the Omaha area. We did hear complaints, that initially people werent letting people merge over, but hopefully by the media expressing those concerns, maybe thats happening now.

Twenty-two months ago, the department expanded westbound I-80 to seven lanes west of the big interchange with I-480 and the Kennedy Freeway. But those seven lanes funnel to four lanes near 60th Street, producing a merge that proved problematic for some motorists, particularly during the evening rush hour.

Some motorists say they totally avoid that stretch of I-80, either heading west by driving through town or north to I-680. Others said they strategize so they can get in the far left-hand lanes earlier, by entering I-80 at 13th Street.

At any rate, the difficulties showed up in the accident statistics kept by the Roads Department, which indicated that injury and non-injury vehicle crashes shot up sevenfold in 2015 over 2014. If you count non-reportable accidents, the increase was tenfold.

The problem, most motorists said, was that drivers werent prepared for the narrowing of the Interstate and compensated with a last-minute crunch to merge from the seven lanes into four.

About a year ago, in an attempt to reduce accidents, the state put up a new sign about a half-mile before the merge, warning motorists to either merge left or prepare to exit the freeway. The new sign gave westbound motorists an earlier warning about the upcoming merge, about a quarter-mile sooner.

The new sign provided better and specific direction to drivers, said Jeni Lautenschlager, a spokeswoman for the state highway department. Weander said the reduced accident figures tell him that people are more aware of the merge, and are working to allow other motorists to merge.

Giesselmann, 24, said the bottleneck on I-80 used to be at the interchange with I-480 and the Kennedy Freeway, and that the widening of westbound I-80 from there to 60th Street has only served to move the congestion farther down the road.

Both he and Bryan said theyre seeing just as many collisions as last year.

Weander, the district roads engineer, said that the state would have widened I-80 even farther westward if it had the money.

He added that the state is working with the Metropolitan Area Planning Agency (MAPA) on a new Metropolitan Travel Improvement Study that will outline what highway and Interstate improvements are needed in Douglas and Sarpy Counties, and in Pottawattamie County in Iowa, in the next few years.

That report, which might include recommending more widening of I-80, is due next summer, Weander said.
PAWNEE, Okla.  Oklahomas second magnitude 5.0 earthquake in 2016  and third in five years  rattled the state and shook several other states, including Nebraska and Iowa, on Saturday, led to the ordered shutdown of dozens of oil and gas disposal wells and revealed a previously unknown fault line.

The magnitude 5.6 quake, which fired off at 7:02 a.m. Saturday about 9 miles northwest of Pawnee (60 miles northwest of Tulsa), is tied with one near Prague in 2011 for the states strongest quake.

In an unprecedented move, Saturdays temblor triggered state regulators to mandate that 37 disposal wells in a 725-square-mile area shut down operations indefinitely.

Disposal wells inject wastewater  a byproduct of oil and gas drilling  deep into the ground. Scientists believe that the high volume of wastewater injected into the ground has triggered Oklahomas substantial increase in earthquakes in recent years.

According to a Tulsa World analysis in January, the volume of wastewater disposed climbed 81 percent across six years, coinciding with the states increase in earthquakes.

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin indicated Saturday that the schedule for well shutdowns would begin within seven days in an area closest to a fault line. All other wastewater disposal wells in the designated area would be shut down in 10 days.

Were trying to do this as quickly as possible, but we have to follow the recommendations of the seismologists, who tell us everything going off at once can cause an (earthquake), said Matt Skinner, spokesman for the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which ordered the shutdown.

He said the commissions area of interest includes another 211 square miles in Osage County, but it doesnt know how many wells may be involved because the area is under the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency. He said the commission is working with the agency.

Dan McNamara, a U.S. Geological Survey research geophysicist, said the previously unknown fault line revealed Saturday is connected to a larger known fault that may be tens of kilometers to 100 kilometers long. That large fault system runs near or through Stillwater and Fairfax in central Oklahoma, McNamara said.

He added that he would label the hazards very high for sizable aftershocks in the coming weeks. People will continue to feel shaking for weeks, probably, he said.

A series of aftershocks was reported in the Pawnee area. None was stronger than magnitude 3.6 as of Saturday evening.

Hundreds of earthquakes have rattled Oklahoma annually in recent years. In fact, parts of the state have become as earthquake-prone as California, experts say.

On Feb. 13 a quake in northwest Oklahoma near Fairview was measured at 5.1. In January a swarm of 32 quakes shook northwest Oklahoma in a 24-hour period. The area was shaken by a 3.2 quake earlier last week.

Sarah Carpenter had just wakened and was sitting on the edge of her bed when the quake hit Saturday, its epicenter not far from her Pawnee home.

I heard the big boom and there were, like, two or three after that and I thought This is not like any one weve ever had,  said Carpenter, 64. My house went back and forth and back and forth. I didnt think it would ever stop. I thought Im on a boat in an ocean. I could hear stuff falling in my house. ... Ive been in a skyscraper in California when they had it and thats what it felt like.

Gov. Fallin declared a state of emergency for the county.

This is the biggest one Ive ever been around, said Pawnee County Sheriff Mike Waters. It was felt all around us.

Pawnee is the county seat, a town of about 2,000 in north-central Oklahoma where more than a dozen older limestone-and-brick buildings were damaged, and one father had to get stitches after his mantelpiece toppled on his head as he shielded his son, Waters said.

About six buildings owned by the local Pawnee tribal authority also were damaged, as were more than a dozen houses in the rural county of 16,000, Waters said.

He said the quake seemed to last more than 30 seconds, longer than recent temblors, and thats why we got so much more damage.

Minor damage to two structures  one of which was a municipal building  was reported in nearby Lincoln County.

Pawnee County Emergency Management Director Mark Randell said no buildings collapsed in Pawnee.

Weve got buildings cracked, Randell said. Most of its brick and mortar, old buildings from the early 1900s.

Pawnee Mayor Brad Sewell was fixing breakfast when what he described as a movie scene began unfolding: trinkets falling from shelves, floors undulating and the house shaking.

The mayor expressed concern about potential damage to the communitys significant number of old buildings, saying one of the top assets of Pawnee is its historic structures. Many of the older buildings in the downtown area were cordoned off by authorities awaiting an inspector to assess structural integrity.

The most visible exterior damage in downtown occurred to a vacant sandstone building on the National Register of Historic Places that opened in 1902 as Pawnees original bank. A shower of stones from the buildings upper facade tumbled to the sidewalk.

Whites Foodliner grocery store was left with a substantial mess: aisles packed with items were left piled a foot deep on the floor. Large ceiling tiles fell, but the two employees inside were uninjured.

Mayor Sewell said there was no visible exterior damage to residences in the area, but said he expected residents would find cracks in plaster.

Department of Transportation crews were inspecting bridges in Pawnee, Creek and Osage Counties following the earthquake and found only minor issues initially, according to the Governors Office.

The damage is not as severe as the 2011 quake near Prague despite being the same magnitude and approximately the same depth. Saturdays was 3.7 miles deep, compared with 3.1 miles in the 2011 quake.

Both are shallow quakes, during which shaking is more intense, like setting off a bomb directly under a city, U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Susan Hough said.

However, hard bedrock beneath the surface in north-central Oklahoma is likely the reason for less damage, Oklahoma Geological Survey geophysicist Jefferson Chang said.

State regulators have asked Oklahoma producers to reduce wastewater disposal volumes in earthquake-prone regions of the state.

The area where the quake was centered is at the edge of a region covered by the commissions spring regional earthquake response plan, designed to reduce the number of earthquakes by decreasing wastewater injection volume by 40 percent compared with 2014.

Oklahoma and Kansas have imposed such volume limits after quakes increased in recent years, but Kansas officials acted more quickly and have seen a decrease in quakes of 2.7 or more  a 60 percent drop from 2014 to 2015. In Oklahoma, quakes have continued to increase in frequency.

An earthquake expert at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Caroline Burberry, said the U.S. Geological Survey may determine the earthquakes cause in the weeks to come. But earthquakes are increasing because of wastewater injection and fracking, she said.

Fracking involves injecting liquid at high pressure into the ground to open fissures and extract oil or gas. Wastewater injection is the rapid injection into the earth of water that has been so fouled by fracking and other oil industry work that it cant be emptied into streams.

Burberry, an assistant professor of structural geology, said the oil industry and geologists are figuring out guidelines to slowly pump the water into the ground to lessen the risk of earthquakes.

Tracy Frank, chairwoman of UNLs department of earth and atmospheric sciences, said its possible that wastewater injection affected the fault in Oklahoma.

The Nebraska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission drew criticism last year after approving a permit for a commercial disposal well in Sioux County. Terex Energy Corp. of Broomfield, Colorado, was given the OK to convert the inactive oil well into a disposal well for water that is brought to the surface during the production of oil and natural gas.

The well is not being used while a challenge is pending.

World-Herald staff writer Rick Ruggles contributed to this report, which includes material from the Associated Press and Los Angeles Times.
HADAR, Neb.  Farrell Heckman loved children, farming and animals, especially cats.

Friends of the bachelor farmer who died in May 2015 said he moved from Florida back to rural Hadar about 20 years ago to care for his mother, Lillian.

Heckman was known for his generosity  in both large and small ways.

There are the stories, for example, of how he gave fireworks to children. Rob Huntley and Mike Mayfield said Heckman used to like to secretly place fireworks on the doorsteps of kids in Hadar simply because he wanted them to have fun.

He was a heck of a guy, Huntley said.

As executors of his estate, the two men now are involved with another example of Heckmans generosity. This time, his thoughtfulness will benefit the Hadar Fire Department and its volunteers.

A couple of years ago, Heckman donated funds for the signs on the north and east sides of the fire hall.

Now, through his estate, he left $500,000 to build a new fire hall. The village is donating land for it.

Hadar Fire Chief Gary Schuett said Heckman was not a member of the Fire Department, but he was one of its biggest supporters.

Heckman was aware of the halls crowded conditions and the struggles to accommodate the trucks and equipment and still have space for people to move around.

Weve just outgrown the place, Schuett said.

Now the chief and other officials are working with architects and the Village Board to design the new building.

Wed like to put a shovel in the ground this fall, Schuett said.

For a town of about 290 people, Hadar has an active Fire Department. There are more than 30 volunteer firefighters, including several EMTs and first-responders.

They come from all walks of life, including plumbers, electricians, mechanics, carpenters and refrigeration workers.

Friends said they are grateful for having known Heckman, who they describe as having a big heart or heart of gold.

In Florida, he worked in the landscaping industry. Back in Hadar to be with his mother, he also kept cats and had one dog, Smokey.

It about tore him up when he (Smokey) died, Huntley said. But he loved cats.

Mayfield said Heckman often would take stray cats home and was always buying bags of cat food.

That love of animals led Heckman to previously donate $200,000 to the Northeast Nebraska Animal Shelter of Norfolk.

He dressed modestly and didnt ask for anything. He mostly looked out for others.

He was genuine, Mayfield said.
Q: How can I vote early in the Madison area?

A: While most Wisconsin voters cast their ballot on voting day, more than 10 percent used an absentee ballot in 2012, according to the Wisconsin Elections and Ethics Commissions.

For those who cant make it to a polling place the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November  which is Nov. 8 this year  an absentee ballot allows them to vote early.

Voters must submit an absentee ballot request to their city clerks office in person or by mail, email, fax or at myvote.wi.gov.

Absentee ballots follow regular voting laws, meaning voters need to provide ID and vote through their district.

Voters shouldnt send their ID through the mail  a photocopy or picture of the ID works, according to the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

If you are voting in person, an ID must be shown to the clerk at that time.

Absentee voters must request ballots through their city clerk. If voters are mailing their ballots, they must be received by 8 p.m. on election day, according to the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

The U.S. Postal Service recommends mailing them one week prior to the election to ensure their arrival.

City of Madison residents can vote early in person on weekdays from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. at the City County Building, 210 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., starting Sept. 26 through the election. Weekend voting times also are available, but vary. Full hours are listed on the citys website at go.madison.com/comvoting.

Verona residents also can vote on weekdays starting Sept. 26. Early voting in Verona is limited to regular business hours for City Hall, 111 Lincoln St., which are 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

At the clerks office in Middleton, early voting will start on Oct. 24. The office at 7426 Hubbard Ave. will extend weekday hours so voters can cast their ballot from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Fitchburg will offer early voting hours on weekdays starting Oct. 3 at City Hall, 5520 Lacy Road, during regular business hours of 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Starting Oct. 24, hours will be extended to 6 p.m. On Saturday, Oct. 29, the office will be open from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. From Oct. 31 through Nov. 3, it will be open from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., and on Nov. 4, it will only be open through 5 p.m.
CBI raid: Khattar says no political vendett

India

oi-PTI

Chandigarh, Sep 4: Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar tonight said that searches conducted at the residence of his predecessor Bhupinder Singh Hooda and other officers were not done "out of malice or political vendetta".

Anybody, including the former chief minister or present chief minister or any officer who is involved in any wrong doing, will have to face the law, he told reporters.

Answering a query, he said CBI is an independent body and conducted the raids on the basis of "facts which came up during the course of its investigation".

Asked about the Justice Dhingra Commission report, Khattar said the government was in process of studying it and "action would be taken once the findings have been thoroughly gone into".

PTI

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Story first published: Sunday, September 4, 2016, 9:06 [IST]
In his maiden visit to Russia since Ukraine war, Jaishankar to hold talks with Lavrov

Crimea assures safety to Indian tourists

India

oi-PTI

Mumbai, Sep 4: In the wake of recent disturbances, Crimean authorities have assured Indian tourists that the country is a "safe travel destination" and said "all is well" in the region.

"I want to assure tourists from India that Crimea is a safe travel destination," Prime Minister of the Republic of Crimea, Sergey Valeryevich Aksyonov, said.

Crimea has been under Russian control since 2014.

"We welcome guests. Especially as Russia and India have long-term friendly relations," a statement quoting Aksyonov, issued here, said.

According to the Russian Federal Security Service, armed clashes took place in northern Crimea last month involving a group that had allegedly came from Ukrainian territory to commit acts of terrorism in public places and thus disrupt the tourist season on the peninsula.

"In the last two years, many politicians, business representatives and tourists from countries like France, Italy, Germany, USA, Japan, China, Israel, Poland and Jordan visited Crimea," he said.

"The inflow of tourists to Crimea has increased. Crimea remains one of the most popular holiday destinations for those from Russia and outside," Aksyonov said.

The Kerch Sea Ferry, which connects the mainland of Russia and Crimea, transported about 59,000 passengers in a day, showing Crimea's great demand as a resort destination, he said.

This year, the number of Ukrainian tourists to Crimea rose by 15 per cent, he said.

"We are planning fam (familiarisation) trips for tour operators and media to Crimea to woo tourists," he added.

"We believe that a vacation in the Crimea should be safe, comfortable and interesting and also value for money for the tourists," he said.

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Story first published: Sunday, September 4, 2016, 11:26 [IST]
Jammu and Kashmir - All party delegation identifies key issues to be addressed

News

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

The All Party delegation that arrived in Jammu and Kashmir today is holding a series of meetings in a bid to ensure that calm returns to the Valley. The members of the delegation headed by Union Home Minister, Rajnath Singh will look to find a solution to restore peace in the Valley which has been on the boil over for 58 days now.

During the meeting that was held with the Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Mehbooba Mufti the delegation proposed several measures to ensure that peace returns. The delegation said that the way forward would be to involve as many stake holders as possible to find a solution to the problem. Mehbooba during the meeting once again stressed on the need for confidence building measures.

The Home Ministry has identified key issues that need to be addressed by the delegation and the top among them is stop the rumour mongering that is escalating violence. A Home Ministry official informed OneIndia that the agencies have been told to keep a close watch on various social media accounts through which rumours are being spread to spread violence.

Home Ministry officials say that the first priority would be to ensure that peace returns to the Valley. Even as the delegation landed in the state today there has been violence at Shopian in which nearly 50 persons have been injured.

The delegation which is holding meetings with the Chief Minister of the state and also government officials will also meet with members of the civil society tomorrow. The idea would be to get all stakeholders to convey the message to the youth to shun violence and ensure that normalcy returns.

The government has noticed that there are several protests which are anti India in nature. The government of J&K has been told to get the youth out of the streets. A series of measures will also be announced by the Home Minister to ensure that the youth stop creating problems.

The all party delegation had proposed that they meet with the victims at hospitals. However this idea was shot down as the situation was volatile in the Valley. Singh has already announced the chilli PAVA shells as an alternative for pellet guns.

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Story first published: Sunday, September 4, 2016, 14:03 [IST]
BJP shreds Kejriwal's demand for Lakshmi on notes; calls it his 'new mask'

Why not Ambedkar's pic: Cong leader over Kejriwal's Lakshmi-Ganesh on currency notes remark

RTI reply reveals AAP govt has given Rs 101 crore to Delhi Waqf board since 2015

Even a Muslim nation has Lord Ganesha's pic on notes: Kejriwal writes to PM Modi

Second time lucky? AAP conducts Punjab-like 'Who should be CM' survey in Gujarat

Kejriwal should resign on moral ground: Sheila Dikshit

India

oi-PTI

Varanasi, Sep 4: Congress leader Sheila Dikshit today launched an attack on Arvind Kejriwal over his former cabinet colleague Sandeep Kumar's alleged sex scandal and asked the Delhi Chief Minister to resign on moral ground.

The former Delhi chief minister accused Kejriwal of "shaming the country" after an "objectionable" CD emerged which showed Kumar in a compromising position with a woman.

She was in the city as part of party's campaign team under the Congress' ongoing '27 Saal, UP Behaal' slogan.

Dikshit also slammed the remarks of AAP leader Asuthosh, who, while seeking to defend Kumar, had written, "Mahatma Gandhi, JawaharLal Nehru and Atal Bihari Vajpai too allegedly had relations with other women, which was on the basis of their mutual consent, though such issues in their personal life did not suffer their political career."

The party's chief ministerial nominee for Uttar Pradesh elections said the remarks are an "insult to the father of our nation" and asked the Union government to take punitive action against the AAP leader.

Dikshit, along with party state unit chief Raj Babbar and other leaders embarked on campaign march to Azamgarh and Ghazipur district.

Diskhit headed the Yatra to Azamgarh and Raj Babbar to Ghazipur district. They addressed gatherings there.

On their way, the congress leaders paid floral tributes to the martyrs of 1942 movement at 'Shaheed Smarak' here at Cholapur in Varanasi.

Asked to comment on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's reference to Balochistan on his I-Day speech and his Vietnam visit, Dikshit replied in a lighter tone saying, "As he is PM, so no comment.

PTI

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Story first published: Sunday, September 4, 2016, 9:03 [IST]
India's steel industry now 2nd biggest, target is to double crude steel output in 10 years: PM Modi

PM Modi to dedicate 2 key rail lines in Gujarat to nation Monday

Narendra Modi in Hangzhou for G20 Summit

News

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia

Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the backdrop of G20 Summit at Hangzhou, China had bilateral meeting with world leaders and addressed the summit.

He also took part in the BRICS leaders meet. PM's first engagement in Hangzhou was a meeting with the host President of China Xi Jinping.

First engagement in Hangzhou is a meeting with the host. PM @narendramodi meets President Xi Jinping pic.twitter.com/Bkj4CGywz6  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) September 4, 2016

PM then arrived at the Convention Centre for the G20 Summit in Hangzhou. There he stood with world leaders for a photo. Opening ceremony of G20 then got underway with remarks by President Xi Jinping.

A grouping for global leadership! The G20 takes a family photo. pic.twitter.com/VqsFnywpHe  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) September 4, 2016

PM Modi then spoke at G20 Summit. He began his address by saying, "We meet at a time when the global situation faces complex political and economic challenges".

Some important points that were raised by PM in his address are:

"A frank, even a difficult conversation will not be enough. What G20 needs is an action oriented agenda of collective, coordinated and targeted action."

Reform to Transform!

PM lays out an agenda for structural reforms revive global growth. pic.twitter.com/0TzKC0b2Ro  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) September 4, 2016

"Aim to improve fin system, boost domestic production, enhance infra investment and create pool of human capital."

"Our challenges are common, so are opportunities. Connected machines, digital revolution and new technology laying foundation for next generation global growth."

PM: To benefit all, G20 would need to act decisively. This will also require strong network of partnerships pic.twitter.com/cfq7BIGC78 September 4, 2016

PM Modi ended his address by acknowledging President Barack Obama as strong advocate of building global partnerships and constant voice of collective action.

PM also met Mohammad bin Salman, Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia following first session at G20.

Another bilateral follows first session at G20. PM meets Mohammad bin Salman, Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia pic.twitter.com/YCfbfgvvX3  Vikas Swarup (@MEAIndia) September 4, 2016
No power cuts even if NTPC cuts supply over dues: BSES

India

oi-PTI

New Delhi, Sep 4: As the state-run NTPC Ltd plans to cut supply to BSES discoms in eastern and central Delhi from Sunday midnight over non-payment of Rs 961.58 crore dues, power companies today said the move will not impact supply quantity as they have enough electricity at their disposal.

"The discoms have power storing arrangements. They will also purchase short-term power in case there emerges unforeseen situation at economical rates.

Residents need not face power cuts. Meanwhile, we are making all the efforts to see the dues are cleared," a BSES official said.

The official further stated the power company is under "financial strain" due to non-liquidation of regulatory assets estimated to be over Rs 16,000 crore as on March 31.

On the other hand, he said, the dues to be paid to the NTPC's Aravali Power Company Private Limited (APCL), which supplies the power to the discoms, are to the tune of Rs 961.58 crore.

"A matter to this regard is pending before Supreme Court and we are awaiting its judgment. The judgment shall pave the way for liquidation of the assets and thereby, clear the dues," he added.

The NTPC Ltd had yesterday said a notice for regulation of power supply was served on Anil Ambani-led Reliance Group's BSES Rajdhani Power Ltd (BRPL) and BSES Yamuna Power Ltd (BYPL), which will deprive Delhi of 445 MW of power with effect from 00:00 hrs of September 5.

"Despite clear directions of the Supreme Court, the dues continued to accumulate. Today, the outstanding amounts are Rs 961.58 crore (Rs.695.25 crore of BRPL & Rs.266.33 crore of (BYPL)," it had said.

APCPL, Jhajjar has been supplying power to BRPL and BYPL since March 5, 2011. It has allocated 445 MW power to the discoms, 372 MW to BRPL and 73 MW to BYPL and average monthly energy bill is about Rs 87 crore (Rs 73 crore to BRPL and Rs 14 crore to BYPL) for the current financial year.

The company had said the payments by the BSES discoms (power distribution companies) had become irregular for quite sometime.

The matter was brought before the apex court, which in its judgement dated March 26, 2014 directed the BSES discoms to ensure payments of all current energy bills from January 1, 2014.

However, the company said that despite clear directions of the Court, the dues continued to accumulate.

PTI

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Story first published: Sunday, September 4, 2016, 9:10 [IST]
In India terror down by 34%, civilian deaths by 90% since Art 370 scrapped: Shah

Lack of development in J&K for decades was one of the reasons behind rise of terrorism: Rajnath Singh

Separatists reject talks offer made by J&K CM Mehbooba Mufti

India

oi-Vicky

New Delhi, Sept 4: The separatists of Jammu and Kashmir have rejected an offer for talks with the all party delegation. An offer for talks was made by Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister, Mehbooba Mufti.

The all party delegation led by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh is in J&K to find a solution to ensure peace returns to the Valley. The delegation had suggested that talks be held with all stakeholders including the separatists.

The separatists have remained adamant and even issued a calendar of protests ahead of the all party delegation visit. The separatists have stuck to just one demand and that is Azadi for Kashmir.

The calendar of protests issued by the separatists has led to widespread violence especially in South Kashmir. In Shopian district protestors set fire to the mini secretariat that houses the office of the Deputy Commissioner.

Violence broke out when the police had tried to stop two freedom rallies. Nearly 100 persons were injured in the protests. Protests were witnessed in Sadoora village of Anantnag. Several angry protestors also created trouble at the Vessu village on the Srinagar-Jammu highway.

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Story first published: Sunday, September 4, 2016, 14:50 [IST]
Subhas Chandra Bose did not die in air crash: Saini

India

oi-PTI

Rupnagar, Sep 4: All India Forward Bloc national secretary VP Saini today contested the claim of a London-based website that Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose died in a plane crash in Taiwan in 1945, terming it "wrong" and "part of the conspiracy" against the revolutionary leader.

He also refuted the claim of the website that it had access to vital declassified documents regarding Netaji's disappearance.

Saini, also the Netaji Subhas Kranti Manch chief, claimed that the documents mentioned by the website were from a book, titled 'Conspirators, Abductors and Killers of Netaji', which was written more than 24 years ago.

He said whatever information and documents on the alleged air crash, in which Netaji was feared killed, were supplied by Japan, had been proved wrong. He said Taiwan had informed India in writing that no air crash had occurred at Taihoku on August 18, 1945. Hence, there was no question of Netaji's death in it.

Justice Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry had also reported that Netaji did not die in the air crash, Saini said and accused certain members of the Bose family of "joining hands" with the government and others in the "conspiracy against Netaji" because of their "personal reasons or vested interests".

He alleged that the Centre, with the connivance of some members of the Bose family, was trying to bring to India the "so-called" ashes of Netaji from Renkoji temple in Tokyo but the followers of the revolutionary leader will never let that happen. He appealed to the Centre to try to find the truth of Netaji's fate "honestly" and give the national hero his due.

PTI
Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson and his Democratic opponent, Russ Feingold, both say theyre steeped in national security know-how.

Each candidate also claims his opponent is as misguided on the issue as he is savvy.

Johnson and Feingold, the leading candidates for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin, both have credentials to bolster their claims of being knowledgeable and influential on national security.

Johnson is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security committee and serves on the Foreign Relations committee. During his three terms in the Senate, Feingold served on the foreign relations and intelligence committees. He went on to work as a special envoy for the U.S. State Department after leaving the Senate.

But while both candidates have resumes to bolster claims they know how to keep Americans safe, they differ sharply on how to do it.

Johnson, R-Oshkosh, has been among the most vocal in his party calling for sending U.S. troops to Iraq and Syria as part of a coalition to fight the Islamic State terror group, also known as ISIS.

Feingold, D-Middleton, who was a vocal opponent of the Iraq War under former President George W. Bush, strongly opposes putting U.S. boots on the ground in Iraq and Syria, saying it would be counterproductive.

He calls for a more targeted approach of taking out ISIS leaders and cutting off their resources and funding.

The candidates also are at odds on intelligence gathering. Johnson has hammered Feingold for being the only U.S. senator to vote against the USA PATRIOT Act when it was enacted in 2001.

Feingold has said that the measure infringed on Americans civil liberties and that he remains proud to have opposed it. He has said there are better ways to improve U.S. intelligence gathering, such as increasing funding for intelligence agencies and recruiting more spies, especially in places where terror groups operate.

National security has become perhaps the most prominent issue in the campaign ad war. Johnson and his allied groups have attacked Feingold as weak on national security and as a hypocrite whose actions contradicted his rhetoric.

Feingold has returned fire, saying hes the only candidate with a plan to keep Americans safe.

In a Wisconsin State Journal interview last week, Feingold said its unfortunate the issue has become so politicized.

To me, going after these groups should be a point of unity, Feingold said.

Since entering the Senate in 2011, Johnson has been a constant critic of President Barack Obamas foreign policy. During this campaign, he has sought to link Feingold to Obama, including on the fact that both support closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Johnson told the Wisconsin State Journal in a recent interview that hes more frightened than ever about ISIS. The group has carried out terror attacks worldwide while controlling territory in parts of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Libya.

They represent a larger threat, a growing threat. Im more concerned than I was 22, 23, 24 months ago, Johnson said.

He essentially has no plan

But Feingold said Johnson, despite his committee leadership post, has no overarching blueprint for U.S. national security. He also criticizes Johnson for, like other congressional Republicans, declining to vote to authorize President Obama to use military force against the Islamic State.

Here he is, the chairman of the homeland security committee, and he essentially has no plan, Feingold said.

Feingolds plan calls for increasing efforts to take out the leaders of terror groups, increasing funding for intelligence agencies and recruiting more spies, and ramping up efforts to cut off money, oil supplies and armaments flowing to ISIS.

Johnsons approach relies on conventional military force. He has said the U.S. should organize a global military coalition, in tandem with European and Arab countries, to enter Iraq and Syria, defeat the Islamic State and create safe zones for refugees fleeing violence in those regions.

Johnson once cited a possible number of 100,000 troops for such a coalition. But he since has said hes not sure how many troops should be part of the coalition; that, he said, is up to military experts.

Despite the unpopularity of the Iraq War, Johnson said Americans can be convinced its wise to send U.S. troops back into Iraq.

You need leadership, Johnson said in the State Journal interview. You need leaders to convey why its important.

Feingold said Johnson is returning to the same flawed approach that led the U.S. into the Iraq War.

Sen. Johnson is using the Iraq approach, which is, lets send in a bunch of troops and see what happens, Feingold said.

Senator Tough Guy

The campaign ad wars in the race continue to focus on national security. The most recent example came last week, when a pro-Johnson super PAC, Let America Work, released a TV ad mocking Feingold as Senator Tough Guy.

During Johnsons Senate tenure, one of his most widely publicized moments came in a 2013 hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations committee regarding the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

In that hearing, Johnsons questioning of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time of the attack, prompting her to respond What difference, at this point, does it make?

Johnson said he also has used his committee posts, particularly his Homeland Security Committee chairmanship, to shepherd key national security proposals into law.

Examples include a measure overhauling the U.S. visa waiver program, which allows certain foreign citizens to travel into the country without a visa.

Among the changes in Johnsons measure were preventing citizens of Iraq, Syria and certain other nations from using the program.

Another measure ushered into law, with help from Johnson, on a bipartisan basis required federal agencies to adopt cybersecurity measures.

Outside the Middle East, Johnson said hes most worried about Chinas presence in southeast Asia, particularly in the South China Sea, and what he described as the menace of Russia in eastern Europe.

Asked if hes troubled by links between his partys presidential nominee, Donald Trump, and Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin, Johnson said he is not. Trump has publicly praised Putin, and Trumps former campaign chairman was closely linked to a top Putin ally, Viktor Yanukovych, in Ukraine.

Johnson said the departure of the former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, from Trumps campaign last month resolved the matter.

Manafort left amid heightened scrutiny of his extensive work on behalf of Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian president.

Feingold agreed that Russias actions in Eastern Europe and Chinas in southeast Asia should concern the U.S.

He said instability in Latin America and in Europe, post-Brexit vote, also should be monitored.
Helal Akbar Chowdhury Babor is an excellent example of non-communal spirit

'Red Light On, Gaadi Off': AAP stages protest against Delhi LG

2,000 protestors join march for Europe in London

International

oi-PTI

London, Sep 3: Up to 2,000 protestors marched through the streets of London today to voice their discontent after June's referendum vote to leave the European Union.

The protestors, some carrying EU flags and others with faces painted in EU colours, carried placards with slogans like "Stop Brexit" and "We Need EU!"

In the June 23 referendum, 51.9 per cent of people voted to leave the European Union compared to 48.1 per cent who wanted to stay in the 28-nation bloc.

Prime Minister Theresa May says her government will not trigger Article 50, the formal process for leaving the EU, before next year.

"We don't want to leave the European Union," said one protestor, 42-year-old charity director David Hillman, who called for a second referendum.

"I think the people here really hope that it won't happen... we're here to try and overturn this," he added.

Comedian Eddie Izzard, who campaigned to stay in the EU, joined the demonstration sporting a pink beret.

"Is it too late? No, we just keep fighting," he said.

"Theresa May said Brexit means Brexit. What does Brexit mean? She doesn't know what it means."

A smaller counter protest also took place featuring people in favour of leaving the EU. They carried banners with slogans like "No More Excuses, We Want Brexit Now".

Organisers of the March for Europe say they want the government to pause the triggering of Article 50.

They are also calling for a greater voice in how the process of Brexit takes place.

PTI

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Story first published: Sunday, September 4, 2016, 9:22 [IST]
From being a victim of terrorism to exploring global solutions: India praised at UN's Counter Terrorism meet

India extends USD 500 mln to Vietnam to bolster defence ties

International

oi-PTI

Hanoi, Sep 3: India today extended a USD 500 million line of credit to Vietnam to deepen their defence cooperation and signed 12 agreements including a deal to construct offshore patrol boats, amid China's muscle flexing in the disputed South China Sea and "emerging regional challenges".

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who held wide-ranging talks with his Vietnamese counterpart Nguyen Xuan Phuc here, said the two countries have decided to elevate their strategic ties to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership to provide it a new momentum.

"Our decision to upgrade our Strategic Partnership to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership captures the intent and path of our future cooperation. It will provide a new direction, momentum and substance to our bilateral cooperation," said Modi, who arrived here yesterday on his maiden visit to this key south east Asian nation.

Vietnam had earlier Comprehensive Strategic Partnership only with Russia and China.

"I am also happy to announce a new Defence Line of Credit for Vietnam of USD 500 million for facilitating deeper defence cooperation," Modi said after the signing of the agreements.

The 12 agreements were signed in a wide range of areas covering defence, IT, space, cyber security and sharing white shipping information in presence of Modi and Phuc.

"The range of agreements signed just a while ago point to the diversity and depth of our cooperation," he said, adding the agreement on construction of offshore patrol boats is one of the steps to give concrete shape to the bilateral defence engagement.

Modi described his talks with Vietnamese counterpart as "extensive and very productive" and said they covered the full range of bilateral and multilateral cooperation.

"We have agreed to scale up and strengthen our bilateral engagement. As two important countries in this region, we also feel it necessary to further our ties on regional and international issues of common concern," said Modi, who is here on a day-long visit.

"We also recognised the need to cooperate in responding to emerging regional challenges," the Prime Minister said, without naming any country.

China is involved in a raging dispute with the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei over ownership of territory in the South China Sea (SCS), a busy waterway through which India's 50 per cent trade passes.

China has also objected in the past to India's Oil and Natural Gas Commission (ONGC) undertaking exploration at the invitation of Vietnam in the SCS, which is believed to be rich in undersea deposits of oil and gas.

India and the US have been calling for freedom of passage in the international waters, much to the discomfort to Beijing, whose claim over SCS was recently struck down by an international tribunal in favour of the Philippines.

"Our common efforts will also contribute to stability, security and prosperity in this region," Modi said.

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Story first published: Sunday, September 4, 2016, 8:53 [IST]
India's steel industry now 2nd biggest, target is to double crude steel output in 10 years: PM Modi

PM Modi to dedicate 2 key rail lines in Gujarat to nation Monday

Narendra Modi meets Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi

International

oi-PTI

Hangzhou, Sep 4 Prime Minister Narendra Modi today met Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad bin Salman here and held discussions on enhancing bilateral ties between the two countries.

According to the Prime Minister's website, both the leaders held discussions regarding enhancing bilateral ties during the sidelines of the G20 summit here.

"Another bilateral follows first session at G20. PM meets Mohammad bin Salman, Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted soon after the meeting.

Mohammad, who is the son of Saudi King Salman, also holds the key defence and economic policy portfolios of the oil-rich Gulf Kingdom.

Modi earlier met US President Barack Obama briefly when they were on a stage to pose for a family photograph at the venue in this eastern Chinese city.

He met Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull on the sidelines of the Summit.

He will meet his British counterpart Theresa May and Argentinian President Mauricio Macri tomorrow before returning to Delhi.

PTI
Promising outsiders, Trump team led by Christie insiders

International

oi-PTI

Trenton (US), Sep 4: Donald Trump is pledging that the government he appoints will bring sweeping change to Washington's culture. So far, that promise comes with a heavy New Jersey accent.

Despite being passed over for the job of Trump's running mate, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and an entourage of his closest allies could leave a lasting mark on a Trump administration, should he win in November.

As chairman of Trump's transition team, Christie is building a coalition of advisers who will staff key federal government agencies and execute new policy prescriptions if Trump wins the general election.

Among them, are two of his longtime aides, Rich Bagger, a lobbyist who helped lead Christie's gubernatorial transition team and Bill Palatucci, a top Christie adviser whose law firm has been showered with government legal work.

"The chairman is the public face, sets the tone and ensures the transition has good connectivity with the candidate," said Clay Johnson, who served as executive director of George W Bush's transition team in 2000.

The team also includes Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner a New Jersey native along with some experienced government officials such as Jaime Burke, who was the personnel director for the Romney transition team in 2012 and a White House liaison to Health and Human Services under George W. Bush.

Christie is also hosting a transition team fundraiser in New Jersey later this month promising to give an inside look at the team for USD 5,000 a person. Presidential transition teams lay the groundwork early since the winner is ultimately faced with the daunting task of readying the new administration in the two and a half months between Election Day and the inauguration.

"You have to be proactive," Johnson added. "We didn't know how fast warp speed was but a transition goes faster than that. It's a mind boggling challenge."

As a former presidential contender, Christie has taken some very public swings at his opponent-turned-ally. He's called the New York businessman "thin-skinned," and said Trump's proposed Syria policies are "painfully naive."

Also Christie, like a number of Trump's closest advisers, brings his own share of baggage to the campaign. The embattled governor is still grappling with the fallout from a scandal back home, after lanes were closed on the George Washington bridge for political retribution.

Lawyers for former Christie appointee Bill Baroni recently revealed text messages sent from an administration staffer to a campaign staffer that Christie "flat out lied" about his knowledge of the scandal. Christie, who has not been charged and denies wrongdoing, disputed the remarks and called them "ridiculous." The criminal trial against Baroni and another former Christie aide is scheduled to begin September 19.

AP
Fact Check: Did Trump thank Musk for welcoming him back to Twitter

Protests outside black Detroit church hosting Trump

International

oi-PTI

Detroit, Sep 4: Police struggled to hold back protesters today outside a Detroit church hosting a visit by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who is on a charm offensive to allay skepticism of wary African American voters.

"The devil's in the pulpit," shouted Wyoman Mitchell, one of about 150 protesters who charged police barricades outside the black Great Faith Ministries International church.

Chanting "Dump Trump" and "We're going to church," the protesters attempted to push over the metal barricades to gain entry to the suburban church, but were impeded by police on horseback and on foot.

It was unclear whether Trump was in the church during the commotion. Reporters were kept out of the church, except those traveling with the candidate.

Church pastor Wayne Jackson had invited the New York billionaire to attend a fellowship service, and possibly make some remarks at the end.

The visit is a high-profile stop in Trump's recent bid to offset the overwhelming advantage his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton enjoys among African American voters, who make up 12 per cent of the electorate.

The charm offensive has been met with skepticism, but some analysts say it could make a difference in certain swing states.

His pitch so far has been a crude appeal to self-interest.

"What do you have to lose?" he said, addressing African Americans in a speech in Ohio less than two weeks ago to an overwhelmingly white audience.

"They don't care about you. They just like you once every four years - get your vote and then they say: 'Bye, bye!'" he said.

To bolster his case, Trump points at the Democratic stance on immigration, claiming his rival would rather give jobs to new refugees than unemployed black youth.

The African-American electorate traditionally leans heavily Democratic.

In 2012, about 93 per cent of black voters backed Obama - an overwhelming enthusiasm that Clinton appears to have kept alive, taking 90 per cent of the black vote in her primary contest against Bernie Sanders.

Detroit has the highest percentage of black residents - more than 80 per cent - of any large American city.

Many neighborhoods have been hollowed out by decades of "white flight," in which Caucasian families left downtown and midtown for more affluent suburbs.

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Story first published: Sunday, September 4, 2016, 9:13 [IST]
Sushma Swaraj meets Indian diaspora in Rome

International

oi-PTI

Rome, Sep 4: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, who is leading a 12-member delegation that is here to attend the canonisation ceremony of Mother Teresa, today met Indian diaspora and talked about various welfare efforts of the government for community members abroad.

Swaraj met the Indian diaspora at a reception hosted by India's Ambassador to Italy Anil Wadhwa. The External Affairs Minister mentioned welfare efforts for diaspora, assisting Indians in distress and the evacuations the government has conducted, External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted.

"I have come here with a delegation from different parts of India, with those of different faiths to pay respects to life of Mother Teresa," Swaraj said at the reception. "For the Indian principle is based on the saying: ekam sat, vipra bahuda vadanthi -- the truth is one, the wise call it as many," she said.

She thanked Indian diaspora for coming, not just from Rome but from Naples, Florence, Milan, Swarup said.

Apart from the central government delegation, two state government-level delegations from Delhi and West Bengal led by Chief Ministers Arvind Kejriwal and Mamata Banerjee respectively were also in Rome to attend the ceremony that will take place tomorrow.

Swaraj's delegation comprises of Minister for Food Processing Industries Harsimrat Kaur Badal, Lok Sabha MPs Prof K V Thomas, Jose K Mani, Anto Anthony and Conrad K Sangma and Deputy Chief Minister of Goa Francis D'Souza.

Others include Judge of Supreme Court Justice Kurian Joseph, eminent lawyer Harish Salve, Secretary General of Catholic Bishops' Conference of India Theodore Mascarenhas and K J Alphons. Secretary (West) in the Ministry of External Affairs Sujata Mehta is also part of the delegation.

In March, Pope Francis had announced that Mother Teresa, who founded the Missionaries of Charity, will be elevated to sainthood after the Church recognised two miracles attributed to her after her death in 1997.

PTI
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Take a good look when someone says unions arent needed anymore. Is that person a representative of a think tank financed by Big Business? Some corporate executive whose place in the 1 percent is secure?

Working people know better. We know the American Dream isnt only for Wall Street bankers and the 1 percent. Its for all of us who want to improve our standard of living and help our children and grandchildren have even better lives. Unions enable working people to make our workplaces safer and to negotiate just wages and working conditions. Unions are how working people can earn a good living and have a better life.

We have a huge income inequality problem in our country today. There hasnt been such a concentration of income in the hands of the richest one-tenth of 1 percent of America since 1928, just before the Great Depression. How do we turn this around? We go back to what works, and thats enabling working people to stand together, to join a union and negotiate for a better life.

Thanks to the New Deal, unions lifted millions of families out of poverty and into the middle class. Unions helped the economy grow from weakness to strength, making the American economy the envy of the world.

For decades after, the wages of working people and productivity rose together, because workers were able to negotiate with management for better conditions. But since the 1970s, the gains from worker productivity started going mainly into the pockets of corporations and Wall Street investors. The overwhelming majority of working families havent seen an increase in real wages for nearly four decades. Some try to dispute this, claiming that average wages across the entire workforce have gone up. For high-end earners, sure they have. But for the rest of us  the bottom 80 percent of wage earners, the average working person  real wages are flat and declining.

Since the 1980s, an aggressive attack has occurred on the right of working people to have a union. That attack, waged by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, some powerful employers and their political allies, first focused on private-sector workers, then on public-sector workers. Without the ability to come together and negotiate collectively, millions of U.S. workers have no way to gain their fair share of a companys profits. Many companies think thats just fine, leaving more for corporate executives, stock buybacks and offshore foreign accounts. Thats the source of our growing income inequality.

Management routinely fires workers who want a union. Supervisors call mandatory meetings to issue threats about what will happen if workers choose a union. Some employers send high-level executives to camp out at workplaces to intimidate workers. For some companies, stopping workers from joining together in a union is more important than almost anything.

In todays economy, Wall Street calls the shots. The 1 percent is booming. Between 2009 and 2012, the top 1 percent received 95 percent of all income gains following the Great Recession, a downturn caused by Wall Street greed. Most working families still havent recovered from the 11.6 percent drop in real income they faced in the Great Recession. Many now face more hardships, including sky-high student loan debt, health care costs and the fallout from bad trade deals that send even more jobs overseas.

Were not looking to shut down Wall Street. We are looking to restore fairness to an economic and financial system thats been one-sided for way too long. And unions, today as much as ever, are the only effective force against rampant corporate greed.

Most of the time, working people negotiate their differences with management and both sides come together in agreement. That didnt happen earlier this year, when members of my union were forced to take on Verizon, a Fortune 15 company with monthly profits in excess of $1 billion. This very wealthy company was insisting on slashing workers benefits and closing call centers in the United States, to send more jobs overseas. The 39,000 working men and women and their families took a stand and went on strike for seven weeks. It was a real hardship. But we knew what we were fighting for, and in the end, we prevailed, with Verizon agreeing to keep call centers open and add more jobs.

That couldnt have happened if Verizon workers didnt have a union. Thats something that benefits all working people, and thats why unions will always be needed.
What? Donald Trump has gained 12 points on Hillary Clinton among likely Wisconsin voters since early August.

Thats right. According to The Marquette Law School Poll of 803 people, Trump trails Clinton 45 percent to 42 percent among likely voters, compared to a deficit of 52 percent to 37 percent early last month.

Why? Clinton is slipping. In fact, the former secretary of state fell in favorability from 43 percent to 35 percent in that time, and her unfavorable number rose from 53 percent to 58 percent. Trumps favorable number actually went up a percentage point, and his unfavorable went down two to 63 percent.

And how about this: 26 percent of respondents say Clinton is honest, compared to 31 percent who say Trump tells the truth. And on the question of Who cares about people like me? Clinton is down from 47 percent to 41 percent. Trump remains at 31 percent.

Clinton leads by 5 percentage points among registered voters, but how do you measure first-time voters? The Marquette poll didnt ask respondents if they had never voted in the past. On that front, Trump does 3 percentage points better in recorded telephone and internet polls than he does in surveys where humans actually ask you questions. Does that mean some wont say out loud that they will vote for Trump?

We do know that 19 percent of those in the poll say they wont vote for Trump or Clinton. Thats up from 6 percentage points from those who said they wouldnt support Obama or Romney in 2012.

Those neither Trump nor Clinton voters could latch on to Libertarian Gary Johnson or Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Johnson has 11 percent and Stein 7 percent in the Marquette poll. If they go up instead of down, the presidential winner will be in the low 40s.

That means Trump is right on the cusp.

Of the independents, 18 percent lean Republican while 16 percent lean Democrat. So with Trumps rough few weeks after his convention, why is it so close? Yes, Clinton has suffered a constant dose of email and Clinton Foundation stories. But something else is going on.

Marquette pollster Charles Franklin says, Its hard for Clinton to get a positive message out when Trump dominates every news cycle.

Even if Trumps mainstream media coverage is negative and Clintons attack ads are running, the spotlight is always on Trump. It prompts the viewer to tune in to see what the television star is going to say next.

Because Trump has been in public view for 35 years, will attempts to smear him as a racist or cartoon character backfire the same way it did when Art Buchwald made fun of Ronald Reagan?

Trump is not as polite as the Gipper, but neither are we. In the age of Twitter and Facebook, society is more crass and cynical of all politicians.

In the primaries, most of Trumps opponents made the mistake of getting elected. And when they get rich from public service, the sharks are in the water. Clinton suffers from financial success the way voters held it against former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson in the U.S. Senate race, which he lost to Tammy Baldwin.

The bombastic Trump loves to talk about his wealth in front of God and everybody. That is part of the reason Trump has only 81 percent of Wisconsin Republicans. He is up three points in that category, while Clintons support among Wisconsin Democrats went from 90 percent to 89 percent.

So get ready for possibly the most vicious and entertaining campaign in history. On this Labor Day weekend, we are reminded of the greatest showman of all, Al Jolson, when he said, You aint seen nothin yet.
By Andrea Gagliarducci



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Live Gaming Summit Comes to Barcelona

Published September 4, 2016 by Lee R

The integration of live gaming to the high speed online environment is the central theme.

The Live Gaming Summit is coming to Barcelona this autumn, with professionals and operators set to come out in droves.

The Event

September 27 marks the date in which the five-star Barcelona Miramar hotel will come alive with the insights, enthusiasm, and innovation of Live Gaming Summit regulars and new arrivals alike for an intense and ultimately fulfilling day of strategically planned talks and exhibitions.

Attendees

The Attendees will include all manner of professionals and operators from the igaming industry attend the annual Live Gaming Summit. Among the attendees will be live gaming providers, online casino operators, land-based casinos, software developers, brand managers, affiliates, legal experts, media companies, consultants, and more.

Key Speakers

The diverse array of specialist keynote speakers will be headed by NetEnt head of live casino Sam Brown. He wil be joined by other iGaming luminaries such as Authentic Gaming managing director Jonas Delin, Playtech Live Casinos Innovations Head Kevin Kilminster, and Ezugi CEO Kfir Kugler.

Topics

Live Gaming Summit 2016 is set to consider vital topics to iGaming in the current climate including themes of Streaming Live Games from Landbased Properties; Streaming Live Games from Live Casino Studios; Regional & Local Studios servicing Local Players; the Future of Live Casino; and Television Gaming: an Area for Growth.

Expo Floor

Live Gaming Summit will also feature a separate exposition area where global suppliers of all manner of games and solutions will be on hand to reveal to attendees their newest products and technologies through demos right there on the showfloor.

Live Game Emphasis

Exhibitors are set to include products designed for the rapdily growing live dealer games segment. Live gaming pioneers Evolution Gaming will be on hand with others to show off new technologies which are harnessing the benefit of high speed internet access to make the segment increasingly attractive to both customers and operators.

Outlook

As iGaming evolves, Barcelona Live Gaming Summit is ready to keep you ahead of the curve.
Megabanks survive and prevail. Useless, murderous war is endless. Living wage, family supporting jobs disappear perpetually. This happens partly because both major parties, on state -- wide and national levels, are thoroughly corrupted by special interest money. Our Constitution and rules of operation of the Senate make it possible for the Presidency or even a sizeable minority in at least one house of Congress to block passage of laws and actions that severely harm large numbers of Americans. But since the early Clinton administration elected Democrats have either failed to stop or actually co-sponsored some egregious harms. These include the

1. passage of NAFTA,

2. excessively harsh criminal, including drug laws,

3. abolition of welfare "as we knew it," and

4. deregulation of banks that allowed the Crash of 2009, plus

5. endless funding for war against the 1.4 billion Muslims living in over 40 countries mostly in the Middle East.

When the election of 2000 was stolen from Gore, by Republicans,

6. Democrats should have raised hell, even "shut down the government," until all the votes were counted. Gore had won the popular vote. Democrats failed majoritarian democracy. After that, it's been disaster after disaster. On February 15, 2003, there were protests against America starting a war against Iraq in 800 cities around the world. Thirteen large American organizations sent open letters to the president against it, but they were all ignored. Yet Congressional Democrats have continued to vote, in sufficient numbers, to keep appropriating vast sums of money to kill Middle Easterners.

7. Democrats could have least have voted to stop or reduce funding for the wars. Also, they vote, with Republicans, to approve very large arms sales to Middle Eastern countries.

In 2008 the Democrats were granted, by the voters, a sweep of the Presidency and majorities in both houses. It was a Roosevelt moment, a golden opportunity for a new New Deal or at least a new Great Society. They could have started by abolishing or reducing the filibuster and then passed those programs.

8. They baulked. In the end they and Republicans passed ineffective "stimuli" programs, laden with tax cuts and subsidies, and voluntary for the private banks.

9. Democrats should have voted against the Bank Bailout! That would have destroyed several of the largest private financial powers and weakened the corrupt lobbying hold of Finance on the government.

10. Democrats, together with Republicans, are failing badly to meet the challenge of global warming. Expense from adaptation will be so great it will severely harm the poorest people of the earth (including our poorest Americans countrymen.)

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By Edward Curtin

In a country with a Mount Rushmore that celebrates the ruthless and frenetic westward expansion, it might be a bit naive to suggest a Do Nothing Day. I have nothing against laboring men and women having their day too; I am a laborer myself, and national holidays are great -- so many sales for stuff no one needs.

To rush less, to idle, and to do nothing sounds so un-American, yet it might be a solution to many of our country's problems. Quixotic as it may sound, if every person in the country could be convinced to lay aside his compulsive busyness for one day per month, for starters, this not-doing would paradoxically accomplish so much. Nothing is a funny word, as Shakespeare well knew. There is so much to it; "much ado" as he put it. It is the great motivator. While it frightens people, it is also the spur to creativity. Samuel Beckett once astutely said, "Nothing is more real than nothing." It is the void, the womb, the empty space out of which we come and live out our days. It is the background silence for all our noise. Like the rain, it is purely gratuitous. Such a gift should not be shunned.

By doing nothing I mean the following: no work, just free play; no travel, except by foot or bicycle; no use of technology of any sort except stoves for cooking meals to share; no household repairs or projects; no buying or selling of any kind, including thinking of buying and selling. You get the point. This not-doing doing could be called dreaming or simply being. It's a tough task indeed, but fitting for the paradoxical creatures that we are. And that's just for individuals.

Nationally, all businesses would be closed, factories would be idled, planes and trains grounded. Only emergency services -- hospitals, police, etc. would be allowed to operate. Quixotic, yes, but our national leaders, Republicans and Democrats alike, are surely apt to agree since it would add one more day to their monthly schedules of doing "nothing." Making my point in a slightly different way, Mark Twain said, "Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."

Think of how much we would accomplish by doing nothing! People might dream and think; they might hear birds singing or even sing themselves; they might have real conversations; they might feel the peace of a wild idleness; our ecological matrix would have a brief chance to catch its breath; a massive amount of energy would be saved and little carbon would be spewed into the atmosphere (a rather startling statistic could be inserted here). The benefits are endless - and all from doing nothing.

The immediate downside would be millions of mental breakdowns of the do-something addicts. Their agony from trying to do nothing would be excruciating. A friend from another country where they still take siestas and celebrate doing nothing was kind enough to suggest a rapid resolution to this mass madness. Kill these do-somethings. Since they are not good for nothing while alive, she said, and can't help contaminating the earth with their compulsive busyness, why keep them around. She advocated enlisting the help of the Pentagon for this work since killing is their business and they are good at it. While acknowledging the aptness of her suggestion, I told her I thought the Pentagon was much too busy killing foreigners to get involved in a domestic caper at this time. It also raises a number of other practical problems, the biggest being how and where to bury so many busybodies all at once.

Furthermore, people who have so utterly forgotten their childhood's lovely ability to do nothing are far too old and tough and set in their skins to be used as food, as another wag of my acquaintance suggested. Even trying a little tenderizer on their frazzled flesh wouldn't work. After all, when Jonathan Swift had that profound idea of how to solve the Irish famine problem, he was suggesting soft and tender one year olds be slaughtered and sold to the wealthy since they would make "delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled." But older, compulsive, do-something people, set in their ways, while seemingly organic -- a good thing these days -- are tough and sinewy -- a not very appetizing thought. I doubt there would be much demand for their meat.

Therefore, in all due respect, let me suggest another way to proceed. I think it best to let them go mad on Do Nothing Days. They will bounce back on the intervening go-go days but should eventually get so discouraged by having to stop once a month that they will commit suicide. That way they'll get what they didn't want -- a quite long stretch of days doing nothing, if eternity has days. And the survivors can live guilt-free, since all they did was nothing.

As you can see, the downsides to Do Nothing Days are small compared to the benefits. But convincing people to adopt my plan won't be easy. Long ago I stopped giving advice to friends and family since whatever I suggested seemed to encourage them to do the opposite. Yet here I go again, suggesting this big Do Nothing Day. So I will desist in the name of the law of reversed effort.

I really don't want to organize a movement to establish particular days for this not-doing. I don't want to establish a cult and be a cult leader. I'm really too busy for that. My schedule is too packed for such a job. Maybe you have time. I have too much to do. I say, "Nothing doing."

I was once rushing to take groceries to my elderly mother when I ran into the sharp metal edge of a stop sign. Stunned and coming to on my back on the pavement with blood dripping down my face, it bemused me to think how fast I was stopped. Ever since, I've been on the go.

Nothing showed me his face.

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While mainstream media tries to paint a picture of violent Native Americans at Standing Rock, Democracy NOW's Amy Goodman was onsite and captured video of peaceful, unarmed protestors of the Dakota pipeline being maced and attacked by dogs.

According to the BBC, "An Indian reservation in North Dakota is the site of the largest gathering of Native Americans in more than 100 years. Indigenous people from across the US are living in camps on the Standing Rock reservation as they protest the construction of a new oil pipeline." They've come from as far away as Maine and Arizona.

Social media is abundant with damning photos and commentary:



Standing Rock Witness

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The company behind the oil pipeline, Dakota Access LLC. allegedly hired the private security company.

Amy Goodman reported:

Donations can be made to Standing Rock Sioux Tribe via Paypal or credit card. I made one.

#standingrock

#standwithstandingrock

#NoDAPL

#lovewaternotoil

ADDED 09/14/16 3:07 pm EST:

From Indian Country Today Media Network:

Sacred places containing ancient burial sites, places of prayer and other significant cultural artifacts of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe were destroyed on Saturday September 3 by Energy Transfer Partners, Tribal Chairman David Archambault II said.

On Friday, the Tribe filed court documents identifying the area as home to significant Native artifacts and sacred sites.

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Republicans enter the fall campaign in moods ranging from grim foreboding to howling despair. They fear Donald Trump will lose so big he will take hordes of other candidates down with him, costing the GOP control of the U.S. Senate and even the House. This election could be the partys worst debacle since 1964.

Republicans dont seem to have prepared for an even bigger catastrophe that could occur Nov. 8: a Trump victory. In that case, they wouldnt be stuck with him for the next two months. They would be stuck with him for the duration of his presidency, and they would have to answer for him forever.

They are in the position of a bride who, on the eve of her wedding day, knows shes making a mistake. If she backs out, shell bring a mess down on her head. But if she doesnt, shell be caught in a snare that will be painful and hard to escape, with consequences she will have years to regret.

The first harm from Trump is that he would be the new identity of the party. Forget the legacy of Ronald Reagan. Never mind what Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan propose. He would be the one defining the national agenda. If President Trump wanted to intern Muslims, launch drones against Mexico or put David Duke up in the Lincoln Bedroom, his fellow Republicans would wear the stain.

One of the miseries they have suffered in recent months is waking up each day anxiously wondering what new folly their candidate is about to commit. Its bad enough having to put up with his insulting of a gold star mother, not knowing that Russia has invaded Ukraine, accusing Barack Obama of founding the Islamic State, and retweeting white supremacists.

But all this amounts to an ignorant egomaniac running his mouth. In the White House, Trump would be acting, not just talking. He would possess powers that can be wielded in all sorts of destructive ways. As Republicans have learned from Obamas use of executive authority, its hard to stop a determined president from doing whatever he pleases.

Scrap NAFTA? Carry out indiscriminate bombing of the Islamic State? Refuse to come to the aid of a NATO ally attacked by Russia? Bring back torture, using methods that would make Dick Cheney weep?

Turn over decisions to advisers who couldnt find their way out of an elevator if you gave them a map and a compass? Dump Melania and start dating? The question is not whether Trump would make bad choices in the White House  only which ones and when.

Since he wrapped up the nomination, Republicans have been hoping Trump would change his reckless style, listen to people who know more than he does, avoid pointless fights and generally behave like a responsible adult. Their hopes have been in vain. He either cant change or sees no reason to.

Winning the election would turbocharge Trumps worst impulses. He would have new grounds to ignore GOP leaders and indulge his every whim. If that approach gets him elected, why would he behave any differently as president?

Maybe Trump would drag the country through four years of chaos and stagnation, trailing broken promises and aborted schemes. Or maybe he would handle the job so irresponsibly that he would provoke his impeachment and removal  an eminently plausible scenario.

The latter outcome would have some special downsides for Republicans. One is that it would saddle them with the herculean chore of defending him at his worst. Another is that it would derail any policy ideas they hope to advance. Then theres the political cost in the next election.

Compared with these nightmares, a Hillary Clinton presidency would have all sorts of advantages. It would give Republicans a unifying focus, mobilize them to block liberal policies, open the way for new conservative leaders to emerge and offer the party a chance to rebound at the polls in 2018. If she were to be embroiled in a White House scandal brought on by her own disregard for the rules, even better for the GOP.

Republicans might remember British statesman Benjamin Disraelis explanation of the difference between a misfortune and a calamity. For his chief rival to fall into the river, he said, would be a misfortune. The calamity would be if someone pulled him out.
Reprinted from Reader Supported News



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You probably have never heard of Alford pleas. They are intended for defendants who maintain their innocence, but who recognize that a judge or jury is likely to convict them. An Alford plea is not an admission of guilt, although judges treat them the same as they would a guilty plea. It is essentially a "no contest" plea. "I'm innocent, but I recognize that you have enough evidence to convict me anyway."

Unfortunately, Alford pleas have become crutches for mediocre defense attorneys or for those who just don't care about defending clients facing criminal charges. The sad truth is that many attorneys simply don't want to do the hard work of defending their clients, and it is hard work to defend people charged with serious crimes.

Many defendants who are innocent, or who otherwise have solid defenses, often conclude that an Alford plea is better than facing a trial with a disinterested attorney. Alford pleas are their only chance to get some kind of defense across in court while maintaining their innocence.

But Alford pleas can backfire.

The term "Alford plea" grew out of a 1963 North Carolina murder case. Henry Alford was arrested and charged and feared that he would be convicted and executed in the gas chamber. His attorney advised him that pleading guilty to second-degree murder was the only way to avoid the gas chamber.

Alford's case was problematic from the beginning. He had a prior murder conviction, and eyewitnesses said he had admitted to the murder. But there were no witnesses to the murder itself.

Alford received a 30-year sentence. An appeals court overturned his conviction on the basis that his attorney coerced him into a guilty plea. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld his conviction in a 6-3 decision handed down in 1970.

(I discussed an Alford plea in my own case. I believed that I was innocent of the five felonies the government charged me with after I blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program. But my attorneys advised that an Alford plea was tantamount to pleading guilty and that we would fight the charges. In the end, the government dropped four of the five charges, I pleaded to the fifth, and I was sentenced to 30 months in prison.)

Alford pleas, in addition to being a tool for the worst attorneys, are really disliked by judges. A 2003 article in the Missouri Law Review found that many judges believe an Alford plea allows defendants to "escape" responsibility for their crimes, even though the point of an Alford plea is to allow them to maintain innocence in the face of harsh penalties.

In 1998, the Virginia Court of Appeals rejected an Alford defendant's argument that the sentencing judge ignored his claim of innocence and cited his lack of remorse for the crime -- which he denied committing -- at sentencing. The court simply noted that he could have testified if he had felt sympathy for the victims. But this would have opened him to cross-examination and potential self-incrimination, something the Constitution protects all of us from. So by denying responsibility, the very purpose of an Alford plea, defendants essentially set themselves up for harsher sentences because they aren't remorseful.

A 2013 article in Northwestern University's Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology concluded that Alford pleas are more likely to be used by defendants charged with violent crimes. One Justice Department study found that 50 percent of defendants charged with violent crimes entered Alford pleas.

But Alford pleas are only useful if the death penalty is involved. The same Justice Department study found that no one who entered an Alford plea in a murder case received the death penalty; almost 21 percent received life sentences. Of murder defendants who entered pleas of not guilty and were later convicted, three percent were sentenced to death, and 46 percent received life sentences.

Other criminal defendants turn to Alford pleas when they conclude that their attorneys aren't up to the job of defending them. For example, the plea requires them to accept all evidence entered against them. But many defendants argue that they were never shown evidence nor were they given an opportunity to object to it.

This happened to a prisoner whom I discussed in earlier articles about solitary confinement. This particular prisoner was charged with sexual assault on a 17-year-old foster child, a charge he denies adamantly. He had no prior arrests, and he had never faced any complaints during a decades-long tenure working with and teaching troubled youths.

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Shale Gas Market will reach USD 105.0 Billion by 2020, Globally

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Zion Research has published a new report titled Shale Gas Market by Technology (Horizontal Drilling, Hydraulic Fracturing, and Water Usage Issue) for Power Generation, Residential, Industrial, Commercial, Transportation and Other Applications: Global Industry Perspective, Comprehensive Analysis, and Forecast, 2014-2020. According to the report, the global demand for shale gas was valued at USD 63 billion in 2014 is expected to reach USD 105 billion in 2020, growing at a CAGR of around 9% between 2015 and 2020. In terms of volume, the global shale gas market stood at around 10.0 trillion cubic feet in 2014.Request Sample Report:Shale gas is also known as natural gas and it is derived from shales. Shale is fine-grained sedimentary rocks and it is highly loaded resources of petroleum and natural gas. Shale gas is generally obtained from the various shales like are marcellus, eagle ford, niobrara, barnett, and bakken. It is primarily used as a feedstock for production of ammonia and ethane gas. To extract shale gas from the source rock, the oil and gas industry uses two proven techniques: horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. Hydraulic fracturing involves injecting high-pressure water to crack the source rock and release the natural gas it contains. 99.5% of the injection fluid is a mixture of water and sand, while the rest is a small quantity of additives needed to prevent bacterial contamination of the reservoir and make the process more efficient.The major driving factor for shale gas market is rapidly increasing demand across the world. In an attempt to lower down dependence on crude oil as source of energy, U.S. is highly focused on shale gas. Moreover, government funding coupled with large investment by many private players is expected to fuel the growth of this industry. However, high cost of production as compared to any other conventional source of energy is expected to limit the growth of this industry. However, ongoing research & development and introduction of new technologies in the field of shale gas are expected to bring down cost of production. Large number of proven reserves for shale gas in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific is expected to provide future growth opportunity to industry participants.Do Inquiry before buying:Horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and water usage issue are the key technologies involved in the shale gas extraction process. Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing are extensively used for extraction process across the globe. Power generation, residential, industrial, commercial, and transportation are the key applications of shale gas market. Industrial applications segment was the largest segment of global shale gas industry and accounted for more than 30% share of the entire market in 2014. The power generation is the second largest application segment for the global shale gas market. Residential applications segment is also expected to exhibit rapid growth during the forecast period.North America dominated the production and consumption of shale gas in 2014. North America accounted for over 75% share in production and consumption of shale gas in 2014. North America. North America is followed by Europe and Asia Pacific respectively. However, with commencement of shale gas production in China, growth of shale gas industry in Asia Pacific is expected to grow at a robust growth. Latin America and Middle East & Africa are expected to remain smallest regional market for shale gas during the forecast period.Some of the key players in the global shale gas market include Baker Hughes Incorporation, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, BHP Billiton Limited, Devon Energy, EnCana Corporation, ConocoPhillips Co, Royal Dutch Shell plc, ExxonMobil, Chesapeake Energy Corporation, and BP plc.Browse detail report at:The report segments the global shale gas market as:Shale Gas Market: Technology Segment AnalysisHorizontal drillingHydraulic fracturingWater usage issueShale Gas Market: Application Segment AnalysisPower generationResidentialIndustrialCommercialTransportationShale Gas Market: Regional Segment AnalysisNorth AmericaU.S.EuropeAsia PacificChinaLatin AmericaMiddle East and AfricaRead Report TOC:About Market Research StoreMarket Research Store 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. Market Research Store is the comprehensive collection of market intelligence products and services available on air. We have market research reports from number of leading publishers and update our collection daily to provide our clients with the instant online access to our database. With access to this database, our clients will be able to benefit from expert insights on global industries, products, and market trends.Contact US:Market Research Store3422 SW 15 Street,Suit #8138Deerfield Beach,Florida 33442United StatesToll Free: +1-855-465-4651 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803Email: sales@marketresearchstore.comWebsite:
Bottled Water Market will reach USD 280.0 Billion by 2020, Globally

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Zion Research has published a new report titled Bottled Water (Still, Carbonated, Flavored and Functional Bottled Water) Market: Global Industry Perspective, Comprehensive Analysis, and Forecast, 2014 - 2020. According to the report, the global bottled water market was valued at approximately USD 170.0 billion in 2014 and is expected to reach approximately USD 280.0 billion by 2020, growing at a CAGR of around 8.5% between 2015 and 2020. In terms of volume, global bottled water market stood at around 290.0 billion liters in 2014.Request Sample Report:Water is an incredibly important aspect of daily lives. Bottled water is a necessary and reliable way to deliver safe drinking water. There are various types of bottled water such as spring water, purified water, mineral water, ground water and others. Bottled water is packaged in plastic or glass bottles. Bottled water can be carbonated or not. Bottled water offers good taste, quality, and convenienceThe global bottled water market is mainly driven by increased health awareness and changing consumer life style. The bottled water market is expected to witness rapid growth fueled by strong demand for clean, flavored and hygienic drinking water. Other important factors driving the bottled water market are advancement in user friendly packaging. Strong growth of tourism industry and portability of hygienic bottled water is also expected to trigger demand of bottled water. However, stringent regulations regarding packaging of water and bottled water standards is expected to hamper the growth of the market to some extent. Moreover, easy availability of tap water and rising concerns with regarding increasing plastic waste is expected to present challenge for industry participants.Still, carbonated, flavored and functional bottled water are the key product segments of the bottled water market. The still bottled water product segment held the largest share in the global bottled water market and accounted over 60% share in overall consumption in 2014. However, still bottled water segment is expected to exhibit moderate growth during the forecast period. Carbonated was the second largest segment of the bottled water market in 2014. Carbonated bottled water is expected to witness slight decline in its market share in the years to come. Flavored and functional water segment are also expected to witness rapid growth during the forecast period. Rapid growth of bottled water market can be attributed to rising concern regarding health & wellness.Do Inquiry before buying:Asia Pacific was the leading regional market for bottled water, with over 30% share of total consumption in 2014. Huge population, strong economical growth, increasing disposable income, coupled with changing lifestyle has been resulted into strong growth of bottled water market in Asia Pacific region. Asia Pacific is expected to remain major regional market for bottled water during the next five years. North America and Europe are expected grow at a moderate pace forecast period. However, North America and Europe are expected to experience decline its market share during the forecast period. Latin America and Middle East are also expected to witness robust growth of bottled water market in the years to come.Some of the key players in the global bottled water market include Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, Inc., Nestle Waters, Ajegroup SA, Groupe Danone, CG Roxane, LLC, Fonti Di Vinadio S.P.A., LLC, Icelandic Water Holdings ehf., Suntory Beverage & Food Ltd, HassiaWaters International GmbH & Co. KG, Grupo Vichy Catalan and Hangzhou Wahaha Group Co., Ltd.Browse detail report at:This report segments the global bottled water market as follows:Global Bottled Water Market: Product Segment AnalysisStillCarbonatedFlavoredFunctionalGlobal Bottled Water Market: Regional Segment AnalysisNorth AmericaU.S.EuropeGermanyFranceUKAsia PacificChinaJapanIndiaLatin AmericaBrazilMiddle East and AfricaRead Report TOC:About Market Research StoreMarket Research Store 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. Market Research Store is the comprehensive collection of market intelligence products and services available on air. We have market research reports from number of leading publishers and update our collection daily to provide our clients with the instant online access to our database. With access to this database, our clients will be able to benefit from expert insights on global industries, products, and market trends.Contact US:Market Research Store3422 SW 15 Street,Suit #8138Deerfield Beach,Florida 33442United StatesToll Free: +1-855-465-4651 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803Email: sales@marketresearchstore.comWebsite:
Yeast Market will reach USD 4.86 Billion By 2021, Globally

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Zion Research has published a new report titled Yeast Market by Form (Instant, Fresh and Dry Yeast), by Type (Brewers, Bakers, Bio-ethanol, Wine, Feed and Other type), by Specialty Yeast (Yeast Autolysis, Yeast Extract and -glucan) for Food and feed: Global Industry Perspective, Comprehensive Analysis and Forecast, 2015  2021. According to the report, global demand for yeast market was valued at over USD 2.96 billion in 2015, is expected to reach above USD 4.86 billion in 2021 and is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of above 8.6 % between 2016 and 2021.Request Sample Report:Yeast is the single celled eukaryotic organisms classified into fungus kingdom. Yeast is aerobic, anaerobic or facultative in nature and can grow in acidic conditions. It is present on all living cells including small intestine. Edible yeast is non toxic and has properties like rising which helps in fermenting and resulting in great taste. Some of the major applications of yeast are baking, brewing, fermentation, bioremediation, industrial fuels and nutritional supplements.Increasing demand for yeast from the bakery due to high consumption of bakery products drives the yeast market. Other factors contributing to the growth of yeast market are surging use of specialty yeast in the processed and packed food. Also, high demand of bio-ethanol as fuel stimulates the growth of the market. Growing demand for alcoholic beverages has led to high production of wine and other beverages in turn increase the demand for yeast. Though, yeast based products have low shelf life and allergies caused due to consumption of some yeast species may hinder the growth of market. Specialty yeast contains MSG; therefore stringent regulations are led by the government on its use. Nevertheless, untapped opportunities for the use of yeast in various industries are likely to open new avenues for the yeast market in the coming years.Based on yeast form the yeast market can be segmented as instant yeast, fresh yeast and dry yeast. Fresh yeast is considered to be the potential segment owing to high use of fresh yeast in bakery product mainly in breads and puffs due to great taste and high rising properties. Further the yeast can be segmented on the basis of type that are brewers, bakers, bio-ethanol, wine, feed and other types. Bakers and brewers are the leading segments due to high use of yeast in this industrial sector. Yet, wine and feed are likely to show high growth prospects in the coming years.Do Inquiry before buying:Specialty yeast is product originating from natural food yeast, which is used for nutrition, health and taste. Some of the key specialty yeast are yeast autolysis, yeast extract and -glucan. Yeast is majorly used in food and feed industry. Food segment is the most prominent market segment due to high use of yeast in food industry such as bakery, wine and breweries.The yeast market was dominated by North America in 2015. This was mainly contributed to high consumption of bakery products along with majority of shares in wine and brewery industry. However, North America and Europe are anticipated to experience sluggish growth in forecast period due to saturation of yeast market. Asia Pacific is expected to be the fastest growing market owing to rising discretional income and changing preference over the conventional foods towards fast and processed foods. The yeast market in Asia Pacific is projected to maintain its market in the coming years due to growing bakery and wine industry.There has been tremendous growth of wine industry in Brazil; this is likely to augment yeast market growth in Latin America. Middle East and Africa is expected to show sustainable growth in the next years owing to rising living standards along with increasing disposable incomes and presence of abundant raw resources.Presence of various vendors in the market forces the companies to focus on R&D for innovative and cost effective products. AngelYeast Co., Ltd, Koninklijke DSM N.V., Synergy Flavors, Leiber GmbH, Chr. Hansen Holding A/S, Associated British Foods plc, Lallemand Inc., Oriental Yeast Co., Ltd., Alltech and Lesaffre Group among others are some of the major players in the yeast market.Browse detail report at:This report segments the yeast market as follows:Yeast Market: Form Segment AnalysisInstant yeastFresh yeastDry yeastYeast Market: Type Segment AnalysisBrewersBakersBio-ethanolWineFeedOtherYeast Market: Specialty Type Segment AnalysisYeast autolysisYeast extract-glucanOtherYeast Market: Application Segment AnalysisFoodFeedYeast Market: Regional Segment AnalysisNorth AmericaUSEuropeGermanyFranceUKAsia PacificChinaJapanIndiaLatin AmericaBrazilMiddle East and AfricaRead Report TOC:About Us:Zion Market Research 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. Zion Market Research is the comprehensive collection of market intelligence products and services available on air. We have market research reports from number of leading industry and update our collection daily to provide our clients with the instant online access to our database. With access to this database, our clients will be able to benefit from expert insights on global industries, products, and market trends.Contact Us:Zion Market Research4283, Express Lane,Suite 634-143,Sarasota, Florida 34249, United StatesTel: +49-322 210 92714USA/Canada Toll Free No.1-855-465-4651Email: sales@zionmarketresearch.comWebsite:
Baby Food Market will reach USD 76.48 Billion by 2021, Globally

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Zion Research has published a new report titled Baby Food Market (Bottled baby food, Baby food cereals, Baby food snacks, Baby Food Soup, Frozen baby food): Global Industry Perspective, Comprehensive Analysis and Forecast, 2015 - 2021. According to the report, the global Baby Food market accounted for USD 53.31 Billion in 2015 and is expected to reach USD 76.48 Billion by 2021, growing at a CAGR of around 6.2% between 2016 and 2021.Request Sample Report:Baby food is either a total or partial substitute for breast milk for infants or toddlers of under two years. It is a soft food, which can be easily consumed by infants and babies. To meet the nutritional requirements of the baby, baby foods are especially designed by the manufacturers. Generally, baby food is prepared with required amount of proteins and iron, so that it properly helps in the babys growth and initial body development. The baby food market is classified into various segments which include product, health benefits and basic ingredients.There are mainly three forms of baby food, which are liquid concentrate, powder, and ready-to-feed. Powder is the least expensive form and it is used by mixing with water before feeding the infant. In case of ready-to-feed form of baby food, there is no need of addition of any liquid and mother can feed this directly to the baby. Furthermore, sub categories of baby foods include dried baby food, milk formula, prepared baby food and other baby food such as baby snacks and beverages. Cow milk-based formulas are gaining large adoption in emerging economies in the past few years. Increasing population base, rising disposable income level of individual and growing urbanization, are some of the major reasons, which are expected to be driving the baby food market in all across the globe. Decline in birth rate in developed countries can act as a major challenge for the growth in baby food market within the forecast period.Growth in the baby food or formula market is also driven by an increase in numbers of women working outside the home. As many working mothers return to their jobs shortly after giving birth, prepared baby foods and formulas provide tempting substitute for working mothers, bridging their desires for nutritious, healthy food with their need for convenience. Hypermarkets, supermarkets, small grocery retails, and health & beauty retailers are the key distribution channels serving in the baby food industry. Among all supermarkets are the primarily preferred distribution channel followed by health and beauty retailers. However, in developing countries like India, small grocery retailers and health and beauty retailers are among the mostly preferred sales channels. At present, small grocery retailers hold a relatively smaller share in the global market. Other sales channels in this market include discounters, non-store retailing and non-grocery retailers.Do Inquiry before buying:Asia Pacific market is prominent and one of the fastest growing markets for baby food among various regions due to population growth in China and India. Hence, in Asia-Pacific region, China and India hold an extensive share in the baby food market. Nestle India Ltd maintained the lead the market accounting for a major share in the market in 2015. The company has continued to leverage the reputation of its leading brands including Cerelac, Lactogen, Nestum, Nan and Nestogen. The company is focusing on enlarging its penetration to smaller cities of India.North America was the largest markets for baby food in 2015. In North America region, the U.S. accounted account the largest share in baby food market. However, the market for baby foods in North America is expected to witness stagnant growth due to the low birth rate and less demand for baby food. Debate over legislations regarding food labeling and its advertisements are poised to exhibit challenges for baby food products sales. Parents are opting for natural ingredients and no additives containing food with major attraction on organic baby food products.Some of the main companies operating in global baby food market are Abbott Laboratories, Bledina SA, Danone SA, Hain Celestial Group, H. J. Heinz Company, Ella's Kitchen Group Ltd, Nestle S.A., Semper AB, Mead Johnson Nutrition Company, Morinaga Milk Industry Co., Ltd.Browse detail report at:This report segments the global baby food market as follows:Global Baby Food Market: Product Segment AnalysisBottled baby foodBaby food cerealsBaby food snacksBaby Food SoupFrozen baby foodGlobal Baby Food Market: Regional Segment AnalysisNorth AmericaU.S.EuropeUKFranceGermanyAsia PacificChinaJapanIndiaLatin AmericaBrazilThe Middle East & AfricaRead Report TOC:About Us:Zion Market Research 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. Zion Market Research is the comprehensive collection of market intelligence products and services available on air. We have market research reports from number of leading industry and update our collection daily to provide our clients with the instant online access to our database. With access to this database, our clients will be able to benefit from expert insights on global industries, products, and market trends.Contact Us:Zion Market Research4283, Express Lane,Suite 634-143,Sarasota, Florida 34249, United StatesTel: +49-322 210 92714USA/Canada Toll Free No.1-855-465-4651Email: sales@zionmarketresearch.comWebsite:
Gastrointestinal Endoscopic Devices Market will reach USD 8.5 Billion by 2021, Globally

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Zion Research has published a new report titled Gastrointestinal Endoscopic Devices (Hemostatis Devices, Biopsy Devices, Endoscopic Retrograde Cholangiopancreatography Devices (ERCP), Capsule Endoscopes, GI Videoscopes, and Others) Market: Global Industry Perspective, Comprehensive Analysis and Forecast, 2015 - 2021. According to the report, the global gastrointestinal endoscopic devices market accounted for approximately USD 5.6 Billion in 2015 and is expected to reach approximately USD 8.5 Billion by 2021, growing at a CAGR of around 7.0% between 2016 and 2021.Request Sample Report:Gastrointestinal endoscopy is used to treat conditions of the gastrointestinal tract. Gastrointestinal (GI) tract includes small intestine, large intestine, stomach, rectum duodenum, cecum, and colon. The scope helps the doctor to have a look if the patient has any ulcer, inflammation, tumors, infection, or bleeding. It helps to collect tissue samples (biopsy), remove polyps, and treat bleeding through the scope. It also helps to find out problems that do not show up on X-ray tests. It is more accurate than X-ray films for detecting inflammation, ulcers and tumors of the esophagus, stomach and duodenum.As a result of changing lifestyle, lack of proper exercise and continuous shift of youngsters towards junk food has given rise to numerous gastrointestinal (GI) disorders which in turn is expected to drive the demand for the gastrointestinal endoscopic devices market during the forecast period. Moreover, increase in a number of patients with colon & rectum cancer, the growing geriatric population with long-term medical conditions such as GI disorders overweight & tobacco consumption are some others factors driving the growth of gastrointestinal endoscopic devices market. However, the fear of infections caused by endoscopes and chances of complications during endoscopy may curb the gastrointestinal endoscopy devices market in the near future. Moreover, lack of government funding and lack of reimbursement policies are some more factors expected to hamper the growth of the global gastrointestinal endoscopic devices market in the near future.GI videoscopes dominated the gastrointestinal endoscopic devices market in 2015. Moreover, capsule endoscopes are also expected to witness modest growth in the coming years.Do Inquiry before buying:North America dominated the gastrointestinal endoscopic devices market in 2015 in terms of demand. North America accounted for more than 30% share of the global gastrointestinal endoscopic devices market. Europe followed North America in terms of demand for the gastrointestinal endoscopic devices market in 2015. However, Asia Pacific is expected to be the fastest regional market for gastrointestinal endoscopic devices on account of the rising and aging population in China, India, and Australia. In addition, the expansion of health insurance coverage in Asia Pacific is expected to increase access to healthcare, government initiative to lower direct taxes, higher depreciation on medical equipment, income tax exemption coupled with increasing medical tourism in India, Singapore and Thailand which in turn is expected to augment the demand for gastrointestinal endoscopic devices in the near future.Key players operating in the gastrointestinal endoscopic devices market include Covidien Ltd., Stryker Corporation, Boston Scientific Corporation, Johnson & Johnson Ltd., Fujinon Ltd and Conmed Corporation among others.Browse detail report at:This report segments the global Alzheimers drugs market as follows:Global Gastrointestinal Endoscopic Devices Market: Product Segment AnalysisHemostatis DevicesBiopsy DevicesEndoscopic Retrograde Cholangiopancreatography Devices (ERCP)Capsule EndoscopesGI VideoscopesOthersGlobal Gastrointestinal Endoscopic Devices Market: Regional Segment AnalysisNorth AmericaU.S.EuropeUKFranceGermanyAsia PacificChinaJapanIndiaLatin AmericaBrazilThe Middle East and AfricaRead Report TOC:About Us:Zion Market Research 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. Zion Market Research is the comprehensive collection of market intelligence products and services available on air. We have market research reports from number of leading industry and update our collection daily to provide our clients with the instant online access to our database. With access to this database, our clients will be able to benefit from expert insights on global industries, products, and market trends.Contact Us:Zion Market Research4283, Express Lane,Suite 634-143,Sarasota, Florida 34249, United StatesTel: +49-322 210 92714USA/Canada Toll Free No.1-855-465-4651Email: sales@zionmarketresearch.comWebsite:
Automated Breast Ultrasound System Market: Global Industry Analysis and Forecast, 2014  2020

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The automated breast ultrasound system is a painless, safe, radiation-free and non-invasive 3D ultrasound system used for early diagnosis of breast cancer. Automated breast ultrasound system is particularly developed for entire breast imaging. Automated breast ultrasound is designed to acquire ultrasound images of the breast using a broadband transducer that is scanned over the entire breast, in an automated fashion, to collect three dimensional (3D) ultrasound volume data. The automated breast ultrasound system device uses a fully automated process to capture 3D images using a high frequency broadband transducer.Request Sample Report:Growing radiology market, increasing prevalence of breast cancer globally, and wide-ranging research and development in the imaging techniques are the major driving factors for the growth of automated breast ultrasound system. However, high manufacturing price of equipment and accessories and scarcity of expertise factors are expected to hamper the market growth.The report provides detailed segmentation of the automated breast ultrasound system market based on end-user and region. Invenia (GE Healthcare, SOFIA (Hitachi ltd.), ACUSON S2000 (Siemens AG) and Sonecine (SoneCine, Inc.) are key company brand product includes in automated breast ultrasound system market. On the basis of application the automated breast ultrasound system market is segmented into hospitals and diagnostic imaging laboratories. Hospital dominated the overall market in terms of revenue. Hospital segment was continuous to grow at a moderate rate. All segments have been analyzed based on historic, present, and future trends, and the market has been estimated from 2015 to 2020.Do Inquiry before buying:Geographically, the automated breast ultrasound system market has been segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and Middle East & Africa, further bifurcation of region on the country level, which include U.S., Germany, UK, France, China, Japan and India. North America was the leading market share of automated breast ultrasound system. North America is followed by Europe. The growth of the North American market is likely to be driven due to extensive advancement in the technology and major market player in this region. Europe is the second largest medical device technologies market owing to improved geriatric population and government regulations fueling the market growth.Some of the key players operating in global the automated breast ultrasound system market such as SonoCine, Inc., General Electronic Co., Hitachi Ltd., and Siemens AG.Browse detail report at:The report segments the global automated breast ultrasound system market into:Global Automated Breast Ultrasound System Market: End-User Segment AnalysisHospitalsDiagnostic Imaging LaboratoriesGlobal Automated Breast Ultrasound System Market: Regional Segment AnalysisNorth AmericaU.S.EuropeUKFranceGermanyAsia PacificChinaJapanIndiaLatin AmericaBrazilMiddle East & AfricaRead Report TOC:About UsSyndicate Market Research provides a range of marketing and business research solutions designed for our clients specific needs based on our expert resources. The business scopes of Syndicate Market 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.Contact Us:Syndicate Market Research3422 SW 15 Street, Suit #8138,Deerfield Beach,Florida 33442,USATel: +1-386-310-3803GMT Tel: +49-322 210 92714USA/Canada Toll Free No.1-855-465-4651Email: sales@syndicatemarketresearch.comWebsite:
dropout blues.jpg

Many educators are confident Oregon schools have adopted new practices that will work to help the state cure its dropout blues. The state has one of the worst on-time graduation rates in the country and has only managed to register a substantial gain in one of the past six years.

(Randy L. Rasmussen / The Oregonian /2015)

Oregon high schools have a terrible track record of getting students to earn diplomas, and despite years of talk about doing better, have produced just one significant bump in graduation rates in the past seven years.

The class of 2015 achieved that 2 percentage point increase, with 74 percent graduating on time.

But as the school year gets into full swing this week, with students from Beaverton to Roseburg heading back to class, education-watchers point to widespread signs that graduation rates will remain headed in the right direction.

Schools are helping more freshmen get off to a successful start, they say, and reacting faster and more skillfully to early warning signs such as failing a course or missing too much school.

Experts say there's increasing evidence administrators know what works -- and are putting it into practice.

In Hillsboro, there's a new emphasis on connecting students to the world of work, and it's paying off, said Brooke Nova, coordinator of career and college pathways.

Glencoe High students Ruth Teklu, left, and Becca McInally sell handmade skincare products from their company, Glow: A Cosmetics Company. They launched Glow and sold hundreds of dollars worth of face cream and body scrubs at Hillsboro's Tuesday Market as part of the Hillsboro School District's efforts to connect all students to a career of their choice and promote teen entreprenuership. Students who are excited about their future see a reason to stay in school and learn skills, educators say.

Connecting students to a chosen career begins in kindergarten now and continues through middle school and into internships with local employers completed by one-third of high school students, she said.

The proportion of ninth-graders with enough credits to be on track for graduation has risen substantially, to 83 percent, state figures show. And it's likely the district will graduate more than 80 percent of its students on time, Nova said.

"It comes down to relevancy," Nova said. "If students feel a purpose for going to class, to connect that to interests they have in a career, so they have that end goal, that really helps."

In Roseburg, a new effort begins Tuesday, the first day of class. The high school there will operate a full-fledged "early warning system," a concept that is suddenly being talked about in districts large and small.

At Roseburg High, every freshman will be watched closely for repeat absences, failing grades in core academic classes and serious behavior incidents. If any occur, a team of adults will intervene immediately to address root causes.

Roseburg is the seat of Douglas County, which has Oregon's third-worst graduation rate, 64 percent. Roseburg's rate, at 77 percent, is slightly above the state average. But it's far from where it should be, said Roseburg High Principal Jill Weber, and remains below 70 percent among low-income students and students of color.

Research makes clear that a good start in high school is essential to graduating, Weber said, hence her decision to focus the early warning system on ninth graders.

"I firmly believe that impacting freshmen is where we are going to make that difference," she says.

Nettie Legters, a national expert on how high schools can change to raise graduation rates, left Johns Hopkins University's Everybody Graduates center in April 2015 to take a job at Portland-based Education Northwest. There, she helps Northwest states and school districts improve. She's gotten an up-close look at graduation initiatives in Oregon and says she likes what she's seen.

"I am pretty optimistic about Oregon's future," she said.

But Toya Fick, head of the student advocacy group Oregon Stand for Children and a lead backer of a November ballot measure that would direct more money to high school graduation initiatives, says progress is genuine - but far overstated.

"We are excited about the pockets of success happening. But they are just that: pockets," Fick said.

More money and more focus is needed to make graduation rates rise for all students, not just those lucky enough to attend a school or district that's making true headway, she said.

This year, for instance, the state doubled grants to expand high school career-technical programs to $9 million. But that was enough to fund just one-third of what high schools requested. Fick said that's a pity because career-tech classes are a proven lever to raise graduation rates.

In Oregon's class of 2014, 88 percent of the 14,000 students who took at least two related hands-on career courses graduated on time, 16 points better than the state average for all students, said Daniel Adams, a state accountability specialist.

Taking three career-tech classes is proven to raise graduation rates among boys, something Oregon sorely needs to see happen. Boys graduate at a distinctly lower rate than girls, 70 percent vs. 78 percent.

If voters approve Measure 98, high schools would receive $800 per student if they agree to do three things: expand career-technical courses, add courses that carry college credit and do dropout prevention -- including carefully tracking grades and attendance beginning in ninth grade.

"What we need is not the hodgepodge we have created," Fick said. "We clearly are in a place where we need a lot of this happening in all of our high schools."

Legters said she bases her optimism on statewide efforts, not just bright spots in districts including North Clackamas, Corbett and Woodburn.

Leadership is key, and "that is something I am really seeing in spades in Oregon," Legters said.

Schools that excel at keeping freshmen on track

Percent of students on track by the start of sophomore year, fall 2015. Schools are listed in the order by which they outperform other schools with similar demographics.

Corbett School

>95%

Nyssa High

>95

Irrigon High

90%

Gold Beach High

>95

Redmond High

92

Cascade High

94

McMinnville High

88

David Douglas Hig

h 82

Sherwood High

>95

Wilson High

>95

Cleveland High

94

Gladstone High

91

Clackamas High

94

Franklin High

85

source: Analysis of Oregon Department of Education data

Helping more students graduate is the clear No. 1 goal at the Oregon Department of Education and is Gov. Kate Brown's highest priority for public schools, Legters said.

Legters noted Brown created a high-level position devoted to raising graduation rates, called the education innovation officer, and said Brown chose a well qualified person, former Bethel Superintendent Colt Gill.

Gill implemented an early warning system in Bethel, a district near Eugene. He also knows how to run an Oregon school district, and is eagerly investigating the challenges and best practices in ushering students to diplomas in diverse parts of the state, Legters said.

Oregon is behind the curve, Legters acknowledges. Roughly 30 other states have early warning systems, while Oregon is still contemplating one, spurred on by Gill. But momentum is building, she said.

That was evident, Legters said, at a conference in Bend this summer that brought together hundreds of high school counselors, principals, employers and representatives from higher education.

Schools that fail to keep many freshmen on track

Percent of students on track by the start of sophomore year, fall 2015. Schools are listed in order by how far they trail schools with similar demographics.

Central Linn High

46%

Metropolitan Learning Center

52

Madras High

50

Willamina High

52

South Umpqua High

58

Redmond Proficiency Academy

54

Vernonia High

64

Reynolds High

63

Gervais High

70

Barlow High

71

Estacada High

66

Myrtle Poin

t 65

Sandy High

70

North Bend High

59

North Medford

67

source: Analysis of Oregon Department of Education data

Teams from regions across the state forged plans to take steps including helping employers and schools become better connected and having community colleges contact new high school graduates over the summer to keep plans to enroll in in the fall from fizzling.

"We are hoping it will start impacting the graduation rate right away in some areas," said Lori Ellis, who oversees mentoring for middle and high school students at scores of schools for Oregon's higher education agency.

Oregon's lowest graduation rates are in rural communities with high unemployment and child poverty. Coos County is worst, at 57 percent, but doesn't have a sense of urgency in proportion to the nearly 400 teens who drop out each year. Young people who fail to earn a diploma, compared with those who do, are less likely to earn a living wage, to find full-time work, to stay married and stay out of jail.

But some rural communities have exceptional results. Grant, Union, Lake and Malheur counties, all in remote stretches of eastern Oregon, have some of the state's very best graduation rates.

Cascade High School, which serves three small towns on the southeastern fringe of Salem, has one of the state's highest rates of ninth-graders who make it to 10th grade with all the credits they need - 6-1/2 - to be on track to graduate in four years.

That success rate, 94 percent, is 14 points higher than at the typical school with a similar student body. Not surprisingly, Cascade also boasts an 87 percent graduation rate.

Principal Matt Thatcher has earned the respect of fellow principals. They elected him president of Oregon's school administrator's group, the Confederation of School Administrators.

He says hiring great teachers who care about kids and are willing to do whatever it takes to help them succeed is the most important thing he does.

Thatcher created an early warning system that is so focused on being early, it begins when students are in eighth grade. Middle school teachers and counselors help find the 25 to 30 students most likely to falter in ninth grade, and he then puts them into a special class taught by just the right teacher to prevent it from happening.

The class those students take, called freshman focus, covers study skills, accountability and organization - and more.

"We are going to do whatever it takes, whether that means check in with you every day, call your parents, help you after school or in the summer," Thatcher said. "You are going to have to work really hard to resist the interventions we are providing."

Gill, the state's point person on graduation, cautions against expecting huge near-term jumps in the statewide rate. Unlike expanding career-tech courses and combating chronic absenteeism, he said, some key steps may take years to pay off.

The state switched kindergartners from half-day to full-day schedules last year and added 1,500 high-quality preschool slots this school year. Those will surely raise Oregon's graduation rate, Gill said - but in the classes of 2027 and 2029.

He said Oregon also has a plan to systematically improve instruction for students learning English as their second language and has devoted millions of dollars to expanding college-credit courses for high school students. Both will translate into more students earning diplomas, he said.

Gill and the Oregon Department of Education will recommend a state-led early warning system by October and a state plan for battling sky-high chronic absenteeism rates before 2017, he said.

In Reynolds, one of Oregon's 15 largest districts, leaders have pointed year after year to changes they were sure would improve its moribund rates, long among the worst in Oregon.

Still, Reynolds High has remained a dropout factory. In 2015, just 58 percent of students made it across the finish line in four years.

Educators in Reynolds School District have worked hard to raise graduation rates, knowing how important a diploma is to a young person's future. Still, just 58 percent of Reynolds students made it across the finish line on time in 2015.

Reynolds faces challenges: 70 percent of its students are low-income, slightly more than half are non-white and one-third have a native language other than English. But it underachieves nonetheless.

Neighboring David Douglas - with an even higher share of minority students, low-income students and English learners - managed to graduate 74 percent of its students on time.

Reynolds Assistant Superintendent Frank Caropelo, who took the job last year after working in graduation-superstar Albany schools, says Reynolds High is about to have a break-through performance. He won't say, however, if that will come with the class of 2017, 2019 or even later.

"Our primary goal is high school graduation," Caropelo said. "That is our focus in all of our work at high school, middle school and elementary. It's all aligned to that as our success marker."

Years-long efforts to keep more freshmen on track are finally working, he said. The school managed to get 63 percent of ninth-graders to earn six credits during 2014-15, up from 49 percent the previous year. Last school year's figures aren't official yet, but Caropelo says Reynolds High kept more than 80 percent of ninth-graders on track.

Suspensions and expulsions, "which we know don't work for kids" because they cost valuable learning time, were down for the third year in a row, he said. And more ninth-graders than ever before - about 150, or 20 percent of the incoming class - took part in a summer program to help students who struggled in middle school ramp up to the demands of high school.

There is no single solution, Caropelo said, and he sees progress on varied fronts.

"There are a lot of little things that need to be done right," he said. "We know that we can do better."

-- Betsy Hammond
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Like many busy, working parents, Sara and Aaron Bourne don't have time for a photo session. Although their tasteful midcentury modern house in Beaverton will be part of a highly anticipated tour offered by Restore Oregon, the idea of stopping life to stage the living room as if in a magazine spread seems, well, unlike them.

Rather than gingerly residing in a museum-like showcase, the Bournes, their three daughters and their stuff occupy this coveted single-story dwelling.

"That's the magic about these homes," says Sara Bourne. "They are beautiful and all, but the 'living' here is the fun part. How to capture that in a photo, I'm not really sure."

This attitude makes developer Robert ("Bob") Rummer smile. After all, he built this highly livable house and about 750 others in the Portland metro area between 1959 and 1975. Each one is about 1,850 square feet or a little larger, and was carefully sited, typically, on a quarter-acre lot to maximize indoor-outdoor living.

Underneath a flat or pitched roof are the fewest interior walls. Sturdy post-and-beam construction also made it possible to support vaulted ceilings under exposed beams and walls of windows. Sometimes sheets of glass encase a distinctive central atrium.

The interiors of Rummer houses are so transparent that owners joke they can't tell if the dog is inside or out.

Surprisingly, the front of the homes are typically buttoned up. There are no porches or big picture windows that allow passersby to peek at the furniture. Unlike the midcentury-era's ranch-style house, the living room in a Rummer was radically oriented toward the backyard.

When introduced in the "Mad Men" era, these homes were celebrated for their open floor plan and inventive features that allowed for easy living and home entertaining.

The design was modeled after architect A. Quincy Jones' revolutionary home plans for Joseph Eichler, a California home builder, who, like Rummer, wanted to make Case Study-style modern houses affordable.

Rooms were organized by tasks. The noise-making kitchen, laundry room and a workshop for the water heater and furnace are on one side of the house. On another end are the quiet-seeking bedrooms - three, four or five of them - and bathrooms with a step-down Roman shower. In the center is the seemingly never-ending living room and dining room defined by soaring glass.

Midcentury modern experts like architectural historian Jack Bookwalter say Rummer homes benefit from better-than-standard workmanship and materials. Bob Rummer insisted that big beams were made from the center cut so they wouldn't warp.

Today, home buyers pay a premium for a Rummer house, if they can find one for sale. According to long-time Rummer homeowner and real estate agent Carolyn Weinstein of The Hasson Co., the median list price for the few Rummers on the market is $542,450 and the median days on the market is six.

Adding to the cachet, in 2013, Washington County's Oak Hills planned community, which includes 29 Rummers, was added to the National Register of Historic Places. This achievement made Oak Hills the first midcentury modern historic neighborhood in Oregon and the state's youngest historic district, according to Diana Painter, architectural historian at the State Historic Preservation Office.

From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 17, Restore Oregon's End of Summer Robert Rummer House Tour opens the doors to six Rummer homes within a walkable one-mile radius in Oak Hills. Tickets ($35, www.RestoreOregon.org or 503-243-1923) will support Restore Oregon and the Oak Hills Neighborhood Association's efforts to preserve historic buildings.

Bob Rummer, 89, will be at the event to explain how he embraced and executed Atomic Age styling in the Pacific Northwest. The stops on the tour include homes that are like time capsules as well as those that have been updated or are being restored.

One of the houses on the tour is owned by Eric Thompson, a modern home builder with Oregon Homeworks. Two years ago, he bought a 1967 Rummer from the first owner who kept the house in original condition, down to the kitchen's Thermador stainless cooktop and double oven.

Thompson replaced worn countertops with new, midcentury-mimicking Formica and older carpet with seagrass. He kept the windows and paneling intact, but to make the dwelling more energy efficient, he added insulation and a new mini-split heat pump system to aid the original radiant heat in the concrete floors.

He also added plants in the indoor atrium, which is visible once he opens his bright yellow front door. Other Rummer houses have similar, otherwise unassuming front doors that are painted orange-red, turquoise or another attention-grabbing midcentury color.

But even the bold door colors fade away when first-time visitors enter the living room. "'Wow, this is really cool' is the universal response when seeing my house for the first time," says Thompson.

"It's just so different than the way we build houses today, where the emphasis is on the budget rather than the architecture, which is really unfortunate," adds Thompson, who adopted Rummer features into a new house with a daylight basement he's building in the Cedar Mill neighborhood.

Rummers, like Eichlers, have been serving the ever-changing needs of families for a half century. Young couples stayed to raise their families and retire. Kids who grew up in a Rummer home often return to start a new generation, says Darla Castagno, a long-time Oak Hills homeowner who was instrumental in creating the historic district.

Sara Bourne grew up in Oak Hills and returned here six years ago with her husband, Aaron, to raise their daughters Eliana, now 7, Adira, 2 1/2, and Coralee, 7 months.

This time around, however, Sara Bourne moved into a Rummer, which is on the tour.

"I knew growing up that Rummers were kind of a thing," says Sara, 38, recalling the unusual see-through design, "but being a kid, I didn't have a full appreciation."

For the last five years, she has served on the board of the Oak Hills Neighborhood Association, and explains that the tract's historic status is not based on its age, but its uniqueness.

She acknowledges that some people love midcentury modern while some don't understand it. "But anything that calls attention to a distinctive era is a good thing," she says.

She and her husband started the Rummer Network, an online resource that includes a downloadable copy of the original, typed Rummer Service Guide.

"The houses are not grandiose," she says. "The exposed framework let's you see the bones of the house."

Over time, the Bournes have restored some of the features that had been updated, and have filled their home with vintage midcentury modern furniture like designer Eero Saarinen's iconic pedestal table as well as walnut Danish modern pieces.

The living room is the center of the house. From here, the family can look through an enclosed atrium to the front yard, or turn in other directions to see the entire backyard or all the spaces in the house except bedrooms and bathrooms.

Bourne describes her living room as "lofty and tall."

A brick fireplace, flanked by glass, rises to met a steeply-peaked ceiling. Skylights are embedded in the ceiling's tongue-and-groove planks that are painted a soft gray. The pitched roof and wood treatment extend to the patio beyond the sliding glass doors.

Bourne says she always has the same response when she comes home: "It's a peaceful place to be," she says. "It feels like you are lifted up."



- Janet Eastman



jeastman@oregonian.com

503-799-8739

@janeteastman




Wednesdays front-page article Shelter, at a cost, reported on Madisons shelter system. While the facilities leave much to be desired, the State Journal article leaves the impression that the providers willingly operate an inhumane system.

This is inaccurate and unjustified.

In particular, this does an incredible disservice to Grace Episcopal Church, the thousands of volunteers and supporters of the drop-in shelter, and the Porchlight staff who put their heart and soul into emergency shelter services for those most in need and who show up on the church shelters doorstep each night of the year.

Also, the article left out that Porchlight developed and operated for over 20 years a model shelter for seriously mentally ill persons called Safe Haven. It offers single occupancy rooms, showers, three meals per day, laundry and daily drop-in services.

The article ignores the staggering numbers of people served. In its drop-in shelter at Grace church and two companion overflow shelters, Porchlight has provided over 35,000 nights of shelter to over 1,000 different men each year for the past decade. The sheer magnitude of the numbers seems overwhelming, given limited funding. Last year, 1,272 different men received 35,382 nights of shelter and over 70,000 evening and breakfast meals.

This is all done on an annual budget of $435,000, of which about $243,000 is government funding ($60,000 is from the state, which is half of what it was in the mid-1990s). That amounts to $6.86 of government funds available to serve one guest for one night with two meals.

Last year, Porchlight raised over $190,000 in contributions to keep the shelter operating. This money was raised from a variety of sources, but organizations such as the United Way of Dane County do not provide support, having decided to de-fund shelters in favor of housing programs over 15 years ago. Also, these expenses do not include meals because Porchlight has organized a committed group of thousands of volunteers from over 60 organizations that provide meals every day of the year.

That so many people request shelter services means many do consider the shelters to be decent and safe despite the facilities limitations. To receive shelter at Porchlight, all you need to be is homeless and show up during intake hours (or call ahead to let staff know why later entry is needed). While intoxicated persons are not served during the summer, Porchlight does serve them in the winter, taking on a role almost as a detoxification center.

Porchlight does not have capacity limits or waiting lists. It does not turn anyone away because of insufficient space, resources or staff. On frigid nights, Porchlight will serve over 180 men with just three staff  one in each of its three locations.

All other shelters in Madison and most across the country routinely turn people away. Porchlight could set limits and turn people away. That would make it much easier to manage and to provide the litany of services listed by the State Journal article. But Porchlights mission is to ensure that those who are homeless for the first time, those who are not chronic, and those who suffer from mental illnesses get a bed for the night.

Those who are last are first for Porchlight.

In light of the numbers served and Porchlights mission, the criticisms in the State Journal article are unbalanced. The article reports that Porchlight only washes its blankets and sheets twice per week. Even so, Porchlight launders about 25,000 sheets and blankets annually, not including towels. Porchlight has been following this practice for over a decade without any major outbreaks of flu, TB or infectious diseases and other vermin such as lice and bed bugs. Porchlight has invested in bunk beds and mattresses that are bed bug and vermin resistant, not allowing infestations. This has largely been successful.

Porchlight does have a 90-day limit on nights of shelter for each guest in any given year (in part required by the state shelter grant). But the limit does not apply during cold or inclement weather. So almost everyone is able to stay from the beginning of November through the middle of March, and weather exceptions to the 90-day limit are made.

The facilities available for the mens shelter are far from ideal. But with over 1,200 men requesting more than 35,000 nights of shelter, Porchlight must be doing something right.

Porchlight would love to have a new $18 million facility like the Higher Ground shelter in St. Paul, Minnesota, with a multimillion-dollar operating budget. But this will require a lot more funding. In the meantime, Porchlight will do the best it can with scant resources to provide its guests with a decent and safe place to stay for the night  today, tomorrow and into the future.
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The scene of a rollover crash in Washington County on Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016.

(Washington County Sheriff's Office)

A driver who missed a curve, ran over a fire hydrant and flipped his SUV in unincorporated Washington County was arrested Saturday for driving under the influence, authorities said.

The man was driving east on Northwest Thompson Road when he came to a bend at Hibbard Drive and crashed around 4:40 p.m., said Sgt. David Thompson, a spokesman for the Washington County Sheriff's Office.

The driver, identified as Andriv Serezentynov, 36, of Portland, was not injured.

Deputies who arrived at the site of the crash in the Bonny Slope neighborhood arrested Serezntynov for driving under the influence of intoxicants. He was booked into the Washington County Jail, although he has since been released, according to county records.

-- Molly Young

myoung@oregonian.com

503-412-7056

@mollykyoung
crc.JPG

This July 14, 2000 photo shows a painting project on the Interstate 5 Bridge in Vancouver, Wash.

(The Columbian/2000)

Columbia River Crossing: Standing still in Interstate 5 traffic offers the chance to reflect on possible solutions. High on the list is attention to the Columbia River Crossing. Surprisingly ignored in this newspaper since the disappointing and expensive failure to create new transportation routes between Vancouver and Portland two years ago, the problem has obviously become even more apparent as traffic has become so dense.

Our candidates for governor of Oregon could help in our choice (between them and bridge options) by presenting their plans for a solution. Each would be well-advised to review the thoughts of Will Macht, professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University, as presented in his Aug. 23 "In My Opinion" piece, "Oregon and Washington link requires reimagining -- and discussion by candidates." Macht emphasizes the urgency needed to at least preserve what we have and offers a systemic approach that is well-reasoned, practical and feasible.

John H. McAnulty

Northwest Portland
By Ruth Marcus

WASHINGTON -- Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas, the old saying goes. If so, Donald Trump should be awfully itchy.

Trump has just augmented his ever-changing cast of mostly second-string campaign operatives with a new deputy campaign manager, conservative activist David Bossie. "A friend of mine for many years," Trump told my Washington Post colleague Robert Costa. "Solid. Smart. Loves politics, knows how to win."

That's one way to put it. Win at any cost would be another, and that's being polite. If Bossie's name doesn't ring a bell, you're lucky, because it means that you haven't been immersed for the last two decades-plus in the mucky minutiae of the right's no-holds-barred war against Bill and Hillary Clinton.

This is a war in which Bossie has risen from foot soldier to general, in large part thanks to his willingness to do anything in pursuit of his prey. He is the Captain Ahab of Clinton haters.

Some highlights:

Back in 1992, Bossie was working with Floyd Brown, of Willie Horton 1988 campaign ad fame, on an anti-Clinton effort that included a phone line in which callers could pay $4.99 to hear supposed sex tapes between Bill Clinton and Gennifer Flowers. President George H.W. Bush denounced the tactic as "the kind of sleaze that diminishes the political process" and filed a Federal Election Commission complaint against the group, the Presidential Victory Commission.

Bossie's particular contribution to this effort involved harassing friends and family of a former law student of Clinton's, Susan Coleman, who had committed suicide. As reported by CBS' Eric Engberg, Bossie's effort involved trying to prove that Coleman shot herself after having a sexual relationship with Clinton and becoming pregnant.

Bossie and another investigator pursued Coleman's mother to an Army hospital where her husband was being treated for a stroke. "Here the two men burst into the sick man's room, and began questioning the shaken mother about her daughter's suicide," Engberg reported.

Five years later, Lloyd Grove recounted in The Washington Post, "A chastened Bossie later told friends that the CBS story had made his grandmother cry."

Chastened? Not so much. Grove was writing about Bossie because he had landed himself back in the news, this time as a committee investigator for former Republican Rep. Dan Burton (of Vince Foster was murdered and shooting a pumpkin, or maybe a melon, to prove it fame).

After working with Bossie for several months on the investigation into Clinton's campaign fund-raising, the committee's chief counsel and two other staffers, with the lawyer, John Rowley III, issued a public letter denouncing Bossie's "unrelenting, self-promoting actions."

"Not since Roy Cohn -- the bare-knuckled chief counsel for Sen. Joe McCarthy in the Red-hunting hearings of the 1950s -- has a congressional staffer been so thoroughly demonized by his enemies," Grove wrote. The comparison is particularly striking in retrospect, since post-McCarthy Cohn became Trump's lawyer.

Less than a year later, Burton was forced to apologize to his colleagues and Bossie resigned under pressure, after accusations that tapes of former Hillary Clinton law partner Webster Hubbell had been unfairly edited to exclude exculpatory comments about whether Clinton had known of his phony billing. (She had "no idea," Hubbell said.)

In a closed-door Republican conference meeting, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich told Burton he was "embarrassed ... at the circus that went on at your committee," The Washington Post reported.

Since then, of course, Bossie, now at the helm of Citizens United, has continued his pursuit, now focused on Hillary. The Citizens United Supreme Court ruling grew out of his 2008 "Hillary: The Movie."

My point is not that the Clintons are blameless -- they aren't -- but that a candidate can be judged by the company he keeps and, especially, the individuals he hires. Trump has shed, sort of, Corey Lewandowski (recommended to him by, yes, Bossie) and Paul Manafort.

Now he has brought on Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon (recommended to him by, yes, Bossie) as the campaign's chief executive officer, and with him questions about Bannon's voter registration at a vacant Florida house and charges, ultimately dismissed, of domestic abuse by his ex-wife.

The grown-up in the room with Trump -- at least the one who's not related to him -- is campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who has a reputation as a capable professional but has been praising her candidate for his supposed "pivot ... to substance" and vowing, in regard to Clinton, "we're going to fight her on substance."

Uh huh. Now comes Bossie, lauded by Conway as "a battle-tested warrior and a brilliant strategist."

Scratch, scratch.

Ruth Marcus' email address is ruthmarcuswashpost.com.

(c) 2016, Washington Post Writers Group
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The Coast Guard station in North Bend received a call about a woman at about noon Saturday from Lincoln County dispatch. The second rescue took place more than 100 miles away near Coos Bay.

(The Associated Press)

Coast Guard crews rescued two people off of the Oregon Coast Saturday.

The first rescue occurred when a woman fell in the water near the entrance to Depoe Bay.

The Coast Guard station in North Bend received a call about the woman at about noon Saturday from Lincoln County dispatch. A boat crew and Dolphin helicopter crew responded and located the woman. They used a heaving line to reach her and bring her on board.

She was taken back to the station and transferred to emergency medical personnel, who took her to the Samaritan North Lincoln Hospital in Lincoln City. Her name or condition was not available.

The second rescue took place more than 100 miles away near Coos Bay.

The Coast Guard received a report at about 3:30 p.m. from local dispatch saying a kayaker was struggling and yelling for help.

An air crew spotted Evan Merrell, 58, of Sunset Bay, in the water. He was clinging to his kayak after falling out while fishing.

A rescue swimmer was lowered into the water and stayed with Merrell until a boat crew arrived.

The boat crew pulled Merrell aboard, and he was treated for hypothermia.

-- The Associated Press
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A couple poses as the sun sets at Yosemite National Park on Thursday, Sept. 1. Photo courtesy of Mike Karas

(instagram.com/mike.karas)

Mike Karas arrived a little late to Yosemite National Park in central California on Thursday. But the amateur photographer from Honolulu wanted to capture the sunset.

His group shared the trail to Taft Point with a couple taking their wedding photos. When Karas paused to photograph the Yosemite Valley below, he noticed the newlyweds in the distance.

An Instagram moment.

"I was just snapping away trying to get them," said Karas, who lived in Vancouver for four years before moving to Hawaii in May for his job at an insurance company.

"It was just unbelievable. The sunset that night was awesome."

By the time Karas wrapped up and the evening light faded, the couple was gone. He never got their names.

He shared the photo on Instagram. Friends posted it to Facebook. They haven't had any luck yet identifying the pair.

So, if you spent Thursday evening hiking in Yosemite with your beloved, Karas has a photo for you. Karas said the newlyweds can reach him through his Instagram account.

-- Molly Young

myoung@oregonian.com

503-412-7056

@mollykyoung
Melissa Click

This Nov. 9, 2015 frame grab provided by Mark Schierbecker shows Melissa Click (right), an assistant professor at the University of Missouri, during a run-in with student journalists during protests on the Columbia campus. On Thursday, Feb. 25, 2016, university administrators announced they had fired Click. She had been on suspension after being videotaped calling for "some muscle" to remove a student videographer during the protests.

(AP file photo)

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Gonzaga University has hired an assistant communications professor

during student protests late last year at the University of Missouri.

that Melissa Click has been hired as a lecturer at Gonzaga in Spokane.

Click was fired in February after a videotaped confrontation in which she called for "some muscle" to remove a student videographer from a protest area in November on the University of Missouri's Columbia campus. The video went viral.

As dean of Gonzaga's College of Arts and Sciences, Elisabeth Mermann-Jozwiak, says Gonzaga officials knew of Click's recent history and were confident in welcoming her to the university.

Click was hired for a one-year, non-tenure-track position as a lecturer in Gonzaga's communication studies department.

-- The Associated Press
Police arrested a 55-year-old man after an hourslong standoff in a Newberg trailer park that ended early Sunday.

Dale William Martineau of Newberg was wanted in connection with robberies that occurred in Washington County, said Capt. Jeff Kosmicki of the Newberg-Dundee Police Department.

Officers learned Martineau was in a trailer at the Chehalem Mobile Park on Oregon 99W on the west edge of Newberg. They surrounded the trailer and ordered Martineau out, but he refused, Kosmicki said.

Help from the Oregon State Police and other area agencies arrived during the standoff, which lasted for more than five hours. Martineau was taken into custody shortly after midnight Sunday. No one was injured, Kosmicki said.

Martineau remains in the Yamhill County Jail in connection with the Washington County charges.

-- Molly Young

myoung@oregonian.com

503-412-7056

@mollykyoung
Lolly Champion thought she was doing everything right.

Champion, now 77, was getting mammograms, she did self-exams and when she found a lump in her right breast in 1986, she went to the doctor.

But every time Champion visited her doctor in Medford during the next two years, he told her it was a simple cyst and that she was fine, she said.

But Champion knew it wasn't fine. When she moved to Portland in 1988, her new doctor immediately had her get a biopsy - something her previous physician had never suggested and something she didn't know she could request, she said.

By that time, the tumor had grown to "the size of a medium apple," she said.

Champion was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer and underwent a mastectomy, radiation and chemotherapy. She wondered what would have happened if she had known the right questions to ask her doctor, if she could have taken charge of her health, if she had caught the cancer sooner.

Champion knew she wanted to help other women with breast cancer and empower them to advocate for themselves.

"It's not the doctor's body," she said. "It's my body."

Champion had noticed the book "The Race is Run One Step at a Time" by Nancy Brinker, the woman who founded the Susan G. Komen organization in honor of her sister who died of breast cancer.

Through family and business connections, Champion then connected with Chris Mulder, now 64, and Raylene Dion, 61, who were also breast cancer survivors, to establish the local affiliate in 1991. The women each contributed $100 to the group and began planning the first Portland Race for the Cure.

"We all came from different treatments, diagnoses, hospital systems," Mulder said. "We were all coming together and working together."

A few weeks before this year's Race for the Cure, Champion sat in Mulder's living room in Wilsonville, sipping coffee and swapping old stories with her fellow founders.

It was the first time the three women had all been in the same room in five years -- and brought back memories of their initial gathering 25 years ago in Champion's living room in Lake Oswego to launch their project, now known as Susan G. Komen Oregon and SW Washington.

***

Portland's first Race for the Cure in October 1992 attracted 6,200 participants and raised $3,188. Over the past several decades, the race has grown to include Eugene and now draws tens of thousands of people in raising over $2.9 million, Komen organization reports show.

2016 Race for the Cure

What:

The big annual fundraiser for the Oregon and Southwest Washington chapter of Susan G. Komen, the breast cancer organization. Breast cancer patients, survivors and people who otherwise want to end the disease will take to the streets wearing Komen's signature pink in pursuit of a cure.

When:

Sunday, Sept. 18

Where:

The Portland race begins at Tom McCall Waterfront Park and loops through parts of the Pearl District and downtown.

Race day schedule:

The starting area opens at 6:30 a.m. Sept. 18. Start times are as follows.

- 7:30 a.m., 10K timed race

- 8:15 a.m., 5K fun run

- 8:30 a.m., 5K fun walk

- 9 a.m., 1-mile family walk

Route:

The 5K and 10K routes begin near the west end of the Morrison Bridge and follow the Willamette River along Naito Parkway. The route then turns through the Pearl District on Northwest Ninth Avenue and Northwest Davis Street. After following Broadway and Southwest Salmon Street back to Naito Parkway, the 5K ends and the 10K continues along the same route for another lap.

How to run:

Register as an individual runner or as part of a team at the local Komen chapter's website or in person on race day. Prices fall between $10 and $50 if you register before Sept. 12, with a $5 increase between then and race day.

Once signed up, your goal is to raise as much money as possible for breast cancer research, early detection and support programs for fighters and survivors. The run itself is a celebration of survivors and those lost to breast cancer, along with the work runners and family members have done to aid in the fight.

-Dillon Pilorget

Champion said that while raising awareness and money through the race was important, the event "is really about bringing people together, to know that you're not alone."

"We say (breast cancer) is a sorority that no one wanted to join and the orientation is no fun," she said. "But we don't ever want to lose a member."

Champion's focus in her work over the years was outreach and education. One way she encouraged women and men to take charge of their health was by creating brochures advising people how to ask the right questions of their physicians.

She wrote her first brochure called "Doctor I Need to Know!" in 1989. She would leave copies at community gatherings, women's groups, the American Cancer Society and with friends.

"In other words, everywhere I went," she said.

Her message: Breast cancer is a "democratic disease" -- you can get it regardless of your age, gender, race or socioeconomic status. Champion's mother, for instance, was diagnosed at age 71 in 1989 after Champion insisted she ask for a mammogram.

"She had never ever been suggested to have a mammogram in her entire life," Champion said, calling it "unforgivable."

***

Mulder was diagnosed with cancer in her breast ducts 30 years ago at age 34 after her first mammogram. She had just started the lavender farm that she still owns, Barn Owl Nursery in Wilsonville, and underwent two mastectomies as a part of her aggressive treatment.

As she recovered, Mulder began attending two breast cancer support groups, where she said she "got a chance to really see and understand that women weren't easily getting the information they needed to make important decisions" regarding their health.

That's why Mulder developed the breast cancer outreach program at Providence Portland Medical Center in 1988, what she calls her third career, before she helped start Komen Oregon.

Mulder coordinated the Providence program for 29 years and continues to volunteer with it, talking to people newly diagnosed with breast cancer and providing support.

To be able to say she's experienced much of what they're going through provides some measure of hope and comfort.

"To say I'm (a survivor) 30 years out ... that's enough," she said.

***

Dion was diagnosed in 1990 at 35 after having two children. She found the lump herself and it was confirmed with a mammogram.

Her primary goal in her work with breast cancer was "to go out and sell the notion of free mammograms for low-income women."

She developed the "Komen Free Mammogram Program" for hospitals to offer mammograms to women in need with the help of volunteers and professionals, she said. The program officially opened after the first Race for the Cure in 1992. Money from the Portland Race for the Cure would cover $25 for each mammogram and the hospitals would pay the rest.

Dion, a nurse, also found surgeons willing to do biopsies for free as well as surgeons, oncologists and insurance providers to donate time and coverage to the women.

She worked for the American Cancer Society, traveling to remote areas of Oregon to speak about breast health, teach self-exams and show women how to gain access to the free mammogram program, she said.

"It was really wonderful to be part of something where people were so passionate, and they loved giving," Dion said.

The three founders have a bond that's different than their other friendships, she said.

"It was a mutual respect and admiration for what the other brought to the organization and we were all just so passionate about it," Dion said.

She recalls Champion going so far as to put her own contact information on materials they gave out.

"She had her personal phone number on every brochure," Dion said, laughing.

The three women are no longer in the trenches at Komen Oregon, Champion said, having allowed others to take charge.

Looking back on the past 25 years, Dion said, "I'm just so thankful ... to be able to pass it on was so rewarding."

"To know that the organization is doing so well today because of the hard work we put in and how many women are being served - it's just amazing," she said.

-- Francesca Fontana

503-294-4009
A polar bear cub made famous in Ohio will soon move to the Oregon Zoo.

Nora's final public day at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, where she was raised, is Monday. Oregon Zoo visitors will be able to see her as soon as next month, according to a statement issued by the zoo.

Nora was born in November and gained attention after she was abandoned by her mother. Zoo employees took over her care and documented her growth. "Nora weighed about 1 pound when the care team began raising her; she now weighs more than 150," the Oregon Zoo said.

Nora's departure from the Columbus Zoo is timed to encourage breeding. Prospective mothers need a calm environment.

When she arrives in Oregon, Nora will join Tasul, an older female polar bear whose brother was euthanized in July.

Staff from the Oregon Zoo traveled to Columbus to help with Nora's transition, and some caretakers from Columbus will accompany her to Portland.

Officials haven't yet set an exact date for Nora's debut in Oregon.

-- Molly Young

myoung@oregonian.com

503-412-7056

@mollykyoung
I have learned the hard way not to put my personal life on the Internet. But suffice it to say that, God willing, things should be pretty much back to norm...

2 weeks ago
Midlands Downtown Development Authority is exploring the option of a potential $3 million snow-melt system for the streetscape redevelopment design plan.

The DDAs Streetscape Committee recently met to look over the final designs, presented by project managers SmithGroupJJR , MKSK and DLZ of Michigan.

While the streetscape features changes such as turning the one-way streets of Ashman and Rodd into two-ways and replacing traffic signals along Main Street with four-way stops in order to make downtown more walkable and less confusing for visitors, the committee is looking to add another pedestrian-friendly feature in the form of a snow-melt system.

It is an idea that some downtown business and property owners have indicated interest in, said Selina Tisdale, community affairs director, and prompted some research into cities like Holland and Grand Haven that utilize the system.

We realize that with the festival streets, were adding quite a bit of sidewalk width, Tisdale said.

That extra sidewalk could mean extra work for business owners clearing paths for customers who brave the elements to shop downtown.

The snow-melt system is still under review, and is not part of the final design plan as of yet, Tisdale said. The biggest factor is cost: she estimated it could be anywhere from $1.1 to $3 million to install the system, not counting operating and maintaining it through the years.

We know that wont be an element provided by the foundation support, Tisdale said, referring to multiple philanthropic organizations that have indicated funding interest in the streetscape design plan. Were keeping it on the table, continuing to explore it, but we know the funding has to come from somewhere and thats still a question at this point.

She noted a snow-melt system could set downtown Midland apart.

Another hot topic for the committee was parking, Tisdale said. It was a subject brought up numerous times by concerned residents, and has resulted in 2.5 blocks of Main Street transitioning to parallel parking.

It also means the loss of six parking spaces along the downtown roadway, a decision that Tisdale said the streetscape committee took seriously, weighing the positives and negatives.

At first we thought it would be a lot more than that, Tisdale said. We support this design from a parking perspective.

It is also supported from a traffic perspective, and backed by statistics by Wes Butch from DLZ of Michigan. He was at the committee meeting, and said traffic would need to be 2.5 times heavier than current levels in order to warrant signalized intersections along Main.

All of these elements, even though they are change, are better for the pedestrians, Tisdale said. Thats the feel the streetscape committee wants for the downtown based on the original community input.

The next steps for the streetscape design plan include approval by the DDA, and a workshop scheduled for 6 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 3, at City Hall where Midland City Council will have the opportunity to hear about the final design draft and ask questions of the project designers. The workshop is open to the public.

We really thought this would be a better setting than a council meeting, when they have lots of items to get to on their agenda, Tisdale said.

The final design draft would then be forwarded to the city council for formal approval at either its regular meeting on Oct. 10 or 24, where the DDA will seek approval to fund the next step: the engineering design phase, estimated at $500,000 to be paid by the DDA.

As for the cost of the entire streetscape project, a previous estimate of $7 million is now closer to $9 million and would increase if the snow-melt system is included.

Construction could begin as early as spring 2017, and the DDA is hopeful it could be done in one phase of construction.

Were focused and committed to making this as painless as possible for downtown businesses. They want whats coming down the pike, Tisdale said.

For Tisdale, the streetscape project is a way to continue the legacy of people who worked hard to bring downtown back from the brink in the early 1990s.

We have to continue to make Midland forward-moving, forward-thinking, Tisdale said. A place where people continue to come, where businesses want to continue to be.
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DETROIT (AP)  Donald Trump swayed to songs of prayer, read scripture and wore a traditional prayer shawl Saturday on a visit to a predominantly black church in Detroit, as he called for a civil rights agenda of our time and vowed to fix the many wrongs facing African-Americans.

I am here to listen to you, Trump told the congregation at the Great Faith Ministries International. I am here to learn.

Trump has stepped up his appeals to minority voters in recent weeks, but the visit was the first time Trump has addressed a largely black audience since winning the Republican nomination.

Trump was introduced by Bishop Wayne T. Jackson, who wrapped a traditional prayer shawl around Trump and told his congregation that, This is the first African-American church hes been in, yall! Now its a little different from a Presbyterian church!

Seated next to him in the front row was Omarosa Manigault, a former contestant on Trumps reality television series, who has helped to guide his outreach to the black community. Also accompanying him was Detroit native Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who ran against Trump in the primaries and is now advising the campaign.

While protesters were a vocal presence outside, Trump made a pitch inside for support from an electorate strongly aligned with Democrat Hillary Clinton.

I want to help you build and rebuild Detroit, he said. I fully understand that the African-American community has suffered from discrimination and there are many wrongs that should be made right.

He also said the nation needs a civil rights agenda of our time, with better education and good jobs.

Unlike his usual campaign stops where he confidently has addressed mostly white crowds that supported him and his plans for the country, Trumps visit to Detroit on Saturday was intended to be more intimate.

Some protesters tried to push through a barrier to the parking lot but were stopped by church security and police.

Rev. Horace Sheffield who led a march from his church blocks away said: I walked up to the gate and said I was going to church. I was immediately confronted and was told I needed a ticket. You need a ticket to get in church? Anybody who is in this church should be appalled.

Ahead of his trip, Toni McIlwain said she believes that as a candidate, Trump has a right to go anywhere he wants. But, she said, it takes a lot of nerve for him to visit Detroit.

Many black people in the city, she said, are still stung by his stop in Michigan last month, when he went before a mostly white audience and declared, You live in your poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed. He asked, rhetorically, what blacks had to lose by voting for him instead of Clinton.

People picked up on Trump saying youre all just crap, said McIlwain, who for years ran a community center that offered education and drug prevention programs in one of Detroits most distressed neighborhoods.

He generalized the total black community. How dare you talk to us like that and talk about us like that? she said.

The risky nature of the visit was underscored by what appeared to be unusually cautious planning by the Trump campaign.

On Thursday, The New York Times published what it said was a script of pre-approved questions Trump would be asked in his interview with Jackson, along with prepared answers.

Jackson told CNN on Friday that he didnt see anything wrong with clearing his questions with the campaign and hadnt offered softballs. Trumps intention was to meet and speak with local residents while hes in town because hes been criticized, Jackson said, for preaching to African-Americans from a backdrop of white people.

Among the members of the clergy denouncing Trumps visit was the Rev. Lawrence Glass, who said Trumps heart was not into helping blacks.

Glass said Trump represents politics of fear and hate and that minorities of all kinds have much to lose taking a chance on someone like Trump.

After the church visit, Trump made a brief stop at Carsons childhood home in southwest Detroit. Surrounded by security and a swarm of reporters, Trump spoke briefly with the homes current owner, Felicia Reese, wishing her luck.

Your house is worth a lot of money, he told her, thanks to the Carson connection.

For Trump, courting black voters is a challenge. Most polls show his support among black voters is in the low single digits. Many blacks view some of his campaign rhetoric as insulting, and racist.

Detroit is about 80 percent black, and many are struggling. Nearly 40 percent of residents are impoverished, compared with about 15 percent of Americans overall. Detroits median household income is just over $26,000  not even half the median for the nation, according to the census.

The citys unemployment rate has dropped, but is still among the highest in the nation. And public school students have lagged behind their peers on statewide standardized tests.
A Coleman man has been sentenced in a Geneva Township methamphetamine case.

Frank Leonard Schrot, 35, entered a guilty plea recently to one count of second or subsequent offense delivery or manufacture of meth.

Midland County Circuit Court Judge Stephen P. Carras sentenced Schrot to one year in jail with credit for 148 days, $1,250 fines and costs, and five years of probation. The probation is to be served in the MI Hope program.

An affidavit in the case states the investigation began when meth making components were dumped, and BAYANET detectives obtained a search warrant for a home at 2600 N. Alamando Road in March. Detectives found numerous items used to produce the drug, and about 1 gram of marijuana.

Also charged in the case is Anthony Eugene Warner, 37, Coleman. He faces one count of operating or maintaining a laboratory involving meth, which is a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

The case against Warner is set for a status conference on Oct. 6.
EDITORS NOTE  OWI means operating while intoxicated. DWLS means driving while license suspended. (MC) is for Judge Michael D. Carpenter. (L) is for Magistrate Gerald Ladwig. Sentences may vary based on previous offenses committed by the defendant. Some sentencings include other fees imposed by the state.

Auburn

Timothy Bryant Fogus, 21, DWLS on Sept. 20, one day in jail with credit for time served, $625 fines and costs (MC).

Jason Alexander Leduc, 25, OWI on May 18, 93 days in jail with all but three days held in abeyance and credit for one day, $975 fines and costs, nine months of probation, attend substance abuse program and Impact Weekend, may not use or possess drugs or alcohol, subject to random drug and alcohol screening, may not enter bars, attend counseling as directed (MC).

Bay City

Richard Brian Davis, 55, allowing DWLS on July 17, $400 fines and costs (MC).

Hemlock

Kenneth Scott Renshaw, 56, domestic violence and malicious destruction of personal property on Feb. 21, 30 days in jail with credit for one day, $135 fines and costs (MC).

Midland

Devon Levi Breece, 32, Virginia Street, domestic violence on June 29; 28 days in jail held in abeyance with credit for 28 days, $525 fines and costs, $900 restitution (MC).

Kristin Kay Byberg, 46, Eastlawn Drive, OWI and second-offense DWLS on July 3; 30 days in jail with credit for three days, attend in-jail programs (MC).

Ryan Matthew Chapie, 23, Collingwood Street, OWI and fail to stop and identify at the scene of a traffic crash on June 12; 93 days in jail with all but eight days held in abeyance and credit for two days, $1,325 fines and costs, one year probation, vehicle immobilized for 90 days, attend substance abuse program, may not use or possess drugs or alcohol, subject to random drug and alcohol screening, may not enter bars, attend counseling as directed (MC).

Michael Scott Cone, 51, Vandemere Drive, impaired driving on June 11; $500 fines and costs (MC).

Dion Keith Cooper, 19, Isabella Street, attempted larceny on Nov. 13; 46 days in jail with credit for time served, $59.60 restitution (MC).

Matthew Robert Dopp, 28, East Ashman Street, impaired driving on May 31; one day in jail with credit for time served, $600 fines and costs (MC).

Christopher Jay Dryer, 34, Sturgeon Creek Parkway, impaired driving on July 21; 93 days in jail held in abeyance with credit for two days, $650 fines and costs, six months probation, attend substance abuse program, may not use or possess drugs or alcohol, subject to random drug and alcohol screening, may not enter bars, attend counseling as directed (MC).

Hunter James Fulkerson, 20, Eastman Avenue, DWLS on July 12; $250 fines and costs (MC).

Adam Richard Harness, 25, Wildes Street, attempted third-degree retail fraud on June 22; $250 fines and costs, $8.49 restitution (MC).

Shonee Michael Johndro, 24, East Isabella Road, attempted assault and battery on June 2 and assault and battery on June 11; 46 days in jail with credit for time served for the first offense and 93 days in jail with credit for 47 days for the second offense (MC).

Deveon Lamar-Allen Johnson, 21, Lee Street, fail to report traffic accident and impaired driving on May 7; 90 days in jail for the first count and 93 days in jail for the second count with each term held in abeyance and credit for one day, $950 fines and costs, one year probation, attend substance abuse program, may not use or possess drugs or alcohol, subject to random drug and alcohol screening, may not enter bars, attend counseling as directed (MC).

Joseph Ryan Letts, 21, South Homer Road, marijuana use on April 29; seven days in jail with credit for one day, $550 fines and costs, driver license suspended for 180 days (MC).

Karen Marie McCormick, 56, West Hines Street, impaired driving on June 25; 93 days in jail held in abeyance with credit for three days, $600 fines and costs, six months probation, attend substance abuse program, may not use or possess drugs or alcohol, subject to random drug and alcohol screening, may not enter bars, attend counseling as directed (MC).

Brian Allen Nickel, 41, North Stark Road, impaired driving on April 23; 93 days in jail held in abeyance with credit for one day, $775 fines and costs, nine months probation, attend substance abuse program, may not use or possess drugs or alcohol, subject to random drug and alcohol screening, may not enter bars, attend counseling as directed (MC).

Justin Lawrence Scheifflee, 25, North Homer Road, improper transportation of medical marijuana and DWLS on April 24; 10 days in jail with credit for one day to be served on weekends, $400 fines and costs (MC).

Jennifer Jo Shaffer, 31, Airfield Lane, allowing DWLS on July 2; $250 fines and costs (MC).

Chaen Lee Skamelka, 38, South Patterson Road, domestic violence on March 28; 93 days in jail with credit for two days (MC).

Stacey Ann Thrush, 38, West Gordonville Road, OWI on Aug. 3; 93 days in jail held in abeyance with credit for one day, $975 fines and costs, nine months probation, 40 hours community service, attend substance abuse program, may not use or possess drugs or alcohol, subject to random drug and alcohol screening, may not enter bars, attend counseling as directed (MC).

Lisa Jo Williamson, 52, Holland Drive, marijuana use on Aug. 3; 11 days in jail with credit for time served, driver license suspended (MC).

Mount Pleasant

Cherish Elizabeth Allen, 22, no proof of insurance on June 17; $120 fine (MC).

Naomi Lynn Stothard, 19, no proof of insurance on July 14; $210 fine (L).

Shad Dion Traver, 38, marijuana possession on Dec. 1; 30 days in jail with credit for two days, driver license suspended as required (MC).

Pinconning

Crystal Marie Dent, 24, DWLS and attempted driving without insurance on April 13; $650 fines and costs (MC).

Saginaw

Jason Marc Bingham, 31, allowing DWLS on July 22; $125 fines and costs (MC).

Anthony Michael Cirilo, 20, impaired driving on May 22; 93 days in jail held in abeyance with credit for one day, $675 fines and costs, six months probation, attend substance abuse program, may not use or possess drugs or alcohol, subject to random drug and alcohol screening, may not enter bars, attend counseling as directed (MC).

Andrew Grant Heska, 32, receiving and concealing stolen property valued at less than $200 on March 15, 2015; 93 days in jail held in abeyance with credit for one day, $500 fines and costs, $125 restitution, six months probation, may not use or possess drugs or alcohol, subject to random drug and alcohol screening, may not enter bars, attend counseling as directed (MC).

Carese Lashay Montgomery, 19, allowing DWLS on April 30; $400 fines and costs (MC).

Stephen Pat Vasquez, 22, DWLS on Oct. 24, 2014; $125 fines and costs (MC).

Sanford

Melissa Sue Chambers, 26, OWI on June 5; 93 days in jail held in abeyance with credit for one day, $600 fines and costs, nine months probation, 60 hours community service in lieu of fines and costs, attend substance abuse program and Impact Weekend, may not use or possess drugs or alcohol, subject to random drug and alcohol screening, may not enter bars, attend counseling as directed (MC).

Nathan John Lang, 23, no proof of insurance on July 16; $210 fine (MC).

Brenda Lee Moody, 48, third-degree retail fraud on June 21; 93 days in jail held in abeyance with credit for one day, $300 fines and costs, $98.45 restitution, one year probation, may not use or possess drugs or alcohol, subject to random drug and alcohol screening, may not enter bars or the Midland Meijer store, attend counseling as directed, one year sentence delay granted (MC).

Zachery Wayne Reynolds, 18, impaired driving on May 30; 93 days in jail held in abeyance with credit for one day, $775 fines and costs, nine months probation, attend substance abuse program and Impact Weekend, may not use or possess drugs or alcohol, subject to random drug and alcohol screening, may not enter bars, attend counseling as directed (MC).

Zachary Cole Stevely, 37, no plate on motorcycle on July 3; $100 fine (MC).

Chloe Renee Young, 18, third-degree retail fraud on May 25; 42 days in jail with credit for time served, $125 fines and costs (MC).

Elsewhere

David Clark Furman, 60, Flint, impaired driving on Dec. 22; 93 days in jail held in abeyance with credit for two days, $775 fines and costs, six months probation, attend substance abuse program, may not use or possess drugs or alcohol, subject to random drug and alcohol screening, may not enter bars, attend counseling as directed (MC).

Michael Colin Gowdy, 19, Shelby Township, allowing DWLS and fail to report traffic accident on March 5; $750 fines and costs (L).

Christopher Glezen Sibley, 48, Rochester Hills, allowing DWLS on July 17; $200 fines and costs (L).

Lenard Dale Yoder, 36, Lansing, illegal entry on Nov. 15; 90 days in jail held in abeyance with credit for one day, $775 fines and costs, nine months probation, no contact with the victim, may not use or possess drugs or alcohol, subject to random drug and alcohol screening, may not enter bars, attend counseling as directed (MC).
As the food industry continues to consolidate into fewer, bigger players, the price risk it once hedged in Chicago and New York futures markets is being pushed back onto the very farmers and ranchers it buys from.

The reason is simple: the Big Boys have the market power to do it.

After decades of Big Ags talk about how farmers and ranchers needed to become part of an industrial supply chain, so many are, in fact, now linked to that chain that local and regional cash markets  where sellers and buyers meet to establish prices  are becoming extinct.

Thats the problem with chained producers: there just isnt enough unchained production left to ensure transparent markets.

The Wall Street Journal highlighted this change in an Aug. 16 story titled Welcome to the Meat Casino! The Cattle Futures Market Descends Into Chaos. The key problem, it explained, is that the trading of physical cattle has become so scant that the futures market cant get the signals it needs to set prices.

American cowboys arent the only ones to see their markets shot out from under them. On Aug. 29, the Journal published another eulogy of sorts for orange juice futures, the decades-long poster child for the high-risk world of commodity futures trading.

Todays thin OJ trading  its down by more than two-thirds since 1997  means that there are too few (trades) to be of much use to producers or buyers hoping to hedge their exposure in the market, noted the article.

The same goes for Chicagos famous pork belly futures. As Big Meat extended its reach all the way down to the farm through either direct ownership or contract production, meat packers stopped trading pork belly futures. They stopped because they didnt need to; they already owned the contracted hog and its price was locked in at birth. Belly futures died shortly thereafter, in July 2011.

A similar change has been under way in the cattle market for more than a decade. In 2005, explained the Journal, about 60 percent of all cattle sold in the U.S. were sold in cash markets. The remainder was sold through either forward contracts, formula prices (with a cash price as the basis of the formula) or a negotiated grid price.

Today, cash markets are less than 25 percent of all sales while formula-priced cattle are now more than 50 percent. The other two sales mechanisms, grid and forward contracts, havent grown as much as formula pricing but continue to be used.

That means over 75 percent of all U.S. cattle sales are now made outside any observable cash market.

That also means that hardly anyone in the marketplace  excluding the big meat packers who developed and use the formula, grid, and forward contracting methods  has any idea what the value of any animal is because theres no cash market big enough anywhere on any day of any week for anyone to find out.

So how do cattlemen know whats a fair price when they sell cattle?

We call the one or two packers in our region, a South Dakota cattle-feeding friend related in an Aug. 30 telephone interview, and we take what they give us. Then we start crying.

What else can they do? With no working cash markets anywhere, there can be no workable futures contracts elsewhere. Thus the CME Group Inc.s (the former Chicago Mercantile Exchange) likely exit from the cattle futures business. Its just too risky  too thin  without any cash market underpinning it for even the wildest speculator to trade it.

That departure, however, virtually guarantees that independent cattlemen will be even more at the mercy of Big Meat. How, after all, can the big meat packers determine what to pay for their formula-, contract- and grid-purchased cattle if theres neither a cash nor futures market to set the price?
McLEAN -- Beads of sweat mixed with dirt on Larry Roberts' forehead as his shovel struck a steel rim of the 1918 steam threshing machine at the Sugar Creek Farm north of McLean. Roberts, 67, of Normal, kept digging dirt, rock and sand from around the driving wheels of the huge machine.

Once owned by his uncle, the late J.D. Roberts, a long-time member of the Pontiac Threshermen's Association, the rare twin-cyclinder tractor has been parked for nearly four decades.

The rusting relic brings back fond memories.

"I grew up in Pontiac. I can remember this tractor supplying steam to boil corn during the (Central States Threshermen's) Reunion. They actually ran pipes beneath a street from the park to cook the sweet corn."

(This year's 68th reunion was expected to draw about 15,000 people to Pontiac, but soggy grounds forced a cancellation -- the first in the reunion's history.)

While the threshing tractor, which also was used at the Illinois State Fair in Springfield and the Heart of Illinois Fair in Peoria, might look too far gone, Roberts says it's a solid piece of equipment with a lot of life left in it. He has already taken the roof off the tractor, removing each bolt with relative ease. "I was shocked -- I thought I'd be using WD-40, but each bolt came off.

Roberts kept digging around the wheels, facing a deadline to prepare the Frick Co. Eclipse tractor, built in Waynesboro, Penn., for transport on a flatbed truck.

His uncle's daughter, Jean Stubblefield, who died last year, did not want the tractor moved based on sentimental feelings for her father. "She wouldn't let anyone touch it,'' said Roberts. But he assured other family members that his plan is to save the nearly century-old machine. It was appraised, at one point using a device much like a sonograph to make sure the boiler was still intact.

An ancient wood threshing machine, which was powered by a large drive belt from the tractor, was donated to the Central States Threshermen's Reunion.

Roberts' brother, John "Shorty" Roberts, owns land outside Ennis., Mont. When Larry approached John about saving the tractor, John was "thrilled" and they made plans for moving the machine out west.

"I plan on moving out to Montana eventually," Larry said, "and my brothers and I hope to restore it.''

Earlier this summer, an RR Hafley Crane Service crew, Jeff and Tony Rich of McLean, took several hours rigging and lifting the tractor onto a truck trailer. With heavy wood blocking in place and large tie-down chains cranked tight, the Eclipse was ready to travel into its next life.
NORMAL  Participants at the Miss Illinois USA Pageant said the annual competition yields more than a crown and a sash; it can provide confidence and a college degree.

More than 150 participants are competing the pageant, split between Miss Illinois and Miss Illinois Teen, at Illinois State Universitys Braden Auditorium this weekend.

The state winners, determined Monday, will move on to compete in the Miss USA pagent.

All participants receive scholarship offers to Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Mo.

Shenell Randall of Lansing, who has competed in pageants for most of her life, used scholarship money from past Miss Illinois events. She graduated in May from Lindenwood with a degree in musical theater.

If youre here for just the crown, you wont get it, said Randall. Its all about the experience, for me. Meeting more girls is great and the weekend is fun. It takes a lot of dedication and training.

On Saturday, the women rehearsed for the evening preliminary round where they would model swimwear and evening gowns.

The women followed the moves of a choreographer; the stage was surrounded with twinkling chandeliers and billowing fabric.

Contestants from both groups will participate in interviews with judges on Sunday; 15 women will be selected for the final rounds on Monday. Judges will crown Miss Illinois USA after a series of on-stage interviews.

A big part of this competition is (the) self-confidence level, said Karen Elliott, pageant coordinator. The contestants must make people feel comfortable and have good communication skills. Its about honing in on those presentation and interview skills.

Elliott started working in pageantry 15 years ago when her daughter competed and won the Miss Teen USA crown.

I saw what it did for her as a teen. I fell in love with the competition as a family, its morals and its love of empowering ladies and opening doors for them, said Elliott.

I sometimes see green, young, intimidated ladies take the stage and after this weekend they blossom and I see such growth.

Contestant Grace Kwon of Northbrook said she was very shy before she started competing in pageants.

I couldn't even order my own meals at restaurants, said Kwon. I have really learned a lot from stage presence and it helps you better interact with people.

If she takes home the title of Miss Illinois, Kwon hopes to work more closely with the pageant organization to help Syrian refugees in Chicago.

I also want to change that negative connotation that comes with pageants, she said. People think its all about beauty. We need to act as role models for little girls and show people they can connect with us.

A coronation show for Miss Illinois Teen will be at 2 p.m. Monday. The show for Miss Illinois finalists will be at 7 p.m. Monday, both at Braden Auditorium. Tickets are $55 to $75.
Mothers breastfeeding in public still experience breastfeeding shaming in this day and age, when it should be the most natural and basic thing. But perhaps one of the worst shaming to happen is when a mom was called a prostitute for breastfeeding her baby. The person who shamed her is a doctor, who reprimanded the mother for breastfeeding in public at the hospital.

The incident took place in Russia and was actually caught on video by the mom. It showed the doctor shouting at her, saying that the mother was a "prostitute" who was doing a "striptease show" because she was breastfeeding in public, per Mirror.

The mother is heard answering back at the doctor in the video, until other staff members at the hospital stepped in. Mirror further reports that the doctor is currently suspended because of what happened and officials from Russia's health office are said to be looking into the matter. Watch the whole thing play out below.

A similar breastfeeding shaming incident happened at a doctor's office in Florida over a year ago. Mom Nichole Moore was seeking a doctor for her post-partum depression, but she was kicked out of the office because she had been breastfeeding in public.

When she couldn't get a babysitter, she decided to bring her child along at the doctor's clinic. Her session was going to be an hour long, but she thought she could settle her baby, then only eight months, by holding her the whole time. But when the baby got hungry, Nichole sought permission from her doctor to feed her during the session. The doctor supposedly agreed, but then left the room. Minutes later, the clinic's receptionist kicked her out.

"She said I was going to have to reschedule because I couldn't nurse during my appointment," Nichole related, per Babble. "She told me the doctor feels uncomfortable with me nursing."

Embarrassed and frustrated the mom shared her story to serve as an eye-opener for those who think that breastfeeding in public is not right. "No negative feeling should ever come from breastfeeding your baby," Nichole said.

What's your take on these matters, parents? How do you really feel about breastfeeding in public? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below!
Fairfield University's Dr. Philip Eliasoph  New York Times Curriculum Leader for Arts & Visual Culture (Photo : WPA Pool / Pool)

FAIRFIELD, Conn. (Aug.31)- Fairfield University announces that Professor of Art History & Visual Culture, Philip Eliasoph, PhD, has begun his new assignment for the New York Times global higher education platform: inEducation. He will be contributing three blog posts weekly as the Times' Faculty Consultant for the newly designated Arts & Visual Culture pages.

The New York Times, used widely by faculty in classrooms across the U.S., reaches hundreds of universities and colleges around the world daily with its inEducation online platform -integrating college coursework, and connecting academic institutions to New York Times content, while engaging and inspiring students. InEducation is driven by the New York Times' commitment to reach the next generation of readers, and spans educational efforts to increase readership among students in elementary school through college and beyond.

Through New York Times InEducation and his Arts & Visual Culture page, Eliasoph will be "engaging and empowering pathways to appreciate the history of art while contextualizing the current cultural zeitgeist expressed in visual media, museum exhibits, art market trends, architectural heritage, style and design." This quote is unattributed

In one of Eliasoph's first posts, "New Evidence on van Gogh's Ear Continues Debate on Painter's Mental State," in conjunction with Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum current in-depth exhibition: "On the Verge of Insanity," he discusses how the exhibit "explores the historical and medical context of the iconic Dutch artist's severing of his left ear." Prompts for faculty to challenge their students follow each post.

"We are very proud that Dr. Eliasoph has been selected to be featured as a New York Times Arts & Visual Culture Consultant," said Lynn Babington, PhD, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs. She continued, "This appointment recognizes Philip's long history of bringing art and culture to the community. His blogs will undoubtedly provoke interesting conversations in the classroom."

In addition to Arts & Visual Culture, inEducation features areas of study including American Government, Biology, Campaigns & Elections, Environmental Sciences, International Relations, Microeconomics, Leadership, Population Health & Nursing and Religious Studies. InEducation offers faculty driven General Instructional Strategies to promote student achievement across disciplines and incorporate The Times into curriculum, as well as out of the classroom Co-Curricular Activities linked to student outcomes.

Dr. Eliasoph joined Fairfield in 1975. He is founder and moderator of the "town hall" public affairs series at Fairfield, Open Visions Forum, and has published numerous books, exhibition catalogs and articles on the mid-century Magic Realists painters including Paul Cadmus, Robert Vickrey and Colleen Browning. Eliasoph's latest book, Adolf Dehn's Manhattan: Rhapsody in Blue, traces the career of a forgotten artist and will be adjunct to the Fairfield University Art Museum's exhibition "Adolf Dehn: Mid-Century Manhattan," on view in the museum's Bellarmine Hall Galleries from January 27 - April 7, 2017.

A lifelong public arts advocate, serving by appointment of the Governor on the Commissioner for the State of Connecticut's Arts Division, Eliasoph was recently elected as a Trustee for the Connecticut Arts Foundation. In 2008 he was honored with the Fairfield Alumni Association's Distinguished Faculty Award and recognized by Bridgeport's Congregation B'nai Israel for Community Leadership last May.

For more information about inEducation and access to the Arts & Visual Culture page, please visit: http://nytimesineducation.com/welcome/
Confirmation that Netflix is bringing "Stranger Things" Season 2 comes with the buzz that Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) will be returning for a darker S2. The new Netflix season of "Stranger Things" will see four new characters join Jane "Eleven" Ives, Will Byers and returning cast as creators Matt and Ross Duffer continue the tale.

E! News reports that "Stranger Things" Season 2 will be longer with nine episodes and will resume events a year after 1983 of S1. "Stranger Things" Season 2 will do away with any attempt at anthology and resume the tale with Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder), Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo) among others.

The adventure continues. Stranger Things 2 is coming 2017. pic.twitter.com/3H4WR3DGEj  Stranger Things (@Stranger_Things) August 31, 2016

Four new characters will join "Stranger Things" Season 2 as the Netflix series will tackle the Upside Down and the mysteries of Hawkins, Indiana once more. Remarkably, Matt and Ross Duffer say that Eleven in "Stranger Things" Season 2 is up in the air for now.

I am going to be there with you the whole time. pic.twitter.com/dSHIK8utbY  Stranger Things (@Stranger_Things) September 2, 2016

Given that Eleven is one of, if not, the most popular character in "Stranger Things" Season 2, return of the Netflix series without Millie Bobby Brown would create waves. Understandably, the Duffer brothers and executive producer Dan Cohen are reluctant to give "Stranger Things" Season 2 a samey feeling and with Eleven being the biggest name in the Netflix series right now as Yahoo reports, the announcement delay is expected.

One might also take note that the Netflix delay in confirming "Stranger Things" Season 2 having created a bigger buzz for the Duffer brothers series may also give a hint on the uncertainty of Eleven in S2 for now. Parent Herald cites reports that the Duffer brothers themselves spoke of exploring a team up between Eleven and Hawkins Police Chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour) when "Stranger Things" continues.

One thing fans of the Netflix series can count on is that Eleven, Jim Hopper and both returning and new cast of "Stranger Things" Season 2 will find a much darker set up in Hawkins. "We want a sequel that feels like it's bigger and badder and darker, while answering more of the questions and getting deeper into what's going on," Dan Cohen promised of the new "Stranger Things" episodes.

Vox advises that while Eleven and the Demogorgon may have been entrancing in "Stranger Things" Season 1, fans of the Netflix series should watch out for the real villain(s) in the story. In "Strangers Things" Season 1, the Demogorgon had been happily existing in the Upside Down until Dr Brenner (Matthew Modine) brought it into Hawkins using Eleven.

Netflix is scheduled to release "Stranger Things" Season 2 to a 1984 setting in 2017. Would you be happy to watch "Stranger Things" Season 2 even if the Netflix series and the Duffer brothers do no return with Eleven?
The upcoming return of "One Punch Man" Season 2 is still indefinite and yet speculations pertaining to the storyline of the epic anime are skyrocketing. Claims have surfaced that Saitama is gaining momentum and will soon throw his power punches against his former ally and to this new enemy.

Although the storylines for "One Punch Man" Season 2 are filled with many presumptions, there are no definitive responses from the creators of the series. Moreover, one rumor that has set the tide against Saitama is the notion of him fighting his former ally, Genos.

Given the rumored storyline, there are no inclinations that Genos and Saitama would be set on differing sides. However, there are notions that Amai Mask would deal with Saitama's power punches in the upcoming episodes of "One Punch Man" Season 2.

Enjoy the face punching! The #OnePunchMan Labor Day weekend marathon continues on Toonami pic.twitter.com/uxDN2KedXJ  Toonami Squad (@ToonamiSquad) September 4, 2016

In a report from Parent Herald, rumors were mentioned regarding "One Punch Man" Season 2 and its possible storyline. However, since the creators have not given any definitive proof of its return, fans and anime watches are still wary for its precise return.

In a different note, iTech Post mentioned that Saitama's powers would be explained on the upcoming episodes of "One Punch Man" Season 2. Since the English dubbed version of the anime is nearing its finale, the fans are hoping that the creators would now focus on the second segment.

With the surging presumptions, everything should still be taken with a grain of salt in mind in regards to "One Punch Man" Season 2. With the tensions underway, it remains to be seen on how Saitama would deal with his own battles and ensure the safety of the people and the other heroes.


A STORY OF EGYPT

A Meditation on Labor Day, Black Lives Matter, & the Great Work of Our Lives

James Ishmael Ford

Delivered on the 4th of September, 2016

At the Unitarian Universalist Community Church

of Santa Monica, California

Once upon a time, so very long ago we cant count, and in a land so very far away no one alive today has been able to travel to it by road or ship, there was a great empire. Lets call that empire Egypt. Its not the Egypt on the map, a very interesting, if sometimes dangerous country, like pretty much all countries in greater or lesser degree, but one that can be visited if you have time and can afford it. This Egypt Im telling about is actually a country that can only be traveled to in dreams. Maybe youve been there. I have.

Anyway, within that empire that was Egypt there was a tribe. They had once been an important people; at least thats what their poets said. But for generations they had been slaves, used, abused, and thrown away at the whim of their owners. And even when not slaves, they continued to be mistreated, given the worst educations, and most of them given only the worst jobs, and many no jobs at all. Although one of their number had once risen to be the Pharaohs prime minister, for most theirs was a hard, and dangerous, and often brutal life.

Finally the current Pharaoh was worried there were too many of the tribe in the country, and feared their strange ways would poison the empires children. Finally, after making it as hard as he could for them, and it turns out it can always be made worse, but when they still didnt leave, he ordered all their newborns be thrown into the Nile, the great river that snaked down the heart of the empire.

As it happened it was just then a woman gave birth to a boy. Lets call her Jochebed. She feared for her babys life and hid him for three months. After which she came up with a plan. Learning where the Pharaohs sister liked to bathe, and hiding nearby in the rushes, she put the baby in a small ark, a tiny boat, and pushed him out into the current where he was carried to Pharaohs sister. Lets call her Bithiah.

Jochebeds desperate scheme worked. As soon as she saw the babe floating toward her, Bithiah fell in love. And so the baby was taken into the royal family and raised as one of theirs. Lets call the baby Moses. Because this is a story Jochebed was able to get employment as the babys nurse. And raised by both his natural and adoptive mothers Moses grew in stature and wisdom and, of course, as a prince of Egypt. During these years Jochebed also whispered Moses true story into his heart.

Then as a young adult he witnessed the brutal beating of a slave from his tribe by an Egyptian overseer. Incensed, possibly overtaken by thoughts of his life of privilege and maybe his sense of guilt that he was a prince while he could just as easily have been the beaten slave, he struck out and with that single blow killed the man. Then fearing for his own life and maybe the possibility of exposure, or some other reason or mix of reasons, we really can paint any picture we want of his character, Moses fled into the wilderness.

From that the story gets ever more complex and mysterious. He has many adventures, he loves and loses, he works hard, he succeeds in life by the labor of his own hand. While he isnt really aware of it, throughout all this he is in fact being prepared. Finally God confronts him in the form of a burning bush and tells him what he was being prepared for. In that encounter Moses is charged with leading his people out of captivity and to the Promised Land.

It doesnt go well for the Egyptians.

Before I dig into that story this is Labor Day Sunday, so of course I think of the pageant of labor and the rights of working people, and actually more than rights. Rights doesnt catch it sufficiently.

Labor Day is a complicated holiday. It was created as much a counter to May Day and those associations as to celebrate labor and the labor movement. But, this ambiguity, and yes, attempt at undermining something has had some interesting consequences. And, yes, I am all for the afternoon barbecue, perhaps one of the more unlikely things to come with our beginning of September celebration. But, really, much more, as well.

For many of us Labor Day has become a time to consider how we live in the world, how much we are caught up in a web of relationships, how we are all supported by others, and how much it matters that we pull together. And with that it becomes a call to reflect on our blessings, and of course specifically to reflect on those whom we owe for these blessings. Those who brought us the eight-hour work day and the five-day work week. The people who brought us child labor laws, and social security, and, well, the list is quite long. And if were feeling really serious about it we can ask ourselves what it is we owe to those who have not yet been given these blessings, or, not in full measure?

Now this church has seen a connection with it being a spiritual community and how that spirituality calls us into engagement in the world. I am past impressed with what this congregation has been involved in as regards labor and the ongoing struggle for human dignity. In the run up to the passage of the bill bringing overtime pay for Farmworkers in alignment with other workers, the constant reminders from members and friends of this church of how important this is to your local state Assembly member no doubt helped him vote in the right way.

The workers at Bonus Car Wash here in Santa Monica are negotiating their third contract, critical as it sets the foundation for contracts at other car washes around the state. Members of this congregation were with them at the beginning, and continue. And of course there is the struggle for union recognition at the Shore Hotel on Ocean Avenue. Again, members and friends of this congregation have been steady in their support. Where it has mattered, you have been present. Again, this is something profoundly right for a spiritual tradition that is firmly rooted in our radical interdependence, and with that with the here and now, in a deep consideration of how we choose to live our lives.

And as important as all that is, Labor Day is about even more. I suggest it is deeply connected to that story of ancient Egypt. Most of us in this church I am sure know that people who study such things deeply tell us the story of Moses and the Exodus are not historical events. Best I can tell there is barely a shred of history, or rather the real history takes place in the Babylonian captivity when the enslaved Hebrews wove together stories of hope and possibility very nearly out of whole cloth. What they did, those poets sitting beside the waters of Babylon, was weave a truest of true stories, a story of hope, and a story of warning. Hope for all those who have been oppressed. And, a warning for the rest of us. Pretty good Labor Day message, if you ask me.

And with that Id like to reflect a little on the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. To hold up a little the many terrible things that has led to this eruption of feelings and demands for justice and reparation, healing, and, equally of the reactions to it. I know members of your community have been involved in the issues surrounding the rise of Black Lives Matter. You have been among those who responded to the killings of Brendon Glenn and Jason Davis by police in Venice and Jascent-Jamal Lee Warren by an armed employee of that Venice hotel. I know your minister Reverend Rebecca and other members of the church submitted a petition to the DA to prosecute the officer who killed Mr Glenn. Where it has mattered, you have been present.

And, also, let me add, symbols matter. Our yellow shirts at events that matter to our greater society have touched many hearts. And I was deeply moved by seeing the Black Lives Matter banner that you all voted to fly in front of the church. I commend your wisdom and your compassion. It isnt always easy. At our church in Long Beach, which voted to put our own Black Lives Matter banner up, the rolled up banner and the frame for it were torn down two days before it was scheduled to be officially unfurled. We dont know who did it. But it does show that there is a lot of passion circling around the questions of the movement and particularly of that slogan. For me it raises a lot of thoughts, and some of them those Labor Day thoughts about who owes what.

Now the reality also is that in any given congregation only a percentage of us are actually involved in the social justice work. And, thats appropriate. We are all of us on our own individual paths as well as walking together. And, its more than okay that some of us take the lead on any given project, whether that be social justice, or religious education, or, membership, or, well, you may see that it is a pretty long list. But, there are things going on that do call to all of us, that I hope inform who we are, and how we stand in the world as Unitarian Universalists.

My friend Doctor Liam Keating observed how in 2011, a time with some solid statistical analysis, here in California a black man was eleven times more likely to be jailed for possession of marijuana than a white man, and added how its all really about systematic institutionalized racism, in a country where we lock up more people than any nation now or in history. More than Hitler or Stalin, and those numbers are essentially a reflection of incarcerating about one in three young black men. Liam concludes, The system is broken. And, he adds, to you and to me. Fix it. Thats a Labor Day message.

Barack Obama commented on that line first given us by the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, and repeated by Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. about the long arc of history, and its bending toward justice. The president said that arc bends because people put their hands on it, and bend it toward justice. Here we are on Labor Day Sunday, a time to honor those who put their hands to the task. Here is a day like few others when we should think on what needs fixing. And our place, yours and mine in that work, how we bring our hands to that great and holy project. Thats a Labor Day message.

So, lets return to the story of Moses and a little of why it is so important, or can be for us. As we listen a little more deeply, when something like the events surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement erupts we might find something helpful if we look at these events through that story of Moses. If its not history, what is it? Well, I suggest it is a map of the human heart, of our longing and our way through. That important. It is the dreaming of people into freedom.

So, as with all true stories, of course, we are in some ways all of us the characters. Were Jochebed, were Bithiah, were Moses. And, of course, we are Pharaoh. As Terence reminds us Nothing that is human is alien to me. And I would go even farther, were all of it, even the things we might consider background, were Egypt the empire itself, and the Nile with its life giving waters, and, very much, somewhere deep in our being we are the Promised Land, the dream home of our hearts where things are put right.

And with that a question: where does the rubber hit the road? How might this ancient story of our hearts longing touch our lives, lives filled with such disparities, where the poor are getting poorer and the rich richer, and where if youre black your chances are very bad, indeed?

I think for those of us in the majority, we need to realize that while we can be all the parts the big part that we mostly live within is Egypt, is the empire, and what holds our hearts is Pharaoh. When we dont see theres a problem, or the problem is someone elses, were Pharaoh. And those of us in the minority, those oppressed, those whove been left behind, we, you are the ones for whom this story was sung. This story is ultimately for those sitting on the shores of that river dreaming the great dream of possibility.

Now, lets think for just a heartbeat or two about the endless cascade of events leading up to Black Lives Matter. Me, I find Moses striking down the overseer keeps bubbling up. What poured into Moses heart in that moment? Rage? Hatred? Shame? And, I think of the litany of unarmed black and brown people killed in police encounters that almost certainly would never have happened if they were white. Its a very long list. And too often only if theres a video playing on social media, might there be an investigation. For which, often, too often the finding is nothing actionable.

And, for us here, in the relative safety of this place, what about those who witness the injustices the endless injustices perpetrated against people of color and particularly black Americans, and who do nothing? How easy is it to just say all lives matter, and wash our hands of the deep complexities. And, yes, if youre wondering, I believe all lives do matter. But can we look at what is happening in our country and really say that black lives matter? Me, I find those words so important. Black lives do matter.

And, yes, without a shred of hesitation, its hard for everyone. This not a good time to be poor and white in America. Its never been particularly good to be a woman here. And, gay or a lesbian, or transgendered. People still die for being LBGTQ. And, yes, all racial minorities suffer in some degree. But, there is a terrible historic injustice around black and white. And, Im sorry, when people who have had the boot on their necks cry out black lives matter, and when I hear all lives matter in response, mainly I hear Pilate asking, What is truth as he washes his hands of that particular mess. Hard words perhaps. Perhaps, but sometimes we need hard words. After all its a Labor Day message.

Now, a couple of years ago when I preached a sermon on climate change, I was challenged by a friend who said, James, you say all sermons should be about hope. Where was the word of hope in that sermon? I responded how I thought there was hope there, but the way through is hard. Its just that there isnt a lot of wiggle room. Its just that it was hard. Yes, very hard. Kind of like looking for racial justice.

And, here we are again. We are all the parts. Nothing human is alien. We can choose, in some very important ways, we can choose, like in that old song Well Build a Land. And with that we are responsible. So, what side do you want to be on? Egypt? The empire? Or, do you want to throw in your lot with the dispossessed, the left behind? The poets have sung true. And the doors are open. The sea has parted. The way is open.

How? Well, it turns out it isnt rocket science. Pay attention. Recognize the preciousness of each one of us, and how we are all bound up together in a single garment of destiny. Join your hands with others to oppose what needs opposing, to stand up for what is true. Speak out. And act. And with that begin the journey, that forty-year journey to make this land the Promised Land.

Those who have ears, those who have eyes. Heaven and hell. Its all in our hands.

Thats the Labor Day message.

Amen.

And amen.
Patna: Protest against prohibition in Bihar took a new turn on Friday when thousands of former Army jawans took out a march from Danapur Cantonment to the Governor's mansion to demand exclusion from alcohol ban saying drinking was their right and Nitish government had no right to infringe on their rights.

Led by retired senior army officials, the march began in Danapur and reached the VIP area near Patna Secretariat where it was stopped by security officials.

"Alcohol ban should apply to drunkards and alcoholics; not to the entire population and certainly not to army jawans for whom alcohol is like medicine. Army rule 32/84 makes provision for liquor from the Defense Ministry and the Chief Minister does not have the power to overrule this," N. K. Singh, a senior army personnel said.

The protestors also demanded release of 70 army jawans who had been arrested in Bihar under the new prohibition laws.

"Many of these jawans were on leave and had arrived in Patna with their allotted quota of alcohol not being aware of the new laws imposed by the Nitish government. These are the people who protect the country from foreign aggression and yet Nitish Kumar is treating them as the enemy of the nation," Singh said.

A 5-member delegation of the protestors was later allowed to submit a memo to the Governor who reportedly said that he would take some action in the next two weeks to address their complaints.

"If our demands are not met within 15 days, we will be forced to launch an agitation that would be unprecedented in the country and could cause a security issue for the nation," a retired Captain said on the condition of anonymity.
Patna: It was just a matter of time when the Nitish government would break its own prohibition laws after months of tough talking about sparing no one who either brought, sold, bought, possessed or consumed alcohol in Bihar, authorities in Nalanda on Thursday arrested Nalanda Excise Inspector on charges of 'conspiring' against a Janata Dal  U leader from whose house he recovered 168 bottles of alcohol during a raid on August 30.

Deepak Kumar, the Excise official who arrested JD-U leader Indrajeet Sen, a close Nitish associate, from his home in Biharsharif after recovering 168 bottles of liquor, was arrested by police in Nalanda district on charges of hatching a conspiracy to frame the JD-U leader, the party President in Harnaut, the home turf of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.

According to the reports, Sen, after his arrest was produced before a court and sent to jail. However, as the news of his arrest reached Patna, officials in Nalanda district released the JD-U leader saying the order for his release came from a 'top party leader' in the state capital.

Kumar was briefly released from the jail on Friday only to be arrested again on Saturday.

Denying any conspiracy, the Excise inspector said he did what he was required to do  arrest those who were in violation of prohibition laws.

"When I get information about someone breaking the law, I react accordingly. I do not question who the person is who is he is connected with. I have made many arrests in the past but this is the first time I am being accused of conspiring against someone," Kumar said.

Seizing on the opposition, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders accused the District Magistrate and Superintendent of Police (SP) of Nalanda district of acting as the personal agents of the ruling JD-U.

Demanding immediate removal of the DM and the SP, former Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi accused the JD-U of adopting dual alcohol policy  one meant for the ordinary people and the other for the ruling party ministers, office-bearers, and supporters.

Modi also demanded the Director General of Police (DGP) to initiate a full enquiry into the recovery of liquor bottles from the home of Sen and the subsequent arrest of the official who carried out the raid at Sen's house.

Caught in a strange situation, Nitish Kumar is yet to make a statement on the controversy. Sources said he is in consultation with his inner circle behind closed door to formulate his strategy to deal with the situation.
A burglar who reportedly tried to stab a senior citizen in the face multiple times during a home invasion in San Bernardino was arrested Saturday morning.

The suspect was identified by the San Bernardino County Sheriffs Department as Antonio Martinez Tellez, 34, of San Bernardino. He was booked into jail on suspicion of elder abuse, assault with a deadly weapon, residential burglary and parole violation.

The senior, who lives in the 24600 block of 6th Street, was not injured in the attacks.

Tellez is an active gang member, according to a department release, who was on parole for assault with a deadly weapon.

The senior said a burglar broke into his house around 11:50 a.m., overpowering him at his front door and trying to stab him in the face.

The senior reportedly ran to his bedroom but the suspect pursued, trying once more to stab him in the face. When the senior dialed 911, the suspect fled from the house.

He was found in the front yard of a neighboring home by responding deputies.
FRESNO, Calif. (AP)  Two unarmed officers were critically injured after being shot by a visitor in the lobby of a central California jail, authorities said Saturday.

Correctional Officers Juanita Davila and Toamalama Scanlan were shot in the head and neck areas during a struggle with a man who tried to cut to the front of the visitors line and refused to take a seat when he began pacing near a secure area of the Fresno County jail, sheriffs spokesman Tony Botti said.

Scanlan, who has 10 years of experience, was hospitalized in critical condition. Davila, who has 18 years of experience, was listed in critical but stable condition, Botti said.

The shooting sent about 15 people, including small children, in the lobby ducking for cover when the shots rang out around 8:30 a.m.

Authorities said officers from the secured areas inside the jail ran to the lobby, where a lieutenant fired shots at the gunman, identified as 37-year-old Thong Vang.

Botti said Vang returned fire, but no one was shot. He said officers tried to subdue him with a stun gun, but he wouldnt give up and ran to the hallway of the jail records area. When confronted by sheriffs deputies and a Fresno police officer, Vang dropped his weapon and told authorities he wanted to be arrested, Botti said.

The injured officers were dragged out of the lobby and taken to the hospital to undergo surgery.

Vang was taken into custody and taken to the hospital for minor scrapes and cuts.

Botti said Vang is a convicted rapist who was released from prison in 2014 after serving 16 years for raping minors aged 14 and under. The parolee had no criminal violations since his release.

Botti said Vang will be booked into jail on several felonies.
Some of Southern Californias most vocal gun rights advocates wear badges.

Riverside County Sheriff Stan Sniff and San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon have consistently opposed new gun control legislation. So does Orange County Sheriff Sandra Hutchens.

In a telephone interview, McMahon said more gun control rules are not the best way to preventing gun violence.

I generally oppose any legislation that puts any more restrictions or control on citizens having an ability to possess firearms, said McMahon, who has been sheriff since 2012. We still have people running around with guns that arent supposed to have them.

In emailed responses to questions, Sniff wrote that while the courts have long held that reasonable restrictions to the Second Amendment are both constitutional and also protect our communities  Many proposed firearms control bills are very poorly thought out, hastily drafted without appropriate expert input, and incorrectly proffered to the public as making things safer in our communities.

In some cases, these proposed bills actually make our communities less safe, and remove inherent rights of our citizens to self-defense, or worse, allow only the wealthy, elite or the well-off to protect themselves, wrote Sniff, who became sheriff in 2007.

Three years ago, Sniff, a Republican like McMahon, sent a letter to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., criticizing her proposed assault-weapons ban.

In many ways your bill unreasonably impinges on the Second Amendment, and it focuses largely on purely cosmetic features of legitimate sporting, hunting, and recreational firearms already in widespread use in our nation, he wrote.

The cosmetic issues alone cause far too much meaningless complexity for law enforcement officers, and worse, could cause common citizens to unintentionally commit crimes that have serious potential sanctions.

California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is behind a ballot measure that would impose new rules on guns and ammunition, said that while he has enormous respect for the sheriffs and what they do, This has been the argument for decades. I dont know that they represent a different point of view than their predecessors, opposing law after law after law.

Since the mid-1990s, when new gun laws were enacted, the gun murder rate in California has fallen 56 percent, more than double the rate of a national decrease in gun murders, Newsom said.

I think these things save lives, he added. They can disagree  but the data does not support their point of view.

Calls for gun control have escalated in recent years following a spate of mass shootings, including the Dec. 2 terror attack in San Bernardino in which a radicalized Islamic couple used assault-style weapons to kill 14 and wound 22. Congressional Democrats in June staged a sit-in on the House of Representatives floor in an unsuccessful effort to force a gun control vote.

California voters in November will consider Newsoms ballot measure. Among other things, it would ban ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds and set up a process for taking firearms from those who are legally barred from owning a gun.

Polling shows 89 percent of people supporting a process for those barred from gun ownership to relinquish their weapons, Newsom said.

This summer, Gov. Jerry Brown signed six gun control bills, including measures that require background checks for bullet purchases and ban semiautomatic rifles with magazines that can be ejected with a small tool. Critics said the bullet button was an end-around to the states ban on detachable magazines.

CONCEALED CARRY

County sheriffs are elected officials in California with the authority to issue permits for civilians to carry concealed firearms in public. Sniff said that while he supports and encourages law-abiding residents to obtain concealed carry permits, radical gun groups believe hes not issuing enough.

The public still expects the sheriff to issue CCWs using good sense as well as reasonableness in making determinations of who is licensed and allowed by the department to carry loaded, hidden handguns into our public places, said Sniff, who is a member of the National Rifle Association, the California Rifle & Pistol Association and Gun Owners of California.

As elected officials, sheriffs can accept campaign contributions. A check of donations to Sniff, McMahon, Hutchens and Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell in recent years found no instances of contributions by the NRA or other gun rights or gun control groups.

Its hard to say exactly how many of Californias 58 sheriffs oppose gun control because its a very nuanced question, said Cory Salzillo, legislative director for the California State Sheriffs Association.

The association, which advocates for sheriffs interests in Sacramento, formally opposed the bullet button bill and legislation signed by Brown that restricts loans of firearms to between family members. Another bill supported by the association and vetoed by the governor would have made firearm thefts a felony offense, although that proposal is now part of Newsoms ballot measure.

Hutchens, the Orange County sheriff, does not support further gun legislation, said Lt. Mark Stichter, a sheriffs spokesman. The sheriff believes we should spend more time making sure people who should not have a gun dont have one.

Sheriff Hutchens supports the Armed Prohibited Persons System, which focuses on getting guns out of the hands of people who should not have them including those who are convicted felons and those who are a danger to themselves and others as a result of a mental disorder, Stichter wrote in an email.

In addition, Hutchens supports any effort focused on mental health treatment because many of the recent mass shooting incidents (were) done by someone who is mentally ill, Stichter said.

A spokeswoman for McDonnell said at this time, the sheriff is not interested in commenting about his gun control views.

In an email, a spokeswoman for San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore said while the sheriff recognizes the multi-faceted issues surrounding Second Amendment discussions, Sheriff Gore strongly favors universal background checks for those who wish to purchase weapons.

HELPING COPS?

Gun control advocates argue that new gun restrictions help law enforcement, since police come face to face with assault-style weapons and guns with high-capacity magazines.

McMahon countered that the Newsom ballot measure and other proposed laws wont make his deputies safer. (High-capacity) magazines are legal in other states, he said. Whats to prevent (criminals) from bringing them into California illegally?

Sniff, a retired Army colonel, said law enforcement officers are more endangered these days in California by a criminal justice system that no longer penalizes those violating our laws, breeds disrespect for lawful authority, encourages not taking responsibility for ones own actions, and fails to deter violators of our laws.

It often seems today that only our law-abiding citizens, which actually have something to lose when they enter the criminal justice system, are in the end more adversely impacted by many of our new laws, added Sniff, who like McMahon is up for re-election in 2018.

While he appreciates sheriffs like McMahon and Sniff, rifle and pistol association President Chuck Michel said hes not sure it matters to pro-gun control lawmakers.

More recently, it seems that some politicians are going against the recommendations of law enforcement and pushing things that advance an agenda thats really disrespectful of law enforcement, Michel said.

Contact the writer: 951-368-9547 or jhorseman@scng.com
A 25-year-old Navy sailor charged with killing his girlfriend in Riverside in July is also under investigation in connection with the death of his ex-wifes fiance, court records show.

Jared Bischoff has not been deemed a suspect in the death of 25-year-old Justin Hilbert, who was found dead June 21 near Lake Mathews, said Riverside County Sheriffs Department spokesman Mike Vasquez.

But detectives investigating Hilberts death served a search warrant at Bischoffs parents Riverside home  where he would stay when not stationed at the Naval Base San Diego  on July 12 and interviewed him at the Naval Base on June 28. Additionally, investigators extracted text and call records from Bischoffs phone from the days surrounding the discovery of Hilberts body.

Hilberts brother, Jesse Kirkendall, said the family has a multitude of unanswered questions about the circumstances leading to Hilberts death. The lack of information has made the grieving process tougher.

For my family its just been very hard, because of the fact it was undeserved, it wasnt warranted, Kirkendall said. Justin didnt have any enemies, he was finishing school and trying to provide a life for his family.

Bischoff remained in jail Thursday with no bail set. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of murder, attempted kidnapping, evading arrest, and possession of a controlled substance for sale in the July 10 killing of 23-year-old Bailey Sharp and subsequent police pursuit from San Diego to Riverside.

According to a search warrant requested by Riverside County Sheriffs Department homicide investigator Lesandro Dean, Sharp and Hilbert were in contact with each other prior to Hilberts death.

Tonya Hilbert  Justin Hilberts fiancee and Bischoffs ex-wife  told investigators that Sharp sent Facebook friend requests to her and Justin and had conversed with Justin over Snapchat, a mobile messaging application. Tonya Hilbert legally changed her last name from Bischoff after Justin Hilbert was killed.

It was upsetting to me, Hilbert said in an interview Friday. She just messaged me out of the blue.

A friend of Hilberts told investigators that he saw Hilbert and Sharp together a few weeks prior to his death.

Hilberts body was found at 2:15 a.m. June 21 near the intersection of La Sierra Avenue and Tin Mine Road. Investigators believe the body was dumped there, and that Hilbert was shot in the face with a shotgun and slashed with a sharp object somewhere else.

Kirkendall said receiving that piece of information shocked the family.

The amount of damage that was done, things that had been done to Justin, discovering that was heartbreaking, devastating, Kirkendall said.

About a week after Hilberts death and two weeks before Sharps death, Riverside County Sheriffs deputies traveled to the Naval Base San Diego to interview Bischoff. Bischoff told them that he was in Riverside on June 20  hours before Hilbert was found dead  but left in the evening to return to the base.

On July 10, Bischoff and Sharp met at around 5:15 p.m. Sunday near Calmhill Drive and California Avenue in Riverside. Thats where Bischoff stabbed Sharp several times before she died in the hospital, according to Riverside Police Department officials. Bischoff was arrested the next day after leading police on a pursuit from San Diego to Riverside.

On July 12, deputies executed the search warrant and confiscated 22 knives, shotgun shells and a note from Bischoffs parents home.

After extracting text messages and call records from Bischoffs phone, deputies found several text messages to and from Sharp on Monday June 21 with her talking about selling drugs and taking risks for him because he was having financial problems  divorce costs  and him having no idea what she just did for him, according to the search warrant request.

Vasquez, the sheriffs spokesman, said the case remains under investigation. Kirdekndall urges anyone with information about his brothers death to contact authorities. Homicide Detectives can be reached at 951-955-2777.

If anyone knows anything, please come forward, Kirkendall said. If you have any information about these people, come forward and speak up.

We just want justice for this horrible thing that happened, Hilbert said.

Contact the writer: 951-368-9284, atadayon@scng.com, @PE_alitadayon
A map on display at the Lake Elsinore Historical Museum dating to 1886 identifies the area now associated with Lake Elsinore as Big Laguna, a partial translation of the Spanish name for the lake.

It also shows the community as being on the San Diego County side of the border with San Bernardino County.

So when Lake Elsinore became a city on April 9, 1888, it became one of the earliest municipalities in San Diego County.

Yet, when Elsinore in 1893 became part of Riverside County  carved from slices of San Diego and San Bernardino counties  the city became the second oldest in the new county after the city of Riverside.

That narrative and many other facets of Lake Elsinores story are told through thousands of artifacts, including the 130-year-old map, memorabilia and records available at the museum since its return to Lake Elsinore Cultural Center on downtown Main Street two years ago. The venues volunteer staff has been in the process of reorganizing and creating new displays since the museum had its official reopening last year.

The 93-year-old cultural center, including the basement housing the museum, was rebuilt to withstand earthquakes, forcing the historical society to temporarily relocate.

Nowadays, the museum is exhibiting a vast trove of material about the city, the region and a fabled lake that appeared on travelers maps long before a town existed.

Contact the writer: 951-368-9690 or michaelwilliams@pressenterprise.com
A new national poll shows nearly half of adults believe public educations main goal should be academics, while others believe the main goal should be preparing students to be good citizens or to get jobs.

Forty-five percent said schools should focus on preparing students academically, while 26 percent said education should prepare students to be good citizens and 25 percent said education should prepare students for work, when asked to choose among those three options. Four percent had no opinion.

Not many As and Bs

Only one-quarter of those surveyed gave American schools an overall A or B grade, but 48 percent rated their local schools as deserving As or Bs. The survey found half of parents feel extremely involved with their childs school, 32 percent feel somewhat involved and the rest less so.

These results were released Monday as part of the 48th annual Phi Delta Kappa International Poll of the Publics Attitudes Toward the Public Schools. Although Gallup previously partnered to produce the poll, Langer Research Associates of New York produced this years poll for the association.

Who was surveyed

The survey included phone interviews with 1,221 adults from all 50 states in English last April and May. However, individual state results are not available.

Association pollsters began asking about public education in 1969, but questions vary each year. Since 2000, the top problem facing Americas public schools named by respondents was lack of money or financial support. This year, 19 percent listed lack of financial support in an open-ended question.

Head of new agency speaks

This is a rich debate thats been with us for over 15 straight years, said Carl Cohn, executive director of the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, a new public agency that advises schools and districts to help them meet accountability goals, during an embargoed panel discussion about the poll last week. Cohn was previously superintendent of the Long Beach and San Diego school districts.

He said results related to education funding, opting out of standardized tests, turning around failing schools, course offerings, and parent engagement stood out to him.

Most OK with tax hike

Fifty-three percent of those polled said they would support raising property taxes to improve schools. If taxes were raised, 34 percent said theyd want the additional revenue targeted toward teachers  with 18 percent favoring hiring more educators and 14 percent suggesting raises.

Cohn predicted these views would be a huge morale boost to teachers.

More oppose opting out

The poll showed 59 percent of those surveyed oppose allowing students to opt out of standardized testing, while 37 percent support this. Four percent had no opinion. Cohn said this was an interesting development that probably bears more scrutiny. In last years poll, 41 percent of those surveyed said parents should have the right to opt their children out.

The Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaced No Child Left Behind, requires 95 percent of students in grades 3 to 8 and one year of high school to take annual standardized tests in math and English language arts. But in California and some other states, parents are allowed to opt their children out. However, Californias opt-out rates have been much lower than those in other parts of the country.

If its failing, fix it

If a school is failing, 84 percent of those surveyed favored keeping it open, while 14 percent said the campuses should be closed. Calling this a big finding, Cohn said this goes counter to the trend toward shutting down failing schools, which has been prevalent for the last decade-and-a-half.

I suspect parents are bringing some common sense, he said. If youve got a dicey neighborhood, just simply closing down might not be such a good idea. So, I think thats something that bears additional scrutiny.

Often, students whose schools are closed must travel long distances to reach other campuses, which has prompted opposition to school closure in many communities.

How to improve

To improve schools, 68 percent of those polled supported more career-technical or skills-based classes, far exceeding the 21 percent who preferred more honors or advanced placement classes. Yet, California has prioritized access to Advanced Placement courses as a key component in its new school accountability system. Nine percent thought both were equally important and 2 percent had no opinion.

I dont know of a single urban superintendent who isnt trying to bump up A.P. (Advanced Placement) participation, Cohn said, adding that its difficult to measure the quality of career technical programs.

Cohn said it was important for school leaders to grasp the importance of keeping parents informed and inviting their participation and input. He pointed to the surveys findings that communication with parents leads to more positive feelings about schools.

EdSource is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, journalism organization whose mission is to clarify complex education issues in California and to promote thoughtful policy decisions about public school improvement.
Stargazers in parts of Africa have been treated to a spectacular ring of fire in the sky as the sun was almost  but not completely  eclipsed.



An annular eclipse happens when the moon is farther away from the Earth than during a total eclipse.



The result is a bright circle of sunshine surrounding a dark, shadowy core.



The best views were seen in Tanzania, where the event lasted about three minutes.



The eclipse could also be viewed in parts of Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, and the French Indian Ocean island of La Reunion.



The moon does not move in a perfect circle around the earth  instead, its orbit is slightly elliptical. That means the distance of the moon varies between around 225,000-252,000 miles (362,000-405,555 km).



When the moon is farther away from the earth, it appears smaller  and does not totally cover the suns disc during a total eclipse. The result is also known as a ring of fire eclipse.



The next eclipse is due to take place in February 2017, and can be seen from parts of South America and Africa.

Source: Today Newspaper









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A senior research Scientist at the Cocoa Research Institute (CRI), Ghana, Professor Jemmy Takrama, has said Ghana needs to accept Genetically Modified (GM) foods to ward off hunger.



According to him, the time had come for the nation to make room for better food policies and to remove barriers that prevented adequate food production and accessibility to nutritious foods.



At the second National Sanitation, Food Hygiene and Safety conference at the Ho Technical University last Thursday, Prof. Takrama said there had been a lot of misconceptions about GM foods because people did not understand what it was all about and only saw it as a bad idea because it might have some health implications.



Although Ghana has signed the National Bio-Safety Bill which will allow the importation and planting of GM plants, Parliament has suspended giving it legal backing so that more consultations would be done.



However, Prof. Takrama said there was nothing to fear as the country would rather benefit from choosing that path.



Definition of GM



Genetically modified food technology is a new production tool to produce more food, he defined and added that it is just like giving medicine to a plant. It has no side effects.



He explained that the technology only prevented diseases from attacking the plants and made them grow better than the organic food but did not carry any health implications as had been speculated.



The Millennium Development Goal (MDG) assessment classifies Ghana as a moderately hungry country in the sense that a number of people are unable to feed themselves and, therefore it has to adopt modern food safety systems with scientific approval to address its food safety challenge.



Countries such as the US, Australia, Egypt, Sudan, Burkina Faso, South Africa and those in Europe have accepted this technology. GM crops should also be accepted in Ghana to contribute to food increase and higher food availability, he stressed.



The conference



The two-day conference was organised by the Faculty of Applied Sciences and Technology of the university in collaboration with Zoomlion Ghana Limited on the theme: The status, current practices and policy options for enhancing sanitation, food hygiene and safety in Africa.



The conference was used to create a platform for researchers and experts to share research findings on modern issues in the areas of sanitation and food hygiene to be adopted by government agencies for implementation to promote the socio-economic development and welfare of the country.



The Rector of the Technical University, Professor Emmanuel Kojo Sakyi, added that the country could not continue to manage its food resources following the old systems because it will get to a time things will get out of hand and we will not be able get solutions.



He called for government agencies to partner academics in finding solutions to problems associated with food safety and hygiene.

Source: Daily Graphic









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured Video
When President John Mahama started his campaign in the Northern Region as a son of the Gonja Land, he paid a courtesy call on the newly enskinned chief of Salaga, Kpembewura Daari Haruna Bismark to pay homage.



It was at the ceremony that the new Kpembewura, urged the people of Kpembe and all true Gonjas, as well as the Ghanaian electorate, to turn out in their numbers on Election Day and vote massively for President Mahama, looking at the numerous infrastructure projects and development that he has brought to the region.



But now with his latest supposed endorsement of NPPs Nana Addo, most residents are not happy and are aggrieved and upset about the new chiefs double tongue and questions his neutrality and credibility.



Some of them are saying if he wanted to be in politics, he shouldnt have ascended the skin, since it would bring a lot of problems, endorsing a son of the soil for developmental gains and at the same time endorsing the NPP.



Even before that the Vice President Kwesi Amissah-Arthur had met a delegation of chiefs from the Gonja Traditional Area, who called on him to announce the passing of the Kpembewura, Abubakari Sulemana Nyen-Churo Ebore II, at the Flagstaff House.



The group invited Vice President Amissah-Arthur to the enskinment of the successor; Haruna Dare at Kpembe on August 14, while the outdooring was slated on August 21.



Besides, the delegation also informed Vice President Amissah-Arthur of the selection of a new successor for the late Kpembewura.

He assured the delegation that the government would be fully represented at the funeral of the late chief.



The Vice President Kwesi Amissah Arthur then led the government team to the outdooring of the new Kpembe-wura Babanye known in private life as Bismarck Haruna Daare, which was on Sunday and it was a well-attended ceremony in Kpembe .



The indigenes are upset because in their view it is a taboo for a Gonja chief to have openly declared political support and approval for two contending parties in a contest.



They said after all the Kpembewura has one vote just as any Ghanaian. They have therefore vowed not to be moved by his latest endorsement.



Kpembe-Wura Babanye once served as a District Chief Executive (DCE) for the then East Gonja District between 2001 and 2005 lauded the NDC government for the numerous development projects that they have done for the region.



It was an opportunity for a display of Gonja culture in Kpembe with Chiefs, Elders, Princes, Princesses and the people of the area all dressed in their beautiful Gonja smocks and other regalia to commemorate the occasion.



Singbunwura Haruna Dari Bismark prior to his new position was the head of the Singbung gate of Kpembe.



The new Kpembewura as a former Teacher and a politician one would have thought that he would stay out of politics based on his new position .



But on Thursday, September 1, 2016, when Nana Akufo-Addo, together with national and regional party stalwarts, paid a courtesy call on him at his palace in Kpembe, in the Salaga South constituency of the Northern Region.



He alleged to have said that the NPP will secure a good victory in the December presidential election, by a margin of not less than 53%.

According to the Gonja Chief, who was enskinned in August this year, when I look into the crystal ball, I can see victory for the NPP. I want to assure you that I am still a friend, and you can always depend on me.



As I said, if God wants to do something, He begins from one. He has done it for me, and He will do it for you.



Advising the NPP flagbearer not to depart from his issues-based campaign, he urged Nana Akufo-Addo to continue to tell the people of Ghana what you will do for them.



The people of Ghana are ready to hear from you, and I hope the next time we meet like this, you will be His Excellency, Nana Akufo-Addo.



Kpembe Wura Babanye Ndefosu II was certain that the Lord, God, is listening to what we are telling Him today. There isnt so much talk. God has done it. I have seen it (an NPP victory) in my dreams.



Shaking hands with you this evening, I have seen something you havent seen.



He, thus, urged the people of Kpembe, as well as the Ghanaian electorate, to turn out in their numbers on Election Day and vote massively, stressing that I predict nothing less than 53% victory for you.



In concluding, the Kpembe Wura asked Nana Akufo-Addo to look into the possibility of carving out another region from the Northern Region, to enable the equitable distribution of the natural resources of the region, as well as the rapid development of the livelihoods of the citizenry.

Source: Maxwell Okamafo Addo









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured Video
Brock Turner might be a free man, but that doesnt mean the general public believes hes served his time. Not one bit.

A day after the convicted rapist completed his three-month stint in jail for the 2015 sexual assault of a woman at Stanford University, protests awaiting Turners return continued outside his family home in Ohio.

Bearing placards with quotes like castrate rapists and the rapist who lives here got 3 months. Justice?, demonstrators brandished some serious firepower in a display of utmost disgust.

#BrockTurner may have gotten a light sentence but the neighbors not making it easy for him to live outside of jail pic.twitter.com/k4DXAF7AY2  coke (@wildd_child) September 3, 2016

Open carry protesters at the house of Brock Turner in Sugarcreek Township. @WCPO pic.twitter.com/QpsqOQCPC2  Jay Warren (@JayWarrenWCPO) September 2, 2016

Speaking to ABC News, one protester said were going to never let him forget what he did. Another explained if he is uncomfortable then he begins to receive at least some punishment that he deserves for his crime.

Turners case has drawn international attention and condemnation due to his lenient sentence  Turner originally faced up to 14 years behind bars  and for the presiding judges apparent bias towards white, affluent offenders.

As it turns out, that judges gentle interpretation of the law has been countered with another American legal idiosyncrasy  the right to bear arms. Thats a right protesters are using to remind Turner of the gross injustice hes the beneficiary of.

Source: ABC News.

Photo: @wildd_child / Twitter.
Today is Fathers Day. With any luck, this isnt the first youve heard about it.

Its also the tenth anniversary of Steve Irwins death, which means Australia has two distinct reasons to stop and reflect on the literally legendary blokes whove helped shaped this country.

Of course, for Bindi Irwin, those reasons are one and the same.

A decade after the Crocodile Hunter was killed in that tragic one-in-a-million accident, Irwin posted a succinct message on Instagram honouring her dad.

Youll be my hero for my entire existence, she writes. I love you more than words can describe.

A photo posted by Bindi Irwin (@bindisueirwin) on Sep 3, 2016 at 3:08pm PDT

Terri Irwin also took the opportunity to post a message, delivering some simple, solid and heartfelt advice:

Happy Fathers Day Australia. Hug your dad. pic.twitter.com/8IASLcKruS  Terri Irwin (@TerriIrwin) September 4, 2016

Fair call.

R.I.P, Steve.

Source: Bindi Irwin / Instagram.

Photo: Handout / Getty.
Mitch Tromp and Ella Tromp, whose bizarre family road trip captivated the nations attention this week, have spoken to the media to express their relief the day after their father Mark Tromp was found in Wangaratta.

51-year-old Mark, the last member of the family to be located, was spotted by a member of the public late yesterday, before police brought him in to the local station; he was described as being dehydrated, but otherwise in good condition.

The family of five, also including Marks wife Jacoba and daughter Riana, set out from their home in Silvan for a technology-free road trip on Monday, but the children abandoned the trip one by one, concerned about their parents paranoid condition.

Speaking to the media this morning, 25-year-old Mitch and 22-year-old Ella simply said that they were happy to hear the news their father has been found alive and well. Ella told reporters:

More than anything, were just happy dads alive and hes going to come back home and all the family is going to come back home and we can get back to normal.

Mitch said he understood there would be a great deal of curiosity about what took place on the family road trip, but said even if we told you the whole story, its still inexplicable. He continued:

I can see everyones questions, I can see why they want to know, but its a family matter. I just want the family to be able to come back together and everything to work itself out. It was tough to see the family like that, and Ive never seen anyone like it. The main thing is everyone is OK now. Its hard to explain [what happened], its bizarre.

Theyve said that they will speak more about their experiences later in more detail, but for now, they will let the police do their job and finish their investigation into the matter.

Describing his decision to accompany his parents on their trip, Mitch said: I didnt feel in danger. I just had to go with the family because I wanted to see where they were going. I couldnt leave them.

He left the trip in Bathurst, but now says: I thought getting out was the best idea for me at the time. In hindsight, I should have tried to stay with them and try and help and bring them back around and talk to them more, but I got out of the car.

Mother Jacoba and sister Riana remain in hospital in Goulburn, in the care of mental health professionals, and the family is unsure at this stage when they will return home.

Source: The Age.

Photo: Sky News / YouTube.
DAMASCUS, Pa. (AP) -- Authorities say a northeastern Pennsylvania man has been charged in the shooting death of his older brother.

State police in Wayne County said 30-year-old Antonio Cilino, of Hawley, turned himself in Saturday to face charges in the death of 40-year-old Joseph Cilino, of Honesdale.

Police say the Antonio Cilino saw Joseph Cilino Friday in a car with Antonio's ex-girlfriend and the former couple's 1-year-old child. Police said he followed the vehicle, and a confrontation followed at a driveway in Damascus Township.

Joseph Cilino was shot in the chest, according to the Times-Tribune.

Authorities said the woman had a protection-from-abuse order against Antonio Cilino. She drove away with the child after the shooting.

Cilino is charged with criminal homicide, aggravated and simple assault, terroristic threats and reckless endangering. Court documents don't list an attorney; a listed number for him couldn't be found Sunday.
ephrata suspect 9/4.jpg

Ephrata police said they believe this man left in this car after stealing groceries and electronics from a Walmart. (Ephrata police)

(Ephrata police)

Police in Ephrata are asking the public to help them find a man suspected of stealing hundreds of dollars worth of groceries and electronics from a local Walmart.

The crime occurred on Friday. Police said first took groceries and stashed them in his car, then pilfered another load of electronics.

Anyone with information can call Officer Martin at 717-738-9200, extension 258.
teresa gatto.png

Teresa Gatto was convicted of stealing money from a Girl Scout camp program.

A western Pennsylvania woman convicted of embezzling nearly $1,000 from the Girl Scouts has failed to convince a state Superior Court panel to overturn her house arrest and probation sentence.

Instead, the court concluded in a recent opinion by President Judge Emeritus Kate Ford Elliott that there is ample evidence to support Teresa Gatto's conviction for theft by unlawful taking.

In fact, Allegheny County Judge Edward J. Borkowski found Gatto guilty of stealing less than the $4,818 a county detective claimed she pilfered while serving as manager for the All Camp program run by the West Perry Service Area of the Girl Scouts of Southwestern Pennsylvania.

Gatto, 47, of Cranberry Township, held that post from 2006 to 2011.

Girl Scout officials only became suspicious after Gatto left that job, according to the state court ruling. There was only $38 in the All Camp bank account when Gatto departed, yet a year later under other management the account had an ending balance of around $2,000, Ford Elliott noted.

Scout leaders went to the authorities and Gatto was arrested. During a nonjury trial, Borkowski concluded investigators had proven that Gatto stole $972. He convicted her of theft by unlawful taking, sentenced her to 6 months of house arrest with work-release followed by 2 years of probation, and ordered her to repay the $972.

On appeal to the state court, Gatto claimed there was no proof she intentionally deprived the Girl Scouts of any money. She argued that she withdrew money from the All Camp account to reimburse herself for purchases she made for the program.

"At most, she argues that she was guilty of bad bookkeeping, and bad bookkeeping is not a crime," Ford Elliott wrote.

Yet the state judge observed that Gatto admitted to county Detective Jackie Weibel that she used All Camp money to buy tickets for herself to Kenywood Park. "Detective Weibel also noted the purchase of gift cards with other Girl Scout officials said were not used for Girl Scout events," Ford Eliiott added.

So Ford Elliott found that investigators had proven Gatto used All Camp money for personal purchases and had reimbursed herself more than was warranted for legitimate purchases she made for the camp.
By Charlie Gerow

Labor Day weekend is the traditional end of summer and the kickoff of the fall campaign for president.

Republican strategist Charlie Gerow (PennLive file)

Those traditional mile markers are things of the past. Kids have been in school for two weeks and the fall campaign began in earnest following the two major party conventions which were held much earlier than in recent years.

At this stage of the race, Hillary Clinton's lead is shrinking.

Some of that is undoubtedly due to the fading of her post-convention "bounce."

Much of it is the result of a continuing stream of information regarding her use of private e-mail servers and her maladroit handling of the various scandals that surround her. Her "unfavorables" are rising and an overwhelming majority of voters say they simply don't trust her.

Nevertheless, Clinton still holds significant, if not commanding, leads in virtually every key state.

Here in Pennsylvania her lead has shrunk from 11 to 7 points. That's still a very solid lead and, if it holds, would eclipse the margin by which Barack Obama won the state four years ago.

Clinton also leads Trump by double digit margins in states like Colorado (+14) and Virginia (+12) where Republicans had hoped to be competitive this year.

Trump's biggest challenge is in states where he should be ahead like Missouri (Trump +1), Georgia (Trump +4) and Arizona (Trump +3), where Mitt Romney won by a double digit margin four years ago.

If Trump fails to carry those states it's difficult to imagine an electoral map that results in his favor

Last week Donald Trump had an opportunity to significantly enhance his position and whittle away at Clinton's lead.

He had a chance to score points with one demographic he badly needs to win over--college-educated whites. No Republican has ever lost this slice of the electorate.

Yet Donald Trump is currently flirting with disaster with this group, especially among the women of this subset where he now trails Mrs. Clinton by 20 points.

Trump beat Hillary Clinton to the punch by accepting the invitation of the president of Mexico to pay a visit.

Who'd have thought that Enrique Pena Nieto would provide Donald Trump with his best opportunity to appear presidential?

That's exactly what happened when Trump appeared side-by-side with him. The visual image and tone of his remarks both worked to his advantage.

Later that day, Trump was back on American soil telling a rally audience about his plans to deal with immigration.

That tone, while drawing raucous cheers from those in the room, did little to appeal to the larger audience he really needs. Especially when he veered from his prepared text, his harsh tones continued to put distance between himself and those he badly needs. He even lost some of his own Latino advisory group.

The first of the presidential debates is now only three weeks away.

There, tone and visual images are as important as any policy pronouncement made by the candidates.

These aren't collegiate "Oxford style" debates scored on points for logical brilliance.

They certainly aren't policy symposiums. They are mini-press conferences in which the responses to each question and the back-and-forth that follows give voters clear impressions.

Little moments within the debate allow viewers and voters the chance to see the candidates unscripted and unvarnished and to draw conclusions about the character and abilities of them.

Body language is exceptionally important. Remember George Bush looking at his watch, Al Gore sighing or Dan Quayle's "deer-in-the headlights'' look when Lloyd Bentsen told him he was no Jack Kennedy? Likewise, tone is as important as the words actually spoken.

Here's where Trump must come across well. He cannot afford the faces that he made during the primary debates. He cannot be condescending to Clinton nor can he appear to bully her.

It's one-on-one.

There won't be any opportunities to retreat as he often effectively did during the crowded primary debates.

Trump must appear presidential. He has to address the "temperament" issue head-on by showing voters that he can be calm yet forceful.

The ultimate test for many swing and undecided voters is whether or not they can visualize a candidate actually sitting in the Oval Office with their finger on the nuclear button and their voice the messenger of the free world.

If Trump shows voters--especially those that should already be in his column but aren't yet there as well as those still making up their minds--that vision he'll have laid the foundation for future debates where he can allay concerns about his depth of policy knowledge.

Trump hasn't burdened himself with binders of policy briefings. Clinton has.

She's also reportedly spending time with Tony Schwartz, the real author of "The Art of the Deal," a man who knows a lot about Donald Trump.

She's banking that between him and a gaggle of psychologists she's chatting with she'll find ways to get under Donald Trump's skin and give rise to some outburst that would destroy his attempts to appear as a calm, strong leader.

Whether she's able to get under his legendarily thin skin or he's able to come across as a calm assured leader will determine who "wins" the debate, controls the agenda for the rest of the campaign and, very likely, who wins the presidency.
immigration reform.jpg

By Tony May

The surprise issue of the 2016 presidential race is the question of illegal immigrants. "America first," says Donald Trump and the crowd roars.

Tony May

"A nation without borders is not a nation." We (a pronoun not clearly defined) were here first so you can't "come in" unless we give you a permit to do so, the reasoning goes.

Uninvited, undocumented - in other words, "illegal" immigrants are ruining America and are being tagged as a source of everything that's wrong, from crime to disease to the condition of the economy.

Keep them out; drive them out, the reasoning goes, and life in these United States will be almost immediately better.

If you drink the Trump Kool-Aid, you would say it will "make America great again."

The entire conceit is built upon the principle that a person who is "natural born" in the words of the Constitution has superior rights to someone who is "without papers."

And, natural born, in turn, is generally defined as one who was birthed on American soil or born to American citizens while abroad.

Thus far this election year, there seems to be a hierarchy of loathing of immigrants among those who want to purge the nation of those not natural-born. Individuals of Asian descent do not seem to be a target, unless they are Muslim.

War refugees from Syria are particularly feared even though many are not Muslim and as a group they are relatively few in number - and those who have arrived here have been cleared by the U.S. government and are "documented."

Immigrants from Europe and Africa seem not to be a factor currently.

Most of the vitriol seems to be reserved for North Americans and Central Americans who are perceived to have arrived in the continental United States by walking or sneaking across the border between Mexico and the United States without acquiring "green cards" or other evidence of legal permission to reside here.

It's a proprietary expectation built around the generally held belief that this is our land because we were here first.

It's a belief which ignores the reality that the forebears of the "founding fathers" were also undocumented aliens.

The Jamestown settlers didn't arrive with papers stamped and authorized by the Powhatans. The Pilgrims weren't "documented" by the Wampanoags. Ponce de Leon didn't get his visa stamped by the Seminoles.

The United States of America didn't come into existence until 1776, just yesterday in the perspective of the actual history of human life in North America.

The American Southwest didn't come into existence until more than 70 years later - and, then, only through U.S. aggression against Mexico.

Who actually has a more historic claim on being "natural born" in the Southwest?

Is it the descendants of Yankees who roots can be traced back as far as the end of the Mexican American War in 1848 or those whose Hispanic roots can be followed back to the 1500s?

Or is it those whose ancestors were the paleo-Indians whose pueblos can be carbon dated as existing 10,000 years ago?

The point is that the argument today seems to revolve around who is documented and who is not.

It's like debating whether having a driver's permit makes you a competent motorist.

Having a permit doesn't automatically make you a good, contributing member of a community and not have documents doesn't mean that you are not a good neighbor.

The solutions offered to the perceived immigration crisis are as puzzling and confounding as the issue itself.

First, we're supposed to deport an estimated 11 million people believed to be undocumented aliens and then build a 2,000-mile-long wall along the border between Mexico and the United States to prevent them from returning.

How much will it cost? How long will it take?

We're talking about the equivalent of moving the entire population of the state of Ohio to Mexico - and that doesn't take into account that the residents of Ohio all live in one geographic region and the 11 million undocumented aliens are living who knows where because they are, after all, undocumented.

We're talking about the world's largest Where's Waldo ever. The wall project would be as daunting - the equivalent of building the entire length of Interstate 95 from Maine to Florida but set on its side and sunk 20 feet into the ground to discourage tunneling under.

Will it work?

Well, it's hard to imagine that either project will work but if the wall project is ever launched, the smart money will migrate into investing in inflatable boat companies to capitalize on the expected boom in sales.
FILE - In this Thursday, Sept. 1, 2016 file photo, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, middle, kneels during the national anthem before the team's NFL preseason football game against the San Diego Chargers, in San Diego. The Santa Clara police chief has vowed to continue providing a safe environment at San Francisco home games after the union representing his officers threatened to boycott policing the stadium if the 49ers don't discipline Kaepernick for criticizing police and refusing to stand during the national anthem. Chief Michael Sellers said in a statement Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016, that he will urge union leadership to put citizens' safety first. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson, File)
This Nov. 3, 2015 photo shows the area where 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling was abducted in Oct. 1989 in St. Joseph, Minn. Patty Wetterling, the mother of Jacob Wetterling said Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016 that his remains have been found. Danny Heinrich, who authorities have called a person of interest in the 1989 kidnapping, denied any involvement and was not charged with that crime. But he has pleaded not guilty to several federal child pornography charges.
Heather Mogg to take plea deal in murder case

Heather Mogg is scheduled to make a plea deal with Emmet County prosecutors for the murder of her boyfriend, Jonathan Tippett.
Is bronchitis contagious? and How many calories should I eat were both top Google health searches between January and November last year. Last year around 1 in 20 Google searches were health-related. In 2015 more than 3 billion downloads of mHealth apps have been estimated for the main app stores, allowing people to self-monitor disease conditions and adjust their lifestyles. Gradually, we are becoming empowered to know more about our own health  and act on it. Understanding the challenges

Does healthcare understand this shift? Communication with friends and family is fast and frictionless today; people can do business, shop and put themselves through a university degree course online. They can now manage their finances seamlessly via phone apps; using virtual reality they can visit and examine the worlds most famous artworks. Soon, they will ask why healthcare isnt being delivered the same way. From one perspective, the challenges embedded in the industry are broad and deep, and the limitations revolve around access to and free movement of data. Medical information is sensitive and often struggles to flow around the complicated and tangled bureaucracies constructed around healthcare services in many countries. This lack of access to data and poor care co-ordination has worked to the detriment of patients and has inhibited health outcomes. For example, despite steady progress towards universal medical records, a vast majority of patients still have to repeat the same basic information to multiple healthcare professionals, according to the Future Health Index1, a survey of 25,000 patients which was commissioned by Philips. Most say they have also experienced repeatedly taking the same tests, delaying treatments and burning up valuable time. These are big challenges for an industry negotiating digital change and it is not a unique problem.
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By Emily Stephenson and Amanda Becker

WILMINGTON, Ohio/WASHINGTON (Reuters)  Some of Donald Trumps Hispanic backers distanced themselves from the Republican nominee on Thursday for standing by a hardline approach to illegal immigration in a key speech after indicating for weeks that he may soften his approach.

Trump tried to clarify confusion about immigration, his signature policy issue, in a speech on Wednesday. He said the only way undocumented foreigners could live in the United States legally if he is elected on Nov. 8 would be to leave the country and apply for re-entry.

But the businessman, trailing Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in opinion polls, did back away from earlier promises to deport immediately the 11 million immigrants in the United States illegally and said he would prioritize those with criminal records.

While polls show a large majority of Hispanic voters oppose Trump, the withdrawal of support from among his small group of Latino backers underscores how difficult it is for Trump to broaden his support with minorities and moderate voters.

Alfonso Aguilar, who recently organized a support letter on behalf of Trump, said he felt disappointed and misled by the fiery speech and withdrew his backing.

For the last two months he said he was not going to deport people without criminal records. He actually said that he was going to treat undocumented immigrants without criminal records in a humane and compassionate way, Aguilar told CNN. He is the president of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles group.

Trump used his Wednesday appearance in Phoenix to clarify his stance on illegal immigration. But instead of moderating his message as many expected, Trump returned to the hardline rhetoric that powered him to victory in the Republican presidential nomination race over 16 rivals, heartening conservatives drawn to Trump by the issue.

Some members of a council Trump formed last month to advise him on Hispanic issues expressed reservations about or cut ties to the New York real estate developers candidacy after the Phoenix speech.

Jacob Monty, a Texas attorney and member of the group, said he was withdrawing his support and would not vote in the election.

There was nothing pro-business in that speech, Monty told MSNBC. We were hoping for some glimmer of the Donald Trump that we met with a week and half ago, but it never came.

SCAM

Panel member Ramiro Pena, a Baptist pastor in Texas who spoke at the Republican National Convention in July, wrote in an email to party leaders that he believed Trump would lose the election and that the advisory panel was a scam.

But other Latino advisers, including Florida pastor Mario Bramnick and Kentucky State Senator Ralph Alvardo, said they would continue working with the Trump campaign.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus downplayed the fallout from Trumps speech, telling CNN that the nominee made clear he first wants to build the border wall and deal with criminal elements, then have a humane conversation about other illegal immigrants.

Somehow or another no one is talking about that piece, Priebus said.

At a campaign rally on Thursday in Wilmington, Ohio, Trump said his immigration plan would treat everyone with dignity, respect and compassion but prioritize compassion for American citizens and include some kind of ideological screening.

We only want to admit those into our country who share our values and love our people, Trump said.

Trump gave his Phoenix address, which was flagged as a major policy speech, just hours after he met with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto in Mexico City.

At a joint press conference after the meeting, Trump said the pair discussed his campaign promise to build a border wall but not which country would pay for it. Pena Nieto said on Twitter on Wednesday night he had made it clear Mexico would not be paying for the wall.

Trump supporters at the Wilmington rally said they approved of the candidates immigration policies but moderate Republicans in Arizona, where Latinos make up more than 30 percent of the population, told Reuters they were less swayed by his message.

Clintons campaign called Trumps immigration speech a disaster and said it would begin running advertisements in Arizona, a sign it sees a chance of winning a state that has long backed Republican presidential candidates.

Clinton raised about $143 million in August for her presidential bid and the Democratic Party, her campaign announced. Trump has not yet released his fundraising totals for the month of August.

(Additional reporting by Steve Holland, Susan Heavey and David Alexander in Washington and Emily Flitter in New York; Editing by Alistair Bell and Jonathan Oatis)
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Chuck Todd claimed that Donald Trump, who refuses to release any personal information to voters, is holding the higher ground over Hillary Clinton on transparency.

Video:

Transcript via Meet The Press:

CHUCK TODD: You guys have higher ground on this issue, on this whole idea of transparency, and her accountability. If you guys were as transparent, releasing the tax returns, him releasing his tax returns, whatever you want to say about the Clintons, and we know this because the information has either been dragged out of them or its been disclosed. We dont have any disclosures. We dont have your tax returns. GOV. MIKE PENCE: Donald Trump and I are both going to release our tax returns. Ill release mine in the next week. Donald Trump will be releasing his tax returns at the completion of an audit. But the issue here is not CHUCK TODD: But that wont be before the election. GOV. MIKE PENCE: The issue here well, well see.

Chuck Todds proclamation that Trump has the high ground on transparency was not based on fact. Chuck Todd needs to tell America what exactly Donald Trump has been transparent about. Trump hasnt released his medical records, his tax returns, has fought to have the release of his video depositions blocked. Trump has destroyed his own emails, failed to release a full disclosure of his business interests and potential conflicts of interest.

Donald Trump has told US voters nothing, but Chuck Todd thinks that he has the high ground on transparency.

In contrast, Hillary Clinton has released a detailed medical history, tax returns, Clinton Foundation data, and more emails than any presidential candidate in US history.

Todd did go on to press Pence about Trumps tax returns, but his basis for the question was an assumption that revealed how low the media had set the bar for Donald Trump. The Beltway press has assumed that Clinton is guilty, so Trump automatically gets the high ground on transparency.

Never has a modern nominee for president publicly disclosed as little information as Donald Trump has chosen not to give voters, but Chuck Todd lazily rejected reality and projected his assumptions about Hillary Clinton into a question to Mike Pence.

Facts matter, and in this case, Chuck Todd ignored the facts in an attempt to keep the 2016 presidential horserace alive.

Update: The Meet The Press transcript did not reflect the fact that Todd was attempting to ask a question about if the Trump campaign has the high ground on transparency. However, the fact that this should even be a question raises concerns about the false equivalency style reporting that is driving the coverage of the presidential election.
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The following post, written by The Rev. Robert A. Franek, is a part of Politicus Policy Discussion, in which writers draw connections between real lives and public policy.

Long before the 2016 presidential campaigns began reforms in our immigration system have been needed. But in this election season attention on this issue is heightened. So also for welcoming refugees into our country, whether minors fleeing from dangers in Central America or the millions trying to escape war torn Syria and other countries in violent conflict.

Too often the complexities surrounding the policies regarding the 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country, DREAMers, and Syrian refugees get reduced to overly simplistic talking points. Additionally, all these and more with their hopes and dreams, fears and struggles, talents and resilience, are objectified and dehumanized in rhetoric of hate and fear along with outdated policies and practices. Consider the treatment of immigrants in private detention centers.

However, for those guided by the Old and New Testaments it seems the least we can do is have compassion for their plight and justice in our laws, remembering that our ancestors were foreigners in the land of Egypt. Exodus 23:9 counsels, You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt (NRSV).

And more strongly we are commanded not only not to oppress but to love. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God (Leviticus 19:34).

This love is made known in practices that provide food and wages for labor. As written in Leviticus 23:22, When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and for the alien: I am the LORD your God. While this ancient farming practice may no longer apply functionally, certainly the need to provide food for the poor and foreigners in the land in a structural and systemic fashion still does.

And as made clear in Deuteronomy 24:14, our love and compassion for the poor and needy has an economic implication as well, an implication that does not discriminate between native and foreigner. You shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy laborers, whether other Israelites or aliens who reside in your land in one of your towns.

And from the law of Deuteronomy to the prophet Ezekiel scripture testifies to consequences of failing to show compassion and justice to the oppressed, poor and needy, and foreigners in the land. In Deuteronomy 27.19 we read, Cursed be anyone who deprives the alien, the orphan, and the widow of justice. All the people shall say, Amen! Can I get an Amen? And Ezekiel tells of the failure of economic justice in 22:29, The people of the land have practiced extortion and committed robbery; they have oppressed the poor and needy, and have extorted from the alien without redress. No one was found to stand in this breach and repair the damage so all suffered the indignation of God.

It is also imperative to know that according to the Gospel of Matthew Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were refugees (without documentation) in the land of Egypt. Interestingly, the place of ancient slavery has become the country of refuge. The holy family had to flee because of an edict from Herod, who sent and killed all the children two years old and under in and around Bethlehem. His violent insecurity on display after being tricked by the wise men and the threat of a new infant king.

These ancient stories sound remarkably contemporary. With attentive interpretive grace we can hear the message in them for today. These living words echo through the ages with a continued call to compassion, love, and justice. As they tell of our own spiritual ancestry, they call us to remember our history and Gods liberating love from captivity in an oppressive regime of tyrannical productivity. And in Jesus we see Gods own identification with those fleeing for life and safety.

Nevertheless, the biblical witness notwithstanding, the call to regard immigrants and refugees with compassion is also grounded in our shared humanity and the basic respect and dignity all people deserve. Oversimplification and sound bites make this too easy to forget as people become pawns in political punditry.

For stories and information on immigrant and refugee issues in this country including policy advocacy please check out Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.
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Hillary Clintons running mate Tim Kaine did his part to help the ticket set a trap for Donald Trump by turning Clintons emails into a discussion of Trumps tax returns.

Video:

https://youtu.be/c4wiFeQEHS8

Transcript via ABCs This Week:

SEN. TIM KAINE (D-VA), VICE PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: Well, and I think, Martha, theyve gotten a better explanation, because to add to what she just said, the reason these materials are being made public is that Hillary Clinton said I want the public to see them. When Congress asked the FBI, give us your notes, Hillary said, yes, thats great, give them your notes but let the American public see it.

And what these notes demonstrate is, in very significant detail, why the FBI chose not to go forward with any additional proceeding.

She did make a mistake. And she made by deciding she wanted to use one device rather than multiple devices. Shes apologized for that. She said it was a mistake. And shes learned from it.

But these notes, which Hillary urged be made public, demonstrate clearly why the FBI saw no need for additional criminal proceedings.

RADDATZ; But Senator Kaine

KAINE: If you contrast that, on the other side  just  Im just  Im saying, just contrast

RADDATZ; Finish up.

KAINE:  the disclosure with a Donald Trump, who wont even allow the American public to see his tax returns.

Republicans opened up a whole new can of worms by pressing for the FBIs notes on the Clinton interview. Sen. Kaine spoke the truth. Hillary Clinton has released her emails, FBI notes, a detailed health history, and her tax returns. Donald Trump wont release anything. Trump has released no medical history, no tax returns, no documents about his business dealings. Trump wont even release proof of his the charitable donations that he claims to have made.

Hillary Clinton has been more transparent than. With his answer on ABCs This Week, Kaine gave a potential preview of one of the traps that Clinton is setting for Trump at the presidential debates. If Trump wants to talk about Clintons emails, he better be prepared to answer questions about his tax returns.

As Gov. Mike Pence fumbles and bumbles through his national television interviews, Tim Kaine continues to be a living example of why Clintons judgment should be trusted over Trumps.
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Democratic vice presidential nominee Senator Tim Kaine tried to help the media as they focused on Hillary Clintons emails yet again, by reminding them that Donald Trump is the actual danger to national security.

Donald Trump is a danger to national security because he actually encouraged Russia to hack Clintons emails, Kaine explained patiently on ABCs This Week, as the media focused on the FBI report raising new questions about Hillary Clintons emails.

Watch here:

On the other hand, weve got a candidate in Donald Trump who wont release his tax returns after he promised to do so, Kaine said.

And talk about national security, he (Trump) has openly encouraged Russia to engage in cyberhacking to try to find more emails or materials, and we know that this cyberattack on the DNC was likely done by Russia, Kaine continued.

Kaine said Trumps advocating for a hack on Clinton is very similar to the Watergate break-in that caused President Richard Nixon to be impeached and ultimately resign.

A president was impeached and had to resign over an attack on the DNC, during a presidential election in 1972. This is serious business, the Democratic Senator explained.

Kaine laid it out, So contrast the Hillary situation where the FBI said theres no need for legal proceedings with an attack that is being encouraged by Donald Trump on the DNC by Russia, similar to what led to the resignation of a president 30 years ago.

Kaine might as well have been waving a huge red flag for the press. Yes, hes biased because hes obviously advocating for Clinton, but that doesnt mean his facts are wrong. His facts are actually right on.

Donald Trump encouraged Russian hackers to hack Hillary Clintons emails. Trump said, I will tell you this, Russia: If youre listening, I hope youre able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.

This is not hard. That is not okay, and it doesnt take an FBI investigation to figure out that its dangerous to the national security of this country as well as democracy itself. Contrast that with the years long Republican-led investigation into Clintons emails, during which theyve tried every which way to create a scandal only to be told by the Republican FBI director that there is no scandal.

Its the press that is struggling this election. They cant seem to find a way to admit that Donald Trump is a disaster on almost every level, so they keep hunting through Hillary Clintons emails, while Donald Trump is actually advocating for a foreign country to intervene in the U.S. election in order to help him win the White House.

Tim Kaine tried to help the media today by pointing out the huge elephant in the room, but its likely that the press simply isnt equipped to deal with Donald Trump. They keep grading Trump on a curve while trying to make Hillary Clinton as bad as Trump in order to appear fair.

But the job isnt about looking fair; its supposed to be about informing the people. Desperately sifting through Clintons emails looking for a problem while ignoring the fact that the Republican nominee actually asked Russia to hack a presidential candidate is negligent.



Image: ABC This Week screencap
NEW YORK  It's perhaps the most contrarian move in investing today: Trust a stock picker.

Investors have been dumping funds run by managers who try to beat the market, and they're pouring money instead into those that track the Standard & Poor's 500 or other indexes. Last month alone, $44 billion left actively managed stock funds, and nearly $41 billion went into comparable index funds.

To understand why, have a look at the mutual fund scorecard. Index funds have generally done better than actively managed ones over the last one, five and 10 years. Among mutual funds that invest in a mix of large-cap stocks, just 15 percent of actively managed funds managed to beat index funds over the decade through June 2016, according to Morningstar.

It's not just stock pickers catering to mom-and-pop investors who are struggling. Hedge funds, which invest for the uber-wealthy and big institutions, have also been lagging behind index funds. Through July, they were on pace for a third straight year of lower returns than either an S&P 500 index fund or an investment that tracks a Barclays bond index, according to industry researcher HFR Inc.

But what if you can't stand the idea of being just average? Some investors are confident they can pick the active manager who will beat the market. Other, more skittish investors would like the comfort of having a manager who can limit losses when market indexes are tumbling.

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That's why some actively managed funds are still pulling in money. American Funds, which is the second-largest fund family by assets, is unabashedly in favor of active management. It attracted a net $5 billion in investment in the first seven months of this year, though the pace has cooled recently.

Even the biggest index-fund provider, Vanguard, has actively managed funds of its own, and they've been drawing dollars too.

Two important factors can help determine whether an actively managed fund will beat the market.

Number one is fees. Lower-cost actively managed funds have a better track record of success than expensive ones. It's for the simple reason that a high-fee fund needs to perform that much better to match the returns of a low-cost fund. Index funds have some of the lowest fees available.

After splitting large-cap blend funds into four categories based on their fees, Morningstar found that 19 percent of the cheapest funds beat index funds over the last decade. That may not sound like much, but it's way better than the 8 percent success rate for the highest-cost funds.

The trend carries through across different categories of mutual funds and is most pronounced at funds that invest in stocks from China, India and other developing economies. Stock pickers say these markets are particularly suited for them because they can avoid the large, state-owned companies that make up big chunks of those indexes.

Another consideration is to look for active funds where managers invest alongside their own shareholders. It's a concept called "eating your own cooking," and managers have to disclose in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission data about how much they've invested in their own funds, if they do so at all.

American Funds says that stock funds with both low expenses and high manager ownership have much better track records than other actively managed funds. After looking at rolling one-year returns over the two decades through 2015, it said this select group within large-cap U.S. stock funds had average returns of 10.1 percent, a shade higher than the S&P 500's 9.8 percent. They also beat the index 55 percent of the time.

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For their part, stock pickers acknowledge they've had a rough few years in comparison to index funds. But they say they're anticipating better conditions ahead.

In recent years, stocks have often moved up and down in unison, making it harder to pick winners and losers. That herding effect reduces the rewards for a stock picker looking to pick which, say, individual oil company looks best in the industry.

Stock pickers lay the blame for this, in part, on the massive amounts of stimulus coming from the Federal Reserve and other central banks. The Fed's next move now, though, is likely to raise rates, not lower them. If that helps break the market's recent herd mentality, active managers say conditions may finally tilt more in their favor.
WINONA  Four suspects arrested in connection with two armed robberies are spending Labor Day weekend behind bars in the Winona County Jail.

The robberies happened late Friday night in Winona. Shortly after 10 p.m. authorities received a report of two individuals being robbed at gunpoint by a group of men in the area of Sixth Street and Johnson Street, according to a Winona County Police Department media release. Less than 20 minutes later, another robbery attempt was reported near Lake Boulevard and Clarks Lane. Two men approached the victim and one of them was holding something the victim believed was a gun.

Shortly after 11 p.m., authorities found a vehicle in Winona that matched the description of the suspects' vehicle from the earlier robbery. Officers stopped the vehicle and found the stolen items belonging to the first victim, along with a handgun. Four suspects that were in the vehicle were arrested and are being held in the Winona County Jail. Authorities are not releasing the suspects' names at this time.

Winona County Police Department says the investigation into the robberies is ongoing, "but at this time, the police department doesn't feel there is any continued public safety threat as a result of these incidents."

Assisting the police department in responding to the robberies were the Winona Fire Department, Winona Area Ambulance Service, Winona County Sheriff's Office, Goodview Police Department and the Minnesota State Patrol.
MILLVILLE  A gun shop owner is still reeling after thieves broke into his shop and stole between 60 to 80 guns in just over a minute.

Keith Shones, owner of Millville Gun & Rod Shop, said the break in happened around 4 a.m. on Friday at the shop, which sits 20 feet from his home. At the time of the robbery, his step-daughter was feeding her newborn and heard strange noises.

"She thought someone was breaking into her car, but actually they were breaking into the gun shop," Shones said.

His step-daughter set off her car alarm and opened the garage. When she heard the sound of breaking glass, she decided to get Shones.

"She said, 'Somebody broke into the gun shop. So I grabbed my gun and came running out and they were already gone,'" Shones said.

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The gun shop owner had surveillance video running at the time of the break-in. It shows the thieves bursting in through the front door, then ransacking the shop. At one point, one of the thieves smashes a glass case with his elbow in order to steal more guns. He said the thieves were armed with blow torches and used them to get in. In all, the thieves were in the shop for just over a minute.

Wabasha County Sheriff's Office says "officers are actively searching for three suspects," according to its Facebook page, and are looking for any information, any suspicious behavior, any suspicious vehicles, "anything, no matter how small it may seem."

On Sunday, Shones was still trying to get an exact count of how many guns were stolen. He has 1,000 guns in the store and was busy cataloguing each one. He said the theft has hit his business hard.

"It's huge. When you're talking 80 guns  some of these guns were (worth) upwards of $1,000," he said.

Given the number of guns stolen, Shones said he is stunned that no one from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has been called out to help with the investigation. He said it is too big a case to leave to local authorities.

"With his many guns, somebody (from the agency) should have been sent here that really knows what they are doing," he said.

The thief who smashed the glass case with his elbow left some blood behind at the scene. Shones is hoping that DNA evidence can help authorities track down the suspects.

Anyone with information is encouraged to call the sheriff's office at 651-565-3361; callers may remain anonymous. Information may also be submitted via www. crimestoppersmn .org, by phone or online.

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They cautioned against leaving information on the Facebook page or via private message.

Staff writer Kay Fate contributed to this report.
RED WING  In the wake of shootings involving police and black men in Dallas, Baton Rouge, La., and Minneapolis, the Red Wing Ministerial Association hosted a forum titled "Building Healthy Communities" Thursday at Christ Episcopal Church.

The forum, a question-and-answer session with Red Wing Police Chief Roger Pohlman, Goodhue County Sheriff Scott McNurlin and Scott Bender, chairman of the Red Wing Human Rights Commission, saw about 40 people come to listen to the panelists discuss community relations with law enforcement in Red Wing.

What is working in Red Wing and Goodhue County?

Pohlman: On the amount of service by the RWPD. "Last year, we answered 14,500 calls for service. We're doing a lot of things right. We're trying to be responsive and trying to listen."

McNurlin: On the need for public input to law enforcement. "There can't be a fear to give feedback. The only way it can happen is if you're honest with us. If a community need is not being met, we need to address that."

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Bender: "The Citizens Academy is really, really excellent. I took part in it 15 years ago. It helps you understand, especially as Red Wing has more minority members, and they come from places where they see the police as a bad guy."

What has changed in the world of public safety in a post-9/11 world?

McNurlin: On active-shooter events. "It seems it's almost a national thing that happens on a monthly basis in this country. We have to prepare for that. You, as citizens, have to prepare for that. ... The world is changing whether we want it to or not. We're no different than any other place on the planet."

Bender: On youth disillusionment. "We have to get back to where our children understand they are a small part of a larger community."

Pohlman: "Technology and transportation no longer make the oceans an effective barrier to someone who wants to do harm to our country."

How do you serve or interact with the immigrant community?

McNurlin: On misperceptions among the Hispanic community. "They believed any interaction with us would be a deportation situation. ... We don't care about your status. We know it affects families, but we still have to police as fairly as we possibly can."

Pohlman: "It doesn't come down to race to me. The thing I always stress is it's the action we are addressing. We address actions that are not accepted by society."

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Bender: On students in the school where he teaches. "If I had a choice between a kid who was not here legally but worked hard, or a white kid who (does not), I'll send the white kid to Mexico."

What role does human dignity take? Is it important to make sure people make it home safely each night?

Pohlman: "Everybody is somebody's brother, sister, mother or son. They all deserve to go home to their families. ... I know officers who have been involved in officer-involved shootings. I know how it tears them up inside."

McNurlin: On the importance of communicating with law enforcement. "Unless you tell me things are broken, I'm going to keep steering the boat in the same direction because I don't know any better."

What do we tell our clients (at Hope Coalition) when they feel they've been racial profiled by the police?

McNurlin: "The first thing they need to do is report that. ... I'm not going to say racial profiling does not happen, It does happen. ... You have to report it. Again, you can't fix something you don't know is broken."

What kind of checklists are law enforcement officers given in training before they use deadly force?

Pohlman: "Years ago, it was called a continuum. If someone used one level of force, you could use one level higher. Today, that'll get you sued. ... At the end of the day, the end goal is everyone goes home safely."

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McNurlin: "Peace officers today get a tremendous amount of training on the use of deadly force."

How do you screen phone calls if people don't want to see blacks or Native Americans in their neighborhoods?

McNurlin: On dispatchers getting calls. "It's hard for a dispatcher to ferret out if a person is sincere."

On changing racial demographics. "There are people who are unfamiliar with different cultures. It doesn't mean there is something nefarious going on. It just means we have to learn to acclimate to others in our community. ... We are all subject to these failings. But it's going to happen. I guarantee it's going to happen. There will be growing pains. Part of growing as a human being is learning to break down those barriers."

Pohlman: "I've been a supervisor on the street, and I've had dispatchers trying to make that call, and it's never a good thing. There's nothing like intelligence on the ground."
WASHINGTON  Donald Trump heads into the Labor Day weekend trailing his Hillary Clinton both nationally and in some of the most crucial states. But with just over two months to go, he still has a narrow window to try to make up for wasted time.

Trump remains deeply unpopular, especially with minority voters and women, giving him a tenuous path at best to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House.

Yet if this election has any lessons to offer, it's to expect the unexpected and never write off Trump.

A look at Trump's Labor Day to Election Day to-do list:

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GROUND IT OUT

Trump and Clinton are both historically unpopular candidates. That could make motivating voters to turn out  and ensuring they do  more important in this election than in most.

In the business, that's called ground game  and Trump has little of it to speak of.

The billionaire has outsourced virtually his entire early voting operation, battleground state staffing and get-out-the-vote organization to the Republican National Committee.

That makes Trump's relationship with the RNC critical. He must maintain a strong relationship with the national party, which could turn its back on Trump if it thinks its resources would be better spent on defending vulnerable Senate and House candidates.

Trump recently updated his leadership team with outspoken RNC critics, which could make his task harder. Almost completely reliant on the national party's ground game, Trump can't allow party leaders to jump ship.

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WALKING THE PATH

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Trump has a narrow path to 270. With only two months to go until the Nov. 8 election, he doesn't have time to waste in states that aren't on it.

Trump needs victories in Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania to have a realistic chance. That means he needs to live in those states for the next two months.

No longer can he devote his most valuable resource  his time  to states such as Connecticut, New York, Washington and Maine.

That's not to say his presence wouldn't be helpful in other places. Battleground state polls suggest he's in trouble in virtually every region in the country, even in reliably GOP states  Georgia, Indiana, Utah and Arizona among them.

But it's time for Trump to focus. He must devote the vast majority of his campaign appearances to the states that matter the most.

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MINORITY SUPPORT

Nonwhite voters represented just 12 percent of the electorate in 1980. The number grew to 28 percent in 2012. That's bad news for Trump, whose standing among blacks and Hispanic voters is historically bad. (He's struggling among women in both parties, too.)

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The Republican nominee must improve his standing with voters who are not white men to have a chance.

That won't be an easy task for a candidate who has called Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, has condemned the Black Lives Matter movement, and lashed out at female critics as "fat pigs" and "dogs."

Avoiding such insults is a place for Trump to start. He can also spend more time in minority communities, as he did Friday in Philadelphia and was doing Saturday in Detroit.

Even if Trump has spent more of his time to date speaking to majority-white crowds in majority-white communities, he's not yet made the sale with white men.

Recent polls suggest that while Trump has more support than Clinton among white men, he is doing significantly worse with that demographic than GOP nominee Mitt Romney did four years ago.

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STAY ON MESSAGE

With a drip, drip, drip of negative news about Clinton's family foundation and her use of a private email server as secretary of state, Trump has plenty of material to use against his Democratic rival.

But time and again, the GOP nominee's own controversial statements have dominated the news cycle and diverted attention away from Clinton's problems.

To best position himself over the coming weeks, Trump needs to avoid major gaffes that lead voters to question his judgment and temperament, and keep the focus on Clinton.

He'll also need to fine-tune his attacks, delivering a more subtle critique that may sway undecided voters instead of the kinds of sweeping broadsides that appeal to his Republican base.

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EXCEED DEBATE EXPECTATIONS

Expectations for the presidential debates are far lower for Trump than they are for Clinton, thanks in part to his relative political inexperience. If Trump appears composed and informed, he is likely to earn strong enough marks from undecided voters to win a closer look.

Yet the risks for the notoriously unpredictable Trump are enormous.

The GOP nominee has shown resistance to traditional debate preparation, and it remains unclear whether he'll buckle down and engage in formal mock debates as a way to get ready.

Trump's performances at the GOP debates were uneven, with Trump often lashing out and mocking his rivals. Research suggests that in-your-face strategy could be especially risky now that he's up against a female opponent.

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Follow Steve Peoples and Jill Colvin on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sppeoples and http://twitter.com/colvinj
WASHINGTON  Hillary Clinton will celebrate Labor Day with an edge over rival Donald Trump in any number of the most competitive states, even as she struggles with the challenge of sealing the deal with large groups of voters who consider her dishonest and untrustworthy.

Clinton's experience as secretary of state and her handle on domestic policy make her the favorite in three presidential debates beginning later this month. She has appeared in more than 30 as a presidential candidate in 2008 and 2016.

But she still has work to do.

A look at Clinton's Labor Day to Election Day to-do list:

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DOMINATE THE DEBATES

Millions of voters will watch the debates, which offer her an opportunity and a challenge.

She needs to prepare for a candidate who's the most unpredictable nominee in decades.

She also needs to prevent Trump from using the televised forums to present himself as a plausible commander in chief, and from turning them into referendums on President Barack Obama's two terms and Clinton's decades in politics.

Clinton acknowledges that the debates could be pivotal. She told donors last weekend, "Somebody said to me, 'Well, remember, there'll be a lot of people watching.' One hundred million people watching. And 60 million will be paying attention to the campaign for the first time."

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CHART A PATH TO 270

Clinton has an edge in most of the highly contested states, the roughly dozen or so where the election will be decided. Her campaign is trying to keep open as many paths as possible through those states to reach the decisive 270 electoral votes needed to win.

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She enters the fall with a decided advantage, both in terms of history and in this year's campaign. If Clinton can hold onto the set of states that every Democratic presidential nominee has won since 2000, she starts with 242 electoral votes.

Beyond those states, preference polls show her ahead in Virginia and Colorado, and competing in close contests in North Carolina, Florida and Ohio. Applying pressure on Trump, Clinton is advertising in GOP-leaning Arizona and in an Omaha, Nebraska, congressional district.

If Clinton can keep open as many routes to victory, she will make it difficult for Trump to chart a way to 270. That will make it hard for him to convince fellow Republicans who are worried about maintaining their congressional majorities that he can win.

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EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED

Clinton's campaign is bracing itself for some type of 'October surprise"  an unexpected event that requires the nominee to adjust in the pressure-cooker of the campaign's final days.

Clinton must be able to deftly deal with such a development, and there are plenty of contenders on the horizon.

The State Department is expected to release some of the 15,000 emails from Clinton's time there that have yet to be made publicly available.

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WikiLeaks has threatened to release more damaging information before the end of the election.

She'll need to make sure any new revelations don't further damage the public's view of Clinton, which isn't particularly strong for a candidate seen as ahead on Labor Day.

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TURNOUT, TURNOUT, TURNOUT

Clinton's campaign needs to maximize voter turnout among members of the "Obama coalition"  the legions of black, Latino, unmarried women and young voters who powered him to two decisive victories.

Trump has sought in recent days to turn around his dismal standing among minorities. But the negative tone of the campaign could dampen turnout and make Clinton's task more difficult.

Clinton also aims to make the most of early voting in a number of critical states, replicating a strategy that worked well for Obama.

She will have plenty of help: Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are hitting the road on her behalf and she can also rely on her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

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TRUSTWORTHINESS

Questions about Clinton's honesty and trustworthiness have dogged her throughout the campaign and she can ill afford to have more voters view her in a negative way.

Her saving grace during the campaign has been Trump's high negative ratings, untrustworthiness and penchant for saying provocative things that have turned off many voters.

But more revelations about her private email server or the Clinton Foundation could reinforce the perception that she's not trustworthy.

On Friday, the FBI released notes from its investigation of her email use as secretary of state. It's the kind of day Clinton needs to avoid.

Even if she wins in November, this is a problem could haunt Clinton in the White House. That's why she needs to start chipping away at her trust deficit now, so that if elected, she will have some public goodwill as she tries to lead the nation and work with Congress.

Clinton could find it difficult to enact her agenda if questions about her honesty linger as president.

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Follow Ken Thomas and Catherine Lucey on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/kthomasDC and http://twitter.com/catherine_lucey
The Consumer Protection Council, CPC, says it is investigating Resort Savings and Loans Ltd., RSL, for alleged diversion of consumers funds.

This is contained in a statement issued by the Head, Public Relations of the Council, Abiodun Obimuyiwa, on Sunday in Abuja.

According to the statement, the Primary Mortgage Bank is to be investigated due to complaints by consumers bordering on alleged diversion of mortgage loans and consumers deposits.

The News Agency of Nigeria reports that RSL is licensed by the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, to undertake mortgage businesses. It is also registered with the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria, FMBN.

The statement said the CPC had communicated details of the complaints from the aggrieved depositors and mortgage contributors to RSL for full response.

It stated that failure of the company to respond appropriately had placed the option of prosecution of the firms principal officers before it.

CPC has already appraised the sector regulator, CBN and FMBN of the allegations against the company.

Some of the allegations against the company included its failure to pay back deposits made by consumers, even after the agreed tenure was over, it said.

In addition, the statement said that RSL allegedly diverted loans disbursed to mortgage beneficiaries by FMBN and gave incorrect information to consumers about their applications for National Housing Fund.

It said one of the complaints against the mortgage company was on behalf of a group of nine beneficiaries of FMBN Batch 54 loans.

It alleged that RSL in 2014 received N149.3 million on behalf of 14 beneficiaries, including the nine and that RSL failed to disburse the loans to the developers of the said beneficiaries.

The nine complainants alleged that five of the 14 in the said batch 54, who are staff of Independent Corrupt Practices Commission brought in the Commission to intervene on their behalf.

The Commission thereby forced the mortgage company to disburse N47.25 million due to the five, leaving N102.1 million undisbursed to the developers of the remaining nine, the statement stated.

It further stated that the action of the primary mortgage company not to disburse their loans led to the revocation of their letters of allocation by their developers.

It stated that other complaints bordered on default in paying back deposits to depositors and failure to refund equity contributions of disappointed mortgage applicants.

This made the total worth of the claims against the company on the alleged diversion mortgagors funds and default in refund of consumers deposits to amount to N128,323,603.64, the statement said.

Commenting on the development, the statement said that CPCs Director-General, Mrs Dupe Atoki, said the Council was determined to investigate the operations of the company.

CPC will also engage in other legal steps in line with its enabling law with a view to protecting the consumers of the services of the primary mortgage company, the statement quoted Atoki as saying.

(NAN)
Two months after deploying more combat aircraft to the Niger Delta, the Nigerian Air Force has said it is set to deploy more personnel to the troubled region.

The new deployments occur despite a unilateral ceasefire by a major militant group in the region, the Niger Delta Avengers. The group, responsible for most of the attacks on oil and gas facilities in the region in the past year, two weeks ago expressed its willingness for conditional dialogue.

Sundays announcement by the Air Force also occurs one week after President Muhammadu Buhari threatened to deal with the Avengers like the government is currently dealing militarily with the Boko Haram terror group in North-eastern Nigeria.

The new Air Force deployment was announced by the Chief of Air Staff , Air Marshal Sadique Abubakar, on Sunday, according to a statement by the Air Force spokesperson, Ayodele Famuyiwa.

Mr. Famuyiwa said the new deployments was part of the resolve to combat militancy and other forms of internal security challenges in the region.

He said Mr. Abubakar disclosed this in Yenagoa during his visit to NAF Mobility Command.

The planned deployment is aimed at strengthening the existing NAF manpower disposition, especially in Bayelsa and to enhance Nigerian Air Force (NAF) involvement in `Operation Delta Safe, Mr. Abubakar was quoted as saying by the spokesperson.

Preparatory to this deployment, new facilities were recently put in place to cater for accommodation and other welfare needs of the personnel.

These include the construction of new blocks of accommodation for officers and men, office accommodation, airmens mess and provost squadron which were commissioned recently.

According to the statement, two of the airmens blocks of accommodation have been named after Cpl. Omaka V.I. and Aircraftman Ofonih E.F., both of whom were killed in Bosso, Niger, during an Internal Security Operation.

Retired Air Vice Marshall Larry Koinyan commissioned the newly-constructed projects as the guest of honour.

The Air Force deployment follows similar ones by the Army and the Navy to quell the militancy in the region which reduced the countrys oil production by half and also damaged power infrastructure.

In his remarks on Sunday, Mr. Koinyan applauded the Air Force personnel for their courage and successes following their renewed vigour at ensuring peace and stability in the various theatres of operations in the country.

He, however, called on the people of Bayelsa to support the Federal Governments effort at solving the problems of the region once and for all.

Earlier, Mr. Abubakar paid a courtesy call on Governor Henry Dickson of Bayelsa, who gave assurance that his administration was ready to partner NAF and other security agencies in their bid to rid the state of criminal activities.

Mr. Dickson said it had become necessary because Bayelsa government understood the importance of security and the need for the state to be safe for economic prosperity.

He also promised that his government would partner the service to build Air Force primary and secondary schools in the state to enable Bayelsa residents benefit from the quality education provided by such schools.

The governor noted that the discipline and re-orientation of the youth in the state would further be enhanced at the Air Force base in Yenagoa where the schools would be sited.

(NAN)
While the All Progressives Congress-led federal government has made the anti-corruption war a priority, the conduct of the partys members in Ondo shows a lot still needs to be done to sensitise Nigerians on the malaise.

The way money was shared by aspirants and their agents to the hundreds of delegates at the venue of the congress, a common scenario in Nigerian polity, arguably demonstrates the endemic corruption in the nations political system.

One of the 24 governorship aspirants of the party, Tunji Ariyomo, believes corruption is systemic and not necessarily the character of the average Nigerian.

Mr. Ariyomo said the buying of votes in the Nigerian political system will continue regardless of which political party is in power. He said the corruption will continue as long as the present electoral system, where delegates and not the people choose their representatives, continues.

He argued that the only way President Muhammadu Buhari can build on the electoral reforms of the past administration is to abolish the delegates system and adopt the open system of primaries where citizens can have the opportunity to choose their candidates.

Mr. Ariyomo lamented the situation where the delegates were virtually camped away by some contenders making it difficult for other competitors to woo them legitimately.

The primary election here appears transparent as you can see, but the process needs to be changed so that the people can decide, rather than use the delegates system, he said.

According to him, he did not spend any money on any delegate as that would contradict his belief on an equitable process.

There is yet to be an equitable process, even though everyone seems to be on an equal platform, the aspirant said.

Other aspirants spoke on how the primary helped some delegates make money off different candidates.

PREMIUM TIMES gathered that some major aspirants gave delegates between N150,000 and N200,000 to secure their votes.

Other less wealthy aspirants gave between N25,000 and N100,000 to each delegate.

The only female aspirant, Jumoke Ajasin Anifowose, said she was not prepared to pay money for votes, as it appeared the highest bidder would win the day.

I did not pay money to anybody,  she said.

Some delegates, who confirmed how much they were given, spoke on how they were treated.

According to them, each aspirant brought his loyal delegates into Akure and lodged them in a hotel beyond the reach of rivals. The aspirant then ensured that none of them went out until the morning of accreditation and voting.

We were lodged in the hotel by our aspirant. And if you lodge in the hotel you will be given money,  a delegate from Owo, who did not want his name mentioned, said.

He said he was given N100, 000 by his preferred candidate before he cast his vote.

Another delegate, who only provided his first name as Fatai, said he only got N20,000 as pocket money, from his candidate.

What I got was N20,000 and it was given to me as pocket money, Fatai said.

I voted for the aspirant because I love him and not because of money.

The primary election was conducted by the Governor of Jigawa State, Mohammed Abubakar, who pledged to uphold fairness and transparency during the exercise.

About 2774 delegates were accredited for the election from the three senatorial districts of the state.

Rotimi Ogunleye, a media aide to Olusola Oke, one of the front runners in the primaries, said cash was not the determining factor in the support and votes garnered by his boss.

He admitted that money was spent, but noted that it was not about the cash.

While I do not rule out the fact that running a political structure requires money, especially issues of logistics; political support is not based on cash, he said.

It is about coagulating interest, creating and sustaining relationship. It is not about cash.

PREMIUM TIMES learnt that some aspirants made double payments after the delegates list was amended on the night before the election.

According to a source within the party, some of the aspirants had to recharge their barrels to chase the new delegates who were later included in the list.

That means spending additional funds, he said. You can imagine after giving out N100million, what are you going to do when the list of delegates was suddenly changed and you did not have access to it until about 10 p.m. on Friday.

But speaking on the development, the Publicity Secretary of the APC in Ondo, Omooba Adesanya, said giving money to delegates was a form of allowance and not necessarily bribery or buying of votes.

He said the delegates left their homes for two days or more and should be properly taken care of or the aspirants would not be fair to them.

Mr. Adesanya, who was also a delegate at the primary, noted that the funds were privately sourced and not from public funds, and so could not be described as corruption.

The delegates deserve some form of allowances for bringing them out from their homes and comfort to Akure for two days, he argued.

Even government officials, governors and other persons, including the security agencies that participated in the primaries received some form of allowances. So I dont see any problem with the aspirants providing allowances for the delegates.

What they got is not outrageous because some of them came from very far away. Some from the creeks and riverine areas; so it is not out of place to ensure that they were taken care of.

Mr. Adesanya said the election, which eventually produced a lawyer, Rotimi Akeredolu, as winner and APC candidate, was peaceful, credible and transparent.

He said all the aspirants would come together to ensure the party emerged victorious in November.
The Lagos State Government on Saturday said it carried out a demolition of some properties in Ikoyi during the week because they were causing environmental nuisance, traffic snarls and more importantly a security threat to the neighbourhood.

A statement by the Commissioner for Information, Steve Ayorinde, said the state would intensify efforts to destroy buildings erected without compliance with construction regulations.

This is an exercise in progress; it is an on-going operation to sanitise the environment, Mr. Ayorinde said. We have also developed strategies to prevent re-occurrences of illegal developments and for the sustenance of a cleaner Lagos.

Mr. Ayorinde said those whose properties were demolished were notified ahead of the exercise on Thursday.

We have documentary evidence of service of all statutory notices, the buildings were also marked with the X red oxide to also call the attention of the owners to physical planning contraventions, Mr. Ayorinde said.

The state government was responding to criticism that ensued after images of the destruction were circulated on social media Thursday afternoon.

Nuli Juice, a fruit juice and meals cafe at 8, Rumens Road, was affected by the demolition. It received sympathies on social media after its owners condemned authorities for not issuing a prior notice.

How do you show up at 8.30 a.m. with bulldozers and armed police to terrorise shop owners, and then proceed to level their stores and property to the ground with no prior notice? Ada Osakwe, Nuli Juice founder, said in a post on Twitter. Even squatters have rights.

But Mr. Ayorinde said the owner of the property and the tenants were served months back.

The demolished building on Rumens Road, Ikoyi was properly served contravention and quit order since March. Both the landlord and tenants, Mr. Ayorinde said in a separate post on Twitter Saturday.

But Ms. Osakwe told PREMIUM TIMES Saturday afternoon that the first time tenants were aware of the planned demolition was when it was taking place.

Ms. Osakwe said there were six businesses occupying the building when the earth moving equipment arrived to tear it down.

None of the six tenants received any form of notice, warning and/or advice from LASG, contrary to what Mr. Ayorinde stated on Twitter today, Ms. Osakwe said.

Ms. Osakwe said Nuli Juice and other businesses were not allowed to evacuate before the demolition commenced.

When PREMIUM TIMES put this question to Mr. Ayorinde, he sent one of his surrogates to respond.

Shina Odunuga, who identified himself as a Public Relations Officer in the Ministry of Information, said the tenants werent allowed to evacuate because they were served months ago and acknowledgement copies signed.

Mr. Odunuga said he would email the proof to PREMIUM TIMES on Monday, including photo evidence showing the properties were marked for demolition.

Akinwunmi Ambode, the state governor, was faulted on social media for authorising the destruction of small businesses at a time the country was grappling with economic recession.
A former Chairman of House Committee on Appropriation, Abuldulmumin Jibrin, on Sunday said he had identified solutions that are crucial in tackling individual and systemic corruption in the House.

Mr. Jibrin, in a statement to PREMIUM TIMES, said the solutions struck him while he was suggesting ideas on how to end budget fraud in the National Assembly to members of the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption Wednesday.

First on the list of Mr. Jibrins recommendations was the implementation of new guidelines for budget process that must be grounded in transparency and probity.

The most important reform here is to ensure that budget estimates and details are returned to the floor of the House at the same time for passage, Mr. Jibrin said. This will check the fraudulent insertions by some standing Committee Chairmen and Principal Officers in the process of budget passage.

It is such gap that allowed Speaker Dogara, Lasun, Doguwa, Ogor and few other committee Chairmen to perpetrate such monumental fraud in the 2016 budget.

To address abuse in the exercise of its appropriation powers, the House must ensure that its budget is circulated to members and made public so that Nigerians can see the expenditure of lawmakers.

The running cost of members must be adjusted to a reasonable amount and made public but, most importantly, the administration of the running cost must not be exposed to abuses as presently obtained.

If these measures are carried out, we will not see such secrecy in running cost and monumental fraud in the management of the finances of the House.

Mr. Jibrin said the National Assembly could become transparent and efficient if it implements mechanisms that are compliant with the modern era.

On the issue of lack of transparency in the affairs of the House, every Member of the House of Representatives who loves this country must embrace the concept of open House. If we must tell ourselves the truth, the House operates as if it has so much to hide. And indeed it does have!

The House must move quickly to implement e-Parliament to include a very functional website that can help track members activities, sitting attendance, movement of bills and motions, voting pattern on issues.

There is also the need to activate the House intercom system so that our constituents can call a member straight on his office desk! I am aware many NGOs have offered to build some of these platforms free of charge but the House has refused to accept, Mr. Jibrin said.

Mr. Jibrin said he told the anti-graft panel to compel Speaker Yakubu Dogara to refund the N40 billion proceeds of fraudulent manipulation of the 2016 budget, saying the funds could make impact at this period.

I have also offered to help remedy some of the fraud committed by Speaker Dogara and others in the 2016 budget. I have suggested that the N40 billion stolen can be returned so that it can be equitably distributed to all constituencies, Mr. Jibrin said.
Samuel Asuquo, an alleged ringleader of a syndicate responsible for the abduction of three Australians, has been arrested, the State Security Service said Sunday.

Mr. Asuquo was arrested in Nasarawa Bakoko Village in southern Nigerian state of Cross River on August 22, the SSS said in a statement signed by its spokesman, Tony Opuiyo.

The three Australians were abducted on June 22 from a worksite while working for Lafarge Cement Company near Calabar, the state capital. The police said their driver was fatally shot.

The expatriates, said to be miners, regained freedom on June 26 after their employer paid a ransom of N150 million, the SSS said.

Similarly, three members of a kidnap gang said to have terrorised travellers along Abuja-Kaduna Highway for a long time were arrested by operatives on August 30th in Lafia, Nasarawa State.

The suspects included Bamaiyi Mustapha, Aminu Isa and Hasan Shehu and they were said to have recently kidnapped five women and collected about 13 million as ransom.

Mr. Opuiyo said the three were apprehended while plotting a high-profile kidnap in Abuja.

During a joint-operation with the Nigerian Army in Kano State, the SSS said two suspected Boko Haram elements were arrested for terrorism.

Ibrahim Abubakar and Idris Audu, whom SSS said are experts in manufacturing improvised explosive devices, were arrested while planning to gain admission into the Nigerian Army as a recruit.

The SSS further stated that two suspected impersonators, Taiye Alade and Ajoke Kolawole, were arrested in Ado-Ekiti, the Ekiti State capital, on August 28 at a hotel in the city after cloning the phone number of the Group Managing Director of the NNPC to perpetrate criminal acts.

The SSS did not clarify if the cloned number belonged to the new GMD of NNPC that was appointed by President Buhari in June or his predecessor, Ibe Kachikwu.

Mr. Opuiyo, therefore, assured all law abiding citizens and residents that the SSS will not rest on its oars in its determination to ensure a safe environment for all to carry out their legitimate business while calling on members of the public to support this effort by providing useful information to security agencies.
Two pan-Yoruba organizations, Development Agenda for Western Nigeria, DAWN, and Afenifere Renewal Group, ARG, have called on the police in Ekiti to cooperate with the state government to execute its grazing regulation law.

The law, Prohibition of Cattle and Other Ruminants Grazing in Ekiti, 2016, was passed by the State House of Assembly last week.

The law followed the killing of two persons in Oke Ako, Ikole Local Government Area, in May by suspected herdsmen, Governor Ayodele Fayose said while assenting to the bill last Monday.

Grazing activities must be from 7am to 6pm on daily basis, the Speaker of the Ekiti House of Assembly, Kolawole Ogunwole said. The government shall allot certain portion of land to each local governments for grazing.

Any herdsman caught with firearms and any weapons whatsoever during grazing shall be charged with terrorism, the Speaker added.

But there is concern over execution of the law since, in Nigerias federalism, states do not have autonomous police institutions. Also, there is an extant federal law on terrorism which does not include carrying firearms and any weapons whatsoever during grazing as an offence.

The state police command, through its spokesperson, Albert Adeyemi, told PREMIUM TIMES that it has no knowledge of the new law officially.

Speaking with PREMIUM TIMES, the ARG spokesperson, Kunle Famoriyo, said, Once the law has been promulgated, it becomes imperative for the police to execute the law.

Although the police is controlled by the federal government, Mr. Famoriyo noted, it is managed by states through funding and other things.

Apart from ammunition and uniform, states support the police with all other things including logistics, he added.

Therefore, they have to cooperate with state government to execute the law.

Similarly, DAWNS Director, Dipo Famakinwa, said a working mechanism should be devised by the state and the police for the implementation of the law.

The mechanism for execution should be worked out between the Ekiti State government and the federal authorities, he said.

The law is what I will describe as signalling, he said. It is to say listen this is not be acceptable here. Statement has been made.

On the possibility of non-enforcement by the police, Governor Fayoses spokesperson, Lere Olayinka, said there is no concern.

He said, after passing the law, the government would in days take steps towards its implementation. He added that during the security meeting, the police will be officially informed.

As part of implementation steps, he said, land allocation for grazing across the local government areas would begin in the coming days.

Timid Southern Governors

Both DAWN and ARG expressed support for the law on the activities of herdsmen in Ekiti.

According to Mr. Famakinwa, herdsmen constitute social and economic problems for us in the south west because their activities are unchecked and unregulated, and I dont think its proper for anybody to leave his space open in that manner.

As a commission, we have asked our states to take steps to regulate the activities of herdsmen, he added.

On his part, Mr. Famoriyo said, What Fayose has done his correct.

He is the chief security officer of Ekiti State. And any law that he enacts to protect the interest of the state, is acceptable by us.

Its just that most of the states in the South are timid. Some states in the North too have what is equivalent to state police that comes under the guise of Islamic Hisba police. We dont have that in the South West.

He encouraged Southern states to promulgate laws that will establish security agencies to ensure protection and security of their people in their respective areas.

Thats federalism, he said.

He also asked the other state governors to enact laws with a view to regulating activities of herdsmen.
SORRENTO, Italy - When people think of Italy and romance, most think of the Tuscany region or Rome. But Sorrento and Capri remain for me among the top spots for lovers.

Why? This corner of Campania has a romantic sensibility to sway even the least sentimental visitor. In fact, I guarantee that within hours of your arrival, its playful ancient magic will make you reach for the hand of your loved one and maybe kiss her, too.

Here are some major ingredients of that magic:

 Lemons, lemons and more lemons: They hang from trees. Their images decorate plates. They are served with every meal.

Lemons also are used in the local liqueur, limoncello, which in my experience is an acquired taste.

 Glamorous views: Sorrento and

Capri (pronounced CAPree, not caPREE) boast some of the most gorgeous views in the world. Sorrento hugs the undulating Mediterranean coastline. On Capri, an island 20 minutes by ferry from Sorrento, the views are spectacular everywhere you look. The water is crystal clear and china blue.

 Shopping: Leather sandals, purses and bags are highlights. Sorrento also has world-famous marquetry (inlaid wood) tables and boxes. Lemony-themed souvenirs abound (a million stores have them, but I like the work at the Sea Gull in Capri Town). Sorrento and Capri both have many streets of shops with twinkling lights perfect for a romantic evening stroll.

 Winding streets: Nothing here is a straight line. In Sorrento, you take an elevator from street level down to beach level. In Capri, you take a funicular up from the port to Capri Town.

In both spots, ultra-narrow streets wind around blind corners and up and down hills to secret spots and views. Many of these winding streets and public squares, naturally, have charming outdoor restaurants and cafes.

 Fresh fish: I strolled past a fish shop on Capri to find I was being stared at - by a fish in the window. Fish here practically jump right out of the sea and onto your plate.

 Perched hotels: So many hotels in Sorrento and Capri (and their Amalfi Coast neighbors) are directly on the edge of the sea.

That is what has made these places vacation havens for everyone from ancient Greek sailors and Roman emperors to modern artists, writers, movie stars, celebrities and the hoi polloi.

The greatest hotel in the world can't compete with the view of these hotels. - Charming boats: Brightly painted wooden fishing boats mix with larger ferries and even larger cruise ships. Every view has scale, because many boats ply this area of the vast Mediterranean. Here, the sea feels more like a friendly lake instead of an impersonal ocean.

- The side trips: Nearby are the ruins of Pompeii, a sort of sexy historical place to visit. To the southeast are stunning tiny towns such as Positano, Ravello and Amalfi, where more romance awaits.

- Brilliant flowers: I was there in May, when roses were blooming their heads off and the air smelled sweet. Colors are vivid, whether it's the sagey green of rosemary or the petal of a deep red rose.

- It's Italy. I mean, come on, it's Italy. Yes, this country is a slightly jaded, world-weary, seen-it-all, sighing, emotional, spend-too-long-at-the-table kind of place. But it's got a good heart. So pack a bag, bring your lover and enjoy.
ATLANTIC CITY  An Atlantic City police officer who was shot early Saturday remained in critical condition Sunday afternoon, but is improving, state union delegate Keith Bennett said.

Were getting reports that its improving slightly and hes showing positive signs, which makes everybody extremely happy, said Bennett, of PBA Local 24. Were feeling positive. Were getting such great outpouring of support from everybody all over the state.

Atlantic City Mayor Don Guardian, at a storm-related news conference Sunday, thanked Atlantic County officials for their assistance after the shooting.

Our officer is doing remarkably well, he said.

The Atlantic City Police Department referred all inquiries to the Atlantic City Prosecutors Office, who did not have any updates on the investigation Sunday.

The officer, who remains unnamed, was injured when he and another officer exited their car while on duty to approach a group of suspects in a robbery near Caesars parking garage.

The incident occurred at 2:34 a.m. The second officer returned fire, hitting and killing one suspect, later identified as Jerome Damon, 25, of Camden. The six men ran in different directions. Damon was found 1.5 blocks away on Missouri and Pacific avenues, collapsed. An autopsy was scheduled for Damon on Sunday.

All five other men were eventually apprehended. Investigation showed three of the men involved Saturday were victims of a robbery, police said. They were interviewed and released.

The other two men were arrested by State Police on Saturday evening. Martel Chisholm, 29, of Millville, and Demetris Cross, 28, of Bridgeton, were taken to the Atlantic County jail.

They were charged with two counts of attempted murder, three counts of robbery, two counts of conspiracy to commit robbery, two counts of possession of a firearm for an unlawful purpose and two counts of conspiracy to commit possession of a firearm for an unlawful purpose.

The men and women of ACPBA are very appreciative of everybody that took part in the investigation process yesterday, Bennett said. It was truly amazing to see everybody coming and working together.

Two Cumberland County men arrested in Atlantic City police officer shooting Two men allegedly involved in the shooting of an Atlantic City police officer arrested Saturday.

Acting Atlantic County Prosecutor Diane Ruberton said the charges were the result of an unprecedented effort by law enforcement from local, county, state and federal agencies.

The Atlantic County Prosecutors Office along with the Atlantic City Police Department, the New Jersey State Police, the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General, the Atlantic City Task Force, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and law enforcement partners in Cumberland County, coordinated investigative efforts with assistance from the public to locate and apprehend the suspects, she said.

In a statement Sunday, Guardian said, I cannot even begin to thank everyone who has offered their support to our police department over the past couple of days. It has been overwhelming. I was on scene shortly after the incident happened, and by daybreak we had hundreds of law enforcement personnel from around the state here in Atlantic City offering to do whatever they could to help.

I am so proud of our police department and how our officers continue to serve the public with true professionalism and dedication. Our thoughts and prayers are with the officer who was wounded, and also all other police officers who put their lives on the line on a daily basis to keep our communities safe. They are truly heroes among us. And if you ever have an opportunity, please make sure you try to thank a police officer for their service to your community.

The New Jersey COP SHOT Program has posted a reward $20,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the suspects responsible for shooting the officer.

Anyone with information on this incident is urged to call the Prosecutors Office Major Crimes Unit at 609-909-7666, Crime Stoppers at 800-658-TIPS (8477), the anonymous and confidential tip line at 69-652-1234, or text TIPCOP plus your tip to 274637. All text tips are anonymous.

Staff Writer Hanna Schweder contributed to this report.

The original version of this story incorrectly stated the age of Martel Chisholm due to incorrect information provided by the Atlantic County Prosecutor's office.

Contact: 609-272-7251
Man, consumer of Earth

We relentlessly waste resources. The consuming role is that of champion of flesh on flour, where death on bread takes center stage. The bold but overcompensating wanna-be carnivore is leading man, whose advances disarm every earthly defense.

An unnatural predator fancying himself on top, he names his chariots Cougar, Tiburon and Jaguar, but remains physically limited by tiny canines, molars, a long digestive track and weak stomach acids. Nonetheless rewarding himself for slaying domestic dragons - chickens, pigs and cattle - with symbols of prestige, prowess and power in ever sexier chassis of icons of intentionally stalled progress, the combustion fossil fuel engine, luxuriously dressed in designer bells and whistles.

Like a dizzy and dumb hormone driven adolescent, each generation compelled to multiply, consume, contaminate, compromise and ultimately destroy its host.

The status quo reaps the profits. Still I believe in the promise of reason. But we must first be willing to abandon mythologies. The Middle Ages saw God and the sun revolve around them, outraged by Galileo's proof of Copernicus' claim that the Earth revolves around the sun.

Today's stumbling block? We continue to see Earth as a commodity. As screenwriter Ted Perry wrote for the Chief Seattle character in a 1972 film, "The Earth does not belong to man - man belongs to the Earth.  Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. What he does to the web, he does to himself."

Steven Mento

Ventnor

Change economic policies

Democrats who want a continuation of President Barack Obama's economic policies should think about the following.

General Motors has spent 30 years moving its factories out of the United States, claiming they can't make money paying the taxes and wages to operate at a profit.

Toyota has spent 30 years building several plants inside the U.S.

The results are that Toyota racked up billions in profits and GM had billions in losses, not to mention the job losses for Americans.

John Gallagher

North Wildwood

N.J. needs more access to fishing places, not less

If Atlantic City gets its way, another prime fishing area will be lost. The jetties at the north end of the Boardwalk and Atlantic City inlet might be closed to fishing in the near future. While I don't fish the area, I know of several who don't have boats who do fish the area on a regular basis and it is a highly productive area.

New Jersey seems to be set on destroying fishing access, and destroying the inshore sand lumps that hold fish when migrating with beach replenishment projects.

The state gets a lot of tax money from fishermen yet it seems determined to destroy the recreational industry for those who enjoy fishing from jetties and the surf. If this continues, the industry will suffer significantly.

N.J. politicians need to wake up to the fact that recreational fishing is critical to coastal areas and the state should be building more access like Florida instead of eliminating access for fishermen.

Bill "Bucktail Willie" Shillingford

Swainton
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.




HATFIELD, England, September 4, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

FOR EMEA MEDIA ONLY: NOT FOR SWISS/AUSTRIAN JOURNALISTS

Assessment ignores unprecedented overall survival benefit for eribulin in advanced liposarcoma[1]

The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) has published a report which suggests that on formal or methodological grounds, respectively, no additional benefit has been proven for Halaven (eribulin) versus established comparator therapies - as defined by the Federal Joint Committee (G-BA) - for the treatment of unresectable advanced or metastatic liposarcomas.[2] The dossier submitted by Eisai for the assessment included a direct comparison to dacarbazine (based on Eisai's phase III study 309) as well as an indirect comparison to trabectedin. With its suggestion, IQWiG ignores pivotal phase III data which demonstrated clearly that eribulin is the first and only single agent therapy to show a statistically significant overall survival advantage in advanced liposarcoma.[1]

"Eribulin has demonstrated a statistically significant survival advantage over dacarbazine in the treatment of advanced liposarcoma. This is a very rare and difficult to treat type of soft tissue sarcoma for which treatment options are few and existing therapies are associated with only limited efficacy. The clinical importance of this unprecedented survival benefit cannot be overstated for people who live with advanced liposarcoma and urgently need new and effective treatment options, such as eribulin," comments Dr. Helga Schmitz, Medical Director, Eisai GmbH.

The final decision on the additional benefit of eribulin lies with the G-BA and is expected for the end of December 2016, following due and balanced consideration of all relevant aspects of the IQWiG report, written statements and an oral hearing of experts and patient representatives.

In study 309, the pivotal phase III trial on which the indication approval was based, eribulin was the first and only single agent therapy to demonstrate a significant survival advantage in advanced liposarcoma.[1] Results from Study 309 showed that patients treated with eribulin compared to those treated with dacarbazine, a longstanding established and internationally accepted treatment option, benefitted from a median 7.2 month increase in overall survival for the pre-specified subgroup of patients with unresectable advanced or metastatic liposarcoma (15.6 months versus 8.4 months, HR = 0.511; 95% CI 0.346-0.753; P=0.0006).[1] [3] In this study, the most common adverse events observed in the eribulin arm were neutropenia, fatigue, nausea, alopecia and constipation, which is consistent with the known safety profile of eribulin. The most common adverse events observed in the dacarbazine arm were nausea, fatigue, anemia, thrombocytopenia and constipation.[1]

Soft tissue sarcomas develop from cells in essential tissues within the body such as fat, muscle, nerves, fibrous tissues and blood.[4],[5] Liposarcomas (adipocytic sarcomas) originate in fat cells and can occur anywhere in the body.[5]Comprising approximately 17% of all cases of soft tissue sarcomas, liposarcomas represent the most common subtype.[6],[7] Sarcomas represent about 1% of all cancers diagnosed in Europe.[5] Approximately 3,000 people in Germany are diagnosed with soft tissue sarcomas each year.[8]

"Eisai cannot understand the suggestion of the IQWiG that no additional benefit has been proven for eribulin, despite compelling phase III data which show an overall survival benefit. We are hopeful that, notwithstanding the report by IQWIG, the G-BA will take a more informed view," comments Dr. Patrik Holler, Director Oncology Business Group, Eisai GmbH.

In May 2016, the European Commission approved a variation to the terms of the Marketing Authorisation (MA) of eribulin for the treatment of adult patients with unresectable liposarcomas who have received prior anthracycline containing therapy (unless unsuitable) for advanced or metastatic disease.

Eribulin is also licensed in Europe for the treatment of patients with locally advanced or metastatic breast cancer who have progressed after at least one chemotherapeutic regimen for advanced disease. Prior therapy should have included an anthracycline and a taxane in either the adjuvant or metastatic setting, unless patients were not suitable for these treatments.[9]

Eisai is dedicated to the discovery, development and production of innovative oncology therapies that can make a difference and impact the lives of patients and their families. This passion for people is part of Eisai's human health care (hhc) mission, which strives to better understand the needs of patients and their families to increase the benefits health care provides.

Notes to Editors

Halaven (eribulin)

Eribulin is the first in the halichondrin class of microtubule dynamics inhibitors with a novel mechanism of action. Structurally eribulin is a simplified and synthetically produced version of halichondrin B, a natural product isolated from the marine sponge Halichondria okadai. Eribulin is believed to work by inhibiting the growth phase of microtubule dynamics which prevents cell division.

About Soft Tissue Sarcomas

Soft tissue sarcoma is a collective term for a diverse group of malignant tumours.

Unlike other cancers such as non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), soft tissue sarcomas are mostly diagnosed with localised disease, and many are amenable to complete surgical removal, yet relapse rates can be as high as 50 percent.[10]Outcomes for patients with advanced disease are poor, with median survival around one year or less. Due to the rarity of these tumours, evidence for prognostic factors is weak and not well understood.[11]

Global Phase III Clinical Study 309[1]

The primary endpoint of the study was to compare overall survival between patients treated with eribulin mesilate (1.4 mg/m intravenously on days 1 and 8) and those treated with dacarbazine (850 mg/m, 1000 mg/m, or 1200 mg/m [dose dependent on centre and clinician] intravenously on day 1). The additional endpoints included progression free survival and quality of life.

Patients were aged 18 years with advanced high/intermediate grade leiomyosarcoma or dedifferentiated, myxoid, round cell or pleomorphic variants of adipocytic sarcoma incurable by surgery and/or radiotherapy were enrolled. Patients had ECOG status 2 and had received 2 standard systemic treatment regimens including an anthracycline. Patients were randomized 1:1 and received eribulin mesilate (1.4 mg/m2, IV on D1 and D8) or dacarbazine (850-1200 mg/m2, IV on D1) every 21 days until disease progression.

Overall, 452 patients (67% female; 79% <65 years) were randomized (228 eribulin; 224 dacarbazine). Median OS for eribulin and dacarbazine was 13.5 and 11.5 months, respectively (HR=0.768, 95% CI 0.618-0.954; P=0.017). PFS was 2.6 months in both arms (HR=0.877, 95% CI 0.710-1.085; P=0.229). PFS rate at week 12 was 33% and 29% for eribulin and dacarbazine, respectively. Eribulin had a toxicity profile consistent with prior experience, with no unexpected or new safety findings. In this study, the most common adverse events observed in the eribulin arm were neutropenia, fatigue, nausea, alopecia and constipation, which is consistent with the known profile of eribulin.

Eisai in Oncology

Our commitment to meaningful progress in oncology research, built on scientific expertise, is supported by a global capability to conduct discovery and preclinical research, and develop small molecules, therapeutic vaccines, and biologic and supportive care agents for cancer across multiple indications.

About Eisai Co., Ltd.

Eisai Co., Ltd. is a leading global research and development-based pharmaceutical company headquartered in Japan. We define our corporate mission as "giving first thought to patients and their families and to increasing the benefits health care provides," which we call our human health care (hhc) philosophy. With over 10,000 employees working across our global network of R&D facilities, manufacturing sites and marketing subsidiaries, we strive to realise our hhcphilosophy by delivering innovative products in multiple therapeutic areas with high unmet medical needs, including Oncology and Neurology.

As a global pharmaceutical company, our mission extends to patients around the world through our investment and participation in partnership-based initiatives to improve access to medicines in developing and emerging countries.

For more information about Eisai Co., Ltd., please visit http://www.eisai.com.

References

1. Schoffski P et al. Eribulin versus dacarbazine in previously treated patients with advanced liposarcoma or leiomyosarcoma: a randomised, open-label, multicentre, phase 3 trial. The Lancet. 2016

2. IQWiG Assessment Report. Available at: https://www.iqwig.de/download/A16-31_Eribulin_Kurzfassung_Nutzenbewertung-35a-SGB-V.pdf Accessed September 2016

3. Chawla S, et al. Subtype specific activity in liposarcoma (LPS) patients (pts) from a phase 3, open label, randomised study of eribulin (ERI) versus dacarbazine (DTIC) in patients with advanced LPS and leiomyosarcoma (LMS). American Society for Clinical Oncology annual meeting 2016; Abstract # 11037

4. Macmillan. What are soft tissue sarcomas? Available at: http://www.macmillan.org.uk/Cancerinformation/Cancertypes/Softtissuesarcomas/Aboutsofttissuesarcomas/Softtissuesarcomas.aspx . Accessed: November 2015

5. ESMO Guidance. Available at: http://annonc.oxfordjournals.org/content/25/suppl_3/iii102.full.pdf+html Accessed: November 2015

6. Schwartz RA. Liposarcoma. Medscape. 2013. Available at: http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1102007-overview ; Accessed April 2016

7. Howlader N, Noone AM, Krapcho M, Miller D, Bishop K, Altekruse SF, Kosary CL, Yu M, Ruhl J, Tatalovich Z, Mariotto A, Lewis DR, Chen HS, Feuer EJ, Cronin KA (eds). SEER Cancer Statistics Review, 1975-2013, National Cancer Institute. Bethesda, MD, http://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2013/ , based on November 2015 SEER data submission, posted to the SEER web site, April 2016

8. Robert Koch Institute, Krebs in Deutschland 2012. 70-73

9. SPC Halaven (updated August 2016). Available at: http://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/medicine/24382 Accessed: August 2016

10. R Pollock. Soft Tissue Sarcomas, A Volume in the American Cancer Society Atlas of Clinical Oncology Series. 2012

11. Fletcher, et al. World Health Organization Classification of Tumours of Soft Tissue and Bone (4th Edition). Lyon: IARC Press, 2013

Date of preparation: September 2016

Job code: Corporate-UK2045

SOURCE Eisai
BEIJING, Sept. 4, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- September 4, 2016 in Hangzhou, China, at the G20 Summit, G20 economic leaders received a policy paper specifically citing the contributions of leading B2B focused cross-border e-commerce firm DHgate.com, to the success of small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs), as evidence of the profound impact that capacity building and internet financing mechanisms really have on SME success in the global marketplace.

DHfinet

DHgate.com was recognized for their internet finance branch DHfinet, which supplies e-commerce micro-loans to small-and-medium enterprises so they can scale up their businesses. The unique part of DHgate.com's service is that, after receiving customer authorization, DHgate.com supplies partner financial institutions with big data generated on DHgate.com, to that they can analyze it and determine risk, in order to administer micro loans to SMEs with no collateral or guarantor on the part of the SME.

To accomplish this process of providing micro loans based on big data, the SMEs applying for the loans must have already conducted business on the cross border e-commerce platform, which generates a tremendous amount of data. The data generated is not just limited to transaction history; buyer feedback, logistics data, and inventory data are all factored into risk assessment.

APEC CBET

The APEC CBET program is a worldwide recognized cross-border e-commerce capacity building program for SMEs supported by DHgate.com, which was also included in the policy paper. CBET stands for Cross-Border E-commerce Training, and aims to convey industry knowledge and insights to global SMEs, to enable them to capture rising business opportunities, and to transform and upgrade their businesses to a whole new level. After 3 years of development, the CBET offline workshop has realized capacity building for thousands of SMEs from over 20 APEC economies, and also has an eLearning program under development.

About DHgate.com

DHgate.com is the first to market and the biggest transactional cross-border B2B e-commerce marketplace in China, aiming to provide global buyers with quality products at competitive prices. Founded in 2004, DHgate.com has approximately 12 million global buyers from 230 countries and regions, with 1.4 million global sellers offering 40 million products. DHgate.com's business enables buyers to directly access global manufacturers of the world's top brands with rich product selections. DHgate.com is an all-in-one platform with integrated services for international logistics, cross-border payments, internet financing, etc. DHgate.com's US, UK, Spain, and UAE product distribution warehouses allow for 24 hour delivery and convenient product returns & refunds, bringing great convenience to buyers at http://www.dhgate.com.

SOURCE DHgate.com

Related Links

http://www.dhgate.com


PARIS, Sept. 3, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Iranian opposition's call for justice for victims of Iran's 1988 massacre of political prisoners received a boost on Saturday from U.S. and European dignitaries.

In a seminar of Iranian communities in Europe on September 3, 2016, Iranian opposition leader Maryam Rajavi called on the international community, and Western governments in particular, to bring to justice the Iranian regime's leaders in international tribunals for committing crimes against humanity in Iran, in particular the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in 1988.

The seminar was held in the headquarters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), in the northern suburbs of Paris.

The vast majority of the political prisoners who were executed in 1988 were affiliated to the main Iranian opposition group People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI or MEK).

Rajavi denounced Western silence and inaction in the face of continued mass executions in Iran.

"Standing up to the violations of human rights in Iran is also the responsibility of Western governments, because its consequences do not remain within Iran. The terrorism and fundamentalism emanating from it, have been hurting defenseless people in Nice, Paris, and Brussels," Rajavi said.

A number of relatives of the massacred prisoners and former political prisoners spoke about their bitter experiences and memories of this horrific catastrophe.

Last month an audio file emerged from 1988 of top Iranian officials acknowledging that the massacre took place. Hossein-Ali Montazeri, Khomeini's one-time heir, could be heard telling members of a "Death Commission" that they and the founder of the regime, Ayatollah Khomeini, will go down in the annals of history as criminals.

Edward Rendell, Chairman of the U.S. Democratic National Convention in July 2016 and former Governor of Pennsylvania, told the seminar: "What could be more galling than to hear that Iran's current Minister of Justice was a member of the Death Commission in 1988?"

"There is so much in common between what the MEK (PMOI) have fought for and what the original American patriots fought for. I was taken by Mr. Montazeri's comment on the tape that the MEK - or the PMOI - is a school of thought, it's a school of logic, and you can't end it by killing people. It's an ideal, and these people are standing up for an ideal," he said.

"There is only one way that freedom will come to the people of Iran, and that's with regime change," Gov. Rendell added.

Bernard Kouchner, former French Foreign Minister and co-founder of Doctors without Borders (MSF) said: "I ask myself what were the human rights defenders doing at that time?" He called for a "special tribunal to prosecute the mullahs for their crimes."

"The massacres did not take place only in 1988. Iran continues to have the highest execution rate per capita. The executions have even increased after the nuclear deal," Kouchner added.

Struan Stevenson, President of European Iraqi Freedom Association (EIFA) and former President of European Parliament Delegation for Relation with Iraq, said: "What has happened about the 30000 who were massacred in 1988? Nothing from the West at all. If the United Nations is to retain one ounce of credibility they must take this take this up at the UN Human Rights Council this month in Geneva. It must be a key item on the agenda. It must go before the UN Security Council. The perpetrators and murderers must be held to account; they must be brought to justice."

Tahar Boumedra, a former UN Human Rights Chief in Iraq, assessed that "it is possible to bring those who committed crimes against humanity, those who committed illegal, summary, arbitrary executions in Iran, to justice. We have all the means of doing so."

Referring to Mr. Montazeri's audio file on the 1988 massacre, Maryam Rajavi said: The recent revelation has provoked a wave of wrath, protest, query, and a movement to obtain justice, among the people of Iran. The mullahs are shaking as the regime and the principle of Velayat-e Faqih have been undermined among the Iranian public, while popular support for the Mojahedin has grown. At the same time, the regime has been cracked at numerous points and the majority of the regime's senior clerics have refrained from defending the anti-Islamic fatwa for the massacre.

Maryam Rajavi emphasized that demanding justice for the 30,000 victims of the 1988 massacre is part of the campaign to overthrow the Iranian regime. She called on the Iranian public to rise in support and solidarity to expand the movement.

SOURCE Iran News Update
ANDOVER, Mass. and LONDON, Sept. 4, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- ndd Medical Technologies, Inc. is holding a practical workshop on performing multi-breath nitrogen washout (MLB) testing to facilitate diagnosis of small airways diseases, this afternoon at the ERS International Congress 2016 in London, England. The workshop, on the utility of the Lung Clearance Index (LCI) in a standard clinical environment, will be led by Prof. Dr. Monika Gappa, Chief of Pediatrics at the Marien-Hospital in Wesel and twice voted among Germany's top doctors.

LCI is already used worldwide to monitor patients with cystic fibrosis (CF). The workshop aims to help physicians interested in introducing LCI to their practice.

Studies have found the LCI to be as good as high-resolution computed tomography (CT) and more sensitive than FEV1 in measuring changes in lung function. There can be significant changes in LCI without notable changes in FEV1, alerting physicians to the need for earlier intervention.

Research also shows that the LCI, derived from multiple-breath nitrogen washout tests, is useful with other respiratory diseases, including non-CF bronchiectasis. The test is easier to perform in children than conventional lung function testing.

ndd Medical's mobile EasyOne Pro LAB performs MBW, LCI testing anywhere

Multi-breath nitrogen washout testing is simplified with the mobile, ultrasound-based EasyOne Pro LAB, which in addition performs the full range of pulmonary function tests including DLCO and FEV1. The single breath diffusing capacity of the lungs (DLCO), measuring the ability of the lungs to transfer oxygen from inhaled air to the red blood cells in pulmonary capillaries, is considered to be one of the most clinically valuable tests of lung function.

Known for its accurate, reproducible results and ease of use, ndd Medical's point-of-service ultrasound technologyrequiring no calibration, no altitude adjustment, no maintenance and no disposables other than spirettes and bariettes--makes the EasyOne line of PFT devices ideal for researchers and clinicians.

"Our EasyOne Plus has achieved 40 percent market-leading share in spirometry for these reasons, and our EasyOne Pro and EasyOne Pro LAB make full PFT testing available wherever the patient isin the office, clinic, lab, hospital or at a mobile screening event," said Georg Harnoncourt, CEO of ndd Medical Technologies.

ndd Medical sponsors Leonard Nimoy (a.k.a. Mr. Spock) COPD documentary

The soon-to-be released documentary COPD: Highly Illogical about Leonard Nimoy's struggle with COPD and the benefits of early diagnosis is sponsored in part by ndd Medical. For more information about the film, and the latest in COPD detection technology, please visit ndd Medical's booth E.08 at ERS.

Best respiratory physiology abstract winner announced

The winner of the ERS Grant for Best Abstract in Paediatric Respiratory Physiology, sponsored by ndd Medical Technologies,is Andrea Crespo Sedano for her research on diagnosing of paediatric sleep apnea.

About ndd Medical Technologies, Inc.

With 40 percent of the U.S. spirometry market share, ndd Medical Technologies offers innovative, easy-to-use pulmonary function testing instruments that help clinicians diagnose lung disease with greater precision for optimal treatment. Its EasyOne and EasyOne Pro portable instruments take up just 12 inches of space to take lung function testing wherever it is needed, measuring DLCO, FRC, LCI and FVC. Ndd's patented Ultrasonic TrueFlow technology, which requires no calibration, eliminates problems associated with traditional methods of flow measurement, making testing fast, reliable and error free. To learn more, visit www.nddmed.com.

Please visit us at ERS Booth E.08

SOURCE ndd Medical Technologies, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.nddmed.com


B20 Summit is the crucial nexus for international business community to participate in global economic governance and international economic and trade regulation which supports the work of the G20 by hosting focused policy discussions and developing recommendations. As has been announced, this year's agenda will cover financial growth, trade and investment, infrastructure etc., which cohere the Theme of G20 which is "Innovative, Invigorated, Interconnected and Inclusive". Correspondently, it is the time for JUMORE to implement its strategy of serving as an ecological e-commerce platform for the real economy. Innovative-driven Growth is the key point of this year's G20/B20, thus in Eric Lu's point of view, the Cross-border E-commerce will be acting as a resource integrator to lead the innovative trends to enhance the resource integration and upgrades, supply-chain circulation and globalized developments.
Singapore, Sep 2 : Thirty-one new cases of Zika have been confirmed in Singapore, raising to 151 the number of persons infected by the mosquito-borne virus in the Southeast Asian city-state, the government said on Friday.

The new cases include a second pregnant woman in Singapore diagnosed with Zika. Like the first case, which was confirmed on Wednesday, the woman is living in the Sims Drive-Aljunied Crescent cluster, authorities said.

Three of the new victims, not linked to any existing infection clusters, live in Tagore Avenue, Yishun Street 81 and Harvey Crescent, the Ministry of Health (MOH) and National Environment Agency (NEA) said in a joint statement.

NEA said that vector control remains key to reducing the spread of the Zika virus. "NEA takes a systematic and holistic approach to arrest mosquito borne transmission in Singapore, through surveillance, prevention and control, outbreak management and outreach. The objective is to keep mosquito-borne disease incidence low through reducing the mosquito population and breaking the disease transmission chain."

This is similar to its approach to dengue cases, NEA said.

An additional five cases were detected as a result of MOH's look-back testing of previous cases. A total of 236 samples were taken, of which 52 tested positive, and 184 were negative.

Authorities are carrying out indoor spraying, misting and oiling, and daily misting of common areas to prevent breeding of mosquitoes. Two rounds of thermal fogging have been completed and another round is to be conducted this week.

As of Wednesday, 57 reported cases are among foreign construction workers, including 13 Indians, based in the residential Aljunied Crescent neighbourhood in Singapore were reported.

NEA added that its officers and grassroots volunteers have completed outreach efforts to distribute Zika information leaflets in the Aljunied Crescent/Sims Drive cluster, and have begun their outreach in the expanded cluster areas in Paya Lebar Way/Kallang Way.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on Thursday warned that Singapore "must assume Zika is elsewhere in (the country)" apart from Aljunied and Bedok, where the majority of cases so far have been, Channel News Asia reported.

On Thursday, Malaysia confirmed that its first Zika case was a woman who had travelled to Singapore.

The Zika virus is transmitted mainly by Aedes mosquitoes, and has been linked to microcephaly and other birth defects thus putting pregnant women at risk, according to the World Health Organization. The virus can also be spread through sexual transmission.
Hangzhou (China), Sep 3 : India's entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and its concern over the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) are expected to be raised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Hangzhou here on Sunday.

Though India is set to push for structural reforms to shore up the flagging global economy, poverty and green finance among others in the forum of the world's largest 20 economies, Modi will once again try to persuade Xi to back India for membership of the 48-member NSG -- an exclusive grouping that controls global nuclear trade.

In June, Modi had, during a meeting with Xi in Tashkent on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit, asked for China's backing for India's NSG membership.

But China, leading a group of 10 countries, blocked India's entry at the plenary of the NSG in Seoul in June, citing New Delhi's non-signatory status to the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty. Beijing has, however, been a keen backer of Islamabad's entry to the bloc.

Intransigent then, Beijing now looks amenable to India's admission into the elite grouping.

Modi is to reach Hangzhou, the capital and most populous city of Zhejiang Province in east China, on Saturday evening to attend the two-day summit that begins on Sunday.

Chinese experts hope the meeting between the two leaders would be "good".

"We are not against India's entry into the NSG. After the Chinese Foreign Minister's (Wang Yi) visit to India (in August), the two sides have agreed to establish a new channel to touch upon all these kind of issues," Hu Shisheng, director, Institute of South and Southeast Asian and Oceanian Studies at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, a government think tank, told IANS.

He was referring to the new "mechanism" between India and China under which Joint Secretary of Disarmament Division Amandeep Singh Gill and Ambassador Wang Qun, Director-General of the Arms Control Division of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, will discuss the NSG issue.

"It's because not to let these issues bother the top leaders (Modi and Xi). Earlier, they could not reach understanding because of lack of information. I hope the meeting would be good," he added.

Asked if China would be more open to India's admission to the NSG, Hu said: "Of course".

The change in Beijing's stance may also have to do with a UN court ruling on the South China Sea dispute in July. The rejection of Beijing's claims over the so-called Nine Dash line -- almost 90 per cent of the disputed South China Sea -- was a blow to China in its dispute with the Philippines, as also Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei. China has rejected The Hague Court's ruling.

India asking the "parties concerned to show utmost respect to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has sort of miffed China", which is worried about its image being sullied in the world.

It has been suggested that Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi's visit to India last month was to ensure that New Delhi does not raise the South China Sea issue at the G20, in a sort of quid pro quo deal -- which could see Beijing giving its backing for the NSG membership.

However, even if India keeps quiet on the issue, the US and Japan are highly likely to bring it up, much to the embarrassment of China which has said an emphatic no to "political discussion" at the G20.

The $46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is also likely to figure in the meeting between the two leaders.

India has strongly opposed the proposed economic corridor which will pass through Pakistan-held Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, which New Delhi claims as its own.

Modi's reference to the two regions, as well as Balochistan, in his Independence Day speech has Beijing worried. Beijing fears New Delhi's tacit support to the separatist sentiment in the region -- a charged levelled by Islamabad and denied by New Delhi -- may hit the already-delayed project.

Chinese experts have warned that China may come to Pakistan's aid if India creates trouble in these regions.

Besides, global structural reforms, inclusive growth and climate financing will be the major issues to be brought up by India at the summit.

"There will be emphasis on appealing to the countries to carry forward the commitment to the issue of climate change and climate change finance. There was a $100 billion commitment which has been made by developed countries -- that $100 billion is nowhere near sight. We would like to again stress the importance of developed nations making available that $100 billion," Shaktikanta Das, Economic Affairs Secretary told IANS earlier.

(Gaurav Sharma is the Beijing-based Correspondent for IANS. He can be contacted at sharmagaurav71@gmail.com, gauravians@yahoo.com)
New York, Sep 4 : World No.1 Serena Williams of the United States defeated Johanna Larsson of Sweden 6-2, 6-1 in the US Open third round here on Saturday, one step closer to winning the women's singles title for the seventh time at Flushing Meadows.

"It was a really good match for me because she played a different kind of match. It was really good for me to have a different type of rhythm and move the ball around," Xinhua news agency quoted Williams as saying of playing against Larsson.

Williams is now 3-0 all-time against Larsson and has yet to drop a set at this year's final Grand Slam. She also won her 307th match in a Grand Slam event to pass Martina Navratilova for the most ever in the Open era.

"That's pretty awesome. What better place to do it than here where it first started," Williams said of breaking Navratilova's record.
Hangzhou (China), Sep 4 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Chinese President Xi Jinping for a bilateral meeting here on Sunday ahead of the G20 Summit.

"First engagement in Hangzhou is a meeting with the host. PM @narendramodi meets President Xi Jinping," tweeted Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Vikas Swarup.

This is their second bilateral meeting after the two leaders met in June on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).
Hangzhou (China), Sep 4 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with the leaders of the other BRICS countries in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, in his second engagement of the day on Sunday.

"Building the BRICS within G-20! PM @narendramodi and the four other leaders for a special BRICS Meeting in Hangzhou," tweeted Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Vikas Swarup.

The BRICS nations comprise - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Modi had met Chinese President Xi Jinping in his first engagement of the day that began at 9.30 a.m..

The meeting of the BRICS Leaders here comes ahead of the summit of the five nations that will be held in Goa, India, in October. India is the host country this year.

BRICS comprise five major emerging economies, comprising 43 per cent of the world population, having 37 per cent of the world GDP and 17 per cent share in the world trade.

The meetings are being held on the sidelines of the G20 Summit that opens here later in the day.
Hangzhou (China), Sep 4 : Prime Minster Narendra Modi met Chinese President Xi Jinping for a bilateral meeting here on Sunday ahead of the G20 Summit.

"First engagement in Hangzhou is a meeting with the host. PM @narendramodi meets President Xi Jinping," tweeted Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Vikas Swarup.

This is their second bilateral meeting after the two leaders met in June on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO ).

Modi, who arrived here from his Vietnam trip Saturday, also attended the BRICS - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - meet after his brief engagement with Xi.

However, the Prime Minister was unlikely to meet US President Barack Obama who met Xi on Saturday upon his arrival at Hangzhou.

The opening ceremony of the G20 will begin in the afternoon.

Climate finance, global structural reform, inclusive growth will be among the major issues raised by India.

It is to be seen if India will raise the South China Sea issue at the summit.

Later in the day, he is scheduled to meet Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

(Gaurav Sharma is the Beijing-based Correspondent for IANS. He can be contacted at sharmagaurav71@gmail.com, gauravians@yahoo.com)
Kabul, Sep 4 : At least 34 persons were killed and 21 others injured on Sunday after a bus collided with a truck in Afghanistan's Zabul province, police said.

"The accident took place along Kabul-Kandahar highway at around 5.00 a.m.," a senior police official told Xinhua news agency.

The death toll was likely to increase as many of the injured were in critical condition, he added.

Local officials said that the bus travelling from Kandahar to Kabul was carrying around 60 persons.
New Delhi : The memorial at the Kohima War Cemetery, where lie dead of a World War II battle termed "Stalingrad of the East", asks us: "When you go home tell them of us and say for your tomorrow we gave our today." It's no less true for soldiers now, but do we consider it in our attitudes to them in peace and to ex-servicemen? And it is an old poet, now deemed a standard-bearer of imperialism, who can draw our attention to our shortcomings.

The modern world may never be less hypocritical when it comes to war -- we extol the profession of arms, we salute the practitioners' contribution to preserving our liberty -- and we ignore them when they are in need. Be it the plight of the Vietnam 'vets' (veterans) in America, the 'Afgantsy' in the Soviet Union, and for us, OROP and a few other issues, the record is not too exemplary.

But this trend is scarcely new -- even for a country that was once the foremost global power on the strength of its military might, Britain was no better. And Rudyard Kipling pointed it out at least thrice.

We may argue over whether Kipling (1865-1936) exhibits imperial and racial attitudes, but even the most virulent critic cannot accuse him of elitism. For he also gave a voice, in all senses of the word, to those who made the Empire possible -- the common British soldier.

Apart from the likes of "The Three Musketeers" or "The Taking of Lungtungpen" about the colourful exploits of privates Learoyd, Mulvaney and Ortheris in his first short story anthology "Plain Tales from the Hills" (1888) (continued in next anthology "Soldiers Three", 1888), Kipling also used verse for this purpose. "Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses" (1892), doesn't only deal with soldiers' lives but social attitudes towards them.

Take "Tommy", common slang for a soldier, first published March 1, 1890, which begins with an unnamed soldier, turned away from a bar with ridicule, reflecting over his plight.

" 'O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' 'Tommy, go away';/But it's 'Thank you, Mister Atkins,' when the band begins to play... and that: "Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep/Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap..."

The soldier stresses: "We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,/But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you.." and "You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all:/We'll wait for extra rations if you treat us rational" but warns: "For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' 'Chuck him out, the brute!'/But it's "Saviour of 'is country," when the guns begin to shoot;/ Yes it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;/But Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool -- you bet that Tommy sees!"

In "The Last of the Light Brigade", published in April 1890, Kipling deals with the sad aftermath of a celebrated wartime action, immortalised by Lord Tennyson. "There were thirty million English who talked of England's might,/There were twenty broken troopers who lacked a bed for the night./They had neither food nor money, they had neither service nor trade;/They were only shiftless soldiers, the last of the Light Brigade."

They finally decide to approach "the man who writes/The things on Balaclava the kiddies at school recites'", and in Tennyson's presence: "'Beggin' your pardon,' he (their spokesman) said,/'You wrote o' the Light Brigade, sir. Here's all that isn't dead./An' it's all come true what you wrote, sir, regardin' the mouth of hell;/For we're all of us nigh to the workhouse, an' we thought we'd call an' tell."

"No, thank you, we don't want food, sir; but couldn't you take an' write/A sort of 'to be continued' and 'see next page' o' the fight?/We think that someone has blundered, an' couldn't you tell 'em how?/You wrote we were heroes once, sir. Please, write we are starving now."

And in a stanza, omitted in collections, we are told in response to Tennyson's fiery appeal (in the poem, that is), "They (the British) sent a cheque to the felon that sprang from an Irish bog;/They healed the spavined cab-horse; they housed the homeless dog;/And they sent (you may call me a liar), when felon and beast were paid,/A cheque, for enough to live on, to the last of the Light Brigade.

Strikes a chord?

Then there is "The Absent-Minded Beggar" (1899), referring to a soldier, who is "an absent-minded beggar, but he heard his country's call", and beginning: "When you've shouted "Rule Britannia": when you've sung "God Save the Queen"/When you've finished killing Kruger with your mouth:/Will you kindly drop a shilling in my little tambourine/For a gentleman in khaki ordered South?"

Though the first two didn't do much, this one, part of an appeal by the Daily Mail to raise money for soldiers fighting in the Boer War and their families, helped raise more than 250,000 pounds.

Maybe we need a poet like Kipling also to make us more aware?

(Vikas Datta is an Associate Editor at IANS. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
Vatican City, Sep 4 : Singing popular Bengali devotional songs, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Sunday walked with members of her delegation to St. Peter's Basilica to participate in the canonisation of Mother Teresa.

Sporting a white saree with blue border, much like what the Nobel Laureate used to wear, Banerjee - flanked by Trinamool Congress parliamentarians Sudip Bandyopadhyay and Derek O'Brien among others - covered the six kilometre distance from Rome to the St. Peter's Basilica doing a traditional Bengali "prabhat pheri" (morning choir).

As the delegation crossed important junctions and marched through roads and lanes, crowds gathered and passersby stopped to listen to immortal Tagore creations "Aguner Poroshmoni".

They also sang devotional songs like 'Biswapita tumi he prabhu' and Mangaladeep jele', with Banerjee taking the lead.

O'Brien - dressed in the traditional Bengali wear of kurta and dhoti - and Bandopadhyay, clad in kurta-pyjama with a blue jacket, matched steps with Banerjee to witness the historic occasion for which dignitaries from across the globe have congregated.

Passionate about walking, Banerjee much like in Bengal, has never let go any opportunity to cover on foot distances during her foreign visits also. During her trips to Singapore and Bhutan, Banerjee and her team would often walk their way to famous tourist attractions.

Sporting small placards with the words "City of Mother Team Bengal", the team from Bengal reached the famous holy site in time to watch the canonisation ceremony which along with the entire world, Kolkata - Teresa'a adopted home - has been waiting for with baited breath.
Hyderabad, Sep 4 : A bridegroom who opened fire from two revolvers during his marriage here last month was arrested by the police, an official said.

Riding a horse during his marriage procession, the bridegroom fired six shots in the air from two revolvers as a mark of celebration of his marriage.

The identity of the bridegroom has not been revealed by the city police.

Though the incident occurred on August 22, the arrest was made on Sunday after police obtained a video clip of the firing.

The police officer said the incident occurred near Shama Theatre, within the Falaknuma police station jurisdiction, around 10 p.m. on August 22.

The police had initially denied that any such incident took place. However, four teams led by Assistant Commissioner of Police conducted the investigations and found the evidence.

A case has been registered and investigations are continuing, according to the police.
Hangzhou (China), Sep 4 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday told Chinese President Xi Jinping India's concerns over terrorism emanating from Pakistan through which the $46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is being built.

In his 35-minute meeting with Xi on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hangzhou city, Modi conveyed to him that New Delhi and Beijing "would have to be sensitive to each other's strategic interests".

"He (Modi) said it is of paramount importance that both countries respect each other's aspirations, concerns and strategic interests," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup told Indian journalists here.

Asked whether terrorism was discussed, Swarup said: "It was raised."

The CPEC passes through the restive regions of Balochistan, Gilgit-Baltistan and Pakistani Kashmir.

India has strongly opposed the project as it claims Gilgit-Baltistan and Pakistani Kashmir.

In his interaction with Xi, Modi said the attack on the Chinese embassy in Bishkek was yet another proof of the "scourge if terrorism".

Beijing's refusal to designate Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar at the UN Security Council has irked India.

This was Modi's eighth meeting with Xi as the Prime Minister.

"China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound relations and further advance their cooperation," President Xi said while meeting Modi.

Modi told Xi that "our response to terrorism must not be motivated by political consideration" - an apparent reference to Pakistan, India's arch rival and China's all-weather friend.

Modi also raised the issue of terrorism in his meeting with BRICS leaders and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on the sidelines of G20.

"In a very hard-hitting intervention, he (Modi) said terrorists in South Asia or anywhere for that matter do not own banks or weapons factories," Swarup quoted the Indian leader as saying.

Without directly naming Pakistan, Modi told Turnbull: "Our (India) neighbourhood, in particular, was suffering from destabilisation effects of terrorism."

Modi stressed the importance to "identify the suppliers, exporters and financiers of terrorism:.

Swarup refused to divulge if the issue of India's membership to the Nuclear Suppliers Group figured in the meeting with Xi.

"If you read between the lines when we are talking about our strategic interests, concerns and aspirations, it is not that China is unaware of our strategic interests, concerns or aspirations or that we are unaware of theirs. It is something that both sides are aware of," Swarup said.

Earlier in June, China had blocked India's entry into the nuclear trade grouping, citing its non-signatory status to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

(Gaurav Sharma is the Beijing-based Correspondent for IANS. He can be contacted at sharmagaurav71@gmail.com and gauravians@yahoo.com).
New Delhi, Sep 4 : After the central government suspended four Home Ministry officials, including an IAS officer, for alleged lapses over the issuing of licence to Islamic tele-evangelist Zakir Naik's NGO, senior officials have expressed their resentment over the punishment meted out.

A group of senior officials in the Home Ministry reportedly registered with Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi their protest over suspension of Joint Secretary G.K. Dwivedi.

"Some officials have met the Union Home Secretary on the issue (over the weekend)," a source said.

Four officials of the Home Ministry were suspended on September 1 for their "lapses" in renewing the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) licence of the NGO Islamic Research Foundation (IRF) of tele-preacher Zakir Naik.

Naik's Peace TV and his speeches have come under the scanner of the central security agencies for allegedly propagating radical views, especially in the aftermath of the July 1 Dhaka terror siege that left 22 people dead.

According to security agencies, Zakir Naik through Peace TV had reportedly promoted radical Islamist views.

While the probe by the Home Ministry and security agencies was on, the Law Ministry has favoured registering a case against Naik and IRF for pursuing divisive agenda and communalism.

The Home Ministry officials told the Union Home Secretary that suspension of Dwivedi, a joint secretary in the Foreigners Cell, was uncalled for as the lapses were committed by his juniors only.

"The action against Dwivedi appears demoralising," a source said, and stressed that the Home Ministry should reconsider its decision as regard a senior official who was discharging his duties diligently.

The Home Ministry and especially Home Minister Rajnath Singh were displeased after the mandatory FCRA licence of NGO IRF was renewed by the Foreigners Division.

Sources said the online route for issuance of licences was utilised by the NGO on August 19 even as a probe was on against Naik.

Sources said that suspended IAS officer Dwivedi has been working on a number of "pet projects" of the Narendra Modi government, offering long term visas and citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs and other minorities of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.

He also worked on the merger of Person of Indian Origin (PIO) card scheme with Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) card scheme.

In July, Bangladesh's Ministry of Information cancelled the downlink permission to Naik's Peace TV.

The controversial Islamic orator is also banned in Malaysia, Britain and Canada.
New Delhi, Sep 4 : A court on Sunday sent sacked AAP minister Sandeep Kumar to one-day police custody, a day after he was arrested on charges of rape followed by the complaint of a woman who figured in a video with him in objectionable position.

Sandeep Kumar was produced before a duty magistrate in Rohini court on Sunday afternoon which sent him to police custody on the plea of Delhi Police seeking his remand for the further investigation of the case.

The former minister was arrested on Saturday night after a woman approached Sultanpuri police station in north Delhi with a complaint of sexual harassment against the former Social Welfare and Women and Child Development Minister following which a case was filed.

He was booked under sections 376 (punishment for rape) and 328 (causing hurt by means of poison, with intent to commit an offence) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

He was also charged under the Information Technology Act's section 67A (punishment for publishing or transmitting of material containing sexually explicit act in electronic form).

The woman had alleged in her complaint that she was sexually harassed by Kumar at his office-cum-residence in Sultanpuri area where she had gone to get her ration card made.

She had also alleged that Kumar had offered her a spiked cold drink following which she could not recall what exactly happened with her and how she had acted.

A Delhi Police team on Sunday visited at the same house where the woman had alleged of being raped.

Kumar was sacked on Wednesday after an alleged "sex video" involving him became viral. On Thursday, he defended himself, saying he had resigned on his own and alleged that he had been targeted because he was a Dalit.
Hangzhou (China), Sep 4 : Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi Sunday invited Saudi Arabia to invest more in India's infrastructure, particularly in the railways, during a meeting with Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud, on the sidelines of the G-20 Summit here.

"Prime Minister invited greater Saudi investment, particularly through the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF)," official sources here said.

"He also sought greater cooperation in infrastructure, particularly modernisation of railway stations," the sources said.

Modi complimented Prince Mohammad for his Vision 2030 Document that charts out a roadmap for the future of the Gulf kingdom.

The Saudi Vision 2030 is aimed at making the Gulf kingdom a global investment powerhouse and turn into a connecting hub for the continents of Asia, Europe and Africa.

Modi also recalled his highly successful visit to Saudi Arabia in April this year following which he was conferred that country's highest civilian honour, the King Abdulaziz Sash.

"There was a detailed discussion on UN Security Council reforms with both leaders emphasising the need for expansion of the UNSC to include more permanent members," the sources said.

Modi also said that he looked forward to an early visit from Saudi King Salman to India.
Srinagar, Sep 4 : Former Chief Minister and working president of the regional National Conference (NC) Omar Abdullah on Sunday said the government can neither tire out nor buy the ongoing agitation in the Kashmir Valley and the only way out was to address it politically.

Speaking to media after he led an NC delegation to a meeting with the all-party delegation in Srinagar, Omar Abdullah said: "We told the delegation that the government can neither tire nor buy the present agitation.

"The only way out is to address it politically."

Omar Abdullah criticised Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti saying: "She wants to be the government and the opposition at the same time.

"On the one hand, she says the sacrifices of those killed in the present agitation will not go waste and, on the other hand, she says only 5 per cent people are involved in the agitation."

Omar Abdullah wondered that if only 5 per cent people are involved in the present agitation then why is every paramilitary force in the country represented in controlling this agitation.

He also said: "The Chief Minister writes to separatist leaders to give time and place for meeting the all-party delegation while these separatist leaders are under arrest."

Omar Abdullah recalled his father Dr. Farooq Abdullah having told the then Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao to give internal autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir.

"My father had then said give internal autonomy now, for I fear if you delay it today, there may be no hands to take it tomorrow.

"I fear that time has come in Kashmir," Omar said.
Vatican City, Sep 4 : Missionaries of Charity Sister Mary Sally, who was evacuated out of Yemen earlier this year by the Indian government, met External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj here on Sunday.

"A special guest in Rome! Sister Sally, who was evacuated out of Yemen by the Govt meets EAM @SushmaSwaraj," spokesman for External Affairs ministry Vikas Swarup said in a tweet.

Union Food Processing Industry Minister Harsimrat Kaur, who is also part of the official delegation from India to attend Mother Teresa's canonisation programme, was also present on the occasion.

During the height of conflict in Yemen in March, after sustained efforts from the central government as well as from the Kerala government, Sister Sally, the Indian mother superior of an aide home in Aden was evacuated.

Four nuns were killed during the conflict and an Indian priest was also later kidnapped by gunmen there and is still missing.
Hangzhou, Sep 4 : Chinas leaders have been accused of delivering a calculated diplomatic snub to Barack Obama after the US President was not provided with a staircase to leave his plane on his arrival in Hangzhou city before the start of the Group of 20 (G20) summit meeting.

Chinese authorities have rolled out the red carpet for world leaders, including India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Russian President Vladimir Putin, South Korean President Park Geun-hye, Brazil's President Michel Temer, and British Prime Minister Theresa May, who arrived here on Sunday, The Guardian reported.

But Obama, who is on his final tour of Asia, was forced to disembark from Air Force One through a little-used exit in the plane's belly after no rolling staircase was provided when he landed in Hangzhou on Saturday.

When Obama did find his way on to a red carpet on the tarmac below, there were heated altercations between the US and Chinese officials, with one Chinese official caught on video shouting: "This is our country! This is our airport!"

"The reception that President Obama and his staff got when they arrived here Saturday afternoon was bruising, even by Chinese standards," the New York Times reported.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry official involved in the visit denied it had been a snub, telling the South China Morning Post that the US delegation had declined to use the usual rolling red-carpet staircase.

"It would do China no good in treating Obama rudely," the official said.

"China provides a rolling staircase for every arriving state leader, but the US side complained that the driver doesn't speak English and can't understand security instructions from the US; so China proposed that we could assign a translator to sit beside the driver, but the US side turned down the proposal and insisted that they didn't need the staircase provided by the airport," the official added.

Obama offered a diplomatic reply when asked to comment on the airport "kerfuffle" on Sunday during a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Theresa May.

"I wouldn't over-crank the significance of it because, as I said, this is not the first time that these things happen and it doesn't just happen here. It happens in a lot of places including, by the way, sometimes our allies," Obama said, adding that "none of this detracts from the broader scope of the relationship".

Obama suggested that his Chinese hosts might have found the size of the US delegation "a little overwhelming".

"We have got a lot of planes, a lot of helicopters, a lot of cars and a lot of guys. If you are a host country, sometimes it may feel a little bit much," Obama added.

US National Security Adviser Susan Rice admitted that she was surprised by the handling of the President's arrival. "They did things that weren't anticipated," she told media.

According to the New York Times, Rice had appeared "baffled and annoyed" that the President had been forced to leave Air Force One through a door normally reserved for high-security trips to places such as Afghanistan.

In the lead-up to the final meeting between Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping, experts had predicted that the pair would seek to part ways on a positive note with the announcement that the world's two largest polluters would ratify the Paris climate agreement.

However, Obama's unconventional welcome -- and a series of subsequent skirmishes and quarrels between Chinese and US officials and journalists -- were a reminder of the underlying tensions.

"I think this time A maybe the seams were showing a little more than usual in terms of some of the negotiations and jostling that takes place behind the scenes," Obama admitted on Sunday.

Official statements issued by both sides on Saturday, as the pair held more than four hours of bilateral meetings, hinted at some of the disagreements between the world's two largest economies.

According to a White House statement, Obama told President Xi of "America's unwavering support for upholding human rights".

"China opposes any other country interfering in its internal affairs in the name of human rights issues," Xi told Obama in response, according to Xinhua news agency.

In an interview with CNN, Obama warned Beijing against muscle-flexing in the South China Sea. Xi told Obama his country would "unswervingly safeguard" its claims in the region.
Chennai, Sep 4 : Actor Vikram, who awaits the release of forthcoming Tamil action thriller "Irumugan", has dubbed in his own voice for one of the two characters he essays in the film's dubbed Telugu version "Inkokkadu".

In the film, Vikram plays two roles - a RAW agent called Akhil, and an eccentric scientist called Love.

"We had originally planned to use the dubbing artist who usually dubs for all Vikram's films in Telugu. However, we had difficulty finding a suitable voice for the character Love, and it's because it's a very different character. Even for the Tamil version, Vikram had to change his voice," film director Anand Shankar told IANS.

Since nobody's voice suited the role, Vikram decided to dub in his own voice.

"Vikram felt only he could bring the uniqueness to the character with his voice. Hence, he decided to dub for the Telugu version too. You don't find many actors willing to take such an effort," he said.

Also starring Nayanthara and Nithya Menen, the film is slated for release in cinemas on Thursday, and a day before outside India.

In US, "Inkokkadu" is being released via popular distribution company CineGalaxy Inc.
Ankara, Sep 5 : The Islamic States (IS) militants lost control of their last territory along the Syrian-Turkish border, Turkish military told Anadolu Agency on Sunday.

According to Anadolu Agency, after Turkey backed the Free Syrian Army (FSA) forces, the FSA, which is supported by the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK), reconnected the Azaz-Jarabulus line on Sunday after flushing the area clean of IS militants.

The Turkish army launched on Aug 24 the "Euphrates Shield" cross-border operation to drive out IS and other militants through the FSA fighters, who are bolstered by Turkish weaponry, ammunition, artillery, and jets, Xinhua news agency reported.

Turkish soldiers, tanks and other equipment entered Syria from the Karkamis area in the Turkish province of Gaziantep during the operation.

Turkish tanks then crossed into northern Syria from the Turkish province of Kilis on Saturday.
the care and attention our people take to make the best spirits we can every day.

Radouga Distilleries, located in Blaine Lake, SK, is proud to announce their Gold Medal win at the recent New York World Wine and Spirits Competition (http://www.nyworldwineandspiritscompetition.com) held August 24th &25th, 2016.

Provincial Vodka is the company's flagship product, created by distillery founder, Paul Riben. The word vodka is a combination of voda, the Russian word for water (diminutives are a Russian specialty) and wodka in Polish, both of which make it little water. The distillery, currently a craft-distillery, uses water from an inter-glacier aquifer along with grains grown by the distillery to create a unique smooth, clean flavor that had a definite impact on the judges.

I'd love to take credit for all of it, says founder Paul Riben, "but it really is a combination of knowing the ingredients that the product is made of, being fortunate enough to have a water source that really is as rare as can be found in nature, and the care and attention our people take to make the best spirits we can every day."

The technical vodka profile is that good vodka will have a creamy, sweet or grainy odor, a crystalline lustre, an internal energy, and should taste soft not hard, creamy not watery, smooth not rough.

The recognition at the NY World Wine and Spirits Competition with a Gold Medal showing builds on last years Silver Medal that Provincial Vodka earned. The company is confident that this level of acknowledgement will garner interest from not only the provinces who haven't yet had the pleasure of experiencing Provincial Vodka, but possible agencies and partners in the US and Europe as well.

For more information, visit http://www.radougadistilleries.com.

About the New York World Wine and Spirits Competition:

Every brand feels their beverage is the best it can be on the market today! But how do they prove it? How does an educated consumer have the confidence to pick the best? Our goal is to establish a clear cut method by which wine and spirit brands can be ranked by the experts in the industry. It is the only wine and spirits competition in the world that is associated with the Triple Crown of Competitions ( The San Francisco International Wine Competition and The San Francisco World Spirits Competition) which we proudly call The New York World Wine and Spirits Competition. This new standard of competence is our primary goal to demonstrate to the buying public how the experts interpret each brands overall quality.

Anthony Dias Blue is the executive director of The New York World Wine and Spirits Competition and founder of the San Francisco World Spirits Competition as well as the San Francisco International Wine Competition. He is recognized world-wide as a leading food, wine, travel and spirits authority. His work in all media is circulated to more than 20,000,000 consumers each month.

About Radouga Distilleries:

Radouga Distilleries is one of the most recent additions to the Canadian distillery scene and is located in Blaine Lake, SK. A privately held company, Radouga founder Paul Ribens maintains involvement in the production and quality control of the Radouga product line, including Provincial Spiced Vodka, and liqueurs Paul's Apple Pie and Paul's Blueberry Pie. No preservatives are used in any of the Radouga products and Radouga is Proud to be Canadian and to represent Canada on the world stage.

Radouga products are currently available in Saskatchewan, Alberta, with expansion to British Columbia, Manitoba and Quebec in current plans.
As part of Bravo Pawn Systems commitment to help out others in need and partake in community involvement, they hosted an internal food bank challenge in the month of August that was open to all employees. To make it interesting, teams were formed evenly by company roles and locations to foster friendly competition while contributing to such a great cause. The end result: over 200 pounds of food donated to multiple food banks, feeding and helping out local communities at each of our locations.

Specifically, over 350 cans of food and boxes of pasta were collected among the Las Vegas Headquarters and Florida office, who donated to Three Square and Boca Helping hands. Also, employees contributed an online donation to the SF-Marin Food Bank and 3 cooked meals delivered to families afflicted from the Louisiana floods.

"My goal in organizing the 1st Annual Bravo Food Bank Challenge was to provide all of our employees the opportunity and platform to give back to their community. One of the reasons I love working for Bravo is because it was founded on the premise of helping others out - not just pawnbrokers with our software solutions, but also taking the time to get involved in our local communities and giving to those in need," says Margo Kleman, Marketing Specialist for Bravo Pawn Systems.

At the end of the day, it truly wasn't about a competition (that was just for fun and team bonding) but it's about using Bravo Pawn Systems as an avenue to give back to its local communities and help others in need. The entire Bravo team shows sincere passion towards helping others out and will continue to do so in future community involvement activities.
Consulting Firm, Vaco, Is Named to the 2016 Inc. 5000, Marking Its 10th Consecutive Appearance, Fueled by Three-Year Sales Growth of 65%

Inc. magazine today ranked Vaco number 4205 on its 35th annual Inc. 5000, the most prestigious ranking of the nations fastest-growing private companies. With a three-year sales growth of 65%, 2016 marks the 10th consecutive year Vaco has been included on the Inc. 5000  a feat only achieved by 1% of the listed companies.

The Inc. 5000s aggregate revenue is $200 billion, and the companies on this list collectively generated 640,000 jobs over the past three years, an impressive result that stands as confirmation of the impact these companies have on the national economy.

A founding principle of Vaco is that no matter where someone is in their career, when they join forces with Vaco, they can expect to retire here, said Vaco Founder and CEO Jerry Bostelman. Making the Inc. 5000 list ten years in a row is sweet confirmation that our clients value a firm that values career-long relationships with its players, and they can be confident their Vaco team will be there to serve them for the duration of theirs. It is an honor to wear the Vaco jersey alongside such a talented team of entrepreneurial and committed individuals.

Vaco Florida is proud to have played a tremendous role in propelling Vaco to the top year after year. Partner, Denise Bennett-Walls joined Vaco as the founding partner of the Florida offices in 2005 carving out a place for Vaco in the Florida marketplace, opening offices in both Tampa and Orlando. In 2015, Vaco launched in South Florida and in 2016 North Florida.

The Vaco Florida team now manages over 200+ consultants and temporary staff who are working on strategic projects and interim needs at over 150+ companies in Florida. In the last 11 years, Vaco Florida has provided professionals seeking employment over 3,000+ jobs in Florida. In addition, they have expanded the business every year since its inception, receiving numerous prestigious awards, and supporting startup growth, corporate moves, and M&A for small, mid-size and global fortune 500 companies. The Vaco Florida team is passionate about companies becoming great and being here long term, and they will continue to support clients with best-in-class talent throughout the state.

About Vaco

Vaco offers consulting, contract and direct hire solutions in the areas of accounting, finance, technology, healthcare, operations and general administration. With over 30 offices across the nation and beyond, Vaco is dedicated to developing creative client solutions, long-term relationships and lifelong careers. For more information, visit vaco.com.

Media Inquiries:

Gilda Diaz

gdiaz(at)vaco.com

321.445.2100

More about Inc. and the Inc. 500|5000

Methodology

The 2016 Inc. 5000 is ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2012 to 2015. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2012. They had to be U.S.-based, privately held, for profit, and independentnot subsidiaries or divisions of other companiesas of December 31, 2015. (Since then, a number of companies on the list have gone public or been acquired.) The minimum revenue required for 2012 is $100,000; the minimum for 2015 is $2 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons. Companies on the Inc. 500 are featured in Inc.'s September issue. They represent the top tier of the Inc. 5000, which can be found at http://www.inc.com/inc5000.

About Inc. Media:

Founded in 1979 and acquired in 2005 by Mansueto Ventures, Inc. is the only major brand dedicated exclusively to owners and managers of growing private companies, with the aim to deliver real solutions for today's innovative company builders. Winner of the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in both 2014 and 2012. Total monthly audience reach for the brand has grown significantly from 2,000,000 in 2010 to over 15,000,000 today. For more information, visit http://www.inc.com.

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Business Architecture Associates Logo I am so excited for the opportunity to attend business architecture training, delivered directly from real experts who are also practitioners. Past News Releases RSS Business Architecture Associates...

Event Location: The Point, 27-29 Market Street, Maidenhead, Berkshire, SL6 8AG, United Kingdom

Business Architecture Associates training courses are based on the formal framework and best practices outlined in A Guide to the Business Architecture Body of Knowledge (BIZBOK Guide), developed by the Business Architecture Guild. BAA courses provide a strong foundation for preparing business architects to sit for the Certified Business Architect (CBA) exam. Attendees already holding a CBA certification will receive Continuing Education Units. Attendees signing up for the complete 4- day training program in London will receive a discount voucher to sit for the Certified Business Architect (CBA) exam. Register today to take advantage of this special, limited-time offer.

According to BAA Partner William Ulrich, We share real life stories as part of the learning experience, which brings business architecture to life for companies. Our history has shown that attendees at all levels of maturity gain value from this experience, where even senior business architects gain insights into this important discipline.

A half-day Practicing Business Architecture session on Day 5 will offer attendees a unique opportunity to exercise what they learned in a live setting. Attendees will bring in business architecture scenarios, mapping requests and solution-oriented challenges, and the instructors will work through the topics, creating a real-time learning experience. Business architecture templates will be included at no additional charge for those attending all 5 days. Dont miss this unique opportunity to learn the discipline directly from leading experts in business architecture.

Mary OHalloran, a neophyte business architect, says I am so excited for the opportunity to attend business architecture training, delivered directly from real experts who are also practitioners.

For course descriptions and outlines, please view the Curriculum page. All courseware is founded on best practices and punctuated with real life experience across a variety of industries. For more information on this event and to begin registration, please view the London event page.Both partners, William Ulrich and Whynde Kuehn, will be instructing the course series.

About Business Architecture Associates

Business Architecture Associates (BAA) is dedicated to the training and education of organizations in the discipline and use of business architecture, an established practice that aligns business strategies with operational tactics. Founded by industry pioneers Whynde Kuehn and William Ulrich, these in-demand business architecture practitioners work with a wide range of businesses to successfully establish and leverage business architecture to deliver lasting business value. BAA is a Guild Accredited Training Partner (GATP) with the Business Architecture Guild, a professional association for business architects, that promotes best practices and expands the knowledgebase of the business architecture discipline.
Amid the screeching battle over the state of our nation and who should lead it, it might be hard to turn our attention to the things that make our own communities great, and what can be done to make them better.

We cannot, of course, ignore the impact on our cities, towns, villages and schools of the policy decisions made at the national and state levels -- indeed the continuing failure of many leaders in Illinois and Washington to lead makes it impossible to do so.

But it is local governments and the men and women who serve them who impact our lives each and every single day.

Even though the Illinois consolidated municipal primary election isnt until Feb. 28, 2017 and the general election is April 4, 2017, NOW is the time to consider whether or not youd like to try your hand at leading your community.

Its hard to overplay the importance of the 2017 local election. As a voter or a potential candidate, you can serve by getting involved in races for mayor, city council and/or township, village, school, library and community college boards and fire protection districts. In short, the people who make our communities go.

Though the deadline for filing candidate petitions is a few months away, decisions and plans must be made and signatures collected and the calendar has a way of getting away from us as one busy season transitions into another.

If you hesitate to get involved in party politics, perhaps this fact will help: Many of those government bodies -- for example, Moline and Rock Island cities and, of course, all local school boards -- are nonpartisan. Moreover, those who identify as independents, which polls say is rising steadily, are welcome in local races.

So get involved. Contact your city, village, school district, township or other elected board to find out more.

Serving in local government can be maddeningly challenging, AND incredibly rewarding. Where else do you stand the chance of helping set public policy that could influence your community long after youre gone?

The water you drink, the streets you drive, the schools your kids attend and so very much more, depends on local officials. Remember, government doesnt work well, unless good people choose to work at it. Opportunities to do so abound in 2017.
EVANSTON, Ill. (AP)  A convicted felon is back in custody after Evanston police say they saw him in a Facebook Live video firing a gun at a shooting range in violation of his parole.

The Evanston Police Department says an investigator with its intelligence unit was monitoring social media Wednesday and recognized an Evanston gang member firing a handgun in a real-time video post.

The investigator recognized the firing range in Winthrop Harbor, 30 miles north, and contacted police there. Officers immediately responded to the shooting range and arrested the man.

Twenty-five-year-old Demarcus Curtis, of Des Plaines, was charged with aggravated unlawful use of a weapon by a felon.

Police arrested a second convicted felon with him, 25-year-old Nicholas Mayfield, of Country Club Hills.

Their public defenders could not be reached for comment.
FORT BRAGG, N.C.  Army Sustainment Commands newest Department of the Army civilians completed week long site visits to Charleston, S.C.; Southport, N.C.; and Ft. Bragg, N.C.

Sites visited included Army Strategic Logistics Agency and Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command in South Carolina; and Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point, North Carolina; 406th Army Field Support Brigade, North Carolina; Logistics Readiness Center  Bragg; Arrival/Departure Airfield Control Group  Bragg; Transportation Motor Pool - Bragg; Ammunition Supply Point  Bragg; and others, as part of ASCs Intern BootCamp, Aug. 14  19.

The visits were designed to give the 20 new employees a real-world, hands-on experience in order to provide better understandings of their roles and responsibilities and how they fit within ASCs overall mission.

T.J. Ukleja, ASC G-3/5/7 (Operations), Training and Programs Division, and Lisa Schuldt, ASC G-3/5/7 (Operations), Leader and Development Programs, planned and led the visit.

The knowledge gained and experiences they had can be reflected on as they develop as leaders, said Ms. Schuldt. Being able to show the interns some of our ASC missions firsthand brings their learning full circle.

Marta Garner, logistics supply specialist, Logistics Readiness Center - Rock Island Arsenal, explained how the site visit was vital to understanding how her role fits into the big picture.

In my role within the LRC, I have a better understanding about Global Combat Support System and how it will improve logistical processes in order to get the supplies and equipment to Soldiers in the field at the right time, right place, and when they need to perform their missions, she said.

Supporting operations and conducting them are two different worlds; so seeing everything that goes on behind the scenes in support of missions was necessary for my integration into the unit, said Jonathan Yacapraro, ASC, logistics management specialist.

After returning from the site visit, the interns received certificates of achievement for completing the month-long Intern BootCamp from Michael Hutchison, ASC deputy to the commander.
EAST MOLINE -- A former East Moline police chief announced Saturday he will be running for mayor in the April 4 general election.

Reggie Freeman, who served 32 years with the police department before retiring in 2004, said he is a lifelong resident of East Moline and wants to make the community "a better place than it already is. On that, you have my commitment. On that, you have my promise.

"On that, you have my word."

Mr. Freeman is currently regional manager for the Illinois Secretary of State Driver Services.

Mr. Freeman said current mayor John Thodos and the city council deserve credit for the growth East Moline has enjoyed during the mayor's tenure.

"I want to take that growth to the next level," Mr. Freeman said. "More than that, my love and passion for the city of East Moline is beyond description.

"I have devoted my entire adult life to serving this community, and now I humbly ask the citizens of East Moline to support me in my bid for mayor."

Mayor Thodos has been in office since 2005. The mayor said Saturday he hasn't rendered a decision yet on whether he will seek a fourth term.
MOLINE -- A small group gathered Saturday at Browning Park in Moline for the Rally to Improve Birth, one of more than 75 similar gatherings across the country to promote alternatives to "medicalized" birth.

The rally was sponsored by ICAN (International Cesarean Awareness Network) of the Quad Cities and Quad Cities BirthNetwork National (QCBNN). It was the fifth annual rally for the national nonprofit advocacy organization ImprovingBirth.org, but the first in the Quad Cities.

Birth is a human rights issue, especially in America, rally organizer Linda Crownover-Inch, of Davenport, said. The way we birth in America has become a medicalized story that weve told one another over decades. Women dont think they have other options, but we do. So were here because how we birth matters.

Other options include informed consent and refusal, and VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean). According to the groups press release, an estimated 40 percent of hospitals in the U.S. have outright bans, or de facto bans, on VBACs, which makes it difficult for mothers who want to try for vaginal birth, despite the consensus by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the National Institute of Health that VBACs are a safe option for most women.

Currently, one in three U.S. births is by Cesarean section, a rate that has increased by 60 percent in the last 20 years. The hospital bans on VBACs is typically driven by liability concerns according to ImprovingBirth.

Jesse and Joelle Jaeger and their children, Jonah and Alice, 3 and 1, attended the rally in the hopes of spreading awareness about informed consent, or the right to have full information about childbirth options and the right to make the final decision about care.

Mr. Jaeger added that the birth rights of women need more support. Mothers-to-be are not always provided options in childbirth, adding that the group is not just about home birth or hospital birth, medicated or natural birth, but respecting womens choices regardless of where or how they choose to birth.

After birthing their first child in the hospital, the Davenport couple opted for an unassisted home birth for their second child. I didnt know I had options, said Mrs. Jaeger, adding that listening to her gut instinct and connecting with a birth network allowed her to deliver a healthy baby girl at home.

Brooke Scholting, of Rock Island, carried a sign that read I left my induction because I have choices. At 42 weeks, she was told by her medical providers that she needed to be induced, and her choice for a lotus birth would not be possible. After reaching out to her birth network, she was able to have a natural birth in an Iowa City hospital two days later.

Ms. Scholtings 4-year-old daughter Serenity held a sign that read Peace on Earth Begins at Birth.

The rally was the first event by Quad Cities BirthNetwork National chapter, which was started in August 2016.

Mr. Jaeger has been the Technology Coordinator for BirthNetwork National for two years, and he and Ms. Crownover-Inch teamed up to start the local chapter. The overall aim is to create a birth network in the region with providers who support mother friendly initiatives, as well as the yearly Rally to Improve Birth.
Two Rock Island natives leading international unions representing roughly 1.8 million workers said in separate interviews with the Dispatch-Argus that difficult times are ahead for the country and for unions.

Dennis Williams, president of the United Auto Workers, and Lonnie Stephenson, the president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, in town to attend the 49th annual "Salute to Labor" picnic at Illinwek Park in Hampton, where both will be honored, said income disparity is among the chief challenges faced, along with fair trade and health care.

They will be joined at the Monday picnic by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and other state and local politicians.

Mr. Williams, of Detroit, joined the UAW in 1977 as a salvage welder at the former J.I. Case in Rock Island. He has been president of the 1.1 million-member union since 2014.

Mr. Stephenson, of Maryland, has been IBEW president since 2015. He began his apprenticeship as an inside wireman in 1975 and was initiated into Rock Island Local 145 in 1976.

With a country divided on social and political issues, and a presidential election that seems to reinforce that division, Mr. Williams said he is not surprised by the visceral response from fellow Americans.

Wage gap

"It's a great divide," Mr. Williams said. "When I first started here in Rock Island, the Case company's CEO pay compared to the average American worker was about 40 times.

"Today, it's over 300 times. So, the gap has just grown so much, and when you see that the middle class is shrinking, it isn't because people aren't working.

"They're working for less. They're working two jobs to make ends meet. They're on the border of poverty.

"You can't have a society divided like we have today and think we're going to be a pacifist society," Mr. Williams said. "The anger is going to continue. There are protests going on in Detroit right now, because Donald Trump is in the heart of Detroit talking to African-Americans.

"They've heard everything this man has said. There's anger there. When I go to Ohio, there's anger there. In Illinois, there's anger here.

"It's the disparity. I've been making speeches about "Black Lives Matter." People get so offended by that term. What they are saying is, 'We want equality, housing, jobs, education and health care.

"What is wrong with that? I don't get it. Equal opportunity -- the last time I looked, that is what this country was about."

Like Mr. Williams, Mr. Stephenson said the income gap is a growing issue. "I think people are starting to look around and say, '1 percent is getting all the income and the gap is growing wider and wider between the working man and the bosses."

He said the overall climate for labor is difficult.

Some states are seeing pushes for "things like Right To Work, trying to eliminate protected labor agreements," Mr. Stephenson said. "We've seen a lot of things we've fought for over the years, and with the political climate now, we've got some challenges."

Membership hits

The Quad-Cities is somewhat of a microcosm of the challenges unions have faced in the past and present, both presidents said. Once known as the Farm Implement Capital of the World, the area lost more than 20,000 manufacturing jobs during the 1980s.

The unions have taken a hit nationally over the years.

"Back in the mid-70s, we had close to 500,000 IBEW members just in manufacturing," Mr. Stephenson said. "Today, we have about 40,000 left in manufacturing.

"Westinghouse Electric, just out of Chicago, they built telephones. At one time, we had over 40,000 IBEW members just in that one location."

"We started seeing our membership shrink," Mr. Williams said of the UAW. "It was the worst storm for organized labor and the American worker.

"Not because people were leaving our union, it was because of the economy and what was happening to our economy. There used to be Case, Farmall. Caterpillar had two huge plants here. International Harvester had two huge plants here."

Today, both presidents said they are seeing membership levels steady, even growing. The UAW has 400,000 active members and 700,000 retirees. The IBEW has roughly 725,000 active and retired members. Pensions and health care are always issues of concern.

"We are constantly in court protecting those plans," Mr. Williams said.

Solutions

Mr. Williams said a national jobs bill dedicated to the country's infrastructure would solve a lot of problems.

"I travel around the world," he said. "Every year, I go to Europe, Asia, or both, and I see their infrastructure, their high-speed rail. What they're doing in technology compared to the United States -- we're falling so far behind.

"It's just a lack of commitment to our country. It helps us, not only for the American public's safety, but as well as corporations wanting to locate in areas. When you have the right grid, when you have the right water system that works, when you have utilities that a storm can't knock out, that investment is so important.

"When you put people to work, they buy trucks, they buy cars, they buy farm equipment. It's lifting people out of poverty and putting them into work that is meaningful and pays well."

Mr. Stephenson said the Quad-Cities is an example of how labor and management can work together.

He pointed out, as an example, IMPACT (Increasing Markets, Productivity, and Construction Teamwork) project labor agreements in the Quad-Cities, where the building trades and contractors work together. Behind IMPACT is Illowa Construction Labor and Management Council, the nonprofit organization designed to bring union building trades and management together.

"Illowa is a great example of a needed partnership in the Quad-Cities community," Mr. Stephenson said.

He emphasized the training and workforce the union can provide.

"Also, in the IBEW, we've developed a Code of Excellence," he said. "It's basically a guarantee to our customers and employers. We have a contract. If we expect the employer to abide by that contract and pay accordingly, we also expect our members to live by that contract."

Against trade pact

Although a supporter of President Barack Obama, Mr. Williams said one topic he disagrees with is the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which the administration has said will promote higher labor standards.

"That's not a good deal," Mr. Williams said. "The president and I disagree on that. When it comes to trade agreements, they have to be reciprocal.

"To me, that means you've got to have a consumer as well as a producer. Trade cannot be fair without both of them. Take Mexico. One of the problems is the fact that they're using these low-wage workers to produce products, but not consumers. So, there's no reciprocal agreement when it comes to trade.

"Toyota, Nissan, Volkswagen, Ford, and General Motors have all invested in Mexico. It's about cheap labor and the lack of independent unions and the lack of a government (Mexico) that's not willing to enforce laws already on the books.

"It's very difficult to convince them (companies) to produce these products in the United States. But, on the other hand, these corporations are the first ones to come to the government saying, 'now, I want you to protect me.'

"It's a difficult task, but we argue it all the time."

The Washington issue

Mr. Williams said, "Washington is probably one of the most aggravating places I've been in my life.

"It's a fact that it's more about the politics than the needs of our people. I'll never forget as a young man hearing Martin Luther King talking about the content of someone's character.

"I do a lot of speeches. People will say to me, 'What's wrong with these people (in Washington)?'

"We (UAW) negotiate all of the time. We don't always get 100 percent of what we want, and neither does the company. That's what negotiations are about. We do it in the best interest of all parties.

"That's what people want in Washington."
Tomorrow, the nation celebrates its 134th Labor Day. Festivities will begin with the Quad City Federation of Labors 33rd morning parade in East Moline, after which celebrants will adjourn to Illiniwek Park for the Democrats annual Salute to Labor picnic.

The picnic predates the parade, having begun back to 1967 Labor Day itself is much older, the first one kicked off by a parade in New York City exactly 134 years ago tomorrow. Some 10,000 workers took that Monday off to march from City Hall to Union Square in support of strikes against the railroads.

Historians arent quite sure who started it all. They agree that it was a man named Maguire, but cant settle on whether it was Peter or Matthew. For some years, the honor was accorded Peter Maguire, general secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiner, and a co-founder of the American Federation of Labor.

However, further research points to a Matthew Maguire, secretary of Local 344 of the International Association of Machinists. He was also secretary of the Central Labor Union of New York, at a gathering at which the day and parade were first proposed.

While the matter of the Real Maguire remains unresolved, Labor Day was a fact from Sept. 5, 1882. Over the next two years several large cities passed ordinances recognizing it; Oregon became the first state to proclaim it in 1887; finally, Congress followed through some 12 years later.

Nowadays, most Americans simply mark Labor Day as an accustomed occasion for one of several three-day weekends spotted through the calendar. But it really deserves closer attention.

It is worth remembering that, before workers began to fight for the right to organize, 12-hour days were the rule; some jobs demanded seven days work; child labor was a fact of life.

There was no benevolent government intervening in the workers behalf. Pope Leo XIII issued his revolutionary encyclical Rerun novarum, which put the Catholic Church on the side of labor: in theory, if not in immediate fact. With few exceptions, the voices of authority in this country opposed strikes, the unions only means of getting owners and managers to the bargaining table.

It is not an exaggeration to say that union struggles transformed America and largely created the famed middle class to which all but the desperately poor now claim to be a part. But the tide has slowly shifted over the past 50 years as unions have shrunk in the shifting currents of politics, automation, world trade, and a forgetful public.

Although the labor movement is considered as locked into the Democratic Party as the Chamber of Commerce is bound to the GOP, it is worth quoting what some prominent Republican presidents have had to say on the subject:

-- Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. All that harms labor is treason to America.  Abraham Lincoln

-- It is essential that there should be organization of labor. This is an era of organization. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize. -- Theodore Roosevelt

-- Only a fool would try to deprive working men and working women of their right to join the union of their choice.  Dwight D. Eisenhower

-- Where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost.  Ronald Reagan

In balance, Ill give the last quote to the first president we label as a Democrat:

-- A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned -- this is the sum of good government. -- Thomas Jefferson
As college students head back to school, the more sensible among them are wondering how they will pay for the privilege.

There are about 21.5 million students in the United States this year, and many of them will be funding their college careers on borrowed money. Given that there is at present more than $1.3 trillion in student loans on the books, its pretty clear that many college students are far from sensible.

The average students debt upon graduation now approaches $40,000, and as college becomes ever more common and expensive, calls to make it free seem to be multiplying. Hillary Clinton says that when it comes to college, Costs wont be a barrier.

But the only way college could be free is if the faculty and staff donated their time, the buildings required no maintenance, the campuses required no heating, cooling or utilities of any kind, and every other expense simply disappeared. As long as it is impossible to produce something from nothing, though, costs are absolutely a barrier.

The actual question we debate, regardless of whether we admit it, is who should pay for people to go to college.

If students do not shoulder the cost, that cost will be shifted to someone else. And this is where things get interesting. No one seems to take the idea of free college for everyone seriously, but the idea of student loan forgiveness has somehow gained traction. In the end, though, it amounts to the same thing:

The American taxpayer will be left holding a very expensive bag.

But if taxpayers are to bear the cost of student loan forgiveness, shouldnt they have a say in how their money is used?

At a bare minimum, taxpayers should be able to decide what students will study on the public dime. If we are going to force taxpayers to foot the bill for college degrees, students should only study those subjects that are of the greatest benefit to the taxpayers. After all, students making their own choices in this respect is what gave us the student loan problem in the first place. We simply do not need more poetry, gender studies or sociology majors. Starbucks is fully stocked with baristas for the foreseeable future.

How do we know which subjects benefit society? Easy.

Average starting salaries give a clear indication of what type of training society needs its new workers to have. Certainly, there are benefits to a college major beyond the job a student can perform. But if were talking about the benefits to society -- as opposed to the benefits to the student -- the only thing that matters is what the major enables the student to produce for society. And the value of what the student can produce is reflected in the wage employers are willing to pay the student to produce it.

Todays wages tell us that we could use more computer engineers (average starting salary $65,000), nurses ($55,000), and statisticians ($53,000), and far fewer criminal justice majors ($35,000), social workers ($33,000), and elementary education majors ($32,000).

A low wage does not mean, for example, that elementary education isnt important. It is. A low wage simply means that there are already so many people in the market trained to teach elementary school that we dont need more of them.

Meanwhile, there are few who are willing and able to perform jobs requiring a petroleum engineering major, so the value of one more of those people is very high (average starting salary, $103,000).

So we can go this way. We can have taxpayers pick up students tuition in exchange for dictating what those students will study. Or we can allow students both to choose their majors and pay for their educations themselves. But in the end, one of two things is true:

Either a college major is worth its cost or it isnt. If the major is worth its cost, taxpayer financing isnt needed. If the major is not worth its cost, taxpayer financing isnt desirable. Either way, taxpayers have no business paying for students educations.
Cooler Smart Cart Collapsible & Leakproof w/ Removable Liner is rated 4.4 out of 5 by 18 .

Rated 4 out of 5 by annem1958 from Pretty Good Bought this to carry heavier items back from store..I do not drive and don't want to bother people for rides. I chose this one over the metal ones for the way it closes and I can carry empty on my shoulder easily and store in my locker at work for my stop after. My only concern is I'm worried the handle will not last..it is a bit flimsy..also would be great if the handle was a little longer...I'm short and I feel it would be more comfortable a bit longer..and stronger. Overall, happy with this cart...haven't had chance to try as cooler yet!!

Rated 5 out of 5 by jardin49 from Wow! Best Cart! I have a few heavy shopping cart. Since i developed frozen shoulder, i was looking for a cart for grocery shopping and to carry water. I was expecting much when i bought this. I was wrong!! This is perfect cart i ever owned!! I love it!!!!

Rated 5 out of 5 by yankees11 from Great Cart I use mine as a lunch bag as I eat so much food during the day. It holds my 3 meals and a gallon of water. I love it so much I ordered another one to have for the future when I finally wear it out.

Rated 5 out of 5 by Kak6154 from Handy Item...cute and practical! This is the handiest little item. I take food to my mother's almost weekly and it's difficult to lug everything to my car and into her place. This solves that problem. Pack everything up at my kitchen, put it in my car and wheel it in to her house. PERFECT! Easy to clean, easy to store. A must have!

Rated 3 out of 5 by savannah4 from Missing handles I love the idea of this product. It works well with traveling short distances with frozen food and drinks. However, I need handles on the sides to pick it up after loading and also maybe some additional velcro on the top side closure to keep it in place.

Rated 4 out of 5 by Hon1 from Glad I bought this! I sell at our local Farmer's Market and the Smart Cooler is perfect for keeping small food items on ice. It is easy to transport and lightweight. The only drawback is that I would have liked a zip lock or some type of closure on the ice bag.

Rated 4 out of 5 by kstrugg from Perfect Perfect for our soccer games and our life group meetings!
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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!
Canada today sells about $20-billion in goods to China every year. The largest share, more than a quarter, is wood and other forest products; the next, at 15 per cent, is canola seeds used to make cooking oil. Almost all the rest is made up of minerals, petroleum, grains, fish and other raw materials pulled from the earth and sea.
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If you're one of the millions of Americans who use their smartphone every day, you probably have a lot of personal information stored on it, from photos and emails to financial and health data. Yet most of us don't worry about smartphone security like we do about keeping our computer safe from malware.

Recent vulnerabilities discovered for both iPhone and Android devices can serve as a reminder to treat your smartphone like the minicomputer it is and avoid falling prey to smartphone hackers.

In early August, an Emirati human rights activist named Ahmed Mansoor received a suspicious text message. It claimed to have new information about torture and human rights violations in the country's state prisons and included a link to follow, if he wanted details. Instead of clicking the link, Mansoor forwarded the text message to security experts at Citizen Lab and Lookout Security.

Upon investigating, Citizen Lab and Lookout Security found that clicking the link on his mobile device would have led to Mansoor's phone being remotely jailbroken (the Apple iOS replaced with an unsecure operating system) and infected with malware that could log encrypted messages, activate the microphone or camera, and remotely track his movements.

Citizen Lab and Lookout Security forwarded their findings on to Apple which created a patch for the vulnerabilities being exploited by the infected link.

Unfortunately for users, the patch was not released as a critical update, so you will not be prompted to install it. If you use an iPhone, iPad or other iOS device, go to Settings  General  "Software Update" and install update iOS 9.3.5.

In addition to the patch, Apple launched a "bug bounty" program to counter hackers and malicious code writers. The highest bounty  up to $200,000  is offered for identifying vulnerabilities that compromise the boot firmware. Their goal is to motivate hackers to "sell" their services to Apple instead of releasing exploits to malicious code writers.

The takeaway from this exploit is that it is imperative that you remain vigilant to never click on suspicious links in texts, emails or through your mobile web browser. Be just as cautious about where you go online with your phone as you would be on your computer. Malware can infect your browser just by visiting a compromised site, and Apple products are not immune to attack.

Before Android users have the chance to nod knowingly and claim superiority over their iPhone using brethren, allow me to mention the recent discovery that 900 million Android phones are "likely to be vulnerable" to a data hack. The "Quadrooter" flaw, as it's being called, is a vulnerability in the Qualcomm chip processor present in a large number of Android phones worldwide.

The flaws were found in software that handles graphics and in code that controls communication between different processes running inside an Android phone. In order to get infected, an Android user would have to install an infected app, typically encountered through app sites outside of the Google Play store. Upon infection, an attacker could gradually take more control over a device and gain access to its data.

Qualcomm has distributed patches to phone makers and operators, but it's unclear how many of those companies have issued updates to customers' phones. If you'd like to see if your device is vulnerable to any of the bugs know to be utilizing the Quadrooter vulnerability, download the free app called QuadRooter Scanner. The app determines if the patches for known Qualcomm chip flaws have been downloaded and installed on your Android device.

Google has confirmed that vulnerabilities won't be completely patched until the September security release. Primary take away? Don't install apps outside of the Google Play Store. The vast majority of infected and malware-spreading apps are only available through sources outside of the legitimate app stores  iTunes App Store and the Google Play Store.

To stay safe on your smartphone, it's important to install all updates to its operating system and apps. While some users may worry that a patch could damage their device, it is exceedingly rare for an update to break your phone. Because updates are often patches to security holes, without the patch, you'll remain vulnerable to known exploits. Known exploits are easily available to hackers worldwide and likely to be quickly implemented by malicious code writers.

In addition to only installing apps from the legitimate iTunes or Google Play stores, only install software updates directly from the manufacturer. Don't install anything from a popup or "warning" that says "you may be infected," or "we've detected that you're using an out of date version of XXX." Instead, head over to the website maintained by the software manufacturer and check for updates to your software there.

Finally, I would caution you against jailbreaking or rooting your device to gain access to apps or services not offered or sanctioned by Apple or Google. However tempting it may be to gain the ability to customize your user experience, the process of replacing the standard Apple or Android mobile operating system with a different shell strips the integrated security. You'll make yourself susceptible to all manner of malware and vulnerabilities, not only because you will no longer be able to install apps through a legitimate, screened source like iTunes, but because you'll lose access to all future security patches and updates.

Nerd Chick Adventures is written by Andrea Eldridge and Heather Neal from Nerds On Call, an onsite computer and laptop repair company in Redding. They can be reached at nerdchick@callnerds.com.
Steve and Betty MacFarland

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Betty and Steve MacFarland

Anniversary

Betty and Steve MacFarland of Redding celebrated their 50th anniversary on Aug. 27, 2016, with a vacation to Maui and a family dinner party.

They were married on Aug. 27, 1966, in San Marino. They moved to Palo Cedro in 1978. Steve worked at Remi Vista. Betty worked for Junction School, Shasta Blood Center and Simpson College. Steve retired in 2012, but still serves as a member of the Shasta County Board of Education.

Their sons are Gary MacFarland of Paradise and Mike MacFarland of Redding. They have three grandchildren.
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By SCOTT SMITH, Associated Press

MENDOTA, Calif. (AP)  Many California farmworkers who make up the backbone of the nation's No. 1 agricultural state on Tuesday were praising historic legislation that brings them closer to receiving the same overtime pay as the rest of the state's workers who are paid by the hour.

If signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown, a new overtime bill would put California at the forefront nationally of farm labor pay and mark a victory in the fight to improve farmworkers rights in the decades old movement launched by Cesar Chavez, the legendary co-founder of the National Farm Workers Association who fought for higher farm worker pay.

Brown, a Democrat, has not said whether he will sign the law that would be the first of its kind for the United States.

Florentino Reyes, 48, has been picking tomatoes and working a wide variety of crops in California's fertile Central Valley for more than two decades and says he could make another $60 weekly. That would give him more purchasing power to buy better food and clothes for his wife and three children and ease his stress over paying down bills.

"For me, it's discrimination," said Reyes, finishing up a day harvesting green tomatoes near the town of Mendota.

But other farmworkers are nervous about California farmers' claims that the higher overtime pay could hurt them economically and outprice California products from the marketplace in favor of crops grown in other states and countries.

Gonzalo Najera, who drives a tractor on Salinas Valley's lettuce, carrots and broccoli fields, said some farmers are saying the extra overtime payments could drive them out of the state, but he doesn't buy the argument.

"The growers can't leave," Najera said. "They can't take their dirt with them."

The 35-year-old father of four also has parents back in Mexico, who rely on money he regularly sends. He earns about $33,000 a year and said he has worked seven days a week since March this year. The added overtime pay he expects to receive will correct a longstanding injustice so farm workers are no longer treated as second class California employees, Najera said.

Under the current law, California employers must pay time-and-a-half to farmworkers after 10 hours a day or 60 hours a week. Lawmakers in Sacramento on Monday sent the legislation to Brown that would give them overtime after eight hours in a day or 40 hours a week. It is backed by the United Farm Workers, which Chavez helped found in 1962, more than three decades before his death.

Farmers vehemently oppose it, and third-generation almond and olive farmer Pat Ricchiuti said approval by Brown could prompt him to cut his workers' take-home pay by as much as 33 percent. The Fresno Country farmer says he and others he know would respond by limiting crews to eight hours by finding other workers and increasing their use of farm machinery.

"It is really, really sad," he said. "The only people getting hurt in this are the workers."

Ricchuiti argued that farming shouldn't be compared to other industries, because it is seasonal, susceptible to unpredictable weather and the availability of water, a scarce resource in drought-stricken California, he said. Each of these limit when he needs workers to certain times of the year, he said.

Farm worker Juan Valencia, 39, who raises calves on a Fresno County dairy, said he often works more than 60 hours weekly and gets overtime but fears his boss might cut him to 40 hours  making it hard for him to support his wife and two young children.

"They make it sound pretty. It's not going to be pretty at all," said Valencia, who earns about $32,000 a year. "I'm going to have to look for another job."

Reyes, the tomato picker, said the farmers' claims are political heat aimed at trying to prevent Brown from giving him the same pay protections that the rest of California's hourly workers have.

"We've been waiting for this change," he said.
FILE - In this Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2013, file photo, a waning moon rises in the distance as a passenger jet takes off at Phoenix's Sky Harbor Airport. A handful of U.S. pilots each year fail random sobriety tests. Those who fail can fly again if they prove rehabilitation. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)

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By SCOTT MAYEROWITZ and DAVID KOENIG, AP Airlines Writers

NEW YORK (AP)  Every few months, a pilot somewhere in the world is stopped before a jet takes off because of suspicion of drunkenness. It makes headlines and gives nervous travelers another reason to avoid flying.

Despite their notoriety, such cases are extremely rare.

Each day, there are 90,000 flights around the world, carrying more than 8 million people. And the overwhelming majority of pilots in those cockpits are sober.

Pilots take being fit to fly seriously and act accordingly," says former US Airways pilot John M. Cox, now CEO of the consulting firm Safety Operating Systems. "Pilots know they are one of the most carefully monitored professions and therefore, are very conservative."

There are occasional lapses. The latest incident occurred Saturday morning when two United Airlines pilots were pulled from their flight  and arrested  as they prepared to fly 141 passengers from Scotland to the United States.

But don't think this will end the pilots' careers.

United has removed both men from flying duties  for now.

Many pilots caught drinking on the job have later returned to the skies.

The United pilots, Paul Brady Grebenc, 35, and Carlos Roberto Licona, 45, were released on bail Monday. Grebenc, from Columbus, Mississippi, and Licona, from Humble, Texas, made no plea and are free until a later court hearing.

The Federal Aviation Administration has a process that allows recovering alcoholics back in the cockpit if they pass a medical evaluation and stay clean during monitoring for the next five years. Since the union-backed program started in the 1970s, about 5,300 pilots  more than 100 a year  have gone through rehab and regained their licenses, according to a program official.

"Pilots aren't any different than other people in the respect of having occasions they probably regret," says airline analyst Robert Mann.

U.S. rules prohibit pilots from flying if they have a blood-alcohol content of .04 percent or higher. (The United Kingdom has a stricter limit of .02 percent.) By comparison, the legal threshold to drive a car in the U.S. is twice that level at 0.08 percent.

Pilots must also wait several hours after having a drink to fly. The FAA has a saying for this: "Eight hours from bottle to throttle."

Last year, random alcohol tests were given to 12,480 U.S. pilots. Only 10 failed.

Pilots in the U.S. and most of Europe are only tested randomly or if there is a suspicion that they are drunk. There are also random drug tests.

But in India, all pilots and flight attendants are tested before departing. That's every single one on every outbound flight. With that stricter policy, 43 pilots tested positive for alcohol before flights last year, according to India's civil-aviation agency. India has about one-tenth the number of annual flights as the United States.

Fliers might take solace in knowing that the danger from drunk drivers is much greater. Each year, about 10,000 people are killed on American highways because of drunk drivers  almost a third of all driving fatalities  according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

But there is a mental disconnect between statistics when it comes to flying. There's something unsettling to many fliers about being buckled into a metal tube, racing through the air near the speed of sound without being able to see who is at the controls.

"If you are in a taxi and you think your driver is drunk, you ask them to pull over and get out," says John DiScala, who runs the travel advice site JohnnyJet.com . "You can't ask a pilot to pull over."

Since the 1970s, airline pilots have had a confidential program in which they can be treated for alcohol abuse and return to the cockpit. Those in the program, called the Human Intervention Motivation Study or HIMS, must be evaluated by an FAA-certified doctor. The pilot is interviewed monthly by a flight manager and a committee of other pilots. Because of the risk of relapse, monitoring usually continues for several years after a pilot returns to flying.

Paul Hayes, director of air safety for aviation consultancy firm Ascend, says that it is extremely rare that alcohol is a factor in an accident.

But there have been a handful of crashes tied to drinking.

In 1977, the American pilot of a Japan Air Lines DC-8 cargo jet was drunk when he crashed the plane during takeoff from Anchorage. All five people onboard  all crew  died.

In September 2008, an Aeroflot flight within Russia crashed on its landing approach, killing 88 people. One of the factors, according to investigators, was that the pilot became disorientated as a result of his drunkenness.

Back in the U.S., there are a handful of cases where pilots were caught actually flying passengers drunk.

A JetBlue Airways pilot was charged with flying two flights between New York and Orlando in 2015 while under the influence. An Alaska Airlines pilot was charged with being drunk on two 2014 flights between Oregon and California.

The most famous case though might be a 1990 Northwest Airlines flight from Fargo, North Dakota, to Minneapolis.

The three pilots had been out at a bar the prior night. One had more than 15 rum and colas while the other two shared at least six pitchers of beer. Their flight left at 6:30 a.m. but two of them had been out at the bar until 10:30 p.m., the other staying until 11:30 p.m.

The plane landed safely; the pilots ultimately ended up in prison.
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By Damon Arthur of the Redding Record Searchlight

Some 450 North State residents and organizations  including local and federal agencies  received notices last week reminding them they had not filed annual water-use reports for their water right permits.

Among those who received the notices were the California Department of Transportation, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service and the Siskiyou County Flood Control & Water Conservation District.

The notices sent to water rights holders in Shasta, Siskiyou, Trinity and Tehama counties were among about 4,000 that went out statewide on Aug. 25, said Kathy Mrowka, enforcement program manager for the State Water Resources Control Board.

About 12,000 notices were sent to water rights holders earlier this year reminding them to file by July 1 their annual water-use reports covering 2015, she said.

Water rights permits allow people and organizations to divert a certain amount of water from streams or take water from springs.

Mrowka said the reports help the state keep track of how much water is being diverted, especially by those who hold senior water rights, she said.

"For us, it's a big issue because we use that data all the time to analyze water use," she said.

State officials said they published the list of those who were "deficient" in filing their reports in the interest of "obtaining a high compliance rate for online use reporting," water board officials said.

Permit holders submit reports to the state through an online form. After the notices sent, state officials went online to monitor reporting and found that one day last week there were 526 people filling out a report, Mrowka said.

For late filers, the state can issue cease and desist orders as well as administrative fines of up to $500 a day, dating back to July 1, according to the water board.

Last year there were 31 civil liability complaints filed alleging water rights and reporting violations.

Randy Akana, manager of the Siskiyou County Flood Control District, said he tried to turn in the district's report earlier this year, but there were apparently computer problems with it being accepted.

"We are in contact with the water board, trying to find out what is going on," Akana said.

One of the district's reports was accepted and one wasn't, he said.

"I have a feeling it's a water board problem," he said.

The flood control district operates Box Canyon Dam, which creates Lake Siskiyou. According to the report submitted March 25 last year, the district can divert up to 26,000 acre-feet of water annually.

The Siskiyou County Flood Control District wasn't alone among public agencies not submitting reports. According to the water board, the BLM did not submit reports on eight water rights permits held in Shasta County and one in Siskiyou County.

Nancy Haug, the BLM's district manager, said officials in her office are working on getting the reports filed. The district has hundreds of water sources to manage and they are still inventorying them. She said they only recently were required to file annual reports.

"In Applegate (field office) we've got hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of water sources," Haug said.

Haug's district covers a large swath of Northern California, including portions of Modoc, Siskiyou, Lassen, Trinity and Humboldt counties.

Several other public agencies also failed to file their reports by July 1, according to the state, including the National Park Service, the Klamath National Forest, the city of Dunsmuir and the Grenada Irrigation District.

Jack Schreder, husband of Redding City Councilwoman Kristen Schreder, also received a late notice. Schreder said he turned in his report before receiving the late notice.

"My records show I did turn it in," he said.

Schreder has a right to use 48 acre-feet annually. An acre-foot of water is about 326,000 gallons. He said he gets water from Cottonwood Creek and from underground to supply water for a cattle grazing operation in Igo.

According to the water board, Caltrans also failed to file reports on four water rights permits  natural springs in Shasta, Siskiyou and Tehama counties and a stream diversion on Cottonwood Creek in Shasta County.

The springs are used for fountains along state highways, such as one along Highway 299 on the Buckhorn grade in western Shasta County, she said.

Trish Coder, a Caltrans spokeswoman, said the reports were filed Wednesday, a day after the agency was contacted by the Record Searchlight. There was a mixup in the filing as there were two new people temporarily assigned to doing the reports this year, she said.
"Make America great, again!" Smiling sincerely, the clerk at the local convenience store handed over a few bills and coins in change to the man ahead of me in line.

The words didn't surprise me. Like many rural enclaves, Shasta County is staunchly conservative and Republican, so I assumed this to be "Trump country." The clerk was maybe 20, juggling a few part-time gigs to get by. He and his girlfriend would like to get married, but for now she and the baby were living with her folks and he was bouncing around on the couches of friends. Maybe they'd go to Texas, he'd told me not long after the baby was born last year. Then again, maybe not.

I never asked what was in Texas, but his eyes brightened when he talked about the possibilities. He'd been there once on a family vacation when he was 10. It was, he often declared, "A good place. Not like here." I wasn't so sure.

It wasn't just me, he talked about Texas to everyone who paused at his register while he rang up cans of iced tea and beer, candy bars, a few lifeless tacos covered with a runny cheese sauce that reminded me of what my mother drizzled over the boiled cauliflower of my childhood.

"You know, George Bush is from Texas," I offered once. "The old president," I prompted in response to his blank stare. He nodded, half-remembering, but that was a long time ago. He wasn't yet in kindergarten when the terrorist attacks of 9/11 happened, or out of middle school when the country elected its first black president, whom he hates for "too many reasons to even count." Born during Clinton's second term, he has no memory of that administration, yet he likes to crack raunchy jokes about Monica Lewinsky and NAFTA.

Now he's backing Trump "all the way," presumably because the GOP nominee has promised to make America great, again. It's that word "again" that I ponder. What does it even mean?

The more people I ask, the more muddled the answers become, especially as we move closer to Election Day. The recurrent theme, though, is that the Obama Administration deliberately destroyed the country for "too many reasons to even count," as the sales clerk likes to say. It's truly amazing how many people either believe totally or at least partially that the sitting president is a foreign-born secretly gay secret Muslim who was admitted to Harvard as a result of some vast conspiracy conceived by the Kennedy family and who fit right in with corrupt Chicago politicians who took their cues from dead anarchists and radicals  or the anti-Christ. Apparently sometimes it's hard to tell.

I wonder, though, if this current era is so problem-fraught to which halcyon years will we be returned should the GOP claim the White House this November? Turns out that to conservatives over age 55, the last time America was truly great, was pre-1980. However, it's probably not prudent for liberals to remind our conservative brethren that Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.

Growing up in what has become America's Rust Belt during the '50s and '60s, I can see the idea's appeal. As a young journalist, I covered factories closing and moving outside the country. When I decided on graduate school across the country my mother told the aunts, "There's prosperity in California."

I wouldn't be there to witness the descent into hardscrabble poverty with factories abandoned to weeds, once-tidy houses growing soft with roofs sagging, shops shuttered and schools closed. Nobody much lives there anymore.

But, oh what a wonder it all seemed when we were kids. America had beaten the Depression and won the war. No need to hunt for "Made in America" tags because most everything was made in America. Jobs were plentiful and so were union benefits. First the GI Bill and later the federal student loans put college in reach for ordinary American families. Women's roles expanded as they entered the trades and professions. People of all races, ethnicities and religions were taking seats at the table for the first time. The brass ring still seemed within reach, even as we spun further and further away.

The convenience store clerk remembers none of that, of course. He just wants his version of the American Dream, which looks a whole lot like Texas.

"Make America great, again!" he beamed, when it was my turn.

"It's already great," I replied.

"Well then, let's make it greater!"

Okay, I told him, we can certainly all work on that.

Nisa Donnelly can be reached at Nisa.Donnelly@gmx.com.
When you think about industry in Redding, what comes to mind? Health care? Engineering? Lumber?

What about fashion?

Sound ridiculous? Sure, maybe fashion in San Francisco or in New York, but in Redding?

The good people of Iowa had a similar reaction when Simeon Talley and Amanda Lesmeister founded the Iowa Fashion Project with a mission to elevate and grow Iowa's fashion community. Did they let that stop them? No. Instead they produced the sardonically named Flyover Fashion Fest and became the central conveners of local fashion talent with more than 20 labels featured. In just over a year, they've managed to change the perception of what's possible in their state.

Can our community do the same?

The first step is to activate our imagination about what's possible. As I wrote in these pages in August 2014, "Public imagination refers to our capacity to imagine future scenarios together, as a community. A recent workshop at Institute for the Future (where I work) put it this way: 'We live in a world of private imaginations  what we don't have is a collective imagination. Imagination is the engine of change and progress. If you can imagine it, you can make it real ... We do not imagine for imagination's sake. We ignite public imagination to galvanize action.'"

We can do this by asking #WhatIfRedding questions. These kinds of questions jostle us from our default assumptions about the future, and they open up new kinds of possibility spaces. In March 2016, community members generated more than 50 #WhatifRedding ideas. Jan Kearns of Gold Coast Goods posed the question, "#WhatifRedding independent makers got together to explore ways to collaborate to bring small batch manufacturing to our community?"

In an effort to understand Redding's past and future when it comes to fashion, we've looked all over town and this is what we've found: Some of the best sewers in Redding used to work at Loralie, a Redding-based dress manufacturer that sold nationwide. The luckiest local theater groups have Loralie alumni on their costume team roster. Women report treasuring the Vaneli label shoes that are still in their closets, designed by a gentleman named Van who used to work at Dickers. The shoe company was official registered in Redding in 1968.

The factory floor at Yates Gear on Hartnell Avenue is where ropes, lanyards and harnesses used by Navy Seals and fire rescue teams are sewn, using top-notch technical fabrics. Ryan Russell is 3D printing next-generation jewelry at his studio on California Street. Etsy entrepreneur Robin Fator is shipping her Dark Pony Designs garments all over the country, and is the recipient of a successful Kiva microloan to expand her business. Clothing retailers are seeding an interest in fashion locally, from California Street Shop to Carousel, from Dandelion to For Elyse, and more. The team that is powering the very first Maker Faire in Shasta County is putting together a textiles track when their event happens at the Civic Nov. 12.

Redding is alive with fashion.

And why does this matter? Because fashion is a big business in the United States. To give a sense of scale, here are some of the numbers published by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress in 2015:

Today there are more than 1.8 million people across the country working in fashion design, apparel manufacturing, wholesale apparel merchandising, retail sales and modeling.

There are almost 18,000 designers working in the United States. This number has grown by almost 50 percent in the past 10 years alone. The median annual income for designers nationwide is greater than $73,000.

Over a trillion dollars is spent annually on apparel and footwear around the globe, with nearly $370 billion spent in the United States.

The economic development potential of fashion is not lost on the Shasta Economic Development Corp. Startup Weekend in Redding already has seen its first fashion startup, Justice Bows, which made it to the final round of pitching last year.

Yes, Redding is alive with fashion.

Don't believe me? Then come see for yourself. From 5:30-7 p.m. Sept. 9 during Fashion Week, of course, you are invited to catch a glimpse of fashion industry locals who are making the future of fashion today.

Learn from local Etsy entrepreneurs, hear from patrons who are crowdfunding fashion, try on wearable technology and more. The event will be held at Shasta Venture Hub, former site of the renowned dress manufacturer, Loralie.

Renowned futurist Jim Dator says, "Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous."

Does it seem ridiculous that a region known for farming would ever have a thriving fashion scene? Tell that to the people in Iowa.

Here's to ridiculous futures in Redding. It just might be a sign that we're on to something.

Contributing columnist Rachel Hatch can be reached via Twitter @Rachelkeas or at RachelReddingCA@gmail.com.
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The opening lyrics of a popular song during the 1940s advised listeners, "You've got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative (and) don't mess with Mister In-Between."

It may be state schools Superintendent Tom Torlakson's favorite ditty, because he certainly adopted its upbeat credo last week in announcing results of the state's latest series of academic achievement tests.

Torlakson trumpeted "significant progress" in the scores of the 3.2 million California students in grades three to eight and 11 who were tested on how well they are performing vis-a-vis the state's new Common Core standards.

Generally, California's students improved by several percentage points from last year's tests on meeting or exceeding standards in mathematics and English language arts and literacy.

"The higher scores show that the dedication, hard work and patience of California's teachers, parents, school employees and administrators are paying off," Torlakson said as he released test results.

Overall, 49 percent of students met or exceeded standards in English, up three points, and 37 percent reached those levels in mathematics, up four points.

One has to wade through hundreds of words that accentuated the positive, down to the 19th paragraph of Torlakson's announcement, to get the first hint of a negative, to wit:

"One concern remains with the continuing achievement gap, with significantly lower scores among students from low-income families, English learners and some ethnic groups compared to other students."

No kidding.

Just 37 percent of Latinos and 31 percent of African American students met or exceeded English standards, compared to 64 percent of whites and 76 percent of Asians.

The gap was wider in math, with Latinos and blacks at 24 and 18 percent, while 53 percent of white students and 72 percent of Asians hit the competency mark. And it was even wider when the scores of poor and "English-learner" students were calculated.

About 60 percent of the 6 million K-12 students fall into one or both of those categories, and not only were their test scores markedly lower than those of other subgroups, but their improvements were smaller, which means the "achievement gap" may be growing.

That's obviously tragic for them, and in the long run for the state. But it also raises serious questions about the efficacy of the state's new approach to education finance, which gives school districts extra money to concentrate on closing the achievement gap, and about the reluctance of state officials, from Gov. Jerry Brown down, to tighten up oversight of and accountability for how well the extra money is being spent.

Torlakson, Brown and state school board President Michael Kirst want to leave implementation of the Local Control Funding Formula largely to local districts, with only soft monitoring by the state. A new accountability system Kirst's board will finalize this fall embraces that hands-off approach, as well as using "multiple measures" that downplay test results.

Education reform and civil rights groups have pressed, so far in vain, for a more focused accountability system to guarantee that the extra money meant for "at-risk" students is not squandered.

The new test results indicate that they are at ever-greater risk of failure, and that allocating billions of extra dollars for them without strict accountability is not only foolish but downright cruel.

Email Dan Walters at dwalters@sacbee.com.
For the thousands of destitute that Mother Teresa treated, she was 'god incarnate' and her hand was the miracle of love the poor needed. Attributing scientifically-unproven remedies as miracles does not help the followers of Missionaries of Charity and humanity in general, says Pallava Bagla.

In her lifetime, she had already earned the title 'saint of the gutters' and to the thousands of destitute and needy who she cared for she was a 'living god'.

And on September 4, 2016 Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, a Catholic nun who served the poor in Kolkata, will be bestowed the title of Saint at a function at the Vatican City.

Her journey from her birth place Skopje, now in Macedonia, to her yeoman work in West Bengal is itself a 'miracle' but after her death to attribute this diminutive woman with a Herculean grit for serving the poor of having performed 'miracles' like curing two people of diseases borders on irrationality.

Mother Teresa should have been made a saint without having so-called miracles associated with her name.

It is worth highlighting that the Constitution of India in Article 51A (h) enunciates "to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform".

This is where attribution of so-called miracles comes into conflict with the under standings of modern science. But India is complex civilisation where faith, science, religion and superstition all co-exit mostly in harmony but occasionally in conflict.

India's best known living scientist and recent Bharat Ratna Professor CNR Rao on being asked said "No, I do not believe in miracles. One in thing general I will tell you, in India there is confusion between religion, faith, superstition and science.

"Faith everybody should have one thing or the other, like if in science you must have faith in the laws of physics. Faith is something everybody should have. If somebody has faith in philosophy or God, I have nothing against it; however, it should not give rise to superstition.

"Even Einstein said nobody could be without faith. Religion also you can have any religion, but do not mix it up with other things in life. Faith has nothing to do with believing in things that cannot happen against the laws of physics."

But for Mother Teresa to officially become a saint she needed to perform some miracles and according to the National Catholic Register: "The first [miracle] took place in West Bengal, India, and involved the healing of an Indian woman, Monica Besra, whose abdominal tumour was so severe that her doctors abandoned hope of saving her.

"Taken into the care of the Missionaries of Charity, she continued to decline and endured such agony from the tumour that she could no longer sleep. On the one-year anniversary of Mother's passing, the sisters at the home placed a Miraculous Medal that had been touched to the body of Mother Teresa on Besra's stomach. The suffering woman fell asleep, and when she woke up, her pain was gone. Doctors examined her and found the reason why: The tumour had disappeared completely."

Busting some of the hype around the miracle in 2003, The New York Times reported quoting Dr. Ranjan Mustafi, a doctor who said he had treated Besra, and claimed that "the medicines he prescribed had eliminated the tumour. He also said it was a cyst caused by tuberculosis, not a cancerous tumour. The Vatican team that travelled to India and certified Ms Besra's account, he added, but never contacted him."

According to the National Catholic Register, "A board of medical specialists worked with the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to study the alleged miracle. After assessing the records and interviewing the medical staff involved, the committee determined that the healing was medically inexplicable. Pope John Paul approved the miracle on December 20, 2002, barely five years after Teresa's death."

But speaking to the New York Times in 2003, Besra's physician Mustafi said "It was not a miracle", adding, "She took medicines for nine months to one year."

According to the National Catholic Register, "The second miracle took place in December 2008 in Brazil. Marcilio Haddad Andrino, a now-42-year-old mechanical engineer from Santos, Brazil, struggled with a bacterial infection in the brain that caused severe brain abscesses and agonizing head pain.

"A priest friend encouraged the recently married young man and his wife, Fernanda Nascimento Rocha, to pray for Mother Teresa's help. Andrino, however, slipped into a coma as treatments failed, and while Rocha prayed, he was taken in for last-ditch surgery.

"When the surgeon entered the operating room, he found Andrino awake and asking him what was going on. Andrino made a full recovery, and the couple went on to have two children, even though it was deemed by doctors to be a near medical impossibility."

Rationalists oppose tooth and nail that miracles take place since most so-called miracles have a scientific basis.

Take the case of 1995 rumour that statues of Lord Ganesha were drinking milk, devotes lined up in thousands outside temples offering milk to the elephant god. In the end it turned out that simple laws of physics and how a meniscus behaves could well explain why milk was disappearing from a spoon and heading down towards mother earth due to laws of gravity.

Yet to date, you can see gullible people being taken in by fakirs, babas and priests for performing miracles.

One common miracle is exorcism of a ghost from person body using a coconut and by sprinkling water on the coconut.

In reality the miracle maker usually hides a piece of sodium metal within the husk of the coconut and when water is sprinkled on it, the sodium catches fire gives out a smoke and the people are fooled into believing that the ghost was cleansed from the victim's body. In reality it was a heat giving or exothermic reaction of water and sodium that became a ghost excommunicated.

Similarly the two miraculous medical recoveries attributed to Mother Teresa would have a rational medical explanation but to the believers faith over powers science. It is high time the Catholic Church gave up this requirement of a person having performed at least two miracles after death to be canonised into sainthood.

Reform seems to be taking place in the church since earlier there was a requirement of more miracles to have been recorded and there was a mandatory 50-year waiting period for a person to be declared a saint, but in Mother Teresa's case that has been waived and she would be officially granted sainthood within two decades after her death. This is indeed a miracle by the conservative church.

Most Indians will be celebrating the elevation of Saint Teresa with Minister for External Affairs Sushma Swaraj representing the might of the Indian Constitution at the august ceremony, yet there are a few who question the rationality of such exercises.

Speaking on these issues, Prabir Ghosh, president of the Science and Rationalists Association of India from Kolkata, said, "If people want to revere Mother Teresa for her social work, I have no problem. But these miracles are unreasonable. I challenge the Pope to cure every poor person in India who cannot afford medical care, by praying to Mother Teresa."

On the other hand, Rao is also fellow of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and on being asked about this issue of Mother Teresa being made into a Saint and how does he justify miracles and science, he points out: "Pontifical Academy has nothing to do with the Pope in this way. Pope deals with the church and the church has made her a saint. Pontifical Academy does not deal with Saints."

Towards lasting peace, Rao has a simple solution: "Do not mix religion and science."

According to an official release from the Pope's Office, in her own life time Mother Teresa said, "What the poor need most is to feel needed, to feel loved. There are remedies and treatments for all kinds of illnesses, but when someone is undesirable, if there are no serving hands and loving hearts, then there is no hope for a true cure."

It is for these reasons attributing scientifically unproven remedies as miracles does not help the followers of Missionaries of Charity and humanity in general.

For the thousands of destitute that Mother Teresa treated, she was 'god incarnate' and her hand was the miracle of love the poor needed.



The author is a columnist for the Press Trust of India
Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah on Sunday met the all-party delegation led by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh in Srinagar and said such efforts have lost credibility as there has hardly been any follow-up after similar visits in the past.

During his hour-long interaction with the delegation, Omar recalled the previous all-party delegation visits since 1990 to Kashmir and said that unfortunately when things cool down, there is no progress on the issue. He said the MPs who have come this time face a mammoth task in their hands to revive faith in this process.

He said the then Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao had promised sky is the limit but failed to do anything.

There was a time when my father had conveyed to grant internal autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir and had warned New Delhi that if they continue to deny it, time will come when it will also not be acceptable to people of Jammu and Kashmir. I think we are heading for that time only, Omar said.

He told the delegation that his workers were pressurising him not to attend the meeting such is the situation.

Omar also spoke of continuous failure of the state government and its dilly dallying tactics.

Mehbooba Mufti should decide whether she wants to be the chief minister or leader of opposition. In the morning, she says one thing and does a complete about turn by evening. She wants that Hurriyat should be talked to but in the evening she puts them under arrest, he said.

Omar said such all-party delegations have lost credibility because there was no follow up after their visits in the past .

What happened to the 2010 all-party delegation. It was never followed up so the parliamentarians who have come have a mammoth task in their hands to revive faith in this process, he said.

When asked whether he agreed with the chief ministers perception that only five per cent people were unhappy, Omar said, I wonder by what stretch of imagination, she has arrived at this figure. I dont agree at all. The space for mainstream politicians has shrunk courtesy the present ruling alliance.

He also said that Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti should have released the Hurriyat leaders if she was serious about talks but she was not clear in her own head about the way forward.

As CM she arrests them (separatists) and as @jkpdp president she invites them to talk and then we wonder why Kashmir burns!!!!

When the CM of J-K isnt clear in her own head about the way forward how do we expect her government to react and act as a cohesive unit? Omar said in a series of tweets.

Mehbooba, in her capacity as Peoples Democratic Party president, on Saturday, wrote letters to top separatist leaders seeking their cooperation in the peaceful resolution of the issue of Jammu and Kashmir by engaging with the all-party delegation.

However, Omar, the former chief minister, said instead of releasing the letter to the media, Mehbooba should have released the separatists who are under detention.

Instead of releasing her letter to the press, @MehboobaMufti should have released the detained Hurriyat leaders if she was serious about talks, the NC working

president said.

He said even as some of the separatist leaders were in jail, the chief minister asked them to suggest time and place to meet the delegation.

An all-party delegation comprising 26 MPs arrived in Srinagar on Sunday in an effort to restore peace in the Valley which has been gripped by violence since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani on July 8.

In the clashes with security forces, 71 people have lost their lives and scores of others have been severely injured.

Cutting across party lines, the leaders said that they were hopeful of finding a solution for restoration of peace in the Valley.

Image: National Conference working president Omar Abdullah addressing a press conference after a meeting with the all-party Parliamentary delegation. Photograph: S Irfan/PTI
IMAGE: PM Narendra Modi addressing the BRICS Leaders Meeting in Hangzhou. Photograph: Press Information Bureau

India on Sunday called on other BRICS members to intensify joint efforts to combat terrorism as Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in an apparent reference to Pakistan, demanded coordinated actions by the grouping to isolate supporters and sponsors of terror.

Leading from the chair, Modi in his hard-hitting address to the BRICS Leaders Meeting in Hangzhou said, Terrorists in South Asia, or anywhere for that matter, do not own banks or weapons factories.

Clearly, someone funds and arms them and BRICS must intensify joint efforts not just to fight terror but to coordinate actions to isolate those who are supporters and

sponsors of terror, he said, without naming Pakistan.

But the reference was clearly aimed at Islamabad -- a close ally of China.

Describing BRICS as an influential voice in international discourse, Modi said it was the groupings shared responsibility to shape the global agenda and help developing nations achieve their objectives.

He said terrorism remains the primary source of instability and the biggest threat to our societies and countries and the supply chains have a global reach.

Use of social media to promote radical ideology is increasing (the) dimension of this threat, he added.

External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup during a media briefing said (Modis address to the BRICS Leaders Meeting) tells you how strongly the prime minister intervened on the issue of terror and how be believes that this really is the central challenge facing the moment and unless we have collective approach to this, it will not be possible for us to defeat this.

Later, a joint statement issued by the grouping said: The leaders strongly condemned the heinous acts of terrorism that continue to disrupt global peace and security and undermine social and economic confidence.

They expressed deep sympathy and support to the innocent victims of terror acts and condemned recent terrorist attacks in various cities of the world, it added.

IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, South African President Jacob Zuma and Brazilian President Michel Temer posing for a group photo before the BRICS meeting. Photograph: PTI

Swarup also said it was important to have informal discussions with other BRICS leaders ahead of the groupings eighth annual Summit in Goa from October 15-16.

Earlier in his brief address, Modi said: We, as BRICS, are an influential voice in international discourse. It is, therefore, our shared responsibility to shape the international agenda.

Our shared responsibility to shape international agenda in manner that helps developing nations achieve their objectives, he said in this picturesque eastern Chinese city on the sidelines of the G20 Summit.

BRICS brings together five major emerging economies, comprising 43 per cent of the worlds population, having 37 per cent of the world GDP and 17 per cent share in the world trade.

Modi said Building Responsive, Inclusive and Collective Solutions is the theme we have chosen which mirrors central priorities at G20 Summit.

The four other leaders who participated in the meeting of the five-member bloc included new Brazilian President Michel Temer, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping -- with whom Modi held bilateral talks earlier, and South African President Jacob Zuma.

Our summit next month would not only be an opportunity to deepen ties with ourselves, we will also interact with Indias neighbouring countries -- Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand, who have been invited for the

outreach summit. We welcome you all to Goa next month, Modi said concluding his address.

According to the joint statement, BRICS leaders recognised that member countries were confronted with new challenges in their respective economic growth.

The leaders underlined the importance of strengthening BRICS strategic partnership guided by principles of openness, solidarity, equality, mutual understanding, inclusiveness and mutually beneficial cooperation.

The grouping was formalised during the first meeting of BRIC Foreign Ministers on the sidelines of UN General Assembly in New York in 2006. The first BRIC summit was held in Yekaterinburg, Russia, on June 16, 2009.
India on Sunday raised its concern with China over the ChinaPakistan Economic Corridor which runs through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, and terrorism emanating from the region as Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Chinese President Xi Jinping the two countries need to be sensitive to each others strategic interests.

Asserting that fight against terror should not be motivated by political considerations, Modi said it is of paramount importance that we respect each others aspirations, concerns and strategic interests to ensure durable bilateral ties.

In the bilateral meeting with Xi ahead of the G20 summit, Modi raised Indias concerns over the $46 billion (Rs 3.06 lakh crore) CPEC being laid through PoK.

Besides a host of energy-related projects, the CPEC consists of rail, road and pipelines to ferry oil and gas from Gwadar port to Kashghar in Xinjiang through PoK.

Replying to a question whether the terrorism emanating from the region where the CPEC is being laid through has been discussed, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup told reporters the issue has been raised during the meeting.

Modi said both India and China need to be sensitive to each others strategic interests and called for specific actions to prevent growth of negative perception.

As a matter of principle, both countries would have to be sensitive to each others strategic interests, Swarup said while touching upon broad themes that Modi stressed upon during his nearly 30-minute bilateral with Xi, their eighth meeting.

In order to promote positive convergence, we would also need to prevent growth of negative perception. For this, the specific actions by both countries would play the major role, he said.

In particular, Modi highlighted that we have succeeded in maintaining peace and tranquility on the border, he added.

Condemning the recent suicide bomb attack on the Chinese embassy in Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan, in his opening remarks, Modi said it is yet another proof of the continuing scourge of terrorism.

The prime minister reiterated that our response to terror must not be motivated by political considerations, Swarup said.

On his part, Xi said China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound ties and further boost bilateral cooperation.

China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound relations and further advance their cooperation, state-run Chinese Xinhua news agency quoted Xi as saying.

About the bilateral relations, which experienced turbulence due to differences over a raft of issues, Modi said in order to make the Asian century a reality, the countries of the continent would have to take responsibility.

The meeting came amid differences over including listing of Pakistan-based terrorist organisations in the United Nations, China stalling Indias membership at the elite Nuclear Suppliers Group and the CPEC being built through PoK.

Asked whether Prime Minister Modi raised the issue of China blocking Indias bid for the membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group during the bilateral, Swarup declined to get into the nitty-gritty of the issues discussed.

I am not going into the nitty-gritty of each and everything that was discussed. Everything is not meant for public consumption. There are certain things (which) need to remain between the two governments, he said.

On yet another question on the NSG issue, he said: I will not go into the specifics, if you read between the lines, you pretty much understand when you we talk about strategic interests, concerns and aspirations, it is not as if China is not unaware of our strategic interests, aspirations and concerns or we are unaware of their concerns. So, it is something both sides are well aware.

This was a meeting at summit level between the two. They are meant to provide high-level guidance and direction to overall relations.

Citing that India has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, China had opposed its bid to join the elite 48-member bloc during NSGs meeting in Seoul in June.

Modi said he always had a strategic vision for India-China relations. The India-China partnership is important not only for the two countries but for the entire region and the world.

India has worked to make progress in the closer, developmental partnership with China.

Cultural and people-to-people ties have also been increasing, Swarup said.

Modi said he always had a strategic vision for India-China relations. The India-China partnership is important not only for the two countries but for the entire region and the world.

Asked to comment on the Chinese state-media quoting Xi as telling Modi that China is willing to maintain hard-won sound relations with India, Swarup said it would not be appropriate for me to characterise President Xis remarks.

After all we are in his country and it is for the Chinese side to amplify and clarify whatever he said. Not appropriate for me to characterise what the other side said, he said.

In the context of India and China, he said that our peoples also have the expectation that we make every possible effort to fulfil their dreams of progress, development and prosperity, Swarup said.

The prime minister is in China to attend the two-day G20 Summit.

Ahead of the 8th BRICS summit next month, Modi also extended a personal invitation to Xi to come to Goa which Xi said he was very happy to accept.

Photograph: Vikas Swarup/MEA/Twitter
Hundreds of thousands of people watched the ceremony in St Peters Square, where the pontiff said Mother Teresa was tireless worker for mercy.

IMAGE: A Swiss Guard stands in front of a tapestry depicting Mother Teresa in Vatican City. Photograph: Stefano Rellandini/Reuters

Pope Francis declared Mother Teresa a saint on Sunday, praising the tiny nun for having taken in societys most unwanted and for having shamed world leaders for the crimes of poverty they themselves created.

The pontiff delivered the formula for the canonisation of the Albanian-born nun -- known as the saint of the gutters -- before huge crowds of pilgrims gathered in St Peter's Square in Vatican City on Sunday morning.

IMAGE: Pope Francis blesses with an incense burner as he leads a mass for the canonisation of Mother Teresa of Calcutta in the Vatican City. Photograph: Stefano Rellandini/Reuters

Applause broke out before he completed the formula of canonisation, in which he declared Blessed Teresa of Kolkata to be a saint.

Hundreds of thousands -- including hundreds of blue-and white-robed nuns from Missionaries of Charity sisterhood founded by Mother Teresa -- had gathered from around the world to attend the canonisation of the church's newest saint, just 19 years after her death.

IMAGE: A general view of Saint Peter's Square as Pope Francis leads a mass for the canonisation of Mother Teresa. Photograph: Stefano Rellandini/Reuters

Praising Mother Teresa for her charitable work, he said, Mother Teresa, in all aspects of her life, was a generous dispenser of divine mercy, making herself available for everyone through her welcome and defence of human life, those unborn and those abandoned and discarded.

She bowed down before those who were spent, left to die on the side of the road, seeing in them their God-given dignity. She made her voice heard before the powers of this world, so that they might recognise their guilt for the crime of poverty they created.

She was an example to volunteers around the world, he said. May she be your model of holiness.

IMAGE: A tapestry depicting Mother Teresa in the facade of Saint Peter's Basilica during a mass, celebrated by Pope Francis, for her canonisation in Saint Peter's Square at the Vatican. Photograph: Stefano Rellandini/Reuters

Born Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu on August 26, 1910, Mother Teresa came to India in 1929 as a sister of the Loreto order. In 1946, she received what she described as a call within a call to found a new order dedicated to caring for the most unloved and unwanted, the poorest of the poor.

In 1950, she founded the Missionaries of Charity, which went onto become a global order of nuns priests, brothers and lay co-workers.

IMAGE: The relics of Mother Teresa are placed in front of the altar in St Peter's Square at the Vatican during the canonisation ceremony led by Pope Francis in Vatican City, Vatican. Photograph: Getty Images

She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

She died in 1997 and was put on a fast-track for sainthood soon thereafter.

IMAGE: Nuns from the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata, India, watch a live broadcast of the canonisation of Mother Teresa at a ceremony held in the Vatican. Photograph: Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters

Sundays festivities honouring Mother Teresa were not limited to Rome and the Vatican.

In Kolkata, where Mother Teresa spent a lifetime dedicated to the poor, a special Sunday Mass was held at the order's Mother House.

Volunteers and admirers converged on Mother House to watch the canonisation ceremony, which was being broadcast on giant TV screens in Kolkata and elsewhere.

THE PROCESS TO BE MADE A SAINT
It seems Prime Minister Narendra Modi just cant get enough of United States President Barack Obama.

Modi exchanged pleasantries with Obama and the two were seen laughing.

Wont let go of you: PM Narendra Modi holds on to US President Barack Obamas hand while Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker gather for a group photo. Photograph: Damir Sagolj/Reuters

Should we sit together? Modi huddles with Obama before the welcome dinner in Hangzhou. Photograph: Stephen Crowley/Pool/Reuters

After you, please: Modi and Obama are immersed in conversation as they head for a group photo. Photograph: Damir Sagolj/Reuters

Why so glum? It seems Modi is missing his bestie when hes not by his side. :-) Photograph: Mark Schiefelbein/Pool/Reuters
On Sunday, in front of a crowd of over 100,000 people, Pope Francis bestowed sainthood on Mother Teresa.

Crowds at St Peters Square welcomed the news with much fervour and joy.

As the gentle carer of the poorest of poor became a saint on Sunday, Rediff.com looks back at the two miracles that she performed, paving the way for her to be called a saint.

>> Curing Monica Besra of stomach cancer

The first miracle dates back to 2003. Monica Besra, a tribal woman from West Bengal, complained of acute pain due to a tumour that had been diagnosed in her abdomen.

After having visited a number of hospitals and doctors, she had not been cured. In May 1998 she was admitted to the home run by the Missionaries of Charity order in the town of Patiram.

On September 5, 1998 -- exactly a year after Mother Teresas death -- nuns placed a tiny aluminium medallion that had been blessed by the future Saint Teresa of Calcutta on Besras stomach and prayed for her.

Two sisters carried me to the church since I was too weak to stand or walk by myself, the 50-year-old said.

As soon as I entered (the church), a blinding, divine light emitted from Mothers photo and enveloped me. I closed my eyes, I couldnt understand what was happening. It was indescribable, I felt faint.

I got up from my bed feeling so light and good. I looked down to see the giant lump had disappeared. I couldnt believe it. I touched that part, poked it, pinched it. It was really gone. I wasnt dreaming it, said Besra, who still wears the medallion around her neck.

The next day she was proclaimed cured, a feat hailed by the Vatican as a miracle.

>> Mother Teresa cures brain infection

In December 2008, a Brazilian man, Marcilio Haddad Andrino recovered from multiple abscesses in his brain.

His wife, Fermanda Nascimento Rocha, said she and her family began praying for Mother Teresas intercession after receiving a relic of her in September 2008.

By December of that year, despite powerful antibiotics, the brain abscesses and fluid had built up so much that Andrino was suffering debilitating headaches.

I asked Mother to cure Marcilio if this is Gods will, and if not, to take him by the hand and bring him to the house of the Father to feel his caress, Rocha said

She said she went to her mothers home and prayed with all the strength I had.

When the surgeon returned to Andrinos room, he was awake, pain-free and asymptomatic, according to the priest spearheading Mother Teresas sainthood cause, the Reverend Brian Kolodiejchuk.

Within six months, Andrino said Friday, he had returned to work. Soon after, the couple conceived the first of their two children, though Andrino had been told that the powerful drugs he had taken had made him infertile.

He calls his two children the extension of that miracle.
Separatists on Sunday rejected Chief Minister Mehbooba Muftis invitation to them for meeting with all-party delegation, terming such a measure as deceitful and insisting that it cannot be an alternative to a transparent agenda-based dialogue to address the core issue.

A day after Mehbooba invited separatists in her capacity as Peoples Democratic Party chief, separatist leaders Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq (both of separate Hurriyat Conference factions) and Yasin Malik of Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front issued a joint statement here, rubbishing her and her offer.

These deceitful methods of crisis management through Parliamentary delegations and Track-Two only prolong the sufferings of the people and can`t take the place of a genuine transparent agenda-based dialogue to address the core issue of the peoples right to self-determination in J-K.

That has been our consistent stand and has been spelled out recently as well in our letters to various international and global fora, the statement said.

While making it clear that they were not interested in meeting the delegation led by union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, the separatist leaders said one fails to understand what hope to attach with a delegation which has not spelled out its mandate for any engagement on a clear agenda.

They alleged, In politics, India has deployed deceit, double talk, themselves and through their quislings, continuously for the past 70 years.

Given this situation, it is not surprising that even now her (Mehboobas) dominant concern, as expressed in her letter, is to lend credence and credibility to the Indian Parliamentary delegation visiting Kashmir avowedly to ascertain wishes of the people.

Commenting on Mehbooba outburst during a press conference with Rajnath Singh recently, the separatists said that seemed to even embarrass the union minister.
Adopting a tough stance, separatists on Sunday rebuffed attempts by five opposition MPs to talk to them even as an all-party parliamentary delegation explored ways to end the 56-day-old unrest by holding discussions with Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti and some other mainstream leaders.

During the first day of its visit, the delegation met about 200 members in about 30 delegations from various sections of society and listened to their point of view to reach at a common solution to the current scenario in Jammu and Kashmir, a statement from the home ministry said.

IMAGE: MPs Sitaram Yechury and D Raja waiting out side the door of Chairman of Hardline Faction of Hurriyat Confrence Syed Ali Shah Gellani in Srinagar. Photograph: S Irfan/PTI

While the delegation, led by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, met mainstream sections, five members of the group broke away to meet the separatists.

Four MPs -- Communist Party of India-Marxists General Secretary Sitaram Yechury, CPI leader D Raja, Janata Dal-Uniteds Sharad Yadav and Rashtriya Janata Dals Jay Prakash Narayan -- went to meet hardline Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani at his residence where he is under house arrest for the last 60 days while All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen leader Assadudin Owaisi went to meet moderate Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq at Chashma Shahi sub-jail where he is lodged.

At Geelanis residence, the gate was not even opened for the MPs while people shouted slogans outside. Geelani saw them from the window but refused to meet the parliamentarians.

It is our effort to show that we are ready to talk to anyone whether they agree to meet or not, Yadav said.

The group also went to meet Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front chief Yasin Malik who is under detention at a Border Security Force camp in Humhama. He told the MPs that he will talk when he visits New Delhi.

Owaisi went separately to meet Miwaiz who met him briefly but only exchanged pleasantries.

After Owaisis failed attempt, the group comprising Yechury, Yadav, Raja and Narayan went to meet the Mirwaiz and were with him for about 15 minutes.

The group tried to meet former Hurriyat Chairman Abdul Ghani Bhat who also refused to talk to them. Bhat welcomed the leaders but made it clear it has been decided that no talks will be held with the delegation members.

Owaisi said he also met another detained leader Shabir Shah for some time and offered namaz along with him there.

But no separatist leader held talks with them.

This is a futile exercise. Nothing concrete will happen until or unless India talks to Pakistan on Kashmir. We will not be able to arrive at any solution if India only talks to Kashmiris or Pakistan talks to Kashmiris. We should try and solve this issue which can otherwise result in hostilities between the two neighbouring nations, said Ghani Bhat.

Earlier in the day, the separatists rejected Chief Minister Mehbooba Muftis invitation to them for meeting with all-party delegation, terming such a measure as deceitful and insisting that it cannot be an alternative to a transparent agenda-based dialogue to address the core issue.

IMAGE: Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh arrives to chair the all party delegation meet at SKICC in Srinagar. Photograph: S Irfan/PTI

The delegation had come to Srinagar to cool the volatile situation arising out of violent protests that have gripped the Valley since the killing of Hizbul militant Burhan Wani on July 8. The clashes resulting from the protests have claimed 71 lives and injured thousands.

After his meeting with Mirwaiz, Yechury said, We are urging both sides to first restore normalcy and ensure that sufferings of people during last two months ends. Start unconditional political dialogue.

He said, When the government gives slogans, some tangible follow up steps should also be taken.

Referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modis talk about vikas (development) and vishwas (trust), the CPI-M leader said no tangible steps have been taken to develop trust among the Kashmiri people.

He said the government keeps on repeating Vajpayees statement of Jamhooriyat, Kashmiriyat and Insaniyat but forgot the steps taken by the former prime mMinister along with the slogan like unilateral ceasefire during Ramzan and talks with Hizbul Mujahideen. (The then) Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani himself held number of meetings with Hizbul leaders.

Earlier, Owaisi said Mirwaiz expressed his inability to have any talks because of position taken by his organisation.

I met him (the Mirwaiz) and he told me that my organisation has not mandated any talks with the parliamentarians. He expressed his inability to carry out any talks, the AIMIM leader said.

He described the attempt as ice breaking and hoped it will continue with some constructive steps being taken by the state and the central government. The process of dialogue needs to continue.

The 26-member parliamentary delegation, which arrived on Sunday morning, began its engagements with a meeting with the Chief Minister Mehbooba who pitched for unconditional dialogue with all stakeholders.

Met the All Party Delegation and pitched for unconditional talks with all stakeholders, Mehbooba wrote in a Facebook post. She refused to talk to reporters at the venue of the meeting.

She said she was committed to help initiate a sustained and meaningful dialogue within the state with political groups, irrespective of the ideological views and

predilections of the political groups.

It was followed by a meeting with National Conference leader and former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah who spoke of continuous failure of the state government and its dilly dallying tactics.

During his hour-long interaction with the delegation, Omar recalled the previous all-party delegation visits since 1990 to Kashmir and said that unfortunately when things cool down, there is no progress on the issue.

He said the MPs who have come this time face a mammoth task in their hands to revive faith in this process. There was a time when my father had conveyed to grant internal autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir and had warned New Delhi that if they continue to deny it, time will come when it will also not be acceptable to people of Jammu and Kashmir. I think we are heading for that time only, Omar said.

He told the delegation that his workers were pressurising him not to attend the meeting such is the situation.

Mehbooba Mufti should decide whether she wants to be the chief minister or Leader of Opposition. In the morning she says one thing and does a complete about turn by evening. She wants that Hurriyat should be talked to but in the evening she puts them under arrest, the opposition National Conference leader said.

Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad, who is part of the central delegation, said the attempted meeting of five MPs with separatist leaders was in their individual capacity.

An official statement from the home ministry said in addition to political parties, delegations of academicians, teachers and student associations, representatives of school management, prominent NGOs, representatives of Leh, Kargil, Pahari associations, Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee, Fruit and Saffron Growers associations, Civil Society etc also met the delegation.

The Jammu and Kashmir Students Welfare Association informed the all-party delegation that they are willing to work with government of India, hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder to bring normalcy in the state, it said.

The statement said various political parties expressed their concern over the injuries to civilians due to the use of pellet guns.

The Union Home Minister said that government is already working on the alternatives to pellet guns such as PAVA shells, it said.
Even though she was one of the planet's best known people, Mother Teresa remained an enigma all her life.

Vaihayasi Pande Daniel/Rediff.com spoke to some of those who knew her best to discover the human being behind the legend.

On Sunday, Mother Teresa was declared a saint by Pope Francis of the Roman Catholic Church in a canonisation ceremony in Vatican City in the presence of over a million followers from all over the world. We republish this September 1997 feature to mark the occasion.

'She was there in between heaven and earth'

-- Dr Patricia Aubanel, her cardiologist

I met her first in 1991 in California. She was on one of her trips to the United States. And she had gone to Tijuana which is on the border of Mexico and the United States, where she has several homes. When she was there she fell ill with pneumonia. That affected her heart and I was called. Since then we had been related. I was very attached to her. Mother felt comfortable with me.

It was a blessing to know here. Being with her has touched my life. Mother has taught me to so much about people. I have learnt so much.

It is impossible to describe Mother. She was a unique being. I am not even sure that she was one of us. She was there in between heaven and earth. It was often difficult to understand her. She was far beyond us. She was a unique, extraordinary human being.

'She would not even celebrate her birthday'

-- Dr A K Bardhan, her personal physician



What kind of patient was she? You know how good she was. In one word I cannot describe her. She was so full of activity. So spiritual. She was very different.

I have been treating her since 1989, but I could not reach there on the last day. An hour before she died, they called one of my colleagues. And there were two missionary doctors in the house. I was a great distance away. Ten or 15 minutes before she died, they called me. And then they called me to say that the old lady was no more.

It will be very difficult for me to forget her. I will remember her every day of my life.

She was an excellent patient. She never complained. She had her own natural therapy that helped her. She expected to be treated as if she was one of the poor. She never expressed pain. We had to always ask her how she was and how she was feeling. She was so happy with the simple things that were done for her.

Mother Teresa was such a great person. How do you expect me, somebody of such small stature, to judge her? But she was such an active person. And I have seen her level of activity (industriousness) with my own eyes. She would begin at 6 and end only at 10 or 11. She was so different -- her spirituality, her activity, her willpower, her energy And her spirituality was her main asset. She would pray a minimum of four times a day. She worked for the poor and never took rest even for her own health.

Mother would have never wanted anything for herself. She wanted money only to be spent on the poor. She would not even celebrate her birthday. The money she would save she spent on the poor.

'She made you feel you that you were the only person in the world'

-- Sandra McMurtrie, close friend and co-worker



It has been a wonderful gift to be with her all week. I am very glad I came. I felt very close to Mother, being there with her in the church and spending these last hours with her. I have been praying. And remembering her.

Mother has touched the lives of so many people. Mine in particular. My life changed after I met her. I came to Calcutta to meet her in 1981.

For me she was, well, like my mother.

When I looked into her face I saw the face of an angel.

When you met her and talked to her she gave you her full attention. And she was like that with everyone.

She made you feel you that you were the only person in the world.

'I will never see anyone like her again in my lifetime'

-- Dr Tarun Praharaj, her cardiologist

I first started treating the Mother in 1993. In September 1993, she had a massive heart attack. Dr Patricia Aubanel and I did an angiography.

She was sometimes a very difficult patient. She would refuse to take her medicines. She would refuse to rest.

She would say 'I am well. I want to go home. I have a lot of work to do.' And we would tell her, "Mother stay a little longer".

She was very fond of me. When I would come to see her the sisters would say, "Your son has come". It was a mother and son kind of relationship.

She was like a god. She was very simple and very kind-hearted. I will never see anyone like her again in my lifetime.

She was very simple. She would always, always, always be talking about the poor.

Photograph: Carsten Koall/Getty Images
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MONDAY

Farewell square dance

TYE  A farewell square dance, featuring longtime caller Marshall Flippo, will begin at 2 p.m. at the Wagon Wheel, 1023 North St. Dance sessions will be presented from 2-4 p.m. and 7-9 p.m., with a dinner served at 6 p.m. Admission is $5 per session. For more information, call 325-829-1517.

Dance

SWEETWATER  A dance featuring Second Chance will begin at 7:30 p.m. at the Nolan County Coliseum Annex. Admission is $6.

Other ...

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.

Taylor County Libertarian Party, 7 p.m., Winery at Willow Creek, 4353 S. Treadaway Blvd. 325-675-0266.

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

Bone health workshop

Dessire Armstrong with present a free workshop, "Bone Builders and Bone Breakers," at 11 a.m. at the Abilene Public Library, 202 Cedar St.

Coffee with CASA

Big Country Court Appointed Special Advocates will conduct a "Coffee with CASA" informational meeting at 2:30 p.m. at The Birdhouse Coffee Shop, 500 Chestnut St., Suite 101. For information, call 325-677-6448.

Public meeting

TxDOT will conduct a public meeting regarding possible safety enhancements to the Interstate 20 corridor from 4-8 p.m. at the TxDOT Training Center, 4210 Clack St.

Informational meeting

BRECKENRIDGE  TxDOT will conduct an informational meeting regarding the reconstruction of U.S. 180 at 6 p.m. at the TSTC Technology Building, Room 129, 307 N. Breckenridge Ave.

Square dance workshop

TYE  The Key City Squares will conduct a square dancing workshop at 6:30 p.m. at the Wagon Wheel.

Other ...

Veterans benefit meeting, 10 a.m. to noon, Disabled American Veterans, 2555 Grape St. 325-793-9699 or 325-480-6175.

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, noon to 6 p.m., Knox County Hospital.

Blood drive, noon to 6 p.m., Munday Clinic.

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.

Dining For Women  Abilene Chapter, 6 p.m., First Christian Church, 1420 N. Third St.

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., Wisteria Place Chapel, 3202 S. Willis St. 325-829-1470.

Overeaters Anonymous, 6:30-7:30 p.m., Exodus Metropolitan Community Church, 1933 S. 27th St.

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.

Abilene Society of Model Railroaders, 7-8:30 p.m., 2043 N. Second St.

Parents, Family, Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) of the Big Country, 7-9 p.m., Unity Church, 2842 Barrow St. 325-232-4726, www.pflagbc.weebly.com.

Unity Group of Alcoholics Anonymous, 8 p.m., Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest, 602 Meander St.

WEDNESDAY

Square dance workshop

TYE  The Wagon Wheel Squares will conduct a square dancing workshop at 6:30 p.m. at the Wagon Wheel.

Other ...

Overeaters Anonymous, 8 a.m., Hinds Square Building, Room 112, 100 Chestnut St.

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.

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

Women's luncheon

A Christian Women's Connection luncheon will begin at 11:30 a.m. at the Abilene Country Club, 4039 S. Treadaway Blvd. Beverly Dillon will be the guest speaker. Tickets are $16. For reservations, or for more information, contact 325-370-6567 or AbileneCWC@aol.com.

Class for iPhones and iPads

Tom Miller will present a free class for iPhone and iPad users at 1 p.m. at the Mockingbird Branch of the Abilene Public Library, 1326 N. Mockingbird Lane. Registration will begin at 12:30 p.m. Information: 325-692-1087.

United Way kickoff

The United Way of Abilene's will celebrate the start of its 2017 campaign at 4 p.m. at the Paramount Theatre, 352 Cypress St. Admission is free. To RSVP, call 325-677-1841. For information on volunteering, visit www.unitedwayabilene.org.

ArtWalk

ArtWalk, a program of the Center for Contemporary Arts, will take place from 5-8 p.m. in downtown Abilene. The theme will be "The Shape of Things to Come," and will celebrate sculpture and architecture in Abilene. Art activities and walking tours of downtown sculptures and buildings will be presented.

West Texas Fair & Rodeo

The West Texas Fair & Rodeo will begin with a sneak-a-peek night from 5-11 p.m. at the Taylor County Expo Center. Gate admission will be free.

Square dance workshop

TYE  A-Team will conduct a square dancing workshop 6:30-8:30 p.m. at the Wagon Wheel.

Grace After Dark

Screenings of several short films will be presented during Grace After Dark at 9 p.m. on the roof of The Grace Museum, 102 Cypress St. Food trucks will open at 6:30 p.m., and a cash bar will be available. Admission will be free, but will be limited to 100 viewers. Participants must be 18 or older.

Other ...

Abilene Garden Club, 10 a.m., 300 Westwood St.

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.

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.

PEP (People Enjoying People) Club, 6 p.m., Wylie Baptist Church, 6097 Buffalo Gap Road 325-692-4909.

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.

West Texas Genealogical Society, 6:30 p.m., Rose Park Senior Citizen Center.

Round Dancing, 7 p.m., Wagon Wheel. 325-829-1517.

Tea Party Patriots of Eastland County, 7 p.m., Myrtle Wilks Community Center, Cisco.

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.

Hendrick Hospice Care sponsors a "Gone But Not Lost" support group the second Thursday of each month for any bereaved parent who has lost a child of any age. Information: 325-677-8516 or 1-800-622-8516.
Diseases

Organizations offer vaccinations for the following diseases:

Diphtheria

Tetanus

Pertussis

Polio

Measles

Mumps

Rubella

Varicella

Meningococcal disease

Hepatitis A and B

Parents of 82 children in the Abilene Independent School District have filed for vaccine exemptions for conscientious or religious reasons, compared to 94 the previous year.

Exemptions for medical reasons declined from 56 to 23 currently.

Texas is one of 18 states that allow exemptions based on philosophical, personal or conscientiously-held beliefs. A two-year exemption requires a notarized affidavit signed by a child's parent or legal guardian.

Students in Texas public schools must generally show acceptable evidence of vaccination against a variety of illnesses, including diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, varicella, meningococcal disease and Hepatitis A and B.

Different injections and boosters are required as a child ages.

Parents of those who file an exemption for conscientious or religious reasons often cite health concerns about vaccinations, including worries about links to autism, while health officials say that misconceptions about vaccine safety have recently contributed to resurgences of vaccine-preventable illnesses.

Earlier AISD statistics for vaccine refusals were not readily available, said Linda Langston, the district's health officer. The current figures are considered preliminary.

Wylie Independent School District did not offer separate statistics for medical or conscientious objection.

But the district has seen an average of 36 children file for some sort of exemption in the past three years  35 in the current year, 37 last year, and 35 before that, said Corissa Parris, district coordinator of health services.

Statewide, a total of 44,716 kindergarten through 12th grade students were reported as having filed a conscientious objection in the 2015-2016 school year, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.

It's important for school-aged children to be protected via vaccines for a variety of reasons, Parris said.

'It helps protect them, but it also helps the other students who, for maybe a medical reason, can't be vaccinated  those who are on certain medications that compromise their immune system or have certain conditions where they are already compromised,' she said.

Not vaccinating children has real risks, national researchers have argued.

In 2000, the United States declared that measles had been eradicated, but the illness has in recent years made a resurgence.

A 2015 Journal of the American Medical Association report stated that a 'substandard vaccination compliance' was likely to blame for a multistate measles outbreak that year, while a separate 2016 JAMA report concluded that a substantial proportion of the U.S. measles cases in the years after the disease was declared eradicated in 2000 were in 'intentionally unvaccinated' individuals.

'The phenomenon of vaccine refusal was associated with an increased risk for measles among people who refuse vaccines and among fully vaccinated individuals,' according to the March 15, 2016, report's abstract.

And although a recent resurgence in pertussis (whooping cough) cases has been attributed in part to waning immunity and other factors, 'vaccine refusal was still associated with an increased risk for pertussis in some populations,' the report concluded.

Beth Lantrip, infection preventionist with Hendrick Health System, said that while there are many studies that show vaccines are safe and outline their benefits, the difficulty in assuring parents are getting solid information is something that makes discussing that difficult.

'It seems we're keen to grab an idea from a source that may or may not be so reliable and kind of hold on to that instead of going with the evidence,' she said.

That said, Lantrip said she understands why parents worry.

'You want what's best for your child as a parent, and we can swing so hard to 'this is what's best' that we don't stop and think why they have these concerns,' she said. 'Is it an article? What is it based on, and can we get past it?'

A Personal Choice

Jason Wilson admits that his decision to not vaccinate his 8-year-old child is unpopular among some, even creating pause in his child's own doctor.

But to Wilson, who runs Abilene Vaccine Information Network group on Facebook, the risks vaccines potentially represent outstrip potential rewards, prompting him to request an exemption for his child from state-mandated vaccination requirements.

'My own child's personal physician was a little reluctant to accept when we refused vaccines for our child,' Wilson said. 'They were reluctant to accept that and seemed (to express) it wasn't a good idea.'

But Wilson said he feels there is a 'lack of knowledge, even among medical professionals, about vaccines, the ingredients that are in them, and possible side effects, which can be severe.'

'I feel like the pharmaceutical industry lobby in Washington is well known to be very powerful in influencing our politicians, and there are a lot of profits at stake,' he said. 'It appears sometimes that profits come before public safety.'

Wilson also said he fears physicians have less knowledge about their ingredients  and too much faith in their safety and effectiveness. He said many vaccines are being 'rushed through (the vetting) process because of the money involved.'

He added that 'there are at times outbreaks of diseases among the vaccinated,' a fact he said was not 'widely reported.'

He said that he and others who are concerned about vaccines primarily want parents to be able to access as much information as possible about potential risks to their children.

'I'm not an expert  I'm not a physician,' he said. 'But I do believe parents should be given all the information. And in my opinion, I believe that doctors should be familiar with vaccine ingredients and be able to recite those back to the parent or at least provide them with the vaccine package insert so they can see the warnings that the manufacturer puts out themselves.'

Wilson also said that he believes there is 'recklessness' in the medical community in requiring certain vaccines, citing an example of requiring a hepatitis B vaccine for newborns.

'Many parents are coerced and probably feel intimidated' into getting the vaccination while in the hospital, even though hepatitis B is 'for the most part a sexually-transmitted disease,' Wilson said.

'A child's chances of catching that disease if the mother did not have it are relatively slim,' he said. 'So it seems a very dangerous idea to be a newborn infant to get a vaccine that has dangerous ingredients where if the parents knew more about how you contract it, it's not necessary.'

Hepatitis B, according to the CDC, is transmitted when blood, semen, or another body fluid from a person infected with the hepatitis B virus enters the body of someone who is not infected.

That can occur through sexual contact or sharing needles, syringes, or other drug-injection equipment. But the illness can also be transmitted from mother to baby at birth.

Most newborns who become infected with hepatitis B virus do not have symptoms but have a 90 percent chance of developing the chronic version of the illness, according to the CDC, which can lead to serious health problems such as liver damage, liver cancer, and death.

Downside of Success

The AISD's Langston said that in her opinion, 'vaccines are a victim of their own success,' reducing or eradicating illness  and prompting people to forgot those illnesses were dangerous.

'Misinformation about vaccines also contributes to anxiety, and some parents have difficulty sorting the truth about the positives from fiction on the negatives,' she said. 'The misconception that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine might cause autism has lingered in some parent's minds for more than a decade despite more than a dozen studies showing no link between the two.'

Vaccines do have some risks, she said, ranging from mild, short-term side effects such as redness and swelling at the injection site, fever, and rash to rare but severe allergic reactions.

The latter, she said, are 'far rarer than the disease vaccines protect against,' she said, while the CDC has estimated the risk of a serious allergic reaction from any one vaccine is one in a million doses.

Langston said it takes years for a new vaccine to make it through four phases of safety-and-effectiveness testing before it is approved.

'The vaccine is first tested on adults, then children, and all brands and formulations must go through a strict process,' she said. 'The FDA will test to ensure the vaccine does what the manufacturer says it does. From there, the CDC and AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics) decide whether to recommend it.'

Some parents elect to delay the recommended schedule of the required vaccinations, she said.

But the recommended vaccine schedule is designed to provide the greatest possible protection, Langston said.

'In fact, dozens of infectious-disease experts and epidemiologists from the CDC, universities, and hospitals across the U.S. closely examine decades of research before making their recommendations,' she said.

While the vast majority of vaccines are 85 to 95 percent effective, Langston said, some  such as flu vaccines  are 'tricky,' she said.

'Each year, infectious-disease specialists from across the world meet to predict which strains are likely to circulate during the flu season,' she said. 'The vaccine's effectiveness depends on the strains they pick and sometimes they do get it wrong. If they get the strain right, research has shown that the right vaccine for the right strain can reduce the risk by 50-60 percent.'

Lantrip said that while it's not what she would prefer to see, it's sometimes better to slow down a child's vaccine schedule, rather than not adhere to it at all.

'I don't want to over dramatize. But for many of these childhood illnesses used to be quite frankly fatal and still can be very dangerous, such as pertussis,' she said.

In her role as a preventionist, Lantrip said she feels it's better to prevent than cure when it comes to illnesses that can be treated via vaccines.

'Stop the problem before it starts, or maybe mitigate it down, like with a flu shot,' she said. 'Maybe if you get the influenza vaccine, maybe you can stop it from taking total hold of your life as opposed to the other way around.'

Echoing Parris, Lantrip said there are other, higher reasons for children of all ages to be vaccinated.

'The thing I don't know people want to hear, necessarily, is that it's not just about you,' she said. 'There's an entire community at risk here, and that's extremely important to keep in mind. When you make the decision to vaccinate your child, you improve our own herd immunity and our own response to organisms as a community. It's just trying to get that perspective and get through (to others) on some level.'
Voting starts surprisingly behind 2018; what can we read into that?
Greg Jaklewicz Columnist SHARE Greg Jaklewicz/Reporter-News Barbecue judge David Wier, decked out in his official Kansas City Barbeque Society gear.

Oh, the questions you could ask David Wier, trying not to grin.

Hey, Dave, what's cookin'?

Where's the beef, Dave?

Glad this isn't hot dogs, Dave, or Anthony Weiner would be here ...

David has been a certified barbecue judge for 10 years. This being Labor Day weekend, when they're making chili in Buffalo Gap and judging meats, beans and such under the live oaks there, David was called to duty. He's in the Fort Worth area for Bedford Blues & BBQ.

It's a KCBS-approved event, and that's important. There are 500 competitions yearly across Planet Barbecue that are sanctioned by the Kansas City Barbeque Society, which is the world's largest organization for grillers and barbecuers (they are, according to the website, "dedicated to ... enjoying barbeque.") The KCBS calls barbecue "America's Cuisine" and calls its preparation an "art form."

Today in Bedford, cooks will turn in chicken, ribs, pork and brisket to determine bragging rights and take home prize money. According to the schedule, turn-ins begin at noon and go every 30 minutes from there.

While four meats officially are judged, events may offer additional judging for beans, dessert, showmanship, etc.

The prize money in Bedford is $1,500 for the grand champion  best meat overall  and $750 for reserve champion. There are cash prizes for top 10 places in the individual categories, with $350 going to first place.

Judges will rate meats on presentation, taste and tenderness. Scoring ranges from 2 to 9.

Or, as David says it once was explained to him: 9 is so good, you'd drive 100 miles out of your way to get more; 2 is so bad, you'd drive 100 miles the other direction to avoid it.

What about a 1 or 10? Two would be bad enough, he joked, and, thankfully, there aren't many of those. These cooks are pretty good. Ten? Besides Nadia Comaneci, Bo Derek and Donald Trump, who's perfect, right?

David emphasized that samples are judged as stand-alone entries and not against each other.

Each category is a challenge, with the most subjective being taste. What one judge likes, another judge may not. David, for example, doesn't prefer a peppery product. Plus, he said, it's hard to get it off his palate when moving on to the next sample.

Tenderness? David said many folks believe the meat should fall off the bones of ribs. But in the judging world, "That's overcooked. You want to see how it pulls apart."

As for presentation, well, does it look good enough to eat? If it came on your plate at a restaurant, would you grab and knife and fork and go to town? David said most entries are enticing.

The trickiest meat is brisket, because it dries out so quickly. The cooking has to be timed so that an entry gets to judges at its peak.

Normally, a half-dozen entries are judged by an individual and most often, there are six judges to a table. If there are, say, 70 entries, it is not humanly possible to judge all 70. That's where scoring comes in, and why it's important that judges follow the same procedure.

How about sauces? Some believe a meat should not smothered in or supported by sauces. Yet, sauces are world famous. We should know here, as we miss the famous sauce (and other items, too) from Harold's Pit Bar-B-Que.

David said sauces are permitted but must be evenly applied to the meat. Sauce can keep brisket moist.

Speaking of sauces, styles differ across the country, he said. We're more tomato-y in the Southwest, while back East they like their vinegar.

"In California, anything goes," he said.

He admitted that he became a fan of pulled pork.

"It has become my preference," the onetime beef-only guy said.

How did David become involved in KCBS?

Like most judges, he once was asked to help. When American Electric Power and Central and South West merged in 2000, David's position (financial analyst) with AEP soon was moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma. He commuted, he said.

One day, someone asked if anyone could represent AEP at a barbecue competition there. David, having enjoyed fine 'cue in Texas and perhaps being hungry that day, raised his hand. He enjoyed his role so much that he sought KCBS certification. The organization specifies rules for judges in addition to cooks to ensure fairness and consistency.

He has been able to get to four or five competitions a year, depending on location. That's about 40 competitions over the past 10 years.

"Some judges have over 100 under their belt," he said, laughing at his own joke. He mentioned one couple that took off a year to travel the country, mapping their journey by determining where the next barbecue competition was scheduled.

Last weekend David was on Lubbock.

We have the world's largest chili bowl here. Is there a Super Bowl competition for barbecue?

David said there are two, actually, both in the fall. One is in Kansas City, the other in Lynchburg, Tennessee. (You know what they make there, right?) Those will draw 500 to 600 teams, the best of the best for an invitation-only division. David hasn't judged in either. Yet. He needs master certification.

He added that most competitions are in the spring or fall. It's just too hot in the summer. The one in Tulsa started the July 4 weekend but was moved.

On Wednesday, David ended a 34-year career with AEP. As one airline would say, he's now free to move about the country to judge at more and more events.

Does wife Cindy, who's the president of Abilene-based Serenity House, go with David? No, he said. She stays pretty busy with work and grandkids, and she's not one to drive 100 miles out of her way to find eat tasty 'cue. But she likes it.

Has David taken the know-how he has acquired and applied it to his own backyard grilling?

"I don't do much cooking," he said, though retirement may change that. No, he said, he's more eatin' than cookin'.

"Can't you tell by looking at me?" he said.

Twitter: @GregJaklewicz
Incidents reported Saturday by the Abilene Police Department:

Assault, 2300 block of Edgemont Drive, Friday

Police arrested a 43-year-old man after responding to a call for assistance. Upon arrival, police observed the man and a female victim arguing in his car. The victim reported that she had been punched in the face by the man.

Unlawful carry of weapon and DWI, 5400 block of South 7th Street, Saturday

Police arrested a 47-year-old man after stopping him for driving without headlights. Police administered a field sobriety test, which the man failed, and they also observed an open container of alcohol in the vehicle. In addition, the man had a semiautomatic pistol in plain view. Police also discovered the man had two previous convictions for DWI.

Assault, 2000 block of Burger Street, Saturday

Police arrested a 35-year-old man after responding to a call for help from a female victim. Upon arrival, the victim reported that the man had choked her, causing bruising and marks on her neck.

Public intoxication, 900 block of Forest Avenue, Saturday

Police arrested a 44-year-old man after discovering him passed out under a tree in a public park. Police discovered the man had prior convictions for public intoxication and disorderly conduct.

Evading arrest, 1700 block of North Fifth Street, Friday

Police arrested a 26-year-old man after stopping him for questioning. During the stop, police discovered the man was not who he said he was, and the man attempted to run away from police. After a short foot chase, he was apprehended and taken to jail.

Public intoxication, 1900 block of Pine Street, Friday

Police arrested a 36-year-old woman after responding to a disturbance at a hospital. Upon arrival, they discovered the woman under the influence of what appeared to be methamphetamines.

Burglary with intent to commit an assault, 1300 block of South 11th Street, Saturday

Police arrested a 31-year-old man after responding to a disturbance call. Upon arrival, they discovered the man attempting to assault a female victim outside her apartment. The victim told police the man had broken into her apartment and chased her outside.

Public intoxication, 300 block of North Judge Ely Boulevard, Saturday

Police arrested a 21-year-old man after responding to a reported theft in progress. Upon arrival, they discovered the man in possession of stolen beer. He also appeared intoxicated and was uncooperative with police.

Possession of a controlled substance, vicinity of South Third Street and Portland Avenue, Friday

Police arrested a 34-year-old man after responding to a report that he was dumping trash in the road. Upon arrival, they discovered the man was in possession of methamphetamine.

Driving while intoxicated, 3100 block of Oldham Lane, Friday

Police arrested a 53-year-old woman after responding to an accident. Upon arrival, she admitted to drinking Champagne and driving her car off the roadway. She failed all three field sobriety tests and ultimately submitted to breath tests, which showed her blood alcohol content to be in excess of the legal limit.

Forgery, 1200 block of Grape Street, Thursday

Police arrested a 43-year-old woman after responding to a report of attempted forgery at a local check cashing business. Upon arrival, police questioned the woman, who admitted to trying to forge stolen checks.
Time magazine has signed up with the hunky-dory crowd. It says in an article that 'politically motivated hyperbole' has led to a sense that 'America is in a state of irreversible decline' and then gives us 'five facts' showing us things aren't so bad.

Many, many things aren't  there are those of us who still believe ours is an incredibly great nation  but some are, such as the way some magazine articles are written these days. The facts presented aren't facts at all. They are arguable interpretations of selected facts and sometimes make no sense at all, as in saying don't fret too much about a significant violent crime rise because things were worse 25 years ago.

Our country happens to be faced with a number of potentially ruinous issues  I am going to briefly list five  but saying that is different from saying decline is irreversible. I don't do that any more than any politician I've ever heard. They all claim they can fix things, and maybe not, but for Time to insinuate  along with some balance  that nothing all that grievous is at hand is a mistake. It can lessen the urge to find answers, and we must search. We must search.

And here is a place to start:

The dissolution of family.

This country has seen an extraordinary rise of single-parent homes. It's usually just the mother running things, it's usually in poor homes and it frequently leads to disaster for the child  crime, dropping out of school, staying poor. Family is society's central institution and its collapse portends other kinds of collapse.

While virtually every other large group of people in both the developed and undeveloped world has been living longer than ever before, one group in this country is not. That's uneducated middle-aged whites.

Here is what's killing them: drugs, alcohol and suicide. Many are clearly in a state of depression, and what put them there, many say, are fewer good job opportunities owing in part to an economy that more and more demands skills they do not have. A drug epidemic would seem to be both cause and effect, and a decline in religion, I would argue, just may have left a spiritual void.

The evaporation of trust.

Only 19 percent of Americans trust their government, says the Pew Research Center. That figure is down from close to 80 percent in 1958. We also don't trust other institutions, professionals, businesses or even each other very much. Societies run on trust, and when you don't have it, it's every man for himself.

A weakening of our constitutional democracy owing to a cascade of regulations  in effect laws  written by unelected bureaucrats, a Supreme Court that regularly overreaches constitutional intent, an executive branch that disregards rule of law and an ever lessening regard for limits.

From the last-but-not-least category, a presidential election featuring one candidate who is an ignorant, vulgar, narcissistic clown and another whose policy ideas could slam us hard and whose character is crumbly. What will follow from whichever candidate wins? How did we get here? How do we fix what got us here?

This list could obviously be extended  to the racial tensions of the moment, to the hooey in some of our universities, to even an economy that leaves Time magazine in a mostly good mood. The point is not to say that all is lost or to be ungrateful about how much remains right in the land. The point is to embrace our ideals and all they have done and to use that glorious spirit to set right what has gone astray, even if it requires a long-term effort.

The thing is, we can do it. That's not a fact, but it is a strongly held opinion.

Email Jay Ambrose, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, at speaktojay@aol.com.
Lyndon Johnson's aides were in a celebrating mood the day in 1965 when he signed the Voting Rights Act. They were surprised, then, when Johnson interjected this sobering advisory: 'It's also the day we gave the South to the Republicans for the rest of our lifetimes.'

Civil rights legislation indeed would serve to drive southern Democrats out of the party.

Georgia Sen. Richard Russell had predicted this in a phone chat with Johnson, who replied, 'If that's the price to pay for this bill, then I will gladly pay it.'

Oh, the Democrats paid.

Five decades later, it's payback time.

Donald Trump, the wizard of the Republican id, can't stop inflaming and alienating people of color. A too-homogeneous party that after 2012 lectured itself in the mirror about being more inclusive has done just the opposite.

The Democrats continue to be more like the rest of the country in its many hues. The GOP continues to model itself after the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

Trump stands to get a mighty shellacking based on 21st century demographics. In that eventuality, he can blame what came from LBJ's pen in 1965.

But the key player in this payback won't be the Voting Rights Act, writes Politico's Josh Zeitz. It will be a less-heralded bill from 1965 supported by the same people who brought us civil rights gains and who drove away the Dixiecrats: the Immigration and Nationality Act.

What that bill did, in short, was to remove race-based considerations about the people the United States allowed to relocate here.

For most of this country's history, immigration laws were as racist as, oh, a Klan clam bake. This bit of American history was news to me: The nation's first immigration act, in 1790, restricted naturalized citizenship to 'free white persons.' As the decades wore on, the abominable complexion of the law hardly changed.

Subsequent immigration overhauls simply reinforced a predilection toward European immigrants, although demands rang out at various points to keep the Italians out, or the Poles or Slavs. After all, were they really white?

Regardless, when Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, he overturned quotas that had kept the general demographic makeup stable by controlling the inflow of 'white' and strictly limiting the inflow of what the 1790 bill people deemed 'other.' Yes, the 'others.' Is any of this sounding familiar?

What were we saying about payback?

When Johnson signed the bill, he presumed that having a race-neutral approach to immigration would have a race-neutral effect on America. It didn't.

The reason was that Western Europe wasn't having famines and land wars in 1965, and Europeans were deciding that places such as France, Spain and Italy were decent places at which to remain. Their people had little reason to flee.

At the same time, that could not be said about strife- and poverty-torn parts of the world like Latin America and Africa, from which a great preponderance of immigrants would come.

Yes: the 'others.'

As Zeitz writes, since 1965 and that stroke of Johnson's pen, 90 percent of U.S. immigrants have come from outside Europe. Guess which political party is least equipped and least inclined to win their loyalty?

Another demographic fact that should cause Donald Trump to toss and turn under satin sheets: First- and second-generation Americans make up roughly one-third of the country.

As the Georgia senator told Johnson, the Voting Rights Act of '65 would cripple the Democratic Party in a politically vital region for generations.

It's anyone's guess as to how many generations it will take for the Republican Party, now embodied by Trump, to recover from how it has ignored the demographic realities of the country.

My guess: a long time.

Email John Young, former Texas newspaperman who lives in Colorado, at jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
Dozens of notable Republicans have said that they will not vote for Donald Trump, including at least six Republican senators, two Republican governors, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee and a group of 50 former national security officials who served Republican presidents from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush, among others.

So where are the #NeverHillary Democrats?

Hillary Clinton has lied to the American people so frequently that multiple polls now show that almost 7 in 10 of our fellow citizens say she is not honest or trustworthy, while only 11 percent say she is, according to an NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll. Fifty-six percent believe Clinton should have been charged with a crime in the FBI investigation of her use of a private email server. And 60 percent say Clinton believes she does not have to play by the same rules as everyone else.

They are right. The FBI director found Clinton to have been 'extremely careless' in handling classified information. We recently learned that the FBI recovered some 14,900 emails she did not turn over, after she assured Americans, 'I turned over everything I was obligated to turn over.' We now know the Clinton Foundation sought favors for foreign donors  like a meeting for the crown prince of Bahrain (he's a 'good friend of ours,' a longtime Bill Clinton aide said) after he had trouble securing one through official channels. The Associated Press has reported, after an analysis of meetings from about two years of her State Department calendars, that more than half of the people outside the government whom Clinton met with while she was secretary of state gave money to the Clinton Foundation  a collective $156 million in donations.

Every day, more evidence emerges that Clinton is morally unfit to occupy the Oval Office. But so far, no leading Democrats have come out and said they will not vote for her.

Democrats are clearly worried about the optics of the Clinton scandals. That is why the Clinton Foundation announced it will no longer accept donations from corporations or foreign entities if Hillary Clinton is elected president. But where are the senior Democrats asking why it is wrong to take such donations if she becomes president, but it wasn't wrong to take millions from corporate and foreign donors when she was secretary of state?

Politico reports that Democrats are 'dismayed by the timing of the three-day [Clinton Global Initiative] conference Sept. 19-21  a week before the first national debate and seven weeks before Election Day' (emphasis added). Note that they are not dismayed because amassing donations from foreign and corporate donors a few weeks before the election is morally wrong  only that it will give the GOP ammunition 'just days before Hillary Clinton defends herself against pay-to-play accusations from Donald Trump in their first debate.'

The hypocrisy is particularly rank, because Democrats have made taking on the Wall Street special interests and the pay-to-play culture in Washington a centerpiece of their political agenda. Now they have a kleptocratic nominee who epitomizes everything they claim to oppose.

In June, Sen. Bernie Sanders said, 'Do I have a problem when a sitting secretary of state and a foundation run by her husband collects many, many dollars from foreign governments  governments which are dictatorships? Yeah, I do have a problem with that.' But now he's supporting Hillary Clinton unreservedly.

The Clinton saga has exposed the Democrats as completely mercenary. So when you hear Democrats talk about how billionaires and special interests have 'rigged the system,' remember that they supported a nominee whose foundation took billions from those special interests. When you hear Democrats talk about gay rights and women's rights, remember that they supported a nominee whose foundation took tens of millions from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and other countries that openly persecute gays and deny equality to women.

As Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., has said of Trump, 'I can't support someone that I don't think would take the oath of office in good faith.' Will even one Democrat stand up and say the same of Clinton?

Don't hold your breath.

Marc Thiessen writes a weekly column for The Washington Post on foreign and domestic policy and contributes to the PostPartisan blog. He is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush.
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US President Barack Obama being welcomed by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G20 summit in Hangzhou, China, Sept. 4, 2016.

As world leaders met in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou at the start of the G20 summit, dozens of dissidents, rights activists and ordinary Chinese seeking to highlight grievances against the government were subjected to "disappearances," detention and house arrest by China's state security police, rights activists told RFA.

Citizen journalist Hang Xiuqiong, who writes for the Sichuan-based rights website Tianwang, said she saw at least eight people detained on a Hangzhou-bound train.

"They are focusing on locking up petitioners ... they have already detained eight people on the Z9 service [to Hangzhou]. They're not letting them leave," Hang said.

As U.S. President Barack Obama met with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, Chinese security forces threw an unprecedented security cordon around the summit venue.

"There are security forces at every intersection, and the plainclothes police and riot police are everywhere," Hang told RFA. "Restaurants and hotels are all closed, and there are security checks at the entrance to all the hospitals, where they are checking people's bags."

"All of the roads to the [venue] are closed, which is where I'm standing right now; they won't let me go any further," she said.

"There are very few people on the streets, just police."

China has launched an unprecedented "stability maintenance" operation ahead of the G20 summit, with many people deprived of their liberty in the weeks running up to the event, rights groups said.

"Incidents of detention, enforced disappearance, forced travel, and house arrest have violated the human rights of many Chinese citizens," the overseas-based Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) network said in a statement on its website.

It said rights activists and petitioners in neighboring counties and provinces have been particularly targeted by the authorities, with at least 42 people illegally deprived of their liberty in Jiangsu province and Shanghai.

"A majority of these individuals have been forcibly disappeared, putting them outside any legal protections and, hence, at greater risk of torture and ill-treatment," the group said.

It cited the detention of Wuxi-based activist Shen Aibin on Sept. 2 on suspicion of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble." Shen is currently being held in the Wuxi No. 2 Detention Center in Jiangsu province.

At least nine activists from Shanghai were detained either at their homes or en route to Hangzhou, while it counted 22 forced disappearances of activists from Beijing and Shanghai, including Ye Hongxia, Wang Kouma and Liu Feiyue.

It said another Shanghai-based activist, Fan Yiyang was taken on "vacation" by police to Zhejiang's Yandang mountains on Aug. 23 as part of the G20 preparations.

Sichuan-based activist Huang Qi, who founded the Tianwang website, said another of the site's contributors, citizen journalist Yang Xiuqiong, had also gone missing on Saturday.

"We don't know Yang Xiuqiong's status right now," Huang said. "She has basically fallen off the radar in Hangzhou."

Calls to fellow activists Lin Xiurong and He Yalin rang unanswered after they traveled to Hangzhou on Sunday.

Pulling out all the stops

Chengdu-based rights activist Chen Qiongshu said she was detained and taken to a third location after being detained by police in Hangzhou at the end of August.

"We are currently in Jiulonggou," Chen said. "We left Hangzhou on Sept. 1, and ... then we were brought here."

"There are people following us the whole time, officers from the local police station and government officials; there were seven of them yesterday," she said. "We won't be able to go home until tomorrow ... everyone who goes to Hangzhou is getting detained."

Veteran media commentator Jia Ping said the level of security was extraordinary.

"They have clearly used the G20 as a starting point to develop from," he said. "This is just a discussion forum for developed and developing countries to meet, but China has to pull out all the stops as if it were the Olympics."

"But its only effect has been to make people care less, and to make them very resentful," Jia said.

"The whole thing has cost a fortune, and they really couldn't care less about ordinary people."

A Hangzhou resident who asked not to be named said an eerie calm had descended on the city after the authorities banned privately registered vehicles from the streets and encouraged large swathes of the population to leave town.

"It's even emptier than it is on Chinese New Year; no vehicles are allowed to be out," the resident said.

"It feels like [a ghost town] with nine out of 10 of the shops shuttered," he said. "Anyone whose official residency papers aren't here in Hangzhou has had to go back to their birthplace."

Activists in Fujian and the northeastern province of Heilongjiang said police had already mobilized to prevent people with grievances from heading to the G20 in the hope of highlighting them.

"There are several petitioners from Fuzhou who were intercepted at the Wenzhou railway station ... We don't know what has happened to them," Fuzhou-based activist Zhuang Lei told RFA.

And Heilongjiang activist Sun Dongsheng said he knew of six people who were detained on a train en route to the G20 venue, although it was unclear if they were the same as the eight counted by Tianwang's Hang.

"Two of them were going to visit friends, and two were going to get medical treatment," Sun said. "Three have already been escorted home, their cameras confiscated."

President Xi on Sunday called on world leaders to avoid "empty talk" and confront sluggish economic growth and rising protectionism at the start of the G20.

The world economy "still faces multiple risks and challenges including a lack of growth momentum and consumption, turbulent financial markets, receding global trade and investment," Xi told the assembled leaders, who represent some 85 percent of the world's GDP and two-thirds of its population.

China is hoping a successful G20 will project a global image of an assured and powerful nation. But experts fear the gathering will be short on substance, with scant progress made on what to do about the conflict in Syria and the global refugee crisis.

The U.S. and China on Saturday ratified the Paris climate accord, paving the way for implementation of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from the two largest producers.

Reported by Yang Fan for RFA's Mandarin Service, and by Lau Siu-fung and Goh Fung for the Cantonese Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.
A campaigner (C) stands behind a placard of Baggio Leung, 30, one of three candidates from new party Youngspiration, during the Legislative Council election in Hong Kong on Sept. 4, 2016.

Hong Kong voters stood in long lines to cast their ballot in legislative elections on Sunday, the first since the 2014 pro-democracy movement, amid growing tensions over the erosion of the city's traditional freedoms.

With six pro-independence candidates already disqualified from the race, reportedly at Beijing's behest, candidates were divided along largely pro-Beijing and pan-democratic lines, while some younger, more radical voices have emerged since the student-led campaign for universal suffrage fell on deaf ears.

The pro-democracy "Umbrella Movement," that drew hundreds of thousands onto the city's streets at its height, underscored fears that the city was already losing the autonomy promised to it by Beijing under the terms of the 1997 handover agreement.

Former colonial-era second-in-command Anson Chan said the stakes for Hong Kong "have never been higher."

"In the four years since the last Legislative Council elections, our way of life ... has faced unprecedented challenges in the form of a systematic undermining of our core values and freedoms," Chan told a meeting of foreign journalists ahead of Sunday's election.

Chan cited a series of recent assaults on freedom of the press, including the firing of outspoken political commentators, physical violence directed at journalists, and the detention by Chinese authorities of five booksellers accused of selling "banned books" to customers across the internal border in mainland China.

"The really scary thing is that these developments are now coming so thick and fast, they no longer even seem to cause surprise," Chan said.

"Not so long ago, it would have been unthinkable that our head of government would actually tell us what we and our children are allowed to talk about," she said, hitting out at a recent ban on the discussion of independence in the city's schools.

"If we as a community start to regard as normal downright dishonesty and lack of accountability on the part of government officials, then we are in real danger."

She warned Hong Kong's seven million residents not to become accustomed to "a new normal" when key institutions like the University of Hong Kong, the Independent Commission Against Corruption and the Department of Justice to become "blatantly politicized."

Reuters reported on Sunday that the barring of the six candidates was directly at the instigation of ruling Chinese Communist Party officials, who were "displeased" that more weren't eliminated from the race.

Told how to vote by China

It also quoted sources as saying that Hong Kong employees of Chinese state-owned enterprises China Resources Land and Bank of China (Hong Kong) as well as Hong Kong-listed South China Holdings had been told how to vote in Sunday's elections by their bosses.

A staff member at Bank of China (Hong Kong), which employs 15,000 people in Hong Kong, showed Reuters a list with names of pro-Beijing candidates handed out by the firm, and said employees were told to call their managers after voting, the agency reported.

Hong Kong's pan-democratic camp needs to win more than one-third of seats in the 70-seat Legislative Council (LegCo) in order to wield a veto over crucial legislation, including any constitutional changes and draconian national security laws.

The emergence of pro-independence voices has been relatively recent on Hong Kong's political scene, leading critics to accuse embattled chief executive Leung Chun-ying of encouraging the movement by harping on Beijing's anti-independence theme.

Baggio Leung, a candidate for the localist youth group Youngspiration that embraces Hong Kong's traditional autonomy, freedoms and unique culture, said the race was too close to call in some electoral districts.

"In the New Territories East, there is just a five percent gap between candidates in 2nd through to 15th place, and the polls are running very close," he said.

Each of the five electoral districts returns more than one lawmaker, using a proportional representation voting system that yields 30 directly elected seats, while 35 are voted in by industry and professional groups, mostly by a limited "selectorate."

Localists urge high turnout

"We can only do our best. I don't think that the voters of New Territories East are likely to have changed their minds in six months," Leung said, in response to the by-election defeat last February of localist Edward Leung, now one of the candidates barred by election officials for pro-independence views.

Edward Leung, who came third in the by-election with more than 66,000 votes, said the main priority for the localists is to win at least one seat in LegCo at this election.

He dismissed concerns about differences within the localist camp on the independence issue.

"The electorate is quite capable of distinguishing between the localist movement's advocacy of "self-determination" and support for independence," he said.

Meanwhile, former Occupy Central student leader Nathan Law, who is running for he newly formed Demosisto Party, called on voters to turn out to vote for pan-democratic candidates.

"If we are to have all three Hong Kong Island seats returned as pan-democratic, the first thing we have to achieve is a high voter turnout," Law said.

"All three Hong Kong Island seats are crucial for the pan-democrats," he said.

Veteran Hong Kong movie actress and Cantopop star Deanie Ip said Law was an inspiration.

"I believe that this young man does everything he does for Hong Kong, and for his generation," Ip said.

"Nowadays it seems that if you speak out, that makes you a bad person, and I have a problem with that," she said.

"You may not care what I think as a celebrity or as a mother, but I am just a person trying to do what I think is the right thing."

Pan-democratic lawmaker Albert Ho has warned that the government, urged on by Beijing, may find it easier to force through unpopular legislation if the pan-democrats don't make a strong enough showing in Sunday's election.

"They can change the electoral system," he told Reuters. "And it will be easier to force through legislation at the will of the government."

But pro-Beijing parties said they are focusing more on social and economic issues, with the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), playing down suggestions that China has been interfering in Hong Kong's political affairs.

Meanwhile, pro-democracy activist Avery Ng defended his actions after he threw a sandwich at the city's leader, Leung Chun-ying, in protest at Beijing's behind-the-scenes influence.

Ng, who heads the Social Democratic Party in China, a pro-democracy group, was restrained by police after Leung dodged the sandwich.

"We are in the progressive faction, and we use such actions to express opposition and protest," Ng told RFA after the incident. "It is no longer possible to hold a free debate in Hong Kong, so we need to protest about that."

"We are standing up to Leung Chun-ying because he is the puppet of the Beijing government," he said.

Reported by Lam Kwok-lap for RFA's Cantonese Service, and by Xin Lin for the Mandarin Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.
At least 35 people have died after a passenger bus collided with a fuel tanker and burst into flames in southern Afghanistan.

Afghan officials said on September 4 that the road accident occurred in the province of Zabul as the bus was on its way from Kandahar to Kabul.

Gul Islam Seyal, spokesman for the provincial governor in Zabul, said that more than 25 other people were seriously wounded, with some in critical condition after the two vehicles collided in Shar-e Safa district.

Seyal blamed both drivers for being reckless.

In May, 52 people were killed on the same highway, but in Ghazni Province, in a collision involving two buses and a fuel tanker.

Based on reporting by AFP and AP
Two years after a contentious, fraud-marred presidential election pushed Afghanistan to the brink of another bloody civil war, the country is once again staring into the abyss.

The compromise power deal signed by political rivals Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah to avert that crisis expires at the end of this month, threatening to upend the beleaguered South Asian state's governing order with no clear alternative at hand.

The so-called national unity government (NUG) effectively installing President Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah in September 2014 was a temporary solution to pave the way for an overhaul of the political system within two years.

But as the U.S.-brokered deal nears its conclusion, Afghanistan's leadership has failed to live up to many of its commitments under the agreement. By now, Afghanistan was meant to hold parliamentary elections, push through sweeping electoral reforms, and amend the 2004 constitution to create the position of prime minister.

The impasse has led to an escalating feud between Ghani and Abdullah, rising tensions among the country's long-warring ethnic groups and factions, and mounting calls from a vocal opposition for the dissolution of the government.

That has raised the specter of a protracted power battle that could give way to a coup d'etat or parallel government by key national players, or even to rekindled ethnic and factional warfare not seen there since the civil war of the 1990s.

The political crisis has been accompanied by the deteriorating security situation in the country, with a resurgent Taliban now holding more Afghan territory than in any year since 2001. With Ghani forced to concentrate on security, his economic plans have stalled and the country remains entrenched in economic distress sparked by the withdrawal of international combat troops in 2014.

Personal Feud

The NUG has been severely strained by a personal feud between Ghani and Abdullah, bitter rivals who both claimed victory in the 2014 election.

Under the power-sharing deal, Abdullah reluctantly accepted the temporary, secondary role of chief executive, comparable to the post of prime minister. In exchange, a Constitutional Loya Jirga -- a gathering of the country's political, ethnic, and religious leaders with the authority to amend the constitution -- would consider the post of an executive prime minister. The two leaders would wield power together until then, although ultimate power would rest with the president.

But Abdullah has long accused Ghani of marginalizing him, making major appointments and decisions without his counsel, and snubbing his calls for reform. His frustrations boiled over recently when he angrily denounced his governing partner as unfit to govern. Although the two leaders have since met, their first meetings in three months, their personal disputes look far from being resolved.

"Abdullah is known among his colleagues as someone who believes in teamwork and has a lot of patience to listen and engage in critical thinking, whilst Ghani is known to have little patience for deliberations and given his background as an expressive lecturer, acts more professorial than politician," says Omar Samad, a former Abdullah adviser and ex-Afghan ambassador to France and Canada.

"Abdullah spends many hours, sometimes till late at night, meeting provincial representatives from across Afghanistan, while Ghani is more comfortable spending that time in his residence reading a book or report and meeting only key yes-men."

Ghani's allies say the former World Bank official is disdainful of small talk and lengthy, frequently inconclusive meetings. Instead, they paint him as a feverish worker who spends most waking hours devising lengthy, concrete plans to build up the country's budding institutions and alleviate Afghans' woeful economic conditions.

Afghanistan's leadership is hoping for a vote of confidence from an international donors conference scheduled for October 5, at which friendly countries are expected to pledge their continued political and financial support for the government.

New Power Structure

At the heart of the current standoff is a fundamental disagreement over the distribution of power in Afghanistan.

Abdullah, who has widespread support among the country's ethnic Tajik community, and Ghani, a Pashtun, embody opposing sides of the divide. Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, are generally seen to support a centralized state that guarantees their control of the state, and to oppose decentralization because it might lead to ethnic or regional groups seeking autonomy, possibly with the help of their ethnic brethren in neighboring countries.

Non-Pashtuns, especially Tajiks, are seen to believe the current system suffers from being too centralized, with too much power of the state left in the hands of one individual, and to support decentralization because it would enshrine a more inclusive and equitable distribution of power.

The power-sharing agreement Abdullah and Ghani signed commits to replacing the current presidential system, forged from the American model, with a French-style parliamentary system in which the president's role would be checked by that of an empowered prime minister.

But over the past two years, the sides have yet to realize their vision for a new political framework. If parliamentary elections are not held and the constitution is not changed, Ghani and Abdullah could annul the NUG agreement and renegotiate a new deal.

"The political system we will see for a while is the current one, bogged down in an adjourned game with no easy and constitutional way out in sight," says Thomas Ruttig, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, an independent think tank in Kabul. "This, of course, is very dangerous for the stability of the country."

Growing Opposition

Opposition political groups have been piling pressure on the government for failing to hold parliamentary elections originally scheduled for June.

Former President Hamid Karzai, one of the most outspoken critics of the government, has even demanded that a Loya Jirga, a consultative body whose decisions are not legally binding, be convened to weigh in on the government's legitimacy. Karzai's critics accuse him of trying to destabilize the government as he eyes a return to power.

"The extra-constitutional shortcuts suggested by some also do not guarantee that things improve -- as this comes from sectors of the same elites who maneuvered the country into this situation," Ruttig notes.

Key allies of Abdullah, including former warlords and top regional powerbrokers, have threatened to withdraw their support for the government unless Ghani meets their demands by the expiration of the power-sharing deal.

The opposition has also increasingly taken an ethnically charged line.

A new protest movement has emerged north of Kabul calling for the government to organize an official state burial and gravesite for former Afghan King Habibullah Kalakani, the country's only ethnic Tajik monarch. The movement is supported by some prominent ethnic Tajik lawmakers and former militia commanders who have long been skeptical of Ghani.

Meanwhile, Ghani has also been confronted by street protests named the Enlightenment Movement, in which minority Hazaras have accused his government of systematic discrimination.

"While Afghanistan is not an ethnically divided country, ethnicity becomes more pronounced in politics when any one side attempts to unjustly usurp power, impose its will over others, ignore or denigrate other stakeholders, or renege on its pledges," Samad says. "It is dangerous when seen as part and fabric of the leadership mind-set."
Mohammad Nayeb-Zehi was among the hundreds of worshippers who gathered on September 30 at the Great Mosalla, a religious site in Iran's southeastern city of Zahedan, for Friday Prayers.

Just hours later, the 16-year-old's family learned he was dead.

Nayeb-Zehi was among the scores of people gunned down by security forces in a brutal crackdown following anti-government protests in Zahedan, the provincial capital of Sistan-Baluchistan Province, which is home to the country's Baluch minority.

"He was a simple laborer and not political," Nayeb-Zehi's brother, Ahmad, told RFE/RL's Radio Farda in a telephone interview from Zahedan, adding that his sibling had been shot in the heart. "We're in pain, and we cannot accept it."

The crackdown in Zahedan came amid weeks-long nationwide protests triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old who died on September 16, days after she was detained by Iran's morality police.

In Sistan-Baluchistan, public anger at the authorities escalated amid reports that a 15-year-old Baluch girl had been raped by a police official in the province's southern port city of Chabahar.

The violence erupted soon after protesters gathered outside a police station near the central mosque in Zahedan. Members of the crowd chanted anti-government slogans, and some threw rocks. Security forces responded with deadly force by firing on the crowd from the station, according to witnesses.

Security forces also raided the central mosque and the nearby Great Mosalla and opened fire on worshippers using live ammunition, rights groups said, adding that many were shot in the head, heart, neck, or torso, revealing a clear intent to kill or seriously wound.

At least 94 people were killed and 350 wounded on that day, referred to as "Bloody Friday," according to the U.S.-based Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. At least 13 minors were among those killed, including Nayeb-Zehi.

The victims were overwhelmingly Baluch -- a mostly Sunni ethnic group that has long faced disproportionate discrimination at the hands of the Iranian authorities.

"He was martyred inside the Mosalla while holding his prayer mat," said Ahmad Nayeb-Zehi.

Nayeb-Zehi's family first visited Zahedan's Khatam al-Anbia hospital, hoping he was among the wounded. They later found his body in a seminary at the Great Mosalla.

"We entered a room there and saw about 10 bodies," said Ahmad Nayeb-Zehi. "[Mohammad] was among them."

He said the authorities prevented the family from filming the scene. "I told them this has to be documented, it has to be published by international media," he said, adding that footage later emerged on social media showing the gruesome scene at the seminary.

The family refused to send Nayeb-Zehi's body to the morgue. Instead, his body lay in the living room for around 24 hours before he was buried.

"We said he was martyred and there was no need for an autopsy," said Ahmad Nayeb-Zehi.

The authorities accused Jaish al-Adl, a Sunni militant group, of attacking the police station. The group is recognized as a terrorist organization by both Iran and the United States and has previously claimed deadly attacks in Sistan-Baluchistan targeting Iranian security forces.

But local and independent sources have rejected the authorities' claims.

The authorities have also reported a much lower number of fatalities, announcing that only 19 people, including several members of the security forces, were killed.

Ahmad Nayeb-Zehi said the authorities were "rubbing salt into the wounds of the people" by claiming "terrorists" were involved.

He said he witnessed a military helicopter shooting at civilians near the Great Mosalla. "I haven't even seen such scenes in Hollywood movies," he said. "A helicopter was shooting at people. A lady was shot in front of my eyes."

RFE/RL could not verify his account. But activists have accused security forces of shooting at protestors from helicopters.

"I don't know what the intention of this crime was," he said. "Our only demand from the establishment is for the murderers of our [family members] to be punished."

The killings have led to widespread anger in Sistan-Baluchistan, one of Iran's poorest provinces.

Anti-establishment protests have been reported in Zahedan since the crackdown, including on October 14 and October 21, when protesters took to the streets after Friday Prayers and chanted "Death to the dictator."

During his Friday Prayers sermon on October 21, influential Sunni cleric Molavi Abdolhamid Ismaeelzahi said senior officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were "responsible" for the September 30 killings.

"We are surprised by the silence of the high-ranking officials," he said in his sermon, which was posted on his website.

"Scores were killed here without any reason. I don't have the exact number. Some have reported 90, some say less, some say more," Ismaeelzahi added.

He also said people will not be satisfied until "those who killed the people" are brought to justice.

The Iran Human Rights Documentation Center said the events of September 30 amounted to "a massacre of protesters by security forces."

"The government's total denial of responsibility for the massacring of citizens by its security apparatus is consistent with similar past denials and is evidence that internal calls for investigation of such crimes are insufficient," said the rights group, which documents human rights violations in Iran.
During Uzbekistan's 25 years of independence, its first family, the Karimovs, was powerful and greatly feared by the local population. Those days are coming to an end now that President Islam Karimov has died. That could leave some members of his immediate family in precarious positions, at least if they entertain any thoughts of staying in Uzbekistan now that Karimov is no longer president.

The problem is the daughters -- Gulnara, the eldest, and Lola.

It's difficult to believe Karimov's wife, Tatyana Akbarovna Karimova (his second wife, actually), would face any problems. She has remained largely out of the public eye. More importantly, her family is influential; in fact, it's doubtful Islam Karimov could have risen to the post he attained without help from his wife's relatives.

Karimov was an orphan -- in fact, he was more of an abandoned child. (Qishloq Ovozi has covered his early years already.) Through his wife's family, he was able to meet people who guided him up the ladder of the Communist Party when Uzbekistan was a Soviet republic. But Tatyana Karimova is an elderly woman now. It's difficult to imagine anyone would equate her with her husband's policies.

People in Uzbekistan are aware that the two daughters have been living extravagant lives. For most people in Uzbekistan, the average wage is somewhere between $200 and $300 per month.

The Karimova sisters owned property in Switzerland, according to Switzerland's Bilan magazine. On its 2009 list of the top 300 wealthiest people in Switzerland, Bilan ranked Gulnara ninth on the women's list, with assets estimated at between $570 million to $665 million. In 2011, Bilan estimated the two sisters' combined wealth at around $1 billion. Lola and her husband, Timur Tillyaev, sued Bilan for that.

Uzbekistan's people probably knew very little about Bilan's rankings. It certainly is not a topic Uzbek state media would ever cover. And if both the Karimova sisters had kept a low profile in Uzbekistan, it might never have been an issue among Uzbekistan's people.

Gulnara, however, craved the spotlight. She not only had vast holdings outside Uzbekistan, she also owned some businesses and enterprises inside the country, including television channels.

Her Forum television channel, for instance, featured youth-oriented films produced in Uzbekistan but was heavy on coverage of events that involved Gulnara. Charity concerts she organized were shown on Forum with plenty of footage of her mingling with the people in attendance. Gulnara attended a fashion school in the United States and Forum aired her fashion shows in Uzbekistan, again with ample coverage of Gulnara at the events.

A cartoon filler shown between programs featured a girl with a clear resemblance to Gulnara wandering a flower-filled meadow, ascending a mountain toward the sun, all the while accompanied by soothing music. Her music videos were also regularly aired on the channel.

One of the best-known WikiLeaks cables about Uzbekistan referred to Gulnara as being "the most hated person in Uzbekistan." Forum TV provided evidence of this one day. A film crew followed a well-dressed Gulnara as she essentially crashed a wedding party. The initial images shown of carefree guests dancing and enjoying themselves quickly turned to people with nervous smiles and stiff postures as Gulnara weaved through the crowd to get a picture with the bride and groom, whom of course she had clearly never met.

Gulnara's shady financial dealings abroad proved her downfall and she is currently connected to several foreign companies accused of paying bribes for contracts in Uzbekistan.

Gulnara was put under unofficial house arrest in 2014 after tirades against top Uzbek government officials and later against her sister and mother.

However, she has not been seen or heard from in months, did not attend her father's funeral in Samarkand on September 3, and there are unconfirmed reports that Gulnara is now outside Uzbekistan. She likely won't be coming back soon, if ever.

Her sister Lola has been Uzbekistan's ambassador to UNESCO since 2008, a position she probably will lose once a new president comes to power. For more than a decade, Lola has funded two charities: You Are Not Alone, which helps orphanages and children with disabilities, and the National Center for the Social Adaptation of Children, which helps provide education and medical help for children with disabilities. She appears to have helped her reputation in Uzbekistan through funding these two charities.

As mentioned, Bilan magazine claimed Lola has assets worth millions of dollars and as recently as 2014 estimated her and her husband's assets at between $100 million and $200 million. Lola has called that figure greatly exaggerated.

An article in the U.K. newspaper The Daily Mail, and a later one in The New York Times, reported Lola and her husband bought a mansion in Hollywood worth $58 million. The Daily Mail also cited The Real Estalker blog as reporting the Tillyaevs bought "a $41 million estate in Geneva" in 2010. The article in The New York Times said the mansion in Hollywood was one of several properties Lola and her husband were connected to in the area. And, of course, Lola has a flat in Paris where she lives when acting in her capacity as UNESCO ambassador.

Lola credits her husband for having all the money in their family.

Lola and her husband have been living outside Uzbekistan for many years. Lola was at her father's funeral in Samarkand, but given her lifestyle abroad it's difficult to imagine she would return to the uncertainty of an Uzbekistan without her father in charge. There's always the example of her estranged older sister's house arrest.

So Uzbekistan's future without Islam Karimov also probably means a future without his daughters. Probably few inside Uzbekistan would be disappointed at this prospect.

Karimov's estranged son from his first marriage, Pyotr, reportedly lives in Russia and may not have ever been in Uzbekistan since it became independent in 1991.

Karimov also has siblings: at least one sister and brother. His parents kept and raised them while Islam Karimov was given to an orphanage. Perhaps understandably, Karimov seems to have rarely been in contact with them and did nothing as his sister's son Jamshed was forcibly confined to a psychiatric hospital after writing critical articles of the Uzbek government for independent media outlets.
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."
A noted Crimean Tatar activist who has been forced into a psychiatric hospital in Russian-occupied Crimea says the conditions hes facing are a threat to his physical health.



Ilmi Umerov, the former deputy chairman of the Crimean Tatars' self-governing body, the Mejlis, was charged with separatism in May after he made public statements opposing Moscow's seizure of the peninsula from Ukraine.

In August, he was forcibly admitted to a psychiatric clinic for a month of assessment tests.



Umerov, 59, spoke to a Reuters reporter who gained access to the hospital in Simferopol, where hes being held.



Umerov, whose relatives and lawyers say he suffers from diabetes, Parkinsons disease, and heart problems, said he had been forced to live in squalid, crowded conditions that endangered his health.



"With this bouquet [of ailments], to be in such conditions is of course dangerous," he was quoted as saying by Reuters.



He added that on his fourth day at the clinic he collapsed and lost consciousness.



He also said that he had been barred from speaking to journalists.



Human Rights Watch has urged the Russian-backed authorities in Crimea to drop the charges against Umerov and provide him with necessary medical treatment.



The Moscow-based Memorial Human Rights Center has called the case against Umerov "illegal and politically motivated."



Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin has compared Umerov's detention to the Soviet-era practice of holding dissidents in psychiatric hospitals.

Based on reporting by Reuters and AFP
Im going to miss being 4.

On the eve of his fifth birthday, my son gently rocked on the same hand-me-down leather recliner he regularly treated like a gymnastics apparatus for years. And as he contemplated what it meant to get older while sprawled out on his sweat- and yogurt-stained throne, his face soured and his eyes welled up.

Nolans forecast for the future was cloudy with a chance of meltdown: tying his own shoelaces, a scary new school, the whispers of chores and the specter of more sanitary bathroom habits. Meanwhile, his 2-year-old sister still shot through life willy-nilly, bouncing around like a blinding silver sphere in a roadhouse pinball machine.

Life wasnt fair. Until Nolans gifts and cake arrived the next day, of course.

Nolan was learning that while they didnt need to be, and surely shouldnt be, birthdays could be stressful. (Just wait until he starts planning birthday parties instead of attending them.)

But birthdays constitute some of my most vivid, oft-recalled memories. And I suspect the same will be true for him. Perhaps its because of the serious self-reflection they demand. Or who knows, maybe its the funnel shape of novelty party hats that compels just the right neurons to fire off in sync every few weeks or months, re-creating forgotten moments as lucid flashbacks.

That might explain why I still remember a classmates ninth birthday party celebrated at Chuck E. Cheeses in Rochester, N.Y. We mowed through pizza, took turns dropping quarters in the now ancient Dragons Lair arcade game, and watched one of our friends punch out a kid from a rival birthday party in the Cheese Hole, a wooden underbelly of peepholes and hiding spots where bad things happened. It was a legendary act of pre-pubescent machismo still talked about in the halls of Victor Elementary School to this day.

Another theory: Maybe we remember birthdays because were so often surrounded by our friends and family. In August 2012, I rode around with my dad buying everything from mulch to Mylar balloons in preparation for my sons first birthday party. After the hard labor, we sucked chicken wings off the bone, traded our best stories over beers, and that weekend, we ate cake for both my kids birthday and my own.

It would be the last such celebration. My dad died unexpectedly four months later.

Its times like these when birthdates dont seem arbitrary, but like carefully calculated born-on dates handed down with purpose by Father Time. But they have to be random, right? Just ask the cynical bunch born on Feb. 29 or Dec. 25.

As kids, we lose sleep over anticipated birthday booty and red-eyed sleepovers. As adults, we lose hair over losing hair  and getting the deposit for the kids party into the trampoline warehouse on time. Our own annual celebrations of shameless self-promotion take a backseat to our kids, not just their own, but the friends kind enough to drop an invite into their preschool cubby.

Nolan, my wife and I have been everywhere these past two months, running through the fun but grueling pre-K summer birthday party gantlet. Once there were three in 36 hours: at a bouncy-house hideaway, a semi-private pool and an indoor soccer arena. At one, Nolan donned a chef hat and cooked up some green pizza at Young Chefs Academy, a refreshing change of pace.

Time will tell which soirees will make the slideshow in Nolans brain.

As for Nolans birthday, we went to Chuck E. Cheeses to celebrate as a family (his call). No fights, but we spent $20 to win a plastic bookmark, a fun-size bag of Skittles and a pocket-size plastic foam rocket launcher that broke in 30 minutes.

When we got home that night, Nolan and I sparred with his new superhero Rockem Sockem Robots.

Then we heard a faint knock at the door. We opened it and quickly stepped back, spying a fist-sized winged bug of some sort. Its brilliant green wings were the size of a hummingbird, and its body resembled a caterpillar after a trip to the buffet. I had never seen anything like it. After a brief Google image search, we identified our new friend as the rarely seen luna moth. They live for a week, mate and die.

Luna moths are seen by some as spiritual creatures, symbolizing intuition, rebirth and even the soul. Others say they come to help us see the big picture in life. Its pretty deep stuff, maybe even silly. Still, I couldnt help but think that the visitor was a perfectly timed birthday gift in many ways  for both Nolan and me  and a birthday memory we would share forever.
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QUESTION: What are the districts biggest challenges heading into this school year and how are you addressing them?

ANSWER: Chesterfield County Public Schools has a goal every day that students receive an innovative, engaging and relevant learning experience that shows real-life application to classroom lessons and keeps students thirsting for more. The challenge is to move away from the old thinking regarding rote memorization and focusing on a standardized test score. From a staff perspective, we need to create learning environments where teachers love to come to work, have the flexibility and resources necessary to serve each child and are actively involved in determining how to make the classroom experience even more rewarding. From the perspective of focusing on students, we want them actively involved in classroom lessons. We also want our students to be prepared with skill sets relevant to todays workplace and hope to partner with our community colleges to help students earn certifications through internships and apprenticeships to prepare them for the world of work. Its also our intention to have Early College Academies in all of our high schools within the next five years. Through this effort, our graduates could leave with a high school diploma and an associates degree. When combining these opportunities with our already stellar programs, such as our specialty centers, we believe we can foster the best schools in the country.

QUESTION: Every year technology becomes a bigger part of what schools do. How are you using technology in schools and what are you doing to make sure kids whose families dont have access to technology or broadband dont fall behind?

ANSWER: The school division is entering its third year of its Anytime, Anywhere Learning initiative. We have implemented what was at the time the largest rollout of Chromebooks at the secondary level. Last year, each middle and high school student had a mobile device that expanded learning opportunities beyond the four traditional walls of a classroom. Moving forward, were looking at ways to expand this initiative into elementary schools. Its our hope to have a device in the hands of all third-, fourth- and fifth-graders in the next two years.

QUESTION: Is there anything new parents and students can expect for the county this school year?

ANSWER: In addition to a focus on modernizing and enhancing the school divisions strategic innovation plan, during my first 120 days in office I am assessing the organizations strengths and weaknesses and identifying areas that will yield quick wins as well as areas that need intense focus.

QUESTION: What is the biggest logistical challenge you face on the first day of school?
As the calendar reaches Labor Day, signaling the sprint lap for Virginias political campaigns, Tim Kaine will be pressing the flesh as usual Monday, making his case to working families  in Pittsburgh and Cleveland.

Kaines wife, Anne Holton, will campaign in Virginia, attending a breakfast salute to labor unions and community leaders in Hampton before heading to Rep. Robert C. Bobby Scotts 40th annual Labor Day cookout in Newport News.

But the vice presidential nominees deployment elsewhere is a measure of Democrats confidence nearly two months before Election Day in what was supposed to be a key swing state.

A couple of the states that were really close have actually moved into pretty safe  safer  territory. Virginia is one, Colorado is one, Kaine said Aug. 27, while speaking to municipal officials in South Florida.

The widening gap means he and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton can really spend a lot of time in states that are real close such as Florida, Kaine said.

He added: If we win Florida, its over.

In August, four polls showed Clinton and Kaine leading Republican nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, by double digits in head-to-head matches in Virginia.

Trump and Pence still are aggressively fighting for Virginias 13 electoral votes, if campaign stops are an indication. Trump will campaign Tuesday afternoon in Virginia Beach at the Sandler Center for the Performing Arts. The event is not open to the public.

Not including the new event in Virginia Beach, Mr. Trump and Governor Pence have campaigned six times in Virginia, jointly or separately, in the last few weeks, and we are working hard to win the commonwealth on Election Day, said Thomas Midanek, state director of Trumps Virginia campaign.

We are reaching out to voters on the ground and taking Mr. Trumps message directly to the people of Virginia. The voters we hear from understand that Hillary Clinton represents a third Obama term, while the Trump-Pence campaign of tougher law enforcement, stopping illegal immigration and bringing back jobs is resonating strongly across the commonwealth.

Democrats think they have a distinct advantage in a robust ground game that has helped the party win every statewide contest in Virginia since 2009.

The Clinton-Kaine team includes many veterans of past Virginia statewide campaigns. In one of numerous examples, Clintons campaign manager, Robby Mook, ran Gov. Terry McAuliffes successful Virginia campaign for governor in 2013.

Listen, weve got to work hard, but Im very confident Hillary is going to win the election, McAuliffe said Wednesday during his monthly Ask the Governor show on Washingtons WTOP radio.

Think about Virginia today, that they have actually stopped the media, McAuliffe said, noting the paucity of political advertising airing in Virginia, although we are the swingiest of swing states.

Asked if he has faith in the recent Virginia surveys, McAuliffe said: I believe the polls today. Do I believe they could tighten? You bet.

Ground game

McAuliffe says the Democrats expect to win Virginia on the ground, regardless of how many ads are on the air.

There are literally thousands and thousands of volunteers every day doing the door-knocking, and going and talking to the folks and doing the phoning and all that, McAuliffe said.

We have a real solid infrastructure, which we have worked on for a long time in Virginia, to make sure were communicating and, most importantly, getting them out to vote.

The Clinton campaign says it has 33 offices across Virginia, including four in the Richmond area  in the citys Scotts Addition neighborhood, Chesterfield County, Henrico County and Petersburg.

Organizers who make calls and knock on doors also seek to boost congressional candidates, such as state Sen. A. Donald McEachin, D-Henrico, who faces Henrico Sheriff Mike Wade, the GOP nominee, in the 4th District; and Eileen Bedell, the Democrat who is challenging Rep. Dave Brat, R-7th.

The Clinton campaign says that each week it holds more than 1,000 organizing events across the state, such as phone banks, voter registration drives or door-to-door canvassing efforts  including 120 every week in the Richmond area. It says 40 elected officials have attended organizing events in the Richmond area in the past six weeks.

The campaign says it also has a robust social media program with Hillary for Virginia Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Medium accounts that boost its digital organizing efforts across the state.

I think the problem the Trump campaign is going to face is that, at the end of the day, youve got to communicate and identify voters and talk to them about the issues and get them to the polls on Election Day, McAuliffe said. There is no ground operation for the Trump campaign in Virginia today, to speak of.

Garren Shipley, a Virginia-based spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said Republicans have learned from President Barack Obamas outreach tactics. It showed in last years General Assembly elections, he said, when Republicans kept control of both chambers despite McAuliffes vigorous attempt to flip the state Senate to Democrats.

Our ground game in Virginia was being rolled out in 2015, Shipley said. And that is the reason Governor McAuliffe and Michael Bloomberg dont have a majority in the Virginia Senate right now.

Republicans have 18 field offices and 61 paid staff members in Virginia, Shipley said. Some of the Trump resources are housed in existing GOP space, Shipley said.

He said offices are less important than door-knocking, and Republicans believe theyve made strides by adopting a neighborhood-centric volunteer model that divides the state into roughly 100 separate areas.

The paid Republican staffers have recruited 72 neighborhood leaders, he said, who then organize local volunteers so that potential voters are hearing from someone they know rather than a college student theyve never met.

Effectively, what were doing is were running over 100 individual campaigns for president. Theyve all got their own goals. Theyve all got their own strategy, Shipley said. Because what works for far Southwest is not what works in Fairfax.

Shipley said theres no doubt that Republicans are better prepared today than they were in 2012.

I think if wed had the ground game in 2012 that we have now, this would be the Romney re-elect, Shipley said.

Third party candidates

The major-party candidates will have company in Virginia. The Department of Elections announced Friday that Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson, Green Party nominee Jill Stein and independent Evan McMullin also have qualified for Virginias presidential ballot.

Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico, is running a radio ad in the Richmond market that casts himself as an alternative to unpopular major-party nominees.

Like 60 percent of you, Im not impressed by the two-party system, Johnson says. Its a dinosaur.

Johnson is pinning his hopes on qualifying for the presidential debates. To do so, he must reach an average of 15 percent in five national polls. He is a few percentage points shy ahead of the first debate, set for Sept. 26 at Hofstra University in New York.

Stein is a Harvard-trained physician who backs a WWII-scale national mobilization to halt climate change.

In a Virginia survey that Quinnipiac University released Aug. 17, Clinton led with 45 percent of the vote to 34 percent for Trump, 11 percent for Johnson and 5 percent for Stein in a four-way matchup.

Johnson received 31,216 votes in Virginia in 2012, good for 0.8 percent of the vote. Stein received 8,267 votes in Virginia that year, or 0.2 percent of the nearly 3.86 million cast.

McMullin, a Never Trump conservative running as an independent, is a former CIA operative and previously was a top policy aide to the House Republican Conference in Congress. He announced his candidacy on Aug. 8, saying: Its never too late to do the right thing.

Kaines Senate seat

The apparent lead that Clinton and Kaine enjoy in Virginia has brought increased attention to some of the elections subplots.

If Clinton and Kaine win in November, Kaine will vacate his Senate seat. McAuliffe would name an interim senator who would hold the seat until a special election in November 2017, on the same day when Virginia voters will choose a governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general.

If Clinton wins Nov. 8, Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take control of the Senate in January, because Kaine, as vice president, could cast tie-breaking votes. But in that scenario, Democrats could lose control of the Senate again if they cannot hold Kaines seat in the 2017 special election.

That heightens pressure on McAuliffe to appoint an interim successor with the best chance to hold the seat. The candidate would need to stockpile campaign cash, because the seat comes up again in 2018, its regular six-year interval.

McAuliffe says that perhaps 20 people have reached out to his office expressing interest in the seat. The governor says he will not tip his hand, hold a meeting or talk about recommendations for the interim appointment unless and until Clinton and Kaine prevail on Nov. 8.

But Virginia political observers will be looking for hints on Monday, when McAuliffe attends Scotts Labor Day picnic in Newport News.

Scott, who has represented parts of the Richmond area and Hampton Roads in Congress since 1993, would be Virginias first African-American U.S. senator. He has the backing of the Congressional Black Caucus and former Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder.

Others mentioned as possibilities for the seat include Rep. Don Beyer, D-8th; Attorney General Mark Herring; and Holton, a former juvenile court judge and Virginia first lady who recently stepped down as McAuliffes secretary of education.

Holton would be the states first female U.S. senator. But a Holton appointment could raise interesting procedural questions if her husband presides over the Senate as vice president.

Another question if Kaine is elected vice president is whether any of the four Republicans in a crowded 2017 field for governor  former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie; Rep. Robert J. Wittman, R-1st; Corey Stewart, chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors; or state Sen. Frank W. Wagner, R-Virginia Beach  would switch and run for the Senate seat instead.

The Comstock seat

Another subplot related to Kaines Senate seat involves the battle for the Northern Virginia congressional seat of Rep. Barbara J. Comstock, R-10th, in a district that stretches from Fairfax and Loudoun counties to Winchester in the west.

In a year in which few of Virginias U.S. House races appear competitive, Trumps unpopularity in diverse Northern Virginia is complicating Comstocks effort to fend off Democrat LuAnn Bennett, a real estate executive and former wife of ex-Rep. Jim Moran, D-8th. Of the districts 802,000 residents, more than 101,000 are Hispanic, more than 109,000 are Asian and more than 55,000 are black, according to U.S. Census figures.

In a traditional year, Comstock, a former state delegate seeking her second term in Congress, would be a strong favorite against Bennett, who is making her first run for office. But Comstock has worked to distance herself from the GOP presidential nominee amid signs of an anti-Trump tsunami in Northern Virginia.

As of Aug. 10, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report listed Comstocks as a lean Republican district. But recent Virginia presidential polls contain warnings of a wave that Comstock will try to withstand. In the Virginia poll that The Washington Post released Aug. 16, Clinton led Trump in the D.C. suburbs by 68 percent to 23 percent.

Comstock is another potential contender for Kaines U.S. Senate seat, should it become open. But first she has to get by Bennett  and Trump.

Believe it or not

For all of the Clinton-Kaine campaigns apparent advantages in Virginia, Holton, who campaigned Friday in Roanoke and Charlottesville, has a clear message for volunteers: Dont believe the hype.

Theres no way its not going to be close, despite all the craziness and the polls, she told campaign workers Friday at Clintons office on Charlottesvilles Downtown Mall.

Dont believe anything that tells you any different. Its going to be a very close race in Virginia and across the nation.
In this autumn of our electoral discontent, hope springs, as it so often does in the American republic, from unexpected precincts. Much of the country is distressed by the presidential candidates offered by the two conventional political parties. And for good reason. Neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton meets the fundamental moral and professional standards we have every right to expect of an American president. Fortunately, there is a reasonable  and formidable  alternative.

Gary Johnson is a former, two-term governor of New Mexico and a man who built from scratch a construction company that eventually employed more than 1,000 people before he sold it in 1999. He possesses substantial executive experience in both the private and the public sectors.

More important, hes a man of good integrity, apparently normal ego and sound ideas. Sadly, in the 2016 presidential contest, those essential qualities make him an anomaly  though they are the foundations for solid leadership and trustworthy character. (At 63, he is also the youngest candidate by more than half a decade  and is polling well among truly young voters.)

As the nominee of the Libertarian Party, Johnson is expected to be on the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. He is, in every respect, a legitimate and reasonable contender for the presidency  but only if the voters give him a fair hearing. And that can happen only if he is allowed to participate in the presidential debates that begin on Sept. 26 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. If the Commission on Presidential Debates wants to perform a real service to its country, it will invite Gary Johnson onto the big stage.

***

The Times-Dispatch editorial board began to explore the possibility of endorsing Johnson and his running mate, former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, several weeks ago, as scandal continued to engulf the Democratic nominee while the Republican candidates statements and behavior daily piled distress upon puzzlement.

Johnsons clear and consistent support for limited government, free enterprise, social tolerance and individual freedom appeals to our own philosophical leanings. An examination of his policy positions revealed that they often match our longstanding editorial creed. (Nearby, youll find an analysis of how the candidates fare when judged by the standards of that creed, as well as a look at the history of editorial endorsements by The Times-Dispatch.)

But our final decision to endorse the Johnson/Weld ticket, and to do so with great confidence and enthusiasm, came only after Johnson met with the editorial board last Monday morning. We found him to be knowledgeable but unscripted, reasonable and good-humored, self-assured but free from arrogance, willing and able to address every question, consistent in his beliefs without being dogmatic, even-tempered, curious  and in all respects optimistically, realistically presidential.

We have over the years interviewed hundreds of politicians  local, state, and national  and theres no doubt that Johnson belongs in the major leagues, and on the debate stage this fall. He is a skilled and experienced leader, an able communicator, an intelligent man.

***

In his meeting with us last week, Johnson explained why he and his running mate offer a sensible appeal to the voters.

I think were reflecting what 60 percent of Americans believe right now, broadly speaking  that being, fiscally conservative, smaller government, combined with being socially inclusive  and combined with a skepticism on our foreign policy, which doesnt seem to be making things better.

At its core, he added, libertarian philosophy always comes down on the side of personal choice, as long as those choices dont harm others. It also builds from a belief in smaller government. Government doesnt have the answers. Government taxes too much. Neither Bill Weld nor I raised taxes one cent  neither of us over both of our terms, not one penny. Weld and Johnson both faced Democratic state legislatures while in office, he added, so the opportunity to cut taxes didnt arise.

Johnson is not afraid to take stands that run counter to current trends in public opinion. Hes the only presidential candidate who backs the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We do support free trade. We think, ultimately, thats the way the world comes together.

He said the federal government should hand control of Medicaid  and eventually Medicare  to the states, as the only way to curtail runaway costs. Let the states have at it ... because there would be fabulous success. He calls for a balanced federal budget and promises to propose one soon after taking office, even if its initial effect is more aspirational than practical.

He advocates significant cuts in defense spending  and in the rest of the federal budget. We should have an impenetrable national defense, Johnson said, and we should strike back with overwhelming force whenever attacked. But he does not believe in nation-building.

Electing Trump or Clinton will make the countrys partisan divide even worse, Johnson said. But with a third party in the White House, Republicans and Democrats would have to compromise if they hope to accomplish anything. Well be a couple of guys in the big middle, hiring a bipartisan administration, ... calling out both sides to come to the table.

***

These are unsettling times. Americans across the political spectrum worry that our once-great institutions no longer work in the interests of the people  and sometimes dont work at all. Why not take this chance to reject the binary choice between Clinton and Trump that was created by our two-party system? We strongly urge the debate commission to invite Johnson onto the stage to give voters an opportunity to hear his positions, to evaluate his temperament, and, perhaps most important, to compare him with the candidates nominated by the two traditional parties.
By Dale M. Brumfield

Defendants should not be executed or sentenced to death if, at the time of the offense, they had a severe mental disorder or disability that significantly impaired their capacity (a) to appreciate the nature, consequences or wrongfulness of their conduct, (b) to exercise rational judgment in relation to conduct, or (c) to conform their conduct to the requirements of the law.

 American Bar Association (ABA) Recommendation 122A, August 2006

***

Sanism, a term coined by attorney Morton Birnbaum in the 1960s, is generally described as an irrational prejudice against the mentally ill. A person in Virginia with a severe mental illness convicted of a capital crime can become a victim of state-sponsored sanism  and can legally be executed, despite a growing consensus that these persons are not the bottom-rung criminals for which the death penalty was intended.

While more general U.S. law has already recognized that juveniles and those with intellectual disabilities should not be put to death due to their inability to control their behavior or appreciate the gravity of their conduct, exemptions for those suffering from classes of mental illness designated assevere  that were proven without a doubt to be present at the time of their crime  are not provided. Sanism, unfortunately, may still prevail.

***

A recent educational forum, Mental Illness and the Death Penalty, sponsored by the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI-Virginia) and the American Bar Associations (ABA) Due Process Review Project, and hosted by the Troutman Sanders law firm, introduced their mental illness initiative to educate legislators, legal professionals, and the general public on the relationship between mental illness and capital punishment, and to support policy reforms to exempt those individuals with significant impaired capacity from execution.

The Aug. 15 forum  moderated by Misty Thomas, director of the ABA Death Penalty Due Process Review Project  was comprised of Professor Richard Bonnie, professor of medicine and law at the University of Virginia School of Law; Dr. James Reinhard, medical director at Virginia Techs Cook Counseling center; and Mira Signer, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness-Virginia.

The policy recommendations are welcome and sorely needed. The insanity defense, though sought infrequently, has long been unfairly maligned by the public and media as a get out of jail free card. Studies have shown that jurors sometimes view mental illness diagnoses and defenses not as mitigating factors in considering punishment, but as aggravating factors that in their minds may indicate a defendants proclivity for future crimes, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Virginia also does not prohibit executions of persons who, at the time of their crime, had significant limitations in intellectual function caused not just by mental illness but by a disability such as traumatic brain injury or even dementia.

A defendant who suffered a serious brain injury at age 18, for example, could be eligible for the death penalty, even if, as a result of the injury, he or she exhibits characteristics of mental retardation, which alone would exempt them.

Professor Bonnie explained that many legal mechanisms to determine mental competency are already in place in capital cases and follow a three-step review process: the test for competency to stand trial, mitigating mental factors weighed during sentencing, and determination of whether the defendant is competent to be executed.

It is the interpretation of these policy steps that the ABA is looking to amend and clarify, emphasizing that they are not taking a moral stand on the death penalty, nor is it their position to absolve mentally ill defendants of responsibility for their crime. On the contrary, if found guilty, defendants still must be punished and even receive life in a psychiatric institution or prison without parole if warranted.

***

To address the byzantine complexities inherent in defending and prosecuting death penalty cases, especially those involving mental illness, a Virginia Death Penalty Assessment Team was created, chaired by John Douglass, professor of law and former dean at the University of Richmond School of Law, to recommend procedures for upholding ABA protocols.

These recommendations go beyond just mental illness issues to include the better preservation of biological and DNA evidence, improved victim identification and interrogations methods, medical examiner and laboratory accreditation standards, and more.

Studies by the team have found Virginia to be only partially compliant with protocol No. 4, which states, Clemency decision-makers should consider as factors in their deliberations the inmates mental retardation, mental illness, or mental competency 

The team also found Virginia to be partially and even non-compliant with several policies regarding capital jury instructions, acknowledging those directives are poorly written and badly communicated, leading to misperceptions among jurors as to which laws are applicable and, worse, confusion as to the magnitude of their life or death responsibilities.

Also ambiguous is the proper definition of mental illness and the extent of how often it applies in individual capital cases. Dr. Reinhard, who was former commissioner of the Virginia public mental health system under Govs. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, explained that, according to best estimates, only 4 percent of violence toward others is solely attributable to certain classes of mental illness, particularly to psychoses such as schizophrenia.

Substance abuse and socio-demographic factors, such as poverty and family dynamics, significantly contribute more to violent behavior than mental disorders. Thus if we could somehow cure all mental illnesses overnight, wrote psychologist John Monahan, we would be left in the morning with a rate of violence that is 96 percent of what it is now.

Sanism, like sexism, is a prejudice that is insidious, based largely upon stereotype, mistaken assumptions, and even superstitions, yet it remains socially and even legally acceptable. It is time that Virginia  with the assistance of the ABA and NAMI  works to exempt the mentally ill and eradicate sanism from its capital punishment processes.
Labor Day begins the sprint to November that will test whether Donald Trump and Republicans can compete with Virginia Democrats ground game.

Tim Kaine will be pressing the flesh as usual Monday, making his case to working families  in Pittsburgh and Cleveland.

The vice presidential nominees deployment elsewhere is a measure of Democrats confidence nearly two months before Election Day in what was supposed to be a key swing state.

In August, four polls showed Hillary Clinton and Kaine leading Republican nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, by double digits in head-to-head matches in Virginia.

Trump and Pence still are aggressively fighting for Virginias 13 electoral votes, if campaign stops are an indication. Trump will campaign Tuesday afternoon in Virginia Beach at the Sandler Center for the Performing Arts. The event is not open to the public.

Not including the new event in Virginia Beach, Mr. Trump and Governor Pence have campaigned six times in Virginia, jointly or separately, in the last few weeks, and we are working hard to win the commonwealth on Election Day, said Thomas Midanek, state director of Trumps Virginia campaign.

We are reaching out to voters on the ground and taking Mr. Trumps message directly to the people of Virginia. The voters we hear from understand that Hillary Clinton represents a third Obama term, while the Trump-Pence campaign of tougher law enforcement, stopping illegal immigration and bringing back jobs is resonating strongly across the commonwealth.

Kaines wife, Roanoke native Anne Holton, will campaign in Virginia, attending a breakfast salute to labor unions and community leaders in Hampton before heading to Rep. Robert C. Bobby Scotts 40th annual Labor Day cookout in Newport News.

A couple of the states that were really close have actually moved into pretty safe  safer  territory. Virginia is one, Colorado is one, Kaine said Aug. 27, while speaking to municipal officials in South Florida. The widening gap means he and Clinton can really spend a lot of time in states that are real close such as Florida, Kaine said.

He added: If we win Florida, its over.

Ground game

Democrats think they have a distinct advantage in a robust ground game that has helped the party win every statewide contest in Virginia since 2009.

The Clinton-Kaine team includes many veterans of past Virginia statewide campaigns. In one of numerous examples, Clintons campaign manager, Robby Mook, ran Gov. Terry McAuliffes successful Virginia campaign for governor in 2013.

Listen, weve got to work hard, but Im very confident Hillary is going to win the election, McAuliffe said Wednesday during his monthly Ask the Governor show on Washingtons WTOP radio.

Think about Virginia today, that they have actually stopped the media, McAuliffe said, noting the paucity of political advertising airing in Virginia, although we are the swingiest of swing states.

Asked if he has faith in the recent Virginia surveys, McAuliffe said: I believe the polls today. Do I believe they could tighten? You bet.

McAuliffe says the Democrats expect to win Virginia on the ground, regardless of how many ads are on the air.

There are literally thousands and thousands of volunteers every day doing the door-knocking, and going and talking to the folks and doing the phoning and all that, McAuliffe said.

We have a real solid infrastructure, which we have worked on for a long time in Virginia, to make sure were communicating and, most importantly, getting them out to vote.

The Clinton campaign says it has 33 offices across Virginia, including four in the Richmond area  in the citys Scotts Addition neighborhood, Chesterfield County, Henrico County and Petersburg. The Clinton campaign says that each week it holds more than 1,000 organizing events across the state, such as phone banks, voter registration drives or door-to-door canvassing efforts  including 120 every week in the Richmond area. It says 40 elected officials have attended organizing events in the Richmond area in the past six weeks.

The campaign says it also has a robust social media program with Hillary for Virginia Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Medium accounts that boost its digital organizing efforts across the state.

I think the problem the Trump campaign is going to face is that, at the end of the day, youve got to communicate and identify voters and talk to them about the issues and get them to the polls on Election Day, McAuliffe said. There is no ground operation for the Trump campaign in Virginia today, to speak of.

Garren Shipley, a Virginia-based spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said Republicans have learned from President Barack Obamas outreach tactics. It showed in last years General Assembly elections, he said, when Republicans kept control of both chambers despite McAuliffes vigorous attempt to flip the state Senate to Democrats.

Our ground game in Virginia was being rolled out in 2015, Shipley said. And that is the reason Governor McAuliffe and Michael Bloomberg dont have a majority in the Virginia Senate right now.

Republicans have 18 field offices and 61 paid staff members in Virginia, Shipley said. Some of the Trump resources are housed in existing GOP space, Shipley said.

He said offices are less important than door-knocking, and Republicans believe theyve made strides by adopting a neighborhood-centric volunteer model that divides the state into roughly 100 separate areas.

The paid Republican staffers have recruited 72 neighborhood leaders, he said, who then organize local volunteers so that potential voters are hearing from someone they know rather than a college student theyve never met.

Effectively, what were doing is were running over 100 individual campaigns for president. Theyve all got their own goals. Theyve all got their own strategy, Shipley said. Because what works for far Southwest is not what works in Fairfax.

Shipley said theres no doubt that Republicans are better prepared today than they were in 2012.

I think if wed had the ground game in 2012 that we have now, this would be the Romney re-elect, Shipley said.

Third-party candidates

The major-party candidates will have company in Virginia. The Department of Elections announced Friday that Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson, Green Party nominee Jill Stein and independent Evan McMullin also have qualified for Virginias presidential ballot.

Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico, is running a radio ad in the Richmond market that casts himself as an alternative to unpopular major-party nominees.

Like 60 percent of you, Im not impressed by the two-party system, Johnson says. Its a dinosaur.

Johnson is pinning his hopes on qualifying for the presidential debates. To do so, he must reach an average of 15 percent in five national polls. He is a few percentage points shy ahead of the first debate, set for Sept. 26 at Hofstra University in New York.

Stein is a Harvard-trained physician who backs a WWII-scale national mobilization to halt climate change.

In a Virginia survey that Quinnipiac University released Aug. 17, Clinton led with 45 percent of the vote to 34 percent for Trump, 11 percent for Johnson and 5 percent for Stein in a four-way matchup.

Johnson received 31,216 votes in Virginia in 2012, good for 0.8 percent of the vote. Stein received 8,267 votes in Virginia that year, or 0.2 percent of the nearly 3.86 million cast.

McMullin, a Never Trump conservative running as an independent, is a former CIA operative and previously was a top policy aide to the House Republican Conference in Congress. He announced his candidacy on Aug. 8, saying: Its never too late to do the right thing.

Kaines Senate seat

The apparent lead that Clinton and Kaine enjoy in Virginia has brought increased attention to some of the elections subplots.

If Clinton and Kaine win in November, Kaine will vacate his Senate seat. McAuliffe would name an interim senator who would hold the seat until a special election in November 2017, on the same day when Virginia voters will choose a governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general.

If Clinton wins Nov. 8, Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take control of the Senate in January, because Kaine, as vice president, could cast tie-breaking votes. But in that scenario, Democrats could lose control of the Senate again if they cannot hold Kaines seat in the 2017 special election.

That heightens pressure on McAuliffe to appoint an interim successor with the best chance to hold the seat. The candidate would need to stockpile campaign cash, because the seat comes up again in 2018, its regular six-year interval.

McAuliffe says that perhaps 20 people have reached out to his office expressing interest in the seat. The governor says he will not tip his hand, hold a meeting or talk about recommendations for the interim appointment unless and until Clinton and Kaine prevail on Nov. 8.

But Virginia political observers will be looking for hints on Monday, when McAuliffe attends Scotts Labor Day picnic in Newport News.

Scott, who has represented parts of the Richmond area and Hampton Roads in Congress since 1993, would be Virginias first African-American U.S. senator. He has the backing of the Congressional Black Caucus and former Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder.

Others mentioned as possibilities for the seat include Rep. Don Beyer, D-8th; Attorney General Mark Herring; and Holton, a former juvenile court judge and Virginia first lady who recently stepped down as McAuliffes secretary of education.

Holton would be the states first female U.S. senator. But a Holton appointment could raise interesting procedural questions if her husband presides over the Senate as vice president.

Another question if Kaine is elected vice president is whether any of the four Republicans in a crowded 2017 field for governor  former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie; Rep. Robert J. Wittman, R-1st; Corey Stewart, chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors; or state Sen. Frank W. Wagner, R-Virginia Beach  would switch and run for the Senate seat instead.

The Comstock seat

Another subplot related to Kaines Senate seat involves the battle for the Northern Virginia congressional seat of Rep. Barbara Comstock, R-10th, in a district that stretches from Fairfax and Loudoun counties to Winchester in the west.

In a year in which few of Virginias U.S. House races appear competitive, Trumps unpopularity in diverse Northern Virginia is complicating Comstocks effort to fend off Democrat LuAnn Bennett, a real estate executive and former wife of ex-Rep. Jim Moran, D-8th. Of the districts 802,000 residents, more than 101,000 are Hispanic, more than 109,000 are Asian and more than 55,000 are black, according to U.S. Census figures.

In a traditional year, Comstock, a former state delegate seeking her second term in Congress, would be a strong favorite against Bennett, who is making her first run for office. But Comstock has worked to distance herself from the GOP presidential nominee amid signs of an anti-Trump tsunami in Northern Virginia.

As of Aug. 10, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report listed Comstocks as a lean Republican district. But recent Virginia presidential polls contain warnings of a wave that Comstock will try to withstand. In the Virginia poll that The Washington Post released Aug. 16, Clinton led Trump in the D.C. suburbs by 68 percent to 23 percent.

Comstock is another potential contender for Kaines U.S. Senate seat, should it become open. But first she has to get by Bennett  and Trump.

Believe it or not

For all of the Clinton-Kaine campaigns apparent advantages in Virginia, Holton, who campaigned Friday in Roanoke and Charlottesville, has a clear message for volunteers: Dont believe the hype.

Theres no way its not going to be close, despite all the craziness and the polls, she told campaign workers Friday at Clintons office on Charlottesvilles Downtown Mall.

Dont believe anything that tells you any different. Its going to be a very close race in Virginia and across the nation.
David Wayne Brooks, 64, of Roanoke, went to be with his Savior on Monday, August 29, 2016. His parents, Raymond and Marie Brooks; and a sister, Betty Wissler, preceded him. David graduated from Jefferson High School and attended Virginia Western Community College. He was a member of Belmont Presbyterian Church for many years. He retired after 17 years of service with TruGreen Lawn Care. He was also a founding member of the Roanoke Valley Mopar Club (RVMC), an organization which was formed on July 18, 1987, in a parking lot with nine people attending. David had a love for all transportation, especially automobiles and airplanes. A very loving and caring husband, son, uncle, and friend, who will be dearly missed by all. Left to cherish his memory are his wife and best friend, Charlotte Brooks; two nephews, Michael Duane Church, of Roanoke and Michael Dewain Wissler of Lyndhurst; brothers-in-law, Eddie D. Church, and Jim Wissler; his canine companion, Valiant; along with a host of other relatives and dear friends. In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to the National Kidney Foundation or to the American Diabetes Association in David's memory. A memorial service celebrating David's life will be held 11 a.m. Tuesday, September 6, 2016, in Parkway Wesleyan Church with Pastor Mike Lauridsen officiating. Family will receive friends from 10 a.m. until service time at the church Tuesday. Condolences may be left for the family at www.simpsonfuneral.com. Arrangements handled by Simpson Funeral Home and Crematory, 540-366-0707.
BLACKSBURG  Mikes Grill owner Nick Varelos said he regrets the way his restaurant closed without warning this week after 40 years in business.

For that, I apologize immensely, he said in an interview after the initial news of the closure broke.

It was the usual mix of economic forces and a challenging hiring environment that stacked up against him, Varelos said. It simply became impossible to reopen for that final hurrah he wanted so badly.

Now, the famous burgers sign inside the Blacksburg landmark is dark.

Nick Varelos said he doubts his dad, Mike Varelos, who started the business in 1976 and died in 2012, would have wanted this day to come.

But he hopes his dad would have understood.

Its not what it once was, Nick Varelos said. Its changed a lot in the last five years, really.

The business was his fathers passion, Varelos says.

Mike Varelos tried two restaurants in Roanoke, before he moved to Blacksburg in the 1970s because he predicted it was about to explode.

He made his burgers with a secret recipe, served them upside-down and was happiest when he was standing at the grill, spatula in hand.

Nick Varelos started working at the family business in 1989, slowly taking over burger duties whenever his dad would have to step away.

By 2005, the son was handling the bulk of the managerial tasks.

The restaurant was his dream and he was willing to put everything he had into his dream, Nick Varelos said of his father.

But Nick Varelos, 44, has a family of his own now, and that has changed things.

He said the restaurant has consumed his time, 18 hours a day, six days a week, for the past 11 years.

Mix that with a gradual decline in profits, exacerbated by equipment repairs, fluctuating food prices and decreased parking around the restaurant.

Things got even worse as Virginia Tech spent the past several years growing its on-campus dining options and pulling in more would-be customers, tax-free as Varelos points out.

Varelos said he tried all summer to hire enough employees to handle the rush when students came back to campus, but he just couldnt fill the positions.

He said thats an issue affecting a lot of Blacksburg restaurants, as fewer and fewer students take on jobs while enrolled in school.

The workers he did have took on extra shifts, but they could only do so much.

I exhausted that, and then finally started to realize its time, Varelos said. I cant really elaborate any more on that. When you feel its time, its time.

Had he announced the closing in advance, Varelos said he simply wouldnt have had the staff to keep up with demand from all those who would have wanted to bid him farewell.

Varelos has spent the past few days making repairs and cleaning up inside the shuttered eatery.

He hopes to sell most of the equipment to whoever rents the space next  which he promises wont be any form of Mikes Grill.

He said he knows it would have been more lucrative to sell the brand and let someone else take over, but he said Mikes has always been a family business and none of us really wanted to see that.

It hurt, Varelos added.

Chris Linden, whose family has owned the building Mikes Grill occupied for longer than the restaurant was there, said hes still figuring out what will happen next.

Before Mikes, Linden said his grandfather owned a restaurant there for about 20 years called SportsCenter. That opened in 1948, before ESPN existed with a popular television show by the same name.

He said the Varelos family were great tenants for 40 years, but now he plans to find someone else to build a legacy there.

I just want to make sure its something that fits the needs of the town, Linden said. Its replacing something thats iconic, so you want to make sure its the right fit.
Though armed with a Masters degree in Commerce; a Bachelors in Business Administration from Bradford University; and a diploma in Information Technology, it was jewellery business that was Ashish Sands calling

Today, as the founder and partner of Savio Jewellery, Jaipur, Ashish runs the company, albeit with the family backing in all fronts.

Coming from a business family, which has been dealing in coloured stone for the past 50 years, it was a natural transition for Ashish to get into jewellery business

In an Interview with Rough&Polished, unable to hide his pride that Savio Jewellery is a Guinness Book Record holder, Ashish talks about his company and plans for the future.

Some excerpts:

Please give us an overview of Savio Jewellery, its history, growth graph and its present position as a leading designer jeweller in India.

Hailing from the beautiful city of jewels  Jaipur, Savio Jewellery was founded in 2006. It received the rich legacy from its parent company, headed by Shri. Narendra Kumarji Sand and Shri Rajendra Kumarji Sand, the eminent leaders of colored gemstones, for the past 50 years in India.

By the grace of god, today in India, Savio is one of the top designer jewellery house, which is giving tough competition to other jewellery houses.

Holder of 6 awards in designing and manufacturing, our company has also received the prestigious Guinness World Record for most diamond studded in a ring. And this is first ever Guinness record for diamond jewellery in India.

Are you manufacturers of solely diamond studded jewellery? Or you are into gold and precious stone studded as well? Can you give an insight into your business?

We are into gold jewellery studded with diamond and precious stones. We are also working for top jewellery designers of US and UK, who are making jewellery on wood and leather.





I hear that you have won numerous awards for your exclusive jewellery. Also, that your company holds the Guinness World Record. Can you elaborate on this and present some of the images as well?

We started to design a ring with the largest number of diamonds ever set in a ring. We designed the 18k white gold Peacock Ring with 3827 VVS-VS quality diamonds mounted on it. The ring has been designed in the shape of a peacock spreading its feathers. The Peacock Ring weighs 50.42 gm in total and the diamonds used in the ring have a combined carat weight of 16.5 cts.

Apart from this, we have won 6 prestigious Jewellery Awards - IJ Award, JAS, IIJS to name a few.

Are you into exports of jewellery? Is there any overseas market/s you would like to cater to in the future?

Yes, we are in exports of gold studded with diamond and colour stone jewellery to USA, UK, Africa and China.

Certainly we want to grow our roots in these market, apart from catering Australia.

Over the years, what transformations have you seen in jewellery demand in the domestic market. What is the trend at present?

Jewellery market is completely changing day by day. Jewellery customers are totally fascinated with the design, rather than seeing jewellery as investment. The young generation of today is educated and going in for diamond jewellery rather than traditional gold jewellery in India. Its the design and craftsmanship which is selling, not gold and diamond. Jewellery connoisseurs feel that their jewellery piece will speak about their personality.

So, it is actually good in a way, because we have to be on our toes always  in creation as well as in implementation.



According to you, what percentage, in terms of demand, would you place for pure gold jewellery, diamond studded jewellery and colour stone studded jewellery in India?

In India pure gold jewellery covers more than 75% of market but things are changing and gradually and percentage of diamond jewellery is increasing day by day.

Going back say about 10 years, we can easily say that this percentage was more than 90% for pure gold jewellery.

However, there is a good scope for diamond jewellery in domestic market.





Where does Savio Jewellery stand in the already crowded Indian domestic market? And how many stores does the company have now and where? Plans for the future?

We are creating Savio as a brand, which represents designer diamond and colour stone jewellery. And hopefully, seeing the present graph, in a matter of 4 to 5 years, you will see Savio shining in its glory across India.

Currently we are having a single store in Jaipur (India) but we do trade shows - JCK Las Vegas, September Hong Kong Show and Shows in Gulf to name few.

We are planning to open 4 stores in India by end of 2017 across the metros in India.

With gold prices on the rise, is silver the new gold at present? How does diamond studded silver jewellery fare in India in terms of demand?

In a jewellery piece, if we talk about calculating gold jewellery studded with diamond, and silver jewellery studded with diamond, the difference is of 20-25%.

In India, even till today, it is gold that is preferred as it is a tradition, especially to gift at the time of marriages etc. Personally I dont think that silver jewellery with diamonds will ever overtake diamond studded gold jewellery in our country.

Aruna Gaitonde, Editor-in-Chief of Asian Bureau, Rough & Polished




Diamcor more than doubles Q2 revenue Diamcor generated gross revenues of about $3 million from its operations in the interim period ended September 30, 2022, compared to $1,4 million for the same period in the previous year. The company is still conducting trial mining exercises at its...

IBJA commits to Declaration of Responsibility & Sustainability Principles The Indian gold industry has signed a Declaration of Responsibility and Sustainability Principles, convened by the LBMA and the World Gold Council, which expresses a commitment to operate responsibly and sustainably, based on a clear set of shared goals...

De Beers boosts Q3 output, maintains production guidance De Beers rough diamond production rose 4% to 9.6 million carats, mainly due to the treatment of higher grade ore at both Orapa in Botswana and South Africa as well as continued strong performance in Namibia, according to its parent company, Anglo...

Hong Kongs major jewellery fairs are set to return in 2023 An announcement from Informa Markets Jewellery indicates that the industrys two biggest B2B sourcing events will be back in action in Hong Kong in 2023 following a three-year forced pandemic break.
Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) said Friday it has started a consultation process that could result in closure of its plant in Gosselies, Belgium, and the loss of 2,000 jobs, as part of its global restructuring and cost-savings plan announced September 2015.

Caterpillar noted that it is considering to allocate the volumes produced at its facility in Gosselies, Belgium, to other manufacturing facilities. The Gosselies plant primarily manufactures construction equipment.

Following extensive review, Caterpillar is contemplating to allocate the volumes that are produced at the Gosselies facility to the manufacturing facility in Grenoble, France, and to other manufacturing facilities outside Europe. It is also contemplated to allocate component production to external suppliers and other Caterpillar facilities and to consolidate support functions to other sites.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

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Mustangs hold off Andover in 5A playoff opener

Salina Central made all the right plays at the right time Friday night to edge Andover, 21-15, in its Class 5A playoff opener.
HONG KONG (AP)  Voters turned out in force Sunday for Hong Kong's most crucial election since the handover from Britain in 1997, the outcome of which could pave the way for a fresh round of political confrontations over Beijing's control of the city.

The vote for Legislative Council lawmakers will test the unity of Hong Kong's pro-democracy camp, with a new generation of radical activists joining the race after emerging in the wake of 2014 pro-democracy street protests.

They're hoping to ride a rising tide of anti-China sentiment as they challenge formidably resourced pro-Beijing rivals for seats. Many of the newcomers back the previously unthinkable idea of independence for Hong Kong, which has added to divisions with the broader pro-democracy movement and overshadowed the election. Last month, officials disqualified six pro-independence candidates in an attempt to tamp down the debate, though other candidates with similar views made the cut.

Hong Kongers feel they have few other negotiating tactics left in their battle for genuine democracy as Beijing takes an increasingly hard-line stance.

"It's bleak, but I think if China doesn't leave us to do what we want, I think the only way is to fight for independence," Aron Yuen, a 34-year-old college lecturer, said as he stood in line with about 100 other people to cast their ballots. "You can't negotiate with somebody who doesn't keep their promise."

Yuen planned to vote for 23-year-old Nathan Law, who, along with teen activist Joshua Wong, helped lead the 2014 protests. Their party, Demosisto, advocates a referendum on "self-determination" of Hong Kong's future.

Voters were choosing from among 84 lists of candidates to fill 35 seats in a complex system of geographic constituencies that makes results, expected Monday, hard to predict.

At stake is the power to keep the city's widely unpopular Beijing-backed leader, Leung Chun-ying, and his government in check. "Pan-democrat" lawmakers currently control 27 of 70 seats, compared with 43 held by lawmakers friendly to Beijing. The democrats are fighting to keep control of at least a third of the seats, which gives them veto power to block government attempts to enact unpopular legislation, including a renewed attempt to enact Beijing's controversial election revamp that triggered the 2014 street protests.

The risk is that the pro-democracy vote will be split, allowing pro-Beijing candidates to take more seats and removing a major hurdle for the government's proposals, which in turn could lead to a new round of political confrontations.

Turnout appeared to be higher than average, with long lines of people still waiting to cast ballots at some polling stations by the time voting was supposed to end. Some 52.6 percent of nearly 3.8 million registered voters had turned out an hour before polls closed, matching the total turnout for the previous election four years ago. Turnout in the 2008 election was 45.2 percent, according to the government's website.

Earlier Sunday, a small group of protesters demanded Leung step down outside a polling station where he cast his vote.

"Our election is a democratic election," Leung told reporters.

"The democracy in the election is reflected by the free choice of voters, they do not need to be told who to vote (for)," he said when asked his thoughts on how results would be affected after seven candidates with low support, most of them pro-democracy, suspended their campaigns at the last minute in a bid to consolidate votes for others.

Hong Kong has been the scene of increasingly bitter political turmoil since the last legislative election in 2012. The growing calls for independence highlight frustration among residents, especially young people, who are chafing under Beijing's tightening hold. A spate of incidents, including the disappearance of five Hong Kong booksellers who later resurfaced in detention in mainland China, has aroused fears that Beijing is reneging on its promise of wide autonomy for Hong Kong under a "one country, two systems" framework.
The main reason I love being out in the villages is that it helps keep my mind straight, 33-year-old Faranisisi Vitale from the village of Falefa told the Village Voice.

It helps keep my Samoan ways. In Apia we are exposed to so many things like the night clubs and so on. Its just not good for the mind.

Its good to live out here where you can straighten out your way of life. There are many rules out here to keep everyone in line.

From schooling to the elderly, everything out here is great.

But how is the general life in the rural villages for you?

Life out here is really great, everything is good, says Faranisisi.

The fathers are good providing food for the family and so on. The only problem I see is that there arent many forms of making money out here.

We need more money making methods if our plantations and the ocean dont provide enough. It would be nice if the government would help out in that regard.

What about Samoa, how do you feel about the leaders of our nation?

Our government is number one in my books,

The government is doing a great job leading the country right now. I would like to thank them for all they have done for us.

The only thing I ask for is that they look into the availability of power in the inner parts of our village and also the roads going inland.

And the educational system out here?

Even the school we have out here is great,

It may not be like the town schools but it does the job. We have good schools out here.
On Thursday, 1st September at 12 noon, Miracle celebrated her 9th birthday at Burger Bills, Vaitele, surrounded by family and friends.

Miracles birthday party was hosted by Burger Bills, Hans Joachim Keil, her benefactor and Papalii Caroline Paul-Ah Chong her surrogate mother of nine years. Honoured guests were Celine and Nathan Keil, Jim Winegar President of RLS Museum and his friends all the way from Utah.

Special guests were Miracles parents Mikaele & Sefulu Nanai, and her two younger siblings PJ and Nyla Nanai, her grandparents Lui & Veronika Nanai and her uncles, aunties and cousins from Matautu, Falelatai.

Also amongst the special guests were Miracles caregiver of nine years, Eterei Roebeck and her family from Laulii, Miracles surrogate sister Sovita Ah Him, family and friends from Vailima and Fiji, and also Tua Tea and the staff of Faataua Le Ola, Miracles other extended family.

The room was decked out with festive balloons and this special little girl had two birthday cakes!

After the customary formalities, everyone sang Happy Birthday after which Miracle blew out her candles, with help from all of the 10 little people who gathered with excitement and joy to celebrate her ninth birthday.

The feasting then began, with the kids devouring their Happy Meal packs with glee and the grownups enjoying their lunch of either Fish n Chips or Chicken n Chips.

Of course all this came with Taxi drinks for everyone!

The party ended at 2pm with everyone content to return home or to work.

Miracle, returned to Matautu, Falelatai, with her family where she currently resides under the care of her mother Sefulu, her father Mikaele, the grandparents and family.

Two months ago, Papalii Carol had no choice but to ask Miracles family to take care of her for a time, because Eterei had to travel to American Samoa for her sisters funeral.

No one else, besides Papalii and Eterei has the expertize and knowledge to take care of Miracle.

Her needs are clinical and she needs 24/7 hands on care.

The family was reluctant, unable to provide for her financially and afraid in case something happened to Miracle under their care.

However, Joe Keil and Papalii travelled to Falelatai and met with Miracles family and explained to them that all that was needed was their attendance to her care, everything else would be provided for by them.

So the family agreed and a few weeks later, Papalii and Eterei took Miracle with all her necessary supplies, medicines, equipments to Falelatai.

Eterei stayed with them for a whole week, teaching Sefulu how to take care of her daughter, from preparing her feeds and feeding her, to administering her meds, to bathing her and keeping Miracle and everything surrounding her hygienically clean and germ free.

Miracle has been with her family at Falelatai for three months now, and Papalii is very happy that her mother Sefulu has stepped up and is giving her daughter the 24/7 dedicated care that she and Eterei have accorded Miracle all these years.

Papalii can also see and feel the love given to Miracle by her parents, grandparents, siblings and family and knows that this is Gods timing and He is asking her to let go of her and allow her family to bond and take care of her.

Papalii has always prayed to God and the Holy Spirit for direction in taking care of Miracle.

She is no medical practitioner, and yet she has managed to care for Miracle and keep her alive and well for nine years. Papalii gives all the honour and glory to God, for without His love and guidance of the His Holy Spirit, she could not have done it alone.

Papalii would like to make special mention of Joe Keil, who helps her financially to take care of Miracle. Likewise, Charlie & Deanne Westerlund of Ah Liki Wholesale, who have kindly provide Miracles pampers and soy milk free of charge for many years.

Papalii says that she loves Miracle as her own, and her work of nine years caring for Miracle will not stop. She continues to visit Miracle in Falelatai every month and takes with her all of Miracles needs and supplies. Her medicines will continue to be brought from NZ every month.

Papaliis dedication to Miracle: God knew you before you were born. You were fearfully, wonderfully and beautifully made for His purpose.

He had great plans for you! He still has many more great plans for your life. Happy 9th birthday precious daughter of the most High God. May your life continue to be a light to the World A prayer for you my precious child.

May Our Father in Heaven continue to pour out His blessings upon your life. May you sense the Smile of God as we celebrate with you yet another year under His watchful eye and protective love.

We love you Miracle, and JESUS loves you even more.

God bless you on your 9th birthday!
Vailele Primary School and Safata College battled their way to the top of the International Day for Biological Diversity  Battle of the Mind competitions.

The celebration this year Diversity was dedicated to the national theme of "Building Sustainable Livelihoods for Tomorrow".

The five primary schools competing were Vailele, Palauli, Vaitele, Aopo and Faleseela while the four colleges were Safata, Chanel, Mataaevave and Aleipata Colleges.

The questions were based on environmental issues that helped to remind us to conserve the environment. Fifteen year-old, Malae Falefou of Mataaevave College from Savaii said that the competition is not just about competing.

The knowledge should be passed on from generation to generation.

Biodiversity refers to the variety of flora and fauna that make up the ecosystem and I believe that conserving the ecosystem in our country is very important.

Therefore, promoting conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity as mentioned before should be pass on to generation to generation,

Its not just something to commemorate today then forget tomorrow but its a must to learn and let our people live it.

Our people need to understand and have awareness about biodiversity issues. The Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment has been promoting sustainable management of biological diversity since becoming a signatory to the Convention on Biological Diversity 1992 (CBD).

Minister of Natural Resources and Environment, Fiame Naomi Mataafa stated in her remarks that Biodiversity Day is a day of connecting people with nature.

It's an opportunity to remind ourselves of the fundamental role of biodiversity to life on earth and the livelihoods and well-being of our people, Fiame stated.

For this reason, we need to better integrate biodiversity into how we think and into everything that we do to prevent its loss. Samoa's flora consists of 500 species of native flowering plants and about 220 species of ferns, making it one of the most diverse collections of flora in the Polynesia.

The status of fauna and flora in Samoa is in decline which has attracted much attention for continuous protection and conservation efforts.

Eleven terrestrial and 65 marine species found in Samoa are listed as globally threatened on the 2009 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species,

Some of these species, such as the Ma'oma'o and the Manumea are found nowhere else in the world.

The main threats to Samoa biodiversity include: (1) coastal pollution, (2) land-use changes, (3)over-exploitation of natural resources, (4) natural disasters and the (5) spread of invasive species.

The adoption of Samoa's National Biodiversity Strategy Action Plan 2015 - 2020 (NBSAP) by Cabinet provides the key framework that underpins conservation and sustainable use of our biological diversity.

This national biodiversity strategy is not only aligned with the CBD Global Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2010-2020 but also contributed to achieving the relevant Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Results;

Primary:

1st place  Vailele Primary School

2nd place  Palauli Primary School

3rd place  Vaitele Primary School

4th place  Aopo Primary School

5th place  Faleaseela

Primary School

College:

1st place  Safata College

2nd place  Chanel College

3rd place  Mataaevave College

4th place  Aleipata College
Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi is making climate change a top priority to discuss at the Pacific Forum Leaders meeting that will be held in Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia this month.

He will attend the Forum Leaders' Meetings which include the Smaller Islands States (SIS) Leaders Meeting, on 7 September; the Pacific African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Leaders Meeting, and the official opening of the 47th Pacific Islands Forum, on 8 September; the 47th Pacific Islands Forum plenary session, on 9 September; the forum leaders' retreat, on 10 September; and the 28th post-forum dialogue partners plenary session, on 11 September.

He will then travel to New York for the 71st United Nations General Assembly where he will deliver a speech.

Tuilaepa told the media on Thursday that climate change would be the most crucial issue for the Forum.

He said it is now time to set up a global action plan to avoid the dangers of climate change by limiting global warming well below two Degree Celsius.

Remember, a decision has been reached by the United Nations and now its time to action it, said Tuilaepa.

Climate change is the most crucial topic today and it affects our coral reefs. If a tsunami or cyclone hits, it will damage our coral reefs and fish which is our food supply.

The Pacific Forum focuses on issues that impact on the Pacific Islands relating to environment, climate change, fisheries and exclusive economic zone.

Communication and information technology matters will also be discussed.

The meeting will be attended by leaders from the Pacific including New Zealand and Australia.

The Prime Minister will be assisted by Chief Executive Officer for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Peseta Noumea Simi and Assistant C.E.O. Tasha Siaosi.
A time to reaffirm our conviction, of the need for this College to continue doing all it can, to offer a high standard of holistic education, that is truly Catholic, and particularly needed in todays world.

The first Principal of Saint Marys College in 1956, Sister Emeritiana.

While celebrating the past and present achievements since the school was first started, Sister Emeritiana said, As I revisit the origins of this college 60 years ago, the image of the little mustard seed comes to mind, the smallest of seeds that grows and grows into a big tree, Sister Emeritiana said.

Some mustard trees are bigger than others of course!

It is a real honour and a joy to be part of the 60th anniversary of the foundation of St Marys College in Vaimoso, and I am sure it will be a very enjoyable moment.

Looking back, Sister Emeritiana reminisced with gratitude, the vision held by Bishop Pearce and Mary Rachel and their assistance to Samoa at the time.

They saw the urgent need, for Catholic secondary education for young Samoan women.

We salute their vision and courage in bringing it into being. The land was purchased in Vaimoso by the S.M.S.M. Sisters but a building was needed too.

The cost was to be about 30,000 pounds sterling  an immense sum for those days. Alas, there was no money for this! So fundraising was decided on.

Masiofo Noue Tamasese was proposed by the Savalalo Parent-Teacher Association to lead it, which she graciously and generously accepted to do, despite all her commitments.

She added that one of Masiofo Noue Tamasese suggestions was for Bishop Pearce to make an appeal, from the pulpit, to the Catholic carpenters, electricians, plumbers and other tradesmen to offer their services free after their days work on weekdays and Saturdays to build the college.

Volunteers responded. For months the grounds in Vaimoso rang out in the evenings with the sound of hammers.

The air was lled with the smell of good food, as wives and daughters provided the evening meals.

Such tremendous generosity remains a powerful witness for us.

We can be sure that God, who is not outdone in generosity, has richly rewarded such extraordinary efforts.

Sister Emeritiana said the College had its very humble beginnings in Savalalo.

It was just the beginning when I arrived in May 1956, the College had its very humble beginnings in Savalalo on the Thiemes property over the road, from the present Savalalo convent.

"We moved to Vaimoso in 1958. From the beginning, the vision for this College was for an holistic education.

There was the opportunity to acquire the academic and other skills to fit the young women for transitioning into adult society, but more importantly a formation to enable them to lead good Christian lives.

Principals and teachers have come and gone, but we can thank God this ideal remains.

In the late l960s, a new and larger building was needed and it was designed in the style of the present one.

lt was the time also when the College was enriched in its teaching staff with young volunteer teachers  members of the American Peace Corps, Catholic Overseas Volunteers from the Australia and New Zealand and a few from other countries too.

Sister Emeritiana said that the anniversary is also a time to thank God for all He has done through the teachers, religious and lay, who have given of themselves in Vaimoso, and continue to do so today, through Mrs Loreta Ulugia and her devoted staff.

We remember in gratitude, too, all the parents, who sacriced themselves, and continue to make sacrices, to give their daughters a Catholic education.

St Marys College has impacted profoundly on the lives of the young women who have passed through its gates during these past 60 years.

They have gone forth into all walks of life, educational, medical, scientic, business, commercial, legal, political, chiey, and their lives have surely made a difference. Some have become consecrated religious as S.M.S.M. but also in several other religious congregations.

I thank God tonight for the mystery of what He has done and continues to do in the life of each one. For the S.M.S.M. Sisters, particularly, this Jubilee is a special time for us to pause and thank God for the strong and committed SMOGA  SMSM who have contributed so much through the years to the ongoing life of church and society, but also so generously to the College.

I am mindful also of those who cannot be with us tonight, as well as those who have gone to God. Here in Samoa, there has been a long history of generosity in helping S.M.S.M. schools.

She also presented the early letters of SMSM Sisters who worked in the Pacific presently and those of Sr Marie Alphonse, who was the rst Mamea pule of the SMSM sisters.

In one letter, written about I900, she mentions how generous the ex-students of Savalalo were, in helping the present students, when some parents were in nancial difculties, trying to cope with the drop in cocoa and coffee prices.

This same spirit of love and generosity is very much alive among our SMOGA today.

A Jubilee, of course, is a time to look to the future as well as the past.

May the celebration further strengthen our resolve to encourage and support the College in trying to do this.

May its motto Agaga Kerisiano continue to be lived by teachers and taught, despite human frailties and weaknesses, not only during school years, but beyond.

And as the College was from its beginning dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, and bears her name, she is in a special way our mother, queen and model.

May she accompany each of us in our particular calling in life.

St Marys College 60th Anniversary ended last Saturday night with a Ball.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned over-the-counter products that contain one of the 19 ingredients that are not proven safe. They consist of 2,100 products that make up 40 percent of the market. According to FDA, these products are actually no more effective than soap and water and could even cause harm.

According to Reuters, antibacterial products including alcohol-based sanitizers used in clinics and hospitals are not affected. Among the companies that used to contain some of the 19 ingredients were Procter & Gamble Co, Colgate-Palmolive Co, and Johnson & Johnson. All companies said they are either reformulating or have reformulated their products to remove the most common ingredients which include triclocarban and triclosan.

CBS News reported that the chemicals have been scrutinized for quite a long time already and some manufacturers have removed the ingredients from their items. In 2013, FDA proposed banning the ingredients unless companies could provide proofs that they are effective and safe. However, the data presented were unsatisfactory. On the other hand, the American Cleaning Institute (ACI) insisted that their products are effective. Its members include Dial Corp.

Certain companies released their statements. As for Colgate-Palmolive, spokesman Thomas DiPiazza, their U.S. products are not affected; however, some of their bar soaps in Puerto Rico are currently being reformulated. As for Procter & Gamble, spokeswoman Tressi Rose said the company will replace a small quantity of their products in advance of the deadline set by the FDA.

According to Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, the industry needed "a good, swift kick in the triclosan" and that it took far too long. Environmental Working Group is a non-profit environmental research organization. At present, manufacturers are doing a research that aims to fill data gaps that were identified by the FDA.

Meanwhile, a ruling on three additional ingredients  benzethonium chloride, benzalkonium chloride, and chloroxylenol (PCMX)  was deferred by a year. Products containing these ingredients may still be sold during this time.
The internet is currently flooded with rumors about Microsoft's alleged Surface Phone 2016 release date, specs and pricing details. New reports suggest the highly anticipated Microsoft Surface Phone 2016 will get unveiled at the ongoing IFA 2016 Berlin event. The IFA 2016 event, which started on September 2, will run until September 7.

It is expected that Microsoft will announce the next gen Surface phone lineup on any of the dates in-between to give a tough fight to Apple's upcoming iPhone iteration, possibly dubbed iPhone 7, according to VineReport. The iPhone maker has already sent out invites for a special September 7 event.

However, if a report coming from PC Advisor is to be believed, Microsoft hasn't yet confirmed if it is taking part in IFA 2016. As per the report there are high chances that the software giant will announce the Surface Phone 2016 together with the Microsoft Surface Pro 5 sometime in October. It remains to be seen whether or not the hotly anticipated Windows phone will get a 2016 release date.

As far as Microsoft Surface Phone 2016 specs are concerned, the Redmond is rumored to roll out three high end Surface smartphone variants with superior hardware configurations and impressive new features. The entry level model is rumored to feature 3GB of RAM, the midrange model is expected to get 6GB of RAM, and the high-end variant is rumored to feature a massive 8GB of RAM and 512GB of built-in storage. All the three handsets are reported to run Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processors and come preinstalled with Microsoft Windows 10 mobile OS, reported Christian Times.

The three Microsoft Surface Phone 2016 variants are expected to come packed in an aluminum and magnesium body featuring a 5.5-inch AMOLED display, a 20-megapixel Carl Zeiss rear camera coupled with Surface Pen functionality, a fingerprint reader, accelerometer, gyro, compass, a barometer and proximity sensors. Continuum support, USB Type-C connectivity and liquid cooling technology are also expected to be on board. The price range of the Microsoft Surface Phones 2016 is expected to remain between $700-$1100.

Stay tuned to SWR for more updates on Microsoft Surface Phone 2016 release date, specs and price details.
New reports suggest Google's much rumored Nexus 2016 smartphones will be ditching the Nexus moniker in favor of a new brand. Going by latest reports, the upcoming Google Nexus 2016 smartphones will now be called Google Pixel and Pixel XL and not Nexus Sailfish and Nexus Marlin. It is rumored that the upcoming batch of Google Nexus 2016 smartphones or so to say Pixel 2016 devices will get an October 4 release date.

According to Android Police, citing two reliable independent sources, the 5" Nexus Sailfish will be named Pixel, while the 5.5" Nexus Marlin will be named Pixel XL. As per the report, the Pixel and Pixel XL will be branded exclusively by Google. However, the smartphone's hardware component could be manufactured by HTC.

Exclusive: Google's new phones will be called the Pixel and Pixel XL https://t.co/wOT23I6T2X pic.twitter.com/LOrEwzNF1X  Android Police (@AndroidPolice) September 2, 2016

As far as specs of the alleged Google Nexus 2016 smartphones- or Pixel and Pixel XL- are concerned, the midrange smartphone Google Pixel will feature a 5-inch full HD display, a Snapdragon 820 chipset, 3 GB of RAM, Android 7.1 Nougat OS and 2,770 mAh battery. The larger sibling dubbed Google Pixel XL is pegged to feature 5.5-inch Quad HD display, a Snapdragon 821 chipset, 4 GB of RAM, Android 7.1 Nougat OS and 3,450 mAh battery. The handset is rumored to sport two different sensors from Sony for its front and back cameras, reported iTechPost.

There are reports which claim that Google will be releasing its alleged Pixel smartphones running Android 7.0 Nougat soon on October 4, 2016 in San Francisco. It is also rumored that the event will the debut of a new Google tablet, a 4K Chromecast, Google Daydream VR, and more. While, price details for the upcoming Google Nexus 2016 smartphones- or Pixel and Pixel XL- have not been announced, it is expected the upcoming handsets will be more expensive than last year's Nexus handsets.

Stay tuned to SWR for more updates and latest news on Google Nexus 2016 smartphones- or Pixel and Pixel XL- release date, specs and price details.
DARLINGTON, S.C.  Hunter Thomas grew up just a few miles from the Darlington Raceway and believes he was destined to be a racing fan.

Being from Darlington, you just grow up loving racing, Thomas said. I went to my first race in 1996 or 1997 when I was around 6 or 7.

Today, Thomas uses every spare minute working on The Fourth Turn, a website dedicated to NASCAR news.

When I was in high school, my dream was to work on the cars, Thomas said. But when I was 16, I had a defibrillator implanted in me. With a defibrillator, I wasnt able to safely work on cars. With welding, you deal with electricity. With a race car, a lot of times you are working on it with the hood up, and with the magnetic force and the engine, I couldnt do that.

The defibrillator implantation was just one of many surgeries Thomas has gone through after being born a "blue baby," a term used to describe a baby born with a lack of oxygen caused by a heart condition.

In 2010, Thomas started to formulate the plan for what would become The Fourth Turn. With help from Florence County Sheriffs Deputy Christopher Neal, a domain name was purchased and the first post was put up in 2012. Neal is the owner of the site and serves as the editor-in-chief.

Our original goal was to share the stories of the local drivers here in Darlington, Dillon, Florence, Myrtle Beach and the southern part of North Carolina, Thomas said. Once you start getting success, and you work hard, you kind of want to up your game a little bit, and we started covering NASCAR. The late model race in Martinsville in 2013 was our first major race that we were credentialed at.

Thomas said the website is unique in the world of NASCAR media.

I think we are the only website in South Carolina that is recognized by NASCAR as being an annual credential holder, Thomas said. There are plenty of South Carolina journalists, out there but our website is actually based here in the state. Right now, we have partnered with the South Carolina Press Association and our articles are available for all of their association members to use. During race week, the local media, TV stations, newspapers, and even radio stations allow us be the experts; that helps us with our credibility as well.

That media relationship began while Thomas was in college at Francis Marion University.

Basically, I worked with a local newspaper as well as a local TV station while in college, Thomas said. Whenever you are competing for stories, you get to know the other reporters and you get to know their replacements. Those relationships, formed over the years, led to opportunities. I remember meeting Joe Murano from WMBF for the first time in the Darlington Raceway media center, and we became really good friends. He was the one who put me on their pre-race show.

Kyle Pokrefky, Camille Jones and Benjamin Sanders write for The Fourth Turn. Friends and family even get into the action. His dad and two friends from Darlington, Tyler Goodson and Barrett Goodson, take pictures.

With Pokrefky, Jones and Sanders being in different parts of the country, Thomas said, they are able to cover a lot of races.

I travel to about 11 races a year, Thomas said. That may not seem like a lot, but there are only 36 races in a season. As a whole, all of us together, I think we covered about 40 percent of the NASCAR Sprint Cup races.

The race in Darlington still holds a special place in Thomas life. The throwback campaign currently being used by the Darlington Raceway is brilliant, he said.

The Darlington tradition is amazing, Thomas said. This throwback campaign was just the most genius idea that anyone in the sport has ever come up with. I say that because in the '90s the special paint schemes were that, they were special. Now these teams have to go through so many sponsors a year to keep their operations going; some drivers might have a different paint scheme every week. To go back and have some of these paint schemes that are dipping into the '90s when I was coming up, it brings back flashbacks of being up in the grandstands watching the races.

His health problems might have stopped him from doing what he thought was his dream career, Thomas said, but since then he has learned differently.

I was kind of forced to go to the media side, but in the end, it worked out, because I like air conditioning and free food, Thomas said. I have a different story, because I have had to battle all of those heart problems, but now Im able to live the dream to work in NASCAR; it is a fairy tale story, I guess.
With Hanjin Shipping filing for court receivership last week both the industry and shippers have quickly found out.

Hanjin was one of five member lines of CKYHE alliance, and also had five joint services with CMA CGM, no doubt some other smaller agreements. As result of the receivership filling an awful lot of cargo from other lines is suddenly stranded on vessels in various parts of the world.

Fellow CKYHE members K Line and Evergreen have already publicly distanced themselves from Hanjin saying they will not load boxes from the South Korean line on their vessels or load cargoes on Hanjin vessels  although the latter is hardly a realistic scenario at the moment. Its membership of the CKYHE alliance has also been suspended.

French line CMA CGM went further on 31 August terminating all its five joint services with Hanjin effectively. Please be assured that we are actively monitoring the situation to address any issue that might occur and ensure flawless continuity of service, CMA CGM said in an advisory to customers.

While certainly the line will not want any disruption to its customers - ensuring this is really the case is extremely difficult in practice.

Shippers and retailers are already expressing serious concerns about shipments stranded on Hanjin vessels stranded outside ports, or on the high seas around the world.

Holman Fenwick Willan partner Craig Neame said in a briefing note: Serious disruption to supply chains is anticipated over the coming weeks as a result of delays and uncertainty caused by Hanjins position.

That serious disruption includes its alliance and service partners, and their customers with cargo on Hanjin ships.

Hanjins partners are likely to be concerned about recovery of freight and termination of their slot sharing arrangements, given the overlap between the governing law of the contracts and the rights of the receiver in the rehabilitation to cancel such contracts, Neame said.

As is happening he noted partner lines would be looking bar Hanjin cargoes being loaded onto their vessels, and unload their own boxes from the Korean lines vessels.

Hanjins vessel partners may begin efforts to have containers re-delivered so that alternative shipment can be arranged. This could lead to complications arising between Hanjins partners and other interested parties, in particular other Hanjin creditors.

Indeed legal actions have already been taken by creditors looking to seize Hanjin vessels via ship arrests. The 1998-built Hanjin Rome was actually arrested in Singapore the day before the company filed for receivership.

Reuters reported that a judge in California ordered the arrest of the Hanjin Montivideo over $488,750 in unpaid bunker costs owed to World Fuel Services. Anyone who followed the OW Bunker bankruptcy will no this will not be the last such legal attempt to arrest assets.

Hanjin has been slow steaming its vessels or anchoring them just outside 12nm territorial limits as the consequence of possible vessel arrests that will make the whole process even more complex for other parties, including unloading cargoes on the vessels.

In some good news there are some solutions in sight in some cases. According to the Port of Prince Rupert agreement has been reached with terminal operator DP World and CN Rail had established a procedure for handling containers from the Hanjin Scarlet which has been sitting outside the port since 30 August. DP World will, however, require pre-payment for the handling of all Hanjin containers.

An agreement that once enabled lines to serve a lot more destinations from Korea than they could on their own is now set to become a very complex legal and logistical problem impacting not just the partner carrier but also their customers.
The Dubai-headquartered global terminal operator has signed a MoU with the privately owned Summa Group which will also focus on the development and implementation of freight delivery and port processing technologies.



The advancement of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and Russian Far East transportation corridors, including free ports Vladivostok and Zarubino, also form part of the contract.



DP World already operates DP World Russia, a joint venture company that targets marine, dry ports and logistics infrastructure in the country while the Summa agreement comes after DP World seized an 80% stake in a $2bn joint venture with the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) in January. Signed on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, the RDIF agreement targets ports, transportation and logistics infrastructure opportunities.



We are always on the lookout for opportunities to collaborate with industry peers, DP World group chairman and ceo Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem said.



I am pleased to have entered discussions with the Summa Group on potential areas of collaboration as Russia has always been an attractive origin and destination market for us with huge long term growth prospects.

The Summa Group is a diversified private holding with significant investments in the port logistics, engineering, construction, telecommunications, and in the oil and gas sectors.

Sulayem said both parties would leverage their international experience in port management, including the operation of free ports. DP World operates a network of 77 marine and inland terminals across six continents.

Summa Group chairman Ziya Magomedov said the partnership with DP World to develop free trade zones in Russia, CIS and beyond was a natural fit.



The Summa Group is heavily focused on transport and logistics along main trade corridors and the partnership with DP World will only enhance such presence, traction and reach, Magomedov said.



I am confident that together we will also implement and deploy such high-tech solutions that will help transform these trade corridors and the transport and logistics arena as a whole.
Irano Hind Shipping Company was founded in 1974 but was reportedly dissolved in 2012 as trade flows stalled following years of sanctions over Irans disputed nuclear program.

However, SCI Chairman B. B. Sinha has been quoted as saying the easing of restrictions on Tehran, following the January 16 implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), has opened the way for the resuscitation of Irano Hind Shipping Co.

Sinha said any revival would potentially offer SCI access to Central Asian markets such as Kazakhstan, a market where IRISL is already strong. SCI is reportedly considering the operation of three bulk carriers and an oil tanker owned by the joint venture of which IRISL held a 51% stake and SCI the other 49%.



We dont want this company to just die out, Sinha said in an interview run by Bloomberg. The other partner, Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, has got great presence in the Caspian Sea.



Indias government holds a 64% stake in SCI which owns and operates about one-third of Indias tonnage and has interests in most areas of shipping. SCI resumed crude shipments from Iran in July after a hiatus of four years.



IRISL was established in 1967 and reportedly operates a fleet of 155 vessels including 48 boxships with the capacity of 100,580 teu, making it the 21st ranked container line globally according to analyst Alphaliner.



The JCPOA agreement was signed last July, inked by Iran and the P5+1 group of countries  the five permanent members of the UN Security Council  the US, France, Britain, China and Russia  plus Germany.
The United States and China on Saturday formally joined the Paris climate change agreement, with President Barack Obama hailing the accord as the "moment we finally decided to save our planet".

The move by the world's two biggest polluters is a major step forward for the 180-nation deal, which sets ambitious goals for capping global warming and funneling trillions of dollars to poor countries facing climate catastrophe.

Obama and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping handed ratification documents to UN chief Ban Ki-moon, who said he was now optimistic the agreement will be in force by the end of this year.

At a ceremony in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, Obama said climate change would "define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other challenge."

RELATED: What's Ahead for Climate Change in 2016?

History would show that the Paris deal would "ultimately prove to be a turning point", he said, "the moment we finally decided to save our planet".

"There's an American saying, You need to put your money where your mouth is. That's what we're doing."

The Paris accord aims to limit global temperature increases to two degrees centigrade, and will be triggered after it is ratified by at least 55 countries, accounting for 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

The US and China are together responsible for some 40 percent of the world's emissions, so their participation is crucial.

China's Communist-controlled parliament ratified the agreement earlier Saturday, and President Xi said the Asian giant was "solemnly" committed to the issue.

"Hopefully this will encourage other countries to take similar efforts," he said in Hangzhou, where he is to host the G20 summit of the world's leading developed and emerging economies.

RELATED: What Would 8 Degrees Of Warming Look Like?

Until Saturday only 24 of the signatories had ratified the accord, including France and many island states threatened by rising sea levels but who only produce a tiny proportion of the world's emissions.

Ban said there would be high-level talks in New York later this month to push more countries to sign up, and told the two leaders they had "added powerful momentum" to efforts to bring the accord into force.

"I am optimistic we can do it before the end of this year."

- 'Powerful signal' - Climate is one of the few areas where the world's two most powerful countries -- who are at loggerheads on issues ranging from trade disputes, cyberspying and the South China Sea -- are able to find common cause.

Campaigners welcomed the move, with WWF saying they had sent "a very powerful signal that there will be real global action on climate change."

But some environmental groups say that the Paris pledges by China, the US and others fall far short of what is needed to meet the goal of less than two degrees of warming.

"This moment should be seen as a starting point, not the finale, of global action on climate," said Greenpeace policy adviser Li Shuo.

WATCH VIDEO: What's the Difference Between Climate Change and Global Warming?
In the new study, 24 people were split into two groups of 12, based on their height. The average height (measured at the eyes) in the groups were 4 feet 11 inches (149.3 cm) and 5 feet 8 inches (173.4 cm). Over three experiments, objects were presented in different levels of light, with different amounts of information to help determine location. The people then guessed the distances to objects by a variety of means, such as pacing out the distance with their eyes closed, so the study was not dependent on the subjects' sense of units of measure.

"Our previous studies have shown that the intrinsic bias is an imaginary curve that extends from one's feet and slants upward to the far distance," Ooi told Live Science in an email.

That model, or "intrinsic bias," is typically revealed when people have very little information about where an object is located, e.g., literally in the dark, and must make an educated guess. People usually underestimate the distance between themselves and an object, and as objects get farther away, the effect gets larger.

The human brain depends on a certain model to provide "the best guess of where objects could be located," said study co-author Teng Leng Ooi, a professor of optometry at The Ohio State University.

Tall people are better than short people at gauging how far away they are from objects in the middle distance, a new study reports. The researchers say the results are evidence for the idea that people's spatial perception abilities are influenced by their height, and develop over time.

The results showed that the people in both tall and short groups showed the bias, increasingly misjudging the distance to far-away objects. However, the taller participants were more accurate in their guesses, and the difference in performance between groups was consistent across all conditions, the researchers said.

When tall participants sat in a chair and shorter participants stood on boxes to adjust their eye levels, the tall people were still more accurate in the middle distances. Because previous experiments showed people are better judges of distance from a higher vantage point, the researchers said, the new result is evidence that taller people have accumulated experience in guessing the distance to objects, and that their height has shaped a mental model of distances.

However, other researchers said they were skeptical of the findings. "I'm a little bit dubious of the results," that show taller people are better at guessing distances, said Maryjane Wraga, a psychologist at Smith College in Massachusetts, who was not involved in the study.

RELATED: Do You Sound Tall?

Because of variations in individuals' vision, Wraga said, the study, with only 12 participants in each group, would have benefited from more participants. Any pattern that emerged based on the study groups might be consistent since all three experiments used the same participants.

Furthermore, "if it's a true effect, it's a modest effect." Wraga told Live Science. The differences in performance between the height groups at distances up to about 33 feet (10 meters) were small, Wraga said, and most people interact with those closer objects much more often in their daily lives. "It's not a uniform effect; it's mostly occurring for distances that are farther away."

"The ideas that they're presenting are very interesting," John Philbeck, a psychologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., told Live Science. But he was also concerned about replicating the results, and called the sample size "a little on the thin side."

"If this effect is real, there are ways to compensate for it in the real world," Wraga said, such as moving our heads and bodies to gather more information, which people probably do naturally, but was restricted in the experiments to specifically test the mental model.

RELATED: Americans Getting Shorter Due to Bad Diet

How should shorter people feel about the results?

"Not worried at all," Wraga said.

The researchers said they are interested in future studies with more subjects in a range of heights, development in children and investigating whether animals have different visual biases, possibly based on their ecological niche.

The study was published in the journal Science Advances.

More From LiveScience:

Original article on Live Science.

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Press Release

September 3, 2016 Statement of Senator Richard Gordon on September 2, 2016

Davao City Night Market Bombing We commiserate and pray for the people of Davao City particularly the families of the 14 people killed and the 71 persons hurt as of the latest report. This has happened before in Davao and was probably not unexpected considering the dastardly actions made previously by lawless elements who are now under unanticipated and effective interdiction from the government. Let us all at this time be reflective, deliberate and calm as a people. Let us do our share by being constantly vigilant and alert as we continue with our daily normal lives and not allow such heinous acts to deter us from moving forward - for in allowing these incidents to stop our normal way of living, we would have allowed those who terrorize to win. The President as Commander-in-chief has now called out our armed forces to suppress lawless violence. Our Constitution allows him to do so and taken alone he is not suspending the privilege of the writ of Habeas Corpus or proclaiming martial law. The Davao bombing is an act of terrorism by a known terrorist organization that must be outlawed by the full force of the law as provided in the Human Security Act of 2007 and other anti-terrorism measures. Let us all support the President and our armed forces, and police forces and their families as well.
Disclaimer on the Statement on the Davao Blast

Sen. Leila M. de Lima categorically denies issuing a statement saying that "It could be a strategy of Duterte forces to provide reason to declare Martial Law. Davao is not the safest place after all."

Obviously, this statement maliciously attributed to her is part of the disinformation campaign designed to discredit her. The Senator will issue an official statement today on the blast.
Press Release

September 4, 2016 STATEMENT OF SENATOR LEILA M. DE LIMA ON THE DAVAO BOMBING AND THE DECLARATION OF A STATE OF LAWLESS VIOLENCE I strongly condemn the bombing at the Davao City night market. This is clearly the act of terrorists, individuals without conscience. Violence is the only language that they know, especially the kind that victimizes innocent civilians and non-combatants. This is not only a terrorist act, but a violation of international humanitarian law as a war crime consisting of an attack on a civilian population, specifically if perpetrated by a terrorist rebel group like the Abu Sayyaf. Those responsible for this bombing are not only terrorists, they are also war criminals. I express my personal grief and sadness to the families, relatives and friends of those who died and who were injured. You are all in our prayers. The whole nation grieves with you today and in the days to come. I still have to see the official document on the President's declaration of the existence of a state of lawless violence. What is clear is that under such a declaration, the President may call out the Armed Forces of the Philippines as the military arm of the government, to help and assist its civilian counterpart, the Philippine National Police, in suppressing the lawless violence. Therefore, under such a declaration, the AFP is given law enforcement tasks that usually pertain to the PNP as the civilian law enforcement agency of the government. It does not give either agency additional powers beyond what is allowed under the Constitution. It is merely a force augmentation of the PNP in order to help it respond to the lawless violence. I will not second guess the judgment of the President in declaring the existence of a state of lawless violence, when he himself cites the example of the extra-judicial killings of the past two months and now the terrorist attack in Davao. He is in the best position to determine the propriety or not of issuing such a declaration. Indeed, the summary executions that have been a regular daily fare in the past two months, at the rate of 36 per day, constitute none other than lawless violence. If this declaration can stop the street killings, together with the terrorist attacks, then so much the better. All killings must stop, whether perpetrated by terrorist groups hiding in the jungle or unknown assailants roaming our streets. While it is for the President to decide what powers are needed to respond to the current situation, it is also for the people to be vigilant that the government response to the crisis does not result in the restriction of their civil liberties and political rights. While it is the role of the government to protect the people, it is the right of the people to make sure and remind the government of the limits of its power, and call out any abuse that may result from the enhanced security measures put in place by the government. The government must therefore be clear on who the enemies of the State are, and calibrate its response in accordance with the threat to national security that they represent. It does not therefore help using this incident to lump together all groups that are perceived by the government as threats to national security as being responsible for the bombing. It is more than inappropriate to characterize in the same breath the extremist terrorist attack in Davao City also as an act of "narco-terrorism", or worse, as having been funded by the political opposition -- the first as advanced by the PNP Chief, and the second by a well-known ideologue of the Duterte Administration - without any verification or validation. This is not the time to use a terrorist attack of a rebel extremist group to loosely and recklessly paint a picture of a conspiracy against the State among drug lords, the terrorists, and the legitimate political opposition. Incidents such as the Davao City bombing should never be used as an excuse to crack down on civil liberties, political rights, and legitimate dissent. We fervently hope that this tendency among some prominent officials and close advisers of the President is an isolated perspective, and does not represent a consensus in Malacanang to use each and every terrorist attack on our people, whether on the civilian population or the military and our security forces, as an opportunity to wag the dog. Otherwise, speculations that there is more here than meets the eye will continue to abound. Prominent Malacanang officials and close advisers of the President must be clear that the national security threat is terrorism, and not democracy and free speech. In this sense, we must remain vigilant against terrorism and terrorist attacks, as well as against threats and attacks on our civil liberties and our democracy. As the reality of this dangerous tendency holds in the different parts of the world where terrorism has taken root and struck, of the State turning against its own citizens in the fight against terrorism, our leaders must always be clear, to the people and, more importantly, to themselves -- the enemy is terrorism, not democracy.
In early August, a group of tech executives and investors gathered at the Claremont Country Club in Oakland to sip drinks and nibble on hors d'oeuvres.

This wasnt a social event but rather a meeting organized by the Berkeley Research Group, a high-powered management consulting firm in Emeryville, to pitch what I can only describe as an extremely unusual investment: a massive high-tech city built from scratch in the New Mexico desert.

Called the Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation, the project would cover 33 square miles across  and under  two counties in southwestern New Mexican. Corporations, universities and the federal government would use the facility to test new technology in clean energy, homeland security and autonomous vehicles on a large scale, but without inconveniencing, or even endangering, millions of people who live in actual cities.

People will be able to see how things work in a real-world environment, Paul Feiler, CEO of CITE Development, said in a phone interview. We needed a place that was remote to test technologies deemed too dangerous for major population centers.

If the facility sounds weird, thats because no one has ever done this before. Pegasus Global Holdings, the group behind the project, even obtained a patent for the idea. The company hired Berkeley Research Group to find investors and operate the city.

The scale and scope of this project is off the charts, said Peter Bianco, a former board member of the Association of University Research Parks. Its unprecedented.

And not in a good way.

First of all, Bianco said, creating a large area for innovation where researchers and entrepreneurs can create new technology is extremely difficult, because you need a number of things in the same location: venture capital, talent, infrastructure and proximity to major research universities.

In 2010, Bianco led an effort to build a research park near downtown Minneapolis, next to the University of Minnesota. The effort failed because he could not find the money to finance the project.

As for the demonstration city in New Mexico, he said, you cant just build something in the middle of nowhere and hope everything else will follow.

A few years ago, Tower Investments, a real estate firm outside of Sacramento, sought to build a biosciences park on an elk farm in Pine Island, a tiny town in southeastern Minnesota. State officials even forked over $50 million to build a highway interchange. But the project ultimately flopped because Tower couldnt persuade anyone to move there, Bianco said.

The New Mexico demonstration citys economics also dont add up, he said.

Feiler said it would cost $700 million to $900 million to build the city. To generate revenue, Pegasus and Berkeley Research Group would lease out buildings and provide services to help customers test, develop and find commercial uses for experimental technology.

But given the high cost to construct the city and keep it running, investors are unlikely to recoup their money anytime soon.

Thats an awfully tough sell, even for deep-pocketed Silicon Valley. Indeed, the project has yet to land any investors or customers. Feiler said the city has attracted strong interest from parties but declined to name them.

Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes

He also said the project enjoys support from the Department of Homeland Security and from New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez.

The groups presentation material includes this quote attributed to Martinez: We are committed to providing the resources, open spaces and talented workforce required to make this project a success. My administration is committed to an ongoing relationship with CITE that will allow the center to thrive and create jobs that will put New Mexicans to work.

However, those resources apparently dont include taxpayer dollars. Angela Heisel, a spokeswoman for the New Mexico Economic Development Department, said the agency is providing only technical assistance to the project. But the department hasnt heard from Pegasus for some time now, she said.

The governors office did not respond to a request for comment.

All in all, the project sounds dubious at best. Berkeley Research Group is perhaps the one thing that gives it credibility. The company boasts a prominent roaster of consultants operating in places like Sydney, Hong Kong and Kuwait City.

But it will take a lot more than wine and shrimp cocktails to get this city off the ground.

Thomas Lee is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: tlee@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ByTomLee
Lois Lehrman cant wait to find out who her real friends are.

For 30 years, the New Jersey native has owned and published the Nob Hill Gazette, a monthly that covers the antics and alms of San Franciscos upper crust.

During that time, her readers  some of the Bay Areas wealthiest civic leaders and philanthropists  have treated her with cordiality and deference. But now that the 85-year-old has sold the magazine to businessman Clint Reilly, the never-ending stream of invitations to charity lunches, summer soirees and gala night openings is likely to dry up faster than a lake in a California drought.

Will she miss the scene? Not really.

If I want to go to something bad enough, Ill buy a ticket, Lehrman says. The other way, I was paying psychically. Now, Ill use cash.

Lehrman joined the Gazette as advertising director in 1981, and purchased it from its founder, socialite Gardner Mein, in 1986. A college dropout, she was an astute businesswoman who boosted the publication to 75 pages in its heyday. It has slimmed down to 36 pages in recent years, competing for readers and ad dollars with a variety of other local publications that offer social coverage, including The Chronicle. Some 64,000 copies a month are printed and delivered to the homes of the rich (median income of her readers: $550,000 a year) and to professional offices in the Bay Area. Counting in the pass-along factor, she estimates readership at 200,000 a month. She charged a substantial fee to groups and people seeking to appear on the cover (to winnow the competition, she said).

Under Lehrmans eye, the Nob Hill Gazettes coverage of the activities of old and noted San Francisco families (Crocker, Rosekrans, Getty, Goldman) and new-money, high-tech billionaires (Benioff, Zuckerberg) leaned toward the lighter side: charitable events, personalities, real estate and lifestyle  not indiscretions or politics. Her mission, she said, was consciousness-raising. Among the Gazettes most popular features are an annual best-dressed list, eligible singles list, and the A List (people whose pictures appeared most frequently that year, ranked in order).

For Lehrman, it wasnt the topic, but the angle that mattered. The Nob Hill Gazette doesnt cover sports, but it has written about the experience and benefits of watching from a luxury box. The worlds oceans may be under environmental threat, but the Gazettes angle was the effect of climate change on yellow or black South Sea pearls.

Critics call the paper elitist, nicknaming it the Snob Hill Gazette. Its motto, An attitude  not an address, doesnt help.

Reilly hailed Lehrman for building the paper into a classic publication, noting, Its really a testament to her dedication and unique perspective that it has been so successful; I hope we can follow in her footsteps. (A Reilly spokesman described the purchase price as less than a one-bedroom pied-a-terre in the Nob Hill Gazettes distribution area. Recent studio sales prices have ranged from $650,000 to $3.5 million.)

Lehrman was inspired by Avenue, Manhattans oldest society magazine. Theyd write that Jackie O went to a certain restaurant, Lehrman said, referring to the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. If I couldnt buy her shoes, I could eat at that restaurant. If you dont know, you cant go.

Like many a public figure or boss, Lehrman is not universally loved by the movers and shakers in town or her past employees.

But her fans include former San Francisco Examiner photographer Ray Scotty Morris, who freelanced for the Gazette and calls it the Holy Bible of San Francisco society. Russian Hill resident Gail Glasser, stepmother of the late New York socialite Nan Kempner, admits, Lets be honest  you couldnt wait to see if your picture was in it. Lois made society fun. And Boaz Mazor, an Oscar de la Renta exec who travels the globe, likens Lehrman to the late John Fairchild, the publisher of Womens Wear Daily and W magazine. The cameras and the glossy photos give everyone such a positive high and a stamp of approval that you are part of what is happening in San Francisco, Mazor said.

Lehrman, born Lois Kotler, studied speech therapy and elementary education before dropping out of New York University to marry and have two children. After a divorce, she dabbled in real estate, sold life insurance and became an ad saleswoman at Gannett newspapers, the Jewish Federation and the Catholic Star Herald.

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.

After marrying again, to Gene Lehrman, a clothing production manager, the couple moved to San Francisco in 1978. Walking through the lobby of the Mark Hopkins, she picked up a copy of the Nob Hill Gazette, founded that year, and said to herself, This could be interesting.

Lehrmans personality is straightforward; her language salty; her sense of humor dry. For proof, look at a recent issue of the Gazette. After a plan to put a charitable group on the cover fell through, she enlisted the help of a neighbor, photographing him in a plaid suit and holding a single flower. Who? Transgressive cult filmmaker John Waters, atypical high-society material.

Thats classic Lehrman. Notes friend Lynn Hershman, a renowned artist and filmmaker: She will always find a smart and witty way to defeat any kind of negativity or problem that happens to her.

Last month, Lehrman picked 2165 Lombard St. as the spot for her 85th birthday party. Sixty guests drove up, expecting to find the home of hosts Pamala and Ted Deikel. Instead, they arrived at Mels Drive-In, where burgers, fries and milkshakes (Lehrmans favorite) replaced caviar and Champagne. Why Mels? Theyre both institutions in our city, said Pamala Deikel. Rock solid. Down to earth.

For that reason, Lehrman doesnt need to worry about losing friends, according to John Goldman, one of San Franciscos leading philanthropists. Shes a good person, he said. I would invite her anytime she wanted to go to anything.

Carolyne Zinko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: czinko@sfchronicle.com
Authorities in China are investigating Ubers planned sale of its Chinese operations to a local rival, complicating a deal intended to bring the American ride-serivce operators costly venture there to an end.

Shen Danyang, a spokesman for the Chinese Commerce Ministry, said last week that the inquiry was prompted by concerns about Ubers plan to sell the business to Didi Chuxing. The deal would create a company worth about $35 billion that would hold a strong position in the Chinese market for hailing cars through apps.

The acquisition is the latest attempt by Didi to consolidate control over the ride-hailing market. Last year, Didi merged with what was then its largest rival, Kuaidi Dache, a move that raised competition concerns. Those worries were short-lived, however, as Uber increased market share.

Uber and Didi offered subsidies to drivers, which may further complicate the investigation.

For the ministry to have jurisdiction, the revenue of each company must be greater than $60 million, and the combined revenue must exceed about $300 million, according to lawyers.

With Didi and Uber, that calculation may not be straightforward. Their subsidies to drivers reduce the amount of money they record as revenue, for example.

Still, the ministry reserves the right to rule on prominent deals. And in this case, the acquisition is likely to reduce incentives for drivers. That could mean higher costs for users, who have become accustomed to rides across Chinas traffic-soaked cities that, thanks to subsidies, can cost much less than a regular taxi fare.

China has been trying to bolster antitrust enforcement. The countrys antitrust law is only 8 years old, but experts say it is an essential part of nurturing a stronger consumer culture and greater competition in business.

The stakes are high for Didi and Uber. The ministry could put conditions on the deal or even block it outright.
STARCAST: Think last tango in Virgo! Just a few short days left until Jupiter leaves wise, witty and, oh, so discriminating Virgo for charming, witty and ultra liberal Libra. Expect life's pace to change. In months ahead time and effort will be centered around the resolution of legal and/or relationship issues.

Libra is the sign of the scales-fair measure. How will Jupiter's 13-month transit there effect you?

ARIES (March 20-April 18)

With proud, propitious Jupiter taking a final poke at your "work house," it's specially important that you organize your priorities. Once nitty-gritty issues are in place, you'll be ready to enjoy all the bounty that your planetary godfather sends your way.

TAURUS (April 19-May 19)

As jolly Jupiter does a parting handspring in your fun house, life takes on a film script quality with you playing the lead. Don't waste a single minute of this super allah gorgeous transit. Mr. De Mille is ready for your close-up? Are you?

GEMINI (May 20-June 19)

Jupiter accents your home--home business?--in a splendiferous way. As a world class party giver, you're well aware that where and how you live creates a statement. Isn't it time you celebrated yourself? Use this week's planetary punch to set the stage. Do it right. High priced help should be the order of the evening. Consider it an investment in you.

CANCER (June 20-July 21)

The cosmic Monopoly board opens before you. A gypsy draws a card . . . GET OUT OF JAIL FREE. It's a free pass on a communications issue. (Amour looks promising, too.) By Labor Day you'll have passed "Go." Come Christmas, you'll be talking "Boardwalk Towers!"

LEO (July 22-Aug. 21)

Jupiter's year-long sojourn in your money house was about a good as it gets. Let's hope you took full advantage of that transit because only five days remain. There's a message for you in Gemini's forecast. Look carefully. You have team potential.

VIRGO (Aug. 22-Sept. 21)

Birthdays always have a "first day of the rest of your life" feel to them. But if you've played your cards right, the after taste from this one will be nothing like "another day older and deeper in debt." Let's hope you took full advantage of Jupiter's largesse because the goodie bag closes in just five days.

LIBRA (Sept. 22-Oct. 21)

Mercury pirouettes mischievously through your dream center as Jupiter saunters into your sign. Is this a date with destiny or what? Clearly the time's ripe for new beginnings. Consider the case for enlightened self-interest and act on it. You'll remember the last months of 2016 and all of 2017 as the time of your life.

SCORPIO (Oct. 22-Nov. 20)

The ghost of Scorpio Past threatens to yank your chain for the next 12 months. It's not enough to do the "If I knew then, what I know now" thing. These matters involve the blueprint of your life. Best to call in an exorcist on this one. Because, once resolved, former issues can work for you in a lucky and expansive way.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 21-Dec. 20)

Face it, Saj, the longing for something "better" often signals the demise of a person, place or thing that's already perfect. Think: Humpty-Dumpty. Jupiter in your house of friends and wishes offers fated opportunities to celebrate where you are right now

.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 21-Jan. 19)

Jupiter does his tour guide thing in your travel house just as the sun and Mercury prepare to play a wild card. It's a fateful summer as fantasy flirts with destiny. Review your life, make a decision. If you don't have a bucket list, start one now-this minute!-and get cracking on it.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 27)

If you didn't strengthen a significant bond while Jupiter was tossing thunderbolts 'round your partnership sector, his current shift into your house of other peoples' resources promises to get the juices flowing. Your sex appeal is a potent asset as 2016 moves toward the home stretch.

PISCES (Feb.18-March 19)

Don't look now, but Jupiter is about to make waves-possibly tidal-in your one-on-one house. Think expansion. Share a wild fantasy with a partner and it may really happen. We're talking coup or counter coup. Perhaps even a revolution and it isn't even Labor Day.

MINERVA'S MAILBAG:

QUESTION: All my friends and I agree that some weird planetary thing must be happening right now.

I call it "the dog days of summer" not because it's hot in San Francisco (it's not) but because I can't seem to make anything happen work wise or on a personal/social level. It's like everything has ground to a halt and I can't get any traction on anything.

I'm a Scorpio 11-21-56 - but some of my non-Scorpio friends have experienced the same.

(I've also wondered if all the terrible things that have happened the last few months have bathed our planet in a blanket of ennui that's sparing no one.)

ANSWER: Thank you for your note. I, too, am a Scorpio, ll-21, and agree that this summer has seemed slow. Nearly everyone swimming against the current. Those "lazy, hazy day of summer," not much to do but enjoy them.

By the time you read this, Jupiter will have moved one sign closer to you. Your best luck though 2017 will come from past. Projects or relationships that fell by the wayside will seek review.

BUT the real pay-of comes in 2018, the year of the Scorpion.

May the stars shine on you.
NORFOLK, Va.  Hermine spun away from the East Coast on Sunday, removing the threat of heavy rain but maintaining enough power to churn dangerous waves and rip currents and keep beaches off-limits to disappointed swimmers and surfers during the holiday weekend.

As it churned several hundred miles off shore in the Atlantic Ocean, the system picked up strength and forecasters said it could regain hurricane force later as it travels up the coast. It was expected to stall over the water before weakening again to a tropical storm by Tuesday.

Its just going to meander for a few days, said Dennis Feltgen of the National Hurricane Center, explaining that Hermine was unlikely to make landfall again but was positioned to batter the coast with wind and waves.

Tropical storm watches and warnings were in effect from Virginia to Massachusetts, with special concern focused on New Jersey and Delaware, where Rehoboth Beach could experience gusts up to 50 mph and life-threatening storm surges during high tide late Sunday and into Monday.

On the Virginia Beach boardwalk, the Atlantic Ocean roared with uncharacteristically large waves. But scores of people descended onto the beach for the traditional last weekend of summer.

Tropical storm-force winds were possible Monday in New Jersey. Gov. Chris Christie warned that flooding was still likely in coastal areas and said the storm will cause major problems, even as it tracks away from land.

Dont be lulled by the nice weather, Christie said, referring to the sunny skies along the Jersey Shore on Sunday. Dont think that nothing is going to happen, because something is going to happen.

Storm surges were expected to continue along the coast from Virginia to New Jersey.

The combination of a storm surge and the tide will cause normally dry areas near the coast to be flooded by rising waters moving inland from the shoreline, the National Hurricane Center said in an advisory.

New York City planned to close its beaches Monday because of rip currents, and the ban could extend into Tuesday, officials said.

Hermine moved from the Gulf of Mexico and hit Florida on Friday as a Category 1 hurricane before weakening to a tropical storm across Georgia.

It has caused two deaths, inflicted widespread property damage and knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of people from Florida to Virginia.

High winds tipped over an 18-wheeler, killing its driver in North Carolinas Tyrrell County on Saturday. Earlier in Florida, a homeless man died from a falling tree.

By Sunday night, Hermines top sustained winds were steady at 70 mph as it moved northeast at 5 mph off the coast of Maryland.

In Virginia, flood-prone neighborhoods in Norfolk saw many streets flooded, especially during high tide. Emily Birknes said she saw a couple of submerged cars and some people kayaked through the streets.

Whenever severe weather is predicted, there is always an elevated sense of anxiety. People are stressed, she said.
FRESNO  Two unarmed officers were critically injured after being shot by a visitor in the lobby of a central California jail, authorities said Saturday.

Correctional Officers Juanita Davila and Toamalama Scanlan were shot in the head and neck areas during a struggle with a man who tried to cut to the front of the visitors line and refused to take a seat when he began pacing near a secure area of the Fresno County jail, sheriffs spokesman Tony Botti said.

Scanlan, who has 10 years of experience, was hospitalized in critical condition. Davila, who has 18 years of experience, was listed in critical but stable condition, Botti said.

The shooting sent about 15 people, including small children, in the lobby ducking for cover when the shots rang out around 8:30 a.m.

Christy Rodriguez told the Fresno Bee she and a woman with a walker hid in the restroom after they heard the gunshots. Moments later, an officer yelled at them to get out of the building.

This is crazy. This isnt supposed to happen, Rodriguez said.

Authorities said officers from secured areas inside the jail ran to the lobby, where a lieutenant fired shots at the gunman, identified as 37-year-old Thong Vang.

Botti said Vang returned fire, but no others were shot. He said officers tried to subdue him with a stun gun, but he wouldnt give up and ran to the hallway of the jail records area. When confronted by sheriffs deputies and a Fresno police officer, Vang dropped his weapon and told authorities he wanted to be arrested, Botti said.

The injured officers were taken to the hospital to undergo surgery.

Vang was taken into custody and taken to the hospital for minor scrapes and cuts.

Botti said Vang is a convicted rapist who was released from prison in 2014 after serving 16 years for raping minors aged 14 and under. The parolee had no criminal violations since his release.

Botti said Vang will be booked into jail on several felonies.
WASHINGTON  Lawmakers return to Washington this week for an abbreviated election-season session in which they will likely do what they do best: the bare minimum.

All Congress must do this month is keep the government from shutting down on Oct. 1 and, with any luck, finally provide money for the fight against the mosquito-borne Zika virus. Republicans controlling Congress promise they wont stumble now, but the weeks ahead could prove tricky.

A chief motivation for the September session, especially for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is allowing lawmakers to return to campaigning as soon as possible. Republicans are scrambling to hold onto their Senate edge as GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump lags in the polls.

The short-term spending measure is sure to pass. The alternative is that Republicans would get the blame for a government shutdown, as they did in 2013.

But its a complicated path for the temporary spending bill. Some House conservatives say the measure should last into next year, when there is a new president and a new Congress, and that would block any chance for a session after the Nov. 8 election. Leaders in both parties feel otherwise  as does President Obama  and a temporary measure until December seems to be the consensus.

We are not doing anything into next year and every Republican should be aware of that right now, said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

Lawmakers left Washington seven weeks ago without resolving a dispute over money for Zika. The virus can cause severe birth defects and is linked to a host of other maladies. Obama asked Congress in February for $1.9 billion in emergency money, but legislation to partially pay for his proposal collapsed in July amid various fights. Among them was a Republican provision to deny money to Puerto Rican affiliates of Planned Parenthood.

Because the shutdown-prevention measure simply has to pass, its a tempting target for lawmakers seeking to use it as a vehicle for their personal causes. For instance, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., is pressing for emergency grants to help communities in his flood-ravaged state to recover.

But GOP leaders probably will try to keep the spending bill as free of unrelated additions as possible, especially now. If GOP leaders were to grant Cassidys request, it would make it more difficult to say no to others, such as Democrats seeking money to fix the lead-tainted water system of Flint, Mich.

In a recent memo, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, said lawmakers will also take up legislation regarding the Obama administrations $400 million payment to Iran in January, made immediately after four U.S. prisoners were released. The payment, for undelivered arms to the shah of Iran, was made on the same day of the prisoner release, and Republicans call it ransom. The as-yet-unreleased legislation is designed to prevent a repeat.
After five years of drought, the native Chinook salmon caught by fishermen off the coast are there only because state and federal agencies do much of the salmon-raising that Californias overtapped rivers once did.

Most of the fish were born at the agencies hatcheries and carried in trucks downstream.

The San Joaquin River has been dry for dozens of miles at a stretch for decades, its water diverted to farms and cities.

With the drought bringing one of the driest periods in Californias history, federal and state authorities increasingly intervene mechanically to carry out key stretches of the life cycle of salmon, whose numbers were already declining.

In 2014 and 2015, authorities reared millions of young salmon in artificial hatcheries and trucked them downstream to keep the fishing industrys mainstay supply of fall-run Chinook salmon afloat.

Another kind of California Chinook salmon, the winter-run, was given federal listing in 2015 as one of the eight U.S. species most in danger of imminent extinction.

Management of Californias river water is a balancing act thats often described as fish versus farmers. With dams blocking more than 90 percent of the salmons original river habitat, agencies have struggled in the drought to release enough water at the right times to suit the needs of both crops and wildlife in the San Francisco Bay-Delta complex, the West Coasts largest estuary.

Farmers and some fishermen envision a different future for salmon, with more machinery aiding their life cycle and less water.

Environmental groups want agencies to go the other way, with less machinery and more water.

The fact that these fish can no longer survive in the system that theyve become genetically adapted to over how many centuries says something about how badly were managing the system, said Kate Poole, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. What we really need to focus on is creating healthy river conditions so these fish can survive and thrive in the wild.
By PTI: Hyderabad, Sep 3 (PTI) Senior Telangana Congress leaders and former ministers Ponnala Lakshamaiah and DK Aruna today launched a two-day hunger strike seeking more districts, other than what the government proposed to carve out.

While Ponnala says Janagoan in Warangal should be made a district, Aruna is pressing for Gadwal division to be converted into a district.

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"They (the TRS Government) are trying to carve out districts without applying any scientific approach. They are saying that new districts will be created for administrative ease. On what basis the draft notification for new districts was announced? There is no transparency in the process," Ponnala, former PCC chief, alleged.

Aruna also demanded that the Government should positively consider the requests that are coming from other parts of the state for new districts.

The Government had earlier announced that it would be carving out 17 new districts additionally from the existing 10, making a total of 27. PTI GDK NP IKA RDS

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The lakes might look gorgeous, but the scientists have some bad news about the scenic water bodies discovered in East Antarctica .

By India Today Web Desk: Nearly 8,000 pristine lakes have formed on the icy landscape of East Antarica. While the lakes might look absolutely breathtaking, it is a point of serious concern.



In a recent study published this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters , scientist revealed the worrisome fact about the scenic lake formation in east Antarctica. Unsurprisingly, the lakes are caused by climate change and global warming which is alarmingly accelerating the process of ice melt and glacier collapse.

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The "Supraglacial lakes," as the scientist call it, are formed as the sun slowly melts tops of glaciers. These were also spotted in Greenland, the worlds fastest melting ice mass. The rapid surface melting can also contribute to global sea-level rise, which directly harms coastal life.



Scientists initially thought of Antarctica to be relatively unharmed by global climatic change. However, the recent discovery reveals a completely different fate of the Atlantic.

Geophysical Research Letters found that 8,000 lakes appeared on the Langhovde Glacier in East Antarctica between 2000 and 2013.The worrying aspect about the lakes on the Langhovde ice shelf is that they 'not only formed but appeared to sometimes drain downward' reports the Washington Post. They eventually weaken the ice shelf by widening or cause fractures within it.



"supraglacial - or meltwater - lakes...could have serious consequences for the stability of the entire ice shelf." https://t.co/GP06nAfFPL stephanie jo kent (@stephjoke) August 23, 2016

Stewart Jamieson, one of the study's authors from the UK's Durham University, told the Washington Post, "the size of the lakes are probably not big enough to do much at present, but if climate warming continues in the future, we can only expect the size and number of these lakes to increase."

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By PTI: Bhubaneswar, Sep 4 (PTI) Ahead of the Panchayat polls due early next year in Odisha, Congress today brought back into the party fold, former MLA Shivaji Majhi, who had been suspended for defying a whip during Rajya Sabha elections six years ago.

Apart from Mahji, the ex-MLA of Lanjigarh in Kalahandi district, former MP Nakul Nayak also joined the party in the presence of Odisha Pradesh Congress Committee (OPCC) chief, Prasad Harichandan here.

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Welcoming the two leaders, Harichandan said the return of Majhi would bolster the party in the backward Kalahandi district while Nayaks entry would strengthen the party in the tribal-dominated Kandhamal. Nayak had been MP from Phulbani in 1989 on a Janata Dal ticket.

The entry of the two leaders into the Congress fold is significant for the party at this stage as the BJD Government in the state is following an "anti-tribal and anti-Dalit" policy, the PCC chief said.

The two leaders joined the party following a decision of AICC on the basis of the recommendation made by Kalahandi and Kandhamal Congress Committees, he said.

Majhi had abstained from voting during Rajya Sabha polls in 2010 defying party whip, party sources said adding he was suspended in June, 2011 after release of an audio tape, which claimed that two ministers had struck a deal with Majhi to keep away from voting in the election.

Suspension of Majhi was revoked in 2014, but he had later joined BJP.

"I was disappointed in 2014 after being denied Congress ticket for the Assembly elections and I joined BJP. However, decided to return to Congress when I saw the attitude of BJP towards Dalits and tribals," said Majhi.

Hitting out at the BJD Government, ex-MP Nayak said Kandhamal has suffered a lot during its rule for the last 17 years as nearly 80,000 people were left homeless and more than a lakh left the district due to riots.

Both BJD and BJP have failed miserably in restoring normalcy in Kandhamal, claimed Nayak, who turned rebel after being denied a BJD ticket in the 2009 polls. PTI SKN CR BSA

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Aam Aadmi Party today distanced itself from spokesperson Ashutosh's comments on Mahatma Gandhi in the backdrop of the CD scandal involving sacked minister Sandeep Kumar, saying it was the spokesperson's personal comments.

By Press Trust of India: Delhi Minister Gopal Rai today said that Aam Aadmi Party spokesperson Ashutosh's comments on Mahatma Gandhi in the backdrop of the CD scandal involving sacked minister Sandeep Kumar, were his personal opinion and the party did not subscribe to them.

He said AAP has taken strict action against its MLA Sandeep Kumar, who was sacked as Women and Child development minister after an "objectionable" CD purportedly showed him in a compromising position with a woman.

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WHAT DID ASHUTOSH SAY

In a blog written for a private TV channel, Ashutosh claimed great leaders like Gandhi and Pandit Nehru had "lived with their desires beyond social boundaries," while seeking to defend Kumar over the alleged CD scandal.

Defending Kumar, the journalist-turned-politician had said he did nothing wrong and action was taken against him solely for "perception management."

Ashutosh, who is AAP's Gujarat election in-charge, also referred to the alleged affairs of Nehru and Gandhi in the said blog.

ALSO READ: Sex CD case: My husband is innocent, I stand by him, says Sandeep Kumar's wife

GOPAL RAI REACTS

"Whatever he (Ashutosh) has said on Gandhi and Nehru is his personal opinion and the party has made this amply clear. AAP has also made it clear that everybody is welcome to join the party but there will be zero tolerance for any wrongdoing," Rai, who was in Delhi to meet labourers and contract wage workers, said at a press conference.

"We have zero tolerance towards those found doing things that are socially unacceptable, unlike other parties that refuse to take action against their people despite public outrage," the Delhi minister said while referring to BJP Chief Ministers Vasundhara Raje, Shivraj Singh Chauhan, and Congress Abhishek Manu Singhvi.

He said his party believed that "everything has to be said and done within socially-acceptable limit."

ALSO READ: AAP minister sacked for sex scandal had said he touches his wife's feet every morning

GOPAL RAI'S GUJARAT CAMPAIGN

Rai, who handles portfolios like Employment, Labour and General Administration, said Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is scheduled to make a trip to Surat on October 16.

The fledgling outfit is looking to make a mark in the 2017 Assembly elections in Gujarat as the people are "fed up with the BJP as reflected in large scale protests against the government and also because Congress does not come across as a formidable opposition," he said.

Rai said his meetings with labourers revealed their condition in the BJP-ruled state was among the worst in the country as they were paid low wages and faced job uncertainty.

He added his visit was meant to drum up support for the party ahead of the Assembly elections.

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The two newest nationally managed preserves in Hawaii  one now the largest protected area in the world  are also the least accessible. But thanks to off-site exhibitions, visitors can still explore the endangered treasures of a vast ecosystem and a dark, little-discussed chapter of World War II.

Papahanaumokuakea National Marine Monument incorporates the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, a 1,200-mile archipelago of virtually uninhabited islands and atolls that begins west of Niihau and ends at Kure Atoll, just west of Midway. On Aug. 26, President Obama quadrupled the size of this preserve, home to more than 7,000 marine species and millions of indigenous seabirds, as well as Native Hawaiian cultural sites and World War II battlegrounds, to 582,578 square miles  more than three times the size of California.

Only a few researchers, maintenance personnel and conservation volunteers live within the monument, most on Midway, where the only visitors program was discontinued in 2012 because of budget cuts. However, the free Mokupapapa Discovery Center in Hilo provides fascinating glimpses into the monuments main isles, with a 3,500-gallon saltwater aquarium holding samples of its reef creatures, life-size models of other wildlife and interactive displays.

Honouliuli National Monument, created by Obama in 2015, is only 15 miles west of Pearl Harbor, but it could take a decade for it to open to the public. Thats because the secret World War II internment center for people of Japanese ancestry, other civilians and prisoners of war became overgrown after Army officials closed the site in 1946. Monsanto has donated the land to the government, but archaeological surveys, road and trail improvement, and construction of interpretive facilities have to happen first.

Before volunteers from the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii rediscovered the site in 2002, even many Hawaii residents were unaware that authorities had incarcerated about 1,400 Japanese Americans across the islands after the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. Joined by 1,000 family members, some were eventually sent to mainland internment camps, while others lived in heavily guarded compounds like Honouliuli, nicknamed Hell Valley.

In the last 14 years, the cultural center has collected the names of island internees, and poignant artifacts such as jewelry made from snail shells and other ingenious omiyage, or souvenir gifts, that Honouliuli inmates made for family members. Theyll be on display in the centers Honouliuli Education Center in Honolulu, opening Oct. 22.

The majority of the work is done. We just need some tweaks, said center President Carole Hayashino, formerly of San Rafael. Its going to be a great gathering place for the community, students and teachers, and hopefully it will provide that kind of learning space that we want to create around Honouliuli.

 Jeanne Cooper, travel@sfchronicle.com

If you go

Honouliuli National Monument, www.nps.gov/hono. No public access. The Honouliuli Education Center opens Oct. 22 at the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii, 2454 S. Beretania St., Honolulu. (808) 945-7633, www.jcch.com. Open Monday-Saturday; hours vary. $7 adults, $5 ages 6 to 17, seniors 70 and older, and students.

Papahanaumokuakea National Marine Monument has very limited access. Visitors can learn about it at the Mokupapapa Discovery Center, 76 Kamehameha Ave., Hilo. (808) 933-8180, www.papahanaumokuakea.gov/education/center.html. 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Free.
Fifteen years ago we used the words indelible and unforgettable. They were the right words, of course: No one will ever forget what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

We can still picture the moment the second plane hit, the moment the first tower crumbled into the smoke and debris, and then holding our breath, telling ourselves the other tower would hold, but suspecting  terrified  it wouldnt.

As indelible and unforgettable as that singular day in American and human history was, a new PBS documentary about the attack on the Pentagon reignites the visceral horror and raw, sustained grief we felt on the day itself. 9/11 Inside the Pentagon, airing Tuesday, Sept. 6, on PBS, takes viewers not only back to that day, but, as the title suggests, directly inside the building where 184 people lost their lives.

Executive producer Kirk Wolfanger has secured firsthand recollections of the day from a variety of people: Steve Carter, the assistant building manager of the Pentagon; retired Army Col. Marilyn Wills, who wears a Purple Heart on her dress; first responders Mike Regan, Alan Wallace and Ed Hannon; retired Navy Capt. William J. Toti; air traffic controller Colin Scoggins; structural engineer Leo Titus; and Washington Post reporter and author Steve Vogel.

Wills fights back tears as she details what seemed like just another day at the office until the building was rocked by an explosion and fire after American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into its side and penetrated three of its architectural rings before coming to a stop.

The attacks on the World Trade Center came out of nowhere, but because those attacks happened first, there was reason to think that attacks on federal buildings in Washington could be coming.

Wallace recalls the Pentagon fire chief suggesting that the building could be a target, because it was so large and out in the open.

Vogel tells us that when the Pentagon was built, some criticized its massive size and called it the worlds largest bombing target.

The building contains 17 miles of corridors under a 34-acre roof, and more than 20,000 people go to work there every day  far more than the number of people who work either at the White House or the U.S. Capitol.

Flight 77 had departed from Dulles International for Los Angeles that morning, but suddenly went dark  someone had turned off the planes transponder as it turned around over Indiana and headed back to Washington.

This is no navigation malfunction, Toti recalls thinking. We knew that this was intentional from the beginning.

Suddenly you hear a sound, he says later. It keeps getting louder and louder and you say, is this happening?

The impact was thunderous, sending a towering plume of black smoke into the cloudless blue sky, while jet fuel flooded the destroyed offices in and adjacent to the airliners trajectory through the building.

That section of the building erupted in flames, smoke, chaos and darkness, the remnants of corridors filled with choking dust from pulverized drywall.

People like Wills tried to find ways out, but it was nearly impossible. The dust was so thick that she dipped her sweater in liquid she thought to be water just to keep some of the dust out of her lungs. It was jet fuel.

Those who managed to escape wanted to go back in to help others, but the first responders said it was too dangerous. The lucky ones drew diagrams of the buildings interior to aid the fire and rescue crews.

At one point, Carter looked up and saw a group of people pounding futilely at a window that would not break or budge: As a security effort, the building had been refitted with blast-resistant windows, which were now imprisoning and perhaps dooming survivors left inside.

Amid all the chaos, a second plane was spotted approaching the building in the distance. No one had any reason to believe it was anything other than a second suicide attack. The highest-level alert was issued for people to evacuate the building and to get 500 yards away as the plane neared, growing from a pinprick in the sky. In what must have seemed like hours, the plane came close enough for everyone to realize it was an American military jet fighter, on hand to protect the building from further attack.

Even after 15 years, the accounts of what went on in the minutes and hours after the attack are raw, terrifyingly detailed and deeply emotional. We feel the panic, the profound despair and unrelenting sadness of everyone who survived.

Hannon, injured in the rescue operation, had to go back to the building after he was released from the hospital because of the enduring emotional pain and guilt he felt at not being able to rescue more people. He thought seeing it again might help.

The documentary is graced by stories of heroism and humanity in the face of hell on Earth. The day before, Toti had written a letter requesting retirement and had left it in his superiors inbox. On his way out of the building the next day, he grabbed it and tore it up.

In spite of what appeared to be a mortal wound, the Pentagon continued to function throughout that day as it had every day before and since. Carter and others made sure the buildings water, electricity and other vital systems continued to work through it all.

The Pentagon was bruised, but it wasnt broken, he says.

In the coming days, we will see again those images of the crumbling towers and the tornado of smoke rising from the side of the Pentagon. The inside stories of people who were at the Pentagon that day offer further insight into why that day is and always should be unforgettable.

David Wiegand is an assistant managing editor and the TV critic of The San Francisco Chronicle. Follow me on Facebook. Email: dwiegand@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @WaitWhat_TV

9/11 Inside the Pentagon: 8 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 6, on PBS.
The patrolling personnel discerned that a bomb was buried at the side of the village road leading to Kwatha Khnnuou, a little distance away from the Trans-Asian highway No. 1.

By Indo-Asian News Service: It was a narrow escape for a patrol of 12 Assam Rifles in Manipur's border district of Chandel when insurgents tried to ambush them using a remote-controlled bomb on Sunday, officials said.

Bomb experts from Imphal later rushed there and defused the bomb.

Intelligence sources told IANS that at 2 pm, the patrolling personnel discerned that a bomb was buried at the side of the village road leading to Kwatha Khnnuou, a little distance away from the Trans-Asian highway No. 1.

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Police said that there might have been some other bombs buried along the road or hung from the tree branches.



OF INSURGENCY AND AMBUSHES

With the arrival of the additional Assam Rifles personnel, a search operation was launched in the nearby areas. However, no suspects were detected. A police officer told IANS that the insurgents must have slipped away towards the no man's land.

There have been some sensational ambushes against the security forces claiming several lives. Attacking security peronnel along the highway linking Manipur to Myanmar in this district have been a recurring feature.

To check the free movement of the insurgents along the international border, the construction of a 10 km long border fence was started at Moreh. However it was suspended when it was established that the fence was being constructed deep inside Manipur. While over 10 villages would be affected, one village in the state's Ukhrul district, namely Choro Khunnou would entirely go to Myanmar.

Police have registered a case. There has been no claim from any insurgent group of the bomb planting.

ALSO READ:

Encounter between Assam Rifles, NSCN(K) militants at Indo-Myanmar border



--- ENDS ---
1 France politics: The leader of Frances anti-immigration National Front on Saturday promised to hold a nationwide referendum on whether the country should leave or remain in the European Union if she is elected president next spring. Marine Le Pen denounced mass immigration and branded Islamism the new totalitarianism of the 21st century. Following the British precedent on voting to leave the EU, the far-right candidate for the April-May election said: I will do it in France. She added: The best weapon against terrorism: the ballot.

2 Polio vaccines: An emergency polio vaccination campaign aimed at reaching 25 million children this year has begun in parts of Nigeria newly freed from Boko Haram Islamic extremists, with fears that many more cases of the crippling disease will likely be found. Two toddlers discovered last month were Nigerias first reported polio cases in more than two years, putting the world on alert just months after the African continent was declared free of the disease. The finding was a major blow to global efforts to stamp out polio, which persists in only two other countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The vaccination drive in northeastern Nigeria is going to extraordinary lengths to fight the disease in areas still threatened by Boko Haram extremists who violently oppose Western medicine.
HANGZHOU, China  Setting aside their cyber and maritime disputes, President Obama and Chinas President Xi Jinping on Saturday sealed their nations participation in last years Paris climate change agreement. They hailed their new era of climate cooperation as the best chance for saving the planet.

At a ceremony on the sidelines of a global economic summit, Obama and Xi, representing the worlds two biggest carbon emitters, delivered a series of documents to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The papers certified the U.S. and China have taken the necessary steps to join the Paris accord that set nation-by-nation targets for cutting carbon emissions.

This is not a fight that any one country, no matter how powerful, can take alone, Obama said of the pact. Some day we may see this as the moment that we finally decided to save our planet.

Xi, speaking through a translator, said he hoped other countries would follow suit and advance new technologies to help them meet their targets. When the old path no longer takes us far, we should turn to innovation, he said.

The formal U.S.-Chinese announcement means the accord could enter force by the end of the year, faster than anticipated.

Fifty-five nations must join for the agreement to take effect. The nations that have joined must also produce at least 55 percent of global emissions.

The U.S. and China together produce 38 percent of the worlds man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

The White House has attributed the accelerated pace to an unlikely partnership between Washington and Beijing. To build momentum for a deal, they set a 2030 deadline for Chinas emissions to stop rising and announced their shared conviction that climate change is one of the greatest threats facing humanity. The U.S. has pledged to cut its emissions by at least 26 percent over the next 15 years, compared to 2005 levels.

Under the Paris agreement, countries are required to set national targets for reducing or reining in their greenhouse gas emissions. Those targets arent legally binding, but countries must report on their progress and update their targets every five years.

The meeting of the minds on climate change, however, hasnt smoothed the path for other areas of tension. The U.S. has criticized China over cyberhacking and human rights and voiced increased exasperation with Beijings growing assertiveness in key waterways in the region. Most recently, the U.S. has urged China to accept an international arbitration panels ruling that sided with the Philippines in a dispute over claims in the South China Sea.

The ceremony opened what is likely Obamas valedictory tour in Asia. But the welcome didnt go smoothly. A Chinese official kept reporters and some top White House aides away from the president, prompting a U.S. official to intervene. The Chinese official then yelled: This is our country. This is our airport.
The New Zealand government will review the law on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) after a High Court ruling which gave local councils the ability to veto their use within their district.

In Auckland's High Court on Wednesday, Justice Mary Peters dismissed an appeal raised by Federated Farmers, ruling that councils have jurisdiction to control the environmental impact of GMOs by regulating their use.

Councils proposing or with a prohibition on GMOs in their resource management plans are the Northland Regional Council, the Far North District Council, the Whangarei District Council and the Hastings District Council, while the new Auckland Unitary Plan, subject to appeals by Sept. 15, also contains a provision banning GMOs.

Environment Minister Nick Smith said today in a statement that the government would "review the appropriateness of councils being involved" in GMO regulation.

"It does not make sense for local councils to duplicate the role of the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) in regulating the use of GMOs in New Zealand," Smith said. "The EPA has taken a very cautious approach, approving only two GMOs in 20 years  an equine flu vaccine and the [liver cancer vaccine] Pexa-Vec trial.

"The problem with councils regulating in this area is that they do not have the technical expertise, resulting in regulations that have unintended consequences. The further problem is that there are no biosecurity controls between councils, so having different rules on what organisms are allowed in different districts becomes a nonsense."

Smith said he had asked the Ministry for the Environment for advice, and solutions could include a law change to clarify GMO controls are determined by the EPA and not councils. Any changes would involve public consultation, he said.

Federated Farmers applauded Smith's comments, with president William Rolleston saying regional authorities weren't equipped to regulate the technology.

"We will see unqualified council staff regulate technology they dont understand and stifle new emerging science," Rolleston said. "Overseas 90-95% of farmers have used genetically modified organisms when they have been permitted to do so. At the end of the day farmers in every district deserve to have choice to use technologies which have been assessed as safe by the EPA."

BusinessDesk.co.nz

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The New Zealand Shareholders Association has succeeded in its dogged pursuit of a legislative change so shareholders dont get taxed on shares of demerged companies.

Revenue Minister Michael Woodhouse has agreed to put the demerger issue onto the governments draft tax policy programme and has given it high priority, chairman John Hawkins told those attending the associations annual meeting in Auckland.

Former minister Todd McClay had said previously that while there was merit in the argument that the taxation of shares in demerged companies was unfair, Inland Revenue didnt have the resources to address the problem which required a legislative change.

Its an issue that not only impacts individual shareholders but also those in managed funds and some KiwiSaver funds. Potentially theres a very large pool of around 1.6 million New Zealanders, Hawkins said.

The current taxation rule is out of step with how Australian shareholders are treated when a company splits its shares. Hawkins said Kiwi shareholders dont mind paying tax on dividends but there was no reason they should pay tax when its purely a split of their existing capital.

The shareholders' association refused to give up after the initial response from government and its lobbying has now paid off. The demerger question will need to be rubber-stamped by a parliamentary select committee and all going well, should be included in the omnibus tax bill due to go before the parliament early next year, Hawkins said.

Given the time it will take to go through the parliamentary processes, Hawkins said the association wants any legislative change back-dated to April 1, 2016, as it highlighted the issue and a potential quick-fix to the government more than a year ago.

Two examples of company deals that impacted shareholders during the year because of the tax issue were NZME and potentially Diligent Corp, he said.

Investors putting their money into the countrys productive assets rather than simply taking untaxed gains on the property market should not be unfairly treated, Hawkins said.

He also slammed the corporate governance of three companies the association had actively lobbied this year: Rakon, where its seeking the appointment of two truly independent directors at the companys annual meeting this month; Wynyard Group, which came close to running out of funds when it failed to raise money earlier this year; and Veritas Investments, whose recent financial results were deeply disappointing to shareholders.

The association, which now has about 1,200 members, had its annual income of $244,000 significantly bolstered by corporate membership. It started corporate membership two years ago and the number has now grown to 16 companies, with three being added in the past year. Corporate members paid a total $161,000 in fees this year, double the amount a year ago.

Hawkins said corporate membership was by invitation only to companies that the association considered had the best corporate governance. He wouldn't comment on whether any company had turned down an invitation to join.

One shareholder asked whether Chinese walls were considered when the corporate membership class was established. A blind trust structure had initially been looked at, but the size and nature of the New Zealand markets meant it wasnt practical to go down that path, the association said.

Hawkins said the heavy reliance on corporate funds doesnt mean the association would be financially troubled in the unlikely event all 16 members left at once as it would simply slice and dice its budget accordingly.

Corporate membership doesnt mean they are immune from the association criticising or lobbying that company if they deserve it, though to date none have, he said.

Corporate members include many of the biggest listed companies including Air New Zealand, Mercury, Ryman Healthcare, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare. Several representatives from the corporate membership were speakers at today's AGM.

BusinessDesk.co.nz

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By India Today Web Desk: Shah Rukh Khan is set to embrace his most challenging role yet, that of a midget in Aanand L Rai's next. And if sources close to the movie and reports according to major publications are to be believed, the film even has a working title now. The film will be called Bandhua.



ALSO SEE: Shah Rukh could have very well been a stand-up comic, says ex employee

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ALSO READ: After Shah Rukh Khan, Ranbir Kapoor is the most candid Bollywood star

The film will see some Red Chillies VFX set a benchmark for Bollywood with reports that the film is budgeted at a lavish Rs 150 crores. Aanand L Rai has seen major success in Sonam Kapoor's Raanjhana, Tanu Weds Manu returns, both of which grossed more than Rs 100 crores along with getting critical acclaim amongst the masses.

Bandhua has Deepika Padukone as the film's leading lady, we will have to wait and see if she too is playing a midget in the film. The film already has a release date that has been announced in 21 December, 2018 and blocked a Christmas release for Shah Rukh Khan.

Shah Rukh Khan has a string of interesting projects lined up over the next two years where he will appear in Rahul Dholakia's Raees, Imtiaz Ali's The Ring, Aanand L Rai's Bandhua and also a film with Aditya Chopra which is still under wraps.



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The second promo of India's most controversial reality show Bigg Boss 10 is out!

By India Today Web Desk: Salman Khan is back in the ring again, but this time for the new promo of the upcoming reality show Bigg Boss 10.

According to reports, Bigg Boss 10 will go on air from October 16, and a tentative list of contestants has already started doing the rounds on the Internet.

Also read: Bigg Boss 10: 8 celebs who might feature in the reality show

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After turning an astronaut for the first promo, in the second promo, Salman Khan can be seen in a wrestler's avatar speaking Haryanvi.

But unlike the movie, you won't be seeing him in action, but rather he can be seeing enjoying a good fight, sitting outside the ring.

Also read: Bigg Boss 10 promo out: Salman Khan is all set to create history with aam aadmi this season

Season 10 of Bigg Boss promises to create history by allowing the participation of common people or 'aam aadmi' for the first time. For nine seasons in a row, the show has housed celebrities of all sorts, including both hugely popular and lesser-known stars from India and abroad.



But this time around, common people will get an opportunity to become Bigg Boss contestants, stay in confinement for over hundred days with other popular celebrities. Who knows, one of them might even win the show!



And this what Salman can be seen hinting in the second promo as well.

Watch the promo here.

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This new initiative is the first to be implemented by any state board in the country. The move will not only add to greater transparency in the exam process but also facilitate easy access to documents.

By Rohit Kumar Singh: In a bid to clean up the examination system, post the toppers scam in the state, the Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) has decided to begin a new process in a full-fledged manner from next year by linking Aadhaar card number of the students with their examination forms to avoid duplication.

This new initiative is the first to be implemented by any state board in the country. The move will not only add to greater transparency in the exam process but also facilitate easy access to documents.

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TRANSPARENCY IN EXAM

"When the student will apply for examinations, they will have to specify their Aadhar card number. Those who do not have Aadhar card are requested to apply for the same in order to benefit from the new initiative of the BSEB," informed Anand Kishore, Chairman of BSEB.

In case any student is unable to provide Aadhar number along with the examination form, he or she will have to put forward a strong reason for not doing so before the school principal. This move will go a long way in filtering fake candidates who appear in exams as proxy.

AADHAAR CARD A MUST

After the new guidelines issued by the BSEB, 58 lakh students will be required to get their Aadhar cards made immediately. Approximately 32 lakh students in Class 9 and 10, and 26 lakh in Class 11 and 12 have been issued directions in this regard.

"There will be a separate column to fill Aadhar number in examination forms in 2017," said Anand Kishore.

Toppers scam has hit international headlines after undeserving candidates were declared toppers in Class 12 exams in exchange for money.

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Skidmore College welcomes the Class of 2020.







Adam Nash 20 knows what its like to be first. The first-year Skidmore student is the first member of his family to attend college or to seriously venture abroad and the first in his sixth form (the final two years of high school in the UK) to even consider applying to an American college.

Nash, who hails from Stoke-on-Trent in Englands West Midlands, along with two other first-generation college students from Scotland, Maria McAveety 20 and Robyn Pattison 20, came to Skidmores attention through the Sutton Trust, a London-based higher education access program. Nash plans to major in physics, perhaps minor in math or geography, an

d hopefully study abroad.

The UK trio joins Skidmores Class of 2020719 students in all from 31 states and 54 countries, selected from a record applicant pool of nearly 9,200. Other 2020 stats include the following:

60% attended public or charter high schools

59% are women, 41% men

49% applied and were accepted Early Decision

24% self-identified as domestic students of color

11% are international students, with an additional 7% carrying dual passports

15% are first-generation college students

In terms of getting a jump on their Skidmore experience, 37 members of the Class of 2020 arrived on campus for an August 2224 pre-orientation before jetting overseas to spend their first semester in the First-Year Experience in London Program. Seventy of the 88 new international students, including the most UWC Davis scholars in school history and a record three Swedes, arrived August 28 for International Pre-Orientation. And 383 first-year students arrived September 1 to engage in a wide array of pre-orientation programs, ranging from hiking/backpacking, to creating sculpture, to doing community service. The remaining 299 members of the Class of 2020 arrived September 4 in time for Opening Convocation, as did 29 transfer students.

In choosing FYE London, New York City native Jeremy Brown-Adams 20 took full advantage of the fact that his sister was already a Skidmore student. Her friends told her that the experience was one of the greatest things theyd done in their lives. As Brown-Adams says, There were just so many superlatives. I knew I had to do it, too. Meanwhile, Baltimorean CJ Seim 20, who applied Early Decision to Skidmore, says she chose London because I want to become a global citizen since thats how the world is.



Members of the class of 2020 will spend their first semester in the First-Year Experience in London Program.

(Photo by Eric Jenks '08.)

One of the highlights of International Pre-Orientation is a traditional day trip, which started in 2007 as a humble hike in the Adirondacks. With a near-tripling in first-year international students, says Darren Drabek, coordinator of International Student and Scholar Services, the group must now split among three mountains, hiking to the summit of Buck, Sleeping Beauty, or Shelving Rock to take in the spectacular views of Lake George. Fifteen mentors, a mix of returning international students and Americans who studied abroad, helped guide students through the pre-orientation activities.



International Student Pre-orientation concludes with a Lake George hiking trip.

Beyond the numbers is the wide range of experiences, backgrounds, and talents that the Class of 2020 brings to the Skidmore community. Here are a few tidbits:

Volunteer work ranging from protecting trout habitats, caring for wolves at a sanctuary in Colorado, and rehabilitating monkeysin South Africa to domestic-abuse shelters, Ivan Lendls adaptive sports camp, and the Syrian Red Crescent Program.

Languages: 21% speak a language other than English at home, including Bengali, Arabic, Fulani, Georgian, and Cantonese.

A student who has lived in Nigeria, the Netherlands, France, England, South Africa, the UAE, and the U.S.

Work as beekeepers, farmers, deck boss on a fishing vessel, leather smith, beach fry cook, busker in Scotland, and commercial bakers.

Top-ranked U.S. Scrabble player; performances in Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and Radio City Music Hall; competitor in Norways Birkenbeiner Ski Marathon; and confirmation by Pope Francis.

Now, all the 20 classmates start an exciting new chapter.



Skidmore College Class of 2020. (Photo by Eric Jenks '08.)



Even Adam Nash is ready to go. Says Nash shortly after his international pre-orientation had come to a close, I was worried that it would be hard at first to communicate with people from so many new places because Im a bit shy. However, everything has been great and I have made so many friends because everybody here is really open and willing to talk with you.

Check out photos from move-in weekend below. (All photos by Eric Jenks '08.)
Actress Sunny Leone is super excited to walk the ramp at NYFW.

By Indo-Asian News Service: Bollywood actress Sunny Leone will be walking for designer Archana Kochhar at the upcoming New York Fashion Week. She says it is like a 'dream come true' moment for her.

Sunny will be opening the show on September 8, and she took to Twitter on Sunday to share her excitement about it.

The Jackpot actress posted: "So excited! A dream come true...I'm walking New York Fashion Week SS17 for Archana Kochhar Opening Show on the Sep 8 2016."

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Also read: The gorgeous Sunny Leone turns up the heat at India Fashion Week Dubai

Kochhar will be showcasing her collection A Tale of Two Travels, a melange of her travels to the Taj Mahal and the village of Banjara tribals, at the FTL New York Fashion Week SS17.



She is also supporting the initiative Bring Beauty Back at the fashion week, where acid attack survivor Reshma Banoo Qureshi will walk the ramp for her.

The Mastizaade star added: "Woohoo! Dreams really do come true! Thank you Archana Kochhar."

The fashion week will go on till September 15.



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PM Narendra Modi said, 'We, as BRICS, are an influential voice in international discourse. It is, therefore, our shared responsibility to shape the international agenda'.

By PTI: Describing BRICS as "an influential voice in international discourse", Prime Minister Narendra Modi today said it was the groupings shared responsibility to shape the global agenda.

Leading from the chair, Modi addressed the BRICS Leaders Meeting in Hangzhou, before the 8th annual Summit in Goa from October 15-16.

"We, as BRICS, are an influential voice in international discourse. It is, therefore, our shared responsibility to shape the international agenda," he said.

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READ: Modi meets Chinese President Xi Jinping in Hangzhou, Pakistan, NSG on agenda



"Our shared responsibility to shape international agenda in manner that helps developing nations achieve their objectives," he added.

Modi said that as chair of BRICS, "Building Responsive, Inclusive and Collective Solutions is the theme we have chosen which mirrors central priorities at G20 Summit".

READ| Exclusive: As China gets first Sanskrit textbooks, scholars appeal to Modi



"Weve taken BRICS out of capitals to involve people from all walks of life. It will be an opportunity to deepen our ties and with BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi- Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) countries.

READ: 'Miniature Modi' dolls a hit in Hangzhou ahead of G20 Summit

The four other leaders who participated in the meeting of the five-member bloc included Brazilian President Michel Temer, Chinese President Xi Jinping - with whom Modi held bilateral talks earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin and South African President Jacob Zuma.

"Our summit next month would not only be an opportunity to deepen ties with ourselves, we will also interact with Indias neighbouring countries of BIMSTEC - Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand, who have been invited for the outreach summit. We welcome you all to Goa next month," Modi said while concluding his brief address.



Also Read:

Hello Hangzhou! PM Modi tweets as he arrives to attend G20 Summit NSG, Pakistan in focus as Modi arrives in China for G20

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Canberra has its fair share of film festivals, but the freshest crop of new filmmakers' work was on show for one night only in Giralang this weekend.

The next generation of directors, special effects crews and foley artists put together Giralang Primary School's second annual film festival on Friday night, bringing their ideas and imagination to the big screen.

Giralang Primary School students Alexander and Cameron Charles worked on a Lego stop-motion movie for the school's film festival. Credit:Stephen Jeffery

Thirteen films from about 15 students were screened on the night, ranging from virtual reality adventures to Lego stop-motion tales, as well as modern interviews.

All students started with instructions to incorporate literacy and numeracy into their films, as well as the Tropfest-esque signature item of a star.
By Rajat Rai: Launching a scathing attack on Bhrtiya Janata Party(BJP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati on Sunday said that the BJP is working on the agenda of the Rashtriya Swaymsevak Sangh (RSS).

Mayawati, who was in the Allahabad district of the UP said, "atrocities on Muslims and other minorities and SC/ST has increased ever since the BJP came to power in the centre. The minorities and Dalit are being harassed in the BJP ruled states."

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She added that Muslims are being harassed on the name of 'Gau Rakhsha' and Love Jihad.

TARGET'S PM MODI FOR FALSE PROMISES

Slamming Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Mayawati said that the Central government has not even fulfilled a single promise that it made in its 2014 Lok Sabha elections agenda.

"Modi promised that he will bring back the black money and every Indian will get Rs 15 lakh in their account. Did you get any single penny in your account ? His promises to the farmers were also fake. He is just working for the benefit of some business houses," said Mayawati.

"Modi is seen in a mobile company's advertisement, what can be worse than a Prime Minister posing for ads," Mayawati added.



MAYAWATI SLAMS CONGRESS



Mayawati also went ahead and slammed the Congress saying that they lost Uttar Pradesh and the centre due to their wrong policies.

"After independence the congress ruled the centre for 54 years. It also ruled UP for 37 years, but it was rejected. False promises do not work for long. Rath Yatra (of Rahul Gandhi) will not work for Congress. Projecting an old lady (Sheela Dixit) who spoiled Delhi during her regime as the chief minister is an evident fact. She had said (when she was the CM of Delhi) that people of UP and Bihar are maligning the face of Delhi," said Mayawati.

Also read:

Mayawati sells tickets according to caste, says former BSP leader Swami Prasad Maurya

Mayawati attacks BJP, calls the party dependent on 'rejected maal'

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One of the reasons Mustafa Muhammed finally broke down and bought a smartphone was because he needed to find a job.

The 57-year-old cook was tired of using a library computer to look for work and watching friends get a jump on leads via alerts on their phones. After picking up his first phone about two years ago, he downloaded a mobile app called Snagajob. This summer he landed a gig at a new IHOP opening in Harlem after seeing it pop up in his inbox.

Smartphone apps now targeting part time jobs Credit:Mayu Kanamori

"This is job No. 2," says Muhammed, who also works in the dining hall at Fordham University. "I wanted to pick up a little something extra for the summer. I don't like to be lazy."

Snagajob is one of a slew of apps that have sprung up in recent years to serve the so-called gig economy. This year alone human-resources startups have attracted $1.2 billion in venture capital, with much of the funding going to companies designed to profit from the fluid nature of temporary or contract work, according to research firm CB Insights. In an election year dominated by concerns over economic inequality, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are pledging to generate more full-time jobs. But Silicon Valley is betting the gig economy is here to stay.
Building more houses won't fix housing affordability, experts say. Credit:Paul Rovere Houses are not bananas "If they understood how housing markets actually worked, this would come as no surprise at all," said Bill Randolph, director of UNSW's City Futures Research Centre. "The problem is you can't apply year 10 economic theory to a metropolitan housing market." The housing market doesn't behave like the market for bananas or cans of beans, experts say. For example, when the price of bananas rise, people buy fewer bananas and more alternative fruits, like apples or oranges, said economist and geographer Peter Phibbs. Professor Phibbs is chair of urban and regional planning and policy at the University of Sydney, and director of the university's town planning innovation centre, the Henry Halloran Trust.

"But with housing, because it's an asset market, as the price goes up it encourages buyers to get into the market because they can see the potential gain of holding an asset that's going up in value," Professor Phibbs said. Homes are unaffordable not because we are building too few but because the market is flooded with cheap credit. Tim Williams, Committee for Sydney This is particularly true in Australia because we have tax incentives (namely, negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount) that actively encourage investment in the private housing market, he said. We just can't build that many houses "Supply is incredibly important and it's very good it's been going up - the population is growing; we need more houses," Professor Phibbs said.

But boosting supply alone won't put home ownership within reach of low and moderate income earners, he says. The link between new supply and house prices is weak, economists argue. It's not like the banana market, for example, where the entire supply is produced each year and new supply has a strong link to price. In the housing market new homes are a tiny fraction of the entire housing supply. "Nobody has ever shown  that you can supply enough housing into a market to effectively make prices fall," Professor Randolph said. "New supply is 2 per cent of the housing market. Even if that doubled, what impact would that have? Most of us buy second-hand housing." Making matters worse in Australia is a finance model that essentially ties supply to demand by requiring developers to sell a certain proportion of new housing off-the-plan, Professor Phibbs said.

"It's unlikely that additional supply will lead to sharp reductions in price because the stock has already been sold  Supply never gets very far in front of demand," he said. The price of money But there is a more fundamental reason the relationship between house prices and supply is not simple or straightforward, according to planning expert and Committee for Sydney CEO Tim Williams. In the housing market, 'demand' is not driven by housing 'need' but by access to housing finance, he says. Virtually everyone needs to borrow money to buy a home, which means the major determinant of house prices is the price of money itself. "Homes are unaffordable not because we are building too few but because the market is flooded with cheap credit," he said.

"Increasingly access to this is being channelled to existing homeowners over first-time buyers, leading to many Sydneysiders owning two and three properties while the average 30-year-old cannot get into home ownership. "We cannot build our way to affordability in such a market." What should we do? Asked whether the government should consider strategies other than boosting supply, Ms Berejiklian said again that increasing supply was "the most effective way of tackling housing affordability". "When we came to office in 2011, NSW annual residential construction spending was just $12.4 billion and building approvals were below 35,000," she told Fairfax Media.

"NSW building approvals have more than doubled to over 70,000 and real residential construction over the past year has reached $19.4 billion  the highest level on record." Professor Phibbs advocates inclusionary zoning, which would require new developments to include a certain number of homes for moderate- and low-income earners. "It's been used in a lot of American cities," he said. "You can't use it everywhere but in high-value areas it's really a no-brainer." Professor Randolph suggests encouraging investment in properties for long-term rent. This would divert demand from the housing market and provide "a real alternative to the nightmare of current private rental," he said. And there's always tax reform, although he acknowledges the lack of political appetite.
Australia sets a double standard when it comes to foreign influence. On the one hand, the federal government has wide powers to prohibit foreign investment in Australia. These powers are often used, including to block the sale of a NSW electricity provider to a Chinese-owned corporation. In that case, national security interests were deemed important enough to put the state billions of dollars out of pocket.

On the other hand, there are no restrictions on foreign interests investing in our politicians by donating money or paying their expenses. This continues unabated despite the very real dangers that can arise, as demonstrated by the furore enveloping Senator Sam Dastyari over Chinese interests paying a $1670 bill.

Embattled Labor Sam Dastyari "called away on business" from ACCI speaking commitment. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

In both areas, money can drive outcomes that suit the foreign interest, and not the Australian community. This may be because national security is compromised, or policy decisions distorted. It makes no sense, then, that there are limits for business but none for our politicians. It suggests self-interest is at play.

Australia's political parties have over many years sought to gain an edge over their rivals by attracting large foreign donations. Their efforts have borne fruit, with Chinese-linked companies and individuals alone donating more than $5.5 million to Labor and the Coalition between 2013 and 2015.
Conservative senator Cory Bernardi says he "won't be dissuaded" from his attempts to rewrite section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, saying he is the person most in touch with the Liberal Party's core constituency, which is telling him to keep pushing for change.

Far from being a distraction from the government's economic agenda, as some Coalition MPs have suggested, the South Australian senator said on Sunday that freedom of speech was a "fundamental ethos of the Liberal Party".

"If you're talking about me derailing government ideas, nothing derails government ideas like losing a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years," Senator Bernardi said of the government's performance late last week during which the early flight from Parliament of several MPs meant the Coalition lost three procedural votes in a row.

The libertarian senator said his desire to see 18C changed was not a "proxy leadership battle" but something conservative voters wanted.
The Grattan Institute has identified superannuation as the most important test of Malcolm Turnbull's leadership, saying if he can't get the changes he took to the election through Parliament, it will mean Australia's system of government is "irredeemably flawed".

It says super should be the Prime Minister's most important political test, "not because our major political parties are at loggerheads, but because they largely agree".

"If we cannot get reform in this situation, then there is little hope for either budget repair or wider economic reform," it says in a paper on the super reforms released on Monday.

In the May budget the government lowered the annual cap on employer-sponsored superannuation contributions to $25,000, introduced a $500,000 lifetime cap on the personal post-tax contributions mainly made by high-income earners, and imposed a $1.6 million cap on the super funds whose earnings would be tax-free in retirement.
High-profile members of the federal government's Climate Change Authority have launched a stinging critique of their colleagues, accusing them of giving "untrue and dangerous" advice that ignores what science demands.

Board members David Karoly, an internationally recognised scientist, and Clive Hamilton, an academic and author, have published a dissenting report criticising the authority's advice to the government released last week.

The split is over whether the authority's role is to give unflinching science-based advice or, after years of policy failure in Canberra, recommend what is politically achievable.

It follows then environment minister Greg Hunt's appointment of five new board members last year, including former Coalition politicians.
Canberra's Fethullah Erdogan considers himself an unlikely terrorist.

The father of two, who moved to the ACT in 2009 with his wife, Handan, and their sons, to head the Bluestar Intercultural Centre, is committed to peace, building bridges between the Muslim community and other religions and cultures and is an outspoken critic of groups such as Isis and al-Qaeda.

Fethullah Erdogan, left, is the director of Canberra's Bluestar Intercultural Centre, a Muslim outreach organisation established here in 2009. He and his colleague, Muhammed Aksu, right, work to encourage interaction between the Muslim and wider community. Credit:David Ellery

"No [true] Muslim can be a terrorist and no terrorist can be a Muslim," he has told Fairfax in previous interviews.

Over the past six years the Erdogan family's south Canberra home has been visited by many prominent politicians and high-ranking ACT religious leaders.
A 17-year-old boy was stabbed at a party in Sydney's north-west after a large fight broke out early on Sunday.

Police, including riot police, were called to Box Hill Nelson Community Centre, where they found about 100 partygoers and the boy with a stab wound to the stomach.

The victim was taken to Blacktown Hospital by his friends and was later transferred to Westmead Hospital. He is in a stable condition.

Another 17-year-old boy was arrested at the scene after police spoke to partygoers.

He was taken to Castle Hill police station where he was charged with wounding with intent.
City of Sydney lord mayoral candidate Christine Forster has slammed incumbent lord mayor Clover Moore for running an "autocracy" as she prepares for the council election on Saturday.

Speaking at her campaign launch on Sunday afternoon, the Liberal candidate told Fairfax Media she expected a "tough fight".

Supported at the event by NSW Treasurer Gladys Berejiklian and federal Coalition MP Trent Zimmerman, Ms Foster said: "I'm definitely the underdog but I'm giving everything.

"We're going to give it every bit that we can possibly give it. I'm not going to die wondering. And the reason for that is because the people I speak to on the streets of Sydney are telling me they really think it's time for change.
These panchayats would expand the ambit of participation of these often marginalised communities and thus connect with them more directly than in previous such attempts.

By Siddhartha Rai: The Narendra Modi government will organise panchayats of minority communities across the country from September 15, seen as a bid by the Centre to bring these sections into the mainstream and boost their participation in local governance.

These panchayats, like the Panchayati Raj system of India, would expand the ambit of participation of these often marginalised communities and thus connect with them more directly than in previous such attempts.

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The Union ministry of minority affairs will launch the exercise in the second week of September and the panchayats will be held at nearly 500 locations across the country.

PANCHAYAT WOULD BE HELD IN DELHI: NAQVI



Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi told Mail Today that the selection of the locations for the panchayats had been done on the basis of the significance and the numbers of the minorities in the respective areas.

Naqvi said such a panchayat would also be held in Delhi. The locations would be such where minority communities make up for at least 30-35 per cent of the population which includes the officially designated "minority concentrated districts" that number 90. Thus, the move is expected to take the Union government to not just districts, towns but even tehsils and blocks.

"We plan to make these panchayats a regular feature and not a one-off occurrence. Our basic idea is to take all the sections of the India society together in the national mainstream as has been envisioned by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. These panchayats will be a congregation of the representatives of the minority communities of the areas in which they would be held. This congregation will deliberate on how it wants the funds to be utilised and thrash out the broad outlines of what their own blueprint of their progress is," he said.

PANCHAYATS TO ACT AS ENGINES OF PROGRESS



The minister said the concept was devised to encourage transparency with progress. The panchayats would analyse the level of progress reached by the communities thus far and what needed to be done in future. Also, they would review the overall progress of their localities. "The panchayats will become engines of progress as they can decide for example what skill development programmes need to be started in their areas and so on," Naqvi said.

The ministry has formally named these gatherings Progress Panchayats as they will decide what kind of progress the minority communities want for themselves and not just bear with the plans hatched in offices and then imposed on them, said the minister.

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Ministry officials told Mail Today that the move is also meant to act as a check on the way the state governments spend the huge money that comes from the Centre, but is left to the discretion of the states to spend.

"So far a lot of money has been released from the Centre to the states from the ministry, but the results have not been very encouraging.

Things have improved significantly since the BJP government came to power as regulation and scrutiny have increased, but a lot needs to be done yet to correct the dysfunctional system that the minority ministry inherited from the past," said a senior official.

Mail Today also leant that the minority affairs minister would be personally visiting the identified panchayat sites and participating in them. "I wish to make it to all of them and get in touch with the sentiments on the ground. The panchayats will also have representatives from the state government as well as top officials from the Union ministry," Naqvi said.

ALSO READ:

BJP snubs Mewat horror, bar council points at victim's minority status



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A state government push to clear a backlog of thousands of cases in the state's busiest criminal trial court is unlikely to reduce delays for 12 months, prompting calls for more judges to be appointed to the bench.

Warnings of a looming "crisis" in the District Court, which handles all but the most serious criminal cases and is labouring under a growing workload, prompted a multimillion-dollar funding boost from the Baird government last year.

Attorney-General Gabrielle Upton says the Law Society is being "mean spirited and petty" for raising concerns about District Court delays. Credit:Wolter Peeters

But the measures are not a short-term fix and, as at the end of July, there were 2042 criminal trials and 1195 sentencing matters outstanding in the court.

This is about double the caseload at the end of 2010, when 977 criminal trials and 722 sentences were pending.
A man has been found dead after a fire destroyed his home in north-west Sydney on Monday morning.



The 65-year-old was found after police and firefighters were called at 2am to a house fire on Spinks Road in Glossodia, 68 kilometres north-west of Sydney in the Hawkesbury region.

"We had a female occupant able to exit, but couldn't account for a second resident, a 65-year-old man," a NSW Police spokesman said.

"Firefighters from Fire and Rescue NSW and the Rural Fire Service were able to contain the fire and once it was under control, entered, and at that stage found a 65-year-old man deceased."

Investigations are underway, however it is believed an indoor combustion fire may have been the cause, trapping the man inside, where he suffered smoke inhalation.
A cyclist suffered serious injuries after colliding with a car at the Sunshine Coast on Saturday.

A car was turning right from the northbound lanes of David Low Way in Diddillibah about 5pm when it crashed into a cyclist travelling south along the same road.

A cyclist was taken to Nambour hospital with serious injuries after hitting a car at Diddillibah on Saturday evening.

The cyclist was taken to Nambour Hospital with serious injuries and the driver of the car was assisting police with their investigations.

The Forensic Crash Unit are investigating.
The Birdsville Races were back up and running on Sunday after a heavy downpour on Thursday saw the track and township flooded and the annual meeting postponed.

One day of heavy rain was all it took for the usually dry town to be flooded until Sunday, but locals and visitors alike didn't let that stop the fun.

Trainer Kristie Peoples-Clark does some early morning track work with Lupo Nero during the Birdsville Annual race carnival on September 3, 2016 in Birdsville. Credit:Bradley Kanaris

People adopted their inner child and had mud fights, built mud snow men and there was even fishing to be had on the side of the road in some of the larger puddles.

With the races off on the Friday and Saturday, Sunday will be a full day of racing with 11 events planned.
Police are appealing for public help to locate a missing Bundaberg man who has not been seen since Thursday afternoon.

Jason Taylor, 38, was last seen in Bourbong Street and police are concerned for his welfare because he suffers a medical condition and has not contacted family which is out of character.

Bundaberg man Jason Taylor was last seen on September 1. Credit:Queensland Police Service

He is described as Caucasian, 180cms tall, with a solid build, brown hair and brown eyes, and was last seen wearing dark trousers with a white chequered jacket.

Mr Taylor is believed to be travelling on foot and may attempt to hitch hike.
When Samsung released the Galaxy Note7 smartphone two weeks ago, it appeared to have a critical and commercial hit, selling an estimated 2.5 million units.

Then the big, fiery letdown. The South Korean electronics giant suspended sales and announced a recall, after discovering batteries of some phones exploded while they were charging.

The major recall of a well-received product in a fiercely competitive market is a blow to any manufacturer. But it is particularly stinging for Samsung, which is in a pitched battle with LG and Apple, both of which are expected to announce new smartphones next week.

Samsung has capitalised on a recent decline in interest in Apple's iPhone, last quarter posting its strongest profits in two years on sales of the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge. Rivals are circling. In addition to Apple and LG, the company faces increased international competition from Android rivals HTC, Lenovo and Huawei.
A man on the run following an alleged armed robbery has been caught after his car collided with a petrol tanker.

The 20-year-old man, who can't be named, evaded police for more than a week.

Keiarhn Carter is still wanted by police.

He was arrested after the allegedly stolen Subaru Forester he was driving collided with a B-double near Camperdown, west of Melbourne, on Friday.

The man was found still inside the Subaru, which had rolled into a paddock after crashing into the truck on the Princes Highway about 3pm.
Gang investigators have arrested eight teens over a series of terrifying violent robberies, including one where a couple, with a young baby, locked themselves in a bedroom while an intruder kicked holes in the door.

The male teens, aged between 14 and 16, allegedly committed two aggravated burglaries and an attempted carjacking within an hour in Melbourne's north-west on Sunday morning.

Credit:Cathryn Tremain

In the first burglary, two teens allegedly smashed a rear sliding door of a Williams Landing home, armed themselves with a knife and demanded a resident's car keys, just after 5am. The pair fled in the man's red Ford Festiva.

In the second, four teens allegedly smashed the rear glass sliding door on a Tarneit home, before stealing car keys and a black 2009 Holden Commodore, about 5.45am.
Too many Australian doctors are splitting their time between public and private hospitals, undermining efficiency and potentially contributing to delays for patients, a health system expert says.

A study of eight groups of specialists found most of them worked in both the public and private systems each week, and most spent the majority of their time with private patients.

Specialists may be less efficient because of the way they straddle public and private health systems.

Eye surgeons spent 87 per cent of their time in the private system, followed by orthopaedic surgeons, ear nose and throat specialists and rheumatologists (joint specialists), who all spent more than 70 per cent of their week with private patients.

Gastroenterologists and cardiologists spent more than 60 per cent of their time in private, whereas neurologists were close to 50:50. The only group in the study who spent the majority of their time in the public sector were kidney specialists.
36 passengers including women and children were killed when a bus collided with a fuel tanker.

By AP: An Afghan official says at least 36 passengers including women and children have been killed when their bus collided with a fuel tanker in southern Zabul province.

Gul Islam Seyal, spokesman for the provincial governor in Zabul, said Sunday that more than 25 others are seriously wounded with some in critical conditions.

RECKLESS DRIVING

The collision took place in Shar-e Safa district, on the main highway linking the capital, Kabul, to the southern city of Kandahar.

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Seyal blamed both drivers for being reckless.

He says authorities will transfer critical patients to neighboring Kandahar province.

In May, 52 people were killed on the same highway in Ghazni province in a collision involving two buses and a fuel tanker.



ALSO READ:

4 persons killed in collision between 2 buses in Jalandhar

3 youths die in car collision on Mandarmoni beach





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The driver of a stolen vehicle who fled after injuring a woman and child in a crash south-east of Melbourne on Saturday night remains at large.

The woman's Mazda sedan was turning into Pound Road from Narre Warren-Cranbourne Road in Narre Warren South about 10.30pm when the stolen Ford hit the rear of her car, a police spokeswoman said.

Emergency crews at the scene in Narre Warren South on Saturday night. Credit:Nine News

The Ford driver jumped out and fled the scene on foot.

Both vehicles were badly damaged and paramedics assessed four people.
Millennials on the internet can make you or break you - as Donald Trump's children just learnt the hard way.

In a campaign targeting millennial and student voters, Donald Trump jnr tweeted a photo of himself and his siblings, encouraging a vote for his father.

The closely-cropped image of Ivanka, Eric and Donald jnr shows them standing emotionless, eerily staring into the camera's lens.
"I was arrested at a protest Wednesday. The trooper asked me what was in my pockets. He didn't believe me."

This was the simple caption accompanying a post from the USA on user-generated news website Reddit over the weekend, showing an old-school Monopoly card.

Your get-out-of-jail free card is more likely to be taken into evidence than to actually do what it says it might... Credit:Reddit

Even more amusingly, a second photo appears to show that the Iowa police officer actually seemed to have taken the card into evidence, along with other items including a e-cigarette and a car key.

"Don't leave home without it," the Redditer posted, before adding, "it didn't work. Bond was $300."
US Secretary of State John Kerry during the G20 Summit in Hangzhou on Sunday. Mr Kerry emerged briefly to announce a ceasefire had yet to be agreed. Credit:AP It would ensure that government fighters pulled back in some areas, including around Aleppo, to allow convoys of humanitarian aid to reach civilians caught in the fighting. The ceasefire would be overseen through Russian-US intelligence sharing and military cooperation that would focus on going after Islamic State and other militant groups. The plan would need Russia to convince President Bashar al-Assad to agree on grounding his air force, a move that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said was not the goal. The war has killed more than 250,000 people and displaced 11 million, causing a refugee crisis in the Middle East and Europe, and contributed to a rise in militant Islamist groups.

Moscow has backed Mr Assad in the war and Russian warplanes have targeted the opposition for nearly a year, while Washington has supported some rebel groups fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army to topple him. A truce brokered by the Cold War foes in February broke down and peace talks between the government and opposition ended in April with both sides trading the blame. Fighting has since escalated in many areas, especially around Aleppo in the north. Mr Kerry said he would not rush into any agreement just to see it fail again. A senior State Department official, who declined to be named, said Russia had walked back on some of issues that the sides had already agreed on, which is why both sides need to continue talking. "If we do not get some buy-in from the Russians on reducing the violence and easing the humanitarian crisis, then it's difficult to see how we get to the next phase," Mr Obama said. The White House has said Mr Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin likely would have the chance to talk informally on the sidelines of the G20.

Mr Kerry said it remained to be seen whether the sides could agree on a deal. "There are a couple of tough issues that we talked about today that we will go back and review, I will go back and review, and we've agreed to meet tomorrow morning and see whether or not it is possible to bridge the gap, come to conclusion on those couple of issues," Mr Kerry said. Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, also speaking in Hangzhou, said earlier that a deal was close but that the timing of any announcement could not be predicted. "We are talking about most serious issues of implementing a ceasefire," he said. "We are close to the dea ... but art of diplomacy requires time to implementation. I can't tell you when the agreement will be reached." Ceasefire terms

A letter from Washington's Syria envoy Michael Ratney to the Syrian armed opposition, a copy of which was seen by Reuters, laid out some of the ceasefire terms. It would oblige Russia to prevent government warplanes from bombing areas held by the mainstream opposition, and would require the withdrawal of Damascus's forces from a supply route north of Aleppo, the letter dated September 3 said. In return, the United States would coordinate with Russia in fighting against al-Qaeda, it said, without elaborating. The deal would focus on delivery of humanitarian supplies to Aleppo, where recent advances by both sides have cut supplies, power and water to nearly 2 million people in government- and rebel-held areas. It also required the Syrian government and Russia to avoid bombing opposition-held areas  including where more moderate insurgent groups are operating close to Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, previously the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front.

Government forces and their allies recaptured areas in south-western Aleppo on Sunday from the rebels after heavy bombardments and repeated attempts to drive the insurgents back. The British-based Observatory said the re-taken areas included the Weaponry College and the Air Force Technical College in Aleppo's south-western outskirts. To the north-east of Aleppo, Turkish-backed rebels pushed Islamic State out of areas around the town of al-Rai near the Turkish border on the second day of an offensive launched from al-Rai. Turkey last month mounted its first full-scale incursion into Syrian territory since the conflict began, aimed at Islamic State and at US-backed Kurdish forces in the area, which have also been battling the jihadists. Loading
Washington: Hillary Clinton's campaign struck back at assertions by Russian President Vladimir Putin that the hacking of Democratic Party groups was a public service and accused him of endorsing "foreign interference" in the US presidential election.

Clinton spokesman Jesse Lehrich said experts have concluded Russia was behind the hacking of Democratic National Committee e-mails that were released by WikiLeaks just before the former secretary of state was to formally accept the party's nomination. Lehrich sought to draw a connection to Republican nominee Donald Trump's campaign.

"Unsurprisingly, Putin has joined Trump in cheering foreign interference in the US election that is clearly designed to inflict political damage on Hillary Clinton and Democrats," Lehrich said in an e-mail. "This is a national security issue and every American deserves answers about potential collusion between Trump campaign associates and the Kremlin."

Lehrich was reacting to Putin's remarks in a Bloomberg News interview in which he called the DNC breach and subsequent publishing of the documents a service to the public. The release led to the resignation of top DNC officials and became a distraction for Clinton just before the Democratic convention in July.
New trainsets to enter service in 2021

Amtrak is contracting with Alstom to produce 28 next-generation high-speed trainsets that will replace the equipment used to provide Amtrak's premium Acela Express service. The contract is part of $2.45 billion that will be invested on the heavily traveled Northeast Corridor (NEC) as part of a multifaceted modernization program to renew and expand the Acela Express service.

"Amtrak is taking the necessary actions to keep our customers, the Northeast region and the American economy moving forward," said Amtrak President & CEO Joe Boardman. "These trainsets and the modernization and improvement of infrastructure will provide our customers with the mobility and experience of the future."

The new trainsets will have one-third more passenger seats, while preserving the spacious, high-end comfort of current Acela Express service. Each trainset will have modern amenities that can be upgraded as customer preferences evolve such as improved Wi-Fi access, personal outlets, USB ports and adjustable reading lights at every seat, enhanced food service and a smoother, more reliable ride.

This procurement comes as demand for Acela Express service is as popular as ever, with many trains selling out during peak travel periods. The new trainsets will allow for increased service including half-hourly Acela Express service between Washington D.C. and New York City during peak hours, and hourly service between New York City and Boston.

"As more people rely on Amtrak, we need modernized equipment and infrastructure to keep the region moving," said Chairman of the Amtrak Board of Directors Anthony Coscia. "These trainsets will build on the popularity and demand of the current Acela Express and move this company into the future as a leader in providing world-class transportation."

The new trainsets will operate along the Washington  New York  Boston Northeast Corridor initially at speeds up to 160 mph and will be capable of speeds up to 186 mph and thus will be able to take advantage of future NEC infrastructure improvements.

Additionally, the trainsets use the base design of one of the safest high-speed trainsets. Concentrated power cars, located at each end of the trainset, provide an extra buffer of protection. The trainsets will also meet the latest Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) guidelines including a Crash Energy Management system.

"The next generation of Acela service will mean safer, faster and modern trains for customers throughout the Northeast," said U.S. Senator Charles Schumer. "This investment will pay immediate dividends for businesses and travelers from Washington D.C. to Boston, and the fact that these new trains will be built in Upstate New York makes this project a win-win. These New York-made Acela trains will soon be zipping along the Northeast Corridor and  as a regular customer  I can't wait for my first ride."

"The Northeast Corridor is a national economic engine that carries a workforce contributing $50 billion annually to the national GDP," said U.S. Senator Cory Booker. "Amtrak's continued investment in modernizing its fleet will only serve to enhance this vital rail link between Boston and Washington D.C. while allowing for safer and faster travel at a time when passenger demand is expected to rise. Strengthening our nation's infrastructure is essential to the economic growth of our region and the nation and this investment by Amtrak will help ensure the reliable service travelers expect."

Amtrak is funding the trainsets and infrastructure improvements through the FRA's Railroad Rehabilitation & Improvement Financing program that will be repaid through growth in NEC revenues.

"Amtrak is grateful for all of the support we have received from Congress, especially from Sen. Schumer and Rep. Reed who represents Hornell, New York  home of the Alstom facility," said Boardman. "We would also like to thank Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Thune and Ranking Member Nelson and House Transportation Committee Chairman Shuster and Ranking Member DeFazio for their leadership on the FAST Act. Additionally, we appreciate the efforts of Senators Booker and Wicker for their support on the inclusion of the rail title, the first time Amtrak reauthorization has been included in surface transportation legislation."

Amtrak Next-Generation First Class interior

In addition to the trainsets, Amtrak is also investing in infrastructure needed to improve the on-board and station customer experience that will accommodate the increased high-speed rail service levels. Amtrak will invest in significant station improvements at Washington Union Station, Moynihan Station New York, as well as track capacity and ride quality improvements to the NEC that will benefit both Acela Express riders and other Amtrak and commuter passengers. Amtrak will also modify fleet maintenance facilities to accommodate the new trains.

The trainsets will be manufactured at Alstom's Hornell and Rochester, N.Y., facilities, creating 400 local jobs. Additionally, parts for the new trainsets will come from more than 350 suppliers in more than 30 states, generating an additional 1,000 jobs across the country.

The first prototype of the new trainsets will be ready in 2019, with the first trainset entering revenue service in 2021. All of the trainsets are expected to be in service, and the current fleet retired, by the end of 2022.
No fan of Donald Trump, Assange really hates Hillary Clinton. Release may come on eve of 3d debate

Julian Assange Claims to have the goods on Hillary, and is planning an election surprise.

He lives in exile in an embassy in London and considers himself a journalist, while the Obama administration and many Americans consider him to be a traitor.

Appearing on Megyn Kelly's Fox News program, WikiLeaks founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange said on Wednesday that he planned to release "significant" information linked to the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Asked if the data could be a game-changer in the election, he said "I think it's significant. You know, it depends on how it catches fire in the public and in the media."

WikiLeaks released files in July of audio recordings taken from the emails of the Democratic National Committee. These were obtained by hacking its servers. That release, during the Democratic National Convention where Clinton was officially named the party's presidential nominee, was the second batch in a series that deeply rattled the Democratic party, and ultimately forced DNC chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to step down--which Assange seemed to brag about tonight.

Kelly speculated that the timing of the dump would be just before Clinton's third debate with Donald Trump. Everyone would be tuned in then and it would do the most damage to Clinton, she said, referring to the Obama administration's hunt for Assange. It was led by then Secretary of State Clinton.

On 4 July 2016, WikiLeaks tweeted a link to a trove of emails sent or received by then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton published on their website. The leak contained 1258 emails sent from Clinton's personal mail server which were selected in terms of their relevance to the Iraq War and were apparently timed to precede the release of the UK government's Iraq Inquiry report.

On 22 July 2016, WikiLeaks released approximately 20,000 emails and 8,000 files sent from or received by Democratic National Committee (DNC) personnel. Some of the emails contained personal information of donors, including home addresses and Social Security numbers. Other emails appeared to present ways to undercut Bernie Sanders and showed apparent favoritism towards Clinton.

WikiLeaks is an international non-profit group of journalists that publishes secret information, news leaks, and steals or appropriates classified media from anonymous sources.

Julian Assange Claims to have the goods on Hillary, and is planning an election surprise.

Its website, initiated in 2006 in Iceland by the organization Sunshine Press, claimed a database of more than 1.2 million documents within a year of its launch.

Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, is generally described as its founder, editor-in-chief, and director. Kristinn Hrafnsson, Joseph Farrell, and Sarah Harrison are the only other publicly known and acknowledged associates of Julian Assange. Hrafnsson is also a member of Sunshine Press Productions along with Assange, Ingi Ragnar Ingason, and Gavin MacFadyen.

The group has released a number of significant documents that have become front-page news items. Early releases included documentation of equipment expenditures and holdings in the Afghanistan war and a report informing a corruption investigation
Mexican President Nieto: "I told him I wouldn't pay for the wall." Trump: "I will build a great wall along our Southern Border."

It was the high point of a rough August for the Donald.

Towering over Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, Donald Trump managed to look downright presidential. He controlled the conversation by picking which reporters could ask him questions (a right ordinarily reserved to the host). He said nothing especially controversial, by Trump standards.

And most of all, he managed to meet with a foreign leader of an important US constituency. Benjamin Netanyahu famously refused to meet President Barack Obama in 2012, ostensibly because he was busy, but really because the two men despise each other and the Israeli PM hoped he would help challenger Mitt Romney with Jewish and Evangelical voters, by snubbing Obama

Experts (those nattering but friendly Nabobs of negativity on Fox), have been saying for a while that if Trump wants to win this election, it's still possible. But he has to reach out to groups either ignored or put off by his campaign, namely African Americans or Hispanics. They say that Ronald Reagan beat Ford in 1980, despite low poll numbers, by going into black and Latino neighborhoods. There, in front of TV cameras, candidate Reagan talked about how the Democratic Party has failed minority voters by creating "a culture of dependency and broken families." Some minority voters were convinced.

Trump took a longshot gamble, says Charles Krauthammer, and it paid off handsomely. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/08/31/krauthammer-on-trumps-trip-to-mexico-took-risk-and-pulled-it-off.html

The invitation from Nieto was a surprise. Nieto's predecessor, Vicente Fox, advised Trump to skip the meeting, but he did not do so. It's actually rather surprising that Nieto would agree to meet with Trump, given that he's down in the polls, unlikely to win, and of course, has stopped just short of saying he would nuke Guadalajara.

Nieto flatly denied Donald Trumps statement that the two did not discuss who would pay for the GOP nominees proposed multibillion-dollar border wall, saying, I made it clear Mexico will not pay.

Who pays for the wall? We didnt discuss it, Trump said in response to a reporters question at a joint news conference after the closed-door meeting between the two in Mexico City. But in a tweet from Pena Nieto's official Twitter account sent later on Wednesday, the president said, At the start of the conversation with Donald Trump, I made it clear Mexico will not pay for the wall.

Mexicos foreign minister, Claudia Ruiz Massieu, tweeted that Pena Nieto had expressed the grievance and outrage of Mexicans for insults and offenses by Trump in their private meeting.

While Trump polls in the 60's with white voters, he polls under 5% with African Americans and under 15% with Hispanics. Both groups are socially conservative by nature, and it is entirely possible that Donald could shift the polling into his favor to say, 30% of each group. This could make the Great Excommunicator competitive in November.

Donald Trump concluded his first meeting with a foreign leader, and flew to Phoenix Arizona. There, he doubled down Wednesday night on his vow to build a "great wall along the southern border" -- and make Mexico pay for it -- while outlining a more focused mission for the deportation force he's promised to create.

In a speech in Phoenix meant to clarify his immigration positions after appearing to soften his stance, the Republican presidential nominee outlined a hardline set of proposals for tackling illegal immigration. He did not, however, definitively call for removing all illegal immigrants in the country.

He said he would focus on deporting the estimated 2 million "criminal aliens" on day one. He would also make a priority of certain groups like gang members and visa overstays for removal. He insisted that any illegal immigrant could be subject to deportation under his administration.

"There will be no amnesty," he said, adding that no illegal immigrant would be legalized without first leaving and coming in through "the front door."

Trump said that America's current immigration system "serves the needs of wealthy donors, political activists and powerful politicians. . . . . Let me tell you who it does not serve, it does not serve you the American people. It doesn't serve you," he said.

Trump Tweeted: Hillary Clinton didn't go to Louisiana, and now she didn't go to Mexico. She doesn't have the drive or stamina to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

You know what would be a really HUGE gamble? Trump meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. I'll bet you a Harriet Tubman $20 bill that we see The Russian strongman meeting Trump in October. But then again, the former Secretary of State has many foreign friends, so she could play this game too. Stay tuned. This is about to get interesting
By India Today Web Desk: Heavy rains which lashed Delhi on Wednesday crippled the entire city with water logging. In one such heavily waterlogged area, two school buses from Eischer Public School, Faridabad were stuck at an underpass at Mehrauli-Badarpur road in South Delhi.

In the bus were 125 terrified children and 18 school staff. The incessant rains caused water levels to rise at an alarming rate. Out of the two buses, one was semi-immersed and the other was going to drown completely. The engines of the two buses went kaput because water logging.

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The TOI reports that the children, many of them around 9-10 years were on their way to attend a programme in Noida. Two teachers trapped in the bus made a distress call to the Police Control room after which fire department officials and a team of police immediately reached the spot to start the rescue operations.

Amid the chaos, the panic-stricken children climbed onto roof of the bus to save themselves. The fire fighters formed teams and pulled each and every child out of the bus onto their shoulders and swam to safety.

Out of the rescue officials, Delhi police head constable, Murari Lal, displayed exemplary bravery when he single-handedly pulled 16 children out of the submerged bus. Just a few minutes after the distress call, Assistant Chokhe Lal Sub-Inspector and Mutrai Lal reached the spot and saw the bus drowning.

As the children were screaming for help, Murari plunged into the sewage mixed water and carried each one on his shoulder to safety, while ASI Chokhe Lal who didnt't know how to swim, stood in the deep water and assisted him. The entire recuse effort lasted for an hour.

"People also made a human chain to help the children. I am thankful to the policemen, firemen and all the people, including rickshaw pullers and passersby, who came forward to help the children," Meenakshi Jetley, an academic coordinator who was on the bus told The Indian Express.



Murari Lal and ASI Chokhe Lal will now be rewarded for their courageous rescue effort, announced Deputy Commissioner of Delhi , R.K Bansal. Thanks to the timely and combined efforts of the fire department and police, everyone is safe now.



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By PTI: New Delhi, Sep 2 (PTI) Realty major DLF today announced the sale of its remaining 7 screens of DT Cinemas in the national capital to Cinepolis India for nearly Rs 64 crore, thereby exiting the cinema exhibition business.

DLF Ltd had in May entered into an amended agreement to sell its 32 screens of DT cinemas to multiplex operator PVR at a revised consideration of Rs 433 crore.

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Originally, PVR was to acquire all 39 screens, comprising 9,000 sitting capacity for Rs 500 crore, but the deal was revised after fair trade regulator CCI raised some objections.

DLF operates multiplex arm DT cinemas business under its subsidiary DLF Utilities.

"DLF Utilities Ltd, has completed a transaction today with Cinepolis India for sale and transfer of remaining seven screens pertaining to DT Cinemas (Saket-6 screens & Greater Kailash Part II - 1 screen) as a going concern on a slump sale basis for a consideration of Rs 63.67 crore upon receipt of CCI approval," DLF said in a BSE filing.

With the closure of this transaction, the company will exit the cinema exhibition business.

"This is in line with the companys strategy to focus on companys core business and divest non-core businesses or assets," it added.

The Competition Commission of India had in May approved PVRs proposed acquisition of DT Cinemas from DLF while directing the companies to exclude these 7 screens from the deal to address anti-competitive concerns. (MORE) PTI MJH ABK

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Mark Burns, a Donald Trump surrogate, is grabbing more headlines than his boss, and that is not a good thing. Mr. Burns is an Evangelical Christian televangelist and pastor of The Harvest Praise & Worship Center in South Carolina.

The religious man delivered a rousing speech at the Republican National Convention and was later picked by the campaign to conduct interviews as Trump launched his outreach to minority voters. He gave several fiery interviews on CNN, FOX, and MSNBC, but on social media, he took things a step further.

He shared a racist cartoon that depicted Hillary Clinton in blackface as she was pandering to black voters (see tweet below). He declined to apologize, and instead reposted the picture of Clinton minus the blackface and called out the media for overlooking her scandals.

As Burns profile rose, the media decided to focus its attention on his background and found several lies. In an interview with Victor Blackwell on CNNs New Day Weekend, Burns was asked about his online bio, which falsely claimed that he graduated from North Greenville University, that he served in the Army Reserves, and was a member of Kappa Alpha Psi, a historic African-American fraternity.

The web page also stated that he earned a Bachelor of Science degree from North Greenville University. The university said that Burns was only there for one semester. Here is a portion of the interview:

DAMON DAVIS, KAPPA ALPHA PSI MEMBER: He just came out of the blue. BLACKWELL: Virginia Beach Navy veteran Damon Davis says hes a Republican but had never heard of the fiery southern pastor. Neither had his friends. DAVIS: So they looked him up. He had webpages up, and they saw one of the claims he was a member of Kappa Alpha Psi. BLACKWELL: David, who is a member of the predominantly African- American fraternity, says he first saw the claim in Pastor Burns bio on his churchs website. Davis says he captured this screen grab in July just day after Burns spoke at the RNC. Then he started investigating. What did you find? DAVIS: There is no person named Mark Burns, John Mark Burns, or any variation thereof in the fraternity ever. BLACKWELL: Davis says he contacted Pastor Burns. Soon after Davis says the webpage disappeared. CNN Called Kappa headquarters too. They have no record of him. So when we sat down with Burns we asked about that. BURNS: I did without question said I had started the process of being a part of that organization, but thats the furthest Ive gotten. BLACKWELL: Is that the bio from your website. BURNS: It is but it is the  it is the bio, but this is not an accurate depiction of the bio. Information has obviously been added. Im pretty  I own up to any mistakes I made like I did with my tweet. Obviously, in this case thats not  BLACKWELL: So this is not from your page. BURNS: No, this is from my page, but what Im saying is, obviously, this has been manipulated or either hacked or added. BLACKWELL: CNN asked the sites host, Wix, about the possibility someone could have tampered with the churchs website. The company tells CNN there is no evidence of a hack. And CNN obtained the pastors full bio from the churchs website through an Internet archive. You also claimed you served six years in the Army Reserves. Is that accurate? BURNS: Yes, it is. BLACKWELL: OK, we called the Army and they said that you had no active army or  BURNS: I was never  I was part of the South Carolina National Guard. BLACKWELL: I asked youd about Army reserves. That was my question, you in this bio claim six years in the army reserves. BURNS: Which is  it is reserves, its the army South Carolina National Guard is reserves. BLACKWELL: In a statement to CNN, the U.S. Army says Burns served in the South Carolina National Guard for 2001 to 2005, was discharged in 2008. He has no active Army or Army Reserve service time. Did you attend North Greenville University? BURNS: I did attend North Greenville University. BLACKWELL: Did you graduate from North Greenville University? BURNS: No, I didnt complete the degree. BLACKWELL: In fact the university tells CNN he was here one semester.

After the embarrassing interview, Burns issued an apology:

As a young man starting my church in Greenville, South Carolina, I overstated several details of my biography because I was worried wouldnt be taken seriously as a new pastor.This was wrong, I wasnt truthful then and I have to take full responsibility for my actions. Since that time I should have taken steps to correct any misrepresentations of my background. We all make mistakes, and I hope that the measure of my character and the quality of my works speak for what kind of person I am.

He also took the opportunity to bash those, who called him out on his false claims. He stated:

I do also want to set the record straight about why this attack is happening  because I am a black man supporting Donald Trump for President. For too long, African-American votes have been taken for granted by Democratic politicians, and enough is enough Instead, Im going to tell people that there is another option  an option that represents a position vision that will unify our country. Thats why I have and will continue to tirelessly support Mr. Trump.

Some experts believe that Trump surrogates often try to push their own brand.

Getting Your Head chopped off by ISIS is more important than a cartoonCan You Hear Me Now? #STOPTHEPANDERING pic.twitter.com/jKfMmd1uYN  Pastor Mark Burns (@pastormarkburns) August 30, 2016
Police acted on the incident after some local TV channels aired a video showing the bridegroom firing two revolvers a few days back.

By PTI: A case was today registered against a man for allegedly firing in the air during his marriage ceremony in Falaknuma area here, police said.

FIRED REVOLVERS



Police acted on the incident after some local TV channels aired a video showing the bridegroom firing two revolvers a few days back.

"We are verifying when the incident happened. Investigations are on," Assistant Commissioner of Police (Falaknuma Division) Mohd Abdul Bari told PTI.



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"We have registered an FIR under relevant sections of Arms Act in the connection with the incident...we are in the process of identifying the bridegroom, who opened fire in the air and will soon catch him," he said.

FIRED 10 ROUNDS



As per TV visuals, the bridegroom was holding two revolvers and fired 10 rounds in the air, the ACP said.

"Once he is taken into custody, we will interrogate him and ascertain from whom he got the weapons," he added.

Further probe is on into the incident.

Also Read: Celebratory firing in Vanzaras rally, police order probe

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A woman today told of her terror after thugs on mopeds snatched a gold necklace from her 64-year-old mother's neck on a leafy high street.

The woman, who the Standard has not named over fears for her safety, had enjoyed lunch with her family at GBK in East Dulwich before walking home along Lordship Lane earlier this month.

She described how she turned to see two men dressed completely in black on unmarked mopeds pulled up at the side of the shopping street as her family turned into a quiet residential road.

The 35-year-old said: I noticed them but thought nothing of it until they came up behind us.

One leapt off and lunged at my mum and grabbed her necklace from round her neck.

Mum tried to fight him off and ended up being knocked to the floor  she shouldnt have fought back but I guess its just instinct.

The woman's five-year-old daughter and heavily pregnant sister also witnessed the terrifying attack.

The woman told the Standard that the dramatic situation could have been a lot worse if her sister had been knocked down.

Police have warned of mopeds being used for phone snatches (file image) / City of London Police

She added: I dread to think what would have happened if my sister had been knocked over, it could have really hurt her.

The family have been left shaken by the theft but have praised selfless passers-by who rushed to their aid.

We have to make sure now that mum doesnt go out on her own and now when I go past the spot with my daughter she says, thats where the naughty men were, the woman said.

We shouted for help and a lot of people rushed over, they were great.

I would say to people, though, be careful when youve got your valuables out in public. This is a very safe area and you dont expect it but it does happen, she added.

Police have previously warned stolen mopeds are being widely used for phone snatches and smash and grab raids in London.

A Metropolitan Police spokesman confirmed that police were called to Whateley Street at 3.15pm on August 12.

He said: A woman in her 60s reported that two men on a moped had snatched a gold chain from her neck.

No one was reported injured.

No arrests have been made and enquiries continue.
A second man has been charged with attempted murder after a teenager was shot in the head near his north London home.

The 18-year-old was shot as he stood with friends near Turnpike Lane on Tuesday afternoon.

Paramedics and London's Air Ambulance were sent to the scene, near Wightman Road.

The teenager was rushed to hospital where he remains in a critical condition.

Today, Jayson Duir-Kota, aged 20, of Newland Road, Hornsey, was charged with attempted murder.

Yesterday, 20-year-old Denizen Karadag, of Boyton Road, Hornsey, was charged with the same offence.

Both men will appear in custody at Highbury Corner Magistrates' Court tomorrow.


A man has been rushed to hospital after he was stabbed outside a south London Sainsburys this evening.

Police and paramedics were called to Garratt Lane in Wandsworth just before 8.45pm following reports of the stabbing.

One person has been taken to hospital, police said. His age and condition are not currently known.

A photo from the scene showed a line of police tape cordoning off an area outside the supermarket.

One resident, who asked not to be named, told the Standard around three police cars were first on the scene, swiftly followed by more.

He said: I saw several police cars and an ambulance.

They had already cordoned off the area and some clothes and a rucksack were lying on the ground.

There was a group of people nearby that was talking to a police officer while a lady was nervously walking up and down the area, followed by a police officer that was keeping her outside the perimeter.

No arrests have been made so far, police said.
A 15-year-old boy was today fighting for his life in hospital after being stabbed outside a south London supermarket last night.

Police and paramedics were called to Garratt Lane in Wandsworth at just before 8.45pm on Saturday following reports of the attack.

One teenage boy was taken to hospital after he was knifed in the abdomen outside Sainsbury's, police said. This morning a spokesman for the Met Police said he is in a "critical but stable" condition.

Police said no arrests have yet been made.

The teenager was believed to be with friends when two men on bikes stopped and spoke to him. Shortly after he was stabbed. His next of kin have been told.

Detectives are investigating and believe the suspects were two black men on black pedal bikes

Detective Sergeant Bronwen Powell, from Wandsworth CID, said: "We are thankful to the members of the public who stopped to help the victim prior to emergency services attending, and who have spoken to police about the incident so far.

"However, we are still keen to hear from anyone else who was in or around the Garratt Lane area, that may have seen or heard anything, and that they think may assist our investigation."

Any witnesses or anyone with any information is asked to call police in Wandsworth via 101. To give information anonymously contact Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111 or visit crimestoppers-uk.org.

A photo from the scene showed a line of police tape cordoning off an area outside the supermarket.

One resident, who asked not to be named, told the Standard around three police cars were first on the scene, swiftly followed by more.

He said: I saw several police cars and an ambulance.

They had already cordoned off the area and some clothes and a rucksack were lying on the ground.

There was a group of people nearby that was talking to a police officer while a lady was nervously walking up and down the area, followed by a police officer that was keeping her outside the perimeter.
By India Today Web Desk: As many as 121 persons were arrested by Gurgaon police from MG Road on Saturday night under the 'Operation Romeo Returns' that was launched to control eve teasing incidents in the city.



"The two-hour long operation was launched in the wake of the recent increase in incidents of eve-teasing in the city," said Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) Dharna Yadav.



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She added that the operation was carried out as working girls were feeling insecure during the night.



Last year, in a similar drive the Gurgaon police arrested over 100 youths under its Romeo-free campaign.



Gurgaon police had deployed 10 men and 10 women police officials in an anti-eve teasing squad in civil dress outside the malls last year to arrest eve-teasers.

Also read:

Gurgaon cops detain 100 in Romeo-free campaign



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A new project in south London is aiming to reduce homelessness by taking a new approach to the housing crisis in the borough.

Housing First is aiming to reduce homelessness in Croydon by providing homes as a starting point rather than end goal to support, and recruiting people who live and work in the area to go out and help rough sleepers.

London Live followed a group of volunteers while they searched south London hotspots for people sleeping rough at night to help.

Lee Buss, director of operations at Evolve Housing, told London Live: The traditional model of supported housing is very linear and it works on the assumption that someone is ready to engage in support at the same time that theyre in housing need, and those two things dont always coincide.

Also, access to the accommodation is conditional on someone being able to accept support, and for some people, theyre not able to engage on that point, which then results in them becoming homeless again.

Volunteers work late into the night to support people sleeping rough / London Live

Housing First, [to] put it simply, works on the principle that to end chronic rough sleeping, you provide a home.

The support is not conditional on accessing the accommodation.

Labour Councillor for Croydon, Alison Butler, said: We have a housing crisis in the borough and that covers all sorts of people, like families, older people, people with disabilities, but as a consequence of that weve also got rising street homelessness.

In a modern, European city, thats something thats really not acceptable and weve really got to find ways of addressing it.

David Ford, who previously slept rough in Croydon, told London Live: Its a community thing but part of that community are those who are rough sleeping and are homeless.

So when it comes to finding solutions, them being part of the solutions and that decision-making process will then empower them.

Its really important that everyone in the community is involved.
A theatre director claims he was kicked off a London bus after its driver launched a vile racist and homophobic tirade at him and his boyfriend.

Omar Okai said the humiliating incident happened after he had enjoyed an evening out with his boyfriend in central London on Friday.

He said the couple were left "shocked and disgusted" after the driver challenged them with an apparently innuendo-laden remark after they boarded the bus at the rear.

The 51-year-old, from Bethnal Green, alleged that the driver told them: "I bet you like it in the backdoor" during the confrontation near Tottenham Court Road station.

Mr Okai and his Spanish partner, 36, have now formally complained to Transport for London and the police over the alleged incident.

Behind the wheel: Omar Okai took a photograph of the bus and driver following the incident. / Omar Okai

"We put our hands out to get the bus but he looked at us and pointed at something and just drove on," Mr Okai told the Standard.

We caught up with the bus at another stop. The front doors were closed but people were on the bus. The back door was open so we got on and go straight to the front and put our Oyster cards on the machine.

He then said, the front doors were closed for a reason. We apologised and said but we have paid, is it ok?

He just kept repeating, how long have you been using buses in this country? I made it very clear I am British but he kept repeating it. It was really aggressive, it was vile.

He then said, why did you use the backdoor?. We again apologised and he said, I bet you like it in the backdoor anyway.

I kind of stopped and said, what do you mean. He said, you heard.

Snapped: The bus driver who Omar Okai has reported as part of the alleged incident. / Omar Okai

He then pressed the button on the top of his bus panel and made this announcement. He said 'this bus is not going any further and people need to get off'.

It was in such a nasty way. We got off the bus but realised other passengers stayed on. He then opened the front doors and allowed another lady to enter and then he drove off.

Mr Okai, who runs his own theatre company, said: You dont have to call me a poof and a queer to be homophobic. This on a bus in your own country in 2016, thats disgusting.

In a letter to TfL, he added: I would like an explanation, not just an apology, as I will be taking it further.

This kind of behaviour is not acceptable in any shape or form in Great Britain and as a British citizen born here, I am not accepting it. My partnerand I were humiliated and intimidated, being made to leave the bus.

In a multi-racial, poly-sexual society, this can't be allowed to pass. I use the transport system day in, day out and have never been so insulted.

Transport for London said they are investigating what happened.

A spokesperson said: We are concerned to hear of this incident and are investigating it with Tower Transit, the operator of the 25 bus route.

We expect the highest standard of public service from bus drivers."

Bus operator Tower Transit have also been contacted for comment.

Mr Okai also reported the alleged incident, which happened at around 10pm on Friday, to the Metropolitan Police. Scotland Yard have been contacted for comment.

People have taken to social media to show their support for Mr Okai and applaud him for reporting the incident.

Steven Kavuma said on Twitter: "Absolutely disgusting. I hope his bus licence gets taken away."

Dean Austin called it "disgusting behaviour" and said he hoped Transport for London address it.

Stephanie Sirr wrote: "Shocking treatment of two gay men on their way home. Feels like we're going backwards".
A man has died after he was hit by a train in Croydon this morning.

Ambulances and transport police rushed to Thornton Heath station just after 4.50am this morning but the man was pronounced dead at the scene.

Officers from British Transport Police are now trying to work out the identity of the man and inform his next of kin, a spokesman said.

They said his death is not being treated as suspicious and a file will now be put together for the coroner.

Five police cars were spotted outside Thornton Heath station, on Brigstock Road, this morning.

The station is served by Southern Rail trains and the line was blocked for several hours following the incident.

Delays of 20 minutes were reported to and from London Victoria. The line has since reopened.
E U leaders have lined up to rebuke Britain over its Brexit strategy, with the former head of the European central bank urging the country to get a move on.

The UK needed to accept the four pillars of the single market, including free movement of labour, if it wanted to remain in the trading area after withdrawal, said Jean Claude Trichet.

"We know in advance that we have quite a long period of uncertainty and I would call for that period to be as short as possible, and for the position of the British government to be as clear as possible, as soon as possible," he told the BBC.

Former Irish prime minister, and ex-EU ambassador to the US, John Bruton also criticised London's failure to prepare for Brexit.

He said: "I think there is a lot of surprise in other European countries that the government, which decided in its manifesto that it would have a referendum, hadn't prepared in advance what it would look for once it left, given that there was always going to be a possibility that was going to be the result.

Brexit: Theresa May on Article 50

"One would have thought they would have prepared in the event that the people voted to leave."

Former Italian prime minister Mario Monti warned that giving Britain a "full Monty" deal without free movement of labour could destroy the single market as other nations demanded special treatment in certain areas as well.

Theresa May makes fresh warning that Brexit will happen

The rebukes came as Theresa Villiers said it is "crucial" that the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic remains open and unfortified.

The former Northern Ireland secretary, who quit front bench politics after declining Theresa May's offer of another Government position, said there was a reasonable chance of keeping the crossing between the two countries open despite the Brexit vote.

Ms Villiers told the Murnaghan programme on Sky News that there had never been a "truly hard border" and that softer measures could be taken to combat illegal migration.

"What has encouraged me since the referendum result is that we have the new Prime Minister, the Brexit secretary, we have the Taoiseach in Ireland all saying we need to keep this border open - it is crucial.

"If you have both countries determined to keep the border open I think there must be a reasonable chance that we can do that."

Concerns about whether the free movement of people and goods will be impacted after Brexit have dominated the political discourse across the island since the vote.

The MP for Chipping Barnet said there were "plenty of ways" to "crack down" on those who do not have the right to work in the UK without the need for "physical border checks".

"Of course we'd need measures to control EU migrants who came to the UK and chose to work if they didn't have appropriate entitlements but we've already got legal mechanisms to deal with that because we've criminalised working without proper permission," she told the programme.

"The best way to enforce rules of immigration is not through physical border checks at our land border with the Republic of Ireland, because as I say that's never been a properly enforced border, no one wants it on either side of the border to become a hard border again.

"There are other ways in which we can deal with the risks around illegal migration."

Additional reporting by the Press Association.
T he inquiry into prostitution led by Labour MP Keith Vaz should be disbanded after a newspaper alleged he paid for the services of male escorts, a campaign group has said.

A report in the Sunday Mirror alleged the married father-of-two met the men at his flat in north west London.

He is alleged to have boasted about sleeping with a prostitute without protection and offering to to cover the cost of cocaine for the men.

Nordic Model Now (NMN) said the Home Affairs Select Committee should immediately scrap the Prostitution Inquiry because the MP's actions were tantamount to a conflict of interests.

The inquiry, led by Mr Vaz as the committee's chairman, is looking into the way prostitution is treated in legislation.

In a statement on the allegations, Mr Vaz said: "It is deeply disturbing that a national newspaper should have paid individuals to have acted in this way.

"I have referred these allegations to my solicitor Mark Stephens of Howard Kennedy who will consider them carefully and advise me accordingly.

"At this time I do not want there to be any distraction from the important work the Home Affairs Select Committee undertakes so well.

"Select committees do vital work in holding the government and others to account. We are due to publish two reports, one into anti-Semitism and the other into FGM (female genital mutilation) in the next few days, in addition we have a number of key witnesses.

MP Keith Vaz 'paid for male escorts'

"I will of course inform committee members first of my plans when we meet on Tuesday. My decision has been based entirely on what is in the best interests of the committee which I have had the privilege of chairing for the last nine years."

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn today insisted the controversy was a private matter.

"I think it should be treated as a private matter. He is going to meet the Home Affairs Select Committee and discuss with them what his role will be in the future.

"I'm not sure what that decision will be. I leave it to him to decide on that," he told the BBC.

Asked if he was happy for Mr Vaz to remain in the Labour Party, Mr Corbyn said: "Well, he hasn't committed any crime that I know of.

"As far as I'm aware it is a private matter, and I will obviously be talking to Keith."

Former culture secretary John Whittingdale said that Keith Vaz's reported resignation seemed "sensible".

"I haven't read the whole of the allegations and therefore it's difficult to comment on them," he told Sky News's Murnaghan programme.

"But Keith Vaz as I understand it is that he will stand aside from the chairmanship of the select committee.

Keith Vaz at a Labour conference party in 2015 / Jeremy Selwyn

"Given the areas of which the committee is responsible, that does seem to me to be a sensible course of action. I wouldn't want to comment beyond that."

Labour shadow health secretary Diane Abbott said this was a "dreadful" experience for Mr Vaz, and his wife and children.

"I have known Keith for over 30 years, I think this must be a dreadful time for him, and his family - his wife and his two children. And I would rather not comment," she told Sky News.
L abour MP Keith Vaz has stood down from his high-profile role as chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee after being exposed apparently paying men for sex.

The married MP is alleged to have met two Eastern European men for sex and boasted about sleeping with a prostitute without protection.

Father-of-two Mr Vaz also offered to cover the cost of cocaine if it were bought to the London flat where he met the men, though he did not want any himself, the Sunday Mirror reported.

In his high-profile position as chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, Mr Vaz takes a leading role in monitoring crime and drugs policy. The Committee is currently overseeing a major shake-up of Britains laws on prostitution.

Last night, the former Europe Minister announced he would step down from chairing the Committee after the allegations. A friend was quoted as saying he may remain a Committee member if he had enough support among MPs.

Keith Vaz parties at Labour conference in 2014 (Jeremy Selwyn)

Mr Vaz, who has represented the Leicester East constituency since 1987, is alleged to have tried to conceal his identity from the two escorts by telling them he was a washing machine salesman.

He reportedly said: These are industrial washing machines that I sell. Industrial. For big  for hotels.

He is also alleged to have said: We need to get this party started during the course of the 90 minute meeting at a flat near his family home in Edgware on August 27.

Keith Vaz at a Labour conference party in 2015 / Jeremy Selwyn

The day before, Mr Vaz reportedly texted one of the escorts to request they bring a legal sex drug with them. Try and pick up some poppers, he is said to have written.

Asked what he wanted by a man in a conversation by text message, Mr Vaz allegedly responded: "You. I'm getting very horny".

During a conversation about another man, the MP is also alleged to have said: "He was OK. He forgot the condom though. I had to f*** him without a condom."

Asked if he knew the man was free of sexually transmitted diseases, Mr Vaz reportedly said: I didnt know.

The three men are also said to have examined pictures of men on gay dating app Grindr during the rendezvous.

Shown a picture of an Asian man, Mr Vaz allegedly responded: He is fit. Browsing another users profile, the newspaper reported that he said: Find out where he is

After the Sunday Mirror published voice recordings of the alleged encounter, a friend of Mr Vaz accepted he had been foolish but claimed the MP was a victim of a newspaper sting.

In a statement to the Mail on Sunday, Mr Vaz said: I am genuinely sorry for the hurt and distress that has been caused by my actions in particular to my wife and children.

"I will be informing the Committee on Tuesday of my intention to stand aside from chairing the sessions of the Committee with immediate effect."

The Evening Standard has contacted Mr Vaz for comment.
S adiq Khan today paid a warm tribute to his friend and ray of sunshine Sally-Ann Epson after the south London councillor passed away.

Tributes have flooded in for the Battersea politician, who died this week following a long illness.

The Mayor of London wrote on his Facebook page: She was a ray of sunshine, much-loved by all who knew her.

As someone who always had time for anyone who needed it, it was her natural calling to become a councillor and represent the community she spent so much time and energy working to improve.

Recalling first seeing her elected as a Labour councillor in Battersea two years ago, he said: She served her constituents with dignity and grace. Sally-Ann also served on the board of the Sickle Cell Society, and was a strong advocate for both improved access to and better quality of care for those with the disease.

I will remember Sally-Ann fondly as a dear friend, determined campaigner and, above all, as someone who never stopped smiling. Rest in peace, Sally-Ann.

Leader of Wandsworth council, Councillor Ravi Govindia , told the Wandsworth Guardian: This is deeply sad news and I wish to convey my sympathies to Cllr Ephsons loved ones and friends.

We have all admired her fortitude and bravery in coping with her illness while continuing to serve the interests of her constituents. She will be sadly missed.

Wandsworth Labour leader, Councillor Simon Hogg, said: Sally-Ann will be missed by her many friends.

She was such a positive force for good and always spoke from her heart. She handled her chronic illness with grace and quiet courage and had a smile for everyone. Above all, she was a kind person."
On the occasion of Rishi 'Chintu' Kapoor's 64th birthday, we look back at the top ten songs of his career which are still memorable in 2016.

By India Today Web Desk: Rishi Kapoor, Bollywood's quintessential chocolate boy, and, now, the jolly, irreverant papa of Ranbir Kapoor turned 64 today. For two decades, he has romanced some of the top heroines of the industry, after which, he took to character roles, and since then, he has aced playing performance-driven characters like Rauf Lala in Agneepath (2012) and Goldman in D-Day (2013).

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On the occasion of Rishi 'Chintu' Kapoor's 64th birthday, we look back at the top ten songs of his career which are still memorable in 2016.

OPINION: Rishi Kapoor is the most 'likeable' actor from the Kapoor khaandaan

Dard-E-Dil (Karz, 1980)

Music: Laxmikant-Pyarelal Lyrics: Anand Bakshi

Om Shanti Om (Karz, 1980)

Music: Laxmikant-Pyarelal Lyrics: Anand Bakshi

Bachna Ae Haseeno (Hum Kisise Kum Naheen, 1977)

Music: RD Burman Lyrics: Majrooh Sultanpuri

Oh Hansini (Zehreela Insaan, 1974)

Music: RD Burman Lyrics: Majrooh Sultanpuri

Khullam Khulla Pyaar Karenge Hum Dono (Khel Khel Mein, 1975)

Music: RD Burman, Lyrics: Gulshan Bawra

Tere Chehre Se (Kabhie Kabhie, 1976)

Music: Khayyam Lyrics: Sahir Ludhianvi

Payaliya (Deewana, 1992)

Music: Nadeem-Shravan Lyrics: Sameer

Tera Phoolon Jaisa Rang (Kabhie Kabhie, 1976)

Music: Khayyam Lyrics: Sahir Ludhianvi

Jab Se Tumko Dekha (Damini, 1993)

Music: Nadeem-Shravan Lyrics: Sameer

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This new strategy has shown the village folks that under the DPCF (Disrupted Pattern Combat Fatigues) beats a kind heart, that feels for their animals. And if the ITBP is so sympathetic to their animals, then surely they have their hearts in the right pla

By Manjeet Negi: There was no presence of government in these villages, situated deep in the jungles of this Naxal affected state. The Naxals ruled the roost. The poor villagers had no option but to eke out a living under the looming Naxal influence. All this has changed now after ITBP launched Op IFVG, an acronym for "Iron fist - Velvet glove".

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The winds of change started blowing across the villages of Narayanpur for the first time after veterinary wing of ITBP, fully trained in jungle warfare and guerilla tactics, started helping small and marginal animal owners.

ITBP senior officials closely monitored the situation in these villages and found that every household was dependent on a cow to feed the infants and adults with milk and curd. If the bovine was sick or dead, the family was denied milk supply, probably the only wholesome source of nutrition other than jungle produce.

Considering economic empowerment, a decision was taken to use the veterinary skills of ITBP to help the villagers. The veterinary wing of the force is also a fighting wing so there were no security concerns during these veterinary camps. In the case of Naxal attack, these animal lovers in combat fatigues, were capable of giving a bloody nose to the opponent.

ITBP saved the life of this milking cow by intravenous drip for 3 continuous days in Naxal stronghold village in Narayanpur district. Due to the efforts, the nine-month-old child of the family can now have milk.

The permanent presence of the newly inducted ITBP "veterinary fighting troops" in Narayanpur district has completely changed the images of forces in these areas that had hardly any presence of the government. Naxals are now at their wits end. They do not have any veterinary trained men and are unable to help the villagers in keeping their cattle wealth healthy. Villager's admiration for the vets in combat fatigues has reached the CM of Chhattisgarh, who has commended the efforts of ITBP in successfully winning the hearts and minds of the villagers, previously forced to live in poverty under fear of the Naxal gun.

ITBP was vaccinating a cow against BQ and RP, ensuring that this cow lives to give milk to the poor family. ITBP diagnosed TRP ( traumatic reticulo-pericarditiis) in this cow and saved her life. ITBP is now providing veterinary cover to all the cattle owned by the villagers under the CAP ( civic action programme) budget as a aid to the stage government.

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This new strategy has shown the village folks that under the DPCF (Disrupted Pattern Combat Fatigues) beats a kind heart, that feels for their animals. And if the ITBP is so sympathetic to their animals, then surely they have their hearts in the right place.

Also read: 34 dead as elephants go on the rampage in Chhattisgarh, but CM Raman Singh blames Jharkhand and Odisha

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By PTI: Washington, Sep 4 (PTI) NASAs Juno spacecraft has sent back the first-ever images of Jupiters north pole, which show storm systems and weather activity unlike anything previously seen on any of our solar systems gas-giant planets.

The images were taken during the solar powered spacecrafts first flyby of the planet with its instruments switched on.

Juno successfully executed the first of 36 orbital flybys on August 27 when the spacecraft came about 4,200 kilometres above Jupiters swirling clouds.

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"First glimpse of Jupiters north pole, and it looks like nothing we have seen or imagined before," said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in the US.

"Its bluer in colour up there than other parts of the planet, and there are a lot of storms. There is no sign of the latitudinal bands or zone and belts that we are used to - this image is hardly recognisable as Jupiter.

"Were seeing signs that the clouds have shadows, possibly indicating that the clouds are at a higher altitude than other features," said Bolton.

One of the most notable findings of these first-ever pictures of Jupiters north and south poles is something that the JunoCam imager did not see, NASA said.

"Saturn has a hexagon at the north pole. There is nothing on Jupiter that anywhere near resembles that. The largest planet in our solar system is truly unique. We have 36 more flybys to study just how unique it really is," said Bolton.

The Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM), supplied by the Italian Space Agency, acquired some remarkable images of Jupiter at its north and south polar regions in infrared wavelengths.

"JIRAM is getting under Jupiters skin, giving us our first infrared close-ups of the planet," said Alberto Adriani, JIRAM co-investigator from Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali, Rome.

"These first infrared views of Jupiters north and south poles are revealing warm and hot spots that have never been seen before.

"And while we knew that the first-ever infrared views of Jupiters south pole could reveal the planets southern aurora, we were amazed to see it for the first time. No other instruments, both from Earth or space, have been able to see the southern aurora," said Adriani.

"Now, with JIRAM, we see that it appears to be very bright and well-structured. The high level of detail in the images will tell us more about the auroras morphology and dynamics," Adriani said.

Among the more unique data sets collected by Juno during its first scientific sweep by Jupiter was that acquired by the missions Radio/Plasma Wave Experiment (Waves), which recorded ghostly-sounding transmissions emanating from above the planet.

These radio emissions from Jupiter have been known about since the 1950s but had never been analysed from such a close vantage point. PTI SAR SAR

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By PTI: Bengaluru, Sep 4 (PTI) An expansion of the Siddaramaiah government in Karnataka will take place tomorrow, nearly three months after a major rejig which had triggered discontent over dropping of some ministers.

"State cabinet expansion on September 5 at 4.30 pm at Glass House of Raj Bhavan in Bengaluru," Department of Information and Public Relations said in a release here.

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Sources in the state Congress said that M Krishnappa, a Vokkaliga leader representing Vijaynagar Assembly constituency here, is likely to be inducted into the cabinet.

This is seen by political observers as a move by Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, heading the three-year old Congress government, to assuage the ruffled sentiments of Vokkaliga community who have been expressing their ire for dropping their leaders -- M H Ambareesh and Kimmane Ratnakar in June this year.

The chief minister, in a major revamp, had sacked 14 ministers and inducted 13 members into his Council of Ministry on June 20, which led to discontent with actor-turned politician Ambareesh resigning as MLA. PTI BDN VS ASV

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Editors note: The Record & Landmark does not identify victims of sexual assault.

March 13, 1979: Around 11 p.m., a knitter in her late 20s arrives home to her Statesville duplex after a long day of work at a local factory.

A short time later, two of her three children  ages 2 and 6 -- are dropped off by her sister. The woman puts the kids to bed then begins to unwind.

Just as shes getting comfortable, a bang on the door startles her. She pulls open the door a few inches and sees a small group of people. She figures its folks from a party she heard in the duplexs other apartment.

One asks if the woman is interested in selling the white Plymouth Fury parked in the backyard. It isnt hers, she tells them. Her husband could talk to them about it, but he wouldnt be home for a few hours. She closes the door and continues to try to relax.

But soon she hears the faint sound of her back door opening.

She walks to the door and closes it, then returns to her bedroom. There she finds the contents of her purse strewn on the floor.

Now its clear that someone is in the apartment with her.

Guarded, the woman then walks into the kitchen. Just then, a man steps out of the shadows and comes face to face with her. Hes wearing dark clothing. Theres red paint on his boots.

She cant look, and covers her face with her hands. She sobs as she begs him to leave. She then feels something press against her head.

Shut up, the man says. If you want to live, youll do as I tell you.

He then begins raping her. Shes helpless as her youngest child cries in the distance.

In that minute, you see your whole life flash by, the woman recalled. You do what you need to do in order to save you and your childrens life.

Then, he stops. The woman falls to the ground.

He tells her his name is John, and warns her to Look out your window tomorrow night. Ill be back.

THE ACCUSED

Norman Satterfield -- inmate number 0358611-- is currently assigned to Forsyth Correctional Center. He was originally sentenced to life for the 1979 rape and burglary. But following a court hearing in Iredell Superior Court on May 20 this year, his sentence was reduced to the 37 years hes served for the crime.

Hes now serving eight years for a robbery conviction.

Satterfield has always maintained his innocence in the rape case.

When he first began his sentence, he studied law books to try to determine how he could clear his name, he said. In late 2000s, he sent letters to the Duke Law Innocence Project to ask for help. Ultimately, that organization declined to help.

Soon a similar organization stepped in.

In 2012, the Wake Forest University Innocence and Justice Clinic agreed to take his case. For four years, they worked with Satterfield trying to clear his name.

During a recent interview inside a 10-by-10-foot break room at Forsyth Correctional, Satterfield spoke in a deep, staccato manner. His hands were animated, and serving as reinforcement for his words.

Satterfield grew up Statesville and attended Statesville High, but left before he graduated.

At the age of 23, he was working at the Gilson Brothers factory spraying steel, he said.

I had a good paying job and good life, he said.

He was shocked the day law enforcement showed up at his work to question him about the rape, he said.

The woman had reported the rape shortly after it happened. She was taken to a hospital, where forensic tests were done -- standard practice in rape cases.

The woman remembers the compassion showed by a nurse during the testing.

Satterfield became a suspect after a man with the name given to the victim during the attack told police about Satterfield. That man was ruled out as a suspect because he didnt match the description of the attacker, according to court documents.

Early on in the investigation, the woman was put under regression hypnosis to help identify her attacker, the documents said.

She identified two men during the session. One was Satterfield and the other his brother, Bruce. The two men looked nothing alike, the documents said. They differed in height by three inches, in weight by 30 pounds. There were also differences in their skin tones, hairstyle, facial hair and voice.

Detectives brought in the Satterfield brothers and other black men for a physical lineup about a week later.

The woman told detectives she was absolutely positive her attacker was one of the brothers, but wasnt certain which one, according to court documents.

On May 17, 1979, detectives arrested Satterfield and charged him with first-degree burglary and second-degree rape. He posted bond three days later and was released.

I was out of a job, Satterfield said. (My employer) told me to get this situation taken care of.

Nobody wanted to hire him after he was charged with the rape and burglary. He soon became desperate for money.

On Sept. 17, 1979, he robbed a bookstore on Shelton Avenue.

Satterfield said he used an unloaded .32 caliber pistol and took money from the register and the clerks pocket.

During the robbery, a second man came into the store and struck the clerk with a hammer. Satterfield said that the man was not part of the original robbery plan, but saw an opportunity to get money.

Both men ran from the scene, but were later caught. Satterfield was charged with two counts of common law robbery. He went back to jail to await the rape trial.

THE TRIAL

Satterfields trial was the first time the woman had ever been to court, she said. She was overwhelmed by the experience.

It was frightening, she said.

Satterfield pleaded not guilty to the charges, and had a court-appointed attorney.

In court, the victim told the jury that Satterfield looked like the man who attacked her, Satterfield said. His sister testified on his behalf, saying that he was home with her when the crime occurred, he said.

During a portion of the victims testimony, she froze, she said.

My mouth was moving, but no sound was coming out, she said. I wanted to speak, but couldnt.

The jury deliberated for three hours before returning the verdict, the victim said.

When the verdict was read, everyone started clapping and cheering until the judge told them to be quiet, she added.

Then, the judge asked Satterfield if he had anything to say. You have the wrong man, he told the court.

Moments later, Judge Hal Hammer Walker sentenced him to life in prison.

TWO LIVES CHANGED

Over three decades later, the woman, now 65, is visually impaired, and has post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression. And time has just compounded her issues, she said.

Back then, I thought all I would have to do is take a bath and itll all be over.

No matter how badly you want to contain it, you cant, she said. Its uncontrollable.

Shes divorced from the man who was her husband at the time of the rape. Her current husband has also been affected, she said.

I became stand-offish, she said. We lost our intimacy. I was trapped in my own personal hell.

Her children were affected too, she said. She fought with them more often, became impatient and lost her drive to perform daily activities.

Sometimes I would sit and cry for no reason, she added.

Before the woman was raped, she was confident, but naive, she said.

I never thought the words rape or assault would apply to me, she said.

Even to this day, she tries to be more aware of her surroundings. You cant ever let your guard down, she said.

Satterfield, now 60, has been assigned to 13 different locations, he said. So far, its been like, going up a mountain wearing rollerblades.

You have no control over your life, he said. Prisons are human warehouses for societys misfits, outcasts, schizophrenics, the poor and the transgressors.

While in prison, Satterfield missed several funerals for loved ones, he said. He continues to try to keep a positive outlook.

Hes completed courses on personal success and human resources, and attempted to finish a sociology course, he said.

He also completed his GED in 1984.

I  realized that both (the victim) and myself were victims of the same circumstance, Satterfield said in a statement following a recent court hearing. So again, I hold no anger, resentment nor animosity whatsoever towards anyone in my heart.

THE INNOCENCE AND JUSTICE CLINIC

The Wake Forest School of Laws Innocence and Justice Clinic offers students hands-on opportunities to investigate, identify and advance credible wrongful felony conviction claims by inmates in North Carolina, according to its website.

In selecting cases, the group looks for risk factors for wrongful convictions, said attorney Mark Rabil, director of the clinic.

When the group dug into Satterfields case, it found that the evidence in the case had been lost. They also learned about the uncertainty of the identification and the hypnosis, which was legal at the time but became inadmissible in 1984.

The problem is that the jury was not told about the hypnosis, Rabil said. And Mr. Satterfield did not know, and it appears his lawyer did not know, and that violates the constitution.

But on May 20 of this year, attorneys were unable to track down the victim for Satterfields motion for an appropriate relief hearing in Iredell County Superior Court. Attorneys said they tried to contact the victim but could not find her.

The victim said she was shocked to hear he could be released.

Why could they not find me? she said. We have all of this technology these days. It really upset me not letting me voice my opinion about this.

During the hearing, Superior Court Judge Julia Gullett signed off on the motion in which Satterfield received credit for time served and was expected to be released.

But at the last minute, court officials told Rabil about the common law robbery conviction. The number attached to the robbery case was overlooked, he said.

One main reason for the change in sentence was the fact that no evidence still existed from the case. Back then, evidence was oftentimes trashed once a case made its way through court and ended in a conviction.

There needs to be some way to preserve evidence, the victim said. theres no evidence, its like it never happened. But it did.

Its very unusual to find evidence from cases that old, so I was not surprised, Rabil said. Nowadays there is a statute that says that biological evidence cannot be destroyed without notice to the defendant.

Rabil said he believes that if the evidence still existed, it would show Satterfields innocence and hopefully identify the real rapist.
A man was killed in Anantnag following violent clashes between protestors and security forces on Saturday evening.

By Shuja-ul-Haq : A civilian was killed in clashes with security forces in Vesu area of Qazigund in Anantnag district Saturday evening while more than 200 protestors sustained pellet and tear gas shell injuries during the day. The death toll reaches 73.

Separatist have given a call for march towards airport road as the all party delegation arrives in the Valley. Close to 50 people sustained injuries in the protests and clashes that erupted in various parts of South Kashmir.

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The number of injured has come close to 10,000 in the past 57 days of wide-spread unrest triggered by the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani on July 8.

Meanwhile, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti had urged Hurriyat leaders to join the all-party delegation meet today. She asked separatists groups to participate in the meet and engage with Parliamentarians visiting the Valley.

In a letter the different groups, Mufti sought cooperation in peacefully resolving the ongoing unrest.



Also read:

Kashmir unrest: Mehbooba Mufti urges separatists to engage with all-party delegation



--- ENDS ---
The global steel glut is shaping up as a hot-button issue as leaders of the Group of 20 major economies meet in China, securing a mention in their communique.

That would show that overcapacity in steel  for which China has come in for criticism  remains on the radar for the world's biggest economies months after it was raised in the discussions at a G-7 summit in Japan.

The wording of the G-20 communique is not final and could be altered before its release, according to two officials involved, who asked not to be identified because the negotiations are confidential. A copy of the planned statement as of Saturday morning was seen by Bloomberg.

"We recognize that the structural problems, including excess capacity in some industries, exacerbated by a weak global economic recovery and depressed market demand, have caused a negative impact on trade and workers," G-20 leaders will say, according to the communique. "We recognize that excess capacity in steel and other industries is a global issue which requires collective responses."

The statement for the Hangzhou meeting echoes one from a July G-20 gathering of finance ministers that expressed concern about the outlook for global growth. It warns that growth is still weaker than desirable and warns against a protectionist mood on trade and investment. China has recently found itself stymied on potential investments in the U.K. and Australia.

China has said the steel issue is one of demand rather than supply. Cutting overcapacity requires global action, China Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao said Friday at a briefing in Hangzhou. Fewer accusations and more cooperation on the matter would benefit the global economy, Zhu said, adding China had been first among the major economies to take action in reducing overcapacity.

"There are concerns on specific issues like steel production, which today is excessive," said Brazil's Finance Minister Henrique Meirelles. "That will be a theme," he said in reference to discussions at the G-20 summit. China, which built up considerable capacity, is at the heart of the issue, Meirelles said.

The global flood of Chinese steel is stoking trade tensions with nations from India to Europe, and U.S. lawmakers have asked President Barack Obama to raise the issue with his hosts at the G-20. President Xi Jinping has ordered as much as 150 million metric tons, or about 13 percent, of annual capacity to shut by 2020 as part of the Communist Party's plans to address industrial overcapacity amid slowing demand for basic materials. China makes about half of the world's steel.
All-party meet delegation lead by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh has ended talks with CM Mehbooba Mufti and other leaders.

By Ashraf Wani: All party delegation on Kashmir lead by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh has ended the talks with chief ministers and leaders from the valley.



During the two-day visit the leaders will discuss the ongoing turmoil in Kashmir with different political parties to bring an amicable solution.

The delegation arrived in the Valley amidst a shutdown call by separatists. While restrictions were imposed to avoid any untoward events, separatists on Saturday called for a march towards airport road ahead of the party meet.

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The delegation arrived amidst beefed security. Sources said that although curfew was not imposed, there were heavy deployment of security forces along the Srinagar airport road.

All party delegation on Kashmir lead by HM Rajnath Singh arrives in Srinagar (earlier visuals) pic.twitter.com/WoL03MRT0D ANI (@ANI_news) September 4, 2016

Delegation will interact with Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti and her party Leaders which will fallow by series of meetings with other Political Parties of from the state.

Meanwhile Hurriyat Conference has already decided not to meet All Party Delegation, but there is strong voice within the delegation wanting to meet separatist leaders.

While all party delegation is in Srinagar there are reports of violence and stone pelting incidents on security forces from different parts of Kashmir. Over 50 people have been injured in the ongoing clashes between protesters and security forces in clashes in Shopian town of south Kashmir.



MEHBOOBA URGES HURRIYAT LEADERS TO JOIN ALL-PARTY MEET



Earlier, CM Mehbooba Mufti had urged Hurriyat leaders to join the all-party delegation meet today. She asked separatists groups to participate in the meet and engage with Parliamentarians visiting the Valley.

In a letter the different groups, Mufti sought cooperation in peacefully resolving the ongoing unrest.

Protests and clashes erupted in Kashmir after Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani was killed by security forces in an encounter on July 8. Including the youth who was killed on Saturday the death toll has reached 74 and thousands of civilians were injured in the clashes.





Also read:

Kashmir unrest: Mehbooba Mufti urges separatists to engage with all-party delegation

Kashmiri traders, Sikh bodies boycott meet with parliamentarians

Kashmir unrest: CRPF used 1.3 mn pellets on protesters till August 11, police pushes for Herstal 303 riot guns

Kashmir unrest: Rajnath Singh approves use of chilli-based PAVA shells as alternative to pellet guns







--- ENDS ---
BRUSSELS  The European Commission denies that its shock demand that Apple Inc. hand 13 billion euros in back taxes to Ireland is, in the pungent phrase of Apple CEO Tim Cook, "total political crap."

But, say senior EU officials involved, the decision certainly has a strong political element, even if Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager says she is confident her case will stand up to Cook's appeal on its legal merits alone.

Brussels' political target is less corporate America than euroskeptics at home who threaten to pull the EU apart if it fails to show alienated voters it can act in their interests.

"Being political should not be confused with politicized," said a spokeswoman for Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker. For him, fighting tax avoidance had been a "top priority" since before he took over the EU executive two years ago, she said.

"The drive towards fairer taxation is in President Juncker's political guidelines," she said. At the same time, Vestager is an "entirely independent" enforcer of EU competition law, she added.

Efforts under way, including in the United States, to clamp down on tax avoidance are political in the sense that all states, with budgets under strain, face pressure from voters to claw back cash from other people, preferably wealthy companies, tax experts and government officials say.

For European Union institutions, the struggle is less for money  Apple's cash will go to Ireland if Vestager wins her case.

What Brussels is fighting for is the EU's very survival against euroskeptics like the Brexiteers who persuaded Britons to quit the bloc in June.

Those populists, on left and right, from the U.K. Independence Party to France's National Front or 5-Star in Italy, have scored with voters by accusing the EU and the executive Commission of cozying up to big, global business against the little people.

"Apple shows how you fight against populism," a senior EU official familiar with the Commission chief's thinking told Reuters, describing a two-pronged strategy directed by Juncker.

One part of the strategy is a push for new global tax rules, led by EU Commissioner for Economic Affairs Pierre Moscovici, a French Socialist former finance minister. The other part rests on punishing the worst past abusers to deter others.

Vestager says the goal is to change corporate culture so that businesses anxious for their reputation stop trying to pay as little tax as possible and choose to pay "the right amount."

On Juncker's political goal, he won government backing in Paris and Berlin. And many European media also welcomed the Apple move. Le Monde, leftish voice of establishment France and critic of Juncker's low-tax policies when he was premier of Luxembourg, said he had shown "the zeal of the newly converted."

"Europe is changing," it wrote. "Bravo, Monsieur Juncker."

Showing voters EU cares

"The EUs message is clear," Juncker wrote for a G20 meeting in China this weekend. "All companies must pay their fair share.

"This is first and foremost a question of fairness. It has urgent practical implications as well. We cannot let down our schools, hospitals and public services that need this money."

The $14.5-billion demand which angered the United States and worried Apple's peers was engineered for shock and awe, the EU official said. Juncker sees Vestager as what the EU president calls his "Rottweiler," he added.

Apple and the Irish government say Vestager is rewriting the iPhone maker's quarter-century of history in Ireland. Apple denies that Dublin gave it tax breaks amounting to illegal state aid.

What has changed is the politics. The financial crisis has impoverished Western governments just as footloose young tech firms became hugely rich without paying much tax anywhere.

U.S. Senate revelations about Apple in 2013 fueled public anger and, with some irony, prompted the EU to start inquiries.

Juncker's own history has also played a part. A conservative prime minister of Luxembourg for 19 years, he helped transform it from industrial rustbowl to a financial hub its bigger neighbors saw as helping businesses deprive them of revenues.

Weeks after taking over the Commission in late 2014, he faced calls to resign when deals between Luxembourg and global corporates were splashed in world media as the LuxLeaks affair.

He denied involvement but, aides say, the uproar helped galvanize Juncker for a tax crackdown he had already promised.

Driving his pledge to run a "political Commission" to reconnect with voters alienated by out-of-touch, technocratic elites in Brussels was a fear that his five-year term was, in his words, the "last chance" to save the Union from break-up.

Legal underpinnings

"It's political in the sense that, if the Commission is prioritizing the allocation of its resources, then clearly tax evasion and tax avoidance are very high on the political agenda everywhere," said Sophie in 't Veld, deputy leader of the centrist group in the European Parliament. "This is something that citizens are rightly and understandably concerned about."

That political approach, Brussels officials stress, does not mean capricious or lacking legal basis. Vestager is clear she must win in court on some untested points of law against the best tax attorneys Silicon Valley and Washington can buy, and against EU member state Ireland.

Asked about Cook's comments to an Irish newspaper about the EU's "political" motives, she said: "I dont think the courts will hear any kind of political opinions or feelings or whats in your stomach or whatever. They want the facts of the case."

Listen, then bite

Some EU officials think the anger of Cook and U.S. officials at the historic scale of the tax demand may partly stem from underestimating Vestager's uncompromising character.

Tall, courteous and soft-spoken, she is a woman who takes trouble to greet captains of industry by the lift and escort them back to her office, often then serving them coffee herself. It may wrong-foot those used to more confrontational politicians and executives. She is a listener rather than a talker.

"There are some people who are very loud ... but ... it is very important to have a very, very, very open ear to those who are not loud," the former economy minister and liberal party leader told Reuters on taking office two years ago.

People who work with her say she listens closely to career officials on her staff  much more than did her Spanish predecessor Joaquin Almunia, a professional economist.

One U.S. tech giant to feel a change of approach after 2014 was Google, with whom Almunia worked for years to reach a compromise over concerns about its market dominance. Since last year, Vestager has hit Google with three separate charges.

She also put an end to hesitation in Brussels by launching a price fixing case against Russian gas giant Gazprom last year.

Most current state aid tax cases, including Apple, were launched by Almunia but competition experts question whether he would have come to Vestager's radical conclusion. Almunia's own predecessor Neelie Kroes, now at another Silicon Valley darling Uber, said this week the Dane had gone too far against Apple.

Some observers believe Vestager, a professional politician since her student days, may be tempted to use cases to raise her profile and further greater ambitions. She says not.

Predecessors have also taken on Washington, among them Mario Monti, later Italy's prime minister, who blocked a mega-merger between GE and Honeywell in 2001 despite U.S. support for it, and Kroes, who slapped heavy fines on Microsoft in 2008.

There may be more to come, Vestager says. Her 800 staff are looking at about 1,000 inquiries where firms may have gained an edge by cutting tax deals with governments seeking investment.

A pastor's daughter, Vestager summed up her political credo in the 2014 interview with Reuters: "I was brought up with a very strong value," she said. "That you should always protect the few and the small against those who want to misuse their muscle."
It sounds like a simple fix to the nations immense problem of funding Social Security and Medicare for an aging country  just get everyone to work to 70 and the math works out a lot better.

But this idea, despite being embraced by a number of politicians, has a long way to go. Its being challenged in academic circles as a new form of inequality. This one has been dubbed longevity inequality.

The argument made against a retirement age of 70 is that its not fair to people in the types of jobs that require brawn. Think of a 68-year-old climbing on top of a house to replace the roofing. Then compare that person with a 68-year-old tapping a computer keyboard.

In addition, people with college educations and desk jobs tend to live longer than those with low incomes. Heres where the money inequality issue gets fierce. If the professional lives a lot longer than the roofer, after retiring at 70 the person who had the desk job could keep getting monthly Social Security checks for years longer than the roofer. So the argument is that a lot more Social Security will go to the affluent people than to those who met their demise at a much earlier point in life.

During the last few years, the issue of pushing the retirement age to 70 gained ground as researchers noted that people are living much longer than they once did. In 1915, a 65-year-old man could expect to live until age 79.7 on average. In 2015, it was 86.1 years. Thats 6.4 extra years of drawing Social Security benefits. For women, life expectancy has climbed from 83.7 years in 1915 to 88.7 in 2015.

But those are averages. Studies have shown life expectancy varies based on income, race, education and even the state or county where people reside. The General Accountability Office dug into the issue this spring with a report that showed great discrepancies in life expectancy between income groups.

Lower-income men approaching retirement live on average 3.6 to 12.7 fewer years than higher-income men, the GAO wrote in its report. And with those shorter life spans, the GAO noted, lower-income people would end up earning far less Social Security than the higher-income people because lower-income groups tend to live shorter than the national average for life expectancy.

Dying earlier ends up cutting a low-income persons lifetime benefits by as much as 11 to 14 percent, said the GAO. Based simply on longevity, higher-income workers now get $70,000 more over a lifetime than low-income retirees, the GAO said.

Low-income people also depend more on Social Security than the affluent. Currently, monthly Social Security benefits on average equal about half of what lower-income people were making while working. Workers with relatively high career earnings received monthly checks that equal about 30 percent of what they earned while working.

When people retire earlier than the full retirement age, their monthly check is reduced. Despite the reduction, the most common age to retire in 2014 was 62. Full retirement age is now 66. So a person who would have received $1,000 at age 66 would get only $750 at age 62.

Many people retire early because they have little choice. They become ill or encounter layoffs or other problems at work. About 36 percent of current retirees retired earlier than they planned, according to research by Employee Benefit Research Institute.

Groups that want 70 to be the age for full retirement benefits would allow people to retire earlier, but doing so would reduce their monthly check. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump have embraced the idea.

Currently the average person in the low-income group who was making $20,000 when working would get $156,000 over a lifetime in Social Security benefits after retiring at age 62 and living to 83, according to the GAO. A person in the high-income group who was making about $80,000 would get about $355,000 over a lifetime after retiring at 62 and living to 83.

But in the low-income group, living to 80 would be more likely. And that would mean receiving about $138,000 from Social Security after retiring at 62. The higher-income man would have a life expectancy of 86 and earn $411,000 from Social Security after retiring at 62.

The Center For Retirement Research at Boston College recently ranked the jobs that would be the most likely to require a person to retire prior to full retirement age: rock splitter in a quarry, floor sander, steelworker, commercial diver, truck driver and oil rigger.

White-collar jobs where people tend to be the most able to continue working include: interior designer, lawyer, aerospace engineer, loan counselor and radio announcer.

Meanwhile, some professional jobs are also physically demanding and can become difficult with age, including surgeons and critical care nurses.
It was early 2009 and the Great Recession was taking its toll. Metro was cutting public transit routes in St. Louis, and Gwen Moore started getting complaints from her students.

She was teaching business and international management classes at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and many of her students said they were having a hard time getting to class or to work with the reduced transit routes and schedule.

Moore approached the problem like an academic. She dug into the numbers, trying to understand why there werent more transit opportunities in St. Louis, especially in neighborhoods serving people at or near the poverty line. Her research focused on state transportation funding, and what she found made her mad.

What I discovered was, the funds were not being distributed appropriately, Moore said.

In fact, like in many areas of state spending, St. Louis and other cities in Missouri  the places where more people live and most of the economic activity in the state is  were getting (and still are) much less than their fair share of transportation dollars. They need to spend the money where people actually live and drive.

In Missouri, thats not the case.

According to research compiled by the Missouri Coalition for Better Transportation, of which Moore is a member, the Missouri Department of Transportation has been shorting its cities, particularly St. Louis, for more than a decade. The coalition, which includes Les Sterman, the former executive director of the East-West Gateway Council of Governments, has produced a research document titled Back of the Bus that outlines the disparities.

For instance:

More than 80 percent of gas and vehicle sales taxes are generated in urban areas, but the cities receive less than a quarter of overall MoDOT spending.

Over the past decade, MoDOT spent 80 percent of its funds in rural areas, even though they carry only 36 percent of the traffic.

In Missouri, urban taxpayers receive only 35 cents on the dollar for their investments.

Moore calls this highway robbery, and she and others are trying a new strategy to do something about it.

In August, Moore, as head of the better transportation coalition, and Esther Haywood, president of the St. Louis County NAACP, each wrote U.S. Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-Mo., and asked him to seek Justice Department intervention into Missouris disparate road funding.

To Moore and Haywood, this is a civil rights issue. By failing to fund transportation fairly in Missouris biggest cities, where the majority of black residents live, the state is out of compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, they argue.

For half a century, long past the civil rights era, transportation in Missouri has discriminated against people living in urban areas, Haywood wrote.

Fixing Missouris transportation issues will be more difficult than repaving an interstate highway during St. Louis rush hour. The problems are structural.

Missouris constitution has been interpreted to not allow state transportation to go to transit funding, which immediately puts the states cities at a disadvantage. Just as important, the state is responsible for almost 34,000 miles of roads, making it the seventh-largest highway system in the country, far out of whack for a state that is 18th in population. Meanwhile, Missouri underfunds its roads and bridges, consistently ranking in the low end of states for highway funding.

Last legislative session, Sen. Ryan Silvey, R-Kansas City, tried to address one of the problems, proposing a bill that would return thousands of rural road miles to the counties that used to be responsible for them. The bill never got out of committee.

Moore wants the Justice Department to come back to St. Louis and follow the model it did in assessing police and court disparities in Ferguson. Just an investigation by the Justice Department viewing transportation through a civil rights lens  which the Ferguson Commission also called for  might put pressure on lawmakers to return more transportation dollars to St. Louis and Kansas City, where they can have a greater impact on the states economy.

Right now, there is momentum building in St. Louis for a serious discussion on improving the regions investment in transit, making it easier to connect poor people to jobs, to health care, to the citys life. Building new transit lines would be much more economical if St. Louis was getting a fair share of its transportation dollars returned to it.

We clearly have disparate impact, Moore said. More than $1 billion a year is not going back to where it was paid. This is real highway robbery.
American employers and workers alike continue to grapple with the right formula that will shake the economy out of its doldrums and restore a robust job market. On a day when America celebrates its working women and men, an unmistakable workforce malaise suggests theres less and less to celebrate. Politicians should pay attention.

Labor feels its back is against the wall on wages, and there are no more sacrifices to be made for the sake of preserving jobs and maintaining U.S. competitiveness. Despite continuing high productivity rates, American workers still see their wages stagnate in real-dollar terms while the nations corporate elite enjoy skyrocketing salaries.

Corporations argue that our nation is losing market share in the global economy, and they must either automate production or locate manufacturing in places where labor and production costs are lower. The same considerations apply domestically. Union-friendly states like Missouri find themselves left in the dust as employers increasingly choose right to work states like Texas, where unions hold minimal sway.

Its an issue that will not resolve itself anytime soon. And it has become the central issue in the Missouri gubernatorial race between Republican Eric Greitens and Democrat Chris Koster, the states incumbent attorney general.

Greitens wants to make Missouri Americas 27th right-to-work state, which means he would downgrade labor unions influence by giving workers in union shops the right not to have union fees deducted from their paychecks. Given the option, workers tend to pocket their money rather than hand it over to a union they dont necessarily support.

Koster, who has strong union backing, pledges not to alter the current formula for collective bargaining rights and continue making dues deductions mandatory when an employer has a union contract in place.

The stakes couldnt be higher, which is why vested national interests on both sides of the issue are pumping money into this race to influence the outcome. If Democrats lose the governorship and its veto power, the Legislature is almost certain to make right-to-work the new standard, dealing a potentially fatal blow to collective bargaining.

No one can deny that Texas has a booming job market. But it also has notoriously low pay scales for workers outside the oil industry. Missourians need to weigh the heavy costs of emulating the Texas model.

Its also unrealistic for American retailers and manufacturers to expect demand in our economy to revive without some kind of stimulus. Consumers need buying power, which can only come through wage increases. Workers can relocate all they want to other states, but if they still have to grapple with low pay scales, demand for consumer goods will continue to stall.

Thats why, this Labor Day, all eyes are on Missouri to see which way the nation tips.
Three members of the all-party delegation, Sitaram Yechury, D Raja and Asaduddin Owaisi, will call on hardline separatist leader Syed Ali Geelani for a "transparent agenda-based dialogue to address the core issue" of Kashmir.

By Ashraf Wani: A section of the all-party delegation will today meet Hurriyat leaders after separatists turned down talks with them, sources said today.

Three members of the all-party delegation, Sitaram Yechury, D Raja and Asaduddin Owaisi, will to call on hardline separatist leader Syed Ali Geelani for a "transparent agenda-based dialogue to address the core issue" of Kashmir.

"The situation is very critical. It seems that the current situation is more critical than that in 2010. We are trying to maintain normalcy in the state," Sitaram Yechury said.

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The leaders, who are part of an all-party delegation, said they would meet the Hurriyat in "individual capacity".



This came after separatists rejected Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti's invitation to them for meeting with the delegation and termed the measure as "deceitful".

Also read: Kashmir unrest: Separatist leaders call Parliamentary delegation's visit a crisis management tactic

In a joint statement, separatist leaders Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq (both of separate Hurriyat Conference factions) and Yasin Malik (of JKLF) dismissed the chief minister's offer.

"No one is more aware than Mehbooba Ji that the Indian war machine is on a spree to kill, maim and disfigure an entire population into complete submission for demanding freedom from Indian occupation which is the birth right of all human beings," the statement read.

Also read: Kashmir unrest: All-party meet with Mehbooba Mufti, other leaders ends

"Indian engagement with the people of Jammu and Kashmir has been only through state violence perpetrated through these armed forces that have killed close to a lakh and brutalized all of the population. In politics India has deployed deceit, double talk, themselves and through their quislings, continuously for the past 70 years. These deceitful methods of crisis management through Parliamentary Delegations and Track-II only prolong the sufferings of the people and cannot take the place of a genuine transparent agenda-based dialogue to address the core issue of the peoples` right to self-determination in Jammu and Kashmir," the separatist leaders said.

WATCH: Hope our outreach to Hurriyat will help restore normalcy to the region: Sitaram Yechury



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Damage caused to the statue by vandals

AN iconic memorial to Stratford-upon-Avon author Marie Corelli is set to be restored by the middle of next year following a recent grant from the Stratford Town Trust.

The project to restore the statue has been led by Stratfordian Nick Birch, who runs a website dedicated to Marie Corelli.

For years the Marie Corelli memorial, featuring an angel with its arms outstretched, stood prominently in Stratford cemetery, but it was targeted by vandals three-and-a-half years ago, who knocked it from its plinth causing significant damage.

Since then Nick has seen it as his mission to restore it to its former glory, liaising with various organisations over funding and finding a suitable place to restore it.

Last month he finally received the news he was waiting for when the Town Trust agreed to pay 4,121 for the transportation costs and reinstatement of the statue.

It is not just Stratford that will benefit from the memorial, students at the City and Guild School of Art in London will restore the statue for their final year project when it arrives from storage in Stratford.

Nick said: Im so pleased and very grateful that the Town Trust has agreed to give us funding, I know there are a lot of worthy causes in Stratford and Im delighted that they have chosen to help this project.

The statue will be transported to London in October and work on it will hopefully be completed by the middle of next year.

Im a huge fan of Marie Corelli and I had this idea that if someone didnt act to restore this work of art, then it could end up just being thrown in a skip. I didnt think anyone else would take it on so I did.

Cliffords will put the statue back on the grave when it is finished and hopefully we can organise a bit of a shindig when its all complete. Were hoping to produce a booklet about Marie Corelli too so people can find out more about her."

The author, who died in 1924, wrote 30 bestselling books in the late 19th and 20th centuries, gaining millions of fans around the globe. At her height she was the bestselling author in England.
PARIS, Sept. 3, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Iranian opposition's call for justice for victims of Iran's 1988 massacre of political prisoners received a boost on Saturday from U.S. and European dignitaries.

In a seminar of Iranian communities in Europe on September 3, 2016, Iranian opposition leader Maryam Rajavi called on the international community, and Western governments in particular, to bring to justice the Iranian regime's leaders in international tribunals for committing crimes against humanity in Iran, in particular the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in 1988.

The seminar was held in the headquarters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), in the northern suburbs of Paris.

The vast majority of the political prisoners who were executed in 1988 were affiliated to the main Iranian opposition group People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI or MEK).

Rajavi denounced Western silence and inaction in the face of continued mass executions in Iran.

"Standing up to the violations of human rights in Iran is also the responsibility of Western governments, because its consequences do not remain within Iran. The terrorism and fundamentalism emanating from it, have been hurting defenseless people in Nice, Paris, and Brussels," Rajavi said.

A number of relatives of the massacred prisoners and former political prisoners spoke about their bitter experiences and memories of this horrific catastrophe.

Last month an audio file emerged from 1988 of top Iranian officials acknowledging that the massacre took place. Hossein-Ali Montazeri, Khomeini's one-time heir, could be heard telling members of a "Death Commission" that they and the founder of the regime, Ayatollah Khomeini, will go down in the annals of history as criminals.

Edward Rendell, Chairman of the U.S. Democratic National Convention in July 2016 and former Governor of Pennsylvania, told the seminar: "What could be more galling than to hear that Iran's current Minister of Justice was a member of the Death Commission in 1988?"

"There is so much in common between what the MEK (PMOI) have fought for and what the original American patriots fought for. I was taken by Mr. Montazeri's comment on the tape that the MEK - or the PMOI - is a school of thought, it's a school of logic, and you can't end it by killing people. It's an ideal, and these people are standing up for an ideal," he said.

"There is only one way that freedom will come to the people of Iran, and that's with regime change," Gov. Rendell added.

Bernard Kouchner, former French Foreign Minister and co-founder of Doctors without Borders (MSF) said: "I ask myself what were the human rights defenders doing at that time?" He called for a "special tribunal to prosecute the mullahs for their crimes."

"The massacres did not take place only in 1988. Iran continues to have the highest execution rate per capita. The executions have even increased after the nuclear deal," Kouchner added.

Struan Stevenson, President of European Iraqi Freedom Association (EIFA) and former President of European Parliament Delegation for Relation with Iraq, said: "What has happened about the 30000 who were massacred in 1988? Nothing from the West at all. If the United Nations is to retain one ounce of credibility they must take this take this up at the UN Human Rights Council this month in Geneva. It must be a key item on the agenda. It must go before the UN Security Council. The perpetrators and murderers must be held to account; they must be brought to justice."

Tahar Boumedra, a former UN Human Rights Chief in Iraq, assessed that "it is possible to bring those who committed crimes against humanity, those who committed illegal, summary, arbitrary executions in Iran, to justice. We have all the means of doing so."

Referring to Mr. Montazeri's audio file on the 1988 massacre, Maryam Rajavi said: The recent revelation has provoked a wave of wrath, protest, query, and a movement to obtain justice, among the people of Iran. The mullahs are shaking as the regime and the principle of Velayat-e Faqih have been undermined among the Iranian public, while popular support for the Mojahedin has grown. At the same time, the regime has been cracked at numerous points and the majority of the regime's senior clerics have refrained from defending the anti-Islamic fatwa for the massacre.

Maryam Rajavi emphasized that demanding justice for the 30,000 victims of the 1988 massacre is part of the campaign to overthrow the Iranian regime. She called on the Iranian public to rise in support and solidarity to expand the movement.

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/iranian-opposition-leader-calls-for-international-prosecution-of-iranian-officials-responsible-for-1988-massacre-300322406.html

SOURCE Iran News Update
SINGAPORE, Sept. 5, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- A drop in global shipping costs and competitive pricing of crude produced in North America is opening the door for US crude exports to reach Asia-Pacific more economically than rival grades from elsewhere in the Atlantic basin, including the North Sea and west Africa, according to a comparison of delivered crude prices launched by global commodity market price reporting agency Argus this month.

US crude exports to countries other than Canada soared to more than 350,000 b/d in May, less than six months after Washington lifted a four-decade ban on shipments abroad. Including Canada, US exports have doubled in the past two years to almost 700,000 b/d. China and Japan are now regular importers of US crude, with occasional purchases from South Korea, India and Singapore.

As US exports rise, refiners around the world are looking for opportunities to buy North American supplies, which are cheaper than traditional sources for light sweet crude. The price of US marker grade West Texas Intermediate (WTI) exported from Houston and delivered to Asia-Pacific was about 50/bl lower than similar quality Nigerian Qua Iboe crude in the second half of August, the new Argus WTI Houston cfr China price shows, implying that a 1mn bl US cargo would land $500,000 cheaper than its west African rival in the world's fastest growing market. WTI Houston delivered to China is now breaking even with lower quality North Sea Forties, a staple import for South Korean and Chinese refiners. Compared with Caspian grades such as Azeri Light, WTI Houston delivered to China has been almost $1.50/bl cheaper on average over the past two weeks.

Refiners from around the world are looking to increase crude purchases from reliable suppliers in North America, while rival producers from different regions are focusing their efforts to remain competitive relative to US exports. And that battle for market share is fiercest in the growing Asia-Pacific market, where price comparisons are most relevant after taking into account export and freight costs from multiple origins. As the leader in North American crude pricing, Argus is also pioneering the publication of price assessments for Canadian crude loaded in the Gulf of Mexico for delivery to Asia-Pacific destinations, including China. Heavy sour Western Canadian Select (WCS) re-exported from US Gulf coast terminals has the potential to reach India and beyond.

To calculate the delivered price of WTI Houston and WCS Houston crude to China, Argus takes the daily volume-weighted average (VWA) of all deals done during the entire trading day for each grade, adds export terminal costs and the daily freight rate for the US Gulf coast-to-China route for Suezmax (130,000t) cargoes and publishes the delivered price of these two grades in the Asia-Pacific section of the Argus Crude report. The Argus WTI Houston and WCS Houston prices can easily be hedged because they are traded on the CME and Ice exchanges and are linked to Nymex WTI futures.

The expansion and development of export capacity on the US Gulf coast, especially the planned completion next year of infrastructure linked to the Magellan East Houston terminal where WTI Houston is priced, will accelerate these flows.

"The US Gulf coast is now an important region for crude price discovery. The new Argus WTI Houston and WCS Houston delivered to China assessments respond to the market need for a price reference for these deals, linking unconventional US shale and Canadian oil sands production to the international seaborne crude market," Argus Media executive chairman and publisher Adrian Binks said.

LondonSeana Lanigan+44 20 7780 4272 [email protected]

HoustonScott Berg+ 1 713 968 0000 [email protected]

SingaporeJim Nicholson+65 6496 9960 [email protected]

About Argus Media

Argus is an independent media organisation with more than 750 full-time staff. It is headquartered in London and has offices in each of the world's principal commodity centres. Its main activities comprise publishing market reports containing price assessments, market commentary and news, and business intelligence reports that analyse market and industry trends.

Today Argus is a leading provider of data on prices and fundamentals, news, analysis, consultancy services and conferences for the global crude, oil products, natural gas, electricity, coal, emissions, bioenergy, fertilizer, petrochemical, metals and transportation industries. Data provided by Argus are widely used for indexation of physical trade. Companies, governments and international agencies use Argus information for analysis and planning purposes.

Argus has 21 offices globally, including London, Houston, Washington, New York, Calgary, Rio de Janeiro, Singapore, Dubai, Beijing, Tokyo, Sydney, Moscow, Astana and other key centres of the commodity industries. Argus was founded in 1970 and is a privately held UK-registered company.

ARGUS, the ARGUS logo, ARGUS MEDIA, ARGUS DIRECT, ARGUS OPEN MARKETS, AOM, FMB, DEWITT, JIM JORDAN & ASSOCIATES, JJ&A, FUNDALYTICS, METAL-PAGES, METALPRICES.COM, Argus publication titles and Argus index names are trademarks of Argus Media Limited. www.argusmedia.com.

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-crude-exports-competitive-to-asia-pacific-new-delivered-argus-prices-show-300322031.html

SOURCE Argus Media
The first British Airways direct flight from London landed in Tehran on Friday (September 2) after nearly four years of suspension.

The airline, owned by IAG, becomes the the second European carrier to resume flights to Iran after Air France made the move in April after a pause for eight years.

Passengers on board the Boeing 777, which departed Heathrow Thursday evening (September 1), welcomed the resumption of direct flights as they landed at Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport.

"Fantastic, fantastic. Because I come to Iran quite frequently and it was a big problem to get a flight in Iran Air," said businessman Reza Arefi.

"It was a really good flight, it was fantastic. The service was really good and the flight was really quick as well," said university student Amir Ali.

The service follows the relaxation of sanctions against Iran and the reopening of the British embassy in the Iranian capital last year which was ransacked by protesters in 2011.
FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Bayer's supervisory board will discuss in a meeting on Sept. 14 whether to sweeten its offer for Monsanto (NYSE: MON) again or even pursue a hostile takeover, German daily Rheinische Post reported, citing company sources.

A spokesman for Bayer, which is due to hold an investor conference in Cologne on Sept. 20, declined to comment on the report.

Sources told had told Reuters last month that U.S. seed company Monsanto had given its German suitor limited access to its books after turning down a sweetened $64 billion takeover offer.

(Reporting by Maria Sheahan; Additional reporting by Till Weber; Editing by Louise Heavens)
By PTI: Jammu, Sep 3 (PTI) On the eve of the visit of an all-party delegation to Jammu and Kashmir, a frontline Kashmiri Pandit organisation today demanded carving out a separate union territory for the community in the valley to "permanently rehabilitate them".

Panun Kashmir said no other solution was acceptable to the pandits of Kashmir who were forced to leave their homes during the onset of militancy in Kashmir.

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"We want the entire political class of India to recognise the need of carving out a Union Territory of Panun Kashmir north and east of river Jhelum for the rehabilitation of internally displaced Hindus of Kashmir," said convener of Panun Kashmir, Agnishekhar, here.

"In Kashmir there is total rejection of coexistence and genocidal war on Hindus is continuing unabated. Kashmir has become a den of religious fascism and anti-India rebellion and to defeat it dividing Kashmir has become a necessity," he said.

Claiming Kashmir had become "an ungoverned zone", the organisation members also advised the members of the all-party delegation "not to make any compromise with separatists".

"We ask the government of India to desist from encouraging soft separatists and recognise the reality that present seditious unrest has been a result of accommodating soft-separatism," said Agnishekhar.

"It is a national responsibility of all the leaders of the all-party delegation to recognise that soft-separatist enterprise has acted as an over ground support structure to the religious fascist upsurge in Kashmir valley," he added. PTI TSS AB CHT ZMN CHT

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By Gwladys Fouche

OSLO (Reuters) - German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said on Sunday he hoped a new regulation aimed at maintaining a fragile ceasefire in eastern Ukraine could be completed soon by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

"We are working with the OSCE for a new regulation to keep the ceasefire," Steinmeier told reporters in Oslo. "We are now in preparation which will allow us to soon meet again on the foreign ministers level."

Steinmeier said implementation of the Minsk accord by Russia and Ukraine remained disappointing, and the security situation in eastern Ukraine was "really insufficient."

(Reporting by Gwladys Fouche; writing by Andrea Shalal)
BANGKOK (Reuters) - One railway worker was killed and three people were wounded when a bomb exploded on a train in Thailand's southern town of Pattani on Saturday, police said, a day after peace talks between the Thai government and Muslim separatists.

The bomb was hidden under rail tracks at Khok Pho district of Pattani, damaging the last carriage, Police Captain Promote Juichouy told Reuters.

The blast destroyed half the carriage and blew a big hole under the track, police said.

The three wounded people included two train workers and a female passenger. The train was heading to Bangkok.

Peace talks between Thailand's government and Muslim separatists ended on Friday with no breakthrough but an agreement to meet again. The insurgents denied responsibility for a string of bombs last month.

A decades-old insurgency in the Muslim-majority southern provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat has claimed more than 6,500 lives since it escalated in 2004, according to the independent monitoring group Deep South Watch.

As with most such attacks, no one claimed responsibility.

The blast occurred three weeks after a series of explosions hit three of Thailand's most popular tourist resorts and a town in the south, killing four people and wounding dozens.

(Reporting by Surapan Boontanom and Manunphattr Dhanananphorn, Writing by Khettiya Jittapong; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
By Gerauds Wilfried Obangome

LIBREVILLE (Reuters) - Tension eased in Gabon's capital on Saturday after days of deadly rioting triggered by an announcement that President Ali Bongo narrowly won re-election in a vote the opposition said was stolen.

More than 1,000 others were arrested in the protests that began on Wednesday and the opposition, led by Jean Ping who claims he is now president, said five people also died.

Shops began to re-open on Saturday and some traffic returned to the streets as the government sought to restore stability with mass arrests and a heavy security presence.

At the same time some impoverished residents of Libreville who need to buy food every day said they hoped for a return to normality given the hardship caused by closed shops and markets.

"The last few days were really difficult for us. The fact that traffic has started to move is very important ... because our families have really suffered," said Alex Ndong, 42, a mechanic who lives in the Lalala suburb of south Libreville.

"I hope everything goes back to normal as quickly as possible," he said.

Bongo came to power in 2009 on the death of his father, Omar, who ruled the Central African country for 42 years, relying on patronage fueled by oil wealth to buy off dissent.

France has had a military base in Gabon since independence in 1960 and 450 troops are stationed there, according to the French Defense Ministry.

The disputed election sparked the protests but discontent has risen in an economy hit by lower global prices for its crude exports and falling production. Major oil producers include Total and Shell.

Many citizens also say the fruits of oil wealth have been shared too narrowly.

APPEAL BY PING

Ping appealed to the American people in an op-ed in the New York Times to send a clear signal to Bongo that they would not tolerate a stolen election.

He also repeated a call also taken up by the European Union for the electoral commission to release results bureau by bureau to make it easier to detect any potential discrepancies.

"The people of Gabon voted for their leader, they chose me. They chose a change from the dynastic regime that has ruled our country since 1967," Ping wrote.

He earlier called for international intervention but there were few signs by Saturday of the kind of decisive external action Ping seeks.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault appealed to all sides in the dispute to use constitutional means and called on the authorities to restore all social media and Internet connections after days of interruptions and cuts.

In several recent African elections the Internet and sometimes cellular phone services have been suspended. Ayrault also welcomed a decision by the African Union to get involved.

The African Union's Peace and Security Council expressed concern over the violence, saying the situation could affect regional stability.

In a statement, the Council "called on all Gabonese stakeholders to demonstrate utmost restraint and make use of all available legal and constitutional channels to resolve any differences pertaining to the results of the elections."

Gabon's law society said on Saturday 800 people were detained in the capital and 300 arrested elsewhere. It called on authorities to respect human rights and treat those who have been detained fairly.

(Writing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg; Editing by Greg Mahlich)
By PTI: New Delhi, Sep 4 (PTI) Chinese tech major Lenovo has become the second-biggest smartphone brand in terms of value ahead of Apple, Micromax and Oppo with a market share of 9.1 per cent, according to the research firm IDC.

Besides, the market share in terms of units sold of the company surged in second quarter, making it the third largest smartphone brand in India, with share of 7.7 per cent, the report by IDC said.

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As per IDCs recent report released this month, both Motorola (now owned by Lenovo) and Lenovo combine emerged as the number two player in Q2FY16.

Lenovo had acquired Motorola in October 2014 from Google.

With a growth of 24.5 per cent over the last year, Lenovo group captured 7.7 per cent of market share by units sold while the market grew by only 3.7 per cent, as per the research firms quarterly mobile phone tracker.

"This is a huge milestone achieved by us, which has motivated and encouraged us further to go against all odds by creating meaningful and innovative, technologically-advanced products that enhance the consumer mobile experience," said Sudhin Mathur, Director-Smartphones, Lenovo India.

The company recently launched a series of smartphones like, K5 PLUS, ZUK Z1, Moto G4 Plus, and Moto X Play, among others in India. PTI PRJ ABK

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Modi Bounces Back

August 29, 2016

Exclusive Mood of the Nation survey reveals that the NDA has recovered ground.

NDA All Star

It is gratifying that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the NDA are steadily recovering credibility (Modi Makes a Strong Comeback). This is on account of the realisation that the government is well on its way to fulfilling its agenda, even if the outcome is not obvious in the short term. More than the Opposition, the negativity of perception the government suffers from is wrought by bhakts indulging in vigilantism on divisive issues. Reining them in will be a challenge. With the Congress hamstrung by the vacuum at the top, the NDA is deprived of the sound counsel of a credible opposition. Non-Congress alternatives offer no prospect of stability either.

Bishan Sahai , via e-mail

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Seventeen per cent think Narendra Modi is among the best prime ministers India has had so far. The figure is implausible and the only explanation is a biased polling sample. How can a prime minister who has been in power for barely 30 months be one of the best in all these years since Independence?

M. Riaz Hasan, Hyderabad

The statistical significance of the data collected through your survey has not been clearly explained. While the increase in Modi's popularity seems to correspond with the government's improved performance and the Congress's decline arising from their failure to project a vision, the reader cannot be certain of the validity of the conclusions. To cite just but one example, does the increase in NDA's vote share from 38.5 per cent to 48 per cent correlate with the decrease in projected seats from 336 to 304-or are both numbers largely constant within the margin of error?

Jerry singh, via e-mail

Our electorate is naturally inclined to a national-level party in the interest of stability than a ragtag coalition of self-serving regional parties at the Centre. With the Congress sliding into eclipse across the country, the BJP effortlessly clinches the TINA factor. Consequently, the party's RSS baggage, black tags of anti-minorityism and inadequate job creation will all be relegated to the backburner in favour of a second term for the BJP.

Valanadu R. Namasivayam, Nagpur

Modi's comeback was expected-people want to see him achieve what he has promised. His famed art of persuasion combined with the frequent international tours he takes have given him global visibility. But, it also underlines his neglect of the home front. The prime minister, now, needs to focus his energies on the seemingly insurmountable problems of the common man. He should consider launching a system of monthly reports on action taken on the ground and granting merit certificates to honest officers.

Mahesh Kumar, Delhi

During the 2014 polls, Modi was considered a bold, decisive, pro-poor, transparent leader with the ability to steer the country and regain the confidence of its citizens. The positive effects have been felt in his many initiatives such as Make in India, Digital India, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, Start-up India, Jan Dhan Yojana and the LPG subsidy rejig. But these schemes did not generate employment, thereby eroding Modi's credibility. He has to take even bolder decisions with emphasis on reform of the judiciary and strict control of population.

Sudarsan Nandi, Midnapore

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Sleepers with the Enemy

Your excellent report, The Veiled Threat, on Islamic State sleeper cells in Kerala credibly exposed the magnitude of the problem with facts and figures. Large-scale conversions have always been fuelled by economic or social causes. The reasons behind conversion have to be addressed on a spiritual plane in conformity with the spirit of religion. What Gandhiji said to Mirabehn when the latter expressed her desire to convert to Hinduism is particularly relevant in this context. His advice was she should continue living in her own faith-by becoming Hindu, she would, in no way, improve her moral conduct. One need only act in accordance with the tenets of his/her own religion. In the current scenario, it is futile to even attempt to propound this Gandhian ideal to the world because at the helm of religions are men ignorant of religion.

EDWIN P. MICHAEL, Thrissur

The state government's proclaimed innocence of any knowledge of IS's spidery network in Kerala is suspect. Considering the sizeable number of expats from the state in West Asia, terror modules must have had the chance to drop stray roots in some pockets of the state. The recent incidents are notable because the IS seems to have inspired Kerala's well-heeled youth by dangling before them the Caliphate dream-at the cost of braving bullets and grenades. Through a demonstration of its powers of indoctrination, the organisation has dealt a chilling blow.

J.S. Acharya, Hyderabad

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Hand of Design

The appeal of handloom fabrics lies in their heritage (Picking up the Threads). But, the prohibitive prices limit it to high fashion. Designers have the responsibility of making it accessible to all strata of society.

ALAKA PADHI, via e-mail

Descent into Chaos

It has taken exactly one-and-a-half years in the CM's chair for Omar Abdullah's transformation from poster boy of electoral democracy to someone who is increasingly being seen as failing to make a difference. Exuding hope and promise but under fire from all sides, Abdullah seems to be finding time only to indulge in firefighting.

The cycle of 11 killings in less than three weeks by the police and paramilitary forces across Kashmir, preceded by fake encounter killings of innocents by the army, has forced the chief minister to acknowledge that everything is not under his govern-ment's direct control. The Abdullah scion has been forced to play from the backfoot while dealing with anger and rage on the streets, triggered by police and paramilitary action against protesters. The police handling of the killing of a teenaged student on June 11, who was not part of the protests, left Abdullah red-faced. The police first described it as a mysterious murder by some miscreants to foment trouble. The medical report, however, showed that the boy was killed by a teargas canister fired at his head from a close range. No responsibility has been fixed for the incident that created a situation leading to more deaths.

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As the protests spread across the Valley, Abdullah seemed unconvincing when he tried to sound tough, although he admitted the political nature of the protests. "This is not a simple law and order matter brought about by lack of good governance," he said, after three youths were killed in Anantnag on June 22.

by Aijaz Hussain

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Attracting smart capital for your tech start-up By Tharushi Ranatunga, Consultant, Stax Inc View(s): View(s):

Despite being relatively young, Sri Lankas tech start up eco system has witnessed tremendous growth over the past few years. Home to world-class human capital, an envious geographical location, an increasingly favourable business climate, and relatively superior infrastructure to other countries in the region, Sri Lanka is well poised to become a thriving start-up hub. Tech in Asias recent article on 5 things you didnt know about Sri Lankas start-up scene sheds light on its underreported potential, and we at Stax could not agree more. However, it is a reality that capital is a key issue hindering the growth of many local tech start-ups.

While availability and access to capital are commonly spoken of, the critical juncture we are at makes it more pertinent to consider start-ups ability to attract capitalsmart capital. Attracting external funding is both an art and a science for companies at any stage of their lifecycle. In the case of start-ups, its not incorrect to say that it is more an art than a science. While many entrepreneurs place paramount importance on the sciencevaluing their business, this is just one piece of the puzzle. Merely having an impressive valuation wont make investors take their checkbooks out.

So what would?

It is imperative to start thinking like an investor when embarking on the journey of raising capital. The biggest concern on most investors minds is risk Is the risk Im taking worth it?, how will the startup manage its risk?, and what premium will I get for the risk Im taking? This essentially means that an investor wants to know the startups growth potential and whether his investment is worth the return he will get when he exits a few years down the line. Building confidence in the mind of your investors often begins with the equity percentage you are willing to offer. This is a delicate balance.

Offer too much and you may indicate lack of belief in your business, offer too little and it wont spark interest among investors. Thereafter, it essentially boils down to two thingshow good your product is and how good your people are. A solid product with an attractive market opportunity, coupled with an experienced and passionate management team is a winning formula. Many tech start-ups inherently possess characteristics that can create risk premiums for investors, but in most cases these are not articulated in pitches.

At Stax, we use our 5C methodology in value creation to identify subtle nuances of your business model to ensure maximum value potential is achieved. So youve got a potential investor whos willing to provide you with the capital you require. But is this it? Is any money good money? In our experience, companies that witness exponential growth are generally ones that have attracted smart capital. Instead of viewing fund raising as an opportunity to receive cash, they have viewed it as an opportunity to expand their resources.

These companies have selected investors who give them access not only to money, but also to experience, access to networks and/or geographies, mentoring, and guidance. Having the backing of strategic investors also give sophisticated investors the confidence in investing in your business should you go for subsequent rounds of funding. Many investors conduct diligence prior to making investment decisions. But it is also important for start-ups to conduct diligence on potential investors to ensure that they are the right strategic fit for the business.
China calls for India to join hands and develop Sri Lanka By Alvin Sallay View(s): View(s):

Chinas top diplomat in Sri Lanka openly welcomed India to join us and develop this country while stressing economic ties, and not geo politics, would be the strong foundation for close relations between Sri Lanka and China. Referring to the Colombo Financial City, formerly known as Port City, Chinese Ambassador in Sri Lanka Yi Xianliang said the multi-billion dollar project which will be built by Chinese companies was open for joint-collaboration with India. We welcome any third party to join us and develop this country. We are open to joint cooperation (in Port City) and open not only to India but any other country too. We welcome constructive partners, said Mr. Yi addressing the National Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday.

He revealed that China will pump in US$8 billion in Foreign Direct Investment (FDIs) into the Financial City which will recruit 99 per cent of its workforce locally. Another $5 billion was touted as investments that will be available for economic zones in Hambantota and the Western province if they are given the green light by the Sri Lankan government. Ambassador Yi, a career diplomat, decried negative stories and comments (in the local media) over the last 18 months  since the government changed  which had created a climate of uncertainty. Since the change of government there have been so many negative comments (about Chinas involvement in Sri Lanka). There have even been stories that people in Sri Lanka would need visas from China to go to the Port City.

But we, the Chinese government and the embassy here, said nothing for we believed the Sri Lankan government knew who their real friends are. We have no change in policy to Sri Lanka and Im happy to say Sri Lanka has no change in policy to China, Mr. Yi added. In the past year, President Maithripala Sirisena has made an official visit to Beijing while Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe has made two official trips to China. The close bond between China and Sri Lanka had stood the test of time with Mr. Yi harking back to 1952 and the Rubber-Rice barter agreement signed by Dudley Senanayakes government as testament to Sino-Sri Lankan friendship. The Ambassador intimated this friendship was bound to become even closer when an FTA (Free Trade Agreement) between the two countries  it will be Chinas 20th FTA  is signed.

We are hopeful we can finalise negotiations before the end of the year. Sri Lankas main exports to China are tea, gems, fruits and fish amounting to around $4.6 billion last year. But Mr. Yi said there was massive room for increased trade in all sectors, especially tea. We have a population of 1.3 billion people. If one per cent of our population drank one cup of tea (from Sri Lanka) a day, you will not be able to sustain it (exports) right now. There is a great opportunity available for Sri Lanka but this opportunity will not be there forever with fierce competition from other countries, Mr. Yi added.
Dismissed Mackwoods staff to resort to union action By Duruthu Edirimuni Chandrasekera View(s): View(s):

The ongoing drama at Mackwoods Pvt Ltd took a different turn last week when some 60 workers were fired and the management allegedly taking steps to dissolve the company, disgruntled employees, seeking union action. Eleven employees have resisted an ex-gratia payment of three months. Some of these workers told the Business Times that they are already in the process of filing action through their Ceylon Mercantile Union. The management said that the termination was triggered by the adverse financial situation due to litigation against the company in May as well as the NDB Bank parate action which saw its factory at Ja-ela being seized.

All this made it impossible for them to carry out normal operations and were therefore not in a position to offer work to us, P. Jayasundera, an employee who resisted the termination said.Mr. Jayasundara has been at Mackwoods for 14 years and has some seven more years to go before retirement. 53-year N.P.A. Chandana who is faced with a similar situation also said that he will follow whatever action taken by the union. The management told me that our stores were seized and that they cant let us work anymore. They offered three months salary, but that isnt fair, he said. Attempts at contacting the management and its directors werent fruitful. Sources close to the management said that as business was slow, they want to dissolve the company, but this could not be independently confirmed.

The 11 union workers had been asked to report to the company Personal Manager Lal Leanage and were informed of their dismissal. They however refused to sign the letter. The letter to workers discontinuing their services read as follows: You would be aware that the company has been facing several economic hardships and litigation due the inability of the company to meet its financial obligations. We have to regretfully inform you the cessation of your employment. Provident and gratuity payment will be paid. The Mackwoods Group is in the midst of a power struggle with its chairman Chris Nonis pitted against individuals including his sister and former co-chairman Nirmali Samaratunga.

The latter had complained to the Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that a recent transaction pertaining to the sale of Agalawatte Plantations (APL) to a Browns Group subsidiary was not proper in law. The deal was then suspended by the SEC amidst protests from the Mackwoods Group with a further development being the Appeal Court on August 10 issuing notice on the SEC and CSE based on a writ application made by Browns Power Holdings Ltd challenging the delay in approving the transaction which saw the regulator nodding conditional approval for the mandatory offer of Browns Power Holdings Ltd to purchase the remaining shares of APL this week.
High level of awareness on controversial issues View(s):

An unusual discovery: The working class and other middle and lower segments of society in Galle have shown a surprisingly high level of awareness on the Colombo Port City, the Central Bank bond issue and the coal tender compared to those in Colombo, a BT-RCB poll this week revealed. The poll tackled some fundamental issues of awareness. Respondents were asked whether they were aware of the Central Bank bond issue, the coal tender, the re-awarding of the highway contracts for Kandy-Colombo, the Port City and a new railway line between Trincomalee and Medawachchiya, and if so whether these projects were transparent.

The RCB sample, in this case a total of 588 respondents in Colombo and Galle, was conducted on the street with respondents being office workers, housewives, students and other categories that one confronts on streets and bus and rail stations. Asked whether they were aware of the bond issue, 83 per cent in Galle said Yes while the Yes vote in Colombo was slightly lower at 78 per cent, another surprise as Galle respondents were more aware than those in Colombo. In the BT email poll conducted mostly amongst professionals, the level of awareness on this question was even lower at 75 per cent.

The same level of awareness (Galle higher than Colombo) was seen in the coal tender with Galle at a high 84 per cent Yes and Colombo at 75 per cent while the Yes response in the BT poll was lower at 64 per cent. In the case of the Port City, Galle was slightly lower at 89 per cent (Yes) against Colombo at 96 per cent while it was 90 per cent in the BT poll. Both Galle and Colombo data have been calculated separately but combined to give an overall (joint) percentage in the results shown on Page 2.
Revenue targets caught between the devil and the deep blue sea By Bandula Sirimanna View(s): View(s):

The government is heading for a revenue shortfall this year due to a delay in the implementation of several tax amendment proposals in the 2016 budget as well as VAT and NBT revisions made by the Prime Minister in April. Central Bank Governor Dr. Indrajit Coomaraswamy on Tuesday warned that the Governments revenue targets could come under pressure unless the proposed VAT increase was implemented as soon as possible. Following the Supreme Courts decision to nullify the 15 per cent VAT revision recently based on a fundamental rights petition, tax officers have encountered difficulties in collecting revenue from several other taxes including the NBT, Income Tax, Corporate Tax, Economic Service Charge (ESC) which are also yet to get parliamentary approval, a senior Inland Revenue Department (IRD) officer, who wished to remain anonymous, told the Business Times.

He said that achieving the target of Rs.602 billion set for 2016, up 16.6 per cent from Rs.516 billion last year, is near impossible due to the non-implementation of several increased taxes proposed in the 2016 budget plus VAT. However Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake revealed in a recent media statement that the government has been able to earn considerable revenue in the first seven months this year owing to its efficient tax collecting mechanism. Although the Finance Minister had announced that IRD revenue has gone up by 26 per cent to Rs. 242.81 billion during the first seven months this year from Rs.191.60 billion in the same period last year, this was below the targeted revenue of Rs. 351.16 billion for January-July 2016 in terms of provisional IRD data received by the Business Times.

Provisional figures also show a shortfall of Rs.108.35 billion between targeted revenue and collected revenue during the first seven months this year. Accordingly total expected revenue for whole year at the current rate of revenue collection would be Rs. 416.24 billion missing the 2016 revenue target of Rs.602 billion by Rs.186.76 billion. The Central Bank Governor told journalists on Tuesday that the Governments ambitious fiscal consolidation plan would be disrupted if tax increases were not approved by Parliament in the next few months. Meanwhile a senior cabinet minister told the Business Times that the VAT Amendment Bill is likely to be taken up after the presentation of the 2017 budget on November 10.

Earlier it was decided to present this amendment bill in coming weeks. However ministers representing the Sri Lanka Freedom Party have decided to propose a number of amendments to the bill. They have requested that the draft bill be shown to them before presenting it in Parliament, he disclosed. Hereafter all the tax reforms of the Government will be introduced in the budget and the Treasury is considering the possibility of the inclusion of tax revisions proposed in the 2016 budget and the 15 per cent VAT which are yet to get parliamentary approval, in the 2017 budget, he added. However, VAT exemptions for essential commodities would be maintained, so that low income groups are not affected, he said.

Fact file IRD targeted revenue for 1st seven months of 2016: Rs. 351.16 billion

IRD actual revenue in January-July 2016: Rs. 242.81 billion

Shortfall between targeted revenue and collected revenue: Rs.108.35 billion

IRD targeted total revenue for 2016: Rs.602 billion

Expected total revenue at the current rate of tax collection in 2016: Rs. 416.24 billion (provisional data)

Expected shortfall between targeted revenue and collected revenue: Rs. 185.76 billion
Tea Board to Finance Ministry: Law doesnt permit fund transfers By Sunimalee Dias View(s): View(s):

The Sri Lanka Tea Board (SLTB) has told the Finance Ministry that it is unable to transfer monies from a special fund to the ministrys Consolidated Fund due to the legal impediments to do so. In an August 26 (Friday) response to a letter from the Finance Ministry received on August 24, it said according to the law there was no provision to transfer the funds collected within a special fund set up under the Tea Board Act of 2010 and under Section 149 of the Constitution. On Monday, six tea sector-related associations also strongly objected to the request from the Finance Ministry issuing a statement and urging the government to respond.

It has led to public disagreement over the issue between Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake and Plantations Minister Navin Dissanayake. The SLTB says these laws state that the funds thus collected as special funds could not be transferred to the consolidated fund and were monies obtained from the tea exporters. Based on the legal advice received, SLTB Chairman Rohan Pethiyagoda told the Business Times that they could not transfer the funds amounting to Rs.4 billion requested for by the Finance Ministry. At present there was a collection of Rs.5.4 billion, he noted adding that these funds were to be used for promotional campaign and plans to carry out this would go ahead in October.
Gota charged by Bribery Commission soon after meeting President Sirisena View(s):

New VAT Bill this month; threshold increased toRs 50 million a month

Two major parties reach consensus on amendments to VAT

Clause on retrospective effect maybe challenged in Supreme Court

Basil goes ahead with secret plans to form new party; SLFP convention today will be a turning point

By Our Political Editor

A Bill to enforce the enhanced Value Added Tax (VAT) will be introduced in Parliament later this month.

At their weekly session last Tuesday, the ministers examined a cabinet memorandum, the prelude to the presentation of a new Bill by Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake. It will conform to the Supreme Court (SC) ruling on a similar previous Bill that it did not signify to Parliament approval as required by law. In an earlier order, the SC ruled that the way the VAT was introduced was illegal. It was argued before the court that an illegal action cannot be righted through retroactive legislation.

At their last meeting, ministers discussed the contents that will form the new Bill, which also appears to be hit by some bad omen. Following consultations between the two major partners of the Government, the United National Party (UNP) and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), there was agreement on a new threshold. This will apply to both the wholesale and retail trade, Finance Minister Karunanayake told the Sunday Times. All other proposals, he declared, would remain the same except for changes already announced. He added that the new Bill would be gazetted soon after it received ministerial approval.

Among ministers who called for a corrected cabinet memorandum were Patali Champika Ranawaka, Anura Priyadarshana Yapa and Susil Premjayantha. Earlier, business ventures that had a turnover of more than Rs 12 million a month or Rs 33,000 a day were required to pay VAT. Enhancing the threshold to Rs 50 million a month, is the result of countrywide protests by small time traders that they would face bankruptcy. The call for enhancing the limit was made by the SLFP. Other than that, almost all other proposals will remain the same.

The cause for the postponement of the discussion until Tuesday next on Karunanayakes cabinet memorandum is the result of a bureaucratic error. If the beginning of a sentence spoke about an increase in the threshold to Rs 50 million, in the second paragraph, it had referred to the existing Rs 12 million. There were arguments on which of the two was correct.

An outstanding issue over the proposed new Bill also remains. Having lost considerable revenue due to these slip-shod drafting and inability to stick to laid down procedures, the Government wants to seek the passage of the new VAT Bill with retrospective effect. In such an event, it would require a two thirds majority. The constitutionality or otherwise of the new Bill too, the Government expects, would probably be challenged before the Supreme Court as the Constitution discourages retrospective legislation.

The new VAT schemes chief architect is Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. In March, he submitted a nine page Cabinet memorandum in which he recommended policy proposals. One such proposal, he said, was that the Budget 2016 had proposed to implement two rates  8 % and 12.5 % instead of a single rate of 11%. Implementing such complex multi rates in taxes could result in a shortfall in revenue target further deepening the crisis. Therefore, the safer option was a single VAT rate of 15 per cent. The extensions on imposing VAT on telecommunications, private education and private health will be removed. Furthermore, VAT will also be imposed on selected retail and wholesale goods excluding the essential items, Wickremesinghe pointed out. His assertions came as the Government was then negotiating an extended fund facility with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The latter had sought an upward revision in the VAT rates.

There are about 77,000 registered to pay VAT. Only 35 % are active. Of that only 15,000 pay VAT. The threshold for VAT has been reduced over the years. In 2013, those who were required to pay were ventures with a turnover of Rs 500 million for three months. In 2014, it was reduced to Rs 250 million for three months, in 2015, to Rs 100 million for three months and in 2016, it was further reduced to Rs 3 million per quarter.

The VAT increase is perhaps the most critical issue the National Unity Government has faced. Even the Central Bank bond issue that rocked the Government last year pales into insignificance simply because VAT hits the people directly in the stomach. The new Bill to enforce it again comes at a time when there were questions over whether payments already made for telephone bills, both mobile and land line, would be refunded. This is besides payments made to known outlets for goods and services. This is on the grounds that the enhanced VAT rate is being charged from consumers although the tax is not in force consequent to the Supreme Court rulings. That the move would become a subject of a hot political issue when the Government holds local elections next year is most likely. However, the SLFP ministers have found some grace in enhancing the threshold to Rs 50 million. They are poised to vote in favour of the new Bill when it comes up on Tuesday.

Like the new VAT Bill, where positions of the two major Government, parties differed, there are similar positions in other areas too. Some of them are resolved through dialogue while others linger on. For the SLFP, the priority consideration has been the consolidation of the party. This has remained elusive for its leader, President Maithripala Sirisena so far. This was from the time he was elected. He has not been successful in uniting the group that is backing former President Mahinda Rajapaksa. The group no doubt includes some parliamentarians who have come under investigation for bribery or corruption.

Sirisena-Gota talks

Ahead of todays SLFP annual convention in Kurunegala, Sirisena has been listening to views from many factions in the party. Some such meetings were unimaginable in the past. Milinda Moragoda , a one-time UNP minister and later UPFA mayoral candidate for the city of Colombo, facilitated a meeting for the President with former Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa. A well informed source said their conversation covered a broad spectrum of views.

The source was emphatic that Sirisena did not commit himself to any position or agree to any suggestion. He listened. Gotabaya Rajapaksa was of the view that an SLFP with a broader representation should have within its fold a member or more from the Rajapaksa family. There was a suggestion that either he or former Speaker Chamal Rajapakasa would be receptive to be within that fold if other members of the family were not harassed through ongoing investigations, the source pointed out. Sirisena remained non-committal to the proposal, the source added.

Some political observers opined that the overture, if accepted, would have not only consolidated Sirisenas power and position. It also would have, if the necessity arose, enhanced his strength in Parliament. However, the move runs counter to Sirisenas pledge that instead of a two year arrangement, they (the SLFP and the UNP) would together continue the full term of governance. Just weeks ago, both Sirisena and Premier Wickremesinghe renewed their pledge when they addressed the UNFs first anniversary in office meeting in Matara. This notwithstanding, no one can blame Sirisena for making efforts to bolster his own party so he does not find himself in a not negotiable position during a crisis situation.

Days after the Maithripala Sirisena  Gotabaya Rajapaksa meeting, in what seemed a surprise development, the Commission to Probe Allegations of Bribery or Corruption (CIABOC) indicted Gotabaya Rajapaksa and eight others. They stand charged with causing Rs 11.4 billion loss to the Government by permitting Avant Garde Maritime Services (Pvt.) to operate a floating armoury. Indicted together were three former Commanders of the Sri Lanka Navy  Somatilleke Dissanayake, Jayanath Colombage and Jayantha Perera. Under the 19th Amendment to the Constitution the CIABOC is an autonomous body,

Others were retired Major General Palitha Fernando, a one-time Military Liaison Officer of the Ministry of Defence, one-time Additional Secretary to the Ministry of Defence Sujatha Damayanthi, former Army Special Forces officer Major Nissanka Senadipathy, Chairman of Avant Garde and Karunaratne Banda Adhikari. They have been noticed to appear in Courts on September 30 before the Colombo Chief Magistrate. The Avant Garde Maritime Services (Pvt.) is also the subject of a separate investigation by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID).

Why is Mahinda calling Ranil?

It is no secret that Gotabaya Rajapaksa favoured groups within SLFP supporting his brother Mahinda to be conciliatory towards Maithripala Sirisena, the leader of the SLFP. However, both Mahinda and brother Basil, were in favour of the UNP faction of the Government. As reported earlier, Premier Wickremesinghe maintained a personal rapport with Mahinda Rajapaksa. Wickremesinghe has explained that he had to respond to calls from Rajapaksa since he was only extending a courtesy to a former President. Recently, Sirisena was to politely ask Wickremesinghe why Mahinda Rajapaksa was making some requests to him when they should have been directed to the President. The query was over a request made by Rajapaksa for security personnel during travel abroad and for four tyres for his official vehicle.

Resolutions at SLFP sessions

The SLFP is holding its sessions in Kurunegala today. UPFA General Secretary Mahinda Amaraweera told the Sunday Times five different resolutions would be adopted. They would include one on international relations, another on current political developments, on the economy and on reconciliation.

State Minister Lakshman Yapa Abeywardena also said said several resolutions would be passed at todays Convention. These include resolutions related to economic policy, international relations, reconciliation and restructuring of the party.

Regarding economic policy, the Minister stated it was the SLFPs view that the countrys economy should take a middle path. It should be neither ultra liberal or ultra leftist, would include SLFPs opposition to privatizing profit making state institutions. Regarding loss making institutions, the SLFPs position was that they should be restructured but the Government should have a majority stake when it came to public-private partnerships managing these institutions.

A resolution to thank President Maithripala Sirisena on behalf of the party for cementing cordial relations with various countries and enhancing Sri Lankas status on the international stage would also be put forward.

Regarding the current political situation it will refer to the SLFP restructuring programme. A resolution will be presented regarding the partys forward agenda. It will propose that the party undertake a restructuring process in the coming year.

A resolution related to the reconciliation process would also be presented, he said.

Countermoves by Basil

As a counter to todays sessions in Kurunegala, the pro-Mahinda group is planning a public rally Organised by Basil Rajapaksa, it will be focused entirely to demand that the Government should conduct local government elections soon. An effort is being made to match the crowds that attend todays rally in Kurunegala. Basil Rajapaksa has already embarked on the task of forming a political party. The exercise is being kept a closely guarded secret. A lawyer has been named to act as Administrative Secretary. The name of the party, obtained from an already registered one, is likely to be used. Basil had advised party higher ups to maintain secrecy over the new party until todays SLFP annual sessions end.

The formation of the new party was decided upon by a Committee named by Mahinda Rajapaksa. It was headed by Basil Rajapaksa and comprised Dullas Allahapperuma, Pavithra Wanniaratchchi, Rohitha Abeygunawardena, G.L. Peiris and Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena. The new party will form a broad common front with political parties opposed to the Government.

With the SLFP convention today, a new chapter dawns for the party. It would have to become stronger in the coming weeks and months if it hopes to win the local elections. On the other hand, the divide has come for the party. A faction will back Mahinda Rajapaksa. Which of the two sides would grow stronger remains the important question. Whoever wins the battle, the UNP appears to be reaping the benefits.
Increase VAT on imported items, dont burden poor people View(s):

According to Buddhism all those who preach must preach what is just and good. What is meant by Just is making life meaningful.

Meaningful living in the long run embraces economic behaviour that helps proper living. When Ranasinghe Premadasa assumed duties as President and was informed about the bankruptcy of the government, I being a British citizen at the time explained to him the Tax structure of that country. He introduced the VAT to Sri Lanka at a rate of 1.5%. This helped the government to manage the economy and did not cause many problems for the people. With time this Tax was raised, but not lowered. During the time of President Mahinda Rajapaksa it was raised to 11% and was lowered later. The present government raised it to 15%. But the Supreme Court intervened and for the time being put a stop to it being raised.

Sometime ago when Thailand was in economic crisis, the Maha Sangha of the country came out onto the streets with the begging bowl. It was not to beg for food but for valuables such as money, gold and silver and donated them to the government. The Maha Sangha was able to help put the country on a forward path within a week.

In Sri Lanka many have forgotten about the insurrections of 1971 and 1987-1989 and the terrorism in the north and east. Who are the members of the clergy who came out with courage to stop the killings? Now again as the country tries to raise its head, there are forces rising against it.

When visiting Africa I observed that to identify a hunting ground of the lion, tiger or the bear we had only to look at the sky. Hawks fly over the hunting spots. Here we have crows. From the media we learn about the escalation of robberies and other crimes in the country. It was reported that public money went to the hands of criminals. And that maybe one of the reasons why the VAT had to be increased. Most robbers were not punished and what they robbed was not confiscated. If the gates are left open there will be a breakdown in the rule of law and increase in crime.

Recently a driver told us the following pathetic story while taking us for a religious ceremony Reverend Sir, I was born in Gampola. I have two daughters working in a garment factory. My wife had diabetes, and later a kidney ailment. I took her for Dialysis to the Kalubowila Hospital. There are four machines there. One or two machines are often broken. I had to get private medical help. Twice a week we had to get the dialysis done. They charged around Rs. 8,000 for each dialysis. For a week it was Rs. 16,000.

During this time the VAT was increased and the charge was Rs. 10,000 for each dialysis. I asked help from the Presidents Fund. An amount was approved. By that time my wife died, and now her three months almsgiving is due. I am 65 and I do this casual job as a driver. Some days I have no work. If I work the good gentlemen gives me Rs. 1100 for a day. Because of todays ceremony I will not get any money. Once I leave the vehicle behind I will have no money to take the bus home.

Stories such as this are told by many. Consultation fees, fees for medical reports, unavailability of medicinal drugs in public hospitals, long queues in the waiting list for operations, sky high prices of milk foods and added to these came VAT.

Because of free education we have tuition classes in most places. Though many charge VAT from students, that money is not remitted to the government by them. Some system should be adopted to correct this. Since many have become greedy for money there is widespread robbery taking place. All of us must be united to curb or eradicate robbery and cheating from society. Public institutions are the worst offenders. Without a bribe little or nothing can be done.

Many people have got used to robbing or cheating. Therefore we see many people involved in security work. But we find it difficult to find someone who would pluck fruits from a tree. The trader buys a Thambili from the owner at Rs. 15 or 20 at most. He sells it for Rs. 60.

There is an increase in the sale of alcohol, illicit drugs and pills because the number of users has increased. Some waste money just for pleasure or satisfaction. In every town there is an increase in liquour shops. Illicit drugs are sol at various places including school gates.

In the days gone by a coffin was made at home. There was no embalming. Today, even in the villages, they keep the body for several days and go on gambling and drinking. In the village today if two or three get together there is gambling.

Formalin is used for the embalming of bodies. During the Jayewardene era we requested that this be stopped. Today most food items contain a little poison. There are more sick

people today, more beggars, lots of lotteries, but few winners. If there are winners

the government gets a tax.

The government says it is not getting enough taxes, but it is spending a lot of money on publicity with regard to taxes. Lot of people earn commissions on account of this.

We need to get used to simple living. Tax must be imposed on those who waste money.

The punishment for those evading tax not only be a fine but a jail term and confiscation of property. We must do away with the taxing of every day items like onions, chilies and other food items and tax only imported foods and luxury items Government officials who are obviously living beyond their means should be brought before peoples committees for an inquiry.

Millionaires and billionaires are debtors to the banks. Many show their debt to get away from paying taxes. If loans are taken they should be taxed, and such taxes should be high. That way we can stop unwanted practice of taking loans. Insurance must be related to the actual value of the vehicle. Taxis and public vehicles do not have full insurance cover today. If there is an accident and people are affected there is no compensation. From the fuel pumps, to the measuring scales there is often tampering. We came out with a plan to stop cheating at fuel stations. If we collect diesel or petrol in a litre bottle we will know how we are being cheated.

Traders should be told or shown how they should do business without cheating but by being fair to customers.

Though we boast about Sri Lanka we are known as a country where employees can take excess leave and go on without working. We have unfortunately earned the reputation of leading in cheating, robbery and drug peddling. To change this we need to educate our society and create a religious atmosphere.

As was done by the Thai clergy we too can work out a system with the help of all clergy. First of all we have to spread the ideas about thrift and then about correct investment. We must eradicate fraud and wastage and cultivate good habits. We waste a lot of money on food. We waste so much food that dogs and crows are increasing in numbers.

We must take immediate steps to curtail imports. Increase of VAT on these items would be one way. Supermarkets are full of cheese, chocolate, and other luxury foods that we did not taste before. The sale of alcoholic beverages through supermarkets should be stopped. We seem to live in a country with no identity. It is useless to talk about caste creed and waste our time. All must be advised to encourage good qualities.
John: The family mans daughter stuck in China View(s):

This is a story that will shock Sri Lankans who believe in good governance or yaha palanaya with the advent of the present Government.

Sri Lanka joined China as a Country Partner in its Silk Road International Tourism Expo 2016 from August 26 to 28. The event was part of One belt, One Road project initiated by Chinese President Xi Jinping. It was being held in Xian, an ancient capital to 14 dynasties. The One Belt, One Road 21st Century Maritime Silk Road initiative encompasses more than 50 countries including Sri Lanka. Last week we published a photograph in our front page under the headline The Art of Diplomacy, an exhibition held at the BMICH as part of this Chinese initiative.

Since Sri Lanka is a country partner one would have thought that tourism industry and government experts would attend. Alas, it was not so. Other than Tourism Authority Chairman, Paddy Withana, there was a Ms Anu Rasiah, daughter of Tourism Minister, John Amaratunga participating. She has no title or designation, official or unofficial except being the daughter of the Minister.

When the question of who was to pay for her air fare came up, Tourism Ministry Secretary, P.H.J.B. Sugathadasa, refused to place his signature on documents confirming that she was a member of the Sri Lanka delegation nor authorise foreign exchange for the trip. State officers are now more conscious that they would be running the risk of facing investigation from the Financial Crimes Investigation Division of the police if they do so.

However, dada boy did the needful. She not only received the requirements but also the foreign exchange for the trip. It did not however go from the Ministry funds as the alert Secretary refused to oblige.

Off she flew to the Chinese city of Xian, as part of the official Sri Lanka delegation, but soon thereafter, Ms Rasiah found to her dismay that she had lost her handbag and with it, her passport. Panic telephone calls were made. The conference had ended but she could not leave China without proving that she had entered the country legitimately. It came to light that her father Minister Amaratunga was not in Sri Lanka. He was attending a seminar together with his son-in-law Dinesh Weerakkody in South Korea.

Ms. Rasiah kicked her heels in Xian. Soon, an official of the Sri Lanka Embassy in Beijing flew into Xian with an emergency certificate. Ms Rasiah is now due in Colombo today.

For Minister Ameratunga, doing the unusual is nothing new. When the United National Party (UNP) was in the opposition, he joined President Mahinda Rajapaksa on his foreign tours. Despite pressure for disciplinary action, he said he had obtained prior permission. His party leader said that he will pay back the air fare the Rajapaksa Government had paid for his ticket.

At least the Minister has proved that he is a faithful family man.

Five-star sandwich for Rs 1, 250: Minister makes Police eat humble pie

Law and Order Minister, Sagala Ratnayake directed that an order placed by the Police with a popular star class hotel in Colombo for as many as 4,000 sandwiches be cancelled forthwith.

The sandwiches were to be served at an event connected with Police Day celebrations yesterday, to mark the 150th anniversary of the law enforcement body. A Police source said the Minister wanted to curb extravagant expenditure by the Police particularly when there is public discontent about them. The 4,000 sandwiches were to cost Rs. 5 million which works out to Rs. 1,250 for a sandwich. Five-star prices, for five-star service. No wonder the Minister saw stars.

Refugee speaks out : Ill build a Singapore

Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera was on a private visit to Jaffna last week.

He took the opportunity to visit refugee camps and to speak with the inmates there. Most demanded that their lands be handed back to them and complained that they had been living in camps for long years.

There was one inmate who spoke out. Give back my land. I dont need any help. I guarantee I will make the place a Singapore, he exhorted. It evoked laughter from Minister Samaraweera and members of his entourage. The land, however, is yet to be given back.

Rajapaksas dead rope men going to UN with Sirisena

Civil society group leaders were invited by President Maithripala Sirisena to be members of his delegation to the United Nations General Assembly sessions later this month.

They politely declined the request. One of them was to point out that among those in the proposed delegation were staunch supporters of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa. They said they were the ones who gave dead ropes to the former President and were doing so to the incumbent.

An official source said the Presidents delegation to the UNGA would comprise 66 members. This will include 11 from the Presidential Media Division.

Two economic centres in the North

The Government has granted approval for two Economic Centres in Mankulam town Mullaitivu District and Mathavaithalaventhu in Vavuniya District.

They will function on the same lines as the Economic Centre in Dambulla where all produce including vegetables is sold both wholesale and retail.

Courtmartialled officer speaks at Defence seminar

Army Commander Chrisanthe de Silva was asked at a news conference ahead of their annual defence seminar why the name of an officer, who was once courtmartialled, has been included as a speaker.

The reference was to a helicopter pilot officer who made a hard landing outside the forward defence lines in Vavuniya during the separatist war. On board was then Deputy Defence Minister, Anuruddha Ratwatte.

The Army Chief replied that the officer in question had been recommended by his Commander. Another participant at the seminar was a one-time cameramen who made occasional visits with a lady journalist to cover the war. He has now turned into a university don.

Protocol mishap for Ban at BIA

Did differences between the United Nations Secretary Generals Secretariat and the Foreign Ministry lead to a low key welcome for Ban Ki-moon?

Insiders at the Foreign Office point out that there were inconsistencies in the practices followed in welcoming dignitaries.

Mr. Ban was received by a Deputy Minister at the Bandaranaike International Airport (BIA). There was also some confusion whether the UN SG is considered a Head of State. During the 1976 Non Aligned Summit in Colombo, the same issue arose and then SG Kurt Waldheim was not afforded such status, but things have changed since and the issue is beyond doubt. When the UN General Assembly is in session in New York, most Heads of State and heads of Government pay him courtesy call at his office.

The Chinese Foreign Minister was welcomed at the BIA recently by the Ministry Secretary and by the Minister only in Colombo. However, Nisha Biswal, an Assistant Secretary of State of the United States had been received by Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera himself at the airport  with Kandyan drummers and the works.

Another instance, they say, is the visit to Sri Lanka by Norways Prime Minister Erna Solberg. She was on holiday in Sri Lanka. The last two days of her visit were turned into an official visit. Ms Solberg received a red carpet welcome outside the precincts of the Presidential Secretariat with mounted horses and a gun salute by the Sri Lanka Air Force. However, she is not a Head of State. It is the Norwegian King who holds that position.

Secretary General Ban is ranked as a Head of State. This, insiders say, has raised questions over Sri Lankas protocol policies.

President J.R. Jayewardene tried to put some order into receiving and sending off visiting VIPs by having the official welcome opposite Presidents House in Colombo Fort. The most (in)famous incident there was the parting shot given to Indian PM Rajiv Gandhi by a naval rating soon after he had signed the (in)famous Indo-Lanka Agreement of 1987.
Media exposes that irk our ministers View(s):

There is hardly a politician who does not pay homage to the concept of media freedom, at least in countries that call themselves democracies. Politicians, particularly those aspiring to higher office will burn incense at the altar of media freedom and portray themselves as defenders of the faith. All this is in the hope of winning public acceptance and hallelujahs from international institutions advocating freedom for the media.

Why, some even proclaim a willingness to shed their last drop of blood defending the media against authoritarian incursions that threaten to destroy one of the four pillars that hold up democratic governance.

It was in the late 18th century that Edmund Burke stressed the vital role of the press at the time, describing it as the fourth estate in parliament though it sat in the press gallery above the parliaments chamber where sat the other three.

Since the days Edmund Burke recognized the critical importance of the press there has been a solid phalanx of politicians who pledge to safeguard press freedom as a cornerstone of democracy.

But there are also those who pay mere lip service to this freedom because it is profitable to do so in the furtherance of self-interest.

Much of this vocal support, of course, comes when they are in the opposition and the opportunity to practise what they preach seems remote. If and when they come to power they count on public memories being extremely short and their homilies on press freedom long forgotten.

But once in the seats of power they soon begin to forget what they pledged in public and how they castigated-quite rightly I think- the predecessor administration for the Damocleansword approach to the media and its repression of practitioners and institutions.

Switching roles from defender of the press while in opposition to offender of the media when in office comes quite naturally to politicians who, like the seven ages of man, play many parts in their political lives.

Admittedly the media is not infallible. It too is guilty of acts of commission and omission and even propagating falsehoods. One reason why media standards have deteriorated in Sri Lanka is because of the plethora of media outlets both in the print and electronic media and the lack of professionalism and trained and experienced practitioners than man them.

Another is that politicians cultivate journalists for publicity and promote themselves and journalists cultivate politicians for self-interest including jobs in state media. This symbiotic relationship also led to stories being planted against rival politicians or those perceived as a challenger to their political patron.

One can understand political anger being directed at institutions and practitioners for distortion, misreporting and worse at deliberate falsehoods. But the reason for the morphing of defender in opposition to offender in power lies elsewhere.

It is the power of the media to expose-and indeed its right to do so- political chicanery, hidden agendas, secret deals, corruption, family promotion and cronyism, lack of transparency and a host of other acts that offend public sensibilities, in fact everything that violate the principles of good governance as spelt out by its leading advocates, that rankles the minds of political power wielders.

It is when the media performs one of its essential tasks of ferreting out and placing in the public domain information that the government desperately wishes to hide from the people but is of public interest, that holders of political power try to coerce the media and want it cowed into silence or for it to retreat from its mandated responsibility.

In recent months the public have witnessed attempts by senior politicians in government making threatening noises against the media that seem not to toe the line they would wish the media to follow.

Media have not hesitated to criticize some actions, proposals and decisions of the government and justifiably so. Moreover, opinions critical of the yahapalanaya administration turning into an appendage of the West have been aired by the media so that the public would have access to other points of view.

Believing the promises held out during two crucial elections last year that the media would be unshackled under a new dispensation, many of the more established and professionally-run media have shown they are not ready to be servile instruments voicing only what the government hopes they should do.

It seems that frequent visits to China and Singapore are teaching our leaders more than how to establish model industrial zones and state-financed quangos. Over the years these two hugely differing states have shackled the media and suppressed dissenting voices.

Lee Kuan Yew, that grand vizier of thought control ran the city state with an iron hand more than a velvet glove. Some might wonder a Leeward lurch might prove useful along with imported economic models would surely be gnawing away at the minds of those who wish to curb the media.

I am not certain whether a story currently doing the rounds that the government intends to disallow print media publishers from venturing into the field of electronic media and TV/radio broadcasters from engaging in newspaper/magazine publishing, is true or not.

But one cannot put it beyond some self-appointed media expert or an official mediocrity in some ministry with nothing significant to do to cook- up a scheme on the false prospectus that this would halt the creation of media monopolies and give government greater leverage in media manipulation.

While this Macbethian broth is being fired up readers were regaled last Sunday with the futile efforts of Minister of Development Strategies and International Trade Malik Samarawickrema trying to wriggle out of an awkward situation as he hurriedly sought to lock the stable after the horse had cantered away.

This is not the first time that the aforesaid Minister Samarawickrema has tried to deny news reports in the Sunday Times as this newspaper made clear last week. His efforts at denial are neatly complemented by a colleague with a name somewhat similar to his- Mangala Samaraweera- reminding one of Tweedle dee and Tweedle dum.

While Samarawickrema is in denial mode Samaraweera is pursuing a creative career perhaps picking up from his early days when he learnt to be a fashion designer.

Last week Samaraweera told the media that some 200 LTTE cadres had secretly left Sri Lanka during the final stages of the war with a help of a defence ministry official. He did not say when he came to learn of it or when the government knew of it. But Samaraweera does have a habit of dropping explosive stories in the lap of the media.

Readers will recall that immediately after the presidential election the same Mangala Samaraweera exploded an incendiary device accusing the defeated president and some acolytes of plotting a coup- something to do with attempts to annul the election result and remain in power. Some 20 months later nary a word is said about it. It seems to have been interred with other promises such as an unfettered media.

Some say such tales from beyond the Bentara Ganga should be taken with a pinch of salt. One would have thought that a bottle of Epsom salt is more appropriate. Anyway it might be unethical to advertise brand names.

Samarawickremas denials are no better. Having failed to raise the flag with his criticism of the Sunday Times he turned to the parliamentary floor where he felt safest and had a bigger audience including the media.

But those who read this newspaper last Sunday would have found that its diplomatic correspondent had done a commendable demolition job that the minister is unlikely to forget for a long time.

Still some comments seem appropriate. Samarawickrema said that the mere intention was to unjustifiably make a comparison with some of the sordid deals made during the Rajapaksa with US lobbying firms. I cannot be certain what the minister means by mere intention but if he had the faintest idea of news reporting he would know that the most important and news worthy parts are in the opening paragraphs.

It is best that he re-reads that opening paragraph which says he has retained a lobbying form to educate officials on a non-existent peace process, increase economic ties and market access.

If anybody is doling out misleading information it is the minister. In quoting those words from the news story the minister deliberately omits the words after process and attaches the words part of the deal. Who is providing incorrect and misleading information minister?

In the months following the election victories last year the world was told that peace has returned to Sri Lanka. If that is so there is no need for a peace process. And where is this process to be found and who is spearheading it?

Admittedly steps need to be taken to achieve reconciliation which could take a generation or two to solidify. But if there is a peace process in motion it must be proceeding in utmost secrecy with a foreign lobbying firm one of the few privy to it.

Minister Samarawickrema states that the contract had been entered into in the fullest transparency manner. If what the minister is struggling to say is what I think he means then that agreement is no secret. So how was it done in the fullest transparency manner?

Why that is simple. The Sri Lanka Embassy in Washington evaluated it, the Economic Management sub Committee approved it, the cabinet said okay and even the Attorney-General weighed in obviously only with legal advice and nothing more.

Therefore it was done with the fullest transparency. So that is what transparency means. Now did the public know about it? Did parliament where representatives of the people sit, know about it? Did that loquacious cabinet spokesman who briefs the media after cabinet meetings announce it? After all by the ministers own admission the cabinet approved it on June 14th?

The answer to all these questions is a resounding no. Where then is the transparency unless transparency means something different to the minister. I thought that the openness and transparency that the advocates of yahapalanaya professed to pursue meant that the actions and decisions of government would be made known to the public by the various means of mass communication.

But the culture of secrecy prevalent in corporate activities and dealings seem to have been transposed to the affairs of state. Consider for instance the remark made by the chairman of SriLankan Airlines Ajith Dias that discussions/disputes between the management and its employees are an internal matter. Perhaps he has forgotten that he is head of the state-owned enterprise.

Some of the functions allocated to this lobbying firm are matters that should be handled by our Washington embassy. Expanding the Sri Lanka caucus and building a friends of Sri Lanka caucus is what embassy officials should be doing. The UK has these. But I doubt they came into existence with the assistance of lobbying firms.

Another function of the lobbyists is promptly notifying of any Congressional or Administrative action of importance to Sri Lanka. For heaven sake this is what every diplomatic mission should be doing. It is part of the job just as writing regular political and economic reports are traditional functions.

The normal practice is that when other ministries or departments wish to obtain the assistance of a diplomatic mission such requests are channelled through the Foreign Ministry. Even such simple things as arranging meetings for visiting delegations should go through the foreign ministry. But this does not appear to have been done in this instance. Whether our Washington embassy informed the foreign ministry about the evaluating request from Samarawickremas ministry is also not disclosed.

All that is said is that the foreign ministry was aware of the agreement. How? Because, according to the minister, the decision approving the recommendation of the Cabinet Memorandum had been sent to relevant Secretaries.

So it is only the decision that had been sent to the foreign ministry, a post facto act. If this is not bypassing settled conventions what is!

If the Sunday Times had not made this deal public-as it did other lobby deals during the Rajapaksa days- would the Sri Lankan people have ever known of it? When history comes to be written perhaps! Maybe further excavation might reveal hitherto unknown connections. Who knows!
By PTI: New Delhi, Sep 4 (PTI) Several makeshift mohalla clinics in north Delhi functioning out of porta-cabins on roadsides, face "demolition" as the areas civic body has decided to remove such structures which have been built "without permission".

Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain today reacted sharply over the issue and claimed that these are temporary structures and "did not need permission".

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The decision was taken during a high-power committee meeting of the BJP-ruled North Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) held last month.

"MCD planning to demolish some Moh Clinics saying its their land. These r temp structures n dont need permission," the minister tweeted.

He also attached with the tweet a photograph of the municipal circular released in this regard.

"During the meeting it was also pointed out that PWD, GNCTD has started erection/installation on footpaths/pavements in many areas...All such structures should not be allowed to be erected on footpaths/pavements without approval of the corporation," the order reads.

The area falls under the NDMC and its Mayor said, "no unauthorised structures will be allowed on pavements and roadsides."

"As a civic body, it is our duty to remove any illegal structure. If the government has put up porta-cabins for mohalla clinics without permission, we will certainly remove those. Illegal structures will not be permitted," north Delhi Mayor Sanjeev Nayyar said.

Mohalla Clinics scheme is one of the flagship projects of the AAP government and currently 105 such facilities have been set up in different areas of the national capital, with most of these operating out of porta-cabins.

The issue is likely to further flare up the standoff between the AAP dispensation and the BJP-led civic body.

The Arvind Kejriwal-led government has an aim to increase the number of such clinics to 1,000 by the end of this year.

These are planned to be set up in commercial hubs, including Nehru Place, Bhikaji Cama Place, and Subhash Place, in order to provide medical facility to the working class there.

Delhi government has identified 300 schools where such clinics will be set up for giving medical service to students near their study places. PTI KND NSD RG NSD

--- ENDS ---
Tax reforms and reform of tax administration vital for success of national development plan View(s):

In one of his budget speeches Dr. N.M. Perera, one time Finance Minister, said that you cant even fry an egg without money. It was his way of emphasising the importance of revenue for the countrys budget. The government is facing a severe revenue crunch owing to inadequate revenue collection. Unless the government is able to increase revenue much above recent amounts, the proposed National Economic Development Plan will remain a theoretical construct.

Inadequate revenue

Adequate revenue is vital for reducing the fiscal deficit, ensuring economic stability and enabling economic growth. For sometime now government revenue has been hardly adequate to meet debt repayment obligations. In some years, government revenue was inadequate for debt repayment and interest costs. In others over 90 per cent of government revenue was expended on debt servicing alone, leaving hardly any money for all other recurrent expenditure such as salaries and pensions, defence, health and education. Consequently capital expenditure was either drastically reduced or inadequately met through domestic and foreign borrowing. Consequently the public debt continued to grow to an unacceptable 76 per cent of GDP in 2015 and its debt servicing cost a huge burden on the public finances.

Unless government revenue is increased substantially there would be no fiscal space for increasing expenditure on education, health and the development of infrastructure. It would also mean that macro economic fundamentals would be weak and unstable. Economic stabilisation and economic growth are impossible without increased revenue. Many facets of the proposed National Economic Development Plan would require additional revenue.

Revenue decline

There has been a significant decline in revenue as a proportion of GDP since 2000. Such a decline during a period when GDP has been growing has been a startling economic feature. Professor Mick Moore of the Institute of Development Studies of the University of Sussex has pointed out that Sri Lanka holds the world record for the longest and largest unplanned decline in government revenue collection. Over a quarter century from 1989, the ratio of government revenue collection to GDP fell by a half, from 21% to 10.4% (in 2014).

Revenue too low

Sri Lankas revenue collection of 13 per cent of GDP in 2015 is far below that of countries with a comparable GDP. It is one of the lowest in the world. While the experience of the rest of the world is a higher revenue collection ratio with increases in per capita income, the opposite is the case in Sri Lanka. Some economists have even suggested that this was due to the GDP figure being exaggerated.

The serious implication of lower government revenue when the economy is growing is that the government has been unable to tax increasing incomes from growth sectors and high income earners. The affluent have been exempted from payment of taxes, or avoided or evaded taxes. Tax rates are also low and tax administration is weak, inefficient and corrupt.

The means

The elimination of tax exemptions and the minimisation of tax avoidance and tax evasion are the means of achieving a higher revenue collection. However conventional approaches to resolve these issues are unlikely to succeed due to innovative and creative methods of tax avoidance and tax evasion, inefficient tax administration and rampant bribery and corruption. Therefore tax reforms must develop a tax system where tax avoidance and evasion are minimized and the affluent pay higher taxes. Expecting to increase tax revenues by resolving the deficiencies in tax administration is impractical in the short run. There should be efforts to improve the tax administration but the results of such efforts would take time.

Tax administration

A root cause for tax short falls has been the inefficiency and corruption in tax administration. Unless this is remedied no amount of tax reforms are likely to bring in adequate revenue. As Devan Daniel has pointed out quite rightly: Tax officials are known to collude with tax evaders and many people in the tax office that have access to tax files without supervisory approval. There is no record of who handles what, so files get misplaced or data manipulated. Good tax officials are demoralised with little career prospects and departments are under-funded, easy prey to tax evaders. The Presidential Tax Commission of 2011 said the success of any reform hinges on a robust and credible tax administration. Reducing taxes and rates will not broaden the tax base if revenue authorities are incapable of enforcing compliance.

Way forward

Therefore other ways and means have to be found to gather in more revenue. The way forward is to have taxes that are difficult to avoid such as withholding taxes on incomes, increased property taxes, and increased license fees on conspicuous consumption such as high value motor taxes and implementation of stringent rules on undervaluation of stamp duties on high value property transfers.

A compulsory declaration of annual changes in assets by all professionals with deterrent punishment on those who fail to declare assets and incomes is essential. An expenditure taxation system is more likely to succeed and be progressive provided it is the consumption expenditure of the affluent and not the lower and middle income earners consumer items that are taxed. These suggestions are indicative of the thrust taxation should take.

Taxation Commission

It is incomprehensible as to why the previous government that appointed the Presidential Taxation Commission in 2011, as well as the present government has not considered the valuable suggestions and tax proposals made in it. Those proposals could be used to reform and strengthen the tax system to enhance tax revenue.

Concluding reflections

Sri Lankas precarious fiscal situation is the root cause of the countrys current economic instability. Much higher revenue collection is essential for fiscal consolidation without which economic development would be a mirage. Unless government revenue is enhanced and the fiscal deficit is brought down to targeted levels, the IMF may not give the remaining tranches of the Extended Fund Facility of US$ 1 billion. The IMFs withholding of it would erode international confidence that could create a severe crisis in external reserves.

It is imperative that the government puts in place a taxation system that is able to increase revenue substantially to achieve fiscal consolidation. The implementation of the pragmatic proposals contained in the Report of the 2011 Presidential Commission on Taxation is a means of achieving it.
That great betrayal and institutional accountability View(s):

Visiting United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moons assertion that much needs to be done in order to redress wrongs of the past and restore accountability of key organizations, particularly the judiciary and the security services raises an interesting question.

Myopic framing of core questions

Post last years rainbow revolution, where is the focus on substantive institutional reforms? Let me delight in being as heretical as always and pointing out that, on the contrary, there appears to be a settling for a straight-jacketed transitional justice package, each in separate limited components. This is quite distinct from an uncompromising insistence on state accountability for systemic wrongs. Put harshly but nonetheless justifiably, this resort to settling is nothing but a great betrayal of long and bitterly fought struggles on fundamental failures of justice.

Lest we mistake the matter, these failures predate the grievous Medamulana affliction upon this land. Rather, every political party along with every political leader, living or dead, has to bear responsibility for the same.

But to be fair, the Government is responsible for this myopic framing of core questions only up to a certain extent. The issue of systemic accountability is a hard question that any political regime will prefer to leave undisturbed if allowed to by citizens. This is precisely what has happened in Sri Lankas frantic rush towards the tempting glamour of justice in transition.

Unacceptable compromises on fundamental issues

Let us take the judiciary and the security sector (mentioned by the UN Secretary General) as good examples thereof. So is the need for legal institutional reform adequately met by the Bar Association of Sri Lanka indulging in a seminar series on the Rule of Law encompassing anti-corruption to victim protection? Or are we to believe that hasty constitutional reform following a bow and tie packaged process of public consultations will suffice?

The irony is even greater given that state law officers who enabled the cover up of abuses in the Rajapaksa years facilitate some of these farcical exercises. In India for example, if a state law officer complicit in enforced disappearances in Kashmir had been tasked to lead witness protection programmes or security sector reform, a storm of (public) protests would have ensued.

That is the singular strength of civil movements elsewhere in the region. But in this strangely incestuous society, the yahapalanaya minded see no problem in joining hands with compromised individuals to unblushingly proclaim their adherence to good governance. This is a parody of the most satirical kind. So let alone Northern victims protesting, can the South profess anything but profound disinterest in these games that are being played?

Who makes the decisions for the victims?

The problem lies with institutional culture and political will, not the Constitution, whether First Republican, Second Republican or (conceivably) the Third Republican, which one devoutly hopes will not be as inherently self-contradictory as the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. The issue is not really the law itself, superior or subordinate as the case may be.

So when the habeas corpus application of a mother whose sixteen year old daughter had disappeared when fleeing from the Wanni with her other family members during 2009 is met by stony silence of the defence establishment in the Vavuniya courts, there is a failure of justice. A Special Court with or without international involvement, aimed at a few military or political scapegoats, leaves that failure undisturbed.

This is also not satiated by an Office of Missing Persons (OMP) which subsumes the disappeared under the bland euphemism of the missing or a Truth and Reconciliation Commission both of which lack an explicit link to an effective criminal justice process or an efficacious habeas corpus remedy. . In the end, who arrives at these decisions on behalf of the victims and then claim the right to ask the victims to believe in those choices? Making these linkages and insisting on reform of these processes would not have been met with howls of protest from the South despite Rajapaksa histrionics

Dismissing crassly simplistic arguments

In any event, no civil or criminal liability attaches to the findings of the OMP. However, if an offence has been committed, it may be reported to a law enforcement authority. Even here, the duty is discretionary. And as information received in confidence by the OMP is not subject to the reach of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, No 12 of 2016, that particular information in unreviewable.

Thus a key ground to compel the disclosure of information on the basis of which it may be judicially reviewed as to whether the OMP has exercised proper discretion in (the minimum) initiating the first step in a criminal investigation is rendered arguable. The crassly simplistic argument that this is necessary for preserving the security of witnesses testimony is unacceptable. This objective may have been achieved by a more tightly drawn clause defining these circumstances narrowly.

Citing the use of the term in confidence in other statutes is also unhelpful as there are clear safeguards in those contexts to prevent abuse, one example being the overriding public interest disclosure clause in the RTI Act at several levels of appeal and review. In contrast, the discretion of the OMP in shutting out such information even to the family members of the victims is dangerously open-ended.

Need for less effusion and more discretion

Overall there is the reposing of a disturbingly naive belief in the great goodness of such bodies which runs counter to all our past experiences. Those lacking a sense of institutional history need to be reminded of this.

And as Sri Lankans are confronted with what appears to be a managed and rushed process to satisfy external timelines, wondrously effusive messages of support ceaselessly emanate from a plethora of foreign missions.

Perhaps it is now time for a little less effusion and a little more discretion. And for more considered thought to be given to reconciliation processes which, as of now, appear to be aimed discomfortingly at reconciling only politicians bound by a common struggle for political survival.
UNs hollow ring for SDGs worldwide View(s):

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Friday spoke in Colombo under the auspices of the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute for International Relations and Strategic Studies (LKIIRSS) on the topic of Sustaining Peace and Achieving Sustainable Development Goals. He referred to the many Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the UN, but clearly went off track to compare what happened in Sri Lanka with what happened in Rwanda which raised some eye-brows and asked the Government to reduce its military strength in the North ; something he would dare not ask the West to do in West Asia.

Only a few weeks earlier, the Norwegian Prime Minister delivering the Lakshman Kadirgamar 2016 memorial lecture spoke on the same SDG theme. Ms. Ema Solberg referred to the importance of the 17 SDGs as the UNs plan of action for people, peace, prosperity, partnership and the planet  the five Ps. Though Mr. Ban made no reference to areas of the SDGs in which Sri Lanka has made vast strides, Ms. Solberg praised Sri Lanka for achieving at least some of these goals. For instance, accessibility to health and education for both males and females has long been achieved in Sri Lanka. Instead, the UNSG made the startling remark that Sri Lanka needed to regain its rightful place in the region and the international community. The local media wanted to grill him on this at a media conference he held later, but his media boys called the presser off after just four questions were asked.

SDG 5 on gender equality; SDG 7 on affordable and clean energy; SDG 13 on climate change; SDG 14 on conservation of the oceans: SDG 16 on peace and justice  these are some of the UNs priorities for a better world. These SDGs are a bi-product of the UNs Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that did not meet their full potential by their target date in 2015. The SDGs now target 2030 but the UNs call for international co-operation in achieving these goals unfortunately fall flat when bigger nations simply ignore them for their national interest. For example, take the rape of the marine resources in the Palk Strait and the Gulf of Mannar by Indian fishermen. Its a classic instance of the world community, including the UN maintaining a deafening silence when the big nations are in the wrong.

The 17 SDGs are inter-connected and many of them require cooperation across international borders  that means we will fail or succeed together, said the Norwegian PM, Co-chair of the UN SDGs advisory group. In many areas, business as usual will not do, she added for good measure and referred to her country cooperating in fisheries (SDG 14 deals with the sustainable use of marine resources).

But look at the sheer hypocrisy in international cooperation. The illegal, fishing practices (IUU) adopted by the Indians continue unabated, filling the Treasury coffers of the Tamil Nadu state Government and lining the pockets of the states businessmen or politicians with exports to the European Union (EU). In the meantime, the EU takes a holistic view on Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) practices against Sri Lankan fishermen and red cards imports from Sri Lanka. It preaches and has its plate full at the same time.

This is why the UNs otherwise noble goals are often unachievable and of mere academic interest to countries that need its help most. These SDGs refer to children needing schools and childbirth issues, poverty and health, when countries like Syria and much of West Asia, Yemen and parts of Africa are living hells due to wars triggered by the Wests agenda. Tax havens overseas, especially in the West, allow corrupt politicians and third-world tax dodgers who have creamed the fat off their land to stack their loot in their banks and bolster their economies. The UN has been widely blamed for standing and watching, doing little or nothing while talking of MDGs and SDGs.

While Sri Lankas public and private sector embrace the UNs SDGs, even the UNSG Ban-Ki moon conceded how hollow the UNs grandiloquence can be when the world is at war. And of course, so too, as long as double standards of the West dominate the world order.

Whither strategic studies

While the United Nations Secretary General was speaking in Colombo on peace and the UNs goals for a better socio-economic-political world, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe was delivering the keynote address in Singapore on the Global Power Transition in the Indian Ocean organized by several think-tanks across Asia (See ST2 cover page for his speech). This was an important event organized by think-tanks from the Asia-Pacific region, co-hosted by India and Singapore with the 2017 edition to be held in Colombo.

Sirima Bandaranaikes proposal at the UN General Assembly in 1971 was for an Indian Ocean Zone of Peace. It was an idealist proposal  an illusion. Today, India is interested in revisiting this proposal given the burgeoning Chinese naval presence in these waters and the interest shown by many competing fleets, mainly the United States and Japan. But still, there are no takers.

PM Wickremesinghe took the opportunity to outline Sri Lankas pivotal position in this lively Ocean and its balancing line between India, China and Western interests. In his keynote address, he called for an Indian Ocean Order with accepted rules to guide interactions between states and having the primary responsibility of upholding the freedom of navigation in the Indian Ocean. He said it should be built on a consensual agreement with no singular state dominating.

This week, the Colombo Defence Seminar was also significant. Though the credentials of some of the foreign speakers were questionable, the topic Soft Power and Influence on Global issues was relevant. Soft power is the persuasive approach to international relations through economic and cultural influence. This is in vogue in world affairs where there are no wars (hard power). In November, the Galle Dialogue, an initiative of the former Defence Secretary for fostering strategic maritime partnerships will be held.

These military-strategic studies are a sine quo non for a country like Sri Lanka given our geographic location, buffeted by the soft power of competing world powers. How the countrys leaders handle the delicate winds of change will be of the essence.

The Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute of International Relations and Strategic Studies (LKIIRSS) was strategized by the former Foreign Minister in whose name the former Institute of Strategic Studies was re-named after his assassination, for this very purpose. The LKIIRSS, an autonomous body under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has however lost its way, falling way short of what was expected of it.

According to the Act that established the LKIIRSS, it was to be a multi-disciplinary research institute dedicated to the study of the strategic interests of Sri Lanka, providing information and data to the Government in relation to issues which may be required as a basis for the formulation and structuring of national policies. How much of the Prime Ministers keynote address in Singapore had the input of the LKIIRSS? A safe guess would be, nil. Holding workshops and guest speakers or yanking foreign VIPs from the beach when on a private vacation and asking them to deliver memorial lectures is far from what the LKIIRSS is expected to do. In the meantime, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Defence have set up a parallel Institute of National Security Studies. The more think-tanks the merrier one should think, but merrier for whom is the question, if it is not for the benefit of the Government and the country.
Canvas of memories By Kaveesha Fernando View(s): View(s):

Ones wedding day is something special and many aspire to do something different to make it a memorable occasion. This is where Asanka Sanjaya comes in. Asanka draws portraits of couples on their wedding day so that they have an enduring memory for the years ahead.

Does having a wedding portrait drawn sound a bit unusual? Asanka agrees, but says its something which is gaining ground. People like the fact that this is something new and unique and this makes them very interested, he says. The portraits are done using soft pastels after the official ceremony is over. Asanka usually takes 1  to 2 hours to complete a 32 feet portrait, but the couple is free to move around and take part in the festivities even during this time. Im only doing something thats a small feature of the wedding so I dont expect them to stay still for that long, he says. He also adds that drawing a portrait isnt something which only the couple enjoys because the guests at the wedding are also intrigued by the process.

A student at the University of Visual and Performing Arts, Asanka has been into art ever since he can remember and says his mothers encouragement is what has made him pursue it as a career. He credits his passion as the driving force behind his work.

Given the response to his wedding portraits, Asanka is hopeful it will grow more popular. A 3X2 feet wedding portrait usually costs Rs. 10,000.

Asanka can be contacted on 071 2574288 or 0777321479. He can also be found on Facebook under the name Asanka Gihan Sanjaya.
FLOW Celebrates its first Anniversary View(s):

FLOW, all day dining restaurant at Hilton Colombo Residences today announced the celebration of their first anniversary this month. The anniversary is celebrated with a 25% discount on all HSBC credit cards for dinner (buffet and A La Carte) and Sunday Brunch, valid until 31 October 2016.

Launched in August 2015 as an all-day dining with an open kitchen concept that was a first of its kind in Sri Lanka with seating for 168 guests, the restaurant offers cuisine from around the globe. The restaurant is open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner from 6:30AM until 10:30PM, daily.

The Sunday Brunch was launched in September 2015 and has now become a popular destination for guests who enjoy the contemporary atmosphere, Asian and western cuisine, and the kids playzone which includes an activity area with bean bags, a PlayStation 4 and other games to keep them enthralled.

FLOW is well-regarded as a restaurant that offers authenticity, quality, and consistency, and is constantly full of business guests, leisure travellers, and families who enjoy this contemporary atmosphere in the heart of Colombo.

FLOW has paved itself as a destination for dining with five open kitchens that include a Chinese wok, Tandoori oven, and Zesti oven, perfect for meat lovers, said F&B Manager Priyal Wijesuriya, who has played an integral part since its design phase.

Priyal Wijesuriya was formerly the executive chef of Hilton Colombo Residences since 2008 and has been involved in spearheading the launch of the Union Ballroom in 2012, the launch of BASICO (bar lounge) in 2014, and placing Hilton Colombo Residences on the map for dining.

Speaking of the beginnings Karim Schadlou, general manager of Hilton Colombo Residences comments that FLOW received positive accolades from its inception. He credits this accomplishment to the culinary team and the food and beverages services team without, whom the restaurant would not have been able to retain its mark for authenticity and quality.

One of the unique traits of this restaurant is that it allows guests to watch their meals being prepared by chefs in the five open kitchens in a contemporarily-designed space.

There was much consideration with design and layout; we were fortunate to have had the backing of our owning company, Hilton Worldwide, and the many project personnel on the job; we are very appreciative of all our guests who have continuously patronised FLOW added Schadlou.

For further information, cotact FLOW on 0-115-344644 extension 635, or find FLOW on Facebook, Instagram, and Tripadvisor.
When beauty is earth  bound By Joshua Surendraraj View(s): View(s):

Climate change is unstoppable, but we can slow it down and give our planet a chance to heal itself. There is no Plan B, this Earth is not ours to begin with. Everything around us is just borrowed  things that we need to respect and protect. This is the message that Miss Earth 2015 hopes to deliver during her visit to Sri Lanka as she prepares to create awareness on some of the pressing concerns of the environment.

The Sunday Times Magazine caught up with 26-year-old Angelia Ong who representing Philippines at the Miss Earth pageant 2015, won the prestigious title ( giving her country a second successive win) and has since been travelling around the world, delivering a message of hope.

I think the number one threat, not only to the environment, but also to humanity is climate change, she tells us adding that people have been denying that it exists altogether, because it will affect their business concerns. But now it is undeniable that its happening.

In Philippines, we are used to typhoons, because we are located beside the Pacific Ocean, where its formed. However, the thing thats changed lately is that our typhoons get stronger and just ruin lives and the environment, she says.

However theres only so much that Angelia can do as Miss Earth. Whats important, according to her, is that we learn how to help and keep each other informed of the ways we can ease the problem of climate change, because there are no overnight solutions, rather its a continuous process.

Angelia tells us they put their investment and effort into children because with the grownups, its really hard to break old habits, but we dont stop trying.

She hits home when she tells us, We should never give up on nature, because Mother Nature never gave up on us. Its just us who are hurting her. I think the first step to a better environment, is really the acknowledgment of the problem. Once you acknowledge that there is a problem thats the time we get to do things and be part of a solution.

It was fate that drove her to become tMiss Earth in Vienna Austria, she tells us. This was because she wasnt a pageant person before. Do you know how your mum tells you, that youre beautiful all the time? Of course you believe it. But its a different thing when the people around you, encourage you to join competitions and thats what really encouraged me and empowered me, she says.

The competition was a huge challenge for her because it was the Philippines which had won the previous year and people told her that it was impossible to have a back-to-back win.

I had to work harder than the rest of the girls but it was all worth it, because on that coronation night when they said Philippines, it was amazing, she says, wiping the tears away from her eyes. Taking a deep breath, she continues, I shouted, I cried and I laughed. I did everything altogether.

I really want to be remembered as the queen who did her job, she says, adding that she always wanted to make an impact.

Miss Earth is very different from other beauty pageants, Angelia tells us. It doesnt only make you rock your heels but it also gets your hands a bit dirty, with planting trees, going to public schools teaching the kids and its really something that you will cherish for the rest of your life.

They arent just beauties with a crown, she stresses.  No matter how pretty you are, if you dont have a love for the environment, it will show, she tells us. We want an ambassador who has the heart to do this job, not just the looks, we are all beautiful in our own ways, its the heart that really differs, she says.

Angelia will be part of launching a project of planting one million trees in Sri Lanka. Isnt that exciting? You guys will be one million trees greener, she says.

She is also joined by Brittany Payne of USA, who was crowned Miss Earth-Water 2015. You have to be beauty for a cause, Brittany tells us adding that she has been in beauty pageants for the past eight years, but Miss Earth has been a different experience altogether.

Making it into the top four was unreal because this was an international pageant. I knew that mentally and emotionally you had to be prepared for this, she says.

It takes a little maturing going into it, she concedes adding that the experience definitely made her humble and love where she came from. As a contestant for Miss USA next year, I would tell you that this pageant isnt just about outer beauty or how well you model, its honestly about what you can do to inspire others, and thats really a big percentage of your score, unlike other pageants, where they like you to volunteer but its not required, she says.
YouthHackstart-up Challenge kick starting entreprenurship View(s):

The YouthHack start-up Challenge was a two day event for high school and university students to dive into the local start-up scene.The programme, which was conducted on August 6 and 7 at the MAS Innovation Centre and Edulink, saw a range of innovative ideas come through, of which a team from gurupala.lk won the award for the best pitch.

The two day conference functioned as a platform to introduce youth from schools and universities, to entrepreneurship, technology and the local start up scene.

The organisation was founded in 2014 by David Ongchoco, who was an 18-year-old high school graduate at the time in the Philippines. Having just come back from Silicon Valley,USA, David was inspired to foster this culture of tech, start-ups and entrepreneurship in Manila.

Since then, YouthHack has gone on to run programs and events in several cities and countries around the world including Singapore, Hong Kong, Philadelphia, Nigeria, Thailand, Australia and recently, Sri Lanka. It constantly aims at empowering the youth around the world.

Their first event in Sri Lanka was held during the weekend. It was similar to a Hackathon, although unlike a Hackathon, where a large number of people meet to engage in collaborative computer programming, in this instance the students were very focussed on learning as well.

On the first day, students heard from speakers and went through workshops in ideation, prototyping and pitching. On the second day, students pitched their ideas to a panel of judges.

Both individual students, as well as teams of four were facilitated for the programme. The hacking was more focussed on ideas and learning key skills from Industry start-ups like Katha, PayMedia, Foodie Global, Layup and many more.

The event kicked off with a panel discussion featuring Madu Ratnayake, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Virtusa, Jeevan Gnanam, CEO of Orion City and DulithHerath, Founder and CEO of Kapruka.com. It provided a valuable opportunity for participants to learn from the experiences of these exceptional individuals in the Sri Lankan tech sector.

The start-up challenge had a total of eight speakers, who conducted specific workshops on a particular area. For example foodieglobal.lk spoke about bootstrapping which is essentially, starting a business without external help or capital. Such start-ups fund the development of their company through internal cash flow and are cautious with their expenses.

The workshop hosts included, Mahen Ratnayake, Co-founder & Chief Executive of Katha , Sheran Corera, Co-Founder, Chief Architect of Layup, Kanishka Weeramunda, Founder of PayMedia, , Mike Soertsz, Founder / CEO of Foodie Global, Chandika Jayasundara, CEO ofCreately, Hiraash Thawfeek, CTO of Creately, Udara Jayawardena the Founder of Tidland AIESEC Colombo Central, who spoke on Social Impact Startups.

Furthermore, the conference also had other workshops which took on topics such as communicating ideas in a short period of time etc. The participants were urged to address global issues through developing their ideas and showcasing them to experienced business leaders in the Sri Lanka Start-up Ecosystem.

Sanjula Weerawardhena, the chapter leader of YouthHack, Sri Lanka tells us that the organization conducts star-up challenges, code weekends and skills boot camps to help high school and university students learn more about startups, technology and entrepreneurship.

We also plan to run a fellowship program that connects students with actual start-ups they can intern in, he says adding that they hope to be able to create a global community of youth entrepreneurs that solve the worlds different problems using technology and entrepreneurship.

(JS)
President Maithripala Sirisena who celebrated his 65th birthday yesterday seen in a happy mood at the 150th anniversary celebrations of the Sri Lanka Police held at the Police Field Force Headquarters. Speaker Karu Jayasuriya and Inspector General of Police Pujith Jayasundara are seen with the President. Pic by Gayan Amarasekera.
Beira project: Spore firm may get huge contract sans tender View(s):

A proposal to hire a Singaporean firm as design consultant for the Beira Lake redevelopment project without a tender has bred fears, the Government will disregard procurement guidelines in the awarding of contracts under the Western Region Megapolis Project.

Under the consultancy, the Beira Lake Master Planfirst formulated in 1996will be updated. A Cabinet paper presented recently says recommendations of this plan are still valid but need to be revisited and modified in the light of new demands created by the Western Region Megapolis Plan.

M/s Surbana Jurong (Pvt) Ltd, Singapore, is considered the most suitable candidate to undertake the study, considering the fact that their involvement [sic] in the preparation of the Western Region Megapolis Master Plan, says a Cabinet paper presented by the Ministry of Megapolis and Western Development.

A quotation from the selected company, Surbana Jurong, has been submitted for Cabinet approval. The deal will cost the Government a minimum of US$373,000 or around Rs 54 million. An optional package to set up a Master Plan Public Exhibition is priced at US$150,000 or around Rs 21.7 million.

The service proposal also provides a breakdown of the fees that various consultants will charge in the event the Government wishes to introduce variations or additional services to the contract. Thus, a project director would cost USS260 (Rs 37,600) an hour or US$ 2,210 (Rs 319,950) a day; associates would be US$ 230 (Rs 33,300) an hour or US$1,955 (Rs 283,049) a day; a project manager would be US$ 230 (Rs 33,300) an hour or US$1,955 (Rs 283,049) per day and so on.

This is not an expensive contract, said Megapolis and Western Development Ministry Secretary, Nihal Rupasinghe. Surbana was involved in drawing up the Megapolis plan. This consultancy is an extension of that. Our objective is to get a marketable product.

But a senior local consultant argued, It is not the price but the procurement principle that matters. The contract could just as easily have been carried out by a Sri Lankan firm. Similarly, how do we know that the selected company is the best one and offers the best price? What is the difference between this and the unsolicited proposals of past?

The Beira Lake area will be the centrepiece of the proposed financial and trading hub, he said. Where is the input of Sri Lankan professionals? In any other country, it is a policy to involve local expertise. They look forward to this kind of development to increase in-house capacity. Sri Lanka has world-renowned architects, structural engineers and other skilled personnel. We should look to enhancing their skills and exposure and exporting their services.

The Ministry has justified the selection of Surbana saying it has handled a wide array of projects in more than 200 cities and 50 countries. It also says the company completed master plans for more than 30 countries, including Sri Lanka. However, there are just ten specialists from Surbana among the 352 contributors published in the Western Region Megapolis Master Plan. They are listed as external consultants. Project insiders said they had played a limited role in the development of the plan.

Surbana Jurong is expected to be heavily involved in various development initiatives proposed by the Government, including the drawing up of a master plan for Trincomalee. In July, it was announced that Sri Lankas Board of Investment would enter into a memorandum of understanding with the company as a precursor to setting up of a joint venture.
Crucial SLFP convention today as split looms View(s):

With a major split in the making, the Sri Lanka Freedom Partys 65th annual Convention will be held today at the Maligapitiya Grounds in Kurunegala.

The convention will be held under the patronage of President Maithripala Sirisena who is also the leader of the party but has come under heavy pressure from a group loyal to former President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

SLFP General Secretary Duminda Dissanayake said he believed todays convention would be the partys biggest ever, with supporters coming in from all parts of the country.

He said a significant feature of the convention would be the large turnout of supporters from the Northern and Eastern provinces which gave a huge vote to Mr. Sirisena at last years Presidential election.

Several resolutions relating to the country and the party are expected to be passed at the convention. Mr. Dissanayake said all SLFP members had been invited, and no one had officially informed the party that they would not be attending. But Rajapaksa group loyalists had publicly announced that they would not attend the convention. Mr. Rajapaksa himself has gone to Malaysia for a conference.

One of the Rajapaksa group frontliners Dulles Alahapperuma told a media conference that none of the 52MPs in the so-called Joint Opposition (JO) would attend the convention. It would also be boycotted by several Provincial Councillor and other local council members. Another JO frontliner, Keheliya Rambukwella said yesterday they were not prepared to work with the SLFP leadership as long as it continued to be in Government with the United National Party (UNP).
Acting Pakistani High Commissioner Samina Mehtab was summoned to lodge a formal protest against a statement issued by the Pakistan Foreign Ministry condemning the execution of war criminal Mir Quasem Ali.

By Indo-Asian News Service: Bangladesh on Sunday summoned the acting Pakistani High Commissioner to lodge a formal protest after Pakistan issued a statement condemning the execution of war criminal Mir Quasem Ali.

Acting Pakistani High Commissioner Samina Mehtab was summoned to lodge a formal protest against a statement issued by the Pakistan Foreign Ministry, the Daily Star reported.

Also Read: Bangladesh hangs top Islamist leader for 1971 war crimes

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WHAT HAPPENED

In a statement issued late on Saturday, after the execution of Jamaat-e-Islami leader Mir Quasem Ali, the Pakistan Foreign Ministry said the act of suppressing the opposition through "flawed trials" was completely against the spirit of democracy.

"Ever since the beginning of the trials, several international organisations, human rights groups, and international legal figures have raised objections to the court proceedings, especially regarding fairness and transparency, as well as harassment of lawyers and witnesses representing the accused," the statement said.

Also Read: Pak saddened by Alis execution, slams flawed trial

It said, "The government of Bangladesh should uphold its commitment, as per the Tripartite Agreement of 1974, wherein it decided not to proceed with the trials as an act of clemency."

"Pakistan believes that such matters should be addressed with a forward looking approach in the noble spirit of reconciliation," it said.

Pakistan also offered deepest condolences to the bereaved family members, it said.

TRIPARTITE AGREEMENT OF APRIL 1974

Pakistan had earlier issued similar statements after the execution of war criminals to which Bangladesh had reacted by summoning the High Commissioner to the foreign office.

Bangladesh has also asserted that Pakistan continues to present "a misleading, limited and partial interpretation" of the Tripartite Agreement of April 1974, reported bdnews24.

Pakistan Jamaat-e-Islami also reacted to the execution and cautioned that Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will meet a similar fate.

In a Facebook post in Urdu language, the party of which Bangladesh Jamaat is an offshoot said they would hold a funeral prayer in absentia for Mir Quasem.

Quasem was hanged at 10.30 p.m. (local time in Bangladesh) at the Kashimpur Jail.

Prior to the execution, Quasem's wife Khondokar Ayesha Khatun after meeting her husband for the final time on Saturday, told reporters that "those responsible for impending death of my husband will not win."



--- ENDS ---
Electronic NICs: Individual consent required to share personal data By S. Rubatheesan View(s): View(s):

Under the new electronic National Identity Cards (eNIC) programme, individuals will be asked to give their consent for the Department of Registration of Persons to share their personal information with other state institutions, a senior official said.

The Customs Department, Land Registry, Immigration Department, Department of Motor Traffic, Inland Revenue Department and Banks will be entering into agreements with our departments to share the details of persons only with the consent letter of the concerned individual, Commissioner-General R.M.S. Sarath Kumara told the Sunday Times.

He said the Department of Registration of Persons would sign a memorandum of understanding with other government agencies to share the personal details of an individual following a consent letter obtained from him or her.

he said details including date of birth, place of birth, gender, address, approved photograph, family details along with bio-metric details including finger prints would be registered in the directory.

However, only restricted access will be given depending on the state institutions requirement.

The Commissioner said the department had set up an electronic database called National Register of Persons to store bio-metric details of persons with their family tree.

Limited access will be given to other agencies after we have signed agreements with them. There are also checks and balances in place at the department to monitor who is accessing the data and the purpose. The data will be available to any agency only with the consent letter of a person agreeing to share his or her details with that respective government agency, Mr Kumara said.

As detailed in the Registrations of Persons Amendment Act passed in July this year, the department had begun issuing electronic identity cards island wide bearing bio metric data and the family tree of a person.

The Commissioner said as indicated in the Act, he was bound to disclose the personal details of a person under three circumstances. These included, national security, prevention or detection of crime and a court directive.

Department officials have signed an official secrecy declaration agreeing that the information they handle would not be leaked to any third party. Heavy penalties will be imposed for wrongdoing, he said.

Clarifying misconceptions that the new identity cards maybe a threat to civil liberties, Commissioner General said the new initiative had been taken by the government for easy access to individual data and effective public service.

He said the department had received more than 5000 forged documents for identity card applications last year alone and he had to ask for the genuine documents.
Keep foreign companies out of the local gem mining industry- President By Chris Kamalendran View(s): View(s):

The Gem and Jewellery Authority has been directed to keep away foreign mining companies attempting to enter the local gem mining industry through local companies.

The directive was given by President Maithripala Sirisena after he was alerted that foreign companies were already buying up lands through local companies in the Ratnapura district for potential gem mining.

More than 100 acres of land has been purchased by the companies in Dodampe, Paradise Estate in Kuruwita and in the Karangoda area in the district.

Authority Chairman Sanjeewa Welagedara told the Sunday Times that at a meeting with the President on Friday, representatives of the gem industry handed over a detailed report warning about the potential dangers of foreign companies getting involved in the industry.

We will be keeping a close watch on companies applying for gem mining to prevent foreign companies entering the market via local companies. Before issuing permits for mining we will check on their background first, he said.

On a Presidential directive a Task Force comprising Government officials will be appointed to monitor and prevent entry of foreign companies getting involved in gem mining here.

Concerns of the local gem industry have been further heightened with the recent announcement at an international gem auction in Singapore that unpolished Sri Lankan gems will be made available at next years auction.

However, Sri Lanka does not permit the export of uncut or unpolished gems. One of our tasks would be to monitor any attempt to prevent smuggling of gems out of the country, Mr Welagedara said.

Earlier the Government cancelled 16 mining licences issued during the former Mahinda Rajapaksa government to a foreign firm involved in producing rough emeralds. The company has gem mines in Zambia and Mozambique.

Ratnapura Gem and Mining Merchants Association President Sarath Ananda said that during the meeting with the President it was explained to him that the foreign companies have sophisticated equipment enabling them to detect gems underground, adding the industry here will collapse within 10 years.

We have advised land owners to be careful when selling lands to foreigners via local companies, he said.

Ratnapura District Government Agent Bandula Harishchandra told the Sunday Times that in the event of a suspicious land transaction taking place, a motion could be moved at the District Co-ordinating Committee meeting to block the sale of such a land.
NLB suspends contract of lottery ticket printer found wanting View(s):

The National Lotteries Board (NLB) has launched an investigation into an error in printing a Lot of lottery tickets undertaken by a private company that had been involved in it for the past 20 years.

NLB Chairperson Shyamila Perera said the said company has been printing five types of lottery tickets and only recently it has come to light there were discrepancies in the tickets, including security features printed.

She said initial investigations revealed the said company did not have all the necessary machinery to print the secret coding for the tickets, and given sub contracts to other printers without NLB authorisation.

The issue had come to light recently when an internal audit revealed discrepancies in the number of tickets issued, which led to an investigation that showed the said company had been flouting the rules under which the NLB has been printing tickets for several years, she said. The contract with the company has now been suspended until investigations are completed.
UN Chief gives top post to his IPKF son-in-law View(s):

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who deemed it fit to sermonize to Sri Lanka during his visit this week, is under fire for appointing his son-in-law, Siddharth Chatterjee, as UN Coordinator for East Africa last week.

Mr. Ban is reported to have signed his appointment letter, according to media reports from the UN headquarters in New York. They had called it a textbook case of nepotism.Mr Chatterjee served as a major in the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) while stationed in the North of Sri Lanka. Inner City Press, a UN headquarters based news agency wrote a series of articles on how Mr Ban in late August awarded the top job in Kenya to Mr Chatterjee without recusing himself.

The UN correspondent for the news agency said that Mr Bans Spokesman Stephane Dujarric refused to answer all questions on his son-in-law, including about his activities in Sri Lanka as part of the IPKF. Inner City Press also said it has been told that Mr Chatterjee had posed with dead and disfigured LTTE cadres, which was a violation of the Geneva Convention, and therefore, a war crime.

Mr. Chatterjee, however, is reported to have praised the Sri Lanka Army for the way they defeated the LTTE. The Sri Lankan Army deserves all our respect, gratitude and admiration, he wrote some years back in an essay where he said the Sri Lanka soldiers are men of sterling character, and I hope they overcome and demolish the LTTE, this organization of pathological tyrants and killers.
Await some page-turners at next years GLF New focus on Sinhala literature, childrens programmes in Jaffna and email updates on festival highlights all on the cards View(s): View(s):

Your favourite Literary Festival is back! The Fairway Galle Literary Festival returns from January 11-15, next year and an exciting initial line-up of authors has just been released.

First on the author list are: Colm Toibin  author of Brooklyn, adapted onto the big screen (the film was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Picture).

Dame Margaret Drabble  author of The Pure Gold Baby and 17 other novels. Holder of the distinguished Golden PEN Award

Lesley Hazleton  author of

The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammed, New York Times Editors Choice and an avid TedTalk speaker.

Amish Tripati - author of the fastest selling book trilogy in Indian history - The Shiva Trilogy

Ten years since its initial start date, the Festival has grown organically in size, content and feeling. Festival organisers are looking to ride on the success of the 2016 Festival, by delivering an exceptional 2017, showcasing participants who inspire and are inspired!

New additions for 2017 will be the introduction of one day of Sinhala programming on January 14. This innovative programme will be free and will highlight the diversity of the Sinhala Literary Arts through discussions, poetry readings, short films and writings in translations amongst others.

Another addition to 2017 is the Outreach Childrens Programme to be held in Jaffna on January 17 and 18 which aims to develop the literary arts in English in the North and bring some wonderful international childrens authors to the children of Jaffna.

Geoffrey Dobbs, Festival Founder said, Im happy to have my 2016 team back on board with Shyam Selvadurai curating the Festival for the 4th year and Amrita Pieris as Festival Director for the 3rd year supported by Natasha Thompson the Festival Manager. They are working to put together a great line-up of writers and are eager to produce the best Festival yet.

The Fairway Galle Literary Festival is substantially supported by Fairway Holdings, in its second year as title sponsor. Hemaka de Alwis, Chairman, Fairway Holdings, stated The Fairway Galle Literary Festival has become one of the principal cultural events in the world, bringing together people of many nationalities who love literature and affording them the opportunity of friendly interaction with world renowned authors. The blending in of architectural, musical and culinary events and the charming, old world atmosphere of Galle Fort contribute to the continuing success of the Festival. We believe that excellence in creative writing is an essential hallmark of modern cultural life in a nation. Accordingly, the annual Fairway National Literary Awards for the best novels in English, Sinhala and Tamil will be awarded during the Festival. Our continued zest to take forward the yearly Fairway Galle Literary Festival stems from the encouragement we receive from our audiences. The Fairway Galle Literary Festival acts as a catalyst to make national literary aspirations blossom forth.

Jetwing Hotels and Sri Lankan Airlines are the Official Hospitality Partner and Official Travel Partner, respectively. Returning Silver partners are: Amangalla, Anim8, the British Council, Galle Face Hotel, the Fort Printers and the Owl and the Pussycat, as well as Electronic Media Partner, the TNL Group and Print/Online Media Partner, the Wijeya Group.

Check out the Festivals revamped website, www.galleliteraryfestival.com, where festivalgoers will find an informed and active source for all vital information regarding the Festival. Follow the website and sign up for email updates on the festival programme highlights as they are announced.
Ends to justify means and cry of bogey men View(s):

By Tassie Seneviratne

The article by Kishali Pinto Jayawardena, (KPJ) titled The ends cannot justify means in nation-building, that appeared in the Sunday Times of August 21st 2016, gives food for much thought.

My mind first went to a conversation I was privileged to have with a friend who was connected to President J.R Jayewardene (JRJ) through marriage of his sisters to two of JRJs brothers. The conversation centered on my contention that President JRJ retaining a five sixth majority in Parliament elected on the old system through a referendum defeating by legal jugglery the purpose of proportional representation introduced by President JRJ himself and enshrined in the constitution, was wrong. My friend agreed with my contention. About a week or so later my friend communicated to me President JRJs response to my argument. He had put my line of thinking to President JRJ and JRJs response had been that he agrees it is wrong, and asked my friend whom he has in mind to take over the Presidency. My friend had stated that there was none other but JRJ. JRJ had responded telling him, in which case, to leave it to him to do it his way, because it was the only way he can remain in power. Mrs. Bandaranaikes coalition government that became unpopular because of the queues, escalating prices, non- availability of essential items etc. that dotted the country, was the bogey.

JRJ however failed to deliver because he was plagued by a terrorist war with the LTTE who believed it was the only means left to liberate the Tamils.

Shakespeare in many of his works brings out the universally established fact that ends dont justify the means. In Julius Caesar he portrays Brutus as noble in character but unpractical and pedantic. Although the nobility of Brutus is unquestioned, the other conspirators with whom he conspired were prompted by jealousy and vengeance.

It is now accepted that the murder of Caesar was utterly base and senseless  base because it was mainly due to jealousy, and senseless because even Brutus who acted from pure motives was grasping at the impossible in his unpractical and futile attempt to restore the old order of Roman republicanism with other conspirators whom he himself described as base elements. Brutus should have realised at the outset that if the murder of Caesar was right, then the other deeds of violence and injustice which that murder necessarily entailed would be justifiable. The unstoppable wheel of crime and punishment caught up with Brutus too and he committed suicide leaving Rome in disarray. The bogey was dictatorship.

Ironically, what followed was the ascendance of Emperor Augustus Caesar who built the Roman Empire.

Christopher Marlowe in Dr. Faustus effectively brings out the eventuality of ends and means of a different kind  complementing each other. Dr Faustus is a professor of divinity at Wittenburg as well as a renowned physician, astronomer and scholar. Not satisfied with the limitations of human knowledge and power and driven by extensive pride, he begins to practice necromancy. He eventually makes a deal with Lucifer whereby he exchanges his soul for twenty four years of the devils service to him. During this period he enjoys a lot of power, fun and frolic. But at the end of the twenty four years he is frightened but helpless and the devils carry him away. His unbridled ambitions and the means to achieve them led him to an unfortunate end.

Had Dr. Faustus lived today, he could have satiated his unbridled ambitions for power, fun and frolic by entering the Sri Lanka Parliament! As stated by KPJ in her article, the bogey men of the Yahapalanaya band wagon are the Rajapaksas. The Rajapaksas are by no means a yard-stick to go by. Thats comparing with the devil incarnate. The Yahapalanaya government must be judged by its own promises  the promises being, ending nepotism and corruption, reducing the cost of living, improving living standards of the people, independent police, independent judiciary, right to information and more.

Some of these promises have been fulfilled. But nepotism, corruption and cost of living are soaring to giddy heights. Bribing opposition members of Parliament with cabinet portfolios and perks that go along with it, at the expense of the people, in return for supporting the government  some of them being corrupt members of parliament rejected by the people but taken in through the national list; appointment of the former Governor of the Central Bank and his questionable deals; are glaring instances of nepotism and corruption, while a myriad other matters of contention regarding economic and environmental concerns remain unresolved.

We can see a repetition of Brutus character by a cultivated reputation for honesty, but engaging others to do the dirty work while remaining Mr. Clean. KPJ writes of another pertinent point raised by a conversationalist of hers  why should compromised groups which clearly have an agenda in riding along on the Yahapalanaya band wagon as it were, be allowed to drive these debates? Some of these compromised individuals were activists in People power for good Governance. They now hold lucrative positions in the Yahapalanaya Government and are singing for their supper, nepotism, corruption etc. notwithstanding. People Power for Good Governance will have to take stock of this Faustian bargaining  base means to mean-ends and forge ahead sans opportunists, till people power becomes a reality.

(The writer is a retired Senior Superintendent of Police.)
Chinese students are going to Germany and not India to study because of difficulty in getting short term courses in India.

By Ananth Krishnan: On Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be presented Chinese translations of ancient Indian texts to mark his visit.

This will be especially significant for Huang Baosheng, China's greatest living Sanskrit scholar and translator.

READ: Modi meets Chinese President Xi Jinping on sidelines of G20 summit



This week, as Modi lands in China, China's most renowned Indologist is also completing a lifetime's endeavour.

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It has taken Huang 10-years to finish China's first complete Sanskrit textbooks. The 11 volumes are a full guide for aspiring Sanskrit scholars that will be introduced in universities and schools.

These include a primary Sanskrit reader, the last book that was finished recently, to literature readers and translated Buddhist sutras that are important to Chinese.

For China's scholars this is potentially a transformative development as for the first time it provides them a complete set of guides to study the language which will be circulated in Chinese universities.

Peking University has taught Sanskrit for decades, and there are still around 30 Chinese studying the language. But they have been facing difficulties.

Huang told India Today: "Why I have compiled these books? We have so many people in China studying Western culture, but few studying Indian culture. Ancient Indian culture has been so important to China , and Sanskrit is a key language to have a deep understanding of this great culture, so this is my effort to help the new generation in China learn this language and culture."

READ: 'Miniature Modi' dolls a hit in Hangzhou ahead of G20 Summit

Many young Chinese interested in India or Buddhism are taking to the language, says Sanskrit researcher Huang Yiting at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

"I majored in Indian English literature, but to learn Indian literature you need to understand ancient culture of India which drew me to learning Sanskrit", she said. "But the problem is many can't go to India to study, as India universities are not interested to host Chinese scholars on short term courses and visas do not come easily. "Most Chinese Sanskrit students go to Germany but what they learn is also not so ideal."

As PM Modi comes to China, the appeal from Professor Huang is that India should do more to help the next generation of Sanskrit scholars starting with providing them visas and allowing them to come to India on fellowships. The biggest tragedy he says is more Chinese scholars are now going to the West to learn the language and not to India.

"What I would like to request to PM Modi is if Indian universities can host Chinese scholars and help them learn what is a challenging language," he said.

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For China's greatest Sanskrit scholar who has given 50 years to the language, he hopes the Prime Minister will help take forward his lifetime's ambition.

ALSO READ:

Hello Hangzhou! PM Modi tweets as he arrives to attend G20 Summit

NSG, Pakistan in focus as Modi arrives in China for G20

--- ENDS ---
A group of Otumoetai College students has been left with a real sour taste to their fundraising efforts after a thief snatched a container of their hard-earned cash last Sunday afternoon.

The Year 9-11 students had put in long hours and hard yards raising funds for their robotics club with a sausage sizzle outside Mitre 10 Gate Pa last weekend.
Proposed new regulations is aiming to lift New Zealand into outer space and beyond.

The proposed regulations would better enable space rocket launches from New Zealand by simplifying the process for dealing with jettisoned material deposited on the seabed in the Exclusive Economic Zone, says Environment Minister Dr Nick Smith.

We need to update the environmental regulations in the EEZ to better accommodate the space industry, says Nick.

The existing regulations make provisions for activities like minerals exploration and seismic surveying but did not contemplate a space industry in New Zealand when they were written.

Nick explains the key change in the proposals announced on Friday is that jettisoned material from space launch vehicles would be a permitted activity under the EEZ Act, subject to certain controls.

The Government has undertaken an environmental risk assessment that concludes the effects and ecological risks are low. Some of the rocket material will burn up in the atmosphere but some may reach the sea and settle on the seabed, he adds.

It would be excessive to require a full EEZ consent process costing over a million dollars and taking nine months for each rocket launch when the effects from a small amount of rocket debris on the seafloor would be small.

The discussion paper includes the findings of an environmental risk assessment, which considered the impact and risks at different levels of launch activity.

Space rocket launches are a new activity for New Zealand. The government wishes to help develop a peaceful, safe and responsible industry.

These proposals are about enabling a new technologically advanced industry to locate in New Zealand while also ensuring we maintain our high environmental standards, says Nick.

To view the discussion paper and the process for providing feedback visit the Ministry for Environments website at: www.mfe.govt.nz
Carpentry apprentice Ethan Inglis has been named the Bay of Plenty Central Plateau Registered Master Builders Carters 2016 Apprentice of the Year.

The 22-year-old from Tauranga trained through the Building and Construction Industry Training Organisation and is employed by Skilled Building Solutions.
Meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, Xi said relations had maintained a steady, healthy momentum, and should continue to increase mutual understanding and trust.

By Reuters: Chinese President Xi Jinping told Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday that the two countries should respect each other's concerns and constructively handle their differences.

The two nuclear-armed neighbours have been moving to gradually ease long-existing tensions between them.

READ: Modi meets Xi Jinping in Hangzhou, Pakistan, NSG on agenda



Leaders of Asia's two giants pledged last year to cool a festering border dispute, which dates back to a brief border war in 1962, though the disagreement remains unresolved.

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Meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, Xi said relations had maintained a steady, healthy momentum, and should continue to increase mutual understanding and trust.

"We ought to respect and give consideration to each other's concerns, and use constructive methods to appropriately handle questions on which there are disputes," Xi said, in comments carried by China's Foreign Ministry.

READ: 'Miniature Modi' dolls a hit in Hangzhou ahead of G20 Summit

"China is willing to work hard with India the maintain the hard-won good position of Sino-India relations," Xi added.

China's Defence Ministry said last month that it hoped India could put more efforts into regional peace and stability rather than the opposite, in response to Indian plans to put advanced cruise missiles along the disputed border with China.

Indian military officials say the plan is to equip regiments deployed on the China border with the BrahMos missile, made by an Indo-Russian joint venture, as part of ongoing efforts to build up military and civilian infrastructure capabilities there.

China lays claim to more than 90,000 sq km (35,000 sq miles) ruled by New Delhi in the eastern sector of the Himalayas. India says China occupies 38,000 sq km (14,600 sq miles) of its territory on the Aksai Chin plateau in the west.

READ| Exclusive: As China gets first Sanskrit textbooks, scholars appeal to Modi



India is also suspicious of China's support for its arch-rival, Pakistan.

Modi arrived in China from Vietnam, which is involved in its own dispute with China over the South China Sea, where he offered Vietnam a credit line of half a billion dollars for defence cooperation.

Modi's government has ordered BrahMos Aerospace, which produces the BrahMos missiles, to accelerate sales to a list of five countries topped by Vietnam, according to a government note viewed by Reuters and previously unreported.

ALSO READ:

Hello Hangzhou! PM Modi tweets as he arrives to attend G20 Summit NSG, Pakistan in focus as Modi arrives in China for G20



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--- ENDS ---
Barack Obama in his intervention during the G20 summit praised Modi for the recent tax reform as an example of "bold policy" in an otherwise "difficult global economic scenario".

By Press Trust of India: Prime Minister Narendra Modi today exchanged views with Barack Obama on the sidelines of the G20 summit here with the US president praising the "bold policy"

move on GST reform in a "difficult" global economic scenario.

Modi first met Obama briefly when they were onstage to pose for a family photograph at the G20 Summit venue in this eastern Chinese city. The two leaders had another opportunity to exchange views during an informal evening programme.

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ALSO READ: Talks with China 'extremely productive' ahead of G20 Summit: Barack Obama





Obama in his intervention during the G20 summit praised Modi for the recent tax reform as an example of "bold policy" in an otherwise "difficult global economic scenario".

LANDMARK CONSTITUTION BILL

On August 8, Parliament cleared the landmark Constitution (122nd Amendment) Bill, 2014, on the Goods and Services Tax.

The government has set April 1, 2017 as the target for rolling out the GST, considered the biggest tax reform in a long time.

Earlier today, Modi met Chinese President Xi Jinping and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on the sidelines of the summit.



Modi, who arrived here yesterday from Vietnam for the summit, also met Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad bin Salman and discussed ways to enhance bilateral ties.

The prime minister called for strengthened partnership with Saudi Arabia in sectors such as maritime, infrastructure, low-cost housing and discussed further cooperation in energy sector, they said.

Tomorrow, Modi will meet British counterpart Theresa May and Argentinian President Mauricio Macri before returning to Delhi.

ALSO READ:G20 summit: Mere talks not enough, we need to be decisive, says Modi



--- ENDS ---
Final scores: Week 10's high school football games on the Treasure Coast

Football teams hit field Thursday and Friday for Week 10 with SSAC playoffs beginning and District 12-4S title game between Treasure Coast and Vero.
The tagline for this little gem of a film brilliantly sums its sweet but bathetic tone in a few words: Once, not long ago, a small Egyptian police band arrived in Israel. Not many people remember thisit wasnt that important.

The Bands Visit is not a self-important film about the bridging of cultures, the power of music or the healing of historical wounds. Instead, it wins you over immediately with its understated and melancholy charm, as it is content to concern itself with the story of a travelling band who find themselves stranded in a foreign city. Luckily, friendly barmaid Dina is on hand to offer them shelter for the night and a slow exploration of their characters emerge.

The band themselves are a superb array of characters, who all look as though they are thoroughly ordinary members of the Egyptian police. Collectively, they give off a perfect mix of confusion, awkwardness and self-imposed dignity, as they do their best to represent Egypt abroad, with the fantastic absurdity of the rigid discipline that permeates the orchestra. Sasson Gabai gives a great performance as Tawfiq, the excruciatingly polite leader of the band, and he is well-balanced by the other two main characters, Khaled, the arrogant young womaniser, and Simon, Tawfiqs put upon second-in-command. These three provide the main three threads of the story, as they get to know their Israeli hosts over the course of one night.

The one weak point of the film is the unlikely coincidence that all three have epiphanies of a sort, but all three are so charmingly dealt with that its difficult to get annoyed. By far the most touching strand is Simons, as his stay with an Israeli family proves that the thing that we probably share most is awkwardness when confronted with strangers. Theres no great political message and the idea that music is a transcendent force that crosses cultures , is dealt a cruel blow when Simons performance of his (unfinished) clarinet concerto is treated with total apathy. His is a melancholic, but far from bleak, story of frustrated ambition and loneliness, a theme which pervades the film. This theme is strongly reinforced by the portrayal of small town Israel. We see it not as an exotic place (probably because its an Israeli-made film) but as an economically depressed place stuck in the seventies surrounded by the bleakest desert.

Tawfiqs story, of his growing friendship and gradual opening up to Dina, which forms the major part of the film, is less immediate in its impact, but is just as brilliant. The slow transformation of the constantly tense policeman into a man who reveals his soul is brilliant, but never loses its credibility. In fact, one of the most creditable areas of the film is the limited nature of the changes undergone by the characters. The message is that no-one changes overnight and it renders the sweet stories all the more believable.

Gabais constancy of emotional reserve creates a sympathetic heart to a film that has a lot to say about what cannot be said. Khaleds story links into this theme nicely, even though it is a more comic (although defiantly in the style of Wes Anderson) storyline. His attempt to teach one their hosts the art of seduction is both hilarious and heart-breaking at the same time.

The key to the film is that, although very little has changed by the morning, all the characters have been enriched by the experience. That might sound like a cheesy ending, but its handled with simplicity, care and bathos, although the latter is just a word I like the sound of. Its not an important film but it is one that will make you happier and, hopefully, lots of people will remember it.

Shane Murray
A Cambridge postman executed an elaborate mail fraud involving abandoned Cambridge University Press textbooks, eBay and counterfeit postage.

Local postman, Ian Thompson, 53, was warned by Cambridge magistrates that all sentencing options remained possible, after he pleaded guilty to swindling 411 worth of postage from Royal Mail.

The court was informed of Thompsons grand scheme, which involved setting up an eBay business using academic books found in a skip and consequently using his position at Cambridge sorting office to send out the parcels for free.

Hugh Cauthery, prosecuting, described how Thompson, while on his rounds discovered 300 text books in a container on the Cambridge University Press site. These books, worth up to 20 each, were sold on eBay for between 1 and 3. He added a postage charge to the orders, but used his knowledge of the Royal Mail sorting office to obtain free postage by printing labels using an out-of-date account.

Mr Cauthery said, He put the parcels in the right bag for the right part of the country to bypass the checking system.

The average cost of the postage was 1.50 and he did it for nine months, sending 274 packages. When interviewed, he admitted the charges, saying: You have got me banged to rights.

Robert Milson, in defence, said that Mr Thompson of Fitzroy Lane, Cambridge had worked at the sorting office and had paid a high price for his dishonesty.

He justified this with the claim that he had lost out on a 19,000 voluntary redundancy pay-off when he was forced to resign, whilst his pension pot had been docked by 709.

The profits earned from the eBay scheme were meant to help his daughter through university, although the profits would be minimal.

Mr Milson said, He has suffered a very large financial penalty. He has also lost his good name and that stings him.

The books were on their way to be pulped  they were in no way for sale. He thought it was a waste and that he could make him some money. But he got a bit greedy and thought he would increase his profits.

The case was adjourned for preparation of reports and Thompson will return to court for sentencing on Thursday 5th November.

Chairman of the bench, Steven Claydon, said the breach of trust resulting from the fraud meant all the options, including committal to Crown court were open.

Saranyah Sukumaran  News Reporter
The route for the English Defence Leagues (EDL) march through the centre of Cambridge on Saturday has been revealed, as well as the route for the counter-demonstration taking place on the same day by the Cambridge wing of the anti-racist group, Unite Against Fascism (UAF), and the Cambridge Trade Union Council (TUC).

According to the EDL divisions website, the group accuse Islamic terrorists of having Cambridge under their thumb and are marching in particular to oppose the building of a new mosque on Mill Road, designs for which go before the City Council on Wednesday. The East Anglia division of the anti-Muslim group have been handing out flyers this week outside Cambridge shops and pubs, including the Osborne Arms and the Emperor, both on Hills Road. The EDL march on Saturday will coincide with Cambridges Big Weekend  a multicultural summer festival taking place on Parkers Piece.

Having gathered on Queens Backs at 1.30pm, the EDL procession will start at 2pm on Silver Street by Queens College, and proceed past the University Pitt Building onto Pembroke Street. Having passed the New Museums Site, the protest will then turn into Corn Exchange Street and advance into Guildhall Street and up Benet Street, before turning left at the Corpus Christi clock onto Kings Parade, passing St Catharines College before finishing back on Silver Street.

The protest is expected to end by 4pm, and will be escorted by police throughout. The march route conspicuously avoids Mill Road, the proposed site of the new mosque, and police will be monitoring both the arrivals and departures of EDL members by bus and train, to ensure no breakaway demonstrations are held off-route. Similar protests by regional EDL branches will also be taking place on Saturday in Middlesbrough, Halifax and Plymouth.

Meanwhile, support for the counter-march by the UAF and the TUC is snowballing according to anti-EDL campaigners. Counter-protesters will meet at 11am at the Cambridge City Councils Guildhall where they will be escorted by police on a march at 11.45am along Market Street, Sidney Street, St Johns Street, Market Square, Sussex Street, King Street, New Square, Fitzroy Street, Burleigh Street, Norfolk Street, Gwydir Street and Mill Road. The route ought to ensure that EDL and UAF/TUC factions are kept separate to prevent the outbreak of violence that has, in the past, characterised similar counter-demonstrations in other English cities. Following the march, the TUC and UAF will gather at Petersfield, near Hughes Hall. The assembly will finish at 3pm.

An online unity statement of opposition to the EDL Cambridge march entitled We are Cambridge, which urges people to attend the UAF/TUC counter-demonstration and cites Cambridge as a multiracial, multicultural and multi-faith community, has received a host of signatures by local councillors, community leaders, trade unionists and musicians.

Among the signatories is Richard Howitt, MEP for Cambridgeshire, who will be the keynote speaker at Saturdays counter-rally. In a message to an anti-EDL public meeting in the Unitarian Church Hall on Emmanuel Street on Tuesday night, he said: Long after the EDL have got back on their buses home, we will continue to celebrate all the diversity of faith, race, nationality, sexuality and background which makes Cambridge such a fabulous place for you and me to live in with our families. We will spread a message of hope to ensure that fear and violence does not win the day in Cambridge.

Inspector Robin Sissons of Cambridgeshire Police said in a statement: At this stage we are unable to estimate the numbers expected to attend the protest, however, we will ensure there will be sufficient resources deployed around the city to ensure minimal disruption and maintain public safety. While those taking part in the protest will be allowed to express opinion and protest peacefully, we will not tolerate violence, incitement to hatred or other criminal activity from anyone.

Michael Yoganayagam

Image: Naomi OLeary
PM Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping met ahead of a BRICS leaders meeting, which will take place before the G20 Summit kicks off in Hangzhou today afternoon.

By Ananth Krishnan: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday met with Chinese President Xi Jinping, kicking off his visit to China with a key meeting that both sides hope will iron out recent irritants in ties.

The two leaders met ahead of a BRICS leaders meeting, which will take place before the G20 Summit kicks off in this city of lakes on Sunday afternoon.

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READ: 'Miniature Modi' dolls a hit in Hangzhou ahead of G20 Summit

Modi's bilateral with Xi has been seen by both sides as an opportunity to grapple with recent issues such as China blocking India's entry to the Nuclear Suppliers Group and its corridor through PoK.

Top Chinese Foreign Ministry official Lu Kang told India Today the summit meeting could "inject momentum".

"This kind of high level exchanges could inject great dynamism to our bilateral cooperation on many fronts. We hope that this coming meeting could inject further dynamism to our bilateral cooperation," Lu, the Director General of the Information Department said.

READ| Exclusive: As China gets first Sanskrit textbooks, scholars appeal to Modi



India is pushing China to rethink its opposition on the NSG, and officials say some progress has been made with China agreeing to a first of its kind disarmament dialogue at the Director General level.

"The two countries have problems like the NSG issues there is some controversy among Indians when they talk of China's efforts to block India's efforts to join the NSG," Han Hua, Director, Centre for Arms Control and Disarmament, Peking University, told India Today. "In China they talk about Modi's new move closer to the US with the new MoU for logistics cooperation with the US. After these problems, two leaders need to find a way to get bilateral ties in a more workable way and to keep bilateral ties on track."

Besides the G20 Summit, the PM will have bilateral meetings on Sunday with the Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Before flying out of China on Monday evening, the PM will also meet with the Saudi Arabian Crown Prince, new UK Prime Minister Theresa May and the Argentinian President.

WATCH: PM Narendra Modi and Chinese President XI Jinping hold bilateral talks in Hangzhou(China) pic.twitter.com/AeGXGmNn1x ANI (@ANI_news) September 4, 2016

ALSO READ:

Hello Hangzhou! PM Modi tweets as he arrives to attend G20 Summit

NSG, Pakistan in focus as Modi arrives in China for G20



--- ENDS ---
Dubai debuts driverless minibus Dubai has unveiled its first driverless bus service, launching a month-long trial period for the electric vehicle with a view to expanding it across the futuristic Gulf city state. The 10-seat vehicle made its first trip on Thursday along a 700-metre (2,300-foot) stretch of road in downtown Dubai, near to the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest tower. Developed jointly by French group Easy Mile and Dubai-based Omnix, the minibus is powered by an electric motor and can hit speeds of 40 kilometres per hour (25 miles per hour). Phys.org

One in two users click on links from unknown senders Most people know that e-mails and facebook messages from unknown senders can contain dangerous links. However, many users still click on them -- and Dr. Zinaida Benenson from FAU's Chair of Computer Science 1 has investigated why. The results of the experiment were clear: up to 56 percent of e-mail recipients and around 40 percent of facebook users clicked on a link from an unknown sender although they knew of the risks of their computer becoming infected with a virus. FAU

Researchers map locations of 4,669 servers in Netflix's content delivery network When you open Netflix and hit "play," your computer sends a request to the video-streaming service to locate the movie you'd like to watch. The company responds with the name and location of the specific server that your device must access in order for you to view the film. For the first time, researchers have taken advantage of this naming system to map the location and total number of servers across Netflix's entire content delivery network... IEEE

How spy tech firms let governments see everything on a smartphone Want to invisibly spy on 10 iPhone owners without their knowledge? Gather their every keystroke, sound, message and location? That will cost you $650,000, plus a $500,000 setup fee with an Israeli outfit called the NSO Group. You can spy on more people if you would like -- just check out the company's price list. The NSO Group is one of a number of companies that sell surveillance tools that can capture all the activity on a smartphone... The NY Times

How I used & abused my Tesla -- what a Tesla looks like after 100,000 Miles, a 48 state road trip, 500 Uber rides, 20 rentals & 2 AirBnB sleepovers Most $100,000 cars are babied by their owners. Never taken out except on a warm Sunday. Garaged and kept with extremely low mileage. Only driven by the owner, not even allowed to be driven by a spouse, much less a stranger. Not my poor Tesla. I've worked that thing like a rented freaking mule. So, you ask, how did the Tesla hold up? Medium

What happened to gaming's Waterworld? Back in 2008, Realtime Worlds was sitting pretty. A year after the release of the well-received Crackdown, the Dundee-based studio's founder and GTA creator David Jones managed to net $50m for its pet project, the ambitious MMO APB: All Points Bulletin. He was positive about its chances, and given the interest in the project and the pedigree behind it he had every right to be. APB would be the company's first big online game, he thought. Instead, it was to be Realtime Worlds' last. Eurogamer

This new 3D-printing pen draws with wood, copper, and bronze 3Doodler's 3D-printing pens have always had a lot of potential (who doesn't want a souped-up glue gun that can draw 3D structures in midair?), but in our hands-on with the pens, their rough build quality means they come across more as toys than serious design tools. The company's latest model, the 3Doodler Pro, wants to shake up this perception, offering professional users more control, faster-setting plastics, and a whole new range of materials to work with. The Verge

Evaluating Futuremark's Servermark VDI on the Supermicro SYS-5028D-TN4T Standardized benchmarks with industry-wide acceptance are a must for evaluating computing systems. These benchmarks may evaluate the system as a whole, or target specific aspects. Vendors such as Futuremark and BAPCo have various offerings for both consumer and business-use PCs. However, the market for such programs in the server space is largely untapped. Futuremark has been working on Servermark for more than two years now, and they finally felt it was stable enough to let us test drive one of their recent beta versions. AnandTech

Building a new Tor that can resist next-generation state surveillance Since Edward Snowden stepped into the limelight from a hotel room in Hong Kong three years ago, use of the Tor anonymity network has grown massively. Journalists and activists have embraced the anonymity the network provides as a way to evade the mass surveillance under which we all now live, while citizens in countries with restrictive Internet censorship, like Turkey or Saudi Arabia, have turned to Tor in order to circumvent national firewalls. Ars Technica (also, How Tor works)

Starting with Linux in the early days In 1991, I was already an experienced Unix sysadmin and writer. I'm sure I saw Linus Torvalds's famous Usenet message: "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones," and I paid it no mind. Many people said similar things and little came of it. This time, it would be different. ZDNet (also, Fedora 24 review: The year's best Linux distro is puzzlingly hard to recommend)

Build log: We put together a potent VR-ready PC The arrival of VR headsets from HTC and Oculus might be one of the main reasons that seasoned and fresh PC DIYers alike are dusting off their system-building chops these days. Those headsets require powerful hardware for a good VR experience, and PCs from even two or three years ago might not have the grunt to provide the necessary pixel-pushing power. The Tech Report

For first time, carbon nanotube transistors outperform silicon For decades, scientists have tried to harness the unique properties of carbon nanotubes to create high-performance electronics that are faster or consume less power -- resulting in longer battery life, faster wireless communication and faster processing speeds for devices like smartphones and laptops. University of Wisconsin-Madison

The shadow brokers publish NSA spy tools, demonstrating possible flaws in the NSA's approach to security vulnerabilities A group calling itself the Shadow Brokers recently released powerful surveillance tools publicly on the Web and promises to publish more dangerous tools for the price of one million bitcoin -- or to whomever makes the best offer, if they can't get to a million. EFF

25 video game cartridges, ranked Rumours have been brewing for some time, but it's looking more likely than ever that Nintendo will use some form of cartridges for its next console, a system currently known as the NX. While Nintendo's home consoles haven't used cartridges since the Nintendo 64, their handhelds have continued to use a form of them, including the current Nintendo 3DS. Vice

Smaller and faster data compression with Zstandard People are creating, sharing, and storing data at a faster rate than at any other time in history. When it comes to innovating on storing and transmitting that data, at Facebook we're making advancements not only in hardware -- such as larger hard drives and faster networking equipment -- but in software as well. Facebook
As the investigation into what caused last week's explosion of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket during pre-launch testing continues, parties directly impacted by the accident are already looking ahead. For one company, that may mean some form of reimbursement or compensation from the Elon Musk-led private space flight firm.

Israeli-based Spacecom, owners of the AMOS-6 communications satellite that was destroyed in Thursday's accident, said during a conference call earlier today that it may seek $50 million or a free flight from SpaceX according to Reuters.

Officials with the company also said they could collect $205 million from Israel Aerospace Industries, makers of the lost payload.

The publication further reports that SpaceX has yet to disclose what insurance it had for the ill-fated Falcon 9 rocket or the launch pad that was damaged in addition to what the Federal Aviation Administration requires for damage to government property.

Spacecom has seen its share value plummet in the wake of the unfortunate incident. Its planned merger with Beijing Xinwei Technology Group may also be in jeopardy as that deal was contingent upon the successful launch of the AMOS-6 satellite. Spacecom general counsel Gil Lotan said he was hope to continue fruitful communications with the prospective buyer.

The launch pad at Cape Canaveral, which was damaged during the accident, will undergo repairs to make it functional once again. Fortunately, SpaceX operates two other launch pads which should be operational in the coming months.
You are the chief diplomat of your country, with knowledge of where the next drone attacks against terrorist suspects are being planned. You rely heavily on correspondence containing classified information. Do you:

A) Choose a private email server and send messages on top secret operations from your own personal device?

B) Let your aides handle which documents oddly marked with the small letter "c" should reach your mailbox soonest? Wait, "c" means "classified," right?

C) Just ask the computer specialist running your server to handle deleting past emails and other important records in your archives? (Even after a House Committee requested these messages be retained.)

Answer: None of the above, of course.

The scenario is a situation many of us will most likely never encounter in this lifetime. But this is exactly the predicament that former U.S. Secretary of State  and now Democratic presidential nominee  Hillary Clinton found herself in the moment she became the nation's top diplomat.

The way information  classified or otherwise  has quickly changed hands via a server that was not authorized for use by the government has become her critics' strongest point against her bid for the White House.

FBI Probe On Clinton Emails

The Federal Bureau of Investigation released on Friday a redacted summary of its probe on the Clinton emails. The agency examined whether Clinton and her aides violated protocol in the way classified information had been handled, especially on a private server.

The 58-page report fills in details and provides further background to FBI Director James Comey's initial findings that Clinton had been "extremely careless" in her correspondence.

The FBI ended the probe in July, and the Justice Department heeded the bureau's recommendation of no longer pursuing criminal charges against Clinton. But the public can still glean a few lessons from the blunder:

'Be Very Careful,' Warned Colin Powell

After taking her oath of office in 2009, Clinton asked former Secretary of State Colin Powell about communicating official matters on a BlackBerry. One clear lesson Clinton could have taken to heart was Powell's advice to "be very careful."

After all, Powell explained, if her BlackBerry were to be used to "do business," her correspondence could "become 'official record[s] and subject to the law,'" the FBI summary states. Powell earlier clarified he never suggested she use a nonsecure messaging system.

Clinton admitted Powell's comments "did not factor into her decision to use a personal email account." She opted for a single private email "out of convenience."

'Oh S***': Never Trust Others To Delete Your Emails For You

The FBI report also sheds light on the supposed "oh s*** moment" of an unnamed computer specialist who forgot to reset Clinton's mailbox preferences. The settings should have retained messages for only up to 60 days, as requested by Clinton's office.

The specialist  who works for the Platte River Networks, the group running Clinton's private email server  said he only realized the mistake until after the New York Times ran the story on the use of the private server. The blunder shows how it might help for someone like Clinton, who is frequently exposed to sensitive information, to monitor the deletion and archiving of top secret messages herself.

The report indicates the worker deleted the Clinton email archives and used BleachBit to delete the exported .PST files.

The move to clean up the mailbox also came weeks after a House Committee, investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, handed down a preservation order for emails and documents pertaining to the attacks. Clinton and her staff, however, said they were unaware the archives had been deleted.

'C' Is For Classified

In her interview with the investigators, Clinton said she "could not recall every briefing she received" during her time as state secretary. This makes it difficult for her to point to specific instructions she may have received on how to manage and preserve classified documents. According to the summary, she was unaware that the small "c" marking on certain documents stood for "confidential" or "classified."

The findings are "a devastating indictment of her judgment, honesty and basic competency," says Reince Priebus, Republican National Committee Chairman.

With the facts uncovered in the Clinton email probe, such revelations are being leveraged by her opponents, just as the Nov. 8 presidential polls draw near.

The Clinton campaign team is pleased the findings are now out in the open.

"While her use of a single email account was clearly a mistake and she has taken responsibility for it, these materials make clear why the Justice Department believed there was no basis to move forward with this case," says Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Clinton.

Photo: Brett Weinstein | Flickr

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Google, which has been making the headlines quite often recently, is set to make some big announcements through a major event being planned for Oct. 4.

According to a report by Android Police, a reliable source said that on that date, Google will be announcing its Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones, the Google Home speaker, a Chromecast model that can support 4K video and an in-house design for a viewer of Daydream VR.

The source, however, did not reveal additional details about the event, such as where it will be held and at what time. Android Police also pointed out that dates for such events are always subject to change, but Oct. 4 should be a good guideline date for Google's planned announcements.

Here's a quick recap of the hardware that are part of Google's upcoming event.

Pixel And Pixel XL

It was recently reported that Google will be dropping the Nexus brand for its upcoming HTC-manufactured smartphones, which were codenamed Marlin and Sailfish. Instead, the 5.0-inch device will be named the Pixel, while the 5.5-inch device will be named the Pixel XL.

The price tags of the successors of the Nexus 5X and the Nexus 6P have also been leaked. The 32 GB Pixel will cost $449, while the 32 GB Pixel XL will cost $599.

Google Home

The Google Home speaker, which Google announced at its annual I/O developers conference, is a voice-enabled device that is being set up as a competitor to the Alexa-powered Amazon Echo.

Google parent company Alphabet also recently moved dozens of engineers from smart home division Nest Labs into Google specifically to work on Google Home, bolstering the talent behind the development of the device.

Chromecast 4K

The new Chromecast model will be able to support 4K videos, and will be named either Chromecast Plus or Chromecast Ultra, according to Android Police. Such a device will receive significant interest because of the growing popularity of 4K television sets and 4K content.

The Chromecast actually did better in terms of sales compared with the Apple TV in the first quarter, and Google will be looking to build upon that success with a Chromecast model that is capable of 4K content.

Daydream VR Viewer

The in-house design for the Daydream VR viewer, which could be simply named Daydream View, is also set to be revealed at the planned Oct. 4 event. This would allow Google to reveal that the Pixel XL is a Daydream-ready device, as well as discuss how its VR platform is different from everyone else's.

The Daydream VR initiative, which was also first revealed at the I/O conference, is expected to be launched by Google in the coming weeks, with YouTube stars being hired to promote the platform.

Google In The Holidays

The upcoming hardware that Google will be announcing could ensure that the holiday shopping season will be filled with Google devices.

Mark Oct. 4 on your calendars for now, but always be on the lookout in case the date of the planned event changes.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Samsung released the highly anticipated Galaxy Note 7 in August. The phablet is one of the most-awaited smartphones of the year, but the company, as well as U.S. carriers, had to suspend sales of the Galaxy Note 7 due to battery issues.

Many customers have taken to social media websites to complain that the Galaxy Note 7 battery explodes when the phone is charging.

The Korean company has acknowledged the issues and confirmed the replacement of all Galaxy Note 7. All top four carriers in the U.S. have also released press statements about the battery issue with the Galaxy Note 7 and are allowing customers to exchange the Samsung phablet for another similar device.

"Because safety is our top priority, customers are strongly encouraged to exchange the Samsung Note 7 for a new device. Customers with a Note 7 may select a Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 edge, Galaxy S7 active, Galaxy Note7 or any other smartphone, and may also return any Note 7 accessories," says AT&T.

According to AT&T, Galaxy Note 7 owners will have the option to exchange their interim device for a new Galaxy Note 7 when the issue is fixed. The carrier will share the process soon.

Sprint has a similar offer for their customers who previously purchased the Note 7.

"We will offer them a similar device until the issue is resolved. Customers should go to a nearby Sprint store to exchange their Note 7 device," says Sprint.

As for T-Mobile, customers can exchange their Galaxy Note 7 by visiting the T-Mobile store where they bought the Samsung phone or call 611 from their mobile phone by Sept. 30 to exchange their Galaxy Note 7.

"Customers can return the Note 7 to T-Mobile for a full, complete refund of anything paid for the device and any Note 7 accessories. We'll waive any restocking charges and shipping fees, and customers can keep the free Netflix subscription and Gear Fit or SD card they received with purchase during preorder. Customers have the option to use their refund to choose any device in T-Moble's stores," announces T-Mobile.

Reports suggest that Verizon will also exchange the Galaxy Note 7 for a similar device.

Samsung has been prompt enough to begin a recall of the Galaxy Note 7 and issue an apology for the inconvenience. The company as well as the carriers will also offer a brand new phone in exchange of the old device.

However, the battery exploding issue has definitely affected the sales of the phablet. Samsung will have to fix the issue as soon as possible, but it is likely that the issue would also affect future sales of the phone.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
If you have been hankering for some great bargains and cannot wait till Black Friday in November, then you're in luck, as Walmart has kicked off its Labor Day weekend sale.

The Labor Day weekend sale from Walmart is currently ongoing and wraps up on Sept. 5  that is Labor Day itself. The deals are valid both in store and online, and if you've been eyeing a Smart LED TV from Samsung, now is a great time to buy one. Why? Because Walmart is offering up to $2,000 savings on the Samsung Smart LED TVs as part of its Labor Day sale.

Here are some of the amazing discounts on offer from Walmart on Samsung's Smart LED TVs.

Samsung 60" 6200 Series

This version of the Full HD Smart LED TV has a list price of $1,699, but the limited period Labor Day sale offer from Walmart brings down the device's price to an affordable $697.99. This means that you save a cool $1,001 on the 60-inch Smart TV.

Samsung 65" 6200 Series

For those looking for a slightly bigger screen size, the 65-inch model in the same series can be a good option. However, you only end up saving $500 on this model and are paying $997.99 instead of the regular price. Walmart is throwing in free shipping so that is some additional savings if you order online.

Samsung 50" 6200 Series

This Full HD Smart LED TV from Samsung is also being discounted by Walmart and will set consumers back by $597.99. The original price for the Smart TV is $1,099.99, which means you save $502. Walmart is also offering free shipping with this purchase.

Samsung 75" 6300 Series

This version of the Smart LED TV from the South Korean company, which released in 2015, boasts a list price of $3,999, but thanks to the Labor Day sale offer from Walmart, it can now be had for $1,997.99. This means that you save a whopping $2,001 on the 75-inch Smart TV. This price is comparably lower than the $1,999.99 being asked by Samsung.

Samsung UN50J6200 50"

This Smart Full HD LED TV from the company is now $600. The listed price is $1,099.99, which means that the Labor Day sale offer ensures you save $500. You also get free shipping on online purchases.

Deals Under $500

For those looking at FHD LED Smart TVs that are under $500, you can check out the Samsung 50" 5200 Series for $497.99, the Samsung 58" 5190 Series for $498, the Samsung 40" 5200 Series for $328 or even the Samsung 40" 6200 Series for $348.

To check out all of Walmart's Labor Day sale offers on Smart LED TVs, just check the page showing all models by Samsung.

Photo: Mike Mozart | Flickr

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
The Sony Xperia XZ is the newest entry in the ring of flagship handsets, and it packs everything a smartphone aficionado could want, from specs to battery and from camera to a posh design.

We looked at the potential of Xperia XZ and compared it with top-of-the-line smartphones from Android and Apple to see which one has the edge.

Water Protection

Where fingerprint sensors were the rage last year, waterproofing phones has now become the new trend.

You can safely pack the Xperia XZ next to the Samsung Galaxy S7 to take to the pool party, as both devices feature IP68 certification. This means that rain or the accidental flop in the soup bowl will not harm either of the devices.

The iPhone 6s, on the other hand, does not feature the certification, but a number of videos show it faring well when dropped into liquid.

Performance And Interface

The Sony Xperia XZ and Samsung's Galaxy S7 are sharing the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 CPU, but the speed of the devices differs somewhat.

When it comes down to Android systems, Sony ranks as one of the fastest and easiest experiences, as the interface remained roughly the same since its debut. Meanwhile, Samsung's TouchWiz UI had some improvements, but holds on to the stutter and sluggishness of old.

Keep in mind that Samsung still excels in its keyboard experience and neatly tweaked tactile feedback, granting quick and satisfying typing experiences. In comparison, Sony's on-screen keyboard feels less responsive and accurate.

It is complicated to compare iOS to Android, but user feedback remains positive about the keyboard behavior and interface of Apple's phones, and iPhone 6s is no exception.

Sony's fingerprint scanner could have been better received if the company took the classic path of placing the sensor front-facing rather than sticking it on the side of the phone.

Camera

Sony's long-lasting ambition to provide users with the best cameras on the market is present in the Xperia XZ as well. However, the camera's interface shows some notable lacks, such as the fast one-tap shortcut present in Galaxy S7 and iPhone 6s. Comparing it to its rivals, Sony's camera also takes its time between shots.

So far, it is apparent that the Galaxy S7 packs a more functional and responsive camera than the Xperia XZ.

Depending whether you value color hue or general sharpness, you might prefer the camera from Galaxy S7 over iPhone 6s. However, the S7's camera fares better than iPhone 6s in low-lighting conditions due to its larger aperture.

Looking strictly at image quality, some of the images captured via Xperia XZ are more natural looking than the ones from Galaxy S7. This is little surprise, as Samsung packed a Dual Pixel focusing system in its snappers, which can distort photographs by oversharpening them.

Although iPhone 6s' raw pictures are less spectacular than the ones from Sony or Samsung's flagships, they yield themselves better for post-processing. Also, Apple's phone seems to deliver slightly more realistic pictures than the ones from the Galaxy S7, especially when shooting indoors.

When looking at video output, the Xperia XZ and Galaxy S7 feature 4K recording at 30 frames per second. Sony touts that its 5-axis stabilization software will grant promising results, and it might stand a chance against the combo of Samsung's OIS and electronic stabilization.

Meanwhile, the iPhone 6s also can record videos in 4K at the same FPS rating, but it will take a few extra taps to trigger the capability.

Battery

Sony embedded a 2,900 mAh non-removable battery into its latest flagship, and it claims that the whole Xperia lineup focuses on preserving battery life and longevity.

A neat thing about Xperia XZ is that it pauses charging when the phone reaches 90 percent during the night and resumes at your standard wake-up time. This ensures that users go about their day with a 100 percent charged phone.

The Galaxy S7 comes with a 3,000 mAh battery, which has a lot more oomph after Android Marshmallow rolled out and optimized its life cycle via Doze.

Apple is far behind its competitors with a 1,715 mAh battery in its iPhone 6s, but the manufacturer features one of the best optimizations between software and hardware.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
A period when dinosaurs roamed the earth and pterosaurs flew freely in the skies has long been an accepted fact. A new study, however, adds a fresh twist to it  saying that there existed a smaller form of flying reptiles as well in the Cretaceous era alongside the gigantic peers who had smaller wingspans and were about the size of a house cat.

Studies on new fossils excavated from Western Canada's Hornby Island in British Columbia have reinforced the existence of a miniature form. This contrasts the established belief that there were only huge pterosaurs including the Quetzalcoatlus which were taller than giraffes.

The Cretaceous era, dating back to around 70 million years, has been documented as having ended in a mass extinction of pterosaurs and dinosaurs. The latest study, however, hints at the survival of a smaller form beyond that era.

The fossils were the upper arm and vertebrae of a fully grown pterosaur. It had a wingspan of just 1.5 meters and suggested a size not bigger than a housecat. The wings were small, less than 5 feet, and must have been folded up against the tiny body.

Researchers are confident that the specimen was certainly an adult, not the tiny tot of any big flier.

The new findings have been published in the journal Royal Society Open Science. In a statement, lead author Elizabeth Martin-Silverstone called the discovery as exciting and reasoned that it was a unique revelation.

"This new pterosaur is exciting because it suggests that small pterosaurs were present all the way until the end of the Cretaceous, and weren't outcompeted by birds," said Martin-Silverstone.

"We have this small pterosaur, which is in a time when there aren't meant to be any small pterosaurs," co-author Mark Witton said. He also added that it can be an Azhdarchoid pterosaur.

"These are things with big heads and relatively short wings. They were probably generalist feeders that spent much of their time walking around on the ground, basically eating whatever they could," added Witton.

But some researchers are far from convinced by the new study and want more evidence. Alexander Kellner, a paleontologist at the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro supports more studies while asserting that he saluted the authors' efforts.

"Pterosaurs are rare. Pterosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous, where they found their specimen, are even rarer. And smaller pterosaurs, small individuals, are rarer than that," Kellner told the Christian Science Monitor.

The limitations of the study were also admitted by Witton.

"We've only got one data point, so don't rewrite the textbooks yet," he said.

Nevertheless, the preliminary findings are still a breakthrough in the crucial research on the evolution and extinction of flying reptiles of the Cretaceous era.

The study of Jurassic era fossil was also reported by Tech Times.

Photo: Garrett Ziegler | Flickr

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.




Under Google's leadership, Motorola Mobility acquired Modu, a small company that popularised the downright dumb idea of manufacturing modular phones. Thanks to a fancy promo video though, most people started seeing it as the future of mobile phones. The search engine giant soon announced project Ara with a promise of delivering open-source hardware, where upgrading phones would be as simple as playing with Lego blocks. Google was so positive about the project that while selling off Motorola's handset division to the Chinese brand Lenovo, it retained the Ara team.





For those not in the know, the idea was to offer customisable phones. On endoskeletal frames made by Google, you could buy and implement modules such as the screen, camera, battery, as per your requirement. Those interested in photography can buy a good camera module. Similarly, gamers can opt for killer GPU. Moreover, these phones were supposed to be cheap and easy to repair. For instance, if your camera stopped working, you could just replace the lens module. This got a lot of gadget freaks and reporters excited. However, I couldn't comprehend how customisable phones were going to beat the mass produced handsets designed for better economy. I was absolutely sure that 'Project Ara Is Destined To Fail' , and I explained why in 2014. I received some extremely nice comments for that.





Fast forward it today, and Google has finally given up on the Ara project . The company did not even manage to produce a single device that could work properly. This is despite the recent decision of toning down the customisation part. To lower the number of modules, Google decided to go ahead with fixed chipset, battery, and display. The company's justification to cut down on customisation was to efficiently use the available space, which effectively proves why the modular phone concept sucks, to begin with. The Ara handsets were going to be bulkier than the conventional phones due to the physical space between each module. As you choose fixed components over modules, you can cram in components as close as possible.

After over three years of "development" things did not materialise. Off course, the axing of the project is sugarcoated as "one of the first steps in a campaign to unify Googles various hardware efforts, which range from Chromebook laptops to Nexus phones". Hardware customisation has worked wonders for the PC industry for decades. However, mobile hardware is a different ball game altogether. Even if it had built and launched these phones, there would have been no buyers as mobile users expect things to work right out-of-the-box. In a market where even an entry-level smartphone flaunts a streamlined metal unibody design, Google's blocky phones never really had a real chance of success.

Google
Finnish company tests fastest mobile internet speed

In this age of internet, where we have moved from 3G to 4G network, a new record has been set for the worlds fastest 4G mobile internet speed, according to a network operator.

The firm Elisa, a mobile carrier provider in Finland, in collaboration with the Chinese telecommunication giant Huawei has broken the record for the fastest speeds reached over a 4G network. The two companies were able to achieve a 1.9 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) speed on a test network said to be the fastest speed ever recorded on a commercial device.

This new speed record is a step towards the 5G network and also an excellent indication of all the opportunities the 4G network still has to offer. The speeds that the 4G network offers are continuously increasing and, possibly in the next few years, we will even be able to offer mobile data connections of several gigabits per second to our customers, said Sami Komulainen, Vice President of mobile network services at Elisa.

According to BBC, hypothetically, this 1.9Gbps speed could download a Blu-ray film in just 44 seconds. As a comparison, Elisas fastest commercial network is 300-MEGAbit-per-second, which is not even a sixth as fast.

Even though the speed may have been broken on a special Elisa-only network, technology commentators say the only true speed test is on a publicly available network.

Komulainen explained why the speed test was important: A speed of almost two gigabits may seem unheard-of, and many people are wondering if such speeds are even needed in everyday use. However, there will be more and more demand for high-speed connections in the future as, for example, 360-degree videos and virtual reality applications become more popular.

While speeds like that could revolutionize the tech industry, the speeds have little significance in real world applications as, Deploying a network that can support 1.9Gbps doesnt mean customers will get 1.9Gbps mobile broadband, quoted Nick Wood, an assistant editor at Total Telecom.

And why is that because that network capacity has to be shared among customers. In reality, customers are likely to experience a modest improvement in overall speed and reliability, which is great, but doesnt make for exciting headlines the same way that 1.9 Gbps does, he added.

Elisa has stated that it plans to bring a premium 1Gbps network in Finland within the next two years. In contrast, Vodafone Germany plans to get there quickly. The operator has said it plans to offer 1 Gbps on its 4G network by the end of 2016.
British statesman Winston Churchill and fictional detective Sherlock Holmes can now be shown smoking in new films - though with a warning, says the ministry. 'Ramadoss shouldn't target Bollywood''Smoking in films is a creative liberty'

By Indo-Asian News Service: India's multibillion rupee film industry, which has been fuming over a ban on smoking scenes in films, now has reason to smile. The Health Ministry is ready to allow the depiction of iconic characters with their favourite poison stick.

So, British statesman Winston Churchill and fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, who cannot be imagined without their cigars and pipes, can now be shown smoking in new films - though with a warning.

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"Characters like Churchill and Sherlock Holmes can smoke on screen. People know about them and their on-screen smoking won't influence the audience behaviour much," a senior Health Ministry official told IANS.

"This will be made public next month," the official added.

The Health Ministry had banned smoking in films but director Mahesh Bhatt moved court against the government decision. The case has been pending in the Delhi High Court for the last two years. The Delhi High Court is going to hear the case in the third week of November.

Earlier, the ministry was completely against any smoking scenes in any movie. It had said all old movies with such scenes would have to be accompanied with a note saying the habit is injurious to health, and new films with such depictions could not be made at all.

But now it has made a concession. The ministry authorities said if it is essential to show a character smoking, the producer would have to follow rules.

"If the scripts cannot do away with such a character, then the producer needs to write on the screen that smoking is injurious to health. The movies must carry a disclaimer and warning message in the beginning and end of the film," the official said.

"After the smoking ban in public places, the ministry wants to curb on-screen smoking but with less fuss. The film fraternity is worried about creative freedom. But what about social responsibility?" the official asked.

Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss has been reiterating that on-screen smoking is accountable for over 60 per cent new smokers. He has appealed to actors like Shah Rukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan not to smoke in films.

"They are big stars and as celebrities their in-film action is influencing youngsters' minds. I am not interfering in their personal life but appealing as the health minister of the country," Ramadoss had told IANS earlier.

Every year, nearly one million people die of tobacco-related diseases. The government has banned smoking in public places from October 2 and is making graphic health warnings on all tobacco packets a must from December 1.

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Government estimates say though the tobacco industry brings revenue of Rs 270 billion to the country every year, the treatment cost of the disease burden is at least Rs 300 billion.

Related stories

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This teenager hacked Sri Lankan Presidents website to try to get the exam cancelled

As kids, we have done many things to avoid the exams like feigning stomachache or headache but none of us would have done what this kid did. A 17-year-old teenager reportedly hacked into his countrys presidents websites so that he could get the authorities to cancel the exam.

Sri Lankan police have arrested the teenager and accused him of hacking into President Maithripala Sirisenas official website and posting a message calling for the postponement of A-level examinations.

President Sirisenas website was hacked a week earlier and the hacker had posted a message calling for the postponement of exams. The police immediately swung into action and zeroed down on the boy who lives near the capital Columbo.

According to the police, the boy was taken into custody on Monday under computer crimes laws and on conviction faces a fine of $2,000 and up to three years in jail. We traced the hack to his home in Kadugannawa, a police official said, referring to a town about 100km (62 miles) east of the capital, Colombo. The website was crippled over the weekend after the attack.

Authorities worked overnight to fix the Presidents hacked website and were able to restore it within 24 hours. The attacker had removed the home page and replaced it with a demand that the president postpone the ongoing GCE Advanced Level examinations or step down.

The name of the teenager was not disclosed as per Sri Lankan laws for juvenile crimes.
On the debate, two pollsters who conducted studies, agreed on Saturday that former president Lula defeated Bolsonaro. | Read More
Albania, where Mother Teresa was born, has its only international airport named after her.

By Manogya Loiwal : Mother Teresa, revered for her work with the poor in India, was today declared St Teresa of Calcutta by Pope Francis in a ceremony at the Vatican City.

In the presence of thousands of pilgrims and world leaders at St. Peter's Square, the tiny nun was conferred the title of saint

While the world celebrates the icon's canonisation, let us have a quick look at some of the facts that you didn't know about Mother Teresa:

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-Mother Teresa was 18, when she left home to join the Sisters of Loreto in Rathfarnham in Ireland. Mother never met her family after that, though she lived till the age of 87.

-She was a citizen of India from 1948 to 1997 when she died, and was given a state funeral.

-In 1964, during a visit to India, Pope Paul VI gave his ceremonial limousine to her which she offered to raise money for the leper colony. Even though had she kept the Pope waiting, he was impressed to see her dedication and offered to help her in the cause by giving his limousine.

Also read: Pope Francis declares Mother Teresa as Saint Teresa of Calcutta



-In 1981, Mother Teresa offered to resign as head of the Missionaries of Charity when elections were held to choose her successor. All the sisters voted for her unanimously, with her one own vote going to Sr Nirmala.

-In 1982, at the height of the Siege of Beirut, Saint Teresa rescued 37 children trapped in a front line hospital by brokering a temporary cease-fire between the Israeli army and Palestinian guerrillas. Accompanied by Red Cross workers, she travelled through the war zone to the devastated hospital to evacuate the young patients.

-Once, a bakery man spat on her hand when had visited him for bread for her orphaned children. To this, Mother told him, I would keep this for me, but give me some bread for my children, while holding her another hand. Realising Mother's kindness, the bakery guy immediately became a main bread donor for her orphanage.

-It was raining in Calcutta on September 5, 1997, when she died and it was raining in Kolkata on September 4, 2016, the day she was canonised.

-After her death and even till today, her name plate at the entrance of Mother House shows IN and not OUT. This is because, Mother's tomb is present in the house and sources say, she is always IN the house (in body and in spirit).

Also read: Kolkata: Mother House erupts in joy over canonisation of Mother Teresa



-Albania, where Mother Teresa was born, has its only international airport named after her. It is known as Aeroporti Nene Tereza.

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-The famous Park Street in Kolkata has been renamed as Mother Teresa Sarani with a life size statue of Mother.

MISSIONARIES OF CHARITY

-The Missionaries of Charity sisters are never seen alone, they always move in pairs or more.

-The sisters own and use only 3 sets of traditional white saris with blue stripes.

-These sarees are never purchased but instead, woven by those who are associated with Missionaries of Charity.

Also read: I feel blessed to have witnessed Mother Teresa's canonisation: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee



-Missionaries of Charity sisters do not eat or drink outside or at anybody's house.

-Mother Teresa was a name given to the saint by the people out of love and affection. No other sister at Missionaries of Charity has ever been addressed as Mother.

WATCH: THOUSANDS GATHER TO WITNESS CANONISATION CEREMONY OF MOTHER TERESA

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'Banh mi' are displayed for sale on a sidewalk in central Hanoi

It has been more than six decades since the end of French colonial rule in Vietnam, but when President Francois Hollande arrives this week he'll struggle to avoid a quintessential legacy of his country's rule: the baguette.

Smeared with pate and loaded with fresh coriander and cucumber, or just enjoyed with a pat of fresh butter, "banh mi" are a delicious symbol of Vietnam's lasting links with its former occupiers.

"The French were very proud of banh mi. I think French cuisine has had a lot of influence on Vietnamese cuisine," baker Nguyen Ngoc Hoan told AFP from his busy boulangerie in Hanoi's French Quarter.

Hoan started baking banh mi - which refers to plain bread or the popular "petit pain" loaded with meat, vegetables or fried egg -- in 1987 and five years later got a stint at the bakery in the storied Metropole hotel, built by the French at the turn of the 20th century.

The sandwich has become a foodie favourite in hipster enclaves around the globe, sold from food trucks and sipped with craft beer in both its classic form and a flurry of new varieties.

Hoan's father was also a baker but discouraged his son from following in his floured footsteps.

"The baking profession chose me, it was not my decision," Hoan said, speaking in front of a wall of ovens as his workers tirelessly knead dough nearby.

An employee prepares to bake croissants at 'Hoan Boulangerie' in Hanoi.

He started his career baking what he called Vietnamese bread - airy on the inside, crusty on the outside - but after training with a French baker in Shanghai decided to switch to the denser French-style.

Now, he churns out thousands of warm baguettes daily, along with croissants, creme caramel and homemade pate.

'Petit pain'

French bread was first made in Vietnam to feed hungry soldiers in Indochina, France's empire which spanned much of Southeast Asia from 1858 to its crushing defeat in the Dien Bien Phu battle in Vietnam in 1954.

But the French became known for more than food, gaining a brutal reputation for crushing anti-imperialist movements and putting Vietnamese laborers to work in gruelling conditions on rubber plantations, while heavily taxing citizens during periods of drought and famine.

Most French who came to Vietnam weren't interested in low-level jobs like baking.

To fill the gap, Chinese and Vietnamese worked in boulangeries -- often hidden away in the back so customers wouldn't know who was baking their bread.

Local Vietnamese cooks used meat scraps and unused bones from French butchers to create pho - the national dish of beef or chicken noodle soup.

"By 1910, little baguettes or 'petit pain' were sold in the street to (Vietnamese) people who were on their way to work," according to Erica Peters, food historian and author of "Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam".

In the years that followed, meat, vegetables or fish appeared in the bread -- precursors to the modern-day banh mi sold all over Hanoi, a city rife with French colonial architecture, bistros and cafes.

Other culinary influences leaked in too.

Local cooks used meat scraps and unused bones from French butchers to create pho -- the national dish of beef or chicken noodle soup, according to Peters. Coffee and creme caramel are some of the other French culinary leftovers.

The ubiquity of those influences will not be lost on President Hollande, who arrives late Monday for talks with Vietnam's leadership and French businessmen.

Hybrid cuisine

Today, Vietnam's commercial capital Ho Chi Minh City is dotted with chic cafes serving croque monsieur and macarons at Paris prices.

An employee prepares a 'banh mi' for sale at 'Banh Mi Phuc' restaurant in Hanoi.

But the $1 banh mi still rules Hanoi's street food scene.

It is so engrained in Vietnam's culinary culture that few draw its lineage back to France.

"I don't know and don't care whether it's French, I just serve it like this," said Nguyen Thi Duc Hanh, sitting in front of her shop as the lunchtime rush begins.

She sells hundreds per day and keeps her menu simple: banh mi served with pate and a fried egg, beef steak or her very own version of "boeuf au vin" made with local spices.

One of her regulars, Nguyen Van Binh, said he has been eating banh mi for 50 years, and unlike Hanh, thinks of it as a hybrid dish.

"Banh mi came from France but it was changed and adapted to suit Vietnamese tastes," said Binh, before digging into his fried egg and pate served with a crusty roll.
F reelancing in Saigon requires a perfect balance of caffeine, quiet and things to keep you busy when you're trying not to work. Here's a list of the best work-oriented coffee shops in the city in no particular order.

WORKSHOP

This roastery and specialty coffee shop has packed its copper brew bar since it opened in 2013. The open room now features a rentable meeting room and several communal slabs of wood. Due to its high windows and thin roof, it remains the coolest spot in town to watch a storm. If you like to work in silencethere are a few tables back by the refrigerator. Cafe sounds aside, the coffee at Workshop may prove a bit too good. If you're not careful, you may find yourself wired at closing time, having blown an entire afternoon and a day's wage on shots of single-origin espresso and pour-over Laotian beans. For the extremely caffeinated, the place offers a long counter at which you may stand and work at the same time. Should you require something other than coffee, consider the English Breakfasta delicious platter of fried protein for just VND120,000. 27 Ngo Duc Ke, District 1

[a] CAFE

When artist and photographer Nguyen Thanh Truc opened [a] Cafe in his home a couple years ago, it was all couches, cigarette smoke and Lou Reed musica nice place to either zone out. A recent refurbishment filled the downstairs with upright chairs and long flat tables. The upstairs maintained a loungier vibe. While this place draws in the occasional worker, it avoids feeling overly bussiness-like. The counter is equally packed with jars of small lot beans and a million different ways to drink them. Start with a cool cup of slow-drip ca phe u lanh--refreshing brain fuel for a reasonable price. Should you need a break from all the coolness, step outside to hit the epic banh mi bay ho (Seven Tigers Sandwich) which opens right around the corner, every afternoon. Also keep a lookout for Co Xuong, who serves the best au hu nuoc duong gung in town from her shoulder-mounted restaurant. 15 Huynh Khuong Ninh, District 1

UCC COFFEE



If you require a more cloistered atmosphere to get work done, look no further than UCC Coffee. After weeks spent navigating the ass-punishing furniture favored by many of the city's busier work-oriented cafe, UCC feels like an interactive museum of commodious chairs. Though I've never met the manager, I assume she spent some time managing a library. The shop's J-pop soundtrack plays at elevator volume and its few shelves contain a small collection of 19th century English classics. Nicholas Nickelby, anyone? For VND50,000, the girls at the Ueshema Coffee Company brew a clean cup of strong, slightly bitter Joe on a series of siphons at the front of the house and press a mean waffle for just over a dollar. 106 Nguyen Trai, District 1

WORK

This list would be remiss not to include Workthe city's sole coffee shop dedicated to the original sin. Situated in an old villa off Dien Bien Phu street, this slick co-working space has evolved a lot since it first opened. The upstairs is now the sole jurisdiction of a handful of resident companies, but the sprawling downstairs remains a generous resource for those in need of a cappuccino and a place to plug in. While an air of focused ambition keeps the indoor atmosphere to a tense quiet, they've added a tidy outdoor patio space. Inexplicably, no one seems to use the free swimming pool. Pool parties aside, Work remains a great place to hang out. Its menu is replete with plenty of fresh healthy options--and cookies. Things can get a little too quiet in the main room. But Boss, the dog, always manages to throw a welcome wrench into the works. 267 Dien Bien Phu, District 3

NEST
Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May answers a reporter's question after a bilateral meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama alongside the G20 Summit, in Ming Yuan Hall at Westlake Statehouse in Hangzhou, China September 4, 2016.

Britain and Russia said on Sunday they hope to improve their relations through dialogue following the first meeting between new British Prime Minister Theresa May and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Relations between London and Moscow have been strained by differences over Ukraine and Syria in addition to Britain's complaint that flights by long-range Russian bombers near British air space have increased.

May said she hoped for an open dialogue with Russia even though the two countries have serious differences, speaking at the start of a meeting with Putin on the sidelines of a G20 summit in Hangzhou city in China.

"While I recognize there will be some differences between us, there are some complex and serious areas of concern and issues to discuss, I hope we will be able to have a frank and open relationship and dialogue," May said.

Putin, in apparent reference to Britain's decision to leave the European Union, told May that "everyone understands that you and your team are facing difficult challenges".

"We wish you success and hope that we will be able to bring our bilateral relations to a higher level than they are at today," he said.

The discussion between Britain and Russia touched on issues including terrorism, Syria, security and drug trafficking, Russian economy minister Alexei Ulyukayev said following the meeting.

"They have searched for common grounds on where the dialogue could be resumed," Ulyukayev said.

In a telephone conversation last month, Putin and May agreed to meet to improve poor relations, expressing dissatisfaction about the state of ties, the Kremlin said at the time.
Teresa did her work without any distinction of caste or religion, said Faisal Edhi, in a message on the occasion of Mother Teresa's canonization as Saint Teresa on Sunday.

By Indo-Asian News Service: A leading Muslim philanthropist in Pakistan has described Mother Teresa as "a great social worker who dedicated her whole life to the service of humanity".

Teresa did her work without any distinction of caste or religion, said Faisal Edhi, in a message on the occasion of Mother Teresa's canonization as Saint Teresa on Sunday.

"Her canonization will immortalize her service for the poorest of the poor," the Catholic News Agency quoted him as saying.

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FATHER TERRESA OF PAKISTAN

Faisal Edhi's late father, Abdul Sattar Edhi, was one of the best known philanthropists in Pakistan. Often called the "Father Teresa of Pakistan", the senior Edhi passed away on July 8 at the age of 88.

The late Edhi's first free medical clinic has today turned into a large foundation, the "Edhi Foundation", that is home to some 5,700 people in 17 residential institutions. It organises 1,500 ambulances.

People like Mother Teresa, Faisal Edhi said, help create a good environment that can assist "in ending rivalries between nations and communities".

MISSIONARY SPIRIT

Faisal Edhi recalled how his father frequently spoke of Mother Teresa and her work, saying Muslims must learn from her example and service to others.

He noted how both his father and Mother Teresa lived during the same period and how both had been criticized by "religious hardliners" who "claimed conversions", perhaps because "they had no other argument".

"Only missionary spirit can help them in working for the welfare of others and understanding their sufferings," he said.

Faisal Edhi recalled how his father always admired the Catholic nuns who ran two centres for the disabled in Karachi and "kept close relations with missionaries and used to send me to there".

He said the Edhi family continues to support the centres and each day sends five kg of mutton to Dar ul Sukun, the largest Church-run centre for the mentally and physically disabled in Karachi.

NEED FOR MORE SOCIAL WORKERS

Faisal Edhi said in his letter that his father had "trained me to do what Mother Teresa did", and voiced his hope that he would be able to serve the poor as she did.

"As a Muslim social worker in Pakistan, I thanks Missionaries for their kindness and establishment centres that work without any discrimination in our third world country," he said.

"There is no other example of the ways in which they help the disabled, especially handicapped children.

"Much work needs to be done and we need more people like Mother Teresa," he added.



ALSO READ:

Goa churches celebrate Mother Teresas sainthood

Sonia hails canonisation of Mother Teresa

--- ENDS ---

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Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Barack Obama shake hands during their meeting at the West Lake State Guest House in Hangzhou, China September 3, 2016.

U.S. President Barack Obama said on Sunday bilateral talks with China's Xi Jinping had been "extremely productive", as world leaders gathered for a G20 summit expected to address sluggish global economic growth and the looming specter of protectionism.

Some G20 leaders have already begun drawing battle lines in disputes over issues like trade and investment, tax policy, and industrial overcapacity.

Security is extremely tight in Hangzhou, with parts of the city of 9 million people turned into a virtual ghost town as China seeks to ensure that the G20 summit is incident-free.

Obama, who arrived on Saturday, held talks with Xi that ran late into the night. He urged Beijing to uphold its legal obligations in the disputed waters of the South China Sea, and stressed U.S. commitments to its regional allies.

Xi said China would continue to safeguard its sovereignty and maritime rights in the South China Sea.

Obama brushed off his chaotic welcome at the Hangzhou airport where his staff argued with Chinese security over media access. He was also not offered a staircase to disembark at the front of Air Force One, and staffers had to scramble to find an alternative exit.

U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping drink tea at a pavillion, at West Lake State Guest House in Hangzhou, in eastern China's Zhejiang province, September 3, 2016.

"The bilateral discussions that we had yesterday were extremely productive and continue to point to big areas of cooperation," Obama told reporters on Sunday, saying he wouldn't "over-crank" the significance of the airport row.

On Saturday, Obama and Xi also ratified the Paris climate change agreement, setting the stage for other countries to follow and for the deal to come into effect possibly as early as before the year-end.

China is keen to keep the summit focused on economic issues and to prevent other disputes from overshadowing it.

Other leaders arriving for the summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou include Russia's Vladimir Putin, Japan's Shinzo Abe, Britain's Theresa May, Germany's Angela Merkel, France's Francois Hollande and India's Narendra Modi.

The leaders are likely to renew their promises to use tax and spending policies to invigorate the sluggish world economy, although a new pro-growth push was unlikely.

Overcapacity in the global steel industry, a sore point for China as the world's largest producer of the metal, barriers to foreign investment and the risk of currency devaluations to protect export markets will also figure in the discussions.

China's President Xi Jinping (L) and U.S. President Barack Obama participate in a Paris Agreements climate event ahead of the G20 Summit, at West Lake State Guest House in Hangzhou, China September 3, 2016.

With the summit tucked in between Britain's vote to leave the European Union and the U.S. presidential election, G20 leaders will also be keen to mount a defense of free trade and globalization.

Battle lines

On Sunday, Xi held talks with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and told him he hoped Australia would continue to provide a fair, transparent and predictable policy environment for foreign investors.

China was angered when Australia blocked the A$10 billion ($7.7 billion) sale of the country's biggest energy grid to Chinese bidders last month.

China has accused Australia of bowing to protectionist sentiment in blocking the bid for Ausgrid, as well as an earlier one by a China-led consortium to buy cattle company Kidman & Co.

Beijing has also criticized Australia, a staunch U.S. ally, for running surveillance flights over disputed islands in the South China Sea.

Meanwhile, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Sunday China must set up a mechanism to address its problem of industrial overcapacity, saying it was "unacceptable" the European steel industry had lost so many jobs in recent years.

"Overcapacity is a global problem but there is a particular Chinese element," he told a news conference.

Britain's future after its departure from the European Union was also subject to discussion.

Juncker said that if Britain wanted access to the European Union's common market, it needed to respect the rules of the common market.

U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping walk together at West Lake State Guest House in Hangzhou, in eastern China's Zhejiang province, September 3, 2016.

Turnbull, meanwhile, said Australia wanted an early free trade agreement with Britain so markets could remain open between them when Britain formally left the European trading bloc.

Obama, now in the last five months of his presidency, wants to put a final stamp on his signature policy shift toward the Pacific, setting the tone for his White House successor, who will be elected in November and take office on Jan. 20.

He has invested in developing closer ties with nations in Southeast Asia, and is taking pains in his last scheduled trip to the region to reassure partners worried about the economic and military might of China.

An arbitration court in The Hague ruled in July that China had no historic title over the waters of the South China Sea and had infringed on the rights of the Philippines, which brought the case under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Beijing rejected the ruling and accused the United States of stirring up trouble in the sea where China's territorial claims overlap in parts with Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan.
The heads of three world economic bodies warned of the risk to trade from the protectionist headwinds sweeping many developed nations as global leaders met in Hangzhou, China.

In a panel session Saturday ahead of the Group of 20 summit, Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, urged business chiefs to lobby governments to help keep trade flows up as she issued a warning about the outlook for growth into 2017. Her views were echoed by Roberto Azevedo, Director-General of the World Trade Organization.

"Trade is way too low and has been way too low for a long time," Lagarde said. "There is at the moment an undercurrent of anti-trade movement. Its at the political level. Its at the public opinion level" and also being reflected in policy, she added.

"If there is no international trade, if there is no cross-border investment, if services, capital, people and goods do not cross borders, then its less activity for you, its less jobs in whichever country you are headquartered," she said.

TPP doubts

Lagardes comments come as momentum for ratifying the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would link 12 nations making up about 40 percent of the world economy, falters in the final months of U.S. President Barack Obamas term. Both presidential candidates -- Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton -- have spoken against the deal, which does not include China, while progress on a U.S.-EU trade and investment deal, known as TTIP, has also stalled.

Frances trade minister Matthias Fekl said late last month that the U.S. hasnt offered anything substantial in negotiations with the European Union on the free-trade deal and that talks should come to an end. His comments followed those of German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel, who said discussions on the TTIP have de-facto broken down, even if no one wants to say so.

Many Western nations are grappling with a mood of protectionism that is leading to calls for caution on free trade, and on foreign investment in things like property and utilities. Chinese companies recently were dealt a blow on prospective projects in both the U.K. and Australia.

Ladders of opportunity

Obama, speaking in a CNN interview, warned of the need to ensure people do not feel left behind by globalization.

If advanced countries dont pay attention to inequality, if we dont pay attention to, not just growth in the aggregate, but how is that growth distributed and do people have ladders of opportunity in this new global economy, then yes, theres going to be a reaction against globalization and against trade, he said.

U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May said shed make the case at the G-20 that Britain can be a champion of free trade, despite Brexit, while warning of the risk of anti-globalization sentiment from those who see themselves hurt by the lowering of barriers.

We cant ignore the fact that theres sentiment out there which is anti-globalization, she told reporters en route to Hangzhou. We need to consider how, when we put these free trade arrangements in place, theyre actually going to benefit everybody.

BRICS Statement

Angel Gurria, Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, noted that 1,400 protectionist measures had been passed since the financial crisis. The U.K.s planned exit from the European Union is a cause for uncertainty, alongside concerns over TPP. He condemned comments from "some European leaders" that TTIP had failed.

Meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 summit, the leaders of the BRICS nations -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- also expressed concern about protectionism.

Leaders reaffirmed their commitment to strengthen the role and negotiating function of the WTO and expressed concern at the rising protectionism in the context of declining global trade and concurred to strive to facilitate market inter-linkages and an inclusive, rules-based and open economy, they said in a joint statement.

The WTOs Azevedo called anti-trade rhetoric extremely sad.

If we dont do anything about it, this would lead to erroneous, to wrong trade and economic policies in the future," he said. "So we cannot let this go without keeping it in check."

"Going against trade is effectively going against growth, is going against your economy and making things even worse. So we do have to take action and if we want to do that, the first thing is to put the facts on the table.
An EU ruling that Apple Inc must pay a huge tax bill to Ireland was clearly based on facts and existing rules and was not a decision aimed against the United States, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Sunday.

Last week, European Union antitrust regulators ordered Apple to pay up to 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion) in taxes to the Irish government after ruling that a special scheme to route profits through Ireland was illegal state aid.

Apple's Chief Executive Tim Cook last week described the ruling as "total political crap", but France and Germany have come out to back Brussels on the decision.

Juncker said EU Commission investigations on taxation had mainly targeted European companies.

The decision comes amidst a coordinated global initiative to crack down on tax evasion by multinational companies, spearheaded by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The ruling against Apple has pushed the issue into the limelight and raised the risk of significant push-back from the United States, analysts say, where some lawmakers are saying the result represents a European encroachment on the U.S. potential tax base.

In separate comments to Reuters on the sidelines of the G20 on Saturday, Pascal Saint-Amans, director of the OECD Center for Tax Policy and Administration, called Apple's tax planning "outrageous" but, like Juncker, said the decision was based on enforcing current regulations.

Saint-Amans said he believed it would be unlikely to serve as a precedent for enforcement on future income earned by multinationals.

Juncker's remarks appeared designed to reassure U.S. lawmakers, who have bickered for years over the treatment of off-shore income but now fear that the European Commission move would mean more profits earned by U.S. corporations flowing into European tax coffers.

"This is not a decision against the United States of America," said Juncker.
Italian firefighters carry golden retriever Romeo after he was pulled from the rubble of a house in San Lorenzo a Flaviano on September 2, more than nine days after Italy's devastating earthquake

A golden retriever called Romeo has been pulled from the rubble of Italy's earthquake, more than nine days after he was given up for dead.

Touching footage filmed by the firemen who saved him shows the shaggy dog being lifted out from under a pile of masonry that is all that remains of his owners' house.

Appearing completely relaxed, Romeo slurps his first drops of water in more than 230 hours from a bottle held by one of the firemen.

As it becomes clear he is unscathed, the fireman holding him puts him down. Romeo then tiptoes gracefully down the pile of rubble to be reunited with tearful owners who had given up hope of finding him alive.

"He's in great shape," says one of the firemen as others whoop in delight while Romeo trots around what remains of his yard.

As he sniffs out familiar smells with trademark retriever insouciance, he looks for all the world as if he has just woken from a short nap.

Woof, woof, I'm here

Romeo's owners were sleeping on the second floor of their house in the tiny village of San Lorenzo a Flaviano when the earthquake struck before dawn on August 24.

They managed to get out, but Romeo, who was sleeping on the first floor, was trapped inside. After searching for him for hours, they were eventually evacuated from the devastated village for their own safety.

Golden retriever Romeo was reunited with his owners after being rescued more than nine days after a deadly earthquake hit central Italy.

All hope of finding Romeo alive appeared to have disappeared until Friday evening, when the couple returned to their home in the company of a group of firemen assigned to help them recover key belongings from the rubble.

Almost as soon as they came into the tiny medieval village, Romeo heard their voices and began barking.

"We immediately began moving masonry from where the barking was coming from and incredibly we got to him and he was in pretty good condition," one of the firemen told the ANSA news agency.

"Luckily some beams had fallen in a way that they were holding up the weight of everything above them leaving Romeo with a little niche that he was able to survive in."

No human survivors of the quake have been found since the evening of August 24th, when four-year-old Giorgia was pulled out alive after being located by another canine hero of the disaster, Leo.

A labrador who works as a police sniffer dog, Leo was granted an audience with Pope Francis on Saturday, two days after he was guest of honour at a summit between Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Cows milked

The toll from the deadliest quake to hit Italy since the 2009 L'Aquila disaster now stands at 294 confirmed dead following the discovery of another body on Friday evening at Casale, a small village near Amatrice, the tourist town where three quarters of the deaths occurred.

The final death count may yet top 300 with a handful of people unaccounted for and some hospitalised victims in a critical condition.

Vasco Errani, the government's reconstruction supremo, vowed Saturday that hundreds of people made homeless by the quake would be back in houses "in your own territory" within seven months.

Many are currently housed in tents in a region where freezing overnight temperatures are common from mid-October.

The clear-up operation was given a significant boost on Saturday with the reopening of a key roadbridge on the main road leading to Amatrice.

The centuries-old original "bridge of three eyes" was left structurally unsafe by the quake but army engineers have built a temporary by-pass next to it.

Farmers organisation Coldiretti meanwhile announced that all the surviving cows in the agricultural area hit by the quake were being fed and milked every day.

The milk is being used to make a "caciotta" cheese. The first samples were sold at a market in Rome Saturday with funds raised going to help farmers in the quake-hit area.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (C), UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and U.S. President Barack Obama (R) shake hands during a joint ratification of the Paris climate change agreement ceremony ahead of the G20 Summit at the West Lake State Guest House in Hangzhou, China, September 3, 2016.

China and the United States ratified the Paris agreement to cut climate-warming emissions on Saturday, marking a major step toward the enactment of the pact as early as the end of the year and setting the stage for other countries to follow suit.

The world's two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases made the landmark announcement as heads of state from the Group of 20 biggest economies, or G20, arrived for a summit in the city of Hangzhou, parts of which resembled a ghost town as Chinese security locked down the area.

U.S. President Barack Obama's last scheduled trip to Asia before leaving office however got off to an awkward start. Soon after Air Force One landed, a Chinese security official blocked National Security Adviser Susan Rice on the tarmac, speaking angrily to her before a Secret Service agent stepped between the two.

China has gone to great lengths to try to make the Sept 4-5 G20 summit a success, hoping to cement its standing as a global power, but a range of thorny diplomatic topics could overshadow the agenda.

G20 leaders are likely to renew their promises to use tax and spending policies to invigorate the sluggish world economy, although a new pro-growth push was unlikely.

U.S. President Barack Obama shakes hands with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon during a joint ratification of the Paris climate change agreement ceremony ahead of the G20 Summit at the West Lake State Guest House in Hangzhou, China, September 3, 2016.

Overcapacity in the global steel industry, a sore point for China as the world's largest producer of the metal, barriers to foreign investment and the risk of currency devaluations to protect export markets will also figure in the discussions.

Beyond economics, there may be friction over territorial disputes in the South China Sea and a U.S.-South Korea decision to deploy a missile defense system in South Korea to counter missile and nuclear threats from North Korea.

When Obama met Chinese President Xi Jinping, he told him they would have candid talks on cyber, human rights and maritime issues.

Nevertheless, the climate deal set a positive tone..

"Just as I believe the Paris agreement will ultimately prove to be a turning point for our planet, I believe that history will judge today's efforts as pivotal," Obama said after he and Xi handed ratified documents to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

"We have a saying in America that you need to put your money where your mouth is. And when it comes to combating climate change, that's what we're doing. Both the United States and China, we're leading by example."

At a joint ceremony, Xi said it "speaks to the shared ambition and resolve of China and the United States in addressing global issues".

Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Barack Obama shake hands during their meeting at the West Lake State Guest House in Hangzhou, China September 3, 2016.

French President Francois Hollande said it was an important step that would pave the way for the implementation of the Paris agreement at the end of the year.

Residents leave in droves

The stakes are high for China to pull off a trouble-free G20 summit, its highest profile event of the year, and security in Hangzhou was intense.

Volunteer security agents prevented journalists from filming in deserted parts of the normally bustling city of 9 million people. Residents left in droves after authorities declared a week-long holiday for the summit, shut down the city's famous West Lake beauty spot and offered free travel vouchers worth up to 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) to encourage people to visit out-of-town attractions.

More than 200 steel mills in surrounding districts were shut as part of a bid to limit pollution.

With the summit wedged in between the Brexit vote and the U.S. presidential election, G20 leaders will be keen to mount a defense of free trade and globalization.

Concerns about subdued growth will be a major concern.

The world's biggest economies have pulled out the monetary policy stops to promote growth, but central banks are now "pretty close" to the limits of their ability to stimulate economies, said Angel Gurria, head of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

U.S. President Barack Obama delivers remarks at a Paris Agreements climate event with United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and China's President Xi Jinping ahead of the G20 Summit, at West Lake State Guest House in Hangzhou, China September 3, 2016.

In the absence of "breakthrough, collective" policies, global growth was likely to remain weak, he told Reuters.

"We have left our good central bankers to do all the heavy lifting."

In separate remarks to Reuters, Pascal Saint-Amans, the director of the OECD's Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, addressed the thorny issue of multinational corporate tax liability, which the European Commission's recent decision against Apple Inc (AAPL.O) has brought into sharp relief.

The European Commission said this week that Apple owed up to 13 billion euros ($14.50 billion) in back taxes to Ireland, based on existing regulations, a decision that both Apple and Ireland, which relies on low taxes to attract investment, have vowed to fight.

China is using the G20 to push its diplomatic agenda with a raft of bilateral meetings.

China and Turkey pledged earlier in the day to boost counter-terrorism ties, setting aside previous disagreements over China's treatment of a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority.
President Pranab Mukherjee on Saturday called Mother Teresa a messiah of the poor and a pillar of support for the weak as he said every Indian will take pride on her canonisation today.

By Mail Today Bureau: President Pranab Mukherjee on Saturday called Mother Teresa a messiah of the poor and a pillar of support for the weak as he said every Indian will take pride on her canonisation today.

In his message on the eve of the canonisation ceremony to be done by Pope Francis at Vatican City, Mukherjee said Mother Teresa was an embodiment of compassion.

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Read: Mother Teresa's mission lives on in Kolkata, grows worldwide



"She dedicated her entire life to serving the poorest of the poor as well as the destitute and forsaken. Mother Teresa saw herself as 'small pencil in the hands of the Lord' and went about her work quietly, offering smiles and warm human gestures. Always dressed in a simple white, blue border sari, Mother Teresa undertook her work with great love and commitment. Mother Teresa provided dignity and respect to those who had been defeated by life. She was a messiah of the poor and a pillar of support for the weak and suffering. Her simple manners touched the hearts of millions of people of all faiths," he said.

The President said her message of love continues to inspire millions of people around the world. Every citizen of India will take pride in the recognition being accorded to Mother Teresa for her service to humanity and God through this Canonisation. "Let the example of Mother Teresa inspire all of us to dedicate ourselves to the welfare of mankind," he said.

PRESIDENT HEAPS PRAISE ON MISSIONARIES OF CHARITY

He said Mother Teresa established the Missionaries of Charity in 1950 with the mission of caring for the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone. Praising the Missionaries of Charity, which has branches in several countries, Mukherjee said the organisation continues its service to humanity, reaching out to the needy regardless of their religion or social status.

"Mother Teresa believed that giving something of our self is what confers real joy and the person who is allowed to give is the one who receives the most precious gift. She glorified her life with the dignity of humble service. In recognition of Mother Teresas selfless and dedicated services, a grateful nation conferred on her India's highest civilian award Bharat Ratna in 1980," he said.

Remembering her words, the President said Mother Teresa often said: "What the poor need most is to feel needed, to feel loved. There are remedies and treatments for all kinds of illnesses but when some one is undesirable, if there are no serving hands and loving hearts, then there is no hope for a true cure.

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Read: Sushma Swaraj addresses Indian diaspora, says delighted to be in Rome



President calls Mother Teresa a 'messiah of the poor'

ALL EYES ON VATICAN CITY

Mother Teresa will be declared a saint by Pope Francis of the Roman Catholic Church in a canonisation ceremony at Vatican City on Sunday in the presence of over a lakh of her followers from all over the world.

From India, a 12-member central delegation led by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and two state government-level delegations from Delhi and West Bengal led by Chief Ministers Arvind Kejriwal and Mamata Banerjee, respectively, will be in attendance during the function.

Nuns at the Missionaries of Charity, founded by the late Nobel laureate nun, said the canonisation in Rome will have a special universal significance because of the Mother's popularity.

A group of around 40-50 nuns from different parts of the country will be present at the ceremony led by Missionaries of Charity Superior General Sister Mary Prema. Besides Archbishop of Kolkata Thomas D'Souza, about 45 bishops from all over India are now in Vatican.

In March, Pope Francis had announced that the Mother, who spent 45 years serving the poor and sick on the streets in Kolkata, will be elevated to sainthood after the Church recognised two miracles attributed to her after her death. To mark the occasion a series of events are being held in the city where the Mother lived and worked all her life. At the Mother House, a special mass will be organised and the nuns have promised to celebrate the occasion with the poorest of the poor.

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- With inputs from Agencies







ALSO READ:

Kolkata gears up for Mother Teresa's sainthood



--- ENDS ---
A new virtual high school available only to students who live within the boundaries of the East Baton Rouge Parish school system will hold its first day of classes Tuesday when schools reopen more than three weeks after they closed due to flooding.

Unlike other schools in Baton Rouge, the new EBR Virtual Academy missed the opening day of the 2016-17 school year on Aug. 10. Instead, the school planned to open the following week. Other schools, including the parish school system, were open only two days before the flooding hit the morning of Aug. 12.

EBR Virtual Academy has remained closed. The virtual schools office stayed dry, but the rest of Glen Oaks High School where its offices and school were located flooded. After an initial attempt to reopen failed, the decision was made to relocate Glen Oaks High School to Northdale Academy, 10755 Cletus Drive, and the online school was moved to Sharp Station, 3000 North Sherwood Forest Drive, where it shares space with the Child Nutrition Program.

Stacey Dupre, a school system administrator who has overseen the online schools development, said that before the flood, they had list of parents interested in their children attending the school and the district was in the process of contacting them.

We are in the process of contacting those parents again, she said.

Approved by the parish School Board in March, the new EBR Virtual Academy has had a slow start. It has flown under the radar even as a handful of other new schools opened in Baton Rouge this past month.

The new online school got a phone number early this month, (225) 478-9264, though for weeks no voicemail was set up. No one is officially enrolled yet, though Dupre said that will change next week. The schools website is in development and is days from going online. There are plans to promote the school via mailers and informational meetings once the school is up and running.

Dupre blamed the delays in part on the new school receiving an official site code from the state only on Aug. 1. The issuance of a site code means the school will receive an annual report card. Other virtual schools run by Louisiana public school districts are organized differently. Those virtual schools route student test scores back to the neighborhood school closest to where their students live.

The EBR Virtual Academy will cater mostly to students not in the system who want a fast track to graduation, including home-schooled students. Scottsdale, Arizona-based Edgenuity is supplying the online courses. Students will need to have access to a home computer and the internet to participate but will be able to access Edgenuity any time of day.

The new academy is selective. Students whove scored at grade level or better  proficiency  on a state-sponsored test such as the LEAP test in math and English can submit those results to gain admittance.

Or they can take a special standardized test developed for the school system by Boston-based Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The test was used in 2015 to determine magnet school admissions. Students taking this test will need to score at the national average or better in math and English.

Originally, the plan was to require that students have a minimum 2.5 GPA, a common entry requirement at magnet schools. Dupre said that proposed requirement was dropped partly out of concern for the difficulty it would present to home-school families.

We also realized there are some students who may not have this GPA but would be very successful on this platform, Dupre said.

The new school is not strictly online. Students will need to come in person to take unit tests and exams. Students in need of tutoring can come in person on weekdays. The virtual school also plans to organize student clubs and to take students on field trips.

Venesa Harris started July 1 as the new principal of the EBR Virtual Academy. She is a longtime high school administrator who has served as principal at Belaire High School. She has a small staff consisting of a counselor and two core teachers.

Harris and company also will run a Blended Learning Program aimed at high school-age students who have dropped out or are on the verge of dropping out. It will blend Edgenuity courses online with a big dose of one-on-one interaction. Its a variation on a program called Moving Forward that the school system launched a year ago but which failed to draw many students.

Dupre said the school system has identified about 100 initial students whom the school is assessing to see if they are suited to the Blended Learning program.
After evacuating about 600 inmates from the Livingston Parish Detention Center due to flooding, the Sheriffs Office and parish government are racking up significant costs keeping them housed elsewhere and repairing the damaged facility.

Early estimates suggest the costs may have already exceeded $500,000 for building repairs and housing alone. No numbers are available yet for the costs of replacing furniture, equipment, inmate gear and other property damaged after more than a foot of water poured through the facilitys doors on Aug. 13, officials said.

We havent gotten any of the bills in yet, and I dont know how long it will be before we do, parish Finance Director Jennifer Meyers said Friday. But we also havent replaced all the supplies yet. Were still ordering new mattresses, sheets, jumpsuits and other items destroyed in the flooding. We just dont know what our costs are going to be when all is said and done.

Officials also dont know how much of those costs will be reimbursed either through the parishs insurance policy or through the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Meyers said the parish is documenting its losses for the insurance company as well as preparing requests for public assistance grants to submit to FEMA through the Governors Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. If the costs are covered by FEMA grants, the federal government would pick up 75 percent or more of the tab.

What officials do know is that every parish pre-trial detainee evacuated and housed elsewhere since the flooding is costing parish government about $24 per day under rates established by state law. The running tally for those nearly 450 inmates was projected to surpass $250,000 before the first wave of trusties returns to the jail this week.

That amount is on top of the per-diem costs for 100-plus parish inmates who already were being housed outside the parish due to ongoing crowding at the detention center, officials said.

Jail space still a problem LIVINGSTON  Livingston Parishs new jail is full, leaving authorities once more having to p

Parish officials also expect to pay about $300,000 for cleanup and repairs to the detention center building under a lowest-quote contract signed after the flooding, Meyers said.

Sheriff Jason Ards budget has taken a hit as well, losing $4,100 per day in revenue that he would have received from housing more than 150 state prisoners who had to be evacuated. Ard also has seen significant increases in overtime costs associated with the flood, which he described as the departments third major response event of the year, following the March floods and the July ambush on Baton Rouge law enforcement.

On top of those losses, the parish faces potentially devastating reductions in sales and ad valorem tax revenues after some 60,000 structures  including 75 percent or more of the parishs homes and thousands of businesses  suffered flood damage, according to FEMAs preliminary damage estimates.

The financial outlook has raised concerns among parish officials who said theyre already working within tight budgets.

Independent auditors repeatedly have expressed concern about the growing deficit in the parishs jail fund where a dedicated -cent sales tax already does not bring in enough revenue to pay both construction debt and the parishs share of operational expenses. Covering additional costs, without knowing how much will be reimbursed or what effect the flooding will have on the parishs economy, has set officials on edge.

Livingston Parish audit cites concerns about deficit in jail sales tax fund A multimillion-dollar deficit in Livingston Parishs jail sales tax fund was among a handful

Livingston bond rating lowered Fitch Ratings has lowered the rating on $6.9 million in Livingston Parishs general obligati

We had always said it would only take one disaster to really punch us in the gut, and this is it, Meyers said. I dont know what were going to do.

Concerned about his offices ability to continue to make payroll, Ard went to the State Bond Commission on Tuesday for approval to sell $5 million in revenue anticipation bonds. The loan will help keep the Sheriffs Office afloat amid the uncertainty, he said.

I have a lot of outstanding bills, things we had ordered before this (flood) that are coming in that I have to pay for, and Ive got to make sure I make payroll and continue to provide safety for the parish, Ard said. Thankfully, the Bond Commission is working with us on that. And well go back to them again if we have to, to get through this. I think well be fine once we get through the first year, and possibly the second year. Well get back on our feet.

Ard said he hopes FEMA will work with the parish in covering flood-related losses.

I dont really know the answer on that, but I do know we are going to be asking for anything we can get, Ard said. This is going to hurt us. Its already hurting us.

FEMA spokesman Alberto Pillot said Friday the agencys public assistance grants reimburse state and local governments for a range of disaster-related costs, including emergency measures, debris cleanup and repair to roads, bridges and other infrastructure.

Our mission is to help restore critical infrastructure so communities can recover from a disaster and support their citizens, Pillot said in an email. FEMA encourages any public entity, if they have incurred costs for the flood fight or damages to a facility, to fill out a Request for Public Assistance.

Ard said the decision to evacuate the inmates came early on the morning of Aug. 13, only a short time after relocating Livingstons 911 communications center from its flooded Satsuma Road facility to the parishs emergency operations center.

While we were doing that, the jail called, Ard recalled during a tour of the detention center Wednesday. I rode over in my four-wheel-drive truck and could barely get to the front door. I had to drive to the door to reach it. Thats when I realized we had a problem, and what I didnt want to have to deal with, on top of everything else, was 600 inmates.

Ard said he called the Louisiana Sheriffs Association and, within minutes, received a call from Secretary Jimmy LeBlanc, of the Department of Public Safety and Corrections, who organized the relocation of inmates.

I turned it over, and some of my jail employees worked with him, and probably around 2 or 3 p.m. that day, they were on buses getting out of here, Ard said. And not long after they got across the (Interstate 12) bridge, the bridge got shut down. We got very lucky, just made some right calls at the right time.

Ard said he used the smaller jail within the Livingston Parish Courthouse to hold people arrested for looting and other crimes during the immediate aftermath.

We were able to work out of that for the people who, believe it or not, while we were rescuing people, they were out looting, he said.

Meanwhile, floodwaters in the detention center lapped at the bottoms of electrical outlets, prompting the sheriff to have the electricity turned off and to limit who could go in, for fear the water would splash up into the receptacles and cause additional damage.

Once the waters receded, the power was restored and deputies brought work release inmates from the sheriffs Walker facility, which did not flood, to help kickstart the cleanup effort.

Crews from Cottons Disaster Recovery Division were working throughout the jail Wednesday, under contract with the parish, to finish repairing the facility so inmates could begin to return this week.

Were doing everything we can to get this into working condition, Ard said, adding that getting inmates back into the detention center is not just about putting his budget back on track.

We have inmates who have families here. They have kids, they have wives, and they have moms and dads who come here to visit, Ard said. Right now, weve got them all over the state where it may be difficult to go visit, so one of my top priorities is to get them back here.
The flood of 2016 has left more than 150,000 properties damaged and thousands of families displaced from home with their lives upended.

But Louisiana demographers say they don't expect this disaster to create a mass exodus of people searching for higher ground.

After Hurricane Katrina, hundreds of thousands of people evacuated New Orleans, which was underwater after the levees failed. And though the population has rebounded over the past decade, there are still thousands of Katrina victims who never returned.

Although the historic flooding event last month was widespread, it also was scattered enough to allow for significant inroads toward the recovery to be made quickly.

"It looks like the way the flooding happened was patchy enough that folks have been able to stay with a friend or a neighbor who may not have been affected two blocks away," said Allison Plyer, chief demographer and executive director of The Data Center in New Orleans.

After the flood, the waters drained from most regions within a few days. Electricity largely was restored within a week. Thousands of people started gutting their homes right away, attempting to salvage some of their belongings. All of these factors help get people into their homes sooner, Plyer said.

She also said school reopenings have a major impact on victims' ability to stay in an area struck by a disaster.

"If a school is closed and your community can't offer any open school to your child, you will find somewhere to enroll your child into school," she said. "Those are the first people to migrate somewhere else."

Although schools in flooded areas all were closed temporarily, many have reopened. Even in Livingston Parish, which was among the hardest-hit, schools will open on Sept. 12, with students being shuffled around to different schools because of lost facilities.

Livingston students return to class Monday, many at new school, different times When Livingston Parish students return to school Monday, many will be at a new campus, and s

Experts also noted the high number of homeowners in the affected areas, which provides an added incentive to stay.

"The preponderance of residents in this footprint are homeowners as opposed to tenants," said Richard Campanella, a geographer with the Tulane University School of Architecture. "Homeowners have equity invested in their house and legal title to their land, both of which tend to harden peoples relationship to place.

Campanella also noted many of the people who were flooded are not in high-risk flood zones and had never seen water in their homes before.

"If these were repeat areas, then you might see more people making the decision to move," he said.

It's renters, experts said, who are among the most likely to leave.

That was the case for Caroline and Kevin Farris, who were renting a comfortable, four-bedroom home in Denham Springs with their 3-year-old daughter Isabella.

They were in North Carolina when the flood hit, visiting with the bride's family, because they'd been married just one week earlier.

After the water receded, the Farrises drove through the night to see their home, hoping for the best. But what they found gave them no reason to stay.

The house got 39 inches of water, enough to damage all of their furniture, the wedding gifts they'd just received and a collection of personal photographs Caroline Farris had pulled down to sort through for the ceremony.

Kevin Farris' family in Watson also flooded, so the couple decided to head back to North Carolina and stay with Caroline Farris' family.

"We didn't have a choice," Caroline Farris said. "My husband called his job and said, 'Look, I'm really sorry, but we can't stay here,' and then I had to do the same."

They considered trying to find a new rental unit in East Baton Rouge Parish, but they didn't want to spend more money for tighter quarters.

Caroline Farris already has gotten a new job in her hometown, and the couple expect to move into their new rental next week.

"I guess we're lucky we were renting, so we can just leave," Caroline Farris said.

But by and large, they will be the exception to the rule.

Craig Colten, an LSU professor who studies migration, said it's also notable that people in Louisiana tend to stay here. Louisiana has among the largest percentages of people who don't leave the state.

"Local connections are powerful magnets that keep people rooted in place," Colten said. "More people who grew up in Louisiana live in Louisiana than any other state. That's a tremendous amount of rootedness. Connections like family, friends and churches are powerful. "
Pope Francis has declared Mother Teresa as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, here's all you need to know about the saint-making process.

By India Today Web Desk: Mother Teresa, the Roman Catholic missionary has been formally declared a Saint of the Catholic Church by Pope Francis at a Mass and Canonisation in St Peter's Square, Vatican today.

An ethnic Albanian born in 1910, Mother Teresa dedicated her life to the service of poor and the destitute and at the age of 18 she became a nun and relentlessly served for the downtrodden until the age of 87. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

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After 19 years of her death in Kolkata, Mother Teresa has been declared the church's newest saint. Here's all you need to know about the 'saint-making process':

What is Canonisation?

Canonisation is the process by which the Catholic church proclaims a holy preacher to be included in the list or canons of saints. In Mother Teresa's case the Catholic church is posthumously bestowing sainthood for the holy deeds she performed during her lifetime which also includes miracles.

The criteria for becoming a saint

There are two essential requirements, the candidate should be a martyr ( killed in the name of Jesus) and must have qualities of faith, hope and courage. In the case of Mother Teresa, there are plethora of documents which testify her exemplary act of kindness and compassion.

The candidates should have performed miracles, for example Mother Teresa is credited with healing an Indian woman from stomach cancer in 1998 and a Brazilian man from a brain infection in 2008.

The path to sainthood

The process begins at the diocese or the place where the individual lived and died, in Mother Teresa's case it is Kolkata.

The postulator heading the research gathers documents and presents it to the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

After this the congregation examines the person's life and forwards the case to the Pope who then signs a decree to speed up the process. When it formally begins he or she get the title "Servant of God."

The process technically takes five years, but in Mother Teresa's case Pope John Paul, allowed the procedure to be launched two years after her death.



The scrutiny of documents

After gathering enough information, the 'Servant of God' needs to prove their 'heroic virtues'. The virtues include faith, hope justice, fortitude and patience. A panel of doctors, theologians and bishops verify the information and forward it to the Pope, who signs a decree for beatification.

If the candidate earns title "venerable" they are then beatified. This requires a miracle, which is magical curing of a sick person.

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The attainment of sainthood

In the final stage Catholic Church declares a person as saint when they prove that the person has communicated directly with God and the phenomenon is called Beatific Vision. In Mother Teresa's case the two miracles proves this point

The First Miracle

The first miracle attributed to Mother Teresa, and which allowed the Church to beatify her, after an Indian woman, Monica Bersa, who had stomach tumor prayed to the nun in 1998 a year after her death. She believes that her prayer to Mother Teresa and a medallion of the Mother tied around her stomach cured her tumor



The Second Miracle



After her beatification in 2003, a second miracle was required for Mother Teresa attain to sainthood. This involved Brazilian Marcilio Andrino, who unexpectedly recovered from a severe brain infection in 2008 after his family prayed to Mother Teresa.



--- ENDS ---
While Senators Derryn 'Shut-eye' Hinch, Nick 'Sensible centre' Xenophon and Malcolm 'Empirical Evidence' Roberts, attracted all the attention, ALP Senator Chris Ketter quietly returned to the Senate on the Queensland ticket behind newbies Murray Watt and Anthony Chisholm, and returning Senator Claire Moore.

Ketter is a creature of Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees' Association, (SDA), known as the Shoppies, one of the original four right wing 'grouper' unions in the ALP, a relic of the great Labor Split of the '50s, and the toxic factionalism of the ALP.

Labor Senator Chris Ketter at the corporate tax avoidance inquiry. Credit:Jesse Marlow

The only job Ketter had before entering Parliament in 2014, appears to be the 32 years he spent as an SDA union official. In his 2014 first speech Ketter tapped all the touchpoints of conservative Catholic social action. He told the Senate:

"The Catholic church's official Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church 2004 states: 'The Magisterium recognizes the fundamental role played by labour unions  to defend the vital interests of workers.'"
The current government's emission reduction target (set during the Abbott years) is to reduce our emissions by 26 to 28 per cent by 2030. This is nowhere near fast enough. If that is all we do, then in 2030 we will have used up 90 per cent of our total carbon budget. To meet our international obligations  endorsed once again by Mr Turnbull at the Paris climate conference last year  we would then have to crash our emissions to zero in five years. That would be impossible. And so Australia would renege on its commitments and free ride on the efforts of the rest of the world, including poor countries. They would be carrying us.

And yet the Climate Change Authority's report accepts this manifestly inadequate target and builds its recommendations around it. This is despite the fact that a year ago (when Bernie Fraser was still the chair) the authority itself warned the government that our budget is rapidly running out and much stronger action is needed without delay.

Yet the majority report argues that the best way forward is to build on the current Direct Action program, including a huge expansion of the flawed Emissions Reduction Fund under which the government pays polluters to reduce emissions. Apart from anything else, this would put a huge strain on the federal budget and make climate policy hostage to the battle over fiscal policy.

Carbon emissions from land clearing have been a major source of Australia's emissions. State government restrictions on land clearing have been very effective at reducing them in recent years. But now state governments are loosening those restrictions and emissions are growing.

The authority's majority report recognises that restrictions are the best policy but says that they do not enjoy "universal support". Farmers' organisations are complaining. That's enough for the authority to withdraw support for land clearing restrictions and suggest we begin looking for an "alternative". No policy ever enjoys universal support, and bad policy results when the national interest is sacrificed to sectional interests.
When we hurt our boys, we hurt our men. And it is a hurt that is felt by all. The fallout from the Royal Commission into Institutionalised Responses to Child Sexual Abuse makes depressing reading for all Australians, and especially for those who dedicate their lives to making a positive difference to the lives of children. But we must not allow accounts of male abuse in schools to erode our trust in men.

One way of preserving this trust is to recognise the positive influence that men have had on boys, and appreciate the unique role that male teachers play in transforming young boys into fine, decent and caring men.Undoubtedly women play a valuable part in the education of boys, as do men in the education of girls, but the point of this article is to highlight the need for more good men in schools.

Role model: Robin Williams (left) and Matt Damon in the film Good Will Hunting.

It was after reading a British survey commissioned by the Training and Development Agency for Schools stating that boys are more likely to turn to male teachers for help, guidance and assistance that prompted me to consider the male teacher's role in the nurturing of boys. I became particularly interested in the question after a mother of three teenage boys recently said, "well, boys certainly don't open up to their dad", adding, "even if they wanted to, many boys can't because there's no dad to turn to".

The survey found almost half of the men questioned said that a male teacher has been a fundamental role model in their life. It also revealed that male teachers were more approachable, and that boys were more likely to turn to them about bullying and problems with schoolwork. Significantly, 29 per cent said they went to a male teacher with problems at home, and 24 per cent were more likely to ask them questions about puberty.
Australia and East Timor are at loggerheads over drawing a maritime boundary to finally and permanently resolve the division of undersea oil and gas resources. What might ordinarily be regarded as a quarrel between otherwise close friends has slowly festered into a toxic dispute, and now presents a serious obstacle to cordial neighbourly relations.

Trust has seemingly evaporated, in large part because of the extraordinary allegation that Australia spied on its tiny neighbour during its first days of independence to win commercial advantage. There is also a vexed history of Australia's dealings with Indonesia during the years of occupation. It is a notable sign of how prickly relations have become that no senior Australian politician, other than deputy Labor leader Tanya Plibersek, has visited East Timor since 2013, shortly after the spying claims first came to light.

A bit of this might help. Credit:Photo illustration

The allegation is that Australian intelligence agents, under the guise of aid workers, bugged the cabinet office in Dili in 2004 during negotiations for a deal to share undersea resources, known as the Treaty on Certain Maritime Arrangements in the Timor Sea. The treaty included a 50-50 split for resources in a rich gas field known as Greater Sunrise, but put off final negotiations on a maritime boundary for 50 years.

East Timor declared the treaty invalid in 2013 and instigated proceedings against Australia in The Hague in a bid to resolve the dispute. It is true Dili's hopes of developing Greater Sunrise have long been frustrated. It wants a pipeline to the south coast of East Timor for processing the resources, rather than proposals to use facilities in Darwin or a floating processing platform. But the cloak-and-dagger suspicions swirling around this case have fuelled a not unreasonable perception of bullying by the larger neighbour.
Australia will "enthusiastically" enter into negotiations on a free trade agreement with Great Britain, its first new trade pact since the Brexit vote.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull discussed the agreement with his British counterpart, Theresa May, on Sunday and said Australia had sent trade negotiators to Britain to help begin work on the deal.

"We are on a unity ticket with that," Mr Turnbull said in the Chinese city of Hangzhou.

"We are already well advanced ... We are very enthusiastic and supportive."
More details about a proposed "city deal" to generate jobs and economic opportunity through western Sydney will be available in the new year, according to the federal assistant Minister for Cities, Angus Taylor.

During the election campaign Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull promised to strike deals to spur growth in Launceston, Townsville and western Sydney.

The "deals", based on an idea applied in UK cities such as Manchester and Aberdeen, would aim to align local, state and federal governments to work with businesses to trigger jobs and investment.

Mr Taylor, the Member for Hume charged with developing the policies, said the deals in Tasmania and northern Queensland were likely to be the first deals implemented by the government.
Queensland has gained two new millionaires overnight as two out of the 11 winners of the $21 million superdraw on Saturday night were purchased in the state.

The hunt is on for the mystery winners, who are unregistered and were yet to claim their prize late on Sunday morning.

Pots of gold: Two lucky Queenslanders are yet to present their winning tickets in Saturday night's $21 million superdraw.

The winning tickets could be hiding in Father's Day card, waiting to make two lucky Queenslanders happy.

Newmarket News and Gifts and The Warana Newsagency were where the tickets were purchased.
Premier Annastacia Palaszcuk, who is also the arts minister, forgot one of Queensland's most awarded and celebrated arts companies in a speech at an arts event on Sunday night.

During a speech at the opening night of Ballet Preljocaj's production of Snow White in Brisbane the premier mentioned what an auspicious occasion it was to welcome the company to Brisbane because "of course we don't have a contemporary dance theatre here in Brisbane".

Choreographer Natalie Weir's genius on display with The Host, from Expressions Dance Company.

What the premier seemed to have forgotten is that Brisbane is the home to Expressions Dance Company, one of Australia's most successful contemporary dance companies.

The company, under the artistic directorship of Natalie Weier, has been nominated for a number of Helpmann Awards as well as Australian Dance Awards.
As part of the worldwide recall of Galaxy Note7 smartphones that Samsung announced late on Friday, every owner of a Note7 in Australia  even if they bought the phone overseas or online  will be contacted proactively to arrange their choice of a replacement phone, a full refund, or an expert repair. No battery fire incidents have been reported in Australia, but the company is taking unprecedented steps to address any potential issue to keep customers happy.

Despite over a million Galaxy Note7s being sold since the phone's launch a fortnight ago, the company said that the 35 reported incidents  with 17 in South Korea, 17 in the US and one in Taiwan  were enough to prompt it to take the action it has. The battery failure rate has been just 0.0024 per cent across all phones sold.

The issue affects the Note7's battery, with an unintended meeting of the battery cells' anode and cathode in some cases leading to the fires. The issue is isolated only to the new, lithium-ion 3500mAh battery used in the Note7, which is a unique design that has not been used in any other Samsung smartphone. The Note7 is Samsung's most successful Note series smartphone, outselling the previous title-holder the Note5 by around double in the two weeks since its launch.

Samsung's Australian arm is going out on the front foot to offer a choice of refunds, repairs and replacements wherever requested. Any Australian customer, whether the phone was purchased on a plan through a telco partner, outright from a retailer or through Samsung's own online store, will be contacted in the coming days to be advised of the process.
The victims of the Muzaffarnagar riots are slowly reclaiming their lives, settling into their new homes, with a helping hand from organisations that have filled a policy breach.

The dainty fairy lights look out of place in the otherwise dark colony on Malakpur Road in Kandhla town. Their gaiety is not in keeping with the stories the residents narrate about the horror of the violence done to them three years ago. They look out of place because this settlement, in Shamli district, Uttar Pradesh, has no electricity, and the lights, powered by a hastily procured generator, are a rare treat. For the past three years, these Muslim families have been working to rebuild their lives, to recover from the trauma of losing their homes in the September 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots that left more than 60 dead and an estimated 100,000 Muslims displaced.

Among them is Mohammed Sajid, who's around 30. His voice still breaks as he speaks of his anguish. But he is hopeful now; after months and years of living in tents, he has a house of his own again. These are residents of the newly inaugurated Apna Ghar colony, the culmination of nearly two years of effort by activists, civil society organisations and the victims of the riots themselves to rehabilitate shattered lives. Through a project called 'Yeh Mera Ghar'. The individual memories of their loss are mirrored in the distinctive designs of their new homes, in the colours of walls and ceilings, so that no two houses look alike.

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In the two years after the riots, some of the victims returned to their villages. Many others refused, fearing repercussions. The state had declared 10 villages the worst affected, offering compensation of Rs 5 lakh to families that had lost their homes. In return, the families signed affidavits promising not to return. Many of those who refused to go back to their villages had stayed put during the riots, keeping the mobs at bay by flinging bricks, until paramilitary forces arrived. Then they left, and never returned.

"In one hour, love changed to hate," Sajid says. "The kids had no shoes when we left...we had no idea where we would go." He ends his account with an unironic 'Jai Bharat'. One of the most violent riots in recent history, Muzaffarnagar also re-emphasised the lack of a comprehensive national policy for Internally Displaced People (IDP). Newspapers were full of stories of displaced people living in terrible conditions in camps, a few even dying in the brutal winter chill that hits Shamli district. After the state ordered victims who'd got compensation to vacate the camps in three days, 230 families banded together and bought plots of land with the money they had got. Under the 'Yeh Mera Ghar' project, these IDP families were helped with funds for housing in three sites-129 families in the two primary sites, Malakpur in Kandhla and Aryapuri in Kairana, were assisted with design and construction. Besides these two sites, 90 families in Basikalan were supported with additional construction.

Activist Farah Naqvi, involved in the process alongside organisations like the Hunarshala Foundation, Sadbhavana Trust and Vanangana, said the project was a "response to the reality that India has no IDP laws". She added that while it was necessary to provide alternative housing, "no resettlement project could give victims back their graveyards, their memories. How do you return them to their history? They will forever carry a sense of displacement."

The women of the house await a formal inauguration of their new living quarters in apna ghar colony on Malakpur road in Kandhla. (Photo: Sara Naim)

On a makeshift stage, Askari Naqvi, a human rights activist and a lawyer, reads out from Asghar Wajahat's short story The Spirits of Shah Alam Camp. At this otherwise celebratory inauguration of a new community-complete with hennaed women in bright salwars and pots of biryani-the reading served as a reminder of the context.

"A child's spirit comes to Shah Alam Camp in the wee hours, like a firefly burning brightly in a dark night...'I am the Evidence'."

"Evidence? Evidence of what?"

"I am the Evidence of Bravery."

"Whose bravery are you the evidence of?"

"Of those who ripped open my mother's womb, tore me out and hacked me in two."

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A woman talks about seeing men struck with machetes during the riots, their blood spurting onto the streets. Now, 40 km away, in this new colony, they are starting again. Still, they cling to reminders of their old way of life. They paint the walls green and blue, arrange the utensils and plastic flowers as they did in their old villages.

Sajid's mother Akhlaq, 50, smokes a bidi outside her home as she introduces her daughter-in-law Sahar, 22, from Jola, the village they had pitched their tents in after fleeing. Sahar's dowry of a bed, almirah and refrigerator remained with her parents till her in-laws moved from the camp. "Now, I have a home," she says.

For Akhlaq, the new settings are disorienting, but she knows return is not an option: "They will shout 'Pakistan jao ya kabristan jao' and they were our people. We worked together, went to their festivals. They came to our homes."

In one of the newly built houses in Kandhla, Rihana, in her late 20s, from a village called Soop, cradles her 17-month-old son, who is suffering from 'water on the brain'. They moved into their house about four months ago, though the formal inauguration happened only on August 12. Her husband is a daily wage labourer. They don't belong to any of the 10 villages the government deems most affected by the riots, so they haven't received any compensation. But they were too scared to stay in their village, choosing instead to pay Rs 1,000 per month to rent a house in the new colony. They sold their own house in the village for Rs 1.75 lakh and spent the money on their ailing son. "We have five children," Rihana says, "and we earn Rs 8,000 a month. It's not enough."

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Many children in the new settlement, particularly girls, attend the local madrasa; the nearest government school is at least 1.5 km away and not safe, they say. "There was wilderness before we came here," says Noornisa, 48, a resident of the colony." N.P. Singh, the former district magistrate (DM) of Shamli-posted there a few months after the riots-says it was a challenge to rebuild people's faith in the administration. "The government for the first time had announced compensation to the displaced," he says, "and I helped by connecting them to social security schemes. We had the support of NGOs. We helped victims enrol their children in schools and slowly put their lives back together."

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Displaced villagers returned to about 19 villages in Shamli. But rehabilitating those who chose to stay away was a big logistical challenge. "Our concept," Singh says, "was to create an integrated village. A riot is a psychologically painful experience and this was a good model." Sandeep Virmani, vice chairperson of the Hunarshala Foundation, calls it community-driven reconstruction. "It's a process where the planning and rebuilding is led by the community, enabled technically and socially. The rebuilding of the lost home becomes a symbol of empowerment, an expression of their identities," he says.

Raeesa Sheikh, 62, says she does not believe in nostalgia. Her village no longer exists for her, she says. But the walls and ceiling suggest otherwise. The ceiling is painted red and white. The walls are green, as they were in her village in Kairana.

"Our prophet wore a green turban," her son Kallu explains. "Back in our village, we had mud floors that looked red and white ceilings. Now we have a pucca floor, so we put the red on the ceiling." Raeesa's husband was killed during the riots in Kutba. "What's the point in burdening yourself with memories," she asks. "If we return, they will cut us again. I am happy here now."

There is a feast on at her house to celebrate the inauguration of this colony of the displaced. Kallu, her eldest son, lives across the narrow street. He saw his father getting killed and the village pradhan urging the Jats to kill more, he says. A Jat widow saved his cousin, Mehdi Hasan. Hasan says that when they went back to collect what had been left behind, the widow cried when she saw them. The memories hurt, but these houses, they say, have helped them reclaim some lost dignity. "We didn't have a kitchen in our old house," Hasan says. "The women also could help with the design. The gate stays the same. It's an ode to Mecca-Medina, which we hold sacred."

In the same settlement, Rubeena, 28, says she is happy she has a kit-chen and a toilet. She wanted two rooms and a small yard. She is grateful that the government compensation, a concession on the land and financial help from the NGOs were sufficient to help her achieve this. "We put in our labour and money. We have built this with our sweat and blood. But it will be years before this becomes a village like the ones we had to leave," she says. "Displacement and the loss of the home," points out Madhavi Kuckreja of the Sadbhavana Trust, "affects women in very particular ways, because it is women who control the traditional domain of home and hearth. This is why you need to involve women in shelter construction."

It has been a long journey to buying land and building houses. But perhaps for the displaced, to begin thinking of this as their new home, they will have to make their peace with what happened, and the fact that justice continues to be elusive.

--- ENDS ---
The Melbourne to Geelong train trip would be cut from an hour to 35 minutes and a new "fast line" would link the CBD with the airport, under an ambitious 25-year plan calling for major investment in Victoria's regional rail system.

The "Intercity" report calls for the introduction of new regional trains able to travel at 200 kilometres per hour, and rail upgrades that would allow this high-speed operation "where achievable".

A revamped regional rail network would help ease the burden on Melbourne from its massive population growth, by encouraging more Victorians to live in regional cities, it says.

The plan, prepared by the Rail Futures Institute and to be launched on Monday by former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer, says a better regional rail network would allow thousands more country residents to commute to Melbourne for work, while enabling more Melburnians to travel to jobs in regional cities. It says Victoria should aim for a regional population of at least three million by mid-century.
Cairo: Islamic State has lost its last link between its main territories and the outside world as Syrian rebels backed by Turkish tanks and airstrikes captured the last stretch of the Syrian-Turkish border held by the extremist group.

Rebel forces advancing west from the town of Jarablus and east from al-Rai captured the last border villages held by Islamic State Sunday afternoon, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and rebel groups involved in the offensive.

Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency confirmed the development, which puts an end to more than three years of Islamic State presence on the border.
Monday 05 September, 2016 Reliable information reaching Biafra writers desk has it that the life of Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of the Indi...
Kate wears Catherine Zoraidas Double Leaf Earrings (Photo: Mark Large  Pool/Getty Images)

The Duchess of Cambridge has several pairs of golden earrings made in a modern style, but today, were looking at a pair that has an extra advantage: a coordinating bracelet. Both pieces are from Catherine Zoraida, a jeweler born in Colombia and raised in Scotland.

Photo: Mark Large  Pool/Getty Images

Kate debuted the suite of leaf-themed jewelry during the 2012 Diamond Jubilee tour. She wore both the earrings and the bracelet at a dinner given by the King of Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur.

Images: Catherine Zoraida

Heres a closer look at the pieces as they appear on the Catherine Zoraida website. The earrings are the Double Leaf Earrings, which are available in a trio of different metal compositions. The Spread Your Wings Bracelet is a gold-plated piece that retails for 430. Both pieces are clearly advertised on the Zoraida website as items worn by the Duchess of Cambridge.

Photo: Mark Large  Pool/Getty Images

Heres another look at Kate wearing the Double Leaf Earrings in Malaysia

Photo: Mark Large  Pool/Getty Images

and another look at the bracelet from the same engagement.

Photo: Scott Barbour/Getty Images

The earrings have become a fairly familiar part of Kates daytime rotation in the years since. In April 2014, she wore them during another royal tour: the extended visit to Australia and New Zealand. She selected the earrings for the visit to Uluru, which is also known as Ayers Rock. For this outing, she paired the earrings with the Woodland Charms necklace from Asprey.

Photo: PAUL ELLIS/AFP/Getty Images

Later the same year, she wore the earrings for a very high-profile event: the royal familys annual attendance at a Christmas church service near the Sandringham estate.
Aakanksha Singh, who is best known for her role as Megha in the popular TV series, Naa Bole Tum Naa Maine Kuch Kaha, is set to return to TV.

By India Today Web Desk: TV actress Aakanksha Singh became a famous household name when her sitcom Naa Bole Tum Naa Maine Kuch Kaha aired on Indian TV screens.

Aakanksha played the role of a widow and mother of two children in the famous TV series, which aired on Colors T,V and was paired opposite Kunal Karan Kapoor aka Mohan Bhatnagar.

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Also read: Karan Singh Grover all set to make a TV comeback with a travel show?

After a brief hiatus, the talented actress is coming back on small screen with a new show called Aye Zindagi on Zing channel.

Aakanksha will be seen playing the role of a lawyer in the youth based show, which will focus on spreading a message to the society through engaging stories.

Confirming the news, Aakanksha told India Forums, "Yes, I will be playing a lawyer in the opening episode of the show. The show though will be a youth based show with an aim to give out messages to the youth and society. I am playing a lawyer for the first time; so really excited about it."

--- ENDS ---
Excuse me, how do these fortune cookies work?

A bunch of us were standing in line at a sensory speed dating event when an anxious redhead named Mona asked me about the curved wafers being passed around on platters.

I guess theyre all about sex? Mona chirped after we exchanged fortunes. Sort of. Ours contained trivia about the mating habits of bonobos monkeys, and the fact that humans are the only mammals who develop boobs when not nursing.

Some 80 people were crowded into Littlefield, a bar and music venue in Brooklyn, which had been transformed to look like the set of The Bachelorette .

There were red tablecloths draped over tall, round tables, and soft, down-lighting that airbrushed everyones faces. It hardly mattered, as I spent most of the next two hours blindfolded, sniffing strangers armpits and caressing their facestwo of five sensory tests to help us consider potential mates.

Mona had seen an ad for the sensory speed dating event online (shed speed-dated without the sensory element before) and wore a red velvet shirt with deep cleavage for the occasion. Shed tied her hair up in a bun with a frilly bow, and her mouth was shellacked with glittery lip gloss.

Mona looked more like Strawberry Shortcake than a typically stylish, thirtysomething single woman in New York City. But her sartorial choices fit in among the crowd at Littlefield, where the tittering women outnumbered the passively desperate men.

Early on, I found a seat between Justin, mid-30s and quiet, whose curly black hair looked like a jumble of steel wool, and Chris, a moon-faced 45-year-old wearing cargo pants and a pale blue shirt with eccentric white embroidery.

The evening was organized by Guerilla Science, a London- and New York-based science collective that create events and installations for festivals, museums, galleries, and other cultural clients.

Theyd brought along a panel of experts to talk us through our experiments: Carlotta Batres, a postdoctoral research fellow at Gettysburg University, and Aaron Owen, an evolutionary biologist whose research is centered in sexual selection.

People with symmetrical faces generally have strong immune systems, Batres said while participants clumsily rubbed each others cheeks.

While a French man (who looked like Idris Elba) fed me a carrot canape, Batres was explaining that in primates, the giving and sharing of foods releases oxytocin, the bonding hormone.

Hunger levels influence facial preferences, which means the hungrier you are the more likely youll be attracted to someone, according to Batres.

My senses were being bombarded with what sounded like pseudoscience; apparently carrots increase attractiveness and fruit and vegetables make your face look healthier. True or notand perhaps I was swimming on oxytocinbut Batress data seemed irrelevant to my being publicly fed by a speed-dating Frenchman.

The emcee, petite and duck-footed with a boyish face, dispensed with corny jokes in game show host intonations. I looked around for other wincing guests, but there were none. People seemed to be enjoying it. The bad puns. The clumsy punchlines.

Perhaps the problem had less to do with science than taste.

As the awkward and partner-less crowd attempted to communicate our emotions through dance (blindfolded once again), we were told that touch is linked to areas of our brains that govern compassion; that women whose partners give them more hugs are less stressed; that if a man walks up to a bar and puts his arm on a woman, hes more likely to get a yes (and get thrown out of a bar). The same applies to those who approach women on the street and ask for their phone number.

As the skin-crawling chorus of Take My Breath Away echoed through the venue, and as we are moved into another group for another scientific exercise that would assist in finding a mate, it became depressingly clear that while science might offer clues on how to approach a women or how to elicit sympathy from a man, science cant fix bad taste.

Its nice to know which part of the brain activates pheromones, but its up to you to not wear cargo pants when trying to find your perfect match.

After we de-blindfolded, there was a brief Q&A, during which one participant asked if anyone had studied how scent knowledge might affect Tinder ratings (apparently yes: there exists a Tinder smell dating variant).

Some people talked closely at tables and others finished their conversations at the bar. I was on my way out when the Frenchman whose nose was buried in my armpit an hour earlier stopped me and offered a tip: Dont change your deodorant.
Georgia has become a battleground state in this election with the latest poll showing Clinton tied with Trump in this reliably red state. As the Daily Beasts Patricia Murphy noted Wednesday, Peach State Democrats are pumped.

Im a native Georgian. I have a hard time thinking of Georgia as a blue state. Pigs have yet to fly. But the close polling does indicate that the state could more closely resemble the relatively reasonable red state that I grew up in.

Im a child of the 1980s. I was raised in the suburban Atlanta town of Marietta in Cobb County. Newt Gingrich represented my district in Congress, and so did current Sen. Johnny Isakson. This area, along with Gwinnett County, was and still is the epicenter of conservative thought in the state.

It grew to prominence as a result of white flight from Atlanta, so black families were not the norm. I still remember not being invited to my white friends birthday parties as a kid, wondering why I was never asked over to some of my friends houses, and experiencing the scorn of interracial dating.

Yet despite all of this, I grew up in arguably the most progressive era of Georgia politics.

I grew up hearing my parents praise Jimmy Carter. They were proud to have a Democrat from Georgia who cared about black people in the White House. This might seem a minor accomplishment, but caring about the lives of African Americans in the South was no small thing then, and it remains arguably the highest form of Southern progressivism. Historically, Southern Democrats were always segregationists and avowed racists.

Prior to Carter winning the governorship in 1971, our previous governor was Democrat Lester Maddox, who still supported segregation, even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And Democratic Sen. Herman Talmadge, who served from 1951-1981, was a vocal segregationist.

But the 1980s and 90s brought about a seismic change in Georgia. I grew up in a Georgia with a new breed of Democratic senatorsSam Nunn served from 1972-1997, and Vietnam war veteran Max Cleland held Nunns seat until 2003. These men werent liberals by, say, Massachusetts standards. But they did reach out to African-American voters to a degree that was previously unheard of.

My Georgia has always had Democratic governors too, despite voting Republican in presidential elections. Democrat Zell Miller was a hugely popular governor. The HOPE Scholarship program he created, which grants merit-based scholarships to Georgia students with B averages, has allowed countless Georgians to attend college. Because of this program many of my high school classmates went to college for next to nothing.

And I proudly remember his successor Roy Barnes creating a new state flag in order to minimize the Confederate battle emblem.

Also, African-American mayors of Atlanta Andrew Young and Maynard Jackson created change that reverberated throughout the state. Both Young and Jackson worked to bring the Olympics to Atlanta in 1996, and they supported the expansion of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport that made it the biggest airport in the world, turning Atlanta into a major international business hub.

However, this era would not last, and by the late 1990s the tide had clearly begun to turn. Bill Clintons supposed immorality had become the focal point of Georgian politics.

As Gingrich spearheaded Clintons impeachment on the Hill, his rhetoric permeated throughout the state and completely changed the political landscape. As a result, the evangelicals grew increasingly important in the state, and quickly the line between religion and politics became blurred.

My family had gone to an integrated Christian church for years, but our commitment to this congregation began to wane in the 2000s as our pastor decided to become a political expert and decry the immorality of the Democrats and the necessity of supporting Republicans. Bill Clinton was viewed as nearly demonic, and George W. Bush, an avowed Christian, was the savior that our society needed. Eventually, my family left that church in favor of a predominantly black church.

The evangelicals felt emboldened to claim the moral high ground and entitled to demean Democrats and their supporters, many of whom were African-American. The state became increasingly divisive and the worst in people became more apparent.

In 2003, Sen. Clelandwho lost both legs and an arm in Vietnamlost his re-election bid to Republican Saxby Chambliss, who bombarded the Georgia airwaves with a disgusting ad declaring that Cleland lacked the courage to lead. During the same year, Gov. Barnes lost his re-election bid due to the outrage over his changing of the state flag. One of new Gov. Sonny Purdues first acts was to redesign the flag, and although he completely removed the Confederate battle emblem, he replaced it with the Confederate national flag.

By 2004, the Republican conservative transition was complete when Miller, by then a senator, spoke at the Republican convention, endorsing President George W. Bush and unleashing an abusive tirade against John Kerry and Democrats generally. For more than 20 years, on every one of the great issues of freedom and security, John Kerry has been more wrong, more weak, and more wobbly than any other nation figure, said Miller at the RNC. John Kerry wants to re-fight yesterdays war. George Bush believes we have to fight todays war and be ready for tomorrows challenges.

Since then Georgia has been a redder and far more corrupt state, thanks to Gov. Nathan Deal.

So if Republicans and corruption dominate Georgia politics, youd think Trump, who is so operatically both of those things, would have a sizable lead, right? But no. Clearly, his negligible amount of support from Georgias African-American and Latino population does not help his cause, but the real damage stems from the moderate Republicans and evangelicals who are reluctant to support him.

Trumps extreme language and divisive politics have turned off many moderate Republicans in the Atlanta suburbs. A large segment of these moderates identify as evangelicals, too. For months, Trump has retained the support of evangelicals in the state primarily due to the vacant Supreme Court seat, and their desire for a conservative Justice. But as his campaign further spirals out of control, the prospect of an immoral Trump presidency that shows no sign of adhering to a conservative ideology has become unappealing.

Gary Johnson has become the go-to candidate for disillusioned Republicans and evangelicals in Georgia. The pocket of Johnson-supporting Republicans represents the potential for positive change in Georgia. When I was growing up these folks represented Republicans who supported bipartisanship and may have voted for Democrats from time to time. This created a more equitable, empathetic state with less corruption, and people discouraged mixing politics and religion.

Georgia has always been conservative, but I remember a time when the state was moderately reasonable and not dominated by far right radicals. The Georgian displeasure with Trump shows that the return of reason might not be too far way.
When you read the Christian Rights wacky, ignorant statements about transgender people, have you ever wondered where they get this stuff?

The answer, often, is feminists.

In fact, the surprising nexus between radical feminists and Christian Right culture warriors has been with us a long time. In the 1980s, anti-porn feminists like Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin teamed up with anti-porn conservatives like Edwin Meese, leading to the passage of laws censoring sexual speech in the name of protecting women. In the last decade, anti-prostitution feminists have joined forces with fundamentalist Christians to prosecute sex workers under the aegis of sex trafficking laws.

And now, some essentialist feminists  pejoratively nicknamed TERFs, for Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminists  have provided the pseudo-philosophical basis for fundamentalist Christians anti-transgender laws. Not all feminists, of course; in fact the term TERF was coined in 2008 specifically to distinguish radical feminists who welcome transgender women as women, and those who insist that biological sex determines ones gender identity.

Cole Parke, LGBTQ & Gender Justice researcher at the left-leaning think tank Political Research Associates, has been tracking what Parke describes as a symbiotic relationship between TERFs and the Christian Right. Parke cited ake for example an April 2016 op-ed by Jennifer Roback Morse (president and founder of the right-wing Ruth Insititute) where she said she's reading "very interesting book" called Gender Hurts, by Sheila Jeffreys, writing "I would not have expected to agree with a radical lesbian feminist. However, in this case, I absolutely agree with her: Bruce Jenner was never a little girl. I dont care what kind of fantasy life he has. I was once a little girl. So was Jeffreys. Jenner never was."

Meanwhile, the author of that book, Jeffreys, approvingly cites the anti-trans scholar Paul McHugh, who was responsible for shutting down the gender identity clinic at Johns Hopkins University and is frequently cited by right-wing scholars and writers. Closing the circle, McHugh cited Jeffreys in a recent anti-trans position paper published by the American College of Pediatricians.

In a recent article , Parke cited a second example: a June, 2015, five-point plan issued by the right-wing Family Research Council (FRC) for responding to the transgender movement. Its co-authors, Peter Sprigg and Dale OLeary, have argued that transgender people suffer from delusions and should be sent to so-caled reparative therapy, or are liars who target children and expose them to molesters and exhibitionists masquerading as sex educators.

Among the sources cited in the FRC report was Janice Raymond, whom Parke describes as a lesbian scholar and infamous anti-trans activist who authored the 1979 book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male and proposed legislation in 1980 for the elimination of transsexualism.

To be clear, writers like Jeffreys and Raymond do not represent the majority of feminists, or of radical feminists. On the contrary, the status of transgender women has been a long, intra-feminist controversy that reached its greatest boiling point in the cancellation of the famous Michigan Womyns Festival (MichFest) over the question of whether or not to allow transgender women to attend the womens-only festival. MichFest shut its doors rather than allow trans women to attend.

But the alliance with anti-transgender forces on the right has further reaching implications. The rhetoric itself is vitriolic, and surely has contributed to the increase in reported violence against transgender people, including a record number of murders in 2015 . But it also has led to numerous anti-transgender laws, most notoriously North Carolinas absurd, evidence-free, and dangerous crackdown against transgender people using bathrooms that correspond to their gender identities.

The rhetoric surrounding North Carolinas law is couched in the language of TERFs: transgender women, in particular, are described as being men in disguise, either because of a psychological disorder or a pathological desire to assault women. Conservative religious writings likewise deny the existence of transgender people as a category; last year, for example, the Southern Baptist Convention said that trans people do not exist.

This despite the lived experience of millions of transgender people, and the scientific consensus among the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Psychiatric Society that gender dysphoria is a real condition that can be addressed and remedied. (Many trans activists, it should be noted, resist this medical diagnosis, since it can stigmatize transgender people as disordered.)

But this isnt the first time when radical feminists and religious conservatives, diametrically opposed politically, have worked together in the name of protecting women.

In 1986, for example, Dworkin testifiedwithout any evidence to support her claimthat 65 to 70 percent of women involved in sex work had been victims of incest of child abuse. She claimed that snuff films, pornography showing women actually dying, were commonplace, when in fact they were an urban legend. And MacKinnon argued that pornography is equivalent to rape.

They made these statements not at arcane academic conferences, but in front of the Meese Commission, and similar entities in Canada. They worked together with right-wing organizations like the Eagle Forum and Concerned Women for America. And, as described in Nadine Strossens Defending Pornography, the far left-far right alliance succeeded in passing laws limiting the distribution not just of pornography but of a wide variety of texts and filmsincluding, ironically, two of Dworkins own books.

To be sure, some women are indeed coerced into pornography, or, more likely, find themselves with few other choices due to systemic discrimination and disempowerment . And as more recent scholarship has shown, porn does affect the brains of people who consume large amounts of it, leading, among other things, to the objectification of women and a lack of interest in actual sex with actual people.

But there are also many adult writers and actors who love what they do, find it empowering, and enjoy giving pleasure to others. Writers like Patrick Califia (who prior to his gender transition wrote as the female-identified Pat Califia) and Laura Antoniou have attempted to give voice to those whom the likes of MacKinnon purports to represent.

And lets get real. Conservatives dont oppose porn because they want to protect women; they oppose porn because they oppose sexual licentiousness and free sexual expression. Just like they oppose protecting trans people because transgender reality scares them, disgusts them, or offends their outdated theologies.

A similar shell-game has recently arisen in the context of sex trafficking. Human trafficking, of course, is abhorrent, tragic, and evil. But the definition if it has recently been stretched so far that police are busting sex workers, not traffickers, often shipping them off to church-affiliated re-education programs like Arizonas project ROSE.

This was a deliberate deception on the part of anti-sex activists like the anti-prostitution group Demand Abolition. As exposed by The Washington Post in 2014, that groups internal document said that framing the Campaigns key target as sexual slavery might garner more support and less resistance, while framing the Campaign as combating prostitution may be less likely to mobilize similar levels of support.

Naturally, fighting sex trafficking had long been a feminist (and human rights) issue. But fighting sex work in general has, like opposing trans rights, united radical feminists and religious conservativesboth of whom claim to be protecting women.

Abolitionist feminism, for example, views all sex work as intrinsically sexist and exploitative, regardless of what sex workers might say. Prostitution, abolitionist feminists say, is a form of violence against women.

This view dovetails conveniently with the conservative moralistic view, which regards prostitution as a sin. And while many feminists have called out the conservative shell game, abolitionist feminist writings have been used to justify it. As a result, the womens rights NGO Equality Now has teamed up with the conservative Heritage Foundation. Sex workers are defined as victims, whether they consider themselves to be so or not, and sent to church-affiliated programs that then preach sex-role-based messages that are the polar opposite of feminism.

The fundamentalist-feminist alliance against transgender people is thus the latest in a series of touch points between the two movements.

Then again, maybe TERFs and religious culture warriors arent that different after all. Both have a rigid definition of what constitutes genderone based on universalizing their own experience, the other based on a narrow interpretation of religious dogma. Both claim to be protecting women, but do so at the expense of (other) vulnerable populations. And both find themselves on the political extremes, one on the left, the other on the right. Maybe anti-trans theocrats and anti-trans radicals have more in common than it would seem.
Certain images will indelibly mark memories of this year and one will be the gut-wrenching video of a five-year-old pulled from rubble in Aleppo with the frozen stare of trauma, his face streaked with soot and blood. Cease fires come and go. Hell, it seems, has a special purchase on Syria. When, for heavens sake, can it end? No one can answer.

When did it begin? That, at least, we can explain.

Rarely can one moment and one place be fixed as a trigger for events that unravel a whole part of the world for more than a century. But the blood-saturated disintegration of todays Syria and much of the surrounding carnage and anomie have their origins 100 years ago, in the summer of 1916, and in British-ruled Cairo.

It was there that critical parts of a secret deal were put in place that carved up control of the Middle East  a land grab that could be completed only by having no regard for promises made and by betraying people who had shed much blood in expectation of those promises being met.

The deal was the Sykes-Picot Agreement, made between Britain, France and Czarist Russia, and named for its principal authors, Sir Mark Sykes for Britain and M. Francois Georges Picot of France.

In this arrangement Britain was to have control of Egypt, Palestine, parts of Arabia and a new nation that became Iraq. France was to get Syria. And Russia would have control of Turkey, including of Constantinople and the Dardanellesthe channel from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean that Russia had sought since the days of Peter the Great to give it warm water naval power.

The Bolshevik Revolution rendered void the Russian slice of the cakeOttoman Turkey was replaced by a secular Turkish state. Butfatefullythe rest of the deal was carried out.

The Sykes-Picot negotiations went on for many months and were handled in a way that defined two contrasting national approaches to foreign policy, embodied in the men themselves.

Picot was a professional diplomat who never stepped outside the protocols of his office. Sir Mark Sykes was a gifted amateur to whom life in the diplomatic corps would have been intolerable.

The British gathered a strange assembly of talents in Cairo in 1916, mixing career military officers, stolid colonial administrators, ambitious diplomats with little local sympathy or understanding, academics renowned for their archaeological discoveries in the region, intelligence agents from India and the Sudan and several civil servants locked into turf fights between rival departments directed from London.

Even in this confusion, Sykes seemed an improbable choice to handle such a potentially explosive issue, the covert cartography that would draw arbitrary new national borders from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, from the Levant to the Sudan, from the Nile to the Tigris and Euphrates.

Sykes had a vast family fortune that, as a young man, he had tapped for extensive travel in the Middle East. He was of a group and class called the Orientalists because they so admired and soaked up the cultures of antiquity  the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Persians, the Arabs, and of later influences like the Turks and the Armenians. In England Sykes had a grand country house and estate, Sledmere, in Yorkshire. Like other travelers with deep pockets he shipped home artifacts from the Orient and had an architect create a Turkish Room at Sledmere, featuring Armenian ceramics.

Sykess self-gathered erudition, though, sat oddly with another trait of the class he grew up witha casual prejudice toward Orientals themselves. He drew impromptu racial caricatures on scraps of paper, Jews and Arabs with large noses, fat Turks and shifty merchants in the bazaars.

The same vein of artistry would transform him into a first-class music hall comedian; holding a chance gathering spellbound by swift and complete changes of characterhe could have become a good high comedy or tragic actor and he was an excellent and entertaining writer, one of the British proconsuls in Cairo noted.

A newcomer to Cairo with a background in archaeology thought Sykes was miscast in such a critical role.

He would take an aspect of the truth, detach it from its circumstances, inflate it, twist and model it, until its old likeness and its new unlikeness together drew a laugh; and laughs were his triumphs, he wrote. His instincts lay in parodyhe saw the odd in everything and missed the even.

This was T.E. Lawrence. In that summer of 1916 Lawrence bounced between the armys intelligence arm and a small, secret outfit called the Arab Bureau. One of his tasks was to explore and judge the military potential of the Hashemites, the Arab monarchy who were the traditional custodians of the Holy cities of Mecca and Medina. They had already risen against their oppressors, the Ottoman Turks.

Lawrence knew about the negotiations between Sykes and Picot. He understood that if implemented an agreement would completely undercut promises of Arab independence already made to the Hashemites in order to get them to fight the Turks. Indeed, his chief at the Arab Bureau, had complained to London in a somewhat convoluted text: the conclusion of this Agreement is of no immediate service to our Arab policy as pursued here, and will only not be a grave disadvantage if, for some time to come, it is kept strictly secret.

Sustaining the impression that British policy was not only of two minds but of at least two irreconcilable camps, the British High Commissioner in Egyptin theory the ultimate colonial satrap of Egyptinstructed an aide to make clear to London that We do not want to create a powerful and united Arab Kingdom either under the Sherif or anyone else, even if such a thing were practicable. It would be a danger and a cause of future embarrassment in view of our arrangements with France and Russia.

Lawrence, on his own, decided that he could not be a partner to this duplicity.

Moreover, he had a radical approach to harnessing Arab armies to a British campaign to drive the Turks from Arabia, Palestine and Syria.

Army orthodoxy was to wait until overwhelming military power was ready for a classic ground battle, particularly depending on an opening barrage from massed artillery. Lawrence knew that this was not the kind of war Arabs were equipped either by temperament or equipment to fight.

The hill men, he reported to his masters in Cairo, struck me as good material for guerilla warfare. They are hard and fit, very active; independent, cheerful snipers.

His plan was to find a Hashemite leader who could fully exploit this ability, to move fast in relatively small numbers, to harass and disrupt the Turks, drawing off forces that they would otherwise use to face a British invasion of Palestine.

In October Lawrence found his man, Prince Faisal, one of four sons of the Hashemite King, Hussein. Lawrence made a 100-mile journey from the Red Sea coast into the desert to meet him. Not yet the obdurate desert traveler of legend, Lawrence was blistered by the pestilent beating of the Arab sun and the long monotony of camel pacing.

Faisal had made a small mud house the base of his camp and immediately he impressed Lawrence.

Tall, graceful, vigorous, almost regal in appearancefar more imposing personally than any of his brothers, knows it and trades on itobviously very clever, perhaps not over scrupulous, Lawrence wrote

This was the Prince whom Lawrence would cast as his military protege and brother in arms, the essential co-star in the literary epic that immortalized their campaign, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In that first meeting Lawrence set the bait for how they would pre-empt the Sykes-Picot map. Faisal asked Lawrence how he liked our place here in Wadi Safra. Lawrence replied: Well, but it is far from Damascus.

Faisal got the message. Lawrence warned him of the French ambition to grab Syria after the war and pressed the need for the Arab armies to sweep up not only Damascus but Homs, Ham and Aleppo. Faisal, it turned out, shared a strong Francophobia with Lawrence.

By December 1917 the British had taken Jerusalem and the Ottoman Empire was collapsing. By this time, in London, the British had agreed to another part of the regions future that, although never part of Sykes-Picot, would have lasting consequences : Palestine should become a national home for the Jewish people.

However, the semantics of this agreement were slippery. The original wording had been Palestine should be reconstituted as the national home of the Jewish people.

This commitment was bitterly opposed by some of the British officials in Cairo, one of whom wrote: The country is wholly unsuited to the ends the Jews have in mind, it is a poor land, incapable of great development. (And within a few years a new British government insisted that there is no question of making Palestine a Jewish State.)

The grander Sykes-Picot plan for Turkey became moot because of the Russian Revolution. In fact, the whole pre-war world order was in tatters. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 Lawrence wrote I hope the Sykes-Picot Agreement is given up.

The French had different ideas. Faisal had led his Arab army into Damascus but his days there were numbered. The Hashemites were given a new kingdom, Trans-Jordan, and in 1921 Faisal got a consolation prize in the form of a throne in Baghdad and a new nation, Iraq.

Sykes never lived to see the outcome of his scheme. He died, aged 39, during the Paris conference in the influenza pandemic that killed many more than did the war.

Of course, its all too easy to see the catastrophe of the present, look at those whose design replaced the vacuum left by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and ask, what were they thinking?

But these were one set of colonial administrators replacing another (the Turks, at least, had not thought it useful to invent client nations). The British, more than the French, were concerned to preserve imperial power. Primarily that meant that stability in the Middle East was essential to having unchallenged routes to the prize of their empire, India. And both the British and the French wanted assured control of the Suez Canal, which meant the subjugation of Egypt.

There were plenty of British administrators with as much knowledge of the Arab territorial claims as Lawrence but in the big picture of colonial security they were, in the phrase that Lawrence used to describe his Arab campaign, treated as being just part of a sideshow of a sideshow.

As result, new states were imposed on the Arabian map with no regard for the occupants. The Iraqi borders, for example, were arbitrarily drawn and disregarded 2,000 years of tribal, sectarian and nomadic occupation.

Nothing had cooled the innate hostilities between the Shia, in the south of Iraq, and the Sunnis in the north. Disastrously, the Shia were left virtually unrepresented in the British-appointed government of Iraq.

These arrangements were combined with a naive belief in religious harmony. The treaty putting Faisal on the Iraqi throne stipulated: The law shall ensure to all complete freedom of conscience and the free exercise of all forms of worshipno discrimination of any kind shall be made between the inhabitants of Iraq on the ground of race, religion or language

The vast desert lands to the south of Iraq were left undefined. The reason was Ibn Saud, the most effective warrior king in the region. Eventually that line on the map was settled by the Saudis themselves, on the strength of their Wahhabi-indoctrinated armies.

There is a terrible symmetry to this story. When Tony Blair decided to become George W. Bushs poodle and accept fake intelligence to justify invading Iraq he became the destroyer of the original British carve-up. The whole region was destabilized andhardly an intended consequenceIran was suddenly given the space to become a regional power, and to reassert Shia influence.

Blair argues that he had a moral imperative, to rid Iraq of a despot, but he displayed the same cultural and historical illiteracy and hubris that allowed the Sykes-Picot scheme to be devised and enforced. He didnt understand that that scheme created states that were so inherently unstable that they needed autocrats to hold them together (not necessarily brutal autocrats) and that they would fall apart if the autocracy ended.

As a result, hundreds of thousands of people have died, carnage on a scale that even Saddam Hussein could never have contemplated. And despite all his post hoc revisionism, Blair destroyed his reputation. He joins a confederacy of ghosts and leaves a charnel house.

Clive Irving wrote the story of A Dangerous Man, Lawrence After Arabia, an Emmy-winning TV drama starring Ralph Fiennes as T.E. Lawrence.
Wednesday, the seventh of September 1814, was a fine day for sailing out of Baltimore harbor and into the Chesapeake Bay. The shallow hull and sloop rigging of the boat fairly sliced through the water with a following wind, her boom swung well out and her canvas filled with power thrusting her down the Patapsco River. Hoisting a fair amount of sail, she whipped along once clear of the headland. This was a packet sloop, custom made for these waters. She was designed to quickly deliver passengers and light cargo across the bay and up into the shallow inlets on the other side, or down the Bay and to Norfolk. She did her job well. With her sails set along the length of her hull instead of square across, she was one of the most maneuverable and versatile boats around. The civilians who had hired her would make good time, wherever they were going. The problem was that they did not yet know their exact destination. Generally south was the best they could guesstimate.

On the deck of the boat was a man with curly brown hair and a long face. He had turned thirty-five just the month before, on the first of August he celebrated his birthday in Georgetown. It must have seemed a lifetime away. He was by any measure successful, well-respected, and in the prime of his life. A lawyer who called Georgetown home, (it was then a separate town, though technically within the boundaries of the District of Columbia) he had opposed the politicking that led to the war that now consumed his nation, a conflict we now know as the War of 1812. But circumstances now thrust him into the epicenter of the conflict. He could not know that the events of the next seven days would make him immortal. At the moment he was intent on finding the British, as he had a bone to pick with them and a mission to accomplish.

At the top of her mast the sloop flew a white flag. This was no warship. And since the skipper intended to close up with a British warship, he wanted to make sure there were no mistakes about his intent. Yes, the packet sloop was fast and maneuverable, particularly in comparison with some of the lumbering warships lurking out on the bay. But the warships carried massive banks of huge cannon, and the sloop had no guns at all. Flying the biggest, whitest flag from the top of the mast was a simple precaution.
Its been 10 years since Mel Gibson, the Oscar-winning helmer of Braveheart, directed a film. And boy, quite a lots happened since then.

In the lead-up to the release of 2006s Apocalypto, a thrilling Mesoamerican drama about a tribesman shielding his family from Mayan warlords and conquistadors, the actor was pulled over for drunk driving in Malibu where, according to the police report, he asked if the arresting officer was Jewish, and remarked: Fucking Jews. The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world. Then, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor battery charge after assaulting his then-girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva (she reportedly claimed he struck her twice in the face, shattering her teeth). During the subsequent custody battle over their daughter, secretly-recorded audio tapes of Gibson threatening Grigorieva with nasty racial epithets hit the internetspecifically, that if she was raped by a pack of n*ggers the blame would fall on her.

Gibson wrote a letter of apology to the ADL and later addressed the controversial comments in a 2014 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, saying, Its behind me; its an 8-year-old story. It keeps coming up like a rerun, but Ive dealt with it and Ive dealt with it responsibly and Ive worked on myself for anything I am culpable for. All the necessary mea culpas have been made copious times, so for this question to keep coming up, its kind of like... Im sorry they feel that way, but Ive done what I need to do.Its been a decade since 60-year-old Gibsons last hitthat being the aforementioned Apocalypto, though his recent action flick Blood Father was surprisingly strongand now, the actor-filmmaker is hoping to escape from movie jail with the WWII epic Hacksaw Ridge. Making its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, the film tells the true story of Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), a Seventh-day Adventist and conscientious objector turned Army medic who, despite his rail-thin physique and refusal to carry a weapon, saves 75 of his fellow troops during the Battle of Okinawa.

To me, to take an ordinary man and have an ordinary man do extraordinary things in incredibly difficult circumstances, I think, is the making of legendary storytelling, Gibson said during the films press conference in Venice. His struggle is singular: Hes a man in the worst situation possible, in the midst of hell on Earth, and he goes into that struggle armed with nothing more than faith and conviction and he does something extraordinary, even supernatural. That inspired me.

The soft-spoken Doss is subject to a string of abuses by his fellow troops and superiors (played by Vince Vaughn and Sam Worthington) during basic training due to his anti-gun stancein short: they brutally haze him like Full Metal Jackets Gomer Pyle. But unlike Pvt. Pyle, Doss turns the other cheek. Though the Christ figure has long been a staple of Gibsons oeuvre, from his torture sequence in Lethal Weapon to his torture sequence in Braveheart to, well, The Passion of the Christ, its hard not to view Doss as Gibsons surrogate for himself: an embattled man of faith who endures countless hardships and ultimately emerges the hero.

Its undeniable what the essence of Desmond Doss was: He was a man of great courage, and strong conviction, and strong faith, said Gibson. To go into a battle zone like that armed with only your faith, your faith has to be strong indeed. Thats an undeniable part of the story that I find really inspiringhe just conquers everything.

While the film itself is a far cry from a Braveheart or Apocalypto, weighed down by a never-ending barrage of war-movie clichesat one point, that scene from Tropic Thunder of Robert Downey Jr. sobbing into Ben Stillers bloody stumps actually happens; in another, Vince Vaughn tells a fellow soldier theyre not in Kansas anymore as they climb into battleGarfield imbues the film with his trademark pathos, and some of the battle sequences impress. It remains to be seen, however, if audiences are ready to warm to Gibson and forgive him for his past sins.

At one point during the Venice press conference, which did not address any of the filmmakers prior controversies, an Italian journalist asked Gibson to sum up how to achieve career longevity in Hollywood in a single word.

One word its the same word everybody uses in relationship to Hollywood, he replied. The one word is: survival.
KIEV  Curving downhill back and forth from St. Andrews, the prettiest of Kievs magnificent onion-domed churches, Andriyivskyy Descent was long considered the heart of the citys artistic community. It was the birthplace of writer Mikhail Bulgakov and is the home of the famed One Street Museum. And just off this iconic street, tucked under a hillside park, there is a wonder of Kiev that literally cannot be missed.

The abandoned luxury development Vozdvyzhenka cannot be missed because it is made up of ostentatious Easter egg-pastel mansions and condo buildings that verge on neon. Loud is the word that comes to mind. Conceived and built at the height of the real estate bubble, today it is reportedly most popular for music videos and wedding shoots.

On one square in the neighborhood, a six-story Pepto Bismal-colored building is topped by no fewer then three stories of dormer windows. Next to it, another apartment complexthis time of a canary yellow varietyrises six stories high and is crowned by a gold-trimmed needle and dome. The abodes here were supposedly designed in the Ukrainian Baroque style of the 17th and 18th centuries, but that seems to have merely been a starting point. Angled gables run into curved ones, which in turn run into others that seem to be a compromise between the two. Another pink edifice, which resembles a cotton-candied version of the nearby Richard the Lionheart Castle, manages to fit in colorful brick latticework, turrets trimmed in turquoise, and crow-stepped gables. Quoins decorate nearly every other building.

The Kiev of legend, the famed city of hillsa city so wealthy and majestic that it awed the richest and most powerful of Enlightenment monarchs, Catherine the Great herselfis by and large gone now. The Nazis and the Soviets left their mark and while there are still Art Nouveau icons like the House of the Weeping Widow or the House of the Chimeras, today, to wander the city is to take in a sense of something lost.

When I first stumbled across Vozdvyzhenka, I wasnt sure if I was looking at one of the worst restoration jobs in history, or an attempt by a rich developer to recapture some of that past glory.

What you see before you is Kiev over the past decade, explained Oleg, a 25-year-old economics student who was showing me around the neighborhood. Todays Kiev is a city of whispers and blase shrugs about endemic corruption. It is a city where kitsch is embodied in the extreme in what has become its most famous attractionthe dacha of ousted President Viktor Yanukovych. The Potemkin village of Vozdvyzhenka is no different.

Over dinners in Kiev, whenever I brought up the citys Twilight Zone of a neighborhood, there were knowing smiles and hints about how the development didnt go exactly as planned.

When it was originally proposed in 2003 and then built in the latter half of the 2000s, Vozdvyzhenka replaced a historic neighborhoodhome to potters and craftsmenthat had miraculously managed to survive Soviet plans to destroy it.

"There are building rules, common sense and there is also a greed which destroys them, Kiev architect Georgy Duchovychniy told The Guardian about the development.

The $100 million project faced hurdles not only from the economic crisis of 2008 that gutted Kievs real estate market, but alsoor so critics allegefrom building decisions that made the apartments less than perfect. Local reports detailed buildings that easily flooded, that had cracked walls, and that were made from poor materials.

Many of these flaws are still visually apparent today. To be sure, there are now cafes and art galleries in the development, and whereas previous accounts describe completely empty streets, there were some inhabitants walking about. But some mansions on Honcharna, a dead-end street in the development, still have chipped paint, overgrown weeds, and deteriorating edifices.

The neighborhood was quickly dubbed the millionaires ghost town as many of the houses and apartments went visibly unoccupied. Prices for apartments dropped from $7,000 per square meter just before the crash to less than half that. But that apparently has not deterred the developers, as new construction sites were under way in Kiev when I visited this summer. The developers claim that the apartments in Vozkvyzhenka have even started selling again in recent years. There is something magical about all those neon-pink turrets, arches, and gables after all.
Cheryl Welsh has been the target of a secret U.S. government mind-control experiment for almost 30 years.

Or, so she believes. A former medical receptionist in Sacramento, Welsh was a freshman at the University of California, Davis in 1987 when she noticed electrical appliances were remotely targeted to harass her. Phones, cars, typewriters, and TVs would stop working at inopportune times.

Streetlights would go on and off as I walked by, and this was before the sensor technology of today, Welsh told The Daily Beast. I traveled to Wisconsin and went to Europe, but wherever I went, the strange harassive things would occur.
Has there been a remark more illustrative of this wretched election than Donald Trumps avowal, I love the poorly educated!? Uttered on the evening of his victory in the Nevada primary, this astonishingly candid admission went both ways, suggesting not only that Trumps campaign is dependent upon a bottomless well of public ignorance, but that he is himself the most ill-informed major party presidential nominee in American history. Rare is the politician who would ever freely acknowledge the credulity of his own supporters.

Not all Republicans have fallen for Trumps con job. The conservative movement in America can largely be characterized as an alliance of three interest groups: national security hawks, economic free marketers, and religious conservatives (mostly evangelical Christians). In different ways and to varying degrees, Trump has brazenly repudiated the core beliefs of all three. His denunciation of the Iraq War as having been predicated upon lies, repeated claims that NATO is obsolete, and coziness with Vladimir Putins Russia rightly render him unpalatable to Reaganite hawks. His mercantilism, protectionism, and opposition to entitlement reform are all major turn-offs for the partys small-government wing. Finally, Trumps squalid personal life and vulgar character constitute a full-frontal assault on the values deemed so important by social conservatives.

Despite these many heresies, however, Trump has only been rejected by two of the movements three constituencies. With few exceptions, national security hawks and free marketers have stuck to their principles and refused to associate themselves with a campaign that has renounced decades of Republican orthodoxy on foreign policy and economics. By contrast, a bevy of religious right personalities have declared their support for Trump, a remarkable development when one considers the vast gulf separating their purported principles and those of the sybaritic former reality television show host. Nor is it just evangelical leaders who have endorsed Trump; according to a July Pew poll, 78 percent of white evangelicals have expressed support for him, compared to just 73 percent who backed Mitt Romney at the same time in 2012. The very voices who once bemoaned the death of outrage over Americans opposition to criminalizing Bill Clintons sex life now want us to believe that Donald J. Trump is morally fit to occupy the Oval Office.

Which is odd, because Trump is a living repudiation of everything religious conservatives claim to believe in. A thrice-married, epically greedy, congenitally dishonest serial adulterer who brags about his sexual conquests and exalts the rich and powerful while heaping scorn upon the weak and vulnerable, Trump is the villain of Sunday school parables made real. He worships not the Lord but material wealth. His entire life is a rejection of the Judeo-Christian nostrum that God put us on this Earth to help those less fortunate than ourselves. Watching social conservative leaders line up to endorse this mans presidential candidacy has the aura of religious allegory, a pageant of disingenuously virtuous fraudsters selling their souls for riches and power with Trump occupying the part of wealthy nobleman who purchases indulgences to absolve himself of worldly sin. A purported concern of many conservative evangelicals is that leaders have a personal relationship with the Almighty; Trump says hes never asked God for forgiveness, which should hardly come as a surprise considering that he has probably never asked anyone for forgiveness, let alone a higher power.

To most leaders of the American religious right, however, the character of Trump, a 70-year-old man, is a work-in-progress. Gary Bauer, who as president of the Family Research Council in the 1990s attacked Bill Clintons virtue deficit, has enthusiastically endorsed Trump (who, by Bauers standard, would have long ago defaulted on his virtue debt). Pat Robertson, who railed against Clinton as debauched, debased, and defamed, now fawns before an Orange god, telling him, You inspire us all. Focus on the Familys James Dobson, who said Clinton should be impeached because he set a bad example for children when it came to respecting women, has joined the Trump train (stating that, because the nominee is only a baby Christian, evangelicals should cut him some slack) as has former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed. Jerry Falwell Jr., who recently tweeted a photo of himself and his wife standing alongside the nominee in his office next to a framed Playboy cover featuring Trump cavorting with a scantily clad woman, says that Donald Trump is Gods man to lead our nation, which goes to show that Christopher Hitchenss observation about Falwell Sr.that if you gave [him] an enema you could fit him in a matchboxapplies just as much, if not more so, to his son.

All politicians engage in insincerity, telling people things they want to hear and making promises they have no intention of keeping. Trump, however, does this to a ridiculousone might even say, unprecedenteddegree. And his latter-day conversion to social conservatism has been perhaps the most transparently craven aspect of the entire campaign. Perhaps the greatest whopper of the election (no mean feat) was Trumps claim that the Bible is his favorite book. Once a man who boasted of being very pro-choice, during the primaries,Trump insisted (only to walk it back a few hours later) that women who have abortions should be punished, an extreme position that even hard-core pro-lifers are reluctant to endorse (paradoxically, Trump supports continued government funding of Planned Parenthood, a heresy social conservatives were unwilling to tolerate in every other presidential candidate).

Trump, a longtime supporter of gay civil unions, expects his social conservative followers to believe that he will appoint Supreme Court justices who will repeal last summers decision legalizing gay marriage. While evangelicals have welcomed Trumps promise to protect religious liberty, their endorsement of him looks utterly self-serving in light of the fact that he has no respect whatsoever for the religious liberty of Muslims. Given his highly selective view of which Americans are entitled to freedom of religion, what makes Christians think theyll be safe under a Trump presidency?

Thankfully, some religious conservative leaders and thinkers have proven resistant to Trumps charms. Mormons, by and large, find Trump repulsive, a view that probably has something to do with their once having been a violently oppressed religious minority. Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore is an outspoken Trump critic, calling his campaign reality television moral sewage, as has Republican White House veteran Pete Wehner, who flatly says Trump embodies a worldview that is incompatible with Christianity, more specifically a Nietzschean moralitycharacterized by indifference to objective truth (there are no facts, only interpretations), the repudiation of Christian concern for the poor and the weak, and disdain for the powerless.

Wehners observation about Trump also serves as a damning verdict against his fellow social conservatives, whose embrace of the Republican nominee suggests they ultimately care more about power than anything else and are willing to sacrifice their dignity and principles in its pursuit. Im used to being the moral scold, but Trump is winning fair and square, so why should the nomination be grabbed from him? says Bill Bennett, author of such titles as, The Book of Virtues, The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Collapse of the American Family, and The Devaluing of America: Fight for Our Culture and our Faith. Robert P. Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, recently told Kirstin Powers of USA Today that, over time, evangelicals were converted from values voters who care about the character of candidates to nostalgia voters, upset over increasing secularization and racial diversity. Trump, while far from a model Christian, at least promises a return to this idyllic, mythologized past.

No doubt some religious right leaders would respond that, unlike hawks and libertarians, Trump has actually embraced their policy agenda by at least stating on the record he is now pro-life and would appoint conservative judges. Trump, however, is an inveterate liar and theres no reason for social conservatives to expect hell keep his promises. Furthermore, by backing a candidate so obviously flawed according to their own standards (let alone those of mental health professionals), social conservatives have put a sectarian political-religious agenda before country.

That Trump would accede to the religious rights dictates while refusing to compromise with GOP hawks and libertarians isnt testimony to social conservative political power, however, so much as a demonstration of Trumps correct reading of them as easy marks. In his Republican National Convention speech, Trump slyly acknowledged just how much he was getting away with in garnering the endorsement of the evangelical and religious community. The support theyve given me, and Im not sure I totally deserve it, has been so amazing, he said to some laughter. Trump appears to have concluded that the religious right is largely composed of hypocritical, power-hungry rubes. Theyve done nothing to prove him wrong.
There is a need to identify suppliers and exporters of terror, Modi said in a message to Pakistan.

By Ananth Krishnan: Prime Minister Narendra Modi stressed to China's Xi Jinping that it was of "paramount importance" for relations that China respects India's concerns on key strategic issues that include Chinese investment in Pakistan occupied Kashmir and on India's entry to the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

The PM raised the China Pakistan Economic Corridor during his bilateral meeting with Xi before the G20 Summit opens in Hangzhou on Sunday afternoon, officials said.

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Modi also stressed the need to address the root causes of terrorism emanating from the neighbourhood, leaving little doubt that his message was aimed at getting China to pressure Pakistan, rather than prevent international action as it has recently done by placing holds on sanctions at the UNSC on Pakistani terrorists such as Masood Azhar.

Modi's meeting with Xi was seen by both sides as an opportunity to set ties on track. While officials said specific issues were not discussed in detail, the idea was to convey a clear message on the way forward for ties and for more sensitivity to each other's core concerns.

PUSH FOR NSG

India's message to China in recent meetings was that Beijing could not delink bilateral ties from its positions that often oppose India in international fora such as the NSG, where China has sought to delay India's entry.

Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Vikas Swarup declined to say if the NSG issue was specifically raised with Xi, pointing out that a summit-level meeting was aimed "to provide overall guidance and direction" to India China relations.

Read| 'Miniature Modi' dolls a hit in Hangzhou as PM arrives for G20 Summit



However, he added, "If you read between the lines when we are talking about our strategic interests, concerns and aspirations, it is not that China is unaware of our strategic interests, concerns or aspirations or that we are unaware of theirs. It is something that both sides are aware of."

The issue has emerged as another thorn in India's ties with China, although hopes are that some progress would be made with both sides soon to hold talks between their directors general of their disarmament departments to bridge differences.

TAKES AIM ON PAK TERROR

Specifically mentioning the recent attack on the Chinese Embassy in Kyrgyzstan, the PM stressed to Xi it was "yet another proof of the continuing scourge of terrorism", Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Vikas Swarup told reporters.

The PM also made what officials described as "a strong intervention" on terrorism during the informal BRICS leader's summit that followed his bilateral meeting with Xi. Terrorism had a "supply chain" that was global, and it was clear terrorists were being armed and funded as they themselves did not own banks of weapons factories.

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This was a message also stressed during his bilateral meeting with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, with the PM stressing that Afghanistan, Russia and China were suffering from the "destabilising" effects of terror.

READ| Exclusive: As China gets first Sanskrit textbooks, scholars appeal to Modi



Hence it was "important for us to identify suppliers, exporters and financiers of terrorism, otherwise the world will face a huge challenge and problem in coming weeks and months" was the PM's message, said Swarup.

The PM also thanked Turnbull for Australia's "proactive support" for India's membership to the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which has faced opposition from China. Turnbull said his government would continue to support India's bid.

WATCH: Response to terrorism must not be motivated by political considerations: PM Modi to China



Also read: Modi meets Chinese President Xi Jinping in Hangzhou, Pakistan, NSG on agenda



--- ENDS ---
"Given the South China Sea issue, Beijing-Hanoi relations have not been smooth over the past years," an article in the state-run Global Times website said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi with President of Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Tran Dai Quang, in Hanoi. Photo: Reuters

By Press Trust of India: Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Vietnam ahead of G20 summit here was aimed at jointly piling pressure on China and to raise their "bargaining chips" with the country, Chinese state media said today.

"Given the South China Sea issue, Beijing-Hanoi relations have not been smooth over the past years. Negative emotions toward Beijing among the Vietnamese people have also been rising," an article in the state-run Global Times website said.

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"Under such a backdrop, Modi's visit to Vietnam has without doubt made Indians associate the tour with many strategic meanings, believing that New Delhi and Hanoi might jointly pile pressure on Beijing," it said.

"The fundamental reason behind it is the interests of India and Vietnam. New Delhi and Hanoi both wish to raise their bargaining position while having interactions with China, but neither of them wants direct confrontation with Beijing," it said.

Also read: Modi meets Chinese President Xi Jinping on sidelines of G20 summit



While such a possibility cannot be totally excluded, but it will not play a vital role either, it said.

"India has always been cautious when it comes to directly putting the screw on China. In this regard, the US has never stopped drawing New Delhi over to its side for its rebalance to the Asia-Pacific strategy, but India only showed reluctance toward it and has not responded to Washington actively.

"This has made the White House quite grouchy," it said.

Also read: 'Miniature Modi' dolls a hit in Hangzhou as PM arrives for G20 Summit



Pointing to various commonalities between India and China which are emerging powers and members of BRICS, the editorial said, "India hopes it can improve its underdeveloped infrastructure with the help of Chinese investments and technology."

Vietnam just witnessed the first visit by an Indian prime minister in the last 15 years.

During the same period, Chinese former president Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, former premier Wen Jiabao, as well as sitting President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang have all paid formal visits to the country.

Some of them even visited Vietnam twice during their time in office, it said.

Also read: BRICS an influential voice in international discourse: PM Modi ahead of G20



"Such a comparison can well illustrate what is going on behind Sino-Vietnam ties and Indo-Vietnamese relations," it said.

"For Vietnam, with or without China, cooperating with an emerging power like India is beyond doubt of great value.

However, such a bilateral relationship will have only limited influence on China.

"After all, strong support from Washington and Tokyo has not yet worked in piling enough pressure on Beijing as Vietnam hoped, thus, how effective can India's vague support be?" it said.

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India extended a USD 500 million line of credit to Vietnam to deepen defence cooperation and signed 12 agreements including a deal to construct offshore patrol boats during Modi's two-day visit to Vietnam earlier this week.

The two countries also decided to elevate their strategic ties to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership to provide it a new momentum.

--- ENDS ---
Experience makes candidate suited to be mayor of Bryan

I usually stay as far from politics as I can, but I'm making an exception.

I first met Andrew Nelson 12 years ago when we both were asked to speak at a technology event at Texas A&M University. I was impressed by his ability to break down complex components and make them simple to understand. Andrew Nelson is absolutely one of the smartest people I ever have met.

I got my first glimpse into his character 11 years ago when his company leased office space from me -- and then expanded multiple times as Andrew grew his business. Andrew always held up his end by doing whatever he said he would do.

A short time later, when I was serving on the board of trustees at St. Michael's Episcopal School, Andrew was asked to come back and serve as the president of the board. Andrew did a masterful job navigating the school through what had been a tumultuous time and I got to see first-hand what a brilliant strategic thinker -- and unifier of people -- Andrew Nelson is. (This was no easy job as there were passionate personalities and opinions on multiple sides of many issues.)

Working with Andrew in multiple capacities has given me clear insight into who he really is. As a result, he has become one of my closest and most trusted friends -- and I have sought Andrew's council many times when I have needed advice.

I fully support Andrew Nelson for mayor of Bryan and encourage you to vote for him in November.

JIM LEWIS

College Station

Surely someone not an elitist academic can be respectable

Walter Kamphoefner doesn't like the slight comparison one letter writer made between Donald Trump and Harry Truman. After reading both letters, sounds like John H. Painter was recalling recollections of the Truman era, something I don't think Kamphoefner can do.

Something Kamphoefner said struck me as odd and a little offensive, depending on interpretation. Kamphoefner said, "Harry Truman was born in modest circumstances and worked his way up to respectability." Truman was raised on farms in his early days. Does that mean you can't be a respectable person if you are not an elitist academic such as Kamphoefner? If you are just common people you're not worthy of respect?

I have read many of Kamphoefner's contributions and it would be an understatement to say I disagree with most of what I've read. He appears to be a megalomaniac as well as an elitist.

JAMES CONNEALY

Bryan

CS needs to do a better job timing it intersection lights

The College Station city planners have messed up. All the new apartment complexes on Jones Butler Road and North Dowling Road have resulted in massive traffic tie-ups.

Tuesday, the line of cars waiting to cross Harvey Mitchell Parkway at Holleman Drive went from that intersection all the way down Holleman Drive to the entrance of Campus Crossings at Marion Pugh apartments. The lights are not timed accurately to allow a large number of cars to get through the intersection on a green light.

Several days I have sat in line at this intersection waiting to turn left from Harvey Mitchell Parkway to Jones Butler Road through a minimum of six lights. On the green arrow, only four cars got through the intersection before it changed to a red arrow. Then when the yellow arrow flashes, you still cannot turn because of heavy traffic on Harvey Mitchell Parkway.

With all of the new complexes, the city needs to consider the ingress and egress of this area and review the timing of the signals in this area to allow traffic to flow in a timely manner. The city allowed all of these new complexes to be built, but never gave a thought to the massive traffic that would come with the influx of new residents.

I am asking the city to investigate the traffic flow at the intersections of Jones Butler Road at Holleman Drive and Holleman Drive and Wellborn Road and adjust the timing of the signals, especially during College Station rush hour 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.

It is maddening for it to take 40 minutes for someone who lives in the area to drive home. Get the signal timing fixed and get the backed up traffic moving.

If the city can't fix the signals, at least assign police officers to direct traffic.

KATHY DURKIN

College Station
Topsy-turvy logic

Millennials are too cool to want a smartphone to do any of these things:



Twitter tattle

Depp-lorable

The Advertising Standard Bureau in Australia has received complaints on Christian Dior using Johnny Depp for their men's perfume Sauvage. The ad, which has the actor rolling up his sleeves, comes at a specially bad time in the light of ex-wife Amber Heard's allegations of physical assault.Web wow



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Web wow

Not So Smart, eh?



Vanity got the better of 18-year-old Amy Smart. After she escaped from a corrective services cell on Friday, a local Australian TV station put up a post on its Facebook page citing the police statement seeking to track her down. Smart asked them to post a better pic. And revealed her location in the bargain!

Instachatter

Sleeping Beauty

The latest to have caught netizens' fancy is Laura Izumikawa's clicks of her sleeping four-month-old in costume (currently at 270,000 Insta followers). Supposedly a very heavy sleeper, Joey Marie Choi makes for a blissfully unaware model. From sushi chefs to Beyonce, all her costumes are homemade.



Weirdonet

Trigger-happy

In a grisly and dramatic turn of events, 21-year-old Zachary Penton murdered his roommate within a few days of venting, in millennial fashion, on how he hates his roommates. Tweeters have been prompt to retweet his posts that speak of his desire to obtain a gun. Police have been sifting through his social media posts, and chances are this could up charges from second degree to first degree murder. Penton confessed to police soon after the shooting.



Net fail

Drollery Dumped

In a case of mistaken identity, Myntra became the target of righteous tweeter anger. A meme on social media site ScrollDroll had Krishna ordering extra-long sarees from the portal for Draupadi while she was being disrobed by Dushaasan. The meme was part of a series on how Hindu mythological characters would have used social media. ScrollDroll has issued an apology.

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Rise lets you snap pictures of your food to get real-time advice from nutritionists.

IOU keeps track of outstanding debts between people.



Over 4 million marvelled at the video of a seal jumping on to a boat to escape a killer whale



A dog made to look like it cooked and ate a meal while sitting at a table amused over 2 million

Over 16 million enjoyed carpool karaoke with James Corden and Britney Spears singing all her hits

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Mediapolis comes up 2-yards short in heartbreaking OT playoff loss

Mediapolis had numerous opportunities, but couldn't capitalize in season-ending playoff loss at Sigourney
By PTI: Bengaluru, Sep 2 (PTI) Amid a court battle between taxi- aggregators and the state government, Karnataka Industries Minister R V Deshpande today said companies like, Ola Cabs and Uber India Technologies, should follow rules of the country.

"I had a meeting with Ola and Uber officials. There are some regulations of the transport department which are applicable for everybody. They should follow them," he told reporters while announcing a ThinkBig Summit, an event to encourage womens entrepreneurs, to be held in November here.

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"They should understand and live with these conditions of this country. Nobody can be above (law)," he added.

The Minister was responding to a query on what suggestions he would give to companies like Ola and Uber, who are facing challenges from government polices.

The remark came after cab-aggregators and state government have been sparring over the recently introduced Karnataka On-Demand Transportation Technology Aggregators Rules, 2016.

Deshpande said tax-aggregators should obtain licences and operate as a legal entity and cannot question the government on this front.

Uber had moved Karnataka High Court after the transport department impounded the vehicles for not securing licences under the new norms.

The department also had suspended taxis, which led to protests by drivers, which prompted them to independently file a petition in the court. The department had in April increased the penalty for the cab aggregators from Rs 1,000 to Rs 5,000, for allegedly operating services without obtaining necessary license, despite its repeated warnings.

Deshpande said the government can encourage and support those entrepreneurs who are legitimate. He also said the government has decided to bring in a new e-commerce policy, which was decided in the Vision Group meeting.

Deshpande welcomed the centres nod to attract overseas funds by giving foreign investors residency status if they bring in at least Rs 10 crore capital in the country.

"It is a good initiative of Government of India because it will help Karnataka in a big way as the state boasts of many multinational companies and R&D facilities. Many a time in previous occasions, Karnataka has proved to be a state which makes them feel at home," he said.

Asked to comment on the exclusion of China and Pakistan from the scheme, Deshpande it would be difficult to react to such "sensitive issues" but hoped that the countries which have been left out are included. PTI BDN RA BN ABK

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The sky-blue billboard heading southbound on Interstate 95 over the Norwalk River is an eyecatcher, with the fast-growing information technology company Datto hiring guardians of the data in Norwalk and specifying all superpowers welcome to those driving by.

If workers heading into Labor Day 2016 are enjoying a sellers market for their talents in some industries, their ability to leverage those skills for long-term security and compensation growth remains very much in question.

For more than a century, the negotiating fulcrum of labor hinged on the threat of organized strikes. And in the disunity of the 21st century workplace, employees still wield no small stick in the implied threat of taking their talents elsewhere.

But it is an ultimatum that is undercut by simple math  it is a lot easier to find a replacement for one person, even a star rainmaker, than it is to transplant an entire workforce.

Playing politics

Arriving at a mutually agreeable valuation of a workers skills is a process akin to a game of poker, according to David Lewis, CEO of Norwalk-based OperationsInc, which provides a range of human resources consulting, training and recruitment services. And it is a game that must be played on the employees part with a subtlety and deftness, and with the understanding that overvaluing ones hand can backfire.

Using ... leverage is dangerous and very slippery, Lewis said. You rarely want to hold your employer hostage or generate upward mobility and added compensation via threats to leave. You have to more subtly politic this by making those in power aware of how green the grass is elsewhere.

Millennials are a whole other animal, with far more frequent events of job hopping in pursuit of stimulation, recognition and mobility  we just launched consulting and training around this very issue, Lewis added. They are far less tactful, and yet when your office is full of them they can raise awareness about competition and compensation levels, benefiting many in the process.

In early August, LinkedIn published a study that suggested 30 percent of millennials plan to leave their current job within the next 12 months, with money and benefits the top driver.

Union impact

If the loose pressure of millennials is having an impact, the organized stance labor unions can bring to bear has regained a bit of lost ground. In 2014 in Connecticut, 17.4 percent of workers were represented by a union, 277,000 people in all, including those who were not actually members. That was up from 15.7 percent, or 245,000, the year before as tracked by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Nationally, Connecticut had the fifth highest union representation, with New York leading at 26 percent of all workers but seeing a far more meager increase from 25.8 percent in 2013. BLS is expected to provide 2015 union data next January.

A report published Tuesday by the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute argued that nonunionized workers benefit from a strong union presence in their communities by the tendency of employers to match union pay increases for nonunion workers to maintain relative pay differentials, also forcing other nonunion workplaces to have to bid higher to secure talent.

EPI researchers estimated that men today who do not belong to unions make $2,700 less annually than they would if union representation was at 1979 levels.

While three of the states industries projected to add the most jobs through 2024  health care, construction and education -- have traditionally high union penetration, several others do not, including finance and professional services.

Though an irreplaceable skill set remains the best leverage any non-tenured worker has to force an organization to deliver more-than-fair compensation, other key determinants include a commitment to working hard  and of course, who you know.

If you want attention, you need to facilitate attention  as such you need to tactfully make those to whom you report know that you are eager to learn and grow. Thats the tactful and productive way to keep you noticed and hopefully appreciated, Lewis said. Keeping tabs on what is going on elsewhere at other area employers helps to understand how you are doing where you are; it gives perspective.

Alex.Soule@scni.com; 203-354-1047; www.twitter.com/casoulman
Lifestyle site Thrillist set out to find the most beautiful building in each state and Philip Johnson's New Canaan Glass House got the nod for Connecticut.

Click here for the full list

Started in 1949, Johnson built the glass dwelling on his 47-acre property as his own home. The house is iconic for its glass exterior, leaving a completely exposed interior. Among the first of its kind, New Canaan's Glass House inspired many modern homes.

Johnson was part of a group of architects known in the 1950s as "The Harvard Five." The group also included Johnson M. Johansen, Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores and Eliot Noyes. Together, they ushered in a modern architecture movement, and made New Canaan a mid-century modern mecca.

"The Harvard Five was so well known, and well respected that young architects wanted to be here too to work for those architects," New Canaan Historical Society Executive Director Janet Lindstrom told Hearst in 2014. "Even if you go now to look at the telephone directory, you'll see there are really a lot of architects in New Canaan, because it's still a place people know as a hub for it."

Other iconic buildings on Thrillist's list include the Hearst Castle, San Simeon in California, the Capitol building in Washington DC, the Empire State Building and the Breakers mansion in Rhode Island.
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DERBY  Howard Towne has been in and out of hospitals for his heart condition for more than 20 years.

As a result, the 64-year-old Ansonia resident has had his blood drawn seemingly countless times. Its often an unpleasant experience. On one of his trips to an area hospital, staff stuck him with needles so many times, I was perforated. Everything was black and blue.

When he was rushed to Griffin Hospitals intensive care unit recently for another incident, Towne thought he knew what to expect. But he was surprised.

The hospital is one of a handful in the country  and the only one in Connecticut  using the PIVO system, designed by San Francisco-based company Velano Vascular. The system allows nurses and doctors to draw blood from a patient by accessing his or her existing intravenous medication line, instead of repeatedly sticking the patient with a needle.

Griffin began using the system in its ICU almost two years ago as part of a pilot program with Velano. Griffin Chief Medical Officer Fred Browne said he heard about the device at a conference and was immediately taken with the idea.

Blood draws have to be done constantly in the hospital, he said, particularly in intensive care. And they are, literally and figuratively, a pain.

Ive never in my career in medicine met anyone who enjoyed getting stuck with a needle, said Browne, vice president of medical affairs at Griffin.

Aside from the discomfort, he said, drawing blood can be difficult in some patients, including chronically ill or older patients whose veins arent as plump and easily accessible as those of younger, healthier patients. For Towne, who typically has his blood drawn around the clock during a hospital stay, the PIVO was a welcome addition.

The nice thing about this is that you dont get black and blue, he said. Ive never had this before. I love it.

Though PIVO is in only five hospital systems nationwide, Velano co-founder and CEO Eric Stone said and his partner, Pitou Devgon, hope to eventually have it in all hopsitals. Stone said Devgon, a doctor, came to him with the idea for PIVO several years ago, after a discussion with a patient.

She said Why do you keep sticking me for blood draws? Why dont you use (the IV line)?  Stone said. Devgon took it to heart, and began developing a way to use the IV as a conduit for withdrawing blood.

Browne said the idea isnt unprecedented. Even before PIVO, there were ways to draw blood without multiple pokes, but preparing the body for these methods was often invasive. For instance, some patients with chronic illnesses, such as cancer, have a device called a port installed that allows them to get medication and have blood drawn. But it involves surgery.

PIVO can be used in connection with nearly any IV line. Sometimes, the line isnt compatible with the device because of where the line is placed. But Griffin uses PIVO with 70 to 80 percent of its intensive care patients, said Edward Valente, clinical manager of the ICU.

Right now, Griffin only uses the device in the ICU, but Browne said he hopes it will be used hospitalwide. Valente said given how much easier and more comfortable the system is than conventional blood draws, he expects it to catch on quickly.

It has the potential to become the next wave of how everyone is drawing blood, he said.
NORWALK  Naramake Elementary School has welcomed new principal and longtime educator Jane Wilkins after the relocation of Principal Patricia Mattera.

Wilkins was the instruction and curriculum site director of Marvin Elementary School since 2014 and has many other education related experiences.

Im just getting to know the staff, but so far its been a very supportive community from the teachers Ive met, they are very caring and very committed to the students, everyone is willing to pitch in, its a very caring community, Wilkins said.

Without knowing fully the structures and systems in place, its hard to say what might I change, said Wilkins, however, In being a part of the Norwalk Public School system I know what needs to change district wide, that being the culture of data driven instruction across the district, everything needs to be restructured.

My ultimate goal is student achievement, while my goal is to raise student achievement, we have to keep in mind the social, emotional needs of the children, the two go hand in hand and are equally critical to the success of a child, Wilkins said.

Wilkins takes on the new role with a masters degree in education from the University of Bridgeport as well as a bachelors degree in English and writing from Manhattanville College. She earned her 092 certification in Intermediate Administration and Supervision from Southern Connecticut State University.

Previous to this position, Wilkins was a fourth-grade teacher at Colombus for four years as well as a reading recovery/early literacy teacher for six years. She then taught fourth and fifth grade at Marvin for 10 years.

Prior to her 2014 role she served as the districts early literacy training and assessment facilitator.
NORWALK  Jefferson Science Magnet School has welcomed new Principal Nicholas J. Brophy, an educator with 20 years of experience and previous principal experience.

Brophy is joining Norwalk after five years as principal at E.C. Stevens Elementary School in Wallingford where he obtained Toyota grants of $45,000 and opened a family literacy grant program.

Theres major opportunity here, a bigger school, the magnet program, Brophy said. Whats happening in Norwalk is very exciting, the leadership is exciting, there are lots of opportunities for a new principal to come in and make a lot of creative decisions, institute more collaboration and teamwork. Its a total opportunity.

Brophy plans on focusing on the climate and safety of children, ensuring a positive school community and achievement for students as well as increasing parent involvement.

We are reviewing our plans for drills, practices, fire drills, lockdown drills, I am in contact with local evacuation sites, possible evacuation sites, Brophy said. I met with the mayor to discuss some insights he may have on processes with the school and school safety. Im also working with the district facilities office to review those systems as well.

Brophy previously taught at Toquam Elementary Magnet School in Stamford as well as Osborn Hill Elementary School in Fairfield.

From 2003-06 he served as the assistant principal at Consolidated Elementary School in New Fairfield, and from 2006-11 served as the assistant principal at Long Lots Elementary School in Westport.

Brophy earned a bachelors degree in religious studies from Fairfield University, a masters degree in elementary education from Southern Connecticut State University and a sixth year certificate in educational leadership from the University of Connecticut.

Im actually having fun, Im thoroughly enjoying working here, Brophy said.
WILTON  Have you ever stopped to think about what police are looking for before initiating a DUI stop? Or do you ever wonder what type of services your tax dollars are getting you from your local police department?

Nobody would know these answers better than the men and women at the Wilton Police Department.

Starting in mid-September, Wilton police will revive their Citizen Police Academy, where they will try to answer questions from local residents.

The academy will give people a better understanding of what we do as police officers, Capt. Thomas Conlan said.

While Conlan said the program wasnt brought back because of the growing tensions nationwide between police forces and the public, he did point out the program is engineered to foster a better relationship between the two constituencies.

Weve been trying to bring the program back for a few years now, but the public interest didnt seem to be there, Conlan said. Police departments throughout the country have been doing similar things, because its a good way to show the public where their money goes.

After a four-year hiatus, the eight-week Citizen Police Academy program will be returning to educate citizens about the various aspects of police work. Participants will be put through hands-on demonstrations, lectures and PowerPoint presentations built to shed light on how the police department works and the many services that they provide to the community.

The Wilton Police Department hopes to connect with the community by teaching the public about crime scene investigation, firearms, speed enforcement, K-9 unit, Emergency Response Team and many other aspects of policing.

Conlan said the two most popular classes tend to be the firearms training class and the crime scene investigation course.

The practical skills night is usually the most popular, when we go over shooting guns, the sort of tactics we use, how we use radar and tactical cameras. Also, the crime scene investigation portion is interesting, he said. People really like the real hands-on training, as opposed to sitting through a PowerPoint and doing classwork.

Not only will participants learn about general police tactics and protocol, but they will be treated to some background information on the departments history, as well.

The academy begins Sept. 15 and will meet every Thursday night from 7 to 9:30 p.m. for eight weeks. Classes will be held at the Wilton Police Headquarters at 240 Danbury Road.

Applicants must be at least 18 years old and must live or work in Wilton.

To apply for the academy, contact Cathy Horn at 203-563-0259.

ptomlinson@hearstmediact.com; 203-354-1046; @Tomlinson_PE
Fairfield University first-year students moved onto campus on September 4, 2016. In addition to moving into dorms, the students interacted with resident assistants, new student leaders, and community associates. Were you SEEN?
Former Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir Omar Abdullah lashed out on both state and Centre government for trying to crush Kashmir uprising by force and time.

By Naseer Ganai, Ashraf Wani: Working President of National Conference and Former Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir Omar Abdullah today met the all-party delegation led by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh and conveyed that Kashmir crises need immediate steps to address issue politically.

Omar lashed out on both state and Centre government for trying to crush Kashmir uprising by force and time.

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"You need to open channels of communication to address the political nature of the problem. You can not either tire this agitation out and you cannot crush it and you cannot buy out a solution to it. You have to address it politically," Abdullah said after coming out of his meeting with the delegation at the SKICC.

Abdullah stressed that current problem cannot be dealt with by underestimating it.

"You need to recognize how widespread this agitation is and only then you can start taking up steps to tackle it," he said.



ALSO READ:Won't talk to all-party delegation, accept 'Kashmir is disputed' first: Hurriyat



Recalling such visits since 1990, Abdullah noted that these efforts have lost credibility due to lack of follow-up. "Unfortunately when things cool down, there is no progress on the issue," said Omar.

Abdullah said this delegation enjoys little credibility as the informal approach was adopted by its participants in 2010.

"I am not expecting any break through from one meeting. To be honest with you I made it very clear to this all party delegation that their lack of follow up from the previous all party delegation has discredited this process to a great extent. This all party delegation has mammoth task ahead of them to rebuild the lost credibility and they are all responsible for it because they were all part of 2010 process," he added.



LOST CREDIBILITY

He further said that he had no hopes from the recent visit of the the all-party delegation as they are only meeting limited political parties of state.

"Today I fear other than a handful of mainstream political parties, at least formally, the number of groups from Kashmir meeting this all party delegation is going to be very small and for that this mechanism has itself to blame," Abdullah said.

"They (parliamentary delegation) should have followed up as what happened to interlocutors report. Their failure to own the outcome of 2010 parliamentary delegation has resulted in a dramatic shrinkage of the number of people and delegations that are willing to meet them this time. In 2010 cross section of people that was willing to meet the all party delegation was much wider and much deeper than it is today," he added.

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Speaking over engaging separatists in the recent meeting, Omar said, "Instead of releasing her letter to the press Mehbooba Mufti should have released the detained Hurriyat leaders if she was serious about talks."

Omar also accused Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti of taking contradictory stance over the issue.

"There is lack of coordination between the two contradictory sides of Mehbooba Mufti herself. She doesn't know whether she wants to be n the government or in opposition. Therefore, on the one hand, she says, sacrifices of those people killed in this agitation will not go in vain and on the other hand, she says, these are only five percent of population, they are not innocent, they are attacking police stations and they have to be punished. She arrests Hurriyat Conference leaders, puts them behind bars, and then writes a letter to them...She should first clear whether she wants to be in opposition or in the government," Abdullah said.



ALSO READ: Kashmir unrest: PDP MLA's house set ablaze, Omar says things have taken an ugly turn



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Meanwhile, fresh violence broke out in south Kashmir ahead of the all-party delegation meet. Angry mob set afire administrative block in Shopian town.

An all-party delegation comprising 26 Members of Parliament arrived here today in an effort to restore peace in the Valley which has been gripped by violence since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani on July 8.

In the clashes with security forces, 71 people have lost their lives and scores of others have been severely injured. Cutting across party lines, the leaders said that they were hopeful of finding a solution for restoration of peace in the Valley.



ALSO READ:

Kashmir unrest: Tension escalates as man dies in clashes, death toll at 73

Kashmir unrest: PDP-BJP to decide the course of all-party delegation visit



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Northwestern Mutual will host an Alexs Lemonade Stand from 5 to 9 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 29, at McKinneys Irish Pub in downtown Grand Island.

Northwestern Mutual partners with Alexs Lemonade Stand Foundation to fund research and support families of children who are undergoing cancer treatment.

Cancer is the leading cause of death by disease in children ages 1 to 19 in the United States.

Liz and Jay Scott established the Alexs Lemonade Stand Foundation in 2005 in honor of their daughter, Alexandra Alex Scott, who, though struggling with terminal cancer, hosted lemonade stands in her front yard to raise money to find a cure.

In Nebraska, Northwestern Mutual raises money for the Nebraska Travel Program, which supports families traveling to the Childrens Hospital in Omaha.

Steven William Ryan is a district agent of Northwestern Mutual in Grand Island.
The Grand Island Veterans Home has 108 open beds.

Its the most open beds of any of the four Nebraska veterans homes, according to census counts reported on the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services website as of Aug. 19.

The Grand Island Veterans Home has 158 members and 108 open beds compared to 81 members and 22 open beds in Scottsbluff, 139 members and 12 open beds in Norfolk and 112 members and six open beds in Bellevue. Thats a 40 percent vacancy rate in Grand Island versus 21 percent in Scottsbluff, 8 percent in Norfolk and 5 percent in Bellevue.

While the Grand Island home has 108 open beds, however, it has 144 people on its waiting list. Thats compared to 187 waiting to get into the home in Norfolk, 257 waiting in Bellevue and 78 waiting in Scottsbluff.

The Grand Island home is scheduled to close in late 2018 or early 2019 when a new veterans home opens in Kearney.

Home Administrator Alex Wilford said Grand Islands waiting list used to be at 25 to 30, but the number has grown steadily since the 2014 announcement that a new home would be built with private rooms and bathrooms.

The current Grand Island home requires two to four members to share a toilet and 10 to 15 to share a shower.

All the new rooms will have private showers, and I think thats a real driving force behind the waiting list, Wilford said.

Its not unheard of that folks put themselves on the waiting list that are not yet ready to come into the facility, said John Hilgert, Nebraska Division of Veterans Affairs director. It can happen even more as the waiting list gets longer. It kind of feeds upon itself.

But why are so many beds open?

Wilford said its not about numbers; its about quality of care.

We make sure the members are safe and they dont have falls and make sure that the medication administration process for antipsychotics is appropriate, he said. I couldnt provide that without the exceptional staff.

The Grand Island Veterans Home currently has 307 staff members.

But it also has the largest force of temporary and agency workers of all of Nebraskas veterans homes.

HHS reports indicate temporary or agency workers are clocking 600 to 750 hours a week at the Grand Island home.

I use agency to try to help our staff with mandatory overtime and with overtime, Wilford said.

Still, mandatory overtime happens a lot, said Mike Marvin, executive director of the Nebraska Association of Public Employees, which represents direct-care staff at the veterans homes.

Theres not enough staff. Theres always been massive amounts of overtime, but now its getting worse, Marvin said.

Oftentimes, its right up to when its time for you to go home, and they say, We dont have anybody to relieve you. You have to stay an extra shift, he said. Were talking back-to-back eight-hour shifts, and sometimes thats happening two to three times a week.

Grand Island home resident L.N. Mack McCallum said the home has lost more than 90 percent of its experienced staff.

We are losing all these loyal, devoted, experienced employees, largely because the state doesnt give a rip about them, McCallum said in a letter sent last week to lawmakers and the media.

People are quitting, Marvin said. Its already tough to attract people now because they dont know when theyre going to move to Kearney, and its not a job a lot of people from Grand Island will want to drive that many hours for because it doesnt pay that well.

Marvin said the home isnt giving the raises it should and isnt rewarding more-tenured employees.

Management treats the employees terrible, he said. They treat them like indentured servants. They can do whatever they want to them, talk to them however they wish to do and treat them with utter disrespect and expect them to stay and mandate them with these hours.

Weve tried to make sure that that has not increased, Wilford said of the mandatory overtime. Weve actually increased agency use to make sure the staff is not burned out.

Hilgert said the mandatory overtime has been cited as a primary reason for staff turnover.

Wilford said the older buildings arent designed for todays veterans needs. He said hes humbled to see the employees overcome those challenges on a daily basis and continue to meet the 4.3 care hours per patient per day.

Wilford said hes also working to grow our own caregivers by offering certified nursing assistant classes.

He said 399 CNAs have been certified through the Grand Island Veterans Home classes over the past three years. A class that starts next week is already full.

Weve also initiated transportation from Kearney to Grand Island, Wilford said. About 15 employees a week use the transportation.

We provide that seven days a week and sometimes three shifts and sometimes four shifts a day, Wilford said. Its free to the employee.

HHS awarded the busing contract in May to Busco Inc., doing business as Arrow Stage Lines in Norfolk. The state signed a one-year contract, renewable for up to two more years, for up to $1 million of transportation service in the first year. Wilford said the costs have been averaging $24,000 a month.

The intent is to keep that contract in place after the move to Kearney.

Those folks who live in Grand Island who still want to be with the home after the move to Kearney will be able to have that transportation going the opposite direction, Hilgert said.

Wilford said he wants all the Grand Island staff to come to Kearney with him.

Ive tried to do everything I can think of to have 100 percent of the staff come from Grand Island or the Grand Island area to work in Kearney, he said.

Marvin said the state needs to do more, primarily with wages and working conditions.

Theyre understaffed and not getting to them (veterans) as soon as they should, he said. Sometimes people are going without being washed for a while and those kinds of things simply because theres not enough people to get to them.

Wilford said quality of care has never been sacrificed. The home has been deficiency-free on state inspection surveys the past three years and was awarded the Bronze Award from the American Health Care Association.

Staffing is a challenge for everyone across the United States and in Nebraska, Wilford said. Nebraska is projected to have 3,838 professional nurse positions open in 2020, and were only four years away from that.

Recruitment efforts have to be constant at all four veterans homes, Hilgert said.

The recruitment wont stop, and it wont stop when we get to Kearney, he said.

Were going to maintain a very commendable number of care hours per patient day, and yes, were going to have some overtime, and yes, were going to have some agency staff, and yes, well have to go through recruitment, Hilgert said.

But the number of people receiving care may decrease as construction on the new home continues, he said.

We are doing our very best to make sure we provide good quality care for our members, and were never lacking to meet our projected outcomes for the members, Wilford said. Our quality never suffers.
There was no curfew in the valley except some areas of Srinagar falling under the Police Stations of Khanyar, Safakadal, Nowhatta, Rainawari and M R Gunj, a police spokesman said.

By Press Trust of India: More than 200 people were injured in clashes between stone pelters and security forces in Kashmir on Sunday, on a day an all-party parliamentary delegation was here to assess the ground situation in the valley where normal life remained paralysed for 58th consecutive day.

There was no curfew in the valley except some areas of Srinagar falling under the Police Stations of Khanyar, Safakadal, Nowhatta, Rainawari and M R Gunj, a police spokesman said.ALSO READ:What went wrong in Kashmir and how to fix it

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10 incidents of stone pelting were reported from Srinagar, Anantnag, Pulwama, Kulgam, Shopian, Awantipora and Sopore, he said.

PROTESTERS SET ABLAZE GOVT BUILDING



In Shopian district of south Kashmir, clashes broke out in the morning and continued for most part of the day with protestors setting ablaze the mini-secretariat building which houses the Deputy Commissioner's office, a police official said.

"In Shopian, a mob attacked and set ablaze mini secretariat Shopian. The fire was brought under control. However, the structure suffered partial damage," he said.

ALSO READ: Kashmir unrest: Rajnath Singh approves use of chilli-based PAVA shells as alternative to pellet guns

The clashes erupted after police stopped people in Penjoora village of the district from taking out a rally, the official said, adding over 100 people were injured.

He said the security forces used baton charge and tear gas shelling to disperse the protestors.

TRAL AND PULWAMA TENSE

Clashes were also reported from Tral area of Pulwama district where more than 60 people were hurt in action by security forces against the stone pelters.

"In Tral, a huge mob pelted stones on the police and security forces. Some of the miscreants, when chased, entered a Ziyarat (shrine) and again started pelting stones from the compound of the Ziyarat," the spokesman said, adding police "cautiously" handled the situation.

PDP MLA ATTACKED

Protestors also attacked the house of ruling PDP MLA from Tral constituency Mushtaq Ahmad Shah, breaking the window panes of the building.

"There were clashes between protestors and security forces in Tral and amidst those clashes, some miscreants attacked the house of Tral legislator Mushtaq Ahmad Shah with stones," a police official said.

ALSO READ:Kashmir unrest: Owaisi, Yechury to hold talks with separatists in individual capacity

He said the protestors broke the window panes of the house, but no one was injured. The forces deployed in the area fired several tear-gas canisters and managed to disperse the protestors from the spot, the official said.

In Sopore town of north Kashmir's Baramulla district, at least 25 people were hurt in the clashes during the day, the official said. Condition of three of the injured persons is stated to be critical.

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Sun, September 4, 2016

After years of speculation regarding the existence of a cinematic universe connecting all of Quentin Tarantinos movies, the acclaimed movie director has finally revealed the truth.

There are actually two separate universes. There is the realer than real universe, alright, and all the characters inhabit that one. But then theres this movie universe. So From Dusk Till Dawn, Kill Bill, they all take place in this special movie universe. So when all the characters of Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction, when they go to the movies, Kill Bill is what they go to see. From Dusk Till Dawn is what they see," Tarantino said.

With this in mind, maybe it is a good time to rediscover some of the masterpieces from the mad genius.

Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Six thieves named different colors and dressed like the Blues Brothers are involved in the bloody aftermath of a stickup turned disaster. It is the bloody debut piece of Tarantino as a director.

It is quite amazing that a film taking place in a warehouse with people bleeding to death can be so great, but the structure of Reservoir Dogs is only one manifestation of the filmmaker's cleverness. He plays with time, showing moments from before, during and after the crime, as each passage acts as a clue in solving the movie's puzzle.

As for solving a greater puzzle in Tarantino's movie universe, here is a clue: Mr. Blonde happens to be Vic Vega, the brother of Vincent Vega. Ring a bell?

Pulp Fiction (1994)

To be clear, this movie is politically incorrect. Film critic Pauline Kael calls it getting drunk on movies as nothing is predictable. The story, set in Los Angeles, progresses in jumps back-and-forth through time and is amazingly fun, even if we are still in Tarantinos landscape of danger.

He ties events together through a cocaine-fueled girl, hit men and unexpected moments of laughter. A long-take camera style and three interconnected stories are in the body of this ultra-violent and provocatively obscene movie. Tarantinos intent to bother people is achieved fairly well.

Another clue to the big puzzle: Mia Wallace refers to a TV pilot about five secret female agents that she took part in. She was the blonde leader, the deadliest woman in the world and she wielded a certain kind of sword. I hope there is a ding-ding-ding moment of realization here. If not, it is essential to watch Tarantino's movies.

(Read also: Five must-see French movies)

Kill Bill (2003 and 2004)

A blonde, pregnant woman gets married, a bunch of killers come, then everybody dies. Kill Bill is a story of revenge. However, it is far more brutal, bloody and amazing than you would ever imagine. In addition, there are innumerable pop culture references, such as to yakuza dramas, or with the film's famous yellow jumpsuit, an allusion to Bruce Lees Game of Death. Kill Bill is not simply a martial arts movie, but one giant homage to cinema.

Sonny Chiba, a veteran Japanese action star, is a legendary sword-craftsman in this movie. Tarantino also brings in the 19-year-old schoolgirl killer from Fukasakus Battle Royale. With all this mixed in, one has the perfect combination to submerge into the world of Asian martial arts. All action films are overwhelming to a degree -- even more when it comes to Kill Bill's Bride who fights mano a mano with her enemies.

Continuing our puzzle: Look at the name in graveyard, Paula Schultz. A certain former dentist who helps the protagonist and his wife in another film holds the same family name.

Django Unchained (2012)

Django Unchained is another revenge piece, but also a Western partly inspired by previous cult 1960s westerns starring Franco Nero. Django, a slave who is transported through Texas during winter, encounters a mysterious German dentist who believes in freedom over slavery. The two team up to try and rescue Django's women who is held at a plantation in Mississippi. A kind of house of horrors image comes to mind when thinking of slaves at a plantation.

Even if the odyssey structure of Django Unchained is familiar, the film is full of unexpected turns, as well as numerous comedic elements -- Tarantinos style reborn, again.

Time for a clue: OK, so this one is way more complicated than the others. Pay attention because it is very subtle. Captain Koons from Pulp Fiction (from the famous scene in which the older veteran hands down his watch) is descended from a wanted gang member in Django Unchained.

Jackie Brown (1997)

This film is kind of a confirmation of what everybody was wondering after Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Tarantino is not only a one style guy. Though not rooted in Tarantino's particular universe, this film is instead immersed in Elmore Leonards one (he made the crime novel a sociological comedy).

Jackie Brown. based on Leonard's novel Rum Punch (1992), tells the story of Jackie, a flight attendant on perhaps the worst airline in North America, in her quest to supplement money she smuggles from Mexico to Los Angeles for a gun dealer. Though it does have violence, it is quieter and deeper in both its story and its characters. This one is worth watching. (tif/kes)
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Linkedin Arya Dipa (The Jakarta Post) Bandung  Sat, September 3 2016

The mayor of Bandung, Ridwan Kamil, and the citys development planning agency are embroiled in an argument after Ridwan criticized the agency for setting unrealistic targets in its plan. For example, the agency has listed in its plan an ambition to create 100,000 new entrepreneurs and to free the city from floods within five years.

Emil, as Ridwan is known, said the agency did not involve him or the deputy mayor in the decision-making process for the 2013-2018 medium-term development plan (RPJMD).

An RPJMD is a legal reference point and political promise prepared by regional heads as a basis for a citys development.

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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Indonesia  Sat, September 3 2016

The Indonesian government has put its weight behind Timor Leste in its bid to join the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a senior official has said.

Indonesia continues to support Timor Lestes membership to ASEAN. We also encourage other ASEAN member states to invite the country to participate in capacity-building efforts that would culminate in its ASEAN membership, Deputy Foreign Minister AM Fachir said in a statement to The Jakarta Post on Friday.

The statement follows a courtesy call from Fachirs Timorese counterpart, Deputy Foreign Affairs and Cooperation Minister Roberto Sarmento de Olivieira Soares, at the foreign ministry premises on Thursday.

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Linkedin Tertiani ZB Simanjuntak (The Jakarta Post)  Sat, September 3 2016

Nearly seven years after the traditional dyeing technique of batik was included on UNESCOs list of items of intangible cultural heritage, the artisans still have a battle on their hands.



The influx of fabrics using batik patterns was inevitable without regulations, following the governments decision to designate Oct. 2 as National Batik Day, plus the requirement to wear batik on Fridays implemented at public institutions, including schools.



As demand for batik increased, more people opted for affordable options. Not only are they alien to the Indonesian batik world, textiles simply using batik print motifs are an insult to the age-old batik tradition, according to artisans.



Many have little knowledge about batik and that explains the low appreciation of it. But there are many cases where textiles with batik prints are sold as original batik at high prices. The buyers only found out about it later after someone else, or even the seamstress, pointed it out to them, said Komarudin Kudiya, the owner of Bandung-based Batik Komar.



Without regulations to protect the cultural heritage, we consider this an emergency that needs attention from the government.



In a bid to protect the originality of batik dyeing techniques and processing, a recent exhibition involving a team of curators led by Komarudin was an effort to educate both traders and consumers.



Titled WARISAN  short for Wasiat Agung Negeri Nusantara (The Archipelagos Inheritance)  the inaugural exhibition was held from Aug. 25 to 28 at the Jakarta Convention Center, Central Jakarta, by event organizer Mediatama Binakreasi. Officiating was chairperson of the National Handicraft Council Mufidah Jusuf Kalla, the wife of the Vice President.



The curation team, comprising batik artisans on the frontline of the industry, checked each of the 80 booths every day to ensure the exhibition was free from products other than genuine batik.



Team members were Mariana Sutandi of Parang Kencana, Dudung Alie Syahbana of Dudung Tie Dye from Pekalongan, Hani Winotosastro of Yogyakartas Batik Winotosastro and Romi Oktabirawa of Wirokuto Batik, also from Pekalongan.



Mariana said the products allowed at the exhibition had to meet at least two of four criteria: either the motif was drawn using traditional tools to make batik tulis, or used copper stamps to make batik cap (stamp), they were a combination of the two, but all must use the hot wax-resist dye technique.



Using low temperature resist is similar to screen printing and its a technique unrecognized in batik tradition, she said.



Romi added that the team also checked whether the artisans actually used the required handmade traditional spouting tools and brushes to draw the motifs in batik tulis.



We could tell by the uneven dots and lines of the motifs which tools were used. They are not defects, on the contrary the uneven motifs indicate how genuine the batik is.



Exhibitors who failed to comply with the terms of the contract with the organizer did not receive a certificate of participation. By the second day of the exhibition 14 booths were listed for trying to sell non-batik items.



This exhibition is more like a pilot project to protect the national handicraft. We expect the government to issue a regulation that will require curation for any handicraft exhibitions to verify the authenticity and quality of the items, said Dudung.



BATIK HAVEN



With most of the major batik manufacturers in Java and Bali taking part in the WARISAN exhibition, there was high appreciation from visitors.



Lawyer Susan Zamril came to find batik kumpeni to add to her collection. It has fun motifs that fit any occasion, she said.



Batik kumpeni, also sometimes referred to as kompeni, is the term for batik originally produced in Cirebon, West Java, by Dutch traders, hence its name derived from the word company.



The motifs are similar to a wall relief that depicts the daily lives of people. It may comprise the drawings of soldiers, farmers, pets or even Volkswagen cars and scooters.



Susan bought three examples of the batik with different motifs at the booth of El-Shifa Batik from Cirebon.



Eli, the artisan from the manufacturer, said a piece of the batik on cotton was priced at only Rp 125,000 but the exclusive motifs on silk reached Rp 2 million.



The price is worth it for the months of hand drawing the motifs, she said.



Another unique batik came from Yogyakarta-based Gee Batik, owned by Sugeng Waskito,that produces genuine batik with modern motifs and patterns, a combination of Picasso-style paintings and traditional patterns of Bali and Yogyakarta.



We import the silk from Germany and India but all the batik process is done in our workshop, said Rini, the booth attendant.



The manufacturer not only produces pieces of cloth, but also clothing, with the full batik process taking place after the cutting is done.



A fashion show of batiks new looks and charity auction of the pieces Muhammad Ali, which was sold for Rp 8 million, and Taman Telaga Teratai (Lotus Pond), which fetched Rp 7.5 million, held on the closing day, were part of the effort to put batik back on its proper pedestal.



Batik is not only a commodity. It is a spiritual visualization of the life experience and dreams of the artisans. Batik is about human skill, not technology. We have all the resources and it is high time to encourage all Indonesians to appreciate batik more, said Romi.

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Linkedin Prima Wirayani (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Sat, September 3 2016

Despite boasting sharper fiscal discipline, the governments plan to reduce its spending next year will potentially create negative spillovers and drag down potential economic growth.

In a meeting with legislators on Thursday evening, the government, represented by Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati and Suahasil Nazara, the Finance Ministrys fiscal policy head, said it had reduced its annual spending growth projection for next year to 4.8 percent from 5.4 percent as stated in the original 2017 state budget draft.

The lower projection is mainly caused by its plan to cut down on what it called consumptive spending.

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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Sat, September 3 2016

The Jakarta Corruption Court on Friday sentenced PT Basuki Rahmanta Putra president director Marudut to three years in prison for being involved in bribing a chief prosecutor in Jakarta.

The court found Marudut guilty of acting as a middleman for state construction firm PT Brantas Abipraya (BA) to bribe chief prosecutor Sudung Situmorang, who is the head of the Jakarta Prosecutors Office, and the offices special crimes division head, Tomo Sitepu.

The defendant has been legitimately and convincingly proven guilty of committing acts of corruption, said presiding judge Yohanes Priatna as he read the courts verdict.

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Linkedin (Associated Press) New Delhi  Sun, September 4, 2016

Bangladeshi authorities executed a top Islamist party leader convicted of war crimes involving the nation's 1971 independence war against Pakistan, officials said.

Mir Quasem Ali, a leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, was hanged at 10:30 p.m. Saturday, hours after several dozen family members and relatives met him for the last time inside Kashimpur Central Jail near the capital, Dhaka, said Proshanto Kumar Bonik, a senior jail superintendent.

"We are doing our necessary formalities now. We will send the body soon to the ancestral home in Manikganj district for burial," Bonik said.

Immediately after the execution, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan said security measures were put in place to prevent unrest by Ali's supporters, including deployment of paramilitary border guards and additional police in Dhaka and other cities.

The Jamaat-e-Islami party in a statement protested Ali's execution and called for an eight-hour general strike beginning Monday morning.

The execution took place a day after Ali refused to seek presidential clemency. The president had previously rejected appeals for clemency by other Islamist party leaders facing execution.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court rejected a final appeal for reviewing Ali's death sentence handed out by a special tribunal two years ago. After the ruling, the Jamaat-e-Islami party called for a daylong general strike across the country last Wednesday, but got little response.

A special tribunal dealing with war crimes sentenced Ali to death in November 2014. The 63-year-old member of Jamaat-e-Islami's highest policy-making body was found guilty on eight charges, two of which carried the death sentence, including the abduction and murder of a young man in a torture chamber. Ali was sentenced to 72 years in prison on the other charges.

Ali built his fortune by establishing businesses from real estate to shipping to banking, and he was considered one of the party's top financiers.

He became the fifth Jamaat-e-Islami party leader to be executed since 2010, when Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina formed the special tribunal to try suspected war criminals. Also executed was a close aide of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia from the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party.

Jamaat-e-Islami is a key partner of Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party in the opposition against Hasina.

Hasina's government says Pakistani soldiers, aided by local collaborators, killed 3 million people and raped 200,000 women in the 1971 independence war.

Jamaat-e-Islami, which had openly campaigned against independence, has denied committing atrocities.

Hasina has called the special tribunal trials a long overdue effort to obtain justice for the victims of war crimes, four decades after Bangladesh split from Pakistan. Her government has rejected criticism from abroad that the trial process did not meet international standards.

The international human rights group Amnesty International noted that the United Nations had raised questions about the fairness of the trials of Ali and other Islamist party leaders.

"There is no question that the people of Bangladesh deserve justice for crimes committed during the War of Independence, but the death penalty is a human rights violation and will not achieve this. It is a cruel and irreversible punishment that most of the world's countries have now rid themselves of," said Champa Patel, Amnesty International's South Asia Director, in a statement released Saturday. (ags)
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Linkedin Theresia Sufa (The Jakarta Post) Bogor, West Java  Sun, September 4, 2016

Ciawi Market in Bogor, West Java, has come into the spotlight after a male prostitution ring was uncovered earlier this week. More than 99 children have fallen victim to the prostitution ring, which has reportedly been operating since last year.

The arrest of two suspects at the market on Wednesday evening startled vendors and local residents, feeding suspicions about a large-scale prostitution network operating in the area.

Siti Juleha, a food vendor in front of Ciawi Market, said she was acquainted with U, one of the two suspects. Ive known [U] for a long time, Siti told The Jakarta Post on Friday.

The man, she added, had worked at a kiosk belonging to Yayan, a Ciawi Market vegetable vendor, and later opened his own vegetable stall.

According to Siti, U was friendly and stylish. He frequently visited a beauty parlor near the market.

In running his vegetable kiosk, Siti further said, U was usually supported by three or four male teenagers between seven and 13 year of age. The children would usually work at his kiosk only for a short time, before they were replaced by other children. All children working at his kiosk would refer to U as ayah (father), she said.

It seems to us he is a good person. He is a father of two. His wife gave birth to their second child last month, said Siti.

Yayans sister Yuyun said U had worked at Ciawi Market since he was seven years old. He previously worked at a kiosk belonging to my mother, Siti Hodijah. After my mother stopped running her business, [U] worked at my brothers kiosk. Two years ago, he quit his job, without saying anything to us, to open his own kiosk, said Yuyun.

Business as usual  A vegetable kiosk belonging to U, a child trafficking suspect arrested by National Police officers on Aug. 30, at Ciawi Market in Bogor, West Java, runs as usual after the arrest.(JP/Theresia Sufa)

U and another suspect, identified by the initial E, were arrested for their alleged involvement in the child prostitution ring for male clients.

Brig. Gen. Agung Setya, director of the special economic crimes investigation unit at the National Polices Criminal Investigation Department (Bareskrim), said they were related with AR, a suspected procuress the police had arrested at a hotel in Cipayung, Puncak, Bogor, on Tuesday.

Police said AR had been released several months ago, after serving two-and-a-half year in prison for trafficking offenses.

The arrests point to rampant sex trafficking in and around Bogor.

Iwan Setiawan, head of the inmate affairs division at Paledang Prison, Bogor, said three inmates on trafficking offenses had been released from the prison in 2016.

In 2015, he said, the penitentiary had released five trafficking convicts, including Arjo Raharjo alias Ricko bin Warto, 43, a resident Cilember, Cipayung district, Bogor regency. He had been sentenced to three years after being found guilty in a human trafficking case, he went on.

Iwan said Arjo had initially been slated for release in March 2016, but was set free in Nov 2015 after receiving a sentence remission.

I dont know whether or not AR, arrested by Bareskrim, is Arjo Raharjo, but if it is him, I can confirm that he was released in November last year, said Iwan.

National Police chief Gen. Tito Karnavian promised to completely investigate the child prostitution case. We will arrest anyone involved in this crime, he said on Friday. (ebf)
By PTI: New Delhi, Sep 2 (PTI) Personal laws of a community cannot be "re-written" in the name of social reforms, All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) today told the Supreme Court, while opposing pleas issues including alleged gender discrimination faced by Muslim women in divorce cases.

The AIMPLB, in its counter affidavit filed in the apex court, said the contentious issue relating to Muslim practices of polygamy, triple talaq (talaq-e-bidat) and nikah halala are matters of "legislative policy" and cannot be interfered with.

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The board said that practices provided by Muslim Personal Law on the issues of marriage, divorce and maintenance were based on holy scripture Al-Quran and "courts cannot supplant its own interpretations over the text of scriptures".

AIMPLB said the presumption that triple talaq was arbitrary and unreasonable was a "fallacy of reason" and it was a "misconception" that Muslim men enjoyed unilateral powers in respect of divorce.

Regarding polygamy, the board said that though Islam permitted it, but it does not encourage the same and referred to various reports, including World Development Report 1991, which had said that polygamy percentage in tribals, Buddhists and Hindus were 15.25, 7.97 and 5.80 per cent respectively as compared to 5.73 per cent in Muslims.

The board further said that Islam always regarded divorce as a "condemnable practice" and the focus was also on the fact that both parties should maintain the marital bond as far as possible.

"It is clear that Muslim Personal Law adequately provides for the rights of Muslim women and the basis of this petition, which assumes that a Muslim man has right to unilaterally pronounce irrevocable talaq or to not pay any maintenance after iddat period, are myths and thus the present petition is entirely misconceived and deserves to be dismissed," the board said in its counter affidavit filed in the apex court.

The apex court had also taken suo motu cognizance of the question whether Muslim women faced gender discrimination in cases of divorce or due to other marriages of their husbands and a bench headed by Chief Justice of India T S Thakur is examining the issue.

Subsequently, various other petitions including one by triple talaq victim Shayara Bano were filed challenging the age-old practice of triple talaq among the Muslim community.

AIMPLB and Jamiat-e-Ulema had defended triple talaq and said it was part of Quran-dictated personal law which was beyond the ambit of judicial scrutiny. (More) PTI SJK ABA MNL RKS ARC

--- ENDS ---
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Linkedin Kelvin Chan (Associated Press) Hong Kong  Sun, September 4, 2016

Hong Kongers headed to the polls Sunday for the specially administered Chinese city's most crucial election since the handover from Britain in 1997.

The vote for Legislative Council lawmakers is the first major election since 2014 pro-democracy street protests rocked the Asian financial hub, and the outcome could pave the way for a fresh round of political confrontations over Beijing's control of the city.

The election is set to test the unity of Hong Kong's pro-democracy camp as a new generation of radical activists, who emerged in the wake of those protests, joined the race. They're hoping to ride a rising tide of anti-China sentiment as they challenge formidably resourced pro-Beijing rivals for seats.

Many of the newcomers back independence for Hong Kong, a once-unthinkable idea that has become widely debated and which has added to divisions with the broader pro-democracy movement.

At stake is the power to keep the city's widely unpopular Beijing-backed leader, Leung Chun-ying, and his government in check. "Pan-democrat" lawmakers currently control 27 of 70 seats, compared with 43 held by lawmakers friendly to Beijing.

The democrats are fighting to keep control of at least a third of the seats, which gives them veto power to block government attempts to enact unpopular legislation, such as Beijing's controversial election revamp that triggered the 2014 street protests.

The risk is that the pro-democracy vote will be split, allowing pro-Beijing candidates to take more seats and removing a major hurdle for the government's proposals, which in turn could lead to a new round of political confrontations.

Hong Kong has been the scene of increasingly bitter political turmoil since the last legislative election in 2012. The growing calls for independence highlight frustration among residents, especially among young people, who are chafing under Beijing's tightening hold.

A spate of incidents, including the disappearance of five Hong Kong booksellers who later resurfaced in mainland Chinese detention, has aroused fears that Beijing is reneging on its promise of wide autonomy for Hong Kong under a "one country, two systems" framework.

Authorities have tried to tamp down the independence debate. Election officials disqualified six pro-independence candidates ahead of the vote, though other candidates with similar views made the cut.

Two hours after polls opened, about 3.7 percent of 3.8 million registered voters turned out, the government said.

Voters are choosing lawmakers to fill 35 seats in geographic constituencies. There are 84 lists of candidates, so the results will be hard to predict. Another 30 seats are taken by members representing business and trade groups such as accounting, finance, medicine and fisheries. Five more "super seats" are chosen by voters citywide. (ags)
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Linkedin Arif Gunawan Sulistiyono (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Sun, September 4, 2016

The government has proposed that Jack Ma, the founder and executive chairman of the worlds biggest e-commerce platform, Alibaba, become an adviser to the forthcoming Indonesian steering committee for e-commerce development.

Communications and Information Minister Rudiantara said the effort to enlist support from Asias richest man was aimed at bringing Indonesia's big potential in e-commerce to the world market.

I propose Jack Ma as an adviser to the steering committee, so that Indonesia may grab greater attention from the international market when they see that even Jack Ma is willing to advise us, he said in a video released by the State Secretariat on Friday.

The government, Rudiantara added, had finished Indonesias e-commerce road map, which would be followed up by forming a special task force with a steering committee consisting of 10 ministers led by Coordinating Economic Minister Darmin Nasution.

Rudiantara was in a delegation escorting President Joko Jokowi Widodo on an official visit to Hangzhou, China. Investment Coordinating Board chairman Thomas Lembong also joined the mission.

Thomas said Jack Ma had become one of the big investors in Indonesia after acquiring Lazada with more than US$1 billion in investment recently. The government was cooperating with Alibaba through Inamal, a commerce platform for Indonesian products on Alibaba's Tmal platform.

We also talked about another potential partnership, as Alibaba has a big online booking platform for travel businesses, so we discussed potential cooperation in tourism, as well as support for small and medium enterprises, he said. (ags)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Sun, September 4, 2016

Dvijatma Puspita Rahmani, an 11th grade student at senior high school SMA 4 in Bandung, West Java, who is also a biology Olympiad contestant, recently failed to progress to 12th grade as she received a zero on her report card.

There was no explanation as to why Puspita had failed, said Danny Daud Setiana, Puspitas father, adding that his demands for an explanation in June had yet to receive a response. Hence, he planned to seek mediation through the National Commission for Child Protection (KPAI).

We could accept it if she failed to go on to the next grade [] But when we saw her report card and found the zero grade, we were amazed because it was odd, he said in Jakarta on Sunday.

Puspita was absent from school for two weeks in February due to an eye complaint, he said. However, the school could not find her sick leave letter. She also joined a biology Olympiad and had trained intensively for a week, causing her to miss classes. She asked for a make-up exam or substitute assignment, but her teacher refused.

Federation of Indonesian Teachers Associations secretary-general Retno Listyarti said it was impossible for a student to receive zero because the curriculum accumulates second semester results with those of the prior semester.

Even if she was sick, she shouldve been allowed to do a make-up exam. She also joined an Olympiad; why didnt the school consider that? Retno said. (wnd/ags)
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Linkedin Joe McDonald (Associated Press) Hangzhou  Sun, September 4, 2016

European Union leaders called Sunday for China to take action on its bloated steel industry and defended an order to Ireland to collect taxes from Apple, highlighting the trade tensions looming over a global economic summit.

The Group of 20 meeting of leaders of the United States, China, Germany and other major economies "must urgently find a solution" to excess steel production, said Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission. He called on Beijing to accept a monitoring mechanism for overproduction that Beijing's trading partners blame for low prices and job losses.

Juncker also rejected U.S. criticism of the order for Ireland to collect $14.5 billion in back taxes from Apple. An EU panel ruled the company's low taxes were improper government aid.

"Free trade must be fair trade," Juncker said at a news conference with Donald Tusk, president of the European Council.

The toughly worded comments reflected the political pressures on governments at a time of weak global economic growth that is fueling demands to protect local industries.

Another prominent issue at the summit is G-20 member Britain's June vote to leave the 28-nation European Union, a move seen by some analysts as the first in a wave of moves by other nations to retreat from free trade.

China, the G-20 host, has made trade a headline issue for the meeting in Hangzhou, a scenic lakeside city southwest of Shanghai. Chinese officials have said they will propose a plan to boost commerce through closer cooperation on regulation, finance, tax and other issues.

China hopes its status as G-20 host will bring it more influence in management of the global economy.

Chinese leaders say they want the G-20, launched to coordinate the response to the 2008 financial crisis, to take on a longer-term role overseeing global economic management.

Germany, South Korea and other governments say they also want to use the meeting to discuss climate, energy and possible reforms to the global tax system to reduce tax evasion.

The two-day meeting began Sunday on a diplomatic high note following a joint announcement by President Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, that their governments had submitted documents committing them to carrying out the Paris climate agreement.

But U.S. and other officials say they plan to bring up Chinese industrial overcapacity and other potentially thorny issues. Washington has imposed import duties of up to 500 percent on Chinese steel to offset what regulators say are improper subsidies.

China, the world's biggest steel producer, has committed to reducing its production capacity by 100 to 150 million tons by 2020, a pledge Xi repeated Saturday.

"This is a global problem, but with a specific Chinese dimension we have to address," said Juncker. "We are really insisting on the need to take this seriously."

Juncker defended the EU's tax order on Apple against U.S. criticism. An EU panel concluded Apple received improper aid because it paid lower rates than other companies. Ireland has has made its low taxes part of its strategy to attract investment.

Juncker rejected suggestions the EU was targeting an American company. He said previous tax orders have affected European companies, including a January ruling that covered 35 companies, most of them from Europe.

"This is not a decision against the United States of America," said Juncker. "We are basing our decisions on facts."

Tusk affirmed the EU's stance on Britain's possible departure, saying there would be no talks with London over future relations until it formally begins the withdrawal process. Uncertainty over the status of trade, immigration and other critical issues has disrupted business activity and prompted anxiety among investors.

"We need to protect the interests of the members of the EU that want to stay together, not the one which wants to leave," said Tusk.

Speaking at a joint news conference with Obama, British Prime Minister Theresa May said her government was going ahead with its departure and was looking to create new trading opportunities.

"There will be no second referendum, no attempt to turn the clock back or get out of this," said May.

The two leaders tried to downplay the impact on U.S.-British relations but Obama suggested London might have to wait to make a post-EU trade deal. He said Washington is focused on finishing trade deals with Asia-Pacific governments and the EU. (ags)
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Linkedin Farai Mutsaka (Associated Press) Harare  Sun, September 4, 2016

Zimbabwe's 92-year-old President Robert Mugabe arrived home Saturday after an overseas absence that led to rumors about a health crisis, joking to reporters that "Yes, I was dead."

"It is true that I was dead," the world's oldest head of state said. "And I resurrected. As I always do."

"Are we speaking to a ghost?" someone asked him.

"Once I get back to my country, I am real," Mugabe said.

The president had not been seen since leaving a regional summit early on Tuesday. Flight data showed his plane went to Dubai after the original flight path indicated a course toward Asia. Mugabe has received treatment in Singapore in the past.

His spokesman had denied reports that Mugabe, the target of near-daily protests in recent weeks, was ill. The president told people Saturday he had been away attending to family matters. He later addressed a youth meeting at his ruling party's headquarters.

His absence had raised the level of uncertainly in this southern African country already in economic and political turmoil. Frustration has been rising in Zimbabwe over a plummeting economy and allegations of government corruption.

Police on Thursday banned protests in the capital for two weeks, on the eve of a demonstration planned by a newly formed coalition of opposition groups.

Mugabe has been in power since 1980, and many in Zimbabwe have known no other leader in their lifetime. He has said he would run again in elections in 2018.

Recently, his wife, Grace, said Mugabe would rule from the grave. (ags)
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Linkedin Fadli (The Jakarta Post) Batam  Sun, September 4, 2016

In a raid at an internet cafe in Batam, Riau Islands, the National Police's counterterrorism unit has arrested an alleged member of a group which reportedly planning an attack on the Marina Bay area in Singapore.

Eight members of Densus 88 arrested LH, the 24-year-old male suspect, at around 11 a.m. on Saturday. They had arrived in a Jeep and a sedan, carrying rifles and pistols, the operator of Matrix @ net, where the raid occurred, told The Jakarta Post.

"They headed straight to cubicle 18 and forcefully grabbed the man inside. Another visitor, who tried to intervene, was hit on the head and bleeding. But Densus personnel left him," he said, asking the Post not to expose his identity.

Riau Islands Police chief Brig. Gen. Sambudi Gusdian confirmed the arrest, saying the operation was directly under the National Polices authority. "It was a National Police operation," he said, refusing to provide details.

The suspect is allegedly a member of a group called Khatiba Gonggong Rebus, which has been involved in hiding and providing accommodation for Uighur terror suspects in Indonesia and gathering money to support their families.

The group, reportedly coordinated by Indonesian national Bahrun Naim from Syria, is also known to have facilitated Indonesians wanting to join the war in Syria.

Siswo Handoyo, the Neighborhood Unit (RT) head of the Carina residence, where the alleged terrorist lives, said he had been asked to accompany LH during an interrogation at his house. He lives with his older brother. Hes been living here for a year, he said. (ags)
By Ezra Friedlander. Everyone seems to be focusing on the candidates for President but not enough on the Vice Presidential contenders. Having the ear of the President is no small matter. In recent memory, vice presidents-think Cheney and Biden-have exercised significant influence, and it would be prudent to assume that the next Vice President will follow suit.

Recently nominated as Hillary Clintons running mate onto the Democratic ticket, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, who has a long history of public service, has likely found the spotlight to be familiar and also (at times) harsh. It is important that we do not neglect discussing figures like Tim Kaine, whose possible election has great ramifications for our community.

Kaine has a long history as a champion for underserved populations or those at disadvantage because of race or disability-a mission that he has upheld throughout his many years as a private attorney and in elected office. His deep-rooted Catholic faith is apparent in every undertaking, such as his missionary trip to Honduras 35 years ago, and in his sense of responsibility as a public servant. I feel that it is imperative to unpack and discuss why he has faced backlash from many in the Jewish community.

It is important to address that I am neither endorsing the Clinton-Kaine ticket nor defending him at any cost. Still, I urge people to reconsider whether he deserves the vilification that he has received. Many times, lack of understanding (or the lack of willingness to understand) fuels distrust or assumptions, as is the case for some labeling him as an Islamist or anti-Israel.

However, should his political blunders merit such caustic labels?

The answer is no.

As a Senator, he co-sponsored the U.S.-Israel Strategic Partnership Act of 2014 and supports funding for Israels Iron Dome missile defense program. He is a member of Congress who undeniably understands that Israels national security and interests are closely aligned with those of the U.S.

Let us read carefully between the lines and look at Kaine in his entirety as an individual with deep convictions. He likely knows better than most private citizens that hindsight is 20/20, especially as the bulk of his job requires very public decisions that are open to criticism. Take for example, Kaines appointment (as governor of Virginia) of Esam Omeish to the Virginia Commission of Immigration in 2007. Given the emergence of disturbing anti-Israel rhetoric and calls for jihad from Omeish, Kaine had to ask for his resignation-ultimately a situation that could have avoided from the very beginning had he been more thorough.

Before he was nominated as Clintons running mate, I had the privilege of interacting with Senator Kaine on many occasions at the annual Jewish Heritage Celebration on Capitol Hill where he recognized the many ways in which the Jewish community has and continues to make valuable contributions to American society. Whatever one may think of Senator Kaines policies, it is unjust to deny the man his humanity or the warmth that radiates from his person. His emphasis on his collaboration with the Jewish community during his time as Virginias governor should be acknowledged. When he speaks of his dedication to promoting peoples rights to honor their own faith traditions, this should resonate with the Jewish community.

Even-keeled and extremely likeable, I understand why he has the support of many of his Democratic colleagues as well as those from across the aisle. Republicans from all over the country including Senators John McCain, Pat Toomey, Lamar Alexander, and many more have demonstrated only the utmost respect and praise regarding his nomination. Republican Senator Jeff Flakes notably tweeted, Trying to count the ways I hate [Kaine]. Drawing a blank. Congrats to a good man and a good friend. Kaine and Ted Cruz, a staunch conservative, find mutual interest in discussing the humanities though they often oppose each others political approaches which reveals Kaines ability to find common ground with all types of people.

He is an individual who has a clear grip on the human factor and knows how to effectively incorporate this understanding into his decisions. These outstanding qualities are obvious to all who work with him and benefit from his leadership. His effectiveness as a lawyer, mayor, governor, and senator are testaments to this. Moreover, it is telling that Republican Senator Lindsey Graham describes Kaine to have a steady hand and well-received by [the Republican side] of the aisle.

Senator Kaine is a fearless unifier with a honed sense of responsibility and duty. The Jesuit ideals he adopted as a young man remain a steadfast beacon in his political and personal life. The extent to which he holds to his religious beliefs and is driven by them were revealed when he said, If faith is your motivation, share that. Such is why I urge people to take deliberate pause when he or any other politician reaches conclusions different from their own. Members of our government undergo long and difficult processes where they must foresee all possible implications of particular decisions but it has become far too easy for those with limited knowledge or understanding to immediately write off people like Senator Kaine when they disagree with him.

In March 2015, he was attacked by segments of the Jewish community when he was not present for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus speech to Congress. Upon his nomination, a firestorm of criticism regarding his absence from the speech has painted him as anti-Israel. As much as others might disagree with him, Kaines position stemmed from the perceived partisan nature of Netanyahus invitation along with the reality of the upcoming Israeli elections at that time.

Let me be clear: If I were a member of Congress, I would have attended the speech. However, to disqualify Senator Kaine as a friend of the U.S.-Israeli relationship for this is absurd, no matter how passionate one is on the subject or how righteous one feels his position is.

It must be understood that a disagreement with a component of Israeli policy is not equivalent to anti-Israel sentiment. There are those that want to promulgate a doctrine that decisions made by Israeli political leaders cannot be criticized in any way or anyhow-surely this cannot contribute to productive discussions or attitudes. I am in no way insinuating that Netanyahu addressed Congress for any political purposes other than to alarm the world to the dangers he foresaw in the Iran Deal, but at the end of the day, Israel, like the U.S., is governed by individuals-politicians-which allows room for criticism.

Thus, instead of jumping to conclusions, we should all be more proactive in examining the political sphere. It is vital that we maintain a civil dialogue with the awareness that inflammatory rhetoric is unbecoming of responsible leaders and citizens. Additionally, there must be emphasis that U.S. government officials such as Senator Kaine have to prerogative to draw their own, informed conclusions.

We, as a community, would benefit from an eagerness to listen and a willingness to understand one another. More importantly, we would all gain from respecting the potential Vice President of the United States and doing our best to acknowledge existing diverse approaches. It is only to our detriment if we approach the world in absolutes.

One of our communitys weaknesses is that we perceive those with different perspectives as menaces to society, but this should not be the case. Life is very complex. There is far less black and white than grey-a fact that many struggle to acknowledge. Though society very rarely experiences total unity, perhaps this is indicative of difference in beliefs and approaches, not necessarily of good or evil. We would do well to see Senator Kaine in this light.

Ezra Friedlander is CEO of the Friedlander Group, a public policy consulting firm based in NYC and Washington, D.C. For more information, go to www.thefriedlandergroup.com and may be contacted at [email protected] or followed on twitter @ezrafriedlander

[TLS welcomes your letters by submitting them to newstip[email protected]]
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to raise the NSG and Pakistan-China corridor issue with Xi.

By India Today Web Desk: Prime Minister Narendra Modi today met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Hangzhou on sidelines of G20 summit.

The prime minister is expected to raise the NSG and Pakistan-China corridor issue with Xi.

A group of Indians on Saturday gathered at a hotel in Hangzhou to greet Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he arrived in this Chinese city for the crucial G20 summit.

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The Prime Minister was greeted with chants of 'Modi, Modi' by the group of Indian men and women when he reached the hotel here after his arrival.

As he went around greeting the people, a number of them raised 'Modi, Modi' slogans. The group came from neighbouring Yiwu, the commodity hub which has several hundred businessmen residing there.

The Prime Minister greeted the people after getting out of his vehicle and then walked into the hotel.

A cautious India on Saturday said it has warded off pressure from the US and China to set this year as the deadline to ratify the Paris Agreement, even as the two countries ratified the climate deal ahead of the G20 summit on Hangzhou today.

India on Saturday also extended a USD 500 million line of credit to Vietnam to deepen their defence cooperation and signed 12 agreements including a deal to construct offshore patrol boats, amid China's muscle flexing in the disputed South China Sea and "emerging regional challenges".





ALSO READ:

Hello Hangzhou! PM Modi tweets as he arrives to attend G20 Summit

NSG, Pakistan in focus as Modi arrives in China for G20

'Miniature Modi' dolls a hit in Hangzhou ahead of G20 Summit





--- ENDS ---
How best to challenge stereotypes of beauty and the ideal body shape? For Canadian artist Allison Tunis, its through a colouring book.

Her new book, Body Love: A Fat Activism Colouring Book is at the forefront of the Body Positivity movement. The book features icons and activists from the movement, celebrating their overall fabulousness.

(Body Love: A Fat Activism Colouring Book/Allison Tunis)

Tunis told us in an email how she came up with the idea for the book.

Ive been working on self love and health at every size (HAES), and learning more about the fat activism movement for about the last year faithfully, and many of the personalities featured in the book are those whom I found on my journey and who have personally inspired me along the way, she says.

Tunis saw how adult colouring had become a huge trend, and with her background in art and art therapy everything fell into place.

(Body Love: A Fat Activism Colouring Book/Allison Tunis)

So many people dont realise that campaigns like the Body Positivity movement exist, so this book is an effort to give it greater visibility.

This book was created to show that people can be sexy, creative, active, successful and so much more at all sizes, and that there should be no limitations on what you can dream or accomplish, Tunis says.

(Body Love: A Fat Activism Colouring Book/Allison Tunis)

You dont have to wait until youre an acceptable size or more traditionally attractive to do the things you want to do. Wear the bikini, take the boudoir photos, dance, run, do whatever you desire. These are not size specific activities.

Whats perhaps most inspiring about Tuniss work is that a portion of the profits from the book will go to each of the personalities represented, or they will be donated on their behalf to the Canadian Mental Health Organisation.

People featured in the book include the body advocate, model, author and mental health professional Jes Baker, and the yoga teacher and body positive advocate Jessamyn Stanley.

Not only is Tunis smashing stereotypes of beauty and promoting self-love through her work, but shes also well worth a follow on Instagram. The photos she posts confirms that shes not only inspirational, but also one cool girl.
A list of Congress candidates standing in the upcoming Punjab Assembly elections has gone viral on social media, but party leader Captain Amarinder Singh says, no such list has been released.

By Manjeet Sehgal: While the Congress is still struggling to scrutinise the 1,600 odd applications received for 117 Assembly seats in Punjab, a list of candidates has already gone viral on social media.

Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee president Captain Amarinder Singh today strongly refuted the reports being circulated on social media about the party having announced a list of candidates for the forthcoming Assembly elections in the state.

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ALSO READ: Ahead of 2017 Assembly elections Kejriwal heads to Punjab, BJP-SAD woo Sikhs in capital

He said, it is the handiwork of some mischievous elements to create confusion.

Captain Amarinder said that unlike other parties the Congress party has a proper, transparent and well established system and procedure for finalising the candidates.

ALSO READ: Why even an AAP victory in Punjab may not satisfy Arvind Kejriwal

He disclosed that the list of applicants was still with the PCC and it was being scrutinised for various eligibility criteria prescribed for the candidates. "The list will be submitted to the high command within a week, where it will be referred to the screening committee and the final decision will be taken by the Central Election Committee (CEC) headed by the Congress president," he said.

The PCC president disclosed that the circulation of the purported list was the handiwork of some mischievous elements who did not seem even familiar with Punjabi pronunciation of names, the way they had been mentioned in the said list.

Captain Amarinder said, "The party will update everyone about the process and also the date when the list will be submitted to the high command by the PCC."

--- ENDS ---
Deadly deeds: Death of former Phuket Land chief lifts lid on islands corrupt, murderous past

PHUKET: The conspicuous death of Tawatchai Anukul, a fugitive of 13 years wanted for illegally issuing at least hundreds of illegal land titles during his three years as Phuket Land Office Chief ending in 2003, has lifted the lid on a sordid career of corruption at the Phuket Provincial Land Office.

landpropertycorruptioncrimepolicepatong

By The Phuket News

Sunday 4 September 2016, 03:35PM

The death of former Phuket Provincial Land Office Chief Tawatchai Anukul has lifted the lid on decades of corrupt land deals in Phuket. Photo: The Phuket News

The circumstances of his death in his cell at the headquarters of Department of Special Investigation (DSI) in Bangkok within hours of his arrest on Monday (see story here)  have only fuelled speculation that Tawatchai was murdered to silence him.

An inquiry has been launched into the initial claims by DSI Director-General Pol Col Paisit Wongmuang that Tawatchai died after attempting to commit suicide by hanging himself with his socks. The assertion flies in the face of autopsy results revealed by police coronoers that Tawatchai suffered severe internal injuries that may have caused his death. (See story here.)

The division between the two lies in that although both the Royal Thai Police and the DSI are law-enforcement agencies, the DSI operates independently under its own executive committee and is akin to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the US. Yet both agencies during different times over the past 13 years have launched their own investigations that have encroached into affairs involving Tawatchai and his accomplices.

Tawatchai, a native of Thalang district in Phuket, was accused of having illegally issued land rights documents for more than 1,000 plots of land in Phuket, Phang Nga and Surat Thani provinces, the DSI chief said.

In the DSI's announcement of Tawatchai's death on Monday, DSI officials said that the charges aginst the dead suspect included a document for 500 rai overlapping the Khao Lampi-Hat Thai Mueang National Park in Phang Nga. The price of the land was officially estimated at B10.5 billion, and it belonged to a rich person well-known in Phang Nga and Phuket, Col Paisit said on Tuesday.

Tawatchai was also accused of aiding encroachment of Sirinat National Park in Phuket and had allegedly issued a land-rights document to a private company for 362 rai of land in Rassada, north of Phuket Town.

Among the details revealed in the initial request by the Land Department for the Royal Thai Police Crime Suppression Division in 2003 to arrest Thawatchai were allegations that land-use document SorKor 1 No 29, for land in Moo 2, Tambon Lam Kaen, Phang Nga  on the northern coastal stretch north of Thai Muang  was inflated from 14.0.80 rai to 145.0.80 rai.

In Phuket, Tawatchai was accused of assisting in the registration of a flying SorKor 1  a technique whereby the paperwork from one piece of land is altered so that it appears to cover another piece of land  by upgrading SorKor 1 No 260 for land in Kamala to NorSor 3 Kor No 1 190, and altered so that it appeared to apply to a different piece of land on Laem Nakalay.

He was also accused of the illegitimate issue of the nine Chanote titles No 61483-91, referring to land in Rassada, Phuket.

CONSPIRATORS

Named as accomplice in several of Tawatchais dealings during the halcyon days of Phuket land corruption was former Kathu Land Office Chief Bunchoo Limraksasin. The Criminal Court in Bangkok in November 2006 sentenced Bunchoo to 20 years in prison after finding him guilty on 10 counts of demanding bribes amounting to millions of baht for land titles between December 21, 2001 and March 8, 2003.

The court also found his personal assistant, 34-year-old Meena Kalra, a part-time helper at the Kathu Land Office, which also administers land ownership in the tourist hotbed of Patong, guilty on seven counts of conspiring to launder money for Bunchoo. She was sentenced to seven years in prison after police raided her home in Land & Houses Park in Chalong and found her with B17 million in personal savings despite her monthly salary of only B5,000.

In the trial against Bunchoo, the court heard that Bunchoo had accumulated B5.4 million from processing land titles for one woman in 2002, including a final payment of B2 million in cash delivered in a gift-wrapped box to Bunchoo by the woman s land broker.

Both Bunchooo and Meena strenuously denied being involved in an adulterous affair.

A warrant was issued for Bunchoos arrest after the woman reported him to police, but Bunchoo, who was transferred to Ubon Ratchathani in June 2003, initially evaded arrest.

Bunchoo went on the run the same time as Thawachai, but after a manhunt in Phuket and Phang Nga in July that year, Crime Suppression officers finally arrested him in Ranong after his return from the Andaman Club casino and resort in Myanmar  a popular visa-run destination among expats in Phuket at the time.

The charges against Bunchoo stated that he transferred more than B17 million to two bank accounts in Meenas name and bought a B2.1-million condominium for her in Bangkoks Phaya Thai District.

The Bangkok Post reported today (Sept 4) that Bunchoo was released earlier this year after winning an appeal against the conviction  though that sentence was handed down 10 years ago. (See story here.)

Fellow conspirator Uru Thipthep also formerly of the Kathu District Land Office is still in jail, while Meena is free after completing her seven-year sentence after being convicted on conspiracy to commit fraud, the Bangkok Post reported.

A GRAND VIEW

In the charges against Phuket developer Boonkeng Srisansuchart that never saw the light of day were a move by the National Counter-Corruption Commission (NCCC) as recently as 2010 to undo corrupt deals dating back to 1997.

Apinan Issarangkul Na Ayudhaya, the NCCC Secretary-General at the time announced that Thawatchai was wanted for gross dereliction of duty, criminal misuse of power and document forgery.

Those allegations were directly linked into three Chanote title deeds issued to Boonkeng in 2001.

Mr Boonkeng, best known for his Srisuchart Grandeview housing development on the bypass road in Phuket, had applied for eight Chanote titles based on a single SorKor 1 title deed covering over 362 rai of land. The NCCC ruled that a survey of the land specified in the document, located along the bypass road on the outskirts of Phuket Town, revealed it to be state forest land.

Boonkeng had earlier been evicted from four plots of state land  also along the bypass road, in 2004, and on November 21, 2005 was wounded in a gun attack on the streets of Bangkok.

Boonkeng denied he was the target of the attack, as an associate of his, Nimit Pokaphol, a former officer in the Phuket Provincial Land Office (PPLO), was killed in the attack by a round from a .22 firearm.

Boonkeng, 57 at the time, was injured in the neck by a single shot and spent time under police guard in a Bangkok hospital before returning to Phuket.

In the unravelling of illegally obtained plots of land in Phuket, the Anti-Money Laundering Office (Amlo) seized four plots of land in the Panturat Hills on the basis the land was SorPorKor state land.

It was also alleged that, in 1983, a provincial vice-governor allowed Boonkeng to take out a 30-year lease on the four plots, totalling 76 rai and comprising forest and agricultural land.

Mr Boonkeng was said to be planning to use the land to collect water for a development of prestige homes, but the properties were never built.

A CLEAR ASSASSINATION

However, police have yet to link Tawatchais dealings with the death of Pongtorn Hiranyaburana, Deputy Chief of the Phuket Land Office at the time of his murder, who was shot dead on the way to his home in Surat Thani on April 25, 2003.

Police at the time believed the murder to be a clear assassination, as Mr Pongtorn was shot dead literally while behind the wheel while the car was in motion.

Tawatchai had transferred out of Phuket to the Thai Muang Land Office in Phang Nga just weeks earlier, after then-Prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra personally appointed Mr Pongtorn to lead the investigation into suspect land titles in Phuket.

The police failed to bring Mr Pongtorns killers to justice.

By June 2004, the trail had gone cold, Pol Col Ronapong Saikaew, Superintendent of Investigation of Police Region 8 at the time, said.

We have to investigate more and check to see if the evidence found at the scene is somehow related to other cases [we are investigating]. We need a fresh lead in order to get closer to the people involved, he told the press.

Col Ronapong had announced on November 11 the previous year that officers expected a breakthrough and were closing in on a key person involved in the killing, but the case has since stalled.

We know who the gunmen were, but we dont have enough evidence [to issue arrest warrants]. The driver fled to the Northeast and the gunmen are likely somewhere in central Thailand. There were at least three people involved in this murder , he said.

From the outset, we have assumed that the masterminds are from Phuket and that they are still living here. I still cant say when I expect to bring the suspects in for interrogation, he added.
From getting 'molested' on her debut film's sets to getting humiliated by Vinod Mehra's mother, from dealing with an affair with a top Bollywood actor to getting shamed by the entire country for husband Mukesh Agarwal's death, Rekha had to brave it all.

By India Today Web Desk: Evergreen Bollywood Diva Rekha's public persona was as tumultuous and turbulent as her personal life. In the new biography Rekha: The Untold Story written by Yasser Usman, published by Juggernaut, the writer chronicles her life and days and some of the excerpts from the book reveal details that are, well, have to be read to be believed.

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ALSO READ: Sonakshi Sinha has done the worst films among her contemporaries

ALSO READ: Can Karan Johar make the best 'Karan Johar' film?

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ALSO READ: Salman to Sonakshi, Alia to Shraddha, why are actors turning singers?



Forced Smooch on a 15-year-old Rekha

While shooting her first film Anjana Safar, in Mumbai's Mehboob Studio, a 15-year-old Rekha had to endure, what would today be called as 'molestation', in the hands of the film's director Raja Nawathe and its star Biswajeet Chatterjee. Right before the shoot, Raja and Biswajeet had it all planned, down to the very last detail. The scene that was to be shot was a romantic scene. According to an excerpt from the book published in The Times of India, the moment Raja said 'action', Biswajeet grabbed Rekha and pressed his lips on her mouth. Anything about the kiss had not been mentioned to Rekha. While the camera kept rolling and the entire crew kept whistling and cheering, the director did yell 'cut' for five minutes, as Biswajeet kept kissing an unsuspecting Rekha for full five minutes. Rekha had tightly closed her eyes but they were full of tears.



When Vinod Mehra's mother almost beat up Rekha with a chappal

According to a filmmaker, in an excerpt published in TOI, when Vinod Mehra, Rekha's rumoured husband, took her to his house in Bombay, after getting married in Calcutta, Vinod's mother was highly hostile to Rekha. She reportedly pushed Rekha away when the actor tried to touch her mother-in-law's feet. She refused to let the new 'bride' enter the house. She kept abusing and humiliating Rekha who kept standing at the door. Vinod tried to keep matters under control but his mother was too agitated. She reportedly took off her sandals and almost assaulted Rekha with it. Rekha, confused and hurt, began running towards the lift, with tears in her eyes, as a crowd began gathering around the flat. Her husband, Vinod, followed her and asked to stay at his house till matters became normal.







When Rekha, wearing sindoor and mangalsutra, landed up at Rishi-Neetu wedding

Rishi Kapoor and Neetu Singh were getting married on January 22, 1980. Neetu and Rekha were close friends. The who's who of the film industry were present at RK Studios, beautifully decked up. Also present at the wedding were Amitabh Bachchan, his wife Jaya Bachchan, and his parents.

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Suddenly, Rekha made a 'sensational entry', wearing a spectacular white sari, with a red bindi on her forehead, and, well, red sindoor on her hair. The cameras soon moved away from Rishi-Neetu and focussed on her.







According to a Cine Blitz report on the events of that night, Rekha walked up to the centre of RK Studios' garden and stood there. But her eyes kept wandering towards Amitabh Bachchan who was speaking to director Manmohan Desai. Soon, Rekha walked up to Amitabh and began talking. They were seen conversing formally, but according to a report in Stardust magazine, "Jaya tried to keep a stoic front for a long time, but eventually she had to bend her head and let the tears roll down."

Later, in an interview, Rekha said that the sindoor and mangalsutra were part of a film she was shooting. She had forgotten to remove them on her way to the wedding straight from the shoot. However, in 1982, at a National Awards function, where Rekha was being awarded for her performance in Umrao Jaan (1981), she famously said, "In the city I come from, it's fashionable to wear sindoor".



What led to Rekha's husband Mukesh Agarwal's suicide?

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In an excerpt from Rekha: The Untold Story published in Mumbai Mirror, Mukesh Agarwal was apparently suffering from chronic depression and was not too pleased with Rekha's acting career, and all of this, coupled with post-divorce trauma, led to him committing suicide.

Reportedly, it was Rekha who made the first phone call to then-rising entrepreneur Mukesh Agarwal. She was looking to get settled down while Mukesh was a die-hard fan of the star. Soon phone calls led to meeting and within a month of knowing each other, the two got married.

However, soon, Rekha got to know that Mukesh had chronic depression, which apparently, ran in his family. He was also involved with his psychiatrist 'Akash Bajaj'. Soon, cracks appeared in the marriage as Mukesh began exhibiting erratic behaviour. He kept Rekha in the dark about his failing business, became too overbearing and started embarrassing her by leaving his work in Delhi and coming to Bombay and hanging around on her sets for no reason.

On October 2, 1990, seven months after their marriage, Mukesh, who reportedly seemed happy on the fateful day, according to his brother Anil, committed suicide. In fully filmy style, he tied one end of Rekha's dupatta to the ceiling fan, made a noose out of it and then hanged himself to death with it.

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A national witchhunt followed. People all over the country starting hating and shaming her as a cold-hearted man-eater. A furious Anil Gupta, reportedly, said, "My brother loved Rekha truly. For him love was a do or die attempt. He could not tolerate what Rekha was doing to him. Now what does she want, does she want our money?"







Akash Bajaj joined the gang as well. "I am angry at his death and absolutely furious with the person who caused this to him. I want to lash out and ask why?," said Bajaj.

Surprisingly, director-producer Subhash Ghai also gave his piece of mind and attacked Rekha. The Karz director reportedly said, "Rekha has put such a blot on the face of the film industry that it'll be difficult to wash it away easily. I think after this any respectable family will think twice before accepting any actress as their bahoo."

He didn't stop there. He added, "It's going to be tough even professionally for her. No conscientious director will work with her ever again. How will the audience accept her as Bharat ki nari or insaf ki devi?"

Anupam Kher, Rekha's co-star in many films around that time joined the chorus. He said, "She's become the national vamp. Professionally and personally, I think it's curtains for her. I mean I don't know how will I react to her if I come face to face with her."

--- ENDS ---
Palestinian villagers in legal limbo

PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES: A tiny Palestinian village in the Hebron hills could soon cease to exist after a nine-year legal battle with Israeli authorities who say its 167 residents live on an archaeological site.

politicsconstructionland

By AFP

Sunday 4 September 2016, 10:00AM

Palestinian children look out from a window in the Palestinian village of Khirbet Zanuta, located in the hills south of the West Bank city of Hebron. Photo: Hazem Bader/AFP

Israels supreme court is expected to make a final decision on the fate of Khirbet Zanuta soon.

The village in the south of the occupied West Bank, around 20 kilometres from the Israeli city of Beersheba, includes makeshift homes made of stones, metal, clay and even tyres.

Caves in the area have also been used as homes in the past, and its residents farm the hundreds of hectares of surrounding land, raising sheep and goats.

I was born here before 1967, said village head Rashad al-Tal, 65, referring to the year when Israels occupation of the West Bank began.

We lived in a cave and we walked seven kilometres to go to school in Dahriya, the closest city, he added as his daughter stirred milk behind him to make curd.

He said villagers began to build houses in the 1970s without having permits from the Israeli authorities and were fined for doing so.

Such permits are extremely difficult to obtain for Palestinians living in most of the West Bank.

We showed them all the ownership papers for our land and asked for construction permits, said Tal.

While Israeli authorities say structures in the village are illegal and are built on an archaeological site, the villagers themselves suspect other motives.

They allege that Israel wants to clear more space for settlers, since a settlement industrial zone called Meitarim is located less than a kilometre away.

Villagers say explosives were used to develop the industrial zone and question why this would have been done if the nearby area was archaeologically important.

Khirbet Zanuta is in what is known as Area C, the part of the West Bank under complete Israeli control.

Around 60 per cent of the Palestinian territory falls under that classification, originally set up under the 1990s Oslo accords in an arrangement meant to be temporary.

Israels military decides on construction permits in Area C, and they are rarely granted to Palestinians. The military demolishes structures it deems illegal.

That process, along with Israels continuous settlement building in the West Bank, has been strongly criticised internationally as contributing to the erosion of the possibility of a two-state solution.

The court case involving Khirbet Zanuta is reaching its conclusion as debate over Israeli demolitions of Palestinian structures in the West Bank intensifies.

In 2015, Israel demolished 548 structures in the West Bank, displacing 787 Palestinians, according to UN figures.

But during the first four months of this year alone, 598 were demolished, displacing 858 people.

The legal battle over Khirbet Zanuta has been waged since 2007. With the two sides unable to settle, Israels supreme court is expected to issue a ruling soon.

Israeli authorities have said in court filings that Khirbet Zanuta is an archaeological site and residents presence in the area can have an impact on the site.

As a result, they must leave the area.

Israeli authorities declined further comment when contacted, saying their case was being presented in court.

Rights activists who support the villagers and their legal battle say claims about the areas importance as an archaeological site are exaggerated.

We have consulted Israeli archaeological experts who say that the presence of the residents does not interfere with that of the historical remains, said Sharona Eliahu-Chai of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.

Yoni Mizrachi of the Emek Shaveh NGO said that every West Bank village contains remains, adding that those in Khirbet Zanuta are neither very important nor very extensive.

This is a political issue, he said. When they want to expel residents, they say that it is an archaeological site.

Mizrachi said the village does indeed contain remains dating to the Iron Age and spanning the Roman, Byzantine and Islamic periods.

But he also alleged that there have been no excavations there since it was declared an archaeological site in 1968, while arguing that in any case the remains do not belong to Israel, but to Palestine.

Others have pointed out that Jewish construction is allowed on much more important archaeological sites.
Phuket Opinion: A remedy for ailing culture

PHUKET: High praise must go to the Fine Arts Departments Phuket office for their outstanding contribution this week in preserving a monument honouring Phukets past.

cultureconstructionhealthlandopinion

By The Phuket News

Sunday 4 September 2016, 09:00AM

The historical Boonphat Building stands proud against the bacdkrop of the modern multi-story wings of the Vachira Phuket Hospital. Photo: Watanyoo Thephuttee

If it werent for Atsawin Auttatum, President of the Culture Office in Phuket Town, raising the alarm by calling for people via Facebook to rise up against the planned fate for the century-old Boonphat Building at Vachira Hospital Phuket, Phuket might have lost one of its treasures forever (See story here.).

The simple image of the Boonphat Sino-Portuguese style mansion against the backdrop of the multi-story modern hospital buildings at Vachira Hospital with stark clarity is reminiscent of the small church surrounded by cloud-reaching skyscrapers in the 1927 classic film Metropolis.

Events this week showed plainly that the theme of the Fritz Lang movie is clearly alive in Phuket. Preserving monuments to the past takes effort, but is most likely a burden to be shouldered by a handful of people far from the public limelight, and whose efforts mostly go unnoticed.

Phuket Town is home to the few buildings on the island that can be directly traced back to roles played in Phukets past. Most people think of the classic shophouses that line the streets through Old Town, but the Boonphat mansion is out of sight, and obviously nearly out of mind.

Kudos must also go to Fine Arts Department Deputy Director Kajon Mookmeeka who called for the Boonphat mansion to be turned into a museum. Phuket has little architectural heritage as it is and all efforts to preserve what we have must be supported.

Thailand is home to only five World Heritage sites as recognised by Unesco. Another five sites remain on the tentative list. Phuket is not among them. Despite the islands vital role as a port of call connecting East and West during the centuries of ships making spice runs, when the island became a veritable mixing pot of cultures, Phuket has yet to be recognised culturally for anything other than its food.

What is dumbfounding is why the Boonphat building was slated for demolition in the first place. Two other similar-style and similar-age buildings  the Ranong and Sripatcharintaranusorn buildings, both already situated on hospital grounds  were already listed by the Fine Arts Department as cultural heritage sites. If this is the calibre of thinking of those responsible for operating the largest government hospital on the island, heaven help us. Were going to need it.
4 candidates seek two four-year terms on Codington County Commission

Two of the three Codington County Commission seats have challengers this year. Here's what you need to know.
An opportunity for foodies and beer lovers to get lost in a world of food and drink from a hand-selected range of food trucks and breweries from around New Zealand.
As Rishi Kapoor turns 64, we take a look at a remarkable career where he's had at least one release for the past 43 years.

By Tatsam Mukherjee: Rishi Kapoor is a study of contradictions. He's vocal, opinionated, passionate about current affairs, and at the same time he has a Twitter bio which reads, "Son of a famous Father-Father of a famous Son.I am the hyphen in between them." Yes, he's the son of famous Bollywood filmmaker, actor Raj Kapoor. And the father of the nation's heartthrob, Ranbir Kapoor. No one has made living in the large shadows of their father and son, look so graceful and dignified. All the while, being an extremely likeable actor himself.

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ALSO READ: I respect Rajinikanth's humility, says Rishi Kapoor



ALSO SEE: Happy Birthday Chintuji, 10 Rishi Kapoor songs that will make your day





Rishi Kapoor made his debut in Raj Kapoor's passion project Mera Naam Joker, where he played the teenage version of his father's character. He shot to stardom along with Dimple Kapadia in Bobby, again directed by his father Raj Kapoor. The film about young love and the song "Hum tum ek kamre mein bandh ho" ensured everyone wanted to be Rishi Kapoor and Dimple Kapadia, eloping on bike.

He went on to make quite a name for himself as a romantic hero, as he starred alongside Amitabh Bachahan and Vinod Khanna in Manmohan Desai's Amar Akbar Anthony. The film became a landmark for the typical Bollywood masala film, at the same time also went on to propogate religious tolerance. The remarkable thing about Rishi Kapoor's career is the fact that he's had a release every year for 43 years now. Except 1998, when he was directing his only film Aa Ab Laut Chalein starring Akshaye Khanna, Aishwarya Rai. Quite remarkable some would say.



ALSO READ: Rishi Kapoor just compared Kim Kardashian to a bag of onions

Does that mean he made a smooth transition from a Bollywood leading man to a character actor? Of course not. He had his reported periods of alcohol abuse, reported meltdowns with wife Neetu Kapoor, however he came out of all that with Kunal Kohli's Hum Tum. Playing father to Saif Ali Khan's character, Rishi Kapoor reinvented the game by playing a very hip, cool father. Even though not the most fleshed out character in the film, Rishi Kapoor registered a memorable performance.

Hum Tum marked the dawn of Rishi Kapoor - the character actor. He was the best thing about Zoya Akhtar's Luck By Chance as the over-the-top Bollywood producer, Romy Rolly. Films like Love Aaj Kal, Delhi 6, Do Dooni Chaar saw him play very likeable father figures and then he changed the game yet again. He played a vital antagonist in Karan Malhotra's Agneepath. Essaying the character of a mob boss Rauf Lala, he made his character despicable and fearsome by pulling no punches in playing the guy all out bad. He also looked eerily close to Underworld Don Dawood Ibrahim in Nikhil Advani's D-Day.

His last release was Shakun Batra's Kapoor & Sons, where he played the patriarch of the dysfuctional Kapoor family settled in Conoor. Playing a grandfather, with a morbid sense of humour and an affinity for porn, Rishi Kapoor continues to be the most likeable element of a movie. After a career spanning 43 years, Rishi Kapoor remains the star he is, even on social media as he calls out hypocrisy, bad governance and at the same time doesn't back off from giving it back to trolls.

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May the 'spirit' in him remain alive. And the whisky never run out. Happy birthday Chintuji!

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While Delhi Police had sought 14-day custody of the accused, the court however, agreed to only a day's custody.

By India Today Web Desk: Sacked AAP minister Sandeep Kumar, who has been accused of raping a woman on the pretext of providing a ration card, was today sent to one-day police custody.

While Delhi Police had sought 14-day custody of the accused, the court however, agreed to only a day's custody.

Also read: Sex CD case: Sandeep Kumar arrested by Delhi Police after rape complaint

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The accused, who was arrested on Saturday, told police that the leaked pictures of the woman were circulated by his one friend, Praveen.

This came after the woman, who appeared in an 'objectionable CD', accused Sandeep of lacing her drink with sedatives and raping her thereafter. The incident reportedly took place when the woman went to the minister's house for a ration card.

Meanwhile, the court also slammed Delhi Police for booking the minister under the Prevention of Corruption Act.

Also read: Sex CD case: My husband is innocent, I stand by him, says Sandeep Kumar's wife



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By Utpal Kumar/Mail Today: History is the account of the victors, by the victors and for the victors. Tell a native American about being 'discovered' by Columbus in the 15th century, and he would grudgingly ask, "But how could we be discovered if we were always there?"

The accidental 'discovery led to the annihilation of nine out of 10 native Americans within a hundred years of the Europeans descending on the continent. Yet we celebrate the event. And we mention it as if it were an act--or should we say the price?--of civilising the 'savage'! It's another matter that these 'savages' were far more advanced scientifically and even materialistically.

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Also read: After successfully self-publishing her first book, author Savi Sharma talks about her second venture

Indians, under British colonial rule for more than 200 years and besieged by incessant attacks from outsiders since the 11th century, too have their share of being imposed a history which hasn't been theirs. Herein lies the importance of Sanjeev Sanyal, an economist and banker by profession, who has come up with the book, The Ocean of Churn, challenging the dominant notion of the seas being a marginal player in Indian history.

According to him, almost all the existing books on the Indian Ocean fall into two categories. "The first category has histories written from a Western perspective and they commit the sin of colonial arrogance. For them, the history of the Indian Ocean begins with the arrival of Portuguese sailor Vasco da Gama.

The Ocean of Churn by Sanjeev Sanyal, Penguin Random House India; Rs599

The second group includes indigenous scholars whose account would be local in nature; they would talk about, say, the Cholas without any interconnectedness with outsiders," says he.

Marshalling evidences from genetics and archaeology to popular cultures, he exposes both colonial and post-colonial biases in our history writings. "While the colonial biases overemphasised the importance of the West in Indian history, the post-colonial biases placed Delhi at the centre of universe.

This explains why we know more about the Lodis than the Satavahanas, who were much bigger rulers." Here, it needs to be emphasised that Sanyal's arguments cut deep on both sides of the ideological divide.

Also read: Bibliophile or not: 5 reasons you should definitely visit the ongoing Delhi Book Fair

While his staunch opposition to the Aryan invasion/migration theory, citing new archeological and scientific evidences, make him a target of the Left historians who may call him "just another amateur historian", the author is equally critical of history being a tool of nationalism.

"Look what happened to Asoka. He was made to look great just because our nationalists needed an Indian hero in the ancient past," he says. The author cites several examples to prove that Asoka's pacifism was political in nature.

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"The Asokan edicts were nothing but propaganda materials. If Asoka was truly serious about non-violence and if there really was repentance, why none of his edicts in Odisha links his conversion to Buddhism to the Kalinga war. In fact, his remorse is found everywhere except in Odisha, the place which needed the healing touch the most."

The most fascinating aspect of the Kalinga affair, however, is what Sanyal terms "Kharvela's revenge". The author finds Kharvela's edict just in front of Asoka's, talking in glorious terms how the Kalinga ruler ransacked Magadha's capital.

"It appeared as if Kharvela wanted to tell Asoka, 'Look here I am after destroying your kingdom.' It was Kharvela's way to take revenge." While targeting the Marxist historiography, which he compares with a "Victorian steam engine driven by the inescapable laws of Newton", the book also manages to salvage history by making it free from the boring, academic jargons imposed by professional historians in the name of objectivity.

History should be about stories, first and foremost. Post-Independence it has become everything except stories. With characters like Kharvela and Nandi Varman II, a Pallava ruler who made a memorable journey from South-East Asia to become one of the most successful south Indian kings, in the process establishing beyond doubt that South-East Asia was culturally an extension of India, Sanyal gives the book several memorable characters which bring the book alive.

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Sanyal also demolishes the myth that India got its Independence through peaceful Gandhian means. "The revolutionaries--from the Ghadar plot to the INA--might not have succeeded but it was their efforts that eventually got India Independence.

It was the result of the realisation that the British Raj couldn't rely on its own forces to keep the empire intact," says the author as he recalls how at the time of Independence the then British prime minister Clement Attlee dismissed Gandhi's role as "minimal".

The book challenges the history of India written by the victorious. It's a tough task, but his efforts are valiant and praiseworthy.

Watch the video here

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In an indirect reference to Pakistan, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked the BRICS member nations to "isolate supporters and sponsors of terror".

In a meet with the leaders of the BRICS ahead of G20 summit, Modi said "terrorists in South Asia, or anywhere for that matter, do not own banks or weapons factories".

"Clearly, someone funds and arms them, and BRICS must intensify joint efforts not just to fight terror but to coordinate actions to isolate those who are supporters and sponsors of terror," he said.

In the meet, Modi said terrorism was the primary source of instability and the biggest threat to societies.

He also raised the issue with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on the sidelines of the G20.

"In a very hard-hitting intervention, he said terrorists in South Asia or anywhere for that matter do not own banks or weapons factories," Indian External Affairs Ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup quoted Modi as saying.

Without directly naming Pakistan, Modi told Turnbull, "Our (India's) neighbourhood, in particular, was suffering from destabilisation effects of terrorism". He stressed the need to "identify the suppliers, exporters and financiers of terrorism".
By Srijani Ganguly/Mail Today: Interestingly, hers is the the most interesting story of them all. After she self-published the novel as an ebook on Amazon, it sold over 5,000 copies last year and went on to garner a multi-publisher bid for a print run. And this year, the book was finally printed in a physical form by Westland.

"If I had gone the traditional way," she says. "I would have had to wait for months to get it published. I didn't want to wait; I knew I had a good story to show to the world. I simply believed in the power of social media and internet to promote my book myself.

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Also read: How author Savi Sharma's self-published book went on to become a bestseller

Once the novel was self-published, I started marketing some content of the book on social media and the response was overwhelming." Prior to writing Everyone has a Story (Westland; Rs150), Sharma had written another book.

Savi Sharma self-published her first novel.

"But I thought it was immature and not really ready for publishing," she says, adding, "A friend advised me to write about something more personal, from the heart. Looking for inspiration, I decided to turn to myself, and the result was a book populated by characters carrying parts of me. From the idea of writing about myself comes a character looking for her first story (Meera), another one who has the urge to travel the world (Vivaan) and someone who wants to open a cafe (Kabir). All of them are part of me."

Sharma's next novel, which should be ready by end of this year, will be an inspirational story, one "about re-discovering one's own self and what truly matters in our journey of life where my characters learn another perspective of life and love."

When she is not writing stories about others, Sharma works as the co-founder and chief content officer at Life & People, a motivational media blog.

Sharma says, "My role there is to write, curate and publish interesting articles related to positivity, law of attraction, spirituality and meditation. It has helped in my personal and professional development. Importantly, it has given me a higher perspective of life and people which is very important for a storyteller."

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Chinas leaders have been accused of delivering a calculated diplomatic snub to Barack Obama after the US President was not provided with a staircase to leave his plane on his arrival in Hangzhou city before the start of the Group of 20 (G20) summit meeting.

Chinese authorities have rolled out the red carpet for world leaders, including India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Russian President Vladimir Putin, South Korean President Park Geun-hye, Brazil's President Michel Temer, and British Prime Minister Theresa May, who arrived here on Sunday, The Guardian reported.

But Obama, who is on his final tour of Asia, was forced to disembark from Air Force One through a little-used exit in the plane's belly after no rolling staircase was provided when he landed in Hangzhou on Saturday.

When Obama did find his way on to a red carpet on the tarmac below, there were heated altercations between the US and Chinese officials, with one Chinese official caught on video shouting: "This is our country! This is our airport!"

"The reception that President Obama and his staff got when they arrived here Saturday afternoon was bruising, even by Chinese standards," the New York Times reported.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry official involved in the visit denied it had been a snub, telling the South China Morning Post that the US delegation had declined to use the usual rolling red-carpet staircase.

"It would do China no good in treating Obama rudely," the official said.

"China provides a rolling staircase for every arriving state leader, but the US side complained that the driver doesn't speak English and can't understand security instructions from the US; so China proposed that we could assign a translator to sit beside the driver, but the US side turned down the proposal and insisted that they didn't need the staircase provided by the airport," the official added.

Obama offered a diplomatic reply when asked to comment on the airport "kerfuffle" on Sunday during a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Theresa May.

"I wouldn't over-crank the significance of it because, as I said, this is not the first time that these things happen and it doesn't just happen here. It happens in a lot of places including, by the way, sometimes our allies," Obama said, adding that "none of this detracts from the broader scope of the relationship".

Obama suggested that his Chinese hosts might have found the size of the US delegation "a little overwhelming".

"We have got a lot of planes, a lot of helicopters, a lot of cars and a lot of guys. If you are a host country, sometimes it may feel a little bit much," Obama added.

US National Security Adviser Susan Rice admitted that she was surprised by the handling of the President's arrival. "They did things that weren't anticipated," she told media.

According to the New York Times, Rice had appeared "baffled and annoyed" that the President had been forced to leave Air Force One through a door normally reserved for high-security trips to places such as Afghanistan.

In the lead-up to the final meeting between Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping, experts had predicted that the pair would seek to part ways on a positive note with the announcement that the world's two largest polluters would ratify the Paris climate agreement.

However, Obama's unconventional welcome -- and a series of subsequent skirmishes and quarrels between Chinese and US officials and journalists -- were a reminder of the underlying tensions.

"I think this time  maybe the seams were showing a little more than usual in terms of some of the negotiations and jostling that takes place behind the scenes," Obama admitted on Sunday.

Official statements issued by both sides on Saturday, as the pair held more than four hours of bilateral meetings, hinted at some of the disagreements between the world's two largest economies.

According to a White House statement, Obama told President Xi of "America's unwavering support for upholding human rights".

"China opposes any other country interfering in its internal affairs in the name of human rights issues," Xi told Obama in response, according to Xinhua news agency.

In an interview with CNN, Obama warned Beijing against muscle-flexing in the South China Sea. Xi told Obama his country would "unswervingly safeguard" its claims in the region.
A record-tying earthquake in the edge of Oklahomas key energy-producing areas rattled the Midwest from Illinois to the southwest part of Texas on Saturday, bringing fresh attention to the practice of disposing oil and gas field wastewater deep underground.

The United States Geological Survey said a 5.6 magnitude earthquake happened at 7:02 a.m. Saturday in north-central Oklahoma, on the fringe of an area where regulators had stepped in to limit wastewater disposal. That temblor matches a November 2011 quake in the same region.

An increase in magnitude 3.0 or greater earthquakes in Oklahoma has been linked to underground disposal of wastewater from oil and natural gas production.

The Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which since 2013 has asked wastewater-well owners to reduce disposal volumes in parts of the state, is requiring 37 wells in a 514 square-mile area around the epicenter of the earthquake to shut down within seven to 10 days because of previous connections between the injection of wastewater and earthquakes.

All of our actions have been based on the link that researchers have drawn between the Arbuckle disposal well operations and earthquakes in Oklahoma, spokesman Matt Skinner said Saturday. Were trying to do this as quickly as possible, but we have to follow the recommendations of the seismologists, who tell us everything going off at once can cause an (earthquake).

Skinner said the commissions area of interest includes another 211 square miles in Osage County. However, he said the commission doesnt know how many wells may be involved because the area is under the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the commission is working with that agency.

EPA decides on the wells in Osage County. We dont know anything about Osage County, legally were not even allowed to ask, Skinner said.

People in Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri; Chicago; Gilbert, Arizona; Fayetteville and Little Rock, Arkansas; Des Moines, Iowa; Memphis, Tennessee; and Big Lake in the southwest part of Texas, all reported feeling the earthquake. Dallas TV station WFAA tweeted that the quake shook its studios, too.

Pawnee County Emergency Management Director Mark Randell said no buildings collapsed in the town of 2,200 about 9 miles southeast of the epicenter. Weve got buildings cracked, Randell said. Most of its brick and mortar, old buildings from the early 1900s.

Randell also said a man suffered a minor head injury when part of a fireplace fell on him as he protected a child. The man was treated and released.

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin has declared a state of emergency for Pawnee County, allowing state agencies to make emergency purchases related to disaster relief and preparedness. The declaration is also the first step toward seeking federal aid should it be necessary.

The damage is not as severe as the 2011 quake near Prague, Oklahoma, about 60 miles south of Pawnee, despite being the same magnitude and approximately the same depth. Saturdays was 3.7 miles deep, compared to 3.1 miles in 2011. Both are shallow quakes, during which shaking is more intense, like setting off a bomb directly under a city, USGS seismologist Susan Hough has said.

However, hard bedrock beneath the surface in north-central Oklahoma is likely the reason for less damage, Oklahoma Geological Survey geophysicist Jefferson Chang said, adding that the subsurface around Prague is softer.

Its pretty much comparable to the Prague event, Chang said. But in harder rock, it wont shake as much.

Pawnee furniture store owner Lee Wills told The Associated Press that he first thought it was a thunderstorm.

Then it just  Everything went crazy after that. It just started shaking, said Wills, who lives about 2 miles outside of town. It rocked my house like a rubber band. Threw stuff off cabinets and out of cabinets, broke glasses.

(AP)
Two months from Election Day, Hillary Clinton has a clear edge over Donald Trump in nearly every measure traditionally used to gauge success in presidential races.

Shes raising huge sums of money and flooding airwaves with television advertisements. A sophisticated data team with a history of winning White House contests is meticulously tracking voters in key battleground states. Clinton also has multiple paths to the 270 electoral votes needed to win in November  so many that she could lose Ohio and Florida and still become Americas first female president.

But Trumps campaign believes there are pockets of voters eager to be persuaded not to back Clinton. While Trump squandered a summers worth of opportunities to court those voters, his campaign heads into the fall suddenly confident in its ability to make up lost ground.

Trump aides were gleeful Friday over the release of FBI notes regarding Clintons controversial email practices while secretary of state. His campaign plans to come out of the Labor Day weekend wielding the report as a warning about the Democrats judgment.

Getting Trump to make that kind of consistent case against Clinton has been a herculean task for much of the campaign. But advisers say hes more receptive to his new leadership teams more scripted approach, mostly because its coincided with a tightening in the public polls he monitors obsessively.

Theres a renewed focus on Hillary Clinton and her problems, which I think has been beneficial, said Matt Borges, the chairman of Ohios Republican Party. Hes got to sustain this for another couple weeks.

Still, Trump aides acknowledge that the brash businessman needs to do more to address his own shaky standing with voters.

Trumps campaign has spent no general election money on positive, biographical ads, despite having plenty of cash to do so. Efforts to highlight a warmer side of the New York real estate developer at the GOP convention were quickly overshadowed by flaps of his own making. Hes also angered anew Hispanics voters, a fast-growing segment of the electorate that Republicans are desperate to draw from, by holding fast to his tough immigration policies.

Hes running up against a population trend and a demographic reality, said Steve Schale, a Florida-based Democratic strategist.

If Trump can reshape the race, hell need to do so quickly. Early voting begins in some states this month. North Carolinians can start submitting absentee ballots Friday. In Ohio  a state no Republican has won the White House without  people can start voting on Oct. 12, a week before the last of three presidential debates.

Both campaigns expect enormous audiences for the debates. Clinton, who has been in intensive study sessions with her debate team in recent days, is sure to face higher expectations from voters. Trumps political inexperience leaves him with a lower bar to clear.

Privately, Republican leaders say it will take more than strong debates for their nominee to alter a race that appears to be leaning in Clintons favor. While Trump publicly maintains support from numerous high-ranking GOP officials, a striking number of discussions among Republicans in Washington often begin with an assumption that Clinton will be president come January.

Trump advisers vigorously dispute that the race has slipped from their grasp. They contend most Americans are just now tuning into the presidential campaign in a serious way.

Were very much on schedule to do what we need to do to turn out the vote for Mr. Trump, said Bob Paduchik, Trumps Ohio state director and one of the most experienced operatives on the Republicans staff. Paduchik said Trumps efforts heading into the fall are focused primarily on rallying disaffected Democrats and independents.

Clintons campaign has long argued that Trump is overestimating the number of voters willing to switch from voting Democratic in presidential election to Republican. But Clinton aides are monitoring movement toward a pair of third party candidates, Libertarian Gary Johnson and the Green Partys Jill Stein.

Theres no question youve got two candidates who are both underwater on their favorables right now, Joel Benenson, Clintons chief strategist and pollster, said by way of explaining the appeal of Johnson and Stein. I think its important as this gets closer that people understand the stakes and the importance of their vote.

Clinton and running mate Tim Kaine will have an all-star stable of Democrats making that case on their behalf through the fall.

President Barack Obama is expected to spend much of October campaigning for Clinton, focusing in particular on increasing turnout among young people, blacks and college-educated whites. Vice President Joe Biden will camp out in working class areas of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clintons vanquished primary rival, will be rallying the young voters and liberals who backed his campaign.

Trump will be largely on his own, with the exception of running mate Mike Pence and a few loyal supporters such as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. In the battle for control of the Senate, most Republicans in competitive races have stayed away from Trump.

Democrats now see a clear path to taking back control of the Senate, with party leaders identifying Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania as favorable opportunities to pick up seats. Democrats are also confident that if Clinton wins in some of the most contested state such as New Hampshire, North Carolina and Nevada, shell bring along the partys Senate candidates.

There are bright spots for Republicans in the Senate contests. Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio is running a campaign that mirrors Clintons more than Trumps  disciplined, well-funded, and heavily centered on data  and appears on track to hold his seat, even if Clinton carries the state in the presidential race.

(AP)
Donald Trump heads into the Labor Day weekend trailing his Hillary Clinton both nationally and in some of the most crucial states. But with just over two months to go, he still has a narrow window to try to make up for wasted time.

Trump remains deeply unpopular, especially with minority voters and women, giving him a tenuous path at best to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House.

Yet if this election has any lessons to offer, its to expect the unexpected and never write off Trump.

A look at Trumps Labor Day to Election Day to-do list:

_

GROUND IT OUT

Trump and Clinton are both historically unpopular candidates. That could make motivating voters to turn out  and ensuring they do  more important in this election than in most.

In the business, thats called ground game  and Trump has little of it to speak of.

The billionaire has outsourced virtually his entire early voting operation, battleground state staffing and get-out-the-vote organization to the Republican National Committee.

That makes Trumps relationship with the RNC critical. He must maintain a strong relationship with the national party, which could turn its back on Trump if it thinks its resources would be better spent on defending vulnerable Senate and House candidates.

Trump recently updated his leadership team with outspoken RNC critics, which could make his task harder. Almost completely reliant on the national partys ground game, Trump cant allow party leaders to jump ship.

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WALKING THE PATH

Trump has a narrow path to 270. With only two months to go until the Nov. 8 election, he doesnt have time to waste in states that arent on it.

Trump needs victories in Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania to have a realistic chance. That means he needs to live in those states for the next two months.

No longer can he devote his most valuable resource  his time  to states such as Connecticut, New York, Washington and Maine.

Thats not to say his presence wouldnt be helpful in other places. Battleground state polls suggest hes in trouble in virtually every region in the country, even in reliably GOP states  Georgia, Indiana, Utah and Arizona among them.

But its time for Trump to focus. He must devote the vast majority of his campaign appearances to the states that matter the most.

_

MINORITY SUPPORT

Nonwhite voters represented just 12 percent of the electorate in 1980. The number grew to 28 percent in 2012. Thats bad news for Trump, whose standing among blacks and Hispanic voters is historically bad. (Hes struggling among women in both parties, too.)

The Republican nominee must improve his standing with voters who are not white men to have a chance.

That wont be an easy task for a candidate who has called Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, has condemned the Black Lives Matter movement, and lashed out at female critics as fat pigs and dogs.

Avoiding such insults is a place for Trump to start. He can also spend more time in minority communities, as he did Friday in Philadelphia and was doing Saturday in Detroit.

Even if Trump has spent more of his time to date speaking to majority-white crowds in majority-white communities, hes not yet made the sale with white men.

Recent polls suggest that while Trump has more support than Clinton among white men, he is doing significantly worse with that demographic than GOP nominee Mitt Romney did four years ago.

_

STAY ON MESSAGE

With a drip, drip, drip of negative news about Clintons family foundation and her use of a private email server as secretary of state, Trump has plenty of material to use against his Democratic rival.

But time and again, the GOP nominees own controversial statements have dominated the news cycle and diverted attention away from Clintons problems.

To best position himself over the coming weeks, Trump needs to avoid major gaffes that lead voters to question his judgment and temperament, and keep the focus on Clinton.

Hell also need to fine-tune his attacks, delivering a more subtle critique that may sway undecided voters instead of the kinds of sweeping broadsides that appeal to his Republican base.

_

EXCEED DEBATE EXPECTATIONS

Expectations for the presidential debates are far lower for Trump than they are for Clinton, thanks in part to his relative political inexperience. If Trump appears composed and informed, he is likely to earn strong enough marks from undecided voters to win a closer look.

Yet the risks for the notoriously unpredictable Trump are enormous.

The GOP nominee has shown resistance to traditional debate preparation, and it remains unclear whether hell buckle down and engage in formal mock debates as a way to get ready.

Trumps performances at the GOP debates were uneven, with Trump often lashing out and mocking his rivals. Research suggests that in-your-face strategy could be especially risky now that hes up against a female opponent.

(AP)
Friday and Sunday are the busiest days for Israel Railways as soldiers are making their way home for Shabbos and then to their bases on Sunday. On the heels of the dispute between Israel Railways and its insistence on performing upgrades and maintenance on Shabbos, the railway has launched a strike that will result in major transportation snarls today, Sunday morning 2 Rosh Chodesh Elul.

The line running from northern communities to the center of the country (Haifa-Tel Aviv line) is not operating and police have announced traffic units will be out in larger numbers in an effort to keep traffic flowing. The railway was informed it may not continue its chilul Shabbos as it has done in recent weeks. As far as the railway is concerned, the work being conducted is pikuach nefesh, which the religious parties told PM Netanyahu is absurd. They explained that performing maintenance and upgrades on weekdays would indeed be costlier and even more difficult for commuters but none of this constitutes pikuach nefesh.

Much has been written in recent days regarding the chilul Shabbos by Israel Railways and the objections by the chareidi parties in Knesset. At the height of tensions, Minister Yaakov Litzman and Aryeh Deri together with Moshe Gafne met with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who promised he remains committed to the religious status quo. Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz stated he has always been and remains committed to protecting the status quo.

With the status quo in place for the time being the only thing left to do is blame the chareidim for sabotaging things and today, many tens of thousands of commuters including soldiers have to find a way to work and their respective military bases.

The ongoing dispute has led to a near coalition crisis which resulted in unprecedented strife between the Prime Minister and Transportation Minister Katz, as Mr. Netanyahu almost fired him on Shabbos.

During their meeting with Mr. Netanyahu, the chareidim explained the coalition is compelled to maintain the religious status quo as per coalition agreements. Realizing the magnitude of the dispute with the chareidim, the Prime Minister turned to his Transportation Minister, whom he blames for acting against his wishes and the policies of the coalition. He also blames Katz for creating an unnecessary coalition crisis.

The Prime Ministers Bureau released the following statement: This is an initiated and unnecessary crisis on the part of Minister Yisrael Katz designed to undermine relations between the Prime Minister and the chareidi public or alternatively to damage the image of the Prime Minister among the general public. From the outset there was no need to initiate work on Shabbat. It would have been possible to carry out the work on other dates that would not have harmed the chareidi public, passengers or soldiers. For example, it would have been possible to combine the work with the eight-day shutdown of the railroad  which has the approval of the Transportation Ministry  in the coming weeks. Israel Katz is holding passengers and soldiers as hostages in an unnecessary and artificial crisis that he initiated after having failed in his attempt to take over the Likud institutions. The Prime Minister is outraged over Minister Katzs cynical attack on passengers and soldiers and is doing his utmost to minimize the damage to these publics in the next 24 hours. To this end, the Prime Minister and Defense Minister have agreed to place buses at the disposal of soldiers over the next 24 hours. The Prime Minister has also instructed the Transportation Ministry to boost public transportation between Tel Aviv and Haifa with additional buses.

In the interim, Egged has increased bus service between Tel Aviv and Haifa and the Defense Ministry has charted buses to assist soldiers making their way back to their bases.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
The United States is skeptical an agreement with Russia to decease violence in Syria can work but will keep pursuing it nonetheless, President Barack Obama said Sunday as negotiators from both countries edged toward a deal.

Obama, speaking on the sidelines of the Group of 20 economic summit in China, said the U.S. and Russia still have grave differences about whats needed to end Syrias civil war and which opposition groups are legitimate targets for the U.S. and Russian militaries. But he said it is worth trying.

Were not there yet, Obama said. I think its premature for us to say theres a clear path forward, but theres the possibility at least for us to make some progress.

A deal could be announced as early as Sunday by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, said a senior U.S. State Department official, adding that the two countries were close to a deal but still had unresolved issues. The official wasnt authorized to discuss the negotiations publicly and requested anonymity.

Kerry and Lavrov have been deep in talks for weeks over a deal to boost U.S. and Russian military cooperation to fight the Islamic State group and other extremists in Syria  a step Moscow has long sought. The package would include provisions so aid can reach besieged areas of Syria and measures to prevent Syrian President Bashar Assads government from bombing areas where U.S.-backed rebels are operating.

U.S. officials have said that as part of a deal, Russia would have to halt offensives by Assads government, something it has failed to do over months of diplomatic efforts. They said the U.S. must get rebels to break ranks with the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front, a task that grew tougher after Nusra fighters last month successfully broke the siege of Aleppo, Syrias largest city and the site of fierce recent fighting.

Though negotiators have been hopeful a deal could come together while world leaders are gathered in Hangzhou for the G20, that optimism has been tempered by the failure of previous ceasefire deals to hold. The U.S. has long been wary of increasing military coordination with Russia in Syrias civil war because it says Russia continues striking moderate, U.S.-backed opposition groups in a bid to prop up Assad. The U.S. wants Russia to focus exclusively on IS and al-Qaida-linked groups.

Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin plan to huddle on the sidelines of the summit, the White House said.

For Obama, a military partnership with Russia would mark a significant change. When Russia started bombing targets in Syria last year, the U.S. declared the intervention an act of desperation and said its coalition fighting IS wasnt coordinating with Moscow. The minimal cooperation focused on avoiding mid-air collisions between Russian and coalition planes.

The new approach would involve intelligence and targeting cooperation. Assads forces would be barred from attacking areas outside of IS control; attacks on Nusra and its allies would be up to the U.S. and Russia to work out among themselves in their Joint Implementation Group. Defense Secretary Ash Carter and National Intelligence Director James Clapper both have expressed misgivings.

Discussions about the intractable Syria conflict and the related fight against IS have been a major focus as world leaders gather for the G20, which brings together the worlds major economies. Obama met first Sunday with new British Prime Minister Theresa May, then with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for their first sit-down since failed coup in his country in July.

Obama called the attempted overthrow terrible. He assured Erdogan that his national security team and the Justice Department would ensure that those responsible are brought to justice, a reference to Turkeys extradition request for an exiled cleric it holds responsible. The U.S. is still weighing Turkeys evidence against Pennsylvania-based cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Turkeys demands for the U.S. to hand over Gulen have coincided with growing clashes between Turkish forces and U.S.-backed Kurds in Syria. The Pentagon has backed the incursions, but said they should only be aimed at IS fighters. Turkey has used the operations to push back Syrian Kurds it accuses of seeking to claim more territory.

Obama called Turkey a key ally in the campaign to defeat the Islamic State and said we now need to finish the job of securing Turkeys border with Syria.

Since the failed coup, the U.S. has been alarmed by Turkeys diplomatic flirtations with Russia, Assads patron, and softened demand for Assads exclusion from a political transition.

Erdogan said it was important for the U.S. and Turkey to embrace a common attitude against terrorism. In a reference to Washingtons support for the Kurds, he said there are no good terrorists or bad; all terrorism is bad.

(AP)
During his tenure as Defense Minister, Moshe Yaalon had to order many budget cuts and included in the cuts were high school military academies around Israel. After leaving the post, replaced by Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Lieberman has to give the final approval for the cuts.

In his recent decision, Lieberman has approved the closure of Ohr Etzion, the only religious military academy, while permitting the non-religious one to continue operating, namely the academy in Haifa. It is reported the decision was made by Defense Ministry Director-General Udi Adam and approved by Lieberman.

The dati leumi communitys response was immediate and audible, accusing the Defense Ministry of taking another step to prevent the growth and rise of religious officers in the military. Some feel this has been the case since IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-General Gadi Eizenkott has sharply reduced the authority of the IDF Rabbinate and this appears to be a continuation of this policy.

Officials in the Defense Ministry insist the fact that Ohr Etzion is religious has absolutely nothing to do with the decision, which was made strictly upon professional considerations.

The dati leumi community is not accepting this and leading the battle is Bayit Yehudi party leader Education Minister Naftali Bennett.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
By Naseer Ganai: Separatist leaders today rejected visits of the Parliamentary delegations and track-II processes describing them as "deceitful methods of crisis management" to prolong sufferings of Kashmiris.

"One fails to understand what hope to attach with a delegation which has neither spelled out its mandate for any engagement on a clear agenda. People know that it is the same parliament which has given unfettered powers to their occupying force to use violence to hold Jammu and Kashmir forcibly with India against all norms of civilized behaviour and international law resulting in death, destruction, collective punishments and humiliation," said separatist leaders in response to the invite of Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti.

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On Saturday evening, Mehbooba urged separatist leaders to join the all-party delegation meet. Mehbooba in an open letter had asked separatist groups to participate in the delegation meet and engage with visiting Parliamentarians.

INDIAN WAR MACHINE ON KILLING SPREE



Reacting to Mehbooba's invite, a joint statement was issued by the three senior separatist leaders, Syed Ali Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Mohammad Yasin Malik on Sunday afternoon.

"No one is more aware than Mehbooba Ji that the Indian war machine is on a spree to kill, maim and disfigure an entire population into complete submission for demanding freedom from Indian occupation which is the birth right of all human beings," read the statement.

"Unfortunately Indian occupation forces in J&K have a fig-leaf available in the shape of a quisling government led by her with the only brief to provide a civilian mask to a brutal military occupation. Despite killings and injuries of war-proportions she continues to perform shamelessly this role of obfuscation," the joint statement read.

They said in a given situation that it was not surprising that even Mehbooba's dominant concern, as expressed in her letter, is to "lend credence and credibility" to the parliamentary delegation visiting Kashmir.

INDIAN ENGAGEMENT ONLY THROUGH VIOLENCE

"Indian engagement with the people of Jammu and Kashmir has been only through state violence perpetrated through these armed forces that have killed close to a lakh and brutalized all of the population. In politics India has deployed deceit, double talk, themselves and through their quislings, continuously for the past 70 years. These deceitful methods of crisis management through Parliamentary Delegations and Track-II only prolong the sufferings of the people and cannot take the place of a genuine transparent agenda-based dialogue to address the core issue of the peoples` right to self-determination in Jammu and Kashmir," the separatist leaders said.

"That has been our consistent stand and has been spelled out recently as well in our letters to various international and global forums," they added.

Also read:

Kashmir unrest: All-party meet with Mehbooba Mufti, other leaders ends



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Mr. Herzl Shaul zl, father of fallen IDF soldier Sgt. Oren Shaul HYD, was niftar last week after battling a difficult illness. Shaul and Lt. Hadar Goldin HYD were killed in fighting in Gaza during Operation Protective Shield and their bodies were snatched by Hamas into a tunnel. Hamas hope to use the bodies as negotiating pawns to obtain the release of terrorists imprisoned in Israel.

Following is the official statement released by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu following the announcement of Mr. Orens petira.

We received with great sorrow the news of the passing of Herzl Shaul, who suffered from a difficult disease and fought for his life over a prolonged period. In our meetings with Herzl, we saw a strong man who dedicated all of his time and energy to the struggles for his health and for the return of his late son Orens remains. We grieve for his dedicated wife Zahava, who experienced a terrible tragedy over the loss of her son Oron and must now cope with the great pain of the loss of her beloved husband. We also convey our condolences to their sons Aviram and Ofek, who have experienced terrible loss twice in two years.

On behalf of the entire people of Israel, we share in the familys bereavement and assure that we will continue to act in all fields to bring Oron back for a Jewish burial. This effort will not cease until Oron returns home.

At the start of the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday, 2 Rosh Chodesh Elul, Mr. Netanyahu added, Today, the late Herzl Shaul, the father of IDF soldier the late Oron Shaul, will be laid to rest. Orons body, along with that of Hadar Goldin, is held by Hamas, a vicious terrorist organization that respects no humanitarian norm. Herzl Shaul was a brave man and until his last days he fought to return his sons remains for a Jewish burial. At the same time, over the past year, he was compelled to fight the cancer with which he had been stricken. I saw him several times and on each occasion, from meeting to meeting, he appeared gaunter, and heroically met the double tragedy that befell him and his family. On behalf of the Government and the people of Israel, I would like to send condolences to his dear wife Zahava and their sons Aviram and Ofek. We will continue to act in all fields to bring the late Hadar Goldin and the late Oron Shaul back for a Jewish burial.

Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman recently elicited the ire of the families of Shaul and Goldin families, announcing he would not trade terrorists for the bodies of fallen soldiers in a prisoner exchange deal.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Israel Railways launched a partial strike on Sunday 2 Rosh Chodesh Elul after it was ordered by the government to stop its Shabbos maintenance and upgrades. This was the result of a near coalition crisis with the chareidi parties, insisting they will not tolerate Israel Railways continued trampling of Kedushas Shabbos, leading to the personal intervention of Prime Minister Netanyahu.

MK Moshe Gafne in a close forum with faction members blamed Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz for the crisis. It is reported that Katz decided to ignore the religious status quo and coalition agreements, giving the green light for the railways chilul Shabbos.

Prime Minister Netanyahu openly blamed Katz, demanding adherence to the so-called religious status quo.

In Likud circles there is an awareness of Katzs growing popularity and increasing desire to become Prime Minister. It is believed that Netanyahu is using this to known Katz down a number of popularity pegs, blaming the near coalition crisis on him and him alone. Katz has opted to remain totally silent, refusing all media requests for comment as the Prime Minister is shifting the blame for the entire crisis in Katzs lap.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
There is no pleasing some people. Charles Plowden, who has been running The Monks Investment Trust for 17 months, is a bit disappointed with how things have panned out  despite the trust recently reaching new share price highs and knocking spots off most rivals along the way.

It has been a difficult time to run an equity portfolio, he adds, somewhat cautiously.

Plowden, senior partner at Edinburgh-based investment house Baillie Gifford, took over the reins at The Monks Investment Trust after the previous managers  also from Baillie Gifford  failed to deliver the kind of investment returns demanded by the funds board.

New start: Plowden has conducted a major overhaul of the portfolio, selling more than 20 holdings

Despite the disappointment and the difficulties, Plowden has so far returned 18 per cent  slightly more than the average rival global trust and the funds benchmark, the FTSE World Index. Over the past year alone, the trust has generated 29 per cent.

Markets have been volatile, he says. There have been major mood swings triggered by Brexit, economic turmoil in China and weak commodity prices. Against this backdrop, it has been difficult to outperform markets to the extent that we would like to have done. But I am sure investments we have made since March last year will come through.

Plowden has certainly not hung around in stamping his mark on the trust. He has conducted a major overhaul of the portfolio, selling more than 20 holdings.

New positions have been taken in firms he believes are bound to grow in the near future. Indeed, growth is the overriding investment theme with companies categorised into four camps  stalwart, rapid, cyclical and latent. All are generating double-digit rises in annual earnings and most are in technology-breakthrough sectors, giving the portfolio a geographic bias towards the US and emerging markets.

Plowdens investment approach, dubbed the global alpha strategy, is tried and tested. It has been used with great success by him and his team at Baillie Gifford for 11 years to run portfolios worth 20 billion for institutional clients such as pension funds.

Major overhaul: Charles Plowden says he's disappointed despite the trust reaching new share price highs

As befits someone who believes stock picking is a great skill, Plowden is an advocate of active management. Despite a wave of investor support for low-cost investment funds  passive funds that track markets  he insists that managers with high active share, low portfolio turnover, a long investment horizon and who engage with company management are far more likely to outperform indices after fees.

Indeed, Baillie Gifford now quotes an active share figure for each fund it runs, giving investors a clear indication of how different a portfolio is from its benchmark.

At Monks, the figure is 93 per cent. So there is only a 7 per cent correlation between the stocks Monks holds and those in the FTSE World Index.

Baillie Gifford likes to badge itself as an active fund manager that charges retail investors low institutional prices.

This is definitely the case with Monks, where the ongoing charge is a competitive 0.59 per cent  a third of that of most investment funds. Last week Baillie Gifford also said it had cut annual charges on trusts Edinburgh Worldwide and Baillie Gifford Japan.
Peter Scott has form. Now 69, he has been in the advertising industry for almost 40 years, during which time he has built up a string of small businesses into huge, international enterprises.

In 1979, he co-founded WCRS, one of the fastest-growing agencies of the 1980s. Ten years later, he took part of that business and developed it into Aegis, ultimately sold for 3.2 billion to a Japanese company. And in 2004 he created marketing business Engine Group, which was sold for 100 million a decade later.

Ad veteran: Peter Scott expects to make three to four acquisitions a year at his new agency building revenue up to 100 million by 2020

Now he is hoping to repeat past success at Be Heard Group, an agency focused exclusively on the digital world. Its services range from designing websites to helping firms steer through the complex world of online advertising.

The shares are 3.05p but should rise substantially as Scott expands the company.

The business was founded last autumn, since when it has made two acquisitions  digital media agency agenda21 and website specialist MMT Digital. Scott expects to make three to four acquisitions a year, building revenue up to 100 million by 2020.

The target sounds ambitious, but the advertising world is changing fast as consumer habits evolve and people increasingly turn to the internet to buy anything from food to electricity.

Independent research suggests that global online purchases will more than double from 1.1 trillion in 2014 to more than 2.5 trillion in 2020. And, even if consumers ultimately go into shops to buy goods, research is often conducted online, while they increasingly share their opinions about what they have bought on social media.

Not surprisingly then, companies are rapidly rethinking how they choose to market themselves and their products. Over the next four years, internet advertising is expected to overtake that of television, with predicted spending of more than 185 billion.

Many advertising giants, such as WPP in Britain and Omnicom in the US, have developed digital arms to cope with this shift. Numerous small, independent agencies have also sprung up in recent years, often focusing on certain fields, such as website design or social media advertising.

Client base: The agency already has customers including Vodafone, the AA and utility group SSE

Scotts intention is to turn Be Heard into something slightly different  a marketing company that specialises in all things digital.

As such, the group will buy businesses in the sector and bring them together so they can offer customers a wide range of digital services, rather than one or two niche areas.

The idea has won support from large investors, such as asset managers Schroders and Henderson Global, as well as entrepreneur Nigel Wray. Companies increasingly like dealing with digital specialists too, often appointing small, up-and-coming agencies specifically to handle internet-based work.

Be Heards board is impressive, filled with experts from the worlds of marketing, advertising and the internet, including Rakhi Goss- Custard, who spent 12 years at Amazon, ultimately becoming director of UK media.

This team helps Be Heard to punch above its weight when it comes to attracting new customers, while the groups network of contacts also gives it early access to potential acquisitions.

Talks are under way with numerous potential targets, but Scott is taking a cautious approach, only choosing to buy firms after spending several months analysing their business, their sector and their people.

As a further precaution, acquisitions will always include a proportion of Be Heard shares, to incentivise management once they become part of the group.

Progress to date has been good and customers already include Vodafone, the AA and utility group SSE. Over time Scott is keen to expand into the US but again, a measured approach will be taken.

Be Heard releases its first-half figures on September 15 and they should be encouraging. For the full year, brokers expect sales of 9.1 million and profits of 700,000, rising to 13.2 million and 1.5 million respectively in 2017.

Midas verdict: Digital advertising is multi-faceted. Companies have to think about website design, e-commerce and social media, not to mention where to advertise across the internet and how to ensure they are noticed. Be Heard has been set up to help them address these issues. Scott has been successful throughout his career and should be able to do it again. At 3.05p, the shares could go far.
Sonakhi Sinha's Akira is not the first Hindi film to feature an ass-kicking heroine. Here are five Bollywood films where the Bollywood heroine was not a showpiece but the showstopper.

(L to R) Rekha in a still from Khoon Bhari Maang, Sonakshi Sinha in a poster of Akira, Anushka Sharma in a still from NH10

By Devarsi Ghosh: Sonakshi Sinha, for once, is not dancing around trees. In her latest film Akira, she is seen flexing her muscles, kicking ass, doing karate chops and not forgiving anyone as the film's tagline will tell you: No One Will Be Forgiven.

Sure, the box office is not in a mood to forgive as well (Rs 10.45 crore in two days), but that does not mean that women action heroines in Bollywood are a recipe for box office disaster.



#Akira shows minimal growth on Sat... Sun is crucial... Fri 5.15 cr, Sat 5.30 cr. Total: ? 10.45 cr. India biz. taran adarsh (@taran_adarsh) September 4, 2016

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As it is, women are either relegated to play arm-candies or lesser supporting characters to male heroes, or even if it is a 'feminist' film, they are not really seen doing action, where they are the ones to take decisions instead of playing foil to the male action hero.

As such, Akira, is unique as it follows the tradition of heroine-oriented films where the lead character takes her own decisions and makes her way in the world of big, bad men either through conceit or by maar-peet.



Here's looking at five such films, other than Akira, that left an indelible mark in the annals of Bollywood.

ALSO READ: Akira movie review

ALSO READ: Has Sonakshi Sinha done the worst films among her contemporaries?

ALSO READ: Smooch to sindoor, scandal to suicide, new Rekha biography reveals shocking details

Khoon Bhari Maang (1988)

Dir: Rakesh Roshan



Rekha plays the dual roles of the hapless Aarti Verma and the cunning and vengeful Jyoti in Khoon Bhari Maang that won her the Filmfare Award for Best Actress. Sanjay (Kabir Bedi) plays the main antagonist who kills his wife Aarti for her wealth. But soon, she returns, having transformed into the very beautiful Jyoti, with some plastic-surgery, a much-abused old-timey Bollywood plot device. Thus, Aarti wins over Sanjay's heart and eventually has her revenge.

Anjaam (1994)

Dir: Rahul Rawail

Madhuri Dixit stars as Shivani who is Vijay's (Shah Rukh Khan) dreamgirl. But Shivani is married and Vijay is a filthy rich psychopath. So Vijay kills Shivani's husband, sister and also daughter and gets the law to put Shivani behind bars. Shivani wants revenge, revenge, and only revenge and when she gets out of prison, boy, is she angry!

Ek Hasina Thi (2004)

Dir: Sriram Raghavan

Urmila Matondkar stars as the innocent Sarika in Sriram Raghavan's debut film, an ahead-of-its-time neo-noir psychological thriller. After she is conned by 'boyfriend' Karan (Saif Ali Khan, gleaming with serpentine charm) and put behind bars, she escapes prison to get revenge. She drops bodies left, right and centre on her way to reach Karan and how does she have the last laugh? By feeding Karan to rats in a secluded place where he cannot be heard.

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Kahaani (2012)

Dir: Sujoy Ghosh



Vidya Balan in the 2012 blockbuster Kahaani plays Vidya Bagchi who is pregnant and looking for her missing husband in dingy, dark and dangerous Kolkata. But there are sinister players lurking beneath the surface, including assassins, Indian intelligence agencies and terrorists. But Vidya Bagchi is focussed and committed and using amazing deceptive skills, she reaches the enemy and kills him with with style.



NH10 (2015)

Navdeep Singh

Anushka Sharma is Meera, an upmarket Dehlite girl who knows that she lives in a patriarchal, oppressive society, but has never been in a situation to confront institutionalised bigortry. However, things take an ugly turn when she and her husband get caught in the badlands of Haryana, among a bunch of depraved, brutal men who will not hesitate to kill. And kill, they do; Arjun is killed, and they are after Meera. But this time, she hits back. With a steel rod. One by one.

Akira, directed by AR Murugadoss, stars Sonakshi Sinha, Konkona Sen Sharma and Anurag Kashyap. It is presently running in theatres.

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( The writer tweets as @devarsighosh )



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Hill & Smith has an international business focused on several fast-growing sectors, including upgrading UK roads, modernising US energy plants and creating security structures for high-profile events such as Trooping the Colour.

Midas recommended the shares exactly two years ago, when they were 549p. Since then, they have more than doubled to 1185p, as both the UK and US governments have pledged to spend billions upgrading national infrastructure.

In Britain, annual spending on roads is predicted to rise from 1 billion to more than 3 billion between now and 2020.

High profile projects: Hill & Smith creates security structures for events such as Trooping the Colour

Hill & Smith, based in Solihull, West Midlands, specialises in motorway messages that warn drivers about problems and temporary barriers that infuriate motorists in a hurry.

It also makes handrails, flooring and other products for energy and water plants, including ultra-durable support structures. This business is particularly strong in the US, where utility sites are ageing.

The firm recently moved into the security business too, creating temporary constructions designed to stop terrorists driving vehicles through popular events, as happened in Nice on July 14.

Chief executive Derek Muir joined the business as a sales engineer 28 years ago and has run the group since 2007. Profits and dividends have grown steadily under him and are likely to continue in the same vein.

Last week, the group unveiled a 28 per cent leap in interim pre-tax profits to 31.7 million and a 20 per cent rise in the dividend to 8.5p.

Analysts expect full-year profits for 2016 to grow by 22 per cent to 65 million with the dividend up more than 17 per cent to 24.3p. Further growth is pencilled in for the next two years as well.
It was one of the busiest days of the year for motorway services at the weekend. That may sound like bad news if you were a holidaymaker, but for Rod McKie  the boss of Welcome Break  it is the best news he could hear.

Sales soared at its sites as Britain was buoyed by the good weather and, of course, by the early signs of a new boom in the so-called staycation and tourism. As the pound has collapsed, more Britons stayed at home for their holidays and more foreigners flocked to the UK for a summer break.

Welcome Break broke sales records at 14 of its 24-strong network which runs from Lanarkshire to Hampshire, and McKie reckons that the best is yet to come.

McKie travels 40,000 miles a year in his Tesla electric company car and last year visited every Welcome Break site non-stop while wearing a Superman suit

The traffic last weekend was phenomenal, we saw some huge numbers, he enthuses. Overall, this summer has been pretty steady and I think next year will be stronger. This year most people had already made their commitments to go abroad, but next year well see the real benefit.

The fact that fewer of us will be able to afford a foreign holiday next year will be seen by most as a Brexit cost. For McKie, its a Brexit boon.

Not only Welcome Break, but its rivals  market leader Moto and third-place Roadchef  are in for some good times, in contrast to just a few years ago when all three were teetering on the brink of insolvency, crippled by huge debts, strict regulation and high running costs.

It was partly their own fault, concedes McKie. The old model was to charge as high prices as possible, give people the worst service possible and then expect them to come back, and that just doesnt work. Instead, weve been modernising, giving customers what they want, when they want it, charging fair prices for a fair product.

McKies strategy has been to bring big fashionable brands into its service stations. To illustrate the point, he has suggested we meet at Welcome Breaks South Mimms services on the M25, where it has just opened a Pret A Manger.

In fact, now all of Welcome Breaks sites are fully branded  gone are the anonymous catering buffets and own-brands such as Red Hen. Now visitors are greeted by high street names such as Starbucks, Waitrose, KFC and WH Smith, all run by Welcome Break employees.

Visitors are greeted by high street names such as Starbucks, Waitrose, KFC and WH Smith, all run by Welcome Break employees

On the price issue, motorway service stations have come in for some stick, with recent newspaper articles accusing them of ripping customers off. McKie is furious about this.

They were comparing Mars bars here to Mars bars in Tesco  weve got 24 sites open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for goodness sake, he says in exasperation. Were not going to beat Tesco on the price of a Mars bar. I have a 70 million payroll, we spend 1 million a year on Tarmac for our car parks. Every time we refurbish the loos its another 1 million. It just doesnt compare.

Footfall has gone up over the past six years from 80 million to 85 million now and like-for-like sales are up 5 per cent, so we know it works.

Welcome Break has spent 35 million over the past few years on refurbishing its sites and upgrading facilities. The last outside toilets (at Sarn Park in South Wales) are finally gone.

But peoples memories of what service stations used to be like are hard to shift. The pub chat is that theyre a rip-off, awful, dont offer choice, poor quality, admits McKie. But its moved forward massively since Ive been here, considering where its come from.

On the price issue, motorway service stations have come in for some stick, with recent newspaper articles accusing them of ripping customers off

We were labelled the worst motorway services in Europe six years ago, and now I think were the best. Its frustrating trying to change peoples opinion, but its great when you stand at the front door and hear people say Wow! 

Most of McKies customers are in and out in 20 minutes  92 per cent use the toilets  and while 25 per cent of visitors dont spend anything, this is down from 35 per cent a few years ago.

Innovations such as the Starbucks drive-throughs mean that people can buy without having to stop. But some developments used by rivals get short shrift: having a pub onsite (following the Wetherspoon at Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire) is not something McKie plans to copy. It is not for us  we dont think its appropriate, it doesnt work.

Having a Pret A Manger is a bit more McKies style and it marks a full circle for his career  he worked at the sandwich chain when it had just six outlets.

After working at TGI Fridays and Coffee Republic, he was asked to join Welcome Break. I intended to stay for four years but have been here for 15. But I never get bored, its such a diversity. Im running retails, hotels, food, gaming, dealing with business people, leisure travellers, truckers. All UK Plc is here.

Next week McKie is taking his team to the Goodwood Revival, when theyll be dressed up as Second World War RAF pilots

Expansion is hard when new motorway service stations are not exactly growing in number  just two have been opened in the last decade. The last, at Cobham, Surrey, took 16 years in the planning.

Despite the fact that I love them, we are a blot on the landscape for many people, says McKie sadly. But we employ a lot of people, were like a town here. We could expand in France, for example, if we wanted to, but for our current owners [a consortium of largely Dutch banks] its not on their agenda.

While the numbers are huge  accounts to January 27, 2015 show a 671 million turnover and a 30 million operating profit  due to 41 million in interest payments, the final figure is a pre-tax loss of 10.5 million.

McKie is relaxed about the figures. We make an operating profit but an overall loss because its a huge cash business, its always been heavily leveraged and always will be, but debt is going down  weve massively deleveraged over the last four or five years.

A question about possible new owners makes him laugh. As a sector, motorway service stations are now perceived as sexy, he says, raising an eyebrow to acknowledge the improbability of such a statement. But its because weve become a quasi-infrastructure business, its regulated and theres steady growth.

McKie travels 40,000 miles a year in his Tesla electric company car and last year visited every Welcome Break site non-stop while wearing a Superman suit. The tour took 25 hours and rather than just being a moment of eccentricity, it was a fund-raising challenge for Children In Need.

But on his days off he zooms around in one of his 14 classic cars  a collection of Aston Martins, Ferraris and Lamborghinis he keeps at home in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, where he lives with his wife and daughter. He also has two adult sons.
Remember the big row over Ireland, the EU and billions of pounds in taxpayers money? No, not the recent Apple tax battle, I mean the bailout of the Irish economy in 2010.

Back then, EU member countries  including the UK  underwrote tens of billions of pounds worth of cheap loans to help restore order to the Irish financial system, which like many had been ravaged by the financial crisis.

Unlike the UK, Ireland was too small (and stuck inside the euro) to manage its crisis without a little help from its neighbours. At the time it was mooted that perhaps Ireland should be required to start charging companies higher taxes.

Its now a bit rum for Ireland to start claiming that in the Apple case the EU has overstepped the mark, says Simon Watkins

Even then fellow EU states were enraged by Irelands low corporation tax rate, which they regarded as encouraging multi-nationals to channel their revenues through Ireland to avoid paying higher rates of tax in other EU countries.

In 2010, Ireland successfully fought off the pressure to raise its corporate taxes, but it accepted harsh austerity which squeezed its citizens still and got its bailout.

Which is why its now a bit rum for Ireland to start claiming that in the Apple case, the EU has overstepped the mark and is interfering in its sovereign rights.

Not only does Ireland have a low corporation tax rate, but it allowed Apple to set up companies that had no taxable location, meaning that in effect it paid virtually no tax at all on a high proportion of its business.

Without that structure, Apple would have paid more tax over the last 12 years, either in Ireland (which would have been useful during its financial crisis when every little might have helped) or perhaps even in other EU countries including the UK.

Not only does Ireland have a low corporation tax rate, but it allowed Apple to set up companies that had no taxable location, so it paid virtually no tax at all on a high proportion of its business

Most British citizens already feel a simmering fury at the Irish-centred tax dodges engineered by many global companies.

It is simply extraordinary that Ireland is surprised that the European Commission has taken a hard line on the Apple case. It may eventually emerge that legally this cannot be made to stick, but the fairness of this case from the point of view of taxpayers across the rest of Europe is unanswerable.

And there is also an echo here for Britain and our own future. Britain is preparing to leave the EU, but we are not even close to deciding the terms of our relationship with it.

Some aggressive Brexiteers have argued that we could set ourselves up as a low corporation tax economy and so lure big business to Britain in a similar way to Ireland.
COFFEE EXPANSION Nespresso is planning to open four new 'boutiques' in the UK before the end of the year.

The coffee capsule company, which is owned by Nestle and promoted by George Clooney, already has 14 outlets in Britain.

FLOAT BONANZA The City is gearing up for a 30billion float frenzy over the next six months. The biggest on the horizon is the 10billion listing of mobile phone operator O2.

It is also thought Sky Bet, software firm Misys and cinema chain Vue could list.

BREXIT BOOST A new mobile phone firm backed by John Caudwell, the billionaire founder of Phones4U, says that the business stands to benefit on the back of Brexit.

Unshackled.com - a new website offering unlocked phones on payment plans alongside SIM-only contracts - claims its emphasis on savings could ultimately boost business.

HEALTH TROUBLE One in eight people are forced to stop work before state pension age because of ill health or disability, new research reveals.

Almost half a million workers within five years of pension age have had to leave their job for medical reasons, according to the TUC.

WORKER WORRIES Workers from the EU are concerned about their status following the Brexit vote, and some have already resigned, a survey of UK businesses shows. The study of 800 firms by the British Chambers of Commerce revealed that one in 10 have already been told by EU staff that they intend to leave the country.

FINANCIAL EDUCATION Academy schools are being urged to pledge to teach financial education from this academic year.
Marks & Spencer will cut 500 head office jobs this week as part of a radical turnaround plan by its new chief executive Steve Rowe.

The redundancies will amount to 15 per cent of workers at its head office in Paddington, London.

The retail giant employs 3,500 staff at its headquarters and 90,000 nationally. Half the job losses, due to be announced in more detail later this week, are expected to be contractors. The job losses come as the group battles to revive falling clothing sales and stagnant profits.

Marks & Spencer's chief executive Steve Rowe will cut 500 head office jobs this week as part of his radical turnaround plan for the chain

Rowe, who ran M&Ss successful food business for three years, was promoted to replace former chief executive Marc Bolland only five months ago, but is already making radical changes.

He announced a review of management responsibilities just a month after he took charge and has taken personal responsibility for the firms shrinking clothing business.

Last month Marks & Spencer also drafted in a new advertising agency, Grey London, to run its 60 million account ending its 16-year relationship with Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R.

The review of the head office is part of a strategic overhaul of the firm ahead of a wider business plan that Rowe will announce to investors in November.

It is expected to include a plan to close poorly performing stores, a review of the international division and a frank assessment of the firms clothing business which has struggled to grow sales for many years.

Half the job losses at Marks and Spencer are expected to be contractors

Asked to comment on the head office cuts a spokesperson for M&S said: We said at our preliminary results in May that organisation was an area of the business that needed further consideration and that we would update on this in the autumn. We would never comment on rumour and speculation and have nothing further to add.

Meanwhile on Friday Marks & Spencer announced a fresh plan to overhaul staff pay and benefits.

Earlier proposals, designed to deal with the new National Living Wage had come under fire from worker representatives and MPs.

The companys retail director Sacha Berendji said the latest plans followed consultation with staff and would mean M&S workers were amongst the highest paid in UK retail and receive one of the best benefits packages.
By PTI: Bhubaneswar, Sep 4 (PTI) A coastal highway, around 451-km-long, is proposed to be constructed along the Odisha coastline with an emphasis on designing it in a manner which is "aesthetic and environmentally compatible", officials said today.

A high-level meeting of the National Highway Authorities of India (NHAI), Odisha region, held under the chairmanship of Development Commissioner and Chief Secretary (in-charge) R Balakrishnan, considered the proposed alignment of the highway yesterday.

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Balakrishnan directed the officials concerned to make the road design "aesthetically" and in a way which is "environmentally compatible", in consultation with the Forest and Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) authorities.

He also sought steps to plan the alignment in a manner which boosts tourism and port-based industrial activities in the state.

The NHAI was also advised to share the plan with the respective departments and collectors for their considered inputs, an official statement said.

Dharmanada Sarangi, Chief General Manager (CGM), NHAI, who made a PowerPoint presentation on the proposal, said the proposed highway currently proceeds through Chhatraput-Satapada-Konark-Astaranga-Nuagaon-Paradeep?Ratanpur -Satabhaya-Dhamara-Basudevpur-Talapada-Chandipur-Chandaneswar? Digha.

Of the total length of 451 km, around 29 km come under Ganjam district, 153 km under Puri district, 54 km under Jagatsinghpur, 49 km under Kendrapara, 61 km under Bhadrak, 99 km under Balasore district and six km connecting East Midnapore district in West Bengal, he said, adding that over 178 villages would be connected by the highway.

It would also have bridges over several rivers including the Rushikulya, Kushabhadra, Mahanadi, Brahmani, Baitarani and Subarnarekha, besides Chilika lake, the statement said.

The road, which would boost tourism and industrial activities in the region, would also serve as a highway linkage to all the ports in the state.

Available data shows that so far, two expert consultants have been engaged for carrying out the preliminary survey and preparing the Detailed Project Report (DPR).

While the preliminary survey has been done and the preliminary alignment of the road suggested, the DPR is expected to be prepared by February, 2017, the statement said. PTI SKN SUS RC

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By PTI: Puducherry, Sept 2 (PTI) The nation-wide strike called by central trade unions evoked a mixed response in this Union Territory today.

Private buses, autos and other passenger vehicles were off the roads while state-run buses were operated as usual. Shops and establishments downed their shutters. Cinema houses suspended the shows for the day.

However, government departments registered normal attendance, official sources said.

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Police sources said around 1,200 workers of different trade unions were taken into custody when they blocked roads at several places.

Police pickets have been posted at all vulnerable points.

A batch of employees of centrally run premier health institute JIPMER observed a fast extending support to the strike, called by the central trade unions to press their charter of demands. PTI COR VS ABI DK

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By PTI: Motihari, Sep 4 (PTI) Three persons have been arrested along with three kg of charas valued at Rs 30 lakh in international market from Raxaul town of Bihars East Champaran district, an excise official said today.

Confirming the arrest and seizure of the contraband, District Excise Superintendent Keshav Kumar Jha said acting on a tip off, a team was constituted to nab the smugglers.

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The persons were arrested from Lakshmipur excise check post in Raxaul town of the district late last night, he said, adding officials recovered one kg of charas from each of the three smugglers.

The arrested have been identified as Akhilesh Kumar, Saddam Hussain and Mohammad Saheb Ansari, all residents of East Champaran district, Jha said.

They crossed over to India from Nepal to supply the contraband item, Jha said, adding the accused have been sent to jail. PTI CORR AR CR SRY SNP

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By India Today Web Desk: It's out in the open. Amitabh Bachchan has openly confirmed to doing Vijay Krishna Acharya's Thug and also the fact that he will be sharing screen space with Aamir Khan for the first time in his career. There were speculations if both these acting exponents would collaborate for this film.

ALSO READ: Amitabh Bachchan to star in Kabali remake in Rajinikanth's role?

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In an interview to a leading online publication, Amitabh said, "Its a great honour and privilege to be working with Aamir and to be working with Yashraj again and also to work with Victor, I just look forward to that moment.?? He also went on to add that Thug might not be the final title of the film.

We had earlier reported to you that the film will see Aamir Khan play a tapori for the first time since Vikram Bhatt's Ghulam and Ram Gopal Varma's Rangeela. Aamir was looking to do something fun and light after the intense transformations in Nitesh Tiwari's Dangal. That's when his Dhoom 3 director offered him this crime caper, which was earlier rejected by Hrithik Roshan.

Amitabh Bachchan is currently looking forward to his courtroom drama, Pink which stars Tapasee Pannu and is directed by Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury. Pink will release on September 15, and is being produced by Shoojit Sircar.

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By William Lewis

The 11th State Senate district of northeast Queens was represented by Republican Frank Padavan for 38 years, before his defeat by Tony Avella in 2010. This year Avella is being challenged by Republican Mark Cipolla, who is an attorney and comes from Hollis Hills. Two years ago Avella had no opponent in the general fall election, although he had a Democratic Party primary.

Cipolla thinks it is important for the Republicans to maintain control of the state Senate since the Democrats control the State Assembly and the governorship. He intends to make corruption and ethics in government major issues in the campaign.

He points out that the recent corruption criminal trials against the leaders of the state Senate and State Assembly negatively affect the image of our state government.

Cipolla believes strongly in political ethics in government. He will continue stressing this issue in candidates nights. The race will be Cipollas first political campaign. For Avella political campaigns have been his career. He began by serving on the staff of several elected officials, then served in the City Council and later ran unsuccessfully for mayor before winning a seat in the Senate. Cipolla thinks he has a chance to win the race, especially if the Republican slate does well.

As we proceed through the presidential campaign, one of the most important aspects of the race are the debates. These events will have a strong influence on the voters.

Looking at the historical background of the debates, the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 in Illinois stands out. Abraham Lincoln lost the race for U.S. Senate in 1858, but he did well in the debates and became known nationally as the result of his performance. That notoriety helped Lincoln get the Republican presidential nomination two years later.

In recent times since World War II, the Nixon-Kennedy debates are memorable. In 1960 there were four presidential debates scheduled. It was the first debate that set the tone for the rest of them.

During these confrontations Kennedy looked more presidential than Nixon. He seemed to have better answers for the questions and was more relaxed. It was after the first debate that Kennedys campaign gained momentum. It seemed to most political observers that the first debate was a great help to Kennedys campaign.

It can be said that it was the debates that helped win the presidency for Ronald Reagan. He impressed his audiences with his presidential style and articulate speaking. Reagan won the elections in 1980 and 1984 by wide margins.

As we view the forthcoming debates in the next few months, we can say that they will have a significant impact on the results of the presidential election. Democrat Hillary Clinton did well in her debates with Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders. Donald Trump also did well in the debates with the other 16 Republican candidates. The debates will play a leading role in this campaign, as they have done in past campaigns. The three presidential debates this year may decide which candidate wins the race. The candidates will be putting a lot of preparation into these events.

As for the presidential race of 2016 itself, the race is the most unusual of races during the last century. It will be interesting to see how it turns out.
Syrian rebels supported by Turkish and coalition air strikes pushed further west into areas held by Islamic State in northern Syria as Ankara and its allies step up a campaign to rout the jihadists from the border area.

Turkish strikes destroyed three buildings used by IS around the villages of Kunduriyah and Arab Izzah, about 30 kilometres (18 miles) west of the border town of Jarabulus, the army said in a statement.

The pro-Ankara rebels took Jarabulus from IS last week on the first day of an unprecedented Turkish offensive aimed both at IS and a US-backed Kurdish militia that had been leading the fight against the jihadists.

In the last few days the rebels have been moving quickly to clear the jihadists from the last stretch of the border under their control, backed by Turkish artillery and Turkish and coalition air strikes.

The army said the area around Kunduriyah was now controlled by the opposition rebels.

An AFP photographer at the border said Turkish-led forces were undertaking operations near the town of Al-Rai, about 20 kilometres further west.

On Thursday, Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis estimated IS only retained control of about 25 kilometers of the border, east of Al-Rai.

Turkey sent tanks and troops into Syria on August 24 to both combat IS  which has been blamed for a string of suicide attacks inside Turkey  and halt the westward advance of the Kurdish People\s Protection Militia (YPG).

Turkey sees the YPG as a terror offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) waging a bloody three-decade insurgency on its soil.

The Turkey-Kurdish fight is yet another complication in Syria\s tangled civil war, with both Turkey and the US seeking to retake territory from IS jihadists by supporting different proxy groups.

Washington, which backs the YPG, on Monday expressed alarm at Turkey\s bombardments of the group and called on its two allies to remain focused on fighting IS.

Ankara has said the YPG will remain a target unless it returns east of the Euphrates river into the two cantons under Kurdish control.

On Friday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dismissed US claims that the YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) had retreated to the northeast, as demanded.

"Right now, people say they have gone to the east but we say no, they haven\t crossed," Erdogan said.

A US defence official in Washington, who requested anonymity, said that any continuing presence by the YPG in the area was "completely insignificant".

Turkey\s operation against the YPG has raised tensions with Syrian Kurds in other areas.

On Friday, Turkish security forces fired tear gas and water cannon at stone-throwing protesters in the Syrian border town of Kobane, which Kurdish militia took from IS in 2015 after a lengthy battle.

The demonstrators were protesting the route of a five-kilometre wall being built by the Turks between Kobane and the Turkish town of Suruc.

SOURCE: AFP
Bangladesh hanged a wealthy tycoon and top financial backer of its largest Islamist party late Saturday for war crimes, dealing a massive blow to the group\s ambitions in the Muslim-majority nation.

Mir Quasem Ali, a key leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, was executed after being convicted by a controversial war crimes tribunal for offences committed during the 1971 independence conflict with Pakistan.

The 63-year-old was hanged at the Kashimpur high security jail in Gazipur, some 40 kilometres (25 miles) north of Dhaka, amid stepped-up security outside the prison and in the capital.

"The execution took place at 10:35 pm (1635 GMT)," law and justice minister Anisul Huq told AFP.

Six opposition leaders have now been executed for war crimes after the secular government led by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina set up a domestic war crimes tribunal in 2010.

Five were top leaders of the Jamaat party  a massive setback for the Islamists in the world\s third largest Muslim nation, which has been reeling from a wave of deadly extremist attacks claimed by the Islamic State group.

After the Supreme Court rejected his final appeal against the penalty on Tuesday, Ali declined to seek a presidential pardon, which would require an admission of guilt, paving the way for his execution.

Prosecutors said Ali was a key commander of the notorious pro-Pakistan militia in the southern port city of Chittagong during the war, and later became a shipping, banking and real estate tycoon.

They said he spent millions of dollars of his fortune to hire international lobbyists to derail the war crime trials.

Hundreds of people in Dhaka and Chittagong held impromptu street celebrations as news of the execution was broadcast live on television.

But more than 1,000 police were deployed in Gazipur and hundreds of paramilitary border guards were outside the prison and in Dhaka, as authorities feared violence by his Islamist supporters, officials said.

Home minister Asaduzzaman Khan warned Islamists against any "unruly" activities.

The war crimes trials have divided the country, with supporters of Jamaat and the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) branding them a sham aimed at eliminating their leaders.

The executions and convictions of Jamaat officials plunged Bangladesh into one of its worst crises in 2013 when tens of thousands of Islamist activists clashed with police in protests that left some 500 people dead.

Jamaat, which is banned from contesting elections, has called a nationwide strike for Monday to protest the hanging, saying Ali was "murdered" for playing a "key role in the Islamic movement" in Bangladesh.

Ali had helped revive Jamaat and made it a potent force in Bangladesh politics by setting up charities, businesses and trusts linked to it after it was allowed to operate in the late 1970s.

Before he was arrested in 2012, Ali headed the Diganta Media Corporation, which owns a pro-Jamaat daily and a television station that was shut down in 2013 for stoking religious tensions.

He was convicted in November 2014 of a series of war crimes including the abduction and murder of a young independence fighter.

Defence lawyers have said the charges against him were baseless.

"All along he said he was innocent. He said he is being killed unjustifiably," said Tahera Tasnim, one of Ali\s daughters. She was among 23 family members who met him for the last time in the prison just hours before he went to the gallows.

"He said this repressive government is killing them (Islamist leaders) to stop Islam being established in the society and the country."

His son Mir Ahmed Bin Quasem, who was part of his legal defence team, was allegedly abducted by security forces earlier in August, which critics say was an attempt to sow fear and prevent protests against the imminent execution.

Hasina\s government has defended the trials, saying they are needed to heal the wounds of the conflict, which it says left three million people dead.

A group of United Nations human rights experts last week urged Dhaka to annul Ali\s death sentence.

The execution of Mir Quasem Ali, following a trial whose fairness was questioned by the UN, will not deliver justice to the people of Bangladesh," said Champa Patel, Amnesty Internationals South Asia Director.

SOURCE: AFP
Q: Our condominium documents provide that motorcycles are not permitted in the condominium. Our board president routinely brings his motorcycle into the property in violation of those rules. It is not a loud motorcycle, but isn't there a rule that all officers must be in good standing?

 AB, Stuart

A: This raises a number of issues, but for purposes of the question I will assume the motorcycle restriction is enforceable. If so, the president is generally a member just like all other owners and subject to the same rules. That being said, being in violation of a motorcycle restriction would not automatically remove the president from his office or from the board. Florida law provides that a director is no longer eligible to serve on the board if the director becomes delinquent in monetary obligations to the board, convicted or indicted for various offenses, suspended by the Florida Division of Condominiums, or if removed from the board by recall procedures.

The board, however, has a duty to enforce the condominium documents and should take action to compel compliance. If there is another motorcycle in the community that is loud and a nuisance, the board would face a strong defense of selective enforcement if it ever sought to remove the motorcycle.

Q: I live on the third floor of my condominium. My next-door neighbor had a pipe burst, which ended up flowing to the units below and my unit. I have read articles about what happens to the lower units for repairs, but does the same analysis apply to next-door units?

 KT, Treasure Coast

A: Yes, the analysis is the same. If your unit is damaged by water from a neighboring unit, the first question is whether the damage was caused by an insurable event. If so, Florida Statutes section 718.111 (11) prescribes who is responsible to repair the various portions of the common elements, limited common elements and the unit. If the damage was not caused by an insurable event, you should look to the maintenance, repair and replacement provisions of your specific condominium documents. The other relevant question is whether the water damage was caused by negligence and, if so, some condominium documents and the statute provide a mechanism to shift responsibility to the negligent party.

Q: Our board routinely forgets to draft minutes and when it does, rarely remembers to post the minutes on the website or email to the membership. Does the law require the board to keep and circulate minutes?

 CS, Delray Beach

A: Yes, the law requires the board to keep minutes. No, the law does not require the board to distribute the minutes or post on the website. Minutes of a meeting should not be difficult because the only required provisions are attendance and voting. Minutes should not necessarily include a transcript of dialogue or verbatim discussion, and thus the secretary or the manager at the meeting should always be prepared to note motions and votes. After the minutes are reduced to writing, they are official records and can be inspected by the membership at any time. So, although many of my clients do post minutes or circulate minutes to the membership, there is no legal requirement to do so and you can always request to inspect the minutes as official records.

John C. Goede Esq. is co-founder and shareholder of the Law firm Goede, Adamczyk, DeBoest & Cross. Visit www.GADClaw.com or ask questions about your issues for future columns, send your inquiry to: question@GADClaw.com. The information provided herein is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice. The publication of this article does not create an attorney-client relationship between the reader and Goede, Adamczyk, DeBoest & Cross, or any of our attorneys. Readers should not act or refrain from acting based upon the information contained in this article without first contacting an attorney, if you have questions about any of the issues raised herein. The hiring of an attorney is a decision that should not be based solely on advertisements or this column.
It was a quiet, somber scene near the alleyway between the 5200 blocks of Kingston and Tower drives Saturday morning.

A place filled with police and firefighters less than 24 hours before was left with a small gathering of people and a memorial that loomed large on their hearts and minds.

Friends and family of Lauren Landavazo and Makayla Smith stopped by the area where the two girls had been shot by an unknown suspect. Some left flowers and items to remember Lauren, who was killed in the shooting. Others left behind tears.

They talked of the lives of Lauren and Makayla, how they knew them from school and asked if anyone had updates on the shooting. While those around the memorial mostly had questions, they also had two conclusions: they wanted to help the families and wanted the suspect found.

Less than four miles away, the club manager of Sam's Club had a similar resolve.

This time of year, the business typically raises money for Children's Miracle Network.

'It actually just kicked off this weekend,' Emmanuel Carrillo said while trying to keep up with orders of seven and eight cheeseburgers at a time. 'This weekend was going to be our first weekend to cookout, but then this happened.

'We said, you know what, let's just donate everything to the families because it's tragic. It hits close to home.'

Carrillo, a father of four, said one of his children attends McNiel Middle School, where Lauren and Makayla were eighth grade students.

'My kid goes to McNiel, but it could have happened to anyone in elementary,' Carrillo said. 'To see that happen in our community, it's devastating. Anything we could to do help out, that's what we're going to do.'

Saturday's cookout, which began at 10:30 a.m. and lasted until 5 p.m., had a steady line of people waiting for hot dogs or hamburgers, as well as some walking up to donate money instead.

'We're doing this one today for the family of the young girl that passed away,' Carrillo said. 'We'll do another one next week for the young lady that's in the hospital currently at this time.'

The club manager was appreciative of the support from the community to help make the fundraiser for the families a success.

'It's been tremendous,' he said while gesturing back at the several dozen people waiting in line. 'It's been like this all day. Everyone has been coming our and really coming together to support the families.

'I think it touches everybody, because it could have been anybody. To think that our kids can't walk around in the neighborhood or in their yard from school, it's crazy.'

In addition to the support shown to the families at the Sam's Club fundraiser, several anonymous donors have stepped up financially to give the Wichita Falls police a helping hand also.

Wichita Falls Crime Stoppers announced soon after the shooting that the reward would be raised to a minimum of $2,500  2.5 times the normal maximum reward  for any information leading to an arrest of the suspect who shot Lauren and Makayla.

Officer Brian Bohn, coordinator of Crime Stoppers, said within hours several donors had added to the reward, raising it to $9,000  one of the largest ever offered locally for a Crime Stoppers tip.

'Wichita Falls is a unique community,' Bohn said. 'We get our negative comments, but we get a lot of support for our police department and Crime Stoppers on a daily basis. It's pretty heartwarming.'

Bohn doesn't recall a recent case where citizens have stepped forward to pledge an additional $6,000 toward a reward to lead to an arrest.

'I don't think to this magnitude, no,' he said. 'You have to figure this involves kids, and anytime kids are involved you're going to get an outpouring of support.

'We don't just have one, but two kids involved in this incident. They weren't even doing anything but walking home from school. The outpouring of support from anonymous donors has been amazing.'

Bohn asked for anyone with credible information that could help detectives on this case to call Crime Stoppers at 940-322-9888 or 800-322-9888.

'Somebody out there knows something and saw something,' Bohn said. 'I don't want people jumping to conclusions and throwing names out there.

'That causes other people to jump to conclusions and causes other problems the officers have to deal with and takes away from the investigation. We're asking for valid information.'
D. Alex Mills, President & Chief of Staff, Texas Alliance of Energy Producers

The story that appeared in Thursday's TRN (Sept. 1) quoted a study by two environmental groups, attempting to blame the oil and gas industry for causing the illness of thousands of children in Texas. The study tries to link air emissions from oil and gas activity to more than 144,000 childhood asthma attacks in Texas in 2025.

How can they accurately predict the number of asthma attacks on children nine years into the future?

The facts clearly show that methane emissions from U.S. oil and gas have declined for many years, and currently only 3.5 percent of overall domestic greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to oil and gas activity by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

EPA also reports that methane emissions have fallen 73 percent since 2011.

Additionally, recent scientific studies demonstrate that methane emissions from fossil fuels are not increasing even as U.S. oil and gas production has risen dramatically in recent years. A study in the journal Science, which included researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), concluded that fossil fuel production is not causing the rise of methane levels in the atmosphere.

Another study by UT Austin published in 2015 in the Environmental Science & Technology journal stated that methane emissions from exploration and production activities are only 0.38 percent of total oil and gas production.

The allegations linking oil and gas activity to illness are irresponsible scare tactics.
By Sourish Bhattacharyya: Tian tends to take first-timers by surprise. Most people who walk in unsuspectingly expect to find the standard pan-Asian mix of sushi, dim sum, Thai curries and chilli chicken, but what they get on the menu is light years away from our age-old mental construct of the cuisine.

The reason for this radical shift from cookie-cutter conformity is a young man named Vikramjit Roy, who comes with all the quirks of a gifted chef, and delivers a culinary experience that is in a league of its own. Not that he doesn't know how to make a mean sushi or a yakitori, but he has mastered the art of creating dishes drawing on influences picked up from Chiang Mai's culinary schools, Seoul's street food vendors and Kyoto's classical Japanese restaurants.

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The results can be quite unexpected for some people. Ask Manish Mehrotra of the now-celebrated Indian Accent, or Gaggan Anand of Asia's No. 1 restaurant, which is named after him, and they'll have stories about their lonely battles against sirkewali pyaaz, butter chicken and maa ki daal. Gaggan now has butter chicken on his menu; Manish has found the middle path in his butter chicken-stuffed naan. The disbelief Vikramjit is living with therefore is not something exceptional. It has happened to the best who dare to be different.

Also read: Got a craving for curry? This Delhi restaurant will spoil you for choice



Tian is called the 'Asian Cuisine Studio' not for any pretentious reasons. In its latest menu, it plays on the theme of 'Illusion'. Its 'fake eggs', for instance, are created with coconut and lyophilised (it's a process of freeze frying) strawberry, with spherified Thai yellow curry standing in for the yolk - a riddle for the senses, a treat for the eye. If Vikramjit's imagination is forever on an overdrive, his boldness matches up. Only he can put goat's brain (infused with coconut milk and Thai herbs) in a coconut-roasted onion crust topped with truffle powder and green tea. A couple of days back, at a wine dinner hosted by Grover Zampa to celebrate its La Reserve range, I was blown by the flavours of the roasted pumpkin (kabocha) soup and by the drama of the miso-infused quinoa salad sitting on a Tree of Life drawn out of the beetroot and roasted pepper sauces, surrounded by teriyaki-glazed shimeji mushroom.

The same sleight of hand is evident in the Tian's version of the universally popular Surf 'N' Turf, where a pork belly yakitori and yuzu-buttered scallops are neatly balanced on a roasted onion mash. The magician's proverbial rabbit, however, is Tian's lamb lasagna, where slabs of spiced pounded lamb alternate between slivers of pumpkin that replace pasta sheets, drizzled with a deliciously tangy Chian Mai curry. Don't expect the commonplace at Tian.

Tian is at the top floor of the ITC Maurya. An average meal for two, minus alcohol and taxes, will set you back by Rs 7,000



--- ENDS ---
The remnants of what had been Hurricane Hermine swept up and along the Eastern Seaboard on Saturday, disrupting the holiday weekend in much of the coastal South while preparing to pester the Northeast long into the week.

The storm, which made its landfall early Friday near St. Marks, Florida, as a Category 1 hurricane, led to hundreds of thousands of power failures and flooded roadways. In Florida, dealt its first direct strike by a hurricane in nearly 11 years, the Tallahassee area was particularly hard hit, and officials said it could be almost a week before electricity was fully restored.

"We still have a lot of work to do following the storm," Gov. Rick Scott of Florida said at a news conference on Saturday in Tallahassee, the state capital. "We'll continue to spend the coming days assessing the damage and responding to the needs of our Florida families."

Scott said there was "significant damage" in the state, including "a lot of downed power lines." Residents and officials described destroyed business, boats set adrift, crumbled sea walls and battered homes.

The National Hurricane Center said the storm, whose winds reached as high as 80 mph after it spent days swirling through the Gulf of Mexico, remained powerful on Saturday. It became a post-tropical cyclone on Saturday morning, but forecasters warned that the storm still "could be near hurricane intensity" for part of the week.

And so the consequences of the storm's path stretched from Florida, which reported the sole fatality attributed to it, to New York, where the city said beaches would be closed Sunday, to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, which was under a tropical storm watch.

The hurricane center said the storm would "meander" off the Delmarva Peninsula into early Monday, and its slow churn past New Jersey and New York could consume about three days.

New York authorities planned to activate the state's emergency operations center on Sunday.

But on Saturday, the National Guard was on alert in Virginia, where forecasters feared flooding in the Hampton Roads region, and visitors to North Carolina's Outer Banks, where strong rip currents were reported, were advised to adjust their travel schedules.

"I'm relieved that everyone took this storm seriously, paid attention to the weather forecast and heeded the warnings of state and local officials," said Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina, who had declared emergencies in 33 counties.

But while people in many communities said the storm would soon become only a minor memory, parts of Florida were entering what could be a protracted recovery, and there were some concerns that the absence of air-conditioning could prove dangerous.

In Leon County, which includes Tallahassee, more than half of homes were without electricity Saturday, and the American Red Cross opened a so-called comfort shelter, a place "for residents to cool off, hydrate and receive information from area nonprofit agencies."

Authorities planned to distribute bottled water throughout the county, where high temperatures were predicted to be in the upper 80s or lower 90s for the next several days.

During his appearance Saturday at Florida's emergency operations center, Scott made a dispiriting roll call of counties and the extent of their power failures.
New Scotland

A swim teacher at Rudy A. Ciccotti Family Recreation Center has been charged with possessing child pornography on his home computer.

The Albany County Sheriff's Office said that early Saturday, deputies responded to the home of William Richmond Moyer at 34 New Scotland Ave. in Feura Bush for a complaint of loud music.

Deputies said when they were speaking with Moyer, they observed photographs of nude, underage girls scrolling across a computer monitor in his home, according to a news release issued by Sheriff Craig Apple Sr. Sunday. Moyer appears to live in an apartment complex that is just off New Scotland Avenue.

Sheriff's investigators then got a search warrant for Moyer's residence and seized several computers, external hard drives and other digital devices. Investigators said when Moyer was interviewed, he said he had been downloading child pornography for several years, according to the sheriff's news release.

Moyer, 51, was charged with one count of possessing a sexual performance by a child, a felony. He was arraigned in New Scotland Town Court by Judge David Wukitsch and sent to Albany County Jail on $20,000 bail.

The sheriff's office said Moyer is employed at Rudy A. Ciccotti Family Recreation Center in Colonie where he teaches swim lessons to children between three to 15 years old. The sheriff's office said at this time there is no indication that Moyer has engaged in inappropriate sexual conduct with children.

Nikki Caruso, executive director of the Colonie Youth Center, which owns the recreation center, said early Sunday that the center had gotten very little information about what happened  only that Moyer had been arrested. The center is off of Wolf Road near the Crossings of Colonie town park.

Caruso said Moyer had worked part time at the center since fall 2015, and has been removed from the staff roster. Caruso had no other immediate comment Sunday morning.

The sheriff's office said the investigation is ongoing and expects additional charges to be filed.

lstanforth@timesunion.com  518-454-5697
Albany

A senior official at the state Department of Taxation and Finance currently running for a state Supreme Court seat was fired late last month for allegedly campaigning on state time, according to a source with knowledge of the matter.

Before her dismissal, Camille Siano Enders served as director of the tax agency's Bureau of Conciliation and Mediation Services since 2013. The post allowed her to make recommendations as to whether a taxpayer's bill should be forgiven or reduced. She is a Democratic candidate for a Supreme Court justice position in the 4th Judicial District, which includes Schenectady and Saratoga counties.

One of the people briefed on the case said Siano Enders allegedly used her state email address to solicit campaign assistance from her fellow employees, which may be a violation of civil service regulations.

The agency acknowledged Siano Enders was no longer working there, but cited its policy of declining to discuss personnel matters.

In a brief phone interview Friday, Siano Enders said she would not comment on the circumstances regarding her departure from the agency  and cited the same policy.

"I'm not going to comment on personnel matters," she said.

Richard Ernst, a deputy commissioner at the Department of Tax and Finance, also was confronted with allegations that he may have assisted Siano Enders with her alleged campaigning at work and retired from his position, according to two people familiar with the matter. Ernst, who was paid $156,953 a year, could not be reached for comment.

Both were "at-will" employees, and not members of a public labor union.

The sources, who are not authorized to comment publicly on the case, said Siano Enders was investigated late last year by the office of state Inspector General Catherine Leahy Scott for allegedly doing work unrelated to state government while she was on state time. At the time, Siano Enders was a Duanesburg town justice, and the inspector general's probe examined whether those duties conflicted with her state job, according to one of the people familiar with the case.

Siano Enders was cautioned by the tax agency following the Inspector General's probe, but kept her job and did not face disciplinary charges. In recent weeks, Siano Enders faced new internal accusations that she was engaged in campaign matters at the tax agency, and was terminated from her $135,000-a-year job. In late June, she began working 90 percent of full-time and received a commensurate reduction in pay, according to the state Comptroller's office. Records show she left state service on Aug. 25.

In 2013, Siano Enders was appointed to head the office of Taxpayer Rights Advocate, an independent office within the agency. Prior to that, she worked at the state Workers' Compensation Board.

Four candidates are running in the Supreme Court race in the 4th District, which in addition to Saratoga and Schenectady counties includes Clinton, Essex, Franklin, Fulton, Hamilton, Montgomery, St. Lawrence, Warren and Washington counties.

Siano Enders is contending with Democrats Mark Powers, an acting Supreme Court justice, and Halfmoon lawyer Mike Violando for the seat; Republican Clinton County Family Court Judge Timothy Lawliss is also running.

State election law prohibits the candidates from commenting on another candidate.

The three Democratic candidates vying for the job are scheduled to take part in a judicial convention on Sept. 24 in Schenectady.

On Friday, Siano Enders  a founding member of the Capital District Women's Bar Association Legal Project  said her campaign was continuing.

blyons@timesunion.com  518-454-5547  @brendan_lyonstu
Hangzhou, China

Setting aside their cyber and maritime disputes, President Barack Obama and China's President Xi Jinping on Saturday sealed their nations' participation in last year's Paris climate change agreement. They hailed their new era of climate cooperation as the best chance for saving the planet.

At a ceremony on the sidelines of a global economic summit, Obama and Xi, representing the world's two biggest carbon emitters, delivered a series of documents to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The papers certified the U.S. and China have taken the necessary steps to join the Paris accord that set nation-by-nation targets for cutting carbon emissions.

"This is not a fight that any one country, no matter how powerful, can take alone," Obama said of the pact. "Some day we may see this as the moment that we finally decided to save our planet."

Xi, speaking through a translator, said he hoped other countries would follow suit and advance new technologies to help them meet their targets. "When the old path no longer takes us far, we should turn to innovation," he said.

The formal U.S.-Chinese announcement means the accord could enter force by the end of the year, faster than anticipated. Fifty-five nations must join for the agreement to take effect. The nations that have joined must also produce at least 55 percent of global emissions.

The U.S. and China together produce 38 percent of the world's man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

The White House has attributed the accelerated pace to an unlikely partnership between Washington and Beijing. To build momentum for a deal, they set a 2030 deadline for China's emissions to stop rising and announced their "shared conviction that climate change is one of the greatest threats facing humanity." The U.S. has pledged to cut its emissions by at least 26 percent over the next 15 years, compared to 2005 levels.

The meeting of the minds on climate change, however, hasn't smoothed the path for other areas of tension. The U.S. has criticized China over cyberhacking and human rights and voiced increased exasperation with Beijing's growing assertiveness in key waterways in the region. Most recently, the U.S. has urged China to accept an international arbitration panel's ruling that sided with the Philippines in a dispute over claims in the South China Sea.

China views the South China Sea as an integral part of its national territory. The U.S. doesn't take positions in the various disputes between China and its Asian neighbors, but is concerned about freedom of navigation and wants conflicts resolved peacefully and lawfully.

Meeting with Xi after the announcement, Obama said thornier matters would be discussed. He specifically cited maritime disputes, cybersecurity and human rights, though the president didn't elaborate during brief remarks in front of reporters at the start of the meeting.

After several hours of talks, the White House said Obama told Xi the U.S. would keep monitoring China's commitments on cybersecurity. The leaders also had a "candid exchange" over the arbitration case between China and the Philippines, the White House said.

The ceremony opened what is likely Obama's valedictory tour in Asia. The president stepped off Air Force One onto a red carpet, where an honor guard dressed in white and carrying bayonets lined his path. A girl presented Obama with flowers and he shook hands with officials before entering his motorcade.

But the welcome didn't go smoothly. A Chinese official kept reporters and some top White House aides away from the president, prompting a U.S. official to intervene. The Chinese official then yelled: "This is our country. This is our airport."

Throughout his tenure, Obama has sought to check China's influence in Asia by shifting U.S. military resources and diplomatic attention from the Middle East. The results have been mixed.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive trade deal the White House calls a cornerstone of the policy, is stuck in Congress. Obama planned to use the trip to make the case for approval of the deal before he leaves office in January.

Climate represents a more certain piece of his legacy.
By PTI: Darjeeling (WB), Sep 4 (PTI) Even as the solemn canonisation ceremony was underway in faraway Rome, members of the Darjeeling branch of the Lay Missionaries of Charity (LMC) today took an 8-km ride on the iconic Darjeeling toy train to retrace the trip Mother Teresa took on September 10, 1946.

"We wished to experience what Mother Teresa must have felt during that time of September 10, 1946 when she got the call within the call during her trip from the plains (NJP-Siliguri) to Darjeeling and her lifes course changed forever," Father Peter Lingdam, LMCs Darjeeling Branch Director said.

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"Todays ride in the toy train is symbolic. Maybe some of us will also be enlightened like her," Father Lingdam said.

On September 10, 1946, during her journey to Darjeeling in the toy train the Mother received the "call within the call" within her soul and the course of her life was decided, the Father said.

Lay Missionaries of Charity (LMC) is an International Association of lay persons (married and single) adhering to the Spirit of the Missionaries of Charity.

Listing the day-long programmes in the Hills, coinciding with the canonisation occasion, Father Lingdam said while special prayers were conducted at the Immaculate Conception Cathedral Church in Darjeeling, an all-faith prayer for peace and unity at the Gorkha Ranga Manch Bhawan will also take place with a giant LED screen in Darjeeling towns Chowrasta roundabout, beaming live the canonisation ceremony in Vatican.

Mother Teresas legacy remains strong in the hills as apart from LMC chapters, branches of the MC (Missionaries of Charity) continue to work for the welfare of the poor, needy and homeless in Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Kurseong sub-divisions. PTI COR SUS MNG

--- ENDS ---
A Nenagh family caught in last week's devastating earthquake that left 291 dead have told how their legs turned to jelly when the second tremor hit.

Frances Doherty, from Gortlandroe, was staying about 90kms away from the epicentre and told the Tipperary Star that her house shook when the quake struck at around 3.35am (1.35am Irish-time) last Wednesday.

Frances was on holidays in the area with her daughter and her two grandchildren.

She said they had to sleep in their car for about four hours because they were afraid to go back to their house. However, she had to return later to find their passports as they happened to be coming back home the day after the quake struck.

We are all safe and well, but I am still a bit shook, she said.

Frances said that in the midst of it all, she and her daughter tried to keep calm for the sake of the children, but the children were excited and knew something was up.

The family got a few hours sleep in their car but before leaving it she said they watched the trees to see if theiy were moving.

Frances could not recall why she woke, but when she did the beds were rattling and there was an eerie silence in their village.

 I heard all the local dogs going wild. I thought it was wolves at the lake. The beds started shaking and the ground was moving. Our legs turned to jelly There was a second tremor. We didn't know how far away it was, said Frances.

After a third tremor hit, they went to their elderly neighbour's house. The couple are in the 80s and have lived through a number of such earthquakes

They were terrified, she said. They said that while you think it becomes easier to cope with quakes, it actually gets harder.

However, while they were worried about the couple, she said it turned out that they were better for them at keeping them calm.

She said the fear now was that winter was coming and it would get extremely cold in the mountains. Residents will have to live in tents and already, some had moved into the local hall.

The magnitude 6.1 quake hit Amatrice and Accumoli near Rieti, some 80 miles (100km) north-east of Rome, though the quake was felt beyond the Lazio region into Umbria and Le Marche. It even registered on monitoring equipment in Dublin.

The centre of Amatrice was devastated with many buildings razed to the ground. Residents huddled in squares as aftershocks continued into the early hours, some as strong as 5.1.

In 2009, nearby L'Aquila was hit by an earthquake in which over 300 people died.

Frances pointed out that some of those victims of that disater were still living in makeshift homes called cassetti or cabinet drawers.
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By PTI: From K J M Varma

Hangzhou, Sep 4 (PTI) Prime Minister Narendra Modi today met his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull who assured his countrys support to Indias bid for the NSG membership and the two leader agreed to deepen the bilateral defence and security cooperation.

Prime Minister Modi thanked Turnbull for Australias pro-active support to Indias membership of the elite nuclear trading club when the two leaders met on the sidelines of the G20 Summit, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup told reporters here.

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"Prime Minister Turnbull assured that Australia will continue to support Indias inclusion in the NSG," he said.

Indias efforts to join the grouping suffered a setback in June when the NSG plenary held in South Korea decided against accepting its membership application after China and some other nations opposed entry of a non-NPT signatory.

"The two leaders discussed defence and security cooperation. In this context, both the sides positively accessed the recent Naval exercises held between the two sides and agreed to remain in touch," Swaup said after their talks.

"The issue of terrorism was also discussed during the meeting and Prime Minister Modi said that it is important for all the democratic forces to come together to counter this challenge," the spokesperson said.

Swarup said the Prime Minister told Turnbull that Indias neighbourhood, in particular, is suffering from the destabilising effects of terrorism.

"Even Russia, China, Afghanistan were all facing terrorism threat emanating from our region and it was important for us to identify the suppliers, exporters and financiers of terrorism. Otherwise, the world is going to face a huge challenge in coming weeks and months," Modi said, apparently referring to Pakistan from where terror groups such as Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Taliban operates.

"Prime Minister Modis overall message was that we need a unified approach on countering terrorism," Swarup said.

Modi said India-Australia relations are full of energy and the implementation of the mutually agreed projects and programmes have been considerably speeded up under Turnbulls guidance.

The two leaders also discussed the possibilities of trade and investment ties between India and Australia.

In the context of trade, both the sides felt that much more can be done and if the comprehensive economic cooperation agreements between Australia and India could be speeded up that would certainly provide much more momentum to their ties.

Modi also sought the support of Turnbull in encouraging the Australian pension funds to invest in India. He also sought Turnbulls support for clean coal technology.

"Because of Indias clean energy targets, it is important for us to adopt as much clean coal technology as possible and this is an area in which Australia has proven expertise. Whether it is underground mining or other form of mining, Australian companies can provide us those technologies," he added. PTI SAI ZH AKJ ZH

--- ENDS ---

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By PTI: From Aditi Khanna

London, Sep 4 (PTI) A 27-year-old British glamour model is on an Islamic State related terror watch by UK authorities after she used social media to communicate with extremists, a media report said today.

Kimberley Miners, who has posed topless for The Sun, is believed to have secretly converted to Islam and her "liking" and sharing Islamic State (ISIS) videos have triggered an investigation by Britains anti-terrorist police and MI5.

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The model from Bradford appears on social media under the alias Aisha Lauren al-Britaniya and has posted images of Muslim women brandishing rifles and other weapons, The Sunday Times reported.

Pictures show her fully veiled or with only her blue eyes on display, but in public she wears skinny jeans and leaves her long blonde hair uncovered.

She said she was abused when she went out in Islamic dress.

Britains anti-terror officers have reportedly spoken to her up to four times and referred her to an anti-radicalisation programme.

She has been warned that she faces arrest if she continues to engage in extremism.

Miners insists that she disagrees with ISIS beheadings and said she was primarily concerned about the plight of Syrias refugee children.

However, the former model admitted being in direct contact on Facebook with an ISIS recruiter called Abu Usamah al-Britani.

The fighter appears to be openly using social media to groom a new generation of jihadist brides from Britain and the West, the report said.

Miners, who comes from a Christian family, first appeared in the national media in 2009 when she was juggling her job as a street cleaner in Bradford with a fledgling career as a topless model.

"People think its really odd that I can be something so glamorous yet do something so dirty by day ? but I love it," she told The Sun at the time.

Her transformation is thought to have begun about a year later when she was deeply affected by the death of her father, Anthony, in a freak drowning.

Miners appears to have found solace in the company of Muslim friends, including another white convert.

She said her interest in Islam was sparked last year.

"I found peace through it all,"she was quoted as saying. PTI AK AJR AKJ AJR

--- ENDS ---
NEW YORK  Star Trek has lasted across 50 years, 13 movies and six TV series, and a seventh show is about to join the ranks. Star Trek: Discovery marks the latest installment to boldly go where no one has gone before, and for the first time, fans have a hint of where that may be. A new panel has shed some light on the show, even though the specifics are still fairly mysterious.

(Image credit: Star Trek Discovery Panel | Photo Credit: Star Trek Missions)

At Star Trek: Mission New York, writers Nicholas Meyer (The Wrath of Khan) and Kirsten Beyer (the Voyager relaunch novel series) sat down to give fans an hour-long QA session about what the future holds for Star Trek Discovery. Up until now, the show has been a mysterious quantity, with little but a ship (the USS Discovery) and the promises of new heroes, new villains and new adventures on display in teaser trailers.

MORE: Top 10 Star Trek Games

The panel kicked off with a video from showrunner Bryan Fuller explaining what he wanted to do: Bring Star Trek television into the modern age, just as J.J. Abrams brought the films into the present. He also dropped what was potentially the biggest news about Star Trek: Discovery:

In previous Star Trek series that Fuller worked on (Deep Space Nine and Voyager), he questioned some of the captains bravado, and whether they could really be at the forefront of solving every conflict. As such, one of the main characters on the new show may be someone who doesnt fit into the traditional command structure. Fuller said that he wanted to tell a richer, more complicated story about life on a Starfleet vessel.

While Meyer and Beyer are not the only writers on the new show, the interplay between the two of them also revealed a lot about how they intend to balance the show to delight both newcomers and Trek diehards.

Kirsten and Bryan are autodidacts, Meyer said. They know everything about the show. For someone like me, thats not the case  I dont have that at my fingertips. Instead, Meyer said that he could offer a real flat-footed, sort of earthbound how can that work? mentality.

When you can get [Meyer] to agree that something is possible, you know youve done well, Beyer added.

Star Trek has often been at the forefront of new TV technologies, including color TV for the original series, syndication for The Next Generation and launching the whole UPN network for Voyager. However, even though Star Trek Discovery will premiere on the CBS All Access streaming platform, neither writer had any strong feelings about that.

I cant even think about that stuff, Beyer said. The pressure is intense enough as is.

Im just learning what streaming is, Meyer joked. I miss appointment television. This whole business about going through life doing what you want, whenever you want it is, I think, probably not good. We could all use some structure in our lives.

Meyers concerns arent totally unwarranted, although Star Trek Discovery will still air on a week-by-week basis rather than releasing all episodes at once. Beyer hopes this will provide a balance for binge-watchers and appointment TV aficionados.

One more exciting development is that Beyer herself will take charge of an initiative to tie in a Discovery novel and comic book series with the show once it launches. Unlike previous Star Trek series, where the books and comics had relatively little bearing on the show, Beyer hopes that the new series will present a real opportunity for the visual and written mediums to build on one another.

One of the most poignant questions came from an audience member who expressed dissatisfaction with some of the recent Star Trek movies, and asked if the writers could promise that the show would be better. Meyer reminded her that expecting a new show to be just like the classics with which she grew up might be a recipe for disaster.

Artis not done by committee, he said. Its not done by voting. With all due respect, fans do not know what is best for them. He cited the controversial decision to kill off Mr. Spock way back in The Wrath of Khan, which could have sparked outrage, but instead wound up being one of the most poignant parts of the film. If it proceeds organically from what is going on in the rest of the story, it belongs, then people dont question it.

Its a symbiotic relationship, he continued. All Im suggesting is that if you go in with open minds and open hearts, you may be rewarded. If you go in with a set of impossible-to-realize expectations, which even you cannot specifically define, then were bound to fail.

In the meantime, fans will have to be patient. Star Trek Discovery will debut in January 2017, with all but the first episode shown exclusively on the CBS All Access Streaming Service, which costs $6 per month. CBS will broadcast the first episode on its network TV channel, but afterward, the show will be a streaming-only affair. Its a plan of which the Ferengi would probably approve.
"It's best known for the giant shuttlecocks on the lawn outside the building."

Remember that the so-calledis often just a clickbait effort to lure people to websites and it's now frowned upon among marketers because so many folks easily dismiss the effort.Still, some are better than others and this one features a lot of info:Local mention . . .Like it or not, it's hard to argue with as much . . . And while other lists may disagree, this one seems about right.More in a bit . . .
CHECK THIS NOTE FROM A LOCAL ADVOCATE WHO IS CURIOUS ABOUT WHY MAYOR SLY TAKES UP THE CAUSE OF THE GREATER KANSAS CITY CHAMBER OF COMMERCE AND HAS BEEN TASKED WITH ANSWERING THEIR MAIL!?!?!

Mayor Sly's Mail Bag . . .

If you have not seen this yet, you might be interested in what I attached. Representatives of Schools for low income kids, the KC library, mental health services, etc. wrote to the KC Chamber of Commerce asking to express our concerns with the impact of KC's penchant for tax abatement on working families.





Tax abatement in moderation is OK. However, Kansas City 's unbridled TIFs and other tax incentives have build a lot of luxury apartments and reduce public services. We wrote to the Chamber because many Chamber Board members are abatement lawyers and real estate developers who benefit financially from these deals.





So who replied?





As you might say, TKC: You decide.

######################

On this Sunday we want to share a powerful bit of testimony offeringof a conflicted economic relationship in Kansas City that continues to siphon local funds from residents.To wit . . .Here's the word . . .And so . . .Voters want to think of Mayor Sly as a powerful guy, a leader and the champion of Kansas City but exchange makes his work seem like that of a PR rep or, even worse, a public official sent on errands by far more powerful men.You decide . . .
The traditional dance festival called Diamantis Palaiologos, held on Skopelos island this August, won a European award by the EILEEN (Enhancing Intercultural Learning in European Enterprises) project. There were over 600 participants and volunteers this year from Greece, Cyprus, Ukraine, and Nepal.

The Festival of Traditional Dances Diamantis Palaiologos is a member of European Folklore Festival Association and is organized by Konstantina Angeletou, President of the Plegma, a nonprofit organization, along with the Thessaly Region.

The Greek National Commission to UNESCO, the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Education, Research and Religious Affairs, the Greek National Tourism Organisation and the Municipality of Skopelos embrace this big cultural event, putting the Festival under their auspices.

Read more here.

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report

Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons Copyright: Stefanos Titanas License: CC-BY-SA
Kyriakos Mitsotakis, president of Greeces main opposition party New Democracy (ND), said the only solution to the current economic crisis was the implementation of liberal reforms, during his meeting with former Portuguese PM Pedro Passos Coello in Portugal. It is clear that only liberal reforms, which support the real economy and attract private investments, can offer growth prospects in the county, Mitsotakis underscored.

He continued by pointing out that the current left government in Greece was undermining such liberal reforms, which was the main problem against the sustainability of the Greek economy, adding that Portugal was partly facing a similar problem with their current government.

The two men discussed the challenges Greece, Portugal and the EU were facing, with Mitsotakis underlining that the two Mediterranean countries had gone through a similar harsh fiscal adjustment program.

Only Portugal managed to exit the fiscal adjustment program under Coello, while our country is unfortunately still under a 3rd extremely painful memorandum, as a result of the problematic policies of the current government, Mitsotakis said.

Mitsotakis claimed the challenges facing the EU could not be addressed by the left.

Read more here.

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report
Oneworld, the leading global airline alliance, today named industry veteran Rob Gurney as its new CEO.

He succeeds Bruce Ashby, who announced in January that he would be stepping down from the role this summer after more than five years in the position.

Rob Gurney will join oneworld in October after leaving Gulf carrier Emirates, where he served as Senior Vice-President Commercial Operations The Americas.

He has substantial experience of airline alliances with much of his 25-year career in the industry spent with oneworld founding members British Airways and Qantas.

For four years until 2012, he was the Australian carriers Group Executive Commercial, with responsibilities for global sales and marketing including alliance relationships, which saw him serving as Qantas representative on the oneworld Management Team Executive Board, working closely with all oneworlds member airlines.

As oneworld CEO, he will report to the alliances Governing Board, comprising the CEOs of all member airlines, and lead the central alliance team, which is based in New York.

Announcing the appointment, oneworld Governing Board Chairman Ivan Chu, CEO of Cathay Pacific, said: Bruce Ashby leaves big shoes to fill  and, in Rob Gurney, oneworld has appointed someone well able to do so. He takes on the role of oneworld CEO with a proven track record of successful leadership in key alliance and broader commercial roles within both the oneworld family and beyond, with all the attributes needed to lead the worlds most highly prized global alliance through the next phase of our development.

Rob Gurney said: In many ways, this move feels like coming home. I look forward to working once again with oneworlds stable of best-in-class carriers from each region to build further on oneworlds position as the best alliance in the skies.

About Rob Gurney, oneworld's new CEO

Rob Gurney joined oneworld founding partner British Airways in 1993, working in commercial roles in Australia, New Zealand and the airlines London headquarters, where he project managed its first code-sharing partnership with Qantas.

In 1997, he switched to Qantas, working in various commercial roles in the airlines Sydney headquarters, including revenue management, marketing and distribution. He served as Head of International Sales and Head of Worldwide Sales, ending as Group Executive Qantas Airlines Commercial, with responsibility for worldwide sales and marketing, including alliance relationships, joint ventures, the groups QantasLink regional carrier, and freight.

After leaving Qantas in 2012, he served for two years as CEO of Helloworld (previously branded Jetset Travelworld Group).

He was recruited by Emirates in 2014 as its Divisional Vice-President Australia and New Zealand, playing an instrumental role in developing the Gulf carriers bilateral alliance with Qantas. A year later, he was transferred by the airline to New York, as Senior Vice-President North America, responsible for all commercial activities in the USA and Canada. In March he assumed responsibility also for South America, becoming Senior Vice-President Commercial Operations The Americas.

Rob Gurney has dual UK and Australian citizenship.

About oneworld

oneworld is an alliance of some of the worlds leading airlines, committed to providing the highest level of service and convenience to frequent international travellers. They include airberlin, American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Finnair, Iberia, Japan Airlines, LATAM Airlines, Malaysia Airlines, Qantas, Qatar Airways, Royal Jordanian, S7 Airlines and SriLankan Airlines, and around 30 affiliates. As part of oneworld, these airlines:

Serve more a thousand airports in 150 plus countries, with 14,000 daily departures.

Carry some 550 million passengers a year on a combined fleet of 3,500 aircraft.

Generate US$ 130 billion annual revenues.

oneworld member airlines work together to deliver consistently a superior, seamless travel experience, with special privileges and rewards for frequent flyers, including earning and redeeming miles and points across the entire alliance network. Top tier cardholders (Emerald and Sapphire) enjoy access to more than 650 airport lounges and are offered extra baggage allowances. The most regular travellers (Emerald) can also use fast track security lanes at select airports.

oneworld is the worlds most highly prized global airline group, with more best alliance awards than its competitors combined, including currently:
The global economy, terrorism and the refugee crisis are on the agenda of talks at the G20 Summit underway in, Hangzhou, China. The 2-day meeting of the worlds most powerful leaders is taking place under draconian security measures. US President Barack Obama, who was snubbed by the Chinese during his arrival as he did not receive a red carpet reception, met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and the two men are expected to ratify the Paris climate change Treaty, while UK Prime Minister Theresa May will attend the meeting for the first time since the UK exited the EU.

According to Bloomberg, her main goal is to reassure other leaders that Britain can be a leading economic power in the globe, despite the Brexit. Participants have voiced their concern about the negative effects of states implementing economic barriers to free trade. IMF Director Christine Lagarde called on the CEOs of global businesses to put pressure on governments to refrain from raising barriers against free trade and keep market routes open. The head of the OECD, Angel Gurria stressed that since the break out of the financial crisis 1,400 measures of protectionism had been passed by governments around the globe.

The leaders of the economic bloc of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa), also expressed their fears and the need for the WTO to strengthen its negotiating role in a common statement. French Trade Minister Matthias Fekl underlined that talks with the US on free trade had failed and should be suspended. Turkish PM Recep Erdogan is scheduled to meet with the US President and leaders of the EU on the refugee crisis.

Meanwhile, European Council President Donald Tusk said in a joint press conference with European Commission President Jean Claude Juncker that Europe had reached its limits on the reception of refugees and called on the international community to provide aid. Recep Erdogan will meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and Italian PM Mateo Renzi on the sidelines of the Summit to discuss ways to deal with the refugee crisis. US President Barack Obama pointed out the pivotal role of Russia in the efforts to solve the Syrian crisis.

Read more here.

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Obama, who arrived on Saturday, held talks with Xi that ran late into the night. He urged Beijing to uphold its legal obligations in the disputed waters of the South China Sea, and stressed US commitments to its regional allies.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama shake hands during the G20 Summit in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. Photo: Reuters

By Reuters: US President Barack Obama on Sunday said bilateral talks with China's Xi Jinping had been "extremely productive", as world leaders gathered for a G20 summit expected to address sluggish global economic growth and the looming spectre of protectionism.

Some G20 leaders have already begun drawing battle lines in disputes over issues like trade and investment, tax policy, and industrial overcapacity.

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Security is extremely tight in Hangzhou, with parts of the city of 9 million people turned into a virtual ghost town as China seeks to ensure that the G20 summit is incident-free.

Obama, who arrived on Saturday, held talks with Xi that ran late into the night. He urged Beijing to uphold its legal obligations in the disputed waters of the South China Sea, and stressed US commitments to its regional allies.

Also read: Modi meets Chinese President Xi Jinping on sidelines of G20 summit



Xi said China would continue to safeguard its sovereignty and maritime rights in the South China Sea.

Obama brushed off his chaotic welcome at the Hangzhou airport where his staff argued with Chinese security over media access. He was also not offered a staircase to disembark at the front of Air Force One, and staffers had to scramble to find an alternative exit.

"The bilateral discussions that we had yesterday were extremely productive and continue to point to big areas of cooperation," Obama told reporters on Sunday, saying he wouldn't "over-crank" the significance of the airport row.

On Saturday, Obama and Xi also ratified the Paris climate change agreement, setting the stage for other countries to follow and for the deal to come into effect possibly as early as before the year-end.

Also read: Hello Hangzhou! PM Modi tweets as he arrives to attend G20 Summit



China is keen to keep the summit focused on economic issues and to prevent other disputes from overshadowing it.

Other leaders arriving for the summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou include Russia's Vladimir Putin, Japan's Shinzo Abe, Britain's Theresa May, Germany's Angela Merkel, France's Francois Hollande and Narendra Modi.

The leaders are likely to renew their promises to use tax and spending policies to invigorate the sluggish world economy, although a new pro-growth push was unlikely.

Overcapacity in the global steel industry, a sore point for China as the world's largest producer of the metal, barriers to foreign investment and the risk of currency devaluations to protect export markets will also figure in the discussions.

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Also read: 'Miniature Modi' dolls a hit in Hangzhou as PM arrives for G20 Summit



With the summit tucked in between Britain's vote to leave the European Union and the U.S. presidential election, G20 leaders will also be keen to mount a defence of free trade and globalisation.

BATTLE LINES



On Sunday, Xi held talks with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and told him he hoped Australia would continue to provide a fair, transparent and predictable policy environment for foreign investors.

China was angered when Australia blocked the A$10 billion ($7.7 billion) sale of the country's biggest energy grid to Chinese bidders last month.

China has accused Australia of bowing to protectionist sentiment in blocking the bid for Ausgrid, as well as an earlier one by a China-led consortium to buy cattle company Kidman & Co.

Beijing has also criticised Australia, a staunch US ally, for running surveillance flights over disputed islands in the South China Sea.

Meanwhile, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Sunday China must set up a mechanism to address its problem of industrial overcapacity, saying it was "unacceptable" the European steel industry had lost so many jobs in recent years.

"Overcapacity is a global problem but there is a particular Chinese element," he told a news conference.

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Britain's future after its departure from the European Union was also subject to discussion.

Juncker said that if Britain wanted access to the European Union's common market, it needed to respect the rules of the common market.

Also read: BRICS an influential voice in international discourse: PM Modi ahead of G20



Turnbull, meanwhile, said Australia wanted an early free trade agreement with Britain so markets could remain open between them when Britain formally left the European trading bloc.

Obama, now in the last five months of his presidency, wants to put a final stamp on his signature policy shift toward the Pacific, setting the tone for his White House successor, who will be elected in November and take office on Jan. 20.

He has invested in developing closer ties with nations in Southeast Asia, and is taking pains in his last scheduled trip to the region to reassure partners worried about the economic and military might of China.

An arbitration court in The Hague ruled in July that China had no historic title over the waters of the South China Sea and had infringed on the rights of the Philippines, which brought the case under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea.

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Beijing rejected the ruling and accused the United States of stirring up trouble in the sea where China's territorial claims overlap in parts with Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan.

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The massive increase in demand for private schools is stimulating interest from real estate investors, developers and builders seeking alternative investments as the supply of quality assets in more traditional sectors such as offices, retail, residential and hotels remains limited, according to JLLs latest report.



To be released as part of Cityscape Global in Dubai, UAE Schools In reveals private schools are becoming increasingly preferred in the Mena region. The demand for private education is being driven by both the growth in the number of expatriates and the desire of more national families for better quality education for their children.



The requirement for around 350 private schools presents significant opportunities for real estate investors, developers and builders, said Craig Plumb, head of Research, Mena, JLL, who will deliver a keynote presentation at the Cityscape Global summit tomorrow (September 5).



The education sector has sparked the interest of many real estate investors right across the Mena region. Private equity firms in particular have been very active in recent years, and they will continue to play a pivotal role in the expansion of the private education sector here.



Historically, real estate investors and developers in the Mena region have focused on four traditional asset classes - residential, offices, retail and hotels. However, alternative investments including the likes of education, healthcare, infrastructure, logistics and student housing have become more popular in recent years.



The shortage of quality income producing assets in traditional sectors and declining returns in some locations has further prompted the interest in alternative asset classes, added Plumb.



With new investment vehicles facilitating the investment in schools, alternative investments diversify the investor portfolio and have the potential to improve the overall risk-return profile. Both retail investors and institutions are seeking greater exposure to non-correlating alternative investments that provide consistent income with low volatility.



As the school age population is growing in the region, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Jeddah and Cairo all require investment in new private schools by 2020. According to the Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Authority (FCSA), the majority of students in the UAE attend private schools, with the total number of students reaching 629,000 last year, 75 per cent of which were in private schools.



While the percentage of pupils in private education is somewhat lower in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, this has been the fastest growing sector of the market in both countries in recent years. Private schools in Saudi Arabia have increased from 5 per cent of new enrolments in 2011 to 11 per cent in 2014. Similarly, in Egypt the private sector accounted for 10 per cent of the total of 18 million students enrolled in the academic year of 2015-2016.



The growing demand for private schools has resulted in strong financial returns from this sector of the market. According to a report prepared by Abu Dhabi Education Council (ADEC) in 2015, private schools in Abu Dhabi earned close to Dh3 billion ($816 million) in profit over the preceding four years. Investment in private schools in Abu Dhabi between 2010 and 2015 reached Dh2.3 billion between 2010-2015, with 45 new private schools being delivered.



Education is regarded as a lucrative business opportunity, said Mr. Plumb. The school age population is growing and this is the main attraction for the education sector. In Dubai, for example, we expect the expatriate population to grow at average rate of 4.7 per cent over the next five years, and as expatriate workers move with their families; this creates demand for private education facilities.



There are three major drivers of the education sector for real estate investors; the strength of demand, the attractive financial returns available and the alignment of this sector with government policies to improve educational standards across the region.



United Arab Emirates



In its 2021 vision, the UAE Government emphasizes the importance attached to improving the education sector. Following the safety of its people, knowledge was addressed early in the vision summary, indicating the weight it holds.



 Dubai has one of the fastest population growth rates in the region. According to Oxford Economics, Dubais population is forecasted to increase from 2.54 million in 2016 to reach 2.90 million people by 2020, representing a CAGR of 3.5 per cent per annum. A total of 53 new schools are likely to be required in Dubai by 2020, with the majority (36 of these) being private schools.



 Abu Dhabi: The population of Abu Dhabi (defined as the Abu Dhabi region, not the entire Emirate) stood at 1.72 million people in 2015. It is estimated that the population will grow at a CAGR of 2.9% per annum between 2016 and 2020 to reach 1.99 million people. Abu Dhabi has a relatively young population with 70% falling below the age of 40 years. A total of 44 new schools will be required in Abu Dhabi over the next five years, split almost 50:50 between the public and private sectors





Saudi Arabia

Recognizing the need to improve the quality of education in KSA, the government has allocated an average of 23 per cent of the national budget to building new schools and improving existing schools over the past ten years.



 Riyadh: As of 2015, expatriates accounted for 42.1 per cent of Riyadhs population. Although this percentage is below the level recorded for Jeddah, this segment is expected to reach 42.8 per cent. A total of 395 new schools will be required to house the growing school age population of Riyadh by 2020, with 154 of these in the private sector.



 Jeddah: The school age population in Jeddah currently stands at just over one million students. This number is expected to grow by average 2.2 per cent per annum to reach 1.2 million persons by 2020. The growing school age population will add pressure on existing schools creating an opportunity for the private sector to capture some of the growing demand. A total of 194 new schools are forecast to be required in Jeddah by 2020, with 67 of these in the private sector.  TradeArabia News Service
India-based Tara Jewels Limited, a leading player in the jewellery industry, plans to set up a manufacturing base in Omans Salalah Free Zone to support the expansion of its existing capacity, said a report.



The company has recently launched business operations of its wholly owned subsidiary company  Tara Gulf at the free zone, added the Oman Daily Observer report, quoting Indian media.



The proposed manufacturing unit is expected to benefit from favourable tax laws, as well as the sultanates Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the US.


Iran will set up a pavilion later this month at German Maritime Trade Fair of SMM in Hamburg, a leading international maritime trade exhibition, revealed the Technological Exchange and International Affairs Department at the Presidential Office.



The Iranian delegation, which will include 50 experts from 22 maritime companies and organisations, will attend the fair to take advantage of developing collaborative technological and industrial ties with foreign companies at the fair, said the Iran Daily News report, citing Shana.



The leading international maritime trade fair will host more than 50,000 visitors and 2,100 participants from 67 countries and provide a forum for building new relationships and getting acquainted with other participants, it said.



The event, which is to be held from September 6 to 9, will highlight Green Propulsion  alternative, low-emission propulsion technologies such as LNG, methanol, hybrid and dual-fuel  and fuel cell systems, along with big data and digitalisation.



It will set the stage for establishing new international business contacts and provide opportunities for participants to become acquainted with Iranian companies and potential customers, added the report.
Schneider Electric, a global leader in energy management and automation, has ranked Masdar Institute among the top 12 finalists in the sixth edition of its globally-renowned, annual Go Green in the City student competition.



Launched in 2011, Go Green in the City is a platform that invites business and engineering students (second-year undergraduate or higher) to develop innovative energy management ideas for smarter cities.



As their response to the 2016 challenge, Masdar Institute students Arslan Anjum and Hiba Riaz, both pursuing an MSc in Microsystems Engineering, proposed a concept to utilise solar energy, through heavy-duty glass solar panel installations on sidewalks and bicycle tracks, said a statement from the company.



The project highlights that energy generated through this approach can be fed back into the city grid, and leveraged to charge electric cars and provide a sustainable distribution of power. The team was mentored by Fadi Halawi, tendering team leader for major projects at Schneider Electric.



Benoit Dubarle, president  Gulf Countries, Pakistan and East Mediterranean, Schneider Electric, said: The GCC, and the world at large, urgently require innovative solutions to help us address the energy challenge in a mindful way.



For our future generations to live in a green ecosystem, we must invest in technology and implement it creatively. The integration of these two factors will help achieve a lasting environmental impact in the years to come, he said.



Schneider Electric is committed to this goal, and has provided a global platform where young minds can come together to find answers and in the process, exchange know-how, he added.



Dr Abdullah Al Hefeiti, acting dean of students and dean of library at Masdar Institute, said: We are proud of our students who have been selected as finalists for this exciting and challenging competition.



Contests like Go Green in the City help to highlight the importance of energy management and sustainable urban systems for a sustainable future, which is at the core of our institutes objectives, he said.



The submissions for the 2016 edition of the Go Green in the City challenge came from 1,183 teams across 182 countries. The top 100 semi-finalists announced in May included 20 teams (from a total of 102 entries) from the MEA region  including the UAE, Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya, Morroco and Ghana - accounting for the second largest pool of regional representation in the second round of the competition, said a statement.



Masdar Institute is competing against student teams from leading universities in Germany, Azerbaijan, China, India, Kenya, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Brazil for the top prize.



Sevda Esenturk, vice president of human resources - Gulf Countries and Pakistan, Schneider Electric, said: We are proud of our institutes achievement in this global challenge. This is the first time a participating team from the Middle East has reached the finals  that in itself is a big milestone for us.



It also signals that the regions efforts in diversifying the national economy and building a knowledge-based ecosystem are on the right track, he said.



The teams SolarWay project was developed over several months, and demonstrates much-needed innovation and creativity in the region, he concluded.



The final stage of the competition will be held in Paris, France, from September 19 to 22, with the 12 contenders invited to an all-expense paid trip, it said.



The four-day finale will include business workshops, networking events, city tours and the main presentations. Students will also have the opportunity to network with Schneider Electrics top management and learn about the industry from experts.



The 2016 winner will earn a chance to visit Schneider Electrics global business hubs and explore opportunities to kick start their careers with the global energy leader, it stated.  TradeArabia News Service
Al Tamimi & Company has opened a new office in Al Khobar, in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, one of the country's largest markets.



The office is the law firm's third in the kingdom and, combined with its existing operations in Riyadh and Jeddah, gives it coverage across the whole of Saudi Arabia. It also becomes the 17th office the firm has opened in the Middle East since its foundation.



The opening of Al Tamimi's office in Al Khobar is the latest phase in the development of a highly successful practice in Saudi Arabia, with the firm having originally opened its first office in the country in Riyadh in 2008 followed by Jeddah in 2015.



The Eastern Province is of vital importance as the core area of Saudi Arabia's petrochemical and industrial production, as well as being a key area for transportation and logistics.



Al Tamimi has already been advising clients there for many years on a wide range of matters and projects across both these and other sectors, including manufacturing, real estate, retail and TMT.

The firm is licensed to practice in its own name in Saudi Arabia without a local association, enabling it to provide such services to clients consistently and to the highest standard.



Husam Hourani, managing partner at Al Tamimi, said: We are delighted to have opened a new office in Al Khobar which further strengthens our presence in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Having already done a considerable amount of business in the Eastern Province, it is an entirely logical step for us to take and underlines the commitment we have to the country.



"Saudi Arabia's economy continues to be strong and, notwithstanding the short-term dynamics of the oil price, is set for a further period of sustained growth, supported by a series of planned reforms that will have a far reaching impact. We are there in force to advise any organisation looking to contribute to the country's future success, and with a deep understanding of Saudi Arabia's legal and regulatory systems, we are already the leading choice for local, regional and international organisations.



Al Tamimi has 24 practising lawyers in Saudi Arabia, including three partners. The Al Khobar office will be headed up by Jonathan Reardon and supported by Omar Amery and Zahir Qayum.

They will collaborate closely with their colleagues in Riyadh and Jeddah to provide comprehensive services to clients both in and outside the country. The team in Al Khobar covers the entire spectrum of legal advice to clients, drawing on the firms overall strength and experience across all business sectors. - TradeArabia News Service
A year after the worst Haj disaster in a generation, Saudi Arabia is issuing pilgrims with electronic bracelets and using more surveillance cameras to avoid a repeat of a crush that killed hundreds.



The world's largest annual Muslim gathering brings some two million to Islam's most sacred sites in Makkah.



Custodian of Islam's most revered places, Saudi Arabia stakes its reputation on organising haj, one of the five pillars of Islam which every able-bodied Muslim who can afford to is obliged to undertake at least once.



This year, efforts are being made to strengthen crowd management. Thousands of civil servants, security personnel and medics have been conducting drills in preparation for the pilgrimage, which officially starts this week.



The kingdom says it is deploying extra staff and increasing coordination with Haj missions from pilgrims' home countries to ensure worshippers comply with agreed schedules to perform various rituals. Hundreds of new surveillance cameras had been installed at the Grand Mosque.



"The scheduling programme is the most important part of the operational programme," Interior Ministry spokesman Major General Mansour Turki told Reuters.



"This is the area we have to concentrate on, to make sure pilgrims ...comply with it once they get there."



Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat said last month the Makkah Development Authority had set up electronic paths and gates to manage crowds heading to Jamarat, the symbolic stoning of the devil where many previous disasters have occurred.



The kingdom also is kitting pilgrims out with electronic wristbands to enable authorities to track the flow of people and get early warnings of crowd build-ups.



NO POLITICS



Wary that some pilgrims may seek to use Haj for ideological purposes, Saudi Arabia said it would not tolerate any attempt to politicise Haj - remarks widely seen as referring to Iran.



Iran said in May its pilgrims would not attend, blaming Riyadh for "sabotage" and failing to guarantee their safety. Saudi Arabia blamed Iran, saying it had demanded the right to hold demonstrations that would have created chaos. - Reuters
Russia hopes to fetch more than $11 billion for a minority stake in the Kremlin's flagship oil producer Rosneft before the end of the year to plug budget holes caused by low crude prices, an industry source told Reuters on Friday.



The sale will be complicated by sanctions imposed on Moscow over its actions in Ukraine and by many investors' wariness of putting money into Russia as well as volatile commodity markets.



But Russia is hoping to repeat the success of Rosneft's initial share offering a decade ago when it raised $11 billion in one of the world's biggest such sales, despite concerns that investors would be spooked by Rosneft's purchase of most of the assets of oil firm YUKOS, bankrupted by the Kremlin.



On Friday, Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukayev said his ministry had received documents needed to kick start the sale of 19.5 per cent in Rosneft, including a valuation and proposals on terms of sale.



An industry source familiar with the sale process said the stake had been valued at over $11 billion. The documents were submitted this week by Rosneftegas, which controls Rosneft on behalf of the government. Italian bank Intesa is advising Rosneftegas on the sale.



In comments to Russian news agencies later on Friday, Ulyukayev said estimates the stake would be valued at around $11 billion were close to reality.



After privatization, the government will keep 50 per cent plus one share in Rosneft, the world's largest oil firm by reserves among listed companies.



Rosneft produces over a third of Russia's total output of 10.7 million barrels per day - a figure making Russia the world's biggest producer on a par with Saudi Arabia and the United States.



Russian President Vladimir Putin said the sale of the stake should take place before the end of the year and should involve strategic investors.



"I think we should be aiming precisely for that type of investment. We are getting ready and are planning to do it this year," Putin told Bloomberg News.



Oil major BP owns just under 20 per cent in Rosneft following the purchase of BP's Russian joint venture TNK-BP by Rosneft for $50 billion in 2013.



Rosneft's own market value has fallen to $55 billion since then as a result of low oil prices and sanctions imposed on Russia, Rosneft and its chief executive Igor Sechin, one of Putin's closest allies.



At its initial public offering (IPO), Rosneft was worth nearly $80 billion. Western majors will find it difficult to invest in Rosneft due to sanctions but their place could be taken by Asian investors, including from China and India, which have been seeking to develop resources in Russia.



Russia is effectively competing with many other resource rich countries for money from investors to compensate for low commodities prices.



The world's largest non-listed oil firm by reserves and output, Saudi Aramco, is planning to list up to a 5 per cent stake in the next two years, seeking an overall valuation of over $2 trillion.



The industry source said Rosneftegas was asking the government to issue a decree guaranteeing a stable tax regime during the sale of the stake and beyond.



"You cannot attract solid investors if the tax regime keeps changing," the source said.  Reuters
Science fiction often speculates about robots that are virtually indistinguishable from humans. However, while there are examples of humanoid robots being developed, the majority of robots will not take after their creators, says GlobalData.
Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide today announced the entry of its innovative Aloft brand to the Saudi Arabian market with the opening of Aloft Riyadh.

Designed for todays hyper-connected, tech-forward global traveller, Aloft continues to re-define the traditional hotel experience and strengthen its footprint in the Middle East, following the success of Aloft Abu Dhabi in the UAE. Owned and developed by FAS Hotels, division of Fawal Al Hokair group, Aloft Riyadh offers a vibrant social scene in the dynamic city of Riyadh.



With a portfolio of more than 100 hotels in dynamic destinations around the globe, Aloft continues to be one of the fastest growing hotel brands and is set to open 12 more properties in the Middle East by 2020, said Brian McGuiness, Global Brand Leader, Specialty Select Brands, Starwood Hotels & Resorts. Saudi Arabia boasts a rapidly growing tech savvy culture, and Aloft resonates in this market with its innovative programming and approach to technology, which appeal to todays hyper-connected traveller.



We thank Fawaz Al Hokair Group for putting their trust in Starwood to open the first Aloft in Saudi Arabia, said Michael Wale, president, Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Europe, Africa and Middle East. Aloft truly brings something new and unique to the hospitality sector in the kingdom where there is a growing demand for modern, tech-forward hotels at an affordable price.



Centrally located at the intersection of Riyadhs main Olaya Street and Makkah Road, the hotel is in close proximity from the key government ministries, the shopping and restaurants of the downtown core, the National Museum and the Diplomatic Quarter.



Aloft Riyadh features 281 modern, loft-inspired guest rooms with the brands signature offerings, such as an ultra-comfortable plush signature bed and custom amenities. The hotel offers a variety of food and beverage outlets including Dish, an all-day dining restaurant; Re:fuel, a 24-hour grab & go for light meals; the brands signature w xyz lounge, the go-to hang out with a fun social vibe, serving handcrafted drinks and snacks and the trendy Crush rooftop pool cafe. Other features at the hotel include a well-equipped Re:charge gym and more than 220 M2 of meeting space across five Tactic rooms.



With design-led innovation in the brands DNA, Aloft Riyadh will feature SPG Keyless, the hospitality industrys first mobile, keyless entry system that allows guests to use their smart phone or Apple watch as a room key. Aimed at the mobile generation, guests of Aloft Riyadh will also be able to make requests from the hotel via the SPG Lets Chat text messaging service.



The opening of Aloft Riyadh marks the launch of the brand in Saudi Arabia, to be followed by Aloft Dhahran at the end of 2016. Featuring 262 rooms, Aloft Dhahran is walking distance from the popular Mall of Dhahran and will feature all the brands signature elements and programming. - TradeArabia News Service
Curating information literacy stories from around the world since 2005
Arjaan by Rotana Dubai Media City, a luxurious hotel in the UAE emirate, has appointed Ayman Ashor as its new general manager.



Ashor brings over 20 years experience in the hospitality industry, and has worked with international hospitality chains across the world, including Egypt, the Netherlands and Germany.



These include groups such as Hilton Worldwide, Movenpick Hotels and Resorts, Sheraton Hotels, Steigenberger Hotel Group and Jumeirah Group.



The Dutch  Egyptian national has been with Rotana since 2014, previously serving as general manager of Centro Capital Centre Abu Dhabi before taking up his new role.



He holds a Bachelors degree in Hotel Management and MBA in Marketing & Communications from the Netherlands. Ashor, who has been in the UAE since 2008, is fluent in English, Arabic, Dutch and German.



I look forward to working with the whole team and for their support in making this year and the years to come a successful one, he said. - TradeArabia News Service
Travellers from Jordan can now apply for visas to Cyprus at the new Cyprus Visa Application Centre launched by VFS Global, a leading outsourcing and technology services specialist, in the city of Amman.



With Cyprus emerging as a preferred outbound destination, applicants will find this centre, located in the heart of the city, an easily accessible and convenient option.



The newly launched centre is located at Galleria Mall on Sweifieh Street, Amman, and joins nine other client governments also served from the same premise. Services at the new Cyprus Visa Application Centre commence from September 4.



VFS Global has partnered with the Government of the Republic of Cyprus to handle visa processing services since 2010. The company now serves the client government through 18 Visa Application Centres globally in five countries.



Commenting on the launch of the new centre, Nafsika Krousti, Ambassador of the Republic of Cyprus in Amman, said: It is indeed important that the Embassy of the Republic of Cyprus in Amman is launching this visa application centre, in collaboration with VFS Global. I need to emphasise that the Cyprus Government highly cherishes its bilateral relations with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and wishes to provide the best possible facilities to Jordanian citizens applying for visas to travel to Cyprus, either for business, or pleasure. In this framework, I hope and trust that VFS Global in its visa processing procedures will rise to the challenge of providing the highest level of quality of service to the visa applicants, for the benefit of all.



Srinarayan Sankaran, COO - Middle East, VFS Global, added: We are delighted to collaborate with the Government of the Republic of Cyprus to launch this new centre in Jordan, which caters to the countrys rising travel demand. Jordan is the fourth country in the Middle East from which VFS Global is privileged to provide citizens with Cyprus visa processing services. The company is committed to the highest levels of customer experience to offer an accessible and safe process, which is seamless and convenient.



The key features of the new centre are:

 Convenient and centrally-accessed location

 Longer operating hours allowing applicants to visit at a time of their convenience

 Professional staff with local language capability to handle queries and applications

 Automated queue governance for smooth flow of applicants, providing better crowd management

 Dedicated counters for applicants and travel agents/tour operators

 Dedicated website for easy access to information including visa categories, requirements, checklist and applicable fees

 Online appointment scheduling, and tracking of application status

 Dedicated call centres and email support to answer queries

 100 per cent secure handling of passports, documents and personal information

 Visa status update via website or SMS alerts. - TradeArabia News Service


Amit Sharma

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, September 4

As many as 2,500 police personnel, including seven DSPs and 25 Inspectors, will be on duty in the city to ensure a peaceful student union elections at Panjab University (PU) and city colleges that will go to polls on September 7.

The UT police have chalked out a plan for the D-day, which will turn both Sector 14 and 25 campuses of the PU into a fortress.

Sources said apart from the strategic points, including Student Centre, the road where student organisations had pitched their tents and entry gates, the police would also be present outside the departments till the time polling ends.

Sources said quick reaction teams (QRT) would also be present on the campus.

Police officials said the barricading would be done near the tents of the student organisations. Patrolling on the campus will continue till the elections are over.

Only students will get entry into the campus on the day of the election and all vehicles on the premises will be checked, the police said.

The Sector 25 campus that houses the UIET Department, has the maximum number of voters and it will also be under the close watch of the police.

On the directions of the UT police, the PU authorities have decided that Gate No. 2 and 3 of the Sector 14 campus will be closed at 8.30 pm till the elections are held.

Meanwhile, the time of campaigning at the

girls hostels have been restricted to 7 pm and the boys to 10 pm.

The security outside city colleges, especially DAV, Sector 10, PGGCM, Sector 11, SGGS College, Sector 26 and GGDSD College, Sector 32, will be tightened.

Police officials claimed that all colleges in the city would be under close vigil and they would ensure that no outsider manages to enter the college.

The seven DSPs will keep a close tab on the happenings in their areas along with the area SHOs.
Chandigarh, September 4

Two motorcycle-borne miscreants snatched gold earrings from a woman at Sector 20. The victim was in a park when one of the accused approached her and snatched the earrings, while his accomplice waited nearby.

The victim, Sushila (49), a resident of Sector 20, had gone for a morning walk at the park on September 3, when a youth wearing a yellow T-shirt came and threatened her.

The accused pulled the earrings from the victims ears and fled from the spot. The victim saw that another youth was waiting for the accused on a motorcycle near the park. After the incident, both of them sped away from the spot on the motorcycle. The woman failed to note down the registration number of the motorcycle. The victim later informed the police and an investigation has been initiated. A case has been registered.  TNS
Gurdeep Singh Mann

Tribune News Service

Bathinda, September 4

The city is witnessing a flurry of activity these days as the state government is trying to complete many unfinished works of laying roads, water and sewerage pipes and constructing ultramodern toilets.

Though a section of city residents and SAD supporters are pleased over such works, leaders in the Opposition parties are raising eyebrows as they are being done at the end of the governments tenure.

They have held the government responsible for holding the so-called development in abeyance for the past nine years.

Terming these basic facilities as their fundamental right, leaders of AAP and Congress have declared it a gimmick to hoodwink the voters.

Development is something different, which is still a far cry. Laying roads, streets and constructing toilets are the basic needs of a person. As per our Constitution, its the fundamental right of citizens, said Gian Chand, a social activist.

If the prices of land shot up in a locality by laying roads, streets, water and sewerage then it is indeed development. Development means empowering people economically. It is not only that their standard of living increases in localities where there is sewerage, water, roads and proper streets but they also become rich in terms of their fixed deposits, claims local SAD leader and councillor Rajinder Sidhu.

On accelerating such works this election year, he said, Its round the year activity without any full stop.

Aam Admi Partys central observer for Bathinda Zone, Romi Bhati, said, Spending a few bucks on works for which the public was crying for past nine years is not development. The dream of SAD leaders to transform Bathinda into New Zealand is still unfulfilled, Bhati said.

These are tactics to woo voters at the end of their term, Romi added.

He said such works would last for just a few months and its a sheer wastage of money. Widening of roads, streets, providing water and laying sewerage pipes should be a round the year process, he said.

At this time, such works are only aimed to give benefit to the SAD leaders and not the public, he said.

District Congress Committee president Mohan Lal Jhumba said development was only in the papers and in the speeches of Badal family, who speak at the top of their voices at public gatherings.

The problem of waterlogging in Sirki Bazar, Power House road, Amreek Singh road, Ganesh Nagar and Dhobiana road still exists. People are dying due to stray animals and engineering faults on roads. There is unbearable pollution in the city. Both railway under bridges (RUBs) remain inundated during rains, Jhumba said. Is this development? he questioned.

He said development was only seen in liquor sale as the number of distilleries had increased manifold in the state, along with the liquor vends. This has lead to a spurt in road accidents caused by drunk drivers, he added. Family members of three recently married women were forced to come on road to protest against the Bathinda police as the policemen pocketed money to allow the escape of the accused, Jhumba alleged.

He said buying interlocking tiles from the factories owned by the rich political leaders associated with SAD was not development.

We can see interlocking tiles laid in every nook and corner of the city. They have been laid even at places which are not even fit for such tiles. The city of lakes has been turned into a city of interlocking tiles, Jhumba said. Whatever the government has done in the name of development is too little and too late, he said.
Robert Fisk

The body of Aylan Kurdi has gone beyond the iconic. Being small and dressed like a little European boy, and being white rather than brown-skinned, his very name posthumously and subtly shifting to the homely English Alan, the son of the Kurdish refugee family fleeing across the Mediterranean from Turkey to Europe became our child. The moment his tiny body washed up on the beach near Bodrum and appeared on front pages around the world, the closet racism of our politicians was briefly stilled. What stone heart could condemn this little boy as part of a swarm, a word used about the occupants of the Calais camp by a former British prime minister?

But the image of Alan Kurdi obscured a host of lessons which we ignored  and continue to disregard  at our peril. Firstly, of course, he was a mere representative of the thousands of other Alans whose remains lie today on the sea bed of the Mediterranean, forever unrecorded and unfilmed. Alan was a symbol, perhaps even a representative of this army of dead children. But he also became a sacrificial three-year-old, thrown up by the waves as a martyr rather than a victim of political violence and betrayal, while the Turkish police officer in rubber gloves gently taking his body from the sand became a kind of male version of the pieta. But if grief was depicted thus by Michaelangelo half a millennium ago, it was nonetheless odd that we regarded the Syrian Kurdish child as the victim of a frightening new phenomenon.

The refugee, the fearful emigrant  soon to become, for us, the threatening immigrant  was portrayed as a uniquely 21st, or at least 20th century, burden. We could look back to the millions of displaced persons of post-war 1945 Europe, even to the Armenian refugee survivors of the 1915 genocide or the victims of the Bolshevik revolution, but there history dribbled away.

Being a college classicist  in Latin, not Greek  I was struck this week, after the Italians rescued those 10,000 migrants from the sea, by how very central the story of Alan Kurdis family and a million others really is in the history and culture of the Mediterranean.

We can read, for example, the epic story of a refugee family launching its equally unstable boat into the Mediterranean only a few hundred miles from the very same Anatolian coast from which the Kurdi family set sail so tragically last year. A son records how he and his father took to the open sea, borne outward into exile with my people leaving behind only corpses and a burned landscape. And, having left what is now Turkey, they arrived at last, after a final treacherous crossing of the Mediterranean from what is now Tunisia  how the parallels shout at us across the ages  in the sanctuary of Italy.

Only in this ancient text, the refugee is no migrant to burden the EUs social services  and conscience  but the first hero of Rome, son of Anchises and relative of King Priam, ancestor of Romulus and Remus. Virgils Aeneid  and I was quoting from Robert Fitzgeralds glorious translation  does not refer to Aeneas as a migrant. He is in the original Latin an exsul  an exile, a banished person  or fato profugus, a fugitive by destiny or by fate.

The Trojans and the peoples of the Middle East today were and are fleeing for their lives. And so we come to the flip side of this tragedy. Not the history of the past, but the history of the future. In the age of the internet, we have stopped thinking about this. The question is rarely how did this come to pass? but what should we do NOW? Dont ask why 19 men who claimed they were Muslims committed the international crimes against humanity of 9/11. Invade Afghanistan! Dont question how Saddam achieved power in Iraq. Invade Iraq!

The story  whether it be of Homers Odysseus or Virgils Aenias  is as contemporary as the present Arab tragedy. People were fleeing the folly of kings and warlords, militia leaders and dictators. Which brings us to the next, even vaster fleets of refugees who will trek from their homelands in the decades to come, victims of the ferocious Saddam-like autocrats and satraps whom we currently support in a different part of the Muslim world.

Daniel McLaughlin, among the best correspondents in central and eastern Europe, has drawn attention to the dangers inherent in the Muslim Asian states which emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union a quarter of a century ago. In a region of oil and gas wealth and strategic importance, their leaders, courted by both Moscow and Washington, are guilty of appalling human rights crimes, massacres and torture of their own people in their war  you guessed it  against Isis and the Taliban.

For just as the brutality and corruption of the Arab dictators whom we largely armed and financed, spawned the Islamic cult caliphates of the Middle East  the Trojan Horse of our own time  so Islam Karimov, Nursultan Nazarbayev, Imomali Rakhmon and the rest have all fought the same nebulous black and purist enemy in the Stans. In Uzbekistan, the death on Friday of brutal Karimov, whose cops specialise in torture  boiling victims alive is a favourite which out-Saddams Saddam  will be good news for the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, ally of both Isis and the Taliban.

In Tajikistan, where a civil war in the 1990s claimed  with statistics as wild as Syrias  up to 100,000 dead, a thousand of Rakhmons citizens have joined Isis, along with Gulmurud Khalimov, the former Tajik police commander. Khalimov, I should add, was trained in the US. The Americans maintained post-9/11 air bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The ghastly Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, a creature whose torture chambers and abuse of civil rights are close to Karimovs standards, pays millions to his hard-working adviser and would be scourge of dictators, Tony Blair. You get the point.

And when these vicious Ruritanias explode, the refugees will come again, the exiles by fate and the fugitives of destiny; Uzbekistans 30 million population is almost a third larger than Syrias. And they will drift across their frontiers and many will come to us, mixed up with more Afghans, Syrians and Arabs. And then we will ask not why?, not how did we come to this?, but what do we do NOW?. And it will be too late again. What was the name of that little chap on the beach, well ask ourselves then? Aylan, wasnt it? Or Alan? And behind those refugees will be the burning cities of the ancient Silk Road, as surely as Aleppo burns today, and Troy long ago.

Independent
MK Bhadrakumar

THE signing of the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) in Washington on August 29 has generated controversy in India. The opposition parties  the Congress and Left parties, in particular  have voiced criticism. The UPA government was hesitant about signing this foundational agreement despite American urgings. The present government has not explained how or why the volte-face became necessary.

LEMOA provides for the armed forces of the two countries to use the other globally for supplies, spare parts, services and refuelling. Effectively, the US forces could operate out of Indian bases on a simple basis. This is the first time India is allowing a foreign power such access to its military bases. Even in the halcyon days of Indo-Soviet friendship and cooperation, the two countries never felt the need for such a platform. India has fought more wars than most countries in modern history, but never felt the need for LEMOA, either. Of course, it is not on Indias mind to project power in faraway regions. From the US perspective, too, a military base in India as such is not a critical need when it has dozens of bases in the Indian Ocean region  spread out in Afghanistan, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE, Oman, Djibouti and Diego Garcia  to fight its wars or pursue its interventionist policies as the world hegemon.

So, what is the raison detre of LEMOA? The heart of the matter is that LEMOA is not a stand-alone agreement. It represents a milestone in a journey that lies ahead. We need to relate it to the ground clearing that has already taken place for this foundational agreement  Indias induction into the Missile Technology Regime (with American help), unique designation of India by the US Congress recently as the US Major Defense Partner (comparable to NATO allies), etc. Equally, we need to discern that LEMOA will be followed by two other milestones  signing of two other foundational agreements, namely, Communications and Information Security Memorandum Agreement (CISMOA) and Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement for Geospatial Intelligence (BECA).

Make no mistake, an architecture is rising on a solid foundation. This is at once clear if we comprehend why the US has been insistent on the signing of these agreements as prelude to the transfer of advanced technology to India. Quintessentially, CISMOA and BECA can lead to the US selectively yes, selectively  transfer advanced military technology to India and, perhaps, allow co-production in India, while the ultimate control rests in American hands in regard of actual usage of the technology. If CISMOA and BECA come through  there is no conceivable reason why the Narendra Modi government will say Nyet  LEMOA at once becomes of great practical use, insofar as given the interoperability of the weaponry, the US will be able to operate out of Indian bases as is they are full-fledged American bases.

On the other hand, CISMOA and BECA are enablers that will open the Great Indian Arms Bazar to the American vendor to a more optimal extent. It means many things  US exports to India will increase exponentially; US-India defence ties will deepen and expand; the US will irreversibly replace Russia as Indias principal partner in defence cooperation; and, most important, the US will emerge as Indias indispensable partner in sustaining our defence preparedness, no matter what lies in the womb of time in regional and international politics.

It is this last aspect that also happens to be the most crucial for Indias tryst with destiny. Clearly, with CISMA and BECA enabling the US to have the ultimate say in the use of American military technology by the Indian armed forces and with such a critical dependence developing for India on American political goodwill, it is not difficult to see where things are inexorably heading to. Its strategic autonomy!

Make no mistake, this is going to be a one-way street all the way  Indias strategic autonomy will get whittled down; India-Russia relations will atrophy (which is also critically important for the US global strategy, against the backdrop of the New Cold War); American arms exports to India will enter a boom period (India is expected to spend $150 billion for arms purchases in a near term); these arms deals, in the absence of open tendering, will be highly lucrative for the American vendor; the US creates powerful interest groups among Indias elites.

Three fundamental issues arise here. One, the US is the only country demanding such a chastity belt to be put around Indias loins. This is despite Russia having supplied BrahMos technology and currently negotiating advanced S-400 ABM system and supersensitive stealth aircraft and nuclear submarines, etc.

Two, the US has a consistent record of keeping its military partners on a tight leash within the overall matrix of its strategies as a superpower  that is to say, there are profound geopolitical implications, given the stark reality that US-India strategic partnership can never be an equal relationship.

This leads us to the third template, namely, implications of all this for Indias relations with third countries  Russia, China, Pakistan, Iran, principally. The US strategic doctrine openly espouses containment strategies against Russia and China. The US has designated Russia as its geopolitical enemy and there is no scope for US-Russia cohabitation under and Indian tent. Simply put, no matter Indias time-tested friendship with Russia, Uncle Sam will kick out Ivan from the Indian tent and Ram can only helplessly watch this happening right in front of his eyes.

Again, while the perception in India could be that the emergent partnership with the US will put pressure on China to be conciliatory toward us, the evidence so far is to the contrary. The relative stability and predictability of the India-China normalisation under the UPA has suffered a setback through the past two-year period. Finally, Iran and Pakistan worry about the US intentions. Thus, a geopolitical realignment in Indias neighbourhood becomes a high probability. And, India lives in its region.

 The writer is a former ambassador
Jalnidh Kaur

Every time I come across news feeds about teacher trainings and workshops, the student in me feels perplexed. I imagine a trainer, a senior pedagogue, coming to these meetings, pontificating to teachers about best practices in the field. I wonder why they dont invite a student instead. Isnt a student the best person to give opinion about what a good teacher should be like?

Having been a student for the last 20 years and having gained quite an eclectic exposure to teachers from Punjab to Delhi to Oxford, I think I have some interesting insights to make. While every human being is distinct and heterogeneity is evident in teacher quality, there are strings that are common across teachers who become their students favourites. This Teachers Day, I make an attempt at compiling the traits that I have keenly spotted in the teachers who have become my personal favourites over space and time:

Those who are passionate about what they are teaching.

John Quah, one of my professors at Oxford, had a contagious passion for his subject. The entire class would be spellbound by the end of his microeconomics lectures. I vividly remember his class on fixed point theorems. After scribbling the proof of Tarskys Fixed Point Theorem on the whiteboard, he remained in a state of trance looking at the proof and then told us, This proof is the most beautiful thing on this planet, and who knows, even beyond! The entire class was thrilled. Passion is contagious and has the power to ignite unparalleled enthusiasm and curiosity in the minds of learners.

Those who always encourage students to ask questions.

It signals that one is the master of ones subject and does not fear answering queries. I fondly remember one of my professors at St. Stephens College, Delhi, Mrs Leema Mohan, who would always take questions from students with a wide smile on her face. Her patient and placid smile would be so encouraging that even the weakest ones in class would not shy to raise their hands and ask their doubts. She was in complete contrast to another teacher who would deride the students for asking questions that according to him were silly. The entire class admitted to having developed a phobia for the subject taught by this particular teacher at the end of three years. Creating an atmosphere where students feel empowered and encouraged to ask questions creates a beautiful two-way flow in a classroom. This is one of the foremost characteristics that differentiates a teacher from a preacher.

Those who make an attempt to link the worlds inside and outside classroom.

One of my high school teachers, Mrs Sargam Malhotra, at Guru Nanak Public School, Ludhiana, would always make it a point to narrate a story in every class. Every student would gear up for this moment in class, putting their pens down and straightening their backs every time she would quip, Let me tell you a story. Mrs Kochhar, my political science teacher at Sacred Heart Convent School, Ludhiana, would embark on tangents and narrate inspiring personal life stories to make a point. Those stories stay with me still. One of the basic responsibilities of a teacher is to simplify concepts so that they no longer remain esoteric. The Indian Economic Development class of my teacher Mrs Poonam Kalra at St. Stephens College was an excellent example. Her lucid and graphic expositions of poverty, unemployment, hunger and other developmental issues beyond pithy facts and figures would leave the entire class charged with the spirit to make a change.

At the same time, I recall experiences of studying under dull teachers who would merely repeat what was present in the textbooks or just fail miserably at explaining concepts to class. Our blank faces were unable to deter one particular teacher as he would continue enunciating his dry script or copying proofs from textbook to blackboard. He would fail to make us see the connection every time. Being able to synchronise my worlds inside and outside classroom has been one of the most crucial challenges growing up as a student.

Those who would go an extra mile to answer questions that are beyond the scope of the course.

A good teacher doesnt snub a question saying this is beyond your syllabus or that it isnt important for the upcoming test. Even if it is something ineffable for the students at their current understanding level, she would draw a simplified analogy and help the curious students sneak a peek at the knowledge that lay ahead.

Those who are honest and say I dont know candidly.

There were times when an unexpected question from class left a teacher blank or confused. Some brushed off the question as being unimportant, some pretended about knowing and gave an ambivalent answer. At the other end of the spectrum were those who would honestly admit, I dont know the answer to that question yet, but I shall get back to you. And then they would get back the next day as a mark of sincerity. I still harbour oceans of respect for these teachers.

Those who hand back graded answer sheets in time.

I had a teacher who would take at least a few months to return answer scripts of the class tests he gave. Then there was Pankaj Tandon, my microeconomics professor who would return the graded class tests right the next day after the test. I remember the entire class getting awed when this teacher gave a test on Monday and walked in with the graded tests on Tuesday. It showed us his utmost sincerity and devotion, the kind he expected of us.

Those who say a word of apology for a mistake made on the blackboard.

There are some teachers who become too defensive to accept the mistake; some who admit the error but very discretely making sure to erase it before any other student notices; then there are those who openly announce in class that they were wrong before making a correction. Acknowledgement of ones infallibility is one of the hallmarks of a great teacher. We came to respect such teachers even more.

While our education bodies keep coming up with eligibility tests and stringent requirements for qualifying teachers to teach, I do hope that someone up there is taking a note and making the students voices heard. It is time to raise teaching standards in our world by assessing teachers by the students criteria as well.

The writer is a Rhodes scholar.
Tribune News Service

PANIPAT, SEPTEMBER 4

Haryana Speaker Kanwar Pal Singh Gujjar said here today that former Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda should co-operate with the CBI. He said the BJP government had not taken action against any person due to political vendetta.

Gujjar was in the city to chair a function to commemorate the birth anniversary of King Mihirbhoj Veer Gurjar by the Gurjar community .

When mediapersons asked the Speaker about the CBI raids on the residences of former CM Bhupinder Singh Hooda and other officials, he said the CBI was an independent investigation agency which worked on its own without any interference.

The BJP has completed more than two years at the Centre and in Haryana but no action has been taken against anyone due to political vendetta, the Speaker added.

The Speaker said if someone was involved in wrong deeds, he should be punished.

No vendetta: Khattar

Faridabad: Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar has ruled out political vendetta in CBI raids at houses and offices of former Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda and officers in connection with the Gurgaon land scam.

The raids on Saturday are part of an investigation. The CBI is doing its job without pressure from anyone, he told the media here today. The CM hoped Hooda would come out clean.

He was in the city to participate in a seminar to discuss strategies to deal with traffic problem in Faridabad and Gurgaon.
Syed Ali Ahmed

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, September 3

The Central Bureau of Investigation today conducted searches at 24 places in Chandigarh, Haryana and Delhi, including the residences of former Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, in a case of alleged irregularities in the purchase of land from Gurgaon farmers, who were cheated of Rs 1,500 crore.

The search operation also covered the residential premises of UPSC member Chattar Singh, who was then Additional Private Secretary to Hooda.

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Raids were also conducted on the premises of Haryana Additional Transport Secretary SS Dhillon (then Director, Town and Country Planning); then Principal Secretary of Hooda ML Tayal (now retired); former Chief Town Planner Dhare Singh; Director of ABW Infrastructure Atul Bansal, his brother Amit Bansal; then OSDs to Hooda MS Chopra and Randhir Singh; the office of Town and Country Planning; then District Town Planner Jaswant Singh and then Deputy Superintendent of Town Planning Kulwant Singh.

CBI spokesperson RK Gaur said it had registered a case on September 15, 2015, against unidentified public servants and unknown private persons and took over the investigation on August 12, 2015, on the request of Haryana Government and further directions of the Centre. He denied involvement of Congress chief Sonia Gandhis son-in-law Robert Vadra.

The CBI team recovered documents related to bank transactions and property in the name of relatives and two computers from Hoodas residence; documents of a flat in Delhi and another in Faridabad from Chattar Singhs house; documents of four flats from Tayals house; four plots in Gurgaon, Panchkula and Chandigarh and farmland in Punjab from SS Dhillons residence; and laptop, hard disk from Atul Bansals place.
Sat Singh

TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE

LEGHA (BHIWANI), SEPTEMBER 4

The stone-laying ceremony of the states first residential Acharyakulam to be set up in nearly 10 acres by the Baba Ramdev Trust remained a VIP affair today though Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar failed to make it.

Addressing a gathering here, Baba Ramdev said Rs. 25 crore would be spent in the first phase on Acharyakulam which would have a capacity to accommodate about 2,500 students. The intake of students would be enhanced at a later stage, if needed.

Replying to query about a remedy for joint pain, Ramdev exhorted the gathering to use cow milk instead of that of buffalo . He said: Murrah uuffalo milk is not good for health as it gets people diseased. One should use cow milk to remain healthy . Imagine when cows urine and dung have medicinal properties, what wonders its milk could do to ones health.

Lauding Baba Ramdev, Health Minister Anil Vij said the former was on a mission to make India into Bharat with his company making indigenous products were worth Rs 10,000 crore today.  I wish to see his company grow to lakhs of crores so that foreign companies which take money to foreign land could be thrown away, said Vij, who is the MLA from Ambala. He also announced that the state would be first in the country to have its AYUSH University soon.

He announced Rs 21 lakh donation for Bhiwanis Acharyakulam. Addressing the gathering, Agriculture Minister OP Dhankar announced a donation of Rs 51 lakh each to the two panchayats of Legha village in the form of a development project. Governor Kaptan Solanki, who was the chief guest on this occasion, said it was a matter of pride for the state that such an institution having a confluence of modern and age-old traditions would come up in Bhiwani district.

Interestingly, local Bhiwani-Mahendragarh MP Dharambir Singh and MLAs of six Assembly constituencies of Bhiwani district were conspicuous by their absence.

Sources said that owing to a dispute on the land where Acharyakulam was said to come up made Chief Minister cancel his programme at the eleventh hour.

The pilot car in the cavalcade of Health Minister Anil Vij was hit by a buffalo at Lohani village when he was on his way to attend the ceremony.
Our Correspondent

Bharmour, September 4

As many as 1,02,500 pilgrims have so far visited the holy Manimahesh Lake in Bharmaur tribal subdivision of Chamba district, according to reports reaching here today.

The pilgrims were very enthusiastic about the Manimahesh pilgrimage which would conclude on September 9, the occasion of Sri Radhashtami when the pilgrims and devotees of Lord Shiva would take a holy dip in the sacred icy cold waters of Manimahesh Lake.

The administration has increased the number of rescue teams to 20 to ensure the well-being of the pilgrims. The availability of oxygen cylinders along with life saving medicines had also been ensured.

The reports said electricity was being provided through solar plants at Dhanchho, Gauri Kund and Manimahesh Lake. In case of any breakdown in the solar panels, power generators had also been made available, the reports added.
Tribune News Service

Solan,September 4

Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh today said the state government would open more educational institutions wherever required after taking into consideration the strength of the students. However, rationalization of those institutes would be considered where the number of students was less.

He was addressing a public meeting at Baddi in Doon constituency of Solan district. He said the government was laying priority on providing best educational facilities to the youth and a number of colleges and schools had been opened, especially in remote and rural areas. This would especially benefit the girl students.

He said four colleges were opened in Solan district alone during this period besides opening and upgrading 51 schools. The Chief Minister said the government had ensured equitable and speedy development of all areas and all panchayats had access to all basic facilities. Efforts were afoot to link every village with a motorable road.

He said more farmers should adopt modern means of farming, horticulture, floriculture and vegetable production to enhance their income. He said the government was providing subsidy on these sectors under various schemes with Rs 1,115 crore Horticulture Development Project being a major endeavour in this field.

The Chief Minister gave details of various industrial projects underway in the Baddi area which included a mega tool room being setup at a cost of Rs 102 crore and Central Institute of Plastic Engineering and Technology which had begun classes. This also included a Rs 15 crore trade centre which would facilitate the industry. He said additional funds would be provided for those irrigation schemes of the constituency which were nearing completion during this financial year. He added that a sum of Rs 2,292 crore was being spent to provide irrigation and drinking water facilities in the state.

The Chief Minister announced that all persons living in the Barad colony in the area would also be provided housing facility.

Earlier, MLA, Doon, Ram Kumar Chaudhary thanked the CM for accelerating the pace of development in the area by providing liberal financial assistance.

Nalagarh Truck Operators Union presented a cheque of Rs. 11 lakh to the CMs relief fund.

The Chief Minister earlier inaugurated St Lukes School, at Kotla in Baddi.

He also inaugurated the newly installed 1500 solar photo voltaic street lights and a women police station at Baddi.

He later inaugurated a lift drinking water supply scheme at Jharmajri and a science block of GBSSS Nalagarh. He laid the foundation stones of police line at Kishanpura to be constructed at a cost of Rs 1.95 crore, an indoor stadium to be constructed at a cost of Rs 4.5 crore and Jawahar Lal Nehru Park at Nalagarh which will be constructed after incurring Rs 4.5 crore.

Industries Minister Mukesh Agnihotri, Hardeep Bawa, Chairman HP Construction and Other Workers Welfare Board was also present on the occasion along with other political leaders and officials.
Ehsan Fazili

Tribune News Service

Srinagar, September 4

All political parties batted for restoration of peace, normalcy and an end to the cycle of killings in Kashmir, during their separate meetings with the all-party parliamentary delegation led by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh here today.

On his third visit to the Valley since the start of the unrest, Rajnath met the delegations of different parties and smaller groups at the highly guarded Sher-e-Kashmir International Conference Centre (SKICC) for over five hours.

Describing the situation as grave, National Conference working president and former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah advocated a political solution to the Kashmir issue.

The situation is grave. This is a political issue, it needs a political solution, he said. During his meeting with the 28-member delegation, he sought opening of channels of communication to address the problem and find a solution to the issue. He pointed out that the presence of paramilitary forces in handling the situation depicted the grave nature of the situation.

Omar said there was a need to rebuild the credibility of all-party delegations as one had visited Kashmir following 2010 unrest also. It recommended that a group of interlocutors should be appointed to hold dialogue with all sections of society of J&K. The report of interlocutors is gathering dust at the Union Ministry of Home Affairs, he said.

State Congress president Ghulam Ahmad Mir accused the Central and state governments of having no plan and political roadmap to resolve the crisis. After the meeting he said, Our demand was to evolve an institution that could talk to people.

Mir said the party suggested five-points  end to raids, minimum use of force, revoking of FIRs, facilities for transportation of fruit from the Valley and compensation to victims of the ongoing violence. Now it is Home Ministers responsibility to address the problems, Mir told mediapersons. He headed a delegation of over 35-party members, including former deputy chief minister Tara Chand, former minister Sham Lal Sharma and Balwan Singh.

BJP state president Sat Sharma said the party conveyed to the delegation that Pakistan was responsible for the ongoing unrest and fomenting trouble. He claimed that the youths were getting money for indulging in stone-throwing at the behest of Pakistan. Everyone wants restoration of peace in Kashmir, the BJP leader said.

Referring to the role of separatist leaders in the present crisis, he said, those who do not want peace did not come to meet the delegation.

CPM leader and Kulgam MLA MY Tarigami said the separatist leaders also should have been invited, like the mainstream parties. He said the people of Kashmir were disappointed and the trust level was at the lowest.

Lamenting nothing concrete had emerged out of a similar exercise in 2010, he said talks were important to address the issue. Others who met the delegation included Independent MLA from Langate Engineer Sheikh Rashid, who advocated the resolution of Kashmir issue under UN resolutions.

PDP favours dialogue with Hurriyat

Ruling Peoples Democratic Party today laid stress on a result-oriented dialogue for the resolution of Kashmir issue. Our party is for dialogue and reconciliation to solve the issues. In our meeting with parliamentarians, we stressed on this, PDP general secretary Sartaj Madni said after meeting the all-party delegation. He said the party was for a dialogue with the Hurriyat and Pakistan. When Mufti Mohammad Sayeed formed alliance with BJP, he said it is an alliance of north and south pole. Mufti sahib tried to act as a bridge between India and Pakistan and the people. In the Agenda of Alliance there is clear mention of political dialogue with all stakeholders, he said.
Tribune News Service

Srinagar, September 4

More than 250 people were injured in fresh clashes with security forces in Kashmir on Sunday as a 28-member all-party delegation led by Home Minister Rajnath Singh arrived here to interact with a cross-section of people with a view to restore peace in the strife-hit Valley.

Protesters in Kashmirs Anantnag district and Pinjora village in Shopian took to the streets a day after another youngster was killed in police action in south Kashmirs Qazigund, prompting security forces to fire tear smoke shells and pellets.

Several were injured in action by security forces in Pinjora.

An enraged mob later set the mini-secretariat at Shopian on fire, damaging some property, eyewitnesses said. Protests continued in Shopian till the time of filing this report.

Health officials in Shopian and Anantnag confirmed that nearly 100 people with pellet and shell injuries were admitted to hospitals.

Clashes also broke out at Aripanthan area of Budgam district, where two people suffered pellets injuries in firing by security forces. Both the injured were shifted to public health centres at Aripanthan and Beerwah, where their condition was stated to be stable.

Protestors attacked a Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) legislator house in Tral.

Protesters from various villages in Tral marched to the towns Eidgah  a large ground where annual Eid prayers are offered  prompting security forces to fire several tear smokes shells.

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They then threw stones at Tral MLA Mushtaq Ahmad Shahs house.

They were young, innocent boys. They pelted some stones at my house and broke windowpanes, Shah said.

Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani, whose killing in July has sparked protests that will soon mark its second month, belonged to Tral.

Four youths were killed in firing by security forces on August 16 at Aripanthan which continues to be tense since then.

The all-party delegation led by Home Minister Rajnath Singh arrived in Srinagar on Sunday morning to a complete shutdown of the Valley and restrictions.

Contingents of police and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) were deployed across Srinagar and other parts of Kashmir, although curfew was not imposed.

The delegation of various political parties will talk to people to find find a way out of the present crisis.  (Inputs from Ehsan Fazili, Samaan Lateef and Majid Jahangir)
Tribune News Service



Srinagar, September 4

Chief Minister Mehbooba Muftis visit on Saturday to the family of Mushtaq Ahmad, who was killed in firing by security forces in a village in Anantnag, had a calming effect on passions there; it was seen as her compassion toward the victims of the ongoing violence.

Reports reaching here said the Chief Minister spent a lot of time with the family and condoled the death of the youth in the firing by security forces. She shared the familys grief. Several PDP workers went with her.

There were no protests anywhere close to the village the Chief Minister visited, and she talked of restoration of peace with dignity and urged the countrys leadership to launch an unconditional dialogue.

It was erroneously reported earlier that protests had taken place and the Chief Minister had to cut short her visit.
Srinagar, August 4

Separatist leaders on Sunday rebuffed attempts by five opposition members of the all-party delegation to reach out to them as they refused to talk to them, with hardline leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani even refusing to meet them.

Four MPs -- CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury, CPI leader D Raja, JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav and RJD's Jay Prakash Narayan -- broke away from the group and went to meet Geelani at his residence where he is under house arrest for the last 60 days.

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They were received with slogans outside the residence whose gate was not opened for them. Geelani saw them from the window but refused to meet the parliamentarians.

"It is our effort to show that we are ready to talk to anyone whether they agree to meet or not," Yadav said.

The group also went to meet JKLF chief Yaseen Malik who is under detention at BSF camp in Humama. He told the MPs that he will talk when he visits New Delhi.

The group tried to meet former Hurriyat chairman Abdul Ghani Bhat who also refused to talk to them. Bhat welcomed the leaders but made it clear it has been decided that no talks will be held with the delegation members.

"This is a futile exercise. Nothing concrete will happen until or unless India talks to Pakistan on Kashmir. We will not be able to arrive at any solution if India only talks to Kashmiris or Pakistan talks to Kashmiris. We should try and solve this issue which can otherwise result in hostilities between the two neighbouring nations," Bhat said.

AIMIM leader Asaduddin Owaisi went separately to meet moderate Hurriyat leader Miwaiz Umar Farooq in Chashma Shahi sub-jail where he detained.

Mirwaiz met Owaisi briefly during which only pleasantries were exchanged.

Earlier in the day, the separatists rejected Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti's invitation to them for meeting with all-party delegation, terming such a measure as "deceitful" and insisting that it cannot be an alternative to a "transparent agenda-based dialogue to address the core issue".

The delegation has come here to cool the volatile situation arising out of violent protests that have gripped the Valley since the killing of Hizbul militant Burhan Wani on July 8. The clashes resulting from the protests have claimed 71 lives and injured thousands.

After Owaisi's failed attempt, the group comprising Yechury, Yadav, Raja and Narayan went to meet the Mirwaiz but could not meet him. They were kept waiting for nearly 25 minutes at the Chashma Shahi sub-jail.  PTI
Tribune News Service

Jammu, September 4

Pandits and Sikhs, who have been displaced from the Valley, have termed any talk process without their involvement as meaningless, saying they are the ones who have been affected most by insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir.

Representatives from both communities claimed that the present situation in Valley was disturbing but the Central government had failed to address the grievances of the minorities who had been facing attacks and harassment following the killing of a militant commander on July 8.

On Sunday as an all-party delegation was on a visit to the Kashmir valley, displaced Pandits organised a demonstration against the attacks on transit camps in the Valley by protesters.

All Parties Migrants Coordination Committee (APMCC) demanded an immediate registration of an FIR in the Nutnusa transit camp attack in Kupwara.

Seeking disbursement of their pending salaries, the protesters also demanded appointment of a nodal officer to look into their problems. Addressing the gathering, APMCC chairman Vinod Pandit expressed dismay over the lackadaisical attitude of state and Central governments which had not initiated talks with those people who had suffered at the hands of militants.

Employees should be shifted to Jammu and no Hindu employee will return to the Valley until the government comes out with a comprehensive plan for minorities, including guarantee of their safety, security, dignity and honour, said Pandit.

Meanwhile, the Displaced Kashmiri Sikh Conference (DKSC) said the Central government should initiate talks with Sikhs of Kashmir who have been forced to leave their homes since 1990.

The whole Valley seems to have been taken over by death and destruction and separatist organisations are doing everything to keep the pot boiling. The government also seems to be having no long-term policy due to which other sections of society are suffering, claimed Harmohinder Singh, president, DKSC.

While praising the Central government for sending the all-party delegation, Harmohinder Singh said the best way to end the present turmoil in Kashmir was not to put any pre-condition for the talks.

The delegation should hold talks with all sections and stakeholders, whether hardliners or moderates. This will elicit their view points on addressing Kashmir problems and pave way for open deliberations. Representatives of Jammu, Kashmiri Pandits, Sikhs and Buddhists should also have been taken on board for talks, said Harmohinder Singh.
Neha Saini

Any discussion on the 1984 Sikh riots brings itself the horrors of the fateful night of 31st October, 1984, when a community witnessed massacre and destruction that haunts every one of us even 32 years later. So, when Soha Ali Khan, who plays the character of a Sikh woman caught in the panic of the night of 31st October in her latest film by the same title, says that she felt emotionally drained to relive that one night for over one- and- half months during the shoot of the film, we knew what she meant was true.

It was exhausting beyond words, and not physically but mentally, emotionally. The film is a based on a true life story of a Sikh family and their struggle to protect their three kids from the madness that prevailed after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on 31st October. My character required a lot of silent acting, with just expressions and no heavy dialogues. Since, it based on a 24-hour timeline, I had to relive that night of bewilderment, horror and pain every time I was in front of the camera, she said. In Amritsar, for the first leg of promotions, Soha says that 31st October is not a political film. We are not trying to pass any judgment or provide justice, but just presenting a true story of a Sikh family. Yes, it does reflect upon the pain and the tragedy so many families witnessed at the time, but it is not an agenda-driven film. Written and produced by Harry Sachdeva and directed by national award winning Marathi filmmaker Shivaji Lotan Patil, it stars Vir Das in lead along with Soha.

The films trailer was hard hitting and crossed one million hits within three days of its official release. Not made to, the film faced delays, taking nine months to get Censor Boards clearance. But now that the film has been passed with nine cuts as opposed to 40 cuts suggested earlier, Soha says that it needs support from all quarters. Its a small budget film, without any catchy songs or attention grabbing elements. It is very important for a film to market itself to get visibility.

For Soha, who plays a sardarni first time on screen, getting the look and feel of the film right was important. Its a period film and since Delhi has undergone a lot of urbanisation, we had to shoot in a village in Ludhiana. Right from the set to the costumes to the language, everything was kept authentic and looks convincing. Not worried about courting a controversy due to the subject of the film, Soha says that it is a responsible film, made with accountability. I would ask the audience to see the film and decide for themselves.
Gursharan Singh

MORE than three-and-a-half decades ago, I was pursuing my doctorate at Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana. Thesis writing was in progress and I was under tremendous pressure for its early submission. But my guide was in no rush. He would not give all the instructions in one go, but in piecemeal. Only after the first mistake was rectified, would he point out another. I found it very annoying and cursed my guide, considering it a wastage of my precious time.

One day, sensing me in a dejected mood, he extended to me a rare privilege of generally talking to me instead of taking up the thesis. His gesture surprised me. He narrated an experience from when he was pursuing PhD at Cornell University in the US. He went to his guide to tell him that he planned to go out of town on a long drive. The guide asked him the date of the visit, which was about a week later; and then advised him to see him before departure. He presumed that the Professor might ask him to deliver a message to someone at the place of his destination, or would ask him to hand over a packet to someone there.

Three days before he was to set out for the journey, he again went to see the guide, and was again questioned about the date of the visit. He again repeated that he should see him before he left. Surprised, and a bit confused, he returned.

A day before the journey, he was with his guide. The Professor got up from his chair, blessed him holding his shoulders and just spoke one sentence  You are going on a long drive for the first time; drive carefully.

My guide continued, Even after so many years, whenever I am at the wheel of my car, I feel his hands on my shoulders, telling me to drive carefully. Would it have the same impact if he had said this to me a week before my visit? It may be important what you say, but still more important is the timing  when you say it and how you say it.

I had got the answer to my eagerness to complete the thesis. I stopped worrying about the time frame and wrote a thesis which was much appreciated. My patience and perseverance had paid off.

The legacy of good advice from a teacher continued. I too remember the words of my guide while driving the car. My students would carry the message forward. I salute my teacher  the late Prof Harcharan Singh Sidhu.
Hangzhou, September 4

India on Sunday called for intensified joint efforts by other BRICS members to combat terrorism as Prime Minister Narendra Modi sought coordinated actions by the grouping to isolate supporters and sponsors of terror, in an apparent reference to Pakistan.

In a hard-hitting intervention while leading from the chair, Modi in his address to the BRICS Leaders Meeting here said terrorists in South Asia or anywhere for that matter do not own banks or weapons factories.

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Clearly someone funds and arms them and BRICS must intensify joint efforts not just to fight terror but to coordinate actions to isolate those who are supporters and sponsors of terror, he said, without naming Pakistan which is a close ally of China.

Describing BRICS as an influential voice in international discourse, Modi said it was the groupings shared responsibility to shape the global agenda and help developing nations achieve their objectives.

He said terrorism remains the primary source of instability and the biggest threat to our societies and countries and the supplies chains have a global reach.

Use of social media to promote radical ideology is growing dimension of this threat, he added.

External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup during a media briefing said this (Modis address to the BRICS Leaders Meeting) tells you how strongly Prime Minister intervened on the issue of terror and how be believes that this really is the central challenge facing the moment and unless we have collective approach to this, it will not be possible for us to defeat this.

Swarup said it was important to have informal discussions with the other BRICS leaders ahead of the groupings 8th annual Summit in Goa from October 15-16.

Modi, in his address to the four other leaders of the grouping said: We, as BRICS, are an influential voice in international discourse. It is, therefore, our shared responsibility to shape the international agenda.

Our shared responsibility to shape international agenda in manner that helps developing nations achieve their objectives, he said in this picturesque eastern Chinese city on the sidelines of the G20 Summit.

BRICS brings together five major emerging economies, comprising 43 per cent of the world population, having 37 per cent of the world GDP and 17 per cent share in the world trade.

Modi said that as chair of BRICS, Building Responsive, Inclusive and Collective Solutions is the theme we have chosen which mirrors central priorities at G20 Summit.

Weve taken BRICS out of capitals to involve people from all walks of life. It will be an opportunity to deepen our ties and with BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi- Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) countries.

The four other leaders who participated in the meeting of the five-member bloc included Brazilian President Michel Temer, Chinese President Xi Jinping - with whom Modi held bilateral talks earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin and South African President Jacob Zuma.

Our summit next month would not only be an opportunity to deepen ties with ourselves, we will also interact with Indias neighbouring countries of BIMSTEC - Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand, who have been invited for the outreach summit. We welcome you all to Goa next month, Modi said while concluding his brief address.

As a formal grouping, BRIC started after the meeting of the Leaders of Russia, India and China in St. Petersburg on the margins of G8 Outreach Summit in 2006.

The grouping was formalised during the 1st meeting of BRIC Foreign Ministers on the sidelines of UN General Assembly in New York in 2006. The 1st BRIC Summit was held in Yekaterinburg, Russia, on June 16, 2009.

BRIC was expanded into BRICS with the inclusion of South Africa at the BRIC Foreign Ministers meeting in New York in September 2010. Accordingly, South Africa attended the 3rd BRICS Summit in Sanya, China in April 2011.  PTI
Hangzhou, September 4

India on Sunday raised its concern with China over the CPEC which runs through PoK, and terrorism emanating from the region as Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Chinese President Xi Jinping the two countries need to be sensitive to each others strategic interests.

Asserting that fight against terror should not be motivated by political considerations, Modi said it is of paramount importance that we respect each others aspirations, concerns and strategic interests to ensure durable bilateral ties.

In the bilateral meeting with Xi ahead of the G-20 Summit, Modi raised Indias concerns over the $46-billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) being laid through PoK.

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Besides a host of energy-related projects, the CPEC consists of rail, road and pipelines to ferry oil and gas from Gwadar port to Kashghar in Xinjiang through PoK.

Replying to a question whether the terrorism emanating from the region where the CPEC is being laid through has been discussed, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup told reporters the issue has been raised during the meeting.

Modi said both India and China need to be sensitive to each others strategic interests and called for specific actions to prevent growth of negative perception.

As a matter of principle, both countries would have to be sensitive to each others strategic interests, Swarup said while touching upon broad themes that Modi stressed upon during his nearly 30-minute bilateral with Xi, their eighth meeting.

In order to promote positive convergence, we would also need to prevent growth of negative perception. For this, the specific actions by both countries would play the major role, he said.

In particular, Modi highlighted that we have succeeded in maintaining peace and tranquility on the border, he added.

Condemning the recent suicide bomb attack on the Chinese Embassy in Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan, in his opening remarks, Modi said it is yet another proof of the continuing scourge of terrorism.

The Prime Minister reiterated that our response to terror must not be motivated by political considerations, Swarup said.

On his part, Xi said China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound ties and further boost bilateral cooperation.

China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound relations and further advance their cooperation, state-run Chinese Xinhua news agency quoted Xi as saying.

About the bilateral relations, which experienced turbulence due to differences over a raft of issues, Modi said in order to make the Asian century a reality, the countries of the continent would have to take responsibility.

The meeting came amid differences over including listing of Pakistan-based terrorist organisations in the UN, China stalling Indias membership at the elite Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and the CPEC being built through PoK.

Asked whether Prime Minister Modi raised the issue of China blocking Indias bid for the membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) during the bilateral, Swarup declined to get into the nitty-gritty of the issues discussed.

I am not going into the nitty-gritty of each and everything that was discussed. Everything is not meant for public consumption. There are certain things (which) need to remain between the two governments, he said.

On yet another question on the NSG issue, he said: I will not go into the specifics, if you read between the lines, you pretty much understand when you we talk about strategic interests, concerns and aspirations, it is not as if China is not unaware of our strategic interests, aspirations and concerns or we are unaware of their concerns. So, it is something both sides are well aware.

This was a meeting at summit level between the two. They are meant to provide high-level guidance and direction to overall relations.

Citing that India has not signed the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT), China had opposed its bid to join the elite 48-member bloc during NSGs meeting in Seoul in June.

Modi said he always had a strategic vision for India- China relations. The India-China partnership is important not only for the two countries but for the entire region and the world.

India has worked to make progress in the closer, developmental partnership with China.

Cultural and people-to-people ties have also been increasing, Swarup said.

Modi said he always had a strategic vision for India- China relations. The India-China partnership is important not only for the two countries but for the entire region and the world.

Asked to comment on the Chinese state-media quoting Xi as telling Modi that China is willing to maintain hard-won sound relations with India, Swarup said it would not be appropriate for me to characterise President Xis remarks.

After all we are in his country and it is for the Chinese side to amplify and clarify whatever he said. Not appropriate for me to characterise what the other side said, he said.

In the context of India and China, he said that our peoples also have the expectation that we make every possible effort to fulfil their dreams of progress, development and prosperity, Swarup said.

The Prime Minister is here to attend the two-day G20 Summit.

Ahead of the 8th BRICS Summit next month, Modi also extended a personal invitation to Xi to come to Goa which Xi said he was very happy to accept.  PTI
Hangzhou, September 4

Prime Minister Narendra Modi today exchanged views with Barack Obama on the sidelines of the G20 summit here with the US President praising the bold policy move on GST reform in a difficult global economic scenario.

Modi first met Obama briefly when they were onstage to pose for a family photograph at the G20 Summit venue in this eastern Chinese city. The two leaders had another opportunity to exchange views during an informal evening programme. Obama in his intervention during the G20 summit praised Modi for the recent tax reform as an example of bold policy in an otherwise difficult global economic scenario.

On August 8, Parliament cleared the landmark Constitution (122nd Amendment) Bill, 2014, on the Goods and Services Tax.

The government has set April 1, 2017, as the target for rolling out the GST, considered the biggest tax reform in a long time.

Earlier today, Modi met Chinese President Xi Jinping and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on the sidelines of the summit. Modi, who arrived here yesterday from Vietnam for the summit, also met Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad bin Salman and discussed ways to enhance bilateral ties.  PTI
R Sedhuraman

Legal Correspondent

New Delhi, September 4

Justice J Chelameswar's demand for transparency in the proceedings of the Supreme Court collegium comprising five senior most SC judges, including him, gained momentum on Sunday with former SC judge Markandey Katju stating opaqueness had resulted in some of the worst appointments.

"Hats off to Justice Chalameshwar for his principled stand demanding recording of the minutes of the proceedings of the meetings of the collegium" for finalising the list of candidates to be appointed as judges of high courts or the Supreme Court, Justice Katju wrote on his blog.

"Some of the worst appointments in the SC and HCs have been made by the collegium system due to its lack of transparency and opaqueness, he said.

He said he fully knew how the collegium system really operated as he had been a Judge in HCs and SC for about 20 years.

In the United States, the Senate proceedings for considering the President's nominees for appointment as judges were televised live and the Senate closely questioned the candidates about their views, and even personal life.

"Ideally, that is the system which should be adopted in India too. But even if it is not adopted, minutes of the proceedings of the collegium meetings should be recorded, and disclosed to the public so that the people know what was said by each collegium member.

In a democracy people have a right to know," he said.

Three former Chief Justices of India KG Balakrishnan, P Sathasivam and RM Lodha have gone on record, stating that the collegium should hold a transparent discussion on the merits and demerits of every candidate and any name on which consensus could not be reached should be dropped. They also favoured recording the collegium proceedings.

Justice Chelameswar had written to CJI TS Thakur on September 1 announcing his decision to stay away from collegium meetings unless these were held in a transparent manner, giving an opportunity to every member to be heard and the views recorded.

CJI Thakur has expressed the hope that the collegium would sort out the issue.
Archit Watts

Tribune News Service

Malout, September 3

Akali and AAP activists attacked one another with sticks, stones and bricks at AAPs Badal bhajao, Punjab bachao rally at the grain market here today as the police looked on. Six AAP activists were wounded. Two of them sustained head injuries. Two Akali workers were injured too.

Mann began his speech lampooning the Badals: Kikli kaleer di, gupp Sukhbir di, chitta mere bhai da, Salwinder to vikayi da, dasso kina chahida. Incensed, the Akali workers hurled chairs and raised slogans. It was utter chaos and Mann chose to walk away.

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Thereafter, angry AAP activists blocked the Malout-Delhi national highway, demanding action against the SAD activists for disrupting the rally. Meanwhile, SAD activists led by Gurjeet Singh Nippy Aulakh, Youth Akali Dals Malout (rural) president, confronted AAP activists at the local car bazar. Terrified, shopowners downed their shutters. Some cars were damaged. Later, AAP activists gheraoed the Malout police station for more than an hour.

Jasjit Singh, AAPs Malout circle in-charge, claimed they had warned the administration that their rally may be disrupted, but nothing was done. Harpreet Singh, Malout MLA, said: Mann made derogatory remarks against Biba Harsimrat. Our activists went to the venue to stop him. This led to a clash. Two of our activists were injured. One of them has been admitted to the Civil Hospital. We will lodge a complaint against AAP activists.

Gurpreet Singh Gill, SSP, said, We have recorded the statements of AAP and SAD activists. We are investigating the matter. Later in the evening, Mann uploaded a video on the Facebook. We have the video footage of the entire episode. Lets see whether Sukhbir Badals police register a case against his men or not, he wrote.
Archit Watts

Tribune News Service

Muktsar, September 4

A day after Akali and AAP activists clashed at a Badal bhajao, Punjab bachao rally in Malout, AAP MP Bhagwant Mann here today accused the police of working under Akali pressure.

Mann, who met two injured party volunteers at the Civil Hospital, said the party would stage protests across the state if the cops failed to register an FIR against the assailants. He added that the AAP leadership would meet the DGP tomorrow.

Mann said, SAD goons carrying sticks, rods and bricks disrupted our rally. The police recorded the statements of our injured men in their daily diary report under Section 323 (punishment for voluntarily causing hurt) of the IPC.

The MP claimed that just 18 cops were spared for the rally yesterday. A majority of the force was deployed for the CMs Sangat Darshan, Mann said.

Refuting Manns allegations, Muktsar SSP Gurpreet Singh Gill said, The statements of injured SAD activists are yet to be recorded as the doctors have declared them unfit. He claimed that proper security arrangements were made for Manns visit today.

AAP activist Sukhjinder Singh Udekaran, who sustained a head injury, named some SAD leaders in his statement to the police. Nippy Aulakh, Lappi Enakhera, Randhir Samagh, Gurbinder Phoolewala, Babbu Nandgarh and Tona Lakhewali, along with 50-60 others, attacked us, said Sukhjinder.

Injured Akali activists Gurbinder Gandhar, Sandeep Nandgarh and Jagmeet Singh were admitted to the Civil Hospital, Malout. Belying the police claim that they were unfit to give statements, the trio told the media that they had tried to stop AAP activists from making derogatory remarks against SAD leaders.

Bhagwant skips rally

Fatehgarh Churian:Bhagwant Mann today skipped a rally organised by AAP candidate Gurvinder Singh Shampura. The Batala police had made security arrangements at Kala Afghana village after Shampura informed them last evening about Manns visit.
Aparna Banerji

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, September 4

A government school at Natthewal village, 12 km from Phagwara, is giving the best private schools in the region a run for their money.

From a campus overrun by grass and infested with snakes, Government Primary School, Nathhewal, has been transformed into a state-of-the-art educational establishment.

Ajmer Singh, the teacher who overcame all odds to reshape the school, has been chosen for the State Award by Education Minister Daljit Singh Cheema on Teachers Day.

Tiled classrooms, painted walls, an aquarium in the office, a well-maintained statue of Bhagat Singh, textured walls, a modern park with manicured lawns, landscaping and benches, a special shed for serving midday meal, a nursery with Cambridge-style furniture and a computer lab (apparently, the only one at a primary school in the state, claims the teacher incharge) are some of the features which set it apart from other government schools in the region.

Established in 1954, the school remained in the doldrums till Ajmer Singhs arrival in 2007. With just 45 students when he came in, the school today has 65.

The school has two teachers, one of whom is presently on leave.

Ajmer recalls, When I stepped in, of the five kanals with the school, only half could be used as a playground. The rest had thick weedy overgrowth interspersed with eucalyptus trees. Ours was considered one of the worst schools in the block. People believe government schools have limitations and cant match private ones. I wanted to prove them wrong.

As the village primarily has a population of poor persons or labourers, there were not many donors. So, Ajmer Singh began seeking the help of donors, NGOs and clubs from outside the village to give quality education and facilities to the students.

I spent a total of Rs 18 lakh on the school. Every penny was very carefully spent. While some villagers were sceptical at first, 99 per cent of the village backs me today. As much as Rs 4 lakh was contributed by the villagers, Ajmer Singh said.

I feel overjoyed and thankful for the recognition of my efforts, said Ajmer Singh. I have a plan for the money I shall receive as reward. In 15 days, I intend to buy a dining table for the schoolchildren, the schoolteacher added.
Ravi Dhaliwal & Archit Watts

Tribune News Service

Fatehgarh Churian/Mukstar, September 4

Sangrur MP Bhagwant Mann, who has been under fire following his outburst against the media, skipped a rally organised by AAP candidate from Fatehgarh Churian Gurvinder Singh Shampura on Sunday.

He, however, paid a surprise visit to Muktsar to enquire about the well-being of AAP activists who got injured at Malout on Saturday following clashes with SAD activists.

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Speaking on the phone, Mann said, I will not only continue with my kikli kaleer di but add more to it. I will meet the DGP tomorrow. If the police do not register a case against SAD activists who attacked our volunteers and disrupted the rally we will launch statewide protests.

Mann said he had to come to Muktsar so he could attend the rallies. I have sent Gurpreet Ghuggi to attend the rallies and will address events scheduled for tomorrow, he said.

His absence at Fatehgarh Churian in Gurdaspur was met with disappointment by his party workers who had gathered in large numbers. However, the cops were happy to see Mann giving the event a miss.

The Batala police had made elaborate security arrangements at Kala Afghana village, the venue of the rally, after Shampura informed the police yesterday evening that Mann had confirmed his visit. Kala Afghana falls under the Fatehgarh Churian assembly segment.

Gurdaspur is the home district of former AAP state convener Sucha Singh Chhotepur. Going by the recent incidents, post Chhotepurs removal, the police had no option except to upgrade the security.

Intelligence reports indicated that the organisers may face trouble from their rivals. SSP Daljinder Singh Dhillon personally supervised the security arrangments and deployed high number of personnel at the venue.

In Mann's absence, comedian-turned-politician Gurpreet Singh Ghuggi took it upon himself to invigorate the crowd. His 20-minute extempore had the crowd smiling.

Although the AAP is yet to officially announce its candidate from the neighbouring seat of Batala, Ghuggi has already started campaigning there. His presence in todays programme is a sign that his name may be announced soon.
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, February 10

After days of speculation, satirist Gurpreet Ghuggi finally joined the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) today.

Speaking on the occasion, he said his conscious forced him to take this path after seeing the plight of the farmers and the common man in the state.

Ghuggi said: The reports of farmers committing suicide sadden me every day. Drugs, killer roads and apathy of the government, all these issues forced me to join AAP.

I have a better and comparatively secure future in films but I want to pay back to the state that made me what I am today, Ghuggi said, adding that Sangrur MP Bhagwant Mann was his inspiration and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwals movement motivated him.

Ghuggi today joined the party in the presence of state party affairs incharge Sanjay Singh, state convener Sucha Singh Chhotepur and national organisation head Durgesh Pathak. He will concentrate on the Majha region.

Ghuggi has remained the brand ambassador of the Punjab Election Commission. He had, on the occasion of National Voters Day on January 25, said he was not interested in joining any political party. Sanjay Singh said Ghuggi had been raising the issue related to Punjab for a long time and his joining AAP would further strengthen the party.

Chhotepur said with his political satires, Ghuggi had always been successful in sending the right message to people and the party would get benefit from his experience.

Bhagwant Mann said he was happy that one of his close associates had joined the party to raise the real issues concerning people from the right platform.

Manpreets aide to meet Kejriwal today

Chandigarh: Continuing with its move to induct leaders from other parties, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is set to rope in Gurpreet Bhatti, then secretary general of the Peoples Party of Punjab (PPP). Bhatti, a close aide of Manpreet Badal, had not joined the Congress with him. He is scheduled to meet AAP national convener Arvind Kejriwal in New Delhi on Thursday. Confirming the meeting, Bhatti said he would announce his plans after meeting Kejriwal. He alleged since Manpreet abandoned the vision and agenda of the PPP and joined the Congress, he refused to do so. I have held several meetings with AAP leaders and I have asked them to clarify their position on various issues confronting the state. I need an assurance on the vision of the party, he said. Bhatti, who was once considered close to Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal, also remained associated with the Youth Akali Dal for over a decade.  TNS
Kamal Preet Kaur

Lush green paddy fields, though soothing to the eyes, trouble my soul as we start the next leg of journey from Rayya. The vicious cycle of wheat and paddy has brought the state farmers to the brink of self-destruction. As I look around, I do not see any Punjabi gabroo tending to his fields, nor any mutiyar taking his meal for him. Migrant workers have taken over most physically demanding chores of farming. I wonder how outside India, Punjabis are willing to undertake many a times menial and similarly challenging jobs. If Punjabis are the same, certainly the work culture is not.

An argument of the sons over sitting closer to the AC vent in the SUV breaks my reverie. Before it gets physical, I swap my seat and sacrifice the rustic nostalgia for sulky faces. To lighten up the atmosphere, I play the guessing game. Guess where we are heading to next? To Bhuajis house near heaps and heaps of buffalo poo, say the boys in unison, pinching their noses. We are nearing the dairy farming territory in Subhanpur near Bholath. My mind quickly turns to hand-churned butter sitting on top of piping hot rotis awaiting us at my next sister-in-laws house. Welcoming tel-chona at the door is followed by hugs, nimbu-pani and a hearty layout on the table.

A little nudge and halqa conversation begins. My sister-in-laws interest and enthusiasm for life, relationships, society and politics make them valuable discussion participants. Votan painiyan ne te Bibi (Jagir Kaur) ne kam hor vi tez karva ditta hai. Sadey pind diyan galiyan vi pakkiyan karvaiya ja rahiyan han. Punjab de har pind di tarah aithey vi parvar de parvar Congressi te Akali ne. Pakke apni party de bandey. Iss layi jo jithey khara hai, othey hi vote paunda. Pehlan lagda si ki jharoo fir sakda hai, hun taan oh ik doojey pichhey jharoo chukki firdey. (Her chuckle is unmissable). Khairey (Sukhpal Khaira) ne vi jharoo far leya par loki bahutey khush nahin.

We say our goodbyes after the afternoon tea and head for a village near RCF, Kapurthala. Boys quickly take out their swim shorts and head for the motor with their cousins to take a cool dip.

Dinner is followed by a thali full of luscious mangoes and the political conversation picks up again. It appears that the old guard is sticking to the takri no matter what. However, the 20-something nephew has other thoughts. People want change for sure. They are disillusioned. Theres a good chance for AAP, he says. His statement is furiously dismissed by the parents. I am struck by the simplistic assumptions and aspirations they have from the new government. AAP comes to power and corruption levels will go down immediately, a certain politician is arrested and Punjab is rid of the drug malaise and so on.

Should parallels be drawn between the Brexit and AAP (and now even Awaaz-e-Punjab) supporters? They mirror each others unequivocal dislike for the status quo and if I dare say, a bit of naivety too. Their decision is going to have serious ramifications for the future. I retire to bed with this sobering thought. The night prayer includes a silent prayer for the future of Punjab too.

(The views expressed by the writer are her own)
Sarika Sharma

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, September 4

They outnumbered Sikh and Hindu soldiers during World War 1, still Punjabi Muslim soldiers have remained a forgotten lot during the centenary commemorations of the war, not just in Indian and Pakistan Punjab but also in Britain.

However, their story is now being promoted to honour their bravery and ensure their remembrance.

By the end of the war that began in 1915, undivided Punjab had provided some 3.7 lakh recruits, including 1.9 lakh Muslims, around 97,000 Sikhs and 83,000 Hindus, historian David Omissi writes in his book Sepoy and the Raj.

Ever since commemorations began in the UK, the Sikh contribution has been highlighted by Sikh bodies such as Punjab Heritage Association (PHA) and British organisations like Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF). Historian Santanu Das points that while Muslims were twice the number of Sikhs in WWI, the latter have been able to draw the archlights because of a better organised diaspora.

The UK Sikhs also have a fantastic infrastructure. Theres also a celebration, bordering at times on fetishisation, of the Sikh martial ethos, which gets connected to World War I in an almost imperial way and feeds into British Sikh identity, says Santanu. He says with the Muslims, its much more difficult because of the contemporary world situation. Any display of martial prowess is potentially dangerous. Also, they fought against their fellow religious brethren in Turkey. They are also not that well-organised in the UK, in terms of funding and infrastructure, he says.

However, it isnt just the commemorations that have been missing, a research conducted by British Future discovered that only one in five people know about the Muslim contribution, and almost nobody (2 per cent) was aware of its scale.

Following that, a project  Unknown and Untold  was launched. Steve Ballinger, director of communications with British Future, feels telling this story is important in Britain today. Both to show non-Muslim audiences that Muslims have been making a contribution to Britain that goes back over 100 years; and also to show younger British Muslims, unsure of their place and identity in Britain, that they are part of a long heritage.

The project has involved Muslim and non-Muslim youth in Birmingham; bringing together different South Asian communities in Leicester, and taking this story to the British Army itself through a lecture at Sandhurst, he tells. Efforts are also being made to raise awareness of the first Indian recipient of the Victoria Cross for bravery, Sepoy Khudadad Khan.

Still, Mahmood Awan, a Dublin-based Punjabi Muslim writer, whose great grandfather fought in WWI and was a friend of Khudadad Khan, feels both Sikh and Muslim efforts have failed to commemorate the collective Punjabi contribution. He feels all these efforts are just for their own religious groups. No one cares for Punjab as a whole. I strongly believe that all these efforts are being funded to showcase the colonial loyalist brigades in the West and it doesnt matter if they are Muslim groups or Sikh-Hindu groups, says Awan, who has written extensively on the Great War.
Tribune News Service

Haridwar, September 4

Members of the Nirmal Virakt Kutiya Society have asked the state government to renovate Shri Nirmal Virakt Kutiya Gurdwara-cum-ashram. BJPs youth wing president Harjit Singh has also supported the demand.

Societys managing committee secretary Harvinder and Kar Sewa chief Baba Pundit said the gurdwara at the ashram had been in existence since 1914, but its renovation and expansion work was getting affected due to multiple cases filed in various courts by people, who wanted to grab the ashram and gurdwara property.

With BJPs Harjit Singh joining the clamour, Congress Mahanagar president Anshul Shrikunj has termed the ashram society and the BJP as hand in glove in this case.

Notably, the issue of Shri Nirmal Virakt Kutiya was raised by BJP leaders Satpal Maharaj and Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank last month at a press conference in New Delhi, where they had accused the Congress-led Uttarakhand government of trying to acquire the ashram land and property forcefully. Maharaj had even said that the Congress wanted to seize the ashram property to benefit some pro-Congress stakeholders and he would give up politics if proved wrong.

Earlier, Chief Minister Harish Rawat had stated that the ashram property was disputed for several decades, so the state government might acquire the affairs of the ashram to ensure efficient management and working of the ashram.

Already three to four cases are pending in various courts, including High Court, regarding the claim of the ashrams property.

Ashram society members also showed some copies of illegal registries made in the name of two local persons  Pankaj Talawar, a resident of Gol Gurudwara, Jwalapur, and Mayaram of Ajeetpur village  in May this year.

BJP leader Harjit Singh said, We want Shri Nirmal Virakt Kutiya to be freed from such vague cases, most of which have been filed by property mafia. We have urged the state government to either pave way for the renovation process of the Gurdwara or hand it over to the Guru Gyan Godri Committee. If the BJP comes to power in the state in the coming Assembly elections, we will renovate it and also pave way for the allocation of land for Gurdwara Gyan Godri.
Hong Kong, September 4

Hong Kong voted on Sunday in its first major election since pro-democracy protests in 2014 and one of its most contentious ever, with a push for independence among disaffected younger voters stoking tension with Chinas government.

The vote is for a 70-seat legislative council in which Hong Kongs pro-democracy opposition is hoping to maintain a one-third veto bloc in the face of better mobilised and funded pro-Beijing rivals.

The former British colony was handed back to China in 1997 under a one country, two systems agreement that promised to maintain the global financial hubs freedoms and separate laws for at least 50 years, but gave ultimate control to Beijing.

A growing yearning for independence and animosity towards Beijing in the southern coastal city pose one of the central governments most pressing domestic political issues. The stakes for Beijing are particularly high this weekend as G20 leaders gather in the eastern city of Hangzhou for a summit.

Hong Kongs opposition now controls 27 of the legislatures 70 seats, giving it the power to block policies and some laws including legislation it sees as eroding freedoms. Some 3.8 million of Hong Kongs seven million people are eligible to vote.

It will give an indication of anti-China sentiment some two years after tens of thousands took to Hong Kong streets to demand full democracy from Chinas Communist Party leaders.

Hong Kong officials are generally supportive of Beijing and keen to preserve one country, two systems, though confidence in Chinas commitment to the formula has been shaken by recent incidents including the abduction of several Hong Kong booksellers by Chinese agents.  Reuters
New Delhi, September 4

The first Bangladeshi vehicle to have entered India through a land border as part of an accord for improved regulation of passenger and cargo traffic between the two countries will arrive here tomorrow.

Fitted with a Global Positioning System (GPS) to track its movement, the vehicle carrying commercial goods will reach Inland Container Depot (CID), Patparganj.

It is a historic moment as a vehicle from Bangladesh carrying imported consignment has been allowed to come into India without changing trucks, said Vinayak Azaad, Additional Commissioner at ICD, Patparganj.

The vehicle had entered the country late last month via Petrapole border in West Bengal, he said. There was no provision to allow trucks registered in India to enter Bangladesh and vice versa until the accord was signed last year.

Bangladesh-Bhutan-India-Nepal Motor Vehicles Agreement, which was signed in June last year, allows vehicles to enter each others territory and does away with trans-shipment of goods from one countrys truck to another at the border, a time consuming and costly process.

This will pave the way for more efficient passage of goods between India and Bangladesh saving a significant amount of time and resources of both the countries, Azaad said.  PTI
When you need a little noise and adulation to pump your ego, head to the place where youre certain to get it, and then throw the crowd some red meat just for good measure.

Following Donald Trumps unorthodox and seemingly unproductive visit to Mexico and a meeting with its president, Enrique Pena Nieto, Trump returned to Arizona. There he was loudly cheered (noise and adulation) and then proceeded to repeat his hard-line immigration stance (red meat).

I still find perplexing the trip to Mexico and Nieto agreeing to meet the Republican presidential nominee who has called most of his people criminals. But I suppose thats just politics.

Trump said his plan to build a wall was discussed, but that who would pay for it never came up. Pena, however, said that he made it clear that Mexico has no intention of paying for a wall.

Nevertheless, Trump, evidently caught up in the exuberance of his adoring crowd, again spoke of his big, beautiful, impenetrable wall and promised that Mexico would pay for it. By the way, exactly how does one go about building an impenetrable wall? He might want read up on China and East Germany on that part.

The one thing that Trump has accomplished is putting the immigration issue back on the table. The last piece of immigration legislation to be signed into law was 30 years ago by President Ronald Reagan.

That 1986 legislation had familiar elements such as a path to citizenship for existing undocumented workers, which many opponents call amnesty, and tighter border enforcement. The so-called amnesty portion made any unauthorized immigrants already living in the U.S. continuously since 1982 eligible for temporary legal status, after paying a $185 fee and demonstrating good moral character. They could apply for a green card after 18 months, provided they learned to speak English. But the law did not address the future immigrant flow. In 1986, there were an estimated 5 million undocumented workers in the U.S. There are at least 11 million today.

There have been other attempts at reform, including 2005 and 2006, both under the administration of President George W. Bush. Both measures received bipartisan support in the Senate. Bush really wanted to make lasting, fair reforms to immigration law but was stymied, particularly by his own party in the House.

President Barack Obama called for reform but never got any traction. Still, he has deported more undocumented immigrants than any president. And the number of undocumented workers has decreased. On the other hand, he has made some improvements through executive order, which further enraged Republicans. A Texas federal judge blocked Obamas executive order that offered deportation relief to more than 4 million people living in the nation illegally, and a Supreme Court tie vote allowed the ruling to stand.

Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has presented her plan to reform immigration, but without the help of Congress, if president, she likely would find the same problems in Congress as did Bush.

Back to Trump and that red meat. He unveiled a 10-point plan, much of which was nothing new. He did say he would authorize a deportation task force and pledged to crack down on criminals living in the U.S. illegally.

Trump also laid out his other plans. The non-partisan PolitiFact ranked most of his statements about those plans from pants on fire to mostly false. He did make it to mostly true with his claim that about half of new illegal immigrants came on temporary visas and never left.

The 2016 presidential race has brought about a resurgence concerning immigration reform, although that attention has come at a disturbing price. Deportation squads rounding people up makes me uneasy. As it should every American with any sense of history.

Trump continues to claim that the blacks and the Hispanics love him. For the life of me, I cant figure out how he has come to that conclusion.

But as long as he continues to toss meat to crowds such as the one in Arizona, I suppose he can convince himself that everyone loves him. Well soon find out.
Coweta police arrested two men Friday in connection with a multistate theft ring that has netted more than $1 million in stolen gift cards from Wal-Mart stores, according to police.

Khrishon Ringo, 22, and Demius Jones, 21, were arrested at the Wal-Mart in Coweta, 11207 S. State Highway 51, after security guards reported the men to police.

Security guards recognized the men from a companywide Wal-Mart email alerting employees of the mens connection to a burglary scheme happening in multiple states, said Coweta Police Chief Mike Bell.

When police arrived at the scene, officers spotted the men driving away, Bell said.

Officers stopped the men, and they were arrested after illegal drugs and drug paraphernalia were found in the vehicle, he said.

The FBI and Michigan State Police Department contacted Coweta police to request information on the suspects and informed them of their involvement in the burglary ring, Bell said.

The ring is suspected to have started in Flint, Michigan, eventually making its way to Oklahoma, Bell said.

The FBI had been tracking the individuals through 15 states before they were arrested.

Jones and Ringo provided Michigan addresses when they were arrested, Bell said.

Police believe the group involved in the ring, consisting of an unknown number of men and women, is tricking cashiers into loading Visa gift cards.

Bell explained the groups scheme:

Two or more people enter a Wal-Mart and target a young, less experienced cashier.

They ask the cashier to load hundreds of dollars onto multiple reloadable Visa gift cards.

In the middle of the transaction, the group members say they have to leave immediately due to an emergency.

The cashier, confused and pressured, gives back the cash without successfully refunding the credit or retrieving the gift cards.

Members of the group are then able to walk out with both the cash they came in with and the newly loaded gift cards.

Ringo and Jones reportedly attempted to load $250 onto eight gift cards in the Coweta Wal-Mart, Bell said, and the cards were recovered in their vehicle when they were arrested.

Investigators believe the group has stolen about $1.2 million using this scheme from Wal-Mart stores in 31 states, Bell said.

Ringo and Jones are believed to have stolen close to $50,000 from Oklahoma Wal-Mart stores on Friday alone, Bell said.

Investigators are looking for more suspects involved in the nationwide ring.

Anyone with information is encouraged to call their local law enforcement.
Ten years ago Sunday, 29-year-old Cpl. Jared Shoemaker of Tulsa died while serving his country, and his family is thankful he has not been forgotten.

Shoemaker was part of a team traveling in a mounted patrol in an area of Fallujah, nestled within the Al Anbar Province of Iraq, when an improvised explosive device went off directly under the vehicle. The explosion killed Shoemaker, a member of the U.S. Marine Corps; Lance Cpl. Eric Valdepenas of Seekonk, Massachusetts, and Naval Corpsman Christopher Walsh of Overland Park, Kansas.

It also left Lance Cpl. Cody Hill of Ada with serious injuries.

The attack cut short the life and career of a man who less than two years prior had realized his dream of becoming a member of the Tulsa Police Department. But in a recent interview with the Tulsa World, Shoemakers parents said they consider themselves fortunate to have their sons sacrifice be remembered in other ways.

In recent years, Shoemakers name has graced a lounge at the Tulsa International Airport, a bridge overpass in Owasso, an annual memorial walk that raises money for the Special Olympics and a Tulsa-based rugby academy.

The couples living room is full of medals, flags and photos from Jared Shoemakers time as a police officer and Marine, including items provided by others in his unit. They have put together a scrapbook with clippings of numerous articles written about him since his death. His older brother, Steve Shoemaker, joined the Army Reserve and finished his service this year.

Despite those reminders of Jareds accomplishments, though, they say the feeling is also bittersweet.

You cant watch TV without realizing whats going on with our military, and it affects not only our son but also other families and friends that are in the military, said Ken Shoemaker, Jareds father. Ive kind of learned to live with the memory, and its maybe gotten a little lighter, but its still there. Theres still part of the grieving process that doesnt go away.

Jared Shoemaker joined the Tulsa Police Department in January 2005 after becoming a member of the Marine Corps Reserve, and was mobilized to active duty in December that year from the Anti-Tank Training Company in Broken Arrow. He was assigned to Weapons Company, 1st Battalion, 25th Marines, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, which mostly consisted of Marines from Massachusetts.

He arrived in Fallujah in March and was set to return to Tulsa in October 2006.

Jared had such a passion for life, and he had such a knack for making friends and just being a good friend to people, said his mother, Linda Shoemaker. For us, we didnt even realize a lot of those things Jared had done until he was killed and people would come up and tell us.

The product of one of those acts of kindness lives on in an Iraqi girl named Mariam, who The Boston Globe reported in 2006 was a baby in serious need of medical care. A doctor told the paper Mariam was born with a rare disorder that made her bladder grow outside her body, and Walsh and others  Jared Shoemaker included  made it their goal to ensure Mariam was safe until she could be transported to the U.S. for surgery.

Jared Shoemaker, who had some medical training from the Tulsa Police Department, worked with Walsh and Marine Capt. Sean Donovan to help protect Mariam from potentially fatal infections.

The explosion that killed him took place about a mile from Mariams home. She eventually made it to the U.S. and survived surgery, but the Shoemaker family knows little of her since her infancy.

Im hoping at the reunion (in Boston) in October (that) we find out more about baby Mariam, Linda Shoemaker said. Our youngest granddaughter is named Sophie Mariam in honor of that. That (story), to us, really showed what the Marines were doing over there.

Every Sept. 4, the Shoemakers house is full of friends of Jareds from both the police force and Marines. The visits, Linda Shoemaker said, were somber at first but have eventually lightened up once the other Marines in Jareds unit  who were still overseas during his funeral  were able to grieve properly.

Ken Shoemaker said the visits from Jareds friends over the years showed him his sons compassion for others.

He seemed to have a positive effect on people, and a lot of that we really didnt know, he said. It brought a lot of joy to us to see what kind of person Jared really was ... All of the humanitarian aid that the U.S. military gave while they were deployed, I think its been completely overlooked and unappreciated. They were there to protect the majority of people in those areas, and its a little sad that we dont have a clearer view of what really went on.

Linda Shoemaker said the treatment of her son in Oklahoma and elsewhere after his death has minimized her fear that he will be forgotten. She said she hopes everyone currently serving, as well as veterans, are able to live their lives to the fullest.

Dont let guilt or sadness or anything hold them back. Jared would not want that, she said. Thats our wish for all our Marines, that they can move on and do all the things theyre meant to do.
I suppose the title Howard on Menzies lets you know what youre in for.

A former Prime Minister turning documentary presenter is not something a broadcaster manages to snag every day, nor is it particularly something I am used to reviewing.

Howard on Menzies is a bit of an oddity. This 2 part ABC documentary by filmmaker Simon Nasht isnt a straight-up analysis of former Prime Minister Robert Menzies. Its Menzies as seen through the eyes of a Liberal descendant -indeed one whom many have regarded as subscribing to Menzies-like politics- and second only in terms of length in office.

But it has assembled a formidable roll-call of interview subjects: historians Geoffrey Blainey and Henry Reynolds, economist Bob Gregory, academics Professor Judith Brett and Dr Stephen Mills, PM Malcolm Turnbull and former PM Bob Hawke, journalists Paul Kelly and Greg Sheridan and former politicians Barry Jones and Alexander Downer, plus Rupert Murdoch, Barry Humphries, Clive James and Thomas Keneally.

Archival footage of Menzies and social Australiana are interwoven with contemporary interviews, narration and John Howard visiting locations such as Menzies hometown of Jeparit, the National Museum, Parliament House etc.

I want to set the record straight about the fundamental role that Bob Menzies played in the building of modern Australia, Howard tells us. Despite Menzies 18 years in office, over two terms, there are those who regard his leadership with faint praise.

Howard only met the man once in 1964 but it was clearly a moment that stayed with him. Throughout the doco we hear much about the young Howard growing up in his family. As fate would have it, not only did he become PM but he lost the leadership of his party before gaining office, just as his political hero did. Cue that Lazarus with a triple bypass line. Similarly, Malcolm Turnbull empathises with Howard. No such inclusion of Andrew Peacock who also led the Libs twice (in Menzies own seat of Kooyong).

The first episode focusses on Menzies term as a United Australia Party PM from 1939  1941 aligning closely with Winston Churchill in the UK during WWII, but losing the political fight back home. Eventually he would forge the Liberal Party and rebuild his standing during subsequent Opposition, with regular radio broadcasts (I presume on the ABC!) winning back middle Australia. When Labors Ben Chifley attempted to nationalise banks, Menzies was surprisingly returned to office in 1949, enjoying a long run of 16 years as PM.

(Labor) made the same mistake with me. When I was in politics I never dismissed the quality of the person I was against, Howard tells us.

Howard maintains Menzies contributed much to modern Australia during his second term. Immigration was high, home ownership lifted to 70%, trade expanded. There was an ANZUS Treaty, a war in Korea, and allowing UK nuclear tests in Maralinga. The first episode concludes with Queen Elizabeths first visit to Australia in 1954.

Its a positive that the doco includes occasional criticisms.

Rupert Murdoch says Menzies largely maintained the status quo: He wasnt a great advocate for change.

But Barry Humphries recalls the broadcasting of Parliament opened Australias eyes to the rough and ready men in office, but believes the well-spoken Menzies was different.

However as a TV presenter Howard makes a good Prime Minister. Most of his links to camera present like flat political statements, reminiscent of his time as PM. I found it unnecessary to hear about Howards own parents when this is supposed to be a doco on Menzies, and thus his personality smothers what remains of interest. At least narrator Linda Cropper is there to break it up and add a sense of story and independence.

I havent viewed episode 2 but I would hope given its participant nature that the experience enlightens Howard to chinks in his own armour and leadership. If one wants to embark on these kinds of docos, you really have to illustrate how the experience throws light on your own shortcomings. Otherwise if there is no change, no lesson-learning, isnt it all just a bit too narcissistic?

Episode two has set up quite a bit of ground to cover.

Howard on Menzies airs 7:40pm Sunday September 17 & 25 on ABC.
Media reports today are sounding a change of heart by WIN TV mogul Bruce Gordon after earlier items suggesting he was looking to oust Nine CEO Hugh Marks.

Both refer to a recent phone call from Gordon to Marks as an olive branch at Sydneys Beppi restaurant.

The Australian reports: Gordon called to express his regret about recent stories in The Australian that reported the Bermuda-based octogenarian had sounded out fellow Nine shareholders, including Perpetual, about ousting Marks. Understandably, the reports went down like a burnt pie at Nine and Gordon is believed to have offered an olive branch of sorts. -The Australian.

The Australian Financial Review also notes Gordon phoned Nine chief Hugh Marks last week to apologise for incessant speculation in The Oz that WIN is agitating to roll Marks and his Willoughby management team.

Articles also suggest David Leckie dined with Bruce Gordon and his WIN chief executive Andrew Lancaster.
As part of Barack Obama's 2016 agenda, the country's Secretary of Education, John B. King continues his back-to-school bus tour. His focus on September will be at a New Orleans charter high school. The United States Education Department stated that he will make four stops during September 15 and 16, 2016.

His visit will include a stop to the Baton Rouge Elementary school. The school is currently flooded, according to Nola. East Baton Rouge public schools were hit with the Louisiana Flood of 2016 back in August. The school has not reopened yet. School authorities stated that they plan to reopen the school on September 6.

The first of King's tour will start on September 12 in Washington, D.C. And each stop highlights a different part of Barack Obama's 2016 education agenda.

On September 15, King visits Sallie Humble Elementary in Monroe. His visit there will touch on a discussion on teacher leadership. It will also include the Race to the Top improvement grants.

In his itinerary, he will most likely spend the whole morning of September 16 with teachers and students of the University Terrace Elementary. His next stop is at the Louisiana State University to discuss the issues surrounding college access, college completion and college affordability. This stems from the recent reports indicating that Southern states are responsible for the "deepest cuts to public higher education."

His last top on the tour is at Cohen College Prep. This school in New Orleans boasts of students that have improved scores ever since a charter group handled the school.

King's responsibility is to maintain and continue Barack Obama's 2016 education agenda. With that in mind, it is unknown if he will remain as the Secretary of Education under the next president. However, democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has expressed she wants to continue Obama's legacy. Clinton herself has an extensive vision when it comes to education. It includes a debt-free higher education system and early childhood education priorities.

Find out more about John B. King and his plans below:
The choice of going to a public school, private university or community college can be overwhelming. But some college are already done with that process. Recent college graduates sat down with NPR to discuss about the cost and value of getting that higher education. All of these students came from Montgomery County, Md. Looking back, they now share their opinions about the choices they made.

Alejandra Gonzales majors in Political Science. She went to the University of Maryland, College Park. After graduating on May 2016, she plans to teach English in France for a year. "Going to UMD was about getting to know people with completely different experiences from my own," says Gonzales.

Karie Cheung also went to UMD. She graduated back in December 2015 and now works at the Montgomery County Department of Health and Human Services. She is the first in her family to get a higher education. She says she grew a lot "socially, emotionally and definitely mentally."

Nancy Chen went to community college. She enrolled in Montgomery College, Tahoma Park. She majored in Nursing. She is still studying at MC and plans to graduate on May 2017. Currently she works as a volunteer firefighter. For her, she was able to save money for her future and for vacations. For her, it is important that she does not have debt.

Becca Arbacher on the other hand, went to a private college. She graduated from Columbia University in May 2016 and now works as a data scientist in Washington DC's Booz Allen Hamilton. For her, CU was hard to enjoy. "There's a lot going on, there's a lot of expectations ... Since graduating, it's a lot easier to look back and appreciate the benefits and the incredible opportunities that I had while there," says Arbacher.

All in all, the most important subjects these students claim was learning a lot about themselves. After graduating they reconcile their plans and dreams with real life.

Check out this video to find out which schools were considered top-notch:
In recent years, Vietnam's economy grew an average 6.5%, one of the highest levels in the world, and GDP per capita increased fivefold, the article said.

It cited the forecast of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as saying that Vietnam's economy will grow by 6.3% in 2016.

Between 1995 and 2015, the countrys exports increased threefold and became the 47 th biggest exporter in the world. In the last five years, its export turnover has risen by 16 percent annually on average.



The Vietnamese exporters started with primary products. However, they have taken advantage of low-cost labour to diversify their products in higher value-added segments, such as software export.



The article attributed the economic achievements to reforms in taxation, customs and investment mechanism, adding that in the Latin America, Brazil is the biggest trade partner of Vietnam.



It called Vietnam one of Argentinas crucial partner, elaborating that Argentine exports to Vietnam increased 20 times since 2002 and reached US$1.8 billion in 2015.

Vietnam mainly imports Argentinean soybean extracted residues, accounting for 69%, followed by animal feed and leather. It exports electronic devices and footwear to Argentina.

In the future, Argentina plans to increase exports of poultry meat, beef, seafood, fruit, wine, milk and pharmaceuticals to Vietnam, while cooperating with the Southeast Asian nation in aquaculture.



The article also called on Argentinean enterprises to invest in Vietnam.
An employee prepares to bake croissants at 'Hoan Boulangerie' in Hanoi AFP/Hoang Dinh Nam

Smeared with pate and loaded with fresh coriander and cucumber, or just enjoyed with a pat of fresh butter, "banh mi" are a delicious symbol of Vietnam's lasting links with its former occupiers.

"The French were very proud of banh mi. I think French cuisine has had a lot of influence on Vietnamese cuisine," baker Nguyen Ngoc Hoan told AFP from his busy boulangerie in Hanoi's French Quarter.

Hoan started baking banh mi -- which refers to plain bread or the popular "petit pain" loaded with meat, vegetables or fried egg -- in 1987 and five years later got a stint at the bakery in the storied Metropole hotel, built by the French at the turn of the 20th century.

The sandwich has become a foodie favourite in hipster enclaves around the globe, sold from food trucks and sipped with craft beer in both its classic form and a flurry of new varieties.

Hoan's father was also a baker but discouraged his son from following in his floured footsteps.

"The baking profession chose me, it was not my decision," Hoan said, speaking in front of a wall of ovens as his workers tirelessly knead dough nearby.

He started his career baking what he called Vietnamese bread -- airy on the inside, crusty on the outside -- but after training with a French baker in Shanghai decided to switch to the denser French-style.

Now, he churns out thousands of warm baguettes daily, along with croissants, creme caramel and homemade pate.

'PETIT PAIN'

French bread was first made in Vietnam to feed hungry soldiers in Indochina, France's empire which spanned much of Southeast Asia from 1858 to its crushing defeat in the Dien Bien Phu battle in Vietnam in 1954.

But the French became known for more than food, gaining a brutal reputation for crushing anti-imperialist movements and putting Vietnamese laborers to work in gruelling conditions on rubber plantations, while heavily taxing citizens during periods of drought and famine.

Most French who came to Vietnam weren't interested in low-level jobs like baking.

To fill the gap, Chinese and Vietnamese worked in boulangeries -- often hidden away in the back so customers wouldn't know who was baking their bread.

"By 1910, little baguettes or 'petit pain' were sold in the street to (Vietnamese) people who were on their way to work," according to Erica Peters, food historian and author of "Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam".

In the years that followed, meat, vegetables or fish appeared in the bread -- precursors to the modern-day banh mi sold all over Hanoi, a city rife with French colonial architecture, bistros and cafes.

Other culinary influences leaked in too.

Local cooks used meat scraps and unused bones from French butchers to create pho -- the national dish of beef or chicken noodle soup, according to Peters. Coffee and creme caramel are some of the other French culinary leftovers.

The ubiquity of those influences will not be lost on President Hollande, who arrives late Monday for talks with Vietnam's leadership and French businessmen.

HYBRID CUISINE

Today, Vietnam's commercial capital Ho Chi Minh City is dotted with chic cafes serving croque monsieur and macarons at Paris prices.

But the $1 banh mi still rules Hanoi's street food scene.

It is so engrained in Vietnam's culinary culture that few draw its lineage back to France.

"I don't know and don't care whether it's French, I just serve it like this," said Nguyen Thi Duc Hanh, sitting in front of her shop as the lunchtime rush begins.

She sells hundreds per day and keeps her menu simple: banh mi served with pate and a fried egg, beef steak or her very own version of "boeuf au vin" made with local spices.

One of her regulars, Nguyen Van Binh, said he has been eating banh mi for 50 years, and unlike Hanh, thinks of it as a hybrid dish.

"Banh mi came from France but it was changed and adapted to suit Vietnamese tastes," said Binh, before digging into his fried egg and pate served with a crusty roll.
She made the confirmation at the second Eastern Economic Forum held in Russias Vladivostok, noting that the two sides finished the ratification of the deal and it will come into force after 60 days.



The EAEU-Vietnam FTA features the two sides obligations pertaining to such spheres as trade, services, investment and movement of natural persons.



With the formation of the EAEU-Vietnam free trade area, bilateral trade can increase from US$4 billion at present to US$8-10 billion. EAEU exporters can save about US$40 million in tax in the first year the pact takes effect, according to the Eurasian Economic Commission.



Under the agreement, Vietnam will immediately remove import tariffs on 59% of the goods from the EAEU, including meat products, wheat flour, alcohol, mechanical equipment and steel products. The tariffs on another 30% of goods will be gradually reduced to 0% in the transitional period.



Indonesia and Singapore also suggested similar FTAs with the EAEU, but procedures will be more complicated, Nikishina said.



The EAEU consists of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. The union and Vietnam signed the agreement in Kazakhstan on May 29, 2015 after eight official rounds of negotiations.
A forensics unit inspects the site of a deadly bomb blast outside a hotel in the southern province of Pattani. (AFP/Tuwaedaniya Meringing)

The coordinated blasts erupted across seven provinces on Aug 11-12, killing four and injuring dozens, including foreign tourists.

No one has claimed responsibility for the bombing spree but analysts say it bore the hallmarks of ethnic Malay Muslim insurgents behind a 12-year rebellion concentrated further south.

The battle for greater autonomy from the Buddhist-majority state has killed than 6,500 people - mainly civilians - since 2004, but the violence rarely spills outside the southern border region.

"One suspected arsonist was arrested yesterday in his hometown in Pattani," assistant national police chief Suchart Theerasawat told AFP Saturday, referring to a province that lies in the heart of the insurgency.

The man, identified by police as 36-year-old Abdul Kadae Salae, is accused of setting fire to a supermarket in Trang province.

The flames severely damaged the building and struck during the same early morning window as bombings in other towns, including the beach resort of Hua Hin and the island of Phuket.

"He is being questioned at a military camp," the officer added. Like some of the four other suspects still at large, Salae has a record of involvement in the southern insurgency, according police.

But officers insist it is too early to call the tourist town bombings an extension of the southern rebellion, suggesting the men could have been hired by other opponents of Thailand's military government.

Analysts say the junta, which came to power in a 2014 coup, would be loathe to admit to a major expansion of the insurgency as it would undercut their claims to have stemmed violence in the restive border region.

Drive-by shootings and roadside bombs happen almost daily in the culturally and linguistically distinct zone bordering Malaysia.

On Saturday one person was killed when an explosive planted on a railway track derailed a train car in Pattani. "One train staff was killed and one person was injured," said Col Pramote Prom-in, a southern army spokesman.

The rebels never claim their attacks but factions are known to be frustrated with their lack of progress after more than a decade of fighting.
During the visit, the two countries will review and specify cooperation contents of towards further strengthening political ties and high-level delegation exchanges, said Vietnamese Ambassador to France Nguyen Ngoc Son.

The visit is expected to help accelerate joint economic projects, especially in infrastructure, climate change adaptation, science-technology, health and agriculture, he added.

Regional and international issues of common concern will also be brought to discussions.

Both sides will sign a number of new cooperation agreements in politics, economy, science-technology, agriculture and judicial affairs as well as exchange regional and international issues of mutual concern.

The two countries established diplomatic ties in April 1973 and upgraded the relationship to strategic partnership in September 2014.

Over the past four decades, France has been one of the most important European partner of Viet Nam.

France was also one of the first Western countries to support and assist Viet Nam in healing war wounds and normalizing relations with the wider world.
British Prime Minister Theresa May chairs a meeting of the cabinet at the Prime Minister's country retreat Chequers. (AFP/Mark Richards)

The prime minister spoke before boarding a plane to China, where she will hold her first meeting as leader with President Xi Jinping amid speculation she could cancel construction of a new nuclear plant with huge Chinese investment.

May, who took office in July after Britain voted to leave the European Union in June's referendum, will also meet a string of world leaders including US President Barack Obama on Sunday.

Her government is still working on its vision for how Britain's relationship with the EU should look post-Brexit.

Downing Street said after a meeting of ministers this week that it wants immigration controls while retaining strong trading ties.

May says she will not trigger the formal process for leaving the EU before the end of this year.

"This is a golden era for UK-China relations and one of the things I'll be doing at the G20 is obviously talking to President Xi about how we can develop the strategic partnership that we have between the UK and China," May said in a pooled television interview.

"But I'll also be talking to other world leaders about how we can develop free trade around the globe and how Britain wants to seize those opportunities. My ambition is that Britain will be a global leader in free trade."

May meets Xi on Monday and her government is expected to make an announcement on whether the Hinkley Point nuclear development will go ahead later this month.

A review of the project, a flagship deal building ties with China agreed under her predecessor David Cameron, was announced shortly after she took office.
Under Circular 04/2016/TT-BNG issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which took effect on September 1, foreigners holding NG3 visas are eligible to apply for temporary residence cards with validation periods of up to five years. The validation period should expire at least 30 days prior to the expiration of their passport.



NG3 visa holders are members of diplomatic missions, consular offices, representative offices of intergovernmental bodies, their spouses and children under 18, and their domestic helpers.



Holders of NG1, NG2 and NG4 visas who want to extend their stay permits should ask the bodies or organisations that sponsored them to enter Vietnam to submit applications for extending their temporary residence cards. The extension period is for a maximum of 12 months and must also expire at least 30 days prior to the expiration of their passport.



A Governments decree, which also took effect the same day, aims to support poor students in areas regarded as extremely disadvantaged.



Under Decree 116/2016/N-CP, a student of elementary or junior high schools in these regions will be provided with 15kg of rice per month for no more than nine months per year.



Each student will also receive an allowance to cover part of the cost of meals and housing which is equivalent to 40 percent and 10 percent of the basic salary per month, respectively.



Boarding schools for ethnic minorities will be financially aided to provide meals for students.



According to Decision 32/2016/Q-TTg, which will be effective from September 22, poor people and ethnic minorities in impoverished localities will have more opportunities to access legal assistance.



The Government will provide budgets to support officials working at centres for legal assistance in impoverished districts, communes and hamlets to attend lawyer training courses. More money will also be spent to establish a hotline for legal assistance at localities and to organise campaigns to raise community awareness on this matter.



Individuals and organisations will be fined 10-15 million VND for not having a plan or measures in place to prevent and respond to chemical-related incidents during the production, trading, use or storage of hazardous chemicals.



The same fine will also be imposed on those who do not comply with conditions for producing and trading chemicals, insecticides and antiseptic products used at home and in medical establishments.



These are stipulated in the Governments Decree 115/2016/N-CP, which will come into effect from September 15.
Nearly 2,500 delegates attend opening ceremony of the Eastern Economic Forum in the Russian city of Vladivostok on September 2.  VNA/VNS Photo Quang Vinh

The Vietnamese delegation included representatives from the ministries of Foreign Affairs, Industry and Trade, Public Health, and Education and Training, as well as the Vietnamese Consulate General in Vladivostok .

Initiated by Russian President Vladimir Putin, the two-day event seeks to foster economic development in the Far East and expand international cooperation in Asia-Pacific.

In his opening speech, the special envoy of the Russian President in the Far East and Deputy PM, Yuri Trutnev, said officials in the Far East are working to build a competitive model with preferential tariff and administrative procedures to attract investors.

The forum includes 52 sessions and five business dialogues between Russia and their partners from China, Japan, the Republic of Korea, ASEAN and Germany, discussing a range of issues regarding business opportunities in infrastructure, energy, aquaculture, tourism, intellectual economy, education and training in Asia-Pacific, manufacturing, forestry, and other topics.

Also during the forum, Russia announced plans to begin work on 11 projects worth US$40 billion to investors. The first forum, held in 2015, witnessed the signing of 80 agreements worth more than $20 billion.

The forum schedule calls for Russian President Putin to deliver a speech at a plenary session on September 3 and meet separately with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, as well as President of the Republic of Korea Park Geun-hye.
PM Nguyen Xuan Phuc and Indian PM Narendra Modi at the joint press briefing after their talks, Ha Noi, September 3, 2016. Photo: VGP

JOINT STATEMENT

Between

THE SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF VIET NAM AND THE REPUBLIC OF INDIA on the Official Visit of Prime Minister of the Republic of India Narendra Modi to the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam

(Ha Noi, September 2-3, 2016)

At the invitation of H. E. Mr. Nguyen Xuan Phuc, Prime Minister of the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam, the Prime Minister of the Republic of India H.E. Mr. Narendra Modi paid an Official Visit to the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam from 02 - 03 September 2016.

On 3 September 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was accorded a ceremonial reception. This was followed by bilateral talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc. Thereafter, the two Prime Ministers witnessed the signing of bilateral documents. Prime Minister Narendra Modi met H.E. Mr. Nguyen PhuTrong, General Secretary of Viet Nam Communist Party, H.E. Mr. Tran Dai Quang, President of Vietnam, and H.E. Mrs. Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan, Chairperson of the National Assembly of Viet Nam. Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid a wreath at the Memorial of National Heroes and Martyrs and Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, visited the Ho Chi Minh Residential Complex and the Quan Su Pagoda in Ha Noi.

Leaders of Viet Nam and India reviewed and expressed their satisfaction over the strong and comprehensive development of the relations of long-standing traditional friendship and Strategic Partnership between the two countries so far. Both sides welcomed the fact that the two countries will be celebrating the 45th anniversary of establishment of diplomatic relations (07/1/1972 - 07/1/2017) and the 10th anniversary of establishment of Strategic Partnership (06/7/2007 - 06/7/2017) in 2017, and emphasized that this marks a milestone and opens a new stage for the bilateral relations.

They shared the view that Viet Nam - India relations have been built on a firm foundation, with close links in culture, history and civilization, mutual trust and understanding as well as the strong mutual support in international and regional fora. The Vietnamese side reaffirmed Viet Nam's support for India's Act East Policy and welcomed a greater role for India in the regional and international arena. Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed that Viet Nam is an important pillar of India's Act East Policy.

Based on the current excellent relations, in order to meet the expectation of the Leaders and people of the two countries, and with the desire to contribute to regional peace, stability, cooperation and prosperity, Viet Nam and India agreed to elevate the current Strategic Partnership to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. The two Prime Ministers agreed to assign the two Ministries of Foreign Affairs to be the focal points, in collaboration with other ministries and agencies of both sides, to build the Plan of Action to bring the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership to reality in all areas of cooperation.

1. Political relations, defense and security:

Both sides shared convergence of views on various bilateral and international issues, including the regional security situation in Asia. They expressed happiness at the success of recent high level visits of President Pranab Mukherjee and Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj in 2014, Speaker of Lok Sabha and National Security Adviser in 2015 from the Indian side, and the visits of General Secretary of the Communist Party of Viet Nam Nguyen Phu Trong in November 2013, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung in October 2014 and President of Viet Nam Fatherland Front in 2015 from the Vietnamese side. Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated the Vietnamese Leaders and people on the successful outcomes of the 12th National Communist Party Congress and of the elections for the 14th National Assembly and People's Councils tenure 2016-2021. Once again, he reiterated sincere congratulations to Viet Nam's newly-elected leaders.

Both sides agreed to increase the exchange of high-level and other visits, step up relations between political parties and legislative institutions of both sides, establish relations between provincial/state governments on both sides, uphold established bilateral cooperation mechanisms, and effectively implement the agreements signed between two countries.

The two Prime Ministers expressed satisfaction at the significant progress made in defence cooperation, including exchange of high level visits, annual high- level dialogue, service-to-service cooperation, naval ship visits, extensive training and capacity building, defence equipment procurement and related transfer of technology, and cooperation at regional fora such as ADMM-Plus.

Both sides agreed to effectively implement the Joint Vision Statement on India-Viet Nam Defence Relations of May 2015. Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed India's significant interest in promoting defence industry cooperation between the two sides and committed to provide a new Line of Credit for Viet Nam in this area. Both sides welcomed the signing of the contract for Offshore Highspeed Patrol Boats between M/s Larsen & Toubro and Viet Nam Border Guards utilizing the US$100 million Line of Credit for defence procurement extended by India to Viet Nam. Prime Minister Modi announced a grant of US$ 5 million for the construction of an Army Software Park at the Telecommunications University in Nha Trang.

The Prime Ministers welcomed the signing of the MOU on Cyber Security between Ministry of Public Security of Viet Nam and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology of India and the transfer of equipment to the Indian funded Indira Gandhi High-Tech Crime Laboratory. They agreed to an early conclusion of the MOU for cooperation between the National Security Council Secretariat of India and the Ministry of Public Security of Viet Nam, emphasized the need to establish the Deputy Ministerial level dialogue and to enhance cooperation on traditional and non-traditional security matters, cyber security, counter-terrorism, transnational crimes, disaster management and response, and undertaking training and capacity building programmes.

2. Economic relations, trading and investment:

The two Leaders emphasized that enhancing bilateral economic engagement is a strategic objective. In this regard, they requested the related ministries and agencies on both sides to explore substantive and practical measures to achieve the trade target of US$15 billion by 2020, including but not limited to: utilizing established mechanisms such as the Joint Sub-Commission on Trade, intensifying the exchanges among states of India and provinces of Viet Nam, strengthening exchanges of delegation and Business-to-Business contacts, regular organization of trade fairs and events such as the India-CLMV Business Conclave and Viet Nam - India Business Forum.

They welcomed the effective implementation of India-ASEAN Trade in Goods Agreement and the conclusion of India-ASEAN Trade in Services and Investment Agreements (AITGA). They also called for close cooperation towards realization of Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (RCEP).

The Prime Ministers urged leaders of business and industry to explore new business opportunities in the identified priority areas for cooperation: hydrocarbons, power generation, renewable energy, infrastructure, tourism, textiles, footwear, medical and pharmaceuticals, ICT, electronics, agriculture, agro-products, chemicals, machine tools and other supporting industries.

Both sides encouraged greater two-way investment between Viet Nam and India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomed Vietnamese companies to take advantage of the various schemes and facilities offered under the 'Make in India' programme. Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc welcomed Indian companies to invest in Viet Nam and affirmed Viet Nam's commitment to create favourable conditions and facilitation for Indian investments in accordance with Vietnamese laws. Prime Minister Modi sought facilitation of the Government of Vietnam for major Indian investments such as Tata Power's Long Phu-II 1320MW thermal power project for achieving contractual conclusion.

3. Energy:

The Vietnamese side welcomed the long-standing investment and presence of ONGC Videsh Limited (OVL) and its partnership with PetroViet Nam (PVN) for exploration of oil and gas in Viet Nam. The Prime Ministers agreed to further enhance cooperation in the oil and gas sector and urged both sides to actively implement the Agreement signed in 2014 between PVN and OVL on cooperation in new blocks in Viet Nam. The Vietnamese side also welcomed Indian oil and gas companies to avail of opportunities in participating in mid-stream and down-stream sectors in Viet Nam.

Both Prime Ministers highly value the importance of renewable energy and expressed the belief that both India and Viet Nam would immensely benefit from enhancing the share of renewable energy in the overall power generation. The Vietnamese side welcomes Prime Minister Modi's ambitious plan for deployment of 175 GW of renewable power capacities by 2022, including 100GW of solar and 60GW of wind power in India. In this regard, the two Leaders urged both sides to step up their cooperation in this sector.

4. Connectivities:

Both sides reiterated the importance of connectivity between Viet Nam and India. They urged airlines of both sides to soon open direct flights between major cities of Viet Nam and India. They sought accelerating the establishment of direct shipping routes between the sea ports of Viet Nam and India. Both sides agreed on the need to further strengthen physical connectivity between India and ASEAN.

The Indian side urged Viet Nam to utilize various initiatives of India for CLMV countries and the India - ASEAN Line of Credit for physical and digital connectivity.

Both sides agreed to enhance banking and financial sector linkages between the two countries for facilitating more intensive economic engagement. The Vietnamese side welcomed the opening of a branch of Bank of India in Ho Chi Minh City in July 2016 and took note of the Indian side's request on licensing international foreign exchange transactions of Bank of India to assist Indian business and industry in Viet Nam.

5. Science and Technology:

The Prime Ministers expressed satisfaction at three decades of bilateral cooperation in the use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes pursuant to the agreement signed by the two countries in 1986. They welcomed the discussions aimed at concluding the Agreement on Cooperation between the Indian Global Centre for Nuclear Energy Partnership and Viet Nam Atomic Institute and agreed to expedite the negotiation and conclusion of the new Inter-Governmental Framework Agreement on Cooperation in the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy, which will set a strong foundation for further cooperation in civil nuclear energy.

The Prime Ministers expressed satisfaction at the signing of the InterGovernmental Framework Agreement between the two countries for Exploration and Use of Outer Space for Peaceful Purposes and urged both sides to soon conclude the Implementing Arrangement between the Indian Space Research Organisation and Viet Nam Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment on Establishment of Tracking and Data Reception Station and Data Processing Facility in Vietnam under the India-ASEAN Space Cooperation. The Vietnamese side welcomed the establishment of the facility which would increase capabilities of Viet Nam and ASEAN countries in remote sensing with numerous commercial and scientific applications.

6. Training:

Both Prime Ministers welcomed ongoing cooperation in the establishment of capacity building institutes in Viet Nam in IT, English language training, entrepreneurship development, high-performance computing and other areas and expressed satisfaction at the finalization of development partnership projects including the establishment of Viet Nam-India English and IT Training Centre at the

Telecommunications University in Nha Trang, the Centre for Excellence in Software Development and Training at Ho Chi Minh City.

Vietnam welcomed the offer to train 15 Vietnamese diplomats at the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, New Delhi and 25 Vietnamese students of Vietnam National University Faculty of Oriental Studies at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.

The Indian side affirmed that it would continue to provide training through Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) and provide scholarships for Vietnamese students and Government officials. Viet Nam welcomed India's assistance under the framework of Mekong - Ganga Cooperation, especially the Quick Impact Projects Fund (QIPF).

7. Health, Culture, Tourism and People-to-people links:

Both sides welcomed the conclusion and signing of the MOU on Health Cooperation. They also emphasized the importance of encouraging traditional medicine.

Both sides agreed to strengthen exchanges and cooperation in culture, tourism, people-to-people links, especially exchanges between the youth of Viet Nam and India. Prime Minister Modi thanked Viet Nam for facilitating the establishment of the Indian Cultural Centre in Hanoi which will open shortly. The Prime Ministers instructed officials to quickly follow-up the implementation of the Memorandum of Understanding on conservation and restoration of Cham monuments at My Son, Quang Nam Province, by the Archaeological Survey of India.

Viet Nam highly appreciated the support and assistance of India in organizing activities highlighting the role and contributions of President Ho Chi Minh. Prime Minister Narendra Modi thanked Viet Nam for its leadership in facilitating the inscription of the Archaeological Site of Nalanda Mahavihara as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

India announced the offer of special annual scholarships for Vietnamese students for advanced Buddhist studies at Masters/Doctoral level courses and annual scholarships of one year duration for study of Sanskrit in Indian institutes for the members of the Buddhist Sangha in Vietnam.

8. Regional and international cooperation:

The Prime Ministers valued the cooperation and coordination between both sides at regional and international fora and agreed to strengthen cooperation particularly in UN, NAM, WTO, ASEAN and related forums including ARF, ADMM Plus, EAS, ASEM and as well as other sub-regional cooperation mechanisms. India welcomed the realization of ASEAN Community and expressed full support for ASEAN's centrality in the evolving regional structure. India welcomed and highlighted the significant contribution of Viet Nam to the ASEAN - India Strategic Partnership in its capacity as ASEAN Coordinator for India for the period of 20152018.

Both Vietnam and India stressed the need for reform of the United Nations and expansion of the UN Security Council in both the permanent and the nonpermanent categories of membership, with enhanced representation from developing countries. Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed gratitude for Viet Nam's consistent support to India's candidature for permanent membership of a reformed and expanded UNSC. The Prime Ministers reaffirmed support for each other's candidature for non-permanent membership of the UNSC, Viet Nam for the term 2020-21 and India for the term 2021-22. Both sides expressed satisfaction at the conclusion of the Program of Cooperation in UN Peacekeeping Matters. The Indian side expressed its commitment to capacity building and training to enable Viet Nam's participation in UN peacekeeping operations.

Both sides reiterated their desire and determination to work together to maintain peace, stability, growth and prosperity in Asia and beyond. Noting the Award issued on 12 July 2016 of the Arbitral Tribunal constituted under the Annex VII to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of Sea (UNCLOS), both sides reiterated their support for peace, stability, security, safety and freedom of navigation and over flight, and unimpeded commerce, based on the principles of international law, as reflected notably in the UNCLOS. Both sides also called on all states to resolve disputes through peaceful means without threat or use of force and exercise self-restraint in the conduct of activities that could complicate or escalate disputes affecting peace and stability, respect the diplomatic and legal processes, fully observe the Declaration on the conduct of parties in the South China Sea (DOC) and soon finalize the Code of Conduct (COC).They also recognised that the sea lanes of communication passing through the South China Sea are critical for peace, stability, prosperity and development. Vietnam and India, as State Parties to the UNCLOS, urged all parties to show utmost respect for the UNCLOS, which establishes the international legal order of the seas and oceans.

The following Agreements were signed in the presence of the two Prime Ministers: (i) Framework Agreement on Cooperation in the Exploration and Uses of Outer Space for Peaceful Purposes; (ii) Protocol for Amending the Agreement on Avoiding Double Taxation; (iii) Program of Cooperation in UN Peacekeeping Matters; (iv) Protocol between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Viet Nam and the Ministry of External Affairs of India on Celebrating 2017 as the Year of Friendship; (v) mOu on Health Cooperation; (vi) MOU on cooperation in Information Technology; (vii) MOU on Cooperation between the Viet Nam Academy of Social Sciences and the Indian Council of World Affairs; (viii) MOU on cooperation in Cyber Security; (ix) MOU between the Bureau of Indian Standards and Directorate for Standard, Metrology and Quality for Cooperation in the Fields of Standardization and Conformity Assessment; (x) MOU on Establishment of the Centre of Excellence in Software Development and Training; (xi) Technical Agreement on Sharing of White Shipping Information; (xii) Contract for Offshore High-speed Patrol Boats.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's interactions with the entire leadership of Viet Nam were marked by warmth, friendship and mutual respect. Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed his gratitude for the warm reception and hospitality accorded to him and his delegation. He extended an invitation to Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc to visit India at a mutually convenient date. Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc accepted the invitation with pleasure. Dates for the visits will be finalized through diplomatic channels.
In Hanoi, imported fruit is priced reasonably and sells well. For example, apples imported from the US and New Zealand are only VND56,000 to VND70,000 ($2.5-3) per kilo, similar to the prices of some local fruits like Hoa Loc mango or mangosteen.



According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, about 17,000 to 18,000 tons of fruit arrive at HCM Citys Thu Duc fruit wholesale market every night, including 30% of imported fruits. Apples, pears, and oranges from Thailand, the Republic of Korea, and the US are more favored and sell very well.



Imported fruit is not only available at supermarkets but also traditional markets and mobile markets in Hanoi.



Customers say that imported fruits are well packed and the prices are also reasonable.



According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, in January-July 2016, Vietnam earned US$1.4 billion from export of vegetables and fruits. Many picky markets are now opened to Vietnamese fruit such as the US, EU, Japan, the RoK. It is expected that fruit exports will bring in over US$2 billion for the country this year.



Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Le Quoc Doanh said that the fruits are considered a "savior" for agricultural exports of Vietnam. The Ministry and related agencies are speeding up trade promotion for this item, which has potential in both quantity and quality.



Doanh said it is good to explore foreign markets but the domestic market is also important.



"Vietnam is spending a lot of money to import fruit. If Vietnamese fruits satisfy picky foreign markets, then there is no reason that local customers cannot choose it. The matter is our poor marketing and promotion activities. Some customers still favor foreign than local products," said Doanh.



Ho Quoc Nguyen, Director of External Relations of Big C supermarket chain, said that besides imported fruit, supermarkets also sell fruit of foreign origin grown in Vietnam.



This kind of fruit is cheaper than imported fruit of the same kind. It sells very well.



Nguyen Khac Huy, Director Hoang Phat Fruit Co., after a long time of improving quality, Vietnams fruits have satisfied the condition of imports of many countries such as the US, New Zealand, Japan...



Besides foreign markets, fruit exporters are beginning to pay attention to the local market.

Fruit and vegetable imports from Australia skyrocket



Vietnam imports from Australia have risen sharply in recent times, particularly industrial raw materials, according to the latest statistics from the General Department of Vietnam Customs.



Worthy of notice were fruit and vegetable imports, which grew by 322% to more than US$19.8 million in the first half of this year. Other products saw a sharp growth, such as cotton (up 319.7%), coal (160.8%), ores and minerals (88.8%) and base metals (41.7%).



Vietnam Customs also reported that trade turnover between Vietnam and Australia hit more than US$2.4 billion in the first six months, of which Vietnams exports to Australia were US$1.3 billion (down 17% against the same period last year) and imports reached US$1.1 billion (up 9.1%).
Indian PM Narendra Modi

This is also the first time an Indian PM visits Viet Nam since 2001.

Viet Nam and India established strategic partnership in July 2007 on the occasion of PM Nguyen Tan Dungs official visit to India.

According to Indian Ambassador to Viet Nam Parvathaneni Harish, strategic partnership is comprehensive, covering domains like defense and security, economy, science and technology, human resource development, education and culture.

Leaders of the two countries believe that such ties will contribute significantly to enhancing stability and development in the region, he said.

Based on good political and diplomatic relations, enhancing economic cooperation is one of strategic targets of the bilateral ties. The two-way trade turnover fetched over US$ 5 billion last year and was set to hit US$ 15 billion by 2020.

India ranks 28th among biggest foreign investors in Viet Nam with total registered capital of US$590 million in 118 projects.

The two countries expanded defense and security cooperation by setting up a dialogue mechanism between the two defense ministries in 2003, focusing on training, defense industry, information and experience sharing.
Center-left Social Democrats (SPD) and anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) parties appear to have taken first and second place respectively in Sundays elections in a German state where Chancellor Angela Merkel has her political base.

ARD and ZDF public television exit polls put support for SPD in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania at around 30 percent. They put support for AfD at 21 percent, with Merkel's Christian Democrats at about 19 percent.



Merkel's refugee policies were a prominent issue in the campaign for Sunday's election, held a year after she decided to allow migrants to enter Germany from Hungary, setting off the peak of last year's influx.

Germany expanded its refugee program that welcomed tens of thousands of Syrians and other refugees who were in danger from war and terrorism.

Frieder Weinhold, a CDU candidate, acknowledged the migration policy has sparked a feeling of insecurity among the people.

The northeastern state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, however, under the quota system based on states income, took in only 25,000 asylum seekers last year. Most people, Weinhold said, prefer to move to places where there are more jobs, people and shops.

Merkel, who is considering a bid for a fourth term as chancellor, had warned voters against the rhetoric politics offered by AfD with its anti-refugee sentiment. She urged constituents to look beyond divisive campaign slogans.

Merkel has supported a quota system for the 28-member European Union to accept would-be immigrants.

Several EU members, particularly those in the east with pro-nationalist leaders, oppose any plans to take in migrants from the Middle East and South Asia, while others oppose quotas.
Conservationists have good news for one beloved species of mammals, and bad news for another.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature said Sunday that giant pandas are no longer "endangered" in China.

The experts meeting in Honolulu thanked the Chinese government's intense conservation program and bamboo reforestation for helping save one of its icons.

"When push comes to shove, the Chinese have done a really good job with pandas," primatologist John Robinson said.

But while the immediate future of panda survival may be bright, the coming decades may not be.

The experts warn that global warming could wipe out more than one-third of the panda's naturally wild bamboo in the next 80 years, depriving them of their chief food and leading to a decline in the panda population.

The conservationists also had bad news for one of man's closest relatives. They rated the eastern gorilla, the world's largest living primate, as "critically endangered," or just one step away from extinction.

They blame illegal hunting in the Democratic Republic of Congo, along with war, and a severe loss of forest to farmers in West Africa and Indonesia.

"To see the eastern gorilla, one of out closest cousins, slide toward extinction is truly distressing," IUCN director Iger Andersen said. "Conservation does work and we have increasing evidence of it. It is our responsibility to enhance our efforts to turn the tide and protect the future of our planet."

The eastern gorilla joins three other great ape species -- the western gorilla, Bornean orangutan and Sumatran orangutan as "critically endangered."

Two other great ape species - baboons and chimpanzees - are listed as "endangered."
The United States and China have agreed to do what they can to avoid a currency war, according to a White House statement issued before the opening of the Group of 20 nations meeting Sunday in the Chinese lake city of Hangzhou.



The move reflects rising fears that some countries might forcibly devalue their currencies to protect falling exports, and hurt their competitors.



"The United States and China jointly reaffirm their G-20 exchange rate commitments, including that they will refrain from competitive devaluations and not target exchange rates for competitive purposes," the White House said Sunday, a day after a meeting between U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.



"China will continue an orderly transition to a market-determined exchange rate, enhancing two-way flexibility. China stresses that there is no basis for a sustained depreciation of the RMB. Both sides recognize the importance of clear policy communication," the statement said.

The move is meant to put at rest fears in some quarters, particularly in Japan and South Korea, that China might devalue its currency to check the slide in its exports, which became more intense in the first half of this year.



Japan, China and South Korea were involved in competitive devaluation of their currencies last year. China's sharp devaluation in August 2015 severely jolted the world markets. But Beijing blamed Japan for starting the process of devaluing the Yen to boost its own trade at the cost of Chinese exports.

The specter of shrinking international demand and the recent Brexit vote in Britain has given rise to fears another round of devaluations may be in the offing.



Brexit fears



European countries are also expected to push the G20 to adopt a binding commitment on curbing devaluations.

"Competitive devaluation of currencies is bad for everyone. We are in favor of any move to stop it. We will go by the decision taken on this issue at the meeting of G20 finance ministers," Schinas Margaritis, spokesman of the European Commission told VOA.



There are fears Britain's decision to move out of the European Union might severely damage the British economy and hurt some countries that are closely connected to its business. The final outcome is not known, but there are fears about instability in the British pound.



Obama met British Prime Minister Theresa May on the sidelines of the G-20 meeting for the first time since she took office. They discussed ways to enhance business connectivity between the countries.





Pledges by finance ministers



The G20 meeting will be a test of whether heads of states will put their stamp on a pledge taken by their finance ministers and central bank governors earlier to "reaffirm our previous exchange-rate commitments, including that we will refrain from competitive devaluations and we will not target our exchange rates for competitive purposes," .



An important question is whether a principled stand taken by the heads of states from 20 wealthier nations is workable, because market forces often tend to prove more powerful at a time of currency turmoil than the might of governments.



"I don't think such agreements would be meaningful," Micheal Pettis, professor of finance at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management said. He pointed out there is extremely weak demand in international trade, and every country would try to compete with others to expand its exports. Besides, most major currencies operate on a floating rate, which allows little room for governments to intervene.



Escape route



The proposal may face some resistance. There might be an attempt to insert an escape clause to allow governments to interfere in currency markets to avoid a local crisis.



After the last meeting of finance ministers, Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the agreement does not mean his government cannot intervene to check a one-sided move by the Yen.

"What the G20 is talking about is arbitrary intervention, which is different from responding to a one-sided move," he said.



Some experts ask whether China's assurances could be relied on at a time when its global markets are shrinking rapidly. Chinese exports fell by an unexpectedly wide margin of 4.4 percent in July, prompting government economists to predict a dismal scenario in the rest of 2016.



"China pledged at the G-20 finance ministers' meeting in February 2016 that it will not [de]value its currency. But it has devalued the Yuan twice after that," Daniel C. Park, a compliance director with the G-20 Research Group, a think tank affiliated to the University of Toronto, told VOA.



In its report, the G-20 Research Group advised world leaders to go beyond making pledges, and devise a plan about "how to collectively respond toward member countries who fail to uphold the pledge and proceed to fix their currencies".
The Clinton and Trump campaigns traded barbs over which presidential candidate Americans can trust, two days after the FBI released notes from its July interview with Hillary Clinton concerning her handling of emails as secretary of state.

Seventeen thousand 448 emails were not turned over to the inspector general. Thats in addition to the 33,000 emails that had been deleted, said Donald Trumps campaign manager, Kelleyanne Conway, on ABCs This Week program. Hillary Clinton is having a hard time being accepted as a truthful and honest candidate.

These notes, which Hillary urged to make public, demonstrate clearly why the FBI saw no need for additional criminal proceedings, said Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine, also on This Week. On the other hand, we have a candidate in Donald Trump who wont release his tax returns to the public after he promised to do so.

The FBI already announced it uncovered no criminal wrongdoing, but the notes underscore conclusions that have dogged Clinton for months.

More than two dozen times, Clinton said she could not remember details about her electronic correspondence as secretary of state. During her tenure, she used a private email account to conduct official business. The FBI was only partially successful recovering data from a private server that had been wiped clean.

According to the FBIs notes, Clinton said she was unaware some emails she received contained classified information because she did not know that a C marking denoted Confidential.

A former U.S. senator, former first lady, and, certainly, the sitting secretary of state should know what the C means, Conway said.

The FBI said it cannot be sure foreign entities did not gain access to classified material Clinton sent or received while serving as President Barack Obamas first secretary of state.

But it the focus is on sensitive data falling into the wrong hands, Kaine argued the most egregious act by far was Trump publicly stating that Russia should try to find Clintons missing emails.

The FBI released 58 pages of notes on Friday, two days after Donald Trumps trip to Mexico and subsequent immigration speech ignited a media firestorm and drew sharp criticism from Democrats.

Although most polls show Clinton leading Trump nationally, the margin has narrowed and majorities of Americans view both Clinton and Trump unfavorably.
Tropical storm Hermine is once again gaining strength, the U.S. National Weather Service said Sunday, posing a "danger of life-threatening inundation" from New Jersey to Connecticut."

"The event is far from over," said National Hurricane Center meteorologist Dennis Feltgen.

As of midday Sunday, Hermine was about 520 kilometers east-southeast of Ocean City, Maryland in the mid-Atlantic region - far out to sea, but close enough to be pummeling coastal areas with heavy rain, riptides and storm surges of up to 1.5 meters.

The storm, now heading north by northeast, is expected to take a northern or northwestern turn. Residents in states as far north as Connecticut are expected to feel its damaging impact.

Hermine was the first hurricane to strike Florida in more than a decade, and is responsible for two deaths  one in Florida and one in North Carolina.

In New Jersey, tropical storm force winds could whip up on Monday's Labor Day holiday. Governor Chris Christie warned that minor to moderate flooding is still likely in coastal areas, and said the storm will cause major problems, even as it tracks eastward into the Atlantic.



"Don't be lulled by the nice weather,'' Christie said, referring to the bright sunny skies along the Jersey Shore on Sunday afternoon. "Don't think that nothing is going to happen, because something is going to happen. ... The eastern track means a less severe impact, but you're still going to see beach erosion, storm surges and dangerous rip currents. There will be impact from this storm.''

Forecasters say Hermine could regain hurricane force later Sunday as it travels up the coast before weakening again to a tropical storm by Tuesday.
U.S. President Barack Obama is telling China it needs to adopt a more responsible role on the world stage and adhere to international norms.

Before heading to the G-20 summit in China, Obama told CNN in an interview broadcast Sunday that Beijing needs to show restraint in its relations with smaller countries, especially as it deals with territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

The American leader said that "with increasing power comes increasing responsibilities." Obama said the U.S. has urged China to accept international rules that build a strong world-wide order.

South China Sea



China, which is a signatory to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, recently lost an arbitration dispute at a court in the Hague over the South China Sea, but rejected the ruling. The court ruled China had violated Manila's sovereign rights by interfering with Philippine fishing and oil exploration activities in the area.

"If you sign a treaty that calls for international arbitration around maritime issues, the fact that you're bigger than the Philippines or Vietnam or other countries... is not a reason for you to go around and flex your muscles," Obama said. "You've got to abide by international law."

Obama said that where the U.S. has seen China "violating international rules and norms, as we have seen in some cases in the South China Sea or in some of their behavior when it comes to economic policy, we've been very firm. And we've indicated to them that there will be consequences."

Trade issues



He said China cannot expect to "pursue mercantilist policies that just advantage" itself now that China has become a more affluent, middle-income country. "Even though you still have a lot of poor people, you know, you can't just export problems. You've got to have fair trade and not just free trade. You have to open up your markets if you expect other people to open up their markets."

Obama added, "Part of what I've tried to communicate to President Xi [Jinping] is that the United States arrives at its power, in part, by restraining itself. You know, when we bind ourselves to a bunch of international norms and rules it's not because we have to, it's because we recognize that over the long term, building a strong international order is in our interests."
U.S. President Barack Obama assured Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday that Washington is committed to bring the perpetrators of the failed July coup against his government to justice, but stopped short of saying the U.S. would extradite the Muslim cleric that Ankara blames.

"We will make sure that those who carried out these activities are brought to justice," Obama told the Turkish leader as they met on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in the Chinese city of Hangzhou.

WATCH: President Obama on failed coup in Turkey

Turkey contends that 75-year-old Fethullah Gulen, living in self-imposed exile since 1999 in the eastern U.S. state of Pennsylvania, orchestrated the putsch, although he adamantly has denied any involvement.

Turkey has pleaded with the U.S. to send Gulen back to Turkey, but American officials say that Ankara has yet to provide them with any evidence linking him to the failed plot to overthrow Erdogan's government, only information about his past activities. The U.S. says that any extradition attempt would have to be approved in the U.S. court system.

Obama on aborted coup

Obama, meeting with Erdogan for the first time face-to-face since the aborted coup, described it as "terrible."

"By taking to the streets to resist the coup attempt, the Turkish people once again affirmed their commitment to democracy and the strength and resilience of democratic institutions inside of Turkey," Obama said.

"I indicated at the time [of the coup attempt] the unequivocal condemnation of these actions and spoke personally to President Erdogan to offer any support that we might be able to provide in both ending the attempted coup, but also in investigating and bringing perpetrators of these illegal actions to justice," Obama said.

The Turkish leader said justice officials from the two countries would corroborate in their efforts hold the perpetrators accountable.

"The post attempted-coup documentation and evidence therein will be amassed and they will be submitted to our friends in the United States," Erdogan said. "The efforts are still under way. We had welcomed a delegation from the American Justice Department and a similar delegation from the Turkish Ministry of Justice will go to the United States. Our minister of justice and minister of interior will travel together to the United States whereby they will concentrate their efforts on the elaboration of this evidence."

Since July, Turkey has ousted 80,000 civil servants, teachers, judges and other workers believed to be Gulen sympathizers or somehow involved in the failed coup, arresting many of them.

Syria



Aside from the Gulen extradition request, tensions between Turkey and United States, two NATO allies, have been strained over the fight to oust Islamic State jihadists from Syrian strongholds south of the Turkish border.

While Washington and Ankara both have carried out the campaign against Islamic State fighters, Turkey also has bombed Kurdish positions, accusing the Syrian Kurds of being allied with the Kurdistan Workers Party, Kurdish fighters who have claimed responsibility for deadly attacks inside Turkey.

The U.S. considers the Syrian Kurds to be staunch fighters against Islamic State and has sought to curb Ankara's attacks on them.

Erdogan says there should be no distinction between "good terrorists" and bad ones.
As Chinas Group of 20 Nations Leaders Summit kicked off Sunday, a commotion on the tarmac during President Barack Obamas arrival and a series of other disputes continue to provide distractions.

When President Obama arrived in Hangzhou Saturday, the airport did not have airplane stairs ready for him to disembark Air Force One, and when he did step off the aircraft, the red carpet provided for other arriving leaders was missing.

Tensions were also high on the tarmac where a Chinese official screamed at White House press photographers as they tried to get into position to take pictures of the president. A White House official tried to intervene stating that the U.S. would set the rules for where the photographers positioned themselves. But the Chinese official yelled back: This is our country! This is our airport!

And that was just the beginning.

The same official tried to keep National Security Adviser Susan Rice from walking to the presidents motorcade, at which point the U.S. Secret Service intervened.

Later in the evening, after holding a ceremony to announce China and the United States joining the Paris Agreement on climate change, and holding wide-ranging bilateral talks for more than three-and-a-half hours, tensions rose again.

This time, disputes arose over how many journalists could witness a late night stroll Presidents Obama and Xi Jinping took. Chinese officials suddenly cut the number of journalists from six to three, and then to one.

That is our arrangement, a Chinese official told a White House press official.

But your arrangement keeps changing, the White House press official responded.

In the end, the two settled on two journalists from the White House press corps.

Obama on incidents



When asked about the string of apparent snubs at a press conference Sunday with British Prime Minister Theresa May, President Obama said he would not over-crank the significance of the incidents, noting that it was not the first time issues around security and press access have become an issue during a visit to China or other countries.

And part of that is a difference in values, he said.

We think it's important that the press have access to the work that we're doing. That they have the ability to answer questions. And we don't leave our values and ideals behind when we take these trips. It can cause some friction, Obama said.

High level diplomatic visits almost always involve weeks or months of negotiations to set the terms for issues such as arrival ceremonies, press access, seating arrangements and more.

But President Obama said, Maybe as [Press Secretary] Josh [Earnest] put it, the seams are showing a little more than usual in terms of some of the negotiations and jostling that takes place behind the scenes.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry official, however, told the South China Morning Post that it was the U.S. decision to have President Obama disembark his plane using a small bare metal stairway.

China provides a rolling staircase for every arriving state leader, but the U.S. side complained that the driver doesnt speak English and cant understand security instructions from the United States, the official told the Post. China proposed that we could assign a translator to sit beside the driver, but the U.S. side turned down the proposal and insisted that they dont need the staircase provided by the airport.

WATCH: World leaders arrive for G-20 summit

Incidents have not been limited to President Obama and his traveling press entourage. Last week, when reporters traveling with Secretary of State John Kerry tried to apply for visas to come to China and attend the G-20, their applications were denied.

This reporter and a VOA Mandarin service reporter were also denied credentials for the G-20 Leaders Summit. Several other reporters have also had their applications rejected. Chinese officials have not said why the applications were rejected.
Facing intense international pressure, war-ravaged South Sudan on Sunday agreed to the deployment of a 4,000-member regional protection force approved last month by the United Nations Security Council.

Sunday's decision by President Salva Kiir, who in August rejected more peacekeepers, came a day after the 15-member Security Council visited the capital, Juba, to press senior officials for approval of the new force.

In a joint statement, the Transitional Government of National Unity of South Sudan and members of the United Nations Security Council agreed that humanitarian and security needs of the South Sudanese people must be priority.

South Sudans government has committed to permit the free movement of members of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) in conformity with its mandate to protect civilians.

To this end, the Transitional Government of National Unity commits to devising a plan with UNMISS by the end of September 2016 on concrete steps to remove impediments to UNMISSs ability to implement its mandate, including reviewing procedures related to movement of UNMISS and streamlining bureaucratic processes, read the statement.

South Sudan government and United Nations members agreed to work in a fresh spirit of cooperation to advance the interests of the South Sudanese people, particularly their aspirations for justice, liberty, and prosperity.

The new regional force, designed to protect civilians in the capital, would bolster the more than 12,000 peacekeepers already in the region.

The visiting Security Council envoys on Saturday also toured a U.N. refugee camp in the capital, where tens of thousands of civilians have lived in squalor and fear during nearly three years of fighting between forces loyal to Kiir and rebels trying to drive him from power.

Afterward, U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power called the Security Council visit "extremely important...because it's our chance to see the human consequences of the failure of political leaders to bring peace back to their country."

Fighting erupted in South Sudan in December 2013, when government forces loyal to President Kiir began fighting rebels led by the president's former deputy, Riek Machar.

The two sides signed a peace deal in August 2015 that elevated Machar to first vice president. But the shaky accord broke apart in July, when Kiir loyalists and fighters backing Machar fought a four-day battle in Juba that killed at least 300 people and wounded hundreds more -- most of them civilians.

Machar has since fled the country. But analysts say his civilian supporters continue to be targeted, along with what Ambassador Power described Saturday as "a huge surge in sexual violence against women" who leave the crowded Juba refugee camp to gather firewood or other family necessities.
The Taliban is urging India to stop giving lethal military equipment to the Afghan government, condemning it as a clear hostility towards the war-torn nation.

In its first public reaction to New Delhis growing military cooperation with Kabul, the Islamist insurgency alleged Indian aircraft and equipment are being used to kill Afghans and destroy their homes as well as other civilian infrastructure.

The Islamic Emirate [the Taliban] condemns this action with the strongest of terms, said Zabihullah Mujahid, the main spokesman for the Taliban, in a statement issued Sunday.

Attack helicopters provided



India recently transferred four Russian-made Mi-25 attack helicopters to boost the Afghan Air Forces ability to assist ground troops fighting Taliban insurgents, and it trains hundreds of Afghan soldiers each year in its military academy.

We call on India to stop exporting items of killing and destruction to Afghanistan and to stop efforts of prolonging the lifespan of this corrupt regime with its military aid, Mujahid added.

He accused Afghan forces of using Indian attack helicopters to destroy a key bridge during recent fighting in the volatile northern Kunduz province.

This cannot be interpreted as anything other than enmity with the Afghans and shall arouse hatred of the people of Afghanistan, asserted the Taliban spokesman.

Call for more assistance



Commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan General John Nicholson traveled to New Delhi last month to urge Indian officials there to enhance military aid to Kabul.

I know that they [Afghan authorities] have asked for more of these helicopters. There is an immediate need for more. When these aircraft come in, they immediately get into the fight, Nicholson told reporters during his August 10 visit.

Pakistan militarys intelligence agency



U.S., Afghan and Indian officials allege the Pakistan militarys intelligence agency covertly supports the Taliban insurgency and allows it use sanctuaries on Pakistani soil to plot attacks in Afghanistan, charges Islamabad rejects.

Afghan army chief General Quadam Shah Shahim visited India last week to seek enhanced bilateral defense ties besides asking for more military equipment, particularly Mi-25 helicopters.

India has contributed $2 billion in economic assistance for reconstruction projects in Afghanistan since the ouster of the Taliban from power in 2001.
Classes are now underway on state university campuses in Texas, where a new law went into effect last month allowing anyone with a concealed weapon license to bring a handgun on to campus, as long as it remains concealed.

At the University of Houston, many students, like Ali Rajwani, express little concern.

I am pretty indifferent about it, Rajwani said. It is not like I think Oh, God, I am going to be shot on campus! I dont feel that in any way. I dont really feel any change at all.

Since January, the same law has allowed open carry of handguns  that is, not concealed, but properly holstered  in most other public places, with little noticeable impact.

State officials report only around 4 percent of the more than 27 million Texas residents have obtained a concealed weapon permit.

The Texas Attorney Generals Office has responded diligently to complaints from around the state involving public buildings that have restricted firearms. This week, the state sued Waller County for not allowing citizens with a concealed weapon license to bring guns into the courthouse.

'No-gun zones'

University presidents and professors argue that campuses should be given special status as no-gun zones, but the Texas legislature did not agree.

The law does allow schools to establish limited no-gun areas on campuses.

Some students worry about the potential problem of having guns on campus, while others think properly licensed, armed students could prevent crimes.

Sitting at a picnic table outside the University of Houston library, sophomore education student Allie said, The university is a stressful place, and people are not always mentally stable, and, with weapons involved, it is just a recipe for disaster.

But Thomas Wanko, who studies marketing, said, I feel safer on campus knowing there are people who have applied for the license and are legally able to carry a weapon. I feel safer in case anything happens.

Wanko said he has friends who will be carrying their handguns on campus and that he plans to take the test and get a license as well.

The University of Houston police department has posted information on policy and procedures online, but otherwise the university is remaining low key on the issue.

Professors worried

At the University of Houston-Downtown, political science professor David Branham tells VOA that his colleagues, for the most part, oppose campus carry, partly because conflicts between young people can sometimes become heated and someone with a gun could make a tragic decision in the heat of a moment.

Branham and his colleagues also worry that they could be vulnerable.

What they are worried about is the student who is on academic probation, who is getting an F in your class and they want you to change the grade, and you are refusing to change the grade because it would not be fair to the rest of the students, and all of a sudden, a gun becomes part of that equation," he said. "I think that is what professors are worried about.

The strongest opposition to the campus-carry policy is at the University of Texas in Austin, where last week a group of students handed out sex toys, which are banned on campus, to make the point that dangerous guns are allowed, while items that would be of little use for someone contemplating violence are forbidden.

At least one professor left the university last year citing the new law as the reason and a group of other faculty members unsuccessfully sued the state to stop the implementation of the law on campus.

Mass shooting

The issue is especially sensitive at UT/Austin because, 50 years ago, it was the scene of the first mass shooting on a U.S. college campus; sniper Charles Whitman killed 16 people, mostly from his perch atop the tower that looms over the center of the campus.

Private citizens, including many students, fired hunting rifles to keep Whitman from taking careful aim and were credited with saving lives. However, those bullets also endangered the police officers who went to the tower platform to shoot Whitman.

One of those officers was Ramiro Martinez, who is now retired from law enforcement.

Visiting the campus last month, Martinez told VOA he is opposed to having guns on campus.

I believe in the Second Amendment, he said, referring to the amendment of the U.S. Constitution that protects the right of citizens to own firearms. I believe in it, but I also believe in common sense and there is a lot of common sense lacking right now.

Many active police officers and commanders agree with his assessment, noting the difficulty open carry imposes when officers arrive at the scene of a shooting to find more than one person holding a gun.

Issue debated

Sabine Wakim, who teaches debate at the university, has used the gun-rights issue in her classes, staging debates over Second Amendment rights.

The problem, as Wakim sees it, is that gun proponents truly believe that armed citizens can stop violent criminals and terrorists, whereas those opposed to guns believe having guns around is likely to cause incidents of violence.

If we can understand where each one of these sides is coming from, we can have better conversations about how to effectively protect ourselves but also stop these things from happening in the first place, she said.

But much of the dialogue now is dominated by the more extreme elements on each side, with most people taking no stand on the issue.

Unlike state schools, private universities in Texas are not obligated to allow armed students on campus and all but one of them have chosen to opt out.
Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump said at a predominantly Black church in Detroit Saturday he wanted to help rebuild the city and there are many wrongs that should be made right in the United States.

Two months before the election, Trump is struggling to attract African-American and other minority voters. He has spent much, if not all of his campaign, talking to overwhelmingly white audiences where he has made condescending remarks about people of color.

I am here to listen to you, Trump told the congregation at the Great Faith Ministries International. As I prepare to campaign all across the nation, I will have the chance to lay out my economic plans, which will be so good for Detroit.

Protesters were blocked from entering the church by church security and police. "The devil's in the pulpit," one protester shouted in a reference to Trump. Others shouted "Dump Trump."

Inside the church, Trump said the nation needs a civil rights agenda of our time, with better education and good jobs.

Seated in the front row next to Trump was Omarosa Manigault, a former contestant on Trump's reality television series who has been helping his campaign reach out to the Black community.

Also in attendance was Detroit native Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who ran against Trump in the primaries and is now advising the campaign. Trump also visited Carsons childhood house.

Trump recently, in front of a predominantly white audience, rhetorically asked African American voters "What do you have to lose" by voting for him. At the beginning of his presidential campaign, the billionaire presidential candidate described Mexican migrants as "rapists" and "criminals."

Denaria Thorn, who was at Saturday's church service, said she is still not a Trump supporter and had decided to come to the church "expecting an apology" for the patronizing remarks Trump has delivered during his campaign.

Trump said to those in the church, "Our nation is too divided."

Critics and analysts, however, have said in recent months Trump's campaign rhetoric has added to that division. Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and other white nationalists have come out in support of Trump. The real estate developer has also been blasted for revelations that he has been sued for failing to rent apartments to black and Latino tenants, and has also been sued by black employees of his casinos.

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said in a statement "Mr. Trump ran a campaign through the nomination process of bigotry."

Public opinion surveys show his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, polling far ahead of Trump with minority voters.
Republican Donald Trump has edged closer to Democrat Hillary Clinton in U.S. presidential election public opinion polls, three weeks ahead of their first face-to-face debate.

Several U.S. polls show Clinton, a former U.S. secretary of state, ahead of Trump, a real estate mogul seeking his first elected office. But he has cut her lead to about four percentage points or less, about half the gap of a few weeks ago, even as she continues to narrowly lead in several battleground election states that likely will determine the outcome of the November 8 election.

Numerous U.S. political analysts are still predicting she will become the country's 45th president and its first female commander in chief, replacing U.S. President Barack Obama when he leaves office next January. But the analysts have narrowed the odds a bit in recent days.

The uncertainty of the race coincides with Monday's Labor Day holiday, the traditional point at which many families end their summer vacations, send their school-age children back to classes, and perhaps give new attention to the quadrennial presidential election. The first of three scheduled presidential debates is set for September 26, with the other two in October.

U.S. voters hold historically high unfavorable views of both candidates, with surveys showing that many of them are more inclined to vote against either Trump or Clinton rather than specifically favoring one over the other.

Both candidates have lobbed sharp verbal barbs at each other, hoping to win over undecided voters. Clinton has repeatedly said Trump lacks the temperament and knowledge to become president, while he points to what U.S. investigators say was her "extremely careless" handling of classified material on the unsecured, private email server she used while she was the country's top diplomat during Obama's first term from 2009 to 2013.

There was new attention to Clinton's handling of the emails Friday as the Federal Bureau of Investigation released an account of its probe and an hours-long interview with Clinton in which she could not recall on numerous occasions how she handled specific emails and did not know that a letter "C" designation meant it was classified. The FBI, over the protests of Republicans, in July decided Clinton's actions did not warrant criminal charges being filed against her.

Trump hired new top campaign aides to shape his populist message, but ended his flirtation last week with a softer line on immigration policies to attract more moderate voters opposed to the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants living in the United States. He instead told cheering supporters, "There will be no legal status or becoming a citizen of the United States by illegally entering our country."

Trump, a one-time television reality show host, said that if he is elected, he would immediately deport several million undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes in the United States and start construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border and force Mexico to pay for it. But he left unclear how he plans to deal with millions of other immigrants who have not committed any crimes other than entering the U.S. illegally.

Despite Clinton's narrowed national lead in the political polls, she continues to hold an edge over Trump in key states. U.S. presidential elections are not decided by a national popular vote, but rather in state-by-state contests, with each state's importance in the outcome weighted according to its population.

About 40 of the 50 U.S. states traditionally vote for Republican or Democratic U.S. presidential candidates, with the remaining states highly contested from one election to the next.

CBS News said Sunday its polling showed Clinton with an advantage in two battleground states, the eastern state of Pennsylvania by a 45-to-37 percent margin, and in the mid-Atlantic state of North Carolina, by a 46-42 edge. Clinton and Trump have campaigned in both states numerous times, with both realizing their importance to overall national outcome.
Turkey says Turkish-backed rebels battling Islamic State extremists on the Syrian border have driven IS fighters from their last remaining strongholds along a 100-kilometer stretch of borderland.

Turkey's direct military involvement in the push against IS began late last month, when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan  responding to a civilian massacre in Turkey's southeast  sent warplanes, tanks and artillery to crush terror threats on the border.

Sunday, Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency said border territory stretching from Azaz northeastward to Jarublus had been cleared.

Those claims were confirmed by monitors from the Britain-based London-based Observatory for Human Rights. An Observatory statement said "IS has lost contact with the outside world after losing the remaining border villages between the Sajur river and [the village of] al-Rai."

Analysts say the rebel advance effectively cuts off key land routes used to supply the extremist movement with foreign recruits, weapons and ammunition.
The mother of the only giant panda twins in the United States delivered a second set of twins, Zoo Atlanta said Saturday, capping off an eventful month for lovers of the fluffy black-and-white bears across the globe.

Three years ago, mother bear Lun Lun gave birth to female cubs Mei Lun and Mei Huan, who are still at the Georgia zoo but could be returned this fall to China, which owns them, zoo spokeswoman Rachel Davis said.

Panda pregnancies, famously rare in captivity and outside China, are notoriously hard to establish or predict. The rarest member of the bear family with roughly 1,864 in the wild, pandas live mainly in bamboo forests high in the mountains of western China, where they subsist almost entirely on bamboo leaves.

News of the births came as twin panda cubs born at a zoo in Vienna, Austria, turned 28 days old Satruday and were said to be fit and healthy  and very cute.

In China, twin panda cubs, a male and a female, were born at a breeding research base in southwest Sichuan province on August 9, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

In Atlanta, Lun Lun was impregnated by artificial insemination on March 28, the zoo said.

If Lun Lun's second set of twins survive, they will be her sixth and seventh cubs, Davis said.

Newborn panda cubs are very vulnerable, being about the size of a stick of butter, according to the World Wildlife Fund. They can grow to up to 330 pounds (149.69 kilograms) as an adult.

While about half of all panda deliveries are twins, mothers in the wild typically only care for one cub, Zoo Atlanta said.

While the zoo will be closely watching Lun Lun and her cubs, the rest of the world can also keep an eye on them over a live camera streamed at www.zooatlanta.org.
The U.N. Security Council on Saturday joined with religious leaders and diplomats in South Sudan in calling on the Juba government to allow the deployment of more peacekeepers in the war-ravaged country.

The U.N. call came after visiting ambassadors from the 15-member council met with senior officials in the government of President Salva Kiir to press for the deployment of a 4,000-strong regional protection force authorized by the council last month.

The council approved the new force of African troops to augment about 17,000 U.N. peacekeepers already seeking to bring order to Africa's newest nation.

The Kiir government has so far rejected any further international deployments, saying they would violate the country's sovereignty.

The visiting U.N. envoys also toured a U.N. encampment, known as a Protection of Civilians (POC) site, where tens of thousands of civilians have languished during nearly three years of fighting between forces loyal to the government and rebels seeking to topple it.

Afterward, U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power called the Security Council visit "extremely important ... because it's our chance to see the human consequences of the failure of political leaders to bring peace back to their country."

Power said council members had heard from women who detailed "a huge surge in sexual violence against women" who leave the Juba POC site for firewood or for other family necessities.

She also said the council had heard "desperate appeals" from refugees for the quick deployment of the newly authorized protection force, and said the council had heard repeatedly that those trapped in the squalid encampments were too terrified to leave.

There has been no immediate comment from the Kiir government on the U.N. visit.

Fighting erupted in South Sudan in December 2013 when government forces loyal to Kiir began fighting rebels led by the president's former deputy, Riek Machar.

The two sides signed a peace deal in August 2015 that elevated Machar to first vice president. But the shaky accord broke apart in July, when Kiir loyalists and troops backing Machar fought in a four-day battle in Juba that killed at least 300 people and wounded hundreds more.
President Barack Obama says he had "productive" talks with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Syria, but the two sides have yet to reach a cease-fire deal to allow more humanitarian aid to the war-ravaged country.

Obama made the comments Monday in a wide-ranging news conference at the close of a Group of 20 Nations Leaders Summit in Hangzhou, China, after meeting with Putin.

The two discussed what a "real cessation of hostilities" would look like, but "given the gaps of trust that exist that is a tough negotiation," Obama sad. Both leaders have instructed their top diplomats to continue working for a deal.

WATCH: President Obama on US-Russia discussions



Remaining obstacles

A potential cease-fire would involve the Syrian government, a Russian ally, and rebels supported by the United States to aid some of the millions of Syrians in need of food and medical supplies.

The two countries appeared to be closing in on a possible deal on Sunday, but major obstacles remained. A State Department official said Russia walked back on some of the areas the United States thought were agreed on by both parties.

Obama lamented that conditions in Syria have "slowly unwound and we're back into a situation where (Syrian President Bashar al-) Assad's regime is bombing with impunity."

The civil war in Syria has killed more than 250,000 people, displaced 11 million and led to a refugee crisis in the Middle East and Europe. The conflict is also contributing to a rise in militant Islamist groups. Previous cease-fire agreements have failed to last for long as both back opposite sides in the five-year war.

Ukraine

The United States and Russia have also been working to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis in Ukraine, where fighting between pro-Russian separatists and government troops has claimed the lives of more than 9,500 people since 2014.

In his news conference, Obama said he made clear to Putin that U.S. sanctions will remain until the Minsk ceasefire for Ukraine is implemented. He described his conversation with Putin on the matter as "constructive, but not conclusive."

Despite the peace accords signed in the capital of Belarus, Minsk, in 2015, which initially helped to halt the fighting and then lower its intensity, international monitors have observed more clashes in the past weeks, some involving heavy weaponry.

Obama said both sides should seize the opportunity to finalize the ceasefire deal in the coming weeks.

Philippines

The U.S. president will now head to a gathering of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Laos, where he is expected to meet with a wide range of regional leaders.

One leader Obama may wind up not meeting with is Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, who on Monday warned the U.S. president not to question him about extrajudicial killings in his country.

Duterte's war on drug trafficking has killed more than 2,400 in just more than two months. But if Obama brings up the deaths, Duterte warned Obama: "Son of a b****, I will swear at you."

Asked about the threat, Obama described Duterte as a "colorful guy" and said he was asking his staff to determine whether a meeting would be useful.

"I always want to make sure if I'm having a meeting that it's actually productive and we're getting something done," Obama said.

The U.S. president said he recognizes the "significant burden that the drug trade plays," and conceded that "fighting narco trafficking is tough."

"But we will always assert the need to have due process and engage in that fight against drugs in a way that's consistent with basic international norms," Obama said.

"If and when we have a meeting, this is something that will be brought up," he added.

Free trade deal

A major topic for Obama's trip to Asia is the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade deal, or TPP, which has been agreed to by 12 nations, but not yet ratified.



The TPP has run into major domestic opposition in the United States, with both Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her Republican rival Donald Trump opposing it.

Obama said there was rarely a "smooth, uncontroversial path" to ratifying trade deals, "but they eventually get done and it's my intention to get this one done."

Asian leaders see the TPP as the right thing to do, Obama said. "Back home, we'll have to cut through the noise once election season is over," he said.
Emily Olivares was surprised when a friend told her she is $50,000 in debt after paying for four years of college.

I almost had a heart attack, Olivares said. Thats a lot of money.

She has no such problem.

Her tuition for four years at Western Michigan University was about $40,000. But, a program called Kalamazoo Promise paid for it all.

Since 2006, a group of secret donors provided money so students who graduate from Kalamazoo public schools can attend a Michigan state college. The money pays tuition for students in part or fully.

I dont think I would be in the same place in life right now if it wasnt for this program, said the 22-year-old Olivares.

She recently graduated from Western Michigan University, and works for Kalamazoo Promise. In the future, she hopes to set up international study programs for college students.

Hillary Clinton's proposed tuition program

The Kalamazoo program is now getting more attention because of Hillary Clinton. The Democratic candidate for president is proposing a free tuition program for the entire country. Clinton wants to provide free state college tuition for families with yearly incomes of up to $125,000.

Republican Donald Trumps campaign website does not list a plan on college tuition. However, last year, Trump told The Hill newspaper that the federal government should not profit on student loans and should allow students to lower the amount of interest they pay.

In Kalamazoo, the tuition aid program is praised as a program that makes a difference in the small city in Americas Midwest. Kalamazoo has a population of 76,000 and is halfway between the cities of Chicago, Illinois and Detroit, Michigan.

Bob Jorth is the Kalamazoo Promise executive director. He said the city has about 25 percent more students attending college than it did 10 years ago, when the program began.

Kalamazoo is sending about 85 percent of its high school graduates to college. That percentage, Jorth said, is similar to the rate in much wealthier communities.

Research group says promise program has limits

But the Brookings Institution research group said in a 2015 report that the program has limitations. It found that only twenty percent of African-American high school graduates earned college degrees six years after graduation. Brookings said the overall college degree average for the citys public school graduates was forty percent.

What it shows, Brookings said, is that Kalamazoo has not yet come close to resolving the problem of inequality of opportunity for African-American children.

But several Kalamazoo Promise students said the program made a big difference for them.

Twenty-one-year-old Tinashe Chaponda is now attending Western Michigan University with a lot of help from Kalamazoo Promise.

Not having to pay full tuition, means he does not have to spend his free time working at a paid job, Chaponda said. It has freed him to set up a non-profit group to help place students with groups needing volunteers.

Chaponda came to Michigan from Zimbabwe in time to start 8th grade in Kalamazoos school system. Today, he gets 70 percent of his tuition covered. Students who attend Kalamazoo public schools for all 12 years get their entire Michigan state college tuition covered.

Chaponda said his goal is to return to Zimbabwe some day and run for president of the southern African country.

The Promise program allows me to focus on college and still have extra time to start my non-profit, Chaponda said. I feel if people are investing in me, the least I can do is give back to the community in some way.

Other cities offer tuition aid

Kalamazoo is not the only place with free- or reduced-cost tuition for public school graduates.

The Upjohn Institute for Employment Research reported that about 30 U.S. communities have created similar programs. One of the largest is in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Upjohn Institute studied graduation rates in Kalamazoo in 2015. It said there was a 12 percent increase in people earning college degrees within six years of high school graduation.

The U.S. Education Department says that is important for economic reasons. People who graduate from college in America earn $1 million more, over their lifetime, than those who only graduated from high school.

The Promise program also means Kalamazoo public school graduates can attend state colleges without owing a lot of money. The average student debt for 2016 college graduates is $37,000, according to the website, StudentLoanHero.com.

Not everyone supports the idea of free tuition. Norbert Michel, writing for the conservative Heritage Foundation, said free tuition can lead to higher education costs.

The core problem is that they remove the paying customer  in this case the student  from the equation, Michel said. If students and their parents are paying they will work to keep costs down, he said.

Students know 'this is something special'

Michael Rice is superintendent of Kalamazoo Public Schools. He said, teachers start talking about the program in early in a students education.

By sixth grade students understand that this is something special and unique, Rice said. He said the program has helped increase test scores for students who know they and their families will be able to afford college.

Jorth said it is too early to say what will happen to the program he leads if Clinton is elected and gets her tuition plan approved by Congress.

When Kalamazoo Promise was announced in late 2005, a press release said the donors wanted to give people a reason to remain in Kalamazoo or move to the city. They also wanted a more educated workforce. But the press release did not say who the donors are.

Since then, Jorth said local residents have been trying to guess who in Kalamazoo has enough money to provide the $80 million given the program since 2006.

The secret donors make Jorths job pretty special. He may be one of the few people who can say, I dont know who I work for.
Media protection groups are calling on the international community to pressure President Robert Mugabe's government to respect freedom of the press in Zimbabwe.

Photojournalist James Jemwa was released on bail Friday after spending a week behind bars, but the Media Institute of Southern Africa said two other journalists were still in custody and several others had been assaulted or had their equipment destroyed by police while covering anti-government protests.

Media in Zimbabwe should enjoy their freedom as granted by the constitution and not at the benevolence of state agencies," said Nhlanhla Ngwenya, head of the institute in Zimbabwe. "We are seeking to engage commanders of these people who have been arresting and wantonly beating up journalists and actually express our anger and let them know that journalism is not a crime. So the fact that they are found at these protests, it is not because they like it there, but it is because they are answering to their call of duty, as much as the police do so.

On Thursday, the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists said it wanted international bodies such as the United Nations and the Committee to Protect Journalists to plead with the Mugabe government to respect freedom of the press, which has been guaranteed in the constitution since 2013.

Wave of demonstrations

For the past two months, Zimbabwe has been hit by an unprecedented wave of anti-Mugabe protests accusing the 92-year-old leader of failing to fix the country's economy and respect human rights. It is during those protests that photojournalists have been assaulted, arrested or had equipment destroyed by police.

In a telephone interview Friday, Zimbabwe Information Minister Christopher Mushohwe maintained his earlier stance, in which he blamed journalists for the assaults from the police.

"Journalists should never, ever be part of a demonstrating mob," he said. "You should always be on the side of law enforcement agents. And that is what is done internationally." If protesters resort to violence, he added, journalists' job "is to take pictures and not to be part of them."

Mushohwe repeated his position despite the fact that video and photos have been circulating on social media showing police assaulting or chasing journalists and, in some instances, asking them to delete their work.
ST. PAUL, MN  Governor Mark Dayton will continue the Dayton-Smith Administrations 87 Counties in 86 Days statewide tour this week, visiting Clay, Mahnomen, Otter Tail, and Wadena counties. On Tuesday, September 6, 2016, Governor Dayton will greet students at Probstfield Elementary on the first day of school. This event is open to the press.

Later in the day, Governor Dayton will meet with White Earth Nation tribal leaders. This event is closed to the press. In the afternoon, the Governor will meet with Mahnomen county commissioners. This event is open to the press.

On Wednesday, September 7, 2016, Governor Dayton will meet with Otter Tail County officials to discuss the countys leadership on water quality issues. This event is open to the press.

In the afternoon, the Governor will meet with Wadena Community and Technical College administrators and local business leaders to discuss workforce development. This event is open to the press.

More details on these events are below. Next week, Lt. Governor Tina Smith is also traveling as part of the 87 Counties in 86 Days tour. Details on those events can be found here.

Governor Daytons 87 Counties in 86 Days Travel

Below is a list of counties Governor Dayton is scheduled to visit next week. Additional details for upcoming visits and events will be announced in the Governors nightly schedules. Click here to see a list and map of all the counties visited so far on the 87 Counties in 86 Days tour.

Stop No. County Location Date

25 Clay Governor Dayton will greet students at Probstfield Elementary on the first day of school. This event will be open to the press. Sept. 6

26 Mahnomen Governor Dayton will meet with White Earth Nation tribal leaders. This meeting will be closed to the press. Governor Dayton will also meet with Mahnomen county commissioners. This event will be open to the press. Sept. 6

28 Otter Tail Governor Dayton will meet with Otter Tail County officials to discuss water quality issues and highlight the countys leadership on the issue. This event will be open to the press. Sept. 7

30 Wadena Governor Dayton will meet with Wadena Community and Technical College administrators and local business leaders to workforce development. This event will be open to the press. Sept. 7

Additional Details for This Weeks Visits

County: Clay County

City: Moorhead

Location: Probstfield Elementary, 2410 14th Street South, Moorhead

Date: Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Time: 11:00am

Description: Governor Dayton will greet students at Probstfield Elementary on the first day of school. This event will be open to the press.

County: Mahnomen County

Date: Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Description: Governor Dayton will meet with White Earth Nation tribal leaders. This meeting will be closed to the press.

County: Mahnomen County

City: Mahnomen

Location: County Courthouse, Commissioners Meeting Room, 311 North Main Street, Mahnomen

Date: Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Time: 3:00pm

Description: Governor Dayton will meet with Mahnomen county commissioners. This event will be open to the press.

County: Otter Tail County

City: Fergus Falls

Location: Otter Tail County Administration Building, County Board Room, 520 First Avenue West, Fergus Falls

Date: Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Time: 11:00am

Description: Governor Dayton will meet with Otter Tail County officials to discuss water quality issues and highlight the countys leadership on the issue. This event will be open to the press.

County: Wadena County

City: Wadena

Location: Minnesota State  Wadena, 405 Colfax Avenue Southwest, Room M-33, Wadena

Date: Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Time: 1:00pm

Description: Governor Dayton will meet with Wadena Community and Technical College administrators and local business leaders to workforce development. This event will be open to the press.

About 87 Counties in 86 Days Tour

The Dayton-Smith 87 Counties in 86 Days tour began on August 1, 2016, at the expansion groundbreaking of Bell Laboratories, Inc. in Eagan, Minnesota (Dakota County). Governor Dayton and Lt. Governor Smith are scheduled to conclude their travels on or before October 25, 2016. To learn more about where Governor Dayton and Lt. Governor Smith have traveled thus far, click here.

One of the best parts of my job as Governor is meeting with Minnesotans where they live and work, discussing their hopes and dreams, and listening to their ideas and concerns," said Governor Dayton. "I look forward to taking the good ideas of Minnesotans back to the Capitol as I travel the state."

During their travels, the Governor and Lt. Governor are listening to Minnesotans ideas and concerns, discussing their priorities for a better Minnesota, and celebrating the achievements and aspirations of Minnesota families, businesses, schools, and communities.

As I travel around Minnesota, I have learned that educators, small business owners and entrepreneurs, and other local leaders are coming up with some of the best ideas and new inventions in our state, said Lt. Governor Smith. As we work to build a state that works better for everyone, everywhere, we can learn a lot outside the Capitol. Governor Dayton and I look forward to meeting with people across the state, and putting their ideas to work at the State Capitol. Working together, we can and will build an even better Minnesota.
On instructions from my Government, I should like to draw your attention to the following:

Further to my numerous letters concerning the support the Jordanian regime provides to armed terrorist groups in Syria, including facilitation of the entry via Syrian border crossings of trucks loaded with weapons destined for armed terrorist groups in Syria, in flagrant violation of Security Council resolutions concerning counter-terrorism, including resolutions 2170 (2014), 2178 (2014), 2199 (2015) and 2253 (2015), I should like to draw to your attention the following:

The Jordanian regime has facilitated the entry of trucks loaded with weapons destined for armed terrorist groups in Syria via several border crossings as follows:

 On 11 July 2016 at 0600 hours, armed terrorist groups brought three tractor-trailer trucks loaded with assorted weapons and ammunition from Jordan into Syria via the Tall Shihab border crossing. They were unloaded at a vineyard in Kharab al-Shahm Farms in the western countryside of Dara governorate.

 On 24 July at 2130 hours, armed terrorist groups brought four vehicles from Jordan into Syria via the Abu Sharshuh border crossing and headed towards the Rusayi well in the Suwayda desert.

 On 27 July at 2300 hours, armed terrorist groups brought seven trucks loaded with tank shells, anti-armour missiles, spare parts for heavy machine guns and assorted ammunition from Jordan into Syria via the Tall Shihab crossing and headed towards the villages of Burayqah and Kudnah in the Qunaytirah countryside.

 On 3 August at 2145 hours, armed terrorist groups brought eight vehicles from Jordan into Syria via the Abu Sharshuh border crossing into the Suwayhat Abu Sharshuh area and headed towards the Rusayi well in the Suwayda desert.

The Government of the Syrian Arab Republic once again calls on the Security Council to assume its responsibility and take a firm approach when responding to this information and all of the information that we have sent in the past regarding the Jordanian regimes ongoing support for the armed terrorist groups that are active across Syrian territory. Such support poses a threat to security and stability in the region and the world.

I should be grateful if this letter could be issued as a document of the Security Council.
35th Note by the Director-General of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons

1. In accordance with subparagraph 2(f) of the decision by the Executive Council (hereinafter the Council) at its Thirty-Third Meeting (EC-M-33/DEC.1, dated 27 September 2013), the Technical Secretariat (hereinafter the Secretariat) is to report to the Council on a monthly basis regarding the implementation of that decision. In accordance with paragraph 12 of United Nations Security Council resolution 2118 (2013), the report by the Secretariat is also to be submitted to the Security Council through the Secretary-General.

2. The Council, at its Thirty-Fourth Meeting, adopted a decision entitled Detailed Requirements for the Destruction of Syrian Chemical Weapons and Syrian Chemical Weapons Production Facilities (EC-M-34/DEC.1, dated 15 November 2013). In paragraph 22 of that decision, the Council decided that the Secretariat should report on its implementation in conjunction with its reporting required by subparagraph 2(f) of Council decision EC-M-33/DEC.1.

3. The Council, at its Forty-Eighth Meeting, adopted a decision entitled Reports of the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission in Syria (EC-M-48/DEC.1, dated 4 February 2015) noting the Director-Generals intent to include reports of the OPCW Fact Finding Mission (FFM) in Syria, along with information on the Councils discussion thereof, as part of the monthly reporting pursuant to United Nations Security Council resolution 2118 (2013). Similarly, the Council, at its Eighty-First Session, adopted a decision entitled Report by the Director-General Regarding the Declaration and Related Submissions by the Syrian Arab Republic (EC-81/DEC.4, dated 23 March 2016), noting the Director-Generals intent to provide information on the implementation of that decision.

4. This, the thirty-fifth monthly report, is therefore submitted in accordance with the aforementioned Council decisions, and includes information relevant to the period from 23 July to 22 August 2016.

Progress achieved by the Syrian Arab Republic in meeting the requirements of Executive Council decisions EC-M-33/DEC.1 and EC-M-34/DEC.1

5. Progress by the Syrian Arab Republic is as follows:

(a) The Secretariat has verified the destruction of 24 of the 27 chemical weapons production facilities (CWPFs) declared by the Syrian Arab Republic. However, the poor security situation continues both to prevent safe access to destroy the remaining aircraft hangar, which stands ready to accept the explosive charges, and to confirm the condition of the two stationary above-ground facilities.

(b) On 15 August 2016, the Syrian Arab Republic submitted to the Council its thirty-third monthly report (EC-83/P/NAT.2, dated 15 August 2016) regarding activities on its territory related to the destruction of its CWPFs, as required by paragraph 19 of EC-M-34/DEC.1.

(c) The Syrian authorities have continued to extend the necessary cooperation in accordance with the implementation of subparagraph 1(e) of EC M 33/DEC.1 and paragraph 7 of United Nations Security Council resolution 2118 (2013).

Progress in the elimination of Syrian chemical weapons by States Parties hosting destruction activities

6. As reported previously, all the chemicals declared by the Syrian Arab Republic that were removed from its territory in 2014 have now been destroyed.

Activities carried out by the Secretariat with respect to Executive Council decision EC-81/DEC.4

7. As reported previously, the Director-General had provided the Council, at its Eighty-Second Session in July 2016, with a comprehensive picture of the Secretariats activities so far, including the efforts to implement decision EC 81/DEC.4 to assist the Syrian Arab Republic in arriving at a declaration that is accurate and complete. The Director-General also reported on the technical details of all outstanding issues still requiring clarification, and reiterated the conclusion that the Syrian declaration cannot yet be fully verified as accurate and complete in accordance with the Chemical Weapons Convention and Council decision EC M 33/DEC.1.

8. Also, as reported previously, the Council at its Eighty-Second Session did not reach a consensus to adopt a draft decision before it entitled Report by the Director-General on the Outcome of Consultations with the Syrian Arab Republic Regarding its Chemical Weapons Declaration (EC-82/DEC/CRP.5, dated 7 July 2016).

9. In an effort to make progress in clarifying the outstanding issues with regard to the Syrian Arab Republics declaration, the Director-General addressed a letter dated 27 July 2016 to H.E. Dr Faisal Mekdad, Deputy Foreign Minister of the Syrian Arab Republic. In the letter, the Director-General reiterated his call for the Syrian Arab Republic to provide scientifically and technically plausible explanations to an attached list of questions related to various facets of its chemical weapons programme.

Other activities carried out by the Secretariat with respect to the Syrian Arab Republic

10. As requested by the Council at its Seventy-Fifth Session (paragraph 7.12 of EC-75/2, dated 7 March 2014), the Secretariat, on behalf of the Director-General, has continued to brief States Parties in The Hague on its activities.

11. As at the cut-off date of this report, one OPCW staff member was deployed as part of the OPCW Mission in the Syrian Arab Republic.

Supplementary resources

12. As previously reported, a Trust Fund for Syria Missions was established in November 2015 to support the FFM and other remaining activities, such as those of the DAT. As at the cut-off date of this report, contribution agreements totalling EUR 7.8 million had been concluded with Canada, Chile, Finland, France, Germany, Monaco, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, Switzerland, the United States of America, and the European Union. Pledges from other donors have been made and are currently being processed.

Activities carried out with respect to the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission in Syria

13. The FFM continued to study all available information relating to a number of recent allegations of use of chemical weapons in the Aleppo Governorate of the Syrian Arab Republic. Additionally, the Secretariat received a note verbale from the Syrian Arab Republic on 16 August 2016 requesting the Director-General to dispatch an FFM team to undertake investigation of an alleged incident. The request is currently being examined. The FFMs work will continue to be guided by Council decisions EC-M-48/DEC.1 and EC-M-50/DEC.1 (dated 23 November 2015), as well as by United Nations Security Council resolution 2209 (2015).

14. The OPCW also continued to extend its full cooperation and support to the OPCW-UN Joint Investigative Mechanism.

Conclusion

15. The main focus of the future activities of the OPCW Mission in the Syrian Arab Republic will continue to be on the implementation of Council decision EC 81/DEC.4, as well as on the destruction and verification of the remaining aircraft hangar, confirmation of the status of the two stationary above-ground facilities, and annual inspections of the underground structures already verified as destroyed.
Its said that an army marches on its stomach, a quote thats been attributed to Napoleon and Frederick the Great, among others. No one knows this better than 94-year-old-Walter Grams of Mexia. The former U.S. Army cook had the job of feeding thousands of Allied personnel during World War II.

Its been over 70 years since he was in the military, so details often escape him, but he does remember exactly how long he served: three years, four months and 21 days. Twenty-nine months were spent overseas.

Grams was born in Perry, an unincorporated community in northern Falls County. Like most military personnel who served in WWII, he grew up during the Great Depression. His father had a 50-acre farm and the family grew or raised just about everything they ate. Grams was one of 10 children.

It was tough. We raised our own meat and canned our own vegetables, he said. We did everything by hand. There was no machinery. We farmed with horses and mules and went to church in a buggy.

As the oldest son, he left school after the sixth grade to help his father on the farm, like most other young men during the 1930s. Raised in the tiny community of St. Paul, six miles north of Marlin, he attended school there while working for a neighboring farmer who paid him $7 a week. The farmer would pick Grams up on Mondays and return him home every Saturday evening.

From the farm to the army

When he was 21, Grams was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Corps and was sent to Drew Army Airfield in Florida where he went through basic training. Initially assigned to the signal corps, he found the training somewhat confusing. Instead, he was sent to cook for a signal corps unit in the European Theater of Operations.

Grams boarded a ship in New York and traveled with the troops to Glasgow, Scotland. From there, it was down to England, where he was attached to a unit in the 9th Air Force. On D-Day Plus 5 (June 11, 1945), Grams was sent to Chantilly, France, and later went briefly into Germany.

Most of his memories center around England, where we had as much as three or four thousand come through our kitchen, he said.

Although he spent his mornings cooking  along with five or more other cooks  he remembers sometimes having to hit the trenches at night when the shelling of buzz bombs would begin.

He also remembers the intense cold.

I tell you what, you went to bed with all of your clothes on just to keep warm, he said. The next morning when youd wake up there would be frost on your blanket where youd been breathing on it. Thats hard to believe, but its true.

Grams also experienced a major event while stationed in England: He got married.

He met his wife, Mary Clark, in Windsor, where she was a corporal in the British Army. After a six-month courtship, they were married in Ascot, with the aid of her family who banded together and pooled their rations to bake a cake for the couple.

War ends, return to the U.S.

After the war in Europe had ended, American troops were on standby to go to Japan when the U.S. bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like thousands of other soldiers, Grams orders to ship out for the other side of the globe were immediately canceled. He eventually returned to the States aboard the Queen Mary.

About five months after his discharge, Mary concluded her service and joined her new husband in America. They went on to have six children  five of them boys. She passed away after 48 years of marriage.

Grams later met Bessie Devies at a dance hall, and they were married for eight years before she, too, died. He then met Mary Milam. Theyve been together for the past 16 years, living in Mexia.

Grams became a farmer and spent the rest of his life, well beyond what most people consider retirement age, in cattle ranching. He finally sold the last of his cows two years ago because hay had gotten too expensive and he was using too much gasoline.

Today, Grams is the lone surviving sibling of his family, and he has outlived one of his children. Occasionally, he thinks about his time spent in the military and what it was like for himself and the thousands of soldiers who crossed paths with him. He doesnt like to dwell on those who were wounded or killed in action.

It was hell, he said. I dont think Id want to go back again. One round of that was enough  especially during wartime.

Voices of Valor, featuring stories about Central Texas veterans, publishes every Sunday in the Waco Trib. To suggest a story about a Central Texas veteran, email voicesofvalor@wacotrib.com. Voices of Valor is proudly sponsored by Johnson Roofing.
If youre wondering what bombastic Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, after days of waffling and wavering, intends to do about some 11.5 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, imagine the plight of Wacos Rev. Ramiro Pena. Hes confused too. And hes one of those advising Trump on immigration policy.

Maybe the graying pastor will find out in the 64 days left before the election. Maybe hell find out, too, who leaked or hacked his email, originally sent to Republican and Trump campaign officials, condemning Trumps combative speech on immigration Wednesday night in Phoenix.

I am so sorry, but I believe Mr. Trump lost the election tonight, the disillusioned pastor said in the email. The National Hispanic Advisory Council [advising Trump] seems to be simply for optics and I do not have the time or energy for a scam.

Next day, Pena says, he awoke to find his private email quoted in major publications nationwide reporting wildly mixed reactions to Trumps speech. Also chronicled: the exodus of Hispanic leaders and immigration reformers who had supported Trump. Stories suggested that Pena also was dumping Trump and his campaign.

Some acquainted with Pena, founder and pastor of Christ the King Baptist Church of Waco, might be surprised to find him involved with Trumps campaign. Pena not only has deep empathy with immigrants in the United States but also an understanding of the wheels they turn in our economy. Many of them replace our roofs, build our houses, manicure our lawns, bus our tables and clean our hotel rooms.

So why is Pena working with a nominee whose immigration policy from Day One emphasizes deporting these very immigrants and building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border?

I have been highly criticized by people I love and are close to me for agreeing to be an adviser to Donald Trump, Pena told me. I have taken a lot of criticism for that. But my response is to point to the multiple examples in the Bible where Gods person is an adviser to someone who is not Gods person. All you have to do is read the short book of Daniel. Daniel served, advised and counseled multiple pagan kings. Im not calling Donald Trump a pagan king. But God uses Daniel to be an adviser to multiple people who are not walking with God  and, again, Im not saying Trump is not walking with God. What Im saying is here is a difficult situation and I have a choice: I can walk away and stay pristine, separate, untouchable  stay in that ivory tower  or I can mix it up when Im asked to be an adviser in a challenging campaign.

Pena says that he has long pressed Republican Congressman Bill Flores on immigration policy. Pena, who delivered a prayer at the Republican National Convention in July, says it isnt hard to figure out how he wound up on Trumps advisory council: Penas television ministry reaches millions. Still, he and other advisory council members were impressed when meeting with Trump in New York just a few weeks ago.

We had a great exchange of ideas, Pena said. There were only 15 of us in the room with Mr. Trump. He was thoughtful, he took notes, he was a good listener  he just did exceptionally well. We had some high expectations coming out of that.

So what happened to expectations for Trumps Phoenix speech, which campaign officials promised would clarify his shifting approach to illegal immigrants? They reportedly became collateral damage after Trumps otherwise successful meeting with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto earlier in the day was undone by a subsequent tweet from Pena Nieto. An incensed Trump angrily inserted his outrage into the Phoenix speech.

Pena has agreed to stay on the Trump advisory council. Ever the optimist, he believes Trump may still modify his confusing immigration policy. While Pena agrees on stronger border security  whether through a physical or virtual wall  he draws the line at mass deportation, something even conservative groups see as unrealistic and cost-prohibitive. And thats not all.

To destroy families, to take grandparents away from parents or children, some of whom are now Americans and in many cases dont even speak Spanish  theyre Americans, they dont know Mexico or Honduras or Guatemala or wherever [they or their families] came from  that is just immoral in my view, he said. And I feel strongly about it and I have for a very long time. Thats the advice Ill give to anybody who asks.
I remember passing by the Democratic booth at the state fair when I was very young. I knew almost nothing about politics or world affairs at that age, but I prayed fervently for those Democrats as I walked by because I knew that Democrats were bad and that they werent Christians.

Rarely can we recognize the hell-bound at first glance, but here I was, a tiny little girl, facing an entire group of adults who had self-selected to be on the side of evil. I assumed they just didnt know any better, so I prayed for their souls, that they would come to love Jesus.

I dont know where I got the idea that all Democrats were going to hell. I doubt any adult put it to me that bluntly. But I was an odd child who took things far more seriously than most children. I absorbed what adults said, probably without the grown-ups knowing I was listening. My mind was always active, drawing conclusions, and when the conclusions were sad, I felt it deeply and also felt responsible for doing my part to fix it. Hence my childhood mission to convert Democrats with my private prayers. (I didnt just target Democrats. I also wrote Bible verses on slips of paper and left them on random porches in my neighborhood.)

Fast-forward to when I turned 18. I was with one of my best friends as she was registering to vote in Oklahoma and she didnt know whether to check Republican or Democrat. I was taken aback at how uninformed she was. Im sorry to confess I might have laughed at her. I blamed her ignorance on the fact that she didnt have nearly as much exposure to Christianity growing up as I did. And so I explained with poised authority that the only right option was Republican.

Growing up

Fast-forward to my early 20s. I met some amazing Christians who deeply inspired me with their sincerity, their compassion and their commitment to Jesus. I didnt find out till much later that they were Democrats. This was disconcerting to say the least. I had to reckon with the fact that, as far as I could tell, there were people on the other side who somehow shared my faith.

Fast-forward to 2008. I found myself thinking that Sen. Barack Obamas speeches made good sense much of the time, even though he was pro-choice. I remember watching his family walk out with him to accept the presidency and seeing all the beaming, tear-filled faces in the crowd and feeling the weight of this historic moment and thinking that, regardless of whether you agreed with his politics, this was a fantastic breakthrough in American history.

I could go on, but the point is, I had to reckon with seeing good on the other side. Meanwhile, the world around me was becoming increasingly entrenched in its polarization.

I spent a few years as the pastor of a quiet little church on the outskirts of San Antonio. In a big city like that, it often felt like our little congregation was largely invisible. We inconspicuously said our prayers, celebrated births and baptisms, sang hymns, did mission work in Moldova and the Eastern Congo, volunteered with Habitat for Humanity and so on.

Real Christians?

When I transitioned to being the pastor of Lake Shore Baptist Church in Waco, I learned Id moved to a church with a questionable reputation. On the one hand, Lake Shore is known for its active participation in compassionate ministries all over Waco. On the other hand, Ive been told there is a rumor around town that we are not really Christian.

Of course, we are flawed just like any church. We are made up of sinners just like any church. Like most churches in Waco, we also read the Bible, preach the Gospel, give our tithe, teach Sunday School, pray for one another and for the world, baptize believers, confess our sins, seek to follow Jesus, take communion, and sing Amazing Grace. If I had to boil it down, I would say our No. 1 priority is to love God and love our neighbor. Were rather convinced that is the most important thing we do. Who knows where we got that idea, but it has stuck. We also try to exact justice, practice kindness and walk humbly with our god. We care for the least among us, visiting the sick and feeding the hungry.

Its odd to realize Im now part of a group that gets labeled as barely Christian, a group that some Christians mock and other Christians pray for when the only significant thing that has happened to my relationship with Jesus over time is that it has deepened.

Political, not spiritual

I am convinced the suspicions people have about us at Lake Shore are not spiritual but political. After all, the detractors dont know our hearts. But Lake Shore is known to have a larger percentage of liberal constituents than your average Waco church. Thus we must not really be Christian.

Meanwhile, Republican presidential nominee, casino mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump must be a champion of Christian values and ideals because he appears to support most of the Republican Party platform.

Im not interested in a superiority game in which we try to prove whose Christianity is better. Im not in the Christian faith to win accolades or to prove myself. Thats not why Im writing this piece.

I am in the Christian faith because I love God and I want to love my neighbor and because I am convinced God loves us all. The only reason I am writing this piece is to remind us that our politics do not make us Christian. Christ is what unites us. Not Donald Trump. Not political campaigns. Not being on this side or that side of an issue.

We are united by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. Lets start there and see where else we might have common ground, despite our political differences. Lets all re-examine what it means to vote Christian. Lets be open to learning and averse to entrenchment.

Lets be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry. Lets be merciful, for God is merciful. Let us consider how we may stir one another on toward love and good deeds, not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another. Let us get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Let us in humility value others above ourselves, not looking to our own interests but each of us looking to the interests of others. In our relationships with one another, let us have the same mindset as Christ Jesus. Let us love one another, for God is love.

Kyndall Rae Rothaus joined Lake Shore Baptist Church as senior pastor in September 2015 after serving in a similar post at Covenant Baptist Church in San Antonio. She graduated from George W. Truett Theological Seminary and served as a resident chaplain at Brooks Residential College (Baylor); pastoral associate at DaySpring Baptist Church in Waco; and interim pastor at First United Church in West. She describes herself as a pastor-poet, listener-liturgist, lover of nature and emerging mystic. Her book, Preacher Breath, was published in 2015.
For more than two years, Antonio E. Turner's been missing on paper.

In reality, he's believed to be alive and well and living in California.

But Lincoln Police Sgt. Luke Wilke said Turner will likely remain a "missing person" until his path crosses with a cop.

Turner's case remains active because of police protocol that a missing person must be verified as OK by a law enforcement officer.

An ex-girlfriend of Turner's reported him missing Aug. 22, 2014. She wanted to serve him with a protection order just a few days before he was reported missing.

Court documents show sheriff's deputies looked for him at all the addresses they knew were connected to Turner in Lincoln to give him the order.

But they came up empty.

And then Wilke was put on the case.

Wilke got in touch with Turner's sister, who said he left Lincoln and is living in California, he said.

Turner is still entered in the National Crime Information Center's missing person database, so if he comes into contact with police, they should clear it out, Wilke said.

Wilke can't clear Turner's name from the database because he hasn't contacted Turner, and the department doesn't have the money to send an officer to California to look for him.

The 45-year-old, who had worked at a north Lincoln bar before he left, knows the investigator is looking for him.

Attempts by the Journal Star to contact Turner or his sister were unsuccessful.

Because Turner appears to be OK, Wilke said, his case doesn't have the urgency of cases in which foul play is suspected.

And cases like Turner's are fairly common, the 24-year department veteran said.

"Some people dont know we are looking for them," he said. "Some people know they are being sought but dont want to be contacted."

And some people don't cooperate with police because they're afraid officers will share their location with family members.

In those cases, investigators don't divulge the person's location if he or she doesn't want police to, he said.

But in all cases, Wilke said, he leaves the National Crime Information Center entry active until the person is contacted by law enforcement.

"We tend to (err) on the side of safety."
Little is known about a 42-year-old man who has been missing since October 2009 -- like whether Leonel Lopez is even his real name.

Cited nine times between July 2003 and September 2006 for various traffic violations, the man never produced a valid drivers license for Lincoln police.

So police cant be sure he's 42. Or whether the name he gave police -- Leonel Lopez -- is real.

Thats the name that he used, said Lincoln Police Sgt. Luke Wilke. I would be surprised if that was his correct name.

What police know is that in June 2010, his girlfriend reported him missing, saying she had last heard from him the previous November. She told police she thought he might have left for a job in Kansas in October 2009.

Despite a lack of leads about the man's whereabouts, police have continued searching for him. Wilke said he cant find any recent information about Lopez using the identity he provided to police.

Lopez said he was born Sept. 5, 1973, and gave two apartment addresses, one at 18th and M streets and one at 23rd and Lynn streets.

Wilke said he has assigned various investigators to the case.

A fresh set of eyes tends to benefit things, he said. We have very little to go on.

He said he does have a fingerprint Lopez gave for a traffic ticket, and he's plugged that into law enforcement databases to try to find Lopez.

He doesnt have anything in there, and thats unusual, he said. It would be nice to get it resolved.
Geelong could be boosted by the return of Scott Selwood for Friday night's qualifying final against Hawthorn at the MCG.

Selwood took part in the Cats' open training session at Deakin University in Geelong on Saturday morning after missing his side's round 23 win over Melbourne with hamstring soreness.

The 26-year-old completed running drills away from the main group before doing some ball work and kicking off both sides.

"One of the things with our list this year is how healthy it is," Cats spearhead Tom Hawkins told reporters after the session.
The federal government has monopoly power over Australia's defence, economy and immigration. Yet with the nation's destiny in its hands, the federal system works on a Tinkerbell system of trust  "clap if you believe!" It is a polite fiction that donors will give money to politicians without expectation of a return on investment. This is all business as usual, and that's why it's so wrong. One of the biggest paymasters of Australian politics, the chairman of the property developer Yuhu Group, laid this out explosively for all to see this week.

"Chinese people were always used as a cash cow by politicians but then they did not worry about helping the Chinese community," Huang Xiangmo wrote in a Chinese state-owned newspaper this week. "We need to learn  how to have a more efficient combination between political requests and political donations," he wrote in Mandarin in the Global Times, as translated by the Financial Review. Huang has paid more than $1 million to both sides of Australian politics since 2012. He is also the financier for Bob Carr's pro-China outfit, giving $1.8 million to set up the Australia China Relations Institute. Carr's outfit is so relentlessly pro-China that Professor John Fitzgerald,of Swinburne University, has written of "the monotony of Carr's China-Whatever comments".

Huang also helpfully paid personal bills for Sam Dastyari. In 2014 it paid a $40,000 legal bill owed by Dastyari. Dastyari held a press conference standing next to Huang in July, where Dastyari said that Australia should, instead of calling on China to respect international law, "respect China's decision on the South China Sea". Huang, fed up with being a "cash cow", is now on the record as expecting a "more efficient" response to his payments. None of this is happening in a vacuum. The president of China, Xi Jinping, has publicly called on the patriotism of overseas Chinese to advance Beijing's interests in foreign countries: "As long as the overseas Chinese are united," declared Xi, "they can play an irreplaceable role in realising the Chinese Dream of National Rejuvenation as they are patriotic and rich in capital, talent, resources and business connections."

The Chinese Communist Party even has a department responsible for the co-ordination of Chinese diaspora and international communities  as sinologist Gerry Groot, of Adelaide University, has written: "The United Front Work Department (UFWD) is the organisation through which the Party reaches out to many key non-party groups within and outside China in order to achieve important political goals. "It also monitors sensitive constituencies and selects representatives from them who they can then incorporate into the political system." There is a group of Chinese Communist Party party-connected influencers in Australia acting not merely for personal or commercial advantage but for China's national interest. As the ABC disclosed this week, the director-general of ASIO, Duncan Lewis, last year warned the major political parties that some Chinese donations posed "national security risks".

The ABC's Chris Uhlmann reported that "the security warning to party chiefs is another indicator of the growing concern in intelligence agencies about the use of 'soft power' in Australia. "That includes donations to politicians and universities, urging community groups to press Beijing's cause, increasing control over Chinese language media and buying space in mainstream media. "The immediate goal is to push China's case for control of the South China Sea and, long-term, to urge a rethink of Australia's alliance with the US." Inside the parties, the connection between Chinese money and Australian foreign policy is being made starkly plain. Senior Labor figures have told MPs that Senator Stephen Conroy's tough position on China's disputed claims in the South China Sea have cost Labor a lot of money, well informed sources tell me.

Specifically, they've said that big Chinese donors withheld $450,000 in payments that otherwise would have been given to Labor, the sources said. Conroy, as Labor defence spokesman, had said that Australia should assert freedom of navigation through Chinese-claimed waters by sailing navy patrols within the 12 nautical mile boundary of islands that Beijing claims as sovereign Chinese territory. An arbitration panel of jurors at The Hague dismissed China's claims as having no legal foundation. China refuses to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the international tribunal. By offering, or withholding, money, this is an attempt at deep, strategic corruption, an effort to pay politicians to change Australian foreign policy. Total disclosed payments to the major parties by Chinese corporate and business interests in the two years to June 30 last year was $5.89 million.

An informed official tells me: "There is very high level concern inside ASIO about the use of donations to purchase access and influence. "It's concern about systematic behaviour by people connected to the Chinese state apparatus. It's centrally directed by Chinese intelligence." This challenge to Australia's sovereignty is a new phenomenon for our system, and it's one for which the federal system is woefully unprepared. It was bad enough that a billionaire miner could form his own political party, bankroll his way to winning some seats and then proceed to vote against tax on miners. In NSW, this blatant conflict of interest would have qualified him for ICAC scrutiny, but in the federal system Clive Palmer went unhindered. "Conflict of interest is a form of corruption," former director of prosecutions in NSW, Nicholas Cowdery, said. Palmer should have recused himself from any decisions in which he had a business interest, Cowdery said. He never did.

This sort of blatant abuse has exposed the glaring flaws in the federal system. As it happens, it comes at exactly the moment that Australians' tolerance for the Tinkerbell system of trust has been withdrawn. The Dastyari case shows that, even if the rules are being followed, public opinion will not tolerate business as usual  the moment Dastyari's story emerged, public rage forced him into an apology. "Corruption is endemic to the human being," a former ICAC commissioner in NSW, David Ipp, said in 2014. "It is so screamingly obvious that there is a breakdown in trust at the moment." To now the Coalition refuses to consider a federal anti-corruption body. Bill Shorten has said that could be open to a debate on the matter. Only the Greens have been firm and consistent on calling for a federal anti-corruption investigator.

How can the main parties be so complacent? Does the temptation to corruption mysteriously evaporate when a politician boards a flight to Canberra? "In my view," Labor's famously clean John Faulkner remarked a couple of years ago, "the sorts of issues being raised at the NSW ICAC do not miraculously stop at state or territory borders." Of course not. The system has long been vulnerable to abuse. Now, with a serious sovereign challenge to Australia's federal parliament as well as the persistent threat of routine corporate and personal venality, the case for change is utterly unarguable. To comply with his legal obligations, Sam Dastyari needed to observe one rule only  that he disclose the payment of his travel bill by his Chinese benefactor - and he did. In fact, his disclosure had been sitting unconcealed on the register of members' interests since October.

It was only when Fairfax Media's Latika Bourke took the trouble to look for it this week that the $1670 payment by Top Education Institute was revealed as news. "I foolishly didn't reflect on the appropriateness of having someone else make the payment," the former general secretary of the NSW Labor party said as the reaction raged. Why would he? The same institute and its head, Minshen Zhu, have been a ready ATM for Labor. Zhu and his company had done the same thing on 28 other occasions for Labor totalling $252,078 over five years, as The Australian reported this week. All were listed not as "donations" but as "other", meaning payments in kind - services, gifts, travel, or such. None of these had created a storm, so why wouldn't Dastyari just tap Zhu when he overspent his parliamentary travel allowance? Or Huang when he wanted to pay his legal bills.
The girl asked if someone could sign her homework, so she could turn it in to her teacher the next day. "That broke my heart," said Burton. "She said, 'I did my work.' She pulled it out and showed it to us. It was math homework, (like) 'Which number is greater? Which number is odd or even?'  I told her, 'Sweetie, you probably won't have to go to school tomorrow.  But where you're going is going to have everything you need.'" In the apartment, Burton found an unopened can of infant formula and a baby bottle; she grabbed both. Michelle Burton comforts a baby after responding to a call in Alabama. At the precinct, officers bought whatever the other kids wanted to eat from a vending machine. There, Burton removed her vest and other police gear so she could comfortably hold the infant and give her a bottle. It had to have been hours since she had been fed, Burton thought.

"A lot of us are parents," Birmingham police spokesman Lieutenant Sean Edwards said. "We just go into parent mode and not necessarily police mode.  Officer Burton, she just really wanted to grab the baby and just cuddle the baby." So she did. Soon, the infant was sound asleep on Burton's shoulder. At some point, someone in the precinct captured a photo of the tender scene, which Burton later showed her husband. Edwards said he wasn't surprised by Burton's actions. The department has more than 800 sworn officers, and they have to be prepared for dozens of different scenarios, he said.

"It's a part of our job, it's a part of what we see, what we do. Our concern is to preserve, to protect," he said. "We find ourselves in a lot of situations like this." Maybe it's because Burton, 33, is a mother of two boys herself, or perhaps it's just that she's good at comforting children. She's often tapped to go to car accidents and other incidents where kids might be left alone. "They're like, 'Let's call Burton because this is what she does.' It happens a lot," Burton said. "But it's not just me. I actually have pictures of officers, male officers, like making baby bottles.  We do what we have to do when we have to do it." The rest of that night was a blur, but Burton said she can't forget the number of people who came together to make sure the four children were safe. A social worker  who had just welcomed her own newborn grandchild  showed up to the precinct and stayed with them until 3 a.m. the next day, when they finally were placed in the care of Child Protective Services, Burton said. Burton finally went home at 4am and promptly fell asleep.

While she was sleeping, Brian Burton, who also is in law enforcement, posted the photo of his wife and the baby on Facebook early the next morning. "Last night, my wife Michelle Burton told me she would be late getting off work because of call she was on where the parents of 4 small children had both overdosed," Brian Burton wrote in his post. "She spent the rest of the night taking care of these babies. She got home at 4 this morning. I've never seen her more beautiful than in this picture. What an incredible woman." Michelle Burton woke up to find hundreds of notifications on her phone. The photo had been shared more than 1700 times. She said she's not surprised by her husband's post, because he has always been her biggest supporter.

"He's very proud of who I am and what I do," Burton said. "What surprised me is just [how much] positive that seems to have come out of it." AL.com wrote about the viral photo. For the next several days, Burton said she couldn't go anywhere without getting stopped. Someone at a gas station recognised her: Are you that officer? the stranger had asked. What happened with the kids? While at the bank, another woman simply walked up to her and gave her a hug. Birmingham may have the largest population in Alabama, but at its heart, it's a small town, Burton said. "I'm overwhelmed about the whole thing," Burton said. "I don't want people to think that it's only me that does this. We all do things like this.  It was one of those nights where everybody worked together and everybody did what they needed to do."
He's been missing nearly two decades, longer than almost anybody from Lincoln.

And you've likely never heard his name.

Michael Watkins would be 67 now, but had just entered his 50s when he left Lincoln in early November 1998, headed to California to spend Thanksgiving with his daughter in Bakersfield.

He wasn't missing then. And he wasn't missing when police pulled him over in Signal Hill, near Los Angeles, on Nov. 16, 1998. Or when cops stopped him again a week later in nearby Cypress.

He never did make it to Bakersfield, but he did end up behind bars in Tijuana, Mexico, in December 1998. He was released two days before Christmas, the last time anyone saw him alive.

Now he was missing, but not officially, at least not yet. It wasnt until four years later, in 2002, that his wife in Lincoln made the call and the formal report to police.

Technically, Michael Watkins could be California's responsibility, or Mexico's. But either through a sense of personal duty or professional obligation, the Lincoln Police Department has devoted its resources to finding a man who was alive and well when he left the city limits.

They've generated at least 50 reports in their search for Watkins. They've communicated with his daughter. They've searched databases that contain descriptions and dental records of unidentified bodies from around the country.

And they've kept his file active all of these years, even though he didn't have the social media force behind his search, like in the case of Craig Baxter, or a determined family, like in the case of Regina Bos, who vanished from outside of Duggan's Pub two years after Watkins left Lincoln.

I dont know if anyone living locally even knows who Watkins was, said Lincoln Police Sgt. Luke Wilke. Everybody knows who Gina Bos is.

Still, they want to close this case, to take Michael Watkins -- a man you've likely never heard of, a man who hasn't been seen alive for nearly 20 years, a man who might not have ever made it out of Mexico -- off their list of missing persons.
Manuel Katakis was stuck between a rock and a hard place. His dream of opening a new burger store in Sydney had finally been realised, but clientele was slow during the winter months and he was struggling financially to keep the business ticking over. He had barely been open for a year when he sought out a small business loan.

"I needed a loan to buy some more equipment to simplify our processes in the kitchen, but the banks didn't want to know us. The paperwork for a small business loan was never-ending, and the likelihood of being approved appeared slim to impossible," the owner of Bare Grill in Sydney's La Perouse says.

Manuel Katakis turned to a small business lender to help grow his enterprise after big banks weren't interested in providing a loan. Credit:Nadine Saacks Photography

Katakis spotted a leaflet for online small business lender Prospa. Desperate, he called them and was told he would be approved for a loan, so requested the paperwork.

"I filled out the form on my iPhone, and the money was in my account the next day, which meant I could get on with running my business," he says.
Carrying around the tools of justice hasn't been easy on the backs of law enforcement officers like Lancaster County Deputy Sheriff Troy Bailey.

Until recently, Bailey and others in the sheriff's office bore about 30 pounds of weight at their waistline.

Duty belts made simple tasks like sitting in a normal office chair a little more complicated, he said.

"For almost 30 years, bending at the waist to pick up dropped keys was not easy," Bailey said.

And driving a cruiser can be downright uncomfortable, he said.

For the last five years or so, Bailey struggled with nerve pain in his back that his doctor, physical therapist and chiropractor all said stemmed from lugging all that weight around at his waist.

So count Bailey among the deputies literally relieved when the sheriff's office joined a national trend of law enforcement agencies making uniform changes to ease the physical strain and stress on their officers.

Locally, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Police Department has already made the uniform switch.

The department's new carrier vests have two benefits, said Sheriff Terry Wagner.

First, they allow the weight of the items to be supported in a more ergonomic way, he said.

At a minimum, deputies have a pistol, two spare magazines containing 15 bullets each, a radio, pepper spray, handcuffs, a baton and a Taser on their duty belts, he said.

Some also carry a flashlight, a spare set of handcuffs and a key ring large enough "to make a janitor envious," the sheriff said.

Traditional duty belts held all those items, straining the back to support the belt, Bailey and Wagner said.

With the new vests, the only items left hanging on Bailey's waist are his pistol and Taser.

Within two weeks of wearing the new vest, Bailey said his back pain improved.

A second benefit of the new vests is increased protection against ballistics following a summer when attacks on law enforcement in Dallas and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, spurred national concern for police safety, Wagner said.

Before the change, deputies could wear a bulletproof vest beneath their brown shirts, but those vests were hot and not easy to shed if a deputy was in the office writing reports and not in need of protection.

The new vests feature an insert for the ballistic vests and are worn on top of a sweat-wicking undershirt.

About 70 deputies now wear the vests, which are mandatory for those on patrol, Wagner said.

Wagner said the change is not in response to any spike in reported back injuries. Rather, he hopes it will relieve the strain some deputies, like Bailey, are experiencing.

No new weapons were added and deputy uniforms will remain the same brown color, said Chief Deputy Sheriff Todd Duncan.

Taxpayers won't have to shell out for the new uniforms, which were covered by $31,000 from the forfeited assets fund, Wagner said.

The Lincoln Police Department doesn't plan to change its uniforms at this time, Chief Jeff Bliemeister said.

But if they did opt for a change, an internal committee would seek citizen input to be sure the uniform isn't a barrier in communication, he said.
By West Kentucky Star Staff Sep. 04, 2016 | 12:09 AM | MAYFIELD, KY

FNB Banks President and CEO, Marty Nichols recently presented a check for $5,000 to Ryan Drane, President of Graves County Economic Development, Inc. (GCED).

The $5,000 donation will be used to further expand and support the GCEDs efforts in growing the local business community. FNB Bank, Inc. believes in what GCED is doing to move our community forward expressed Marty Nichols, FNB Bank President and CEO. We have long been a contributor to the organization and we are pleased to show our enthusiasm for the current momentum by increasing our financial support.

We appreciate FNB's continued support of economic development stated Ryan Drane, GCED President. They have been a key partner in the attraction, retention and creation of several businesses in Mayfield and Graves County for decades. They are the epitome of what a community bank should be and we look forward to a continued partnership with them into the future.
Even with 5-0 lead, Verlander can't get 1st World Series win
By West Kentucky Star Staff Sep. 03, 2016 | 11:52 PM | KUTTAWA, KY

A two-vehicle crash Saturday on Interstate 24 in Lyon County claimed a Louisville woman's life.

According to Kentucky State Police, the wreck happened just before 2 pm at the 37 mile marker near Kuttawa. Troopers said 71-year-old Leslie D. Cunningham, of Evansville, IN, was traveling west in the right hand lane of I-24. According to police, 73-year-old Joseph M. Mouser, of Rineyville, KY, was traveling west in the left hand lane just beside Cunninghams vehicle.

Police said Cunningham turned left into the path of Mousers vehicle in what appeared to be an attempt to make a U-turn across I-24. Mouser could not avoid contact and struck Cunninghams vehicle in the driver's side.

A passenger in Cunninghams vehicle, 72-year-old Mary D. Fugate of Louisville, sustained multiple blunt force injuries and was pronounced dead at the scene by the Lyon County Coroner. Cunningham was air-lifted from the scene to Deaconess Hospital in Evansville, IN for treatment of her injuries.

Mouser sustained some minor abrasions on his arm but refused medical treatment.
Rita Redmond was a true lady who felt that every pupil had something to gift to the world
Image via WWF Austria

Camera traps set up in the Allentsteig military training area in Austria's northeasternmost state have captured snapshots of a wolf family: a wolf pair and two pups. The youngsters are the first to be born in the country since the last wolf disappeared in 1882, says WWF Austria.Since 2008, several wolves have made appearances within Austrian borders, but these have been migrants from elsewhere  places like Italy, Slovenia and Switzerland  searching for new territory. These visitors sometimes left telltale signs of their presence (like deer carcasses), but they never stayed. Until now.Conservationists suspect the parents of the young pups found their way here from the Lusatia region of Central Europe, and they appear comfortable in their new location. Since the average wolf pack has between four and six members, it's also possible that other individuals have yet to be spotted.A military training area might seem like an unusual home for a wolf pack, but this large, forested site has everything the predators might need. A big section of Allentsteig's 15,000 hectares is protected, and home to plenty of other wildlife. "Four-fifths of our area accounts for the Natura 2000 protected area. We are trying to balance the demands of nature with the needs of the military," says Johann Zach, a spokesperson for Allentsteig. "You have plenty of space and also a large food supply with roe deer, deer and wild sheep here."The young wolves in the photographs are around four months old, and if all goes well, they'll remain with their parents for two years, before forging out on their own to form new packs.WWF ecologist Pichler also emphasises that wolves are not a danger to humans; the animals are wary of people and encountering them is rare. "If you see a wolf, enjoy it. It is a unique experience," he says.
Ninth Street is crowded, cars driving away from downtown just as bars begin to close.

A few lanes to the right and ahead a block, Officer Kenny Morrow sees a red pickup truck make its first move across a lane. The driver doesn't signal. Then the truck passes a car and moves back, again not signaling. Then it swerves a bit inside its own lane.

Morrow says he's going to stop the pickup -- not signaling gives him a reason to make a traffic stop and the swerving makes him suspicious that the driver is intoxicated.

It's 1:31 on Sunday morning, Aug. 21.

The driver turns onto West O, this time using a signal.

Morrow turns on his overhead lights. The driver of the red pickup acknowledges, pulling over between a gas station and the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant. Its employees peek outside to see what's happening.

The driver gives Morrow his ID, and the officer brings it back to his cruiser.

Hes definitely been drinking, Morrow says.

* * *

For three weekends, the Lincoln Police Department has participated in a nationwide effort to crack down on drunk driving.

The initiative began the weekend before students returned to college and extra officers were put on the street in preparation for Labor Day weekend. Morrow, an LPD officer for 18 years, normally works an 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift, but adjusted his schedule to work a little later. Because his district covers downtown, it's normal for him to nab some DUIs on weekends.

Last year, LPD made 1,206 DUI arrests. Through July of this year, they've made 606.

Morrow said he hopes initiatives like these will save lives. On Aug. 21, he arrested two people for DUI. The police department won't have statistics on the number of people arrested during the initiative until a few days after its completion.

* * *

The red pickup truck is Morrow's fifth stop of the night and the first DUI.

Morrow begins the field sobriety test and asks the driver to follow a small light with his eyes. The driver sways as he stands, legs closed.

He asks the driver to walk in a straight line, heel to toes. The drivers moves are slow and calculated, the swaying better under control.

Next, Morrow tells the driver to raise his foot, whichever foot he prefers, and hold it off the ground with a straight leg while counting one thousand eight, one thousand nine  until he's asked to stop. Morrow demonstrates the task.

The driver lifts his foot, knee bent.

Straighten out your leg, Morrow reminds him.

The driver starts counting.

One thousand eight, one thousand nine, one thousand ten.

He voluntarily stops there and lowers his leg.

Keep going until I tell you to stop, Morrow reminds him, his voice calm.

After reaching one thousand sixteen, Morrow tells him to stop and motions him to the back of the cruiser. The driver calmly gets into the backseat.

Were going down to detox, Morrow tells him. Have you ever had a DUI?

Yes sir, the driver replies. This is my second.

Processing at detox will take about 30 minutes, Morrow says. If a sober driver over the age of 19 can pick him up, hed be free to go at that point.

After getting permission, Morrow parks the mans truck in the restaurant parking lot. The driver's brother, also drunk, is in the passenger seat. Morrow keeps the keys. The passenger tells the officer his sister will pick him up.

From the backseat of the cruiser, the driver calls home.

Hey dad, I got busted coming down to get (his brother), he says into the phone.

Just right over O Street, Im heading to detox shortly.

His father knows the process.

Sorry, his son whispers into the phone.

The driver apologizes to Morrow.

Im sorry Im wasting your time, he says. I kinda messed up.

They get to The Bridge at 1:50 a.m. A young woman is there talking to a University of Nebraska-Lincoln officer. She tells him she drank at Frog Fest, possibly had four Busch Lights since 7:30. Shes cited for minor in possession, speeding and DUI.

Morrow reads his driver his Miranda rights and they talk a bit more. The man was driving home after picking his brother up from a Haymarket bar. Hed had four beers that night, he said, his last Bud Light was at 12:20 a.m.

After a 15-minute waiting period ends to make sure residual mouth alcohol evaporates for a more accurate testing, Morrow turns on the breathalyzer machine and tells the driver to blow into a long tube. His blood alcohol level registers at .207 percent, almost three times the legal limit to drive.

Morrow takes his license, exchanging it for a temporary one that will work for 15 days. He tells him his court date before walking him outside where his dad waits.

Youve been quite polite, the man tells Morrow.

I appreciate you being cooperative as well, Morrow tells him.

Youve got enough to deal with.

Morrow straps himself back into the driver seat of his cruiser, another call waiting for him.

Someone is passed out behind the wheel in a parking garage, he says.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 04/09/2016 (2246 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeggers are mourning the death of a former Winnipeg Blue Bombers employee and community volunteer.

Jerry Maslowsky, CEO at Variety, the Childrens Charity of Manitoba and former Bombers volunteer turned sales and marketing vice-president, died Saturday night after battling cancer. He was 58.

A tweet sent by his daughter, Tara, on Sunday noted it was a "very short battle with cancer."

JOHN WOODS / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES Jerry Maslowsky died Saturday night.

I love you so much Dad. pic.twitter.com/RXPeXL7koX  Tara Maslowsky (@TaraMaslowsky) September 4, 2016

As the team took the field in Regina Sunday afternoon for its Labour Day Classic battle against the Saskatchewan Roughriders, players paid tribute to Maslowsky by adorning their helmets with stickers bearing his initials.

Maslowsky was hired in the Bombers sales and marketing department in 2000 after volunteering during the 1999 Pan American Games. He remained with the club for 14 years, leaving to head up Variety in 2014.

According to Tara, a celebration of life for Jerry Maslowsky will be occurring Thursday at the Winnipeg Convention Centre.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 04/09/2016 (2246 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Heavy rain is expected in some parts of the province Sunday as a stalled cold front pushes thunderstorms and showers into the Red River Valley, Environment Canada says.

Southeastern Manitoba is in for 40 to 60 mm of rain by Monday morning, with a risk of thunderstorms between now and then as the cold front moves east into Ontario.

In Winnipeg, todays forecast high is 20 C, with a low of 13 C.

TREVOR HAGAN / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Rain falls as pedestrians walk along Broadway Sunday. Between 40 mm and 60 mm of rain is expected to fall in southeastern Manitoba by Monday morning.

For more information, visit Environment Canada.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 04/09/2016 (2246 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On and off showers didnt stop thousands of Sikhs from descending on downtown Winnipeg to celebrate the anniversary of the Sikh holy scriptures Sunday afternoon.

Nagar Kirtan is the annual religious processional Sikhs living in Winnipeg hold. The parade took a float and participants singing hymns from the Memorial Park at Memorial Boulevard and York Avenue, down York to Garry Street and down Garry to Broadway where the route began to loop back around.

The parade was followed by speeches, music and food at the park where a number of local vendors were set up for the afternoon.

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESSWinnipeg Sikhs Sukh, Harman, Navneeb and Karanbeer take a selfie after making offerings and paying their respects to their sacred scripture during a community parade on Broadway and Memorial Sunday, September 4. 2016. Sikhs celebrated the 412th Anniversary of the Installation of Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji, the Sikh sacred scripture, at the Golden Temple with a parade and community festivities in downtown Winnipeg.

Darshan Kaila is the main co-ordinator for the event in Winnipeg. He said hes been organizing Nagar Kirtan in Winnipeg for six or seven years and usually starts at the beginning of the year to put it together.

Our holy book was compiled this day 412 years ago, Kaila said. Its a celebration of that.

Kaila said Winnipeg is not the only Canadian city to put on an event attracting so many people streets have to be shut down.

Vancouver, Toronto. In Winnipeg, our population isnt as big as in Vancouver and Toronto. In Toronto, more than 100,000 people get together, he said. Because of the weather today, itll make some difference, but we were expecting 10,000 to 15,000 people.

Even though Kaila said he makes sure everything is in place for Nagar Kirtan in Winnipeg, it wouldnt be possible without help from the community and support from local politicians.

People like to come out and celebrate and they enjoy the food, he said. We have about eight temples in Winnipeg. They all get together to put this function together. Its not a one group show. Its an entire community together, putting this community together.
MINNEAPOLIS  It took a while to get to downward-facing dog.

First, the eight men and women at a recent class at Tarana Yoga Studio in Minneapolis engaged in joint warm-ups, circling their wrists three times in each direction.

Next, they carefully moved into standing poses, keeping a chair at the edge of their yoga mats to steady themselves as needed.

Finally, their bodies limber, they tilted their hips back with hands and feet planted on the mat  expertly performing the challenging downward-facing dog pose.

The minutes ticked. No one flinched.

Held twice a week, the experimental class is part of a study being conducted by the University of Minnesota to find out if yoga is an effective tool for managing Parkinsons disease.

Corjena Cheung, a professor at the universitys School of Nursing, said she hopes to build on her previous research examining yogas effects on osteoarthritis. The results of that study were so promising  increased mobility and less fear of falling  that she wanted to explore whether yoga could help with Parkinsons, too.

Yoga is one of the leading alternative therapies used by Americans, according to a National Institutes of Health survey on alternative medicine use.

Cheungs work would add to a growing body of science on the popular practices impact on Parkinsons disease  a degenerative brain disorder involving the nerve cells responsible for voluntary movement. The condition is diagnosed in about 60,000 Americans a year. Tremors, a shuffling walk, muscle stiffness, depression and dementia are among the symptoms.

The focus on yoga as a possible therapy for Parkinsons stems from its gentleness and its emphasis on breathing, strength and flexibility.

A Kansas University Medical Center study found a visible reduction in tremoring and improvement in the steadiness of gait in people who participated in yoga sessions, according to the American Parkinson Disease Association. In her osteoarthritis and yoga study, Cheung found that participants were better able to cope with their symptoms by doing yoga rather than aerobic strength exercises.

Eager volunteers

For this study, she recruited participants through local support groups for people with Parkinsons. It was an easy pitch.

People are very motivated, she said.

There are 20 people involved in the study. Half of them were told to make no change in the way they manage their symptoms. The others are doing yoga. Cheung will measure their stress levels by giving them a blood test and checking for the presence of certain stress hormones. She also will examine their motor functions, checking their range of motion, stride length, balance and gait.

Five yoga experts who had experience teaching yoga to people with physical limitations helped design the hour-long classes, which will go on for six months. Cheung said she suspects that by the end of the experiment, the results will show that yoga improves motor function and reduces stress for people with Parkinsons.

But for now, all she knows for sure is that the participants seem to be enjoying themselves.

The fact that yoga includes both physical as well as the breathing and relaxation piece, I think that has added benefits for people with Parkinsons, she said. They are suffering from not only the physical limitations. Yoga teaches them how to cope with the disease and work with what they have and build on it.

The classes start out with slow, basic exercises done sitting, standing or lying down. Gradually, the participants build up to more difficult exercises and poses. In addition to the usual yoga props of a mat and block, there are chairs to help maintain balance and small sandbags to help control hand tremors.

They can use the prop to help them get to where the ideal pose is for them, Cheung said, adding that shes heard that some of the people are now doing yoga at home, too.

Exercising optimism

Although the study wont wrap up until December, the participants have reached their own conclusions about yoga therapy.

Jerri Smith is encouraged. The 58-year-old St. Paul woman is new to yoga but not to Parkinsons. She was diagnosed with the disease six years ago.

She said she agreed to participate in the study because she wanted to see whether yoga would help her symptoms.

Its good to calm my mind down, she said. Also, I have a lot of [muscle] cramps and spasms. My back is really stiff.

After a session last week, she reported that her muscles no longer feel so tight.

Bob McGonigal, 72, balanced on one leg and bent the other to form a Figure 4. He held the pose, standing perfectly still.

Thats called the tree pose, he said. When we first started, I couldnt do that.

He, too, came to the study in search of alternative ways to manage his Parkinsons. The Bloomington, Minn., man was diagnosed in 2010 and has tremors in his forearms and upper arms.

Steve Knudsen, 69, of Burnsville, Minn., said hes found that his body is more flexible after an hour of yoga. Recently, he left class and noticed that he didnt need to take his medications for Parkinsons for an hour because he felt so good.

There are a lot of possibilities with this, he said.

The focus on yoga as a possible therapy for Parkinsons stems from its gentleness and its emphasis on breathing, strength and flexibility.
A little more than 42 years ago, a saint paid us a visit.

From June 20 to June 22, 1974, Mother Teresa of Calcutta was in Winona to attend the meeting of the national officers and regional vice chairs of the Co-Workers of Mother Teresa in American Inc., at the Tau Center on the campus of the College of Saint Teresa.

At a Friday-evening public prayer service at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart she said, The poor are the hope of salvation for us all, for we will be judged on our love.

Hunger, she said, is not only for bread, but for love, for understanding.

We think of poverty as being hungry for bread, naked of clothing and homeless, she said, But there is a greater poverty: the poverty of not being wanted, of being unloved, of being naked of knowledge and being lonely. This kind of poverty is with us all.

She urged her listeners to look into their own homes. Are we too busy?

Are we too busy to have time for our own children, our husbands, wives or neighbors?

Do we take time to understand our own people, those closest to us, to smile at them.

Our sisters do the humble work that no one has time to do, the work that brings God into peoples lives.

She spoke of the work the missionaries do with the lepers who have been cast out and are shunned, in the homes for the dying and homes for abandoned children.

We are not social workers, she said, but sharers in His work of love. You and I must bring His love to everyone. We are responsible for happiness in the world. If we want peace in the world, let us make our own homes, our own communities happy, she said.

On her 1974 visit, Mother Teresa met with various chapters of the Co-Workers of Mother Teresa throughout the U.S. The organization was begun by English-American foreign service personnel in India who learned of Mother Teresas work while they lived there. The U.S. chapter of the Co-Workers was organized in 1971. Mrs. Warren L. Kump of Minneapolis was national chair and the Rev. Msg. J. Richard Feiten, former director of Winona Catholic Charities, was national treasurer and host of the Winona meeting.

The Co-Workers organization was dissolved worldwide in 1994 at Mother Teresas request. She was concerned that the Co-Workers were becoming too institutionalized and encouraged the membership to return to their grassroots origins.

Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity to serve the poorest of the poor in 1948. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, died in 1997 and today will be canonized a saint by Pope Francis.

We are responsible for happiness in the world. If we want peace in the world, let us make our own homes, our own communities happy.  Mother Teresa, speaking in Winona in 1974
Officials confirmed Saturday that they recovered the remains of Jacob Wetterling after Danny Heinrich, who is a suspect in the boys 1989 disappearance, agreed to cooperate and provide information.

KSTP first reported that the remains were found at an undisclosed location in central Minnesota and that DNA tests are currently being conducted to determine if they are the boys remains.

Our hearts are broken. We have no words, Patty Wetterling, Jacobs mother, texted to the Star Tribune.

She later told KARE 11 Saturday morning that Jacobs remains have been found. All I can confirm is that Jacob has been found and our hearts are broken. I am not responding to any media yet as I have no words.

Heinrich has been in federal custody since late October, after authorities arrested him on charges of receiving and possessing child pornography. He was indicted in December on a total of 25 child pornography charges  five from October, plus an additional 20 related to possessing and receiving child pornography both in print and digital images. Some of the material featured children younger than 12.

The child pornography case against Heinrich began building last summer, while authorities searched his home looking for evidence in both Jacobs abduction and a separate kidnapping and sexual assault involving a 12-year-old boy in nearby Cold Spring, Minn., nine months before Jacob disappeared.

Jacob was 11 when he was kidnapped shortly after 9 p.m. on the night of Oct. 22, 1989, as he and his brother, Trevor, 10, and best friend, Aaron Larson, 11, rode their bikes to a Tom Thumb store not far from the familys rural St. Joseph, Minn., home to rent a video.

As they headed home, a masked man with a gun appeared on the remote dirt road leading to the Wetterling house, told the boys to lie face down in a nearby ditch and asked each his age. He then ordered Trevor and Aaron to run to the woods and not look back. When the boys did, Jacob and the masked man were gone.

Jacob has yet to be found, and no one has ever been charged in the case.

Heinrich, who lived in Paynesville, Minn., about 30 miles southwest of St. Joseph, at the time of Jacobs abduction, was first questioned by investigators soon after it happened, and several times in 1990. He said at that time that he was not involved in the case, authorities have said.

Heinrich re-emerged as a person of interest last summer, authorities have said, because of similarities to the January 1989 kidnapping and sexual assault of the Cold Spring boy.

In that case, the driver told the boy after releasing him not to look back or he would be shot, according to court documents.

DNA evidence later found on the sweatshirt of the boy, Jared Scheierl, now 39, matched Heinrich. Authorities said in October that Heinrich could not be charged in Scheierls case because the statute of limitations had run out.

Yet they have long cited similarities in the two cases  both in the description of the suspect and how he approached his victims  as reason to believe the same person could be responsible for both.

Authorities said in October that Heinrich consistently has told them, both soon after Jacobs disappearance and again recently, that he was not involved in the case.

They also said that when they searched Heinrichs home last summer, they found nothing to connect Heinrich to Jacob.

At that time, however, they found 19 three-ring binders containing numerous images of child pornography. The binders included pictures of some known child victims. Child pornography also was found on Heinrichs computer hard drive.

When authorities arrived at Heinrichs house with a search warrant, he described himself as a dirty old man, but denied creating pornography or sharing it with anyone, according to a federal agent who testified in court.

None of the charges allege that Heinrich distributed pornography.

Danny Heinrich has been in custody since late October, after authorities arrested him on child pornography charges.
Cindy Lange-Kubick Columnist Cindy Lange-Kubick has loved writing columns about life in her hometown since 1994. She had hoped to become a people person by now, nonetheless she would love to hear your tales of fascinating neighbors and interesting places. Follow Cindy Lange-Kubick Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today

The German soldier was 17 in January 1944, a kid learning to be a carpenter before the Nazis drafted him to fight.

Paul Stutz would later say he was lucky to be captured and brought to America. That if he hadnt been caught, he would have been killed.

Instead, he landed in Wyoming and found kindness at the farm of Art and Pauline Otto.

The German soldier is an old man now, his voice weak over the phone from his home near Heidelberg.

His youngest son does most of the talking, telling his fathers side of a story that started long ago and continues more than 70 years later.

He said it was exciting for him to see America, says Armin Stutz. He had education as a carpenter but his father and mother had a farm and a few cows, so he knew how to work in the fields.

Paul Stutz ended up in a POW camp near Scottsbluff and worked in the sugar beet fields, but later, he was sent to eastern Wyoming and another work camp, he says.

The farmers came in the morning and picked them up and brought them home at night.

Most mornings, the young soldier went away with the Farmers Otto.

All of the farmers had been warned not to speak to the Germans, but the Ottos didnt listen.

He told me they have German roots and they were happy to speak German and hear about German stories, Armin says. He says it was like being a member of the family.

* * *

Jim Otto is 67. His grandparents were those Wyoming farmers.

The Lincoln man grew up knowing the story of the German POW they befriended.

Pauline and Art Otto had two sons navigating B-17s in the war, Jim says. One of them would become his father; the other had been captured by the Germans.

Perhaps they were hoping someone in Germany would be just as compassionate toward their captured son as they were to Paul Stutz.

Perhaps they were lonely for someone to speak with in German, a language their seven children seemed to be embarrassed by as they grew up.

Over the next year, the couple bonded with the young soldier who helped them harvest wheat and do carpentry work on their farm.

When the war ended and the camps closed, they exchanged addresses. Letters went back and forth between Schwabisch Hall, Germany, and Yoder, Wyoming.

Pauline sent care packages, too, to their new friend in Germany. Once she mailed a mans suit. Another time, pepper and sewing needles and soap. Each Christmas, a package arrived with a gift for Paul and his wife, Lore, and each of their five children.

His father had a name for the woman who sent them, Armin says. The Angel from Yoder.

When I was 7 years old I met her. I can understand why he said that.

* * *

The letters and packages continued year after year.

Decade after decade.

His grandmother was hard of hearing, Jim says. She could read lips and she loved people, but telephone conversations were impossible. So she turned to letters.

She was a thrifty woman who sewed patches over patches, boiled chicken carcass for broth and raised seven kind and compassionate children.

And she was 81 when she flew to Germany in 1975 to visit Paul. An old photograph shows the young German soldier, middle-aged and balding, his hand on the shoulder of a small woman in a billowing house dress.

After the reunion, she flew home and resumed her letters.

We received letters from Mrs. Otto through 1980, Armin says. And then we wrote and nothing came back.

Armin decided to find out what happened. When he turned 20, he flew to Denver and bought a Greyhound bus ticket.

He headed for Wyoming, he knew where the Otto farm stood.

I found the family, he says. They said, Yes, yes, we know who you are.

They told him Pauline had died in 1981.

Her death didnt end the friendship, after all. In 1992, Paulines descendants -- sons and daughters and spouses -- traveled to Germany for a reunion. Paul and his wife came here the following year.

Jim remembers seeing his father and Paul sitting together at the supper table, the German soldier who became a POW and the American soldier who guided B-17s.

It struck me, here they are, same heritage, same religion. They agreed on everything, but at one point in time they were enemies.

* * *

Two years ago, Jim and his wife, Beth, traveled to Germany. Last year, Armin and his wife, Birgit, came to America.

The two couples and a boatload of Otto cousins visited the farm near Yoder. They went to Yellowstone. They made their way back to Lincoln and Jim arranged a visit with the mayor.

A proclamation was read declaring that day -- Sept. 4, 2015 -- Stutz-Otto International Family Friends Day.

It told the story of an enduring and unlikely alliance with one whereas after another, until it ended with a call for goodwill and understanding between nations -- one friendship at a time.

Beginning with the friendship forged on a farm in Wyoming by the Angel from Yoder, so very long ago.
Are you looking for an opportunity to hear candidates for office respond directly to voters questions on issues that matter in your community?

For nearly a century, the place to do just that has been the League of Women Voters Minnesota candidate forums, which kick off in Winona on Sept. 8. The League does not support or oppose candidates or political parties and conducts its forums to ensure impartiality, equal time and a focus on issues.

In a few select partisan contests in 2016, finding any nonpartisan unbiased candidate forum has become a challenge for voters who just want a chance to ask a question and learn more about the candidates views. Its like the childrens game of hide-and-seek. Todays political version has the candidate hiding behind the podium of a friendly sponsor while most voters are left to seek out facts and policy positions in a forest of outside spending, biased and incendiary advertising and false accusations.

What should voters make of candidates who refuse to participate in a free public League forum, but who do participate in an event sponsored by an organization where an admission fee of perhaps $60 is charged? How unbiased is a forum when that organization also endorses candidates? When an incumbent limits their debate appearances to just one or two events staged by friendly (endorsing) sponsors controlling which questions are asked, this deliberate effort to duck the public and/or media means voters are the real losers.

For state and local races, the League of Women Voters Minnesotas policy is that a forum will be held as scheduled, regardless of whether a candidate chooses to participate. The League will not be held hostage by candidates who want to control our nonpartisan voter education work. But races for Congress are different. Federal Elections Commission rules mandate that two candidates in federal races be on stage together for a debate to occur. If only two candidates are running, and if one refuses to participate, the forum cannot be held. It also prohibits single-candidate appearances without affording other candidates the same opportunity to speak to the same audience.

Paying for access to candidates is nothing new in American politics. But, voters should know when candidates are ducking public forums in favor of only friendly audiences. How can a voter make an informed choice? What does this hide-and-seek practice say about that same incumbents willingness to listen to constituents and share their policy views?

No candidate should want to charge voters a fee to hear them address issues that could determine who that voter casts their ballot for on Election Day.

The League of Women Voters urges all candidates to participate in candidate forums and every other event where voters can be educated. An informed electorate makes for a better democracy.
From wire services

Argentines protest presidents job cuts, subsidy reductions: BUENOS AIRES, Argentina  Argentinas unions brought tens of thousands of people into the capitals streets Friday to protest government job cuts, the elimination of subsidies and other policies of President Mauricio Macri. Closing out three days of demonstrations that included road blockages across the country, columns of protesters waving blue and white Argentine flags converged in front of the presidential palace to voice their anger at Macris government. If they dont hear our clamor, if they dont give us answers, there will be a social conflict, said Pablo Micheli, secretary general of the Argentine Workers Union. If they dont listen to us, sooner or later, there will be a nationwide strike.

Spanish missionary who devoted life to poor killed in Haiti: PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti  A missionary from Spain who devoted her life to helping the poor in Haiti was fatally shot at a crowded intersection in the Caribbean countrys capital Friday. Jean Bruner Noel, a justice ministry official at the scene, identified the woman as Isabel Sola Matas, 51. He said she was from Barcelona but had lived in Haiti for years. Noel said her purse was stolen after assailants shot her twice in the chest as she sat at the wheel of her old SUV. She was attacked as she inched down a winding avenue filled with pedestrians and vehicles in Bel Air, a rough hillside neighborhood of shacks in downtown Port-au-Prince. A Haitian woman who was a passenger in the car was also shot twice and taken to a hospital. Her condition was not immediately known.

EgyptAir: Passenger detained after storming pilots cockpit: CAIRO  EgyptAir says a passenger has been detained after storming the pilots cockpit on a flight carrying 150 passengers. The Friday incident took place aboard charter airline CairoAir 462, which took off from the Saudi capital, Riyadh, to Alexandrias Borg el-Arab airport, EgyptAir said. The passenger was not armed. The crew checked if the passenger was not carrying whatever can impact the security and the safety of the passengers, it said. The pilot notified airport authorities, who declared a state of emergency. The passenger was detained when the plane landed, EgyptAir said.
The political enemy this past week was Mylan Pharmaceutical for raising the price of an EpiPen from $57 to more than $600 in the past nine years. Step in Hillary Clinton, who has announced a government solution to solve another big problem created by big government.

For those not familiar, the EpiPen literally is a lifesaver. Anyone suffering from serious allergic reactions to things like food or bee stings should carry one. The EpiPen is an emergency medication that treats these reactions. Each device carries a small dose of epinephrine to stop anaphylaxis as the result of coming into contact with a severe allergen. The symptoms usually are a sudden onset of low blood pressure, shortness of breath, or even the swelling of the tongue or throat  events that could lead to death if not treated immediately.

The problem is that EpiPens come with a shelf life. If all goes according to plan, a person who requires one should have to replace it with a new one before actually using it. Replacing an unused device for $600 is, pardon the pun, worse than a shot in the arm. The cost of the drug actually is less than $1.

Of course, the blame fell mostly on greedy pharmaceutical companies. It really comes down to plain old greedy people. The question one should ask is, who are those greedy people and how did they drive up the price?

In 2013, President Barack Obama signed the School Access to Emergency Epinephrine Act into law. This bill created a pile of money that could then allow states to mandate the drug be carried by schools. Its a ridiculous requirement when you consider any kid who actually needs this drug already has one.

Just as a kid with asthma or allergies can benefit from an emergency dose of epinephrine, one has to ask why not also mandate insulin be stocked for kids with Type I diabetes? Schools are required to administer the insulin, but the government isnt mandating schools stock the medication.

Isnt diabetic shock just as potentially fatal as allergic anaphylaxis?

A number of sources cite the fact that Mylan Pharmaceuticals lobbied extensively for this law. One of the guys who ultimately voted for the EpiPen Law was Democratic Sen. Joseph Manchin III of West Virginia. Manchin was elected to replace Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd in 2010.

Manchins vote normally would not be that big of a deal until you know that Manchins daughter is Heather Manchin Bresch, the CEO of Mylan Pharmaceuticals, the no. 1 lobbyist and manufacturer of the markets standalone EpiPen. Call me a cynic, but its rather difficult to believe Manchin wasnt a key cog in the successful effort to pass legislation requiring federally funded EpiPens to schools across America.

However, Hillary Clinton has a plan. Shes going to call these crooks out and plans to introduce more government intervention to stop big pharma. How about a plan that prevents guys like Manchin from giving his daughter access to big government?

Clintons efforts to go after the bad guys at Mylan do not simply target what happened as a result of the sneaky lobbying efforts by Manchin and Bresch. Clintons plan, in a very traditional big government response, targets an entire industry because of the shameless greed of a corporate CEO with ties to her dad, the senator.

Clinton cannot go directly after her buddy Bresch. Breschs company has donated at least $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation going as far back as 2009. The ultimate political payback for Bresch, and her company, was a government-funded purchase plan for their products and a $16.5 million raise for the CEO.

Is it a surprise the Clinton Foundation has suddenly appeared in this EpiPen saga? It shouldnt be. Just as Clinton used BleachBit software to erase her computer server so no one could find out what she was hiding, she also is misleading folks when she says she intends to go after big pharma or her buddy Blesch.

The Clintons openly have been involved in a pay for play scheme for years through their foundation. Fortunately, there are two sides to every email or this scandal, the one she thought she erased from the secret computer server she had hidden in her basement, never would have come to light.

Do we really want her solution to a problem she helped create? Clinton is the big government problem and she wants back inside our big government.
Why would one of the biggest polluting corporations want to fund GOP politicians? Answer: So they can pollute more and have the public pay for it.

The Koch brothers are funding Rep. Ed Brooks because he and his GOP cronies have delivered for them. They have weakened environmental laws to allow Wisconsins water and the land to be poisoned. Wisconsin is now open for their dirty business.

Google the Kochs on the Internet. Koch Industries has a dirty environmental record and the multi-billionaire Koch brothers have a dirty political record. You be the judge.

If Wisconsin people truly value clean water, fresh air and their land, they should not vote for Koch puppets. Art Shrader is endorsed by the Sierra Club and the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters. Shrader is the best choice for the 50th Assembly District.

Daniel Holzman, Baraboo




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WASHINGTON -- The one great service of Donald Trump's extended peregrinations on immigration policy is to have demonstrated how, in the end, there's only one place to go.

You can rail for a year about the squishy soft, weak-kneed and stupid politicians who have opened our borders to the wretched refuse of Mexico. You can promise to round them up -- the refuse, that is, not the politicians (they're next) -- and deport them. And that may win you a plurality of Republican primary votes.

But eventually you have to let it go. For all his incendiary language and clanging contradictions, Trump did exactly that in Phoenix on Wednesday. His "deportation task force" will be hunting ... criminal aliens. Isn't that the enforcement priority of President Obama, heretofore excoriated as the ultimate immigration patsy?

And what happens to the noncriminal illegal immigrants? On that, Trump punted. Their "appropriate disposition" will be considered "in several years when we have  ended illegal immigration for good." Everyone knows what that means: One way or another, they will be allowed to stay.

Trump's retreat points the way to the only serious solution: enforcement plus legalization. The required enforcement measures are well known -- from a national E-Verify system that makes it just about impossible to work if you are here illegally, to intensified border patrol and high-tech tracking.

The one provision that, thanks to Trump, gets the most attention is a border wall. It's hard to understand the opposition. It's the most venerable and reliable way to keep people out. The triple fence outside San Diego led to a 90 percent reduction in infiltration. Israel's border fence with the West Bank has produced a similar decline in terror attacks into Israel.

The main objection is symbolic. Walls, we are told, denote prisons. But only if they are built to keep people in, not if they are for keeping outsiders out. City walls, going back to Jericho, are there for protection. Even holier-than-thou Europeans have conceded the point as one country after another -- Hungary, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Austria, Greece, Spain, why even Norway -- has started building border fences to stem the tide of Middle Eastern refugees.

The other part of the immigration bargain is legalization. What do you do with the 11 million already here? In theory, you could do nothing. The problem ultimately solves itself as the generation of the desert -- those who crossed the border originally -- is eventually replaced by its American-born children who are automatically legal and landed.

But formal legalization is a political necessity. It gets buy-in from Democrats who for whatever reason -- self-styled humanitarianism or bare-knuckled partisanship -- have no interest in real border enforcement. Legalization is the quid pro quo. If they want to bring the immigrants "out of the shadows," they must endorse serious enforcement.

Such a grand bargain could and would command a vast national consensus. The American public will accept today's illegal immigrants if it is convinced that this will be the last such cohort.

This was the premise of the 1986 Reagan amnesty. It legalized almost 3 million immigrants. Because it never enforced the border, however, three has become 11.

And that's why the Gang of Eight failed. They too got the sequencing wrong. The left insisted on legalization first. The Gang's Republicans ultimately acquiesced because they figured, correctly, this was the best deal they could get in an era of Democratic control.

The problem is that legalization is essentially irreversible and would have gone into effect on Day One. Enforcement was a mere promise.

Hence the emerging Republican consensus, now that Trump has abandoned mass deportation: a heavy and detailed concentration on enforcement, leaving the question of what happens to those already here either unspoken (Trump on Wednesday) or to be treated "case by case" (Trump last week).

The Trump detour into -- and retreat from -- deportation has proved salutary. Even the blustering tough guy had to dismiss it with "we're not looking to hurt people."

The ultimate national consensus, however, lies one step further down the road. Why leave legalization for some future discussion? Get it done. Once the river of illegal immigration has been demonstrably and securely reduced to a trickle, the country will readily exercise its natural magnanimity and legalize.

So why not agree now? Say it and sign it. To get, you have to give. That's the art of the deal, is it not?
Oscar Hancock, owner of American Beauty Signworks, holds up one of his latest creations on Thursday in front of his Providence Street business. He designed and made the signs at the request of a local couple who want to show their support for local law enforcement.
A young man wanted to make a point about racism in the United States, but his plan backfired when he was exposed for a liar by police. 20-year-old Khalil Cavil of Texas was working at the Saltgrass Steak House in Odessa when he claimed he was discriminated against because of his Muslim name. Cavil took
When will gambling proponents ever

learn that Nebraskans cherish our Good Life and we do not want to see it ruined by expanded gambling  especially in the form of Casinos and Slot Machines? For 21 years expanded gambling has been defeated in the Legislature or by the voters. Our state senators wisely examined the facts and came to the conclusion that the 3 to 1 cost of gambling is not worth it.

Nationwide studies show that for every dollar a state gains in gambling revenue it costs them $3.00 in social costs. Nebraska does not need increased crime, embezzlements, domestic violence, divorce, suicides and other problems. We value our families and businesses and are not interested in trashing our state.

But will the gambling proponents just stop the foolishness and leave us alone  NEVER! The latest attempt by the Keep the Money committee was led by former Sen. Scott Lautenbaugh. It was financed by the Winnebago Tribe who put up $1.4 million dollars trying to ram casinos and slots down our throats.

The tribe did not put up that kind of money because they wanted to help horse racing. They did it because they knew if we changed our Constitution they would be allowed under federal law to have unlimited Indian casinos in any city or town they wanted  virtually untaxed and unregulated.

Caring citizens were not fooled and refused to sign their petitions. The proponents gambled and failed miserably to make their goal and they lied about their numbers when they submitted them on July 7th. They claimed to have 130,000 but had less than 120,000 and 41,000 of those were invalid.

This deception cost the state hundreds of thousands of dollars for county and state staff to count the signatures. How in good conscience could they abuse the taxpayers in this way? Is there any way we can send them the bill for this farce that was perpetrated on us? They should be ashamed of themselves and be held accountable!
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) - A man linked to social media posts threatening a Pulse-style attack against the LGBT community in South Florida was arrested by the Florida Highway Patrol on an unrelated charge.

According to the FBI, 50-year-old Craig Jungwirth was arrested Saturday for a violating bond conditions in an unrelated pending misdemeanor case.

In a news release sent Sunday, FBI spokesman Michael D. Leverock said Jungwirth has been charged with transmitting threatening communications and will appear in federal court on Tuesday.

Jungwirth has been charged in connection with online threats made in his name, and police say Facebook posts on Aug. 30 mentioned the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando and made threats planned for Labor Day weekend in the Wilton Manors area.

His attorney, Ron Baum, did not respond for comment.

(Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

9/4/2016 12:37:23 PM (GMT -4:00)
TALLAHASSEE, FL. (WTXL)-- Tallahassee Fire Department is cautioning safety while using generators in the Tallahassee Area as power remains to be out for several citizens.

TFD is warning residents of Carbon Monoxide Poisoning. They say that there have been several calls in just a few days of residents breathing poisoned air.

The department says, Generators are typically run on gas and whenever there is burning fuel, that fuel can release Carbon Monoxide. This is the number one silent killer and those depending on generators to keep the lights on must take proper precaution to stay safe, says TFD Captain Luther McClellan.

Captain McClellan says people need to read the instructions and put the generator away form the house in a ventalated area.

Symptoms of Carbon Monoxide Poisoning include headache, dizziness, weakness, and vomiting. These can also effect pets.

TFD is encouraging anyone with Generators to use detectors and they recommend you change your batteries regulary while being sure to double check them before any major natural disaster.
WASHINGTON -- Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas, the old saying goes. If so, Donald Trump should be awfully itchy.

Trump has just augmented his ever-changing cast of mostly second-string campaign operatives with a new deputy campaign manager, conservative activist David Bossie. "A friend of mine for many years," Trump told my Washington Post colleague Robert Costa. "Solid. Smart. Loves politics, knows how to win."

That's one way to put it. Win at any cost would be another, and that's being polite. If Bossie's name doesn't ring a bell, you're lucky, because it means that you haven't been immersed for the last two decades-plus in the mucky minutiae of the right's no-holds-barred war against Bill and Hillary Clinton.

This is a war in which Bossie has risen from foot soldier to general, in large part thanks to his willingness to do anything in pursuit of his prey. He is the Captain Ahab of Clinton haters.

Some highlights:

Back in 1992, Bossie was working with Floyd Brown, of Willie Horton 1988 campaign ad fame, on an anti-Clinton effort that included a phone line in which callers could pay $4.99 to hear supposed sex tapes between Bill Clinton and Gennifer Flowers. President George H.W. Bush denounced the tactic as "the kind of sleaze that diminishes the political process" and filed a Federal Election Commission complaint against the group, the Presidential Victory Commission.

Bossie's particular contribution to this effort involved harassing friends and family of a former law student of Clinton's, Susan Coleman, who had committed suicide. As reported by CBS' Eric Engberg, Bossie's effort involved trying to prove that Coleman shot herself after having a sexual relationship with Clinton and becoming pregnant.

Bossie and another investigator pursued Coleman's mother to an Army hospital where her husband was being treated for a stroke. "Here the two men burst into the sick man's room, and began questioning the shaken mother about her daughter's suicide," Engberg reported.

Five years later, Lloyd Grove recounted in The Washington Post, "A chastened Bossie later told friends that the CBS story had made his grandmother cry."

Chastened? Not so much. Grove was writing about Bossie because he had landed himself back in the news, this time as a committee investigator for former Republican Rep. Dan Burton (of Vince Foster was murdered and shooting a pumpkin, or maybe a melon, to prove it fame).

After working with Bossie for several months on the investigation into Clinton's campaign fund-raising, the committee's chief counsel and two other staffers, with the lawyer, John Rowley III, issued a public letter denouncing Bossie's "unrelenting, self-promoting actions."

"Not since Roy Cohn -- the bare-knuckled chief counsel for Sen. Joe McCarthy in the Red-hunting hearings of the 1950s -- has a congressional staffer been so thoroughly demonized by his enemies," Grove wrote. The comparison is particularly striking in retrospect, since post-McCarthy Cohn became Trump's lawyer.

Less than a year later, Burton was forced to apologize to his colleagues and Bossie resigned under pressure, after accusations that tapes of former Hillary Clinton law partner Webster Hubbell had been unfairly edited to exclude exculpatory comments about whether Clinton had known of his phony billing. (She had "no idea," Hubbell said.)

In a closed-door Republican conference meeting, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich told Burton he was "embarrassed ... at the circus that went on at your committee," The Washington Post reported.

Since then, of course, Bossie, now at the helm of Citizens United, has continued his pursuit, now focused on Hillary. The Citizens United Supreme Court ruling grew out of his 2008 "Hillary: The Movie."

My point is not that the Clintons are blameless -- they aren't -- but that a candidate can be judged by the company he keeps and, especially, the individuals he hires. Trump has shed, sort of, Corey Lewandowski (recommended to him by, yes, Bossie) and Paul Manafort.

Now he has brought on Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon (recommended to him by, yes, Bossie) as the campaign's chief executive officer, and with him questions about Bannon's voter registration at a vacant Florida house and charges, ultimately dismissed, of domestic abuse by his ex-wife.

The grown-up in the room with Trump -- at least the one who's not related to him -- is campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who has a reputation as a capable professional but has been praising her candidate for his supposed "pivot ... to substance" and vowing, in regard to Clinton, "we're going to fight her on substance."

Uh huh. Now comes Bossie, lauded by Conway as "a battle-tested warrior and a brilliant strategist."

Scratch, scratch.
You are the owner of this article.
The energy level in the struggle in the statehouse to reduce Nebraskas property tax burden waxes and wanes.

Currently the push to reduce property taxes is powered up, thanks mainly to Gov. Pete Ricketts.

The attempt focuses on making changes to the system that will be long-lasting, and thats the way it should be.

But a local story week showed that while Ricketts and state senators are looking for systemic changes, they should also be alert to bills that could have the impact of boosting local property taxes.

The inmate population in the Lancaster County Jail has jumped 13 percent this year, according to Brad Johnson, interim corrections director.

The same impact is being felt across the state. All counties are seeing an uptick in their jail populations, said Larry Dix, director of the Nebraska Association of County Officials.

Sheli Schindler, director of the Lancaster County Youth Services Center, put the blame squarely on LB605, a multi-faceted piece of legislation intended to reduce overcrowding in the state prison system. Essentially the cost of corrections has been shifted to the counties, she said.

Thats not what state leaders expected to happen. Lancaster County Attorney Joe Kelly said state leaders estimated an increase of just 50 inmates statewide.

Lancaster County alone saw its jail population increase by about that amount; in a recent week the jail population was about 670 a day. The jail has 786 beds, but only enough staff to handle 665.

In this case state leaders should be given the benefit of doubt; they didnt intend to shift this big a burden to the local level, where costs are born by property taxes rather than sales or income tax.

But this sort of shift happens with regularity. When the state added juvenile probation officers a few years ago, for example, Lancaster County had to provide office space and supplies at a yearly cost of $300,000.

And sometimes state officials know exactly what they are doing when they shift costs to property taxes  and they do it anyhow. In 2009 the elected officials in the statehouse abandoned the longtime policy of reimbursing counties at the rate of $35 a day for defendants who were later sent to state prisons. The state walked away owing Lancaster County $3 million in back payments, local correction officials said at the time.

In the effort to lower property taxes, state officials should adhere to the Hippocratic Oath: First, do no harm.
HANGZHOU - US President Barack Obama said on Sunday that talks with Russia will be key in reaching any deal to end hostilities in Syria, but negotiations are difficult and grave differences remain between Washington and Moscow.

The United States has long been interested in finding a way to reduce violence and improve humanitarian aid in Syria but it would be difficult to get to the next phase if there is no buy-in from Russia, Obama told a news conference in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, where global leaders are convening for a G20 summit.

A senior State Department official, meanwhile, said Sunday that while issues remain to be solved, the US was close to a deal with Russia and Syria.

A deal may be announced as soon as later in the day, the official said on the sidelines of the G20 summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou.
Heavy traffic is expected to build up on Israels roads over the course of Sunday as a result of the cancellation of the train line connecting the countrys northern and central citiesthe Haifa-Tel Aviv line.

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Photo: Gil Nachshoni

As a result of work currently underway on the lines, the police said that heavy traffic could be expected on inter-city roads from Tel Aviv to northern roads.

In an effort to reduce the traffic and compensate for the train cancellations, the Egged bus company will increase its operations with more than 140 additional buses. However, the measure is only a partial answer given that Israel Railways will not be providing alternative shuttle services to passengers, bar soldiers, along the affected routes.

Photo: Yair Sagi

Traffic police have been dotted along the roads and have been instructed to prioritize the flow of buses. The police also announced that the train artery linking the north and center will not become operational again until 7pm and have therefore urged drivers to avoid using the affected roads and to remain patient.

The IDF and the Defense Ministry have implemented measures to address the issue of the interrupted movement of soldiers returning to military bases after the weekend. To that end, dozens of extra buses in both directions from the north to the center have been provided.

Soldiers await transport in Hof HaCarmel (Photo: Zahar Shahar)

The inconvenience was caused when, last week, a political furor broke out over planned infrastructure-improvement construction that was supposed to take place during Shabbat, when the trains do not run.

The ultra-Orthodox factions in the government objected and threatened to withdraw from the coalitioneffectively bringing down the government. Under pressure, the prime minister proposed a compromise in which he suggested that out of the 20 projects that Israel Railways had requested to undertake on Shabbat, 17 would be cancelled. On Friday however, Haredi politicians insisted that all 20 projects be cancelled.

The current coalition controls 67 of the Knesset's 120 seats. Haredi parties Shas and United Torah Judaism hold 13 seats, meaning that their retreat from the coalition would cause a governmental crisis and a possible downfall.

Criticizing the decision, Director-general of the Transport Ministry Keren Turner claimed that work during Shabbat is nothing new. The Work and Rest Hours Law doesnt just refer to Pikuah Nefesh (a Jewish principle which permits most transgressions, such as violating Shabbat, if a life is at risk). If they (the ultra-Orthodox parties) dont want us to work on Shabbat, they need to know what the law allows, Turner said.

Director-general of Transport Minisry Keren Turner (Photo: Yogev Attias)

We have been doing this for years already. Similar companies have been working on Shabbat. Other companies unconnected with the Transport Ministry also work on Shabbat. You dont just shut down electricity in the middle of the week or close a water or sewage pipeline and you also dont just shut down trains, she added.

We made clear the whole time that we are going to carry out work in 20 locations unless we are told otherwise. Toward the beginning of Shabbat I read in the news that other instructions had been given. I myself called the government chief of staff to see if it was true and at no point did anyone inform us.

Protestors gather outside Tel Aviv train station

Some 400 people protested Saturday night outside Tel Avivs Savidor Central Railway Station and Lev HaMifratz Railway Station in Haifa.

Protest outside Savidor Central Railway Station (Photo: Motti Kimchi)

Demonstrators, which included activists from the Meretz party and the Zionist Union Camp, waved placards which read: A country according to Jewish law means a country gone and Bibi wake up. Travellers are worth more. Other signs read, I am waiting for a bus on Shabbat. The protesters succeeded in blocking some roads for a short while which led to arguments with drivers passing by.

MK Tzipi Livni from the Zionism Union Camp said during the Tel Aviv protest: The time has come to leave our chairs and take to the streets so our anger can be heard and so that we can fight for our rights for public transport on Saturday night. This whole thing is not about Shabbat, but rather about Netanyahu taking contemptuous decisions just to remain in power. A solution could have been found.

Tzipi Livni at the protest (Photo: Motti Kimchi)

MK Tamar Zandberg (Meretz) also spoke at the protest. Tonight we became pawns of Bibi, Yisrael Katz and Yaakov Litzman. We want to get to place in Israel on Shabbat. We are going back to the years when rabbis decided where we could go, she said. We wont tolerate this anymore and we wont be quiet anymore.

MK Tamar Zandberg (R) and Meretz Chairwoman Zahava Golan (Center) at a protest (Photo: Motti Kimchi)

Soldiers to bear the brunt of the decision

The decision has caused significant outrage among soldiers who, as a result of a separate demand by the Haredi and ultra-Orthodox parties vis-a-vis how trains operate immediately before and after Shabbat, will now have the amount of time at home on weekends restricted. Currently, Israels trains cease to operate 20 minutes before Shabbat commences and 20 minutes after its conclusion.

While this means that the trains do not run during Shabbat itself, it nonetheless requires workers to violate it in preparation for work. As a result therefore of the Haredi demands, some of the lines operating on Friday and Saturday night will be cancelled or their operational hours reduced.

One soldier, Yinon, explained that his journey from his home in Karmiel in the north to his base in the south was next to impossible. I have no way of getting to the base. The only way around it is if I get a sick day because otherwise I will be late and I will be considered as missing which could mean I go to military prison, he said.

Commenting on the Sunday disabling of the center-north train line, Yinon said, As a soldier it seriously affects me. I have to be at the base. It is a three-and-a-half-hour journey and if I travel on the bus I have to change three or four times which turns it into a 5-hour journey or more. Its crazy. Worried that he would not make it to base on time, the soldier concluded: It is a disgrace that people who give their lives for the country need to become stuck because of religious coercion and the prime minister.

Before entering a cabinet meeting on Sunday morning, Yaakov Litzman, who has spearheaded the work cancellations on Shabbat and pushed for the change in the trains' operational hours, told the press, It didnt need to get to a desecration of Shabbat.
Parents at a school in Jerusalem and another in Haifa have declared a strike on Sunday.

The parents at the national-religious school Harel in Jerusalem are protesting Mayor Nir Barkat's plan to temporarily move some of the students to the nearby ultra-Orthodox school Ohel Rachel, until the construction of the former school is completed.

Meanwhile, parents at the Netivot Moshe school in the Kiryat Shmuel neighborhood in Haifa are protesting overcrowding at the school.
While Israels roads are still expected to remain jammed until the Haifa-Tel Aviv line is reopened in the evening upon completion of maintenance work, it appears that the political storm has calmed as senior Likud officials say that the possibility of Prime Minister Netanyahu firing Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz has been removed from the table.

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According to the officials, Netanyahu heeded the advice not to fire Katz so as to avoid turning him into a public hero who voiced his anger over the chaotic situation of public transport.

On Saturday night, the prospect of Katz becoming the next victim of Netanyahus political hit list was a serious possibility. However, after an extremely tense cabinet meeting, during which the two exchanged not a single word and Netanyahu signalled a clear threat against Katz, the option seems to have been scratched.

Photo: Reuters

The tension comes on the heels of the Shabbat-train dispute which continued to dominate the headlines and political agenda at the beginning of yet another week.

Katz became a source of irritation for Netanyahu when the two publicly locked horns in recent weeks over the issue. Before the meeting, Katz refused to comment on the matter during a meeting with Likud ministers. Netanyahu however, did not remain silent. I wont let anyone launch a putsch against me, he said earlier Sunday morning.

During his opening cabinet remarks, the prime minister wasted no time in addressing the matter.

Prime Minister Netanyahu and Yisrael Katz (Photo: Yael Friedson)

This crisis is completely unnecessary; there was no need for it to come to this. There has been a status quo in Israel for many years. When work needs to be done on Shabbat, it is done, just as it was last Saturday on the Ayalon Highway, Netanyahu said.

When work doesn't have to be done on Shabbat, they it isn't. This is the rule that has been guiding us and will continue guiding us. Over the past seven years, the government has invested close to NIS 30 billion in a massive expansion of the roads, train tracks, and, of course, in building interchanges, tunnels, etc., he continued. We've succeeded in doing all of that without any unnecessary crises. When you don't want a crisis, it can be avoided. I expected full cooperation from all of the ministers."

Asked earlier on Sunday whether Netanyahu had decided to fire Katz, Coalition Chairman MK David Bitan (Likud) did not deny it. It is a possible option. We are trying to avoid this but at the moment we are not succeeding in doing so, Bitan said during an interview with Ynet. There is a serious confidence crisis and this is an option from his point of view. We are trying to stop the decision.

Soldiers scramble for the bus to arrive on time to their bases (Photo: Motti Kimchi)

Bitan went on to say, I suggested all kinds of compromises. Today things are not good and the situation needs to be calmed. I am trying but the way to do it is to work in harmony so that that we can solve the crisis together. The minister can cooperate with the prime minister in order to solve the crisis. We need to find a compromise.

Addressing the ongoing political dispute with the Haredi party, Bitan described it as real. No one understands why the Israel Railways is insisting on doing things the way it is and creating a real crisis.

The inconvenience was caused when, last week, a political furor broke out over planned infrastructure-improvement construction that was supposed to take place during Shabbat, when the trains do not run.

Packed bus as main train line disabled

The ultra-Orthodox factions in the government objected and threatened to withdraw from the coalitioneffectively bringing down the government. Under pressure, the prime minister proposed a compromise in which he suggested that out of the 20 projects that Israel Railways had requested to undertake on Shabbat, 17 would be cancelled. On Friday however, Haredi politicians insisted that all 20 projects be cancelled.

Giving in to Haredi demands, Netanyahu's decision caused major disruptions to the public transport networks as the Haifa-Tel Aviv line was put out of operations for maintenance work on Sunday, leading to heavy traffic buildups, massive lines at bus staions and crowded buses. Haphazard solutions were sought such as Egged bus company sending 140 extra buses to the roads. However, huge delays were caused and traffic mounted significantly.
LONDON - British Prime Minister Theresa May has warned that Britain faces some "difficult times" as it prepares to leave the European Union following the June referendum.

She told the Andrew Marr Show in an interview broadcast Sunday that not all would be "plain sailing" as Britain withdraws from the 28-nation bloc.

She said in her first extended interview since taking office that she will not call an early election because Britain needs stability.

She said she would not "pretend" leaving the EU would be easy despite some encouraging recent economic news.

Nevertheless, May says she is certain Britain will make a success of its departure from the bloc and will also find economic opportunities outside the EU.
Leonard Pitts, a once-thoughtful writer, descends yet again into his leftist myopia by suggesting that conservative America is to blame for a decline in fact-acknowledging, objective discourse ("How conservative pundits wrecked the idea of fact," Aug. 25). However, Mr. Pitts should consider important realities.

The decline in informed and educated discourse, which he laments, has been powered by an education establishment wedded to the very politicians that Pitts supports. Conservative activists are not the people on American campuses that are shouting down speakers they dont like or forcing others to uninvite speakers they dont want to hear.

Whatever influences talk radio hosts or other alternative media have in the culture is far outweighed by leftist domination in the academic world, media, and popular culture, while the acceptable media Mr. Pitts recommends have had to retract numerous stories and have seen their people exposed as frauds.

Conservatives are not calling for the trial and imprisonment of people they disagree with on environmental issues. Conservative thinkers are not the ones who have attacked, through published discourse, the very concept of truth; this is the postmodern fashion of notable and influential leftist philosophers and lesser lights in the world of education and literature.

Richard Terrell, Lincoln
After three years of drought in northern Israel, the forecast for the first half of the coming winter is not very encouraging.

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According to the forecast, which was prepared by the Water Authority, the first half of the winter is expected to have lower-than-average rainfall.

Officials at the Water Authority said if this forecast does prove accurate, the Kinneretone of Israel's main water sourcescould reach its lowest point over the past decade, lowering the water level in the lake as well as the levels of ground water down to 1-1.5 meters below the red lines.

Photo: Motti Kimchi

The Hydrologic Service at the Water Authority prepares a seasonal weather forecast ahead of every winter to examine evaluations made regarding the water supply to the public.

This forecast is based on an analysis of a series of climate models and has in recent years proved to be highly accurate. At this point, a highly likely forecast is only possible for the first half of the winteruntil December.

Desalination facilities have helped Israel become less reliant on rainfall for its water supply, but desalinized water has several disadvantages: It's more expensive, the desalination process takes a lot of energy, and the desalinized water is lacking in important minerals.

Israelis at the Kinneret during Passover (Photo: Kinneret Authority)

The lack of sufficient rainfall would also necessitate the use of water from other sources to water crops.

The rain season began last year with a big storm, which caused flooding in the coastal area. But in northern Israel, the last winter has been particularly dry.

Over the weekend, the Kinneret's water level stood at some 30 centimeters below the lower red line, despite the fact water pumping from it has been reduced. Over the summer, the Jordan River has also come close to drying out.
At an economic summit in China, President Barack Obama is turning attention to the Islamic State group, consulting with the leaders of Turkey and Britain, important allies with their own challenges at home.

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Obama has not met with Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, since an attempted coup nearly toppled Erdogan's government in July. The attempted overthrow has led to accusations of US involvement, and those tensions have been aggravated by growing clashes between Turkish forces and US-backed Syrian Kurds.

Also on Obama's schedule Sunday was a first meeting with Theresa May, the new British prime minister who is managing her country's exit from the European Union after the leave side won a referendum.

Preident Barack Obama in China (Photo: EPA)

Obama arrived Saturday in Hangzhou, an eastern lakeside city, for the economic summit. On probably his final visit to Asia as president, he was quick to underscore what he views as a success in an otherwise rocky relationship with his Chinese hosts.

Obama and President Xi Jinping announced they had committed their nations to a landmark climate deal brokered last year in Paris. The two, representing the world's two biggest carbon dioxide emitters, formally submitted documents marking their commitment. The move puts the deal closer to taking effect, potentially by year's end.

Still, the announcement only papered over long-standing tensions surrounding cybersecurity, maritime disputes and human rights. Both presidents signaled that those subjects were at the heart of private discussions lasting late into the night.

Differences over open government and media freedoms were evident from the moment Air Force One landed in Hangzhou.

As Obama was greeted on a red carpet, a Chinese official yelled at White House officials and traveling journalists to get back.

"This is our country! This is our airport!" the official shouted.

Even Obama's national security adviser, Susan Rice, and her deputy, Ben Rhodes, were briefly caught up as the official tried to keep them away, too.

Obama officials were jeered upon arrival in China (Photo: AP)

Chinese officials sparred with their American counterparts into the evening, with quarrels up to the last minute about how many officials and journalists would be allowed to witness meetings.

The summit's second day promised to highlight another frustrating relationship for the American leader.

The coup attempt in Turkey has accelerated the deterioration in the relationship between Turkey and the United States. The Obama administration has expressed concerns about Erdogan's crackdown on the press and, in the weeks since the coup, mass firings of teachers, military personnel and others accused of associating with the opposition.

The US is worried about Turkey's recent operations across its border into Syria . The Pentagon has backed the incursions, but said they should only be aimed at IS fighters.

Turkey has used the operations to push back Syrian Kurds it accuses of seeking to claim more territory.

For the US, the dispute is a reminder of its increasing entanglement in the long-standing local rivalries and conflicts exposed by Syria's civil war.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (Photo: AFP)

Since the failed coup, the US has been alarmed by Turkey's diplomatic flirtations with Russia, Syrian President Bashar Assad's patron, and apparent softening of its tone about the need for Assad to be excluded from a political transition. At the same time, the US continues to work toward an agreement with Russia to cooperate more closely in the fight against IS in Syria.

Obama told CNN in an interview yet to be broadcast Sunday that Turkey is an important NATO ally and cooperation on security issues hasn't been affected.

"What we want to do is indicate to them the degree to which we support the Turkish people," he said. "But like any good friend, we want to give them honest feedback if we think that the steps they're taking are going to be contrary to their long-term interests and our partnership."

Obama's talks with Theresa May were expected to include an update on the IS campaign, and May's strategy for managing the departure from the EU. Obama has said Britain's decision to leave the EU would not harm the "special relationship" between the two countries but he has warned Britain to be prepared for economic ramifications.
Two residents of Silwan in East Jerusalem were detained on Sunday morning after they worked to remove concrete roadblocks placed in the neighborhood, thinking they were put by the police as part of security measures in the area.

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The roadblocks, however, were put there by the municipal water company Hagihon to stop cars from entering a road where infrastructure work was being done.

During the police questioning, the suspects claimed they were acting on instructions from others in Silwan, who told them authorization was given to remove the roadblocks.

Silwan residents working to remove concrete roadblocks

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Police investigators, however, were not convinced and are looking to see if there is enough evidence to prosecute them.

Maor Tzemach, Chairman of the organization 'Lach Yerushalayim' (To Thee Jerusalem), which seeks to apply Israeli sovereignty in all parts of Jerusalem, said that "There is great importance in doing the (infrastructure) work to provide municipal services to the residents of East Jerusalem. Unfortunately, extremist groups that oppose Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem time and again incite the residents, leading them to think the State of Israel was hurting their daily lives, even when there is work done to benefit them. The Israel Police should handle anyone who harms or interrupts the infrastructure work in East Jerusalem."

In October 2015, at the height of the wave of stabbing attacks, the cabinet authorized the police to impose a closure of Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem based on operational considerations.

Among others, concrete roadblocks were stationed in entryways to Jabel Mukaber a day after three terrorists who resided there committed two attacks in Jerusalem, murdering three Israelis.
With Russian tourism to Israel on the decline in recent years, the Israeli Ministry of Tourism in Moscow has undertaken a unique project in cooperation with the National Geographic in an effort to give it a boost.

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An exhibition of works by different Israeli photographers will be held in one of the main streets in the Russian capital over the course of the coming week which shows Israel in its best light. The name of the exhibition is entitled, Israel: The entire world in one country.

Photo of the Western Wall in the Old City (Photo: Israeli Ministry of Tourism in Moscow)

After a week in which a pro-Israel rally was held in Swedenin which Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid participated in response to growing anti-Semitism in Europe in general and Sweden in particular on the heels of the BDS movementIsraelis could find solace in the fact that some countries in the world are still prepared to portray the country in a more positive light.

Exhibition advertised in Russia (Photo: Israeli Ministry of Tourism in Moscow)

The exhibition is taking place on Moscows central avenue, Tsvetnoy Boulevard, and is open to the general public. More than 60 photographs, which were taken by known Israeli photographers, will be displayed. In addition to the exhibition itself, the National Geographic created a special website dedicated to the Israeli exhibition.

The entire world in one country

National Geographic has good relations with us and they approached us asking us to do the exhibition together, said Ksenia Kobiakov, the director of the Ministry of Israeli Tourism in Moscow.

Photos of Israel in the exhibition (Photo: Israeli Ministry of Tourism in Moscow)

Kobiakov also described the difficulty in choosing which pictures to add to the display. After thousands of photos taken by Israeli photographers were sent to the ministry, they were carefully picked by the bureau and the Russian National Geographic. It was important to us that we chose the most beautiful photos which best represent Israel, she said.

It was important to us to first show Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and the contrast between the two cities. Moreover, we wanted to show that we have entire worlds in one country, and therefore we couldnt help but also show Israels wonderful nature, whether it be the desert in the south, the Dead Sea, Eilat to the north.

Thank you for bringing the the Israeli summer here

Kobiakov said that the reactions of passers-by was extremely good and posited that the reason for this was that the Russian summer was very short and is going to conclude in the coming days.

Russian passers-by enjoy the photos of Israel

This, at least, is what she said people were saying at the exhibition, which is supposed to continue until the end of September. Thank you for bringing the Israeli sun here, she said people say.

Those who already visited Israel say that the photos fill them with a sense of nostalgia and those who have not been say now we really want to go to Israel, Kobiakov said, adding that despite the economic crisis in Russia, Russian tourism continues in Israel. Israel is really ideal for the Russian public, she concluded.
Someone needs to be held accountable and pay the price for the colossal damageno lessdone to a large part of the public, who spent its Saturday night and Sunday morning stuck in traffic . Someone needs to provide an acceptable explanation to the thousands of soldiers who had to find alternative ways to get back to base this morning. And to us, the general public, who watches flabbergasted as a belligerent, inter-party political dispute paralyzes an entire country.

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A crazy country: There is no other way of describing what's going on here. Every time we think we've reached a new low of cynicism, paranoia and distrustit turns out things could be worse, and that we've yet to see it all.

Let us not be confused: There is nothing else to this. Don't let anyone tell you tales. It's all politicspathetic, petty, interest-based, self-centered politics. There's a power struggle here, a fight over authority and credit. This is something that in a normal country would not have affected the operations of the train system.

Katz and Netanyahu in today's cabinet meeting (Photo: AFP)

On Saturday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz of holding an entire public hostage, of trying to mount a putsch and dismantle the coalitionall sorts of things.

But I believe that the question everyone in Israel is asking is: Where is the prime minister? Who should take responsibility over the fact there is a crisis in the coalition, the likes of which we haven't seen in years; that the status quo, which has been working for years in peace and quiet, was so blatantly violated; and that a crisis artificially created to undermine a minister instead hurt an entire country?

There is one sentence that perfectly sums up the fiasco that has been going on here over the past 24 hours: "He who digs a pit will fall into it."

The prime minister tried to incite his ultra-Orthodox coalition partners against Minister Katz while making promises to them that he cannot keepand found himself deep in a pit he will have a hard time climbing out of.

The escalation of the conflict with Katz and the strange statements coming out of the PMO, as well as the pathetic interview the PMO's chief of staff, Yoav Horowitz, gave Channel 2were all meant to draw fire away from the fact the prime minister completely capitulated to the ultra-Orthodox parties. We can only hope that Horowitz was better at selling cars than he was selling us on explanations for Netanyahu's actions.

Soldiers crowding around shuttle buses in Tel Aviv (Photo: Motti Kimchi)

And it's not like the prime minister doesn't know what's been going on in Israel all of these years. He's supposed to know the law and the procedures regarding work on Shabbat. He's supposed to know the law allows work on Shabbat not just in cases of Pikuach Nefesh (a Jewish principle which permits most transgressions, such as violating Shabbat, if a life is at risk), but also for vital works. He's supposed to know the police opinion that determined these works must not be done during the week, as it could endanger lives.

He knows that when Deri was the economy minister, he issued permits to work on Shabbat, and when Netanyahu replaced the Shas leader, he himself issued such permits. In fact, it's quite possible many of the permits that are supposed to be used for the train works were given while Netanyahu was the economy minister.

Disassembled train lines (Photo: Israel Railways)

But the urge, oh the urge! Netanyahu could not miss an opportunity to put the blame on Katz, the strongest minister in the Likud party today. Those in the prime minister's inner circle are fanning the flames, encouraging him to get rid of Katz. Netanyahu's instincts, driven by paranoia and distrust, are pushing him towards the inevitablegetting rid of his successful minister.

Netanyahu's problem is that Katz is not just any other minister. He's not Gideon Sa'ar, Moshe Kahlon or Moshe Ya'alon. He won't quit politics and wait on the sidelines for the right moment to return to center stage. He'll stay close. Close enough to breathe down Netanyahu's neck. He will stay in the faction and invest his time in politics. Lots of politics. Or in other words: He will be a thorn in Netanyahu's side.

If I were Netanyahu, I would do anything to prevent that from happening. The last thing he wants right now is for the head of the Likud secretariat, Yisrael Katzwho is close to the head of the Likud center, Haim Katzto have time on his hands. Lots of time.

If I were Netanyahu, I'd be trying to claw my way back out of the pit he fell into.
KUWAIT CITY - The Gulf nation of Kuwait has warned citizens traveling to the US to check their phones and laptops to ensure they do not contain any material that could be linked to extremist groups.

The official Kuwait News Agency reported Saturday that the Kuwaiti Embassy to Washington also urged citizens to "cooperate fully" with American airport officials seeking access to their devices.

It warns that immigration officials could interrogate Kuwaitis and cancel entry visas if extremist photos, videos or other materials are found.

The warning comes after Kuwaiti media reported that three Kuwaitis were refused entry to the US earlier this year.
The police and Shin Bet have arrested Moshe Yinon Oren, an 18-year-old right-wing activist from the West Bank Jewish settlement outpost Givat Ronen Aroussi, for allegedly firing a gun at a moving vehicle.

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Oren is accused of firing an air gun at a Palestinian cab, following an incident in which Oren was forced to move to the side of the road by said cab. The air-gunfire pierced the taxi's back window, but no injuries were caused by the incident. The official indictment Oren is facing does not mention any nationalistic motives for his actions.

Searching his home, authorities found the air pistol that was allegedly used in the incident, air gun ammo, several propane tanks, an empty 5.56 ammunition clip (the kind of ammunition used in the standard-issue IDF M-16 assault rifle), a slingshot, and a metal box with tire-piercing spikes. Oren confessed to the charges during questioning.

Evidence found at Moshe Yinon Oren's home. (Photo: Israel Police)

According to the indictment presented to the court on Sunday, the incident took place on August 24. Moshe Yinon Oren was allegedly driving an ATV , with the Palestinian taxi cab driving the opposite way. At a certain point, the cab diverged from its path, forcing Oren to turn away, onto the side of the road. The indictment claims that Oren then made a U-turn, chased the cabin which five Palestinian laborers were ridingpulled out his air gun, fired, and broke the rear window.

The damadged back windshield of the Palestinian cab. (Photo: Israel Police)

Prosecutors came to the conclusion that the motive for the incident could not be discerned to have been necessarily related to nationalistic sentiment, and so Oren was indicted merely for the crime of firing at a vehicle.

Oren's attorney, Itay Rozin, responded by saying, "This is a young guy ahead of his IDF enlistment, who felt (he was in) danger as a result of the wild driving by the plaintiffs and used an air gun, which is a toy gun. This is not a 'price tag' action," later adding, "It's inconceivable that my client's place of residence would lead to the decision to have the case investigated by the Shin Bet, and (the decision) to bar him from seeing an attorney, while severely and continuously doing harm to his basic rights."
BUDAPEST  The daughter of late, Hungarian-born US Congressman Tom Lantos is returning a distinguished state award to Hungary to protest the bestowing of the same award to journalist and writer Zsolt Bayer, who has made anti-Semitic and racist references in his articles.

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Dr. Katrina Lantos Swett, who received the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit in 2009, joined over 100 other recipients in returning their awards.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington earlier called on Prime Minister Viktor Orban and President Janos Ader, who respectively nominated and granted the award to Bayer to "immediately" rescind it.

Ader's office told news website hvg.hu that based on current laws the award couldn't be recalled.

Szolt Bayer at Hungary's National Day in Budapest (Photo: Derzsi Elekes Andor: Metapolisz)

Lantos Swett was honored for her work in setting up the Budapest-based Tom Lantos Institute, which focuses on minority rights. Tom Lantos, a California Democrat who died in 2008, was the only Holocaust survivor in the US Congress.

Lantos Swett said that she had hoped to leave the award to her children, but felt Bayer's distinction had "sullied" the Knight's Cross.

"Mr. Bayer's despicable record of overt and hateful anti-Semitism and racism is beneath contempt. He deserves censure, not honor, for his loathsome writings and speech," Lantos Swett said in a statement, adding that she was sure her father "would call on Hungary to restore the honor and virtue of this award by stripping Mr. Bayer of this unmerited recognition."

Daily newspaper Magyar Hirlap was fined by media authorities in 2013 and earlier this year for hateful remarks about Roma and Muslims in Bayer's columns.

In 2013, writing about a New Year's Eve bar fight in which several people were seriously injured and some of the attackers were identified as Roma, Bayer wrote, "A significant part of the Roma are unfit for coexistence. They are not fit to live among people. These Roma are animals, and they behave like animals."

In a November 2015 column about the migrant crisis and extremism, Bayer said all Muslims older than 14 were "potential murderers."

Bayer was distinguished with the Knight's Cross on August 20 for his writings about the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, the fates of Hungarian prisoners in the Soviet Gulag prison system and for his "exemplary journalistic activities."

Bayer told website Mandiner.hu that receiving the award required him to be more restrained and, for example, abandon the foul language he often uses in his columns. Last year, he also said he regretted using some of the phrases deemed to be racist or anti-Semitic.

The Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities issued an ironic statement saying that the government had given Bayer the award to cheer up the "unsuccessful and grumpy" journalist, since his "frustrated cursing, and monotonous, hysterical and pitiful hatred harms not only he himself but the public mood, as well."

Several earlier recipients of state awards, including Miklos Haraszti, a former OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, were planning to auction off their medals on Sunday in benefit of destitute children and families, but the event was canceled.

Auction sponsor Klubradio, which the Orban government tried for years to ban from the airwaves, said it was called off because organizers of a street festival where the auction would have been held asked for its cancellation because of its political nature.
HONG KONG - Voters have turned out in force for Hong Kong's crucial Legislative Council election.

Turnout appeared to be higher than average, with long lines of people still waiting to cast ballots at some polling stations by the time voting was supposed to end Sunday night. Some 52.6 percent of nearly 3.8 million registered voters had turned out an hour before polls closed, matching the total turnout for the previous election four years ago. Turnout in the 2008 election was 45.2 percent, according to the government's website.

The vote for Legislative Council is seen as Hong Kong's most important election since the handover from Britain in 1997, and will test the unity of Hong Kong's pro-democracy camp.
A little over a year after the Iran nuclear deal was signed , it seems that some of the predictions that accompanied it have failed the test of time. Those who assumed Iran would do anything to avoid implementing the agreement were wrong, as were those who thought it would strengthen democratic forces in the Shi'ite state and weaken the Islamists. Those who thought Iran would continue talks with the US after the deal were mistaken, and so were those who thought it would be flooded with European investments.

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In practice, Iran strengthened its ties to Russia and Syria, rather than Europe or the US. The conservatives tightened their grip on the state and reinvigorated the witch hunts against their opponents. Western corporations are still far from investing in Iranian markets, not just because of the difficulty in acquiring guarantees and funding, but because of the non-measurable risks that usually accompany investing in these kinds of countries. It took British Airways a year to open a line to Tehran. Not many other airlines are eagerly awaiting their turn.

Protesters against the Iran deal. Many assumptions have not stood the test of time. (Photo: Reuters)

Reality, then, is showing us a different view of this deal than before. Iran, according to it, lost the willand the moneyto keep developing its military-side nuclear capabilities. It basically gave those up, but did not give up the image held in the eyes of the worldthat it wanted to be seen as a nuclear power. For nearly a decade, until 2013, this image served Iran quite well. Its influence in the Muslim world grew, nations started to treat it with respect. The Iranians' vagueness and braggadocio also fitted the character of its president between 2005 and 2013, Mahmoud Ahmadinejada man of both proud vision and paranoid sentiment.

This vagueness became less and less of an asset in the two years that preceded the nuclear deal. The state's investments in the development and acquisition of unneeded nuclear technologies became more and more burdensome to the local economy, and were less and less justifiable by the excuse of local scientific advancement. Israel was shouting, the West was ratcheting up sanctions and badly hurting the economy's coreoil exportswhich had been decreased already. When the cost of the boasts exceeded their value, Iran initiated talks with the United States. The Iranians intended on selling a product they did not yet ownone called "future nuclear weapons armament."

The moment the deal was signed, Western countries only heard the quiet sound of shut-down turbines. (Archive photo)

And this gamble by the leaders in Tehran paid off. They "gave up" their non-existent plans to bring about their military-nuclear capabilities, and in return got the sanctions halted, were embraced by the world, andmost of allwere given almost total internal and external freedom of action. The moment the ink on the signed deal dried, the only thing Western statesmen noticed was the number of idle centrifuges and the amount of enriched uranium that was destroyed.

As if by magic, the West ceased to be interested in the assistance Iran was providing to the mass murderer Bashar Assad. Leaders in western capitals looked away from Iranian human rights violations as well: The arrests, detentions, the stomping out of free speech. Recently, we even found out that Iranian leaders managed to squeeze a ransom payment from the Obama administration, consisting of hundreds of millions of dollars that went straight into the same leaders' pockets, in return for the release of American citizens held in Iranian jails.

US Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. (Photo: Reuters)

The removal of international sanctions (some American sanctions are still present) has not changed the overall dismal picture of the Iranian economy. The main blocks to its development are still government oversight of major markets, a lack of preservation of property rights, huge government spending on subsidies, a decades-old technology gap, and the infamous Revolutionary Guard's control of about a third of the economy.

The government in Tehran is far from implementing the Chinese model of a global, growing, capitalistic economy, alongside cultural freedoms and a one-party rule (albeit one that is free of idiology). The Ayatollahs definitely don't want thatwhatever their opinions on nuclear misadventures may be.
Don Walton Political reporter/columnist Don Walton covers politics and the Legislature along with writing a weekly column. Follow Don Walton Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today

Game on.

"Not a high tax or spending state" was the message on the video screens in the attractive conference room at Nebraska Innovation Campus one morning last week.

That was an assessment of Nebraska's comparative position among the states.

And it was accompanied by a reminder of the substantial "budget shortfalls" that already have been opened by a continuing decline in anticipated state revenue.

Add in the approaching spending pressures, including those created by continuing challenges at the Department of Correctional Services that are going to take big bucks to help resolve and the needs of a growing and aspirational University of Nebraska as it enters the two-year state budget phase with new leadership at the helm.

That was the big picture painted by the OpenSky Policy Institute with lots of state senators seated throughout the room and a number of them perched on the stage.

Not the same picture that was sketched at a Platte Institute forum last month that made the case for tax reform that reduces top-line corporate and individual income tax rates while broadening the sales tax base and reducing corporate tax credits.

Those are battle lines.

And they are being drawn four months before the 2017 Legislature convenes in January and begins to tackle a plate full of hot potatoes.

Gov. Pete Ricketts is expected to propose a tax cut package of his own.

Sen. Jim Smith of Papillion will be authoring a comprehensive legislative proposal, one which he earlier suggested might be similar to the plan aired at the Platte Institute gathering.

Smith sat on the stage at the OpenSky event along with three fellow senators to answer questions about the revenue issue, and he quickly distanced himself from the premise that Nebraska is not in need of more tax reduction.

"Nebraska does have a tax issue," he said, and the state needs tax reform to create jobs and "provide for its growth needs," which, in turn, would increase revenue over time.

Speaker of the Legislature Galen Hadley of Kearney pointed to the recent legislative history of virtually annual tax cuts that already have reduced revenue by $750 million over the past 10 years.

And Sen. Paul Schumacher of Columbus raised a caution flag.

"Obsession with taxes blinds us to opportunities and challenges," he said.

This is going to be a legislative battle and it's already begun.

* * *

Continuing evidence that the Clinton campaign is really going for it in Omaha keeps emerging as the Democratic nominee pursues a single Nebraska presidential electoral vote.

House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer showed up last week to host a "working families organizing group" in Omaha a couple of days after the campaign held an event in Lincoln where it gathered volunteers to help in the Omaha district campaign.

Eight years ago, the Obama campaign also looked to Lincoln Democrats to help in Omaha.

Best guess today is Clinton wins Lincoln in November while Trump wins the 1st Congressional District electoral vote, which would appear to be out of reach for a Democratic presidential nominee. Bill Clinton won Lincoln twice.

Up the road, Clinton would appear to have a good chance of snagging metropolitan Omaha's 2nd District vote just as Obama did in 2008, although that district always is very competitive. Marginal in political terms.

The state itself is a virtual lock for Trump with the R behind his name.

Aggressive voter registration, identification and turnout efforts in Omaha by the Clinton campaign, which mirror the Obama campaign's successful effort to energize new and occasional voters eight years ago, presumably could have some impact in other election contests.

The first to come to mind is Democratic Rep. Brad Ashford's re-election bid.

But Obama's win in the Omaha district did not lead the way to a Democratic congressional victory in 2008. Each contest has a life of its own.

Obama bested John McCain by 10,000 votes in Douglas County eight years ago, while losing the congressional district's strongly Republican Sarpy County precincts by 7,000 votes.

Subsequent redistricting by the Legislature following the 2010 census purposely strengthened the Republican hand in the district.

In November, it will be a battleground.

* * *

Prem Paul was a gift to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the key figure in its research funding surge.

His contribution to the university and to the state and to students will continue.

That is a powerful and lasting legacy.

Finishing up

* David Brooks comes to the Lied Center for an E.N. Thompson Forum look at the 2016 election on Oct. 4, a month before the nation chooses between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and a week after their first presidential debate.

* It's hard to even imagine what that "debate" will look like and how the referee, uh, moderator, will be able to control it.

* The developing spring 2017 mayor's race up Interstate 80 between Omaha Mayor Jean Stothert and Sen. Heath Mello should be a heavyweight struggle worth watching. More on that later.

* Mixed message from the Huskers on Saturday with Ragtime Cowboy Joe now riding our way. Time to fix the leaks and establish early-game dominance before that big, high-scoring Duck waddles into Lincoln.
Randi Zuckerberg, an entrepreneur, radio host and sister to Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, discussed and encouraged "unplugging" from electronic devices on Shabbat while at the One-to-One forum in New York this past June.

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Zuckerberg, who currently has over 1.75 million Facebook followers, worked at the social media giant until 2011, when she founded Zuckerberg Media, a social media firm. Though she works in digital media, she still advocates taking a regular break and unplugging.

The One-to-One Global Forum, which organizers described as being inspired by the late Chabad Lubavitch Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, "seeks to inspire a groundswell of collaborative, focused, public good."

: onetoone.global

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The 12-hour event, a nonstop relay discussion with some 75 leading changemakers from around the world included former New York Mayor David Dinkins, Israel Prize Laureate Prof. Mordechai Shani, US Senator Joseph Lieberman, and filmmaker Abigail Disney.

Addressing the forum, Zuckerberg discussed the concept of unplugging from the perpetual connection to one's telephone.

She said, "I find that it's so important in my own life. Any big entrepreneur, any CEO you talk tothey're not coming up with the world-changing ideas by being constantly plugged in and constantly on text message, distracted, getting emails. You can only come up with those amazing world-changing ideas by giving yourself the time and space distraction-free to be creativeIn my own life, I definitely take the time to unplug."

Speaking outside the forum's venue, the New York Public Library, Zuckerberg gave an interview to Rabbi Avraham Berkowitz that was broadcast on Facebook Live and said, "I talk about unplugging a lot, and people are like, 'Wow, that's such a new conceptso exciting,' and I'm like, 'Well, it's not actually that new. This is like a multi-thousand-year-old concept of Shabbat and unplugging and taking time."

She continued, holding up her iPhone, "I think these devices are amazing; it's the whole reason that we're talking to you live right now, the whole reason I can be a working mom and travel, but then there's time and space to put it away and focus on the people you love. Tech should bring you closer to the people you love, not put up a barrier."

The organizers explained that the event was inspired by the New York Times best-selling biography, Rebbe , by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, as a source for information and inspiration from Schneerson, and many of the forum's speakers referenced it.
The Shabbat train crisis , which led to a bit of a transportation mess in Israel, also reverberated in the ultra-Orthodox press, which stood firmly by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday. The ultra-Orthodox media also criticized Netanyahu's main rival in the matter, Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz, who supported conducting renovation and repair operations on Saturday.

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Yated Ne'eman's headline said "Transportation minister starts sinister incitement wave," implying that Katz's advocacy of the Shabbat work, and the fact that it was halted, causing heavy delays in service on Sunday, would lead to the Israeli non-ultra-Orthodox public's disapproval of the ultra-Orthodox public as a whole.

The lack of train availability caused a mass transit mess on Sunday in Israel.

Hamevaser, which is affiliated with Agudat Yisrael, one of the two factions that make up the United Torah Judaism Knesset party, wrote, "(Answering the demand of the ultra-Orthodox parties), the prime minister halted the Shabbat violations that were to occur at Israel Railways."

Hamodia, in an editorial, made a connection between the loss of the Amos 6 satellite, which exploded at Cape Canaveral in Florida, USA, on Thursday, September 1, and work that is done on Shabbat. "We don't know what the calculations (of the divine) are. And so, it would not be correct to say, 'this event happened because of that deed.' Schadenfreude is not a Jewish quality, and we are of course not  god forbid  happy (about the suffering of) the people of Israel Aerospace Industries and all of those involved with the Amos 6 satellite, which exploded on the ground before its launch, which was set to take place on the holy Shabbat day, while massively desecrating the Shabbat. On the contrary, we desire their success."
The world's main scouting organization on Sunday said it has no connection to a Palestinian troop in Jerusalem that dedicated a recent training course to one of the killers of an Israeli-American man.

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Stephen Peck, spokesman for the World Organization of the Scout Movement, said the Jerusalem troop is not a member of his organization's Palestinian affiliate and "has no right to speak or publish on their behalf."

The east Jerusalem troop last month hosted a course dedicated to Baha Alyanone of two Palestinian attackers who shot and stabbed passengers on a Jerusalem bus last October. Alyan was killed by a security guard, while a second assailant survived and is now serving multiple life sentences in an Israeli prison.

Richard Lakin, a retired school principal from Connecticut and advocate for Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, was among three people killed in the attack.

In this Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2015 file photo Israeli ZAKA emergency response members carry the body of an Israeli at the scene of a shooting attack in Jerusalem (Photo: AP)

Lakin's son, Micah Lakin Avni, had appealed to the world scouting movement to expel the Palestinian Scout Association, saying the Alyan course violated the group's core principles.

The Palestinians have two scouting organizations: the globally recognized Palestinian Scout Association and the similarly named Palestinian Scout and Guide Association. The Jerusalem branch belongs to the second group, Peck said.

"The World Organization of the Scout Movement strongly condemns any acts of terrorism and all actions which seek to support them," he said in an emailed statement. "WOSM also condemns any attempts which seek to link our members with any such actions."

"WOSM is the world's largest youth movement with a strong commitment to peace and we will always take the strongest action to uphold these values," he added.

Tawfiq Salem, the general secretary of the recognized association, said his group is "fully committed" to the standards of the world scouting movement.

Richard Lakin killed in stabbing and shooting attack in Armon Hanatziv

"We did not do any course in Jerusalem," he said. He declined to comment on the course, saying he did not want to discuss a "political" matter.

Ahmed Mashahreh, leader of the Jerusalem troop, on Sunday confirmed that his group did not belong to the Palestinian Scout Association.

He had claimed earlier that the recognition of Alyan had "nothing to do with politics." He said Alyan had been a longtime activist in his troop and the dedication was to acknowledge his years of activities.

Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli group that monitors what it says is incitement in Palestinian media and society, rejected the scout movement's conclusions.

In a letter to the movement, it said it had found overwhelming evidence that the two Palestinian scouting groups work closely with one another, including dozens of pictures identifying the same people as leaders of both organizations. The photos indicate "that the organizations are one and the same," it wrote.

Avni said he was "appalled" by the global scouting movement's response.

"There is no question that the Palestinian scouting association has been systematically inciting to violence and murder," he said. "I can't believe any true scout would want its hand in incitement in terror."
DUNCAN, SC - Authorities say they are investigating online threats to kill Jewish and Muslim students at a South Carolina high school.

Spartanburg School District 5 said in a news release that a Byrnes High School student reported the threats Friday evening. The threats said Byrnes High would be attacked Tuesday and included pictures of a person in a gas mask and a knife with a swastika on the handle.

Superintendent Scott Turner says Spartanburg County deputies are patrolling the school the holiday weekend, and there will be security sweeps and extra officers on hand when school returns Tuesday.

The sheriff's office says it is investigating the threats, but no arrests have been made.

Byrnes High has about 2,300 students and is one of the largest high schools in South Carolina.
Following the "spillover firing" of a mortar from Syrian that landed in the Golan Heights, the IDF attacked on Sunday night Syrian army artillery. The shell fired into Israel was part of intra-national Syrian fighting, and it landed in an open area, not causing any injuries or damage.

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The IDF responded by attacking artillery belonging to Syrian regime in the northern Syrian Golan Heights. The IDF stated that it saw the Syrian regime as responsible for the goings-on in its territory and would not tolerate any attempt to harm the State of Israel's sovereignty or the security of its citizens. No special instructions were given to the civilian population, and the normal routine of inhabitants in the Golan Heights has not been affected.

IDF soldiers in Golan Heights (Archive photo: EPA)

A senior military official told the official Syrian news agency, "The Israeli enemy is continuing to support terrorist organizations, and it attacked in the area of the village of Khdeir with two missiles fired from an unmanned Israel aircraft. As a result, damage was caused." That source did not report any injuries as a result.

Syrian media identified with the regime reported that unverified sources were claiming that the IDF had attacked two targets aerially. The first was in the northwest village of Harfa and the second was in the Tel al-Shaer region.

At the same time, the Al-Mayadeen network, which is affiliated with Hezbollah, reported that the IDF carried out four attacks on Syrian military targets in the area of Quneitra.

A Syrian army official stated to the Russian news agency Sputnik that an unmanned Israeli aircraft carried out the attack with three missiles. That report did not mention injury or damage.

During the five years of warfare in Syria, a few shells have exploded in the Israeli Golan Heights as part of fire exchange between the warring parties. The IDF usually returns fire towards the shells' place of provenance.
The Israeli military says it has fired at Syrian army cannons in the Syrian Golan Heights in response to mortar fire from Syria that hit the Israeli-held Golan Heights.

The army says that the mortars appeared to be errant fire from Syria's civil war, and were not deliberately targeting Israeli-held territory.

No injuries were reported Sunday.

The military says it holds the Syrian government accountable for the "blatant breach of Israeli sovereignty."
OMAHA  The parents of the toddler who was killed by an alligator at Walt Disney World in Florida say they will always remember their sweet little boy.

Melissa and Matt Graves spoke to a group of several hundred people gathered at a high school stadium Saturday to remember Lane Graves on what would have been his third birthday.

Lane died June 14 after an alligator pulled him into a lagoon at Disney's upscale Grand Floridian Resort. He was gathering sand for a sand castle when the gator bit his head. The final report on his death said the boy died from a crushing bite and drowning and that his dad reached into the alligator's mouth to try to save the boy.

After Lane's death, Disney made changes to restrict visitor contact with alligators on the property. Fences and other barriers were built around some of the lakes, and "No Fishing" signs were installed around waterfront areas. Disney World also limited fishing to excursions.

Melissa Graves said the family wanted to celebrate Lane's "first birthday in heaven."

"You'll always be Mommy's loving, sweet, baby boy. ... We miss you, buddy, and we miss those hugs and kisses," Melissa Graves said.

Matt Graves said Lane's life brought joy to the family.

"My wife will tell you those are the happiest days of her life, and I couldn't agree with her more," he said. "Happy birthday, buddy."

He also said he appreciated all the support the family received from the community after Lane's death. The family also has a 4-year-old daughter.

The crowd wore blue shirts and released blue balloons into the air.

Matt and Melissa Graves offered M&M cookies because they were Lane's favorite treat and handed out small silver crosses with blue ribbons attached to a prayer card.

The Graves have said they don't plan to file a lawsuit against Disney World.
MOUNT PLEASANT  Elton John had a Top 10 hit in 1972 with Rocket Man. The Willkomm brothers hope their Rocket Wash will also be a smash.

In the coming months, people will see three new buildings rise from the ground at Green Bay Road (Highway 31) and Spring Street with the $8 million Willkomm development at the southeast corner of Green Bay and Spring. One will be a car wash unlike any other in this area, according to the developers.

Michael Willkomm said the cost of the car wash, which theyve named Rocket Wash, will rival that of the new convenience store/gas station. Only three other car washes in the state have the same technology, he said.

The building itself will stand out in the car wash world: Rocket Wash will be housed in a building that is 140 feet long, 32 feet wide and 20 feet tall. It will be bright inside during daylight hours, with a translucent roof and glass walls.

The technology, from a company in Holland, Mich., is not a conveyor belt wash that requires ones tires to line up exactly into two tracks, Mike said. Instead, the driver will simply drive onto a large conveyor belt that doesnt require exact alignment into tracks.

Three cars a minute can be loaded in, and the wash takes 2 minutes, Mike said.

Three different types of pay lanes will lead the way to the entrance, he explained: an auto-pay lane for credit-card users; a lane where employees take the payment; and the Unlimited Club lane.

With the Unlimited Club, customers will choose the level of car wash they want and pay a monthly amount. A 2-by-2-inch radio frequency tag stuck in a corner of the windshield will tell the car wash what level of service the customer is paying for, and the driver will have no limit on usage. The basic unlimited wash will cost $20 a month and the top-grade treatment $30 a month, Mike said.

They havent determined prices for individual washes but said theyll be competitive within the area.

In addition to 19 blowers, another bit of technology the Rocket Wash will have is brushes at the end of the wash that rotate so they move forward against the car. Their sole purpose is to dry the water droplets on the driver and passenger sides, Mike said.

Outside, after vehicles have passed through the wash, will be 21 free vacuum stations and two free stalls for cleaning car mats.

The Willkomms hope to have the Rocket Wash open first in their corner development; theyre aiming for about Jan. 1.
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Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - Officers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) arrested 101 individuals during an operation that concluded August 26, targeting criminal aliens and other agency enforcement priorities primarily in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

During the 12-day enforcement action, ERO officers apprehended 64 aliens with criminal convictions. The remaining 37 fall under the agencys enforcement priorities as recent immigration violators or important federal interest cases. Those arrested had criminal histories with past convictions for drug trafficking, DUI, weapons violations, child sex offenses, identity theft, and other serious criminal offenses. Two of those taken into custody now face federal prosecution for re-entry after deportation, a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

"ICEs targeted enforcement operations like this one take convicted criminals and other public-safety threats off the streets," said Thomas Decker, field office director for ERO Philadelphia, which covers Pennsylvania, Delaware and West Virginia. "These actions focus our resources on the most egregious offenders and promote public safety in the communities in which we live and work.

Among those arrested were:

A 46-year-old Liberian man with a felony conviction for statutory sexual assault on a minor. He was arrested in Philadelphia, Aug. 15 and will remain in ICE custody pending removal proceedings.

A 57-year-old Jamaican man with a felony conviction for aggravated assault. He was arrested Aug. 15 in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, and will remain in ICE custody pending removal proceedings.

A 29-year-old Sierra Leonean man with prior convictions for DUI, drug possession and corruption of minors. He was arrested in Hamilton, New Jersey, Aug. 19 and will remain in ICE custody pending removal proceedings.

A 22-year-old Mexican man with a prior conviction for carrying a deadly weapon. He was arrested in Huntington, West Virginia, Aug. 26 and will remain in ICE custody pending his removal from the United States.

The foreign nationals arrested during the operation include citizens of 24 countries, including Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Poland, Brazil, Italy, Morocco, Liberia, Guinea, Kenya, Honduras, Jamaica, Georgia, Bahamas, Columbia, Peru, Haiti, Sierra Leone, Korea, Ecuador, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq and India. Those who are not being criminally prosecuted will be processed administratively for removal from the United States. The arrestees who have outstanding orders of deportation, or who returned to the United States illegally after being deported, are subject to immediate removal from the country. The remaining individuals are in ICE custody awaiting a hearing before an immigration judge, or pending travel arrangements for removal in the near future.

All of those apprehended during last weeks operation were immigration enforcement priorities as outlined in Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Jeh Johnsons 2014 memorandum. Priority 1 targets include threats to national security, criminal street gang members, convicted felons, and aggravated felons. Priority 2 targets include individuals with convictions for three or more misdemeanors, or convictions for significant misdemeanors, including DUIs.
RACINE COUNTY  Its been a good summer tourism season, but one that was evidently affected by a relative shortage of hotel rooms, the countys top tourism official says.

Dave Blank, president and CEO of Real Racine, the tourism bureau, said hotel room occupancy was down by 2.4 percent from last year through Aug. 27. This year, two major hotels have been undergoing extensive renovations, he pointed out.

The Harbourwalk Hotel Racine, 223 Gas Light Circle  which is soon to become a DoubleTree by Hilton  has had up to 60 rooms at a time out of commission, Blank said. And the Racine Architect Hotel & Conference Center, 7111 Washington Ave., which is being converted to the Racine Delta by Marriott, has had about 20 rooms unavailable at a time, he said.

Its doesnt feel like were down (in tourism), Blank said, but we have fewer rooms. That means visitors likely stayed elsewhere during their visits, perhaps outside of the county.

In addition to the above renovations, a new 93-room, $10 million Holiday Inn Express & Suites is under construction at 13317 Hospitality Court, just off the frontage road and south of Highway 20.

Its been a good, solid summer, and were looking forward to several renovated properties and a new hotel for next year, Blank said.

When he talked with representatives of some local attractions, Blank heard mostly good news:

The Racine Heritage Museum was even with last year, and theyre happy with the numbers.

Racine Art Museum, through July, was 6 percent ahead of last year.

SC Johnson was up slightly from last year.

The real standout report came from the Racine Zoo, Blank said. For June, it was up by an astonishing 39 percent for adults and 79 percent for children ages 3-12. For July it was up by 29 percent for adults and 36 for children. The Animal Crackers outdoor jazz series was about even with last year.

Among summer events, the Color Run drew about 3,000 people, Blank said, but is paling as an attraction. Its been steadily declining across the country, but ours not as much, he said. I dont know if itll be back again. Its very costly to put on.

I dont know what the next craze will be, he added.

Downtown

Downtown Racine Corp. Executive Director Devin Sutherland gave a good report on how Downtown businesses have fared this summer. Were certainly not past the end of summer quite yet, he said Friday, but we have had record crows at First Fridays all summer long, and established businesses have told us it was a good summer for them.

Sutherland said Downtown businesses have felt a bump from the efforts of Reefpoint Marinas management which brought more boaters in this year than last.

Finally, he said Downtown is seeing investment in buildings that have been empty for years, including 246, 306, 309 and 311 Main St. and 612 Sixth St. And businessmen Mark Porcaro and Ray Stibeck continue to invest and make improvements at Indian Motorcycle of Racine, 522 Sixth St.
Juba: The UN Security Council on Saturday urged South Sudan to drop its opposition to the deployment of a regional protection force to beef up a large UN peacekeeping mission in the war-scarred country.

Echoing a call made earlier Saturday by South Sudanese religious leaders, ambassadors from the council`s 15 member states met with senior government ministers in Juba and all spoke in favour of sending an additional 4,000 troops to the 13,000-strong mission, known as UNMISS.

One of the ambassadors, who asked not to be named, told AFP he thought the South Sudanese ministers "were surprised to see that the Security Council spoke with one voice.

"They were surprised by the tone of Russia, and also of China, which acted like someone who lost two peacekeepers."

Two Chinese peacekeepers were killed in an attack on a UN base during July clashes between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and those of rebel leader Riek Machar.

The upsurge threatened a fragile peace accord signed last year to end a devastating 18-month civil war which left tens of thousands dead.

China and Russia abstained from an August 12 Security Council vote on the resolution that authorised deploying a protection force with a more robust mandate than that of UNMISS.

UNMISS faced considerable criticism over its failure to protect civilians during the July fighting.

So far Kiir`s government had rejected the idea of a new force, saying it would violate national sovereignty.

Those at Saturday`s meeting emerged on a conciliatory note.

"I want to assure the people of South Sudan that the rumour that the UN has come to impose on us and bring in foreign forces to take the freedom of our country is not there," said Government Affairs Minister Martin Elia Lomoro.

Lomoro said the "modalities" of deploying the new force were being discussed but he did not state that his government had dropped its opposition.

US Ambassador Samantha Power said the meeting was "useful" because "we got to debunk, as the Security Council, some of the myths that have existed about what the Security Council has intended.

She added that proponents of the force had "one constituency in mind, and that is the people of South Sudan... with an eye to protecting them, to ensuring they get the humanitarian assistance they need. Some are facing famine-like conditions."Earlier Saturday, Catholic Archbishop Paulino Lukudu Loro told AFP: "This force should come, and it should come now. I think this force will help us to further implement this (peace) agreement."

"As a country, we cannot address this mess alone, we cannot put the country back on track alone. And there is no humiliation in this need to be assisted," he said.

The Security Council delegation visited a camp housing people, mostly of Machar`s Nuer ethnicity, who fled the bloody fighting.

"These people here did not come because they were given food and shelter, they are here because they don`t have any alternative," Peter Wilson of the British delegation told reporters.

"They want to go out," he said, adding a protection force would restore security and allow people to go home.

South Sudan descended into war in December 2013 after Kiir accused his former deputy Machar of plotting a coup.

Anglican Archbishop Daniel Deng Bul backed the intervention call, saying "the UN is momentarily the father of the people of South Sudan".

Church leaders -- both Catholic and Protestant -- carry strong moral authority in Christian-majority South Sudan and bishops have played an important role in brokering past peace deals.

During the fighting in July, Machar, who had been persuaded to return to Juba as part of the national unity government agreed under the peace deal, fled the country and is now in Khartoum, having been replaced by Taban Deng Gai in Juba.

Aside from the tens of thousands of people killed, the United Nations has reported shocking levels of brutality including gang-rapes and the wholesale burning of villages.

An estimated 16,000 children have been recruited by armed groups and the national army in the conflict and 2.5 million people have been driven from their homes.


Detroit: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump promised African Americans prosperity and jobs Saturday in a tempered speech to black churchgoers in a US city famous as a symbol of economic and urban decline.

Setting aside his usual stridency, Trump adopted a humble tone, telling his audience at Great Faith Ministries International that he came to listen, expressing sympathy for the out-of-work young men he had seen on boarded-up Detroit streets.

"Nothing is more sad than when we sideline young black men with unfulfilled potential, tremendous potential," Trump said, speaking from notes.

"Our whole country loses out without the energy of these folks. We`re one nation. And when anyone hurts, we all hurt together," he said.

Trump faced criticism in recent weeks for wooing black voters but in front of overwhelmingly white audiences.

On Saturday he was received courteously and rewarded with occasional bursts of applause as he set about trying to allay the deep skepticism of African Americans who have swung overwhelmingly behind his rival, Hillary Clinton.

Blacks account for 12 percent of the US electorate, and Trump, who trails in the polls with 66 days before the election, recently has sought to widen his base.Before the speech, protesters chanting "Dump Trump" tried to breach police barriers to gain entrance.

"The devil`s in the pulpit!" shouted Wyoman Mitchell, one of several dozen protesters who were pushed back by horse-mounted police and other officers in the tense encounter.

Rick McGowan, who works in Detroit schools, described Trump`s outreach here as "an insult to black people."

"He`s never come to our rescue," McGowan said. "Why are we supposed to believe him now?"

Church pastor Bishop Wayne Jackson had invited New York billionaire Trump to attend the fellowship service.

Trump also sat for an interview with Jackson that will be aired Thursday night, according to Jackson`s Impact Network.

Jackson had said he submitted questions in advance, but it was not known whether the two men went off script.

Trump told the congregation he believes "we need a civil rights agenda for our time, one that ensures the rights to a great education -- so important -- and the right to live safely and in peace."The church appearance contrasted sharply with Trump`s previous crude appeals for black support.

"What do you have to lose?" he posed nearly two weeks ago, rhetorically addressing African Americans in a speech before a white audience in Ohio, admonishing that Democrats "don`t care about you."

Trump has been faulted for largely ignoring the black community during his campaign, and bypassing appearances before black churches and organizations in favor of rowdy, largely white rallies.

But in Detroit, he extolled black contributions to America and the moralizing force of black churches.

"I am here today to listen to your message and I hope my presence here will also help your voice to reach new audiences in our country," Trump said.

"Our nation is too divided. We talk past each other, not to each other and those who seek office do not do enough to step into the community and learn what is going on."

Trump said he aimed to help "remedy injustice" and improve economic standards for black communities.The African American electorate traditionally leans heavily Democratic, and Detroit has the highest percentage of black residents -- more than 80 percent -- of any large US city.

Many neighborhoods have been hollowed out by decades of "white flight," in which Caucasian families left downtown and midtown for more affluent suburbs.

Recognizing that the community has suffered from discrimination, Trump stressed that "there are many wrongs that must still be made right. They will be made right."

Small business owner Carletta Griffin was in the church and said she was "overcome with emotion."

Trump`s message of compassion was "genuine, it was authentic, and it was warm," she said, adding that fellow African Americans needed to "change the lens in our perspective" and recognize Trump`s sincerity in seeking to help their communities.

"We`ve been loyal to the Democratic Party for in excess of 50 years. Where has that gotten us?" she said.

But Denaria Thorn, who also attended the service, said she remained opposed to Trump`s candidacy and that she was "expecting an apology" for harsh rhetoric he delivered in the past.

"He has a whole lot of making up to do," Thorn said.

Trump also took a short tour with Ben Carson, a retired African American neurosurgeon and former 2016 Republican presidential candidate, who showed Trump the modest Detroit home in which he grew up.

"This is a great day," Trump told reporters.
District of Columbia: Former hurricane Hermine churned Saturday off the US East Coast, killing a second victim as it threatened deadly flooding and spoiled beach plans for the summer`s last holiday weekend.

Hermine, now a post-tropical cyclone, was moving across the Outer Banks of North Carolina in an east-northeasterly direction at approximately 12 miles (19 kilometers) per hour, the Miami-based National Hurricane Center said.

The storm`s latest fatality occurred when winds estimated between 60 to 70 mile per hour blew an 18-wheeler across highway lanes in North Carolina and propelled the cab into the railing of a bridge, killing the unidentified driver, Tyrrell County Sheriff Darryl Liverman told AFP.

The death brings the storm`s casualties to two, after a homeless man was killed by a falling tree Friday in Florida.

Already packing sustained wind gusts maxing at 70 miles per hour, Hermine threatens deadly flooding along the East Coast.

"Hermine is expected to intensify to hurricane force on Sunday," the NHC said in its latest bulletin.

The Miami-based service also warned of an anticipated dangerous storm surge in the next 36 hours along the coast from Virginia to New Jersey.

Hermine was a hurricane when it slammed into Florida`s Gulf of Mexico coast early Friday, causing street flooding and power outages, the southeast state`s first hurricane landfall since 2005.

It was downgraded later that day to a tropical storm as it moved north.

Hermine was expected to lose forward speed and then "meander" offshore of the mid-Atlantic coast into Sunday, the center said.

Forecasters say the storm could dump up to seven inches (nearly 18 centimeters) of rain over parts of Virginia and Maryland through Monday morning.

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency Friday under the potential threat of damaging high winds, heavy rainfall and a dangerous storm surge and flooding.

"I urge Virginians to limit travel as the severe weather arrives and evacuate if recommended by officials," he said.

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency for coastal areas.

Hermine brought bad news for throngs of travelers hoping to enjoy beach time on the three-day Labor Day weekend, the unofficial end of the US summer vacation season.

Large waves likely to cause life-threatening surf and rip currents are expected from the mid-Atlantic states to southern New England, the NHC said.

Hermine is the fourth Atlantic hurricane of 2016. The last hurricane to make landfall in the United States was Arthur in 2014 in North Carolina.
Kathmandu: At least four persons including two children were killed today when a house was swept away in a landslide triggered by incessant rain in western Nepal.

The incident occurred at around 2 am in Syangja district when the victims were sleeping in the house, police said.

Those killed include 78-year-old house owner and her three guests, including two children, who had arrived there to celebrate Teej festival, observed by Hindu women by fasting for a day for the wellbeing of their husband and children.

Police and villagers were carrying out rescue and relief works.
Beijing: Chinese President Xi Jinping told Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday that the two countries should respect each other`s concerns and constructively handle their differences.

The two nuclear-armed neighbours have been moving to gradually ease long-existing tensions between them.

Leaders of Asia`s two giants pledged last year to cool a festering border dispute, which dates back to a brief border war in 1962, though the disagreement remains unresolved.

Meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, Xi said relations had maintained a steady, healthy momentum, and should continue to increase mutual understanding and trust.

"We ought to respect and give consideration to each other`s concerns, and use constructive methods to appropriately handle questions on which there are disputes," Xi said, in comments carried by China`s Foreign Ministry.

"China is willing to work hard with India the maintain the hard-won good position of Sino-India relations," Xi added.

China`s Defence Ministry said last month that it hoped India could put more efforts into regional peace and stability rather than the opposite, in response to Indian plans to put advanced cruise missiles along the disputed border with China.

Indian military officials say the plan is to equip regiments deployed on the China border with the BrahMos missile, made by an Indo-Russian joint venture, as part of ongoing efforts to build up military and civilian infrastructure capabilities there.

China lays claim to more than 90,000 sq km (35,000 sq miles) ruled by New Delhi in the eastern sector of the Himalayas. India says China occupies 38,000 sq km (14,600 sq miles) of its territory on the Aksai Chin plateau in the west.

India is also suspicious of China`s support for its arch-rival, Pakistan.

Modi arrived in China from Vietnam, which is involved in its own dispute with China over the South China Sea, where he offered Vietnam a credit line of

half a billion dollars for defence cooperation.

Modi`s government has ordered BrahMos Aerospace, which produces the BrahMos missiles, to accelerate sales to a list of five countries topped by Vietnam, according to a government note viewed by Reuters and previously unreported.
Patna: VHP International Working President Praveen Togadia today hailed Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar for enforcing total prohibition in the state and said he would like to see a countrywide ban on consumption of liquor.

"I salute Chief Minister Nitish Kumar for enforcing total prohibition in Bihar," Togadia told PTI.

The measure would help alleviate problems in the lives of the people and their families by putting to good use crores of rupees that they used to spend on consumption of liquor, he said.

Making an appeal to other states to impose liquor ban, he said the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) under its initiative 'India Health line' had launched a nationwide de-addiction campaign by its team of doctors.

The de-addiction campaign had received good response from the people in several states, Togadia said and exuded confidence that the country would be made liquor-free one day.

The Nitish Kumar government has enforced total prohibition in Bihar in April this year, banning consumption, marketing and manufacture of liquor.
Raipur: In a major success for security forces, as many as 38 Naxals, including seven women cadres, surrendered in Narayanpur district today citing "empty" Maoist ideology and "wrong policies".

"Citing frustration with empty Maoist ideology and their wrong policies, the ultras turned themselves in before senior police and Indo-Tibetan Border Police officials at Narayanpur district headquarters," Narayanpur Superintendent of Police, Abhishek Meena said.

Among the cadres was Punaye Bai (40), who was active as the head of Dandakaranya Adivasi Kisan Majdoor Sanghthan in the region and was carrying a reward of Rs 1 lakh on her head, he said.

Most of the surrendered Naxals are lower rung ultras allegedly involved in murder, loot and attacks on police.

"In their statement, the ultras said they decided to quit the movement due to growing pressure on Naxals from security personnel, wrong policies and empty ideology of the Maoists," the SP said, adding they were also impressed with the provisions of the surrender policy of the state government.
Narayanpur: Under pressure from security forces but encouraged by the state government's rehabilitation policy for former insurgents, a total of 38 Maoists, including seven women, surrendered in this Chhattisgarh district on Sunday, police said.

Of the surrendered rebels, one woman carries a reward of Rs 1 lakh on her head, while the others are accused in various cases of attempted murder, explosions, arson, loot and dacoity and damaging property, a police official said.

According to police, Sunday's surrender owes to the pressure piled on the insurgents by the campaign being jointly carried out by the local police, the Special Task Force, the District Reserve Group and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police under the instructions of Inspector General of Police, Bastar, SRP Kalluri and Narayanpur Superintendent of Police Abhishek Meena.

Meena, who was also present on the occasion, said that most of these rebels had been active for at least the last decade, and out of them, Phool Singh, Subhash and Raju had been involved in many major incidents.


New Delhi: HRD minister Prakash Javadekar on Sunday said reaching out to children who are out of the school system was of vital importance even as he called for greater community participation in education.

"There is a vital need to reach out to children who are still out of school," he said while stressing on the need to involve communities in education.

"Teachers can be the agents of change," he said, adding that reaching out to the unreached is the focus of the NDA government.

Javadekar also spoke on the need to focus on pre-school education especially for tribal population.

He had a freewheeling interaction on innovation in teaching with 346 teachers who will be conferred the National Teachers' Awards by President Pranab Mukherjee tomorrow.

Teachers from various parts of the country also shared the problems they tackled by coming up with innovative solutions.

An award-winning teacher from Bikaner mentioned how girls dropped out after class X in her school after which teachers formed a group to convince parents to let them study rather than push for early marriage.

"As a result, the numbers have increased manifold," she said.

One of the teachers from Madhya Pradesh spoke about how he painted stories on walls to teach tribal children while another one from Telangana mentioned translating nursery rhymes in Sanskrit to teach children.

Referring to the interaction as "Javadekar sir's class", the HRD minister invited innovative suggestions, saying they could be taken across the country.

He told the gathering that his mother was also a school teacher in a village where they lived.
Paris: Thousands of ethnic Chinese staged a protest march in Paris on Sunday over the fatal mugging of a Chinese tailor last month, as crime against community members has spiralled.

The protesters, almost all wearing white T-shirts reading "Security for All" and many waving French flags, rallied at the Place de la Republique in central Paris.

Police estimated the crowd at about 14,000, while organisers said 100,000 people took to the streets against "anti-Asian racism."

Zhang Chaolin, who was 49, was set upon on August 7 by three thieves who tried to snatch a bag belonging to a friend of his. He died a few days later from his injuries.

Zhang`s image appeared on a giant banner in the middle of the square, under the words, splattered with red paint: "Zhang Chaolin, dead for nothing. Who will be next?"

"He came to France in search of a better life... he found violence and insecurity," a spokesman of France`s 300,000-strong Chinese community told the crowd.

"These hooligans have destroyed our faith in France. Let our voice be heard," he said in Chinese.

"Stop violence, aggression, insecurity", one placard read amid the sea of white T-shirts worn by the protestors, who later marched towards nearby Place de la Bastille.

An umbrella organisation, Stop the Violence, Security for All, called the protest two weeks after around 1,000 people marched in the Aubervilliers suburb north of Paris where Zhang was killed.

Elected officials who joined Saturday`s protest included the right-wing president of the greater Paris regional council, Valerie Pecresse.

Security for All is demanding police reinforcements, more security cameras and a recognition of anti-Asian racism.On Sunday, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve pledged to beef up the police presence in Aubervilliers and provide funding for security cameras.

Reported violent robberies targeting the Chinese community, who are seen as lucrative prey as they are thought to habitually carry large sums of cash, have tripled in the past year from 35 to 105.

The bag the thieves were after during Zhang`s mugging contained only candy, cigarettes and sunglasses, according to a source close to the investigation.

The stereotype has prompted a string of attacks on Chinese tourists, including one early last month in which assailants sprayed teargas on members of a tour group before making off with their luggage.

In September last year, a Chinese tourist guide was robbed of 25,000 euros ($28,300) in cash and his new Rolex watch after he had prevented two of his group from being robbed themselves outside a hotel in a Paris suburb.

Protester Le Xu, who came to France as a child and is now 38, told AFP: "In the Asian community we are targeted because we are easy prey -- we are little and we are discreet. We often don`t bring charges, so there aren`t any consequences."A lawyer for the community, Francois Ormillien, has warned that without an adequate response from city authorities the community could form "defence leagues" -- vigilante groups -- to defend itself.

"There are youths 17 to 19 years old who are more aggressive than their elders and want to let loose, but they are very much in the minority," Ormillien said.

He noted that authorities have begun cracking down harder on crime targeting the community, citing the example of a teenager with no prior police record who was jailed for two years for a violent theft.

Aubervilliers, home to generations of Chinese immigrants, is the hub of Europe`s textile industry, where traders recently opened the continent`s biggest garment centre.

Stop the Violence staged demonstrations in 2010 and 2011 in the eastern Belleville section of Paris, home to another sizeable Chinese community, after an attack on a wedding banquet there.

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Panaji: Amid rumblings in RSS's Goa unit following the ouster of its chief Subhash Velingkar, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar has arrived in the state and is likely to meet Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar today.

Parrikar landed here last night at about 9.30 PM.

"He is likely to meet the Chief Minister to take stock of the situation," a senior BJP leader today told PTI on the condition of anonymity.

The crucial meeting between the two leaders is kept away from the media glare considering the sensitivity of the issue.

Parrikar is also expected to meet state BJP leaders during his stay here.

He is likely to be here till Tuesday as the state will celebrate Ganesh Chaturthi festival tomorrow.

The senior BJP leader would be attending festivities at his ancestral place in Parra near Mapusa town.

Velingkar had taken on the BJP government in Goa over its support for English-medium schools and was ousted from his post as RSS's state unit chief on August 31.

He had blamed Parrikar and Union Minister Nitin Gadkari for the action against him.

Velingkar, who claimed that hundreds of RSS workers and supporters have rallied behind him, had also asserted that the Sangh unit in the state will function independently of the parent body, at least till the Assembly polls.

However, later striking a conciliatory note he had said there was no rift in the organisation and the differences would be sorted out soon.
GENESEE DEPOT  A small bus in the woods is filled with a group of 10. Eight are visitors and the other are Gene and Edie Goodman, Racine residents and docents for the Ten Chimneys Foundation in Waukesha County.

Gene, 79, is the eccentric one. He dons a full tuxedo with a red pocket square. He leads the tour. On the bus, he stands before the audience. A raspy voice commands their attention. If that doesnt, his hands flying every which way as he speaks will.

The bus has a short journey, but in that time Gene said a change will occur.

We are going on a ride from reality to fantasy, he said. To an era gone by.

The bus arrives at the entrance of the home of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, a married couple once known as the greatest team in the history of American theater. Here is where they hid from the hustle and bustle of Broadway. Here is where the group was now, ready to enter the opulent home.

Edie, 78, is off the bus and goes ahead. The first stop is the small foyer. A small hallway with a winding staircase to the left. Gene gives his spiel about the room. As he explains how Fontanne would come down the stairs and greet guests, down comes Edie in her black lace dress, white sweater, black beret, and dazzling jewelry around her neck and hanging from her ears.

Oh, hello, she said. Wont you come upstairs and join us.

The Goodmans play off each others ebb and flow just at the Lunts did on stage; the Broadway married duo performed together from 1928 until they retired in 1960. The Goodmans have done this for years on and off tours. Thats what comes from 59 years of marriage and 13 years as docents.

They put on a show. Gene is the only male docent that dresses up and Edie is one of the few. Its part of their act that is fitting for a tour of a Broadway legends home. Up the stairs the tour group goes. The show is underway.

The green umbrella

Edie and Gene hit it off when they met in 1956. The setting was a fraternity party.

Gene was 15. Edie was 14. Both were from Buffalo, N.Y. Five years later they were married.

Edie did not attend college. Gene attended the State University of New York-Buffalo. When Gene was accepted to a postdoctoral program at University of Wisconsin-Madison, the two packed up for Wisconsin.

Edie worked selling Tupperware and jewelry to help put Gene through school. When he graduated, he joined the UW System and taught at UW-Parkside until he retired.

I really enjoyed teaching, Gene said. She thought for sure that when Id leave, it would be feet first from the lab. It was time to move on and do other things, and thats what we did.

A pair of sons and pair of daughters came amidst the teaching career. They were raised in the Racine home that the Goodmans purchased in 1970.

Though the Goodmans never took to the stage, they always adored the theater. Thats what the kids were raised on. Plays were attended regularly between Milwaukee and Chicago. They had such a fascination for shows.

I love the theater because it makes you look at things in a different way, Gene said. Im a very bad theater-goer because Ive never seen a bad play. I always find a redeeming feature like hey thats something we never thought about. 

While taking a tour of Ten Chimneys in 2003 when it opened to the public, the Goodmans knew what was next for them.

Before we got on the shuttle back, he signed us up to be docents, Edie said.

After 14 weeks of training, the Goodmans were trained and ready to go. They gave their first tours in 2004.

While researching the part of docent, the Goodmans learned how Alfred Lunt got into character.

Lunt believed his job as an actor was not to interpret the play through his eyes. Rather, he wanted to portray it the way the writer intended. While struggling with a character from Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew," Alfred just couldnt get it down. Then he picked up a green umbrella. He immediately had it down.

From then on he referred to getting into character as getting his green umbrella. For the Goodmans, dressing up was their green umbrella.

You just put that on and youre ready to go, Gene said. I think its become an almost necessary tool for the part.

Exit stage left

Through the lavish house -- the Lunts moved in in 1932, having signed a contract which gave them every summer off -- the tour group goes. Into the "flirtation" room. Into the dining room. Into the bedrooms. All through the house, with each room set up exactly the way it would be set on a stage.

Every single item in the house in a specific room and in a specific spot for a reason. From the lights having half-shades to create certain lighting, to the separation of wallpaper columns going up the stairs to make the room appear larger.

The Goodmans' act gets a good laugh in each room, their theatrical jokes cleverly crafted over the years. They overlap each other fluidly, just as the Lunts did in their time. Their timing is flawless. Each room, a new scene used to entertain.

The tour circles around the property and finally back to the bus. Time to go. Back at the lobby, the group thanks the Goodmans before departing. Fitting that they exit to the left.

I tell people Ten Chimneys is the best-kept secret in Wisconsin, Edie said.

As time goes by, the Lunts' names will be lost to history. Once a name the paparazzi would flock to is now a name receding to the edge of extinction. The Goodmans will continue to make the hour trek to provide the theatrical tour though. They will put on their costumes and be back here in a week for another round.

The tour is gone. The Goodmans are still in costume.

They will get in their car and drive back to Racine. They will return for their next shift soon to detail the Lunts lifestyle and contributions to theater, and honor them the way they know best: By putting on a show.
Panaji: Goa Shiv Sena on Sunday alleged irregularities in vehicle registration process in Goa and bordering Puducherry where taxation is minimal.

"Tax on registering a vehicle in Puducherry is only one per cent, while in Goa one has to pay more than 15 per cent. We have noticed a spurt in vehicles with Puducherry number plates on Goan roads," local Shiv Sena unit chief Sudip Tamankar told reporters here today.

He said there was a possibility that locals in order to avoid to high taxes here were getting their vehicles registered in Puducherry.

The BJP-led state government during the recently held Monsoon session of the Assembly had hiked the tax on registration of vehicles, due to which the total taxation (for registration) has crossed 15 per cent mark.

"We have also understood that former Goa Transport Director Arun Desai has been transferred to Puducherry," he said.

Though he was quick to add that the transfer can be mere a coincidence.

"Transport Minister Sudin Dhavalikar in the Assembly had justified the hike stating that number of vehicles in the state is on the rise," Tamankar said.

He said majority of non-Goans living in the state can get their vehicles registered on the leave and licence document or by an affidavit about their residential proof whose authenticity is never checked by state Transport Department.

"But Goans have to submit number of documents including voting card, Aadhaar card and others to prove their identity," he said.

"We have written to the Transport Department asking them to issue a circular to all Regional Transport Offices to verify the authenticity of the leave and licence document or affidavit sworn by appointing an officer before registration," he said.
Hangzhou: Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20 summit on Sunday.

In their second meeting in less than three months, both leaders are believed to have discussed irritants in bilateral ties like Indias NSG bid and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which runs through PoK.

Modi and Xi had last met on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit in June in Tashkent.

Today's meeting was important given the steady decline in the bilateral relations over contentious issues despite the good rapport between the two leaders.

The Modi-Xi meeting was followed by a meeting of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) leaders ahead of the G20 summit, which would begin later in the day.

Modi will also hold bilateral meetings with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Saudi Arabias Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.

On Monday, he will take part in the second and concluding session of the G20 and hold bilateral meetings with British Prime Minister Theresa May and Argentinian President Mauricio Macri before returning to Delhi.

A meeting between Modi and US President Barack Obama is, however, not on the cards during this trip, reports said.
Malout: Ten persons were injured in a clash between AAP and Akali Dal supporters at a rally addressed by Sangrur MP Bhagwant Mann here on Saturday, police said.

The clash broke out when some youth Akali workers objected to Bhagwant Mann allegedly criticising senior SAD leaders Harsimrat Kaur Badal and Bikram Singh Majithia, they said.

The fight continued for a few minutes during which the supporters of the rival parties hurled chairs at each other.

An Akali worker alleged that Bhagwant Mann was talking about Harsimrat and Majithia "in bad taste" and some of the workers raised objection over it. It was the AAP workers who clashed with the Akalis, he claimed.

AAP workers, however, claimed that Akali supporters clashed with them.

The AAP workers later raised anti-Akali slogans and blocked the Malout-Delhi national highway to protest against the disruption of the rally. Stone-pelting was also reported at the Malout grain market.

"However, neither side has lodged any complaint so far," a police spokesperson said.

Meanwhile, condemning the disruption of the AAP rally at Malout, AAP's national spokesperson Jarnail Singh told reporters in Chandigarh that with the growing support of AAP among masses, opposition parties "have got frustrated and are adopting such tactics to create fear among AAP workers, who are courageous enough to give befitting reply to such tactics".
Islamabad: Pakistan's cabinet has given the go-ahead for negotiating a long-term defence agreement and security cooperation with its all-weather ally China, a media report said today.

Pakistan's cabinet in a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on July 15 at the Governor House in Lahore gave the go-ahead for negotiating a long-term defence agreement with China, The Express Tribune reported.

The cabinet considered the summary to initiate negotiations on a draft agreement between Pakistan and China on a long-term strategic framework agreement for enhancing defence and security cooperation in diversified fields.

The cabinet held detailed discussions on the proposed agreement before giving the nod of approval, the report said.

The cabinet was informed that the draft agreement was based on principles of mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity, sovereignty, non-integration and non-interference in each other's internal affairs, equality and cooperation for mutual benefits, and peaceful coexistence for strategic gains in defence and security, including arms and technology transfers.

It was also informed that input from ministries of foreign affairs, interior and defence production as well as the Joint Staff Headquarters had been obtained and incorporated in the draft agreement which was subsequently vetted by the law and justice division.

In April 2015, when Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Pakistan, the two countries agreed that their relationship had acquired greater strategic significance against the backdrop of complex and changing international and regional situations.

They agreed to elevate the Pakistan-China relationship to the all-weather strategic cooperative partnership.

The reports of defence agreement surfaced a week after the US signed a key logistics agreement with India governing the use of each other's land, air and naval bases for repair and resupply.

Pakistan had called the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement between the US and India as an agreement between the two sovereign states and hoped it would contribute to peace and stability.

"Pakistan would like to see that such arrangements do not contribute to polarising the region by disturbing the strategic balance in South Asia and escalating the arms buildup," Foreign Office spokesperson Nafees Zakaria told a news briefing on Thursday.
New Delhi: Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was on Saturday directed by a city court to appear before it on September 17 when it will consider the issue of framing of notice against him on a criminal defamation complaint filed by BJP MP Ramesh Bidhuri.

Metropolitan Magistrate Harvinder Singh passed the direction while granting exemption from personal appearance to Kejriwal for today after he was told that the CM was unable to attend the hearing as he was out of India.

The court would also decide on the next date of hearing, Kejriwal's plea seeking permanent exemption from personal appearance in the matter.

"Since he (Kejriwal) is not in India, therefore, the application for exemption from personal appearance for the day is allowed.

"Date be fixed for consideration on framing of notice and accused's (Kejriwal) application (seeking permanent exemption from appearance in the case)... Kejriwal is directed to appear on the next date. Matter be put up for September 17," it said.

During the proceedings, Kejriwal's plea for personal exemption for the day was opposed by the counsel for complainant Bidhuri, who was present in the court.

Kejriwal, who was summoned as an accused in the complaint filed by Bidhuri, was granted bail by the court on July 8 after he appeared before it and furnished a personal bond of Rs 10,000.

Kejriwal was summoned as accused by the court in February this year on a criminal defamation complaint filed against him by Bidhuri, an MP from South Delhi parliamentary constituency, under section 500 (defamation) of the IPC.

Bidhuri had alleged that Kejriwal had defamed him in an interview to a news channel.

He had claimed that during the interview, Kejriwal had falsely said that criminal cases were pending against Bidhuri and a Congress leader but the Delhi Police was not taking action against them.

Bidhuri has claimed that no case was pending against him and Kejriwal had defamed him by giving such a statement.
New Delhi: Punjab Congress Legislature Party leader Charanjit Singh Channi on Saturday exuded confidence that Congress will "comfortably" form the government in the state after coming together of the fourth front adding he will go on a cycle yatra from September 27 to reach out to the masses.

The yatra will highlight the corruption and unemployment in Punjab during the last 10 years.

Channi met Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi here and discussed the political scenario in the state and briefed him about the party's prospects in the upcoming state elections.

After the meeting, he said Shiromani Akali Dal-BJP and AAP parties are disintegrating with many of their leaders quitting or looking for other options.

"The Congress party has very successfully completed its first phase of zone level programmes in which all the 117 constituencies have been covered. The Congress party will fight the ruling alliance in the coming Vidhan Sabha session also," he said.

Channi assured Gandhi that Congress will corner the ruling government on the issue of law and order, farmers' debt, urban issues and Dalit atrocities.

He also told Gandhi of his plan to start a cycle yatra in Punjab from September 27 covering all constituencies of the state in three phases. Punjab Congress chief Amarinder Singh will flag off the yatra.

The final programme and the constituency-wise detailed programme will be worked out soon in sync with PPCC. At least 1,000 cyclists will accompany Channi on the yatra on every phase which will last for seven days each.
New Delhi: Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal today picked on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whom he has already dubbed "Mr Reliance", while attacking Congress as he said "no Prime Minister has sold himself to a corporate house the way he has".

"Congress was also in Reliance pocket. But they helped them secretly. Modiji proudly n brazenly announced it by modelling for Jio ad," the CM said in a tweet.

Modi had to face jibes from the Opposition parties after his picture featured in full page Reliance Jio advertisments yesterday on the launch of its telecom service.

"PM knew people won't like Reliance ad. Still he did. So, PM wants to say - 'Yes, I am Reliance man n I don't give a damn to what people think'," Kejriwal said in another tweeted.

Kejriwal, who has been unsparing in his criticism of the Prime Minister, had yesterday mockingly advised him to keep modelling for the Mukesh Ambandi-led group.

"No PM in independent India sold himself so brazenly to a corporate house. After PM modelled for Reliance product, wud anyone have courage to take any action against Reliance in any case?" Kejriwal asked.
Srinagar: Clashes broke out in south Kashmir's Shopian district on Sunday morning with protesters setting ablaze a mini-secretariat building while curfew remained clamped in parts of Srinagar on a day the all-party delegation was here on a two-day visit aimed at restoring peace in the Valley.

Normal life in the Valley was paralysed for the 58th day as restrictions continued in the rest of the Valley which has been hit by violence since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani in July.

People in Penjoora village of Shopian tried to take out a protest rally which was stopped by the police, leading to clashes, an official said.

The protesters also set afire the mini-secretariat building, housing the deputy commissioner's office in the area, the official said.

He said the security forces resorted to baton charge and tear-gas shelling to disperse the protesters.

"There are some injuries but more details are awaited," he said.

Yesterday, protesters in the neighbouring Kulgam district burnt a house of the ruling PDP's block president Gulzar Ahmad.

Ahmad had facilitated a meeting of Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti with the family of a victim of violence in the district. Mehbooba had visited the family of Late Mashooq Ahmed, firing victim of Kund, Kulgam and offered condolences to the bereaved family yesterday.

"Curfew remains in force in five police station areas of downtown Srinagar," a police spokesman said.

He said curfew in these areas of the summer capital continued as a precautionary measure in view of the call given by separatists asking people to occupy Airport road, city centre Lal Chowk and district headquarters against the all-party delgation's visit.

The spokesman said curfew has been lifted from the other areas of the city where it was in force yesterday.

The all-party delegation led by Home Minister Rajnath Singh reached here today for a two-day visit during which it is expected to hold talks with a cross-section of people.

"Curfew has been lifted from Batamaloo and Maisuma areas in the uptown city in view of the improving situation," the police spokesman said.

He, however, said restrictions on the assembly of people were in place in the rest of the Valley.

Normal life remained affected in Kashmir due to the separatist sponsored strike on 58th day. Shops, business establishments and petrol pumps continued to remain shut during day time and open only in the evening. Public transport continued to be off the roads.

The separatists have extended the shutdown till September 8.

As many as 71 persons, including two police personnel, have been killed and several thousand others injured in the clashes between protesters and security forces in the Valley since Wani was killed in an encounter in south Kashmir on July 8.
Patna: VHP International Working President Praveen Togadia on Sunday hailed Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar for enforcing total prohibition in the state and said he would like to see a countrywide ban on consumption of liquor.

"I salute Chief Minister Nitish Kumar for enforcing total prohibition in Bihar," Togadia told PTI.

The measure would help alleviate problems in the lives of the people and their families by putting to good use crores of rupees that they used to spend on consumption of liquor, he said.

Making an appeal to other states to impose liquor ban, he said the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) under its initiative 'India Health line' had launched a nationwide de-addiction campaign by its team of doctors.

The de-addiction campaign had received good response from the people in several states, Togadia said and exuded confidence that the country would be made liquor-free one day.

The Nitish Kumar government has enforced total prohibition in Bihar in April this year, banning consumption, marketing and manufacture of liquor.
New Delhi: The meeting between all-party delegation, J&K CM Mehbooba Mufti and other state ministers is under way in Srinagar.

With an aim to find a possible solution to the prolonged Kashmir unrest, the all-party delegation on Kashmir led by Home Minister Rajnath Singh had arrived in Srinagar on Sunday.

The delegation headed byRajnath Singh left for Srinagar on Sunday morning.

During the two-day visit, the MPs will interact with Governor N.N. Vohra and Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, and will also be holding meetings with representatives of all political parties and other delegations in Srinagar to bring peace in the Valley.

Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader Saugata Roy, before the departure, said, "It is a good step for ensuring normalcy in the Kashmir Valley. I hope this will pave the way for improving the situation there. Yesterday, in the all party meeting everyone suggested that we should talk to everyone, including the Hurriyat.

Therefore, it is a good thing that Mehbooba Mufti has invited them."Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad on his part said that he hopes that the all-party delegation would be able to find solution to the Kashmir issue.

"I hope we will be able to find solutions; our delegation will be beneficial for Kashmir and for the country. Of course we won`t be able to take decisions on the spot but it will be an opportunity for parties and Kashmiri people to interact. I appeal to all the party, be it mainstream or non-mainstream, to come forward and talk so that things are brought to some solution," Azad told ANI.

Union Minister of Food and Public Distribution and Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) chief Ram Vilas Paswan asserted that they are going with an open mind and are ready to talk on anything that is within the framework of the Constitution.

Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Sitaram Yechury told ANI that they would try and talk to all the stakeholders and try to restore normalcy and stop all this senseless killing."It is very late we wanted this to happen two months ago. Let`s hope that even now we will be able to make some difference," he said.

Biswajit Daimary, Bodoland People`s Front leader, said that they would today be meeting people at the ground level in the Valley."After our visit, I am sure we will find some way to bring normalcy into the Valley," he said.

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti yesterday invited Hurriyat leaders for talks with the all-party delegation.

This came after the opposition parties suggested the government to invite the Hurriyat Conference for talks.Rajnath said the Centre would take a final decision with regard to Kashmir unrest on the basis of feedback and suggestions given by the all party-delegation.

The delegation was made aware of the prevailing situation in the state and contours of the tour during which they will hold talks with a cross-section of people.

Apart from the Home Minister and Minister of State in PMO Jitendra Singh, those who will be part of the all-party delegation include Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, leader of opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad, his Lok Sabha colleague Mallikarjun Kharge, senior Congress leader Ambika Soni, Ram Vilas Paswan (LJP), JD-U leader Sharad Yadav, Sitaram Yechury and CPI leader D Raja.

NCP`s Tariq Anwar and Saugata Roy, Shiv Sena`s Sanjay Raut and Anandrao Adsul, TDP`s Thota Narasimham, Shiromani Akali Dal`s Prem Singh Chandumajra, BJD`s Dilip Tirkey, AIMIM`s Asaduddin Owaisi, AIUDF`s Badaruddin Ajmal and Muslim League`s E Ahamed will be part of the delegation.TRS` Jitendra Reddy, N K Premchandran (RSP), P Venugopal (AIADMK), Tiruchi Siva (DMK), Y B Subba (YSR-Cong), Jaiprakash Yadav (RJD), Dharamveer Gandhi (AAP) and Dushyant Chautala (RLD) are also in the team.

The valley is facing unrest due to protests in the aftermath of the killing of terrorist Burhan Wani on July 8 amid which over 70 people have lost their lives and thousands others have been injured.
Vatican City: Join the world to witness the canonization of Mother Teresa by Pope Francis on Sunday (September 4).

The Holy Mass and canonization by Pope Francis is set for 10:30 am Vatican Time (2 pm Indian Standard Time).

The live streaming of the event will be available via the following link: http://livestream.com/wydcentral2013/events/6154734

As per Vatican officials, 100,000 tickets have been distributed for the event that will see attendance by 15 official delegations, including 13 led by heads of state.

Many more thousands of the faithful will converge around the historic St Peter's Square to witness the ceremony honouring the mother who served the poorest of the poor on the streets of Kolkata.

The Indian delegation is led by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and his West Bengal counterpart Mamata Banerjee are among the others who will represent India for the canonization ceremony.
Vatican City: Mother Teresa will be declared a saint by Pope Francis of the Roman Catholic Church in a canonisation ceremony in Vatican City on Sunday in the presence of over a lakh of her followers from all over the world.

From India, a 12-member central delegation led by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and two state government-level delegations from Delhi and West Bengal led by Chief Ministers Arvind Kejriwal and Mamata Banerjee, respectively, will be in attendance during the function.

Nuns at the Kolkata-based Missionaries of Charity, founded by the late Nobel laureate nun, said the canonisation in Rome will have a special universal significance because of the Mother's popularity.

A group of around 40-50 nuns from different parts of the country, led by Missionaries of Charity Superior General Sister Mary Prema, are at the Vatican

Besides Archbishop of Kolkata Thomas D'Souza, about 45 bishops from all over India are also in Vatican.

In March, Pope Francis had announced that the Mother, who spent 45 years serving the poor and sick on the streets in Kolkata, will be elevated to sainthood after the Church recognised two miracles attributed to her after her death.

To mark the occasion a series of events are being held in the city where the Mother lived and worked all her life.

At the Mother House in Kolkata, a special mass will be organised and the nuns have promised to celebrate the occasion with the poorest of the poor.

In 2003, Mother Teresa was beatified by then Pope John Paul II in a fast-tracked process which is the first step to gaining Sainthood.

In 2002, the Vatican officially recognised a miracle she was said to have carried out after her death, namely the 1998 healing of a Bengali tribal woman, Monika Besra, who was suffering from an abdominal tumour.

With PTI inputs
Vatican City: Pope Francis on Sunday declared Mother Teresa a saint after a canonisation ceremony at Vatican City and hailed her as the personification of maternal love and a powerful advocate for the poor.

"We may have some difficulty in calling her 'Saint' Teresa. Her holiness is so near to us, so tender and so fruitful that we continue to spontaneously call her Mother. She made her voice heard before the powers of this world, so that they might recognize their guilt for the crime - the crimes! - of poverty they created," the pontiff said.

The unscripted comments came at a canonisation mass attended by 100,000 pilgrims, including 13 heads of state or government and hundreds of sari-clad nuns from Teresa's order, the Missionaries of Charity.

Queen Sofia of Spain and some 1,500 homeless people also looked on as Francis described Teresa's work in the slums of the Indian metropolis as "eloquent witness to God's closeness to the poorest of the poor."

To applause, the Pope added, "Mother Teresa loved to say, 'perhaps I don't speak their language but I can smile'. Let us carry her smile in our hearts and give it to those whom we meet along our journey, especially those who suffer."

Pope Francis also used his sermon to recall Teresa's fervent opposition to abortion, which she termed "murder by the mother" in a controversial Nobel Peace prize speech in 1979.

She "ceaselessly proclaimed that the unborn are the weakest", he said.

With the 16th century basilica of St Peter's glinting in the late summer sun, Francis led a ritual mass that has barely changed for centuries.

Speaking in Latin, he declared "blessed Teresa of Calcutta (Kolkata) to be a Saint ... Decreeing that she is to be venerated as such by the whole Church."

After the mass, the 79-year-old pontiff boarded an open-topped jeep and toured around St Peter's square and surrounding streets to a rapturous reception from tens of thousands of well-wishers.

VISUALS FROM Vatican City's St Peter's Square:

Mother Teresa's work with the poor of Kolkata made her an instantly recognisable global figure.

The sainthood ceremony came one day short of the 19th anniversary of her death, at 87, in Kolkata where she spent her adult life, first teaching, then tending to the dying poor.

It was in the latter role, at the head of her own still-active order, the Missionaries of Charity, that she became one of the most famous women on the planet.

Born to Kosovar Albanian parents in Skopje - then part of the Ottoman empire, now the capital of Macedonia - she won the 1979 Nobel peace prize and was revered around the world as a beacon for the Christian values of self-sacrifice and charity.

She was simultaneously regarded with scorn by secular critics who accused her of being more concerned with evangelism than with improving the lot of the poor.

The debate over the nun's legacy has continued after her death with researchers uncovering financial irregularities in the running of her Order and evidence mounting of patient neglect, insalubrious conditions and questionable conversions of the vulnerable in her missions.

A picture of her as someone who was just as comfortable flying around in a private plane as clutching the hand of a dying patient also emerged to counterbalance her saintly image.

By historical standards, Teresa has been fast-tracked to sainthood, thanks largely to John Paul II.

The Polish cleric was a personal friend of Teresa and as the Pope at the time of her death, he was responsible for her being beatified in 2003.

Achieving sainthood requires the Vatican to approve accounts of two miracles.

The first one, ratified in 2002, was of an Indian woman, Monica Besra, who says she recovered from ovarian cancer a year after Teresa's death - something local health officials have put down to medical advances rather than the power of prayer.

In the second, approved last year, Brazilian Marcilio Haddad Andrino says his wife's prayers to Teresa led to brain tumours disappearing. Eight years later, Andrino and his wife Fernanda were in the congregation on Sunday.

(With PTI inputs)
Muzaffarnagar: A Dalit couple was allegedly assaulted by some land owners when they refused to do manual labour in their sugarcane fields in Pipalhera village here.

Raju was beaten up by Inam Singh and three of his family members yesterday when he refused to work in their sugarcane fields. His wife Mantesh was also beaten up and misbehaved with when she tried to rescue her husband, police said.

Meanwhile, members of Dalits community gheraoed Khatoli police station and protested over the incident.

A complaint has been filed and police is investigating the case.

In another incident, two Dalits Rajbir and Vipin Kumar were injured in an alleged attack by people belonging to another caste at Sherpur village under Purkazi police station in the district.

A complaint has been filed with the police after irate people protested over the incident.

In a third case, a Dalit youth Amerjit was allegedly beaten up over some dispute with a woman at Faloda village in the district yesterday, police said.
New Delhi: After the central government suspended four Home Ministry officials, including an IAS officer, for alleged lapses over the issuing of licence to Islamic tele-evangelist Zakir Naik's NGO, senior officials have expressed their resentment over the punishment meted out.

A group of senior officials in the Home Ministry reportedly registered with Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi their protest over suspension of joint secretary GK Dwivedi.

"Some officials have met the Union Home Secretary on the issue (over the weekend)," a source said.

Four officials of the Home Ministry were suspended on September 1 for their "lapses" in renewing the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) licence of the NGO Islamic Research Foundation (IRF) of tele-preacher Zakir Naik.

Naik's Peace TV and his speeches have come under the scanner of the central security agencies for allegedly propagating radical views, especially in the aftermath of the July 1 Dhaka terror siege that left 22 people dead.

According to security agencies, Zakir Naik through Peace TV had reportedly promoted radical Islamist views.

While the probe by the Home Ministry and security agencies was on, the Law Ministry has favoured registering a case against Naik and IRF for pursuing divisive agenda and communalism.

The Home Ministry officials told the Union Home Secretary that suspension of Dwivedi, a joint secretary in the Foreigners Cell, was uncalled for as the lapses were committed by his juniors only.

"The action against Dwivedi appears demoralising," a source said, and stressed that the Home Ministry should reconsider its decision as regard a senior official who was discharging his duties diligently.

The Home Ministry and especially Home Minister Rajnath Singh were displeased after the mandatory FCRA licence of NGO IRF was renewed by the Foreigners Division.

Sources said the online route for issuance of licences was utilised by the NGO on August 19 even as a probe was on against Naik.

Sources said that suspended IAS officer Dwivedi has been working on a number of "pet projects" of the Narendra Modi government, offering long term visas and citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs and other minorities of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.

He also worked on the merger of Person of Indian Origin (PIO) card scheme with Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) card scheme.

In July, Bangladesh's Ministry of Information cancelled the downlink permission to Naik's Peace TV.

The controversial Islamic orator is also banned in Malaysia, Britain and Canada.


Hangzhou: In his 35-minute meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hangzhou city, Prime Minister Narendra Modi raised India's concern over USD 46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which runs through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), and terrorism 'emanating from the region'.

He also told Jinping that India and China need to be 'sensitive' to each other's strategic interests.

Asserting that fight against terror should not be motivated by "political considerations", PM Modi said it was of "paramount importance that we respect each other's aspirations, concerns and strategic interests to ensure durable bilateral ties", Vikas Swarup told Indian journalists, touching upon broad themes that the PM stressed upon during his bilateral with Xi, their eighth meeting.

Asked whether terrorism was discussed, Swarup said, as per IANS, "It was raised."

"In order to promote positive convergence, we would also need to prevent growth of negative perception. For this, the specific actions by both countries would play the major role," Swarup said.

In particular, PM Modi highlighted that "we have succeeded in maintaining peace and tranquility on the border", Swarup added.

Asked whether Prime Minister Modi raised the issue of China blocking India's bid for the membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) during the bilateral, Swarup declined to get into the "nitty-gritty" of the issues discussed.

"I am not going into the nitty-gritty of each and everything that was discussed. Everything is not meant for public consumption. There are certain things (which) need to remain between the two governments," he said.

On yet another question on the NSG issue, he said, "I will not go into the specifics, if you read between the lines, you pretty much understand when you we talk about strategic interests, concerns and aspirations, it is not as if China is not unaware of our strategic interests, aspirations and concerns or we are unaware of their concerns. So, it is something both sides are well aware."

"This was a meeting at summit level between the two. They are meant to provide high-level guidance and direction to overall relations," Swarup added.

The CPEC passes through the restive regions of Balochistan, Gilgit-Baltistan and Pakistani Kashmir.

India has strongly opposed the project as it claims Gilgit-Baltistan and Pakistani Kashmir.

Besides a host of energy-related projects, the CPEC consists of rail, road and pipelines to ferry oil and gas from Gwadar port on Arabian Sea to Kashghar in China's Muslim-dominated Xinjiang province through PoK.

On his part, Xi said China was willing to work with India to maintain their "hard-won sound" ties and further boost bilateral cooperation.

"China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound relations and further advance their cooperation", state-run Chinese Xinhua news agency quoted Xi as saying.

"China and India should respect and care for each other on issues of major concern, and handle differences in a constructive way," Xi told PM Modi, as per PTI.

Xi said both sides had seen healthy, stable and speedy development of their relationship, and that as neighbours and developing nations they should continue high-level exchanges.

PM Modi and Xi's meeting comes at a time when the bilateral ties have witnessed turbulence over a raft of issues involving Pakistan including China's technical hold on UN ban against Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Muhammad chief Masood Azhar and its attempts to block India's entry into NSG.

Had a very good meeting with President Xi Jinping. pic.twitter.com/Of3uDE5EZN  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) September 4, 2016

(With Agency inputs)
Hangzhou: US President Barack Obama praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for enacting the Goods and Service Tax bill, describing it "as an example of bold policy in an otherwise difficult global economic scenario".

Modi also hailed Obama for his leadership in the two-day ongoing G20 Summit here.

"PM closed his intervention at the G20 by paying tribute to President Obama for his leadership in G20," External Affair Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup said of the meet.

"Earlier, in his intervention President Obama praised PM Modi for tax reforms as example of bold policy in an otherwise difficult global economic scenario," Swarup added.

During the informal evening programme on Sunday the two leaders had yet another opportunity of exchanging views, he added.
Hangzhou: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday met Chinese President Xi Jinping here amid differences between the two countries over a raft of issues, including the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor which runs through PoK.

The meeting was held this morning on the sidelines of G20 leaders summit at the Hangzhou West Lake State Guest House.

"First engagement in Hangzhou is a meeting with the host. PM @narendramodi meets President Xi Jinping," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted.

The meeting between the two leaders comes in the backdrop of contentious issues including listing of Pakistan-based terrorist organisations in the UN, China stalling India's membership at the elite Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and USD 46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) which runs through Pakistan- occupied Kashmir (PoK).

The two leaders had last met at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit in June in Tashkent and are again set to meet in Goa next month on the sidelines of BRICS summit.

China too has been concerned over the close ties of India with the US and the recently signed Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) which will give the militaries of both countries access to each other's facilities for supplies and repairs.

After the meeting, both the leaders will attend the BRICS leaders meeting ahead of the G20 summit to finalise their strategy at the summit.

Modi reached Hangzhou last night after concluding his two-day visit in Hanoi. He will also hold bilateral meetings with his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull and Saudi Arabia's Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.

He will attend the two-day G20 summit to begin here later under the theme of "Strengthening Policy coordination and Breaking a new path for growth".

Tomorrow, he will take part in the second and concluding session of the G20 and hold bilateral meetings with British Prime Minister Theresa May and Argentinian President Mauricio Macri before returning to Delhi.

A meeting between Modi and US President Barack Obama is, however, not on the cards during this trip, officials said.
Srinagar: An all-party delegation led by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh will be in Kashmir on Sunday to hold talks with representatives of all political parties and other stakeholders to ensure return of normalcy to the valley.

At least 28 parliamentarians and senior government officials will be part of the delegation that will be in the state for two days. The delegation will also meet Governor and Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Food and Public Distribution Minister Ram Vilas Paswan, Congress leaders Ghulam Nabi Azad, Mallikarjun Kharge as well as opposition leaders like Asaduddin Owaisi of AIMIM are likely to be part of the delegation.

Kashmir has been under curfew following the death of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani on July 8.

Meanwhile, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti has called for engaging all sections of the society, including Hurriyat Conference, in a credible and meaningful political dialogue for resolution of the problems in the Valley.

The Chief Minister said it is perhaps for the first time that the Kashmir issue has been, during the past two months, discussed in so many forums and at so many levels including Parliament and at all-party meetings where judicious views were put across by all shades of the country's political opinion on how to end the stalemate.

The need of the hour is to build on this larger political consensus within the country and initiate tangible measures to address the issue, she said.
Srinagar: Kashmir problem is political which needs to be addressed politically and not militarily, Congress said on Sunday as it pitched for a sustained dialogue with "all stakeholders" for restoration of peace in the restive Valley.

A Congress team led by its state chief GA Mir conveyed the party's sentiment during its meeting with the all-party delegation headed by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh which arrived here today.

"Kashmir is a political issue and shall have to be addressed politically rather than militarily. The Centre must initiate a sustained meaningful dialogue with all stakeholders in the state keeping in view the aspirations of Jammu and Ladakh regions also," said Mir.

"The recommendations of interlocutors and round-table conferences held under the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should be the basis of dialogue process as that will be a viable roadmap to resolve the issue," he added.

Deliberating on the overall situation in the state, the Congress leaders apprised the delegation about the turbulent situation in the Valley due to the loss of lives.

"The Congress delegation discussed the overall situation in the Valley and briefed the leaders about the current upsurge and losses caused in the backdrop of protests across the Valley," a Congress spokesperson said after the meeting.

The Congress leaders stressed on the need for "serious and proactive measures" on the part of both state and Central governments to put an end to the current unrest.

"There is a need to adopt a well-planned strategy to resolve the issues politically, besides serious efforts must be put in place to address the grievances of the people," they said.

Talking to reporters after the meeting, Mir said both the state and the Central government had failed to restore peace "which is not only unfortunate, but also reflects the lack of any policy to deal with the situations on their part."

"Even after 57 days there is no improvement on the ground, the regular incidents of casualties have vitiated the atmosphere to the largest extent and as a result, the situation is completely unpredictable and dangerous," he said.

The all-party delegation is on a two-day visit to the Valley during which it is expected to interact with a cross section of people and find ways for restoration of peace in the valley where violent clashes have claimed 71 lives since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani on July 8.
Srinagar: Ahead of the all-party delegation led by Home Minister Rajnath Singh reaching Srinagar for assessing the situation in Jammu and Kashmir, a fresh clash broke out between security forces and protestors in the Valley.

The clashes broke out in south Kashmir's Shopian district today morning with protesters setting ablaze a mini-secretariat building that comprises the office of the DM and many other district level officers. Fortunately, no employee was present at the secretariat when the incident occurred.

Normal life in the Valley was paralysed for the 58th day as restrictions continued in the rest of the Valley which has been hit by violence since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani in July.

People in Penjoora village of Shopian tried to take out a protest rally which was stopped by the police, leading to clashes, an official said.

Over 100 people have been injured so far in the ongoing clashes between protestors and government security forces in Shopian.

Early today, government forces including police and paramilitary men foiled a pro-freedom rally in Penjoora village of Shopian.

Meanwhile, authorities today lifted curfew and restrictions from the entire Kashmir Valley.

"There are some injuries but more details are awaited," he said.

Yesterday, protesters in the neighbouring Kulgam district burnt a house of the ruling PDP's block president Gulzar Ahmad.

Ahmad had facilitated a meeting of Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti with the family of a victim of violence in the district. Mehbooba had visited the family of Late Mashooq Ahmed, firing victim of Kund, Kulgam and offered condolences to the bereaved family yesterday.

"Curfew remains in force in five police station areas of downtown Srinagar," a police spokesman said.

He said curfew in these areas of the summer capital continued as a precautionary measure in view of the call given by separatists asking people to occupy Airport road, city centre Lal Chowk and district headquarters against the all-party delegation's visit.

On the other hand, aiming to bring peace in Jammu and Kashmir, the all-party delegation reached today in Srinagar for a two-day visit to the state during which it is expected to interact with a cross-section of people.

"We intend to talk to individuals and groups who want peace and normalcy in Kashmir Valley," Rajnath Singh said before the departure of a delegation comprising 30 members from 20 parties.

Cutting across party lines, leaders said that they were hopeful of finding a solution for restoration of peace in the Valley where violent clashes have claimed 71 lives since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani on July 8.
Srinagar: India's most wanted terrorist and Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin vowed to block any peaceful political resolution to the Kashmir conflict even as an all-party delegation headed to Valley on Sunday for a peaceful resolution on the Kashmir unrest after the encounter of Hizbul Mujahideen Commander Burhan Wani.

The separatist leader exclaimed that he would make all effort to derail dialogue on peaceful resolution in Kashmir. Aggregating his stand on the Kashmir row, the 69-year-old said that he would train more Kashmiri suicide bombers to take his struggles outside of Kashmir, hinting at spreading terror outside of the Valley.

Justifying the use of suicide bombers, Salahuddin said, "If soldiers from Andhra Pradesh, Madras, Assam, Nagaland, Haryana, Bihar and Delhi violate the sanctity of our houses, we are compelled and justified to carry out a suicide attack."

"The Kashmiri leadership, people and mujahideen should know there is no formal, peaceful way," said Salahuddin in an interview at his office in Baila Noor Shah Area of Muzaffarabad.

Salahuddin, who dismissed talks as futile, insisted that there was no solution to Kashmir except militancy, by launching a target-oriented armed struggle. He also called for the Indian government to recognise Kashmir as a disputed area, without which talks could not be held.

The terror outfits chief threatened to show his might and said Hizbul Mujahideen would take the struggle outside Kashmir, to other parts of the region and the globe.

In 1987, Salahuddin had unsuccessfully contested the J&K Assembly elections as a candidate of the Muslim United Front. He appeared to be the favourite for the seat but lost in circumstances which sparked allegations of vote fraud. He later fled to Pakistan and was provided protection by ISI and the establishment.
Srinagar: More than 200 people were injured in clashes between stone pelters and security forces in Kashmir on Sunday, on a day an all-party parliamentary delegation was here to assess the ground situation in the valley where normal life remained paralysed for 58th consecutive day.

There was no curfew in the valley except some areas of Srinagar falling under the Police Stations of Khanyar, Safakadal, Nowhatta, Rainawari and M R Gunj, a police spokesman said.

10 incidents of stone pelting were reported from Srinagar, Anantnag, Pulwama, Kulgam, Shopian, Awantipora and Sopore, he said.

In Shopian district of south Kashmir, clashes broke out in the morning and continued for most part of the day with protestors setting ablaze the mini-secretariat building which houses the Deputy Commissioner's office, a police official said.

"In Shopian, a mob attacked and set ablaze mini secretariat Shopian. The fire was brought under control. However, the structure suffered partial damage," he said.

The clashes erupted after police stopped people in Penjoora village of the district from taking out a rally, the official said, adding over 100 people were injured.

He said the security forces used baton charge and tear- gas shelling to disperse the protestors.

Clashes were also reported from Tral area of Pulwama district where more than 60 people were hurt in action by security forces against the stone pelters.

"In Tral, a huge mob pelted stones on the police and security forces. Some of the miscreants, when chased, entered a Ziyarat (shrine) and again started pelting stones from the compound of the Ziyarat," the spokesman said, adding police "cautiously" handled the situation.

Protestors also attacked the house of ruling PDP MLA from Tral constituency Mushtaq Ahmad Shah, breaking the window panes of the building.

"There were clashes between protestors and security forces in Tral and amidst those clashes, some miscreants attacked the house of Tral legislator Mushtaq Ahmad Shah with stones," a police official said.

He said the protestors broke the window panes of the house, but no one was injured. The forces deployed in the area fired several tear-gas canisters and managed to disperse the protestors from the spot, the official said.

In Sopore town of north Kashmir's Baramulla district, at least 25 people were hurt in the clashes during the day, the official said. Condition of three of the injured persons is stated to be critical.
Srinagar: Separatists on Sunday rejected Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti's invitation to them for meeting with all-party delegation, terming such a measure as "deceitful" and insisting that it cannot be an alternative to a "transparent agenda-based dialogue to address the core issue".

A day after Mehbooba invited separatists in her capacity as PDP chief, separatist leaders Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq (both of separate Hurriyat Conference factions) and Yasin Malik (of JKLF) issued a joint statement here, rubbishing her and her offer.

"These deceitful methods of crisis management through Parliamentary delegations and Track-Two only prolong the sufferings of the people and can`t take the place of a genuine transparent agenda-based dialogue to address the core issue of the peoples' right to self-determination in J-K.

"That has been our consistent stand and has been spelled out recently as well in our letters to various international and global fora," the statement said.

While making it clear that they were not interested in meeting the delegation led by union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, the separatist leaders said one "fails to understand" what hope to attach with a delegation which has not "spelled out its mandate for any engagement on a clear agenda".

They alleged, "In politics, India has deployed deceit, double talk, themselves and through their quislings, continuously for the past 70 years."

Given this situation, it is "not surprising that even now her (Mehbooba?s) dominant concern, as expressed in her letter, is to ?lend credence and credibility? to the Indian Parliamentary delegation visiting Kashmir avowedly to ascertain wishes of the people."

Commenting on Mehbooba "outburst" during a press conference with Rajnath Singh recently, the separatists said "that seemed to even embarrass" the union minister.
Mumbai: On the day when Mother Teresa, the nun whose work with the dying and destitute of Kolkata made her a global icon of Christian charity, was made a saint, some unknown miscreants vandalised a statue of Jesus Christ at Juhu Tara road in Mumbai on Sunday.

An NGO told CNN-News18 that some police officials tempered with the evidence and demanded that they be also booked along with the attackers.

Today, almost 19 years after her death, Mother Teresa, Nobel laureate and the messiah of the poor, was formally canonized by Pope Francis at Vatican city.

The founder of the Missionaries of Charity, who brought dignity to the thousands dying on the streets of Calcutta, was honoured at the mid-morning ceremony in front of St Peter's Basilica, which was attended by the more than 100,000 people.

Her elevation to Roman Catholicism's celestial pantheon came in a canonisation mass in St Peter's square in the Vatican that was presided over by Pope Francis in the presence of 100,000 pilgrims.
Kolkata: Even as the nuns of the Missionaries of Charity on Sunday cheered loudly, clapped freely and rang bells the moment Pope Francis declared Mother Teresa a saint, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee took to the social media to reveal that she had gifted a Bible in Bengali bound in Baluchuri silk to Pope Francis at Vatican City.

In a tweet, Mamata, who attended the function in Vatican, said Missionaries of Charity's Superior General Sister Prema and Archbishop of Kolkata would hand over the holy book to the Pope.

"Sr Prema & Kolkata Archbishop met @MamataOfficial today. This Bible bound in Baluchuri to b handed over to @Pontifex," Banerjee tweeted.

Sr Prema & Kolkata Archbishop met @MamataOfficial today. This Bible bound in Baluchuri to b handed over to @Pontifex pic.twitter.com/T0g1z6f8S9  Mamata Banerjee (@MamataOfficial) September 4, 2016

I feel immensely blessed to have witnessed the canonisation of our beloved Mother in the Vatican today pic.twitter.com/1pViQFmml6  Mamata Banerjee (@MamataOfficial) September 4, 2016

Banerjee is in Vatican with 12-member official delegation as a guest of the Missionaries.

Meanwhile, decked up with larger-than-life posters of the late Roman Catholic nun, the Mother House, headquarters of the congregation and house of the saint in Kolkata, was kept open throughout the day as visitors poured in to watch the ceremony live on big TV screens and offer flowers at her tomb.

The sisters of the Order, who don't watch TV or use mobile phones, made an exception as they all remained glued to specially-arranged large screens.

Around 300 of them gathered from nearby homes to watch the canonisation ceremony live.

Pope Francis today proclaimed Mother Teresa a saint, hailing her as the personification of maternal love and a powerful advocate for the poor.

"We may have some difficulty in calling her 'Saint' Teresa," the pontiff said. "Her holiness is so near to us, so tender and so fruitful that we continue to spontaneously call her Mother. She made her voice heard before the powers of this world, so that they might recognize their guilt for the crime - the crimes - of poverty they created."

The unscripted comments came at a canonisation mass attended by 100,000 pilgrims, including 13 heads of state or government and hundreds of sari-clad nuns from Teresa's order, the Missionaries of Charity.

Queen Sofia of Spain and some 1,500 homeless people also looked on as Pope Francis described Teresa's work in the slums of the Indian metropolis as "eloquent witness to God's closeness to the poorest of the poor."

To applause, he added, "Mother Teresa loved to say, 'perhaps I don't speak their language but I can smile'. Let us carry her smile in our hearts and give it to those whom we meet along our journey, especially those who suffer."

Pope Francis also used his sermon to recall Teresa's fervent opposition to abortion, which she termed "murder by the mother" in a controversial Nobel Peace prize speech in 1979.

She "ceaselessly proclaimed that the unborn are the weakest", he said.

The ceremony came on the eve of the 19th anniversary of Teresa's death in Kolkata, where she spent nearly four decades working in wretched slums.

With the 16th century basilica of St Peter's glinting in the late summer sun, Francis led a ritual mass that has barely changed for centuries.

Speaking in Latin, he declared "blessed Teresa of Calcutta (Kolkata) to be a Saint... Decreeing that she is to be venerated as such by the whole Church."

After the mass, the 79-year-old pontiff boarded an open-topped jeep and toured around St Peter's square and surrounding streets to a rapturous reception from tens of thousands of well-wishers.

Let us carry Mother Teresas smile in our hearts and give it to those whom we meet along our journey. pic.twitter.com/YNGkhd9Z6m  Pope Francis (@Pontifex) September 4, 2016

(With PTI inputs)
Kabul: At least 34 persons were killed and 21 others injured on Sunday after a bus collided with a truck in Afghanistan`s Zabul province, police said.

"The accident took place along Kabul-Kandahar highway at around 5.00 a.m.," a senior police official told Xinhua news agency.

The death toll was likely to increase as many of the injured were in critical condition, he added.

Local officials said that the bus travelling from Kandahar to Kabul was carrying around 60 persons.
Kabul: At least 36 persons were killed and 28 wounded when a bus collided with a fuel tanker in Afghanistan's southern province of Zabul on Sunday, an official said.

"The accident took place on the Kabul-Kandahar highway in Jaldak area. Both the vehicles caught fire after the crash," Xinhua news agency quoted a police official as saying.

According to security officials, the accident took place when the fuel tanker collided with the passenger bus, Tolo news reported.

The wounded, suffering from severe burns and fractures, were transferred to various hospitals in Kandahar province, the police official said.

The deaths in the collision are likely to rise as many of the injured were in critical condition, he said.

According to the official, the overloaded bus travelling from Kandahar to Kabul carried around 60 people.

Reckless driving might have caused the accident, some of the officials said, adding that an investigation was underway.

More than 3,000 people die every year in road accidents in Afghanistan due to inexperienced drivers as well as poor condition of the roads and vehicles.
Animal minds

When you eat meat, you are really eating an animal as bright as, if not brighter than, you
Hangzhou: British Prime Minister Theresa May arrived here in China on Sunday for the 11th leaders' meeting of the G20 major economies, her major international summit debut.

At the summit, themed "Toward an Innovative, Invigorated, Interconnected and Inclusive World Economy", Britain is to show it is "open for business as a bold, confident, outward-looking country" and will be a "global leader" on free trade, Xinhua news agency quoted May as saying on Saturday before leaving for China.

The European country's shock vote in June to leave the European Union (EU), led to the resignation of May's predecessor, David Cameron, and has put Britain's posture on regional integration and globalisation in question.

On the sidelines of the two-day G20 summit, May is expected to have a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss bilateral relations and other matters of common concern.

During her stay in Hangzhou, May is also expected to meet with other world leaders including US President Barack Obama, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Washington: Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine on Sunday defended Hillary Clinton against criticism over her handling of classified information as secretary of state, saying she was unaware of the sensitivity of some information she exchanged over email because it had been "improperly labeled."

In July, the Federal Bureau of Investigation rebuked Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, for her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, saying she was "extremely careless" in her handling of classified information.

According to records released by the FBI on Friday, Clinton told the bureau`s investigators in a July interview that she could not recall getting any briefings on how to handle classified information or comply with laws governing the preservation of federal records.

Kaine, a US senator from Virginia who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees, told ABC`s program "This Week," that the volume of information received by government officials often makes it difficult to know what information has been declared classified.

"There were emails that contained classified information that had been improperly marked. So when she received the email, the material that was classified - which is supposed to be flagged and identified as classified - in many instances was improperly labeled," he said.

"We look at so much material, unless it is specifically pulled out and identified, it is difficult to know sometimes whether a statement or a paragraph is classified or not," Kaine added.

Clinton, who is facing Republican Donald Trump for the White House in the Nov. 8 election, has been dogged for more than a year by the fallout from her decision to use an unauthorized private email account run from the basement of her Chappaqua, New York, home.

She repeatedly said she did not use it to send or receive classified information. The government forbids handling such information outside secure channels.

Contradicting Clinton`s comment that she never exchanged classified information over her private email server, the FBI said that at least 81 email threads contained information that was classified at the time, although the agency said the final number may be more than 2,000. While the FBI has scolded Clinton over the handling of classified information, the agency recommended that no criminal charges be filed against her.

Clinton has said that in hindsight she regretted using a private email system while secretary of state. Opinion polls show that voter concerns about Clinton`s honesty and trustworthiness are among her biggest vulnerabilities.

A series of surveys show the race has tightened over the past few weeks. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken during the week of Aug. 26 to Sept. 1, Trump had the support of 40 percent of likely voters while Clinton had the backing of 39 percent. Clinton`s support has dropped steadily in the weekly tracking poll since Aug. 25, eliminating what had been a eight-point lead for her.
London: Indian-origin British Labour MP Keith Vaz stepped down as chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee following allegations he paid two male prostitutes for sex and offered to cover the cost of Class A drugs at his London flat.

The MP for Leicester East, has issued an apology after the Sunday Mirror reported he met and paid two Eastern European male escorts at his property in Edgware and boasted about having unprotected sex.

During the meeting, the 59-year-old allegedly offered to cover the cost of cocaine if it were brought to the flat, but refused to have any himself.

A series of text messages published by the newspaper allegedly show Vaz asking for the legal "high poppers" to be brought to the meeting. The substance is widely used as a sex-enhancing drug.

Voice recordings of a 90-minute meeting on August 27, also purport to show Vaz examining pictures of men on the gay dating app Grindr, reported The Independent.

In a statement issued to the Mail on Sunday, Vaz, who has been chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee since 2007, said: "I am genuinely sorry for the hurt and distress that has been caused by my actions in particular to my wife and children."

"I will be informing the Committee on Tuesday of my intention to stand aside from chairing the sessions of the Committee with immediate effect," Vaz added.

He said in a statement he believed he had been the victim of a sting operation, saying: "It is deeply disturbing that a national newspaper should have paid individuals to act in this way."

He added that he had referred the allegations to his solicitor.

A friend of Vaz told the Mail on Sunday, the politician was not resigning entirely and would wait to see if he had enough support from MPs to remain on the committee.

According to the Sunday Mirror, Vaz had at least two meetings with the prostitutes and had made contact with the pair through an escort they knew in London.

The Home Affairs Select Committee is currently overseeing an inquiry into prostitution laws. An interim report recommended significant changes to existing laws so that soliciting and brothel-keeping are decriminalised.


Tokyo: Authorities on Sunday issued advisories of heavy rain, high waves and possible floods in Kyushu island of Japan as typhoon Namtheun approached the area, the weather office here said.

Japan's Meteorological Agency (JMA) issued advisories for northern parts of Kyushu area as the typhoon approached the island, while parts of Iwate prefecture in the northeast continued to struggle with flood damage, EFE news reported.

The storm was moving north over the ocean and was expected to make landfall in northern Kyushu by late Sunday or on Monday, according to local media.

Up to 200 mm of rains were predicted in Kyushu, and 150 mm in Shikoku and Kansai islands until Monday noon.

Nakanoshima island recorded 129.5 mm of rainfall per hour on Saturday, the largest amount so far recorded there, and south of Kyushu was also lashed with heavy rain and high winds.

In Iwaizumi, landslides, floods and fallen trees on Saturday left 622 persons cut off from outside, with another 212 persons isolated in Kuji.

Japan's Ground Self-Defense Forces personnel were deployed in the area to rescue those trapped, distribute daily necessities, help the injured and restore damaged water supply which has affected 7,026 persons.

Electricity was also cut off to about 2,400 households in Iwaizumi.

Earlier this week, Japan was hit by another typhoon Lionrock that claimed 16 lives and the number was expected to rise as rescue operations continued in northern Japan.

Rain caused by Lionrock led to overflowing rivers and severe flooding.


Washington: All illegal immigrants may not be deported from the US if Donald Trump is elected as the next president of the country, a top aide of Republican presidential candidate said on Sunday.

The former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani told the CNN in an interview that decision of the rest of the illegal immigrants would be taken only after all criminal aliens are deported.

This is what Trump said in his major policy speech on immigration early this week, he said.

"The speech is consistent with what he said in the past, and it leaves a very big opening for what will happen with the people that remain here in the US after the criminals are removed and after the border is secure," he said.

"He says in a very, very important sentence, that, at that time, when America is safe, we will be open to all of the options, meaning that Donald Trump, as he expressed in one of his interviews recently, would find it very, very difficult to throw out a family that's been here for 15 years, and they have three children, two of whom are citizens," Giuliani said.

"That is not the kind of America he wants. His main focus of that speech, and I think the reason for the emotion in it was because of all of those mothers who came up whose children were killed by illegal criminal immigrants," he said.

"What he said in the speech is, after we secure the border and after we remove the criminal illegal immigrants, to a large extent -- you're never going to get to 100 per cent -- then and only then can we look at this in a very rational way in which we can look at all the options and be open to all the options," he added.

The former New York Mayor said not all illegal immigrants would have to go back.

"There are other options too. I mean, it's going to depend on the person. Some of these people could have been on welfare for the last 30 years, or taking benefits or cheating. And maybe some of them have to be thrown out, but not necessarily all of them," he said.
Hangzhou: Chinas leaders have been accused of delivering a calculated diplomatic snub to Barack Obama after the US President was not provided with a staircase to leave his plane on his arrival in Hangzhou city before the start of the Group of 20 (G20) summit meeting.

Chinese authorities have rolled out the red carpet for world leaders, including India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Russian President Vladimir Putin, South Korean President Park Geun-hye, Brazil's President Michel Temer, and British Prime Minister Theresa May, who arrived here on Sunday, The Guardian reported.

But Obama, who is on his final tour of Asia, was forced to disembark from Air Force One through a little-used exit in the plane's belly after no rolling staircase was provided when he landed in Hangzhou on Saturday.

When Obama did find his way on to a red carpet on the tarmac below, there were heated altercations between the US and Chinese officials, with one Chinese official caught on video shouting: "This is our country! This is our airport!"

"The reception that President Obama and his staff got when they arrived here Saturday afternoon was bruising, even by Chinese standards," the New York Times reported.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry official involved in the visit denied it had been a snub, telling the South China Morning Post that the US delegation had declined to use the usual rolling red-carpet staircase.

"It would do China no good in treating Obama rudely," the official said.

"China provides a rolling staircase for every arriving state leader, but the US side complained that the driver doesn't speak English and can't understand security instructions from the US; so China proposed that we could assign a translator to sit beside the driver, but the US side turned down the proposal and insisted that they didn't need the staircase provided by the airport," the official added.

Obama offered a diplomatic reply when asked to comment on the airport "kerfuffle" on Sunday during a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Theresa May.

"I wouldn't over-crank the significance of it because, as I said, this is not the first time that these things happen and it doesn't just happen here. It happens in a lot of places including, by the way, sometimes our allies," Obama said, adding that "none of this detracts from the broader scope of the relationship".

Obama suggested that his Chinese hosts might have found the size of the US delegation "a little overwhelming".

"We have got a lot of planes, a lot of helicopters, a lot of cars and a lot of guys. If you are a host country, sometimes it may feel a little bit much," Obama added.

US National Security Adviser Susan Rice admitted that she was surprised by the handling of the President's arrival. "They did things that weren't anticipated," she told media.

According to the New York Times, Rice had appeared "baffled and annoyed" that the President had been forced to leave Air Force One through a door normally reserved for high-security trips to places such as Afghanistan.

In the lead-up to the final meeting between Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping, experts had predicted that the pair would seek to part ways on a positive note with the announcement that the world's two largest polluters would ratify the Paris climate agreement.

However, Obama's unconventional welcome -- and a series of subsequent skirmishes and quarrels between Chinese and US officials and journalists -- were a reminder of the underlying tensions.

"I think this time  maybe the seams were showing a little more than usual in terms of some of the negotiations and jostling that takes place behind the scenes," Obama admitted on Sunday.

Official statements issued by both sides on Saturday, as the pair held more than four hours of bilateral meetings, hinted at some of the disagreements between the world's two largest economies.

According to a White House statement, Obama told President Xi of "America's unwavering support for upholding human rights".

"China opposes any other country interfering in its internal affairs in the name of human rights issues," Xi told Obama in response, according to Xinhua news agency.

In an interview with CNN, Obama warned Beijing against muscle-flexing in the South China Sea. Xi told Obama his country would "unswervingly safeguard" its claims in the region.


Damascus: Syrian government forces advanced on Sunday south of Aleppo city, a military source and state media said, as they pushed to once again encircle rebel neighbourhoods and reimpose a siege.

"The Syrian army, supported by allied forces, has total control of the armaments academy and expanded the territory it controls in the military academies zone," state news agency SANA said.

An AFP correspondent in the rebel-held east of Aleppo city reported heavy aerial bombardment on the combat zone in the south of the city, where three military schools are located.

Government forces have already recaptured the air force academy and rebels "are now besieged in the artillery academy," a military source said.

If they recapture the school, government forces could then "easily take Ramussa, a suburb south of Aleppo, and reimpose a siege of the rebel districts," said Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor.

Once Syria`s economic powerhouse, Aleppo city has been ravaged by the war that began with protests against President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011.

It has been roughly divided between regime control in the west and rebel control in the east since mid-2012.

In mid-July, advancing regime forces encircled the rebel-held east, placing the opposition districts under a siege that provoked international concern.

But on August 6, opposition forces seized Ramussa and reopened a route into the rebel-held portions of the city.
London: Aid workers have warned that tens of thousands of "ghost" refugees, who have been trapped in the desert along Jordan`s border with Syria for more than two months, are at a risk of epidemics.

The refugees, who have no sanitation or medical facilities, are living in some of the worst conditions and activists say the situation could undermine Jordan`s role as co-host of a major summit on refugees in New York this month, reports the Guardian.

No aid or food deliveries are allowed across the border and irregular water supplies barely cover drinking needs in temperatures reaching 50 degree Celsius over the summer, with nothing left for sanitation.

Some people have reportedly dug themselves holes in the ground because they have nothing at all to improvise shelter against regular desert sandstorms.

One settlement was bombed by Russian planes in July. "These are some of the most extreme conditions on earth. Then you add to that not having any access to healthcare or enough water or food, and being under threat of aerial attack. This is a critical humanitarian emergency," said Natalie Thurtle, the medical team leader for charity Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF).

Jordan is co-hosting the major international Leaders` Summit on Refugees on 20 September, on the sidelines of the UN general assembly.

Jordan says it is hosting nearly 1.4 million Syrian refugees, of whom 630,000 are registered with the UN. The huge numbers have placed a massive strain on the kingdom`s economy and resources as well as raising security concerns.
Beirut: Syrian rebels backed by Turkey seized several villages from Islamic State near the town of al-Rai, from where the rebel groups launched a new operation against the jihadists earlier on Saturday, a rebel official said.

"They took several villages, about eight villages. At first they took two and withdrew from them, but then reinforcements came and there was an advance," Zakaria Malahifji of the Aleppo-based Fastaqim group told Reuters.

The areas seized were to the east and south of al-Rai, which is 2 km (1 mile) from the Turkish border.
Ankara: Ankara stepped up its fight against militants in Turkey and northern Syria with air strikes on Kurdish rebel positions in the restive southeast and IS extremists in northern Syria, security sources said on Sunday.

Jets bombed four PKK targets in the Cukurca district of the southeastern province of Hakkari close to northern Iraq yesterday evening, the sources told state-run Anadolu news agency.

The bombing took place after a bloody 48 hours during which at least 22 Turkish soldiers and a village guardsman were killed in clashes and an attack blamed on PKK militants.

Twelve soldiers were killed in two separate clashes in the Cukurca and Semdinli districts in Hakkari, the provincial governor's office said, while in Van province, eight soldiers died during fighting between soldiers and militants. Two more died in southeastern Mardin, Anadolu said.

The village guard, killed in an attack in Mardin on Friday, was part of a group of local residents who cooperate with Turkish security forces against the PKK, listed as a terror group by Ankara and its Western allies.

Another six PKK positions were hit in the Mount Tendurek region between Agri and Van provinces in the country's east yesterday evening, Anadolu said.

The Turkish military said more than 100 PKK fighters were "neutralised" during clashes in Cukurca with its security forces yesterday, without explaining how many were killed and how many were injured.

Meanwhile Turkish warplanes destroyed Islamic State (IS) group targets in northern Syria yesterday, hours after Ankara sent more tanks from the southern Kilis province to support Syrian rebels.

A two-year ceasefire between Ankara and the PKK collapsed last year, after which Kurdish rebels launched frequent attacks on security forces in the country's southeast.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim vowed that billions of lira would be invested in centres "damaged by PKK terror" during a televised speech in Diyarbakir today.

He promised 1.9 billion lira (643 million dollars) would be invested in the historic Sur district of Diyarbakir, which has been ravaged by renewed violence.

Another seven "terror-damaged" areas would receive 10 billion lira and Yildirim promised thousands of new homes would be built in the southeast.

More than 600 Turkish security force members have been killed since July 2015 while more than 7,000 militants have been killed in Turkey and northern Iraq, Anadolu said.

It is not possible to independently verify the toll.

Activists claim innocent civilians have also been killed in the offensives.

More than 40,000 people have been killed since the PKK first took up arms in 1984.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said today NATO countries needed a common approach to all terrorist acts and organisations after talks with US President Barack Obama on the sidelines of the G20 summit in China's Hangzhou.

"There is no good terrorist or bad terrorist. All types of terrorism are bad. We must stand against them."
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London: A 27-year-old British glamour model is on an Islamic State related terror watch by UK authorities after she used social media to communicate with extremists, a media report said on Sunday.

Kimberley Miners, who has posed topless for The Sun, is believed to have secretly converted to Islam and her "liking" and sharing Islamic State (ISIS) videos have triggered an investigation by Britain's anti-terrorist police and MI5.

The model from Bradford appears on social media under the alias Aisha Lauren al-Britaniya and has posted images of Muslim women brandishing rifles and other weapons, The Sunday Times reported.

Pictures show her fully veiled or with only her blue eyes on display, but in public she wears skinny jeans and leaves her long blonde hair uncovered.

She said she was abused when she went out in Islamic dress.

Britain's anti-terror officers have reportedly spoken to her up to four times and referred her to an anti-radicalisation programme.

She has been warned that she faces arrest if she continues to engage in extremism.

Miners insists that she disagrees with ISIS beheadings and said she was primarily concerned about the plight of Syria's refugee children.

However, the former model admitted being in direct contact on Facebook with an ISIS recruiter called Abu Usamah al-Britani.

The fighter appears to be openly using social media to groom a new generation of jihadist brides from Britain and the West, the report said.

Miners, who comes from a Christian family, first appeared in the national media in 2009 when she was juggling her job as a street cleaner in Bradford with a fledgling career as a topless model.

"People think it's really odd that I can be something so glamorous yet do something so dirty by day but I love it," she told The Sun at the time.

Her transformation is thought to have begun about a year later when she was deeply affected by the death of her father, Anthony, in a freak drowning.

Miners appears to have found solace in the company of Muslim friends, including another white convert.

She said her interest in Islam was sparked last year.

"I found peace through it all," she was quoted as saying.
District of Colombia: US forces have hit Islamic State group targets along Syria`s border with Turkey using a "newly deployed" mobile rocket system, American officials said Saturday.

A US Army High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) carried out a successful strike on Friday on a tactical unit and building belonging to the IS group, Major Josh Jacques, a spokesman for US Central Command, told AFP.

US President Barack Obama`s anti-Islamic State envoy Brett McGurk said on Twitter US forces hit the jihadist targets with the "newly deployed" system.

The detachment, which allows the United States to strike a target "with a high degree of accuracy and a significantly greater range," was deployed to Turkey in support of the US-led anti-IS mission, Jacques said.

"HIMARS is unique in reducing the potential collateral damage as it impacts a target at a high angle, has a relatively small blast radius for the effect achieved, and functions in all weather conditions," he said.

The US embassy in Ankara posted on Twitter that it was the "latest step in US-Turkey cooperation in the fight against ISIL (IS)."

HIMARS has been used over several years in previous operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The weapon system is incorporated into our normal deliberate targeting cycle and has been for quite some time," Jacques said.

"Precision strikes conducted by HIMARS are similar to the (US-led anti-IS) coalition`s precision airstrikes; HIMARS is a complementary asset and involves US troops operating artillery from the soil of a NATO ally," he said.
Washington: Barack Obama believes that young Americans "completely reject" Republican White House hopeful Donald Trump's tough line on immigration and that most Americans share their stance.

"There's a long tradition in the United States of inclusion, immigration, diversity," the president said in an interview broadcast today on CNN but recorded before he left for the Group of 20 summit meeting in China. I don't think that's going to change because Mr Trump's got a little more attention than usual," added Obama. He reiterated that he felt certain the 70-year-old real estate mogul would not succeed him as president next January.

"If you look at the current polls," Obama said, "he's been able to appeal to a certain group of folks who feel left out or worried about the social change, who have legitimate concerns around the economy and (are) feeling left behind. But that's not the majority of America."

"And if you talk to younger people, the next generation of Americans, they completely reject the path" taken by Trump.

The president said it was important to "pay close attention" when there was a rise in intolerance and calls for "banning certain classes of people," a clear allusion to Trump's call last year to ban all Muslims from entering the country "until we find out what's going on."

But overall, Obama concluded, "I'm optimistic."

After issuing a series of contradictory signals on immigration -- reflecting the tensions within his campaign team -- Trump delivered a much-anticipated speech Wednesday in Phoenix, Arizona that essentially repeated the hard line on immigration that helped fuel his rise during the Republican primaries.

Detailing the arsenal of tough measures he intends to take if he defeats Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the November 8 election, he ruled out any path to citizenship for the undocumented immigrants -- most of them Mexicans -- living in the shadows in the United States.

He has, however, backed away from the idea of forcibly deporting the totality of the undocumented -- generally estimated to number 11 million -- perhaps in view of the enormous logistical challenges such a sweeping operation would pose.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin writes his signature on a graffiti at a youth educational forum in Crimea on August 19, 2016

After Russia snatched the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea from Kiev the new authorities installed by Moscow set about taking over one of Ukraine's largest banks as well as shipyards and hotels.

The state lender has now fired back by filing a massive claim with a court in The Hague -- one of multiple cases being fought by Kiev on a new legal front as a war with pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country drags on.

The various lawsuits add up to tens of billions of dollars (euros) and may take months or years to resolve.

But the ex-Soviet state is certain it will win back at least some of the money to help fill its shallow state coffers at a time when IMF aid remains suspended over Ukraine's perceived failure to properly tackle graft.

Ukraine?s Justice Minister Pavlo Petrenko added fuel to the fire by warning that even more cases against Russia linked to its seizure of Crimea and alleged invasion of the east were in the works.

"We are preparing another lawsuit together with the foreign ministry that we plan to submit to the (UN) International Court of Justice," Petrenko told Ukraine's private 112 news channel on August 27.

- 'Total destruction of investment' -

The case of the State Savings Bank of Ukraine (Oschadbank) is of particular importance to Kiev because it may boost the pro-Western authorities' hand in winning back other properties from Russia.

It has hired the Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP global law firm to represent its case at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.

An August 26 hearing boycotted by Russia heard that Oschadbank was seeking more than $1 billion (0.9 billion euros) in compensation "for the total destruction of its investment in Crimea".

Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP partner Alex Gerbi said that "if Russia continues with this stance, the claim shall proceed through an accelerated timetable to a final hearing scheduled for the end of March 2017."

Gerbi told AFP that a judgement in favour of Kiev would not necessarily set a precedent for similar disputes.

Story continues

But he added that "investment treaty awards typically may be used as persuasive... authority in other cases under appropriate circumstances."

PrivatBank -- Ukraine's largest private lender with branches stretching from Italy to China -- is also seeking compensation over losses suffered when Crimea was swarmed by Russian troops and then staged a referendum to join Ukraine's eastern neighbour.

The UN General Assembly condemned the vote as 'illegal" by a nearly-unanimous margin.

Evghenia Sleptsova of the Oxford Economics forecasting and analysis centre said that "Russia would never pay" the huge state claim mentioned by the justice minister because Moscow "considers that Crimea joined Russia voluntarily."

"However, it does make sense for individual Ukrainian enterprises to pursue these cases, not to leave those losses simply pending in the air," Sleptsova told AFP.

- From Stockholm to London -

The two sworn foes have further been duking it out in the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce over natural gas bills that add up to more than $65 billion.

Russia has cut off the flows to Ukraine -- one of its most important transport routes to central and southern Europe -- on four occasions in the past decade over price disputes.

Ukraine is now buying more gas from its European allies than Russia in order to eliminate what it sees as a political weapon wielded by the Kremlin each time Kiev looks to establish closer links with the West.

The February 2014 pro-EU revolution that finally pulled Ukraine out of Russia's orbit has resulted in all the pent-up resentment over the gas spilling over into one giant headache for the judges in Stockholm.

Ukraine's state energy company Naftogaz is seeking $26.6 billion from its Russian counterpart for its alleged failure to pay the required sums for transits and billing Kiev for gas it never bought.

Russia's Gazprom energy giant is demanding $38.7 billion from Naftogaz for what it sees as non-payment on contracted gas.

Yet the English High Court of Justice in London may be dealing with an even more explosive issue relating to a $3-billion eurobond Russia bought from Ukraine in December 2013.

Kiev views that money as a bribe paid to then-president Viktor Yanukovych -- now living in self-imposed exile in Russia -- for his surprise November 2013 decision to ditch a landmark EU deal.

The Moscow-backed president's about-face sparked three months of protests that ousted Yanukovych and was followed by Russia's seizure of Crimea and the onset of the eastern separatist war.

Ukraine's decision not to pay back the money by the loan's December 2015 deadline prompted the IMF to bend its rules and continue its programme with a nation that is technically in default.
By Manuel Mogato VIENTIANE (Reuters) - The Philippines expressed "grave concern" on Sunday and demanded an explanation from China's ambassador over what it said was an increasing number of Chinese boats near the disputed Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea. A Philippines air force plane flew over the rocky outcrop on Saturday and spotted more boats than usual in a flotilla China has maintained since seizing the shoal after a tense standoff in 2012, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said. "There were four Chinese coastguard ships and six other vessels, including blue-coloured barges, around Scarborough Shoal," he said in a text message sent to reporters. "The presence of many ships other than coastguard in the area is a cause of grave concern." China's embassy in Manila could not be reached for comment. Although the shoal is merely a few rocks poking above the sea, it is important to the Philippines because of its tranquil waters and rich stocks of fish. Manila says China's blockade of the shoal is a violation of international law. The dispute has become more significant since the Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled on July 12 that no one country had sovereign rights over activity in the Scarborough Shoal, a traditional fishing ground for Chinese, Filipino and Vietnamese. China has refused to recognise the ruling and the latest comment from the Philippines could cause a stir ahead of a regional summit in Laos starting on Tuesday, where leaders of Southeast Asian states as well as China, Japan and United States will meet. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte wants China to abide by the ruling but has pledged not to raise the issue during the summit. He wants to smooth the way for bilateral negotiations and last month sent former President Fidel Ramos as his special envoy to meet Chinese representatives in Hong Kong. Lorenzana said Beijing had earlier this year tried to send dredging barges to the shoal, but there was no sign of any reclamation activity so far. China previously used barges to dredge sand for its seven man-made islands in the Spratlys. "We don't know yet if those barges are precursors of future dredging operations," he said. "If they try to construct anything in Scarborough it will have far-reaching adverse effect on the security situation." China maintains claims to almost the entire South China Sea, which is a vital waterway for global trade. Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Brunei and Vietnam have competing jurisdictional claims. A U.S. State Department spokesman said on Sunday the United States was monitoring the situation and encouraged "all sides to exercise restraint and take practical steps to lower tensions." U.S. President Barack Obama pressed his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, on Saturday on territorial disputes in the South China Sea, urging Beijing to uphold its legal obligations and stressing the United States' commitments to its regional allies. Tensions over the disputed waters between China and its neighbours were expected to hang over the G20 summit, which opened in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou on Sunday. (Additional reporting by Arshad Mohammed in Washington; Editing by Kim Coghill and Peter Cooney)
By Florence Tan and Gavin Maguire SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A widening gap between Asia's oil production and demand is creating a growing capital drain for the region and leaving countries vulnerable to global supply disruptions and a sudden surge in oil prices. Asia's net oil imports surpassed the total amount of oil consumed in North America in 2015 and are set to rise after producers slashed spending on exploration and production on low oil prices , leaving oilfields at risk of sharp production declines in the next decade. Activities across Asia-Pacific to search for energy resources have nearly ground to a halt in the past year while recent exploration finds have struck more natural gas than oil, analysts said. As Asia's net imports grow and crude prices recover, the region's oil import bill is set to climb back above $500 billion in 2017 for the first time in three years, calculations based on forecasts by the International Energy Agency and a Reuters crude oil price poll in August showed. . "With demand growth set to continue and outpace declining domestic production, this leaves Asia increasingly vulnerable to rising prices," said Energy Aspects analyst Virendra Chauhan. FALLING OUTPUT The oil price slump since mid-2014 had given Asian economies a breather from high import bills. But oil demand in the Asia-Pacific is expected to grow by 800,000-900,000 barrels per day (bpd) this year and next, while the region's output could shrink by 240,000-330,000 bpd during the same period, Chauhan said. The gap between oil production and demand has jumped over 30 percent since 2010 to an estimated 25.7 million bpd in 2016 and is set to grow by another 1.1 million bpd next year. Rising oil prices, however, means the cost could soar by a third in just one year to $566 billion. "We have seen two years in a row in 2015 and 2016 oil investments declining," International Energy Agency (IEA) chief Fatih Birol said. "This would mean oil security and oil markets may face a challenge as a result of a huge drop in the investments in a very few years in the medium term." Producers across the region are struggling, which is not being helped by international oil companies' capital and expertise leaving the region, said Chauhan. Consultancy Wood Mackenzie expects Asia's oil production to fall to 5 million barrels per day in 2025 from 7.6 million bpd in 2016. "We've seen a number of projects delayed  some cancelled - plus the level of investments in existing oil fields is falling," Angus Rodger, director of Asia-Pacific upstream research at Woodmac said. "That has a minor impact in the short-term, but if you go out to 2020, it means oil production across the region will have declined significantly." China is leading the decline, with output hitting a five-year low in July as producers shut-in marginal fields while imports hit a record. Indonesian officials said they are looking at ways to shore up a production target of 780,000 bpd in 2017, the lowest since 1969 and 40,000 bpd lower than 2016's forecast. "We are discussing how to make Cepu block production higher than now," Director General of Oil and Gas Wiratmaja Puja said, adding that output at the oilfield operated by Exxon Mobil may increase by 15,000 bpd. Indonesia, the largest oil producer in southeast Asia, faces a potential 20-25 percent natural decline in production unless it steps up activities such as drilling and well servicing, said Muliawan, deputy for operations at regulator SKK Migas. MIDEAST SUPPLY IMPASSE China, Indonesia and India have been actively investing in overseas oil production assets to supplement domestic output. China has also been broadening its sources of supply, taking more oil from Russia and Latin America to reduce its dependence on the Middle East, as well as building its strategic reserves to cushion itself in the event of an oil price shock. The region's biggest oil consumer is also turning to gas and renewable energy, but these are long-term solutions. Asia imports just over half of its oil from the Middle East and will continue to rely heavily on Gulf producers, analysts said, exposing the region to geopolitical risks that have disrupted oil production and exports. "Asian production is on the decline, notably among others in China, and with increases in refining capacity that are unlikely to remain idle, the dependency of the region to Middle Eastern oil will remain," BNP Paribas Global Head of Commodity Markets Strategy Harry Tchilinguirian told the Reuters Global Oil Forum. "It is, as you can imagine, hard to replace Saudi Arabia in your import mix for many an Asian refiner." (Reporting by Florence Tan and Gavin Maguire in SINGAPORE, additional reporting by Wilda Asmarini in JAKARTA, editing by Richard Pullin)
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Innovative fintech firms worldwide have been transforming the processes in banking and financial services, largely by introducing automation and technology. While the entire financial industry is having to deal with increased regulation and compliance, many of the simplest financial transactions still involve great inefficiencies. This has been recognized by the Singapore monetary and regulatory authorities, who have taken the bold move of permitting startups to test financial products in a controlled environment. The result has naturally been to boost the attractiveness of the low-tax city state to potential entrepreneurs, and is being monitored closely by Hong Kong in particular.



It does seem evident that the combination of committed public funding and promotion, and the removal of red tape have given Singapore the edge over Hong Kong in the race to become Asias fintech hotspot. Singapore has long been regarded as the trade and finance gateway to Southeast Asia, and the country has been constantly vying with Hong Kong for pre-eminance in Asian financial services. However, the economy has been adversely affected by Chinas slowdown, and the fintech drive was initially seen as a necessary attempt to revive and offset faltering growth. In the last one year alone, Singapore funding of $S225 million has been pledged for fintech start-ups and expansion, while all but a handful of the 210 fintech firms currently in Singapore were founded in the last 2 years.



As Singapore ramps up its support for fintech, companies in the city state can operate payment systems and e-wallets without seeking prior approval. The Money Authority of Singapore (MAS) have said there is unlikely to be hands-on regulation for fintech firms until they grow large enough to pose a risk to the current financial system.



One potential barrier for fintech entrepreneurs is Singapores immigration laws. In order to limit foreign workers, businesses must give priority to Singapore nationals. Some argue this has led to a talent shortage in fintech. Others, however, see Singapores hurdles as easier to overcome than those imposed by rival Hong Kong. The $300 million in fintech funding offered by Hong Kong is offset by the onerous rules and regulations imposed on much of the fintech industry, including crowdfunding platforms, payment firms and peer-to-peer lending operations. In the financial industry, licenses have been notoriously tricky to obtain. Some firms, including Chinese peer-to-peer lender Jimubox, have been forced to abandon Hong Kong due to onerous regulation.



Speaking on current ability to attract and retain fintech startups, the chairwoman of Hong Kongs Financial Services Development Council (FSDC), Laura Cha, admitted they were, absolutely not moving fast enough. Ms Cha went on to recognise fintech as an integral area of development in the financial industry, saying it could not be ignored.



For Singapore going forward, thee country will hold the inaugural Singapore FinTech Festival in November 2016, supported by the Association of Banks in Singapore. The week-long event will be an amalgamation of conferences and events, awards for the most innovative fintech start up and the global fintech hackcelerator - where businesses will be invited to submit and co-create financial sector cyber solutions. Furthermore, the Money Authority of Singapore has announced a regulatory sandbox for financial technology experiments to be outlined and tabled. As for Hong Kong, all eyes will be watching its next move in fintech.



(By Sarah Thorp)



Related Articles

- Fintech: Singapore especially promising within Asia

- Australia and Singapore give their joint support to fintech start-ups

- Five of Singapores most exciting startups
About 200 investors, entrepreneurs and technology transfer professionals listened to appeals on Tuesday from innovators at New Mexicos major research institutions for funding and assistance to take new technologies to market.

The event, held at the Albuquerque International Balloon Museum, marked the first time that the states three research universities and the national laboratories have all come together to showcase innovation from around the state in a single, joint forum. But thats now likely to become a regular activity organized by Innovate New Mexico  a new umbrella group set up to collectively coordinate technology commercialization efforts statewide, said Lisa Kuuttila, the University of New Mexicos chief economic development officer and head of the Science and Technology Corp., UNMs tech-transfer office.

Its a really opportune time to bring everyone together and leverage our collective assets, Kuuttila told participants during a panel discussion. For folks coming from out of state, its much more efficient to have one central place to learn about the technologies of interest to them at our different institutions.

Attendees heard pitches from researchers at UNM, New Mexico State University, and the New Mexico Institute for Mining and Technology, and from scientists at Sandia National laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Air Force Research Laboratory. Technologies ranged from new medical devices and processes to novel inventions in water treatment, consumer electronics and optics and photonics.

UNM, for example, discussed advances in infrared imaging at the Center for High Technology Materials and development of a new, all-natural method for killing disease-carrying mosquito larvae with essential plant oils. New Mexico Tech showcased a novel water desalination process that could substantially lower costs for the oil and gas industry to clean produced water. And NMSU revealed a newly developed polymer coating to protect against corrosion from hydrogen in pipelines and other infrastructure used to transport and store that fuel.

The labs offered a range of technologies as well, such as a non-invasive detection device from Sandia to potentially identify pathogens in a persons breath rather than through blood or urine samples.

Apart from technologies pitched in the event, more than a dozen startups from all the universities and labs showed off products and services in trade booths.

Corporate technology scouts and investors from out of state said they were impressed.

Ive seen some amazing technology here, said Hsiaoli Chen, senior manager for licensing and innovation at ThermoFisher Scientific, a global biotechnology company based in Boston. Its even more than I expected.

Participation by the national labs proved a particularly strong draw for Chen and others.

The fact that Sandia and LANL are involved with this really caught my eye, said Ashwin Rao of Daikin America, a Japanese firm that makes air conditioners and chemicals for lubrication and other purposes. The labs are a well-known source of innovation, and by working together with the universities, theyre creating a great ecosystem here.
The 2016 Miss New Mexico pageant will be hosted at Eastern New Mexico University this week.

Girls from 13 to 17 years old participate in the Miss Teen contest, while participants 17 to 24 participate in the Miss New Mexico contest.

The Miss New Mexico Scholarship Organization allows young women throughout the Land of Enchantment to earn scholarship money for college, cultivate their individual talents and speaking skills, develop self-confidence and poise, as well as the opportunity to serve their local communities, said Greg Smith, executive director of the Miss New Mexico Scholarship Organization.

Fifty-six girls from across the state will be participating in this years pageant, according to Marissa Livingston, who was crowned the 2015 Miss New Mexico at last years pageant, along with Miss New Mexicos 2015 Outstanding Teen Sasha Butcher.

One of the participants is Alexa Vigil, 20, who won the title of Miss Portales at the Miss Portales pageant last November. She was also crowned Miss Eastern New Mexico in 2014.

Local residents Madison Belcher of Texico (Miss Portales Outstanding Teen), Kara Young (Miss Eastern New Mexico Outstanding Teen) and Haley Baca (Miss Roosevelt County Outstanding Teen), both of Portales, also won teen titles in the Miss Portales contest.

These girls have been really working hard these past couple of months, even years, said Livingston, discussing the effort that the participants put forth in the pageant.

Its not about their performance, said Livingston. I know what the job entails, and it really is a full-time job.

The competition is very tough, and we would like for everyone to come out and see the show, said Smith.

Participants will be arriving today and Monday for the event with the Crown the Town event taking place in the Portales town square at 3 p.m. Monday with pageant participants visiting Portales businesses and local residents to kick-off the event.

Livingston said she always looks forward to the event in Portales.

Its a fantastic event that will bring fanfare to the city, said Livingston, adding that she also looks forward to mentoring this years Miss New Mexico winner.

The girls who win are in for the most amazing, fun adventure, said Livingston. I am very honored and proud to have served as Miss New Mexico in 2015 and very excited to watch the girls this year.

The participant crowned Miss New Mexico will be participating in the Miss America competition in September.

It was an honor representing New Mexico on the national stage at Miss America, said Livingston of her experience last year.

A meet and greet event will be held at 6 p.m. Monday at the Campus Union Building at ENMU, and Miss New Mexico pageant contestants will also be part of the Heritage Days parade at 9 a.m. Saturday.

Pageant participants will be competing Thursday through Saturday with the Miss New Mexico Teen competition at 6 p.m. Thursday and Friday at the University Theatre Center, and the Miss New Mexico competition at 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday at the theater.

The Miss New Mexico Teen will be crowned at 2 p.m. Saturday while the 2016 Miss New Mexico will be crowned at 6 p.m. the same day.

Tickets for the events can be purchased for $30 Thursday and Friday at the door at the ENMU theater for entrance to both the teen and Miss New Mexico events.

The public can also attend the Miss New Mexico Ball at 9 p.m. Saturday at the ENMU Campus Union Building. Tickets for the competition finals Saturday are $40 for the teen competition and $50 for Miss New Mexico with prices including admission into the celebration ball.



2016 The Portales News-Tribune (Clovis, N.M.)

Visit The Portales News-Tribune (Clovis, N.M.) at www.pntonline.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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An Albuquerque doctor, at the suggestion of a friend, posted her profile to an online dating site recently.

She got an immediate response from a guy who said he loved to dance as much as she did. She said he described himself as a retired military officer who was in Cyprus, closing a $3 million deal on the sale of a business.

They exchanged phone numbers, and he texted her numerous times over the next two days, calling her baby-boo and asking her at one point if she was alone.

He knew she was a doctor, even though she hadnt told him that.

It started getting spooky when he texted me, she said. I just kind of started feeling weird.

By the end of that weekend, he had sent her a photo of himself holding a sign that read, I want you to know I love you so much  Thank you for coming into my life.

The woman became even more suspicous when Mr. Romance asked her to buy a computer chip he said they needed to continue talking through a Google phone site. Seems the connection in Cyprus was not very good.

He would reimburse her, he said, through a Paypal account that he wanted her to open.

For the doctor, that was the final straw. She said the man was trying to establish trust, and she suspects he would have gone on to ask for her money or her banking information.

She pulled the plug, telling him that if he contacted her again, she would tell the police.

Heres what the police  specifically Albuquerque Sgt. Will Dorian  had to say: Thats pretty weird all the way around.

The incident has several hallmarks of the classic online dating scheme, said Dorian, who is with the Albuquerque Police Departments organized crime unit, which includes white-collar crime.

One is the fast come-on, Dorian said. Hes probably trying it on 15, 20 people at a time.

What hes doing is trying to see who will bite.

A common ploy is to research the intended victim and get information beyond what is offered on the dating site, he said. That might include a persons hobbies and interests  favorite movie, favorite song  as well as endearments used by family or friends.

Theyre basically portraying themselves as someone the other person is wanting, Dorian said. Theyre building up trust as fast as they can. Dorian referred to a case several years ago in which an Albuquerque woman fell in love with a man she met on a dating site. He told her he was in Europe and needed money so he could sell his house and they could get married.

She believed him, sight unseen. In the end, she wiped out her savings account, took out a loan and was considering getting a reverse mortgage  all in the name of love.

The case was turned over to the FBI, but charges were never brought because there was nothing they could do, Dorian said.

Nationwide, victims lost nearly $120 million to so-called romance scams during the first half of this year, a 23 percent increase over the same period last year, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Dorian said his main advice is to keep it local. Getting to know someone who lives in the same area means its easier for authorities to investigate if something goes bad, he said.

Also, check the person out. Ask for background details and see if they can be verified. Ask for a photo and do an image search to see if the same picture appears with different names.

Other red flags, according to the FBI: the person presses you to leave the dating website and communicate by phone or texting; proclaims instant feelings of love, is out of the country at the moment and asks for money for a variety of reasons.

Albuquerque and Santa Fe area businesses should be on the lookout for a scam involving fake PNM employees, the Attorney Generals Office says. Well-established hotels and restaurants are among the targets, but the AGs alert says all businesses and their employees should be on guard.

If you receive an unsolicited call from someone claiming you owe money, do not give out payment or financial information without first verifying the individuals claims and employment with the company, the alert says.

Ellen Marks is assistant business editor at the Albuquerque Journal.
AT BOOKWORKS: Patrick Conoway will sign Listening With My Eyes: An Abused Horse, a Mother With Alzheimers, the Journey to Help Them Both at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 6.

A true story about how a formerly abused horse taught the author non- verbal communication (body language), which she used with her mother, who suffered from Alzheimers disease and lost her ability to speak.

John Fleck will talk about Water Is for Fighting Over: And Other Myths about Water in the West at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 7.

When we think of water in the West, we think of conflict and crisis.

Barbara Schoichet will sign Dont Think Twice: Adventure and Healing at 100 Miles Per Hour at 6 p.m. Friday, Sept. 9.

Within six months, Barbara Schoichet lost everything: her job, her girlfriend of six years, and her mother to pancreatic cancer. Her life stripped bare, and armed Barbara pursues an unlikely method of coping.

Mel Yazawa will talk about Contested Conventions at 3 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 10.

There is perhaps no more critical juncture in American history than the years in which Americans drafted the federal Constitution, fiercely debated its merits and failings, and adopted it, albeit with reservations. In Contested Conventions, senior historian Melvin Yazawa examines the political and ideological clashes that accompanied the transformation of the country.

Bookworks is at 4022 Rio Grande NW. Call 344-8139.

AT PAGE ONE: Local science fiction and fantasy authors S.M. Stirling and Victor Milan will discuss the new books in their Change and Dinosaur Lords series at 4 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 10.

Page One is at 5850 Eubank NE, Suite B-41, in the Mountain Run Center. Call 294-2026.

AT COLLECTED WORKS: Francis Levine will talk about Dona Teresa Confronts the Spanish Inquisition at 6 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 8.

In 1598, at the height of the Spanish Inquisition, New Mexico became Spains northernmost New World colony. The censures of the Catholic Church reached all the way to Santa Fe, where in the mid-1660s, Dona Teresa Aguilera y Roche, the wife of New Mexico Gov. Bernardo Lopez de Mendizabal, came under the Inquisitions scrutiny.

Natural resource attorney Todd Lopez will talk about Dysfunctional Development: The Trials and Tribulations of Community Development Work in Northern New Mexico at 11 a.m. today.

Collected Works is at 202 Galisteo St. in Santa Fe. Call 505-988-4226.
Sunpower by Positive Energy Solar installed 30 solar panels on the roof of Elizabeth and Sutter Sugars Northeast Heights home. (Greg Sorber/Albuquerque Journal) Part of the 30 Sunpower solar panels on the roof of Sutter and Elizabeth Sugar's home in the Northeast Heights. (Greg Sorber/Albuquerque Journal) Sutter Sugar shows the DC to AC converters in the garage of his home. Sugar says improving technology and dropping prices make installing a solar system kind of a no-brainer. (Greg Sorber/Albuquerque Journal) Prev 1 of 4 Next

Some solar installation companies are now aggressively canvassing Albuquerque neighborhoods in search of new customers, bringing the solar electric shopping experience to peoples front doors for the first time.

Utah-based ZingSolar in particular, which arrived in New Mexico last year, is knocking door-to-door in Albuquerque, Los Lunas and other places, signing up homeowners to either lease solar systems, or buy them outright with no upfront costs.

For most New Mexico consumers, its a totally new shopping experience, one many never knew was available until the sales reps rang their door bells.

And company pitches can make the benefits seem like no-brainers, empowering homeowners with a completely newfound ability to dump their electric utility in favor of moderate monthly solar bills that can often save money from the start while racking-up thousands of dollars in accumulated savings over the years.

Such promises can indeed be quite accurate, but like all consumer products, industry experts say the benefits can vary widely depending on the system a homeowner purchases and the terms and conditions of their contracts. Before committing, consumers should educate themselves about costs and benefits, learn all they can about the company pitching a system plus the details of any contract they offer, and shop around among solar firms for the best deal available.

The right fit

People are not used to shopping for energy, said Ryan Centerwall, CEO of the Albuquerque-based installation firm Affordable Solar. Its a different experience, and consumers are usually not educated about it because we live in a world where the local utility is generally the only decision regarding electricity. Homeowners need to take the time to consider all options and become informed, the same as you would shop for a car or a television.

Given the lengthy, 25-year commitments and warranties generally connected with either leasing or buying a solar system, consumers need to make sure from the start that the contract they sign is the right one for them.

These agreements are based on many assumptions, and to get a return on investment, those assumptions have to hold true for 25 years, not just the first few years, said Affordables general manager, Trishelle Kirk. That means looking at a few key components of systems before committing, as well as the company doing the installation, to make sure it will produce the electricity offered.

These days, theres a lot to choose from, with about 60 contracting and installation companies operating throughout the state, including three national companies that arrived last year  Solar City, Vivint Solar and ZingSolar. A sharp drop in prices in recent years, plus government tax credits to help consumers buy solar systems, have also made them a lot more affordable.

In New Mexico, the system price for an average home usually ranges from about $17,000 to $23,000, depending on the size of the system needed. A 10 percent state tax credit in effect since 2008 is ending this year. But a 30 percent federal tax credit remains available, cutting the cost for a $17,000 system to just $11,900.

Most companies now also offer a range of financing options through banks and credit unions, with loans scaling from a low of seven years to 20 or 30 years, and with no upfront costs.

Lease options

The newest consumer option, however, is leasing a solar system for 25 years, which ZingSolar, SolarCity and Vivint now offer in New Mexico.

Were doing a lot of installations in New Mexico now, said ZingSolar energy consultant Adonae Anderson. I personally have overseen 30 installations.

Under the lease option, ZingSolar fronts the cost of the entire system and homeowners pay a monthly charge for the power it generates, the same as they would with a utility. The payments, however, are set from the start at a lower amount than the homeowners average monthly utility bill today.

The monthly charges increase by 2.9 percent per year in later years, but ZingSolar says thats much less than the average 5 percent annual increases expected on utility bills over the next 25 years, providing substantial accumulated savings over the life of the lease. And when the lease is up, the system becomes the homeowners property, unless they ask the company to take it down.

For a homeowner paying an average of about $100 per month to Public Service Company of New Mexico for electricity, that would mean about $57,000 paid to the utility over 25 years if costs rose an average of 5 percent per year as projected, Anderson said. With ZingSolar, that same homeowner would pay out about $39,500.

If you paid the utility, its like half a mortgage in 25 years, Anderson said. That electricity is now a debt you can officially get out of.

Leasing could be a good option for homeowners with few tax liabilities, or for consumers with poor access to credit to finance their own system.

It could be the right path if you cant use the federal tax credit, Affordables Centerwall said. But consumers should carefully consider the cost escalations a leasing company charges in later years to make sure the savings add up over time, not just in the first years. Also, if customers dont stay in their homes for 25 years, they need to clearly define their options for transferring the lease to a new owner.

Greater savings

For homeowners who can access the federal tax credit, purchasing a system may well be the best option, because it offers far greater savings over time. Homeowners can opt for short-term loans that mean higher monthly payments than their current utility bills in the first years.

But electric rate hikes will push the utility bills higher than the loan payments on solar systems in later years, and once the loan is repaid, its then generating electricity for free, effectively wiping away a homeowners electric bill.

For the homeowner with an average $100 monthly electric bill, a $19,000 solar system might produce all the electricity needed. The tax credit would reduce that to just over $13,000. And with a 15-year loan, the buyer may pay between $110 and $120 per month.

By the end of the loan, the consumer would have already recovered the investment through savings from locked-in prices that buffered against utility rate increases, and after that, there are no more electric bills.

Still, consumers need to shop around for the best deal, making sure that a solar system can actually produce all the electricity a company promises, that the firm installs it adequately to assure maximum sunlight, and that warranties fully protect the consumer over the 25-year life of a contract.

Make sure the product and equipment youre buying is backed by good companies with good warranties, said Regina Wheeler, CEO of Sunpower by Positive Energy Solar. Be informed. Seek multiple quotes from different companies to build your understanding and confidence.

Some companies like Positive Energy offer particularly high-quality solar panels that are sturdier and more energy efficient than others, and they provide particularly strong warranties. That makes their systems a bit more expensive than others, but for some homeowners, quality is key.

These days, installing solar seems like kind of a no-brainer, said Sutter Sugar, an Albuquerque Realtor who contracted Positive Energy to install panels on his home in the Northeast Heights. The technology is getting better and more efficient and the price keeps dropping. Id be surprised if it doesnt become a lot more popular now.

Information

Consumers can learn more about solar companies serving the New Mexico market by visiting solarreviews.com. That website rates each company based on reviews by solar customers.

When shopping around for a solar system, check the background of companies through the Better Business Bureau at bbb.org, and through Angies List at angieslist.com.

The Solar Energy Industry Associations website, at seia.org, has a huge range of free information to learn about going solar, including a new Residential Consumer Guide to Solar Power, published last February and available for free download.

Nuts and bolts

DO YOUR HOMEWORK: Going solar can, potentially, save homeowners a lot of money in the long term, but its a significant commitment that can easily go sour if consumers rush into buying or leasing a system without doing their homework.

Shopping around strengthens the tools in a homeowners hands, said Rob Davis, consultant with the Albuquerque installation company Affordable Solar. You need to compare everything to get the best deal. Its not just the price, but how the system is designed and installed to make sure it produces the electricity needed.

UNDERSTAND WHAT YOURE BUYING: In general, thats two things:

Solar photovoltaic panels, which convert sunlight to electricity

Inverters, which convert the raw direct current (DC) coming through the solar panels into alternating current (AC) used in homes and buildings

SIZE MATTERS: The size of a system, which is usually placed on rooftops, depends on home size and layout, the amount of electricity residents consume, house location and sunshine availability. Solar installers survey homes for free to determine size and the best layout for maximum sunlight.

The goal is to generate at least as much power as an electric utility would otherwise provide. Thats critical, because if the system produces less, the utility will make up the difference, undermining savings from the solar panels.

PRICE, OUTPUT: System size largely determines price, but the electric output can be significantly hindered by poor installation, such as locating panels under shade. Installer knowledge and experience are key.

This is still a young industry with lots of new people coming in, said Kate Jackson, senior technical adviser with Sunpower by Positive Energy Solar. The homeowner should know how knowledgeable a companys employees and installers are.

Solar panel quality can also vary, with some systems losing more generating capacity over time than others. That makes system warranties essential, not just for the equipment, but for installation workmanship. Most companies offer 25-year warranties, but some only cover equipment, not transportation and installation costs if something goes wrong. You need to read the fine print, Jackson said.

NET-METERING: Net-metering is when local utilities buy excess electricity produced in summer months beyond what a homeowner consumes. The utility uses that for its other consumers and then credits it toward the solar customers bill. Later, when the solar system produces less than a homeowner needs, the credit is used to buy back electricity from the utility.

HOME VALUE: Buying a solar system can raise the value of homes, but the New Mexico market is still young, with too few solar homes finding their way into appraisals yet to estimate how much value is added.

But in more mature markets, like Arizona, its adding like 50 percent to 80 percent of the systems total cost to the value of a house, Jackson said. The value added depends on the installation quality, how old the system is, and what warranties are still in effect when ownership is transferred.


Paris climate deal: US and China formally join pact

The US and China - together responsible for 40% of the world's carbon emissions - have both formally joined the Paris global climate agreement.
HANGZHOU, China  Setting aside their cyber and maritime disputes, President Barack Obama and Chinas President Xi Jinping on Saturday sealed their nations participation in last years Paris climate change agreement. They hailed their new era of climate cooperation as the best chance for saving the planet.

At a ceremony on the sidelines of a global economic summit, Obama and Xi, representing the worlds two biggest carbon emitters, delivered a series of documents to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The papers certified the U.S. and China have taken the necessary steps to join the Paris accord that set nation-by-nation targets for cutting carbon emissions.

This is not a fight that any one country, no matter how powerful, can take alone, Obama said of the pact. Some day we may see this as the moment that we finally decided to save our planet.

Xi, speaking through a translator, said he hoped other countries would follow suit and advance new technologies to help them meet their targets. When the old path no longer takes us far, we should turn to innovation, he said.

The formal U.S.-Chinese announcement means the accord could enter force by the end of the year, faster than anticipated. Fifty-five nations must join for the agreement to take effect. The nations that have joined must also produce at least 55 percent of global emissions.

The U.S. and China together produce 38 percent of the worlds man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

The White House has attributed the accelerated pace to an unlikely partnership between Washington and Beijing. To build momentum for a deal, they set a 2030 deadline for Chinas emissions to stop rising and announced their shared conviction that climate change is one of the greatest threats facing humanity. The U.S. has pledged to cut its emissions by at least 26 percent over the next 15 years, compared to 2005 levels.

The meeting of the minds on climate change, however, hasnt smoothed the path for other areas of tension. The U.S. has criticized China over cyberhacking and human rights and voiced increased exasperation with Beijings growing assertiveness in key waterways in the region. Most recently, the U.S. has urged China to accept an international arbitration panels ruling that sided with the Philippines in a dispute over claims in the South China Sea.

China views the South China Sea as an integral part of its national territory. The U.S. doesnt take positions in the various disputes between China and its Asian neighbors, but is concerned about freedom of navigation and wants conflicts resolved peacefully and lawfully.

Meeting with Xi after the announcement, Obama said thornier matters would be discussed. He specifically cited maritime disputes, cybersecurity and human rights, though the president didnt elaborate during brief remarks in front of reporters at the start of the meeting.

After several hours of talks, the White House said Obama told Xi the U.S. would keep monitoring Chinas commitments on cybersecurity. The leaders also had a candid exchange over the arbitration case between China and the Philippines, the White House said.

The ceremony opened what is likely Obamas valedictory tour in Asia. The president stepped off Air Force One onto a red carpet, where an honor guard dressed in white and carrying bayonets lined his path. A girl presented Obama with flowers and he shook hands with officials before entering his motorcade.

But the welcome didnt go smoothly. A Chinese official kept reporters and some top White House aides away from the president, prompting a U.S. official to intervene. The Chinese official then yelled: This is our country. This is our airport.

Throughout his tenure, Obama has sought to check Chinas influence in Asia by shifting U.S. military resources and diplomatic attention from the Middle East. The results have been mixed.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive trade deal the White House calls a cornerstone of the policy, is stuck in Congress. Obama planned to use the trip to make the case for approval of the deal before he leaves office in January.

Climate represents a more certain piece of his legacy.

Under the Paris agreement, countries are required to set national targets for reducing or reining in their greenhouse gas emissions. Those targets arent legally binding, but countries must report on their progress and update their targets every five years.

Xi said he acted after Chinas legislature voted Saturday to formally enter the agreement. In the U.S., Senate ratification is not required because the agreement is not considered a formal treaty.

Li Shuo, Greenpeaces senior climate policy adviser, called Saturdays declarations a very important next step.

If the deal clears the final hurdles, he said, well have a truly global climate agreement that will bind the two biggest emitters in the world.

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Associated Press writer Louise Watt contributed to this report.
Toting wine and beer glasses, laughing with friends and taking in Sandia Mountain views, hundreds tasted their way through dozens of tents at this years Mountain West Brew Fest.

In its second year, the two-day brew fest incorporated wine and spirits. It brought together 16 breweries, six wineries and one distillery, most based in New Mexico, including two based in Bernalillo.

Maria Rinaldi, Bernalillo community planning and development director, said the addition of wine and spirits was an effort to grow attendance, and to appeal to a wider audience.

Even amongst couples, one person likes wine and the other likes beer, Rinaldi said. On Saturday afternoon, she said based on the size of the crowd, the plan seemed to be a success.

The brew fest, held at Loretto Park, replaced the towns longstanding wine festival, and so the addition of wine at this years event was welcome news to many, Rinaldi said.

Also new this year was a local focus: local bands, local breweries, wineries and distilleries.

Thats what people around here wanted to see, Rinaldi said.

Brian Langwell, Left Turn Distilling owner, said that, for his company, the brew fest, which continues from noon to 6 p.m. today, is an opportunity to give beer drinkers a taste of craft spirits.

A lot of people who like beer also like cocktails, Langwell said, adding that many people dont realize theres a craft distillery in Albuquerque.

Most people have realized craft beer is a lot better, Langwell said. Guess what, same thing with spirits.

Chris Medina, Left Turns sales manager, said festivals are good for business, because employees can chat with customers about the distilling process and give them a taste of their product. If they like what theyve had, they often visit the brick-and-mortar location.

Sara Egbom said thats exactly what she likes about festivals. Its an opportunity to try drinks she might not order at her favorite breweries, while being introduced to breweries she has never been to before.

Theres newer ones popping up all over, Egbom said. This gives you a chance to taste the newer ones.

Egbom attended the event with a friend and her sister, Jennifer Dominguez, who was visiting from Denver. Dominguez said that having attended larger festivals, she appreciated the size of the Bernalillo event because of its manageable lines, but said she was also impressed with how much Albuquerques craft brewery scene has grown. The trio took the Rail Runner to Bernalillo and walked the short distance to the festival, though shuttles were available.

We didnt drive at all, Egbom said.

Danielle Gardner and Larri Trujillo sat on the lawn eating pizza while a group of friends played frisbee nearby. They said they appreciated that the event lasted six hours, plenty of time to taste everything and hang out.

The two went to an indoor beer festival last year and said they were enjoying spending the day outside.

The weathers nice, people are nice, Gardner said, The atmosphere is great.
LAS CRUCES  This years Domenici Public Policy Conference tackles three issues that have dominated discourse nationwide and in New Mexico: public policy toward mental health, public trust in institutions and national security.

The annual conference Sept. 14-15 at New Mexico State University  which is expected to draw about 1,000 people  is named for retired Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., who during his 36-year run in office made mental health legislation a cornerstone of his legacy.

I was working on these issues 40 years ago and they havent been resolved, but there have been some great people working and some great things happening, Domenici told the Journal.

The two-day program features nationally recognized advocates and experts in the fields of national security, criminal justice and mental health; schizophrenia and bipolar disorder research; institutional credibility and the public trust; and political strategy in an election year.

Over the years, weve had some really strong programs, and this year is one of our strongest, said NMSU Chancellor and former Gov. Garrey Carruthers. I think were right on topic here.

Opening the conference, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel is slated to share his perspective on national security issues.

Mental health, the key topic on day one of the conference, is an issue that just keeps resurfacing, Carruthers said, pointing to incidents of fatal violence that have dominated the news cycles from Albuquerque to Dallas and Orlando.

It has become a dominant public issue, and yet we have not come up with appropriate policy actions, Carruthers said.

Judge Steve Leifman of the Miami-Dade County Court Criminal Division is expected to speak about ending the criminalization of mental illness. Research psychiatrist Fuller Torrey will speak about the future of psychosis, or what schizophrenia and bipolar disorder will look like in 2040. Mental health advocate and author Liza Long, whose son has bipolar disorder, will share a moms perspective on mental illness.

On the issue of public trust in government, Carruthers said, As you can tell around the country, its fairly apparent that there is a lack of complete trust between the community and the police force. That is becoming more and more common around the country.

Albuquerque Mayor Richard Berry is to speak about police-community relations.

John Edelman, managing director of Global Engagement and Corporate Responsibility at consulting firm Edelman, is scheduled to speak about trust and credibility in 2016.

On the topic of the upcoming elections, two strategists on each side of the political fence will share their perspectives: James Carville, former campaign manager to President Bill Clinton, and pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson, author of The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials are Leading America (And How Republicans Can Keep Up).

Sara Patricolo, program manager of the Domenici Institute at NMSU, said she expects about 1,000 participants, including hundreds of students, to attend the ninth iteration of the conference, on par with years past.

Students can attend for free; non-student registration is $75. Online registration will be open until Sept. 12.

Im especially proud of the conferences content this year, she said. It adds value to our students education, but it also adds to the knowledge base of those working so hard in our community to improve the lives of New Mexicans.

During his time in office, Domenici co-sponsored and helped pass the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008, which ensured that mental health was treated the same as physical health by insurers.

Register online

https://domenici.nmsu.edu/
Copyright  2016 Albuquerque Journal

While hunting sources for his recently published book The Apache Wars, University of New Mexico history professor Paul Hutton struck a rich vein of information in his own backyard.

In old issues of the New Mexico Historical Review, a journal Hutton himself had once edited, he found the memoirs of John Clum, an Indian agent who had captured Geronimo and who knew many of the principal figures on both sides of the Apache conflict.

Between the late 1920s and the early 1930s, Clum, who lived until 1932, published Review articles with titles such as Geronimo, The Apaches, Apache Misrule and The San Carlos Apache Police. There in the pages of the Review, telling the story in his own words, was a major player in the events Hutton was researching.

I dont think people understand how important the Review is to the history of the American West, said Hutton, 66, who was Review editor from 1985 to 1992. I delved into stacks and stacks of old issues for the Apache book. There are interviews with Indian scouts and Clums memoirs. The Review has a very long and storied history. It is one of the oldest journals in the West.

The New Mexico Historical Review, founded in 1926, is celebrating its 90th anniversary with special events on the UNM campus this week. John Kessell, UNM history professor emeritus and another former Review editor, gives a free lecture Friday afternoon. And, on Saturday, there is a daylong symposium, free and open to the public, featuring a keynote address by New Mexico state historian Rick Hendricks, and panel discussions by Review editors and authors.

Durwood Ball, 56, the Review editor since 2000, said the publication was founded as the journal of historical record in New Mexico and the greater Southwest. He said the journal continues to publish articles about the Spanish borderlands, American Indian history, the territorial period, Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War.

We still study the conquerors and the settlers, Ball said. But we do it in a different way. Since the 1980s, there has been more of a focus on social and cultural development, race, ethnicity, class and gender. And now we publish a good many pieces on the history of photography in the region.

New Mexico in the 20th century has been a recurring theme in the Review, as well. In the Winter 2012 issue, for example, there are two articles, one of them profusely illustrated with photos, about communes that sprouted up in New Mexico during the 1960s.

UNM publishes the Review quarterly and the publications offices are in UNMs Mesa Vista Hall. But the Review did not start out as a UNM publication.

Santa Fe roots

Co-editors Lansing Bartlett Bloom and Paul A.F. Walter founded the Review in 1926 as the official bulletin of the Historical Society of New Mexico. It was originally edited and printed in Santa Fe.

Walter, a former editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican, was president-elect of the Historical Society when the Review was founded.

Bloom, a native of Auburn, N.Y., came west in 1907 as a Presbyterian minister and missionary, but was soon enmeshed in the history of New Mexico and the Southwest, studying the records of Spanish Franciscans while doing missionary work in Mexico, reveling in the archaeology, history and lore of Jemez Pueblo while assigned to a church there.

He earned a masters degree in history and had left the ministry for positions with both the School of American Research (archaeology and anthropology) in Santa Fe and the Museum of New Mexico by the time he and Walter launched the Review. The first four issues included articles on New Mexico in the Great War (World War I), and pieces about Juan de Onate and the founding of New Mexico, Spanish folklore in New Mexico, the U.S. Armys experiment with a camel corps and frontiersman Kit Carson, among others.

The Review moved to Albuquerque in September 1929, when Bloom joined the history faculty at UNM. Even though it was now edited and printed on the UNM campus, the Review retained its ties to the Historical Society.

Bloom retired from UNM in June 1945, but worked with the Review until his death in February 1946.

In a tribute to his late colleague, published in the April 1946 issue of the Review, Walter wrote, Though ordinarily serious as proverbially becomes a Presbyterian clergyman and a research scholar, Bloom also had a sense of humor and was witty in a restrained way.

Frank Driver Reeve, a 1925 UNM graduate and member of the universitys history faculty, was known for his jovial nature. He liked to tell humorous stories and anecdotes in class. Reeve succeeded Bloom as editor, and kept the Review alive and vigorous during some stormy economic years. It was Reeve who suggested that UNM assume sole ownership of the Review and the university did that in 1963. At that point, the Review became a UNM project.

Reeve worked as Review editor until October 1964 and continued to contribute to the journal until his death in December 1967.

Its all in the details

Eleanor B. Adams, the Reviews first woman editor, took over for Reeve.

I can still hear her demanding, Look it up. Look it up,' said Kessell, who served as Review editor in 1999-2000, but had just completed his history Ph.D. at UNM when he worked with Adams as a Review editorial assistant in the early 1970s. She taught me to pay close attention to detail. When I started working for her, it shocked the hell out of me at how poorly some big-named authors wrote and at how quietly (Adams) made them look better.

Adams, a native of Cambridge, Mass., and a graduate of Radcliffe College, started her career in the Division of Historical Research in the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. She moved to UNM in 1941 to continue her lifelong collaboration with Carnegie colleague France V. Scholes, with whom she published important Yucatan studies.

Scholes taught history at UMM, and would also serve the university as dean of the graduate school and academic vice president. UNMs Scholes Hall is named for him.

Both Scholes and Adams contributed articles to the Review, Adams both before and after she became the journals editor in 1964, and Scholes mostly between 1928 and 1945.

Kessell said Scholes was still around when he started working with Adams at the Review in 1970.

He used to come into the office now and then, and you could hear him coming because he coughed, Kessell said of Scholes. He was absolutely astute and almost regal. He had this great mane of white hair and was a true personality.

Adams was a personality in her own right.

She could be particularly crusty and there were those who did not like her, Kessell said. But I liked her right from the start. I respected her scholarship. We became very close friends. She was a mentor and almost a surrogate mother.

School for scholars

Kessell, 80, may be the only person to have worked as editorial assistant, editor, author and reviewer for the Review, situations that helped him build his own career as a history professor, researcher and author of books.

Review editor Ball, an associate professor of history at UNM, said a vital role played by the Review is teaching the nuts and bolts of scholarly publishing to UNM history students. The nine-person staff working at the Review now includes Ball, office manager Cindy Tyson and seven graduate students.

Since 1979, 13 graduate students have held the title of managing editor and, since 1968, 88 students  most of them graduate students  have worked as editorial assistants, Ball said. Theres no better way to learn writing than to edit other peoples writing.

The most recent Review turned out by Ball and his team of graduate students  volume 91, number 3, Summer 2016  is a theme issue devoted to the Magoffin family, a bicultural and binational clan important in the history of the Southwest, especially New Mexico and West Texas. It is an issue that is true in every way to the journals mission. As it marches toward its 100th anniversary, the Review just keeps on doing what it has always done.

When it comes to borderland scholarship, Spanish and Indian history, the New Mexico Historical Review is the leading journal on those topics, Hutton said. It always has been.
Sometimes in the wild, a foal will become separated from the herd.

If a different herd of horses should come upon the foal, the alpha male  the stallion  might kill the foal by snapping its neck.

Adult male chimpanzees will kill the young offspring of adult female chimps with which they hope to mate. Having lost the infant, the female might be more receptive to courtship.

Evolutionary biologists say that the imperative of male animals in general is to propagate their own genes as widely and as often as possible. An infant produced by a different male is both competition for resources  food, mating partners  and a manifestation of an alien genetic code.

I once attended a conference of families that had fallen victim to the same genetic disease. I was struck by the number of mothers there who had been divorced after their children were diagnosed with the disease. In evolutionary terms, the men had attempted to propagate only to find that their mates could not produce successful offspring. Faced with genetic failure, the men left in search of more biologically compatible mates.

And they were jerks.

Let us state the obvious: Men are animals. Human beings share 96 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees. Homo sapiens is as driven to find the most biologically compatible partner as any other species. And as we have seen too many times this year in New Mexico, some men are as inclined to kill a child as is any chimp.

There is no excusing the murder of children, and it takes a better Christian than I am to forgive it. Biology is not a rationale, and it is not destiny, as evidenced by the millions of men who lovingly raise children who are their own in all ways but genetically. Biology may help account for this evil. If biology can explain it, perhaps there is a cure for it.

There is evidence that the brains of killers are different from normal brains. Dan Jones reported in Nature that a 1997 study found that there is less activity in the prefrontal cortex of murderers and greater activity in the limbic system. Decision-making, planning and the regulation of emotion are associated with the prefrontal cortex. The limbic system is associated with aggression, Jones said. In a murderers brain, the moral inhibitions that most of us experience when contemplating an antisocial behavior do not seem to occur.

Kent Kiehl of Albuquerques Mind Research Network ran MRI scans on dozens of prisoners at the Western New Mexico Correctional Facility in Grants. He believes he identified a flaw in the brains paralimbic system that could account for psychopathic behavior. A psychopath feels no empathy or remorse.

Evolutionary pressures that might compel men to violence might also account for the steadily declining murder rate in the Western world. Jones reported that University of Cambridge researchers found that, in Europe, there were 32 homicides a year per 100,000 people in the 13th and 14th centuries, and 41 per 100,000 people in the 15th century. Then, the murder rate dropped in every subsequent century until it reached 1.4 per 100,000 people a year in the 20th century.

Researchers believe that long-term reduction in the inequalities of life circumstances and prospects reduced the conflict among large populations. There just isnt that much to fight about when the lot of people improves.

I dont know that anyone knows much about the socio-economic circumstances of the thugs weve been reading about, but Im guessing these guys are societys losers who somehow manage to insinuate themselves into the lives and families of their victims. Perhaps they know they are operating at a genetic disadvantage and instinctively do whatever it takes, including infanticide, to try to gain even the slightest evolutionary edge.

If you throw in drug and alcohol abuse, the already compromised mental hardware that inhibits loathsome behavior doesnt have a chance.

Fortunately, evolution appears to work in favor of peace and love, as well as selfishness and violence.

Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, believes that the human need to collaborate and cooperate has over the millennia imbued the human race with a sense of morality.

At least 400,000 years ago, Tomasello said, human beings collaborated to hunt large game, probably out of necessity due to a lack of enough fruits and vegetables. Collaboration extended to tasks like building habitat and defending the group. The result was that human beings began to understand themselves in relation to other people. Emotions like group loyalty, trust and empathy developed, Tomasello said.

Add it up, and we seem to inhabit a planet where the impulse to good and the impulse to evil are engaged in a life-and-death race. Evil took the lead last week in Albuquerque, but the race continues.

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Winthrop Quigley at 823-3896 or wquigley@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
Copyright  2016 Albuquerque Journal

Environmentalists in New Mexico and elsewhere are forcefully pushing to end new oil and gas leases on federal lands to fight global warming, but the industry says such a move would devastate the local and national economies.

Protesters are targeting most new land-lease sales by the Bureau of Land Management, filing lawsuits to roll back leases recently granted and pushing for policy changes at the local and federal levels.

Climate change activists consider it the next logical step after pushing the coal industry back on its heels.

Its imperative, said Rebecca Sobel, senior climate and energy campaigner at WildEarth Guardians in Santa Fe. If we dont curb our addiction to dirty carbon-based fuels, the conversation about the cost of ending these programs becomes moot, because the environment cant sustain it. We need to end the extraction of fossil fuels for the sake of a livable planet for the future.

But industry representatives and state politicians say the consequences of ending new leases, much less rolling back production on lands already under development, could wreck the economy and that the nation needs a diversity of energy sources.

A new study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says that ceasing all fossil fuel production on federal lands, which accounts for nearly 25 percent of oil and gas production nationwide, would wipe away about $11.3 billion in annual royalties for federal and state governments while eliminating up to 380,000 jobs.

New Mexico would lose about $500 million, or 8.4 percent of total general fund revenues, and up to 24,000 jobs, according to the report.

The impact would be monumental, said Sen. John Arthur Smith, D-Deming, who chairs the state Legislative Finance Committee. Direct and indirect taxes from oil and gas development in New Mexico account for about one-third of total government revenue.

Given the current downturn in the oil and gas industry, New Mexico already faces a half-billion-dollar budget deficit that lawmakers are expected to deal with in a special session.

There are a lot of people who would like to shut down the oil and gas business, said Senate President Pro Tem Mary Kay Papen, D-Las Cruces. I support solar and wind, but we need all sources of energy, and we cant keep oil and gas off limits. We need those dollars.

Environmentalists have pushed for years to limit or roll back new oil and gas development, especially after modern drilling technologies opened new production basins and revitalized old ones, driving output to historic highs. But until recently, those groups focused on potential environmental and health impacts from things like hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which many fear contaminates air and water.

Last year, some 400 groups launched a new, nationwide Keep it in the Ground campaign to end all new leases for oil and gas on federal lands. Several Democratic U.S. senators, from mostly Eastern states, introduced a Keep it in the Ground Act in November to ban new leasing and cancel existing leases that arent yet producing.

The Paris climate agreement in December, plus a federal moratorium this year on new coal production, gave vitality to the campaign.

Last year, scientists said if we want to keep global warming below a two-degree increase as agreed to in Paris, then 80 percent of all fossil fuels must be left in the ground, Sobel said. We heard that as an urgent and critical call. So weve been taking every opportunity to challenge new federal lease sales for fossil fuels around the country.

That includes sometimes raucous protests at BLM land-lease auctions around the West. In New Mexico, about 200 activists protested an auction in Santa Fe in April. Another protest was held Thursday in Roswell, where the BLM auctioned off nearly 14,000 subsurface acres for oil and gas in Eddy and Lea counties.

In the San Juan Basin in northwestern New Mexico, environmentalists are working to block new leases near Chaco Culture National Historical Park. They filed a lawsuit last year to force the BLM to stop leasing there, pending an environmental impact study and a new resource management plan.

And on Aug. 25, WildEarth Guardians, New Mexico-based Western Environmental Law Center and the national Physicians for Social Responsibility filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia challenging the federal lease of nearly 380,000 acres since early 2015 in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. They want the government to first study the potential climate impact before those leases go forward.

Industry leaders fear environmental pressure may already be influencing policy.

In New Mexico and other states, weve seen the postponement of lease sales, said U.S. Chamber of Commerce spokesman Matt Letourneau. These activists are having an impact.

That, combined with stricter environmental policies pushed by the Obama Administration, prompted the U.S. chambers new study. It said losses from ending new development would cause annual royalty levels to drop by about $6 billion, with states losing about $780 million per year. New Mexicos annual royalties would decline by $363 million.

Some industry groups are taking action. On Aug. 11, the Western Energy Alliance sued the BLM in federal court in New Mexico to force it to hold lease sales four times a year as required by statute. The BLM has postponed or canceled lease sales more than a dozen times in the last two years nationwide, said Mark Barron, lead attorney in the lawsuit.

The BLM is failing pretty much in every state office, Barron said.

The New Mexico Association of Commerce and Industry held its own event in Roswell during the BLMs recent land lease sale to counter protesters.

If the environmental groups succeed, it will have a huge impact on jobs and revenue in New Mexico, said ACI President and CEO Jason Espinoza. This industry is worth fighting for, given the benefits it brings across the state.
ANDREW ROMERO



By the time he was a suspect in officer Gregg Nigel Benners death, Andrew Romero had spent much of his adult life behind bars.

When he was interviewed by a New Mexico State Police agent shortly after Benner was shot, he described himself as homeless, and said that jail was the last place he had stayed for an extended period of time, according to a transcript.

In 2006, Romero was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for voluntary manslaughter. By 2010, he was facing another three-year prison sentence for shoplifting and other charges. In 2013, he was indicted for selling heroin to an undercover officer, and a year later he was indicted for stealing gasoline at gunpoint.

A warrant for his arrest was issued in March 2015 for a probation violation and, just months later, another warrant was issued in connection with several armed robberies.

Romero told the State Police agent that he had used heroin every day for the past 10 years. He said he had used it just an hour before police picked him up and hauled him into the State Police station in Albuquerque for questioning.

He said he hadnt eaten in three days. He hadnt slept in five.

Every single day, its the same thing, he said, according to a transcript of the interview. I meet the same people, Ive had the same drugs, I inject them and thats it. Thats my life, you know what I mean?

He told the agent that his mother died when he was 9, and that he and his two younger siblings were split up and adopted.

He attended Ernie Pyle Middle School, and said he earned his GED in prison.

TABITHA LITTLES

Tabitha Littles had been dating Andrew Romero for about a month when Gregg Nigel Benner stopped their vehicle in May 2015.

Minutes later, Littles had been shot in the foot and Benner lay dying on a city street, according to police.

In an interview with State Police, Romero said Littles truly loved him.

I finally met somebody that really loved me, OK, poor Tabitha, he said, according to an interview transcript. Whats going to happen to her?

She had a criminal history. Littles was convicted of receiving or transferring a stolen vehicle and conspiracy to commit armed robbery in 2008. The next year, she was convicted of felony larceny, and of felony drug possession in 2010.

Littles was convicted of escaping from custody in 2011. And in November 2011, she pleaded guilty to trafficking and conspiracy and was sentenced under a plea agreement to five years in a therapeutic center and probation, according to court documents.

GREGG NIGEL BENNER

Gregg Nigel Benner was a witty, hardworking, dedicated officer; a father of six who loved his wife deeply; an avid cyclist and an Air Force Veteran.

Benner, 49, joined the Rio Rancho Police Department in 2011, shortly after retiring from a 22-year stint in the Air Force. He was born in Oklahoma to a military family.

He spent much of his military career in England, which is where he met his wife and why he spoke with an accent. He ended his police radio calls with Cheers rather than the more typical 10-4.

He served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Rio Rancho Police Chief Michael Geier described Benner as a hardworking, very motivated officer with a dry sense of humor.

That dedication to his work led Benner to make one last traffic stop, four minutes after his shift ended, on May 25, 2015. Minutes later, he was shot by one of the vehicles occupants, according to police.

Kevin Mroczko, Benners longtime Air Force buddy, told the Journal in an interview last year that Benners love for his wife, Julie, stood out to him.

Ive never seen a man who loved his wife so deeply and so genuinely, Mroczko said. She must be devastated. He always talked about her and talked about how lucky he was to be married to her.

Mroczko described his friend as the life of the party, a considerate man who did 50 favors for you before you even knew you needed the help.
LAS CRUCES  A street corner in California brought two strangers into Tony Jones life.

Jones, 44, who spoke to the Sun-News in recent days, said theres no way he couldve known at the time the two men  Jesse Denver Hanes, 38, and James Nelson, 36  were suspects in a homicide halfway across the country. He said he also couldnt have imagined how his encounter with the two would ultimately end: with all three of them jailed in New Mexico, Hanes accused of fatally shooting Hatch police Officer Jose Ismael Chavez, and Nelson and Jones accused of drug-related charges.

Nelson, 36, of Newark, Ohio, also spoke with the Sun-News last week.

At the corner of El Camino Real and Lawrence Expressway in Santa Clara, Hanes and Nelson approached Jones, telling him they were having a difficult time finding a hotel. Jones said he understood their problem: Adele was in the neighboring city of San Jose for a concert, putting a high demand on places to stay.

I knew exactly why they couldnt find the room, he said. Hotels are booked for miles around.

So Jones helped them find a room in Sunnyvale, another adjacent city. And in return, Hanes and Nelson let him stay there for the night.

Touring California

The ensuing relationship between Jones, Hanes and Nelson proved to be one of shared convenience. A few days before he met Hanes and Nelson, Jones was released from jail. He said hed spent a stint in jail after an officer in Hemet, California, discovered a 20-year-old outstanding warrant for his arrest. Jones said hed been sentenced to less than a month in jail and was released at the end of July.

Before that, Jones  who said he had lost his job earlier in the year  said hed been homeless and at times living with friends. While staying with a friend, hed gotten a call from his sister telling him that his mother in Missouri had breast cancer.

Hanes and Nelson told Jones they were in California to see the sights and they needed someone to show them around. The men also told Jones theyd planned to travel to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after California and could drop him off in Missouri. The deal sounded good, Jones said, because he didnt have any money but he wanted to visit his mom. Plus, Hanes and Nelson were buying the meals and hotel stays, Jones said.

Before long, the trio was touring California. They went to San Francisco, a trip Jones said hed taken many times throughout his life. Hanes wanted to avoid roads that required tolls; Jones said he knew the routes that didnt require them. They saw the Golden Gate Bridge and tasted some of the local flavor.

We got some clam chowder, Jones said.

In Los Angeles. the trio visited The Forum  the longtime, former home of the L.A. Lakers  and visited a nearby casino, according to Jones. Nelson enjoyed gambling, having stopped in Las Vegas en route to California. Jones said gambling wasnt his forte.

Capping off the day, the group saw the Hollywood sign, Jones said.

They attempted to stay the night in a parking lot, but Jones said his traveling companions didnt like that the lot was monitored by security cameras. So they set out from Los Angeles early in the morning, about 2 a.m., headed to Phoenix.

Uneasy experience

During their cross-California travels, Jones said a particular incident began to make him uneasy. The group was in Bakersfield, about 100 miles north of Los Angeles. It was there that Hanes approached him, proposing they carry out a bank robbery. Hanes bragged hed robbed a bank at age 6 with a toy gun, according to Jones.

Jones told the Sun-News hed served time in prison in Virginia, getting out in 2008. And he didnt want go back. He said he told Hanes he wouldnt rob a bank, which upset Hanes.

Jones does have a number of convictions, including possession of a controlled substance in 2006 in Virginia, breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony in 2003 in Virginia, failure to appear in 2003 in Virginia and driving with a suspended license in 1998 in San Jose, California, according to 3rd Judicial District Court records.

Later that night in Bakersfield, the three got a hotel room. Jones slept on the floor, but he happened to wake up in the middle of the night to find Hanes was awake, too, holding a gun in his lap.

He was on the edge of the bed, and I could feel him looking at me, he said.

Eventually, Hanes went back to sleep. Jones said hes had weapons pointed at him before, but this incident unnerved him. Jones said he considered parting ways with the duo.

He was kind of wild, Jones said of Hanes. He thrived on chaos, and that bothered me.

But Bakersfield is in the middle of nowhere, he said. Plus, he still needed to get to Missouri.

Before leaving California, Jones said Hanes and Nelson stopped at a Big 5 Sporting Goods, where Hanes bought a holster for a .45 caliber handgun and a box of hollow-point bullets. Hanes had claimed he was buying the items as a birthday present for Nelson.

A favor granted

Throughout the trip, Jones said Hanes and Nelson were taking turns driving and smoking heroin. Jones said hes been around drugs before, so that wasnt a big deal to him. Jones said he only smoked a couple of times.

In Phoenix, the group stopped to try to find a place to stay overnight, Jones said. Hanes crossed a street to check out a hotel. And Nelson took the opportunity to talk with Jones.

Jones said Hanes and Nelson were good friends. But Hanes had a controlling personality. Nelson didnt want Hanes to get a small stash of drugs he had, so he asked Jones if he could put it in his suitcase to hide it, Jones said.

Jones allowed him to keep the drugs in his bag. He estimated it was a gram of what authorities have said was methamphetamine. Also, there was a pipe.

It wasnt mine, he said of the drugs.

According to court records, Dona Ana County authorities seized 1.2 grams of meth from a black suitcase Jones had at the time of his arrest.

From zero to 1,000

The group set out from Phoenix on Interstate 10 in the 1991 Lexus car in which theyd been traveling. In New Mexico, Nelson sold some marijuana to a person at a rest area, who told him there was a Border Patrol checkpoint near El Paso if they stayed on I-10, Jones said. So Hanes and Nelson reprogrammed the cars GPS, and thats how the three wound up in the village of Hatch on Aug. 12.

Jones said he was sleeping and listening to music and was sitting directly behind Hanes, who was driving, when they got pulled over by a Hatch Police officer. Jones said he doesnt know what violation prompted it.

County authorities have said the traffic stop took place about 3:40 p.m. on Franklin Street, one of the main routes through Hatch.

Officer Chavez, a two-year veteran of the Hatch Police Department walked up to the vehicle  authorities have said he approached from the passenger side  and asked for Hanes drivers license. Jones recalled Hanes saying it was in his baggage. Meanwhile, Jones spotted one of the registration documents for the car in a pouch near him in the back seat. He pulled it out and tapped Nelson on the shoulder to hand it to him. But thats when the situation went from zero to 1,000, he said.

Jones said he heard the officer say to Hanes: Whats that in your hand?

Within seconds, he whipped around and fired one shot into the officer, Jones recounted.

Hanes then hit the gas pedal, speeding out of Hatch.

Jones said he looked back because he was concerned about the officer. But a second Hatch officer started firing at the car. Jones said he ducked at that point because he knew the trunk had luggage in it. He was hoping the bullets would hit that before striking him.

Hanes hit Interstate 25, traveling at speeds up to 120 mph. Jones said Hanes almost crashed twice before exiting at Rincon, about five miles south of Hatch.

Jones said Hanes pulled into a yard, and everyone jumped out of the car, adrenaline pumping. Jones said he got out and had his back to Hanes. Thats when he saw a young boy wearing a yellow shirt, who hed later come to credit with saving his life.

Suddenly, Jones heard a boom, another deafening gunshot.

It was terrifying, he said.

Hanes started hopping around, apparently having shot himself in the thigh. Jones decided he needed to grab his suitcase and was able to get it out of the trunk. Nelson and Hanes were arguing, Jones said.

According to court records, the 9-year-old boy who witnessed the three in Rincon was on his way home from school. He saw one white man arguing with another white man who was seated in the drivers seat of a gray car, according to the records. Hed also seen a black man.

Jones is African-American, and Nelson and Hanes are white.

The boy ran inside to tell his mother what had happened and he came back out to see a white man chasing the gray car as it drove away, court records state.

Hanes had jumped back into the car and sped off, Jones said. After he rounded a corner out of sight, Jones said he heard another gunshot. He said that prompted Nelson to break down crying. Jones said he and Nelson assumed Hanes had taken his own life. Jones, however, said he wasnt about to check whether that was the case.

Authorities have said Hanes then continued south on I-25, stopping at a rest area near Radium Springs. Hanes is accused of carjacking a person there and shooting him, though not fatally. Hanes then continued to drive in a loop that took him back to Hatch, where police arrested him.

A brush with death?

Because it was hot that day, Jones and Nelson, still in Rincon, sat under a nearby tree. There, Nelson told him that he and Hanes were suspects in a homicide in Ohio. Also, according to Jones, Nelson told him the nature of the argument hed just had with his friend: Hanes had wanted to kill Jones, whod witnessed the shooting of the Hatch police officer. Nelson was arguing against it.

Jones now believes that bullet fired by Hanes in Rincon was meant for him. But the child who walked by somehow startled Hanes. Along with possibly an itchy trigger finger, Hanes wound up shooting himself instead, Jones said.

Jones said he also feared being killed by the police, who were aware a Hatch officer had just been shot.

I thought: Were all going to die,' he said.

The next thing Jones remembers is waking up.

Jones said he thought at first Nelson had punched him. But Nelson told Jones hed fainted on his own, likely a reaction to everything that had just happened. The two saw police vehicles zipping by on the interstate. Heavily armed law enforcement officers eventually zeroed in on Nelson and Jones.

They took us down hard, he said.

At the time of their arrest, Nelson told police about the drugs in the suitcase and that they belonged to him, Jones said.

Authorities initially said they werent going to level charges against Jones, who they said was a hitchhiker. But Jones was indicted by a 3rd Judicial District grand jury on Aug. 25 on a possession of a controlled substance count, a fourth-degree felony. An arraignment is set for Sept. 6 in district court before state Judge Fernando Macias.

I didnt do anything wrong; Im a nice guy, Jones said. It was a bad situation. I dont mind helping people, but it went bad so quickly.

Reaching out to Mom

The Sun-News reached Jones mother, Shirley Williams, 62, last week at a nursing facility where she lives in St. Louis, Missouri. She confirmed in a phone interview she was diagnosed with breast cancer after discovering a lump earlier this summer. She said she was dismayed to learn that Jones had been caught up in the situation involving the Hatch officer, but glad to know that her son was OK.

Jones has tended to be a drifter and had been living in California, Williams said. But she didnt know where exactly.

Williams said she she wishes Jones had asked her for help in getting back to Missouri  and not hitchhiked.

I would have given him a bus ticket, she said. I dont have the money for a plane ticket.

Jones told the Sun-News he didnt contact his family for a ride after learning of his moms cancer diagnosis because he didnt want to burden his family with additional costs.

Williams, whos undergoing chemotherapy, said she misses her son.

I want to see him; thats what I want to do, she said.

While in jail, Jones said he was having trouble reaching his family because he didnt remember phone numbers. But he mailed a letter to his mom in recent days and was hoping it would reach her at the nursing home.

Jones is being held on a $75,000 secured bond, meaning hed have to post 10 percent of that in cash through a bail bondsman to be released from jail, according to court records.

Apology given

Hanes is facing six state felony charges and one misdemeanor, including first-degree murder. Hes set to appear in state court on Sept. 26. In addition, a federal grand jury has indicted him on five charges, to which he pleaded not guilty on Aug. 24.

Nelson spoke with the Sun-News last week, stating he didnt want to say much without consulting his attorney. But he did want to offer an apology to the victims and to New Mexicans. He said he never intended to harm anyone.

I feel great remorse and a lot of empathy for all the victims, he said, on the verge of tears. This situation is very tragic. I do want to say to the people of Las Cruces and to the people of New Mexico it was never my intention for people to get hurt.

Asked if he had a role in saving Jones life after the Hatch shooting, Nelson replied simply: Yes, maam.

Nelson said hes only seen his attorney one time, but hes hoping to go back home soon to get my situation in Ohio cleared up.

A state grand jury indicted Nelson on trafficking controlled substances (possession with intent to distribute)(narcotic or meth)(first offense), a second-degree felony; distribution/possession with intent to distribute marijuana/synthetic cannabinoids (first offense), a fourth-degree felony; and use or possession of drug paraphernalia, a misdemeanor, according to court records.

I feel bad for what has happened here, he told the Sun-News. Im not a monster.

Diana Alba Soular may be reached at 575-541-5443, dalba@lcsun-news.com or @AlbaSoular on Twitter.
Patient dies in ambulance-tractor collision

Two persons including a patient were killed in a fateful collision involving an ambulance and a tractor on Saturday night at Simariya of Sunsari.
Thousands of would-be drone pilots are racing to get licensed under new U.S. regulations that have opened an aerial stampede.

More than 3,300 have signed up to take the test on Monday, the first day its available, and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration estimates the number of drone operators-for-hire may exceed the nations 171,000 private pilots within a year.

The sky is going to open up at the end of August for a lot of opportunities, said Randy Yates of Omaha, Nebraska, who plans to take the FAA exam this week so that his company, National Property Inspections Inc., can use the devices for viewing rooftops and other difficult-to-reach locations. Its going to be a whole new world.

The first major regulations governing civilian drone operations in the U.S. take effect Monday and permit anyone 16 or older to fly for hire if they pass a written knowledge test and background check. They can only fly drones during daylight, within sight, and no higher than 400 feet (122 meters) from the ground.

Ad Hoc Standards

The rules replace ad hoc standards and a system of waivers that the industry said had hindered its growth. The rules dont apply to hobbyists, who can fly without a license.

Were going to see so much starting to develop, said Brendan Schulman, vice president for policy and legal affairs at Chinas SZ DJI Technology Co., the worlds largest civilian drone manufacturer.

The appeal is clear. Drones can be used by farmers to monitor fields, by telecom companies to inspect cell phone towers, and by media outlets to videotape news events  often with greater ease and lower cost than using helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft. Industry officials at a Congressional briefing on Aug. 24 predicted insurance, construction, agriculture and electrical power companies, which have been cautiously exploring applications for unmanned aircraft, would now leap into such operations. The regulations also open the door to more small operators and service companies that fly drones for hire, they said.

Before now, the FAA had required commercial drone operators to have a traditional pilots license, something that takes months and costs thousands of dollars to obtain. Now they simply have to pass a test costing $150, though some are opting to pay more for study courses.

New Opportunities

Larry McInnes, a Boston resident scheduled to take the exam on Thursday, has pinned his future career hopes to the exam.

McInnes learned earlier this year that his job as a court reporter was being phased out. He had an interest in drone photography, but before the FAA announced its new rules he didnt think it was feasible for him to qualify under the agencys waiver program.

Now that the FAA has changed the rules as far as commercial flying, it looks like there could very well be a big potential for change in my career direction, he said.

At least some in the drone industry are also expressing worry that the government wont be able to keep up with demand, or that the flood of new users may not have the skills necessary to safely fly under the new rules. Unlike every other pilot certification issued by the FAA, the agency chose not to require that drone operators demonstrate their flying skills.

Drivers License

Why would you ever have a drivers license if you had never been in a car, a pilots license if you had never been in a plane? Keven Gambold, chief executive officer of Unmanned Experts Inc. in Denver, said in an interview.

And yet now not only do you get a UAV license, you get a commercial license, Gambold said, referring to drones as unmanned aerial vehicles. His company sells drone services such as bridge inspections and also offers training courses.

Many are also wondering how the FAA will handle an expected flood of requests for expanded uses of drones. Because the technology is expanding so rapidly, the agency said it will grant waivers for operations outside the new limits if applicants could prove they would be safe.

When asked how long that waiver process will take, Earl Lawrence, head of FAAs Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Office, said, It depends on what you ask for.

Nighttime Flights

Simple waivers allowing such things as limited nighttime flights will be approved faster than more complex requests, he said.

In the meantime, thousands of people who just want to fly under the new rules are preparing to take the tests at about 700 locations around the country.

DARTDrones LLC, a Woburn, Massachusetts-based training company, has seen a steep increase in interest in its training since the FAA unveiled its new regulations in June, Abby Speicher, chief executive officer of the company, said in an interview.

Everyone was pretty much in a frenzy trying to figure out how to study for the test, Speicher said.

Community College

The aviation program at the University of the District of Columbia Community College, which operates of the FAAs test site at Reagan National Airport, has reserved slots for more than 100 people seeking drone licenses within the next month, said Eric Johnson, the programs secretary. Thats well above the usual three or four people per month taking FAA exams there, Johnson said.

Were obviously very excited to make sure we go through this new process because its going to open up a lot of new opportunities for our firm, said Tristan Randall of Autodesk Inc., the California-based company that sells computer tools to engineers, architects and construction contractors. He plans to take the FAA exam on Tuesday.

Autodesk has invested in two drone companies, the unmanned aircraft manufacturer 3D Robotics Inc. and Skycatch Inc., which operates the devices in construction, agricultural and other industries. Just as computer-aided design tools have been a boon for engineers and architects, Autodesk is hoping that drones carrying sensors will help streamline construction work and related tasks.

Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.
Dhaka : The Momins are not tolerating the ISKCON followers of Hindu legacy, though the ISKCON authorities had arranged gala Iffter parties on last Ramadan in their different temples in Bangladesh including their HQ at Mayapur, India.

In what has been termed as a radical attack, a group of jihadi radicals allegedly attacked ISKCON Temple in Sylhet, a major city lying on the banks of Surma river in northeastern Bangladesh as the Namajis felt disturbed with Hari Kirtan (singing Lord Haris praise loudly) during the Friday Namaj session as alleged.

The Muslim mob came to attack the ISKCON Temple from the Kajal Shah area of the adjacent locality with iron rods, bamboo sticks, wooden planks etc. and pelted bricks to the temple to get an entry to the inner side of the temple complex. Big trouble averted anyway for closed main gate of the temple and police intervention in time. 7 persons were injured at the time of chaos including a female. Police arrested 14 temple attackers so far.

The youth coordinator of the Sylhet ISKCON unit, Devarshi Shrivas told HENB that there was a cultural programme inside the temple comprising Krishna Picture Drawing by the children and the guardians were engaged in Hari Kirtan. There was no possibility to be disturbed anybody for another prayer session of others if any beyond 300 meters.

Principal of Iskcon, Navadwipa Dwija Gauranga Das Brahmachari told that the locals, who had allegedly grabbed a portion of ISKCONs property, instigated the Muslim devotees to attack the temple from a nearby Mosque loudspeakers. As per the reports, the group of Muslims hurled chunks of bricks at the devotees, offering prayers in the temple.

As soon as the Jihadi chaos was reported, police rushed to the spot and fired rubber bullets and 15 teargas shells to take control of the situation.

Additional police force was deployed to avoid any such unwanted development further.

Out the seven injured, one was the staff of the Iskcon temple and the other six were pedestrians. The injured persons have been identified as Ex councillor Jebun Nahar Sheerin (58), Babul Ahmed (43), Saju Ahkter (28), Syed (24), Arif (22), Sumon (17) and a ISKCON staff members Rajendra Choudhury (40). The fanatics were injured by Police rubber bullets as reported at the time of dispersing the rowdy Jihadi Mob attacking the temple or passing through the area as pedestrians.

Very unfortunately, the police of Islamic Bangladesh freed the 14 arrested jihadis even the temple attack scene went to viral in Bangladesh and in a part of India also.

As per statement of Suhel Ahamed the Officer-in-charge of Kotowali PS of Sylhet, a three persons committee has been made consisting of the District Magistrate Sylhet, Addl District Magistrate and an Inspector of Police to investigate the matter so far.

Source : Hindu Existence
Petrol induced fire in Khalanga-based hotel claims life of teenage girl

A teenage girl died and four others were left injured in a fire that engulfed a hotel in Jajarkot headquarters Khalanga on Sunday.
Tribe against Dakota Access Pipeline

August 29, 216 - The National Lawyers Guild (NLG), the oldest and largest human rights bar association in the United States, by its International Committee, its Indigenous Peoples Rights Committee and its Environmental Human Rights Committee, as well as the NLGs Environmental Justice Committee, stands in solidarity with the sovereign Oceti Sakowin Oyate (the Great Sioux Nation), the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and its people in their just opposition to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline across their sacred and ancestral lands. The United States has failed to respect the national sovereignty and interests of the Tribe and its people, has failed to respect the nation-to-nation relationship with the Tribe established by treaties, and has failed to properly consult with the Tribe to obtain its free, prior, and informed consent for the construction of the pipeline. We stand with the great many defenders and protectors of ancestral lands, water, and spiritual, historic, and cultural resources at the Camp of the Sacred Stones currently blocking construction of the pipeline across the Missouri River near the Tribes land and territory. We applaud the indigenous youth who ran 2,200 miles to Washington, DC, to deliver to the United States government a petition signed by 160,000 people in opposition to the pipelines construction. "" The 30-inch diameter, 1,172-mile pipeline is proposed by Dakota Access, LLC, to connect the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota across South Dakota and Iowa to other pipelines in Illinois for the transport of approximately 470,000 to 570,000 barrels of crude oil per day. It has been estimated that the Bakken oil reserves, the largest in the United States, hold in excess of 5 billion barrels of oil and are producing over a million barrels per day. In April of this year, researchers at the University of Michigan found that the Bakken field is emitting about 2 percent of the worlds ethane, about 250,000 tons per year into the air, directly affecting air quality across North America. These emissions, combined with combustion of Bakken oil, are major contributors to the Global Climate Crisis that threatens the well-being of our environment, future generations, and the Earth.The proposed pipeline route crosses ancestral lands of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Missouri River. The Missouri River is a major source of water for the Tribe. The ancestral lands and water are sacred to the Tribe and its people, and they possess a responsibility to Mother Earth and to future generations to protect these ancestral lands and water.Energy Transfer Partners, the Texas company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, and its affiliated entities, have a long history of violations of environmental laws including pending lawsuits by the states of New Jersey, Vermont, Pennsylvania, and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and the City of Breau Bridge in Louisiana over MTBE contamination of groundwater, as well as citations for releases of hazardous materials from its pipelines and facilities in Ohio, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Missouri, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Hawaii. Pipelines leak and spill. In one year alone, there were over 300 pipeline breaks in North Dakota. Numerous pipeline spills of millions of gallons of oil and contaminants into the Missouri River and its tributaries have already occurred. In January, over 50,000 gallons of Bakken crude oil spilled into the Yellowstone River in Montana. Oil from the Bakken field is more volatile than other crudes.The conduct of the US government in its approval of the Pipeline proposal breaches the terms of the 1851 and 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaties between the Oceti Sakowin and the United States. The exercise of colonial power by the United States in approving the proposal further violates the collective human rights of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and its peoples including the rights to self-determination, national sovereignty, and free, prior, and informed consent as to those matters that may affect them, which are secured to all peoples by the Charter of the United Nations, Art. 73; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Art. 1, 3 (ICCPR); and specifically to indigenous peoples under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Art. 3, 4, 11, 18, 19, 27, 28, 32, 37, 40 (UN DRIP), and Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization (ILO), Art. 6; and other international instruments that the United States as signed and ratified or have become binding customary international law. By Art. VI, Clause 2, of the United States Constitution these have become part of the Supreme Law of the United States of America.The pipeline further violates not only the National Environmental Policy Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, but also the collective human rights of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and its people to their spiritual, historic, and cultural interests in their ancestral lands across which the pipeline is proposed to travel, rights which are secured to them by the afore-stated international instruments and law. The proposed pipeline violates the collective environmental human rights of the people of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to life, health, clean water, and a clean environment, treaty rights secured to them by the Ft. Laramie Treaties as well as by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Art. 3, 25; ICCPR, Art. 6; the UN DRIP, Art. 7, 24, 29; and the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, Art. 1.In a flagrant violation of environmental justice principles, the pipeline was redirected towards lands near the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe from its original route north of the drinking water intakes for Bismarck, ND, in part to avoid non-Native lands and communities. This act of racial discrimination placing the people of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe at disparate risk of harm violated their collective human rights as secured by the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and violated the Executive Order on Environmental Justice, EO 12898.On August 10, Dakota Access, LLC moved construction equipment to the proposed Missouri River crossing site adjacent to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Members of the Tribe prevented the developers earthmovers from digging trenches for the pipeline. Several tribal members and supporters were arrested, including Tribal Chairman David Archambault. NLG attorneys have responded to help with their defense.On August 15, Dakota Access, LLC filed a SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) suit in federal court in Bismarck, ND against a number of individuals, including the Chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The suit is an attempt to silence their opposition and to get the pipeline constructed before a federal lawsuit filed by the Tribe in the District of Columbia can be decided on the adequacy of federal consultation with the Tribe. Dakota Access, LLC seeks an injunction against anyone interfering with construction of the pipeline and could add federal contempt charges to existing criminal charges for those who continue to resist construction. A decision on the preliminary injunction sought by Dakota Access, LLC in Bismarck is scheduled to be issued by September 9, 2016. Meanwhile, the encampment of protectors of the land and water and the spiritual and cultural resources of the Tribe, which started with 35 people, has grown to over hundreds, with tensions mounting.We call for the respect of the sovereign rights of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and its peoples, and for the immediate and permanent halt of the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. In light of the growing Climate Crisis, we further call for the Bakken oil to be left in the ground.
The nine point statement on the U.S.-China Climate Change Outcomes in Hangzhou China negotiated between Presidents Xi Jinping and Barack Obama outlined the growing bilateral cooperation between the US and China on climate policy in a number of meetings since 2013. (First outcome).

These bilateral negotiations should be widely welcomed. They proved to be an important stage setter for the Paris Agreement at COP21 in Paris which set in place for the first time a true international framework for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and dealing with climate change.

Read the U.S.-China Climate Change Outcomes (Whitehouse.gov) in full.

United States and China ratify Paris Agreement

The formal occasion in Hangzhou China was used to lodge instruments of ratification of the Paris Agreement with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, and call for all other UNFCCC signatory countries to ratify the agreement this year. (Second Outcome)

Read more on this by me: China and the United States Ratify Paris Agreement on climate

Phaseout HFCs refrigerant gases under Montreal Protocol

The third outcome focussed on negotiating an ambituous amendment restricting HFCs as part of the Montreal Protocol. This treaty was established to slow down and reverse the destruction of the ozone layer in the atmosphere and has already had a noticeable impact. But some of the replacement refrigerant gases such as HFCs are also strong greenhouse gases. Improving efficiency standards and researching alternatives is important to transform the air conditioning industry use of refrigerants.

Why is this important? Because research shows that phasing out HFCs could save 0.5C of warming by the end of the century. (Xu et al (2013) - The role of HFCs in mitigating 21st century climate change (PDF)). It is clear that Phasing Down HFCs Under Montreal Protocol Can Cut Climate Pollution Twice Over (IGSD)

Capping aviation emissions

The fourth outcome dealt with aviation emissions. Emissions from aviation and shipping were not specifically mentioned in the Paris Agreement, despite their size as the 7th largest source of total global emissions and projected to rapidly increase. For the moment the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) and International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) have the mandate for addressing emissions in this area, although Meinhard Doelle, a Professor in the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University argues that control of this sector's emissions could be brought under the UN climate regime if their efforts are seen as insufficient.

The United States EPA in July 2016 declared that jet engine exhaust endangers public health by contributing to climate change, announcing that it will work to develop regulations that will cut carbon emissions from commercial aircraft.

The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) Assembly, to meet from 27 September to 7 October 2016, has before it a plan for a global market-based measure (MBM) for international aviation emissions.

This amounts to an offsets program for civil aviation, a small step in the right direction but doesn't really reduce emissions. The proposal being put forward aims to cap the carbon pollution of all international flights at 2020 levels, but be voluntary between 2021 and 2026 and then mandatory from 2027 for the world's largest emitters. Airlines that exceeded their cap would need to buy carbon credits from designated environmental projects. China and the US support the first, voluntary, phase. Mexico, Canada and Indonesia have said they would join, and now the European Union have agreed to join the aviation emissions pact (This includes 16 surrounding countries including Turkey, Ukraine and Georgia).

Read more on the NGO campaign dedicated to reducing aviation flight emissions at FlightPath1.5

Building co-operative partnerships and taking ambituous domestic action

The fifth outcome celebrated the US-China partnerships in Climate Change Working Group (CCWG) and U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center (CERC), and the U.S.-China Climate-Smart/Low-Carbon Cities Summits in 2015, 2016 and the upcoming summit in Boston in 2017.

The sixth outcome reiterated and committed both countries "to continue taking ambitious domestic action to further promote the transition towards green, low-carbon and climate-resilient economies both domestically and internationally."

US efforts for greenhouse gas reduction

The seventh outcome dealt with US domestic climate policy and greenhouse gas reduction including:

a five-year extension of production and investment tax credits for wind and solar energy will deploy roughly 100GW of renewable energy over the next five years

a pause in new coal leasing on federal lands, while undertaking a comprehensive review of the federal coal program

New vehicle efficiency standards for heavy-duty vehicles, which will reduce more than 1 billion tons of carbon pollution over the life of the program

20 additional efficiency standards for appliances and equipment by the end of the year, which will contribute to achieving its goal of cutting 3 billion metric tons of carbon pollution from such standards.

measures to reduce domestic HFCs and methane from the oil and gas and landfill sectors

China efforts for greenhouse gas reduction

The eighth outcome dealt with China domestic climate policy and greenhouse gas reduction, detailing actions during the 13th Five-Year Period (2016-2020):

Decrease carbon dioxide per unit of GDP and energy consumption per unit of GDP by 18% and 15% respectively

increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to 15%

increase the forest stock volume by 1.4 billion cubic meters

increase efforts to increase energy efficiency in industries, transportation and buildings,

promote green power dispatch to accelerate the development of renewable energy

start in 2017 its national emission trading system

phase down the production and consumption of HFCs

promote low-carbon development of transportation by developing standard modern transportation equipment and energy-efficient, environmentally-friendly means of transport.



Climate Finance and clean energy investment

The ninth and final outcome dealt with climate finance and investment, including limiting export finance for coal-fired power stations.

It described how the United States worked with other OECD member countries in 2015 to adopt new OECD guidelines to limit export finance for overseas coal-fired power plants.

Unfortunately Japan, Korea and Australia were able to insert exceptions in these guidelines to allow for 'high-efficiency' coal power stations to still be financed and built. Australia did this to ensure a market for coal. Japan wanted the exceptions has it has developed these 'high efficiency' coal technology processes. And Korea is big in financing coal power. PhD student Marc Hudson had an illuminating background paper on this on OECD coal subsidies decision, or read Luke Kemp at The Conversation on how the OECD agreement deals another blow to coal worldwide.

On climate finance, the United States remains committed to the goal now enshrined in the Paris Agreement of jointly mobilizing 100 billion US dollars per year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries in the context of meaningful mitigation and adaptation action.

But really this amount is just a drop in the bucket needed to support adaptation and mitigation action across the many developing nations. Climate economics researchers Alex Bowen, Emanuele Campiglio & Sara Herreras Martinez in a 2015 study published in Climate Policy called An equal effort approach to assessing the NorthSouth climate finance gap (abstract), estimated that an equitable NorthSouth annual financial transfer of around US$400 billion (4 models) to $2 trillion (2 models) may be required by 2050. That $100 billion commitment looks rather low in comparison and should under the principles of fairness and equity be quadrupled as part of the climate debt by industrialised countries.

China undertook in this outcome to strictly control public investment flowing into projects with high pollution and carbon emissions both domestically and internationally.

Increased climate action by G20 nations needed to close the gap

The bilateral outcome between the US and China was completed as a precursor to the G20 nations heads of state forum. No doubt this bilateral will spurr major discussion at the G20 on climate action and the Paris Agreement, as it should do.

Research by Climate Transparency in their Report for China Presidency 2016 shows an enormous Emission reductions gap between G20 nation plans (INDCs) and the Paris Agreement temperature targets. The INDCs only cover 15 percent of the reduction needed for moving to a 2 degrees C decarbonisation trajectory. To keep within a 2 degrees C trajectory, the G20 nations need to increase 2030 climate action at least six fold more than the plans that are currently registered with the UNFCCC.

The Climate Transparency report highlights

Coal is the main issue with the carbon intensity of the G20s energy sector

G20 member states pledged climate action is still far from where it needs to be to meet the Paris Agreements temperature goals. G20 energy-related emissions need to be reduced six times what has been pledged so far.

While renewable energy has increased by 18 per cent since 2008, G20 annual country investment in power sector transition by 2035 will need to roughly double to be in line with a 2 degrees C trajectory.

Fossil fuel subsidies need to be phased out. The G20 has repeatedly committed to removing these subsidies since 2009.

Energy-related emissions per capita, currently averaging across the G20 at 5.7tC02e/y per person, has decreased slightly, but needs to drop right back to 1-3tC02e/y per person by 2050 to keep on a below 2 degrees C warming trajectory.

G20 economies energy intensity and carbon intensity are both decreasing, but not enough to compensate for the increase in economic activity.

The report recommendations to the G20 nations were for:
CANNON BALL, NORTH DAKOTA, September 3, 2016  Sacred places containing ancient burial sites, places of prayer and other significant cultural artifacts of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe were destroyed Saturday by Energy Transfer Partners, Tribal Chairman David Archambault II said.

The desecration came one day after the Tribe filed court documents identifying the area as home to significant Native artifacts and sacred sites on Friday, before the Labor Day weekend.THIS DEMOLITION IS DEVASTATING, ARCHAMBAULT SAID. THESE GROUNDS ARE THE RESTING PLACES OF OUR ANCESTORS. THE ANCIENT CAIRNS AND STONE PRAYER RINGS THERE CANNOT BE REPLACED. IN ONE DAY, OUR SACRED LAND HAS BEEN TURNED INTO HOLLOW GROUND.Construction crews removed topsoil across an area about 150 feet wide stretching for two miles, northwest of the confluence of the Cannon Ball and Missouri Rivers.I surveyed this land and we confirmed multiple graves and specific prayer sites, said Tim Mentz, the Standing Rock Siouxs former tribal historic preservation officer. Portions, and possibly complete sites, have been taken out entirely.Thousands of people from across the United States have joined the Standing Rock Sioux to protest Energy Transfer Partners building of the 1,200-mile Dakota Access Pipeline. If built, a half-million barrels of crude oil would pass through the line daily.The Standing Rock Sioux have filed suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to stop construction. The Tribe says it was not properly consulted before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers fast-tracked construction approval.A decision in that case is expected by September 9.Were days away from getting a resolution on the legal issues, and they came in on a holiday weekend and destroyed the site, said Jan Hasselman, attorney for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. What they have done is absolutely outrageous.Standing Rock Sioux Tribe
PMs India visit: Fast Track not on agenda

Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal, who is set to embark on a visit to India from September 15, is not likely to include some projects, including the Kathmandu-Nijgadh Fast Track, that have been highly debated at home, according to sources.
Pope Francis proclaims Mother Teresa a saint

Mother Teresa of Calcutta, known as the saint of the gutters during her life, was declared a saint of the Roman Catholic Church by Pope Francis on Sunday, fast-tracked to canonization just 19 years after her death.
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--In 2012, the MAI division of BAE Systems at the Warton and Samlesbury sites in Lancashire, United Kingdom, kicked-off a major project to enhance its existing global trade management system and thus the efficiency of its export controls compliance. The MAI's export operation includes shipping of complete aircraft, spare parts, repair parts, and associated technology, and the size, scope, and complexity of the business required the launch of a transformation project  Project Saturn  with a new IT system at its core.BAE Systems selected solution provider AEB to help drive forward BAE Systems' objective of implementing a best in class export controls compliance programme, including US ITAR and UK controls. Building on a successful, 10-year business partnership, BAE Systems engaged AEB to enhance its export controls IT systems by implementing the latest functionalities from AEB's ASSIST4 Compliance & Risk Management software suite.The project is structured into three discrete phases, and the first two stages have been successfully completed. About 60 users across the BAE Systems sites in Warton, Samlesbury, and some Royal Air Force bases are already working with AEB's software solutions. The third phase is due to go live in 2017 and will include US ITAR export control functionalities.Tony Croughan, MAI's Head of Programme  Business Transformation, said: "When managing controlled material, we have a responsibility to our customers, suppliers, and regulators. Compliance with export control requirements is of the utmost importance for us at BAE Systems. Processes are often subject to frequently changing legislation, and with this transformation project, we are enhancing our global trade management operations through maximising the levels of standardisation and efficient deployment of modern toolsets. Following MAI's COTS ("commercial off the shelf") strategy, this also involves the elimination of individually tailored workflows and customised IT applications as far as possible to reach the highest levels of process optimisation and process automation."For deployment in MAI, BAE Systems selected AEB's products ASSIST4 UK and US ITAR Licence Management, ASSIST4 UK and US Technology Transfers, and ASSIST4 UK Customs NES from the ASSIST4 Compliance & Risk Management suite. The new products complement the AEB solutions that already successfully support the BAE Systems MAI business: ASSIST4 Despatch, ASSIST4 Export Documentation, ASSIST4 Freight Cost Management, and ASSIST4 Carrier Integration.Tony Croughan explains: "Selecting the right partners for major modernisation projects like Project Saturn is essential and many standard requirements must be met. There were many aspects that made it clear for us that AEB was the right choice going forward, such as mature integration capabilities with our ERP systems and other information management toolsets, and the readiness to develop new standard IT modules in line with emerging requirements. And of course it is of continued benefit for us to work with solution experts who are familiar with the BAE Systems business and who have integrated well into our in-house project teams."AEB's solutions support BAE Systems' goals to efficiently manage export controls of current MAI volumes and cater for future growth at the same time; to ensure compliance with the latest trade control obligations, including those under the ongoing US Export Control Reform (ECR); and to minimise compliance risk across the MAI division.Benefits of the AEB solutions include faster processes, more efficient workflows, better data accuracy, and improved accessibility through enhanced web services. BAE Systems estimates a return on investment within 5 years of the purchase order date, and is currently discussing options to implement further AEB functionality to support efficient US EAR compliance.AEB is one of Europe's leading providers of supply chain logistics software, consultancy, and services and has been delivering solutions to customers for over thirty five years. AEB's core product - ASSIST4 - is the comprehensive solution suite for all logistics processes in global business. ASSIST4 offers a complete set of business services for end-to-end logistics, including international goods movements, making it possible to standardise and automate business processes in supply chain execution. ASSIST4 also creates transparency and provides a reliable basis for making the right decisions about the planning, monitoring, control, and continual optimisation of supply networks - even beyond the boundaries of the business.BAE Systems is a global defence, aerospace, and security company with c. 80,000employees in over 40 countries and a global customer base. Headquartered in London, the company's wide-ranging products and services cover air, land and naval forces, as well as advanced electronics, security, information technology, and support services. BAE Systems' business sectors across the globe include BAE Systems Applied Intelligence, BAE Systems Australia, BAE Systems Saudi Arabia, Electronic Systems, Intelligence & Security, Land (UK), Maritime, Military Air & Information, Platforms & Services, Regional Aircraft, and Shared Services. The company was formed in 1999 following the merger of two British companies: Marconi Electronic Systems (MES)  the defence electronics and naval shipbuilding subsidiary of the General Electric Company plc (GEC)  and British Aerospace (BA)  an aircraft, munitions and naval systems manufacturer. The Military Air & Information division of BAE Systems is primarily involved in the air sector and can trace its roots back to the earliest days of aviation. Today, the MAI division offers an array of associated training solutions, support, and information services for customers worldwide. With extensive experience in the development, delivery, and support of military air platforms, components, and technologies, MAI also provides defence information systems, networks, and delivery platforms. BAE Systems MAI's customer base is formed of global government agencies.
Order of Saint John of Jerusalem Knights of Malta installed new Noble Knights During The 4th Annual G.O.D. Awards in New York.

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-- With great success, the firstInvestiture in New York was held last August 18 and followed by Awarding of Diplomas last August 19 in the presence of illustrious Dignitaries, Royalty and Honorees during the 4th Annual Global Officials of Dignity Awardsa flagship event ofat the United Nations.The solemn investiture that was perpetuated in the glorious and Millenian tradition was officiated by His Royal Imperial Highness, the, assisted by Her Highnessof the Royal House of Baloi and the current Minister of International Cooperation and Integration of the OSJ, and newly promoted OSJ Ambassador, His ExcellencyThe newly installed high profile Noble Knights are:is the founder and CEO of the connected care telemedicine practice World Clinic. He is a former U.S. Navy Chief Medical Officer who has served as a refugee camp physician on the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier. Carlin is board certified in Emergency Medicine and holds a consultant-staff appointment at Lahey Hospital and Medical Center in suburban Boston. He has been in practice for 29 years.is a regional expert in Geriatric Medicine and Palliative Care/Hospice. He is board certified in Family Medicine with two Certificates of Added Qualifications:Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine and has achieved the level of Certified Medical Director (CMD). Out of the 7,162 board certified geriatricians in the United States, he was one of 2,700 who was also a Certified Medical Director, signifying expertise in long-term care (LTC) medical direction.is Chief Investment Officer of The Innovation Institute and senior advisor to The Saudi royal family. Barry's background and experience in investments, mergers & acquisitions (M&A), startups, and global business perspective enable him to assist The Institute in reaching its highest potential in terms of volume of ideas and inventions, as well as mission, impact, value, and access to care for vulnerable populations globally.is Senior Managing Director of Athos II Holdings, a privately-held company overseeing the investment and philanthropic interests of its founding principals, focused on direct and syndicated co-investments with select Single Family Offices and institutional investors globally. He is based in New York., Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Army (Retired), is the National Associate Director for Simulation-Based Medical Education Training at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Mr. Ariza is responsible for providing short and long range simulation-based training solutions to be delivered to 23 Veterans Integrated Service Networks (VISNs) and 150 VA Medical Centers.is the Executive Vice President, Western Region of Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. Norbert has a B.S. in Business Economics from University of California, Santa Barbara and an Advanced Executive Education from Wharton. Prior to joining Gallagher he spent two years at The Wyatt Company and six with Foster Higgins/Johnson & Higgins in a lead consulting capacity in both Defined Contribution Retirement and Health & Welfare practices.Newly promotedof the OSJ Knight of Malta Stephen Shaya, M.D. graduated from Birmingham Brother Rice High School Summa Cum Laude. He was awarded a Merit Scholarship to attend Wayne State University. During his time at WSU, Dr. Shaya won many leadership awards including the Outstanding Student Leader in 1991 and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Grant Awardee. He was selected to serve on the Wayne State University Board of Governors from 1991 to 1993. He attended Wayne State University Medical School and graduated in 1996. Since 2004, Dr. Shaya has been the Chief Medical Officer of J & B Medical, a global healthcare solutions company. In addition, Her Highness, Prince Maria Amor was honored with the firstfor her profound service to Humanity during the Awards. Princess Raden Dato'Seri Maria Amor Torres DK, D.D., Minister of Foreign Affairs and Protocol & Appointment Officer of The Royal House of Baloi, Foreign Minister of The Royal Kingdom of Sulu, Honorary Princess of Melayu Jambi, Indonesia and Minister of International Cooperation and Integration of OSJ Knights of Malta, recipient of DERJAH KERABAT (highest award for Royalty given to Kings, Sultans, Presidents) is the Founder and President of the We Care for Humanity, a non-profit organization whose mission is to promote universal humanitarianism and provide education, health and empowerment to the underprivileged and underserved women and children using various global novel collaboration and projects. We Care for Humanity was founded in 2009 and formalized in 2011.To view photos of the Investiture, click here: https://www.facebook.com/godawards/photos/?tab=album&album_id=789915531151766Click here for more info about. And here for*The Order of St. John of Jerusalem, Knights Hospitaller (Malta) is one of the oldest Orders of Chivalry in existence today. It is the third oldest religious order and its origin dates back to the times of the Crusades in the Middle Ages. The Order is famous and revered for its countless works of mercy and charity performed unceasingly by its members since the days of its founding in Jerusalem by the Blessed Gerard in 1048AD as a Benedictine nursing Order and, thereafter, as a Christian military order under its own charter charged with the care and defense of pilgrims to the Holy Land.
Jeunessima's novel concept allows women to enjoy life to the fullest at any age, on an international scale

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-- Most professional women with families can find themselves easily engulfed by responsibilities that include performing at high levels in their respective work environments and tending to families, leaving them with no time for relaxation or self-appreciation.The solution to this is as ingenious as it is simple and easy to partake in. Jeunessima has introduced the concept of a 'virtual cocktail party', a refreshing new source of inspiration, which will motivate such women to take a little time out of their day to revitalize and focus on themselves, through a dynamic social environment.Over the span of one hour, Jeunessima provides an uplifting space where women can not only relax and rejuvenate their spirits in each other's presences, but also re-invigorate their outlook on their lives. The beauty of this concept is its' factor of barrier-free, ease of attendance. All that is needed is connectivity for guests to enjoy the experience from any place they choose, be it their home or even when outside.Heart-felt connections are encouraged, with the goal of creating a long lasting support system of professional women, all with the joie-de-vivre, enthusiasm and sparkle of an ageless woman.Carol McWilliams, a guest at the event can testify to this, '", said Carol McWilliams.Women from all over the world are invited to join the event, which requires going through a simple registration process so as to be provided in advance, with the recipes for an elegant champagne based cocktail along with a refreshing light mocktail. With these at hand, they can socialize through spirited conversation, sharing thoughts, opinions and anecdotes over soothing music, profound poetry and energizing power of dance. Attendees are welcome to share pictures of memorable moments from the event on social media to incite their family, friends and colleagues to join in on the next occasion, expanding the reach of inspiration provided by Jeunessima.Ulla Gaudin shared her experience saying, "The virtual cocktail parties have been enjoyed by women world over, throughout the course of summer, with the next being held on the 15of September. These have laid the foundation for Jeunessima's live cocktail parties that will be held through October and November across cities in Europe and the US, as Jeunessima looks forward to bringing even more women together in an inspiring, soul-nourishing way that is unique in the world.Jeunessima has turned anti-aging into the art and joy of feeling young  at any age.Jeunessima, based in London and at the French Cote d'Azur/Monaco, and its Founder Dr. Ines O'Donovan, PhD, offer busy Entrepreneurs and Business Women from around the world luxurious lifestyle experiences and guide them in making sophisticated decisions about her health & wellness, nutrition, fitness, beauty & style and relationships.The company publishes the Jeunessima Magazine, offers women in the US, Asia, Europe and Australia the opportunity to gather in their exclusive private membership Club for Women only, the Jeunessima Luxury Lifestyle Club, and organizes events in Europe and the US.For more information please contactDr. Ines O'Donovan, PhDJeunessima Ltd. The Lifestyle Company for WomenEmail: ines@jeunessima.com Website: http://jeunessima.com Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/Jeunessima
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-- Turkmenistan's GDP slacked to 6.1 percent in the first 6 months of 2016 from 9.1% previous year. The country's gas-dominated economy has been clubbed by the decline in energy prices and Russia's decision to stop purchases of Turkmen gas. The World Bank expects full-year economic growth in Turkmenistan to slow to 5.0% in 2016 from 6.5% a year earlier."Our deeply esteemed president, speaking before you all, spoke about the global economic crisis, which has led to a sharp drop in prices for energy resources," said Alexander Dadayev, chairman of the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs according to Chronicles of Turkmenistan.However, In January 2016 a total of 242 joint-stock companies (JSCs) were registered in Turkmenistan. This is of greater importance to Turkmenistan as incorporation of JSCs will help the country to make profits from market economy than completely dependent on energy exports. Modernization of Abadanhaly industrial complex which is an open joint-stock company that specializes in production of high-quality carpets and rugs is one such example. Entrepreneurs in Turkmenistan, continue to confidently develop new segments in the market and use advanced technologies to increase the competitiveness & meet consumer demands.In Turkmenistan there are ways of establishing joint-stock companies:incorporating a new joint-stock company with 2 shareholders and directors;altering the legal entity type of the present company;taking measures for privatization of the state property.The government of Turkmenistan has adopted laws to promote creation and operation of joint-stock companies. These include the lawsOn joint-stock companies,On Securities Market,On Investment Activities andOn Foreign Investments. This has encouraged entrepreneurs and led to the surge in registration of JSCs in the country.To support modernization, Turkmenistan is also constructing a new international airport in Ashgabat, which will become a major transit hub for continental and intercontinental flights.For over a decade, the incorporation experts at Healy Consultants Pte Ltd., with their branch in Turkmenistan, have been assisting investors worldwide to set up the optimum corporate structure for doing business in the country. The services offered include company registration, banking solutions, accounting and tax and legal services and corporate support services.To inquire more about Turkmenistan company setup options and schedule a conference call, email us at email@healyconsultants or call us on +65 6735 0120.
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Opening a broad vista in the search for effective pharmaceuticals, a collaboration of Chinese and U.S. chemists has laid out a highly efficient new method to convert abundant organic molecules into new medicines.

Writing Sept. 2 in the journal Science, teams led by Guosheng Liu of the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry (SIOC) and Shannon Stahl of the University of Wisconsin-Madison describe a way to convert carbon-hydrogen bonds into nitriles, common components of bioactive molecules used in medicinal and agricultural applications.

Carbon-hydrogen bonds are the most common feature of the molecular building blocks used to make valuable chemicals. The new method will help break the stranglehold of carbon-hydrogen bonds present in the chemical feedstocks used to make bioactive molecules. Exchanging hydrogen atoms in such molecules for more useful elements is difficult without damaging or destroying the rest of the molecule. The new method described by Liu and Stahl gives chemists prospecting for bioactive molecules a new tool in the search for novel drugs or chemicals for agriculture.

"We need more efficient ways to convert feedstocks into useful molecules," explains Stahl, a UW-Madison professor of chemistry. "Selective functionalization of carbon-hydrogen bonds is one of the holy grails of modern chemistry."

Although chemists have ways of making biologically active molecules now, the current routes are often laborious and create large amounts of waste. The new method removes many of the intermediate steps and will make the process far easier for medicinal chemists.

An important feature of the new method is that it provides access to so-called chiral molecules that are a match for enzymes targeted in disease. Chiral molecules have mirror-image versions of themselves, similar to a pair of human hands. For drug molecules to be effective, they must fit -- like a hand into a glove -- the targeted molecular niche of an enzyme.

"The three-dimensional shape and chirality of molecules often correlates with the efficacy or potency of a pharmaceutical," notes Stahl.

The two mirror-image forms of drug molecules can have vastly different effects. An infamous example is thalidomide, first prescribed as a sedative in the 1950s. The reverse image of the molecule, however, was later linked to severe birth defects.

"It is important to be able to synthesize only one of two mirror images of the molecule, and development of new catalytic methods that achieve this goal, starting with carbon-hydrogen bonds, is highly desired," says Liu, a professor of chemistry at SIOC.

In their Science report, Liu, Stahl and colleagues Wen Zhang, Fei Wang, Dinghai Wang and Pinhong Chen of SIOC, and Scott McCann of UW-Madison, describe a very efficient strategy for the preparation of benzylic nitriles, which are precursors to broad classes of hormones, neurotransmitters, psychoactive and anti-inflammatory drugs.
Less than one year after President Barack Obama announced a White House Arctic Initiative that included better mapping of the area, a team of researchers led by the University of Minnesota Polar Geospatial Center released the first-ever publicly available set of high-resolution, three-dimensional topographic maps of the entire state of Alaska.

The digital elevation models, or DEMs, serve as a benchmark for measuring future climate changes in the Arctic by assisting scientists studying glaciers, permafrost collapse, and coastal retreat. All of the information is publicly available online. The DEMs also provide critical new information for ground and air transportation safety, land management, sustainable development, and scientific research.

"With these digital elevation models we can see detailed topography of the land, including individual trees, lakes, roads and buildings," said Paul Morin, director of the University of Minnesota's Polar Geospatial Center. "This high-resolution data is invaluable. For example, researchers and land managers can use the data to "digitally rain" on a surface and watch where the rain goes to analyze watersheds."

The digital elevation models are based on 50-centimeter resolution images captured by DigitalGlobe commercial satellites and licensed by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

"We used sub-meter optical satellites to collect stereo imagery from space. We broke the Arctic up into 20 trillion two-meter-by-two-meter squares and then used one of the most powerful computers to measure the height of each of those squares," Morin said. "We are measuring the surface of Earth at a resolution and geographic scale and spatial resolution that no one has ever done before. It is one of the most exciting things I've ever seen in my career."

This technology is significant in polar mapping because it allows for a wider coverage of the Arctic than did traditional data collection by aircraft, which is limited in the inhospitable and remote polar region. The data can also be collected again in the future to watch ice, permafrost and vegetation change over time.

Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), researchers at the University of Minnesota, Ohio State University and Cornell University have been using the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Blue Waters supercomputer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. The U.S. Geological Survey and the State of Alaska were also key partners in coordinating the project internationally.

Teams from NGA and NSF worked with the partners to launch an unclassified, open Arctic portal where the DEMs and emerging information is available to the public. Esri, a geographic information system provider, hosts the site at nga.maps.arcgis.com. The public website hosts webmaps, map viewers, other DEM exploratory tools, nautical charts, sailing directions, and infographics. It also includes a downloadable Pan-Arctic map with mission-specific data layers.

The United States serves as the chair of the Arctic Council through Spring 2017 when the position rotates to Finland for two years. The White House Arctic Initiative supports efforts to understand the Arctic, engage with residents, and develop tools, products and services that improve federal, state and local activities in the Arctic.

Digital elevation models of the entire Arctic are scheduled for release in 2017.
PWR clears 100ha of its occupied land

Parsa Wildlife Reserve (PWR) has cleared around 100 ha of its forest land taken over by squatters at Syauli in Nirmalbasti VDC.
Cell models from stem cells serve an ever-increasing role in research of cardiac dysfunction. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have succeeded in producing cells which offer new insights into properties of the heart. They installed a molecular sensor into the cells which emits light, and not only makes the cells' electrical activity visible, but also makes it possible for the first time to quickly identify cell types.

It has been possible to produce so-called induced pluripotent stem cells in the laboratory for the past ten years. These stem cells are derived from white blood cells, for example, and can be infinitely reproduced in the laboratory, and be turned into all possible types of cells. This has enabled the use of heart cells produced in this way in order to investigate cardiac rhythm dysfunctions, for example. Animal experiments are only of limited use for this application, and tissue samples cannot be easily taken from patients' hearts. Cultivated heart cells, however, provide the opportunity to research such diseases in a 'miniature' format.

"Our development solves several problems which had made working with such cell models difficult," said t Dr. Daniel Sinnecker, Cardiologist at TUM's Klinikum rechts der Isar. Laboratory-produced heart cells still pose the problem of how one can best measure electrical activity. In the past, microelectrodes were most commonly used in order to directly determine the cells' electrical signals. This procedure, however, is quite tedious, and can only be used on a small number of cells.

Differences between cell types

In addition, not all heart cells are alike. All heart cells are able to contract at their own cyclic rhythm, and to forward electrical signals to neighbouring cells. On the other hand, the cells which form the various structures of the heart, such as the atria, the chambers or the sinus node, i.e. the 'pacemaker' of the heart, differ significantly from each other, for example in their action potentials. These are variations in electrical voltage between the inside and outside of cells which form an electric signal that controls the excitation process in the heart and thus its contractions.

This difference becomes relevant when examining rhythm disorders which are caused by malfunctions in specific areas of the heart muscle. Producing heart cells from stem cells, scientists today have only insufficient ways of influencing whether those cells become heart chamber cells, atrial cells or nodal cells. In order to investigatea particular disorder, scientists must meticulously identify the type of each individual cell.

Biological sensors instead of microelectrodes

Daniel Sinnecker and his team described a possible solution for both of these problems in their article in European Heart Journal. Instead of attaching microelectrodes to cells, the scientists used biological sensors. These are built from fluorescent, i.e.luminous, protein from deep sea jellyfish. The DNA which contains the "construction plans" for these sensor proteins is inserted into heart cells, which then produce the sensor proteins. When the altered heart cells are stimulated with light at a specific wavelength, they produce light at a different wavelength. The precise color of the returned light depends on the voltage difference between the cells' interiors and exteriors. One can therefore measure and record the action potential of individual cells using a special camera.

A special characteristic of this new method is that the inserted DNA can be coupled with specific recognition sequences, so-called promoters. These ensure that the sensor proteins are produced only in specific types of heart muscle cells. Thus, it becomes possible to capture only the electrical signals from atrial cells, heart chamber cells or sinus node cells, as needed.

New possibilities for investigating drugs

In contrast to the prior cumbersome microelectrode technique, this method offers significantly improved performance. "We can already investigate hundreds of cells in one day instead of only a handful," says Zhfen Chen, first author of the study. "This process can basically be automated and scaled up, so that thousands of cells can be investigated at the same time."

"In the future, we can use our method not only in the laboratory in order to study disease," says Daniel Sinnecker. "The fact that we can investigate large numbers of cells means that we can also use this method for investigation of drugs, in which, for example, we can investigate whether a product has a negative effect on heart muscle." A challenge for such new types of procedures is that the cells must be produced in the needed quantities. Daniel Sinnecker and his team are working on increasing the sensitivity of their method.
Blowing bubbles underneath a ship's hull, causes them to be pushed against the surface. In the surface layer between the ship and water, these air bubbles cause less friction: it's also known as air lubrication. In practice, friction can be reduced 20 percent, with a huge impact on fuel consumption and CO 2 emission. The precise mechanism is still unknown, as the local water flow is complex and turbulent. As UT scientists now demonstrate, the size of the bubbles make a big difference: tiny bubble don't have a net effect at all. This may seem counterintuitive, but large bubbles that can be deformed easily, give the strongest effect.

For investigating the effects, the University of Twente has a unique 'Taylor Couette' setup, capable of generating fully developed turbulent flow. This machine consist of two large cylinders with fluid in between. When the inner cylinder is turning fast, injected bubbles will be pressed against the surface, just like they do at the ship's hull. At the surface of the cylinder, they start influencing drag. This setup enables the scientists to search for the relevant parameters in efficient air lubrication.

With four percent of air in the water, a reduction of 40 percent is feasible in the experimental setup, using large, millimeter size bubbles. By adding a tiny amount of 'surfactant', the scientists were able to vary the surface tension between bubbles and water, and they could vary bubble dimensions. The other properties, like flow speed and density, were kept the same. What was the result? On average, the bubbles get much smaller, because the surfactant prevents bubbles getting together, coalescing, forming larger bubbles. Within the turbulent flow, the bubble have a uniform distribution and moreover, they will not be pushed against the surface. With, again, four percent of air that is in microbubbles now, there is four percent reduction: there is no net air lubrication at the ship's hull. Ruben Verschoof: "From previous experiments, we knew that deformable bubbles work well, but in no way we expected a dramatic difference like this.

By doing the experiments in real life turbulent flows, and not in the simplified situation of slow and laminary flow, the outcome of this research is directly applicable in the naval sector. For reducing drag in pipelines, the experiments also provide valuable new insight.

The research has been done in the Physics of Fluids group of Professor Detlef Lohse. This group is part of UT's MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology. Research is funded by Dutch Technology Foundation STW and Dutch Foundation for Fundament Research on Matter (FOM).
Brought into captivity as a nearly starved, 3-month old cub, the tigress that became known as Zolushka (Russian for "Cinderella") flourished in a rehabilitation center designed to prepare her for life back in the wild. Without a mother (probably lost to poachers) Zolushka learned how to kill natural wild prey presented to her in the rehabilitation center, where she was kept far from people to preserve her innate fear of humans.

In spring 2013, she was released into Bastak Reserve, in the Pri-Amur Region, an area where wild tigers disappeared some 40 years ago. Zolushka thrived in her new, wild home, and miraculously connected with her prince -- a male tiger that apparently dispersed from tiger range far to the east.

In December 2015, the first ever photos (from remote camera traps placed by Bastak ranger Ivan Polkolnikov to monitor tiger movements) revealed Zolushka with two young cubs- the first ever occurrence of a rehabilitated tiger not only surviving, but reproducing in the wild. Olga Polkolnikova, reserve employee and manager of Bastak's growing tiger database, remarked that "on the eve of their first birthday [the cubs will soon turn 12 months old], the cubs decided to host a small photo session."

Photos show the cubs approaching their mother (still with radio collar) and also playing with each other.

Dale Miquelle, Director of the Wildlife Conservation Society's Russia Program, which helps organize camera trapping in Bastak, noted, "These most recent photos from Bastak Reserve demonstrate that not only have these young cubs survived -- they are thriving, and represent the second generation of a recovery of a tiger population that was once lost to the Pri-Amur region of Russia. This event represents not only a happy next chapter in an ongoing story for this particular tigress and her cubs, but a new phase of recovery for tigers in this region, and new hope for tigers everywhere."
Apple confirmed Monday that it will have a press event on Sept. 7  at which it is expected to introduce a new iPhone and the next version of the Apple Watch.

While Apple never says what its planning before it announces new products, this is the time of year for a new iPhone and there have been plenty of reports indicating whats expected for the next smartphone. The main rumour is that the company is going to break with its normal upgrade rhythm this year. In the past, Apples alternated between offering major updates for the iPhone and smaller, more incremental updates. According to that schedule, Apple should be offering a significant update to the iPhone this year, and call it the iPhone 7.

But reports from analysts and other Apple watchers indicate that Apples actually not going to offer that much of an overhaul to its phones, but will instead likely introduce two phones that look an awful lot like its current iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus. A bigger change to the device is actually now expected next year, in 2017.

Apple is expected to give the guts of the phone its typical overhaul, with faster chips, a better camera and maybe a larger battery, according to multiple reports, including one from Bloombergs Mark Gurman. The larger version of the iPhone, which will probably be called the iPhone 7 Plus if Apple sticks with its conventions, may have two cameras on the back of the phone.

Despite not being a major upgrade on the scale of years past, Apple is expected to make at least one big change: many reports have said that Apple will do away with its headphone jack. Instead, reports have said, the company is expected to use the space now occupied by the headphone jack for a second speaker. Headphones for the iPhone may instead work with the Lightning port on the bottom of the phone, which is currently only used for charging and data transfer.

That would make the standard headphones that users have had for years completely useless with a new iPhone. Since the rumour first broke, theres been lots of pushback from those who say its not a consumer-friendly move. That includes Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who told the Australian Financial Review last week that Apple shouldnt ditch the headphone jack unless it also improves the sound quality over Bluetooth wireless headphones.

Overall, Apples iPhone sales in 2016 havent been as strong as they were last year, and thats worried many investors who know that the majority of Apples money comes from iPhone sales. If the reports are true, Apple is unlikely to get a sales bump on the scale that it normally does when releasing an overhauled iPhone. For example, those still using the iPhone 6 (or older) may find themselves unwilling to pay for more incremental updates, and may hold out for another year until the next model.

Then again, Apple is nothing if not surprising  so hopeful phone buyers shouldnt go into mourning just yet.

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Sue Paul remembers the trips she took to Sambro Island as a child. She remembers the storms that made her realize the isolation her family must have felt living there. Every time she goes back, she can feel its history.

Sambro Island is a seven-square-kilometre island standing mightily in the Atlantic off Nova Scotias coast, at the entrance of Halifax Harbour. On it stands the oldest working lighthouse in North America.

It was built in 1758 and is getting the biggest overhaul its had since, according to Paul. Last May, former MP Peter MacKay announced $1.3 million in funding to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to restore the lighthouse.

The repairs, which include a new paint job and facing, restoring the towers stone structure and its concrete foundation, are set to be completed in November.

Shes completely encased in scaffolding. Workers out there are diligently and lovingly taking care of her, Paul said of the lighthouse, which she and others familiar with it refer to with female pronouns (Isnt it always a woman thats home as the sentinel? she explains).

Its like the lighthouse is getting this great big bear hug.

Paul is a member of the Sambro Island Lighthouse Heritage Society, one of Canadas several organizations lobbying government to help preserve the countrys beacons of light  many of which receive little to no maintenance and have been weathered by humans, nature and time.

Her advocacy for Sambros began after her grandmother, whose family Paul says were some of the lighthouses original keepers, died at the age of 100.

Paul had been seeing the islands structures progressive decay. Shed regularly venture to it for family reunions and picnics. And so, she, her cousin and other friends of the lighthouse created a petition signed 5,000 times and presented in the House of Commons in 2013. It was a catalyst for their relentless advocacy, she says. We just never gave up.

Their plan is to see the island and its lighthouses ownership transferred from the DFO to Parks Canada, whose mandate it is to ensure heritage sites are preserved, for Canadas 150th in 2017.

While Pauls family may have been among its first lightkeepers, Kelly Fairservice Brown and hers were its last. Brown grew up on the small island; her parents, both lightkeepers, moved there when she was 9 months old.

Until I was 6, the island was the world as I knew it, she said. Brown played on every inch of it with her older brother and younger sister. Theyd jump in the water in June and swim until what felt like the first day of school. In the winter, theyd toboggan off its side, stopped only by a mound of slush created by the salt water and snow.

We ran pretty wild, said Brown, now mother to a 30-year-old daughter and 25-year-old son. Browns ambition was to become a sea captain and when she was 24, as her father was retiring as lighthouse keeper in 1987, she applied to replace him.

Brown manned the beacon like it was her life for eight months. I took my job very seriously . . . I did everything by the book, she said. But that February, the government announced the lighthouse would be automated from then on. It took away her job, but Brown says with it she lost her identity.

It broke my heart; it devastated me, she said. The government threw us away in a sense; we werent valued anymore.

Brown now lives in Dartmouth and owns a small speedboat. Sometimes, shell drive it seven minutes to Shearwater in Halifax and on a good day, I can see the island.

She still cant go often, she said, tearing up. Its something that I work on because it hurts my heart. It makes me really sad (to see the structures in disrepair). The home she lived in was burned down a few years ago by arsons that ventured to the island.

The repairs bring her hope because its a beautiful place; its something that everybody should have access to  Sambro Island needed a big hug.

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Inspiration was the message at the Canadian International Air Show on Saturday.

Returning for its 67th year as a part of the Canadian National Exhibition, the show featured 15 performers, including the Canadian Forces Snowbirds and other international daredevil pilots. They will be soaring and gliding over Lake Ontario throughout the Labour Day weekend.

Vanessa Martin comes to the air show every year and brings her daughter Atiya, 6. Martin says the planes are absolutely breathtaking with what they do in the sky.

Martin, who has a friend who is also a pilot, says she wants to show Atiya that its possible for her to become one as well if she wants to.

It just opens it up to young girls as well, that they can join a profession typically known to be male dominated, Martin said.

Indira Thackorie, a pilot and public affairs officer with the fan favourite Snowbirds, says inspiring girls is the highlight of her career.

Its a huge responsibility, being that person little girls are looking up to. When my voice goes across the PA system, my voice is reaching thousands of little girls, said Thackorie.

Thackorie also says she gets many messages from moms on Facebook, saying she was a huge inspiration for their kids. Its something she takes very seriously.

Its such a huge honour. To me, Im just doing my job but I know its making a difference. Its so awesome, said Thackorie.

As a kid, Mike Wiskus was told often that he shouldnt dream of being a pilot, in part because he struggled with math. But at 15, Wiskus had enough of the naysayers and walked to a local airport and begged for a job washing planes just to spend time hanging around the aircraft and the pilots. Hes never looked back.

Theres so many people who put you down, versus giving you a chance to think that maybe I can. The simple fact of the matter (is that) the people who put you down, theyre the ones with the problems, Wiskus said.

Im 57 years old and Ive been playing with airplanes and aerobatics now since I was 15 years old, and there hasnt been a day thats gone by its been like work.

Wiskus flies the single-engine Lucas Oil Pitts plane, constantly winding and spiraling down to the water and always pulling back up just in time. He says it took him years to get to that point, but says anyone can do this and just needs to practice.

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Note - September 9, 2016: Minister of Children and Youth Services, Michael Coteau, says the province is not considering putting foster youth in custody facilities in the Star's follow-up article.

Also see Michael Coteau's letter to the editor here.

It was never on the table, Michael Coteau

A provincial suggestion that children in foster care could be temporarily housed in empty space in youth criminal justice facilities in northern Ontario is under fire from native leaders and the provinces youth advocate.

The suggestion is one of many the province is considering as part of an ongoing and sweeping review of the residential services provided for all children in care.

One of the goals of the review is to keep foster children, many of whom are native, closer to the northern Ontario communities they come from. But a lack of facilities in the north means they are often sent to southern Ontario or beyond.

Putting children in local criminal facilities is like putting them in jail and is not a solution, say Alvin Fiddler, grand chief of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, and the provinces youth advocate, Irwin Elman.

My mother may have to go into a seniors home someday soon, Elman said. What if somebody in the province came to her and said, I know theres a prison down the street. We could put you in there. That is not acceptable for my mom. Why should it be acceptable for children?

Fiddler and Elman want to see better support to help indigenous children stay closer to their families, communities and culture.

A spokesperson for the Minister of Children and Youth Services says the entire system is under review and no decisions have been made.

Youth justice facilities are custody and detention centres for youths between the ages of 12 and 17 who are in conflict with the law. They operate under two categories: open custody, in which youths are given some freedom to come and go, and secure custody, which operate like jails.

There are 15 such facilities across northern Ontario. Three are run directly by the province. The rest are administered by private agencies paid for with public funds.

A ministry spokeswoman, Mary Ellen Beninger, said the number of youths in custody has fallen by almost 80 per cent since 2003, leaving these facilities with empty space. At the same time, a shortage of foster, treatment and group homes in the north means that many youths under provincial care are sent far from home.

We are currently exploring all options to make better use of these facilities, Beninger said.

A government report released in February as part of the review included feedback from stakeholders and called the idea of co-housing inappropriate.

It could be perceived as punishment and be stigmatizing, the report said.

Melissa Di Costanzo, a spokeswoman for children and youth minister Michael Coteaus office, said the ministry agrees and she called the co-housing suggestion very notional.

Still, the goal of keeping indigenous youth closer to home is a worthy one, said Karen Hill, the director of aboriginal services with the Ontario Association of Childrens Aid Societies.

I understand the pressures of the ministry, too, Hill said. There are such limitations in the current system right now with these northern communities being forced to send their kids south.

But placing them in criminal facilities, even close to home, is the wrong approach, she said.

Theyre really marginalized and stuck in these places. We just seem to be Band-Aiding the situation. Its not a good choice, she said.

The province committed to overhauling its residential services for youth after reports from Elmans office and a Star investigation found a youth protection system that repeatedly failed to ensure that vulnerable children were getting quality care.

One report from Elmans office, released in February, detailed the experiences of youth in care and highlighted stories of kids being warehoused in group homes where they face bullying, physical restraints and isolation.

But whether or not foster care youths are placed in the same facilities with criminal justice youths, it still misses the larger picture, Fiddler said.

I think its dangerous and we should be focusing on empowering our families and our communities, he said.

Fiddler said the government has spent too long thinking up ways to take indigenous children away from their families, and needs to start focusing on resolving the social problems of native communities.

What were more concerned with is the long-term solution. We need to move beyond these short-term emergency measures, he said.

According to the Ontario Association of Childrens Aid Societies, a monthly average of 14,539 children were in provincial care in 2014-15. Of those, 2,299 were from northern and northeastern Ontario and many were First Nations, Hill said.

One of the most damaging effects to indigenous children is the feeling of being cut off from their culture, Hill said.

Trivena Andy, 22, was once one of those children. She was in Grade 6 when her teacher asked her and her four siblings to stay late after school one day.

It was scary. We had no idea what was going on, she said. They sent a social worker over, and she just explained to us that were all going to different homes.

Andy and her siblings were taken by childrens aid from their parents and their home on the Big Grassy reserve near Fort Francis in northwestern Ontario. They were split up, and shuffled between foster homes across northwestern Ontario, she said.

At one point, Andy said, she was sent to a group home in Edmonton  the farthest from her family she had ever been.

It felt as if I just got pushed to the side, as if Oh, if we send her here we dont really have to worry about finding her a different home. I felt as if they were just trying to get rid of me, she said.

Now studying community advocacy in Thunder Bay, Andy wants to see more support for families that, like hers, faced struggles.

I think there needs to be more of a relationship between workers and the families. I think there just needs to be more pushing to make sure that the parents try to get done what theyre supposed to so the kids can go home, she said.

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BEIRUTTurkish troops and allied Syrian rebels expelled Daesh from the last strip of territory it controlled along the Syrian-Turkish border on Sunday, effectively sealing the extremists self-styled caliphate off from the outside world, Turkeys prime minister and a Syrian opposition group reported.

Also on Sunday, Syrian pro-government forces backed by airstrikes launched a wide offensive in the northern city of Aleppo, capturing areas they lost last month and besieging rebel-held neighbourhoods, state media and opposition activists said.

Turkey-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebels have cleared the area between the northern Syrian border towns of Azaz and Jarabulus, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said.

From Azaz to Jarabulus, 91 kilometres of our border has been completely secured. All the terrorist organizations are pushed back, they are gone, Yildirim said, speaking at a dinner with non-government organizations in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir.

The FSAs advance shut down key supply lines used by Daesh, also known as ISIS and ISIL, to bring in foreign fighters, weapons and ammunition.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Daesh has lost its link with the outside world after losing all border areas with Turkey.

Daesh had occupied the border area even before it declared its self-styled caliphate in June 2014 and used it to bring in fighters from around the world. The extremist group, which controls parts of Syria and Iraq, is now surrounded on all sides by hostile forces.

The loss of its territory along the Turkish border follows a series of recent defeats for Daesh, including its expulsion from the central Iraqi city of Fallujah and its defeat in the former stronghold of Manbij in northern Syria. Airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition have killed a number of the groups most prominent founding members and leaders.

In a statement, Turkeys armed forces said the Jarabulus-Azaz line has been connected. Turkey has long pushed for a safe zone in Syria between these two towns, with a plan to house Syrian refugees there. Turkey hosts an estimated three million Syrian refugees, the highest number in the world.

Meanwhile, the recapture and return to siege of rebel-held parts of Aleppo dealt a major blow to insurgent groups. They have lost scores of fighters in recent weeks in the battle to open a corridor into the city and lift the governments blockade.

After the government laid siege to Aleppo for the first time in July, the United Nations said that nearly 300,000 residents were trapped in rebel-held neighbourhoods, making it the largest besieged area in war-torn Syria. The city has been contested since the summer of 2012.

Sundays push follows a month after insurgents captured several military academies south of Aleppo and opened a corridor into opposition-held parts of Syrias largest city and one-time commercial centre. Since then, government forces and their allies have been trying to recapture the area.

State TV quoted an unnamed military official as saying that troops are now in full control of the military academies south of Aleppo and are chasing the remnant of terrorists. It added that all roads linking rebel-held eastern Aleppo with opposition areas outside the city have been cut.

The Observatory confirmed these gains. The (rebel-held) neighbourhoods are under siege again, said the Observatorys chief, Rami Abdulrahman, by telephone. The whole areas are under complete siege.

Turkey has launched two incursions into Syria since Aug. 24 in an operation designed to drive Daesh away from the border and prevent the advance of U.S.-backed Kurdish forces, which are also battling the extremist group.

Yildirim on Sunday defended his countrys intervention in Syria, pointing to their long-shared border. We are there to protect our borders, ensure the safety of our citizens lives and property and to protect the territorial integrity of Syria, Yildirim said.

Turkey has also said it will not allow Syrian Kurds to unite their cantons, the regions under their control in northern Syria, which have emerged as autonomous zones during the civil war. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a joint press conference with U.S. President Barack Obama at the G20 in China that our wish is that a terror corridor does not form on our southern border.

Turkey views the Kurds as a threat and the Turkey-backed forces have clashed with them outside Jarabulus.

In an emailed press statement, Turkeys military said the FSA have taken 20 villages from Daesh, adding that the Turkish army struck 83 Daesh targets. Since the Turkish operation began on Aug. 24, the army says it has hit 383 targets with 1,599 rounds.

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Texture of bonding

Nepal-Japan relationship is shaped by a broad sense of human love and respect than anything else
Three lessons stand out in light of the staggering Liberal defeat in the Scarborough byelection last week:

Premier Kathleen Wynne cant rely on mistakes by Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown to win re-election in 2018.

Recent efforts to bolster Liberal popularity havent worked. https://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2016/02/25/free-tuition-for-college-or-university-promised-to-students-from-low-income-families.html Free tuition END for many post-secondary Ontario students, detailed in this years budget, didnt sway many voters in Scarborough-Rouge River. And neither did Wynnes bold https://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2016/06/13/struggling-wynne-shuffles-cabinet-adds-7-new-ministers.html cabinet shuffle END in June.

Unless Wynne engineers a drastic change in the trajectory of her government, the Liberals are likely to be routed in the next general election, two years away.

Theres still time to produce a turn-around. But efforts need to be undertaken now to reverse the partys slide and protect a Liberal legacy of social justice initiatives, public transit expansion, environmental protection and education advances. Considering his past support of hard-right policies, and his much-publicized flip-flopping, Brown hasnt shown he can be trusted with these files.

People often vote against the governing party in a byelection, venting their displeasure without having to go to the extreme of installing a new administration. This urge to send a signal was, no doubt, a factor in Thursdays outcome, which delivered victory to Tory candidate Raymond Cho, a Toronto city councillor.

But conventional byelection blues dont account for the extent of the Liberal wreckage in Scarborough-Rouge River. This riding has been painted Liberal red ever since its creation in 1999.

The turnaround is remarkable. Cho placed a distant third in the previous contest there, in 2014, while Liberal candidate Bas Balkissoon garnered 39 per cent of the vote. Just two years later, Cho nailed down almost 39 per cent of byelection ballots, leaving Liberal candidate Piragal Thiru trailing with just 28.9 per cent.

That didnt happen in isolation. The Wynne government suffered a stinging repudiation in February when the Conservatives handily won a byelection in Whitby-Oshawa, despite a full-bore effort by the premier that included bringing in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau two days before the vote. All to no avail.

Recent polls confirm that the government is in trouble, with a Forum Research survey indicating that the Tories would have won more than 40 per cent of the vote if an election had been held in August. Just 16 per cent of respondents said they approve of the job Wynne is doing, while fully 72 per cent disapproved.

Even Browns humiliating double flip-flop on sex education failed to significantly dent the Conservative appeal in Scarborough-Rouge River. Although he had previously backed the provinces new sex-ed curriculum, a letter bearing Browns signature was circulated in the riding declaring that a PC government would scrap it. When the media exposed this reversal, Brown declared he had made a mistake and again expressed his support of the new curriculum. It was hardly an inspiring example of coherent leadership.

The challenge facing the government isnt that voters have embraced Brown  its that theyre rejecting Wynne along with elements of the Liberal record.

Soaring electricity costs are a particular sore point, but the government is also burdened by concern over the sale of Hydro One and a string of anger-inducing scandals. After 13 years of the Liberals in power, theres a growing sense that its time for a change.

More than anything else, too many Ontarians believe they wont be better off under a Liberal government. Too many have been hurt by the erosion of jobs in Ontarios industrial heartland. And too few see their circumstances improving with Wynne at the helm.

She appears to grasp this. Speaking after the byelection loss, Wynne said: I understand, as do my ministers, that the government needs to focus on helping people with their everyday expenses.

The Liberals have two years to win back Ontarians trust, not a huge amount of time. But it can be done if the party reconnects with its roots and finds a way to enhance peoples lives in a way they can see, feel and  ultimately  support.

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The expectations bar was set deliberately low for Justin Trudeau in his first visit as prime minister to China, and he cleared it comfortably. From economic ties to human rights, he set a steady new tone for relations between Ottawa and Beijing.

Thats an accomplishment after years of confused, and often confusing, dealings under the Conservative government. It blew hot and cold on China, injecting needless uncertainty into the relationship.

The task for Trudeau was to calm those waters and strike a balanced note that shows Canada is no supplicant but sees healthy ties with China as a vital, long-term proposition that requires consistency and hard work.

On the economic front, Trudeaus team successfully resisted pressure from the Chinese to commit to early formal discussions towards an eventual free trade treaty between the two countries. That was wise; there are too many trade deals with other countries up in the air, and too much uncertainty in the global politics of trade, to rush into such talks.

But the government did take the much lower-risk step of announcing that Canada will apply to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a Chinese initiative, headquartered in Beijing. Other big western countries like Britain and Germany were charter members of the bank, but Canada becomes the first North American nation to seek membership.

Thats a solid gesture of good will towards China and a nod to its ambitions to play a bigger role on the world stage. At the same time, Canada can strengthen the western group in the AIIB and help to make sure it is run in a transparent manner, not just as a tool of Beijing. And signing $1.2 billion worth of commercial deals with Chinese companies was a solid, if unexciting, achievement.

Trudeau also managed to speak some elementary truths to Chinas government on human rights without apparent blowback. He called on China to do better on promoting free speech, and Canadas ambassador, Guy Saint-Jacques, went a step further by opining that China has been going backward on freedom of expression under President Xi Jinpings hardline leadership.

Chinas official mouthpiece, the Xinhua news agency, riposted by archly advising Ottawa to look in its own backyard and reflect on our shoddy treatment of aboriginal people. But by the standards of these exchanges it was mild stuff.

This was a good first step, but nothing more, towards establishing the balance in Canada-China relations that Trudeau says he wants. The Chinese are famous for taking the long view, and Canada has no choice but to do the same.

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Re: A promise to fix disability crisis, Aug. 25

A promise to fix disability crisis, Aug. 25

Thanks to Ontario Ombudsman Paul Dube for his Nowhere to Turn report on Ontarians with developmental disabilities. Dube talked of baffling lack of leadership and Minister of Community and Social Services Helena Jaczek said she was appalled and apologized.

Every six months, the government will be monitored and assessed by the Office of the Ombudsman and the government will be judged not by what the government says but by what the government will do. This must include the various ministries truly working together and a recognition, as the minister herself noted, that the Ministry of Education must play a key role in inclusion and seamless transitions into adulthood.

Time is not running out. Time has run out. Families want action. Families want meaningful action now.

Janis Jaffe-White and Reva Schafer, Toronto Family Network

Ombudsman Dube delivered words for all to hear: families have nowhere to turn for help for their adult children, with complex (special) needs. He quipped that the definition of crisis was differing across regions offering supports and services to families.

Webster Dictionary says, Crisis is a time of intense difficulty, trouble or danger. The Select Committee for Development Services, Ontario, heard an earful and heartful back in July 2014.

How could a crisis be so confusing to so many? How could one not shed a tear when Johnny bashed his skull into the plaster, of the hallway, as desperate mom or dad tried once again to intervene? How many more stories needed to be told in order to have compassion match funding and daily living needs?

Families in Ontario are exhausted and desperate in the hopes for a better life for their adult children. We want more than to be heard  we want life to be lived to its fullest, for all.

Lillian Wagman, North York

It is heartening that the Minister of Community and Social Services is pledging to fix the problems identified in the Ombudsmans report. We hope that the Minister of Health will make a similar commitment when he receives the report from the Mental Health and Addiction Leadership Council this fall.

In 2010 a Select Committee of the Legislature reported that the mental health system was in crisis. While the government has rolled out a new strategy with limited funding, it has been estimated that there is a $1.5 billion annual gap between the services available and the disease burden.

Some 11,000 people are waiting for supportive housing in Toronto alone, and it has been estimated that there are at least 25,000 people in social housing across the province who lack access to mental health and addiction services and are at risk of eviction.

Ontario needs to make a commitment to increase the mental health share of health spending to 9 per cent as recommended by the Mental Health Commission in 2012 from its current level of less than 7 per cent.

We dont need another ombudsmans report. We just need a multiyear plan with targets and funding to scale up the kinds of community based services that we know work to meet peoples needs and reduce unnecessary hospital visits.

Steve Lurie, executive director, Canadian Mental Health Association Toronto Branch

I would like to congratulate Ombudsman Paul Dube on the thoroughness of his report on developmental services in Ontario. The report highlights situations of crisis and challenges of access into services for adults with developmental disabilities. The crisis circumstances described within the report are unacceptable.

Thank you to the Ministry of Community and Social Services on their willingness to accept the recommendations of the report. I am optimistic that the government will continue to work to put into action the changes necessary to address the challenges outlined in the ombudsmans report and will also continue their ongoing efforts to improve access into the developmental services system, with the goal to eliminate waitlists so all people with intellectual disabilities can live and belong within their community.

Still, this is something that goes beyond the ministry or even developmental services agencies in Ontario. This reports highlights the need for all of us to make our communities more inclusive for people with developmental disabilities. It is all our responsibility  community neighbourhoods, faith communities, employers, educators and families  to embrace and welcome people with developmental disabilities.

Everyone must work together so that all of us, including people with disabilities, can enjoy a secure, safe place to live, go to school and receive an education, gain meaningful, competitive employment, and fully contribute and be contributed to in our community.

Janet Noel-Annable, CEO, Christian Horizons, Kitchener

The recently released and appropriately titled Ontario Ombudsmans report Nowhere to Turn is a damning indictment of the often horrendous bureaucratic and systemic failures of the inadequate care system for developmentally handicapped adults with complex and severe needs who make up a only a fraction of the total population of developmentally and physically handicapped adults being supported.

Their plight is only the tip of the iceberg in a system in desperate need of overhaul. While the report necessarily focuses on those most in need, it also documents a system operating in constant crisis due to chronic and historic underfunding with insurmountable waitlists and a Dickensian minimalist approach to the provision of funds to those most in need in our society. Even for those few in crisis, the system fails them repeatedly. While the recent $810 million investment over three years and the $2 billion in total funding look impressive, they pale in comparison to the rate of increase in need as our population ages and the decades of neglect that this sector has received from successive governments.

The reality the report reveals is that by default the provincial support system is premised on parents and caregivers taking the major financial and emotional load while failing to provide them with the proper resources or funding to do so. The unflinching report is a compendium of the despair, anguish and frustration of the vast majority of aging parents and caregivers of those with severe developmental disabilities who face a limited list of options and a confusing and impenetrable wall of cross-conflicting bureaucratic silos that actually actively work against each other to provide the often desperately needed supports for the disabled. Parents of tens of thousands of handicapped adults with less severe needs who make up the bulk of this population and who are under-served as well wait in quiet, futile, helpless desperation for residential placements that never materialize because in an underfunded crisis-based system there is always someone with greater need. The report estimates there are more than 15,000 people on the waitlist for residential placements alone while the new government funding has provided a mere 1,400 new spaces. This is not a waitlist it is a no service list. The vast majority of disabled people with lower priority designations have no reasonable hope of ever securing a residential place over their entire lifetimes. It is a fraud. We have a barely functioning crisis care system, not a fully functioning developmentally handicapped support system.

The report also exposes the Orwellian kindness of the MCSS in downloading the responsibility for services and supports under the guise of individualizing, humanizing and democratizing the funding and support system for the disabled while in reality placing its full burden squarely on the shoulders of already besieged parents and caregivers who have enough on their plates simply dealing with the challenges of managing their adult children and their deficits let alone being case managers as well. Like Pontius Pilate, the MCSS has washed its hands of all direct responsibility for care in this most vulnerable sector. Under the new de-institutionalized system people are free to choose from a list of minimalist, inadequate. inappropriate or non-existent options within a skeletal funding model provided by a system that lacks provincial-level coordination or organization and possesses an officious hands-off attitude to actively supporting and organizing services for what the report aptly terms the most vulnerable and voiceless clients and their careworn families.

The report concludes that MCSS approach to organizing and administering services for the severely handicapped with complex needs was unreasonable and wrong. For tens of thousands of parents of aging developmentally handicapped adults across Ontario waiting for services the MCSS should be charged with failing to provide the necessities of life.

Robert Bahlieda, Newmarket

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NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Shares of Ambarella (AMBA) were lower in after-hours trading on Thursday even though the company posted better-than-expected earnings and revenue for the 2017 fiscal second quarter.

Following the closing bell, the chipmaker that powers GoPro's (GPRO) action cameras reported adjusted earnings of 54 cents per share. This topped analysts' projections for earnings of 38 cents per share.

Revenue for the quarter slid 22.6% to $65.1 million year-over-year, but was higher than Wall Street's estimates of $64.3 million.

For the fiscal third quarter, the Santa Clara, CA-based company sees revenue in the range of $95 million to $99 million. Analysts are looking for revenue of $95.7 million.

The company expects fiscal 2017 revenue to be flat to down 5% compared to last year, in which Ambarella generated $316.4 million in revenue for the year. Wall Street is projecting revenue of $310.78 million for fiscal 2017.

CEO Fermi Wang said the company executed well in the quarter despite "several hurdles."

"We believe the continued investment in the development of advanced technologies in video capture and computer vision will help to expand our market opportunities," Wang said in a statement.

About 2 million of the company's shares traded on Thursday vs. its 30-day average volume of roughly 954,000 shares.

Separately, TheStreet Ratings objectively rated this stock according to its "risk-adjusted" total return prospect over a 12-month investment horizon. Not based on the news in any given day, the rating may differ from Jim Cramer's view or that of this articles's author.

TheStreet Ratings rated this stock as a "buy" with a ratings score of B-.

The company's strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as its largely solid financial position with reasonable debt levels by most measures, expanding profit margins and notable return on equity. We feel its strengths outweigh the fact that the company has had sub par growth in net income.

You can view the full analysis from the report here: AMBA
An ever-confusing web continues to be strung involving Tesla (TSLA) , SolarCity (SCTY) and Elon Musk.

Elon Musk is the CEO and largest individual shareholder in Tesla. He's also the largest shareholder in SolarCity, and serves as the chairman for the company. Musk's cousins, Lyndon and Peter Rive, serve as the CEO and CTO of SolarCity as well.

SolarCity recently looked to raised $124 billion in a bond sale, of which Musk will purchase $65 million, while the Rives purchase $17.5 million each, good for $100 million of the $124 million offering.

But wait, there's more. Musk also started another company, SpaceX, which has also purchased bonds from SolarCity in the past, and $165 million worth by my count this year. So there are a lot of Musk family dollars funding SolarCity. That's why the announcement that said Tesla would purchase SolarCity for $2.6 billion (which, incidentally was wrongly valued by $400 million by its investment bankers) shouldn't have come as too much surprise.

But this has been a bad week for Musk. Tesla shares have plunged, along with SolarCity, and SpaceX saw its rocket explode on the launchpad in Cape Canaveral while carrying a Facebook (FB) satellite.

In all, the estimated damage to Musk's personal net worth was a whopping $779 million. Although don't feel too bad for the billionaire. His net worth is still estimated at $8.3 billion.

Shares of Tesla closed at $197.78 Friday, down 1.5%, while SolarCity shares closed at $18.48, down 1.6%. Shares of Tesla and SolarCity fell 10% and 16.2% this week, respectively.

The year was 2014, ride-hailing was a budding growth opportunity and Uber had a valuation below $20 billion. Fast forward just two years - "just two years" in tech is a lot of time, admittedly - and Uber commands a valuation north of $60 billion and garners enough news to make you think it's a publicly-traded entity.

Ask many in the U.S. who Uber's largest competitor is and many will respond, "Lyft."

That's precisely why in 2014, Uber tried to buy Lyft. According to CEO Travis Kalanick, the deal ultimately broke down due to price. The two sides simply couldn't come to terms. Uber didn't want to pay more than $2 billion for Lyft.

As of January, Lyft was valued at $5.5 billion.

Uber understands how costly price wars can be. Uber and Lyft were (or still are, actually) competing with each other, trying to win market share by cutting prices. Without the competition, the prices wouldn't be as low.

The same sort of thing was happening in China with Didi-Chuxing, as the latter fought with Uber for market share. In the end, Uber ceased its operations in China, and received $1 billion in cash from Didi-Chuxing, along with a 17.7% stake in the company.

That happened earlier this month, but on Friday, it was also announced that Chinese regulators are probing that recent deal.

Ethics for artificial intelligence? That's the word on the Street. Over the next few decades, artificial intelligence is poised to drive our cars, simplify our tasks and - sigh - take away our jobs.

But at least some of Silicon Valley's biggest aren't looking to do so with cold-blooded conviction. Facebook, Amazon (AMZN) , IBM (IBM) , Alphabet (GOOGL) and Microsoft (MSFT) have "been meeting to discuss more tangible issues, such as the impact of A.I. on jobs, transportation and even warfare," according to the New York Times.

Reportedly, the meetings have centered around helping, not hurting the population. In other words, these mega-companies are trying to work together for the greater good; to try and make sure that AI helps society the way they intend it too.

While many Americans have little doubt that a robot will be doing their jobs or chores at some point in the future (far or near), it's at least good to see someone is trying out there.

Remember, a few hundred years ago our nation was primarily farmers. As the population grew and advancements were made, it sparked a new revolution. Hopefully the next revolution doesn't leave millions of people behind.

Shares of Alphabet closed at $796.87 Friday, up 0.7%

Facebook and Alphabet are holdings in Jim Cramer's Action Alerts PLUS Charitable Trust Portfolio.



This article is commentary by an independent contributor. At the time of publication, the author held no positions in the stocks mentioned.
Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto says part of his motivation to let Uber test autonomous-car hails in the city is that he wants to ensure growth. (Keith Srakocic/AP)

Last month, Uber made a surprise announcement: The company would let Uber customers hail self-driving cars on the streets of Pittsburgh. Mayor William Peduto shares his thoughts on what this test means for the citizens of Pittsburgh  and for the long-struggling Rust Belt citys role in the future of the global economy.

Pittsburgh will be the first U.S. city to have commuters riding in self-driving cars. How did it happen?

[Uber chief executive] Travis Kalanick reached out about a year ago. I had fought for them in Harrisburg  on regulations that would have stopped them from operating. When we had our first meeting, he referenced the Pittsburgh Project. Whats that? I asked. Do you know about the Manhattan Project? he said. At Uber, we call this the Pittsburgh Project  the goal is to build an autonomous vehicle center in Pittsburgh. Well, that piqued my interest. The conversation quickly led to Uber setting up a headquarters in Pittsburgh, and by the end of the year, they employed over 200 people. They employ over 500 now.

Then what happened?

We agreed with them about six months ago to let them take autonomous vehicles onto our streets. Were also working with them to expand their operations and research facilities.

What was the agreement? Do they assume all the risk if theres an accident?

There is no formal agreement. They are permitted under existing state law to operate the vehicles with a licensed human driver. We required that Uber coordinate with the traffic division of our police bureau to ensure public safety. They assume all the risk.

Why is Pittsburgh a good place for this experiment?

Pittsburgh has challenging topography, different types of weather and bridges. That makes it an interesting place to test. Its a small city, so you can do things here; it doesnt get bogged down in red tape. We have world-class talent in robotics. We created the first doctorate in robotics, at Carnegie Mellon. There is another thing too: Pittsburgh has a history not only in innovation but also in building things. All the parallel research  the parts that would be needed to create autonomous vehicles, like cybersecurity research for vehicles, is being done here. We have over a century of advanced manufacturing.

Uber has been a job creator in Pittsburgh by providing work for drivers. Now, the city is poised to become a leader in building a technology that could make those jobs obsolete. Does that concern you?

Its not a question of whether there will be a change in jobs. The question is where a new industry will be born. There are cities that are becoming the new industrial hubs. Pittsburgh is one of the only cities that has traffic signals that can learn. The technology of autonomous vehicles is where the world is moving. Airlines, worldwide shipping  its all gone autonomous. If we tried to stop time and did not want to be a leader in an industry that will forever change transportation over the next decade, we would be losing this opportunity to another city. Mobility, and especially urban mobility, is moving to shared, electrical and autonomous. These arent trends.

But people are upset. Kalanick has said he hopes to replace all of Ubers human drivers with technology.

Five years ago, Uber didnt exist. We would hope to replace drivers lost with advanced manufacturing jobs. Everything from the sensors in vehicles to the automotive add-ons that will be required. The thing that makes Uber unique in this is that, unlike Google or even Volvo, Uber is partnering with automotive manufacturers  and the manufacturing component is something Pittsburgh can seize upon. We know how to build things.

Still, there could be blowback.

Let me tell you where Im coming from. Im 51. I have never seen my city grow. I saw it go through economic depression. When I graduated high school, the unemployment rate was about 19 percent  higher than it was in the Great Depression. I watched my family move away and my friends move away. And I worked for so many politicians whose campaigns were predicated on bringing the mills back. But at the same time, people were planting seeds. People like Dick Cyert of Carnegie Mellon, who made one of the first robotics and supercomputer centers. Our overnight success story, which took 30 years of suffering to get to, is that new industries will replace the old steel mills. This is showing how a Rust Belt city that everyone considered dead has come back.

Is there an application for self-driving cars in public transit?

This is a last-mile and a first-mile technology. Think about someone who is elderly who lives a mile away from the bus stop. This is a way to get to the bus stop. Or if the bus drops them off far from the doctors office, they can get a ride to the doctors office. This is something well be able to think about addressing. We need a healthy public transit system combined with an automated ride-share system.

This is coming quickly. Like all of a sudden  boom, driverless cars! How can that be?

Over the last nine months, working with these companies and people, I now can see how this technology is moving rapidly.

Have you taken a ride in a self-driving car?

The day they announced, [Kalanick] picked me up from work and took me home. There is a person in the car. Their hands are on the wheel, feet are off the pedals. Theres another person staring at the computer screen. When the car doesnt recognize something, a light turns on and the driver has control of the vehicle. It was very smooth. There was no time I was fearful. Im more worried when Im the road with an 18-year-old kid, or when I see someone drive and play Pokemon Go.

A lot of people are scared of self-driving cars. Have you talked to Kalanick about that?

I had dinner with him one night. One person at the table was the guy who created Google Maps, and the other person is the reason you dont see the fail whale on Twitter anymore. I asked them, Do you know a lot of people are worried about this? About cars without humans? That its causing people anxiety to think they are driving down the street and the car next to them wont have anybody driving? Its a foreign thought. And they said, you know, people should be worried about things like genetic engineering  how DNA could be tampered with. That went into a conversation about a South Korean operation where you can clone animals. I looked it up  its true, there is a doctor in South Korea that does that. It started an interesting conversation.

It sounds like they were sidestepping the issue.

You hear other technology executives talk in these grandiose terms about making the world better. You dont hear that much from Uber. I tell [Kalanick], the model has to be beyond libertarian. Your factory is the publics right of way  your factory is owned by the people. Theyve already proven they can be a successful company. But can they make it a successful company for all? Travis knows where I stand on that.

This city was built on the backs of people like my grandfather, who worked in a steel mill his entire life. And we didnt make steel, we made the middle class. When you talk about what happens to the drivers and the safety of people, those have to become the forefront of this conversation. [Kalanick] agreed to talk about that.
Josef Mengele, the Nazi Angel of Death who presided over medical experiments at Auschwitz, was never captured. Had a stroke and drowned while swimming in Brazil  a swifter and less agonizing death than he afforded the 3,000 twins who were the subjects of his gruesome mutilations and surgeries. Some 160 survived.

Affinity Konars unflinching second novel, Mischling, imagines the childrens lives at Auschwitz and the process by which they managed to carry on after the war. The novel acknowledges its debt to the seminal nonfiction book on this subject, Children of the Flames, especially the story of Romanian twins Eva and Miriam Mozes. The women founded a support group for other survivors of The Zoo, as Mengeles compound in a former horse stable was nicknamed.

Pearl and Stasha, the heroines of Konars novel, are identical 12-year-old twins, with blond hair that Mengele believes proves them mischling, or only part Jewish, under the Aryan racial laws. Many of the descriptions of the camp, from the arrival of the cattle cars to the crematoria, will not be news to anyone who has been to the Holocaust Museum, seen Schindlers List  or read any of the great memoirs on the subject, like Primo Levis Survival in Auschwitz. But Konar draws us quickly from that familiar landscape to the bizarre world of the Zoo, focusing on the twins special bond.

[The Complete Works of Primo Levi: A literary treasury on humanity]

In alternating chapters, the girls chronicle their diametrically opposed mechanisms for coping with the horrors they experience. The more extroverted Stasha becomes intent on revenge, but also on keeping her humanity. Such darkness should make life impossible, I know, she asserts, as she forms alliances with others in the camp. But my other part? It was wild hope. And no one could extract or cut or drain it from me. No one could burn it from my flesh or puncture it with a needle. As Stasha becomes bolder, Pearl withdraws, keeping meticulous notes of the other childrens diseases and deaths  a form of bearing witness.

Konar unveils Mengeles atrocities gradually and only in glimpses. Stasha sees the thousands of human eyes pinned to the wall in his office, part of his pet project to change eye color to the preferred Aryan blue. It gets much worse before it gets better as the twins are separated, and Pearl is subjected to ever more severe torment, with Stasha as control group for sympathetic suffering.

[Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate and memory keeper of the Holocaust, dies at 87]

The novels second half takes place after the camps liberation. Konar constructs a sinuous plot from the chaos of the postwar landscape. The faster pace frees her from the burden of having the children quite so lyrically narrate their own suffering. It was as if my cells recognized the sound of [Mengeles] voice  I could feel them branch and unfurl in their deathlessness, like blooms acknowledging an untrustworthy source of light, Stasha muses, as Mengele injects her with deadly bacteria. Readers will have varying levels of credulity about 12-year-olds, even precocious ones, forming such perceptions while being starved and tortured.

Author Affinity Konar (Gabriela Michanie)

The morality of fictionalizing the Holocaust has been a subject of scholarly discussion since philosopher Theodor Adorno famously declared, To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Do the scaffolding of plot and invention, the linguistic embroidery, deny the actual victims their more authentic voices? Conversely, might fiction have the power to take the narrative to places that survivor testimony cannot? as Anna Richardson asks in her essay The Ethical Limitations of Holocaust Literary Representation. Cynthia Ozick, author of a celebrated Holocaust story (The Shawl), later regretted writing it: I think the way to understand the Holocaust is through the documents, which just keep coming and coming and coming.

Certainly Konar is sensitive about the dangers of seeming sensationalistic, or voyeuristic, by lingering too long in the chamber of horrors. Miri, a Jewish doctor forced to assist Mengele, agonizes after liberation: These are only some of the brutalities I can speak of. They are too innumerable and varied, so grotesque  I do not have the words.

Yet the project of Mischling is precisely to find the words. Readers reactions to the novel will largely depend on how they feel about touring the Zoo with Konar as guide, rather than learning about this cruelty in a more documentary format  or from an actual survivor, like Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz, whose novel Fatelessness draws from his own experiences at Buchenwald. I would not want to argue that only survivors are entitled to approach this subject matter, although obviously they have an advantage. Jim Shepards novel The Book of Aron, grounded in massive research on the Warsaw Ghetto, reaches astonishing heights of empathy and insight. In fairness to Konar, its Shepards 11th book of fiction, not his second.

Of course, fact and fiction neednt be enemies. Mischling may send some readers unfamiliar with this material back to Children of the Flames, whose authors have endorsed this novel. It is certainly miraculous, and moving, that any of these victims survived, and Konar is wise to keep her focus not on the incomprehensibly sadistic Mengele in his shiny black boots, but on the children themselves.

Lisa Zeidners most recent novel is Love Bomb. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University at Camden.
Women devotees throng Pashupatinath

Women devotees have been thronging the Pashupatinath temple from as early as 3 am on Sunday morning to celebrate the Haritalika Teej festival.


Donald Glover as Earn Marks in "Atlanta," a mesmerizing tale of a young man adrift in a hardscrabble Georgia suburb. (Guy D'Alema/FX)

FXs Atlanta  magnificently conceived by and starring Donald Glover  doesnt begin so much as it simply happens, opening with a confrontation in a convenience-store parking lot and immediately shifting to morning light, where Glover, as Earnest Earn Marks, wakes from a dream next to Van (Zazie Beetz), the mother of his baby daughter, Lottie.

As this tenuous family wipes the sleep from their eyes and gets on with their day, its up to viewers to orient ourselves to Atlantas casual pace and glean some details about its characters lives: Earn is only an occasional visitor in Vans house; she implores him to help out more with the rent and his daughters care. He has the desire, but lacks the plan. When he steps outside, we get a sense of both the splendor and blight of the shows inner-suburb setting: verdant, kudzu-covered cul-de-sacs of low-income housing and potholed streets with gas stations where the clerks are protected by thick layers of plexiglass.

Its tempting to jump to conclusions about bad neighborhoods (and what typically occurs there on other TV shows), yet Atlanta immediately and effortlessly imbues its environs with a tender sense of home and community, where hardship is a backdrop rather than an agenda item. Creators and producers are fond of talking up a TV shows setting as becoming a character in and of itself, which is often just talk. In Atlantas case, the setting is a vital, narrative through-line  and a welcome take on a stereotyped world.

Atlanta, which premieres Tuesday with two episodes, was filmed in and around East Point, Ga., which was once dinged by a real-estate website as the nations most dangerous suburb; from the shows first moments, Glover and his collaborators have given this place the kind of respect and unvarnished regard that is somewhat similar to the love and concern with which David Simon and company portrayed Baltimore in The Wire  only in this case, gallows humor supplants pathos. (Glover has drawn on his own Atlanta upbringing and his experiences as a rapper  which might be news to viewers who only know him from his roles on Community or in The Martian.)

It is across this landscape  back and forth by punishingly long bus routes  that Earn meanders from one possibility to the next.

In short order, we meet Earns parents, Riley and Gloria (Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Myra Lucretia Taylor), who wont give their son any more money or let him in their house (I cant afford it, Riley says), yet remain reliable babysitters for their granddaughter. Earn, who makes $5.15 an hour at a Hartsfield-Jackson Airport terminal, where he unsuccessfully tries to sign up people for a new credit card, discovers that his cousin, Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry), is blowing up in the rap scene with a self-produced mixtape, using the name Paper Boi.

Earn offers to become Alfreds manager, but Alfred is leery of his cousins sudden presence: N----r, I aint heard from you since my moms funeral. And the first thing I hear out of your mouth is Lets get rich. Walk, man.

The first episode would seem to indicate that Atlanta might settle comfortably as another rags-to-riches dramedy filled with the usual cautions about showbiz success, in the vein of HBOs Ballers (or Entourage), only with far fewer luxury items and a lead character who has trouble affording a Happy Meal.



Earns effort to reconnect with his rapper cousin (Brian Tyree Henry, right, as Alfred) is not welcomed at first. (Guy D'Alema/FX)

Zazie Beetz as Van, the girlfriend who tries to push Earn to become a supportive father. (Guy D'Alema/FX)

The second episode suggests something broader and more ambitious  and is also circumspect about where its taking us or what kind of show it wants to be. Much of what happens, when not enveloped in a literal marijuana haze, unfolds in a slow, dreamy state. But what is this dream really about?

As Earn rides the bus with his baby, a bow-tied stranger forcefully offers him a sandwich and a menacingly cryptic philosophical monologue  or was the man just another late-night mirage? For better, weirder and certainly blunter thoughts about life and everything else, Atlanta leans heavily on the comic relief of Darius (Lakeith Stanfield), Alfreds right-hand man, who is often so stoned hes on another (sometimes brilliant) plane of logic altogether.

The episodes surf hypnotically along, succeeding less on thematic concerns and more on Atlantas unerring knack for portraiture. The show introduces us to its world and its inhabitants without declaring its intent in every other scene.

Some of the intent, of course, has already been predetermined for Atlanta: Its a show about black men living far afield of societys white mainstream, which is burden enough. A passing reference is made to the fact that Earn took a year off from attending Princeton, which is now going on three years off, which is perhaps what lends his character an outside-in perspective. Earns encounters with white people (a radio-station employee who is far too comfy with using the n-word; a waitress who upsells expensive appetizers and cocktails; a county jail officer who brutally beats a mentally ill inmate) are remarkable only for being such commonplace indignities. In both a topical and cultural sense, Atlanta couldnt have picked a better time to come at us with its mix of comedy and anger.

By Episode 4, the show trades in some of its hallucinatory, laid-back vibe for the forward momentum that is necessary to all TV dramedies, regardless of who or what theyre about. It will be interesting to see how many viewers come to Atlanta willing to view it from a place other than amused privilege. Atlantas authenticity (or what certainly feels to me like authenticity) might tempt outsiders to view it more as a work of sociology than as a half-hour cable series about a set of people experiencing a set of events and emotions. Many viewers, of all races, are hungry for more shows that can weave outrage and narrative and everyday life together as effortlessly as this one does.

Atlanta (30 minutes) two-episode premiere, Tuesday at 10 p.m. on FX.
Amelia Wegner, 6, and Daphne Wegner, 10, of Kensington, Maryland, traveled to Canada with their parents and grandparents. They visited Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, where more than 40 species  and 150 complete skeletons  of dinosaurs have been discovered.

Amelia Wegner, 6, and Daphne Wegner, 10, of Kensington, Maryland, traveled to Canada with their parents and grandparents. They visited Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, where more than 40 species  and 150 complete skeletons  of dinosaurs have been discovered.

Labor Day marks the traditional, bittersweet end of summer. Its a time to have one last party at the park, to look ahead to the coming school year  and to remember all those great summer memories.

More than 120 readers submitted photos of their adventures as part of the Summer of KidsPost. In these four pictures, kids zipped through the rain forest, tried wooden shoes in the Netherlands, saw camels on the beach and visited a small town in southern Alaska.

Out of all our entries, three lucky kids were randomly chosen to win a KidsPost prize pack. Congrats to Ziggy Tomares, 12, who traveled from Rockville, Maryland, to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia; Kristine Paza, 10, of Myersville, Maryland, who explored Peggys Cove, Nova Scotia; and Lukas Orozco, 9, of Vienna, Virginia, who hiked to a waterfall at Holland Lake in Montana.

Summer is over, but you can still have adventures this fall. And, if youre feeling creative, you can start thinking about a spooky or funny costume for Halloween. Well announce our annual costume next week.
Dear Miss Manners: I have never heard of Call or write if you do not wish to attend when I receive an invitation. I have always understood RSVP to mean Let us know by such and such a date if you plan to attend.

There is no mystery if you do not reply by the date mentioned, as that automatically excludes you from the invitation list. No muss, no fuss, no need to write or call and say you cannot make it.The host automatically knows that all who plan to attend will have sent in an RSVP by the specified date.

It is also more feelings friendly, as you need not offer an explanation as to why you choose not to attend. You may not like the people, or you may have a previous engagement. By not replying, you do not have to hurt or ruffle feelings.

It adds no burden whatsoever to the host, as by the deadline, they know how to plan their event, as they know exactly how many people are attending. It saves time (and maybe feelings) for both the invitee and the host.

Do you have any idea how much havoc and hurt you are causing? You and everyone else who hold the bizarre and callous notion that people who are good enough to offer you hospitality may simply be ignored?

Even the most casual invitations require definitive replies. If a co-worker stopped by your desk and asked if youd like to go out for coffee, would you just turn away without a word?

About the workability of what you suggest, Miss Manners assures you that you are wrong. She is flooded with mail from anguished hosts who find that people who have not responded to their invitations may nevertheless show up  and those who have accepted may not. (The same is true of the odd but common directive Regrets only, which you claim does not exist.)

Hosts feelings are also something Miss Manners knows about. People who entertain are not so naive as to believe that everyone can or will attend. But they are insulted not even to receive the courtesy of a reply.

No excuse for declining need be given  just an expression of gratitude for the invitation and regret at being unable to accept.

Dear Miss Manners: We are a gay couple who have been together for 24 years. We always hoped that someday we could be married, and now we can.

Since we have been together for so long, we really dont need linens, china, etc., so we have requested that in lieu of gifts, guests should please consider making a donation to one of three chosen charities.

Well, the bills are piling up, and Ive got a severe case of sticker shock. (Weddings are expensive!)

I sense that some relatives might try to write checks to us as gifts, regardless of our request. Would I be a hypocrite if I accepted them? Its starting to look like we really could use the money.

Take it.

Miss Manners will spare you her distaste for soliciting presents, even on behalf of charities, and also for making payments instead of giving presents. If people decide by themselves to give you checks that are not directed toward charities, you should accept them graciously.

New Miss Manners columns are posted Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays on washingtonpost.com/advice. You can send questions to Miss Manners at her website, missmanners.com.
Mike Miculinic rents out pedaling vehicles of all sizes at the shop he has operated on and off since 1969. He had to stay closed due to bad weather Saturday and was glad to be able to open Sunday. (Julie Zauzmer /TWP)

Even as the sun shone and Hermine shed its hurricane force Sunday, forecasters warned that rising tides could still cause life-threatening flooding in areas from southern Virginia to Connecticut.

Looming 300 miles off the coast, the storm remained robust Sunday as it meandered north, churning wind gusts and propelling monstrous waves as it hammered beaches from the Outer Banks and Delaware north to Cape Cod.

The brunt of Hermines assault was offshore. But coastal cities and communities from Virginia to Massachusetts face the potential for menacing waves and soaring water levels for the next few days.

The combination of a storm surge and the tide will cause normally dry areas near the coast to be flooded by rising waters, the National Weather Service said Sunday in a 2 p.m. advisory. Along the immediate coastline, the surge will be accompanied by large and dangerous waves.

The Weather Service identified Cape Charles, Va., and Sandy Hook, N.J., as in danger of life-threatening inundation. The Weather Service also said the coastal region that includes Sandy Hook, Long Island and Bridgeport, Conn., faced the possibility of life-threatening flooding.

A tropical storm warning was in effect Sunday for Cape Charles and the Delaware Bay, but it was dropped late in the afternoon for all areas south of Fenwick Island, Del., including Ocean City, the Capital Weather Gang reported. A tropical storm watch was issued for Marthas Vineyard and Nantucket, off Massachusetts, and Block Island, off Rhode Island.

Ocean City and nearby beaches were not expected to experience all of the storms ferocity until Monday morning, when water levels could rise to four feet above high tides average, the Capital Weather Gang said.

Along the Maryland and Delaware coast, the National Weather Service forecast 15 to 25 mph winds, with gusts reaching 40 mph along the ocean, and minor to low-end moderate flooding Sunday. Severe flooding is possible Monday when the highest storm surge of the event is likely to occur, the Capital Weather Gang said.

In Ocean City, officials relaxed water restrictions Sunday, allowing beach visitors to go in up to their knees. But small children were not allowed in the water, and surfers were ordered to leash themselves to their boards.

Awesome! John Bell said of the waves after listening to a beach patrol officer recite a list of rules and warnings.

Bells dripping wet suit suggested he had already ignored the restriction.

His wife and 14-year-old daughter were sitting by the waters edge, competing to see who could withstand crashing waves without moving.

Sarah Fox said Dimensions Body Piercing on the boardwalk did six or seven nose piercings on Saturday, compared to 20 on a normal summer weekend day. She got 11 piercings in her first summer working in Ocean City and has continued to add and replace her body art. (Julie Zauzmer /TWP)

Were from Florida, Bell said. This is nothing to us.

Fakharia Nowroozi said she had wanted to cancel her familys trip to the coast when she heard about the impending storm. But she and her sister had already booked rooms for their families, and their $1,400 payment was nonrefundable.

So they set out from Loudoun County, Va., on Saturday and were greeted in Ocean City by the rain and a beach patrol officer who stopped them from going in the water.

Even as the sun shone Sunday, another beach patrol officer told them not to go in.

By the afternoon, they were beyond irritated as they searched for activities for their children, whom they took for kiddie rides on the boardwalk. Nowroozis 17-year-old son, Sohail, got a henna tattoo of the Pillsbury Doughboy and said he wished it was permanent.

They paid someone to take a portrait of them dressed in old-timey clothes. For a bit, they sat on benches overlooking the ocean, where they were stung by windswept sand.

Im taking an Uber home, Sohail announced at one point, checking his phone for the fare.

It would cost at least $450.

If I was able to go in the water, that would be fine, he said, unimpressed by word that the city was allowing beachgoers to go in up their knees. This isnt even a beach trip. Were stuck in the hotel and on the boardwalk.

Merchants moods brightened with the suns appearance. Most said they had lost Labor Day weekend revenue Saturday but were seeing signs that Sunday and Monday would be stronger than they had hoped when they first heard a big storm was coming.

Megan Leonard was grateful to find that the power was on when she arrived at Kohr Brothers frozen custard shop, where she works. The soft custard dispensers, just behind the counter, still worked.

All the waffles are still hard, she said with relief Sunday, referring to the cones. Humidity and rain makes waffles go flat like anything.

Mike Miculinic, who has operated on and off since 1969, is accustomed to the perils of bad weather for beach businesses, especially during a key time like Labor Day weekend. I was under the impression it was going to be a big event, a three-day event, he said of the storm.

Instead, Miculinic found himself renting out bikes all Sunday morning. Everybodys anxious to be outside, he said.

Hermine battered communities along the Atlantic coast Saturday, overwhelming beaches from the Outer Banks to the Delmarva Peninsula with gusting winds and hard rain. As much as seven inches of rain fell and 30 to 60 mph winds blew from North Carolina to the Eastern Shore. Vacationers stayed home, and Labor Day weekend plans collapsed.

There is still considerable uncertainty as to how many of the characteristics of a tropical cyclone Hermine will have while it is off of the coast of the Mid-Atlantic and New England, the National Hurricane Center said Saturday.

Forecasters downgraded Hermine from tropical storm status Saturday morning.

By Tuesday, it was expected to be stalled over warm water in the 80s southeast of Long Island.

Offshore, from the Baltimore Canyon to Cape Charles, Va., waves as high as 37 feet were expected Sunday, with visibility a mile or less, the Weather Service said.

A hurricane warning was issued for the open ocean off southern New Jersey and Delaware, with winds approaching 75 mph Sunday night.

On shore, the threat of storm surge and flooding loomed all along the coast, especially in southeastern Virginia.

[Mid-Atlantic beaches are getting battered by Hermine]

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) issued a state of emergency Friday before the storm. A state of emergency also was in effect in the Maryland counties of Caroline, Cecil, Dorchester, Kent, Queen Annes, Somerset, Talbot, Wicomico, Worcester, Calvert, Charles and St. Marys.

The association representing Ocean Citys hotels and motels reported that the citys rooms were approximately 85 percent occupied.

On the beach, Jackie Wescott splayed out on a chair as her 12-year-old daughter, Alex, played by the oceans edge.

As the waves crashed, Alex dug a ditch, an activity that she said would not end until I get tired.

The threat of crashing waves would not deter her.

It was a holiday weekend, after all.

Schwartzman reported from Washington.
Charles Wells, 63, who earns the minimum wage for his job at Reagan National Airport, barely makes enough money to take Metro back and forth to work for his job. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

Charles Wells did the math.

From a tattered wallet held together with three rubber bands, he pulled out $5. His Metro card didnt have enough on it to cover his trip to Reagan National Airport in Virginia, where he works pushing wheelchairs, so he paid $2.70 toward the fare. That left him with $2.30  not enough to get home to the room he rents in the District.

But Wells is not one to complain, or worry. And so on that morning, and others before it when the numbers didnt fall in his favor, he quietly accepted what an empty wallet means. If he didnt get any tips that day, he planned to do what he had done many times before  sleep at the airport, sitting upright, coat pulled tight on top of him.

They keep the temperature real cold in there, Wells said. But he said its better than the alternative: no paycheck. If I stay home, Im getting nothing. So I gotta go out there.

This Labor Day weekend, as the national debate intensifies over whether the minimum wage should more than double to $15 an hour, states, cities and counties are implementing a hodgepodge of wages. That leaves the countrys lowest-paid employees facing different circumstances depending on where they live. And nowhere is that disjointed reality more stark than in the Washington region, where people travel fluidly, sometimes in the same day, among Virginia, Maryland and the District, which share a high cost of living but diverge drastically in their minimum wages.

In Virginia, the minimum wage remains at the federal $7.25 an hour rate. In Maryland, the rate is now $8.75 an hour and will rise to $10.10 in two years. Montgomery and Prince Georges counties go above their states minimum to $10.75 by Oct. 1. And in the District, the minimum wage a few months ago hit $11.50, with the goal of reaching $15 in 2020.

The confusion for workers is nationwide, where 29 states have set their minimum wage above the federal level.

[DC Lawmakers approve $15 minimum wage]

What this means, according to interviews with employees and service providers, is difficult decisions based on uncertain math. Should a person travel from Virginia to the District, knowing they will have to pay more for transportation and cant get home quickly to take care of children who might need them at unexpected times? Should that same family move to Washington, where they might find higher pay but also higher rents?

Is it worth Wells taking the train to work, knowing he might not make it home?

Wells, 63, said he enjoys helping those who cant help themselves. Besides, he doesnt know what other job he would do. He is a self-taught artist whose paintings are good enough to hang on restaurant walls, but to a potential employer, he has a GED, a limited resume and bad feet that he shoves into shoes without socks because otherwise the pain is too intense.

Im glad to have a job, Wells said. But hed like to see Virginia follow Washington in raising the minimum wage. Thats not too much to ask for someone who is willing to get up at least five days a week and work hard. It seems to me, the less money people earn, the more work they have to do.

Not just me

Kerrie Wilson can tell you exactly how much more work that is: 137 hours a week.

Thats how many hours it takes for a person earning minimum wage in Virginia to afford an average rental apartment in Fairfax, said Wilson, who runs Cornerstone, a Northern Virginia nonprofit agency that provides shelter and support to families in need.

What that means is people working two or three jobs, Wilson said. It means minimum-wage workers living in homeless shelters or choosing to leave children home alone so they can work more hours, she said.

Stephanie Berkowitz, who heads Northern Virginia Family Service, a nonprofit agency based in Oakton, Va., said that nearly 70 percent of the people using the agencys housing-assistance program are working and that 60 percent of the people in their homeless shelters are employed.

When you are living in a community where it appears most people can meet their basic needs, people have cars and food and take vacations, its easy to forget about the fact that there are lots of people in our community who dont have those opportunities, Berkowitz said, They literally are making choices across their basic needs.

Carleisha Foster, a 28-year-old District native who moved to Virginia this year, faced a choice during the last snowstorm. She could leave her five children on a day when she didnt have child care or she could lose her $7.50 an hour job at Dollar Tree. She chose her children, she said.

Within a five-month period, while living in a homeless shelter, she also lost a job at Starbucks because she couldnt work weekends and a job at Target because she couldnt work nights. Now, she is earning $8 an hour at a salon and receiving housing assistance. She said it is the first job that has excited her in a while, but even so, her limited hours means a paycheck of $280 a month.

Im late on bills every month, Foster said. People ask me all the time, every day, how do you do it? The truth is, it takes you for a ride. You have to learn to maneuver through it.

Business leaders nationally have argued against raising the minimum wage, saying it will force employers to cut jobs and hours. The impact on individuals also remains uncertain because in many cases people who receive government assistance will see those benefits decreased as they earn more, leaving them just as financially fragile.

But union and civil rights activists argue that a livable wage is a moral issue, and nationally the Fight for $15 movement has only gained momentum. Just two weeks ago, thousands of people marched through Richmond in support of the cause. Some held signs that read, Cant survive on $7.25.

[The $15 minimum wage sweeping the nation might kill jobs  and thats okay]

In his 2015 State of the Union address, President Obama urged Congress to raise the federal minimum wage, saying: If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, go try it. If not, vote to give millions of the hardest-working people in America a raise.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has said she would support a $15 federal minimum wage, with stipulations. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, after giving conflicting statements on the issue, has said he supports a $10 federal minimum wage, while allowing states to decide whats appropriate for them.

Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, said in just a few years, starting with fast-food workers taking a stance, the discussion of a $15 minimum wage has moved from being ridiculous to being a standard.

She said the hope is that Washingtons increase will pull its neighbors along.

Delfina Flores, a 62-year-old woman who cleans office buildings in the District, said $11.50 an hour has helped, but she still has to take housekeeping jobs on the side to make ends meet. She earns $396 every two weeks and rents a room for $450. After paying for bus passes, her phone bill, medication and food, she said she has no money left to send to her mother and daughter who remain in El Salvador.

I tell them, I want to, but I just dont have enough,  Flores said in Spanish. I dont even have enough for me. Right now, Ill go to the mall and I dont spend any money. I just go to look.

She said she is looking forward to when the minimum wage in the District reaches $15 and that she hopes it becomes the standard because its not just me this is happening to.

Been through a lot

In a shoulder bag missing its strap, Charles Wells keeps everything that is important to him. On a recent morning, he pulled from it a folder filled with drawings for a comic series he hopes to one day publish. The subject matter, like his pen strokes, is dark and deep. In one strip addressing stealing at a homeless shelter, he wrote, One man was so traumatized by the theft of his shoes, he never wore a pair again, even in the winter snow, he only wore socks.

Wells knew the man and said the loss just really affected him.

Wells, who grew up in the District, used to move with a gait rapid enough to warrant comments from those he passed. Now, he shuffles on feet that hurt him constantly. He said he has worked at National Airport for seven years and during that time spent three years living in a homeless shelter and one year sleeping most nights at the airport.

Now, he rents a room for about $500 a month. On a recent morning, he walked into his bank to cash his paycheck and then went to the Post Office for a money order that he then deposited into his landlords bank account. Just like that, in less than an hour, the money passed through his wallet.

Its been through a lot, Wells said, turning the fraying leather over in his hands.

He could have been talking about himself.

Wellss sister Diane Williams, who works as the curator of his artwork, maintaining a website for him and other artists in the family, said her brother is a creature of habit. Before his wife died 14 years ago and he fell into a depression, he worked at a hospital transporting people in wheelchairs and gurneys. Now, she said, he is comfortable doing that, even if the pay doesnt offer much security.

And she should know. She has done the math.

Williams handles her brothers taxes each year and said his annual pay has remained consistently between $11,000 and $12,000. She said he also hasnt sold much art lately, although his work has been displayed at Busboys and Poets and currently hangs at Everlasting Life restaurant in Capitol Heights. When he couldnt afford art supplies, she said he utilized whatever was available. He has painted on cardboard and the backs of political signs.

Williams said the life she wants for her brother is one in which he could teach art to children who otherwise wouldnt have access to it. They ran a workshop in Anacostia two summers ago and he loved it, she said. But she and her brother are realistic about his situation. Regardless if the minimum wage is $7.25 or $15, it adds up the same in one crucial way: Hes going to have to continue working until he cant work anymore, Williams said.

Wells said he has accepted that he wont be able to retire anytime soon, or ever. But he isnt one to complain, or worry. Instead, he gets up for work each day, hoping that maybe that day he will get a tip and the math will fall in his favor.
A student in Maryland uses her iPad during an online-based class discussion. A parent volunteer in Virginia was criticized for her role in monitoring an iPad-based lesson. (Joe Crocetta/Herald-Mail via AP)

March 18 was a typical day for Melissa Dana, a parent and physician who volunteers as a classroom aide in Falls Church City schools. Her local elementary school was having an Ancient Civilizations Festival. She played a 15-minute video for each class and helped students use an app on their iPads to write Chinese calligraphy.

As instructed by the schools teachers, she checked to see if the children were working just on calligraphy and not other parts of the app. Curious about what her child was learning, she looked at some of the apps. She took screen shots so she could view them later at home. She noted what students were doing with the technology and took some photos of what was on their iPads without identifying any student.

She also asked her childs teacher about the activity, chatted with another teacher who was a friend and, on her way out, stopped to talk to the librarian.

Thats when it gets weird. All of her movements were reported to Falls Church City Schools Superintendent Toni Jones. Jones called Dana in five days later and gave her a letter saying she better watch her step. Please accept this as a formal notification that making interview or meeting requests and impromptu questioning which causes staff to feel uncomfortable is not appropriate during the course of the school day and/or on school grounds, said the letter, which ended with Regards, Toni.

Despite 14 years of unpaid effort on behalf of the citys schools, Dana was told by Jones she would no longer be allowed to volunteer if she did not mend her ways.

Dana has been a critic of Jones. Such tension between school leaders and active parents is common but rarely reported. School districts say they welcome outsider involvement. The Falls Church City school boards mission statement says our schools must be responsive and accountable to the community. But parents like Dana often feel a chill if they ask too many questions.

In a statement, the school district said Jones warned Dana in part because we are careful to protect student privacy and data. It also bothered staff that Dana had asked to meet with staff members on more than 20 occasions during the school year and wrote over 2,100 emails to 145 separate FCCPS email accounts, according to the statement.

The best teachers I know like dealing with parents. A teacher who worked last year at an elementary school told me a majority of her colleagues were thrilled that Melissa was asking questions. Jamie Scharff, an International Baccalaureate teacher at George Mason High School, said he has never met a parent as sincerely dedicated to helping the schools as Dana.

Joness letter accused Dana of attempting to log on inappropriately to at least one technology device, and taking random pictures not associated with tasks assigned to you in your role as a parent volunteer. Dana said the charge of logging on inappropriately was absolutely false and I was taking very specific pictures of the activity to which I was assigned.

What bothers me most is the school district presenting her large number of emails as a sign of misbehavior. Dana told me she was concerned by teacher complaints of mismanagement and made hundreds of contacts with parents and teachers, plus school board members. Whats wrong with that? She said 234 people emailed her their support for a satisfaction survey she was advocating.

In May, several people, including Dana and her husband, formed a group called The Falls Church Way, seeking more input on school policy for parents, teachers and community members. The group wants the board to include staff, parents and community members in its evaluation of Jones this month. Jones has agreed to meet with the group every month.

School officials often consider such groups a nuisance. But asking questions can lead to meaningful change. Smart administrators know that and listen carefully to parents before threatening to ban them from volunteering.
BLOOD DONATIONS

BLOOD DRIVES Tuesday 3-8 p.m., Ashburn Farm Association, 21400 Windmill Dr., Ashburn, 800-733-2767; Saturday 9 a.m.-2 p.m., Leesburg Public Safety Center, 65 Plaza St., Leesburg, 800-733-2767.

INOVA BLOOD DONOR CENTER Mondays noon-8 p.m., Tuesdays 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Fridays 6 a.m.-4 p.m. and Sundays noon-4 p.m. Dulles Town Center, 45745 Nokes Blvd., Sterling. 866-256-6372 or inova.org/donateblood.

FIRST AID

FIRST AID/ADULT, INFANT AND CHILD CPR/AED Sept. 17, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Fauquier Hospital Medical Office Building, 500 Hospital Dr., Warrenton. 540-316-3588. $85. Registration required.

HEARING

DISABILITY RESOURCE CENTER Technical assistance through the Virginia Department for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing and presentations to businesses, civic groups and schools. Third Tuesdays 2-5 p.m., Workplace, 205 Keith St., Warrenton. Call for an appointment, 800-648-6324; TDD, 540-373-5890. Free.

FREE HEARING TESTS Age 18 and older. Mondays-Thursdays 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m., Blue Ridge Speech and Hearing Center, 19465 Deerfield Ave., Suite 201, Lansdowne. 703-858-7620. Registration required.

HEARING LOSS, TINNITUS AND MENIERES SYNDROME SUPPORT For all ages, including parents of children with hearing loss. First Fridays at 2 p.m., Senior Center at Cascades, 21060 Whitfield Pl., Sterling. 703-430-2906.

NORTHERN VIRGINIA RESOURCE CENTER FOR THE DEAF AND HARD OF HEARING Age 18 and older, second Tuesdays 10 a.m., Carver Center, 200 Willie Palmer Way, Purcellville. 571-258-3400.

HEARING LOSS OUTREACH Free referrals. Fourth Thursdays 10 a.m.-noon, Loudoun County Workforce Center, 102 Heritage Way, Leesburg; third Thursdays 10 a.m.-noon, Senior Center at Cascades, 21060 Whitfield Pl., Sterling. Free appointments: 703-430-2906 or nvrcloudoun@aol.com .

MENTAL HEALTH

COUNSELING FOR SEXUAL VIOLENCE SURVIVORS Provided by Loudoun Citizens for Social Justice. 703-771-9020.

CRISISLINK Suicide and crisis intervention. The organization provides community education, has a volunteer crisis response team and offers CareRing, a daily telephone outreach program for the elderly and disabled. 703-527-6016, volunteer@crisislink.org or crisislink.org.

PIEDMONT CHAPTER, NATIONAL ALLIANCE ON MENTAL ILLNESS Serves Fauquier, Orange, Madison and Rappahannock counties. Support group, education classes and events for people living with mental illness and their family members. First Wednesdays 7-9 p.m. Fauquier Hospital, 500 Hospital Dr., Sycamore Room A, Warrenton. 571-426-8213.

NORTHERN VIRGINIA CHAPTER, NATIONAL ALLIANCE ON MENTAL ILLNESS A support group, classes and programs for people living with mental illness and their family members. naminorthernvirginia.org.

PREGNANCY, PARENTING

ADOPTIVE FAMILY PRESERVATION Adoptive families discuss common experiences; registration required. Third Tuesdays 12_2 p.m., Ashburn Library, 43316 Hay Rd. Call 703-941-9008, Ext. 23, or email jmellario@umfs.org.

BIRTHRIGHT OF LOUDOUN COUNTY Free pregnancy tests, baby clothing, transportation and support throughout pregnancy, 823 S. King St., Leesburg. 703-777-7272.

BOND BETWEEN US A nonprofit organization that offers support to birth parents when children have been placed for adoption. Fourth Tuesdays 7:30 p.m. Call for location. 703-771-7844.

BREASTFEEDING SUPPORT Mondays 9:30-10:30 a.m., Fauquier Hospital Family Birthing Center, 500 Hospital Dr., Warrenton. 540-316-3588.

BREASTFEEDING MADE SIMPLE Sept. 6 from 6-8:30 p.m. Fauquier Hospital Family Birthing Center, 500 Hospital Dr., Warrenton. 540-316-3588. $25. Registration required.

DAD SUPPORT New and expectant fathers share ideas. First Tuesdays at 7 p.m. Inova Loudoun Hospital, 44045 Riverside Pkwy., Leesburg.

FOR THE CHILDRENS SAKE A group for separating or divorcing parents to share advice. Four-hour session weekly. Information : 703-391-8599 or fitsfoundation.org.

LA LECHE LEAGUE Mother-to-mother support and breastfeeding information. 10 a.m. second Wednesdays in Warrenton, 540-351-6103. Third Fridays 10:15-11:45 a.m., call for location, 703-444-7386. Second Fridays 10:15 a.m., Ashburn Library, 43316 Hay Rd., 703-431-3852; Thursdays 10 a.m.-noon, Panera Bread, 43670 Greenway Corp. Dr., Ashburn, email lllashburn@gmail.com. Third Fridays 10:15 a.m., Christ the Redeemer Church, 46833 Harry F. Byrd. Hwy., Sterling, 540-338-4637.

LOUDOUN FATHERHOOD PROGRAM Fathers discuss the joys and challenges of being a parent. Meets every other Saturday for two hours for four months; sponsored by Northern Virginia Family Service. 571-748-2796. Free.

LOUDOUN NURTURING PARENTING PROGRAM Positive parenting techniques; children attend with parents. Registration required. Call 703-771-3973, Ext. 27, or email nurturingprogram@lcsj.org . Free.

MOTHERNET/HEALTHY FAMILIES LOUDOUN Program links first-time parents with medical, social and educational resources to give children a socially and physically healthy start in life. Family support workers meet with participants in homes. English-Spanish translation provided. 703-444-4477, Ext. 217 , or inmed.org.

NEW MOTHERS SUPPORT Wednesdays 9:30-11:30 a.m. Inova Loudoun Medical Pavilion, 224 Cornwall St., Leesburg, main entrance. Babies welcome. 703-858-6360.

YOUNG PARENT SERVICES Support for teenage parents. Loudoun County Department of Family Social Services, 52 Sycolin Rd., Leesburg. Call for times. 703-771-5375.

ONLINE CHILDBIRTH EDUCATION PROGRAM Inova Loudoun Hospitals Web-based program uses animation, videos and interactive activities to guide users through the basics of childbirth, breastfeeding and caring for newborns. 703-858-6360. thebirthinginn.org/classes.

PARENTING ALONE GROUP For parents of school-age children who have lost a spouse or partner to cancer. Second Tuesdays 5:30-6:30 p.m. Inova Loudoun Hospital, Radiation Oncology Center, 44035 Riverside Pkwy., Suite 100, Leesburg. 703-698-2536 or email jennifer.eckert@inova.org .

PREGNANCY AND CHILDBIRTH SUPPORT Childbirth Solutions Resource Center, 8393 W. Main St., Marshall. 571-344-0438.

SENIORS

EXERCISE EQUIPMENT: Weights, treadmills, bikes and a cardio-glide. Instruction provided. Age 55 and older. Weekdays 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Leesburg Senior Center, 102 North St. NW. 703-737-8039. Free.

FITNESS FOR PEOPLE 55 AND OLDER Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays 1-1:45 p.m. Carver Center, 200 Willie Palmer Way, Purcellville. 571-258-3400. $36, 12-visit card.

EYE CARE LensCrafters staff members will clean glasses and make minor repairs. Second Wednesdays 1-2 p.m. Senior Center at Cascades, 21060 Whitfield Pl., Sterling. 703-430-2397. Free.

INOVA LOUDOUN MOBILE VAN Blood pressure checks. Second and fourth Tuesdays 9:30 a.m.-noon, Senior Center at Cascades, 21060 Whitfield Pl., Sterling, 571-258-3280; first Wednesdays 9:30 a.m.-noon, Leesburg Senior Center, 102 North St. NW. 703-737-8039.

LAUGHING YOGA FOR SENIORS I mprove flexibility and balance. Thursdays 9:30-10 :30 a.m. Leesburg Senior Center, 102 North St. NW. 703-737-8039. Free.

LOUDOUN ADULT DAY CENTERS For seniors with physical limitations or memory loss, a safe and social environment, therapeutic activities, individualized care and respite for caregivers. Limited transportation. Sliding-scale fees. Weekdays in Leesburg, 7:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m., 703-771-5334; Purcellville, 571-258-3402; and Ashburn-Sterling, 571-258-3232.

SENIOR OUTREACH SERVICES Free and confidential assistance from an Area Agency on Aging case manager. Call for an appointment or sign up at the Senior Center at Cascades. First and third Wednesdays 11 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Senior Center at Cascades, 21060 Whitfield Pl., Sterling. 571-258-3280.

SENIOR OUTREACH SERVICES Free and confidential assistance from an Area Agency on Aging Elder case manager. Sign up in the Leesburg Senior Center lobby. Second and fourth Thursdays 11 a.m.-noon and 12:30-4:30 p.m. Leesburg Senior Center, 102 North St. NW. 703-737-8039. Free.

SENIOR OUTREACH SERVICES Free and confidential assistance from an Area Agency on Aging Elder case manager. Call for an appointment or sign up at the Carver Center. First and third Mondays, 12:30-5 p.m. Carver Center, 200 Willie Palmer Way, Purcellville. 703-737-8741. Free.

ZUMBA: For people 55 and older who are learning Zumba for the first time, or those who prefer a lower-impact version. The fitness program combines Latin and international music with dance.Thursdays 11 a.m. Senior Center at Cascades, 21060 Whitfield Pl., Sterling. 571-258-3280. $12.

TAI CHI Stretching and strengthening movements. Mondays 11 a.m. Leesburg Senior Center, 102 North St. NW. 703-737-8039. Free.

ZUMBA GOLD CLASS Age 55 and older. Wear rubber-soled shoes and comfortable clothing; bring water and a towel. Tuesdays 11 a.m., Tuesdays and Fridays at 1 p.m. Senior Center of Leesburg, 102 North St. NW, Leesburg. 703-737-8039. $24 per month.

SUPPORT GROUPS

AL-ANON SERVICE CENTER OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA A volunteer is available 24 hours with information for spouses, family members and friends of problem drinkers. 703-534-4357 or 877-339-8350. Mondays 8 p.m. Emmanuel Episcopal Church, 125 W. Washington St., Middleburg, 540-554-2747; Tuesdays 7:30 p.m. St. James Episcopal Church, 14 Cornwall St. NW, Leesburg, 877-339-8350; Fridays 8:30 p.m. Grace Episcopal Church, 6507 Main St., The Plains, 800-344-2666; Tuesdays 12:15 p.m. Warrenton Church of Christ, Route 29 N., 540-347-7448; Tuesdays 7 p.m. and Saturdays 8:30 p.m. Warrenton Presbyterian Church, 91 Main St. 800-344-2666.

ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS Various meeting times and locations in Loudoun County. 800-208-8649 or 703-876-6166. nvintergroup.org.

ALZHEIMERS CAREGIVER SUPPORT For those who care for people with Alzheimers disease and other forms of dementia. Fourth Wednesdays 4-5:30 p.m. The Villa at Suffield Meadows, 6735 Suffield Lane, Warrenton. 540-316-3800.

ALZHEIMERS CAREGIVERS SUPPORT For those caring for people with Alzheimers disease and other forms of dementia. Second Mondays 7-8:30 p.m. Galilee United Methodist Church, 45425 Winding Rd., Sterling. 703-430-9229. galileeumc.org.

ALZHEIMERS CAREGIVER SUPPORT Emotional, educational and social support for family members and friends of people with the disease. Third Saturdays 10 a.m. Loudoun County Area Agency on Aging, 20145 Ashbrook Pl., Ashburn. Call 703-771-5407 or email lesley.katz@loudoun.gov.

ALZHEIMERS CAREGIVER SUPPORT GROUP Fourth Thursdays 3-4 p.m. Carver Center, 200 Willie Palmer Way, Purcellville. 540-903-6831 or alz.org.

ALZHEIMERS SUPPORT First Tuesdays 10-11 a.m. Spring Arbor Assisted Living, 237 Fairview St. NW, Leesburg. 540-338-6520.

ALZHEIMERS SUPPORT First Wednesdays 4 p.m. Leesburg Adult Day Center, 16501 Meadowview Ct., Leesburg. 703-771-5334.

ALZHEIMERS SUPPORT Fourth Thursdays 3-4 p.m. Carver Center, 200 Willie Palmer Way, Purcellville. 571-258-3400.

TALK ABOUT CURING AUTISM A nonprofit organization educating and supporting families affected by autism. tacanow.org.

AUTOIMMUNE SUPPORT Last Thursdays 6:30-7:30 p.m. Jackson Building, 209 Gibson St., Leesburg. Email autoimmunesupport@hotmail.com .

BEREAVED PARENT SUPPORT One-on-one counseling is available. Spiritual Care Support Ministry Center, 76 W. Shirley Ave., Warrenton. 540-349-5814. scsm.tv.

BEREAVEMENT SUPPORT For those experiencing loss because of the death of a loved one. Age 18 and older. Third Mondays 1 p.m. Fauquier Hospital Chestnut Room, 500 Hospital Dr., Warrenton. Sponsored by Capital Caring. 703-957-1800.

BREAST CANCER SUPPORT Fourth Tuesdays 7-8 p.m. Fauquier Hospital Tower, Chestnut Room, 500 Hospital Dr., Warrenton. 540-349-0588.

BREAST CANCER SUPPORT For those with new diagnoses or starting treatment. Register if attending for the first time. Fourth Mondays 5:30-6:30 p.m. Inova Loudoun Hospital Radiation Oncology Center, 44035 Riverside Pkwy., Suite 100, Leesburg. 703-858-8857.

BREAST CANCER SUPPORT For those who have finished treatment, have had a recurrence or metastatic breast cancer. Register if attending for the first time. Fourth Mondays 6:30-8 p.m. Inova Loudoun Hospital Radiation Oncology Center, 44035 Riverside Pkwy., Suite 100, Leesburg. 703-858-8857. Free.

BREAST CANCER SUPPORT ASSISTANCE FUND Loudoun County residents who have received a diagnosis or have undergone treatment in the past 12 months are eligible to apply for financial assistance. Areas included are wigs, bras, puffs and prostheses, mammograms and medical bills, food and help with utilities, rent or mortgage, and transportation costs. The Pink Assistance Fund has been established by the Loudoun Breast Health Network. lbhn.org.

CANCER SUPPORT Oncology nurses, social workers and spiritual care providers offer education and support to patients, families and caregivers. Second Mondays 5:30-6:30 p.m. Fauquier Hospital Sycamore Room, 500 Hospital Dr., Warrenton. 540-316-2273.

CANCER SUPPORT Life with Cancer, for patients, family members and friends. Second Thursdays 7 p.m. Ashburn Presbyterian Church, Room 202, 20962 Ashburn Rd. 703-729-2012. ashburnpresbyterian.org.

CAREGIVER SUPPORT Provides emotional, educational and social support. Encourages caregivers to maintain their personal, physical and emotional health while caring for people with demenita or other chronic illness. Fourth Thursdays 3-4 p.m. Carver Center, 200 Willie Palmer Way, Purcellville. 540-903-6831.

CAREGIVER SUPPORT AND RESOURCE GROUP Wednesdays 10:30 a.m.-noon (no meeting first Wednesdays), Spiritual Care Support Ministry Center, 76 W. Shirley Ave., Warrenton. 540-349-5814. scsm.tv.

CARING FOR AGING PARENTS Support group. Confidential. Fourth Wednesdays 7:30 p.m., Family Focus Counseling Service, 20-B John Marshall St., Warrenton. 540-349-4537.

CHADD PARENTS SUPPORT For parents of children with ADD/ADHD. Fourth Sundays 3 p.m. KinderCare, 44051 Ashburn Village Shopping Plaza. chadd.nova loudoun@gmail. com .

CHRONIC ILLNESS SUPPORT Tuesdays 10:30-11:30 a.m. Spiritual Care Support Ministries, 76 W. Shirley Ave., Warrenton. 540-349-5814 or scsm.tv.

COFFEE AND CONVERSATION: Support for those discouraged because of illness, bereavement, caregiving or a loved one in the military. Thursdays 10 a.m.-noon. Spiritual Care Support Ministry Center, 76 W. Shirley Ave., Warrenton. 540-349-5814.

COMPASSIONATE FRIENDS For parents who have experienced the death of a child. First Wednesdays 7:30 p.m. St. James Episcopal Church, 14 Cornwall St. NW, Leesburg. 540-882-9707.

CREATING AND CONNECTING Two-hour art therapy and relaxation workshop for cancer patients. Every other month, 12:30-2:30 p.m. Inova Loudoun Hospital Radiation Oncology Center, 44035 Riverside Pkwy., Suite 100, Leesburg. Call for dates. 703-858-8850.

DEPRESSION BIPOLAR SUPPORT ALLIANCE OF WESTERN LOUDOUN Saturdays 3 p.m. Purcellville Library, 220 E. Main St., Carruthers Room. Call 703-431-7160 or email kathy@dbsanca.org.

DROP-IN GRIEF SUPPORT For those coping with a death. Second and fourth Wednesdays 1-2 p.m. St. Davids Episcopal Church, 43600 Russell Branch Pkwy., Ashburn. Sponsored by Capital Caring. 703-597-1781.

FAMILIES OVERCOMING DRUG ADDICTION SUPPORT First and third Thursdays at 6:30 p.m. Fauquier Hospital Sycamore Room, 500 Hospital Dr., Warrenton. 540-316-9221 or email myfodafamily@gmail.com.

GAY, LESBIAN, BISEXUAL AND TRANSGENDER YOUTH AND PARENT SUPPORT A group in partnership with Metro DC PFLAG. Fourth Sundays 4-6 p.m. Unitarian Universalist Church, 22135 Davis Dr., Sterling. 703-328-6518.

GRIEFSHARE Open to anyone who has experienced the death of a loved one. Tuesdays Sept. 13 through Dec. 6 from 7-8:30 p.m. Purcellville Baptist Church, 601 Yaxley Dr., Purcellville. Call 540-338-0918 or email caring@purbap.org . Workbook, $15.

GRIEFSHARE Nondenominational seminar and support group. Tuesdays 7:30-9 p.m., and Wednesdays, 1-2:30 p.m. Spiritual Care Support Ministry Center, 76 W. Shirley Ave., Warrenton. 540-349-5814. Free.

GRIEF SUPPORT Sponsored by Hospice Support of Fauquier County. Individual counseling available. First and third Thursdays 3:30-5 p.m. Hospice Support Office, 42 N. Fifth St., Warrenton. Registration required. Call 540-347-5922 or email hospicesupport@verizon.net.

GRIEF SUPPORT Wednesdays, 10:30 a.m.-noon, Spiritual Care Support Ministry Center, 76 W. Shirley Ave., Warrenton. 540-349-5814.

HOSPICE SUPPORT Free medical-equipment loan facility for Fauquier County residents. Especially needed are donations of wheelchairs, bedside commodes, rolling walkers, electric hospital beds, shower benches and chairs, adult diapers, lift chairs, Ensure and hospital bed mattresses. 540-347-5922.

LOOK GOOD, FEEL BETTER For women undergoing or emerging from cancer treatment. Every other month, 6:45 to 9 p.m. ,Inova Loudoun Hospital Radiation Oncology Center, 44035 Riverside Pkwy., Suite 100, Leesburg. Call for dates. 703-776-2820. Free.

LOUDOUN CHADD SUPPORT Led by Children and Adults With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. Third Thursdays 7 p.m. Leesburg Town Hall, lower-level conference room, 25 W. Market St. 703-669-2445.

LOUDOUN INTERGROUP OF OVEREATERS ANONYMOUS Fellowship and support. For locations and times, call 571-420-2012. oa.org.

LYME DISEASE SUPPORT Fourth Sundays 2-4 p.m. Inova Loudoun Hospital, 44045 Riverside Pkwy., Conference Room A and B, Leesburg. Go to natcaplyme.org or email loudounlymeadvocates@gmail.com.

LYME DISEASE SUPPORT Third Thursdays at 7 p.m. Warrenton Church of Christ, 6398 Lee Hwy. Access Road, Warrenton. 540-347-7265 or email lymeinfauquier@gmail.com.

LYME DISEASE SUPPORT Third Thursdays at 7 p.m. Warrenton Church of Christ, 6398 Lee Hwy. Access Road, Warrenton. 540-347-7265 or email lymeinfauquier@gmail.com.

LYME DISEASE SUPPORT Age 18 and older. First Tuesdays 7-8:30 p.m. Carver Center, 200 Willie Palmer Way, Purcellville. Email charphealy@yahoo.com.

MADD LOUDOUN VICTIM SUPPORT For those who have been affected by drunken driving. Third Wednesdays 7:30 p.m. 210 Wirt St., Leesburg. 540-338-6491.

MAN-TO-MAN CANCER SUPPORT Sponsored by Loudoun Cancer Care Center, for prostate cancer patients and their families. Second Tuesdays 6:30-8 p.m. Senior Center at Cascades, 21060 Whitfield Pl., Sterling. Call 703-858-8857 or email karen.archer@inova.org.

MENDED HEARTS Northern Virginia chapter, for heart surgery patients and families and friends of heart disease patients. Third Saturdays 11 a.m., Inova Loudoun Hospital, 44045 Riverside Pkwy., Leesburg (Patient Information Lounge) . 703-924-6244 or mendedhearts200.org.

MENOPAUSE SUPPORT Third Thursdays 6:30-9 p.m. Inova Loudoun Hospital, 44045 Riverside Pkwy., Leesburg (second floor, Patient Education Room). 703-858-8060.

MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS SUPPORT Saturdays 10:30 a.m. Fauquier Hospital Chestnut Room, 500 Hospital Dr., Warrenton. 540-349-2826.

MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS SUPPORT Last Sundays 2-4 p.m. Cascades Library, 21030 Whitfield Pl., Potomac Falls. 703-771-4256.

NAR-ANON FAMILY SUPPORT For those affected by loved ones with addiction. Meaningful Mondays, 7-8 p.m., Galilee United Methodist Church, 45425 Winding Rd., Sterling. 703-203-9792; Wisdom Wednesdays 7-8 p.m., St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church, 37730 St. Francis Ct., Purcellville, 703-606-7125; Serenity Thursdays, 7-8 p.m. Leesburg Presbyterian Church, 207 W. Market St., Leesburg, 703-606-7125.

PARKINSON'S SUPPORT Open to those with Parkinson's disease, their family members and caregivers. First Tuesdays 1:30-3 p.m. Call for Ashburn location. 571-442-8851.

POST-PARTUM SUPPORT Second and fourth Wednesdays 1-2:30 p.m. Inova Loudoun Cornwall Campus, 224 Cornwall St., Leesburg. 703-909-9877. Email lamckeough@gmail.com. Registration required.

REACH TO RECOVERY Home visit program for mastectomy and lumpectomy patients. Temporary prostheses, exercise instruction and encouragement. 703-938-5550.

SEXUAL ASSAULT AND INCEST SURVIVORS GROUP COUNSELING Services provided by Loudoun Citizens for Social Justice and the Loudoun Abused Womens Shelter are free and confidential. 703-771-9020.

SEXUAL ASSAULT SURVIVORS EMPOWERMENT SUPPORT Sponsored by Sexual Assault Victims Volunteer Initiative. Child care available with 48-hours notice. Mondays; call for times and locations. 540-349-7720.

SPIRITUAL SUPPORT GROUP For cancer patients, family members and friends. Third Tuesdays 6:30-8 p.m. Inova Loudoun Hospital Radiation Oncology Center, 44035 Riverside Pkwy., Suite 100, Leesburg. 703-858-8850.

STROKE SURVIVORS AND CAREGIVERS SUPPORT Second Wednesdays 11 a.m.-noon, Inova Loudoun Hospital, 44045 Riverside Pkwy., Leesburg, second floor, Patient Education Room. 703-858-6667 or robynthomson@inova.org.

SUICIDE COUNSELING Third Wednesdays 7-8:30 p.m. Leesburg Town Office, Conference Room 2, lower level, 25 W. Market St., Leesburg. 703-587-1618 or survivorsofsuicidelossleesburg@gmail.com.

WOMENS SUPPORT Sponsored by Services to Abused Families. Tuesdays 6:30-8 p.m. Confidential location. 540-825-8876.

WIDOW AND WIDOWER SUPPORT Third Mondays 11 a.m. Leesburg Senior Center, 102 North St. NW. 703-737-8039.

WOMENS CANCER SUPPORT Woman to Woman, first Wednesdays 6:30-8 p.m. Inova Loudoun Hospital Radiation Oncology Center, 44035 Riverside Pkwy., Suite 100, Leesburg. Registration required. 703-858-8850.

MISCELLANEOUS

BRAIN TRAUMA SURVIVORS BROWN BAG LUNCH For survivors and caregivers, first Tuesdays, noon-1:30 p.m. Inova Loudoun Hospital, 44045 Riverside Pkwy., Leesburg, second-floor Patient Education Room. Call 703-737-3150 or email jberg@braininjurysvcs.org. Free.

ASK THE EXPERT LECTURE Hernias: Causes, Symptoms and Treatment Options, Sept. 12 at 6 p.m. Inova Loudoun Hospital, Conference Rooms A and B, 44045 Riverside Pkwy., Leesburg. A presentation by James Lesniewski, general surgeon. 855-694-6682. Free. Register.

CANCER RESOURCES, EDUCATION AND WELLNESS (CREW) Sept. 12, 5:30-6:30 p.m. Fauquier Hospital Chestnut Room, 500 Hospital Dr., Warrenton. 540-316-2273.

CHILD DEVELOPMENTAL SCREENINGS For ages 2-5. Children may not be kindergarten-age-eligible. Sponsored by the Loudoun County public schools Child Find Center. 571-252 - 2180.

CHOLESTEROL SCREENINGS Weekdays 6 a.m.-8 p.m. Fauquier Health LIFE Center, 500 Hospital Dr., Warrenton. 540-316-2640. Registration required. $35.

SKIN CANCER LECTURE Detection and Prevention. Sept. 14, 7 p.m. Fauquier Hospital Sycamore Room, 500 Hospital Dr., Warrenton. 540-316-3588.

EMERGENCY FOOD SUPPLIES Loudoun residents who are in need can receive a free three-day supply of groceries. Supplies are distributed Mondays through Saturdays by Loudoun Interfaith Relief. 703-777-5911. interfaithrelief.org.

FAUQUIER FREE WALK-IN MEDICAL CLINIC Patients must call Thursdays from 12:30 to 1 p.m. to register for the clinic, which begins at 5:30 p.m. Patients are also seen by appointment Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Fauquier and Rappahannock residents only. Bring proof of address for the first visit. Patients cannot have Medicaid, Medicare or private insurance. Information: 540-347-0394 Tuesdays or Thursdays, 9 a.m.-4 p.m.

FAUQUIER HOSPITAL BISTRO SENIOR SUPPER CLUB Nutritious meals and fellowship for people 55 and older. Tuesdays and Thursdays 4:30-6:30 p.m. Fauquier Hospital Bistro on the Hill, 500 Hospital Dr., Warrenton. 540-316-3588. $5.49.

HEROES (Hometown Enabling Relationships, Opportunities and Empowerment through Support) is a program for military families. A trained volunteer provides support to military members and their families, from pre-deployment up to two years post-deployment. Assistance includes financial help, job placement, family care and mental health services. heroescare.org or email caring@purbap.org .

FAUQUIER HOSPITAL BISTRO SENIOR SUPPER CLUB Nutritious meals and fellowship for people 55 and older. Tuesdays and Thursdays 4:30-6:30 p.m. Fauquier Hospital Bistro on the Hill, 500 Hospital Dr., Warrenton. 540-316-3588. $5.49.

LOUDOUN CARES INFORMATION AND REFERRAL HELP LINE Call for help in finding resources for county residents who are dealing with rent eviction, utility cut-offs, needed health care, employment and more. 703-669-4636.

MOTOR SKILL SCREENINGS Birth to 21 months. First Thursdays, Blue Ridge Speech and Hearing Center, 19465 Deerfield Ave., Suite 201, Lansdowne. Call for an appointment. 703-858-7620. Free.

INOVA LOUDOUN HOSPITAL MOBILE HEALTH SERVICES BLOOD PRESSURE SCREENINGS Tuesday 10 a.m.-noon, Dulles South Multipurpose Center, 24950 Riding Center Dr., South Riding; Wednesday 10 a.m.-noon, Leesburg Senior Center, 102 North St., Leesburg; Sept. 13, 9 a.m.-noon, Senior Center at Cascades, 21060 Whitfield Pl., Sterling; Sept. 15, 11 a.m.-noon, Lovettsville Community Center, 57 E. Broad Way, Lovettsville. For information, call 703-858-8818 or go to inova.org/mobilehealth. Free.

MEDICARE AND MEDICAID BENEFITS COUNSELING Thursday 1-3 p.m. Fauquier Hospital sycamore Room, 500 Hospital Dr., Warrenton. 540-316-3588. Free.

NORTHERN VIRGINIA LONG-TERM CARE OMBUDSMAN Call for help in resolving complaints related to long-term-care facilities. 703-324-5861.

PREVENTING FALLS, WORKSHOP AND SCREENING Balance, Balance and More Balance, Sept. 28 at 10:30 a.m. Loudoun County Area Agency on Aging, 20145 Ashbrook Pl., Suite 170, Ashburn. 703-771-5407. aaasupport@loudoun.gov. Free.

ROAD TO RECOVERY For cancer patients who need rides to appointments. 410-781-6909. Email jen.burdette@cancer.org. Free.

SAFE SITTER BABYSITTER TRAINING Saturday 8:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m. Fauquier Hospital Sycamore Room, 500 Hospital Dr., Warrenton. 540-316-3588. $60. Register.

SAFE SITTER CLASSES For girls and boys ages 11-14. First Saturdays except for holiday weekends. 7:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m. Inova Loudoun Hospital, 44045 Riveerside Pkwy., Leesburg. To receive a Safe Sitter Certificate, students must pass practical and written tests on babysitting concepts and handling an emergency. Take a lunch from home or buy lunch in the cafeteria. $70, includes handbook and snacks during the day. Registration required. Call 703-858-8818 or email charlene.martin@inova.org.

SEVEN LOAVES FOOD PANTRY Individuals and families can receive a three-day supply of food, distributed Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays 10 a.m.-noon. 540-687-3489 or sevenloavesmiddleburg.org.

STAYING ACTIVE WITH ARTHRITIS Wednesday 7 p.m. Cascades Library, 21030 Whitfield Pl., Potomac Falls. A presentation by Stuart Melvin of Ortho-Virginia. 703-444-3228. Free.

TREE OF LIFE FOOD PANTRY Serving western Loudoun County. Food is delivered Wednesdays and Saturdays. 703-554-3595.

 Compiled by Sandy Mauck

TO SUBMIT AN ITEM

Email: ldliving@washpost.com

Fax: 703-777-8437

Mail: Health Calendar, The Washington Post, 104 Dry Mill Rd. SW, Suite 101, Leesburg, Va. 20175

Loudoun County and Fauquier County health calendar

Loudoun County and Fauquier County health calendar

Loudoun County and Fauquier County health calendar

Loudoun County and Fauquier County health calendar
Prince William County police have found a 3-month-old and the man accused of abducting the child. The two were found in a Woodbridge home late Sunday, officials said.

The pair had been missing since Wednesday, when Russell Carnell Walker, 44, allegedly assaulted the babys 22-year-old mother at a Dumfries-area motel and disappeared with the infant. The woman told police that she and Walker had been in a domestic dispute.

Investigators took Walker into custody about 3:45 p.m. Sunday in the 15100 block of Cardin Place in Woodbridge after receiving a tip about the mans whereabouts. The child, Zion LeBron Favors, was found safe at a nearby home.

Walker, who is not related to the infant, is facing charges of abduction and assault and battery.

The investigation is ongoing, police said.
Edward Stith, 87, has been living for three years in the Transitions Nursing Facility in Southeast Washington, where he shares a room with three other people. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

As a television blasted on the other side of the curtain of his shared nursing home room in the District, 87-year-old Edward Stith sat near his prosthetic leg and wondered if he would ever get out of there.

In March, the retired hotel maintenance worker and veteran, whose leg was amputated four years ago, had a glimmer of hope. He was accepted through a lottery into a federal program that helps Medicaid recipients move out of nursing homes and receive services in the community. He had submitted the paperwork and knew he had until Sept. 30 to use the voucher. But here it was, the end of August, and nothing had changed.

Birth certificate, Social Security, government-issued ID  everything they asked for, I gave it to them, and theyre not giving me nothing, he said, adding that he would prefer to live on his own with someone coming to help with bathing and meals. I wasnt supposed to be here no three years; I thought Id be here maybe a year.

Stith is among several hundred nursing home residents who are plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit alleging that the District has failed to comply with a federal mandate to move eligible and interested Medicaid recipients out of nursing homes and into the community, where they are entitled to in-home care.

The suit, filed in 2010 by University Legal Services, AARP Foundation Litigation and the private law firm of Arent Fox, is scheduled to go to trial Sept. 13. It contends that an estimated 500 to 2,900 people with disabilities are unnecessarily institutionalized in nursing facilities, segregated and isolated from their families and friends. These individuals desperately want to return to their communities.

Edward Stith, 87 (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

Surveys consistently show that older people prefer to stay in their homes for as long as they can, and federal and local government policies have increasingly moved in that direction. A 1999 Supreme Court ruling said that public entities must provide community-based services to people with disabilities whenever possible and that unnecessarily institutionalizing them is a form of discrimination.

Serving people at home is also more cost-effective, advocates say.

The no-brainer part of this is this would actually save the District money, said Kelly Bagby, an attorney for the AARP Foundation, adding that there are people who have secured housing but are waiting for the city to set up in-home services. Were saying that they can do more and should.

The Office on Aging and the mayors office declined to comment on the lawsuit. City officials also did not respond to a request for the cost of nursing home care compared with in-home care. But Marjorie Rifkin, managing attorney for Disability Rights DC at University Legal Services, said the District had reported that for 2014, the average cost was $52,334 a person for in-home care and $69,886 for nursing facility care.

Despite the potential savings, getting people out of institutions and provided with home care requires work upfront to find appropriate housing and to set up the services, Bagby said. D.C. is just not setting enough resources to this task, she said. Last year, D.C. was very proud of moving 35 people from nursing homes to the community. At this rate, a lot of people will never get out, and a lot of our plaintiffs have died waiting to get out of the nursing home.

Twenty-six people were moved in 2014, and previously the numbers were in the teens or below, Rifkin said.

The suit also alleges that people with disabilities have been forced into nursing homes because the city has not provided adequate alternatives.

Federally and state-funded waivers for Medicaid recipients who are elderly or have physical disabilities  known as EPD waivers  allow people to receive up to 16 hours a day of in-home services and case management if they need help with at least two activities of daily living such as bathing, eating or dressing. If they need 24-hour care, they can get an additional eight hours through the D.C. Medicaid Personal Care Assistance program.

The program Stith qualified for, Money Follows the Person, is a federal Medicaid program that helps older people and those with disabilities move to their communities from nursing homes. To qualify, a person must have been in a nursing home or hospital for at least 90 days and must have received Medicaid in the last month of services there.

The Office on Agings executive director, Laura Newland, said that in the past, people had had trouble applying to the EPD waiver program, so the application process was revamped in 2015.

Newland could not confirm how many people have been moved in recent years from nursing homes into the community. But she said that of about 4,000 slots for EPD waivers, available to people who have made that transition and also to those who have never moved from their homes, only a little more than half have been filled.

We have been kind of waiting to see if when we changed the application process for the waiver, would that change the utilization of the waiver, she said, adding that there has not been a change. It just looks like we have more slots than people who are qualifying and wanted to use those services.

She added that the expiration date on MFP vouchers such as Stiths are advisory. That deadline, honestly, its a deadline because we want to make sure that people use the voucher, she said. The deadline is extended on an individual, case-by-case basis. No one has been denied a voucher because of that deadline.

Newland said that although the city sends workers to help people complete the applications, nursing-home social workers can gather the information on their own as well.

But most facilities dont have enough staffing to do so, Rifkin said. Transitions Healthcare, the 360-bed Anacostia nursing home where Stith lives, has three social workers, she said. Other states have far surpassed the Districts level of providing basic transition assistance. . . . Theres no system here.

To Rifkin, the unfilled EPD waiver slots are a sign of a problem. Most states have years-long, in many cases decades-long waiting lists to get home services. Its a big mystery. We think that nobodys willing to go out and help them get these services.

James Edelin, 61, says hes too young to spend the rest of his life in a nursing home. A former addiction counselor who has worked with nonprofit groups, he has lived at Deanwood Rehabilitation and Wellness Center in Northeast Washington since he had a kidney and liver transplant in 2013. He said he is on a waiting list for housing.

I want to go back to the community. I want to go back to work if I can, he said. Here, every room you go to theres somebody there. I use a curtain in my room, but that doesnt do anything for sound. If you wanted to have an intimate conversation I dont know where youd go. The sooner I can get out of here, the better.

Stith feels the same way. Hes sick of institutional food  we eat turkey all the time  and would love some potato salad and barbecued ribs. He also misses the beach.

I served this country. I gave this country four good years of my life, he said, and they tell me they cant give me a house or apartment to live in?
Yes, its hard to to tell when one enters the city limits

Yes, they will make the city more inviting

Maybe ... does it really matter?

No, the signs in place are fine

No, it would be a waste of taxpayer dollars

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Sgt. Ivan Gunter leads a special team of police officers called the Foxtrots in the Southwest Patrol Division of the Dallas Police Department. (Cooper Neill for The Washington Post)

Sgt. Ivan Gunter climbed the stairs, sweating beneath a ceramic-plated tactical vest, his finger resting beside the trigger of his 9mm handgun. He could hear the suspects muffled voice above, between thunderous cracks of gunfire.

Gunter, 49, led a specially trained team of nine Dallas police officers called the Foxtrots. In the July twilight, beneath the citys skyscrapers, a gunman had taken aim at his officers as they stood along Main Street policing a protest rally. One fell, then a second, and a third. After helping to drag one of his wounded men into a patrol car, Gunter followed the gunmans trail of broken glass and blood.

As sirens wailed across downtown, Gunter paused in a stairwell of El Centro College. He was part of a small group of police officers closing in on the shooter.

Hold your positions, a supervisor ordered over the radio. Gunter crouched in the stairwell, waiting. After a few minutes, his cellphone buzzed.

Where you at, Gunter? You okay? asked Sgt. Alan Villarreal, a longtime friend, calling from the hospital. He spoke the names of two of Gunters Foxtrots.

Pat and Krol  they didnt make it.

What? Gunter said.

Im sorry, Gunter, Villarreal said. You need to get over here, now. Your guys need you.

Gunter felt a wave of anguish, then rage. Two of his men dead, others gravely wounded on what would become the single deadliest day for U.S. law enforcement since Sept. 11, 2001. Gunter couldnt leave the stairwell, not with the gunman still alive, still firing.

Youre going to have to take care of them for me, brother, Gunter said. I have to see this through.

***

Seven hours earlier, at 2:30 p.m., Gunter had arrived at a two-story brick building off West Illinois Avenue in southwest Dallas. He swiped his security card and walked to his desk, passing rows of cubicles filled with sergeants who supervised the Southwest Division, one of seven patrol districts at the Dallas Police Department. About 300 of the departments 3,375 officers worked there.

Gunters team of Foxtrots handled special assignments requested by supervisors across the department. The group had been formed nearly a decade earlier to respond to high-priority calls on third watch, from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. Some of its founding members were military veterans who picked the name Foxtrot, which signifies the letter F in radio communications.

The Foxtrots were trained in combat medicine, fugitive apprehension and tactical surveillance. They responded to shootings, carjackings and armed robberies, as well as to lower-priority calls if a need arose. They operated radar guns on high-traffic roads, investigated clusters of vehicle break-ins, tracked robbers snatching womens purses in parking lots. Some officers considered them a miniature version of the departments elite SWAT team, responsible for the districts 75 square miles. The unit had demonstrated success and been replicated at other stations in Dallas.

Gunter needed a team with a variety of skills, and he helped pick his nine officers, choosing one seasoned robbery detective for his knowledge of sophisticated computer programs to help track suspects. He chose another for his enthusiastic tenacity in locating drug houses and cultivating informants.

They were a close-knit group who ate together, spent long hours on surveillance together, knew each others girlfriends and wives and children. One officers mother invited them over for Sunday barbecues. The department did not allow units to have their own logos, but the Foxtrots quietly created one anyway, sketching a picture of a red fox with a menacing stare, a lightning bolt shooting behind it. Gunter had the drawing made into a patch. Some of the men Velcroed it onto their heavy ballistic vests, marking them as Foxtrots.

Gunter arrived at work that Thursday, July 7, wearing his Class B uniform  navy cargo pants and a police button-down  already informed that his team would help with crowd control that night at a protest against shootings by police. Tensions were high across the country again; that week, two videos had gone viral in as many days, showing black men shot dead by police.

A black man born in Dallas and a 25-year department veteran, Gunter sympathized with the Black Lives Matter movement. Hed had his own run-ins with police as a boy. He once got stopped while riding his bike to a friends house in a largely white, affluent neighborhood. The citys activists were not given to violence, and Gunter wasnt expecting trouble at the rally. Still, he needed to be prepared.



On July 7, protesters were in downtown Dallas minutes before a gunman started shooting. Officers in the crosswalk at the top of the photo are, from left, Sgt. Ivan Gunter, Senior Cpl. Lorne Ahrens and Officer Michael Krol. Officer Patrick Zamarripa is in the yellow shirt, near the patrol car on the bottom left. (Smiley N. Pool/Dallas Morning News via AP)

As his team members filed into the station around 3 p.m., he instructed them to gear up, standard protocol for rallies and protests. They climbed the stairs to the second floor and grabbed black bags filled with riot gear  shin guards, batons and helmets. Gunter also required all Foxtrots to have military-grade ballistic vests that could protect from high-velocity gunfire. The officers had bought the vests for about $300 each because the department did not provide them.

The team walked out into the sweltering 91-degree heat carrying their bags and bottles of water. Several officers paired up to ride downtown together. Among them were Senior Cpl. Lorne Ahrens and Officer Michael Krol.

Ahrens, 48, was one of the most experienced investigators on the team, known for his guile and ability to get suspects to talk. He was 6 foot 5, weighed more than 300 pounds and could rip burglar bars off a house with his bare hands. Friends called him Meat and loved summoning him as backup. But those who knew him well considered him a softy. Theyd seen him roll around with his two children, 8 and 10 years old.

Officer Krol was 40 with a boys face and goofy grin. He was the only member of the team  maybe the only officer on the force, his colleagues joked  who loved working traffic accidents. Most cops consider them tedious and loathe the paperwork. But Krol enjoyed the meticulous task of figuring out who had collided with whom, and at what speeds and angles.

Krol, like Ahrens, towered over 6 feet. When the pair climbed into a patrol car, officers liked to watch and laugh as it drooped toward the ground.

That afternoon, Gunter led the caravan in his patrol car filled with supervisors tools, crowbars, rifles, a gas mask and two medical bags. The Foxtrots headed north to police headquarters to receive their assignments.

***



Sgt. Ivan Gunter, right, speaks with members of the Foxtrot team on Aug. 11. (Cooper Neill for The Washington Post)

From left to right: Senior Cpl. Ruben Lozano, Sgt. Ivan Gunter, Officer Gretchen Rocha and Senior Cpl. Ivan Saldana talk. (Cooper Neill for The Washington Post)

About 6:45 p.m., the Foxtrots parked their patrol cars near the intersection of Commerce Street and Interstate 45. Their job would be to block protesters who might try to march onto the highways.

Officer Gretchen Rocha sat in the passenger seat of a patrol car. At 23, Rocha was a recent police academy graduate three weeks into her field training. She was married with an 11-month-old and had wanted to be a police officer since she was a girl. One of the Foxtrots, Senior Cpl. Ivan Saldana, 44, had been assigned to train her.

As Rocha waited for orders, she glanced in a side mirror and saw a man who looked homeless approach a patrol car behind her. He banged on the window, visibly upset. She watched as another Foxtrot, Patrick Zamarripa, stepped out of his car. Rocha and her trainer climbed out to see what was happening.

Someone had stolen his potato chips, said the homeless man. He was near tears. Zamarripa walked toward a convenience store, the man following. Inside, they headed toward the chips. The man looked at Zamarripa, then picked out a bag.

Want two bags? Zamarripa asked.

The man shook his head. Just one.

Zamarripa paid for the chips, then led the group back to their patrol cars. The homeless man thanked Zamarripa the whole way. He asked whether he could sit next to Zamarripas car as he ate, worried that someone might steal the chips again. Zamarripa nodded. The man sat cross-legged on the pavement and ripped open the bag.

That interaction made an impression on the rookie, Rocha. Such a small gesture, but she could tell it made the mans day. She was impressed with Zamarripa, a 32-year-old father who had served in Iraq before joining the department.

Before long, their sergeant, Gunter, walked over. Supervisors now wanted the Foxtrots to leapfrog from intersection to intersection, blocking traffic as the marchers headed toward the end of the parade route. The officers worked their way toward Main Street, eventually stopping at Lamar Street, near El Centro College. Protesters walked by, some thanking the officers, others stopping to pose for selfies. The officers still had their riot gear  including their military-grade ballistic vests  on the back seats of their cars. But the crowd was peaceful. The department had spent considerable money and resources in de-escalation training in recent years and wanted to avoid looking like an occupying army whenever possible.

The sun had fallen by the time the marchers chants began to fade. The protesters drifted off Main Street, walking toward their cars. Just before 9 p.m., Gunter was about to dismiss his unit when he heard the first crack of gunfire.

***

Officer Krol screamed, then fell to the ground. Ahrens collapsed beside him, his immense frame sprawled across the pavement.

Another crack, then another. Gunter looked around, trying to figure out what was happening. The sound of gunfire echoed through the streets, getting louder, coming closer. Get down, get down! Gunter shouted.

He realized his unit, standing within a space of 15 to 20 feet, was under fire, in the middle of the street, with nowhere to hide except behind patrol cars. Gunter recognized the sound as that of an assault rifle. The thin Kevlar vests beneath their shirts would not protect them.





Gunter turned to his right and saw Zamarripa fall. He pressed the button on his radio. Shots fired, officer down! Shots fired, officer down! Were in a kill zone! Stay clear! Gunter recalls saying on the radio.

He dragged Zamarripa behind his car.

A few feet away, another Foxtrot, Jorge Barrientos, 28, felt a shift in the air as bullets whizzed past his ears. He ran toward a patrol car, seeing bullets hit the ground next to him. A chunk of his radio, attached to his belt, flew into the air. Hes aiming at me, Barrientos thought.

Just before he ducked behind the patrol car, he felt something slam into his chest. It stung, then faded. Barrientos coughed into his hand, looking for blood. He didnt see any and figured he was okay. Then he looked down and saw a piece of his left index finger dangling.

He and his partner crouched behind the car. Stay down! he screamed. A piece of a tire blew off, striking his partner in the face and pitching him backward.

During a break in the gunfire, Barrientos looked out into the street and saw Krol, lying motionless. He saw Ahrens struggling, trying to apply a tourniquet to his own leg. Then he saw his sergeant, Gunter, crouched over Zamarripa. He crawled over to help.

Grab my med kit, Gunter yelled. It was in the back of his patrol car. Barrientos raised his head, felt the bullets speed by. He couldnt reach the kit without exposing himself.

Gunter tugged on Zamarripas shirt, trying to remove it. Trained in combat medicine, Gunter feared his officer had a sucking chest wound, one that might fill his thorax with air and cause his lungs to collapse. He needed to plug the hole.

What do you have? Gunter asked Barrientos.

Barrientos reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of Marlboro Lights. Gunter grabbed them, slid off the clear plastic wrapper and placed it over Zamarripas wound, pushing down.

Zamarripa flinched. Good, Gunter thought. Hes with me.

Im sorry, bro  I know it hurts, Gunter told him. Youll make it. Just stay with me.

Gunter grabbed his officers hand; Zamarripa squeezed back.

***

Another Foxtrot, trainer Saldana, was across the intersection when the shooting started. He shouted at his rookie: Get cover! He raced toward the fallen officers, hiding behind a patrol car. Sparks flew as bullets struck the pavement. Saldana got on his stomach and peered beneath the car. From this vantage point, he could see Ahrens, lying on his belly, struggling to raise himself up, as if doing a push-up. Then Ahrens shook his head and went back down. It looked as if he were trying to move closer so he could help Krol. Saldana yelled at him from beneath the car: Dont get up! Hes still shooting!

Farther down the street, another Foxtrot, Senior Cpl. Brian Fillingim, 36, ducked behind the wheel of his patrol car. In front of him, he saw a man throw his girlfriend into a gutter, then lie on top of her. The man shouted at Fillingim: My mom! Youve got to help my mom!

As the man shouted, a motorcycle officer roared into the road and laid his bike down to help cover them, crouching behind it. Fillingim and other officers saw the mother in the street, ran over and dragged her between two cars. Fillingim felt several bullets fly past his head, as if a wasp were buzzing beside his ear.

Fillingim rose and looked out. He saw Krol and Ahrens lying in the street. He stood there staring as everything fell quiet. Then bullets ripped down the street, jolting him back.

The rookie, Rocha, stood across the intersection near El Centro. She had lost sight of her trainer. She took cover behind a patrol car. Three weeks into her training, she had no idea what to do. She heard her trainers voice in her head: Just keep moving.

Rocha saw the wounded officers lying in the street. Patrol cars screeched toward them, bullets flying all around. Several officers began dragging the three wounded toward the cars.

Rocha ran over to help. On the way, she felt bullets whizzing by.

After they loaded Krol into a car, Rocha noticed the drivers seat was empty. She jumped in. Another officer climbed in the back and started CPR. Do you know how to get to the hospital? she asked him.

Yes, he said. Go!

She slammed the door, pressed the gas and jumped a curb. Bullets slammed into the car as she sped away. As she gripped the steering wheel, she noticed a throbbing in her right arm. She looked down and saw a growing circle of blood. She, too, had been hit. As the officer in the back pumped on Krols chest, Rocha pressed harder on the gas, watching the speedometer climb to 118 mph.

At Parkland Memorial Hospital, medical staffers heaved Krol onto a stretcher and rushed him inside. Rocha ran in beside him. Dont give up, she told him.

Nurses noticed blood on Rochas arm and forced her to sit. As they began treating her wound, Rocha reached for her phone to call her husband.

***

President Obama delivered remarks July 12 at an interfaith memorial service in Dallas for the five police officers killed by a sniper July 7. ( Reuters)

As the wounded officers were being rushed to two hospitals, whoever was shooting was still near the intersection of Lamar and Main streets. Gunter, still at the scene, shouted to the officers around him: Get your heavy vests on, now!

He pulled his on and joined a couple others racing toward El Centro College, less than a block away from his patrol car. The rage that filled him was of a sort that he had never before felt.

Where is he? Gunter shouted at other officers.

Officers followed the gunman into the college. Inside, Gunter helped clear the first floor. Then he entered a stairwell. The colleges security alarm wailed as the gunman exchanged fire with police. An officer on the radio gave the gunmans location, about 18 minutes after the shooting started: Second floor, body armor, just reloaded, assault rifle.

A minute later, We may have the suspect pinned down, northwest corner of the building, on the second floor.

We have dialogue going with the suspect. We need the sirens in the building off to communicate.

Supervisors instructed officers to hold their positions. No one was allowed onto the second floor except the SWAT team.

Gunter crouched in the stairwell with three other officers, just below the gunman. Gunter remained on one step, his arm raised as he pointed his 9mm pistol toward the door, in case the gunman appeared. An officer from El Centro stood on a nearby step, pointing a rifle at the same door above them.

While in the stairwell, Gunter got the call from Villarreal, letting him know Zamarripa and Krol were dead. Gunter bowed his head and fought tears. Another sergeant approached: Do you want to take a minute? Do you need to leave?

Gunter shook his head. How could he walk into the hospital and face his men, with the gunman still alive, still shooting at officers? He would hold his position until it was done.

For the next four hours, Gunter remained in the stairwell as police negotiated with the gunman. Gunter called his cousin, told him to call Gunters mom and let her know he was okay. As news spread about the shooting, texts poured in from friends.

Ivan, are you alright? one sergeant texted.

No, Gunter texted back. My people are dead, Im held up in a stairwell, 1 susp still in the building above me, and the car is shot up . . . Im pretty far from ok . . . im pissed the hell off.

Another sergeant  it was a group text  added: Keep your head on the damn swivel and get off yo phone. Update us when you are safe.

Gunter knew the SWAT team had the gunman cornered above. All he could do was await directions. He never saw the gunman, but he could hear him as he talked on a cellphone to a police negotiator. At times the gunman shouted. F--- it, he yelled at one point, according to Gunter.

The officers hands became cramped and sore from aiming their guns for so long. They rotated positions and took short breaks, passing bottles of water around. At times, Gunter thought about his men and felt a rush of emotion, then suppressed it.

Near 1:30 a.m., Gunter heard an explosion and felt the building rumble. Then quiet.

The standoff was over. Gunter waited for another hour while officers searched for bombs. Finally, a supervisors voice came over the radio: All clear. Micah Johnson, the Army veteran who had ambushed police, was dead.

Gunter stepped outside into the glow of the streetlights. By now he knew three of his officers were dead.

He had thought the gunmans death would feel like a victory. It didnt. Gunter walked alone, toward his car.

***

Another Foxtrot, Fillingim, also had remained downtown. He had raced inside a high-rise parking garage during the shooting, thinking the gunman was inside. After he had cleared the garage, supervisors had ordered him to stay put. For hours, he had been texting Ahrens. The men were close, had worked dozens of robberies together.

Where you at?

Did you go with Krol?

Whats going on?

No response.

After the standoff, Fillingim got a call from his sergeant, Gunter. The men met in the street. They looked at each other in silence for a moment. Then they turned toward Gunters car. Bullet holes dotted its exterior; three tires had been shot out.

Without speaking, they walked over to Fillingims car. It was still running, just as he left it hours earlier. They climbed in, and Fillingim flipped off the chatter of the police radio. He put the car in drive. The night was silent, except for the low sound of Gunters voice.

I was supposed to look after them.

This wasnt even our fight. Our guys, they had nothing to do with this.

The men drove through the quiet streets downtown to Baylor University Medical Center. They stepped around the yellow crime scene tape surrounding the ambulance bay. Dozens of officers fell silent as they saw the pair.

The men walked through the hospital to Ahrenss room and stepped inside. His giant, tattooed frame stretched across the hospital bed, still hooked to a ventilator, machines beeping. It seemed impossible that this powerful man  who had once commandeered a cab to chase a bad guy  was gone.

Ahrenss wife, Katrina, who is a Dallas police detective, was not in the room when her husbands commander arrived. Shed been awakened that night and taken to the hospital. Shed let their two children sleep, in the care of their grandparents. Shed learned that her husband survived an initial surgery before being rushed back into the operating room. The damage to his liver was extensive, and doctors had not been able to save him.

Fillingim approached, said his goodbyes. Then Gunter walked over. He looked at Ahrens, said a prayer, and turned away.

Ahrens was the fifth officer to die that night, a final, crushing blow to the dozens of officers who had arrived at the Baylor hospital. Gunter also went to Parkland, where his other two men had been taken. But by the time he arrived, his men already had been zipped into body bags and taken to the medical examiners office.

***



A member of the Dallas Police Choir passes the portraits of five fallen officers before a memorial service at Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas on July 12. The officers, from left, Michael Krol, Brent Thompson, Lorne Ahrens, Michael Smith and Patrick Zamarripa, were killed and several others injured in a sniper attack on July 7. (Eric Gay/AP)

Gunter walked back into the Southwest station about 5 a.m. Several supervisors, including Lt. Juan Salas, sat at their desks, waiting for him.

Salas called Gunter into a chiefs office. Years earlier, while Salas had been supervising a gang unit, one of his officers had been shot and killed. Salas had felt responsible. Hed endlessly replayed the what ifs. Salas believed that if he had talked about his guilt  said it aloud, rather than keeping it in his head  he might have healed better.

Salas and the other supervisors sat down, telling Gunter they wanted him to talk. No documentation, no recorders, no therapists. Just cops.

Gunter sat in a chair. It all came tumbling out. Seven of his men on duty with him that night, five of them injured, three fatally, at the hands of a sniper.

It was an ambush, an unfair fight, the officers told him. It wasnt his fault.

For the first time that night, Gunter broke down and sobbed.

***

The following week, three Foxtrots were lowered into the ground. Two others and the rookie in their care had begun recoveries from gunshot and shrapnel wounds.

After the last funeral, Gunter and four of the men met at a tattoo parlor near downtown. They took with them a picture of their patch, the red fox head, the bolt of lightning. Around the bottom, the tattoo artist sketched in the badge numbers of the fallen: #9217, #8193, #10112.

The needles buzzed, branding the officers on the back of a calf, on a forearm, on a left shoulder. Foxtrots forever.

Gunter stood to the side, watching. He wasnt ready for the tattoo yet. He wanted to quiet his thoughts, to stop the images in his mind. He wanted to remember. He wanted to forget.
TURKEY

Scores of Kurdish rebels neutralized

More than 100 Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants were either killed or wounded in clashes with Turkish security forces Saturday, Turkeys military said.

It was one of the highest casualty tolls in a single day of the conflict in recent years. Turkeys largely Kurdish southeast has been rocked by waves of violence following the collapse of a 2 -year cease-fire between the state and the PKK last year.

The military said in a statement that more than 100 PKK militants had been neutralized in clashes, without specifying how many were killed and how many wounded. It said most had been taken back to northern Iraq, where the PKK has mountain camps.

Turkeys southeast has seen heavy fighting in recent days in Hakkari province, near the border with Iraq, and in Van province, near the border with Iran. Five Turkish security force members were killed and six more were wounded in clashes in Hakkari, security sources said. Eight more security force members were reported killed overnight in Van.

More than 40,000 people, most of them Kurds, have died since the autonomy-seeking PKK launched its insurgency more than 30 years ago. The PKK is regarded as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.

 Reuters

PAKISTAN

Search for missing U.S. hikers called off

The families of two well-known Utah climbers who went missing on an icy mountain peak in Pakistan called off the search for them Saturday.

Jonathan Thesenga, a representative for one of the climbers sponsors, said the families of Kyle Dempster and Scott Adamson made the extremely difficult decision based on how much time had passed and the continuously storm weather.

Search team members as well as expert observers agreed the chances of finding any sign of the two were extremely slim, said Thesenga, global sports marketing manager for Utah-based Black Diamond Equipment, which was sponsoring Dempster.

According to Thesenga, the Pakistani military conducted exhaustive sweeps over the mens likely descent route with two helicopters. The aircraft also flew over where they were last seen. Saturday was the first day that the weather was clear enough for flyovers.

A rescue effort was launched last Sunday near northern Pakistans Choktoi Glacier after the men failed to return Aug. 26 to base camp.

Dempster, 33, and Adamson, 34, both of Utah, are two of the most accomplished alpinists of their generation. Dempster is a two-time winner of the coveted climbing award Piolets dOr. He last won in 2013 for a climb he did with others in the same area in Pakistan.

 Associated Press

Bangladesh hangs Islamist party leader: Bangladesh hanged a top Islamist party figure Saturday for atrocities committed during the 1971 war of independence from Pakistan, the law minister said, a move that could draw an angry reaction from his supporters. Mir Quasem Ali, 63, a key financier of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, was executed at Kashimpur Central Jail on the outskirts of Dhaka, the capital, for murder, confinement, torture and incitement to religious hatred during the war fought to break away from Pakistan. The execution took place amid a spate of militant attacks in the Muslim-majority nation, the most serious on July 1, when gunmen stormed a cafe in Dhakas diplomatic quarter and killed 20 hostages.

Venezuela makes arrests after president is jeered: Venezuelan authorities have arrested more than 30 people on Margarita Island for heckling President Nicolas Maduro, activists said, in what appeared to be a rare public confrontation with the unpopular leader. Videos published by activists, purportedly from the Margarita locality of Villa Rosa on Friday night, show scores of people banging pots and pans and jeering the socialist president during his visit to inspect state housing projects. The display of anger followed a vast march in Caracas on Thursday that opposition leaders say has emboldened Maduros foes after 17 years of socialist rule in the OPEC nation of 30 million people.

Pope denounces indifference to needy: Pope Francis on Saturday denounced what he called the modern-day sin of indifference to hunger, exploitation and other suffering, while commending the example of Mother Teresa on the eve of a sainthood ceremony for the nun who cared for Indias destitute. Choosing to not see hunger, disease, exploited persons, this is a grave sin. Its also a modern sin, a sin of today, Francis told thousands of lay volunteers in St. Peters Square at a special gathering to stress the need for more mercy and caring in the world.

Egypt promotes austerity in wake of IMF loan: Billboards and street signs have gone up across Egypts capital extolling austerity and hope, part of a pro-government public relations campaign aimed at preparing Egyptians for sweeping economic changes. The campaigns main slogan is: Oh, Egypt, with bold reforms, we shorten the road. The advertising blitz follows last months provisional agreement by the International Monetary Fund to give Egypt a $12 billion loan over three years to help President Abdel Fatah al-Sissis government overhaul the ailing economy. Egypt is expected to gradually lift state subsidies on fuel, basic services and food items as part of its economic program.

 From news services
For normal people, the general-election cycle starts now. (By normal, I mean, well, not me.)

Labor Day is the traditional start of the final two or so months of the presidential campaign  a time when even the casual political watcher starts to pay some attention to the race that I (and my fellow political junkies) have spent more than two years of our collective lives thinking and writing about. (It seems somewhat sad when I see it in writing.)

Given that the race is just starting for lots of people, its worth revisiting what we know about the contours of the contest.

1. Hillary Clinton is the front-runner . With less than 70 days left until Nov. 8, this is Clintons race to lose. She is better funded, better organized and  marginally  better liked. She also is the beneficiary of demographic and resultant electoral-college shifts in the country (more on that below). Although Clinton is the favorite, she has not, somewhat remarkably, closed the deal with a decent-size chunk of the electorate, which still has major questions about her honesty and trustworthiness. Her ham-handed response to the controversy over her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state has exacerbated those issues. Still, if you are a betting person, she is the safer pick.

[This professor has predicted every presidential election since 1984. Hes still trying to figure out 2016.]

2. There is no new Donald Trump. Since May 3  when Trump crushed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) in the Indiana primary and effectively sealed the Republican nomination  there has been talk of a Trump pivot in which he drops some of his brashness and reactionary rhetoric to convince wavering voters that he is temperamentally up to the task of being president. It has been four months and, time after time, Trump has taken one step forward and two steps back in support of the long-promised pivot. Heres a little secret: There is no new or other Trump; there is just this Trump, take him or leave him.

3. The public does not really want either of them. Clinton, at the moment, has a clear  although slightly shrinking  lead over Trump in key swing state and national polling. But what comes through loud and clear in those polls is that voters  especially Republican voters  are making up their minds not based on whom they like but based on whom they do not like. The aversion to Clinton is so extensive among GOP base voters that they are beginning to rally to Trumps cause despite having major issues with much of what he says and lingering questions about how committed he is to the conservative cause. And Democrats are fearful and astounded at the idea of Trump anywhere near the White House.

4. Republicans have a demographic problem . In the wake of the GOPs loss in the 2012 presidential election, a group of top thinkers in the party released an autopsy of what went wrong  and how to fix it. One of the central recommendations was that Republicans needed to find a way to be in support of some sort of comprehensive immigration reform  otherwise, they would lose their chance at the growing Latino vote, maybe forever. Four years later, the party has nominated a candidate whose centerpiece campaign issue is building a wall on the Southern border and making Mexico pay for it. In most polls, Trump is underperforming the 27 percent support that former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney got among Hispanics in the 2012 race. Thats a disaster for the Republican Party going forward.

5. Republicans have an electoral map problem. Fueled by its inability to broaden its coalition beyond white voters, the GOP faces an uphill struggle to get the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House. Although there is a tendency to blame Trump for this, its not entirely (or even mostly) his fault: Only 1 in 10 people who voted for Romney in 2012 were nonwhite. What that means in practical terms is that states such as Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Virginia and Colorado are moving to the Democratic Party at varying speeds. Meanwhile, there is no such movement toward Republicans. (Minnesota and Wisconsin are getting slightly more Republican with each passing presidential election, but it is a very slow change.) Consider this: Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every election since 1992. That accounts for 242 electoral votes. Meanwhile, 13 states have voted for the Republican nominee in each of those six elections. Add them up, and you get 102 electoral votes. Its just math.

These are the people who will be lobbing questions at Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton when they go head-to-head at the 2016 presidential debates. The first debate is slated for September 26. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)

6. The first presidential debates will be bananas. Circle Sept. 26 on your calendar. Thats the night of the first general-election debate between Trump and Clinton. Even if you do not like politics, its going to be must-see TV. The debate, which will be moderated by NBCs Lester Holt, will almost certainly draw the biggest audience of any presidential get-together in American history. And given that Trump is likely to enter it behind Clinton and in need of a major moment, it has the potential to go in a thousand directions. I get excited just thinking about it.
Sen. Ron Johnson runs down a litany of the United States ills: a rising debt and deficit, unsecured borders, threats from the Islamic State. And he knows just what to blame: an overreaching federal government stepping on the throats of American entrepreneurs.

Sometimes I refer to myself as Mr. Sunshine, the Wisconsin Republican tells the employees of a small energy-management firm here. And I do it somewhat facetiously because, lets face it, I am laying out realities that are not the brightest every now and again.

Johnson was one of the most unlikely political success stories of the 2010 Republican wave, a plastics manufacturer who made his first run for political office and spent $9 million of his own money in a long-shot bid to unseat popular three-term incumbent Russell Feingold  and succeeded.

Six years later, Johnson is trailing in a rematch with Feingold. Johnsons sharp-edged message of a nation heading off a cliff hasnt changed much. But its target has shifted from President Obama to include Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

From my standpoint, youve got another six years of failure of liberal progressive Obama-Clinton-Feingold policies, he said in an interview after his campaign appearance.

Former senator Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) is running to recapture the seat he lost to Ron Johnson in 2010. (Scott Bauer/Associated Press)

As of Labor Day weekend, the unofficial start of the campaigns final stretch, the electoral map is bigger than Republicans are comfortable with. Bolstered by Republican nominee Donald Trumps unpopularity with non-white, female and suburban voters, Democrats have recruited candidates in enough Senate and House races to potentially flip control of both chambers.

Democrats chances are strongest in the Senate, where they now lead in enough races to eke out a majority, with hopes of putting more in play should Trump continue to falter throughout the fall.

Republicans, playing defense, are asking voters to look past Trump and to question whether they really trust Clintons party to fix Washington.

Wisconsin will need me to be a check and balance on her, Johnson said when asked about the prospect of a Clinton presidency, before adding that he would work my tail off trying to find areas agreeing with her as well.

Johnson is one of dozens of Republicans asking voters to thread that needle, from the suburbs of Philadelphia to the exurbs of central California. After winning his primary last week, for instance, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) offered his own check-and-balance pitch in a new ad.

In Minnesota, just across the state line here, Democrats bullishness about a Trump backlash has them playing in two House districts they would need if they are to retake the House, which remains an uphill fight with two months to go.

In the 2nd District, south and east of St. Paul, the retirement of Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.) has created a race between liberal health-care executive Angie Craig and conservative talk radio host Jason Lewis  a Trump endorser who bested Klines preferred successor in the primary. In the 3rd District, south and west of Minneapolis, Democrats recruited state Sen. Terri Bonoff to challenge Rep. Erik Paulsen, who hasnt faced a credible opponent since his election in 2008.

1 of 60 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  What Donald Trump is doing on the campaign trail View Photos The GOP presidential nominee is out on the trail ahead of the general election in November. Caption The GOP presidential nominee is pressing his case ahead of Election Day. Nov. 7, 2016 Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event at SNHU Arena in Manchester, N.H. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post Wait 1 second to continue.

Paulsen is presenting himself as a can-do Republican who got the most legislation signed by the president of anyone in Minnesotas delegation. He has not endorsed Trump, who has not earned his support  and pointedly he does not say what Trump could do to earn it.

I havent been paying attention to him, to be honest, Paulsen said in an interview at the Minnesota State Fair.

Bonoff, like every Democrat on the ballot this year, can recite Trumps greatest hits. In an interview, the state senator credited Trump with pulling her into the race after months of pressure from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

I was watching those Republican debates in shock, she said. My opponent has a record that reflects the current Republican platform, and hes kind of flown under the radar. He was the co-author of the bill to defund Planned Parenthood, and he has not rejected Trump.

On Saturday, Bonoff tested her theory of the race by knocking on doors in Paulsens hometown of Eden Prairie  focusing on voters who were not identified as Democrats. When the doors creaked open, Bonoff introduced herself as an exceedingly independent candidate who had a 20-year career in business before running for anything. She mentioned her party only when prompted.

Democrats view the Paulsen-Bonoff race as a reach, one that could be winnable if Trump significantly depresses the suburban Republican vote. They view the Craig-Lewis race as an example of what Trump has already done to the party.

Lewis, a long-time booster of former congresswoman Michele Bachmann, won his primary after years of high-profile talk radio punditry. Craigs Arkansas twang has not rubbed off since moving to Minnesota; the executive at St. Jude Medical, a Twins City medical device manufacturer, had no political record to run from.

Democrats have attempted to bury Lewis in his old quotes. Hes riffed on single women voting on the issue of somebody else buying their diaphragm; suggested it was hard to say if the Civil War needed to be fought; and worried about the cultural suicide of white people having fewer children than non-whites.

As Craig walked through the state fair more than once, voters told her that they worried about the district if Lewis won. He says, Oh, I was just trying to be provocative,  Ken Boyd said after shaking Craigs hand. Weve had enough of that.

Craig, who freely admitted that both candidates at the top of the ticket are unpopular in the district, quickly pointed out that her polling had Clinton on top. It was clear, Craig said, that Lewis would be a poor fit.

Jason has spent his entire career staring at a microphone and trying to elicit the most provocative thought, she said.

Lewis suggested that Democrats were running on phony issues to distract from Craigs radical agenda and endorsements from liberal groups.

People are tired of the predictable, canned political campaigns, Lewis said, as he ordered cups of black coffee from a supporters St. Paul restaurant. I dont want to be glib about it, but when I see one of those Hillary ads that ends with her and Bill hugging?

Lewis rolled his eyes and brought up health care, an issue that Democrats arent sure how to finesse. As they met voters this weekend, Craig and Bonoff repeatedly met people who had seen insurance premiums spike. A pair of dairy farmers told Craig that their farms employees were being forced onto the states most expensive plan. A retiree methodically walked Bonoff through all of his cost increases.

They make an ad about what Trump said 15 years ago, Lewis said. Well, great. He said that, but so did my sister at Thanksgiving last year. Meanwhile, people are watching their insurance premiums double. Its like a bad Miller Lite commercial  less coverage, now with more cost. How is any of this helping with that?

In Wisconsin, Feingold is running a conventional Democratic campaign, talking about the same kinds of middle-class economic issues that Clinton has embraced. Issues he built his reputation on in his three Senate terms  campaign finance reform, civil liberties and foreign policy in Africa  are not on his front burner.

I think in 2010 everybody was feeling the pinch; everybody was frustrated that the economy had collapsed, Feingold said in an interview. There was a lot of anger. I wouldnt characterize what Im seeing right now as so much anger as, Wheres the fairness? Why is it that things have gotten better in some respects, but why am I not feeling it? 

Feingold has taken a cautious approach to questions about Clintons honesty. Asked whether the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation ought to shut down to eliminate possible conflicts of interest, Feingold suggested that the Clintons be as open as possible, and make sure theres not anything out there thats going to tarnish a new presidency.

Johnson has had a rougher time dealing with his own presidential nominee, staking out a tricky support-but-not-endorse approach.

Donald Trump, hes a business guy, knows how hard business is, knows how much harder government makes it, Johnson said. When you talk to his most ardent supporters, if they have any discomfort with his positions, they realize thats his starting position. A good negotiator doesnt lay the best deal on the table right off the bat. Hes got the personality and the approach of a negotiator of a businessperson, and thats not all bad for a president of the United States, okay?

To the extent that Johnsons fate is separate from Trumps, it depends on motivating voters such as J.D. Thorne, a Milwaukee employment lawyer who attended a Kiwanis Club lunch where Feingold spoke. Thorne left the event feeling that Feingold comes off as anything goes.

Hes not as strident, Thorne said. Johnson is, and I want him to be. I want him to do something.

Weigel reported from Minnesota.
Supreme Court justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the U.S. Capitol before a Women's History Month reception in March 20105. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

The Supreme Court is never going to look like America.

Get over it, as the late Justice Antonin Scalia might say. Or at least get used to it.

Sure, it might be nice if there was another religion represented among the courts five Catholics and three Jews. Maybe there could be someone who didnt go to law school at Harvard or Yale. The court is stocked with judges and law professors  how about a criminal defense attorney? Someone of Asian descent?

[Does the Supreme Court need a Protestant?]

The courts newest justices  Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan  came west last week, and each drew attention to the way their exclusive club at 1 First St. NE does not resemble the rest of the country.

But Sotomayor told those gathered at the lavish Broadmoor resort for the 10th Circuit Bench and Bar Conference that the court is simply not engineered to mirror a changing America.

The Supreme Court is never going to be a melting pot reflective of the country, Sotomayor said in response to a question from Timothy M. Tymkovich, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit.

The Constitution protects judges from political pressure by giving them lifetime tenure. That means that openings on the court are wildly unpredictable, dependent on an individuals mood or health. Justices are living  and serving  longer.

In most of our lifetimes, the court is going to turn over [only] one full circle, said Sotomayor, who is 62. In such a context, she said, perhaps it is not surprising there was not a Hispanic justice until the 21st century.

[Sotomayors fierce dissent references Black Lives Matter movement]

And when a young girl asked her recently whether there would be a female chief justice in the girls lifetime, Sotomayor could only shrug.

Its not a job that comes open very often. While we are about to elect our 45th president, there have been only 17 chief justices.

John G. Roberts Jr. was one of the youngest ever when he was confirmed in 2005 at the age of 50, and we all hope Chief Justice Roberts will have a very long tenure, said Sotomayor, who joined the court four years later.

When Roberts does exit the center seat, whether he is replaced with a woman will depend on who is president at the time, the list of candidates and the vagaries of the Senate confirmation process.

Kagan was in Colorado Springs too, after a stop at the University of Arizona. It was at Arizona that she worried about how the court appears to the public.

People look at an institution and they see people who are like them, who share their experiences, who they imagine share their set of values, and thats a sort of natural thing and they feel more comfortable if that occurs, Kagan said, according to news reports.

She worried about the fact that most of the justices have spent their formative years on the East Coast, in Washington, New York or Boston.

I think more than gender, race or ethnicity, it really does have to do with this kind of coastal perspective, she said.

Neither Sotomayor nor Kagan mentioned the pending nomination of U.S. Circuit Judge Merrick Garland  who is a white, male, Jewish, a Harvard graduate and a longtime judge who spent his professional career in Washington.

Kagan, 56, is a friend and admirer of Garland; it seems unlikely she thinks geographic diversity is important enough to deny him a seat on the high court.

And Sotomayor made the point that looks can be deceiving. The justices right now do share a lot of similarities, she said, listing their religions, educational backgrounds and professional pursuits.

But we are very different people, she said.

For instance: You would think Clarence Thomas and I would be more similar, wouldnt you, if you looked just at our background and upbringing?

Thomas, 68, is only the second African American to serve on the high court, Sotomayor the first Hispanic. Both come from humble backgrounds, were the first in their families to attend college, and were recruited to Yale Law School in an effort to boost minority enrollment.

But they disagree on the law more than almost any other pair of justices. (Sotomayor said she hoped we are similar in a characteristic I greatly admire in him, which is his kindness and generosity toward people.)

The same might be said of criticism of the educational backgrounds  all have Ivy League credentials, with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburgs Columbia degree coming after two years at Harvard.

But thats hardly a predictable indicator of a justices ideology. Yale is often cited as the nations best law school, and one of its most liberal. Its alums on the court include Sotomayor, perhaps the courts most liberal justice, but also Thomas and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., easily the courts two most conservative.

Sotomayor concluded of her fellow justices: I think we do bring a kind of diversity of approaches, thinking, analysis that is reflective of the vibrancy of the country.

Sotomayor and Kagan joined the court in one of its most turbulent times in recent history: Roberts, Alito and the two of them all joined in a five-year span. But no new justice has been confirmed since.

Kagan, in a fireside chat at the conference, reflected on what it has meant to be the junior justice since her confirmation in 2010.

For one thing, she serves on the courts cafeteria committee, where she regularly attends meetings in which a common concern is what happened to the good chocolate-chip cookie recipe.

By tradition, she takes the notes when the justices meet alone to discuss cases. And she is expected to leap up to answer the door even if Im in the middle of a sentence.

But, in a reminder of why the court changes so slowly, Kagan noted that she holds the longevity seat. She replaced John Paul Stevens, who served from 1975 to 2010. Stevens took over for William O. Douglas, who had served for nearly 37 years.

Knock wood, Kagan said.
The University of Missouri is defending its research practices after a national pet-adoption group publicly decried an experiment that led to six female beagles being euthanized.

The California-based Beagle Freedom Project (BFP), which is suing the university system over $82,000 in fees it says it is being charged for an open-records request, said it learned of the dogs deaths after happening upon a published study about treatment for damaged corneas.

As detailed in April in the Journal of Veterinary Ophthalmology, the study said roughly 1-year-old beagles had their left eyes intentionally damaged while they were anesthetized. Half of the animals then were given a topical acid treatment to determine if that healed the eye damage. It didnt, and the dogs eventually were put to death.

Kevin Chase, vice president of the BFP, which rescues former research animals ranging from ponies to goldfish for adoption, called the universitys experiment a colossal failure and cruel, noting the corneas top layer is filled with thousands of tiny nerve endings.

Animal-rights groups widely say nearly 400 U.S. research labs use nearly 70,000 dogs each year, the majority of which are beagles, usually because of their docility.

The university issued a statement saying the beagles were anesthetized during the procedure and were given pain medications if any discomfort was evident. The research, meant to develop painless or noninvasive treatments for corneal injuries, improves the quality of life for both animals and humans, the university said.

Animal research is only done when scientists believe there is no other way to study the problem, and our researchers respect their research animals greatly and provide the utmost care, the statement said. The animals were treated humanely and every effort was made to ensure dogs were as comfortable as possible during the tests to study the effectiveness of the new drug treatment.
At the G-20 summit on Sunday in Hangzhou, China, Secretary of State John Kerry , second from right, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, second from left, tried to negotiate a Syrian cease-fire. (Yuri Kochetkov/EPA)

Efforts by the United States and Russia to forge a deal for a cease-fire in Syria and to coordinate their counterterrorism operations there faltered again Sunday, even as a major new Syrian-Russian offensive in the besieged city of Aleppo appeared to undermine key components of the proposed agreement.

After an anticipated news conference did not take place, Secretary of State John F. Kerry told reporters that his negotiations here with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov snagged on a couple of tough issues  nearly identical to the language he used when the two failed to reach agreement in their last meeting, just over a week ago in Geneva. Officials said they would meet again Monday.

Kerry and Lavrov are in Hangzhou for a meeting of the Group of 20 economies, also attended by President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin. In his own news conference, Obama said he was skeptical that Russia and Syria would abide by any agreement but said a long-term solution to Syrias civil war is still urgently needed.

It is worth trying, he said, because there are women, children, innocent civilians who can get food and medical supplies to get some relief from the terror of constant bombings. Citing grave differences, Obama said that its premature for us to say theres a clear path forward, but theres the possibility, at least for us, to make some progress.

The administration, which has long been reluctant to intervene directly in the civil war, nonetheless thinks it is a distraction to what it considers the more important, separate battle against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, and must be resolved.

Kerry, with approval from Obama, traveled to Moscow in mid-July to propose an agreement under which the United States would share intelligence and coordinate its bombing of terrorist targets with Russia if Moscow would agree to ground the Syrian air force and stop its own bombing of U.S.-backed opposition forces.

Russia has complained of increasing overlap between the opposition and terrorist groups on the ground, and it said it was up to the United States to separate them before a deal could be struck. U.S. failure to do so has allowed the Russians to claim they are targeting only terrorists of the Front for the Conquest of Syria  or Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, the al-Qaeda affiliate formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra  and the Islamic State.

In comments to Russian journalists earlier in the day, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov indicated that the separation of forces remains an issue. There is a great phrase: Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed, Ryabkov said. For months, he said, Russia had been asking the Americans for a real, genuine demarcation between terrorists and the so-called opposition.

But he insisted that the two sides were close to agreement. . . . There is no basis to expect that all of this will collapse.

On Aug. 26, Kerry met with Lavrov in Geneva to try to build momentum for the proposal. The two sides said then that they were close to agreement and that military and intelligence teams from both sides were ironing out technical details. Kerry predicted a deal could be made within a week.

Since then, the bombardments have continued, including in the city of Aleppo  divided between rebels in the east and the government in the west  where the United Nations says nearly 2 million people are now without food, water and medical care. The northern route out of the city to Turkey, previously held by the rebels, has been cut by the government. U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura has pleaded with all sides to allow aid to travel into the city along the corridor, but the rebels have refused unless government forces withdraw from what is known as Castello Road.

In a letter to rebel leaders Saturday, the U.S. liaison to the opposition groups, Michael Ratney, outlined the parameters of the Kerry proposal and asked for their agreement, Reuters reported.

In the meantime, though, the Syrian government this weekend has made important new battlefield gains around Aleppo that challenge basic assumptions of a proposed cease-fire that was to freeze last weeks battle lines.

While Front-led forces last month broke through government encirclement from the south to join with opposition rebels occupying the eastern half of the city, that route now also appears to be closed as a conduit for aid, as the government launched a major new push to retake it.

Late on Sunday, Syrian forces, backed by Russian airstrikes, seized control of the area, known as the Ramouseh corridor, and fully laid siege to Aleppo.

Russian support for the offensive prompted U.S. officials to raise questions over whether the Russians could be relied upon to implement an agreement to freeze battle lines and ground the Syrian air force.

The Russians must have known that if Ramouseh falls, the deal would have to be scrapped and started over, said Faysal Itani of the Washington-based Atlantic Council. The deal was not a good deal for the Russians. . . . If they have a chance to make gains on the ground and start over, its not bad for them.

Beyond Aleppo, Russia and the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad have continued to refuse to allow U.N. humanitarian aid convoys to enter more than a dozen besieged towns and cities held by various rebel forces. In recent days, two suburbs of the capital, Damascus, that have been under siege for years  Darayya and Moadamiya  have given in to government proposals to evacuate civilians and withdraw rebel forces.

De Mistura has criticized those arrangements, and outside experts have charged the Russians and the Assad government with violating earlier agreements to allow aid to pass and of dragging their feet on a cease-fire until they can starve the besieged communities into submission.

.

DeYoung reported from Washington and Sly from Beirut; Carol Morello in Washington and Andrew Roth in Moscow contributed to this report.

Read more:

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Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world
All day long, a line of Afghans waited outside Farid Hamidis office, clutching sheaves of tattered legal papers they had brought to other officials in the past. They had heard that Afghanistans new attorney general was an honest man, willing to listen to anyone, so they had gathered up their fading hopes for justice and taken a number outside his door.

Their cases ranged from petty to tragic. A weeping woman in a blue burqa begged Hamidi to stop some neighbors from harassing her daughters. A despondent farmer in a stained tunic pleaded for leniency for his son, a former police officer, who is in prison facing a death sentence. He said the son was forced to confess to a murder committed by his superior officer, who was in love with a woman and killed her fiance on their wedding night.

Hamidi, 49, a scholarly man with a shock of gray hair, listened gravely to each entreaty last Monday, often asking for more details or pausing to consult several assistants. Sometimes he signed a legal order or promised to review the matter. Other times he explained apologetically that there was nothing he could do to help.

I have been pursuing this case for 16 years, going from one office to another. You are my last hope, said Mohammed Sarwar Akbar, 57, a rural district official carrying a satchel full of documents. He said his brother had been killed long ago and the murderer had been released from prison due to political pressure. This man should not be free, he said. Hamidi agreed to look into it.

[Afghanistan has many problems. Its president may be one of them.]

The weekly public access session, which Hamidi instituted after taking office in June, is part of a campaign to boost public confidence in a justice system that has long been criticized as slow, corrupt and heavily politicized. President Ashraf Ghani has made this issue a centerpiece of his reform agenda, and his choice of Hamidi, a former human rights activist, was widely praised and unanimously approved by parliament.

At conferences and on his official website, Hamidi often says his highest priorities are attacking corruption and ensuring that all Afghans have access to justice. He has replaced scores of prosecutors across the country, and two weeks ago he inaugurated a new anti-corruption justice center, with a team of investigators and prosecutors to pursue high-level cases of fraud and bribery. .

The future of Afghanistan is at stake because of corruption. If we dont act against it, we wont be able to bring peace, stability, security or rule of law, Hamidi said in a recent interview. We are building a machine that has public support and strong political will. I will be accountable, transparent and committed to this mission.

A former official of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, Hamidi said he was persuaded to take the job by Ghani, who called him at 6 a.m. last spring in Boston, where he was finishing a masters degree at Harvards John F. Kennedy School of Government. The president told me, I need you and your country needs you. Three days later, I was in Kabul, Hamidi said.

[Hard-boiled cops of Afghan major crimes unit up against ocean of lawbreaking]

Still, many observers remain skeptical that Hamidi will be able to penetrate the web of corruption in Afghanistan, where a generation of conflict empowered armed strongmen and a decade of foreign-funded projects has created vast opportunities for stealing. Jobs in law enforcement are widely viewed as opportunities for extortion, and powerful men in dark-windowed SUVs break the law with impunity.

Many of the cases that came before Hamidi last Monday had a common theme of abuse and de facto power wielded by wealthy or well-connected Afghans who flout the law  often in cahoots with corrupt officials. The individual stories hinted at a far wider and deeper problem that previous justice ministers and top prosecutors have been unable or unwilling to tackle.

Hajji Hayatabullah, 53, a community leader from Kabul, said he had come on behalf of several hundred residents who had been robbed of their land by a group of wealthy young men with guns and close ties to powerful members of Parliament. He said he had been to numerous other officials to complain but had come away empty-handed.

One agency put out an arrest order, but the district police officer ran away, Hayatabullah said. These are mafia people. They have weapons and ride around in Land Cruisers with no license plates, and they do what they want. Nobody can stop them.

Hamidi agreed to review the case, and he has repeatedly stressed that under his new authority, no one in Afghanistan will be above the law. His team of eager young prosecutors is slated to set up the new anti-corruption unit in a heavily guarded compound on the outskirts of the capital. But so far, they have yet to go after any really big fish, and commenters on social media warned that Hamidi is taking on a monster.

You are a very qualified person for this job and we wish you all the best, one Afghan tweeted, listing a litany of common abuses, from legislators who drive untaxed luxury vehicles to terrorists who bribe their way out of prison. He strongly urged Hamidi to give polygraph tests to all judges and prosecutors. Hope this is a good start and you will do some work and not get corrupted like the others, he added. Good luck.

Read more

Afghan political crisis intensifies as two-year anniversary nears

Young people dont see a future in Afghanistan, so theyre leaving

Afghanistan has many problems. Its president may be one of them.

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world
Tareq Oubrou is the leader of the Muslim community in a city famous for the earthy red wines that have made this region a household name  and that his followers are forbidden from sampling.

But after three major terrorist attacks in two years and recent controversy over the burkini swimsuit, Oubrou has become Frances leading advocate for an Islam that is progressive, inclusive and, most of all, French.

In a series of articles, television interviews and now a popular book, Oubrou has publicly criticized the headscarf, argued for welcoming homosexual Muslims into the faith and equated the essence of Islam with the basic French idea of human emancipation.

For this imam, the two are one and the same  and entirely unrelated to the frequent public debate over what Muslim women wear, either on the street or on the beach.

I dont care what people put on their heads, he said during an interview in his office in Bordeauxs grand mosque. The room was piled with books from floor to ceiling. I find that a shameful debate.

Frances highest administrative court, the Conseil dEtat, overturned the so-called burkini bans in 26 of the countrys coastal towns and cities. (Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)

In his recent book, What You Dont Know About Islam, published in February, Oubrou calls for an Islam of France, which he defines as the reconciliation of a spiritual Islam that expresses itself in the language of the Republican values already in place. Namely, Frances holy triumvirate of liberty, equality and fraternity.

Largely for ideas like these, Oubrou has become a darling of the French political elite. In 2013, he was named a chevalier of the Legion of Honor, the countrys highest award for civil and military merit; in January 2015, he was chosen by the Interior Ministry as a special adviser to the government after the Charlie Hebdo attacks. There are even rumors that he could become a government minister if Bordeauxs mayor, the popular Alain Juppe, wins the countrys presidential election next year.

[French suspect arrested for alleged attack plot to protest Muslim migrant surge]

But his ideas have also earned Oubrou many detractors, including a number of ordinary French Muslims, who feel that his views often parrot those of the government. After all, the same people who decorated Oubrou with the Legion of Honor ultimately condoned the burkini ban, on the grounds that it was an affront to republican equality.

Its coming from a good intention, I think, Marwan Muhammad, director of the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, said in an interview. But many see his vision of Islam  that Muslims should be discreet, should be less visible than they are today  as basically validating Islamophobic stereotypes, that basically Muslims should prove their loyalty to the state by assimilating.

Meanwhile, the Islamic State has issued several fatwas against Oubrou, whom its leaders regularly call the imam of debauchery. He should be killed without hesitation, insisted Dar al-Islam, its French-language magazine, in its spring issue. Oubrou says he has not lost any sleep over this latest threat  and still refuses the governments offer of police protection. If I were afraid, it would be a defeat, he said.

To Oubrou, France has been since the French Revolution less of a country and more of a concept, committed to human rights and universal equality. And these, he argues, are the same lofty aspirations as those of Islam and any true religion.

The Muslim faith is in the service of all humanity in general  as is the nation, he said. Thats what religion is: how to serve man, how to transform him, to make man as perfect as possible in thought, in sensibility, in spirituality, in relation to the mysteries of God.

[Nice attack propels anti-immigrant sentiments into Frances mainstream]

Born in Morocco to Francophone parents in 1959, Oubrou was naturalized as a French citizen in the late 1980s. It was a watershed moment in his life and his development as a thinker. As he put it: I adopted French nationality, and so I should be loyal, quite simply. I should respect the law, contribute to the economy of this country and its prosperity as much as any other citizen.

In France, as elsewhere in Europe, there is a long tradition of religions perceived as foreign working tirelessly to demonstrate that their teachings are more than compatible with society at large.

Throughout the 19th century, for instance, Frances Jewish leaders, facing constant anti-Semitism, argued that the Hebrew Bible stressed the same values as the nation. They proudly sent their sons and brothers to serve in the French military in World War I.

In the face of rising Islamophobia, Oubrous sermons and teachings show a similar patriotic impulse. For instance, he has insisted that the Bordeaux mosque use the French language in addition to Arabic. Children in the mosques school learn about Islam in French, as do those enrolled in its seminary.

Our third and fourth generations dream in French, Oubrou said. They should speak to God in French.

Besides, he says, French citizenship is an identity distinct from other national affiliations: It is a moral contract, a commitment to lofty, abstract ideals that make more sense when individuals can connect them with their private faiths.

These days, what primarily interests Oubrou are those who feel excluded from that moral contract, especially the young French and Francophone Muslims who, for a variety of reasons, have been pushed toward radicalization in recent years. In each of France's recent terrorist attacks, the perpetrators came from this loose demographic, a fact that Oubrou has begun confronting on a local level.

Along with Bordeauxs City Hall, he has helped create a pilot program for deradicalizing young people suspected of showing violent tendencies at an early age. Called the Center of Action and Prevention Against the Radicalization of Individuals (CAPRI), it was formally launched announced in January.

[French newspaper Le Monde will no longer publish photos of terrorism suspects]

According to Marik Fetouh, the Bordeaux municipal officer for equality and citizenship who oversees the program, CAPRI receives referrals from local authorities about individuals they suspect may be susceptible to radicalization: typically young men in relative social isolation whose social-media profiles suggest an affinity with the Islamic State or the rhetoric of other extremist groups.

Fetouh added that since the announcement of the program, local families  entirely independent of the authorities  have also begun approaching the organization about their children. They feel comfortable doing so, he said, because CAPRI is not meant as incarceration: It is primarily designed as a mental-health initiative, staffed with trained professionals who help troubled youths identify and confront the sources of their anger.

Since it began, Fetouh said, CAPRI has worked with roughly 30 individuals. While a success rate will be difficult to ascertain, the hope is that the program will serve as a humane template for what other communities across France might do as the country confronts the issue collectively. This year, for instance, Frances prime minister, Manuel Valls, announced the establishment of other deradicalization centers, although those will focus on individuals at a later stage.

For Oubrou, a key factor in the fight against radicalization lies in acknowledging the shortcomings of the same nation he has devoted his life to upholding.

To be honest, radicalization is a symptom of the malaise of the republic. Our notion of equality is never applied on the level of schools or on the level of work. Equality is important between women and men, and everyone must dress the same, he said, referring to the rationale of those who opposed the burkini. But not on the level of salary.

This, in his mind, is the eternal riddle of the French Republic, at times as elusive and equivocal as the religions its staunch secularism nominally opposes. France is perhaps the most utopian country in the world, Oubrou said. But its a utopia thats not achievable.

Read more

Frances burkini debate: About a bathing suit and a countrys peculiar secularism

As France fights burkini war, many ask: Why?

To curb radicalism, France targets foreign funding for mosques

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world
People line up at a polling station to cast ballots for the legislative council election in Hong Kong. (Vincent Yu/AP)

In 2014, tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents took to the streets in a defiant challenge to China. They called for full democracy, universal suffrage and the protection of their way of life.

But few spoke of independence  until now.

Two years after the umbrella revolution swept Hong Kong, with rising anger about Beijings influence in the city, what once was a fringe position has become a nascent political force.

On Sunday, in the first election since the 2014 protests, the ballot included candidates who support the idea of independence, as well as other newcomers who have called for greater autonomy for the Chinese special administrative regionand early results suggest a strong showing.

A record number of people cast ballots, creating hours-long lines across the city. In one district, turnout was so high that voting was extended until 2:30 a.m.

The results will not immediately change Hong Kongs governance. Only half of the seats of the citys 70-member legislative council are directly elected through universal suffrage; half are functional constituencies that give corporations, associations and chambers of commerce actual votes.

Yet the rise of young, independence and pro-democracy candidates means that those critical of Beijings influence will likely maintain the ability to veto policies proposed by the pro-China camp.

And it sends a clear message to Beijing: The battleground may have shifted, but the fight for Hong Kong is on.

Over the past four years, Hong Kongs political landscape has been radically reshaped.

In 1997, the onetime British colony was returned to Chinese rule under an arrangement known as one country, two systems. Hong Kong would maintain certain rights and separate laws for 50 years but would be beholden, ultimately, to Beijing.

In the two systems framework, many in Hong Kong saw space for political change. And for the better part of 15 years, the citys pro-democracy camp worked within the system for that goal.

When people in Hong Kong last voted in legislative elections, in 2012, independence was not on the agenda. But 2014 changed that.

In June of that year, Beijing issued a white paper that confirmed some of the democracy movements worst fears about the Chinese governments plans for Hong Kong. One country, two systems does not mean autonomy, it said, but rather the power to run local affairs as authorized by the central leadership.

By September, anger about the paper, combined with outrage about the arrest of student leaders, culminated in the peaceful occupation of one of Asias financial centers  for 79 days.

But thousands of people sleeping on a major thoroughfare did not secure a single concession from Beijing. And by the time the crowds dispersed and the tent city was torn down, many thought the movement was over.

Perhaps it could have been. But in the years since, Beijing has done little to ease fears. Last winter, five men affiliated with a Hong Kong publishing house that specializes in gossipy books about Chinese leaders disappeared  abducted, it later emerged, by Chinese security forces.

[The saga of Hong Kongs abducted booksellers takes a darker turn]

One of the men, Lee Bo, is thought to have been spirited away from a Hong Kong warehouse and smuggled across the border to the Chinese mainland  an act widely considered a violation of one country, two systems.

While missing, he sent strange, seemingly scripted letters back to Hong Kong claiming that he was not missing but assisting with an investigation. As the farce unfolded, Hong Kongs government was either unwilling or unable to help.

This and other incidents have fueled a surge in anti-China sentiment and an interest in the idea of independence, especially among the young. Rather than address that anger, though, the government has tried to outlaw it.

In July, Hong Kongs election commission said candidates in the legislative election had to sign a pledge accepting three clauses in the citys mini-constitution, known as the Basic Law, that say Hong Kong is part of China. Six candidates were later barred from running because of their views.

In August, Hong Kong teachers were warned that they could lose their qualifications if they advocated independence in schools.

Hong Kongs leader, Leung Chun-ying, said that the citys teachers should stop students from talking about independence  just as they stop them from doing drugs. Another official, Fanny Law, said on the radio that the topic is simply too complicated for school.

The interest does not mean that independence is likely, but it suggests how hard it will be for Chinas leaders to win hearts and minds as the gap between Beijing and Hong Kong seems to grow.

In a poll published in July by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, about 17 percent of 1,010 Hong Kongers surveyed said they support independence after 2047. The survey found that less than 4 percent thought independence was possible.

In Beijings eyes, of course, it is absolutely not an option. In May, a top Communist Party official, Zhang Dejiang, dismissed independence out of hand, warning Hong Kong against moves to resist the central government.

Read more:

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world
Turkish troops and Syrian rebels on Sunday pushed the Islamic State out of the remaining stretch of territory the group had controlled along the Turkish-Syrian border, severing the militants last access to the outside world.

Since 2013, when the group announced its formation, it has had territory bordering a NATO state  Turkey  but the sweep by Turkish forces and rebels fighting under the umbrella of the Free Syrian Army has brought that to an end.

According to the official Turkish news agency Anadolu, the Turkish army helped Syrian rebel allies secure 57 miles of border territory stretching from the Syrian towns of Azaz and Jarabulus by ejecting the militants from a string of villages on Sunday.

The Islamic States defeat in the border area had been inevitable since Turkey dispatched troops and tanks into Syria on Aug. 24 into Syria to support a long-stalled Syrian rebel offensive there, bringing new muscle to the fight.

But their removal from the border nonetheless marks a symbolically important moment in the war against the militants, who had long relied on their access to Turkey for supplies.

Above all, the border had served as the main conduit for the foreign fighters who have swarmed to participate in the militants ambitious experiment in Islamic governance, formalized in 2014 into what the groups leadership termed a caliphate.

The traffic went both ways, and operatives who participated in attacks in Turkey as well as Paris and Belgium had crossed back across the border from Islamic State territory.

At one point the militants controlled towns along a stretch of the border spanning hundreds of miles. But they have been steadily pushed back by the efforts of the different groups working against them, including the Kurds farther east and the Syrian rebels in locations farther west.

The conquest came as President Obama pledged support for Turkeys stepped-up role in the fight against the militants after meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the Group of 20 summit in China.

The Turkish government has made it clear that its incursion into Syria is also intended to prevent Syrian Kurds from expanding the areas under their control. In comments to reporters after meeting Obama, Erdogan reiterated that the Kurds are as much of a target of Turkeys Syria intervention as the Islamic State.

Turkeys fight against all terror organizations including Daesh and YPG will continue with determination, he said, referring to the Islamic State and the main Syrian Kurdish militia, the Peoples Protection Units.

Read more

U.S. is trapped between its allies ambitions in Syria

U.S., Russia not yet eye-to-eye on possible resumption of Syrian cease-fire

How Turkeys offensive into Syria is opening up a hornets nest

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world
Rescue workers carry a bag containing a dead body of victims of an explosion at a night market in Davao City in southern island of Mindanao early Saturday. (Manman Dejeto/AFP/Getty Images)

Philippine police blamed Islamic State-linked rebels on Saturday for a bombing that killed 14 people in President Rodrigo Dutertes home town and dealt a blow to the firebrand leaders bloody crackdown on narcotics and militancy.

Investigators said that Abu Sayyaf, a southern Philippine group notorious for acts of piracy, kidnappings and beheadings, had claimed responsibility for Fridays night bombing at a Davao street market, although police said they were still trying to authenticate the claim.

The attack rattled the normally peaceful city, where Duterte typically spends his weekends, some 600 miles from the capital, Manila. He was in Davao at the time of the bombing but far from the site of the blast, which occurred outside a hotel where he often holds meetings.

The national police chief, Ronald Dela Rosa, said that the bomb was homemade and that fragments of a mortar round were found at the site, where two persons of interest had been caught on camera. He said that the bomb was likely to have been planted by Abu Sayyaf in an effort to divert the militarys attention from its operations to flush the militants out of their strongholds on the islands of Basilan and Jolo. The military on Tuesday agreed to deploy a further 2,500 troops to carry out Dutertes order to destroy Abu Sayyaf.

Duterte on Saturday canceled what would have been his first overseas visit as president, to Brunei, and declared a nationwide state of lawlessness to deal with what he said was an extraordinary security situation.

A young resident looks at lighted candles and flowers during a memorial for bomb blast victims at the site in Davao City. (Manman Dejeto/AFP/Getty Images)

I must declare a state of lawless violence in this country, Duterte told reporters after visiting the blast site, where he assured the public that martial law had not been imposed.

I have this duty to protect this country, he said.

The bombing came as the abrasive former prosecutor wages war on narcotics kingpins and street dealers, Islamist rebels, and corrupt bureaucrats and scores big points in opinion polls  but at the risk of making powerful enemies.

Rumors have swirled of a plot to assassinate Duterte, 71, a danger that he has shrugged off as part of his job.

Duterte was elected by a huge margin but was condemned by human rights groups and the United Nations. More than 2,000 alleged drug dealers and users have been killed since Dutertes June 30 inauguration. Critics are alarmed at the number whose deaths have been attributed to vigilantes, and the president and police chiefs apparent support for the extrajudicial killings.

Protesters display placards during a prayer vigil in Manila, Philippines, for the victims of Friday night's explosion in Davao city southern Philippines, Saturday. (Bullit Marquez/AP)

Abu Sayyaf, which means bearer of the sword, has previously used an Islamic State flag in some of its propaganda videos and runs what is among Asias most lucrative kidnapping rackets. This year, it has decapitated two Canadian hostages and held Norwegian, Indonesian, Malaysian and Japanese citizens.

The group has long been a thorn in the side of the military and has used its ransom earnings to entrench its network and invest in modern weapons, boats and radar technology.
Temperature records from ice cores and sediments analyzed by NASA show that the current rate of global warming is increasing and is more rapid than at any point in the past millennium. This trend makes it very unlikely that the average global temperature will stay within 2 degrees Celsius above the 19th century average.

One of the main reasons global warming is accelerating is that the whole system suffers from positive feedbackfor example, as warming occurs, Arctic ice melts, causing more sunlight and heat to be absorbed by the Arctic ocean, since water is less reflective than ice, meaning more warming, ad infinitum.

Another potential positive feedback mechanism is the melting of permafrost (ground frozen throughout the year) in places like Siberia, where it is estimated that a global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius could release 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere over a span of years, something which takes industrial activity decades to do.

Gavin Schmidt, director of NASAs Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of its leading climate scientists, commented, In the last 30 years weve really moved into exceptional territory. Its unprecedented in 1,000 years. Theres no period that has the trend seen in the 20th century in terms of the inclination (of temperatures).

One can also compare the last few decades of global warming to the most recent years. When the first indications of global warming were detected in 1977, it was predicted that average global temperatures would rise 2 degrees Celsius per century. In the past five years, the rate of global warming has been about five times that amount.

These rates are also much higher than what has occurred in Earths past when the planet has moved out of ice ages. During those periods, average temperatures typically rose 4-7 degrees Celsius over a span of 5,000 years. The past centurys rise in global temperatures has been 10 times faster than the most recent exit from an ice age. Current data suggests that the coming centurys rate of warming will be at least 20 times this rate.

Such estimates are in line with the latest month-by-month temperature data from both NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The thousands of worldwide meteorological stations, ship- and buoy-based instruments and Antarctic research stations all show that July 2016 was the hottest month ever in the 136 years of modern temperature recordings. It is also the tenth consecutive month of monthly high-temperature records (i.e., the hottest January ever, followed by the hottest February, etc.), the first of which was October 2015. If this trend continues, which it likely will, 2016 will be the hottest year yet recorded.

Some of these measurements are the effect of an abnormally long El Nino, a periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean that has taken place for at least 100,000 years. However, climate models of the most recent El Nino, which ended in May, show that even without the increase of temperatures caused, 2015 and 2016 would still be among the hottest years ever recorded.

Other metrics are available to provide insight into what Earth will look like if global temperatures continue current trends. Research done by the National Science Foundation from 2012 looked at the late Pliocene epoch, 2.7 million to 3.2 million years ago, the last time the carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures were as high as they will soon be. It was an attempt to understand the sensitivity of Earths glaciers to even small changes in global temperatures.

The research found that over the course of that period, sea levels were raised by 12 to 21 meters as a result of melted land ice from areas such as Antarctica. That is, Earths natural state with carbon dioxide at modern levels is one with sea levels possibly 21 meters higher than they are now and we are living through the process of the ecosystem approaching that state.

A primary difference, however, is the rate of change of temperatures between the two periods. The Pilocene epoch was one that lasted half a million years. The current era of increasing global temperatures and carbon dioxide levels has lasted half a century, raising the probability of a much quicker, more major shift in the worlds ecosystem.

Most of these potential shifts are potentially catastrophic: oceanic acidification leading to the mass death of coral and plankton, the basis of the Earths food chain; the total collapse of the tropical rainforests; an ice sheet the size of Greenland or Antarctica falling into the ocean, causing a near instantaneous rise in worldwide sea levels of at least five meters and flooding one third of the worlds population.

Coral reefs are already suffering the longest global die-off on record, which has so far lasted 28 months and is not expected to end until at least 2017. It is estimated that at least 16 percent of the worlds reefs will die as a result.

Short-term effects of climate change have already been felt. Droughts in 1982 and 1997 were more intense than they would have been without climate change. Dry, hot weather in 1998, 2005 and 2007 almost set fire to the Amazon rainforests on a massive scale. This year, global warming has contributed to record flooding in South America, flooding and fatal landslides in Ethiopia, wildfires in Canada, droughts in Africa, Thailand and Venezuela, and a general increase in the intensity and destructiveness of this years Pacific tropical cyclones and Atlantic hurricanes. These are only a handful of the challenges to human well-being and even survival that have occurred in the past several years, attributable to global warming.
Themed weddings are a fantastic way of making your special day that little more unique and special. Not everyone wants the traditional church wedding in a long white dress complete with a sit down dinner and romantic first dance. Take a look at 10 of the best themed weddings which we seriously cant get enough of.

Festival

Plenty of people head off on honeymoon to festivals but why not host your own festival wedding? Perhaps youd have guests donning wellies, have live bands playing in tents strung with fairy lights, or maybe youll opt for a lineup poster showcasing the days proceedings.

caption: http://www.rocknrollbride.com/2013/09/a-rain-soaked-wedding-festival-helen-james/

caption: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/463026405410270305/

caption: http://www.somethingkindacute.com/festival-wedding-inspiration

caption: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/156077943312226616

caption: http://www.cosmopolitan.co.uk/love-sex/relationships/a34874/festival-wedding-ideas/

Harry Potter



Harry Potter was such an integral part of many of other lives so some people have opted to take that even further and theme their wedding around it. Think long banquet tables akin to Hogwarts, wands and all round magic.



caption: http://www.today.com/style/harry-potter-themed-wedding-charms-fans-skeptics-alike-t91241

caption: http://www.boredpanda.com/harry-potter-themed-wedding-cassie-lewis-byrom/

caption: http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/news/a58296/expensive-harry-potter-themed-wedding/

Zombie



A zombie wedding isnt one anyone will forget in a flash. Think blood, guts, your guests chasing you look zombies for your wedding photos and enough gore to have you picking bits off your skin for weeks. Definitely not a theme for the faint hearted.



caption: http://bridalguide.com/blogs/bridal-buzz/zombie-wedding-ideas

Superhero



The world of superheroes is far more popular than its ever been and its no longer exclusively geek territory with superhero weddings on the rise. Imagine your groomsmen with hidden superhero identities and the groom ready to battle and save his wife.

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Alice in Wonderland



If you want some quirkiness and mystery to your wedding perhaps an Alice in Wonderland theme is best for you. Tea Cups and pocket watches are likely to be in centerpiece with top hats and signs pointing everywhere and nowhere adorning the surrounds.



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Disney



Disney is such an open theme perhaps you want the fairytale Cinderella wedding with a massive horse drawn carriage and huge dress, or maybe you want a quirkier Shrek style wedding complete with green face paint and ogre ears. A Disney wedding will help any couple capture their youth.



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Star Wars



What Star Wars fanatic wouldnt want a wedding which included a lightsabre battle, long robes and someone dressed up as a wookie?



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Hawaiian



You dont have to spend thousands flying yourself and your wedding party out to Hawaii to have a Hawaiian themed wedding. Think lots of flowers, pineapples, cocktails and hula dancers. And hopefully some sunshine!

caption: http://www.lovewedbliss.com/real-weddings/outdoor-weddings/hawaii-theme-wedding-in-southern-california/

caption: http://www.theweddingspecialists.net/cheap-beach-theme-wedding-centerpiece.html

Pirates



You dont need to go all out and get married on a boat to have the pirate-themed wedding, think skulls, treasure chests, sword fights and pirate hats.



Caption: https://www.rocknrollbride.com/2014/03/pirate-wedding-in-toronto-jackie-yves/

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Fairy



A fairy themed wedding might come across as pretty girlie but its actually quite popular for those interested in spiritual healing and mythology. While a wedding outside would be perfect think candles and string lights covering everywhere and flowing dresses and pretty bouquets.



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caption: http://weddbook.com/media/2073190/fairytale-woodland-weddings

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caption: https://www.insideweddings.com/weddings/seaside-winter-wedding-in-palm-beach-florida/269/

caption: http://bridalcouch.com/plan-fairy-tale-wedding/

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Robin Shobin for Charlottes Book

Joanna Vargas is a name synonymous with celebrity skincare: in fact, shes one of the first people to be dubbed a celebrity facialist. Until now, her home base has been in New York city, with pop-up outposts during awards season (but nothing permanent) for her lucky celebrity clients in Los Angeles.

Her namesake salon opened in New York ten years ago, but with so many West Coast clientele, Joanna had been looking for the perfect spot to service bi-coastal clients. She told us, LA was a no-brainer because I have so many dedicated clients who live there. I also travel to LA so frequently I have needed it for a while.

Related: Olivia Munn Claims Potatoes Are Her Beauty Secret

Privacy and comfort was key for Joanna when choosing her new West Hollywood location: I wanted a location that was convenient, central and private. I dont want my clients to feel like they are on display when entering and exiting. Also I love this part of town because I can walk out of my house and go shopping or go to lunch. Its awesome!

All of Joannas signature treatments (check out this video of her amazing radio frequency treatment) will be available at her Los Angeles location, plus the addition of one treatment special to the West Coast. Says Joanna, [At the Los Angeles location] We are doing a full body detox peelits a full body microdermabrasion followed by a massage with compresses of shredded coconut so the skin is detoxed hydrated and soothed.

Related: Charlotte Tilbury Condones Sleeping In Your Makeup - Say What?

It happens with restaurantsthe terror of losing your original touch when opening a satellite location is real for spas, too. But Joanna assured us this wont be just a namesake outpost; shes taking her second spa very seriously. Im going to be in LA monthly to service all my regulars and will be doing more specialized trips for red carpets, she says. The salon will have four full-time aestheticians, which includes two of Joannas senior staff from New York.

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The space in West Hollywood looks so gorgeous, complete with an elaborate greenery-filled outdoor seating area (oh hey, California). It officially opens in September, but theyre taking bookings now. For client privacy, the Joanna Vargas L.A. Salon wont publicize their address; to book a treatment, just get in touch with her New York salonclick here to reach Joanna through the Charlottes Book listing. We suggest you a secure a spot. We know we are.

READ MORE

The LED light bed at the CB-approved Joanna Vargas New York Salon is a thing of beauty.

Her radio frequency facial is incredible, and the woman herself is a dream (check out our intimate interview).

FIND BEAUTY AND WELLNESS EXPERTS

Read client reviews of Joanna Vargas Skincare, book sessions, and get expert advice. Only the best cosmetic doctors, skincare gurus, nutritionists, fitness and wellness professionals make it into our book.
Aden (AFP) - At least 15 pro-government Yemeni soldiers were killed in rebel attacks in the north and in a suspected jihadist bombing in Aden on Sunday, military and security sources said.

Shiite Huthi rebels and their allies launched twin attacks to try to retake the port of Midi in the northern province of Hajja, after loyalists had captured it, military sources said.

"Eleven soldiers were killed in the attacks and 28 others were wounded," a military official said.

Meanwhile, Saudi-led coalition warplanes carried out 15 air strikes against the Iran-backed rebels to stop their advance in the area, military sources said.

Other air strikes hit rebel positions in the insurgent-controlled capital Sanaa and other provinces over the past 24 hours, they added.

The sources spoke of rebel casualties but AFP could not verify this as the Huthis and their allies rarely acknowledge their losses.

The coalition began its war on the Iran-backed rebels in March 2015.

It intensified operations since the suspension in early August of UN-brokered peace talks between the rebels and their allies and Yemen's government.

Also on Sunday, in Yemen's main southern city of Aden, a roadside bomb killed four soldiers and wounded one at a checkpoint in the Sheikh Othman district, a security official said.

He said jihadists, who have boosted their attacks in government-controlled Aden over the past few months despite efforts to increase security, are suspected of being behind the bombing.

Earlier, the official had given a toll of two soldiers killed and three wounded but said that two later succumbed to their injuries.

More than 6,600 people have been killed in the Yemeni conflict since March 2015, the UN says.
Donald Trump, king of metaphors, has a brainteaser for the Jewish people.

Let me tell you, he declared during a speech in Milwaukee last March, Ivanka Trump is the new Esther. The campaign stop coincided with the holiday of Purim, which his daughter, a Jewish convert, was apparently celebrating with her husband, Jared Kushner.

The biblical story of Esther is an imperfect allegory for the Trump family, but as for Ivanka, the comparison isnt half bad. Esther is a Jewish woman who conceals her identity when she becomes the bride of a powerful king. It is only when she reveals who she is that she can save the Jewish people from an evil adviser plotting their destruction.

Like Esther, Ivanka might appear to be nothing more than a pretty face until she shows that shes the savviest person in the room. Like Esther, Ivanka has a familial, almost accidental position of influence with a powerful gentile political figure. And like Esther, Ivankas Jewishness is veiled: Something she describes as an important part of her identity and family lifewhen she agrees to talk about it at all, which is rareis essentially invisible to those who dont know its there.

Now, as Ivanka steps more into her public role as the daughter of a potential U.S. president, she faces the same dilemma as Esther: figuring out whether and what obligation she has to be a champion of her peopleespecially when its not clear what her people might want from her.

Unlike a neat tale of biblical-style good and evil, the roles in the Trump campaign are scrambled. Far from being a unified bloc, American Jews might have conflicting opinions about the greatest threat to their country in 2016, whether theyre more concerned about terrorism and the future of Israel or the intolerance for minority groups that has come out on the campaign trail.

Recommended: Here's How NASA Thinks Society Will Collapse

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Similarly, they might identify different villains in the story of Trump. The Republican nominees opponents might snicker that he makes a good Haman, or perhaps an incestuous version of the king. But to some, like the estimated 66 percent of Floridas Orthodox Jewish voters who say theyre supporting Trump, he might seem like Mordechai, Esthers wise uncle who finally brings order to the kings decadent and unruly court.

All of this makes Ivanka a figure of profound ambivalence for American Jews, and particularly the Orthodox. Theres ambivalence: We want to distance ourselves from you, but we also want you to be looking out for our interests,  said Lila Corwin Berman, a professor of history at Temple University. And we also want to believe that if Trump gets into power, well have someone with interests close to our heart close to that power center.

Ivanka is tacitly expected to be a public advocate for Jewish identity and interests, and yet the community is deeply divided over the messages she delivers as a surrogate for her fathers campaignones that many reject outright. While American Jews have a strong instinct toward privacy in hashing out internal conflicts, many also seem to yearn, in some small way, for Ivanka to be their Estheran embedded representative who can, in the end, step in and save them from ruin.

* * *

When she married Kushner in 2009, Ivanka joined a distinctive Jewish world. Its very New York: Upper East Side, private schools, lots of wealth and connections. Jerry Kestenbaum, a longtime member of their synagogueCongregation Kehilath Jeshurun, also known as KJsaid its not out of place to have the likes of a presidential candidates daughter and son-in-law show up on Saturday mornings. Our congregation has a lot of people like that, he said. He could list them from memory. Michael Mukasey, who was the attorney general, is a regular participant in our community.  Senator Lieberman is very wired into our community even though hes not a regular participant there. Its a congregation that is pretty comfortable with their members being in key positions."

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KJ is affiliated with the small, somewhat-disparate Modern Orthodox movement, which accounts for roughly 3 percent of the American Jewish population. Its more ritually traditional than many other parts of Judaism; Ivanka has said in interviews that she and her husband keep a kosher home and observe the rules of Shabbat, including not working or using electronics, which is typical of that community. While more than two-thirds of American Jews tend to vote Democratic, according to Pew, the Orthodox are a bit more politically conservative: In a 2013 survey, 57 percent said they lean Republican, including both Modern and other Orthodox Jews. People in that group are also more likely than those in any other Jewish movement to say the United States is not supportive enough of Israel; in the Pew survey, more than half said that was true.

This summer, the New York Modern Orthodox scene faced twin controversies concerning Ivanka Trump and the rabbi who oversaw her conversion, Haskel Lookstein. In June, Israels rabbinical courts rejected Looksteins authority to oversee Jewish conversions. Then, in July, Lookstein agreed, at Ivankas invitation, to give a blessing at the Republican National Convention, which brought on protests and counter-protests within the community.

When Israels courts were critiquing the rabbi, the Orthodox community in the United States was overwhelmingly in support of Rabbi Looksteins ability to perform conversions, said Zev Eleff, the chief academic officer at Hebrew Theological College and author of a history of Modern Orthodox Jews. An attack on one of their own was met with unified resistance; Lookstein, they said, should be able to represent them to the world.

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But when he appeared to get involved with Trump, the community split with anger. To embrace Trump and Trumpism goes against all weve been taught, wrote Jacob Savagean alumnus of the Jewish private school, Ramaz, which is closely tied to KJin a Change.org petition. As graduates of Ramaz, and as current or former members of the Modern Orthodox community, this is a shandaYiddish for shame or scandalbeyond the pale.

Jews, of all people, should know that when you embrace a xenophobic movement  were not far behind.

The petition got hundreds of supporters. But there was also pushback. Someone writing under the name Friends of Rabbi Lookstein sent an anonymous email to Savages parents. Do you really condone your sons reprehensible behavior? the person wrote. Is this the education that you spent so much to provide? To ridicule Holocaust victims  as a young and failed writer?

Definitely enjoy the young and failed part, Savage wrote to me in an email.

Kestenbaum, the longtime KJ member, launched a counter-petition. You have a lifetime track record of seeing all aspects of a situation and using your judgment in a way that creates a Kiddush Hashem, or a sanctification of Gods name, he wrote to Lookstein on Change.org, winning about one-eighth of the supporters that Savage did. We trust you to do the same again this time.

While these dueling petitions were mostly evidence of juicy internecine fight, they inadvertently illustrated a broader Jewish ambivalence about Ivanka. One of the most prominent Jewish women in America is a close adviser on a campaign that has attracted the admiration of neo-Nazis and anti-Semites. Trump has passively cheered on anti-Semitic trolls, appointed a man accused of denying the Holocaust as one of his advisers, and tweeted graphics that incorporate anti-Semitic imagery. Its understandably difficult for Jews to embrace a candidate who told a room full of Jewish Republicans that hes a negotiator like you folks, and who has been reluctant to condemn white supremacists in interviews. And thats setting aside his inflammatory comments about Muslims and Mexicans, along with the endless insults hurled at every imaginable group.

I think Jews, of all people, should know that when you embrace a xenophobic movement, even if in that moment Jews arent on the top of that list, were not far behind, said Savage in an interview. In the moment, I felt a deep sense that we should know better.

The other instinctKestenbaumsis one of privacy: Perhaps being involved with Ivanka and the Trump campaign shouldnt be read as a reflection on the Jewish people at all. Political disagreements are fine, but people should keep their religious community out of it. This type of a public, ad hominem attackeven if it werent on the rabbiits like an invasive species: It doesnt belong in our community, he told me. A similar argument could be made about Ivanka: She should be able to be privately Jewish, and its not appropriate to use her religious affiliation as a point of critique.

My father-in-law is not an anti-Semite.

Whats curious is that neither letter stated a view on Ivankas responsibility for her fathers campaign and the ensuing drama in the KJ community. Shes the obvious link between Lookstein and the RNC; KJ was still represented at the convention, only by one of its members, rather than its rabbi. Neither side sought to disavow or defend the daughter of the Republican nominee; they were silent about her position in their community, and what her new role in politics says to the world about Judaism. Even those who felt moved enough to call out a revered rabbi were stumped on what to say about their fellow Jew.

Throughout the campaign season, Ivanka and her husband have only occasionally been called to account for the anti-Semitism of the Trump campaign. In July, Kushner wrote an editorial for the paper he owns, the Observer, rebutting a staffers article that directly criticized him for enabling vitriol and attacks against Jews. My father-in-law is not an anti-Semite, Kushner wrote. Trump is an incredibly loving and tolerant person who has embraced my family and our Judaism since I began dating my wife.

Theres something uncomfortable about a Jewish adviser to a presidential campaign being personally held accountable for its wrongdoings; all political operatives should be held equally responsible for their alleged involvement with bigotry. Yet, even in this case, it was Kushner who was singled out to defend his family. Ivanka hasnt spoken out about her Judaism or its connection to politics at all. Except for some boilerplate stuff about how much she loves Judaism, I havent heard [Ivanka] speak on any Jewish issues or on Jewish ethics or anything other than Judaism as a lifestyle brand, Savage pointed out. (Her representatives declined an interview request for this article.)

Its not that Orthodox Jews arent worried about Trump, including those who travel in Ivanka and Jareds comparatively conservative world. Im a member of the Rabbinical Council of America, said Eleff, referring to the clerical organization associated with the Modern Orthodox movement in the U.S. As a member of that community, I know its leaders are terribly disturbed by those images [of a Jewish journalist portrayed in a concentration camp] and by white-supremacist people who do support the Trump campaign. A few dozen Orthodox rabbis recently signed a statement in protest of Trump, arguing that his rhetoric is morally offensive and that his policy proposals violate fundamental religious norms. Yet, at least publicly, its not clear that these worries have reached their obvious point of connection to the campaign: the candidates daughter.

More broadly, it seems like American Jews dont quite know how to make sense of Ivanka. On one hand, Jewish media outlets write about about her constantly. She presents this way to try to talk about Trump, whos really confusing to everybody, and especially to Jews, and especially to observant Jews, said Corwin Berman. Heres this accomplished, beautiful, blond woman who converted to be one of usand not just one of us, but really one of us: She converted through an Orthodox conversion.

This is a somewhat unusual choice. Many Americans who marry Jews end up in a situation more like that of Ivankas Democratic counterpart, Chelsea Clinton, who chose not to convert when she wedded her husband, Marc Mezvinsky. But Ivanka embraced Judaism.

Now, shes getting the full experience of what its like to be an American Jew with mixed heritagepeople feel free to subtly question her authenticity as a Jew. Shes often treated as other in Jewish press storiestheres a kind of obsessive need to label her as a convert, Corwin Berman said. Many in the Orthodox community might be uncomfortable with calling out her status as a convert; a provision in Jewish law specifically forbids Jews from treating converts differently than they would other Jews. For most people, though, that probably doesnt matter. I dont think that every time in the Jewish press its noted that shes a convert, people are like, Oof, this is a breach of halachic standard, Corwin Berman said.

Ivanka is a perfect cipher for the collective anxiety of American Jews.

In an election in which few Americans seem enthusiastic about their choices for president, this seems to have become the question for many groups: Which candidate, in a field of bad candidates, is more likely to hold our interests in their heart? Conservative evangelical Christians seem to have made that calculation with Donald Trump, hoping hell put a pro-life justice on the Supreme Court. Perhaps many Orthodox Jews are making a similar trade, daring to trust Trump when he asserts that theres nobody more pro-Israel than I am.

Of all the unlikely things conservative evangelicals and Orthodox Jews might share this election besides Donald Trump, the other is the metaphor of Esther. Sarah Palin has found resonance in the story of the Persian Empire-era Jewess, perhaps also seeing herself as a figure whose role is to speak out in a time of crisis. Pastors have drawn on Esther in sermons about her moral uprightness, and popular adaptations of her story have portrayed her as a Christ-like figure, ready to die for who she was and what she believed.

Thats a radical interpretation of what Esthers story means, and probably one with which most Jews would disagree. But Esthers story is all about interpretation: what it meant that she hid her identity, and what her obligation was to her people; whether the lesson is that morally righteous people speak truth to power no matter what, or that they assimilate and bide their time, perhaps never publicly exposing an agenda.

And so it is with Ivanka. She is a perfect cipher for the collective anxiety of American Jews; in one person, she is a dilemma of assimilation and authenticity and moral responsibility. While some Jews may find it easy to write off Trump, its more complicated to write off his daughter. No matter what happens in November, Ivanka will be part of American political historyand Jewish history. Perhaps, like Esther, she will prove herself a champion of her people. Or perhaps, also like Esther, she will continue the cultural dance of Jews in diaspora: to be hidden in plain sight.

Read more from The Atlantic:

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
Caracas (AFP) - Venezuela has released all but one of dozens of protesters rounded up after an angry, pot-banging crowd reportedly surrounded President Nicolas Maduro amid mass protests over the country's crippling food shortages.

Of around 30 protesters detained, only one -- apparently a journalist who released videos of the chaotic protests -- remained in custody Saturday, Alfredo Romero of the NGO Venezuelan Justice Forum said on Twitter.

With tempers heating up over the woeful state of the economy, Maduro's critics on Sunday pledged new mass demonstrations for the next two Wednesdays to build pressure for a recall vote, while a top socialist said no such referendum was possible before March.

The incidents Friday, in the Caribbean island resort city of Porlamar, came just a day after anti-Maduro critics had mobilized a vast march filling the streets of Caracas.

The embattled Maduro -- whose state-led leftist government is fighting crippling shortages of everything from hard currency to food and toilet paper -- had gone to Porlamar to speak at the opening of a remodeled public housing development.

But social media images appeared to show an angry crowd surrounding Maduro, following him down a street, banging pots and insulting him.

Dozens of protesters were swept up in an ensuing crackdown, reports said.

Information Minister Luis Marcano accused local media of exaggerating the protest, tweeting that the pot-banging "reflects what remains of the right (wing)."

- Growing support for recall -

On Thursday, Maduro's opponents claimed to have mobilized a million demonstrators in Caracas in the biggest rally in decades.

Jailed Maduro opponent Leopoldo Lopez said on Twitter that "the people made it known what they want... a recall vote, and change."

The government, however, estimated that only 30,000 people attended.

Jesus Torrealba, executive secretary of the opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), on Sunday called for new mass protests on the next two Wednesdays.

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He told private television network Televen that protests would continue until the National Electoral Council (CNE) set a date and specified conditions for collecting the four million signatures needed for a recall referendum.

Unless it does so soon, he said, the opposition "will protest in an energetic manner throughout Venezuela."

But Diosdado Cabello, a former National Assembly speaker and a leading socialist, vowed to "mobilize our people" against a recall.

He told Televen that "the recall does not have the slightest chance of being this year," as the opposition demands, and would not occur before March.

He has accused the opposition of seeking to provoke violence to justify a coup d'etat.

The latest rallies come at a highly volatile time for Venezuela, where a plunge in prices for oil exports has led to shortages, looting and violent crime.

The government in July put the military in control of food distribution, as well as key ports, companies and factories. Eighteen military commanders were named Saturday to work to alleviate the severe shortages.

- President in crosshairs -

Maduro, the hand-picked political heir of the populist leader Hugo Chavez, won election in 2013 following Chavez's death. But polls this year show growing support for a recall.

Despite sitting atop the world's largest proven oil reserves, Venezuelans line up at dawn -- or earlier -- outside supermarkets, guarded by heavily armed police.

More and more people are buying scarce products from the black-market sellers known as "bachaqueros."
A savvy student is funding her medical degree through her famous husky.



Jasmine Miltons two-year-old husky Anuko has already brought in 20,000 after finding fame through his fierce looks.

Anuko hit the headlines last year and now has nearly 11,000 followers on Instagram, in turn bringing in hundreds of gifts and even modelling jobs.

Jasmine is planning on using the cash Anuko has earned to fund her dream career in medicine.

Pooch pounds - Anuko has already earned Jasmine 20,000 (Pictures: SWNS)

The 20-year-old, from Shropshire, suffers from bipolar disorder and tried to end her own life in 2013.

While recovering in hospital, another patient suggested that a dog can help bipolar sufferers and just months later, Jasmine got Anuko.

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The pair became inseparable and as well as helping with Jasmines mental health issues, Anukos looks began to turn heads.

Despite his loving nature, the pattern of his fur gives him a near-permanent steely frown.

Glare - Anukos fur makes him look like he is permanently frowning

Jasmine set up an Instagram account which quickly gained a following, but Anuko shot to international fame last June when Jasmine posted some pictures of his betrayed face after she tricked him with a ball.

Jasmine said: It was amazing, there were hundreds of people contacting me. It was crazy.

Anukos pictures were retweeted 25,000 times and Jasmine raked in 5,000 in just a fortnight.

Jasmine said: For quite a while I wasnt asking for money, but then a company told me: You can make money out of this. Thats when I had the idea to use it to bring in cash.

Since then, Jasmine has made thousands through Anukos Instagram following, a modelling contract, website and YouTube channel, and regularly receives gifts such as treats and toys.

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Famous - Anuko has nearly 11,000 followers on Instagram

She now plans to put the money to good use to become a clinical psychiatrist, and is set to attend Plovdiv Medical University in Bulgaria next year.

I have always been that person who would put even a penny in the bank, she said.

"I was looking at all this money and knew I had to decide what to do with it and what to do with my life.

"My dad is a clinical psychologist and having gone through my own struggles, I decided I wanted to be a clinical psychiatrist.

The 20-year-old said she will be forever grateful to Anuko, adding: He is my whole world, he is like my baby.


Hangzhou (China) (AFP) - European authorities' decision to slap Apple with a huge bill for back taxes was not a decision "against the United States", European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker said Sunday as world leaders gathered in China for a major economic summit.

The 13-billion-euro demand for payment from the American electronics giant has raised hackles in the US, with the White House decrying what it described as a "unilateral" approach to rewriting global taxation norms.

Speaking to reporters before the Group of 20 leadership summit in Hangzhou, Juncker said the decision was not aimed at the US.

"It would be absurd to choose this territory of state taxation to attack the USA," he said, adding that most of the commission's punitive measures were against European companies.

"We are applying the rules," he said. "We are basing our decisions on facts and on the legislation."

Brussels said Apple, the world's most valuable company, avoided virtually all tax on its business in the bloc by illegal arrangements with EU member Ireland, which gave the company an unfair advantage over competitors.

Apple and the Irish government have said they will appeal against the European Commission ruling, with the iPhone maker warning it could cost European jobs.

Ireland has attracted multinationals over many years by offering favourable tax deals to generate much-needed jobs and investment.

But after a three-year investigation, Brussels said the arrangement with Apple broke EU laws on state aid.

The findings come amid growing tensions between Washington and Brussels over a series of EU anti-trust investigations targeting other giant US companies such as Google, Amazon, McDonald's, Starbucks and Fiat Chrysler.

Tax avoidance has moved sharply up the political agenda since EU governments adopted tough austerity policies to balance public finances, fuelling public resentment that the rich paid relatively little tax.

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Speaking before the summit, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said President Barack Obama would seek to address tax avoidance with world leaders in Hangzhou.

"We need to find a way to make the global system of taxation more fair -- more fair to countries around the world, particularly countries like the United States," he said.

But, he added, "we need to make sure that there arent entities or countries acting unilaterally in ways that exacerbate inequities in the global tax structure".
DHAKA (Reuters) - Police in Bangladesh have arrested another suspect in the killing of a publisher who was hacked to death by Islamist militants last October, the head of the counter-terrorism unit in Dhaka said on Sunday. Militants have targeted secularist writers in Bangladesh in recent years as the government has cracked down on Islamist groups seeking to turn the South Asian nation of 160 million people into a sharia-based state. "Another man whom we believe was one of the main prime suspects in killing the publisher was arrested on Saturday," Monirul Islam, chief of the counterterroism cell of the Dhaka police, told reporters. The victim, Faysal Arefin Dipon, had published books written by Avijit Roy, a U.S. citizen of Bangladeshi origin. Roy was also hacked to death by Islamist militants last year. On July 1, militants killed 20 hostages, most of them foreigners, in an assault on a cafe in an upmarket area of the capital. (Reporting by Serajul Quadir; Editing by Kim Coghill)
By Ruma Paul DHAKA (Reuters) - Bangladesh on Sunday summoned Pakistan's acting high commissioner to protest its interference in its affairs after Islamabad said it was "deeply saddened" by the execution of a top Islamist party figure for atrocities committed during the war to leave Pakistan. Mir Quasem Ali, 63, a key financier of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, was executed on Saturday at Kashimpur Central Jail on the outskirts of the capital, for murder, confinement, torture and incitement to religious hatred during the war. Pakistan's foreign ministry said it was "deeply saddened" by Ali's execution, describing the proceedings of the war tribunal as "flawed". Since December 2013 five prominent Jamaat members, including Ali, and a leader of the main opposition party, have been executed for war crimes. Relations between the two countries have never recovered from the 1971 war when Bangladeshi nationalists, backed by India, broke away from what was then West Pakistan. Official figures show about 3 million people were killed and thousands of women were raped during the war, in which some factions, including the Jamaat-e-Islami, opposed the breakaway. The party denies that its leaders committed any atrocities. "By repeatedly taking the side of those Bangladesh nationals who are convicted of crimes against humanity and genocide, Pakistan has once again acknowledged its direct involvement and complicity with the mass atrocity crimes committed during Bangladeshs Liberation War in 1971," Bangladesh said in a statement. "The Government of Bangladesh strongly rejects Pakistans claim that these are recriminations for political gains." Critics say Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has used the war crimes tribunal, set up in 2010, to target Jamaat and weaken the opposition. The government denies the accusations. International human rights groups say the tribunal's procedures fall short of international standards but Bangladesh rejects that and the trials are supported by many Bangladeshis. In January, a Bangladeshi diplomat in Pakistan was expelled in what Dhaka officials called "an act of retaliation" after a Pakistani diplomat in Dhaka was expelled for spying. (Reporting by Ruma Paul, editing by Louise Heavens)
Barbra Streisand achieves her 11th No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart, as her latest release, Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway, enters atop the list.

Her newest leader extends her record for the most No. 1 albums among women, and ties her with Bruce Springsteen for the third-most among all acts. The only artists with more No. 1s are The Beatles, with a record 19 chart-toppers, and Jay Z, with 13.

Florida Georgia Line, Britney Spears & Young Thug Debut in Top 10 on Billboard 200

Among women, Streisand outpaces Madonna, the runner-up with eight Billboard 200 No. 1s.

Encore was released on Aug. 26 through Columbia Records, and starts with 149,000 equivalent album units earned in the week ending Sept. 1, according to Nielsen Music. That's a stronger-than-expected launch for the set, which was forecast by industry sources to start in the No. 2 slot, behind Florida Georgia Line's new Dig Your Roots. The latter album enters in the runner-up position, with 145,000 units.

The Billboard 200 chart ranks the most popular albums of the week in the U.S. based on multi-metric consumption, which includes traditional album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA). The new Sept. 17-dated chart (where Encore debuts at No. 1) will be posted in full to Billboard's websites on Wednesday, Sept. 7 (one day later than normal, due to the Sept. 5 Labor Day holiday in the U.S).

Encore follows Streisand's previous No. 1 albums: Partners (2014), Love Is the Answer (2009), Higher Ground (1997), Back to Broadway (1993), The Broadway Album (1986), Guilty (1980), Barbra Streisand's Greatest Hits, Volume 2 (1979), A Star Is Born (1977), The Way We Were (1974), and People (1964).

Barbra Streisand Scores Seventh U.K. No. 1 Album With 'Encore'

Further, Streisand surpasses her own record for the longest span between No. 1s on the Billboard 200. Encore arrives 51 years, 10 months and 17 days after her first No. 1, People, spent its initial week at No. 1 (Oct. 31, 1964). People ruled the tally for five consecutive weeks. Streisand previously set the record for the longest span between No. 1s when she topped the chart in 2014 with Partners -- 49 years, 11 months and 14 days after People.

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One more fun fact: Streisand continues to be the only act to have achieved No. 1 albums in the last six decades -- the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s.

Encore is an all-star collaborative affair, and pairs Streisand with a range of actors to cover songs from Broadway. For example, Anne Hathaway and Daisy Ridley (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) team up with Streisand for "At the Ballet," from A Chorus Line; Jamie Foxx guests on "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" (from The Sound of Music) and Melissa McCarthy duets on "Anything You Can Do" (from Annie Get Your Gun).

Nearly all of Encore's first-week unit total was comprised of traditional album sales -- 148,000. And of that figure, physical album sales (CDs and vinyl LPs) equated to 126,000 -- the largest sales week for a physical album in 2016. Previously, Blink-182's California held the biggest physical week for an album this year, when it started with 107,000 sold.

Encore's physical sales were bolstered by the availability of a deluxe edition of the set sold through Target, which came with four bonus solo Streisand performances.

Barbra Streisand Talks Trump's DNA, 'Funny Girl' Stage Fright & More at SiriusXM Town Hall

In addition, the album benefits from a promotion with Streisand's recent concert tour, where tickets purchased online were bundled with an offer for a CD copy of Encore.

For ticket/album bundle offers where the purchase price of a ticket includes an album, only those albums that are actively redeemed by a customer count towards the charts. (The redemption rate is usually low for these offers, but can vary depending on the type of artist and how effectively they promote the ticket/album offer to their fans.)

Streisand is one of many acts that have employed a ticket/album bundle offer to sell music. Others include Kanye West (who sold The Life of Pablo with tickets to his Yeezy Season 3 fashion show), Justin Bieber, Duran Duran, Madonna, Janet Jackson, Michael Buble, Cyndi Lauper, Tom Petty, Bon Jovi and many more.

Streisand supported Encore by doing a number of big media appearances, including a sit-down chat and two performances on NBC's The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Aug. 25. She was joined by one of her Encore partners, Alec Baldwin, on the show, and also did a humorous duet with Fallon (who impersonated Donald Trump). In addition, Streisand was interviewed on NPR's Weekend Edition (Aug. 20), CBS Sunday Morning (Aug. 28) and CNN (Aug. 29).
bernie sanders

If Sen. Bernie Sanders controlled which candidates qualified for the official presidential debates, some of this year's third-party candidates would likely be onstage.

In an interview on "Meet the Press" on Sunday, the Vermont senator would not weigh in on whether Libertarian party candidate Gary Johnson should be included in the presidential debates.

But the senator did say that the 15% support threshold needed by presidential candidates to qualify for the official debates was "probably too high."

"It should be lower than that," Sanders said.

Sanders, however, brushed off polls that showed many of former millennial Sanders supporters backing either Johnson or Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

The Independent senator acknowledged that one of the two major-party candidates would almost certainly become president, and of the two, Clinton's positions on issues like climate change and college affordability were far closer to his own stances than those of Donald Trump.

"Either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is going to become president of the United States. And there is no question in my mind that Hillary Clinton is far, far, far and away the superior candidate," Sanders said.

NOW WATCH: Watch Bernie Sanders get booed for telling supporters to vote for Hillary Clinton





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Sept. 4, 2016 is finally upon us.

Not only does today mark the anniversary of the birth of Beyonce Giselle Knowles, but on this blessed day our queen turns 35 year old.

This means Beyonce is officially eligible to run for president of the United States.

SEE ALSO: Michelle Obama throws wicked shapes to Beyonce in epic Carpool Karaoke trailer

With such chaotic presidential campaigns unfolding before us, it should come as no surprise that people are hoping for a flawless candidate to swoop in and help get our country into formation.

Though Queen Bey has performed at multiple White House events and is seriously tight with the Obama family, she has yet to announce any plans to run for office.

Nevertheless, the internet has spoken and is totally down to vote #Beyonce2016.
Hanoi (AFP) - It has been more than six decades since the end of French colonial rule in Vietnam, but when President Francois Hollande arrives this week he'll struggle to avoid a quintessential legacy of his country's rule: the baguette.

Smeared with pate and loaded with fresh coriander and cucumber, or just enjoyed with a pat of fresh butter, "banh mi" are a delicious symbol of Vietnam's lasting links with its former occupiers.

"The French were very proud of banh mi. I think French cuisine has had a lot of influence on Vietnamese cuisine," baker Nguyen Ngoc Hoan told AFP from his busy boulangerie in Hanoi's French Quarter.

Hoan started baking banh mi - which refers to plain bread or the popular "petit pain" loaded with meat, vegetables or fried egg -- in 1987 and five years later got a stint at the bakery in the storied Metropole hotel, built by the French at the turn of the 20th century.

The sandwich has become a foodie favourite in hipster enclaves around the globe, sold from food trucks and sipped with craft beer in both its classic form and a flurry of new varieties.

Hoan's father was also a baker but discouraged his son from following in his floured footsteps.

"The baking profession chose me, it was not my decision," Hoan said, speaking in front of a wall of ovens as his workers tirelessly knead dough nearby.

He started his career baking what he called Vietnamese bread - airy on the inside, crusty on the outside - but after training with a French baker in Shanghai decided to switch to the denser French-style.

Now, he churns out thousands of warm baguettes daily, along with croissants, creme caramel and homemade pate.

- 'Petit pain' 

French bread was first made in Vietnam to feed hungry soldiers in Indochina, France's empire which spanned much of Southeast Asia from 1858 to its crushing defeat in the Dien Bien Phu battle in Vietnam in 1954.

But the French became known for more than food, gaining a brutal reputation for crushing anti-imperialist movements and putting Vietnamese laborers to work in gruelling conditions on rubber plantations, while heavily taxing citizens during periods of drought and famine.

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Most French who came to Vietnam weren't interested in low-level jobs like baking.

To fill the gap, Chinese and Vietnamese worked in boulangeries -- often hidden away in the back so customers wouldn't know who was baking their bread.

"By 1910, little baguettes or 'petit pain' were sold in the street to (Vietnamese) people who were on their way to work," according to Erica Peters, food historian and author of "Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam".

In the years that followed, meat, vegetables or fish appeared in the bread -- precursors to the modern-day banh mi sold all over Hanoi, a city rife with French colonial architecture, bistros and cafes.

Other culinary influences leaked in too.

Local cooks used meat scraps and unused bones from French butchers to create pho -- the national dish of beef or chicken noodle soup, according to Peters. Coffee and creme caramel are some of the other French culinary leftovers.

The ubiquity of those influences will not be lost on President Hollande, who arrives late Monday for talks with Vietnam's leadership and French businessmen.

- Hybrid cuisine 

Today, Vietnam's commercial capital Ho Chi Minh City is dotted with chic cafes serving croque monsieur and macarons at Paris prices.

But the $1 banh mi still rules Hanoi's street food scene.

It is so engrained in Vietnam's culinary culture that few draw its lineage back to France.

"I don't know and don't care whether it's French, I just serve it like this," said Nguyen Thi Duc Hanh, sitting in front of her shop as the lunchtime rush begins.

She sells hundreds per day and keeps her menu simple: banh mi served with pate and a fried egg, beef steak or her very own version of "boeuf au vin" made with local spices.

One of her regulars, Nguyen Van Binh, said he has been eating banh mi for 50 years, and unlike Hanh, thinks of it as a hybrid dish.

"Banh mi came from France but it was changed and adapted to suit Vietnamese tastes," said Binh, before digging into his fried egg and pate served with a crusty roll.
(L(Adds detail, quotes)

By Kylie MacLellan

LONDON, Sept 4 (Reuters) - The British government will set out in the coming week how it plans to shape its relationship with the European Union upon leaving the bloc, Prime Minister Theresa May said in an interview broadcast on Sunday.

Since taking office in July, May and her Brexit minister David Davis have given little detail about what Britain's future relationship with the EU will look like, saying only they want it to involve curbs on immigration and a good deal on trade.

"He (Davis) will be making a statement to parliament this week about the work that the government has been doing over the summer and obviously how we are going to take that forward in shaping the sort of relationship we want with the EU," May told the BBC in an interview recorded before she left Britain for the G20 summit in China.

On her way to the summit, May told reporters Britain's economy will suffer as a result of the decision to leave the EU despite signs in recent economic data that the impact has not been as severe as some predicted.

May told the BBC she would use the summit to begin talks with world leaders including U.S. President Barack Obama, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over future trade deals.

"I want to talk about how we can scope out what a trade deal and the negotiations on a trade deal would be like so that when the time comes, when we are able to sign those deals, we are able to do so," she said.

May, who upset Chinese officials by delaying a $24 billion project to build a partly Chinese-funded nuclear power plant, is also due to hold a one-to-one with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the summit. She told the BBC she would be making a decision on the deal later this month.

May has been clear she will not trigger Article 50, the formal process of leaving the EU, this year in order to give Britain time to prepare for upcoming negotiations, but said it would not be "kicked into the long grass".

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May said there would be no early national election, despite some in her ruling Conservatives believing turmoil in the opposition Labour Party gives them an opportunity to increase their small parliamentary majority.

"We need that period of time, that stability to be able to deal with the issues that the country is facing and have that election in 2020," she said.

She also dismissed comments by Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon that the Brexit vote had shifted the debate on Scottish independence just two years after Scots voted by 10 percentage points to reject it. Opinions polls did not suggest the Scottish people want another vote, May said.

(Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
At least 35 people were killed on Sunday when a bus collided with a fuel tanker and burst into flames in southern Afghanistan, in the latest road accident in the war-torn country.

Many of the victims, including women and children, were burned beyond recognition in the accident in Zabul province, one of the areas worst hit by the Taliban insurgency.

"The passenger bus was on its way from Kandahar to Kabul when it collided with a fuel tanker in Jildak area of Zabul," provincial governor Bismillah Afghanmal told AFP.

"In the accident, 35 people were killed and more than 20 others were wounded."

Some of the injured were rushed to hospitals in the provincial capital Qalat as well as in neighbouring Kandahar province, said Ghulam Jilani Farahi, deputy Zabul police chief.

The Kabul-Kandahar highway passes through militancy-prone areas and many bus drivers are known to drive recklessly at top speed so as not to get caught in insurgent activity.

"President Ashraf Ghani expressed deep sadness over the death of our countrymen in the accident," the presidential palace said in a statement.

"Ghani has ordered the relevant authorities to help the victims and their families as soon as possible," it added.

Afghanistan has some of the world's most dangerous roads, often in dilapidated condition, and traffic rules are seldom enforced.

Many in the country rely on old and rickety passenger vehicles and road accidents with high casualty rates are common.

In May 73 people were killed when two buses and an oil tanker burst into flames in a head-on collision in the eastern province of Ghazni.

And in April 2013 a bus hit a wrecked fuel tanker in the southern province of Kandahar, killing 45 people.

The World Bank last November signed off on a $250 million grant to upgrade roads crossing Afghanistan's Hindu Kush mountains, crucial trade links that are often closed in winter by snow.

Insecurity is growing across Afghanistan as the Taliban press on with their 15-year insurgency against the Western-backed Kabul government.

Afghan troops have struggled to stave off the nationwide attacks since NATO forces ended their combat mission at the end of 2014.
Washington (AFP) - A tarmac tiff between US and Chinese officials as President Barack Obama arrived in the city of Hangzhou prompted the posting -- and prompt deleting -- of an uncharacteristically sarcastic tweet by a US spy agency.

"Classy as always China," read the Defense Intelligence Agency tweet, which linked to a New York Times article about the incident.

The post was quickly deleted but not before the Wall Street Journal noticed the snark.

The agency later tweeted its apology: "Earlier today, a tweet regarding a news article was mistakenly posted from this account & does not represent the views of the DIA. We apologize."

The tarmac kerfuffle included a shouting match that broke out as White House staffers tried to help American reporters position themselves to film Obama's arrival in the eastern Chinese city for a G20 summit.

"This is our country!" a Chinese official in a dark suit shouted at a White House staffer. "This is our airport!"

The outburst was caught on camera, in an awkward prelude to face-to-face talks between Chinese President Xi Jinping and his American guest.

When US National Security Adviser Susan Rice and senior White House staffer Ben Rhodes tried to get closer to the president, the official also turned his ire on Rice, prompting her Secret Service agent to step in.

Obama took the fracas in stride on Sunday, saying that although the United States insists on press access and does not "leave our values and ideals behind," the travelling White House juggernaut could be intimidating.
By Dominique Patton

BEIJING, Sept 5 (Reuters) - China's near two-year ban on U.S. imports of chickens used for breeding is threatening supplies of chicken meat in the world's second-largest poultry market, leading to the first shortfall in at least a decade and potentially pushing up prices.

China relies on imported breeding stock for production of white-feathered broiler chickens, the type used by fast-food chains, which account for more than half the country's chicken supply.

But Beijing banned poultry imports from the United States last year in response to a December 2014 bird flu outbreak. That, followed by a similar ban on imports from France late last year, has seen a sharp drop in the supply of white-feather "grandparent" stock.

Grandparent birds are the progeny of pedigree stock bred largely by three global companies, Aviagen, Cobb-Vantress and Groupe Grimaud. China has so far been unsuccessful in developing its own white-feather pedigree lines.

Imports of breeding chicks - shipped in lots of 168 - fell to 720,000 units last year, around half the levels of 2013, said Fujian Sunner Development Co, a chicken supplier to Yum Brands' KFC.

Only 110,000 units have entered the market so far this year, it added in its first half-report, well below what is needed to produce enough broiler chickens for next year's demand.

The U.S. supplies about half of the world's breeding chicks, followed by the United Kingdom. Only Spain and New Zealand, much smaller producers, can currently ship chicks to China.

"Even if the government lifts its bans by the end of the year, next year's supply [of meat] wouldn't recover," said Pan Chenjun, senior analyst at Rabobank.

The World Organization for Animal Health declared the U.S. free of bird flu in April but China is yet to lift its ban.

PRICE PRESSURE

Poultry prices have already been rising following a recent surge in prices of pork, the country's most popular meat.

That has pushed some consumers, such as school canteens, to buy more poultry, a cheaper substitute, helping the industry recover some demand after a protracted decline caused by food safety fears and China's own outbreaks of bird flu.

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A shortfall next year, forecast by Rabobank at around 1 million tonnes or 8 percent consumption, could push prices up by as much as 20 percent from a current 19.8 yuan ($2.96) per kg, added Pan.

However, prices will be kept in check by alternatives such as duck meat and increased imports.

China will import 480,000 tonnes of poultry meat next year, up 33 percent from this year, from markets like Brazil, Argentina and Chile, said a recent report by U.S. agriculture department attaches in Beijing.

"Next year's chicken price will certainly be higher than this year, but it will definitely be at an acceptable level," said Huang Jianming, director of the China White Feather Chicken Alliance, adding that it wouldn't rise high enough to spur substitution.

The situation, meanwhile, is offering temporary benefits for domestic poultry firms.

The price of parent stock, or birds bred from imported chicks that produce broiler chickens, has jumped tenfold in the past year to 45 yuan ($6.74) a package.

That helped Shandong Yisheng Livestock and Poultry , Asia's top broiler breeder, generate first half profits of 270 million yuan, against losses of 192 million yuan a year ago.

The situation could also drive more consolidation in the industry, pushing out smaller players unable to get their hands on sufficient parent stock.

"In 2016 and 2017 supply in the white feather broiler sector is going to be damaged for quite a long period, and we expect the whole industry could see new opportunities in the next three years," said Fujian Sunner.

($1 = 6.6793 Chinese yuan renminbi) (Reporting by Dominique Patton, additional reporting by Beijing Newsroom, editing by Richard Pullin)
BEIJING (Reuters) - China and the United States made "significant progress" in talks last week on investment rules, state news agency Xinhua reported on Sunday.

Reaching an agreement over the so-called 'negative list' of businesses in China that are out of bounds to foreign investors is crucial in sealing a treaty between Beijing and Washington that would lift investment flows between the worlds two largest economies.

The issue has been made more prominent by a wave of Chinese acquisitions of U.S. companies that have raised questions over the inability of U.S. companies to buy assets as freely in China.

During last week's meeting in Beijing, the two nations exchanged for the third time the latest revised draft of the negative list.

"This signals a common goal to establish an investment system that is non discriminative, transparent and open," a Ministry of Commerce spokesman was quoted as saying on Sunday.

"Two sides will intensively push for further negotiations, expedite the work pace in order to reach a win-win, high level investment treaty."

China has not made public the negative list, although sources told Reuters previously that the number of items on the list in earlier drafts had fallen to between 35 and 40, from around 80 previously.

Securing an investment treaty with the United States could bring a much-needed boost to Chinas slowing economy, where domestic investment is at its lowest since 2000.

(Reporting by Chen Aizhu; Editing by Kim Coghill)
By Venus Wu and James Pomfret HONG KONG (Reuters) - Hong Kong voted on Sunday in its first major election since pro-democracy protests in 2014 and one of its most contentious, with a push for independence among disaffected younger candidates and voters stoking tension with China's government. The vote is for a 70-seat legislative council in which Hong Kong's pro-democracy opposition is hoping to maintain a one-third veto bloc in the face of better mobilized and funded pro-Beijing and pro-establishment rivals. The former British colony was handed back to China in 1997 under a "one country, two systems" agreement that promised to maintain the global financial hub's freedoms and separate laws for at least 50 years, but gave ultimate control to Beijing. Long queues formed outside some polling stations as voters flocked to cast ballots for a record number of candidates who fanned out across the city of seven million on election day. Much attention focused on a group of about 20 pro-democracy "localists" pushing a more radical, anti-China agenda who could become a fledgling new force in the legislature. A growing yearning for independence and animosity towards Beijing in the southern coastal city pose one of the central government's most pressing domestic political issues. "Hong Kong is really chaotic now. I want to do something to help," said 28-year-old Maicy Leung, who was in a snaking queue of several hundred. "It's to help the next generation and to help myself." The stakes for Beijing are particularly high this weekend as G20 leaders gather in the eastern city of Hangzhou for a summit. Hong Kong's opposition now controls 27 of the legislature's 70 seats, giving it a one-third veto bloc to oppose funding and various legislative bills including those it sees as eroding freedoms. Over 50 percent of eligible voters cast ballots, with the results due early on Monday. It will give an indication of anti-China sentiment some two years after tens of thousands took to Hong Kong streets to demand full democracy from China's Communist Party leaders. A younger generation of activists who joined those protests is openly advocating independence - a push some people warn could jeopardize Hong Kong's economic and political future, but which seems to be gaining traction. A recent Chinese University of Hong Kong poll found around one in six people now support a separation from China. China's stability-obsessed leaders have categorically rejected any possibility of independence. Hong Kong officials are generally supportive of Beijing and keen to preserve "one country, two systems", though confidence in China's commitment to the formula has been shaken by recent incidents including the abduction of several Hong Kong booksellers by Chinese agents. BEIJING CAMPAIGN Many residents see the 79 days of student-led "Umbrella Revolution" protests in 2014 as a turning point in the city's politics even though Beijing gave no ground. Since then, many disaffected youngsters have decried what they see as increasing Beijing interference to stifle dissent and civil liberties, leading to a radicalization of the political scene and occasional violent protests and a riot. In July, six pro-democracy election candidates were disqualified from the election by the Hong Kong government on the grounds that they supported independence, even after some were forced to sign a pledge that Hong Kong is an "inalienable" part of China "We don't want our next generation to be slaves of the Chinese Communist Party," said Edward Leung, one of those disqualified who campaigned for a replacement candidate in an open top bus and addressed cheering crowds of with a loudhailer. "It's a revolution of this era," shouted Baggio Leung of Youngspiration, who was running on Leung's vacated ticket. China has launched a multi-pronged campaign to try to sway the vote through its channels of influence including state companies and grassroots patriotic associations.. "It is an open secret that they ... pull strings, they make threats, they plant votes," said Anson Chan, a former senior Hong Kong official. The city's Beijing-backed leader, Leung Chun-ying, rejected any suggestion of interference. "Our election is a democratic one," Leung told reporters after casting his vote, when an activist threw a tuna fish sandwich at him. "Voters have their own free choice and don't need anyone to tell them how to vote." (Reporting by Venus Wu, Tris Pan and James Pomfret, Editing by Robert Birsel and Angus MacSwan)
Chinas newest glass bridge closed just 13 days after opening, due to an overwhelming number of visitors.

Zhangjiajie Grand Canyon, in Chinas Yunan Province, opened its record-breaking bridge on August 20. Since, the park has inundated with visitors coming to walk across the 1,115-foot glass bridge.

Park officials told CNN that while the bridges capacity caps at 8,000 per day, they have been swarmed with 10 times as many visitors every day. Access is limited to 800 people at a time.

(See photos of the bridge.)

The bridges management announced via Weibo, the Chinese social networking site, on Thursday that the bridge would close September 2 because of an urgency to improve and update the facilities. No accidents, problems or cracks in the bridge have been reported.

The closure came without much warning, although park officials had suggested moving the closure to September 5 to allow guests time to rework plans. Visitors who were planning on crossing the bridge over the weekend are not happy.

I have booked everything and now you are saying you are closed... Are you kidding me? one Weibo user wrote in response to the attractions statement.

During closures, the park will revamp its infrastructure, parking lots, ticket-booking system and customer service. At this point, it is unclear for how long the park will remain closed.

Zhangjiajies glass bridge is over 1,100 feet long and hangs over a 980 foot drop. When it opened two weeks ago, it smashed the previous record for longest bridge.

Last year, another glass bridge in China cracked two weeks after opening. The 853-foot glass bridge at Yuntaishan Scenic Park cracked while visitors were on it. It immediately closed for inspection, but later reopened. Officials said the damage was just superficial and never caused any harm.

Cailey Rizzo writes about travel, art and culture and is the founding editor of The Local Dive. You can follow her on Instagram and Twitter @misscaileyanne.

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Unlike her opponent, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, Democrat Hillary Clinton has run a disciplined campaign and has, for the most part, avoided unnecessarily drawing the spotlight to herself when her opponent has been struggling.

However, that discipline extends only to things under the Clinton campaigns own control, which the Federal Bureau of Investigation plainly is not. Thats why the days-long story about Trumps puzzling decision to follow up a decorous and conciliatory visit to Mexico last week with a fire-breathing anti-immigrant speech just hours later lost some of its steam over the weekend with the release of details from the FBIs investigation into Clintons use of a private email system while she served as secretary of state.

Related: The One Endorsement Clinton Really Doesnt Need

The revelations in the materials released on Friday were many and varied. They included details about the (potentially illegal) destruction of some of the 13 different mobile devices that were used to access Clintons private email account, which she used for official State Department business and the deletion of emails from Clintons private email server by her staff months after she was directed to preserve any evidence.

Clinton, it turns out, cited her failure to remember specific information dozens of times in her interview with FBI agents investigating her use of the private system. This included whether or not she had received basic instructions on the handling of classified materials.

She also professed confusion about the markings on certain documents signifying their classification status -- a puzzling defense for someone with Clintons record of service.

The FBIs findings included thousands of emails identified as official correspondence by investigators that Clinton had not turned over to the State Department despite her assurances that the contents of her personal server had been meticulously combed for such material by her own legal team. In fact, the volume of emails left out of Clintons submission to the State Department reveals that the system used to screen out her personal emails was poorly designed at best. To the many inclined to a less charitable view of Clintons motives, it will suggest deliberate withholding of information.

Story continues

Related: Trump Dealt Himself a Losing Hand With Fiery Immigration Speech

The FBIs release of its records related to the Clinton email investigation offered a welcome respite to the Trump campaign, giving people like vice presidential candidate Mike Pence, the current governor of Indiana, something other than his running mates flip-flops on immigration policy to talk about.

It's just more evidence that Hillary Clinton is the most dishonest candidate for president of the United States since Richard Nixon, Pence said in an interview with Meet the Press host Chuck Todd.

Hillary Clinton, what's evident from the notes, what's evident from all of the revelations over the last several weeks, is that Hillary Clinton-- operated in such a way to keep her e-mails, and particularly her interactions while Secretary of State with the Clinton Foundation, out of the public reach, out of public accountability.

It remains unclear how frequently and at what point in the final two months of the presidential campaign more information from the thousands of emails recovered by the FBI will be released into the public domain. However, what seems abundantly clear is that there will be more revelations that Clinton will have to answer for -- every single one of them a life preserver tossed to a floundering Trump campaign.

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Coca-Cola Company says it has fully "replenished" all the water it uses globally to make billions of bottles of soft drinks, juices and purified H20.

The Atlanta-based beverage giant recently estimated it had returned roughly 192 billion liters of water to the communities and watersheds near hundreds of its bottling plants in 2015  or about 115 percent of all the water used in Coca-Cola's beverages last year.

It did so by treating wastewater from its bottling facilities, building clean drinking water projects in impoverished areas, planting trees and native grasses to catch rainfall, and other initiatives to help offset Coca-Cola's massive water footprint.

SEE ALSO: Coca-Cola's world famous neon billboard is up for charity auction

"Water is the lifeblood of every single community, and for us, it's also our No. 1 most critical ingredient," Bea Perez, Coca-Cola's chief sustainability officer, told Mashable by phone last week from the World Water Week conference in Stockholm, Sweden.

Coca-Cola said it is the first Fortune 500 company to reach such an aggressive target for replenishing its water use.

A man pushes his bike through a Coca-Cola sign in Awasa Lake, Ethiopia, Oct. 22, 2010.

Image: UIG via Getty Images

Coca-Cola's achievement is part of a slow but growing push by food and beverage companies  steered largely by environmental groups  to make sure that ample water supplies still exist as climate change and population growth threaten the world's freshwater resources.

One of Coke's largest competitors, PepsiCo Inc., said it is making similar investments to protect the watersheds where it produces snacks and beverages and to provide safe drinking water for millions of people.

"PepsiCo believes that the ability to flourish long-term ultimately depends on the health of the communities we operate in and the natural resources we rely on," a spokesperson told Mashable in an email.

The United Nations estimates that withdrawals of freshwater supplies rose by at least 1 percent per year in the past three decades.

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If communities and companies don't do more to limit their water usage, withdrawals could surge by a staggering 55 percent by 2050, the U.N.'s water agency said in a 2014 report. More than 40 percent of the global population would live in areas of severe water stress if that happens.

A cattle farmer stands next to a remaining puddle of what used to be his 200,000 cubic meter dam in Ladysmith, South Africa, Nov. 11, 2015.

Image: Getty Images

Consumer demand threatens water supplies

Higher living standards and rising demand for consumer goods  from Cokes and packaged foods to cars and mass-produced meat  are major reasons why the world is guzzling more freshwater, according to the U.N.

So manufacturers face a dilemma: They can meet the growing demand by expanding operations and producing more goods, but if they take a business-as-usual approach, they might deplete local freshwater resources  a risky business move and a surefire way to tarnish their brands.

Coca-Cola has experienced its own such debacle in India, where farmers and activists have voiced repeated concerns that the company's bottling plants could erode groundwater levels, undermine local agriculture and pollute neighboring water bodies.

PepsiCo was similarly accused of depleting groundwater and dumping pesticides into waterways near its bottling facilities in India, charges the company has refuted.

India is the world's second-most populous country and represents a massive market for snack and drink makers like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. But the nation has suffered devastating droughts and deadly heat waves in recent years, putting an unprecedented strain on water supplies and boosting competition for the scare resources.

An Indian beverage delivery man drives past a mural of a Pepsi bottle in the suburbs of New Delhi, June 25, 2009.

Image: AFP/Getty Images

Coca-Cola in February closed a factory in the northern Indian city of Kaladera, citing a lack of demand. However, the plant had faced a decade of local opposition before its closure. The beverage giant last year shelved plans for a proposed $73 million plant in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, and in 2014, it dropped plans to expand an existing facility in the northern city of Uttar Pradesh.

Perez said a fight involving another one of Coca-Cola's plants in India gave the company a "wake-up call" that helped jumpstart its campaign to curb water consumption and invest in conservation and clean drinking water projects.

The Kerala state government accused the Indian unit of Coca-Cola of depleting groundwater and dumping toxic waste at its bottling plant in Palakkad around a decade ago. In 2010, state officials asked the unit to pay $47 million in compensation. Coca-Cola denied the allegations and was later cleared of wrongdoing.

"Although we were found not guilty of those allegations, our wake-up call was truly that that didn't matter, because the communities [in India] were in need," Perez recalled. "They turned to Coca-Cola to say, 'Well how are you going to help our community?'"

How Coca-Cola "replenishes" water

In 2007, Coca-Cola set a goal to take the equivalent amount of water used in its global sales volume and "return" the same amount back  or more  to nature and communities.

The company then approached The Nature Conservancy, a major U.S. environmental organization, and the water-focused consulting firm LimnoTech to figure out how to reach that target. The group created methodologies for calculating the benefits of each water conservation project, which were subject to a scientific peer review and are annually evaluated for accuracy.

"The goal is tied to our sales volume, so the more we sell  whether we grow our business organically or by acquisition  the more we have to do," Greg Koch, Coca-Cola's senior director of global water stewardship, told Mashable via phone..

So far, Coca-Cola has spent around $2 billion to develop nearly 250 community water projects in dozens of countries, Perez said.

In China, for instance, the soft drink behemoth is partnering with the World Wildlife Fund to restore ecosystems along the Yangtze River, the world's third-longest river and a severely polluted waterway. Pilot projects to improve flood protections, conserve wetlands and boost water conservation in nearby industrial parks helped replenish over 10 billion liters of water so far, Perez said.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, Coca-Cola is working with the U.S. Forest Service and other partners to prevent snowmelt from escaping into the ocean.

Because of overgrazing and agricultural use in the East Bay, snowmelt often slides down the mountains before it can be stored downstream near towns like Oakland and Berkeley. By planting willow trees and restructuring the landscape, the group is helping to capture snowmelt in the spring and summer to ensure a more steady supply of freshwater for residents in the area.

People walk along the dried and cracked river beach of the Yangtze River in Chongqing, China, Aug. 24, 2016.

Image: AFP/Getty Images

Those projects don't immediately produce liters of water that can instantly offset Coca-Cola's water consumption.

Instead, they create the infrastructure or systems for projects that will steadily replenish those volumes of water over time, said Hugo Contreras, who leads The Nature Conservancy's Latin American unit for water security and works on the partnership with Coca-Cola.

"All natural processes take a long time to consolidate," he said by phone last week from Stockholm, where he was also attending World Water Week.

Calculating the benefits of those projects is also an evolving process.

Contreras said when his organization and Coca-Cola first began working together on the replenishment initiative, they didn't have a proper way to collect data from the watersheds. Now they have protocols for measuring the projects' benefits based on three criteria: improving water quality, refilling underground aquifers and boosting flows of water into rivers and streams.

While the teams can measure benefits at the micro level, they're still figuring out how best to analyze the benefits to the entire watershed. "We have done some analysis so far, but not to the extent we envision should be done," Contreras said.

More companies could do this

Coca-Cola's push to essentially reimburse the planet for the water it uses has inspired other companies to follow suit.

Contreras said a handful of large corporations have approached The Nature Conservancy about launching programs like Coca-Cola's replenishment initiative, although Contreras declined to name those firms while talks are still underway.

"The work that Coca-Cola has been doing, and the ambition they have shown, has started to move other peers in the industry," Contreras said.

PepsiCo said it already has similar programs in the works.

In 2009, the New York-based manufacturer became the first beverage business in India to return more water locally than it used through agricultural initiatives, water efficiency in manufacturing and replenishing water supplies in local communities. Deloitte, the global consulting firm, independently verified that statement.

"The company has been 'water positive' since then [in India]," the PepsiCo spokesperson said by email.
Coldplay took the stage in Denver Monday night just hours after news broke about the death of Gene Wilder, and found a beautiful way to honor the legendary actor.



During the performance of their song "The Scientist," Chris Martin and the band inserted a line from "Pure Imagination," the iconic song sung by Wilder in the classic film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.



Following the concert, the band tweeted a clip of Martin singing a dreamy rendition of the song's chorus as confetti and paper stars rain down on a crowd.





In a world of pure imagination... R42 pic.twitter.com/R2KD3kA0RK a Coldplay (@coldplay) August 30, 2016











RELATED VIDEO: Remembering Gene Wilder's Best Movie Moments





Over the years, the song from the 1971 movie has been covered by Maroon 5, Josh Groban and even Mariah Carey.



Coldplay has also performed tributes to the late musicians Prince and David Bowie almost nightly on their current A Head Full of Dreams tour.



Wilder's passing at the age of 83 from complications with Alzheimer's disease was a surprise to many, as the beloved comedy star kept a low profile in recent years in an effort to hide his health issues.



"The decision to wait until this time to disclose his condition wasn't vanity, but more so that the countless young children that would smile or call out to him 'there's Willy Wonka,' would not have to be then exposed to an adult referencing illness or trouble and causing delight to travel to worry, disappointment or confusion," his nephew wrote in a statement announcing the actor's passing. "He simply couldn't bear the idea of one less smile in the world."
Madrid (AFP) - Colombian President Juan-Manuel Santos urged the country's elite to back a peace deal with Marxist FARC rebels to end a half-century of conflict.

"I am sure that the Colombian people understand that an imperfect peace is preferable to 20 or 30 years of war," he said in an interview published Sunday in Spanish daily El Pais.

The peace deal is due to be signed on September 26 in Cartagena ahead of an October referendum on final ratification of the historic accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

Once the deal is formally signed, the FARC, launched in 1964, will have 180 days to demobilise, disarm and relaunch itself as a political party. The UN has agreed to monitor the process.

Santos slammed the country's upper crust for opposing the deal, saying the gilded circle -- of which he was member -- was "misinformed."

"I don't understand why my peers in the elite, of which I am part -- I am a member of the poshest clubs in the capital -- have allowed themselves to be misinformed on the advantages of peace.

"I am sad to see that these people... don't understand the importance of taking these steps to leave our children a more peaceful country," he said.

He said the accord "will change the history of Colombia."

The conflict, which has drawn in various left- and right-wing armed groups and gangs, has left 260,000 dead, 45,000 missing and 6.9 million uprooted from their homes.

On October 2, Colombians will vote on this question: "Do you support the final accord to end the conflict and build a stable and lasting peace?"
Two California correcitonal officers were rushed to a hospital after a visitor opened fire in a jail lobby this weekend.

Police say visitor Thong Vang opened fire on correctional officers Juanita Davila and Toamalama Scanlan in the lobby of the Fresno County Jail Saturday morning after he was told to wait his turn in line.

According to a statement from the Fresno County Sheriff's Office, Vang tried to cut to the front of the visitation line, but a correctional officer working at the front desk told him to wait his turn.

Read: 89-Year-Old Motorist Faces Up To 30 Years in Jail For Fatally Hitting Ex NFL Player

He then began to display bizarre behavior by pacing back and forth next to a metal detector that leads to a secure area of the jail, the statement reads.

Davila and Scanlan then approached Vang and told him to take a seat. At that point, authorities say Vang pulled a handgun out of his clothing and shot both officers.

The officers were shot in the head and neck areas. Davila is in critical, but stable, condition and Scanlan is in critical condition.

A responding correctional officer fired shots at Vang, who allegedly Vang shots. However, no one else was struck.

At some point, officers used a Taser on Vang, but they were still unable to get him to surrender, according to the statement.

Read: Man Shoots Shopper at Mall, Makes His Getaway in an Uber Car: Cops

Vang then ran to an unlocked door that led to the jail records area and stayed in the hallway as responding deputies and a Fresno Police officer entered the jail lobby and ordered him to surrender.

Cops say Vang then dropped his weapon and was held at gunpoint while other deputies rescued the two injured correctional officers by dragging them out of the lobby to ambulances waiting outside.

Vang was taken into custody and transported to the hospital for minor scrapes and cuts. He is scheduled to be booked into the Fresno County Jail on felony charges, which will include attempted murder.

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By Anton Zverev

SIMFEROPOL, Crimea, Sept 4 (Reuters) - A Crimean dissident undergoing enforced psychiatric testing by Russian authorities is being held in a dilapidated medical facility and says the poor conditions are a danger to his physical health.

Ilmi Umerov, deputy head of the Crimean Tatars' semi-official Mejlis legislature, which was suspended by Moscow after it annexed the peninsula from Ukraine in 2014, was committed to compulsory psychiatric testing by local authorities in August.

The 59-year-old, who says his mental health is fine, had previously been criminally charged over statements he made protesting what he called the "Russian occupation" of Crimea.

He has since been held at a crumbling psychiatric ward in the Crimean capital of Simferopol. A Reuters reporter who gained access to the hospital during visiting hours spoke to Umerov in the facility's courtyard, where other patients have been forced to sleep outside because of building works.

Western countries, including Britain and the United States, have called for Umerov's release and condemned his treatment. Rights activists say Russia is reviving the Soviet practice of subjecting political dissidents to enforced incarceration and psychiatric treatment.

Umerov suffers from Parkinson's disease and attacks of high blood pressure after undergoing heart surgery in 2011. He said he had been barred from speaking to journalists and forced to live in squalid, crowded conditions that endangered his health.

The Russian Federal Security Service in Crimea was not immediately available for comment on Umerov's case.

"With this bouquet (of ailments), to be in such conditions is of course dangerous," he said, grey-faced and struggling to control his arms and the left side of his face, which shook violently because of his Parkinson's. "On my fourth day here I collapsed and lost consciousness."

"Yesterday, the administrator came and told the patients and staff that journalists were not allowed to speak to me, that phones, dictaphones and cameras were not allowed because it is a closed facility."

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Two orderlies blocked the view of a Reuters reporter who tried to photograph Umerov.

The Tatars, a mainly Muslim community that makes up about 15 percent of Crimea's population, have largely opposed Russian rule in the peninsula and say the 2014 annexation was illegal, a view supported by the West.

Moscow says the overwhelming majority of Crimeans voted to join Russia in a proper and fair referendum.

Umerov said doctors were due to rule on his mental condition next week.

"It is all an attempt to keep the population in a constant state of fear," he said. "If the Mejlis deputy chairman can be charged and punished, then everyone else should just shut up.

"I don't think it is the prosecutor who is accusing me, rather this comes from somewhere in the Kremlin." (Writing by Jack Stubbs; Editing by Christian Lowe and Larry King)
Australians paid tribute to the memory of "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin on Sunday on the tenth anniversary of the death of the iconic television celebrity and conservationist.

Irwin, world-famous for his daring stunts with dangerous animals, died on September 4, 2006 after being stabbed in the heart by a giant stingray while filming on the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland.

As the nation marked Father's Day on Sunday, his daughter, Bindi Irwin, who was eight years old when her father died, wrote a tribute on Instagram and Twitter alongside an image of her beaming father carrying her as a baby:

"You'll be my hero for my entire existence. I love you more than words can describe."

The 18-year-old, a media star, promotes her father's conservation causes.

Irwin's close friend and manager John Stainton, who was with Irwin when he died, said it was still "hard to talk about" what happened.

"It was never a put on, he was larger than life in life," Stainton added, speaking to ABC radio on Friday.

"He burnt a hole in the fabric of our lives as he jumped through the television and grabbed you by the scruff of the neck. He had that magnetism and there was nothing like him before."

Irwin's son, Robert, told the Brisbane Times news website he was working towards being a wildlife photographer to "carry on in his (father's) footsteps".

Earlier this week, Irwin's father Bob released a letter his son wrote to his parents when he was 32 to thank them for their support, but which he only found this year.

"Probably one of the most unfortunate things in a bloke's life is that it takes over 30 years to realise how essential you have been to build my character, my ethics and, most importantly, my HAPPINESS," Irwin wrote.

Other Australians took to social media websites to recall where they were when they heard the news of Irwin's sudden death, while sharing their appreciation for his conservation efforts.
It was a big night for Stanley Tucci on Saturday, as he received a career tribute at the Deauville Film Festival.

It was the Oscar nominee's fourth time at the French festival, which he called "one of his favorite places ever and one of my favorite festivals ever."

In a contentious election year in the U.S., Tucci said cinema can lead by example.

"Cinema is a collaborative art form," he said, noting how teams bring the finished product together, not individual directors. "That collaboration is one that has brought us so many great films, but it's in that spirit of collaboration that we hope we can all move forward and I think in this way, politicians might have something to learn from artists."

Tucci was introduced by jury president and former French culture minister Frederic Mitterrand, who cited the actor's Emmy and Golden Globe wins.

"I don't feel like I've achieved enough to warrant this, but I'm glad of it," he told The Hollywood Reporter of the lifetime achievement honor.

Tucci will head to Los Angeles next week as shooting starts on the upcoming Ryan Murphy TV series Feud, in which he plays studio bigwig Jack Warner, alongside Susan Sarandon as Bette Davis and Jessica Lange as Joan Crawford. The show focuses on the rivalry between the two legendary actresses during the shooting of 1962's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

"It's very funny and a fascinating story," he said. "I had no idea that this had happened. [Warner] is horrible, but he's really funny. It's very satisfying to play the mean, funny guy." Tucci would not, however, divulge which studio heads he would use as inspiration.

He has yet to meet Murphy, but said he is a big admirer of the director's work.

As for a possible follow-up to 2006's The Devil Wears Prada based on author Lauren Weisberger's new book Revenge Wears Prada, Tucci outright dismisses it.

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"That's never going to happen," he said.

Though co-stars Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt have expressed interest in a sequel, Tucci has no interest in reprising what he says is the favorite role of his career.

"That role was so great because it was so beautifully written and he was incredibly funny and there was a real substance to it. It was a truly great American studio movie in every way," he said. "Perfect in every way."

He then added: "Sometimes it's best just to leave things. If you try to redo it, let's face it, there are very few sequels that actually work."

Read more: Ryan Murphy Anthology 'Feud,' Starring Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon, Set at FX
Think "jazz festival" and a number of cliches come to mind, most centering around old people and even older music. Elephant ears and dancing in the street, on the other hand, are less likely candidates for any celebration of "America's classical music" -- but in Detroit, home of the world's largest free jazz festival, that's what you'll find.

To be clear, "free" in this case means dollars in your pocket, not required Ornette Coleman (though chances are, he stopped through at least once). This weekend, the 37th annual Detroit Jazz Festival took over the city's downtown with four stages and four days of programming, most centering on the riverfront Hart Plaza.

Norah Jones, Kamasi Washington & More Inspire Sell-Out Crowd at Newport Jazz Festival

Though the festival kicked off officially on Friday night with an opening concert from the festival's artist-in-residence Ron Carter and Breezin' hitmaker George Benson, things really started swinging on Saturday, as everyone from veterans such as Randy Weston and Jimmy Heath to local high school students got in on the action.

Here's a rundown of the day's highlights:

1:15 p.m. A live rendition of DownBeat magazine's long-running Blindfold Test -- in which musicians are played a series of songs, and asked to speak about them sans liner notes -- had veteran guitarist John Abercrombie slightly stumped. "...Muddy Waters?" he said hesitantly when played classic sounding blues, which turned out to be by John Lee Hooker, who fittingly enough got his start in the Motor City playing clubs when he wasn't working at the Ford factory.

1:40 p.m. "I went to the army and we thought when we came back, things would be different for African Americans," said pianist Randy Weston of his three years in the Korean War. "But everything was the same." Weston was joined by fellow recent nonagenarian Jimmy Heath for a talk in the Mack Avenue Records tent, where the pair shared memories from their storied careers for the microphones of Voice of America. Of his former sideman John Coltrane, Heath said, "He was on the saxophone 26 hours a day. One day I said, 'Willie Mays hit three home runs!' and he said, 'Who's Willie Mays?' "

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2:45 p.m. A tribute to Detroit native Kenny Cox -- who played piano with Etta James during her '60s heyday, among others -- featured a performance by his former bassist Ron Brooks, who led a classics-oriented quintet. "Here's one of Kenny's favorite tunes," said Ralph "Buzzy" Jones before a sweet rendition of the standard "Alone, Together."

New Orleans Jazz Fest Day Six Sees Headliners Rained Out, Big Freedia Pays Tribute to Prince

3:10 p.m. Within seconds of starting Tony Bennett favorite "My Foolish Heart," Jack WIlliams III, 17 years old and one winner of the festival's Youth Jazz Vocal Competition, earned whoops and whistles and laughs of surprise -- his polished baritone made the swooning rendition (backed by the Wayne State University big band) sound straight out of a Technicolor movie.

4:15 p.m. Randy Weston and Jimmy Heath reunited onstage for a performance of the former's most famous composition, "Hi-Fly." Somehow, after performing the tune for literally half a century, both appeared completely jubilant at the opportunity to play it for the rapt crowd, turning out solos that still showed up just about everyone else at the festival.

4:55 p.m. Alfredo Rodriguez's virtuosic trio turned up the heat with their ever-escalating compositions, pushing their tunes' Afro-Cuban rhythms to tempos that would make Rio's best samba band envious. After a day filled with easy swing, the catharsis (see Henry Cole's jaw-dropping drum solo) was a perfect counterpoint.

6:43 p.m. New Orleans natives The Soul Rebels proved the party was just getting started with their covers-filled set, moving from "Human Nature" to "I Wish" to a number of inimitably-groovy originals and keeping things funky enough that even the security guards couldn't stay still.

7:55 p.m. Chris Potter and his Underground Orchestra proved the crowd was as into the stuff that was a little bit further out as they would be for Roy Hargrove's romantic run of standards that followed, as the saxophone stalwart and his band moved through mellow string arrangements to Potter interpolating "God Bless the Child" to an incredible vibraphone and marimba solo from Steve Nelson.
By Simon Cambers NEW YORK (Reuters) - Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal can take a step closer to a 50th career showdown when they play their fourth-round matches at the U.S. Open on Sunday. Both arrived in New York with question marks over injured left wrists, but seemingly have put the issue behind them. If they survive two more matches, a semi-final encounter awaits, with Djokovic holding a 26-23 head-to-head career record. World number one and defending champion Djokovic, who takes on Briton Kyle Edmund, has played just one full match due to injuries by his second and third-round opponents. He understands the pros and cons of lack of court time. As you are approaching the second week of a grand slam you want to have match play and you want to have time spent on the center court before you face one of the top players," said the Serbian. But I'm not too concerned about my game itself. I've worked hard the last couple days and health-wise I feel much better than I did at the beginning of the tournament. Im confident that everything is going in the right direction. Nadal, who missed Wimbledon with a wrist injury that forced him to quit after two rounds of the French Open, has not dropped a set on his way to the last 16, building on his run to the semi-finals at the Rio Olympics, where he won a gold medal in doubles. I don't know in which kind of level I am, said the fourth-seeded Spaniard, who takes on 24th-seed Lucas Pouille of France. It is true that when I had to stop I was playing great. I felt myself ready for the French. For me it is great news that I am on the tour again and I am playing every day with less pain on the wrist. That's the most important thing. In women's action, second seed Angelique Kerber plays two-time Wimbledon champion Petra Kvitova for a quarter-final spot, while 2015 runner-up Roberta Vinci faces Lesia Tsurenko. (Editing by Andrew Both)
donald trump mark burns cnn

Pastor Mark Burns, a fiery surrogate for Donald Trump, walked out of a CNN interview as he faced pointed questions about his credentials.

The interview, which took place on Wednesday, was aired Saturday afternoon.

In it, the South Carolina clergyman lauded Donald Trump as "a great judge of character."

At one point, CNN news anchor, Victor Blackwell, pointed out some apparent inconsistencies in the pastor's professional resume  among them were claims made on Burns' church website that he was a member of Kappa Alpha Psi, a predominantly black fraternity. The organization, according to CNN, said it had no record of Burns' membership.

Burns implied that the website containing that information may have been hacked.

Blackwell noted other inconsistencies, including that Burns claimed to have served six years in the US Army Reserves. A statement from the Army to CNN contradicted that assertion as well.

"He has no active Army or Army Reserves service time," the statement read.

Claims that Burns earned a bachelor's degree from a South Carolina university and was currently working on a master's degree were also debunked.

Appearing stunned, Burns accused the CNN host of "trying to destroy" his character and said that the information in question was "extremely old." After a tense back-and-forth, Burns walked out of the interview.

Burns issued a statement on Friday acknowledging that he "overstated several details" in his biography.

Watch the exchange below:

NOW WATCH: NEW POLL: Hillary Clinton is more disliked than ever before





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Paris (AFP) - The Champs-Elysees was the setting of a mini-air show on Sunday as amateur drone enthusiasts flew their high-tech toys over the famed Paris avenue in the city's first festival celebrating the gadgets.

Concentrating intently, punters guided their remote-controlled flying machines through a brightly coloured obstacle course accompanied by commentary worthy of a Formula One race.

The afternoon festival included a race and demonstrations of the remote-controlled devices that are increasingly used as toys as well as for surveillance, aerial photography and -- controversially -- in the secretive US counter-terror campaign.

"It's really magical to be at a site like the Champs-Elysees, one of the most famous places in the world," said Dunkan Bossian, 19, one of eight pilots who competed in the race.

A German entrant, 27-year-old Julia Muller, added: "Events like this are important to show people that drones are not only dangerous things but you can have fun with them as well."

Part of the famous avenue -- which is carless on the first Sunday of every month -- was converted into a drone aviary for the occasion, a space confined in netting that is about eight metres (25 feet) high and 140 metres long.

"There has been a democratisation of the drone for leisure activities," city official Jean-Louis Missika told AFP, adding that drones were last year's most popular Christmas present.

However, "people must absolutely understand that it is not a toy, that regulations are very strict for good reasons," Missika said. "You can't fly a drone in the park like you can play badminton."

So the festival had a teaching component, with displays on the regulations, the drone's various uses, and workshops on piloting them that allowed amateurs to try their hand.

The festival was an occasion for the postal service to demonstrate its delivery drone, which weighs 3.7 kilos (eight pounds) and can carry three kilos of mail over 20 kilometres (12 miles).

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France is the world leader in the market for civilian drones, selling 300,000 of the devices last year -- three times as many as in 2014.

The industry had a turnover of some 300 million euros ($335 million) in 2015, of which 60 million euros was in the professional drone sector.

The city on Sunday announced the opening of two permanent sites -- in the Bois de Boulogne park in the west of Paris and in the Parc de la Villette to the north -- where amateurs can pilot their drones on Sundays starting September 18.
CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt's General Authority for Supply Commodities (GASC) purchased on Sunday 50,000 tonnes of Brazilian raw sugar, GASC vice chairman Ahmed Youssef told Reuters. GASC bought the sugar for $491.50 per tonne, Youssef said. The sugar is sought for arrival between Oct. 15-30. Egypt plans to buy 450,000-550,000 tonnes of sugar in local and foreign markets to cover its needs until the end of February, a supplies ministry official said last week. GASC received just four offers from two companies in the tender, held on Saturday, before deciding to postpone its purchase decision until Sunday, traders said. The winning offer was made by Union company, traders said. The state buyer had originally scheduled the sugar tender for last month, but postponed it until Saturday after receiving limited interest, traders said. (Reporting by Maha El Dahan; Writing by Eric Knecht; Editing by Mark Potter)
Dakar (AFP) - As Gabon is rocked by violence following the contested re-election of President Ali Bongo, experts says electoral fraud in Africa is becoming harder, thanks to civil society vigilance and spread of mobile technology.

Opposition leader Jean Ping on Friday declared himself the rightful president of Gabon and called for a recount, following Bongos claim of victory with a razor-thin margin of just under 6,000 votes in the August 27 election.

But recent elections in Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Benin and Burkina Faso have all been held largely without dispute, overseen by engaged citizens who assured careful monitoring of the process, said Mathias Hounkpe, Political Governance Programme Manager for the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA), which promotes greater government transparency.

"It is more and more difficult to commit fraud," he said.

Preventing fraud with ballot papers was down to a clear legal framework for organising elections, electoral bodies "in a position to respect the rules", independent figures such as international election observers and a free press and active social media users who would guarantee a fair vote, according to Hounkpe.

For Aboubacry Mbodji, secretary-general of the African rights group RADDHO, west and central African countries such as Senegal, Ghana and the Atlantic island of Cape-Verde have shown Africa how a successful democracy holds an election.

A strong civil society and the combination of free media and citizens with access to new technology to disseminate information was "extremely important", he told AFP.

Senegal, where RADDHO is based, saw "a change at the top" in 2000 when liberal candidate Abdoulaye Wade challenged the socialist regime that had held power for 40 years, and was elected president for two terms.

- Government fightback -

But Wade himself was booted out in 2012 after angering voters with attempts to stay on for a third stint in power, showing the maturity of the electorate, Mbodji said.

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"(The 2000 election) was in large part thanks to the use of mobile phones, but also the internet," he added.

Any party members tempted to tamper with ballots had to face the large numbers of Senegalese who remained in place at voting stations to ensure it passed off peacefully, he said, and reporters who called in the results to media from mobile phones, especially radio stations, covering the event.

The last 15 years have seen organisations such as "Y en a marre" (We are sick of it) in Senegal, "Balai citoyen" (Citizen sweep-up) in Burkina Faso and "Lutte pour le changement" (Fight for change) in the Democratic Republic of Congo appear, intent on pressing governments to be less opaque.

Despite the trend towards more transparent elections, heavy handed government reactions have not entirely vanished, with internet and social media shutdowns during presidential elections in Uganda in February and in Congo-Brazzaville in March, and now in Gabon.

"The African Union observers couldnt even communicate properly to complete their tasks," Mbodji said, referring to the Congo election that returned longtime leader Denis Sassou Nguesso to power.

But even the continent's most entrenched leaders couldnt escape the effect of the tidal wave of information the internet made possible, said Hounkpe.

"Those in power have less and less capacity to manipulate the process."
DUBLIN, Sept 4 (Reuters) - The European Commission is scrutinising around six tax opinions multinationals received in Ireland in the early 1990s, the same period in which it said one granted to Apple amounted to illegal state aid, Ireland's Sunday Business Post said.

Last week, European Union antitrust regulators ordered Apple to pay up to 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion) in taxes to the Irish government after ruling that Ireland granted undue and selective tax benefit to the company.

Apple denies that Dublin gave it any tax breaks, a view shared by Ireland's Office of the Revenue Commissioners, which assesses and collects taxes, and the Irish government, which on Friday agreed to join Apple in appealing the decision.

The Commission is now actively scrutinising multiple tax opinions given to multinationals in Ireland and focusing on around six that could lead to Apple-style investigations, the Sunday Business Post said, without quoting any sources.

Irish Finance Minister Michael Noonan has, along with the Revenue Commissioners, said the opinions given to Apple were done in accordance with the law of the time and that any other company could and would have received the same advice. No companies received preferential treatment, they said.

The Commission has two outstanding cases involving two more U.S. firms, Amazon and McDonald's, both in Luxembourg, and is expected to press on with a crack down on other similar deals, officials and experts said last week.

(Reporting by Padraic Halpin; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
Hangzhou (China) (AFP) - Europe is "close to limits" on its ability to accept new waves of refugees, EU President Donald Tusk said Sunday, urging the broader international community to shoulder its share of the burden.

"The practical capability of Europe to host new waves of refugees, not to mention irregular economic migrants, is close to limits," he told a press conference on the sidelines of the G20 summit.

A steady stream of refugees has flowed into Europe over the last year, largely fleeing the civil war in Syria.

The issue has become a political hot potato for leaders in the region as a series of Islamist terror attacks and rising anti-globalisation sentiment have combined to create an increasingly inhospitable environment for refugees from the brutal conflict.

The highly publicised drowning of a three-year-old Syrian boy last year temporarily softened hostility to migrants, after pictures of his corpse lying on a Greek beach rapidly became an emblematic image of the suffering involved in their journeys.

Germany threw open its borders and volunteers across Europe flocked to train stations and frontier crossings to welcome those fleeing war and poverty.

But a major backlash swiftly followed. The EU's outer borders have since come back down hard, the so-called Balkan migrant route has shut and anti-migrant sentiment has soared.

Angela Merkel has been a strong voice pushing to continue to accept refugees. Although she won praise at first, the mood has since turned, giving way to fears over how Europe's biggest economy will manage to integrate the million people who arrived last year alone.

Her decision has left her increasingly isolated in Europe, and exposed her to heavy criticism at home, including from her own conservative allies.

Tusk said there were 65 million displaced people around the world, and "the G20 community should scale up its share of responsibility".

"We have enough space for all parties to discuss these problems including China," he said, calling for financial assistance and development aid for migrants' countries of origin. "Only global efforts will be able to bear fruits."

Story continues

Recent comments from leaders in Germany and Italy have signalled a hardening of attitudes about how to resolve the migrant crisis reshaping politics across Europe.

In March, the EU and Turkey signed a controversial deal aimed at stemming the flow of migrants to Europe.

US President Barack Obama praised Ankara's efforts to help refugees, thanking his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the country's "exceptional humanitarian support of refugees."

"Turkey hosts more refugees than any country in the world, and it has been a key partner in providing aid and assistance to vulnerable citizens that have poured out of Syria as well as Iraq," he said at a meeting with Erdogan.

"This is not an issue in which Turkey should be carrying the burden alone," he added. "It needs support from all of us, and we intend to provide it."
HANGZHOU, China (Reuters) - An EU ruling that Apple Inc (AAPL.O) must pay a huge tax bill to Ireland was clearly based on facts and existing rules and was not a decision aimed against the United States, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Sunday.

Last week, European Union antitrust regulators ordered Apple to pay up to 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion) in taxes to the Irish government after ruling that a special scheme to route profits through Ireland was illegal state aid.

Apple's Chief Executive Tim Cook last week described the ruling as "total political crap", but France and Germany have come out to back Brussels on the decision.

Juncker said EU Commission investigations on taxation had mainly targeted European companies.

The decision comes amidst a coordinated global initiative to crack down on tax evasion by multinational companies, spearheaded by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The ruling against Apple has pushed the issue into the limelight and raised the risk of significant push-back from the United States, analysts say, where some lawmakers are saying the result represents a European encroachment on the U.S. potential tax base.

In separate comments to Reuters on the sidelines of the G20 on Saturday, Pascal Saint-Amans, director of the OECD Center for Tax Policy and Administration, called Apple's tax planning "outrageous" but, like Juncker, said the decision was based on enforcing current regulations.

Saint-Amans said he believed it would be unlikely to serve as a precedent for enforcement on future income earned by multinationals.

Juncker's remarks appeared designed to reassure U.S. lawmakers, who have bickered for years over the treatment of off-shore income but now fear that the European Commission move would mean more profits earned by U.S. corporations flowing into European tax coffers.

"This is not a decision against the United States of America," said Juncker.

(Reporting by Nathaniel Taplin; Editing by Robert Birsel)
HANGZHOU, China (Reuters) - It is crucial for China to set up a mechanism to address its problem of industrial overcapacity, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Sunday, saying it was "unacceptable" that the European steel industry had lost so many jobs in recent years.

Speaking at a news conference at a G20 summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, Juncker also said that if Britain wanted access to the European Union's common market, it needed to respect the rules of the common market.

National authorities cannot give tax benefits to some companies and not to others, he added.

(Reporting by Nate Taplin; Writing by Jason Subler; Editing by Robert Birsel)
By Hadeel Al Sayegh and Andrew Torchia

DUBAI (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's top sovereign wealth fund is negotiating to buy a stake in one of the kingdom's most ambitious real estate projects as Riyadh restructures the economy to cope with low oil prices, a source familiar with the plan said.

The Public Investment Fund aims to invest in King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) on the Red Sea coast near Jeddah, the source said.

That would inject capital into the business zone, now being developed by Emaar the Economic City (EEC) , a Saudi consortium affiliated with Dubai's Emaar Properties Group (EMAR.DU), developer of the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building.

Launched in 2005, KAEC had a population of only about 5,000 people and 120 industrial tenants at the end of last year, but says it plans to grow swiftly into a full-blown metropolis.

The chief executive of the city, Fahd Al Rasheed, told Reuters in January its population was projected to hit 50,000 by 2020, with an ultimate target of 2 million around 2035.

Tenants now include French pharmaceutical maker Sanofi (SASY.PA), a venture involving U.S. battery maker Johnson Controls (JCI.N) and producers of building materials.

But with economic growth slowing sharply because of cheap oil, the government wants such zones to expand much faster and focus more on industries such as tourism, medical care and education to diversify the economy beyond oil and create jobs.

Under economic reforms announced in April, the government said it would work with companies developing major business zones to "revamp" them; KAEC may be the first of those cases.

"What they can do is inject cash. Its no secret KAEC needs a lot of equity for this project," the source said of the PIF's plan. KAEC, EEC and the PIF declined to comment.

The source, speaking on condition of anonymity because the matter is not yet public, said the PIF could either buy a stake directly in KAEC and serve as a partner to develop the project along with EEC, or take a stake in EEC itself.

Story continues

EEC obtained a 5 billion riyal ($1.33 billion) loan from the Saudi Ministry of Finance in 2011, which has been extended until 2026, and the source said the company had a similar amount of debt to commercial banks.

An investment by the PIF in the economic city would be a step in the fund's development as one of the most important institutions in the Saudi economy, using its financial power to push projects which the government considers vital.

Under the economic reforms, the government has said it will expand the PIF from 600 billion riyals to over 7 trillion riyals, by giving it assets such as ownership of state oil giant Saudi Aramco. That would make the PIF the world's biggest sovereign fund by far, on paper though not necessarily in terms of the cash it had available for investment.

The PIF will invest abroad - in June, it bought a stake in U.S. ride-hailing firm Uber for $3.5 billion - but it will focus much of its money and management attention on domestic projects designed to reduce Saudi Arabia's reliance on oil exports.

For example, the PIF will take over Riyadhs floundering King Abdullah Financial District and restructure the project, sources have told Reuters. It is also expected to get involved in developing a Saudi shipbuilding industry and in restructuring state firms such as utility Saudi Electricity Co .

The PIF will "help unlock strategic sectors requiring intensive capital inputs. This will contribute towards developing entirely new economic sectors and establishing durable national corporations," the national reform plan reads.

(Reporting by Andrew Torchia; editing by Peter Graff)
By Hadeel Al Sayegh and Andrew Torchia

DUBAI (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's top sovereign wealth fund is negotiating to buy a stake in one of the kingdom's most ambitious real estate projects as Riyadh restructures the economy to cope with low oil prices, a source familiar with the plan said.

The Public Investment Fund aims to invest in King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) on the Red Sea coast near Jeddah, the source said.

That would inject capital into the business zone, now being developed by Emaar the Economic City (EEC) <4220.SE>, a Saudi consortium affiliated with Dubai's Emaar Properties Group <EMAR.DU>, developer of the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building.

Launched in 2005, KAEC had a population of only about 5,000 people and 120 industrial tenants at the end of last year, but says it plans to grow swiftly into a full-blown metropolis.

The chief executive of the city, Fahd Al Rasheed, told Reuters in January its population was projected to hit 50,000 by 2020, with an ultimate target of 2 million around 2035.

Tenants now include French pharmaceutical maker Sanofi <SASY.PA>, a venture involving U.S. battery maker Johnson Controls <JCI.N> and producers of building materials.

But with economic growth slowing sharply because of cheap oil, the government wants such zones to expand much faster and focus more on industries such as tourism, medical care and education to diversify the economy beyond oil and create jobs.

Under economic reforms announced in April, the government said it would work with companies developing major business zones to "revamp" them; KAEC may be the first of those cases.

"What they can do is inject cash. Its no secret KAEC needs a lot of equity for this project," the source said of the PIF's plan. KAEC, EEC and the PIF declined to comment.

The source, speaking on condition of anonymity because the matter is not yet public, said the PIF could either buy a stake directly in KAEC and serve as a partner to develop the project along with EEC, or take a stake in EEC itself.

Story continues

EEC obtained a 5 billion riyal ($1.33 billion) loan from the Saudi Ministry of Finance in 2011, which has been extended until 2026, and the source said the company had a similar amount of debt to commercial banks.

An investment by the PIF in the economic city would be a step in the fund's development as one of the most important institutions in the Saudi economy, using its financial power to push projects which the government considers vital.

Under the economic reforms, the government has said it will expand the PIF from 600 billion riyals to over 7 trillion riyals, by giving it assets such as ownership of state oil giant Saudi Aramco. That would make the PIF the world's biggest sovereign fund by far, on paper though not necessarily in terms of the cash it had available for investment.

The PIF will invest abroad - in June, it bought a stake in U.S. ride-hailing firm Uber for $3.5 billion - but it will focus much of its money and management attention on domestic projects designed to reduce Saudi Arabia's reliance on oil exports.

For example, the PIF will take over Riyadhs floundering King Abdullah Financial District and restructure the project, sources have told Reuters. It is also expected to get involved in developing a Saudi shipbuilding industry and in restructuring state firms such as utility Saudi Electricity Co <5110.SE>.

The PIF will "help unlock strategic sectors requiring intensive capital inputs. This will contribute towards developing entirely new economic sectors and establishing durable national corporations," the national reform plan reads.

(Reporting by Andrew Torchia; editing by Peter Graff)
Fifth Harmony's Camila Cabello has apologized to fans after leaving the band's set early in St. Louis on Friday night, blaming "anxiety."

Fifth Harmony Congratulates Women's USA Gymnastics Team: 'Our Girls Got Gold!'

"Hey Missouri, sorry I couldn't finish the set last night was having too much anxiety and I couldn't finish it," she shared on Snapchat. "I love u I'm truly sorry."

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports Cabello left the Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre show shortly after performing "Bo$$" with several songs left in the set. One of her bandmates blamed a wardrobe malfunction at the moment, though Cabello never returned.

Fifth Harmony's Normani Quits Twitter Over Racist Bullying: 'I Can't Subject Myself Any Longer to the Hate'

Cabello later tweeted she just wanted to sleep for three days.

just wanna sleep for 3 days

- Camila Cabello (@camilacabello97) September 3, 2016

Cabello previously told Billboard she started having anxiety problems last year.

"I was having terrible anxiety, nonstop," she said. "My heart would beat really fast the whole day. Two hours after I woke up, I'd need a nap because my body was so hyperactive. It was so eff -- sorry, but it was so f--ed up. I was scared of what would happen to me, of the things my brain might tell me. I realized the stuff I thought was important isn't worth my health. Now I write in a diary every day, work out and meditate."

Watch Fifth Harmony finishing the concert without Cabello below.
Hangzhou (China) (AFP) - Russian President Vladimir Putin held talks with British Prime Minister Theresa May for the first time Sunday, telling her Russia wants to re-establish ties in all areas, the Kremlin said.

The meeting, on the margins of a G20 summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, was "good, constructive and open," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

"Mr Putin gave a clear and unequivocal indication that we are interested in completely re-establishing our relations and dialogue in all areas, including the most sensitive ones," he added.

In that regard Russia is ready "to move forward as far as the British are prepared to go," Peskov said.

British relations with Russia have soured in recent years, notably over Britain's efforts to prosecute the case of Kremlin critic and former spy Alexander Litvinenko, who was murdered by radiation poisoning in London in 2006.

Britain has also been one of the most fervent supporters of Western sanctions against Moscow over Russia's role in the Ukraine crisis.

When May became prime minister in July, following the resignation of David Cameron, Putin said he was ready for "constructive dialogue" with the new British leader.

The Kremlin strongman had accused the British government of being "overconfident" and "superficial" in the June referendum that saw the UK vote to split from the European Union, a decision which cost Cameron his job.

Putin warned that the move to leave the EU "will have consequences for the United Kingdom, for all of Europe and for us, of course."

Many observers have said that Brexit could play into Putin's hands as he has been accused of trying to drive a wedge between EU members.
The Group of 20 summit opens Sunday in the scenic city of Hangzhou, providing China's image-sensitive rulers an opportunity to showcase the country's emergence as a global powerhouse.

The government has spruced up the city, best known for its island-dotted West Lake, shut down thousands of factories to ensure telegenic blue skies, and rolled out restrictive security precautions.

But although the leaders meet in a climate of economic uncertainty and sluggish global growth, the absence of an urgent crisis means the forum will be short on breakthroughs, analysts say.

As heads of state from around the world gather, here are five things to know:

What is it?

The Group of 20 (G20) comprises 19 of the world's largest economies and the European Union, representing 85 percent of world GDP and two-thirds of its population.

The annual summit is primarily about financial and economic policy, but it is also an opportunity for a disparate group of leaders to hobnob and tackle pressing issues of the day, from geopolitical crises to climate change.

How did it start?

The G20 was born in 1999 after the shock of the Asian financial crisis showed the need to improve global economic coordination.

The Group of 7, the exclusive club for the world's most developed countries, did not include powerhouses such as China, India and Brazil that were playing an increasingly critical role.

At first it hosted fairly technical meetings among ministers. But after the 2008 financial crisis it was upgraded to leadership level in the hope of staving off the collapse of the global financial system.

What has the G20 accomplished?

That depends on who you ask. Some experts say it is an important venue for coordinating economic policy. Others think it is little more than a gab fest.

What can be said for sure is the meetings have produced a long list of promises. At last year's gathering in Turkey, for example, leaders made 113 commitments on issues ranging from cutting subsidies for fossil fuels to increasing aid to refugees.

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But the forum's failure to deliver on past pledges has raised questions about the credibility of future promises.

Compliance with 13 priority commitments made in 2015 stands at 77 percent, according to an analysis by the University of Toronto.

What should we expect from this year's meeting?

Observers say this year, in particular, is unlikely to produce any serious results. Without an acute crisis to galvanise change, rising anti-globalisation sentiment makes it difficult for many leaders to make any meaningful commitments.

IMF chief Christine Lagarde warned this week that the world faces a potentially toxic mix of low long-term growth and rising inequality, creating political temptations to populism and raised trade barriers.

Why is this such a big deal for China?

Since the world turned to China to help power it out of the 2008 financial crisis, Beijing has increasingly felt it deserves a more prominent role befitting its status as the world's second-largest economy.

The G20 is the largest, most prestigious summit that China has ever held.

It might not be a coronation ceremony, but President Xi Jinping intends to show the world -- and political rivals at home -- that China is a powerful, capable nation ready to take up its role in guiding the world economy.
#FlowerReport is a Twitter movement we can get behind

#FlowerReport is a Twitter movement we can get behind

A lot of Twitter movements use hashtags as a method of organization. Hashtags can be used to track live event recaps, but on the flip side, also as a means of spreading vile hate. Social media movements are co-opted, for good and for bad, all of the time, but amidst all the noise, theres one lovely movement whose message is one of pure love: #FlowerReport.

Author Alyssa Harad is the person behind the latest iteration of #FlowerReport, which she started in March and cultivates every Sunday. (It was originally informally started by writer and photographer Teju Cole.) In an interview with GOOD, she revealed that while she didnt necessarily intend for #FlowerReport to become a healing movement, through horrible chance, it evolved to become that when a suicide bombing in Lahore, Pakistan occurred on March 27:

The attack took place in a parka park! [Gulshan-e-Iqbal] So horrifying. And I thought, well, there must be photographs of this park. A park is a place where, among other things, people go to look at flowers. And I was right. There were many heartbreaking photos taken by people who had gone to this beautiful, popular park to look at the scenery. So I tweeted a few of them. It was a small thing, but sometimes small things help. It felt very important to me to see and know that park as something besides a site of terror.

Since then, more horrible eventsthe Pulse shooting, a terrorist attack in Baghdadoccurred on Sundays, and #FlowerReport respondees, originally just looking to share their favorite flower snaps, began to become a community focused on healing images. Its a pure desire: To put beauty and color into a world that oftentimes feels bleak.

The post #FlowerReport is a Twitter movement we can get behind appeared first on HelloGiggles.
TORONTO (Reuters) - Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney on Sunday criticized Donald Trump's potential plan to scrap the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and said the U.S. presidential candidate will likely lose the Nov. 8 election. Speaking on CTV's "Question Period" politics talk show, Mulroney, who in the 1980s signed a Canada-U.S. free trade deal, said scrapping NAFTA will hurt the United States. "Millions and millions of jobs in the United States depend directly upon their trade with Canada and Mexico," Mulroney said. "You tear that up - my mother used to say, 'You're cutting off your nose to spite your face.'" Republican presidential nominee Trump has railed against the NAFTA trade deal with Canada and Mexico as a U.S. job killer, saying that if elected, he would be prepared to scrap it if he could not negotiate much better terms for the United States. The North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994 during the administration of President Bill Clinton, the husband of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Trump also has a hardline immigration plan that emphasized deporting illegal immigrants who commit crimes. His proposals include building a wall at the border with Mexico. Mulroney said that while Trump's rhetoric "carried him through the Republican primaries," he does not think "something that negative carries you to the White House." Trump's campaign team did not immediately respond to a request for comment. (Reporting by Ethan Lou in Toronto; Editing by Alan Crosby)
- Lewis Hamilton admitted he had no explanation for his terrible grid getaway at Sunday's Italian Grand Prix. The series leader and defending three-time world champion plummeted from pole position to sixth as Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg took the lead and then reeled off his second successive victory. Rosberg finished ahead of the Briton and cut his lead from nine points to two with seven races remaining. "Obviously, it was lost at the start," said Hamilton. "I knew that my engineers would be worried or nervous of how the start went, so that is why I tried to put their mind at ease. I don't know what happened. I will try to understand it later. I did everything normal."

AFP
LA BAULE, France (Reuters) - Nicolas Sarkozy said on Sunday that party unity was the key to victory for his Les Republicains party in France's 2017 presidential election. At the same time, though, he mocked a call by Alain Juppe, his main rival, for a code of good conduct in the campaign before the party's November primaries. "There will be no victory if we are divided," Sarkozy told the party's first gathering after the summer break, in the seaside town of La Baule. "The first rule of these primaries must be that the choice that we make is respected by all. We must all stand behind the winner of these primaries." On Saturday, the first day of the two-day gathering, Juppe had called for a code of good conduct to ban personal attacks in the increasingly heated campaign. "I do not like a code of good conduct. I like good conduct," Sarkozy said, drawing laughter and cheers from the audience. "If you need a code, that's because there is already a problem." Sarkozy, 61, a former president, and Juppe, 71, an ex-prime minister, are by far the two leading candidates for the Nov. 20 and 27 primaries. The winner of those contests will become the candidate of the conservative Les Republicains in the April 2017 presidential election. The unpopularity of the governing Socialists means the winner of the conservative primaries is likely to make it to the second round of the presidential election, where he is expected to face Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front. The soft-spoken Juppe has led in opinion polls for months. The more divisive Sarkozy has been dogged by legal issues and by lingering voter distaste for the abrasive style that marked his 2007-2012 presidency. But Sarkozy closed some of the gap in June as Juppe's campaign lost steam. His ratings improved further after deadly attacks by Islamist militants in Nice and Normandy in July. (Reporting by Dominique Vidalon, editing by Larry King)
By Larry Fine NEW YORK (Reuters) - Flummoxed and frustrated by wily veteran Paolo Lorenzi for two sets, second seed Andy Murray changed tactics and beat the 34-year-old Italian at his own game to advance to the U.S. Open fourth round on Saturday. Murray was moping and muttering to himself as he pressed for winners against the steady Italian and piled up unforced errors before deciding to patiently play long rallies that enabled him to secure a 7-6(4) 5-7 6-2 6-3 win. World number two Murray committed 47 errors in the first two sets, including 31 off his forehand, and converted only 4-of-12 break points before finding his form in the third set. The 40th-ranked Lorenzi put up a gritty fight despite coming off a grueling five-set, five-hour win over French 30th seed Gilles Simon in his second-round tilt. The Scotsman's harder than expected three-hour 17-minute victory kept his golden summer moving forward after triumphs at Wimbledon and the Rio Olympics. Lorenzi is also enjoying a stellar season, logging his first victory ever on the ATP Tour, becoming the oldest first-time champion by winning at Kitzbuehel, and adding two semi-finals and a quarter-final to his credit. "I stopped rushing in the rallies," 2012 U.S. Open winner Murray said in an on-court interview. "I was making quite a few unforced errors. "He's an extremely solid player and doesn't give you many cheap points. I was trying to get cheap points, I was going for too much. "When I slowed things down and waited for the right shot to go for, my unforced errors went down, the winners went up and the scoreboard started working in my favor as well." Murray advanced to a fourth-round clash with 22nd seed Grigor Dimitrov of Bulgaria, a 6-4 6-1 3-6 6-2 winner over Joao Sousa of Portugal. The second seed said he did not overlook Lorenzi. "He's ranked 40 in the world. He's pretty good. So I expected a tough match. I expected long rallies, I'm just disappointed with the amount of errors I made," Murray said. "That cost me in the first and second sets." Murray was impressed with the fortitude of the Italian, who battled the Scot through a brilliant 42-stroke rally in the second set among many long exchanges. "After the match he had a couple days ago, to come out and move like he did and work as hard as he did out there shows that's a huge quality of his and it gets you a long way," Murray said. (Editing by Ed Osmond/Andrew Both)
By Larry Fine NEW YORK (Reuters) - Flummoxed and frustrated by wily veteran Paolo Lorenzi for two sets, second seed Andy Murray changed tactics and beat the 34-year-old Italian at his own game to advance to the U.S. Open fourth round on Saturday. Murray was moping and muttering to himself as he pressed for winners against the steady Italian and piled up unforced errors before deciding to patiently play long rallies that enabled him to secure a 7-6(4) 5-7 6-2 6-3 win. World number two Murray committed 47 errors in the first two sets, including 31 off his forehand, and converted only 4-of-12 break points before finding his form in the third set. The 40th-ranked Lorenzi put up a gritty fight despite coming off a grueling five-set, five-hour win over French 30th seed Gilles Simon in his second-round tilt. The Scotsman's harder than expected three-hour 17-minute victory kept his golden summer moving forward after triumphs at Wimbledon and the Rio Olympics. Lorenzi is also enjoying a stellar season, logging his first victory ever on the ATP Tour, becoming the oldest first-time champion by winning at Kitzbuehel, and adding two semi-finals and a quarter-final to his credit. "I stopped rushing in the rallies," 2012 U.S. Open winner Murray said in an on-court interview. "I was making quite a few unforced errors. "He's an extremely solid player and doesn't give you many cheap points. I was trying to get cheap points, I was going for too much. "When I slowed things down and waited for the right shot to go for, my unforced errors went down, the winners went up and the scoreboard started working in my favor as well." Murray advanced to a fourth-round clash with 22nd seed Grigor Dimitrov of Bulgaria, a 6-4 6-1 3-6 6-2 winner over Joao Sousa of Portugal. (Editing by Ed Osmond)
KABUL (Reuters) - At least 38 people were killed and 28 were injured in Afghanistan after a fuel tanker collided with a passenger bus, causing a massive explosion, local officials said on Sunday. The incident took place on a major highway connecting the southern province of Kandahar with the capital city of Kabul. Ghulam Jilani Farahi, deputy police chief of Zabul province where the accident occurred, said authorities could identify only six bodies and the rest were totally burnt. Farahi said several women and children were among the victims in the bus that was carrying more than 60 people. The driver of the oil tanker and a co-passenger died immediately after the truck burst into flames during the early morning hours on Sunday. The Kabul-Kandahar highway passes through areas prone to militancy and many drivers are known to drive at top speeds in hopes of avoiding insurgent activity. Afghanistan has some of the world's most dangerous roads, often in dilapidated condition, and traffic rules are seldom enforced. (Reporting by Sayed Sarwar Amani in Kandahar, Writing by Rupam Jain; Editing by Kim Coghill)
BERLIN/OSLO (Reuters) - German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Sunday urged Russia to finalize a ceasefire agreement on Syria with the United States and stressed the urgency of delivering humanitarian aid to people under siege in Aleppo. "The USA has made its offer. Russia can now show that it is genuinely interested in seeing an end to the fighting in Syria," Steinmeier told FUNKE Mediengruppe, a German newspaper group, in an interview to be published in Monday editions. "Even Russia cannot have an interest in seeing the fighting continue in Syria. Moscow knows, like everyone else, that there is no military solution for the conflict in Syria," he said. Steinmeier, a Social Democrat, has frustrated members of his own right-center ruling coalition by insisting on the need for continued engagement with Russia. He said that ending the fighting in Syria was not solely up to Moscow, but "also other players inside and outside Syria who just want to keep fighting". Chancellor Angela Merkel also discussed the "catastrophic" humanitarian situation in Syria with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a nearly two-hour meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit, a German government spokesman said. Speaking in Oslo on Sunday evening, Steinmeier told reporters that a ceasefire in Aleppo was the prerequisite for the Syrian opposition to agree to return to negotiations. "This is the only condition under which the opposition ... will be ready to return to Geneva for the political talks," he said. Steinmeier added his hope that U.S. and Russian officials would make progress on the issue during bilateral meetings on the sidelines of the G20 summit in China. (Reporting by Andrea Shalal in Berlin, Gernot Heller in Hangzhou, and Gwladys Fouche in Oslo; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
HANGZHOU, China (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel struck an upbeat tone after meeting Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on the sidelines of the G20 summit, and said she expected progress on two thorny issues that have marred German and European ties with Ankara. Both Germany and the EU, which depend on Ankara to keep a lid on the movement of migrants to the bloc, are trying to ease tensions with Turkey after criticizing Erdogan's crackdown on opponents following the failed coup in July. Merkel said she was hopeful that the European Union and Turkey could resolve their differences over visa-free travel for Turks, but an agreement was likely still several weeks away. "The discussions with the European Commission are very intensive and are continuing," she said. Merkel also said she expected a resolution in Germany's dispute with Ankara over visits to an air base in Turkey. She and other German officials have insisted that Ankara must end its ban on German lawmaker visits to 250 German soldiers working at Incirlik Air Base as part of the U.S.-led coalition's air strikes against Islamist State targets. "I believe it is possible that we will get positive news on the justified demand in the coming days," the German leader told reporters after meeting with Erdogan in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou. Turkey banned German lawmakers from visiting the base near the Syrian border in June after the parliament passed a resolution declaring the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces a genocide. German lawmakers in turn threatened to end the military mission there. Turkey accepts many Christian Armenians were killed but contests assertions that up to 1.5 million died, and denies the killings were orchestrated. Rainer Arnold, defense spokesman for the Social Democrats in parliament, told Reuters earlier he expected Turkey to approve an Oct. 4 visit by lawmakers to the base next week. The EU worries Turkey applies its anti-terror laws too broadly to go after Erdogan critics and has made easing them a precondition for granting Turks visa-free movement. Ankara previously threatened to walk away from cooperation on migration should it not get more relaxed travel rules in October, but now appears willing to push the deadline to the end of the year, the Welt am Sonntag newspaper reported. [L1N1BF0CS] Merkel said she and Erdogan also agreed that the political process aimed at ending the fighting in Syria must be resumed since the situation in Aleppo was unacceptable and a ceasefire was urgently needed. (Reporting by Gernot Heller and Andrea Shalal; Writing by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
Honolulu (AFP) - Decades of conservation work in China have paid off for the giant panda, whose status was upgraded Sunday from "endangered" to "vulnerable" due to a population rebound, officials said.

The improvement for the giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) was announced as part of an update to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, the world's most comprehensive inventory of plants and animals.

The latest estimates show a population of 1,864 adult giant pandas. Although exact numbers are not available, adding cubs to the projection would mean about 2,060 pandas exist today, said the IUCN.

"Evidence from a series of range-wide national surveys indicate that the previous population decline has been arrested, and the population has started to increase," said the IUCN's updated report.

The cornerstones of the Chinese government's effort to bring back its fuzzy, black-and-white national icon have included an intense effort to replant bamboo forests, which provide food and shelter for the bears.

Through its "rent-a-panda" captive breeding program, China has also loaned some bears to zoos abroad in exchange for cash, and reinvested that money in conservation efforts.

"When push comes to shove, the Chinese have done a really good job with pandas," John Robinson, a primatologist and chief conservation officer at the Wildlife Conservation Society, told AFP.

"So few species are actually downlisted, it really is a reflection of the success of conservation," he said at the IUCN World Conservation Congress, the largest meeting of its kind, which drew more than 9,000 heads of state, policymakers and environmentalists to Honolulu.

According to Simon Stuart, chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission, the improvement was "not rocket science" but came from the hard work of controlling poaching and replanting bamboo forests.

"This is something to celebrate because it is not a part of the world where we expect this to happen," Stuart told reporters at a press conference to unveil the updated Red List.

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Experts warned, however, that the good news for pandas could be short-lived.

A warming planet, driven by fossil fuel burning, is predicted to wipe out more than one-third of the panda's bamboo habitat in the next 80 years.

That means the panda population is projected to decline, and any gains realized to date could be reversed, said Carlo Rondinini, mammal assessment coordinator at the Sapienza University of Rome.

"The concern now is that although the population has slowly increased -- and it is still very small -- several models predict a reduction of the extent of bamboo forests in China in the coming decades due to climate change," he told reporters.

The IUCN report said China's plan to expand its conservation effort for pandas "is a positive step and must be strongly supported to ensure its effective implementation."

The IUCN Red List includes 82,954 species, including both plants and animals.

Almost one-third -- 23,928 -- are threatened with extinction, it said.
Rudy Giuliani

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said Sunday that Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto breached the terms of an agreement with Donald Trump's campaign by asserting during a meeting last week that Mexico is not going to pay for Trump's proposed wall along the US-Mexico border.

In an interview on CNN's "State of the Union," Giuliani said that the campaign and the president's staff agreed before the meeting between Trump and Pena Nieto last week that they would not discuss payment for the proposed wall, considering Mexican leaders have dismissed Trump's promise that the country will pay for construction of the wall.

"We had ground rules for this meeting and one of the ground rules was we weren't going to discuss paying for the wall, because that's not something we're going to agree about," Giuliani said.

He added: "What we wanted to do was find areas of common agreement. And maybe the president's staff didn't brief him on it  maybe the president forgot it. But he brought it up. It wasn't at the beginning. It was sort of in the middle of the sentence, and I just briefly said, 'that's not on the table.' And the reality is they have a disagreement over that."

Giuliani's admission that the topic was briefly broached is one of the first direct acknowledgements from the campaign that payment for the wall was indeed brought up during the meeting.

At a press conference after the meeting on Wednesday, Trump denied that the two leaders discussed payment for the border wall. Shortly after the press conference, Pena Nieto took to Twitter to announce that he had told Trump Mexico will not pay for a wall.

The Trump campaign has attempted to push back against Pena Nieto without directly denying that the topic was discussed.

In an interview on "This Week" on Sunday, ABC's Martha Raddatz asked Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway if Pena Nieto was not telling the truth about whether a conversation regarding the border wall took place between the two leaders.

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"Well, they disagree on that conversation," Conway said.

NOW WATCH: Who is paying for the wall? Trump and Mexico's president contradict each other





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UPDATE, WRITETHRU with press conference comments after 4:53 AM post: Hacksaw Ridge, Mel Gibsons fifth directorial effort, and his first since 2006s Apocalypto, screened for the press this morning at the Venice Film Festival. Applause greeted the World War II pic inside the Sala Darsena, and reviews are strong  the word comeback has been used more than once. Equal parts faith-based film and horrors-of-war action drama, Hacksaw tells the story of real-life hero Desmond T Doss, a conscientious objector who saved 75 men in Okinawa without firing or carrying a gun. Andrew Garfield as Doss leads a cast that also includes Sam Worthington, Vince Vaughn, Luke Bracey, Hugo Weaving, Rachel Griffiths and Teresa Palmer.

Gibson told the press corps this afternoon why he was moved by Doss tale. To have an ordinary man do extraordinary things in incredibly difficult circumstances is the makings of legendary storytelling. His struggle is singular  in the midst of Hell on Earth, he goes in armed with nothing more than faith and conviction. He does something extraordinary and supernatural, really, that inspired me, the director said.

Scripted by Robert Schenkkan and Andrew Knight, the movie has a sort of throwback quality, yet remains technically very much of today. I asked Schenkkan, who spent 10 years working on the project, about the old-fashioned tone and he suggested there were two reasons: Doss complete lack of irony and his heroism on the battlefield which is not at all contrived.

The film is laid out in two parts. After opening with a brief glimpse of flaming, flying bodies on the battlefield, the story quickly retreats 16 years earlier to Doss childhood with his brother (Roman Guerriero/Nathaniel Buzolic), loving mother (Griffiths) and abusive WWI vet father (Weaving). From the outset, its clear religion plays a big part in the boys life  particularly following a harrowing incident of roughhousing gone wrong. As a young man, Garfields now resolute pacifist develops an interest in medicine, and a crush on a nurse, Dorothy (Palmer). And then, he enlists.

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Gibson takes Doss through Basic Training and introduces the men with whom he will go into battle, including Vaughn, Worthington and Bracey. But hes bullied and not going anywhere until he convinces the military that he belongs there, despite his refusal to touch a gun. Doss believed that while the war was justified, killing was nevertheless wrong. Ultimately, he was allowed to serve as a medic.

From the bucolic hues of Lynchburg, Va and boot camp, the action shifts to Okinawa and the impossibly threatening Hacksaw Ridge of the title. Doss battalion must scale a wall a hundred feet high and then advance against Japanese soldiers who have resisted all other attempts to take the stronghold, resulting in scores of American casualties.

The battle scenes bear Gibsons signature and are fresh, (very) gory and great spectacle (even at 8:30 in the morning on a Sunday). Theyre also tense and moving  particularly as Doss seeks out the men still breathing amid the carnage, while also trying to avoid enemy fire. He later became the first conscientious objector awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

The Guardian gave the film four stars, saying Gibson has absolutely hit Hacksaw Ridge out of the park; The Telegraph calls it fantastically moving. One Italian outlet has called it poignant and effective. As Deadline has previously reported, the film tested through the roof in the States.

Doss pacifism contrasted with the violence of the battle scenes, along with themes of redemption, are shaping up as talking points. In Venice today, Gibson said he hopes to get a message across. There are such things as just wars, but I hate wars. But you have to love the warrior and give him homage and honor him. I hope it honors people who have gone into conflict and sacrificed so much and suffered A lot of attention needs to be paid to our warriors; they need some love and understanding. I hope this film imparts that message. If it does nothing but that, thats great.

Garfield added with regard to the current state of the world and how the film relates, Its a pretty wild time were in societally speaking. There are violent uprisings and separation and warring ideologies that are plaguing our planet right now. Doss is a wonderful symbol of the idea of live and let live no matter what your value system is.

Lionsgate is showing its faith in Hacksaw by opening domestically in the heart of awards season on November 4. Expect the faith-based base and adults seeking action and emotion to climb the Ridge. The pic opens opposite fanboy destination Doctor Strange and kid pic Trolls. Offshore dates are not yet widely confirmed.

Bill Mechanic, David Permut, Brian Oliver, Terry Benedict, Paul Currie, Bruce Davey, William D. Johnson and Tyler Thompson produced Hacksaw through Cross Creek Pictures, Demarest Media, Pandemonium, Permut Presentations and Gibsons Icon Productions. IM Global handles world sales on Hacksaw which sold out in Berlin last year.

Earlier asked to sum up his current relationship with Hollywood in one word, Gibson replied to laughter, Just one word? Then, he added, Its the same word everyone uses in relation to Hollywood: survival.

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Toni Tennille is coming out of retirement to fulfill a lifetime wish. The Grammy-winning singer, known for her bouncy 1975 song "Love Will Keep Us Together" alongside her former husband Daryl Dragon, is set to lead the Yavapai College Performing Arts Center production of "Hello, Dolly!" in Prescott, Arizona.
Monza (Italy) (AFP) - Lewis Hamilton admitted he had no explanation for his terrible grid getaway at Sunday's Italian Grand Prix.

The series leader and defending three-time world champion plummeted from pole position to sixth as Mercedes team-mate German Nico Rosberg took the lead and then reeled off his second successive victory.

Rosberg finished ahead of the Briton and cut his lead from nine points to two with seven races remaining.

"Obviously, it was lost at the start," said Hamilton. "I knew that my engineers would be worried or nervous of how the start went, so that is why I tried to put their mind at ease.

"I don't know what happened. I will try to understand it later. I did everything normal.

"I did the sequence exactly the same, I think I just got lots of wheel-spin  a bit like Nico's start in Hockenheim.

"We have a relatively inconsistent clutch. In the past, they told you the clutch temp and it was easier to hit targets.

"Now, it's a lot less easy to know what the clutch will be delivering or won't."

Hamilton managed to climb back to second place, but the time lost meant Rosberg cruised to his first Monza win.

"I could see Nico pulling away and while anything can happen, the chances of the win decreased lap by lap, second by second

"I knew in the early stages that winning the race was not possible, but I could try. I got up to second and that is the best I could do.

"It's so hard to overtake here, but we live to fight another day."
Washington (AFP) - Post-tropical storm Hermine is again nearing hurricane strength, the US National Weather Service said Sunday, posing a "danger of life-threatening inundation" from New Jersey to Connecticut.

Hermine has killed two people since striking the Florida coast as a hurricane on Friday before weakening to tropical-storm status as it moved northward off the US East Coast.

Its winds have since picked up, however, and the weather service said Sunday that it "is expected to be at or near hurricane strength during the next 48 hours."

As of midday Sunday, Hermine was about 325 miles (520 kilometers) east-southeast of Ocean City, Maryland, in the mid-Atlantic region -- far at sea, but close enough to be pummeling coastal areas with heavy rains, riptides and storm surges of up to five feet (1.5 meters).

The storm, now heading north by northeast, is expected to take a northern or northwestern turn. Residents in states as far north as Connecticut are expected to feel its damaging impact.

The weather service said Hermine's current maximum sustained winds of 70 miles per hour would probably reach 75 mph -- classifying it again as a category-one hurricane -- between now and Tuesday morning.

The storm's latest fatality occurred Saturday when heavy winds propelled an 18-wheel truck into a bridge railing in North Carolina, killing the unidentified driver, authorities told AFP. A homeless man was killed by a falling tree Friday in Florida.

Hermine was a hurricane when it slammed into Florida's Gulf of Mexico coast Friday, causing street flooding and power outages, the southeast state's first hurricane landfall since 2005.

Hermine, the fourth Atlantic hurricane of 2016, brought bad news for throngs of travelers hoping to enjoy beach time on the three-day Labor Day weekend, the unofficial end of the US summer vacation season.
By Daniel Trotta and Chris Prentice NEW YORK (Reuters) - Storm Hermine churned off the U.S. Middle Atlantic Coast on Sunday, threatening to regain hurricane strength after carving a path of destruction through the South while so far sparing the Northeast from the worst of its wind, rain and sea surge. Officials warned the storm could produce deadly surges and ordered swimmers, surfers and boaters to stay out of treacherous waters during the Labor Day holiday weekend, when many Americans celebrate the end of summer. Overnight, the center of the storm moved farther east and away from the coast than previously forecast, said Rick Knabb, director of the National Hurricane Center (NHC), in a webcast. "That's good news, but this is not over yet because we still are forecasting it to slow down and meander generally northward ... We think it could become hurricane force again," Knabb said, as the storm was likely to strengthen as it moved over warm water. The storm, which claimed at least two lives, in Florida and North Carolina, is expected to stall off the coast for several days. It had sustained winds of nearly 70 mph (113 kph) as of 11 a.m. Eastern time (1500 GMT), the hurricane center said. The mass power outages and flooding that battered Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas had yet to materialize further north, where alarming news reports scared tourists away from the beach. Those who stayed awoke to sunshine but stronger than usual winds and choppy seas. "It was a little overhyped by the media," said Andrew Thulin, assistant general manager of Daddy O Hotel Restaurant in Long Beach Township, New Jersey. "It killed the weekend for everybody down here. I talk to all my other colleagues in our business and everybody was like, 'Are we going to send the Weather Channel a bill?'" Further south in Cape May, New Jersey, tourists fled during rainstorms on Saturday only to have the weather improve. "The temperature is great. It's beautiful out, the birds are out," said Kathleen Wilkinson, a Philadelphia lawyer with a vacation home in Cape May. "Knowing the storm is 100 miles out at sea is comforting." Officials who were mindful of the devastation caused by Superstorm Sandy in 2012 took every precaution. In other parts of the state people reported coastal roads were flooded and beaches swallowed up by the surging sea. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said officials were still on alert, especially on the state's southern coast where he declared a state of emergency in three counties. "Unless it makes a turn back west ... we're going to be looking at moderate flooding rather than a very severe impact," Christie told CBS News.Hermine, the first hurricane to make landfall in Florida in 11 years, swept ashore on Friday near the town of St. Marks with winds of 80 mph (129 kph), knocking out power for 300,000 Florida homes and businesses. It left North Carolina with more power outages, flooding, downed trees and power lines, while rain and tides brought flooding along Virginia's coast. In the northern Florida town of Ocala, a falling tree killed a homeless man sleeping in his tent. In North Carolina, a tractor trailer overturned on a bridge over the Alligator River, killing the driver. The center forecast the heaviest rains to remain offshore, with Hermine expected to produce 1 to 2 inches (2.5 to 5 cm) of rain through Monday from Long Island to eastern Massachusetts. (Editing by Phil Berlowitz)
By Daniel Trotta and Chris Prentice NEW YORK (Reuters) - Storm Hermine lurked off the U.S. Middle Atlantic Coast on Sunday, threatening to regain hurricane strength after carving a path of destruction through the South while so far sparing the Northeast from the worst of its wind, rain and sea surge. Officials warned the storm could produce deadly surges and ordered swimmers, surfers and boaters to stay out of treacherous waters during the Labor Day holiday weekend, when many Americans celebrate the end of summer. Overnight, the center of the storm moved farther east and away from the coast than previously forecast, said Rick Knabb, director of the National Hurricane Center (NHC), in a webcast. But he said the storm could regain its hurricane force as it feeds off warm water. "Hermine expected to meander off the mid-Atlantic Coast for the next day or two," the center said in its 2 p.m. (1800 GMT) update, placing the center of the storm some 300 miles (480 km) from shore. The storm, which claimed at least two lives, in Florida and North Carolina, had sustained winds of nearly 70 mph (113 kph). The mass power outages and flooding that battered Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas had yet to materialize further north, where alarming news reports scared tourists away from the beach. Those who stayed awoke to sunshine but stronger than usual winds and choppy seas. "It was a little overhyped by the media," said Andrew Thulin, assistant general manager of Daddy O Hotel Restaurant in Long Beach Township, New Jersey. "It killed the weekend for everybody down here. I talk to all my other colleagues in our business and everybody was like, 'Are we going to send the Weather Channel a bill?'" Further south in Cape May, New Jersey, tourists fled during rainstorms on Saturday only to have the weather improve. "The temperature is great. It's beautiful out, the birds are out," said Kathleen Wilkinson, a Philadelphia lawyer with a vacation home in Cape May. "Knowing the storm is 100 miles out at sea is comforting." Officials who were mindful of the devastation caused by Superstorm Sandy in 2012 took every precaution. In other parts of the state people reported coastal roads were flooded and beaches swallowed up by the surging sea. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said officials were still on alert, especially on the state's southern coast where he declared a state of emergency in three counties. "Unless it makes a turn back west ... we're going to be looking at moderate flooding rather than a very severe impact," Christie told CBS News.Hermine, the first hurricane to make landfall in Florida in 11 years, swept ashore on Friday near the town of St. Marks with winds of 80 mph (129 kph), knocking out power for 300,000 Florida homes and businesses. It left North Carolina with more power outages, flooding, downed trees and power lines, while rain and tides brought flooding along Virginia's coast. In the northern Florida town of Ocala, a falling tree killed a homeless man sleeping in his tent. In North Carolina, a tractor trailer overturned on a bridge over the Alligator River, killing the driver. The center forecast the heaviest rains to remain offshore, with Hermine expected to produce 1 to 2 inches (2.5 to 5 cm) of rain through Monday from Long Island to eastern Massachusetts. Commercial air travel was largely unaffected, with airlines reporting only a handful of flight cancellations. (Editing by Phil Berlowitz)
Over 3.7 million Hong Kongers go to the polls Sunday in the semi-autonomous city's closest thing to a fully democratic vote, as stark political divisions widen.

With fears growing that Beijing is tightening its grip, some young activists are campaigning for a complete break from China. On the other side, pro-establishment parties warn they are risking the stability and prosperity of the finance hub.

Here are five key points on Legislative Council vote:

What's so important about this election?

The election for members of Hong Kong's lawmaking body is the biggest public poll since the mass "Umbrella Movement" pro-democracy rallies of 2014, when Beijing and the city's government brushed aside calls for political reforms.

It is the first time that young activists calling for independence for Hong Kong have stood in the vote.

Polls show that one or two of them could win seats -- which would be a landmark for the fledgling movement.

How does the vote work?

Half the council's 70 members will be directly voted by the public on Sunday and represent geographical constituencies. Pro-democracy candidates tend to fare well in these seats.

However, 30 other members are appointed by special interest groups, including transport, tourism and business sectors -- who tend to be pro-Beijing.

The remaining five "super seats" are not attached to any constituency and will be on the ballot paper for all residents, except for those who have voted as part of the special interest groups.

So, is Hong Kong really democratic?

A British colony for over 150 years until it was handed back to China in 1997, and semi-autonomous since then, Hong Kong has never experienced full democracy.

The system of having 30 members of the Legislative Council appointed by pro-Beijing special interest groups makes it almost impossible for the democratic camp to take a majority in the legislature.

Currently, pan-democratic lawmakers hold 27 of the Legco's 70 seats, enabling them to block bills.

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But if they drop just four seats on Sunday, they will lose that veto power.

What does the city's parliament do?

The traditional role of the Legislative Council is to introduce, examine, and approve bills, budgets and expenditures.

But frustrated pro-democracy lawmakers have long turned to filibustering to disrupt proceedings, delaying the passage of multiple bills.

Much of the previous council session was deadlocked, with the pro-establishment camp accusing the opposition of blocking progress and democrats slamming pro-government legislators as yes-men.

What is Beijing's take on the vote?

Central Chinese authorities say pro-independence candidates are acting illegally, going against the city's mini-constitution, and Beijing is likely to keep up pressure on the breakaway camp.

Some strident pro-independence activists have been banned from standing in Sunday's election and the Hong Kong government has warned action may be taken against those who have advocated independence while campaigning.

However, if new young candidates draw support away from more established pro-democracy parties, it could work in Beijing's favour, splitting the vote and giving more seats to pro-establishment candidates.
Caracas (AFP) - Most of 30 or so protesters arrested in a rally against President Nicolas Maduro have now been freed, authorities said, after mass demonstrations over Venezuela's food shortages.

"They have been set free," Alfredo Romero of the NGO Venezuelan Justice Forum said on Twitter. The exception was apparently a journalist, Braulio Jatar, who released video of protests on social media, Romero said.

The dramatic incidents erupted Friday in the resort city of Porlamar on Venezuela's Margarita island in the Caribbean state of Nueva Esparta.

The embattled Maduro -- whose state-led leftist government is fighting crippling shortages of everything from hard currency to food and toilet paper, had gone to make a speech at the opening of some remodeled public housing.

However, it appeared, based on social media images and reports, that Maduro found himself surrounded by an angry crowd, which followed him closely, banging pots in the street and insulting him.

There were reports of a crack down on the protesters by authorities.

"We are receiving reports of police abuse and unauthorized break-ins from Villa Rosa," another NGO, Provea, said on Twitter, referring to a neighbourhood in Porlamar.

Communication and Information Minister Luis Marcano wrote on Twitter that the pot-banging "reflects what remains of the right (wing)", and accused local media of exaggerating the protest.

- Recall a must: Maduro foes -

Opposition leaders criticized the arrests.

"Neither Maduro, bodyguards, nor the Casa Militar (security agency) nor the ministry can avoid the sound of pot-banging in a town that wants a recall election," tweeted Henrique Capriles, a former opposition presidential candidate.

On Thursday, Maduro's opponents claimed to have mobilized a million demonstrators in Caracas in the biggest rally in decades and vowed to hold weekly protests to demand a referendum on his ouster.

The government estimated 30,000 people attended.

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The rallies come at a highly volatile time for Venezuela, where a plunge in prices for oil exports has led to shortages, violent crime and outbreaks of looting.

Maduro blames the crisis on the collapse of oil prices and an "economic war" by businesses backed by US "imperialism".

Analysts have warned of a repeat of the deadly 2014 clashes that left numerous opposition leaders in prison.

Venezuela on Saturday named publicly 18 military commanders to oversee the production and distribution of food and basic goods in an effort to alleviate severe shortages affecting the country.

Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez selected the military personnel for the "Great Mission of Sovereign Supply and Security", appointments formalized in the state newspaper.

- President in cross-hairs -

The country's opposition seeks to unseat the leftist president with a referendum, staging this past week a mass demonstration in favor of holding a recall vote.

Despite sitting atop the world's largest proven oil reserves, Venezuelans line up at dawn or even overnight outside the nation's supermarkets, guarded by heavily armed police to battle the growing problem of looting.

Many people resort to purchasing scarce products from "bachaqueros" -- black-market sellers who buy subsidized products and sell them at a mark-up.

The government launched in July a new plan against the shortages, putting the military in control of food distribution, the country's key ports, and of companies and factories.
Animal Medical Center Veterinarian vet veterinary surgery_23

This post includes graphic images of surgery, some of which may be upsetting to readers.

Emergency veterinary medicine is rough work.

"Some people can't take the screaming," said Sue Maraczi, an emergency and critical care nurse at the Animal Medical Center (AMC) on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Animal Medical Center Veterinarian vet veterinary surgery_27

"But you have to consider that [the animals] are sick, they don't feel well, they're in a weird place, there's unfamiliar faces."

She held a Yorkie in her lap. It didn't need any treatment right that second, but cried pitifully whenever it was left alone in its cage.

Animal Medical Center Veterinarian vet veterinary surgery_11

Like any big-city hospital, patients show up at AMC's emergency room with problems ranging from sniffles to abuse to horrible injuries. Down the hall in the intensive care unit, a team of veterinarians and technicians care for a small army of critical and terminal creatures.

AMC is the most advanced animal hospital in New York City, and among the most advanced treatment centers anywhere in the country. It's a place where cats and dogs routinely get state-of-the-art radiation treatment for brain cancer, total hip replacements, and even alternative treatments like acupuncture.

One day this summer, I spent 13 hours in the ER: trailing doctors, talking to vets, and watching how they treated the hundreds of animals in the building.

It's an expensive, luxury level of care for people who treat their pets with the same concern that they'd afford a member of their own family, as many AMC veterinarians and staff emphasized.

Animal Medical Center Veterinarian vet veterinary surgery_13

"We get dogs helicoptered in all the time," said Lori Asprea, a technician in internal medicine.

On the day I visited AMC, a cat was released after receiving more than $50,000 in care.

Asprea described one dog that came in with severe leptospirosis, an infection most common in canines but that can jump to humans. When he arrived  on a private jet  his kidneys had already failed. He seemed to recover with treatment, but when it came time to release him back to his owners, a potentially fatal clot clogged up the blood vessels in his lungs, sending him back to the ICU. Another clot killed off flesh on one of his legs.

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Today, she said, he runs marathons with his owner.

(Some identifying details, like the names of certain pets, are withheld or altered because of an agreement with AMC intended to protect the identity of the center's patients.)

***

Often, pet owners show up at AMC without the cash on hand or insurance to cover emergency treatment.

On the day I visited, a small white dog named Daisy showed up both of her front paws hanging limp. Daisy had leapt off a high curb after her owner and, Maraczi determined, broken both her legs on the asphalt. Treating her would likely cost several thousand dollars, which her owners could not afford to pay.

Animal Medical Center Veterinarian vet veterinary surgery_31

Animal Medical Center Veterinarian vet veterinary surgery_41

The next step for AMC staff in this situation is to ask if the owners want to open a line of credit for their pets. Many, especially those who bring in young pets like Daisy with major injuries, say yes.

Daisy's owners agreed, but said they expected to fail the hospital's credit check. ER vets began to discuss whether it was time to tell the owners about AMC's payment relief plan. AMC, a nonprofit with high operation costs, keeps the lower-cost option as a last resort to avoid sending seriously sick or injured animals away untreated.

"I've seen people refinance, sell things, you name it," Maraczi said.

It happens even when AMC's staff thinks the animals or their owners would be better off without extreme interventions. "It's easier to give advice than to take it," she added.

Before it came time to offer Daisy's owners payment relief, they got approved for $3,000 in hospital credit.

***

The standard of care at AMC  and the lengths people go to secure it for their pets  can be jarring for pet owners who consider spaying, neutering, shots, an annual checkup, and end-of-life euthanasia their cat or dog's due at the local clinic. But to AMC's vets and technicians, it's obvious that people would want for their animals the same treatment they'd expect for their children.

cat in a CAT scan veterinarian animal medical center

cat in a CAT scan veterinarian animal medical center

And it's clear that they love pushing the boundaries of the possible in veterinary medicine.

Rachel St. Vincent, AMC's radiation oncologist, uses a linear accelerator purchased from a human hospital to finely target and burn away brain tumors and other cancers that resist surgical intervention.

She studied alongside human radiation oncologists, and described her fellow students gathering around, fascinated, to see how she would apply what they learned to the alien anatomies of dogs and cats. Many of her patients are enrolled in clinical trials that will inform how people with cancer are eventually treated.

Animal Medical Center Veterinarian vet veterinary surgery_07

Robert Hart, director of orthopedic surgery at AMC, excitedly showed me the glue-free 3D-printed hip replacement he uses in large dogs. The high-tech structure induces the bone itself to grow into its nooks and crannies. It's a treatment not yet available to humans.

These advances to appear to emerge from more than just detached scientific interest. Every AMC vet and technician I asked owned multiple pets, often animals adopted after they were abandoned and ended up at AMC.

Asprea adopted her dog, Shadow, after he was dumped out of a moving car and ended up in the ER.

"Oh he looks like a project that will cost me thousands of dollars," she said, laughing, "where do I sign?"

Maraszi said she has something close to a rescue menagerie at home: one Caribbean island dog with just three legs, another with all its original limbs, a poodle mix that had been electrocuted and ended up at AMC, three cats, and a cockatoo found in the trash that now enjoys regular laser skin treatment and acupuncture at AMC.

***

The pace of work at AMC's ER resembles that in an emergency system geared toward humans.

The hospital is staffed 24 hours a day, as doctors and technicians rotate in and out. The workload is unpredictable. The flow of patients ebbs and flows, seemingly at random, though the pace seems to pick up in the evening.

That's when everyone gets done with dinner, Maraczi said.

Animal Medical Center Veterinarian vet veterinary surgery_24

One of the most important skills AMC's new technicians learn in the ER and ICU is keeping the animals calm while the vets work.

Romper, a large black German Shepherd mix, showed up in the ER after leaping through a closed glass window trying to chase a cat. He was agitated, with slices up and down his legs, and tried to bite the vet who triaged him.

With his owner's help, the staff got him in a muzzle. But while he waited in the back room for the vets and his owner to decide on a treatment plan, he grew anxious, breathing heavily, rolling his eyes, and drooling. Every few minutes, he'd pull hard on his leash.

Animal Medical Center Veterinarian vet veterinary surgery_36

Omar, a young technician building experience before vet school, held Romper in place. When it was time to stitch him up, Omar wrapped him in a tight bear hug. When Romper calmed a little, Omar helped lay him on the floor so an anesthesiologist could prepare intravenous drugs. Once Romper was asleep, the team made quick work of cleaning and closing his wounds.

At that point, it was 10 pm  my cue to leave the ER staff in peace. As I walked out the door, a woman passed me pushing a bloody mess of fur and torn skin on an improvised stretcher.

"Please somebody help!" She called into the waiting room. "Somebody help me!"

An attendant broke from behind the front desk at a run.

NOW WATCH: Dramatic video shows the moment a man rescued a woman and her dog from a sinking car





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Sirjan (Iran) (AFP) - The pistachio trees at the village in southern Iran are long dead, bleached white by the sun -- the underground water reserves sucked dry by decades of over-farming and waste.

The last farmers left with their families 10 years ago, and the village has the look of an abandoned Martian colony.

The dome-roofed, mud-walled homes are crumbling, once-green fields are now nothing but dirt furrows, and the only sign of life is a couple of drifters camping out in an old storehouse.

Pistachios are Iran's biggest export after crude oil, with 250,000 tonnes of the nut produced last year -- a figure only recently topped by the United States.

In Kerman province in southern Iran, cities have grown rich from pistachios, but time is running out for the industry as unconstrained farming and climate change take a devastating toll.

Near the city of Sirjan, a long line of enormous sinkholes like bomb craters mark the points where an underground aquifer was pumped completely dry, and the ground simply collapsed.

"Farming is being destroyed," says Hassan Ali Firouzabadi, who has lived in the nearby village of Izadabad for half a century.

His business is barely clinging on. Some of his pistachio trees are old enough to remember the golden age of Shah Abbas in the 17th century, but the leaves have turned yellow-green from the salty water he now dredges up.

"The well was six to 10 metres (deep) when I was a child, but now it's 150, and the water is bitter and salty," he says.

"This used to be a village full of people. Most have left to become labourers and drivers. Ten more years and there will be nothing left."

- 'A long-held illusion' -

Iran faces two key challenges -- dealing with a years-long nationwide drought that shows little sign of abating, and trying to convince farmers to stop the uncontrolled pumping of water.

Some 300,000 of Iran's 750,000 water pumps are illegal -- a big reason why the United Nations says Iran is officially transitioning from a state of "water stress" to "water scarcity".

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In 2013, Iran's chamber of commerce carried out a survey showing that Kerman province was losing about 20,000 hectares (49,400 acres) of pistachio farms every year to desertification.

For centuries, Iran relied on one of the world's most sophisticated irrigation systems -- a web of underground canals known as "qanats" that carried water from under mountains to the arid plains.

But then came the electric pumps and chaotic politics of the last century. The need to preserve water was little understood and secondary to self-sufficiency in food production -- an attitude that persisted into the sanctions era.

"We are slowly moving past a long-held illusion that we have endless resources," says Mohsen Nasseri at the National Climate Change Office in Tehran.

He says the government is finally looking at financial incentives to encourage water conservation. One scheme offers funding for farmers to buy modern irrigation equipment, but changing ingrained attitudes will take time.

"It's late, but it's happening," Nasseri says.

- 'A crisis point' -

Some farmers have taken matters into their own hands.

The lushly green pistachio trees of Farhad Sharif's farm near Sirjan are an oasis against the flat brown landscape.

The family installed a drip-irrigation system eight years ago that carefully controls the amount and quality of water delivered to each plant.

"We get more quality and more quantity from our pistachio trees, and we use 70 percent less water," says Sharif, who runs the business with his father.

They strictly limit the size of the farm to ensure the underground water levels can be replenished naturally.

"Everyone should do it," he says, but he knows the problem is money.

Sharif's family had cash and connections in Tehran that helped them secure a loan for the system, but even their farm cannot avoid the wider problems in the area.

Each year, he says, they have to pull up the pipes and shorten them as water tables deplete and the land gradually sinks.

"The problem is more dangerous than people realise. There is just not enough oversight," Sharif says.

"What is happening around here is a catastrophe -- it has reached a crisis point."
Noor Huda Ismail (black jacket) at the private screening of his documentary Jihad Selfie. (Photo: Safhras Khan/ Yahoo Newsroom).

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terrorist group will collapse eventually according to Noor Huda Ismail, an Indonesian filmmaker who is affectionately known as the Terrorist Whisperer.

Noor Huda, who is known for his efforts to reintegrate former convicted terrorists back into mainstream Indonesian society, was in Singapore on Saturday (3 September) for a private screening of his new documentary Jihad Selfie, a 50-minute film that offers insights into the jihadist psyche and cyber radicalism.

Speaking to an audience which included Senior Minister of State for Defence and Foreign Affairs Dr Maliki Osman at the RELC Auditorium after the screening, the former Washington Post correspondent said he could guarantee that ISIS will eventually shut down.

An organisation that practices closed ideology will eventually collapse like Al-Qaeda. But countering terrorism cannot be seen as a government problem alone because terrorists come from the community, said Noor Huda at the private screening, which was organised by the Association of Muslim Lawyers Singapore (AML).

The trailer for Noor Huda Ismails documentary Jihad Selfie.

Personal experience

Noor Huda, who is also the author of My Friend, the Terrorist? also shared his teenage experience regarding his former boarding school roommate.

While studying at an Islamic boarding school near Solo in 1985, he got to know Utomo Pamungkas, better known as Hasan, one of the men responsible for the 2002 Bali bombing.

The school itself was founded by Abu Bakar Bashir, who is well-known for his connections the Jemaah Islamiah terror group.

A community issue

Noor Huda pointed out that terrorism is a community problem and combating it is also the responsibility of the community.

(There is) no way any government can solve the problem alone because terrorists come from the community. More important is to help the children and the women because they are victims in the network. They are the real victims, he stressed.

Story continues

In his speech, Dr Maliki said the government have and will continue to invest in security hardware and strengthen the countrys mechanisms.

However, he added that it is ultimately the minds, the wills as well as the hearts and souls of Singaporeans that will determine the countrys security and stability.

It is imperative that we must do more to promote intra-faith alignment, which in turn helps build a strong foundation for inter-faith appreciation and cohesion.

"They are both interdependent,  said Dr Maliki.
Jerusalem (AFP) - The Israeli air force hit Syrian government forces after mortar fire from its war-wracked neighbour struck the Israeli-held zone of the Golan Heights on Sunday, the military said.

It said in a statement that "mortar fire" from Syria hit an open area without causing any apparent injuries, but it did not specify how many shells fell.

Unlike a similar incident on August 22 the Israelis did not immediately characterise the incident as stray fire.

"In response to mortar fire earlier today, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) targeted cannons of the Syrian regime in the northern Syrian Golan Heights," the English-language statement said.

A spokeswoman told AFP that the Israeli fire came in an air strike.

"The Syrian government must be held accountable for this breach of Israeli sovereignty," military spokesman Peter Lerner wrote on his official Twitter account.

"The IDF will continue to act to safeguard Israel."

In the August 22 exchange, the Israeli air force hit what it said was a Syrian army rocket launcher in response to "stray fire from Syrian conflict".

There were similar events in July and previously.

Israel has sought to avoid being drawn into Syria's complex war which is now in its sixth year, but it has attacked Syrian military targets when fire from the conflict spills over.

Israel seized 1,200 square kilometres (460 square miles) of the Golan Heights from Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967 and later annexed it in a move never recognised by the international community.
Jacob Wetterlings remains were discovered in Minnesota recently, 27 years after he was kidnapped as an 11-year-old, authorities told The Associated Press on Saturday, September 3. Specifics of when and where the remains were discovered werent disclosed due to the ongoing nature of the investigation.

According to the AP, the Sterns County Sheriffs Office confirmed in a statement that Jacob Wetterlings remains have been located, and the Ramsey County medical examiner and a forensic odontologist identified them Saturday.



PHOTOS: Most Shocking Celebrity Deaths of All Time

A law enforcement official told the AP that a person of interest led authorities to a field in central Minnesota last week, which is where they eventually found the remains and other evidence.



We are in deep grief, a statement on the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center site reads. We didnt want Jacobs story to end this way. In this moment of pain and shock, we go back to the beginning. The Wetterlings had a choice to walk into bitterness and anger or to walk into a light of what could be, a light of hope. Their choice changed the world.

The Wetterling family started the resource center in Jacobs honor to help prevent the exploitation of other children; Jacobs 1989 abduction led to the passing of a 1994 law that requires states to establish sex offender registries. The story made headlines for shattering the image of relative innocence surrounding suburban Minnesota life at the time.

PHOTOS: Most Infamous Family Murders in History

Our hearts are broken, Jacobs mother Patty texted to KARE-TV on Saturday after news of the discovery broke.



On October 22, 1989, Jacob was riding his bicycle with his brother and a friend when a masked gunman abducted him, telling the two other boys to run. That was the last that anyone saw of the 11-year-old.

Though authorities pursued numerous leads trying to track down Jacob or his kidnapper, it wasnt until last year that a suspect was named: 53-year-old Danny Heinrich, who was tied to another case of a Sterns County boys kidnapping and sexual assault.

Story continues

PHOTOS: Celebrity Deaths in 2016: Stars Weve Lost

Heinrichs brother, David Heinrich, told KARE-TV Saturday that he was sending his sympathies to the Wetterling family. "I want the Wetterlings to know I had no idea," David told KARE. "I am happy for them that they know  not that he's passed, but at least they have closure."



The statement on the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center site assures the public that the organization will not rest just because Jacobs remains have been found.

Our hearts are heavy, but we are being held up by all of the people who have been a part of making Jacob's Hope a light that will never be extinguished, the statement reads. It shines on in a different way. We are, and we will continue to be, Jacob's Hope. Jacob, you are loved.





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TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan has warned Britain that its exit from the European Union could prompt Japanese financial institutions to relocate from London and listed a raft of concerns from Japanese companies about the transition away of the EU.

In a 15-page report published on the eve of a summit of the Group of 20 big economies in China, a Japanese government task force formed to respond to "Brexit" also warned of a possible outflow of drug research and development investment from Britain, though it said it expected the British government to handle its exit from the bloc smoothly.

Recent economic data suggests the economic impact of Britain's vote to leave the EU has not been as severe as some predicted, although British Prime Minister Theresa May said on Sunday its economy will suffer as a result of the decision.

The Japanese report, published on the Foreign Ministry's website on Friday, cites numerous concerns including that Japanese financial institutions may have to apply for corporate status in the EU if Brexit means they lose the 'single passport' - the right to operate across the bloc. It also raises worries over ease of access to unskilled labour, tariff protection, and London's status as a clearing centre for euro transactions.

Formed in July shortly after Britain voted to leave the EU, the task force was headed by Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Koichi Hagiuda and comprises senior officials from the Prime Ministers Office, the foreign, finance, trade and agriculture ministries and the Financial Services Agency.

"Since the inception of the task force, three meetings were held and we've compiled the message, taking into account concerns from the private sector," a Foreign Ministry official told Reuters on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hangzhou, China.

"As a next step, we would like to relay this message to EU and UK leaders, taking advantage of a various diplomatic opportunities that are coming up including a G20 and UN high-level week," he said, declining to be identified.

Story continues

END TO UNFETTERED ACCESS?

London will set out in the coming week how it plans to shape its relationship with the European Union upon leaving the bloc, Prime Minister Theresa May said in an interview broadcast on Sunday.

Many Japanese financial institutions and other companies, such as Nissan Motor Co , count Britain as their European headquarters. Nearly half of Japan's EU investment last year flowed to Britain, the report noted.

These Japanese companies have counted on unfettered access to the giant EU market in their investment decisions that the report says have created 440,000 jobs in Europe.

A British official said such reports were welcome.

"It's not unhelpful to also have some of our trading partners setting out some of the issues they are looking at and the types of concerns or issues that they would want to be addressed," the official said on condition of anonymity.

"This is all more information that helps to inform our thinking on what is the right deal for Britain."

As for pharmaceuticals, the task force warns that if the European Medicines Agency were to move to the continent, "the appeal of London as an environment for the development of pharmaceuticals would be lost... this could force Japanese companies to reconsider their business activities."

The report also said that Japan "has no doubt that the UK and the EU will overcome such difficulties and lay the foundations for the creation of a new Europe."

(Additional reporting by Kiyoshi Takenaka and William James in Hangzhou, China; Writing by William Mallard; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan has warned Britain that its exit from the European Union could prompt Japanese financial institutions to relocate from London and listed a raft of concerns from Japanese companies about the transition away of the EU. In a 15-page report published on the eve of a summit of the Group of 20 big economies in China, a Japanese government task force formed to respond to "Brexit" also warned of a possible outflow of drug research and development investment from Britain, though it said it expected the British government to handle its exit from the bloc smoothly. Recent economic data suggests the economic impact of Britain's vote to leave the EU has not been as severe as some predicted, although British Prime Minister Theresa May said on Sunday its economy will suffer as a result of the decision. The Japanese report, published on the Foreign Ministry's website on Friday, cites numerous concerns including that Japanese financial institutions may have to apply for corporate status in the EU if Brexit means they lose the 'single passport' - the right to operate across the bloc. It also raises worries over ease of access to unskilled labor, tariff protection, and London's status as a clearing center for euro transactions. Formed in July shortly after Britain voted to leave the EU, the task force was headed by Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Koichi Hagiuda and comprises senior officials from the Prime Ministers Office, the foreign, finance, trade and agriculture ministries and the Financial Services Agency. "Since the inception of the task force, three meetings were held and we've compiled the message, taking into account concerns from the private sector," a Foreign Ministry official told Reuters on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hangzhou, China. "As a next step, we would like to relay this message to EU and UK leaders, taking advantage of a various diplomatic opportunities that are coming up including a G20 and UN high-level week," he said, declining to be identified. END TO UNFETTERED ACCESS? London will set out in the coming week how it plans to shape its relationship with the European Union upon leaving the bloc, Prime Minister Theresa May said in an interview broadcast on Sunday. Many Japanese financial institutions and other companies, such as Nissan Motor Co <7201.T>, count Britain as their European headquarters. Nearly half of Japan's EU investment last year flowed to Britain, the report noted. These Japanese companies have counted on unfettered access to the giant EU market in their investment decisions that the report says have created 440,000 jobs in Europe. A British official said such reports were welcome. "It's not unhelpful to also have some of our trading partners setting out some of the issues they are looking at and the types of concerns or issues that they would want to be addressed," the official said on condition of anonymity. "This is all more information that helps to inform our thinking on what is the right deal for Britain." As for pharmaceuticals, the task force warns that if the European Medicines Agency were to move to the continent, "the appeal of London as an environment for the development of pharmaceuticals would be lost... this could force Japanese companies to reconsider their business activities." The report also said that Japan "has no doubt that the UK and the EU will overcome such difficulties and lay the foundations for the creation of a new Europe." (Additional reporting by Kiyoshi Takenaka and William James in Hangzhou, China; Writing by William Mallard; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
Singing nuns and followers clutching flowers flocked to Mother Teresa's tomb in the Indian city of Kolkata to celebrate her proclamation as a saint at the Vatican on Sunday.

People began gathering in the early morning at Mother House in Kolkata for a special mass for the "Saint of the Gutters" before the ceremony at St Peter's Basilica.

They placed candles and flowers on her tomb in sombre contemplation. But the atmosphere at the headquarters of the Missionaries of Charity, the order that Teresa founded, was also one of celebration.

Nuns were singing songs honouring her and giant television screens were erected so the gathering visitors could watch the ceremony.

"It's a day of rejoicing, a day of gratitude and a day of many, many blessings," said senior sister Mary Lysa.

"The Missionaries of Charity has decided to turn this into a celebration to further Mother's cause serving the poorest of the poor and the dying and sick."

"We will gather to witness the entire process at Vatican City as it unfolds," she said.

Teresa rose to fame in the eastern Indian city, where she devoted her life to helping the destitute and the sick in its teeming slums.

Lighting a candle and placing it on the tomb, Konica Cecilia said the beloved nun had given her impoverished parents money to help them send her to school as a child.

"I was fortunate to meet Mother. She was a living saint and an inspiration to me," the 32-year-old said, adding that the nun was the pride of Kolkata.

"My memories of her comfort me when I am in trouble."

A giant portrait of Teresa was erected near Mother House and there were rounds of applause as a growing numbers of nuns and followers gathered to watch the ceremony live on the screens.

In the city of Mumbai the Indian government unveiled a commemorative postage stamp of Teresa, born into a Kosovar Albanian family in 1910 in Skopje.

The mass at the Vatican came one day short of the 19th anniversary of Teresa's death, at age 87, in Kolkata.

Story continues

The Nobel Peace Prize winner's path to canonisation was sealed after the Vatican last year recognised the second of two required miracles, following her death.

But she had long been regarded by many as a saint.

English literature teacher Madhura Banerjee described her as an inspiration to the younger generation in today's modern world.

"I was touched by her simplicity," said Banerjee, who visited Teresa in 1995 at the headquarters to celebrate her own birthday.

"When I think of her, it makes the difficult things look easy," she said.

There were also celebrations at the various homes for the destitute in Kolkata run by the charity, including special meals for those in their care.
Line nails are FINALLY a nail trend we think we can DIY

Line nails are FINALLY a nail trend we think we can DIY

When nail art took over the world with intricate designs, fun patterns and playful colors, people couldnt get enough. However, adding the designs on your own were a different story. Now theres finally a nail craze were confident we can DIY.

Say hello to line nails a.k.a. your new favorite nail art.

The trend can easily add poise and flair to any ensemble. Whether youre wearing yoga pants and a comfy tee or a little black dress with high heels, line nails are sure to make your outfit pop.

lc

Its a simple style and thats what is so awesome about this new nail art. Everyone can pretty much polish their nails with this trend and walk out looking like they just bought out every store on Rodeo Drive.

All you really need is your favorite polish, nail strips and Katy Perry confidence to complete the line design. The look is so simple and easy that lazy girls can finally rock nail art without having to put in too much effort.

Just like makeup and fashion, nail art is the perfect way to express yourself and it doesnt hurt that it adds sophistication and pizzazz to any outfit.

Take a look at some of the cutest designs people are rocking on Instagram.

Pretty in pink.

A photo posted by _ (@unistella_by_ek_lab) on Sep 1, 2016 at 3:01am PDT

You can add a touch of black.

A photo posted by  _ (@nail_unistella) on Aug 29, 2016 at 10:02am PDT

Adding black and white together makes everything right.

A photo posted by  _ (@nail_unistella) on Jan 12, 2016 at 9:32am PST

Get in the Halloween spirit with these spider web inspired lines.

A photo posted by _ (@unistella_by_ek_lab) on Sep 1, 2016 at 6:46pm PDT

All that glitters is gold.

A photo posted by Euna Um (@eunaum_k) on Sep 3, 2016 at 1:05pm PDT

Sometimes, less is more.

A photo posted by Eclaire  Nail & Lash - (@eclaire_beauty) on Aug 23, 2016 at 6:26am PDT

Sparkle makes everything look better.

A photo posted by Yukie Beauty Spa (@yukiebeautyspa) on Jul 30, 2016 at 7:37am PDT

Shine bright like a diamond.

A photo posted by  VCTOrAJHo (@victoria_judy) on Jul 16, 2016 at 11:23am PDT

We hope this nail design lasts forever because it is seriously something we can pull off and create on our own.

The post Line nails are FINALLY a nail trend we think we can DIY appeared first on HelloGiggles.
Ankara (AFP) - Islamic State jihadists were expelled from their last positions along the Turkish-Syrian border, Turkey said Sunday, as Syrian forces again laid seige to rebel strongholds in war-torn Aleppo.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said his nation's forces and Syrian rebels had pushed back "terrorist organisations" on its southern border with Syria, depriving IS of a key transit point for recruits and supplies.

"From Azaz to Jarabulus, our 91 km border has been completely secured," Yildirim said during a televised speech while visiting the southeastern city of Diyarbakir.

The news comes as Syrian government troops renewed the siege of rebel-held parts of Aleppo on Sunday as Washington and Moscow failed to reach a deal on stemming violence in the country's devastating war.

The more than five-year conflict has become increasingly complex, involving not only regime and rebels, but international backers on both sides, Kurdish forces, jihadists and now Turkey.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said earlier "rebels and Islamist factions backed by Turkish tanks and warplanes" had taken several villages on the Turkish-Syrian border "after IS withdrew from them, ending IS's presence... on the border."

Ankara began an operation inside Syria on August 24, using tanks and war planes to back opposition fighters with special forces also providing support.

Turkey's success is likely to deliver a blow to the Syrian Kurdish YPG, which has been gaining territory in Syria's north after working with the US-led coalition against the jihadist force.

But Ankara considers the YPG a "terrorist" group and has been alarmed by its expansion along the border, fearing the creation of a contiguous, semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Syria.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said Turkey would not allow a "terror corridor" on its southern border.

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With Turkey's rapid success in less than two weeks, his position looks stronger with territory in between the two Kurdish "cantons" of Afrin and Kobane now in the hands of Ankara-backed rebels.

The loss of the Turkish border will also deprive IS of a key transit point for recruits and supplies, though the group continues to hold territory in both Syria and Iraq.

- Syria army besieges Aleppo -

Despite several rounds of international negotiations, a solution to the civil war that has killed more than 290,000 people and displaced millions remains elusive.

Syrian state media said the army and allied forces had taken an area south of Aleppo, severing the sole route left into the eastern neighbourhoods held by the opposition.

"The armed forces in cooperation with their allies took full control of the military academy zone south of Aleppo and are clearing the remaining terrorists from the area," state television said, citing a military source.

It said the advance "cut all the supply and movement routes for terrorist groups from southern Aleppo province to the eastern neighbourhoods and Ramussa."

The development leaves about 250,000 people living in rebel-controlled parts of the city cut off from the outside world once again, and will raise new fears about a humanitarian crisis in Aleppo.

Once Syria's economic powerhouse, the city has been ravaged by the war that began with anti-government protests in March 2011.

It has been roughly divided between government control in the west and rebel control in the east since mid-2012, but in recent months regime forces slowly began to encircle the east.

In July, they severed the only road into the rebel neighbourhoods, the key Castello Road running from the Turkish border in the north, creating food and fuel shortages in the east.

The siege prompted international concern, with aid agencies urging 48-hour ceasefires to ensure humanitarian access.

- US-Russia talks stumble -

In early August, rebel forces including Al-Qaeda's former Syrian affiliate battled regime forces south of the city to open a new route to the east, through Ramussa district.

But in recent days regime forces backed by Syrian and Russian war planes launched a counter-offensive.

A key regime ally, Moscow began an aerial campaign in support of President Bashar al-Assad's government last September, even as it continued to publicly support efforts for a negotiated solution to the five-year war.

Earlier Sunday, hopes were raised that Moscow and Washington might be on the verge of announcing a deal to halt the bloodshed.

US President Barack Obama said both nations were working "around the clock" on a ceasefire, and a State Department official said a deal was close.

But the hopes evaporated later in the day, with a State Department official saying Russia had "walked back on some of the areas we thought we were agreed on."

Instead, US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov are set to meet again on Monday in Hangzhou, China, where G20 leaders are gathered.

"We're going to review some ideas tonight, a couple things on these couple of tough issues, and come back together and see where we are," said Kerry.

"We're not going to rush," he said, stressing the importance of reaching a deal that was able "to try to get the job done".
Police arrested a man for fatally stabbing a New York woman in what many are calling a hate crime.

Yonatan Galvez-Marin was charged in the stabbing of Nazma Khanam, a 60-year-old Bangladesh-born woman living in Queens, police said Sunday.

Khanam was killed a few feet away from her husband on Wednesday night after the two were walking home from a souvenir shop. Galvez-Marin allegedly approached and asked Khanam for money. When she refused, he stabbed her repeatedly and then fled.

Somebody killed me, Khanam screamed, according to her husband who found the weapon sticking out of her body.

Khanams death come weeks after the shooting of imam Maulama Akonjee and his associate Thara Uddin as they left a Queens mosque. Like the killing of Akongee and Uddin, the NYPD has not labeled the stabbing as a hate crime; however, the departments hate crime unit is looking into the case, a spokesperson said on Sunday.

Hundreds gathered at the Jamaica Muslim Center for Khanams funeral service on Friday, where her family spoke and mourned. Many who attended the funeral said they believe the killing was a hate crime.

This was not a robbery and though we do not know all the facts, the reality is this is happening too often, public advocate Letitia James said, according to the Guardian.

Khanams nephew is a New York Police Department transit officer, and several police officers attended the funeral service.

Galvez-Marin, 22, was charged with second-degree murder, robbery and criminal possession of a weapon
Hangzhou (China) (AFP) - British Prime Minister Theresa May on Sunday defended her decision to delay a partly Beijing-backed nuclear power project, despite it causing diplomatic tensions, as she arrived in China for a G20 summit.

Beijing has a one-third stake in the plan to build Britains first nuclear plant in decades at Hinkley Point in southwest England, along with French company EDF.

May unexpectedly delayed the project in July after EDF gave it a green light, but gave no clear reason.

"The way I work is that I don't just take an instant decision. I actually look at the evidence, take the advice, consider it properly, and then come to a decision," May said at a press conference.

"I've been very clear that I will be doing that and will be taking a decision sometime this month," she added.

May has reportedly suspended the project on national security grounds, echoing fears which caused Australia to block a major electricity grid deal with a Chinese consortium last month.

Critics cite the enormous cost of the 18-billion (21-billion-euro, $23-billion) project as well as security concerns about the involvement of China's major energy group CGN.

China's ambassador to Britain last month urged London to approve the plant as soon as possible, warning that relations between the two countries were at a critical point, as state media said China cannot tolerate accusations that its involvement threatened British security.

The nuclear deal had been seen as a cornerstone of a "golden era" of Chinese-British ties pushed by then-prime minister David Cameron and finance minister George Osborne.

British media said the move was a sign that May took a more sceptical view on ties with China than her predecessor.

The project has been criticised for committing British taxpayers to paying above-market rates for electricity for decades to come.
Libreville (AFP) - A media crackdown in Gabon left people on Sunday searching for loved ones aided mainly by rumour and hope, following days of violence since the announcement that President Ali Bongo had been re-elected.

The post-election violence has so far claimed seven lives throughout the country, according to an AFP count; six civilians, mainly in the capital Libreville, and a police officer in the main northern town of Oyem.

Rumours of a higher death toll, notably in the economic capital Port-Gentil, have been swirling around despite the lack of any internet access.

Some 800 people have been arrested in the capital since the last weekend's election result was announced on Wednesday, according to official figures.

"We are calling for the list of those arrested" and which police stations they are being held in, said lawyer Jean-Pierre Akumbu M'Oluna.

Bongo was declared victorious by a razor-thin margin of just under 6,000 votes, but his main challenger Jean Ping, a veteran diplomat and former top African Union official, has insisted the vote was rigged and on Friday claimed victory for himself.

"The whole world knows who is president of the republic, it's me Jean Ping," he said.

- 'Deep concern' -

Ping is calling for vote recount, something the Gabonese authorities have categorically refused to contemplate.

The post-vote violence in this small but oil-rich central African nation, a former French colony, has sparked international concern with top diplomats calling for restraint as rights groups raise the alarm over the use of "excessive force".

In a special session on Gabon on Thursday, the UN Security Council expressed "deep concern" about the situation, urging all sides to "to refrain from violence or other provocations".

And Washington has urged all parties to work together to "halt the slide towards further unrest."

UN chief Ban Ki-moon spoke to both Bongo and Ping on Sunday and "deplored the loss of life" in post-poll violence, a UN statement said.

Story continues

"He expressed concern about the continuing inflammatory messages being disseminated and called for an immediate end to all acts of violence in the country," it said.

Two people in Libreville told AFP Sunday that they are still searching for loved ones missing since Wednesday night, when security forces stormed Ping's offices.

"I'm looking for my son, Jocelyn. He was a Jean Ping's headquarters," said a woman who gave her name as Jacqueline.

A man, who preferred to remain anonymous, said he'd had no news of his brother since Wednesday.

"He's married, father of four children," said the man who has searched police stations, hospitals and even funeral parlours.

- Government silence -

Information is hard to come by. The government hasn't issued any statements for days and even the regime-friendly L'Union newspaper hasn't appeared since Wednesday.

"We were the object of an arson attack, we can't work," the paper's boss Lin-Joel Ndembet told AFP, adding that he didn't know when publication would resume.

The premises of private television channels Radio-Television Nazareth (RTN) and Tele Plus, have both been attacked.

The RTN offices were set ablaze late Wednesday "by hooded and heavily armed agents of the security forces," the channel's chief executive Georges Bruno Ngoussi said.

According to him, attacks on RTN began on August 28, the day after the presidential election, when it was reporting that Ping was ahead in the vote count.

Starved of information the Gabonese people have turned to French media, including RFI, France 24 AND TV5 Monde, which have special correspondents in Libreville but are largely absent in the provinces.

Some Gabonese TV channels are continuing to operate, if barely, notably Tele Gabon and Gabon 24 -- public broadcasters close to the powers that be.

Tele Gabon ran in-house ads for television series while Gabon 24 repeatedly announced that the opening of parliament had been delayed until September 6.

The country had previously enjoyed relative political stability, mainly because former colonial power France helped Omar Bongo rule for 41 years.

After he died in June 2009, his son Ali won an election but opposition media claimed he had essentially been installed by France.
Hangzhou (China) (AFP) - Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel said Sunday she hoped Ankara would soon lift a ban on German lawmakers visiting a Turkish airbase that was imposed amid a row over the Armenian genocide.

Turkey last month stopped German MPs from visiting their troops stationed at the Incirlik base in southern Turkey, which is used to launch coalition raids against Islamic State (IS) jihadists in Syria.

After meeting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the G20 summit in China, Merkel said she was hopeful of progress on the issue.

"I think it is possible that in the coming days we will have good news about this completely justified request," Merkel said.

The airbase ban came with tensions running high between Berlin and Ankara over a resolution by the lower house of the German parliament calling the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman forces during World War I a genocide.

Turkey vehemently rejects the genocide claim, arguing it was a collective tragedy in which both Turks and Armenians died.

The German government has stressed the Bundestag vote was non-binding, a move widely interpreted as a step to soothe Ankara, a key player in both the fight against IS and the European migrant crisis.
ANKARA (Reuters) - More than 100 Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants were either killed or wounded in clashes with Turkish security forces on Saturday, the military said. It was one of the highest casualty tolls in a single day of the conflict in recent years. Turkey's largely Kurdish southeast has been rocked by waves of violence following the collapse of a 2-1/2-year ceasefire between the state and the PKK last year. The military said in a statement that more than 100 PKK militants had been "neutralised" in clashes, without specifying how many were killed and how many wounded. It said most had been taken back to northern Iraq, where the PKK has mountain camps. Turkey's southeast has seen heavy fighting in recent days in Hakkari province, near the border with Iraq, and in Van province, near the border with Iran. Five Turkish security force members were killed and six more were wounded in clashes in Hakkari, security sources told Reuters. Eight more security force members were killed overnight in Van, the sources said. More than 40,000 people, most of them Kurds, have died since autonomy-seeking PKK launched its insurgency against the Turkish state more than 30 years ago. The PKK is regarded as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. (Reporting by Tulay Karadeniz, Orhan Coskun, Asli Kandemir and Humeyra Pamuk; Writing by David Dolan; Editing by Greg Mahlich)
Mother Teresa, the Albanian-born nun who dedicated her life to working with the poor in India, was named a saint on Sunday by Pope Francis.



According to the Los Angeles Times, a crowd of 120,000 gathered in St. Peter's Square in Vatican City to celebrate the canonization of Saint Teresa of Kolkata, as she will now be known.



Pope Francis lauded the Nobel Peace Prize winner as "a generous dispenser of divine mercy" in his homily.



"She bowed down before those who were spent, left to die on the side of the road, seeing in them their God-given dignity. She made her voice heard before the powers of this world, so that they might recognize their guilt for the crime of poverty they created," he said in Latin.







The pontiff continued that the womea who he expected would continue to be known as Mother Teresa set an example to volunteers around the world. "May she be your model of holiness," he said.





Mother Teresa Is Officially Canonized as a Saint by Pope Francis Just 19 Years After Her Death| Mother Teresa, Pope Francis





The L.A. Times reports the enormous crowd included Queen Sofia of Spain, hundreds of nuns from the sisterhood started by Saint Teresa, Missionaries of Charity, their trademark blue-trimmed saris and 1,500 homeless who were treated to a pizza lunch at the Vatican after the ceremony.





Mother Teresa Is Officially Canonized as a Saint by Pope Francis Just 19 Years After Her Death| Mother Teresa, Pope Francis







Related Video: Mother Teresa To Be Named a Saint in the Roman Catholic Church





Just 19 years after her death at age 87, the canonization took place unusually quick.



The case for canonization is usually initiated five years after the candidate's death, but Pope John Paul II waived this rule for Mother Teresa.



In December, a second miracle was attributed to the new saint, making her eligible for sainthood.



According to the Associated Press, the mysterious recovery in late 2008 of a Brazilian man who was suffering from a brain infection that resulted in several abscesses was attributed to Mother Teresa. The man was in a coma and dying but, when he was scheduled to undergo surgery, suddenly sat up without pain and was soon declared symptom-free. His wife had prayed to Mother Teresa for his healing and was at her parish church praying alongside her pastor when he unexpectedly awoke.



In order to become a Catholic saint, one must perform two miracles. Saint Teresa's first miracle was approved in 2003, after she was said to have healed an Indian woman's tumor through divine intervention.
Narcos has received critical acclaim for turning the rise and fall of Pablo Escobar into a gripping drama that shows how the War on Drugs is akin to fighting a hydra. Every time law enforcement takes down a major drug lord, another takes its place, and business continues as usual. The most recent drug lord to go down, El Chapo, said as much in his famed interview with Sean Penn just a few months before his capture.

Netflix has yet to renew Narcos for a third season. But if it does continue, it will do so without Wagner Moura and his powerful performance as Escobar. With his death following an attack from Colombian special forces at the end of Season 2, Escobar and his Medellin cartel are now finished. But that cocaine hunger wont feed itself.

The closing episodes of Narcos brings the rise of Escobars successors: the Cali Cartel and its top men, Helmer Pacho Herrera and Escobars former partner, Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela.

Also Read: Netflix Gives Bill Nye His Own Talk Show

This season, the Calis helped bring down Escobar through an unholy alliance with Judy Moncada  whose husband Escobar killed  as well as the extremist anti-communist Castanos brothers and the CIA, who wanted assurance they had say in who took over the drug trade.

Ultimately, they got what they wanted, as Gilberto triumphed over Escobars family by making them an offer they couldnt refuse: the Calis would help them get out of the country in exchange for Pablos drug fortune. Not only did Tata Escobar lose her husband, she also lost everything they built through their criminal empire.

So what comes next? Well, according to the history books, the Cali Cartel picks up right where the Medellin Cartel left off and becomes the most powerful drug ring not only in Latin America, but in the entire world.

Also Read: 'Stranger Things' Season 2 Is a Go at Netflix: Watch First Teaser Trailer (Video)

According to Time Magazine, the Calis rise had been in the works from the moment Escobar entered La Catedral. At the peak of their power, they were responsible for 90 percent of the worlds cocaine sales thanks to a powerful system of connections that enabled them to get their hooks into military and political organizations in many countries, including Russia and the U.S.

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Narcos hints at the effects of this complex system of crime in its final Season 2 scenes, as the DEA notes that drug sales have only increased since Escobar was killed. Its noted that the Calis did business completely differently from the Medellin Cartel, which allowed it to quickly gain strength as law enforcement focused on Escobar.

While the Medellins built their system entirely around Escobar, the Calis used a cadre of independent but close-knit cells that exchanged information and cash with great efficiency. Its estimated that at their height, the Calis were raking in over $7 billion each year.

Also Read: Emmy Contender Pedro Pascal on 'Narcos': Netflix 'Isn't Movies, It's the Next Thing'

Still, this doesnt mean that the Calis couldnt be brought down by eliminating their top men, and the DEA was able to do that with some unexpected help.

An in-depth story from the Los Angeles Times in 2007 revealed that the CIA received assistance from Jorge Salcedo, a former Colombian army official who was brought in by the Calis to devise a plan to take Escobar down. Salcedos plans failed, but he stayed on as the cartels head of security.

Eventually, Salcedo feared for his life and the life of his family, which was heightened after he was tasked with executing one of the cartels lead accountants because Orejuela and the Cali brass became increasingly paranoid.

Also Read: 'Narcos' Season 2 Trailer Shows War in Colombian Streets (Video)

Salcedo became a key informant and provided the CIA with important information that led to the capture of many of the Cali kingpins, including Orejuela, who is currently serving a 30-year prison sentence. Salcedo and his family have relocated to the U.S. and have taken on different identities.

The efforts to take down an even bigger cartel than Escobars empire and the story of paranoia and betrayal that led to major arrests would be the perfect way to continue the story of Narcos. It also leaves open the potential for even more sordid drug tales, as members of the Cali Cartel that evaded arrest build yet another cartel, starting the drug cycle anew.

As long as theres a strong need to snort a line of cocaine in the world, drug lords will always be there to supply that itch, no matter how much blood is shed.

Related stories from TheWrap:

Netflix's 'Narcos' Season 1 to Air on Univision in Historic Agreement

'Narcos' Writer to Create El Chapo Drama '#Cartel' for History

'Narcos' Pedro Pascal Compares Drama to 'Game of Thrones': 'We Don't Need Dragons, We've Got Cocaine'
Hillary Clinton embracing her husband, then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump in the 1990s. (Photos: Paul Sakuma/AP; Stephen Trupp/AP)

Welcome back, the 90s.

With news this week that longtime anti-Clinton conspiracy theorist David Bossie is joining the Trump campaign, and that longtime Clinton defender Joe Conason is publishing another book in their defense, it feels, more than ever, like that decade never ended.

So pull on your plaid flannel shirt, fluff up your Rachel haircut and pop a Cobain CD into your Discman while we review.

Hillary and Bill. Our flashback begins with our main characters, the former president, whose critics called him Slick Willie, and his wife, whom Donald Trump now calls Crooked Hillary. Bill was heavier back then, Hillary was thinner, but their basic temperaments were already in place. He loved everyone (which made him a talented politician and a cheating husband). She was less voluble and more cautious, never wanting to apologize, and distrusting the press (so much so that as first lady she tried to get the press corps moved out of the White House and into an adjoining building).

All these years later, he is the kind of glad-hander who would have a quick visit on the tarmac with an attorney general who is investigating his wife, and she is a candidate who has held no press conferences for more than 270 days.

Donald Trump. The 90s were not his best decade, either. By the time the Clintons moved into the White House, Trump was divorced from his first wife, Ivana, and by the time they left, hed divorced second wife Marla Maples as well. On the financial front, he fought bankruptcy during this stretch, restructuring billions in debt in 1990, selling the Trump Shuttle airline and the Trump Princess yacht in 1991, and seeking business (although not personal) bankruptcy protection for his casinos in 1992. Hillary Clinton brings that history up often now on the campaign trail, saying, We should  make sure he never has the chance to bankrupt America the way he bankrupted his businesses.

At the time, though, the Trump business failures werent a national story. Trump didnt have a lot of people paying attention to his every move back then. Which brings us back to the Clintons, who did.

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The Scandals. There was no email to speak of during the Clinton presidency (Bill himself sent only two over eight years) so there were no emails to be deleted. But there were documents. And they did go missing. One of the first congressional investigations of the Clintons was over documents chronicling the couples participation in a real estate project called Whitewater, in which they turned an investment of $1,000 into $100,000. Some of those papers disappeared from official files and were mysteriously found in the White House residence. (She testified before Congress for four hours about those missing papers  the first time a first lady did so; in retrospect, it was a warmup for the 11 hours she spent testifying last October about Benghazi and her missing emails.)

There were other kinds of investigations too, which the press or the couples political enemies elevated to gatehood (a trope dating back to the 1972 Watergate scandal): Filegate, Travelgate, Troopergate. In all, $80 million was spent on congressional probes into the Clinton administration, and while none of them resulted in criminal charges against the couple, they did provide lots of accusations that still come up 30 years later. Vince Foster, for instance. A White House counsel, he killed himself during the Whitewater affair, and while five separate investigations found it to be suicide, Clinton conspiracy buffs say otherwise. He knew everything that was going on, and then all of a sudden he committed suicide, Donald Trump said earlier this year. I will say, there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely murder.

Speaking of which

The Conspiracies.



Think the birther stuff is wacky? Or the Trump-is-a-Putin-plant theory? Or the Hillary-is-dying meme? Those kinds of theories hark back to the 90s too. As David Corn wrote in Mother Jones: During the 1992 campaign, some right-wingers whispered that Bill Clinton was a Manchurian candidate who had been brainwashed by the Russians when he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and took a student trip to Moscow. Others circulated fliers  this was before the Internet hit big  claiming he had fathered the son of an African American prostitute. And there were claims that the Clintons were connected to a major drug-running operation that had been based in Arkansas and tied to a series of murders. Yes, murders. Dozens of murders.

All of this led Hillary in 1998 to vent against what she labeled a vast right-wing conspiracy out to bring down her husband, and, by extension, herself. Thirty years later many of those same names are still in the anti-Clinton business, leading the Washington Post to headline a story on Thursday How Hillary Clinton helped create what she later called the vast right-wing conspiracy.

The news that day was that Trump had hired David Bossie as deputy campaign manager. Bossie and the Clintons go way back, to when Bossie was a staffer on the special committee investigating Whitewater. Then-Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., who Bossie worked for, took it upon himself to test his Vince Foster suicide theory by shooting up a watermelon in his backyard, which should give an idea of how zealous he was on the subject. But Bossies ways were too extreme even for Burton, and Bossie was fired in 1998 for allegedly doctoring hearing transcripts. He went on to lead Citizens United (he has taken a leave to join the campaign) and to found the super-PAC Defeat Crooked Hillary. His job, as described by the Washington Post, will include returning to the past, by crafting attacks against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and mining past controversies involving her and former president Bill Clinton.

He will be working alongside others from back in the day. His boss in the campaign, Steve Bannon, previously ran Breitbart.com, a site whose founder got his own start working with Matthew Drudge at the Drudge Report back when it was first covering the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and who then helped Arianna Huffington found the Huffington Post, back when she was still a conservative Republican calling for Bill Clintons impeachment. (You got that? You might have to read that sentence twice.)

Newly revealed to be on Team Trump is Gennifer Flowers, who emerged during the 1992 campaign to say shed had a longtime affair with Bill Clinton, (which he denied at the time but later, under oath in 1998, conceded was a one-time thing). Earlier this week she reemerged, telling Politico she now considers herself a Trumpette in a story you really have to read to believe.

Also out on the 2016 playing field is David Brock, who was an investigative reporter for the American Spectator in the early 90s and wrote a story about how Arkansas state troopers assigned to protect then-Gov. Bill Clinton had procured women for him instead. But Brock has switched allegiances since then. In 2002 he wrote a book, Blinded by the Right, saying he has come to think that the troopers were lying to him, and now he works for the Clintons, pushing back against the kinds of stories he used to write.

Which brings us to

The Clinton Team.

It is not just the anti-Clinton players who have resurfaced for another go-around. The Clinton team, and the news organizations covering the campaign, are staffed by throwbacks as well.

Among the familiar names doing familiar things are Sidney Blumenthal, who is credited for coining the term vast right-wing conspiracy in the first place and whose name is back in the news because he seems to have been her most frequent email correspondent, at least among those emails that have been released. John Podesta, Bill Clintons chief of staff, is chairman of Hillarys campaign. Paul Begala, a chief strategist for Bill Clintons 1992 campaign, is now a CNN commentator. Lanny Davis, a Clinton White House counsel, now appears regularly on Fox News.

clinton_degrees_v5

For full circle, one might also look to the bookshelf. There youll find Joe Conason, a longtime journalist whose first book, The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, has a title that speaks for itself, and whose latest book, Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton, made news last week with the assertion that Hillary Clinton relied on Colin Powells advice when setting up her private email server. (Powell has disputed the account.)

The book comes out next week. At nearly 500 pages, its a long read. But maybe if you kick off your platform shoes and turn off your brick-size cellphone, you can burrow in and give the 90s another go.
By Kevin Yao and Kiyoshi Takenaka HANGZHOU, China (Reuters) - The global economy is being threatened by rising protectionism and risks from highly leveraged financial markets, Chinese President Xi Jinping said at the open of a two-day summit of leaders from G20 nations. His warning on Sunday followed bilateral talks with Barack Obama that the U.S. president described as "extremely productive", but which failed to bring both sides closer on thornier topics such as tensions in the South China Sea. With the summit taking place after Britain's vote in June to exit the European Union and before the U.S. presidential election in November, observers expect G20 leaders to mount a defense of free trade and globalization and warn against isolationism. The global economy has arrived "at a crucial juncture", Xi said, in the face of sluggish demand, volatile financial markets and feeble trade and investment. "Growth drivers from the previous round of technological progress are gradually fading, while a new round of technological and industrial revolution has yet to gain momentum," he said. G20 countries are set to agree in a communique at the end of the summit that all policy measures - including monetary, fiscal and structural reforms - should be used to achieve solid and sustainable economic growth, Japanese Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Koichi Hagiuda said. "Commitment will be made to utilizing all three policy tools of monetary and fiscal policies and structural reforms to achieve solid, sustainable, balanced and inclusive growth," Hagiuda told reporters on the sidelines of the summit. Xi also called on G20 countries to match their words with actions. "We should turn the G20 group into an action team, instead of a talk shop," he said. But some of the G20 leaders have begun drawing battle lines in disputes over issues ranging from trade and investment to tax policy and industrial overcapacity. BATTLE LINES On Sunday, Xi held talks with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and told him he hoped Australia would continue to provide a fair, transparent and predictable policy environment for foreign investors. China was angered when Australia blocked the A$10 billion ($7.7 billion) sale of the country's biggest energy grid to Chinese bidders last month. China has accused Australia of bowing to protectionist sentiment in blocking the bid for Ausgrid, as well as an earlier one by a China-led consortium to buy cattle company Kidman & Co. Beijing has also criticized Australia, a staunch U.S. ally, for running surveillance flights over disputed islands in the South China Sea. Meanwhile, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said China must set up a mechanism to address its problem of industrial overcapacity, saying it was "unacceptable" the European steel industry had lost so many jobs in recent years. "Overcapacity is a global problem but there is a particular Chinese element," he told a news conference. Britain's future after its departure from the European Union was also subject to discussion. Obama reassured Prime Minister May that Britain's closest political, commercial and military ally would stand by her. But he did not shrink away from his stance that Brexit was a mistake and that London would not be able to jump the queue to arrange a bilateral trade deal. Juncker said that if Britain wanted access to the European Union's common market, it needed to respect the rules of the common market. Turnbull, meanwhile, said Australia wanted an early free trade agreement with Britain so markets could remain open between them when Britain formally left the European trading bloc. LATE NIGHT TALKS Obama held talks with Xi on Saturday that ran late into the night. He urged Beijing to uphold its legal obligations in the disputed waters of the South China Sea, and stressed U.S. commitments to its regional allies. Xi said China would continue to safeguard its sovereignty and maritime rights in the South China Sea. But China is keen to keep the summit focused on economic issues and to prevent other disputes from overshadowing it. According to a "fact sheet" on China-U.S. relations issued on Sunday, the two sides agreed on a range of issues, including avoiding competitive currency devaluations and not limiting deal opportunities for foreign information and communication technology providers. Obama, now in the last five months of his presidency, is using the visit to put a final stamp on his signature policy shift toward the Pacific, setting the tone for his White House successor, who will be elected in November and take office on Jan. 20. His visit began chaotically at the Hangzhou airport, where his staff argued with Chinese security over media access. Obama said on Sunday he "wouldn't over-crank the significance" of the airport events. "None of this detracts from the broader scope of the relationship (with China)," he told a news conference. "The bilateral discussions that we had yesterday were extremely productive and continue to point to big areas of cooperation." Security was extremely tight in Hangzhou, with parts of the city of 9 million people turned into a virtual ghost town as China seeks to ensure that the G20 summit stays incident-free. (Additional reporting by Sue-Lin Wong, Michael Martina, Roberta Rampton, Ruby Lian, Kiyoshi Takenaka, Vladimir Soldatkin, William James and Engen Tham in HANGZHOU, and Ben Blanchard, Nick Heath, Jason Subler and John Ruwitch in BEIJING; Writing by Raju Gopalakrishnan and John Ruwitch; Editing by Ryan Woo)
By Roberta Rampton and William James

HANGZHOU, China (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama offered Britain little hope of a fast-track post-Brexit trade deal on Sunday, but said he would work to ensure the economic relationship between the two does not unravel after the British vote to leave the European Union.

Obama met with British Prime Minister Theresa May at the start of a G20 summit in China as Britain embarks on the long process of reinventing itself as an independent trading nation following the shock June EU referendum outcome.

Obama, who in April used a visit to London to tell Britain it would be at the back of the queue for a trade deal if it left the EU, met with May for the first time since she became prime minister to discuss Brexit and other global challenges.

He offered May reassurance that Britain's closest political, commercial and military ally would stand by her, but did not shrink away from his stance that Brexit was a mistake and that London would not be able to jump the queue to arrange a bilateral deal.

"It is absolutely true that I believed pre-Brexit vote, and continued to believe post-Brexit vote, that the world benefited enormously from the United Kingdom's participation in the EU," he said.

"First things first - the first task (for Britain) is going to be figuring out what Brexit means with respect to Europe, and our first task is making sure we get, first, TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) done and also that we move forward on the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) negotiations in which we've invested a lot of time and effort."

TTIP is a stalled U.S.-EU trade deal, while TPP is Obama's signature Asian trade deal.

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, meanwhile, said on Sunday his country and Britain were both very committed to having an early free trade agreement after Britain leaves the European Union.

"They've got to put in place free trade agreements and we are enthusiastic and supportive; we're providing Britain with as much assistance as we can at a technical level," Turnbull told reporters in Hangzhou.

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Both Obama and May said they would try to minimise the impact of Brexit, stressed the closeness of their relations and expressed a desire to strengthen those ties wherever possible.

"What I committed to Theresa is that we will consult closely with her as she and her government move forward with Brexit negotiations to ensure that we don't see adverse effects in the trade and commercial relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom," Obama said.

"We're going to do everything we can to make sure that the consequences of the decision don't end up unravelling what is already a very strong and robust economic relationship," he said.

(Additional reporting by Sue-Lin Wong; Editing by John Ruwitch and Kim Coghill)
HANGZHOU, China (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama said on Sunday his talks with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping a day earlier had been "extremely productive" and that the significance of a row between U.S. and Chinese officials at the airport upon his arrival shouldn't be overblown. "I wouldn't overcrank the significance" of tensions at the airport, Obama told a news conference in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, where global leaders are convening for a G20 summit. Obama's last scheduled trip to China before leaving office got off to an awkward start soon after Air Force One landed in Hangzhou when a Chinese security official blocked National Security Adviser Susan Rice on the tarmac and yelled at another U.S. official trying to help journalists get closer to Obama. (Reporting by Roberta Rampton; Writing by John Ruwitch; Editing by Kim Coghill)
Hangzhou (China) (AFP) - The US and China have different values when it comes to media freedom, President Barack Obama said Sunday, playing down an airport dispute over his arrival that spiralled into suggestions of snubs and insults.

A Chinese official who wanted US reporters travelling with the president to move shouted at a White House staffer: "This is our country! This is our airport!"

Chinese government minders confronted National Security Advisor Susan Rice when she moved closer to Obama as he walked from Air Force One after landing in the Chinese city of Hangzhou for a G20 summit.

And when US security personnel decided Obama should leave the plane using its built-in staircase, he was left stepping onto the tarmac rather than a red carpet, prompting speculation of a snub.

But the US leader said the tensions were the result of different approaches to the media, as well as the sheer scale of the US operation when he travels.

Washington stands up for press freedom and human rights and -- whatever the fallout -- does not "leave our values and ideals behind when we take these trips", he said.

"It can cause some friction. The seams are showing a little more than usual in terms of some of the negotiations and jostling that takes place behind the scenes," Obama told reporters on Sunday.

"Part of it is we also have a much bigger footprint than a lot of other countries. And we've got a lot of planes, a lot of helicopters, a lot of cars, a lot of guys. You know, if you're a host country, sometimes it may feel a little bit much."

- 'No good to be rude' -

US sources told AFP that the staircase incident stemmed from their own decision to use Air Force One's own staircase, rather than the one proffered by airport authorities.

The South China Morning Post newspaper also quoted a Chinese foreign ministry official as saying: "US side complained that the driver doesnt speak English and cant understand security instructions... and insisted that they didnt need the staircase."

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"It would do China no good in treating Obama rudely," he added.

Both Xi and Obama are eager to smooth over their differences and find common ground as the American leader approaches the end of his term and looks to cement his legacy, and his Chinese counterpart seeks a greater role on the world's diplomatic stage.

Obama said it was not the first time Washington's differences with Beijing had erupted during a visit, and that clashing values were also on display in his discussions with Xi.

"And so I wouldn't over-crank the significance of it," he said.

"We think it's important that the press have access to the work that we're doing. That they have the ability to answer questions," he said.

Kerfuffles over press access are common in China, where the ruling Communist Party sees the media more as a tool for forwarding its political agenda than an independent check on governance.

The country tightly controls domestic journalism, regularly censoring reporting on issues it deems sensitive or unflattering.

Its approach is particularly apparent in Hangzhou, where a suffocating security presence is designed to avoid any disruption to an event China sees as an opportunity to display its global leadership credentials.
Washington (AFP) - Barack Obama believes that young Americans "completely reject" Republican White House hopeful Donald Trump's tough line on immigration and that most Americans share their stance.

"There's a long tradition in the United States of inclusion, immigration, diversity," the president said in an interview broadcast Sunday on CNN but recorded before he left for the Group of 20 summit meeting in China.

"I don't think that's going to change because Mr Trump's got a little more attention than usual," added Obama. He reiterated that he felt certain the 70-year-old real estate mogul would not succeed him as president next January.

"If you look at the current polls," Obama said, "he's been able to appeal to a certain group of folks who feel left out or worried about the social change, who have legitimate concerns around the economy and (are) feeling left behind. But that's not the majority of America."

"And if you talk to younger people, the next generation of Americans, they completely reject the path" taken by Trump.

The president said it was important to "pay close attention" when there was a rise in intolerance and calls for "banning certain classes of people," a clear allusion to Trump's call last year to ban all Muslims from entering the country "until we find out what's going on."

But overall, Obama concluded, "I'm optimistic."

After issuing a series of contradictory signals on immigration -- reflecting the tensions within his campaign team -- Trump delivered a much-anticipated speech Wednesday in Phoenix, Arizona that essentially repeated the hard line on immigration that helped fuel his rise during the Republican primaries.

Detailing the arsenal of tough measures he intends to take if he defeats Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the November 8 election, he ruled out any path to citizenship for the undocumented immigrants -- most of them Mexicans -- living in the shadows in the United States.

He has, however, backed away from the idea of forcibly deporting the totality of the undocumented -- generally estimated to number 11 million -- perhaps in view of the enormous logistical challenges such a sweeping operation would pose.
From deadly flooding in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to destructive wildfires in California, a growing number of Americans face the consequences of climate change every day. But with the majority of people still thinking of climate change as a distant threat, two entrepreneurs want to remind Americans to consider the most important people in their lives: their children.

We feel that if people were to think about climate change and the legacy theyre leaving for their children and grandchildren or other children in their lives that they care about, then they would be more willing to take action, Jill Kubit, cofounder of online community DearTomorrow, told TakePart. We cant wait for everybody to actually be impacted before we take action.

With DearTomorrow, Kubit and cofounder Trisha Shrum want to force Americans to consider climate change personally by appealing to their protective instincts. The organization asks parents and caregivers to write letters, create videos, or compose photo messages about climate change addressed directly to a family member.

The organization has collected more than 200 letters and photo memories on its website and on social media, all of which will be archived and revisited in 2030 and 2050. Some of the messages chronicle the state of the environment, while in others the writers make promises to their children, such as growing sustainable food, using public transportation, or upgrading to an energy-efficient home.

DearTomorrow won the judges choice award in the Shifting Behaviors category at the Massachusetts Institute of Technologys 2016 Climate CoLab. Kubit and Shrum and are in the running for a $10,000 prize and will present their project at MITs Crowds and Climate Conference in September.

Although only 41 percent of Americans believe they will be personally harmed by climate change, 70 percent think future generations will be affected, according to a 2016 report from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Still, Kubit and Shrum found that future generations was too vague of a concept to encourage action. DearTomorrow makes the future less abstract by asking participants to put their childrens names on their letters.

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People really carefirst and foremostabout their families and their children and their grandchildren, Kubit said. Before cofounding DearTomorrow in 2015, she worked to institute climate-friendly policies in the workforce at Cornell Universitys School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Even after a decade of working on environmental policy, she noticed a change in her perspective following the birth of her son.

After I had my child in 2013, I started thinking a lot more about climate change through the lens of whats his life going to look like, Kubit said. My child will basically be my age now in that year. It makes the time frame in which we have to make these changes seem much shorter.

Adults considering the legacy they will leave are more likely to donate money to conservation organizations, according to a survey published in Psychological Science last year. Feedback from DearTomorrows users supports that study: Participants reported making good on promises to consider their personal carbon footprint and vote for environmentally responsible leaders.

While individual participation is the core premise of DearTomorrow, Kubit hopes that activism will foster broader policy changes.

Its very important that we are pushing for changes on a much bigger societal level and were talking about shifting to renewable energy, were supporting big infrastructure projects, more public transportation, better agriculture practices, she said. Those are much bigger than what individuals can do, but we can all participate.

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Original article from TakePart
Alexandra Lebenthal

Alexandra Lebenthal, the president and CEO of municipal bond company Lebenthal & Co., has lived with essential tremor since she was 3 years old. It's made daily tasks like taking a sip of coffee a much more complicated task.

But it's not something she talked about much, out of embarrassment. "I didnt like to talk about even though its clear Im shaking a lot," she said.

Now, thanks to a new procedure approved in July by the FDA, Lebenthal can hold a coffee cup in confidence.

"I'm really excited to take something that's been such a frustration for me over my life, and be able to talk about it, and see this change," Lebenthal told Business Insider the day before she went in for the procedure.

The procedure Lebenthal opted to do is something called high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU for short). It's gained traction in recent years as a potential treatment for everything from prostate cancer to uterine fibroids.

The results look promising, but it hasn't worked for everyone who's used it  and it does come with some risks.

Frying the brain to help it function

Essential tremor is a condition that causes involuntary shaking. It affects an estimated 10 million people. The tremors can happen anywhere, but one of the most common locations is the hands, making it difficult to do simple daily activities like writing or eating. Although it may worsen with age, it's something many people live with.

Medication may work for a while in suppressing the tremors. And before doctors started experimenting with HIFU, there were already other medical procedures used to treat it, including deep brain stimulation (a surgical procedure that inserts batteries and wires to block out the abnormal nerve signals that cause tremors), and another procedure that burns the part of the brain responsible for the tremors.

HIFU isn't like the ultrasound you might get to image your internal organs, or the health of your baby during pregnancy. The technology uses 1,000 ultrasound rays and focuses them onto one part of the brain, setting up a way to remove that piece without having to cut a hole in the skull to get inside.

Story continues

You know how if you focus a magnifying glass over a leaf on the sidewalk, it will soon catch fire because of the sun's rays? That's loosely how the ultrasound rays work. They're all focused in on a very specific part of the brain, Dr. Michael Kaplitt, the neurosurgeon from Weill Cornell Medicine who performed Lebenthal's procedure explained. For the rest of the brain, the rays are low frequency enough to not do anything, but at that one focused point, it essentially fries that portion.

"In patients with essential tremor if you can the block the function in this point in the brain and take a small spot out, you can make peoples tremor better," Kaplitt told Business Insider. "It's essentially releasing the brain to function more normally."

A randomized, controlled trial of 76 patients with essential tremor who had stopped responding to medications found that the procedure was able to reduce their hand tremors for at least a year. The trial, sponsored in part by the company that makes the HIFU device, was published August 25 in the New England Journal of Medicine. It noted that the procedure wouldn't necessarily work well in everyone; in five patients on the study, the waves couldn't get past the skull, and some types of tremors were harder to treat than others.

A few important caveats

Some doctors have concerns about the experimental procedure. Dr. Michael Okun, a neurologist at the University of Florida, wrote in a review of the NEJM trial that "it is worrisome that the tremor score worsened progressively and that ultimately 14% of efficacy was lost over 12 months."

And others have questioned how effective the procedure is in comparison to deep brain stimulation.

Frederick Lenz, a professor of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Medicine, told Business Insider that he was a skeptic about HIFU, particularly because the change it creates is permanent. While DBS requires an invasive surgery, if there is an adverse or unexpected side effect, the procedure can be reversed.

And although the NEJM stacked up those getting the treatment against those receiving a placebo, there hasn't been a trial that compares DBS to HIFU. The ultrasound procedure is still a relatively new treatment for tremor, so more research is needed.

Lenz said he would consider using HIFU, but with the caveat that it would be best suited for people who had other illnesses or were otherwise not well enough to go through the surgery required for DBS.

How HIFU works

To treat essential tremor with HIFU, the patient gets set up in an MRI that's attached to a helmet that's filled with water to allow the ultrasound rays to go through it (it's similar to that gel that gets placed on you with a normal ultrasound).

Here's what the set-up looks like:

Screen Shot 2016 08 29 at 1.35.12 PM

Throughout the course of the procedure, Lebenthal was awake and running tests to see how her hand was doing. The ultrasound started on low energy and gradually built up the intensity to make the mark more permanent.

There's a lot of energy that gets lost as the ultrasound tries to pass through the skull. So to play it safe, patients have to shave their hair to ensure that nothing unexpected catches fire (that's another reason for the cold water). Lebenthal was also given a device that allowed her to stop the procedure at any time, in case things got a bit too hot. Kaplitt said the procedure only stopped once near the very end because Lebenthal felt some tingling. After explaining that it was a normal sensation, the procedure carried on.

Lebenthal's transformation

Here's a look at Lebenthal's left hand tremor, before the procedure:

alex before

And here's how her left hand works, after the procedure.

Alex after

For now, the procedure is only being done on one side of the brain, so Lebenthal chose to have her left hand (her writing hand) go through the process.

Lofty goals

Kaplitt has bigger visions for this HIFU system, beyond treating essential tremors. "What this represents is another critical step in the evolution of the entire field of neurosurgery," he said.

Because HIFU has been able to get past what's known as the blood-brain barrier, it might be a major component in treatments that involve delivering certain medications or gene therapies to the brain, something that in the past has been difficult to pull off. The blood-brain barrier is made up of the special blood vessels that separate the brain from the rest of the body's. It makes it so viruses or bacteria can't get into the brain the same way they can other organs in the body. If researchers could use HIFU to open up a spot in the barrier, they could then simultaneously inject the medication, helping it pass into the brain.

"It not only has the ability to transform how were treating this particular disease," Kaplitt said. "To me, it represents a real platform for the future."

But some of the side effects for the HIFU procedure are serious. They can include feeling tingling in the fingers, headaches, imbalance when moving around, loss of control in body movements or changes in the way a person walks. Other side effects may include burns on the skin, blood clots, and tissue damage, according to the FDA.

In the end, it's important to keep in mind that the procedure has only been approved for a little more than a month. It's still so new that many insurers likely don't yet cover the cost of the procedure, though that may change as more people elect to do it instead of the alternatives.

For some individual patients who have been living with tremor, like Lebenthal, HIFU already seems to be making a difference. But many others may choose to wait until it's compared directly to deep-brain stimulation, or even just until more people have tried it out successfully.

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Pakistan suspended a helicopter search Sunday for two American climbers who went missing six days ago while trying to summit a mountain in the country's far north.

Kyle Dempster and Scott Adamson began their ascent of the 7,285-metre (23,900-foot) Ogre-II peak off the Choktoi Glacier in the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan on Sunday August 21, but went missing the next day and have not been seen since.

"The helicopter-search was suspended after authorities did not get a go-ahead for today from families and friends of the two climbers," Karrar Haidri, a spokesman for the Alpine Club of Pakistan told AFP.

However, a search by high-altitude rescuers is continuing, he said.

"Even on Saturday, the rescuers failed to find any sign of the two climbers," Haidri added.

Another official, who did not want to be identified, told AFP the helicopter-search can be resumed as and when Pakistani authorities are asked to do so.

Earlier, the helicopter search had been delayed for days because of adverse weather conditions.

Authorities said that a team of local high-altitude rescuers has been searching for the missing climbers for almost a week but bad weather prevented them from ascending the peak.

Pakistan has long been a draw for foreign climbers lured by some of the most spectacular mountains on Earth, including the savage K2, the world's second highest peak.
Washington (AFP) - Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence said in an interview Sunday he would release his tax returns this week but that Donald Trump had not budged from a plan that might see his own kept under wraps until after election day.

"Donald Trump and I are both going to release our tax returns," Pence, the Indiana governor, said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "I'll be releasing mine in the next week. Donald Trump will be releasing his tax returns at the completion of an audit."

When the NBC interviewer suggested that the audit -- by the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) -- might not be completed until after the Nov. 8 election, Pence replied only, "We'll see."

The release of such returns has been a tradition of American presidential politics for a half-century, and Democrat Hillary Clinton and her running mate Tim Kaine have already released theirs.

But Trump has deferred, saying he cannot release his until the IRS completes its audit. That agency has said Trump is free to release the returns whenever he wants.

His failure to do so has fueled speculation that he fears some embarrassing revelation: perhaps that his fortune is far smaller than the $10 billion he speaks of, that he has donated far less to charities than he suggests, or that he has awkwardly close business ties to Russian interests.

Clinton's returns, released last month, showed she and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, had adjusted gross income of $10.6 million last year, placing them at the very top of American households. Kaine and his wife had income of $313,000.

Trump's campaign has said his wealth is "in excess of $10 billion," and he has tied his populist pitch to his acumen as a successful businessman and leader.

A detailed analysis by Fortune magazine suggested that the actual figure might be closer to $3 billion or $4 billion.
The Philippines has asked China to explain the increased presence of Chinese vessels near the disputed Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea, the defence secretary said Sunday, expressing "grave concern".

Philippine Defence Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said a Philippine air force plane saw four Chinese coast guard ships, two barge-like vessels and two suspected troop ships near the shoal on Saturday.

"The presence of so many ships, other than coast guard in the area is cause for grave concern," Lorenzana said.

"The DFA (Department of Foreign Affairs) has already called the attention of the Chinese Ambassador and demanded explanation," he added.

The shoal, which is located just 230 kilometres (650 miles) from the main Philippine island of Luzon, has long been a bone of contention between the two countries.

Lorenzana said that earlier this year, the Chinese tried to bring in dredging barges in an apparent attempt to turn the Scarborough into an artificial island but were dissuaded by the United States.

"If they try to construct anything in Scarborough it will have far reaching adverse effect on the security situation," he added.

The Chinese Embassy in Manila could not be reached for comment.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has said he intends to ask Beijing -- possibly at a regional summit in Laos this week -- if they are building up the shoal despite an international court ruling rejecting most of China's claims in the resource-rich area.

Duterte said Friday he had received an "unsettling" intelligence report showing China had sent barges to the contested Scarborough Shoal and had appeared to begin construction in the area for the first time.

A UN-backed tribunal ruled in July that China's claims to almost all of the strategic sea had no legal basis and its construction of artificial islands in disputed waters was illegal.

The United States has warned of "actions" if Beijing extends its military expansion to the Scarborough Shoal.

Story continues

China has sought to assert its claims in the South China Sea by building a network of artificial islands capable of supporting military operations.

Its massive land reclamation has prompted criticism from the US and claimant countries, with Washington warning it endangers freedom of navigation in international waters.

Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also have claims to the sea, through which over $5 trillion in annual trade passes.

The Scarborough Shoal, a rich fishing ground within the Philippines' exclusive economic zone and 650 kilometres away from the nearest major Chinese landmass, is a particular flashpoint.

China took control of Scarborough Shoal in 2012 after a stand-off with the Philippine navy.

Duterte, who took office in June, had earlier vowed to mend ties with China after his predecessor Benigno Aquino angered Beijing by filing the arbitration case in 2013.
Philippines police Sunday were searching for three people wanted for questioning over the bombing of a night market in President Rodrigo Duterte's home town blamed on a notorious group of Islamic militants.

The blast, which tore through a bustling market in the heart of Davao city on Friday, killed at least 14 people and led to the president imposing a "state of lawlessness" on the country.

Police are searching for two women and one man for questioning over the bombing, which has been widely been blamed on the Muslim extremist Abu Sayyaf group, said Chief Inspector Andrea de la Cerna on Sunday.

Davao is the hometown of President Rodrigo Duterte, who had recently ordered an offensive against the Abu Sayyaf.

He has said that the explosion was in retaliation for the military operation against the group in their stronghold in the southern island of Jolo.

However De la Cerna, spokeswoman of a task force investigating the explosion, said they were not ruling out other motives for the attack.

"We have copies of the CCTV (closed-circuit television), we have eight possible witnesses but we have named no one (as suspects)," she told AFP.

She said the three "persons of interest" being sought were not yet considered suspects, but would not give further details.

Duterte believes the attack was "80 percent" likely an act of terrorism, his spokesman, Martin Andanar told reporters on Sunday.

After the bombing, Duterte declared a national "state of lawlessness", which his security adviser said gave the military extra powers to conduct law enforcement operations normally done only by the police.
By Alastair Macdonald and Foo Yun Chee

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Commission denies that its shock demand that Apple Inc. hand 13 billion euros in back taxes to Ireland is, in the pungent phrase of Apple CEO Tim Cook, "total political crap".

But, say senior EU officials involved, the decision certainly has a strong political element, even if Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager says she is confident her case will stand up to Cook's appeal on its legal merits alone.

Brussels' political target is less corporate America than eurosceptics at home who threaten to pull the EU apart if it fails to show alienated voters it can act in their interests.

"Being political should not be confused with politicised," said a spokeswoman for Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker. For him, fighting tax avoidance had been a "top priority" since before he took over the EU executive two years ago, she said.

"The drive towards fairer taxation is in President Juncker's political guidelines," she said. At the same time, Vestager is an "entirely independent" enforcer of EU competition law, she added.

Efforts under way, including in the United States, to clamp down on tax avoidance are political in the sense that all states, with budgets under strain, face pressure from voters to claw back cash from other people, preferably wealthy companies, tax experts and government officials say.

For European Union institutions, the struggle is less for money -- Apple's cash will go to Ireland if Vestager wins her case.

What Brussels is fighting for is the EU's very survival against eurosceptics like the Brexiteers who persuaded Britons to quit the bloc in June.

Those populists, on left and right, from the UK Independence Party to France's National Front or 5-Star in Italy, have scored with voters by accusing the EU and the executive Commission of cosying up to big, global business against the little people.

"Apple shows how you fight against populism," a senior EU official familiar with the Commission chief's thinking told Reuters, describing a two-pronged strategy directed by Juncker.

Story continues

One part of the strategy is a push for new global tax rules, led by EU Commissioner for Economic Affairs Pierre Moscovici, a French Socialist former finance minister. The other part rests on punishing the worst past abusers to deter others.

Vestager says the goal is to change corporate culture so that businesses anxious for their reputation stop trying to pay as little tax as possible and choose to pay "the right amount".

On Juncker's political goal, he won government backing in Paris and Berlin. And many European media also welcomed the Apple move. Le Monde, leftish voice of establishment France and critic of Juncker's low-tax policies when he was premier of Luxembourg, said he had shown "the zeal of the newly converted".

"Europe is changing," it wrote. "Bravo, Monsieur Juncker."

SHOWING VOTERS EU CARES

"The EUs message is clear," Juncker wrote for a G20 meeting in China this weekend. "All companies must pay their fair share.

"This is first and foremost a question of fairness. It has urgent practical implications as well. We cannot let down our schools, hospitals and public services that need this money."

The $14.5-billion demand which angered the United States and worried Apple's peers was engineered for shock and awe, the EU official said. Juncker sees Vestager as what the EU president calls his "Rottweiler", he added.

Apple and the Irish government say Vestager is rewriting the iPhone maker's quarter-century of history in Ireland. Apple denies that Dublin gave it tax breaks amounting to illegal state aid.

What has changed is the politics. The financial crisis has impoverished Western governments just as footloose young tech firms became hugely rich without paying much tax anywhere.

U.S. Senate revelations about Apple in 2013 fuelled public anger and, with some irony, prompted the EU to start inquiries.

Juncker's own history has also played a part. A conservative prime minister of Luxembourg for 19 years, he helped transform it from industrial rustbowl to a financial hub its bigger neighbours saw as helping businesses deprive them of revenues.

Weeks after taking over the Commission in late 2014, he faced calls to resign when deals between Luxembourg and global corporates were splashed in world media as the LuxLeaks affair.

He denied involvement but, aides say, the uproar helped galvanise Juncker for a tax crackdown he had already promised.

Driving his pledge to run a "political Commission" to reconnect with voters alienated by out-of-touch, technocratic elites in Brussels was a fear that his five-year term was, in his words, the "last chance" to save the Union from break-up.

LEGAL UNDERPINNINGS

"It's political in the sense that, if the Commission is prioritising the allocation of its resources, then clearly tax evasion and tax avoidance are very high on the political agenda everywhere," said Sophie in 't Veld, deputy leader of the centrist group in the European Parliament. "This is something that citizens are rightly and understandably concerned about."

That political approach, Brussels officials stress, does not mean capricious or lacking legal basis. Vestager is clear she must win in court on some untested points of law against the best tax attorneys Silicon Valley and Washington can buy, and against EU member state Ireland.

Asked about Cook's comments to an Irish newspaper about the EU's "political" motives, she said: "I dont think the courts will hear any kind of political opinions or feelings or whats in your stomach or whatever. They want the facts of the case."

LISTEN, THEN BITE

Some EU officials think the anger of Cook and U.S. officials at the historic scale of the tax demand may partly stem from underestimating Vestager's uncompromising character.

Tall, courteous and soft-spoken, she is a woman who takes trouble to greet captains of industry by the lift and escort them back to her office, often then serving them coffee herself. It may wrong-foot those used to more confrontational politicians and executives. She is a listener rather than a talker.

"There are some people who are very loud ... but ... it is very important to have a very, very, very open ear to those who are not loud," the former economy minister and liberal party leader told Reuters on taking office two years ago.

People who work with her say she listens closely to career officials on her staff -- much more than did her Spanish predecessor Joaquin Almunia, a professional economist.

One U.S. tech giant to feel a change of approach after 2014 was Google, with whom Almunia worked for years to reach a compromise over concerns about its market dominance. Since last year, Vestager has hit Google with three separate charges.

She also put an end to hesitation in Brussels by launching a price fixing case against Russian gas giant Gazprom last year.

Most current state aid tax cases, including Apple, were launched by Almunia but competition experts question whether he would have come to Vestager's radical conclusion. Almunia's own predecessor Neelie Kroes, now at another Silicon Valley darling Uber, said this week the Dane had gone too far against Apple.

Some observers believe Vestager, a professional politician since her student days, may be tempted to use cases to raise her profile and further greater ambitions. She says not.

Predecessors have also taken on Washington, among them Mario Monti, later Italy's prime minister, who blocked a mega-merger between GE and Honeywell in 2001 despite U.S. support for it, and Kroes, who slapped heavy fines on Microsoft in 2008.

There may be more to come, Vestager says. Her 800 staff are looking at about 1,000 inquiries where firms may have gained an edge by cutting tax deals with governments seeking investment.

A pastor's daughter, Vestager summed up her political credo in the 2014 interview with Reuters: "I was brought up with a very strong value," she said. "That you should always protect the few and the small against those who want to misuse their muscle."

(Writing by Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Jon Boyle)
By Alastair Macdonald and Foo Yun Chee BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Commission denies that its shock demand that Apple Inc. hand 13 billion euros in back taxes to Ireland is, in the pungent phrase of Apple CEO Tim Cook, "total political crap". But, say senior EU officials involved, the decision certainly has a strong political element, even if Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager says she is confident her case will stand up to Cook's appeal on its legal merits alone. Brussels' political target is less corporate America than eurosceptics at home who threaten to pull the EU apart if it fails to show alienated voters it can act in their interests. "Being political should not be confused with politicised," said a spokeswoman for Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker. For him, fighting tax avoidance had been a "top priority" since before he took over the EU executive two years ago, she said. "The drive towards fairer taxation is in President Juncker's political guidelines," she said. At the same time, Vestager is an "entirely independent" enforcer of EU competition law, she added. Efforts under way, including in the United States, to clamp down on tax avoidance are political in the sense that all states, with budgets under strain, face pressure from voters to claw back cash from other people, preferably wealthy companies, tax experts and government officials say. For European Union institutions, the struggle is less for money -- Apple's cash will go to Ireland if Vestager wins her case. What Brussels is fighting for is the EU's very survival against eurosceptics like the Brexiteers who persuaded Britons to quit the bloc in June. Those populists, on left and right, from the UK Independence Party to France's National Front or 5-Star in Italy, have scored with voters by accusing the EU and the executive Commission of cosying up to big, global business against the little people. "Apple shows how you fight against populism," a senior EU official familiar with the Commission chief's thinking told Reuters, describing a two-pronged strategy directed by Juncker. One part of the strategy is a push for new global tax rules, led by EU Commissioner for Economic Affairs Pierre Moscovici, a French Socialist former finance minister. The other part rests on punishing the worst past abusers to deter others. Vestager says the goal is to change corporate culture so that businesses anxious for their reputation stop trying to pay as little tax as possible and choose to pay "the right amount". On Juncker's political goal, he won government backing in Paris and Berlin. And many European media also welcomed the Apple move. Le Monde, leftish voice of establishment France and critic of Juncker's low-tax policies when he was premier of Luxembourg, said he had shown "the zeal of the newly converted". "Europe is changing," it wrote. "Bravo, Monsieur Juncker." SHOWING VOTERS EU CARES "The EUs message is clear," Juncker wrote for a G20 meeting in China this weekend. "All companies must pay their fair share. "This is first and foremost a question of fairness. It has urgent practical implications as well. We cannot let down our schools, hospitals and public services that need this money." The $14.5-billion demand which angered the United States and worried Apple's peers was engineered for shock and awe, the EU official said. Juncker sees Vestager as what the EU president calls his "Rottweiler", he added. Apple and the Irish government say Vestager is rewriting the iPhone maker's quarter-century of history in Ireland. Apple denies that Dublin gave it tax breaks amounting to illegal state aid. What has changed is the politics. The financial crisis has impoverished Western governments just as footloose young tech firms became hugely rich without paying much tax anywhere. U.S. Senate revelations about Apple in 2013 fuelled public anger and, with some irony, prompted the EU to start inquiries. Juncker's own history has also played a part. A conservative prime minister of Luxembourg for 19 years, he helped transform it from industrial rustbowl to a financial hub its bigger neighbours saw as helping businesses deprive them of revenues. Weeks after taking over the Commission in late 2014, he faced calls to resign when deals between Luxembourg and global corporates were splashed in world media as the LuxLeaks affair. He denied involvement but, aides say, the uproar helped galvanise Juncker for a tax crackdown he had already promised. Driving his pledge to run a "political Commission" to reconnect with voters alienated by out-of-touch, technocratic elites in Brussels was a fear that his five-year term was, in his words, the "last chance" to save the Union from break-up. LEGAL UNDERPINNINGS "It's political in the sense that, if the Commission is prioritising the allocation of its resources, then clearly tax evasion and tax avoidance are very high on the political agenda everywhere," said Sophie in 't Veld, deputy leader of the centrist group in the European Parliament. "This is something that citizens are rightly and understandably concerned about." That political approach, Brussels officials stress, does not mean capricious or lacking legal basis. Vestager is clear she must win in court on some untested points of law against the best tax attorneys Silicon Valley and Washington can buy, and against EU member state Ireland. Asked about Cook's comments to an Irish newspaper about the EU's "political" motives, she said: "I dont think the courts will hear any kind of political opinions or feelings or whats in your stomach or whatever. They want the facts of the case." LISTEN, THEN BITE Some EU officials think the anger of Cook and U.S. officials at the historic scale of the tax demand may partly stem from underestimating Vestager's uncompromising character. Tall, courteous and soft-spoken, she is a woman who takes trouble to greet captains of industry by the lift and escort them back to her office, often then serving them coffee herself. It may wrong-foot those used to more confrontational politicians and executives. She is a listener rather than a talker. "There are some people who are very loud ... but ... it is very important to have a very, very, very open ear to those who are not loud," the former economy minister and liberal party leader told Reuters on taking office two years ago. People who work with her say she listens closely to career officials on her staff -- much more than did her Spanish predecessor Joaquin Almunia, a professional economist. One U.S. tech giant to feel a change of approach after 2014 was Google, with whom Almunia worked for years to reach a compromise over concerns about its market dominance. Since last year, Vestager has hit Google with three separate charges. She also put an end to hesitation in Brussels by launching a price fixing case against Russian gas giant Gazprom last year. Most current state aid tax cases, including Apple, were launched by Almunia but competition experts question whether he would have come to Vestager's radical conclusion. Almunia's own predecessor Neelie Kroes, now at another Silicon Valley darling Uber, said this week the Dane had gone too far against Apple. Some observers believe Vestager, a professional politician since her student days, may be tempted to use cases to raise her profile and further greater ambitions. She says not. Predecessors have also taken on Washington, among them Mario Monti, later Italy's prime minister, who blocked a mega-merger between GE and Honeywell in 2001 despite U.S. support for it, and Kroes, who slapped heavy fines on Microsoft in 2008. There may be more to come, Vestager says. Her 800 staff are looking at about 1,000 inquiries where firms may have gained an edge by cutting tax deals with governments seeking investment. A pastor's daughter, Vestager summed up her political credo in the 2014 interview with Reuters: "I was brought up with a very strong value," she said. "That you should always protect the few and the small against those who want to misuse their muscle." (Writing by Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Jon Boyle)
Venice (AFP) - "Real heroes don't wear Spandex," Mel Gibson told Venice Sunday as he unveiled his new World War II drama "Hacksaw Ridge", starring Andrew Garfield of "Spiderman" fame.

The film tells the true story of Desmond Doss (played by Garfield), who enlists and is determined to save lives on the front line as a medic, but refuses to carry a gun on moral grounds.

The flick's title comes from a battleground in Japan at the top of a towering cliff. US soldiers who climb its sheer face are met with bunkers and corpses, as well as Japanese bullets and flame-throwers.

Doss, despite being a conscientious objector, was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Harry S. Truman for single-handedly saving the lives of over 75 of his comrades during the brutal Battle of Okinawa.

While the first hour of the movie is essentially a love story between Doss and his future wife Dorothy (Teresa Palmer), the rest sees the bible-clutching medic first reviled then gradually accepted by the rest of his squadron.

"The man who refuses to touch a weapon and wants to do something much higher than something as venal as killing in a war is a very high calling," Gibson said, adding that he did believe "just wars" exist.

He said that with the violent but essentially uplifting film he hoped to "pay homage to and honour the warrier".

"It's a sad fact that veterans of wars harm themselves afterwards. In Vietnam so many people were killed in the conflict but afterwards over three times as many took their own lives."

His Academy Award-winning "Braveheart" (1995) was famed for its bloody battle scenes, but here Gibson has taken the blowing off of legs and slicing through of guts to an operatic level.

"The important thing with battle and depicting it on screen is to give the impression of chaos and confusion but to be absolutely clear what you want the audience to see," he said.

Story continues

- 'Like a good Dad' -

"It's all about screen direction and knowing where the players are, you almost have to approach it as a sporting event. If you then put characters into that situation that you have actually come to care for it takes it up a level."

A bearded Gibson, whose first directoral offering in 10 years is in competition for the Golden Lion, said he had felt like "a traffic cop" director, while Garfield said he was more like a mother.

"Mel's really in the scene with you, he can't help it. He's always there with every single actor in every single moment. He's like a good dad or a good mum, with that kind of wonderful nurturing instinct," he joked.

Garfield, who shot to fame with the movie "The Amazing Spider-Man" (2012) before co-producing and starring in the 2014 thriller "99 Homes", said Doss was much more inspiring than the web-weaving hero, whose Spandex costumes prompted Gibson's jibe.

"The fact that this man, who is built as skinnily as I am, dragged men across the most rugged terrain under gun fire, sniper fire, the possibility of motors and shells, and then lowered them down a 75-foot escarpment... that's like when you hear about mothers who lift trucks off babies," said Garfield.

"He had a knowing in his heart and core that he wasn't supposed to take a man's life, but wanted to serve something greater than himself, and found his personal genius path to do that," he said.

He added: "It's a pretty wild time we're in societally speaking. There's a lot of violent uprising and separation and warring ideologies that are plaguing our beautiful planet right now.

"I think Desmond Doss is a symbol who embodies the idea of live and let live no matter what your value system is. You can't really argue with that, I think we could all learn a thing or two from Desmond."
A new generation of young Hong Kong politicians advocating a break from Beijing became lawmakers for the first time Monday in a result likely to rattle China.

It was the biggest poll in the city since mass pro-democracy rallies in 2014 failed to win concessions on political reform, leading to the emergence of a slew of new parties demanding more autonomy from Beijing.

Those parties now have a foothold in the legislature with five candidates backing independence or self-determination taking seats.

Observers branded their victory "a strong message to Beijing", which has railed against people supporting a split from China.

A record 2.2 million people voted in the city-wide election for members of the Legislative Council (LegCo), Hong Kong's lawmaking body, as fears grow Beijing is tightening its grip on the semi-autonomous city.

It was the highest turnout since Hong Kong was returned to China by Britain in 1997 under a handover agreement guaranteeing its freedoms for 50 years.

Many feel those liberties are already disappearing and young activists particularly have lost faith in the "one country, two systems" deal under which Hong Kong is governed.

At the forefront of the new guard in LegCo is Nathan Law, 23, leader of the 2014 "Umbrella Movement" rallies, who took more than 50,000 votes to become the council's youngest member.

Law and his new party Demosisto are calling for a referendum on independence, emphasising Hong Kongers' right to choose whether they want to split from China.

"I think Hong Kongers really wanted change," Law said, celebrating his win.

With the pro-democracy camp divided between those who back the idea of possible independence and those who are more wary of the once taboo notion, Law said he would seek unity.

"We have to be united to fight against the (Chinese) Communist Party," he told AFP.

Law has previously distanced himself from the more radical "localist" movement, which includes activists who are stridently pro-independence and have in the past advocated violence.

Story continues

- 'Message to Beijing' -

Young campaigners have been galvanised by a number of incidents that have pointed to increased Beijing interference.

The most high-profile was the disappearance of five city booksellers known for salacious titles about Beijing politicians. They resurfaced in detention on the mainland.

There was also outrage after the loudest pro-independence voices in the city were banned by the government from running for LegCo.

Some localists who were allowed to stand continued to call for independence on the campaign trail.

One of them, Yau Wai-Ching of new party Youngspiration, gained a seat saying Hong Kong had "the right to discuss its sovereignty".

Another Youngspiration candidate, Baggio Leung, who has openly supported independence, also won a seat.

Political analyst Willy Lam said voters had backed the activists to "send a strong message to Beijing".

"Beijing will be very unhappy about the results and it's quite possible that they may use this as a pretext to squeeze Hong Kong even harder," he told AFP.

Political commentator Joseph Cheng said he expected Beijing to adopt a "very hawkish position", and that authorities could seek to disqualify any legislator advocating a split from China.

Hong Kong and Beijing officials have consistently slammed independence as unconstitutional.

Most established pro-democracy politicians do not support the notion of independence and there were concerns in the democratic camp that new activists would split the vote, triggering overall losses.

But although some veteran pro-democracy politicians were voted out to make way for the younger generation, the democratic camp including independence activists gained an extra three seats in the 70-strong Legco, going from 27 to 30 members.

That means the anti-establishment side can veto key bills, which need a two-thirds majority to pass.

However, the overall make-up of the LegCo remains weighted towards Beijing under a system that makes it almost impossible for the democracy camp to take a majority.

Thirty seats are elected by special interest groups representing a range of businesses and social sectors and are traditionally conservative -- 22 of those seats went to pro-Beijing candidates Monday, giving them 40 members overall.

Of 3.7 million voters, 58 percent came out to vote, up from 53 percent in 2012.
By David Bailey

MINNEAPOLIS (Reuters) - The remains of an 11-year-old boy abducted in 1989 while riding his bicycle near his home in central Minnesota have been found and were officially identified on Saturday, authorities said.

Jacob Wetterling, whose parents Patty and Jerry Wetterling became tireless advocates for missing children after his disappearance, was identified by dental records, the Stearns County, Minnesota, sheriff said in a statement.

The statement did not say where or how the remains were located. Authorities expect to be in a position to provide more detailed information early next week, it said, and the sheriff's office said additional DNA testing will be performed.

Authorities last October named Danny James Heinrich a person-of-interest in the disappearance and suspected homicide of Wetterling and announced separate federal charges of possessing and receiving child pornography.

Heinrich has been in custody since his arrest last year.

"Our family is drawing strength from all your love & support," Patricia Wetterling said on twitter. "We're struggling with words at this time. Thank you for your hope."

FBI Special Agent Richard Thornton in October 2015 said Heinrich was a person-of-interest given the similarities between Wetterling's abduction, a number of unsolved sexual assaults in central Minnesota dating to the 1980s and the nature of the charges against him.

Wetterling was abducted near his St. Joseph home in October 1989 while riding a bicycle with his brother and a friend.

Authorities looked closely in 1989 and 1990 at Heinrich, who in 1990 submitted his shoes and tires for comparison to tracks and prints left near the abduction scene, Stearns County Sheriff John Sanner said in October 2015.

Investigators reviewing the Wetterling disappearance in the past year took another look at Heinrich and retested DNA from clothing a juvenile male was wearing in January 1989 when he was sexually assaulted by a man about 10 miles from Wetterling's hometown, Thornton said. They found a match to Heinrich.

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U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger said in October 2015 the statute of limitations had run out on the sexual assault and Heinrich had denied any involvement in Wetterling's disappearance.

Authorities searched Heinrich's home in July 2015, finding child pornography in three-ring binders and on a computer hard drive. They also found dozens of videotapes Heinrich appeared to have filmed of young boys delivering newspapers, playing or riding bicycles, officials said, but Wetterling's picture was not among them.

(Reporting by David Bailey; Editing by Dan Whitcomb and Dan Grebler)
HANGZHOU, China, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Russian Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukaev said on Sunday President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan had agreed to form a joint investment fund between their two countries.

The two leaders met on the sidelines of the G20 summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou on Saturday.

"We are concluding work on the formation of a Russian-Turkish investment fund," Ulyukaev said. "At the end of August, Turkey made the necessary legislative changes to create a corresponding partner to our direct investment fund - the Turkish sovereign wealth fund."

"I think by some time in October or November we will have a list of projects and allocate a credit line to begin work."

Putin and Erdogan have been working to restore ties between the two former regional allies following the downing of a Russian plane on the Syrian border by Turkish forces last year.

Turkey announced plans for a sovereign wealth fund last month, intended to boost annual growth over the next decade and reassure investors unnerved by a failed coup attempt in July.

(Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin Writing Jack Stubbs; Editing by Mark Potter)
HANGZHOU, China (Reuters) - Russian Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukaev said on Sunday President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan had agreed to form a joint investment fund between their two countries. The two leaders met on the sidelines of the G20 summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou on Saturday. "We are concluding work on the formation of a Russian-Turkish investment fund," Ulyukaev said. "At the end of August, Turkey made the necessary legislative changes to create a corresponding partner to our direct investment fund - the Turkish sovereign wealth fund." "I think by some time in October or November we will have a list of projects and allocate a credit line to begin work." Putin and Erdogan have been working to restore ties between the two former regional allies following the downing of a Russian plane on the Syrian border by Turkish forces last year. Turkey announced plans for a sovereign wealth fund last month, intended to boost annual growth over the next decade and reassure investors unnerved by a failed coup attempt in July. (Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin Writing Jack Stubbs; Editing by Mark Potter)
HANGZHOU, China (Reuters) - Russia and the United States are close to reaching a deal in Syria, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Sunday. "We are close to the deal ... But art of diplomacy requires time to implementation. I can't tell you when the agreement will be reached and announced," Ryabkov told reporters. "I think we have no reason to expect that talks will collapse." "We are talking about most serious issues of implementing a ceasefire," he added. "The most intense work is continuing." "Until we lay the last brick ... We can't say that the results have been achieved." (Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin; Writing by Jack Stubbs; Editing by Mark Potter)
Juba (AFP) - UN Security Council officials on Sunday began a key meeting with the president of South Sudan to get him to accept the deployment of a regional protection force to beef up a large UN peacekeeping mission.

The meeting began late afternoon in the presidential palace in the capital Juba, where clashes between President Salva Kiir's guards and troops loyal to his former deputy Riek Machar erupted on July 8, shattering a fragile truce that has been breached several times.

Kiir showed the ambassadors from the council's 15 member states bullet marks in the heart of the building as well as shattered window panes. He said Machar had wanted to assassinate him that day but that he managed to flee.

Following the violence, the UN Security Council authorised the deployment of an additional 4,000 troops from East Africa with a stronger mandate than the 13,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission UNMISS.

The UN officials arrived on Friday in a bid to secure Kiir's agreement to the extra troops.

UNMISS has faced considerable criticism over its failure to protect civilians during the July violence, which included the rape of civilians sheltered in its camps.

Kiir had opposed the deployment of additional troops, initially touted as an "intervention force", as breaching national sovereignty.

South Sudan, the world's newest nation, descended into war in December 2013 after Kiir accused his former deputy Machar of plotting a coup.

During the fighting in July, Machar, who had been persuaded to return to Juba to join a national unity government agreed under a peace deal, fled the country and is now in Khartoum, having been replaced by Taban Deng Gai in Juba.

Aside from the tens of thousands of people killed, the United Nations has reported shocking levels of brutality including gang-rapes and the wholesale burning of villages.

An estimated 16,000 children have been recruited by armed groups and the national army in the conflict, and 2.5 million people have been driven from their homes.
The tranquil waters of Hangzhou's West Lake have inspired Chinese poets and painters for centuries. On Sunday the serenity was imposed by force as authorities deployed a vast security operation for the G20 summit.

The throngs of tourists who usually crowd the shores of the island-dotted lake were absent and the surrounding roads closed off -- except for police vehicles and the occasional motorcade of black luxury cars emblazoned with national flags.

But when a handful of locals living in the immediate area were allowed past the cordon, they took advantage of the empty streets to embrace an untraditional pursuit: road-top selfies.

Young people sat on the tarmac taking pictures of themselves, while others made star-shaped poses with their arms and legs for friends to snap them.

The streets spruced up for the benefit of leaders, trees glowing with artificial lights, made an ideal backdrop.

State media say that more than two million people out of a population of some nine million have left Hangzhou, taking advantage of a paid holidays which local firms have been ordered to give employees.

Local reports said so many people visited Huangshan, a mountain range in the next province where Hangzhou residents were given free tickets, that hillside passes turned into human traffic jams.

Wealthier residents of apartments near the G20 venue were offered sizeable cash incentives to leave their homes.

But treatment was apparently harsher for Hangzhou's vast population of migrant workers, with several saying they were ordered to shut their small businesses without compensation.

"We were ordered to close our restaurant, so I've gone back to my hometown in Sichuan," said a woman surnamed Zhou whom AFP reached by telephone. "We are losing money."

"At the beginning we were told about compensation but it didn't happen," she added.

Security is generally tight for G20 summits wherever they are held, as they are a magnet for protesters seeking a global audience for their cause.

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State media say that since December one million people have been mobilised as "volunteers".

Red-armbanded personnel stand, squat or sit on street corners and inside apartment compounds throughout Hangzhou, apparently with little to do.

A policeman prevented an AFP reporter from taking photos of the guards in one compound, and several volunteers said they needed authorisation to speak to foreign media.

"I work for a state-owned enterprise, who have organised this volunteer work," said one armbanded worker surnamed Wang, sitting on a stool near a bus stop.

"My job is to look our for people who get off the bus with dangerous items such as knives."
Part of The Seven Deadly Sins of American Politics, a series in which OZYs Sean Braswell examines the literal and metaphorical vices that grease the rails of American government. See part 1, on gluttony, here, and part 2, on lust, here.

Donald Trump may boast to the world, as he did in his Republican National Convention speech, that I alone can fix it, but deep down, countless other politicians believe the very same thing about themselves. In some ways, a megalomaniacal billionaire like Trump merely represents a more advanced case of someone with excessive self-confidence, one that lays bare the architecture of the ego-addled brain in 140-character bursts of narcissistic bombast.

When it comes to pride, the writer and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis once labeled it the great sin because it leads to every other vice. In politics, where the intoxication of power can magnify even the most modest character flaw, pride is often the original sin  that sense of personal importance that both fuels a politicians ambitions and prefigures his or her demise.

Repeated exposure to power, including unaccustomed thoughts, may fundamentally alter a leaders brain chemistry.

Rise by the Sword, Fall by the Sword

Public service is not for the timid or the humble, particularly in this modern age when running for office  and the endless phone calls, handshakes and fundraising it entails  requires an almost pathological level of drive and determination. And among U.S. presidential contenders seeking the highest office in the land, such ambition is particularly pronounced. If youre asking for the power to blow up the world, says Claremont McKenna College politics professor John J. Pitney Jr., then you have a very big ego to begin with.

Take Theodore Roosevelt: A hyper-energetic, freakishly industrious man of action and adventurer who wrote roughly 40 books and penned letters as if they were tweets (more than 150,000 in total). Roosevelt  not unlike Trump  turned his robust egotism into a personal brand that became larger than life.

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This kind of extreme self-esteem can morph into an irrational confidence in ones own abilities when exposed to the pull of power. A prideful leader starts to believe he really can change the world, that he knows what is best for others and that normal laws and mores no longer apply to his self-ordained quest. Give this power to the best man on earth, the Persian nobleman Otanes observes of absolute rule in Herodotus fifth century B.C. Histories, and it would stir him to unaccustomed thoughts.

Political Hubris as a Syndrome

True political hubris, though, is more than an outgrowth of ambition or an occupational hazard that can exacerbate existing narcissism in a politician. Repeated exposure to power, including unaccustomed thoughts, may fundamentally alter a leaders brain chemistry. So-called hubris syndrome is an acquired change in personality associated with the exercise of power, Lord David Owen, author of In Sickness and in Power, tells OZY.

As a member of the House of Lords and a former British foreign secretary who is trained in neurology and psychiatry, Owen is well-placed to argue  as he and Duke University psychiatrist Jonathan Davidson do in the medical journal Brain  that extreme hubristic behavior is a medical syndrome, constituting a cluster of features (symptoms) evoked by a specific trigger (power), and usually remitting when power fades. The product of power, isolation, pressure, lack of sleep and more, hubris syndrome, says Owen, is better categorized as a personality trait, and should not be confused with other psychiatric disorders featuring grandiosity that have afflicted leaders such as Roosevelt, who was likely bipolar.

A better, more recent example might be former President George W. Bush or ex-British prime minister Tony Blair, two psychologically normal leaders driven by exceptional circumstances to engage in everything from showy Mission Accomplished stunts to ill-advised invasions and strategic planning. As one U.S. official observed of Blair at the time: Hes sprinkled too much adrenaline on his cornflakes. Or, as comedian Will Ferrell puts it, playing the exuberant president in full flight suit in Youre Welcome, America (below), perhaps Bush had Highway to the Danger Zone playing in [his] helmet.

The Pride Capital of the World

Of course, if you spend time within the corridors of power in Washington, D.C., you will find any number of people willing to sprinkle adrenaline, and much more, on your cornflakes. Washington is to ego as Iowa is to corn, Pitney once wrote in Reason magazine, a place where abundant fertilizer promotes amazing growth. Every would-be hubristic politician, member of Congress or prominent official has their own coterie of enablers. Fortunately, notes Pitney, most presidents also have someone in their inner circle  as President John F. Kennedy had in his brother Robert  who helps keep the worst excesses of their egos in check.

Still, sometimes political hubris can infect an entire administration and cause lasting and dire consequences. As Peter Beinart, editor at The Atlantic, argues in his book The Icarus Syndrome, most of Americas foreign policy woes over the past century, from Bushs Iraq misadventure to Lyndon B. Johnsons misstep in Vietnam, have stemmed from overreach and an unreasonably optimistic belief in American capabilities. This conviction that America can accomplish anything is a lie, but one that can be politically essential for our leaders, writes Beinart, making such cycles of folly difficult to avoid. Its hard to be illuminated by failure in a country where success is a national religion.

In the end, according to Owen, democracy is the best prescription for the hubristic leader: the relinquishment of power via an election, impeachment or political pressure. But can we Americans  in a nation that is, as Beinart suggests, so patriotic, proud and addicted to success  succeed in holding our politicians accountable? Or when it comes to our collective political ambitions, are we merely a fawning staff of 300 million boosters, more than happy to rally behind Mission Accomplished banners, secure in our belief that our leaders alone can fix it?

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SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in a televised interview broadcast on Sunday that he was "alright", after he took ill two weeks ago during a national day rally speech. In his first televised appearance since the incident, Lee told local television Channel 5 that doctors concluded that he had suffered "vasovagal syncope", which is the most common type of fainting. "I'm alright. Doctors went over me very thoroughly the same night and after that night and they went through all the possible causes on why it could have happened," Lee said. "For the layman it means 'you stood up and you fainted.' Fortunately it's nothing worse than that and no harm came to me but I had a week's break and I'm back at work," said Lee, who is now in China to attend a summit of leaders from G20 nations. Vasovagal syncope is usually harmless and requires no treatment. "I usually have a doctor travel with me when I'm going on working trips. I just have to keep a sustainable pace," he said at the beginning of an interview about upcoming changes to make it easier for minorities to become the president of the multi-ethnic city state. A key change could be that from time to time the presidential race could be reserved to minorities if needed, he said. The presidential role in Singapore is largely ceremonial, but the president has veto rights over the use of past state reserves and key civil servant appointments. Lee, 64, has twice survived cancer. He was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1992 but the cancer went into remission after successful chemotherapy. He had his prostate gland removed in February 2015. (Reporting by Marius Zaharia and Masayuki Kitano, editing by Louise Heavens)
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Singapore confirmed 26 more cases of locally transmitted Zika infections, the health ministry and National Environment Agency (NEA) said in a joint statement on Saturday, bringing the tally to 215. Of the 26 new cases, 24 were linked to existing clusters while two cases have no known links to any existing cluster, they said. The sequencing analysis of the Zika virus found in two patients from an existing cluster in Aljunied Crescent/Sims Drive, showed that the virus was not imported from South America, the Ministry of Health (MOH) and NEA said. "The analysis found that the virus belongs to the Asian lineage and likely evolved from the strain that was already circulating in Southeast Asia. The virus from these two patients was not imported from South America." The MOH and NEA said a research team that conducted the analysis would release more details shortly. The Malaysian health ministry said earlier on Saturday that it had detected the first case of a locally transmitted Zika infection in Malaysia, in a 61-year-old man in the state of Sabah. Zika was first identified in Uganda in 1947 and was unknown in the Americas until 2014. The virus is currently affecting large parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, with Brazil the hardest hit so far. Zika infections in pregnant women have been shown to cause microcephaly - a severe birth defect in which the head and brain are undersized - as well as other brain abnormalities. (Corrects background to show virus first identified in Uganda in 1947) (Reporting by Masayuki Kitano; Editing by Jon Boyle)
Nairobi (AFP) - The United Nations called on Somalia on Sunday to do more to protect the freedom of the press and expression in a country where 30 journalists have been killed in four years.

But in a report the UN noted progress on the issue over the last five years.

The report, drawn up by the UN Assistance Mission in Somalia (UNSOM) as well as the UN Human Rights Council, noted that adoption in January this year of a new federal media law, which "guarantees a number of freedoms, including the right to inform."

But the report also expressed "concern about the laws unclear terminology, which allows for subjective interpretation and undue restrictions to freedom of expression".

"Despite the vibrant media culture in Somalia  which hosts more than 90 media outlets and scores of websites and blogs  numerous violations aimed at journalists and political leaders" are documented in the report.

These include killings, attacks, arbitrary arrests and detention, intimidation, harassment, closure of media outlets, confiscation of equipment and blocking of websites.

"The dangers facing media workers and public figures are illustrated by the fact that, between August 2012 and June 2016, a total of 30 journalists and 18 parliamentarians were killed in Somalia," it added.

While the greatest threat to journalists comes from the Al-Qaeda aligned Shabaab jihadist group, which has vowed to bring down the Somali government, the country's security forces are guilty of numerous violations against journalists and politicians.

"Political activists and journalists are detained in the NISA detention centre, together with Al Shabaab suspects, with no judicial oversight," lamented the report, referring to the National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA).

"In a worrying development, since February 2016, the NISA has started using the media to show Al Shabaab suspects confessing their crimes," it added.

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Somalia is preparing to hold indirect elections in late September and October, in a process which will see 14,000 delegates chosen on a clan basis vote for deputies and representatives in a new upper chamber of parliament.

Those elected will then designate a new president at the end of October. Elections by universal direct suffrage are scheduled in 2020.

This year will be crucial for Somalia's political transition, said the UN report.

"Attacks against individual journalists and media organisations have a deeply corrosive impact on democracy, with profoundly negative repercussions on freedom of expression and human rights in general," said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad Al Hussein of Jordan.

He called on Somali authorities to investigate violations of freedom of expression "irrespective of the identity of the perpetrators."
A South Korean law aimed at improving human rights in North Korea came into force on Sunday, days after reports that the regime in Pyongyang had executed a top official.

The bill, proposed in 2005 but shelved for more than a decade by bickering between parties, has modest aims -- such as funding for civil activist groups and the creation of an official archive to record rights abuses in the North.

The funding could be extended to defector groups which regularly float anti-Pyongyang leaflets across the border with helium balloons -- a practice fiercely condemned by the North.

The ruling Saenuri Party said the law would act as a "light to protect the freedom and rights of North Korean citizens" and provide the grounds to punish violators.

"The government must address the urgency of human rights abuses in the North and actively seek diverse ways to improve the situation, such as releasing a list of human rights violators," the party said in a statement.

While conservative legislators have long advocated a "name and shame" approach toward Pyongyang's rights record, liberals have argued the bill would inflame tensions and prevent cross-border dialogue.

Seoul's unification ministry said last week that North Korea had executed a vice premier for showing "disrespect" to leader Kim Jong-Un.

The regime also banished two other senior officials, Seoul said, the latest in a series of punishments Kim is believed to have ordered in what analysts say is an attempt to tighten his grip on power.

Pyongyang is extremely sensitive to criticism of its human rights record which was the subject of a scathing 2014 report by a UN Commission of Inquiry. It concluded the North was committing rights violations "without parallel in the contemporary world."
By Michelle Nichols JUBA (Reuters) - The government of South Sudan agreed on Sunday to accept 4,000 extra peacekeepers in a bid to avoid an arms embargo threatened by the United Nations Security Council, but said the details of the deployment were still being discussed. The announcement came after a meeting in the South Sudanese capital, Juba, between President Salva Kiir and the U.N. Security Council, led by U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power. The 15-member council last month authorized the deployment of a 4,000-strong regional protection force as part of the U.N. peacekeeping mission already on the ground, known as UNMISS. It threatened to consider an arms embargo if Kiir's government did not cooperate. "To improve the security situation the Transitional Government of National Unity gave its consent to the deployment, as part of UNMISS, of the regional protection force," the South Sudanese government and the Security Council said in a joint communique. The countries contributing troops to the force, UNMISS and the government would "continue to work through the modalities of deployment," the statement said. East African regional bloc IGAD pushed for a regional protection force and has pledged to provide the troops. South Sudan Minister of Cabinet Affairs, Martin Elia Lomoro, said the government had no objection to who contributes soldiers. The council authorized the new force following several days of heavy fighting involving tanks and helicopters in Juba in July between troops loyal to Kiir and those backing former Vice President Riek Machar. The violence raised fears of a return to full scale civil war in the world's newest nation. In the resolution, the council pledged to discuss imposing a possible arms embargo on South Sudan if U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon reports back in mid-September that the government was not cooperating on the force and was obstructing the work of peacekeepers on the ground. "The Transitional Government of National Unity commits to permit free movement to UNMISS in conformity with its mandate, including to protect civilians," according to the statement on Sunday. The government and the peacekeeping force will come up with "concrete steps to remove impediments to UNMISS' ability to implement its mandate." U.N. peacekeepers have been deployed in South Sudan since 2011, when the country gained independence from Sudan. Political rivalry between Kiir and Machar sparked a civil war in 2013, but while the pair signed a shaky peace deal a year ago, fighting has continued and Machar fled the country after the eruption of violence in July. "The challenge now is to make sure that a piece of paper becomes operationalized," Power told reporters after meeting Kiir. "Now we have to turn it into steps to improve life for people in great need." The government and the Security Council agreed "that the humanitarian and security needs of the people were paramount." (Reporting By Michelle Nichols; Editing by Mary Milliken)
(Photo: Getty Images)

If you have painful cystic acne or stubborn hormonal flares, you know the struggle to find the right treatment. Its a bit like the search for a swimsuit  there are plenty of good options, but it also takes a ton of frustrating trial-and-error to find one that makes you feel comfortable in your own skin. After trying what feels like every over-the-counter cream, liquid, and mask your drugstore and Sephora have to offer, that battle brings many of us to the dermatologists office.



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Lately, two drugs have been gaining popularity and stealing the acne-treatment spotlight: isotretinoin (formerly known as Accutane) and spironolactone. These medicines are the big guns that dermatologists turn to when nothing else has worked. To help you learn the difference  and figure out which one is right for you  we talked to skin doctors to learn the must-know details of each. Read on for a crash course in acne drugs, and how these sometimes life-changing pills can make you feel confident to show some skin.



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(Illustrations by Elliot Salazar.)

How They Work

The drugs have very different mechanisms of action, but yield similar results. First used as a diuretic to treat high blood pressure, spironolactone (spiro for short) has been prescribed off-label as an acne treatment.

Spiro acts like a roadblock to androgen hormones in your body, preventing them from stimulating your oil glands, says acne researcher Josh Zeichner, MD, an assistant professor of dermatology at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. With the hormones shut off and oil production reduced, theres very little sebum for bacteria to feed on or clog pores. The catch is that spiro only works as long as youre taking it  once you stop, the breakouts will likely return.

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Isotretinoin is a form of vitamin A now sold as Absorica, Claravis, Myorisan, and Zenatane. It addresses all the major causes of acne, Dr. Zeichner says. Isotretinoin essentially shuts down the oil gland, decreasing the amount of sebum available for inflammation-causing bacteria to eat. In addition, isotretinoin prevents skin cells from sticking together and clogging follicles. Isotretinoin is very effective for acne, and is the closest we have to magic in dermatology, says Katherine Holcomb, MD, a clinical assistant professor of dermatology at Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans. Its very safe when used correctly and has been around for 35 years. Taking isotretinoin often has long-term results.

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Who Should Take Them

Spironolactone is one of the easiest, most reliable drugs for adult-pattern acne, says Doris Day, MD, a clinical associate professor of dermatology at New York University. Dermatologists tend to go for spiro when breakouts occur before your period or are focused on the chin, jawline, and upper back. This type of acne is due to a hormonal imbalance and is hard to clear with other options, Dr. Day explains. Blocking the androgen receptors helps restore balance.

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Women are the only candidates for spiro, Dr. Day says. The androgen-blocking effects can cause erectile dysfunction and gynecomastia in men. Due to the impact on hormones, doctors also avoid prescribing the drug to pre-menstrual teens.

But there is a caveat with spiro: I wouldnt prescribe spiro for anyone planning pregnancy soon, Dr. Day says. You dont want to block hormone receptors in a developing child.

I prescribe isotretinoin for many types of severe acne, Dr. Zeichner says. A course of treatment can also be effective for hormonal acne, but dermatologists tend to save this option for those with severe, cystic acne that is focused on the center of the face. In some cases, hormonal acne recurs after taking isotretinoin. For those patients, spiro can keep skin clear when isotretinoin cannot, Dr. Zeichner says. And there are no issues with men or women taking the drug. (More on the side effects in a minute.)

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Dr. Zeichner says that he often prefers isotretinoin for those with sensitive skin because they wont need to apply potentially irritating topicals during treatment. But those with very dry skin and eczema may have a harder time tolerating the drying effects of the drug.For women whove been on isotretinoin and still have recurring acne, I tell them spiro is the way to go, Dr. Day says. Theyll see better, longer lasting results. I often encourage women to do so.

The Side Effects

If youve heard of Accutane, its likely because of the publicity around the worst-case-scenario side effects. If you become pregnant while taking the drug, there is a high probability the baby will develop severe birth defects. So during your treatment, youll be required to use two forms of birth control. In some cases, suicidal thoughts and depression have been reported, so its important that you check in with your doctor and report any changes in mood.

The major side effect is very dry skin and chapped lips, Dr. Holcomb says. Some people experience joint pain, but as long as you follow the doctors instructions and moisturize, youll likely do great. Your skin and hair will also feel dramatically less oily, which can be a nice perk.

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With spiro, you could see increased potassium levels, at which point doctors will advise you to reduce your intake. Some women report breast tenderness on spiro, but more often I hear that theyve lost a couple pounds and feel less bloated, Dr. Day says. Since its a diuretic, youll likely have to pee more often: Dr. Day suggests taking the med during the day so you wont wake up to go at night. And, doctors advise patients on spiro to avoid pregnancy as well since the hormonal side effects can also cause birth defects.



On the upside, some women with thinning hair see an improvement in hair thickness  and oil production may also be reduced, Dr. Holcomb says.





What Treatment Is Like

The main consideration with either treatment is what protocol youre willing to follow  a short, high-maintenance procedure or an indefinite option with fewer requirements.

With spiro, you usually just need a low dose of 25 to 50 milligrams a day to maintain clearance, Dr. Day says. You might need to come in for blood work on occasion to ensure your potassium is at a safe level, but the drug doesnt require much monitoring. Spiro is a long-term commitment, says Karen Chernoff, MD, a dermatologist at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York. Acne will come back once you stop taking it, but you can take it indefinitely.

You may not see results from spiro for three months, so dermatologists will often give patients a three-month course of antibiotics like doxycycline and stop it as soon as the spiro starts working.

Doctors often like to combine spiro with another medication to attack acne on all fronts. One of the best studies Ive seen shows an excellent response when women take spiro and Yaz [the birth-control pill], Dr. Chernoff says. Your doctor might also suggest a topical retinoid, like Retin-A, or a benzoyl peroxide treatment, she explains.



The counterpoint is the intense, but short-treatment period with isotretinoin. Treatment tends to last four to six months and requires monthly visits to your dermatologist, blood work (to test for liver function, cholesterol levels, and pregnancy), and compliance with the iPledge program, which involves taking monthly quizzes that prove you understand the side effects of the drug. Plus, doctors often advise avoiding alcohol during treatment.



Doctors have seen some instances in which the first dose of isotretinoin causes an acne flare-up, Dr. Chernoff says. To avoid that, you might take a low dose for the first month and then increase to a full dose after that. And depending on your results, your dermatologist might extend your treatment to nine months. There has been some newer data that says using the treatment longer extends the length of time before a relapse may occur, she says.



While youre taking isotretinoin, your doctor wont use any other topicals or prescription treatments since the drug addresses all the acne-causing variables. Youll just need to moisturize more than you ever have in your life and spend lots of quality time with your doctor.





How Your Doctor Decides Which To Prescribe

The decision is about the type of acne the patient has and how likely they are to follow the prescribed treatment, Dr. Holcomb says. I really base my choice on whether a patient wants to take a pill every day for an indefinite amount of time or a finite amount of time, she says. Again, spiro is a long-term solution, while isotretinoin requires a few months of treatment.A lot of the decision is patient preference, Dr. Chernoff says. Many women are worried about the side effects of isotretinoin, and spiro is easier to tolerate.

For acne thats focused on the center of the face, or appears as large cysts that have the potential to scar, dermatologists tend to prefer isotretinoin. I find isotretinoin can be a lifesaver [for those at risk for] severe scarring  we want to stop the cycle as soon as possible.

Either way, these proven treatments offer a way to escape the frustrating breakout cycle. Spironolactone and isotretinoin are two of the most important drugs we have to treat acne, particularly in women unresponsive to topical treatments, Dr. Zeichner says. So if youve tried it all and still arent seeing results, maybe its time to give one of these take-no-prisoners treatments a shot.

The grown-up guide to dealing with acne. Read more from The Acne Diaries here.



By: Liesa Goins
DEAUVILLE Stanley Tucci, who was in Deauville to receive a career tribute on Saturday, will reprise his role as Joshua Joyce in Michael Bays Transformers: The Last Knight.

While in Deauville, Tucci confirmed his character, Joyce, the anti-hero of Transformers: Age of Extinction, will be back in the next installment of the franchise which has just started shooting with Mark Wahlberg, Laura Haddock and Anthony Hopkins.

Introduced by Deauvilles jury president Frederic Mitterrand, Frances former culture minister, the tribute to Tucci included clips of his career highlights, from The Devil Wears Prada to The Lovely Bones, Margin Call and Hunger Games.

Tucci took the stage and addressed recent terror attacks that have shaken France and in the U.S. Were living through very difficult times in France, in America and in the world right now and cinema is something that can bring us all together and bring some positivity to life, said the actor, who also said during his press conference that he was sad to see a military presence at the festival for the first time.

The actor added, Cinema is a collaborative art form  a number of directors will even refuse to have a film by and their name (in the credits) because cinema is a collaborative art  and its in that spirit of collaboration that we can all move forward and I think some politicians have something to learn from artists.

Tucci is one of the few American stars who made the trip to Deauville this year. Bruno Barde, the festivals artistic director, said the recent attacks have had an impact on attendance. Another factor is timing as Deauville is sandwiched between Venice and Toronto film festivals which lure some of the biggest U.S. indie films and talent.

The tribute to Tucci was followed by the French premiere of Free States of Jones. Matthew McConaughey was not in Deauville to present the movie because hes currently shooting a film, said the distributor, Metropolitan Filmexport.

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Michael Moore, who was being honored today, canceled his attendance earlier this week for personal reasons. His tribute was followed by a screening Where to Invade Next.

Related stories

Deauville Film Festival Opens With Chloe Grace Moretz Tribute, Heavy Security

Deauville Opens With Brad Furman's 'Infiltrator,' Pays Tribute to Michael Moore

Deauville's Artistic Director Bruno Barde Chats About American Cinema, Talent
People around the world paid tribute to Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin on Sunday, the 10th anniversary of the Australian conservationist and television personalitys tragic death.

Irwin died on Sept. 4, 2006, after being stabbed in the heart by a giant stingray while filming on the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland. The 44-year-old left behind a wife, Terri, and two children.

Youll be my hero for my entire existence, Irwins daughter, Bindi, now 18, tweeted. I love you more than words can describe.

Youll be my hero for my entire existence. I love you more than words can describe. pic.twitter.com/R9OUzGWUwO  Bindi Irwin (@BindiIrwin) September 3, 2016

Irwins 12-year-old son, Robert, told the Brisbane Times that he hopes to carry on his fathers legacy as a wildlife photographer.

Irwins manager, John Stainton, who was with him when he died, told an Australian radio station that Irwins larger than life personality was never a put-on.

He burnt a hole in the fabric of our lives as he jumped through the television and grabbed you by the scruff of the neck, Stainton said. He had that magnetism, and there was nothing like him before.

Actor Russell Crowe also took to Twitter to memorialize his late friend on Sunday, which also marked Fathers Day in Australia.

10 years ago today..

Steve Irwin passed away. Terri, Bindi and Robert are a testament to the love you embodied mate, happy Fathers Day  Russell Crowe (@russellcrowe) September 4, 2016

Terri, Bindi and Robert are a testament to the love you embodied mate, Crowe tweeted. Happy Fathers Day.

Last week, Irwins family shared a heartfelt letter the Crocodile Hunter penned to his parents 12 years before his death.

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Probably one of the most unfortunate things in a Blokes Life is that it takes over 30 years to realise how essential you have been to build my character, my ethics and, most importantly, my HAPPINESS, the note, in part, reads. At 32, I am finally starting to figure it out. In good times and in bad, you were there. Your strength and endurance to raise me will not go unrewarded.

The letter, which was recently discovered by Irwins father, Bob, will be included in the elder Irwins upcoming memoir, The Last Crocodile Hunter: A Father and Son Legacy.

According to Bob, though, his correspondence with Steve has continued since his death.

Its something I do privately. I get messages from Steve, and I dont mind admitting I talk to him, Bob told the newspaper in 2011. If people think Im crazy, thats fine. I talk to the animals, too.

Its something Ill never completely get over, Bob added. I dont think you do. But what you do is learn to live with it. I know Steves out there, and he helps me do what Ive got to do.
VENICE (Reuters) - Martin Koolhoven decided to cast a female character in the lead of his Western "Brimstone" to finally portray the macho world of the Wild West from a woman's point of view, the Dutch director said at the Venice film festival on Saturday. The movie tells the survival story of a mute woman called Liz, played by Dakota Fanning, who is stalked by a vengeful preacher, portrayed by Guy Pearce. It is one of 20 films competing for the Golden Lion that will be awarded on Sept. 10. "I have always been a big fan of the genre, it is just that I have also been a little bit intimidated by the genre because there are so many great movies," Koolhoven said at a news conference ahead of the movie's premier. The Dutch director decided to shoot the film in English. It is a co-production between six countries -- the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France, Britain and Sweden -- which the director said granted him bigger flexibility to "make it what we wanted" than if it had U.S. funding. Fanning said portraying a mute character almost throughout the movie was a particular challenge. "I'm fascinated with the way people communicate without words in just everyday life, I think the energy, the body language, and overall vibes can say so much more than the words that we say to each other," the 22-year-old U.S. actress said. Religion and violence are strong themes in this survival epic set in the American West, but shot in Europe, and Koolhoven said being graphic was deliberate to make the story credible. "I would feel morally very dubious if I made that violence too comfortable, it should be uncomfortable, and if its too easy to watch then I am doing something wrong," he said. Fourteen-year-old Emilia Jones, who plays the heroine as a child, said some of the images were so violent that Pearce was hesitant to do some of the things prescribed by the script. "But it was very key to the script and the minute we said cut he'd hug me and say 'I'm so sorry'," she said. (Reporting by Agnieszka Flak)
NIAMEY (Reuters) - Suspected militants from the Islamist group Boko Haram rode on camels into a village in southeastern Niger and killed five people, Anfani radio station said on Saturday. A militia repulsed the overnight raid in the commune of Toumour, about 75 km (47 miles) from the regional capital Diffa. The attackers burned houses and left others wounded, the station said. Diffa region has been targeted numerous times by suspected militants, who usually come on foot or in vehicles. Boko Haram is headquartered across the border in northeastern Nigeria and seeks to carve out an emirate and impose a strict interpretation of Islamic law. (Reporting by Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Editing by Angus macSwan)
Beirut (AFP) - Syrian government troops renewed the siege of rebel-held parts of Aleppo on Sunday, as Washington and Moscow failed to reach a deal on stemming violence in the country's devastating war.

Turkish forces and allied Syrian rebels meanwhile expelled the Islamic State group from the last stretch of the Syrian-Turkish border under its control, a monitor said.

Syrian state media said the army and allied forces had taken an area south of Aleppo, severing the sole route left into the eastern neighbourhoods held by the opposition.

"The armed forces in cooperation with their allies took full control of the military academy zone south of Aleppo and are clearing the remaining terrorists from the area," state television said, citing a military source.

It said the advance "cut all the supply and movement routes for terrorist groups from southern Aleppo province to the eastern neighbourhoods and Ramussa."

The development leaves about 250,000 people living in rebel-controlled parts of the city cut off from the outside world once again, and will raise new fears about a humanitarian crisis in Aleppo.

Once Syria's economic powerhouse, the city has been ravaged by the war that began with anti-government protests in March 2011.

It has been roughly divided between government control in the west and rebel control in the east since mid-2012, but in recent months regime forces slowly began to encircle the east.

In July, they severed the only road into the rebel neighbourhoods, the key Castello Road running from the Turkish border in the north, creating food and fuel shortages in the east.

The siege prompted international concern, with aid agencies urging 48-hour ceasefires to ensure humanitarian access.

- US-Russia talks stumble -

In early August, rebel forces including Al-Qaeda's former Syrian affiliate battled regime forces south of the city to open a new route to the east, through Ramussa district.

But in recent days regime forces backed by Syrian and Russian war planes launched a counter-offensive.

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A key regime ally, Moscow began an aerial campaign in support of President Bashar al-Assad's government last September, even as it continued to publicly support efforts for a negotiated solution to the five-year war.

Earlier Sunday, hopes were raised that Moscow and Washington might be on the verge of announcing a deal to halt the bloodshed.

US President Barack Obama said both nations were working "around the clock" on a ceasefire, and a State Department official said a deal was close.

But the hopes evaporated later in the day, with a State Department official saying Russia had "walked back on some of the areas we thought we were agreed on."

Instead, US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov are set to meet again on Monday in Hangzhou, China, where G20 leaders are gathered.

"We're going to review some ideas tonight, a couple things on these couple of tough issues, and come back together and see where we are," said Kerry.

"We're not going to rush," he said, stressing the importance of reaching a deal that was able "to try to get the job done".

- IS expelled from border -

Washington is opposed to Assad's government, but has been accused by the opposition of failing to deliver concrete support.

And despite several rounds of international negotiations, a solution to the conflict that has killed more than 290,000 people and displaced millions remains elusive.

The conflict has become increasingly complex, involving not only regime and rebels, but international backers on both sides, Kurdish forces, jihadists and now Turkey.

Ankara began an operation inside Syria on August 24, dispatching troops to battle both the Islamic State group but also Syrian Kurdish forces it accuses of "terrorism".

On Sunday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said rebels backed by Turkish tanks and warplanes had seized the last parts of the border held by IS from the extremist group.

"IS has lost its contact with the outside world after losing the remaining border villages," the Britain-based monitor said.

Much of the earlier work to expel IS from elsewhere on the border was done by the Syrian Kurdish YPG, working with the US-led coalition against the jihadist force.

But Ankara considers the YPG a "terrorist" group and has been alarmed by its expansion along the border, fearing the creation of a contiguous, semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Syria.

The loss of the Turkish border will deprive IS of a key transit point for recruits and supplies, though the group continues to hold territory in both Syria and Iraq.
BEIRUT/GENEVA (Reuters) - A deal in Syria being discussed by the United States and Russia, which would involve a country-wide ceasefire and focus on delivering aid to embattled Aleppo, could be announced soon, Washington's Syria envoy has said. The deal would oblige Russia to prevent Syrian government warplanes from bombing areas held by the mainstream opposition, and would require the withdrawal of Damascus's forces from a key supply route north of Aleppo, according to a letter from Michael Ratney to the armed opposition, seen by Reuters and dated Sept. 3. In return, the United States would coordinate with Russia in fighting against al Qaeda, the letter said, without elaborating. It said the rebels must cooperate in order for the agreement to take effect, but that guarantees were being sought that Moscow, Syria's most powerful ally, would respect the deal. A truce brokered by the Cold War foes in February collapsed and peace talks crumbled earlier this year, with the Syrian government side and the opposition accusing each other of violating it. Fighting has since escalated across the country, particularly around divided Aleppo, where advances by both sides have cut supplies, power and water to nearly 2 million people in government- and rebel-held areas. The latest agreement would see government forces withdraw from a key supply route which led into the rebel-held east of the city and which was cut in July. The Castello Road would become a demilitarized zone, Ratney's letter said. The government and rebels would also be required not to block any aid entering the city, it said. (Reporting by John Davison and Tom Miles; Editing by Mark Potter)
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian government forces and their allies recaptured areas in southwestern Aleppo on Sunday that rebels had seized last month and laid siege to the city's opposition-held eastern sector for a second time since July, rebels and monitors said. The areas recaptured, after weeks of bombardment and attempts to drive the insurgents back, included the government's Ramousah military complex on the city's southwestern outskirts. Rebels captured the complex last month in an assault that broke through the first government siege of eastern Aleppo. Zakaria Malahifji of the Fastaqim rebel group confirmed reports that the complex had been retaken by government forces. That place eastern Aleppo under siege, he said. The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and a Damascus military source confirmed east Aleppo had been cut off. President Bashar al-Assad, who is backed by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, wants to recapture all of Aleppo, Syria's biggest city before the five-year-old conflict. Moscow's intervention last year turned the war in Assad's favor in many areas, but rebels have made some gains, including in Aleppo and in Hama province, further south. Insurgents have launched a campaign to try and capture the town of Maan, north of the city of Hama, the provincial capital, according to Mohammed Rasheed, a spokesman for rebel group Jaish al-Nasr. Advances by the insurgents in recent days have brought them to within 10 km (six miles) of government-controlled Hama. (Reporting by John Davison; Editing by Larry King)
Dead Mall

One in six American malls are expected to disappear in the next decade. That's scary news for many communities.

Visits to malls declined by 50% between 2010 and 2013, according to real estate research firm Cushman & Wakefield. Analysts expect upcoming data will show an even steeper drop in mall traffic.

Mall closures could have terrifying implications for communities, Howard Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz & Associates, a national retail-consulting and investment-banking firm, told Business Insider.

About 15% of malls will disappear in the next decade, according to a study by Green Street Advisors. That means hundreds of malls will close down, potentially affecting thousands and thousands of jobs.

dead mall

"When a mall closes, it's a blight in the community for a very long time," Davidowitz said in a telephone interview. "Empty stores mean ugly holes where jobs are lost and taxes aren't paid."

While there has been speculation that shuttered department stores will be replaced by new businesses like e-commerce warehouses, medical clinics, and gyms, Davidowitz says it will take a decade for these spaces to be filled.

"The jobs that will be lost will take 10 years to replace," he said. "In the mean time you have people who are out of work, which will hurt the middle class even more."

Shopping Mall

Malls are typically economic centers that pay high taxes and employ a lot of people. When they shut down, the whole community feels the impact.

Macy's just announced it is closing 100 stores, following similar announcements from Sears and JCPenney.

Fewer "anchor stores" in malls also spells even more trouble for specialty stores like Gap and Abercrombie & Fitch. Many Americans visit a mall intending to go to department stores, then stop in other stores once they're there.

There are numerous reasons for the brick-and-mortar apparel industry's decline.

Story continues

Americans are increasingly choosing to spend on technology and experiences like vacations, leaving less money for apparel. This has led to a spike in discount retailers like TJ Maxx. When people do shop at traditional full-price retailers, they increasingly prefer to do so online.

Davidowitz says America has too many stores, and more shut-downs are inevitable.

"America has five times more square foot of shopping per person than any other country," he said. "We're so overstored it's ridiculous."

NOW WATCH: Panera Bread CEO says he was 'offended' by this McDonald's commercial





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PARIS (Reuters) - At least 13,000 people attended a rally in Paris on Sunday to protest against what they say is a crime wave targeting the Chinese community in France, police said, after a Chinese textile designer died after being mugged last month. Demonstrators waving French flags and sporting T-shirts printed with the slogans "Stop violence, muggings, insecurity" or "Equality for all, security for all" marched from the Place de Republique square to the Bastille in eastern Paris, asking for more police protection. Chaoling Zhang, a 49-year-old textile designer, died last month after five days in a coma after being attacked in the northern Paris suburb of Aubervilliers by three men who stole his bag. Members of Aubervilliers' large Chinese community, home to many Chinese immigrants, said that the death of Chaolin Zhang was the latest in a string of targeted assaults. "At first it was just stealing bags, then it was stealing bags with violence, and now it's stealing bags and killing. It could happen to anyone," 31-year-old Wang Yunzhou told Reuters TV. "The people here are angry. We can't feel relaxed in the street, and if we don't even get a basic welcome in the police station people start to wonder," he said, adding that he moved to France from Wenzhou in south east China twenty years ago. Aubervilliers, which has a population of 77,500, is home to a large Chinese community connected to the garment trade. Some 600,000 ethnic Chinese people live in the country overall, including French citizens. Last month, 27 Chinese tourists were robbed and their driver sprayed with tear gas as they boarded a bus that was to take them to Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport. The incident raised fears that Chinese tourists, important luxury spenders, would stop coming to Paris. Tourist traffic in Paris has dropped significantly since attacks by Islamist militants last November, leading to sharp declines in sales for luxury goods makers but also for the capital's retailers, hotels and restaurants. Attacks on Chinese, Korean and Japanese tourists are also frequent in the French capital as robbers believe they carry large sums in cash and their suitcases are stuffed with luxury goods purchased in Paris, according to police. In May, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo traveled to Beijing to reassure Chinese authorities that Paris - the most visited city in the world - had taken measures to beef up its security. (Reporting by Clotaire Achi, Johnny Cotton, Noemie Olive and Dominique Vidalon; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
On Thursday at the low the SP500 cash hit 2157 which was just 5 points from the 50 Day Moving average and our minimum target for a decent low. Most of our indicators did not get oversold enough at those levels for a huge bounce but at the same time the bears had every opportunity to pounce and run the stops below 2157 which they did not take.

Therefore it appears that the bulls have the ball at the moment and likely will attempt to retest the recent highs at 2194 cash sp 500 which is only 14 points from the close on Friday. Ideally, they can take that level out to get any remaining bears to cover their shorts and trap the bulls one last time.

Keep in mind that this all comes at a time when hedge funds have been piling back into the markets with their net equity exposure reaching the nosebleed levels of 42%. I sent out Sentimentrader.com chart that showed that this extreme exposure level has only been seen rarely and every time has caused the market to pause and fall over the coming weeks. In some cases in marked the exact highs while in others it took a few weeks the manifest into a market top. Under every circumstance the market was unable to carve out a new high that was greater than 1.9% from recent highs. This would put 2235 out of reach. This was the best case for the bulls which was triggered in December 2006. In addition, while the market did achieve this level it subsequently fell to equivalent of 2090 in the coming weeks. The worst case for the market was 7/12/07 which preceded by a few days the end of our last major bull market which saw equities lose 50% in a little over a year. This indicator also triggered a sell signal on May 5th 2011 which was a few days after Osama Bin Laden was killed and Euphoria was in the air. The market began a 20% decline.

The bottom line on this indicator is that extreme caution is warranted considering the best the bulls can expect is up 1.9% and down 4.8%. Long term traders should use this rally as an opportunity to hedge or raise cash in preparation of a better buying opportunity down the road below 2100. The hedge funds with 2.6 Trillion in net assets under management are by far the largest players in world markets. Keep in mind this does not include any leverage they may have which is generally above 50%. At the moment they have an enormous amount of assets in equities. If this time is not different they will be forced to sell equities to preserve returns and return to their normal level of exposure.

We will only hear of the catalyst or excuse for the selloff after the fact. The market is discounting what will happen in the economy 6 to 9 months into the future. While we focus on the latest jobs report we know that its its importance means very little in the big picture. Everything always looks great at the top of a market.

This is not the only indicator that has been flashing caution over the last month but one could say it is the most important because of its 100% success rate and what it is measuring. Remember that the Vix has been hovering near all time low levels as well. In addition, most sentiment polls of investment advisors are showing their allocation to equities have not been higher.

The fed has given market participants no alternative but to pile into equities like sheep. It could not have been a better scenario for equity prices. But just like the over capacity built in the late 1990s in the tech space and the financial engineering in the housing bubble this too will have its consequences. People will look back and say..How the heck can a soup company like Campbells trade at a PE of 26? Or for that matter how can a utility company do the same? Their is only one reason and it is due to the feds policies pushing people to buy stocks primarily due to their current yield.

This next correction if and when it happens may or may not be the last or the end of the current bull market. For now I will give the bulls the benefit of the doubt and look for just a 10% correction from the high which would be similar to the Spring 2012 and the Hedge fund sell signal on 3/20/12.(See Chart Below) This would be around the median of all sell signals by this indicator.

This week has very little on the economic calendar but will start out on Tuesday with the ISM services at 10am.

http://online.wsj.com/mdc/ public/page/2_3063- economicCalendar.html

Since we did get oversold enough on a very short term basis the bulls do have the ability to rally the market a little this week. This is good news for the subsequent bear set up. Each point that the sp moves up the more asymmetric the risk versus reward will be.

Ideally we can rally above 2200 in sp cash to create the ultimate bull trap. I am not saying we must rally as high as that but I would welcome that with open arms. The bulls have no excuses not to rally this coming week.

The central banks are all meeting in just over two weeks to offer their latest Christmas gifts. Japan and ECB are expected to offer the best ones. Most of this is already known but many players will want to wait until Christmas morning to see what the gifts will be.

I will predict now that in the next bear market in the USA the fed will buy stocks directly and implicitly like China and Japan this past year. The ECB is already buying corporate bonds and their is a rumor they too will announce ETF buying at their next meeting. Since the fed has not raised rates quick enough they will not have the traditional tools needed combat a recession.

The triple witching expiration will be the Friday Sept 16 before all the Feds meet so it is hard to say whether or not the market will hold up as long as the meetings.

One trade at a time.

A break of 2156 would mean that the down move already started and I was wrong about a rally this week.

Below is the 2012 correction that I referred to above.

Inline image 1



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By Melih Aslan ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkey will invest 10 billion lira ($3.4 billion) in rebuilding areas in the largely Kurdish southeast that have been damaged by heavy fighting between militants and the state, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Sunday. Turkey's southeast has been hit by waves of violence following the collapse of a 2-1/2-year ceasefire between the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the state last year. The government has previously estimated some 6,000 buildings have been destroyed in security operations, and put the cost of replacing them at 1 billion lira ($345 million). "We are investing 10 billion lira," Yildirim said in a speech in Diyarbakir, the region's largest city. "Instead of houses destroyed by the PKK we are building beautiful houses." He said the government would invest in seven provincial centers across the southeast, and build houses, mosques and hospitals. The government will also focus on rebuilding Diyarbakir's historic Sur district, he said. Sur's Roman-era walls are listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. However, the district sustained heavy damage in fighting this year, leading to concern it may be beyond repair. (Additonal reporting by Tuvan Gumrukcu in London; Writing by David Dolan; Editing by Mark Potter and Stephen Powell)
By David Dolan and Melih Aslan ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkish-backed rebels on Sunday cleared Islamic State from Turkey's Syrian border, securing a 90 km (55 miles) corridor and marking a substantial advance in Ankara's plan to drive out Sunni militants and stop the advance of Syrian Kurdish fighters. The rebels, mainly Syrian Arabs and Turkmen fighting under the loose banner of the Free Syrian Army, took charge of the frontier between Azaz and Jarablus after clearing out the Sunni hardline group, state-run Anadolu Agency said. That puts Turkey in firm control of a stretch of land it wants in order to keep the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish YPG militia in check. But that could also sharpen tensions with the United States over Syria policy. Turkey is fighting a three-decade-old Kurdish insurgency in its southeast and fears that gains by the Syrian Kurdish YPG will embolden militants at home. Turkey considers the YPG a terrorist organisation and an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). "We are there to protect our border, to provide for our citizens safety of life and property, and to ensure Syria's integrity," Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said in a speech on Sunday, discussing the incursion, which Ankara calls Euphrates Shield. "We will never allow the formation of an artificial state in the north of Syria," he told a crowd in Diyarbakir, the largest city in the mainly Kurdish southeast. The advance took place little more than a week after Turkey launched the Syrian incursion, deploying tanks and air power to support the rebels, who swept into the border town of Jarablus. On Saturday, Turkey and its rebel allies opened a new line of attack in northern Syria, rolling across the border some 55 km (34 miles) west of Jarablus. The United States had said on Saturday it some Islamic State targets in the region, but it did not say where. While the United States and Europe also regard the PKK as a terrorist group, Washington sees the YPG as a separate entity and an effective client in the fight against Islamic State in Syria. That position has caused friction with Turkey, a NATO member and a partner in anti-IS coalition. 'TERROR CORRIDOR' President Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday raised concern about the formation of a "terror corridor" along Turkey's Syrian border. Speaking to reporters after a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama at the G20 gathering of world leaders in China, Erdogan said: "It is our wish that a terror corridor not be formed across our southern border". Erdogan has repeatedly said that Turkey's allies should not be making a distinction between Islamic State and the YPG as both groups pose a threat to Turkey. Some Kurds have criticised Turkey for its role in Syria. A demonstration broke out along the Syrian border on Friday, where Turkey is building a concrete wall. Police used tear gas and water cannon to drive the protesters back. At a rally in Istanbul on Sunday, the co-head of Turkey's Kurdish-rooted Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) denounced the incursion into Syria as an "invasion". "The government, which says it wants to stop ISIS (Islamic State) with the Jarablus invasion, has no credibility. The invasion of Jarablus is totally an adversarial approach against Kurds and we will never accept it," Selahattin Demirtas told reporters. Separately, Anadolu said Turkish warplanes hit four Islamic State positions on Saturday evening in Syria's northwestern Aleppo province as part of the operation, citing security sources. The warplanes hit three targets in the al-Kaldi area and another in the Wuguf region, Anadolu said, citing the sources. (Additional reporting by Bulent Usta and Hamdi Istanbullu; Writing by David Dolan,; Editing by Louise Heavens and Raissa Kasolowsky)
By David Dolan and Orhan Coskun ISTANBUL/ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish-backed rebels on Sunday cleared Islamic State from Turkey's Syrian border, securing a 90 km (55 miles) corridor and marking a substantial gain in Ankara's plan to drive out Sunni militants and stop the advance of Syrian Kurdish fighters. The rebels, mainly Syrian Arabs and Turkmen fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, took charge of the frontier between Azaz and Jarablus after seizing 20 villages from the Sunni hardline group, the Turkish military said in a statement. That puts Turkey in firm control of a stretch of land it sees as a bulwark against the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish YPG militia. However, that could sharpen tensions with the United States over Syria policy. Turkey is fighting a three-decade-old Kurdish insurgency in its southeast and fears that gains by the Syrian Kurdish YPG will embolden militants at home. Turkey considers the YPG a terrorist organization and an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). "We are there to protect our border, to provide for our citizens safety of life and property, and to ensure Syria's integrity," Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said in a speech on Sunday, discussing the incursion, which Ankara calls Euphrates Shield. "We will never allow the formation of an artificial state in the north of Syria," he told a crowd in Diyarbakir, the largest city in the mainly Kurdish southeast. The advance took place little more than a week after Turkey launched the Syrian incursion, deploying tanks and air power to support the rebels, who swept into the border town of Jarablus. On Saturday, Turkey and its rebel allies opened a new line of attack in northern Syria, rolling across the border some 55 km (34 miles) west of Jarablus. The United States had said on Saturday it some Islamic State targets in the region, but it did not say where. While the United States and Europe also regard the PKK as a terrorist group, Washington sees the YPG as a separate entity and an effective client in the fight against Islamic State in Syria. That position has caused friction with Turkey, a NATO member and a partner in anti-IS coalition. 'TERROR CORRIDOR' President Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday raised concern about the formation of a "terror corridor" along Turkey's Syrian border. Speaking to reporters after a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama at the G20 gathering of world leaders in China, Erdogan said: "It is our wish that a terror corridor not be formed across our southern border". Erdogan has repeatedly said that Turkey's allies should not be making a distinction between Islamic State and the YPG as both groups pose a threat to Turkey. Some Kurds have criticized Turkey for its role in Syria. A demonstration broke out along the Syrian border on Friday, where Turkey is building a concrete wall. Police used tear gas and water cannon to drive the protesters back. At a rally in Istanbul on Sunday, the co-head of Turkey's Kurdish-rooted Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) denounced the incursion into Syria as an "invasion". "The government, which says it wants to stop ISIS (Islamic State) with the Jarablus invasion, has no credibility. The invasion of Jarablus is totally an adversarial approach against Kurds and we will never accept it," Selahattin Demirtas told reporters. Separately, Anadolu said Turkish warplanes hit four Islamic State positions on Saturday evening in Syria's northwestern Aleppo province as part of the operation, citing security sources. The warplanes hit three targets in the al-Kaldi area and another in the Wuguf region, Anadolu said, citing the sources. (Additional reporting by Melih Aslan, Bulent Usta and Hamdi Istanbullu; Writing by David Dolan; Editing by Louise Heavens and Raissa Kasolowsky)
(BEIRUT)  Turkish troops and allied Syrian rebels expelled ISIS from the last strip of territory it controlled along the Syrian-Turkish border on Sunday, effectively sealing the extremists self-styled caliphate off from the outside world, Turkeys state-run news agency reported.

Also on Sunday, Syrian pro-government forces backed by airstrikes launched a wide offensive in the northern city of Aleppo on Sunday, capturing areas they lost last month and besieging rebel-held neighborhoods, state media and opposition activists said.

Turkey-backed Free Syrian Army rebels have cleared the area between the northern Syrian border towns of Azaz and Jarablus, the Anadolu news agency reported. It said the advance has removed terror organization Daeshs physical contact with the Turkish border in northern Syria. Daesh is an Arabic acronym for ISIS.

The FSAs advance shut down key supply lines used by ISIS to bring in foreign fighters, weapons and ammunition.

Meanwhile, the recapture and return to siege of rebel-held parts of Aleppo dealt a major blow to insurgent groups. They have lost scores of fighters in recent weeks in the battle to open a corridor into the city and lift the governments blockade.

After the government laid siege on Aleppo for the first time in July, the United Nations said that nearly 300,000 residents were trapped in rebel-held neighborhoods, making it the largest besieged area in war-torn Syria. The city has been contested since the summer of 2012.

Sundays push follows a month after insurgents captured several military academies south of Aleppo and opened a corridor into opposition-held parts of Syrias largest city and onetime commercial center. Since then, government forces and their allies have been trying to recapture the area.

State TV quoted an unnamed military official as saying that troops are now in full control of the military academies south of Aleppo and are chasing the remnant of terrorists. It added that all roads linking rebel-held eastern Aleppo with opposition areas outside the city have been cut.

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The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed that government troops captured first the Armament Academy and later the Artillery Academy, laying siege on the rebel-held eastern neighborhoods.

The (rebel-held) neighborhoods are under siege again, said the Observatorys chief, Rami Abdurrahman, by telephone. The whole areas are under complete siege.

Turkey has launched two incursions into Syria since Aug. 24 in an operation designed to drive ISIS away from the border and prevent the advance of U.S.-backed Kurdish forces, which are also battling the extremist group.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim on Sunday defended his countrys intervention in neighboring Syria, pointing to their long shared border.

We are there to protect our borders, ensure the safety of our citizens lives and property, and to protect the territorial integrity of Syria, Yildirim said during a visit to the southeastern city of Diyarbakir.

We will never allow an artificial state in Syrias north, he said, apparently referring to U.S.-backed Kurdish forces, who have taken a large swath of territory from ISIS along the border. Turkey views the Kurds as a threat and the Turkey-backed forces have clashed with them outside Jarablus.

In a press statement late Saturday, Turkeys military said the FSA took control of 10 villages from ISIS, adding that the Turkish army struck 20 IS targets. Since the Turkish operation began on Aug. 24, the army says it has hit 300 targets with 1,306 rounds.

___

Bilginsoy reported from Istanbul. Associated Press writer Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria contributed to this report.
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Turkish tanks entered the Syrian town of al-Rai near the border on Saturday in support of a new insurgent attack against Islamic State, a rebel spokesman said. "They (the tanks) entered the attack now," said Mohammed Rasheed of the Jaish al-Nasr rebel group, which operates under the banner of the Free Syrian Army. The wider offensive against Islamic State along the Syria-Turkey border is being waged by Turkish-backed FSA factions and has been supported by Turkish tanks and warplanes. (Reporting by John Davison; Editing by Jon Boyle)
By Umit Ozdal and John Davison ELBEYLI, Turkey/BEIRUT (Reuters) - Turkey and its rebel allies opened a new line of attack in northern Syria on Saturday, as Turkish tanks rolled across the border and Syrian fighters swept in from the west to take villages held by Islamic State. The incursion was launched by Turkey from Kilis province - an area frequently targeted by Islamic State rockets - and coincided with a separate push by the Turkish-backed Syrian rebels, who seized several villages further to the east. By supporting the rebels, mainly Arabs and Turkmen fighting under the loose banner of the Free Syrian Army, Turkey is hoping to drive out Islamic State militants and check the advance of U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters. The rebels last week took the frontier town of Jarablus with Turkish support. The operation, called Euphrates Shield, is Ankara's first full-scale Syrian incursion since the start of the five-year-old war. On Saturday the tanks crossed the frontier and entered the Syrian rebel-controlled town of al-Rai to support the new offensive, a rebel spokesman and monitors said. Al-Rai is about 55 km (34 miles) west of Jarablus, and part of a 90-km corridor near the Turkish border that Ankara says it is clearing of jihadists and protecting from Kurdish militia expansion. The rebels then seized villages to the east and the south of al-Rai, according to one rebel official. "They took several villages, about eight villages. At first they took two and withdrew from them, but then reinforcements came and there was an advance," Zakaria Malahifji of the Aleppo-based Fastaqim group told Reuters. The Turkish-backed operation was putting pressure on Islamic State from both east and west of a stretch of territory it controls along the border between the towns. "The operations are to work from al-Rai towards the villages that were liberated to the west of Jarablus," Colonel Ahmed Osman of the Sultan Murad rebel group told Reuters. EASTERN PUSH The Hamza Brigade, also part of the Free Syrian Army, said it had taken control of Arab Ezza, a village about 30 km west of Jarablus and near where Turkish warplanes carried out air strikes on Friday. FSA factions had also captured the villages of Fursan, Lilawa, Kino and Najma just south of Arab Ezza, according to a source in another rebel group, the Failaq al-Sham. The United States said it hit Islamic State targets in the region overnight, although it did not say where. "U.S. forces struck ISIL targets near Turkey's border in Syria last night via newly deployed HIMARS system," Brett McGurk, the special presidential envoy for the coalition fighting Islamic State, said on his Twitter account. HIMARS refers to a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System. Turkey has struggled to protect the area around Kilis from Islamic State rocket fire. Three rockets fired from northern Syria hit the region on Saturday, Dogan news agency reported, adding there were no casualties. Turkey's pro-government Daily Sabah newspaper said Turkish air strikes in support of the rebels continued on Saturday. FOCUS ON KURDISH MILITIA While Euphrates Shield initially targeted Islamic State in Jarablus, most of the focus since has been on checking the advance of U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters, to the alarm of NATO ally Washington. Turkey disagrees with its ally's support for the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, which it considers a terrorist group. The YPG has been among the most effective partners on the ground in the U.S.-led fight against IS. Turkey is worried that advances by Syrian Kurdish fighters will embolden Kurdish militants in its southeast, where it has been fighting an insurgency for three decades led by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). In China, to attend the G20 meeting of world leaders, President Tayyip Erdogan said there should be no support for any terrorist organization - a reference to the United States' backing of the Syrian Kurdish fighters. "There is no good terrorist. All terrorists are bad. All organizations involved in terrorism are cursed. This is how we see things and how we put up our struggle," he said, according to a transcript of an interview with China's CCTV released by Erdogan's office. The United States has voiced concerns about Turkish strikes on Kurdish-aligned groups that Washington supports. Germany said it did not want to see a lasting Turkish presence in an already tangled conflict. Turkey has said it has no plans to stay in Syria and simply aims to protect its frontier from the militant group and the Kurdish YPG militia. Turkish security forces used tear gas and water cannon to disperse protesters along the border on Friday. The demonstrators were protesting against Turkey building a concrete wall on the border with Syria. (Additional reporting by Yesim Dikmen and Asli Kandemir in Istanbul, Tom Perry in Beirut and Suleiman Al-Khalidi in Amman, Writing by David Dolan, Editing by Andrew Bolton and Angus MacSwan)
Warsaw (AFP) - Poland on Sunday announced three ministers would make an urgent visit to London following attacks on its nationals in Britain, including a murder which may have been a hate crime.

Announcement of the government delegation to Britain came hours after two Polish men were assaulted in a British town, following a vigil for a fellow Pole killed in August.

There was an upsurge in the number of reported hate crimes around the period of the June 23 referendum in which Britons voted to leave the European Union.

"In connection with the recent incidents targeting Polish citizens in Britain, the following ministers are planning an urgent trip to London: Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski, Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro and Interior Minister Mariusz Blaszczak," foreign ministry spokesman Rafal Sobczak told Polish media.

The date of the visit had not yet been finalised, Sobczak added, but a government source said it could take place as soon as Monday afternoon.

Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo also wants to speak directly to her British counterpart Theresa May about the recent attacks, Sobczak said. May is currently in China for the G-20 summit.

According to Sobczak, the Polish government delegation wants to elicit "an effective declaration from the British side that the safety of Poles will be guaranteed."

Warsaw for its part wants "to firmly state that the divorce between Britain and the EU cannot mean that Poles who work legally in the UK will suffer," he added.

- 'Prevent xenophobia' -

"This was a vicious and horrible attack," said police official Trevor Roe of the most recent assault, which took place at around 3:30 am (0230 GMT) on Sunday.

One Polish man suffered a broken nose and another a cut to the head during the attack outside a pub in Harlow, which is northeast of London, police said.

"Although we are considering this matter as a potential hate crime, it is not being linked with the attack at The Stow last weekend," he added, referring to the killing of factory worker Arek Jozwik.

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Jozwik, 40, was killed in Harlow on August 27 and hundreds of people attended a vigil in his memory Saturday.

Six teenagers have been arrested on suspicion of being involved in the murder and released on bail. While police are investigating whether it was a hate crime, they say the motive is still not clear.

On Saturday, Waszczykowski urged Britain to keep Poles safe from xenophobia in comments that followed talks with visiting British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson in Warsaw.

"We're counting on the British government and authorities responsible for the safety of British and European citizens, including Poles, to prevent the kind of xenophobic acts we've seen recently," he said.

Some 800,000 Poles are thought to live in Britain, one of its biggest minority groups, under EU rules allowing freedom of movement between member states. Poland joined in 2004.
U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May said Britains departure from the European Union may bring difficult times to the country.

Ahead of the G20 summit with world leaders in China, May told BBC that Brexit would not be plain sailing for the country, despite positive economic figures in the months since the referendum.

I think we must be prepared for the fact that there may be some difficult times ahead, she said. But what I am is optimistic.

May said her administration wants to emphasize its role in the world, including making new deals.

We want to be an independent Britain, forging out own way in the world, she said.

President Barack Obama met with May ahead of the summit to discuss the new leaders plans as it exits the European Union.

The bottom line is that we dont have a stronger political partner anywhere in the world than the United Kingdom, Obama told reporters. Despite the turbulence of political events over the last several months, we have every intention to making sure that that continues.
HANGZHOU, China (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Sunday that climate change scepticism is over, the day after the United States joined China to ratify the Paris agreement to curb climate-warming emissions. Climate change skeptics dispute the widely held understanding that excessive levels of emissions in the atmosphere cause global warming and harm the environment, and have become increasingly side-lined at international summits. "The debate over climate phenomenon is over scientifically and environmentally," said Ban, adding that the influence of climate change deniers or skeptics has waned. "It is affecting our day-to-day life," Ban said, at a new conference ahead of a G20 summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou. U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping deposited the legal instruments to join the Paris agreement to curb climate-warming emissions to Ban on Saturday, Ban said. Experts have said the temperature target is already in danger of being breached, with the U.N.'s weather agency saying 2016 is on course to be the warmest year since records began. (Reporting by Engen Tham in Shanghai; Editing by Kim Coghill)
Chinese visitors to the United Arab Emirates will now be granted visas on arrival, the Gulf state's prime minister announced on Sunday, in a new bid to boost tourism.

China, the world's second-largest economy, has a burgeoning and increasingly prosperous middle class that is travelling abroad in numbers greater than ever before.

"We have approved a decision to grant visas on arrival at the country's airports to visitors from the Republic of China," said Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, who is also the ruler of Dubai.

"Our relations with China are strategic and a priority," he added in remarks published on his official Twitter account.

Chinese tourists previously had to obtain visas before travelling to the UAE.

The UAE has invested billions of dollars over more than a decade to put itself on the map as a regional business and tourism hub.

Among the UAE's seven emirates, Dubai is the most attractive for tourists.

More than 14.2 million people visited Dubai in 2015, but the target is 25 million by 2020 when the Gulf emirate hosts the global trade fair Expo 2020.

In February, local media quoted Dubai Tourism chief Issam Kazim as saying that 450,000 Chinese visitors made the trip to the emirate in 2015, in a 29 percent increase over the previous year.

Apart from citizens of its five Gulf neighbours, nationals of 47 countries -- most of them Westerners -- can obtain a visa on arrival to the UAE.
Kiev (AFP) - After Russia snatched the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea from Kiev the new authorities installed by Moscow set about taking over one of Ukraine's largest banks as well as shipyards and hotels.

The state lender has now fired back by filing a massive claim with a court in The Hague -- one of multiple cases being fought by Kiev on a new legal front as a war with pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country drags on.

The various lawsuits add up to tens of billions of dollars (euros) and may take months or years to resolve.

But the ex-Soviet state is certain it will win back at least some of the money to help fill its shallow state coffers at a time when IMF aid remains suspended over Ukraine's perceived failure to properly tackle graft.

Ukraines Justice Minister Pavlo Petrenko added fuel to the fire by warning that even more cases against Russia linked to its seizure of Crimea and alleged invasion of the east were in the works.

"We are preparing another lawsuit together with the foreign ministry that we plan to submit to the (UN) International Court of Justice," Petrenko told Ukraine's private 112 news channel on August 27.

- 'Total destruction of investment' -

The case of the State Savings Bank of Ukraine (Oschadbank) is of particular importance to Kiev because it may boost the pro-Western authorities' hand in winning back other properties from Russia.

It has hired the Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP global law firm to represent its case at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.

An August 26 hearing boycotted by Russia heard that Oschadbank was seeking more than $1 billion (0.9 billion euros) in compensation "for the total destruction of its investment in Crimea".

Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP partner Alex Gerbi said that "if Russia continues with this stance, the claim shall proceed through an accelerated timetable to a final hearing scheduled for the end of March 2017."

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Gerbi told AFP that a judgement in favour of Kiev would not necessarily set a precedent for similar disputes.

But he added that "investment treaty awards typically may be used as persuasive... authority in other cases under appropriate circumstances."

PrivatBank -- Ukraine's largest private lender with branches stretching from Italy to China -- is also seeking compensation over losses suffered when Crimea was swarmed by Russian troops and then staged a referendum to join Ukraine's eastern neighbour.

The UN General Assembly condemned the vote as 'illegal" by a nearly-unanimous margin.

Evghenia Sleptsova of the Oxford Economics forecasting and analysis centre said that "Russia would never pay" the huge state claim mentioned by the justice minister because Moscow "considers that Crimea joined Russia voluntarily."

"However, it does make sense for individual Ukrainian enterprises to pursue these cases, not to leave those losses simply pending in the air," Sleptsova told AFP.

- From Stockholm to London -

The two sworn foes have further been duking it out in the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce over natural gas bills that add up to more than $65 billion.

Russia has cut off the flows to Ukraine -- one of its most important transport routes to central and southern Europe -- on four occasions in the past decade over price disputes.

Ukraine is now buying more gas from its European allies than Russia in order to eliminate what it sees as a political weapon wielded by the Kremlin each time Kiev looks to establish closer links with the West.

The February 2014 pro-EU revolution that finally pulled Ukraine out of Russia's orbit has resulted in all the pent-up resentment over the gas spilling over into one giant headache for the judges in Stockholm.

Ukraine's state energy company Naftogaz is seeking $26.6 billion from its Russian counterpart for its alleged failure to pay the required sums for transits and billing Kiev for gas it never bought.

Russia's Gazprom energy giant is demanding $38.7 billion from Naftogaz for what it sees as non-payment on contracted gas.

Yet the English High Court of Justice in London may be dealing with an even more explosive issue relating to a $3-billion eurobond Russia bought from Ukraine in December 2013.

Kiev views that money as a bribe paid to then-president Viktor Yanukovych -- now living in self-imposed exile in Russia -- for his surprise November 2013 decision to ditch a landmark EU deal.

The Moscow-backed president's about-face sparked three months of protests that ousted Yanukovych and was followed by Russia's seizure of Crimea and the onset of the eastern separatist war.

Ukraine's decision not to pay back the money by the loan's December 2015 deadline prompted the IMF to bend its rules and continue its programme with a nation that is technically in default.
By William James HANGZHOU, China (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Theresa May said on Sunday she wanted her security advisers to help review a delayed nuclear power investment from China - a source of diplomatic tension - as she arrived for a G20 summit. May upset Chinese officials in July by delaying a $24 billion project that would see French firm EDF build Britain's first new nuclear power plant in decades with the help of $8 billion from China. Speaking during her first visit to China, May was asked whether she would ask the National Security Council, a team of ministers supported by intelligence officers, to look at the potential security implications of the Hinkley deal. "I will be doing exactly as youve said which is -- as you know, Ill be looking at all the evidence around this issue," May replied. Although there is not expected to be a formal review process by the NSC specifically on Hinkley, the comment marked the first official acknowledgement that national security advice would be a factor in her decision. The initial delay caught investors by surprise and has cast doubt over whether May, who took office in July following Britain's vote to leave the European Union, will continue to court China as a major source of infrastructure investment. "This is the way I operate," May earlier told reporters en route to the summit, which will include a one-to-one with Chinese President Xi Jinping. "I look at the evidence, ...take the advice and consider that and come to my decision." A final decision is expected later this month, May said. May, a former interior minister, is wary of the risks of allowing China to invest in nuclear projects, according to a former cabinet colleague. The EDF deal is viewed as a precursor to Chinese involvement in another two nuclear plants. Asked whether she trusted China, May said: "Of course we have a relationship with them... What I want to do is build on that relationship." She also stressed a need to broaden the group of nations that Britain can trade with and tap for cash to help reinvigorate its power, transport and technology infrastructure. "This is the G20, this is about talking to a number of world leaders. I'm going to give the message that Britain is very much open for business... I want to be talking about the opportunities for free trade around the world." (Editing by John Stonestreet and Stephen Powell)
For the first edition of a UN-organized conference on wine tourism, leaders will gather in the cradle of winemaking next week to discuss the burgeoning industry and its importance in local heritage.

It's a strategic and significant decision to hold the first edition of the UNWTO Global Conference on Wine Tourism in the South Caucasus country of Georgia instead of bigger and more popular wine tourism destinations like France, Italy, Spain or Australia.

By choosing Georgia, organizers are returning to what some experts have described as the birthplace of winemaking.

Evidence of winemaking traditions have been traced back 8,000 years among archeological records found in Georgia, well before reaching Western Europe.

At the conference, experts and industry leaders will discuss the development of a Wine Tourism Prototype, a model that will focus on the integration of wineries in the local cultural, economic, social and environmental heritage.

Sessions will be hosted at different wineries in the Kakheti, Georgia's main wine-producing region.

The conference will also invariably help promote Georgian wine and the country's unique winemaking traditions which were inscribed on UNESCO's List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2013.

Traditional Georgian winemaking entails storing and aging wine in large, egg-shaped clay pots called Qvevri. Likewise, winemaking is a family affair in Georgia, with many households producing their own homemade batch.

Knowledge and experience of Qvevri manufacture and wine-making are passed down by families, neighbors, friends and relatives, all of whom join in communal harvesting and winemaking activities, reads a UN profile.

Children learn how to tend the vines, press grapes, ferment wine, collect clay and make and fire Qvevris through observing their elders...Wine plays a vital role in everyday life and in the celebration of secular and religious events and rituals. Wine cellars are still considered the holiest place in the family home.

The UNWTO Global Conference on Wine Tourism takes place September 7 -9.
Washington (AFP) - Throughout the history of modern warfare, countless wounded fighters have been saved from bleeding to death by tourniquets -- the straps or ties that wrap around a damaged limb and staunch hemorrhaging.

But what if a soldier is shot through the pelvis, or in the armpit, where a tourniquet would be of no use?

Militaries the world over have grappled with the question for decades, and the issue took on new urgency during the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now the US Army has found an answer.

The service currently is training and equipping its combat medics with a new device, called a junctional tourniquet.

It looks a bit like a belt, but comes with two inflatable bladders that can be pumped up to put pressure over a wound, even in locations where a traditional tourniquet would be ineffective.

"Exsanguination (bleeding to death) is the most common cause of potentially survivable death for wounded warfighters," said Ellen Crown, a spokeswoman for the US Army Medical Materiel Agency.

The junctional tourniquet is designed so "a person can position it in under a minute -- a crucial factor for combat medics who only have mere minutes to save a fellow warfighter's life if he or she is hemorrhaging."

The first recorded combat use of a junctional tourniquet was in Afghanistan in 2014, when US and Afghan medics saved a young Afghan National Army soldier who had been shot by insurgents.

The bullet lodged high in his upper thigh, likely severing a femoral artery, a location where a normal tourniquet would have little effect.

By inflating one of the junctional tourniquet's bladders over the wound, medics stemmed the blood loss, and he ultimately survived.

"The junctional tourniquet is a way to see how can we save more lives," said the Army's new surgeon general, Lieutenant General Nadja West.

- Improving outcomes -

Regular tourniquets had gone in and out of vogue among battlefield medics over the years, West noted.

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Their use was sometimes questioned because, if badly applied, they can damage nerves or tissues on a wounded limb.

Now the US Army teaches its combat soldiers to correctly use tourniquets.

"They are usually the ones that are right beside their buddies when something happens," West said.

"If they are in the vehicle that is hit by an IED (bomb), they may or may not have a medic on that vehicle, but a survivor who can put a tourniquet on within minutes."

According to West, as many as 93 percent of US troops currently survive being wounded in combat, a record up from 84 percent in Vietnam and 80 percent in World War II.

The US military gained wide experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, where shrapnel and gunshots accounted for about three-quarters of battlefield wounds, according to a study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery.

After regular tourniquets were given to all US soldiers in 2005, the rate of deaths from hemorrhaging dropped 23.3 per year to just 3.5 per year, the study said, and Army officials hope junctional tourniquets will reduce numbers still further.

But nearly a quarter of combat deaths are still considered potentially survivable, according to the study that focused on 4,596 fatalities between 2001 and 2011. In nine cases out of 10, these avoidable deaths were due to massive blood loss.

The US military has also spent millions developing a novel solution to battlefield bleeding.

Called XStat, the technology is essentially a large syringe-like applicator filled with 92 small, tablet-shaped sponges.

The sponges are injected directly into a wound, expanding and swelling to fill the cavity after approximately 20 seconds upon contact with water from blood or bodily fluid.
By Roberta Rampton and Nathaniel Taplin HANGZHOU, China (Reuters) - China and the United States ratified the Paris agreement to cut climate-warming emissions on Saturday, marking a major step toward the enactment of the pact as early as the end of the year and setting the stage for other countries to follow suit. The world's two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases made the landmark announcement as heads of state from the Group of 20 biggest economies, or G20, arrived for a summit in the city of Hangzhou, parts of which resembled a ghost town as Chinese security locked down the area. U.S. President Barack Obama's last scheduled trip to Asia before leaving office however got off to an awkward start. Soon after Air Force One landed, a Chinese security official blocked National Security Adviser Susan Rice on the tarmac, speaking angrily to her before a Secret Service agent stepped between the two. China has gone to great lengths to try to make the Sept 4-5 G20 summit a success, hoping to cement its standing as a global power, but a range of thorny diplomatic topics could overshadow the agenda. G20 leaders are likely to renew their promises to use tax and spending policies to invigorate the sluggish world economy, although a new pro-growth push was unlikely. Overcapacity in the global steel industry, a sore point for China as the world's largest producer of the metal, barriers to foreign investment and the risk of currency devaluations to protect export markets will also figure in the discussions. Beyond economics, there may be friction over territorial disputes in the South China Sea and a U.S.-South Korea decision to deploy a missile defence system in South Korea to counter missile and nuclear threats from North Korea. When Obama met Chinese President Xi Jinping, he told him they would have candid talks on cyber, human rights and maritime issues. Nevertheless, the climate deal set a positive tone.. "Just as I believe the Paris agreement will ultimately prove to be a turning point for our planet, I believe that history will judge today's efforts as pivotal," Obama said after he and Xi handed ratified documents to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. "We have a saying in America that you need to put your money where your mouth is. And when it comes to combating climate change, that's what we're doing. Both the United States and China, we're leading by example." At a joint ceremony, Xi said it "speaks to the shared ambition and resolve of China and the United States in addressing global issues". French President Francois Hollande said it was an important step that would pave the way for the implementaton of the Paris agreement at the end of the year. RESIDENTS LEAVE IN DROVES The stakes are high for China to pull off a trouble-free G20 summit, its highest profile event of the year, and security in Hangzhou was intense. Volunteer security agents prevented journalists from filming in deserted parts of the normally bustling city of 9 million people. Residents left in droves after authorities declared a week-long holiday for the summit, shut down the city's famous West Lake beauty spot and offered free travel vouchers worth up to 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) to encourage people to visit out-of-town attractions. More than 200 steel mills in surrounding districts were shut as part of a bid to limit pollution. With the summit wedged in between the Brexit vote and the U.S. presidential election, G20 leaders will be keen to mount a defence of free trade and globalisation. Concerns about subduded growth will be a major concern. The world's biggest economies have pulled out the monetary policy stops to promote growth, but central banks are now "pretty close" to the limits of their ability to stimulate economies, said Angel Gurria, head of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In the absence of "breakthrough, collective" policies, global growth was likely to remain weak, he told Reuters. "We have left our good central bankers to do all the heavy lifting." In separate remarks to Reuters, Pascal Saint-Amans, the director of the OECD's Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, addressed the thorny issue of multinational corporate tax liability, which the European Commission's recent decision against Apple Inc has brought into sharp relief. The European Commission said this week that Apple owed up to 13 billion euros ($14.50 billion) in back taxes to Ireland, based on existing regulations, a decision that both Apple and Ireland, which relies on low taxes to attract investment, have vowed to fight. China is using the G20 to push its diplomatic agenda with a raft of bilateral meetings. China and Turkey pledged earlier in the day to boost counter-terrorism ties, setting aside previous disagreements over China's treatment of a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority. (Reporting by Kevin Yao, Sue-Lin Wong, Michael Martina, Roberta Rampton, Engen Tham, Ruby Lian and Ben Blanchard; Additional reporting by Dominique Vidalon in Paris; Writing by John Ruwitch; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
Washington (AFP) - US forces have hit Islamic State group targets along Syria's border with Turkey using a "newly deployed" mobile rocket system, American officials said Saturday.

A US Army High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) carried out a successful strike on Friday on a tactical unit and building belonging to the IS group, Major Josh Jacques, a spokesman for US Central Command, told AFP.

US President Barack Obama's anti-Islamic State envoy Brett McGurk said on Twitter US forces hit the jihadist targets with the "newly deployed" system.

The detachment, which allows the United States to strike a target "with a high degree of accuracy and a significantly greater range," was deployed to Turkey in support of the US-led anti-IS mission, Jacques said.

"HIMARS is unique in reducing the potential collateral damage as it impacts a target at a high angle, has a relatively small blast radius for the effect achieved, and functions in all weather conditions," he said.

The US embassy in Ankara posted on Twitter that it was the "latest step in US-Turkey cooperation in the fight against ISIL (IS)."

HIMARS has been used over several years in previous operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The weapon system is incorporated into our normal deliberate targeting cycle and has been for quite some time," Jacques said.

"Precision strikes conducted by HIMARS are similar to the (US-led anti-IS) coalition's precision airstrikes; HIMARS is a complementary asset and involves US troops operating artillery from the soil of a NATO ally," he said.
Caracas (AFP) - Venezuela named publicly 18 military commanders to oversee the production and distribution of food and basic goods in an effort to alleviate severe shortages affecting the country.

Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez selected the military personnel for the "Great Mission of Sovereign Supply and Security," appointments formalized in the state newspaper.

"We will have thorough, precise control of the strategic areas," Padrino Lopez told journalists Saturday.

"This semester we will record supply levels greater than what we presented in the first semester, and next year, we will already have a structure to increase projection and improve distribution."

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro created the plan to combat severe shortages -- which private firms say have hit 80 percent -- of basic products like rice, sugar and toilet paper that has fueled mounting unrest.

The embattled Maduro blames the crisis on the collapse of oil prices and an "economic war" by businesses backed by US "imperialism."

The country's opposition seeks to unseat the leftist president with a referendum, staging this past week a mass demonstration in favor of holding a recall vote.

Venezuelans line up at dawn or even overnight outside the nation's supermarkets, guarded by heavily armed police to battle the growing problem of looting.

Many people resort to purchasing scarce products from "bachaqueros" -- black-market sellers who buy subsidized products and sell them at a mark-up.

The government launched in July a new plan against the shortages, putting the military in control of food distribution, the country's key ports, and of companies and factories.

According to state television, 660 private companies, 133 public companies and 2,467 food outlets have been audited since then, leading to 102 individual arrests.

Maduro says the military will make things right, arguing that the private sector controls 93 percent of distribution of basic goods and is killing the economy with hoarding and scalping.

But the opposition and entrepreneurs say the problem is low production, which they blame on price controls and a lack of dollars to buy imported goods.

Francisco Martinez, president of the business association Fedecamaras maintains that operating companies are working between 30 and 40 percent of their capacities because of challenges acquiring raw materials.
The number of South Sudanese refugees crossing into Uganda at Oraba border has continued to increase.

According to figures from the Office of the Prime Minister and Ministry of Disaster Preparedness, the numbers are now between1000-1500 every day.

Solomon Osakan, a Senior Settlement Officer in Arua tells KFM that there has been a shift in the type of people being received with more youth and men now being received compared to the passed shifts which were dominated by women and children.

He attributes this to recent attempts by military groups in South Sudan to recruit them into their ranks, forcing them to flee.

Meanwhile on the business front, traders at Oraba border in Koboko district dealing in foreign exchange are counting losses due to reduced business from South Sudan.

Speaking to KFM, one of the traders Chut Swali says because of the violence that broke out in July, Ugandan traders are no longer crossing into South Sudan, a situation that threatens to throw them out of business.

Relatedly, local leaders in Lamwo district have expressed fears over the growing number of South Sudanese refugees grossing into the country with their livestock. According to the District Veterinary Officer Dr Bosco Odong, they are concerned because most of these animals are brought into the country without scrutiny.

Dr. Odong says the livestock is not even vaccinated and it could lead out to disease outbreak.

Story by Benjamin Jumbe
A Nobel prize-winning writer in self-imposed European exile accepts an invitation to return to the small Argentine town he hasnt visited for 40 years in The Distinguished Citizen, an enjoyable, if thoroughly predictable story pitting worldly sophistication against rural stereotypes. Other key elements involve the burden of success, lost ideals, and whether artists truly give back to the communities theyve creatively mined for decades. Co-directors Mariano Cohn and Gaston Duprat (The Man Next Door) again collaborate with screenwriter Andres Duprat, who supplies intelligent dialogue but falls back on easy situations and a misjudged penultimate chapter. More mainstream than the usual festival fare, Citizen will be welcomed by audiences at home.

Taciturn novelist Daniel Mantovani (Oscar Martinez) has an ambivalent relationship to fame: its brought him the kind of wealth few authors can ever imagine, yet hes concerned such success means hes not the challenging writer he was at one time. All this is succinctly conveyed in a strong opening scene, when Daniel receives the Nobel and voices his fears. Five years later, the Barcelona-based author remains too much in demand, relying on assistant Nuria (Nora Navas) to politely decline most offers, until he gets a letter from his hometown of Salas, a seven-hour drive from Buenos Aires. Its been four decades since hes been back, despite using Salas as the setting for all his stories  as he says, hes never left, and hes never returned  and to Nurias surprise he accepts the invitation to receive the towns Distinguished Citizen award.

His one proviso: no publicity, no press. On arrival in Buenos Aires, hes picked up in a broken-down car by a semi-cretin and eventually makes it to town, where the mayor (Manuel Vicente) warmly welcomes him. From here, the film could go in one of two directions: the Preston Sturges route, where the townspeople only seem simple and have big hearts that win over the cynical sophisticate; or it could take an equally humorous but more superior tone, with kooky, unattractive rednecks and no rediscovery of a lost ideal. Citizen chooses this latter direction, which perhaps is more in tune with the 21st century.

The townsfolk are proud to have a celebrity in their midst, especially one who put their backwater on the map. Some are certain his characters are based on themselves, and ply him with invitations and requests. Its arranged that hell give a series of lectures and judge a local painting competition. Old school pal Antonio (Dady Brieva) is only too happy to tell the returning author that he married Irene (Andrea Frigerio), the girl Daniel left behind.

More of Irene, one of the few normal people in town, would have helped to balance things a bit, especially as theres a moment when she appears to be challenging thoughts Daniel might have that her life as a teacher is somehow less fulfilling than his own. However, the moment is brief, and like much else here, theres something bordering on the cartoonish about her relationship with crass, loud-mouthed Antonio. The script rises to the occasion when Daniel makes speeches, whether in front of the Nobel audience, or the people gathered for the local art prize  thats when Andres Duprat aspires to say something meaty about inspiration and culture. Otherwise, there are amusing situations and a few scraps about Daniels parasitic appropriation of the town for his art, but it would have had more meaning if his main accuser, Florencio Romero (Marcelo DAndrea), wasnt a one-dimensional caricature.

Most everyone are thick-headed yokels, apart from aspiring writer Ramiro (Julian Larquier), working as the hotel clerk, and nubile Julia (Belen Chavanne), a nose-ringed groupie. The next-to-last scene is especially out of place, though its followed by one of Daniels speeches, which aims to right the balance. Daniels voluntary exile in Spain has resonance in a New World country still looking to Europe for cultural affirmation, but the film feels only haphazardly invested in making such points and calls out for a more equitable distribution of intelligent commentary with broad satire, as in the directors The Artist. A pronounced digital over-clarity makes it look like the film could use a little more post-production work, not with every scene but particularly those that are strongly lit.

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Mel Gibsons Hacksaw Ridge, which premiered today at the 73rd International Venice Film Festival, is a brutally effective, bristlingly idiosyncratic combat saga  the true story of a man of peace caught up in the inferno of World War II. Its the first movie Gibson has directed since Apocalypto, 10 years ago (a film hed already shot before the scandals that engulfed him), and this November, when it opens with a good chance of becoming a player during awards season, it will likely prove to be the first film in a decade that can mark his re-entry into the heart of the industry. Yet to say that Hacksaw Ridge finally leaves the Gibson scandals behind isnt quite right; it has been made in their shadow. On some not-so-hard-to-read level, the film is conceived and presented as an act of atonement.

It should be obvious by now that the question of whether we can separate a popular actor or filmmakers off-screen life from his on-screen art doesnt have a one-size-fits-all answer. Every instance is different. In the case of Mel Gibson, what we saw a number of years ago  first in his anti-Semitic comments, then in leaked recordings of his phone conversations  wasnt simply objectionable thoughts, but a rage that suggested he had a temperament of emotional violence. It was one that reverberated through his two most prominent films as a director: The Passion of the Christ, a sensational and, in many quarters, unfairly disdained religious psychodrama that was a serious attempt to grapple with the stakes of Christs sacrifice, and Apocalypto, a fanciful but mesmerizing Mayan adventure steeped to the bone in the ambiguous allure of blood and death.

Like those two movies, Hacksaw Ridge is the work of a director possessed by the reality of violence as an unholy yet unavoidable truth. The film takes its title from a patch of battleground on the Japanese island of Okinawa, at the top of a 100-foot cliff, thats all mud and branches and bunkers and foxholes, and where the fight, when it arrives (one hour into the movie), is a gruesome cataclysm of terror. Against the nonstop clatter of machine-gun fire, bombs and grenades explode with a relentless random force, blowing off limbs and blasting bodies in two, and fire is everywhere, erupting from the explosions and the tips of flame-throwers. Bullets rip through helmets and chests, and half-dead soldiers sprawl on the ground, their guts hanging out like hamburger.

Yet at the center of this modern hell of machine-tooled chaos and pain, there is Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), a soldier who refuses to carry a gun because it is against his values. Hes a conscientious objector who acts as a medic. But because hes every bit as devoted to serving in the war as he is to never once firing a bullet, he isnt just caring for soldiers. Hes on the front lines, in the thick of the thick of it, without a weapon to protect him, and the film exalts not just his courage but his whole withdrawal from violence.

There really was a Desmond Doss, and the film sticks close to the facts of his story. Yet theres still something very programmatic about Hacksaw Ridge. It immerses you in the violent madness of war  and, at the same time, it roots its drama in the impeccable valor of a man who, by his own grace, refuses to have anything to do with war. You could argue that Gibson, as a filmmaker, is having his bloody cake and eating it too, but the less cynical (and more accurate) way to put it might be that Hacksaw Ridge is a ritual of renunciation. The film stands on its own (if youd never heard of Mel Gibson, it would work just fine), yet theres no point in denying that it also works on the level of Gibsonian optics  that it speaks, on some political-metaphorical level, to the troubles that have defined him and that hes now making a bid to transcend.

Will audiences, and the powers of Hollywood, finally meet him halfway? One reason the likely answer is yes is that Hacksaw Ridge, unlike such landmarks of combat cinema as Saving Private Ryan, Platoon, or Full Metal Jacket, isnt simply a devastating war film. It is also a carefully carpentered drama of moral struggle that, for its first hour, feels like it could have been made in the 1950s. Its a movie that spells out its themes with a kind of homespun user-friendly clarity. We see Desmond as a boy, growing up in a small town on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia with a drunken abusive father (Hugo Weaving) and a mother (Rachel Griffiths) hes driven to protect. Early on, Desmond gets into a fight with his brother and hits him in the head with a brick, and that incident, which leaves him reeling in sorrow, is the films version of one of those Freudian events that, in an old Hollywood movie, form the cornerstone of a persons character.

It all seems a bit pat, but once Desmond grows up and Andrew Garfield starts playing him, the actor, all lanky charm and aw-shucks modesty, wins us over to seeing Desmond as country boy of captivating conviction. He knows nothing about girls, yet he woos a lovely local nurse (Teresa Palmer) with a fumbling sincerity that melts her resistance. And when the war arrives, he enlists, just like his brother, because he feels he has no choice not to. Hes a Seventh Day Adventist scarred by violence in his family; all of this plays a role in his pacifism, and his patriotism. That difficult dad of his is portrayed by Hugo Weaving as a haunted, complex man: a slovenly lush who tries to keep his family in line with the belt, and even the pistol, but also a decorated veteran of World War I who is desperate to keep his sons alive.

The film revs up its old-fashioned pulse when it lands at boot camp, where Desmond proves a contradiction that no one there  not his fellow soldiers, let alone the officers  can begin to fathom. Hes an eager, good-guy recruit who refuses to pick up a rifle even for target practice; they assume (wrongly) that he must be a coward. For a while, the film is strikingly reminiscent of the legendary Parris Island boot-camp sequence in Full Metal Jacket, only this is WWII, so its less nihilistic, with Vince Vaughn, as the drill sergeant, tossing off the wholesome version of the usual hazing insult zingers; he looks at Desmond and barks, I have seen stalks of corn with better physiques. (Hence Desmonds Army nickname: Cornstalk.) Hacksaw Ridge often feels like an old studio-system platoon movie, but when Desmonds pacifism becomes a political issue within the Army, it turns into a turbulent ethical melodrama  one can almost imagine it as a military courtroom drama directed by Otto Preminger and starring Montgomery Clift.

The question is whether the Army will allow Desmond, on his own terms, to remain a soldier  a conscientious objector who nevertheless wants to go to war. In a sense, the dramatic issue is a tad hazy, since Desmond announces, from the outset, that he wants to be a medic. Why cant he just become one? But one of the strengths of Hacksaw Ridge is that it never caricatures the military brasss objections to his plan. On the battlefront without a weapon, Desmond could conceivably be placing his fellow soldiers in harms way. His desire is noble, but it doesnt fit in with Army regulations (and the Army, of course, is all about regulations). So hes threatened with a court martial. The way this is finally resolved is quietly moving, not to mention just.

And thenthe hell of war. Its 1945, and the soldiers from Desmonds platoon join forces with other troops to take Hacksaw Ridge, a crucial stretch  it looks like a Japanese version of the land above Normandy beach  that can lead them, potentially, to a victory in Okinawa, and the beginning of the end of the war. Gibsons staging of the horror of combat generates enough shock and awe to earn comparison to the famous opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan, although it must be said that he borrows a lot from (and never matches) Spielbergs virtuosity. Yet Gibson creates a blistering cinematic battleground all his own. Each time the fight breaks out again, its so relentless that you wonder how anyone could survive it.

The real story that Hacksaw Ridge is telling, of course, is Desmonds, and Gibson stages it in straightforward anecdotes of compassion under fire, though without necessarily finding anything revelatory in the sight of a courageous medic administering to his fellow soldiers (and, at certain points, even to wounded Japanese), tying their blown-off limbs with tourniquets, giving them shots of morphine between murmured words of hope, and dragging them to safety. In a sense, the real drama is a nobility that wont speak its name: Its the depth of Desmonds fearlessness, and his love for his soldier brothers, which we believe in, thanks to Garfields reverent performance, but which doesnt create a combat drama thats either scary or exciting enough to rival the classic war movies of our time. This isnt a great one; its just a good one (which is nothing to sneeze at).

Desmond devises a way to save lives by tying a rope around the soldiers bodies and lowering them down the vertical stone cliff that borders Hacksaw Ridge, and using that technique he rescues a great many of them. Desmond Doss, who saved 75 men at Hacksaw Ridge, became the first conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor, and Gibson has made a movie thats a fitting tribute to him (at the end, he features touching footage of the real Doss). But one surprise, given the drama of pacifism-versus-war that the movie has set up, is that theres never a single scene in which Desmond has to consider violating his principles and picking up a weapon in order to save himself or somebody else. A scene like that would have brought the two sides of Hacksaw Ridge, the violent and the pacifist  and, implicitly, the two sides of Mel Gibson  crashing together. But that would have been a different movie. One that, in the end, was a little less safe.

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Silverstone (United Kingdom) (AFP) - Spaniard Maverick Vinales rode a masterful race to secure his first ever MotoGP victory, easing to take the chequered flag in the British Grand Prix at Silverstone on Sunday.

The 21-year-old -- the 2013 Moto3 world champion -- gave Suzuki its first win in the British edition in this category since American Kevin Schwantz in 1994.

It was their first in the category overall since Australian Chris Vermeulen triumphed in France in 2007.

Vinales led home Honda's Cal Crutchlow -- the first Briton since Barry Sheene in 1977 to take pole -- with legendary Italian Valentino Rossi third on his Yamaha for his 217th podium placing.

Rossi marginally reduced Marc Marquez's lead in the overall standings, the Spaniard holding a 50-point advantage over the Italian, 210 points to 160.

Vinales, winning his 17th Grand Prix in all categories, said he had felt all weekend something special was on the cards.

"This is a dream come true, one I thought was possible this weekend," said Vinales, whose win makes it seven different winners of the last seven MotoGPs.

"I hope I can deliver more dreams to Suzuki in the future as the team has worked so hard."

Crutchlow, whose win in the Czech MotoGP last time out was the first by a British rider since Sheene in 1981 in the top category, said he couldn't have wished for more.

"To take pole and finish second is more than I could have dreamt of. I thought I would finish in the top six at best," confessed the 30-year-old.

"I am really happy I could satisfy the home crowd as they have supported me through thick and thin down the years.

"It was great fun to be battling away with the guys in front."

For the as always exuberant Rossi he was satisfied to have at least not allowed Marquez to stretch his imposing lead.

"I am happy with that because I had to really battle very hard as my tyres were worn out by the end of the ninth lap and I was sliding all over the place," said the 37-year-old seven time world champion in the class.

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The race had to be reduced to 19 laps after it was halted following a brutal first-lap collision between French rider Loris Baz and Pol Espargaro of Spain.

Baz, on a Ducati, and Espargaro on a Yamaha Tech3 were at the back of the field but debris from their bikes littered the corner and the track.

Once the race got underway for a second time, Vinales made a superb start on his Suzuki to lead from Marquez with Crutchlow in third and Rossi fourth.

Rossi produced a supreme passing movement with 14 laps to the chequered flag, relegating Marquez to third.

Vinales was well clear of the pack and maintained his advantage of 2.5sec despite Rossi's best efforts.

Marquez lost further ground as Crutchlow and Andrea Iannone passed him in quick succession with the latter then overtaking the Englishman and Rossi to move into second with eight laps remaining.

Rossi fought back to take second again as an engrossing tussle took place for the minor placings with six riders involved.

Iannone dramatically fell out of that equation when he came to grief with five laps to go while Marquez's overzealous attempt to pass Rossi saw him exit off the track but return just behind the Italian.

The lead pursuer of Vinales was now Crutchlow, with arch-rivals Rossi and Marquez conducting their private duel behind him -- the Spaniard going past him with four circuits of the track to cover.

Crutchlow staved off a stern challenge by Marquez for second spot in the closing stages before the latter also had to concede third place to Rossi.
Cannon Ball (United States) (AFP) - Protesters camping near Native American lands in North Dakota to protest the construction of an oil pipeline clashed late Saturday with construction company workers they blamed for destroying ancient sites.

Hundreds of protesters confronted a bulldozer crew in an area known as Cannon Ball, amid the vast grasslands of the northern US state.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe claims the crew dug up and destroyed sacred burial grounds, places of prayer and other cultural artefacts -- even after the pipeline developer had voluntarily paused construction in the disputed area less than a mile (1.6 kilometer) from the tribe's reservation.

Angry protesters broke through a fence and fought with private security guards, who employed dogs and pepper spray.

"They tried to push us back with their trucks and their bulldozers, but we just kept on coming," Seeyouma Nashcid, a protester from Arizona, told AFP.

Some protesters were left bloodied, and displayed signs of dog bites. The Morton County Sherriff's department said three private security guards were injured after being struck with fence posts and flag poles.

The tribe, whose reservation is located just south of where the 1,200-mile (1,900-kilometer) pipeline would cross the Missouri River, has been locked in a court battle to stop the project, which it says would endanger its drinking water and destroy historic sites.

Members of American Indian tribes from across the United States have rallied in support, gathering for months in a makeshift camp near the reservation.

On Saturday, protesters were suddenly alerted to renewed digging, a day after the tribe filed evidence in court of dozens of newly discovered artefacts, grave markers and sacred sites.

The tribe said in a statement that a two-mile stretch was destroyed before the bulldozer crew was confronted and stopped.

"This demolition is devastating," Standing Rock Sioux Tribe chairman David Archambault said in a statement. "These grounds are the resting places of our ancestors. The ancient cairns and stone prayer rings there cannot be replaced."

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Witnesses said law enforcement officers were nearby during Saturday's clashes but did not immediately intervene. But sheriff's spokeswoman Donnell Preskey said deputies "were not on the scene when the conflict initially occurred," and arrived later.

The sheriff's office was notified of the situation by an emergency call from a private security officer.

Citing the safety and security of law enforcement, Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier said that the number of protesters made it "unsafe for officers to directly respond until further officers were able to respond."

A federal judge is expected to decide by September 9 whether to grant a temporary injunction to stop the pipeline construction under the river, as the tribe pursues its lawsuit.

The pipeline's US developer Energy Transfer Partners did not return a call for comment placed during a holiday weekend.
Mother Teresa will become a saint at the Vatican on Sept. 4, on the eve of the 19th anniversary of her death.

Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity, a religious order dedicated to caring for the worlds poorest people, in 1950. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, and performed her first miracle in 1998 when she reportedly cured an Indian woman of a stomach tumor. Pope Francis recently declared the healing of a Brazilian man with a brain infection and kidney disease to be her second miracle; the Catholic church requires two miracles to qualify for sainthood.

Writing about the connections between Mother Teresa and Pope Francis, TIMEs Elizabeth Dias says, It is no accident that he will canonize Mother Teresa during his declared Jubilee Year of Mercy, a dedicated time for Catholics all over the world to return to the church and experience Gods mercy anew. Just as Mother Teresa will be remembered from here on out as the Saint of the Jubilee, so will Franciss works of mercy be ever marked by her mission.
(Photo: Vincent Oquendo)







By Linda Wells

Pat McGrath, the makeup artist, has an army of assistants who travel with her  most on their own dime  to fashion shows, photo shoots, and advertising campaigns. From 2009 to 2014, Vincent Oquendo was one of them. Born in Queens, Oquendo became a makeup artist at 17 and started working with McGrath when he was 23. When he left McGraths team, he already had one magazine cover to his credit and a few celebrity clients, including models Bella Hadid and Ashley Graham. He explains what its like to be a makeup elf.

How did you meet McGrath?

Id been emailing her agency [Streeters] for a while. When the fashion shows moved to Lincoln Center, there was a show for Fashions Night Out. I was one of about 50 assistants on a supplemental team who were all new to Pat. She had the new people work with the old team.

I was so nervous and young and green. You know when youre on set and you ask an assistant to get you something and they walk casually, and then there are the assistants who run? That sense of urgency is what she might have seen in me.

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At that first show, the model Arlenis [Sosa] came backstage and she saw me  we knew each other  and said Vincent? Pat asked Arlenis if she wanted to sit with me [for makeup] and Arlenis said, I love Vincent. So Pat walked through the crowd and all the madness and grabbed my hand and said, Can you do this? She wasnt asking me in an intimidating way. I said, Yes, I can!

The look was a bleached brow. On a Latina girl, you cant just bleach it a platinum blonde. It wouldnt look right on her. Its a really tricky look, but I did it.

I was one of two or three people out of the 50 that she invited to work on the rest of the New York shows. Pats right-hand personal assistant said, She likes you, and between you and me, you should fly to Paris. We definitely need more help there. I didnt have very much money but I saved my pennies and went.

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I did four, maybe five shows in Paris. One was Vuitton. The look was a dark lip with a gold eye and a bleached brow with a thin brown line through it. I didnt want to look like I didnt belong, because if you dont think you belong, then Pat wont [think so] either. So I said to myself, Keep busy, lotion the legs, powder the face, hold the brushes.

(Photo: Vincent Oquendo)

Did you pay your own way?

At the beginning, I bought my own plane ticket to Paris. I stayed in a little studio apartment with three other makeup artists. One girl slept on a blow-up mattress in the kitchen.

For my second season with Pat, I paid to go to Milan. And she put me on every single one of those shows. I was so grateful to have the opportunity to work with Pat. You cant buy that.

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After a while I was paid per show. And when I started doing [ad] campaigns with Pat, she started flying me and putting me up in a hotel that was actually comfortable. I was about the third or fourth assistant when I got to work on the Prada campaign with Pat and Steven Meisel. To be on set with Pat, Guido [Palau], Steven, Edward [Enninful]  that really humbles you. It teaches you set etiquette. Theres no fumbling. You have to have everything ready.

A lot of people on Pats team have specialties: They do brows or foundation or lips. Did you have one?

Pat liked the way I did the women of color. Im Puerto Rican, and the women in my family range from very pale to very dark. Pat is a woman of color and she really understands how to make women of color look great. Makeup can go ashy, or the colors cant read, or theyre too vibrant.

I worked on CoverGirl and Max Factor. Pat flew me out to L.A. to do the Janelle Monae ads for CoverGirl. Pat had to leave early so I worked the rest of the day with Janelle, doing touch-ups. Years later, she became my client.





Watch the #gorgeous @chrissyteigen on @jimmykimmellive tonight hair by @christianMarc #makeup by me #supermodel #ilovemyjob #chrissyteigen A photo posted by Vincent Oquendo (@makeupvincent) on Feb 23, 2015 at 6:31pm PST

Why did you leave Pats team?

While I was working for Pat, in 2013, I was asked to do Jessica Chastains makeup for the cover of W magazine. I thought there was no way they were going to confirm me. But they did.

Afterward, I called up Streeters [McGraths agency] and let them know that I did the cover and that I wasnt able to work with Pat as an assistant anymore on editorial shoots. It didnt make sense for me to assist on a shoot in book if Id done a cover. I told them Id work with her on shows if she needed me.

I asked other people what I should do, whether I should bring up the cover to Pat. They said, Dont rub it in her face. You dont want to throw your ego when youre assisting because its not about you.

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Two seasons went by and I wrote Pat a really nice email, thanking her for all the experience and time she gave to teaching me. I stayed a year after to train other assistants. One friend I recommended got one of the top assistant roles. I helped train her a little bit.

The first time I saw Pat after I left her, it was at a soiree that Kris Jenner threw in Paris. She gave me the biggest hug and I felt like Id come back home.

It was scary to leave; leaving, being respectful, and the financial aspect  its just scary all around. And I never wanted to upset her. It would be like making your mom cry. Why would you ever want to do that?

How do you feel now about your years with Pat?

I dont know where Id be. Id still be hustling. She taught me how she uses her hand. How she does the skin. It took me two, maybe three years to learn. I wanted to work harder to make her proud.

When I think of Pat McGrath, I think of one of the smartest business minds and her amazing energy. She knows how to make a woman look beautiful and feel beautiful.

This interview has been edited and condensed.





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CNN will air two back-to-back documentaries on Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on Monday night, both of which prominently feature the candidates adult children to offer sides of their political parents the public might not be aware of.

In Unfinished Business: The Essential Hillary Clinton, her daughter Chelsea reveals that she would bring boys to the White house and that she would talk to her mom  but not dad/POTUS Bill Clinton  before they arrived.

Her dad would sort of try to intimidate them but her mom already knew the scoop because she talked to her mom about boys, which is such an interesting insight into their relationship, CNN justice correspondent Pamela Brown told TheWrap.

Also Read: 6 Biggest Fox News Revelations From Gabe Sherman's Explosive Roger Ailes Expose

The two-hour documentaries, Unfinished Business: The Essential Hillary Clinton, hosted by Brown, and All Business: The Essential Donald Trump, hosted by CNN chief political analyst Gloria Borger kick, off on Labor Day, Sept. 4 at 8 p.m. ET.

Borger spoke with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trumps three eldest children, Donald Trump, Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump, while Brown sat down with Chelsea Clinton. Roughly 60 family members, childhood and lifelong friends, former colleagues and analysts were interviewed for the pair of documentaries, but both hosts believe it was the children who stood out.

Borger says that Trumps progeny are important parts of his campaign, not only as his surrogates, but also as advisors.

Also Read: Madonna Calls Donald Trump's Son 'P--y' for Killing Leopard

First of all, theyre amazing adult children. They are devoted to Donald Trump, Borger told TheWrap We talked a lot about him as a father. And, what was interesting, they always felt that their father made them understand the value of a dollar, and he was always available to them growing up, but on his turf  the office.

Borger explained that Ivanka shares how she used to call her father from school, and he would always take the call regardless of what important meeting was going on. Her brothers had a different type of relationship with the GOP nominee.

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The boys tell stories about going out on construction sites with him, and that the office was kind of their place to be with him. It was a very different kind of childhood, Borger said.

Also Read: HLN Apologizes for Censoring Pro-Donald Trump Shirt Worn by Baby-Saving Hero (Video)

Brown found Chelsea as someone who is very down to earth, very open and very real, especially for someone who has been in the public eye since childhood.

She did not come across to me as scripted, Brown said. I got the sense she really wanted to give me an honest assessment of her mother.

Chelsea explained that her mother can be embarrassing, pointing out the time that the Democratic nominee obsessed over the shelf paper inside her college dorm room. On the other hand, Hillary is often the less embarrassing parent when compared to Bill.

Also Read: Matt Lauer Was Not a Member of Clinton Global Initiative, Insiders Say

They both [went] to her softball games and her dad would be cheering her on before she even started playing. Her mom would cheer her on in a much more appropriate way, Brown said of Chelseas childhood.

Chelsea kind of brought us into the behind-the-scenes moments when Hillary was just a typical mom, Brown said.

Combined, Brown and Borger conducted more than 60 interviews for the pair of documentaries. Hillary participated in the Clinton version, while Trump opted to let his friends and family represent him. The documentarians waited to work on their respective films until it appeared each candidate was officially the partys nominee before diving in.

All Business: The Essential Donald Trump will re-air on Saturday, Sept. 10 at 8 p.m. ET on CNN, with Unfinished Business: The Essential Hillary Clinton following at 10 p.m. ET.

Related stories from TheWrap:

CNN Sets Premiere Date for 'This is Life With Lisa Ling' Season 3 (Exclusive Video)

CNN Nabs Ex-Fox News Political Analyst Kirsten Powers

BuzzFeed v CNN: How One Snarky Comment Ignited a Fight for the Future of News
The world's largest gorillas have been pushed to the brink of extinction by a surge of illegal hunting in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and are now critically endangered, officials said Sunday.

With just 5,000 Eastern gorillas (Gorilla beringei) left on Earth, the majestic species now faces the risk of disappearing completely, officials said at the International Union for Conservation of Nature's global conference in Honolulu.

Four out of six of the Earth's great apes are now critically endangered, "only one step away from going extinct," including the Eastern Gorilla, Western Gorilla, Bornean Orangutan and Sumatran Orangutan, said the IUCN in an update to its Red List, the world's most comprehensive inventory of plant and animal species.

Chimpanzees and bonobos are listed as endangered.

"Today is a sad day because the IUCN Red List shows we are wiping out some of our closest relatives," Inger Andersen, IUCN director general, told reporters.

War, hunting and loss of land to refugees in the past 20 years have led to a "devastating population decline of more than 70 percent," for the Eastern gorilla, said the IUCN's update.

One of the two subspecies of Eastern gorilla, known as Grauer's gorilla (G. b. graueri), has drastically declined since 1994 when there were 16,900 individuals, to just 3,800 in 2015.

Even though killing these apes is against the law, hunting is their greatest threat, experts said.

The second subspecies of Eastern gorilla -- the Mountain gorilla (G. b. beringei) -- has seen a small rebound in its numbers, and totals around 880 individuals.

According to John Robinson, a primatologist and chief conservation officer at the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Rwandan genocide sparked a disastrous series of events that impacted gorillas, too.

"The genocide pushed a lot of people out of Rwanda, a lot of refugees into eastern DRC, who moved into areas which were relatively unoccupied by human beings," he told AFP.

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"It was a situation that kind of unraveled," he said.

Some people hunted gorillas for bushmeat, while activities like mining and charcoal production and human settlement also infringed on gorillas' habitat.

"The people that moved into that part of DRC saw gorillas as a delicacy," Robinson said.

- 'Wrong direction' -

The IUCN Red List includes 82,954 species -- both plants and animals -- and undergoes a major update every four years.

Almost one third -- 23,928 -- are threatened with extinction, it said.

Compared with previous years, even more species are under threat.

Carlo Rondinini, mammal assessment coordinator at Sapienza University of Rome, said almost 28 percent of mammals are threatened with extinction, three percentage points more than in the previous mammal assessment in 2008.

"A takeaway point we would like to emphasize is we are not journeying in the right direction with respect to species conservation," said Andersen.

"We are losing species at a faster pace than we have ever done."

- Pandas improve -

There was good news for pandas, whose status changed from "endangered" to "vulnerable" due to intensive conservation efforts by China.

The Tibetan Antelope (Pantholops hodgsonii) has also improved, after protections helped it move from "endangered" to "near threatened" following a spate of commercial poaching for its valuable underfur, or shahtoosh, which is used to make shawls.

But the situation deteriorated for others, including the Plains Zebra (Equus quagga) which has been increasingly hunted for bushmeat and skins, and has moved from a species of "least concern" to "near threatened."

"The population has reduced by 24 percent in the past 14 years from around 660,000 to a current estimate of just over 500,000 animals," the IUCN said.

Illegal hunting and habitat loss also pushed three species of antelope found in Africa to "near threatened" status, including Bay Duiker (Cephalophus dorsalis), White-bellied Duiker (Cephalophus leucogaster) and Yellow-backed Duiker (Cephalophus silvicultor).

Among plants, the Red List highlighted the growing extinction threat to Hawaiian plants posed by invasive species, including pigs, goats, rats, slugs and non-native plants.

Some 38 of the 415 Hawaiian plant species were listed as extinct and four other species listed as extinct in the wild, meaning they only occur in cultivation.

A full 87 percent of native Hawaiian plants are threatened with extinction, it said.

Among the new entries to the Red List is the Psychedelic Rock Gecko (Cnemaspis psychedelica), which is listed as "endangered" and known only to exist on two small offshore islands in southern Vietnam and is highly, and illegally, sought for the commercial pet trade.
Riyadh (AFP) - Cross-border shelling from Yemen killed a Saudi woman on Sunday and wounded two other citizens, the kingdom's civil defence agency said.

The shelling at 2:00am local time (1100 GMT) in the southern Jazan region killed a woman and wounded a man and his son, according to the agency's spokesman Major Yehia al-Qahtani.

Saudi Arabia has lead a military coalition battling Iran-backed rebels in Yemen since March 2015 in support of Sanaa's internationally recognised government of President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi.

Attacks from Yemen on Saudi border areas have intensified since the suspension in early August of UN-brokered peace talks between the Shiite Huthi rebels and their allies and Yemen's government.

On Wednesday, a Saudi border guard was killed after shelling from Yemen hit a frontier post in Jazan.

And a week ago, similar attacks killed three children in Saudi Arabia and wounded nine other people.

Cross-border fire from Yemen has killed about 100 civilians and members of the security forces on the Saudi side since the war began.

In Yemen itself, more than 6,600 people, mostly civilians, have been killed since March 2015, according to the UN.
A boy was left dangling 9 metres above the ground from a chairlift after he slipped out of his seat at the Mount Hutt ski resort on New Zealands South Island on Saturday morning. The father held on to the boy for about a minute before staff and visitors caught the 11-year-old boy using a safety pad from a chairlift pole.

In an interview with Stuff.co.nz, the boys father Kevin Clulee said Jack sat down too early and slipped, missing his chair. Jack was unharmed and although he was shaken up he was back on the slopes later in the day. Credit: YouTube/Liam Whitman
From Cosmopolitan

1. It could lower his risk of prostate cancer. According to a study from Harvard Medical School, men who ejaculated more often reduced their risk of developing prostate cancer by 22 percent. Researchers still dont know why that is, but hey, if you needed one more reason to hit that tonight, having your guy avoid getting cancer is a pretty solid one.

2. Your chance of getting a cold goes way, way down. Researchers at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania found that people who had sex at least twice a week released more antigens like immunoglobulin A, which helps fight off colds and the flu, so just think of how healthy youd be if you had sex all seven days. Youd be basically immortal is what Im trying to say.

3. It keeps you looking super young and confident. In a study by Scottish researcher and clinical neuropsychologist David Weeks, judges guessed the ages of 3,500 European and American women and men, and found that the people whose age was underestimated by seven to 12 years were also reporting having sex three times a week, in comparison to the control group which was doing it twice a week. They also found these young-looking babes to be really comfortable and confident about their sexual identity. Win, win, win, win.

4. Itll help get rid of your heinous menstrual cramps. A study done in 2000 found that 9 percent of 1,900 women were masturbating solely to get rid of their menstrual cramps. Theres no way that many masturbating women are wrong.

5. It could make you crazy-fertile, if youre trying to conceive. A new study in Fertility and Sterility found that having sex every day could help prepare your immune system for pregnancy, which is critical in terms of increasing your chances of having a baby.

6. It lowers your blood pressure and your ability to stress out over basically nothing. A 2005 study found that people who had penile-vaginal intercourse (their words, not mine) had lower blood pressure and better stress responses than people who didnt (or those who masturbated or had non-penetrative sex), which in theory would mean they were also way more chill. Never a bad thing.

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7. Sex can actually make you a super genius. Separate studies by researchers at the University of Maryland and Konkuk University in Seoul, South Korea, found that mice and rats who had sex more often were also less stressed, and since stress makes your brain less able to function, that made them more intelligent thinkers.

So in theory, having sex every single day would make you fertile, live longer, never get sick, and have the brain of noted genius Beyonce. Basically, sex makes you a superhero. Thats my takeaway from this.



Follow Lane on Twitter and Instagram.

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HANGZHOU, China (Reuters) - An EU ruling that Apple Inc must pay a huge tax bill to Ireland was clearly based on facts and existing rules and was not a decision aimed against the United States, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Sunday. Last week, European Union antitrust regulators ordered Apple to pay up to 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion) in taxes to the Irish government after ruling that a special scheme to route profits through Ireland was illegal state aid. Apple's Chief Executive Tim Cook last week described the ruling as "total political crap", but France and Germany have come out to back Brussels on the decision. Juncker said EU Commission investigations on taxation had mainly targeted European companies. The decision comes amidst a coordinated global initiative to crack down on tax evasion by multinational companies, spearheaded by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The ruling against Apple has pushed the issue into the limelight and raised the risk of significant push-back from the United States, analysts say, where some lawmakers are saying the result represents a European encroachment on the U.S. potential tax base. In separate comments to Reuters on the sidelines of the G20 on Saturday, Pascal Saint-Amans, director of the OECD Center for Tax Policy and Administration, called Apple's tax planning "outrageous" but, like Juncker, said the decision was based on enforcing current regulations. Saint-Amans said he believed it would be unlikely to serve as a precedent for enforcement on future income earned by multinationals. Juncker's remarks appeared designed to reassure U.S. lawmakers, who have bickered for years over the treatment of off-shore income but now fear that the European Commission move would mean more profits earned by U.S. corporations flowing into European tax coffers. "This is not a decision against the United States of America," said Juncker. ($1 = 0.8966 euros) (Reporting by Nathaniel Taplin; Editing by Robert Birsel)
SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea's LG Electronics Inc said on Sunday it will aggressively invest in robots, seeking to capitalize on advancing artificial intelligence that may eventually lead to sophisticated machines performing everyday human tasks. LG, in a statement, said its appliances division is preparing the firm's entry into the robotics industry with the aim to develop products that will work closely with home appliances products such as refrigerators, washers and air conditioning units. "We will prepare for the future by aggressively investing in smart home, robots and key components and strengthen the home appliances business's capabilities," said Jo Seung-jin, head of LG's appliances business, in the statement. Advances in fields such as artificial intelligence and wireless communications are allowing for more sophisticated machines that can talk to each other via the internet and perform more complex tasks. Countries across the world are investing heavily in robotics in hopes to develop a new industry or cope with socioeconomic problems such as low birth rates or an ageing population by introducing machines which can serve humans as cooks, caretakers or laborers. LG did not elaborate on how much it plans to invest in its push or when it expects to launch robotic products, but the firm said it is exploring a variety of options through the combination of technologies including autonomous driving and artificial intelligence. (Reporting by Se Young Lee; Editing by Kim Coghill)
The California-based smart kitchen startup Innit has been cooking up an expanded master plan for itself this year thats brought it millions in new funding as well as major corporate partnerships, the newest being the big appliance maker Whirlpool.

Innit wants to essentially be the software layer that sits on top of a growing assortment of connected appliances and devices. Manufacturers like Whirlpool are increasingly turning to smaller software-focused companies to help bring smart kitchens to life  indeed, its why Innit announced a partnership recently with Whirlpool to enable advanced automated cooking on their kitchen appliances, starting with Jenn-Air brand WiFi connected wall ovens.

The Redwood City, Calif.-based startup also recently raised another $18 million in funding, bringing its total funding from private investors to $43 million.

Call it the Internet of Things That Help You Cook Better Food. Brett Dibkey, vice president and general manager of integrated business units at Whirlpool, told BGR the company is trying to speed up innovation on connectivity and sensors in its kitchen appliances.

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Were starting with digital recipes and WiFi oven integration, which can yield tremendous benefits for our consumers, he said. Were looking at driving additional innovation with Innit as part of our joint roadmap.

The Innit crew told us earlier this year they have pretty big ambitions for what they want to do in the kitchen, mentioning maybe having something like a refrigerator be aware of possible ingredients on hand and just suggesting meals for you. In response to Innits partnership with Whirlpool, Michael Wolf  creator of the Smart Kitchen Summit event  said companies like Innit have the potential to dramatically reshape food storage, preparation, recipe discovery and cooking in the consumer kitchen over the next decade.

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And, to be sure, its not just Innit.

CNET reported in recent days that Bosch is using a company called Drop thats based in San Francisco and Dublin to provide software for Boschs Series 8 ovens that lets users tweak things like cook times and temperature based on recipes you pick with an app. Drop is a company whose main products are a connected kitchen scale and a recipe app, and its integration with the Bosch ovens will start showing up in October.

Then there are companies like Samsung, which was scheduled to show off its smart refrigerator called the Family Hub at this years IFA tech show in Berlin that runs from Sept. 2 through Sept. 7. Among its sensors and other capabilities, the frig has cameras that photograph whats inside, measures how long the food has left and sends information like that to a mobile app. A display panel also shows similar information.

IKEA is in on the act, too. Its promoted its Concept Kitchen 2025, for which it collaborated with the design firm IDEO and a group of students from Lund and Eindhoven universities. One feature  a Table for Living, upon which someone can place a piece of food and cameras scan it, recognize it and can display things like recipes and a cooking timer right there on the table.

To be sure, this is a subset of a much larger trend. The research firm Gartner has said it thinks the average household could very well be packed with hundreds of connected devices in just five years.

Indeed, a Gartner report from the end of 2015 forecast that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide this year, up 30 percent from 2015, and will reach 20.8 billion by the end of the decade. 5.5 million new things, the firm noted, will get connected every day.

Obviously, thats great for a company like Innit, the growth of which will unfold in tandem with the rise of the Internet of Things. Longer term, Innit CEO Kevin Brown told BGR, the Innit connected food platform extends throughout the end-to-end cooking cycle, including food selection, storage, preparation and cooking. Innit is building a connected food ecosystem, and we're incredibly excited about the potential to rally the broader $21.5 trillion food industry to empower consumers in the kitchen.

Maybe what theyre proposing for the kitchen sounds like a kind of dystopian Mrs. Doubtfire to some people, wherein theyre enabling machines to tell us how to feed ourselves and take care of our meals. The potential is there, though, for improvement and efficiency in the kitchen that plenty of people should be able to appreciate  so long as that improvement doesnt come with a flat Hal-like voice scolding Im sorry, Dave, Im afraid I cant let you do that every time it catches us reaching for some junk food.

Trending right now:

See the original version of this article on BGR.com
From VR headsets and 360-degree cameras to AR glasses, tech giants are offering visitors a glimpse of reality-altering experience at the IFA electronics trade fair in Berlin (AFP Photo/Tobias Schwarz)

Berlin (AFP) - Always wanted to know what it would be like to watch a TV talkshow in the studio? Or zoom in on a particular player in a Bundesliga game rather than see a wideshot of the field?

The technology is there for such "live" 3D television experiences from the comfort of your home, according to the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, one of many exhibitors at Berlin's mega consumer electronics show IFA touting the latest in virtual and augmented reality technology.

From VR headsets and 360-degree cameras to AR glasses, tech giants like Samsung, Qualcomm and Acer are offering visitors a glimpse of reality-altering experience.

Don a pair of VR glasses at Fraunhofer's stand and you are plunged straight into a TV talkshow. Turn your head to the left to see the crew filming the presenter, while on the right, there are spectators sitting next to you and beyond, the producer with her clipboard. Look up and you see the studio lights.

With its OmniCam-360, the institute has filmed live events that can be replayed back in 3D mode by a viewer wearing VR goggles.

"You can feel the roar of the crowd in the stadium, or see what the television crew is doing, it's the live experience," said Fraunhofer HHI's spokesman Andre Groeger.

- The year for VR -

Goldman Sachs predicted earlier this year that the virtual reality and augmented reality markets will reach $80 billion (72 billion euros) by 2025.

The difference between the two is that while virtual reality blocks the user's view of the real world through special glasses, augmented reality blends real life with virtual reality.

At German optical giant Zeiss' stand, senior product manager Franz Troppenhagen is showing off the company's new VR headset to curious visitors.

"Since 2016, the market has really started to grow because people are now seeing the benefits of using VR," he told AFP.

One key factor is the increasing popularity of 360-degree cameras, which are allowing people to take 3D "panorama pictures while on vacation," he said, adding that the images can be easily shared with friends.

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- 'Technology not there yet' -

A few halls down, a man was waving his arms around, trying to catch avatars on a screen in front of him -- giving a glimpse of what a living room could look like once augmented reality invades.

Marek Maciejewski, product development director at Chinese TV maker TCL, said the AR game was just one example of how screens would be used in the future.

"In the next five to eight years, you will look at the screen, which will be on your wall, and you won't be able to tell if it is reality or the screen," he said.

If VR is seeing a boom in 2016, AR is only in its nascent stages of development, even if Pokemon Go has given a foretaste of the potential of the market.

The AR gaming app has been a runaway hit, sending millions of people across the world into the streets to catch digital monsters.

While many VR headsets can also be used with AR apps, industry experts believe that as the sectors mature, manufacturers will develop distinct gadgets for each area.

"In the medium term, the development of these two trends may converge," said Klaus Boehm of consultancy Deloitte, noting that new offerings such as Microsoft's HoloLens can offer VR on top of AR.

"But even for these mixed reality glasses, specific applications will be developed for new goggle types perfectly," he said.

And that spells more opportunities for the industry.

"AR is a market with a very high potential but the technology is not there yet, and apps are missing but this is something that will come," said Zeiss' Troppenhagen.

"I think if you come to IFA 5 years from now, you'll see very nice AR applications."
By John J. Metzler



BRATISLAVA, Slovakia The majestic Danube River connects Vienna, Bratislava and Budapest. Just 40 miles downriver from Vienna, the historic city of Bratislava rises above the Danubian plain. Still the turrets of Bratislava castle on the hill are more picturesque than forbidding butare usually missed in a journey between Vienna and Budapest. Yet here awaits a positive story, largely overlooked by the major media but very well known to foreign investors..



First a bit of history. Once part of the Austro/Hungarian Empire, after the First World War,



what is today's Slovakia formed part of old Czechoslovakia founded in 1918. Following the Second World War, Czechoslovakia fell under communist control and was part of the East Bloc.



Despite its relative proximity to Vienna, during the Cold War, Bratislava was largely forgotten and forsaken until 1989 when this epic year of freedom, bought Eastern Europe and with it Czechoslovakia, out of the cold.



In what was called the velvet divorce, Slovakia peacefully separated in 1993 from Czechoslovakia in a move many pundits thought imprudent, but were proven wrong. Bratislava is the capital of this country of five and a half million people (5.5 million).



Though certainly in the shadow of opulent Vienna or even Budapest, historically Bratislava, once known by its Hungarian name Pozsnoy, was a city of eleven royal coronations. During the Ottoman/Turkish occupation of Hungary, this city served as the seat of Royal Hungary. In June 1741, Maria Theresa, one of Austria's most powerful monarchs, was crowned at St. Martin's Cathedral.



Nonetheless Bratislava, this gem of a once thriving royal city, is not yet a tourist nexus.



From the dark days of the Cold War and socialist economy, since 1989 through hard work and focused policy, Slovakia has emerged as a multi-party democracy and an economic success story. Freedom House, the human rights watchdog group adds, "Slovakia has been among the most obvious economic success stories in post-communist Europe, and with economic growth topping 3 percent in 2015, it is one of the fastest growing economies in the European Union (EU). "



According to the media monitor Reporters Without Borders, Slovakia ranks number 12 globally in press freedoms out of 180 countries; just behind Austria but ahead of Canada and the USA.



The Washington based Heritage Foundation think tank adds, "A prudent regulatory framework for the financial sector combined with competitive tax rates has fueled Slovakia's transition into a flexible and vibrant market-based economy with considerable resilience. Openness to foreign trade and investment has positioned the country as one of the most attractive destinations for foreign direct investment in Europe."



For a number of years already, the country has become home to high profile manufacturing industries. Korean firms such as Samsung produce widescreen TV for the European market.



Though Slovakia was traditionally known for its heavy industries during the socialist era, the country has in a sense reinvented itself with far reaching market reforms to attract investors.



Surprisingly Slovakia is one of the world's largest auto producers with Germany's Volkswagen, the French PSA Peugeot Citroen and South Korea's Kia Motors as major manufacturers. Over a quarter million people are employed in the automotive industry. Labor costs are far below those of Germany and France.



American firms such as Dell, HP, IBM and Microsoft are well established in the computer and IT sector. Research & Development and computer security centers thrive and form a vital element in Slovakia's rich high-tech landscape.



Two way trade between Slovakia and the USA reached $2.7 billion in 2015.



Last year Slovakia attracted $479 million in foreign investment mostly from Europe and East Asia. Foreign Direct Investment into Slovakia increased to $2,6 billion in the first half of 2016.



Given that Slovakia is a member of the European Union since 2004, as well as in the Euro currency zone, the country is well poised for intra-European trade. Equally, geography and transport routes favor Slovakia which is located as a transit hub between West and East. However, there's a dangerous dependence on Russian energy supplies.



On the international front Slovakia is a member of both the European Union and NATO, a vital insurance policy for the country. Though currently holding the rotating Presidency of the European Union, Slovakia's tenure has been overshadowed by the British BREXIT crisis. Slovakia has provided troops to the NATO mission in Afghanistan as well as to UNpeacekeeping missions.Slovak Foreign Minister Miroslav Lajcek is currently a candidate for the post of UN Secretary General.



While the mighty Danube binds Slovakia into central Europe, the high Tatra mountains exemplify the spirit of this small country to excel and reach for the heights.



John J. Metzler is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues.




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FREMONT  Authors of a historical fiction crime anthology set in Indiana will bring some tales to the Fremont Public Library.

Some of the writers of the Speed City Indiana Chapter Sisters in Crime short story anthology, Decades of Dirt: Murder, Mystery and Mayhem will share their works at a book signing 1-3 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 17, at Fremont Public Library, 1004 W. Toledo St.

Speed City Sisters is a group celebrating Indianas bicentennial with its Decades of Dirt Bicentennial Speaker Program. It is endorsed as an Indiana Bicentennial Commission Legacy Project.

Dina (Ferree) started it at Carnegie (Public Library of Steuben County), said Fremont Public Librarys Anne Abernathey, young adult and adult services. They like to visit libraries, but one in each county. It started out as a collaboration between Carnegie and us.

Decades of Dirts book cover describes it as a Native American mystic solving a murder, a foiled presidential assassination attempt, a violent case of mistaken identity and the evils of racial discrimination and 11 other compelling short stories.

The genre is growing in popularity. Cheryl Shore, Indiana chapter president, said she likes it because of the emphasis on plot development.

I like mystery crime writing because of the complexity of the plot (compared to other genres) and the drive toward the truth and justice. Like many mystery readers, I want my endings to tie up most of the loose ends generated by the story and have any evils deeds exposed and/or penalized, Shore said in an email.

Three authors with works in the anthology will appear at Fremont Public Library: N. W. Campbell, author of Tumbling Crows, M.B. Dabney, author of Miss Hattie Mays Secret and co-editor of Decades of Dirt and Claudia Pfeiffer, author of A Piece of Pie.

Dabney, Decades of Dirt co-editor and author was an award-winning journalist with United Press International and the Associated Press. He switched to crime writing.

This is a real challenge. (Stories) are personal and Im in them and more of a part of them, Dabney said. Stephen King said, If you dont know something, you make it up. Thats fiction because I was a reporter for so long, I know how cops work.

Dabney is vice president of Speed Sisters in Crimes Indiana chapter. It is a national organization of 3,600 members. The goal of the organization is to foster crime writing by women, Dabney said, adding men also belong to the chapter. We do a good job in helping people understand the genre of crime writing.

Like any writer, Dabney said he focuses on fulfilling the readers needs.

My hope is they enjoy it. As a fiction writer, my first audience is me. I want someone to be entertained and informed. I dont want to waste their time, Dabney said.

Campbell will also come to Fremont. He has been a technical writer and is a retired United Methodist pastor. He is an Ivy Tech Community College adjunct instructor.

The reader brings hopes, dreams, worries, goals and life experience to the act of reading. As we read, we hold the writers words up to the light of our experience, Campbell said. Some of the words offer familiar truths  Thats what I want to do when I write  create a world my readers find intriguing and want to explore.

The third author who will come to Fremont Public Library, Pfeiffer, has her first published work in the anthology. She wrote in her youth and teens then quit for nearly 50 years to work in her husbands law office, raise her family and paint landscapes. She said she likes the puzzle element to her type of writing.

I love puzzles and mystery offers those. Its also a challenge to create these puzzles and difficult to make them fit the situations where they need to occur. Its hard to develop clues and keep them hidden from the reader until the appropriate time. So I hope the reading is as interesting for my audience as the writing of the novel is for me, Pfeiffer said.

Speed City Sisters other three anthologies are Racing Can Be Murder, Bedlam at the Brickyard and Hoosiers, Hoops and Hijinks.

In October, Speed Sisters will release the anthology, The Fine Art of Murder, that will be available at amazon.com.

To learn more about Speed City Sisters, visit speedcitysistersincrime.org.

For more details, call the Fremont Public Library at 495-7157.
MINNEAPOLIS  Executives at Lifetouch Inc. like to describe their $1.5 billion company as the best-kept secret in the Twin Cities. To millions of parents and students, however, the brand is a household name.

The company is far and away the nations largest producer of school photos and IDs. It also publishes yearbooks, operates more than 600 portrait studios at J.C. Penney and Target and is the biggest player in the church directories market.

In one form or another, Lifetouchs photos find their way to the wallets, refrigerators, bookshelves and picture frames of more than 48 million homes across North America each year.

But the digital age has upended the once-structured photography industry, and even market leaders like Lifetouch are feeling pressure.

Inexpensive cameras, easy-to-use editing software and quality off-the-shelf printers have leveled the playing field in a fragmented industry dominated by mom-and-pop shops and solo operators.

Led by a new chief executive for the first time in nearly 20 years, the employee-owned Lifetouch is striving to modernize and stay on trend in a world where people prefer the instant gratification of selfies over staid family portraits that once hung proudly over fireplaces.

Most of our business historically has been done on paper fliers, said CEO Michael Meek, who stepped into the top job in July after serving as president and chief operating officer for 2  years.

Today, the opportunities are around digital sharing, digital storage and digital enjoyment.

Meek aims to move the company from one built around capturing images into one he describes as a memory solution. The future, he believes, lies in taking the companys four distinct business lines out of their silos so consumers can buy, store, curate and archive Lifetouch images, whether they were taken at school, church, a retail studio or anywhere else.

Lifetouch took the first bold step toward that end in May when it acquired iMemories, an Arizona startup that transforms old photos, slides, home movies and audio into a modern digital format and stores it in the cloud. It has kiosks in 8,000 Walgreens stores.

Were like this massive Swiss Army knife that takes all these crazy decades of content that keeps changing because technology keeps changing, said iMemories co-founder Mark Rukavina.

Rukavina said iMemories has a broader offering than services such as YouTube, which is about videos, or Flickr, which stores digital photos. iMemories pulls together photos and videos so that they can be shared on social media or viewed on any computer or mobile device.

While the acquisition gives Lifetouch a new avenue to reach consumers, it was the untapped potential of iMemories proprietary software, e-commerce platform and established R&D team that convinced Meek the deal could become the most transformative in company history.

Since its founding in 1936 by a couple of traveling salesmen, Lifetouch has used acquisitions and technological advances to further its business ends. It expanded beyond school photos in 1983 by purchasing a company that operated portrait studios in J.C. Penney stores. Lifetouch moved into the preschool market in 1990 and launched a church directory division in 1995, both through acquisitions. Lifetouch snapped up the remaining assets of once-formidable portrait studio rival Olan Mills in 2011, having bought its school business in 1999.

The company has pushed in-house innovations in photography as well. At its sprawling headquarters campus in suburban Minneapolis, a hallway is devoted to portraits of patent holders. Its most famous invention, the Micro-Z camera, revolutionized school portraiture in the 1980s and is part of the Smithsonians permanent history collection.

With as many as 30,000 employees during its peak school portrait season, Lifetouch is one of the nations five largest employee-owned companies, according to the Washington, D.C.-based ESOP Association. Its heft makes it an influential lobbyist for tax and business policies that benefit its ownership model, and executives nurture strong ties with Minnesotas congressional delegation.

Profit figures arent public, but the company doesnt shy away from rewarding workers. At its 80th celebration in July, Lifetouch turned its parking lot into a fairground, with a Ferris wheel, fireworks and performances by Sheryl Crow, Aaron Neville, Charlie Puth and Minnesotas Chris Hawkey. Four employees scored $25,000 each in an annual photography contest.

Educators, nonprofits and other business partners credit its employee-ownership model for building an unusually loyal and community-minded workforce. Anyone who works 700 hours a year qualifies for the plan. At retirement, the company buys back shares at current market rates.

When you talk about, Were in this together, its true, said Meek, who previously spent more than 20 years in retail, including stints with Macys, Dayton Hudson and Nordstrom. If you have to cut expenses or make adjustments, were making them in the interest of us all  not some guy on Wall Street or some wealthy family.

Lifetouch donates $100 million each year in cash and in-kind services mostly to charities related to childrens development, education and safety, said spokesman Kelvin Miller.

Since 2004 it has worked with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to provide photo IDs for children at more than 35,000 schools. The SmileSafe program provides law enforcement a clear, current photo of the children, considered the most essential tool if a child goes missing.

Coming up with one, when parents are frantic, isnt as easy as you think, said Marita Rodriguez of the Alexandria, Va.-based nonprofit, who added that the cards have aided the safe return of children in 24 states.

Sara Sternberger, who runs Free Arts Minnesota, said Lifetouch donates $85,000 to her organization each year, a vital 14 percent of her annual budget. Lifetouch officials have assured her that should donation plans change, she would get a few years advance notice  a gesture she said illustrates the companys quiet but sincere commitment to community service.

Its in the DNA of Lifetouch that they believe its important to give back, Sternberger said. Every employee will tell you that.

As Lifetouch sets out on its ninth decade as the undisputed industry leader  its closest competitor, CPI Corp. declared bankruptcy in 2013  Meek said there is plenty of room to grab market share in every business unit.

The outlook for the $10.5 billion photography industry is challenging but far from bleak, according to a report by IBISWorld, which forecasts a 6.6 percent rise in sales this year as consumer confidence rises.

Lifetouch controls about 40 percent of the market for school photos, a relatively stable industry that accounts for well over half of Lifetouchs revenue. Although Jostens, also headquartered in suburban Minneapolis, has the corner on high school yearbooks, Lifetouch leads in publishing the books for grades K-8.

Pressure is strongest on Lifetouchs portrait studio division, which is more tied to discretionary income and changing consumer tastes. Lifetouch operates studios in 475 J.C. Penneys and 140 Targets, but in the past five years has closed more than 40 underperforming studios in Target and about two dozen at J.C. Penney.

As Lifetouch strives to stay relevant, observers and some of the companys partners notice a surprising lack of racial and gender diversity in the C-suite, particularly at a time when the nation  particularly schools  are becoming more diverse. The CEO and leaders of all five business units are male, and the board of directors includes just one woman.

Lifetouch officials said the company is working to increase diversity and pointed out that women lead its human resources and accounting departments.

Paul Harmel, the newly retired CEO who spent 40 years with the company, said hes losing no sleep over the companys future under Meek, whom he described as a practical decisionmaker and strategic thinker.

Whether the output is digital or the output is film, the mission hasnt changed, said Harmel, who will remain as board chairman. How you deliver it has changed. People still want their memories protected and presented in a way that makes them feel good about themselves and their loved ones.
Pizza. In many ways, it is the perfect food.

It contains all the main food groups. Its almost as delicious cold as it is hot, but not really. It is equally loved by the snootiest of gourmands (Id like one with wood-grilled octopus and burrata, please) and the most average of Joes (Gimme a slice with pepperoni). Kids adore it, adults crave it and college students basically live on it.

According to one survey, more than half of all millennials have taken a picture of pizza and posted it online.

Beginning with three basic ingredients  crust, sauce and cheese  pizzas have developed a near-infinite number of variations.

And I dont just mean the now-familiar Thai-duck pizza, the Canadian-bacon-and-pineapple pizza or even the Brussels-sprouts-and-pancetta pizza. Im talking about pizza with smoked reindeer meat, which you can get in Iceland. Im talking about kangaroo-and-emu pizza, which of course is available in Australia. Im talking about baked beans pizza, which is a British thing.

Actually, baked beans pizza sounds kind of good. And I wouldnt turn up my nose at smoked reindeer pizza, but I wouldnt go to Iceland to try it.

Pizza is available on practically every corner, and a phone call or app brings it to your house in a half-hour or less. So why would you even think of making it yourself?

For one, homemade pizza is better than nine-tenths of the stuff that is commercially available. And it is almost certainly going to surpass anything that is delivered to your door. The time it takes for delivery and the aroma of a cardboard box take their toll on even the best of pizzas.

You can customize a homemade pizza to be exactly the way you like it, and it is less expensive than store-bought pizza.

If you dont make the crust yourself, it is faster, too.

But try making the crust yourself. You can buy premade crusts that are just fine  and some that are better than fine  and many pizzerias will sell you their dough, which is better still. But there is something special about a crust you make yourself. Call it a pride of craftsmanship.

Though the crust I make is simple, it has a nice, robust flavor that complements the toppings rather than competes with them. It makes the perfect backdrop for everything that is to come.

Particularly the sauce. The crust may be the part of a pizza that you notice the most, but the heart of a pizza is its sauce.

Some people like their sauce sweet. I dont. Some like it spiced with a lot of herbs. I dont. Some go the other way and want it bland, the better to focus on the toppings. I dont.

A few years ago, my wife and I experimented to try to create the best homemade pizza sauce we could make. The one we came up with is, to our taste, just right. Its got enough flavor to stand up to cheese and crust and toppings, but it does not overwhelm.

One of the secrets of our sauce is stolen directly from Mario Batali, who makes his out of nothing but Pomi brand strained tomatoes right out of the box. That feels a little bit like cheating (they charge money for that?), but the Pomi strained tomatoes do make an excellent beginning.

So I start with the boxed strained tomatoes and add a bit of oregano, garlic and crushed red pepper. But the other two ingredients make our sauce truly stand out.

The first is shredded Parmesan cheese stirred right into the sauce, which gives it extra heft and a shock of salt that is very much needed. And the other is a single anchovy fillet.

I know that many people roll their eyes and make little gagging sounds at the very thought of anchovies, but this sauce does not leave even a hint of anchovy flavor. You wont even know it is there. Even so, it adds an essential complexity to the sauce that really brings it to life.

Once you have the crust and the sauce, all you need is the cheese. I have a tip about the cheese, too. This one comes from my favorite pizza at pretty much my favorite restaurant: Put the cheese under the sauce.

Self-proclaimed pizza aficionados will object. I dont care. Its better this way. The cheese keeps the sauce from making the crust soggy, and the sauce keeps the cheese from browning or burning.

Its the best way to keep the perfect food perfect.

Basic pizza dough

1 package active dry yeast

1 cup warm water, around 110 degrees

Pinch granulated sugar

1  teaspoons salt

1  tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for coating bowl

2  to 3 cups all-purpose flour, divided

Cornmeal, optional

In a large bowl, mix yeast, water and sugar, and stir well to combine. Set aside until foamy, about 5-10 minutes. Add the salt, olive oil and 1  cups of the flour, and mix well to thoroughly combine. Add another 1  cups flour and mix well with your hands, working to incorporate the flour little by little. The dough should be slightly sticky to the touch.

Transfer dough to a lightly floured work surface and knead for 5-7 minutes, adding additional flour as necessary to form a smooth and elastic dough that is not sticky. Transfer to a lightly oiled 2- or 3-quart bowl and turn to coat with oil. Cover with a damp towel and let rise in a warm place until doubled in size, about 1 hour.

Divide dough into 2 equal portions and form into balls. Use immediately or wrap individually in plastic wrap and refrigerate for up to one day. Makes 2 pizzas.

Best pizza sauce

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 anchovy fillet

1 garlic clove, minced

 cup shredded Parmesan cheese

1 cup Pomi brand (or similar) strained tomatoes or tomato puree

1 teaspoon dried oregano

Pinch crushed red pepper

Heat oil in heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium-low heat. Add anchovy and cook, stirring frequently, until it dissolves. Add garlic and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute. Do not allow the garlic to burn.

Add strained tomatoes, oregano, crushed red pepper and cheese. Raise the heat to medium and simmer 12-15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Taste for seasonings and add salt or pepper if needed. Makes about 1  cups.

Assemble the pizza

1 ball pizza dough, or a premade crust

4 to 6 ounces mozzarella cheese

Pizza sauce

Toppings of your choice

Heat oven to 500 degrees and place a pizza stone or upside-down baking sheet on the bottom rack. If the pizza dough has just been made, cover with a damp towel and allow to rest 15 minutes.

On a lightly floured work surface, roll out pizza dough into a circle 12 to 14 inches in diameter and about 1/8-inch thick. Transfer dough to a pizza peel or the back of a cookie sheet that has either been sprinkled with cornmeal or covered with a piece of parchment paper. If using parchment paper, trim with scissors until it is just barely bigger than the dough.

Use a cheese slicer or vegetable peeler to slice the cheese very thin. Completely cover the dough with a single layer of cheese, leaving only a small circle of dough near the edge. Ladle about 1 cup of the sauce in a spiral pattern over the dough and use the bottom of the ladle to spread it evenly across the pizza; use more sauce if necessary to cover the cheese. Top sparingly with the toppings of your choice.

Slide the dough onto the preheated pizza stone or baking sheet and bake until crispy and golden brown, about 12-18 minutes, depending on the toppings and the thickness of the crust. Remove from the oven with a metal peel or spatula, discard the parchment paper (if using) and serve immediately.

Makes 1 pizza (2 servings). Per serving (no toppings): 367 calories; 24 grams fat; 11 grams saturated fat; 52 milligrams cholesterol; 24 grams protein; 16 grams carbohydrate; 7 grams sugar; 3 grams fiber; 679 milligrams sodium; 1,035 milligrams calcium.
Every few months, a pilot somewhere in the world is stopped before a jet takes off because of suspicion of drunkenness. It makes headlines and gives nervous travelers another reason to avoid flying.

Despite their notoriety, such cases are extremely rare.

Each day, there are 90,000 flights around the world, carrying more than 8 million people. The overwhelming majority of pilots in those cockpits are sober.

Pilots take being fit to fly seriously and act accordingly, says former US Airways pilot John M. Cox, now CEO of the consulting firm Safety Operating Systems.

Sometimes, though, there are occasional lapses. The latest incident occurred just more than a week ago when two United Airlines pilots were pulled from their flight  and arrested  as they prepared to fly 141 passengers from Scotland to the United States.

But dont think this will end the pilots careers.

United has removed both men from flying duties  for now.

Many pilots caught drinking on the job have later returned to the skies.

The United pilots, Paul Brady Grebenc, 35, and Carlos Roberto Licona, 45, were released on bail Monday. Grebenc, from Columbus, Miss., and Licona, from Humble, Texas, made no plea and are free until a later court hearing.

The Federal Aviation Administration has a process that allows recovering alcoholics back in the cockpit if they pass a medical evaluation and stay clean during monitoring for the next five years. Since the union-backed program started in the 1970s, about 5,300 pilots  more than 100 a year  have gone through rehab and regained their licenses, according to a program official.

U.S. rules prohibit pilots from flying if they have a blood-alcohol content of .04 percent or higher. (The United Kingdom has a stricter limit of .02 percent.)

By comparison, the legal threshold to drive a car in the U.S. is twice that level at 0.08 percent.

Pilots must also wait several hours after having a drink to fly. The FAA has a saying for this: Eight hours from bottle to throttle.

Last year, random alcohol tests were given to 12,480 U.S. pilots. Only 10 failed.

Pilots in the U.S. and most of Europe are only tested randomly or if there is a suspicion that they are drunk. There are also random drug tests.

Fliers might take solace in knowing that the danger from drunk drivers is much greater. Each year, about 10,000 people are killed on American highways because of drunk drivers  almost a third of all driving fatalities  according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

But there is a mental disconnect between statistics when it comes to flying. Theres something unsettling to many fliers about being buckled into a metal tube, racing through the air near the speed of sound without being able to see who is at the controls.

If you are in a taxi and you think your driver is drunk, you ask them to pull over and get out, says John DiScala, who runs the travel advice site JohnnyJet.com . You cant ask a pilot to pull over.

Since the 1970s, airline pilots have had a confidential program in which they can be treated for alcohol abuse and return to the cockpit. Those in the program, called the Human Intervention Motivation Study or HIMS, must be evaluated by an FAA-certified doctor. The pilot is interviewed monthly by a flight manager and a committee of other pilots. Because of the risk of relapse, monitoring usually continues for several years after a pilot returns to flying.

Paul Hayes, director of air safety for aviation consultancy firm Ascend, says that it is extremely rare that alcohol is a factor in an accident.

But there have been a handful of crashes tied to drinking.

In 1977, the American pilot of a Japan Air Lines DC-8 cargo jet was drunk when he crashed the plane during takeoff from Anchorage. All five people onboard  all crew  died.

In September 2008, an Aeroflot flight within Russia crashed on its landing approach, killing 88 people. One of the factors, according to investigators, was that the pilot became disorientated as a result of his drunkenness.

Back in the U.S., there are a handful of cases where pilots were caught actually flying passengers drunk.

A JetBlue Airways pilot was charged with flying two flights between New York and Orlando in 2015 while under the influence. An Alaska Airlines pilot was charged with being drunk on two 2014 flights between Oregon and California.

The most famous case though might be a 1990 Northwest Airlines flight from Fargo, N.D., to Minneapolis.

The three pilots had been out at a bar the prior night. One had more than 15 rum and colas while the other two shared at least six pitchers of beer. Their flight left at 6:30 a.m. but two of them had been out at the bar until 10:30 p.m., the other staying until 11:30 p.m.

The plane landed safely; the pilots ultimately ended up in prison.
WINONA, Minn.  Winona police arrested four men after a pair of armed robberies in the city late Friday night.

Just after 10 p.m. Friday, the Winona Police Department responded to Broadway and Johnson streets for a complaint by two people claiming to having been robbed at gunpoint by a group of men, according to the department. The victims said the men pointed guns at them and demanded their belongings. The victims were able to describe the men and their vehicle.

Then at 10:22 p.m., officers responded to anther complaint of an armed robbery, this time near Lake Boulevard and Clarks Lane. This victim said they were walking when they were approached by two men. The victim said one of the men was holding an object the victim thought was a gun, according to the department.

Just after 11 p.m., working off the witness descriptions, officers found the vehicle matching the description and pulled it over near West Sarnia Street west of Huff Street. Four men inside were arrested without incident, and a handgun and items belonging to the first victims were found, according to the department.

Several law-enforcement agencies assisted in the search and arrest, including the Winona County Sheriffs Department, Goodview Police Department, and Minnesota State Patrol, with the Winona Area Ambulance Service and Winona Fire Department standing by.

Winona police on Saturday did not formally release the names of the men arrested.

Xzaviar Dominique Rian Aune, 18, and Alex Boyd, 37, were both arrested and booked in the Winona County Jail early Saturday morning, each on first-degree aggravated robbery charges, according to online jail records.

Two other men were booked on third-degree drug charges Saturday morning, according to the records.

Winona police said they believe there is no threat to public safety at this time.

The investigation into the incidents is ongoing.
Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson and his Democratic opponent, Russ Feingold, both say theyre steeped in national security know-how.

Each candidate also claims his opponent is as misguided on the issue as he is savvy.

Johnson and Feingold, the leading candidates for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin, both have credentials to bolster their claims of being knowledgeable and influential on national security.

Johnson is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security comittee and serves on the Foreign Relations committee. During his three terms in the Senate, Feingold served on the foreign relations and intelligence committees. He went on to work as a special envoy for the U.S. State Department after leaving the Senate.

But while both candidates have resumes to bolster claims they know how to keep Americans safe, they differ sharply on how they propose to do it.

Johnson, R-Oshkosh, has been among the most vocal in his party in calling for sending U.S. troops to Iraq and Syria as part of a coalition to fight the Islamic State terror group, also known as ISIS.

Feingold, D-Middleton, who was a vocal opponent of the Iraq War under former president George W. Bush, strongly opposes putting U.S. boots on the ground in Iraq and Syria, saying it would be counterproductive. He calls for a more targeted approach of taking out ISIS leaders and cutting off their resources and funding.

The candidates also are at odds on intelligence gathering. Johnson has hammered Feingold for being the only U.S. senator to vote against the USA PATRIOT Act when it was enacted in 2001.

Feingold has said the measure infringed on Americans civil liberties and that he remains proud to have opposed it. He has said there are better ways to improve U.S. intelligence gathering, such as increasing funding for intelligence agencies and recruiting more spies, especially in places where terror groups operate.

National security has become perhaps the most prominent issue in the campaign ad war in the Senate race. Johnson and his allied groups have attacked Feingold as weak on national security and as a hypocrite whose actions contradicted his rhetoric.

Feingold has returned fire, saying hes the only candidate with a plan to keep Americans safe.

In a Wisconsin State Journal interview last week, Feingold said its unfortunate the issue has become so politicized.

To me, going after these groups should be a point of unity, Feingold said.

He essentially has no plan

Since entering the Senate in 2011, Johnson has been a constant critic of President Barack Obamas foreign policy. During this campaign he has sought to link Obama to Feingold, including on the fact that both support closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Johnson told the Wisconsin State Journal in a recent interview that hes more frightened than ever about ISIS. The group has carried out terror attacks worldwide while controlling territory in portions of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Libya.

They represent a larger threat, a growing threat. Im more concerned than I was 22, 23, 24 months ago, Johnson said.

But Feingold said Johnson, despite his committee leadership post, has no overarching blueprint for U.S. national security. He also criticizes Johnson for, like other congressional Republicans, declining to vote to authorize President Barack Obama to use military force against the Islamic State.

Here he is, the chairman of the homeland security committee, and he essentially has no plan, Feingold said.

Feingolds plan calls for increasing efforts to take out the leaders of terror groups, increasing funding for intelligence agencies and recruiting more spies, and ramping up efforts to cut off funds, oil supplies and armaments flowing to ISIS.

Johnsons approach relies on conventional military force. He has said the U.S. should organize a global military coalition, in tandem with European and Arab countries, to enter Iraq and Syria, defeat the Islamic State and create safe zones for refugees fleeing violence in those regions.

Johnson once cited a possible number of 100,000 troops for such a coalition. But he since has said hes not sure how many troops should be part of the coalition; that, he said, is up to military experts.

Despite the unpopularity of the Iraq War, Johnson said Americans can be convinced its wise to send U.S. troops back into Iraq.

You need leadership, Johnson said in the State Journal interview. You need leaders to convey why its important.

Feingold said Johnson is returning to the same flawed approach that led the U.S. into the Iraq War.

Sen. Johnson is using the Iraq approach, which is, lets send in a bunch of troops and see what happens, Feingold said.

Senator Tough Guy

The campaign ad wars in the Senate race continue to focus on national security. The most recent example came last week, when a pro-Johnson super PAC, Let America Work, released a TV ad mocking Feingold as Senator Tough Guy.

During Johnsons Senate tenure, one of his most widely publicized moments came in a 2013 hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations committee regarding the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. In that hearing, Johnsons questioning of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, who was Secretary of State at the time of the attack, prompting her to respond What difference, at this point, does it make?

Johnson said he also has used his committee posts, particularly his Homeland Security Committee chairmanship, to shepherd key national security proposals into law.

Examples include a measure overhauling the U.S. visa waiver program, which allows certain foreign citizens to travel into the country without a visa. Among the changes in Johnsons measure were preventing citizens of Iraq, Syria, and certain other nations from using the program.

Another measure ushered into law, with help from Johnson, on a bipartisan basis required federal agencies to adopt cyber-security measures.

Outside the Middle East, Johnson said hes most worried about Chinas presence in southeast Asia, particularly in the South China Sea, and what he described as the menace of Russia in eastern Europe.

Asked if hes troubled by links between his partys presidential nominee, Donald Trump, and Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin, Johnson said he is not. Trump has publicly praised Putin, and Trumps former campaign chairman was closely linked to a top Putin ally, Viktor Yanukovych, in Ukraine.

Johnson said the departure of the former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, from Trumps campaign last month resolved the issue. Manafort left amid heightened scrutiny of his extensive work on behalf of Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian president.

Feingold agreed that Russias actions in Eastern Europe and Chinas in southeast Asia should concern the U.S. He said instability in Latin America and in Europe, post-Brexit vote, also should be monitored.
BLACK RIVER FALLS  Jackson County Highway Commissioner Randy Anderson would like to see about 12 miles of county roads repaved each year.

The local transportation system needs it: Nearly one-fifth of the countys 231 miles of highway are rated a three on a 10-point scale. Another large portion comes in at five or six.

But the most the county can afford is 2.3 miles in projects a year because local budget constraints and declining assistance from the state.

Really, I would say, at best, our system would be rated fair, said Anderson, whos been Jackson Countys commissioner since 2009. And it could even learn toward the poor side.

We have some areas that need immediate attention that are not going to get immediate attention because we dont have the funding. Its not good for the motoring public right now. We absolutely need an infusion of funding so we can at least get our roads so that we would be set at at least fair condition.

Jackson County has joined other county and local governments across the state in urging Wisconsin legislators to Just Fix It, a Transportation Development Association-developed campaign aimed at pushing for feasible ways to increase state aid to local governments to pay for needed repairs and projects.

County highway departments receive general transportation aid from the state  funds largely derived from registration fees and gas taxes  but its money that has flatlined at best during the past five years, Anderson said.

Weve got a political party that says no new taxes, and that doesnt work here, Jackson County Board Chairman Ray Ransom said. It looks like, going into 2017, we could do something with registration fees or add some gas tax  gas (price) is predicted to go down.

What a great chance  nobody wants any new taxes, but we need to understand these roads arent going to fix themselves.

The issues arent exclusive to the county highway system. Town officials also are grappling with limited ability to complete needed projects. The town of Garfield has been forced to convert back to some gravel-surface roadways because of financial limitations.

Garfield, like the county, has been able to conduct some major projects because of grants and funding from organizations such as the Ho-Chunk Nation, but otherwise has limited ability, said longtime town chairman Steve Dickinsen.

Its been such a struggle to try to get anywhere. We made some headway about 15 years ago, and its hard to go backwards, said Dickinsen, who also serves as District 2 state director for the Wisconsin Towns Association. If it werent for grants, there wouldnt be any kind of any major maintenance that goes on.

The county is projected to receive about $810,000 in state general transportation aid for 2017 and plans to conduct 2.3 miles of resurfacing on Hwy. FF  one of the roads rated in poor condition with several potholes and alligator cracking.

Last year the county utilized an extra $1 million in county fund balance and another $850,000 in Ho-Chunk Nation assistance to repair 9.7 miles of Highway P, a project needed for years.

This year, the county only had enough to conduct three miles of work  1.6 miles on Hwy. G and 1.4 miles on Hwy. X, Anderson said.

The projected 2.3 miles of feasible yearly projects puts the county on a 100-year replacement cycle.

Its been deteriorating. We havent had a real increase in the county tax levy for highway  for over 10 years, said Jackson County Board Supervisor Jeff Amo, whos been chairman of the highway committee for the past six years. So were just doing less and less and less. Now its getting back to the point where its at 2.3 miles. That 100-year resurfacing schedule is not something to look forward to. Thats not going to work.

State Rep. Chris Danou, whose Assembly District encompasses a large portion of Jackson County, said hes heard transportation concerns from constituents and highway department officials from across district. He said he hopes to see a priority change in the Legislature to focus more on rural infrastructure and how to develop funding to support it, rather than initiatives such as an agriculture and manufacturing tax credit that cut millions in tax revenues.

Were really at a point right now in Wisconsin where weve got to take a hard look at want we do to maintain and improve rural infrastructure, he said. Thats the fundamental problem  theres a political unwillingness to do the right thing here.

Were really at a point right now in Wisconsin where weve got to take a hard look at want we do to maintain and improve rural infrastructure. Thats the fundamental problem  theres a political unwillingness to do the right thing here. State Rep. Chris Danou
LOS ANGELES  A NASA spacecraft has captured the best views of Jupiter yet, revealing turbulent storms in the north pole.

Jupiters northern polar region is stormier than expected and appears bluer than the rest of the planet, said mission chief scientist Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.

This image is hardly recognizable as Jupiter, he said in a statement.

NASA on Friday released a batch of close-up pictures taken by the Juno spacecraft last week when it flew within 2,500 miles of Jupiters dense cloud tops.

During the rendezvous that took Juno from pole to pole, the solar-powered spacecraft turned on its camera and instruments to collect data.

The first glimpse of Jupiters poles came in 1974 when Pioneer 11 flew by on its way to Saturn.

The detailed pictures taken by Juno look like nothing we have seen or imagined before, Bolton said.

Juno also sent back unique views of Jupiters bright southern lights considered the most powerful in the solar system.

The flyby was the first of three dozen planned close passes during the 20-month mission.

Unlike rocky Earth and Mars, Jupiter is a gas giant that likely formed first, shortly after the sun. Studying the largest planet in the solar system may hold clues to understanding how Earth and the rest of the planets formed.

After a five-year journey, Juno slipped into orbit around Jupiter in July to map the massive planets poles, atmosphere and interior. Its the first spacecraft to carry a titanium vault designed to shield its computer and electronics from intense radiation.

Juno is only the second mission to orbit Jupiter. When it completes its job in 2018, it will deliberately crash into Jupiters atmosphere and disintegrate. NASA planned the finale so that Juno wont accidentally smack into Jupiters moons, particularly the icy moon Europa, a target of future exploration.
My 1-year-old granddaughter has a look that needs no words for amplification. She does not say much, content to trade long-winded glances with a knowing smile on her face. With one look, she can melt your ice cream.

I find wisdom in that look, a love of life and absence of cynicism that radiates from the eyes of a 1-year-old. When she looks at me, I have little choice but to return that look.

I learned this point of view from my seven grandchildren on our recent annual trip up north, to the tranquil lakes of northern Wisconsin. The fishing was bad. The time spent fishing with family was irreplaceable.

We also found time to tie-dye shirts. My compatriots of the 1960s would be disappointed with my effort, producing a shirt more reminiscent of a paint factory accident than the artistry and idealism of the love generation.

Between casting my line and dyeing shirts, I found time to read a book over vacation, Miracle in the Andes, about the 1972 Uruguayan Rugby team whose plane went down in the Andes Mountains. The author, who scaled a 17,000 foot peak without mountaineering experience or equipment to seek help, never thought of himself as a hero; simply a survivor.

The captivating drama was well-documented in the book Alive and the subsequent movie of the same name, so he never felt compelled to tell his story. Until he realized, while giving a speech that left the audience spellbound, that it was not his story. It was our story. A story of the humanity in all of us.

When Nando Parrado climbed that peak to find a route to Chile and rescue, he stood there on the summit and saw only more mountains. Confronted with what he perceived as certain death, he made a remarkable discovery. The opposite of death is not mere living. The opposite of death is love. The love for his family gave him a reason to live.

My family is my miracle. Each of you have a miracle. A reason to quiet our doubts about what lies beyond the mountains in front of us. A reason to set aside our cynicism. A reason to live.

Love does not remain the sole province of institutional religions, romantic artists, song writers, romance novelists, or naive sentimentalists. It endures as one of the strongest forces of humanity. Parrado, no starry-eyed sentimentalist himself, used the sentiment to survive. Breathe. Breathe again. With every breath you are alive.

For the cynics among us, including myself, we might choose another word for this sentiment. We may call it compassion; a collegiate, thought-filled word that we can say in mixed company without biting our lip.

Confronted with racial hatred, political anger, and mounting natural disasters, we can turn away from cynicism to the power of compassion to survive.

Compassion for our family and friends, yes, but also for our adversaries. Compassion does not compel us to agree with them, vote for them, or buy into their particular flavor of cynicism. It only allows space in the rhetoric; space to take a breath.

And in that breath we find in our common story, a story shared without regard to race, politics, or religion. A story just beginning in the eyes of my grandchildren.

Confronted with racial hatred, political anger, and mounting natural disasters, we can turn away from cynicism to the power of compassion to survive.
The states youth prison logged nearly 500 incidents involving aggression, fighting and violence in the four months leading up to a December raid during a criminal investigation at the facility.

The altercations and confrontations that occurred at Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls between July and December of 2015 resulted in 32 injuries to inmates and seven injured prison staff, according to incident report logs provided to the Wisconsin State Journal from the Department of Corrections through the states open records law.

The staff reports provide a snapshot of the conditions within the prison after a state investigation into abuse allegations began in January 2015 and just before a fleet of state and federal law enforcement officials arrived at the Irma facility to interview staff and inmates as part of an investigation into potential crimes ranging from child abuse to sexual assault to destroying public records to misconduct in public office.

The place was getting more and more violent and out of control  and thats what brought the place down, said Troy Bauch, the youth prison union representative at the time of the incidents. The kids took control of the institution.

Department of Corrections spokesman Tristan Cook said the logs were part of a tracking document maintained by John Ourada, the former superintendent of the Irma facility, but is not an exhaustive list.

This should not be considered a comprehensive listing of every incident and every injury that occurred during the time period in question, said Cook.

Gov. Scott Walkers office did not respond Friday to a request for comment on the number of incidents, but a spokesman said earlier in the week that Walker has directed DOC Secretary Jon Litscher to address the problems at the institution and he has visited it multiple times.

The records provided to the State Journal illustrate a range of incidents, from fights to vandalism to lewd commentary.

The records show:

In a dispute over candy, inmates and staff were injured after a fight broke out between two inmates. Staff witnessed one of the inmates heads bouncing off the floor repeatedly. An inmates knee was injured by a staff member who intervened.

A staff member was injured when an inmate pushed the staff member and threw a canteen at the staff member.

An inmate made sexual threats against a staff member and his wife.

An inmate found a Tomahawk Police Department uniform donated to the prison about a decade ago and wore it while beating another inmate with closed fists and biting the inmate.

An inmate broke off a piece of metal from a bed and used it to break out of a room designed to be more secure than other rooms.

An inmate was injured during a game to see who could hit their door the hardest.

An inmate shoved a T-shirt to the bottom of a toilet and flushed it repeatedly until it overflowed, prompting prison officials to shut off the rooms toilet water temporarily and the inmate to threaten to spit on staff members.

The records also show that over the course of two days in October 2015, three fights occurred between inmates, an inmate refused to follow a staff members directions and started throwing things, an inmate spit on a staff member and both an inmate and a staff member were injured as a result of restraining the inmate who became violent.

In November, staff found a toothbrush an inmate had fashioned into a weapon, the records show. That inmate also made threats to kill and stab staff and refused to hand over the makeshift weapon. Staff had to forcibly remove the weapon, the logs show.

The incident reports detail the day-to-day situations staff and inmates dealt with during a time when investigators were in the midst of what has stretched into a 19-month probe into allegations at the facility.

Bauch said the number of incidents provided by DOC is likely conservative, because staff often did not record incidents after supervisors destroyed reports.

Kenneth Streit, a UW-Madison Law School professor who studies criminal justice systems, said its hard to say whether 498 incidents within four months is typical or not of a juvenile detention center.

Its sort of a conflict of interest situation for staff reporting incidents, Streit said in an email, speaking generally. If youth on the unit get the idea that certain minor behaviors are tolerated, at least a few will push further to see what more is tolerated. In addition, since they know that the institution rules require staff to report, individual youth can use a non-report as leverage/blackmail. On the other hand, if there are too many reports, an employee might be afraid that managers will think that the employee cannot control situations and this could (affect) promotions.

The original John Doe investigation into conditions at the youth prison, now closed, sought to determine whether crimes of child neglect, abuse of inmates, strangulation and suffocation, intimidation of victims, use of pepper spray to cause bodily harm, intimidation of witnesses, tampering with public records and violating state or county laws governing institutions had occurred.

U.S. Attorney John Vaudreuil said this week in an interview that the investigation, headed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as of early 2016, is still under way. Vaudreuil said he couldnt say how much longer reviewing evidence could take.
Sen. Luther Olsen was on two Wisconsin political talk shows on Sunday to discuss the Cap Times' recent investigation into conditions at Wisconsin Veterans Home at King.

On the way to the studio for "UpFront With Mike Gousha," Olsen (R-Ripon) said he got another of many calls he's been getting lately from a family member concerned about conditions for a relative at the home. As upsetting as the complaints where, Olsen said, it "made his blood boil" that the family member was worried that her relative would face retaliation for her speaking out.

"This is the United States," he told Gousha. "This is Wisconsin. We don't do that to people. I think. What kind of culture have we got going up there?"

Katelyn Ferral's report in the Cap Times detailed medical errors and cases of neglect at Wisconsin's largest veterans home.

Olsen said he had heard complaints about staffing shortages at the veterans home for several years. But it was only in the last couple of weeks that he has begun hearing complaints about the quality of care patients have been getting.

Olsen said the issue is not merely staffing shortages, but that the home doesn't have enough qualified personnel to handle the complex varieties of care that, increasingly, more and more patients need.

"It's a great place if you don't need much care," Olsen said on WKOW's "Capital City Sunday" with Greg Neumann. "But the demographics have really changed.

"They have money. I believe it's not being spent, or released, to hire folks to deal with the more acute care that they need."

Rick Badger, executive director of AFSCME in Wisconsin, said the union has been sounding the alarm on staffing issues at the home for years. He said the issue is not just having positions filled, but retaining staff and keeping morale up, something that's become more and more difficult to do for public-sector employees in the wake of Act 10.

"It's not just the number of staff. It's keeping the staff there and keeping morale up."

Olsen said that both state and federal officials believed that King was a five-star facility that did not need to be investigated. In the wake of the Cap Times report, swift action is needed.
An Edgerton Police Department lieutenant who once punched a hole in a wall during a family disagreement was arrested for an alleged domestic battery involving his wife in March and lost five days pay for breaking department conduct and ethics rules in connection with the incident.

But Lt. Randy Meehan, who holds the second-highest rank in the nine-officer department, wont face criminal prosecution for the March 9 incident. The Dane County District Attorneys office, which was asked to review the case, declined to prosecute the case on April 18, and Meehans boss, Edgerton Police Chief Tom Klubertanz, reinstated Meehan, 53, the same day.

Meehan had been placed on paid leave by Klubertanz after the incident, in which investigators said Meehan grabbed his wife, Cindi, by the arm and threw her into a couch, causing her pain and leaving marks that were photographed as evidence, according to reports obtained by the State Journal in a public records request.

Klubertanz on April 12 changed Meehans paid leave to an unpaid suspension, which remained in effect for five days until Meehan was reinstated.

Edgerton is located about a half-hour southeast of Madison in Rock County.

A misdemeanor charge of domestic battery recommended by three Dane County Sheriffs Office detectives  who investigated the incident at the request of the Rock County Sheriffs Department later on the same day it occurred  was dismissed when the case was dropped.

But the investigation of Cindi Meehans domestic abuse complaint produced a litany of additional allegations by Meehan family members and some revealing details, including a violent incident Jan. 3 in which Randy Meehan, by his own admission, punched a hole in his kitchen wall.

Cindi Meehan, the couples daughter and the daughters fiance in separate interviews told investigators it happened as the three of them cowered in a kitchen corner that a drunken Meehan had backed them into, while he repeatedly slammed his fist into the palm of his other hand and repeated the phrase, Ive got the muscle. Meehan acknowledged only the punch.

Family members also described to investigators several other bouts of heavy, off-duty drinking and sometimes driving by Randy Meehan, and other menacing comments they said he made  including a disagreement on Feb. 23 in which Cindi Meehan said he told her, I may end up in jail today and youll be in the hospital. It will be worth it.

The couples daughter told investigators that while she had never seen her father hit her mother, he had kicked the familys Jack Russell terrier across the room recently as a way to hurt her mother and had punched and kicked the familys horses during fits of anger.

Cindi Meehan also said her husband once told her no one would believe her side of the story because he was in law enforcement, according to the investigative report.

In his interview, Randy Meehan denied most of the allegations and told the detectives he and his wife had been having problems for many years.

He also said getting him into trouble with his job had been a frequent threat of hers. Its all about money, he said.

About the incident on March 9, which occurred around 6 a.m., Meehan told investigators he only touched his wifes arm to lead her upstairs so they could talk to their children about their failing marriage, and that she had then pulled away violently and tripped over the couch.

Randy Meehans interview ended around 7:35 p.m. on March 9 with his arrest and processing into the Rock County Jail. He posted bond and was released under a prohibition ordering no contact with his wife for 72 hours.

Cindi Meehan on March 10 was granted a temporary restraining order against Randy Meehan, who filed for divorce a week later. The restraining order was lifted April 6, in a court decision that also gave her exclusive use of the couples home and required him to get counseling.

Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne did not return a phone call asking why the domestic battery case against Randy Meehan was dismissed. Ozanne often declines to discuss cases he declines to prosecute.

In his concurrent investigation of possible departmental infractions committed by Randy Meehan, Klubertanz found that he had violated several ethical standards, including one that says officers will conduct their public and private lives (so) that they exemplify the high standards of integrity, trust and morality required of the profession.

Klubertanz declined to comment for this story, but told the Janesville Gazette in May he was glad the investigation of Meehan was over and was glad to have him back.

Meehan did not respond to a request for comment. He has worked for the Edgerton Police Department for 30 years and earns $59,737 annually, according to city officials.
COLLECTIVE MADNESS



Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."
After a two-year investigation, the European Union (EU) says the American company Apple must pay over $14 billion in back taxes to Ireland.

The EUs competition commissioner said the company did not pay enough in taxes between 2003 and 2014. She questioned how anyone might think that Apples 2014 Irish tax rate of five thousandths of one percent was fair.

The European Commission is responsible for making official decisions for the European Union. The Commission follows rules designed to make sure businesses in Europe compete fairly.

In late August, the Commission announced that it would attempt to recover the back taxes from Apple. It said the company reported earnings for all of the computers, computer tablets and mobile phones it sold in Europe through its office in Ireland. Because of a tax deal with the Irish government, Apple never had to pay much tax on its earnings.

The Competition Commission is not only investigating Apple. It is looking at deals between European countries and major international businesses including Starbucks, Fiat, Amazon and McDonalds.

Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook denies the EU allegations. He said Apple paid $400 million in taxes in 2014, and his company paid more in taxes than any other business in Ireland.

The tax bill is not only causing concerns in Ireland and Europe. Government officials in the United States are also worried.

Josh Earnest is the spokesman for President Barack Obama. He said Americans could be hurt by the EUs ruling if Apple is required to make the payment. He said the company then could legally reduce the billions of dollars it pays Ireland from the U.S. taxes it owes.

Earnest said the Obama administration is concerned EU officials decided to rule against Apple without first talking to the U.S. government.

The U.S Treasury Department called the EUs decision unfair. It claimed the EU was targeting American companies for punishment recently. The commission denied that allegation.

On September 1, Tim Cook told an Irish newspaper that Apple would work with Irish officials to overturn Europes decision. He also said the tax ruling was politically motivated.

The European Commission said Ireland offered Apple the low tax rates in order to save thousands of Apple jobs within the country. It called the deal, illegal.

Irelands Minister of Finance, Michael Noonan, said his country will appeal the commissions ruling. But if the tax is paid, it would be the largest ever in Europe.

Im Dan Friedell.

Dan Friedell adapted this story for Learning English based on reports by VOANews.com and Reuters. George Grow was the editor.

What do you think about the large tax bill sent to Apple? We want to know. Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page.

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Words in This Story

commissioner  n. a person who is responsible for a government office, agency or part of a government department

commission  n. a group of people who have been given the official job of finding information about something or controlling something

allegation  n. a statement saying that someone has done something wrong or illegal

motivate v. to give someone a reason for doing something
Driverless vehicles could threaten the jobs of millions of Americans who drive trucks and taxis. Some experts believe driverless trucks will be deployed throughout the United States soon. Others believe it will not happen for years.

In Australia and other countries, driverless trucks move large loads of dirt and ore in mines. The trucks can operate in the mines because there are few other vehicles there. But it will be more difficult for vehicles to operate on roads where there are many other vehicles.

Ted Scott is the head of engineering at the American Trucking Association. He says it will be years before rules are written, testing is completed and other drivers accept driverless vehicles.

The carmaker Volvo and the ride-sharing company Uber have announced a plan to test self-driving cars in the eastern city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Ford Motor Company recently announced it would work with a Chinese company to research self-driving vehicle technology.

Carmaker Audi and other companies are testing robot drivers in more complex environments. These include mountain roads in the United States and in large American cities.

Chan Leiu is a former official at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. He says these tests may help speed up the deployment of driverless vehicles.

Leiu says self-driving vehicles may help save lives. He says 94 percent of vehicle crashes are caused by human mistakes. These include driving while tired, writing on a digital device or after drinking too much alcohol.

Tim Carone is a professor at Notre Dame University. He says tens of thousands of lives could be saved if self-driving vehicles are deployed.

Rogelio Rada has been driving a truck for 16 years. He believes it will be a long time before robots take his job.

Barry Waters is also a truck driver. He believes robots will not be driving trucks for 20 or 30 years.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says more than 1.7 million people worked in the trucking industry in 2014.

Many people are concerned about the effect of driverless cars on employment because manufacturing in the United States has been decreasing for years. The car manufacturing industry is no exception. American carmakers sold a record number of vehicles in 2015, but had far fewer workers than ever.

Carmakers now use robots to weld, paint and perform other tasks, often better than humans.

That is bad news for millions of workers like Holly Stover. She worked in steel mills for many years.

Well I hope to end up working a good, a decent job, making a decent living.

Stover is working with an employment counselor to explore new kinds of work. She is also considering going back to school to learn new skills.

Anthony Carnavale is a workforce expert at Georgetown University. He says an increase in industrial robots means fewer humans will have high-paying manufacturing jobs.

Probably 75 percent of the job loss is technology-based, which is to say robots -- machines in general -- are substituting for people.



Does the new technology offer new opportunities?

Chris Lu is the Deputy Secretary at the United States Department of Labor. He says the changing economy is creating new opportunities for workers if they have the skills.

Some employers in the United States complain that they cannot find enough workers who have the ability to operate advanced machines or program computers.

Weve also in this country had a remarkable transition to a service economy and really wonderful high-paying jobs in IT, for instance. Those are industries that didnt exist 20 or 30 years ago.

Greg Pitoniak is the head of the Southeast Michigan Community Alliance. He says his organization closely records the skills employers need and helps displaced workers meet those demands.

Many job seekers look at it as I cant afford to go to school for a couple of years and not have an income, he says. He explains that employers are seeking workers they can train for high-paying jobs like electrician, plumber, carpenter, millwright and pipefitter.

Pitoniak says the American education system does not do enough to prepare some students for technical jobs.



Im Christopher Jones-Cruise.

VOA News reported this story from Washington. Christopher Jones-Cruise adapted it for Learning English. George Grow was the editor.

Are robots displacing workers in your country? We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section, or visit our Facebook page.

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Words in This Story

weld  v. to join pieces of metal together by heating the edges until they begin to melt and then pressing them together

counselor  n. a person who provides advice as a job; a person who counsels people

transition  n. a change from one state or condition to another
VOA Learning English talked with two students in the Culinary Arts program at Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School. Maksym Olah is from the Ukraine, and Isidro Dubon comes from Central America. They are studying to become chefs and work hard to make their American dreams come true.

From the Ukraine to the U.S.

Maksym Olah was an actor and dancer in the theater in his home country, Ukraine. He fell in love with an American woman who was in the Peace Corps. Olah immigrated to the U.S. when she finished her service in the Ukraine. That summer, he showed his dancing skill in the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

"I came to the U.S. because I married an American girl and she finished her Peace Corps service and then, we have (a) small project in the Smithsonian festival, and we represent Ukranian country on the Smithsonian festival four years ago."

Olah found a different culture in the U.S. and learned to treat others differently than he had at home.

"My wife  told me it's (a) different language, different culture, different mentality  and you need  she told me  you need to respect everybody. Here, people (are) more gentle to each other. "

Olah started to study English soon after he arrived.

"When I came here, I don't speak, , I don't speak any kind of words, just (a) few words, like "hello, my name is Max, and goodbye".

I'm in (the) international program cuisine. We study about each country's food, gastronomy, history, techniques, and this is, for me, it's very helpful help. Because every people start to cook in the French. This is history. And, for me, new techniques. Kind of techniques, like, boiling, or micro-cook, or something like that. This is new and interesting for me.

Olah dreams of owning his own restaurant or a food truck one day.

"My goal: I want to open a small business, a food truck, Eastern European truck, maybe American, if I studied a lot of recipe, maybe I mix it for example, each country, and American I forgot (the) name of that word, but, it's like "fusion"! Oh, yeah.

Although he has a busy schedule of study, Olah finds time to keep up his Ukrainian dancing.

"Yes. On a Saturday, I work in a Ukrainian school. I teach folk dance (to) children. I have 150 people. Yeah, I teach Ukrainian folk dancing. This is my hobby!"

From Honduras to the U.S

Isidro Dubon is like many students at Carlos Rosario, a public charter school in Washington D.C. He comes from Central America. Born in Honduras, Dubon came to the U.S. when he was 16-years-old.

Dubon's brother had lived in the U.S. for some time. He encouraged Isidro to join him. Dubon's reason for coming to the U.S. was simple enough. He came to America, as many immigrants do, searching for two things: a better job and a better life. Before coming to the U.S., he expected to work hard. He hoped to one day buy his own house.

He didnt speak English, but he did not think it would be a problem.

Finding work is not easy

When Dubon arrived, he was surprised to discover that it was very difficult to find work. He had not thought that his lack of English skills would stop him from getting a job.

Dubon began studying in the English program at Carlos Rosario. After some time, he found work as a dishwasher in a restaurant. He worked hard, and received promotions. Dubon's dream had been to buy his own house. Every time he paid rent for an apartment, he would say to himself "Wow, that's too much money."

Dubon decided to quit school and find a second job, so that he could save money. His English classes at Carlos Rosario helped him understand how to build his credit rating  the most important factor for a home buyer in the U.S.

So, after I found two job(s), I start(ed) to build my credit. And then after three years, I start to look at house(s), for sale. After five years (of) that process, I found a beautiful house, and I bought it. And then, when I had all this, I quit one job, and I return to the school."

When he returned, Dubon enrolled in the Culinary Arts program at Carlos Rosario. He is taking a course called "Culinary Arts: Fundamentals," which exposes students to theoretical and hands-on training in culinary arts.

Achieving the dream luncheon

The school put on a lunch at the end of the fall semester. It is called "Achieving the Dream."

During the lunch, students, families, local politicians, and community organizers came to the school. The goal was to give students practical experience preparing, cooking, and serving food.

The lunch also served as an opportunity to ask for donations to support the school. Carlos Rosario is a public, non-profit school that has had funding problems before. In the mid-1990s, the school had to close for a year because public funding was cut to adult education programs in Washington, D.C.

Olah and Dubon assisted in preparing the lunch, and worked as servers during the event. But problems came up during the lunch. Dubon's partner had to go help in the kitchen, so Dubon had to serve alone. He had trouble at first, but he says that he remembered his experience working in restaurants.

The lunch, said a smiling Dubon, was a success. The chefs who teach him were happy with his performance.

Dubon and Olah are both grateful for the education they have received at Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School. They are working hard to reach their dreams.

Im Jill Robbins.

John Russell and Dr. Jill Robbins reported and wrote this story for Learning English. Mario Ritter was the editor.

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Words in This Story

culinary - adj. used in or relating to cooking

recipe - n. set of instructions for making food

fusion - n. food prepared by combining methods and ingredients from different areas of the world

promotion n. to move someone to a higher position, job or status

fundamental - n. one of the basic and important parts of something  usually plural

achieve - v. to get or reach (something) by working hard

fund - v. to provide money for (something)

Are you learning a job skill? Do you want to improve your English to get a better job? Write to us about your goals in the Comments Section.
Muslim militants tried to create areas governed by Islamic law long before the Islamic State group began its campaign in the Middle East.

Some groups supported attacks on governments that they did not believe were enforcing Islamic law. Others believed they should work to weaken Western countries -- especially the United States.

In the 1990s the terrorist group al-Qaida won the debate. It supported attacks on the United States, including those that took place on September 11, 2001.

But al-Qaidas power has lessened in recent years. Terror groups have formed that are working to weaken government in the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa. These groups include the Islamic State, which has supported attacks on neighboring countries -- including those led by Muslims.

The result is that most of the victims of terrorist attacks by Muslims over the past 15 years have been other Muslims. Recently, a 14-year-old Islamic State suicide bomber attacked a Kurdish wedding in southeastern Turkey. More than 50 people were killed.

Richard Bulliet is a retired professor of history at Columbia University. He says most non-Muslims should not be worried about terrorism.

I understand why the media cover terrorism in the West so closely, and I understand why people who follow these events become so frightened, but, objectively speaking, the threat of terrorism is not very great.

Between 2001 and 2015, there were 167,221 victims of terrorism. About 98 percent of them took place outside the United States and Western Europe, according to the University of Maryland Global Terrorism Database.

The database is supported by the United States government. It is the largest public collection of information about terrorist attacks in the world.

The database does not record the religious belief of victims. However, it has gathered information about attacks in 25 Muslim-majority countries from Iraq to Malaysia. The information shows that 75 percent of all deaths from terrorist attacks from 2001 to 2015 took place in those countries.

During that time, there were 3,689 deaths in the United States and Western Europe from terrorist attacks. This includes 2,977 from the September 11, 2001 attacks. That is 2.2 percent of all terrorism-related deaths during that time.

Not all victims of terrorism in Muslim-majority countries are Muslims. Victims have included Christians, Yazidis and other minorities. There also have been many non-Christians among the victims of terrorist attacks in the United States and Western Europe.

Michael Jensen is the data collection manager for the Global Terrorism Database. He says it is safe to assume that the majority of victims of terrorist attacks in Muslim countries are Muslims.

Driven by more than religion

Information in the database shows some countries have many victims while others have very few. More than 50,000 have been killed in Iraq. But only six people have been killed in Malaysia in terrorist attacks in the past 15 years.

The reason for many of the attacks is not clear. Jensen says the large number of victims in Muslim countries compared to those in non-Muslim countries suggests that the reason is not limited to religion.

It has to be something else, he says.

Researchers at the Institute for Economics and Peace have looked for patterns in the Global Terrorism Database.

They have found two things common to countries where there is terrorism. Their research shows that 92 percent of all terrorist attacks in the past 25 years have taken place in countries with state-sponsored political violence. And 88 percent of attacks have taken place in places where violent conflicts are happening.

In most Muslim-majority countries with a high level of terrorist activity, one or both of these problems are present.

Iraq may be the strongest example of a country with a long history of state-sponsored violence and political conflict.

Since the 1990s terrorists have sought to oust governments in the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa.

Jensen said that in Muslim-majority countries, militants often attack citizens and property, security forces and government and diplomatic officials and institutions.

I think in a majority of cases where Muslims are victims of terrorism, theyre largely targeted not because theyre Muslim but because theyre police officers or soldiers or happen to be in a public place, Jensen said.

He said disputes between Sunni and Shiite Muslims is a major source of conflict. About 10 percent of the 1.7 billion Muslims in the world are Shia.

Professor Bulliet says Shia are being attacked by Sunni extremists from Iraq to Pakistan because they are considered a heretical minority.

Bulliet says the conflict is part of a struggle for power in majority-Sunni societies. He says those societies have still not decided what power will be held by political and religious officials.

He adds that it is still not clear in those societies what the relationship is between religion and the modern world. He says these questions have been unanswered for many years.

Correspondent Masood Farivar reported this story from Washington. It was adapted for Learning English by Christopher Jones-Cruise. Mario Ritter 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

assume - v. to think that something is true or probably true without knowing that it is true

pattern - n. a repeated form or design especially that is used to decorate something

state-sponsored - adj. paid for by the government

institution - n. an established organization

heretical - adj. someone who believes or teaches something that goes against accepted or official beliefs
Ready for another TV binge? These shows are most worthy of your precious time.






From father to son

The blood runs thin

See faces frozen still

Against the wind



The seam is split

The coal face cracked

The lines are long

There's no going back

Through hands of steel

And heart of stone

Our labor day

Has come and gone



Yeah you leave me holding on

In Red Hill town

See lights go down, I'm



Hanging on

You're all that's left to hold on to

I'm still waiting

I'm hanging on

You're all that's left to hold on to



The glass is cut

The bottle run dry

Our love runs cold

In the caverns of the night

We're wounded by fear

Injured in doubt

I can lose myself

You I can't live without



Yeah you keep me holding on

In Red Hill town

See the lights go down on

I'm hanging on

You're all that's left to hold on to

I'm still waiting

Hanging on

You're all that's left to hold on to, on to



We'll scorch the earth

Set fire to the sky

We stoop so low, to reach so high

A link is lost

The chain undone

We wait all day

For night to come

And it comes

Like a hunter child



I'm hanging on

You're all that's left to hold on to

I'm still waiting

I'm hanging on

You're all that's left to hold on to



Love, slowly stripped away

Love, has seen its better day



- lyrics by U2


The question 'which language India's children should be schooled in?' is not an easy one to answer. Some years ago, when he was still chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi told me what his solution was to this problem, and I will tell you what he said.

I am writing about this because of four stories that have appeared in recent days. One is from Goa where the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's state chief has been sacked for opposing Goa's BJP government.

The local RSS unit opposed state financial support to English-medium primary schools in Goa. Specifically it wants grants to 127 English medium schools, which are run by a church body, stopped. Before it won the Goa elections, the BJP had also insisted on Konkani and Marathi as the medium of instruction in the state. But after winning, it has gone soft on the issue because it feels it is not practical.

The BJP realised the issue is a complicated one with no clear answer. The question of language in schooling has been debated from before independence. Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhi were of the view that schooling should be in the mother tongue. Tagore in particular felt that India's children would not be able to develop their artistic talent and sensibility if they were schooled in a foreign language. Gandhi had I think more patriotic reasons for taking the same line. On the other side of the debate were Nehru and Gujarat's scholar-politician KM Munshi. These two did not reject what Tagore and Gandhi said but were concerned about losing the benefits English had given India. These benefits included access to the knowledge of the outside world and a modern legal framework.

All four of these men were bilingual and so they could appreciate the issue from both sides. Where they ultimately stood was based on their priorities.

The second news story connected to this was from Bhopal's Atal Bihari Vajpayee Hindi Vishwavidyalalya. This Hindi-only university is struggling to attract students for its courses. A report said that this was particularly true for the engineering course. The students' apprehensions were that they would not get jobs with such a degree. And they also were worried about taking a course where the engineering terms would be newly coined Hindi words replacing basic English engineering terms they were already familiar with. Because of this only a dozen students have applied for the 90 seats that are available in Nagar (Civil), Vaidyut (Electrical) and Yantrik (Mechanical) streams this year.

However, the university was not discouraged. Even if we get just one student, we are committed to starting the course from this year. We are swimming against the tide. English took root 250 years ago, Hindi will require a few years to catch up, ABVHV Vice-Chancellor, Prof Mohanlal Chheepa was quoted by Indian Express as saying.

The third report was about the lack of published laws in Hindi. All legislation is supposed to be passed in English with the Hindi translation. There were approximately 200 Indian laws related to environmental protection in India, according to a report in The Hindu. "All these acts and rules are available online, including on the new digitised The Gazette of India website that allows you to comfortably search for any law. But only in English," the report said.

One reason could possibly be the same one that affects the Hindi engineering course. People are familiar with technical terms in English and it is only confusing to change what is already familiar and accessible. Another may also be a lack of demand.

The fourth story is of a boy in Bihar, who has written to Narendra Modi complaining about the poor condition of government schools in his state and urged him to make English a compulsory subject. The boy wrote: My father does not earn much and so we had to do our primary education from a government school in Bihar. I urge you to request the Bihar government for English teaching from Class 1, as without it students have to face a lot of difficulty in higher classes."

This is an issue Modi understands from all sides. In Gujarat, the RSS has blocked teaching of English in government schools till Class V, by when it is too late. Modi's solution, which he explained to me, was to have some subjects taught in Gujarati and others in English. If I remember it right, he was considering maths and science in English and history and geography in Gujarati.

I thought it was an elegant solution though I do not know if he was ultimately able to implement it, under RSS pressure.

But even here, the question of who will teach children English is also unanswered because it is a language very few Indians know well enough to teach. Certainly we do not have the millions of qualified individuals required. As I said earlier, it is a difficult question to answer. This problem will remain with us for a very long time because we are the only major nation whose elite speaks a language that is a foreign tongue.
Srinagar: Adopting a tough stance, separatists on Sunday rebuffed attempts by five opposition MPs to talk to them even as an all-party parliamentary delegation explored ways to end the 56-day-old unrest by holding discussions with Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti and some other mainstream leaders.

During the first day of its visit, the delegation met about 200 members in about 30 delegations from various sections of society and listened to their point of view to reach at a common solution to the current scenario in Jammu and Kashmir, a statement from the Home Ministry said.

While the delegation, led by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, met mainstream sections, five members of the group broke away to meet the separatists.

Four MPs -- -CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury, CPI leader D Raja, JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav and RJD's Jay Prakash Narayan -- went to meet hardline Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani at his residence where he is under house arrest for the last 60 days while AIMIM leader Assadudin Owaisi went to meet moderate Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq at Chashma Shahi sub-jail where he is lodged.

At Geelani's residence, the gate was not even opened for the MPs while people shouted slogans outside. Geelani saw them from the window but refused to meet the parliamentarians.

"It is our effort to show that we are ready to talk to anyone whether they agree to meet or not," Yadav said.

The group also went to meet JKLF chief Yaseen Malik who is under detention at BSF camp in Humhama. He told the MPs that he will talk when he visits New Delhi.

Owaisi went separately to meet Miwaiz who met him briefly but only exchanged pleasantaries.

After Owaisi's failed attempt, the group comprising Yechury, Yadav, Raja and Narayan went to meet Mirwaiz and were with him for about 15 minutes.

The group tried to meet former Hurriyat Chairman Abdul Ghani Bhat who also refused to talk to them. Bhat welcomed the leaders but made it clear it has been decided that no talks will be held with the delegation members.

Owaisi said he also met another detained leader Shabir Shah for some time and offered 'namaz' along with him there.

But no separatist leader held talks with them.

"This is a futile exercise. Nothing concrete will happen until or unless India talks to Pakistan on Kashmir. We will not be able to arrive at any solution if India only talks to Kashmiris or Pakistan talks to Kashmiris. We should try and solve this issue which can otherwise result in hostilities between the two neighbouring nations," said Ghani Bhat.

Earlier in the day, the separatists rejected Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti's invitation to them for meeting with all-party delegation, terming such a measure as "deceitful" and insisting that it cannot be an alternative to a "transparent agenda-based dialogue to address the core issue".

The delegation had come here to cool the volatile situation arising out of violent protests that have gripped the Valley since the killing of Hizbul militant Burhan Wani on 8 July. The clashes resulting from the protests have claimed 71 lives and injured thousands.

After his meeting with Mirwaiz, Yechury said, "We are urging both sides to first restore normalcy and ensure that sufferings of people during last two months ends. Start unconditional political dialogue."

He said "When government gives slogans, some tangible follow up steps should also be taken."

Referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's talk about "Vikas (development) and Vishwas (trust)", the CPI(M) leader said "no tangible steps have been taken to develop trust among the Kashmiri people."

He said the governemnt keeps on repeating Vajpayee's statement of 'Jamhooriyat, Kashmiriyat and Insaniyat' but "forgot the steps taken by the former Prime Minister along with the slogan like unilateral ceasefire during Ramzan and talks with Hizbul Mujahideen. (The then) Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani himself held number of meetings with Hizbul leaders."

Earlier, Owaisi said Mirwaiz expressed his inability to have any talks because of position taken by his organisation.

"I met him (the Mirwaiz) and he told me that my organisation has not mandated any talks with the parliamentarians. He expressed his inability to carry out any talks," the AIMIM leader said.

He described the attempt as "ice breaking" and hoped it will continue with "some constructive steps being taken by the state and the central government. The process of dialogue needs to continue."

The 26-member parliamentary delegation, which arrived this morning, began its engagements with a meeting with the Chief Minister Mehbooba who pitched for unconditional dialogue with all stakeholders.

"Met the 'All Party Delegation' at SKICC today and pitched for unconditional talks with all stakeholders," Mehbooba wrote in a Facebook post. She refused to talk to reporters at the venue of the meeting.

She said she was committed to help initiate a "sustained and meaningful dialogue" within the state with political groups, irrespective of the ideological views and predilections of the political groups.

It was followed by a meeting with National Conference leader and former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah who spoke of "continuous failure of the state government and its dilly dallying tactics".

During his hour-long interaction with the delegation, Omar recalled the previous all-party delegation visits since 1990 to Kashmir and said that "unfortunately when things cool down, there is no progress on the issue".

He said the MPs who have come here this time face a mammoth task in their hands to revive faith in this process.

"There was a time when my father had conveyed to grant internal autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir and had warned New Delhi that if they continue to deny it, time will come when it will also not be acceptable to people of Jammu and Kashmir. I think we are heading for that time only," Omar said.

He told the delegation that his workers were pressurising him not to attend the meeting "such is the situation".

"Mehbooba Mufti should decide whether she wants to be the Chief Minister or Leader of Opposition. In the morning she says one thing and does a complete about turn by evening. She wants that Hurriyat should be talked to but in the evening she puts them under arrest," the opposition NC leader said.

State Congress chief G A Mir, after meeting the delegation, said it seems it (delegation) has no roadmap. "They do not have anything concrete to offer," he said.

PDP General Secretary Sartaj Madni met the delegation with 10 PDP leaders.

He apprised the delegation about the ground situation in the state and reiterated its stand that PDP will be a bridge between Indo-Pak dialogue, dialogue between the Centre and separatists and the Centre and Kashmiris.

"We have told the delegation that they should find a political solution to Kashmir issue. Both PDP and BJP are committed to agenda of alliance where dialogue with all stakeholders can be agreed upon," he said.

Asked about killings in the protests, Madni did not give any direct reply and asked reporters to write only the truth.

Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad, who is part of the central delegation, said the attempted meeting of five MPs with separatist leaders was in their individual capacity.

An official statement from the Home Ministry said in addition to political parties, delegations of academicians, teachers and student assciations, representatives of school management, prominent NGOs, representatives of Leh, Kargil,

Pahari associations, Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee, Fruit and Saffron Growers associtions, Civil Society etc also met the delegation.

"The Jammu and Kashmir Students Welfare Association informed the all-party delegation that they are willing to work with Government of India, hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder to bring normalcy in the state," it said.

The statement said various political parties expressed their concern over the injuries to civilians due to the use of pellet guns.

"The Union Home Minister said that government is already working on the alternatives to pellet guns such as PAVA shells," it said.
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Kolkata: Mother Teresa will be declared a saint by Pope Francis of the Roman Catholic Church in a canonisation ceremony in Vatican City on Sunday in the presence of over a lakh of her followers from all over the world.

From India, a 12-member central delegation led by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and two state government-level delegations from Delhi and West Bengal led by Chief Ministers Arvind Kejriwal and Mamata Banerjee, respectively, will be in attendance during the function.

Nuns at the Missionaries of Charity, founded by the late Nobel laureate nun, said the canonisation in Rome will have a special universal significance because of the Mother's popularity.

A group of around 40-50 nuns from different parts of the country will be present at the ceremony led by Missionaries of Charity Superior General Sister Mary Prema.

Besides Archbishop of Kolkata Thomas D'Souza, about 45 bishops from all over India are now in Vatican.

In March, Pope Francis had announced that the Mother, who spent 45 years serving the poor and sick on the streets in Kolkata, will be elevated to sainthood after the Church recognised two miracles attributed to her after her death.

To mark the occasion a series of events are being held in the city where the Mother lived and worked all her life.

At the Mother House here on Sunday, a special mass will be organised and the nuns have promised to celebrate the occasion with the poorest of the poor.

In 2003, Teresa was beatified by then Pope John Paul II in a fast-tracked process which is the first step to gaining Sainthood.

In 2002, the Vatican officially recognised a miracle she was said to have carried out after her death, namely the 1998 healing of a Bengali tribal woman, Monika Besra, who was suffering from an abdominal tumour.

The traditional canonisation procedure requires at least two miracles.

The second miracle was from Brazil, where a person had been healed miraculously as a result of her earlier prayers.
Srinagar: Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah on Sunday met the all-party delegation led by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh in Srinagar and said such efforts have lost credibility as there has hardly been any follow-up after similar visits in the past.

During his hour-long interaction with the delegation, Omar recalled the previous all-party delegation visits since 1990 to Kashmir and said that "unfortunately when things cool down, there is no progress on the issue". He said the MPs who have come to Srinagar this time face a mammoth task in their hands to revive faith in this process.

He said the then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao had promised "sky is the limit" but failed to do anything.

"There was a time when my father had conveyed to grant internal autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir and had warned New Delhi that if they continue to deny it, time will come when it will also not be acceptable to people of Jammu and Kashmir. I think we are heading for that time only," Omar said.

He told the delegation that his workers were pressurising him not to attend the meeting "such is the situation".

Omar also spoke of "continuous failure of the state government and its dilly dallying tactics".

"Mehbooba Mufti should decide whether she wants to be the Chief Minister or Leader of Opposition. In the morning, she says one thing and does a complete about turn by evening. She wants that Hurriyat should be talked to but in the evening she puts them under arrest," he said.

Omar said such all-party delegations have lost credibility because there was no follow up after their visits in the past.

"What happened to 2010 all-party delegation. It was never followed up so the parliamentarians who have come here have a mammoth task in their hands to revive faith in this process," he said.

When asked whether he agreed with the Chief Minister's perception that only five percent people were unhappy, Omar said, "I wonder by what stretch of imagination, she has arrived at this figure. I don't agree at all. The space for mainstream politicians has shrunk courtesy the present ruling alliance."

An all-party delegation comprising 26 Members of Parliament arrived here today in an effort to restore peace in the Valley which has been gripped by violence since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani on 8 July.

In the clashes with security forces, 71 people have lost their lives and scores of others have been severely injured.

Cutting across party lines, the leaders said that they were hopeful of finding a solution for restoration of peace in the Valley.
Srinagar: Opposition National Conference on Sunday said the frequent unrests in Kashmir were due to New Delhi's "continued refusal" to undo the wrongs of history and restore constitutionally legitimate rights of Jammu and Kashmir.

"From 1953 till 2016 today, New Delhi's continued refusal to undo the wrongs of history and restore the constitutionally legitimate political rights of J&K and its people have resulted in a pervasive sense of alienation and isolation in Kashmir," it said in its memorandum submitted to the all-party delegation in Srinagar.

"It is this sense of alienation and isolation that fuels all agitations in Kashmir including the current one," it said.

The Opposition party said in recent years in successive efforts to pacify recurring agitations in the state, New Delhi has taken political initiatives in times of unrest only to abandon them in times of peace.

"The failure to implement the recommendations of the Prime Minister's Working Groups on Kashmir as well as the shocking indifference and contempt shown towards the Interlocutors Report are recent examples of this pattern of apathy and callousness," the party said.

"Similarly, the then central government refused to even acknowledge the Autonomy Resolution passed by the J&K Legislative Assembly in 2000 with a two-thirds majority. These glaring failures have provoked violence and instability in Kashmir," it said.

The NC said there was a needed for an acknowledgement of historical injustices perpetuated against the people of Jammu and Kashmir under the fig-leaf of "national interest" and "integration".

"The fact that J&K has acceded to the Union of India under a certain set of conditions and has not merged with the Union needs to be respected. The erosion of the state's autonomy from 1953 to 1975 needs to be reversed to uphold the integrity of promises made by the Union of India with the people of Jammu and Kashmir," the party said.

"The relationship between the state and the rest of the country is unique and constitutionally validated and no amount of shrill rhetoric or jingoism can change this reality," it said.

The party said that the genesis of the political issue in Kashmir lay in the erosion of the state's internal autonomy and a number of broken promises that violated good-faith agreements between the leadership of the state and successive central governments.

"The dismissal of a popular, elected government in 1953 and the incarceration of J&K's Prime Minister late Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah was the first blow that demolished the bond of good faith between Kashmir and New Delhi," it said.

The NC said that for the last couple of years the political narrative vis-a-vis J&K's special status and Article 370 of the Constitution had become increasingly "reductionist, regressive and jingoist".

"The resulting atmosphere of shrill rhetoric has created a sense of insecurity among the people of the state and taken us further away from the overarching goal of reconciliation," the principal Opposition party said.

"Unfortunately the goal of appeasing respective political constituencies has taken precedence over the goal of a stable and peaceful J&K," it said.

Noting that Pakistan is a party to Kashmir issue, the NC called for involvement of Pakistani establishment in finding a solution to it.

"We cannot shy away from the fact that the Kashmir issue has both internal as well as external dimensions. A tit-for-tat diplomatic policy of one-upmanship between New Delhi and Islamabad will change precious little as far as restoring peace and stability in Kashmir is concerned," it said.

"Pakistan, by the very nature of this political issue and the fact that a large part of J&K's territory is administered by Islamabad, is a party to the issue. Any serious, meaningful process of finding a lasting solution to the Kashmir issue has to not only include an engagement with stakeholders of various opinions within J&K but also with the Pakistani establishment," it added.

The NC said that New Delhi's conventional investment in a policy of containment and operational management of the political sentiment in Kashmir had created a prolonged phase of political vacuum.

"The very fact that initiatives of political outreach, such as the visit of this all-parties delegation from New Delhi, are seen as reactionary manoeuvres rather than proactive initiatives, points at the reason for the sense of scepticism in the Valley," it said.
Srinagar: Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti should have released the Hurriyat leaders if she was serious about talks but she "was not clear in her own head" about the way forward, National Conference leader Omar Abdullah as said after she invited the separatists to meet the all-party delegation.

"As CM she arrests them (separatists) and as @jkpdp president she invites them to talk and then we wonder why Kashmir burns!!!!

"When the CM of J-K isn't clear in her own head about the way forward how do we expect her government to react and act as a cohesive unit?" Omar said in a series of tweets late last night.

Mehbooba, in her capacity as PDP president, on Saturday, wrote letters to top separatist leaders seeking their cooperation in the peaceful resolution of the issue of Jammu and Kashmir by engaging with the all-party delegation that arrived here today.

However, Omar, the former chief minister, said instead of releasing the letter to the media, Mehbooba should have released the separatists who are under detention.

"Instead of releasing her letter to the press @MehboobaMufti should have released the detained Hurriyat leaders if she was serious about talks," the NC working President said.

He said even as some of the separatist leaders were in jail, the chief minister asked them to suggest time and place to meet the delegation.

"Mirwaiz (Umar Farooq) is in a Government sub-jail, Yasin (Malik) is in central jail, others are spread in various prisons and she asks them to suggest the time & place!!!" Omar said.

Taking a jibe, the former chief minister said Mehbooba should instead furnish a list of the jails where the separatists were lodged and notify the visiting hours to the delegation to allow them to meet the separatists.

"She should just give a list of the prisons used and the official visiting hours to the delegation and allow them to visit the detainees," Omar said.
Hangzhou: Leaders of the world's biggest powers met Sunday to try to revive the sluggish world economy, with their host Chinese President Xi Jinping urging them to avoid "empty talk".

Xi welcomed each president and prime minister to the Group of 20 summit with a handshake, and had an extended clasp with Barack Obama as both men smiled, despite protocol stumbles around the US leader's visit.

In a circular conference hall in Hangzhou  the scenic eastern city left deserted by a vast security operation  Xi told them the G20 "should work with real action with no empty talk".

China is hoping a successful meeting will portray it as an assured, powerful nation ready to assume a role on the international stage that befits its status as the world's second-largest economy.

Authorities shuttered thousands of factories to try to ensure clear skies, and encouraged residents to leave town on free holidays, as well as detaining dozens of dissidents to prevent any hint of unrest.

The G20 brings together representatives of 85 percent of the world's GDP and two-thirds of its population.

But experts expect the gathering to be short on substance, with no acute crisis pushing leaders to defy rising populist sentiment and take difficult steps such as liberalising trade to address the world's most pressing issues.

Even so it was preceded by a flurry of diplomatic activity in China on issues ranging from climate change and the war in Syria to international trade.

The US and China Saturday ratified the Paris climate accord, a crucial step towards bringing into force the pact against global warming.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon, who personally received the ratification documents from Xi and Obama, applauded them Sunday for "making this historic step" and urged other G20 leaders to follow suit.

'Around the clock'

On Sunday the US said it was close to a deal with Russia on stemming the violence in Syria's brutal civil war, with President Barack Obama saying negotiators were "working around the clock".

Moscow and Washington support opposite sides in the conflict, which erupted in March 2011 after President Bashar al-Assad unleashed a brutal crackdown against a pro-democracy revolt.

Successive rounds of international negotiations have failed to end a conflict that has left more than 290,000 people dead and forced millions to flee, a key contributor to migrant flows into Europe.

"It is a very complicated piece of business," Obama told reporters.

EU President Donald Tusk said Europe was "close to limits" on its ability to accept new waves of refugees and urged the broader international community to shoulder its share of the burden.

The issue has become a political hot potato for European leaders in the face of Islamist terror attacks and rising anti-globalisation sentiment driving public resentment of immigration.

Pictures of a drowned three-year-old Syrian boy lying on a Greek beach briefly changed the discourse last year, with Germany throwing open its borders, but a major backlash swiftly followed.

Ahead of the summit, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned against "rampant" protectionism and nationalism, saying that "building walls" was not the solution."

The talks are being held in the wake of Britain's vote to leave the European Union, which leaves it with the task of renegotiating access to the markets of the rest of the world, as well as those of the group it is leaving.

It is a huge job for the world's fifth-biggest economy, and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Canberra had "got things moving towards having a free trade agreement with the UK".

But European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker said he opposes such talks while Britain remains part of the EU, insisting they were an "exclusive matter" for the bloc on behalf of its members and "we are sticking to it".

Trouble spots

With the world in town, Beijing is keen to avoid discussion about the South China Sea  where it has built artificial islands and facilities including airstrips on reefs and outcrops in disputed waters  that could cloud the proceedings.

But there were suggestions of a testy exchange between Xi and Obama Saturday over a ruling by a UN-backed tribunal which found there was no legal basis for Beijing's claims to the waterway.

The White House said the two leaders had a "candid exchange" on the issue, while Xinhua said Xi urged the Washington to "play a constructive role" in the area.

China craves a polished summit but there were more wrinkles Saturday when a shouting match broke out over access for reporters travelling with Obama as Air Force One arrived on the tarmac.

"This is our country!" a Chinese official, in a dark suit, shouted at a White House staffer. "This is our airport!"

Obama took the fracas in his stride on Sunday, saying that although the US insists on press access and does not "leave our values and ideals behind", the travelling White House juggernaut could be intimidating.

"I think this time... the seams are showing a little more than usual in terms of some of the negotiations and jostling that takes place behind the scenes," he told a press conference.
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TWIN FALLS  The first genetically engineered organism  a bacterium with an appetite for oil spills  was patented in 1980. Humulin, designer insulin produced by genetically engineered E. coli bacteria, appeared on the market two years later to lower blood sugar levels of diabetic patients.The same year, the first genetically engineered crop was grown: a tobacco plant. And in 1994, the Food and Drug Administration approved Flavr Savr tomatoes, designed for longer shelf life than conventional tomatoes. The GMO tomato was unsuccessful in the market, but it opened the door for hundreds of genetically engineered (GE) foods, including nearly all the beet sugar produced in the nation.

It also opened the door to a raging controversy.

GMOs, genetically modified organisms, are organisms whose DNA has been altered by inserting fragments of DNA from another organism.

In the 22 years since Flavr Savrs hit grocers shelves, GMOs have become popular with growers who say they changed farming for the better, but are loathed by many consumers who say they present a health risk and a danger to the environment.

Roundup Ready Sugar Beets

When Monsanto genetically engineered a glyphosate-resistant sugar beet, nearly the entire sugar beet industry embraced it.

Glyphosate, the predominate chemical in Monsantos Roundup Ready herbicide, can kill a wide range of unwanted plants. Glyphosate resistance has been engineered into some crops  sugar beets, cotton, soybeans and corn  so that an entire field can be sprayed with the herbicide to kill weeds without killing the crop. The crop is slightly damaged but recovers. GMO proponents say less pesticide is used, making it safer to consumers and chemical applicators alike.

Genetic engineering also targets hard-to-control insects using Bt, a gene from the soil-borne bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis that induces a crop to produce a protein thats toxic to insect pests.

Natural Selection Versus Genetic Engineering

Humans have been modifying our foods for more than 10,000 years, Xiaohua Yang, postdoctoral research fellow in Cornell Universitys horticulture department, wrote in a biotechnology forum. The domestication of agricultural crops was a process of selecting certain genetic compositions that were more beneficial for human consumption. Traditional breeding continues this process. The name for certain methods used to introduce new traits or characteristics to an organism typically involving the use of recombinant DNA methods. While these techniques are sometimes referred to as Genetic engineering is also trying to achieve the same goal and often more directional and with better efficiency.

Those who oppose the technology disagree.

They claim the process of blending DNA from two species is unnatural and that genetic designers are playing God. Frankenfood is a popular term used to portray the creepiness that many feel about genetically altered food products.

GMO proponents  including many scientists, the FDA and the World Health Organization  dispute the mountains of anti-GMO evidence, saying the claims are fear-based propaganda and that genetic engineering is safe.

I am not aware of any solid research that confirms the danger of GMO at the moment, Yang told the Times-News in June. Not a single case of ill health has originated from the consumption of these products for the past 20 years, she said, and there is no reason to expect that to happen.

But is it too soon to make that call? Anti-GMO forces say it is.

Refuted Claims

Before GM crops can be released to the market, they are tested in ways in which conventional and organic crops are not, Yang said. Safety testing is done largely by certified independent third-party laboratories using protocols required by the government. GM crops are also tested for their safety as animal feed and in the environment.

Despite the scientific evidence otherwise, most consumers remain skeptical of GMO safety. Numerous surveys, including one commissioned by a group called Just Label It, show overwhelming  more than 90 percent  support for GMO-labeling laws.

GMO opponents  organic farming groups, some faith-based groups and grassroots consumer groups made up of women who shop for their families  say the argument is much larger than the safety issue and list numerous reasons consumers should oppose the technology:

GMO crops foster monocultures, which spell bio-disaster.

Biotechnology has socioeconomic consequences and environmental impacts.

GMO seed companies squelch competition.

GMO seed developers have too much control of the seed market and represent a legal threat to growers themselves.

Also, GMO opponents refute many of the claims made by proponents, claiming GMO crops are not safe; pose a threat to the character and quality of the food supply; do not reduce pesticide use; and do not increase yields.

The FDA acknowledges the publics perception and has written guidelines for voluntary labeling, because some consumers are interested in knowing whether a food was produced using genetic engineering and some manufacturers want to respond to this consumer interest, an FDA article says.

GMO foods cannot be labeled organic, according to law.

The GMO labeling campaign is an effort to convince consumers that a problem exists, even though the overwhelming scientific consensus is that GE products are completely safe, said John McCreedy, Amalgamated Sugar Co.s president and CEO. If there is no safety issue, there is no role for the government to play.

Many non-GMO companies, such as Chobani, label their products as such. The Hershey Co. in 2015 switched from beet sugar to cane sugar for some of its most popular chocolates. Others companies have converted some of their products to non-GMO.

Campbells, General Mills, Kelloggs, Mars Inc. and ConAgra Foods, which all still use GMO ingredients, have announced they will label their products nationwide.

Campbells announced in January that it supported a mandatory national labeling law rather than the state-by-state patchwork approach to the issue.

Were in no way disputing the science behind GMOs or their safety, Campbells said in a statement detailing its reasoning. The overwhelming weight of scientific evidence indicates that GMOs are safe and that foods derived from crops using genetically modified seeds are not nutritionally different from other foods.

GMO opponents pushed the battle to the legislative level by lobbying for labeling laws. Several states passed laws requiring labeling, while others voted down similar measures. Vermonts labeling law went into effect July 1 but was superceded by a federal bill signed into law in mid-July by President Barack Obama that will require most food packages to carry a text label, a symbol or an electronic code readable by smartphone that indicates whether the food contains genetically modified ingredients.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has two years to write the rules.

Amalgamated Sugar supported the national labeling law.

While we believe GMO labeling is unnecessary government regulation, we have supported the recently passed federal biotech labeling bill, McCreedy told the Times-News. This bill will eliminate the costly and chaotic state-by-state patchwork of laws that consumers, agriculture and food manufactures have been facing in recent years.
MURTAUGH  By 8:30 a.m. on a Thursday in late August, sugar beet grower Ron Hepworth had finished moving water and was settled in for the day at his workshop. A brown haze of smoke and dust hung over the valley, obscuring everything in the distance but a ghostly outline of the South Hills.

Hepworth, whose first memory is of learning to drive a tractor on his fathers sugar beet farm, continues the tradition with his own son and grandson. The stability of sugar beet income is a key reason his family can live a lifestyle tied to the land, and sugar beets contribute almost 10 percent of Idahos cash receipts from crops.

Its a sweet deal for southern Idahos grower-owned cooperative.

As the Times-News documents a year in the sugar beet cycle, youll meet those who grow the sweet roots and those who run the largest sugar beet factory in the world.

That late-August morning, Hepworth was replacing cutter rods and bearings on his bean cutter, which he expected to use by the end of the month. The leaves on his bean plants were turning from green to a bright yellow, signaling their edible seeds would soon be ready to harvest.

The growing season had started to wind down. Hepworths 315 acres of malt barley were cut and threshed. His hired hand was disking barley stubble in a nearby field. His alfalfa crop was on its third cutting; Hepworth grows only enough hay  35 acres  to feed 25 cow-calf pairs.

Im hoping to build that number up, he said.

His son, Daniel, who works full time on the farm, wrestled Hooch, a 10-month-old American bulldog, who wanted to be in the middle of everything. The dog is not unlike Daniels 3-year-old son, Wyatt, Hepworth said: Wherever Im working, thats where he wants to be.

Then the talk turned to the business of making sugar.

A lot has changed since the buyout, Hepworth said, referring to the growers co-op, Snake River Sugar Co., and its 1997 purchase of the century-old Amalgamated Sugar Co.

Before the buyout, we (the growers) were at the mercy of whoever owned Amalgamated, he said. Since then, the grower co-op has been in control of the operation.

Were always looking down the road, Hepworth said. Always looking for ways to secure our future.

The sugar beet industry has left abandoned factories scattered across the nation, victims of a sink-or-swim process of elimination, he said. In such a specialized manufacturing environment, only the most efficient and adaptable survive.

Thats how Amalgamated Sugar Co.s plant in Paul became the largest sugar beet factory in the world. The sugar company has fine-tuned the plant and its processes over the past century as it stays in step with advances in technology.

Model of efficiency

While beets bulk up in Hepworths Murtaugh fields, a massive manufacturing machine is readying to receive the crop from him and 750 other south-central Idaho growers.

Theirs is a cooperative in the true sense of the word, Hepworth said. Growers and factory workers together customize their solutions for harvesting the crop, preserving the beets while they make their way to the factory, and keeping the product flowing through the plant without interruption.

We learn as we go, Larry Lloyd, manager of the Paul plant, said during a July tour of the factory. The sugar company owes thanks to the forward-thinking growers. Were now the biggest in the world. Without the co-ops support, we couldnt have done this.

Perhaps the biggest manufacturing advance is the factorys ability to make sugar year-round, rather than being limited to a few months in the fall and winter.

Sugar beets must be processed quickly, before they spoil. For decades, the factory would begin its slicing campaign at harvest  slicing whole beets into cossettes similar to french fries, then extracting the sugar. It took several months to process the entire crop, then the factory would all but shut down until the next harvest.

The Paul plant and its smaller counterparts in Twin Falls and Nampa used to employ many seasonal workers  especially farmers who planted and grew sugar beets in the spring and summer, then worked the slicing campaign after harvest.

It gave the farmers a winter job, Hepworth said.

In the past decade, an expanding factory schedule increased opportunities for full-time, year-round employees.

The Paul factory still processes the crop as quickly as possible  the slicing campaign now lasts 200 days  but the plant holds back 40 percent of the nonperishable sucrose juice to be crystallized after the slicing campaign ends.

The factory now operates 24 hours a day with no breaks; the movement of product through the plant is choreographed to last 11 months, so the last of the 2015 crop is made into sugar shortly before the first of the 2016 crop hits the factory.

The sugar-making process takes a huge toll on equipment. Every summer, the factory is filled with workers who maintain, repair and upgrade the facility.

Beets are abrasive. Sugar is very abrasive. Juice is corrosive, Lloyd said.

Thousands of valves and miles of piping are inspected and repaired or replaced so the plant can run the next slicing campaign without breakdowns. Such work is called prediction maintenance.

We have to predict what could go wrong in order to prevent a breakdown, said Jeremy Smith, facility manager. We cant afford the downtime.

Amalgamated Sugars three plants employ a total of about 1,600 workers, while an additional 400 seasonal workers man the 74 sugar beet receiving stations during harvest and the slicing campaign. As the Paul factory becomes more efficient, fewer employees are needed to work the slicing campaign and more are needed for maintenance and repair.

But the maintenance and repair season is crunched down now, Lloyd said. And thats the challenge.

Ideal growing season

While the Paul plant crystallizes juice held back from the 2015 crop, Mother Nature is being kind to most Magic Valley sugar beet growers so far this year.

No catastophes, Hepworth said. Unlike some years.

In the first two months after sowing seeds, Hepworth made only three passes through the field: two applications of Roundup to kill emerging weeds and one cultivation to break up a hard layer of soil between the rows.

No tractor has been in my beets since June, he said.

The few exceptions to the near-perfect growing season include a narrow band of damage from a July hailstorm, a small infestation of the black bean aphid in some of the beet crop, and a few fields that show symptoms of rhizomania  called crazy root because of the deformed and shriveled root that results from the disease.

We dont worry about rhizomania too much any more, Hepworth said. Theres rhizomania in all the soil here, so most of us grow rhizomania-resistant beets now.

The hailstorm set back affected sugar beets about four weeks, so growers expect a 4-ton-per-acre loss of yields in those fields. The aphids effect on the crop is not yet known, but damage was enough to warrant some growers near Kimberly spraying for the insect, which sucks the life out of new foliage.

Growing a crop is all about balance  paying close attention to economic thresholds, Hepworth said. Its costly to treat a crop for pests and diseases, and crop losses in early stages are often less than the cost of treating the pest.

It doesnt make much sense to spend money to kill them unless they are doing a lot of damage, he said.

Natures trigger

With the 2016 sugar beet crop heading into the homestretch, growers are hoping for temperatures to drop to increase its sugar content.

How does that work?

The sugar beet is a biennial: In nature, it grows from a seedling to a mature adult the first year, winters over, then flowers and produces seeds the second year.

But here in sugar beet country, the beet is harvested at the end of the first growing season, when its sugar content is highest.

During the growing season, each sugar beet plant needs a lot of water, sunlight and heat to bulk up its root. Then cool nights and shorter days signal the crop that winter is coming on and its time to store sugar. The plant needs sugar to sustain itself through the winter  it doesnt know that a harvester will cut short its life before winter hits.

Beginning in a few weeks, 35,800 tons of sugar beets per day will enter Amalgamated Sugars factories, resulting in 3,400 tons of White Satin sugar shipped daily and maintaining the companys standing as the second largest sugar processor in the U.S.
GLENDALE, Arizona  Katelyn (Fjeld) Gilbert, M.M.S., of Twin Falls, ID, has completed the Master of Medical Science (M.M.S.) in Physician Assistant Studies degree at the College of Health Sciences (CHS) of Midwestern University.

Mrs. Gilbert is the daughter of Twin Falls residents Scott and Karen Fjeld. After graduating from Twin Falls High School in 2009, she earned a B.S. in Psychology from Idaho State University in 2013. She and her husband, DJ Gilbert, also a TFHS and ISU graduate, moved to Glendale to pursue her degree. After graduating from MWU, Mrs. Gilbert and her husband plan to return to Idaho.
JEROME  Jerome first-grade teacher Tamrah Munk held up a big flashcard with the letter T and a picture of a turtle.

Tortuga. Tortuga. Tortuga. Tuh-tuh-tuh, her students recited Wednesday, saying the Spanish word and the letters sound. They also used hand motions to mimic a turtles movements.

They moved on to other letters of the alphabet, each with a corresponding word in Spanish. The lesson is typical in Munks classroom at Jefferson Elementary School. Her students are part of a new dual-language immersion program, which launched the first day of school Aug. 22. Students are learning in two languages: English and Spanish.

School officials say dual immersion has many benefits  academically, with critical thinking skills and helping students prepare for an increasingly global economy. In many countries, children grow up learning multiple languages in school

Being bi-literate is truly an advantage academically and economically for kids, said Angie Brulotte, principal at Jefferson Elementary.

Research shows children in dual-immersion programs may struggle with reading and writing until third grade but later surpass their peers.

The biggest benefit is critical thinking, said Janet Avery, curriculum director for the Jerome School District.

This year, the program is kicking off with two kindergarten classes and two first-grade classes. The program has a nearly 50-50 mix of native English and Spanish speakers.

We wanted it to represent the demographics of the school, Brulotte said.

There are two sessions of kindergarten, each with 20 students. Students stay with one teacher the entire day but use two languages.

Theres a total of 50 children in two first-grade classes. They go between two classrooms  one with instruction in English and the other with instruction in Spanish.

For students, its a long-term commitment. Theyll continue in the program throughout their school years.

Parents Erin Coppin and Megan Williams  who came up with the dual-immersion proposal  say theyve heard of families who are moving to Jerome specifically for the offering. And theres a waiting list.

The program also helped Jefferson Elementary with hiring. A couple of teachers sought out jobs at the school because they wanted their children to participate in dual immersion, Brulotte said.

But its a challenge to find bi-literate teachers  especially, since schools are already struggling with a teacher shortage.

And there are some community misconceptions. One of them: the program was created specifically to benefit Hispanic students. School district superintendent Dale Layne said thats not true. Parents sign their children up for the program voluntarily, and its not a requirement to participate.

How students are adapting

Children in dual-immersion classes are catching on quickly to instruction, Brulotte said. By Christmas, we should see them go more to advanced beginner levels.

In Munks classroom, all of the decorations are in Spanish. Across the hallway, the other first-grade classroom, with instruction in English, looks like a traditional classroom.

Teachers aim for about two transitions between the classrooms per day  often, coinciding with recess time.

Children in the classes are often wide-eyed, Brulotte said, as they figure out whats happening in class. Theyre taking a lot in right now.

Coppin and Williams both have children in the first-grade dual-immersion classes.

Jerome school officials held parent meetings in the spring and again before school started to help parents understand what to expect. And they warned parents their children may be especially tired when they come home from school.

Coppin said her daughter, Grace, is excited about school.

The first day, they came home and they were bouncing off the wall, Coppin said, but her daughter was tired the second day of school.

Williams said her son can already count to 30 in Spanish and is pointing out colors using their Spanish names. They are absorbing things much faster than us as adults.

A parent idea

Coppin used to live in Utah and was planning to enroll her son in a dual-immersion program. But then, she and her family moved to the Magic Valley.

Her husband speaks Spanish. And with a lot of diversity in Jerome, Coppin thought there were be lots of opportunities for school dual-immersion programs.

I called around and there was nothing, she said.

Two years ago, Coppin sent an email to Layne about the topic. Then, Coppin and Williams both attended an initial meeting with the superintendent.

The parents started looking into existing dual-immersion programs in Rigby and Utah to see what could work in Jerome.

These guys did a whole bunch of fabulous research, Avery said.

Avery started talking with curriculum directors in other school districts with dual-immersion programs. She also arranged for trips to see dual immersion classes.

Utah has provided support such as inviting Jerome teachers to training and answering questions. And the Jerome School District is using the Utah schools as a model.

The Jerome school board approved the dual-immersion program in spring 2015 with conditions: It cant create extra costs for the school district, and there cant be a cost for participating families, Layne said.

Utahs dual immersion programs are state-funded. But thats not the case in Idaho. The Jerome School District is relying on parent and business donations, grants and help from the Jerome School District Foundation.

A rare program

Here in the Gem State, dual immersion is rare. Only about a dozen schools have a program, according to the Idaho Department of Education.

In addition to English, languages taught include Spanish, Mandarin and Shoshone-Bannock.

In Blaine County, theres a robust English-Spanish program. More than 800 students are participating  about 25 percent of the districts students.

A dual-immersion magnet school, Alturas Elementary School, opened in 2014 in Hailey. It was previously Woodside Elementary School, but non-dual immersion students now attend other schools.

At Gooding Elementary School, a kindergarten dual-immersion class was offered in 2014. But it was discontinued after one year  largely, due to budget constraints.

Long-term plans

In Jerome, school officials want to expand the program by adding one grade level each year.

For example, this years first graders will continue onto a new second grade dual-immersion class next year.

By the time students get to middle school, theyll take elective classes in Spanish and possibly, college-level language classes in high school.

Said Coppin: Thats our vision.
WENDELL  Wendell and Cassia County school districts are preparing to launch new after-school programs this fall.

Theyre among nine Idaho recipients to receive a total of $1.38 million in federal funding through the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program. Grants are renewable for up to five years.

Students at high-poverty schools will have access to academic help, and activities such as dance and robotics.

After Wendell was turned down for the grant in 2015, school officials decided to apply again.

The main reason is, we just felt like Wendell School District is a perfect fit, Superintendent Greg Lowe said.

The Wendell district will receive $179,550 for this school year. The program  which will serve 90 students in kindergarten through eighth-grades  will start Oct. 17.

In Cassia County, the school district will get $121,413. Money will be used to start after-school programs at Dworshak Elementary School in Burley and Burley Junior High School.

The district already has 21st Century Community Learning Centers at White Pine Elementary School in Burley, Declo Elementary School, Declo Junior High School and Mountain View Elementary School.

Program director Katie Muir wasnt available to comment.

In Wendell, nearly 80 percent of the approximately 1,200 students in the district considered economically disadvantaged.

With those demographics, offering cultural and social activities for children is just as important as academic help, Lowe said. Children will also go on field trips.

The after-school program wont cost anything for families. It will also include occasional evening classes for parents.

Students will get help with homework. Theyll also do physical and enrichment activities, including dance and tumbling, and LEGO robotics.

Wendell schools are on a four-day school week, with Fridays off. The after-school program will run one hour before school and two hours after school Mondays through Thursdays, and for four hours on Fridays.

The school district will partner with community groups  including Gooding County 4-H, Wendell Recreation District and University of Idaho extensions Eat Smart Idaho program  to offer activities.

Sign-ups for the after-school program havent started.

At-risk students will be identified based on academic, economic, social and emotional needs, or if theyre from a migrant family.

Teachers are the ones who will do the initial referral, program director Jennifer Clark said.

Lowe anticipates the program will have a waiting list.

In the spring, the Wendell district did a survey of parents to see if theyd be interested in the program.

I think that helped us get the grant, Lowe said. It helped show there was a need and support for it.
Time for political change, says my Democratic opponent, Catherine Talkington, in a column in the Times-News (Aug. 31). But of course, what she really means is for Twin Falls voters to turn out common-sense, conservative Republicans and vote in liberal Democrats, including herself. However, theres not much chance of that happening, as Idahoans have repeatedly voted a different path, even more so because of the out-of-sync logic of her positions.

Talkington seemed to make two main points. One is that I and other Idaho Republicans should spend even more than we do on education, despite strong increases in education funding in recent years. Her second point is that, by some strange logic, she thinks the state of Idaho is trying to deny your access to public lands and convert title from the federal government to the states and ultimately, sell off lands to the highest bidders.

Heres what shes not telling you: On education funding, she wants to raise all your taxes, property taxes and income and sales, to add more to spend on the education pool. On federal lands, she doesnt tell you that Idaho is already working toward cooperative management of specific tracts of land within the state. On both issues, shes hiding or distorting important facts, hoping you dont notice. Heres the real information:

On public education, Idahos public schools budget has increased close to 15 percent in two years, the largest single item of which is teacher salaries. Education funding since 2015 is up over $250 million. The state has recovered from an $800 million recession and school funding has led the way back. Weve implemented a new pay plan for teacher compensation and filled gaps in discretionary funding as well. Just this past week, the state superintendent of schools proposed a next-years budget of about 6.6 percent increase. That doesnt sound like Idaho is scrimping on education funding.

But Talkington wants even more, claiming education is still underfunded in the state. The truth is that Idaho has lived within its means but that the teachers union, of which Talkington is an ardent mouthpiece, always wants more. Just give us the money.

Where would that extra money come from? By raising taxes, of course. In her campaign literature, Facebook posts and website, Talkington calls for eliminating current tax exemptions on such services as medical care, prescription medicines and many more. That would add an immediate tax of 6 percent more on all these items and services. On income taxes, she opposes any rollbacks in tax rates for either individuals or businesses. And then, shes called for repeal of the 2006 schools property tax reduction, which was approved by the voters in every precinct in the state. For Twin Falls homeowners, repealing the reduction would increase the schools tax on property values from $171 to $388 per $100,000, an increase of more than 55 percent, according to a recent report in IdahoEdNews. I dont know many people who want to see a property tax increase, much less for more than 50 percent, but thats what Talkington is supporting.

On federal lands, she continues to repeat the lie that Idaho lawmakers and me in particular are somehow scheming to sell off tracts of federal land to the highest bidders. She knows that this is a lie, as in SCR 126 in 2015 we specifically set up models for cooperative management, with no sales, between Idaho and the federal land managers. The $50 million in fire costs weve seen this summer have been mostly on federal lands, in part due to the lock it up policies of which Talkington praises.

On agriculture, she opposes a law which would prevent eco-terrorists from trespassing on private farms and ranches. She said Idaho was wasting money to protect private property rights from these anti-agriculture extremists. In siding with these dangerous anti-farm anarchists, shes turning her back on thousands of southern Idaho families whose farms and ranches make the Magic Valley one of the most productive in America, and a great place to live and raise our families. With a position like this, is it any wonder Talkington doesnt have the support of a single agriculture group in the Magic Valley?

In short, Talkington is an anti-agriculture tax-raiser and big spender who wants to expand government, add to bloated bureaucracies and who opposes fiscal responsibility and common sense, conservative governance.

Her Idaho Democratic partys platform is cut wholly from the Sanders socialist campaign, including pro-abortion, opposition to the Second Amendment and support of the Sanders/Clinton checklists. By her positions, Talkington doesnt fit southern Idahos long-standing conservative values and fiscal responsibility. As the Times-News put it when she ran in 2014, her basic understanding of the issues (is) wanting. Her ideas, the newspaper said, consist of happy talk and wishful thinking  she offers nothing in the way of solutions.

A close look at Talkingtons positions shows that shes a extremist, liberal Democrat whose positions are almost always opposite of the people of southern Idaho. If you want your taxes raised and your homes and businesses open to eco-terrorists, shes your vote. If you want a common-sense, conservative, practical Republican state representative, Ill welcome your support on Nov. 8.
On Nov. 8, a majority of Idaho voters will go to the polls and vote to end the Republic. By casting their votes for Donald Trump they will be stating their opposition to the American ideal.

Trump has been called a narcissistic sociopath. Thats putting it mildly.

Ivana Trump, Trumps first wife, said Trump kept a copy of Hitlers speeches by his bed and regularly read them. That would explain the eerie parallels between Trumps vicious attack campaign and Hitlers. Hitler and Trump appeal to the same kind of angry white conservatives, those who hate immigrants, minorities, non-Protestants, gays and women.

Donald Trump Jr. stated in 2008 that the Trump businesses were heavily supported with money from Russia. Could this explain Trumps bromance with Putin? Trump must release all of his tax data so we can see how much Russian (and Chinese) money he has.

What if Trump is Putins Manchurian candidate to divide and conquer America?

Sadly, Republican leaders failed to do extreme vetting of their presidential candidates before they selected a Fifth Columnist like Donald Trump. Since Republican leaders have failed, it is up to us, the American people, to save America by voting against Fuhrer Trump.

Gary Bennett

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Posted on: Sept 01, 2011

Rejoicing and Realising the Ganesha Principle

pArt - 01

Some call Him Vigneshwara, the One who removes all our obstacles; others adore Him as Vinayaka, the One who is second to none. For the ritualists He is the Agrapujya, the One who has to be offered the first worship; for the students He is Vidya Buddhi Pradata, the One who bestows Knowledge and Wisdom. Mooshika Vahana is how His devotees describe Him and His diminutive vehicle; when the devout relate to His exalted family, they call out to Him as Shambu Kumara and Parvati Nandana; when they think of His enchanting form with that elephantine trunk they adore Him as Sundara Mukha Sri Gajanana, as Gajavadana, Gajamukha, Lambodara; and when they contemplate on His cosmic form and hail Him as the source of all sound and learning, the deity who is the primordial one, they offer worship to Him as Pranava Swarupa, as Sri Ganesha - innumerable are the appellations of this enchanting form of the Lord and equally fascinating are the ways by which this captivating countenance of the Almighty has captured the imagination of people from various lands from time immemorial.

That is why Ganesh Chaturthi, the day dedicated to the worship of Lord Ganesha, is such a lively and reinvigorating festival not only all over India but also in distant countries like Java, Bali, Cambodia, Thailand and so on. In Western India, especially in the state of Maharashtra, the tremendous religious fervour that this festival evokes in the minds of thousands and the way it galvanises multitudes into an ecstatic state of devotional frenzy is to be seen to be believed. Be it a Hindu or a Muslim, a Parsi or a Christian, everyone joins in the slogan Ganapati Bappa Morya; to celebrate Ganesh Chaturthi is to connect to the spiritual source of joy within.

While this is how this sacred occasion is celebrated in various parts of India, what what happens in Prasanthi Nilayam every year is truly exceptional.



The student's celebrations begin in the Divine presence of Bhagawan in the Sai Kulwant Hall. On the morning of the auspicious day, Bhagawan's students offer a garland of songs and verses in praise of Lord Ganesha. After the program in the mandir the students congregate in the hostel prayer hall where an elaborate and traditional worship is offered to all the Ganesha idols that are to be installed in the various rooms of the hostel. And then with fanfare and rejoicing the Lord is taken to the rooms, which are decorated to welcome their respective Ganeshas. For the next few days these rooms transform into holy shrines. After scrupulously worshipping Lord Vigneshwara, the remover of obstacles for the next few days, the students prepare to take Him to their beloved Bhagawan on the day of the immersion of the idols.

What follows is the most beautiful and vibrant part of the celebrations. Why describe it in words; see it for yourself in the video that follows and be a part of the festivities!

Besides the beautiful statues of this beatific Lord, the innovative and decorative chariots, the vigorous and vociferous belting of chants, the colourful costumes, the dance, the singing and the unmistakable gaiety, what has always distinguished Ganesh Chaturthi in the holy hamlet of Puttaparthi is the deep involvement of Bhagawan in every part of the celebration. In fact, it is Swami who always sent the beautiful idols of Ganesha to every institution in Prasanthi Nilayam; He fixed the date for the immersion of idols including the time, the place and the way it has to be done; even mentioning which class should be doing what, when and how. He always is the sole inspiration for this grand celebration and as with every event that Bhagawan orchestrates, Swami used this occasion too to instill indelible lessons in the hearts of His young brigade. Here is one such, narrated by the current warden of the Brindavan Campus of Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning, Dr. T. Ravi Kumar:

In our Indian culture everything starts with the worship of Lord Ganesha. In fact, this festival of Ganesh Chathurti is something that is celebrated by Swami in a grand manner. And I feel, among all the festivals, this one has something very special about it with respect to Swami and His students. Those days, every year during this time Swami used to visit the hostel. If He was out of station, He would visit as soon as He returns to Puttaparthi and drop in at the hostel where the Ganesha Idol was installed; He would invariably do this every year. Now I am taking you to the time in Brindavan when I was a student; it was in the seventies. In those days it was a tradition for the boys to make Ganesha idols. They would take clay from a nearby lake (near Hoskote) and make an idol to be worshipped. And after this get it blessed by Swami. It was a great event. One particular year Swami was in Prasanthi Nilayam. A few days before Ganesh Chathurti the warden remarked: We are taking clay from the lake and making the idol, but since we are not baking the clay cracks start appearing in the statue after a few days. And it is traditionally not correct to worship such an idol. So I think this year we will not do that. Instead we'll buy a regular idol and worship it. The very next day the warden received a phone call telling him to proceed to Prasanthi Nilayam; Swami had called him. And when he returned he told us that Swami had called him and after discussing a number of things straight away asked him, What about Ganesh Chathurti? What arrangements are you making? So the warden said, Swami, I was telling the boys that since the idols develop cracks, this year we'll buy an idol and worship it. Swami said, No, no, that is not how it is done traditionally. In the Vedic times people used to make the idol in their own house and worship it. That is the correct way to do it. So tell the boys to make the idol. So when the warden came and told us this, we were all very excited; particularly the art group boys. There were hardly five or six days left. There is a hostel next to the Walter Cowen block called the S. N. Singh block. That time it had just been built and was empty. So as these boys wanted a place where there was restricted access, they started making the idol there. They kept four bricks and on top of that placed a platform. And when the first trowel of clay was put chanting Ganesh Gayathri and Jai bolo Bhagawan Sri Sathya Sai Baba ji ki, suddenly a rat came from somewhere and went under that platform. However since they had started they said, No no, it'll go away. Let's continue; let's not stop. So they continued making the idol and it took them all of those five or six days, and on Ganesh Chathurti day at 5 a.m., it was time for them to shift the ready idol to the prayer hall where the pooja had to begin. And so all of them gathered around it and chanted Ganesh gayatri and Sai Gayatri and just when they lifted it, the rat ran out. Which means, the rat had been there all the while during the making of the idol. This was something which was very surprising. It was a cute little rat, and every one was talking about it very happily and excitedly. A couple of days later Swami came to Brindavan. As He got down from the car He asked, Boys, how was the Ganesh pooja? We all said, Swami it was very nice. Then He said, I sent one rat, did it come? So when we were making the idol we actually had a direct representative of the Lord present! Therefore in every aspect of life, like this Swami would relate to what is happening and show that He is always present with us. Either He would be present in His physical form or would definitely make it a point to show us that He is omnipresent and is always with us, protecting us, guiding us, guarding us and showing us His love.



So that is how interested and involved was Swami even in the making of this celebration. The students were witness to not only yet another instance of His omnipresence and omniscience but also had a glimpse of how significant this festival was, and how much importance Swami attached to observing this festival in its entirety. In fact when the rituals are adhered to with a steadfast and sincere attitude, the results they bestow are absolutely gratifying. Perhaps the best example of this is the experience that Baba granted to Swami Amritananda, a former disciple of Sri Ramana Maharshi, which has been duly documented in Baba's biography Sathyam Shivam Sundaram, Volume I. This is what Prof. Kasturi, the author of this volume, writes:



Swami Amritananda came to Baba after the passing away of his guru, Sri Ramana Maharishi of Thiruvannamalai. When Amritananda first came to Prasanthi Nilayam, Baba accosted him, "Amritam", and Amritananda was genuinely astonished at the familiarity and even affection with which the call was saturated, and said, "Only Ramana Maharshi, with whom I spent seventeen years, accosted me in that manner. The voice and manner were exactly the voice and manner of the Maharshi!" Later Baba asked the eighty-five year old Swami about a Ganapati Homa, a sacrifice to Lord Ganesha, which he had performed for forty-one days when he was seven years old! He told the Swami all the details of that sacrifice, including the long mantra involved chanting which the offerings were placed each time in the fire. The mantra, as disclosed by Baba, begins, Om Sreem Hreem Kleem Gloum Gam. Baba told him that he had repeated this mantra a thousand times a day for forty-one days and made as many coconut offerings in the fire of the sacred sacrifice. "But what is the reward promised in the scriptures?" Baba asked the old ascetic. He answered that if the sacrifice is done with scrupulous regard for ritual, Lord Ganapati Himself will appear in "the fiery enclosure" (the homa kunda), as the golden-colored effulgent elephant-headed God; that with His trunk He will receive the final and concluding offerings and will grant everlasting bliss by means of His darshan.



Baba asked him whether he had the Vision. Amritananda replied that it was not so easy for a seven year old boy to get the Vision of the Lord by the mere number and quantity of offerings and mantras. Baba interrupted him, saying, "No, no. It is due to all that mantra and all that sacrifice that you have now come to Me. You will today, after an interval of seventy-eight years, get the reward mentioned in the scriptures."



He asked the Swami to look at Him, and when he did, Amritananda saw the golden-colored elephant-faced Lord, Ganapati as described in ancient texts. He was overwhelmed with joy and bliss for four days following this darshan, and forsook food, drink, and sleep.

That is how Bhagawan confirmed the faith of this holy man in his spiritual practices. And to inculcate this steadfastness of devotion in His students, Baba never missed an opportunity to instruct them about the efficacy of the celebration of this sacred occasion so that through this they could inculcate in them devotion towards Lord Ganesha.

- Bishu Prusty

Radio Sai Team
We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright 2004 by Stuart Dybek, Curtains, from the collection Streets in Their Own Ink (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2004). Poem reprinted by permission of Stuart Dybek and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2016 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.
The two major Montana wildfires are expected to hold or shrink in size, as cold, wet weather moves into Western Montana on Sunday and Monday.

The Copper King fire is staging down operations, with a Type 2 crew incident management team set to take over at 8 p.m. Monday, although the fire remains around 70 percent contained at 28,534 acres, the fire update said.

Cool and damp weather was predicted for Sunday in the Thompson Falls area, as well as a quarter-inch of rain, putting the fire in a weather-induced sleep, the report said.

Mop-up operations, patrols and fire line strengthening were planned for Sunday, according to the update, while crews took advantage of calmer fire conditions Saturday to lay fire line and retardant along Bad Rock Lane near the west side of Munson Creek.

The bright red-orange retardant is visible from Highway 200, the report said, but will wash away within two weeks. The fire still burning in Munson Creek isnt spreading, though residences along Buffalo Bill Road remain on evacuation notice.

The fire area closure was reduced Saturday and now encompasses the Thompson River drainage and all tributary drainages south of the ACM road, Weeksville Creek, Buffalo Bill Creek, Smiley Creek and all connected tributaries as well as ACM road and Little Thompson River Road.

A fire information map, including the fire perimeter and all closures, is available to view from the National Interagency Fire Center.

As of 10 a.m. Sunday, the Montana Department of Environmental Quality reported all areas in Montana, save one, have good air quality, the cleanest grade. West Yellowstone is one higher, at moderate.

***

The Roaring Lion Fire in Hamilton held at 8,658 acres Saturday and is still at 70 percent containment.

Cooler and wetter conditions are expected later Sunday into Monday in the Bitterroot as well, with fire crews working to keep the fire contained in Ward Bowl, north of Camas Creek and south of Sawtooth Creek, according to the inter-agency fire information site Inciweb.
A lack of housing options in Missoula is driving up prices here like never before, and that trend has wide implications for the economy because it creates challenges for businesses trying to retain workers and may cause less consumer spending.

Something tells me well be talking about this 10 years from now, said Patrick Barkey, the chief economist at the University of Montanas Bureau of Business and Economic Research. He said that because the economies in some of the least affordable places in the nation  San Francisco and New York, for example  are doing extremely well, people are often tempted to conclude that higher housing prices equal a better economy.

He said its hard to untangle whether high housing prices create a strong economy or if they are often just a side effect of strong economy.

Im not saying the economy of Missoula is all that strong but its in pretty good shape, he said.

There are both good and bad ramifications for the economic health of Missoula if the trend continues.

Housing prices clearly make it more difficult to keep workers, modestly paid workers in particular, Barkey said. Workers have to be able to live close enough to where jobs are being created and clearly thats proved to be a big issue in the big urban areas. You look at Silicon Valley. Everything from schoolteachers to service workers of all kinds, they have to travel great distances to be there.

Municipalities with unaffordable housing have to take extraordinary measures to recruit and retain those types of workers.

Missoula is nowhere near that, Barkey said.

Over just the past eight months, the median sale price of homes in the Missoula urban area have surged up 4 percent from $239,500 to the current price of $249,900. Prices have increased $53,000 since 2011. In July alone, the median sales price was $268,000, so the price increases are accelerating.

The housing affordability gap has also been growing in Missoula. From 2012 to 2016, the median price of a home in Missoula rose from $209,700 to $249,900. However, the median household income for a single person has languished right around $44,000 and actually decreased last year.

It would take an income of $80,000 to afford a median-priced home with the FHA's standard 4 percent down payment, according to the Missoula Organization of Realtors annual housing report.

Barkey said there are two main reasons that lurk in the background and arent brought up very often.

The first is that we have a whole alphabet soup of primarily federal programs to help people buy houses, he said. Everything from the Federal Housing Authority loans to Frannie Mae and Freddie Mac. You have to travel to other countries to appreciate how different it is here.

Because lots of people are able to qualify for loans, they are able to buy houses and thus the inventory decreases.

When you have a restricted supply like we do in Missoula, it pushes up prices, he said. People can get 30-year loans and it tends to show up in price growth.

The second reason supply is low is because there are restrictions on development, Barkey said.

Im not picking on Missoula or Montana because there are a lot of towns like this, he explained. There are clearly communities with a combination of zoning policy and geography that are not real friendly to housing supply. Weve had very restrained homebuilding here.

Barkey said hes not the only person who has pointed out that housing policy in many cities has failed.

Basically, what affordable housing policies in communities across the country do is try to subsidize house purchases for people who cant afford market prices, he said. At least in my opinion, those policies are doomed to failure. Market prices are the problem.

Barkey said that for prices to go down so that people can afford housing, developers need to be able to build large subdivisions for a relatively low cost. To do that, they need cheap land and agreeable zoning codes. Not everyone appreciates high density housing being built near their neighborhood, but its going to have to happen if Missoulians want affordable housing.

According to the Urban Institute, a Denver think-tank that recently published a report on the barriers to affordable housing, new construction is always too expensive to make affordable housing pencil out. That means new, affordable housing is almost an oxymoron.

Development costs a lot of money, the report reads. Developers rely on loans and other sources to fund construction before people move in and start paying rent. But developers can only get those loans and equity sources if the development will produce enough revenue to pay back the loans and pay returns to investors. The gap between the amount a building is expected to produce from rents and the amount developers will need to pay lenders and investors can stop affordable housing development before it even begins, leaving few options for the millions of low-income families looking for safe, affordable homes.

The problem is even more difficult when you consider the poorest residents, the report continued. In many places, the rent the poorest families can pay is too little to cover the costs of operating an apartment building, even if developers could build that building for free, it said.

It goes back to buildable lots, Barkey said. It might get worse before it gets better.

Barkey said there havent been any new large subdivisions built in Missoula over the past year, likely because there just isnt an ideal place to put them.

Those kinds of developments are hard, he said. The one and two houses arent going to affect supply anyway. What you see in community after community is its very difficult to get the kind of developments that would make a meaningful impact on the supply of housing and would therefore impact prices.

The reason, Barkey said, is its hard to get huge subdivisions approved by various planning and zoning boards. There are regulations and protests by neighbors who dont want higher density in their backyard.

Its been that way for a long time, he said. Its also compounded by geography. We are so close to the mountains here. It also affects places like Bozeman, which is relatively flat and has higher housing prices. It comes back to buildable lots. If you think of all the buildable lots here, there arent that many.

Barkey said that people are being forced to have roommates, settle for less adequate housing or live farther away as home affordability falls.

People buy the amount of housing they can afford, he said. Its the same way with gas. When it gets more expensive, you buy less gas. People economize on housing in whatever way they can.

If an individual or a family is collectively paying more than 30 percent of their income toward housing every month, they are what the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development considers housing stressed.

Only 27.2 percent of Missoula homeowners pay less than 30 percent of their income on monthly mortgage payments. That means for the rest, they are spending less on consumer goods, savings, cars and other things that boost the economy.

Prices are rising faster than incomes and that has consequences, Barkey concluded.

The commercial real estate market is also fairly tight in Missoula, according to Mike Bryan, a real estate agent with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices. He said there arent any official stats for commercial real estate here like there are with residential property.

Because of the size of our market and the fact that each commercial property is radically different, we dont have enough data like we do with residential homes to say the average price is up, he said. There is a change in the product mix on an annual basis and Missoula isnt big enough to add credibility to that.

However, Bryan said theres been a lot more activity in the commercial market here since 2015 than hes seen in years past, and hes been in the business for 15 years.

There has been a significant uptick in volume over the last 18 months, he said. My belief is prices havent appreciated greatly but stabilized, and the market is trending up. There isnt a graph I can point to, but there is less lease space available than there was.

Many commercial buyers decide that they have to simply build something to suit their needs rather than try to take over a property, he said, and that means there are fewer and fewer buildable lots available. Then, the property they moved out of is now empty and somebody has to find a use for it.

The Missoula Food Bank is a good example. The nonprofit decided to construct a new building, but its old building on 2nd Street will be empty in the near future. It lacks parking, and the interior might not be suitable to potential tenants.

When people are looking for commercial real estate, their needs are way more specific, he said. There is a shortage of buildable lots. People assume that if you have a lot thats zoned commercial that makes it more valuable. But because the residential market is so tight its really worth more as a place you could build apartment buildings or homes.

Bryan said that a large commercially-zoned property on North Scott Street was recently bought by a developer who decided it was more valuable to build houses.

So the commercial zoning was absolutely meaningless, he said.
Congolese refugees and the people trying to help them get settled in Missoula are facing a housing crisis.

Five families from refugee camps in East Africa will be in town by the end of September, none of them with a source of steady income or credit history.

Its the job of the local resettlement agency, the International Rescue Committee, to help them secure both as quickly as possible, said IRC director Molly Short Carr.

But record home sales prices in Missoula have placed rentals at a premium. And in a town that swells this time of year with university students  many with no credit ratings themselves  property managers and landlords can afford to be picky about who they rent to.

Were kind of hitting a bit of a brick wall, Carr admitted.

The Congolese family of six that arrived Aug. 18 is adjusting well but lives in temporary housing. Its not ideal, when stability is the goal, to have to uproot them again when a more permanent home is found, Carr said.

A second family consisting of a mother, father and five children  the youngest an infant  is due in as soon as domestic booking is finalized. Carr was close this week to an agreement with a homeowner on a three-bedroom house for them but by week's end it hadn't panned out.

"They're still thinking about it," she said. "It's understandable. This is a totally new thing. But I'm happy they talked to me."

Missoula has been approved as the destination for families of five, four and three people  25 refugees in all  in the next few weeks, so the hunt for housing is becoming critical.

Were really trying to reach out to everybody who has a unit that would be sufficient to our needs, Carr said. So far the response has not been very great. We dont fit into a mold.

Landlords and property managers have a structure they use to vet potential tenants, she said. That includes credit checks and background checks, which is something you cant do with refugees.

The IRC doesnt allow its offices to co-sign for refugees.

Our focus is really on getting them self-sufficient, said Carr. Co-signing is kind of a contradiction to self-sufficiency and being able to guide their own lives.

In a newsletter this week, Soft Landing Missoula said its volunteers have reached out to some property managers and received a "very positive response, so we know there is interest and available housing.

Louise Kreis, who owns Professional Property Management, feels sure there's a solution.

The way our company looks at it is that no credit history is better than bad credit history, so that should not be a stumbling block, Kreis said. What we look at is the care, how the rent will be paid, and that they dont establish bad credit.

John Sinrud, a licensed Realtor in Kalispell and former state legislator, is the lobbyist for the Montana Landlords Association. While hes not familiar with the situation in Missoula, Sinrud said hes not surprised that landlords are gun shy about renting to refugees.

Just bringing people in, theres a lot of issues with that for landlords, businesses and everything else, he said. Unless you have your ducks in a row and have some surety for the landlord and their ability as sanctioned individuals that are able to sign a contract and understand it, how do you get through those hurdles?

Carr said interpreters and a five-member family mentor team coordinated by Soft Landing Missoula help each new refugee family with transportation, housing applications, job applications and schooling.

Our focus is employment, self-sufficiency and integration, and that helps the refugees get on steady feet faster, the Missoula IRC director said.

The U.S. State Department supplies a one-time grant of $1,125 for each arriving refugee, including children, to cover housing and other costs for the first 90 days. The money is managed by Carrs office, not turned over in a lump sum to the family.

Follow-up federal programs, such as one that provides refugees matching grants for financial support for up to six months, allow local agencies to focus on securing employment for adult refugees. Carr said the newcomers are immediately eligible for either Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or refugee cash assistance through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement.

We do have significant financial support to get refugees into permanent housing, Carr said. Were not looking for housing thats, like, low income, and were not looking for any kind of special assistance. What were looking for is to find a way to collaborate with property managers and landlords that allows them to take into account that you dont have a way to do credit checks, and they dont have jobs when they get here.

Incoming refugees have been thoroughly screened by the State Department, which prohibits anyone with a criminal record from migrating to the United States. Records of the vetting, however, are off limits to property managers and everyone else.

Sinrud said a bigger concern for those with available housing to rent is financial.

A lot of landlords still have mortgages on property they have or some sort of lien against them, he said. They need to get their bills paid. If somebodys late on their rent  Thats why youve got late fees. If (landlords) are late on their mortgage payment they will have late fees too. So youre trying to be equitable all the way around.

Carr said Missoula is far from the only city struggling to provide sufficient housing for refugees. But in cities with established resettlement agencies, refugees have developed good relationships with landlord/property managers.

Ive been working in this field a very long time and Ive never had a refugee experience an eviction, said Carr, who owns rental property herself in her home state of New York.

They are looking for a place to call home. That first home is like the foundation to their lives in the United States. They take a lot of pride and care in that home.

Kreis agreed the ability of a refugee family to pay its rent after the initial government aid is exhausted is sure to be a concern for a property owner.

What happens then? she said. But I can also say many of our property owners would be willing to help.

Were starting to break down some barriers," Carr said. "But if there are property management companies and landlords out there who are interested in working with us, itd be helpful if they let us know who they are.

It's common in Missoula to charge application fees of $30 to $36 to cover the cost of background checks and obtaining credit reports. Short said she and her husband paid upward of $600 in application fees when they moved to Missoula this summer, only to be turned down by many because they have a dog.

Even those who arent interested in renting to refugees arent going to say that up front, Carr pointed out.

We dont want to spend money on application fees on behalf of our client with someone who has no interest in renting to us, she said. So it would be helpful if they come forward and contact us.

Kreis said in her 34 years of property management in Missoula she's seen the "ebbs and tides and changes, and the different personalities come and go."

Refugee resettlement is "a wonderful program," she said.

"Certainly our intent would be to help in any way we can. Our job is to rent units."
None of the 10,000 Syrian refugees allowed into the United States since President Barack Obama set that threshold last fall landed in Montana.

A map published this week by the New York Times displayed the distribution of refugees who arrived in the U.S. from camps outside the war-torn Middle East country in fiscal year 2016, which ends Sept. 30. Other maps show those whove come to the U.S. since 2012.

Montana is one of about 10 that has received no Syrians. Neighbors Wyoming and South Dakota are among the others.

The closest city to western Montana that has accepted Syrian refugees in recent months is Spokane, where the Times map indicates up to 100 Syrians have resettled.

The International Rescue Committee recently reopened an office in Missoula, but the initial refugees here are Congolese coming from refugee camps in East Africa.

The Bismarck Tribune reported Friday that the first Syrians to touch down in North Dakota arrived in Fargo on Aug. 19.

The newspaper said Jamal Tmr, his wife and seven children, ages 1 to 12, had flown more than 15 hours from Iraq, with stops in Amman, Jordan and Chicago.

The flight over the ocean, that was just kind of endless, Tmr told the Tribune, speaking Kurdish through a translator. The kids, they were just not patient at all.

A monthly update on Aug. 10 by the Canadian government reported that 708 Syrian refugees had been resettled in Calgary, Alberta  some of the 25,000 Syrians that have landed in Canada since November.

In the U.S., most of the 10,000 refugees from Syria have been sent to more affordable medium-size cities, the New York Times pointed out. Boise, Idaho, for instance, accepted 108, more than New York and Los Angeles combined. The largest concentration is in San Diego, where 626 Syrian refugees have arrived since last Oct. 1.

According to the New York Times maps, other states besides Montana and its two neighbors with no Syrian refugees since 2012 are Alabama, Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Mississippi, New Jersey and New Hampshire.
It was starting to drizzle rain when Terry carried Pattys badly beaten and unconscious body to the shallow grave hed dug for her. He threw her body in the grave and returned to their house. She regained consciousness, was able to claw her way out of the grave and crawl to her car, in which, miraculously, shed left her keys and cell phone.

He chased her on foot at first, then raced back to his truck and pursued her in a high-speed chase down a dirt road between Victor and Hamilton. She met law enforcement, who responded to her 9-1-1 call along the way. Terry was arrested and he spent one night in jail before bonding out the next day.

The Ravalli County attorney agreed with Patty to charge him with felony partner/family member assault, and assault with a deadly weapon with intent to do permanent damage. But later, without telling Patty, the county attorney agreed to a plea that dropped the more serious crime. He was set free, and he continued to stalk her and threaten to murder her until he was caught with marijuana and a meth pipe. Now hes in prison.

Patty and I werent friends at the time this happened. We didnt even know each other. But we shared something terrible in common that brought us together. You see, Terry tried to murder me a decade earlier in Missoula after I ended our relationship.

I too was saved by a frantic, last-minute 9-1-1 call after he broke into my home and attacked me. He had strangled me unconscious when the police broke my door down, subdued him and arrested him. A few minutes later and I would be dead.

He was charged with attempted deliberate homicide. I thought that was the end of it. I thought he was in prison and Id never have to see him again. What I didnt know at the time was that he had worked out a plea deal with the Missoula County prosecutor that let him off with a few months of jail time. This dangerous predator was free to find his next victim. He found Patty.

If Montana had had Marsys Law I believe Patty would never have met him and he wouldnt have been allowed to end her life as she knew it. Under Marsys Law, the prosecutor in my case couldnt have negotiated a plea agreement without my knowledge; nor would the prosecutor in Pattys case.

Under Marsys Law, we would have had the right to be heard by the court and we would have told them what a dangerous predator this man is.

Under Marsys Law, I would have been notified when Terry was released from custody. I would have known he was loose and that my life, and other womens lives, were in danger.

Crime victims in Montana deserve to have equal rights with individuals accused crimes. That is why it is so important for us to pass Marsys Law for Montana, CI-116.

Marsys Law is a Crime Victims Bill of Rights that will ensure victims are better protected, better informed and better involved in the criminal justice process.

I can tell you firsthand how big a difference Marsys Law would have made for me as a victim of a horrible, violent crime. I believe it could have helped me prevent the crimes against Patty from happening.

Im forever grateful to the Missoula police who saved my life, and to the Hamilton police who saved Pattys. Marsys Law will save future lives by helping to keep repeat violent offenders off the streets. Please, vote yes for CI-116.

Debra Ricci lives in Missoula.
Did you know that Montana was home to the first Social Security law in the United States? In 1923 Montana Gov. Joe Dixon signed the Old Age Pension Bill into law  12 years before President Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act.

Social Security has been, and continues to be, crucial for older Montanans.

So with the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump quickly approaching on Sept. 26, folks across the state will be paying close attention  hoping and expecting debate moderators to ask each candidate to explain their plans to strengthen Social Security.

Social Security is the foundation for financial security in retirement, yet many younger Montanans think Social Security is irrelevant to them. The reason, according to a 2015 AARP poll, is that more than half of all 18- to 29-year-olds and 65 percent of all 30- to 49-year-olds believe Social Security won't be there for them later in life.

Although these concerns are valid, the reality is that Social Security will continue to pay about three-quarters of scheduled benefits after the Social Security trust fund is depleted in 2034. Even a depleted trust fund can pay reduced benefits because every month, Social Security collects billions of dollars in payroll taxes, and those funds continue to pay for current benefits.

However, without immediate action, Social Security benefits could be substantially reduced for all Americans.

If Social Security is not updated and kept strong, after 2034 beneficiaries will lose $4,000 to $10,000 per year in benefits.

That's a lot of money. Thats why it's crucial that America's leaders explain where they stand on the protection of Social Securitys future.

In the last year, voters have heard nearly two dozen presidential debates. Yet fewer than 3 percent of all the questions asked in those debates have focused on Social Security.

That's unfortunate  especially considering the impact that Social Security has on Montana families. Here are the facts:

 For more than half of Montana retirees, Social Security represents at least half of their overall income. For 22 percent of Montana retirees, Social Security is over 90 percent of their income.

 Because retirement savings continue to be alarmingly low for many Montana workers, the importance of Social Security will only continue to grow. In the just-released Employee Benefits Research Institute 2016 Retirement Confidence Survey, 42 percent of all U.S. workers surveyed said they had less than $10,000 saved for retirement. Younger workers are even more likely to have little saved  in 2015, 57 percent of workers age 25-34 reported having less than $10,000 in savings.

 Social Security is the bedrock on which a successful retirement plan is built. Your Social Security check is there every month  regardless of the ups and downs of the market. Unfortunately, even a lifetime of faithful saving can be wiped out by a stock-market crash, high medical costs or long-term care expenses.

 Keeping Social Security strong helps all of Montana. The program pumps a staggering $2.7 billion into Montanas economy each year.

To help make sure Social Security is there for all Montanans  including our children and grandchildren  AARP has launched a nationwide initiative called Take A Stand. Since last fall, AARP volunteers across the country have urged candidates to explain  with specifics and in detail  exactly how they would keep Social Security strong.

Lets hope the presidential debate moderators pose the same question.

In the meantime, AARP will keep urging all the candidates, including those running for Congress, to spell out their plans to ensure that Social Security is there for us  and for future generations.

At TakeAStand.aarp.org/why-act-now, AARP provides details about major proposals that could help fix Social Security  from cutting benefits, to raising the full retirement age, to raising the payroll tax cap. An interactive tool lets you test your favorite solutions to see how that specific measure would help strengthen Social Security's future.

Ultimately, strengthening Social Security is a test of leadership. Those who aspire to our nations highest elected offices  be it the presidency, the U.S. Senate or Congress  should be able to tell voters they'll take action to keep Social Security strong.

This election season, urge those who want your vote to Take A Stand.
In November, Montanas voters will have a chance to choose between two very different candidates for the office of state auditor, Jesse Laslovich and Matt Rosendale. One has made a career out of protecting Montanans from investment fraud. The other would sacrifice the interests of everyday Montanans on the altar of the free market.

Laslovich was born and raised in Anaconda. He has an ironclad work ethic and knows that Montana workers need protection from out-of-state corporate interests. He has experience as a Montana representative, senator and as chief legal counsel to State Auditor Monica Lindeen. He wants to protect our public lands from private encroachment.

Matt Rosendale, of course, is best known for playing with a hunting rifle in a campaign video. As for our public lands, Rosendale would sell them off to the highest bidder. Which is not as great as it sounds, since Montanans would once again not get fair market value for their resources. We would get ripped off in the style of the utility deregulation debacle.

So when election day finally comes and we put this most interesting of campaign seasons to bed for good, vote for Jesse Laslovich. He will protect Montanans because hes one of us. Rosendale needs to return to his real estate business where he will do as little harm as possible.

Lee Conway,

Missoula
BILLINGS  Beating the pervasive bias against Native Americans in Montana may come from first admitting the biases exist, says Montana American Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Caitlin Borgmann.

She was one of 18 panelists representing criminal justice, education and health care who spoke recently in Billings about discrimination against Native Americans.

The meeting was meant to gather information for The Montana Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

The committee presented a report on border town discrimination in 2011. A major note of that report was the high percentage of Native American high school dropouts. Since the report was produced, Montana schools have seen an improvement in the number of Native American graduates, going from 61.5 percent in 2011 to 65 percent in 2014.

Borgmann believes public officials should put into place inherent bias training in their departments.

Racial disparity is "baked" into our systems, Borgmann said.

Questions regarding release from jail prior to a case being tried and release from prison on parole are in themselves biased against American Indians, who are often impoverished, Borgmann said. Most don't have a car or a steady job, and because of this are often not released from jail or can't afford bond.

There is some bias in decision-making, but it doesn't come from inherent racism, Borgmann said.

"People are not conscious of these biases. They don't have bad intent," Borgmann said. "But they've seen images in the media or other places and have ingrained views of people."

Yellowstone County Deputy Chief of Criminal Litigation Ed Zink presented statistics at the meeting that showed that from 2013 to 2014, the Native American population in Montana was about 6.2 percent. But American Indians made up 11 percent of the homicide victims, 9.2 percent of rape victims and 13 percent of aggravated assault victims.

American Indians also made up 11 percent of the people arrested in connection with a homicide case, 14 percent of those arrested on rape charges and 19 percent of those arrested for aggravated assault, Zink said, citing statistics from the Montana Board of Crime Control. Crime data kept by individual reservations was not included in those numbers.

Health statistics also were alarming. According to the 2014 Montana Vital Statistics Annual Report, white Montana women live an average of 82 years and 75 years for men. American Indians in Montana have a life expectancy of 63 years for women and 58 for men.

Gwendolyn Kircher, an advisory committee member, was attending school during the civil rights era of the 1960s. She said Native Americans need to organize and prepare to be beaten down, as African-Americans did.

"Native Americans are in the same spot African-Americans were before the civil rights movement," Kircher said. "Passive, docile, content and happy to have what we got and accept whatever happened to us. Separate but equal didn't work for us and it doesn't work for Native Americans.

"Many people are bigoted and they don't even realize it,'' Kircher said.

The Montana Advisory Committee does not have much power, committee member David Lopez said. The committee is meant to advise the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which can in turn make recommendations to Congress. The power of the advisory board comes from exposing biases, not fixing them.

People wishing to submit comment about discrimination against Native Americans in Montana have until Thursday, Sept. 29, to share their thoughts with the Montana Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Those comments can be submitted to the email address ebohor@usccr.gov.
As authorities gradually reopen the Yellowstone River after an unnerving fish-kill, anglers across Montana share the same thought:

Weve been here before.

The parasite that killed more than 4,000 mountain whitefish and prompted the complete closure of 180 miles of the Yellowstone (and all its tributaries) between Gardiner and Laurel is related to another scourge of the fishing world  whirling disease.

While the present outbreak of proliferative kidney disease appears on the wane, nobody wants a repeat of the infestation 20 years ago that killed up to 90 percent of the rainbow trout in several of Montanas most popular trout streams and devastated rainbow populations statewide.

At first, there was a lot of fear among fisheries professionals that this (PKD outbreak) would end up being like whirling disease, said Travis Horton, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks fisheries manager for the Yellowstone area.

Were not taking a sky-is-falling perspective," he said. "Whirling disease was serious, but fish figured out how to get around it. It just takes some time. That experience gave us some perspective on what to anticipate this time around.

Whirling disease appeared in Montana rivers around 1991, although it took several years for biologists to realize the magnitude of the threat.

The Madison River near Ennis was one of the first trouble spots. Rainbow trout populations in a 50-mile reach above Ennis Lake tumbled from 3,300 fish per mile in 1991 to 300 per mile in 1994.

Whirling disease had been prevalent in Europe for decades, and was detected in the United States first in 1956. Eighteen states soon reported the parasite, generally associated with hatchery-bred fish and stream-stocking programs.

But the Madison never had a hatchery program, although biologists suspected some illegal stocking of fish with hatchery connections may have occurred in the 1980s.

By 2004, whirling disease was collapsing rainbow trout numbers in more than 100 Montana rivers. There was no cure, no vaccine and no certainty about how to stop the spread.

The disease still exists, but has decreased significantly as the rainbow population, the most vulnerable species of trout to the parasite, has crashed.

FWP biologists first found traces of the PKD parasite in tributaries to the Smith and Ruby rivers while searching for clues to whirling disease 20 years ago. But PKD was not infecting significant numbers of fish at the time and the momentum to solve whirling disease pushed the other parasite out of the picture.

The current outbreak of PKD started on August 12 on the Yellowstone, when reports of belly-up whitefish started pouring into FWP offices in Livingston. Whitefish, like the rainbow trout, were the favorite target of the new parasite.

Lab tests confirmed PKD on August 18, and the FWP Board of Commissioners ordered immediate closure of all fishing, floating and even wading along 180 miles of the river through the Paradise Valley and along Interstate 90.

The closure did not extend into Yellowstone National Park. Park spokeswoman Charissa Reid cited two reasons. First, the Yellowstone River above Gardiner is much colder than the Paradise Valley reach, and the disease appears to depend on warm, low water conditions. And second, Knowles Waterfall in the Black Canyon of the Yellowstone just east of Gardiner forms a natural fish barrier that should prevent any spread into the interior of the park.

The hugely lucrative fish-guiding business downstream of Gardiner wasnt so lucky. Livingston boat-builder Jason Cajune said guides were scrambling to reschedule clients on the Missouri, Big Horn or Madison rivers.

Everybody thats working on the river is doing something else, Cajune said Wednesday, just before some portions of the Paradise Valley Yellowstone reopened. A lot of people lost their trips or had to cancel a lot of bookings. But the river needs a rest. Its been loved to death for a lot of years.

On Thursday, FWP reopened the Yellowstone River downstream of Livingston to all recreational activity. It also permitted boating (but not fishing) between Gardiner and the Carbella Fishing Access Site just downstream of the popular Yankee Jim Canyon whitewater rafting area. The reach between Carbella and Livingston remains closed to all public use, although tributaries along there have reopened to fishing. FWP officials plan to survey the river on Sept. 6 to assess the fish-kill and decide on further action.

At the Rock Creek Mercantile, an angling store on the blue-ribbon trout stream 25 miles east of Missoula, manager John Staats was preparing for his September clients with a wary eye toward the Yellowstone. Theres one big bug hatch left that connects anglers to guides in fall, providing the last economic boost before business goes dormant for the winter.

I was just talking to the guys at Yellowstone Fly Goods in Billings, Staats said. Were trying to give them some business, ordering stuff from them. Theyre hunkering down, waiting for this to pass.

Rock Creek went through a similar collapse two decades ago, when whirling disease got in its water. In 1993, a fish census of its upper section counted 344 rainbows and 59 brown trout per mile larger than 13 inches. By 2004, that had reversed: 300 browns and 57 rainbows in that size category. Rainbows in the 6- to 13-inch class went from 695 per mile in 1996 to almost non-existent in 2004.

Theres still a lot of fish there, FWP Region 2 Fisheries Manager Pat Saffel said. But the change of species had an effect on anglers. Rainbows are easier to catch than brown trout. Rock Creek was a unique blue-ribbon rainbow fishery. The brown trout tend to be smaller, overpopulated, and by nature more difficult to catch.

Microscopic Myxosporean parasites cause PKD after a long and complicated life cycle. Another species of Myxosporea causes whirling disease. At various stages, they move from bryozoan moss-animals (which look kind of like spider webs) to aquatic worms and then to fish. However, the PKD parasites arent built as tough as their whirling disease cousins, and arent expected to spread with such plague-like ease.

However, no one has a test or detection kit for PKD spores. While Montanas aquatic invasive species check-points have ways of spotting zebra and quagga mussels, milfoil and other dangerous pests, they have no definite protocol for blocking Myxosporeans.

The bryzoan is the host for the dormant form of the parasite, which can live out of water for a long time, said Caryn Miske, executive director of the Flathead Basin Commission which partners with state officials on the boat check point program. In a 1999 study, they soaked bryzoans in lots of compounds, including ammonia, and found it was highly resistant to everything. Two hours in silver nitrate eventually killed it.

The Flathead Basin Commission is already seeking an administrative rule change to start inspecting fishing gear as well as boats for the parasite and its host. However, it's a much bigger ask on the traveling angler public to submit every tackle box and wader boot for a cleaning check. Plus, inspectors cant spot gear in a trunk the way they see boats strapped to rooftops.

Were just reminding everyone to drain, clean and dry, Saffel said, referring to the aquatic invasive species defense slogan. We should treat all our gear that way. We hope for voluntary compliance. I think when people see the effects on our fisheries, theyll be very willing to cooperate.
1. Seeing Your Kids Stretch And Step Outside Their Comfort Zone

Look who got to play George Washington at school on Friday!! They did a little presentation for the parents at chapel and he had his first on-stage speaking part.

l was so proud of him This once incredibly shy, would-not-even-look-at-someone-he-didnt-know boy spoke with poise and confidence and a smile.

Watching your kiddos stretch and grow and step outside their comfort zones and develop character is such a rewarding thing as a parent!

2. Poldark: Season 2 is Coming!

Oh happy day!! Did you see that Season 2 of Poldark is coming?!?!

Im super picky about what shows Ill watch. To me, a lot of TV is boring, lacking character depth and engaging storylines.

So most of the time, when we try out a new show that has been raved about, I feel let down. But not Poldark!! From the first episode, we were hooked.

It is 100% my kind of show. I love the rich character development and have high hopes for Season 2!!



3. Photos From South Africa

My phone showed a message from WhatsApp earlier this week  which can only mean one thing: Someone from South Africa was texting me.

I was thrilled to get the text with these photos from the large building you all are helping to build at Reagaboka. After going last year and getting to see the classrooms you all helped build, Im just ecstatic about this new building knowing what a need it is going to meet in so many ways in this community.

Can you believe that they are putting a roof on it now?? Its getting SO close to being done. And this could have never happened without you all.

4. Were GOING to South Africa Next Week!!!!!

You guys, Im SO excited! And seeing the above pictures just makes me more excited.

Those of you who are long-time followers know how part of my heart will always be in South Africa. And Im absolutely thrilled that I get the opportunity to bring a team of my readers with me to South Africa.

We leave on Thursday (September 8) and will get back the following Saturday (September 17). The onlyreally sad part for me is that our kids are staying back in the states this time. (We took them with us on our last trip to South Africa and it was such a special time for our family!)

My mom has been so kind to be willing to come and stay with them and they are looking forward to getting to spend a lot of quality time with Grandma while were gone.

If you want to follow along with our trip, be sure to follow me on Instagram (if you arent following me already). Thats likely where Ill be updating the most.

I may also post some on Snapchat (Im crystal.paine there) or see if I can get good enough wifi to hop on Facebook Live. And Ill be sure to post some details about our trip on my blog  either while were in South Africa or after we get back home.

5. Peace In My Heart

I was struggling and stressing over some situations in my life that are outside my control and I read a chapter in Wild and Free last week that kicked my behind. I realized my fear and anxiety was really just my lack of trusting in my all-wise, all-knowing, always-working-for-my-good Heavenly Father.

I can leave my burdens, my stress, my anxiety at His feet and I can rest in the truth that He is in control.

He doesnt need me to try to fix, solve, or micro-manage all the details of my life and others lives. He calls me to rest in His Master Plan and trust His unfailing goodness.

This truth brought so much peace at a deep level. He is good! And this truth sinking deep in my soul made this past week a thousand times better.
Thanks to Dr. Julie Strong, patients who need root canals have a new option in the Mining City.

Strong, a Mississippi native with a love for Montana, recently launched Montana Root Canal Specialists, an endodontics and microsurgery practice on Dewey Boulevard in Butte.

Strong concluded her residency in Missouri at St. Louis University only two months ago, and already shes hit the ground running in Butte by opening her first practice.

Strong said she choose Butte because she and her husband, Michael Strong, have family in Missoula and have long had an affinity for the Treasure State.

My husband and I have always wanted to move out west, said Strong, who has a bachelors in biological sciences from Mississippi College in Clinton and a doctorate in dental medicine from Jacksons University of Mississippi School of Dentistry.

Strong said she was drawn to the Mining City in particular because of its small-town atmosphere, which reminds her of her hometown of Poplarville, Miss.  a town of just under 3,000.

The people here are really friendly, said Strong. Theyre really genuine and its really refreshing because you dont get that in a lot of places anymore.

Since July Strong has been working out of Dr. James Stroehers dental office on Platinum Street until remodeling on her Dewey office is complete.

Her practice not only serves Butte, she said, but also surrounding communities. So far Strong has treated patients from Anaconda, Deer Lodge, Dillon and Belgrade, among others.

We provide service to patients from all that area, said Strong.

Strong said work on her office at 1454 Dewey Blvd. should be completed in about three weeks. Upgrades to the building include new plumbing and electricity, new walls and paint and hardwood floors.

However, of all the features of the new office, Strong is perhaps most proud of her cone beam, a machine that allows her to take detailed 3D x-rays. She said other tools of the trade include her microscope.

I use the microscope for the entire appointment, said Strong. And that helps me to locate maybe extra canals or extra anatomy that could have possibly been missed and it really helps me to do a better job treating the patient.

Although most people shudder at the word root canal, Strong said for her endodontics is a passion.

The tooth is bothering the patient (and) you get them out of pain. Youre really providing a direct service to the patient, and I like that, said Strong. I try really hard to make it as pleasant and as positive an experience as possible so that they leave thinking that it really wasnt as bad as they were anticipating it to be.

As far as the future goes, Strong said what shes most looking forward to exploring Montana and establishing her practice, which includes one receptionist and one dental assistant. Strong said she plans to hire on a second dental assistant within the next year.

Im really excited about discovering the outdoors around Butte, said Strong. And just meeting more of the people because the people have just been so great.
A new orthodontist is serving the Mining City.

Dr. Jonna (VanDaveer) Laslovich took over the practice of Dr. Tim Ballweber at 2400 Massachusetts Ave. earlier this year.

A native of the Mining City and Butte Central graduate, Laslovich graduated in 2009 from Montana Tech, where she received a bachelors in biology. She has a doctorate in dental medicine from and completed her residency at the Arizona School of Dentistry and Oral Health in Mesa, Ariz., where she received a certificate in orthodontics and dentofacial orthopedics.

After completing her residency, Laslovich and her husband and Anaconda native Anthony Laslovich decided to move to Butte in order to be close to friends and family.

"Because it's home," Laslovich said.

Anthony Laslovich, meanwhile, is an engineer at Water & Environmental Technologies on Park Street in Butte.

Laslovich said she choose orthodontics among other dental disciplines because she enjoys working with young people.

I love the age group of orthodontics and the transformation both on the inside and the outside of the patient, said Laslovich.It affects not only their smile, but also their confidence.

In a transition letter he wrote to his patients, Dr. Ballweber said, Dr. Laslovich has certainly excelled in her studies, which is important, but I am even more impressed with her kindness, desire to learn, consideration of others, and outgoing nature. I am confident that she will strive to continue to provide the highest level of orthodontic care for your family.

Details: Laslovich Orthodontics, 406-723-2144; Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
State chamber to host meeting in Butte

Workforce, reducing the cost of doing business in Montana, and developing infrastructure are a few of the core objectives the Montana Chamber of Commerce will be focusing on in the coming years.

The first gathering is Tuesday in Butte at noon at the Butte Chamber of Commerce, 1000 George St.

With the 2016 elections and 2017 Legislative session just around the corner, the State Chamber will tour Big Sky Country to provide updates on its strategic plan. Also, attendees will be asked for their thoughts on Montana's economy.

President/CEO Webb Brown invites all members and future members to attend.

"Gauging statewide perspectives assists us in setting priorities. We've learned the best way to do that is not through phone calls or tracking the news, but to travel the state and hear directly from those invested in the business climate of Montana,'' Brown said.

Brown will also be introducing new staff members: Bridger Mahlum, Government Relations Director, and Nate Kavanagh, Communications Director will join the tour.

The schedule follows:

Tuesday, Sept. 6, 12 p.m., Butte Chamber of Commerce

Tuesday, Sept. 6, 4 p.m., Missoula Chamber of Commerce

Wednesday, Sept. 7, 12 p.m., Polson Red Lion Ridgewater

Wednesday, Sept. 7, 4 p.m., Bigfork Glacier Bank

Thursday, Sept. 8, 8 a.m., Cut Bank Chamber of Commerce

Additional dates and locations will be announced.

Local agent receives certification

Leo McCarthy, of Leo McCarthy Insurance Agency Inc., 15 Discovery Dr., Butte, has earned the Retirement Income Certified Professional designation from The American College of Financial Services, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, according to a news release.

McCarthy's agency is with State Farm. He can be reached at 406-723-3285.

Candidates for the RICP designation must complete a minimum of three college-level courses and are required to pass a series of two-hour proctored exams. They must also have three years experience, meet stringent ethics requirements and participate in the college's continuing education program.

Using the most current techniques, RICPs identify retirement income needs and objectives and evaluate a client's current situation relative to those goals.
Sit down with Pam Haxby-Cote for five minutes and youll take in off-the-charts enthusiasm about Butte, Montana, and her conviction that theres no other place like it.

Wherever she goes, she brings that message along.

We live in the best town in the best state in the greatest nation in the world, she told the Council of Commissioners recently.

Shes not just talking about the business climate here in her 24/7 role as executive director of the Butte Local Development Corporation, the lead organization trying to bring new jobs to town while keeping and growing the ones here.

Shes talking about the schools and parks and trails and neighborhoods and restaurants and Montana Tech and, of course, the surrounding mountains that make this mile-high place a valley for 34,000 people.

Its the people, she says, that truly make Butte special.

We have the most innovative, talented, experienced entrepreneurs in the nation right here doing amazing things, said Haxby-Cote (pronounced HACKS-bee-COE-tee). They are doing business to business; they are solving problems  problems that are connecting with outside markets; they are starting internships.

And theyre running businesses small and large, some simple, some cutting edge.

If you want to bring your company here, there are like-minded companies here, she says. We are not some rural town with nothing. We have it going on here.

She brought 30 years of experience in the economic development arena when she took reins of the BLDC, a private nonprofit organization, 13 months ago after Jim Smitham retired.

Smitham was admired and respected by many, but as many new leaders do, Haxby-Cote brought a new face and new energy to the BLDC, got its budget back in the black, and started new projects and initiatives.

The BLDC and its partners on the relatively new Butte Economic Development Coordinating Council are working closer together than ever and, along with local government, are marketing Butte with unified messages.

And more than ever, Haxby-Cote and the organizations 17-member board are firmly behind anything they believe will enhance Buttes quality of life and economy, despite opponents and the controversy that comes with them.

Many in Butte were against the pool and lazy river and their $7.2-million cost to taxpayers, but the BLDC backed them all the way. Voters approved the project by a big margin in June.

Plans to redesign West Park Street between Uptown and Tech have drawn ire, but the BLDC has been actively involved in the initiative.

Talk and efforts to establish a tram to Our Lady of the Rockies atop the East Ridge are nearly 30 years old, leaving many to dismiss it as a pipe dream. BLDC leaders think it can be done and say it would be a fabulous boon to Butte.

All of those things, no matter how we get there or how long it takes to get there  they are all worth it, said BLDC Board member Bill Markovich, president and chief executive officer of Markovich Real Estate.

The BLDC has never been in the pessimism business, but the people behind it have emerged from a rough time of transition with more optimism than ever.

A ROCKY START TOWARD CHANGE

The beginning of that transition period two years ago wasnt pretty, and the jury is still out on whether it was fair.

It began when Butte-Silver Bow Chief Executive Matt Vincent formed a committee with five commissioners in 2014 in response to several business closings or layoffs, including shutdowns of the Copper King Hotel and the JCPenney store in Butte.

The panel met with groups that get at least some county money, including the BLDC, Mainstreet Uptown Butte, Headwaters RC&D, and the Convention and Visitors Bureau.

In the end, the committee said overall economic development here wasnt working and recommended the county critically reconsider its $46,000 contract with the BLDC, which had often been renewed over the years without issue.

The report was endorsed during a meeting the public didnt know about, and it took the BLDC and others by surprise. The committee wanted greater emphasis on marketing and performance measures for the BLDC, among other things.

Smitham, the BLDCs director then, said its primary function was being a middle-man for businesses seeking money in addition to providing recruitment and relocation assistance. It had other contracts with the county tied to loan programs but had other revenue sources, including business memberships.

But Smitham and the board, without any kicking and screaming, fashioned a new contract with the county to address its concerns.

Jim Bennett, who was board president at the time, said the alternative was saying that were going to take our marbles and go home.

Within a few months, the BLDC moved from its location on East Park Street to the Thornton Building at 65 E. Broadway St., also home to Headwaters RC&D, another business advocacy group. It was a step toward having a one-stop shop for economic development.

The BLDC joined hands with numerous other entities, including the county, Chamber of Commerce, MERDI, Tech, and St. James Healthcare, to form the Butte Economic Development Coordinating Council and work together on recruiting and marketing.

When Smitham announced his retirement in 2015, the board hired Haxby-Cote.

The Butte native started her career as a deputy director and loan officer for the BLDC when it was led by Evan Barrett, who went on to be Brian Schweitzers economic development chief during Schweitzer's eight years as governor.

Haxby-Cote has been community development director for Butte-Silver Bow, an economic development specialist for Gov. Schweitzer, and was Butte regional director and economic development chief under Montana Sen. Jon Tester.

Gov. Steve Bullock and the Montana Ambassador Group named Haxby-Cote as the 2014 Montana Ambassador of the Year for outstanding service and tireless promotion of Montana and its entrepreneurs.

All of that paid off immediately for Haxby-Cote in her new role with the BLDC.

There was no learning curve, Barrett said. She hit the ground running.

Markovich said when she came on board, I thought, 'Wow, this woman is here to work.'

She is so energetic and that gets to be contagious, he said.

NEW CHALLENGES, NEW LOOKS, NEW DAY

One of Haxby-Cotes biggest challenges in promoting Butte is getting its people to do something against their nature.

I am trying to teach people to be less humble, she said. Its innate in our culture. It makes us special, and I want to be humble in my personal life. I dont like a braggart, but we have so much to brag about, and we dont do it very well.

She put it this way to commissioners recently:

I need you to be obnoxious about how great this place is.

That all takes time, but she wasted none in steering the BLDC back in the black. It was in the red when she started, in part because it was paying rent for two places and memberships had slipped.

She agreed to come on at a lesser salary, got out of one rental lease, and cut other operating expenses. She also raised some money, landed some grants, and the books are balanced now.

Haxby-Cote spent several months researching websites, scanning hundreds of those for economic development organizations across the country. An overhauled one for the BLDC  www.bldc.net  was launched last month.

It has a fresh, new look, pictures of the city and its gorgeous mountain backdrops, and loads of information and personal accounts of life in Butte that any business or person or family would want to know before moving here.

To any economic development group these days, Haxby-Cote says, only a great staff is more important than a great website. With longtime Office Manager Audrey Combo and Adam Benson, director of loan services, she has the great staff. Now they have a great website.

We wanted to take it from a website that marketed the Butte Local Development Corporation to one that marketed Butte, she said.

The BLDC has a new logo, too, and several new initiatives are underway, including the Mile High Innovation Network. Once a month, local innovators and those with start-ups get together with experienced business folks from the area. Ideas are exchanged, connections made, new markets explored.

The BLDC provides the food and soda and beer  local microbrews  but there are no chairs.

By human nature, folks want to sit down and talk with their best friends, but I need them out of their chairs and talking to each other, Haxby-Cote said.

Butte hasnt landed a giant, new employer in the past few years, but it has added a new, popular park; a carousel 20 years in the making is going up at Stodden Park; and the new pool and lazy river will be right next to it. Those kinds of amenities are just as important as tax breaks to many businesses.

The BLDC, through its numerous loan programs, has loaned $1.9 million this year alone, helping 13 companies create or retain 228 jobs with total investments of nearly $3.4 million.

In March, the BLDC and others on the Coordinating Council launched a campaign called "Butte. Elevated." with a consistent, consolidated message to promote Butte as a place to live, work and play. It has its own a web page (butteelevated.com) and is featured on social media staples including Facebook and Instagram.

Vincent, the countys chief executive, says the BLDC has been a key partner in a new push that is bigger than any one organization  something Haxby-Cote also espouses.

It has more to do with the leadership of all these organizations finally working together, he said. I think they are doing a lot more individually and a lot more collectively.

Just this past week, Vincent joined key staff leaders Kristen Rosa and Karen Byrnes, Haxby-Cote, and representatives for several economic entities to start defining three to five goals they want to achieve collectively over the next year so we all start marching to the same beat.

That wasnt happening four years ago, he said.

And Butte has so much to offer, Haxby-Cote says, including basics most families want more than anything.

They are looking for a place they can make a good wage, afford a mortgage, and be able to recreate, she said.

Butte, she says, has all of that and more.
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 []
Social collaboration will be a dominating factor in years to come and businesses not yet realising this are already behind in leveraging the relevant technologies, explorer Jonathan Knowles said at the recent Autodesk conference in Cape Town.

With the technology now at our fingertips we can today enter an era where the cloud, social and mobile computing are connecting people more than ever before. It is, therefore, essential to go beyond just design to how something is constructed, he told Fin24.

The way things are designed and constructed will change and, therefore, will bring new ways of working. The future of making things can be just as transformative and empowering for small companies and start-ups as for big companies.

Knowles task at American multinational software company Autodesk is to explore whats next in terms of a 10 to 100 year time frame at the frontier of beyond the horizon technologies and how design-driven innovation can be applied.

It is talking about the future of making things and what it means for you and your business, he said.

Construction, for instance, then becomes more a process of design than a process of building. It becomes like assembling the structure rather than building it, he explained.

He gave examples of companies already using innovative technologies in the building and auto industries, which enables greater precision and speed of construction. The use of drones and 3D printing is becoming the norm .

I am an optimist and for a good reason. While there are a lot of challenges, my job is to think about the very big picture and the very long term. I am optimistic that design and engineering tools will be some of the primary things to help us address the challenges we have in the world. For me it is about how everyone could have greater access to it in order to find solutions collectively, said Knowles.

One area which he is particularly excited about is generative design  basically letting computers do what they are good at and people do what they are good at. Autodesk is, for instance, working with a company to build a car that has its own digital nervous system.

The future is clearly upon us. We are ready for the next age of innovation. It is a future of making things, he said.

He emphasised that Africa clearly has a big part to play in this future of making things and South Africa is positioned to be one of the biggest influences for all on the continent.

We will see signs of innovation from South Africa, for instance in the building, construction and housing sectors. I believe it will get better at an increasing rate and these product innovations can flow into the rest of Africa, said Knowles.

The mind-set needed, however, is one of participation. Therefore, getting more people to participate in the design and engineering and to embrace the design process in which we must learn to mentor our computers, he said.

Fin24

More business news

Labour Court holds union members in contempt for violating Telkom interdict

ZAR X stock exchange gets a licence and will begin operations next week
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The Department of Transport recently confirmed it has embarked on a process to standardise the South African motor vehicle number plate.

The new standards for national number plates were published in the Government Gazette Draft Regulation Amendments on 28 January 2015.

The Departments internal discussions and consultation process on the matter is ongoing, it said.

Until regulations for new national number plates are published, heres what you can and cannot do with your current provincial number plates.

The information below is courtesy of the South African Number Plate Association (SANA), as per the requirements of the National Road Traffic Act No. 93 of 1996 (Regulations 2000) and the South African National Standard (SANS 1116) for number plates.

Number plate sizes

The SANS 1116 specification references three legal number plate sizes, as well as the correct size of the alphanumerics (letters and numbers):

520mm x 113mm  must be embossed with 75mm (height) alphanumerics.

250mm x 205mm  must be embossed with 75mm (height) alphanumerics.

250mm x 165mm  must be embossed with 60mm (height) alphanumerics.

Note: 440mm x 120mm (75mm alphanumerics) number plates may not be used on vehicles registered for the first time on or after 1 January 2010.

Attachment of a number plate

The number plates of vehicles, which were registered for the first time on or after 1 January 2010, must be attached to the vehicle by 4mm rivets or 4mm one-way self-tapping screws.

Plates can be attached directly to the vehicle or to a holding bracket (number plate carrier), which must comply with the requirements of SANS 973 and be approved by the National Department of Transport.

Motorists may have two different size number plates on a vehicle if required  the Nissan Tiidas rear number plate aperture, for example, cannot accommodate a 520mm x 113mm or a 250mm x 205mm number plate.

The 250mm x 165mm size number plate may then be used with the permission of the relevant provincial MEC.

However, the National Road Traffic Act is silent on the usage of this size number plate on the vehicles front.

The intention is thus clear that 60mm alphanumerics cannot be used in the front and the user doesnt have the option to obtain permission, said SANA.

Number plates for motor vehicles and SUVs may not be affixed higher than 1.5 metres from ground level.

Front number plates may be attached to the side of the front bumper if the vehicle design cannot accommodate a number plate in the middle.

Background graphics

The graphic background design of a provincial number plate is determined by the MEC of the relevant province.

Below are examples of the provincial plates used.

Certification

A number plate must bear a certification mark, and an SABS sticker is placed underneath the provincial logo of an embossed plate.

Markings and number plate font

A number plate must bear a certification mark, along with the SABS sticker. The mark contains:

Name or trademark of the supplier.

Batch number of the supplier.

Only the GE font, specifically designed for the South African number plate industry, may be used for number plates. Below are examples of illegal number plate fonts.

Personalised number plates

Zurika Louw, CEO at SANA, also provided information on personalised number plates  as detailed below.

Whats allowed

Vulgar language is not allowed and blatantly vulgar or offensive numbers will not be allocated.

Only alphanumerics are allowed and symbols (example: $, @) are illegal.

The public may submit complaints to their local metro police if they feel a personalised number plate is offensive.

Price

The price of a personalised plate varies between R1,000 and R6,000.

A single alphanumeric will cost more than the maximum of seven alphanumerics.

Ownership

A personalised number plate is the owners property and is transferable to a new vehicle.

A personalised number plate can also be transferred to a beneficiary in the event of the death of the original user.

More on number plates

New South African number plates are real

New number plates for South Africa
Napa County Library patrons suddenly have access to another 11 million books, movies and other materials from across the state.

Eleven million  you can hardly even comprehend that number, assistant library director Anthony Halstead said. I cant.

The library earlier this year ended its partnership with the Solano County libraries to share materials through an online catalog system. Now it has joined the Link + system that provides access to materials at more than 50 library systems and colleges and universities in California and Nevada.

Initially, patrons must make their requests by phone or in person through library staff. But by mid- to late September, the search system should be available on the librarys website.

Want to find a book in an out-of-print mystery series that the Napa County Library system no longer has? Or an obscure academic title likely to be found only at a university?

Alameda County might have it. Or Cal Poly Pomona. Or San Francisco County. Or Sacramento County. Or San Diego County. Or San Jose State University. Or Pacific Union College in Angwin. Or one of dozens of other library systems.

San Francisco Public Library has materials in dozens of languages, Halstead said.

For library patrons, borrowing materials through Link + will be free. Items should be received in five to seven days and patrons will be notified upon arrival. The loan period for most items is the same 21 days for Napa County Library materials, with some exceptions for movies and music, a county press release said.

Napa County formerly had a contract with Solano County for $260,000 annually to provide databases and other services. As part of that deal, Napa County patrons could search online for items at Solano County libraries, as well as local libraries.

In August. 2015, the Napa County Board of Supervisors approved ending the library systems 25-year partnership with Solano County effective March 2016. It approved signing a five-year, $474,367 contract with Innovative Interface Inc.

As a result, library patrons saw the debut in March of a new online catalog using the Polaris system. The new system also opened up the ability to join the Link + inter-library loan service.

In January, the Board of Supervisors increased the five-year contract with Innovative Interface Inc. to $614,938 to include Napa Valley College and Solano Community College. Those institutions will pay to be part of the system.

For Napa County Library patrons, this agreement means having access to materials at Napa Valley College and Solano Community College, specifically the scholarly and history materials, a county report said.

The agreement also allows students at both colleges to use Napa County Library materials.
Napas long-awaited fire house in Browns Valley may edge nearer to reality.

The City Council is scheduled on Tuesday to place construction of Fire Station No. 5 in the hands of a Central Valley contractor. Diede Construction Inc., based in Lodi, offered the lowest of seven bids at $4.23 million, associate civil engineer Ernie Cabral reported last week.

Planned for a half-acre parcel at 3001 Browns Valley Road at Laurel Street, Napa Fires new outpost is meant to quicken firefighting and paramedic response in neighborhoods west of Highway 29. The project will feature a 5,145-square-foot fire hall. City staff have described plans for an energy-efficient design and a minimum 50-year lifespan for the building, which the fire department plans to open by the end of 2017.

Among the other firms who sought to build the Browns Valley station was Helmer & Sons Inc., the only Napa-based company to apply. As a local firm, Helmer received a 3 percent credit on its bid but its adjusted offer of $4.26 million remained only the second lowest, Cabral told the council in a memo.

Napa has set aside $4.15 million for the fire hall in its current budget, and plans to add $942,100 from a reserve fund for capital improvements. The full $5 million bill will cover soil testing, construction management and inspection, and any contingencies.

A growing number of calls, more than 8,000 annually, requires the city to add a station in Browns Valley to meet its standard of responding to calls within four minutes, Fire Chief Mike Randolph said in 2014. Currently, firefighters from the downtown fire house on Seminary Street are assigned to emergencies on the citys west side.

Although Napa has owned the land for Station No. 5 for several years, it waited out the Great Recession and the resulting financial cutbacks before moving ahead. The city awarded a $600,000 design contract in March 2014 to Shah Kawasaki Architects Inc. of Oakland.

In other business Tuesday, the council will have its say on a $45 million bond issue to overhaul the Napa Park Homes, a four-decade-old affordable housing complex at 790 Lincoln Ave.

Napa Valley Community Housing plans to refinance existing bonds for a project to renovate all 140 rental units, convert 14 dwellings for use by disabled tenants, and replace plumbing throughout the complex. Tenants would be temporarily relocated during the makeover, according to city Housing Manager Lark Ferrell.

The bonds would be issued by the California Municipal Finance Authority, a partnership of Napa and about 240 other cities, and liabilities are tied to the authority rather than to Napa itself.
Six men in red T-shirts were digging holes on the side of the highway in order to erect a plaque commemorating a German prisoner of war Camp in Yountville on Saturday morning. The men are members of the Sam Brannan chapter 1004 of E Clampus Vitus, a fraternity that works to preserve the history of the American West.

Were pretty darn serious about preserving, said Bob Proctor, the chapters current Humbug or president. When Proctor heard there may have been a World War II prisoner of war camp in Napa, he knew he needed to learn more and do something to pass that knowledge on.

Camp Napa, a branch POW camp of Beale Air Force Base, received 250 German POWs on Aug. 14, 1945, just three months after the German surrender. Proctor said that the United States had opened 700 POW camps across the county at the request of Great Britain. California was a prime location because of year-round agricultural work.

Camp Napa was located in a former farm labor camp on the Silverado Trail just north of Yountville  the current address is 7294 Silverado Trail.

Just outside of the gated area, used by Napa County, and underneath the shade of a tree, now stands a bronze plaque reading:

Prisoners performed labor on surrounding farms and were paid $.80 cents per day. Local citizens often attended social activities at the camp, reads one passage.

The commemorative plaque explains why the camp opened and how it operated.

The prisoners helped preserve agriculture in the valley, Proctor said.

Proctor said that although the prisoners were sent back to Germany, many of them found sponsors in their former employers, returned to the United States and became citizens. They got to know each other really well, he said, and, in some cases, became romantically involved. They married the gals they worked for after the women became war widows, he said.

Some of the German POWs didnt have anything to go back home to after the war, Proctor said. Their time spent as prisoners actually gave them an anchor in their lives, he said.

A lot of people dont know what went on here, said Jim Woody Morton, chapter member or Clamper after their group name E Clampus Vitus.

The Napa County Historical Society confirmed the existence of the camp in Napa in a column for the Register in 2013.

Proctor researched the history of the camp himself with help from county records, local historical societies, the Napa Valley Museum and by speaking with people who had associations with the camp.

It took almost two years of planning for the chapter to get the plaque erected, but Proctor said that Napa County was great to work with. The Napa P.O.W. Camp plaque is the eighth plaque erected by the Sam Brannan chapter, he said. Most are in downtown Napa.

Anytime we can remember history, its a good thing, Morton said.

We really enjoy what we do, Morton said. Its important to preserve history and to have a group of people you like hanging out with, he said. While working, the men make fun of each other, mess around and joke about beer, profanity and anything else they can think of in the moment.

We have fun but we really get some good stuff done while were having fun, he said. In fact, tomfoolery is a part of the Clamper way of life, he said, since the organization started as a way to not only take care of one another but also as a way to relax. And their red shirts? They're a tribute to the red long-johns that coal miners used to wear, Proctor said.

Were a society thats steeped in traditions and history, he said. We act crazy sometimes (but) were actually serious behind the scenes.

The Clampers chapter 1004 will hold an official unveiling and dedication of the plaque on Sept. 17 at 10:04 a.m.

For more information, visit www.clamper.com.
A Napa resident was pronounced dead on Saturday morning after succumbing to injuries sustained after being hit by a vehicle at the intersection at Monarch Street and Byway East early Friday, according to Napa Police.

The victim, Michael Dean Green, 54, was on foot when he was hit at 2:17 a.m. Friday. He was transported to Queen of the Valley Medical Center and was in critical condition. Green died from his injuries at 10:02 a.m. on Saturday.

The motorist left the scene, but some identifying car parts were located on the scene by investigators. Sgt. Amy Hunter said that investigators know the involved vehicle is a 2014 silver Volkswagen Beetle with a California license plate of 7EFY913. The vehicle will have drivers side damage, she said.

Police have identied the owner of the vehicle, and the CHP tweeted at 6:20 Saturday evening that the car was found on I-80 in Solano County. The owner was driving the car.

Anyone with information related to the case is asked to

call Napa Dispatch at 707-253-4452 at any time. Tips can

also be reported anonymously and via text by texting the

word 707NPD and the tip information to 847411 (tip411.
This letter is to show my enthusiastic support for Debra Alter-Starr in her candidacy for Napa Valley College Trustee for Area 6.

Through my role as the Safe Schools Healthy Students Director for the Napa County Office of Education, I have known Debra for almost a decade, working with her on various projects throughout Napa County. She has been a volunteer for most of those projects, demonstrating her care and concern for our community.

I have watched as she raised two wonderful children and have seen her advocate for their interests and the needs of all students at local school board meetings. She has a strong commitment to education. She also has a masters degree in Social Welfare and is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker.

Among Debras many qualities, there are a few that I find particularly admirable and that I believe would make her an excellent choice for the Napa College Board of Trustees.

She is highly ethical and tenacious. Debra carefully weighs the assignments that she accepts. After accepting a task, Debra will pursue it with great passion. I have been on the receiving end of that passion, and I can tell you that it is quite powerful! I have been on several task groups with Deb, and when she accepts the assignments, she does them. I know that as a college board member, she will carefully weigh the issues and perform due diligence in her efforts to bring stability and accountability to the College.

Debra has a strong commitment to an inclusive Napa community - including the Hispanic community. Among her many awards, Debra has been honored by the Napa County Hispanic Network and the Napa County Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. She helped establish Somos Napa (We are Napa), a bilingual community website, Facebook page, and resource site. She is bilingual. She will be able to reach out and speak directly to English- and Spanish-speaking students and parents.

Debra has a strong understanding and working relationship with the school districts. I believe that one of the most critical roles of a community college is to assist students with the transition from high school to college. Debra knows the systems, and I believe she can assist with this important mission.

I believe that Napa Valley College is a treasured community resource. It provides an excellent opportunity for students to get a quality education at a reasonable cost. I was quite proud that in 2015 BestColleges.com distinguished Napa Valley College as the best two-year college in California, based on its retention and graduation rates.

Knowing Deb, as a board member she would strive to continually improve Napa Valley College until all students are reaching their educational goal. I feel confident that Debra would provide leadership, stability, and accountability to the board. I hope she will have your vote.

Terry Longoria

Napa
On a scale from 1 to awesome, Jason Aldean scores huge with this fan appreciation gesture.

Today, while in Lexington, KY, Aldean, along with some of his crew, paid a visit to the winner of a special fan prize pack, Brittany. While Brittany knew a delivery was coming today by way of Aldeans camp, what she wasnt expecting was the country music superstar to be standing at the door to her apartment.

We have to hand it to Aldean here  he didnt only stop by, drop off the goods, invite Brittany to Boston, and head out to watch his Georgia Bulldogs play in their first game of the college season. Instead, the award-winning, chart-topping megastar stayed, drank a beer, signed almost everything Brittany owns, lingered for a FaceTime conversation with her boyfriend, and fielded a few too many questions about Ellen DeGeneres.

Kudos to you, Jason Aldean, for going above and beyond with this fan surprise. Watch the video of his visit to Brittanys apartment below.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday told Chinese President Xi Jinping about India's concerns over terrorism emanating from Pakistan's restive regions through which the $46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is being built. In his 35-minute long meet with Xi on the sidelines of the G20 leaders' summit in Hangzhou city, Modi conveyed to him that Delhi and Beijing "would have to be sensitive to each other's strategic interests". "He (Modi) said it is of paramount importance that both countries respect each other's aspirations, concerns and strategic interests," External Affairs Minstry spokesperson Vikas Swarup told Indian journalists here. The ongoing China-Pakistan Economic Corridor passes through the restive regions of Balochistan, Gilgit-Baltistan and the Pakistan-administered Kashmir. In his interaction with Xi, Modi said the attack on the Chinese embassy in Bishkek was yet another proof of "scourge if terrorism". Modi told Xi that our response to terrorism "must not be motivated by political consideration" -- an apparent reference to Pakistan, India's arch-rival and China's all-weather friend. In his meeting with BRICS leaders, Modi said "terrorists in South Asia or anywhere for that matter do not own banks or weapons factories and are funded". Swarup refused to divulge if the issue of India's membership to the Nuclear Suppliers Group figured in the meet with Xi. "If you read between the lines when we are talking about our strategic interests, concerns and aspirations, it is not that China is unaware of our strategic interests, concerns or aspirations or that we are unaware of theirs. It is something that both sides are aware of," Swarup said. Xi told Modi that China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound relations and further advance their cooperation, Xinhua news agency reported. --IANS gsh/rn/vt ( 303 Words) 2016-09-04-14:45:58 (IANS)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday told Chinese President Xi Jinping India's concerns over terrorism emanating from Pakistan through which the $46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is being built. In his 35-minute meeting with Xi on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hangzhou city, Modi conveyed to him that New Delhi and Beijing "would have to be sensitive to each other's strategic interests". "He (Modi) said it is of paramount importance that both countries respect each other's aspirations, concerns and strategic interests," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup told Indian journalists here. Asked whether terrorism was discussed, Swarup said: "It was raised." The CPEC passes through the restive regions of Balochistan, Gilgit-Baltistan and Pakistani Kashmir. India has strongly opposed the project as it claims Gilgit-Baltistan and Pakistani Kashmir. In his interaction with Xi, Modi said the attack on the Chinese embassy in Bishkek was yet another proof of the "scourge if terrorism". Beijing's refusal to designate Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar at the UN Security Council has irked India. This was Modi's eighth meeting with Xi as the Prime Minister. "China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound relations and further advance their cooperation," President Xi said while meeting Modi. Modi told Xi that "our response to terrorism must not be motivated by political consideration" - an apparent reference to Pakistan, India's arch rival and China's all-weather friend. Modi also raised the issue of terrorism in his meeting with BRICS leaders and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on the sidelines of G20. "In a very hard-hitting intervention, he (Modi) said terrorists in South Asia or anywhere for that matter do not own banks or weapons factories," Swarup quoted the Indian leader as saying. Without directly naming Pakistan, Modi told Turnbull: "Our (India) neighbourhood, in particular, was suffering from destabilisation effects of terrorism." Modi stressed the importance to "identify the suppliers, exporters and financiers of terrorism:. Swarup refused to divulge if the issue of India's membership to the Nuclear Suppliers Group figured in the meeting with Xi. "If you read between the lines when we are talking about our strategic interests, concerns and aspirations, it is not that China is unaware of our strategic interests, concerns or aspirations or that we are unaware of theirs. It is something that both sides are aware of," Swarup said. Earlier in June, China had blocked India's entry into the nuclear trade grouping, citing its non-signatory status to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. (Gaurav Sharma is the Beijing-based Correspondent for IANS. He can be contacted at sharmagaurav71@gmail.com and gauravians@yahoo.com). --IANS gsh/mr ( 444 Words) 2016-09-04-16:07:57 (IANS)
Since 2006, Canada's Anglo-Celtic Connections has been an independent view of family history resources and developments seen from an Ottawa perspective.
"CBI court vide order dated September 3 held B.B. Singal, chairman of the company, guilty under the Indian Electricity Act, 1910, (case related to Bhushan Industrial Co. Ltd, Chandigarh)," Bhushan Steel said in a stock exchange filing.

"On submitting the surety bond, B.B. Singal has been granted bail and sentence has been suspended for 60 days to enable him to file the appeal against the said order," it added.

The company also said that Monica Aggarwal has been appointed as an Additional Independent Director with effect from September 3 "as recommended by Nomination and Remuneration Committee of the Board of Directors".

--IANS bc/py/vt

( 149 Words)

2016-09-04-16:41:56 (IANS)
Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia today said the Delhi government is going to embark on an ambitious scheme for the students of government schools called "Chunauti 2016," under which the non-reading students of classes sixth, seventh and eighth will be brought to the basic reading level and make them "Performing average students". Addressing mediapersons at the Delhi Secretariat here, he said ''In a study, it was found that 74 per cent students of class ninth could not read and comprehend their own curriculum books and 46 per cent students of class sixth found it difficult to read the basic second class Hindi books. No solution or concrete plan was in sight to tackle the deficiency, but then after much deliberations, ''Chanauti 2016'' was devised on the lines of "Chunauti 2018," in which students flunking in classes ninth and tenth were targeted.'' Flaying the education system and students' learning capabilities, he said, ''Let's accept the reality. Our students stand nowhere vis-a-vis international standards. Despite quality education imparted to them, they are not able to absorb it and hence, do not pass out with flying colours.'' On students' lack of urge to study, he said, ''There are two level of students. One, those who are performing well and others, who lack the basic reading capability. There is imbalance and the latter do not have the confidence to study. They need to be imbibed the feeling of 'I also can,' so that they are motivated to study.'' ''Therefore, this experiment. Teachers will work hard till November 14. After that, an assessment will be carried out by teachers, parents, principals and all people who want to be a part of it. After one week on November 21, these people can interact with students after permission from the Principals and assess the learning levels of the students,'' the Minister added. The teachers who will excel in making students excel will be awarded by the Delhi government and the schools as a team will also be adequately incentivised. Mr Sisodia rued that government schools were intentionally kept backward with the mentality that they are poor students and whats the need to work hard on them, whereas the dire need is to work hard on them only.Around 16 lakh students are enrolled in Delhi schools and if they start reading, they will absorb the syllabus and what's being taught. ''It's a herculean task, but we are geared up,'' he added. On Teachers' Day on September 5, the Delhi government is organising a discussion on "The evolution of Indian politics," in which students are welcome to take part and teachers too will be given prizes so that they are motivated to teach well and put their heart and soul to churn out well read students, Mr Sisodia said.UNI SY RJ SB 1748 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0093-917359.Xml
BJP today said Congress was unable to digest the success of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and it was accusing the Government of working with a political vendetta just out of frustration. In a sharp reaction to Congress spokesperson Anand Sharma's allegation that Mr Modi was misleading the nation on the state of economy, HRD Minister and BJP leader Prakash Javadekar while talking to reporters here said whatever Mr Modi said yesterday in an interview to a news channel about economic condition was on the basis of a report. The HRD Minister said the whole world feels that India's economy was progressing fast but Congress was not ready to accept this. ''Government needs no certificate from Congress on country's economy,'' the HRD Minister said. Congress is frustrated with the success of the Prime Minister on economic front, the BJP leader said. Mr Javadekar said it was ironical that the party(Congress) was accusing Mr Modi of acting out of political vendetta but ''now it is a well known fact that the party went to all extremes to frame the Prime Minister and BJP chief Amit Shah.'' Meanwhile, BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra said,''Congress when confronted with evidences says go for probe when it is caught then they call it vendetta.'' Both things do not go together, he said. ''This is a case of Looters Vs Makers,'' the BJP spokesperson added.UNI NY AE 2015 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0099-917807.Xml
Former Delhi minister Sandeep Kumar, who was sacked as Social Welfare Minister and suspended from the Aam Aadmi Party following surfacing of a controversial CD featuring him with two women, was today arrested by the police. He was arrested shortly after the police received a complaint from one of the two women seen in the video, against the AAP MLA, alleging that she was sedated and sexually exploited by him. The police booked Sandeep under Section 376 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and other relevant sections of the Information Technology (IT) Act. Talking to reporters here, DCP Vikramjeet Singh said, "The ex-minister has been arrested on the basis of evidence. He was on his way to surrender when we arrested him. He will now be produced in the court."The complainant said that she met Sandeep in his office with regard to her ration card.According to the complainant, he allegedly offered her cold drink which was spiked with sedatives. She became unconscious after which he sexually exploited her and wasn't aware of the video recording."I want action against him. I am a poor woman and because of him my image is spoiled. I want my identity not to be disclosed as I have small children," the victim said reportedly in her complaint.Minutes after the woman approached the police, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, who had sacked Sandeep from his Cabinet following surfacing of the sex CD, demanded exemplary punishment for him, ''If the woman's allegations are correct, this is very serious. Strongest exemplary punishment should be given to Sandeep,'' he wrote on micro-blogging site Twitter. Kumar was sacked by the Chief Minister on August 31 immediately after the CD surfaced. In a tweet, Mr Kejriwal had said he received the objectionable CD, which showed the minister indulging in some wrong-doing and he immediately removed him as a minister from the Cabinet. Earlier, in a blog titled 'The Sex Was Consensual, Private Act. Why AAP Punished Its Man,' journalist-turned-AAP spokesperson Ashutosh defended Sandeep, saying that the leaked video clearly established that both individuals knew each other and consented to sex and it doesn't amount to any crime. Ashutosh's views on the 'scandal' were opposite to that of Mr Kejriwal, who had called Kumar 'betrayer of the AAP movement' and a 'rotten fish.' UNI SM AKC 0047 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0432-918033.Xml
Police sources said as part of the operation, police intensified patrolling and conducted vehicle checks and searches in hotels and lodges in a bid to arrest history sheeters, who were on the run, and execute the non-bailable warrants issued against them by the courts.

During the night-long operation, 459 people were detained on suspicious grounds.

The sources said six criminals against whom non-bailable warrants were pending, were also arrested, along with 11 people under Sec 109 and 110 of CrPc.

A total of 6 people were held on charges of drunken driving, the sources said.UNI GV CS 1258

-- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0275-918344.Xml
Urging Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government to bring an end to the environment of distrust in the valley, the Shiv Sena on Sunday said Pakistan is through the separatists trying to make Kashmir the main focus of all issues. Shiv Sena leader Manisha Kayande said that Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti should have met the separatists much earlier. "The situation in Kashmir is deteriorating day by day. The only relief at such time is that the curfew has been lifted from the valley. Mehbooba, who has called the separatist leaders for talks, should have taken this step much earlier," said Kayande. "As of now, there is an environment of distrust in Kashmir and it seems like all the political parties are trying to pull out their agenda. There are many problems, which need to be addressed and because of them the whole episode is becoming complicated. So, I would request Modi Government to take major steps in this regard," he added. Mehbooba has written to the separatist leadership requesting them to "take a lead and engage" with the delegation, "which will be the start of a credible and meaningful political dialogue and resolution process." Expressing hope that the separatists would accept her offer, she wrote: "My party has always believed that the Hurriyat Conference is a stakeholder in the peace... and prosperity of the state." Meanwhile, an all-party delegation, led by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, arrived in Srinagar today for an assessment of the situation due to the unrest in the valley. During the two-day visit, the delegation will interact with Governor N.N. Vohra and the Chief Minister besides holding meetings with the representatives of all political parties and others. Kashmir has been on the boil since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani on July 8 with curfew continuing in parts of the valley for the 58th day today. (ANI)
BJP called a dawn-to-dusk district 'hartal' in the Mahe region today, as a protest against the murder of RSS worker M Vineesh (25) of Pullipyilil near Thilankery allegedly by unidentified gang. The traffic would not be affected and essential services are exempted from the hartal. CPI(M) also called the hartal at Thilankery to protest against the bomb attack on the vehicle of DYFI local leader Jijesh (28) of Kunderinghal near Thilankery last night. Jijesh suffered minor injuries and had been admitted in a private hospital at Kannur. No untoward incident is reported so far since morning at Thilankery, however tense situation prevails in Thilankery near Iritty, following the last few days violence between CPI(M) and BJP. Both the party sources alleged that rival party workers are behind the murder and bomb attack. The post-mortem of Vineesh body would be conducted at Pariyaram medical college hospital (PMCH) around afternoon and the body would be cremated this evening. Large number of BJP/RSS workers assembled at PMCH and police also provided strong security across the district. District Police chief K Sanjay Kumar Gurudin and Iritty Dy SP Prajeesh Thottathil led police team are camping in Thilankery and near by areas and the situation was under control, police said. Two minor incidents are reported in Koothuparamba at wee hours as the house of CPI(M) Thokilanghadi branch secretary Rajeevan came under bomb attack around 0110 hrs, However, no casualty is reported. Late last night, the body of RSS worker Jijesh (28), with severe injuries on legs and head, was found in a narrow street near the Panchayat office by locals around 2130 hrs. Police rushed to the spot and shifted the body to Iritty Taluk hospital. The sounds of bomb explosion was also heard by locals. BJP sources alleged that CPI(M) was behind the murder. Meanwhile, DYFI Kunderinghal unit vice-president Jijesh suffered minor injuries, when an unidentified gang hurled three crude bombs at his car when he was traveling on Alayad road near Thilankery town around 1930 hrs, about half km from the Panchayat office. Police suspected that 'retaliation attack' was behind the murder of RSS activist. Muzhakunnu Police registered two cases in these attacks. DYFI activist Jijesh, who was one of the accused in the 20 member CPI(M) gang, was attacked with bombs and lethal weapons by four RSS workers including Muzhakunnu Mandalam Karya Vahak P Sujesh (31) at Kadukapalam near Muzhakunnu on August 25. Sujesh suffered serious injuries on legs and head and had been admitted at a private hospital in Kozhikode, while three others Santhosh (25), Deepesh (26) Arun (25), all hailing from Thilankery, also suffered injuries on legs and have been admitted at a private hospital at Thalassery. The tense situation has been prevailing at Thilankery since August 24, following the series of attack related to Sreekrishna Jayanthi sobha yathra, against the rival workers by CPI(M) and BJP. UNI AK CJD PY -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0298-918181.Xml
The Editor of city based local news channel Sagar Narayan Shinde, who was seriously injured after his motorcycle tyre was burst while driving, has succumbed to his injuries at private hospital at wee hours today. He was 41. Shinde was the founder Editor of Janvarta local news channel. He was seriously injured near Katraj Pune- Mumbai highway when he was returning from the pilgrim place Narayanpur. The family sources said Sagar was regular visitor to Narayan Pur every Thursday for the darshan of lord ' Guru Datta'. His tyre got bursted when he reached near Katraj and received serious head injuries. He was admitted to Navale Hospital but died at wee hours. He is survived by his wife two daughter and a son. Sagar was also the in-charge of Shiv Sena publicity in Pune for few years. He was also established an organisation of 'consumer protection committee' to help the people. He was cremated at Vaikunth crematorium ground here where a large number of people from media fraternity, social workers, and politician were present.UNI SP HK PY ADG RK1308 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0141-918582.Xml
In a land mark judgement ahead of the Teachers Day, the Thane district court here found a school headmistress guilty of misappropriating government grant and sentenced her to two years Rigorous Imprisonment. Coming down heavily on the headmistress who was also a member of the management committee of the school and supervisor the Chief Judicial Magistrate RM Kulkarni also fined the accused a sum of Rs 5000 and in default another 3 months rigorous rpt rigorous imprisonment. This judgment of the Thane court comes as a big relief for thousands of teachers who suffer silently under the school management and is perhaps set a precedent in the history of the courts. The order itself speaks volumes of the present state of affairs in the education field in the country as well as the state.Now now the case. The APP AB Dhamal, submitted in the court that the accused Omlata Umeshchandra Shukla, 62, a resident of Wagle Estate, worked as a headmistress/ supervisor with the Saint Ulai Vidyalaya of Lokmanya Nagar Pada No: 4 here. The Deputy Director of Education, Nashik had approved the grant of 60% for four teachers of the school amounting to Rs 1,84,800. The Thane Municipal School Board had made payment of the same to the bank account of the institute Shri Adishakti Hindi Prachar Samiti, the governing council of the school, vide a cheque drawn on May 03, 2002. The prosecution further alleged that the accused who is the supervisor in the school instead of making payment to the four teachers from the grant of Rs 1,84,800 received from the Civic school board, swindled it misappropriated the same and siphoned it off and used it for her benefit, while the four teachers were left high and dry without their salaries. The TMC Education department which received the complaint about the misappropriation filed a criminal case with the Thane police against the school management after which the trial began and the supervisor is convicted and jailed incidentally ahead of the teachers day.UNI XR VS ADG RK1440 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0141-918585.Xml
Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh-led 'All-Party delegation' (APD) will not be meeting political parties during its Jammu visit tomorrow. "No political party has been allowed to meet the delegation during the All-Party delegation's visit," official sources here told UNI today. They said that social, religious and some NGOs will be meeting the delegation. ''Associations and bodies, including Kashmiri employees, Kashmiri migrants, refugees, backward classes, social organisations, traders and others will be interacting with the APD members." Besides Mr Singh, Union Ministers Arun Jaitley and Dr Jitendra Singh, Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad, AICC general secretary will also be the part of the delegation. The delegation will arrive here tomorrow afternoon and meet the visitors for around two hours. They will return to the national capital in the evening. Meanwhile, infuriated by the decision of the Union and state governments to invite the political parties to meet the All-Party delegation in Kashmir only, a battalion of Panther activists spearheaded by Harsh Dev Singh Chairman JKNPP staged protest demonstration citing the move as an effrontery to the political leadership of Jammu region. Mr Singh said that the government functionaries had intimated the Panthers Party that the political parties could interact with central delegation only in Kashmir and the meetings in Jammu region were to be held only with the representatives of the civil society as per the itinerary. He dubbed the outright exclusion of political class as malevolent proposition and alleged the BJP for contemplating such malicious moves to keep the regional political leadership away from the All Party Delegation. Expressing dismay over the state government's invitation to NPP for meeting the All Party Delegation in the valley, Mr Singh said it defied logic to invite the political leadership of Jammu to place the concerns and issues of Dogra land before the central delegation in Kashmir valley rather than Jammu itself. He said that this was not only disrespect to the Dogra electorate but strangulation of the essence of democracy. However, ahead of day-long visit to Jammu the state government has appointed liaison officers for both the regions. "As many as 35 liaison officers have been appointed for All Party Delegation led by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh arriving Jammu on Sep 5," an official here said. The liaison officers appointed for Jammu have reported to Divisional Commissioner Jammu on September 3.UNI VBH PS SB 1555 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0421-918548.Xml
Pondicherry State Parents, Students Welfare Association (PSWA) today urged the government to get at least 17 more MBBS seats from Pondicherry Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) as government quota to be on par with other colleges coming under the Pondicherry university. In a letter to Lt.Governor Kiran Bedi, Association President Y Balasubramanian said all the seven private Medical colleges including deemed universities together have allocated 283 seats as government quota for the year 2016-17. At the time of allocation, PIMS was having an intake capacity of only 100 seats and had given 38 seats, Venkateswara Medical college 53 of the 150 and Manakkula Vinayagar medical college 55 of the 150 seats. However, the government of India on August 20 has given approval to PIMS to enhance its intake capacity to 150 seats. Though, PIMS is said to be a minority institution, 50 percent seats of minority institutions was given as government quota in other states, Mr.Balasubamanian pointed out and urged the intervention of the Lt.Governor.UNI PAB CS 1732 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0275-918737.Xml
An All-Party Delegation (APD) today emphasised that a clear roadmap needs to be drawn with a focus on the way forward and stressed that the recommendations of Working Groups and Parliamentary delegations need to be considered. The delegation reaffirmed that J&K is an issue of 'national interest' and needs a common solution. The Home Minister chaired the meeting of All Party Delegation (APD), at which a detailed presentation was given by the State Government, highlighting various issues related to the current scenario in Jammu and Kashmir. It was emphasised that a clear roadmap needs to be drawn with a focus on the way forward. It was also stressed upon that the recommendations of Working Groups and Parliamentary delegations need to be considered. Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti attended the meeting. Interacting with the delegation, Ms Mufti said Kashmir is a common issue of national interest and should not be viewed as a political issue. All the parties agreed to this fact and emphasised that steps need to be taken to restore normalcy and peace in Kashmir at the earliest. The Chief Minister also thanked all the parties for visiting the state and listening to the problems of people of Jammu and Kashmir. She also thanked the members for holding discussions on the issue of Jammu and Kashmir in Parliament. Ms Mufti emphasised that media needs to be sensitive while reporting on such issues like the current happenings in Kashmir, an official statement here said. The APD also met the representatives of various political parties. Various political parties expressed their concern over the injuries to civilians due to the use of pellet guns. The Union Home Minister said the Government is already working on the alternatives to pellet guns such as PAVA shells. The J&K National Conference led by Omar Abdullah, Indian National Congress J&K led by President Ghulam Ahmad Mir, Peoples Democratic Party led by Sartaj Madni, Peoples Conference led by Sajad Gani Lone, Communist Party of India (M) led by MY Tarigami, Awami Itihaad Party led by Er Abdul Rashid, Peoples Democratic Front led by HM Yaseen, Democratic Party Nationalist led by Ghulam Hassan Mir and BJP-led by state President Sat Sharma met the All Party delegation. These parties interacted with the All-Party delegation and expressed their views and ground level experiences during the meeting. In addition to the political parties, delegations of academicians, teachers and student associations, representatives of school management, prominent NGOs, representatives of Leh, Kargil, Pahari associations, Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee, Fruit & Saffron Growers associations and Civil Society also met the All Party meeting visiting Srinagar. The Jammu and Kashmir Students Welfare Association informed the All-Party delegation that they are willing to work with the Government of India, hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder to bring normalcy in the state. The delegation will meet Governor of Jammu and Kashmir NN Vohra later in the evening today. The All-Party delegation will visit Jammu tomorrow after meeting different civil society delegations in Srinagar in the morning. Prior to their departure, the APD, led by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh said, ''We intend to talk to individuals and groups, who want peace and normalcy in Kashmir valley. The delegation is on a two-day (September 4-5, 2016) visit to Jammu and Kashmir.'' Yesterday, on the first day of its visit, the delegation met about 200 members in about 30 delegations from various sections of the society and listened to their point of view to reach at a common solution to the current scenario in Jammu and Kashmir.UNI SD RJ 2003 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0005-918994.Xml
Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh-led All Party Delegation (APD) today held talks with mainstream political parties including Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), National Conference (NC) and Congress here to find a solution to the unrest in Kashmir valley. The 30-member delegation arrived here this morning on a two-day visit to Jammu and Kashmir to hold talks with leaders of different political parties and organisations to assess the situation and restore normalcy in the valley. The APD met about 30 delegations from various sections of society and listened to their point of view to reach at a common solution to the current scenario in the state. Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti and her cabinet colleagues were first to meet the APD. During the meeting, a detailed presentation was given by the state government highlighting various issues related to the current scenario. An official release said, it was emphsasised that a clear roadmap needs to be drawn with a focus on the way forward. "It was also stressed upon that the recommendations of Working Groups and Parliamentary delegations need to be considered," the release said. Ms Mehbooba Mufti told the APD that Kashmir is a common issue of national interest and should not be viewed as a political issue. The Chief Minister emphasised that media needs to be sensitive while reporting on such issues like the current happenings in Kashmir. Prominent leaders who met the APD include Omar Abdullah of National Conference, Ghulam Ahmad Mir of Congress, Sartaj Madni of PDP, Sajad Gani Lone of Peoples Conference, MY Tarigami of CPI(M), Abdul Rashid of Awami Itihaad Party, HM Yaseen of Peoples Democratic Front, Ghulam Hassan Mir of Democratic Party Nationalist and Sat Sharma of BJP. All the parties emphasised that steps need to be taken to restore normalcy and peace in Kashmir at the earliest. Various political parties expressed their concern over the injuries to civilians due to the use of pellet guns. The Union Home Minister said that the government is already working on the alternatives to pellet guns such as PAVA shells. In addition to the political parties, the APD also met delegations of academicians, teachers and student associations, representatives of school management, prominent NGOs, representatives of Leh, Kargil, Pahari associations, Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee, Fruit & Saffron Growers associations and Civil Society. The All Party delegation will visit Jammu tomorrow.More UNI TEAM SHK 2025 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0430-919080.Xml
Shouting slogans, activists of Shiv Sena led by state President, Shiv Sena, Dimpy Kohli, protested against Pepsi Beverages Limited as some bottles of Pepsi are allegedly found sub standard filled with dirty particles.

Mr Kohli said that these Soda companies are playing with the lives of the people especially children charging huge money for sub standard cold drinks.

''Quality control units of these companies are not doing their job efficiently playing with lives of people,'' he said adding that Shiv Sena is going to file FIR against Pepsi beverages and file suit in the Court. UNI VBH CJ AE 2106

-- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0400-919115.Xml
The Centre has released an amount of Rs 3,000 crore to Bangladesh for development of Indo-Bangla Corridor from Hili in West Bengal to Mahendraganj-Tura in Meghalaya through Bangladesh.A meeting of the Joint Movement Committee for development of Indo-Bangla Corridor from Hili in West Bengal to Mahendraganj-Tura in Meghalaya through Bangladesh was held at Tura Circuit House yesterday here in Meghalaya's West Garo Hills district. During the meeting, Convener of the Joint Movement Committee Naba Kumar Das informed the meeting that the proposal of Indo-Bangla corridor was initiated during the tenure of UPA Government in India and the same is now being pursued with the present Government, for which the Committee had already met and discussed the matter with the Union Minister for Road Transport & Highways Nitin Gadkari. According to an official statement issued here today, the meeting was also informed that the Union minister has supported the proposal and that the Government of India has already released an amount of Rs.3000 crore to Bangladesh for the purpose. The meeting was chaired by Mahendraganj Legislator Dikkanchi D. Shira and attended by Parliamentary Secretary for Home, etc W.D. Sangma, Convenor of the Committee, Naba Kumar Das from West Bengal, Retd Joint Secretary of GHADC, C.B.Chetry and delegates from Bangladesh, West Bengal and Meghalaya, among others. The Working Group on Improvement and Development of Transport Infrastructure in North East under National Transport Development Policy Committee (NTDPC) in its report had strongly recommended the development of alternative highway alignment linking West Bengal and Bangladesh through the Hili in West Bengal Mahendraganj in South West Garo Hills Corridor which is the closest approach from Meghalaya to West Bengal (the distance is just over a 100 kms.)"It is the vision of Meghalaya Chief Minister Mukul Sangma to see that the proposed route becomes trans-nation business corridor for the entire North East region and is aggressively pursuing it with much anticipation that it would bring a complete turnaround in the region's economy," the statement stated.In the meeting, all the delegates present at the meeting also spoke in favour of the proposal as it would help to bring the build closer trade relations between the two nations. UNI RRK CJ AE 2135 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0400-919141.Xml
Sacked AAP minister Sandeep Kumar, who was arrested after a woman filed a rape complaint, was today sent to one-day police custody. The Delhi Police had sought 14-day remand for the accused, but the court only agreed for one-day police custody. During interrogation of the accused, it was found that leaked pictures of the woman were circulated by his friend Praveen. The police arrested the accused after the woman, who was seen in the 'objectionable CD', complained to it that he offered her a cold drink with sedatives and raped her thereafter. According to police, the woman had gone to the minister's house to get her ''ration card prepared''. The court criticised the police for booking the minister under the Prevention of Corruption Act.UNI SM CJ AE 2332 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0400-919178.Xml
With the rest of the world, catholics in Meghalaya also celebrated the canonisation of Mother Teresa as Saint Teresa of Calcutta. Inmates and nuns at the Missionaries of Charity Centres in Shillong, Nongpoh and Tura also held prayers as they celebrated with a loud round of applause when Pope Francis in declared Mother Teresa as 'Blessed Teresa of Calcutta'. Archbishop of Shillong Archdiocese Rev. Dominic Jala also celebrated the canonization of Mother Teresa at the newly inaugurated parish St. Teresa named after her at Nongshyrngam village in the southern slopes of Indo-Bangladesh, about 63 km from the state capital Shillong. A book named "Saint of the Gutters" written by former Meghalaya Deputy Chief Minister Bindo Mathew Lanong, who had interviewed Mother Teresa in 1976 at Calcutta, was also released at the Mary Help of Christians Cathedral here. Mother Teresa, who founded the Missionaries of Charity had visited Shillong twice, first in 1975 and again after 11 years. "It is a proud moment for the Catholic family and the people who understands Mother Teresa's defending life without distinction of language, culture, race or religion," Maria Lyngdoh Nongbri said. Expressing his happiness with Mother Teresa after be declared Saint Teresa of Calcutta, Archbishop Jala said, "Mother Teresa, in all aspects of her life, was a generous dispenser of divine mercy, making herself available for everyone through her welcome and defence of human life, those unborn and those abandoned and discarded. She was committed to defending life." Mr Lanong, who had interviewed Mother Teresa, who was known to the world as a "Living Saint" then, recalled of an open letter to the then Prime Minister Moraji Desai and Members of Parliament on March 25, 1979, regarding the Freedom of Religion Bill, 1978. "Mr. Desai, you are so close to meeting God face-to-face. I wonder what answer you will give for allowing the destruction of the life of the innocent unborn child and destroying the freedom to serve God, according to one's choice and belief," Mr Lanong read Mother Teresa's open letter. Recalling his half-an-hour tete-a-tete with Mother Teresa, Mr Lanong, a former Editor of a Khasi vernacular U Lum Shyllong said , "I fondly remember she wanted the people of Meghalaya to have a heart and feeling for the Leperes at her Leprosy Colony in Nongpoh only by understanding that we will able to love and extend our helping hand." Remising his first encounter with "Saint of the Gutters" as a 13 year-old boy, John Fillmore Kharshhing remember his parents and his grandmother late Tilda Narayan Majaw, who told him and his siblings that they were fortunate a "living Saint has walked into this house". "Mother Teresa who's humility was felt by all mankind cutting across caste and religion. had tremendous personality. When my late father was under detention during 1976 emergency period, we found tremendous comfort when we received letters from Mother consoling us which we sent to the jail where my father was lodged," Mr Kharshiing said.Indeed, it was Mr Kharshing's parents who were also instrumental in roping Mother Teresa to Shillong and to set up homes for the nuns of Missionaries of Charity in Shillong and Nongpoh to cater the needs of the orphans, destitute and the lepers.The head of the Missionaries of Charity in Shillong Sr. Lipika MC from Shanti Bhavan said that on September 5, there will be a thanksgiving mass at 1730 hours at Laitumkhrah Cathedral Church to be concelebrated by Archbishop of Shillong, and Bishops of Jowai and Nongstoin.On September 10, there will be a special mass at Shanti Bhavan as part of the celebration of the canonisation of Mother Teresa by the sisters of Missionaries of Charity.A film festival will mark the canonisation of Mother Teresa where the life and teachings of the "saint of the gutters" would be showcased across the world to spread the message of "peace, love, and service to humanity".Festival (Northeast) Director Fr Francis Stephen said that the festival would be held from September 6-9 at the U Soso Tham auditorium where nearly 20 films on Mother Teresa would be screened.Free passes will be available at certain locations in the city from August 15-30, Fr Stephen said.The festival will also be held in Jowai, West Jaintia Hills, from September 14-17."We would be presenting the best and biggest repertoire of films and documentaries made on the Nobel laureate and inspired by her life," Fr Stephen said. UNI RRK CJ AE 2336 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0400-919183.Xml
"First engagement in Hangzhou is a meeting with the host. PM @narendramodi meets President Xi Jinping," Ministry of External Affairs official spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted.

This is first meeting between Prime Minister Modi and President Jinping after their meeting on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit held in Uzbekistan capital Tashkent in June 23.

During the talks, Prime Minister Modi highlighted the menace of terrorism, saying the recent attacks show how it is spreading across the world and is, therefore, a matter of grave concern.

He also condemned the terrorist bomb attack at China's embassy in Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek.

The meeting is a significant one as it follows after China stalled India's membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and bilateral differences over the proposed USD 46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor which runs through Pakistan occupied Kashmir, Beijing blocking the UN move to ban Masood Azhar, chief of the Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM).

Beijing has raised concerns over the close ties of India with the US and the recently signed Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA), which will enable the militaries of both the democracies access to each other's facilities for supplies and repairs.

However, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi's visit to India last month indicated that it would be ready to revisit the question of India's membership to the NSG. (ANI)
"Building the BRICS within G-20! PM @narendramodi and the four other leaders for a special BRICS Meeting in Hangzhou," tweeted Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Vikas Swarup.

The BRICS nations comprise - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Modi had met Chinese President Xi Jinping in his first engagement of the day that began at 9.30 a.m..

The meeting of the BRICS Leaders here comes ahead of the summit of the five nations that will be held in Goa, India, in October. India is the host country this year.

BRICS comprise five major emerging economies, comprising 43 per cent of the world population, having 37 per cent of the world GDP and 17 per cent share in the world trade.

The meetings are being held on the sidelines of the G20 Summit that opens here later in the day.

--IANS rn/ksk

( 179 Words)

2016-09-04-08:59:56 (IANS)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping today held a bilateral meeting during which they touched upon all important issues between the two countries, including the one on which they have strong differences. The 25-minute meeting between the two leaders, which took place on the sidelines of the G-20 Summit, was the second one during the recent months. Earlier, they had met in June on the sidelines of the SCO Summit in Tashkent. The two leaders met against the backdrop of Chinese opposition to India's membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group and New Delhi's concern over the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor besides Chinese veto on UNSC move for ban on Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) chief Masood Azahar. The issue of 46 billion dollar corridor, which passes through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, has assumed a new dimension with the Prime Minister's reference to Gilgit-Baltistsan, along with Balochistan, in his Independence Day speech, which has worried the Chinese. There are also some Chinese concerns over the growing defence ties of India with the US, especially the recently-concluded landmark logistics supply agreement to give mutual access to bases. However, so far there is no official word about the contents of the deliberations between the two leaders. The agenda of the G-20 and the coming BRICS summit in Goa was also expected to have been discussed in the meeting. Mr Modi flew in here last evening after his two-day visit to Vietnam during which India signed 12 agreements with the country bolstering its security and defence cooperation. The Prime Minister will also hold bilateral meetings with his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull and Saudi Arabia's Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman today. He will meet British Prime Minister Theresa May and Argentinian President Mauricio Macri. Earlier, the Prime Minister addressed a meeting of BRICS leaders at which he said the group had a shared responsibility to shape the international agenda in the interest of the developing countries. UNI XC NAZ SV ADG 1000 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0298-918125.Xml
Displaced civilians and religious leaders in war-torn South Sudan appealed to the UN Security Council today to urgently deploy extra foreign troops as government ministers questioned whether more peacekeepers were needed in the capital, Juba.The 15-member council met with President Salva Kiir's cabinet, religious and civil society leaders and visited two UN compounds in Juba where tens of thousands of civilians have been sheltering amid nearly three years of violence.While the country's conflict was sparked in December 2013 by political rivalry between Kiir and opposition leader Riek Machar, Anglican Archbishop Daniel Deng warned that "people have been made to believe it's a tribal war.""What happened in Rwanda - we're afraid it can happen in this country," he told the Security Council, referring to the Hutu genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994.Catholic Archbishop Paulino Lukudu Loro described the planned deployment of a 4,000-strong regional protection force to ensure peace in Juba, authorized by the Security Council last month, as a "reconciliation force.""We need this help," he said. "We cannot put our nation on the right track alone."South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011 but slid into civil war after Kiir sacked Machar as his vice president. The conflict between forces loyal to Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, and Machar, a Nuer, has often followed ethnic lines.The pair signed a peace deal a year ago but fighting has continued and Machar has now fled to neighboring Sudan.After a meeting between the council and Kiir's cabinet, US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power said the cabinet ministers had asked "whether the regional protection force was still needed given that Riek Machar has fled the country, given the transitional government is working more smoothly.""We as a council sent an unequivocal message that 'yes, this force is still needed'," she told reporters. The Security Council has threatened to impose an arms embargo on South Sudan if the government does not cooperate.South Sudan's Minister for Cabinet Affairs, Martin Elias Lomoro, said of the planned deployment: "We're discussing the modalities."The new force will boost a 12,000-strong UN peacekeeping force (UNMISS) that has been on the ground since 2011. When the conflict erupted in 2013, the United Nations took the rare step of sheltering civilians at several of its compounds."That's one of the reasons why a regional protection force is so necessary because so much of UNMISS's resources is devoted to protecting civilians in the camps," Deputy British UN Ambassador Peter Wilson told reporters.UN peacekeepers currently protect nearly 200,000 civilians at six sites around the country. The Security Council, which visited two camps in Juba today, were greeted at the UN House site by mainly displaced Nuer shouting "down, down, Salva Kiir.""We need your help, we are tired," said Peter Gatkuoth, 23, who has sheltered at the UN House site for several years.The South Sudan conflict has been marked by the use of rape as a weapon and some displaced women told council members today that they had to risk being the target of sexual violence every time they left the camp to get food and firewood."As a mother I can't imagine that choice," Power said. "I know I would go and take that risk for my children, I think any mother would. We heard desperate appeals for the regional protection force to be deployed quickly."Oil producer South Sudan's fledgling economy has been battered by the conflict, driving prices higher and leaving half the country's 5.8 million people without enough food.Paleki Ayang, director of the South Sudan Women Empowerment Network, told the council her monthly salary had dropped from 2,000 dollars more than two years ago to 80 dollars."If somebody is hungry you can't preach to them about peace agreements," she said. REUTERS AKC 0306 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0432-918048.Xml
Turkey is expected to approve an October 4 visit by German lawmakers to the Incirlik military air base next week after the arrival of a new Turkish envoy to Germany, ending a dispute that jeopardised Germany's continued use of the base, a senior lawmaker said."I expect that the issue will be resolved next week," said Rainer Arnold, defence spokesman for the Social Democrats in parliament, echoing hopeful but less specific comments made by senior German officials last week.Lawmakers had threatened to withdraw 250 troops from the base near the Syrian border unless Turkey allowed them to visit.The news, first reported by the Welt am Sonntag newspaper, comes after efforts by Germany to mend fences with Ankara and a meeting was held yesterday between the European Union's 28 foreign ministers and a senior Turkish official in Bratislava.The EU, which depends on Ankara to keep a lid on the movement of migrants to the bloc, is now seeking to ease tensions with Turkey after criticising President Tayyip Erdogan's crackdown on opponents following the failed coup in July.Turkey had already banned lawmakers from visiting Incirlik in response to a June parliamentary vote declaring the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces a "genocide." Senior officials last week said permission for the lawmaker visits depended on Germany distancing itself from the resolution.On Friday chief government spokesman Steffen Seibert said the Armenia resolution was not legally binding, although he denied the government was distancing itself from the resolution.Arnold said permission for the lawmakers' visit was essential for the Bundestag to extend the mandate due to end in December for German troops now stationed at Incirlik along with six Tornado reconnaissance jets and one refuelling plane, in support of the US-led coalition's fight against Islamic State.NATO also agreed last week to move its Airborne Warning and Control System, or AWACS, surveillance planes to Turkey from the Baltic region.About 30 per cent of the personnel for the planes is provided by Germany. Because the planes will provide information to the US-led coalition fighting Islamic State, the German parliament must approve any such deployment, Arnold said.He said he did not expect any significant obstacles to parliamentary approval for the AWACS deployment, as long as Turkey agreed to let parliamentarians visit their troops at Incirlik. REUTERS AKC 0409 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0432-918052.Xml
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday told Chinese President Xi Jinping that the partnership between both nations is important for the region and also for the whole world. The Prime Minister's assertion came as the duo held bilateral talks on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Hangzhou City of China. During the talks, Prime Minister Modi highlighted the menace of terrorism, saying the recent attacks show how it is spreading across the world and is, therefore, a matter of grave concern. He also condemned the terrorist bomb attack at China's embassy in Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek. The Chinese President on his part said Beijing is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound relations. "China is willing to work with India to maintain their hard-won sound relations and further advance their cooperation," Xinhua quoted Xi as saying. The meeting between the two leaders is significant as it follows China's move to stall India's membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and bilateral differences over the proposed USD 46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which runs through Pakistan occupied Kashmir besides Beijing blocking the UN move to ban Masood Azhar, chief of the Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM). Beijing too has raised concerns over the close ties between India and the US and the recently signed Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA), which will enable the militaries of both democracies access to each other's facilities for supplies and repairs. This is first meeting between Prime Minister Modi and President Jinping after their meeting on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit held in Uzbekistan capital Tashkent in June 23.(ANI)
Canonization ceremony of Mother Teresa has begun at St. Peter's Square in Vatican City where she will be declared a 'saint' by Pope Francis. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, known as the "saint of the gutters" during her life, will be made a saint of the Roman Catholic Church, just 19 years after her death. Millions of Catholics revere her as a model of compassion, and more than 100,000 people are attending the mid-morning ceremony in front of St Peter's Basilica, which is decked out with a canvas of the late nun in her trademark blue-hemmed white robes. Pilgrims have streamed from all over the world at St. Peter's Square at the Vatican from early morning ahead of a service to honour the Nobel peace laureate, who worked among the world's neediest in the slums of Kolkata. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj is leading a 12-member delegation to attend the function. In India, a series of events are being held in Kolkata to mark the occasion. A special mass is being organised at the Mother House in the city, with nuns promising to celebrate with the poorest of the poor. Her statue was today unveiled at Seashore St. Anthony's Shrine in Chennai hours ahead of the canonization of the Nobel peace laureate, who dedicated her life to helping the poor. Bishop Dr A.M. Chinnapa expressed his delight and said the entire humanity will take pride in the recognition being accorded to Mother Teresa for her service to humanity. "Mother Teresa's statue is being installed here to celebrate her sainthood...she thought it was a call from Lord Jesus to take care of the people. A saint doesn't belong to one religion, a saint belongs to humanity, belongs to everyone," he added. Director of St. Anthony's church Father John said it is a really big day for not only Christians but for all Indians. Pope Francis had in March announced that Mother Teresa, who spent 45 years serving the poor and sick on the streets in Kolkata, will be elevated to sainthood after the Church recognised two miracles attributed to her after her death. (ANI)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today expressed his concern to Chinese President Xi Jinping over cross border terrorism, especially from the places in Pakistan falling under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor that passes through PoK. In about half an hour-long meeting with the Chinese leader on the sidelines of G-20 Summit, Mr Modi underlined to Mr Xi the need of the two countries being sensitive to each other's strategic needs. "The Prime Minister told President Xi that it was of paramount importance that India and China respect each other's aspirations,'' Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson Vikas Swarup said here, while briefing the media about the meeting. Mr Swarup said the Prime Minister told Mr Xi that India-China relationship was important not only for the region, but for the whole world. "As a matter of principles, both the countries have to be sensitive to each other's strategic interest. We have to promote positive convergences and battle negative perceptions,'' Mr Modi told the Chinese President. The MEA Spokesperson also said that the Prime Minister condemned the terrorist attack on the Chinese embassy in Bishkek, and said it was yet another proof of "scourge of terrorism." The Prime Minister underlined to Mr Xi that response to terrorism should not be coloured by political considerations. The two leaders touched upon all important issues between the two countries, but Mr Swarup did not specifically mention the NSG issue. It was the second meeting between the two leaders during the recent months. Earlier, they had met in June on the sidelines of SCO Summit in Tashkent. The two leaders met against the backdrop of Chinese opposition to India's membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the bitterness over Chinese veto on UNSC move for ban on Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) chief Masood Azahar, and also Chinese concerns over the growing Defence ties of India with the US, especially the recently-concluded landmark logistics supply agreement, to give mutual access to bases. Mr Modi flew in here last evening after his two-day visit to Vietnam, during which India signed 12 agreements with the country, bolstering its Security and Defence cooperation. The Prime Minister also had bilateral meetings with his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull and Saudi Arabia's Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman today. He will meet British Prime Minister Theresa May and Argentinian President Mauricio Macri tomorrow. Earlier, the Prime Minister addressed a meeting of BRICS leaders, at which he said the group had a shared responsibility to shape the international agenda, in the interest of the developing countries.UNI XC NAZ PS RJ 1706 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0421-918634.Xml
Modi also hailed Obama for his leadership in the two-day ongoing G20 Summit here.

"PM closed his intervention at the G20 by paying tribute to President Obama for his leadership in G20," External Affair Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup said of the meet.

"Earlier, in his intervention President Obama praised PM Modi for tax reforms as example of bold policy in an otherwise difficult global economic scenario," Swarup added.

During the informal evening programme on Sunday the two leaders had yet another opportunity of exchanging views, he added.

--IANS gsh/rn

( 129 Words)

2016-09-04-20:27:56 (IANS)
At least 13,000 people attended a rally in Paris on Sunday to protest against what they say is a crime wave targeting the Chinese community in France, police said, after a Chinese textile designer died after being mugged last month.Demonstrators waving French flags and sporting T-shirts printed with the slogans "Stop violence, muggings, insecurity" or "Equality for all, security for all" marched from the Place de Republique square to the Bastille in eastern Paris, asking for more police protection.Chaoling Zhang, a 49-year-old textile designer, died last month after five days in a coma after being attacked in the northern Paris suburb of Aubervilliers by three men who stole his bag.Members of Aubervilliers' large Chinese community, home to many Chinese immigrants, said that the death of Chaolin Zhang was the latest in a string of targeted assaults."At first it was just stealing bags, then it was stealing bags with violence, and now it's stealing bags and killing. It could happen to anyone," 31-year-old Wang Yunzhou told Reuters TV."The people here are angry. We can't feel relaxed in the street, and if we don't even get a basic welcome in the police station people start to wonder," he said, adding that he moved to France from Wenzhou in south east China twenty years ago.Aubervilliers, which has a population of 77,500, is home to a large Chinese community connected to the garment trade. Some 600,000 ethnic Chinese people live in the country overall, including French citizens.Last month, 27 Chinese tourists were robbed and their driver sprayed with tear gas as they boarded a bus that was to take them to Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport. The incident raised fears that Chinese tourists, important luxury spenders, would stop coming to Paris.Tourist traffic in Paris has dropped significantly since attacks by Islamist militants last November, leading to sharp declines in sales for luxury goods makers but also for the capital's retailers, hotels and restaurants.Attacks on Chinese, Korean and Japanese tourists are also frequent in the French capital as robbers believe they carry large sums in cash and their suitcases are stuffed with luxury goods purchased in Paris, according to police.In May, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo travelled to Beijing to reassure Chinese authorities that Paris - the most visited city in the world - had taken measures to beef up its security. REUTERS CJ PM2130 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0400-919136.Xml
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today earned praise from US President Barack Obama for the passage of the GST Bill which was described by the latter as an example of bold policy move. Mr Modi also hailed President Obama's leadership in the two-day G 20 Summit that was inaugurated here today. Briefing media about the Summit, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Vikas Swarup said the Prime Minister's success in finally getting the GST bill cleared was taken note of by the US President who said it was ''an example of bold policy in an otherwise difficult economic scenario. "PM closed his intervention at the G20 by paying tribute to President Obama for his leadership in G20," said Mr Swarup. Mr Modi and Mr Obama first met briefly on the G20 stage when they were there for the family photograph in this eastern Chinese city. They found time to exchange views also later during an informal evening programme.UNI NAZ CJ AE 2325 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0400-919176.Xml
During the meeting, their first ever, Putin congratulated May on becoming the British Prime Minister, and said he hopes the two countries can take bilateral relations to a higher level, Xinhua news agency reported.

"We certainly have much to do -- both in the political and economic spheres," he added.

Relations between Moscow and London have been strained in recent years due to their different stances over the Ukraine and Syria crises.

May, for her part, recognised the existence of "some differences as well as some complex and serious issues of common concerns" between the two countries, calling for a "frank and open relationship and dialogue".

Putin and May also touched on such issues as counterterrorism, the Syria crisis, aviation safety and drug-trafficking, Russian Economic Development Minister Alexei Ulyukayev said after the meeting.

The Russian and British leaders are both in the Chinese city of Hangzhou for the 11th summit of the Group of 20 major economies.

--IANS lok/

( 190 Words)

2016-09-05-00:37:58 (IANS)
President Barack Obama attributes the rise of Donald Trump to his ability to "appeal to a certain group of folks who feel left out" economically and culturally. In an interview to CNN's Fareed Zakaria on Sunday, Obama pointed to the country's "long tradition of inclusion" as well as its historical suspicion of "outsiders". "Although you'll see bumps, whether it's anti-immigrant sentiment directed at the Irish, or Southern Europeans as opposed to Northern Europeans, or the Chinese, or today, Latinos or Muslims, the long-term trend is people get absorbed, people get assimilated, and we benefit from this incredible country in which the measure of your patriotism and how American you are is not the colour of your skin, your last name, your faith, but rather your adherence to a creed, your belief in certain principles and values," Obama said. He added: "I don't expect that that's going to change simply because Trump has gotten a little more attention than usual." Trump, Obama said, has "been able to appeal to a certain group of folks who feel left out or are worried about the rapidity of demographic change, social change, who, in some cases, have very legitimate concerns around the economy and are feeling left behind". But the President maintained that these people do not make up "the majority of America". "If you talk to younger people, the next generation of Americans, they completely reject the kinds of positions that he's taking," he insisted. --IANS lok/ ( 256 Words) 2016-09-05-01:31:58 (IANS)
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 2, ARMENPRESS. President Bako Sahakyan held meetings with the delegations of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic on September 2 that arrived in Artsakh within the frameworks of festive events devoted to the 25th anniversary of the NKR independence proclamation.

As Armenpress was informed from the press service of Artsakh presidents Office, issues related to bilateral ties were on the discussion agenda. The President welcomed the visit of representatives from the fraternal countries to Artsakh considering important deepening and developing relations with them on a continuous basis.
Pressure continues to build on Clinton over allegations that special access was giving to foundation donors when she was Secretary of State.

On NBC's "Meet the Press," Clinton's one-time rival was pressed on if that means the foundation should shut down entirely.

Sanders replied, "At the very least, she should not be involved. At the very least."

However, Sanders conceded that he didn't "know enough" to say if the foundation should be shut down during a potential Clinton presidency. He also acknowledged that the group does "a lot of good things with AIDS, and so forth".

Separately, Sanders was asked if third party candidates, like Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson, should be able to participate in the presidential debates.

The Vermont senator said if "people reach a certain level" they should be included, but added the current 15 per cent standard is "probably too high" and "probably should be lower".

--IANS lok/

( 189 Words)

2016-09-05-01:41:58 (IANS)
ANKARA, Sept. 3 (Xinhua) -- A tourist boat capsized due to strong wind and rainfall in Turkish resort province of Antalya on Saturday, 86 people on board were rescued while one passenger is still missing.

According to Governor of Antalya Munir Karaloglu, a large number of coast guards and maritime police officers were dispatched to the scene, Daily Sabah reported.

Dogan News Agency said that 79 people were rescued and two people were missing in the region.

The boat left a yacht port in Kaleici of Antalya before capsizing off the coast of Konyaalti, some 26.5 kilometers away.

The report said that search and rescue operations were still underway.
ALGIERS, Sept. 3 (Xinhua) -- Visiting UN Special Envoy for Libya Martin Kobler said here on Saturday that he discussed with Algerian officials the situation in Libya and the growing threat of the terrorist group of Islamic State.

Kobler held in Algiers talks with Algerian Minister for Maghreb Affairs, the African Union and the Arab League Abdelkader Messahel over the situation in Libya.

The UN official said they discussed the fight against terrorism in this neighboring nation, and the situation in the city of Sirte which will sooner be freed from the hands of the IS.

Kobler said Algeria is playing a positive role in the process of peace in Libya.

For his part, the Algerian minister urged Libyan warrant parties to sit around negotiation table to reach national reconciliation through the implementation of the peace agreement signed in December 2015 in Morocco.

He said another round of peace talks is due in Tunisia in the forthcoming days.

Messahel said they insist the international community should further back up peace in this neighboring nation.

Libyan protagonists reached a shaky peace accord following UN-sponsored talks held in the Moroccan resort of Skhirat in 2015, while a national unity government and a cabinet were established.
TEHRAN, Sept. 3 (Xinhua) -- Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Saturday that the family is the principal foundation that shapes people's progress and ensures the welfare and power of Islamic society of Iran, Tasnim news agency reported.

The Islamic republic needs to move toward creation of a family-oriented society that functions on the basis of an "Islamic model of family," Khamenei said.

"As the underlying entity and cornerstone of the Islamic society, family is the locus of growth, human sublimity, and the source of well-being, flourishing, prowess, and spiritual promotion for the country and the Islamic establishment," he was quoted as saying by Tehran Times daily.

To this end, all the plans, regulations, educational and cultural programs as well as social and economic projects in the country should pay special regard to the importance of family institution, he stressed.

Also, he urged the need for a national movement to promote and facilitate marriage, urging effective ways to avoid tendencies which undermines the nucleus of family, Tasnim reported.

In this regard, revising, rectifying, and completing the judicial laws and the relevant procedures in connection with family is a necessity, he said.

Khamenei said that to this end, the establishment of a counseling system should be added to offer services before and after marriage and to protect the families from a breakdown.

These are instrumental to support the dignity of connubiality, motherhood, house holding, paternal and economic roles of men, he said, adding that this will hopefully prevent social abnormalities which loosen the foundations of family and results in divorce.

The Iranian leader called for fertility and increasing birth rate in order to have a young, healthy, dynamic, and booming society, according to Tehran Times.

The remarks of the Iranian leader were the outlines of general policies on family to be observed and followed by three branches of the establishment, namely the administration, the judicial and legislation systems.
RIO DE JANEIRO, Sept. 3 (Xinhua) -- The Brazilian government emphasized Saturday that it will focus on climate change and sustainable development during the G20 Summit on September 4-5 in the Chinese city of Hangzhou.

In a video released by the government, the Brazilian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jose Serra, stated that Brazil will seek ways to raise global trade, especially for raw materials, which are of supreme importance for Brazil's commercial balance.

"We are a country doing very well environmentally, compared with the rest of the world. We will put great emphasis on sustainable development, to determine the right practices and the right policies," said Serra.

Before arriving in Hangzhou, the Brazilian delegation attend a Brazil-China business seminar in Shanghai, where they presented the potential for investment opportunities in the South American country to Chinese investors.

China was Brazil's main trading partner in 2015, with bilateral trade of 71.6 billion U.S. dollars. Furthermore, in the first six months of the year, exports from Brazil to China rose by 7.0 percent, particularly due to meat, iron and grain exports.

"We want the Chinese to come with more investments in infrastructure, transport and logistics. Today, the cost of production is very high due to infrastructure deficiencies and the Chinese have the money and the interest to invest," confirmed Serra.
by Anthi Pazianou

ERESOS, Greece, Sept. 3 (Xinhua) -- More than 1,000 women from all over the world gathered in Eresos, a small village on the Greek island of Lesvos on Saturday to participate in the 16th Women's Festival which is held every September.

Ioanna Savva, the organizer of the festival, told Xinhua that this year's festival, which runs till Sept. 17, is the biggest one since 2000. The events include women-only walks, sunset cruises, boat trips to hot springs, drumming workshops, beach volleyball, DJs and live music, Greek dance classes and film screenings, said Savva.

About 90 km away from Mytilini and with a permanent population of about 1,200, Eresos has a rich tradition in arts and literature with its economy based on agriculture and tourism.

"Every event is put on by women, and for women," Gina Hendrix from the Netherlands explained to Xinhua. The festival takes place at the end of summer when the nights are still warm.

Its 2.5 km long sandy beach and the deep-blue sea combined with the exceptional tourist services make Eresos one of Lesvos's main tourist spots.

"This year has been really difficult for local tourism due to the refugee situation," said Savva, referring to the refugees and migrants that have crossed the island whose photos have become known worldwide.

However, women from Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Turkey, the United States, France and Norway came to this international event, and all the local stores looking forward to their arrival, have created a really hospitable place for them.

Social Anthropology Professor Venetia Kantsa said that Eresos is "a place with female energy, a place where lesbian women gather to pay tribute to Sappho."

Eresos is considered to be the birthplace of the great poet of antiquity. Since the end of the 1970s, a fairly large number of lesbian women have visited Eresos, which has become known as a meeting point for lesbian women from all over the world during the summer.

"A seasonal lesbian community is re-created every summer, a community with its own territorial and symbolic boundaries, a community differentiated over time," Kantsa said.

Panagiota Teloniati, a local restaurant owner said the annual festival is a boost to the local economy especially this summer as tourist arrivals have decreased.
NIAMEY, Sept. 3 (Xinhua) -- Five people were killed in an overnight attack by suspected Boko Haram militants in east Niger, according to local media reports.

The attackers, believed to belong to the extremist group Boko Haram, rode into the village of Toumour on camels on Friday night. They burnt down houses, and killed and injured residents in the village.

The attack is the first in three months carried out in the east by the group, according to Niger Public Radio.
RIO DE JANEIRO, Sept. 3 (Xinhua) -- Brazilian airplane manufacturer, Embraer, has signed a contract to sell up to five E190 planes to China's Colorful Guizhou Airlines for a value of up to 249 million U.S. dollars, the company announced late on Friday.

In a press release, Embraer said the sale was concluded Friday during a Brazil-China business seminar in Shanghai, attended by Brazil's President Michel Temer.

The deal includes the confirmed purchase of two planes and the right to purchase three more. The first two will be delivered in 2017.

Embraer also sealed the sale of two Phenom 300 private jets to Colorful Yunnan General Aviation.

Embraer's director-general Paulo Cesar de Souza, stated that this sale confirms China's growing interest in Embraer. He added that over the past 15 years, Embraer has delivered 230 planes to China.

"China has huge potential for us and...represents 12 percent of our income," commented de Souza, who highlighted that Temer was presented in order to send a message of trust to investors and promote the commercial interests of Brazilian companies.

Colorful Guizhou's chairman, Zhai Yan, also said that "we hope that the E190 fleet can help us build a sky passageway inside and beyond Guizhou Province, and eventually contribute to improving the connectivity of China's Southwest Region.
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 3 (Xinhua) -- Researchers have reported that a nanotech-based drug delivery system may offer new hope for patients with a rare, ultimately fatal genetic disorder, known as Niemann Pick Type C1 disease, or NPC1.

No treatment currently exists for NPC1, which affects about one in every 120,000 children globally and results in abnormal cholesterol accumulation, progressive neurodegeneration and eventual death. While a compound that shows promise is now undergoing clinical trials, its high doses necessary cause significant hearing loss, requires direct brain injection and causes lung damage.

In a study published this week in Scientific Reports, researchers at Oregon State University (OSU) and other institutions outline the potential for the new delivery system to carry the new drug into cells far more effectively, improve its efficacy by about five times, and allow use of much lower doses that may still help treat the condition without causing severe hearing loss.

"Right now there's nothing that can be done for patients with this disease, and the median survival time is 20 years," Gaurav Sahay, an assistant professor in the Oregon State University/Oregon Health & Science University College of Pharmacy, and corresponding author on the new study, was quoted as saying in a OSU news release.

With the new approach, the HP Beta CD drug is attached to an extraordinarily small, nanotech-sized lipid particle that can carry it into cells, where it helps to flush out cholesterol.

Surprised to discover that the carrier itself also helped address the problem, while working in synergy with the drug it carries to greatly increase its effectiveness, the researchers said the system should allow use of much lower dosages, and possibly an easier delivery through intravenous injection, instead of brain injection.

In the form currently used, only 0.2 percent of the drug is able to cross the blood brain barrier.

The researchers noted that this type of drug delivery system has several advantages, including prolonged circulation times, the ability to incorporate multiple drugs with different mechanisms of action, and a variety of "targeting ligands" that can help cross the blood brain barrier. And the same system may ultimately show similar benefits for 50 or more other genetic disorders.
Brazilian President Michel Temer receives an interview in Hangzhou, capital city of east China's Zhejiang Province, Sept. 3, 2016. (Xinhua/Jin Liwang)

HANGZHOU, China, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Newly-installed Brazilian President Michel Temer said here Saturday that he has high expectations for the upcoming G20 summit and believes it will bring benefits to all its members.

The Brazilian leader made the remarks in an interview with Chinese journalists prior to the leaders' meeting, which will mark his first appearance as head of state at a major international occasion.

He was sworn in as Brazil's president on Wednesday after lawmakers ousted his predecessor, Dilma Rousseff, in an impeachment vote.

Temer noted that the G20 is a heavyweight international organization and this year's summit features such subjects as innovation and climate change, which Brazil also cares about.

He said he is full of positive expectations for its outcome.

"I think this G20 summit will bring benefits to all its members, particularly to our country," said the president, who is to join other G20 leaders at the two-day summit starting Sunday.

He spoke highly of the integration and interaction among G20 members, and also spoke of the upcoming summit of the emerging-market bloc of BRICS -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- in October in India.

International mechanisms like the G20 and BRICS not only help their members strengthen relations but also help them boost their respective development, noted the Brazilian president.

The Hangzhou summit involves the largest number of developing countries in the G20's history, which will help these countries promote common development, he added. He also expressed confidence in the BRICS framework.

On Brazil-China relations, the Brazilian leader said the relationship enjoys a very solid foundation and is currently at its best in history, as high-level bilateral contacts have greatly boosted bilateral diplomatic and trade ties.

"China is one of Brazil's largest trading partners. Though geographically far apart, our two countries are getting closer and closer," the president said.

Citing a series of cooperation deals the two sides signed on Friday during his stopover in Shanghai en route to Hangzhou, Temer hailed the bilateral partnership as a paradigm for integrated development of the world economy.

He hoped China will continue to open up its market to Brazil's soybeans, meat and other agro-products.

The president, who has long served as the Brazilian chairman of the China-Brazil High-Level Coordination and Cooperation Committee, said the mechanism made new progress in each of its last four sessions and has laid a solid foundation for bilateral ties.

He suggested that he might continue to lead the committee in the future.

Commenting on China's economy, he noted that the world's second largest economy has registered higher growth rates than many other countries, and the Chinese model has inspired many followers.

"China sets an example by being confident in its own economy at a time when the global economy is beset with difficulties," he said, adding that China's development experience is very useful to Brazil.

The South American country is striving to ride out the worst recession in its recent history. Its economy contracted by 3.8 percent in 2015 and is expected to shrink by 3.16 percent in 2016.

Touching upon Brazil's domestic situation, Temer said he is committed to restoring public confidence and judicial security, and pledged to protect the interests of foreign investors.
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 3, ARMENPRESS. Chairman of the National Assembly of Nagorno Karabakh Ashot Ghoulyan received Vice-President of the European Free Alliance (EFA) party Lorena Lopez de Lacalle and Co-Director of the party Gunther Dauwen on September 2, the press service of the NKR Parliament told Armenpress.

Welcoming the guest, Ashot Ghoulyan highly appreciated the EFAs activity on assisting Nagorno Karabakh and the delegations visit to Karabakh for participating in the ceremonies dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the NKRs Independence.

I am confident the EFA delegations third visit will create a new opportunities for cooperation, he said.

Speaking about the visit to the NKR, Co-Director of the party Gunther Dauwen said they gratefully accepted the invitation and expressed readiness to continue the process of informing the European community about the Nagorno Karabakh Republic.

The events taking place in Nagorno Karabakh cannot stay out from the processes happening in Europe, Gunther Dauwen said.

At the meeting issues related to the NKR political field, in particular, the exchange of experience between the NKR Democratic Party and the EFA, the protection of NKRs interests in the European structures through the inter-parliamentary platform and the expansion of cooperation were discussed.
British Prime Minister Theresa May arrives in China's eastern city of Hangzhou to attend the 11th Group of 20 (G20) summit, Sept. 4, 2016. (Xinhua/Cai Yang)

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HANGZHOU, China, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- British Prime Minister Theresa May arrived in this eastern Chinese city on Sunday for the 11th leaders' meeting of the G20 major economies, her major international summit debut.

At the summit, themed "Toward an Innovative, Invigorated, Interconnected and Inclusive World Economy," Britain is to show it is "open for business as a bold, confident, outward-looking country" and will be a "global leader" on free trade, May said Saturday before leaving for China.

The European country's shock vote in June to leave the European Union (EU), led to the resignation of May's predecessor, David Cameron, and has put Britain's posture on regional integration and globalization in question.

On the sidelines of the two-day G20 summit, May is expected to have a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss bilateral relations and other matters of common concern.

Upon her departure for China, she said "this is a golden era for UK-China relations," and that in Hangzhou, she will talk to Xi "about how we can develop the strategic partnership that we have between the UK and China."

China and Britain can enhance cooperation in a number of fields, from infrastructure investment and international financial framework to cooperation on taxation, anti-corruption and anti-microbial resistance, said Liu Xiaoming, China's ambassador to Britain.

"Our joint efforts in these areas will be essential in the G20's transition from an organization for crisis control to an institution of long-term governance," he said in a signed article published by Britain's Daily Telegraph on Thursday.

During her stay in Hangzhou, May is also expected to meet with other world leaders including U.S. President Barack Obama, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
VIENTTIANE, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- To upgrade the Free Trade area (FTA) between China and the Association of the Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are in line with the common aspiration and practical need of both sides to deepen and expand cooperation in trade and economy, Chinese Ambassador to ASEAN Xu Bu said.

China and ASEAN agreed to upgrade the FTA in November 2015, China's first with foreign trading partners, after four rounds of talks that officially started in August 2014.

The move will not only forge closer economic and trade ties between the two sides, but also help realize the targets of scaling up two-way trade to 1 trillion U.S. dollars and two-way investment to 150 billion dollars by 2020 and promote the negotiations on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), Xu said in an interview with Xinhua on the eve of the China-ASEAN summit to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the dialogue partnership between the two sides.

"It will speed up the economic integration and further liberalize and facilitate trade and investment in the region."

The Chinese ambassador said the negotiations on RCEP have been at the crucial stage.

"A total of 13 rounds of negotiations have been conducted and four meetings at the ministerial-level held so far, with the establishment of a related working group."

Progress has been made in the negotiations in the sectors such as trade in goods, trade in service, investment, economic and technical cooperation, intellectual property, competition policy, legislation and mechanism, Xu said.

China respects ASEAN's central role in the negotiations and is willing to work with it to press forward the negotiations and bridge differences between the two sides in a bid to conclude the negotiations within the year, he said.

RCEP is a proposed free trade agreement between the 10 member states of ASEAN and the six countries that have existing FTAs with the bloc, namely Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand. ASEAN groups Brunei, Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

RCEP potentially includes more than 3 billion people or 45 percent of the world's population, and a combined GDP of about 21.3 trillion U.S. dollars, accounting for about 40 percent of world trade.

Once the agreement is nailed down, it will significantly optimize the production networks and value chains in the region and help Asia become a "world factory" in the world value chains.

"It will simplify the complicated trade ties among the Asian countries, eliminate trade barriers, promote trade and facilitate investment."

"RECP will also narrow the gap in development level and significantly promote the industrial upgrading of its members by opening up," Xu noted.

Speaking of cooperation in industrial capacity, the Chinese ambassador said it should be a priority for the two sides.

"Cooperation in industrial capacity will give new impetus to the development of both China and ASEAN. To achieve their respective development goals, both sides need to create new channels and break new grouds."

To further boost cooperation in industrial capacity, Xu said China and ASEAN should enhance synergy between their respective strategies and initiatives.

"China is willing to align its international industrial cooperation drive and the Belt and Road Initiative with the ASEAN Economic Community Blueprint 2025 and the Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity, as well as development plans of respective ASEAN member states," Xu said.

China and ASEAN should also prioritize key sectors including iron and steel, cement, engineering, power and building materials to improve efficiency of their cooperation, he added.
BUENOS AIRES, Sept. 3 (Xinhua) -- Argentine media Saturday hailed the meeting between Argentine President Mauricio Macri and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Hangzhou, believing it would push forward relations between the two countries in various economic and trade sectors.

Macri, who has come to the eastern Chinese city to attend the G20 summit scheduled for Sunday and Monday, met Xi on Saturday.

The Clarin newspaper said the meeting was important given China's important infrastructure investments in the country.

The state Telam news agency said: "Macri and Xi agreed to strengthen commercial and cultural links between both countries" while the Diarios and Noticias news agency said Macri "proposed to Xi Jinping that the tourism flow from China to Argentina should be increased."

Macri said Argentina is committed to deepening its friendship with China and would "drive cooperation in energy, trade, investments, quality control, infrastructure and tourism."

After the meeting, Argentine ambassador to China, Diego Guelar, said China "has become a main partner of the U.S., Europe, Russia, Brazil and Argentina. It is our main banker and investor and the most important market for agricultural products."

Argentina has received a great amount of investments from China, especially in infrastructure, such as railway, hydropower and nuclear projects, according to officials.

According to Infobae, Macri was also set to meet with Jack Ma, the president of China's on-line business group, Alibaba, as well as representatives of China's Sany Heavy Industry, China National Nuclear Corporation, Power China and China Gezhouba.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) meets with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, who is here to attend the Group of 20 (G20) summit, in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, Sept. 4, 2016. (Xinhua/Yao Dawei)

HANGZHOU, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Sunday met with his Egyptian counterpart Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi who came to attend the Group of 20 (G20) summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou.



Xi said China steadfastly supports Egypt's effort to maintain stability and explore its own development path in line with its national conditions.

He said he hopes China and Egypt continue to support each other on issues of their core concern and take concrete actions to promote economic and trade cooperation.

China is satisfied with the continued progress in the two countries' comprehensive strategic partnership, Xi said.

He added the two sides should strengthen cooperation in industrial capacity, finance, people's livelihood, environmental protection and infrastructure, and coordinate and cooperate closely in global and regional affairs.

The Egyptian leader thanked Xi for inviting him to attend the G20 Hangzhou summit and hopes to deepen exchanges with China in fields of industry, telecommunications, technology, agriculture, hydrology, finance, local administration, and human resources.
RIO DE JANEIRO, Sept. 6 (Xinhua) -- The Director-General of the World Trade Organization Roberto Azevedo has said that greater market confidence in the Brazilian economy was already perceptible, given the "political stability that is resuming."

Azevedo made the remarks after meeting with Brazilian President Michel Temer on Saturday on the sidelines of the G20 summit held in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, according to a statement from the Brazilian government.

Temer, who took over the presidency from suspended former President Dilma Rousseff, will serve out the rest of her term until elections are held in 2018.

"This is the moment to resume growth with the measures that are being adopted by the Brazilian government," the statement quoted Azevedo as saying.

"The figures already show that markets are reacting more favorably, and the growth perspectives are getting clearer," he added.

Temer and Azevedo, who is also Brazilian, met in Hangzhou to discuss matters of interest for Brazil in the international trade arena, mainly concerning agriculture, healthcare, digital commerce and the inclusion of small and medium-sized enterprises.

Azevedo said the WTO and Brazil hoped to deepen their cooperation to allow the country to further integrate into the global economy, with a focus on growth and social development.
DAVAO CITY, the Philippines, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- A moderate earthquake shook parts of southern Philippines on Sunday, sending panicky people to the streets, but there were no reports of damage.

The 5.7-magnitude quake struck around 10:38 a.m. local time and was centered some 6 kilometers northeast of La Paz township in Mindanao's Agusan del Sur, according to the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and

Seismology (Phivolcs).

The temblor has a depth of focus of 11 kilometers, Phivolcs said.

Residents in several areas across the southern Philippine island had felt the tremor which lasted for over 15 seconds.

"I was inside my room when things began to suddenly move. I soon realized there was an earthquake," said Frederick Divino, a disc jockey for a music station in Davao City, over 200 kilometers south of the epicenter.

In San Francisco, Agusan del Sur, some 50 kilometers from La Paz, radioman Richard Grande said he was feeling dizzy due to the strong movement caused by the quake.

"The shaking lasted for almost a minute," Grande said.

Phivolcs said aftershocks are expected following the quake.
Photo taken on Aug. 25, 2016 shows the Hangzhou International Expo Center in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province. The 11th G20 summit will be held in Hangzhou from Sept. 4 to 5. (Xinhua/Li Xin)

HANGZHOU, China, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- The eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou is poised to offer the world the greenest G20 summit through a tree-planting project to offset carbon emissions during the meeting, underlining the country's commitment to green growth.

The project aims to plant more than 22 hectares of trees in the Hangzhou suburbs next spring which, over the next 20 years, are expected to absorb all greenhouse gases discharged during the summit, thus making the Hangzhou gathering the first G20 leaders' meeting to implement the concept of "carbon neutrality."

It also testifies to China's commitment to green growth, an important subject at this year's G20 leaders' meeting, which opens Sunday with the theme of "Toward an Innovative, Invigorated, Interconnected and Inclusive World Economy".

EPITOME OF GREEN CAUSE

Hangzhou, whose lake-front scenery has inspired generations of painters and poets, has evolved into an epitome of China's endeavors in promoting green growth.

Among its eco-friendly projects, it boasts the world's largest bike share program, with 78,000 bicycles scattered across the city at around 2,700 stations.

"There are so many city bikes that, in the downtown of the city, you cannot go five minutes without seeing one," a citizen said.

Meanwhile, to clean up the environment, the city government has employed modern technologies such as replacing diesel buses with electric ones.

Hangzhou has been replacing diesel buses since 2008. Up to now, official statistics show 22,000 new-energy buses have been deployed on 90 percent of the bus routes in the city. That puts Hangzhou in the vanguard of green energy transportation development.

Thanks to such efforts, Hangzhou, in the first half of 2016, accumulated 123 days of good air quality, and the PM 2.5 concentration declined by 7.7 percent, according to official data.

GREEN GROWTH AGENDA

Recognizing its vital significance, G20 economies agreed at their summit as early as in 2009 to phase out subsidies for oil and other carbon dioxide-spewing fossil fuels in the "medium term" as part of efforts to combat global warming.

The pledge was hailed by the international community as a breakthrough, but was lamented for its lack of progress and impetus for years. Hopes are running high that China, host of the G20 summitry for the first time, will give it a boost.

Beijing will make green finance the first time on the G20 agenda to mobilize more investment in environmentally friendly projects. Besides, climate change and other green initiatives are expected to form a major part of the gathering.

John Kirton, co-director of G20 Research Group at the University of Toronto, highlighted green growth as one of the three areas that the world leaders at the summit should coordinate a fiscal stimulus to support.

"If you can do this, you are going to have really big win at the summit," Kirton has told Xinhua.

As a matter of fact, the "green" issue is more burning now than ever, experts said.

The Hangzhou summit comes at a time when the world economy has continued to struggle on the path of fragile recovery despite aggressive monetary policies and rather loose fiscal policies put in place by almost all the world's developed economies to stimulate growth.

Experts said the pursuit of more sustainable green growth reflects the evolving global economic landscape and is in the interests of both the developing and the developed economies in combating the economic downturn.

"While China is looking to the developed countries like those in Europe for green technologies and expertise, the developed economies also expect to take the advantage of their competitive edge in green growth to expand their market," said Sun Yanhong, associate research fellow with the Institute of European Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, citing China's cooperation with European economies like Germany, France and Italy.

Meanwhile, the many developing economies need greener growth too, and they need help from the advanced economies to achieve this, experts said.

FROM AGENDA TO ACTION

To make the green growth initiative feasible, G20 economies have established a study group to clarify the definition, mandate and the scope of green finance, identify challenges faced by green finance and provide voluntary options for countries to consider.

Despite every arrangement, a meeting cannot do much to transform the global economy from brown into a green and low-carbon growth model.

Chen Yulu, deputy governor of the People's Bank of China, said the establishment of a sound green financing mechanism will be a systemic project that requires the coordination among central authorities, local governments, financial institutions and enterprises.

The central authorities will enhance related infrastructure and urge local governments to include green financing into their annual task list while guarding against possible risks to ensure financial stability, Chen pointed out.

To give the "green" agenda a big boost, China announced Saturday, one day ahead of the G20 summit, that it has ratified the emissions-cutting agreement reached last year in Paris.

The ratification will "further advance China's green, low-carbon development and safeguard environmental security," said a proposal adopted at the closing meeting of a week-long bimonthly session of the National People's Congress Standing Committee.

Addressing climate change would help the country realize sustainable development, it added.

Also prior to the summit, China said it will establish a green financing mechanism to facilitate the economy's transition to sustainable growth, becoming the first country worldwide to make such a move.

"Green growth is now part of China's development strategy and the demands for green financing keep growing as China enters a critical period for economic restructuring," said Chen, the bank official.
HONG KONG, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- The election for the sixth-term Legislative Council (LegCo) of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) began early on Sunday as hundreds of polling stations opened at 7:30 a.m. local time for registered electors to cast their votes.

Voting will end 15 hours later at 10:30 p.m. and final results of the election are expected to be unveiled on Monday.

The Legislative Council has 70 members, with 35 returned by geographical constituencies through direct elections, and the other 35 by functional constituencies.

Of the 289 validly nominated candidates for the election, 213 will compete for 35 seats in the five geographical constituencies.

For the functional constituency election, there are 55 validly nominated candidates (excluding candidates of the District Council (second) functional constituency), and 43 of them will run for 18 seats in the functional constituencies. The remaining 12 candidates in 10 functional constituencies will be returned to the LegCo uncontested.

In addition, 21 candidates have been validly nominated to contest five seats in the District Council (second) functional constituency, commonly known as the "super seats."

According to the final registers of electors for 2016 published in July, the final register for the geographical constituencies has a total of 3,779,085 electors who are eligible to vote in Sunday's election.

A total of 595 polling stations have been opened on the polling day across Hong Kong, including 571 ordinary polling stations and 24 dedicated polling stations.

Vice Chairman of Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference Tung Chee-hwa visited a polling station in the morning to cast his vote, expressing his hope that voters pick the candidates that would build a better Hong Kong.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying and some officials of the SAR government also voted in the morning. Leung urged the public to come out to vote and pick the candidates of their choice.

The LegCo is the legislature of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Each term of office of a member is four years, except for the first term when it was set to be two years.

The fifth term of LegCo began on Oct. 1, 2012 and will end on Sept. 30, 2016. The term of office of the newly-elected sixth LegCo members will begin on Oct. 1, 2016.
Photo taken on Sept. 2, 2016 shows the Hangzhou International Expo Center in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province. The 11th G20 summit will be held in Hangzhou from Sept. 4 to 5. (Xinhua/Wang Dingchang)

BRUSSELS, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- The G20 summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou will be an opportunity for China to promote its own development model and to push the G20 members to adopt a joint approach towards infrastructure finance, a foreign policy expert told Xinhua in a recent interview.

Putting "interconnectivity" as one of the priorities for its presidency of G20 reflects China's approach to development policy, said Balazs Ujvari, research fellow at the Egmont Royal Institute for International Relations.

"It builds on Beijing's recent successes in realizing rapid growth by focusing on physical infrastructure development as a motor for sustained economic growth," he said.

China has mobilized significant efforts to take on a more active role in international development policy, including through the Belt and Road Initiative and the creation of the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank, the expert noted.

"There are two main initiatives at the moment in place that China uses to directly or indirectly contribute to the economic recovery of the European Union," Ujvari said, citing the Belt and Road Initiative which aims to increase connectivity between China and Europe through Central Asia, and the "16+1" framework which aims to help finance infrastructure and energy projects in Central-Eastern Europe.

To harmonize efforts in infrastructure improvement, the expert expected the upcoming G20 summit will come up with initiatives and measures to build bridges between the recently created multilateral development banks and the traditional financial institutions.

"The only way to address the enormous infrastructure gap around the world, particularly in Asia and Africa, is to enhance the coherence of these existing multilateral development institutions," he stressed.

Last but not least, the expert said China will also be pushing for a harmonious relationship between economic growth, society and the environment during its presidency of the G20.

Since the global financial crisis buffeted the United States and Europe in 2008, the global economic landscape has gone through significant changes.

However, the global economic governance mechanism is not in line with the economic realities, which makes additional reforms necessary, Ujvari pointed out.

Taking the global economic performance between 2010 and 2015 for instance, 56 percent of the global economy measured in purchasing power parity is represented by developing countries, but they only have 42 percent of the voting power at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the expert added.
Chinese PresidentXi Jinpingdelivers a keynote speech at the Business 20 (B20) summit in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, Sept. 3, 2016. (Xinhua/Ma Zhancheng)

BEIJING, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- The speech made by Chinese President Xi Jinping Saturday at B20 Summit ahead of the opening of the G20 Summit in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou has drawn great attention and comments from experts worldwide.

Nasser Abdel-Aal, an expert in Asian Affairs and professor of Chinese studies at Cairo-based Ain Shams University, said Xi's remarks were an extension and continuation of China's foreign policy on economic cooperation with the world.

"It is a clear message welcomed by everyone, as it shows China's vision on the world future through a new Chinese policy that is not restricted to self-development but extends to make other partners in the development," he said.

Koh Chin Yee, CEO of Longus Research Institute, Singapore, said Xi's speech shows that China will firmly stick to the policy of widening collaboration with foreign countries and uphold an open strategy of seeking mutual benefit and win-win situation.

It shows that China will continuously follow an open policy with a more comprehensive, deeper and multilateral model, he said.

David Dosset, founder of the Euro-China Forum in Paris, said Xi sent important messages with an overall objective to inject confidence in a world of uncertainties.

"China ratified the COP21 agreement hours before the G20, a fact which indicates that the world's most populous country wants to be a catalyst of sustainable development," he said.

Xi sent a message to the world on Saturday that China will continue to be an engine of global growth, according to Adrian de Leon Arias, director of the University of Guadalajara business school in Mexico.

"China has embarked on a transformation process but needs international cooperation to do so. If all collaborate, the process will be less painful for society and all will benefit," said de Leon.

Farok Contractor, professor at Rutgers Business School of the United States, said Xi's speech covers not only the concerns of other G20 governments, but also shows China as an example of reform over the past more than three decades.

"I think it was a very inspirational and aspirational speech, because going forward into the 21st century, we need to build a global civilization based on common rules and he mentioned harmony and cooperation as one of the values of eastern civilization," he said.
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 3, ARMENPRESS. On September 4-8 short rain with thunderstorm is expected mainly in the evening hours in northern regions of Armenia, the Ministry of Emergency Situations informed Armenpress.

In separate places hail is possible.

The Western wind speed is 3-8 m/s. During the thunderstorm the wind speed may exceed up to 15-20 m/s.

The air temperature will not change considerably.

In the evening of September 4-8 thunderstorm is expected in Yerevan. The wind speed may exceed up to 16-18 m/s. In separate places there is a chance of short rain.
QALAT, Afghanistan, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- At least 34 persons were killed and 21 others wounded after a long-distance bus collided with a truck along a main roadway in Afghanistan's southern province of Zabul on Sunday, provincial police chief said.

"The accident took place along Kabul-Kandahar highway in Jaldak locality roughly at 05:00 a.m. local time. The crash caused the vehicles to catch fire," Gen. Mirwais Noorzai told Xinhua.

The wounded, suffering from severe burns and fractures, were transferred to hospitals in provincial capital Qalat city and neighboring Kandahar province, the police chief added.

The number of the deaths was likely to rise as many of the injured were in critical condition and among the victims were several women and children, he noted.

Local officials said that the overloaded bus travelling from Kandahar to Kabul was carrying around 60 people.

Reckless driving might be the reason for the deadly accident and an investigation into the incident is underway, according to local officials.

Some 73 people were killed and several others wounded in a three-vehicle crash on the same highway on early May this year.
BEIJING, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Negotiations on a bilateral investment treaty (BIT) between China and the United States have made significant progress, the Ministry of Commerce (MOC) said Sunday.

The two sides held their 28th round of BIT talks in Beijing from August 21-28 and continued consultations from August 29 to September 3, where both sides exchanged new "negative list" offers, with the common goals of establishing non-discrimination, and transparent and open investment through negotiations, said MOC spokesperson Sun Jiwen.

They conducted in-depth talks on the remaining issues in the agreement text and reached a consensus on important issues, said Sun. Both sides will continue intensive talks to advance negotiations and work to reach a mutually beneficial agreement, said Sun.

China and the United States started BIT negotiations in 2008 to increase mutual investment.

In June 2015, both sides started negotiations on a negative list. The negative list define sectors that remain off-limits to each other's investments.
Photo taken on Sept. 3, 2016 shows an ambulance carrying the body of Mir Quasem Ali amid tight security in and around the Kashimpur Central Jail in Gazipur, on the outskirts of the capital Dhaka, Bangladesh. (Xinhua photo by Rizwan Karim)

DHAKA, Sept. 3 (Xinhua) -- Bangladesh on Saturday executed another top leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, Mir Quasem Ali, for war crimes committed during Bangladesh's 1971 war of independence with Pakistan.

"Ali has been hanged to death (Saturday) at 10:30 p.m. (local time)," Proshanto Kumar Banik, superintendent of Kashimpur Central Jail on the outskirts of the capital Dhaka told journalists at scene.

Bangladesh Saturday evening ordered to execute death row war criminal Ali as he chose not to seek presidential pardon after losing the final legal battle.

Ali, well known as a key financier of Jamaat, was the sixth and one of the most influential opposition figures who have been tried in two war crimes tribunals which Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's BangladeshAwami League-led government formed in 2010 to bring perpetrators to book.

On Saturday evening, family members walked into the Kashimpur jail to meet him for one last time as authorities completed preparations to hang the war criminal.

Security has been beefed up in and around the jail, where 64-year-old Ali was kept.

As part of tightened security measures, paramilitary troops have been deployed in the capital to thwart any untoward incident in the wake of the execution.

Bangladesh's apex court on Aug. 30 rejected Ali's final legal appeal against the death sentence given to him by a special tribunal in March 2014.

Ali was convicted of abduction, torture and mass murder as one of the key leader of a pro-Pakistan militia.

Four Jamaat-e-Islami party leaders -- Motiur Rahman Nizami, Abdul Quader Molla, Muhammad Kamaruzzaman and Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid -- have already been executed for 1971 war crimes.

Apart from them, opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) leader Salaudin Quader Chowdhury was executed on Nov. 22 last year.

Both BNP and Jamaat have described the court as a government "show trial," saying it is a domestic set-up without the oversight or involvement of the United Nations.
HOUSTON, Sept. 3 (Xinhua) -- Two people are presumed dead after a plane crashed in Texas late Saturday and another person was confirmed dead in a separate plane crash in Arkansas earlier in the day.

In Texas, two people are presumed dead after a single-engine Cessna plane with two people on board crashed into a river in the Liberty County in the southeastern part of the Lone Star state on Saturday night, according to local TV station ABC13.

Witnesses said the plane appeared to be doing stunts before it stalled and crashed into the Trinity River near a highway.

The two people inside the plane have not been identified, according to authorities.

In Arkansas, one person was killed on Saturday afternoon following a gyrocopter crash near a regional airport in Bryant, a suburb of Arkansas' capital city of Little Rock.

The pilot of the small, single-engine aircraft suffered fatal injuries in the crash, which occurred shortly after 4:30 p.m. local time.

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating into the causes of the two crashes.
Chinese President Xi Jinping attends a BRICS leaders' meeting on the sidelines of a summit of the Group of 20 (G20) major economies in Hangzhou, capital city of east China's Zhejiang Province, Sept. 4, 2016. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, South African President Jacob Zuma, Brazilian President Michel Temer and Russian President Vladimir Putin also attended the meeting. (Xinhua/Li Xueren)

HANGZHOU, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Sunday urged BRICS members to jointly work to safeguard international equity and justice, and build a peaceful and stable environment for development.

BRICS countries -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- should continue to strengthen cooperation in political security while respecting each other's concerns and giving consideration to each other's interests, Xi said while addressing a BRICS leaders' meeting on the sidelines of a summit of the Group of 20 (G20) major economies in Hangzhou.

The president called upon the emerging-market bloc to help build new-type international relations featuring win-win cooperation and cultivate a peaceful, stable, equitable and reasonable international order.

The BRICS members should insist that each country chooses its development path in accordance with its national conditions, and resolutely opposes the interference in its internal affairs by external forces, Xi said.

The president also called for increased cooperation in the fields of counter-terrorism, outer space, energy security, and cyber security under the framework of BRICS.

Xi urged BRICS countries to build new-type global development partnership in line with the G20's action plan for implementing 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and push developed countries to fulfill their commitments and provide strong support for developing countries to reach development goals.
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Three Taliban militants lost their lives in the premature blast of a mine they wanted to plant on a road in Kunduz province on Sunday, an army spokesman in the province, Nasratullah Jamshidi said.

"Three Taliban rebels were attempting to plant a mine on a road in Khan Abad district early Sunday to target security convoys but the device went off accidentally killing all the trio militants on the spot," Jamshidi told Xinhua.

Taliban militants after overrunning Khan Abad district couple of weeks ago blocked the road linking the district to the neighboring Taluqan city, the capital of Takhar province.

The security forces, nevertheless after bloody fighting reopened the essential road three days ago forcing the militants to run away.

However, the armed militants who are engaged in hit-and-run fighting and largely relying on suicide and roadside bombings haven't commented on the situation. Enditem
BEIJING, Sept. 4 (Xinhua)-- Chinese companies are expected to make more acquisitions in Germany as they continue to embark on outbound investment around the globe, a report showed.

The long standing trade and investment partnership between the two countries has provided a solid foundation for Chinese companies to invest in Germany, and merger & acquisition (M&A) activities of Chinese investors in Germany have increased significantly since 2010, according to an investment guide to Germany produced by Deloitte.

Sino-German economic relations have evolved into a strong trade and investment partnership over the past 25 years. China has been Germany's second largest export market outside Europe since 2002, while Germany is China's largest European trading partner, according to the report.

"The motivation to tap into the global market will continue to drive outbound M&A activities by Chinese companies, and Germany will remain a major investment destination for Chinese companies because of the long-term trade and investment relationship between the two countries," said Rosa Yang, chair of Global Chinese Services Group, Deloitte China.

In recent years, Chinese investors have shifted their focus from acquisition of troubled assets to strategic investment in leading multinational technology companies.

China's home appliance manufacturer Midea offered to take a 95 percent holding in German robotics maker Kuka in August, and the German government said it would not block the acquisition as it would not endanger German security.

When it comes to industry sectors, automotive suppliers and industrial companies have traditionally been the focus areas for Chinese investment in Europe. Meanwhile the real estate industry in Germany has showed steady performance in recent years, both in residential and commercial property, and caught the attention of Chinese investors.

"With regard to foreign investment, there are sometimes concerns about job losses and whether the acquired companies will be dissolved with technology being taken away. In fact, foreign investment creates jobs and promotes growth and that is why they are economically important to Germany," said Dirk Hallmayr, leader of Chinese Services Group, Deloitte Germany.

Many Chinese investors have taken over financial distressed automotive suppliers in Germany, which have subsequently undergone successful restructuring and regained competiveness, Hallmayr added.
DAMASCUS, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- The Syrian army on Sunday recaptured a military base that fell to the rebels last month in the northern province of Aleppo, as part of a progress made by the army to restore fallen territory in the key province, a military source told Xinhua.
by Liu Tian, Rong Zhongxia

VIENTIANE, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Laos, the only landlocked country in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), is now facing a golden opportunity to rewrite its "disconnected destiny" and export its abundant resources to the rest of the world thanks to a railway that will connect it with the world.

The China-Laos railway, which is a part of the pan-Asia railway and will link Vientiane to the China-Laos border area in the north and Thailand in the south, will become the realization of a strategic mission to transform Laos into a land-linked nation and help boost economic growth in the world's least developed Southeast Asian country.

"It is good timing for both Laos and China as the Belt and Road Initiative is highly in accord with our strategy to become a land-linked country," said Saysana Sithiphone, chief cabinet of Lao-China Cooperation Commission, adding that the railway will bring Laos new opportunities for future development.

"Tourism will be the first industry that will truly benefit from the Laos-China railway and then tourism-related real estate will follow. The railway will also speed up development in industrial and agricultural sectors due to decreased transportation costs," Saysana told Xinhua in a recent interview.

The China-Laos railway is the first Chinese overseas railway project that has been primarily financed, built and will be operated by China and connect with its own railway network. The railway will bring hundreds of thousands of Chinese visitors to neighboring countries and create a reliable way for Lao products to access a vast Chinese, regional and global markets.

Furthermore, there is no doubt that the project will help ASEAN countries to implement their ASEAN Community Vision 2025, which emphasized "vibrant, sustainable and highly integrated economies, enhanced ASEAN Connectivity as well as strengthened efforts in narrowing the development gap."

Close to a planned railway freight station in Vientiane along the China-Laos railway is the Saysettha Development Zone, where in June 2010, Laos and China signed the Memorandum of Understanding on Vientiane Comprehensive Development Project, witnessed by then vice Chinese President Xi Jinping and his then Lao counterpart Bounnhang Vorachit.

The special economic zone aims to attract around 150 enterprises to operate from the hub with a total output value to reach 6 billion U.S. dollars and to create about 30,000 new jobs for locals by 2030 after its full development. The Saysettha area will become the embryo of a new Vientiane subcenter and will develop to provide about 300 million U.S. dollars in fiscal revenue to the local government annually.

"All entering enterprises must abide by relevant Lao environmental regulations and need to acquire an environment assessment license issued by the Lao government. In the meantime, the development zone will build disposal plants to reduce waste emission," said Liu Hu, general manager of the operator of the Saysettha development zone.

According to Liu, since the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative, 32 enterprises have entered the Saysettha development zone after 2013 and have already brought new operating and managing ideas to local plants, adding that related infrastructure such as roads, water and power supports are now in position for the first stage of the exploration.

During his visit to the special economic zone in April, then Lao President Choummaly Sayasone said that the zone would become a model for the cooperative development between China and Laos, adding that China has become the top country of investment in Laos and has made an important contribution to the economic and social development in Laos.

Besides the hard infrastructure construction, China's investment in Laos also involves high-tech areas to promote communication and internet development in the country and to enhance bilateral people-to-people exchanges.

China on Nov. 21, 2015, helped Laos launch its first communication satellite and the two sides jointly established the Lao Asia Pacific Satellite Company Ltd., or Laosat, to maintain the satellite's operation.

"Laos is a small developing country, it is very encouraging for the country and its people to have its own satellite encircling the Earth, as neighboring countries and other nations that have satellites now are noticing that Laos has obtained a satellite," said former Lao Minister of Post, Telecommunication and Communication Hiem Phommachanh, who now chairs the Laosat.

He said the the satellite is important to push forward the development of Lao's economy and provide convenient services such as internet and television program to families in remote mountainous regions. "I hope they could connect to a new world through the advanced technology that will also change their lifestyles," said Hiem.

Onideth Oudomsak, manager of the Satellite Marketing Department at Laosat, who spent eight years in China to study communication, said he is proud to play a part in his country's first satellite and called the satellite "historic."

"I've been to many remote areas in my country. Now, the satellite covers these places and people there can watch our TV programs," Onideth said.

The Laosat provides professional training to Lao employees so as to help the country cultivate more local satellite engineers for the future. "We will launch another satellite in the foreseeable future and our services will expand. Therefore, we need more professionals in this area," Hiem told Xinhua.

"We hope that through our satellite services, China's cultural and personal ties with Laos and other ASEAN countries could be deepened and ASEAN members' understanding of China enhanced through programs broadcasted by our satellite," said Ding Yongbing, general manager of the Laosat.

"The connectivity between China and ASEAN should not be limited to infrastructure on land. There must be connectivity between hearts from the two sides," Ding said.

On Friday in China's Hangzhou, Chinese President Xi Jinping told his Lao counterpart Bounnhang Vorachit that the two sides should advance their comprehensive strategic partnership and join hands in building a community of common destiny, as this year marks the 55th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between China and Laos and the 25th anniversary of China-ASEAN dialogue.
Pro-government fighters gather at al-Dhabab area after they took it from Houthi fighters outside the southwestern city of Taiz, Yemen August 21, 2016. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo)

RIYADH, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Saudi forces killed over 40 Houthi militias Sunday at Saudi border city Jazan while foiling infiltration attempt, Al Arabiya local news reported.

The Saudi forces also destroyed militias' vehicles and tanks during the attack, according to the report.

The forces, a leading Arabic coalition to fight Houthis in Yemen, have launched frequent missile attacks against militias in Saudi border cities.

The war has no ending signs after the end of talks of Yemeni political groups in Kuwait without fruitful results.
DAMASCUS, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- The Syrian army recaptured Sunday a military base that fell to the rebels in the northern province of Aleppo, as part of a progress made by the army to restore fallen territory in the province, a military source told Xinhua.

The Syrian army recaptured the Armament College in the southern countryside of Aleppo, continuing to advance in that area to lay a "nearly full siege" on the rebels in the eastern part of Aleppo city.

The college is one of a series of military colleges that had fallen to the rebels early last month, as part of a wide-scale rebel offensive aimed at breaking the government troops' imposed siege on rebel-held areas east of Aleppo.

The rebels managed to open a narrow route into eastern Aleppo, following their attack, promoting the government forces to unleash a broad offensive to recapture the fallen basis and re-impose the siege on eastern Aleppo.

The army reached the Armament College several days ago and clashed with the rebels inside, but achieved full control Sunday.

The Syrian army sent some of the elite forces fighting in Aleppo to fend off the attack in Hama.
HANGZHOU, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping met with U.S. President Barack Obama on Saturday ahead of the Group of 20 (G20) summit in China's eastern city of Hangzhou. Following is the full text of an outcome list of the meeting from the Chinese side.

Chinese Outcome List of the Meeting Between the Chinese and U.S. Presidents in Hangzhou

On September 3, 2016, President Xi Jinping of the People's Republic of China held meetings with President Barack Obama of the United States of America during the G20 Hangzhou Summit. The two sides had in-depth, candid and constructive talks on China-U.S. relations and major regional and global issues of common interest, and reached a wide range of important consensus. According to the Chinese foreign ministry officials, the consensus and outcomes reached by the two sides are as follows:

1. The New Model of Major-country Relationship Between China and the United States: The two sides commended the important progress made in the building of a new model of major-country relationship between China and the United States since the meeting between the two heads of state in Sunnylands in June 2013, and agreed to continue the joint endeavor to move forward this relationship in accordance with the consensus reached by the two presidents. The two sides will maintain close high-level communication and institutionalized dialogues, continue to enhance strategic mutual trust, deepen coordination and cooperation at bilateral, regional and global levels, manage differences and sensitive issues in a constructive manner, and promote the sustained, sound and steady development of China-U.S. relations.

2. China and the United States recognize that the two economies are closely interconnected and each country has a strong stake in the economic prosperity of the other. Policies that lay the foundation for strong and sustainable growth in both economies are essential to improving the livelihoods of Chinese and American citizens, as well as countless others around the world. To this end:

-- China and the United States commit to use all policy tools - monetary, fiscal and structural - to foster confidence and strengthen growth. Monetary policy will continue to support economic activity and ensure price stability, consistent with central banks' mandates, but monetary policy alone cannot lead to balanced growth. Fiscal policy should be used flexibly to strengthen growth, job creation and household demand, and can complement and support the implementation of structural reforms.P -- China and the United States jointly reaffirm their G20 exchange rate commitments, including that they will refrain from competitive devaluations and not target exchange rates for competitive purposes. China will continue an orderly transition to a market-determined exchange rate, enhancing two-way flexibility. China stresses that there is no basis for a sustained depreciation of the RMB. Both sides recognize the importance of clear policy communication.

-- The United States welcomes the commitments China has made on economic reform, especially on supply-side structural reform, and progress achieved so far, including efforts to strengthen the fundamental role of domestic consumption in driving China's economic growth. China commits to steadfastly advance supply-side structural reform, concentrating on cutting excess capacity, reducing inventory, deleveraging, lowering costs, and enhancing support for addressing weaknesses in economic and social development, to support China's transition to a more sustainable growth path. China commits to balance stable economic growth and structural adjustment, and expand domestic demand by increasing household consumption, increasing the service sector's proportion of the economy and ensuring investment is high quality and driven by the private sector. China will continue to simplify administrative procedures and transform government functions, press ahead with financial sector reforms to further enable the market to play a decisive role in credit allocation, open further the services sector to competition, and strengthen the social safety net.

-- The United States remains committed to promoting strong, sustainable and more balanced growth characterized by higher domestic investment, in particular infrastructure investment, and national savings. At the same time, the Administration continues to prioritize policies geared toward expanding access to education, reforming the immigration system, and improving the labor force participation rate and productivity.

-- China's fiscal policy has played a role in expanding domestic demand and supporting structural reform. Measures have included lowering taxes and fees, establishing a special fund to provide support for laid-off workers, reducing social security contributions of employers in a phased approach, strengthening the management of local government debt to address risks, and addressing shortcomings in economic and social development, including poverty reduction and ecological protection. Going forward, China commits to use proactive fiscal policy to promote structural reforms and expand demand as appropriate.

-- The United States recognizes the importance of predictability in the budget process and the impact budget uncertainty can have on the United States and global economies, and is committed to putting U.S. government finances on a sustainable path over the medium term.

-- China recognizes that one of the goals of supply-side structural reform is corporate deleveraging, including managing the corresponding challenges for the banking sector. Building on current progress, China is to deepen supply-side structural reforms with a comprehensive strategy, including state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform, giving full play to the role of the market and legal mechanisms, to reduce corporate debt, including SOE debt.

-- Acknowledging the sizable impact these reforms will have on China and ultimately on global growth, China reaffirms its commitment to further improve the transparency of economic and financial policies as well as the availability of data on economic activity to better inform regulators, policymakers, firms, and investors worldwide.

3. China and the United States recognize that structural problems, including excess capacity in some industries, exacerbated by a weak global economic recovery and depressed market demand, have caused a negative impact on trade and workers. Both countries recognize that excess capacity in steel and other industries is a global issue which requires collective responses. Both sides recognize that subsidies and other types of support from governments or government-sponsored institutions can cause market distortions and contribute to global excess capacity and therefore require attention. The two sides commit to enhance communication and cooperation, and are committed to take effective steps to address the challenges so as to enhance market function and encourage adjustments. In this regard, China and the United States welcome the potential establishment of a Global Forum, with active participation of G20 members and interested OECD members, as a cooperative platform for dialogue and information-sharing on global capacity developments and on policies and support measures taken by governments, to be facilitated by the OECD Secretariat.

The United States welcomes China's supply-side structural reform program, which has cutting excess capacity as one of its key objectives. China and the United States recognize that due to a weak global economic recovery and depressed market demand, the excess capacity of the electrolytic aluminum industry has increased and become a global issue requiring collective response. Both countries are to work together to address the global electrolytic aluminum excess capacity.

China and the United States recognize the importance of the establishment and improvement of impartial bankruptcy systems and mechanisms. China attaches great importance to resolving excess capacity through the systems and mechanisms relating to mergers and acquisitions; restructuring; and bankruptcy reorganization, bankruptcy settlement, and bankruptcy liquidation, according to its laws. In the process of addressing excess capacity, China is to implement bankruptcy laws by continuing to establish special bankruptcy tribunals, further improving the bankruptcy administrator systems and using modern information tools. China and the United States commit to, starting as early as 2016, conduct regular and ad hoc communication and exchanges regarding the implementation of our respective bankruptcy laws through forums or mutual visits.
LUSAKA, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Zambian President Edgar Lungu started consulting his lawyers after the country's Constitutional Court failed to rule on a petition by the main opposition leader challenging his re-election within the stipulated time, the president's spokesman said on Saturday.

The Constitutional Court could not rule on the petition filed by main opposition leader Hakainde Hichilema within the 14 day period stipulated in the Constitution on Friday, a move that has received mixed feelings.

The court had on Friday given the opposition leader who was defeated in the August 11 polls, only two hours to present his case, but his lawyers protested over the short period of time.

The opposition leader filed the petition on August 19 and the ruling could have been done on Friday but the court adjourned the matter to next week after the opposition leader asked for more time.

"Following the decision of the Constitutional Court on Friday, September 2016 to adjourn the presidential petition, His Excellency President Edgar Lungu is consulting his lawyers," presidential spokesperson Amos Chanda said in a statement.

Lungu has since called on ruling party supporters to remain calm and respect law and order, he added.

The statement further said the government will issue a statement next Monday on the direction.
JERUSALEM, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Political infighting between Israeli leaders suspended train lines that link Israel's two largest cities on Sunday, creating mile-long traffic gridlock and public protest.

Numerous commuters and returning soldiers found themselves stuck in massive traffic jams between Tel Aviv, Israel's financial capital, and the northern city of Haifa.

Long queues were seen at central bus stations, in what local media dubbed as "transportation chaos."

The train was shut down on Saturday after Netanyahu ordered to suspend repair works until Sunday, in order to observe the Jewish religious law, which forbids working on Shabbat.

His decision came in the wake of pressures from his ultra- Orthodox partners in his narrow governing coalition, who were angered by the "defilement" of the Jewish holy day.

Netanyahu blamed Transportation Minister Israel Katz for sparking the conflict with the ultra-Orthodox parties by allowing "non-essential works" on Saturday.

"This crisis is completely unnecessary. There was no need to reach this situation," he told the ministers at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting.

He said that the State of Israel has been honoring a status quo with the ultra-Orthodox for many years. "When work needs to be done on Shabbat -- it is done. When it does not need to be done on Shabbat -- it is not done," he said.

On Saturday, Netanyahu also accused Katz of deliberately trying to shake his coalition by undermining his relations with the religious parties.

Katz's office was not immediately available to comment on the dispute.

The cancellation of the train lines wreaked havoc on Sunday, with television broadcasting live from bus stations and jammed roads. Israel's Jerusalem Post reported that about 150 trains were cancelled, affecting around 150,000 people including work commuters, students, and soldiers.

A spokesperson for Israel Railways, a state-owned company that operates the trains, said that the lines would be resumed on Sunday evening.

On Saturday night, the decision to halt the infrastructure works and the expected traffic jams sent hundreds of Israelis and several lawmakers to the streets of Tel Aviv and Haifa. They lifted banners calling, "Let's get the country back on track" and "Netanyahu this is our train too."

The rallies were organized by called "Free Israel," a movement which advocates against the ultra-Orthodox hegemony in Israel.
BEIJING, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- The international community has welcomed the ratification of the Paris Agreement by the world's two largest economies on Saturday, lauding the move as an important step toward the deal's early entry into force and for the battle against global warming.

In a meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping, U.S. President Barack Obama and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon on the eve of the G20 Hangzhou summit scheduled for Sunday and Monday, both China and the United States formally joined the climate change agreement.

French President Francois Hollande on his Facebook account hailed the ratification as an "important step" by the two biggest carbon emitters, and said it opened the way for the agreement's entry into force at the end of the year.

Depositing the documents together, China and the United States have displayed their ambition and determination to jointly tackle a global challenge, Xi said after depositing the ratification documents to the United Nations. The handover of the legal document is evidence of China's solemn commitment, he added.

"Just as I believe the Paris Agreement will ultimately prove to be the turning point for our planet, I believe history will judge today's efforts as pivotal," Obama said in the presence of Xi and Ban.

Nathaniel Keohane, vice president of Global Climate at Environmental Defense Fund, said in an interview with Xinhua, "Continued global momentum on climate action depends on strong leadership by the United States and China, the world's top two emitters, by a large margin."

"Today's joint announcement represents important progress, but also highlights where continued leadership will be critical," Keohane said.

On Dec. 12, 2015, after hard and lengthy bargaining, climate negotiators of 196 parties to the U.N. conference on climate change in Paris sealed the climate change pact, aiming to reverse the trend of temperature rises mainly caused by carbon emissions.

"Nearly two years ago, the early announcement of emissions reduction targets by China and the United States helped to catalyze broad support for the landmark Paris climate agreement adopted in December 2015," Keohane said.

Keohane made the remarks in reference to a joint climate change agreement issued by Beijing and Washington in November 2014, in which Washington set new targets of reducing its emissions and Beijing pledged to achieve the peaking of carbon dioxide emissions by around 2030.

"Today's action will play a similar role, as U.S.-China leadership inspires other countries to formally join the agreement and do their part to ensure that it enters into force this year," he noted.

"With the United States and China together accounting for nearly 40 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, the world just got much closer to the 55-percent threshold necessary for the agreement to take effect," he added.

The ratification of the Paris Agreement "hailed their (China and the U.S.) new era of climate cooperation as the best chance for saving the planet," the Associated Press commented Saturday in an article.

Setting aside their cyber and maritime disputes, the two countries cemented their partnership on climate change and offered "a rare display of harmony," commented The New York Times.

United Nations climate chief Patricia Espinosa said in a statement that, by ratifying the agreement, China and the United States open up avenue for the world's sustainable development, and bring the historic global climate deal a big step closer to its entry into force.

Civil aviation is one of the world's fastest-growing sources of carbon pollution.

Both China and the United States on Saturday pledged support for the Assembly of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to reach consensus on a global market-based measure to address carbon emissions from international aviation.

"A market-based measure to cap aviation emissions from 2020 could prevent 8 billion tons of emissions in the first two decades alone, but only if the agreement covers a sufficient share of the growth in global emissions," Keohane noted.

The two countries' leading commitments to the ICAO deal, along with China's indication of early participation, is "a good start toward closing the gap between the aviation industry's future growth and what's necessary to avoid the worst effects of a warming climate," he said.

"Participation by China as well as other countries with significant aviation footprints, such as Japan, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and Brazil, will be crucial to ensuring environmental integrity and avoiding market-distorting loopholes," he said.

Ratifying the agreement was in some ways "a natual desicion" for China, a number of experts were cited by Los Angeles Times as saying. The agreement is in line with the country's domestic effort to clean up its air pollution and lends its leaders international prestige, it added.

The experts agree that China is likely to live on its promises.
TIRANA, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- The Albanian Central Bank has allocated around 1.095 billion lek (about 8.8 million U.S. dollars) of its profits to the state budget, the official statistics published by the Finance Ministry showed Sunday.

The ministry said the Bank of Albania profits transferred to the state budget in 2016 are higher than planned at the beginning of the year. The profits transferred last year amounted to 962 million lek (about 7.7 million U.S. dollars).

The contribution of the Central Bank to the state budget account for only 0.1 percent of the country's GDP.

According to a survey carried out by Open Data Albania, the weight of the profits transferred by the Bank of Albania as non-tax revenues has declined in the last 3 years.

Data published by Open Data showed that the value of profits transferred to Albanian state budget dropped from 21.47 percent it was in 2013 to the level of 3.14 percent in 2015.

Meantime, for 2016 this indicator is projected to be 3.49 percent.
Chinese President Xi Jinping attends a BRICS leaders' meeting on the sidelines of a summit of the Group of 20 (G20) major economies in Hangzhou, capital city of east China's Zhejiang Province, Sept. 4, 2016. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, South African President Jacob Zuma, Brazilian President Michel Temer and Russian President Vladimir Putin also attended the meeting. (Xinhua/Li Xueren)

HANGZHOU, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping said Sunday that BRICS members should enhance coordination to make emerging-market economies and developing countries play a bigger role in international affairs.

Since the beginning of this year, cooperation among BRICS countries -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- has maintained sound momentum with an expanded scope and more outcomes, Xi said while attending a BRICS leaders' meeting on the sidelines of a summit of Group of 20 (G20) major economies in Hangzhou.

BRICS nations are leaders among emerging-market economies and developing countries, and also important members of the G20, Xi said, noting that they should reinforce coordination to build, maintain and develop the BRICS and G20 platforms.

At the meeting, BRICS leaders exchanged views on a wide range of important global issues of common concern, including political, security, economic and global governance sectors.

Despite challenges in their respective economies, BRICS members recognized that they are still critical engines for global economic growth due to positive growth momentum and prospects, according to a statement issued after the meeting.

The nations should strengthen BRICS strategic partnership guided by principles of openness, solidarity, equality, mutual understanding, inclusiveness and win-win cooperation.

BRICS leaders appreciated the emphasis on development at the G20 under China's presidency, encouraging G20 members to strengthen macroeconomic cooperation, innovation, robust and sustainable trade, and investment growth, the statement said.

They also expressed concern about rising protectionism, against a backdrop of declining global trade, vowing to join efforts to facilitate market links and build an inclusive, rule-based and open world economy.

They said that International Monetary Fund (IMF) quotas fail to reflect current global economic realities, urging G20 members to step up efforts with the IMF to increase quota resources and review the distribution of quotas and votes to ensure a fair reflection of emerging and developing economies.

They called for the completion of 15th general review of quotas and the creation of a new quota formula before the 2017 IMF annual meeting, the statement said.

Xi called on the BRICS members to promote the reform of the governance structure of the IMF and the World Bank, with an aim to boost the representativeness and say of emerging-market and developing countries.

The five countries should also work to safeguard the position of multilateral trade system as the key channel, jointly build an open world economy and oppose all kinds of protectionism and exclusionism, to ensure that all countries will be equal in terms of development rights, opportunities, and rules, Xi said.

The president also called upon members of the emerging-market bloc to drive the BRICS New Development Bank to implement the first batch of projects and boost the bank's management level and financing capabilities.

The bank should promote the capabilities of macro research on the contingent reserve arrangement in order to enhance financial security for BRICS countries, he said.

The president called upon the emerging-market bloc to help build new-type international relations featuring win-win cooperation and cultivate a peaceful, stable, equitable and reasonable international order.

The BRICS members should insist that each country chooses its development path in accordance with its national conditions, and resolutely opposes the interference in its internal affairs by external forces, Xi said.

The president also called for increased cooperation in the fields of counter-terrorism, outer space, energy security, and cyber security under the framework of BRICS.

Coined by former Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O'Neill in 2001 in a paper titled "Building Better Global Economic BRICs," the term "BRIC" was originally an acronym referring to Brazil, Russia, India and China.

In June 2009, leaders from the four countries held their first official meeting in Yekaterinburg, Russia, during which they founded a cooperative mechanism known as BRIC. In 2010, South Africa was officially admitted as a new member of the group, and the acronym was changed to BRICS.

Related:

Xi urges BRICS to safeguard int'l fairness, justice
DUBAI, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- The United Arab Emirates (UAE) cabinet in Abu Dhabi adopted Sunday a decision to grant visas for Chinese visitors to the UAE upon arrival, the government-controlled Dubai Media Office reported.

The Dubai Media Office did not reveal the exact date the decision will be implemented.

In 2015, 450,000 Chinese visitors came to the UAE, up 29 percent year on year. This growth represented the highest increase among all nationalities visiting the Gulf Arab state, according to the official Dubai Tourism body.

In May, the UAE's first carrier Emirates Airline from Dubai expanded its network to China by adding Yinchuan and Zhengzhou in western and central China as its 4th and 5th destination in the country.

Approximately 350,000 Chinese nationals live in the UAE which has a total population of 10.5 million.

Earlier last week, the Gulf state of Qatar announced that Chinese visitors would be allowed "soon" to get their visas to enter the country on arrival, the Qatar daily The Peninsula reported.
TEHRAN, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Iran's Foreign Ministry condemned the deadly terrorist attack in Pakistan and urged the international cooperation to tackle the problem, semi-official Mehr news agency reported Sunday.

In a statement, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qasemi offered condolences to the government and people of Pakistan, and the families of victims.

"Still the international responsibility remains on the place to address the cruel events in the region in the face of atrocities afflicting the people on daily basis," Qasemi was quoted as saying.

"Fight with extremism entails strong resolve and global coordination," he said.

At least 18 people were killed and more than 50 others injured in the two suicide attacks on Friday in the northwest province of Pakistan, reports said.
KAMPONG CHAM, Cambodia, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- A group of Chinese ophthalmologists launched an over-two-year project on Sunday to help treat 1,000 patients with cataracts in Cambodia, officials said.

The eye doctors from China's Hainan province began their operations at the Kampong Cham Provincial Referral Hospital in southeastern Cambodia before moving to other provinces in the kingdom from September 2016 to December 2018.

During the period, five teams of ophthalmologists will travel to Cambodia to perform cataract surgeries for Cambodian patients.

Tan Qingsheng, charge d'affairs of the Chinese embassy in Cambodia, said the Chinese doctors would provide free-of-charge treatment to 1,000 cataract patients throughout Cambodia.

"China attaches great importance to the development of Cambodia's health sector, particularly helping to improve the health of poor people," he said during the launching ceremony of the project. "I'm confident that Cambodian patients with cataract will definitely get benefit from this project."

He expressed his belief that this humanitarian mission would contribute further to enhancing people-to-people relations between China and Cambodia.

Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister Yim Chhay Ly said the government strongly supported the project, saying it would greatly help improve eye health for Cambodians.

"This is a new testament to longstanding relations and good cooperation between our two countries and peoples," he said, expressing profound thanks to the government and people of China for help improving the well-being of Cambodian people.
HANGZHOU, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Despite new challenges for BRICS, their economies still have huge potential and the mechanism is still full of vitality.

On Sunday, leaders of the BRICS -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- held an informal meeting on the sidelines of the ongoing G20 summit in Hangzhou.

As leading forces of emerging-market economies and developing countries, they should reinforce coordination to make emerging-market economies and developing countries play a bigger role in international affairs, Chinese President Xi Jinping said at the meeting.

Coined by former Goldman Sachs economist Jim O'Neill in 2001, the term "BRIC" referred to Brazil, Russia, India and China, four emerging markets with faster growth and greater potential.

In 2009, leaders from the four countries held their first official meeting in Yekaterinburg, Russia. In 2010, South Africa joined the group, and the acronym was changed to BRICS.

In Chinese, the mechanism was translated into four characters with the literal meaning of "gold brick countries," partly to convey the meaning of their promising future.

As the Chinese saying goes, pure gold fears no fire.

Those countries have showed no fear of the crucible from a lackluster world economy but demonstrated to the world what they could achieve by pooling their capabilities.

Originating at the height of the global financial crisis, the BRICS had been the envy of the world in the first few years due to their galloping growth that was faster than the rest of the world.

However, affected by protracted sluggish world recovery and dropping commodity prices in the recent years, lingering slowdown and even depression began to haunt the economies.

The World Bank forecast that the Russian and Brazilian economies may shrink by 1.2 percent and 4 percent respectively this year, even though China and India are likely to maintain fast growth.

Despite the new challenges, BRICS members still enjoy abundant natural and human resources, vast markets, huge growth potential and bright prospects from their policy coordination.

Facing new situations, the BRICS must be confident in themselves and realize the vitality of emerging-market economies and developing countries they represent, Xi said.

At the BRICS meeting, leaders agreed on the prospects and momentum of their economies and the fact that they will continue to be strong engines of the world economy.

The countries are also committed to promoting emerging economies and developing countries to play a bigger role in international affairs and global governance, which will contribute to building a robust and more balanced global economy.

With their solidarity and openness, the "gold content" of the BRICS will continue to rise in the long haul.
HONG KONG, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Firefighters were battling a huge blaze engulfing a fruit market in Hong Kong on Sunday afternoon.

The fire broke out at a store built from metal sheets, located at the Yau Ma Tei Wholesale Fruit Market, at around 4:24 p.m. local time (0824 GMT), sending palls of black smoke high into the sky, according to local TV reports. It was raised to a No. 3 alarm in 13 minutes.

Fire crew and police officers rushed to the site after receiving reports from nearby residents. No casualties have been reported so far and the cause of the fire remained unknown.

The market was founded in 1913 and is classified as a Grade II historic building by the Antiquities Advisory Board. It is also next-door to the Yau Ma Tei Theatre, another listed building.

The incident occurred less than three months after two firefighters died when battling a fire that razed an industrial building in Hong Kong's East Kowloon.
HANGZHOU, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Business leaders from across the world gathered here over the weekend to ferret out the ills of the world economy and work out prescriptions to cure them.

At a business summit known as B20 on the sidelines of the 11th leaders' meeting of the Group of 20 (G20) major economies, the star-studded lineup also spoke highly of China's contribution to promoting world economic recovery and sustainable development.

Describing the global growth rate as "too low," International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde said Saturday that she is not optimistic about the prospects of recovery.

The coming year might register the lowest growth rate since the 2008 financial crisis, she warned, suggesting that besides monetary tools, fiscal and structural reform measures should also be adopted to realize truly sustainable development of the global economy.

Meanwhile, Lagarde recognized China's pivotal role in revitalizing the global economy and its continued efforts in deepening relevant reforms, and expected China to make new positive contributions in such areas as investment and trade.

In the eyes of Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, the G20 Hangzhou summit has laid special emphasis on the topics of inclusive and green finance, which are of vital importance.

Green finance plays an important role in solving climate change and other environmental problems, he said, noting that China, having granted an ever-growing number of ordinary people access to financial services, leads the world in inclusive finance.

Commenting on a report of policy recommendations the B20 has presented to G20 leaders, World Trade Organization (WTO) Director-General Roberto Azevedo pointed out that the document will have a crucial impact on the growth of world trade.

He called on all members of the WTO to endorse as soon as possible the Trade Facilitation Agreement reached by the organization, join hands to combat the rising trend of protectionism, and bring the general public more benefits from global trade.

For his part, U.N. Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) Director-General Li Yong also emphasized green finance and inclusive development as well as relevant policies, which he said are crucial to the future global economic development.

Speaking highly of the B20 report's inclusion of the issue of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), Li suggested that governments create good conditions for the healthy development of SMEs.

Focusing on the employment dimension, President Daniel Funes de Rioja of the International Organization of Employers noted Sunday that due to the impact of globalization, automation and other factors, global unemployment reached 197 million in 2015, up 27 million from the pre-crisis level, and that the situation remains challenging now.

Secretary-General Angel Gurria of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) noted in his Saturday appearance that the sluggish world economy now faces three vicious circles, namely a low-growth trap, a low-interest-rates trap and a circle of inequality resulting from all sorts of unfavorable factors.

Offering a three-pronged solution that consists of fiscal stimulus, structural reform and inclusive growth, he expressed confidence that the international community, through cooperation, can surely find a roadmap for future development and release the huge potential of the global economy.

Related:

Xi expects G20 summit to offer remedies to world economy

HANGZHOU, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- President Xi Jinping on Sunday urged the leaders of the Group of 20 (G20) major economies to prescribe remedies for the sluggish world economy to embark on a road of robust, sustainable, balanced and inclusive growth. Full story

World economic recovery faces multiple risks, challenges: China's Xi
BEIJING, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Immediately after the Group of 20 (G20) Hangzhou summit on Sept. 4-5, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang will visit Laos from Sept. 6 to 9 to attend the 11th East Asia Summit and pay an official visit to the country.

Li's visit is widely considered an important diplomatic action to deepen China-ASEAN relations, and promote cooperation among East Asian countries.

UPGRADE CHINA-ASEAN COOPERATION

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the establishment of dialogue relations between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and developing ties with ASEAN is a priority of China's peripheral diplomacy.

Over the past 25 years, the political, commercial, social and cultural cooperation between China and ASEAN nations has all yielded significant achievements. Now bilateral cooperation has entered into a "period of maturity" and needs to be upgraded.

To echo the need, Li will attend the 19th China-ASEAN (10+1) leaders' meeting to plan future development of relations between the two parties on the basis of successes already achieved.

Currently, the global economy is still trapped in the quagmire of weak recovery. How to promote economic growth and seek development are major challenges of Southeast Asian countries, yet they also provide opportunities and impetus for China-ASEAN pragmatic cooperation.

As ASEAN's most active partner, China has always been offering wisdom and strength for the development of ASEAN nations. In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed construction of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road with ASEAN countries and establish a closer China-ASEAN community of common destiny.

In the same year, Premier Li initiated the 2+7 cooperation framework while attending the 16th China-ASEAN leaders' meeting in Brunei, and outlined together with other ASEAN leaders the roadmap of the "diamond decade."

According to Professor Wei Ling, Director of the Institute of Asian Studies at China Foreign Affairs University, Southeast Asian nations are very much concerned on how China would support the ASEAN common community building in the future, especially within the framework of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road Initiative, also known as the Belt-Road Initiative.

China's Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin mentioned that besides political mutual trust and pragmatic cooperation, China and ASEAN would also build people-to-people exchanges as the third pillar of bilateral relations, which would also serve as a new impetus to bilateral cooperation.

INJECT NEW VITALITY INTO EAST ASIA COOPERATION

One of the shadows against the upcoming East Asia summit is the recent South China Sea Arbitration farce. In recent years, as the East Asia cooperation and integration process have been hampered by some outside forces, the regional situation has become complicated.

Ruan Zongze, executive deputy president of the China Institute of International Studies, said that most of the countries concerned want to cool down the South China Sea issue. Wei said many ASEAN countries have expressed the hope that the East Asia cooperation should refocus on economy and development.

The Chinese premier will also attend the 19th ASEAN-China, Japan and Republic of Korea (10+3) leaders' meeting, the main mechanism for building the East Asia economic community and promoting cooperation in various fields.

Although there have been twists and turns in the development of relations between China, Japan and South Korea, the 10+3 mechanism has led to the achievement of a series of fruitful results in finance, food security and other areas this year.

According to Liu, Li will urge all parties at the meeting to enhance cooperation in areas such as financial security, trade and investment, agriculture and poverty alleviation, inter-connectivity and capacity building.

As for the East Asia Summit, Liu said the premier will introduce China's views on the summit's future development as "a strategic forum guided by leaders," and adherence to principles such as leadership by ASEAN, consensus on the basis of consultation, accommodation of the feelings of all sides, and driving by the "two wheels" of economic development and political security.

Wei suggested that the East Asia Summit emphasize pragmatic cooperation and regional inter-connectivity, and return to the path of joint cooperation to tackle challenges such as terrorism.

CHINA-LAOS TRADITIONAL FRIENDSHIP REFRESHED

Premier Li will also pay an official visit to Laos, the first during his term. The visit will surely propel bilateral friendly cooperation to move forward, and promote development of China-Laos comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership.

Since the two countries established diplomatic relations 55 years ago, China and Laos have been trusting each other politically, and cooperated fruitfully in trade and infrastructure construction, bringing real benefits to both peoples.

Located at a unique geographical position, Laos is China's important partner in building the Silk Road Economic Zone and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.

The two countries signed a treaty last year on joint construction of the China-Laos railway linking Vientiane to the China-Laos border area in the north and Thailand in the south, which is currently progressing well.

The Lao government also expects to develop the country's infrastructure construction with the help of China's Belt-Road Initiative, and invite Chinese companies to participate in the exploration of Laos' rich hydropower resources.
MANILA, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Philippine President Duterte tapped Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea as head of a caretaker committee that would oversee the day-to-day operations of government while he takes a weeklong visit to Laos and Indonesia on Monday.

The president is set to leave late Monday afternoon for Laos to attend the 28th and 29th ASEAN summits and related summits on Sept. 6-8. He will visit Indonesia on Sept. 8-9 before he returns to Manila.

Duterte, who had been staying in Davao City since last week, will fly to Laos from Davao.

He will head a 30-man delegation which includes Senator Alan Peter Cayetano who is accompanying Duterte as chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Also joining the president are Communications Secretary Martin Andanar and presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella.

He cancelled a planned visit to Brunei following a bombing attack in Davao City on Friday which left 14 people dead.
NAIROBI, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta has signed into law the Fisheries Management and Development Bill to ensure equitable use of marine resources.

Kenyatta said in a statement on Sunday that the Fisheries Management and Development Act 2016 provides for the conservation, management and development of fisheries and other aquatic resources to enhance the livelihood of communities that depend on fishing.

The new law also gives guidance on the import and export trade of fish and fish products, fish quality and safety among other provisions.

It also establishes the Kenya Fisheries Services and the Kenya Fisheries Advisory Council.

"Functions of the Kenya Fisheries Services include ensuring the appropriate conservation, development of standards on management, sustainable use and protection of the country's fisheries resources," the statement said.

President Kenyatta said the new law will ensure that the country's marine resources are used for the benefit of Kenyans, especially coastal residents.

"With this law in place, we are able to protect our marine resources from exploitation by other nationals at the expense of our people," he said.

The Kenyan leader said the new law will also help the country to utilize the blue economy to create jobs for Kenyan youth.
ADEN, Yemen, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- An explosion struck a police checkpoint in Yemen's southern port city of Aden on Sunday, killing six soldiers and injuring at least five others, a government official told Xinhua.

Unidentified attackers detonated a roadside bomb at the checkpoint in Sheikh Othman district of Aden province, causing huge blast that rocked the area, the Aden-based government source said on condition of anonymity.

"The roadside bombing resulted in the killing of six pro-government soldiers who were positioned in the area with their armored vehicles," the source said.

Witnesses confirmed to Xinhua that heavy gunfire took place after the explosion and several ambulances rushed to rescue injured people.

No group has yet claimed responsibility for Sunday's roadside bombing that struck Aden province, where the Saudi-backed government has temporarily based itself.

However, the Yemen-based al-Qaida offshoot and the Islamic State (IS) group used to launch similar suicide bombings against Yemeni army and security forces in the past weeks.

Last month, the IS claimed responsibility for a deadly suicide bombing that struck an army recruiting center in Aden province, leaving about 75 dead and more than 100 injured.

Yemen, an impoverished Arab country, has been gripped by one of the most active regional al-Qaida insurgencies in the Middle East and the affiliate of the IS.

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.

More than 6,400 people have been killed in ground battles and airstrikes since then, half of them civilians.
FREETOWN, Sept. 4 ( Xinhua ) -- The last groups out of the 49 Sierra Leonean students who won Chinese scholarships this year left Freetown on Sunday to pursue further studies in China.

The 49 students, some of whom had begun leaving for China on Sept. 1, will undergo various studies in a number of Chinese institutions of higher learning.

Saying goodbye to the students and handing over their tickets, Sierra Leone's Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation Samura Kamara hoped they will serve as ambassadors of Sierra Leone by promoting the country's good culture and traditions.

He told them to count themselves very fortunate to be selected among the many students who vied for the Chinese scholarships.

He thanked the Chinese government for offering the people of Sierra Leone such a high number of scholarships for the students to capacitate themselves and contribute to the country's economic development.

Dr. Samura described the courses as very relevant to Sierra Leone's economy noting that "that these are the type of professionals the country is looking for ".

He spoke of the very cordial relationship existing between both countries and recalled the Chinese intervention in the country's Ebola crisis, which he said helped to galvanize the international support.

The deputy Minister of Education Christiana Thorpe hoped the students going will make "good use of their stay and comport themselves as ambassadors of Sierra Leone ".
Yemenis inspect the site of a suicide car bombing claimed by the Islamic State group on August 29, 2016 at an army recruitment centre in the southern Yemeni city of Aden. (Xinhua/AFP Photo)

ADEN, Yemen, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- An explosion struck a police checkpoint in Yemen's southern port city of Aden on Sunday, killing six soldiers and injuring at least five others, a government official told Xinhua.

Unidentified attackers detonated a roadside bomb at the checkpoint in Sheikh Othman district of Aden province, causing huge blast that rocked the area, the Aden-based government source said on condition of anonymity.

"The roadside bombing resulted in the killing of six pro-government soldiers who were positioned in the area with their armored vehicles," the source said.

Witnesses confirmed to Xinhua that heavy gunfire took place after the explosion and several ambulances rushed to rescue injured people.

No group has yet claimed responsibility for Sunday's roadside bombing that struck Aden province, where the Saudi-backed government has temporarily based itself.

However, the Yemen-based al-Qaida offshoot and the Islamic State (IS) group used to launch similar suicide bombings against Yemeni army and security forces in the past weeks.

Last month, the IS claimed responsibility for a deadly suicide bombing that struck an army recruiting center in Aden province, leaving about 75 dead and more than 100 injured.

Yemen, an impoverished Arab country, has been gripped by one of the most active regional al-Qaida insurgencies in the Middle East and the affiliate of the IS.

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.

More than 6,400 people have been killed in ground battles and airstrikes since then, half of them civilians.
TEHRAN, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- The Secretary of Iran's Human Rights Bureau Mohammad-Javad Larijani rejected the appointment of a new United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran, reported Tasnim news agency on Sunday.

Tehran regards the recent move by the UN Human Rights Council, appointing the Pakistani human rights activist Asma Jahangir as the UN special rights rapporteur on Iran, as "unjustified," Larijani was quoted as saying.

Basically, Iran is against an appointment implemented under pressure from some western countries, he said.

Larijani criticized what he called "double-standard policies and selective approaches to human rights issues adopted by certain Western governments."

Asma Jahangir will replace former Maldivian Foreign Minister, Ahmed Shaheed, who has been the UN rights rapporteur on Iran since 2011.

Iran rejected Shaheed's multiple reports on Iran as accusations which bore "certain professional flaws."

Shaheed had demanded to visit Iran to discover the realities of the human rights situation in the country, a request refused by Iran.
ALBANY  Dan Ryszka is a pharmacist, so he knows something about medicine. But he was still stumped when drug after drug failed to curb his children's violent seizures. Then they joined New York's fledgling medical marijuana program, and the attacks all but stopped.

"You go through the ABCs of medicine. Let's try this drug, let's try that one, let's find one that works," said Ryszka, a Buffalo-area resident whose 15-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son are now taking medications derived from marijuana. "We tried 10 drugs. Now, my son is off oxygen. He's smiling. Somedays my daughter was having three to five seizures. Now it's one a month."

More than 7,000 New Yorkers have signed up since New York began allowing patients with certain conditions to obtain non-smokeable marijuana preparations early this year through one of the most cautious medical marijuana programs in the nation. Now, the state is looking to expand it, with plans for home delivery and more dispensaries.

State health officials say they will also allow nurse practitioners to authorize medical cannabis, and are weighing proposals to make chronic pain a qualifying condition for medical cannabis. To make it easier for patients to find doctors, the state may post an online list of physicians who participate in the program.

The steps are overdue and don't go nearly far enough, said Assemblyman Richard Gottfried, a Manhattan Democrat and one of the authors of the law, which was passed and signed into law by Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2014.

"The excessive restrictions in the medical marijuana law and regulations are not justified," he said. "Patients deserve easier access and more choice."

Currently, there are 17 dispensaries around the state operated by five companies that grow and process the marijuana. Three more are slated to open. The state's expansion plan calls for up to 20 more dispensaries.

At least one company picked to operate the program is concerned about the expansion plan.

"Right now there's a micro market," said Ari Hoffnung, CEO of Vireo Health New York, which operates dispensaries in Queens and Westchester and Broome counties. "We urge the state to hit the pause button... there may at some point be a rationale to adding more. The time for that has not yet come."

Alphonso David, Cuomo's counsel, said the state will carefully assess the need for more dispensaries as it makes other changes  such as allowing nurse practitioners to authorize medical marijuana recipients  to ensure the transition is smooth.

"We are expanding the program we're doing so in a thoughtful way," he said. "We are focused on patient access. ... We need to make sure there is sufficient demand before we increase the supply."

Unlike most other states, New York's program prohibits smokeable marijuana, instead requiring dispensing the drug capsules or oils or tinctures that can be vaporized or used with an inhaler. Doctors must complete an online training course before authorizing the drug. Patients may not know which doctors have agreed to participate, making it difficult to access the program.

When he signed the program into law Cuomo said it "strikes the right balance" between treatment for patients and the need to protect public health and safety.

Twenty-five states and the District of Columbia now have medical marijuana programs. Enrollment rates vary considerably. Michigan has 182,000. Rhode Island, which has a population 1/20th of New York's, has nearly 12,000.

A study by Columbia University Medical Center researchers this year found that enrollment is highest in western states with older, less restrictive programs and lower in more recent "medicalized" programs like the one in New York. Minnesota, which has a program similar to New York's, has enrolled nearly 2,800 patients since its program started a year ago.

The study suggests that if Cuomo's plan was to create a program that's difficult to abuse, he may have succeeded.

Ryszka said he's pleased the state is expanding access to a program that has helped his children. He said there are still many people in need who can't get the drug.

"It's a step in the right direction," he said. "I get calls all the time: 'I live in this area, is there a doctor I can talk to?'"
COLOMBO, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lanka's Foreign Ministry on Sunday condemned an act of violence on its high commissioner in Malaysia.

The ministry confirmed that High Commissioner to Malaysia Ibrahim Ansar had been assaulted by a group of people at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport.

Ansar is receiving medical attention in Malaysia.

The Foreign Ministry said the High Commission of Sri Lanka in Kuala Lumpur is coordinating with local law enforcement authorities and other relevant local authorities to identify perpetrators and assist with investigations.

The ministry is taking all necessary action in this regard through diplomatic channels.
RAMALLAH, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki said Sunday that a delegation from the International Criminal Court's Prosecutor's Office will soon visit the Palestinian territories over "Israeli crimes against humanity."

Malki said in an interview with official Voice of Palestine radio that the delegation will meet with Palestinian officials to brief them on the efforts of Fatou Bensouda, the ICC prosecutor, with regards to the initial examinations of the files submitted by Palestinians 20 months ago.

The minister said that Palestinians are preparing for this "important visit," pointing out that the Palestinian side will brief the delegation on details that could speed up the initial court investigation into "Israeli crimes against humanity."

Malki, who met with Bensouda at The Hague last week, said that "it's clear that they would start the official investigation process soon, maybe in a few months."

Israeli public radio cited on Friday Israeli media as reporting that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is considering allowing representatives of the ICC Prosecution to visit Israel and the Palestinian territories in the coming few weeks.

The daily Israeli Haaretz quoted an anonymous source as saying that the ICC delegation's visit comes against the backdrop of the complaints filed by Palestinians against Israel's settlement activity and the Israeli military offensive on Gaza in mid 2014.

The sources said that Israel has nothing to hide and that Israel will brief the delegation on the work of the judicial system to prove that there is no need for The Hague's intervention regarding Palestinian complaints.

However, Netanyahu has not made a final decision, the sources said.

Palestinians have joined the ICC official since 1 April 2015, after the United Nations recognized Palestine as a non-member states on 29 November 2012.

The ICC prosecutor initiated a preliminary investigation on the status of affairs in the Palestinian territories on 26 January 2015.

Palestinians filed a comprehensive complaint on "Israeli crimes" in the Palestinian territories, which was followed by an additional memorandum regarding the Israeli settler arson attack in the West Bank in July 2015.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and other leaders of the Group of 20 (G20) members, some guest countries and international organizations pose for a group photo ahead of the opening ceremony of the G20 summit in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, on Sept. 4, 2016. (Xinhua/Pang Xinglei)

HANGZHOU, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- The Group of 20 summit opened Sunday in China's eastern city of Hangzhou amid multiple risks and challenges, aiming to find a therapy that can bring the world economy back to a healthy growth trajectory.

The therapy will be an integrative approach to address both the symptoms and root causes, and propel the world economy onto a path of robust, sustainable, balanced and inclusive growth, said Chinese President Xi Jinping when addressing the opening ceremony of the summit.

Chinese President Xi Jinping presides over the opening ceremony of the Group of 20 (G20) summit in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, on Sept. 4, 2016. (Xinhua/Li Tao)

Xi said the summit would focus on topics essential to the world economy, including macro-economic policy coordination, innovation-driven growth, more efficient world governance, robust trade and investment, and inclusive and interconnected development.

Chinese President Xi Jinping addresses the opening ceremony of the Group of 20 (G20) summit in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, on Sept. 4, 2016. (Xinhua/Li Tao)

There are high hopes for this year's summit, as it seeks a transformation from crisis response, which focused on short-term policies, to one of long-term governance, which shapes medium- to long-term policies.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and other leaders of the Group of 20 (G20) members, some guest countries and international organizations walk into the venue of the G20 summit in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, on Sept. 4, 2016. (Xinhua/Li Tao)

With the theme of "Toward an Innovative, Invigorated, Interconnected and Inclusive World Economy," the summit has put the issue of development front and center of the global macro policy framework for the first time.

It is also the first time that the G20 has an action plan for implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and carries out cooperation to support the industrialization of African countries and least developed countries.

Chinese President Xi Jinping presides over the opening ceremony of the Group of 20 (G20) summit in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, on Sept. 4, 2016. (Xinhua/Li Xueren)

With two-thirds of the world's population, G20 contributes about 90 percent of the world's total gross domestic product and 80 percent of the world's trade volume.

Wang Wen, executive dean of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies with the Renmin University of China, took the summit as "a landmark event in the history of China's diplomacy that reveals the growing influence and soft power of the country."

The event also brought the world a chance to understand China's practices and innovations in pursuing sustainable development, said researcher Jia Jinjing, Wang's colleague.
World Trade Organization Director General Roberto Azevedo speaks at the Business 20 (B20) summit in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, Sept. 3, 2016. (Xinhua/Li Xin)

RIO DE JANEIRO, Sept. 6 (Xinhua) -- The Director-General of the World Trade Organization Roberto Azevedo has said that greater market confidence in the Brazilian economy was already perceptible, given the "political stability that is resuming."

Azevedo made the remarks after meeting with Brazilian President Michel Temer on Saturday on the sidelines of the G20 summit held in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, according to a statement from the Brazilian government.

Temer, who took over the presidency from suspended former President Dilma Rousseff, will serve out the rest of her term until elections are held in 2018.

Brazilian President Michel Temer (R) receives interviews in Hangzhou, capital city of east China's Zhejiang Province, Sept. 3, 2016. (Xinhua/Jin Liwang)

"This is the moment to resume growth with the measures that are being adopted by the Brazilian government," the statement quoted Azevedo as saying.

"The figures already show that markets are reacting more favorably, and the growth perspectives are getting clearer," he added.

Temer and Azevedo, who is also Brazilian, met in Hangzhou to discuss matters of interest for Brazil in the international trade arena, mainly concerning agriculture, healthcare, digital commerce and the inclusion of small and medium-sized enterprises.

Azevedo said the WTO and Brazil hoped to deepen their cooperation to allow the country to further integrate into the global economy, with a focus on growth and social development.
HANGZHOU, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Turkey can serve as a bridge connecting China and Europe, especially in terms of logistics, Turkish Minister of Economy Nihat Zeybekci said here Sunday.

Speaking at a business summit on the sidelines of the 11th Group of 20 (G20) summit, he also expressed interest in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), saying that his country has been paying close attention to and hopes to take part in the program.

The CPEC is part of the initiative on the construction of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road (the Belt and Road Initiative), which was proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013. It is aimed at building a trade and infrastructure network connecting Asia with Europe and Africa along the ancient Silk Road routes.

The Turkish minister spoke highly of the initiative, noting that the ancient Silk Road has played a vital role in exchanges between countries.

Moreover, the minister stressed the need to promote inter-connectivity in transport, human resources and information, adding that removing trade barriers is also of crucial importance.

Turkey is a founding member of the China-proposed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. It signed a memorandum of understanding with China in November 2015 on the harmonization of the Belt and Road Initiative with Turkey's Middle Corridor project, a proposed regional transportation network between Turkey and China.

In their meeting on Saturday, Xi and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, agreed to advance cooperation in such fields as infrastructure, energy and counter-terrorism.

The two sides, Xi suggested, should work out concrete measures and projects to link the Belt and Road Initiative with Turkey's development strategy.
HANGZHOU, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin and British Prime Minister Theresa May met here Sunday and expressed hopes to repair bilateral relations through dialogue.

During the meeting, their first ever, Putin congratulated May on becoming the British prime minister, and said he hopes the two countries can take bilateral relations to a higher level.

"We certainly have much to do -- both in the political and economic spheres," he added.

Relations between Moscow and London have been strained in recent years due to their different stances over the Ukraine and Syria crises.

May, for her part, recognized the existence of "some differences as well as some complex and serious issues of common concerns" between the two countries, calling for a "frank and open relationship and dialogue."

Putin and May also touched on such issues as counterterrorism, the Syria crisis, aviation safety and drug-trafficking, Russian Economic Development Minister Alexei Ulyukayev said after the meeting.

The Russian and British leaders are both in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou for the 11th summit of the Group of 20 major economies.
BEIJING, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Foreign ministers at the Group of Twenty (G20) summit in China's eastern city of Hangzhou reached broad consensus on hotspot issues at an informal luncheon, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Sunday.

Hua Chunying told reporters that Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi hosted the luncheon, and his counterparts from more than ten countries including Russia, South Africa, Republic of Korea, Indonesia, Mexico, and Singapore attended the meeting.

Wang said at the luncheon that all the countries share closely linked interests against the backdrop of globalization, and the world should recognize the importance of building a community of common destiny for all mankind and work together to establish a new kind of international relations with win-win cooperation as the core.

Hua said the foreign ministers exchanged views and reached broad consensus on hotspot issues and major issues of common concern such as anti-terrorism, refugees, climate change and sustainable development.
Jiang Zengwei (L), chair of the Business 20 (B20) China and also chairman of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, hands over a document to the representatives of the next B20 summit host Ulrich Grillo (C), president of the Federation of German Industries, and Gerhard Braun, vice-president of Confederation of German Employers' Associations, in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, Sept. 4, 2016. The B20 summit concluded in Hangzhou on Sunday. (Xinhua/Chen Yehua)

HANGZHOU, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- The Business 20 (B20) summit, which was attended by business leaders and officials including those from the Group of 20 (G20) economies, came to an end Sunday with many consensuses and results, especially a policy recommendation report.

The two-day event, which was scheduled on Saturday and Sunday ahead of the G20 summit, attracted more than 1,100 business leaders to discuss hot topics and difficulties for the world economy.

The summit issued the B20 2016 Policy Recommendations report to the G20, raising 20 important aspects of recommendations and 76 concrete measures.

The report offers some suggestions for the first time, such as an Electronic World Trade Platform initiative, a SMART innovation initiative to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation, as well as developing green finance and investment market.

Leaders of Argentina, South Africa, Australia and Canada as well as heads of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the other multilateral organizations participated in the meeting and discussed with business leaders.

They agreed that G20 members should strengthen cooperation with an open attitude, advance reform and promote growth.

With good interaction between government and companies, sound environment for investors, investment in education and technology development, all sides should make joint efforts toward an innovative, invigorated, interconnected and inclusive world economy, the participants agreed.

They held the view that it is necessary to break a new path for global economic growth, increase high-quality and "bankable" projects, and promote innovation in financial tools for infrastructure investment.

The participants also agreed to facilitate private sectors' investment in infrastructure, promote the development of green finance and investment market, and develop inclusive finance.

Ahead of the closing of the summit, Jiang Zengwei, chair of the B20 China, handed over the hosting right of the summit to Markus Kerber, director-general of the Federation of German Industries.
A photo show, titled "Ever Victorious General of World War II" on legendary Chinese General Sun Li-jen, opens on Sept. 3, 2016 at Virginia Military Institute, the United States. (Xinhua/Yin Bogu)

LEXINGTON, the United States, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- An exhibition on famous Chinese General Sun Li-jen, known as Jungle Fox or Rommel of the East during World War II, opened here on Saturday, marking the final victory over Japan and complete ending of WWII against fascism 71 years ago.

The photo show, titled "Ever Victorious General of World War II," traces the life and times of the general who became internationally famous for his staunch leadership and daring battlefield strategy in Myanmar (then Burma) fighting against Japanese aggressor troops.

The exhibition is being held at Virginia Military Institute (VMI).

"This really is a remarkable, outstanding history," said VMI Superintendent Gen. Binford "Binnie" Peay III at the opening ceremony in Marshall Hall, named after Gen. George Marshall, VMI's most famous alumnus.

Peay told the audience that he was struck after taking a couple of hours walking all around this exhibition one day before.

The exhibition, with the timeline taking place in China during the turbulence of WWII, includes over 300 photos printed in UNESCO intangible cultural heritage Xuan paper with modern graphic art style. It is said many of the pictures go to the public for the first time.

"I think General Sun was an example of natural leaders who understood how to lead people," Col. Keith Gibson, director of the VMI Museum System, told Xinhua.

"We have many visitors to come here every year to honor General Sun," he said. Sun, a member of the VMI Class of 1927, died in Taiwan in 1990 at the age of 89.

Under the command of Sun and his subordinate Liu Fangwu, a regiment of the Chinese Expeditionary Army smashed through the Japanese line and rescued almost 7,000 British troops, as well as some 500 missionaries and journalists in Yenangyaung, Myanmar, in April 1942.

"A tide of overpowering joy flooded through me as I recognized the insignia of the Chinese Army and I stood up shouting 'Chung Kuo Wan Wan Sui' -- which means 'China for ten thousand years'," Jack Belden, a U.S. correspondent among those desperately encircled at the time, wrote in Life magazine issued in May 1942.

It is believed Sun was the first non-British general to command British troops during WWII. He was knighted Commander, O.B.E., by King George VI, and awarded Legion of Merit by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Also on the exhibition is a 12-meter-long Chinese brush-drawing mural, titled "Historical Monument" and painted by contemporary Chinese painter Hou Zhen in China, illustrating the Chinese Expedition Army's performance.

"With huge national sacrifice, the Chinese people held ground in the main theater in the East of the World Anti-Fascism War, thus making major contribution to its victory," said Wang Fawei, secretary-general with the China Association for Promotion of Culture, one of main sponsors of the exhibition.

"General Sun Li-jen was a quintessence of a hero in that war," said Wang, praising the war hero for combining traditional Chinese and modern American training to create the so-called Sun Doctrine which proved unique and effective in the battlefield.

"As we learn from history, we appreciate even more of our two nations' friendship. We are determined to collaborate with you and maintain the world peace together," Wang addressed the opening ceremony.

General Sun and his senior alumnus Gen. Marshall are "great leaders who inspire the future generation represented by the young men and women today here in the uniforms," said Peay. He later said the exhibition will be extended from originally one week to a whole month in the VMI.

Once the exhibition closes, its contents will be donated to the VMI Museum. The items also to be donated include a traditional Chinese thread-bound book illustrating Sun's military careers and a replica of the mural in the same size.

Sponsors of the exhibition also include the office of California legislator Kansen Chu, Anhui Hongtian Culture & Media Promotion Society of China, and the American Sun Li-jen Historical Association.
British Prime Minister Theresa May arrives in China's eastern city of Hangzhou to attend the 11th Group of 20 (G20) summit, Sept. 4, 2016. (Xinhua/Cai Yang)

LONDON, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- British Prime Minister Theresa May will seize the opportunity during the G20 meeting in China to talk to leaders from countries like Australia who have already made clear that they want to strike a deal once Britain has left the European Union (EU), Downing Street said in a statement on Sunday.

May has traveled to Hangzhou with a mission to set out her ambition for Britain to become a global leader in free trade.

Her official spokesperson at Number 10 said the prime minister intends to use the G20 summit to robustly champion free trade "while underlining the need to do more to spread the benefits and build a fairer economy for all".

"The Prime Minister will warn that while more people are feeling left behind by globalization, 'the answer cannot be to retreat, turn to protectionism or abandon free trade'," said the official.

Hailing the British government's new industrial strategy as an example, May has called on countries to do more to ensure that working people benefit from the jobs and opportunities that trade brings by investing in skills, training and infrastructure.

"The Prime Minister also hopes to kick off exploratory talks with a number of countries around the world to enable the UK to forge its own new trade deals once we have left the EU," according to the statement.

"Tomorrow (Monday) the Prime Minister will meet with the Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, who has already signaled that Australia will want to negotiate an important trade deal with the United Kingdom," added the statement from London.

It added that following an introductory phone call between both leaders in July, officials from May's newly established Department for International Trade have been in discussions with the Australian government about the expertise and experience that Australia can offer, having themselves negotiated five free trade agreements in the last three years as well as the multilateral Trans-Pacific Partnership.

"This week a team of UK government officials will hold talks in Canberra with their Australian counterparts about establishing a trade negotiating team and the Australian government have also offered to second experienced negotiators to the UK as we seek to rapidly establish a world class trade policy team," said the statement.

One of the issues raised in Britain following the June 23 referendum on continued EU membership, is the shortage of highly experienced government trade negotiators.

Trade matters concerning Britain have for more than 40 years come under the remit of Brussels, where trade deals are negotiated for the whole of the 28-nation EU.

Downing Street said New Zealand and Canada are among other countries to have also offered the British government expertise, adding that it reflected support from countries around the world to make a success of Brexit.

Later this month, one of New Zealand's top trade negotiators will fly in to London to provide support for officials in the Department for International Trade.

Prime Minister May said: "We are going to make a success of Brexit and one way we will do that is by playing to Britain's strengths as a great trading nation and forging our own new trade deals around the world.

"We are building up the necessary expertise to go after these trade deals and here in China, I will be seizing the opportunity to talk to leaders from countries like Australia who have already made clear that they want to strike a deal once we have left the EU," said May.

"And we will continue to be a powerful advocate for trade, recognizing that with the right investment in training, skills and infrastructure, it can help us to build a fairer economy that works for all, not just the privileged few," added the British prime minister.

Downing Street said the prime minister's talks on trade with world leaders come ahead of the second meeting of the Cabinet committee on EU Exit and Trade which will meet later this week and focus on the government's trade policy, in particular the principles which should guide the British approach including further work to prioritize early free trade discussions.

Prior to joining the EU in the 1970s Australia and New Zealand were among Britain's major trading partners.
The 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, was ratified in 1920. But three years before, New York was one of the first states to allow women to cast ballots in elections.

New York's place in the women's suffrage movement is the focus of a new commission led by Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul. The panel, the New York State Women's Suffrage 100th Anniversary Commemoration Commission, will develop ideas for commemorating the historic event.

The 14-member commission held its first meeting Aug. 22 at the M'Clintock House in Waterloo. Hochul has led other meetings throughout the state.

"What's so exciting is that New York state has a significant place in history," Hochul said in a phone interview. "We were the very first state  in fact, three years ahead of the rest of the nation  in granting women the right to vote.

"What we're doing in 2016 is preparing for 2017, which is actually the 100th anniversary. The rest of the country has to wait a few years, but we're going to start celebrating now because this was accomplished because really, the women's rights movement started in central New York."

Hochul noted that the site of the commission's first meeting, the M'Clintock House, was where women held the first planning session for the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848.

Seneca Falls is home to several historic sites related to the women's rights movement. The Women's Rights National Historical Park and the National Women's Hall of Fame are based in the town.

"There's so many pieces of this history in central New York," Hochul said. "We have a history to celebrate, a story to tell and it's important as women and people who support this that we talk about how far we've come in this state."

The commission's work won't be limited to celebrating the past, Hochul said. They'll also look at ways for present-day women to leave a lasting legacy.

There have been positive developments in recent years. Hochul used Hillary Clinton as an example. This year, Clinton became the first woman to be nominated by a major party for president.

Hochul also referenced one of her personal heroes, Geraldine Ferraro. Ferraro was the first woman to receive a major party's vice presidential nomination.

"Those are great barriers to break, but at this point, 100 years later, we think there should be a greater critical mass  a higher percentage of women in positions of leadership," she said.

One issue Hochul is eyeing: voter participation. In recent elections, New York has ranked near the bottom for voter turnout.

"That's not something we're proud of given the fact that we were the first to be progressive enough to grant women the right to vote way ahead of anybody else," she said. "That's something we should talk about  what we can do to inspire people to exercise this right that was so hard-fought for."

While Hochul is focusing on commemorating the anniversary at the state level, New York's junior U.S. senator is pushing for the creation of a national commission to mark the occasion.

U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand announced Friday that she's supporting the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission Act. She outlined the bill during a visit to the Susan B. Anthony House in Rochester.

The legislation would create a commission that would work with state and local partners and private organizations to develop educational activities commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment's ratification.

Gillibrand, D-N.Y., is one of 12 cosponsors of the bill introduced by U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat. Other cosponsors include U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and U.S. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.

"The women's suffrage movement was born in New York, and nearly a century after the 19th Amendment was passed, our state continues to be at the forefront of fighting for women's rights, from paid family leave to equal pay for equal work," Gillibrand said. "I will urge all of my colleagues in the Senate to support the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission Act, so that our nation can properly commemorate this pivotal moment in American history."
Chinese President Xi Jinping addresses a banquet for the Group of 20 (G20) summit in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, Sept. 4, 2016. Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan hosted a banquet for guests attending the 11th G20 summit in Hangzhou on Sunday evening. (Xinhua/Lan Hongguang)

HANGZHOU, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- In the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, leaders and other guests from the Group of 20 (G20) major economies were welcomed with a banquet and an evening gala.

On Sunday evening, Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted a grand banquet for those attending the 11th G20 summit in Hangzhou.

Before the banquet, Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan greeted the honored guests at the entry of a hotel by the side of the West Lake.

Leaders and their families, including U.S. President Barack Obama, Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, came to shake hands with the Xi couple.

While proposing a toast at the banquet, Xi assimilated the G20 platform to a bridge of friendship, cooperation and the future.

"We have come here for a common obligation to build an innovative, invigorated, interconnected and inclusive world economy as well as lead a new round of robust economic growth," Xi said.

After the banquet, the guests enjoyed a feast of classic Chinese music, folk dance, traditional songs and ballet performance -- a blend of East and West cultures.

The performance, directed by famed Chinese director Zhang Yimou, was staged with the glowing West Lake in the background. Through a remarkable feat of engineering, the platform was centimeters below the surface of the lake and the performers seemed to be treading the water.
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- The UN Security Council and UN Secretary-Generl Ban Ki-moon on Sunday condemned a deadly terrorist attack on a Philippine night market that killed at least 14 people, stressing the need to bring perpetrators to justice.

"The members of the Security Council condemned in the strongest terms the heinous and cowardly terrorist attack at a night market in the city of Davao in the Philippines on 2 September," the 15-nation council said in a press statement.

They expressed their deepest sympathy and condolences to the families of the victims and to the government of the Philippines and they wished a speedy and full recovery to those who were injured, the statement said.

"The members of the Security Council reaffirmed that terrorism in all its forms and manifestations constitutes one of the most serious threats to international peace and security," the statement said.

"The members of the Security Council underlined the need to bring perpetrators, organizers, financiers and sponsors of these reprehensible acts of terrorism to justice," it added.

"The members of the Security Council reiterated that any acts of terrorism are criminal and unjustifiable, regardless of their motivation, wherever, whenever and by whomsoever committed," the statement said.

The Security Council reaffirmed the need for all countries to combat by all means threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts, according to the statement.

Also on Sunday, the UN chief, in a separate statement, condemned the attack in the Philippines, and stressed "the need to ensure accountability and to bring to justice the perpetrators of these terrorist attacks."

"The secretary-general extends his deepest condolences to the families of the victims and wishes a speedy recovery to those injured," the statement said. "He stands with the government and people of the Philippines."

No group has claimed responsibility for the Friday attack that also injured more than 70 people. Philippine Presidential Communications Secretary Martin Andanar said components of a suspected improvised explosive device were found at the scene.

Police said they could not yet determine if the latest blast was caused by a bomb and that an investigation was now underway.

The bloody incident was the latest in the southern Philippine city since 2005 when suspected Islamist terrorists set off a bomb in a bus terminal in Ecoland village, killing a child and wounding five others.

In 2003, more than 30 people were killed and over 130 others wounded when alleged Muslim insurgents bombed the city's old airport and passenger harbor within a month.
HANGZHOU, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met here separately with his U.S. and Russian counterparts over the weekend on improvement of Ankara's relations with the two countries.

In their first meeting since the recent coup attempt in Turkey, U.S. President Barack Obama condemned the plot and reassured Erdogan that Washington will work to ensure those responsible for the failed coup be brought to justice.

For his part, Erdogan stressed that the United States and Turkey must adopt a common attitude against terrorism, and that there should be no distinction between "good terrorists" and bad ones as all terrorism is bad.

Turkey, a NATO ally of the United States, is a major member of a U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State group. But the two countries are facing challenges in maintaining robust ties over their divide on Syria policies.

In addition, Turkey-U.S. relations suffered another twist after Ankara expressed discontent over a lack of support from Washington in the wake of the failed coup, particularly the extradition of cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Turkey accuses of orchestrating the bloody attempt from Pennsylvania.

Prior to his Sunday meeting with Obama, Erdogan held talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday night, in which Putin said Russia is happy to see that political life in Turkey is coming back to normal.

In an English transcript of the meeting published on the Kremlin's website, Putin was quoted as saying that a great deal has to be done to restore full-scale bilateral cooperation in all areas.

The two sides agreed to form a joint investment fund, and agreed that sometime in October or November, they will have a list of projects and allocate a credit line to begin work, said Russian Economic Development Minister Alexei Ulyukayev, who witnessed the meeting.

Relations between Russia and Turkey were severely strained when Turkey downed a Russian warplane along the Syrian border in November 2015. The icy ties began to thaw in June when Erdogan wrote a letter to Putin to express his deep sorrow over the jet incident.

The three leaders are in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou for the 11th summit of the Group of 20 major economies.
DAMASCUS, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- The Syrian army wrested back control over a series of military bases south of the northern province of Aleppo Sunday, reimposing a full siege on rebel-held areas in the eastern part of Aleppo city, Syria's national TV reported.

The military forces recaptured all the military bases near the al-Ramuseh area south of Aleppo, said the report.

The rebels, mainly the Jaish al-Fateh, or the Army of Conquest, unleashed a wide-scale offensive early last month, capturing the military colleges and breaking the government-imposed siege on rebel-held areas in eastern Aleppo.

The Syrian forces, backed by the Lebanese Hezbollah group and Russian airstrikes, mounted a counterattack, succeeding Sunday to capture those areas and placing back the siege.

Previously, the army said the civilians wishing to leave eastern Aleppo are allowed to do so, while the rebels would be granted pardon if they laid down their weapons and surrendered to the army.

It's not yet clear whether the pardon is still in place after the military recapture of the bases.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) meets with Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, Sept. 4, 2016. (Xinhua/Pang Xinglei)

HANGZHOU, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- China and Thailand should enhance cooperation in all fields, President Xi Jinping said on Sunday.

Xi made the remarks when meeting with Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha on the sidelines of the G20 summit in the eastern city of Hangzhou. Prayuth is attending the summit as a leader of guest countries.

Xi said China attaches great importance to China-Thailand friendly relations and is willing to work with Thailand to continuously advance their comprehensive strategic cooperation.

Both China and Thailand are important developing countries in Asia and they have the same tasks of developing economy, improving people's livelihood and maintaining stability.

The two sides should strengthen strategic communication, further align their development strategies, forcefully promote cooperation in all fields, expand people-to-people exchanges, and enhance coordination in multilateral frameworks, Xi said.

As the leader of rotating chair of the Group of 77 (G77), Prayuth's attendance in the summit reflects developing countries' support for China's G20 presidency, Xi noted.

Prayuth expressed his appreciation for China's invitation to the G20 summit. The developing countries speak highly of China's effort in promoting cooperation between G20 and G77, he said.

Thailand will work to deepen the traditional friendship between the Chinese and Thai people, and expand cooperation in economy and trade, tourism, and infrastructure, the prime minister said.
ISTANBUL, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Turkey has sent more tanks and other military equipment into northern Syria for an extended operation, signaling its readiness to wade deeper into the raging war in the neighboring country to confront challenges on the ground, analysts said.

Some 20 tanks and a number of armored vehicles rolled into the northern Syrian town of al-Rai, in what the state-run Anadolu Agency described as a "new phase" in Operation Euphrates Shield launched on Aug. 24, in which the Islamic State (IS) was driven from the Syrian border town of Jarablus.

Al-Rai fell last week under the control of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), a rebel group backed by Turkey, as the town had changed hands multiple times during the past months in battles with the IS.

In the wake of Jarablus' capture, the offensive's second aim is to secure al-Rai and connect the FSA-held territories of Azaz and Jarablus, the English-language Daily Sabah said.

"Once this goal is achieved, the third target will likely be to push Daesh terrorists further south to al Bab," the daily noted, using IS' Arabic name.

Soon after capturing Jarablus, the Turkish military started to hit positions of the rebel Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) dominated by the People's Protection Units (YPG), the armed wing of Syria's Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), sparking concern in Washington and other parts of the world.

Ankara sees the YPG and PYD as offshoots of its home-grown Kurdistan Workers' Party, which was labeled as a terror group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union for its decades-old armed struggle for autonomy in southeastern Turkey.

Washington regards the YPG as effective forces on the ground in the fight against the IS.

In the view of Abdullah Agar, a security analyst and writer, Turkey is now engaged in a struggle for existence against terror groups as well as the powers behind them.

"Today the epicenter of that fight is Jarablus operation, which is small in terms of its operatives but important in terms of its public diplomacy, its context and effects," he told Xinhua.

The ultimate goal of Ankara is now believed to curb the advances of the SDF in northern Syria, which had aimed to control a territory that would connect the Kurdish cantons of Afrin and Kobani through Jarablus and Azaz along the Turkish border.

Analysts argued that after the fall of Jarablus, the YPG would now try to establish that connection through Manbij, Al-Bab and southern Mare.

The establishment of such a corridor in northern Syria, which would strengthen the hands of Kurdish groups to launch a Kurdish state in the region, is the biggest fear of Turkey.

"Ankara will never allow the establishment of a Kurdish 'terror corridor' in northern Syria," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told the press on Thursday.

With such a corridor established, Turkey's ties with the Middle East, in particular with the Arab world, will be cut, warned Agar.

According to Hasan Selim Oztertem, a security and energy analyst, two key issues -- international reactions and the realities in the field -- will determine Turkey's next moves in Syria.

"If necessary, Turkey would move towards further south," he said. "But before taking such a step, Turkey will of course stop and discuss the matter with its partners."

In the view of Taha Akyol, a columnist, the operation has apparently reached a "delicate diplomatic stage."

"Euphrates Shield has demonstrated the FSA could be successful when supported, making it a better fighting force against the IS than the PYD," Akyol wrote.

He noted, however, that Turkey's operation should not be expected to cover a broad area, as this development could cause military problems and the diplomatic climate might suddenly deteriorate.

As Washington urged Turkey and the Kurdish forces not to fight each other, Russia and Iran had also voiced their concerns, with Moscow calling on Ankara to avoid attacking any ethnic groups while Tehran demanding an end to the campaign.
ANKARA, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- The Islamic States (IS) militants lost control of their last territory along the Syrian-Turkish border, Turkish military told Anadolu Agency on Sunday.

According to Anadolu Agency, after Turkey backed the Free Syrian Army (FSA) forces, the FSA, which is supported by the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK), reconnected the Azaz-Jarabulus line on Sunday after flushing the area clean of IS militants.

The Turkish army launched on Aug. 24 the "Euphrates Shield" cross-border operation to drive out IS and other terrorist militants through the FSA fighters, who are bolstered by Turkish weaponry, ammunition, artillery, and jets.

Turkish soldiers, tanks and other equipment entered Syria from the Karkamis area in the Southeastern Turkish province of Gaziantep during the operation.

Turkish tanks then crossed into northern Syria from the Southeastern Turkish province of Kilis on Saturday.
Chinese President Xi Jinping addresses the opening ceremony of the Group of 20 (G20) summit in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, Sept. 4, 2016. (Xinhua/Li Tao)

HANGZHOU, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- Leaders of the G20 economies took a break on Sunday from their tight schedules and set sail into the night waters of the West Lake in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou.

The image of Chinese President Xi Jinping standing among leaders from emerging markets and developed countries sends a strong signal: that we are in the same boat, with China charting the course ahead this time.

Hours earlier, Xi, the helmsman of the world's second largest economy, had referred to boats metaphorically to stress the need of joint efforts when addressing leaders of the world's leading economies who have gathered for their annual meeting.

"To brave through the rough waters of world economy and start a new journey for future growth, it's good to know that we are in the same boat," he said in the opening address of the G20 summit.

"Let's make Hangzhou a new departure point and steer the giant ship of global economy on a new voyage from the shore of the Qiantang River to the vast ocean," the Chinese president said.

For the world's most populous nation, the Hangzhou summit on Sunday and Monday comes as an important opportunity to show the world that China has what it takes to help navigate world economic recovery.

It is the first time that Xi has chaired a G20 summit. Many hope the heavyweight get-together could set a course for global growth.

Speaking on Sunday afternoon minutes after welcoming the G20 leaders with handshakes, the president said he hoped the summit would prescribe a cure that would take the global economy onto a healthy growth trajectory.

"The therapy will take an integrative approach to address both the symptoms and root causes, and propel the world economy onto a path of robust, sustainable, balanced and inclusive growth," he said.

Called a "paradise on Earth" by 13th-century traveller Marco Polo, Hangzhou is the capital of Zhejiang, one of China's most successful provinces of which Xi was once Communist Party chief. The city's economy grew by 10.8 percent in the first half of this year, faster than most of the big cities in China.

The choice of Hangzhou as the host city of the summit well captures the role China now seeks on global stage.

As the world's most populous nation, the second biggest economy, and above all a powerful driver of global growth, China has every reason to lead.

But China beyond Hangzhou faces big challenges. GDP expanded 6.7 percent in the second quarter this year, the lowest rate since the global financial crisis in early 2009.

Xi, nevertheless, struck a rather optimistic tone on Saturday.

China has the confidence and ability to maintain medium-high growth as the country continues to deepen reform, pursues an innovation-driven development strategy, and opens up to the outside world, he told business leaders on the eve of the G20 summit.

The global circumstances in which the G20 leaders are meeting are also far from promising, but many of the issues with which the G20 is grappling are not so different from those of previous summits.

So far, Xi's efforts to persuade his peers to transform the familiar rhetoric into reality seem to have paid off.

With the theme of "Toward an Innovative, Invigorated, Interconnected and Inclusive World Economy," the summit has put the issue of development at the front and center of the global macro policy framework for the first time.

It is also the first time that the G20 has an action plan for implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and will discuss the industrialization of Africa and the least developed countries.

Chairing the G20 also offers China a unique opportunity to participate in the top-level design of global economic governance.

One of the goals of China's G20 presidency is to push the group to transform from a crisis response mechanism focused on short-term policies to one of long-term governance that shapes medium- to long-term policies.

With two-thirds of the world's population, G20 contributes about 90 percent of the world's total gross domestic product and 80 percent of the world's trade volume. Now, the G20 has become the premium forum of global economic cooperation.

China's increasing involvement in the G20, and in global governance in general, evolved gradually.

Eight years ago when the first G20 summit was held in Washington amid a major global financial crisis, global governance was anything but a familiar term to most Chinese. Chinese leaders back then repeatedly said China's biggest contribution to the world would be getting its own house in order.

In fact, global governance only entered the official Chinese political parlance in the wake of the 2008 crisis, and it was Xi who, years later, accredited the term its due prominence.

Attending a BRICS summit in South Africa in March 2013, about two weeks after assuming the presidency, Xi spoke of the need for emerging economies to take part in global governance, to uphold international fairness and justice and safeguard world peace and stability.

"No matter how the reform of the global governance system may unfold, we should always take an active and constructive part in the process," Xi said.

In the words of Wang Wen, executive dean of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies under Renmin University of China, "Xi has played a very important part in his personal capacity in China's participation in global governance."

Emphasis on global governance is now a hallmark of China's diplomacy, and features prominently when Xi addresses domestic audiences.

In early July, in a speech marking the Communist Party of China's 95th anniversary, Xi said that China should actively participate in building global governance and strive to contribute Chinese wisdom.

China's embrace of the G20 reflects a rising economic power's desire to steer and reshape the global agenda.

"With China's rise, it is only logical that the country plays a bigger role on the global stage," said Xu Guangjian, deputy director of the School of Public Administration and Policy at Renmin University.

"This development is in line with China's deepening affirmation of globalization, and its realization that no country could stand unaffected in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis," Xu said.

The remarks were echoed by Douglas Paal, vice president for studies at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"China has a big and growing interest in maintaining and strengthening the international economic and trading system," Paal said.

In the meantime, China is also holding high the banner of the developing world.

Xi has long called for increasing the presence of developing countries and emerging-market economies and offering them a bigger say in international systems, and ensuring the equality of different countries in global economic cooperation in terms of rights, opportunities and rules. That call was renewed at the Hangzhou summit, attended by a record number of developing countries.

For emerging markets, the G20 offers a unique chance to sit at the table as equal partners with all the major powers in the world in talking about the global economy and having their voices heard.

While attending a BRICS leaders' meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit on Sunday morning, Xi said that BRICS members should enhance coordination to make emerging-market economies and developing countries play a bigger role in international affairs.

BRICS nations are leaders among emerging-market economies and developing countries, and also important members of the G20, Xi said, noting that they should reinforce coordination to build, maintain and develop the BRICS and G20 platforms.

It would seem that the West Lake boat trip with Xi being flanked by leaders of both developed countries and emerging markets could signal an increasingly important role China seeks on the world stage: a bridge between the developed and developing nations.
BAGHDAD, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) -- A prominent leader of Islamic State (IS) group and four extremist militants were killed Sunday in a U.S.-led coalition airstrike near the IS stronghold of Mosul in northern Iraq, a security source said.

The airstrike destroyed four IS positions near the newly-freed town of Qayyara, some 50 km south of Mosul.

The prominent leader of IS, among the five killed, was said to be close to the top IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a security source on condition of anonymity told Xinhua citing an intelligence report.

The source didn't give the name of the prominent leader, adding that there were six other IS militants injured in the airstrike.

On August 25, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared the liberation of Qayyara after defeating the extremist militants.

Regaining control of the town and the airbase would help government forces free Iraq's last major IS stronghold in Mosul, which is located some 400 km north of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.

Meanwhile, Iraqi aircrafts dropped leaflets over the besieged town of Shirqat, some 280 km north of Baghdad, and the nearby village of Zuwiyah, telling the residents to leave their homes immediately for secure places.

The residents, otherwise, must stay away from the positions of IS militants which will be targets of the Iraqi aircrafts, a statement issued by the Iraqi Joint Operations Command said.

Residents in Shirqat and other besieged cities and towns were prevented from leaving by IS militants who used them as human shields during armed military attacks.

However, the siege upon Shirqat imposed by security forces has drove most extremist militants to the IS major stronghold in Mosul.

The escape of IS militants weakened their grip on the town, enabling some of the residents to leave their homes, where long-term repeated power blackouts, acute food shortages, scarce drinking water and lack of medicine prevailed.

The security forces and allied paramilitary units known as Hashd Shaabi have been preparing for an operation to free the towns of Shirqat and nearby Hawijah as part of their major offensive towards liberating Mosul, the capital of Iraq's northern province of Nineveh, from the extremist militants.

Iraq has witnessed increased violence since the IS took over parts of its northern and western regions in June 2014.
How quickly the summer months pass, and rather soon our children and young people are returning to school.

When contemplating the formation and education of our youth, we cannot but be so deeply troubled about the violence that has become a regular part of our culture. In our streets, neighborhoods, towns, cities and states, nation and world, our young people observe violent actions as the solution to problems and daily occurrences of war both near and far.

Still another tragic lesson being taught is that human life is disposable. Quickly eroding is the fundamental principle that all human life is sacred and we are created in the image and likeness of God. Although there is a great diversity among people, our greatest identity, our true source of joy, is that we are a daughter, a son of God; we are his children and we belong to the family of God.

Jesus, the first teacher, so close to his death continued to teach. At the Last Supper, the one rightly called lord, master and teacher put on the apron of service and washed the feet of his disciples and told them to do likewise in fulfilling the apostolic commission. This act is the culmination of his many lessons captured in his words: "I give you a new commandment: love one another. Such as my love has been for you, so must your love be for each other" (John 13:34). It also was at Golgotha that Jesus lessons on forgiveness shone brilliantly in the midst of the darkness of Good Friday. Nailed to the cross, Jesus looked down upon his captors and then prayed to his heavenly father: "Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing" (Luke 23:34).

The lessons taught to our children are incomplete without the lessons of Jesus. Without the message of the Gospel, we deprive our children of what they truly need to navigate their way in the world and to become positive and hopeful leaders in the church and in society.

Our Catholic schools and parish religious education and formation programs are essential components of our diocesan ministry to teach as Jesus taught. In these places our children are expected to come to know and to love Jesus and to embrace the Christian life that he reveals in holy Scripture.

As all education is in pursuit of the truth, so religious education pursues the ultimate truth, the living truth, Jesus Christ. In him, love and truth are united and from this union mercy and justice are born. Jesus Christ became the standard by which we judge our own lives in order to achieve, in his words, the goal of all academic endeavors: "In a word, you must be made perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48).

I am deeply grateful to the administration, the teachers and staff of our Catholic schools and religious education and formation programs for their dedication to this vital apostolate of the church.

But education reaches beyond the boundaries of our schools and parishes. At the baptism of their children, parents are reminded that they are to be the first and the best of teachers for their children in the ways of the Christian life.

Our schools and religious education programs strive to be a great support to our families, but they cannot replace the needed positive influence of families that embrace the faith, where prayer is a part of everyday family activities and weekly attendance at holy Mass is a regular practice. Indeed, the education of our children is a cooperative effort on the part of parents, schools, parishes and religious education programs.

In his poem, "A Psalm of Life," Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote:

"Life is real! Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

Was not spoken of the soul."

Like us all, our children have an eternal destiny, life with God forever! But ones relationship with God begins in the here and now. Education is a principle vehicle for developing this relationship with the lord.
Deosaran: Good move for independent to chair security JSC

The idea is a commendable one in principle, he told Sunday Newsday.

Alluding to the existing configuration of the Parliament - a Government majority, Opposition minority and nine independent senators, Deosaran, who once served on the independent bench, said the move augured well for future deliberations on the crime situation. Given the tensions that can permeate such an exercise, the appointment could bring a level of public trust and confidence in the process, he said.

Deosaran said the independent senator will be required to exercise acute judgement, balance views and ensure that the decisions taken are implementable.

The public is looking on with eager expectation because previous talks on crime have not borne fruit, he said.

Apart from legislation and other initiatives, Deosaran also called for widespread public consultation on the fight against crime The Governments decision to appoint an independent senator to chair the National Security JSC followed talks concerning crime on Friday between Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley, Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar and members of their respective delegations. The meeting was held at the Office of the Prime Minister in St Clair.
A positive step

On Friday, following a 90-minute meeting between Government and the Opposition, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley addressed a news conference at the Office of the Prime Minister in St Clair, stating that he was optimistic that both sides had set the framework for future effective cooperation to deal with crime in Trinidad and Tobago. He added that agreed to cooperate more effectively in the Parliament.

In a release, the TT Chamber of Industry and Commerce stated, In the face of this countrys disturbingly high homicide rate, the attendant violence and general state of lawlessness, todays meeting at the Office of the Prime Minister to treat with crime, is a positive step in the interest of our nation. The decision to take the fight to the Parliament, by passing appropriate and targeted anti- crime legislation with the support of the Opposition, is one that resonates positively with the business community, as it aims to target long term solutions through new and/or amended laws, it continued.

The Chamber stressed that the situation was urgent and warned those in authority and warned against complacency.

It agreed with several proposed alterations to legislation, including the stripping criminals of their unlawful gains, and the appointment of an Independent Senator to chair the Joint Select Committee on crime.

The Chamber also renewed the call for the urgent appointment of a Commissioner of Police.

San Fernando Business Association president, Daphne Bartlett said the meeting sent a good message to the nation that both parties were serious about the countrys crime situation and that they were heartened by the Prime Ministers statement.

However, she said they should not focus only on laws as these have changing for over a decade. Instead, she suggested the Association would like to see an increase in crime detection, an increase in policing, more community policing, and an overhaul of the Justice System.

Bartlett expressed the belief that the Police Service did not need more equipment or training but simply needed to be on the ground more.

She recommended more joint police/ army patrols to act as a deterrent to crime, not just in hot spots, but anywhere people congregate such as taxi stands and shopping areas.

She also said she believed it was necessary for police officers to build relationships and trust with people in communities so that they would feel comfortable to go to the police when an incident occurs, or of they have a problem.

Meanwhile, she said the countrys justice system needed to be revamped.

She said the system was not just supposed to be about catching criminals and having them in jail for ten years before they go to trial, and then the case going on for 15 years.

Bartlett said it was necessary for Chief Justice Ivor Archie, the Government and the Opposition to get together to put a system in place to get the justice system flowing more efficiently. They have already committed a crime. Why should taxpayers now have to feed them and keep them secure.

As business people, our business levy and green fund were increased.

We have to pay extra money, which would be then used to feed and protect the prisoner. I think its rather unfair, she said.

The Government needs to work with what they have and really fine tune, cut out wastage, and improve on what is being done, she added, noting that she did not expect everything to be done in a year.

While remaining sceptical, Downtown Owners and Merchants Association (DOMA) president, Gregory Aboud expressed the hope that Government and Opposition were moving in the right direction.

Indeed Caribbean societies have been crying out for some unity among politicians, particularly on national issues related to crucial subjects such as security and health care, he said.

Aboud clarified that DOMAs concerns and their request to the PM to take charge were not related to the generic reference to crime but to the savage bloodshed being witnessed in the country, including the murder of nine-year-old Cyon Paul.

Obviously the national community will be understandably sceptical about any improvements following this meeting since it is not the first time that these types of initiatives have been presented to the public.

Having said that we are under the leadership of a new Prime Minister and we think it is only fair that he be given the chance to make a difference on the question of the rampant state of murders taking place, he said.
Tough time

The economy and crime were the bane of the Dr Keith Rowley-led Peoples National Movement (PNM) Governments first year in office.

And, with the administration still grappling to streamline both issues amidst a turbulent global climate, there are fears that a stagnant economy, increased joblessness and rising crime could persist if steps are not taken to mitigate the problems.

Moreover, there is a prevailing view, in some quarters, that the Government needed to be more forthcoming with citizens on matters of national interest.

The Government, at this time, appears to be maintaining the status quo in a difficult economic context in a situation where earnings are less, political commentator Dr Winford James said on Thursday. You cant have more from less and people simply have to adjust their expectations. James observed that the Government, which commemorates its first year in office on Wednesday, appeared to be just holding things together in a situation where there is significantly reduced income.

Arrears are due to workers but that (payments) depend on earnings, he said, adding that the Government appeared to have deliberately avoided embarking on any expensive development projects.

There has been no excitement in a positive sense. A senior lecturer in the Department of Education at the St Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies, James, however, expressed serious concerns about the worsening crime situation. Describing it as outrageous, James said he was at pains to recognise an initiative which gives me comfort that crime is being handled effectively and the detection rate is not particularly inspiring.

As of April, the overall detection rate stood at a dismal 5.84 per cent.

I cant say that I am happy with crime, James said.

Alluding to reports which have suggested that the countrys flagging fortunes could be reversed post-2017, James said one of the bright spots for the Government over the past 12 months has been its attempts to prevent widespread job loss.

James gave the example of the Central Statistical Offices recent unemployment rate figure of 3.8 per cent, which, he said, did not represent a significant increase from the 3.5 per cent reported during the last quarter.

His PNM, coming into power by a five-seat majority 23 to 18 against the Peoples Partnership (PP) in the September 7 general election last year, Prime Minister Rowley signalled to supporters that the country had embarked on a new era and in which his party would have been a true servant to the -people. On that occasion, though, he warned that difficult times were ahead - a position which was informed by a precarious international economic climate fuelled by dramatic declines in energy prices and in our instance - due largely to our continuing heavy reliance on oil and gas for foreign exchange earnings and for 50 per cent of the Governments revenues.

Rowleys call for sacrifice in the face of fluctuating energy prices was galvanised in a much-anticipated televised address to the nation in December.

Remember, we had pitched our revenue stream and consumption lifestyle on US$80 per barrel as far back as October 2014, he said then. We are now being told that by 2020, we would still be substantially short of that price target and our projected revenues will be similarly curtailed if we are not blessed by significant increases in production of oil and gas. Without such increases, it means that in order to sustain where we are now, we will have to borrow substantially for the next five years. Added to the last five years, this would mean ten years of heavy deficit spending and explosive growth in the national debt burden.

Whatever the projections, it is clear that we cannot expect any significant and immediate rebound in oil and gas prices. Nor can we significantly increase our production of these commodities in the short run. When our export earnings fall the supply of foreign exchange flowing into the economy is reduced. The whole of the rest of the economy outside of the energy sector depends on the availability of foreign exchange. Nevertheless, the Government remained optimistic  such relatively positive sentiments were expressed in the PNMs manifesto ahead of the general election.

The party had said that despite the damage done by the UNCled government we believe that there are several intrinsic areas of strength in our economy, which, if properly harnessed and properly incentivised, will allow us to achieve sustainable growth. These, the PNM said, included TTs status as a mature energy sector, its reputation as an attractive destination for investment in both the energy and non-energy sectors and strong manufacturing base.

But months into its tenure, the Rowley administration was confronted with several crucial realities, most notably the closure of international steel giant, Arcelor Mittals local operations, which sent some 600 workers on the breadline.

There was also fervent clamouring in various sectors, including labour and the public sector, for the Government to settle outstanding arrears and devise strategies to quickly bolster the economy - issues which still persist.

One of Rowleys strategies to develop the economy included a controversial proposal to construct a 750-room Sandals hotel as well as two marinas in Tobago so as to enhance the local tourism product.

Rowley also said in June that the new road from Valencia to Toco and the Toco Ferry Port to Tobago, will create thousands of jobs in construction and operationalisation.

On the impact of declining oil prices on the local economy, retired head of the public service Reginald Dumas regarded the Government as being a victim of circumstance.

The decline in oil and gas prices is not their fault and will continue, he told Sunday Newsday.

However, he believes the time has come for candid, national conversations on issues that continue to affect the vast majority of the population.

This, Dumas said, could be facilitated through ongoing meetthe- people tours and town meetings.

A Cabinet pronouncement is not a dialogue, he posited. They have to consult with the people, adding that the Government needed to be more forthcoming on issues confronting the country.

It has not been giving that impression at all, he said Dumas argued that TT had grown accustomed over the years to being what he called a pampered society. With all the subsidies on items like school books and medicine, he said, People have come to expect certain things.

But these things cannot continue because the money is not there and the PNM is faced with a serious problem. Further, Dumas claimed many of the partys supporters were unhappy and disillusioned because the Government is not showing the type of leadership in the current situation that they expected of them. For instance, he recalled Rowley had spoken last year about public- private sector partnerships in the housing sector.

Has this happened? Dumas asked. Is it enough to just talk about something? What about the implementation? Dumas also wondered what became of the public consultations on education and prisons reform.

There is a feeling of a drift, that the Government is not in control of the situation or does not even have the appearance of control that people expected, he said, adding there was still much goodwill for the Government. Dumas suggested Government must conduct a reality check.

Subhas Ramkhelawan, managing director of Bourse Securities Limited, said Government has had a challenging year with respect to balancing revenues and expenditures.

He claimed there was a shortfall of $20 billion between recurrent revenue and recurrent expenditure from the previous administration.

And with the new Government, this has provided further challenges, he said.

The former independent senator did not give the PNM a grade for its performance over the past year but noted that their stewardship was governed by economic and socio-political issues, including crime.

As it embarks on its second year in office, Ramkhelawan hoped Government would promote strategies to either reduce or eliminate the fiscal deficit.

The upcoming Budget, he said, will be an important milestone to establish how the Government is likely to fare given the challenges plaguing the country.

Saying he had not truly considered the highlights and shortcomings of the PNMs first year in office, Movement for Social Justice (MSJ) political leader David Abdulah observed there were major problems in almost every sphere of national life.

Abdulah said the problems were manifested in the economy, which, he observed, has not been transformed from its colonial, plantation structure; in the institutions of State and in social relations of power that were still defined by traditional age, gender and class divisions.

ROWLEY GOVTS FIRST YEAR

* Fallout from Arcelor Mittals closure of local operations in March.

* Removal of Housing Minister Marlene Mc Donald in March over the controversial hiring of her common-law husband at her Port-of-Spain South constituency office among other issues.

* Revamping of the Government Assistance for Tuition Expense Programme (GATE) and student laptop initiative.

* Reconfiguration of the CEPEP programme.

* Firing of Jwala Rambarran as Central Bank Governor in December 2015.

* Presiding over the State Funeral for former Prime Minister Patrick Manning in July.

* Controversial withdrawal of US$2.5 billion from the Heritage and Stabilisation Fund (HSF) in June.

* Appointment of former Tobago House of Assembly presiding officer, Kelvin Charles as the new leader of the PNM Tobago Council in June under the historic one man, one vote system instituted by the party.

* The Prime Ministers thrust in January to promote history in schools through the appointment of Prof Theodore Lewis as chairman of the Committee to review Early Childhood Education and the Primary School Curriculum and to develop and Foundation Textbook on the History of T&T.

* Rowley heads special committee in May to manage Tobagos tourist sector and the islands affairs, generally.

* Questions over the Prime Ministers health following request for prayers as he travelled abroad for a medical checkup, which he disclosed related to his prostate, declaring he is cancer free.

* Rowley makes official visit to Ghana to forge relations in energy sectors.

* Rowley meets with Venezuelan President Maduro in Port-of-Spain and offers sale of foodstuff to that country under special arrangements.

* Rowley goes to Jamaica for meeting with his counterpart to iron out complaints of treatment of Jamaicans when they seek to enter Trinidad and Tobago.
No joint Govt, Opposition briefing disappoints

He said this spoke volumes about future collaborations between the two groups in minimising the menace.

Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley, Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar and members of their respective delegations discussed crime on Friday at the Office of the Prime Minister in St Clair but held separate news conferences after the talks.

Very interestingly, strangely and quite disappointingly, a joint press media briefing did not take place, Ramdhanie told Sunday Newsday.

The public would have wished that for the very least both parties would have come out and say - we will partner together in Parliament to fight crime together.

The separate press briefings says a million things. If a joint statement cannot be made as most agreements are announced, do we really expect them to work together in Parliament? I would guess, No. I dont really expect much collaboration in Parliament later this month. In fact, we did not even get a time frame when these legislative interventions would be taking place? Ramdhanie said he would have loved to see what mechanisms were discussed to resolve the sticking points in the Parliament.

Because there will be such for obvious reasons, so how will they get passed these? he asked. How will compromises be made? Principal of the Caribbean Institute for Security and Public Safety, Ramdhanie said he believed that people do not feel a sense of hope and relief following the discussions between the Government and the Opposition.

As National Security Minister (Edmund Dillon) rightfully said, many of the ideas on the table are already being done to varying extents. We really need to know if they have been effective, he said.

The Opposition Leader (Kamla Persad-Bissessar) spoke about low-hanging fruits that can be implemented from today.

If these were so easily implementable, why havent they been done? Ramdhanie argued that there was a limit to what the Government could dictate to the police.

This is our law. There is this separation, he said.
Imagine the property listing:

Large house constructed in the 1800s with breathtaking views of Lake Ontario. The former home of a Spanish-American War veteran and a lieutenant at Fort Ontario, this house has six bedrooms, five fireplaces and more than 3,900 square feet of space.

Sounds like a gem?

Well, there's a chance it could be, but the truth is the house does need some significant work. A new roof and the replacement of asbestos siding top the list.

Whether to move forward with that work  or knock the entire structure down and building something new  is a decision that will confront the Cayuga County Legislature at some point in the next few years. The building in question is the Jensvold House in the town of Sterling, and the building happens to be the headquarters and visitor center for the community treasure that is the Sterling Nature Center.

A recently completed update of the county-owned nature center's master place puts replacing the Jensvold House among the priority projects for the county in the next decade. With visitor traffic steadily rising at this relatively new county park, there's no question it's smart to look at long-term investments in the facilities and expansion of programming.

On the whole, the master plan is a terrific guide for the Sterling Nature Center's future. As with any such document, the tricky part will be figuring out the details of future projects, including how much they will cost and who will pay for them.

To that end, we urge the Legislature and officials in the county's parks, buildings and planning departments to take a hard look at whether the Jensvold House is worth preserving. The master plan seems to make it simple  it's old and needs work, so let's building something totally new.

But far too often, here and everywhere, we've knocked down solid structures with unique history in order to build something from scratch. In the end, that could be the only choice for the Jensvold House and the need for improved facilities at the Sterling Nature Center. But let's not allow that to happen without a thorough examination of what's possible if this house could be given new life.
The Gaza-based Islamist movement, Hamas, has received the green light from the Algerian authorities to open an office in Algiers, Algerian press reported.

Following the example of its rival Fatah, which already has a representation in Algiers, Hamas has been given approval to open an office in Algeria which will be headed by Abu Al-Bara, a senior Hamas commander.

In a statement to the Algerian TV, member of Hamas political bureau, Moussa Abu Marzouk, said the office is already running.

The opening of the office was made during a six-day visit to Algeria by a Hamas delegation led by Moussa Abu Marzouk.

With different ideological referential, Hamas and Fatah have been at loggerheads since the death of Yasser Arafat and the legislative victory of Hamas in 2006 when relations between the two Palestinian rivals degenerated to in-fighting after they failed to reach a deal to share government power.

With Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007, the Palestinian Authority split into two polities, one based in Gaza and the other in Ramallah, each claiming true representation of the Palestinian people.
As students begin their school years and we approach the fall in our community, it is important for us to remember the impact of education in our homes, schools and communities. For decades, research has shown that when students participate in the arts as a part of their education, they go on succeed in school, work and life.

Designated by Congress in 2010, the week beginning with the second Sunday in September is National Arts in Education Week: a national celebration of the transformative power of the arts in education. We are celebrating here in Penn Yan, and would encourage all supporters of arts, culture, and education to join with us as well as our elected officials and education leaders.

Recently, in Washington, D.C., the new Every Student Succeeds Act was signed into law, replacing no Child Left Behind. This new bill fully supports the arts as part of every student's "well-rounded" education. It provides the flexibility for students to learn creatively and for local districts and states to create schools that embrace the arts. What we know is simple: students attend school more often when they have access to the arts, parents and families engage with the schools when schools embrace the arts, dropout rates decrease, grades increase  and the halls are filled with artwork, songs, drama and dancing.

And I'm not alone in this belief. According to a recent public opinion poll, released in March, nine out of 10 Americans believe that the arts are essential to a student's well rounded education.

However, so often we see that access is not there in communities across our state and the country. In that same public opinion poll, 67 percent of Americans believed that there was not sufficient access to the arts for their students to reap the benefits. Additionally, there is study after study that indicate the opportunity gap in arts education, specifically along racial and socio-economic lines. We must stand together to fight for equity in access and delivery of arts education to the young people in our community our state, and the nation.

As we celebrate National Arts in Education Week, we should take pause to cheer for our accomplishments, but we should also remember the work we have to do. How can our district help provide equitable opportunities for all of our young people? How can we use the new law to create arts-rich schools? How can we support parents, families and the community in provide more opportunities for engagement? It's up to us, the arts education community, to take a stand and lead.

John Hunter

Penn Yan
French President Francois Hollande will attend the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, COP22 in Marrakech on November 15.

The news was announced by the French President himself who said he will attend the conference upon invitation from King Mohammed VI, the Elysee said in a statement.

The Participation of the French President was discussed over a phone conversation between the two heads of state.

During the phone conversation, King Mohammed VI and President Hollande expressed satisfaction at the bilateral cooperation and coordination to make of the Moroccan chairmanship of the Cop22 a success.

On the same occasion, the French President praised the King for his brave firm stand against jihadism and extremism which he expressed in a speech on the 63rd anniversary of the Revolution of the King and the People, celebrated by Morocco on August 20.

In this respect, President Hollande endorsed the call of King Mohammed VI for the faithful of the three monotheistic religions to form a common front against extremism.

Scheduled in Marrakech on November 8-18, the COP22 will bring together states to strive to reach agreements on reducing greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity, assess the evolution of their commitments and review the implementation of the Framework Convention and other legal instruments.

So far, 197 Parties have adhered to the Convention (196 States and the European Union) including Palestine who joined in March 2016.
Trump got his political start questioning the legitimacy of Americas first black president, and once defended his familys real-estate business against federal discrimination charges. Photo: Evan Vucci/AP

Donald Trump visited Detroit on Saturday to finally test his new outreach to black voters with actual black voters, as opposed to the near universally white audiences he usually addresses about black Americans problems. The focal point of the day was a trip to one of Detroits black churches, Great Faith Ministries International, where he attended a ticketed service and gave an interview to Bishop Wayne T. Jackson for the bishops television program. It was, according to Jackson, the first time Trump had ever been to a black church. But while Trump told the congregation of about 100 people that he had come to Detroit to listen and learn, its not entirely clear how much listening and learning the candidate made time to do  and as Trumps mostly disbanded Hispanic advisory council can now attest, Trump listening and Trump learning are often two very different things.

Nowhere near a full crowd as Trump enters (far left) pic.twitter.com/kL1AlVukG4  Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) September 3, 2016

Trump addressed the congregation for about 12 minutes, emphasizing that he was reading a statement from the heart that he had written himself a few days prior. This wasnt supposed to happen, as Jackson had originally said (and Trump had agreed) that the candidate would only be able to offer a short greeting. Then on Saturday, top-level Trump aides reportedly pressured Jackson to let Trump deliver his speech, since it would really be a blessing.

Ultimately, the address featured a greatly subdued version of Trump, and one congregant told Politico that Trumps speech sounded like a weak little whisper compared to his normal appearances. Beforehand, the candidate sat in the front row of the church, flanked by Ben Carson and Omarosa Manigault, where he clapped and swayed along with the service, and press-pool reports indicate the crowd received Trump warmly, though outside the church, where about 30 people were protesting the visit, was another story:

"He ain't out here for black people. He's here to make himself palatable to white people who don't want to vote for a racist." #Detroit  jelani cobb (@jelani9) September 3, 2016

To paraphrase Barbra Streisand, "selling tacos is the best revenge."https://t.co/3RS5VIDLo5  Phillip Rodriguez (@PRrodLA) September 3, 2016

In his remarks, Trump noted his appreciation for black churches and how they have been the conscience of our country, and that the African-American faith community has been one of Gods greatest gifts to America and to its people. He also told attendees that were all brothers and sisters created by God, and that he understood that black Americans have suffered from discrimination and that there are many wrongs that must still be made right and they will be right.

On the other hand, Trump did not repeat one of the core arguments he has made to white audiences over the past few weeks: that black voters have nothing to lose by supporting him, since their desperate lives will likely end in gunfire as they walk through the blighted, economic wasteland of their communities. He did, however, roll out what has become a classic, context-free trope of Republican black outreach by reminding the congregation that a lot of people dont realize that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican too. He also said Detroit would be rebuilt and that America needed a civil-rights agenda for our time, which would consist of basic political campaign promises like good schools, public safety, and well-paying jobs, since nothing is more sad than when we sideline young black men with unfulfilled potential, tremendous potential.

With regards to the interview with Bishop Jackson, Trump said in his remarks that it went fantastic and insisted, I didnt really know what I was getting into, even though it was reported that the Trump campaign had gotten the questions from Jackson in advance and prepared a script of answers for Trump to then follow. The interview wont be posted for a few days, so its not clear if the scripted exchange is what happened or not, and after the preprepared script was published, Jackson told CNN he would come up with some new questions.

At the end, Trump closed with a Bible passage, which he improbably implied he was already familiar with (while also oddly suggesting that his typical campaign audiences arent as familiar with the Bible):

Id like to conclude with a passage from 1 John, Chapter 4. You know it? See, most groups I speak to dont know that. But we know it. If you want, we can say it together: No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in us and His love is made complete in us. And that is so true.

Trump even came away with a few gifts, as he was eventually draped in a Jewish prayer shawl, which Bishop Jackson told Trump would help him through the adversities of his campaign, and he also gave Trump a pair of Bibles for him and his wife to study. I feel better already, Trump responded.

Trump then left the church, and though his campaign had originally said he would tour local neighborhoods, what happened instead was a drive to a several-minute photo-op outside Ben Carsons childhood home, which is currently occupied by a Hillary Clinton supporter. (Trump reportedly told her, Your house is worth a lot of money, as a result of Carson having once lived there, and the campaign will now apparently be sending her a copy of Trumps book, The Art of the Deal, according to the New York Times.)

Ben Carson, for his part during the brief stop, gave a live interview to CNN during which he walked away for a time because he was worried about his luggage:

When @JDiamond1 is interviewing @RealBenCarson live on CNN and Carson runs away to go find his luggage https://t.co/ram3K689iw  Noah Gray (@NoahGrayCNN) September 3, 2016

After the short trip down Carsons memory lane, Trump then headed back to the airport, though he told the Detroit News that he would return at some point during his campaign to visit Flint, Michigan, a majority black city that has recently suffered a terrifying outbreak of lead poisoning as a result of city and state mismanagement. Previously, when Flints lead-contamination story was first attracting national attention, Trump had declined to comment on the problem.
use your oscars to beat you know who to death

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The meeting was so dumb. Like this was basically what happened.



Trump: Pay for border wall.

Pena Nieto: lol no



Trump goes back to the US and gives a cry baby speech about deporting everyone.

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does trump have a legit reason why he wants to deport all immigrants?

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Not really. It's just a bunch of whining about how they're here illegally to cover the fact that it's based on racism.

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It's to continue using illegals as a scapegoat to detract from the true problems in this country. Trying to convince and instill anger/hate/fear in uneducated/ignorant American citizens by telling them that illegals are dangerous criminals who are stealing their jobs and living off the system all the while they hire and exploit illegal immigrants to do menial labor with little to no pay to keep up revenue. This is the story that Republicans have been weaving and using for years now to keep their pockets lined and try and keep hold of power. Create an enemy to deflect the fact that you are the actual enemy in sheep's clothing.



And as for Trump, he just wants to win, so whatever the crowd wants, he'll back. No substance whatsoever.

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Except that Trump also tried to play it off like Nieto had agreed to pay for the wall (on twitter and in his speech after the meeting). And the frustrating thing is that his supporters will buy it.



Edited at 2016-09-04 03:26 am (UTC)

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Also it was dumb to meet in public.



Donald (or Hillary) are not elected yet, so they are not equal in status to the Mexican president so they should not be negotiating anything or standing side to side as equals.



Idk who advices Pena Nieto but it was a big mistake on his part.

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this election is tiring and I'm so over it .

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same lol

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I'm voting for Hilary but I'm just over trump bitching and complaining over everything and the media is obsessed with Hilary's emails

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MTE

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ikr. it's too much

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Me too

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I love that Trump's entire campaign has been based on building a wall and then when he got the chance in Mexico to prove he's ~strong~ he choked big time lmao. Not that his supporters will care but I love that their hero who thinks he's tough couldn't do shit. Then to come back to the states, lie about what was said and then talk again in a rally saying Mexico is gonna pay for his magical wall.



Pena Nieto is sf dumb tho. Your approval rating is already abysmal and then you go and meet with Trump and show you have no backbone. He should have used it as a set up/trap and make Trump look dumb but instead it made himself look much worse.



Edited at 2016-09-04 02:38 am (UTC)

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That's because Pena doesn't have the brains nor los tanates to set anyone of power up.



He doesn't care that his approval ratings are down, people will say nothing and things will keep going down. Until we here in Mexico stand up and actually fight for our rights, we will be getting the same bullshit every six years (or three, if we go by major's elections).



Also, fuck Trump and every single American that put him where he is right now.

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Pena Nieto is a fucking idiot. Idg how he doesnt have better advisors.

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So I watched a movie about the Holocaust today and in the movie they kept saying "make this country great again" and I just found it really unsettling on top of that fox news reporter suggesting camps for immigrants till they know what to do with them.



I dont think it would ever happen but jfc people still have these thoughts in 2016

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It makes me think of the Japanese internment camps.

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Yeah, none of that surprises me unfortunately. I know that it will end up going that way if he's elected. I know people say that comparisons to Hitler are unrealistic but really they're not. This is exactly how he started out. He didn't let anyone know the full extent of his plans until after he was elected. It is really scary.

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I don't want to attribute anything positive to Hitler but I just don't think Trump is this smart.

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there are so many echoes, i shuddered when he brought up the grieving families of fallen comrades. inflaming hatred and encouraging blind faith in a single leader is really working for him. the one thing that makes me less worried is the US's political system has more checks and balances i.e. congress and supreme court.



I've been reading a book from 1939 about Hitler that says his plans were actually really clearly laid out in Mein Kampf but the book wasn't translated fully into English so people didn't pay attention. Political leaders like Chamberlain believed him when he said he wouldn't touch Czechoslovakia & Poland and was a friend to France when he had directly spelled out that Germany's borders must expand in those directions and France was an enemy. Can't trust a word he says, just like Trump.

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the general political climate in the world right now is so reminiscent of 1930's Europe, it's frightening.



I'm French but I've been in Canada for the last 16 years, seeing what's going on in France at the moment makes me sick to my stomach...

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camps for immigrants till they know what to do with them



isn't that basically what the Nauru detention camp for asylum seekers is for Australia



https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/aug/10/the-nauru-files-2000-leaked-reports-reveal-scale-of-abuse-of-children-in-australian-offshore-detention isn't that basically what the Nauru detention camp for asylum seekers is for Australia

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Reading that last part really sent chills down my back

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The media's coverage of this was infuriating. During and after the meeting everyone was like "he's so Presidential because he didn't tell the Mexican President to fuck off! How amazing of Trump!" and then he gave his disgusting speech in Arizona and the media was like "He moderated himself because he said he didn't want to kill all brown people! How great! We have ourselves a horserace!" Basically, fuck the media and the way they're covering and validating Trump.

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It made me incredibly nervous for the first debate.

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I want to see Hilary destory trump, like Hilary is practicing and getting ready, why won't trump?

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I'm worried about which Trump will show up - but honestly as long as Trump doesn't call Clinton a gendered slur i'm sure the media will claim him the winner because he did the bare fucking minimum.

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mte. The media continues to normalize Trump to the point they'll applaud him for reading a fucking speech and for once having an ounce of etiquette. His expectations are so low that when he's not a bigot for 2.5 seconds he's called presidential. What was hilarious was all the journalists who praised his Mexico visit looked like complete dumbasses when hours later in Arizona he delivered one of his most bigoted, racist speeches yet.



He.Is.Never.Going.To.Pivot.

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MSNBC has been pretty good at nailing him to the wall, especially Rachel Maddow, Joy-Ann Reid, and the various contributors they've had on representing racial minority voters.

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the media is honestly so fucking disgusting in this election

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yes. this has been going on for months and they dont care.

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goddddddddddddddddd



the never ending election cycle is depressing and exhausting.

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you betta make a post on ontd_p!!!

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I do think trump called his bluff.

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american politics 2016 american politics 2016

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I don't remember Rudy being this insane when 9/11 happen and years after what happen?

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He has always been insane. It's just people felt terrible criticizing him since he was the mayor of NY during 9/11. He milked that to his own benefit for ages and now people are not having any of it.

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Lol wtf

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And this, because Vic Berger is the only person keeping me sane during this election...







AMERICAAAAA!

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not a word about mexico paying for the wall while in mexico.



trump is the bully who talks a bunch of shit behind your back but as soon as you step to him he doesn't say a damn thing to your face then goes back to his clique and acts all hard again.



that whole trip was a joke. shame on pena nieto

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Theoretically, Trump could seize all cash remittances and use that to build the wall.

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What he says he will attempt is to stop all remittances and then like a hostage taker demand Mexico pay a ransom [ie money for the wall] to allow money to flow into back.



If he deports all illegal immigrants who are a huge chunk of people sending back money home...what a threat.



Lawyers and financial people all agree even trying to pull a move like this would be hard and a clusterfuck.



But Trump is dumb enough to try.

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I agree with him tbh, but living in San Diego I can confirm absolutely 0 latinos fuck with Drumpf

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I know a few latino Trump supporters, there are some and it makes me sick. There are a lot of latinos and other POC that do not support him but I am afraid that they will not all get out to vote.

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I know one or two. My dad at one point said he liked Trump. Idk what how he stands now though but if he's still for Trump I'm thankful he can't vote.

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NY Times had to edit one of their articles after they got called out for how inaccurate it was in its depiction of Trump. This is NY Times we are talking about...

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The Keepin it 1600 podcast has talked about this a lot - basically in an effort to be "unbiased" the media has totally failed at calling out legitimate nonsense. It's dangerous and has to stop.

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i love keeping it 1600

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They got called today very harsh on social media when they posted an article calling the rapist who abused a passed out girl a "young swimmer out of jail" instead of rapist.



Idk if they edited it but the harm was already done.

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And since we are talking politics, I wonder if the press will question Powell for openly lying about not advising Hillary. FBI's emails released this morning not only show he recommended it to her but also told her not to tell anyone about it.

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Is that the guy she recently talked about and he was pissed she outed him?

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... the guy? sis...



but, yes.

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Ahh Pena Nieto, como cosa rara cagandola.



I still don't understand why he accepted to have a meeting with him, why?? I know he wants to lick gringo's asses but yikes.





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He invited both Clinton and Trump for some reason.

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sorry bb :( I always thought we had leeway to make political posts as long as they were framed as "x celebrity makes comment about politics"

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This happens to me quite a bit with political posts, even when a celeb is attached.

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This happens to me all the time. It's beyond frustrating.

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I think she's gotten a lot prettier. Her makeup (or lack of it) probably helps.

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She was only like 15/16 when she started out so it's not too surprising that she's getting prettier and prettier.

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yeah nobody is cute at 15 tbf. i was definitely tragic lol

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I hate her new hair

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i think she's just kind of settling into her face if that makes sense. although i always thought she was pretty. i'm glad she seems chill about beauty/her 'look' because she definitely looks best laid-back and natural.

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ugh i'm sorry she has to deal with assholes. "old lazy eye" referring to herself? her eyes are gorgeous!

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mhm, she's referring to her left eye. i never noticed that it was lazy though

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This asshole at the bar one time wanted to fight my cousin bc she accidentally (she was tipsy to say the least) stepped on his Jordans. Like this guy was legit screaming and threatening her and tried to lunge at her . My cousins yelling at him right back and both her and the guy get kicked out

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People who are super obsessed with their shoes are honestly annoying. If you don't want to dirty them then put them in a case and leave me alone.

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I have a couple coworkers like that.



We were in a somewhat outdoorsy place and it gets messy. Like.....common sense lol

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A dude I use to work with wanted to put the shoes he had just worn to work in a display cube that we had to use because he didn't want them to "touch the floor" like?????

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Yep and like why wear nice shoes to a crowded bar where people will be spilling drinks, etc.

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Why tf would you wear shoes you care so much about to a crowded place like a bar??

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One of the first things I learned about my BF was that he doesn't give an f about shoes. He likes a particular style of adidas and he'll buy two pairs at a time and wear them out. His other shoes are gifts from his mom (good taste).



Thank god bc if he was one of those idiots lining up for a pair of shoes or freaking out bc someone stepped on his J's... Nope.

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I have so many bad stories. middle school was a nightmare..I'm so happy i'm in my 20s now

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you were in a bar during middle school??

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I'm so tall I started visiting bars and clubs at 14. They never even ask me because the asuume I'm older, I'm almost feel bad for spending money on a fake drivers license lol

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if she was in the studio working on album 2 this wouldn't have happened



but seriously fuck guys who wanna comment on girls' outfits/makeup/etc

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Lol what are you doing on ONTD then

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omg D:

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That guy is a scum.

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Holy shit. What a fucking wankstain

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WOOOOOW WOW WOW

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Holy fuck.

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Wow, in the ass too. he sounds like a rapist who craves power

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I hope somewhere down the line someone clubbed him over the head.

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This. Or kicked him in the balls.

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this is really scary

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What a disgusting POS. I hope all bad things happen to him.

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I hope he's dead, I really do

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Omg! Was he decent looking?



Edited at 2016-09-05 05:36 am (UTC)

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what a loser.

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I've only ever been to a bar like twice, I don't make a habit of going there.



is she back in NZ? is she old enough to be in bars?

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On St. Patrick's Day I had a guy tell me I should buy him a drink because his name was Patrick, and I said "So what? My name is [very Irish girl's name." He said "Oh! I love a Mick!"

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That was entirely my thought! LOL.

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i love that name tbh, that and tierney as far as super irish names go.

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if he did he wouldnt call them that

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Not a bad story as much as just funny/awkward but I was at a bar with some friends and this reeeeaaallly drunk older woman was hitting on one of my guy friends there. He wasn't interested and kept trying to politely turn her down, but every few minutes or so she'd be back trying to touch him and stuff. Finally we decided to leave and she jumped in front of him, lifted her skirt up (she was not wearing underwear) and yelled "what, you don't want any roast beef honey?" It was mortifying/hilarious at the same time.

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did NOT expect that ending

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There are literally so many people like this in my town its weird.

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holy shit

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o m f g

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D: lmfaoo

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roast beef???? nooooo

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I was walking out of a bar once with my friends...I was the last person to step out and some fucking guy slapped my ass.

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I try to frequent just dives BC everyone leaves me alone. But from college town bars I've gotten so much shit. Had my outfit critized loudly TWICE on different days/incidents to the point I'm like yo, you don't like my kitty sweater cool its not for you. Also getting bros to tell me why am I going out to bars (with my sister and girlfriends) if I have a boyfriend and I'm not down to fuck. Literally disgusting behavior from assholes. I've been hit on and when I casually decline drinks and walk away they yell at you and call you a cunt BC you're not interested. Some times are shitshows but catch me on a bad day and I'll throw down.



Edited at 2016-09-04 06:05 pm (UTC)

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I love going to bars with my friends but men always try their best to ruin the experience. I remember one time a guy was grabbing me because I didn't feel like dancing to a band that played there and when I told him to stop touching me he got all defensive. Ugh

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one of the reasons I started going to gay clubs/bars only even before I was out was because men just don't understand boundaries. it was difficult having a good time with my friends only when there were men constantly harassing us, hitting on us, grabbing our arms or just literally seating on our table/next to us and refusing to leave, they just don't understand or accept a 'no'. I hardly ever go to clubs anymore, but when I go to bars it's usually in this very gay-friendly neighborhood, so there's always a mixed crowd and I go with a group of friends and we're very rarely bothered by other people.



Edited at 2016-09-04 06:06 pm (UTC)

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I've been groped plenty at gay clubs. A lot of gay guys think that being gay gives them a pass.

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I went to the bathroom alone once (bad idea but my friend had to watch our drinks) and a drunk guy tried to corner me and he said "there's my girl" ;-;



Luckily I ducked and weaved as fast as I could to get to my friend but still EW

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Not for her.

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Shocked he didn't go for another 18 yr old

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Seriously

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Didn't he used to date her bff, Mandy Moore? Hollywood's dating pool is shallower than a puddle in a desert.

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mte

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it's so weird when sleazy guys manage to keep getting famous(ish) women to date them. i just don't get it



at least she's a little more age appropriate than his last few gfs i guess

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I think he's a more recongnizable face that her

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they both seem like nobodies/on the same level tbh



i was generous calling her famous i guess, but i feel like fnl was huge enough that she'd be recognizable to someone who likes pop culture



Edited at 2016-09-04 10:50 pm (UTC)

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The only way she is more recognizable than him is if people mistake her for the Gossip Girl actress



Edited at 2016-09-04 09:59 pm (UTC)

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how is she too good for him?

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lbr everyone is too good for wilmer. he's typically trying to start relationships with women still in their teens.

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He's a 35 year old who dates teens



Everyone is too good for him

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He has been dating many underage girls (her included). She deserves better than that.

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dating Demi comes with too much baggage, issues that she needs to deal with professionals before she can date anyone.



I'm glad he escaped that.

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Is this his first age appropriate girlfriend since Ariana Richards?

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Why is he dating a decrepit 36 year old grandmother looking woman when Bella Throne is fresh and available.

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Let's be real though... Minka Kelly looks a good deal younger than Bella Thorne. And fresh is not a word I would use to describe her.

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Bella is dating girls now. she's dating her brothers ex

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Hold up, he's beginning a relationship with someone who isn't a teenager?

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What is it with this guy? Idgi

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Edited at 2016-09-04 09:48 pm (UTC) he's a witch

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He has a big dick

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Does he know she's not 18?

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That tweet could be about anyone lol



This is funny because Minka is bff with Mandy.

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Mandy's apparently friends with Wilmer again, so I wouldn't be surprised if they got together through her

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i wanna see him naked

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so they dated back in 2012 , then dated Demi for 6 years and now back with minka

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yup. he and Demi got together in like, 2010, then broke up by 2012. and I'm pretty sure Demi's song "Stone Cold" is about him and Minka.

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Somewhere, Demi is screaming.

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isnt she dating a ufc fighter?

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Haddaway! Omg this gif just took me back to the 90s with my triflin aunt scamming on him tryna be a groupie with her old ass.

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The latest

2022 farmers markets guide

There's simply nothing better than a farmers market in Wisconsin. Here's your guide to supporting them.
A dozen middle-school kids are chatting and eating a snack as they wander around a room in the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority (WHEDA) building, where technical equipment is piled on scattered tables. As they finish eating, they gravitate toward a long table where they find a bag of marshmallows, sticks of uncooked spaghetti, a roll of bright blue duct tape and some string.

"Its time for the marshmallow challenge," announced Que El-Amin, one of two brothers running the YES STEAM Accelerator summer technology camp.

The eight-week program was the latest in a series of opportunities that Que, 31, and Khalif El-Amin, 30, offered city youth free of charge. The brothers, who started their for-profit company, the Young Enterprising Society (YES), in 2011, have recently focused their efforts on bringing their knowledge of technology to middle and high school students, mostly in central city schools. The company is using a $90,000 WHEDA grant to fund its in-school workshops and summer camp.

"We feel that if you have the proper resources, anyone can accomplish anything they want to in the world," Que El-Amin said.

The marshmallow challenge involves teams of three or four kids, and a yard of string, a yard of tape, 20 sticks of spaghetti and two marshmallows per team. The challenge is to build a standing structure with a marshmallow on top in 18 minutes.

After some minutes of puzzling over and manipulating the materials, Amariana Troutman, 12, shouted, "Start from the bottom and build up."

Troutman, a seventh-grader at Greater Holy Temple Christian Academy, 5575 N. 76th St., later explained that she had worked on a similar project at school and remembered that the key had been to build a stable foundation.

Like everything that happens at the camp, the goal of the marshmallow challenge is to get the participants thinking creatively and to build confidence in their ability to figure things out.

Other hands-on activities included building a structure out of materials such as boxes, newspapers and plastic bags that could withstand a 10-foot drop; building aquaponics tanks; and flying drones. In addition, visitors including a surgeon, a data security lawyer and a banker demonstrated how STEAM skills could be used in life and work.

"Its fun," said Troutman. "We get more connected to technology. They help us learn to build stuff. We worked on connecting wires to a hard drive. We had to download something onto the hard drive and then connect the wires to the motherboard and make lights light up."

The camp, like the in-school workshops the brothers taught at 13 schools last semester, was free to participants. With the help of technology entrepreneur Greg Meier, a professor of innovation in the business school at Cardinal Stritch University, YES applied for and received a $90,000 grant from WHEDA last year.

Chantia Lewis, whose sons, Jireh, 10, and Jeremiah, 9, participated in the summer camp, said her sons "wish it was an all day, every day program because they love the robotics and the aquaponics."

Lewis attributes the childrens love of the program to the El-Amin brothers "level of excellence, patience and expertise." They take the time to ask them what they are interested in and the kids know they really care about them, she added.

Que and Khalif El-Amin, who graduated from Dominican High School and Rufus King International High School, respectively, said they acquired their ability to aim high and go around obstacles from their strong family and a sense of friendly competition. Que noted that his family also values education.

"(They) embody the entrepreneurial spirit, said Meier, who has worked with the brothers for four or five years. "(To them) failure is not a reason to stop, its a reason to learn," he added. Meier, the El-Amin brothers and the other 10 or so core members of YES share a passion for contributing to the community, Meier and Que El-Amin agreed.

"We want (our workshops and summer camp) to give young people their first exposure to technology so they can find what theyre interested in and continue to explore," said Que, who graduated from the University of Wisconsin.

Meier noted that many of the schools that YES has worked in lack basic technology. "The students are as isolated as if they were living on a mountain in Tibet."
Reprinted from WSWS

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders will carry out his first official activity as a drum major in the Hillary Clinton marching band Monday, when he takes part in Labor Day events in Lebanon, New Hampshire in support of the Democratic presidential nominee. It will be Sanders' first campaign appearance on behalf of Clinton since his dismal "unity rally," also in New Hampshire, on July 12.

According to the press release issued by the Clinton campaign, "Sanders will discuss Hillary Clinton's plan to building [sic] an economy that works for everyone, not just those at the top, and Donald Trump's plan, which would benefit himself and other millionaires and billionaires."

Sanders' campaign appearance for Clinton comes as the Democratic Party is seeking to transform the elections into a mandate for war and aggression. In a speech to the American Legion on Wednesday, Clinton threatened to respond militarily to accusations of Russian cyberwar and hacking, pledged to carry out a nuclear posture review as her first act as president and called for an increase in military spending to ensure US domination of the world. (See, "Clinton's 'American Exceptionalism' speech: A bipartisan policy of militarism and war")

Sanders has maintained a complete silence on these war plans, which is in line with his role throughout the Democratic Party primary. He kept the issue of war largely out of the campaign, and when he spoke on foreign policy it was generally to endorse the Obama administration's escalation of war in the Middle East, its drone assassination program and its threats against Russia.

The web site of Our Revolution, the vehicle set up by the Sanders campaign to continue to channel opposition behind the Democratic Party after his endorsement of Clinton, initially made no mention of foreign policy at all. A section has recently been added which, while including various gestures toward antiwar sentiment, insists: "We should protect America, defend our interests and values, embrace our commitments to defend freedom and support human rights, and be relentless in combatting terrorists who would do us harm."

In other words, this "revolution" fully supports the propaganda justifications for American military aggression all over the world, from the "war on terror" to "human rights" imperialism.

Sanders' appearance for Clinton also follows a week that put to the test Sanders' claims that his supporters can carry forward a "political revolution" by working within the Democratic Party to elect "progressive" Democratic candidates.

Our Revolution's campaign to support various local Democrats throughout the country fell flat on its first effort. Sanders-backed challenger Tim Canova was defeated in the Democratic primary for the south Florida congressional seat held by Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who won renomination with 57 percent of the vote. Schultz resigned her position as chairman of the Democratic National Committee last month after the release of emails showing the DNC had intervened in the primary contest on behalf of Clinton, despite its official posture of neutrality.

Our Revolution tried to make the best of the results of Tuesday's primaries in Arizona and Florida, claiming in an email message "a tremendous night for our political revolution. Out of the five progressive primary campaigns we supported, three were victorious." Two of the three, however, were incumbent Democratic Party officeholders, a further demonstration of Sanders' integration with the Democratic Party establishment.

The email message reiterated the perspective that "as Bernie said, our job is to transform the Democratic Party and this country." It claimed that the Canova campaign, while unsuccessful, had pushed Debbie Wasserman Schultz to shift her position "on a number of important issues, including fracking."

In actual practice, however, the Canova-Schultz contest, in a heavily Jewish district centered on Ft. Lauderdale, devolved into a vulgar competition between the two candidates on who could best posture as a defender of Israel. Canova initially entered the race attacking Schultz ferociously from the right for her public support of the Iran nuclear deal, which he said endangered Israel's security.

He repeated the charge during an August debate, only to have Schultz attack him for supporting "disarmament" in the Middle East, which she claimed would apply to Israel as well as Iran and the Arab states.

The email from Our Revolution also declared, referring to Schultz, that "because of the challenge we gave her, you can expect a more fair and impartial Democratic National Committee in the next presidential primary."

This underscores the real purpose of the Sanders campaign from its inception: to foster illusions in the Democratic Party and block any movement against it. Sanders sought to capture youth and working people who are moving to the left, and to divert them back within the blind alley of the oldest US capitalist party.

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Meditation

(Image by dee_dee_creamer) Details DMCA



By David Shapiro, Dr. Keith Wallace, and Dr. David Leffler

The United Nations has voted to send more peacekeepers into South Sudan. It's a desperate attempt to resolve that young country's ongoing turmoil and violence involving government forces and rebel groups, with innocent civilians caught in the middle. The South Sudanese government may not cooperate, and accuses the U.N. of trying to take over the country.

Rather than peacekeepers (there is no peace, so the term is questionable to begin with), how about peacemakers who address the plague of stress underlying the lack of peace and harmony?

A rapid, highly cost-effective approach is available for the United Nations and South Sudan to end the internal conflict so that the traditional, but unwanted, military intervention by the U.N. would not be necessary.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a major cause of anger and violence, ravages South Sudan and many African nations beset with bloodshed and instability.

Introduction of next generation, evidence-based PTSD reduction technologies, including Transcendental Meditation (TM), has the potential to quickly introduce inner peace, leading to societal peace. Peer-reviewed research shows that TM reduces the anger and violence that fuels social turbulence that is so widespread.

Two studies published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress (April, 2013; February, 2014) confirm that within 30 days of introducing a TM-based PTSD reduction strategy, over 90% of Congolese war refugees with PTSD became non-symptomatic. Similar results were found in South African students diagnosed with PTSD.

In addition there are 100's of studies documenting the beneficial effects of TM on physical and mental health, including reduction of crime and violence with advanced TM practice in groups.

These examples indicate that rapid reduction in PTSD means that along with growth of inner peacefulness, anger and violence subside quickly. Suicides decrease. Significant reductions are experienced in traumatic flashbacks, hyper vigilance, and negative emotions. In addition, there is less negative behavior, such as excessive drinking and non-prescription drug use.

For $100-200 per victim per year (with regular and thorough follow-up), a South Sudanese plagued by PTSD can get permanent relief from this otherwise chronic and debilitating condition. South Sudan's population is about 13 million people. The number of people with PTSD is estimated to be around 20%, so the cost of helping the most affected citizens would be about $250-$500 million for the first year, less than half the 1.1 billion dollar current annual expenditures for UN troops in South Sudan.

New scientific approaches are needed to reduce war and violence, especially in hot spots. It is painfully obvious that the current arms-based emphasis does not work.

Innovative science-based tools are available that can produce inner peace as a means of reducing the anger and violence ravaging South Sudan, Africa and other highly stressed regions worldwide. Inner peace is contagious. It spreads and has the potential to create societal peace. That kind of peacemaking is what's needed and now.

David Shapiro is Founding President of African PTSD Relief (CFC #94568), Dr. Keith Wallace, Founding President and Professor of Physiology at Maharishi University of Management, Dr. David Leffler is the Executive Director at the Center for Advanced Military Science. All are experts in the application of Transcendental Meditation to create coherence and peace in society.
Reprinted from Smirking Chimp

What a mess! In the crazy Syrian war, US-backed and armed groups are fighting other US-backed rebel groups. How can this be?

It is so because the Obama White House had stirred up war in Syria but then lost control of the process. When the US has a strong president, he can usually keep the military and intelligence agencies on a tight leash.

But the Obama administration has had a weak secretary of defense and a bunch of lady strategists who are the worst military commanders since Louis XV, who put his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, in charge of French military forces during the Seven Year's War. The French were routed by the Prussians. France's foe, Frederick the Great of Prussia, named one of his dogs, "la Pompadour."

As a result, the two arms of offensive US strategic power, the Pentagon and CIA, went separate ways in Syria. Growing competition between the US military and militarized CIA broke into the open in Syria.

Fed up with the astounding incompetence of the White House, the US military launched and supported its own rebel groups in Syria, while CIA did the same.

Fighting soon after erupted in Syria and Iraq between the US-backed groups. US Special Forces joined the fighting in Syria, Iraq and most lately, Libya.

The well-publicized atrocities, like mass murders and decapitations, greatly embarrassed Washington, making it harder to portray their jihadi wildmen as liberators. The only thing exceptional about US policy in Syria was its astounding incompetence.

Few can keep track of the 1,000 groups of jihadis that keep changing their names and shifting alliances. Throw in Turkomans, Yzidis, Armenians, Nestorians, Druze, Circassians, Alawis, Assyrians and Palestinians. Oh yes, and the Alevis.

Meanwhile, ISIS was inflicting mayhem on Syria and Iraq. But who really is ISIS? A few thousand twenty-something hooligans with little knowledge of Islam but a burning desire to dynamite the existing order and a sharp media sense. The leadership of these turbaned anarchists appears to have formed in US prison camps in Afghanistan.

The US, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey armed and financed ISIS as a weapon to unleash on Syria, which was an ally of Iran that refused to take orders from the Western powers. The west bears heavy responsibility for the deaths of 450,000 Syrians, at least half the nation of 23 million becoming refugees, and destruction of this once lovely country.

At some point, ISIS shook off its western tutors and literally ran amok. But the US has not yet made a concerted attempt to crush ISIS because of its continuing usefulness in Syria and in the US, where ISIS has become the favorite whipping boy of politicians.

Next come the Kurds, an ancient Indo-European stateless people spread across Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. They have been denied a national state by the western powers since WWI. Kurdish rebels in Iraq have been armed and financed by Israel since the 1970's.

When America's Arab jihadists proved militarily feeble, the US turned to the Kurds, who are renowned fighters, arming and financing the Kurdish Syrian YPG which is part of the well-known PKK rebel group that fights Turkey.

I covered the Turkish-Kurdish conflict in eastern Anatolia in the 1980's in which some 40,000 died. Turkey is now again battling a rising wave of Kurdish attacks that caused the Turks to probe into northern Syria to prevent a link-up of advancing Kurdish rebel forces.

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[Editor's note: Franklin Lamb emailed this updated version of his article from Syria]

How Two Sisters, Ten Year Old Ghina and 8 Year Old Nagham, Survived Three Sniper Bullets in Syria.

Written by Franklin Lamb, Children's Orthopedics Ward, Al-Mouwasat Hospital, Damascus, Syria, September 2, 2016.

It was about 11 in the morning on Tuesday August 2, 2016 when two sisters, ten year-old Ghina and her eight year-old younger sister Nagham were walking a short distance from their home in the town of Madaya to its "field hospital" in order to acquire serum for their anemic mother Sahar whose body was very deficient in calcium because of 18 months existence with very little food. Sahar explained to this observer a couple of days ago that she and her four babies, lived at times with nothing more than a watery soup made of grass, or sometimes black peppers, but most often made from the pink and white flowers of thistle plants she gathered from a nearby field.

For more than a year, after having fled from their own Sunni village of Zabadani due to fighting, the family has been living in surrounded Madaya, a mountain town of 40,000, now with four times its pre-war population, about 30 minutes northwest of Damascus. Military forces encircled Madaya in July of 2015 as part of a broader offensive to recapture the nearby Qalmoun Mountain villages and the town of Zabadani, held by rebels since 2012. Residents of Madaya have been trapped ever since.

Having made their medicine purchase, the girls started their short 60 yard walk home. A claimed eye-witness says that a sniper near al -Asali checkpoint took aim and fired at the youngsters. One explode-on-impact bullet entered Ghina's upper-left thigh, shattering her leg bone and thigh.

For an instant, not realizing what had happened, Ghina's younger sister 8 year old Nagham, noticing that Ghina had dropped the small plastic medicine bag to be given to their mother at home, instinctively picked it up and began to scold her big sister for dropping it. The little heroine, by now instantly covered in her sister's blood, tried to pull badly bleeding and screaming Ghina off the road to a secure location...the roadside ditch. The sniper took aim a second time. This time, shrapnel from the bullet struck Nagham's right arm and hand. The two young girls lay on the side of the road until minutes later passersby were able to pull them out of the line of fire and transport them to the towns nearby "field hospital".

Over the past year, snipers have killed seven people in Madaya, according to a report published on 7/13/2016 by Physicians for Human Rights, a US-based organization that has provided medical assistance to thousands in Syria since the civil war erupted in March of 2011. The PHR findings were confirmed in a separate Report from the Madaya Medical Commission published on 7/23/2016. The following week, snipers shot and wounded three more people, a Madaya resident reported last week by telephone to a relative of the girl's family.

The sniping of civilians continues until today in Madaya as some try to escape the siege imposed on their town. So also do deaths mount from the approximately 6,000 additional landmines recently placed around the southern and eastern sides of the town, by militia in order to further imprison residents inside.

Such indiscriminate use of landmines violates international humanitarian law and, as with sniping civilians, constitutes a punishable war crime once the conflict ends and hopefully the global community insists on full accountability under the law for all who have targeted the people of Syria.

Several dozen people have also died from starvation in Madaya, despite surrendering in exchange for relief from the siege. With almost nothing and no one allowed in or out, the town continues slowly dying from the inside.

At Malaya's "field hospital" whose medical staff consists of two heroic dental students and an animal veterinarian, Ghina was diagnosed with a displaced fracture, a badly shattered leg bone and a severed nerve in her upper left thigh.

Before long, Ghina's leg and thigh became badly infected and a tentative decision was taken to amputate it. As one of the MDs reported at the time via "What'sUP" to medical colleagues abroad, Madaya's health workers today are only able to perform emergency surgery, mainly amputations.

As Dr. Darwish, a dentistry student and one of three health professional still in Madaya insisted, they did not have the equipment or the training to repair the damage to Ghina's leg and thigh or most other serious injuries brought to the "Field Hospital." However, amputation of Ghina's leg was something they could perform.

Dr. Darwish further explained in a follow up email: "Franklin, if a situation requires major surgery, there's nothing that we can do about it. Recently a baby girl died after her delivery because we don't have neonatal incubators. That wasn't the first time, and it certainly won't be the last as long as we continue to lack the proper medical equipment. Too many children have died here in Madaya for this reason...we don't have the training, and we don't have the expertise. We're out of our depth. We can sort of perform C-sections, natural births and amputation operations, but that's it. We try to treat sick people that come our way, but with our limited training, many times it's just not possible. If a situation requires major surgery, there's nothing that we can do. One time, there were three children who were injured by a landmine. They were rushed to the hospital, but we just stood there staring. When it comes to these situations, we're normal people; we aren't trained doctors. The children died before our very eyes that day, and there was not a single thing that we could do except pray."

Madaya's severely wounded, like Ghina, have only one way to get out of the besieged town and thru the 65 checkpoints, countless landmines and snipers, and to receive the lifesaving treatment they need. It is through a painstakingly negotiated reciprocal agreement between rebel and regime forces, brokered by Iran and the United Nations last year. In theory it provides for the evacuation of some wounded people from Sunni Madaya in exchange for a parallel evacuation from two Idlib Shia towns of Foah, and Kafraya , besieged by rebel forces.

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This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.



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Reprinted from www.theecologist.org with author permission

Many of the scientists here have calculated that we are looking at a collapse of society within this century if we continue on this growth path

Ten years ago only a few professors and some activists used the word "degrowth" as alternative to the neoliberal model of perpetual economic growth. Today, "degrowth economics" is an activist academic discipline with dozens of top-quality peer reviewed papers, widely translated books like Degrowth. A Vocabulary for a new era and massive bi-annual conferences - like the ongoing 2016 Budapest Degrowth Conference and Week.

At least one thing unites those activists and scholars: they all agree that the basic assumption of the necessity of economic growth is fatally flawed and in urgent need of correction simply because it undermines the conditions for humanity to thrive.

Sustainable degrowth challenges inequalities and the environmental destruction caused by a growth-oriented development paradigm; it calls for a downscaling of production and consumption, but also a rethinking of human and planetary wellbeing. It calls for a future where societies live within their ecological means, with open, localized economies and resources more equally distributed through new forms of democratic institutions.

Degrowth is relevant in North and South alike

To get to this degrowth society, we first need to recognise that we live in a neoliberal dystopia. Then we need to build new narratives and defend those that have been silenced or swept away, like those of repressed Indigenous communities. Then, we need to critically articulate them in diversity and solidarity.

This process caught on in Europe in the past years and the degrowth movement is now finding allies beyond Europe as well. Federico Demaria, researcher at Research and Degrowth and co-organiser of the conference says: "We don't want to export degrowth. It started in Europe and mostly applies to the so-called developed (or industrialized) countries. But we are discussing the synergies between the degrowth movements in Europe, the global environmental justice movement and others. An example is the growing alliance with the climate justice movement, as shown during the Climate Camp in Germany in these last two years at least. We all say - we need system change, not climate change."

Daniela Del Bene, Phd researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, says the degrowth debate is also relevant in the Global South as there too "growth" has not necessarily meant improvement of people's living conditions. Think of expropriation of land for mining, the consolidation of arrogant elites detaining political power and huge wealth divides defended by violence and criminalization of environmental justice activists. This is not due to bad management or unfortunate accidents it's the necessary condition for the "easy growth" of some elites.

Ashish Kothari, Indian activist and author of Churning the Earth, voiced a very similar pro-degrowth argument. He said that the focus on GDP growth in India since around 1991 "has not only not helped but further marginalised those who were self-sufficient before."

He calculated that in India, in the past half century over 60 million were physically displaced while some 100 to 200 million people stayed in places where land was taken away from them. This comes on top of the 300 to 400 million who were already in the margins. "You also have to realise that in India, only 7% of all jobs are in the formal sector and that the whole GDP growth was there in that little bubble, often at the expense of the rest. We figured out that in the past 20 years GDP growth in India created only 3 million new jobs while 120 new people needed a job."

But Ashish Kothari has been very active in uniting different communities around India fighting for a different economy. According to Kothari, no resistance can win without an alternative vision. "From the bottom-up, a new world view is created and it's based on values like generosity, respecting diversity, ecological resilience, equality and justice."

A different kind of democracy

Jason Hickel from the London School of Economics recently wrote for The Ecologist that we must end growth - not just to save our planet but to refocus the economy on meeting human needs. Many academics in Budapest would agree and add that it's not just a moral question but a scientific question: what if the world's best political compromise, the so called "green growth" advocated in many UN circles, is physically impossible according to hard core natural science?

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Reprinted from alJazeera



Israeli Armored Corps Near the Gaza Border

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Nazareth -- Israel has agreed to allow the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to send a delegation to Israel and the occupied territories. It was revealed over the weekend in a step that could dramatically increase the risk of Israeli officials being tried for war crimes.

Emmanuel Nahshon, a foreign ministry spokesman, confirmed to Al Jazeera on Sunday that Israel had agreed to the visit in principle, though the "when and how" were still under discussion.

The ICC's move comes as human rights groups have harshly criticized Israel for closing investigations into dozens of allegations that its military has broken the laws of war during an attack on Gaza in the summer of 2014.

The Hague prosecutors are reportedly interested in examining how effective Israel's legal mechanisms are in investigating allegations of war crimes.

Under the terms of its founding statute, the ICC could take over jurisdiction of such probes if it is persuaded that Israel is unable or unwilling to conduct credible investigations itself.

So far, only three Israeli soldiers have been indicted on a relatively minor charge -- of looting -- even though Israel's 51-day offensive, named Protective Edge, in July and August 2014 resulted in some 2,250 Palestinian deaths. The vast majority were civilians, including 551 children.

"We have seen Israel conducting flawed investigations or dragging out the legal process with long delays. The main aim appears to be to place obstacles in the way of the investigations so that Israel's armed forces are not held accountable." -- Nadeem Shehadeh, a lawyer with Adalah

The Israeli military exonerated itself late last month in 13 cases it had been investigating. These included lethal attacks on three Palestinian families, the shelling of a hospital and a United Nations shelter for civilians, and the bombing of Gaza's main power plant. It declined to investigate another 80 complaints.

In response, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon criticized Israel for the "low rate of investigations opened into these serious allegations."

Since Protective Edge, two of Israel's largest human rights groups, B'Tselem and Yesh Din, have refused to cooperate with Israeli investigations in Gaza, accusing the Israeli military of using them to "whitewash" its actions.

In June, the New York-based monitoring group, Human Rights Watch (HRW), added to the pressure on the ICC, calling for it to open a formal investigation into the Gaza offensive.

The credibility of Israel's probes has been further undermined by a report issued last week by two local human rights groups, Adalah and Al Mezan, based in Israel and Gaza, respectively. The report accused Israel of failing to examine properly the evidence they had collected relating to 27 suspected war crimes during the 2014 offensive. Five cases referred to the Israeli attacks on UN schools sheltering civilians. Two years on, the groups noted, Israel had issued no indictments. Investigations, where they occurred, were "clearly flawed."

Nadeem Shehadeh, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal center for Palestinian citizens in Israel, told Al Jazeera the possibility of legal redress in many cases was close to "exhausted."

"We have seen Israel conducting flawed investigations or dragging out the legal process with long delays," he said. "The main aim appears to be to place obstacles in the way of the investigations so that Israel's armed forces are not held accountable."

Israel's failure to conduct thorough and transparent inquiries could open the door to the ICC launching its own formal investigation, he said.

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Congress Switchboard: 202-224-3121

"Rob Kall demonstrates how the Bottom-Up revolution has ushered in a business, political and social upheaval the likes of which we've never seen. Bottom-Up: Tapping the Power of the Connection Revolution is a must read book that you need, to understand how this revolution affects every area of your life and the opportunities it is creating."



Jim Donovan, author, happy@work - 60 Simple Ways to Stay Engaged and Be Successful
Founded in 2005 - before the Right went nuts!
A woman prone to guilt is visited by her conscience, which has taken physical form. A man tries to talk to his deceased sister who took her life, when he meets a woman with a connection to what happened. A retold tale of English reformer John Bradford is at the center of the play that has him question his own ideals.

These are only a handful of play scenarios that are part of this years Northern Arizona Playwriting Showcase. The showcase is built from seven selected, 10-minutes-or-less plays blind-judged by local members of the writing and theater communities. The winners will stage at Theatrikos Friday and Saturday night at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, Sept. 11, at 2 p.m. Learn more at www.theatrikos.com.

Built from a partnership between the Northern Arizona University Department of English and Theatrikos, the Northern Arizona Playwriting Showcase this year received around 70 submissions from across the country and at least one from overseas. So, about one out of 10 are being produced, with local directors and actors delivering an on-book (no memorized lines) version of each.

With the fierce competition, organizers were excited to see local playwright Tom Marcinko in the winners circle with his play, A Team Building Exercise. Also, a previous winner, Dan Borengasser, made it again this year with Seeing is Believing.

For Marcinko, the premise of his play was simple, but it followed a classic idea of theatre and put two realistic and genuine characters on the stage.

Its about the last ten minutes of a marriage, Marcinko said. There are only two characters in the play, neither based on any particular person. I tried to make this couple as real as possible, and then applied an old rule: Two people come on stage, and one of them better say something pretty soon.

Marcinko  who relocated to Flagstaff from the Valley three years ago and has since become involved in four Theatrikos productions  explained that the Northern Arizona Playwriting Showcase offered a great opportunity and a challenge for him.

It also gave me something most writers need: a deadline, he noted. Im incredibly flattered and thrilled to be part of it.

On the rigors of playwriting, Marcinko explained, There are limitations and demands to a script, but so many possibilities. I love the process of collaborating with cast and crew and watching a show gradually come together. And the immediacy of it is wonderful. Everybody, including the audience, participates to create a little world. Its reality and illusion at the same time.

The other winners to be staged are: Her Worst Enemy by David Carkeet (Vermont), Bootstraps by Paul McCormick (California), Paper Planes by Michael Pisaturo (Rhode Island), Cooleys Reel by Madeline Puccioni (California) and Adulation by Rosemary Zibart (New Mexico).
From Greg Swank, 12-4-2 You are about to read a list of 45 goals that found their way down the halls of our great Capitol back in 1963. As...
Meteorologist Paul Douglas writes about Minnesota weather daily, trying to go beyond the "highs" and "lows" of the weather story to discuss current trends and some of the how's and why's of meteorology. Rarely is our weather dull - every day is a new forecast challenge. Why is the weather doing what it's doing? Is climate change a real concern, and if so, how will my family be affected? Climate is flavoring all weather now, and I'll include links to timely stories that resonate with me.
The Majority in Parliament has indicated that they will reject any move by the Minority to remove President John Dramani Mahama from office before Decembers general elections.

The Speaker, Edward Doe Adjaho, dismissed a motion filed by the Minority on Thursday] to initiate a probe into the Ford gift saga by Parliament. The Minority believed that the President acted inappropriately, given his position, by accepting the gift from the Burkinabe contractor. The Ranking Member for Legal, Constitutional and Parliamentary Affairs Joe Osei-Owusu said on Friday that the Minority was putting some evidence together against President Mahama as it tried to reach a desired end. When we get there, when we put the evidence together and the body that is responsible and has brought its conclusions out, that is when the desired end issue will arise, he explained.

He added that the Minority is totally capable of putting the evidence together and making a presentation that will persuade anybody that is listening to us. We will be willing to do the work, that there is evidence, that conduct of the president in this matter brought the office of the President into disrepute. However, according to the Majority leader, Alban Bagbin, any attempt to remove the president from office with negative politics will not be successful. I never underestimate the intelligence of my colleagues in the opposition, I never do. But sometimes you are compelled to say that because you dont underestimate their intelligence, you know that they know. So when somebody knows the right thing but proceeds to do the wrong thing, there must be a reason. In many cases youll see that its rather meant to play negative politics, he said. Politics is a double-edged sword; and so it is for everything in the world; democracy is the same. If we decide to focus on the negatives of democracy, well reap the consequences.

My colleagues know that if they proceed along the way of impeachment, theres no way they are likely to succeed. If with that knowledge, you still decide to embark on a wild goose chase, thats your own issue. Minority motion distracting Alban Bagbin echoed the comments made by the Speaker, that the Minoritys motion was redundant given the fact that petitions had already been submitted by three parties, including the Progressive Peoples Party (PPP), and the youth wing of the Convention Peoples Party (CPP), to the Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice, (CHRAJ) to look into the matter He argued that the fact that the body mandated to handle such cases has already commenced investigations, it was unnecessary for the minority to call for independent parliamentary investigations into the issue. The good people dont want politicization so they established a constitutional commission to handle such matters. Thats why we have CHRAJ because they know the nature of party politics and that is why they took those issues away from part of the functions or duties of parliament and decided that CHRAJ should take such issues, he said. Those that are left on the plate of oversight is for Parliament to do.

Those that have been identified and given to other institutions of state are for those institutions of state and not Parliament. He said the Minoritys actions were creating a distraction from the actual issues that were vital to the development of the country. Its going to distract the attention of the whole country from focusing on laying down, not just the process to a successful election, but the culture of making sure that we start looking at issues. The media rather focused on shaping the thinking and minds of people on the process to impeach, Alban Bagbin said That is going to distract the country from focusing on the serious issues that are confronting us which we would have to discuss and find solutions to.

Theres no government that will come and will not face those issues because there are global crisis, global security, unemployment and economic crisis. Thats what led to the Arab uprising and these are issues that as a country, we should have the political space to discuss. People want to see the solutions being offered by the various political parties before we get to the elections.

Source: citifmonline.com









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The University of Missouri is defending its research practices after a national pet-adoption group publicly decried an experiment that led to six female beagles being euthanized.

The California-based Beagle Freedom Project, which is suing the university system over $82,000 in fees it says it is being charged for an open-records request, said it learned of the dogs' deaths after happening upon a published study about treatment for damaged corneas.

As detailed in April in the Journal of Veterinary Ophthalmology, the study said roughly 1-year-old beagles had their left eyes intentionally damaged while they were anesthetized. Half of the animals then were given a topical acid treatment to determine if that healed the eye damage; it didn't, and the dogs eventually were put to death.

Kevin Chase, vice president of the BFP, which rescues former research animals ranging from ponies to goldfish for adoption, called Mizzou's experiment "a colossal failure" and "cruel," noting the "cornea's top layer is filled with thousands of tiny nerve endings."

"Caging dogs in a laboratory, intentionally damaging their corneas, and then killing them is about as ethical as picking people off the street and hitting them over the head with a pipe in order to test new concussion treatments," Chase said.

Animal-rights groups widely say nearly 400 U.S. research labs use nearly 70,000 dogs each year, the vast majority of which are beagles, usually because of their docility.

The university issued a statement saying the beagles were anesthetized during the procedure and were given pain medications if any discomfort was evident. The research, meant to develop painless or noninvasive treatments for corneal injuries, "improves the quality of life for both animals and humans," the university insisted.

"Animal research is only done when scientists believe there is no other way to study the problem, and our researchers respect their research animals greatly and provide the utmost care," the statement read. "The animals were treated humanely and every effort was made to ensure dogs were as comfortable as possible during the tests to study the effectiveness of the new drug treatment."

That statement did not say whether its research animals commonly are euthanized. In the study's conclusion, the four researchers acknowledge the small sample size, saying it was determined before undertaking the study that two dozen of the dogs would be required to detect a significant difference in the healing rates.

The BFP successfully has lobbied for "beagle bills," which essentially require healthy dog and cat test subjects to be offered up to rescue organizations instead of having them automatically euthanized. The Humane Society of the United States says such laws now exist in Connecticut, California, Minnesota, Nevada and New York.

The BFP sued the University of Missouri in May, alleging it violated the state's Sunshine Law by charging more than $82,000 for documents that the group sought related to dogs and cats on the Columbia campus. Chase called the fees "exorbitant" and an effort to stymie disclosure.

His group routinely files open-records requests in search of post-research candidate dogs for rescue and was looking through previously published reports about University of Missouri animal research when BFP happened upon the study involving the beagles.

"Had they just given us the records for current protocols, we probably wouldn't have dug that deep," Chase said.

Explore further Dogs chase cats in the name of science

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